{"id": "cf0660a8af9b-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nPsilocybin and the Sands of Time\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\nDecember 1982\n\nSEN Interview, Esalen Institute, Big Sur, California\n\n8169\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo youtube link available, try the following:\n\nFrank [surname unknown]: Welcome Terence McKenna\n\nTerence McKenna: Thank you very much [laughs]\n\nF: Um, what I, what I'm, kind of, first of all interested in is your, your education, like you know, how come that you developed this very particular kind of interest.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Psilocybin+and+the+Sands+of+Time"}
{"id": "cf0660a8af9b-1", "text": "ut it was not until the Amazon that I saw that this was possible in a way that was accessible to me. So then I concentrated on those people, those chemical families and that, uh, that then became the compass for all the work that I've done since then, and, uh, I regard the degree more or less as a joke because it was self-directed study. They don't really, uh, there is no degree in shamanism. But, my interest was basically one in the phenomenology of religious experience, religious traditions worldwide and, uh, primitive people against a background of tropical nature. And, uh, stumbled onto the mushrooms in the jungles of Colombia in 1971 and was not even particularly interested in mushrooms at the time. We were looking for a, m-less well-understood drug that is still not discussed much in the literature but exists in a very circumscribed area among three Indian tribes. And we went into the jungle to stay at a mission that served these Indians, and the priest at this mission had cleared pasture and brought in white cows and there were many, many of these mushrooms. And as soon as we started experimenting with them, I realized that what I had been told about psilocybin, which was that it was analogous to LSD but simply required a larger amount for the effect to be present, was, uh, a complete simplification of the issue. And actually, then, psilocybin became the focus of my interest and, by extrapolation, the other tryptamine related hallucinogens.\n\nF: You just mentioned that, uh, that the mushroom is really important for our country right now. Do you perceive yourself an advocate to bring into our culture new elements like an easy way to reach altered states of consciousness? What can we learn from these experiences?\n\nF: How do you perceive in this context the future of mankind and the human mind?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Psilocybin+and+the+Sands+of+Time"}
{"id": "cf0660a8af9b-2", "text": "F: How do you perceive in this context the future of mankind and the human mind?\n\nF: Were you just talking about the Bell theory?\n\nF: What is the Bell Theorem you were talking about?\n\nF: Some people talk about entities?\n\nF: This is all what Jung called the Collective Unconscious?\n\nF: Are these entities coming from outer space or are they more part of us?\n\nF: It\u2019s not important to know the context? It\u2019s more important to know the content?\n\nFemale audience member: Terry, are you--are you a shaman?\n\nF: Are you an exploring shaman?\n\nF: Do you want to everybody to take this drug...goes out and takes the drug, or...\n\nF: You mentioned earlier mankind evolving towards a teleological goal. Would you kindly tell me, what is the goal?\n\nF: Do you have any comments about the fact that DMT is located in the human brain?\n\nF: You stated earlier that psilocybin is coming from outer space. There is a possibly that the mushroom is?\n\nF: Uh, can I ask another question, uh, it'll be the last one?\n\nF: What do you think is evil? And, can these mushrooms be misused?\n\nF: Well, uh, you know during your talk I thought about one experience Rita and I had in in India when we were at the [Ajanta?] caves. We were looking at lingam and you know, we would look out of the caves; we would see across the bay. You could see an atomic plant and these two things just looked really identical.\n\nF: Oh it's perfect.\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Psilocybin+and+the+Sands+of+Time"}
{"id": "cf0660a8af9b-3", "text": "Follow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Psilocybin+and+the+Sands+of+Time"}
{"id": "a2e48515d69e-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nTryptamine Hallucinogens and Consciousness\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\nDecember 1982\n\nLilly/Goswami Conference, Esalen Institute, Big Sur, California\n\n7714\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo youtube link available, try the following:\n\n...the rite is the only religious practice observed by the sectarians. The rite constitutes the Secret. This Secret...is transmitted from generation to generation. ...The act in itself is trivial, momentary, and requires no description. ...The Secret is sacred, but is always somewhat ridiculous; its performance is furtive and even clandestine and the adept do not speak of it. There are no decent words to name it, but it is understood that all words name it or, rather, inevitably allude to it.\n\nv1.0 - Dec 1982 - Dolphin Tapes - From a talk given at the Lilly/Goswami Conference on Consciousness and Quantum Physics at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. This was the first of many lectures that Terence gave at Esalen. A transcription of his talk appears in Terence's 1991 book The Archaic Revival, wherein the incorrect year of 1983 is given for the talk.\n\nv1.1 - Oct 1999 - Hosted by Erowid. Text taken from the Hyperreal Drug Archives, which used The Archaic Revival as its source.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Tryptamine+Hallucinogens+and+Consciousness"}
{"id": "a2e48515d69e-1", "text": "Erowid Note: The audio recording of this talk was republished in 1986 by Lux Natura, and has recently been posted online. In addition to appearing in the 1991 book The Archaic Revival, a longer transcription of the recording that includes some of the audience question-and-answer session was published in 1993 in the Jahrbuch f\u00fcr Ethnomedizin und Bewu\u00dftseinsforschung/Yearbook for Ethnomedicine and the Study of Consciousness Nummer/Issue 2, 1992. Versions of this talk also appeared in the 1996 magazine Towards 2012, Part II and in the 2003 Book of Lies: The Disinformation Guide to Magick and the Occult.\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Tryptamine+Hallucinogens+and+Consciousness"}
{"id": "6f00d197619d-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nNew and Old Maps of Hyperspace\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\nNovember 1982\n\nInstitute for the Study of Consciousness, Berkeley, California\n\n10992\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo youtube link available, try the following:\n\n[Announcer]: The big issue these days, and it has nothing to do with his talk... is this idea of self-reflection and and of, uh, things that, uh, self referential things and the paradoxes that can come out of that, and I find Terence McKenna a kind of self-referential person. Uh, he's spoken to us at least once; [Terence: Twice] twice I think, right, uh, and each time, uh, I have experienced, uh, an almost hallucinogenic experience in listening to him talk, and I'm looking forward very much tonight to hearing him speak on dreams, hallucinogens, and UFOs... New and Old Maps of Hyperspace; take off.\n\n[Announcer: Let's have a break] [Applause]\n\n[BREAK]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/New+and+Old+Maps+of+Hyperspace"}
{"id": "6f00d197619d-1", "text": "[Announcer: Let's have a break] [Applause]\n\n[BREAK]\n\nteonan\u00e1catl, the flesh of the gods. Well, the Catholic church has a monopoly on theophagia and was not pleased by this particular approach to what was going on. Now, three hundred, four hundred, whatever it is years after that initial contact, I think that the uh, that eros, which retreated from Greece and retreated from Europe with the rise of Christianity, retreated to the mountains of the Sierra Mazeteca essentially, and then was finally pushed into seclusion there. It now reemerges in Western consciousness, and our institutions, our epistemology, all of these things are so shakily founded and so misconstrued, that with the, uh, help of shamanically inspired personalities, we can release this thing once again. I mean the Logos can be unleashed once again, and the voice that spoke to Plato and Parmenides and Heraclitus, that voice can speak again in the minds of modern people, and when it does, uh, the alienation will be ended because we will have become the alien, and this is, uh, this\n\nQuestion: Uh, well, you indicate that this essentially needs to be done through hallucinogens. I'm not saying they're good or bad; I'm just saying that there appear to be many ways of discovering that, that, um the inner reality, the ultimate reality.\n\nQ: Yea.\n\nQ: Well maybe it's, uh, it's a shortcut for a lot of people.\n\nQ: But information in the form of a flood of data. That isn't gnosis, I mean could you spell out what you mean, you certainly must mean something more important than data.\n\nQ: Yes. That is a very powerful statement\n\nQ: Yes, Yes] you do believe it, you do believe it.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/New+and+Old+Maps+of+Hyperspace"}
{"id": "6f00d197619d-2", "text": "Q: Yes, Yes] you do believe it, you do believe it.\n\nQ: But I was going to say that, that you're speaking of 'seeing', and we say 'Q.E.D.' after the demonstration in geometry but, the Hindus says 'Behold'. Now the seeing involved there, I wouldn't think of as visual, but does get the word 'seeing' or name 'seeing'. You somehow, your whole, uh, whatever it is, I wouldn't say 'mind', your 'being', resonates, I like to use the term 'recognize'. You say \"i see that this is the same thing as the other thing.\" And, I don't know whether it's 'seeing' but it, 'seeing' is a good word, but it isn't, I wouldn't call it visual.\n\nQ: well, yea, that's the recognition], the thought which is heard becomes more and more intense until finally its intensity is such that with there being no jump or glitch, you now are beholding it in a three dimensional visual space and you command it, and this is very typical of psilocybin. Yes.\n\nQ: I have, uh, two questions. One, when you were talking in terms of the dialogue, I was wondering if you could be more descriptive in that regard. And the other thing was as far as the effects of this type of experience, especially over, say, a prolonged period of time, on the body and the body as-as an energy system. And how do you, how do you balance that or how do you counteract possible negative effects or...?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/New+and+Old+Maps+of+Hyperspace"}
{"id": "6f00d197619d-3", "text": "Q: I'd like some clarification on some of the things you said. I can, um, understand, at least in my own way, how this idea about, uh, an overconsciousness--or, you know--casting a shadow, and, um, that our psychedelic experience or dream experience has to do with getting in touch with that. But you said that, um, some--I'm not really positive about this, which is why I need some clarification on it, is that in some sense that, uh, that, uh, those brief experiences, something about that our experience was in order to get back there, and that was the reason for us to be?\n\nQ: Um.\n\nQ: Well, I have a bit of trouble thinking kind of like which came first. Are you saying the chicken or the egg? Are you saying this overmind has something to do with, uh..\n\nQ: Can you comment on the, um, importance of your discussion on the I Ching in your book.\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/New+and+Old+Maps+of+Hyperspace"}
{"id": "20c491686497-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nThe Transformations of Language Under the Influence of the Psychedelic Experience\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\nOctober 1983\n\nBerkeley, California\n\n10441\n\nEnd of Results\n\nQ: Yeah, that last generalization sounded real broad. Maybe you could expand on tribalism is a social form which can exist at any technological level.\n\nQ: Would this kind of visional or beheld language have any basic structural units to it, like an alphabet, or would it be, uh, something so abstract which you couldn't re- resolve into basic... [??]\n\nQ: It occurred, something that I've been devoting a fair amount of thought to lately -.haven't gotten very far - and that's the conviction under certain experiences, you're getting information from deep within your psyche or so, from deep within some sort of racial or human information - sometimes what you talked about before, foreign but yet human information and yet another experience that you are just willing to absolutely bet that's not human information that is coming into your brain, or whatever. Many people talk about this and I was just wondering if you would share your thoughts on that division or any hypotheses, whether you feel that that's accurate, not accurate...\n\nQ: Can you relate this in any way to the crisis their having currently in the art world [???] the end of art, you know - that kind of thing...\n\nQ: Take your pick. [laughs]\n\nQ: You talked about language as information structures...", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Transformations+of+Language+Under+the+Influence+of+the+Psychedelic+Experience"}
{"id": "20c491686497-1", "text": "Q: Take your pick. [laughs]\n\nQ: You talked about language as information structures...\n\nQ: ...and, but you could also think of personality structure, that with which the witness consciousness identifies with as an information structure, too. Wh- Where do you draw the line between language that is beheld as something other and language that is, or- that - those information structures which are part of the, the identity experiencing?\n\nQ: Yeah.\n\nQ: In terms of language.\n\nQ: Yeah.\n\nQ: Yes- in Hindu, um, mythology there is reference to a state of being dissolved into the absolute, or being \"one without a second\", not, uh, defined by, uh, any past historical reference. Does that in any way connect to what you're talking about?\n\nQ: Yeah, Terence - I had a question: in the traditional use of substances that you've described - this ritual around it.\n\nQ: The - There's also intention generally from shaman around healing, uh, and focus around hunting, uh, real earthly kind of pursuits around survival... and that seems to ground the experience in many ways or provide a focus for it. When we do it by ourselves, shans, uh, sans ritual, sans this kind of language, sans this kind of training, we're prey to the whole deceptions of the mind.\n\nQ: And, so my question to you is, uh, what sort of critical inquiry do you personally use, what kind of critical language do you personally use with these forms in front of you? How do, you know w-... guard against self-deception? Uh, you use the words \"critical analysis.\" What does that mean when you translate into practice these things?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Transformations+of+Language+Under+the+Influence+of+the+Psychedelic+Experience"}
{"id": "20c491686497-2", "text": "Q: Could you comment on how that issue relates to the more general one that seems to contain it: of the turning towards the archaic, the attempt to recapture or reintegrate the unconscious forces after a period of deliberately not being able to do so as a society and what- how that's going to affect both individual and social change over the next visible historical horizon?\n\nQ: Yeah, what about a development of a suh- a language of consciousness, which we don't have - like Sanskrit's theoretically, uh... [??]...Maslow was playing around with words that would scientifically [audience cough] [comment inaudible] ..ase. Could you comment on that?\n\nQ: Could you elaborate more on the effect of the ayahuasca and with the combination with Stropharia cubensis that you mention in Invisible Landscapes [sic] in effect altering, uh, the DNA and when you mentioned the [stone box?]\n\nQ: What if you don't know anything about any of this?\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Transformations+of+Language+Under+the+Influence+of+the+Psychedelic+Experience"}
{"id": "9b948dc1e36c-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nThe Syntax of Psychedelic Time\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nAudio\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\nJuly 1983\n\nBerkeley, CA\n\n11245\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo youtube link available, try the following:\n\nAudio Link\nTranscription", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Syntax+of+Psychedelic+Time"}
{"id": "9b948dc1e36c-1", "text": "The poster says 'The Syntax of Psychedelic Time: Fractals, Endpoints, End-times, Zero points', something like that. What all this indicates is a set of ideas that I want to share with you that are a slightly different tack than my normal lectures. My normal lectures deal with the psychedelic experience as a generalized and, uh, historical phenomenon, but this effort at communication is slightly more personal in that it's an effort to impart one idea that came out of an involvement with psychedelic, uh, substances: my idea. It is idiosyncratic; it is a psychedelic idea, certainly, but it's only one of, uh, an infinite possible set of such ideas. And the reason I spend time on it to communicate it to a group of people like this is because I think it can serve as an example of psychedelic ideas, uh, generally--how they're formed, how they operate, and what's so great about them. And, (perhaps with an element of ego) I think that", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Syntax+of+Psychedelic+Time"}
{"id": "9b948dc1e36c-2", "text": "(perhaps with an element of ego) I think that this idea intrinsically has an elegance that makes it worth pursuing. But before I talk about that, I want to, uh, talk about fractals for a moment, as they are understood in orthodox mathematics, because the idea 'fractals' will serve as a basis for much of what I'm going to talk about. Fractals are technically defined as, uh, curves with a dimension greater than 1 and less than 2, or surfaces with a dimension greater than 2 and less than 3, none of which need concern us. What's important to know about fractals is that they have the peculiar property of, uh, presenting the same appearance at all scales. Uh, an examples of a fractal in nature or a fractal-like phenomenon would be a mountain range which, when you get up to it and examine small pieces of rock that are sloughing off the face of the cliff, and hold one up against the light, you discover that the edge of the", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Syntax+of+Psychedelic+Time"}
{"id": "9b948dc1e36c-3", "text": "against the light, you discover that the edge of the small fragment of rock and the edge of the mountain range are in fact the same thing. And at first this doesn't appear startling because you say 'well, the mountain is made of this stuff, this small boulder is made of this stuff, and it simply...fractures the same way.' But actually, a number of issues are being touched on, uh, in this phenomenon. First of all, when you begin analyzing nature, you discover that, uh, many, many forms of phenomena are fractal. Uh, coastlines, islands, uh...the way processes condense, the way solids condense out of liquids in cheese-making, for example, or something like that. There are many kinds of processes where, uh, a single process is reflected and refracted at many levels of magnitude so that, uh, the whole and its parts and many levels within the whole composed of its parts all have the same, uh, structure. Some fractals have been known for quite some", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Syntax+of+Psychedelic+Time"}
{"id": "9b948dc1e36c-4", "text": "structure. Some fractals have been known for quite some time, since the late 19th century, but they were considered pathological curves because they had the property of, uh, infinite lengths in very short distances because they adumbrate themselves so intricately that their, uh, length can be said to be infinite. In the same way, you can understand that very readily if you can ask yourself \"how long is the coast of California?\" Well, it depends on h-what we mean by this, if you... because the.. smaller the unit of measurement that you use, the more detail that will arise. And, at some level, the unit of measurement is so small that it's smaller than the molecular interstices of that which composes California. And at that point the length of the coastline becomes infinite.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Syntax+of+Psychedelic+Time"}
{"id": "9b948dc1e36c-5", "text": "Ok, so you get the drift of what fractals are and how they've been treated by, uh, mathematicians, particularly one mathematician. You can't discuss fractals without giving all the credit there is to Benoit Mandelbrot because if you don't give him all the credit there is, he'll ask you why not. So, he has invented this branch of mathematics. He has perfected it, and he's given us, uh, marvelous books where you can see these curves, and I thought about making this a slideshow because the fractals are tremendously beautiful objects aesthetically, but I decided against that because I want to, uh.... hold to ideas. This is a think-along lecture, by the way, and you're free to think along at any point that you feel so moved to do so. [audience laughs and a couple of small claps]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Syntax+of+Psychedelic+Time"}
{"id": "9b948dc1e36c-6", "text": "Ok, so that's what fractals are for orthodox mathematics. The psychedelic part... and what I did with this was I began to think about time. I've always had this idea that our physics has failed us because it is not true to experience, and every advance in physics has been gained at the expense of moving the terms of physics further and further away from anything that could be called concrete experience, so that what we finally have is an integrated set of complicated equations that we are told correctly map at the microphysical or the cosmological level the objects of nature that we're interested in, but it does not come tangential to our experience. I'm sure you've heard me say this before. So I meditated on time, with the idea of fractals in the background, and I noticed certain things which are obvious except they have implications when the idea of fractals is linked to them. And they're trivial things, really. They're things like, uh, 'every day is rather like every other", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Syntax+of+Psychedelic+Time"}
{"id": "9b948dc1e36c-7", "text": "like, uh, 'every day is rather like every other day, and every week is rather like every other week, and every year, and to some degree every century, and to some degree every millennium. But, I noticed that as you raise the ante on these temporal scales, change did become apparent, but at the daily level, every day is very much like every other day, but every day also is obviously different. And it's in the differences that we have the feeling of advance into a future, and, uh, and a feeling of, uh, completion. So, I took all these ideas and, uh, in the Amazon when we were investigating, uh, the beta-Carboline drugs, which were used in combination with DMT... I, uh,... under the influence of these drugs, fell into a long, extended meditation about all these themes. In fact, it actually went on for years. In fact, it's still going on in some sense. It was a true boost, and I looked at the I Ching, which", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Syntax+of+Psychedelic+Time"}
{"id": "9b948dc1e36c-8", "text": "and I looked at the I Ching, which I was familiar with but had never particularly been obsessed with, and I noticed something very interesting about it, which is: the King Wen sequence, which is the oldest sequence of the hexagrams, uh, a sequence which precedes any written commentary. When mathed for its first order of difference (and its first order of difference is nothing more than, as you pass from one hexagram to another, how many hexagrams change--[corrects himself]-- lines change. So for instance as you go from hexagram 1 to 2, all lines change, so 6 is the value of that, 6 lines change. When you go from 2 to 3, there is another value, and I graphed the I Ching this way for its first order of difference. Now, in a random distribution, you would expect a fairly even distribution of breaks of orders 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6, but, I found immediately that there were, uh, no 5s whatsoever, no breaks of order 5, and", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Syntax+of+Psychedelic+Time"}
{"id": "9b948dc1e36c-9", "text": "5s whatsoever, no breaks of order 5, and that there had been an obvious effort to, uh, optimize breaks of value 2 and 4, so.. that in itself, I mean, obviously it's ordered some way, so this wouldn't be too startling to discover a property like that. And I should pause for a moment and point out for people who have interest in the I Ching, that the I Ching is actually formed of 32 pairs. If you've ever looked at it, it's formed of pairs such that the second term in each pair is the inverse of the first term, except there are 8 cases, naturally, where inverting a hexagram has no effect on it. The obvious case is where you invert the first one. It's all solid lines, so inverting it has no effect. In that...in those 8 cases, the rule is 'all lines change'. And you see following the first hexagram, which is all solid lines, is the second hexagram, which is all broken lines. So, in studying the sequence", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Syntax+of+Psychedelic+Time"}
{"id": "9b948dc1e36c-10", "text": "is all broken lines. So, in studying the sequence of the I Ching, your problem is not really wh--'how are these 64 hexagrams arranged'? The question is 'how are these 32 pairs of hexagrams arranged.' So, I graphed the first order of difference as I mentioned, and, uh, and then I noticed a peculiar visual symmetry in my graph, which was: it looked basically like a random squiggle except that the beginning and the end of the wave were stereo-isometric reflections of each other. Now, what that means is that if you were to rotate in the plane an image of this wave without lifting it off the paper, you could bring the two graphs together and they would dovetail together perfectly at the beginning and at the end but nowhere in between. And this seemed to me a very powerful argument for, uh, order; that I had in fact discovered a previous kind of order that was implicit in this thing. Now, to some audiences I have to make a complicated apology", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Syntax+of+Psychedelic+Time"}
{"id": "9b948dc1e36c-11", "text": "some audiences I have to make a complicated apology about Logos and voices in the head and all that. I'll just skip that and say 'and so I continued working with this thing under the instruction of the voices in my head'. And...and, the first thing that I noticed when the wave was fitted together in this particular way, was that the hexagrams paired up so that they always summed to 64. In other words, 63 would pair with 1, 62 would pair with 2, 61 with 3, 60 with 4, and so on. So, it was as though a kind of magic square was being generated, where the I Ching was additive to itself in all directions on a grid. And so I took this forward-and-backward-running 64-term...glyph or graph and I said 'aha, it is the complete I Ching running forward and backward against itself'. Since it is the complete I Ching, all 64 hexagram, all 384 lines, I will follow the principle of constructing modular hierarchies. I will collapse it to", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Syntax+of+Psychedelic+Time"}
{"id": "9b948dc1e36c-12", "text": "modular hierarchies. I will collapse it to the simplest term in a system...of levels, and I will treat this rather complicated looking thing as though it were a line, one of only 384, and then I, uh, then from there, over a period of years and many pencil sharpenings, we went to computers and produced very complicated versions of this graph and, uh..... then found a way to mathematically quantify it so that it could be, instead of a network of lines running forward and backward against each other, it became, uh, a single line running in one direction into the future.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Syntax+of+Psychedelic+Time"}
{"id": "9b948dc1e36c-13", "text": "Ok, so now, what's so great about this?......... In its own terms, it is a self-consistent idea about time that tries to be true to experience. It's saying that, uh..... time is made of elements. It is not simply an event-space, something required for things to have duration. You see, before Einstein, space was thought of as a... the place where you put things. The necessary adumbration of a thing having being was that it be in space. Einstein came along and said, no, time can be thought of as a surface, as a continuum, as something which in and of itself can affect the outcome of the propagation of a beam of light or an electromagnetic field or something like that. What this idea suggests is something similar about time: that time is made of elements, and that what we intuit about time is more true to the facts of the matter than what physicists are telling us about time. What we intuit about time, and what astrology and all forms of prophecy and", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Syntax+of+Psychedelic+Time"}
{"id": "9b948dc1e36c-14", "text": "and what astrology and all forms of prophecy and intuition and clairvoyance and all these things are are the idea that we can know about time by deploying our feelings into it, and, uh.... what this theory does is take what has generally been a very, uh, feeling-toned, intuitional kind of idea and, uh, mathematecize it and give it rigor, and say that with a very simple computer we can predict novelty. We can understand, first of all, that what is happening in the world of becoming, the world that we all experience as beings, is that novelty is entering into being and it is changing the modalities of the real world toward greater and greater levels.. of integration, and no matter on what timescale you view the universe, you see this happening. In other words, the universe, uh, in its early moments, is all chaos. There are...er, er...Temperatures are too high to allow even inter-atomic bonding, so there's only a plasma of", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Syntax+of+Psychedelic+Time"}
{"id": "9b948dc1e36c-15", "text": "bonding, so there's only a plasma of stripped, uh, er, uh... particles, charged particles, and then as the universe cools, atomic bonds become possible and atomic systems come into being, which, which, uh, indicate a....m-more refined level of organization, and then later, much later, molecular systems and st--and on another level, stellar dust and star systems and organization of large aggregates of matter. Then life, and it represents another one of these quantum leaps in complexity, which is old stuff. But something else besides a leap in complexity is happening with each of these ingressions into novelty. What is happening is a speeding up of the speed at which these ingressions are happening, so that the early, uh, the first half of the history of the universe, you can say virtually nothing happened. Everything happened in the last half of the universe, uh, of the life of the universe. And, about, uh, a billion or two or three billion years", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Syntax+of+Psychedelic+Time"}
{"id": "9b948dc1e36c-16", "text": "uh, a billion or two or three billion years ago, about 20% of what we assume to be the total life of the universe ago, life appeared, and then the mammalian line, the early mammalian line appeared 60 or 70 million years ago at the close of the dinosaurs, then we get culture, 25, 30, 50 thousand years ago. And very shortly after that, mathematics, and very shortly after that, uh, electronic circuitry, and there is this compression of events which, from the point of view of the historian, is the major thing that he sees when he looks at the history of the universe, but science has never mentioned this peculiar compression of events and densifying of complexity. Science takes the position that if that's happening, it's unimportant, and it probably isn't happening at all, and science goes to great lengths, though it admits evolution, to make sure that it arises out of non-teleological processes, and to make sure that it's always confined within the realm", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Syntax+of+Psychedelic+Time"}
{"id": "9b948dc1e36c-17", "text": "make sure that it's always confined within the realm of biology so that a real..., uh, an orthodox evolutionist is very uncomfortable if you start speaking of stellar evolution or cultural evolution. I've heard these guys say 'if there are no genes involved, you do not use the word evolution'. See, they don't want to see it as a formative process touching the organic, the inorganic, the social, the psychological.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Syntax+of+Psychedelic+Time"}
{"id": "9b948dc1e36c-18", "text": "Uh...So, uh, I took very seriously this deepening ingression into novelty, and I said it is a physical quality of the continuum that we're existing in. It is not a, um, a loose and unconstrained tendency, but it is a predictable tendency like charge, speed, momentum, that kind of thing. And I noticed something very interesting about the number 384, which, if you'll recall, is the number of lines in the complete set of the I Ching. The number 384 is 13 lunar cycles. There are 29.29, I believe, days in the lunar cycle, 13 of which gives you 383.89 days or something like that. So in other words, it's to within a fraction of the day, 384 days, so, I.... it suggested to me a calendar. And, then I noticed that in, uh, hexagram 49, which is revolution, it specifically says, \"the magician is a calendar maker.\" And then I, uh, used resonances of this 384-day solar year, uh, resonances of", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Syntax+of+Psychedelic+Time"}
{"id": "9b948dc1e36c-19", "text": "this 384-day solar year, uh, resonances of 64. So, for instance, I would take the 384-day year and multiply it times 64. This gives you a period of time which is 67 years, 104.25 days. That is, uh, 6 minor sunspot cycles and 2 major sunspot cycles. Plus it also...in The Invisible Landcape, the other astro..logical... astronomical, pardon me, correlations are made clear. Uh, when you rise to the next level; when you take the 67-year cycle times 64, you get 4,306 years. This is, uh, very close to, uh, uh...let's see, half of the zodiacal age. In other words, the precession of the earth on its nutational axis requires about 25,000 years, and that is what is spoken of when they talked of the Piscean age, the Aquarian age. They're talking about how, through the slow procession of the equinox, it is moving from sign to sign, and it takes about 2000 years for a sign to be transited, so two", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Syntax+of+Psychedelic+Time"}
{"id": "9b948dc1e36c-20", "text": "years for a sign to be transited, so two signs can be transited in exactly the cycle of time indicated.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Syntax+of+Psychedelic+Time"}
{"id": "9b948dc1e36c-21", "text": "Now, I want to talk briefly about, uh, something which happened in the past which happened, possibly, hypothetically, and how it relates to this running into the short epochs where all time and culture and information seem to flow together in a kind psychedelic, uh, eternity, uh, and information stasis, a kind of standing-wave hologram that is, uh, the now. I mean, I believe the poster says, \"Plato says, time is the moving image of eternity,\" because we, we talked about that last time. Julian Jaynes, who was a psychologist at Princeton, talked about, uh, what he called 'the origin of consciousness in the bicameral mind', and he said that [clears throat] in pre-Homeric times...excuse me [takes drink]...what we experience as ego-consciousness was experienced differently by people, uh, in those early societies. What we experience as our selves, something which we completely dominate and somehow enfold in our bodies--this is the cultural metaphor that the", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Syntax+of+Psychedelic+Time"}
{"id": "9b948dc1e36c-22", "text": "bodies--this is the cultural metaphor that the self is inside the body--they experienced as outside the body and exterior from the ego and, uh, somehow independent of their own will, so that what we experience as the self and the ego, they experienced as a kind of disembodied god, or guiding voice, or inner spirit, or guardian angel. The important concept in all of this being that they experienced it as separate from themselves. Uh, and then Jaynes goes on to suggest that it was traders, who were people who passed from one society to another for the purpose of exchanging goods, who were the first cynics, because they realized that everybody's gods in different places were saying different things, and they realized therefore that there was something funny about these gods: that they were, in fact, somehow rooted in, uh, in human...psychology, rather than in theogony, in some sense. And, they became the world's first egotists, or the world's first individuated people,", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Syntax+of+Psychedelic+Time"}
{"id": "9b948dc1e36c-23", "text": "egotists, or the world's first individuated people, because they correctly identified a psychic function as arising from themselves and they integrated it. And, then, he goes on--I don't want to spend to much time with this--but then he goes on to say that it was the spread of trade, the rise of money, all these things, which broke down these dialogues between cultural wholes and their gods, and that, when it broke down, that was what shattered that, uh, world of city-civilizations that is the true ancient world, in other words, the world of Babylon, Ur, Sumer, Chaldea, the states which precede the Hellenic world, were shattered by the breakdown of this dialogue between the people and the god...and kingship. He talks a lot about how the kings assimilate, were associate with, this voice in the head, so everyone thought the king was speaking to them when they were told to...go pump water, uh...herd the cows, sheer the", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Syntax+of+Psychedelic+Time"}
{"id": "9b948dc1e36c-24", "text": "water, uh...herd the cows, sheer the sheep...whatever they were told to do.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Syntax+of+Psychedelic+Time"}
{"id": "9b948dc1e36c-25", "text": "Ok...I mention this, because, I thinks that something similar is happening in the present, and that, unwittingly Jaynes may have provided a, uh, metaphor for understanding this. We talked a bit last time about the flying saucer and how it was, uh, a projection of a future state of mankind, a mobile psychic entity, linked to the idea of the exteriorization of the soul and the interiora....interiorization of the body in electronic circuitry. I think that, uh, what we all experience as...our culture...fashion, rock and roll, politics, music, media....all of these things which we experience as the clothing that we must put on in order to be able to talk to each other. This is a kind of god, or a kind of autonomous psychic function that has slipped out of our control, or which has arisen outside of our control as a legacy of this earlier, uh, uh, process of integration in the Hellenistic period, so that...ph-phenomena like the Nuclear", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Syntax+of+Psychedelic+Time"}
{"id": "9b948dc1e36c-26", "text": "period, so that...ph-phenomena like the Nuclear Freeze Movement, or, uh, the t-the rise of the term 'networking', or, uh, all of these integrative, holistic, feeling-toned, you could almost say 'liberal', or you could almost say that liberalism in its classic 19th century guise is the first faint, uh, uh, uh-uh, sounding of this theme; this rising global humanism is in fact the rising into consciousness of a tribal god, similar to the kind of tribal god that functioned in..in these pre-Hellenic societies. And, however, in the present cultural context, cultural evolution is happening so fast that it is not going to take a millennium to pass through, you know, the first faint enunciation of the theme, the full-fledged exploration of the theme of, uh, cultural wholeness as exteriorized, uh, uh....God, or God-like mind to the integration of it. And, the psychedelic, I believe, are the keyyy to moving from wearing culture like", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Syntax+of+Psychedelic+Time"}
{"id": "9b948dc1e36c-27", "text": "are the keyyy to moving from wearing culture like clothes to recognizing that culture is this intensifying reflection of an aspect of the self and integrating it into the self. And, that's what all the hullaballoo is about, I think. And, I think that, uh, this is happening. And, uh, if, if the date 2012 means anything, it means, uh, simply that, uh, we can take that as...we can make a statistical model of what's happening and say that, uh, on, uh November 15th, 2012, a sufficient number of people will have integrated this state of global electronic self-hood that it will be uh, um....irreversible. That, up until a certain point, when any stochastic process begins to happen or when any...cascade begins to get going, up until it has a certain momentum, there is a possibility of many different bifurcations leading different end-states. But, once a certain amount of energy is in the system, then, you know, you can say", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Syntax+of+Psychedelic+Time"}
{"id": "9b948dc1e36c-28", "text": "in the system, then, you know, you can say it's going to go all the way, and I prefer to think of....I prefer to probabilitalize all of these predictions of the end of the world and to think of them simply, uh-uh, the way you think of a particle in the quantum mechanical model. When we assign a position to the particle, we understand that the particle isn't at that position, that that point is merely the center of a cloud of probably positions, any one of which could be occupied. Nevertheless, outside of a certain short distance from that point, the probability of finding the particle drops off asymptotically. So, it's a cloud of probability, and this date up after the first of the century is the center of a cloud of probability. Now, what kind of ethics decline from that kind of a position. It seems to me obvious that the first thing that's apparent from that is that you don't sit around waiting for the apocalypse. You understand that as soon as", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Syntax+of+Psychedelic+Time"}
{"id": "9b948dc1e36c-29", "text": "for the apocalypse. You understand that as soon as you push yourself over the brink, you've done the major piece of work that has to be done in your cosmos. From then you just sit around, uh, watching it happen. So, uh, it's an invitation...we're, we're all very fortunate. It reminds me, and I probably mentioned this last time, I think about it fairly often, of the Irish prayer, 'May you be alive at the end of the world'. Uh....probably we all have a very good shot at it [audience laughter], but I have no idea what the probabilities are for any one of us. Uh...I've spoken of this tonight more in its operation terms, rather than in the 'gee whiz' kind of terms, which I did last time, where I painted a picture of what it will be like to invoke this global electronic, uh, uh, aspect of the self and to integrate it. But, these ideas about collapsing time vectors, about history having an end, about,", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Syntax+of+Psychedelic+Time"}
{"id": "9b948dc1e36c-30", "text": "time vectors, about history having an end, about, in fact, history being the shockwave of an event at the end of time, these are the ideas that religions handle, uh, fairly well...I mean, not religions so much but theology. Religion tends to concern itself with, uh, with public morality. But, underpinning religion is theology, and it seems to always, at least in the West, meaning in Judaism, in Christianity, in Islam, and in all of the spectrum of cults that each one spawned, or, and continues to spawn, there is this wish to put an end to time, to close it off, to redeem us from the cycle of becoming. And, I think that the reason these ideas are so persistent in the human psyche is because, uh, all of history can be seen, in biological time, as so brief that it is simply, uh, a prelude and an anticipation...[end side 1 of tape]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Syntax+of+Psychedelic+Time"}
{"id": "9b948dc1e36c-31", "text": "[start side 2 of tape--ambient music in background]...so that they actually look down on their culture. They become extra-environmentals is a way of putting this: they act the role of the extraterrestrial. And, and, uh, we all connect the role of the extraterrestrial when..and do, when we adopt this extra-environmental position. It can be viewed as alienation if what arises out of it is, uh, uh, a feeling of forlornness and being 'cast into being', as Heidegger says. But, that need not necessarily be the feeling. The extra-environmental is also tremendously, uh, freed from the cultural conditioning. And, when you travel, you are always an extra-environmental and, extra-environmental and, you have a, uh, very deep insight into societies that you may only spend a short time in. Uh...I think the emerging archetype of the other or the alien is an effort to integrate alienation and actually make it a positive thing. And, I think I mentioned either here", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Syntax+of+Psychedelic+Time"}
{"id": "9b948dc1e36c-32", "text": "positive thing. And, I think I mentioned either here as Will [last name?]'s show about ET and how clever this was to make people identify with something which looks like a cross between a can of anchovies and the Pilsbury Dough Boy [audience laughter] and to actually....you know, love is what that movie is about and it's alien love, and, uh, it's a very important form of love to cultivate, because this process of integration of the electronic overself that is one way of looking at the end of history; that is, uh, that is the process that we're all involved in, and psychedelics, uh, which I haven't mentioned too much tonight, but which I hope you realize are the, uh, entire source and motivation and raison d'etre of all of this, because what psychedelics are doing, uh, are they are anticipating this future state, this electronic global information organism is, in fact, already present in the same way that most of the future is present in the past. I", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Syntax+of+Psychedelic+Time"}
{"id": "9b948dc1e36c-33", "text": "most of the future is present in the past. I mean, think of any point in the past. Think of 1950. Think of how much of today was present in 1950. It means that this idea that science fiction has sold us that the future is a total other world just up around the bend, it isn't actually true. The future is, uh, 95% present", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Syntax+of+Psychedelic+Time"}
{"id": "9b948dc1e36c-34", "text": "Save the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Syntax+of+Psychedelic+Time"}
{"id": "4a1ca6290c0e-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nDynamics of Hyperspace\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nAudio\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\nJune 1983\n\nSanta Cruz, California\n\n10346\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo youtube link available, try the following:\n\nAudio Link\nralphabraham.org Transcription\nScribd Transcript\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dynamics+of+Hyperspace"}
{"id": "c713b0191918-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nA Necessary Chaos\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n10 June 1983\n\nNew Dimensions Radio\n\n7433\n\nEnd of Results\n\nTerence McKenna in conversation with Michael Toms\n\nTerence McKenna: The human imagination, in conjunction with technology, has become a force so potent that it really can no longer be unleashed on the surface of the planet with safety. The human imagination has gained such an immense power that the only environment that is friendly to it is actually the vacuum of deep space. It is there that we can erect the architectonic dreams that drive us to produce a Los Angeles or a Tokyo, and do it on a scale and in such a way that it will be fulfilling rather than degrading. So yes, I think we cannot move forward in understanding without accepting as a consequence of that that we have to leave the planet, that we are no longer the bipedal monkeys we once were. We have become almost a new force in nature, a thing of language and cybernetics and an amalgam of computers and human brains and societal structures that has such an enormous forward momentum that the only place where it can express itself without destroying itself is, as James Joyce says, \"up n'ent!\"\n\nQ: So long long ago in the far away gala", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/A+Necessary+Chaos"}
{"id": "c713b0191918-1", "text": "Q: So long long ago in the far away gala\n\nTM: Well, it's in our present I think. Our future is probably almost unimaginable because I think the transformation that leaving the planet will bring will also involve a transformation of our consciousness. We are not going as 1950s style human beings. We are going to have to transform our minds before we are going to be able to leave the planet with any amount of grace. This is where I think the psychedelics come in because they are anticipations of the future. They seem to channel information that is not strictly governed by the laws of normal causality. So that there really is a prophetic dimension, a glimpse of the potential of the far centuries of the future through these compounds. No cultural shift of this magnitude can be unambiguous, i mean the very idea that as a species we would leave the earth behind us must be as rending an idea as that a child would leave its childhood home. Obviously it's a turning away from something that, once left behind, can never be recaptured. However, this is the nature of going forward into being, a series of self-transforming ascents of level. And we now simply happen to be at that moment of ascent to a new level that is linked to leaving the planetary surface physically and to reconnecting to the contents of the unconscious collectivity of our minds. These two things will be done simultaneously. This is what the last half of the 20th century, it seems to me, is all about.\n\nQ: Well by and large psychedelics have really not been accepted into the mainstream. Do you see a change in that?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/A+Necessary+Chaos"}
{"id": "c713b0191918-2", "text": "TM: Well, not particularly. They hold a certain fascination for a persistent majority, and in that way they do their catalytic work on society, which is to introduce new ideas and to release a certain kind of creative energy into society. I certainly would not like to see a return to the psychedelic hysterias of the 1960s. I think it's fine that these things are now the subject of interest of a much smaller group of people, but perhaps a group of people with a greater commitment and a better idea of exactly what these things are. And it's really the same people. It's just a smaller group of them, and they have accumulated experience over the past 20 years. However I certainly don't think all psychedelic frontiers are conquered. One of the things that I write about and speak about are the phenomena that many people confirm with the psilocybin family of hallucinogens that no one has included in the standard model of psychedelic drugs, and by that I", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/A+Necessary+Chaos"}
{"id": "c713b0191918-3", "text": "model of psychedelic drugs, and by that I refer to the Logos-like phenomenon of an interiorized voice that seems to be almost a superhuman agency, a kind of genus loci. And I have been writing recently about alien intelligence, which is what i call this, where you have contact with an entity so beyond the normal structure of the ego that if it is not an extraterrestrial it might as well be because its bizarreness and its distance from ordinary expectations about what can go on is so great that if flying saucers arrived here tomorrow from the Pleiades, it would make this mystery no less compelling because I believe that the place to search for extraterrestrials is in the psychic dimension. And there the problem is not the absence of contact, but the volume of contact that must be sifted through because the fact of the matter is shaman and mystics and seers have been hearing voices and talking to gods and demons since the paleolithic and probably before. That", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/A+Necessary+Chaos"}
{"id": "c713b0191918-4", "text": "demons since the paleolithic and probably before. That doesn't mean that we can rule out this approach to communication. It seems to me far more likely that an advanced civilization would communicate interdimensionally and telepathically. That amounts of time available for intelligent species to evolve these kinds of communication are vast. So I think that it's very interesting then that the tryptamines, psilocybin and DMT, at the 15 milligram level, very reliably trigger what could only be described as contact-like phenomena. Not only the interiorized voice in the head, but also the classical flying saucer motifs of the whirling disk, the lens-shaped object, the alien approach. This seems to be something hard-wired into the human psyche, and I would like to find out why. I think it's a very odd fact of human psychology, and I don't buy any of the current theories ranging from that nothing at all is happening to that this is in fact another species with a world around another star that is", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/A+Necessary+Chaos"}
{"id": "c713b0191918-5", "text": "another species with a world around another star that is getting in touch with us. I think it's something that's so bizarre so that it actually masquerades as an extraterrestrial so as not to alarm us by the true implications of what it is.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/A+Necessary+Chaos"}
{"id": "c713b0191918-6", "text": "But I suspect it is something like an overmind of the species, that actually the highest form of human organization is not realized in the democratic individual. It is realized in a dimension none of us have ever penetrated, which is the mind of the species, which is actually the hand at the tiller of history. It is no government, no religious group, but actually what we call the human unconscious, but it is not unconscious, and it is not simply a cybernetic repository of myth and memory. It is an organized entelechy of some sort, and human history is its signature on the primates, and it is so different from the primates. It is like a creature of pure information. It is made of language. It releases ideas into the flowing stream of history to boost the primates towards higher and higher levels of self reflection of it. And we have now reached the point where the masks are beginning to fall away, and we're discovering that there is an angel within the monkey struggling to get free, and this is what the historical crisis about. And I'm, for no reasons in particular, very optimistic. I see it as a necessary chaos that will lead to a new and more attractive order.\n\nQ: Terence you were talking about extra-ordinary realities. It occurs to me that there's an enormous amount of prejudice against the psychedelics and the use of hallucinogenic substances. It's almost as if there's an inordinate fear to open up the door to the closet that these substances reveal. What about that prejudice? What do you think, how's that going to be resolved?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/A+Necessary+Chaos"}
{"id": "c713b0191918-7", "text": "TM: Well I think it's more complicated that a prejudice. it's a prejudice born of respect because most people sense that these compounds probably actually do what their adherents claim they do. It's possible to see the whole human growth movement of the 1970s as a wish to continue the inward quest without having to put yourself on the line the way you had to when you too 250 gamma of LSD. And I think all these other methods are efficacious, but I think it's the sheer power of the hallucinogens that puts people off. You either love them or you hate them, and that's because they dissolve world views. And if you like the experience of having your entire ontological structure disappear out from under you , if you think that's a thrill, you'll probably love psychedelics. On the other hand, for some people that's the most horrible thing they could possibly imagine. They navigate reality through various forms of faith, and I think that the psychedelics, the doors of", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/A+Necessary+Chaos"}
{"id": "c713b0191918-8", "text": "I think that the psychedelics, the doors of perception are cleansed and you see very very deeply. I spent time in India, and I would always go to the local sadhus * of great reputation, and I met many people who possessed wise old man wisdom. But wise old man wisdom is a kind of Tao of how to live. It has nothing to say about these dimensions that the psychedelics reveal. For that you have to go to places where hallucinogenic shamanism is practiced, specifically the Amazon Basin. And there you discover that beyond simply the wisdom of how to live in ordinary reality, there is a gnosis of how to navigate in extra-ordinary reality. And this reality is so extra-ordinary that we cannot approach what these people are doing with any degree of smugness because the frank fact of the matter is that we have no viable theory of what mind is either. The beliefs of the Wetoto shaman and the beliefs of a Princeton phenomenologist have an", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/A+Necessary+Chaos"}
{"id": "c713b0191918-9", "text": "the beliefs of a Princeton phenomenologist have an equal chance of being correct, and there are no arbiters of who is right", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/A+Necessary+Chaos"}
{"id": "c713b0191918-10", "text": "So It's the power of these things, the fact that here is something we have not assimilated. We have been to the moon, we have charted the depths of the ocean, the heart of the atom, but we have a fear of looking inward to ourselves because we sense that here is where all the contradictions flow together. And the same prejudice against psychoanalysis that characterized the 20s and 30s when it was thought to be a superfluous or some kind of fad attends the psychedelics now. It's because it touches a very sensitive nerve. It touches the issue of the nature of man, and people are uncomfortable with this, or some people are uncomfortable with this.\n\nQ: What is the value of exploring the extraordinary realities?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/A+Necessary+Chaos"}
{"id": "c713b0191918-11", "text": "Q: What is the value of exploring the extraordinary realities?\n\nTM: Well I guess it's the same value that attends the exploration of ordinary realities. There's an alchemical saying that one should read the oldest books, climb the highest mountains, and visit the broadest deserts. I think that being imposes some kind of obligation to figure out what is going on. And since all primary information about what is going on comes through the senses, any drug or any compound which alters that sensory input has to be looked at very carefully. I have often made the point that chemically speaking, you can have a molecule which is completely inactive as psychedelic, and you move a single atom on one of its rings, and suddenly it's a powerful psychedelic. Well now, it seems to me this is a perfect proof of the inner penetration of matter an mind. The movement of a single atom from one known position to another known position chances an experience from nothing to overwhelming. This means that mind and matter at the quantum mechanical level are all spun together. This means that in a sense the term extraordinary reality is not correct if it implies a division of category from ordinary reality. It is simply there is more and more and more of reality, and some of it is inside our heads, and some of it is deployed out through three dimensional Newtonian space.\n\nQ: Most of us I think just simply accept the everyday reality as the only one, and you're talking about journeys into the nether regions, far beyond most peoples' conception or even wanting to conceive of such a reality.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/A+Necessary+Chaos"}
{"id": "c713b0191918-12", "text": "TM: Well I think there's a shamanic temperment, which is a person who craves knowledge, knowledge in the Greek sense of gnosis. IN other words, knowledge not of the sort where you subscribe to Scientific American and it validates what you believe, but cosmologies constructed out of immediate experience that are found always to be applicable. You see I don't believe that the world is made out of quarks or electromagnetic waves or stars or any of these things. I think that the world is made out of language, and that this is the primary fact that has been overlooked. The construction of a flying saucer is not so much a dilemma of hardware as it is a poetic challenge. And people find it very hard to imagine exactly what I\"m talking about. What I'm saying is the leading edge of reality is mind, and mind is the primary substratum of being. We in the West have had it the wrong way around for over a millenia, but once this is clearly understood, with what we have learned in our little excursion through three dimension space and matter we will create a new vision of humanity that will be a fusion of the East and the West.\n\nQ: Well a world being made of language, and I think of these extraordinary realities which are totally beyond any language that we use in any ordinary sense", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/A+Necessary+Chaos"}
{"id": "c713b0191918-13", "text": "TM: Yes well they are beyond ordinary language. I always think of PHylojudeas writing on the logos. He posed to himself the question: What would be a more perfect logos? And then he answered, saying it would be a logos which is not heard, but beheld, and he imagined a form of communication where the ears would not be the primary receptors but the eyes would be. A language where meaning was not constructed through a dictionary of little mouth noises, but actually three dimensional objects were generated with a kind of hyper-language so that there was perfect understanding between people. And this may sound bizarre in ordinary reality, but these forms of synesthesia and synesthesia-glossolalia are commonplace in psychedelic space.\n\nQ: Terence could you identify Phylos for us and tell us who he was?\n\nTM: He was an Alexandrian Jew of the second century who made it his business to travel around the Hellenic world and discussed all the major cults and religious and cosmogonic theories of his day. So he's a major source of Hellenistic data for us.\n\nTM: How would you relate to Socrates' view of the world.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/A+Necessary+Chaos"}
{"id": "c713b0191918-14", "text": "TM: How would you relate to Socrates' view of the world.\n\nQ: Well, I think that it's hard not to be a platonist, but it's something perhaps we should struggle against or at least struggle to modify. I think of myself as sort of a Whiteheadian platonist. Certainly the central Platonic idea which is the idea of the ideas, these archetypal forms which stand ouside of time, is one which is confirmed by the psychedelic experience. And Plato's formation of time as the moving image of eternity is another one of these aphorisms that the psychedelic state confirms. And certainly Neoplatonism, Plotinus and Poriphry, and that school are psychedelic philosophers. Their idea of an ascending hierarchy of more and more rarefied states is a sophisticated presentation of the shamanic cosmology which is the cosmology that one experientially discovers when they involve themselves with psychedelics.\n\nTM: What I think most of us don't understand or don't really know is the fact that Greek cultures and Elucinean\n\nTM: Yes well my brother has made the point asking what mushroom is it that grows at the end of history? Is it the mushroom of Fermi and Oppenhimer and Teller, or is it the mushroom of Wasson and Hoffman and Humphrey Osmond?\n\nQ: Somehow I think the latter is safer (laughter)\n\nTM: Well it may not only be safer, it may open the way to escape from the former. It's like a pun in physics that the force of liberation and the force of destruction could take the same form. It's what the alchemists call a coincidencia oppositorum.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/A+Necessary+Chaos"}
{"id": "c713b0191918-15", "text": "Q: It is an amazing synchronicity it seems, that. Also I was interested, I was talking with Andy Wile some time ago about the fact that there are a new genus of mushroom appearing that have psilocybin in them that had never been seen before, never been tracked before, and it's almost as if they're appearing now.\n\nTM: Well it's amazing how many have been discovered since people have bent their attention to it. There have been psilocybin mushrooms reported from England, France, localities where so far as we know there is no cultural history of usage at all. However it's interesting that cultural usage seems to disappear very early in human history. Hallucinogens are hardly even welcome in agricultural societies. I think it was Weston LeBar made the point that once you learn how to grow plants, your god shifts from the ecstatic god of the hallucinogens to the corn god or the food god, and it no longer is about divining the hunt and weather through the ecstatic use of hallucinogen. It's about being able to get up every morning and go to work and hoe the crop. So you mentioned earlier the prejudice against hallucinogens, I think it reaches back to the beginning of agriculture. This competition among plant gods which exemplified lifestyles that must have seemed very alien to each other.\n\nQ: Is psilocybin illegal?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/A+Necessary+Chaos"}
{"id": "c713b0191918-16", "text": "Q: Is psilocybin illegal?\n\nTM: Oh yes, it's a schedule 1 drug. Without any public debate it was placed on the list at the same time that LSD was, and yet the issue was always couched in terms of LSD being made illegal, but actually at that point in time a whole bunch of things were made illegal. And there was never any public debate. All psychedelics were viewed as the same drug, and LSD was used as the model. Actually, these drugs, there's a spectrum of psychedelic effects and certain drugs trigger some of them and certain ones others, but yes, psilocybin is illegal.\n\nQ: Are the mushrooms illegal?\n\nTM: The mushrooms also are illegal as they contain psilocybin.\n\nQ: I got a call from Andy Wild saying he walked down a downtown Seattle residential street picking up psilocybin mushrooms from the front yards of residential homes.\n\nTM: (laughing) Well English law took the view that it was preposterous to try and outlaw a naturally occurring plant, and they took the position that only the chemical was illegal which I think is a very wise position. But I noticed that Canada recently chose the American interpretation over the British one.\n\nQ: Interesting. Turns out, going back to the Andy Wild story, that the reason that these mushrooms were in such plenitude in various locales in the northwest was that their spores were contained in a mail order company's mushroom growing product that they sent out mail order. And so...", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/A+Necessary+Chaos"}
{"id": "c713b0191918-17", "text": "TM: Yes, this is an interesting phenomenon. You see, the spores of the mushroom are not illegal because they do not contain psilocybin. They only contain the message and the DNA of the mushroom for the production of psilocybin, so it's a kind of bizarre catch-22. The mushroom spores can move anywhere legally, can be bought and sold, but they are the sine-qua-non for the production of mushrooms of course.\n\nQ: Terence the kind of knowledge and the kind of information you're putting forth is not generally available. It's not the kind of information or knowledge that one would find in the typical academic anthropology curriculum. And yet it seems to be a knowledge that is ever expanding, but somehow it's outside of the cultural institutional entities in some way. Number one, why do you think that's the case- of course there's a logical answer to that one. What do you see as the future of this kind of information, this kind of knowledge.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/A+Necessary+Chaos"}
{"id": "c713b0191918-18", "text": "TM: Well I think in a sense it signals the rebirth of the institution of shamanism in the context of modern society, and anthropologists have always made the point about shaman, that they were very important social catalysts in their group, but they were always peripheral to it, peripheral to the political power and actually usually physically peripheral, living at some distance from the village. And I think the electronic shaman, the people who pursue the exploration of these spaces, exist to return to tell the rest of us about it, that we are now coming into a period of racial maturity as a species where we can no longer have forbidden areas of the human mind or cultural machinery. We have taken upon ourselves the acquisition of so much power that we now must understand what we are. We cannot travel much further with the definitions of man that we inherit from the Judeo-christian tradition. We need to truly explore the problem of consciousness because as man gains power he is becoming the", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/A+Necessary+Chaos"}
{"id": "c713b0191918-19", "text": "because as man gains power he is becoming the defining fact on the planet in the near space area. So the question that looms is, is man good? And then, if he is, what is it he's good for. And the shaman will point the way, because what they are are visionaries, poets, cultural architects, forecasters, all these roles which we understand in more conventional terms rolled into one and raised to the nth power. They are cultural models for the rest of us. This has always been true, that the shaman has access to a superhuman dimension and a superhuman condition, and by being able to do that he affirms the trans...the potential for transcendence in all people. He is an exemplar, if you will. And I see the attention that's been given to these things signaling a sense on the part of the society that we need a return to these models. This is why, for instance, in the Star Wars phenomenon Skywalker, Luke Skywalker, Skywalker is a direct translation", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/A+Necessary+Chaos"}
{"id": "c713b0191918-20", "text": "Skywalker, Luke Skywalker, Skywalker is a direct translation of the word 'shaman' out of the Temgusik which is where Siberian shamanism comes from. So these heroes that are being instilled in the heart of the culture are shamanic heroes. They control a force which is bigger than everybody and holds the galaxy together. This is true as a matter of fact, and as we explore how true it is, the limitations of our previous world view will be exposed for all to see. I think it was J. B. S. Haldane who said 'the world may not only be stranger than we suppose, it may be stranger than we can suppose'.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/A+Necessary+Chaos"}
{"id": "c713b0191918-21", "text": "I think that the character Yoda describes a sort of shamanic character.\n\nVery much so\n\nAs we talk about shamans and shamanism, again that brings up cross-cultural currents. Do you see the shaman taking on a new...certainly you don't see Indian shamans walking into the metropolitan areas...but do you see the shaman taking on a new form?\n\nWell I believe, along with Gordon Wasson and others, but in distinction to Merciliad who is a major writer on shamanism, that it is hallucinogenic shamanism that is primary, and that where shamanic techniques are used to the exclusion of hallucinogenic drug ingestion, the shamanism tends to be visciated\n\nQ:So as we continue to move towards the further exploration of the spaces. We can expect that social change is a result?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/A+Necessary+Chaos"}
{"id": "c713b0191918-22", "text": "TM: Tremendous social change. I see in fact what is happening is a tendency to what I call turn the body inside out. We are through our media and our cybernetics, we are actually approaching the point where consciousness can be experienced in a state of disconnection from the body. We have changed. We are no longer, as I said, bipedal monkeys. We are instead a kind of cybernetic coral reef of organic components and inorganic technological components. We have become a force which takes unorganized raw material and excretes technical objects. We have transcended the normal definitions of man. We are like an enormous collective organism with our data banks and our forecasting agencies and our computer networks and the many levels at which we are connected into the universe. Our self image is changing. The monkey is all but being left behind, and all but will be left behind. The flying saucer, again, I take to be an image of the future state of humanity. It is a kind of millenarian transformation of man where the soul is exteriorized as the apotheosis of technology, and it is that eschatological event which is casting enormous shadows backward through time over the historical landscape. That is the siren at the end of time, calling all mankind across the last ten millenia toward it. Calling us out of the trees and into history and through the series of multilevel cultural transitions to the point were the thing within the monkeys, the creature of pure language and pure imagination whose aspirations are entirely titanic in terms of self transformation, that thing is emerging, and it will emerge as man leaves the planet. And i's not something quantized and clearly defined. It is in fact what the next fifty or so years will be about. But at the end of it, the species will be off-planet and transformed, and fully wired from the depths to the heights.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/A+Necessary+Chaos"}
{"id": "c713b0191918-23", "text": "Q: Are we just talking about another version of the Christian death, resurrection, ascention, and heaven?\n\nTM: Except that it is coming into history. What is happening is that the paradise promised the soul is actually going to enter into history because technological man took the apocalyptic aspirations of Christianity so seriously that we are going to make it happen. It has become the guiding image of what we want to be. And I'm reminded of the poem by Yates. It's 'Sailing to Byzantium', where he speaks of how after death, he would like to be an enameled golden object singing to the lords and ladies of Byzantium. And it's the image of man transformed into eternal circuitry and released into a hyperspace of information where you are a thing of circuitry but you appear to be walking along an unspoiled beach in paradise. It is that we are going to find the power to realize our deepest cultural aspirations. This is why we must find out what our deepest cultural aspirations are. Again, another way of phrasing the question 'is man good.'\n\nQ: What about the idea that the spaces that we've been talking about that you've been illuminating are spaces that can be achieved without the use of psychedelics.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/A+Necessary+Chaos"}
{"id": "c713b0191918-24", "text": "TM: Well, again I scoured India and my humble personal opinion is that it is highly unlikely. I have always approached people of spiritual accomplishment with the question 'what can you show me' because as I said earlier this 'wise old man' wisdom is one thing, but only the hallucinogen-using shaman of the Amazon seem to be able to go beyond that. There may be techniques for doing this, but the efficacy and the dependability of the hallucinogens seems to me to make them the obvious choice. It would only be a series of cultural conventions that would cause one to want to engineer around that. It is the obvious path to transendence. People must face the fact that at one level we are chemical machines. That doesn't mean we are that at every level, but it does mean that that is a level where we can intervene to change the pictures that are coming in and going out at higher levels.\n\nQ: You're not suggesting that people should do this by themselves?\n\nTM: Take hallucinogens? Well I don't know about take it by themselves, probably not, though I always do and I seem to prefer it. What I am suggesting is that they take it in a situation of minimum sensory input, lying down in darkness with eyes closed cannot be surpassed, and people want music, they want to walk around in nature, they want all these things. But nature and music are beautiful in their own right. They are the adumbrations of the psychedelic experience that we deal with in ordinary reality. In confrontation with the psychedelic experience, these things are hardly more than impediments. There are very interesting things happening in the utter blackness behind your eyelids, lying still in darkness. And that is where the mystery comes from and goes to.\n\nMy question had to do with with or without a guide.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/A+Necessary+Chaos"}
{"id": "c713b0191918-25", "text": "My question had to do with with or without a guide.\n\nOh, I don't think people should do it without a guide unless they feel very confident from experience that they don't need a guide. Because I like to have these ideas get out. I think it's important that we discuss all this in a way that is only now becoming possible because of how it was in the 1960s. Now we need to shed all that and look back, and look forward and try to make a mature judgement for our culture based on the facts of the matter.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/A+Necessary+Chaos"}
{"id": "c713b0191918-26", "text": "0:42:08.9 Well someone asked when we first went around to try and talk about the furture. I don't know if I made the point strongly enough. I wasn't sure I felt it click, and I think it's a strong one and it's somewhat new with me. It's this idea that our...that we represent some kind of singularity, or that we announce the nearby presence of a singularity, that the evolution of life and cultural form and all that is clearly funneling toward something fairly unimaginable. I mean I really don't think we can imagine our future because when we try to project some little science fiction scenario of our future, we inevitably select a very small number of trends and then we propagate them forward without integrating the forward propagation of everything else that is going to be happening simultaneously. You know there are options such as nanotechnology, the building of super tiny machines. Space migration was once an option- this seems to be fading,it seems to have been written", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/A+Necessary+Chaos"}
{"id": "c713b0191918-27", "text": "to be fading,it seems to have been written off the menu by the powers that be as the Soviet Union cracks to pieces, the human race's ability to leave this planet becomes a memory of ancient times. I mean, we could not return to the moon in less than fifteen years if we committed ourselves to it tomorrow, so the space thing seems to have been taken off the agenda. There's nanotechnology, there's virtual reality. The present solution seems to be this enforced larval neoteny on the consuming blue-collar masses, in the high-tech societies, and triage through epidemic disease and mismanagement in the third world. It's a huge mix, this problem of saving the world or halting the forward thrust into catastrophy. People say, well why do you worry about saving the world, you just said it's going to end in 2012. I don't see that rap as any sort of permission for political irresponsibility or a lack of attention to world problems. If it's true, great,", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/A+Necessary+Chaos"}
{"id": "c713b0191918-28", "text": "attention to world problems. If it's true, great, we're golden. If it's not true, and what a long shot it is, then we should still keep our eye on the ball with all of this stuff. It is overpopulation is what's driving us crazy. All other problems, toxic waste disposal, epidemic disease, resource extraction, degradation of the environment, collapse of the atmosphere. Inability to satisfy third-world aspirations. All of these problems are population problems. And capitalism doesn't want to talk about it because capitalism is not a human being. Capitalism is a Moloch, a god, a god of bloody sacrifice that sees human beings as ants. And the more ants there are, the more offerings there can be to Moloch, but this is not a good situation for us ants. Capitalism is a gun pointed at the head of global civilization. If you read the theoreticians of capitalism, Adam Smith and so forth, capitalism assumes an unlimited exploitable frontier. There is no", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/A+Necessary+Chaos"}
{"id": "c713b0191918-29", "text": "assumes an unlimited exploitable frontier. There is no such creature, so it has turned pathological. The only frontier now left to exploit is not a frontier in space, but a frontier in time. We steal the future from our children by plunging massively deeper and deeper into debt. But this frontier, the end is in sight, and when we hit that wall we will join the Eastern Bloc in a fundamental reappraisal of our situation. Democracy I believe in. I think democracy is the psychedelic form of government because I don't see it as a product of rational thought. I see it as institutionalized anarchy. Democracy is biology managed for human purposes. It honors the biological unit, it takes the biological unit and gives it a vote, and that's a way for mother nature to then enter into human history. I mean I'm fairly mystical about democracy, sort of like William Blake.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/A+Necessary+Chaos"}
{"id": "c713b0191918-30", "text": "Q: So how are you preparing for 2012 yourself?\n\nTM: Well, by going way out on a limb, I guess. People ask me 'what will you do if nothing happens in 2012'. Well, by god-sent coincidence, my 65th birthday occurs a month before the date, so then I think I'll just steal away in disgrace and find myself a girl on an island who runs fish traps and disappear forever.\n\nAs to what I do in the meantime, I don't...I should make it clear. I don't believe this stuff. I find believing in these high-flown complicated synthetic systems to come off sort of like pathology, so I entertain ideas but I don't give the leaf over. I'm very amazed by the timewave. It continuously surprises and delights me. Very few people are obviously as into it as I am, but it's proof enough as far as I'm concerned. I mean, it's all I ever would have asked for. It's the gem from the other, it's aladdin's lamp, it's what I wanted and I got it. At one point in La Chorrera naturally this question arose in our group. Why us? Why are the aliens revealing the unified field theory to us, and the mushroom just replied without hesitation 'because you don't believe in anything.' And that apparently is what's required.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/A+Necessary+Chaos"}
{"id": "c713b0191918-31", "text": "Do you all know that Van Morrisson song about 'no guru, no method no teacher, just you and me and nature, in the garden, in the garden.' I think that's actually where it's at. So what I do between now and 2012 is I'm a meme spreader, a mean replicator, and the purpose of these teaching things is to turn you into fellow replicators of the meme, I mean I see it all in the metaphors of molecular biology. I have a new sequence of codons here, and I want to insert it into each one of you without error in copying and you should go forth and tell other people and copy it into their head, and this meme will spread because we cannot evolve faster than our language. The edge of being is the edge of meaning, and somehow we have to push the edge of meaning, we have to extend it because if we appear to be confronted by insoluble problems it's because we have the wrong language for dealing with this", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/A+Necessary+Chaos"}
{"id": "c713b0191918-32", "text": "because we have the wrong language for dealing with this problem. You learn that with computers. Certain languages are good for certain kinds of problems. We have to constantly evolve language and push it forward, and the way I think of the psychedelics is they are catalysts to the imagination. That's what they were back a hundred thousand years ago. The imagination, which was just this glimmering, this iridescence on the surface of ape cognition, was under the influence of the reciprocal feedback of self reflection, you know, that is created by watching your own mind because it has suddenly become interesting, because it has suddenly been flooded by a psychoactive aiming. That iridescence has been coaxed into language, art, architecture, music, poetry, the whole ball of wax. But now we know these things. It's no longer a sort of haphazard process. We can, by analyzing different kinds of cultures existing in the world today and cultures that existed in the past, we can", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/A+Necessary+Chaos"}
{"id": "c713b0191918-33", "text": "and cultures that existed in the past, we can uncover, reveal, unravel the lost secret of our origins. I haven't talked too much this weekend, but I'm very keen for the notion of what I call the archaic revival, and the archaic revival is this overarching metaphor that is the way for us to go to save our necks at this point. When a culture gets into trouble, instinctively what it does is it goes back through its own past until it finds a moment when things seem to make sense, and then it brings that moment forward into the present. The perfect example is when medieval Christianity no longer made sense to a major proportion or percentage of the people of Western Europe because of the rise of new kinds of classes, new forms of wealth, new information about the world outside Europe, when the medieval vision lost its power, the intellectuals of that time instinctively reached backwards into the past looking for a stable model, and finally they reached the golden", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/A+Necessary+Chaos"}
{"id": "c713b0191918-34", "text": "a stable model, and finally they reached the golden age of Periclean Athens. And there they found Plato, Aristotle, the dramatists, so forth, and they created Classicism. Notice that we're talking here about the 1400's. Classicism was brought to birth in the 1400's, two thousand years after the death of Plato, and we are still to a tremendous degree, we are the children of this classical revival which we call the renaissance. Our theories of law, our theories of government, our notion of justice, our notions of city planning, of architecture, military planning and so forth, are all drawn from classical Greek and Roman models that were brought back from the dead five hundred years ago by a bunch of Italian investment bankers who thought that this was a good model to build on, to hang their civilization on. And now this has run out. The contradictions are too extreme. This classicism, I don't want to say it's failed, but it has just taken us", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/A+Necessary+Chaos"}
{"id": "c713b0191918-35", "text": "say it's failed, but it has just taken us as far as it can go. So now we again, we confront great existential confusion, we confront cultural values completely different from our own such as rainforest aborigines and so forth. We confront the toxic legacy of modern science, the retreating species counts of the earth, the decaying atmosphere, all these things. So we must now reach far back into time for a new cultural model. Our crisis is so great that we have to reach back to the high paleolithic, to the moment immediately before the invention of agriculture and the creation of the dominator ego. People talk about the new age and the new paradigm and this and that, well it's larger than that. It's been going on throughout the 20th century. The discovery of the purification of mescaline in Berlin in 1987, Freud begins to publish at the turn of the century, Jung....they are discovering the primitive unconscious. They are revealing to Edwardian and", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/A+Necessary+Chaos"}
{"id": "c713b0191918-36", "text": "primitive unconscious. They are revealing to Edwardian and Viennese ladies and gentlemen of great culture and breeding that they have inside them brawling, incestuous, violent, lust-driven animal natures. In other words, they are reintroducing an awareness of the primitive into this tremendously constipated male dominated late 19th century post-Victorian cultural milieu. And then, following hard upon them, the impressionists in the 1880s giving way to analytical cubism and all that. Cubism arose as the result of the fascination of a few artists with primitive African masks. Picasso and his circle, and when they brought this stuff back to Paris in 1905 through 15, nobody had ever seen this kind of thing, and these guys began to try to reconstruct the pictorial space of people like Degas and those people into the pictorial space of the primitive mentality. Meanwhile anthropologists were bringing in..and Frazer published The Golden Bow, which laid before the European intellectual community this vast repository of integrated", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/A+Necessary+Chaos"}
{"id": "c713b0191918-37", "text": "the European intellectual community this vast repository of integrated mythology. National socialism, surrealism, all of these things- some negative, some positive- are all aspects of the 20th century fascination and re-vivification of the primitive. Rock and roll, the rise of sexual permissiveness, the rise of styles of dancing which were not the minuet and so forth. All of this signals this fascination with the primitive, but at the center of it stand two phenomena, or two integrated phenomena: the personality of the shaman, and the fact of the psychedelic of experience, and we've come late to that. The 1960's is when this theme was first announced for any large number of people and I think that we have to consciously deconstruct the constipated, classical, industrial, linear, dominator civilization that we're trapped inside because it's a vehicle we can't steer. It's glued to the tracks which run right over the cliff. If we cannot alter the assumptions of this society, if the George", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/A+Necessary+Chaos"}
{"id": "c713b0191918-38", "text": "the assumptions of this society, if the George Bush's and Helmut Coles of this world are going to continue to run things, then head for the bunkers folks and pray, because the bunkers aren't going to be any consolation.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/A+Necessary+Chaos"}
{"id": "c713b0191918-39", "text": "Save the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/A+Necessary+Chaos"}
{"id": "d335a7d96113-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nNew Dimensions Radio Interview (aka Towards the Unknown)\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n10 June 1983\n\nSan Francisco, California\n\n5759\n\nEnd of Results\n\nMichael Toms: So, long, long ago in a far away galaxy, uh, Star Wars style may be in our future?\n\nMT: As opposed to our past?\n\nMT: Well by and large, uh, psychedelics have, uh, really not been accepted into the mainstream - do you see a change in that?\n\nMT: Terence, you were talking about, uh, extra-ordinary realities and it occurs to me that there's, um, an enormous amount of prejudice against um, the... psychedelics and the, uh, use of hallucinogenic, uh, substances and, um, it's almost as if there's an inordinate fear to open up the, um, door to the closet that these substances, uh, reveal. Um, what about that prejudice? What do you think is- how's that gonna be resolved? What is the resolution of that?\n\nMT: What is the value of exploring, uh, extraordinary realities?\n\nMT: Most of us, I think, just simply accept, uh, the everyday reality as the only one. Uh, and, and you're talking about uh, uh, journeys into the nether regions of, uh, uh, which- far beyond most peoples, uh, conception or even wanting to conceive of, uh, such a reality. Uh.\n\nMT: Well, the world being made of language and I think of these extraordinary realities which are totally beyond any language that we [laughs], we use in any ordinary sense.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/New+Dimensions+Radio+Interview+%28aka+Towards+the+Unknown%29"}
{"id": "d335a7d96113-1", "text": "MT: Terence, could you identify Philos for us and tell him-tell us who he was?\n\nMT: How would you relate to, uh, Socrates view of the world?\n\nMT: What I think most of us don't understand, or don't-don't really know is the fact that Greek culture and the Eleusinian min-mysteries, um, incorporated the use of something that- very akin to psychedelics.\n\nMT: And, and, essentially Western civilization [Laughing] is based on the culture that, uh, had at its core root, um, an experience and a ritual that-that used, as I say, something akin to psychedelics\n\nHuautla de Jimenez in the Sierra Mazateca of Oaxaca, discovered the psilocybin mushroom cult. It was as if Eros who had been martyred in the Old World was then found sleeping in the mountains of Mexico and resurrected. And, uh, the experience of the mushroom is very much the experience of a\n\nbacchanalian nature power that uh, is-is very alien and yet resonates with our expectations of what that experience would be like.\n\nMT: Interesting that the mushroom also is a symbol in our culture of death and destruction, being the symbol of the nuclear explosion.\n\nMT: Mushroom cloud.\n\nMT: Somehow, I think the latter is safer!\n\nMT: Hm, it is an amazing synchronicity it seems uh, that uh... Also, I was interested in--interested in talking with Andy Weil some, uh, time ago about the fact there are new genus of mushrooms appearing that, um, have psilocybin in them that have never been seen before, never been, um, tracked before, and it's almost as if they're appearing now.\n\nMT: Is psilocybin illegal?\n\nMT: Are the mushrooms illegal?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/New+Dimensions+Radio+Interview+%28aka+Towards+the+Unknown%29"}
{"id": "d335a7d96113-2", "text": "MT: Is psilocybin illegal?\n\nMT: Are the mushrooms illegal?\n\nMT: I recall Andy Weil saying that he walked along a downtown Seattle residential street picking up psilocybin mushrooms from the front yards of...\n\nMT: ...residential homes. [chuckles]\n\nMT: Hm, interesting. It turns out, uh, going back to the Andy Weil story, that, uh, the reason that these mushrooms were in such plenitude in various locals in the northwest was that, uh, that their spores were contained in a mail order company's, uh, um, mushroom growing, uh, product that they send out, mail order, and so...\n\nTM: Yea. So, this is an interesting phenomenon; you see the spores of the mushroom are not illegal because they do not contain psilocybin. They only contain the message in the DNA of the mushroom for the production of psilocybin, so it's a kind of bizarre catch-22. The mushroom spores can move anywhere legally, can be bought and sold but they are the sine qua non for the production of mushrooms, of course.\n\nMT: Terence, the-the kind of knowledge and kind of information you're putting forward is... is not generally available. It's not the kind of information or knowledge that one would find in the typical academic anthropology, uh, curriculum, um, and yet it seems to be, um, a knowledge that, uh, is ever-expanding, but somehow it's outside of the cultural institutional, uh, entities in some way. Um, number one, why do you think that's the case? Of course, there's a logical answer to that one, but, um, what do you see as the future of this kind of information, this kind of knowledge?\n\nMT: I think of, uh, the chara-[clears throat] excuse me, the character Yoda...", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/New+Dimensions+Radio+Interview+%28aka+Towards+the+Unknown%29"}
{"id": "d335a7d96113-3", "text": "MT: ...certainly as a shamanic type character.\n\nMT: Yea..... As we talk about shamans and shamanism, again that brings up, uh, cross-cultural currents, and, um, do you see the-the shaman taking on a new uh, -certainly you don't see Indian shamans walking, uh, into metropolitan areas, uh, but do you see the shaman taking on a new form?\n\nMT: So, as we, uh, continue to, uh, move towards the further exploration of these spaces, um, we, uh, can expect that, um, social change is a result? Personal change?\n\nMT: Are we just talking about another version of the Christian death-ressurection-ascension into heaven?\n\nMT: What about the idea that these spaces that we've been talking about, that you've been illuminating, are spaces that can be achieved without the use of psychedelics?\n\nMT: You're not suggesting that people should do this by themselves?\n\nMT: My question had to do with 'with or without a guide'.\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/New+Dimensions+Radio+Interview+%28aka+Towards+the+Unknown%29"}
{"id": "0f9bca6ebac6-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nHallucinogens Before and After Psychology (aka Beyond Psychology)\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n14 May 1983\n\nUniversity of California Santa Barbara, Psychedelics & Spirituality Conference\n\n3533\n\nEnd of Results\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Hallucinogens+Before+and+After+Psychology+%28aka+Beyond+Psychology%29"}
{"id": "019a31850ca6-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nThe Definitive UFO Tape\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\nApril 1983\n\nMill Valley, CA\n\n8014\n\nEnd of Results\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Definitive+UFO+Tape"}
{"id": "0f398e56b0eb-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nThe Voynich Manuscript\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\nApril 1983\n\nMill Valley, CA\n\n4376\n\nEnd of Results\n\nFaustin Bray: Greetings, this is Faustin Bray for Sound Photosynthesis, Brian Wallace is recording, and today we have the good fortune to talk with Terence McKenna. He has chosen a subject that has been interesting to him for quite a while, and, um, the title of this tape is \"The Voynich Manuscript.\"\n\nwhen he encountered it in Paris. He was involved with a series of Angel contacts where he elaborated a language called Enochian, which like Voynich, is not written in, uh, characters of the English alphabet but has a peculiar set of characters unique to itself. Over 3000 words have been defined in Enochian, first through Dee's, uh, uh, spirit contacts and later the Golden Dawn took it up and further expanded it. But in Dee's diaries which are deposited in the British Museum there are 93 pages of encrypted material which are columns of numbers, and uh, I believe that, uh, uh, to eliminate the possibility that Dee was the author of the Voynich Manuscript the encoding methods of this material in his diary need to be computer analyzed and then compared to the Voynich material.\n\nFB: What would you like to do with it?\n\nFB: [unintelligible] and it's um...?\n\nBW: What does it look like?\n\nFB: What are the ingredients of the inks and the...?\n\nFB: Boy, Bacon gets in there everywhere-\n\nBW: [Unintelligible]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Voynich+Manuscript"}
{"id": "0f398e56b0eb-1", "text": "FB: Boy, Bacon gets in there everywhere-\n\nBW: [Unintelligible]\n\nFB: Collapse of the Winter King and Queen?\n\nFB: Are you pursuing it?\n\nFB: And so concludes the interview with Terence McKenna in 1983. Since that time, a book composed of interviews by Terence and various other people, including this one, called \"The Archaic Revival\" has been put out by Harper Collins, and in that book he continues on with the, um, research that's been done about the Voynich Manuscript, and he writes, on page 182, of that book, The Archaic Revival:\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Voynich+Manuscript"}
{"id": "d3c97e4fff2d-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nAlien Love\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n1983\n\nShared Visions Bookstore, Berkeley, CA\n\n8213\n\nEnd of Results\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Alien+Love"}
{"id": "925ac46ea210-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nThe Gnostic Astronaut\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\nJune 1984\n\nShared Visions Bookstore, Berkeley, CA\n\n10987\n\nEnd of Results\n\n[audience member says something--\"...tell a story] What?!", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Gnostic+Astronaut"}
{"id": "925ac46ea210-1", "text": "[audience member: \"you didn't tell a story, the UFO story\"] Oh, which UFO story [audience commotion]......Well.....I don't know. It has to do with this whole thing. You see, the alien is an archetype, as well as whatever else it may be. I mean, if aliens didn't exist or don't exist, we would still invent them, because it's, it's the other. You know, I've, I've made the metaphor that we have arrived at some kind of, uh, collective puberty, where we now are fascinated by, uh, the notion of a non-human partner. We're obsessed, as an adolescent is obsessed with sex, we're obsessed with the notion of alien love. We want this, and yet we have all the feelings about it that an adolescent brings to the early sexual experiences; it seems like an abyss, a devouring, a kind of a giving up, impossible, and yet, our, our historical development, has led us to the place where we", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Gnostic+Astronaut"}
{"id": "925ac46ea210-2", "text": "development, has led us to the place where we now realized this was possible, it's like finding out the facts of life. The facts of life are that there could be a girl next door......and now [audience member: \"who's an alien\"]...Who's an alien. Of course! What other kind of girl next door could it be [audience laughter]. So, then, hmmm, there's a girl next door....a-a-and, so, it's not--all the talk about the wonderful technical benefits that we would reap, and all this, and obviously it isn't that. It's an erotic fascination with the notion of the other that drives us and that perhaps this is why, in the psychedelic experience, the alien emerges so fully and completely, because it is a repressed notion. Although, I've noticed that in the...in the history of the, the phenomenology of the UFO contacts, the theme....it was first a light in the sky, then we had all these exotic abductions, and then the last four or", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Gnostic+Astronaut"}
{"id": "925ac46ea210-3", "text": "exotic abductions, and then the last four or five years there are more and more persistent stories of, uh, sexual relations, pregnancies, this kind of thing. Well, this obviously means that, you know, we're growing up, we're getting older [audience laughter], the pressure is on to come to terms with how this thing is going to present itself....Yes. [Terence laughs]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Gnostic+Astronaut"}
{"id": "925ac46ea210-4", "text": "[audience member: that's the story man!]\n\nQuestion: Uh...sort of, psilocybin glossolalia....that's, that's not any words that are in any cultures right, but that has meaning for you [Terence: \"Yes\"]...Have you ever heard of, or have you ever, communicated with any other person in this language.\n\nQ: Yea.\n\nQ: And both of you have this experience of shared meaning?\n\nQ: No, I just, I mean, I'll take your word, if you both experienced shared meaning and confirmed it, that's about as far you can go...\n\nQ: So, it's like you, you do some and they do some back and forth...and it's totally unintelligible to the English ear.\n\nQ: What, w-you know, what you're talking about, really could be the language before we were trying to build the tower of Babel. We all shared the same language [can't decipher] because we...\n\nQ: I mean, it happens without drugs all the time.\n\nQ: So is it anything like what babies who are about to learn to speak to use to carry on these things, and sounds like a language that you just don't understand...there's all this inflection, and, it sounds very intelligent if you could just kinda catch it [Terence: \"It's, it's like that...\"--several people talking at once]...well, a lot of it was to actual language.\n\nQ: Is it easier if there's somebody else there to hear it?\n\nQ: Is it easier, in other words....And, uh, I got the impression that there was something about the attention, the listening to somebody else, that facilitated it, a channeling through...\n\nQ: Do you think you're a better speaker in English since having these experiences?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Gnostic+Astronaut"}
{"id": "925ac46ea210-5", "text": "Q: Do you think you're a better speaker in English since having these experiences?\n\nQ: Is there more fluidity that there are, you know, you have developed, you know, in your face, in your expression, and..?\n\nQ: You see that, the first thing that comes to mind when you talk about the creative power of sound, err...or language, uh....um...for me, is the experience that I've had with the holophonic sound, where you have this sense, you know, that, that qualities in other senses are created through sound [Terence: \"right\"] and, uh, I wonder what would happen if you record this holophonically, and then people listen to that.\n\nQ: I heard a lot of things, you know, with transmits qualities, emotions for people in unusual states and so, um...but there I came as close as I've ever been to understand that there is something special about the creative power of sound...\n\nQ: You know, I was always saw it as a metaphor that, what science has discovered about vibrations and so that when they talk about sound, they really mean vibrations and not sound literally.\n\nQ: Yea, but there's just...you know, there's just, it's just the next stage.\n\nQ: Well, that's like, what I...two things come to mind. One is, I understand that Hitler's generals would go into him, you know, and they're gonna talk him out of this next invasion, cause he's totally off the wall, and they come out glassy-eyed and convinced they're gonna go and invade some more.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Gnostic+Astronaut"}
{"id": "925ac46ea210-6", "text": "Q: Well, the other thing is, uh...the other thing is to, uh...is, uh, Milton Erickson, who, just with his voice, uh, does all sorts of things with people that are, you know totally [other audience member]: he can't even speak their language; he can do it to people that he doesn't even understand them and they don't understand him... [first audience member]: totally with sound and he moves his head around in real unusual ways even when you stop talking and who knows what that does\n\nQ: Don Fidel\n\nQ: We have the tape down here...\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Gnostic+Astronaut"}
{"id": "ba65049cc819-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nPsychedelic Society\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\nFebruary 1984\n\nEsalen Institute, Big Sur, California\n\n5702\n\nEnd of Results\n\nQ: Earlier- earlier in your talk, you mentioned the expression, \"gene swarm.\" I'm not familiar with it. Could you explain it?\n\nQ [Same]: So that you would see the, the actual organisms and all that is being maybe, uh, all the gene swarm expressing itself as an interaction with the environment at that particular moment...\n\n[Q: Right] aggregates\n\n[Q: Right] of genetic material.\n\nQ [Same]: I'd never heard that and I find it very interesting! [Laughter]\n\nQ: Politically speaking, what would be some of the first steps to integrate psychedelics into our culture?\n\nQ: I- I'd like to have a clearer vision of how you would see a psychedelic society, in that, if we were able to demolish a lot of the belief systems that we do operate under, what would - how would we relate to one another? How would you see that vision unfolding?\n\nQ: Ahh..\n\nQ: So, there would be a value system in operation then?\n\nQ: Was there, uh, a is there any truth in, um, um, Jung's point of view that, that there had been a certain amount preserved in Tubingen University that he tracks back to a lot of myths [TM: Well, uh..]\n\nto a secret art of [indecipherable]..Tubingen, which was [indecipherable]?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Psychedelic+Society"}
{"id": "ba65049cc819-1", "text": "Q: I've been picking up a, a sort of an urgency of, uh, 'we gotta do it and do it now' type of thing as far as shamanism. I- I couldn't quite understand why I can't sit back in my stupidity and continue this, you know, practice. Is it because we're coming to, uh, man can destroy the world?\n\nQ [Same]: So it's only the opportunity; there is no great urgency as far as you see it. It's not a matter of, 'We gotta do it now, because we got ourselves into a, a bind and if we don't get, uh, the realization or the knowledge of, uh, [indecipherable] with, with\n\nQ [Same]: So if it's not done now, it'll be done in a hundred years from now.\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Psychedelic+Society"}
{"id": "19af3efbb055-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nShamanology\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n1984\n\nMill Valley, CA\n\n22207\n\nEnd of Results\n\nY\u0105nomam\u00f6, uh, if they are, the men are on a hunting expedition and they run out of the supply of the drug, they are persistently reported to scrape the arrow poison off their quill arrows and to sniff that. [Laughter].\n\nyag\u00e9\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Shamanology"}
{"id": "3aa4d683842a-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nNew Maps of Hyperspace\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nAudio\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n1984\n\nBerkeley Institute for the Study of Consciousness, Berkeley, CA\n\n5805\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo youtube link available, try the following:\n\nNeeds Audio Link\nScribd Transcript\nDeoxy Transcript\n\n//Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide//, there is a mushroom monologue that goes: \"I am old, fifty times older than thought in your species, and I came from the stars.\" Sometimes it's very human. My approach to it is Hasidic. I rave at it; it raves at me. We argue about what it is going to cough up and what it isn't. I say, \"Well, look, I'm the propagator, you can't hold back on me,\" and it says, \"But if I showed you the flying saucer for five minutes, you would figure out how it works,\" and I say, \"Well, come through.\" It has many manifestations. Sometimes it's like Dorothy of Oz; sometimes it's like a very Talmudic sort of pawnbroker. I asked it once, \"What are you doing on Earth?\" It said, \"Listen, if you're a mushroom, you live cheap; besides, I'm telling you, this was a very nice neighborhood until the monkeys got out of control.\"\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/New+Maps+of+Hyperspace"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nThe Invisible Landscape (Peer Review)\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\nApril 1985\n\nThe Ojai Foundation, Ojai, California\n\n16464\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo youtube link available, try the following:\n\n[Introduction on recording: \"This is first of three tapes of Terence McKenna at the Ojai Foundation, under the Teaching Tree, in April 1985]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-1", "text": "Terence McKenna: I don't think of myself as a teacher, primarily or at all. I think of myself as a researcher, who, because of the unorthodox nature of the research has to submit to this kind of situation for peer review. That's what this is. This is peer review of my rap, not teaching in any sense of the word. So, before I get into it I'll say a little bit about my attitude toward epistemology and system making generally. Um, this is one of the slightly uncomfortable moments because I have to make distance, uh, between myself and large numbers of other people and say I do not believe in the wars of Atlantis. I do not believe in reincarnation. I do not believe in the healing power of crystals, and a whole string of alienating \"I do not believes\". Fact of the matter is; I don't believe in belief. I think belief is a tremendously stultifying force. What I'm interested in is freedom, and I noticed very early that a belief absolutely precludes the possibility of holding to its opposite, and therefore if you believe something you have signed away its opposite and, uh, limited yourself. This comes close to the ideal but not the fact of how science is supposed to be waged. So I'm , uh, impression and fact-collector and I will propound a number of ideas that are very controversial, I guess, and I want you to understand they appear controversial to me, and the controversy over their applicability to reality rages in me at least as strongly as it will rage in any dialogue that I have with any of you.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-2", "text": "The area that we're working in at the fringe of science, at the frontier of psychology is too chaotic and disorganized to be called a science at this point. We're in the Baconian phase of it where you merely collect facts, catalogue facts and wait for emergent patterns to, uh, be visible. And, uh, this is what I've done and I did it, I began as a skeptic, fairly confident that this kind of examination of reality and collection of facts would support the rationalist reduction- reductionist minimalist mapping of reality, and I discovered, to my delight and amazement that the world is quite a complex place, quite a large percentage of it goes on outside the descriptive power of any metaphor that we presently have a handle on and, uh, so I just want to put that out, that my attitude is, uh, is one of a kind of skepticism that allows and I am well-known as the proponent of the notion that there is an extra-terrestrial or trans-human intelligence accessible through certain psychedelic drugs. I have that experience often, but I am not a believer in it. I am very puzzled by it. I return again and again to reason as the measure against which all these things have to be played, so peer-review is very important I think because we're moving in an area where very little is known. It- we're somewhat in the analogous position to the early explorers of the Amazon who would sail up the main flow of the Amazon and note in their logs 'passed a river mouth that ?? two miles wide. Origin, unknown.' This is what we are charting. Enormous unknown flows of which we are only able to chart the, uh, the most gross, uh, expression of these things.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-3", "text": "Ok, so that's enough about method. The, um, as I understand it, the- the matter around which this counsel is spun is the journey beyond history and the notion in that implicit is that there is an end to history. So, what I want to talk about this morning, and it's the most difficult lecture that I give because it is- the goal is not to convey a feeling or an impression, but to actually convey an idea, and ideas, you either get or don't get. It isn't like you can halfway get how to factor a quadratic equation. You either know how to do it and it's trivial or you don't know how to do it and it's inconceivable.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-4", "text": "What happened to me was a series of, um, channelings, although I hate that word [audience laughter, Terence laughs]. It's so obnoxious -- I prefer maybe the word 'psychosis'. [laughter] Anyway, a series of self-amplifying revelations springing from an interior source that appeared from my best judgement not to be me, right? [laughter] And it was, uh, an unusual example of this sort of thing, although I do not immerse myself, I have never read a word of what Seth? has to say or any of that. But I gather these things are largely, um, urging people, they\u2019re moral teachings is what they are, urging people to straighten themselves out and fly right and care for the earth and be aware and be decent, and. the thing which I received was more in the character of an unravelling of a mystery. Somewhat analogous if any of you are familiar with Robert Graves book \u201cThe White Goddess\u201d wherein a series of continuing revelation", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-5", "text": "Goddess\u201d wherein a series of continuing revelation he grains, gains great insight, uh, into early Celtic and Goidelic poetic alphabets and encryption methods. The object of my uh experience was I Ching and I noticed, discovered, uh, a number of things about the I Ching which lead me to the conclusion that what we possess in the King Wen sequence is in fact a fragment, an archeological chunk of a piece of broken cosmic machinery. I concentrated entirely on the I Ching as a prehistorical artifact. I unburdened myself completely of the necess, of the necessity to be a sinologist by concentrating on the I Ching as it existed in the pre-han period, that is before 400 B.C., 200 B.C. All the commentary on the I Ching, all the exegesis is han or post han, so I didn\u2019t deal with that at all, I dealt with what is called the King Wen sequence. How many of you are well familiar with the", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-6", "text": "How many of you are well familiar with the I Ching? Good. The rest of you, good luck. [Laughter].", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-7", "text": "The King Wen sequence is the oldest uh, if you give up Atlantis, Lemuria, etcetera, the oldest ordered human abstraction. It is uhh, we find fragments of it on shoulder bones that are four to five thousand years old, so it\u2019s a human generated abstraction that has been preserved through the millennia. Now the question is: Is it an ordered sequence? And this was the first koan that the interior voice posed to me. \"What is the order of the King Wen sequence?\" As you know the human sequence [clears throat] begins with the creative and which is all solid lines, then the receptive which is all broken lines, and then umm whatever it is, uhh I noticed immediately that it was obviously organized in pairs. In other words, each hexagram the subsequent hexagram can be generated by turning the first one upside down. That\u2019s all that\u2019s happening. Now there are 8 cases where turning a hexagram upside effects no change in it. In those 8 cases a second rule", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-8", "text": "change in it. In those 8 cases a second rule has been applied which is if turning the hexagram upside down causes no change, then all lines change. You meet the first exception in the first two hexagrams. Clearly, when you invert the created six solid lines, you obtain the created again. Therefore, all lines change, and you get the recepted?. So then that solved a problem of partial ordering, that showed that uhm, we were dealing not with 64 hexagrams but with 32 pairs of hexagrams, and the next question was \u201cWhat is the order of the 32 pairs?\u201d. Now this is a deeper question, and not so easily solved. But it was easily solved for this interior voice that had my attention. It said \u201clook at the first order of difference\u201d. Now this is a very fancy way of saying \u201cLook at how many lines change as you move from one hexagram to the next.\u201d Obviously as you move from the first hexagram to the second, six lines change. As you move from the", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-9", "text": "second, six lines change. As you move from the second to the third \u2013 I forget how many it is \u2013 four I believe, and so on. So that you can make a linear graph of the first order of difference as you move through the King Wen sequence and I rushed out and bought graph paper and did this, and looked at it. And it\u2019s a saw tooth, all of these figures by the way are in the book \u201cThe Invisible Landscape\u201d. It\u2019s a double challenge to give this lecture without visual aids let me tell you. But as you all are probably expert visualizers, why uh, you should have no problem.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-10", "text": "So when you graph the first order of difference in this way, an anomaly just jumps out at you. This is clearly not a random, uh, stochastic process that you\u2019re graphing. If it were a stochastic process you would expect the possible values which are 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, to occur in more or less, uhh, similar proportions. However, you notice immediately there are no values of 5, there are no first order of different changes in the King Wen sequence of 5. Now what is the prohibition against 5 about? I don\u2019t know but its worldwide and Neolithic. Astragali are the knucklebones of sheep that have been used since the late Neolithic inter-roman times to gamble with by burning dots into the knucklebones, and in fact playing dice is called throwing the knucklebone. There are no Neolithic astragali with 5 dots burned into them, it\u2019s a number which is just strictly avoided. So there is some curious, uh, thing going on with the number", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-11", "text": "some curious, uh, thing going on with the number 5, knowing that Timaeus as people are coming in and sitting down for dinner, Plato turns to Timaeus and he \u00ad\u00adsays \u201cThe one generates the two, and the two the three, but where oh where is the fourth my dear Timaeus.\u201d And this the first four numbers seem to lie in a much more archetypically intense relation than the number 5. 5 has been called the first human number. In any case, uh, that was not the anomaly which leaped out at my eye when I graphed this thing. What I noticed was that, uh, there was a saw tooth stroke at the beginning and at the end. Such that if a reflection or to use the technical term if the stereo-isometric reflection were rotated 180 degrees the two ends would fit together perfectly. They would dovetail like the joint of a cabinet maker. And it would not fall into this kind of parallelism or congruence at any other point. Only at", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-12", "text": "or congruence at any other point. Only at the beginning and the end, and only I then noticed, if the hexagrams were paired across from each other in such a way that they always added to 64. In other words, 64 is across from 64, that\u2019s the exception. 63 is across from one, 62 is across from 2, 63 is across, and so forth okay so the sums in all directions to 64.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-13", "text": "And umm, so I looked at that for a long long time, and then I saw that what I had done, that though there were parall- these congruencies at the beginning and the end, there were also approaches to parellism \u2013 parallelism at 6 points in this figure, rather evenly spaced. And I realized then that what I had done if I had taken the entire King Wen sequence, run it forward, run it backward against itself and created a kind of macro hexagram. A super hexagram which contained the entire sequence twice, running backward and forward, and at that point I had insight into a curious passage in the Confucian commentaries, where it says, of the I Ching, the backward running numbers refer to the future, the forward running numbers refer to the past. This was a, a, an anagram which makes no sense whatsoever, unless you posit the kind of structure that I am talking about. So then I wondered, what could this thing possibly be for? And I experimented", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-14", "text": "could this thing possibly be for? And I experimented with, uh, I said okay, this thing I have built in accordance with the principal of hierarchy construction, which is completely expressed at every point in Chinese history, and is therefore be assumed to antedate Chinese history and be prehistoric. This hierarchical principal can be used to manipulate this strange figure. Now the lines of a hexagram are called yao, and there are 384 yao in the 64 the hexagrams, obviously, 6 times 64 is 384. So I said I will take my figure and I will treat it as the yao of a hexagram. And so I made 6 of them, end to end and then I said okay now I have the 6 lines of a hexagram, some kind of hyper or macro hexagram. But a hexagram is composed of more than 6 lines, it is composed of 2 trigrams. So I took my figure and I multiplied it by a value of 3, and I laid those two, over the 6, generating everything", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-15", "text": "laid those two, over the 6, generating everything from a common point of origin. So then I said okay, now I have everything that is in a hexagram, except the hexagramatic wholeness, but it is embodied by the thing as a gestalt as a holonomic entity. So I laid a big one over the 6 little ones and the two medium sized ones, generating everything from a common origin point and having everything return to a common origin point, so it looks and its figured in the invisible landscape, like a, uhm, an oscilloscope tracing, a mult- a three level tracing of lines, a tremendous mish-mash. And this was a problem. The voice then was by this time saying \u201cthis is the map, the fractal map of all space and all time. It is existing on many levels of resonance, and I personally could feel that. And I spent literally months and it was madness, much of this was generated in the amazon jungle. You have to picture a man in a", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-16", "text": "jungle. You have to picture a man in a thatch house on stilts, with the amazon flowing by, the Indians, the drugs, everything raging outside, and me with my slowly deteriorating pad of graph paper just drawing these lines, hours and hours a day, and looking at them and finally realizing convincing myself that it did in fact map time in a certain way. But realizing that it had the quality of a mystical doctrine. The interpretation of these slashing paralleling intersecting lines was impossible to convey to another person. I had to have a method of reducing this compound complex wave to a single wave, moving in a single direction on a single level.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-17", "text": "Fortunately for you I am going to skip over the mathematical details of how this was accomplished, but I assure you that it was accomplished and to me it was, it was like a series of revelations. I didn\u2019t even care about the I Ching. And the notion that out of myself I could extract the techniques to collapse this wave and to produce something coherent out of it, it was like a revelation. And I don\u2019t even today know that much about the mathematical ways of handling waves. Im sure that I reinvented the wheel in some sense. But the point is that I didn\u2019t reinvent it all by myself. And when it was over, I had something which I could show to people. I had the notion that there is a factor in reality, which we have previously missed, which is called novelty. Right and novelty is something which comes and gos, dowism is talking about this.Tao Te Ching it says the way that can be told of is not an unvarying way.\u201d Way is clearly a mistranslation for wave, and [Laughter] and uhm, so then okay you have this thing you\u2019ve reduced it to one level, and it is now an object of reasonable research but what are the periods, what are the frequencies, what are the harmonic uh, uhm resonances by which this thing expresses itself in time.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-18", "text": "In other words, what I had generated up to this point was a wave unscaled against the world. And the teaching voice said \u201cnow we will show you how to scale this against the world\u201d If, remember that there are 384 yao in the complete sequence. 384, is a number that has not be well regarded by calendar makers, its 19 days longer than a solar year. However there have been lunar calendars at various times among the pre exzealot jews and other people where 384 day lunar calendars were used. I found out all this after the fact but the voice proposed was that I looked at lunations and I discovered what seemed to me an astonishing fact which is a lunation is 29.53 days long, 29.53 x 13 is 383.89. So it it comes very close to being exactly 13 lunations so I looked at that and then I said well I constructed this wave through affrication of these principals of hierarchical ordering that are inimical to Chinese thinking. I will", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-19", "text": "ordering that are inimical to Chinese thinking. I will now using the same periodicities apply the thing to time and see if I get astrological correlations at higher levels. So I took the 384 days and I multiplied it times 64, that\u2019s the obvious uhh multiplicon. And you get 67 years 104.25 days, now if we think of that as a hexagram, it should have 6 lines embedded within it, if you decide 67 years 104.25 days by six you get a number which is very very close to the average duration of a sun spot cycle, 11 plus years. However people who study the sun know that there isn\u2019t only the famous 11 year sun spot cycle. There is also a larger cycle of 33 years, where the peak reaches a greater height. Well that then would be the trigramatic? level of this hexagram. So what I seemed to have was a lunar calendar which was also capable of keeping track of sun spot cycles. Now the earliest observation of sun spots occurs in China, and", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-20", "text": "earliest observation of sun spots occurs in China, and is a naked eye observation from around 12 A.D. So obviously and we don\u2019t know whether there was part of a tradition of observing these things or not. So then I was very pleased with that, well that\u2019s interesting. So what happens if you take 67 years 104.25 days and multiply it by 64. The same multiplicon used before. And it uh the answer is 4306 years s-something like that. Uhm and I thought that was very interesting because that is uh, exactly 2 zodiacal ages. It takes approximately 2200 years \u2013 and there\u2019s argument about the length of zodiacal ages because theres argument about the width of the sign the number of degress to be assigned to each sign. So but it was remarkably good correlation.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-21", "text": ". And then the voice said \u201cnow multiply that not by 64\u201d, the previous multiplicand used, but by 6 the number of lines in a hexagram. When you do this you get 25,800 years, within 1% of the value accepted for the processional great year, in which the zodiacal signs move around, uh , the earth in a twenty-six, roughly twenty-six thousand year cycle.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-22", "text": "Well, you know, great thrills for the person who discovered it. But so far all we have is a Neolithic calendar, constructed out of the I Ching. The notions that then began to be put forth were, that the ancient Chinese had assimilated this notion through their early development of what are called stilling of the heart techniques, which are this particular stripe of yoga that aims for complete suppression of bodily functions in order to contemplate the mind in its nakedness, you now, uncontaminated by the gross uh, attributes that are being reflected upon it by the body. And uh, the notion was that they were actually observing a fact in nature. That this is not simply a calendar, it is THE calendar. It is some kind of previously unnoticed thing present in the world, which is mitigating change. The e- recall that I said that uh what we had was a figure which was together at the beginning flowed apart in a series of interference patterns and then flowed together at the end and restored the value of 0. In other words, if you think of 0 as parity, parity is conserved by this wave. So the notion was that this hierarchical calendar is not an eternal calendar. It\u2019s a calendar with a built in closure, and this is hard to visualize so I wont spend too much time on it but.. The last 3 values in the wave are 0. Consequently, as you approach the last 3 positions on the wave, in any of these duration schemes I\u2019ve mentioned \u2013 384 days, 67 plus years, 400 and three hund.. \u2013", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-23", "text": "As you approach the last 3 positions the higher level in the hierarchy is given a value of 0 and it ceases to contribute its valuation to the lower levels. So you get a sudden drop in the in the mathematical value of the wave. And these things, for a long time I called them passages and I called them necks and I called them different things. Jos\u00e9 calls them harmonic convergence \u2013 something like that. And I saw them as places where novelty rushed into the world at a much faster rate than it had done before. And, yes. And then I Saw the entire career being in space time is effected by this curious property of intensification of novelty and acceleration of time. And we have tended to -because we view the universe as fragmented we have tended not to connect this up to the universe. We believe that human history is an abomination unrelated to biology and modern times an abomination unrelated to sacral and mythical civilizations and uh so forth.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-24", "text": "and mythical civilizations and uh so forth. But what this notion was suggesting was that matter, I don\u2019t know how far back you care to go, but the something is in the process of becoming and that this process of becoming is not gradual but proceeds in a series of telescoping leaps into density of connectedness and that uh, if you look at the history of the universe it was very active the first 10 high sixteen (10^16) nanoseconds. But then things settled down for a long long time and there was just cooling until finally a point was passed in the cooling process where uh, electrons could maintain orbits around atomic nuclei so that we were no longer in the era of free particles but we entered into the era of nuclear chemistry. Further cooling of the universe allowed a much more intensified form of novelty to come into being through the molecular bond which then allows a fantastic variety of structures and possible combinations. You no longer now have free atoms winging", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-25", "text": "You no longer now have free atoms winging around in the void. You have uh, the complete cornucopia of molecular structure that we\u2019re familiar with. Physical chemistry I\u2019m talking about, life has not yet appeared. But then further levels of order, further inclusions of novelty into the becomingness of being, and you begin to get self-replicating molecules. Then you get life in the sea, THEN life on the land. Now each one of these phases of novelty is taking less time than the previous phases. Finally you get land animals, finally then you get higher mammals, then the \u201cponzi deradiation\u201d? of the primates.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-26", "text": "[30:00]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-27", "text": "Suddenly, 50,000 years ago you arrive at the threshold of self-reflecting consciousness. Instantly, you have thermonuclear weapons, parallel processing in computer, super-conducting colliding waves and all of the accoutrements of modern uh, modernity. This is a continuous process that has been going on since the moment the universe was born. Now, what is so interesting about it and what boggles my imagination and what causes me to wonder if I wasn\u2019t in fact losing my marbles and heading by some dark path toward Christianity it was the notion that this process that we have no entered what I call the short epochs. The epochs now do not last a billion years or 18 million years or 275 thousand years the short epoch is history. The first short epoch is history and we entered it around 2300 B.C. See I - this is why I\u2019m not fond of \u201cpushing-backism\u201d. The amazing thing to me about humanity is not how there are cities in the Bermuda triangle that are 50,000 years old but", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-28", "text": "Bermuda triangle that are 50,000 years old but how man emerged almost instantly out of the background of a planet covered by forests and populated by animals. Something happened. I mean it IS the thumbprint of God, it DOES push you almost to the notion of a deus ex machine intervention in the course of nature. Uhm.. We have entered the short epochs. We entered the 4,306 epoch as I say around 2300 B.C. arou- You know there is a hiatus, pre-dynastic Egypt is the Egypt which built the pyramids. It- That all closed down around 2400 B.C. then there\u2019s a period of about 350 years where we have very little information. I\u2019m talking Egypt. Then suddenly you get the rise of the dynasties, and the thing we are familiar with as the Egyptian stereotype. So I believe there was a significant cultural change at that point. It may be Julian Janes Bicameral Mind; it may be the ability to epigenetically code information through writing; To no", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-29", "text": "ability to epigenetically code information through writing; To no longer depend simply on the genetic machinery to carry information. I see this whole process I am describing as the career of information. It is information that is loose on this planet. When people say DNA they mean information. DNA is the vehicle of the information god, and all nature is the vehicle of the information God, and so is all culture and all individuality. Okay.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-30", "text": "Dividing 4,306 years by 64 you see the need for 67-year epoch. The next short epoch, and this occupied me for a long long time trying to figure out where it began. And then finally it hit me where it began. It began about 8:30 in the morning on August the 6th 1945 over the Japanese city of Hiroshima. And at that moment the big bang - Its tiny parallelism. It\u2019s little self in the world of history was born, as a thermos-nuclear expl- er- not a thermo-nuclear, but a nuclear explosion. Uhhh, and we are now living out that last epoch. Now why did this push me toward uh, Christianity? Because the next short epoch will only be 384 days in duration. And the one after that will only be 6 days in duration. And the one after that will only be an hour and a half in duration. And the one after that, two and a half minutes. So what I have done is I had constructed a cosmology that 5 hours before its complete dissolution it was only half way to completion. You see? Because these rapid closures mean that half of the novelty that the universal being will express in its career of becoming will occur in the last 384 days of time, of time.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-31", "text": "And uh, and so this explains to me the chaos at the end of history, which is what we are living through, and the mushroom has said you know, many times, \u201cno big deal\u201d. This is what it\u2019s like when a species prepares to depart for the stars. There is nothing wrong, nothing wrong with H-Bombs and super colliding. This is all part of the narrowing neck. You know, monkeys don\u2019t go to the stars, and you must go through the monkey net to find yourself on the other side. But what I\u2019m not, I\u2019m not talking about uhm, a historical transformation in quite the same way that I think Jose and perhaps Peter were indicating. I am talking about a change in physics, not a change in the human heart or the human political structure. I\u2019m talking about a collapse of the entire space time continuum, and a necessary consequence of the laws under which IT operates. And so we are not responsible and we have no choice and it\u2019s not a question of", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-32", "text": "we have no choice and it\u2019s not a question of who wants it and who doesn\u2019t, any more than death is open to that kind of fiddling. And in fact, death is the reflection in the macrocosm of every individual experience of the wave running down to zero into the ultimate novelty, which you can call a zero or you can call the concrescent essence of everything. Depending on your ontological bent. Uhm. Now, there\u2019s a funny thing about this which is and to talk about it requires introducing the notion of fractals. Fractals are curves of a peculiar variety because they seem to have fractional dimensions. M- C- They are one and a half dimensions, two and a half dimensions, three and a half dimensions, and the reason for this is that when you talk a portion of a fractal and blow it up, it looks exactly like it looked before. Now this is easy to visualize in the simplest version of a fractal, which is a circle. I mean think of", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-33", "text": "fractal, which is a circle. I mean think of a segment of a circle. If you blow it up, it looks just like it, and then take a piece of it and blow it up \u2013 TAPE GOES BLANK FOR UNDETERMINED TIME \u2013", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-34", "text": "There are given themes, and this is what the hexagrams are about. This was the genius of the Chinese to realize that time has elements. The orthodox uh, or, let me put it this way. Western science had to go through a whole conceptual reformulation to realize that space is not simply where you put things, that\u2019s how space is treated in Newtonian dynamics and up until Einstein. It\u2019s just the necessary dimension for three dimensional description. But then Einstein said \u201cwell no no, space is a thing affected by magnetic fields. Torqued in the nearby vicinity of a star.\u201d And, and so then this notion that it was a thing and that it could have various properties of curvature because allowable. Now what I am suggesting is that time has elements \u2013 64 of them as a matter of fact. And the formulators of the I-Ching simply by stilling the heart, by eliminating noise from the body, where able to see these states which we could call quantum mechanical, but since they are not material we don\u2019t need to invoke the holy god of quantum mechanics to bless this effort. Anyway whatever these things are and whatever dimension they exist you could think of them more, I think of them more like platonic archetypes. They \u2013 the way in which they inner penetrate three dimensional being is what gives three dimensional being its primary qualities. The qualities of color, of tone, of emotion, of feeling. All of the descriptive qualities that science has left out, and has called epiphenomenal and uh, and uh, subjective but which are the things we all experience, you know, what science has achieved is a tremendous devaluation of primary experience. And what this notion is trying to say is that there is possible physics of experience, and understanding of history that will make it coherent. So that the coherency which we know must be resident in the universe is no longer a value dark dimension to us. The order becomes visible.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-35", "text": "Now how does this work? I always use this rather idiotic example but it amuses me. Its that if you find yourself in Hadrian\u2019s Hamurger Joint having a burger, there is a direct causal relationship between your doing that and the campaign of the roman emperor Hadrian; You are in fact passing through the Hadrian analogic moment. Now, I think the only person who has really understood this to bedrock, is probably James Joyce. Who realized that a walk to the store IS the Trojan War. It IS the Trojan War. You cannot pass through a gate without passing through the gates of Thermopylae. You cannot, uh, we and so, a notion like reincarnation or past lives is seen in a whole different light. What we are are harmonic adumbrations of events in the past. Now this comes fairly close to Rupert Sheldrake\u2019s notion, and we\u2019ve talked a lot about this. The, what is absent in Rupert\u2019s scheme is an explanation of novelty. What he is saying is that the past has a tremendous influence on the future that the very fact that something has happened, sets up all uh, following time for a more.. a higher likelihood of this thing happening. What I\u2019m suggesting is that that\u2019s true but then the mystery of why there is novelty is solved by realizing that the way in which the morphogenetic field impinges upon reality is through a fractal expression. And there would be nothing surprising about this, uh, fractal- the electromagnetic waves described by Maxwell\u2019s equation. That is essentially a fractal transformed. It is how waves work.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-36", "text": "So uh, another way of thinking about this notion that we are adumbrations of larger historical epochs is the aphorism \u201cRome falls 9 times an hour\u201d. This is the idea- and it does! I mean I always notice it. Its.. its just there. We are very state bounded in our self-observation and we only tend to value what is relevant to profane existence and communication. So, the fact that as you sweep the house you notice Rome falling nine times an hour, there\u2019s not much to say about it. It\u2019s just I think weird things; I wonder if everybody thinks weird things. I think the answer is yes and not only does Rome fall nine times an hour but the Celts move out of Spain and into England nine times an hour and so forth. That really the present is a, an interference pattern caused by epochs in the past uhm, coming together to create a certain particular situation. So what has been happening since 1945, since the dawn moment over Hiroshima", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-37", "text": "since 1945, since the dawn moment over Hiroshima is that the entire history of the universe is being recapitulated uhh. Now it has many cycle levels of cyclic expression. On one level the first land animals have yet to appear. We are truly in the inchoate darkness. On the level of the 4,306-year cycle, we are deep in the dark ages. And on the basis of that, and the barbarians, the time when the barbarian hoards poured into Europe. The sacking of Eleusis and all that. I see uh, punk culture as the harmonic response to the fact of this happening. On the basis of it I would predict that in the late 80\u2019s the uh, new wave punk phenomenon will give way to an almost gothic, religious sensibility. Which will be in fact a recapitulation of the early middle ages and uh,. - Well No no.. [laughter] in the mariological cults that found their expression at Sharpe and places like that in the early 90\u2019s. We will", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-38", "text": "places like that in the early 90\u2019s. We will have a, a, uh, a feminist revival which will be slightly longheaded because it will make those same mistakes that those gothic people made. We will not even reach the threshold of the industrial revolution until about 23.., two-zero-zero-three.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-39", "text": "So you see the notion of us sitting around making sense of things is quite preposterous. I mean, we are still waiting for Newton, let alone for Maxwell and Einstein. We are not-prehistory except on the highest level. Uhm, so this intensification will occur. Now uh, what is it leading to? This is the part that, you know, Christianity insists that the world will end. And that it will just roll up like a scroll and uhh, the triumphant Christ will come to judge the living and the dead. Now, why do they believe that? Obviously, apocalypse haunts history like a ghost, in the kind of cosmology I\u2019m defining. There MUST be anticipations of it. The death of every human being is an anticipation of the apocalypse. The collapse of every empire, the uh- ANY sensation is a part of THE sensation. It is the archetype of the ending. So this knitting together, this compactification of novelty and connectedness which is emanating out from the most densely compactified and connected thing in nature which is the human cortex. This is an interesting thing, we\u2019ve worked so hard to move ourselves out of the center of the mandala, but the fact of the matter is the most complex object nature is the human brain. Curious... Uhhh.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-40", "text": "This knitting together that is emanating from the human brain is accelerating at such a rate that we are rapidly going to become unrecognizable to ourselves. [49:35] The- The end point which I have come to feel is correct is the endpoint 67 years 104.5 days after the Hiroshima blast, and that would be dawn of the 16th day of November in 2012. Now I have worked all this out and the thin thread on which I am here in a conference devoted to the Mayans is that after I had worked all this out I discovered that the long count of the Mayans, the calendar of which you have heard so much, contains thirteen baktuns. Now the emergence of uh, of uh, Mayan civilization as we currently understand it is around bak- late in baktun 6, and the complete collapse of the Mayan is in around the middle of baktun 11. But their whole calendar was generated from the end of baktun 13; There is no baktun 14. They said \u201cthat\u2019s it. That\u2019s the end.\u201d The end of baktun 13 is the winter solstice of 2012. 34 days later than the date I reached through this series of involvements with the I-Ching.\n\nBut then I discovered there\u2019s what\u2019s called the Thompson Correction. The Thompson Correction is a different reading on certain calendrical material which would locate the end of baktun 13 only 4 days after the date that I had chosen. So the question seemed to me then, \u201cWhat is it about psilocybin mushrooms that a civilization in Mesoamerica in the 11- in the 8th and 9th century and an individual in California in the 20th century would both, through an elaborate series of mathematical contortions, different mathematical contortions, reach the same point in time?\u201d What is happening there?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-41", "text": "And uh, we were talking last night about how um, how the uh, my, my little story about what happened to the Mayans, to the Maya. And Peter pretty much agreed was around 970 and probably at Copan, which was the Alexandria of the Mayan world. Its where the mathematics and this and these things were you know, brought to their peak. They figured it out. They figured it out. And they ended the long count. It was obviously ended as a uh, an order. It took about 20 years to emanate out from Copan and to reach the most remote Mayan centers, Paraguay and Palenque and so forth. But within 30 years the long count had been ended. The stele had been pushed over face down in the grass. The cities emptied and the Maya returned to being primitive agricultural pastoralists.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-42", "text": "I think it was because they figured it out. They saw what was coming, and one you have figured it out the curious thing about this notion I\u2019m propounding is that it carries no obligation. It is a way of making you free by admitting you are more deterministically bound than you ever dreamed, you know. You HAD to go into Hadrian\u2019s Hamburger Joint, it was settled when Hadrian invaded Scotland, that you had to go into that hamburger joint. And so we are, we are bearing an unnecessary burden of guilt and responsibility. We are living in a cosmos, not a chaos. The universe IS doing what it wants to do. It is calling forth the kind of novelty that it wants to call forth. The fact that we cannot understand it\u2019s purpose is our problem. You know? And we are not its victims. The- In these short epochs, what is happening is something that I think can only be understood by uhm, having recourse to the metaphors of alchemy. Alchemy and modern science; These are anticipations of taking control of energy. Of binding as James Joyce says, \u201cAll space in a nutshell.\u201d Its where- what the concrescence is, is the flowing together of everything in a higher spatial dimension.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-43", "text": "We mentioned last night the saying in the I Ching \u2013 if this sacrifice is cor- the person who correctly understands this sacrifice can hold the universe in the palm of their hand like a spinning marble. 54:46 This is absolutely true. It\u2019s a statement of physics. It is not a metaphor, and analogy or anything else. It is that reality is being knitted together, into a spinning marble. Everything but that spinning marble is an illusion. Uhm, it has many reflections in linear history, which is like the shadow cast into three dimensional space time, by this higher dimensional reality. It is the telos at the end of time. Uhh, its modern manifestation is the flying saucer. The flying saucer haunts time like a ghost. It only exists at the end of the historical process, yet it is somehow co-present spread throughout the historical process. It is uhm, the proof that the apocalyptic moment exists.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-44", "text": "Another metaphor for this is concrescence, this spinning marble is uh, the holy grail, or the philosophers stone. The philosophers stone is an object which is made out of mind. It has, [it\u2019s called the] one gloss on it was it was called the sophic hydrolith. The uhh, the water thought stone. It is something which has the quality of mind and matter. And this is what the human function is, I think, is through technos to eliminate the distinction between mind and matter, to free us into the imagination. That\u2019s where we\u2019re going when the novelty wave runs to zero and we are released into this trans-historical space. It is the imagination and it will not be miraculous. It will be created by us, through us, through a number of uh, disciplines, technologies, ideas, and innate abilities that we cannot currently hope to do more than glimpse, because we are so far back in the historical continuum from where this thing is going to happen in 2012. So basically, uh, this is a funny explanation of almost everything.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-45", "text": "They say when you create a funny explanation of almost everything, you have to be careful that you don\u2019t unexplain a whole bunch of things, and I don\u2019t think this unexplains too much because it is uhm, it is not an extension of a current paradigm. In other words it is not physics, it says nothing about particle physics or quantum mechanics or anything that- it talks about time, which is not matter. We have been obsessed with matter for millennia, and thought of time as, just as something passing by, couldn\u2019t really get a handle on it. But uh, maturity will mean getting a handle on it. And everything I\u2019ve said about the historical process and how puzzling it is is true in our own lives. For instance, you may have noticed that every day is sort of like every other day and yet every day is different. This is this fractal nature of things working, and there are days of great advance but they are embedded in this larger matrix of a pretty state situation. I studied with West Churchman who was a futurist, and he used to like to say that most of the future is already present in the present. And uh, its this kind of idea so uhm..", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-46", "text": "What I was able to do with this I-Ching wave and what I offer as the uh proof or at least the uhm the place where pressure should be put on the theory if we want to falsify it is uh- We wrote a computer program which very rapidly sorts through the wave on many levels, and will draw the graph of novelty for any point in time, and it will draw it on different scales, like uh- Say you were interested in the French Revolution, 1789. We can throw a picture up on the screen which shows you 1788, 89, and 90. And you can then ask yourself \u201cDoes this line fulfill MY intuition of how a novelty curve descriptive of the French Revolution should look?\u201d Suppose you\u2019re a specialist, you\u2019re interested only in the assignation of Marat, okay.. Then we can look at the 19 days in 1789 surrounding his assassination on the 20th of July, and so forth. But where it is really interesting is in application to our own lives. And there then, you have a personal body of information that you can try against the wave, to see if in fact it fits your intuition of how your life should work.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-47", "text": "There are a couple of people here who have counselled with me one on one, where we\u2019ve actually looked at their life and then on into the future. It goes right on into the future to 2012, and of course 2012 is just my choice after a lot of reflection I chose that as the apocalyptic zero date. The program is set up so early in the program you can enter any apocalyptic zero date. And then you search the best fit. And the way I use it is I like to go to the scale where there is 19 years on the screen or I mean 3 years on the screen or even 200 years on the screen, and then I\u2019ll go way back and then it has a continue function and I just fly over the mountains of time. And when I see a steep valley I dive into it, and blow up the fractal landscape and then the program has a function called \u201cNear\u201d which is a historical data file and you can just hit a button and it will tell you uh- Ascension of Artaxerxes, 514 B.C.\n\nThere it is, look! His son was an idiot but then he came on and the wave it fits, it works, it fits! It\u2019s all clear! So it\u2019s a way of modeling history, and If I could contort it into a video game my life would be much easier. [Laughter].\n\n1:01:30s \u2013 2:05:15 is peer review questions and dialogue.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-48", "text": "1:01:30s \u2013 2:05:15 is peer review questions and dialogue.\n\nSelf-maintaining, over quite a long period of time until then its overcome and it is in this period that I mentioned this morning that all of these things happen. Now let me demonstrate some of the commands within the program. These are the position numbers of the wave here, and as I mentioned to Francis, we could take those position numbers, and if you have a copy of the invisible landscape you could look at the drawing of the wave in there and derive this set of hexagrams that would give you feeling toned rather than mathematical information about what\u2019s going on. Anyway, here are some of the commands.\n\nQuestion mark and one of these numbers, such as, for instance 157, gives you the absolute value is 308 righ there. So this trough is riding along at about the 300 level. Okay now, if we query D 157 we\u2019re asking a different question about this point and the answer is the 11th day of the 3rd month of 533 B.C. Is right there so- and I through long experience happen to know that these blips are 11 years long so I\u2019ll just save us the trouble and tell you that that flat area there runs then, uh, from the 11th day of the third month from early in 533 B.C. to uh, let\u2019s see, we substract.. to 511 B.C. Right in here. Now when I query 158 which is in there, with the command \u201cn\u201d which stands for near, \u201cn1-5-7\u201d, lets make it 1-5-7, it now goes to the history file and it searches.\n\n(Female Peer) \u2013 \u201cAnd you programmed all this?\u201d", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-49", "text": "(Female Peer) \u2013 \u201cAnd you programmed all this?\u201d\n\nTerence \u2013 Yes that\u2019s just a chore to enter a huge bunch of historical data. I used the uh, London \u2013 Tape cuts off.\n\n2:07:55\n\nworks of art, political acytivity, migrations, religions, artistic motifs, all that stuff.\n\nKay, what have we got. Okay, if minus 540 was the restoration of cestatus? Deuteronomy is being worked uh, 539 is the fall of the Babylonian empire. Here at 532 Pythagoras flourishes according to Apollodorus, uhm- And in that same period all these other things were happening. C is the continue function, it gives you more data. What it does is it blots out the nearest date. It prints in reverse the nearest date and then it prints all the other stuff around it. Now it\u2019s scrolling up more okay.\n\nPythagoras, Persian conquest of Egypt, birth of Aeschylus, uhh Buddha, Lao Tzu uhm- Ezekiel will scroll up next and so forth. So it is uh, or is it,\n\nconfirming that this deep trough is in fact reflective of an incident of novelty?\n\nNow if we hit uhm, quit, we just go back to the beginning and we can look something else. Not rub 0, run zero.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-50", "text": "Although rubbing 0 might be more interesting. Okay and again the default date, and what I want to show you now is uhm, the waves version of the 20th century. Essentially, let\u2019s just start with uh, well lets enter the Hiroshime date which is the 5th day of the 8th month of the 1945. And let\u2019s look at this situation on the 200-year level. I promise you this will end at three o\u2019clock. And, yeah I don\u2019t know where\u2019s the sun coming from. Is that better?\n\n[Chatter]\n\nIs that good? Okay. Now.\n\nThe entirety of time from 1945, in other words, the 67 year period in which all of the historical themes will be recapitulated is contained in this center section and as you see its almost a flat line. All that\u2019s there is like a tiny pimple, all that lies between us and this completion that we are so hot for, is portrayed at this scale, as just the tiniest uh, energy barrier. That\u2019s why I think we can feel it so eminently. But remember that because the wave is fractal also lying, that this is the same picture if we think of this as 4,000- as the 4,306 years preceding the apocalypse, er- preceding the whatchamacallit. So uh, all of that time period since 2300 B.C. has been imbued with this sense of the eminence of the transcendence, the transcendent. And that is what has given this period of time its peculiar character.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-51", "text": "The bomb is uh, right there. The top of the pimple is early January 1967, and that is where if you\u2019ll recall what was going on at the time, that\u2019s where the concatenation of the struggle of the opposites reached its most intense point. That\u2019s where LSD was a mass phenomenon, when the hippie phenomenon was in the quintessence of the 60\u2019s is spring-summer 1967, that\u2019s the summer of love. 12 months later we were in the streets fighting the police and so forth. So it was a brief, brief moment. We have no come off that uh, that uh, high point and we\u2019re moving along now a kind of uh, prenylated surface, where there are many dips and many rises but the sum total of what\u2019s happening is that we\u2019re oscillating around a mean. And I certainly, that for me describes the 1970\u2019s. It was much oscillation around a mean and many people found that very ideological corrosive because they expected the continuous deep descent of ever faster into novelty that they had experience in the 60\u2019s, and the fact of the matter is it just isn\u2019t happening. Now \u2013\n\nMale Peer - Was not 67 also the year that Mao released the red guard?\n\nTerence \u2013 That\u2019s right, the whole red guard phenomenon in China, all of these things were global phenomenon.\n\nMale Peer \u2013 sort of the opposite to the summer of love.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-52", "text": "Male Peer \u2013 sort of the opposite to the summer of love.\n\nTerence \u2013 Right, although these things uh, certainly represented chaos forces each in the society in which they were happening. Now, the my reading of it is is that at 2012 the wave disappears, the reason the graph is shown as ascending rapidly into entropy is because the computer is stupid and it wraps it around, and connects it to the beginning of the wave. But you should view this last one as simply the blank unknown, okay? We know not about that. Now I want to change the date of interest and uh, let\u2019s look at 1-1-1-9-8-5. In other words, the 1st of January this year, and let\u2019s look at it at a level which will give us uh, 3- approximately 3 years on the screen. I say approximately because what is really being given on the screen are harmonic resonant increments of the other calendrical system that I have lined- the one that uses the 384 day year, not the 365 and \u00bc day year.\n\nSo what we\u2019re really seeing is 3 of these lunar years, these thirteen month lunar years on the screen. So we\u2019ll see this will be \u201984 into \u201985 here. It will pass into the future approximately mid-screen. Oh yeah, I remember this.\n\nThis is uh, here is the campaign, here is the election, here is the inauguration, and here are we. Well, if you, we are down on, we are in a deeper more novel situation. This definitely was a long period in which everything was held in stasis, and then the, the uh, uh, party of the right uh gained ascendancy at least on this continent, and you see this happening.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-53", "text": "Now let\u2019s see, you see this line here at 228 is uh, 16-7, the 16th of July 1985 is right there. So we are in this small period here coming down off this peak, I can get it up in more detail, let\u2019s see, change the date of interest, no. Yes, change the date of interest to the present, what is today? The 14th. The 14th day, January- February- March- April- of the fourth month.\n\nAfter years of doing this..\n\nAnd I\u2019m going to show it al- So that we only have 19 days on the screen.\n\nSo this is like a uh, my notion of a preview of the next 6 weeks or so, we can just look \u2018til we\u2019re bored.\n\n[Chatter]\n\nWell that period before the election was long, it was more than a year in length, uh.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-54", "text": "Well that period before the election was long, it was more than a year in length, uh.\n\nYes, like, remember how I said we were moving through, that we had just moved through the period of the dark ages and the barbarian invasions when learning died out in Europe and they thought that the circumference of a circle was twice its diameter and all this stuff. Well, that is that is that same plateau and we are now slightly beyond it, but only at the beginning of the proto-mediaeval period. I mean we\u2019ve reached approximately A.D. 800 which is of course the coronation of Charlemagne, and the inauguration of the Carolingian Kingdoms, which really do end the dark ages, although where this is happening I\u2019m not sure, maybe in Brazil. Oh, now what have got, oh yes! The 10th, 289 or 288. It was the 11th, that was uh, did I fly in from Hawaii? Was it the 11th? Well we\u2019re all in it together, how was the 11th for you? Judging by this see, its giving a very clear indication that in all of those 19 days unambiguously the 11th was uh, the clincher. Thursday.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-55", "text": "So you know it\u2019s not doing sleight of hand, if you didn\u2019t have a big 11th then this is wrong for you. Well its lunar so it tends to keep track of that kind of thing. Now, is a deep decent in to novelty. Now we\u2019re moving along this thing. We are in this trough right here, and I might say that because I have assumed the end date to be in 2012 even uh, small drops in novelty like that carry the entire planet into a new level. We are now every day there is we are going more and more into it. There are very few backwashes, enough to wipe out the impression that just every day novelty is intensifying and we\u2019re thinking it to it.\n\nLet\u2019s see if that was the 11th, 12th, 13th, 14th\u2026 must be 291.. [2:20:00]\n\nYes, had we given it at the very beginning of the program when it asked \u201cEnd date:\u201d we could give it any date. We could give it Jos\u00e9\u2019s date, uhmm..\n\nDo you want to see Jos\u00e9\u2019s date with my end date setting?\n\nOh okay, uhmm.\n\nLet\u2019s see Jos\u00e9\u2019s end date it the 16th of August 19-\n\nNo, but the date you\u2019re interested in is? Yes, It\u2019s the 16th day of the 8th month, no \u201987, \u201987.\n\n[Peer] Whats curious to me Terence, is does this also take into account uh, like the southern hemisphere?\n\n[Terence] Yes, I believe so. I think its hyper-dimensional. Its uh, you mean because of the international date line and all that?\n\n[Peer] The history you\u2019ll have stashed in there will be northern \u2026 history", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-56", "text": "[Peer] The history you\u2019ll have stashed in there will be northern \u2026 history\n\n[Terence] Oh yeah, although so much of the southern hemisphere is ocean, and so recently colonized that there is an absence of historical uh.. It\u2019s the blank end of the wave you see. It\u2019s the blank\u2026\n\nBut we\u2019ve no record, we can only work with the data we have. That\u2019s a data dark dimension, for example these African empires and stuff.\n\n[Peer] So we still have northern hemisphere chauvinism. [Laughter]\n\n[Terence] Well we need to recover the secret history of kiwi land. [Laughter]\n\nOh no I know! I am sympathetic. The marsupials where do they fall into all this. [Laughter]\n\nOkay, level 5. Okay now we\u2019ll see Jos\u00e9\u2019s date embedded in the three years, the three lunar years of time, around it. There\u2019ll be 3 lunar years of 13 months portrayed on the screen. His date will fall somewhere on the second year, as close as the computer can look at it. Okay now see this does not support his contention, because what we have here is this situation of oscillation around a mean. It goes up, it goes down, it goes up, it goes down, but after three years of this, it is in fact exactly where it started out from. Now let\u2019s get the dates on this.\n\nWhich means nothing as far as the theory is concerned. What this screen is saying is that from uh, the 16th of July 1985 until uh the 10th of September 1988 you might as well go fishing. Because it\u2019s all uhh, it all amounts to very little you see.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-57", "text": "If we put, if we enter Jos\u00e9\u2019s date as the end date and then look at another date. Oh okay, uhmm.. Now I think that requires a cue ... here. Okay now it asks zero date, we\u2019re going to enter Jos\u00e9\u2019s date, 16th day, the 8th month 1-9-8-7.\n\nNow what date should we look at to test Jos\u00e9\u2019s theories. The bomb. I think the bomb is the good concentrated clearly major event that we can all agree is some kind of a water shed.\n\nEnter the day you wish to look at it. What is it uh, 5, August, 1-9-4-5. Okay, now we\u2019ll, let\u2019s look at it uhh, if we look at it on the 200 year scale it will just say it\u2019ll close to the end because this date is even earlier than the previous date. Let\u2019s look at it on the 3 year scale, 3 lunar years. It always tells you you are 15,351 days from the end. A nice little touch there. Yeah, shopping days.\n\n[Peer] How much will you consume.\n\n[Terence] Whooa, now where is it? It\u2019s at position 144, okay look! Look whats happening a long flat totally steady state at this level of clarification, and then bingo, and a long, long slide. That we could by well- well- before i change the screen does everyone understand the interpretation. That that moment clearly initiated a long plunge into novelty. Oh you mean where is the date? It says it\u2019s at 144, 5-8-45 is at position 144. Right at the falling. Now I\u2019m going to shift the screen by using the command continue and we\u2019ll see how long this descent into novelty went on before it was overwhelmed by the uh, entropic backwash.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-58", "text": "Okay, there it is. It\u2019s this thing here. D-157. Until uh, early November 1947, now my guess would be that\u2019s an election day. 6-11-47, wouldn\u2019t someone have been inaugurated in January \u201948.\n\n[Peer] Elected in \u201848, Inaugurated in January \u201849\n\n[2:26:40]\n\n[Terence] Oh I see so it\u2019s not an election date. It\u2019s something, by this version, and this long trough it\u2019s like this long flow into novelty, which ends in a wide trough and then is mitigated and slides off. So if we use Jos\u00e9\u2019s end date we get pretty good agreement with that particular piece of data, now let\u2019s see. We have two minutes shall we test him on the whole history thing? How can we do that, Oh I know, now let\u2019s see.\n\n[Peer] You should \u2026 continue with this cause it sounds like everybody\u2019s interested.\n\n[Terence] January 1 minus 6 minus eight hundred, let\u2019s give ourselves some room here, minus 800, yes, yes, at the two hundred year level. Well I just want to get way back in B.C. I just want to get way in front of that trough, then we\u2019ll cruise forward in the wave until we find the trough, then we\u2019ll get the date then we\u2019ll\u2026\n\nWith my setting. Well there will only be uhh, yes, whatever the difference between \u201887 and 2012 is. So he\u2019ll hit the trough too.\n\n[Laughter] about surviving the timewave.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-59", "text": "[Laughter] about surviving the timewave.\n\nThe continue function pushes it up one shingle, these things are called. Pushes it up on shingle. We\u2019re looking for the trough, I hope we didn\u2019t miss it. There it is, okay now by Jos\u00e9\u2019s applying mine to his there\u2019s the most, the moment of greatest creative advance, concentrated creative advance in human history was from, yes, from uhhhh, December 559 B.C. until December 547 so what would right in the middle of that be about 553. So let\u2019s query near with his date on 158, and 158, and it goes to the history file and.. this really seems like magic to people who don\u2019t know how computers .. they say, \u201cIs all of human history in the computer? What?\u201d All we typed in, friends.\n\nSure, we\u2026 From Hildegard Von Bingen to Judy Chicago, it\u2019s all\u2026\n\nOkay Cyrus the 2nd of Persia defeats Eumenides. The Persian empire, oh he establishes the Persian empire, the great counter-foil to roman power which held Zoroastrianism is made the official religion, in 545 Persia conquered Assyria, restoration of Cestada? So here we come then into my thing, oh look he got Zoroastor, although my typist apparently didn\u2019t know who Zoroastor was, uhmm\u2026", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-60", "text": "Anyway, I think that\u2019s enough of that\u2026It\u2019s 3:00. I\u2019ll briefly entertain questions, you, I\u2019m sure now I hope get more of the jist of some of what was said this morning. Because I think, the program really makes it accessible to people. And you can spend hours cruising these hills and valleys and dipping into the thing, if that\u2019s the kind of thing that interests you. I\u2019m a real bug about history, I think that people who don\u2019t know history are amnesiac. And that uh, you know, we would all, there\u2019s nothing more important, really in all these forms of self-cultivation and development, than to read history. You know it\u2019s not clich\u00e9 that those that don\u2019t know it are doomed to repeat it. It\u2019s true in individual lives as well, and it\u2019s the story of who you are, and how you got here, and if you don\u2019t know it, it\u2019s kind of a strange lacuna, in your uh, in your knowledge.\n\n[Peer] \u2026 correlate I-Ching with the DNA codings?\n\nWell, no, I did that, that\u2019s not very interesting to me, it\u2019s been done by a number of people and I had a scheme for doing it and uh it just didn\u2019t tell me anything. Once I knew what hexagram was lysine and what hexagram was L-alanine, I didn\u2019t know enough about lysine and L-alanine to know really what to do with that information. Uhm, this session will go I believe until about 5:00. Are there any questions about this morning or is anyone burning to take up any of that again? If not I\u2019ll go on to uh, something related but different. Related but different.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-61", "text": "Okay well, I guess what I\u2019ll talk about is uhh, uhh\u2026. Just trains of thought that I see present in the world, that I think will eventually be seen to flow together and to provide facets of this question \u201cWhat is the nature of the transformation and what are the factors that go into it?\u201d I mean obviously all fronts of human knowledge are developing at a tremendous rate but uh, certain strains of thought claim for themselves a kind of primacy, and I know the new age, whatever that nebulous term means, it has a connotation sometimes of an elite with an answer that is only- all that\u2019s holding back the world is that this answer is frustrated in making its appearance, and I don\u2019t really hold with that I think that by and large the new age is a fairly minor phenomenon. It\u2019s basically the search for a way to get high without drugs, a way to uh advance yourself without putting yourself on the line, you know, just anything is better than facing 25mg of psilocybin and uh, while all these things have merit, they don\u2019t seem to have transformative merit; In the sense that the great decade of new age thinking which was the 1970\u2019s is certainly one of the most stagnant decades that we\u2019ve seen in a long long time.\n\nHowever, there are strains and things going on and I sort of wanted to construct a mandala, not very seriously... But a mandala of four human concerns that lead to what I will, in my short hand, call the flying saucer, which is this concrescent alchemical union of humanness and otherness and humanness and technology that is uh, to come, I think, and inevitable I think we all are articulating the inevitability of something. And this game we play of prophesying the moment..", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-62", "text": "You know William Blake said there is only one moment in all eternity, and Satan\u2019s Watch-Fiends search through all eternity which is the way into God\u2019s Creation, but they can never find it, it is, the secret of the moment is well kept. Uhm..\n\nThese fields, or these endeavors I\u2019m going to called Psychedelics, Cybernetics, Space and Feminism. But each one of them over-flows it\u2019s label, and becomes many other things. I mean, in other words if someone said but \u201cWhat about politics?\u201d I would say well, that\u2019s a subset of feminism, and what about something else that goes somewhere else\u2026\n\nSo let me, there\u2019s no particular order in which to take them... I think maybe first I\u2019ll talk about cybernetics because that\u2019s a good transition from this little beast.\n\nCybernetics is this epigenetic transformation of information going wild. It begins with uh, the notion of writing and number and develops up to the point where now 9 million computers a month are being connected into the global information grid, and uh, there are only 9 billion neurons in the human brain. There is a school of self-organizational theory which holds that new properties simply emerge through the connecting up of large numbers of elements, and that once you pass a critical level whole new properties begin to emerge from what were before fairly well understood matrices and arrays.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-63", "text": "The cybernetic thing is viewed as uh, invasive, and masculine and technological, but I think that\u2019s only because we\u2019re seeing it in its most raw emergent phase, we\u2019re actually seeing adding machines changed into these cybernetic devices. All the computers in the world are digital analyzers. We have yet to have an analytical machine, and this is coming. And what we have so far are large adding machines, and when we get the so called \u201cthinking machine\u201d and its coming, it\u2019s going to have an enormous impact on our self-image and our society. You can imagine the impact that Darwinism had on the 19th century conception of man where, you know, the notion that man was descended from the primate line was just intolerable. Well, the notion that machines can think, and you\u2019ve noticed it used to be very fashionable for cyberneticians to write articles saying \u201cThe thinking machine is a complete misunderstanding of cybernetics. Utterly impossible. Machines don\u2019t think,\u201d That voice has grown quiet in the light of what has been learned about cybernetics and linguistics in the last 5 years, particularly in the last 18 months. And it now seems very reasonable that this goal is within reach, an actual simulacrum of the human mind and what that will mean is very hard to gauge. I had a mushroom trip recently in which the aphorisms arose \u201cTo design computers is to be designed by computers.\u201d And I saw very clearly that the keyboard is entirely an illusion, a convenience, and that the keyboard could be made to disappear very quickly and then you would not truly and clearly perceive where the interface stopped.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-64", "text": "And people who spend hours and hours working on computers admit that this happens, and there\u2019s a meshing and you\u2019re part of the circuitry. I think what holds this back from becoming any even more noticeable phenomenon is just our willingness to materialize these cybernetics objects as furniture. But the day is coming you know, when you will be able to reach the library of congress by tapping a certain tooth with your tongue. And that is simply what the masculine engineering mentality is thinking about. Obviously the feminine matrix which supports these kinds of imaginative constructs exists already, and it\u2019s simply that the engineers are catching up to these notions of integrated intuition and field perception and that sort of thing.\n\nTo me the computer not the computer so much as the cybernetic network is actually a feminizing force, it\u2019s like hardwiring the unconscious so that these oceans of information that beat against the human uh mind are not abstracted, not contained in libraries but made ubiquitous throughout , you know, consciousness and actually that we are beginning to create a, an extra genetic foundation of human understanding which will always be there in the form of these large data banks. And as we learn to swim in this sea of information, the character of our understanding is going to change radically. We are all confined by ignorance of all sorts, basically ignorance of simply the facts of the matter. Leave alone what theories might organize the facts of the matter. The other thing is the human machine interface is becoming more and more subtle and miniaturized away. And its, it\u2019s possible you know, to imagine a world where you wander naked through Eden, and there appears to be no technology on the planet, because the technology is all in a particular grain of sand lying on a particular beach uhh, in Madagascar. We\u2019ll put it in the southern hemispheres to uh..\n\n[Peer] That\u2019s where it is now!", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-65", "text": "[Peer] That\u2019s where it is now!\n\n[Terence] You\u2019re right! The key is to actualize this thing you know.. William Blake said \u201cTo see what eternity in a grain of sand, and to put it in there if need be in order for that to happen.\u201d So that is cybernetics.. The transformation of cybernetics into something really exciting I think is going to happen through psychedelics, which is the next of these quadrants of the mandala that I would mention. Psychedlics is uh, totally discounted as a transformative force by the powers that be. It isn\u2019t even, it doesn\u2019t even rate much of a budgeting in the DEA budget. It\u2019s just a dead issue, and ytet I believe, perhaps many of you believe that it is some kind of overlooked factor. Almost of the character of a taboo because it is totally corrosive to all paradigms. It is, it cannot be encompassed. The measure of it cannot be taken, science it useless because it is a phenomenon of individual experience, and uh there is no way that science can get a hold on that, any more than it can get a hold on falling in love. The problem is falling in love has not yet been shown to be completely dependent on a chemical substance, a material molecule, an atomic arrangement in space and time. And uh, the psychedelic thing is the path to the origins, The transformation that we want to see talk place is essentially an ouroboric transformation. A taking of its tail in its mouth, by the snake of time, and this cannot happen unless we\u2019re in contact with our origins.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-66", "text": "This is why I think the shamanic uh, strain of the new age mentality is the probably the most enduring, because there is something to be learned from primitive so called primitive pre-literate people who are living in the dream time, who are living in the imagination, and never saw any need for technological constructs, because the constructs of the imagination were so wonderfully satisfying. We glimpsed these constructs uh, with psychedelic drugs and even upon our society with all of its rationalism and all of its reductionism they have a tremendous impact which we respond to with prohibition and coercion and propaganda. I don\u2019t think that they are uh, static in spite of the importance of shamanism. I don\u2019t believe that it is always had the character that it has today. Because the psychedelic experience works with the cultural overlay, works with the contents of your mind, I could never have created the theory I created if I had not known about the I-Ching and DNA and all of these things. And yet the psychedelic intelligence was able to take that information and whip it together into something which was astonishing even to me and yet I had been the source of the information. Psychedelics show the relativity of these various mental dimensions and constructs that we inhabit, and uh to this point I\u2019ve been basically speaking of drugs like mescaline, LSD, that sort of thing \u2026", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-67", "text": "Possibly although it\u2019s not really a psychedelic, it is a synthetic for sure. What I\u2019m more interested in, and I think that Rupert Sheldrake\u2019s ideas open a way to understand the difference is plant hallucinogens which have existed in living systems for millions, in some cases hundreds of millions of years, and have been taken by human societies for untold millennia. When a person takes a drug the drug takes the person, and so a drug like psilocybin that has been used for thousands and thousands of years has a tremendous morphogenetic field about it, garnered from the experiences of all the people that have taken it that have flowed into it. Uh, these things point the way toward engineering states of mind that we can hardly imagine. The interesting drugs to me are the ones which uhm, occur in plants, have a history of shamanic usage, and mimic brain chemistry in some way. In other words, you\u2019re not interested in a massive disequilibrating intrusion", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-68", "text": "not interested in a massive disequilibrating intrusion into your brain chemistry... you want something which is almost like what is present but which gives you a massive shift in cognitive apperception without any shift in the perception of how your body is operating. You know, you don\u2019t want it to cause muscle tension, kidney.. all of these things. You want it to touch the mind and all else very lightly. The curious thing about the mushrooms is of course that they seem to have this logos like entity, locked up inside them. A speaking voice, a teaching entelechy, that is somehow concerned to involve you in a personal exchange of information and that point when you reach that level you have totally cast of from uh any of the metaphors that your society has prepared for you to understand that kind of things. It just appears to be delusion and yet it has a very healing and uh, integrating quality for the person who is experiencing it. Perhaps there is a lifeform,", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-69", "text": "is experiencing it. Perhaps there is a lifeform, long resident on the Earth and so different from us the main problem is one of recognition.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-70", "text": "I mean I vacillate between whether the mushroom is you know, whether we really can split off portions of our psyche so completely that we cannot recognize them as parts of ourselves and then they can approach us to teach and torment us. Or whether that\u2019s an unnecessarily breast beating attitude and that it would be much more reasonable to just say there\u2019s no reason to be in awe of the pronouncements of modern science. Modern science knows nothing about the density of life in the universe or the constitution of consciousness or its probability of occurring in any planetary or physical regime other than the one we\u2019re acquainted with. We have no idea how densely life and intelligence is spread through the universe and what the strategies are that have evolved. What I said this morning about uh, taking control of the human form by the act of understanding DNA which got a ripple from people, I\u2019m sure that this is inevitable and I\u2019m sure it is inevitable for every species which passes through that", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-71", "text": "is inevitable for every species which passes through that narrow neck, because knowledge is used and applied. I mean there may be Zen like cultures that find out these things and turn and move away from them. Perhaps that\u2019s what the Maya were about, but pastoral and romantic as the vision of the Maya turning away from technocratic civilization is still if you take evolution seriously the goal of evolution is to keep the options open. Many- most (creatures?) preachers \u2013Tape cuts out 2:40:34-:44 \u2013scended to the tropical veldt and grass lands, we migrated across the deserts of a near and middle east which were not so desertous at that time but we also were able to cross the Himalayas, we exist in the arctic, in the rainforest, we exist at the level of the Witoto or the modern new Yorker. We are adaptable and this is what\u2019s kept our options open, and this is what I think we have to uh, recognize and conserve, and the", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-72", "text": "have to uh, recognize and conserve, and the psychedelics do that. The psychedelics are to my mind, although people have actually argued this with me, although it seemed really incontrovertible to me, that they are deconditioning agents, that they make you question what Marxist Mormon, whatever you are, if you take psychedelics you will ask questions that cannot be answered in the paradigm in which you were brought up. And that\u2019s important because all of these social systems are only means to the next level of ascent. What we see in the Soviet Union today is a hang-up, they have an ideology which allows no means to the next level of ascent. They are caught forever in the Hegelian dialectic, there\u2019s no escape its uh, its hopeless and uh, so they have occupied an evolutionary niche very successfully but now what are they going to do. And every society is confronted with this because every society erects institutions which try to freeze the historical process. It\u2019s", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-73", "text": "which try to freeze the historical process. It\u2019s almost as though we are continuously calcifying and yet we must not let that happen. I think it was Ludwig Von Bertlanffy who said \u201cHuman beings are not machines, but in every situation given their own will they will behave like machines, falling to routines and just cease to examine what is in front of them.\u201d", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-74", "text": "So I think that the psychedelic thing is very important. I\u2019m sorry to see its \u2026 clouded it\u2019s a murky picture. I don\u2019t see, I think people should do more of it, and reflect and that there should be much less missionary work. That the goal is not to get as many people stoned as possible. The goal is to make sure that everybody who gets stoned gets really stoned. So that we don\u2019t have a bunch of confusion about just exactly what we\u2019re talking about. I mean I meet people who the only drug they have ever taken is MDMA. [2:54:34]\n\nAnd we\u2019re trying to have a conversation about the nature of psychedelic cosmology? It\u2019s weird sledding, you know.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-75", "text": "Okay, cybernetics, psychedelics, space is the other one. And I see all of these things as just completely one thing, and I, as I said this morning, I think the difference between Jos\u00e9 and I, one difference is that he is interested in creating a planetary consciousness, out of the surrender of the ego, of individuals to this higher vision of what should happen. I think that there already is this tra- super-human organism, and that our freedom is largely illusory. We are all moving to the tune of what Feud called the super-ego, and I what I call the overmind because I don\u2019t like the notion of superego, is a little torch light parade and that sort of thing. But the overmind, the notion of simply a control mechanism, which is uh, almost cybernetic, but which is leading everything forward and actually is orchestrating what is happening, so that all of these human groups, which aspire to hegemony, you know wall street, the communist party, the Zionist, you name it. They are all frustrated, because there seems to be an invisible, impeding force against their machinations, and their vision of how things should be. And no matter how many guns they pile up, no matter how much propaganda they churn out the historical continuum has a way of stabbing them in the back, and surprising them endlessly, because they are fools, playing with a master which is the super-ego.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-76", "text": "And uh until this en- what we as individuals can do, is help that process by not participating of the projections of anxiety that these various factions are pushing, that arise out of their frustration with their inability to get a handle on things. I don\u2019t want them to run things, Wall street or the communist party or anybody. I think that it works very nicely that it is run invisibly from the unconscious. I think it was Charles fort who said uh, there comes steam engine time, and then there will be steam engines. And uh, and that is what is happening with modern technology, even to the point of the atomic bomb, I am willing to explore the notion that the atomic bomb has been a wonderful force for cohering people\u2019s minds around the question of planetary survival. That if we had come out of World War II with aerial bombing and mustard gas but nothing quite horrifying enough to shock people awake. I think it\u2019s remarkable that we have lived in such a stable world since 1945. That it has never- only once used against a human population. And my god think of the hatred and the loathing that is loose on this planet, and yet the bomb has sobered people, and every political movement for social cohesion and enlightenment that is post 1945 has built its rhetoric around the bomb. The peace movement to some degree, the hippies, the existential response of the beat generation. All of these rich cultural phenomena have been reflections on the bomb. So the bomb is good, the thing that is important is not to use it. Then, then it becomes a problem.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-77", "text": "I think that this thing that has broken about nuclear winter is very interesting. But uh, capitalism is very interested in making money. A decimated earth is not good real estate. And I think that the nuclear winter issue is the beginning of the end of the nuclear uh, log jam, that because the soviet academy of science has conducted an independent study, they reached the same conclusion. The people that were skeptical of Sagan and the others they researched it, they reached the same conclusion. War is obsolete, and this is actually understood by the people who frighten us the most. I really think that they have come to see it as a bad deal, and no money maker. And in that case, uh, there will be change. The novelty wave is effecting all of these institutions. The strategies are changing at the very topmost level, because it\u2019s no good to have a no-win situation.\n\nSo, and as far as the space travel thing is concerned, I really think that inner and outer space are the same thing, and that we will come to understand this through research on the psychedelics. That when the Ayahusacero in the Peruvians amazon tells you he goes to the milky way, he is not really kidding. You see no matter how radical we are in our assumptions, it\u2019s very hard to not assume that we don\u2019t at least have 95% of the picture. I mean for instance, we believe in things like elementary particles and all- well these things may be no closer to the mark than the notion that the world was created when the Ant King got out of his canoe at the second waterfall to take a leak. You know?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-78", "text": "These may be preposterous notions. The polite approach that is usually taken is to say well \u201ceverybody has a bit of the piece. The Mayans had a bit of the piece, the Buddhists they know something, those Sufis they\u2019re pretty sharp.\u201d The mushroom suggested that nobody has a piece of the action. That it\u2019s all wrong, that it\u2019s all completely 100 percent bullshit. You see? And that\u2019s a very cleansing notion to begin to explore. To return to ground zero. And start out with- how radical a deconstruction can we carry on with this world. What is the real nature of language? This is what all of these fine theories leave out. It\u2019s what mine leaves out, it\u2019s what Jos\u00e9\u2019s leaves out. It\u2019s that you know, what is this phenomenon called language? Where by making little mouth noises, we coax roughly congruent into each other\u2019s brains, and then gabble joyfully over this achievement, you know? Reality is not made of electrons or quarks or any of these things. It is clearly made of language. And all of these abstractions, the faithless myths we mentioned this morning, are totally na\u00efve about language. They just view it like a fish views water. You know? It\u2019s good to speak clearly, that\u2019s important., but other than that they haven\u2019t a word to say about the epistemic basis of language. Science is most guilty of this because science is a very old institution. Consequently, its most fundamental assumptions are, were carried out in the atmosphere of greatest epistemological na\u00efvet\u00e9. [3:03:15] You know, things like that the universe is knowable at all. Things like that induction is a good way to think. Induction is when you say well if it happened ten times it\u2019ll probably happen the eleventh time. Probably. There\u2019s a loaded word, that science is very big on.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-79", "text": "So the real revolution is to come, I think, in language and the way in which psychedelics and feminism and cybernetics all come together is that we each need to carry out a very basic analysis of what we think about language and what we think it is and what we think it does. For instance, I\u2019ve noticed and uhm, this may be because I\u2019m male, but I\u2019ve noticed that there are all these things flying around which can\u2019t be discussed. And I finally realized that they\u2019re emotions, is what they are. And that we have a very very limited vocabulary of emotions. We experience an amazingly rich interior gradient of shifting modalities, of which we never can say- I mean we say \u201cI like you\u201d, \u201cI don\u2019t like you\u201d, \u201cI\u2019m uncomfortable\u201d, \u201cI really feel weird\u201d. I mean this is just like, y\u2019know, petroglyphs about emotion. Ralph Metzner and I have have been playing with the idea that there is a- and certainly Robert Graves and other people have preceded us in this but that there is hardwired into the human brain a kind of \u201currr\u201d language, that is older than agreed upon dictionaries, that is in fact to hear it is to understand it. The problem is that the only thing it can convey are emotions. But the emotions that it can convey are so finely graded and so rich in their adumbrations and resonances that it\u2019s like a form of magic, and we call this glossolalia and classify it is as a sub-psychotic or near-psychotic phenomenon, brain origin-uncertain, cultural use-uncertain, so forth and so on.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-80", "text": "Ralph and I have even toyed with the notion of holding weekends where we would insist that every rationally apprehendable utterance be followed by an utterance which was not rationally apprehendable. The non-rationally apprehendable utterance would uh, anchor you in the emotional gestalt of the moment. And that would be like the carrier wave- Do it? I thought you\u2019d never ask!\n\nTerence McKenna glossolalializes.\n\nAs does peer member.\n\n[Audience member] I\u2019ve had a conversation like this with a Sufi in the Sudan, and it was amazing to me because there was a third person there who could translate exactly what he said\u201d\n\n[Terence] What is being conveyed once you get used to it is the anchoring and the gestaltum of the emotional moment.\n\n[Peer member] And this man was reading my emotions to a finer level, the one who was translating. I mean I recognized what he was saying but it was accurate, the mood that \u2026.? The Sufi made.\n\n[Terence] That\u2019s right. You discover these things on psychedelics, but the are clearly subject to creodization, in other words to being learned. That you can lay down these pathways in the brain and its marvelous that-\n\n[Peer] I think there\u2019s some mental language learning anyway. This is how the child learns and how you learn when you\u2019re in a foreign country and you don\u2019t study from a book. You understand long before you can speak and you don\u2019t know what\u2019s being said but you can come to understand. And the child is always spoken to in turn about anything? Of its verbal comprehension.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-81", "text": "[Terence] So we need to learn to be able to create these linguistic constructs, which are not meaning-tied but which communicate. One of the most interesting things about psilocybin is that on high doses, a synesthesia takes place, where, when you articulate in this emotional glossolalia you actually can condense objects which are beheld, in other words you take control of the mechanism of the hallucinations and you create these hyper-\n\nthese toy-like, jewel-like self-transforming grammatical complexes. You\u2019re speaking some kind of translinguistic language which is beheld, rather than heard. And you know Philo Judeus talked about the more perfect logos. And he said the more perfect logos will be beheld, rather than heard, but it will pass from being heard to be being beheld without ever crossing a discernable barrier of transition. And I\u2019ve experienced this, and I think other people have, where you hear the glossolalia like wave, and it comes closer and closer and then at a certain point it is manifest as a topology and I think many of the psychedelics communicate in these visual languages, after taking ayahuasca you know, and sitting with these people in darkened huts in the amazon, after hours and hours of it, your eyes are just bugging out of your head. You just have spent hours looking and looking and looking and drinking in this visual data, and uh, this is how really dense information is conveyed. Not a linear of string of little mouth noises where the brain rushes to the conventionalized dictionary and then grimly reconstructs the intention provided nothing too finely sculpted was intended.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-82", "text": "And I think what\u2019s happening with the monitoring of brain states- Ralph Abraham who was here this morning is the director of the visual mathematics project at Santa Cruz. Glossolalia, language, drugs, cybernetics, all of these things are the means to transforming the human self-image. It\u2019s almost impossible to imagine what a society would be like where this glossolalia held sway equal with speech. I think the pre-celtic- or I mean the Celts of Ireland may have been into this, because they rarely spoke without punning, and you were expected to pun on multiple levels. And the pun, far from being trivial, is a step toward this hyper-dimensional linguistic construct. It\u2019s almost like a fractal. A pun is a word with one and a half dimensions, or more, in it. And uh, it resonates. This historical, this vision that I conveyed this morning of the co-presence of resonant epochs in time, could only be conveyed if someone could transform their language in such a way that it was implicit that this was happening and we were all noticing it and experiencing it the way we are noticing and experience the greenness of this tree, the fall of the sunlight through the leaves. We could also also be experiencing the ebb and flow of midd- Mesopotamian empires and Hellenistic religions and so forth and so on.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-83", "text": "The fourth quadrant of the mandala, and then I will open it up for questions, which I hope there are many, is feminism, and I feel very trepidatious, wading into this, but never the less, I really feel in some ways it is the most important of all of these, because it is uh, going to work the change that is going to go on between us as individuals. What is happening I think is nothing less than an awareness that the most appropriate way to talk about the entelechy of this, on this planet is to call it her, and to admit that the goddess worship which was repressed by the rise of the patriarchal religions is now, its return is necessary. I don\u2019t want to say that the patriarchal interlude which lasted two-three thousand years was not necessary, I think it was necessary, but the fear will go out of the bomb when the hand that rocks the cradle holds the bomb, essentially. And all the bad little boys of the 19th and the 20th century who have been fiddling with their chemistry sets, now need to recognize that this all has to be handed over, to cooler heads who have not been scarred by the historical experience, in the way that I think masculine intelligence has been.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-84", "text": "And uhm, psychedelics I count as a feminizing force, because they introduce you to the unconscious. Cybernetics I count as a feminizing force because it hardwires that same unconsciousness and raises it into inaccessibility. No longer are these things the theoretical constructs of psychologists, they become, you know, living realities in our lives. And uh, the transformation of the species into a, into a space-faring, whether interior or exterior or something else kind of space is only going to happen if this feminizing influence can now take the heat off the technological processes which were necessary to move us here. And feminism really, it has nothing to do with gender, it\u2019s just an attitude toward being in the world that is open I think basically to the translingustic. If you had to stirp it of all biological notions of what feminism is, feminism is a kind of mentality which operates exterior to language. And there\u2019s no, it\u2019s like, the Nogual and the Tonal, theres no unifying those two things, or encompassing one with the other, it just is not like that. These things are uhm, alchemical opposites and as such the only way they can be unified is in a kind of coincidentia oppositorum. A union of opposites where the identity of each element is still fully expressed. This is not a rational concept, its like being in two places at once time. Nevertheless, it is a concept that is psychologically and experientially very, very valuable. And I see, as I say, all of these forms of self-exploration and technological expansion and even space,I mean if the earth is our mother then certainly outer space is our dark-blue great grandmother.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "0d59bdc75e43-85", "text": "So I sort of give this as a background on what was said this morning, because I, I wanted to convey the one thing I have to convey which is uniquely mine which is this strange wave, and that\u2019s mine. That its difficult to understand and its importance is open to debate. It may be trivial in the extreme. This afternoon, I sort of wanted to speak as a member of the culture who is trying to figure it out like everybody else using the same data banks that everybody else is using, and I- it was in Hawaii that I thought about this a lot, and I think these are the four pillars or the four quadrants of the mandala that lead into the coincidentia oppositorum which is the flying saucer, the exteriorized soul of the human race and the end of time, the transcendent object that will carry us all completely out of these concerns and into an entirely different set of concerns of which we have not the faintest inkling. So are there questions, or debates? In the back, Don.\n\n[3:17:20]\n\n[Peer Review for remainder of lecture-]\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Invisible+Landscape+%28Peer+Review%29"}
{"id": "962adad23f2e-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nCauldron Chemistry Interview\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n1985\n\nTerence McKenna's Home, Sonoma County, California\n\n6603\n\nEnd of Results\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Cauldron+Chemistry+Interview"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nThe Rites Of Spring\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\nApril 1986\n\nRites of spring, Ojai Foundation, Ojai CA\n\n32616\n\nEnd of Results\n\nTerence McKenna: Well, the parachute never looked more like a mushroom than it does right now. [Terence chuckles]\n\nI couldn't really see you all in the firelight last night so this is like seeing you for the first time. Welcome, and, uh, I hope you feel free to interrupt what's going on at any time and ask questions, or if something needs clarification please, uh, don\u2019t hesitate.\n\nMy hope for these kinds of retreats is that it will quickly become so interesting to everyone that the, uh, presentational form will transform itself into a dialogue among many people. It seems to me that\u2019s when it happens best. And I don\u2019t think people would be here if they didn\u2019t have strong opinions and ideas about probably everything which is said. So, that\u2019s the way the group mind is generated, by everyone opening up and, uh, expressing how they relate to these things that we\u2019re going to discuss.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-1", "text": "I guess the place to start is sort of with looking at the notion that, uh, the dawning paradigm of post-modern consciousness seems to be the growing awareness that we don\u2019t know what is happening at all. That all of the models whose implications have been worked out over the past 500 years or so have come to a place where they are now recursive and they no longer can be pushed forward as models of explanation. In other words, they are completed, and ontological analysis of how they work now shows us the limitations of their application to reality. They just simply cannot -m- there is not more blood to be squeezed from the stone of science. There may be further discoveries, but further growth and understanding along those lines now seems unlikely, what with the complementarity principle, Bells theorem, the primacy of language with the formation of ontology. All these things show the relative power of science to account for reality where before it was assumed that science would ultimately give a good account of reality.\n\nSo, postmodern living is living in the light of the fact that that faith has dissolved away, and that we\u2019re now living in some kind of intellectual free space, or fire-free zone where everything is up for grabs. And the, uh, the 20th century\u2019s fascination with the archaic, with shamanism and, uh, breakdown of perception through modern art, exploration of the unconscious through psychoanalysis, mass political movements, all of these things relate to this fascination with the archaic which is an effort on the part of the culture to stabilize itself because we really have- having seen the limitations of science, we have discovered we are in a small rowboat in a dark ocean and we\u2019re being swept we know not where. So all past tradition is searched: magical traditions, alchemical traditions, lost philosophical traditions, pre-literate tribal traditions, everything is frantically searched for a key.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-2", "text": "And while there are consoling perceptions that arise out of this search through all this other extended human knowledge, there haven\u2019t yet emerged certain answers about what is going on. This is why several people last night referred to how weird the time is, how hopeful we are with so little reason, uh, on the surface to be hopeful. And, uh, it\u2019s because the gelling out of this historical problem is happening right now, and it\u2019s not clear, uh, what it will become. Meetings like this are efforts to uh, build an understanding of it. It doesn\u2019t appear that it\u2019s going to filter down through the transformation of institutions of control. It appears more like it\u2019s going to be some kind of proletarian, uh, upwelling of a shift of point of view.\n\nNow, the shorthand way of saying what I just said is that we now know that we don\u2019t know anything. And things like uh, the psychedelic experience and the use of psychedelic plants throws open doorways that science was able to successfully keep closed during its heyday because they were areas where the number of variables exceeded science's power of description and therefore they said \u201cWell we\u2019ll just keep driving straight ahead, and we\u2019ll go up those rivers later.\u201d But now that is all changed and the exploration of, uh, the existential dimension of not-knowingness which psychedelics makes possible is what is forming modern people, I think. I mean, people who will be seen to have lead lives that were relevant 50 years from now, or 100 years from now, people who had actually figured out the context of the world they were living in and tried to come to terms with it.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-3", "text": "And, uh, this morning I think we want to talk about uh, plants and how they relate to the planet, but before we do that I want to paint a picture for you of a, of a mandala which then I will discuss later in other meetings. But my notion of, of what the post modern person's mandalic projection on to the world should be in terms of a map of understanding is a, uh, a quadrated circle in which psychedelics, and feminism, and cybernetics, and space travel are the four parts of the circle. And in the center of the circle, looking backwards in time, there is a category that I would call conservation. Which means conservation of the planet, conservation of traditional and historical knowledge, conservation of values, conservation in the sense of intelligence husbanding the planet.\n\nAnd when the mandala is flipped over and you look through it into the future, conservation has been replaced by art. Art is the ultimate expression of this transformation of, uh, unorganized matter into ideas, which human beings carry on. And we carry it on in a technical mode of necessity, but in the artistic mode, out of a kind of upwelling of ecstatic self-expression about the universe. So conservation is the way we relate to the past and human history is seen as an object of collective artifice-making in the future culminating in the notion of, uh, of the flying-saucer.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-4", "text": "To do this, we have to completely re-design our understanding of reality which in terms of practical experience will mean that reality itself will appear to be redesigned. And I touched on this for a moment last night when I mentioned plants and said how admiring I was of them because they subs- they exist on sunlight, air, and earth, and that this is what we have to learn to do in order to release spirit out of the ape matrix that we\u2019re bound in. And strangely enough the way this is to be done apparently is by a redefining of the nature of the biological world in relationship to this other kingdom of being which we call plants. Plants represent some kind of entire other dimension of existence of which we view the topological manifestation of the form, but are completely occluded as to the network or energy and information that this represents.\n\nAnd like the zoological kingdom which has uh, thousands of forms of expression and progressively more complex forms which culminate in self-reflecting primates the vegetable kingdom seems to have intelligent species and gradations of awareness in the world so that we are opening a dialogue at the end of history with this other form in the biosphere which we are just beginning to cognize as our own understanding about what the world is really about falls into focus. And certainly a hundred years ago no one would have thought that this was in the direct line of historical development of the high tech civilizations, that they would have to explore the mind of the vegetable plant goddess who was the only force contending with them for control of the planet. That\u2019s what it\u2019s come down to.\n\nSo, with that kind of idea in mind, the idea of \"plant and planet\", which is a phrase of Anthony Huxley\u2019s which is wonderful. Uh, Kath maybe you would want to talk about this, this is a good...", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-5", "text": "Kat Mckenna: Um, yeah. I was thinking uh, last night and this morning about plants particularly [clears throat], um, because of our talks that I anticipated and back at the tent a little while ago I had a gnawing feeling that I was ignoring the animals too much and then I, um, arrived here and they all began to gnaw on me. I just got about 14 ant bites just sitting here, you see the scratching on it, so I feel grounded again. [Kat chuckles] Uh, I don\u2019t know about having a dialogue with the end of history through plants [laughter], I don\u2019t know about that, but um, I do think they are this obviously great and ever-present mystery which we ingest all day long, um, without thinking of those as plants, without thinking of them as sacred plants in the way we do the sacred ones. Their chemistry- their input is influencing us all the time. Whether we eat meat or not we eat plenty of plants, and we breathe from them, and we soothe our nerves by seeing them and being near them, and we go out into places like this and see kinds we\u2019ve never seen before and marvel at how they can survive. They're real models of graceful survival, I think.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-6", "text": "Um, the jungle where we spent a fair bit of time, the competition it seems is for light and for protein, I guess, for, for organic matter, the animals competing. Here it\u2019s obviously for water. They have a kind of, uh, a deal. If you look around under the bushes you see wonderful wildflowers right now, the rains have just held on, the moisture has held on long enough that many things are going- and the short life cycle plants are going through their intense short life cycle and they often need to shade to do it. So you can see- we found something that we were sure was an African violet bush yesterday, you know? You can see wonderful things if you look carefully and don\u2019t bother anybody else that might be under there.\n\nUm, the question I\u2019ve been asking of myself recently, and of a few other people- now I have many of you to ask it I hope I get some answers, is, um, how can a plant be a teacher?\n\nUm, I asked this of someone the other day who was deeply involved in neuro-linguistic programming and he got way off on a tangent about \u201cWhat does this question mean?\u201d you know [laughter] just broke down every part and phrase and it was wonderful, we never got to anything like what he thought about the answer but [Kat chuckles] uh, it does assume all sorts of things. You have to have an image of what you think of as a plant, which although we have sort of a language-verified easy answer it doesn\u2019t really touch on the reality and, uh, and then of course you have to think what you mean by 'teacher'.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-7", "text": "Well, I know there\u2019s at least one biologist, serious biologist in the group here so I\u2019m hesitant to define a plant. I guess from my point of view as an observer, I, I\u2019ve done botanical illustration and I really value the opportunity I had to learn to really look and them. And then when you think you've really looked, look closer. You can just keep on learning from them just visually, that way. But they are, uh, organisms like us that that draw in all the elements: fire in the form of sunlight, and water and air and earth and, uh, go through this transformation of energy into, uh, something else, in the same way that we do. Um, this moment right now is when they are doing that most energetically for the year. They are taking that moisture in their\u2026you can look at each one- the leaf tips are new, and the tissue is soft, and the colors are bright as well as the blossoming and all that.\n\nUm, they are also laying out the structure as I understand it for that growth to become more permanent, or woody, the perennials anyway, so during the year they will fill that out, and next year they will come from that place doing this envisioning the future, what they\u2019ll have to deal with, how to move to make their interface with it, and then how to reproduce. And, uh, and their little messages are going into the, uh, the seeds coming from the pollination of other plants. So it\u2019s always like with us, you choose a mate it's your choice for how you\u2019d like the future to be, right? My genes, your genes, here it goes down the line.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-8", "text": "Um, really all I have about this is questions. I hope you don\u2019t mind if I just throw questions up, if anyone wants to say anything, please do. Uh, one thing I wonder is, we regard ourselves as such individuals, we don\u2019t think of ourselves a species much. Terence talks about that a fair bit. But in our daily life we really identify ourselves as individuals, as, uh, some of us having more power, more clarity, more energy, more talent, whatever. We divide that way. With plants we tend to think of each plant on a species basis, you know. I wonder if, um, how much that\u2019s true. plants that we\u2019re familiar with like ayahuasca, banisteriopsis capii in the South American jungle, if you want to make this visionary drink you go and find uh, a member of that species but different members have different potencies and different takes on the same kind of message. This gets to the teacher part.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-9", "text": "The, the, um- a friend of ours, Eduardo Luna, interviewed a number of shamans in the uh, jungle. They use this term \u201cplant teacher\u201d in Spanish as we\u2019ve come to use it too and uh, he asked them, do you think that all plants have a, a plant teacher in them, or do you think that some do? And they were divided on this question, some people think that only the sacred plants do, right? Other shamans said \u201cno all plants do, just some of the spirits; they call them \u2018the mothers\u2019, the mother of the plant, or the spirit or the teacher. Some are stronger.\u201d So that implies that anytime we eat any plant we\u2019re taking in that, that teacher. They um, they mix these plants with ayahuasca which already provides the vision. Then they take a new plant that they don\u2019t know so well, or that they want some particular aspect of and they mix it in with that and take it and feel that they are radiating what is that plant, what is the personality, Whatever you want to call it, of that plant. And that they take on the qualities of that plant.\n\nSo um, I think the Indians in this area as I understand did that too with their plants, they wanted to take on the quality of the- peyote is a good one, you know. I mean, it's- it lasts a very long time in a very subtle way doing who knows what all that time when it\u2019s not being eaten by something which is metabolizing the teacher in it. Is the teacher in it, when it\u2019s just sitting there all that time? Is it experiencing the, the visions that come with, uh, that come into the, the animal organism that ingests it? I don\u2019t know", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-10", "text": "I guess on the species and individual thing I wonder as a, an adjunct that, you know when you grow your own plants- anyone who gardens you know when you grow your own plants and vegetables how they taste different than the ones obviously at the store whom are probably grown, certainly with the same kind of physical care, but certainly not the same kind of attention.\n\nTM: It\u2019s the question for me, or what always astonishes me about it is where does the information come from? I mean, the peyote plant or the ayahuasca vine, or the mushroom growing there in the jungle or in the desert, how did it manage to tap in and become filled with a, a universe of alien Platonic beauty? Why is that there? All the rules of orthodox evolutionary theory conserve- only what is necessary is conserved. So it\u2019s very hard to understand how- why a plant needs a uh, library card at the intergalactic library, uh, because it\u2019s just sitting there in the desert of some planet alive and living. S-\n\nKM: But each plant is different too, their library cards don\u2019t take them to the same libraries even you know? Each one of these visionary plants provides something distinct. And sometimes you can see how it\u2019s a cousin of that one and sometimes you can\u2019t see that they are related at all.\n\nTerence: Well isn\u2019t it that mind is, somehow at the reflexive level, chemical? And that when you change the chemistry of the engine which is giving the pictures, the pictures change. There- sometimes it seems almost like a biological radio that you tune in to very strongly broadcasting stations, some of which are, uh, you know, alien high-tech insectoid science-fiction places, others are jungle worlds or things that you can\u2019t even English.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-11", "text": "KM: Giant human teachers, I met one who was 40 feet tall, you know, and he took me by the finger like a little child and let me through, what was that doing in the plant?\n\nTM: Yeah what is it for?\n\nQ: [???]\n\nTM: Sure.\n\nKM: Yes.\n\nTM: When you take a longer slice, you realize that the individual existence is like an illusion,m= and that really the planet is involved in some kind of chemical process which is like a gene swarming, and it\u2019s been going on for a billion years with more and more- and, and animals and plants, as species and as individuals, are just, uh, aggregates of genes of varying degrees of permanence. The individual is a very impermanent aggregate of genes. The species has a slightly longer duration. But what\u2019s really happening is these information transferring molecules are just swarming on the surface of the planet, and controlling, as you mentioned, the weather, the chemistry of the soils, the rate of heat transfer. They\u2019ve discovered now that plankton control weather in the oceans by controlling the surface reflectivity that- the question I think is the peculiar dualism in the world of information. Why does it seem that reality is not reality? Why are there co-present- actually two worlds are co-present in our experience. This is the taboo subject that we\u2019re here to talk about: the weird fact that there are two worlds, one of which our culture doesn\u2019t acknowledge but we all experience. That\u2019s a very schizophrenic situation to be in. We all exist in both of these worlds, but our language, our culture, our institutions tell us \u201cNo there\u2019s only one world.\u201d", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-12", "text": "We have gotten into this lethal cul-de-sac where, by not acknowledging the second world we have, uh, have veered off on a tangent which is uh, threatens our extinction now, this obsession with control of world one, matter, energy, and the complete ignoring of the world of consciousness which stood in front of it and manipulated it, but just taking that as a given has created this fantastically imbalanced culture.\n\nQ: I think that gets back to the plants as teachers because uh, since we do, as in your words, play with fire as human beings, perhaps the question you were asking as to the plants as being teachers, my feeling at the time was they are in communication with us as we are in communication with them, we\u2019re all transparent beings, and you\u2019re talking of gene swarming on the planet. There\u2019s no, um, safe in which we lock our own human knowledge. It's, we\u2019re transparent to all around us and if you get into intelligent plants which is what we were talking about earlier, perhaps, I mean if you follow that logically out, why not have teachers as chemicals? That's how they can manifest within this particular body and do the library cards as you said.\n\nQ2: They realize that we are doers and shakers.\n\nQ1: Well I think there is only one life on the planet though, and to say that we\u2019re separate from the plants or from this or from the air is a fallacy.\n\nTM: So that\u2019s a great image, the growing transparency. That's, that\u2019s a good idea for what the end of history is, it\u2019s that everything becomes clearer, and clearer, and clearer, and as it becomes clearer boundaries disintegrate and everything is seen to be of the same, uh, of the same stuff.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-13", "text": "KM: I think for much of the world, and still for instance in the Amazon and other cultures who are tuned into nature, it was very transparent for very, very long. Progress was the losing of that transparency and the you know forging ahead of certain parts of it and, and almost the point of either just eliminating to extinction or to the extinction memory, the, the lessons.\n\nOne day, I was just- I think it was during bookkeeping or something very much mundane, the little voice that interrupts every once in a while said that \u201cA plant teacher is a teacher who has taken the form of a plant\u201d and that raised all these questions for me you know, does that mean there are teachers floating around looking for places to land, right? And ways to interface with the other species? Or- and you know I\u2019ve always thought of rocks, big rocks, many places in the world you can just sit on them and you can just hear them you know and feel them, really.\n\nTM: I\u2019m sure you're- you know Rupert Sheldrake\u2019s theory, well its basically the idea of like kind resonate together, and, when- I've thought about this problem before, about LSD and where does it fit in to all of this. LSD is in, uh, is in the morning glories of central Mexico and the far Pacific. And what I think that makes a plant teacher complex is how many people it\u2019s taken. And that a plant that has been used 100,00 years is filled with all of the contents of the minds of the people who took it over that time.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-14", "text": "But I want to introduce the notion that life, the plants and the animals, are intrusions into 3-dimensional space of some kind of topological manifold of a higher order. You see, the way in which a chair differs from a giraffe is that if you, if you slice through the chair and then come back and examine it twelve hours later it will be the same, but the giraffe will have changed radically. This is because by cutting into the giraffe you will have intruded into the temporal dimension of its existence. It is more like a musical note than an object. It must be born, grow, mature, and die. I- it- and that process, growth maturity and death, is how 3-dimensional beings like ourselves describe the intrusion of these hyper-dimensional vortices into our world. That\u2019s the mystery of life. Cannot be encompassed in 3 dimensions. Life is a hyper-dimensional object. All hyper-dimensional objects are organisms whether they be societies or animals. So the question of \u201cWhat is the plant.\u201d", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-15", "text": "animals. So the question of \u201cWhat is the plant.\u201d You know, when you ask yourself \u201cWhat am I?\u201d What you immediately concentrate on is what philosophers call your internal horizon of transcendence. You look into yourself to understand yourself. When we try to describe a plant, we inevitably give a topological mapping of it, how it appears to us: its uptake of minerals, it\u2019s surface reflectivity, it\u2019s weight. But the plant obviously experiences itself very differently. All life has an internal horizon of transcendence toward which it aims. Its, um, Whitehead called it \u201cappetition,\u201d its inclusion of sensory data out of which it maps being. But what the nature of this higher dimension is, that these vortices are intruding into our dimension from, is absolutely anybody\u2019s guess. I mean you can call it a mathematical conundrum or a religious mystery, but it\u2019s what\u2019s making the world happen. It\u2019s what- how the mystery of our being will eventually be shed one", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-16", "text": "mystery of our being will eventually be shed one more level of uh, veil to let us understand it.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-17", "text": "You see an organism is a chemical system which does not run down. The, the second law of thermodynamics says that the whole universe tends towards the dissipation of structure and the release of energy in heat and then everything, all structure and all energy is dissipated. But, the, uh, life has achieved the miracle of, by being an open system and taking material into it, and extracting energy from it, and getting rid of waste, uh, life has been able to leave the main stream of thermodynamic degradation and establish itself at an equilibrium point off that graph and maintain itself there for, at least on this planet alone, four billion years. Now the average life of a star in this galaxy is on the order of 2.5 billion years, some last longer. But that means that biology is no epiphenomenon, no iridescence off the surface of matter as the 19th century physicalists wanted to describe it. It means that life is, uh, indicative of a physics of higher dimensions which intrudes into this otherwise thermodynamically degrading system which we call the physical universe.\n\nAnd, uh, information, there seems to be an informational ghost of this universe which is somehow co-present at all points within the matrix, perhaps a-la Bell's Theorem, or something like that. And that\u2019s what the psychedelic experience shows you. It shows you a hologramatic space of information where, by sitting still in your room and ascending the mind, you can cross the universe in an instant, you know, and return. And the question of \u201cIs this real?\u201d is in bad taste. [audience laughter] It violates the two ontological categories you see. I, I mean, uh, it just isn\u2019t done.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-18", "text": "But- you're right, and the plants seem to be the things which shake us out of these cultural conventions. We have this very bad habit of when we encounter a new experience we describe it, and as we describe it we erase its reality and replace it with a map. And forever after when we encounter that input, we access the map and overlay it over the things and say \u201cAha I know what this is\u201d and so by the time a child is five years old they have completely entered into a symbolic construct which hides the real world from them. And, uh, fortunately, uh, these plant teachers seem to have the unique ability of showing you the relativity of language which for us is the relativity of being. And then you are freed because you have seen something incontrovertible, there\u2019s no going back. You know, you are-that is the great first gateway on the path, to realize the relativity of language and the malleability of, of, of the world.\n\nAnd for instance, coming out in to the desert is typical of people seeking visions, the first thing you have to do is leave the polis. Culture is this effort to hold back the mystery and replace it with a mythology which is then in the control of those who recite that mythology whether they be shamans or priests. This holding back of reality is this strange- is what Christian theologians call \u201cThe Fall\u201d, our strange alienation from nature that causes us to crowd into cities and mint money, and uh, put a price on everything.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-19", "text": "This is why it\u2019s so important to go back to the Amazon and Eastern Indonesia, and these places and try and understand what spark it was that those people kept, you know, over the millennia while we became the prodigal son and wandered into matter and, uh, you know, horde on the cities on the plain. We have now come full circle and returned at the end of history with the dilemma that we have made such a mess of things that there\u2019s nothing we can do now but lay\u2026\n\nEach stage is a greater distancing from the wellspring of being, and it\u2019s brought us, you know, to the valley of dry bones, to the valley of the apocalypse. And, uh, now the fat is in the fire. Now we\u2019ll find out what stuff man is made of as, uh, the chickens come home to roost. But, uh, well no, I- I\u2019m very optimistic!\n\nQ: The metaphors!\n\nTM: Well is it my metaphors or my pessimism? Oh the horrible metaphors... Yes well the rhetorical hyperbole unbridled\u2026\n\nQ: Asking about the multiple worlds \u201cIt interests me greatly, do you think there's two worlds, or do you think there\u2019s many, many worlds?\u201d\n\nTM: Yes well I think you\u2019re right, but there are different orders of different worlds. I mean, I guess it was the physicist Wheeler who thought that every time there was a choice, the universe took both paths and had always done this, so that the number uh, and kinds of universes was, uh, you know, staggering.\n\nQ: [unintelligible]\n\nRight.\n\nQ: [unintelligible]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-20", "text": "Q: [unintelligible]\n\nRight.\n\nQ: [unintelligible]\n\nI don't- I find that cumbersome [laughter], but there certainly seem to be a number of universes and there seems to be different kinds of universes, for instance, uh, you can tune from channel to channel, but some of them you can\u2019t make heads nor tails out of, you know. It\u2019s just too far away from your conceptual schema for you to be- so it\u2019s sort of like watching, uh, ideological mandalas or something. You can\u2019t say much about it afterwards, but it certainly was compelling while it was\u2026[audience laughter] And, uh, well, I don't know, Robin. You've, you're such a skillful questioner, you've brought yourself to the doorway of my most recent mania. Maybe I should unburden myself briefly about it. [audience laughter]\n\nOne of the weird things about, about growth, or trying to make your ideas always become new is that you always assume you\u2019re going to, uh, to, uh, know what the next step is, that even though you\u2019re going to become more and more enlightened, there won\u2019t be any surprises. In, and- uh, so, a few weeks ago I was meditating in my usual fashion and uh, I began to get this new idea which was so weird that I immediately shifted into \u201cAha this is, this is not the truth, this is not a transmission about the nature of reality. This is a plot for a science fiction novel that I, that I should write\u201d and try to hold that as the defense. That was my shield against the onslaught of this thing.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-21", "text": "And I\u2019ve never been one for Atlantis, or Lemuria, or all these invisible pre-historic lands and places that people enjoy so much, but I was told a very funny thing which I will share with you. It\u2019s, uh, a funny idea. Now let's see, how does it go. It has two versions, one of which speaks a scientific language, the other speaks a mythological language. Ok, so the scientific language goes like this: There\u2019s something in the universe called a fractal soliton of improbability. This means it\u2019s a unicate event, it only happens once in the lifetime of a universe. You can think of it as a wavelength with one wave. That\u2019s why its called a soliton. And if, if one of the- and these things move not in ordinary 3-dimensional space but, but in some kind of much higher spatial manifold, and when they collide with a planet, or when one collides with a planet in a universe the time stream of that planet is divided and two copies of the entire planet spring into existence without either having any knowledge of it, it just is something which happens. So this voice was telling me that, uh, this had happened to the earth, and that this was the secret that we were all striving to understand, was that an event in the past had actually divided our time stream, and that a twin of this planet had come into being in another dimension.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-22", "text": "Ok, so that\u2019s the scientific explanation of it. So the mythological explanation was that the universe is Gnostic, that the creation of a demiurge, not the highest expression of divinity, but a kind of demon, a fallen creature, and that this demiurge was able to coax itself into being and actually incarnate into history as a human being. And that when this happened this was then the mythological expression of the fractal soliton of improbability. And when it happened the time stream split.\n\nKM: The universe was the creation of the demiurge, and the demiurge impelled itself in in the form of an individual?\n\nTM: Right.\n\nKM: It waited a long time!\n\nTM: When you're a demiurge, who can hurry! [laughter]\n\nKM: Ok, go ahead.\n\nTM: Ok so, so the time splitting event had to do with the career of Christ who was an extraordinary manifestation of energy in the historical time stream, not to be confused with a Buddha, or a Mohammed, or a Zoroaster, who were great saints. And, uh, it was something else. It was in some sense what it claimed to be, but in some sense. Ok? So now at the moment of, and you can choose either the immaculate conception or the resurrection depending on which side of the bed you got up on today. But at that moment the time stream split and this other place came into being without having any awareness that- and they were identical at that moment, these two worlds.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-23", "text": "Now, Christ had no children, so- oh, what I forgot to say was that the event, the fractal soliton of improbability, has this quantum mechanical half-charge so that in one of the universes it happens, in the other universe it doesn\u2019t happen. And so everything about these two worlds was the same, except that in one of them the immaculate conception had not taken place, or the resurrection had not taken place. Now because Christ had no children, the world in which he was absent, it was not a genetic line which was missing, it was an ideological line which never received expression. And consequently, as time passed, first decades and then centuries, the absence of this particular intellectual influence in the world changed the world radically in the following way: Greek science did not suffer the suppression that occurred with the conversion of Constantine. The academies were not closed. The hermetic knowledge was not repressed.\n\n-Audio cuts off here and starts again at \"Greek science did not suffer the suppression...\"\n\nConversely, the Empire was stronger and was able to repel the barbarian invasions of the second to the fifth century, and, and mathematics, which had halted in our world at Diaphantis, proceeded through his disciple Hypatia to develop a calculus by AD 370 so that the millennium of Christian stasis that occurred in our world did not occur in that world. And as time passed and engineering advances occurred by around 850 they had ships which were able to cross the Atlantic ocean and they encountered the Mayan civilization reaching its fullest flower on- in Guatemala and on the Yucatan peninsula. And in fact in this vision I saw the Roman Emperor Cosmodorus the Fifth make a pilgrimage to Tikal in 920 to be present at the coronation of a king at the end of that Baktun 8.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-24", "text": "Anyway, this Greco-Roman imperial culture immediately recognized the genius of the Mayans in mathematics and astronomy and, and Europe was transformed into am- an amalgamation, a Greco-Mayan civilization with, uh\u2026[clears throat] [laughter] So let me see, and, and this civilization continued to develop. Now one of the influences around the year 950 was their extremely sophisticated psychopharmacopaeia and shamanism. And this mated with Neo-Platonism and Hermeticism, so that rather than science developing as it developed in our world, a kind of magical, psychopharmacolitic technology of thought and understanding was what was developed over the centuries. And then in later centuries, centuries before it happened our world, they contacted the orient and the Sung- the dynastic influence of the Sung poured itself into the creation of the global civilization such that by around 1200 AD they were able to land on the moon and create a cybernetic global civilization similar to the kind we have now. They continued evolving with all this psychotronic and shamanically derived, and now by this time you can imagine it was an unbelievably exotic and alien, uh, civilization compared to our own.\n\nThe fruits of their psychedelic and psychoanalytic investigations into higher space was the discovery of our world. [laughter] They found out what had happened. They figured it out by studying dreams and by making deep journeys into the psychedelic space they were able to discover our sleeping unconscious with its repository of the legacy of the Christian centuries under the reign of this demiurgic ideology. And they conceived of the notion of saving us.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-25", "text": "And it, it has to do with this whole thing about the UFO\u2019s, and influencing dreams, and astral traveling, and the other side, is actually the manifestation of this bizarre Greco-Mayan, postmodern, star-faring civilization trying to reach across the dimensions to save us from the momentum of our history by making us aware of, first of all, their existence, and also their technology which is evolving towards a point where, I think around the Mayan millennium, around 2012 the time island will be f- we will flow past the time island and the two time streams will be rejoined, and we will make peace with this civilization which is now 1,000 years more advanced than us with this totally different cultural history and this completely different take on reality. So this came to me in the space of about 15 seconds [audience laughter] and uh, more details have flowed in, I use it mostly as a meditational device because it\u2019s so interesting ask to be told about how this other civilization developed.\n\nIts amazing exoticism, you know, its Neo-Platonism, its Daoism, its Mayan influences melded into a completely different kind of civilization than the one that we inherited. I\u2019ve always thought, you know, that the, that Christianity, without making any judgement about Christ himself, that Christianity is hands-down the single most reactionary force in all of human history, and where would we be had that 1,200 years not been given over to this peculiar meditation, you know? All the pieces were in place for the kind of civilization that I\u2019ve outlined, it was just, uh coincidence. Kat does not endorse this idea, [laughs] or even encourage it...", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-26", "text": "KM: He only told it to me a couple of days ago in Apache Junction at a truck stop or something, and he didn\u2019t tell me it\u2019s the plot for a science fiction novel he said \u2018this is the truth!\u2019 and I said \u2018let's get back to it being a good science fiction novel.\u2019\n\nQ: Well the thing is that it, it would on our level explain perhaps the questions you were asking earlier. Why the teaching plants?\n\nTM: Ye- sure.\n\nKM: Yeah.\n\nQ: Another thing I was curious when you were talking, the physics nowadays you can have an electron on one side of the universe and split it into two and separate them on two sides of the universe and they are still in communication with each other so is that why, logically, you can bring the time island back together again?\n\nTM: Yeah, this would be a quantum-mechanical super macro-physical Bell's Theorem event, a kind of, a kind of hyper dimensional vacuum fluctuation where the two worlds spring apart, sail along for a period then parity is conserved and they're rejoined.\n\nQ: Well this is interesting. I\u2019ve had dreams that are parallel, and its very interesting that you bring this up, I\u2019ve not heard of it before,\n\nTM: It's a-\n\nQ: It, it- another thing I was curious is that this takes place, uh, this would be on a human experience level, uh, what you\u2019re speaking of. Now the plant kingdom, would they remain in, uh, connection between the species?\n\nKM: Interesting question.\n\nQ: Uh...\n\nTM: We're free to have it any way we like. [chuckles]\n\nKM: So it- how has Christianity possibly affected the evolution of plant species in this time stream as opposed to the other. Have they gone on..", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-27", "text": "Q: How did our lack of say 100,000 or one million species in the last 200 years that the other planet has- how does that affect the parity between the two? Uh..\n\nTM: You mean how does our destruction and contort... Well, the part of the myth which I didn\u2019t tell you which I will now tell you [audience laughter] was, uh, that, uh, naturally, well, they were developing and exploring technical options many hundreds of years ago and they, uh, theoretic- they discovered the theoretics for nuclear fusion and fission but they never used it, until a few hundred years later one of their great theoreticians- this was after they had discovered our time stream -made the prediction that the physics of atomic explosions were such that they would cross the time stream, and so they performed an experiment by detonating an atomic device in what is our year 1907 and this was the Tungusca-\n\nKM: ...yes sir, can anyone guess?\n\nTM: ...the Tungusca, the Tungusca event. And then by monitoring the dreams of Siberian shaman which they had in clear focus, they saw aha, this explosion which we actually set off did occur in both time streams and at that point they became very interested in monitoring our, uh, time stream because they were picking up the dreams of a Swiss telegraph worker [audience chuckles] who seemed to be pushing toward an unimaginable conclusion. So now there is a certain amount of urgency because if we explode our atomic stockpiles it will wreck the place that they call \u201cHome world\u201d.\n\nQ: [unintelligible]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-28", "text": "Q: [unintelligible]\n\nTM: Yes, yes. Not self-preservation because they now have star flight and encompass many systems, but preservation of Home World which on the other side is a vast botanical and ecological preserve from pole to pole, I mean it\u2019s a sacred site of pilgrimage, it\u2019s, uh-\n\nKM: ...the earth\n\nTM: ..the home of the species, it\u2019s the Earth. And the notion that suddenly great parts of it will be blown apart by leakage from hyperspace of one of our atomic wars is impelling them now to attempt to open the doorway and rejoin the time streams, and we'll be allowed a few years inside the botanical park to acclimate and then most people will ship off for the stars, I imagine.\n\nThe British science fiction writer, Ian Watson, has a wonderful book called \u201cChekov\u2019s Journey\u201d in which he talks about the Tungusca event, and his theory is that it was a catastrophic failure of a Soviet time-travel experiment conducted shortly after the turn of the next century. [audience laughter]\n\nKM: Tough one to prove, right? [chuckles]\n\nTM: Obviously! Why didn't I think of that! [laughter] Well, I mean, I\u2019m not sure, I\u2019ve thought of that before, you know, it\u2019s the claim of Christian theologians that Christ comes in the center of history, they speak this same language. Before Christ no souls were entering Heaven. He freed the valve and now it's possible to enter into heaven. Before his intercession that was impossible.\n\nQ: [unintelligible from the audience]\n\nTM: You're....\n\n[audio splits here 56:20]\n\nSo I thought that the millenium had come, that forever after we would - BREAK\n\nAll trash... Muzare Sharif\n\n[this seems to repeat?]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-29", "text": "All trash... Muzare Sharif\n\n[this seems to repeat?]\n\nefore I had this idea, I had another which I\u2019ll tell you (laughter) which was a completely different kind of idea and it\u2019s the idea that there is an overmind, this doesn\u2019t involve other dimensions.\n\nThere is an over-mind co-present on this planet and when technology, when the development of technology exceeds the development of ethics then this over-mind can work miracles. Because the over-mind is plugged into each of the individual minds that compose it, this miracle always has this unbelievably creepy quality of being exactly the thing which can convince you to change your mind.\n\nIn other words it like it reads you so perfectly that it\u2019s able to present the one situation which you can not refuse, so in the case of Rome, you know Rome was a pigsty, Pasterna called it \u2018a bargain basement that ran on two floors\u2019 it ran on slavery and it ran on brutality and captive populations and outrageous garrisoning of military power in foreign lands.\n\nPeople like Diophantus, this mathematician I mentioned and hero of Alexandria, these people were on the brink of the calculus and the steam engine. So the over-mind is seeing that and seeing their appalling ethical state sent their miraculous personage of Christ who in a world where information could not move faster than a horses gallop, this religion within 60 years was beating at the gates of Rome itself, it was like a fire you know just burned through the empire, and changed everything, and halted technical advance.\n\nEverything stopped, now I created this idea in an effort to explain the UFOs because the new theory of UFOs or the new school of UFOs says \u201cwe\u2019ve been wrong to ask what are they, that has not been fruitful, what we should be doing is asking what are they doing?\u201d\n\nWhat are they doing?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-30", "text": "What are they doing?\n\nAnd we can analyze what are they doing in the same way that we can analyze what anybody is doing through sociological polling of human populations we can find out what the flying saucers are doing.\n\nSo they polled human populations and what they discovered is that what the flying saucers are doing is that they are sowing disbelief in science.\n\nThey cause people to not believe in scientists, because scientists come off so lame when asked to explain flying saucers.\n\nIt\u2019s like, the flying saucer is a confounding of science in the same way that the resurrection was the complete confounding of Greek stoicism, and democracy, and materialism in the Roman world. It\u2019s conceivable that the flying saucer, the statistics are now something like 12 or 11 percent of the American population have seen a flying saucers 52 percent believe flying saucers are real.\n\nAnd so forth. It is a faith which is percolating up from the lower levels, its people who live in trailer courts and read Fate magazine who are the believers in this thing.\n\nWhat it may be is an intercession on the part of the over-mind, which it can do anything, it can do ANYTHING from our point of view.\n\nIn the most extreme version of this idea I said \u201cWhat if enormous space-crafts were to fall into orbit around this planet?\u201d and \u201cWhat if television images of this craft were to be beamed into every home on the planet?\u201d\n\nThen a teaching revealed some completely mind boggling thing which you could have thought of it yourself but you never did, which is always how these things are.\n\nThen suddenly, then after 30 days of melting the nuclear arsenals and causing all cancers to disappear and curing all infectious diseases and delivering this message the enormous spacecraft disappears, 30 days\u2026", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-31", "text": "Then everybody says \u201cMy god, we have been abandoned, we have abandoned again into time.\u201d\n\nAnd you know\u2026history would halt, everybody would do nothing but study the teachings of the saucer and try to figure out how we can get right with them, how we can figure out how to get them to come back. Dogmatism, theories of communication, priestcraft, the whole thing.\n\nThough I am fascinated with the flying saucer, and what it says about the malleability of mind and matter, I think mature civilizations should not be haunted by Messiahs or Flying Saucers. That these things are like metaphysical spankings imposed from on high that are saying it\u2019s a boot in the tail, wake up! Stop repressing.\n\nK: Lets take your two ideas, because neither one of them is that old, what does the over-mind have to do with, or think of the double time stream?\n\nTerence: Now that\u2019s a question I never would have asked. You mean if that\u2019s true? I sort of think of these as mutually exclusive. I think the demiurge is a negative expression of the over-mind. I think of the over-mind as the logos, you know, it\u2019s the understanding and self-existence which permeates everything and the demiurge is the force of matter and time and cosmic destiny which is always trying to lock in the logos and condition it and make it subject to the rules of the physical universe of space and time. The logos is like something from like, this is all Gnostic theology by the way this is just straight from the book. The logos is trying to struggle through the labyrinth of the material universe to escape, to rejoin the real source of itself which is outside of matter. Matter is viewed as an entrapment.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-32", "text": "If any of you have read the late works of Phillip K Dick, he was probing in these areas, he was a genius, his book Veilus is pure exegesis of internal, unravelment of what was going on.\n\nHis take on it was that he believed from AD 69 until 1948, no time had actually passed and that we were living in apostolic time, and that the crucifixion lay only 75 years in the past, and that the demiurge had inserted a false history, and the Nag Hammadi manuscripts, he believed, were actually the logos as printed letters and when the Nag Hammadi manuscripts were deciphered it was like this information creature would come alive and again be present on the earth.\n\nLike the Logos in 1948 was beginning to infuse everything and that shortly it would dissolve the illusion of the intervening 1,860 years or whatever it was and then we would realize that the prophecy would be fulfilled and that the last days were upon us.\n\nHe didn\u2019t get around to the anti-Christ, to his credit probably.\n\nYou have to distinguish between Christ the person, the teacher, and this thing called the Christos, which is the archetype of such power and force that immediately people of ill-intent could get lined up behind it and impose their will. Yeah sell love, and sell forgiveness, what a scam.\n\nThe Christos is the thing history is ruled by the archetypes which the people can generate, I mean most people are very ordinary, I mean your Mick Jaggers and your Henry Kissingers are very ordinary people but they are able to project an archetype and that is the thing which sets them apart.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-33", "text": "And when that reaches the kind of super intense focus that you get in a Mohammed or a Christ, then you know history is just putty in the hands of the force, not the person, the person is usually martyred in some horrible way. But the archetype draws energy to itself, and we don\u2019t understand how this process works.\n\nIf there ever is developed by benevolent or malevolent forces a science of social control, it will be a science of knowing how to project archetypes.\n\nDifferent archetypes apparently are suitable to different times, I mean you can almost pause at an astrological theory of archetypes, but its something about how\u2026what\u2019s appropriate for the 1st century AD is not appropriate for the 15th.\n\nWhen the archetype is appropriate, nothing can stop it.\n\nThe modern term for archetypes is paradigm.\n\nWe expect it not to be a person, not a messiah, but an idea which will save us all which will then give us certain affinities with Mystical Judaism where the Messiah was expected in the form of an idea, and this is sort of our faith. We are Messianic ideologues or something like that.\n\n(brief commentary, inaudible)\n\nOh I agree with you I think dualisms have to be dissolved in the notion that there is one thing, you know that\u2019s the Platonic faith. The problem is all these secondary and tertiary operational levels and you know we\u2019re actually trying to operate in a universe of scarcity and a body which requires energy and all these things. This is really the central problem in Western thinking, I think.\n\nThe tension between dualism and unity and matter and spirit, and how do you do it?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-34", "text": "The tension between dualism and unity and matter and spirit, and how do you do it?\n\nI think we are spiritualizing matter, this is what technology is. The spiritualizing of matter is the highest expression of our technological output and that this will become more and more of what this is about, so that in the next century the difference between mind and brain and cell and machine will all have been subsumed under a new vocabulary.\n\nBecause we are hard wiring our minds and we are making the artifacts of our culture intelligent, and we are breaking down the barriers between ourselves and larger databases, and this kind of thing so that the old \u201cI am an ego inside a skin\u201d definition gives way to a much more malleable and plastic thing.\n\n(Commentary) \u201cIn astrology, something I like is that the symbol for Pisces is a symbol with 2 lines and a line going through it, it\u2019s the definition of relationship quality by opposition, it\u2019s polarity, it\u2019s right and wrong, good-bad, male-female, Russians-Americans.\n\nThe Aquarian one which is 2 lines of waves over each other is one of resonance, it\u2019s one of dolphins jumping in the water together, it\u2019s one of people coming together and realizing how I resonate with you and what I have to give you and what you have to give me, but you\u2019ll have something to give me that other people can\u2019t and so on, and we need to swim together.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-35", "text": "That breaks down all the of the dualistic bonds, and I think we\u2019re right at the crux right at the moment, the place between Pisces and Aquarius where we\u2019re kind of 2 worlds again, flipping from one side of opposition, being torn from life and death and seeing, as the Christ I feel was that prototype, that template, of light and spirit and matter coming together and saying \u201cI can dance in this, I can leave it, and I can come back into it, I have this power it\u2019s my conscious compassionate love that is just so unbounded that it give me the opportunity to play in clay, if I so choose\u201d\n\nMuch of what I say is Alfred North Whitehead, his philosophy and believe me if you\u2019re looking around for a serious ontological foundation you don\u2019t have to read Sanskrit, ANW will serve very admirably, science in the modern world, process and reality. He was and remains the great psychedelic philosopher of the 20th century and the heir of Burgson. You had another question?\n\nYeah I\u2019m going to be 84 in the year 2012 and I\u2019m wondering how to manage my life so I\u2019ll be ready for the concrescence.\n\nWell I don\u2019t know, I think that the canyons of the creode down which we as individuals are moving, those walls are getting higher and higher too.\n\nA lot of times when I had this intense contacts with the teaching entity I would have an anxiety about \u201cWhat should I do? What is it for me to do?\u201d\n\nAnd it always said \u201cNothing, relax\u201d\n\nYour function is to just\u2026you\u2019ll be present where you\u2019re necessary, and this isn\u2019t a fatalism, this is a kind of recognition of the dynamics of time that the thing is trying to teach you see.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-36", "text": "It\u2019s trying to say that, if you understand how process works you will always understand where you are in any given process, and then you won\u2019t have anxiety about not occupying some other point in that process, you know.\n\nWhen I began having these ideas, the only way I could previously relate to the notion of the end of the world was that I had a head full of cartoons of bearded men in sandals carrying signs on street corners saying \u201cRepent! Repent!\u201d and here was I, former Marxist, former this former that espousing these unimaginable things.\n\nIt\u2019s always good to do your homework, and I discovered there\u2019s this wonderful book called Pursuit of the Millennium by Norman Comb in which he details the history of Milinarianism, that\u2019s what this phenomenon is, belief by a person or a group of people that the end of the world is about to occur.\n\nIt existed among the Jews in the Exilic period, it\u2019s part of the phenomenon, or part of the social expectation that gave Christ his entre.\n\nThe early Patristic Christians lived in the imminent expectation of the end of the world, and then during the Medieval period the most utopian prophetistic Millenarian movement before Marxism was Floraism, or the people who followed the teachings of Wakiin of Flora who was a wandering monk who predicted the end of the world, I think for 1244 and he died in 1222, but his followed carried on and the Pope had to send out armies to quell uprisings as people wanted to distribute the wealth because they felt the end of the world was upon them and why should anybody go to work you know this sort of thing.\n\nSimilarly in the year 1,000 there was great expectation of Christ\u2019s imminent return.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-37", "text": "Similarly in the year 1,000 there was great expectation of Christ\u2019s imminent return.\n\nThis is the thing which the human mind, at least in its Western expression seems to seek to do. Islam too has its apocalypses, 1967 isn\u2019t bad, I thought it was happening, I thought we were months away from a new secular order for the ages.\n\nMy theory of history views these things not as evidence against such a thing occurring, but as evidence that it will occur.\n\nThat these uprisings, that these outbreaks of irrational expectations of the millennium are in fact temporal reflections, they are catching the light on the temporal prisons from the object at the end of history contains the apocalyptic scenario.\n\nIt\u2019s very important to manage the apocalypse in the millennium.\n\nIt\u2019s very important that people not confuse the cleansing flames of transcendence against the ability to use thermonuclear weapons against your ideological enemies.\n\nIt\u2019s a very delicate matter because our mythologies and our fears run so deeply, but I think that its an awareness of this potential of the existence of this law of temporal compression.\n\nAnd of course institutions don\u2019t promote Millenarianism because institutions want people to invest their money at low interest and long term, and have the expectation that everything will carry on pretty much as it has.\n\nAn examination of the last 500 or 1,000 years of human history would lead anyone I think to the conclusion that everything is going to be swept away, and that everything that replaces it is going to be swept away, and we are just moving into an era of change that might as well be called apocalyptic and it must be made Millenarian, otherwise it will just end in some kind of Goterdamuron and the worst Bogey men will emerge and destroy it.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-38", "text": "(Commentary) I know how the wave accelerates and comes towards this transition point, I never call it the end because then the beginning of a new series of many (muddled?) waves is there I guess I believe in flux so the whole process is one wave and at that moment we begin another process. At that point we discuss being the end of the universe as you did a little while ago and sometimes I feel like when everything is accelerated like it seems to have recently and when you\u2019re close to a moment of transformation of some sort as it seems to be you see great strives forward being made and great slips backward being made all at the same time right. It seems possible that the transformation will be so fantastically physical as the end of the universe or turning inside out of the, whatever this is. But actually as we sweep through world wide peace of mind, what if that occurred?\n\nThat\u2019s large enough to qualify, it seems to me for the change-over in the wave.\n\nTerence: Yeah I think the hardest thing to know is the nature of what this ultimate compression is. What it means. Like one way I imagine it, and that\u2019s why I love to quote Joyce about \u201cMan becomes dirigible\u201d I imagine it as \u201cThe day when your mind becomes your home\u201d and all over the world people just realize that their mind is their home.\n\n(Question) \u201cBut do you feel free to describe that as the end of history or the end of the universe?\u201d\n\nNot the end of the universe, the end of history because I think history is some kind of involvement with matter, it\u2019s a wrestling with the angel of matter and the end of history is when you pin the angel of matter to the mat. Then you stand up and you say \u201cI am the ademic human being made of light\u201d and you leave the realm of matter and you return to some previously hidden dimension.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-39", "text": "Whitehead called these things epochs, these long periods of time. He called transition from one to the other \u201ca shift of epochs\u201d well we\u2019ve only been dong things like measuring the speed of light since 1910, all the so-called constants of our physics are based on miniscule periods of actually monitoring these things to see if they are constants.\n\nSo I can imagine it as a shift in the laws of the universe that somehow cause consciousness to perceive itself more as it must truly be. I am always trying to find physical models for these transcendental hallucinations, the one which fits this is a few years ago this Scandinavian astronomer called Hans Altden wrote a book called Worlds and Anti-worlds and in it he talked about what\u2019s called a vacuum fluctuation.\n\nA vacuum fluctuation is where suddenly out of nothingness there emerge a stream of particles and they are equally particles and anti-particles. And they sail along for a period of time and then they collide again and each particle is destroyed by its anti-particle.\n\nWhat is called parity is conserved, meaning that when you add up all the charges positive and negative you get zero. So it\u2019s ok that this matter came from nothing, and returned to nothing, it violates no laws as long as parity is conserved.\n\nThe interesting thing about this phenomenon called a vacuum fluctuation there seems in quantum mechanics no rule which would limit the size of such a phenomenon as this.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-40", "text": "It\u2019s conceivable that our entire universe is an enormous vacuum fluctuation and its just you know 10^72 particles that emerged from nothingness and are hurtling through space and in another parallel dimension the anti-dimension which is the twin of this universe is also hurtling through space and at some point in future time, completely unpredictable from the state given within each universe, the two will collide and parity will be conserved, and all particles and anti-particles will be conserved. However the interesting thing is that photons, which is what light is composed of, do not have anti-particles.\n\nThey are this one weird exception. So that when the universe collided with its anti-matter twin what would be left would be a universe made only of photons, and those photons would be in the configuration they were in in the moment when the cosmic collapse of the state vector occurred.\n\nWell we have no idea what the physics of a photonic universe would be about, a limiting case or a good try would be that it is just nothing, no life, no self reflection, but why posit that?\n\nThere is such a persistence in the perennial philosophy of the notion that spiritual development is somehow related to light, and to the cultivation of inner light, and to the creation of light bodies, and to the stabilizing of light.\n\nIt\u2019s possible to suggest that the world of the imagination is simply the world of internal light, that it\u2019s a world where light is manipulated by thought in the way that in this world physical organism manipulates matter. You live in the radiant castles of the imagination after a shift of epochs in which the photonic mode predominated. That\u2019s just one way of imagining it.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-41", "text": "It\u2019s one of the richest meditations there is, to try to imagine the millennium, again it\u2019s this thing, what would you have if you could have anything? Sometimes I imagine it, Heronomous Bosche\u2019s great trip to the garden of earthly delights where men and women of all races mingle among giant rends and strawberries and feed each other pomegranates under autumnal sun in an endless rolling park-like world of exotic vegetables and sexual excess hard stuff to (base?)\n\nYou can really take a readout on yourself by seeing how would you like things to be. I have sometimes my fantasy is \u201cI would like to be alone on a star ship 10,000 light years from home with all the books in the universe and I would dress like captain Ahab and I would stride around the catwalks inside this echoing star ship and faithful robot slaves would bring me crumbling volumes of ancient lore which I would say\u2026\u201d no this is a little too Vincent Price.\n\nIf any of you are into science-fiction the science-fiction of Cordwainer Smith is really wonderful, and one of his stories The Starship is really George Washington\u2019s estate Mount Vernon in New York. And it\u2019s all exactly like Mount Vernon in Washington\u2019s time except that in the library of the big plantation house there is one room from which the thing is controlled and its actually a starship in mid-flight.\n\n(Question) Yes I had a question, you mentioned how the now is flooded with future perception and I have, its really part of the Tibetan practices, it\u2019s always something which captures my imagination, how come it\u2019s now, now?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-42", "text": "The fact that these future perceptions are so tremendously tangible to us, especially while sitting in meditation, while taking a meal even or something, and how come it\u2019s not yet today? And how come it\u2019s not tomorrow? How come I am here now when I just have to flick my mind and I\u2019m in yesterday, and equally easy in tomorrow. I wonder if you have anything to say on that?\n\nWell I think that life precedes through time, it\u2019s an effort by organism to map something one-dimension larger than itself, so it takes a whole life to do it, a life is an effort to map a something, and the now is the moving edge of the mapping process. You cannot map it instantly, or you would be it.\n\nSo what being in time is, is experiencing the incremental mapping of this higher order object, and that\u2019s why hopefully a long life would give wisdom, because a person would begin to get the whole picture.\n\nWhat did Plato say? The present is the moving image of eternity. That\u2019s pure good Platonism.\n\nYou can think of the now as a kind of laser which is moving over a larger surface and illuminating it, you know scanning it. It\u2019s scanning something and it takes it a while to scan it, and in the end all the data is in place and you say \u201cOh yes I see now what the object of cognition was\u201d and our faith is, and there\u2019s no reason to doubt it, that this is a great transcendent experience.\n\nThis is the peace that paseth all understanding as you sink into death.\n\nIt\u2019s just that we like to think that the psychedelic experience gives us preview, no one escapes the final realization, it\u2019s just that some people do postpone it to their last act,\n\nBut there\u2019s no reason for that\n\nBecause it is the mystery, the culmination, it is the depalm and the wellspring.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-43", "text": "Because it is the mystery, the culmination, it is the depalm and the wellspring.\n\n(Commentary) I\u2019d like to\u2026I\u2019m always interested in pursuing things from the Mayan days and I\u2019d like to ask about how this theory of time relates to the individual, somewhat related to BJ\u2019s question, there\u2019s some sense I have that in their techniques and certainly you\u2019ve experienced this, and other people have experienced this with the mushroom at high doses of traveling through time and actually seeing the future or seeing the past. I was wondering if you could say more about that, and some framework for understanding how that is possible.\n\nYes will I think psilocybin seems to be the great teacher of history and part of its teaching is\u2026it views a person without a history as a person with amnesia, a person with a diminished capacity because your history gives you your power of convictions.\n\nThe way I use the wave, or the way I\u2019ve been using it recently is I\u2019ve been trying to study the time immediately ahead of us so we don\u2019t misjudge what is going on, and you know it\u2019s a mathematical process, there\u2019s no indeterminacy about it, if we anchor the whole wave system on 2012 and what I see from that anchorage point is in the 67 year cycle from 1945 to 2012 we have reached that point which resonates with the larger 4,306 year cycle at that point which corresponds to the collapse of the Roman empire around 475 AD, in other words, we have been through a period of Imperialist expansionism which has lasted for a number of years, certainly since the beginning of the 80s, but I see a re-treanchment of that and a recidivus tendency, a tendency towards religious fundamentalism, rigid social structures and in short the sorts of things which could be seen as valid resonance patterns to the early Medieval phase of European civilization.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-44", "text": "The period from AD 474, lets for shorthand call it 500 AD, the period from 500 AD to 1500 AD, in other words till the discovery of the new world by Columbus, that 1,000 year period is the resonance that we are going to experience from now to the late 90\u2019s, from now until 1998 we will reach the beginning of the Renassaince and the discovery of the new world, but we are going to have to endure a period not entirely to our liking, we represent the pagan Helenistic spirit which has held full sway within the empire for the past 25 years. We may feel constricted now but I think that our ideas and our position in society has further constriction to undergo before it reflowers downstream a bit.\n\nWhen I first realized that I felt very pessimistic, then I asked myself \u201cWhat aspects of Medieval life could I groove? What aspects of that Medieval eschatology were solitary to my needs and wishes?\u201d then I discovered it was an age of great mystical faith and illumination, it was an age of communities of like-minded peoples seeking transformation far from the turbulence of the collapse of the empire.\n\nMy theory leads me away from those people in the New Age who think we\u2019re about to be catapulted into the corridors of power, I think that\u2019s preposterous, and the evidence for it: Zero\n\nI think better we should tend our gardens and form brotherhoods and sisterhoods of affinity and realize that the task of transformation is one of a lifetime, our lifetimes you know.\n\nEvery time someone like Dick Price or Tony Lilly moves from the wheel I always wonder \u201cHow did it feel to know it wasn\u2019t finished?\u201d To go with it undone?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-45", "text": "I have no doubt that when the saucer comes that Tony or Dick will be in control, one of them. What is it Bob Dylan says in his song? \u201cEzra Pound and T.S Eliot fighting in the captains tower\u201d?\n\nBut yes so I don\u2019t know if that answered your question but I wanted to get it in because the real meat for most people for this idea about time is not the mathematics of it and the symmetry of it, that\u2019s only pleasing to a certain mentality. But really what does it tell us about the years immediately ahead?\n\nWhat it says is \u201cconsolidation, illumination, community, and self-discipline\u201d\n\n(Commentary) I can always say thanks a thousand times we don\u2019t have to go through it for 1,000 years, and only for like 15 years, this acceleration seems to be very, very convenient. Imagine if we were born in 500 AD and we had to look forward to that\n\nYes well that\u2019s why I say you know, imagine the people who lived in times when the temporal river was stagnant, or even when counter currents swept it backwards. This is the anguish of the ancestors, this is the sacred trust that must not be betrayed, the pagrons and the invasions, and the atrocities conducted across history can only be somehow redeemed if we, who are the living way front of this genetic experience do not fumble the ball. All our ancestors are watching to see how we will do.\n\nKat: It seems like you were asking on a more mechanical\u2026how did this happen,\n\nCommentator \u201cWell yeah how can it be that the Mayans or we on psychedelics can travel through time and see these things\u201d", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-46", "text": "Kat: My image for it that explains that phenomenon to me and I\u2019ve had the same experience, past and future, is Terence just referring to the temporal river. It\u2019s a river which flows two ways, from the past to the future and from the future to the past\n\nAnd if you put yourself out in the middle of it, let go of control, let go of fear and maybe you want to choose your orientation, or maybe you don\u2019t\u2026\n\nYou can just find out where you float and sort of face the past or face the future and just float there. I mean this is not a physicists explanation of how this happens but it seems to work that way you know and we think perhaps far too much of the past creating the future and that we should think more, and perhaps other people have of how it\u2019s flowing the other way.\n\nAnd this is how some so-called primitive people have managed to conserve the very simple effective beauty of their lifestyle, and that REAL strong feeling that every moment is now\u2026because they\u2019re thinking of it simultaneously\u2026\n\n(commentator) I think about it and that also sets my mind off, you know that\u2019s kind of like the river is flowing both ways, and if you take a step to the side somehow that you\u2019ll catch the current from the future. That\u2019s appealing, but I am always playing with these metaphors and maybe I\u2019m literalizing too much. Is it possible to step out of that stream in some way and then looking above sort of choose where you are going to descend into and then another image that came to mind was\u2026are there somehow holes in the fabric of time that you can shoot through, sort of like in 2001 the Stargate opening up and there\u2019s this hole in between and where you emerge is not the other side of it but some place completely different", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-47", "text": "Terence: If you take the wave seriously and apply it on these short scales of time, you know you can find your way into unique configurations of the moment, it\u2019s like astrology in that way. Often the content of a psychedelic experience can be later seen to be because of the situation of historical resonance that you weren\u2019t perhaps even aware of at the time.\n\nKat: Or if there are parallel worlds, one or many, which ones happen to be adjacent in that moment as the cosmic weather comes, you know sometimes I\u2019ve taken the mushroom just to say like a weather person would say \u201cI just want to see what\u2019s happening out there right now\u201d not with a will, you know you can find that it\u2019s about knitting in your rocking chair you can find that you are just in some landscape that you couldn\u2019t have conceived of before.\n\nTerence: The essence of Tao is the correct apperception of process. That\u2019s what Taoism is, is to understand processes to be Taoist. I think that this is almost a formal rendering of the notion of Tao, almost an effort to create a mathematics, an algebra of the Tao.\n\nAnd as long as it\u2019s true to the notions of what Taosim conserves, which is flow, and determinacy, and indeterminacy, it serves. This is what understanding time is to understand process, but to understand it so well that it\u2019s like a sense for you, it\u2019s like seeing. This is the kind of seeing that is very important, to see into time.\n\nIt\u2019s what history and culture have experimented with.\n\nIt\u2019s what we now, by identifying that as what is going on, can accelerate much faster.\n\n(Commentary) I was picking up a conversation earlier this morning, maybe you could talk more about The Other.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-48", "text": "Oh, the other\u2026\u2026well I\u2019m not sure exactly what he meant by talking about the other, I mean the other is just a way of thinking about all of these things that we name \u201cspirit, God, demon, void\u201d it\u2019s that there just necessarily is a place off our map, whenever you have a map it implies the part that is not on the map.\n\nThe other, the truly other, it lays outside the domain of language, its like the unspeakable, all you can do is point at it, you know.\n\nThe Gnostic idea of God was that it was totally other, that there was nothing in this universe that gave any clue whatsoever as to the nature of God. That that was its essence, to be completely other.\n\nThe other trickles through and reverberates in our lives in all kinds of dimensions, the first other that you meet is the world, and a later point in your development, your attachment to another human being can become a confrontation with the other. It\u2019s just a way of shorthand, signifying, right?\n\nThe dimension that carries you beyond yourself into the things that you previously couldn\u2019t expect or imagine.\n\nOr Vitchkinstein\u2019s Unspeakable or, you know, I\u2019m always fond of quoting this poem by Trumble Stigny where he says \u201cI lean over your meanings edge and feel the dizziness of the things you have not said\u201d That\u2019s the other, it\u2019s the dizziness of the things unsaid, the things that lay beyond the edge of meaning.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-49", "text": "(Commentary) Part of the question to do specifically in the mushroom experience in high doses, this sense of alien intelligence or other, I think that like you said I think that its some of our conceptions of God, many psychedelic experiences, at least with LSD or other light doses are that I am connected to that, I am part of that thing, but somehow the tryptamine said its this alien intelligence, I mean what do you make of that?\n\nWell I don\u2019t know what quite to make of that, LSD is self-reflective and integrative I think. These tryptamines seem to be informational, and largely unconcerned with the impact that the information they carry has on the perceiver.\n\nI don\u2019t know I think it just must have to do with the fact that the universe is not all smoothed out and filled in, and that this is really an area of personal exploration where you can penetrate into an area, a terra-incognito, a place where nobody knows exactly what is going on.\n\nWe\u2019re not used to that experience. We expect to have maps of everything we look at and everywhere we go. And it is strange that in this one area we don\u2019t, that apparently our taboo at looking at the unconscious or delving into the mind has made us content to just fence off this area.\n\nWell then if you climb over the fence and start wandering around out there, you don\u2019t know what you\u2019re going to find because the culture has carefully engineered itself to go around all of this stuff.\n\nEven I think shamanism is largely concerned with gaining power to protect yourself from the onslaught of the other.\n\nI mean, you know they\u2019re very concerned\u2026to hold stuff back, they don\u2019t really have this \u201cLets hurl ourselves into it\u201d attitude that we have.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-50", "text": "We found in the Amazon, we were looking for this one plant which had DMT in it, and the ayahuascera that we were working with, I kept leading the questioning back to the matter of this one plant, first he said that it was \u201ccomida del perro\u201d food for dogs, which seemed like maybe a putdown of some sort.\n\nThen he went back over it again and he said \u201cWhoa it\u2019s mallen bizarre, it\u2019s too strange!\u201d So this was a man who his whole life was about taking ayahuasca and triggering hallucination, but he felt to go into that plant it was too weird. You often have the feeling with those people that they involve themselves in the psychedelic effect like a dancer, almost as little as possible to get the job done.\n\nKat: Refers to the history of that particular man and his opinions on psychedelics including mushrooms, and do different things on different nights and he would try new plants and new combinations, he was pretty intrepid, he did have boundaries.\n\nTerence: In 1983 or whenever it was that I was down there last we were dealing with a different group of shamans on the upper Apeyaku and it was to get this orally DMT thing made from tree resin, and we had pure chemical DMT as a trade item, or we weren\u2019t sure why but just in case we needed it.\n\nThen talking to the shaman that could make the verolla paste stuff we said this and he said \u201coh you have the essencia, you have the essence!\u201d and we said \u201cso what is that like?\u201d You don\u2019t take it orally, you don\u2019t take it by mouth, you smoke it.\n\nHe said \u201cOh what happens?\u201d So we described it a typical DMT trip to him and said \u201cwould you like to try it?\u201d and he said \u201cNo thank you\u201d (laughter)", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-51", "text": "So they\u2019re not thrill crazy by any means\n\n(Commentary) I read the Castenada books he goes into what he calls the old seers and the new seers, and the old seers, maybe you\u2019re more aligned with them, but they were more willing to explore any territory, they made a division between the known and the unknown. It was the new seers that came up with the third category of the unknowable, in other words there\u2019s this reality which is the known, then there\u2019s the other realities you go to which are the unknown, which maybe the ayahuascero takes you to the unknown, but then there\u2019s this other realm where they don\u2019t go, they would probably call the unknowable because the impact it has on you to go there would be dangerous,\n\n(2nd commentator) From the place of the unknown they could glimpse very briefly the unknowable, which is usually a pretty shattering experience.\n\nWell that\u2019s interesting, it makes me think of you know I mention Vitkenstein\u2019s Unspeakable I think the unspeakable and the unspoken, and all these esoteric and initiatory religious numbers are trading in the unspoken, you know you come to them and they will whisper in your ear the previously unspoken teaching, they will give you an oral empowerment but beyond that lies the unspeakable which no teacher can orally impart, or impart any other way because it lays outside the bounds of transmissibility by its nature and to some degree I would think so, and that\u2019s the thing which you validate, you can only validate it for itself, in itself for itself.\n\nIt is the private object of being, it is not something which I can tell you about or you can tell me about, it\u2019s the private mystery that is ontologically private because it\u2019s unspeakable.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-52", "text": "Kat: I don\u2019t think what we call the unspeakable is the same as the unknowable, I think that all of us who have pursued these dimensions have many experiences that it\u2019s very hard to talk about, or that when you talk about them its very silly compared to what you experienced, right?\n\nIts on of the challenges of having this kind of group discussion or these kinds of workshops, to try to talk about that. But there is, I think a big area that just doesn\u2019t language, the ineffable is all I can think of\u2026\u2026\n\nTerence: Well you can sort of chip away at it, the whole progress of human development is maybe slowly eroding the unspeakable and turning it into the spoken.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-53", "text": "(Commentary) That is the process of everything from the very beginning to the very end, we as human beings on the planet are just somewhere in the middle of this process of the unknowable becoming the known. Tying back to your whole thing with time yesterday, you say that the physicists are interested in the first second, or parts there or and what you\u2019re interested in are the final or coming up moments as things speed up, what the physicists are looking at is basically the form, but you\u2019re looking at it as the ideas which are coming into being more and more, time is more and more recognition so it\u2019s really like spirit, or mind, or knowing, so its like the opposite end, and one is the latter coming into form in the beginning, and the former is the knowing of all of this just coming to a point. An ant, or whatever lower level of consciousness, or say a cell, or an amoeba, they have their thing, and there\u2019s the unknowable which is what we are acting in. What about the blood cells inside our body can they know about our world of communication and symbols, such as we are on this unknowable is really a greater universe, a higher level of just known by a higher way of being, so it\u2019s like each end, the matter here and the mind coming into it, this point comes shortly, this 2012 is significant in that it is possibly the opposite end of knowing becoming complete, like life becoming completely aware of all life in and of itself. But is that the end of everything?\n\nIt seems that its just a point, like a mid swing of the pendulum.\n\nYes well then some other process having to do with the career of spirit instead of matter is initiated.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-54", "text": "Yes well then some other process having to do with the career of spirit instead of matter is initiated.\n\nYes well that\u2019s the end of everything, it\u2019s a complete end of one way of being, of us a species as a life development, it\u2019s not just humans, it\u2019s all life, if that life entity goes through a great metamorphosis another way of saying what happens to the rest of the universe is that the universe is a concept in our minds. Right well that\u2019s the metaphysicality of it.\n\nBut to say what\u2019s never been said, to do what\u2019s never been done, to paint what\u2019s never been painted, to dance what\u2019s never been danced, this is somehow you are acting for everybody when you do that.\n\nIt\u2019s an amazing thing to do what\u2019s never been done, it means once you\u2019ve done it, it\u2019s been done!\n\nRefers to something like a big fence that is becoming larger and more extensive and the great minds fence off a particular area where all of humanity can run around and you know it\u2019s a whole process of\u2026\n\nIt\u2019s what aeronautical engineers call \u201cstretching the envelope\u201d when you fly a figher plane you have the predicted engineering performance characteristics, but once you validate that it can do that, then its up to the pilot to find out, to stretch the envelope, to find out what it can really do\u2026how fast it can turn, how fast it can climb.\n\nThat\u2019s what we as creative artists can do for the human enterprise.\n\nThe lacking ingredient is courage, I think.\n\nOften I have the feeling that it\u2019s no longer at least in my own life about seeking the answer, its about facing it.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-55", "text": "It isn\u2019t about \u201cIs it yoga? Is it Taoism? Is it this is it that?\u201d I think now I know, at least for me what it is, but that the answer is so appalling and requires such courage to execute it and carry it through that I don\u2019t know what to do.\n\nI have no doubt that we could all become the Taoist hermit on cold mountain, and be that person of whom people in the valley say \u201cOh him! We see him sometimes when it snows very deeply, because he comes further down for wood\u201d He comes and goes in the mist and never talks to anybody, we could all become that person.\n\nThere are no barriers to ultimate spiritual attainment, but what about your mortgage? And your lover? And your devotion to French chocolate? And all of these things.\n\nThat\u2019s tricky. That\u2019s very, very tricky.\n\nFor instance like the matter of the flying saucer, I have no doubt that if you took 10 people selected from this group and trekked days east of Death Valley and stayed up all night and everybody took 8 dried grams of mushrooms and hoped and hollered and waited that something would happen that would be so appalling and so destructive to our preconceptions of what\u2019s possible in this universe that you just come out of it pointing into the desert saying \u201cmmMMM mmMMM MMMMM!!!\u201d", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-56", "text": "I\u2019m careful, I don\u2019t doubt that appalling, appalling, appalling things can happen and reality can be completely pulled to pieces, I don\u2019t know what that means but I really want to deal with that on my terms. That\u2019s a kind of fear you know, it\u2019s a kind of holding back. That\u2019s why, I know people who seem to me superhumanly reckless, I mean they tell me the thing they do and I just shake my head, you know because of the power, of the vistas of the energies that they must have laid their hands on. It\u2019s too much for me, I am a simple scholar and bookish collector type. I am like Brother John here.\n\nWe like our home and hearth. But that\u2019s the challenge you see, that\u2019s the weird things of psychedelics. It\u2019s a path, but in a sense it\u2019s the end of the path, and then what do you do? Now it\u2019s up to you, it\u2019s no more about the guru says \u201cIn 5 years you\u2019ll make progress, or if you just keep eating this spiralina, or fiddling with your crystals\u201d or something, but no, you\u2019ve arrived, now what do you do with it?\n\nDo you really want to be a wandering figure at the edge of civilization glimpses occasionally with your tattered clothes and your wild ravings\u2026\n\nKat: Nick and I were talking this morning about envisioning something and how these plants help you to generate a vision of something real that you want to create or organize in the world and then they help you to have the discipline and dedication to carry it out.\n\nIn the real day-to-day telephone call, how do I get the money for it? Kind of way.\n\nThat I think is a real strength for it that all of us have, it\u2019s one of the responsibilities of being granted the visions is to make the visions then as real as you can.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-57", "text": "We do have our bodies here on earth for some time to come, we do have pleasure of course which we should all indulge in, but we also have responsibility to make it as much as like, even if it\u2019s a small step, as much like as that fantastic thing we can see in our visions and I think that it gives you the object then it helps you move towards it, and we need to do that work and keep refreshing our vision if it starts to get weak or we start to give up on it. If we need to shift directions slightly.\n\n(Commentary) Let me go back to astrology, with Saturn being on a ring around a vision and then Saturn stairway, envisioning the steps that it takes to get there, and how you can\u2019t jump 40 steps up without losing part of the foundation, as an artist myself I\u2019m finally getting to a place of patience that the slower it goes, the better it gets, and my statement goes \u201cIf I only had more time, I\u2019d use less words to write\u201d, I would start using things carefully, and allowing the process, for years I was just like \u201cI gotta get this out!\u201d but not anymore, I\u2019m just taking the slow, patient steps to create a foundation strong enough to someday, even if its not in this lifetime to manifest that dream.\n\nKM: If you use the quality of your daily life as your currency for how you\u2019re proceeding towards something. If you know the quality of your daily life is good, deep, and satisfying and you have a goal, you\u2019re probably on the right path.\n\nBut if you\u2019re saying \u201cGod it\u2019s just going to be hell for 3 years until I can get this project together\u201d you maybe should think about it again.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-58", "text": "I could reflect all this on a greater scale to the evolution of life itself, and that if life were to very quickly achieve the knowing pure spirituality, then what good is it? And that\u2019s like (through humanism?) and through history and through all of our time, and even this coming moment 2012, that might just be this reflection of another even ultimate, and it most likely is, it\u2019s just that reflection, and it\u2019s really endlessly drawn out patient process is just taking its time as long as possible so that every aspect can work into place.\n\nThis quality of daily life thing is an interesting point, because I think it was yesterday or two days ago we meditated or thought \u201cWhat would you do if you could do anything? How you imagine\u2026or if the genie were to tell you you had not 3 wishes but thousands, and you begin to dabble in fulfillment and of course all the trivial and superficial things I mentioned, palaces and Ferraris and all this, but then things that you could move anywhere instantly, how would you choose to travel instantly if you could move anywhere instantly?\n\nAt La Chorrera, these possibilities were to real to us that we actually grappled with it sufficiently to see how it would develop. How it develops is that if you discover that you can do anything, the only values which have any meaning, if you can do anything and have anything, are aesthetic values. If you could travel anywhere instantly, how would you travel? You would walk\u2026obviously. You know, because it\u2019s so tasteful, it\u2019s so completing, it\u2019s such a complete reverence for space and time in your body and the correctness of the situation. Time and time at La Chorrera, someone would be doing something some way, and someone else would be saying \u201cWell you\u2019re omniscient, why don\u2019t you just make it be done?\u201d and the answer is that is crass to do that.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-59", "text": "The way to do things, if you can do anything, is to do them right.\n\nKM: Cooking is like that.\n\nI guess, but that realization of the total richness and correctness of the moment is that\u2019s the correct interpretation of the attainment of these cities. The things that would go on at La Chorrera, as an example of how the Tao works, I would walk out into the jungle and there would be butterflies circling.\n\nI would hold out my hand and speak to the butterflies with my mind and invite them to come down and land on my hand and display themselves. And the butterflies would do this, they would come and land in my open hand and turn, and strut, and show me all facets of themselves, and this would go on for 2 or 3 minutes where I would experience gratitude, reverence, delight, and then this other emotion: the need to show somebody else what I could do.\n\nThen I would walk back to the camp and smiling with a bizarre inward smile I would select one of my camp mates and ask them to walk out into the jungle with me. Then to their horror, I would stand underneath this tree and gesture, and ask for the butterflies to come down from the trees and land in my hand, and people would just turn away in a mixture of horror and embarrassment that anyone could be such a jackass first of all, and that anyone could be so mentally deranged as to operate like that. Of course the butterflies would have nothing to do with me, I would be left just sputtering and it happened many times. It was not only the butterflies, it was that as long as I had no ego I could work magic, but it was magic that was the necessary magic.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-60", "text": "It absolutely had no use other than to make my life a more perfect work of art, as an example we had a pot in which we could de-vein (\u2026?) every morning it was our magic pot, and the scrubbing out of this pot was a major pain in the neck and was consequently a rotating camp duty. So at the height of this it was my turn to scrub this pot and I went down to the little spring where the sand was, and I squatted down by the water and I picked up the sand and I rubbed it on to the pot to get ready to scrub it. Then I looked and the black stuff was just flaking off, it was like easy off or something, and I just took the pot holding it by it\u2019s 2 little protrusions and immersed it in the spring like this and looked and all the black stuff was just flaking off and crudding off and I was just amazed. The magical scouring agent.\n\nSo then I went back to the camp and got my most severe critic and again, smiling with inward benign-ness I lead them down to the river and said \u201cI\u2019m going to teach you how to wash a pot\u201d, the Zen master you see. So we squat across from each other by the spring and I pick up the sand I put it on and she says \u201cSo I\u2019m supposed to know that sand can wash a pot?\u201d I say no, look. And again it failed me. By then I was getting the message, and I stopped\u2026and there was one other instance which was actually very puzzling because I saw another person go into it too. It had to do with this prophecy which my brother had made.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-61", "text": "One of the motifs which circled in his mind space during this period was what he called \u2018The good shit\u2019 and this was, he had claimed, imagined that sometime in the past he had got a sample of Afghani hash that had had cow manure, very, very carefully worked into it and the hash had been infected with psilocybin mycelium and all of the cow manure had been converted into psilocybin, so he had this psilocybinated hash, and he had this notion that he would invent a musical instrument like an electric guitar, which when you played it, it would cause this stuff to come out of the air and reign down on great crowds of people.\n\nSo anyway there was this thing about the good shit, and one night he announced that the good shit would appear at a certain time. So then I went back to my hammock in this hut in the jungle and the woman who was with me came as well and we had no watches, but he had said that at 11 PM the good shit was going to get here. I was settling down to roll my evening joint, and it was this Colombian weed that we had brought in with us. As I lit the joint, this little thing fell out of the end of it on the floor burning, and I picked it up and I smelled it and it was unbelievable hashish, I mean hashish to die for. I put it in the pipe and I smoked it and I said to this woman, and I said \u201cSmoke this\u201d and she agreed that it was astonishing. I looked and opened this baggy with this stuff and started smoking it, it didn\u2019t change its appearance, but the odor and everything was just the most finest hash I\u2019ve ever smoked. I thought the millennium had come.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-62", "text": "So I thought that the millenium had come, that forever after we would all trash. Yes. The end of the world is when all trash, as Muzare Sharif, uh [Terence laughs] ...when trash becomes hash. [more laughter]\n\nBut, but at the crack of dawn the next morning I went tearing down to my harshest critic and knelt beside her hammock and woke her up and said, you know \u201cYou\u2019ve got to smoke this!\u201d and of course, you know, garbage was back! [Terence laughs]\n\nSo, so I don\u2019t know why I got off into this, I guess it was the 'life is art thing and this thing about what would you do if you could do anything.\n\nK: Enhance that. The\n\nmyth, isn't it from New Guinea? Uh, about the good ship? Remember that one, where they generated.\n\nTM: You mean the thing about the resin, where the resin bar grew longer?\n\nI\u2019m not sure how this relates to it, but I\u2019ll tell it. In the study of Messianic movements, in fact you can read about this in Sylvia Thrupp\u2019s book Millenial Dreams in Action where she talks about a number of millennial religious groups. There was a movement around 1910 in Java called the calloupan [?] movement and it was some guy was sitting on his porch on day in a hut off in the jungle, and he was playing his flute, and they collect Kopal in the forest there and sell to traders. And as he was playing his flute, he noticed that this bar of rolled-out Kopal multiplied to twice its size right in front of him. And not only did this happen, but the same moment it happened his mind was flooded with the sudden realization that the meaning of this event was that all human lives were now going to be twice as long as they had previously been before.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-63", "text": "And he started, uh, he told people in his village and he had the proof because they had this bar of Kopal that was twice as long than anybody had ever rolled them in the village. So it spread from village to village and, uh, before long people from all over, uh, Java were vectoring in on this place, and, uh, eventually the army had to be sent to put up road blocks and turn people back, and uh, it all had to do with uh, this piece of resin which had doubled in length while this guy was playing his flute.\n\nKM: And that is what you call a cognitive hallucination..\n\nTM: A cognitive hallucination..\n\nKM: Right, where an idea becomes so real to you that you see it, but then there's this funny border where maybe it becomes so real that other people see it, and maybe that's actually how we keep enlarging and complicating reality is by having consensual cognitive hallucinations of what's possible.\n\nTM: That's right, that's right.\n\nKM: Yeah.\n\nTM: The ayahuasquero that Kat mentioned she liked so much and worked with in Peru, Don Fidel, he lived behin- he lived off this road we knew and a few miles down this trail, and we would go over there often and we would walk with him back and forth between his house and where we could catch these little Jitney busses into town.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-64", "text": "And he said one afternoon as we were walking along the Amazon jungle, apropos of nothing he said \u201cThis is the path that Christ walked when he lived on Earth\u201d and it became so. You saw that somehow this was not a logical statement, this was a statement about the transposition of time and dimensionality, and that he was living in the light of Christ, that he was living in the presence of the master through being enveloped in a cognitive hallucination, and uh, I think our entire culture is headed for being enveloped in a cognitive hallucination where our real wishes will be fulfilled and that\u2019s why its so important to, uh, to find out what our real wishes are.\n\nOne of the most powerful forms of yoga, one of the highest forms of yoga is what is called Yanutatara-Yoga-tantra and it involves a series of visualizations and they say \u201cImagine your home as a sp- splendid palace, and imagine the common utensils of your everyday life as golden vessels, vessels of beaten gold encrusted with jewels. Imagine your raiment as being made of the finest silk, and imagine yourself as a God centered in the midst of all of this splendor. Well, this is like trying to induce what is called in Western psychotherapy \u201cA delusion of grandeur.\u201d A delusion of grandeur is when you are a hell of a lot happier other people think you should be, you know? [audience laughter] And uh, say \u201cWhat do YOU have to be so happy about?!\u201d", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-65", "text": "And it\u2019s all about infusing the quality of life with greater purity. We were saying around the fire last night that the way to relate to the millennium is to make it happen as soon as possible in your life so that you become a spectator to it as a historical phenomenon. Well the way to make it happen in your life is to not transcend desire but to transmute it so that what you really want is what you actually have, you know.\n\nKM: I um, that, the mushrooms particularly, that to will, to choose, to become an archetype that I of course both have to be able to identify as an archetype, but one that I can relate to or wish to be, and become, you know, as large, a hundred, a thousand times larger than we are, and as smooth, and as...everything is light, you can practice being in the Tao so deeply in those states, and that everything you do no matter how minuscule it is you\u2019re doing most gracefully, and everything you say you\u2019re saying most eloquently. And, you know, even um, I\u2019ve used the mending-sock thing, because sometimes I think that\u2019s what I\u2019m doing, that level of work, but that I\u2019m doing it perfectly, you know, and that\u2019s, that's a great feeling.\n\nIf you indulge in the feeling of being a Goddess, or a God or Goddess, or one of whatever you identify with, you know, you get to choose whatever, then you get to carry it back. It's a really good way to carry it back into your daily life, and, and uh learn to practice it either in moments when you\u2019re wobbly and you suddenly need to grow into the situation, or in moments of ecstasy, you know, and to be archetypes making love is pretty good.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-66", "text": "TM: Well that\u2019s the technique of tantric practice, imagining these Gods in union with their consorts in sexual union\u2026\n\n[Guitar Music & Singing Interlude ends 1:10:19]\n\nTM: The people burning to speak should speak. [Terence chuckles]\n\nBut I think we're all dancing around it very well. I think you\u2019re dancing around it really well, and so I think we know something, not a lot perhaps, but we do know something. If words are that important and do have that meaning, meanings, whether it's what we\u2019re saying is true, or the sound of our voice that is true, something is true right here. Uh, I think we're beginning to say the unsayable. I just have that feeling. [Audience chuckles] [Terence chuckles]\n\nTM: And what a feeling it is! Yes, well, we're f- feeling the dizziness of the things not said, we feel it, we\u2019re dizzy from it, it\u2019s here.\n\nIts about trust and that leap of faith to the other side to what you can understand, to trust it, as you trust your lover, as you trust a friend, it doesn\u2019t always work out, but trust is the only way. Uh, because otherwise there\u2019s only fear, fear of ourselves, fear of others, fear of ideas. I think this community is part of that building trust among people who have different ideas.\u201d [1:13:10]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-67", "text": "Q2: learning and teaching [???] psychedelic experience....You can use a lot of verbiage to explain to people what that search is about, but in the end probably the best communication is\u2026dispense the sacrament (inaudible) I just want to express my appreciation to those involved in the work, with great respect for the sacrament, I just am very deeply wishing the best, it\u2019s something I missed for a long time since the days in the 60\u2019s was the last time I was around people who knew about that work and approached it with the kind of reverence that I see here.\n\nTM: The great thing about the psychedelics is that they speak for themselves, so they need no priest, no interpreter, uh, they can deliver their message all by themselves.\n\nQ2: [??] seem to be so wonderful with words. Even the unspeakable [???] togeth in silence. -to say. For me it was always babbling. It's quite an event.\n\nTM: Well it\u2019s wonderful that you feel so comfortable with people that you don\u2019t have to rattle on. Why don\u2019t you lead us now, Kat, in a meditation.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-68", "text": "KM: Hold hands. We\u2019ve seen, uh, many eggs in the last two days and had the pleasure of holding them and swallowing them, and um, I\u2019ve spoken about luminous eggs and feeling very \u201ceggy\u201d today, resurrection and all that stuff. Um, so I was thinking that our luminous eggs should meet each other in maybe a less verbal way. Ok close eyes, and find your center, the light. And let it swell out into your egg, your shape. And then you feel that light of yourself moving into your head and letting everything else out of it. You can breathe through the top of your head, and through your forehead and your eyes and let it become, let your head become like a cloud of light. When it gets strong, that floats up above your head so you have a sphere of light that you can feel and see just above the top of your head that seems to get more charged as you perceive it. And then it grows. The light is", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-69", "text": "it. And then it grows. The light is growing, the sphere is growing rounder and fuller and softer until it meets the lights of your neighbors. And we have a huge halo over us together. If you travel through it, in your light, you'll encounter everyone very softly. And we can charge that halo of light to be stronger and bigger than us. I feel like it, uh, becomes a sphere, a dome above and beneath us which meets the light of the spirit of this place, the spirit that lives here. It's partly in the earth and partly in the air, and very old and wise with a sense of humor. And so we're all inside our collective luminous egg which we could take anywhere actually, but perhaps for now we should just greet the spirit of this place and gradually breathe and draw the white light energy back into ourselves, into our circle and into our individual spaces. Above and through and beneath us. And when we go out and", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-70", "text": "and beneath us. And when we go out and sit out on the rocks alone we can keep doing this even though we're not in a circle.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-71", "text": "TM: Thank you. Mhm.\n\nQ: I don\u2019t know how to phrase this best, um, you were suggesting that this kind of, um, visual language, somehow, um, our future lies there, I know Gueyes talks about the future of technology being light and sound in probably the same way you\u2019re talking about it. Um, I guess my interest in formulating this question has to do with, um, things like the Mayan hieroglyphic language system or, um, also Egyptian hieroglyphs, basically that kind of um, visual language that maps Northwest coast Indian designs were there\u2019s very particular kind of uh, design patterns. Another piece of this question is the interface between the past use of that and the future use of that somehow. That is seems that- I mean, my sense of these hieroglyphic languages used in the past, they would literally see these things that are being drawn, or these things would speak to them and provide information as you are talking about. Um, and that somehow as we evolved we lost that ability somehow, or buried it, or shunted it off to one side. And so my question has to do with some sense of the re-emergence, or the uh, in the Joyce sense here comes everybody, the democratization of, uh, of that ability in future cultures.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-72", "text": "TM: Yes well I think so, I think that the way that these, uh, hieroglyphic languages especially Mayan and Egyptian differ from uh, alphabetic languages is that, uh, etymology remains on the surface in a hieroglyphic language so that, uh, thousands of meanings are immediately visibly present. And, and so it\u2019s more like an ideogram rather than like a word with a dictionary meaning. You couldn't really- I doubt that a Mayan could conceive of a dictionary of Mayan glyphs because they're, they're, uh, they infinitely shade off one into another so that- and, and that kind of sensitivity to the depth of language and to the uh, presence of the past in the present, in a word, in what Joyce is trying to do in Finnigans Wake, you know. And that\u2019s why if you read it carefully, you feel many historical layers of meaning in the same passage because he wrote it with almost a pictographic consciousness of the meaning of the words rather than a lineal and literary sense of it. So yes in that sense, it\u2019s like that. How this will be achieved in the future in our culture I\u2019m not sure.\n\nThe control of the macintosh through an internationally set of unders- internationally understood set of control glyphs is very weird and if any of you have worked with a macintosh you immediately see \u201cAh\u201d this idea which seems very odd, could in fact, I could learn this very quickly and anyone could do it, kind of thing, may be presages a world of illiterate computer users who communicate with computer through symbols, because literacy has been lost. But it's it\u2019s very interesting.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-73", "text": "Q: [??] So the computer plays a role in the visual component. Like I heard you talk about actually when you asked your question \u201cWill computers become intelligent?\u201d I\u2019ve heard you talk about it more, and that the technology of computers will become available to us as almost a biological extension from the-\n\nTM: Yes that\u2019s what I think will happen. I mean my vision of a perfect world is where, you know, the earth is restored to its prehistoric, edenic perfection but technology has not been eliminated, it\u2019s merely been micro-miniaturized to the point where the computers which maintain the history of the race and the governance of the planet have all been secreted in a certain pebble which lies on a certain beach somewhere on the planet and we walk around in perfect harmony with nature and in perfect and complete touch with an imaginary holographic world that is our self-expression, as a city is our self-expression.\n\nTo then be simultaneously, you know, in the world of techne and in the world of nature, but with neither violating the other, and I think that\u2019s reasonable. In fact, I think perhaps in a sense this is what so-called preliterate cultures in the Amazon have achieved. That\u2019s how it looks to them from the inside. They have an extremely rich inner life. It isn\u2019t maintained by vast computer networks and projected into holographic space and taped on to magnetic tape and all of that, but it\u2019s still, in feeling, it\u2019s the notion that the richest world is within and that you uh, promote a balance with the exterior world, but then the purpose of the leisure created when you have achieved balance is not then to accumulate things but to explore the interior horizon of transcendence through the recitation of myth, and ecstasis, and uh, and this sort of thing.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-74", "text": "Q: Terence, in connection with Roberts question, in conjunction with it, could you further elaborate this idea of the material externalization of the soul and the internalization of the body as a definitive thing in evolution.\n\nTM: Well, I think imagination is where we want to go, that this has become the arrow of our epigenetic development because everybody says \u201cIn the future, you\u2019ll have everything you want!\u201d Well if we believe this then we have to think seriously about \u201cwhat everything you want\u201d is.\n\nI mean obviously you want plenty of food, plenty of clothes, plenty of money, plenty of friends, but then if you get all that and they say \u201cWell you still- you haven\u2019t even dented your credit account\u201d and you say \u201cWell I want to live in Versailles, surrounded by brilliant robots who- and I want great writers and artists to have lunch with me every day, and then the Hope diamond, and Rembrandts.\u201d Eventually this becomes very silly and instead there is an ascent toward truly grandiose aspirations, you know. Truly boddisatvic calling. And I think that uh, this- the rich imagination is the real frontier, this is why the poets and the artists are so important.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-75", "text": "This is why, I think, one of the aspects of the space thing that is never mentioned by the Al-Phi society or any of these engineering types who are so into it, is the interesting thing about outer space, we are not going to go through space to other worlds. That will be very incidental to going into space. Going into space will be going into space, that space itself is a medium with unique properties for a species such as ourselves, and one of those unique properties is the engineering, which on the surface of the planet always has to always be cognizant of stress, and bearing loads, and the limitation of materials, engineering is just going to become like ballet. And objects miles in extent can be created that are obedient only to the laws of the human imagination, and of course the funding available to create these things, in other words the constraints of nature are pretty much lifted.\n\nOuter space is very much like what you see when you close your eyes in a dark room. It\u2019s a vast unfilled void into which anything whatsoever can be projected. The hallucinations of the individual are, are the cultural artifacts of the species 500 years from now. I mean, all these visions and dreams that we have will been realized, I mean, in ways that we can not imagine, but realized nevertheless. This has been consistently what has been going on. The alchemical dreams of the 16th century are fully realized in the 20th century, you know. And of course it has facets that they never imagined.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-76", "text": "But, uh, going into space and going into the imagination is the same thing, and in the same way that the new world presented a tremendously tight genetic filter to immigrants so that only the soldiers of fortune, the religious fanatics and exiles came to this place and that created a unique gene mix, space is going to be a much tighter genetic filter. I mean, most people who go are going to be very smart and very healthy, and uh, and uh, very quickly I think a space type will arise but I don\u2019t think you can create a space-based civilization without recourse to psychedelic plants and the psychedelic experience, because it\u2019s too much the same thing. You know, without- if you don\u2019t integrate psychedelics into the leap to space and realize that what is happening is that more and more we perfect the uh, aspiration to vertical ascent.\n\nIn the myth of Icarus and Daedalus you get this, then in the brother Mongofie [??] and their gas-filled balloon, and then the Wright brothers, and then the Apollo project. All of these things are this aspiration to ascension. Apparently it is a biological drive, some people have suggested it is a nostalgia for the canopies of the rainforest that no longer exist, but whatever it is, it\u2019s going to take us eventually outwards to the stars and inwards to the stars because, uh, you know the real question mark which hangs over all this is the nature of mind, and we do not know what mind is, and yet everything goes on upon the stage that is conditioned by and assumes mind as a given. And, uh, every society has assumed that it had the answers, that just fifteen years more of fine-tuning of the current ideology would do it. And no society has ever been right about that, so why should we be right?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-77", "text": "We are hurtling toward an unimaginable future in the same way that our present would have been unimaginable to people 200, or 500 years ago. But it is uh, it is the imagination because it is consciousness that is growing and expanding and strengthening itself. And if we take the notion that these uh, psychedelic plants are consciousness expanding agents, this is what they were originally called, \u201cconsciousness expanding drugs,\u201d if you take that seriously for a moment how can you not center it in your life? I mean obviously consciousness is what must be expanded as fast as possible at all costs in all times and places because it is a lack of consciousness that will, uh, be toxic to our species and the planet. Consciousness is the saving grace and so it has to be cultivated by any means, uh, available. Yeah.\n\nQ: You were saying that this urge to ascend is related to this biological urge and that maybe something related to the rainforest.\n\nTM: Well I think we are the trigger species...\n\nQ: What I want to make is that, when we think of going to space we\u2019re so human centered, yes us as humans can exist in space, but what I think is really important about going away from this planets surface is that it\u2019s not just a human centered thing, it\u2019s a totally biological thing and that we are just implements of it, we are the thinking conscious creative tool-makers that will be able to implement this getting off this \u201cgravity trap\u201d, this \u201cgravity well\u201d but it\u2019s not just for humans it\u2019s for all life, and we have to, it will be a complete synthesis of all biological life that will exist away from the planet.\n\nTM: Yes if we go to space we will take everybody with us.\n\nQ: Just like in a rainforest, it\u2019s not just\u2026..it\u2019s everything.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-78", "text": "Q: Just like in a rainforest, it\u2019s not just\u2026..it\u2019s everything.\n\nTM: That\u2019s right we are the species that is deputized to use energy to do the thing for all life on the planet. That\u2019s why I\u2019m not pessimistic about history and I don\u2019t see history as unnatural or somehow opposed to nature. What history is is a 10,000 year process by which the monkeys attain an understanding of physical processes to build the habitats in to which all life on the planet can then migrate. That\u2019s what I was talking about this morning when I said \u201cI think the planet senses the finite of its- the finiteness of its existence and that biology is a wild scheme for getting out to the stars for dispersal of uh, of life, and you\u2019re right, we have great hubris and believe \u201cwe are doing this\u201d and man will go to the stars. It\u2019s more that man is the pecking beak of the cosmic egg- of the cosmic chick in the egg of life on earth, and the entire bird will emerge and fly but it was man with his atomic weapons and his radar and all this who, who can break the shell and then the whole of the biosphere will flow outward into space and escape the cycle of energy degradation that will eventually turn this solar system into a group of cold cinders rotating around a uh, a red giant or something.\n\nTM: Yes, well we\u2019re trying to compare our maps, everybody has seen different pieces of a geography whose total size we don\u2019t know. So we don\u2019t know, maybe none of our maps overlap, or maybe some do and some don\u2019t. And maps which don\u2019t overlap are not invalidated, it just means nobody has been there but you. I mean, I often have the feeling that I am seeing things that no one has ever seen before. Often.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-79", "text": "Leon asked me to talk about time, Leon is off on alone time, so he\u2019ll miss this. The thing that really interests me or draws me back to the psychedelic experience again and again is the notion that there\u2019s something that you can learn that would somehow be, uh- have an impact on society at large, that when, that when you have the psychedelic experience, it\u2019s like you\u2019re a sailor on some kind of a vast ocean where you let down your net into the deeps and the hope is that you will snare an idea of some sort and of some size. And it may be, you know, that you come up with the equivalent of tuna, which is many small ideas, or- and perhaps you bring up your nets and see that they have just been shredded by something so large [audience laughter] that you scarcely care to imagine it.\n\nBut the, the hope is to land an idea of intermediate size that, uh, you can then fully, um, explore and understand. When you s- go into that ocean as a swimmer you see these things passing in review, uh, things of such beauty and intricacy and complexity that you are literally speechless, and even speechless in terms of an interior dialogue about what you\u2019re seeing. You can't, uh, it just blows your mind and washes past you in such profusion that there seems to be- the notion of capturing it seems to be like a child emptying the ocean with a cup. But if you have a net, and I\u2019m not sure what a net is exactly, but it\u2019s a way of somehow capturing these psychedelic ideas and then bringing them back for examination.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-80", "text": "And I think, um, part of it rests on a technique of, uh, cyclical recitation to yourself of what you have seen so that you carry a vision to a level of reflection in memory as you pull away from it, and then 10 minutes later you tell yourself again what has just happened, and then 20 minutes later again so that you get a series of telescoping images which are granted a compression of the original event, but nevertheless they bear the, uh, the uh, stamp of what the thing was.\n\nSo, the thing of this class that has happened to me is a very peculiar idea about time which was developed, uh, fairly suddenly as I would imagine ideas develop, uh, in me in the early and mid 70\u2019s and then it was pretty much formulated in my head but it took the invention of small computers to make it possible to write software so that I could actually talk to other people about this idea. Well since we have no computers and not even a blackboard this will be a kind of feeling-toned uh, excursion into talking about this theory of time.\n\nIts, um, it has an abstract foundation and a practical foundation. Its abstract foundation is the notion that, uh, time is different than we have come to conceive of it as the legacy of Western science. The legacy of Western science is that time is duration, that time is a dimension necessary for process, and it\u2019s usually thought of as a flat plane against which some other fluctuating variable can be plotted. This is called, you know, \u201clinear time.\"", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-81", "text": "Um, and Newton's physics took the same view of space. The Newtonian view of space was that it was essentially emptiness; it was something which you had to have if you wanted to put something somewhere, so it was a kind of an abstract, uh, plenum, but Einstein showed that space is actually some kind of a thing, it has properties of thing-dom, it is distorted in the presence of a large magnetic field and, uh, and so it beca- it rose out of the realm of abstraction and then was cognized as an objectifiable entity, a topological manifold that was real.\n\nThis is, I think, the same step that has to be taken for time. Time is not simply the dimension of duration required for the successive occurrence of occasions. It is rather some kind of conditioned topological manifold. We can think of it as, um, uh, a fluid medium flowing across a surface, a river in other words. In some places the river is very broad and shallow and meanders because the pitch of the incline over which it's moving is so slight that it can barely discern which way to move. You see this often in the Amazon. In other situations the incline increases and the speed of the flow increases, and the depth of the channel increases, and the sides o- distance between the banks decreases, so time runs slowly and it runs quickly. It has a kind of modulated speed.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-82", "text": "Well, it\u2019s been a, uh, a commonplace of Western cosmology since Darwin, although it\u2019s never been elevated to the status of a law or even a principle that complex- steady complexification has occurred in the universe since its very beginning. That this is, uh, something that we see in the very first moments of physics and proceeding right up into our own day. In other words, in the era before physics, that period of time so short that it\u2019s the period of time- it's less than the amount of time necessary for the photon to cross the radius of the nucleus of the atom, there was absolutely chaos and a complete absence of physics. And then what sprang into being was a physics of pure electrons, of pure energy. And it was not for many seconds that, uh, temperatures fell to a point such that other factors could come into play, such that free electrons could fall into atomic orbitals and, uh, and, and this sort of thing.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-83", "text": "And at each successive level of cooling new forms of order became possible. At first everything was just this plasma of particles and energy, and then atomic systems sprang into being. And then at still lower temperatures these atomic systems were able to form molecular systems. The energy level in the general medium dropped below the level at which it would disrupt the molecular bond, so then molecules came into being. And then at that point there was the aggregation of stars and the cooking out of the heavier elements through the hy- the process of cooking hydrogen so that iron and carbon and these things then arose. And by this time the universe is much cooler than it was at the beginning, and then finally you get, uh, temperature regimes and environmental situations where very large colloidal molecular, uh, species can come into being, large polymerized molecules and, uh, and this sets the stage for DNA which once it emerges- and the, the thing to notice at each of these stages of complexification is that it requires a shorter time than the processes preceding it.\n\nIf the universe is, uh, let's uh, take the long view and say 20 billion years old, then the first 10 billion years not very much happened that was interesting in the realm of complexity. There was star formation and, uh, the percolation of heavy chemistry but not life and- or it's doubtful that life occurred in the early universe. So what we see then is the emergence of more and more complex animal forms at a greater and greater speed. And then finally the emergence of self-reflection in the primates, and then epigenetic methods of encoding information in other words writing, and storytelling, and language.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-84", "text": "And uh, at each point what is happening is there\u2019s a progressive time-binding of energy and a progressive intensification and speed-up of the complexification of certain parts of the universe. Right now the most complex part of the universe that we know is the human brain-mind situated in its network of computers and cultural conventions and social obligations and expectations and hopes and fears and historical aspirations, et cetera. This is the realm of the densely-packed that the Buddhists are talking about.\n\nSo it seems to me that this should be seen as the operation of a general law and we are not outside of this. We are in fact the cutting edge of it. Somehow of all the animal species on the earth the human beings are carriers of this temporal, speeding-up process which is now engulfing, uh, the entire planet. And, uh, so that\u2019s the general law, or the general perception upon which this idea I elaborated was based, the notion that complexification is being conserved through time and being built up as, uh, some quality that the universe is very interested in maintaining.\n\nAnd then I looked at the I-Ching which I hope, uh, is familiar to most of you. I\u2019m sure it probably is. It\u2019s a very ancient Chinese oracle system of- that uses what are called hexagrams which are 6-leveled ideograms of broken or unbroken lines, and the possible subset of these things is 64 which is an interesting number because it\u2019s the number which DNA operates on because it uses 64 codons, and in fact I came to see that as no coincidence, that actually life was organized around this number and the I-Ching as well because both were subject to, uh, a set of rules which was, uh, surfacing in the phenomenon of biological organization and the organization of a Chinese oracular theory for understanding past and future time.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-85", "text": "But- and I looked at what is called \u201cThe Sequence\u201d which is the way in which you move from one hexagram to the next, and I sought order there and found order that I think had been lost since pre-Han perhaps pre-Zhou time. And I came to see the I-Ching as we possess it today as an archaeological artifact, a piece of broken machinery. It\u2019s like the turbine of a jet plane. You puzzle over it and you see that it can be used for various things and you do use it for things and you see that it\u2019s very effective but it\u2019s really a piece of broken machinery from a very ancient technology which ceased to exist before the rise of the Han dynasty. And what it was, was, it was like a uh, Taoist technology of understanding time, that by the practice of certain techniques whose historical, uh, echoes I think you get in the stilling-of-the-heart techniques of Vadrayana Buddhism, these people were able to see into the quantum-mechanical foundations of thought and consciousness and they noticed there a flux which they called The Tao and it was a thing which came and went. The Tao Te Ching says \u201cThe way that can be told of is not an unvarying way\u201d and they stilled their body functions and they looked inward with a cataloging, analytical mentality, and they noticed that while this flux was variable it seemed to be not infinite in its, in its, uh, in its uh, contributing factors but that in fact it seemed to have a pattern and they discerned the pattern as revolving around the number 64.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-86", "text": "In other way- in other words, they discerned through this process of meditation temporal elements that had a kind of ontological validity that the material elements of the periodic table have for matter. That there is not one kind of time or two kinds of time, but actually 64 facets of the possible temporal jewel. And they saw that any moment in time was the combination and the overlay of, uh, this a a- wave system which they called Tao and it was a harmonic wave system, it had, uh, re- it had, uh, periods of self-expression which were very short in duration, on the order of seconds or hours or microseconds, it had levels of expression which were cognizable in the human world as years and decades and centuries, and it had vast resonant periods which were as large as history and then larger many times. Periods of historical- or periods of, uh, temporal resonance which could only be referenced to the life of the planet. And this is, I think, uh, you know, part of the Chinese notion of, uh, the Tao of heaven, earth, and man. These are different speeds at which these temporal waves of conditioning of the world of phenomenal appearance are moving.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-87", "text": "And if you, if you take an idea like this, uh, seriously, even as a personal discipline of thought to, to picture it, to visual it- visualize it in a Vadryana spirit then you see that what\u2019s really being offered is a map of time. It\u2019s saying that, um, the condition of knowing a fading past and facing an unanticipatable future is not a n- ontologically given necessity of existence, that it is possible to imagine an existence in which one saw into time the way we as animals see into the space in front of us so that we are able to run, and leap, and dance among the rocks. It\u2019s because we can see into space. A creature that- or a culture that could see into time could anticipate where the river of time would flow quickly, where it would broaden out and move slowly with a rich sense of the conservation of accomplishments achieved, where it would cascade and break-up its previous patterns and produce great cataracts of novelty. A civilization which knew these things, or a person which knew these things about their own life would claim a new dimension of existential freedom for being.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-88", "text": "And um, you know, I was having this whispering entity, this daemon, this Logos show me these things and it was expressed on a very, very practical level. I mapped what is called \u2018The first order of difference\u2019 in the sequence of the I-Ching. That means how many lines change as you go from one hexagram to another. And I discovered that it looked like a random wave, it looked like a stochastic slice except that at the beginning and the end there were tongue-in-groove points of fit if you rotated the thing 180 degrees and brought it down against itself so that the thing achieved closure at the beginning and the end. This satisfied me that I was dealing with an artifact of natu- uh, that, you know, I was dealing with an organized structure either of nature or created by intelligence. And then using the principle of hierarchical resonance and stacking of modules into, uh, into hierarchies which is really the principle by which all Chinese metaphysics has operated from the very beginning, I created, um, a cosmic calendar which had- where each level was a resonance of the level below it, but either collapsed or multiplied by a factor of 64.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-89", "text": "I discovered a very- well, recall that, um, because the I-Ching is 64 hexagrams with, uh, 6 lines in each hexagram, it\u2019s composed basically of 384 \u201cyao\u201d or lines. And I discovered that this number 384 has a very interesting property, the, uh, cycle of the moon is 29.5 days so that if you take 29.5 times 13 it's something like 383.93, and it seemed to me then immediately obvious that, that part of what the machinery of the I-Ching was describing in the humanly cognizable phenomenal world was the cycle of the moon using a 384-day lunar calendar which precessed 19 days a year against the solar calendar. And when you take that 384 day unit and multiply it times 64 you, uh, get 67 years and some months and days. This is exactly six 11-year sunspot cycles, and China is the first place where we have historical records of the observation of sunspots.\n\nSo that\u2019s one sunspot cycle for each line in the six-line hexagram. Also sunspots cycles have a greater peak every third cycle so that\u2019s one large sunspot cycle for each hexagram in that trigram. And I saw then that there were, uh, these resonances. When you take that number, 67 years, again times 64 you get 4306 years. And uh, that was- that works out to...let's see 4306... two hundred, one hundred and fifty years for each zodiacal sign, each zodiacal sign is slotted to one trigram. These are all- notice that all of these things that this resonance calendar is predicting are things that are visible to the naked eye. We\u2019re talking about movements of constellations, sunspots, and, um, and the moon.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-90", "text": "So I saw then that this was a tremendously powerful natural calendar that- that, that was a, a technology developed by proto-Taoist central Asian shamanism very, very long ago. But it had this curious property of when the wave was mathematically analyzed in modern mathematical- by modern mathematical methods so that we could draw these maps of novelty, we could see then that it showed us the map of the temporal river from earliest beginnings to the collapse of the state vector at some time in the future. And so it was obvious then that if we could lay the map over the portion of reality we had already experienced we could then propagate the map forward into the future and know- and begin to take hold of ourselves in this other temporal dimension. And so it became a question of what is the best fit of this undulating wave of novelty?\n\nAnd I used the word novelty out of Alfred North Whitehead\u2019s philosophy because he, he had this notion that novelty was the concrescing of a force which knits things together. And, uh, and I like that, that\u2019s what I felt it was, that the Tao is making itself and that this compression of novelty through the speeding-up of time will eventually reach a place where everything is connected to everything else. And this is, you know, the universe\u2019s self-birthing of itself.\n\nWell, you must be aware of all these, uh, very straight studies which say \u201cIf we keep increasing how fast we go by the year 2020 we\u2019ll go 10 times the speed of light, if we keep increasing the amount of energy we release by so-and-so we'll release the energy in the sun. The propagation of all these curves of development become asymptotic and then nobody knows how to interpret what they mean, they just seem to mean that the whole culture is just going to go kazowie, you know.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-91", "text": "And this is sort of the idea that this theory implies, it implies that far from the universe being a steady-state entity uninfluenced by the existence of the human mind, which is going to go on and exist for billions of years until the stars burn out and the 2nd law of thermodynamics is going to reduce everything to heat death, that that\u2019s all wrong, a hundred percent wrong, and that actually the universe is made by mind within and without organism, and that mind is a- capable of bootstrap leaps in its organizational self-expression and that we are, uh, privileged to be the witnesses of the final act of life going through some kind of immense transformative, um, unfolding from itself in a kind of vortex which has been building on this planet for billions of years but which has been accelerating to, you know, such excruciating intensities over the last 25,000 years that it has called forth self-reflective intelligence from the monkeys, and the invention of quantum physics, and spaceflight, and shamanism, and it is novelty upon novelty. Novelty so intensified that the genetic machinery can no longer carry it and it bubbles out into the epigenetic, into art, and language, and poetry, and religion, and religious mania and romanticism and, uh, all of these things. It is a progressive knitting together, an expression of the universe's will to become, that causes me to think that we may be in the shorter \u201cgyres\u201d as William Butler Yeats called them, the shortening spirals, of this vortex of novelty and compression.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-92", "text": "You see, a curious quality about this kind of cosmology that I\u2019m describing, a cosmology where each, uh, epoch is preceded by an epoch which is a 65- 64 times greater in duration. The curious thing about that is that you only need about 20 multip- instances of multiplication before you go from a period of time smaller than the duration of Planck\u2019s constant, which is, uh, ten poi- 1.55 x 10^-23, which is a very short period of time, to- then by th- by 20 multiplications of 64 you reach a period of time in excess of the required time for the age of the universe, a period of time on the order of 72 billion years. Well, if each time the, uh, spiral goes into a state of collapse at the end of one of its cycles, then in the last 384 days of the existence of a universe like that it would transit through half of its epochs of transition. Do you see what I mean? It\u2019s like a screaming mimi, it really winds up.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-93", "text": "And, uh, instead of the w- the the vision which physics gives us, is that the really rapid transitions of phase and state occurred at the beginning of the universe, they- whole professional lives are given over to discussing the first ten pico-seconds of the physics of the universe, right? And well I'm saying it's- I don\u2019t care about that, I think that the really interesting stuff will happen in a big hurry at the end of the universe. That the picture that the 2nd law of thermodynamics gives us of just\u2026[sighs] you know, tumescence, maximum de-tumescence is what it's picturing is all wrong, and that actually this strange hyper-dimensional force in the universe called life and information transfer is in the process of working itself up into a real tizzy and wrapping all space and time around itself.\n\nAnd, uh, what was startling and what made me think that maybe I was losing my marbles was that when you look at that time that way and push these novelty graphs against the historical continuum, I reached the conclusion that we entered the last 67-year period before the collapse of the state vector at 8:30 in the morning on August the 6th, 1945 when the atomic bomb went off over Hiroshima. You see, it was a temporal reflection of the birth of the universe. It was actually a- you could call it an event which was a reincarnation of the big-bang, because each cycle begins with a bang, and that cycle, initi- the fact that human beings had used atomic weapons on other human beings meant that we had entered a new era, a new epoch of moral danger, and the stakes had been raised, you know, by a power of 64 to a new level.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-94", "text": "Now, using the mathematics inherent in the cycle, if you propagate forward from that date, 67 years, 104.25 days you reach, uh, um, late November of 2012 AD. And I concluded based on all kinds of factors, personal, and historical and so forth that that was the fit. That, that if Hiroshima was, was day 1, then the place where it all came together was this date in 2012. And I worked with that for several years before some kind soul, Henry Munn I think, pointed out to me that the Mayan calendar which is a cycle of three- of thir- the long-count calendar I\u2019m now talking about, is a cycle of 13 time periods which are called baktuns, and the baktun is 396 years in duration. After 13 baktuns the world ends completely, and the 13th baktun of the classical Mayan long-count calendar is the winter solstice of AD 2012, within 30 days of the date that I had fastened in on, using a completely different, uh, path of analysis.\n\nAnd so this raised all kinds of questions, uh, one of which is, is it simply that individuals and civilizations who take mushrooms become, I want to say privy slash engulfed by a certain mathematical secret about the cosmic machinery? What is so important about this date in 2012? You know, the meso-American cultures have the most uncanny history of, uh, successful prophecy in the world. I mean, the Aztecs anticipated the coming of the Spanish, the day, the book of Chilam Balam [pronounced wrongly as 'Belam' by TM], gives the day when the Spaniards would weigh anchor off the coast of Mexico. And of course, the fact that it happened exactly as prophesied was a major undoing of that civilization.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-95", "text": "So I put this out, I- this was a very confusing experience for me to, uh, channel or transmit this idea because I was interested in the I-Ching, I had carried it with me in India, I used to throw it at each full moon, but I was not mathematically inclined and when\u2026\n\ns reading the philosophy of science, like Paul Firob [TM may have meant Feyerabend?] and Imre Lakatos, and reading the history of science, Thomas Kuhn, and all of those people trying to understand you know, well what is a true idea? What is true and what is false? And, and when you have an idea which makes claims as sweeping as these, then you want to try to understand just what the limits of knowability are, and I discovered that, um, all you can require of any idea is that it be self-consistent, that it not generate any contradictions within its own set of rules, you see. And that\u2019s why astrology is, uh, beyond criticism, because astrology is a mathematical theory with an interpretive exegesis attached to it, and who can quibble with a mathematical theory? Well then the ma- the, the uh, interpretational exegesis has to do with the sensitivity and subtlety of the interpreter. Well, isn\u2019t this true of mathematical data in science exactly the same way?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-96", "text": "So, I discovered that what I had created was a self-consistent idea that appears to be sealed beyond refutation in some weird and uncanny way which makes it seem very non-human because you can\u2019t really find your way in to telling whether it's- can answer- can be answerable to the notion of objective truth. So what I\u2019ve decided about it is, that it\u2019s a, it's a teaching, or it\u2019s, um, it's a kind of- it an exemplary model about how all process goes on and it\u2019s a way of learning how things happen. To see time as a modulated flux of elements; to see it as a series of waves moving at different speeds through which you are taking a vertical slice and then stacking that slice and that gives rise to the multiplistic ever-changing flux that is called the now. It is actually made up of reflections and adumbrations of the past, and it\u2019s made up of, of, uh, anticipatory shock waves and intimations of the future.\n\nThe past and future are co-present in the now, they are in fact what\u2019s making it happen.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-97", "text": "You can almost think of it as a hologram where you have two- or, or a standing wave, where you two wave systems\u2014one from the past, one from the future where they cross an interference pattern forms which has a curious, uh, stability as a system in, and of itself. And, and yet it\u2019s almost a ghost created by these other two realities and that is the moving present. And uh, ah, mathematically this notion of time that I evolved delivers, you know, the map of novelty, a two-variable flux, a wandering-line graph that\u2019s, uh, very pleasing for arguing with formalists. But what lurks behind it and what is so rich for the romantic, and the shaman, and the poet, is these- this wandering-line graph is the composite of s- of the the overlay of certain historical time periods which are in a state of flux at various speeds so that they give rise to an endless kaleidoscopic unfolding in what we call three-dimensional space and of what we call reality.\n\nAnd this is why I often mention Finnigans Wake in my lectures because Joyce understood this, he understood that every moment is caused by everything that happened in the past, and everything that happened in the future, and I like to give, you know, the, the trivial example that you find yourself in Hadrian's hamburger joint, this is because the emperor Hadrian invaded England in a certain year and conducted a campaign.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-98", "text": "We are ghosts of past and future events. And what the- what the chaos at the end of history that we are now living through is, is that for thousands and thousands of years people have felt a vague thing calling across time to humanists, calling us to be a certain way, to practice certain rituals, to observe the stars, to observe the plants, to observe birth, and observe death, a calling, and that thing which some people have called \u201cGod,\u201d whatever it is, is throwing a gigantic shadow over human history now, because now the creode of development that leads to our merging with this thing the walls are very steep, the water is moving very swiftly, and it\u2019s almost as though the future event is throwing off great sparks that are themselves faceted, contradictory epitomizations of this mystery. This is what Mo- Mohammed, and Christ, and Buddha are. They are human personalities that were situated in time in such a way that they became macrocosmic reflections of the super-ordinate edenic humanity that is going to be generated at the end of history.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-99", "text": "And we are close, we are close. It is, uh, all of history can be seen as the shockwave of this eschatological event. This is what the prophets were anticipating: the culmination of man\u2019s God-making effort in time will be the perfection and the release of the human soul. And it has- it- it\u2019s not that we are doing it, you see, it\u2019s that a natural law that we were previously unaware of is inexorably unfolding. And that is what all this cross-connectedness of, of, uh, man into matter, plant into animal, uh, earth into space, all of this flowing interconnectedness, this reaches right down into the rocks of the planet. This is not simply a phenomenon of biology. This is the unfolding of a general law of which biology is only the cutting edge of a wedge of becomingness which includes all being and reaches right down into the neutrinos.\n\nAnd it is, uh, you know, i- to be a being in time is to share in the immense flood of pre-cognitive anticipation that fills the universe in, uh, anticipation of this event, and that\u2019s what being is and that\u2019s why it's so rich and complete within itself, and yet always somehow pointing beyond itself because, uh, the, the richness of the matrix through which we are moving is, uh, incomparable and beautiful.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-100", "text": "And, uh, and so I- this is the basis of my extreme optimism, is I think that everything is under control, that we are in the grip of a force so powerful that the notion that we could jeopardize or overthrow it is completely preposterous because uh, we are acting in accordance with a resonance that was set going millions and millions of years ago. And of course being is fraught uh, with danger, but uh, the stakes are uh, you know, to be at play in the fields of the Lord, to be at rest in the mansions of the Goddess, and uh, it's- it\u2019s soon I think. At least the historical mimicking of it is clearly soon because, uh, the- the thrust toward the millennium of this society will not be, uh, turned aside, if it is not a law of the universe then it will become a myth of human beings and be created anyway. So, since we are human beings I see us as the central actors in that mandala, and this is the task of the next hundred, or five hundred years to realize the alchemical nature of, uh, humanity and being and have everything fused into a super-numinous concrescence that is time. Joyce said \u201cAll space in a nutshell\u201d, you know, all time bound into a lenticular vehicle which is bo- both everyone\u2019s and mine alone, and yours alone, and yours alone\u2026", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-101", "text": "What I want to talk about this morning is an idea, I\u2019ve talked about it in a couple of places, uh, some of you may have heard it before. I think it bears repeating. It\u2019s a much more serious idea than what I put out yesterday which had a note of whimsy in its genesis. This idea is important, whatever that means, because it would change, uh, not only the area of its concern but our view of the world generally. And Easter is an appropriate time to discuss this because it concerns the genesis of man, of consciousness and self-reflection which is what the Easter mythologium is uh, also an expression of.\n\nSo what I wanted to talk about this morning is a new notion of how human evolution occurred, and what the critical factors were in it and how to draw a, uh, picture for us that shows how our intellectual complexity and symbol manipulating facilities could have emerged naturally from a background of animal existence and over a fairly rapid period of time. Over the last, uh, 3 to 5 million years actually the African continent has been growing more dry and has experienced fluctuations of aridity. Nevertheless as recently as, uh, 2,000 years ago the Roman historian Pliny called North Africa \u201cThe breadbasket of Rome\u201d because wheat was being grown over thousands and thousands of acres. Now, it\u2019s in this same area [TM clears throat] of Northern Africa, the great rift zone of the Serengeti plane where physical anthropologists place the origin of human beings and it has to do with the following sequence of events.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-102", "text": "Arboreal primates living in an unbroken ra- continental rainforest ecology achieve a close adaptation to existence in the canopy and this is stabilized for millions of years. They are insectivores they have the opposable thumbs and binocular, or uh, rudimentary binocular vision. The drying up of the African continent caused the breakdown of this continental rainforest into a configuration of patches of forest with uh, grassland in between. And in this grassland ecology, uh, herds of mammals evolved, proto-cattle, proto-bison, exotic mammals like giraffes and gazelles of all types. At the same time the primate adaptation to this increasing aridity was to begin to descend from the trees and to hunt in packs and to shift from a diet of, uh, canopy fruits and berries, and roots dug from the ground to an omnivorous diet that could include meat.\n\nSo, in this situation these, uh, tribal monkeys developed a complicated repertoire of signals to aid in pack hunting in exactly the same way wolves are known to do. Now, into this situat- their, and their habit was nomadic and to follow behind these great herds either killing the animals that were uh, less well and could be killed by the crude means at their disposal, or living off [TM clears throat] the kills of other carnivores and this is still the habit of uh, baboons.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-103", "text": "Now into this situation comes a mushroom which grows in the manure of the ungulate animals that have evolved on this plain. And in this protein intensive environment where there is pressure on the availability of protein, these foraging primates are testing every object in the environment for its food value. So, uh, Rolland Fischer who was a researcher into the effect of psychedelic drugs and the structure of consciousness showed that small doses of psilocybin, sub-psychedelic, thr- uh, sub-threshold doses of psilocybin actually increase visual acuity and he had a very elegant experiment where t parallel lines could be deformed by turning a dial, and you would put graduate students in front of this stoned, and unstoned, and ask them to press a buzzer when the lines no longer appeared to them to be parallel. And he showed that consistently a small amount of psilocybin allowed you to detect this change uh, sooner than an ordinary subject was able to. And he said to me, he said you see that \u201cThis proves that drugs give you a clearer picture of reality than their absence.\u201d And what it means is that these primates who were inculcating the mushroom into their diet were gaining a subtle adaptive advantage over their fellows who were avoiding the mushroom, because they were gaining in visual acuity which is one of the critical parameters that a uh, pack hunting carnivore would be subject to in that kind of an environment.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-104", "text": "So, uh, without any teleology being involved, without any invocation of extraterrestrial intelligence we see that a feedback loop was established in the food chain of these primates very early on. Those who ate the mushroom tended to survive and outbreed those who did not, at the same time the relationship between these animals and these herd ungulate mammals was shifting from a hunting situation to a situation of domestication which was bringing the mushroom ever more into the fore, and if you look back, uh, at the archeological evidence in North Africa, especially the paintings, the uh, late Neolithic paintings on the Tassili Plateau in Southern Algeria you see there magnificently portrayed herds of cattle, and, and, I mean, num- beautifully painted. More sensitively portrayed cattle than you find at Altamira and Lascaux, and you see also shamans dancing with mushrooms sprouting out of their body and with mushrooms clutched in their hands, groups of them running holding on high with geometric matrices of connected dots all around them.\n\nAnd, uh, now of course in that area its very similar to this, its an area of sculpted sandstone, and uh, cross-cut arroyos with undercut cliffs. And it\u2019s very dry, but in some places the Neolithic detritus is several meters deep. And the people who lived in the Tassili Plateau when the aridity of the Sahara further increased are the people who migrated east to the valley of the Nile and established the proto-Egyptian civilization of six to ten thousand years ago.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-105", "text": "The important point I want to make about this later phase of the, uh, human involvement with the mushroom was that it was always intimately connected with cattle. And the Goddess religions of Ancient North Africa and the Middle East are, are, uh, religions of cattle Goddesses, and this connection between the cow and the mother Goddess and the mushroom is some kind of, uh, key to understanding the evolution of, of uh, religious sensitivity in early man and that part of the Middle East.\n\nIt carries forward into, uh, historical time with the mysteries at Eleuisis where there is a, uh, a clear indication that a psychedelic substance is being used. Either ergotized rye or, uh, a mushroom of some sort. And this, uh, this notion that uh, it was the presence of the mushroom on the African veldt at a critical bifurcation of primate evolution that created uh, the feedback loop which eventually developed into self-reflecting consciousness. Because you see at lower doses the psilocybin is giving increased visual acuity and it seems like increased symbol-processing ability, its strange effect on the language centers. But of course inevitably they would have discovered its higher dose effects which would be to convey then into an inner tremendum that became then the cultural guiding image. In other words it was perceived as, as a God, as a Goddess, as the Goddess and became then the arrow for cultural dynamics and evolution.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-106", "text": "And the reason I think this is important is because the spinoff implications of the acceptance of an idea like this would bring us into much greater harmony with our environment. We sort of have the anxiety of an orphan about our origins because our best people in physical anthropology don\u2019t give very good accounts, can\u2019t seem to make sense of how we could have l- been forced out and emerged out of primate organization. And so there\u2019s been much talk in the 20th century for the search for the missing link which was always been conceived of a physical skeleton of a certain kind of intermediate hominoid form. But it isn\u2019t a missing link I think, it\u2019s a missing factor. And the factor which accelerated the forward the evolution of the brain size of this particular primate line was the inclusion of psychedelic plants in the diet, which then fed the tendency towards symbol formation and self-reflection.\n\nIf this idea gained wide acceptance uh, some of our laws and some of our ways of relating to nature and to medicine plants in particular would have to be altered and brought into line. This is the source of our humanness. Apparently the, the psychoactive compounds being elaborated by plants throughout nature are regulators of various forms of evolution in animals, and food chains and all this which appear very trivial on the surface are actually the message-bearing, uh, medium of the, of the hand of God which is forming and sculpting nature along these various creodes of development.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-107", "text": "And, uh, the thing to understand about this, or why this has impact in the future is because it\u2019s a continuous process which we can foster and husband, uh, and help develop in healthy ways if we recognize that it\u2019s going on. I mentioned Eleuisis as this kind of thing going on in historical time, also of course Soma, the sacrament of the Vedic civilization, appears to have been a mushroom, was certainly a psychedelic plant. And it isn\u2019t only psychedelic plants but all plants which affect and shift consciousness.\n\nI mean, a history of the human race could be written analyzing it not it terms of class struggle of the impact of great personalities but as a shifting set of interactions between sugar, tobacco, opium, caffeine, uh, alcohol, and psychedelics so that, you know, we need to understand that- chocolate, that these food- cocaine- that these foods and drugs and spices, we have subtly overlooked them and taken them for granted. They have regulated human history, and individual self-expression, how much you know, how you look, how, uh, pure your transmission of your genetic heritage to the next generation, all of these things are being regulated and controlled by these plants in this way.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-108", "text": "Now, if we could create a civilization or even a, even uh, a clique within a civilization that understood this and that had its fingers on a vertical monopoly of research from the jungle to the clinical hospital, great things could be understood. Uh, this is the way to do it, to systematically explore these relationships and see that Gaia apparently works through the intercession of catalytic compounds that convey revelation, and revelation is then the factor which has historical impact. The people, the messiahs, and the teachers are merely the pipelines for ideas and the, the metabolic release of these ideas in the macro-environment is being controlled by the plant-animal interaction. And so it will be on into the foreseeable future, and by understanding this a kind of new science looms into view. A kind of integrated, dynamical understanding of, uh, the flux of energy mediated by chemistry in the environment so that the, the guiding image of culture can be revitalized and realized, uh, in a much shorter period of time. And this whole shortening period of time thing has also been going on for a while.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-109", "text": "You see it isn\u2019t astonishing I think that self-reflection could emerge giving basic- given basic primate organization, but what is astonishing about it is the speed with which it happened. I mean in the last thirty to fifty thousand years the human brain has changed more than it changed in the previous 3 to 5 million years. So, you know, factor has entered, a catalyst is in the mix and it must be something in the food chain, or something in the environment, or the hand of almighty God, or the extraterrestrials, or, you know, elf invasion from hyperspace\u2026 but something is causing this accelerated development. And I thi- and what I said this morning could be criticized as being reductionist, I try to give a very sober account of it, I haven\u2019t said why the mushroom appeared in the manure or discussed whether it has awareness or a stake in the catalyzing of this primate evolution. I just introduce it as a chemical factor, and that\u2019s how it would be written if it were presented to a straight audience.\n\nThe fact of the matter is that it raises all kinds of questions, I mean why is this process being catalyzed in the primates? Is it just by happenstance? Where has the mushroom been? Is it, uh- what is its relationship to the evolution of other forms of life on this planet? Did it drift in from the stars? If so, long ago or recently? And with intent, or by chance? And, you know just a host of questions. The thing that puts us in such an existential situation, individually and culturally, is this puzzlement over our origins.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-110", "text": "We are not strictly speaking religious in the 19th century way so that we can not really, I think, accept that, you know, God sculpted us out of clay and set us down here on a world he created, and yet if you were to look for the thumbprint of God on this planet you would certainly have to focus in on the human beings and their activities as a special case of natural phenomenon. Perhaps so special a case that it had to be accorded a separate ontological status. We are different and, uh, why, and for what?\n\nUm, I think that probably we are the agent of change that Gaia has unleashed upon herself, that the planet itself is aware of the finiteness of planetary existence. And it's sort of like the story of the ant and the grasshopper. You can have a planetary consciousness which says \u201cWell I look forward to 3 to 5 billion years of sentient existence and then I am willing to be extinguished with the death of my star\u201d or you can have a plant with an an- a planet with an ant-like mentality that says \u201cI can sense winter coming 3 to 5 billion years down the line and I\u2019m going to organize some wild strategy to break through the tyranny of the energy cycle of one star and I\u2019m going to organize biological existence so that energy can be brought- greater and greater amounts of energy can be brought under control so that eventually a kind of liberation can occur where life can burst out of the planetary cradle and disperse itself through the universe.\u201d", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-111", "text": "And here are apparently several strategies for this, one is evolve intelligence and build starships. Another is, you know, become a mushroom and produce 3 to 5 million spores per minute during sporulation, that are particles small enough to percolate by Brownian movement away from the atmosphere of the given planet and by sheer numbers, uh, and the slow gradient of drift by light pressure and that sort of thing, emanate through the universe, and establish yourself in any planetary regime that is suitable.\n\nThe- the obvious next great revelation in biology, and it\u2019s strange that we can state it because once it\u2019s stated by Carl Sagan it will be headlines everywhere, but it\u2019s obvious that space is no barrier to life. It\u2019s a- it's a- it's a barrier, in the same way that the Pacific Ocean was a barrier to life\u2019s colonization of the Hawaiian islands, but that\u2019s all. It\u2019s just a tight filter, but spores and starships, and shamans probably get through to other, uh, closed topologies in orbit around other stars. You know, there must be a dimension somewhere where all surfaces in the universe are contiguous, and if you could move into that dimension you could just walk to Zeta Reticuli.\n\nSo, uh, the means by which life will penetrate these larger dimensions that free it from its dependency on the energy cycles of the material universe are not by any means clear. I mean, it may be that it\u2019s about organizing the mind and building an inner vehicle and moves off into the imagination. The imagination may be, in fact, a 3-dimensional slice of a higher dimensional universe that is holding all of this, uh, in being and causing it to happen. The imagination, it\u2019s hard to account for it in evolutionary terms if it is not, uh, somehow mapping a, uh, field of data that is important for development.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-112", "text": "So that\u2019s that notion, the notion of the importance of, uh, psychedelics in the formation of the- this species and a continuing formation of the cultural design. I think what the psychedelics do is they de-condition from cultural programming and allow models to be replaced at a much greater rate of speed so that, uh, that the culture that uses psychedelics can trim itself to every historical current. And this is really the challenge of the future. We are moving as a culture faster and faster through the temporal medium, through the historical space, and this is creating a compression of events. And it\u2019s almost like an airfoil approaching the speed of sound. There is a wave of concushi- concussive shock building in front of our culture and we have to almost re-design ourselves in mid-flight in order to push through that barrier and into the, uh, different order, the different set of laws that will prevail once we have gotten through that. But this whole sense of everything accelerating, of all historical input being intensified and all previous times being somehow co-present, this is the phenomenon of the winding down of a universe, or the building up of an eschatological shockwave in front of a, uh, a vehicle that is trying to transit out of history and into some kind of millenarian space that is not, uh, not subject to the anxiety that history involves.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-113", "text": "And that\u2019s what the whole crisis and, uh, around the millennium and the whole 20th century really is about, you know, is this, this effort to create a complete summation that can also be used as the force to propel us beyond everything we have been or thought before because there\u2019s obviously no other escape from the culture crisis. It is, uh- that kind of situation is called a forward escape. It means the only thing you can do is move forward into the crisis at ever greater speed, because the only solution is to pass through it and move beyond it.\n\nAnd, and, as we move toward the millennium and as, you know, the intelligence of our machines, the size of our databases, the desperation of our politicians, the intensity of the visions of our visionaries, all of this will build to a crazy concatenatious climax. It can\u2019t be any other way because Christian civilization has wired us up for these things at the end of every 1,000 year period.\n\nI mean, in the year 1000 everything just went haywire, I mean people stood in the streets for months just gaping at the sky, no work got done, you know, there was such an eminent expectation of the onslaught of the millennium. Nevertheless this archetype of renewal is seeking in thousands and thousands of ways to be born, and I think that the rediscovery of psychedelics, LSD, everything that Wasson did, all of these things are critical factors in this cultural mix that is going to gel towards the recognition of the things which we hold as clich\u00e9s. You know, that the inside and outside are the same thing, that the universe can be crossed by thought in an instant, all information is somehow co-present, and, uh, and so on.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-114", "text": "Are there any questions about any of this? Yes, I said that what we take for granted, that the inside and the outside are the same thing, these things will be assimilated by the larger culture. And things like, uh, you know, human-machine interface and the ego identification with the body, I think all these things are going to be obviated. That, you see, we don\u2019t know what man is and we have a strong association that humanness is related to the monkey body, but yet our whole historical career has been of projecting ideas into technical, uh, accretions, and now that we have computers and things which, uh, mimic intelligence we are beginning to explore, you know \u201cWhat is humanness ontologically?\u201d That\u2019s what people are really talking about when they say \"can machines think? Will machines think?\" They mean \u201cis what we have focused in on as the defining factor of our being that sets us apart from all other things something which we could manufacture?\u201d", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-115", "text": "And the answer is probably to some degree yes. Because much of what is intelligence, or appears superficially to be intelligence is simply data and retrieval so that, you know, more and more of the culture is being hardwired into an electronic coral reef that is simply the outermost of each of our own exoskeletons. We all, uh, have telephones in our homes. Many of us have computer terminals. These things introduce us to a global skin of information but as the hardware grows more and more unobtrusive we will more and more come to identify these things with our own ego. And we won\u2019t even realize that we\u2019re being charged for thinking about certain questions because we\u2019re actually accessing a database somewhere which is feeding us data. So that the commonality of mind is I think going to be- somehow the triumph of socialism would be the commonality of mind in a capitalist context. That there really will be an ocean of thought that you will swim in and that will be composed of deeper and deeper levels of integrated information. Perhaps this is all that hyperspace is, is the entirely expressed informational ghost of this physical universe.\n\nAnd that it\u2019s in the, it's in the informational reconstruction of the physical universe that the mind will eventually come to swim like a fish, you know, and will come and go from various constellations of aggregation and integration. I mean you see, what\u2019s going to happen is that the rules of the imagination are going to replace physics so that we are going to be able to do and be whatever we can imagine. Well, none of us have ever probably put in much thought to what would I be if I could be anything I could imagine?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-116", "text": "And just 20 minutes of that meditation will lead you into pretty strange places. So what would it be like if the culture evolved for a thousand years in that way? If you could be anything. I guess the first step everyone takes is they imagine themselves as the flying saucer, the lenticular, uh, mind-object made of light that can move at any speed and become any object and answer any question. And, uh, well its an archetype of wholeness in Jung in his flying saucer book, uh, talked about this thing in alchemy called the \u201crotundum\u201d which is the thing which spins, you know? It\u2019s also in alchemy called \u201cthe scintillia\u201d, the spark, and it's, uh- simply because it\u2019s round and spins it\u2019s a symbol of wholeness, but its like the exteriorization of the human soul. The realization that, you know, expressing what is within us may culturally eventually mean actually exteriorizing the human soul and interiorizing the human body so that this world is traded in for the imagination. And this is sort of what art has always been trying to do, but we\u2019re talking about a breakthrough in ways and means on such a scale that you can just march off into this art.\n\nQ: Terence, do you find it reasonable to anticipate that eventually human technology will succeed in producing computers that are just as conscious as we are, and can be able to do anything that we can do?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-117", "text": "TM: Oh yes well Kat and I did that without even a flashlight battery, just by having children. [audience chuckles] I mean there\u2019s an epigenetic combonent and a genetic component and, but what I\u2019m saying is the difference between these things may become dim indeed, in other words the way a person is made is the way a DNA message is read by RNA, and it\u2019s a, it's a group of codons of nucleotide bases which are then templated and then a ribosome reads it and, and assembles little pieces correctly and then the protein is created.\n\nWell, there\u2019s no reason why anything should be made any other way. All machines should be produced by the transcription of molecular templates, so then all our machines will become strangely quasi-biological. You wo- Chevrolets will not be manufactured, they will be grown [audience laughter] in yeasty vats and when they talk to you, the question, you know, becomes very moot as to whether this is a pet, a friend, a colleague, or uh [Terence chuckles]\u2026 Because that's- you see, nature works with very low energies, DNA can make anything and there\u2019s no smelting, no huge release of toxic byproducts and uh, and the amazing thing about these proteins is that the ribosome stamps them out and they come out in like a line, but they have forces, electrostatic, and other kinds of forces, uh, scripted into them so that they fold in very, very complicated ways, and they always fold the same way. And their memory of how to fold, where this comes from is one of the great, uh mysteries of molecular biology, it\u2019s not at all understood. Well imagine if we could make machines which just uh, emerged as a strange form of spaghetti which then folded itself into jet planes, refrigerators, automobiles, color television sets, lipstick cases, and what have you.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-118", "text": "This has to do with my notion that uh, really the next evolutionary leap is uh, well, I shouldn\u2019t call it an evolutionary leap, is uh, it\u2019s a leap in epigenetic development, but is what I call the genesis of visible language. That there is an ability just under the surface of human organization waiting to be coaxed out either through yoga, or slight genetic engineering or something like that, and it is, uh, something that was anticipated by the Alexandrian philosopher Phylo-Judeas. He talked about the Logos, and- which is this teaching voice, this informing thing which is heard, and he was interested in what is called \u201cThe more perfect Logos.\u201d And he said \u201cWhat is the more perfect Logos?\u201d and then he answered his own question and said \u201cit would be a Logos which went from being heard to being beheld without ever crossing over a uh, border of transition.\u201d In other words a form of synesthesia.\n\nWell, what using ayahuasca and DMT and compounds like this which are very closely related to our ordinary brain chemistry, and practice and dedication, you can begin to explore places where a vocal synesthesia becomes a colored topological manifold. And you can communica- you can show someone your thoughts by singing in such a way as to condense visible objects into the air in front of them. And these objects are, they are hyper-words, they are words which you don\u2019t hear but which you see. And they are, and like objects they have sides, and facets, and can be rotated and examined from all sides.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-119", "text": "Well now, the biases in our language that cause us to say things like \u201cI see what you mean\u201d when we mean \u201cI understand you fully\u201d shows that we really place a greater emphasis on seeing the truth than on hearing the truth. So, the truth seen is somehow more valid than the truth heard. And, uh, ayahuasca is a perfect example of a plant which communicates with a visible language. The mushroom, you often hear it, and often the hearing evolves into a uh, visible synesthesic field of photonic input. But the ayahuasca always communicates visually, and it\u2019s like the Mayan glyphs or something. It\u2019s this fantastically complicated surface which is conveying alien meaning. After an ayahuasca trip you just feel like your eyes are sticking out of your head because you\u2019ve just been looking, a- as one looks as the page of a book, for hours and hours as this strange, uh, alien, uh, 3-dimensional language flows through your mind.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-120", "text": "But I believe this is a human ability just under the surface, and that in psychedelic states of mind this happens to people. This is why all the fiddling with glossolalia, it\u2019s the hope of reaching, you know, that concordance of chemistry and that the moment will allow this to happen because it\u2019s for some reason very satisfying, it\u2019s like an utterly harmless siddhi- it seems to ha- it is true magic and the person doing it is utterly transported by their ability to project vis- visual beauty. But it appears to have no use other than entertainment of one's self and others, but eventually when it is integrated as a cultural mode I think it will be- it is what telepathy will be. Telepathy will not be hearing other people\u2019s thoughts in your head. Telepathy will be when you switch into the language which lets people see what you mean. It will be the \u201csee what I mean\" language.\n\nAnd I think that, uh, psilocybin from the very beginning was catalyzing the language centers, and in fact the kind of language that I\u2019m speaking to you right now is a prototypic type of this eventual development in human organization, and that this is the thing that makes humans unique, is this ability to make small mouth noises which are arbitrarily coded with conventionally agreed-upon meanings, which allows us then a vast control of a previously invisible, uh, linguistic space. And it\u2019s in that linguistic space that we have erected our cathedrals and conducted our pogroms, and gone about all our, uh, forms of business. And, uh, and becoming aware of this, of language as a thing to journey into, and language as a thing to avoid the pitfalls of. To be- you know, the Buddhists say \u201cawareness of awareness\u201d maybe it\u2019s easier if one thinks of it as \u201cawareness of language,\u201d you know.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-121", "text": "Q: I wanted to, um, pursue this thing of the visual language, because they'll have their mouth open and there will literally be these beautiful things coming out of their mouth with flowers and they interpret this flowery speech, but perhaps, uh, they were in fact doing what you\u2019re talking about.\n\nQ2: Huh!\n\nTM: They don\u2019t interpret that as flowery speech they call it that, that yes I think that\u2019s what it must have been. This is all very puzzling to me, and if anybody knows, if anybody is an acoustics person, or I don\u2019t know what\u2019s going on exactly, but the question of how- \u201cwhat is voice?\u201d and \u201cwhat can you do with self-generated sound?\u201d How neutral is it to your own organism? In other words, any of you who read The Invisible Landscape, the theory in there is that you take a certain drug, a certain plant, and you hear and interiorized tone which is not a psychological phenomenon, but rather it is actually the electron-spin resonance of this highly biodynamic molecules by the millions entering into the synaptic cleft and competing with the endogenous, uh, transmitter there for uptake.\n\nAnd that this \u201cmmmmMmmMMmmMm\u201d is molecularly real and hence can be treated as a manipul- a variable to be manipulated with the input of other kinds of sounds such as the sound which cancels it or sound which uh, reinforces it to then manipulate these molecules in, in one's body.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "a04416f550f3-122", "text": "And this is uh, this is really I think the frontier of shamanism world-wide, that everybody is trying to figure out how far you can go with sound, and what you can do with it and also how dangerous is this? How permanent can some of these brain changes be? And what is the mechanism? You know, is the electron spin resonance thing pretty close to it or is that just a myth, and that an entirely different set of coupling mechanisms are, are making that happen?\n\nBut all of the ayahuasca shamans are great hummers, and great controllers of their voice, and, uh, you know, they do operate on your body with light and sound, and there are sounds which can slice into your body. And, uh, and it seems to me this is where experiential and experimental work with these things should concentrate to try and understand just how much of humanness can we take control of?\n\nHow bound in are we? What do these special abilities mean and uh, and uh that tradition, if any, have anticipated them?\n\nThe thing---\n\n[audio cuts off here]\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Rites+Of+Spring"}
{"id": "6d9ec9c8d19b-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nShamanic Approaches to the UFO\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n21 November 1987\n\nAngels Aliens and Archetypes 1987 Conference, San Francisco, California\n\n1128\n\nEnd of Results\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Shamanic+Approaches+to+the+UFO"}
{"id": "76af2132c424-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nUnderstanding and the Imagination in the Light of Nature\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n17 October 1987 (Potentially incorrect)\n\nPhilosophical Research Society, Los Angeles, California(Potentially incorrect)\n\n38\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo transcript available for this talk!\n\nHelp Transcribe\n\nLIGHT IN NATURE\" TALK, PART 2. WHICH IS NOW FULLY TRANSCRIBED.)\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Understanding+and+the+Imagination+in+the+Light+of+Nature"}
{"id": "6e1963447760-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nNature is the Center of the Mandala\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n12 September 1987\n\nShared Visions Bookstore, Berkeley, California\n\n5167\n\nEnd of Results\n\nthe lecture is \u201cNature is the center of the mandala\u201d. And his is really, basically, simply a structure to anticipate and discuss where nature lies in the future, the cultural future that is unfolding in front of all of us. And to background my thoughts on this matter a little bit, I have always had a relationship to nature which I pretty much took for granted, but perhaps it was, uh, it was more intense and somewhat unique than most peoples'. I grew up uh, in a small town in Colorado. I was really early into being a rock hound and then a butterfly collector. I had no interest in stamps or baseball cards or anything like that. It was always natural objects, and the attraction of tropical butterflies was the exuberant expanse of color, the affirmation of the uh, patterned richness of the universe that was seemed to be thrown out like a spark by these things. And eventually I pursued it quite foreign was\n\nanother lecture I give in which I go into this in great detail. I try to show that mushrooms in the dung of ungulate animals on the veldt of Africa 150,000 years ago drove a series of processes which resulted in self-reflecting human beings. That process didn't end with the invention of language or the domestication of cattle, it continues right up to the present day.\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Nature+is+the+Center+of+the+Mandala"}
{"id": "6e1963447760-1", "text": "Rating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Nature+is+the+Center+of+the+Mandala"}
{"id": "c70d39c9277a-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\naka Suggested Reading List\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nAudio\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\nEaster 1987\n\nEsalen Institute, Big Sur, California\n\n5697\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo youtube link available, try the following:\n\nAudio Link (Psychedelic Salon)\nTranscription\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/aka+Suggested+Reading+List"}
{"id": "95a5a05a4d44-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nWhat's so Great About Mushrooms?\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n1987\n\nUnknown\n\n1471\n\nEnd of Results\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/What%27s+so+Great+About+Mushrooms%3F"}
{"id": "227e6b7d9896-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nPsychedelics Before and After History\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n1987\n\nCalifornia Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco, California\n\n787\n\nEnd of Results\n\nfrom 49:50...", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Psychedelics+Before+and+After+History"}
{"id": "227e6b7d9896-1", "text": "\"Now, as a culture we must come to grips with the fact that the world is not simple, in the same way that a nine year-old must come to grips with the fact that the world is not simple \u2013 it is not as mummy and daddy said it was: there are tremendous vistas and abysses to be plunged. Ask your uncle and he will tell you that nobody knows what's going on in these areas. Ask a shaman and he will tell you that nobody has found the bedrock of the psychedelic experience. Nevertheless this wish to live with a bedrock of experience is a kind of trivializing of the great mystery in which we find ourselves embedded. We would have a far more accurate and complete picture of Reality if we were willing to live with the felt presence of the Mystery. And the way to do this is to experience what these plant teachers are trying to say, what these planetarily manufactured information-bearing pheromonal molecules are trying to imbue into us. Now,", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Psychedelics+Before+and+After+History"}
{"id": "227e6b7d9896-2", "text": "molecules are trying to imbue into us. Now, shamans throughout history have short-circuited the Fall. They are those who know. That's what gnosis is : it is privileged knowledge vouchsafed to the courageous. And the fact that we have fallen into a neurotic or childish style of relating to being, is nothing more than a statement about the inherent biases of our languages and our institutions. Many people have not, perhaps because they carried out their lives in the vastness of the tropical forests, where the force of Nature cannot be denied. You see, had we stayed in the tropics, we probably would never have taken the Fall into History. The Fall into History is what happens when one moves into a progressively more and more barren landscapes, and substitutes for the input of organic Nature, the self-generated neurotic maps that are based on incomplete information. Now, that cycle is being closed. I often think that the discovery of the New World and its subjugation, which", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Psychedelics+Before+and+After+History"}
{"id": "227e6b7d9896-3", "text": "of the New World and its subjugation, which was like the carrying out of the ultimate fantasies of these neurotic Judeo-Christian tradition \u2013 a world to plunder \u2013 ends very oddly : with Gordon Wasson and Valentina Wasson in 1953 penetrating into the jungle highlands of Mexico and finding there something more astonishing than a flying saucer or an alien artefact, finding there the true heritage of the human species, in the form of the intact mushroom psychedelic religion. Eros lost since the dismemberment of Osiris! Lost since great Pan\u2019s death at the rise of the Christian era! But not dead, only sleeping! And now, through cultivation techniques and the propagation of ethnographic literature and the work of people like Metzner, and Hoffman, and Wasson, and Schultes, shoved directly in the path of the careening cultural juggernaut of Western civilization. This is why I have called the weekend Psychedelics Before and After History, because I see history, as", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Psychedelics+Before+and+After+History"}
{"id": "227e6b7d9896-4", "text": "Before and After History, because I see history, as I say, as a prodigal hiatus, a wondering in the desert of Unknowing, an indulgence in an easily cured neurosis, if we will but take upon ourselves the personal \u2013 personal! \u2013 responsibility for cultivating a relationship with the Mystery! We have bought in so thoroughly to the notion of a hierarchy of information and a declension of truth from experts \u2013 whether they be politicians, priests or scientists \u2013 that we have devalued ourselves as the primary instruments of our knowing. And this is why I think among other reasons why psychedelics are so repressed, why it is so important to society to keep them out of the hands, not only of children and high-schoolers and hedonistic experimentalists, but to keep them out of the hands of research psychologists, pharmacologists and physiologists as well, because fully appreciated they will explode the Newtonian, Einsteinian universe the way a stick of dynamite explodes a rotten", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Psychedelics+Before+and+After+History"}
{"id": "227e6b7d9896-5", "text": "way a stick of dynamite explodes a rotten apple. And in the process, the hierarchies of paternalism, scientism and reductionism will just be completely swept away! And this is all going to happen, God willing, in our lifetimes. My faith is that if it doesn\u2019t happen then the cultural momentum toward a lethal conclusion will continue on to the ultimate catastrophe. And so that\u2019s why I am willing to address groups like this and seek to inspire psychologists and chemists and students of anthropology and culture to examine this. Because I think we have wandered far from our birthright and trivialized a mystery of Being in the process, and to recoup that mistake we are going to have to become as little children in the face of the shamanic phenomenon and investigate it intellectually, experientially, linguistically, individually and collectively. Only in that way will we be able to rescue the enterprise from its momentum towards catastrophe. \"", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Psychedelics+Before+and+After+History"}
{"id": "227e6b7d9896-6", "text": "Save the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Psychedelics+Before+and+After+History"}
{"id": "89da8d2ae36d-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nMushrooms, Elves and Magic\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n30 November 1988\n\nBig Sur, California\n\n6494\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo youtube link available, try the following:\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Mushrooms%2C+Elves+and+Magic"}
{"id": "2d7b510ce707-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nVision Question Through Sacred Plants\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nAudio\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n(9-14) October 1988\n\nInternational Transpersonal Conference, Santa Rosa, California\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo youtube link available, try the following:\n\nAudio Link Needed\nTranscription\nOther links\n\nNo transcript available for this talk!\n\nHelp Transcribe\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Vision+Question+Through+Sacred+Plants"}
{"id": "bbef0795b9c9-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nVision Plants - The Transpersonal Challenge\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n1988\n\nInternational Transpersonal Conference,\n\n8507\n\nEnd of Results\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Vision+Plants+-+The+Transpersonal+Challenge"}
{"id": "26d2ee9747ee-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nBefore and Beyond History\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n1988\n\nOjai, California\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo transcript available for this talk!\n\nHelp Transcribe\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Before+and+Beyond+History"}
{"id": "76c00c17e3d3-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nPlaces I Have Been\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n15th, May, 1988\n\nHermosa Beach, Los Angeles, California\n\n6013\n\nEnd of Results\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Places+I+Have+Been"}
{"id": "2c25b938e300-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nMorphogenic Fields and Psychedelic Experiences\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n1988\n\nShared Visions Bookstore, Berkeley, CA\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo transcript available for this talk!\n\nHelp Transcribe\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Morphogenic+Fields+and+Psychedelic+Experiences"}
{"id": "f7755762e73b-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nThe Light in Nature\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n1988\n\nThe Esalen Institute (Benefit for KPFK and Botanical Dimensions), Big Sur, California (Big Sur Tapes, Big Sur, California)\n\n24471\n\nEnd of Results\n\nDAY 2:\n\nI want to mention this is a benefit for Botanical Dimensions and KPFK. Botanical Dimensions is the real world kind of real politick response to all the issues that Kat and I hammered out over the last 11 years. And what it boils down to is a plant rescue project built around a 20-acre botanical garden in Hawaii. What we're doing there is trying to bring in plants that are threatened in the warm tropics; either the extinction of the species is threatened, or the knowledge of its medicinal or herbal or shamanic use is in danger of being lost. There are a lot of fancy organizations, World Wildlife Fund, Earthwatch, Earth First!, that are saving the rain forest or at least fighting that battle, legally and by getting huge tracts of forests in the tropics made into reserves. But nobody really even cognizes or is focused on saving ethno-botanical lore, data that concerns the very subtle relationship between aboriginal people and botanical resources in their environment. So that's something we're doing.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Light+in+Nature"}
{"id": "f7755762e73b-1", "text": "A theme was touched on last night which is one of the centerpiece themes of aboriginal shamanism; the felt presence of some kind of alien intelligence. An intelligence that is somehow co-present with the human sense of self, for different people, in different ways, with varying degrees of intensity in different times and places. At the bedrock of shamanism is the notion that life is really finally a mystery wrapped in an enigma, but without resolution. Nevertheless as you close distance with this mystery there are a series of analogical metaphors that don't really suggest themselves but that are communicated to you by the other.\n\nOne of these analogical metaphors is the presence of an alien intellect, an organized other that is folklorically present in tradition as fairies, gnomes, elves, jinns, afreets, sprites, tree spirits -- that sort of thing -- and anecdotally present in rural cultures throughout the world as the poltergeist and the milk-souring fairy -- these things seem to reside in a curious area that is not epistemically clearly defined for the culture.\n\nAmong aficionados of these domains the question of, \"is it real or not?\" is thought to be mildly tasteless. You would intuitively sense if you were drinking in an Irish pub and people began to spin leprechaun stories, that the question \"is it real?\" is a real bring down. It isn't really like that because the question \"is it real?\" can ultimately be shown to be infantile in any situation. I mean is the Bank of America real? Immediately we realize that ordinary experience is simply assumption skating over the mystery.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Light+in+Nature"}
{"id": "f7755762e73b-2", "text": "But I choose to talk so much about the felt presence of the other because it was for me such an astonishing personal surprise. I was raised Roman-Catholic and indulged in the kind of theological fiddle-faddle that involves. And then grew out of that into atheism, into agnosticism; by the time I got to college I was reading Jean Paul Sartre and Husserl. My intellectual ontogeny had followed historical phylogeny and I had arrived in the 20th century. And then having thought I had absorbed the lessons of LSD, which seemed to me to be to reinforce and confirm the theories of Freud concerning the dynamics of the psyche: that it was about repressed memory, repressed desire, sexual neurosis, parental foul-ups and the imprinting of traumatic behavior experienced in infancy.\n\nAnd then someone came to me one rainy February evening, in 1967, really a mad person, a kind of a social menace and intellectual criminal. A person who had said to me only months before, \"we must live as if the apocalypse has already happened.\" Here he was on my doorstep, he wore little black suits that he buttoned up to the throat. He came in and he said \"here's something that you might be interested in.\" And he brought out a sample of di-methyltryptamine that he had somehow come into contact with. And I said, \"well what is it?\" And he said, \"well, it's short acting -- it's a flash.\" And I said, \"how longdoes it last?\" -- that was my first mistake. He said, \"oh it doesn't last long.\" So I said, \"OK, we'll do it.\" And we did it.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Light+in+Nature"}
{"id": "f7755762e73b-3", "text": "And I discovered, I had, I guess it's called a peak experience, or a core revelation, or being born again, or having your third eye opened, or something, which was a revelation of an alien dimension; a brightly lit, inhabited, non three-dimensional, self-contorting, sustained, organic, linguistically intending modality that couldn't be stopped or held back or denied. I sank to the floor -- I couldn't move. I had become a disystolic hallucination of tumbling forward into fractal geometric spaces made of light, and then I found myself in the sort of auric equivalent of the Pope's private chapel, and there were insect elf machines proffering strange little tablets with strange writing on them. And I was aghast, completely -- appalled -- because the transition had been a matter of seconds and my entire expectation of the nature of the world was being shredded in front of me. I've never gotten over it.\n\nAnd it all went on, they were speaking in some kind of -- there were these self-transforming machine-elf creatures -- were speaking in some kind of colored language which condensed into rotating machines that were like Faberge eggs, but crafted out of luminescent super-conducting ceramics, and liquid crystal gels, and all this stuff was so weird, and so alien, and so \"un-english-able\" that it was a complete shock. I experienced the literal turning inside-out of the intellectual universe and I had come to this -- I thought -- fairly intellectually prepared: A kid, but nevertheless double-Scorpio, art history major, Hieronymus Bosch fan, Moby Dick, William Burroughs.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Light+in+Nature"}
{"id": "f7755762e73b-4", "text": "And as I came down -- this went on for two or three minutes, this situation of disincarnate dimensions orthogonal to reality engulfing me -- and then as I came out of it, and the room re-assembled itself, I said \"I can't believe it. It's impossible. It's im-possible.\" That to call that a \"drug\" is ridiculous. It means that you just don't know, you don't have a word for it and so you putter around and you come upon this very sloppy concept of something which goes into your body and there's a change -- it's not like that, it's like being struck by noetic lightning.\n\nThe other thing about it, which astonished me, was there is no clue in this world -- in the carpets of Central Asia, in the myths of the Maya, in the visions of an Archembolo or a Fra Angelico or a Bosch -- there is not a hint, not a clue, not an atom of the presence of this thing. When you look at the religious hierophanies of the human species they don't have the same vibe, don't have the same charge. Religion is all about dissolving into unitary states of love and trans-linguistic oceanic unity and this sort of thing. This was not like that. This was more multiplistic than the universe that we share with each other. It was almost like the victory of neo-Platonic metaphysics -- everything had become made out of a fourth-dimensional tesseractual mosaic of energy.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Light+in+Nature"}
{"id": "f7755762e73b-5", "text": "I was quite knocked off my feet. And set myself the goal of understanding this. There was really no choice you see. I don't know how it hits other people. There are many things that can be said about introducing a chemical into your body. They've shown that certain people are 50,000 times more sensitive to the odor of certain compounds than other people. And part of the unique genetic heritage of each of us are our complement of synaptic receptors for psycho-active alkaloids. So that there may be something to the notion that the Celts tend to be poets, that certain peoples tend to be expressive in certain artistic modes, or certain senses seem to be accentuated for certain human sub-groups.\n\nBut whatever the explanation for how it hit me, I felt it like a call -- there was no turning back from trying to understand, because there is no place for it in our world, and yet it is overwhelmingly, existentially real. You see? And easily accessed. I'm not telling you that you have to go some place in India with poor sanitation and put yourself at somebody's feet for a dozen years or something like that. The enunciation of the presence of this dimension should inspire some kind of coming to terms with it. It's preposterous that we can entertain in our popular journalism the titillation of the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence and prop up all reductionist personalities, and trot them out to give the statistics on the distribution of G-type stars, and this sort of thing. Because the fact is, what blinds us to the presence of alien intelligence is linguistic and cultural bias operating on ourselves. The world which we perceive is a tiny fraction of the world which we can perceive, which is a tiny fraction of the perceivable world, you see.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Light+in+Nature"}
{"id": "f7755762e73b-6", "text": "We operate on a very narrow slice based on cultural conventions. So the important thing, if synergizing progress is the notion to be maximized (and I think it's the notion to be maximized), is to try and locate the blind spot in the culture -- the place where the culture isn't looking, because it dare not -- because if it were to look there, its previous values would dissolve, you see. For Western Civilization that place is the psychedelic experience as it emerges out of nature.\n\nAs human societies interact with the psychedelic experience in nature, they inevitably secrete the institution of shamanism. Like a pearl around a sand grain, a nexus point, a loci of inter-dimensional data-flow, which is really what it is. Under certain conditions, which have to do with molecules that have evolved in these species which have a weirdly quasi-symbiotic relationship to our species, you strike through the veil. Melville said, \"if you would strike, strike through the mask.\" And that's what's done, you strike through the mask of the coordinates of apparent reality. And then, something is there which to me is a miracle.\n\nIt transcended any miracle I could ever ask for because it not only had the quality of a miracle as I imagined it, it had the quality of a miracle as I could not have imagined it. It was entirely charged with the energy of the other. It had the ambiguity of a pun: A kind of zany, impossible, improbable, hysterical revelation of the joke, the self-contradiction, the provisional nature of it all -- that it really is a Marx Brothers movie in some sense.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Light+in+Nature"}
{"id": "f7755762e73b-7", "text": "So I pursued it. First to Nepal, and involvement with pre-Buddhist shamanism in Tibet. The thing that puzzled me most, I guess because I was an art historian, was the absence of the theme in the artistic productions of human kind. I felt that maybe there was a trace of it in the artistic conceptions of the old pantheon of Tibetan shamanism. And that Central Asian Tibetan shamanism had actually created astronauts of inner space that had gotten good recon on this same area. The Dharmapalas -- the guardians of the Dharma -- are not Buddhist deities per se, they are autochonous Tibetan folk demons that protect the Dharma by virtue of the fact of having been overcome in magical battles by great Buddhist saints who came to Tibet. In fact, there are, or were before the Chinese occupation, monasteries in Tibet where the vow of fealty to the Dharma, on the part of the Dharmapala, had to be renewed by the monks every 24 hours or the thing would run amok and be on its own and bust up the countryside. (I'm just telling you what they told me.)", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Light+in+Nature"}
{"id": "f7755762e73b-8", "text": "It seemed to me that the raw sense of the shamanically accessed demonic realm was there. I also saw traces in Hellenistic gnosticism, and alchemy. But such thin traces. So I went to Nepal, immersed myself in those studies, and decided ultimately that it was inaccessible -- I wasn't sure whether it was there or not. Then I placed myself in the context of nature by moving my sphere of operations to eastern Indonesia. To the climaxed, continental rain forests of the ancient continent of Sundaland. You see Indonesia was a continent until as recently as 120,000 years ago. And then with the melting of the glaciers and the subsidence of the land, it became a vast group of islands. It was my good fortune, or fate -- because it was prudent for me at that time in the late sixties to remain outside the United States -- to become the hero I had pretended to my friends that I was. Which I wasn't. I had an around-the-world air ticket and was entirely a preppie poseur. But suddenly return was not a possibility. So I became, and my apologies to Buddhists in the audience, a professional butterfly collector.\n\nI pursued this blood sport for many months in these remote montane jungles of eastern Indonesia. And it was there that the missing link in the quest for the resolution of the meaning of DMT and spirit fell into place. Because I saw what most of us only see on National Geographic specials; the real fact of the rain forest; the real fact of organic nature. And how nature is communication. Not only are the species that comprise the biota linked by pheromones and acoustical signals and color signals and other various methods by which communication is seeping around.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Light+in+Nature"}
{"id": "f7755762e73b-9", "text": "In fact, nature ultimately resolves itself into a self-reflecting, syntactical metasystem, right down to the DNA. DNA working as it does, with nucleotide sequences that code -- that means arbitrarily assign association -- code for certain amino acids. It means that organic objects are essentially utterances in three dimensional space and express of some kind of universally distributed linguistic intent. This is what it means when it says, \"In the beginning was the word.\" Nature is that word. This infinitely self-adumbrating, fractal, syntactical hallucination with an infinite number of facets for potential regarding and self-regarding.\n\nAnd having said all of this, I might invoke here Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, which as I'm sure many of you know was Kurt Godel's brilliant contribution to theoretical mathematics where he showed that the possible set of true formal statements generated by any formal system exceeded the possible set of true formal statements which the rules of that system allowed. He showed this for simple arithmetic. And what this means, friends, is that what was called truth up until the beginning of the twentieth century, is absolutely impossible. That's what Godel's Incompleteness Theorem secures. It shows that there is no ultimate closure in an effort to describe a formal system.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Light+in+Nature"}
{"id": "f7755762e73b-10", "text": "And so in a way, my take on nature, and culture, and man, is that human language is a meta-linguistic system, generated out of the necessary formal incompleteness of nature. Nature is a self-describing genetic language and yet out of it arises something which is not formally predicted by its constraints and rules. There's a symmetry break there, and a so-called emergent property comes into view. This emergent property is our unique ability to provisionally code sound to meaning so that we then can freely command and reconstruct the world. We imagine that we do this for our own purposes of communication. The analysis that I'm suggesting would seem to indicate that actually we do it because we are complicated enzyme systems that are moving linguistic charge around inside some kind of metasystem. A metasystem that is very important for the emergence of new order out of nature.\n\nThe fact that it is contrived, provisional, is very interesting. It doesn't arise out of the gene structure. Rather it is agreed upon by individuals who are living at the time that the linguistic structure, whatever it is, emerges into consciousness. Since individuals are replaced, the language is much more in flux than the genome. The genetic component of an organism is a physical structure stabilized by atomic bonds -- possibly stabilized by a phenomenon like room-temperature's superconductivity. In that the way nature works is to conserve the genes. Molecular machinery has evolved to do that. But there is no mechanism in nature with the same kind of binding force that conserves meaning. Meaning is some kind of freely-commanded, open-ended, self-evolving system. The rules are that there are no rules.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Light+in+Nature"}
{"id": "f7755762e73b-11", "text": "Meaning consequently addresses itself to a much larger potential modality of expression than the genes. The genes basically repeat themselves, over and over. Almost like Homeric poetry, where the idea is that it be memorized and repeated. And that's what sexuality is about: memorizing and repeating gene structures, handing on parts of the story. But the epigenetic domain is different, the creation of linguistic systems, where meaning can be freely commanded, allows very rapid evolution of cultural forms.\n\nI suggested last night, and want to say more about it tonight, that this process is mediated by plants. It is synergized in human beings by plants, of all sorts. We are obsessed with drugs, and short-term spectacular effects, but think about the effect on a culture of the presence or absence of say, sugar; or the presence or absence of coffee. Human culture can essentially be seen to be a series of plant-established developmental creodes for a higher mammal. The fact that we are omnivorous lays us open for the formation of weird relationships to things in our food chain. Everybody is taught in school that the Renaissance, the close of the Middle Ages, the rise of urban culture all had to do with the search for spices. Bringing spices back to Europe. Why was it so important that a drive to simply broaden the palate of Europe is given credit for the re-defining of post-medieval civilization? Very strange.\n\nHofmann and Ruck and Wasson, showed that the Eleusinian Mysteries, which were the philosophical and experiential linchpin of the ancient world's cosmology -- the Hellenistic cosmology -- was a cult of ergotized beer. Every September at Eleusis, this Mystery was carried out, and everyone who was anyone participated in it. The rule was that you only got to do it once in your life so you had only one opportunity to understand it.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Light+in+Nature"}
{"id": "f7755762e73b-12", "text": "The point is clear: in human culture in all times and places, the way in which our cultural institutions have been molded by these so-called tertiary compounds in plants is very suggestive. It seems to me that the felt presence of the other, the alien intelligence felt as being from outer space, is actually co-present with us on this earth. And that the problem is not the finding of it, but the recognizing of it when it is seen. In the same way that in the present cultural crisis everyone is crying `answers, answers, we have to have answers,' the fact is we have the answers. The question is to face the answers.\n\nThe answer to self-empowerment lies in the psychedelic experience. The answer to dissolving the hierarchically-imposed set of mythical conventions that disempower us, lies in the psychedelic experience. Because what is really happening is a return to the primacy of feeling. And feeling is not something you convey to people the way you convey facts to them. Facts can be handed down every week through Time magazine, and the latest issue of Science News and Nature. But feelings will not lend themselves to that marketable, hierarchically-distributed system. Consequently feelings represent a backwash against that. Yet feeling is the modality in which we all operate. So as long as we are under the umbrella of the print-created, linear, post-medieval institutions that promote the myth of the public, the notion of the atomic individual, the notion that we are all basically alike then we are going to be unempowered.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Light+in+Nature"}
{"id": "f7755762e73b-13", "text": "The amazing thing to me about the psychedelic experience, is that it can be kept under wraps; that people don't insist; that somehow we're leaving it to experts to figure it out. But did you know that the experts are not allowed to work it out? That in this particular area, the entire human race has been relegated to an infantile status. It is not really professionally possible, to do work with these things.\n\nNevertheless, our cultural crisis is deepening. Deepening mainly because we have very poor connections among our fragmented and autonomous psychic structures -- within ourselves as individuals and within ourselves as a society. Our whole problem is that we can't communicate with each other, we can't express intention. Yet the psychedelics are sitting there waiting to unify us, to introduce us to the trans-linguistic intention. To carry us forward into a realm of appropriate cultural activity, which is to my mind, the realm beyond history. Beyond history lies effortless and appropriate cultural activity. And nature has proceeded us, as it always does, by laying out models that can be followed to realize this.\n\nAs an example, I'll point out that the 19th century had a titular animal. Its titular animal was the horse, idealized as the steam engine, the Iron Horse. Marx talked about the locomotive of history, and there was a whole focusing on the horse archetype. Which in the 20th century, gave way to the titulary animal, the raptor, the bird of prey, as exemplified by high-performance fighter aircraft, as the kind of ultimate union of man and machine in some kind of glorification of the completion of a certain set of cultural ideals.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Light+in+Nature"}
{"id": "f7755762e73b-14", "text": "In thinking about this and in thinking about how language is the cultural frontier of our species, I went to nature looking for models of how we might move beyond the bird of prey, which when you think about it, is the American symbol. It was also the symbol of the Third Reich. A lot of creepy scenes have actually been into birds of prey, when Alleric the Visigoth burned Eleusis, it was the crow that fluttered on his battle standard as the greasy smoke swept by. These dark birds have been ever with us.\n\nIn looking for a new titulary animal and drawing the conclusion of what it would mean, I was drawn to look, strangely enough, at cephalopods, octopi. Because I felt, first of all, they are extremely alien. The break between our line of development in the phylogenetic tree, and the mollusca, which is what a cephalopod is, is about 700 million years ago. Nevertheless, and many of you who are students of evolution know, that when evolutionists talk about parallel evolution, they always bring out the example of the optical system of the octopi. Because, isn't this astonishing? -- it's very much like the human eye, and yet it developed entirely independently. This shows how the same set of external factors impinging on a raw gene pool will inevitably sculpt the same organs or attain the same end, and so forth and so on.\n\nWell, the optical capacity of octopi is one thing. What interested me was their linguistic organization. They are virtually entirely nervous system. First of all, they have eight arms in the case of the octopods, and ten arms in the case of the squid, the decapods. So coordinating all these organs of manipulation has given them a very capable nervous system as well as a highly evolved ocular system.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Light+in+Nature"}
{"id": "f7755762e73b-15", "text": "But what is really interesting about them is that they communicate with each other by changing the color and texture of their skin and their physical shape. You may know that octopi could change colors, but you may have thought it was camouflage or something very passive like that. It isn't that at all. They have a vast repertoire of traveling bars, dots, blushes, merging pastels, herringbone patterns, tweeds, mottled this-and-thats, can blush from apricot through teal into dove gray and on to olive -- do all of these things communicating to each other. That is what their large optical system is for. It is to be able to see each other.\n\nThe other thing which octopi can do -- besides having these chromatophores on the surface of their skin --they can change the texture of the skin surface: can make it rugose, papillaed, smooth, lobed, rubbery, runneled, so forth and so on. And then, of course, being shell-less molluscs, they can hide arms, and display certain parts of themselves and carry on a dance.\n\nWhen you analyze what is going on here, what at first seems like merely fascinating facts from natural history, begins to take on a more profound aspect. Because it is an ontological transformation of language that is going on in front of you. Note that by being able to communicate visually, they have no need of a conventionalized culturally reinforced dictionary. Rather, they experience pure intent of each other without ambiguity because each octopus can see what is meant -- this is very important -- can see what is meant. And I think that this heralds, or could be made to herald, a transformation in our own definitions of language and communication.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Light+in+Nature"}
{"id": "f7755762e73b-16", "text": "By eliminating the ambiguity of the audio signal, and substituting the concreteness of the visual image, the membrane of separation, that allows the fiction of our individuality, can be temporarily overcome. And the temporary overcoming of the illusion of individuality is a much richer notion of ego-death than the kind of white-light, null-states that it has imagined to be. Because the overcoming of the illusion of individuality has political consequences. The political consequences are that one can love one's neighbor, because the commonalty of being is felt. Not reasoned toward, or propagandized into, or reinforced, but felt.\n\nThis is why there is a persistent notion, which accompanies these psychedelic compounds, of a new political order based on love. This was a hard thing to say in the panhandle in 1965, it's not easy to say in heavy-metal LA.. in 1987. But it seems to be the fact of the matter. That love, which poets have celebrated for eons as ineffable, may in fact have certain ineffable dimensions attached to it, but it may in fact be more affable than we had previously cared to imagine. And the invoking of the effability of love has to do with discovering the shared birthright, the atemporal dimension that is co-present with this reality, a dimension that is a vast reservoir of anchoring -- existential anchoring -- for each and all of us in our lives.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Light+in+Nature"}
{"id": "f7755762e73b-17", "text": "So my response to feeling the political pull of this, feeling the power to transform language, that resided in these things, was to go to the people who I thought would know most about it: the shamans for whom hallucinogenic shamanism has never been an issue; for whom the notion that you're supposed to do it on the 'natch, is a patent absurdity. If you're serious about doing it on the 'natch I suggest you eliminate all food. Because this notion of the pristine self somehow riding above the muck of the world, carrying on a spiritual evolution is absolute foolishness. We are made of the stuff of the world.\n\nPeople who do not confront the presence of the hallucinogenic possibility, are turning their back on their birthright. In the same way that if you do not experience sex throughout your life you are turning your back on your birthright. After all we could argue that to allow another person to touch you, is to not do it on the 'natch, right? But, dear friends, we're slicing too close to the bone here to take that approach. It's much better, I think, to open to the world.\n\nThe world is communication. Nature is the great teacher. All human gurus are simply distillations of the wave of nature that is coming at you. So you can just short-circuit the whole human boil-down, and go straight to the executive suite by putting yourself under a tree in the wilderness. The Great Ones all have said this but they need to be taken more seriously on the subject of their own expendability. Me too.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Light+in+Nature"}
{"id": "f7755762e73b-18", "text": "Going to the Amazon with these kinds of notions, and looking at what had been achieved there, I came to have a vision then, of the future that could be. That we are hurling ourselves into a new stone age, where the fruits of the prodigal wandering, that I discussed in such detail last night, can be used to infuse new meaning into that paradise. That the imagination of man and woman is so incomparably rich, and exerts such an attraction on us as the builder-monkey, that we have to honor that. We cannot demonize that and preach a kind of naturalism that if actually put in place would cause the starvation of tens of millions of people.\n\nWe have passed the point where some kind of Luddite reform can save us. Only self-indulgent elites can preach voluntary simplicity, because a lot of people are experiencing involuntary simplicity. And, unless you're one of them it rings rather hollow to be told that Zen values are best.\n\nRe-inserting ourselves into nature is inspiration for cultural design. That's what it is -- it's not flight from the design process but a re-invigoration of it. Some of you may be aware of the concept of nanotechnology in which everything is built at the molecular level. By studying the mechanisms of the cell, and the immune system, and DNA, we begin to have a picture of how molecules and atoms are the machine parts of a microcosmic world that if we were elf chemists we could make our way into and create anything that we could imagine. I can foresee a world where all machines will be made by DNA-like polymers that will code base materials into larger and larger aggregates.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Light+in+Nature"}
{"id": "f7755762e73b-19", "text": "The minaturization of our world is a great frontier. As culture becomes more enveloping, its physical manifestation should become less material. So the ultimate notion is of the world turned back to the form it held, let's say 35,000 years ago, in which people lived in an environment of entirely climaxed natural perfection. However behind their eyelids would lie a culturally and consensually validated data phase space that is culture, civilization. Turn each of us into a telepathic aquarium, that has a direct pipeline to the general ocean of mind and being. This is possible. In fact, its not only possible, it may be the only decent solution: to down-load ourselves into another dimension. (And I want to note in passing the collapse of Max Headroom. What a tragedy I think it is that his last show was tonight. This was a weird force for cultural transformation, but to be applauded. If anybody here tonight has anything to do with it, I wish them luck.)\n\nBut this sort of notion -- the Max Headroom people and the William Gibson people have a very high-tech take on this, because they are interested in accentuating this tight blue-jean, cyber-punk kind of notion. But in fact the worlds that they describe will have many many different social sub-groups and social eco-systems forming in them. What the future really means is choice to become who we are, to flower out, to find our own way.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Light+in+Nature"}
{"id": "f7755762e73b-20", "text": "McLuhan saw all this 20 years ago: he said that the rise of global electronic feudalism would create an atomistic fragmentation of culture. It may well be that within 50 years the largest organizational entity on the planet will be corporations with a few million loyal employees, and all larger social institutions will have disappeared because they were unable to command loyalty in a social environment where direct experience has become empowered. And this empowering of direct experience, this return to the feminine, this legitimizing of the presence of the vaster regions of the unconscious -- these are all aspects of this emerging paradigm of the spirit. Understanding and the imagination in the light of nature, which is what this two-night party has been called, is a definition of the spirit.\n\nIn other words, true understanding, poetic imagination, standing as a mirror before nature as object, will cause the hologrammatic presence of the spirit to magically appear. It will be then seen to be a kind of emergent quality of the situation that was previously masked, simply because the elements had not fallen into the correct arrangement. As we move forward through time over the next 25 years there will be many prophets of the transcendental object at the end of time, many takes.\n\nThe important thing is to recall Godel's Incompleteness Theorem, and to always recognize the provisional nature of the metaphysical goods that you're going to be sold. Nobody has the faintest notion of what's going on. It's important to keep that in mind. If you have that in mind, then the game proceeds much more cleanly.\n\nWhat is ahead of us is true high adventure. The essence of it is its unknowability. Its promise is transformation. Its theater of occurrence is the here and now. We are not waiting for it to begin, it has already happened for us, and our job is to understand how that can be so.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Light+in+Nature"}
{"id": "f7755762e73b-21", "text": "Plato said time is the moving image of eternity. My notion of shamanism is, it is that state of mind which accrues to those who have seen the end. By cultivating this notion of closure with hyper-space, imaged as the archaic return to the world of the pre-cultural ambiance, we can have an anticipation of the transcendental object. It is still in Eden. It is we who have undergone the fall and the recurso. And now the laden prodigal son returns to beat at the doors of the manorial home, the birthright. And within lies the beginnings of true civilization.\n\nWe are the forerunners of a truly moral and ethical human society. The deepest aspirations, however badly mangled and mishandled by our traditions, nevertheless still have the potential for archetypal fruition within them. The torch that has been passed from generation to generation, ad infinitum back into the distant past, is alive. And by some strange quirk of the metaphysical machinery it's our great privilege to live through this symmetry break, this revelation of the next level of the open-ended mystery. I think that the real thrill lies in relating to our world with an open mind, a sense of caring, a sense of wonder, and a sense of real, grounded, intellectually firm hope. So that's all I want to say this evening. I think we'll break for about 15 minutes and then we'll have questions. Thank you very much.\n\nQuestion and Response", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Light+in+Nature"}
{"id": "f7755762e73b-22", "text": "Question and Response\n\nNow comes my favorite part of these things which is the period where there's interaction because I think this is really a group process. Every one of you to some degree has taken upon yourself the role of the Magellan-in-the-living-room, and probably every one in this room has at some time or another gazed upon things no other human eye has ever beheld. The psychedelic dimension is not yet a science. We're more like explorers comparing our crudely drawn maps, and hastily scrawled journal notes, trying together to get a picture of this new continent in the imagination. So, I'm yours. Sir -\n\nQuestion: You have said in your book that the mushroom was genetically engineered for producing psilocybin by an alien intelligence. What do you think now about the possibility of us using psilocybin genes within other kinds of organisms like fungi or plants, or, I don't know about animals.\n\nResponse: Well, interesting question. The question was I've described the mushroom as genetically engineered by some other agency for the production of psilocybin, what do I think about the possibility of human beings being able to genetically manipulate organisms to produce psychedelic compounds? I think that the technology and theory has reached the stage where, if there's an enterprising graduate student within the sound of my voice, the way to go is to locate the gene for psilocybin in the mushroom genome, and to translate it via standard techniques to E. coli, to Escherishia coli. Then you would have an easily grown bacterium which would be a chemical factory for pouring our psilocybin. So if any of you are aspiring genetic pharmacologists, this would be a fine project.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Light+in+Nature"}
{"id": "f7755762e73b-23", "text": "I might elaborate on the answer for some of you who are not familiar with the premise. The reason I suggested that the mushroom might have been engineered and be in fact an artifact of an alien intelligence was number one, of course, the informational content of the trip, but number two, the fact that psilocybin is one of the few four-phosphoralated indoles known to occur in nature. Out of thousands and thousands of compounds and organisms, only a few four-phosphoralated compounds are known. This suggests that such compounds are artificial, or at least highly unusual.\n\nEvery week the science magazines are full of talk of strategies for locating and identifying extraterrestrial life. Well a very obvious practical and scientifically reasonable way to proceed would be to look at the DNA of various life-forms on earth, and see if there are any in which there is a wild statistical departure from the norm. Whenever you get an organism which is producing, or has genes that no other organism has, this is highly suggestive. Because species evolve incrementally out of each other. So you would expect that there would be a relative smoothness in the expression of chemical taxa. That one fungus would be rather like its taxonomic near relatives. One member of a genus would be chemically similar to another. In fact, of course, we do find subtle chemical variations, but the presence of a four-phosphoralated indole in a fungus like that is very suggestive.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Light+in+Nature"}
{"id": "f7755762e73b-24", "text": "There's an interesting book by Cyril Punampurama called Perspectives on the Problem of Extraterrestrial Communication. In it he outlines what he believes would be a general strategy for extraterrestrial contact that any kind of species would have to operate with if it were to seriously conduct a search through space. And the model posits a ship, which at a certain distance from its origin planet, must replicate itself. And then at a certain distance, replicate again. And then again, in order to keep the density of ships constant as the sphere of the area being explored expands. These ships could be as small as an animal cell. They don't have to be thought of as Star Trek-type ships.\n\nBut the point is this ship contains instructions that you must read and follow in order to call in. There are so many planets and star systems to be surveyed that the only way such a survey could be conducted is if there were a message in the ship-qua organism, such that in the gene swarm of an alien planet it would eventually be read by an organism on the planet that would act to do the things necessary to call the central switchboard. Then the folks who made the ship would say: `ah-ha, we have contact in sector alpha sub-N 362,' and they would concentrate all their attention there.\n\nQ: Yes would you speak on the time-line a little?\n\nR: Oh what a kind questioner, to lead me to my favorite subject. Well, it has to do with why (people do this for different reasons), why people take psychedelic plants and what lies behind it always. And what always lay behind it for me, from that very first DMT trip that I described to you at the beginning, was the notion, `My god, this stuff has historical significance. Nobody knows about this,' carrying with it the notion, `we are discovering it.'", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Light+in+Nature"}
{"id": "f7755762e73b-25", "text": "If we could bring it back, somehow, it would change the world. Perhaps people are bringing it back, by designing buildings and creating fashions or fashioning mathematical descriptions of reality. I never had that aspiration. I just simply defined myself, more humbly than that, as a consumer of ideology, as an intellectual who would learn what has been said and done and proposed.\n\nBut after the DMT experience I realized that there is unclaimed stuff out in those dimensions. James Joyce says in Finnegan's Wake, \"Up-nee-ent prospector you sprout all your worth and woof your wings.\" Well, the key word is prospector. A prospector is a rock hunter. I wanted to prospect for the alchemical stone, for the lapis philosoforum. And I conceived it as an idea: the timewave -- I think it would come differently for each of us -- for me it was an incredibly formal, aesthetically symmetrical, and therefore satisfying idea about what time is.\n\nThat the Tao is something which could be mathematically described as a flux of a quality in time. A quality that I named Novelty. And once I had enunciated it for myself I saw that it was the part of the world that we have no description for. Science gives us descriptions for what is possible. But we have no descriptions for what, out of the set of the possible, undergoes the actual formality of occurring. Why are certain things selected to come to be? And I saw then the notion of the Tao, which is generally presented as a kind of intuitive notion -- you're not supposed to demand too much hard-edged clarity. You say, `just flow with it man, flow with it.' Well when someone says flow to me, I think of equations which would describe flow. Flow as a dynamical system which therefore can be mathematically modeled.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Light+in+Nature"}
{"id": "f7755762e73b-26", "text": "What the timewave is, is a seeing that the very largest patterns which describe the whole birth, evolution and death of the universe, are repeated at successively shorter and shorter spans of time, down into the quantum-mechanically and micro-electronically cognizable realms of time. The realm of nano and pico seconds. I saw the I Ching, which as a kind of phenomenological description of time, produced by the oriental mind completely unencumbered by our particular set of cultural conventions. Certainly it has its own set of peculiar conventions -- but not ours -- that there is a pattern in nature, not in three dimensional space, but in time, a pattern in time on many levels that reproduces itself and can be known, can be formally described. And once known, can be seen to control the ebb and flow of connectedness. Or the forward and backward surge of novelty. I thought that this was a great insight -- since it was the only one I had, I could hardly sell it short. And what pleased me most about it was that a rap is only as good as the rapper. But here was a mathematically formal idea, that could stand on its own; be examined in the absence of the rapper; be examined by critics who were as hostile as they cared to be.\n\nIt's simply a tool. It's in a long line of tools that stretches back toward the first chipped flint, and stretches forward toward the soul made manifest as starship and alchemical transformation. But it was the tool that I came upon and what is always put against the psychedelic experience is they say, `well, big deal, what's ever come out of it?' So I was pleased that here was a concrete notion that came out of it. Richard -\n\nQ: Along the line of this timewave, can you give us a reading of our current time in the not-too-distant future?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Light+in+Nature"}
{"id": "f7755762e73b-27", "text": "R: I would be only too happy to. The question is would I care to prophesy based on this timeline? Yes, one of the assumptions built into the theory is that time is a series of nested resonances. And that each time is composed of resonance with previous and future times on varying levels. The time we are living through, I call the Roman Twilight. Simply because we are living through a period that is in resonance with the time of the last Roman emperors. And I think that if you look at it carefully, you can begin to see the way this theory proposes to be analogical and yet formal at the same time.\n\nWhat was happening in the decades immediately preceding the fall of Rome? A progressively weakened series of self-indulgent propagandists ruled the greatest empire on earth with a more and more shaky hand as they succumbed to gonorrhea, mercuric poisoning, various occult pursuits, millenarian obsessions and so forth. Meanwhile in the east, in Byzantium, a new civilization was unleashing itself, and if you think of those events, which unfolded over a few hundred years, as telescoped into a few years in our own era, you see that with the rise of Gorbachev and the continued mis-management of the American empire under the crypto-fascist series of rotating bimbos and buffoons that we have suffered through; that what is happening is an empire is being betrayed into eclipse by self-indulgence, stupidity and bad management, and its cultural adversary is in ascendancy.\n\nNow Byzantium never conquered Rome -- it doesn't happen like that -- but what ended was the Roman world of indulgent, cohesive imperialism. And what it was replaced with was a rise in religious fundamentalism, a stricter and more puritan kind of morality, the rise of epidemic diseases, and a vast economic retrenchment which initiated what we call the Dark Ages.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Light+in+Nature"}
{"id": "f7755762e73b-28", "text": "Now, in the present situation of the 20th century these themes are being recapitulated at an extremely rapid rate. So their Dark Age is for us, a tough three or four years, fortunately. It's said history occurs first as tragedy, then as farce. We are the heirs of the vast tragedy of extended history who live through the curiously mediaized and dehumanized farce of the recapitulation of these same themes. Because the very notion that the last ten Roman emperors could be symbolized by someone like the present American chief executive cannot fail to bring a small smile to any open mind.\n\nSo what I see happening over the next twenty-four years really, is first this retrenchment which, hell, it may be upon us judging by the market's performance Thursday and Friday, I may not be doing prophesy at all, this may be recap at this point. But whether that is a technical move, or the actual beginning of the unraveling of the over-bought western capitalistic system, one can't say. But I will say that by mid-1989, by the time the next presidential ritual has been enacted, it will be clear I think, that we have entered into a whole new kind of temporal domain. A kind of temporal domain that will appear superficially to be fairly bleak. Because the situation will be highly chaotic, highly novel, and tending to oscillate wildly around a mean. So in other words there will be no clear trend visible. There will appear to be progressive surges, and then losing of ground, and then progressive surges, and losing of ground. And this will go on through until the mid-nineties.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Light+in+Nature"}
{"id": "f7755762e73b-29", "text": "Around 2000 the resonance pattern will have shifted, and we will be occupying a relationship to the late high Middle Ages, and the emergence of the new social forms created by the emergence of the mercantile class and the bourgeois. In other words private wealth, cities, end of cultural insularity, a re-starting of the economic machinery, and a kind of new flowering. But still under the shadow of these fundamentalist forces that will have come into ascendancy in the previous dark age.\n\nThen in 2004 we come into that area which is in resonance with the period of the discovery of the new world. 1492 in other words. And the exploration of the New World and its subjugation over about a hundred and fifty years will be going on as we open the millennium.\n\nWhat the discovery of the new world will mean, in terms of our reenactment of these great themes, is any body's guess. It could be the vindication of my style of rap: a nearby inhabited dimension filled with alien intelligence. Or it may be the vindication of a more orthodox sort of expectation of extraterrestrial contact. Or perhaps, ultimately, the launching of large telescopes into orbit which will confirm for us the existence of oxygen-rich water-heavy worlds around nearby stars. That alone would make an intellectual revolution that would leave our world unrecognizable to itself.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Light+in+Nature"}
{"id": "f7755762e73b-30", "text": "We have to recall that as recently as 500 years ago the continent that we are inhabiting was unknown, it was something talked of by wild-eyed dreamers. It was an impossibility, a psychedelic dimension. Everyone knew that when you sailed west far enough there be monsters and that was the end of it. It was, literally, the unconscious. Now we deal in the real estate of thatunconscious. And there is no reason why our children should not deal in the real estate of the psychedelic dimension that we are discovering and confirming over the next ten years or so. Let me carry this through to the end because the good part comes at the end.\n\nAfter the turn of the century, the acceleration of the unfolding of these resonances becomes more and more intense and eventually we reach the super-compression of modern times. This is why I proposed to you last night, the term \"compressionist\" for this school of thought that myself, and Sheldrake, and Frank Barr, and Ralph Abraham represent. Because we all are talking about the dense nesting of concrescent systems. And ultimately, in my own point of view, the emergence of a transcendental object at the end of time. And the end of time is not far off. As Joyce says in The Wake -- it may not be as far off as you wish to be congealed. It is, I think within the lifetimes of all of us, that there will be an ontological transformation of the human mode. The transcendental object is emerging.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Light+in+Nature"}
{"id": "f7755762e73b-31", "text": "Once it has emerged there will be no big deal about it. In the same way that we look back at the emergence of language. And nobody gets excited about it, or only a few philosophers do. And yet the fact that we possess language is the thumbprint of God upon our species. It's an impossible break with previous animal organization. You can talk all you want about Coco the talking gorilla, this and that, but then you turn to a poem by Andrew Marvel you realize there is an ontological break here -- there is not an even progression.\n\nSo as we anticipate this thing, it could be anything. It could be the visible language that I indicated as a possibility earlier this evening. It could be emergence in an extraterrestrial mind. It could be the transcendental emergence of all and everything -- the Tao made flesh, the actual collapse of the state vector into some kind of mysterious completion. It's much more rational to place this kind of singularity at the end of a complex evolutionary process, like the life of the universe, than at the beginning which is the scientific approach. To just say everything sprang from nothing, for no reason, in a single instant, and please don't ask questions about that because our map begins one ten-trillionth of a pico second after that happened. We don't talk about that. Well isn't this somewhat begging the question, for an intellectual enterprise that purports to offer an explanation of how things came to be?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Light+in+Nature"}
{"id": "f7755762e73b-32", "text": "The transcendental object, suggests to me a negative casuistry -- a purpose in the universe that is focusing and drawing everything toward it. And in fact I've said, history is the shock-wave of eschatology. History, which lasts 10,000 years, is a microsecond of ultra-complex experience, where the penetration of the natural world by the transcendental object occurs, each exists co-temporaneous with the other for a historical or geological microsecond and then the two terms are merged and all opposites are dissolved and somehow the gift is claimed, the pearl is restored and the project is ended.\n\nWe are living through that moment. A 10,000 year rush, from chipping of stone flint, to walking through the violet doorway of a self-generated, hyper-dimensional vehicle that carries us to our true home. No wonder it leaves an explosive set of eddies in its wake. This is what happens when a culture prepares to depart for the stars. This is not business as usual, this is something else entirely. And it's the intellectual adventure and challenge of our time for each of us to understand this in terms relevant to ourselves and the people immediately around us.\n\nSo this is the inspiration for TimeWave Zero. This is what it maps. The odd thing is that when the time-map came through, it wasn't only a map of historical process, but there was the transcendental object mapped into it, and all of its sub-reflections could be seen. This is what Christ was about. This is what Buddha was about. This is what your most enlightened moment was about. You, each of you, and me. It is the hyper-dimensional, particulate reflection of God-head scattered back through the flatter plane of this lower-dimensional slice of experience. It's hard to say it any clearer than that...\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Light+in+Nature"}
{"id": "f7755762e73b-33", "text": "Completed this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Light+in+Nature"}
{"id": "95ceb1a9d6c6-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nAliens and Archetypes\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n1988\n\nInterivew w/ Jeffrey Mishlove on 'Thinking Allowed' Show\n\n3743\n\nEnd of Results\n\n[Jeffery Mishlove, Ph.D.]: Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. Throughout recorded history, human society has been haunted by reports of unidentified flying objects in our skies, many of which have defied all attempts at scientific explanation or understanding. What are these phenomenon, and how can they be explained? With me today is Terence McKenna, a philosopher and thinker of note in the area of altered states of consciousness and alternative realities. Terence is the coauthor, with his brother Dennis of 'The Invisible Landscape', and also 'Psilocybin: The Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide'. He is a founding member of Botanical Dimensions, a nonprofit organization devoted to preserving and studying psychoactive plants used by native cultures throughout the world, and he is also the developer of a computer software package called Timewave Zero, designed to augment interpretation of the ancient Chinese book of prophecy, the I Ching. Welcome, Terence.\n\n[Terence McKenna]: It's a pleasure to be here with you.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Aliens+and+Archetypes"}
{"id": "95ceb1a9d6c6-1", "text": "[Terence McKenna]: It's a pleasure to be here with you.\n\n[Mishlove]: It's a pleasure to have you here with me, also. You know, the UFO phenomenon is, uh, striking because it's so bizarre. It seems as if the, the reports that come in about UFOs defy any attempt whatsoever to categorize them. I guess from my point of view, I can only assume that there are probably many different interpretations of, of this event. I think, given your background as a student of shamanism and altered states of consciousness and alternative realities, you have some unique perspectives on the UFO phenomenon. I wonder if we could, uh, get into that material.\n\n[McKenna]: Yes. Well, the ordinary approach to the UFOs has been to view them as visitors or intruders from a nearby star system that have come in metal ships, uh, for reasons of trade or scientific investigation or military conquest --\n\n[Mishlove]: Or missionary activity.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Aliens+and+Archetypes"}
{"id": "95ceb1a9d6c6-2", "text": "[Mishlove]: Or missionary activity.\n\n[McKenna]: -- or missionary activity, to the vicinity of our planet. This was a myth that sprang up but concomitant with the modern wave of sightings that began shortly after World War II. As time has passed and the number of sightings has gone from hundreds to thousands to hundreds of thousands of instances, as the myth has fleshed itself out with sub-themes -- the theme of abduction, the theme of telepathic contact, uh, it's become much more difficult to fit all the known facts into the simple model of, uh, space-faring visitors from another world. S,o what we are left with, then, are a number of more exotic competing theories in the so-called postmodern phase of thinking about the UFO. Probably the best known of these alternative explanations was the one pioneered by, uh, the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, who in 1953 wrote a book called 'Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky'. And, Jung was at great pains, without passing judgment on the reality of the saucers, of the things seen, to interpret them psychologically, to interpret them as one would interpret a dream. And, he saw in their circular form, in their scintillating, shining, uh, alchemical brilliance, a symbol of human wholeness, and felt that they were a symbol of our collective yearning for a kind of totality and individuation. Now, in a way this kind of explanation is very satisfying; however, it is not satisfying to the person who has immediately undergone a very strange and a very real seeming experience.\n\n[Mishlove]: Unless such a person were told great messages of hope for the planet.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Aliens+and+Archetypes"}
{"id": "95ceb1a9d6c6-3", "text": "[Mishlove]: Unless such a person were told great messages of hope for the planet.\n\n[McKenna]: Well, and this is a persistent part of the flying saucer phenomenon [Mishlove: Yea]-- that people who have close contact with the saucers return with messages of universal brotherhood and benevolence, with stories of a beneficent hegemony of organized intelligence, where wiser, older worlds and civilizations help younger and, uh, and, uh, less mature worlds toward a kind of galactic citizenship. However --\n\n[Mishlove]: That's just one thread of the evidence.\n\n[McKenna]: It's one thread of the evidence, and it isn't really well supported by the evidence. Jacques Vallee, who is one of the foremost commentators on the phenomenon, has been at great pains to point out that with the flying saucer phenomenon we're dealing with thousands and thousands of incidents per year, throughout the world. It's very hard, with...even at our own primitive level of scientific sophistication, we can learn a great deal about a planet by sending a single probe to that planet. What kind of scientific program of investigation requires thousands and thousands of appearances? And, if we make the assumption that not all appearances are observed, but that in fact only a small number are observed, then the number of appearances that must actually be going on soars toward an astronomical number. It suggests we're dealing with an interpenetration by an alien dimension on an almost industrial scale.\n\n[Mishlove]: Of course, a single probe could cause thousands of appearances.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Aliens+and+Archetypes"}
{"id": "95ceb1a9d6c6-4", "text": "[Mishlove]: Of course, a single probe could cause thousands of appearances.\n\n[McKenna]: If it were of a sophisticated enough nature, that's right. The approach that I have taken, that has charactermize--, uh, characterized my work with this phenomenon, was first of all to say, we have not carried out a sufficiently in-depth survey of the life already on this planet to be able to say that at some time in the past life did not arrive here and thrive here that is not part of the general heritage of life on this planet, but that has somehow come in from the outside. My candidate for that kind of an intrusive extraterrestrial would be probably a mushroom of some sort, or a spore-bearing life form, because spores are very impervious to, uh, low temperatures and high radiation -- the kind of environment met with in outer space.\n\n[Mishlove]: In other words, a mushroom spore could conceivably, uh, even waft itself up through the atmosphere of our planet and enter into empty space.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Aliens+and+Archetypes"}
{"id": "95ceb1a9d6c6-5", "text": "[McKenna]: Oh, there's no question but what this is happening -- that through what's called Brownian motion, which is sort of random percolation, spores do reach the outer edge of our atmosphere, and, there, in the presence of cosmic rays and meteors and rare, highly energetic events, occasionally a very small percentage of these biological objects are wafted into space. We even possess, uh, meteorites that are believed to be pieces of the Martian surface, thrown out by impacts on the Martian surface of asteroidal material. In fact I think part of the grappling with the UFO mystery is going to lead to the conclusion that space is not an impermeable and insurmountable barrier to biology -- that, in fact, planets are islands, and life does occasionally wash in from distant places, and if conditions are correct, can, uh, take hold. However, let me say, in the UFO phenomenon we are dealing, or we presuppose that we are dealing, not simply with the phenomenon of extraterrestrial biology, but with the phenomenon of extraterrestrial intelligence, and this is a hair, uh, hackle-raising notion.\n\n[Mishlove]: We're dealing with more than mushroom spores in that [indecipherable].", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Aliens+and+Archetypes"}
{"id": "95ceb1a9d6c6-6", "text": "[McKenna]: We're dealing with more than mushroom spores, at least as ordinarily conceived. And, I--I think the thing that has been overlooked in almost all discussions of extraterrestrial contact is how strange the extraterrestrial is likely to be. It isn't going to be a friendly, elfin little feller with a beating heart of gold. It isn't even going to be some of the more extravagantly grotesque creations out of Hollywood. Uh, conditions and time spans in the universe are long enough and varied enough that, I would bet, the real task with extraterrestrial intelligence will be to recognize it, you see. We have no conception of how species-bound our images of life and biology are. This is a place where we have never been asked to confront to what degree the monkey within us has channeled our expectations and perceptions.\n\n[Mishlove]: Well, it is the case that, on this planet, virtually all known life forms are based on the same DNA molecule.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Aliens+and+Archetypes"}
{"id": "95ceb1a9d6c6-7", "text": "[McKenna]: Well, except that, have all life forms been examined, to see to what degree they deviate, percentage-wise, from, let's say, a standard DNA molecule? The answer is no. The sequencing of DNA is a very expensive process, and is only carried out on laboratory organisms with an extensive history of involvement in medical research, like E. coli or, uh, the ordinary laboratory rat. No, there's a great deal we don't know about life on earth. We don't know when the fungi entered into the evolutionary chain. We don't know what kind of intelligence is really possessed by, uh, the cephalopods, the shell-less molluscs that include the octopi. The intelligence of dolphins has been studied by Lilly and others; the intelligence of, uh, of the large primates other than man. One way of looking at nature is that it is entirely linguistic intent -- that DNA is in fact a-a way of uttering protein syntactical structures into matter.\n\n[Mishlove]: In other words, that all of nature is, is like a poem. [laughs]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Aliens+and+Archetypes"}
{"id": "95ceb1a9d6c6-8", "text": "[McKenna]: Yes, nature is a communicating system [Mishlove: mmmhmmm] of some sort, and the, the problem that we have is to transcend cultural languages [Mishlove: mmhmmm], historically created languages with very limited applications, and instead fall into phase with the communication systems that nature has placed all around us. One possible view of the flying saucer is that it is a kind of projection from the consciousness of the planet -- that it is Gaia, that it is in fact a kind of alchemical object haunting human historical time with a symbol of totality, the kind of totality that our religions and our mystical yearnings are so at pains to concretize for us. But, unless we, as egocentric beings, clarify our relationship to the unconscious, then I think the flying saucer is going to remain quintessentially mysterious. And, this was Jung's view.\n\n[Mishlove]: One of the things that Jung pointed out in his book is that we must pay attention to the research that Dr. J.B. Rhine was doing at that time at Duke University in ESP and psychokinesis, and that, even if UFOs had a physical reality, could be photographed or could be weighed and measured, that they still might in some manner be projections of the human mind.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Aliens+and+Archetypes"}
{"id": "95ceb1a9d6c6-9", "text": "[McKenna]: Oh yes, this is an important point to make, which the flying saucer people are forever misunderstanding, and that is, saying that the flying saucer is a psychic object does not mean that it is not a physical object. Uh, Jung in 'Mysterium Coniunctionis' is at great pains to say that the realm of the psychic and the realm of the physical meet in a strange kind of never-never land that we have yet to create the intellectual tools to explore. This is where the mystery of synchronicity is going to come to rest, the mystery of, uh, all kinds of paranormal activity on the part of human beings, and the mystery of the flying saucer. It's interesting, you see, that if you take the broad world of the so-called 'Mysteries' -- para-psychological, shamanic, extraterrestrial, and so forth -- and hypothesize another spatial dimension, one more spatial dimension, then suddenly all these mysteries become trivial. They are easily done. Locked boxes are opened; future events are discerned; lost objects are found. Uh, this sort of thing becomes quite the ordinary run of things if we hypothesize dimensions hidden from ordinary experience.\n\n[Mishlove]: And, of course, there's serious work, at this point, in the field of, uh, unified field theory in physics, to postulate other dimensions of space than we normally think of, so....", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Aliens+and+Archetypes"}
{"id": "95ceb1a9d6c6-10", "text": "[McKenna]: That's right. [Mishlove: mmhmmm] The current physical models of the universe require eleven dimensions, eleven integrated variables to describe. And that's physical models of the universe. If we then turn our attention to mind and realize that we have no definition of what mind is, why then is there any mystery in the fact that we have no definition of what the UFO is? The mind is present at hand in every conscious moment. It has been our constant companion for fifty thousand years, and we haven't a clue as to what it is. So therefore, a manifestation of the other -- the superego, or the extraterrestrial other like the UFO -- it is not surprising that it is a mystery. I always hark back to the words of J.B.S. Haldane, the great British enzymologist, who said \"reality is not only stranger than we suppose, it may be stranger than we can suppose.\"\n\n[Mishlove]: Well, that, that suggests to me that if we look at some of the most bizarre, most anomalous cases that we have, such as UFOs, and we begin to ask ourselves, not so much what are they, because that's a mystery, but what is their function? How are they affecting us? That's like holding up a mirror to ourselves, and it tells us a great deal about the basic mystery of our mind and our reality.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Aliens+and+Archetypes"}
{"id": "95ceb1a9d6c6-11", "text": "[McKenna]: Yes, this is the so-called postmodern approach -- to ask the question, not what is the UFO, but what is it doing to us? And, Jacques Vallee pioneered this approach. And, the answer is fascinating. What the UFOs are doing to us, to global society, is they are eroding faith in science by casting directly in the path of science a-a-a kind of gauntlet, a challenge: \"Crack this\" -- almost as though the cosmic giggle had shown up at, uh, the bachelor party of science to spoil the bash, uh, in the same way that the resurrection of Christ posed a tremendous problem for the intellectuals of late Roman antiquity, because they had no place in their world view for someone rising from the dead. They were Greek materialists, atomists, essentially. In that same way, the UFO challenges the assumptions of science, and, uh, I think in that way--in that sense, Jung was really onto something when he saw it as", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Aliens+and+Archetypes"}
{"id": "95ceb1a9d6c6-12", "text": "was really onto something when he saw it as coming from the unconscious. It is like an object coming from the unconscious with a compensatory function -- to turn us away from the rational and toward the intuitive; to turn us away from the paternalistic, Apollonian, solar, uh, masculine view of things, and toward a kind of watery, lunar, mysterious, intuitively felt, feminine force -- almost as though the UFO is a manifestation of Gaia as mother goddess. Science, as the proudest -- pardon the word -- erection of the rational mind, then, is challenged by something from an entirely other dimension, an entirely other realm, that concretizes for us the culture crisis. And that's why I've gotten into UFOs; I think they are important for a resolution of the culture crisis. They concretize the struggle between the paternalistic-masculine and the lunar-feminine, to--uh, between a dominator society and the kind of partnership society that we require", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Aliens+and+Archetypes"}
{"id": "95ceb1a9d6c6-13", "text": "and the kind of partnership society that we require to survive.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Aliens+and+Archetypes"}
{"id": "95ceb1a9d6c6-14", "text": "[Mishlove]: And yet, it seems as if that challenge is not a direct confrontation. As Vallee points out, the UFOs are operating almost at the mythological level of our culture. They're not landing in the White House; they're not really challenging the military or NASA.\n\n[McKenna]: No, they're very mercurial, very watery. When you reach out toward them, there is nothing there. What they chiefly have--have become is an intellectual force in human thinking about the future, but when you reach out to grasp the hardware, to read the message, to meet the alien, there is nothing there. I've come to the conclusion, both from talking to contactees and having had a contactee experience that whatever lies behind the UFO mystery, it is a force which can literally do anything. So, it is fruitless to talk about the size of the objects or their composition or color, or the size of the entities, their dress and weapons and accoutrements, because it can appear literally any way it wants to. It can appear as the Virgin Mary; it can appear as galactarian overlords; it can appear as gnomes, elves, sprites, this sort of thing. It is not to be s-caught in the rational net.\n\n[Mishlove]: Your description is strikingly actually parallel, with one exception, to the view of many Fundamentalist Christians, who say this UFO stuff is all the work of the devil.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Aliens+and+Archetypes"}
{"id": "95ceb1a9d6c6-15", "text": "[McKenna]: Well, I don't know about the work of the devil. Jung's criticism of Christianity was that it had not made a place for what he called the shadow, and he said the production Chr---the productions of Christian culture will always be neurotic because the shadow has not been included, so there's a lack of psychic balance. Perhaps the UFO carries compensatory psychic energy from the realm of the shadow. Some people are very frightened of it. Some people see it as an almost millenarian, salvational hope, the savior of mankind. I think that it's very powerful, that it haunts time like a ghost, that the messianic anticipations of Fundamentalist Christianity and Islam are in fact a picking up on the shock wave that the image of the flying saucer casts backward through time -- that this image of the New Jerusalem, the four-gated city descending from the sky to whisk the elect away to a better place, is a kind of prophecy yearning toward a fact in the act of becoming. You know, Christianity and Islam are the most history-obsessed of all the world's major religions.\n\n[Mishlove]: Along with Judaism.\n\n[McKenna]: Along with Judaism. And, all three of them have this notion of the transcendental object at the end of time. And, alchemy in the sixteenth century was an outbreak of an expectation of a transcendental object in the nearby here and now, that would cure --\n\n[Mishlove]: The omega point of history, so to speak.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Aliens+and+Archetypes"}
{"id": "95ceb1a9d6c6-16", "text": "[Mishlove]: The omega point of history, so to speak.\n\n[McKenna]: Yes, it would cure all ills, confer longevity, fertility, virility, immortality. And I think that the flying saucer is an airborne philosopher's stone -- the sophic hydrolith of Paracelsus haunting the skies of modern America, with a promise of mandalic cohesion for the future that science has not given us. Science has been a very sadly disappointing religion in the realm of the heart. The flying saucer comes from the heart, but it bears the very strange energy of the other in its manifestation as planetary goddess.\n\n[Mishlove]: I'm often struck by the, uh, psychic powers that seem to be associated with people who've had intensive encounters with UFOs. I've researched many of these cases myself.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Aliens+and+Archetypes"}
{"id": "95ceb1a9d6c6-17", "text": "[McKenna]: That's right. [Mishlove: I've researched many of these cases myself] The thing is both material and psychological. It anticipates the future. It seems that the memories of the contactees are transparent to this force. It can reach deep into their lives and confront them with information taken from forgotten incidents in their lives. It is an awesome kind of force that transcends space and time for the individual. Now, it may be that we will never have a general theory of flying saucers. It may be that this is something that addresses the individual, in the same way that I don't think we will ever have a general theory of falling in love. That, too, is something which addresses the individual. We have been mistaken to expect Time magazine or the New York Times to explain the flying saucers to us. They will not explain the flying saucers to us, any more than they will explain ourselves to us. This is something that haunts the membrane of experience very close in to the experiencing ego, and therefore it, it, uh, is threatening. This is one of the reasons that I think it relates to the psychedelic experience, because the psychedelic experience is like a UFO encounter on demand. [Mishlove: Yea] It's where the will of the person having the experience enters in. They decide to have this curious symmetry-breaking kind of experience. What I have tried to, uh, say to the UFO community is that we will not really have a deep understanding of what the contact experience is until we include data from the psychedelic experience as legitimate data to be included when looking at the problem.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Aliens+and+Archetypes"}
{"id": "95ceb1a9d6c6-18", "text": "[Mishlove]: Well, you have talked earlier about our need to make an extensive survey of all of the biological manifestations on our planet. It almost seems that, eh, in order to really get a handle on the UFO phenomenon, we'd need to make a comparable survey of all of the psychological manifestations of which we are aware, and it seems to me that at some level you would agree with me that the UFO phenomenon is one of our psychological manifestations.\n\n[McKenna]: Yes, I agree.\n\n[Mishlove]: We've got about two minutes left, so I wonder if we can sort of summarize your view in that regard.\n\n[McKenna]: Yes, I think that the UFO phenomenon is a modern manifestation of a phenomenon which has been with us for thousands of years -- that is, the partial penetration of our own cultural space by others -- pixies, elves, fairies, sprites, demons, whatever you wish to call them.\n\n[Mishlove]: Angels.\n\n[McKenna]: Angels. [Mishlove: mmhmm] In the past we had a professional class for dealing with these go-betweens. We called the professional class 'shamans', and they mitigated these comings and goings and had a lore and a mythology about them. As we have lost contact with our shamanic roots, the things which go on at a low frequency, out in the wilderness and deserts of this planet, have become to seem to us either like invasions from another world, or like virtual impossibilities. I think that the flying saucer is knocking on our door to remind us of the depth and strangeness and animate intelligence that is resident with us in nature on this planet.\n\n[Mishlove]: Terence McKenna, it's been a very eloquent presentation and extremely thought provoking. Thank you very much for being with me.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Aliens+and+Archetypes"}
{"id": "95ceb1a9d6c6-19", "text": "[McKenna]: It's always a pleasure to talk with you.\n\n[Mishlove]: And, thank you very much for being with us.\n\n[Theme music]\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Aliens+and+Archetypes"}
{"id": "9353e29be5b9-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nThe Human Future\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nAudio\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n1988\n\nUnknown\n\n3523\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo youtube link available, try the following:\n\nAudio Link\nTranscription\nOther links\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Human+Future"}
{"id": "c2287ca81881-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nTime and the I Ching\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n1988\n\nUnknown\n\n3802\n\nEnd of Results\n\nJeffrey Mishlove: Hello and welcome, I\u2019m Jeffrey Mishlove. Today we are going to examine the nature of time and the relationship between time and the human mind. With me in the studio is Terence McKenna, a specialist in shamanistic traditions and also hallucinogens. Terence is the co-author, with his brother Dennis, of Psilocybin: The Magic Mushroom Grower\u2019s Guide, and also The Invisible Landscape: Time, Hallucinogens, and The I Ching. In addition, he is the developer of a computer software program called Timewave Zero and is the founder of Botanical Dimensions, a non-profit organization devoted to preserving hallucinogenic plants as used by native peoples throughout the world. Welcome, Terence.\n\nJM: It\u2019s a pleasure to be with you again. You know, shamanistic peoples and, uh, early peoples throughout the entire world have all been involved in systems of what we call divination. It could be throwing bones, or using the I Ching, or looking at the end trails of animals, or clouds of smoke, but each system seemed to involve some sort of a unique way of linking the human mind with-with the very nature of time itself in order to understand cycles of time and understand, perhaps even to predict, the future.\n\nJM: We don\u2019t even have to mention the enormous sales of the I Ching and tarot decks and astrology products here in the United States.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Time+and+the+I+Ching"}
{"id": "c2287ca81881-1", "text": "JM: And, I know in the literature today, especially in trans-personal psychology, there are many psychotherapists who use the I Ching as a regular part of their practice. And, parapsychologists have, have found striking evidence that the [stutters] coincidences of tossing the coins in the I Ching do have, uh, psychological validity.\n\nJM: You mean, the order of hexagrams from 1 to 64.\n\nJM: Now, you\u2019re beginning to lose me a little bit.\n\nJM: It sort of reminds me of the, uh-uh, builders of the great Greek temples who used the, uh, mystical rectangle.\n\nJM: Mmmhm] seems to be the central concern here. You see, we have in-in-inherited from our fascination with Eastern philosophy the idea of Tao. And Tao, in the East, is a concept which antedates the introduction of Buddhism into China by many, many centuries. Tao is the notion of a flux, which comes and goes, a transient medium which builds structures up and pulls them apart according to\n\nJM: They--and, you seem to be suggesting, then, that the 64 hexagrams of the I Ching, in their mathematical relationship one to the other as you go through the sequence, describes a waveform.\n\nJM: That\u2019s right, different atoms.\n\nJM: And, as we have then, if I can extrapolate from what you are saying, the periodic table of-of elements in Western chemistry which defined not just 100 elements but a relationship between them, cycles and patterns \u2026\n\nJM: Families of chemicals [TM: That's right\n\n], so we have in other words families of ways of looking at time.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Time+and+the+I+Ching"}
{"id": "c2287ca81881-2", "text": "], so we have in other words families of ways of looking at time.\n\nJM: Now, you\u2019re describing this in mathematical terms, and I\u2019d like to come back and ask you to define the term fractal in a moment, but I-I'm also curious about how you seem to be going back and forth between something purely quantitative and something qualitative.\n\nJM: Well, let me step back for a moment, uh, because we\u2019ve been talking very intensively about the I Ching, which is one system, a very popular and profound and highly respected system of this type, but there are other comparable systems; for example, there is astrology.\n\nJM: But, then we're dealing again with the nature of [stutters] nested cycles.\n\nJM: Mmhm] of free will [\n\nJM: Yes], and this is why I think quantum physics, with its probabilistic notion of, uh, of determinacy, has been so attractive to the modern mind. My conclusions looking at the I Ching have been that it is not possible to know the future, for if it were possible to know it life would be a determinism and thinking would be divorced from meaning, and we would be out of business. Uh, but what is possible to know about the future is levels of novelty which future states will fulfill by the happenstance of unpredictable events. Now, this is a formal way of saying, uh, \u2018we know where the road goes, but we don\u2019t know what the scenery looks like\u2019. I think, where the future is concerned, we can know where the road goes [", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Time+and+the+I+Ching"}
{"id": "c2287ca81881-3", "text": "JM: Mmhm], but we cannot know what the f-what the scenery will look like. People who have looked at my theory have said \u2018Well, these time maps that your computer draws, you\u2019re trying to get rid of the future\u2019. And, as a matter of fact, a map of time no more eliminates the future than a map of South America eliminates the need to go there. It simply gives one a better handle on one\u2019s destination.\n\nJM: Now, you mentioned quantum physics a moment ago [TM: Yes\n\n], and, in-in quantum physics there are a number of different notions related to the future. One is a notion of multiple universes, another [the Wheeler notion\n\n]--yes--and, another is a notion of-of pro-everything is probabilistic and while we can\u2019t know with any certainty what will happen, we can state with various probabilities what-what the possibilities are. Uh, how does this relate to-to your view of time and the future?\n\nJM: And, you see this described in the I Ching?\n\nJM: Mmhm]. We have failed in our effort to assimilate time into our physics, because of our obsession with matter and the release of energy.\n\nJM: Now, there are some scholars who suggest that the African, uh, Yoruba people which their system of divination called Ifa, which-which has a cycle, I think, of 244 or 264 various myths and stories is even more sophisticated than the I Ching which has only 64. Do you- have you looked into that?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Time+and+the+I+Ching"}
{"id": "c2287ca81881-4", "text": "JM: Ahh]. There are 64 codons which code for amino acids in DNA, uh, there are 64 hexagrams, there are 8 primary hexagrams, there are 8 indispensable amino acids. I felt that, uh, really, the I Ching is like mankind\u2019s best shot at this, because it has this reflection in the biological matrix out of which consciousness emerged.\n\nJM: In-In other words, the various ancient divination systems may all reflect a-a striving of human beings towards this, this intuitive understanding of the cyclical nature of time and the relationship between mind and-and the flow of time, and yet the I Ching may have hit the nail on the head better than the others.\n\nJM: In other words, the laboratory for studying time would not so much be our observatories or our systems of quartz clocks but rather looking inside of ourselves, observing our own organism.\n\nJM: Swann's Way?\n\nJM: Mm, yes, well, I haven\u2019t read that, so you\u2019ve got me, a-buh, a bit in the dark here, we have about five minutes left, so could you summarize that point or amplify it a bit.\n\nJM: So, whereas Carl Jung, the great Swiss psychiatrist who wrote, incidentally, the preface to Richard Wilhelm\u2019s Book of the I Ching and postulated this theory of synchronicity, well, well, Jung didn\u2019t really provide any mechanism for synchronicity. He-he simply said it works this way, that the mind seems to be related to these events, and he found enormous therapeutic benefit from that understanding. What you\u2019re suggesting is that the potential mechanism behind the Jungian notion of synchronicity has to do with the structure of time itself, and [TM: That's right", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Time+and+the+I+Ching"}
{"id": "c2287ca81881-5", "text": "], and, and, you must be suggesting therefore that the human mind, at this very deep level that the sages discovered from stilling their organism, that the mind has a parallel structure, an isomorphic structure.\n\nJM: Terence McKenna, you\u2019re taking the provocative position that the I Ching, which some people view as religion and other people dismiss as superstition, is actually a science. And, I gather that your computer software package Timewave Zero proposes to be the demonstration of that.\n\nJM: Terence it\u2019s been a pleasure. Thank you very much for being with me.\n\nJM: And thank you, very much, for being with us.\n\n(415) 339-0466\n\n(415) 339-0466\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Time+and+the+I+Ching"}
{"id": "3812caf0ea45-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nHallucinogens & Culture\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n1988\n\nUnknown\n\n3519\n\nEnd of Results\n\nJeffrey Mishlove: Hello and welcome. Our topic today is hallucinogens and culture. We're going to examine the way that various cultures throughout the planet have been influenced in their social and cultural and intellectual development by hallucinogenic substances in the food chain. With me in the studio is Terence McKenna, author, lecturer, explorer, and philosopher. Terence is the co-author with his brother, Dennis McKenna, of a book called \"The Invisible Landscape: Mind, Hallucinogens, and the I Ching.\" He's also the co-author of \"Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide.\" He is the author of a computer program called \"Time Wave Zero,\" and he's the co-founder, and president, of an organization called Botanical Dimensions, which devotes itself to saving botanical plants used in shamanistic traditions throughout the world. Welcome Terence.\n\nJM: It's a pleasure to have you here. I think a good starting point for our discussion would be the ancient Vedic culture of India; one of the world's great and and one of the world's earliest religions. The Rigveda is, is considered by all scholars to be one of the most, uh, beautiful composite of religious hymns and deep philosophical discussions, and and yet when one reads the Rigveda carefully one discovers an enormous emphasis on a mysterious, apparently hallucinogenic, substance called Soma.\n\nJM: It seems quite clear that the references to Soma in the Rigveda were not really symbolic; they referred to some actual plant substance.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Hallucinogens+%26+Culture"}
{"id": "3812caf0ea45-1", "text": "JM: While I think most notable in South America is the drug ayahuasca.\n\nJM: Isn't it the case, that, I believe it was the German, uh, chemist who isolated this, uh, chem [stumbles] the chemical active ingredient in ayahuasca originally named it telepathine.\n\nJM: I would imagine that many of our viewers have seen the movie \"The Emerald Forest\" which seems to deal with the use of substances of this sort in the Amazon culture.\n\nJM: And there's also the suggestion there then, I guess, that DMT would trigger telepathic-like experiences, or clairvoyant types of experiences.\n\nJM: Well, well DMT I believe is dimethlytryptophan-\n\nJM: -Tryptamine?\n\nJM: Tryptamine. It's related to the protein tryptophan, is it not?\n\nJM: No, other cultures around the world have also used other types of substances. I think it might be interesting to talk, at least briefly, about alcohol which is referred to so often, in the Bible for example.\n\nJM: I think coffee is a very interesting example because when it was first introduced into our culture, as I understand, it was considered virtually a hallucinogenic drug.\n\nJM: And, and wasn't tobacco also viewed that way initially?\n\nJM: I.., It wouldn't be fair really to talk about drugs without mentioning, socially, what's happened in western culture, particularly during the 60s and early 70s when there was quite a wave of psychedelic drug use.\n\nJM: It's as if our culture, if I understand you right, acts as a filter, uh, between our minds and and direct experience of of reality and the drugs, somehow, blow away that crust of culture and allow more of a direct, a gnostic experience.\n\nJM: For authentic-", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Hallucinogens+%26+Culture"}
{"id": "3812caf0ea45-2", "text": "JM: For authentic-\n\nJM: Sort of still under the sway of a Victorian sense of, uh, morality.\n\nJM: You have the same controversy, don't you now, within the Hindu tradition where many gurus say 'no drugs', and are denying I suppose the, uh, um, the tradition of the Rigveda which we spoke of earlier.\n\nJM: Do you find the use of drugs of this type, hallucinogenic drugs, in the Tantric traditions, the traditions that deliberately use taboos in order to inculcate higher states of awareness?\n\nJM: You know, I think it's interesting how you referred earlier to the, uh, shamanistic religions as being the ones that really have sanctified the use of these drugs for religious purposes, and yet we find in our Western tradition, Christianity has come and in an effect labeled these sorts of things as diabolic. Uh for example, uh, drugs, I believe, uh, were used, uh, amongst various witchcraft groups that were persecuted by the church.\n\nJM: I have heard, for example, in you know the old story of, of witches using toad skins in in their brews that that there's a drug called bufotenine in- which is a hallucinogenic that comes from the skin of toads.\n\nJM: Now, other than the, uh, obvious spiritual and religious implications which we see again and again in different cultures, even, and I suppose we should mention the Native American Church and their use of\n\nJM: peyote uh, uh, what are the other kinds of cultural developments that we can trace to the use of these drugs?\n\nJM: We've got only about 2 minutes left but I, I wonder what the connection; I don't, I don't quite see it between the mushroom and the cattle and the Goddess.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Hallucinogens+%26+Culture"}
{"id": "3812caf0ea45-3", "text": "JM: Well, Terence McKenna, this is a very interesting discussion. You seem to be suggesting that our evolution, I suppose, from the animal kingdom into the human kingdom itself was catalyzed or, or triggered by our encounter with these hallucinogenics um.\n\nJM: Yeah. And one can only wonder how these hallucinogens might affect our future evolution as well.\n\nJM: Terence McKenna, thank you very much for being with me.\n\nJM: For me too. And thank you very much for being with us.\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Hallucinogens+%26+Culture"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nEthnobotany of Shamanism\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n5-6 November 1988\n\nCalifornia Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco, California\n\n49017\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNote: The talk available on the Psychedelic Salon and in the TMK audio archive torrents was mislabeled and out of order \u2013 I have restored the transcript of the talk to its order as presented in November of 1988.\n\nBecause this is a small group and probably self-selected for high interest in these subjects, as much as possible you should direct me toward whatever your special concerns are so that for each person, whatever their slant, there is a reasonable payback in information. There may be areas where I am disappointing or unhelpful but usually then I can point you toward somebody else or some source.\n\nThe first thing this afternoon is that I\u2019ll bring in some books to show you, ten or fifteen source books that would help you in researching any aspect of this, whether you are interested in it academically, or for personal spiritual growth, or whatever. It\u2019s very important to be informed. This is an area where it\u2019s very hard to bluff it, because on one level it\u2019s a branch of medical science. What we\u2019re talking about is folk pharmacology, and you really should understand certain things about pharmacology, certain things about physiology, because your life may come to depend on it in some situations. It\u2019s not casual; you want to be able to assess risk and make intelligent choices.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-1", "text": "I\u2019ll say just a little bit about my own interest in all this, or how I got into it. I don\u2019t know, I mean one creates a false history when you look back into time to try to explain how you got to where you are, or at least I do. Trying now to understand how I came to be involved in the psychedelic experience, it seems to me that what it really requires is a love of the peculiar, of the weird, the bizarre, the outr\u00e9, the freaky and unimaginable. I don\u2019t give great credence to astrology, but I am a double Scorpio, so I\u2019m told that this kind of thing predisposes one for 12th house activity.\n\nSeveral times in my life I\u2019ve gone through these kinds of revelations where everything seemed to change so profoundly that I could hardly recognize who I had been before. I noticed this happening the first time around the time I was 7 or 8. Nature and the imagination seemed to be the precursors to involvement in the psychedelic experience, so I was a rock hound, a butterfly collector, a rocket builder, a connoisseur of explosives and all of this sort of thing. While my peers were off playing little league baseball I was back in the hills digging out trilobites and tracking down moths and stuff like that. Then science fiction was a tremendous stimulus to my imagination, because it seemed to say that anything you can imagine is fair game, anything that you can conceive of can be treated as a reality. I was also raised in a Catholic household, so my whole thing was to build cynical resistance to the spirit. I was an atheist, a Marxist, an existentialist, a rational materialist \u2014 a pain in the neck, basically.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-2", "text": "In all of that, somehow I began reading Aldous Huxley, the social novels: Antic Hay, Chrome Yellow, these comedies of manners of British academic society. I was 12 or something, but I always drove myself to read beyond my level. This lead me to The Doors of Perception. I had read Brave New World, which is an anti-drug dystopia, a nightmarish world of plastic never-grow-old people who take tranquilizers every time there\u2019s a hint of any deep emotion or any kind of anxiety. The motto was, \u201cA gram is better than a damn!\u201d and you could just for a quarter, anywhere, get one of these pills that just put you right back into being happy and cooperative. And so Huxley, who was a very concerned person, very interested in the fate of 20th century society, went from this dystopic vision of drugs to The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell in which he describes experiments with mescaline that totally turned him around and convinced him that these medieval mystics that he was so fond of, Meister Eckhart, William Blake and San Juan de la Cruz and so forth, were actually describing the same reality that he was getting into.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-3", "text": "So I wanted to pursue this, and this was 1962 or something, I was about 14 years old. Then a few months later there were stories in the newspaper that morning glories were being abused for their psychedelic effect. There was a bindweed that grew locally, so I went tearing out and gathered half a peanut butter jar of this wild morning glory and took it home and ground it up and took it. Of course, nothing happened, but in the hour before it failed to come on I sat quietly and fearfully and examined my mind from that point of view for the first time in my life. In other words, from the point of view of watching it to see if it was changing in some unpredictable way. Actually, though the morning glories were totally inactive, in that hour of watching I did observe some interesting false positives that would come and go for a few minutes.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-4", "text": "Then a few months later I got my data a little more together and learned that it was a certain species of morning glory and that you had to buy the seeds from a seed company. Then I discovered what it was, though not the full-blown psychedelic experience. By this time I was in southern California going to school, and a friend of mine and I would go out into the Mojave desert and grind up low doses of these morning glory seeds, because we didn\u2019t know what a dose was, really, or what actually was supposed to happen, because if you read Huxley it\u2019s pretty high-flown language, it\u2019s all about radiance and significance and existential validity flooding into the rose. Well, once you\u2019re looking at a rose and posing the question, \u201cIs existential validity flooding into it?\u201d you don\u2019t have anything to measure it about. We would go out into the Mojave and take these morning glory seeds and observe shifts in the apparent significance of things. Everything would appear somehow more pregnant with potential meaning. Then, in fact, if you would close your eyes in that situation there would be the beginnings of hypnagogia: drifting lights and undulating colored patterns, grids and laceworks, all these things which are the preconditions for the psychedelic experience.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-5", "text": "It wasn\u2019t long after that that I went to Berkeley in the fall of 1965, and LSD was available a few months later, DMT was available. I was just stunned and have never lost that sense of profound astonishment that such things could exist. I mean, DMT seems to argue \u2014 convincingly, I might add \u2014 that the world is made entirely of something that for want of a better word we would have to call \u201cmagic.\u201d Things are not what they appear, not at all what they appear. What we call reality is some kind of utterly provisional construct that if leaned upon too hard can just fly to pieces before your startled eyes. Then the question is, \u201cWhat are the implications of this? What lies behind it?\u201d So I, as most people do, looked to tradition for some kind of guidance about what this was, and read Jung and read Mircea Eliade and saw parallels, but not a clear congruency.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-6", "text": "What I saw in the iconography of Tibetan Buddhism seemed to me to bear certain kinds of parallels to the hallucinations that I had by that time glimpsed in LSD states. So I studied the Tibetan language, went to Asia, and learned that the iconography of Tibetan Buddhism is a rip from the pre-Buddhist shamanism of Tibet, which has been there since the Stone Age. Buddhism only entered Tibet in the 7th century with Padmasambhava, and all the iconography was taken from the autochthonous indigenous shamanism that was there. I didn\u2019t find in these yogis and lamas what I was looking for, which was direct experience of these realities. Tibetan Mayahana seemed tremendously sophisticated in its analysis of states of mind, but operationally it was not coming anywhere close to what these psychedelics were able to deliver. Because I was fortunate enough to have wise and well read friends, I knew that this tradition was alive in the Amazon. I went from Nepal to India throughout Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia, ostensibly making my living as a professional butterfly collector but also using that as an excuse to go to these extremely rural and tribal situations and observe what was going on. I concluded that it was far in the past, or far removed, that it was something that had retreated to the status of a myth in most cultures.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-7", "text": "Then in late 1970 I went to the Amazon and very quickly, through using mushrooms and through using ayahuasca, learned that there it is accessed, the traditions are alive and the attitudes were simpatico with my own. There were not lineages, you didn\u2019t have to pledge eternal fealty to some character. They were exploratory in their approach, they were open-minded, everybody admitted that nobody knew what was going on with it. Yes, they could cure, yes, they could balance their societies and act as paradigms of behavior to other members of their tribe, but what these shamans really liked to do was get together and puzzle over what the hell it is, and how can it be? They were like scientists, they were like explorers, they didn\u2019t have a myth that encompassed it. They were technicians of myth which they presented back to their societies, and this is something that is very important to realize about shamanism as it is being packaged and sold in this society.\n\nA shaman is primarily a theatrical entertainer. They are not putting on the show for themselves, but in this society people actually become actors on their own stage. I maintain from spending time with them that the shamans do not believe in the powers of magic words, crystals, healing darts, and so forth and so on. They manipulate these things the way a stage magician manipulates rabbits, hats, saws and boxes with women inside them. They understand what it\u2019s for and how it works, and these things are manipulated to create an effect on other people, but the shamans understand that the real magic is the magic of sign, symbol, and language, and that by manipulating cueing, by manipulating expectation you can lead people to a fundamental confrontation, not only with themselves but with the Other.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-8", "text": "It is no easier for an Amazonian Indian to come to terms with these things than it is for a native of Manhattan. Ultimately, this coming to confront the Other is coming to confront the mystery of being. Not as a phrase, \u201cmystery of being,\u201d I mean we all give lip service to that \u2014 the mystery of being is everywhere, it\u2019s in the trees, the stones, the elevators, the life of the city, the life of the country, everything is radiant with the mystery of being \u2014 this is some kind of gloss. What I\u2019m talking about is the mystery of being as existential fact: that there is something that haunts this world, that can take apart and reduce every single one of us to a mixture of terror and ecstasy, fear and trembling. It is not an idea, that\u2019s the primary thing to bear in mind, it is an experience.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-9", "text": "As we went around this morning a surprising number of people spoke to it as an experience. This is what makes the great distinction between the shamanic, pragmatic approach and what I called last night the political ideologue approach: that we are not working here from theory, our theories are the weakest part of what we say. What we are working from is the fact of an experience which we need to make sense of. Now, most of these Other-oriented experiences, which are hard to keep track of or make sense of, cannot be commanded freely. They are more in the realm of: you are traveling in a foreign country and you contract a terrific fever and you fall into a vision and you have deep awareness and realization about the nature of life. This is not an experience that can ever be repeated; or you\u2019re alone in a wilderness and you confront a flying object in the sky which seems to trigger strange bursts of thought in yourself; this cannot be repeated and triggered on command. So only in the context of the psychedelic experience and the willed decision to act can you enter this arena of repeatedly going to meet the experience of the Other. It is a very, very bizarre enterprise. It is not that if we do it enough times, we will understand it, or become comfortable with it. It is not in its nature to be understood, and it is not in its nature to accommodate itself to us. Rather it\u2019s that we have discovered another dimension, almost in the same way that Europeans discovered another world only 500 years ago.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-10", "text": "In 1992 we will celebrate the 500th anniversary of Columbus\u2019 discovery of America. Now, notice that when Columbus set out from Spain there was a large body of intelligent opinion which believed that he was sailing over the edge of the world. Literally, that he was sailing out of mind. Instead, what lay at the end of that voyage was real estate, immense amounts of real estate, and we have come to terms with that and in fact now inhabit what 500 years ago was not even on the maps. It was in the unconscious; now it is the center of the global economy. In the same way that these European navigators began to have this intimation that the world was a wrap-around \u2014 that\u2019s what it means to say that the world is round, it means that you can get back to where you started from by going away continuously \u2014 in the same way, I think we are on the brink of discovering that you can start in three-dimensional space and time, move off in a linguistic vehicle, and find your way back to the place you left from. This means that what we call three-dimensional space and what we call the imagination actually have a contiguous and continuous transformation from one into the other, and this is big news. This is entirely goes against our Cartesian expectation of thoughts inside, world outside, objects outside, perceptions inside. This is actually nothing more, this inside-outside thing, than an artifact of European languages, and yet we take it to be how God made the world, basically, because we are so embedded in our language that we literally cannot cognize reality without it.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-11", "text": "We cannot cognize reality without our language, but in the psychedelic state somehow this happens. Somehow syntax is replaced by hypersyntax, linguistically-moderated and modulated perception is replaced by perception in the raw; not coded and sculpted and sifted for culturally validated meaning, but rather just the full hit. This is tremendously disorienting, but it is also tremendously liberating, because that\u2019s the full deck. That\u2019s when you have full command of the options available within the matrix. If you play the cultural game it\u2019s like playing only with clubs, or playing only with the red marked cards. You have to play with a full deck, and that includes this prelinguistic surround in which we are embedded.\n\nWhy is it so emotionally charged for us? In other words, why can the shamans go into this dimension and heal or divine, see into the future, or, in a sense, see into the past by discovering who stole whose cow, or who is sleeping with who, all these things that shamans are concerned with? What is this ground of being that we discover by dissolving the cultural machinery of cognition? I think it is simply reality unpackaged for a historical epoch. In other words, reality uncompromised by the need to be culturally efficacious and useful. This is precisely what we need to throw light on our culture crisis, because the models that we have used to sanction information that is culturally useful have given us information which is toxic. We have actually created a toxic relationship between ourselves and nature. We have pursued avenues of questioning, the feedback from which has given us an overpopulated, polluted, ideology-obsessed, unresponsive planet.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-12", "text": "One of the things that\u2019s so striking about shamanism in the native context is the absence of mental illness, the absence of serious neurotic patterns of behavior. This is because this translinguistic reality is allowed to work its will through shamanism, is allowed to regulate the society. In other words, our model of how society works is that we are at war with nature and we must push it back, seize a beachhead, fortify our position, dig in \u2014 these kinds of metaphors, metaphors of capture and control \u2014 while the shamanic approach is that we must communicate with nature in order that nature can communicate with us, in order that we may know what should be done. Shamanism as classically practiced is hunting magic, weather magic, healing magic. In other words, ways of getting into the evolving of state-bound system-patterns within nature. Weather, we would presume, can to some degree be predicted by looking at past weather states. Hunting can to some degree be predicted by looking at the migration and movement of game in past situations. So shamanism then becomes a kind of mnemonic exercise, where by keeping track of what has happened you can build up a model of what will happen. Originally this was done through great mnemonic feats of memory, like the Yugoslavian folktale singers or the Homeric epics or the people who sang the Edda. These were works of hundreds of thousands of lines that were passed down virtually without change over millennia.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-13", "text": "There\u2019s a strange phenomenon, at least in the evolution of cultures and perhaps more generally, which is that every step into freedom contains within it the potential for greater bondage. Here\u2019s an example of what I mean by that: women in charge of the gathering phase in hunting-gathering cultures developed language, I believe, because they had great need of the ability to make fine distinctions. In other words, here you have 50 grasses, small herbs, shrubs, roots, fruits, berries, seeds, inflorescences. Some of these things are poisonous, some of these things are foods, some grow in the spring, some in the fall, some along the river courses, some on the hilltops, so forth and so on. A great many descriptive dimensions come to bear on this, so consequently I think that women are to be held responsible for the evolution of language, in order to discuss the extremely important matter of what is good to eat and what is not, where do you find it, how do you preserve it, what do you combine it with and so forth and so on. Men, on the other hand, who were in charge of the hunting \u2014 because of the different body type and bladder capacity and so on \u2014 the premium there was placed on silence, stoicism, being able to stalk and for days make no noise, possibly, and to just sort of integrate into this silent kind of thing.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-14", "text": "This same kind of freedom which binds occurred in the shamanic effort to steer culture by mnemonic means, because eventually even the greatest of the shamanic memory artists were overwhelmed by the amount of data, by the size of the epics, by the sheer length of these genealogies, so then symbolic notation is brought in. Shamanism turns into scribecraft, signifying magical forces turns into writing down their names, and there is a tremendous binding, a compression, a limitation of freedom because the strategy of freedom became too successful. This reaching beyond ourselves is a process that is continuous. We transcend a state, we then lock ourselves into the transcendant state, it becomes defined by its own set of limitations and we move beyond it. This kind of bootstrapping mechanism has been at work throughout the evolution of language, throughout the evolution of shamanism.\n\nNow we have come to a similar kind of bind having to do with the bankruptcy of analytical analysis and rationalism, which has lead us to a pretty complete mastery of inert matter, but when pushed into the quantum realm, suddenly contradictions begin to multiply and impossible conclusions force themselves upon the investigator. What this means is that rationalism has simply reached its limit. There is no reason to think that it doesn\u2019t have a limit. It was just the inflated fantasy of the 17th century that thought that God\u2019s mind must work like the mind of a watchmaker. In fact, what with chaos theory and catastrophe theory and numerous other non-equilibrium partial differential processes in nature, we now know that nature is extremely unpredictable, highly variable, not subject to analytical understanding except in very limited domains.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-15", "text": "This understanding that quantum physics has brought the physicists and that the psychedelic state has brought the people who pursue that has not fed back into the mainstream of society. We\u2019re still living in a male-dominated, object-dominated, subject-other kind of world model, a world model inherited from the 18th century even more than from the 19th century. Well, is it going to kill us? Is it too late? What can we do about it? This is what I talked about last night, about the archaic revival as the notion of making a sharp left turn away from the momentum that the historical vehicle wants to follow, which is thanatotic, don\u2019t kid yourself. You cannot have three religions stacked up on top of each other, stretching back 4,000 years, pursuing this monotheistic vision which ends in an apocalypse without building a tremendous morphogenetic predilection for the apocalypse.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-16", "text": "Our demonic investigations into matter have lead us to create the machinery to produce the apocalypse. It was interesting, somebody said of the Reagan administration \u2014 this was when James Watt was running around saying that we didn\u2019t have to save the trees because Jesus was coming anyway, so it didn\u2019t matter \u2014 someone said, \u201cThe jerks want to be in the Bible\u201d, and that\u2019s precisely the historical situation, the jerks want to be in the Bible. In other words, every petty potentate from Frederick Barbarossa to Ronald Reagan has secretly believed that they were living in the time of the Antichrist and would participate in the scenario of the Book of Revelations. I mean, this is psychosis if you meet it in a person; if you meet it in a culture it\u2019s called religious piety and conviction. It has been going on so long that it has actually created a very narrow neck in the historical process that cannot be avoided. We now have no choice in the matter of business as usual; there will not apparently be business as usual. There will either be an apocalyptic destruction of the planet, a kind of Ragnar\u00f6k, a G\u00f6tterd\u00e4mmerung, a complete storm of fire brought on by the eruption of the psychotic mythologies that have driven the matter-centered, monotheistic, male ego culture, or there will be a plucking of victory from the jaws of that defeat, and not an apocalypse but a kind of cultural millennium, a complete breaking out of the pattern into something else.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-17", "text": "Some of you may know Riane Eisler\u2019s work The Chalice and the Blade. If you haven\u2019t read this book I recommend it to you \u2014 for psychedelic people, for feminists, for people concerned with the state of society, this is certainly an important book. What she\u2019s saying is that it is not true that the story of the human race is the story of a pendulum swing between matriarchy and patriarchy, each with its own flaws. Rather it is that human beings have always lived in an equilibrium style partnership society, except that during the last 8,000 years this pattern has been disrupted by the rise of the male ego, the suppression of the Logos-like connection to nature and a certain evolutionary path taken in the epigenetic coding of information, in other words, the phonetic alphabet. The phonetic alphabet, which has no reference to the icon of the things expressed, is utterly cool, utterly unable then to give you any feeling of engagement with what is being described. This gives permission for analytical science and the detachment of rationalism and the sorts of philosophies that have created the tremendous split between head and heart that characterizes the political systems of the last several hundred years.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-18", "text": "This thing which the shamans are contacting, which we can call another dimension, hyperspace, the collective unconscious \u2014 whatever it is, it is the ground of our becoming. The only way to unhitch ourselves from the ego is to open pathways of communication to this invisible field of intentionality in which we are embedded. This is a very difficult task because the culture in which we live denies that this thing even exists. If you start saying that you feel the heartbeat of the planet, or that you are in resonance with the local ecosystem, or still worse, if you say that you hear the voices of elves and fairies, this is automatically psychosis. You have to be observed, sedated and cured because you are participating in a model of reality that is not consensually validated. Nevertheless, I think that what we\u2019re trying to do with meetings like this is empower this particular meme, empower this idea. I can\u2019t remember who developed the idea of memes, but it\u2019s basically the notion that ideas compete with each other the way animals and plants compete in an ecosystem, that ideas adapt and spread, occupy niches, defend territory and redefine environments, and so my mention last night of the woman who said to me, \u201cI thought I was crazy until I heard you speak,\u201d for me that is really the nugget of this work and the most satisfying kind of comment that anybody could make.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-19", "text": "What has happened since the 1960s is that the straight people all went off together \u2014 and by this I don\u2019t refer to sexual preference, I use \u201cstraight\u201d in the earlier sense \u2014 they all went off and became very weird together, with their golden Mercedes and their Picasso ceramics and all that. The freaks all went off and became strange alone, each apart in our own way, because community was shattered, affinity groups were suppressed, people went all kinds of directions. Now the people who went through the \u201860s, approaching or in their 40s, have had 20 years to see how they like that kind of alienated aloneness, and so this morning as we went around I heard many people saying that they had done these things in the \u201860s, but not for a long time, and now they were returning to it. I think this is because it finally dawns on you that this may be the only shot you\u2019ve got at it. Reincarnation is fine, past lives are fine, but we\u2019re all getting daily older and we don\u2019t know where we came from, what lies beyond the zygote, and we don\u2019t know where we\u2019re going, what lies beyond the pine box. Who can say?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-20", "text": "Out of the incredible mystery of whatever the universe is, a microsecond of opportunity against impossible odds has sprung into being. We are embedded in that moment of opportunity, so what are you going to do with it? Are you going to sweep up around the ashram for 30 years and then decide that that was a mistake, or are you going to just give yourself over to the arms of holy mother Church for a lifetime? I mean, people do this. You cannot escape making some kind of commitment to something. Nobody gets through life without being asked to sign up, either in their own club or somebody else\u2019s. The mushroom said to me once, in the way that it does when it delivers these aphorisms, it said, \u201cYou must have a plan. If you have no plan you will become part of somebody else\u2019s plan. You either have a plan, or you are part of somebody else\u2019s plan.\u201d", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-21", "text": "I think people are waking up to the fact that we must use what works. When we went around the room someone talked about yoga and how the psychedelic gives the experience on demand, but are we ready, and how do you gain skills? This sort of thing. To my mind, the goal is not the psychedelic experience, the beginning of the path is the psychedelic experience. So if yoga promises that after 20 years it will deliver you to the beginning of the path, then there\u2019s something seriously wrong here. The psychedelic sets you at the beginning of the path and then people do all kinds of things with it. I am amazed; I feel there is more variation in how we deal with this than in almost any other phase of human activity, because some people seem to have almost no self-reflection. I\u2019ve noticed that it also touches sexuality. I don\u2019t know how many of you have ever encountered the Penthouse Forum, but this is where people write into Penthouse and detail these", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-22", "text": "is where people write into Penthouse and detail these astonishing, unpredictable sexual exploits \u2014 threesomes, foursomes and twelvesomes that just fell upon them \u2014 and whenever I have some occasion to read these things, what is amazing to me is that these appear to be descriptions of the behavior of an alien species. There is no self-reflection on, \u201cWhat does this mean?\u201d \u201cWhat does this mean that I get stuck in an elevator and end up copulating with twelve stockbrokers?\u201d It\u2019s just accepted as how it is. Well, you get this same thing with psychedelics, someone says, \u201cOh yeah, in the \u201860s I took psychedelics. Wow, it was really strange, all these colors and voices,\u201d and apparently there is no self-reflection, no realization that this is actually happening to you. This is happening to you; therefore the implications must be fairly central. Then other people immediately get it, they say, \u201cMy gosh, this plant, this pill shows me that reality is at least a", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-23", "text": "this pill shows me that reality is at least a thousand times larger than I thought it was. It showed me that I don\u2019t know who I am, where I am, what I am, or anything else.\u201d I don\u2019t know what it takes to instill that in people, maybe intellectual self-reflection.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-24", "text": "One of things that is so puzzling about shamans when you actually deal with them in the field is that they are not like the other people in the tribe. The other people in the tribe are very tribal people. In other words, they have all the curious cultural limitations of people in every culture. They think you smell funny, they think you look funny, everything you do is amusing, they stand around in small groups giggling and pointing. The shamans, on the other hand, are nothing like that. They accept you totally as a person. They make no cultural judgments \u2014 you don\u2019t look funny, smell funny, so forth and so on \u2014 because they are what I call extra-environmentals, they are deconditioned from the assumptions of their own culture. So they may be the Witoto shaman, but the Witoto shaman is less Witoto than any other Witoto, because the Witoto shaman operates in the context of Witotoness embedded in the larger reality.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-25", "text": "I think what we need to do when we try to revivify shamanism in our own lives is to recover the profound reality of what it\u2019s doing. Sometimes I have flashes when I\u2019m giving these talks of how different it is to be stoned than to talk about being stoned. I mean, here we sit in our cotton underwear, with our schedules in front of us; the mundaness of it is so all-pervasive. We could be discussing Gnosticism or a political action project, but we\u2019re discussing instead something really appalling, I think. We\u2019re calmly discussing the fact that there is another world overlapping our own and very few people will even admit the fact. I always think of a wonderful B-movie I saw when I was a kid where there\u2019s a dinosaur in the swamp, and it\u2019s set somewhere in Mexico, and the typical campesino is sent by the patr\u00f3n of the ranch to gather firewood in the jungle, and he of course encounters this extremely large rubber reptile roaring around, and then comes back to the ranch and is pointing back in the woods, and is completely inarticulate trying to say, \u201cA creature from the id, a beast from another dimension is rampaging around in the forest.\u201d They just dismiss him as, \u201cThese peasants, they believe anything. You can\u2019t trust them for a moment.\u201d This is the sort of situation we\u2019re in.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-26", "text": "The extraterrestrial invasion that so many people anticipate, or the extraterrestrial contact that so many people hope for and that sells so many cheap newspapers is well under way. It\u2019s simply that the words we have to describe it are utterly inadequate. So words like \u201cextraterrestrial invasion,\u201d \u201ccontact with an intelligent species,\u201d \u201cend of history,\u201d \u201cmigration into hyperspace,\u201d these are pathetic signifiers of what is actually happening to us. What is actually happening to us is pretty darn hard to wrap your mind around. We are caught in a vortex of concrescence and compression that was set in motion at least as early as the melting of the last glaciation. We are reaping the fruits of 10,000-50,000 years of sowing of the fields of mind. It is being dropped into our laps for us to create human-machine interfacing, control of genetic material, redefinition of social reality, reengineering of languages, re-visioning of the planetary ecology. All these things fall upon us, and for us to be worthy of it, for us to make sense of it, for us to be anything other than victimized by the 20th century, we need to reach back into time and to anchor ourselves with the transcendent mystery which is somehow tied up with our own being, somehow present on the planet, but mostly a large list of unanswered questions.\n\nWe don\u2019t know what is going on on this planet. We don\u2019t know why there is life here, whether it\u2019s an accident or somebody\u2019s plan. We don\u2019t know why intelligence is here: again, accident? Plan? If plan, whose plan? If plan, for what? If plan, where are we in the plan? We all tend, when we abandon ourselves to cultural values, to focus in so tightly that we lose the big picture, and if psychedelics are anything, they are a zoom lens back to the broadest possible point of view.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-27", "text": "Audience: I was curious about what you were talking about with extraterrestrials and not having the appropriate language to really discuss it, and your view of what\u2019s going on.\n\nIt changes for me all the time. I don\u2019t have a point of view, and my primary job is not public speaking or writing, but exploring. When I first started taking mushrooms, and throughout the \u201870s when we wrote the Mushroom Grower\u2019s Guide, I held several opinions, but my most strongly held opinion was that it actually is an extraterrestrial. Just no shit, flat out, it is an extraterrestrial. What\u2019s surprising to me is that a single mushroom trip of a certain sort could probably put me right back there again. Getting it worked down to Gaia, or the Overmind of the species, is a kind of process of coming down from the real unassimilable context of the experience. It\u2019s like an extraterrestrial. I would certainly say this: if extraterrestrials appeared over Washington and Moscow tomorrow it wouldn\u2019t make this any less mysterious or puzzling. In fact, the extraterrestrials might turn out to be mundane; this is not. It speaks: this is the most astonishing thing for me to get used to. I mean, the visual hallucinations, somehow I can work it around that these are floods of imagery set off from deep structures of the brain and dumping of memory banks, but that it can just address you in real time and say, \u201cTerence\u2026\u201d and then proceed to blow my mind.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-28", "text": "Now, several things may be happening here. The only time when we have the experience of focusing on an incoming message, decoding it in real time, and responding to it immediately is when we have a conversation with someone. So if you find yourself responding to a message in real time, your brain automatically thinks you\u2019re having a conversation. \u201cIf it looks like a duck, if it walks like a duck, it must be a duck. So here I am, listening and responding to someone speaking to me in English, therefore this must be a conversation.\u201d There are physical arguments for viewing the mushroom as extraterrestrial. First of all, what is psilocybin? Psilocybin is O-phosphoryl-4-hydroxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine. Of all the indole compounds in nature, only psilocybin is hydroxylated at the 4-position. If you were to design a computer program to search the life forms of earth for evidence of extraterrestrial origin, one of the things that you would tell this program to do is look for unusual molecules that have no apparent cousins or relatives among other organisms. Well, here is psilocybin, hydroxylated in the 4-position. Nothing else on earth is; a material argument for its origin outside of the terrestrial ecosystem.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-29", "text": "A slightly different argument that would see the mushroom as extraterrestrial is to look at its style, for want of a better word. What is a mushroom? First of all, they reproduce by spores. Spores are the most economical biological unit imaginable. They can survive the radiation levels of interstellar space. They can survive for aeons under conditions very close to those encountered in deep space. The mushroom spore falls into an ecosystem and it immediately undergoes cell division; a fine, thread-like network full of neurotransmitters begins to spread itself through the soil. It\u2019s very closely analogous to the neural network of a higher animal, including a human being. We\u2019re accustomed to thinking that an extraterrestrial would bear the imprint of the evolutionary situation in which it came to be. In other words, if it evolved on a low-gravity planet it will be tall and thin, if it evolved in a methane atmosphere it will have an exotic body chemistry and so forth, but that\u2019s because we ourselves have possessed the knowledge of how DNA works for only about 40 years. It\u2019s reasonable to assume, I think, that if an intelligent species gets 1,000 years of study of DNA that they can design themselves to be however they care to be. In fact, if you think of the mushroom from that point of view, I think that we might chose that kind of an adaptation if we could have any form we wanted, because it\u2019s very non-invasive, very humbly insinuates itself into a situation and grows essentially on waste material in the soil, yet when it sporulates it can actually cross the boundary of outer space.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-30", "text": "Great economy, great artistry, tremendous Zen-like aesthetics seem expressed in the mushroom if you view it as a designed piece of work rather than an object in the environment. Then finally, of course, the major argument for the extraterrestrial origin of the mushroom \u2014 but it\u2019s an insider argument \u2014 is the content of the experience. Number one, it says it\u2019s an extraterrestrial organism and it has the data to back up the claim. It can show you movies of desert worlds, jungle worlds, high-pressure, high-gravity, methane worlds, planets whose cores are helium-4, worlds where you don\u2019t know whether you\u2019re inside an organism or inside some kind of piece of machinery, whether you\u2019re under the surface of a planet, literally things where our minds just stop in the presence of. To me, that\u2019s really the interesting thing about the mushroom. It can be as friendly as it needs to be and can even reassure you with a Disneyesque burlesque of dancing flowers and pirouetting pink elephants, but once you are comfortable with it, and enter the dialogue, and begin to get to know it, getting to know it is an appalling experience. You can say to it, \u201cShow me a little more of who you are for yourself,\u201d and then a veil is lifted and your jaw just drops. Then you say, \u201cShow me a little more of who you are,\u201d and, \u201cThat\u2019s enough of who you are for yourself!\u201d", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-31", "text": "Then you wonder, while this thing is talking to me, how engaged is the mushroom by me? Is all of its attention focused upon me when I\u2019m talking to it the way all of my attention is focused back on it, or is it like a multi-user computer system, is it able to simultaneously deal with huge numbers of organisms? What is the relationship of psilocybin to the inner life of the mushroom? Is it stoned all the time? Why is it so important that these indole compounds get lodged in the nervous systems of mammals? It\u2019s almost as though it\u2019s a symbiotic relationship, that the mushroom does not truly live its life unless it is taken, unless its unique molecular component can find its way into the synapses of a self-reflecting higher animal. Then what are we for for it? You can ask these questions.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-32", "text": "One reason why I think people have had trouble confirming the animate and intelligent quality of the mushroom is that you must ask. You just don\u2019t take psilocybin and sit there because it won\u2019t do it, but if you take psilocybin and call it in some sense, whatever that means \u2014 invoke, call, try to visualize \u2014 then it will begin to come toward you and lift these veils, and this world of zany, pun-like, hyperdimensional intelligence that is revealed is as strange as an extraterrestrial would be. This is, I guess, the final content of evidence for the extraterrestrial origin, the fact that it just seems so different from anything one could conceive of or imagine. I mean, you cannot, in one of these volleys of hallucination, convince yourself, \u201cThis is only me, these are my memories, or these are distorted transforms of past experience.\u201d I was trained as an art historian to have an eye for stylistic difference and cohesion of a set of aesthetic canons, and it just blows my mind. There is more art locked up in these things to be viewed in a single hour than the human race has produced in 10,000 years, art of a compelling, weird, breathtaking, awesome quality that just breathes in every pore of itself, \u201cThis is the Other, this is not you. Don\u2019t be deceived, my little primate friend.\u201d\n\nAudience: This thing about popular culture digs into that, because if you look at the movies that came out between 1952-1962, how many of those sci-fi movies were about spores from outer space and plants coming down? These were from very straight people who hadn\u2019t taken psychedelics at all; maybe they were tuning into what was about to come 10 or 15 years later.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-33", "text": "Well, I think, and I am so far as I know pretty alone in this opinion, that a very small percentage of information is able to tunnel backward through time, that there is a very small counterflow to the forward movement of causal efficacy. One of the things that shamanism is about is going into that hyperdimensional place and picking up this thin signal from the future and tuning it in. This is why prophecy and seership and all of that has to do with states of ecstasy and intoxication. One way of viewing all religion and all spiritual metaphor-making is as an anticipation of the future. These Western religions have these apocalyptic transformations built into them almost as a self-fullfilling prophecy, in other words, they believe that the world is going to end because the world is going to end. Since the melting of the glaciers, people of sufficient sensitivity have heard through a vast wall of stochastic noise coming from the future the thin, reedy broadcast station of the true vision of the future.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-34", "text": "This seems to be one of the things that you can do with these psychedelics, tune this in. It\u2019s a cliche, and I\u2019m sure you\u2019ve heard it, that artists are society\u2019s antenna for change, that artists are supposed to be somehow more sensitive than the rest of us and they pick up the new design forms, the evolving aesthetic canons and then translate it into society for the rest of us. Well, that gains a little more bite if you substitute shaman for artist, and realize that this may not be a metaphor, it may not be simply because they pursue bohemian lifestyles and are willing to accept poverty for a life of free thinking and so forth. That isn\u2019t what\u2019s allowing an anticipation of the future; what\u2019s happening is that there truly is an anticipation of the future. Visionaries like William Blake or the author of Revelations are actually people who, by virtue of some fortuitous confluence of circumstance, space, time and genetic constitution, are able to draw these messages out. What is startling is that apparently this is fairly ordinary in psychedelic states, that in fact one way of thinking of psychedelics is that you begin to move through time when you put them into your life. I don\u2019t mean while the trip is happening, I mean ever after. If you\u2019re living with a 1960s style mind and you have a strong psychedelic experience, you will come down with a 1970\u2019s mind, or perhaps a 2040 style mind. Mind is a temporal style, it\u2019s like clothing. This is what McLuhan understood, you see, that we dress ourselves out of the closet of ideology.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-35", "text": "\u201cLadies and gentlemen, we are floating in space,\u201d that we\u2019re living in. We, as a culture, must conventionalize and believe that today is whatever it is, November 5th or 6th, 1988, but some of us are living in the 21st century and some of us are living in the 18th century. The goal is to try to move all this forward. It\u2019s funny, certain themes that have emerged in the Western mind are, in fact, very psychedelic. One of them is the notion of progressivism, which is a pretty Western idea and quite psychedelic. It\u2019s the idea that things are getting better, or that things can get better. Most societies look backward toward a paradigm of a past paradise and all effort is toward recovering this paradise. We are the only people who have this faith in progress, and it\u2019s quite strong in us, so strong that we barely question it. I remember the first time I was in Karachi, Pakistan, I was being hauled around the city in a rickshaw drawn by a guy with bare feet. It was a human-powered machine, and he spoke English and we were scoring hash and this and that and we got to know each other, and he said, \u201cIn Pakistan we understand what is wrong with the world,\u201d and I said, \u201cSo what\u2019s wrong with the world?\u201d He said, \u201cProgress, that\u2019s what it is! We have to stop progress!\u201d which for me was quite a revelatory idea.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-36", "text": "This thing about time, though, is very interesting and operates on many different levels. Ultimately, I think what the psychedelic experience may be is a higher topological manifold of temporality; that the reason it is so puzzling and so familiar, so alien and so exalting is that it is, in fact, mundane. It is in fact just us, but us sectioned through some higher spatial dimension. If, for instance, you think about magic for a moment, let\u2019s think about the major identifiers of the magical act, such as psychic surgery, where your hand is plunged through the wall of the body cavity of a human being and a tumorous organ is taken out and no wound is visible. A typical form of folk magic, much discussed, I\u2019m sure you\u2019re all familiar with it. Another form of magic, stage magic in this case: a word is written on an envelope, the envelope is locked in a box and the blindfolded magician is able to tell the audience what the word is in the envelope in the box. These things are miraculous and we cannot conceive of how they could be done, but if you allow the possibility of a higher spatial dimension, then these things become trivial because it means that the body is open. There is a way that, from the point of view of this higher spatial dimension, the inside and the outside of the body are on the same side, so no problem is posed by removing this organ. Likewise, from the point of view of a higher spatial dimension the locked box is open on one end, the end that is intersecting that dimension, so the way you read the message is you just go over and look, it\u2019s completely trivial.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-37", "text": "A way to make this cogent for people who are now thoroughly confused is to recall Edwin Abbott\u2019s fantasy Flatland, where he imagined a world of two dimensions where a house was what in our world is what\u2019s called a blueprint, and that was all you needed, and you could live in the blueprint, because you could walk in and once you had closed the door, no one in Flatland could come through that blue line and get at you. Of course, to those of us in three dimensions, we just lean over and look at the blueprint and put your thumb on the inside of the Flatlander\u2019s living room. From his point of view, from out of nowhere an enormous thumb has magically appeared in his living room. Well, this shows how perfectly mundane situations on one level appear to be absolute violations of natural law on another level. This is happening very much in the psychedelic experience, because the mind is the cutting edge of the evolving event system.\n\nAudience: Can you talk a little bit about the idea of the period that we\u2019re in with the apocalypse as some kind of transformational event, and how your experience in altered states has lead you to believe or feel that there is some hope for changing that?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-38", "text": "I think it\u2019s clear that we\u2019re in a race between apocalypse and breakthrough. I suppose breakthrough is the dark horse. Everything seems to be set up to favor apocalypse, it has the inside track, although very few people would own up to saying that they personally would want to die. So why is it, if none of us really want to die, why is the overwhelming global cultural image one of inevitable catastrophe? I\u2019m very optimistic, I really think history was for a purpose. I would not have not had it; I think it was useful and that we must have learned something very important. What we learned that was so important, I\u2019m not sure, but probably when we need it we\u2019ll have it. Maybe we need atomic weapons because a large object will be detected hurtling toward earth, and if nature had not split off the monkeys 100,000 years ago and evolved intercontinental missile thermonuclear weapon delivery systems that we could use to destroy that asteroid, then all life on earth would die. So what appears to us as madness, our own dedication to the release of larger and larger amounts of energy for no purpose other than to destroy ourselves, is suddenly rescued from pathology and shown to be this tremendously foresightful thing: \u201cThank God we did this, because otherwise we\u2019d all be dead and everything else would be dead.\u201d I don\u2019t seriously believe that, but I do think that we must have learned something very, very important.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-39", "text": "Perhaps cybernetics come in here; perhaps this exoskeleton of mnemonic material that allows us, essentially, to freeze and record our entire culture. Everything is going into the databanks. One way of thinking about what\u2019s going on is compression of information, and history represents a compression of information magnitudes more accelerated than the evolution of life. Then 20th century history represents an even greater information compression, information finally compressed to such a degree that it\u2019s like the singularity inside a black hole. A black hole has at its center a place where the equations don\u2019t sum, in other words where it doesn\u2019t make any sense. The only conclusion you can reach is that at that point of so-called infinite compression or singularity, another universe bursts into being somewhere else in a greater and vaster cosmology, and then the energy equations balance. It\u2019s as though mind is undergoing this kind of gravitational collapse, and information is being compressed to such a degree that eventually it will not all fit in the present, and then the information begins to move off into the only dimensions available to it, which are the past and the future, exactly as you fill a glass with more water than it can hold. Once it has more water in it than it can hold, the water begins to flow down to the sides and out into the larger domain; and so I think that people who try to use history, which are usually male egos and male-dominated institutions, are actually tremendously frustrated. We don\u2019t see it that way because to us it looks like they win every battle because they win every election, but because they win every election, it is their job to manage this situation. It\u2019s a case of, \u201cYou want it? Here it is!\u201d and they have not a clue as to how to manage it. Their thing is all about the headaches of ownership; our political point of view is pretty much about the headaches of disenfranchisement.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-40", "text": "I think that there is some kind of event ahead of us in time, on the order of 20-40 years, that is casting an enormous shadow back through the lower-dimensional slice of being which we call history, so that religions, mystical visions and the visions of revolutionary leaders are a response to flickering intimations of this transcendental object that is pulling intelligence out of the organic matrix of life on this planet in a process that is occupying 50,000-100,000 years. It\u2019s extremely unusual what\u2019s happening. A process that creates a series of self-transforming bootstrapped steps in a period of 100,000 years means it\u2019s a unique kind of phenomenon, there\u2019s never been anything like it on the planet. What it is leading toward is hard to say, but I know that its values are the values of life, connectedness, primacy of experience, and caring, and it is using the historical process to wire us all together in some way. Control mechanisms are spreading through the society at an enormous rate.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-41", "text": "One of the horror fantasies of the 1950s \u2014 when this conservative, straight, crew cut point of view was really at its height \u2014 one of the fears of the future that people would just toss off off-handedly was that in the future machines would take over and run everything, and this notion of the control of the planet wrested from the sure hands of noble human beings and instead betrayed into the power of calculating automatons was a great science fiction theme of the \u201850s. It\u2019s interesting how impartial computers are. They are not ideologues, they are managers, and remember, I said that the struggle was between the shaman manager and the ideologue politician. So I think that the cybernetic matrix is a tremendous tool for feminizing and radicalizing and psychedelicizing the social matrix. I see computers as entirely feminine. People have a reaction to this because they think that, because men spend a lot of time around them and seem obsessed with them, that somehow it isn\u2019t feminine; but men have always been obsessed with the feminine. I think it was D.H. Lawrence who said, \u201cWhat life is really about is men keeping women from ever suspecting how truly obsessed we are by them.\u201d", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-42", "text": "I think that this linking-together, feminizing, cybernetic thing is part of the anticipation of this object at the end of time. What seems to be happening is that we are all flowing together. We keep talking about unity, globalism, completion: well, you\u2019re going to get what you ordered. I think what it means is that probably the dear individual \u2014 which, don\u2019t be fooled, is a soft description of the male ego run rampant \u2014 the democratic individual, the citizen, this notion is in fair peril to be replaced by \u201cthe person,\u201d which is a much more nubbly kind of concept. The person is not an interchangeable part, the citizen is. The citizen is a model of society based on the industrial revolution of the 18th century, but the person is a harking back to a pre-print model. This is being set loose; it\u2019s what the hippies were, essentially. What they were trying to evoke was this \u201cdo your own thing\u201d idea, but there\u2019s a paradox here: the \u201cdo your own thing\u201d idea is somehow leading to this vectoring toward a unified cultural state where everybody is involved in everybody else. It\u2019s alright that it\u2019s paradoxical, because there\u2019s no reason that it should be reasonable.\n\nAudience: I wonder if you could address the difference between the LSD experience and the mushroom experience, if there is a difference, and also your feelings about marijuana as an altered state.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-43", "text": "I speak only from my own experience, of course, but to me the LSD experience seemed more psychoanalytical than psychedelic. I mean, I was in my early 20s when I encountered LSD, maybe I had more \u201cstuff,\u201d as they say, to deal with, but it was not a reliable visionary drug for me. It caused me to have funny ideas; it seemed mostly to be a thought thing, but not a visual thing. Somehow in my education, somewhere along the way I had picked up this bias in favor of the visual channel, so I wasn\u2019t satisfied with LSD. I wanted those things that Havelock Ellis describes, \u201cJeweled ruins and phosphorescent maidens in diaphanous gowns, howling demon songs beneath a violet moon,\u201d not funny ideas. I worked pretty diligently at it with LSD and I found that my most satisfying LSD experiences were while smoking hash, and that then really did do something interesting with it, it sent it skittering off in these wonderful visionary directions. These things do have characters, and this is something probably worth talking about in this group. At low doses, everything seems like everything else. In other words a little mescaline, a tiny amount of LSD, a little bit of MDMA, a tiny tad of psilocybin, all of these things simply register as wired, arousal, eager to hear what\u2019s being said and follow the thread of the argument and absolutely fascinated by what\u2019s going on, no matter what\u2019s going on. As you raise the dose, the character of these things begins to appear.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-44", "text": "For instance, psilocybin is, to my mind, in many ways the most anomalous, because, number one, this thing about how it speaks; it does speak. None of the others do. The others, you may occasionally in years of fiddling get a sentence or two, but the mushroom is just voluble, it just comes on and raves, and people have said to me, \u201cIt really does rave!\u201d It\u2019s not a calm, go-with-the-flow rap, it\u2019s a rap about planetary destiny and the next ten million years and the last ten million years. It\u2019s this trumpet blast, Cecil B. DeMille, hyperreal rap. Then something like ayahuasca, which is this thing that these shamans use in the Amazon basin that\u2019s based on DMT and monoamine oxidase inhibitors, you take that and it\u2019s about the rivers and the jungle, and these people and their humility and dignity, and your humility and dignity, and the earth, and plants, and life, and water and sunlight.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-45", "text": "and plants, and life, and water and sunlight. It\u2019s this totally earth-bound, terrestrial, life-affirming thing, and it does not speak. It\u2019s an eye, and its language is visual, and after an ayahuasca trip you just feel like your eyes are literally bulging out of your head. I mean, you\u2019ve spent 6 hours looking, not really doing anything else but looking. Then something like datura has this watery, magical, forgetful, kind of witchy, occult quality. It\u2019s shadows, shadows, and a peculiar quality of erosion of your own attention. No matter who you are, you find yourself wandering through empty colonnades under a sky pregnant with the possibility of rain. It\u2019s this strange de Chiricoesque kind of landscape. DMT has another quality, it seems to convey you into a world of utter outrage where all linguistic, sensory and analytical machinery is just brought to a screeching halt.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-46", "text": "It\u2019s important to learn what you like and to learn what you can put up with. I said to someone at a recent weekend who takes mushrooms quite religiously and quite regularly, \u201cDoes it ever get easier?\u201d He said, \u201cNo, it never gets easier. Each time what I pray as I go into it is, \u201cPlease let me be able to stand a little bit more!\u201d\u201d Finally, it is the real mystery, so the only way your relationship to it can end is by you averting your gaze, because no human being can gaze into it endlessly. It is what it says it is, it is the Other.\n\nAudience: I just want to follow up on that question a little bit. Stan Grof describes LSD as a non-specific amplifier, and by that he means it amplifies that which already exists in the psyche. He uses this metaphor that LSD serves as a sort of a telescope or microscope, in that itself it does not produce the experience, but it enables you to have an experience that is already there in potentia, latent in your psyche. I was wondering if you could comment on that, since you just described the various psychoactives as having a character. So would you disagree with his framework, or would you say that the various telescopes are tinted with a certain lens? How would you reconcile that?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-47", "text": "Well, at the beginning of your question you characterized LSD. It\u2019s that it is a non-specific amplifier, but of the contents of the personal unconscious and the sensorium. What people notice about LSD is either what\u2019s right or wrong with themselves, or how freaky the world is. A bug, a drop of water, it can be anything, but you discover the strangest things on LSD and they\u2019re real things: relationships of reflections and windows\u2026 It basically seems to be a tremendous amplifier of attention and analysis of the input of attention when directed into the outer world, and when directed into the inner world it\u2019s an analytical tool for looking at the past history of the individual, which is what I call the personal unconscious. The thing that always puzzled me about enthusiasts of LSD was that they claimed that beyond this lay what they call \u201cthe white light,\u201d which they put great store by, and put all kinds of Buddhist associations to it. I don\u2019t know if I\u2019ve ever had the white light experience. As I go deeper into strong psychedelics what happens is that multiplicity proliferates; there is not a simplifying, there is a further and further complexifying. I was talking to someone at Ojai Foundation about this and they said, \u201cBut surely, beyond all this there is some kind of simplification and unity,\u201d and I said I wasn\u2019t sure, that maybe it\u2019s just an infinite samsaric ocean in all directions and all dimensions forever. Ketamine comes closer to providing a no observer, nothing observed kind of state, but you can\u2019t do much with that. You can have it, and there is, of course, with the dropping of all boundaries, a feeling of release.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-48", "text": "What I am interested in is bringing back artifacts to share with the tribe, and I\u2019ve accepted that they will come in the form of either things that can be painted or things that can be said. Since I\u2019m better at the saying than the painting, I work like that. Stan is a good friend of mine, we\u2019ve talked about this over the years. I just can\u2019t confirm his maps of the psyche, I don\u2019t see those states occurring along a continuum the way that he says they do. I think it\u2019s much more chaotic. If his categories work to facilitate psychotherapy then that\u2019s good, because that\u2019s what he\u2019s interested in. In other words, I see his maps as very, very provisional and useful for navigating but I doubt that when we get the final maps, if we ever do, that they will bear terrifically much resemblance to that. I think he would agree with that; we\u2019re not at loggerheads about this. Anybody who works with psychedelics, their ultimate position is that, \u201cHell, we don\u2019t know.\u201d", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-49", "text": "This afternoon I thought we would do some operational homework and academic referencing. One of the most important things about all of this that we\u2019ve been discussing is to get the information straight, to be as well informed as possible. It\u2019s as important to be well informed in this area if you\u2019re going to do it as it is to be well informed about procedures in skin diving if you\u2019re going to do that. What I thought I\u2019d do at the beginning of this afternoon today, apropos of this idea that people should inform themselves about what\u2019s going on \u2014 though you can\u2019t find out everything, you can find out a lot more than most people know. It\u2019s amazing to me the number of people who would pay a couple of hundred bucks to come to a weekend with a person like myself to learn about psychedelics, when a couple of hundred bucks would get you quite far in a bookstore, and the public library is a marvelous resource for this stuff.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-50", "text": "I hauled some titles off my own bookshelf and I\u2019ll go through them, this is by no means all. I simply chose books that I thought were either important to the field or that I felt would be fairly easy for someone to obtain if they wanted to look into these matters. This one some of you may know, this is probably the easiest to obtain and the most compendious. It\u2019s Plants of the Gods by Richard Evans Schultes, who is professor emeritus of botany at Harvard. This is basically the distillation of his life\u2019s work. It\u2019s filled with pictures, it has all kinds of information arranged in this kind of table form where you can look up a plant, get a notion of what it looks like, what family it belongs to, what its chemical constituents are and so forth, and it has a very good bibliography and chemical appendix. So this is around and highly recommended. If you want to go slightly deeper than that book goes, this is the academic version of the same book, this is The Botany and Chemistry of Hallucinogens. This is the bible of this field. It lists virtually the state of the art circa 1980, and it has a compendious bibliography. This book, though it\u2019s from an expensive academic press, is highly recommended. If you had to have just one book on hallucinogens, this would probably be the one to go for. It\u2019s also by Richard Evans Schultes and Albert Hofmann, who some of you may know as the discoverer of LSD and the man who first characterized and synthesized psilocybin.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-51", "text": "From a slightly more countercultural point of view, this is the revised edition of the Psychedelics Encyclopedia by Peter Stafford, who some of you may know. Again, this is an effort to be compendious. No one of these books should be taken as gospel; you want to get it from several different sources before you conclude any given fact as true. This book is published by Tarcher in L.A., I think this is a fairly easily obtained book. This is the 2nd edition and he\u2019s going to do a 3rd edition, and he\u2019s very good about keeping up on the literature. This is an interesting book.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-52", "text": "Then for those of you who are more inclined to pharmacology and neurophysiology, this is a fairly hard book to obtain but in a way it\u2019s never been surpassed. It\u2019s called The Hallucinogens by Hoffer and Osmond, and there was never a revised edition after 1965. It discusses a lot about LSD and psychotherapy, and also has all kinds of strange information that was never again mentioned in the literature, that was just sort of dropped out. You can read here, for instance, about the hallucinogen dimethylacetamide, where you drink 8 fluid ounces a day for 5 successive days, and then the onset of hallucinations begin that are supposedly quite spectacular; it\u2019s just that the notion of drinking 8 fluid ounces of this bizarre chemical compound is not too appetizing. Then for sort of the state of the art in one book is Solomon H. Snyder\u2019s book Drugs and the Brain, and it doesn\u2019t simply address hallucinogens, it talks about all kinds of drugs. It explains the mechanism of drug activity, the notion of the lock-and-key activity of the drug molecule to the synaptic cleft. It gives you a short, basic course in neurology, and Sol Snyder is one of the giants of psychopharmacology, Albert Lasker Award winner, so forth and so on. Here\u2019s another book somewhat along the lines of Snyder\u2019s book, this is one of the most recent books written on hallucinogens. The editor is Barry Jacobs, Hallucinogens: Neurochemical, Behavioral and Clinical Perspectives, and as my brother said, \u201cAll of the uninteresting perspectives are covered here, very thoroughly and in detail.\u201d", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-53", "text": "What these books are good for, besides whatever they say, is that they contain excellent bibliographies, so tracing a particular problem you go to these books and then they direct you to the journal articles that give you what you want to know. Most of the literature of psychopharmacology is in journals which you will never, as a layman, encounter unless you go to medical libraries and attempt to see these things, things like Lloydia and Acta Neurologica and the Journal of Psychopharmacology. Some of these journals cost as much as $200-300 a year to subscribe to, so if you don\u2019t want to do that, the bibliography directs you to the articles you need, and you just go to the med library and xerox them out.\n\nThis sort of bridges the gap between pharmacology, sociology and anthropology. This is Brian du Toit, Drugs, Rituals and Altered States of Consciousness. Let me see if I can make a quick identification here. I think this is actually Banisteriopsis rusbyana, which is a rare admixture plant that contains DMT but has the lanceolate leaf end which distinguishes it from Banisteriopsis caapi. Probably could do 10 years for the book. The publisher on this one is a weird one, Balkema of Rotterdam, so it\u2019s a Dutch publisher.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-54", "text": "Then sort of moving out of the realm of pharmacology and psychology and into the specifically anthropological stuff, this is one with a number of various contributors, Alternate States of Consciousness: Multiple Perspectives on the Study of Consciousness, edited by Norman Zinberg of Harvard. This deals not only with shamanic drug usage but the heroin subculture, and a number of different things. Urban drug cultures are discussed as well. It\u2019s mostly a sociological perspective here. Moving into the more specifically anthropological stuff, here\u2019s my favorite one. Before he got into drumming, Michael Harner edited this book, Hallucinogens and Shamanism, Oxford University Press, available in paper. A number of writers contributed to this, there are about four articles on ayahuasca that you just will not find anywhere else, articles on peyote, a wonderful article by Henry Munn called The Mushrooms of Language, just a classic article on mushrooms. This is highly recommended.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-55", "text": "A sort of similar book by a different author is Flesh of the Gods: The Ritual Use of Hallucinogens by Peter Furst. He\u2019s an anthropologist who made his reputation among the Huichol in Mexico. This has articles by Wasson, Furst, Doug Sharon, William Emboden, Fernandez, Reichel-Dolmatoff, the usual names in this ethnobotanical field. This is a specific guide, Hallucinogenic Plants of North America by Jonathan Ott. The interesting thing about this is that it\u2019s pretty compendious, meaning that there are things discussed here that you just won\u2019t find discussed anywhere else, probably because there are so few hallucinogenic plants in North America. This guy really had to scratch to produce a book about it, but this is useful for that. Similar but more broadly-based is this book Narcotic Plants, terrible title, by William Emboden. This book has a lot of visuals in it. Why I value this book is because he has a more liberal definition of psychoactivity than most people do, so consequently his species lists are longer than anybody else\u2019s. If somebody asks you about an obscure plant \u2014 is it psychedelic or not? \u2014 this is where I look first, because he seems to list many things that nobody else has ever discussed. He teaches at Cal State; some of you may know him, I don\u2019t.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-56", "text": "Here\u2019s another one of these anthologies of writing about psychedelics, also by the same author as Flesh of the Gods, Hallucinogens and Culture by Peter Furst. Again, this has articles on mushrooms, on the discovery of LSD, on ayahuasca, on cannabis and tobacco, the biochemistry of consciousness, shamanism as the ur-religion, so forth and so on. It seems like every one of these authors then goes on to edit a book of their own favorite essays. Here\u2019s another one, Hallucinogens: Cross-Cultural Perspectives by Marlene Dobkin de Rios, who is a woman who has done a great deal of work on ayahuasca. She published a book called The Visionary Vine and another book called Ayahuasca: Mestizo Curing in an Urban Setting. Basically a sociologist, she\u2019s also at Cal State.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-57", "text": "This is sort of the granddaddy of all of these anthologies, a very interesting book, hard to get but fascinating. It\u2019s called The Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs, and it was the name of a conference that was given in San Francisco in 1967. The plan at the time of the conference was to have it occur every year, but it never occurred again because of course everything was made illegal the next year and this faltered. To show you to what degree the government was of two minds about psychedelics, it says on the frontispiece of this book, \u201cSponsored by the Pharmacology Section, Psychopharmacology Research Branch, National Institute of Mental Health, United States Public Health Service, U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare,\u201d and it was published at government expense. This is in fact a technical publication of the National Institute of Mental Health. Wonderful bibliography, extremely interesting discussion of DMT-containing snuffs, an article on the psychopharmacology of nutmeg that you just won\u2019t find anywhere else, articles on kava and an article on the history of research into psychedelic plants that goes clear back to the medieval herbalists. The last time we were in the Amazon we christened our expedition, in honor of this book, The Ethnopharmacologic Search for Cold Beer; because there ain\u2019t any, and it becomes an obsession. It\u2019s so strange what you miss. I don\u2019t even drink beer, so what do I care? After ten days in the jungle, all anybody could talk about was the possibility of cold beer, and it was still four weeks away, so\u2026", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-58", "text": "Then for somebody who really is serious, or technical, or plotting an expedition or a research project of some sort, this is really a pretty amazing book. It\u2019s dull as death, because it\u2019s essentially listings from the herbarium sheets at the Harvard Museum Botanical Library. It was put together by Siri von Reis Altschul, who was one of Schultes\u2019 graduate students, along with Ara DerMarderosian and Marlene Dobkin de Rios, some of the few women who have made significant contributions to this field when it was firmly in the hands of dominator male types. Anyway, this book is called Drugs and Foods from Little-Known Plants, and they\u2019re not whistling Dixie when they say \u201clittle-known plants.\u201d You look through this and some say \u201challucinogen\u201d or \u201creported hallucinogen,\u201d and this touches foods, one of the things that\u2019s not part of our concern here. One of the things that\u2019s so frustrating when you do ethnobotany is to realize that people can be starving in environments where there are many food plants, but they don\u2019t utilize the food plants because they\u2019ve accepted the values of a capitalist economy. Because the foods cannot be trucked to market or have a short shelf life, they are called \u201cpig food,\u201d and nobody will eat it. Time and time again in the tropics, I would come upon a plant that I knew to be edible and proteinaceous, say to my informant or guide \u201cWhat\u2019s the story on this?\u201d \u201cFood for pigs, people don\u2019t eat it,\u201d but you know they are buying canned tuna fish and spam from the priests at the mission. So this is a way in which people\u2019s folklore and folk heritage is distorted.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-59", "text": "Then a book by a good friend of mine, and if any of you are interested in ayahuasca, or plan on going to South America where you may encounter ayahuasca, this book, Vegetalismo: Shamanism Among the Mestizo Population of the Peruvian Amazon, this is a lovely book. This is about the people that I spent most of my fieldwork time with. You just cannot read this book without coming away with a sense of the depth and complexity of the ayahuasca worldview: its healing classifications, the power allies, the admixture plants, the magical songs. It\u2019s by Luis Eduardo Luna, who I know has lectured and shown his films here at CIIS. He\u2019s an excellent person, a very good friend of mine, to my mind probably the person doing the best anthropological work on ayahuasca in the world right now. The publisher, in case you want to try to track this down, is Almqvist and Wiksell International, Stockholm. If any of you are just dying to have this book, order it from Lux Natura, we have three copies left.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-60", "text": "This is the last one that I was going to mention, because this could have been the title of our weekend. This is Psychedelic Drugs Reconsidered by Lester Grinspoon and James Bakalar. Lester Grinspoon managed to find his way into Herb Caen as a name freak when he published a monograph on the dangers of excessive cocaine use. Basically, this is a very reasoned presentation of why psychedelics should be reconsidered for therapy, the case for them, the case against them, the nature of the hysteria that placed them off limits. He has also written Marijuana Reconsidered, and is a very nice person and leading the fight to decriminalize drugs for research. So that\u2019s all the books that I brought in to show you; they are, as I say, by no means all. The only resource that I would mention for the serious student of these things that I didn\u2019t bring in is: nobody should try to deal with this subject without being aware of what\u2019s called the Harvard Museum Botanical Leaflets. These are a series of leaflets that have been published since the \u201830s by the Peabody Museum in Boston. So write to the Harvard Museum Botanical Garden and say you want a list of the leaflets. They cost between $1-4 a piece. They deal all of Schultes\u2019 papers; all kinds of very hard to recover information is available there. There are about 180 of these reprints on all aspects of all psychedelics and some non-psychedelics as well.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-61", "text": "It\u2019s important to have this information, to have it at your fingertips. The compartmentalization between areas of knowledge that impinge on this always amazes me. I mean, you get psychologists who don\u2019t know what an MAO inhibitor is, you get people combining things without knowing how drug synergies work. You get people just not informing themselves on the importance of set, setting, dosage, psychic predisposition, so forth and so on: all vital matters that can impinge on how an experience develops. If you can take the time to inform yourself you will feel much more sure of what you\u2019re doing, and that in itself can alleviate confusion and negative reactions.\n\nSo then I thought what I would do is sort of go around the world and talk about these things a little to give you an idea of what is available, what\u2019s on the menu.\n\nAudience: Could you explain the difference between psychoactive, psychotropic and psychedelic?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-62", "text": "Audience: Could you explain the difference between psychoactive, psychotropic and psychedelic?\n\nPsychoactive means exactly what it implies, that you can detect this compound as a higher cortical experience, that\u2019s all. To my mind a higher cortical experience is a shift of mood, depression, elation, acute hearing, sensitivity to noises: all of these things could be classed as psychoactive reactions to a compound. Psychotropic is a word that I\u2019ve never been very fond of and it sort of came in late. Psychedelic, which is a fairly maligned word, but was coined by the psychiatrist Humphry Osmond, means simply \u201cmind-manifesting,\u201d and I like that because it is phenomenologically neutral. Some people have tried to push the word \u201centheogen\u201d for these things, meaning literally \u201cgod-inducing,\u201d but to my mind this carries a huge amount of ideological freight that we may not wish to buy into. Maybe it\u2019s god-inducing, maybe it isn\u2019t, but psychedelic \u2014 meaning mind-manifesting \u2014 is pretty good, and then if all of these make you uncomfortable you can just fall back on a completely phenomenological description and call them \u201cconsciousness-expanding drugs.\u201d I certainly don\u2019t consider alcohol a psychedelic, but clearly a psychoactive. Marijuana is one of these things that\u2019s so widely variant, both in how people react to it and how strong it can be. I would call MDMA a psychoactive drug, not a psychedelic drug.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-63", "text": "I use the word \u201challucinogen\u201d a lot, and a lot of people don\u2019t like that, even people in the field. They say, \u201cHallucinogen seems to imply that it\u2019s an illusion,\u201d but not in my mind, I don\u2019t hear that. I\u2019m fascinated by hallucinations. To me that is the sine qua non that you\u2019re getting somewhere. I guess that\u2019s just my philosophical biases, but a hallucination is such an extraordinary concept, isn\u2019t it? To see something which isn\u2019t there. I don\u2019t mean to misread a surface, so that you think it sticks into the room when in fact it sticks out of the room, or something like that, I mean seeing something that is not there. Then that divides into two classes: seeing an ordinary object which is not there \u2014 I think this is what most people think a hallucination is: \u201cHere is a bicycle. Is it real or not? The drug-crazed victim cannot tell,\u201d \u2014 but most hallucinations are of things which can only be hallucinations, because that\u2019s what they are. They have this aura of the unexpected and the Other, the intrusive alienness.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-64", "text": "People have claimed to me that they have seen objects which are not there which are completely ordinary. That is more typical of accounts of datura users, people who take high molecular weight tropanes, such as occur in jimsonweed and those kinds of things. My brief experimentation with that is that it\u2019s what I call a deliriant, rather than a psychoactive. When you take datura you are so messed up that you literally lose all discrimination: you can\u2019t tell exactly where you are, you can\u2019t tell thinking about being somewhere from being there. Well, you\u2019re in no shape to undertake a spiritual quest if you\u2019re that discombobulated. What I like are the things which do not destroy what I call core functions. In other words, there is still an evidence-gathering, observing mind left intact, and the disruption of perceptual input, if you want to put it that way, is pretty much confined to the visual cortex, and then to the metaphor-forming capacity that is relating to the visual cortex; but I don\u2019t like things which confuse you, which impair judgment.\n\nAudience: What about Salvia divinorum?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-65", "text": "Audience: What about Salvia divinorum?\n\nThat\u2019s an obscure one about which not much is known, although in the past year they\u2019ve learned the absolute chemical characterization of the psychoactive compound, which is called salvinorin A. More work has to be done. Anthropologists who have taken it with Indians in Oaxaca describe a very intense experience. When we grew it in Hawaii and took it exactly the way these people said to do it, it was an experience, but it was not clear whether it was psychedelic or merely so physiologically active in such a complex way that you couldn\u2019t tell exactly what was going on. The impression which was not mine, but Kat\u2019s and a beloved dean, they both experienced flow. They described the experience as though you were lying in a dirty ditch with this cold fluid flowing from the top of your head to the bottom of your feet, and where this kind of cold, clammy fluid encountered energy obstructions in your body, it would wash them away. It was a kind of vertigo with nausea; it was a complex experience, but it was not largely mental, it was more a re-visioning of the body image. This is another one of these things where no research has been done. It isn\u2019t illegal, but you\u2019re not going to do your career any good to get tangled up with this, so consequently it\u2019s pretty much left alone. Salvorin A is extremely unstable and breaks down within 12 hours, so that indicates that it\u2019s probably a polyhydric alcohol or an isoquinoline or something like that, it\u2019s not an indole.\n\nAudience: Wasson talked about \u201centheogen\u201d versus \u201challucinogen,\u201d and his theory was that a hallucination is something that isn\u2019t there completely. He thought that the experience on soma or the mushroom is something that you are actually experiencing, so it\u2019s not a hallucination, it\u2019s real.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-66", "text": "Yes, that was what he said, but if you actually look at the etymology of the word \u201challucination,\u201d what it has come to mean in English is a delusion, but what it really means in the original language is \u201cto wander in the mind.\u201d That\u2019s the meaning of hallucination, to wander in the mind. Well, that\u2019s a pretty good operational description of what\u2019s happening, and then when you add in the visual component, it\u2019s hard for me to imagine how someone could undervalue hallucinations if they had had them. These guys were very frustrated with seeing this thing turned into a social hysteria, and Wasson at the time expressed great unhappiness with Tim Leary\u2019s approach, and hated going to Mexico and seeing these mushroom villages invaded by graffiti-covered vans of filthy freaks from southern California who were disrupting the local ecology.\n\nIt was a kind of proprietary approach: this thing belongs to anthropologists, to specialists. Wasson was very reticent to assess his own work. Some of you may have seen Bob Forte\u2019s interview with him in that psychedelic issue of Revision where Forte asks him, \u201cHow do you assess the historical impact of your work?\u201d and he said, \u201cI\u2019ll leave that to others to decide.\u201d He didn\u2019t want to deal with the question of the potential impact on his own society. He really looked at it as this exotic, foreign kind of thing. These guys were cautious, this first generation \u2014 Hofmann, Wasson, Schultes \u2014 these guys are not stoners by any means. Their approach is cautious, and their psychedelic experiences in a lifetime can be counted on the fingers of one hand. I\u2019m not sure that they ever realized the size of the tiger whose tail they had seized.\n\nAudience: The DMT and the toad, whatever it is, how is that extracted?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-67", "text": "Audience: The DMT and the toad, whatever it is, how is that extracted?\n\nWell, I haven\u2019t had the good fortune to be present at the milking, so I really couldn\u2019t say. I gather that you put pressure on the back of the neck in two places and this exudate emerges, exactly where I\u2019m not sure, and probably decency should scarcely inquire. Then it\u2019s dried on sheets of glass and scraped up and packaged and so forth.\n\nLet me start through this and give you a notion of what is available. Whenever you talk about the distribution and cultural usage of hallucinogens the first thing that you come up against is a curious unsolved problem in botany. No one knows why this is, and we would be grateful if somebody could figure it out, but for unknown reasons there is a tremendous concentration of psychoactive plants on the South American continent. The South American continent has more known hallucinogens than the rest of the planet combined. Why is this? After all, the climaxed tropical rainforests of Eastern Indonesia are at least as species-rich as the Amazon basin, and yet not a single powerful hallucinogen is known with certainty from the Old World tropics. All kinds of suggestions have been made: that actually there are psychedelic plants common throughout the tropics of the Old World but the cultures have lost contact with them and forgotten them, and hence our anthropologists have not discovered them, or something in the soil of South America \u2014 very improbable theory. I was talking about this once in a workshop and somebody raised their hand and said, \u201cNo problem. Obviously that\u2019s where the spaceships landed.\u201d Good! Well, we\u2019ve solved that problem, now we can move on.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-68", "text": "North America is extraordinarily poor in hallucinogens, perhaps the poorest of all continents, so that the psychedelic phobia that Europe created against paganism was completely reinforced, or at least not eroded, by the colonization of the New World or of North America, because there were no plants here to challenge that. The North American Indians tend to ordeal as a shamanic vehicle, the Sun Dance thing which some of you may be familiar with, or sonic driving, which is worldwide in shamanically-oriented cultures without drugs. You should know that not everyone agrees with me that psychedelics are the sine qua non of shamanism; that\u2019s what Wasson thought, that you don\u2019t have shamanism unless you have psychedelics. If you have people calling themselves shamans and not using psychedelics, then they are cut off from the older level of tradition, and through ritual, drumming, ordeal, starvation and flagellation they are creating near-psychedelic, or pseudo-psychedelic states.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-69", "text": "Now, a brilliant and respected commentator on comparative religion like Mircea Eliade, who I quote whenever it suits my purpose, totally disagreed with this and said no, what he called \u201cnarcotic shamanism\u201d \u2014 which means psychedelic shamanism, the choice of the word tells you that the guy had a problem \u2014 \u201cNarcotic shamanism is decadent shamanism,\u201d and the flagellation, the starvation, the ordeals, and the drumming is the real shamanism, and it\u2019s only when the tradition is abandoned and decadent that a culture will turn to drugs. I maintain that this is nothing more than his Western cultural bias operating. He was a Romanian who became an academic in Paris. Also, in his youth he was pretty infatuated with yoga, and they will insist to you that drugs are an inferior path. However, any of you who are scholars of yoga should know that all yoga is based on the Yoga Sutras of Pata\u00f1jali, 2nd century Hindu, Vedic commentator, and Pata\u00f1jali specifically says, \u201cThere are three paths to the goal of yoga, and they are control of the breath, control of posture and light-filled herbs.\u201d It says it right there, stanza six of the Yoga Sutras of Pata\u00f1jali. It\u2019s never discussed again, basically. In the entire exegesis of the yogic literature, the third path is never mentioned. Is that because it\u2019s a secret tradition, or what? I don\u2019t know. When you go to India seeking these yogis practicing these higher yogas, what you find are a bunch of guys smoking as much charas as they possibly can, and the notion that you could do it without that just gets a long laugh from everybody down around the burning ghats. They deal with it on a practical level.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-70", "text": "Moving out of drug-impoverished North America, or psychedelic-impoverished North America, where there are more than 20 species of indigenous psilocybin-containing mushrooms but, and this is interesting, no evidence whatsoever for tribal or traditional usage. In other words, in this Northwest Coast Indian complex \u2014 the Tsimshian, Tlingit, Nootka group \u2014 there\u2019s no reason to believe, other than our own predilection for romantic fantasy, that these people were using mushrooms in pre-contact times, and yet the mushrooms were there. The complex that we\u2019re most familiar with as a North American hallucinogen is in the Southwest of the United States: Lophophora williamsii, the peyote cactus. Now, the interesting thing here is that we cannot find archeological evidence of peyote use that is particularly ancient. Peyote use in the Southwest appears to be less than 500 years old. Before that, what we find in Indian graves of the Tarahumara and so forth are the seeds of Sophora secundiflora. Sophora secundiflora is a highly poisonous legume that contains cytisine. This is an example of what we call, not a psychedelic, but an ordeal poison. In certain parts of the world this approach to spiritual growth has been taken, most notably on the island of Madagascar off the coast of eastern Africa.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-71", "text": "What is an ordeal poison? This is a plant where you take it and you are so convinced that you are dying that you have an experience of self-abandonment, getting straight, surrender, and then you live and you\u2019re fine. You are absolutely convinced that you are dying, your heart pounds or fibrillates, or you convulse, or you fall into deep coma, or you have tetanus in the limbs and then you recover. Well, anybody can tell you that this is a kind of psychedelic experience, because you\u2019re so damn glad you lived that you see everything in a new light. You can be kind to your children, love your wife and tolerate your relatives. People say, \u201cIt made a new man out of him!\u201d Well, yes, because he came so close to dying that he shed neurotic behavior patterns, but this is not a true psychedelic.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-72", "text": "What we\u2019re assuming is that about 500 or 1,000 years ago, sometime in that span, the Sophora cult was replaced by the peyote cult which came from a much smaller usage area. Then, also in southern California, there were what were called the toloache religions, religions of datura intoxication, initiation of young men by intoxicating them with datura and leaving them in the wilderness to fend for themselves. Again, this comes close to being an ordeal poison, although it also has psychoactive properties, but so confusing, such a deliriant that it bears no relationship to the true hallucinogens which, with the exception of mescaline, I believe all fall into the category of the indoles. Now, mescaline is not an indole, it\u2019s an amphetamine, closely related to MDA and MDMA, but it is a true hallucinogen at fairly high doses. The indoles, which are this structurally-related small family, they seem to me to be the true visionary ecstatogens, and I will mention as I go through the list which ones are indoles and which ones are not.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-73", "text": "A kind of parallel phenomenon to the peyote cult of the Southwest is in the deserts of northwestern Peru. There are very large columnar cacti in the genus Trichocereus that contain mescaline, and they have been used for a long time, a lot longer than peyote. We have Moche ceramics dated to before 1,000 B.C which show a Peruvian design 1,500 years old. In central Mexico we come upon the first of these large centers of hallucinogenic use, in the cultural area in which the Olmec arose and were subsequently succeeded by the Maya, who were subsequently subjugated by the Toltecs. The plants that were in use in those situations fall into two pretty well defined categories, first of all, psilocybin-containing mushrooms of several species, and second of all, morning glories of at least two types, Convolvulaceae which contain LSD-like alkaloids active in the milligram range that are highly visionary. There is considerable evidence in the Codex Vindobonensis and in some of the Mayan ceramics that this was a culture that made a very important place for hallucinogens, and that it was the privilege of the priestly class, and that their obsession with calendrics and astronomy and this sort of thing was also somehow intimately connected to their interest in the psilocybin mushrooms. Again, one of these botanical puzzles: here is a cluster of 10 or 15 species of mushrooms in central Mexico, and a culture builds itself around them. A similar cluster of species on the Northwest Coast, the culture seems to totally ignore and have no use for, and nowhere else on earth are there clusters of species of psilocybin mushrooms with a long history of use.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-74", "text": "Naturally, the export of cattle throughout the warm tropics has allowed the coprophilic mushrooms, the mushrooms which grow on manure, to be spread throughout the warm tropics. Then in places like England and France you get the occurrence of the diminutive psilocybin mushrooms, Semilanceata, but again, only the most unconvincing evidence of traditional use. I mean, I am Irish Celtic, I would love to have somebody come up with a bunch of evidence that ancient Celtic and Druidic art and magic was somehow related to mushrooms, but to date the efforts have been unconvincing to any skeptic. It may still be there, perhaps in heraldic devices. Someone should go back and study the escutcheons of the families of medieval Europe; and you do find, for instance, the Morelli family, a noble Italian family with mushrooms on the family coat of arms, and other families in France whose names escape me.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-75", "text": "Let me say a little bit more about the morning glory complex, because it\u2019s very interesting. LSD, discovered by Albert Hofmann in 1938, comes from ergot, comes from an organism called Claviceps purpurea which is a smut which grows on ergot. A humbler organism you could hardly imagine. This is basically \u201cYuck!\u201d That\u2019s how you would describe this organism if you were to come upon it. It looks like a mistake, because it\u2019s just an amorphous, slimy, black mess growing on certain cereal grains. One of the fascinating questions to these chemists once they discover a new compound is to try to figure out, \u201cDoes it occur anywhere else in nature?\u201d Some plants, some fish, some something, and then you can form theories and judgments about evolutionary relationships. So Albert Hofmann, the discoverer of LSD, was amazed when carrying out analytical work for Gordon Wasson on magic morning glory seeds that had been sent to Wasson from Schultes, he discovered the same compounds or very closely related compounds as he had synthesized to make LSD. I\u2019m going to slightly jump around here now and say that in India, there are 13 species of morning glories in a different family \u2014 not in the family Ipomoea or the family Turbina, which are the Mexican families, but in the family Argyreia \u2014 of morning glories which contain these ergotamine-like compounds. This is the Hawaiian baby woodrose. Again, the interesting thing is that there is no evidence that ancient India, with its obsession for altered states of consciousness, ever utilized any of these Asian morning glories, so this would be something that somebody would want to look at.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-76", "text": "Audience: Probably you would not be able to get any hardcore data on the use of mushrooms in Arthurian times, but I was delighted to note in The Mists of Avalon that when Morgaine was supposedly banished, one of the fairies of Avalon left her some mushrooms to accompany her on her journey.\n\nWell, Marion Zimmer Bradley lives in the hills of Berkeley. We can assume she\u2019s fully installed and hooked into the myths of the counterculture, but it would be great. Someone told me that they went to the island of Iona, where the Book of Kells was supposedly composed, and they said that there were mushrooms everywhere, that to be there is to be inescapably confronted with mushrooms; and yet there is no tradition, no mention. This is where Saint Columba came and reintroduced Christianity into England in the 900s. Christianity had died out in England; it was only in the advanced Celtic civilizations on the fringes of the British landmass that the Christian tradition was preserved.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-77", "text": "Audience: The deterioration of the etymology of hallucinogen into a delusional, romantic meaning kind of catalyzed my mind going into how mythology has devolved into \u201ca lie.\u201d If you look up the original meaning of mythology, it means \u201cthe mutterings of eternity,\u201d mytho-Logos, and this whole thing with Avalon being that place between the worlds that one went to, the mythical part, and Glastonbury was sort of the other place where all this Christianity existed. When I was in a mushroom experience one time in a circle, and I was a recovering Catholic trying to find out what my mind was all about, this one man, this shaman student from the Amazon, he said, \u201cIf you eat these mushrooms you\u2019re going to be excommunicated, because the Christians will tell you that once you eat the mushrooms you are doomed forever to hell, Satan, and the devil.\u201d Well, it\u2019s bullshit, you\u2019ve got to be kidding. Where would that come from? Maybe the Christian control looked at these people, their paganism and everything, and just wiped out their connection with the other world.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-78", "text": "It\u2019s very interesting that when the Jesuits arrived in Mexico and talked to the Indians and found them eating these mushrooms, they said, \u201cWhat do you call it?\u201d and they said, \u201cWe call it teonanacatl,\u201d and when they got their lexicons out and got that pieced together, what teonanacatl means is \u201cflesh of the gods.\u201d Well, the center of the Catholic mystery is the Eucharist, a sacrificial meal where a small wheat wafer is believed to be transubstantiated into the body and blood of the son of God. So then to place the psychic experience which follows upon a good Holy Communion next to the psychic experience which follows upon a good dose of mushrooms, clearly these guys said, \u201cThis is competition we don\u2019t need, we\u2019re going to wipe this out,\u201d and it is interesting. Think about this for a moment. We grow so inured to these religious forms; think about the notion of instituting at the center of your religion a rite where you eat your god, and that is what is happening in Christianity. It suggests that this sacrificial meal idea, which can be traced back even to pre-Exilic traditions in Judaism, is probably a memory of a relationship to some kind of psychedelic experience of some sort. I think institutions will inevitably substitute a rite or a ritual for the real McCoy, because then priests can control the pipeline to God and the parishioner can approach with offerings. If everybody can have a pipeline to deity then the whole priest scam is put out of business.\n\nAudience: Has Buddhism substituted a ritual for the experience and then empowered the priests? In other words, has the process that you are describing in Christianity happened in Buddhism?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-79", "text": "OK, we discussed the central Mexican complex. It has minor components such as were mentioned here, Salvia divinorum, and there are others not chemically well understood but also not widely or regularly used, but then as you pass down across the Dari\u00e9n Gap and into South America proper there is just an explosion of available psychoactives. Not only the tropane complex of the daturas, which now reemerge in the subgenus Brugmansia, the arboreal daturas which we see around town as ornamentals with huge, pendulous, hanging white flowers. All of those tree daturas, with yellow, orange, red, white or purple flowers, originated in a very constrained area in the Andes and have been used for shamanic purposes for a long, long time. Also, coca is endemic to that part of South America \u2014 it occurs nowhere else in the world naturally \u2014 but more interesting from my point of view are the tremendous proliferation of DMT cults and options based around two pharmacological approaches:", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-80", "text": "cults and options based around two pharmacological approaches: one, you orally ingest DMT as the same time as you orally ingest an MAO inhibiter. MAO is monoamine oxidase: this is the enzyme system that oxidizes monoamines, that makes them harmless. Monoamines are this whole family of drugs we\u2019re talking about, and many other things as well. If you don\u2019t have any monoamine oxidase in your body, then monoamines just stick around because the machinery to degrade them is inoperable. So, there are what are called MAO inhibitors. This means that you take this compound and it causes the monoamine oxidase in your body to be bound, it can no longer do its work. DMT ordinarily would be destroyed in the gut, in the upper gastrointestinal tract, but if you inhibit all the MAO in the upper gastrointestinal tract then the DMT is conveyed into the bloodstream, can cross the blood-brain barrier and initiate a psychedelic experience. This is the strategy of", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-81", "text": "a psychedelic experience. This is the strategy of ayahuasca, also called yag\u00e9. North of the Caquet\u00e1 it\u2019s called yag\u00e9, south of the Caquet\u00e1 it\u2019s named in the Quechua language ayahuasca.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-82", "text": "This is a really fascinating thing for many reasons. First of all, this begins to look like the world\u2019s first truly designer drug. Notice what\u2019s happening here: all these other things I\u2019ve been talking about \u2014 peyote, mushrooms, datura, cannabis, what have you \u2014 are single plants that require very little preparation. Basically, find it, eat it: that\u2019s the way you prepare it. Ayahuasca is very different: it\u2019s composed of two plants, neither of which is active except in combination with the other. So somebody figured this out. This may not sound like such an accomplishment until you stand in the Amazon basin and look around you, and realize that we\u2019re talking 50,000 species per square mile and 50,000,000 square miles, so how did anybody ever figure out that you take the leaves of the little bush and the bark of the woody vine, and combine them in these proportions, and boil them and concentrate it, and then you have this fantastic psychedelic drug? The only way that I can imagine is that somebody told them. My experience is that these plants talk. This does not make sense to the rational and discerning mind, but nevertheless it is possible for one plant to lead you on to another.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-83", "text": "A perfect example of this is actually in the chemical literature. Melvin Bristol was a student of Schultes in the late \u201960s and he specialized in the Brugmansias, the arboreal daturas, and he went to the valley of the Sibundoy, and there they actually add the datura to the ayahuasca. He took this ayahuasca, and while he was on it the ayahuasca entity showed him a plant. He kept seeing this plant and he couldn\u2019t get it out of his mind, and the next day after they came down from the trip he was collecting in the forest with Indians and he came upon the plant, the exact plant that he had seen in his vision. Well, he thought that was pretty strange, so he made extensive collections of this plant, took it back to Harvard, analyzed it and it was in fact psychoactive, it did contain psychoactive alkaloids. So we are tiptoeing over the surface of some kind of mystery. We maybe can bring ourselves to accept that a voice could speak on mushrooms telling you that you should be kinder to your children, or love your mother, or not be so hard on yourself, but it\u2019s a real leap for us to believe that a plant could tell you, \u201cYou know that plant over there? Analyze that sucker!\u201d In other words, real information, not information subject to personal interpretation.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-84", "text": "The whole of the Amazonian narcotic complex, as it\u2019s called in the old literature, is based on activation of DMT by one strategy or another. Either by drinking this \u201cghastly beverage,\u201d as the literature calls it, this psychedelic beverage, ayahuasca, or as you go east into the lowlands, the ayahuasca complex is replaced by what\u2019s called the snuff complex, and it is based around a number of species of myristicaceous trees. The Myristicaceae are the same family as nutmeg occurs in, although nutmeg is an Old World member of the genus. Several members of the Myristicaceae contain DMT in the inner bark exudate, and these Indians go out before dawn \u2014 before the first rays of sunlight strike the tree, because when that happens this resin retracts \u2014 and put their hands on both sides of the tree to determine the coolest side, and strip the bark from that side of the tree. Then they take these long strips of bark back to the village, burn a fire and let it burn to coals, and then spread the coals out; lay these long strips of bark on the coals with the \u201cwounded\u201d side up, the clean inner side up, and this orange resin will be forced out of the bark and onto the surface. Then you can go along with a scraper of some sort, gather this stuff up, put it in a pot, cook it down, grind that in a mortar and pestle, and then you have a dandy paralytic arrow poison which can also be honked up as an outlandish hallucinogenic snuff.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-85", "text": "There are many stories of these Y\u0105nomam\u00f6 and Waika people going out on the hunt and honking up their supply of drug, just getting their poison arrows out and scraping off the points so the guys can get a buzz on and won\u2019t have to go back to the village. It\u2019s a very interesting complex, it hasn\u2019t been very much researched by Westerners and the reason is easy to figure out why. Here\u2019s how you take this stuff: you get with your buddy and you have a bamboo tube \u2014 maybe some of you remember this from The Emerald Forest \u2014 and you pack it with this ground bark exudate, then you hunker down in front of your friend, put the thing with the loaded end into your nostril, your friend takes a huge inhalation of air, blasts on the end of this thing and just drives this stuff up into your sinus cavities. Everything goes violet, you scream, you salivate outlandishly, you fall over backwards, and by the time you\u2019ve gotten yourself together your friend has repacked the other side and is ready to give you that. Then you do that \u2014 it goes purple again, you scream, you salivate, you fall over \u2014 and then people usually say something like, \u201cGood!\u201d I\u2019m sure you\u2019ve seen the films about this. Napoleon Chagnon did a film, Juan Downey did a film; this is great filmic material. In these Waika villages, I wouldn\u2019t want to say it\u2019s a drug of abuse, but it\u2019s certainly a recreational drug. Not only the shamans are doing this, but people are just doing it. You see people leaning against walls with a line of saliva coming out of their mouth and people just say, \u201cOh, he\u2019s doing the ipina.\u201d \u201cOh, OK.\u201d People are in various attitudes of consciousness and unconsciousness\u2026", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-86", "text": "Coca, of course; there\u2019s not a whole lot to say about coca. It\u2019s an interesting example of a psychoactive non-psychedelic. The minute you hit the Amazon rainforest they are so concerned that you\u2019ve been misinformed about coca. They say, \u201cNot a drug! This is not a drug! This is a food, this is a good food, this food makes us healthy.\u201d There is some evidence that this is true, that cocaine bears very little resemblance to coca. Coca is not a spectacular experience. What I found was that the way coca works is that you\u2019ve been sitting with these people for hours and they\u2019re talking in Witoto or some language that you have no hope of understanding, you\u2019re just about ready to excuse yourself and go to your hammock, and they drag out the coca. The way you do it \u2014 this is another thing where people miss the point in South America, because they have no idea how much you\u2019re supposed to do. Imagine taking a tablespoon and", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-87", "text": "supposed to do. Imagine taking a tablespoon and going into a jar or a sack of flour and getting as much flour as you possibly could on a tablespoon. I mean a high-walled tablespoon; so you get that much coca, you bring it to your mouth and you put it in. It\u2019s dry as dust, and the trick is to slime it over, get it into your cheek and hold it there, all without a break in your conversational flow. For a honky, the main effort is not to strangle and disgrace yourself in this scene, because it\u2019s usually no women, you\u2019re in the longhouse with the men, and these guys are the authentic bare-ass scarified folks, and you\u2019re trying to fit in and choking to death on this wad of coca. Well, it dribbles down your throat and suddenly these people don\u2019t seem so bad, this place doesn\u2019t seem so filthy and you don\u2019t seem so tired, and maybe you can make out what they\u2019re", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-88", "text": "tired, and maybe you can make out what they\u2019re saying, and maybe you\u2019ll just try out a little of what you\u2019ve picked up on. Before you know it you\u2019re the life of the party, and then about 20 minutes later you think, \u201cMaybe now I\u2019ll knock off,\u201d and then like clockwork they reach for the tin can again and send it around, and they will do this until it\u2019s all gone.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-89", "text": "Let\u2019s see, which way shall we go? Let\u2019s jump across the water now to Africa. I talked a little about iboga; fascinating cult, very similar to ayahuasca in the social patterns that have arisen around it. The way ayahuasca is taken in the Amazon in the Mestizo populations that Luna is talking about is that people get together on Saturday nights in windowless sheds: about one third to have the trip, about one third because they have something physically or psychologically wrong with them that they want help from the shaman with, and about one third who are wannabes or just hanging in for the social occasion. In Zaire and Gabon where the iboga cult is operating, this same pattern exists. These things, ayahuasca and iboga in Africa, are the major forces resisting conversion to Christianity. They really are the native people\u2019s answer to the missionaries, and as such they act as a tremendous force for social cohesion. Outside of the iboga complex, in Africa we really only have rumors.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-90", "text": "You will meet shamans from this place and that place, and they even have come and spoken at this school. They claim knowledge of extremely powerful plant hallucinogens but they won\u2019t cough up the name, or the species, or a sample, and until that\u2019s done you have to be very skeptical that these things are real. One of the things that was so interesting to me, and I mentioned it this morning, is how the shamans are like scientists. We would take ayahuasca with these people and sing, and cure, and go through all these trips and hallucinations, and 6 or 7 hours later, as dawn was breaking and all but the most hardcore people had gone back to their huts, the assessing of the trip would begin. Inevitably people would say, \u201cWell, this was pretty good, but I remember a time in Rio Yaguas when so-and-so made it, and it was like this and like this.\u201d In other words, amazing dope tales, amazing stories of other trips in other times and places and what had been achieved, so these shamans were consistently engaged in the search for the perfect high. They were not set in a cultural pattern, they were experimentalists, always on the outlook for rumors of new plants, untried combinations, so forth and so on.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-91", "text": "Returning then to the African situation, there is a complex of plants and suspect hallucinogens in southern Africa in use among the Hottentots, the aboriginal peoples of South Africa. In the family of the Mesembryanthemaceae, which includes the Lithops, the Haworthias, these little ground-growing things that look like stones, the so-called \u201crock plants,\u201d some of those contain mesembrine. Mesembrine is an alkaloid of some sort, with unresearched psychoactivity but a persistent enough rumor of its use that it should probably be checked on. Then when you turn to the Eurasian continent, the largest landmass on the planet, you discover what I referred to before: this surprising poverty of hallucinogenic plants. You get the belladonna complex, the tropanes, you get the opium complex. Opium poppies are native to Southeast Asia and have been used by people in Eurasia at least as far back as the ancient Scythians; we have accounts in Herodotus which make that clear. In fact, there\u2019s a considerable amount of Greek archeological material that shows opium diadems and opium poppies being used as ornaments by various goddesses, so it was understood that it was psychoactive.\n\nAudience: Robert Graves suggests in one of his books that the ambrosia of the Greek gods was actually psilocybin mushrooms. Have you ever come across another allusion to that?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-92", "text": "Yes, well it\u2019s an interesting question, it has to do with Eleusis, and as you probably know, Eleusis was a major prophetic mystery site in classical and ancient Greece where every September a ceremony would be done, and the rule was that you could only do it once in your life, so you never got a second shot. Everybody in the Greek world would go at some point in their life \u2014 Plato, Aeschylus, Aristotle, the whole gang \u2014 everybody had this experience, and at the center of it something was drunk and something happened. There\u2019s been great argument about what it was and what happened. Wasson and Hofmann and Ruck, who\u2019s a classicist at Cornell, all wanted to argue that it was an ergotized beer. In other words, that on the Eleusinian Plain there was a kind of rye being grown which was infected with a strain of Claviceps that was mild enough that it was hallucinogenic without being convulsive or causing miscarriages or something like that. Because if you just go out and gather ergot smut, Claviceps purpurea \u2014 and you should be very careful with it, some of these ergot alkaloids can send you into convulsions and they\u2019re fairly toxic \u2014 but it\u2019s conceivable that a strain grew on the Eleusinian Plain that was made into a kind of beer that was then this hallucinogenic intoxicant, but Robert Graves, who didn\u2019t have the kind of public relations machinery that Wasson had, had a different notion.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-93", "text": "He claimed that the surviving recipes of the sacrament at Eleusis, and there were I think four examples of surviving recipes, all called for the same ingredients. Don\u2019t hold me to it, but I think the ingredients were barley, honey, water, and something else, haisa, maybe. He pointed out that a recipe for beer in Greece would never specify water because you understand that water is part of beer, so he said that these words were code words, and that in Greek the first initial of these four words could be arranged to spell the word \u03bc\u03cd\u03ba\u03b7\u03c2, mykos, which is mushroom, mucus. Part of the Indo-European language family believed that mushrooms are slimy. This is why the word mucus can be traced back to the word mykos, mushroom, Mykonos. Mycenae, in fact, means \u201cthe land of the mushroom,\u201d and so the role of mushrooms in generating the religions of early Greece is a completely unexplored area, it\u2019s never been fully thought through.\n\nI mentioned the Argyreia complex in India, that\u2019s the Hawaiian baby woodrose. That\u2019s an interesting one, and I\u2019m always on the alert for these, because I\u2019m interested in unclaimed indole complexes. In other words, why was Argyreia nervosa never utilized by anybody? It\u2019s extremely powerful, you only have to take 8 or 9 seeds, and you don\u2019t have to prepare it at all, you just chew it up and swallow it. How come there\u2019s no cult, no impact on the history of ideas? Well, we don\u2019t know. Those 13 species of Argyreia are spread from India down through Polynesia. It\u2019s called Hawaiian baby woodrose, but it was introduced into Hawaii 100 years ago, it has nothing to do with Hawaii.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-94", "text": "The only major complex that I didn\u2019t discuss is the cannabis complex. This is one that is not an indole, and there are many anomalous things about cannabis. First of all, it\u2019s what is called a polyhydric alcohol, the only psychedelic polyhydric alcohol known to science. It\u2019s an extremely old plant. I mentioned last night the relationship of the metaphors of storytelling and weaving and language, and of course hemp is a fiber plant. We find hemp mats that go back to as late as PPNB, Pre-Pottery Neolithic B. At \u00c7atalh\u00f6y\u00fck there are hemp mats. Well, it\u2019s very unlikely, what with tossing waste from weaving into fires and the oiliness of the seed and so forth, that the psychoactive properties of this thing were not discovered. Cannabis originates in Central Asia, the original species is ruderalis. Then very early in prehistory it divided into the resin race, indica, and the fiber races, and then it was carried across the land bridge, presumably, into North America and that accounts for the sativa variant and so forth.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-95", "text": "Herodotus describes, interestingly enough, that marijuana was used for thousands and thousands of years before it was smoked. One of the hardest things to wrap your mind around is the notion that until Columbus discovered the New World 500 years ago no one in Europe had ever conceived of smoking anything. It was a New World cultural practice, and if you read Columbus\u2019 diary of when he landed in the New World, he was amazed. He wrote, \u201cThe natives drink smoke.\u201d That was the only way he could imagine it: \u201cWhat are you doing?\u201d Then, of course, it was less than 100 years before it was a major vice of the sophisticated raconteurs of Europe. Within 100 years of the introduction of tobacco into Europe, tobacco was being buried in the graves of Lapland shamans above the Arctic Circle. So the shamanic nature of tobacco was immediately recognized, even in the European context. Herodotus describes marijuana ingestion as a process somewhat like being in a sweat lodge and then pouring hemp seeds and hemp waste onto the hot rocks and letting it mingle with the steam in this closed space and deep breathing, but nobody ever had the notion of a pipe or anything like this. It\u2019s very interesting for many different reasons, and one is that it\u2019s a new use for the human body, less than 500 years old in European culture. At Non Nok Tha in Northern Thailand, and in other Neolithic graves, they have found long bones, arm and leg bones with burned-out centers, and they don\u2019t know whether this was a marrow extraction procedure or if it was a chillum. A chillum is a ceramic tube, narrow at one end and wide at the other, and you pack it with hash and tobacco and then you hold it and inhale. It may be that smoking was known in Asia in Neolithic times but somehow died out in the preclassical period and had to be reintroduced from the New World.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-96", "text": "Audience: Terence, do you want to comment about Amanita muscaria?\n\nYes, I\u2019m glad you reminded me. Amanita muscaria is perhaps the Old World hallucinogen par excellence, at least in the opinion of Gordon Wasson and a lot of other scholars. The problem with it is that it\u2019s extremely difficult to get a reliable positive experience from it. The reasons for this are complex: first of all, it\u2019s geographically variant, it\u2019s seasonally variant, and it\u2019s genetically variant. So only if you have lived in an ecosystem virtually your entire life and have inherited the accumulated knowledge from the shamanic elders of your tribe are you going to know whether you\u2019ve got a good one or not. Nevertheless, Gordon Wasson tried to argue that it was the ur-hallucinogen, the prototypic hallucinogen of prehistory used by these Vedic peoples who invaded India. In fact, he thought it was soma, and I had correspondence with him about it before he died. I think the soma question isn\u2019t settled and it could well have been a coprophilic mushroom associated with the dung of cows. After all, the role of cattle in Indian religion is very central, and in fact the role of cattle in early religion generally is extremely central.\n\nI mean, you do not get goddess religion in the ancient Near East without cattle worship. Cattle and goddesses seem to go very much together, and on the other hand, the Dionysian-Mithraic complex is a bull cult, and it too can be traced back into time until it\u2019s just lost in remote antiquity. So, yes that\u2019s the Arctic mushroom used by Siberian shamans, and it\u2019s been made the prototypic hallucinogen, because Siberian shamanism was made the prototype of all other shamanism, only because some anthropologists somewhere decided that that would be a good idea.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-97", "text": "Australia is again singularly poor in known hallucinogens. I always say in known hallucinogens, because somebody could go out into these places and come up with something brand new, something that we\u2019ve overlooked. This is a great challenge for fieldworkers.\n\nThe other thing I want to say, and then I\u2019ll stop for today, is a bit about this issue of synthetics. Are all psychedelics the same? Are synthetics in any way inferior or superior to naturally occurring hallucinogens? If so, why or why not? This controversy began for me as an aesthetic issue. I just felt better about taking plants sanctioned by thousands of years of use, but I didn\u2019t particularly feel that it was a strong distinction. But the more time I\u2019ve spent with it, and the more time I\u2019ve spent with Rupert Sheldrake\u2019s theory of morphogenetic fields, the more I come to see that I really think there is a very large distinction between synthetic and naturally occurring drugs. It\u2019s not a distinction that you\u2019re going to get a chemist to agree to, or a materialist. As far as they are concerned DMT from a plant or DMT synthesized in a laboratory are exactly the same thing, and as far as they are concerned, a synthetic hallucinogen like, I don\u2019t know, ketamine, let\u2019s give it the benefit of the doubt for the moment. Ketamine and a natural hallucinogen such as psilocybin, the differences do not reside in the fact that one is organic and one is synthetic. I think that these plants take people as much as people take the plants, so that when you have a mushroom trip, you not only are having a mushroom trip, you are contributing to the future mushroom trips of everybody in the future who will take this thing.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-98", "text": "In other words, you make a small offering on the altar, and that henceforth becomes part of the setting of the thing. It\u2019s like the notion of the Tao of the ancestors; when you take one of these ancient hallucinogens you are locking into the morphogenetic fields of all the people who ever took it. How else are we to explain the fact that when you take morning glory seeds you are flooded with Mayan imagery of stairstep cities and heiroglyphed balustrades, people dressed in gold and Quetzl finery and all this, or that when you take ayahuasca, even in this culture, there is a very strong impression of the jungle, of jaguars, of rivers. These things are coded into these compounds somehow. It seems to me, without talking about issues of toxicity and pharmacological uncertainty, that the content of the naturally occurring hallucinogens are much richer.\n\nOne last I point that I want to make to sum up this geographical survey of what is available is to say that, again, another research frontier is China. There is very little evidence of any use of hallucinogens in China, and yet there are clues that mushrooms were understood, that other plants may have been used, the knowledge of which has been lost. The Cultural Revolution did a pretty thorough job on wiping out this kind of traditional Taoist shamanic data. A very simple way of focusing the problem is to say that there has never been reported from China a psilocybin-containing mushroom, and yet I\u2019ll bet that if a reasonably informed investigator were to go to southern China and spend no more than 2 or 3 months off the beaten path, talking to country people, I\u2019ll bet you could come up with half a dozen psychoactive mushrooms with a history of folk usage, it\u2019s simply that the question has not been asked.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-99", "text": "Well, we\u2019re not going to have a clear understanding of the historical development of Chinese thought and institutions unless we know what their relationship to the invisible world precisely was, and I think that the indigenous tradition of shamanism, which then became Taoism, which became the real substratum of Chinese religion while it weathered various late-grafted variants and foreign imports like Buddhism, but that native stratum of Taoistic shamanism hints very strongly that there was psychedelic usage of these plants in ancient China.\n\nA couple of people expressed interest in this week that I\u2019m doing at Esalen, so I might describe it a little bit. It\u2019s quite different from this, it\u2019s an in-depth involvement in the mathematics of the I Ching and then a theory that I evolved out of my engagement with that that has to do with the structure of time and analysis of history as a predictable phenomenon. It has no connection with psychedelics, other than that the entire thing was dreamed up under the influence of psychedelics, but it\u2019s a stand-alone idea. If I am able to control the group, I will keep it quite far from psychedelics except in moments of rhetorical desperation. If you are interested in the I Ching, don\u2019t let the word \u201cmathematics\u201d put you off. I am not a mathematician, and the best mathematicians aren\u2019t either. It\u2019s just a way of talking about it and doing analysis that was very fruitful, so that\u2019s a five-day, from the 28th of this month to the 2nd of December at Esalen. A lot of people will be bringing their computers, there will be a lot of machine implementation people. It will go from Taoist scholars to assembly language programmers, and everybody will have more of a contribution to make than they suspect at the time.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-100", "text": "Well, hopefully you turned some of this over in your minds in the time that we were apart. I certainly did, in the sense of trying to figure out what I had missed and whose concerns had not been met. What I came up with was your interest in the specifics of time, place, and manner, which should certainly be covered because it\u2019s operational information.\n\nTalking about the various visionary plant complexes that we talked about yesterday, each one of these things has a style and a set of demands that it makes on its practitioners. If you look at the ethnographic literature you then see how the people who have used these things over millennia have come to terms with them, how they have accommodated themselves to these things. For instance, in the iboga cult of Gabon, what is aimed for is that early on in the involvement in the plant, a massive dose is taken, and they say, \u201cIt splits your head open,\u201d and you never have to take very much again, because somehow a creode or a predilection has been created and then you are initiated into this. When you read the ethnographic literature it\u2019s hard to believe how much they say they are taking. There\u2019s a saying in Gabon \u2014 Bwiti is what they call iboga \u2014 \u201cBwiti begins at 60,\u201d and that means 60 grams. Even allowing for the fact that they\u2019re using fresh root and you might get a collapse rate of 50-75%, that still means they\u2019re saying that Bwiti begins at 15-20 grams, which from my own experience with this stuff I can tell you is not even a conceivable place to begin. That\u2019s not a strong hit, that\u2019s an impossible hit.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-101", "text": "You have to know, pharmacologically speaking, the window of effective activity. Every drug, every compound has a profile which you can imagine as a linear spectrum. Below a certain amount it\u2019s undetectable, above that amount it becomes detectable, first as this CNS arousal that I mentioned yesterday and then as a full-blown psychedelic experience. At higher doses it begins to have toxic effects; all drugs are toxins. People often make the mistake of thinking that if you have a toxic substance and you take half of it, then it\u2019s not toxic because there is no register of its effects, but of course everything is incrementally toxic. Some things are very safe, have a great range of effectiveness well below the range where any toxicity begins to set in; other compounds are active as psychedelics at a level just slightly below the level where you\u2019re going to begin to have toxic effects. So you want to know what the profile is of the particular substance that you are thinking of taking.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-102", "text": "In pharmacology, one of the parameters that they establish is an LD50, which is a fairly unpleasant concept which you should nevertheless be informed of. LD50 means lethal dose 50. This means that we have 100 mice and we give them an unknown drug; at the point where half of them die, that is the LD50 dose of that compound. There\u2019s an LD100 and LD10 and so forth. What you want is for the LD50 to be tremendously high relative to the effective dose. Now, the perfect or model compound in that case is of course LSD. LSD is active at the 25 microgram range, 25 \u03bc. A microgram is a millionth of a gram. It\u2019s well below a smidgen. The LD50 for lysergic acid has never been determined. It\u2019s never been found how much it takes to kill half of the test animals, so that makes it a tremendously safe drug if mortality is the only concern. Of course, what most psychedelic trippers eventually realize is that mortality is rarely at risk in psychedelic experiences. What\u2019s at risk is sanity. Being nuts is not as bad as being dead, but nevertheless it can spoil your entire day. It\u2019s very reassuring to have taken a compound like psilocybin, and having become totally convinced that you are dying, to remind yourself that the LD50 is 200 times more than what you took, and therefore it\u2019s impossible, and you merely have to discipline the hindbrain and take control of your fear and then you will be alright.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-103", "text": "We\u2019ve talked so much about hallucination here, and always because of my particular bent which I have unconsciously transferred to you we\u2019re talking about visual hallucinations, but all psychedelic explorers should be aware of the concept of what is called a cognitive hallucination. This is a much more insidious phenomenon; this is quite simply an out-and-out delusion. The commonest form of cognitive hallucination goes like this: you take mushrooms, an hour and 20 minutes into it it\u2019s getting mighty strange \u2014 this is especially a problem with first timers \u2014 and you realize with the force of revelation that you didn\u2019t take psilocybin, you took a poisonous mushroom, and now you are going to die. This is an out-and-out cognitive hallucination which is as real as a belief, but it is not a disturbance in the visual field, it is a disturbance in the cognitive machinery.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-104", "text": "A friend of mine had never taken mushrooms and was very concerned about how to do it and got the instructions from me \u2014 silent darkness, quiet room, stay sitting \u2014 and took them in his room in silent darkness. At about the hour and a half point he realized with a demonic chuckle that I had been kidding, I had been putting him on, and actually had told him to stay in his room because we were preparing a surprise party for him at the bar two blocks down the street. Chuckling to himself with this realization, he showered, dressed, went down to the bar, pushed open the door and said, \u201cI\u2019m here!\u201d and the guy behind the bar said, \u201cOh, really?\u201d Well, the trip got wilder from there, because in the wake of disconfirmation in one of these cognitive hallucinations people tend to become confused, paranoid and upset. You have to continuously track your mental processes and it\u2019s really good to stick with whatever rules that you\u2019ve laid down for yourself. I actually apply this technique in my own life. If I get to the place where I cannot understand what is happening, I try to think back to the last moment when I did understand what was happening, and then do what I said I was going to do then, having given up on understanding it in the moment.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-105", "text": "The practical fallout from this in terms of psychedelic research is what we call the \u201cchained to a tree technique,\u201d which is where you just chain yourself to a tree, and providing you don\u2019t hang yourself with the chain, this cuts down the possibility of doing something peculiar. With psychedelics this doesn\u2019t tend to be a problem, but for instance with datura, the best intended and most together people lose it completely and then come back into it 12 or 24 hours later to just survey the swath of wreckage that they have cut through their own and other peoples lives. I had a friend years ago, a very diminutive, attractive woman who took datura with a couple of boyfriends, waited hours and hours, nothing happened. They finally decided to go to their homes. She walked them down the stairs, said goodbye to them at the top of the stairs \u2014 it actually happened in the Haight. That was the last thing she remembered until she came to on the 6th floor of the federal building in the San Francisco County Jail. The charge was assault on arresting officer, and the evidence was the officer\u2019s thumb, which had been bitten off. She was an Antioch PhD in medieval literature, so it happens to the best of us.\n\nAudience: Can\u2019t you eliminate a lot of that cognitive uncertainty by having somebody with you when you do this?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-106", "text": "Yes, you can. I\u2019m only speaking from my own experience, and I may have an odd take on it, because God knows, I\u2019m odd, but to my mind the ideal situation is to have the sitter two rooms away, and to have a doorbell or the equivalent, because if the sitter is with you, you start to analyze the sitter. As someone once said to me in India, \u201cFace is index of mind,\u201d and the sitter can just become an existential galaxy of possibilities, because you can read their history, their intent, their most secret thoughts \u2014 your belief in what are their most secret thoughts. People are concrescences of ambiguity that you don\u2019t want to get too tangled up with in that state unless you really are ready for the trip to take that particular direction. I don\u2019t know if it was in this workshop or the other night that I mentioned that I recall a trip I took with this English guy; it took me two weeks to get his voice out of my head. It just became like this accompaniment to consciousness, this stream of sort of understated, English upper class gibberish on all subjects, and finally it retracted.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-107", "text": "That\u2019s called becoming a victim of the transference. All psychotherapists are aware of this. The transference is when you get dragged into the other person\u2019s system of values or delusions. There\u2019s even a name for this in clinical psychology: it\u2019s called allophrenia. Allophrenia is schizophrenic behavior on the part of normal people in the presence of schizophrenics. This is a real problem. Your friend is put in the place, you go to see your friend to cheer them up, and your friend is not violently insane, but saying strange things, behaving in strange ways, and you, in an effort to relate to them, begin saying strange things and behaving in strange ways, and before you know it, the resident has to break in and escort you to the elevator because you\u2019re causing a problem in the ward. The transference is this phenomenon happening among people who are more or less psychologically healthy, but still it can be very disrupting.\n\nI think the sitter should be there only if there\u2019s a three-dimensional emergency. I like the word \u201csitter,\u201d because it\u2019s operational, it tells what you should do. \u201cGuide\u201d is not such a pleasing word: this implies control, prior knowledge, hierarchy, so forth and so on. The best guide-sitter I ever knew was a wonderful old guy, he\u2019s dead now but I\u2019m not yet ready to say his name in public, his style was that he read these paperback trash novels. He would just sit down with somebody, give them the stuff, and every once in a while they would fight their way out of this ocean of hallucination to deliver some insight and he would just put down his book and turn to them and say, \u201cThat\u2019s nice, now go back to the music.\u201d This guy could get 600 pages in a situation where he was nominally in charge of a dozen people who were tripping. Non-intervention, I think.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-108", "text": "Then there\u2019s the question of doing it with another person, meaning that the other person is going to be stoned too, and this has its own pitfalls and ambiguities. If it\u2019s your lover, your sexual partner, then in my opinion that\u2019s probably the best way to spend your time. If it\u2019s not, then the sky\u2019s the limit. You\u2019re going to learn more about this person than perhaps you were prepared to. Sometimes it\u2019s easy, it\u2019s no problem, everybody stays who they appeared to be before you took off, but sometimes the masks just start being hurled across the room in all directions and you don\u2019t know where it\u2019s going to leave you.\n\nMy approach, I guess, is one of two extremes. I sort of belong to the sensory deprivation school that says, \u201cLie down, shut up, silent darkness, music very judiciously, if at all,\u201d and I always do it at night, which some people find strange, but night is quiet, the energy dies down. There is calm and still between midnight and 4 a.m. The other end of the spectrum is someone like Salvador Roquet, who gives you three drugs, plays heavy metal rock \u2018n roll, then you get to see the Auschwitz film. I\u2019m not kidding; it is an effort, so far as I can tell, to drive you absolutely starkers. I would not submit myself to that. This same polarity exists in therapeutic theories. Some schools of therapy want you to lose it, want you to weep, lament, rend your clothing, throw yourself on the floor, kick your feet in the air. This is called \u201cgetting out your stuff,\u201d or \u201cworking through your stuff.\u201d What I find about this kind of thing is that it resonates too long. It doesn\u2019t feel like you\u2019ve gotten clear of it, it feels like you have simply objectified it, but life is an uncompleted puzzle; I could certainly change my mind.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-109", "text": "I have never felt that the primary use of these things was to cure what is called in modern parlance \u201cneurosis,\u201d what I call \u201cunhappiness.\u201d It isn\u2019t for that. This may be the influence of Jung in my background. Jung felt that there was no such thing as normality, that the task of life was what he called individuation, and he felt that it doesn\u2019t really begin until you approach middle life. You must leave the 20s behind you, because they are so socially and hormonally turbulent that you\u2019re just basically trying to make sense of it on a day to day basis. Then you settle in and this unfolding takes place. I really assume that we are all beyond neurosis; not that we are not neurotic, but that we all have our own strategies and our own take on our own quirks and peculiarities. The psychedelic thing as tool is more to go beyond the legacy of the normal into the transpersonal or the suprapersonal, and really view life as an open-ended domain to be explored.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-110", "text": "I find myself talking to psychologists a lot \u2014 because this is where this has been seized upon, because it does perturb the dynamics of the psyche \u2014 but for instance, I don\u2019t think you should give people hospitalized for psychotic behavior psychedelics. They are having enough trouble. They are being overwhelmed by the contents of the unconscious 24 hours a day and have no tool to make sense of it. The rest of us can make sense of overwhelment by the unconscious if it doesn\u2019t go on too long. I don\u2019t think there\u2019s any one of us who would wish to take mushrooms, arrive at the heights and just stay there. After 48 or 72 hours, some situation would arise which would cast us into an extreme state of disequilibrium. It\u2019s more like diving. A friend of mine said many years ago, \u201cThe yogi,\u201d and sub in \u201cshaman,\u201d \u201cpsychedelic voyager,\u201d \u201cThe yogi and the schizophrenic dive in the same ocean, it\u2019s just that the yogi remembers to take his tanks along.\u201d That\u2019s what it is: there is this possibility of inundation and overwhelment. Well, let\u2019s return to the matter of dosage and set and setting.\n\nAudience: You mentioned yesterday how you favored organic materials over synthetics. What about taking organic materials and then refining them and narrowing them down, getting rid of all the other ingredients in the plant? That\u2019s our Western tendency, to take something and refine it down and isolate the active ingredient and then take doses with that. Do you see that the natural ingredients in mushrooms, or ayahuasca, or whatever it is, have provided and sort of synergized the active ingredients and made the trip easier or smoother?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-111", "text": "Yes, I think so. Rarely in a plant where you have a psychoactive compound will it occur all by itself. For instance, in the peyote cactus, there is mescaline, there is N-methylmescaline, there is anhalamine, anhalinine, there\u2019s a whole family, about a dozen of these things. Similarly, in the coca bush: cocaine, several other -caines and several other active compounds. When you take a plant, you\u2019re getting a broad spectrum of these active molecules that have a familial relationship to each other. No chemist has ever exactly explained to me what\u2019s happening, but I think all chemists and pharmacologists are aware of the fact that natural compounds, even extracted or purified, are smoother than their synthetic counterpart.\n\nI recently had occasion to relearn this because there\u2019s been some amount of experimentation with 5-methoxy-N,N-DMT, which is not like DMT, but it is short acting and creates a profound oceanic emotion, but also in the pure substance there\u2019s a tremendous heart rush in the first 30 seconds. I mean, you just feel like you are in an up-elevator which knows no limit, and just about the time that you figure you\u2019re going to go into some kind of emergency situation, it tends to back off. So recently there has been this material in the underground called \u201ctoad foam,\u201d which is actually 5-methoxy-N,N-DMT extracted from the glands of a large southwestern toad. Well, when you smoke that, it too is 5-MeO-DMT, but there is no heart rush and it also doesn\u2019t last as long. It\u2019s much more benign and easygoing.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-112", "text": "Even in cases where there isn\u2019t a detectably variant spectrum of compounds present \u2014 for instance, in Stropharia cubensis there are really only two active principles: psilocybin and psilocin, and psilocin is the dephosphorylated ester of psilocybin, so they are basically the same compound. Nevertheless, if you talk to somebody who has only taken Sandoz psilocybin, it\u2019s much less animated and interesting than organic psilocybin. The counterexample to this is that when Hofmann synthesized psilocybin for the first time, he gave some of it to Wasson, and Wasson took it back to Huautla in the Sierra Mazateca of Oaxaca and gave it to Mar\u00eda Sabina, and Mar\u00eda Sabina said, \u201cThe spirit of the mushroom is in the little pill.\u201d This story has been repeated over and over again. My assumption is simply that Mar\u00eda Sabina was a wily old lady. It\u2019s not writ anywhere that shamans have to always tell you the truth, and I very seriously doubt that the experience is the same, although I\u2019ve never had the opportunity to take chemically pure psilocybin.\n\nThe difference between the morning glories and LSD is one of animation and color. The morning glories \u2014 I\u2019m talking now about Ipomoea and Turbina, the Mexican species \u2014 when you take them there is a flood of Aztec, Toltec, Mayan imagery. It\u2019s just uncanny. You can\u2019t believe it while it\u2019s happening, that you would see this much carved obsidian, glyphs, Quetzl feathers and all of this stuff. Is it the morphogenetic field? Is it the broader vegetable spectrum of the alkaloid rather than the synthetic? Who knows; these things remain to be looked at.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-113", "text": "In terms of the theory of morphogenetic resonance \u2014 some of you probably follow Rupert\u2019s ideas and Rupert himself \u2014 he problem is that the morphogenetic field is very difficult for instruments to detect. So far the only instrument I think that can detect it is the human mind. This probably means that it\u2019s perturbing a field that is very, very far removed from the fields associated with the four or five ordinary forces of nature. But for instance when you go to Tikhal in Guatemala, or Borobudur in Central Java, or Konark on the Puri Coast of India, and you take these psychedelics, the past is present. You see these places at their height, and you can say, \u201cWell, it\u2019s just suggestion,\u201d but I don\u2019t know.\n\nWhen I take ayahuasca, wherever I take it I encounter the motifs typical of Amazonian shamanism: the jaguar, the giant anaconda. To show you that sometimes the iconography of these compounds is not predictable: black people. Everyone in the Amazon says this, that you see black people. Well, there are no black people in the Amazon, not really. In the Lower Amazon there are a few, but in the Upper Amazon a black person is as rare as a Kurd, and yet everybody insists on this. I have had this experience on ayahuasca, and to call it \u201cseeing black people\u201d is a very mild gloss on what it is. It\u2019s like being at the Apollo Ballroom on a hot evening in 1960 and Aretha Franklin is onstage; I mean, it is a deep hit of blackness.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-114", "text": "I don\u2019t know quite what to make of it. I don\u2019t know why, and Claudio Naranjo gave harmaline to urban people in Santiago, Chile \u2014 stockbrokers and advertising executives, people who have no connection to the jungle \u2014 and they reported jaguars, giant snakes, jungles and black people. This is a tremendously fertile area for Jungians to look into. Psychics have claimed since who knows how long that by holding an object in their hand they could penetrate its past states of being. Well, it\u2019s like all these other occult claims in my experience: mantra, yantra, yoga posturing, past life recovery. For me, none of these things are possible unless I\u2019m stoned, and then they all become possible. It\u2019s like you just throw the switch and suddenly mantras work. I can chant mantras until hell freezes over in an unstoned state. The precondition for empowering occult idea systems seems to be a shift in brain chemistry.\n\nIt\u2019s to be noted that in these cultures where a lot of magic, a lot of violation of natural law is going on, there is a lot of psychedelic stuff going on. Among the Aguaruna-Jivaro for instance, a very no-nonsense tribe of headhunting people in the Amazon, the shamans live continuously in a state of altered consciousness. I mean, they are taking this stuff all the time, it is a food item. What would it be like to be the shaman of the Aguaruna in the jungle, all the time taking all this stuff? It\u2019s hard to imagine, because when you just do it once all plants have auras, all plants have songs which can be extracted out of them. They are living, literally, in some kind of other dimension.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-115", "text": "Audience: I\u2019d like to play devil\u2019s advocate, if I can for a minute, about this whole idea that certain plants or certain substances have certain attributes or certain places that they take people to. I\u2019ve had the ideation that you\u2019re talking about \u2014 the visualization of the snakes, the cats, the jungle, the pyramids, the whole Mayan aspect, jungle and shamanic routine \u2014 on LSD, on mushrooms, on ibogaine and on yag\u00e9, and I\u2019ve had clients that have had the same ideation doing breathwork.\n\nYes, this raises a real question. I don\u2019t understand exactly how this works. I will join your side for a moment because there\u2019s a phenomenon that I\u2019ve noticed, and some of you have heard me talk about it. It\u2019s possible to do this on psilocybin; it\u2019s really easy to do it on ayahuasca. Ayahuasca, in a way, is somehow more open to suggestion. These other things have their own agenda; ayahuasca will work with you. One of the bizarre things that you can do on ayahuasca is that you can suggest a period, let\u2019s say Italian Baroque. You just say it in your mind and paintings, altarpieces, architectural spaces, balustrades, vehicles, armaments, saddlery, clothing, serving utensils, bowls, pewter, candelabra, all of this stuff will begin drifting toward you, and it is high Baroque. In fact, it is more Baroque than the Baroque, it\u2019s obviously what they were shooting for. Then you say, \u201cDynastic Egypt,\u201d and you get a hawk-headed guy. Then you say, \u201cArt Deco,\u201d and thousands of cigarette lighters and coffee tables appear, more intensely realized than when you actually encounter these things in real life.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-116", "text": "Well, what does that mean? I have no idea. First of all, the possibilities seem to be that what we call styles or motifs are actually categories in the unconscious, but the amazing thing about it, having looked at the Italian Baroque, Dynastic Egypt, and Art Deco, is that you can also say to it, \u201cSurprise me,\u201d and suddenly it can surprise you, 100%. It can show you objects that you cannot place to any set of motifs, any historical period, past, present or future, and then you can say to it, \u201cSurprise me again,\u201d and it gives you Surprise B, which is completely different from Surprise A and also not related to any known style. So then you say, \u201cAre styles categories in the unconscious? How many of them are there? What does it mean then for a group of people in 1680 or 1930 to suddenly find one of these places and punch into it?\u201d Then another question is, \u201cIs there a necessary historical progression, or is it by chance?\u201d In other words, \u201cCould the political world of the 16th century have lived with the design motifs of Art Deco? Could we have had Columbus arriving in America in a ship consonant with the best canons of Bauhaus design?\u201d Strange questions, friends. \u201cIs there necessary succession in style or are these things pure chance?\u201d I don\u2019t know.\n\nReturning to and responding to your demonic advocacy, it may be that going to Tikal preconditions you and that pushes the button, and then when you take the psychedelic you realize that the high Mayan, the classic Mayan button had been set, and then you find all of this stuff. It\u2019s a little more bewildering to have it happen in your living room.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-117", "text": "Audience: My feeling about it is that those experiences are available to anybody in various states, with various ways to get there, and I don\u2019t feel that it is mutually exclusive to say that some substances do seem to have a certain predilection for certain kinds of experiences. I\u2019ve had both feelings about it, that the bandwidth of experiences is available and some things are more likely to put me there than others.\n\nWell, LSD is a relative of morning glories, so if you got Mexican imagery off of LSD that would be understandable. It may be that all the indoles resonate together, and Rupert is fond of saying, \u201cThe thing which is most impinging on the present is the immediate and most closely related past,\u201d but also impinging are the related past moments and the related contingencies. Perhaps all of the indoles can access each other. One thing that I\u2019ve done on psilocybin \u2014 and you might try this, this is an interesting experiment \u2014 once you get it up and running smoothly, then you can say to it, \u201cBe MDMA!\u201d and it will be it, and you can say to it, \u201cBe LSD!\u201d It loves to do imitations of other psychoactive drugs. I don\u2019t think you can say to MDMA, \u201cBe DMT!\u201d and it will move over into that space. You hope not, don\u2019t you? Obviously, it\u2019s some kind of freely commanded modality in the psyche with which we can have a relationship if we will but evolve a control language and a dialogue. It remains mysterious. A point that I made yesterday that I think is worth repeating is that the psychedelic experience is the beginning of the spiritual path. That\u2019s why it\u2019s not important that yogis claim that they can deliver you the psychedelic experience, because it begins with the psychedelic experience and then you go from there.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-118", "text": "I said something like this a few weeks ago at the John Ford Theater in L.A., and this guy got up and said, \u201cSo why don\u2019t you take more?\u201d which I think is a very interesting question, very valid for me, personally. Our whole lives, we conceive of spiritual development as looking for the answer: is it Taoism? Is it diet? Is it tantra? We look for the answer, and I think we have become so accustomed to looking for the answer that it\u2019s never really entered our minds what it would be like to find it, to have it. Once you come face to face with these psychedelics, the trail ends. You have found the answer. Perhaps because you\u2019re smart, perhaps because you\u2019re lucky, perhaps because you deserved it, perhaps because you hang out with the right people, you have found the answer. Now the question is, \u201cWhat the hell do you do with it?\u201d because the answer is going to make hash out of your life, because your life is based on living without the answer. Suddenly it\u2019s not, \u201cI want to be an enlightened being, I want to be a shaman, I want to be a Taoist, I want to be a yogi.\u201d Be it; see how you like it!", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-119", "text": "So the answer to the question, \u201cWhy don\u2019t you take more?\u201d is because I am attached, basically. It is entirely my own attachments that now impede my spiritual growth. Nobody is holding me back, nothing is holding me back except my sense of the awesomeness of what is now possible. This is true of everybody who reaches a certain point. Think of the Taoist sage on Cold Mountain who has been up there in the fog and the mist and the rock escarpments for 30, 40, 50 years, and the people in the village occasionally mention him to each other and say, \u201cIs old Fuzhi still alive? Has anyone seen him recently?\u201d and someone will say, \u201cOh yes, I saw him three years ago across a valley gathering wood, but when I approached he ran further up the mountain and disappeared.\u201d To be Fuzhi is entirely possible, to actually attain what we have previously thought of as unattainable spiritual accomplishment, but I don\u2019t think it can happen without leaving everything. Do you really want to be a Taoist hermit circulating the light for 200 years in a cave, high up above the timberline? You can; there\u2019s nothing stopping you once you understand that this psychedelic vehicle is available. I am appalled at that. I mean, it\u2019s one thing to change your life to be nicer to your coworkers, it\u2019s quite another to change your life to be incomprehensible to 99.9% of all humanity.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-120", "text": "Once you have the psychedelic tool in hand, then real choices have to be made. What is this to you? Is it simply something that you do once or twice a year to affirm to yourself that it\u2019s possible? Is it something that you can use in some way for your good and the world\u2019s? That\u2019s sort of where I have come to rest, and I hope it\u2019s not a delusion, but I think that there are ideas out there, and that they don\u2019t do any good out there, that they only have efficacy if brought into three dimensions. There are all kinds of ideas, in fact they are all ideas. So we\u2019re talking about a more efficient internal combustion engine, how people can learn to love each other, how to save the planet, the most efficient way of packing crackers in a box for long shelf life and low destruction of their structural integrity. It doesn\u2019t matter what the problem is, the answer can be found out there. It puts people who are into this psychedelic thing in an entirely different stance from all other spiritual seekers, because all other spiritual seekers are furiously seeking. Psychedelic people are holding it back with all their power because they are in the presence of the mystery, and then the trick is to get a spigot on it so that it can be turned on and off, rather than just coming at you like a tidal wave a mile high and twenty miles wide.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-121", "text": "It\u2019s a different problem, an embarrassment of riches, an embarrassment of access to past, present, future, alien dimensions, mantra-hoarding elves and promise-bearing demons. Strangely enough, it creates a certain kind of conservatism. I don\u2019t think that everybody realizes this. Many people take psychedelics in order to prove to themselves that they can, and then gain acceptance from their social group. It\u2019s a way of fitting in. You can always evade the mystery; not always, but if you\u2019re trying to from the get-go you can evade fully confronting the mystery, but if it\u2019s what you want, you will quickly discover that you have hit the main vein, and that changes the rules of the game pretty entirely.\n\nAudience: Some psychologists say that psychedelics will only take you so far, and then you have to do something else, but my experience with it is that that\u2019s not true and it will take you as far as you\u2019re willing to go.\n\nThat\u2019s what I think, I think people who quit doing it see something, detect. If you think of the self as a diamond, the psychedelic is pressure on the diamond. You can raise the pressure to 1,000 pounds per square inch and there are no structural flaws, but if you raise the pressure to 10,000 pounds per square inch microflaws begin to show and sheer lines appear, because everything will fly apart at a certain level. One cannot encompass this mystery. I think finally you have to avert your eyes and just \u2014 \u201cadore\u201d is a strange word, and \u201cworship\u201d is also a strange word \u2014 but certainly give credit to. It is not a program that you finish, and people who say, \u201cI learned all I could from it,\u201d probably learned mostly that they shouldn\u2019t do more of it.\n\nAudience: I think it threatens to put people out of a job, especially psychotherapists.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-122", "text": "Well, it threatens to put anybody out of a job, because eventually the contradictions of living in this low-level slice of reality will just become unbearable. This actually happened in the \u201860s, many people quit and dropped out for many reasons, but the seed of all that talk is that you just say, \u201cThis is absurd, I am going to sit.\u201d That\u2019s not absurd. But what about your stockbrokerage? What about your portfolio? What about your divorce in progress? I think that the depth of this cannot be taken. Eventually the male ego in every single one of us, regardless of our gender, will feel threatened, because it\u2019s hardly different from death, because you\u2019re not going to recognize yourself. That\u2019s the point that I wanted to make in talking about the guy up on Cold Mountain. Once he ran a gas station, once he followed the Dodgers, but then it all began to slide in a certain direction and he is no longer recognizable to himself.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-123", "text": "Carlos Castenada has Don Juan say, \u201cYou must lose your personal history.\u201d I don\u2019t know whether Don Juan is a real person or whether he ever said that, but it\u2019s interesting, that notion. How many of us would be willing to become unrecognizable to ourselves? And yet obviously that\u2019s the path that one is on, and so then you just decide, \u201cIs there an obligation to go to the end? Do I have to become a genie? Do I have to become a Taoist sage, an immortal?\u201d and I think the answer is no, one doesn\u2019t have to do that. Buddhism creates the notion of the Bodhisattva, that is in a way this same thing. It\u2019s where you\u2019re just about to go over the hill into incomprehensibility, and then you say, \u201cWait a minute, what about the people in the prisons, the naked, the hungry, the oppressed?\u201d and you pull back and say, \u201cNo, I forswear enlightenment until the last being attains enlightenment.\u201d Well, it\u2019s a noble gesture, but I\u2019ll bet these Bodhisattvas make this vow with a tremendous sigh of relief. Now they know what they\u2019re going to do with their lives: they\u2019re going to work in prisons, or council the dying, or get into political action. \u201cGeez! For a minute I thought I was going to go straight into the light, and become unrecognizable to myself and lose my definitions,\u201d and so forth and so on.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-124", "text": "Audience: The two words that struck me were \u201cadore\u201d and \u201cworship.\u201d On Friday night Matthew Fox quoted, \u201cWe have come to a point in history where we must either find some form of meaningful worship or commit suicide,\u201d and somehow that quote came back when you mentioned, \u201cWhen one may reach that point of the penultimate truth, of the unspeakable, or the formless form, or the light,\u201d and the mushrooms are pointing the way. Breath therapy, all these things are only something that points you to the ultimate, and when you get there it moves into the adoration and the worship level. Interestingly enough, coming from a recovering Catholic, I could never find any kind of religious community and I didn\u2019t want to join a monastery for that purpose. What I see is this neurosis or unhappiness that exists in so many people in this country. They have no contextual format for worship, because it doesn\u2019t have that power for them to do it.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-125", "text": "You have to have the personal experience of something to worship: this is what has been lacking. What the churches are peddling is high abstraction, and you really have to work yourself up into a lather to be able to accept that as worthy of that kind of attention. The psychedelic subset of society is into an experience, it\u2019s accessible. In a way we\u2019re like Calvinists, not in our ethics or our restraint on behavior, but in our insistence on a direct personal relationship with the mystery. This is something very new. We have really accepted the idea that truth descends through hierarchies, basically from Newsweek and Time and the Washington Post down to us, as consumers of these various images of what is going on. The notion that you might know more about reality than the combined editorial board of Scientific American and the Journal of Foreign Affairs is startling stuff. We always give ourselves away, we don\u2019t realize that it only depends on you. To believe that at Cornell or down at SRI people understand the universe is not helpful. You must understand the universe, and if you don\u2019t know partial differential calculus then your model of how the universe works must do it without partial differential calculus. In other words, it\u2019s not writ anywhere that only one model will work, and in fact I think that all abstract models should be highly suspect.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-126", "text": "We have to view life as an opportunity. What are you doing with it? Are you afraid of it? Some people live their lives and apparently what they are doing is arranging their deathbed scene. They want it to take place in a large baronial house with clipped green lawns, acres in surround, they want the room in which they die to be filled with fine art, they want their loving heirs to be dutifully assembled while they pass out the final wisdom, and they spend their entire life creating the dramatic scenario of their passage. Of course you have to work hard, because you\u2019ve got to make the money to buy that house, you have to sire all these children, educate them into your values so they won\u2019t be stabbing you in the back and misbehaving in this situation. You have to create loyalty, possession, power, all of these things and then you won\u2019t die in a ditch, unknown and abandoned; but on the other hand, what was the quality of that life?\n\nLife is an opportunity; how much pressure should you put on it? How many places should you go? How many drugs should you take? How many sexual configurations should you experiment with? How many professions? It depends; the question, I think, is, \u201cHow seriously do you take it?\u201d Do you just think that life is a lark and it\u2019s fine with you that you\u2019re going to go into a pine box and be forgotten for all eternity, or do you have some inner consolation that that won\u2019t happen and you\u2019re going to go off and be with Lao Tzu and Mao and everybody else who ever died? Just what is it? I think of it as a telephone booth being filled with water. You can see that when the water reaches the top of the telephone booth you\u2019re going to be dead as a doornail, so you have 30 years to figure it out.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-127", "text": "We are alive, there\u2019s no contest about that. It\u2019s extremely improbable that we should be alive, that we should be here thinking, feeling, sharing. The fact that we\u2019re alive throws open the whole game, means anything is probably possible, but I doubt that it\u2019s easy. I\u2019ll bet that you have to be very smart to figure out what\u2019s going on and get it right, so I guess I have a private religion of intelligence. It isn\u2019t how good you are, it\u2019s how wily you are, which was the Greek virtue of Odysseus, that was always his epithet. He was \u201cwily Ulysses.\u201d Reality is some kind of maze, a puzzle garden that you walk through to try to find your way out. It isn\u2019t to the swift that the race goes, it\u2019s to the thoughtful, to the careful, to the one who can tease it all apart. For puzzle solving, the psychedelic is this tremendously powerful tool, because it extends the domain of mind, and that\u2019s what\u2019s necessary to make it go.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-128", "text": "OK, moving through these things and discussing dosage, probably in order of the likelihood of your encountering them. Mushrooms: I feel that people who weigh around 140 pounds should take five dried grams. This is a stiff hit. This is a committed hit. There will be difficult moments in a five gram trip, but on the other hand certain questions will be solved forever for you, because you will validate the existence of this dimension, you will see what your relationship to it is. I don\u2019t believe in diddling with these things. People tend to take tiny amounts, thinking that one tenth of a dose is one tenth of an experience. It doesn\u2019t work like that; half a dose can be no experience at all, and a full dose can feel like ten of these experiences, so trivializing it is really, and I use this word advisedly, sinful, because you are trivializing the only mystery. It\u2019s like trivializing sex. The ordinary objections to pornography are not my objections, but to my mind a very strong objection to pornography is that it trivializes, and anything which trivializes anything central to our self-definition is bad mental hygiene. Taking small doses of psychedelics tends to trivialize them. There are people who probably take LSD every weekend and go dancing and have done this for years and have no idea what LSD is capable of.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-129", "text": "The main shift in the use pattern with LSD is: it may have been childish, but the style of the \u201860s was, \u201cHow many mics can you bolt down?\u201d \u201cHave you had the 500? Have you had the 1,000? Have you had the 2,000?\u201d Eventually it becomes moot because you just dissolve into shimmering atoms for longer and longer periods of time on these trips, but the modern approach, which is, \u201cHow little can you get away with taking and still be one of the gang?\u201d is even more insidious, because then people feel capable of talking about these things. There are people who feel that their opinions on the psychedelic experience should be weighed very carefully who have only taken MDMA. Well, listen, I\u2019ve got news for you: that is to the domain we\u2019re talking about like a broken tricycle to a Testarossa Ferrari. So this is a general comment, that you should take a committed dose of whatever it is you\u2019re taking so that there is no ambiguity, because there\u2019s nothing worse than a sub-threshold psychedelic experience. It\u2019s all show and no go: you feel the CNS activation, you feel the keyboards light up, everything comes on, you start down the runway, you pick up speed, and then you come to the end of the runway and taxi back to the hangar. Well, that was not a flight to Boston, that was just clogging the traffic pattern.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-130", "text": "So, committed doses. Then, because you\u2019re going to take a committed dose, inform yourself of the medical and pharmacological chitchat on the matter so that you can feel reassured. Talk to a heart specialist, questions like, \u201cIf my heart is pounding, does that mean I am having a heart attack? What is a fibrillation and how will I recognize it?\u201d because you can have very odd feelings and not be in any danger whatsoever. Your heart can pound \u2014 it\u2019s made to pound, look at all these aerobic exercise freaks \u2014 well, the fact that you\u2019re sitting still when this begins to happen doesn\u2019t mean that you\u2019ve been shoved to death\u2019s door, it just means that everything is equalizing and coming to some kind of equilibrium, and you\u2019re passing through a transition. These drugs do have a kind of Mach barrier. In other words, there is a barrier somewhat like the speed of sound. It\u2019s a pharmacological and physiological barrier. So you take the compound, the plant, whatever it is, nothing happens for 40 minutes or so except false starts and little things and you have to pee and then you come back and sit down, and then it begins to come on.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-131", "text": "It can have many manifestations. It can be chills, tremoring, knotted stomach, nausea, restlessness, so forth and so on. This is what I call, taking a page from the engineering book, \u201cQ.\u201d \u201cQ\u201d in engineering circles is vibration in a physical system. When they launch the space shuttle, if you listen to the radio chitchat they will say, \u201cApproaching max Q,\u201d then they\u2019ll say, \u201cMax Q, mark,\u201d and then they\u2019re through that. What that means is that as the system approaches a transition it begins to shake, it begins to shake as though it\u2019s going to shake to pieces. The Q forces are building on all the air surfaces, the airframe. Then you break through that, Q falls to 0 and then you\u2019re in the cool, main engine cut off. You are now in orbit, all vibration has ceased, noise has ceased. You are in orbit, you are weightless, you are there. It\u2019s different. Now you shut down all these switches related to the launch procedure and begin to set a course through a different kind of medium, a medium characterized by smooth stillness and that sort of thing. LSD: I don\u2019t see anything wrong with 300-400 micrograms as an initial dose. I don\u2019t see any point in running up into the 1,500-2,000 \u03bcg range, because in my experience what happens at higher doses is that there is simply an area where you can\u2019t remember what happened, and the higher the dose, the longer that period of time, but since you can\u2019t remember anything about it, it should be shortened. DMT: 70 milligrams vaporized in a glass pipe.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-132", "text": "Audience: I have taken very large doses of LSD at times and it\u2019s always seemed to me that it\u2019s very difficult to process all that\u2019s going on. The biocomputer shut downs for a while, and like you said, I forget.\n\nYes, it overloads, it just shunts it past you. What do we need to cover here? DMT, psilocybin, LSD. MDMA, which probably you all know, 125-150 milligrams, and because I tell you these doses it doesn\u2019t necessarily mean I approve of all these things. I\u2019m just saying that if you take them, these are the doses. Ketamine: people take small amounts, again usually after attaining some amount of proficiency with it. I\u2019ve only done it four or five times, and always fairly large doses, 130-150 mg. Interesting compound, but contraindicated because of physiological problems. It depresses the immune system, there\u2019s the possibility of epileptic kindling. Certainly, if you were to vomit in that state, you might well strangle because you wouldn\u2019t be able to clear your throat. What I also have against ketamine is that you have to shoot it. As I was driving home last night I was listening to some program and they were talking about intravenous drugs and I thought, \u201cHow interesting. That\u2019s a distinction you don\u2019t hear made very often.\u201d They were saying, \u201cWe should legalize all drugs except intravenous drugs,\u201d so that\u2019s of course morphine, cocaine, heroin, ketamine, steroids, I suppose. That\u2019s an interesting distinction, operationally.\n\nAudience: You can snort ketamine, can\u2019t you, though?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-133", "text": "Audience: You can snort ketamine, can\u2019t you, though?\n\nYou can, but I\u2019ve heard that it\u2019s dangerous. When they give it as an anesthetic it\u2019s 600 mg IV push, which must be just like being struck from behind by a freight train. I\u2019m sure you never know what hit you. I mean, imagine an exploratory dose is 100 intramuscular, they are talking about IV, directly into the vein, 600 push, that means pressure on the feeder. So it\u2019s just like a high pressure filling of your gas tank, you would never know what hit you. Now they\u2019ve pulled it from general surgery, even veterinary surgery, because it seems to depress the immune system and the worst thing you could do is to do surgery on somebody and then put them into a surgical recovery ward with a depressed immune system. So that is kind of out.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-134", "text": "I must say about ketamine that it did something to me that nothing else has ever done, which is that it erodes the observer in a way that the indoles don\u2019t. On ketamine you can get so out there that it is a major intellectual breakthrough to realize that you\u2019re on a drug, in other words, there\u2019s this situation and it seems like it\u2019s always been there and it always will be there and you can\u2019t remember who you are, or what you are, or where you are. This situation continues, and there\u2019s something about it but you can\u2019t quite put your finger on it, and there\u2019s never been anything else, there will never be anything else, and then suddenly comes this tiny thought: \u201cYou\u2019re on a drug!\u201d \u201cOh, right, I remember now. That\u2019s it! That\u2019s it, I\u2019m a human being and I took a drug. This is a trip. That\u2019s right, I\u2019m on a trip. Now I\u2019ve got it!\u201d Well, what this means is that you\u2019re now coming down because the trip is now over with.\n\nAudience: I had this experience with mushrooms. For hours I had no connection to anything which had any connection to my personality or to life. It was wonderful to be there and to see what makes up our minds, how this world is made up, with all of its structure and architectural designs.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-135", "text": "Yes, maybe this is the white light. Maybe this is what these early LSD people were so enamored of, getting so far into it that you don\u2019t even know you\u2019re into it, because you can\u2019t remember where you started from. It\u2019s not what I\u2019m shooting for because I always want to bring stuff back. My belief is that this stuff is important for all of us, that we are in some kind of lower-dimensional slice and what you see in the psychedelic experience actually has historical implications. I find this sort of paradoxical because I\u2019m the person who draws everybody\u2019s attention to the fact that people have been doing this for 50,000 years, so in a way that sounds like I\u2019m saying, \u201cIt\u2019s not a big deal, it\u2019s part of the human heritage, certain people have always known about this.\u201d\n\nAudience: The point between when there\u2019s nothing and when the observer kicks in: that\u2019s a big issue in my life, where does the observer come from? Is it an evolutionary thing, like animals never have it when they fade into the white light? Do you have anything to say about that little place in between?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-136", "text": "I think it begins with self-reflection. In other words, the question, \u201cWhat is happening?\u201d I don\u2019t think animals ever ask that question. For animals, what\u2019s happening is what\u2019s happening, but we are capable of creating a state of distance and posing the question, \u201cWhat is happening?\u201d and at that point in the trip it means that you are making your way back to the modality that you left from, you are drawing away from the translinguistic place \u2014 and it truly is translinguistic: nothing can be taken out of it \u2014 but at the interface of the sayable and the unsayable is the novel, the new, the never before seen, said or done. I think it\u2019s important to try to bring out ideas because I think we are the animals that bring back ideas. Somehow our hunting and gathering adaptation then set us loose in our own minds, and somebody came back and said, \u201cLet\u2019s throw a chunk of this meat in the fire and see what happens.\u201d It\u2019s this \u201csee what happens\u201d attitude, so then suddenly they discovered that meat burned in fires is easier to digest and tastes better.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-137", "text": "By this means, this, \u201cLet\u2019s see what happens,\u201d approach to things, the ideas come in the mental dimension. The, \u201cLet\u2019s see what happens,\u201d translates those of them that can be translated into three-dimensional space. \u201cLet\u2019s plant this plant, let\u2019s slaughter this animal, let\u2019s try sex this way, let\u2019s go over that hill this year instead of that hill.\u201d What has come out of this is the entire legacy of our cultural heritage as a global civilization, but all of these ideas began in the mind. What are ideas? This is the central question of Platonic philosophy. What are we that we seem to separate the doable from the undoable in the realm of ideas? Anything that can be done, we do. It doesn\u2019t matter how perverse, how painful, how destructive, how grandiose, how wonderful, how sublime; if it can be done, we do it. Then, in this three-dimensional domain of space and time, these ideas compete with each other like organisms and an ecology of mind evolves. That\u2019s really what culture is: it\u2019s the ecology that mind has created for itself, in the same way that bees create a beehive and then the beehive is the cultural context of beeness. We have created civilization through language and then civilization has become the context for humanness, and yet we always seek to transcend it and go beyond it.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-138", "text": "Now, I don\u2019t know whether this is something innate in us or whether it is somehow programmed in from the planet at different levels. It\u2019s very interesting, I don\u2019t know how many of you are aware of this, but there are leafcutter ants in the tropics, they are a major part of life in the tropics, and they march in columns through the jungle, and they can swarm up a tree and take all the leaf material off a large jungle tree in a matter of hours. What they do with these leaves is that they return, sometimes at great distances, each one carrying like a little banner a chunk of leaf, and they go down into their nests, chew it up and stick it on the wall, and then some of them go back to the surface and gather spores on their antennae, and then they go back down into the anthill and they inject or inoculate the chewed plant material with these spores. Naturally, this chewed plant material is pretty organic and funky, so it begins to grow all kinds of things: molds, mildews, bacteria, so forth and so on. The ants farm this and weed out all these bad bacteria and small microfungi and organisms, and only cultivate this one fungus which then converts the plant material into a usable sugar. This is a symbiotic relationship between the fungi and the ant. The ant is getting an enriched food out of this and what the fungi is getting is a cultivated situation where all its competitor organisms are carefully kept away and weeded out.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-139", "text": "This is precisely, in my model, what is happening with the human species at a more complex level. In other words, by domesticating cattle we have set up an environment that is very favorable to the growth and appearance of what would otherwise be a very rare deep forest mushroom, but because we domesticate cattle and clear land we have created a huge circumtropical global environment in which these mushrooms can reside. What they make for us is not sugar but ideas, something we need the way ants need sugar, and these ideas take all kinds of forms and then we refine them. I really believe that human populations that do not have contact with the psychedelic tremendum are neurotic, because they are male ego-dominated. The reason I call it male ego is because women, by virtue of physiology, basically, are pretty unavoidably welded to the nitty gritty, because they give birth, they carry children to term, and those two things are biologically dictated. There is also the cultural dictate that women are usually involved in preparing and burying the dead in traditional societies, so women know how weird it is. Surely, to give birth must give you a perspective that anybody who has never done it just cannot hope to have. The male ego floats on this myth of separateness that no woman has the luxury of entertaining, because birth, pregnancy, menstruation, care for the sick, care for the dying, these are boundary dissolving activities that keep women close to the nitty gritty. The male organism can go off into its own private Idaho, pretty much. Often what child rearing means is the simple act of impregnation, and that\u2019s the contribution in many cases, in primitive and modern societies. Death is something that the women take care of. At birth in primitive societies men are never present; women do it alone or with other women.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-140", "text": "In these Neolithic and Paleolithic societies this tendency of the ego to tumorize and grow in individuals was kept down by a chemical regulator, which was the psychedelic experience. It was part of the food chain and it suppressed ego, much in the way that drugs are given in prisons to suppress libido, because it\u2019s hard to manage a highly libidinous people in an institutionalized situation, especially when only one sex is involved. So this natural regulation of the human species by regulating this psychic function called ego was disrupted with the invention of agriculture. The hunting-gathering society with its deep involvement in ecstasy, these weekly or biweekly psychedelic orgy ecstasy picnics that people used to have, that gave way. Weston La Barre makes the point that ecstasy is not at a premium in agricultural societies because it\u2019s disruptive. What is at a premium in agricultural societies is the ability to get up before dawn and pick up your tools and go to the fields and work like a dog. If people have been up all night before, dancing and tripping, they can\u2019t do that. The psychedelic gods are replaced by cereals \u2014 corn, wheat, rye \u2014 and of course at a very early strata in the Neolithic you do get the emergence of the Great Corn God and all this. Frazer is full of talk about this. So we are living the legacy of millennia of cultural neurosis in Western civilization by virtue of the fact of the untreated growth of the cancerous ego. We know this, it\u2019s simply that we assume there is no cure, we assume that it\u2019s natural to have ego and that it\u2019s somehow unnatural to suppress it. Wherever you have an outbreak of psychedelic use in a high-tech society then you see refeminized, hang loose, communal, caring values. Values come into prominence within the community.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-141", "text": "Audience: Have you seen a difference in the way men and women react to psychedelics, given the fact that perhaps men embody a stronger male ego than women? My other question has to do with the role of observer ego when you\u2019re doing drugs, whether it\u2019s marijuana or alcohol or especially psychedelics. Sitting here, thinking that the reason that I don\u2019t take anything stronger than marijuana is that I lose myself even in a strong hit of marijuana, I lose my ego completely. I get a different form of the experience if I don\u2019t get fearful and paranoid, but it\u2019s easy to get scared when the sense of the observer ego just goes and I don\u2019t remember that I\u2019m on a drug trip and it seems timeless and eternal. Then I come down later. As you were saying, at the backside of the high I say, \u201cOh, yes, I just took some marijuana two hours ago. Everything\u2019s fine, I\u2019ll recover tomorrow.\u201d Maybe you can talk a little about that and what people can do who don\u2019t have a strong ego structure, whatever it takes to do these powerful drugs. I don\u2019t think I would be able to handle it.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-142", "text": "If you don\u2019t have a strong ego structure, chances are you\u2019re not a heavy-duty male dominator, because they\u2019re sort of antithetical. I think probably cannabis was a major ego dissolver and that all these things have been used this way, and if that works for you, that\u2019s fine. I didn\u2019t take psychedelics to lose my ego. Although people said that would happen, I never quite understood what was meant, but looking at it as a mass phenomenon, where you\u2019re not talking about an individual tripper but tens of thousands of people, inevitably this feminizing of values seems to take place. I don\u2019t know if men and women experience psychedelics differently, I\u2019ve never quantitatively looked into this, but my impression is that it\u2019s less of a surprise to women and that they feel less of a need to do it. I think this is particularly true of cannabis; I\u2019ll bet that two thirds of cannabis use is male use. Why is this? I\u2019m not sure. Maybe women have too much work to do, too many obligations. The old man can sit and smoke dope, but somebody has to do the shopping, get the kids to school and pick them up, keep the insurance paid and all that. Women, I think, have a different relationship to it. Women are often shamans, and in many cultures the best shamans are usually felt to be women. Women are connected up to all of this stuff. Drug taking may not be a male enterprise but history is a male enterprise. I don\u2019t think we would have ever gotten into it if it had been up to women.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-143", "text": "In a way, the women outsmarted themselves because they had, not control in the conscious sense, but they were sitting in the front of the canoe and then they invented agriculture and that undercut their own position, because the vast repository of plant knowledge that had been the secret knowledge of women no longer really mattered as long as you knew how to grow corn and a couple of other things. The vast encyclopedic data on wild plants became less important and it became more labor intensive. Men, because they had evolved toward being efficient hunters, probably did have a physical edge on women in terms of stamina and the ability to work with a hoe for 8 or 9 hours a day, because what the women did when they were in the prime cultural situation was that they gathered. They looked at stuff and talked about it with each other, and this was the domain in which language then arose. Gathering is not hard work, it\u2019s just steady work, and it\u2019s lots of fun", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-144", "text": "it\u2019s just steady work, and it\u2019s lots of fun if you do it with your friends. The cliched notion about aboriginal peoples is that women chatter, this phrase, \u201cthe chattering of women\u201d in primitive situations. It really is true that women avail themselves of language much more than men in these preliterate situations. The men are hunters and they act like hunters: they\u2019re stoic, they hold it all in. Literally, the larger bladder size of men is thought to be related to the hunting adaptation and so forth. The men are stoic, they\u2019re holding it in; the women are information freaks, for them it all rides on information. \u201cWhere do you find it? How do you cook it? What does it look like? Is it poisonous? What time of year is best? What soil is best? What do you combine it with? Is it good all year round? What do the flowers look like? What does the fruit look like?\u201d Data, information. How could you ever understand the", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-145", "text": "Data, information. How could you ever understand the use and location of 600 plants or more unless you had a tremendously evolved vocabulary for this kind of thing?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-146", "text": "Audience: The physical weakness that follows psilocybin, is there any way to prevent that?\n\nThese things take energy. Obviously, during the trip energy is being sucked into the moment. A trip is hard work even if you\u2019re sitting still, so then there\u2019s going to be an energy debt. One way of assessing the toxicity of a drug \u2014 in the course of this weekend I\u2019ve named several ways, and they all need to be used together \u2014 one way of assessing toxicity is how you feel the next day. What I do when I take mushrooms is that I usually take them at about 9 at night. By 1 or 2 in the morning it has usually passed, and then I eat before I sleep so that I don\u2019t wake up in the morning with a protein debt. That\u2019s very important, if you eat before you sleep after a trip, it won\u2019t be nearly so hard a comedown. One of the things that\u2019s really appalling to me about MDMA is that here is this pretty minor psychoactive, and my God, the day after is tough sledding. For a hangover like that you should at least have seen God. LSD: if you drink a lot of water, that helps, and yes, vitamins are never a bad idea at any point with these things. LSD, as I said yesterday, was so effective at low doses that on that scale it appeared very non-invasive. I feel terrible after taking LSD, it takes me 24 hours to put it back together.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-147", "text": "The interesting exception to this, and it always seems to cut my way in terms of favoring the ones I think are most interesting, DMT is again the anomaly here. DMT is the most powerful hallucinogen there is. If it gets stronger than that I don\u2019t want to know about it. 15 minutes after you do it, you feel as though as you have never done a drug, you are down 100%, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, physically. It just returns you to the baseline. Ayahuasca goes DMT one better, and ayahuasca is the only one that I know of that does this. I maintain that the reason these things behave this way is because they are so similar to ordinary brain chemistry. With ayahuasca, you actually come out slightly higher than you went in, and it isn\u2019t lost. I mean, you feel great the day after an ayahuasca trip. If it\u2019s your first trip and you spent 8 hours vomiting, you\u2019re probably not going to feel so good, but if it was an ordinary ayahuasca trip then you\u2019re going to feel much better the day after than you did going in: more connected, more alert, more energy. This must have something to do with the fact that the constituents of ayahuasca \u2014 harmine, harmaline, DMT \u2014 all occur in the human brain. Why doesn\u2019t this happen with psilocybin? I don\u2019t know. Psilocybin doesn\u2019t occur in the brain but it is a very close relative.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-148", "text": "I think DMT is absolutely fascinating from every point of view. Why is it so benign? Why is it so powerful? Why is it so short acting? Why is it so hard to get any? That\u2019s the $64 question. Believe me, every book on drugs that you pick up says it\u2019s easily made, they ask you to believe that people are making it in their kitchens all around you. Well, I don\u2019t know. I\u2019ve seen it botched many times. The literature doesn\u2019t tell you that; botched, ruined. If somebody comes to you with a grainy, dark brown syrup, forget it. That is not what it looks like. That means that they swept the floor after they dropped the retort or something. What it looks like is orange moth balls. It looks like a crystalline, waxy, orange to pale rose to yellow kind of substance, and it\u2019s very aromatic. If someone shows you a liquid or stuff which looks like brown sugar, it\u2019s a mess. We were", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-149", "text": "like brown sugar, it\u2019s a mess. We were appalled, we got samples of underground DMT and ran high pressure liquid gas chromatography on them, and it literally looked like the guy swept the floor. These people had actually done it. I wouldn\u2019t have given it to a rat, much less a human being. The notion of someone actually taking that stuff was just hair raising. What you should have is a very steep spike at 620 nanometers and what we got looked like the Himalayas. It was running around all kinds of stuff. There has been DMT around which was shootable DMT, which is the hydrochloride, and since I don\u2019t shoot things I didn\u2019t pursue it, although what people tell me is that shooting is not as effective as smoking. People think that shooting a drug is the most effective way, because you see it all go into your body or something, I don\u2019t know. If you shoot DMT it takes about 5 minutes to come on and lasts about 45 minutes.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-150", "text": "minutes to come on and lasts about 45 minutes. That\u2019s why if you read in the literature, \u201cHow long does DMT last?\u201d it will always say 45 minutes. If you smoke it, the peak experience lasts 400 seconds, something like that. It\u2019s extreme, that\u2019s why it\u2019s so astonishing, because it is so intense and the onset is so sudden that it\u2019s more like something has happened to you, rather than that you\u2019ve taken a drug.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-151", "text": "Sometimes people come out of it saying, \u201cWhat happened?\u201d \u201cHave we done it yet, or was there an earthquake and the roof fell on me just as we were about to do it?\u201d It has the quality of an event rather than an experience, and also it has the quality of an event because it does not touch the core observer. You are not changed, what\u2019s changed is the sensory input. You are still who you are. You don\u2019t think you\u2019re God, you don\u2019t feel bad about yourself, you are exactly who you were before you did it with the same set of concerns, but you have been whisked into an alien dimension, one you never had imagined existed or could have a moment before have conceived of, and suddenly it\u2019s 100% in place 360 degrees around you, and then 3-10 minutes later you\u2019re raving to your friends, and it\u2019s as far away as that trip to Mallorca four years ago.\n\nAudience: Could you explain the distinction between DMT and 5-MeO-DMT in terms of the quality of the experience?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-152", "text": "They are day and night. 5-MeO-DMT, some people like it. It\u2019s a feeling, that\u2019s what it\u2019s been for me. It\u2019s this huge feeling that kind of sweeps through you, and it\u2019s velvety. It\u2019s hard to describe, but the main thing that I\u2019m noticing when it\u2019s happening is that I am not hallucinating. Of course, the main thing that\u2019s happening with DMT is that you are having hallucinations so intense, so three-dimensional, so highly colored, so sculpturally defined that it\u2019s more real than reality. By that I mean: if you look at this room, notice how all edges are slightly feathered, there is at all boundaries a slight indeterminacy, but on DMT it\u2019s hard-edged, everything is just defined. Sometimes people say, \u201cIt\u2019s as though all the air had been pumped out of the room.\u201d You\u2019re seeing it with that lunar starkness and clarity: unimaginable objects, objects off the art scale, and entities. DMT is the only one of these psychedelics where I have seen the entities. On psilocybin it speaks and it\u2019s audial. On DMT you see these things. I don\u2019t know whether it\u2019s my personal mythology\u2026", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-153", "text": "For me, DMT is the center of the mystery. I fear it, I love it, I thank God for it, I wonder if I\u2019ll ever understand it. It takes a huge mustering of courage on my part to do it. I mean, we talk, talk, talk: change, transformation, other dimensions. This is not talk when you do it. You just do not know the parameters. I feel like I know more about what could happen to me if I\u2019m in the Amazon jungle than I know what could happen to me when I\u2019m in that place, and after many DMT trips I\u2019ve finally been able to paint a picture for myself of what is happening in there. I don\u2019t know anybody who has done it as much as I have. I wish people did it more and talked more about it, because, boy, if there is a landscape where we need some consensus, this is it. I have been present when people did it, and they come back babbling about the same thing I think that I have encountered. One woman said, \u201cIt was a carnival, it was an extraterrestrial midway,\u201d and somebody else came back and said, \u201cThere were gnomes, there were elves,\u201d and yes, this is getting close to it.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-154", "text": "What happens to me when I do it is that there is an initial period of hysteria and confusion. It\u2019s almost as though time speeds up, even before you take the first hit. Many people say, \u201cJust before you do DMT there\u2019s this funny kind of impression in the room,\u201d almost as though there is backwash from the event about to happen. You are caught in the psychic field of this event and everything is moving faster and faster, it\u2019s like the Q phenomenon. Then you take the hit and it\u2019s building up in your body and your heart is pounding, and then you break through to this place. The first impression is of the sound of cellophane being crumpled, that crackling sound, as if someone had just taken a bread wrapper and crackled that cellophane. A friend of mine says, \u201cThat\u2019s the sound of the radio entelechy of your soul tearing out of the organic envelope,\u201d which is what it sounds like. It sounds like your body has just been", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-155", "text": "sounds like. It sounds like your body has just been wadded up and thrown into a corner and now you\u2019re a radio signal approximately four lightseconds in diameter spreading out through an alien universe, and the next impression is of a cheer. It\u2019s, \u201cHoorah! Welcome, welcome!\u201d It\u2019s them, they\u2019re waiting and they can hardly wait. There\u2019s a moment when they are not on me, just a moment, and then they say, \u201cYou\u2019re here, we\u2019re glad to see you! Why did you stay away so long?\u201d and then they come toward me, and the main thing for me in the DMT thing is to struggle not to go into shock of wonder, basically. There is a strong tendency, and for the first few trips I couldn\u2019t conquer it. I was just a victim of it, I would just go into this, and I would say, \u201cHeart? Heart OK. Breathing? Breathing OK,\u201d but I\u2019m looking and I can\u2019t believe my eyes, because I\u2019m in some kind of domed place.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-156", "text": "The impression, don\u2019t ask me why, the impression is of being underground, even though it\u2019s a huge vaulted space and highly colored. What is, of course, riveting my attention are these beings. They\u2019re small, and they\u2019re like I\u2019ve described them, as machine elves. They seem partially machine-like and partially elf-like. They are not so mundane as that, they don\u2019t have a fixed body outline, and in fact that\u2019s one of the things that going on in this space that\u2019s so baffling. They come toward you. They are singing in this alien language which you somehow understand \u2014 it cannot be translated into English but you understand it in that moment \u2014 and they are using their voices to produce objects. So song becomes thing, and there are dozens of these things and they come closer and closer, and the songs they sing condense into objects, and the objects themselves can sing. These things come and they are saying, \u201cLook! Look!\u201d and they are holding this stuff out to you, and you look at it, and you\u2019re fighting wonder because your entire being is caught up in, \u201cThis can\u2019t be happening,\u201d and yet they\u2019re saying \u201cJust look!\u201d", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-157", "text": "What are these things? Devices? Toys? Works of art? Objects? Whatever they are, they are amazing, and you look into it and they seem to be shifting, even though they\u2019re made of metal and glass and gems and pulsating. Everything is migrating and shifting and changing and they say, \u201cLook at this one!\u201d It\u2019s the most astonishing thing you\u2019ve ever seen, and then they say, \u201cLook at this one, look at this one!\u201d and they\u2019re piling up. These things are coming toward you and then they jump through you, they can pass through your body. They\u2019re running around, chirping and singing and making these objects. What they\u2019re doing is they are saying, \u201cDo what we are doing, do what we are doing!\u201d and you just say, \u201cI just want to go back to New York.\u201d They say, \u201cLater for that!\u201d The implication is \u2014 and this is the mystery of my life, I\u2019m teasing it out, trying to understand it \u2014 but the implication and the promise is that ahead of us in time, 6 months, 50,000 years, is a visible linguistic channel of communication. That the thin channel of audial communication composed of small mouth noises is just a provisional kind of communication, and what is being proposed in this state is a true telepathy. Now I always thought that telepathy means that you think and I hear what you\u2019re thinking. What it actually turns out to be is that you speak and I see what you mean. I don\u2019t mean that metaphorically, I mean I see what you mean, so that your linguistic intentionality condenses as a three-dimensional object in front of us, a sculptural modality. So then we both see what you mean; you made it and I\u2019m your conversational cohort, and we\u2019re both looking at your meaning. We can walk around it, we can adjust it.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-158", "text": "Notice that no common dictionary is necessary here. If you\u2019re Witoto and I\u2019m Polish, I still see what you mean, because what you mean is an objectified three-dimensional modality, not a string of Witoto words, and it\u2019s saying, \u201cDo this, do what we are doing!\u201d It took me about 15 trips to get this far, and then I began to experiment with sounding in that state and I discovered that they were right. That \u201cmmmm\u201d is a 3.5 foot wide, 8 foot long, magenta curved surface with lime auras, and that \u201cuhnnn\u201d shifts the lime auras into rose pink and adds grey-silver pinstriping along one edge. I thought, \u201cMy God, what is this?\u201d Then when you break out into actual chanting, actual linguistically-modulated sound, you discover that you too can make these objects. What they apparently are \u2014 how this could be, don\u2019t ask me \u2014 they are apparently syntactical sculpture, sculpture made of syntax. Syntax suddenly becomes not the rules that govern spoken languages, but the rules that govern the assembly of three-dimensional thought objects, as though words were the shadows of hyperdimensional intentions that can actually be broken through to. Well, my God, I just thought that this was the weirdest, this takes the cake. I\u2019ve never heard of such a thing. Nobody\u2019s ever suggested to me that this is possible.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-159", "text": "So then, as is the case with most things, if you look long enough you discover precursors. What I discovered in a wonderful book, and any one of you would love this book, I\u2019m sure. It doesn\u2019t deal with the psychedelic experience by name, but it is a psychedelic book. It\u2019s called The Phenomenon of Life by Hans Jonas, and if you can find this book, what a read. It\u2019s a group of essays, and in one of the essays he is talking about the etymology of the word \u201cIsrael,\u201d and he says, following Talmudic thinkers, that Israel means \u201cHe who sees God,\u201d that this is the actual etymological basis of the word \u201cIsrael.\u201d Did I say that we are talking now about the writings of Philo Judeaus? Yes, Philo Judeaus, in discussing the etymology of the word \u201cIsrael,\u201d says that it means \u201cHe who sees God.\u201d Then he says, \u201cWhat does this mean, he who sees God?\u201d Well, as you probably know, in the Hellenistic world there was this phenomenon called the Logos. The Logos was an informing, internal voice that tells you the right way to live. It\u2019s like a spirit ally that speaks to you and informs you. So Philo Judeaus said, \u201cWhat would be the more perfect Logos?\u201d and then he goes on to answer his own question. He said, \u201cThe more perfect Logos would go from being heard to being beheld without ever crossing over a quantized moment of distinct transition.\u201d This is precisely, and in fact, what is going on in these states, because now I have learned or have found out how to evoke this DMT phenomenon in the more controllable environment of the psilocybin intoxication.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-160", "text": "It happens like this: first of all, I form the wish for it to happen. I usually follow a line I learned in an old I Love Lucy rerun where she\u2019s explaining to Ethel how she contacts flying saucers and she says, \u201cI just say, \u201cCome in, little green men! Come in, little green men!\u201d\u201d So on mushrooms I do this, I say, \u201cCome in, little green men!\u201d and what begins to happen is this sound like bells, like very distant bells. Then it becomes louder and louder, sort of like bells with wind. It becomes louder and louder and more complicated and more complex, and at a certain, very hard to precisely define moment, it begins to spill over into the visual cortex. Then I see the language and I can interact with it. It is apparently a more perfect Logos.\n\nThis is what I had in the back of my mind yesterday. Remember when I talked about how smoking was new to Europeans and they couldn\u2019t understand what it was, and then I made this offhand comment that it was a new use for the human body, only 500 years old? Well, it proves that there may be undiscovered uses for the human body. I mean, we\u2019ve only been around playing with our bodies for 50,000 years, and we\u2019ve discovered most sexual configurations, and all these acrobatic things and amazing things that people can do like make pyramids of ten individuals, but smoking is pretty basic, and yet only 500 years old. It seems to me that right under the surface of human neurological organization is a mode shift of some sort that would make language beholdable, and that if we could somehow kick over into this alternative mode we would become unrecognizable to ourselves. Now I realize that this sounds pretty far-fetched, but you always have to have reference to context.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-161", "text": "In a universe where there were no people, that would be a pretty far-fetched idea, but the fact that we already possess language seems to argue that we are in the process of continually evolving new applications for our bodies. When spoken language burst onto the scene 35,000 years ago, by most estimates \u2014 think of it: 35,000 years ago, people invented language \u2014 what must it have seemed like to them? It must have seemed like a miracle. Hardly anything sets you up for it. The difference between a 9 hour recitation of oral poetry and three chickadees on a line is quite a leap. I\u2019m suggesting that somehow there could be a leap forward in the communication dimension and that this is in fact what shamanism is all about, what the end of history is all about, what psychedelic drugs are all about. We are edgewalking on an ontological transformation of what it means to be human. The mode that this transformation will come in will not be political or technological. It isn\u2019t starflight, it isn\u2019t socialism; it\u2019s a whole other way of making our minds known to each other, by being able to show each other our minds. In psychedelic states you can do this.\n\nAudience: Do you think there is any relationship to the Australian aboriginal belief that the forefathers actually sung the world into being? That concept doesn\u2019t seem too far off.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-162", "text": "Yes, that\u2019s right. In our own tradition, \u201cIn principio erat Verbum, et Verbo caro factum est,\u201d in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was made flesh. That\u2019s the whole story. What we need to do is to pass through this transition and make the Word flesh. In other words, to somehow objectify the Word. Believe me, I talk about these things but the pictures are provisional. I don\u2019t understand how it could be done. I\u2019m an engineering type on one level, but is it an acoustical hologram? How in the world could I make you see a concept in my mind as though it were hovering three feet above the floor? Is there a way?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-163", "text": "I\u2019ve noticed on psychedelics, and again, I don\u2019t know whether this is a false trail or whether this is part of the mystery, but I\u2019ve noticed on psychedelics that if you get a person between yourself and a candle so that you have them in profile, and they are raving and you can see the candle past them, there\u2019s something coming out of their mouth. It\u2019s like how when you agitate oil in water you see this swirling oiliness of water, or when you\u2019re in a swimming pool with too much suntan lotion in it there\u2019s this kind of roiling discontinuity that\u2019s fairly subtle. Well, something like that is happening for about 8 inches in front of people\u2019s mouths when you look at them under certain conditions. Maybe it doesn\u2019t need psychedelics, I don\u2019t know. It\u2019s possible that it\u2019s nothing, it\u2019s that air goes into your lungs, is heated and then is returned to the colder air of the room, and what you\u2019re seeing is the mixing of the warm and cold air which have different refractive indices, and so it shows up as a kind of wave-like distortion. Could be; I am a reductionist on one level. If it\u2019s not real, then I want to know that it\u2019s not real, but I\u2019m not sure that that\u2019s what it is, because it seems to me that they are beginning on a very small level to do this thing and language seems to me to be a continuous spectrum.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-164", "text": "Because I\u2019m a public speaker, because I work with language, I think about these things a fair bit. It seems to me that language begins in total inarticulation, basically \u201cum, erm, ungh\u201d kind of stuff, and then it goes on to operational speech: \u201cGive me this, bring me that, change my diapers,\u201d this kind of thing. Then you introduce the notion of communication. I mean, at what age do children become capable of saying, \u201cI feel x, y and z\u201d? What this means is that they are beginning to move invisible, interior modalities out into the linguistic domain, say, \u201cI feel sick to my stomach, I feel too awake to go to bed,\u201d so forth and so on. Then you get more complex ideas, where people are conveying abstract ideas. Then you get eloquence, a speaker who can make you listen and can rivet your attention. Then beyond eloquence comes poetry, and supposedly in the Irish tradition and in other traditions, great poetic feats were undertaken and poets were magicians. The difference between a poet and magician was practically nil, but that\u2019s where we\u2019re asked to believe that it ends, in great poetic eloquence.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-165", "text": "It seems to me that it\u2019s possible to just keep going, and one of the curious things about the way we think about language is that when we talk about clear language, we always use visual metaphors. To understand someone you say, \u201cI see what you mean.\u201d Seeing is the sense that we trust. \u201cHe spoke clearly,\u201d is a visual metaphor. \u201cShe painted a picture,\u201d \u201cI see what you mean,\u201d as though we unconsciously sense that language is an uncompleted project at this point, moving toward a visual mode of expression. If we say that the psychedelics are catalysts for imagination, then what is it that they are catalyzing? They are catalyzing the further concrescence of language. Who knows how long this is. Looking back at the invention of language, you kind of have to suspect that it happened rather suddenly, that people went from not speaking to speaking quite suddenly. They had all the physical machinery: the lungs, the vocal chords, the coordinating mind, and apparently, if you follow Chomsky and his school, the genetic foundations for syntax. Syntax, Chomsky has shown, precedes language. Chimpanzees and squids show evidence of syntax, but their language is extremely rudimentary. Somehow you can\u2019t have language until you have syntax \u2014 syntax is the set of rules that define language \u2014 but at a certain point, language has this capacity to become truly self-reflecting. I can\u2019t imagine what a world would be like where this ability would be mastered. I suppose you would have to say it is a psychedelic world.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-166", "text": "Audience: Earlier you were talking about this possibility, and you were saying, \u201cI can\u2019t imagine how we would do this,\u201d and you started talking about it, and to me it felt like you were talking about something hovering. At that point I could almost see that it would be possible to continue. When you said \u201chovering,\u201d I got \u201chovering,\u201d I could almost see something hovering, and it seems like there\u2019s really an evolutionary thing, that once people get used to really hearing each other it would just begin to happen. Little by little, we\u2019ll get used to it and we may not even know it. Maybe it\u2019s happening now, that language is being used much more in different ways than it used to be.\n\nYes, I think that\u2019s true. My fantasy is of a workshop where some day we get it out. That\u2019s really what I want to do: I want to punch a hole into this other place and have this linguistical, syntactical, intentionality-directed stuff pour into the universe and fill it to the brim. It seems to me that this is a real possibility. Whenever I\u2019m stoned, I have this notion that I call the Last Conversation. It\u2019s where it seems possible to sit down with somebody of good will and say, \u201cWe\u2019re going to have the Last Conversation. We\u2019re going to start from here and we\u2019re going to work our way in, and when it\u2019s over with there will be no you, there will be no me, there will be no here, there will be no there, because we will have carried out some kind of Derrida-type deconstruction project on the apparent reality and we\u2019ll be left with bedrock.\u201d I don\u2019t know if that\u2019s the same program as the visible language. What I do know is that with ayahuasca in the Amazon basin, this is what\u2019s going on. They call it singing, but it\u2019s a visual art.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-167", "text": "Our little company sells ayahuasca songs. Well, they are audio recordings, but they are visual works of art. How they sound doesn\u2019t matter, it\u2019s how they look. When you\u2019re sitting in a blackened hut with these people you\u2019ll hear someone lay down a riff which manifests as a flourescent pink line with grey undershading, and it\u2019s a wavy line. The shaman is sitting next to the singer and will go back through and place a mirrored green dot in the trough of each wave, and the sound is lost in this. The experience is entirely visual. Is it only abstract colored patterns and moving fields of light, or can I sing you my grandfather and you would see him with his blue visor and his pegged pants and his crew cut? It\u2019s this kind of thing, you know.\n\nThis is why I believe that the psychedelic experience has some kind of historical role to play. If we take seriously that it is an enzyme for the imagination, and if we take seriously the notion that language is the carrier wave of the imagination, then probably what we\u2019re involved in here is a quantized evolutionary leap to a higher modality of language. It will come out of our biological organization; it\u2019s not cultural, and it\u2019s still less technological. It\u2019s in the bones and tongue and brain and lungs of human beings.\n\nAudience: Terence, when you\u2019re in one of these circumstances and you speak to the little people, if someone were in the room with you, would they hear you speak? Do you actually acoustically verbalize this kind of conversation from your side?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-168", "text": "Yes. It\u2019s a kind of glossolalia, or that\u2019s what we would have to call it. Glossolalia, as you all probably know, is speaking in tongues, but this has characteristics that glossolalia doesn\u2019t have. For one thing, people who do glossolalia have a kind of disconnectedness from it. In other words, in these Pentecostal churches when someone will go into glossolalia, often when they come out they will turn to the people around them and say, \u201cDid I speak in tongues? Did I really do it?\u201d In other words, there seems to be a kind of occlusion of the observing mind. The other thing is that glossolalia of that sort involves pretty radical physiological changes. Some of you may know Felicitas Goodman, who wrote a book on glossolalia. She measured pools of saliva 18 inches across, having originated from a single person during a 20 minute burst of glossolalia. Well, that\u2019s a pretty lathered-up, hyped-up state to be in. The glossolalia induced by DMT and psilocybin is controlled and willed. It\u2019s as though the English-forming part of the mind steps away and an ursprach, a kind of primordial language, steps in. It\u2019s highly modulated; it doesn\u2019t have to be screamed, sung or chanted, it can simply be done at conversational levels. When you do this in the stoned state, it\u2019s wonderful, and when you make tape recordings of it and listen to it in the unstoned state, it\u2019s either alarming or silly. I mean, people have said to me, \u201cSoft-pedal this part of it, because it\u2019s too weird.\u201d", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-169", "text": "Audience: The point I was trying to get at is that in order to form these sounds there\u2019s some sort of electronic, neurological something going on in the synapses to cause the muscles to form the sounds, and there\u2019s a radiation of electric energy that starts the mechanical-acoustical coupling to the vocal chords, and in trying to figure out the mechanism you were discussing, how would you make this work? Would you actually see the sound coming out of the throat? It would seem more reasonable to me to pick the electronic model and the radiation of electromagnetic energy, rather than acoustical, to project this information.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-170", "text": "True, although it is interesting that sound can be used to form holograms, which are three- dimensional objects. In other words, there are what are known as acoustical holograms, not generated by lasers, but generated by patterns of interference that are acoustic waves. For years, in the psychedelic states I could hear this translinguistic stuff but never do it. Then I became able to do it on the drugs, and then after many more years I\u2019ve been able to do it pretty much on the natch, or at least give a reasonable imitation of it; but when I do it and I\u2019m not stoned, it doesn\u2019t transport me. It has syntax, it has order. I\u2019ll give you a short sample of this. If I\u2019m at all self-conscious or anxious, something shuts down and I can\u2019t, and I know I\u2019m faking it and it\u2019s not real. Nideughey voundwy haxigivitchny moughamvwa takitam didikini hipikektet. It\u2019s like that. It\u2019s far removed from English, it", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-171", "text": "like that. It\u2019s far removed from English, it sounds to me like a very primitive language. The image that comes to my mind is of pygmies around a fire, one guy raving. He\u2019s telling a story. There\u2019s something in there; it feels like meaning, but it doesn\u2019t compute to a dictionary. When you do it on your own you just can do it for hours in that state, and it\u2019s very, very satisfying. What you\u2019re hearing is the shadow thrown by a hyperdimensional object that the person making the sound is actually seeing, and you are just rotating this thing, going into it, expanding it, taking it apart, melting it, fusing it, remaking it. Strange stuff. I played this stuff for a linguist, this very straight linguist. I played about a 30 minute burst of it, and he smoked his pipe through it all, and when it was over he said, \u201cNo O\u2019s.\u201d", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-172", "text": "Audience: Did you just make that up? Did you have any images? Can you describe what was going on inside of you when you were doing that?\n\nI was trying to stand aside, I was trying to not do anything to it, I was just trying to let it be, because there will be a part of it and I\u2019ll think as it goes by, \u201cHmm, sounds French.\u201d The main effort is just to relax and let it be. The way I discovered it is that when I smoke DMT I can\u2019t stop myself. At first I would yell it, and that got my friends concerned. Slowly I\u2019ve been able to bring it down into this conversational level, but it just goes on and on, has a feeling, has a tone, it\u2019s very satisfying to do. That\u2019s why I think that language existed for millennia before meaning. Bowl, bison, reindeer: meaning is just some kind of late thing that was tacked on to language to make it a more practical enterprise, but I think that people were taking drugs and amusing each other with artistic compositions of the sort I just did for you for a long time before they did anything practical with it.\n\nAudience: I was just wondering if you thought that language may have changed around the time that agriculture came in, when things were narrowed down to a few commodities.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-173", "text": "I think that language goes through tremendous periods of impoverishment, and I think that was one. The origin point of language is placed at about 35,000 years ago, although on what basis they do this I\u2019m not sure. There is a flute in existence that\u2019s 26,000 years old. That\u2019s pretty interesting, and that\u2019s not the Museum of Atlantis artifacts either, that\u2019s the real thing. The Pythagorean face of number, musical tone, language and proportion is still alive. There\u2019s still something to be learned there. A perfect science, an appropriate science, a science of harmony, resonance, proportion: that is and remains the shamanic ideal, the Orphic ideal, the Pythagorean ideal.\n\nAudience: What are the risks associated with MAOIs and psychedelics?\n\nYou do not want to take certain hallucinogens if you\u2019re taking an MAO inhibitor, because it will prolong it and will cause it to behave in unpredictable ways. There are many MAO inhibitors commercially prescribed, some quite strong. In other words, that act for weeks, I think even after a single dosage. What are those things for?\n\nAudience: The common scenario is Marplan, which is a monoamine oxidase inhibitor. What that means is that monoamine oxidase is the enzyme that destroys monoamine, so if you are taking that particular drug and then you take something that builds up in your system like aged cheeses, lentils, maybe mushrooms, wines, fermented kinds of things that have lots of amphetamine-type chemicals in them, then they overload the synapses. It happens because you can\u2019t break it down in your brain and basically it deteriorates. There is one that people did this with and died, so apparently the hallucinogen had some of that build up and it can\u2019t be destroyed properly, so that\u2019s why there\u2019s the warning not to take it.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-174", "text": "The hallucinogen is a monoamine, and then if you inhibit the monoamine oxidase, which is the compound which inhibits the monoamine, then the monoamine will accumulate. It\u2019s important to know this because we tend to move in a yuppie environment, and a typical yuppie buffet of good burgundies and good brie is just going to load your system with tyramine, tyrosine, these kinds of things. They are monoamine oxidase inhibitors, and then if you take a hit of ayahuasca 12 or 24 hours later it\u2019s just going to send you skittering all over the board, and you won\u2019t understand why unless you are aware that this monoamine thing is working.\n\nAudience: Someone gave a talk in New York about smoked fish and plantain, and possibly this is a precursor of certain neurotransmitters.\n\nYes, this is a more complicated question than simply yes or no on the MAO inhibitors. Serotonin, which is, of course, the neurotransmitter that runs the nervous systems of all higher animals and occurs in all animals, is very strongly present in bananas, for example. You can load your system with serotonin without realizing it if you eat a lot of bananas, and that\u2019s very interesting. There was a group of people in tribal Africa who had actually lost the gene for the production of serotonin, or of serotonin-2. In any case, one subspecies of serotonin, and they didn\u2019t know that that was what was wrong with them. All they knew was that as soon as anybody left the tribe they all became psychologically ill, and then they would return to the tribe and this situation would immediately normalize. So they looked into it and they discovered that these people were eating bananas as a huge component of their diet. Consequently, even though the serotonin gene was deficient, they always had a sufficient amount of serotonin because they were getting it from a dietary source.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-175", "text": "If somebody left the tribe, left the forest and went to Kampala and got a job and stopped eating so many bananas, they immediately appeared to become mentally ill. This is because they were then finally forced to confront the fact that on the natch they could not produce enough serotonin to stay balanced, so this is an example of how foods and neurotransmitters and all of these things work. It\u2019s really astonishing, the fact that evolutionary biologists, in talking about how human beings have come to be, have so far as I know never talked about the evolutionary influence of diet. The fact that under pressure from dwindling rainforests, we ceased being fruitarian, canopy-living creatures, and instead became omnivores and meat eaters on the plain. In going through that transition we subjected ourselves to a huge amount of mutagenic influence.\n\nThere are all kinds of compounds in plants that will break chromosomes, interfere with ovulation, interfere with lactation, interfere with fetal formation, control or accelerate tooth decay, interfere with acuity of vision, digestive enzymes that may or may not work in certain situations. If you just start eating things randomly or testing things to be foods, you\u2019re exposing yourself and your progeny to an immense number of mutagenic influences. This may explain why the human somatotype, the human body type, went through this period of rapid change about 50,000 years ago. This is when the brain size doubled, and then nothing much has happened since to human beings physically; all evolution has gone on in the cultural domain. This sudden explosion in the size of the brain case is occurring at the same time when there is this dietary shift.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-176", "text": "One of the things that I mentioned the other night is the preservation of infantile characteristics as a part of our species, not necessarily simply infantilism psychologically, but also our hairlessness, for instance. More primate babies are born hairless, but we\u2019re the ones who stay hairless the whole time. The suppression of secondary sexual characteristics \u2014 for instance, our rumps don\u2019t redden when we\u2019re in estrus \u2014 and all these things that we see happening in other primate species are suppressed in human beings. There\u2019s a lot of debate about why these things go on. Why, for instance, there isn\u2019t a mating season in human beings, or why it is that female human beings can keep pregnancy a secret for quite a long time before it becomes apparent. How does this feed back into primate social organization? What do males do if they think a female is pregnant or not pregnant? How does this work into the evolutionary thing? There\u2019s a lot of thought that needs to be given to all this.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-177", "text": "MAO is one of the most easily influenced of these internal enzyme systems because there are MAO inhibitors in so many things that are human foods \u2014 pulses, all beans, fish, cheeses, dairy products, so forth and so on \u2014 the very things that were probably fairly prominent in the primitive diet. All monoamines will be more active in a human being who has taken a monoamine oxidase inhibitor. One of the strange things, and I mentioned this yesterday, is that in the Amazon they have figured out how to make this work for them. For instance, DMT cannot be taken orally, it\u2019s destroyed in your gut. If you inhibit MAO then it isn\u2019t destroyed in the gut, it passes through the bloodstream and through the blood-brain barrier. They figured this out; it\u2019s only been since the mid \u201850s or something that the MAO system has been understood by Western medicine. These people apparently intuitively figured it out thousands and thousands of years ago. These things compete with serotonin for the bond site; many of them are in fact inhibitors of serotonin. If you have a huge amount of serotonin in your system, the serotonin can mitigate the trip. It\u2019s a gentler trip because it\u2019s not as strong a trip as it would be had you not loaded yourself with serotonin.\n\nAudience: But some people do, that\u2019s the whole theory of why some people get depressed, that certain people have higher levels of serotonin and certain people have lower, and that if you have higher levels supposedly it correlates with how naturally high you are.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-178", "text": "Yes, well it\u2019s sort of hard to nail this down. When people first started doing psychedelic research they thought \u2014 it was the so-called psychotomimetic theory of psychedelics \u2014 that these things make you crazy, therefore being crazy must be a natural state of producing these things. So for instance, they measured DMT in the blood of schizophrenics, people who are diagnosed as chronic schizophrenics. The problem is that there is no visible correlation. Some people have more, some people have less. It isn\u2019t as simple as that mad people are people who are making their own psychedelic molecules. There was great hope for this in the \u201850s but it didn\u2019t quite pan out.\n\nA thing to bear in mind, sort of related to what you were saying, is that disease, which we accept as part of life, is actually something fairly unusual in nature. The only places in nature where you see a lot of disease happening is in insects. Insects are highly subject to viruses and there\u2019s a huge family of insect viruses. This is the basis of many pesticide design strategies, to spray crops with viruses that attack insects. The other area in the animal world where you see a lot of disease is human beings and the animals they have domesticated. Cattle, pigs, poultry and people are all fairly subject to disease, but for instance, birds of prey are not greatly subject to disease. Fish, all animal groups have some susceptibility to diseases, but really human beings and insects seem to be the most set up for this.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-179", "text": "The reason that is advanced for this is that these are the social animals, the insects and the human beings, wherever you have intense social activity. For instance, in some species a male and a female will encounter each other only once in the life of each individual, then have sex and that\u2019s it. There is no social life. No disease can get a foothold there, because diseases require transmission and contact. The AIDS thing is a perfect example of this. The statistics are that a professional prostitute has five or six sexual contacts in an evening. A person at high risk for AIDS with a very active homosexual lifestyle may have three or four times that number of sexual contacts. No virus is going to pass a chance like that up, it\u2019s just like a super intense environment for transmission. The diseases want to be able to move from one person to another. The susceptibility to disease was apparently also something that was going on at the same time as we were beginning to acquire language, to domesticate animals, to switch our diet.\n\nWhat we really are is the evolutionary wreckage of a very chaotic and crazy series of pattern shifts that went on between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago. Now we are the inheritors of that. As long as I\u2019m on this subject, there\u2019s a very interesting relationship between disease and spirituality because pilgrimage sites are the great disease vectors of the ancient world. Here you can imagine that you have a temple, everybody comes there to get cured, and everybody leaves sick because all these infected people have been there. There\u2019s a wonderful book, I can\u2019t remember the author but the title is Plagues and Peoples. It\u2019s a study of epidemiology and the history of disease and its impact on human populations. Very interesting, and it has a lot to say about psychedelic use by implication, because psychedelic use also brings people together under very close and intimate circumstances many times.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-180", "text": "Audience: Let me ask a chemical question. I have never done these substances that you\u2019re talking about, specifically N,N-DMT and 5-MeO-DMT and what you\u2019re talking about as ayahuasca, which is a hybrid of an MAOI and DMT. Those are the chemical names of these substances. Are there generic names or so-called street names for these things that you are aware of?\n\nFirst of all, 5-MeO-DMT doesn\u2019t occur in ayahuasca. The way ayahuasca works is that the MAO is a \u03b2-carboline: harmine, harmaline, tetrahydroharmine. These things are hallucinogens in their own right, but only at uncomfortable doses. If you took 600 mg of harmine, you would have hallucinations, but you would also have so much discomfort and icky feeling that you couldn\u2019t call it a trip. 5-MeO-DMT occurs in Anadenanthera peregrina and in the toad foam that I mentioned. It\u2019s interesting that the toad foam is the only animal-based hallucinogen that we know anything about. DMT does occur in certain fish and these fish are eaten for psychedelic effect. DMT is psychedelic in its own right, but not when taken orally. When taken with the harmine it becomes orally active. If you combine 200 milligrams of harmine, which is a sub-threshold dose of harmine, with 50 mg of DMT, which is a sub-threshold dose of DMT, you\u2019ll have a tremendous trip. That\u2019s called ayahuasca, and it comes from these plant sources. You drink it, it\u2019s a beverage. It\u2019s a fluid; tastes terrible.\n\nAudience: You recommended a committed dose, like five grams of mushrooms, in a silent space, preferably at night and also alone.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-181", "text": "If that\u2019s your predilection, if you\u2019re comfortable with that. If you\u2019re uncomfortable with that, get a friend. Is that your question?\n\nAudience: I guess that\u2019s my question, because it seems to me from reading Stan Grof\u2019s books that the point he makes is that these substances are physiologically very safe. The danger is in psychological acting out, and for that reason you have someone there, in order to prevent a confusion of what he calls holotropic and hylotropic, i.e. you decide that you want to jump off your balcony and you confuse your psychic reality in which you can fly with the physical reality of your body, which is that you\u2019ll fall off and die.\n\nIf you have that delusion you would certainly want a sitter present. In 99% of the cases what the sitter is there for is not to restrain you but to tell you that it\u2019s OK. Just to say that it\u2019s OK, this is immensely reassuring to people, no matter how uncertain the sitter is that it is OK. You could almost have a button that you could push which says, \u201cYou\u2019re OK! Don\u2019t worry, it won\u2019t last forever,\u201d something like that. I guess I\u2019m sort of in a funny position on the sitter issue because I find them so distracting, but you do want it, the one time you need them you really need them. The other thing is this issue of whether you should do it indoors or outdoors. What I found is that I really like keeping it mental, that\u2019s my way of controlling the situation. We all know this phenomenon called synchronicity, which is where it\u2019s weird for no reason. If you go out into the world stoned you will just discover that it is a maelstrom of synchronicity, and I don\u2019t like being swept away into strange and unexpected adventures.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-182", "text": "This is an example of how this works: I was at Sarnath once, outside of Benares. Sarnath is the place where Buddha preached his first sermon after attaining enlightenment. He was enlightened at Bodh Gaya and then he walked south many miles to the deer park at Sarnath and gave his first sermon there. There\u2019s a stupa there, an ancient stupa, 2nd century B.C., and manicured green parks; a very nice place to take a psychedelic, I thought. So I took this psychedelic, it happened to be mescaline, with these two women who were friends of mine, and there was nobody around. It was very early in the morning, we were sitting up on this little knoll in a tree and it began to come on strongly. I was looking out over this green expanse, and almost at the edge of discernable vision I suddenly see two dots, two people moving orthogonal to my position across my field of vision. Then they got to the middle of my field of vision, and they just stop dead. These two people must be 500 yards away, 1,500 feet away over these rolling green lawns, and they stop dead, they scan and they start toward me. I cannot believe my eyes, that these people have changed course 90 degrees and are now headed right for me. I kept telling myself, \u201cIt\u2019s a hallucination, it\u2019s an illusion. They are not getting larger in your field of vision, you are not going to have to confront these people. Please, God, make it so.\u201d No reprieve.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-183", "text": "They just keep getting larger and larger, and so I said, \u201cI\u2019m going to make this go away by not looking, and I\u2019m just going to sit like this,\u201d and I sat like this, not moving, until the guy\u2019s feet entered my field of vision. Then I didn\u2019t move, I didn\u2019t say anything. I just looked up, and he said, \u201cYou\u2019re from which place? You have been how long in India?\u201d and it was the grilling. Any Indian tourist knows that any citizen of the subcontinent can approach you at any time of the day or night, anywhere, demand to know your name, how long you\u2019ve been in this country, and then the kicker, \u201cAnd what you think of India?\u201d This question is asked for the specific purpose of observing your discomfiture, because they know damn well what you think of India. I looked up and I gave this guy my most penetrating gaze and I said, \u201cI cannot be interrogated,\u201d and I just put my head down and waited an", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-184", "text": "and I just put my head down and waited an hour. When I looked up they were gone, but only in that circumstance of being so stoned would I have ever behaved that way. The normal tourist reaction is, and they watch this happen to you, you just go into a tailspin of, \u201cIt\u2019s their country, everybody\u2019s a person, I\u2019m a stranger. I should be nice, they\u2019re harmless. What\u2019s so bad about this, anyway?\u201d Then you pare it out, you explain, \u201cI\u2019m from San Francisco, California. I\u2019ve been here three months,\u201d so forth and so on. A friend of mine told me a funny story about taking the Bombay-Calcutta mail and arriving in Calcutta on this train. It\u2019s 4 a.m. and he gets off the train, and there\u2019s a little sadhu man over there, and the guy starts toward him and comes up to him. My friend said, \u201cWait a minute, before you say a word: my name is Nathan Jones, I\u2019m from Brooklyn, New", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-185", "text": "name is Nathan Jones, I\u2019m from Brooklyn, New York. I\u2019ve been in India three and a half months and I hate it,\u201d and the guy said, \u201cOoh, you\u2019re great, baba! You\u2019re reading my mind!\u201d You\u2019ve got to be fast, that\u2019s all there is to it.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-186", "text": "Audience: You\u2019ve said that the mushroom tends to create its own agenda. You\u2019ve also given examples of how you\u2019ve directed it. So which of those is true? Are there ways to direct it to specific regions by doing specific things, whether you want to deal with certain issues like death or the body, or to get into certain regions of consciousness?\n\nIt has its own agenda. It has certain qualities, this extraterrestrial, outer space, planetary, history is ending, apocalypse, millennia, kind of thing. You can direct it if it likes the way you\u2019re going. It\u2019s sort of like a very strong horse. If you\u2019re going the way it wants to go you\u2019re fully in control, otherwise not. I can remember situations with mushrooms where I hadn\u2019t taken it for a long time and I fall into confusion, and it usually revolves around, \u201cAm I doing the right thing?\u201d whatever the right thing is, so then I\u2019ll take mushrooms and wait until properly stoned, and then put this question to it, \u201cAm I doing the right thing?\u201d It reminds me of a press conference that Lyndon Johnson gave shortly after he became president. Somebody asked a question that he didn\u2019t care for and he said, \u201cWhat kind of a chickenshit question is that to ask the president of the United States?\u201d When I go to the mushroom and say, \u201cAm I doing the right thing?\u201d it basically said, \u201cWhat kind of a chickenshit question is that to ask me?\u201d I think that was a very good answer, that was what I needed to hear, you know, \u201cAre you kidding?\u201d", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-187", "text": "My father used to say, \u201cYou can drive a horse to water but a pencil must be lead,\u201d and I think that\u2019s sort of the situation with the mushroom. If the question pleases it, it will answer. If the question doesn\u2019t please it, you\u2019ll hear about it. It is amazing how it gives people what they need. You know that Rolling Stones song, \u201cYou can\u2019t always get what you want, you get what you need\u201d? I have a friend, dear friend, but arrogant, no doubt about it. This guy is arrogant, he definitely thinks he has the truth by the throat in most situations, and he won\u2019t take mushrooms because it gives him such a hard time. It says, \u201cYou\u2019re arrogant! You want to know what we do to arrogant people?\u201d \u201cFor God\u2019s sake, lift it off me!\u201d A certain amount of humility; it\u2019s a relationship, like to a crusty Zen master or something like that. It is really like another entity, because you cannot predict the answers. I remember a dialogue that I had with the mushroom early on where I said, \u201cWhat are you doing on this planet?\u201d and it said, \u201cYou\u2019re a mushroom, you live cheap.\u201d It said, \u201cListen, this neighborhood was not so bad until the monkeys moved in. To you it may look like a mess, to me it was paradise.\u201d", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-188", "text": "The mushroom is very, very weird. I\u2019ll tell one more story and then I\u2019ll try to get off stories. I was in Malibu with all these fancy film people and we went out to dinner; Ralph Abraham was there, too. There was this French woman there, a film producer, and she was seated next to me at dinner, and before dinner we had been talking about the mushroom. I had been introduced to her as \u201cthe mushroom man,\u201d and she said to me, \u201cYou say that the mushroom speaks to you, but I do not understand exactly how this works,\u201d and I said, \u201cWell, it\u2019s sort of like it has many faces that it can show, like sometimes it\u2019s like the role that Rod Steiger played in The Pawnbroker.\u201d At that precise instant, Steiger shows up at the table to shake hands with everybody and slap a few backs and then he just drifts off into the recesses of this restaurant. Ralph Abraham, who was sitting across the table from me watching this whole thing and had heard what I said to this woman, reached across the table to me and said, \u201cYou see, the mushroom is showing us that it can touch us anywhere, anytime.\u201d Strange stories; synchronicity.\n\nAudience: How do you remember to bring back what you\u2019ve learned?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-189", "text": "Audience: How do you remember to bring back what you\u2019ve learned?\n\nThat\u2019s a good question, that\u2019s an important question, that\u2019s a key question. Roland Fischer, who was a great psychedelic researcher with psilocybin and later retired to Mallorca to be Robert Graves\u2019 next door neighbor, coined the phrase \u201cstate-bounded.\u201d This means that you can\u2019t bring it back. I\u2019m sure you all have had the experience of dreaming, being caught up in some incredible dream with strange people, foreign countries, exotic costuming. The alarm goes off and as you stagger out of bed this is just melting like an ice cube in a blast furnace. By the time you are out of bed and fully dressed you have nothing, not a shred, not a hint, not a clue, it\u2019s absolutely gone. This is a state-bounded memory. Chemically what is going on is apparently that short term memory transcription is just not occurring. You are having the immediate impression of these things happening and then it\u2019s not going to disk, so to speak, it\u2019s just lost.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-190", "text": "The dream is not truly lost in that situation where you wake up and it melts away. The proof of this, and I\u2019m sure you all have had this experience is that you go off about your daily business and then there will be, almost always by coincidence, an image, a chance phrase, a view of a street or something, and it will cause you to remember the dream. Once you get a hook into a portion of the dream, if you then work on it, you can probably bring a lot of it out. How this works in psychedelics is that I have an insight or something that I particularly want to remember, first of all, I will say it aloud. This is strong imprinting. Then the real imprinting is to repeat it a few minutes later, and then a few minutes later again. If you can carry it over a number of minutes to several different levels it won\u2019t leave you. A very useful shortcut for this is a tape recorder, where if you play the tape of the trip back after the trip, just a phrase spoken will set off a chain of associative recall and you will retain it this way. To my mind, what shamanic training must really be is mnemonic training. If you want to bring stuff back you have to train yourself to bring it back.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-191", "text": "Now, this state-bounded thing: it\u2019s important to notice, we talk about how dreams are state-bounded, how psychedelic experiences are state-bounded, but what we fail to notice, usually, is that ordinary reality is state-bounded. If I were to ask any one of you, \u201cWhat did you discuss with the person you had lunch with yesterday?\u201d it\u2019s probably very touch and go to actually put this together. I had lunch yesterday with Richard, we discussed his television transmission system, but that was new to me and therefore easy to retain, and also Richard and I haven\u2019t had thousands of hours of conversation together. The person we are most familiar with is ourselves. I don\u2019t know if it works for you like this: I am, let us, say cleaning my house, vacuuming, doing dishes, making beds, and I\u2019m all the time thinking. I understand why Rome fell, I realize what I said wrong to somebody two weeks ago, I recall a telephone obligation that I have to fulfill, I think about things that happened years and years ago, and then the doorbell rings, I go to the door and there\u2019s someone there. They say, \u201cWhat are you doing?\u201d and I say, \u201cNothing.\u201d This is because the ordinary state of consciousness is highly state-bounded.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-192", "text": "One thing these Buddhists have certainly gotten right is that attention to attention is the key to taking control of your mental life. Most of it is just like a river flowing by, and every once in a while we check to see if the river is still flowing by, but we don\u2019t attempt to retain it. Memory training is great psychedelic training, and of course, as I\u2019m sure you know, there were arts of memory in the past. We are very poor memorizers because we rely on technologies to do it for us. People in the past had all kinds of technologies for allowing them to remember things. For instance, the most common one in use in late antiquity and up through the Renaissance was the memory palace approach. This is where you think of a place you know well \u2014 a school, a hospital, a cathedral, a university, but big \u2014 and sit and think about it, think about how it looks as you go through the main doors and then what you see when you turn to the left and what you see when you turn to the right. Learn this building until you really can command it with reasonable vividness in most situations. Then if you want to remember something, imagine yourself walking through the front door of this building, turning to your left, and there near the water fountain you will place an emblem of this thing that you want to remember. Then you will go down the hall and around the corner, and by the fire extinguishers you will place another emblem of the next thing you want to remember.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-193", "text": "The act of remembering this long list of things is the act of mentally moving through this imaginary building. When you come to the water fountain, the clue will be there, when you pass the fire extinguishers in your mind, the emblem you place there will be there. I know this sounds highly unworkable and unwieldy, but it actually is extremely workable, and people like Catulus and Cicero, the great late Roman orators, were able to speak for hours on end with lists of virtues and vices and interconnecting causes and this sort of thing, because they were masters of this mnemonic memory palace technique. Well, psychedelics are this vivid. This is another one of these things like mantras and yantras that works on psychedelics. You can do this so that when you\u2019re on a psychedelic and you have an experience that you want to remember, place it in your memory palace, and the next time you come past that point in your memory palace this thing will be there.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-194", "text": "If any of you are interested in this, the last word is The Art of Memory by Frances Yates, who was a wonderful woman, a great scholar of Renaissance magic. The final trick is to make the image extremely vivid, so that for instance, if you\u2019re about to give a speech to your collegium on the seven deadly sins, one of these sins is lust. I chose the easy one because I can\u2019t remember what the other six are; shows you where my problem lies. You don\u2019t just place the word \u201clust\u201d in the memory keeping spot, you place some vivid and shocking image. Yates suggests the image of a nun lifting her skirts. I think this was a classically suggested one that people were taught to use. Then when you come around the corner and meet the nun lifting her skirts you think, \u201cAha, lust, that\u2019s the first one,\u201d then you go on, and so forth. Some of the most astonishing products of the medieval engravers\u2019 art are these books of what are called \u201cemblemata.\u201d Emblemata are surreal juxtapositions of things, animal parts and bodies and machines, that are memory emblems, made as grotesque, surreal and bizarre as possible in order to make them unforgettable. That was the technique, and the surrealists used this very consciously. There is something about the unexpected, the grotesque and the surprising that is almost by definition memorable, and this will work very well in the psychedelic state as well.\n\nAudience: I\u2019m interested in the legal aspect of this thing. We\u2019re talking about something that is highly illegal. As far as the law is concerned, how do you handle it? Anybody that drives around with the license plate \u201cNNDMT,\u201d I wonder, are you paranoid about that?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-195", "text": "No, I\u2019m not paranoid about it. If they wanted me they should have come a long time ago, because I was much more vulnerable then. I\u2019ve sort of covered my ass. Naturally, if you speak about these things you can\u2019t do anything particularly illegal. Perhaps I\u2019m foolish, in the sense that I shouldn\u2019t be worried about being arrested, I should be worried about being shot. If that\u2019s how they play the game then I\u2019m in big trouble, because they\u2019ll just come and shoot me, and you too, if you get into this; but if we actually have a legal system that works, then this is called advocacy, and it\u2019s not a crime. It\u2019s an exercise of the First, Fourth, and a couple of other amendments to the constitution. Henry David Thoreau, you don\u2019t get more American than that, said, \u201cIf you are right, you are a majority of one,\u201d and we live by majority rule. I don\u2019t feel heroic. It\u2019s not false modesty or anything, I don\u2019t feel heroic doing this. This is really humdrum to me; I just could not behave any other way because of what I\u2019ve seen. This transcends laws, all that is seen as preposterous. I believe in universal laws: you shouldn\u2019t kill people, you shouldn\u2019t lie to people, you shouldn\u2019t inject yourself between lovers. Most cultures recognize a set of universal laws, but, \u201cThou shalt not smoke marijuana?\u201d Surely the God of Mount Sinai has better things to do than worry about that sort of thing.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-196", "text": "We have to create a new option. All social progress is made by people taking chances. If I am an anomaly, some kind of dangerous sociopath, then my message will be swamped and lost in the noise of the tumult of the world, because there are thousands of messages out there. If, on the other hand, this is a great and important domain of truth, then they are crazy to try to repress it because it cannot be repressed. They have tried to repress it.\n\nAudience: Why did they seek to repress it? If the use of psychoactive drugs is so good for the psyche, why have they sought to repress it?\n\nThey sought to repress it because there is something in the Western mind that gets very nervous when you try to talk about the bedrock of ontology. McLuhan talked about this. He met great resistance, and all he was saying was that print had created certain kinds of unconscious biases in society in favor of uniformity and linearity. He was amazed at the violence of the reaction against this. He concluded that those cultures that have evolved from the phonetic alphabet are so removed from the stuff of the world, as opposed to languages like Chinese or Mayan where there is a retention of the image in the written language. The cultures descended from the phonetic alphabet are extremely paranoid about questions about the nature of reality. That\u2019s what this is really about.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-197", "text": "The psychedelic issue does not relate to the drug issue at all. In fact, it\u2019s important to make this point: drugs and psychedelics are not two members of a family, they are antithetically opposed to each other. The pro-psychedelic position is an anti-drug position. How can this be, since we are accustomed to thinking of psychedelics as drugs? Well, it\u2019s like this: what is it that we object to about drugs? I think most people can agree that we do have a drug problem. If you live in the inner cities you see people getting all twisted up behind this stuff. So what is it about drugs that we find problematic? I think that what is objectionable about drugs is that they cause unconscious, obsessive, destructive to self or other behavior. Unconscious, obsessive behavior is intolerable, because we are conscious people accustomed to injecting choice and meaning into our lives. You cannot have meaning if you do not have choice. This is why we don\u2019t have to spend any time at all talking about whether the world is predestined, because if the world is predestined, then I\u2019m not saying what I\u2019m saying because it\u2019s what I want to say, I\u2019m saying what I\u2019m saying because I can\u2019t say anything else. You\u2019re sitting there because you can\u2019t not sit there, so it makes the world very dull and uninteresting. Compulsive, unexamined, obsessive behavior is the quintessence of antihuman behavior. It was Ludwig von Bertalanffy, the founder of General Systems Theory, who said, \u201cPeople are not machines, but in every situation where they are given an opportunity to behave like machines, they will so behave.\u201d", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-198", "text": "Then there are drugs which reinforce obsessive, unexamined and self-destructive behavior patterns. Well, what do psychedelics do? They destroy behavior patterns, destroy cultural assumptions, completely hold everything up for grabs, completely throw open the possibility that reality could be any number of ways that are not culturally sanctioned. In that sense, the psychedelics are almost the answer to the drug problem. The early use of psychedelics reported spectacular progress with alcoholism. The people who believe that alcoholism is a disease \u2014 and I don\u2019t follow this literature closely \u2014 it seems to me that this is a preposterous statement. You mean a disease like influenza, smallpox and AIDS? Alcoholism is a disease? Can you get it if you don\u2019t practice safe sex, or do you have to wash your eating utensils? It isn\u2019t a disease, it is a failure of self-image. The reason LSD, in many cases, had a tremendous impact on alcoholic behavior was because it just showed people what they were doing. It said, \u201cThis is you. You\u2019re a drunk! You\u2019re a burden to your family, a bore to your friends, you smell bad and you\u2019re useless! How do you like it?\u201d So you say, \u201cI don\u2019t like it,\u201d and it says, \u201cThen stop drinking!\u201d That\u2019s how psychedelics cure addiction. When we talk about addiction, nobody ever talks about what is called self-restraint.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-199", "text": "Audience: There\u2019s a new book that came out about a month or two ago that\u2019s incredibly controversial. The man takes the position that for the last 30 or 40 years we\u2019ve seen alcoholism as a disease, and that\u2019s just more bullshit from the medical model, and that we need another alternative. Of course AA is up in arms about the book. It\u2019s called Heavy Drinking: The Myth of Alcoholism as a Disease, and he discusses the fact that essentially it\u2019s a rationalization to say that alcoholism is a disease. There are certain people that have certain chemical reactions to alcohol, but they are in the minority. This is very important to me because this is work that I am interested in, and alcoholism has also touched my family, as it has a lot of families.\n\nIn the disease model there\u2019s no responsibility involved. AA\u2019s position, their goal, is not to understand the nature of the universe; they\u2019re not in the philosophy business. They are trying to get people to stop drinking. So to maximize that goal, I think that they go far overboard. First of all, all substances: they say, \u201cIf you are an alcoholic, then you must forswear everything.\u201d I don\u2019t know how they relate to tobacco, but what you\u2019ve got to understand is that we are set up for addiction. It\u2019s just like language and cognition and all of these other things. We are the animal which addicts; other animals don\u2019t addict. Addiction is a way of relating to the world. We not only addict to drugs, we addict to each other, to chunks of territory, to behavior patterns. We attach to everything.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-200", "text": "It\u2019s very real, it\u2019s physiological. I remember that years and years ago a woman left me for a homunculus, and I was appalled. I was vomiting every four hours, could not sleep, would burst into tears in inappropriate situations, of which there were many in my life. Heroin withdrawal cannot be worse than that, I mean, are you kidding, vomiting every four hours? Then one night, in the middle of the night, I was just frantic, because when I was awake I felt like I wanted to be asleep, when I should have been sleeping I couldn\u2019t sleep. I was just dragging myself to classes, I thought, \u201cThis is crazy, I should turn myself in, but they don\u2019t have crisis centers for broken hearts. What are you going to do?\u201d So then in the middle of one of these bouts, I went to the medicine cabinet, and this woman who had left me had left all these pills there. I sorted through all these pills and came upon a small bottle of tranquilizers, a very mild tranquilizer like valium or something. Well, I had never taken valium, so I said, \u201cI\u2019ll take half.\u201d I took it, and a few hours later I went out to breakfast and somebody sat at my table and said, \u201cHow are you coping since Hermione left you?\u201d and I said, \u201cWho?\u201d", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-201", "text": "It really gave me respect for tranquilizers. I was appalled that something so real to me, so much me, half a tab, I didn\u2019t care. Let \u2018em go. I realized that this is how all the people around me deal with emotional crisis. Nobody wants to feel anything. The moment that an unpleasant emotion rears its head, people go take valium or something else and cut themselves off from feeling. We addict to people, that\u2019s the point of that story, and when they leave us suddenly it\u2019s just like having your heroin taken away and you become a mad thing for months, years sometimes. I mean, I still vibrate from this event and it was 15 years ago. We addict to territory. This is war: our turf, our land. This arises as again a consequence of agriculture. Before agriculture, nobody had land, land was something you walked around on as you migrated behind your herd. Once it was cognized as an object and fixed upon, they were ready to knock the other guy\u2019s brains out for setting foot on your territory. We all do this. We are addicted to caffeine, money, sugar, praise, television.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-202", "text": "This is a favorite one to talk about because television is a forerunner of very insidious drugs to come, it\u2019s just the crudest and the first. Imagine if, after World War II, a drug had been introduced into this country of right-thinking, hard-working, decent Christian people, such that 20 years after its induction the average American citizen would be spending 6.5 hours per day involved in this drug. That\u2019s the figure for television consumption in this country: the average American watches 6.5 hours per day of TV. It is an electronic drug. It is an obsessive behavior pattern, an unconscious behavior pattern, and a physically destructive behavior pattern. I mean, it\u2019s done more for the rebirth of hemorrhoid specialists than any other single force in our society; but people say, \u201cThat\u2019s not a drug, that\u2019s entertainment.\u201d 6.5 hours per day of entertainment? Before electronic media a person could regard themselves as a great patron of the musical community if they heard twelve live musical performances a year when they would go to a theater. How many experts on Beethoven in his generation or the generation following heard the Ninth Symphony more than several times in their intellectual life? You have to get a lot of people together and cooperating to perform the Ninth Symphony. To us, the Ninth Symphony is an object: listen to it, listen again. We are able to objectify experience and then addict ourselves to it. Is this bad? How can it be bad if it is so written into us? I don\u2019t think it is bad; I think what we have to do is choose our addictions, choose our behavior patterns. One can choose to be addicted to punctuality. I am accused of this; other people are addicted to always being late. One can be addicted to meaningless sexual encounters.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-203", "text": "I think the physiological end has been much overplayed. Should we not fall in love because we pheromonally lock together with this person and become a single unified set of drives and goals? The physiological aspects of addiction have been, I think, very strongly overdrawn. I smoke cannabis every day at most opportunities, and have for years and years, since I was 18 years old. Every once in a while I stop, just to see what that\u2019s like. It\u2019s trivial; it\u2019s utterly easy. All that happens is a shift in behavior patterns. I read more: that\u2019s what happens when I stop smoking cannabis, and yet I\u2019m supposed to be breaking out into cold sweats, wandering aimlessly through the streets of the city staring up at lighted windows. I think we give each other too much permission to be weak in this area. What is never talked about in talk about addiction is self-restraint. For heaven\u2019s sake, just take hold of yourself. If you tell people that addiction is a disease, addiction is because you\u2019re black, it\u2019s because you\u2019re poor, it\u2019s because you\u2019re this, it\u2019s because you\u2019re that, you have just given them a whole bunch of reasons not to take responsibility for their own situation. What is needed in these addictive situations is the shock of recognition.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-204", "text": "I believe that if you don\u2019t take drugs, you\u2019re unbearable. I can\u2019t think of a society on earth where people don\u2019t take drugs that any of us would want to have anything to do with. Let\u2019s take Calvinist Geneva, say. I imagine that as an example of an environment of moral rectitude. These people did not wear bright colors, didn\u2019t listen to music, never drank coffee, never smoked, forget about alcohol, sex is for procreation, so forth and so on. They were paradigms of the male ego frozen in place: didactic, paternalistic, all-knowing, filled with hellfire and damnation. Everything is seen in terms of a moral dimension that makes impossible demands on the human animal. Rather, I think what we should realize is that somehow our evolution into a civilized self-reflecting being is caught up in these synergistic relationships that our conscious mind has with various things in the environment, so that we should choose our addictions.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-205", "text": "Notice that addictions to natural substances are harmless. Let me name some natural substances that you might disagree with me on this point. I think probably the strongest one would be opium. People will say, \u201cWhat about opium? Surely, this is the scourge of mankind.\u201d Actually, opium was never a problem in human populations until it was conceived of as a problem by British colonial policymakers who decided that they could manipulate the opium trade to get an entree into China. Alcohol was never particularly a problem until the discovery of distilled alcohol. Of course, heroin is distilled opium, morphine also. Sugar is a refined vegetable substance. In every case, it has required the intercession of science and technology to take harmless habits and turn them into dangerous addictions. Everybody has a solution to the drug problem. I think what I would suggest is something called the Vegetable Drug Act, where you just say, \u201cIf it\u2019s a vegetable, it\u2019s not a drug.\u201d This was the position until very recently with British common law; in Canada, mushrooms were legal. Mushrooms aren\u2019t psilocybin, psilocybin is a refined chemical. It is technology which allows us to create these super powerful, addicting substances, and there will be more and more of them downstream, you may be sure.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-206", "text": "I think we need to think of human beings as hardware, as the computer, if you will, and drugs are forms of software. The software that you run determines the kinds of functions that you can perform. If you run distilled alcohol software then you take on the persona of the alcoholic. I believe that cannabis is probably the most harmless and benign drug around. It carries out this feminizing that I talked about, it lowers the profile of the male ego. Instead of wanting to duke it out, people just say, \u201cWell, if that\u2019s your thing\u2026\u201d I mean, that practically boils down to what we call tolerance. So I think that this disruption of our relationship to psychoactive plants is what set us on the long, hard downward path into neurosis. It began with agriculture, with the narrowing of our spectrum of plant awareness from many plants down to the rye, the oats, the barley. It\u2019s interesting that then out of this came the cultivation of beer, which preceded wine. That comes out of the fact of having created surpluses, because the way beer was discovered was through the fermentation of grain that was stored. If you didn\u2019t have surpluses you would never discover the psychoactive properties of fermented grain.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-207", "text": "In Nepal, the Newari people have an alcoholic beverage that looks like a bowl of granola when it\u2019s put in front of you. It\u2019s dry; they pour it out of a sack into your cup and you say, \u201cThis is beer?\u201d Then they come along with boiling water and pour it over it, and then you get this foamy, lightly fermented, contaminated grain water. To my mind, that is clearly how fermentation of grains and production of alcohol was established. Notice that it was also the accumulation of surplus from the agricultural adaptation that creates the need for defense, because now you\u2019ve got a surplus and you have to guard your surplus from everybody who doesn\u2019t have any. The other thing that the creation of surpluses caused was the invention of barter and money, and this sort of thing, because now you have something that you can trade for something that you don\u2019t have. All of these adaptations; also, a nomadic people cannot move a grain surplus with them. If you\u2019re a semi-nomadic people, a people like in the Amazon, they plant things and then they leave them and go away. They have a yearly peregrination and when they come back to that place a year later there\u2019s all this food ready for them.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-208", "text": "Imagine a nomadic people who were doing that kind of quasi-agriculture with cereal and then there\u2019s one year of great weather and great rainfall and when they arrive at their little wheat patch, so much wheat has been produced that they can\u2019t move it, they can\u2019t take it with them. So then they say, \u201cWe have food now, we don\u2019t have to keep hunting, so let\u2019s spend the winter here,\u201d and this interruption of the cycle of nomadism to deal with unexpected surpluses obviously spawned the idea in people\u2019s minds, \u201cWouldn\u2019t it be great if we had surpluses every year!\u201d Then that says, \u201cThat won\u2019t happen if we are as careless as we have been about our sowing and harvesting, but maybe if we\u2019re very careful and till the land, carefully plant and do careful weeding, we\u2019ll have to stay here and weed, but then we\u2019ll get this tremendous payback in the end.\u201d To my mind, the invention of agriculture broke our relationship to the wild plants and the lowered profile of the male ego and set us on a path of defending wealth, creating fortifications, supporting more specialization, larger populations, so forth and so on, and from there to the present predicament it\u2019s only a moment.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-209", "text": "I think that now things are very far out of hand, and we are caught up in the endgame of history. We are going to have to create a way out of this impasse that is probably going to mean a complete redefining of who we are and how we relate to each other, and space and time, and life and death. It appears that technology is now the thing that is guiding us forward. We are not being lead into the future by politicians. Politicians are running frantically along behind the wagon of history, trying to jump onto it. What is pulling the cart is technology. I think that technology is the program of realizing the practical concerns of the imagination, and that really where are headed is the imagination: it\u2019s a place. I don\u2019t know whether it\u2019s in solid-state circuitry, or the in the bones of the planet, or in artificial archeologies in deep space. The future will figure out the details, but we are close enough to it now that we can anticipate it. It\u2019s what the shamans always said was possible: a world of value and meaning lived in the light of nature.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-210", "text": "I think that if we can get through this narrow neck that rationalism has imposed upon us, and overcome these poisonous, paternalistic philosophies, we will return. That\u2019s why I call it the archaic revival: it\u2019s the myth of the eternal return. History is something that you finish with as quickly as possible and then return to the archaic mode of eternity. I think that\u2019s the adventure that we\u2019re all caught up in, that\u2019s the agenda that the plants and the planet have always had in front of them. It\u2019s just that we wandered away from an awareness of what was happening by deluding ourselves with our own inflated self-image: man as master of woman and nature. This distorted part of our self-image has now become so dangerous to us that we have to abandon it, we have to draw back from it.\n\nUnder that kind of pressure, I think we will. Harking back to another question, the reason I do this, and the reason I don\u2019t feel any great trepidation about it, is because I believe that historical momentum is with us. This is what is destined to come to be. We are going to take control of who we are by taking control of the physiological and psychological foundations upon which the self rests, and that means the chemical reengineering of ourselves into the state of Edenic innocence that was lost when we set out on the long trail of the sword and the hoe. That\u2019s it. End of weekend.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "0bfa7f74799e-211", "text": "Thank you very, very much. It\u2019s a political point of view, you see, and as a practical matter there\u2019s no better way to succeed in politics than to champion the most out-of-it point of view. We live in an era where beige fascism is apparently the rising rule of the day. Well, that means that if you want to be on the cutting edge you have to embrace something very akin to psychedelic anarchy, the absolute antithesis of the fascist state. Then you will participate in the turning of the tide and the vindication of this point of view; and it will be vindicated, there\u2019s no doubt about it. All other points of view are bankrupt on the face of them. End of footnote.\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+of+Shamanism"}
{"id": "7d7c0e62c24c-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nEthnobotany and Shamanism - Psychedelics Before and After History\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n1988\n\nCalifornia Insitute of Integral Studies\n\n1795\n\nEnd of Results\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Ethnobotany+and+Shamanism+-+Psychedelics+Before+and+After+History"}
{"id": "36f7799e7027-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nGaia, Eros, and the Archaic Revival\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n24 August 1989\n\nFord Theatre, Los Angeles, California\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo transcript available for this talk!\n\nHelp Transcribe\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Gaia%2C+Eros%2C+and+the+Archaic+Revival"}
{"id": "c48dab7cdc35-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nLive at the Hollywood Bowl\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n24 August, 1989\n\nHollywood Bowl, Los Angeles, California\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo transcript available for this talk!\n\nHelp Transcribe\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+the+Hollywood+Bowl"}
{"id": "dccd20f4f95b-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\naka Psychedelics and the Feminine\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nAudio\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\nJune 1989\n\nUnknown\n\n7337\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo youtube link available, try the following:\n\nAudio Link (Psychedelic Salon)\nTranscription\nOther links", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/aka+Psychedelics+and+the+Feminine"}
{"id": "dccd20f4f95b-1", "text": "Audio Link (Psychedelic Salon)\nTranscription\nOther links\n\necstasis that the time wave gets about a minute -- about three seconds because they say, \"Look at this.\" You say, \"Oh, wow! That\u2019s amazing!\" Then, they say, \"My God, but look at this.\" \"But, look at this!\" And each one of these, your amazement is genuine and your reaction is correct. You are being shown the most amazing things you\u2019ve ever seen. It\u2019s simply that you cannot retain what they are. So, the goal is, first of all, to be there, to know about it and to draw strength from the evidence for magic. But, then the higher calling is to be a hunter. To find something, to bring it back. If that\u2019s a little too meaty a metaphor for you, well then think of yourself as a noetic archeologist. We want to bring back an object: a flower from hyperspace, a machine from another world. Apparently, the easiest things to bring back are ideas. And so, we have to pay a lot of attention because ideas can cross the barrier - very little else can, but if we pay sufficient attention, I think all -- much of these ideas can be brought across and we can bring -- nothing is unfair. I mean, computer graphics, voice operated tape recorders, uh, anything that works and this is -- we\u2019ve hit the main vein of ideas out there in hyperspace and the goal is to just fill our knapsacks as full as we can and then get back to base with this stuff. [audience laughs]\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/aka+Psychedelics+and+the+Feminine"}
{"id": "26144fb0a2c8-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\naka A Psychedelic Point of View\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nAudio\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\nJune 1989\n\nUnknown\n\n6456\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo youtube link available, try the following:\n\nAudio Link (Psychedelic Salon)\nTranscription\nOther links\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/aka+A+Psychedelic+Point+of+View"}
{"id": "02c6f8bcb1e5-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\naka The Evolution of a Psychedelic Thinker\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nAudio\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\nJune 1989\n\nUnknown\n\n10638\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo youtube link available, try the following:\n\nAudio Link\nTranscription\nOther links\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/aka+The+Evolution+of+a+Psychedelic+Thinker"}
{"id": "b32ec316017b-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nA Survey of Shamanic Options\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\nJune 1989\n\nUnknown\n\n10404\n\nEnd of Results\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/A+Survey+of+Shamanic+Options"}
{"id": "9fe8c93d7f62-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nPsychedelics and the Chaos Revolution\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nAudio\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n22 June 1989\n\nEsalen Institute, Big Sur, California\n\n9143\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo youtube link available, try the following:\n\nAudio Link\nTranscription\nOther links\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Psychedelics+and+the+Chaos+Revolution"}
{"id": "59de0b9e4e4e-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nEsalen Scholar In Residence (aka Enough is Enough)\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\nJune 1989\n\nEsalen Institute, Big Sur, California\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo transcript available for this talk!\n\nHelp Transcribe\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Esalen+Scholar+In+Residence+%28aka+Enough+is+Enough%29"}
{"id": "1f2862ec13c9-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nShamanology of the Amazon\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n1989\n\nOjai Foundation, Ojai, California\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo transcript available for this talk!\n\nHelp Transcribe\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Shamanology+of+the+Amazon"}
{"id": "dbe7b163e9d8-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nHistory Ends in Green - Gaia, Psychedelics, and the Archaic Revival\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n1989\n\nEsalen Institute, Big Sur, California\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo transcript available for this talk!\n\nHelp Transcribe\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/History+Ends+in+Green+-+Gaia%2C+Psychedelics%2C+and+the+Archaic+Revival"}
{"id": "7387a2b2f089-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nShamanism, Symbiosis, and Psychedelics Workshop\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nAudio\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n1989\n\nWhole Life Expo\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo youtube link available, try the following:\n\nAudio Link\nTranscription\nOther links\n\nNo transcript available for this talk!\n\nHelp Transcribe\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Shamanism%2C+Symbiosis%2C+and+Psychedelics+Workshop"}
{"id": "0aa5f5615fa6-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nOpening the Doors of Creativity\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n20 October 1990\n\nPort Hueneme, CA\n\n7519\n\nEnd of Results\n\nQuestion: You spoke about science being in the realm of ego and art and shamanism being in some other realm [couldn't decipher]. My own psychedelic experience convinced me of the insistence of that other realm, but I felt not enough sense of personal power to be that antennae that you're saying that artists can be for bringing that other, until I became convinced not only of the existence not only of me but then the other realm and the other realm within me, and perhaps the psychedelic experience prepared me for that second awareness, but I guess you could comment on how, if possibly--if possible, that second awareness could become more easily accessible, and st...\n\nQ: Um, being aware that the other realm is something that's also very personal and ....", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Opening+the+Doors+of+Creativity"}
{"id": "0aa5f5615fa6-1", "text": "Q: Um, being aware that the other realm is something that's also very personal and ....\n\nQ: Hello Terence...I've known you for a long time, but you've never met me. I'm one of Roy's night people, and, uh...I guess, I don't know, I guess I ought to prep this remark by saying that I got about a $50,000 education and three degrees, college degrees in psychology, but I've never learned anything like I've learned from listening to Roy's show [audience applause] on KPFK [rest of comment indecipherable].........Uh, in pursuing those degrees, I've decided to learn a little bit about it hands-on, so I went to work in [couldn't decipher]. So, it's my misfortune, actually, to be earning my survival at this time to be working as a.....I would like to see psychology take a different direction, and I know that what you're talking about provides a focus to a direction for psychology to take which I think would...blow the lid off things. So, we're really close to, uh...I mean, I'm in total agreement that Freud and Jung discovered the [couldn't decipher]-conscious about a hundred years ago, but they discovered it 900 [couldn't decipher] in Santa Fe.\n\nUm, how do we get closer to this in this kind of society, uh, that's the first part of this question...I'm a little bit nervous speaking in front of all these people. But, um, the second part of this question has to do with a study that you spoke of in '72 where with single-dose administration of LSD, alcoholics were achieving a 72% success rate, and, uh, I would you like you to speak a little bit on the pro-psychedelic, uh, the pro-psychedelic approach being and anti-drug approach\n\nQ:", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Opening+the+Doors+of+Creativity"}
{"id": "0aa5f5615fa6-2", "text": "Q:\n\nQ:\n\nQ:\n\nQ:\n\nQ:\n\nQ:\n\nQ:\n\nQ:\n\nQ:\n\nQ:\n\nQ:\n\nQ:\n\nQ:\n\nQ:\n\nQ:\n\nQ:\n\nQ:\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Opening+the+Doors+of+Creativity"}
{"id": "a74f07be72fe-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nThe Light at the End of History\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n14 October 1990\n\nThe Wetlands, New York, NY\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo youtube link available, try the following:\n\nNo transcript available for this talk!\n\nHelp Transcribe\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Light+at+the+End+of+History"}
{"id": "4327156533b7-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nThe World Could Be Anything\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\nJuly 1990\n\nUnknown\n\n11041\n\nEnd of Results\n\nWe closed last night, or we discussed yesterday, a bumper sticker that I saw driving down here, and the bumper sticker said, uh, \u201cMan thinks. God knows.\u201d And, then, someone had bought a second copy of the bumper sticker and cut it apart and reversed it and put it under it, so it said, \u201cMan thinks. God knows. God knows Man thinks.\u201d [Audience laughs]\n\nNow, it seemed to me there was a lot going on in [audience laughter] what was attempting [Terence chuckles] to be expressed here. First of all, something about God, that God knows, that God exists in a superior state of intellection. Plato said, \"Time is the moving image of eternity.\" My notion of God\u2019s cognition is simply the regarding of all points in the spacetime continuum with equal clarity. God knows. The limited program of knowing is thought, cognition. Man thinks. This is what man can do in imitation of the all-knowing and omniscient example of God. But, implicit is that this is somehow in a- a limited undertaking, this thinking of man. And some of you may recall the famous comment of Pascal that, \"Man is a reed bent by the wind.\" And then, Pascal added, \"But a thinking reed.\"", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+Could+Be+Anything"}
{"id": "4327156533b7-1", "text": "So, then, the second half of the conundrum was that, \u201cGod knows. man thinks.\u201d Now this, I thought, was very interesting, because it seems to imply a relationship between the limited project of knowing, which is human thought, and the completed project of knowing, which is omniscience. God knows Man thinks. In a way, what this is saying, is that God knows that man is making his way toward God. God knows man thinks. God knows that man is participating in the same project of being, that God regards from this higher dimensional space. And, so, then, this meditation on these four lines closes with a recurso which returns you then to this realization that what we are talking about is 'the project of knowing', Heidegger called it, carried out on two levels: on the level of omniscience and on the level of limited being.\n\nSo, then I th-- meditated on this after we discussed it yesterday, and I thought tonight it might be interesting, then, to [takes drink] talk about the thinking project of\u2013 that is the essence of humaneness on one level \u2013 the thinking project which has as its vector, um, I call it 'concrescence' following Whitehead's Neoplatonism or one could call it \"God.\" Teilhard de Chardin called it \"the Omega point.\" But, the, the, the, um, process by which knowing transforms itself from, uh, some kind of k- aboriginal, uh, apperception of the possibility of God into union with God, and the process that lies between these two points, is the story of the evolution of human consciousness, or more properly speaking, human history.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+Could+Be+Anything"}
{"id": "4327156533b7-2", "text": "And, the interesting thing, I think, about, uh, the Western religions, generally, is their insistence on, um, the tangentiality of God and history, that God was something to be realized in the life of each individual, but that there was also somehow a collective drama of redemption, that was stretched out over a very large period of time, and history then becomes the theater, you see, of the struggle between good and evil, for the redemption of the human soul. And, from the modern point of view, or \u2013 let\u2019s be more frank, from my point of view [Terence laughs; audience laughs] \u2013 this is, uh, primarily something to be analyzed within the context of language, and our myths about it, and its evolution, and its potential future evolution.\n\nSo, I -- and this is in my personal life, the, the great mystery to me, because I feel that I\u2019m -- my intellectual style is that of a scientist, and I take very seriously science, and yet my \u2013 not only my faith, but my, uh, experience \u2013 has led me to believe that the world is not a construction of space and time and matter and energy. That that mapping is, uh, insufficient. That the world is instead some kind of a, uh, linguistic construct. It is more in the nature of a sentence, or a novel, or a work of art, than it is in the nature of these machine models of interlocking law that we inherit out of a thousand years of rational reductionism. That the world only behaves as science says it should when we confine our engagement with it to information that is at a great distance from us, like reading the New York Times every day.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+Could+Be+Anything"}
{"id": "4327156533b7-3", "text": "If you read the New York Times every day, few miracles will occur while you are engaged in that activity. Essentially, what is happening is you are getting your cultural programming for the day, all your switches, if any need being- need to be reset by cultural values, are reset at that point, but when we recede into what I call 'the primacy of immediate experience', the, the rules and models that we\u2019ve been handed by science, and, uh, what\u2019s called, common sense, are just totally found to be inadequate.\n\nAnd, I don\u2019t mean when we perturb ordinary consciousness with psychedelic drugs. I\u2019ll speak about that in a moment. But, I simply mean when we go into solitude, when we go into wilderness, when we endure great travail in our lives, or when we put ourselves in extraordinary, alien circumstances, then, it\u2019s as though the membrane between the ego, and... something else, which we could call our guardian angel, or the Jungian unconscious, or the Overmind, something like that, the membrane grows thin, and the world loses its, um, \u2013 [snaps] what do I want to say? \u2013 its mundane character. And, instead, things previously mundane, begin to become charged with psychic energy. They become carriers of meaning. They become carriers of meaning.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+Could+Be+Anything"}
{"id": "4327156533b7-4", "text": "This is very peculiar. A- At a low level, it\u2019s not so astonishing. It\u2019s a kind of a generalized opening to the world, because everything is imbued with significance. That tree, that person, that greeting, that conversation, is imbued with a kind of depth and significance that is satisfying. It's like living deeply. Living deeply. But, this phenomenon can proceed to a deeper level of introspection and relationship to the exterior. And, in that case, then, this significance which everything was previously seen to have, begins to concresce or densify, and the world begins to dissolve into animate intelligence.\n\nNow, at this point, um, if you didn\u2019t bargain for this, you're probably very concerned about your mental condition, and if you aren\u2019t, your friends are, because what you\u2019re saying at this point is, the rivers talk to me, the trees whisper in my ear. What you\u2019re recovering is the meaning, that\u2019s all. The meaning that is self-evident in nature, but that we blocked. The meaning is so pregnant in everything that it can actually articulate itself in your native English tongue.\n\nAnd, uh, you know, talking rocks, talking trees, talking boulders, we define this as, uh, pathology. It means, uh, in technical jargon, a severely diminished ego is in danger of overwhelm-ment by, uh, material from the inchoate and disorganized unconscious. Well, but what\u2019s actually happening, is that, for the first time in somebody\u2019s life or experience, they are meeting the resident meaning in reality, with its force un-blunted by, uh, conditioning and denial.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+Could+Be+Anything"}
{"id": "4327156533b7-5", "text": "And, um, this is some kind of a linguistic process. We and all nature, I think, swims in some kind of sea of signification of which we are in the same way that the amphibians were able to drag themselves out of the primitive oceans of this planet on- into air and exist in a completely different dimension; we, whether grandly or perversely - the verdict is not yet in - we dragged ourselves out of the sea of telepathic interconnected signification that united all life, and we exist, panting and pop-eyed, in this other dimension called History.\n\nEgo awareness, presence of self, sense of loss, anticipation of gain, all of these, uh, dimensions of experience, really, have been added to what was previously the animal Tao - just the howling at the moon Tao of animal existence. And to this, we have added, you know, a dimension of future anticipation: a dimension of regret, a dimension of: how do I make choices? and so forth and so on.\n\nUm, there is not a -- I don\u2019t put a- a moral, uh, judgment on this, but it has to be said, that in the tradition of the West, this has been viewed classically as the \"Fall.\" This is the Fall into names instead of realities, into, uh, constructs of reality rather than reality itself. And this has now been, uh, inculcated into each and every one of us, as, you know, both the glory and the, and the trauma of human existence which is our extraordinary ability to reside in and be in language. [Takes drink]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+Could+Be+Anything"}
{"id": "4327156533b7-6", "text": "So, for instance, you know, I\u2019ve made this example before: a child lying in a crib and a hummingbird comes into the room and the child is ecstatic because this shimmering iridescence of movement and sound and attention, it\u2019s just wonderful. I mean, it is an instantaneous miracle when placed against the background of the dull wallpaper of the nursery and so forth. But, then, mother or nanny or someone comes in and says, \u201cIt\u2019s a bird, baby. Bird. Bird!\u201d And, this takes this linguistic piece of mosaic tile, and o- places it over the miracle, and glues it down with the epoxy of syntactical momentum, and, from now on, the miracle is confined within the meaning of the word. And, by the time a child is four or five or six, there- no light shines through. They're- they have tiled over every aspect of reality with a linguistic association that blunts it, limits it, and confines it within cultural expectation.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+Could+Be+Anything"}
{"id": "4327156533b7-7", "text": "But, this doesn\u2019t mean, that this world of signification is not outside, still existent, beyond the horizons, the foreshortened horizons of a culturally validated language. Well, so then, classically, the path through this has been through use of psychedelic plants, or, uh, some form of ascetic practice, or fasting, or prayer and meditation... whatever, some way of breaking through. And, it is literally presented as a breaking through, a penetration to another level, that culture is an imprisoning bubble of interlocking assumptions, that are like, a, um, a collective hallucination. I mean, I hate to say it because it\u2019s a recursive metaphor, but culture is like a delusion of some sort. Because, it isn\u2019t true, of course. It isn\u2019t true, if you\u2019re, uh, a Witoto. It isn\u2019t true that you came from the piss of the anaconda god when he had to get out of his canoe at the first waterfall. That\u2019s not really true. But, that\u2019s your cultural myth and you live inside it.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+Could+Be+Anything"}
{"id": "4327156533b7-8", "text": "Our cultural myths, that the world is made of things called mu mesons and anti-protons is, of course, not true either, but it\u2019s a linguistic construct that we culturally validate and live inside, and these cultural myths give permission for certain things. F- Basically, they give permission to ignore certain kinds of realities. So, our language is uniquely set up to ignore, for example, the suppression of femininity. It\u2019s also uniquely set up to suppress the statistically, um, uh, infrequent. We really have no patience with that. We have an assembly mind mentality. What we\u2019re interested in is that things run smoothly. One can imagine a completely different mentality that cared nothing for statistical norms and only pursued the miraculous. I mean, India, in a way, is that society. They don\u2019t give a hoot for, you know, how it works on the humdrum level, but the alien, the peculiar, the other, the unexpected is revered, adored even.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+Could+Be+Anything"}
{"id": "4327156533b7-9", "text": "So, these kinds of cultural values shift. But, now, now, we are in a global culture with the combined understandings of five, six, seven hundred language groups and half that many literatures being poured into a global database where some people are assimilating enough of this to begin to play their part in the creation of, uh, a kind of global meta-program for language. And, uh, I think it\u2019s interesting to talk about the form that this may take, because I see this as our, uh -- this is not our salvation, but, this is the angel of our salvation. If we can transform and remake language, then we can have the conversation that we must have in order to save ourselves. But, we cannot save ourselves until we have a language adequate to the problem that we're facing. And, uh, English just won\u2019t do it because English is a language of subject opposite, uh, subject/ob-object opposition. It\u2019s a language of a past, present, and future, and the kind of world we\u2019re living in is not that kind of world.\n\nNow, toiling in the background, misunderstood and, uh, unnoticed for centuries, have been mathematicians, laboring to create, what they call, meta-language of de- of description, that seem to them very satisfying, to the rest of us, very bewildering. And, a question worth asking is: why is it that this language, mathematics, which we have so much trouble understanding, seems so tremendously powerful when it comes to the description of nature? This is not a trivial question. Why should numbers, in a sense the most abstract quintessence of the human mind, have anything whatsoever to say about the topology of three dimensional space and time? It isn\u2019t clear.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+Could+Be+Anything"}
{"id": "4327156533b7-10", "text": "What I believe is happening - and we talked about this last night, generally, in the form of a conservation of novelty throughout the history of the universe, but I tended, last night, to present the universe as a material thing. I spoke of atoms compressing into molecules into organic creatures into thinking beings with civilizations and so forth. But, another way to think of this is a kind of take a spiritual x-ray of the material universe, and then say, \"If matter is merely the vehicle of the transformations that we call the life of the universe, well then what is the inner dynamic composed of, what is it that is striving, what is it that bootstraps itself forward, what is it that self reflects?\"\n\nWell, I think what it is is it's actually information. Information is some kind of, um, ontological modality that is capable of organizing any system, in which it inhabits, into self-reflection. So, you pour information into matter and you get back DNA capable of making life. But, you know, there is a persistent spiritual tradition backed up by psychedelic and shamanic experience that says that there are also hierarchies of incorporeal and disincarnate intelligence that is nevertheless highly organized.\n\nWell, until the advent of the computer, I think we were just pretty much at loss to form any conception, whatsoever, of how you could have consciousness without, uh, a body. But, e- the computer shows us that you can have large scale systems which have degrees, and then, you know, there's a long philosophical wrangle which we can just stamp as 'for another time', degrees of sentience in operating systems. So, then, it seems to mean that information is the thing which uses matter, uses light, uses spirit, uses whatever it can put its hands on to organize itself into higher and higher levels of self-reflection.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+Could+Be+Anything"}
{"id": "4327156533b7-11", "text": "Well, then, to what end? I mean, what is all this? Is it just an innate drive toward totality? Or, is it a process which exists completed in some higher dimensional space and we are somehow trapped in a lower dimensional matrix and we have to go, uh- we have to endure the illusion that it is incomplete? I mean, I don\u2019t have answers for these things; this is the business of theologians, basically, to tell us where we are in this universal machine. But, I think that, uh, what we can do to enrich our, uh, experience and to feed data into our heuristic models, is to begin to think in terms of language as the material that we need to work with instead of, uh, public opinion or matter or even energy. It\u2019s meaning that we need to coax into our lives, number one.\n\nAs meaning enters our lives individually, we became- we become more capable of raising our voices, both in joyous song, and in political protest, if necessary. My whole shtick, and the whole shtick of the psychedelic experience, I think, is: reclaim immediate experience. Realize that you out-vote all parliaments, police forces, and major newspapers on the planet, because, who knows, they may be illusions. Complicated phenomenological forms of analysis can be carried out to show that their existence is in considerable doubt. But, if you carry out this phenomenological reduction, you will discover that it reinforces the notion that you must actually exist and be real. So, therefore, you start from that -- that nub of immediate experience and real being -- and extrapolation outward should be very provisional.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+Could+Be+Anything"}
{"id": "4327156533b7-12", "text": "I mean, I don\u2019t know, uh, how Buddhism handles this, my- I, I, um, I grant you all a strong possibility of existing, but I\u2019m not nearly as sure about you as I am about me. [audience laughs] And, I don\u2019t think any of you should be any sure- more sure of the rest of us than yourself. I mean, the world could be anything, you know? It could be a solid state matrix of some sort. It could be an illusion. It could be a dream. I mean, it really could be a dream \u2026\n\nSo it, uh, it pays to stay on your toes, I think. In practical terms, what does all this come down to, besides that we should speak from the heart, clearly, and with our minds engaged? Well, I th- I think that, remember I said we should see language as the stuff with which we work, rather than matter, and that means, uh, creating a technology of the say-able, making the complete understanding of new puns a national priority on a par with weapons development, it means exploring, uh, the real implications of substituting Finnegans Wake for the Constitution, this sort of thing. Because, what we\u2019re doing, you see, is-is-is pulling the beard of the linear print-heads, who really believe all of this stuff, who really are lost in the labyrinth of the political errors of the last 500 years. It isn\u2019t going- we can\u2019t, uh, overwhelm them by the force of arms, nor should we wish to. Uh, they can actually be teased out of existence, because they themselves feel their position to be so ridiculous.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+Could+Be+Anything"}
{"id": "4327156533b7-13", "text": "It\u2019s very interesting how, uh, the way the collapse of our enemy in the Soviet Union has exposed the absurdity of our previous positions. All our previous positions are now exposed as absurd, but n- people don\u2019t draw the obvious conclusion. It must also mean, then, that our present position is absurd [audience laughs]. And, so, it\u2019s tremendously liberating. Our culture is ruined. It\u2019s, uh, it's a disgrace from which we can now simply walk away. Well, then, the question is: into what? And, I believe that our persistent fascination with psychedelic states of mind since prehistory forward has been because, in the psychedelic state, from the, you know, from the very beginning, there was an anticipation of the very end. And the very end still lies ahead of us.\n\nWhat it is is that our nervous system is in the process of evolving us through a linguistic transformation where language, which at the beginning of the process was something that you heard, at the end of the process becomes something that you actually see. And, this simple shift from seeing to hearing is the key to our being able to finally recognize each other and communicate.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+Could+Be+Anything"}
{"id": "4327156533b7-14", "text": "Print and linearity and what\u2019s called 'ear bias' for language is what has shattered our sense of ourselves as a collectivity. A positive way of putting it is to say, it\u2019s also what created the idea of democracy, individual freedom, labor unions, the vote, all of these atomized notions of human obligation and political participation arise out of print. But, so do ideas like that we're all alike, because letters from printing presses on pages are all alike. The idea that products should be mass-produced out of mass-produced sub-units. This is a print-head notion. It could never have occurred to anyone outside of a printing press culture and never has. These ideas have imparted to our existence a tremendous material opulence and intellectual poverty and spiritual uniformity. And, now, literally, we have to illuminate our civilization. We have to take its shoddy, spiritually-empty, Bauhaus skeleton and illuminate it, psychedelicize it, let a thousand paisleys bloom [Audience laughs]. Uh, in other words, release the design process from a commitment to material values. Well, how can you do that, because the bottom line of material values is the bottom line? It costs.\n\nThe reason we build in the Bauhaus style, for whatever reason we got into it, we now build in that style, because it\u2019s the cheapest around. And, once you start adding filigrees and changing things, costs soar. How can you do that in a civilization with a cult of democratic values, individualism, and print-created linear uniformity? Well, the only way you can do it is, you have to drop design costs to zero. The only way you can do that is if you build virtually.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+Could+Be+Anything"}
{"id": "4327156533b7-15", "text": "This means, you build in an electronic dimension that is added on to ordinary cultural space like an orthogonal dimension. In other words, it\u2019s like a TV that you walk into; it\u2019s called cyberspace. And, in cyberspace things are built out of light. So, it costs as much to build Versailles as it costs to build a hamburger stand, because Versailles and the hamburger stand are just two programs that, uh, look exactly the same on disk. So, what this means is that the previous set of class-created values, based on the acquisition and control of matter, begin to break down. This is already happening in America, on one level, where, you know, to live as a middle-class person is to live on a better level than the mogul emperors ever dreamed of. I mean, what mogul emperor could stride to his refrigerator and see cases of French mineral water [audience laughs], juices from the South Seas , pomegranates from South America. Eat your heart out, Mogul-deli! No chance!", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+Could+Be+Anything"}
{"id": "4327156533b7-16", "text": "So, um, in a sense we\u2019re beginning to create this leveling, but we have created them by looting the material resources of the rest of the world. Conceivably, it can be created in a virtual space, where we would all, uh, live, in this world, a rather monkish existence. But, you know, there\u2019s that wonderful passage in Finnegans Wake where he says (he\u2019s speaking of the red light district in Dublin which is called Moicane), and he says: \u201cHere in Moy Kain we flop on the seemy side, but upmeyant Prospector you sprout all your worth and you woof your wings. If you want to be phoenixed, come and be parked.\u201d Well, he was advocating death as a solution for life\u2019s problems, so if you want to be phoenixed, come and be parked. Uh, my solution is not so radical. I think if you want to be phoenixed, come and be parked at your local virtual reality arcade. And, then, you can be phoenixed in, in several ways.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+Could+Be+Anything"}
{"id": "4327156533b7-17", "text": "Well, some of what I\u2019m saying here, is, uh, is facetious. We talked last night about Stan Tenen\u2019s \"wonderful object.\" For those of you who weren\u2019t here, this is a man, a cabalistic scholar, who has developed a piece of sculpture such that when you illuminate it from a certain angle, the Hebrew letter aleph appears as a shadow. And, then you move the light slightly and aleph turns into bet and then you move the light slightly, and so on. In order, his sculpture produces all of the Hebrew letters as shadows from this beautiful form, which he calls \"the lily.\" And, uh, uh, it ties in with, uh, an experience I had, but, well, first let me talk a little bit more about this \"lily\" thing that Tenen has discovered.\n\nHe also made one for Demotic Greek, which, you know, for those of us who thought it was proof positive that Hebrew was the language of God, this was a real blow to the chest. But, because he did one for demotic Greek, too, and it works just as well -- implying, and, uh, he's working on Arabic -- implying that perhaps such forms exist for all alphabets. And, so then I was thinking about this last night, and I said, \"Well, if there\u2019s a sculpture in four dimen- in three dimensions that throws the two dimensional alphabets, then obviously, in a higher dimension, there must be a form which throws into lower dimensions the sculptures that make the alphabet.\"", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+Could+Be+Anything"}
{"id": "4327156533b7-18", "text": "So, that means all alphabets, all letters, lead back to a hyper-dimensional surface of some sort which can probably then be described with some kind of weird fractal algorithm. And, so then I thought, 'Wow! This is a pretty Hebraic vision of what\u2019s going on here'. We have the alphabets of local languages being generated from higher dimensional objects that are three dimensional that are then referent to still higher dimensional objects that- through which the light of God\u2019s love passes, scattering out into the radiance of what can be said. And, uh, in a way, this is sort of my vision of the millennium, that we will be re-soared into the Word. You know, the whole story begins in principio et Verbum, et Verbo caro factum est \u2013 in princip- in the beginning was the Word, and the Word was made flesh. The whole cosmic drama is the mystery of what it is for the Word to be made flesh. Language is seeking to birth itself into the domain of concrete existence. That\u2019s, obviously, what \"the Word made flesh\" means! And, uh, it seems to me, that if the Word can be made flesh, this implies a reciprocity; It implies that the flesh can be made Word.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+Could+Be+Anything"}
{"id": "4327156533b7-19", "text": "And, this brings us back to, what I was talking about at the very beginning of this evening, which is the curiously literary nature of reality. That it\u2019s much more like a- a novel by Thomas Pynchon than it is like an equation by Ilya Prigogine. And, why is that? Is it because, in fact, the flesh is Word? And that understanding this, is the real task of uncovering our spirituality? Somehow, it\u2019s a riddle, it\u2019s a conundrum, it\u2019s a koan. If we could correctly understand this, if the world did not disappear immediately, at least it would roll around in a palm of your hand like a spinning marble as the I Ching promises. It\u2019s something about the recognition of the primacy of the Word, that history is the process of the descent of the Word into concrete expression - I didn\u2019t say matter - and that our relation to this retro-flexive process is an ascent into the Word, a going toward the approaching mystery, and a meeting there, in a domain of unknowability, essentially. I mean, this is the 'casting into being' that Heidegger talked about, this is the \u2018going to meet the stranger\u2019. This is \u2018the flight of the alone to the alone\u2019, that is the driving force of Plotinus' mysticism.\n\nWell, that\u2019s really all I have to say about that, so [audience laughs], uh, let me see what time it is. How am I doing?\n\n[Other voice: Ques- Question and Answer]\n\nYes, let\u2019s take some questions, if there are any.\n\nQuestion: Do you know how to use Amanita muscaria medicinally and shamanistically without killing yourself? [audience laughter]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+Could+Be+Anything"}
{"id": "4327156533b7-20", "text": "Terence: I can tell you were following my argument with bated breath [clears throat]. Carefully! Because, it\u2019s dangerous. It\u2019s dangerous because it\u2019s seasonally variable, geographically variable, and genetically variable, and that\u2019s enough variables that you should be very careful with what you\u2019re doing.\n\nUh, generally, I don\u2019t recommend it. It's v- the attention that has been given to that mushroom is, to my mind, entirely out of proportion to its cultural importance. This is because Gordon Wasson fastened in on it with a tenacious will as soma. He decided that it was soma. Are you all up to speed on what we\u2019re talking about here?\n\nSoma\n\nwas this mysterious, ecstatic, hallucinogenic plant that the Rig-Vedas were basically composed about. The major subject of the Rig-Vedas is soma. The ninth mandala of the Rig-Vedas is a paean of praise to soma that exalts it above all the other gods, and no one knows what soma was. And, the descriptions are puzzling. It seems to have been -- it's didn\u2019t have leaves; it had yellow flowers. It grew in mountains. And, they speak of pressing it. It was prepared some way. It was pressed, it was filtered, and then they talk about this golden liquid which they drank.\n\nThen, other people said you have to dry them for months or smoke them over a fire. Again, this is- doesn\u2019t seem to be reliable. So, Wasson went to the grave. He, in his last book,\n\nPersephone\u2019s Quest", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+Could+Be+Anything"}
{"id": "4327156533b7-21", "text": "Persephone\u2019s Quest\n\n, he referred to Amanita muscaria as the supreme entheogen of all time, which was just a completely wrong-headed judgment, I believe. And, this was from the man who discovered the true psilocybin mushroom cult in Mexico! There was an angle on all this which Wasson completely overlooked because of his bias towards certain languages, and that is that along with all this Indo-European Vedic Hindu material, there was a Zend Avestan literature, based around haoma, the same stuff, same word. And, from there, Flattery argues that, uh, it was Peganum harmala, that it was harmaline, that it was not a mushroom, that it was a higher plant in the, uh, Zygophyllaceae. And, uh, I think, probably, he\u2019s right, actually. It\u2019s a very interesting book. Apparently, uh, w-uh, in the Avestan classical period, no one would have dreamed of having a spiritual experience without resort to drugs. They just put it very plainly. They\u2019re the most \u2018matter-of-fact\u2019 people. These texts are fascinating! And -- but, they don\u2019t devaluate it. They say, you know, \"Here\u2019s our map of the spirit world entirely based on our drug experiences. And, here are the drugs we use. And, to see these angels, you must use this drug. And, to see these angels, this drug,\" and so forth.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+Could+Be+Anything"}
{"id": "4327156533b7-22", "text": "We don\u2019t really know what these drugs were, because the-the etymologies are lost, but harmaline figures very strongly in all of this. And, of course, harmaline is a, uh, neurotransmitter present in human metabolism. In fact, I didn\u2019t get into it tonight because I was trying to keep it off the biochemistry and that sort of thing, but, this transformation of language from something heard to seen that I was talking about, I believe, is a one or two gene mutation. That\u2019s all it would take.\n\nBecause, in the human pineal gland, there is a compound called adeneroglumerotropine [sic--adrenoglomerulotropin), that\u2019s what the enzymologists call it. But, when you show it to, uh, a plant biochemist, he says it\u2019s 6-methoxy-tetrahydro-harmaline. And, so it is! Adeneroglumerotropine [Adrenoglomerulotropin] and 6-methoxy-tetrahydro-harmaline are the same thing. Well, it\u2019s a psychedelic harmine alkaloid similar to what\u2019s in Peganum harmala. It, uh, could be converted to DMT by a simple methylation! Well, a one gene mutation would make a methylation possible!\n\nAttention, consciousness, cultural values, we don\u2019t know how many times since the invention of language there have been significant mutations in the n- in the, uh, chemistry of the nervous system that have created significant changes in cultural programming. I mean, doesn\u2019t anyone find it a little odd that the laws of perspective were discovered less than 400 years ago? I mean, what the hell was wrong with people before that? How can you\n\ndiscover", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+Could+Be+Anything"}
{"id": "4327156533b7-23", "text": "discover\n\nthe laws of perspective? I mean, I find that not credible for somebody to say that the laws of perspective were discovered. It's always seemed weird to me! It\u2019s as though, uh, you know, there was a shift, a very subtle tweaking of the processing of visual space itself necessary to be able to do that. Yeah?\n\nQ: Um, you had spoken about the Word, and the Word made flesh, and, um, Dorothy Sayers wrote a book called The Mind of the Maker, in which she discusses the Trinity, as, uhm, really an image of what the creator process is all about. And, where the father is having, like, a great idea for a play. He\u2019s the Father. The Son is making the thing happen on the stage, bringing it into the world, and having it \u2018made flesh\u2019. And, then the Spirit is the response that you have to that completed product, and how all three of them really beget one another and they nurture one another. Um, and she talks about people who have these problems with scalene trinities where there is someone who, let\u2019s say, may have only the Father, only have a great idea, but be unable to make it into something that's physically real on a stage. And, I wondered if you could pick that up, uh, that story.\n\nTerence: Well, yeah. I mean speaking to it, generally, I think if you think of history, as this kind of a process, Western history, as the manifestation of, uh, the demiourgos, Ialdabaoth, Jehovah, and then you get this middle-declension in the Christos, and then this peculiar and misunderstood promise of the redemption by the Holy Ghost. Uh,\n\nMcLuhan", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+Could+Be+Anything"}
{"id": "4327156533b7-24", "text": "McLuhan\n\n, 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.\n\nI mean, he literally saw electricity as God\u2019s love made manifest, and-and he may not -- he hasn\u2019t 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\u2019s 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.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+Could+Be+Anything"}
{"id": "4327156533b7-25", "text": "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\u2019s 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.\n\nAccording to McLuhan, that\u2019s the major thing, and 'the electrification of the body', you know, this is a theme you get as early as Whitman: \u2018I sing the body electric\u2019. You get it in Steven Vincent Ben\u00e9t in his poem \u2018John Brown\u2019s Body\u2019 where he says, \u2018I see the human body cold electric rage\u2019, 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\u2019s credible. It\u2019s 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\u2019s cities. Uh, it\u2019s, uh, pure energy in the service of light, one thing, and information. And, it\u2019s generated--I don\u2019t know how many of you know this, but it\u2019s generated out, uh, stable magnetic fields.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+Could+Be+Anything"}
{"id": "4327156533b7-26", "text": "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\u2019t understand it, but if you\u2019re down close to where it\u2019s coming into being, it\u2019s like coaxing some kind of demon out of the matrix and into the service of thought and light. Very psychedelic.\n\nQ: So, how do you see the body being coaxed back into the Word?\n\nTerence: Well, I don\u2019t know, It\u2019s a hard thing to picture, isn\u2019t it? Um.\n\nQ: Well, maybe it\u2019s like those Tibetan letters that start becoming real and vibrating\u2026I don't know.\n\nTerence: Well, there are a number of -- I think we have like pieces of the puzzle, but we don\u2019t know quite how to arrange them. One is, Virtual Reality. Do you all understand this concept? Because, I\u2019ve mentioned it and it\u2019s 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\u2019re in it. And, you can walk around and pick things up and open doors and -- and it\u2019s all sustained by computers, but the illusion is very real, and they\u2019re only at the beginning of the process of creating this illusion.\n\nOkay, so that\u2019s a technology sitting off there with a potential application. Another is nanotechnology. Nanotechnology is making things very small. And, there\u2019s a whole enthusiasm for this. And, people who, uh, you know -- I talked yesterday about, uh, being down at the\n\nbaz", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+Could+Be+Anything"}
{"id": "4327156533b7-27", "text": "baz\n\n, 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\u2019s another technology that\u2019s sitting there.\n\nAnother 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.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+Could+Be+Anything"}
{"id": "4327156533b7-28", "text": "This is one possibility, that the culture be made virtual. Another possibility, which is sort of the reverse of that, and there\u2019s 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\u2019s, it is what it is, but it\u2019s also a button. So, I look at this, the question forms in my mind: \u2018What is this?\u2019 The \u2018What\u2019 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\u2019re 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.\n\nOh, 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\u2019t 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.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+Could+Be+Anything"}
{"id": "4327156533b7-29", "text": "Uh, I\u2019ve 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 d\u00e9noument: 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.\n\nI--this kind of thing makes me very uncomfortable, uh, perhaps because it\u2019s fairly feeling-toned and emotion-laden. Uh, I can ima--I- it doesn\u2019t 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.\n\nBrother David \u2026\n\nQ: Yes. In this process of, uh, great return to the Word in flesh, where do you see the function of the poets?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+Could+Be+Anything"}
{"id": "4327156533b7-30", "text": "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.\n\nAnd, there is a model for this which I will explain to you so that it doesn\u2019t 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", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+Could+Be+Anything"}
{"id": "4327156533b7-31", "text": "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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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 \u2018parallel 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\u2019s a very neat example of convergent -- non-convergent evolution.\n\nUm, but what\u2019s 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\u2019s dancing! And it\u2019s 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].", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+Could+Be+Anything"}
{"id": "4327156533b7-32", "text": "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 \u2018the same language\u2019, it will be close enough, that you will, sort of, understand what I mean.\n\nNow, if I don\u2019t 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: \u2018Yes. You meant that you don\u2019t want to sit with Harry and Sally because their pending divorce makes you uncomfortable.\" So, \"No, that\u2019s not what I meant .\" So there\u2019s a misunderstanding because the dictionaries are not matched.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+Could+Be+Anything"}
{"id": "4327156533b7-33", "text": "Now, notice what\u2019s happening with the octopi \u2013 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\u2019s 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\u2019t think it\u2019s that outlandish.\n\nOur 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.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+Could+Be+Anything"}
{"id": "4327156533b7-34", "text": "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]\n\nIs this guy for real? Was it Flanders Fields, armies clash by night and that whole business?\n\nQ: Was it only beholding one another, or is there, maybe, a mechanism at work, like when yawning is contagious, that it\u2019s not only watching, but actually, perhaps what happens to your body has transmitted it to mine?\n\nTerence: 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\u2019s 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\u2019s also important that your message not be picked up my other somebodies. So, there can\u2019t be just a full-on drive toward apprehend ability.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+Could+Be+Anything"}
{"id": "4327156533b7-35", "text": "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\u2019s true, because of the problem of non-communication. As soon as you have something to communicate, there are places that you don\u2019t 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\u2019m -- 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!\n\nQ: What kinds of things are they communicating, besides maybe fear, or\u2026", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+Could+Be+Anything"}
{"id": "4327156533b7-36", "text": "Q: What kinds of things are they communicating, besides maybe fear, or\u2026\n\nTerence: Well, they are communicating -- they have elaborate sexual displays, and it\u2019s a very tricky thing, sexuality among cephalopods because the male usually doesn\u2019t 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\u2019s always said about them, is that, uh, you know, I mean, every child\u2019s book will tell you this about octopi \u2013 they\u2019re shy creatures. Well, guess why! It\u2019s because they wear their heart on their sleeve! Everywhere they go, other octopi can tell exactly what they\u2019re 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\u2019s epithalamium or something. I mean, we don\u2019t know what they\u2019re talking about!\n\nQ: Do we have a sort of Rosetta Stone you know about?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+Could+Be+Anything"}
{"id": "4327156533b7-37", "text": "Q: Do we have a sort of Rosetta Stone you know about?\n\nTerence: We have a primitive grammar, but, uh, it\u2019s only for one species. And, uh, I\u2019m not really interested in what they\u2019re saying, because I think it would only make sense if you were an octopus. But I\u2019ll be that, uh, -- you see it\u2019s a model for us. Wouldn\u2019t we like to dance for each other and be perfectly understood, and we -- wouldn\u2019t we like to see someone dance and to know that this was their mind and their body, somehow at one? In a way \u2013 God, does everything go back to everything? \u2013 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 \u2018nakedness of truth\u2019 is a clich\u00e9.\n\nQ: You mentioned, um, bringing it to a practical level.\n\n[Terence: Do that, yes!]\n\nYou mentioned the hallucinogenic experiences, in one, in one way, that um, I don\u2019t think I accelerated anything in my life; I feel that I just have just aligned with it, moving a freer way, so, I wouldn\u2019t -- I wouldn\u2019t seek out a kind of hallucinogenic experience in order to accelerate or to get more transforming; I do it because it\u2019s enjoyable. It\u2019s, um, it\u2019s 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\u2019m interested in sound which is -- you're talking about going from sound to light.\n\n[Terence: Mmhmm]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+Could+Be+Anything"}
{"id": "4327156533b7-38", "text": "[Terence: Mmhmm]\n\nAnd I have a way of starting to where I am or, again, following my excitement which happens to be making tones. And I\u2019ve 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\u2019s drugs you mentioned earlier in the Amazon \u2026\n\n[Terence: \u2018That you could reproduce it with sound?\u2019]\n\nI 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\u2026 That\u2019s my exploration, I was wondering if you had any ideas on them.\n\nTerence: 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 yag\u00e9", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+Could+Be+Anything"}
{"id": "4327156533b7-39", "text": "And what seems -- it\u2019s -- it\u2019s chemically a little different from anything we\u2019ve discussed, and so, consequently, neurologically a little different. When this -- when this drug was first discovered in the 20\u2019s, 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.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+Could+Be+Anything"}
{"id": "4327156533b7-40", "text": "But, persistently, since then there have been reports of group states of mind caused by this drug. So we explored this in the 70\u2019s fairly thoroughly. In \u201971, \u201972, again in \u201976, and again in \u201981. 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\u2026 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.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+Could+Be+Anything"}
{"id": "4327156533b7-41", "text": "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\u2019s 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\u2019s not exactly a vision of the future. It\u2019s 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.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+Could+Be+Anything"}
{"id": "4327156533b7-42", "text": "They are -- it isn\u2019t 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\u2019ve 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.\n\nQ: By, copying your hand movements, it helps me see what you were talking about like in a virtual reality, and that\u2019s what they do in neuro-linguistic programming and the people who\u2019ve made fire-walking popular, like, Tony Robinson\u2019s country where neuro-linguistic programmers...", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+Could+Be+Anything"}
{"id": "4327156533b7-43", "text": "Terence: Maybe neuro-linguistic programmers could study octopi? If I had eight hands I could really get gestural. I, I\u2026 a funny experience involving octopi. I know a woman, I\u2019m sure she would not begrudge me this description of her. She\u2019s 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\u2019s an inveterate exhibitionist and she\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019 lines. The power of neurosis knows no barrier [Terence and audience laugh together].\n\nQ: But she also had almost orange hair, very red, bright hair that the sunlight \u2026\n\nTerence: That\u2019s true, it was probably sending a message to this octopus that was, uh, obscene, in the very least.\n\nQ: Was she dancing?\n\nTerence: No, she was just trying to be unobtrusive, but this woman being unobtrusive is a show stopper.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+Could+Be+Anything"}
{"id": "4327156533b7-44", "text": "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\u2019m making all these unconscious assumption values of what you\u2019re saying is true partly based on your body language?\n\nTerence: 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\u2026 there\u2026 we probably were much more linguistically rich in the past. We muted ourselves.\n\nQ: 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,\n\n[Terence: Yeah, right?]\n\njust left a bad taste in my mouth. I\u2019m glad we\u2019re onto other things now besides sparks and amber.\n\n[Terence: Oh, okay!]\n\nA bitter experience.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+Could+Be+Anything"}
{"id": "4327156533b7-45", "text": "[Terence: Oh, okay!]\n\nA bitter experience.\n\nTerence: There is a notion, you know, in Latin spark is as, is scintilla. This word exists only in English in the legal phrase \u2018there was not a scintilla of evidence against him\u2019. But in alchemy, this idea lived on for a long, long time, and there\u2019s a whole literature of causing the scintilla and seeing it like you did, so you were unconsciously caught up in an alchemical archetype.\n\nWell, why don\u2019t we knock off, I think that\u2019s enough for this evening \u2026\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+Could+Be+Anything"}
{"id": "78eedf467079-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nTime and Mind\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nAudio\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\nMay 1990\n\nNew Mexico\n\n2478\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo youtube link available, try the following:\n\nAudio Link\nScribd transcription\nErowid transcription (used here)\nOther links\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Time+and+Mind"}
{"id": "05fa7fefe484-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nNothing's Wrong\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\nMay 1990\n\nSanta Fe, New Mexico\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo transcript available for this talk!\n\nHelp Transcribe\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Nothing%27s+Wrong"}
{"id": "7755bfb1fa8d-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\naka Loose Ends Time\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nAudio\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\nMay 1990\n\nUnknown\n\n7929\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo youtube link available, try the following:\n\nAudio Link\nTranscription\nOther links\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/aka+Loose+Ends+Time"}
{"id": "5c7bda21965e-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\naka The Psychedelic Option\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nAudio\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\nMay 1990\n\nUnknown\n\n11017\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo youtube link available, try the following:\n\nAudio Link\nTranscription\nOther links\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/aka+The+Psychedelic+Option"}
{"id": "bdcd0c3cf195-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\naka A Stiff Dose of Psychedelics\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nAudio\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\nMay 1990\n\nUnknown\n\n7851\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo youtube link available, try the following:\n\nAudio Link\nTranscription\nOther links\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/aka+A+Stiff+Dose+of+Psychedelics"}
{"id": "dd1c7f479ded-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nTouched by The Tremendum\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nAudio\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\nMarch 27 1990\n\nNew York New York\n\n11739\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo youtube link available, try the following:\n\nVideo Link\nOriginal Transcription from Edge.org\nOther links\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Touched+by+The+Tremendum"}
{"id": "dfc16580a532-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nTerence McKenna Live in Maryland\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nAudio\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n24, February 1990\n\nMD\n\n484\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo youtube link available, try the following:\n\nAudio Link\nTranscription\nOther links\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Terence+McKenna+Live+in+Maryland"}
{"id": "313955ad4a4b-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nInner Visions, Future Vectors\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nAudio\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n1990\n\nEsalen Institute, Big Sur, CA\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo youtube link available, try the following:\n\nAudio Link\nTranscription\nOther links\n\nNo transcript available for this talk!\n\nHelp Transcribe\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Inner+Visions%2C+Future+Vectors"}
{"id": "5fc0603d6a21-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nNovelty and the Transcendental\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nAudio\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n1990\n\nEsalen Institute, Big Sur, CA\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo youtube link available, try the following:\n\nAudio Link\nTranscription\nOther links\n\nNo transcript available for this talk!\n\nHelp Transcribe\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Novelty+and+the+Transcendental"}
{"id": "5359037c61a5-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nExperiment at Petaluma\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n1990\n\nUnknown\n\n2521\n\nEnd of Results", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Experiment+at+Petaluma"}
{"id": "5359037c61a5-1", "text": "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,", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Experiment+at+Petaluma"}
{"id": "5359037c61a5-2", "text": "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", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Experiment+at+Petaluma"}
{"id": "5359037c61a5-3", "text": "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.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Experiment+at+Petaluma"}
{"id": "5359037c61a5-4", "text": "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.\n\nThen[sp?] should we talk about language?\n\nFemale audience member: Yeah.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Experiment+at+Petaluma"}
{"id": "5359037c61a5-5", "text": "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", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Experiment+at+Petaluma"}
{"id": "5359037c61a5-6", "text": "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,", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Experiment+at+Petaluma"}
{"id": "5359037c61a5-7", "text": "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", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Experiment+at+Petaluma"}
{"id": "5359037c61a5-8", "text": "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", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Experiment+at+Petaluma"}
{"id": "5359037c61a5-9", "text": "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.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Experiment+at+Petaluma"}
{"id": "5359037c61a5-10", "text": "Like that.\n\n[Terence laughs]\n\n[Female audience member inaudible]\n\nTM: [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.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Experiment+at+Petaluma"}
{"id": "5359037c61a5-11", "text": "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", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Experiment+at+Petaluma"}
{"id": "5359037c61a5-12", "text": "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", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Experiment+at+Petaluma"}
{"id": "5359037c61a5-13", "text": "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", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Experiment+at+Petaluma"}
{"id": "5359037c61a5-14", "text": "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,", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Experiment+at+Petaluma"}
{"id": "5359037c61a5-15", "text": "uh, the grammar and syntax of, uh, squids and octopi.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Experiment+at+Petaluma"}
{"id": "5359037c61a5-16", "text": "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\u2019re 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.\n\n[Terence speaking indistinguishable glossolalia]\n\nMale audience member: That's great.\n\nFemale audience member: Yeah.\n\nTM: That's it. I'm out of here! [Terence laughs]\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Experiment+at+Petaluma"}
{"id": "5359037c61a5-17", "text": "Rating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Experiment+at+Petaluma"}
{"id": "5d598e4aeef5-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nMind & Time, Spirit & Matter\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\nNovember 1991\n\nWhole Life Expo, Los Angeles, California\n\n11625\n\nEnd of Results", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Mind+%26+Time%2C+Spirit+%26+Matter"}
{"id": "5d598e4aeef5-1", "text": "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\u2019s 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\u2019t 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\u2019s what we get in that Genesis story. Remember at the end of the Genesis story it says, uh,", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Mind+%26+Time%2C+Spirit+%26+Matter"}
{"id": "5d598e4aeef5-2", "text": "the end of the Genesis story it says, uh, \u201cand 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.\u201c That\u2019s 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 \u2013 it was not as simple as that may have made it seem, you see \u2013 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\u2019re 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\u2019t fully dressed unless the gown is by", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Mind+%26+Time%2C+Spirit+%26+Matter"}
{"id": "5d598e4aeef5-3", "text": "isn\u2019t 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\u2019t 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", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Mind+%26+Time%2C+Spirit+%26+Matter"}
{"id": "5d598e4aeef5-4", "text": "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\u2019t because honey was the preferred medium for pickling hummingbirds tongues, it was because that\u2019s 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,", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Mind+%26+Time%2C+Spirit+%26+Matter"}
{"id": "5d598e4aeef5-5", "text": "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 \u2013 improves visual acuity, promotes sexual activity, delivers a religious experience \u2013 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\u2019s 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.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Mind+%26+Time%2C+Spirit+%26+Matter"}
{"id": "5d598e4aeef5-6", "text": "Well, uh, I want to say more about it. That isn\u2019t the whole story. That could be the whole story, I mean there\u2019s enough in that for it to be the whole story. In other words, if it\u2019s true that the mushroom, uh, you know, suppresses male dominance, it it in facts promotes communal values, and so forth\u2026 what a wonderful thing it must be. And we can leave it there. But that\u2019s only a small part of the story. The real story is what is so wonderful about it? Since it\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019ve said is- could be imputed to be just talk about a superb psychedelic drug. And so", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Mind+%26+Time%2C+Spirit+%26+Matter"}
{"id": "5d598e4aeef5-7", "text": "talk about a superb psychedelic drug. And so they\u2019re saying \u201coh well, so this guy advocates the use of a superb psychedelic drug, seems reasonable or unreasonable\u201c depending on where you went to church. But it\u2019s 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\u2019t know what we\u2019re going to do with the content of the experience, because fully gotten out, and fully discussed, and fully realized it\u2019s not going to leave one brick upon another in the cheerfully naive edifice that our half-backed civilization has erected as universal truth, we\u2019re 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\u2019t even an encounter", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Mind+%26+Time%2C+Spirit+%26+Matter"}
{"id": "5d598e4aeef5-8", "text": "went through. And it isn\u2019t 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\u2019s in the hallway where you hang your hat and the antechamber where they take your coat. The main event, folks, doesn\u2019t 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\u2019s 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\u2019s somebody living there. And for them it\u2019s not the new world at all. And you know, you haven\u2019t discovered anything. You\u2019ve just showed in the", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Mind+%26+Time%2C+Spirit+%26+Matter"}
{"id": "5d598e4aeef5-9", "text": "haven\u2019t discovered anything. You\u2019ve 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.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Mind+%26+Time%2C+Spirit+%26+Matter"}
{"id": "5d598e4aeef5-10", "text": "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\u2019re not that kind of sick. It\u2019s 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", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Mind+%26+Time%2C+Spirit+%26+Matter"}
{"id": "5d598e4aeef5-11", "text": "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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Mind+%26+Time%2C+Spirit+%26+Matter"}
{"id": "5d598e4aeef5-12", "text": "120 to 350 pounds of meat somewhere in the Universe. But that isn\u2019t 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\u2019t ever remember any other way of doing business. We know we\u2019re messed up. We know we\u2019re unhappy. But what\u2019s to be done, you know? I mean we have a million minor fixes, and people peddling all of these things.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Mind+%26+Time%2C+Spirit+%26+Matter"}
{"id": "5d598e4aeef5-13", "text": "fixes, and people peddling all of these things. I mean you\u2019ve just been through the aisles, you know what I\u2019m 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\u2019t 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\u2019s wearing grey, you can wear green. That\u2019s one way to turn your back on a culture. But another way is to break its laws. Now, that\u2019s a little more", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Mind+%26+Time%2C+Spirit+%26+Matter"}
{"id": "5d598e4aeef5-14", "text": "to break its laws. Now, that\u2019s a little more serious. And, you know, brings in big philosophical issues. But in fact, the culture is an enormous arrow pointing \u201cgo this way.\u201c And you know what lies that way? Impoverishment, madness, degradation, and death. That\u2019s where the culture is pointing. You can see it. You can see it, just look where we\u2019re 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\u2019t 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", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Mind+%26+Time%2C+Spirit+%26+Matter"}
{"id": "5d598e4aeef5-15", "text": "single 500 gamma dose of LSD. Well, now for heaven\u2019s sake, nobody is suggesting that LSD is a cure for alcoholism. That, to me, is absurd. It\u2019s not a cure for alcoholism, it\u2019s 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 \u201cwhat a stupid person I am [audience laughter]. I\u2019m killing myself.\u201c 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", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Mind+%26+Time%2C+Spirit+%26+Matter"}
{"id": "5d598e4aeef5-16", "text": "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\u2019ve raised the price of an ounce of weed from $15 to $500, they\u2019ve 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\u2019s because it\u2019s so much older than their con game [audience giggle]. They\u2019ve invented their con game post-sphinx or something. And we\u2019re talking about a reality that reaches back 15, 25, 30\u2019000 years. And it\u2019s a reality so far I\u2019ve only spoken \u2013 I keep trying to get to this subject but I won\u2019t let myself for some reason \u2013 so far I\u2019ve spoken of it as boundary-dissolving, promoting group sexual activity, this and that and the other thing [audience giggle], but those are like generalizations.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Mind+%26+Time%2C+Spirit+%26+Matter"}
{"id": "5d598e4aeef5-17", "text": "[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\u2019t think there\u2019s another way to it. I mean I\u2019m not ready to categorically say there\u2019s 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, \u201cif you just- I want you to meet Babaji, he\u2019s as good as psilocybin\u201c - \u201cOh really? I want to meet this man!\u201c [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 \u201cwell, you know, these things you described on DMT and psilocybin, uh, I can show how to", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Mind+%26+Time%2C+Spirit+%26+Matter"}
{"id": "5d598e4aeef5-18", "text": "and psilocybin, uh, I can show how to do that naturally.\u201c 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\u2019m getting close to that stuff. If I woke up one morning in that place [audience giggle] and I couldn\u2019t tell myself I\u2019ve taken mushrooms, I would define myself as seriously discombobulated [audience laughter] and wait to see what happens, you know. Um, and people say \u201cwell don\u2019t you think you ought to be able to do it by yourself?\u201c And I love this question, because the answer is \u201cyou can\u2019t do it by yourself.\u201c That\u2019s the entire message of the last 10\u2019000 years of human history. The self is insufficient. The ego will not suffice. The only way you\u2019re ever going to get anywhere, is you must humble yourself to the point where you admit that you can\u2019t do it unless you have help from", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Mind+%26+Time%2C+Spirit+%26+Matter"}
{"id": "5d598e4aeef5-19", "text": "that you can\u2019t do it unless you have help from someone whose idea of home is a cow flop [audience laughter and applause]. If you\u2019re 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 \u2013 channeling, and spirit guides, and reincarnation, and so forth \u2013 the material upon which these models are being built is real, but the models that are being built are tremendous, uh, compressions of the", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Mind+%26+Time%2C+Spirit+%26+Matter"}
{"id": "5d598e4aeef5-20", "text": "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 \u201cbut you were a butcher in 13th century everywhere. And you were a butcher in 14th century everywhere.\u201c 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\u2019ve 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,", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Mind+%26+Time%2C+Spirit+%26+Matter"}
{"id": "5d598e4aeef5-21", "text": "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\u2019s 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\u2019s very empowering. But it\u2019s not the general sense of things that this Gaian mind imparts, that is really to me the interesting part. It\u2019s 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", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Mind+%26+Time%2C+Spirit+%26+Matter"}
{"id": "5d598e4aeef5-22", "text": "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\u2019s 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\u2019ve 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\u2019t even imagine it. If someone were to begin talking about how the earth was speaking to them and giving them messages about how to", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Mind+%26+Time%2C+Spirit+%26+Matter"}
{"id": "5d598e4aeef5-23", "text": "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\u2019ll drop a net over you and you\u2019ll find stuffing envelopes for a convalescent home or something [audience laughter]. Okay, so that\u2019s part of it. The Gaian. And it is this feminine nurturing, infolding things, it\u2019s 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.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Mind+%26+Time%2C+Spirit+%26+Matter"}
{"id": "5d598e4aeef5-24", "text": "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\u2019m not particularly into that. I just see it as the transcendental object at the end of time. But what it is, is it\u2019s a kind of attractor. And we\u2019re 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.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Mind+%26+Time%2C+Spirit+%26+Matter"}
{"id": "5d598e4aeef5-25", "text": "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\u2019m 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", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Mind+%26+Time%2C+Spirit+%26+Matter"}
{"id": "5d598e4aeef5-26", "text": "the time to look up all this botanical and pharmacological data. So I\u2019m like a clearinghouse. But then there\u2019s another thing which I do which I\u2019m a little more nervous and touchy about, which is I tell you what I think [audience giggle]. And it\u2019s just what I think. It has exactly that much weight behind it, which is like \u201czip\u201c, you know [audience giggle]. I mean, you don\u2019t 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\u2019ve 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\u2019s an", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Mind+%26+Time%2C+Spirit+%26+Matter"}
{"id": "5d598e4aeef5-27", "text": "Uh, but whatever you call it, it\u2019s 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\u2019t 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\u2019s what we\u2019re inside, folks, a novelty-making machine. Now, what do I mean by novelty? People mean- say \u201cyou mean like little plastic bugs and puzzles inside plastic capsules? Is that what you mean by novelty?\u201c - \u201cNo, you idiot, it\u2019s of course not.\u201c [Terence + audience laughter] By novelty I mean", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Mind+%26+Time%2C+Spirit+%26+Matter"}
{"id": "5d598e4aeef5-28", "text": "+ 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 \u201cI am fascinated by the kind of beauty that arises when a bicycle meets a sewing machine on an operating table.\u201c Now, that\u2019s novelty, folks [audience giggle]. Because you just don\u2019t 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 \u2013 and it\u2019s an interesting story, by the way \u2013 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", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Mind+%26+Time%2C+Spirit+%26+Matter"}
{"id": "5d598e4aeef5-29", "text": "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", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Mind+%26+Time%2C+Spirit+%26+Matter"}
{"id": "5d598e4aeef5-30", "text": "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 \u2013 meaning gene mixing as opposed to the previous thing which was vegetated like- like making cuttings from plants. Well, do you see what\u2019s 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\u2019s creation, or some kind of trip like that, instead you discover \u201caha, human beings are important. We are more novel than anything else in nature.\u201c And we 20th century human", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Mind+%26+Time%2C+Spirit+%26+Matter"}
{"id": "5d598e4aeef5-31", "text": "anything else in nature.\u201c 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\u2019t 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", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Mind+%26+Time%2C+Spirit+%26+Matter"}
{"id": "5d598e4aeef5-32", "text": "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 \u201ctime is the moving image of eternity.\u201c That moving image", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Mind+%26+Time%2C+Spirit+%26+Matter"}
{"id": "5d598e4aeef5-33", "text": "is the moving image of eternity.\u201c 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\u2019m telling you you can turn your living room into the bridge of Magellan\u2019s 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\u2019t drop the ball. Every pogrom, every instance", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Mind+%26+Time%2C+Spirit+%26+Matter"}
{"id": "5d598e4aeef5-34", "text": "don\u2019t 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]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Mind+%26+Time%2C+Spirit+%26+Matter"}
{"id": "5d598e4aeef5-35", "text": "Save the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Mind+%26+Time%2C+Spirit+%26+Matter"}
{"id": "747e045b3a98-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nMushrooms, Evolution and the Millenium\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n8 September 1991\n\nMasonic Temple, Van Nuys, California\n\n10029\n\nEnd of Results\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Mushrooms%2C+Evolution+and+the+Millenium"}
{"id": "e3db64d23a60-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nTime Travel, Psychedelics, and Physics\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nAudio\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\nAugust, 1991\n\nUnknown\n\n8103\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo youtube link available, try the following:\n\nAudio Link (Matrixmasters)\nOriginal Transcription by DominatorCulture.com\nOther links\n\nAn elf told me that \u2013 now, there\u2019s a fine thing for a scientist to say \u2013 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\u2019s constrained is, once time travel is discovered, you can travel as far into the future as you wish, but you can\u2019t 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\u2019t any? [Audience laughs] You see, it\u2019s just to preserve logical consistency.\n\n[Audience] \u2013 That\u2019s like saying that you can\u2019t drive a car where there hasn\u2019t been a car driven before.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Time+Travel%2C+Psychedelics%2C+and+Physics"}
{"id": "e3db64d23a60-1", "text": "That\u2019s right. You can\u2019t 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\u2019t 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\u2019s 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\u2019s interest would be to follow this woman wherever she\u2019s 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?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Time+Travel%2C+Psychedelics%2C+and+Physics"}
{"id": "e3db64d23a60-2", "text": "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\u2019s 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\u2019m sure of, are thinking. I hope, anyway. Uh, it\u2019s 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\u2019t exist. Well, so then this sets up a logical impossibility. Either you exist or you don\u2019t exist, and some science fiction authors have assumed", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Time+Travel%2C+Psychedelics%2C+and+Physics"}
{"id": "e3db64d23a60-3", "text": "don\u2019t 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\u2019t exist, in which case, he couldn\u2019t 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, \u201cThe last few years have been good for time machines,\u201d 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", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Time+Travel%2C+Psychedelics%2C+and+Physics"}
{"id": "e3db64d23a60-4", "text": "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\u2019m sure, are familiar with these and they\u2019re 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", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Time+Travel%2C+Psychedelics%2C+and+Physics"}
{"id": "e3db64d23a60-5", "text": "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 \u2013 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\u2019t 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.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Time+Travel%2C+Psychedelics%2C+and+Physics"}
{"id": "e3db64d23a60-6", "text": "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\u2019s assign low pressures to the bare-assed folks in the Amazon and eastern Indonesia and let\u2019s 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\u2019s 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\u2019m not familiar with how they overcame the grandfather paradox, so we\u2019ll pretend that the grandfather paradox is very strong.  [Audience] \u2013 I want to say something about the grandfather paradox.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Time+Travel%2C+Psychedelics%2C+and+Physics"}
{"id": "e3db64d23a60-7", "text": "Okay. Let me -- I\u2019m 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\u2019s 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\u2019s 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", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Time+Travel%2C+Psychedelics%2C+and+Physics"}
{"id": "e3db64d23a60-8", "text": "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", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Time+Travel%2C+Psychedelics%2C+and+Physics"}
{"id": "e3db64d23a60-9", "text": "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.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Time+Travel%2C+Psychedelics%2C+and+Physics"}
{"id": "e3db64d23a60-10", "text": "So, let me see if I\u2019ve got some notes here. I think I\u2019ve covered everything. What\u2019s interesting about this is, for the first time\u2026 In this article by Frank Tipler called, \"The Omega Point as Eschaton,\" he seems - and this is why Paul is here and I couldn\u2019t really get into it 'cause it\u2019s crazy to repeat what you can\u2019t 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\u2019s called a vacuum fluctuation ex nihilo, literally out of nothingness. However, there\u2019s a caveat which is - this creation ex nihilo can only occur if what\u2019s 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.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Time+Travel%2C+Psychedelics%2C+and+Physics"}
{"id": "e3db64d23a60-11", "text": "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.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Time+Travel%2C+Psychedelics%2C+and+Physics"}
{"id": "e3db64d23a60-12", "text": "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\u2019s 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", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Time+Travel%2C+Psychedelics%2C+and+Physics"}
{"id": "e3db64d23a60-13", "text": "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\u2019t 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 \u201cclick\u201d and all particles in the universe would disappear and the original unflawed nothingness would be restored. Actually, no, there\u2019s 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", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Time+Travel%2C+Psychedelics%2C+and+Physics"}
{"id": "e3db64d23a60-14", "text": "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\u2019s 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.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Time+Travel%2C+Psychedelics%2C+and+Physics"}
{"id": "e3db64d23a60-15", "text": "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\u2019s assumed that you can\u2019t 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\u2019t enough energy to propel it. But, a photon", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Time+Travel%2C+Psychedelics%2C+and+Physics"}
{"id": "e3db64d23a60-16", "text": "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] \u2013 It\u2019s fascinating. You\u2019re playing with physics. Um, you know, everything has to be conserved; it\u2019s 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\u2019re happening all the time from the point of", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Time+Travel%2C+Psychedelics%2C+and+Physics"}
{"id": "e3db64d23a60-17", "text": "they\u2019re 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\u2019s how they detect them on photographic plates on cloud changes. But, everything you say is right. One thing, I don\u2019t think this notion of the big bang \u2013 and I\u2019m not sure whether I subscribe to the big bang model \u2013 but, it sounds so far fetched because if, uh, if there there was something in the universe then we\u2019d have a real problem explaining how it got here. So, the simplest thing to us humans is nothing here.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Time+Travel%2C+Psychedelics%2C+and+Physics"}
{"id": "e3db64d23a60-18", "text": "You mean that we are in a vacuum fluctuation?  [Audience] \u2013 No, it's just that there\u2019s nothing here. I mean, there is nothing before the big bang and there\u2019s nothing after.  This sounds like Buddhism.  [Audience] \u2013 A vacuum fluctuation includes everything; good/evil, male/female, the whole thing added together like a zero. Just like it always was.\n\nWell, then what are the complex appearances that impinge upon our senses and what are we then?  [Audience] \u2013 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\u2019s all unified.\n\nIt 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\u2019s not clear why we assume that. I mean, think about it for a moment. We\u2019re 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.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Time+Travel%2C+Psychedelics%2C+and+Physics"}
{"id": "e3db64d23a60-19", "text": "Uh, we could -- and we are tremendously under the spell of this illusion. I mean, we worry about \u2018the\u2019 future all the time. Well, notice that you could just move to an island somewhere and get a brown-skinned girl and then you wouldn\u2019t have to worry about anybody else\u2019s future because you would have made your own future. We can step out of the assumption of a universal history in which we\u2019re trapped. And, I think realizing this is the beginning of a kind of liberation. Our assumptions, uh, are the edges of our worlds and this is one of our strongest assumptions. The assumptions that there is a past and a future and our destinies are all caught up in that. But, actually you can \u2013 a word that rarely passes my lips \u2013 you can deconstruct that assumption and, uh, and then you\u2019re given back a-a whole different way of looking at the experience of being, which is empowering. Because, somehow when we are embedded in the future, we feel we have no control whatsoever. We\u2019re like corks in a raging river. But, in fact, that\u2019s a false model, I think. Anybody want to get in on this?\n\n[Audience] - Sometimes when I\u2019m listening to you, um, I have sort of the troubling thought that Terence hasn\u2019t done enough psychedelics. Or, I think that you\u2019re too straight in some way. When you get onto some of your scientific tracks, and as you put it, you\u2019re a rationalist, I start thinking, um, why get lost? I start thinking -- I start referring to experiences I have had of being altered where a lot of this seems, um, in", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Time+Travel%2C+Psychedelics%2C+and+Physics"}
{"id": "e3db64d23a60-20", "text": "cidental to the experience to one experience of eternity, which I know you had. And, how do you reckon with yourself sometimes and think when you doubt yourself and think this is just my ego, um, concocting things to make me feel good, etc., etc. whatever would be the worst-case scenario for you?. It\u2019s hard for me to express this sort of well , but there\u2019s something about the way you often refer to what seems to be a scientific model that\u2019s, um, very linear even as you talk, you know\u2026.\n\nWell, I would certainly say that I haven\u2019t taken enough psychedelics. [Audience laughs] Um, reading these people, it seems like, uh -- I mean, I doubt these guys are real psychedelic heads and they\u2019re much further out than I am. Um, the real truth -- the real truth is and I\u2019ve said it many times that the world is not only stranger than we suppose, it\u2019s stranger than we can suppose. And, in a way, that\u2019s either permission to suppose anything you want or to just stop supposing, you know. Um, these things are models. The real -- nowhere is it writ large that bipedal apes should be able to understand how the universe works. Still less likely is it written anywhere that Terence McKenna should be able to understand how the universe works. Were you here the other night when we talked, uh, about the black hole theory of enlightenment? It was two nights ago?\n\n[Audience] \u2013 I was here. [Audience laughs]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Time+Travel%2C+Psychedelics%2C+and+Physics"}
{"id": "e3db64d23a60-21", "text": "[Audience] \u2013 I was here. [Audience laughs]\n\nWell, that\u2019s the idea - that the real truth can\u2019t be told. I\u2019m very aware, uh, that all of this is just stuff to support me, to make a living, in other words [audience laughs], you know. Um, that, in fact, what\u2019s really going on defies rational apprehension. I hope! [Audience laughs] I mean, I would hate to think -- I would hate to think that we could understand what\u2019s going on. Nevertheless, there\u2019s something to be said for this modeling process and I agree. I think I\u2019m getting old. Uh, you can only push yourself so far. I mean, when I read one of these things today and he was off on some tear, and I just realized, you know. It struck fear in my heart. And, I said, \"My God! You know and I actually did a, mirror, mirror on the wall, who\u2019s the weirdest one of all?\".And, it said, \"Hans Moravec is the weirdest one of all.\" I said, \"Shit!\" I should bring him here and sit at his feet! I don\u2019t know. Am I talking about what you\u2019re talking about? Oh good!", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Time+Travel%2C+Psychedelics%2C+and+Physics"}
{"id": "e3db64d23a60-22", "text": "[Audience] \u2013 I find a fantastic parallel between psychedelic experience and physics. I mean, I haven\u2019t found anything in the psychedelic experience that would be any problem to relate to the point of view of the physicist. And, actually, I think that all the stuff in physics got out of the bag because of the psychedelic, you know, breakthroughs in the \u201860s. Fritjof Capra and others had psychedelic experiences and then started to ferret it out. I mean, In the 1920s, people were puzzling about these things and having the spiritual crises and throwing away all of their assumptions about reality and having these types of breakthroughs, and then it go lost because we started to bag physics to use for the military. It was all an environment that opened up because of the psychedelics.\n\nBut, I don\u2019t think that science -- that the purpose of science is to understand reality. This may go to what your saying. I think the purpose of science is to advance technology, which is a heresy. I don\u2019t think reality can be understood and that it\u2019s absolute hubris for science to, you know, cloak itself in the mantel of philosophy. All it\u2019s for is to make better toys or, if you're nuts, better weapons. And, um, ultimately there\u2019s not going to be any closure in the effort to understand and I think that the real -- the thing that you take away from psychedelics finally is that all models are provisional. That there is no truth.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Time+Travel%2C+Psychedelics%2C+and+Physics"}
{"id": "e3db64d23a60-23", "text": "We talked at one point in here about Wittgenstein\u2019s phrase, \"true enough\" \u2013 true enough to get you to the gas station \u2013 true enough to get your taxes paid. But, uh, there'll be no, uh -- there'll be no closure on this stuff. We have to live in the light of the mystery. But, I think we also said in here, you know, it\u2019s the death of conversation, if we glorify the mystery too much cause then I\u2019ll be just like everyone else here and I\u2019ll announce that we\u2019re now going to have a meditation, which I\u2019ve never done to you, I want to point out! [Audience laughs, applauds] Somebody wanted to say something?\n\n[Audience] \u2013 With that in mind, I wonder how you can project an end to eternity at a certain time?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Time+Travel%2C+Psychedelics%2C+and+Physics"}
{"id": "e3db64d23a60-24", "text": "Well, I didn\u2019t mean to imply a nothingness beyond. It isn\u2019t like that. I think it\u2019s an everythingness. That when I talk about what I envision it as - as boundary dissolution. If all boundaries dissolve then, you know, I am you, and you are me, and we are all together. [Audience laughs] It's a -- it\u2019s an exfoliation of the human experience. The great boundaries are -- no, the small boundaries are man/woman, self/world. And then the big boundaries are life/death, uh, past/future. All of these will be dissolved into something like William Blake\u2019s Divine Imagination. And, we will become, you know, our, our grandest dreams. And, so, the whole challenge is to dream a dream worthy of that dimension. I mean, it\u2019s a very interesting exercise. I don\u2019t know if you\u2019ve ever done it. God! It comes close to being a visualization, I\u2019m sorry to notice, but have you ever played the game, uh, \"What would I do if I could do anything?\"", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Time+Travel%2C+Psychedelics%2C+and+Physics"}
{"id": "e3db64d23a60-25", "text": "First of all, you have to wrap your mind around the concept \"anything.\" What would I do if I could do anything? And, I used to think about it in terms and for some reason for me it takes the form of an architectural fantasy. You know, first of all, I just locate myself in the house featured in last month's Architectural Digest. Then from there, I begin to work it out. Well, if you could do anything within a few minutes of entering into that exercise, you\u2019re unrecognizable to yourself. I mean, you don\u2019t even have to exist in a forward flowing casuistry of three dimensions. Uh, you can be a number of species and all possible sexes. You can be translocated at many points in time. Uh, you begin to realize that you are tremendously limited by your assumptions. And that, this is sort of what I imagine death is: It\u2019s release into the divine imagination and if you\u2019re, you know, blown up in an airliner, then immediately after dying, you\u2019re just a dead person, but then you begin to unfold and test the boundaries.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Time+Travel%2C+Psychedelics%2C+and+Physics"}
{"id": "e3db64d23a60-26", "text": "And, you know, as James Joyce says in Finnegans Wake, uh, \"up n\u2019ent prospector, you sprout all your worth and woof your wings.\" And that\u2019s just in the first 30 seconds that you woof your wings. And then you\u2019re able to assume to divide your consciousness to assume any form, to be any place, to know anything. Anything recognizable as human, I think, would quickly drop away or would just become a tiny and familiar touchstone that you would occasionally return to, to touch. And, somehow the dying, which occurs to each one of us, that\u2019s the microcosm of the planetary and historical process that we're caught up in. It\u2019s the thing that we hate most of all. We fear it. We really get agitated when death is raised as an issue. James Joyce called it, \"The Grim Reaper\"\u2014a blessing in disguise. \u201cIf you want to be Phoenixed, come and be parked.\u201d Meaning: You know, you have to die to fully exfoliate into this dimension.\n\nAnd, sometimes I think \u2013 and I don\u2019t often say it to groups because I fear I\u2019m misunderstood and I don\u2019t want people to go out of here depressed \u2013 but, sometimes, I think that what human history pushes for is the extermination of all life on the planet for the simple reason that we\u2019ll never be free till then. That we are in some kind of hell world and we are locked in a world of matter and energy and space and time, and that it is not \u2013 you know, my God! this sounds like, you know, Southern Baptists \u2013 [audience laughs] but, we are living death at this moment and that we must die in order to be born again. In other words, that somehow what we are has become trapped in a lower dimensional matrix and our greatest delusion is to cling to this most tenaciously.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Time+Travel%2C+Psychedelics%2C+and+Physics"}
{"id": "e3db64d23a60-27", "text": "Jorge Luis Borges, in one of his stories, has this idea that, uh, the species, uh, any species, is somehow not completed in eternity until the last member of that species dies. And, it is interesting that if you think about biology, 95 per cent of all species that have ever lived on this planet are extinct. This is what happens to species: they go extinct. And yet, we\u2019re driven to pursue immortality. It pains us greatly to imagine the death of all life on this planet, and particularly, the death of our individual selves or our species. But, the fact of the matter is, we don\u2019t know what death is. I mean, one of the puzzling things about the DMT trance is, you know, these creatures, made of light, in the mind, that are so different from us, but have such affection and love for us, they seem like relatives. They seem like \u2013 dare we whisper the word \u2013 they seem like ancestors. And yet,", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Time+Travel%2C+Psychedelics%2C+and+Physics"}
{"id": "e3db64d23a60-28", "text": "word \u2013 they seem like ancestors. And yet, you know, we would rather believe that they were aliens from Zeta Reticuli or elves in a parallel continuum than apply Ockham\u2019s Razor to the phenomenon, and say \u2013 since we are the only intelligent entities that we have ever contacted in this universe \u2013 these things which we contact in our minds in the center of the DMT flash, they must be human beings of some sort, but they don\u2019t look like human beings. But, they love us so much and understand us so well!   Well, is it possible that the kind of human being that they are is a dead human being? That we\u2019re actually breaking through into an ecology of souls. I mean, if we say that the psychedelic experience is an experience of boundary dissolution and, if we say that DMT is the strongest of all psychedelics, then may it not be that it is dissolving the most resistant of all barriers, which is the barrier between the", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Time+Travel%2C+Psychedelics%2C+and+Physics"}
{"id": "e3db64d23a60-29", "text": "of all barriers, which is the barrier between the living and the dead? And that what you actually come into is the antechambers of eternity for a brief glimpse. If you were to take that rap and properly translate it into Witoto or Munangi, or something like that, and go to the Amazon and query those folks, they\u2019d say, \"Of course. I mean, your own Mircea Eliade tells you that shamanism depends on the spirit ancestors.\" And, for all the credit we give shamanism, we\u2019ve never actually come to grips with the possibility that, uh, shamans really do work with the spirit ancestors, that there really is an ecology of trans- trans-material human beings in a nearby continuum that can be approached by a boundary-dissolving drug.   And, it\u2019s because, you know, we and certainly I \u2013 and certainly proven by this rap tonight \u2013 are obsessed with technological explanations of it and how it\u2019s going to be the flying saucers,", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Time+Travel%2C+Psychedelics%2C+and+Physics"}
{"id": "e3db64d23a60-30", "text": "how it\u2019s going to be the flying saucers, or it's going to be the time machine, or the collapse of the quantum vector or something like that. But, because the forward thrust of our technology is toward immortality. I mean, that\u2019s what gnawing at the back of our minds. And yet, what may actually be coming towards us, orthogonal \u2013 meaning at right angles to the historical process \u2013 is the dissolving of the barrier between the living and the dead, which is so unsettling and mind boggling to us that we'd take a flying saucer invasion any day over having that happen to us! [Audience laughs] And yet, it\u2019s very, very late in the game. You know, human nature is going to have to undergo a radical, vertical translation of some sort, if we are to avoid, um, the extinction of ourselves and all life on the planet. Well, so then, you know, uh, maybe that\u2019s what it was for. If we believe that we were always embedded", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Time+Travel%2C+Psychedelics%2C+and+Physics"}
{"id": "e3db64d23a60-31", "text": "for. If we believe that we were always embedded in the machinery of nature - that we could never act outside the purposes of nature - then this must be what it\u2019s for.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Time+Travel%2C+Psychedelics%2C+and+Physics"}
{"id": "e3db64d23a60-32", "text": "It\u2019s very interesting in embryology. I think most people think, you know, of a fetus in the womb, um, as you all know \u2013 we begin as very fish like creatures in the womb and then out of what are essentially little paddle mitts, the human hand appears. I think most people think that the tissue retracts tightly and that the human being emerges, but if you\u2019ve seen fetal stages in bottles in medical schools, what\u2019s actually going on is that cells die off. And, massive amount of dying goes on in the womb in order that the human form may emerge out of the fetal form.The webbing between the fingers doesn\u2019t retract. Those cells die and are released into the amniotic fluid. The growth of the fetus involves the death of millions and millions and millions of cells. So, we are born, we are -- you could almost say sculpted into life by the hand of death. I mean, I feel as nervous about all this as you must, uh, but, you know, this is what we\u2019re here for, right? \u2013 to stretch the envelope. Yeah.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Time+Travel%2C+Psychedelics%2C+and+Physics"}
{"id": "e3db64d23a60-33", "text": "[Audience] \u2013 Terence, I would like to go back to something you said about the beings of light and the shamanic capacity to see and interact with these beings, and they could be the ancestors. Thinking in terms of those individuals who refined their senses to being able to see more than the average ability to see and to hear more than just the normal ability to hear; where there\u2019s a growing awareness of inner-penetrating planes of beings that are actually co-existing with us, but we can\u2019t hear them or see them because we haven\u2019t refined those senses enough. And, the more psychically sensitivity individuals have an increasing ability in a non-drug state to be aware. It's just that they can see more and hear more, and I haven\u2019t heard you say that.   Well yeah, I mean, that\u2019s a very good point. The perfect example of it in terms of a cultural tradition is, uh, uh, Fairyland. Fairyland is, uh -- the pre-Christian Celtic peoples believed that dead souls stayed around in the immediate vicinity and that there were thousands of them all around. The accumulated dead, very much in the way that when you smoke DMT, then there are thousands of these things and it raises the question \u2013 were they always there or what\u2019s going on?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Time+Travel%2C+Psychedelics%2C+and+Physics"}
{"id": "e3db64d23a60-34", "text": "Saint Patrick, who, uh, brought Christianity to Ireland, found this belief (and also Anita makes the point about sensitivity). In Irish folklore, there\u2019s the idea that if you have the eye, you can see these things, uh, and no drugs are required. It\u2019s a psychic ability which the country Celtic people have sometimes claimed. So, when Patrick came to Ireland on his mission of conversion, he found this belief in Fairyland so powerfully entrenched in these people that he invented purgatory. Purgatory was invented by St. Patrick to convert the Irish. And then when word was carried back to Rome that Patrick, who was this great bishop of the early Church, that he had made this doctrinal concession to Celtic folk thinking \u2013 the Pope thought it was such a fine idea that they just wrote it into dogma.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Time+Travel%2C+Psychedelics%2C+and+Physics"}
{"id": "e3db64d23a60-35", "text": "So, uh, purgatory, which as you all know is neither heaven or hell, but a place where you expiate your sins for some amount of time before you pass on to heaven, is nothing less than a cleaned-up version of Fairyland written in to Christian theology. Now, I don\u2019t know why the Celtic people had, not a monopoly but a firm grip on this. I mean, it may be their innate gloominess, their obsession with death, their, uh, uh \u2013 it\u2019s called the \"Ayenbite of Inwyt\": it\u2019s that, we just chew on ourselves until we dissolve \u2013 but, there was something about that character that set it up for perceiving, uh, these entities. Although, in all traditions all over the world, uh, if you dig deep enough, you can usually find a tradition of small people that live in the hills or under the hills \u2013 meaning graves, right? \u2013 under the hills and they are the ancestors. And, the best that straight folklorists", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Time+Travel%2C+Psychedelics%2C+and+Physics"}
{"id": "e3db64d23a60-36", "text": "ancestors. And, the best that straight folklorists can tell is they have some weird law that as a people recedes into time, they shrink, which seems to me preposterous. I mean, I just don\u2019t understand that.  I think the evidence is pretty good that this is going on. The fact that DMT is, uh, a naturally occurring neuro transmitter is very suggestive. Rupert Sheldrake has made the suggestion that dying is a unique chemical experience and he calls DMT a necrotic hallucinogen. That, that you actually -- if you are truly dying, your brain will be flooded with DMT and then you will see the ecology of souls waiting to receive you. I once questioned a very well known Tibetan teacher, uh, about what was going on in DMT, and he said, \"Yes, these are the lesser lights.\" He said, \"You can't -- if you go further than that, you will break the thread of connection and be unable to return.\" And, so,", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Time+Travel%2C+Psychedelics%2C+and+Physics"}
{"id": "e3db64d23a60-37", "text": "of connection and be unable to return.\" And, so, you know, I think this is the most challenging idea to us on the conscious and unconscious level because we may, you know -- I mean, I\u2019m only speaking for myself, but it seems to me true that we really have, at a profound level, accepted the scientific lie that death is non-entity, you know. And it gives us -- it\u2019s a permanently weakening idea because it makes us each such a finite being. I mean, it means that no matter what you do, eventually, you know, it will all end in the cold, cold ground.  You know, \"But at my back I always hear / Times wing\u00e8d chariot hurrying near;\" \"This coyness, lady, were no crime.\" \"Had we but world enough and time.\" \"The grave's a (fine) and private place / But none, I think, do there embrace.\" Well, maybe Andrew Marvell was wrong. Maybe there\u2019s more fun on the, uh, other side than, uh, you might wish", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Time+Travel%2C+Psychedelics%2C+and+Physics"}
{"id": "e3db64d23a60-38", "text": "uh, other side than, uh, you might wish to be congealed. Anybody? Save me from myself! [Audience laughs]  [Audience] \u2013 What I\u2019m wondering, I have the impression of what comes to mind is a world that you project where everybody is schizophrenic. So that today I can be Napoleon, tomorrow Jesus, and then I can meet somebody else who also believes that he is Napoleon, Jesus, Buddha or whatever, and back and forth in time. I\u2019m just wondering what kind of a place that's going to be.   Well, I would buy into that. I think schizophrenia is the absence of cultural expectation, you know. In the most profound sense. I mean, the casuistry doesn\u2019t even apply. I mean, I consider myself schizophrenic and I have observed schizophrenia in other members of my family at close up and in great detail. And, what it is, is simply the breakdown of casuistry and then ordinary people - imprisoned in the hallucination", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Time+Travel%2C+Psychedelics%2C+and+Physics"}
{"id": "e3db64d23a60-39", "text": "then ordinary people - imprisoned in the hallucination of culture, language and linear time - lock you up and put you away because, uh, you\u2019re reporting from outside the cultural envelope and carrying information that terrifies, alarms, disturbs and just... You drive other people crazy is what it is! [Audience laughs]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Time+Travel%2C+Psychedelics%2C+and+Physics"}
{"id": "e3db64d23a60-40", "text": "I\u2019m talking now about process schizophrenia, which is the spectacular kind: where you bring back information that is absolutely incommensurate with the models of your culture. No, I think -- It\u2019s been said that the world is becoming more schizophrenic. Well, that\u2019s just because they didn\u2019t have the word \"psychedelic.\" Psychedelic experience is essentially a kind of schizophrenia and the people who, in the early phase of psychedelic research \u2013 they wanted to call it a psychotomimetic, meaning it mimics psychosis. It doesn\u2019t mimic psychosis; it\u2019s a schizomimetic of some sort. Psychosis is a whole different pathology. But, uh, schizophrenia is simply a, uh, uh, category for, uh, behavior and insight that the rest of society is unable to do anything with, I think. Yeah. No, that doesn\u2019t trouble me at all. I like talking about how I\u2019m schizophrenic. Maybe this answers your, uh, criticism that I\u2019m linear and running down and old. I can always go nuts. [Audience laughs] You know, if all else fails, you can go bananas, I suppose. [Audience laughs]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Time+Travel%2C+Psychedelics%2C+and+Physics"}
{"id": "e3db64d23a60-41", "text": "The schizophrenics return with the great aesthetic visions and the scientific breakthroughs and the poetic understandings, I mean, uh, and, it\u2019s almost as though they have been aided by the demon artificers. They have taken into their, uh, retinue, uh, supernatural helpers and a shaman would say, of course, allies. And, I\u2019m sure you all know the way in which schizophrenia and shamanism map together. I mean, our own Julian Silverman is the great pioneer in the one-to-one mapping of shamanism and schizophrenia. And years ago, when I was completely bananas, every time they would approach from three sides with nets, I had Julian\u2019s paper called, \"Shamans and Schizophrenia,\" and I could quote it chapter and verse and back them off [audience laughter] because, uh, what is called the initiatory crisis in shamanism is nothing more than a schizophrenic break with ordinary reality.\n\nThe problem is, we freak out completely and rush to drug people and give them electroshock and tie them down and slap them around. Well, so then the, uh, unfolding of the process is interrupted and it\u2019s as though you were to, you know, perform surgery on a fetus or something and then be amazed when it turns out a monstrosity. When, if you would have just left it alone, for crying out loud, it was unfolding along its own cryodes of morphological development. This is why people like R. D. Laing seem to me to be the ones who thought most deeply and correctly about schizophrenia.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Time+Travel%2C+Psychedelics%2C+and+Physics"}
{"id": "e3db64d23a60-42", "text": "To become schizophrenic is a wonderful, wonderful opportunity. The trick is to make sure that you\u2019re nowhere where straight people can get at you. [Audience laughs] And, uh, my schizophrenic episode occurred in the Amazon basin and, you know, it was five days march to just a mission. And, I\u2019ve always felt that evading modern mental health care facilities saved my mind. Absolutely! And, in a traditional society, it\u2019s supported, you know. If someone shows signs, uh, because their dreamy or they hallucinate or they\u2019re epileptic or something like that then this is encouraged and they\u2019re put under the care of shamans, and drugs are used to initiate the crisis in some cases. And, it\u2019s a cause for great rejoicing to have these personalities because -- in the culture -- because they\u2019re the antennas of culture that are contacting the, uh, raw stuff of real being and transducing it down into, uh, cultural artifacts and institutions that then are useful. Anything else?\n\n[Audience] \u2013 The grandfather paradox.\n\nOh, yeah What did you want to say?\n\n[Audience] \u2013 I don't think, I mean -- your idea of the end point makes perfect sense to me and I don\u2019t think the grandfather paradox is an objection. It\u2019s not really a paradox.\n\nNo, I don't think it's a paradox.\n\n[Audience] \u2013 It\u2019s a self-consistent universe. You\u2019re here so you didn\u2019t kill your... If you killed your grandfather, you wouldn\u2019t be here to ask us the question.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Time+Travel%2C+Psychedelics%2C+and+Physics"}
{"id": "e3db64d23a60-43", "text": "I think that\u2019s the way to handle that. I think that when we finally really understand time travel, we may find out that it\u2019s common as dirt and has been going on all around us in all kinds of physical processes.   [Audience] \u2013 We make up stories. I mean, the human mind likes to make up stories. So, if you came back and killed your grandfather and you\u2019re still here then we\u2019d have to make up a story. Like somebody else got -- even your grandmother.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Time+Travel%2C+Psychedelics%2C+and+Physics"}
{"id": "e3db64d23a60-44", "text": "But, since that isn\u2019t how it works.  [Audience] \u2013 Well, it may be working that way. I mean, people disappear mysteriously and all sorts of things happen and we just fit them into a framework that makes sense to us. When we\u2019re in the realm of time travel, then maybe we\u2019ll have to reinterpret all that weird stuff that occurred in history.  That\u2019s an excellent point. That all kinds of stuff goes on around us that may be, in fact, the collapse of paradoxical situations that we don\u2019t understand. Like, you know, all these well-documented cases of spontaneous human combustion and stuff like that. I mean, unless you just flat out deny that this goes on, which is a kind of cop out, I think, because it just means that you don\u2019t believe large bodies of evidence. I mean, not everything weird that\u2019s claimed goes on, but on the other hand, I don\u2019t think God is a republican. I think that there's plenty of weird", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Time+Travel%2C+Psychedelics%2C+and+Physics"}
{"id": "e3db64d23a60-45", "text": "I think that there's plenty of weird shit flying around and as I said, nowhere is it writ that anthropoid apes should understand reality. And, every culture that\u2019s ever existed has operated under the illusion that it understood 95 per cent of reality and that the other five per cent would be delivered in the next 18 months.   And, from Egypt forward, they\u2019ve been running around believing they had a perfect grip on things. Yet, we look back at every society that has preceded us with great smugness at how na\u00efve they all were. Well, it never occurs to us that then maybe we\u2019re whistling in the dark, too. That the universe is stranger than you can suppose. And that that openness that that perception imparts is a great joy, a great blessing because then you can live your life not in service to some fascistic metaphor, but in service to the living mystery. The fact that you\u2019re not going to understand it. It is not going to yield", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Time+Travel%2C+Psychedelics%2C+and+Physics"}
{"id": "e3db64d23a60-46", "text": "to understand it. It is not going to yield to logic or magic or any other technique that\u2019s been developed. It's bigger -- you know, the novelist John Crowley has this wonderful aphorism: The further in you go, the bigger it gets. And, I think this is true of most things.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Time+Travel%2C+Psychedelics%2C+and+Physics"}
{"id": "e3db64d23a60-47", "text": "That\u2019s all, folks! [Audience laughs] We got through another one of these. [Applause]  Okay. Thank you all for coming. I do not understand why you put up with this [audience laughs], but I appreciate it. I do appreciate it!\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Time+Travel%2C+Psychedelics%2C+and+Physics"}
{"id": "fb47aff290ce-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nWe Are at the Cutting Edge\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\nAugust 1991\n\nUnknown\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo transcript available for this talk!\n\nHelp Transcribe\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/We+Are+at+the+Cutting+Edge"}
{"id": "79f8781b2459-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nUnfolding the Stone - Making and Unmaking History and Language\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n2 June 1991\n\nWilshire Ebell Theater, Los Angeles, California\n\n7189\n\nEnd of Results\n\n[Introduction of Timothy Leary]: He's an old friend of all of ours, so, I'd like you all to welcome, uh, Timothy Leary [audience applause and cheers].\n\n[Introduction by Timothy Leary]: Yea.....[laughs] I for one am overjoyed to be here [audience applause]..... [LEARY INTRODUCTION NOT FULLY TRANSCRIBED]\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Unfolding+the+Stone+-+Making+and+Unmaking+History+and+Language"}
{"id": "bfa8f76f6473-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nFinale - Bridge Psychedelic Conference\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nAudio\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n1991\n\nStanford U, Mill Valley, CA\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo youtube link available, try the following:\n\nAudio Link\nTranscription\nOther links\n\nNo transcript available for this talk!\n\nHelp Transcribe\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Finale+-+Bridge+Psychedelic+Conference"}
{"id": "783460664059-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nAddress to the Jung Society\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n1991\n\nClaremont, CA\n\n21503\n\nEnd of Results\n\nDeus Ex McKenna - Address to the Jung Society - 2:54:43 to 3:35:35 is mislabeled - this segment is from Rites of Spring 0:09:40 to 0:50:45 -- already transcribed at https://terencemckenna.wikispaces.com/The+Rites+Of+Spring. The Q&A (the second of two question periods during this seminar) for Address to the Jung Society has not yet been transcribed and is available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OKZTV5bXw9w&t=1h3m20s - questions begin at 1:03:20.\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Address+to+the+Jung+Society"}
{"id": "ee6d92898286-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nHallucinogens in Shamanism & Anthropology\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nAudio\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n1991\n\nUnknown\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo youtube link available, try the following:\n\nAudio Link\nTranscription\nOther links\n\nNo transcript available for this talk!\n\nHelp Transcribe\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Hallucinogens+in+Shamanism+%26+Anthropology"}
{"id": "cd27eda51798-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nExploring the Hermetic Tradition\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n1991\n\nUnknown\n\n740\n\nEnd of Results\n\nWhen Kat and I were in the amazon in \u201876 taking ayahuasca, we got in with this certain group of people in Peru that took it every week. and, you know cultures have different ways of handling hassle and in some cultures it\u2019s confrontational, in other cultures not. The way these Peruvian country folk operated was if somebody was screwing up nobody would ever say so they would just talk about these people behind their back until the morphogenetic field of gossip was so strong that you'd basically awaken to the problem.\n\nSo, there was a complex social situation going on in this ayahuasca circle, which was: there was a master shaman, who we were apprenticed to, who was beloved by his neighborhood, but he had a nephew, a sobrino, who was a jerk. I mean, this guy was, as Don Fidel says, ambitious. He dealt a little weed, he did a little pimping, he was just sort of an edge runner type of guy. And every saturday night we would all get together and take ayahuasca, about 30 of us, older shamans, our guy, people from the neighborhood, and this sobrino, Don Jose.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Exploring+the+Hermetic+Tradition"}
{"id": "cd27eda51798-1", "text": "So uh, I don't know what the real history of it was, \u2018cause I had just arrived on the scene, but these old guys would sing these icaros, these magical songs on ayahuasca that appear as colored tapestries in front of your eyes and you know, they were, they had soul, they were into it, they were, and this guy would sing against them. I mean, it's the rudest thing you could possibly imagine, I mean, imagine if, if you know, lou reed were trying to give a performance and the guy in the third just launched into Old Man River, and kept at it! You know, I mean in this town I'm sure large guys would appear and say \"sir.\" In Peru it didn't work like that.They just kept singing, he kept singing, and it was clear that this is how it was gonna be handled. That we had just divided into two separate entities here.\n\nWell, um, my, uh, wife was sitting next to me and he was sitting across the room from us, the sobrino, and I had been watching him for a long time and I was loaded to the gills, and I could see he would get up on his haunches, he. he looked like a monkey. he, he, his face it was uncanny, he looked like a monkey and he also looked kind of like a jackal a dog with long teeth, he kept going through these changes, and.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Exploring+the+Hermetic+Tradition"}
{"id": "cd27eda51798-2", "text": "And Kat leaned over to me and said something like \u201cthis guy is an asshole\u201d and I just said, you know, \u201clet it slide, what do we know, think of it as anthropology,\u201d but she, she wasn't having it. So after a while he kept doing this and at one point everybody in the room, every person in the room was bummed out, and they were looking at their laps, all eye contact was broken, it\u2019s actually. When I was a kid I invented a word. The word is Fardow, and it means: The embarrassment you feel when someone else fucks up, you know. and you happen to just be there and somehow the aura of it is so strong so, the entire room is awash in fardow and the old guys are singing and the guy is singing. So then, at the end of a particularly intense clash of these two styles, uh, my wife just looked across the room at this guy and, like, put the whammy on him. And I saw these red arrows leave her eyes and like, like, dotted lines going across there: unh unh unh unh unh, and they moved fairly slowly, you know, more slowly than you can throw a ball or something. Well when this line of red arrows got to this guy he was knocked off his feet. He, he fell backwards with his legs in the air there was a big noise and all the singing stopped and everybody in the room looked up and these three old shaman, who were sitting behind Don Fidel, who I to that point had not heard speak any language but Quetchua, one turned to the other and he says in Spanish \"ooooh, the gringa sends the ziboodibooodiblugh!\"\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Exploring+the+Hermetic+Tradition"}
{"id": "cd27eda51798-3", "text": "Rating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Exploring+the+Hermetic+Tradition"}
{"id": "da5a2b6b2f85-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nInto the New Millenium\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nAudio\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n1991\n\nEsalen Institute, Big Sur, CA\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo youtube link available, try the following:\n\nAudio Link\nTranscription\nOther links\n\nNo transcript available for this talk!\n\nHelp Transcribe\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Into+the+New+Millenium"}
{"id": "94b3adf12b59-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nLive at the Cyberdome\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n1991 (Autumn)\n\nStuttgart, Germany\n\n3181\n\nEnd of Results\n\nTerence McKenna: [Audio cut off] Hyperspace that's being created. You know, we had this chance five thousand years ago when we started living in cities and we made all the wrong decisions. Hierarchical society, kingship, uh, straight street plans, phonetic alphabets. This time I hope we're a little smarter and we can exalt, uh, magic, eroticism, the feminine, tribal values and an deanem[sp?] emphasis on the natural world and a deemphasis on consumerism, thing worship, sexism and generalized stupidity.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+the+Cyberdome"}
{"id": "94b3adf12b59-1", "text": "Micky Remann: Und in dem Masse in dem wir uns anschicken das Reich der Imagination im Cyberspace zu erkunden und zu bewohnen, sollen wir uns bem\u00fchen die Magie, das Zauberische am Leben zu erhalten. Was f\u00fcr die die die wirklichen Gew\u00fcrze des menschlichen Geistes sind und, uh, nicht die Fehler zu machen die wir vielleicht in unserer menschlichen Geschichte vor f\u00fcnf Tausen Jahren gemacht haben auf einem anderen Zivilisationstrip, n\u00e4mlich gerade Stra\u00dfen, uh, Immobilienm\u00e4rkte, hierarchische Ordnung, B\u00fcrokratie und Politikerstrukturen zu bilden. Sondern dass, uh, wenn es jetzt um des Ph\u00e4nomen des Cyberspace gelt, dass wir die magischen Elfen, die, uh, Gnome und andere spot sp\u00f6ttische Wesen halten auch in diese technologisch vermittelten Welten Hineinlass gew\u00e4hren.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+the+Cyberdome"}
{"id": "94b3adf12b59-2", "text": "TM: So, you know, when you think about the cybernetic community, the psychedelic community, the cyberpunk community. It's in places like this that we gather and we self-select out of the rest of society. So what I think would be important to come out of any evening like this is that everybody take a good look at the people next to them and realize that somebody in this room has what you need. And you have what somebody in this room needs. The, uh, the spreading of the idea of cyberspace has two aspects. It's first of all informing people for whom all of this is new and completely unexpected, but then the other thing is deepening our own commitment to it and that means, uh, more plant psychedelics. It means higher doses in silent darkness. It means a commitment and a courage to live out this way of life so that we can really take back our minds from the dominator culture, the linear paternalistic industrial capitalist culture and live the kind of erotic tribalism that we have our fondest memories of.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+the+Cyberdome"}
{"id": "94b3adf12b59-3", "text": "MR: Die psychedelischen Gemeinschaften, die technodelischen Gemeinschaften, die psychone- navigatorischen neurologischen Gemeinschaften wie immer man sie in dieser Disko oder sonst wo anfinden mag, haben das gemein, dass sie sich selber gew\u00e4hlt haben ein Raum zu finden der sich vom Rest der Gesellschaft abhebt, in dem sie ihre Neugier erkunden, in dem sie ihre neurologischen Pfahl begehen k\u00f6nnen und sich da gegenseitig best\u00e4rken k\u00f6nnen. Und, uh, das Beste was man aus einem solchen Abend wie diesem mitbringen k\u00f6nnen ist vielleicht die, uh, Realisierung dass wenn man sich nacht rechts und links umschaut, da genau die Leute sind, die diese Gemeinschaft bilden und was immer man braucht, sicher ist in diesem Raum irgendjemand der genau das hat und du hast genauso irgendetwas was jemand anders der in diesem Raum ist braucht und in dieser Gewissheit zu leben um sich umzugucken, das k\u00f6nnte die Vertiefung der psychedelisch neuronautisch Cyberspaceerfahrung sein zu der man hier zusammenkommt.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+the+Cyberdome"}
{"id": "94b3adf12b59-4", "text": "TM: What put me on to the connection between archaic shamanism and the new technology and the new music was when I went to the Amazon and, uh, spent time with the people down there who use a plant psychedelic called Ayahuasca. I discovered that, uh, the people were singing what they called magical songs, that were, uh, revealed to them under the intoxicating influence of this plant. But when they criticized the magical songs to each other, they treated them like painting, or like sculpture, not like music. So then when someone would sing a song and then, uh, everyone would say well I like the part with the blue stripes and the yellow dots but I didn't like the part that was red with gray overlay. In other words, for them sound was something that you see, rather than hear. And my, uh, fantasy for virtual reality is to use it as a technology for objectifying language. Because, you see, if we could see what we meant when we spoke, it would be a kind of telepathy. The method that we use to communicate now, small mouth noises moving through space as acoustical signals and then the consulting of learned dictionaries. This is not, uh, a wide band of communication and yet the whole world is held together by small mouth noises and their electronic transductions as radio, television and so forth. So what the cyberpunk generation holds out to the rest of us is a new kind of communication. A communication that is like telepathy because it's seen with the eyes and so then it dissolves boundaries and unites us back into this tribal, uh, community that we feel such a need for.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+the+Cyberdome"}
{"id": "94b3adf12b59-5", "text": "MR: Was mich interessiert an der Verbindung von archaischen schamanistischen Methoden und der Bewegung der Cyberspace und Cyberpunk ist die Verbindung zum, uh, zu der Art und Weise wie die Amazonasschamanen ihre magischen Ges\u00e4nge vollf\u00fchren. Sie nehmen eine halluzinogene Pflanzentinktur namens Ayahuasca zu sich, die, uh, die Wirkung hat, dass sie, uh, sehr f- in sehr tranceartige schamanische Ges\u00e4nge verfallen und die Art und Weise wie sie \u00fcber diese Ges\u00e4nge reden ist allerdings nicht auf die, uh, Kritik der T\u00f6ne bezogen, sondern es ist eine Beschreibung der Farben. Es findet ein \u00dcbertragung von T\u00f6ne auf Farben statt. Und wenn am n\u00e4chsten Morgen nach dieser Ayahuascatrance die Leute sich dar\u00fcber unterhalten wie diese magischen Ges\u00e4nge waren, die sie unter dem Einfluss der Pflanze gesungen haben, da sagen sie nicht ja, dieses Lied hat aber", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+the+Cyberdome"}
{"id": "94b3adf12b59-6", "text": "sie nicht ja, dieses Lied hat aber gut geklungen oder es geht [sp?], sondern sie sagen mir hat besonders gut der Teil gefallen wo eben wie diese auf Lilauntergrund diese gelben Sterne erschienen, aber diese Teile mit den roten Streifen auf gelbem Feld, die fand ich weniger interessant. Das ist die Art und Weise wie im Amazonas eine synesthetische Verkn\u00fcpfung zwischen auditiven und visuellen Kan\u00e4len geschaltet wird. Und unsere Hoffnung der Cyberpunkgeneration ist die, dass wir einen Weg finden diese telepathische \u00c4sthetik wiederherzustellen, dass wir auf die, uh, Sprache wie sie jetzt stattfindet in Form von kleinen tonalen Mundst\u00fccken die hier ausgesprochen werden und dann \u00fcber die Luftschallwellen irgendwo in eure Ohren kommen wo sie mit erinnerten Lexika und deren Bedeutungen verglichen wird, um dann wieder in eine Bedeutung r\u00fcck\u00fcbersetzt zu", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+the+Cyberdome"}
{"id": "94b3adf12b59-7", "text": "wieder in eine Bedeutung r\u00fcck\u00fcbersetzt zu werden, was ein extrem komplizierter Vorgang ist. Da w\u00e4re die Hoffnung des Cyberpunk des Cyberspace ein neue Form von visueller synestethischer Kommunikation zu finden, die es erm\u00f6glicht, dass wir das sehen was wir meinen.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+the+Cyberdome"}
{"id": "94b3adf12b59-8", "text": "TM: So it seems to me the way the cyber, uh, punk, cybertech community can keep its compass pointed toward a real human future is to always keep natural models in mind. So, when I became interested in this whole problem of visual language, I went to nature to see if there was some natural system of communication that modeled this thing that I was interested in. And what I discovered was that in the octopus and in the squid you have this form of psychedelic language is already highly evolved. Because the octopus can change the colors and the texture of its surface and because it lives in water and so can dance and fold and unfold parts of its body very quickly. It has essentially become the surface of its own mind. It is, uh, uh, in effect a nervous system turned inside out, so that the thoughts of the octopus ripple across its surface and, uh, you know the engineers who have designed cyberspace and virtual reality environments in California are fond of saying that you can be anything in virtual reality. Well then it seems to me the thing you want to become is naked linguistic intent, pure intent toward communication and so by mapping the linguistic possibility onto a topological continuum and then processing it through, uh, computers we actually create a true mirror for our own mind. And so to look upon this or to share it with other people is to participate in a true form of telepathy and I think this true boundary dissolving telepathy that unites us all into one family should be the goal of the cyberspatial community.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+the+Cyberdome"}
{"id": "94b3adf12b59-9", "text": "MR: Wenn man diese neuen Dimensionen des Cyberspace erkundet, dann empfiehlt es sich vielleicht zu sehen ob es irgendwo nat\u00fcrliche Modelle gibt, die diese Art von angestrebter synesthetischer Kommunikation schn praktizieren. Das w\u00fcrde der Entwicklung auf jeden Fall sehr helfen, wenn man sich auf solche Modelle, uh, r\u00fcckbesinnen k\u00f6nnte. Und erstaunlicherweise gibt es bereits ein Lebewesen auf diesem Planeten, das telepathische Synesthesie praktiziert. Das ist der Tintenfisch, dessen, uh, M\u00f6glichkeiten auf der eigenen Haut Farbkaskaden, Mosaikgebilde und ganze TV-Screens abzubilden schier unersch\u00f6pflich sind. Und, uh, der Tintenfisch k\u00f6nnte dargestellt werden als ein nach au\u00dfengeklapptes Nervensystem. Alles was innerhalb dieses Tintenfisches an Emotionen oder Mitteilungen vorgeht wird sichtbar in Form von farbigen Displays auf seiner eigenen Au\u00dfenhaut. Und das Versprechen, das die, uh, Cyberspacetechnologie macht geht ganz in eine \u00e4hnliche Richtung, dass, uh, die der Inhalt meiner Imagination sichtbar wird als ein, uh, dreidimensionale farbige Skluptur, die nicht weiter beschrieben oder umschrieben werden muss, wenn an die direkt wahrgenommen werden kann, uh, als die Au\u00dfenhaut meiner Imagination.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+the+Cyberdome"}
{"id": "94b3adf12b59-10", "text": "TM: It's always held against the technical community that somehow we've moved beyond the values of the natural and the biological world. But if you think about what the tools of cyberspace are, they are integrated circuits, chips and, uh, electronic components which are made of gold, platinum, arsenic, silver, copper, silicon. These are all the materials of the earth and in a sense what we are doing is organizing the raw material of the earth so that it can reflect the dynamics of electrons, of light, moving through fiber optic cables. So really, the in in the cybernetic revolution what is happening is a kind of completion of the dream of alchemy. That spirit could actually, uh, come mingle with, uh, metals and glass and, uh, that out of this mingling of spirit and matter could come a new possibility, a new evolutionary option, a kind of philosopher's stone, a kind of panacea at the end of time. And this is to me what the computer and the virtual technologies all push toward. A kind of mirroring of our own souls. That what the agenda of cyberspace is is a kind of, uh, turning the body insight out. Bringing the soul into visible manifestation in the world as a kind of eternal transdimensional object and then turning the body into a freely commanded object in the human imagination. I mean this is the idea. To tray[sp?] to make this reality behind the menu and make the reality of cyberspace the reality in front of the screen, to reverse the figure ground relationship and find ourselves free at last in the imagination.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+the+Cyberdome"}
{"id": "94b3adf12b59-11", "text": "MR: Was der Cyberspacegemeinschaft h\u00e4ufig vorgehalten wird ist ihre Fixierung auf diese technischen Mittel. Aber es ist nat\u00fcrlich, uh, wenn man sie auseinandernimmt, diese technischen Mittel, kommt man auf Silizium, Kohlenstoffverbindung, Polymere, Kupfer, Nickelt, Eisen, verschiedene Substanzen dieser Erde sind. Und was letztlich in der technologischen, uh, Evolution geschieht ist dass diese Erd irdischen Stoffe auf eine Weise zusammengef\u00fcgt werden, dass sie eine eigene Intelligenz hervorbringen, oder dass sie eine in ihre zu in ihrem Zusammenwirken eine R\u00fcckkopplung mit der irdischen Intelligenz bilden, die es vorher noch nicht gegeben hat. Und was die, uh, Cyberpespacetechnologie[sp?] verspricht ist ein alchemistischer Traum. N\u00e4mlich eine Verbindung zu schaffen zwischen Geist und Materie in der Weise, dass die Seele oder die die Kraft der Imagination nach au\u00dfen gekehrt wird und dass der K\u00f6rper mehr nach innen gekehrt wird und dass die Beziehung zwischen Keyboard und Vorstellungsverm\u00f6gen durchl\u00e4ssig werden.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+the+Cyberdome"}
{"id": "94b3adf12b59-12", "text": "TM: So when I try to imagine the cybernetic world of the not too distant future, what I imagine is a world where, uh, all tools and toolkits have been tucked away into a virtual cyberspace. So what we see when we look at this world of the future is we see healthy men and women living in a natural environment, uh, naked, happy, at peace and when these people close their eyes in this natural environment, what they see hanging in mental space are menus. And these menus are the way you make your way into an interface which is completely hidden in three dimensional space, but which is nothing more than a hard wiring, a downloading into, uh, hardware, if you will, of the unco- the collectivity of the unconscious that exists anyway. I mean, what we're doing is, uh, the end male men engineering mentality is following along at hardwiring what the animal body has always been into. So, uh, the future is a future of ultratechnology in a dimension that", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+the+Cyberdome"}
{"id": "94b3adf12b59-13", "text": "a future of ultratechnology in a dimension that is split off from what is called the ordinary world. The ordinary world, the natural world is maintained like a botanical garden or a natural preserve and then the human imagination, which is this titanic, Promethean force that is loose in our species, it is free in a virtual reality to create all of the castles of the imagination, to create the mile long buildings in all kinds of architectural styles, to create the arcologies and vision spaces that are the affirmation of the imagination. We are our mental power to project imagery has become so powerful that now really our only option is to break with the planet and head out into a cultural space defined by our dreams and by our machines. And this is in fact what we're doing and you people are many of the people who will do it. What we're doing is we're taking back our minds. I mean that's more than a political slogan. We're taking back our minds from", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+the+Cyberdome"}
{"id": "94b3adf12b59-14", "text": "political slogan. We're taking back our minds from reductionism, from materialism, from scientism, from all of these intellectual philosophies which disempowered the artist and made the artist somehow slave to other forces in society. In the cyberdelic future, artists will rule, because the world will be made of art.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+the+Cyberdome"}
{"id": "94b3adf12b59-15", "text": "MR: Wenn ich meinen kurzen Ausflug in die weitere Entwicklung dessen machen kann was Cyberspace heute am Anfang versucht, dann, uh, kann man sich vorstellen, dass es ein, uh, freundliches, l\u00e4chelndes, \u00e4u\u00dferes Universum gibt, gr\u00fcne Wiesen, l\u00e4chelnde Menschen, die nackt in ihren H\u00f6hlen hausen und sich, uh, das Leben gut sein lassen, in der herk\u00f6mmlichen dreidimensionalen Realit\u00e4t. Aber sobald diese Menschen ihre ihre Augen schlie\u00dfen werden also unendliche Men\u00fcleisten von Optionen und Werkzeugk\u00e4sten erscheinen auf ihrem inneren Auge, die sie dies ihnen erm\u00f6glicht, uh, psychedelische, imaginative Optionen zu erleben, und mit der gleichen Wirklichkeit und der gleichen Realit\u00e4tsdichte wie diese dreidimensionale Realit\u00e4t. Und mit ihren, uh, K\u00f6rpern auf dem gesunden Grass liegend k\u00f6nnen sie hinter geschlossenen Augen in unendliche R\u00e4ume vordringen und, uh, sich in alle m\u00f6glichen Situationen und Gesellschaftsformen hineindenken, die von den jetzigen Gesellschaften so weit entfernt sind wie wir von den, uh, Steinzeith\u00f6hlen und, uh, diese M\u00f6glichkeiten sind in der Evolution dieser Technik enthalten und wir k\u00f6nnen uns gegenseitig Mut machen oder uns dagegen, uh, w\u00e4hren, aber wir k\u00f6nnen uns auf diese Schienen einschw\u00f6ren und in Gesellschaften oder den Gemeinschaften wie diesen die, uh, Wege dorthin erkunden.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+the+Cyberdome"}
{"id": "94b3adf12b59-16", "text": "TM: Yes, you see. What we're doing is, uh, invoking a co- kind of collective mind. It's a a political project that has been the dream of civilization for as long as there has been civilization. And it actually is within the power of this generation to, uh, create this kind of new definition of humanness, where all the shit and horror of the last five thousand years of human history can somehow be reclaimed or made to have meaning by the application of technology toward the reflection of the human soul.\n\nMR: Und der Versuch der dahinter steht ist eigentlich ein sehr alter Traum der Menschen, n\u00e4mlich sich ihren eigenen Geist zur\u00fcckzugewinnen und, uh, das Territorium was von B\u00fcrokraten und Politikern und Zi- und Zivilisationen bei denen alles durch, uh, Horror und Shit gegangen ist. Dieses belebte Territorium der eigenen Tr\u00e4ume und der eigenen Imagination wieder f\u00fcr sich selbst zu reklamieren. Und, uh, dieses. Da war noch irgendwas. Das hab ich inzwischen vergessen wie's weiterging, aber es ging in dieser Art weiter. Uh, dass die, uh, die M\u00f6glichkeiten dieses zu einer bewohnbaren Welt zu machen.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+the+Cyberdome"}
{"id": "94b3adf12b59-17", "text": "TM: Boring[sp?] the natural psychedelic vision into that loop, then, uh, endless realms of alien and unpredictable beauty lie ahead. And this is really what human beings were made for. I mean, we are the information generating, art making creature. All our higher activities, dance, painting, music, poetry, uh, human relationships, all of these things have the character of art. And so the the future is lies in the realization of beauty, the making it more and more explicit, the sharing of our dreams by at last applying tools, not toward warfare, but toward the dissolving of boundaries between people and, uh, nations so that, uh, the real biological fact of a human community can show through. If we're able to do that we're we will be able to fast forward the cultural crisis and we will be able through psychedelics and mass media and the, uh, distribution and control of the flow of information actually be able to save ourselves and this world from ruin. It rests in the hands of the high tech communities developing and controlling, uh, information technology, because we have the money, we have the power to make any change we want in the world. But we have to change our minds. And that means better art and more psychedelics and so that's the responsibility which rests on you guys, and, uh, I'm sure you're up to it. Thank you very much.\n\n[Audience claps]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+the+Cyberdome"}
{"id": "94b3adf12b59-18", "text": "[Audience claps]\n\nMR: Ich werd sehen, ob ich aus dieser Rede noch ein paar Fische ins deutsche Land heranziehen kann. Was als Kompass und Ma\u00dfinstrument[sp?] gelten sollte, wenn man jetzt diesen Cyberspace erforscht und bewhont, sollte die Sch\u00f6nheit der psychedelischen Erfahrung sein. Nimmt man ein, uh, nimmt man diese diesen Reichtum der psychedelischen Vision nicht mit in diesen Cyberspace hinein, l\u00e4uft man Gefahr auf eine narzissistische Selbstschlaufe hereinzufallen in der eigentlich nur die eigenen, uh, Begrenztheiten widergespiegelt werden. Aber der unendliche Reichtum, der in der psychedelischen Vision die ich[sp?] die andersartige und au\u00dferirdische Sch\u00f6nheit dieser Visionen, das k\u00f6nnte das Element und das Ingredient sein, dass aus dem Cyberspace eine wirklich lohnende Alternative zu dieser Realit\u00e4t ist, uh, wo wir auf der Endmor\u00e4ne von technologischen Problemen sitzen, die, uh, ein dieses genau dieses neue und vision\u00e4re Input brauchen, damit wir uns \u00fcber die Runden kommen. Und, uh, es ist sch\u00f6n in einer Gemeinschaft, in einer Gruppe zu sein, die sich mit diesen Themen besch\u00e4ftigt, weil das liegt in unserer Hand, diese menschlichen Tr\u00e4ume, die Welt als Kunstwerk und Imagination zu verwirklichen. Sch\u00f6nen Dank.\n\n[Audience claps]\n\nTM: Thank you[sp?].\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+the+Cyberdome"}
{"id": "bff261a86fc4-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nTerence McKenna vs. Young Republican Radio Debate\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n2nd-6th September 1991\n\nKFI radio station with Tom Leykis\n\n39\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo youtube link available, try the following:\n\nNo transcript available for this talk!\n\nHelp Transcribe\n\nTRANSCRIBER: copy and paste the question and answers templates (below) for each question and answer. remove this red text before publishing.\n\nFirstname Lastname: question?\n\nFL: question?\n\nFL: question?\n\nFL: question?\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Terence+McKenna+vs.+Young+Republican+Radio+Debate"}
{"id": "08ebc48d88fe-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nApproaching Life's Edges and Boundaries\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nAudio\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n20 November 1992\n\nUnknown\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo youtube link available, try the following:\n\nAudio Link\nTranscription\nOther links\n\nNo transcript available for this talk!\n\nHelp Transcribe\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Approaching+Life%27s+Edges+and+Boundaries"}
{"id": "c25490b82f8f-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nImagination in the Light of Nature\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n2 October 1992 (Apparently: 17, Oct, 1987?)\n\nEarth Trust Benefit, Los Angeles, California (Apparently: Philosophical Research Society, Los Angeles)\n\n6210\n\nEnd of Results\n\nAudio Link\n\nTranscription\n\nOther links\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Imagination+in+the+Light+of+Nature"}
{"id": "5aa344d4fa08-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nEarth Trust\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\nOctober 2nd 1992\n\nUnknown\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo transcript available for this talk!\n\nHelp Transcribe\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Earth+Trust"}
{"id": "5e3640a0a52d-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nThe future of humanity with Abraham and Sheldrake\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\nAugust 29 1992\n\nEsalen\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo transcript available for this talk!\n\nHelp Transcribe\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+future+of+humanity+with+Abraham+and+Sheldrake"}
{"id": "71ebc5ea9186-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nCamden Centre Talk\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nAudio\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n15 June 1992\n\nLondon, England, Camden Centre\n\n19061\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo youtube link available, try the following:\n\nAudio Link\nTranscription by Deoxy\nOther links\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Camden+Centre+Talk"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch For The Original Tree Of Knowledge\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\nMay 29-31 1992\n\nBoulder, Colorado\n\n85354\n\nEnd of Results\n\nhere.\n\n[0:00:00] [Introduction begin] Sounds True, presents; In Search of the Original Tree of Knowledge, a weekend workshop with Terence Mckenna. Researcher, author and philosopher. Terence McKenna has spent 25 years studying the foundation of shamanism and the ethnopharmacology of spiritual transformation. His books include Food of Gods and The Magic Mushroom Grower\u2019s Guide and most recently, The Archaic Revival. He is also the founder\n\n[0:00:30] of the Botanical Dimensions, a non profit botanical research project. In this weekend workshop, Terence Mckenna examines time and its mysteries, the nature of language and the techniques of ecstasy that have developed the non western societies to navigate to and from invisible worlds. And now, recorded live in Boulder, Colorado. In Search of the Original Tree of Knowledge. A weekend workshop, with Terence Mckenna. [Introduction ends]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-1", "text": "[0:01:00]..ahh..how to slice into this pie, I try to never do it the same way because i don't want to get bored but that lays a sort of obligations on me that i am not always able to meet. 2 things i think are going on inside this wrap, as currently packaged. First of all, i am very interested in talking about the impact of uhmm.. psilocybin.. [0:01:30]..on human evolution an.. and values and institutions, and then so that you don't think we\u2019ve just fallen into French anthropology 101.. [audience laughter] I am interested in taking ..the.. the inside from that discussion, and trying to apply it to the modern or postmodern as the case may be, dilemma. Trying to draw some.. [0:02:00..implications from (uhh..uhhh) looking at human prehistory and the 7 factors that were in place as the moment of human emergence; and since i feel pretty much among friends and fringy here.[audience laughter]..I.. it doesn\u2019t", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-2", "text": "fringy here.[audience laughter]..I.. it doesn\u2019t trouble me to concept that my book, Food of the Gods.. I really conceived of as a kind of an intellectual.. [0:02:30]..trojan horse. It\u2019s written as though it were a scientific study; footnote, bibliography, citations that\u2019s impossible to attain book and so forth and so on. [audience laughter] but this is simply to assuage and calm the academic anthropologists. The idea is to leave this thing on their doorstep, rather like an abandoned baby or a trojan horse and they will open their doors.. [0:03:00]..to it and take it inside only to discover that out of this very vague rational discourse for the self- transforming-elf-machine from hyper space [audience laughter] with their own agenda. [audience laughter] (clears throat).. I..I feel like i should say this; it\u2019s more for my ease than yours. That..i\u2019ve reached the conclusion that i\u2019m now..[0:03:30]..espouse..through skepticism,", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-3", "text": "now..[0:03:30]..espouse..through skepticism, reason, rationalism and the tough argument. So it may sound bitsy, flaky and soft headed. Uhmm. But that\u2019s just because you\u2019re hearing it wrong. [audience laugh] the ..uhh.. The guiding input was .. experience. And in a way [0:04:00]..what we are gathered here to talk about..uh.. tonight is an experience which is not only rare, transformity, challenging.. But, also for reason that will probably get around to illegal. So, its.. uhh.. it's a very peculiar situation, very few experiences are illegal. And our models of the world..[0:04:30]..are built up based on our experience. So if u make an experience illegal, you\u2019re essentially saying it is off limit for model building, You can\u2019t include that in your model because it isn\u2019t really there in some sense. And..and this is the situation in western society, these are the psychedelic experience. To my mind, the psychedelic", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-4", "text": "psychedelic experience. To my mind, the psychedelic experience..[0:05:00]..is as much a part of being human as sexuality, in..personal independence, uhhh.. child rearing.. These are the things which are scripted into us as opportunities for exercising our peculiar situation.. These..these phenomenal being. And a society which would deny that..[0:05:30-0:06:00]..is a society whose secret or maybe not so secret agenda is the infantilization of its citizens. I mean if we are not capable of dealing with these things, then who is? And are the people who make the rules; did they carefully, conscientiously and that depth.. Explore these dimensions and decide they were unfit for human consumption? [audience laugh]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-5", "text": "Transcribed By Azlan\n\n[6:00]\n\n\u2026.or, uh, was it done more hastily, more mindlessly, and with more fear? I would submit to you that, uh, it\u2019s the latter. Well, first of all I want to talk about the impact of psychedelics, especially in this case psilocybin, on human-ness. And then if there\u2019s time maybe we can talk a little bit about what is so great about it? I had a philosophy professor once, Paul [inaudible], [6:30] some of you may know his book, and he opened his epistemology 101 course by saying, \u2018i\u2019m going to teach you what truth is, and then i\u2019m going to teach you what\u2019s so great about it.\u2019\n\nWell I won\u2019t claim to teach what the psychedelic experience is, that you will have to find out on your own, but I think it is legitimate to discuss what\u2019s so great about it. You know, are we, by any measurable [7:00] index, superior or inferior to people who do not have this experience? Because if not, then really, the psychedelic position is no more than a kind of cult, to be lined up along with Roman Catholicism and all the other cults out there. Speaking as a former member of course. [audience laughter] Well, my uh, my notion [7:30] of the way to legitimi- to legitimate the importance of psychedelics is by showing, and I think one can show, uhm, in fairly short order, that these things are not alien to the human experience, or ancillary, or the province of uneducated, uhh, little brown people down in the rainforest or anything like that.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-6", "text": "I submit to you [8:00] that the psychedelic experience and the impact of psychedelic plants on human beings, is central to understanding who we are, and how we got this way. And if we can, uh, explore this issue and convince ourselves there\u2019s some merit in this point of view, then it will simply- it will do more than rewrite the annals of a stayed science like anthropology [8:30], it will actually change how we relate to each other and to the planet that we\u2019re in the process of grinding into, uh, pollution. So that\u2019s the raison d'\u00eatre for the politics behind it. Now here\u2019s the spiel. Uhm, sometime in the last three million years, the, uh, proto- our remote ancestors [9:00], the proto-hominids, uh, were, uhh, disrupted in their evolutionary climax in the canopies in the great rainforests of Africa. You see most animal species evolve into a niche; tighter, and tighter, and tighter. We see this with termites and cockroaches and most lifeforms, this is what happens to them.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-7", "text": "Only if the niche [9:30] is somehow disrupted or destroyed does the game veer away from its tendency toward closure. And this is what happened to us. Uh, our remote ancestors would have lived happily in the climaxed rainforests of Africa, in the same way the primates to this day live happily in the climaxed rainforests Indonesia and South America[10:00], but for the fact that the dynamics of the planet, and this ultimately is if we\u2019re looking for a cause, or some people would say it\u2019s the villain, then it\u2019s the climatological dynamics of the planet, which began to, uh, limit these rainforest habitats. And a new kind of habitat began to form in Africa which was grassland. It\u2019s very recent [10:30]. And under nutritional pressure, and under a pressure that was the result of this retreating environment, our remote ancestors descended from the trees and began to, uh, adapt themselves to the new world of the grassland. And they did this, uh, over a period of probably a couple of million years.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-8", "text": "Now, I maintain, and if any of you are [11:00] evolutionary biologists or anthropologists this is the nub of my position: here\u2019s what\u2019s new scientifically: What they teach you about evolution is that it\u2019s caused by mutation, which is a random process, which then meets another random process which is natural selection, and out of these two random processes, lo and behold you get Sea Urchins, Birds of Paradise, [11:30] Grey Whales, and Human Beings. Now, uh, when you inquire as to what is the source of this mutation, you will be told it\u2019s cosmic rays, incident, incoming hard radiation which can disrupt chromosomes, and then- most of these mutations are lethal; some huge percentage of them. But a vanishingly small of them actually confer adaptive advantage. And they are then . . .\n\nTranscribed By Nigel Milligan\n\n[12:00]...and they are then preserved in the genome and passed on. Now, what I want to suggest, and I\u2019ve never seen it thoroughly treated by evolutionary thinkers, is that food, is the unexamined source of evolutionary pressure, it can be. If you know anything about animal species, you know that most animals tend (12:30) to specialize their diet. Insects are famous for this. If you find a caterpillar and you want to raise it in a jar you must give it the food plants you found it on, because they just don\u2019t eat leaves, it doesn\u2019t work like that, they have species specific adaptations. Now why is this?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-9", "text": "It\u2019s because it\u2019s a strategy to limit exposure to toxic and mutagenic chemicals (13:00) that other life forms are sequestering in their tissue to discourage predation, essentially. Well, so then what happens when an animal population such as our remote ancestors comes under pressure from a dwindling habitat or a limited availability of food? Well what happens, if you have any sense, is you start experimenting. (13:30) You start digging up roots you never thought about before, and chewing on them. You start eating leaves, you start eating insect protein, you experiment with the slaughter of small animals and so forth and so on. And this is precisely what our remote ancestors did. This is the much lamented transition from fruitarian holiness to predatory carnivorous messiness. (14:00) But had we not been able to lower our gourmet standards we would have entered the fossil record at that point.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-10", "text": "So. So here we have these proto-hominids foraging into this new grassland environment beginning to beat on prairie dogs, and stuff like that, and, and, simultaneously as we all know, evolving in this African veldt environment (14:30) were great herds of undulet animals; proto-cattle, bison, wildebeest, antelopes, many many different kinds of animals. And one of the curiosities of nature is that many mushrooms prefer the dung of undulate animals to just going out and making a deal with the raw, natural environment. (15:00) They like the leavening that goes on with vegetable material when it passes through the double stomach of the undulate animal. As a headline what this means is mushrooms grow in manure. And so, our remote ancestors, testing for insects and eating small animals would certainly have encountered the so-called coprofitic or coprophilic; the dung loving mushroom. (15:30) And they would have tested them for food.\n\nYears ago when I was in Kenya, I observed baboon troops in this very environment we\u2019re discussing, and their habit was; they were very interested in cowpies. Because they had learned from experience that if you rush over to a relatively old cowpie and flip it over (16:00) there\u2019s a high probability of beetles or beetle grubs under there and so these were vectors for food getting. Well in the end I did not observe mushrooms in Africa but I observed mushrooms in the Amazon and they can attain the size of a dinner plate. I\u2019ve never seen them in cultivation quite that large. But, you know, you come out after a hard rain and these things are landed like little flying saucers or frisbees in the meadows. (16:30) They would certainly have been tested for their nutritional potential.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-11", "text": "And psilocybin, different from all other chemicals in nature, including as far I can tell all other hallucinogenic chemicals in nature; (17:00) psilocybin has a unique set of characteristics which implicated to my mind very strongly in the catalyzing of the emergent of humanness out of proto-hominid and hominin organization. And it worked like this; (it\u2019s very uh, relatively easy to understand as major scientific breakthroughs go, at least you\u2019re not going to be asked to do any partial differential equations this evening.) Psilocybin in very low doses, (17:30) doses so low that if you were to take a dose this low you could conceivably forget you have done it, and just go out and shop and fiddle around. But at doses so low that they do not register as a psychedelic experience, psilocybin imparts measurable improvement in visual acuity. Roland Fischer did this work in the late 50\u2019s and early 60s, and they had, they built an experimental device, where a person could not be seen by turning a crank\u2026.(18:00).....\n\nTranscribed by Kevin Evans", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-12", "text": "[0:18:00] be seen, by turning a crank- There were two parallel bars, and by turning a crank this person could rotate one of the parallel bars so that, uhm, it was no longer parallel. And, uhm, lacking talking rats they went to the next prefered experimental animal which is graduate students. And they would sit a graduate student down in front of this device, give them a very low [0:18:30] dose of psilocybin, and then put a buzzer in their hand and say \u2018When the two bars are no longer parallel, push the buzzer\u2019. And, uhm, [Fisher?] collected large amounts of data which showed that the people who had taken psilocybin, and the other people were given a placebo of course, could detect this deformation long before the unstoned subjects were able to do so. And [Fisher?] who was a totally [0:19:00] straight European scientist, in fact a vianesser. When I talked to him about this stuff he was very cagey,", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-13", "text": "to him about this stuff he was very cagey, and he- he was funny in fact, he said \u201cWell you see it\u2019s very interesting. Apparently here we have data which, uhm, argues significantly that we are perceiving reality better with the drug than without the drug!\u201d. [Audience laughs] Yes, yes. For him that was a joke. [0:19:30] I mean, he never did anything with it; It was just a throw away line. But it stuck with me and I don\u2019t think you have to be a rocket scientist to see that if you are a hunting animal in a situation of nutritional pressure, as our remote ancestors were, and there is a food in that environment that will give you better vision then, by God, the animals which accept that into the diet [0:20:00] are going to be more successful hunters than the ones that do not.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-14", "text": "And, consequently, they will outbreed those members of the population that have some aversion to this exotic food. Either they don\u2019t like the look of it, or they don\u2019t like that it grows in manure, or they don\u2019t like the taste of it. But those who accept it, as a dietary item, will be more successful at getting food and consequently more successful and raising their offspring to sexual maturity. [0:20:30] And that\u2019s the name of the game in darwinian evolution. You must raise your offspring to sexual maturity. Then the genes flow forward. If you fail in that you get an F in the evolution game. Well, ok so visual acuity, that\u2019s a very fine. Uhm, but psilocybin has other properties which build on that initial pharmacological peculiarity. [0:21:00] Uhm, if you take slightly larger doses of psilocybin, uhm, and this is typical with many indoles, you get- many of which are hallucinogens, you get what is called CNS arousal. Central nervous system arousal. You all know this feeling it\u2019s the feeling of two double cappuccinos in short order. It\u2019s that you do not sleep. You are very restless. [0:21:30] You are very alert. Your attention is scanning, scanning, scanning. And in highly sexed animals, like primates, arousal means exactly what it sounds like. It means erection in the male animal. And, uhm, now isn\u2019t that interesting? Uhm, that is a second factor feeding back into this, uhm, increased success with offspring [0:22:00] business. Not only are you a better hunter, but you\u2019re a more highly sexed creature.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-15", "text": "And you\u2019re having more of what straight anthropologists refer to as \u2018Successful copulations\u2019. An amazing phrase actually. [Audience laughs] Meaning, of course, that impregnation is a consequence of these- of this sexual activity. Now the other thing that psilcoybin does, [0:22:30] uhm, at or slightly above this arousal level, and this is very important for the argument, is it creates- it causes what I call boundary dissolution. And boundary dissolution in human beings, like you and me, means ego loss. And I believe that this would have promoted, uhm, a social and sexual style based, not on monogamous [0:23:00] pairing but, on orgy. The scenario is fairly easy to imagine. It\u2019s that these remote ancestors of ours would take these mushrooms and they, probably at the new and full moon, the thinking is that ritual was originally lunar time. And then they would, we\u2019re talking about nomadic groups of people. Probably no more than 80 to 100 people. [0:23:30] And then there would be, uhm, group sexual activity. Now, an interesting social consequence of orgiastic social styles, besides a whole lot of fun, [Audience laughs] is it\u2019s impossible to trace lines of male paternity in that kind of a situation. You see, women know whose children are whose because they see the child come out of [0:24:00]\n\nTranscribed by Paul Mullins", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-16", "text": "0:24:00...Out of their body and they nurse the child but man do not in that situation have their children. My children. What they have are our children. The tribal group, and at this boundary dissolving thing, let\u2019s dwell on this for a moment because this is central to my argument and it has political consequences for our own lives. (..urmm..) all primates.. Clear backed.. 0:24:30...down into squirrel monkeys and howler, all primates have what are called male dominance hierarchies. Now what this means is the most.. The males with the longest claws.. The hardest muscles and the meanest disposition.. Take control of everybody else. Women.. Children.. Weaker males.. (..urmm..) everybody comes under the thumb of the alpha male of the pack. 0:25:00...This is true as i said a squirrel monkeys, howler monkeys.. So forth and so on.. It is also true of us.. Sitting here in this room. This is a male dominant society. I mean", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-17", "text": "This is a male dominant society. I mean there\u2019s a lot of complaining and hair pulling about nit and there\u2019s a political alternative in the form of the women\u2019s movement and feminist sensitivities. But for most people male dominance is the rule..Well, I...Would like to.. 0:25:30...suggest that our peculiarly discomforted relationship to reality is a consequence of the fact that for a long period of time perhaps as short as twenty-thousand (20,000) years.. Perhaps as long as a million (1,000,000) years.. As a species, and not consciously.. 0:26:00...We accepted into our diet a drug that has the consequences of suppressing male dominance. But this was the social consequence of accepting psilocybin into the diet.. The ego is a structure that forms in the psyche like a calcareous tumour or a growth if you do not.. 0:26:30...have regular recourse to the cure. And the cure is, psilocybin and the boundary dissolving, sexual and social style which", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-18", "text": "and the boundary dissolving, sexual and social style which you carried in its way. So the reason that we as a people are haunted by the idea of a lost paradise, a perfect world sometime in the misty past. Is not.. 0:27:00...(..uhmm..).. You know the (..inaudible..) art called the..the nostalgia for paradise and thought that it was a time of.. Of a longing that has no bases. But i think that it is entirely a memory of the period when male dominance was chemically suppressed, ego was chemically suppressed and by male dominance and ego i don\u2019t mean to lay this entirely on men. I mean i would wager.. 0:27:30..Probably everyone in this room has more ego than they need, certainly starting from me.. And that part of the paradox that you\u2019re supposed to enjoy in this\u2026 (..audience laughter..) you know the ambiguity of me preaching the loss of ego...(..audience laughter..) so essentially, you know.. What happened was", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-19", "text": "so essentially, you know.. What happened was chemical.. A chemically driven leak in evolution had the consequence of the suppression of these 0:28:00.. behaviors that favoured male dominance. Ahh.. as a species.. Ahh.. we would\u2019ve continued with male dominance forever. Had it not been for psilocybin in the diet.. And it established a situation in which in less than two-million (2,000,000) years the human brain size doubled. This is without contest. The greatest mystery 0:28:30..in the whole of evolutionary theory..(..Uhm..ahh..)..Lampston.. Who is a brilliant evolutionary biologist called the doubling of the human brain size in two-million (2,000,000) years, (..ah..) the most spectacular transformation of a major organ of a higher animal in the entire fossil record. Well, now it would be spectacular enough if it were the liver of an otter, or.. (..audience laughter..) or the pancreas of an elephant.. but , notice that..", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-20", "text": "pancreas of an elephant.. but , notice that.. 0:29:00-0:30:00...it is the organ which created the very of evolution itself (..audience laughter..) and all other theories..so, th..we\u2019re getting a little topological here folks, there\u2019s something (..audience laughter..)..fishy going on.. (..ahh..) what was it that caused this explosive doubling in human brain size? Well, i maintain that it was the new behaviors that emerged with the suppression of ego and their reinforcement in this situation of nomadic pastoralism and that there was a period, let\u2019s call it from the melting of the last glaciers until \u00c7atalh\u00f6y\u00fck six-thousand five hundred (6500) BC, there was a period where men and women were in balance with each other, children and .. children and adults were at peace with each other and human beings and the planet were at peace with each other.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-21", "text": "Transcribed by Azlan", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-22", "text": "\u2026.and then it was lost, and we fell into history, you know the long slug toward armageddon is what was initiated in its place. Well know,if it was so wonderful, why would anybody ever let go of it; why was it lost?. Well, we have to go back to the very forces which created this situation. Remember I said it was the climatological dynamics of the planet [that] created the grasslands in place of the rainforest. Continuation of those processes turned those grasslands into desert. And where there once were waterfalls, running rivers, grasslands and vast herds of animals and their human symbios; suddenly they were was encroaching desert, fewer waterfalls. The mushrooms began to be seasonal , began to be located only in the rain shadows of mountains, the great mushrooms festivals which had been at new and full moon, became solsticio and then equinoctial and then, you know, biannual, and something, anyway, you get the picture. It was fading,", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-23", "text": "anyway, you get the picture. It was fading, and I don't think people took this lying down [laughs], no pun intended.[audience laughs]. I think that, there was great anxiety about the fading of the mushroom and the loss of the sacrament, and so, these people searched for a strategy for preservation. Well, in a world without refrigeration, there\u2019s only one, well no, there are two strategies for preservation of a delicate food like that. One is air drying, which is not terribly satisfying because as soon as the rain cloud comes along your dry stuff absorbs moisture out of the air and turns yuck. And so the real, the only real option is preservation in honey, and this was done, I am sure; it\u2019s s still done in Mexico to this day in remote mushroom using villages, people preserve them in honey. Now the problem here, and this is a lot on my book, into this kind of thing a lot because, Food of the gods.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-24", "text": "of thing a lot because, Food of the gods. Because what Food of the gods is really about are the hidden, ahh, actors, that drugs lay upon us; that we are not even aware of - and if you are tempting to preserve an hallucinogenic mushroom in honey what you have to be aware of is that honey itself is potentially a psychoactive drug. Honey will turn into mead, .it will ferment into a crude kind of honeyd alcohol. Well, if the mushroom brings suppression of ego, group sexual activity and the formation of group values, what this alcohol brings.. Alcohol has two effects primarily, it lowers sensitivity to social queuing; at the same time that it it consents and exaggerated sense of verbal facility [audience laughs]. In other words people turn into jerks behind it. I mean you only have to go to a busy singles bar somewhere here in Boulder and you will see the alcohol ambiance being acted out right in front of you.So and", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-25", "text": "being acted out right in front of you.So and you know, it's not so true of our generation but I think probably for a thousand years nobody got laid in the western civilization unless they were juiced! Because christianity was laying such a heavy trip on everybody, people barely took their clothes off. In other words, you have to become blindly intoxicated to do what comes naturally..And I think up to very recently, how many women have their first sexual imprinting in an atmosphere of alcohol abuse- I mean, some huge percentage, I imagine. So that is the story basically of the fall into history. The loss of this mushroom cult happened right at the time we were inventing agriculture, and agriculture and the suppression of orgy have something in relationship to each other- on two unrelated levels. First of all- you suppress orgy because once you have agriculture - it's no more about psyching yourself up for the great hunt; It's all about getting up before dawn", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-26", "text": "great hunt; It's all about getting up before dawn and hoewing the wheat out of the crops- so it doesn't promote a party mentality[audience laughs]. The other thing is, that as human mental capacity was evolving -remember that exploding brain size- as human mental capacity was evolving, women in this nomadic groups began to notice a curious fact. Which was, every year they would return roughly to the same places they've been the year before, and in the discards from last year\u2019s camps they would discover food plants growing and some brilliant woman or group of women put it together and said AHA!. \u201cwe buried food here last year and now there's food here . There must be something about putting food down into the ground that gets you food\u201d\u2026\u2026\u2026..", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-27", "text": "Transcribed by Javier Alonso\n\n[0:36:00] gets you food, in other words they were able to cognise a cause and effect relationship that were separated over many months of time. At the same time that women were putting this together men were noticing that the act of sex had certain consequences nine months later.\n\nThe same perception had different impact on both sexes, but it was an ability to [00:36:30] coordinate a temporally separate cause and effect.\n\nWell once men got onto the notion of male paternity they realised that these aren't our children, some are mine and some are somebody else's and from that notion you go to \"my child\" to \"my woman\" to \"my hunting area\", to \"my weapon\" , to my sib group [00:37:02] you get it all you see, the ego is born, and it is born in an atmosphere of complete paranoia.\n\nThe first consequence of agriculture , well it has a number of consequences, but one consequence is Ah, it's a tremendously efficient way of producing food, that's obviously why people got into it. What does efficiency mean? Surplus! What does surplus mean? Haves and have nots. [00:37:30] The ole......the most spectacular architectural edifice of 10,000 BC on this planet was the grain tower of Jericho. It was had thick walls to hold the grain and it had high walls so you could climb up on top of it and drop rocks on the people who were trying to get into it. Surplus makes nomadism impossible cause you can't drag this huge amount of grain with you so you get sedentary populations and then [00:38:00] some of the people who want the grain are killing your people in fury when they can't get the grain , you decide to put a wall around the whole encampment.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-28", "text": "Now you have a small town , now you have urbanism, now you have the division between nature and secular society, you have classes, you've got it all. And I maintain that this is the long march into hell and our particular uh obsession with drugs [00:38:30] as a species, I maintain can be traced back to this transition that you know, yes elephants love fermented papayas and so do butterflys and so forth and so on, but this kind of intoxication is not what we're about. We addict severely to several dozen substances, less severely to probably a hundred more and we addict [ 00:39:00] to everything! [inaudible] You know. What we call romantic love uhh shows a lot of similarities to hard drug addiction when you separate the lovers. No... sleeplessness, suicidal tendencies, bursting into tears, hysteria, eh .. loss of weight. Can't tell whether this person is getting off heroin or eh has separated from uh their partner.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-29", "text": "Uh, well if you take an [00:39:30] individual who is alcoholic or or has some kind of serious drug problem, current thinking is this can be traced to traumatic abuse in childhood. This is what happened to us! Traumatic abuse in childhood, we were literally torn out of a symbiotic relation to the earth by the forces of male dominance, agriculture, sedentary living so forth and so on [00:40:00] and we've been trying to uh scratch an itch that we can't find ever since. And it has, you know, money doesn't do it, uh..power doesn't do it, nothing seems to do it. We cannot... we seem to be the unhappy monkey and we take this unhappiness out on each other .... with a vengeance. And uh you see what happened was that when the mushroom faded, the million years of [00:40:30] pharmacologically , interrupted patterns of male dominance reasserted themselves, but it was no more a foraging monkey with this style, it was a creature with language, tools, music , social organisation and suddenly it got very ugly, and people weren't, and people began fighting over the women. So we don't want to have orgies anymore, this woman is my woman, touch her you die, and [00:41:00] so forth and so on, and we are living out the legacy of this.\n\nWell before I talk about the [takes drink] the social consequences of it for us. I want to go back to the question....What was so great about it? I mean we've talked about orgy, but you can have orgy without psilocybin. What was so wonderful about that proto-historical mode? Well this is", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-30", "text": "where it becomes slightly more woo woo [00:41:30] .. uh [laughs] Because what we have to talk about is .... What is the Psychedelic experience anyway? And I maintain that if we're talking about psilocybin, and were talking about taking it in nature as these people did, that you know, yes first come the dancing mice , the little candies, the coloured grids and so forth and so on, but what eventually happens quickly, like ten minutes later is uh\u2026[0:42:00]\n\nTranscribed by Rodney Aries\n\nuhh there is an entity in the trance, in the vision. There is a mind there waiting that speaks good english, that invites you up into its room ... and once there uhh you realise that this is what all the hooflah about the Gaian mind and the rebirth of the goddess and all that is about. It's not a metaphor [42:30] folks, it's a headline in biology. We are not the only intelligent minded species occupying this planet. We may be the only bipedal hairless mammal with intelligence on this planet but there is something out there spread through the grasses, the forests, the rivers and the oceans. Uhh our own own emergence into intelligence took less than [43:00] two million years.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-31", "text": "Life has been on this planet for a billion and a half years and we don't know how many strange pathways beckon but at some point a kind of mind came into existence and it is real. It's what lies behind the religious impulse in our species. Uhh there really is somebody else sharing the local mind space and I [43:30] don't believe we're talking theology here. In other words this is not eh y-you know in Milton's wonderful phrase, \"...the God who hung the stars like lamps in Heaven\". It's not about that. For me that's a big questionmark. But it is the god\\goddess of this earth. It is the biological mind. It is that all boundaries are illusions and that life is a thinking [44:00] feeling entelechy of some sort and we are just like a little droplet that has somehow escaped from the river of cognition and now imagine that we are the only water in the cosmos. Not so it turns out.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-32", "text": "What, the reason the reason the psychedelic experience is so baffling and transformative, even as we sit here with your heads full of Heidegger and Husserl and uh I don't know [44:30] Wilson Phillips and all the stuff is because uh in the face, in contact with that we have no more sophistication than our orthiastic mushroom munching ancestors. Civilization doesn't give you a leg up on this step. In fact it makes it harder to figure out what's going on eh because we have defined nature as dead. You know? Scr- Atoms screaming through empty space [45:00] ruled by tensor equations of the third degree. That's our picture of what nature is. That isn't what it is. It's uh a-a mind of some sort. Okay. W-what is the implication of all this? Is this just some kind of fringe oh uh anthropological revisionism? No, it isn't because the-the fall into history and its consequences is at this point a loaded [45:30] gun held to the head of the entire plant. We are about to uh pull over the soup cauldron and if we do this then two and a half billion years of evolutionary advance will be shot. Nobody else ever dropped the ball so you know we appear to be vying for uhh this peculiar honour. If we do not awaken to [46:00] the consequences of ego then we are going to run this system right over the edge.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-33", "text": "The whole thing which characterises our dilemma as a global society is our inability to feel - feel the consequences of what we are doing. You know? We've got the data, the ozone hole is disappearing, the planktonic life in the sea will die if it does, that will disrupt the food chain. The world [46:30] food supply will drop by sixty percent. Everybody who isn't white as a sheep will have to starve in that case and uh so forth and so on. I mean we actually toy not only with our own extinction but with the extinction of all life on the planet and with the extinction with the idea of dignity and decency itself. Well, I'm not in this psychedelic game because I think it's easy, or because uh I think it's going to be a cinch. I'm in it because [47:00] I think it's the only game in town.\n\nYou know if hortatory preaching could have done the trick then \"the sermon on the mount\" would have turned the corner. Uh if if uh uhh cautionary data flowing back to its ruling institutions could do the trick then sometime uh after Thomas Malthus people would have begun to hit the brakes. Nothing seems to work. We're sick. We need pharmacological [47:30] intervention. The ego is uh out permitting us to slowly, not so slowly commit suicide and you know the fact that we cannot act collectively. That we are suspicious of all forms of collectivism. That we uh really are eh-\"all for one, and one for all\" is not our style. Instead what we have going is a catfight [48:00]\n\nTranscribed by Marc Van Niekerk", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-34", "text": "\u2026(0:48:00)...and, you know, no less a straight person than Arthur Koestler, in a book called The Ghost In The Machine said humans are so wired for beating the brains out of woolly mastodons, that\u2019s what evolution has equipped us to do; not negotiate weapons treaties and destroy bacteriological factories. We have to force our evolution. (0:48:30) We have to chemically restructure the primate brain so that we do not commit suicide. And the only way to do it in the time left is for the psychedelic community to stand up on it\u2019s hind legs and roar. And you know, maybe they\u2019ll build camps for us. But the point being I think there\u2019s a moral imperative to try what works! I mean, you know in the 60\u2019s psychedelics were called \u201cconsciousness expanding drugs\u201d, (0:49:00) a good old phenomenological description. Well, if consciousness does not loom large in the future history of our species then what the hell kind of future is", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-35", "text": "our species then what the hell kind of future is it going to be? No future at all I maintain. So, if there is even the slightest iota of possibility that these things do what I\u2019m saying they do, then we need to get Johnny-Quick on it and check it out. (0:49:30) Because we may be beyond the point of no return right now. Nobody knows how bad this ozone hole thing is, or what\u2019s locked up at Rocky Flats or behind the Iron Curtain or dumped in the Arctic Ocean. We may be past the failsafe point right now folks. There is no time to lose. It is time to engage the powers-that-be in a little more serious dialog than the \u201cjust say no\u201d horseshit that\u2019s been pedaled recently. (0:50:00) Because we\u2019re talking about the survival of life on the only planet that we are at certain has life on it. This may be the site of a cosmic experiment with universal implications and it rests in", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-36", "text": "cosmic experiment with universal implications and it rests in our hands.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-37", "text": "Everybody here tonight is here because a whole bunch of people didn\u2019t drop the ball. (0:50:30) And you know, you think you got problems? Nine times in the last million years the ice has moved south from the poles miles thick. No antibiotics, no electronic communication, nothing, and I\u2019m sure these people were miserable, and they dragged through it and they lived. And they passed it on, now we\u2019re it. And we will be judged the lamest of the lame (0:51:00) if we cannot come to terms with this and begin to talk about what is going on. This is not obscure. As I said I view the psychedelic experience as central to humanness as our sexuality. We cannot allow dominator institutions to infantilize us and to tell you where your mind can and cannot go. \u2018Even have a piece of paper locked up in a vault in Washington DC (0:51:30) that guarantees life, liberty and pursuit of happiness. Well now what can the pursuit of happiness possibly mean if it doesn\u2019t mean the freedom to practice your own relationship to nature and it\u2019s gifts?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-38", "text": "So I think we have been entirely too casual about the importance of the psychedelic experience. This is, for one reason, because we cannot publically get together and discuss it in detail. (0:52:00) And one of the things I think is very important about get-togethers like this is if you would look around you\u2019ll notice that we cannot really be distinguished from the rest of society. Some of us live under bridges, some of us clip coupons, you know there\u2019s a wide spectrum of people here. But this is your affinity group. This is your community. (0:52:30) Someone in this room actually has what you need. And you know, I have acted as a filter so out of millions living along the front range, here we\u2019ve gotten it down to two hundred. I can\u2019t get go any further than that folks. the rest is up to you.\n\nWell, I guess the last thing I want to say and then we\u2019ll take a little intermission (0:53:00) and then come back and do questions afterwards, which is my favorite part. But I want to just for a minute invoke the psychedelic experience without regard to the evolutionary forces that created it, or the political institutions that suppress it, and so forth, and just say, in case there\u2019s some soul in this room that\u2019s never had this experience, that this is extraordinary news. (0:53:30) We are not talking about something like a dream. It is not like meditation. No you can\u2019t get there by yourself. And Baba Gee is equally useless, because you and Baba Gee are starting from the same place in this game. It requires pharmacological perturbation of ordinary neuro chemistry in order to see this mystery.\n\nTranscribed by Kevin Evans", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-39", "text": "Transcribed by Kevin Evans\n\n[0:54:00] And it is a mystery. It is not gonna be reduced to the firing of synapses or repressed sexual desires or day residues or anything like that. It is uh the very thing we call this religions yammering about. It\u2019s there. It\u2019s real. I mean, if you think if the world is empty of adventure then you just haven\u2019t been hanging out with the right crowd.[audience laughs] I mean, [0:54:30] on a saturday night, within the confines of your own apartment, on five grams of psilocybin mushrooms in silent darkness, I guarantee you, you will believe that [inaudible] should place second place to you. [audience laughs]. You will see things which no human being has ever seen before, and that no human being will ever see again. That is how big [0:55:00] that universe is. The -can be- incredibly constricting space time locus of here and now that evolutionists forced upon us for survival purposes, is simply one point in an apparently infinite hologram of explorable data that is the human world. I mean the [uh], you know, the entire world of every science fiction novel or story ever written is miniscule [0:55:30] compared to the universes of strangeness and peculiarity that are accessible to anyone of us, if you will, but apply the methods. And if you're not willing to apply the methods then you know, you're gonna sweep up around the [inaudible] till hell freezes over [audience laughs] and not understand what\u2019s going on. [audience laughs] [laughs].", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-40", "text": "I mean I think, you know [0:56:00] I-I\u2019m sorry to be so hard on religion. [audience laughs] I think it has it\u2019s place, it places it\u2019s inspirations of - of ethical behaviour, you know religion should teach ethical behaviour. But is has very, very little to say about the mystery of being of other than that it\u2019s there. And that\u2019s not practicing religion. Practicing religion is dancing with the mystery. [0:56:30] Losing and finding yourself in the mystery. And people often say to me you know, well this- how does this relate to other forms of spiritual work? The answer is: maybe not at all. I mean I\u2019ve certainly taken a lot of psychedelics and I think I see no sign of spiritual attainment uh of ethical perceptions or anything so wa-de-da as that. I don\u2019t know what this is [0:57:00] all about but I do know it\u2019s ours. It belongs to us. We are the creatures of mind. And 95% of what mind is lies on the other side of the psychedelic, eh boundary. Ordinary consciousness is just like keeping the account of live. But there\u2019s more to life than the account books. I mean everything else is out there. The colour, [0:57:30] the affection, the humour, the terror, the mystery, the incredible strangeness of it all. This is the domain that we want to claim and explore. And if we can find the collective institutional courage to do it. I think this current planetary crisis will be seen for what it really is. And what it is is, it is not a dime, these are not the last rights for intelligence, this is a birth process.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-41", "text": "[0:58:00] I mean if you were to come around, if you\u2019ve never seen someone give birth and you came around the corner and it was in progres, you would be thoroughly, profoundly alarmed. I mean it looks like an enormous tumour is making it\u2019s way out of somebody and they are being split in two and blood is being shed and there's pleading and screaming and thrashing, It would be a real leap of understanding for you too say: \u201cOh how wonderful, new life [audience laughs] [0:58:30] is emerging, this is the way we do it!\u201d Well this is the way we do, I mean we are in the birth canal, right now of a planetary civilization. Literally the amniotic oceans of 500 years ago, that\u2019s all gone. There is no frontier, there is no going back. Th-the peace of the fetal environment is gone and now in transition literally the walls are closing in. [0:59:00] You can\u2019t breathe, you can\u2019t eat, you can\u2019t find your way, it appears to be the end. But there\u2019s light at the end of the tunnel. The problem is, that tunnel is in the back of your mind. And if you don\u2019t go to the backside of your mind you will never see the light at the end of the tunnel. And once you see it then it the task becomes to empower it in yourself and other people. Spread it as a reality. God di-did not retire to the seventh heaven. God is some kind of lost continent in the human mind. And if we will but explore the human mind we can reclaim these relationships with our own authenticity and shed the childishness of historical existence and euh gender politics and all the rest of it and move on to the real business of establishing a real civilisation. Thank you very much! [audience claps] [1:00:00]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-42", "text": "Transcribed by Matthijs Pals\n\n1:00:00(..audience clap.) Does anyone want to ask a question? Or is it all just perfectly clear out of the convincing and urm..\n\nTerence: Yea?\n\nAudience: (inaudible question)\n\nTerence: urm.. Psilocybin? Bad effect.. (drinks water)..Huh.. somebody once said, \u201cwhat\u2019s wrong with DMT?\u201d and i said, \u201cwell nothing, unless you fear death by astonishment.\u201d (audience laughter) (Terence Mckenna laughing) 1:00:30..(uhm).. But..but your question is a good one, first of all..uhm.. You know I talked a lot about how what we will have to do is destroy and ablate ego. However, there is a very small percentage of us who have a hard time creating any ego whatsoever. And this...for these people boundary dissolution is no problem, their boundaries are dissolving all the time on them. I would say that they are at the (umm)\n\n1:01:00..(uhmm) contraindicated end of the spectrum. That if you\u2019re fearful already and fighting to keep overwhelmed by confusion and what\u2019s going on in your life at the paper box factory or something.. (inaudible audience laughter) Then probably tossing in megadoses of hallucinogens is not the way for you to do it, or if you do, if you\u2019re just advance on doing that then i would say umm..", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-43", "text": "1:01:30..do it in the presence of some kind of professional and how you find a professional in this legal climate you\u2019ll have to discuss with me privately. Uhm..uh., i don't want to make it sound though, i mean it\u2019s a tricky thing. I don\u2019t want to make it sound like it\u2019s absolutely riskless. Physically; I think that\u2019s pretty safe. Unless you are odd some way. But you need to know. You know you..you don't wanna find out your odd an hour and half into it. (..Audience laughter..)\n\n1:02:00..But the problem comes with the mind, if you are delicately balanced, if your whole life has been about not looking at that, or that or that (audience laughter) then this is not your game. (Audience laughter).. You know you should go back to watching Jeopardy, and.. (Audience laughter).. The kind of person.. The kind of person who is called to this is..\n\n1:02:30..the person who has an exploring soul. I mean, my , i am not a courageous person in the sense that you won't find me shooting white water, you won't see me you know repelling down the faces of cliffs, but from the time i was the tiniest little kid, i was into the weird. What\u2019s weird? Weird is the compass heading..\n\n1:03:00..and if you keep your compass always pointed towards the peculiar, the oppressed, the bizarre, the unspeakably alien then you know you will find these places. (Audience laughter.) The people who think life is all cut and dried and they\u2019re perfectly happy to have Carl Sagan and George Bush explain all off reality. (Audience laughter). Have never left the broad swift stream of mundane thinking. But you know out", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-44", "text": "1:03:30..in the by way and in tributaries (ahh..) there is a wonderful alchemical saying which i generally mangle..but i think it goes something like this; the tallest mountain, the oldest book, the wisest desert.. there you will find the stone. And what it is? It is a prescription for exploring weirdness. That\u2019s all. It's\u2019 not gonna be on MTV. It's not going to be in god forbid; Esquire. (audience laughter)\n\n1:04:00..It\u2019s going to come, umm.. From you know ..It\u2019s going to come from doing your homework, visiting strange people in strange lands and checking it out. The.. What i can\u2019t give you to return to your question is, i can\u2019t give you a guarantee that it will be fun. You know, The Rolling Stones have that wonderful line, \u201cyou don't get what you want, you get what you need\u201d. This stuff is ruthless. And if there\u2019s..something that you're trying not to look at 1:04:30..that\u2019s gonna get you, for sure. But after the veteran, most people will tell you you learn more from the bad trip than you do from the good one, the good ones are ecstatic and can connect you up to nature and other people the bad one show you your ..your kinks. And your limitations, and your thought errors.. And that sort of thing. It's not a easy road to hold. That\u2019s why i think uhm..", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-45", "text": "1:05:00..there\u2019s a little bit of social confusion about it. One of the things i should make clear is i really advocate high doses, rarely. I think the worst thing you can do is get into a style of psychedelic didling. Where you know you take half a gram everyday. Wh.. All this is doing is giving you a tolerance to psilocybin. You\u2019re not having the psilocybin experience. You\u2019re having the tolerance to.. 1:05:30-1:06:00..psilocybin experience. The.. Really, the way to do these things, is to (urm..) do them rarely so that your whole system can reassert itself and come to equilibrium and then just slam it! (Audience laughter..) And this is amazing, i mean i think..i think that this works for all the psychedelics. I'm a.. I\u2019m an inveterate cannabis user and i wish in a way that i could get a..\n\nTranscribed by Azlan\n\n1:06:00.. In a way that i could get a slightly better grip on my cannabis use because .. the rea..i think the real way to do cannabis is like.. Once a week.. By yourself.. In silent darkness.. With the strongest stuff you can get.. And then immense amounts of it.. (..audience laughter..) and.. You know.. People call it a recreational drug and a this..and a that...hey...Done that way.. It will", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-46", "text": "1:06:30.. Catapult you into places where its.. It.. i love it.. The great place to get to on cannabis and some people never in their whole life touch it, is the place where you say, \u201cMy god! I\u2019ve done..too much!\u201d. (..audience laughter..) (..Terence Mckenna laughing..).. It's not easy folks, but it.. It\u2019s worth shooting for.. (..audience laughter..) Basically what..\n\n1:07:00.. What you should do is.. You know.. Do some homework.. Read some book.. Talk to your friends. And then hang on Hannah.. (..audience laughter..) It..It\u2019s like.. Ah.. you know.. It's very much like riding an enormous roller coaster. You know.. Once fat baby rolls out of the station.. Do not stand up.. Do not try to climb out of your car. (..audience laughter..) Shut up and hang on! With the faith that most people\n\n1:07:30.. have lived through this. (..audience laughter..)\n\nTerence: somebody else.. Yea? The purple.\n\nAudience: (..inaudible question..)\n\nTerence: Well.. having just heard that i am a pothead please ask them one at a time (..audience laughter..) What is your first literary question? (..audience laughter..)\n\nAudience: (..inaudible question..)\n\n1:08:00.. (..audience laughter..)\n\nAudience: (..inaudible question..(..I mean my associate experience..)\u2026 inaudible question..)\n\n1:08:30.. Terence: Well.. i don\u2019t mean to imply that people first use it in low doses and then middle and then higher over time. What i mean..", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-47", "text": "1:09:00.. What i meant to imp.. I think they were using low, middle and high doses from the very get go. But they were using low doses to hunt.. Middle range doses for orgy and ceremony and truly high doses for this boundary dissolving tremendum.\n\nTerence: Second literary question.\n\nAudience: (..inaudible question....)\n\nTerence: ..Ahuh.. Well....I\u2019m...I\u2019m not wedded to that. First of all,\n\n\u00c7atalh\u00f6y\u00fck\n\nfor those who haven\u2019t read the book. Or know\n\n1:09:30.. about\n\n\u00c7atal\n\n.. Was this immensely sophisticated civilization that existed in the 7th millennium BC. We\u2019re talking .,. Three tho.. We\u2019re talking six thousand (6000) years before (..uhh..) zero (0). This civilization existed and was destroyed.. And the.. (.. urm..)Characteristic of it is, shrine dedicated to cattle. And in my book i argued that this was probably..\n\n1:10:00..the last outpost of this partnership, society.. Ahh.. but it would still..I think the real golden age of mushroom use was probably from about thirty thousand (30,000) years ago to about fifteen thousand (15,000) years ago and by the time\n\n\u00c7atalh\u00f6y\u00fck ..\n\nso long.. it\u2019s a fading, or yearly, or seasonal saying..\n\nAudience: (..inaudible question..)\n\n1:10:30..Audience: (..inaudible question..)\n\n1:11:00..Audience: (..inaudible question..)\n\nTerence:Well.. I..urm..\n\nAudience: (..inaudible..)\n\nTerence: My argument would be that people don\u2019t take enough and they don\u2019t take it frequently enough. That.. there are a lot of people..", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-48", "text": "1:11:30 - 1:12:00.. Who..who.. Really would rather not.. Get loaded.. But still they must take some psychedelic drug in order to keep membership in their peer group. So what they did, you know.. You can always spot these people.. Because their first question..on..at the get go is, \u201cwill i be able to drive?\u201d.. I love this question. (..audience laughter..) because.. You know it indicates you got a real tough nut on your hand..in every sense of the word...No..!..You will not..\n\nTranscribed by Azlan\n\n1:12:00.. No.. You will not be able to drive. (..audience laughter..) ahh.. So, you know, I.. One of the things that inspires me to do this, is.. I want to get to the people who\u2019ve taken three (3) grams of mushrooms and the people that have taken 150 mics.. Of LSD .. and i want to convince those people that they never got close to what i\u2019m talking about even though they have a life transforming experiences softly..\n\n1:12:30.. totally, differently.. They never got close to what i\u2019m talking about. And so what you have to do is to convince people to take high doses and then..that\u2019s to break them through.. And then frequently enough that they don\u2019t forget. What the deal is.. So i think if you take a psychedelic population and divide into those who have done 5 grams and above, then you will see an exceptional.. Uhm.. slice.. But not the dabblers..\n\n1:13:00.. The dabblers don\u2019t count. And we all can be or at times guilty of this. (..audience laughter..)\n\nTerence: Is that your last question? (..Terence laughing..) That do it for you? (..audience laughing..)", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-49", "text": "Terence: Or do you wanna be thought psychotic? You choose. (..audience laughing..) (..Terence laughing..)\n\nAudience: (..inaudible question..)\n\nTerence: (..Terence laughing..) Well.. i love competition, i mean.. I .. (..audience laughing..) The..\n\n1:13:30.. The.. competition is terrible, that\u2019s the entire basis of my success. (..Terence laughing..) (..audience laughing..)\n\nTerence: Yeah? No.. Because you were before.. If you still wish..\n\nAudience: (..inaudible..)\n\n1:14:00.. Audience: (..inaudible..)\n\nTerence: Right..\n\nAudience: (..inaudible..)\n\nTerence: Why? Because.. I mean i don\u2019t know if its preferable.. But here\u2019s the thing.. People are going to think you\u2019re a nut, if you come down and say.. That Johan Sebastian Bach or Jerry Garcia is God. And this is what you will have to say..\n\n1:14:30.. If you listen to the dead.. Or the B Minor Map. So.. So.. What i am interested in.. is.. Iss. uhh.. I want to know the thing in itself. Not what it does to Bach.. Not what it does to river flowing through a forest at a valley. I wanna see what it can do with darkness. And silence.. And i think most people think it will be boring..", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-50", "text": "1:15:00.. Probably because they\u2019ve been hanging out with BDI groups, meditating and god knows there\u2019s nothing more boring on earth than most meditation. (..audience laughter..) however.. Psychedelic sitting in a dark in a room on five (5) dried grams of psilocybin mushroom is nothing like meditating and that\u2019s where it can get at you. My relationship to it is always one of.. \u201cI wanna know what it is..\u201d and so i think this sensory..\n\n1:15:30..deprivation method is the only way to get at that.. Other people might not like that.. People say.. Well you mean, put down the whole thing of going into nature? Isn\u2019t nature the great affirmation in all this? And the answer is, yea.. But it works for me sort of without the drug.. Plus and this is just maybe my own weirdness, but i\u2019ll share it with you. I know this that these things are incredibly disruptive of..of..the ordinary\n\n1:16:00.. flow of casuistry.. You all know the concept synchronicity? Well.. if you don\u2019t stay in your room with the lights out and the phone unplugged and the damndest things will happen to you. I mean you couldn\u2019t pay me to go into an american city even mildly loaded because adventures beckon. Now some people like that.. (..audience laughter..) some people say you know.. Let\u2019s take 500 mics, and go meet..\n\n1:16:30.. weird people.. (..audience laughter..) (..ah..Uhh..)...not this cookie..\n\nTerence: Yea?\n\nAudience: (..inaudible..)\n\n1:17:00.. Audience: (..inaudible..)", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-51", "text": "1:17:00.. Audience: (..inaudible..)\n\n1:17:30 - 1:18:00.. Audience: (..inaudible..)\n\nTerence: Are you asking me, \u201cDo i think a homeopathic preparations of a psychedelic would be effective?\u201d. (..umm..) It would be homeopathically effective.. I wouldn\u2019t expect it to be experientially effective..\n\nAudience: (..inaudible..)\n\nTranscribed by Azlan\n\n[1:18:00]\n\nAudience: Question?(inaudible) regarding homeopathic preparations of psychedelics\n\nTerence: But don\u2019t you think that if it were true and since in a high dilution like that no molecular trace of the original compound remains, that you have just found the solution to the illegalization conundrum.\n\naudience : \u2026(inaudible) we\u2019re getting a lot of political slack for having medicines out there but homeopathy is being passed over as weird.\n\nTerence: Because in a materialist world it\u2019s assumed to be bogus.\n\n[audience laughs]\n\nTerence: Right, Yeah\n\nAudience: same woman continuing her question\n\nTerence: Well this seems to me not an abstract proposition at all let the best homeopaths sucuss the strongest hallucinogens and set them out and let's give it a whirl\n\n[audience laughs]\n\nTerence: Over on this side, yeah.\n\nAudience: This question may be too personal, or an embarrassment to answer, but..\n\nTerence: Oh I can hardly wait !\n\nAudience: Why are you not in jail?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-52", "text": "Terence: Oh I can hardly wait !\n\nAudience: Why are you not in jail?\n\nTerence: Ahhhhh\u2026. Why am I not in jail? hmmm. Well that\u2019s an interesting question. And I , uh, number one I don\u2019t know, here\u2019s what I\u2019ve come up with.Uh, notice that I use big words.\n\n[audience applause]\n\nTerence: I don\u2019t boil, I don\u2019t try to boil it down to a shoutable slogan like \u201cturn on, tune in, drop out\u201d uh uh that, that, then they come, they come, uh, so that\u2019s one possibility. That simply if you are defined in their eyes as an intellectual then they automatically put you in the harmless category and send resources elsewhere. That\u2019s one possibility. Now the other possibility is slightly more disturbing but in the interest of thoroughness let me raise it. Uh, perhaps I\u2019m sanctioned. Perhaps they decided \u201cwe don\u2019t really understand what this stuff is, and we can\u2019t have a mass movement, but let one guy just kind of keep the pilot on in case we ever change our minds about this, he will have kept the pilot light on\u201d. Uh, and the other possibility, which is probably too naive but in the interest, again, of exhaustive thoroughness. Maybe they just haven\u2019t noticed yet? You know, Tim Leary, who is a friend of mine would address 25,000 people at a throw. My crowds are, you know, a couple of times a year they creep over a thousand. And I think the key is to keep it low-key. And we don\u2019t want to you know, Dodger Stadium filled or anything like that.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-53", "text": "It\u2019s very good to atomize it and spread it through, now the other thing is, you know, I advocate plant hallucinogens. And people always say, \u201cwell why, what about LSD, I mean, didn\u2019t LSD change your life? Didn\u2019t LSD change your life? Didn\u2019t LSD change all our lives? Why aren\u2019t you into LSD?\u201d and the answer is certainly yes, and yes. The reason I\u2019m not into LSD is a, a uhhh\u2026 not having to do with the effects of LSD, which I think are marvelous. But with the fact that, uh, a, a couple of enterprising second year biochemistry students can produce six or seven million hits in a long weekend. Six or seven million hits of an illegal drug? Suddenly, this is the realm of governments and criminal syndicates and revolutionary disruption of populations. My brethren, I wrote \u201cpsilocybin: the magic mushroom growers guide\u201d if you work like a dog for six months, maybe you can produce, uh\u2026 2 or 3 thousand hits. So, that\u2019s the thing. LSD had chemical qualities that made it terrifying to the government, I mean, anybody with 50,000 dollars worth of backing and uh, uh, uh an educat,... 2 years of biochemistry could turn themselves into a major threat to political stability in this country. So they slammed that. They\u2019re not going to put up with that.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-54", "text": "The thing I love about the mushrooms is that, if you\u2019re a dedicated mushroom grower, you produce this piddling amount, and if they come and drag you away because it is illegal, all they get is you. No\u2026 no\u2026 syndicate collapses. No pyramid disappears. So, its invasive. And low-key, and slowly spreading. The other thing is, mushrooms are, this is a cultural thing, mushrooms are inherently non-threatening. They\u2019re absurd , you know, they\u2019re what we, they\u2019re what we put decals of on serving trays and bath towels, bare [1:24:00] mushrooms on them. It's a kind of silly thing.\n\nTranscribed by Joseph Sadaka\n\n\u201cAnd uh, bath towels [1:24:00] bear mushrooms on them - It\u2019s a kind of silly thing. And uh, and so I think that they don\u2019t really understand what a powerful hallucinogen this is. Well that\u2019s enough on why I\u2019m not in the can. [*points at audience member*] This woman, yeah?\n\nAudience Member: \u201c[inaudible] Uhm, you talk about the uh.. the evolutionary processes how it\u2019s encourage by the \u2018essence?\u2019 of the the mushrooms [inaudible] to be, uh, more creative and beneficial process if we worked on evolving our minds without using an external drug, what happens if the government does come in and decide to [inaudible] and we can\u2019t access that same consciousness anymore and then things, you know they could be set backwards again, wouldn\u2019t it be so much more productive to teach people how to get there without the drug?\u201d", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-55", "text": "Terence: \u201cAbsolutely if we could do it, I mean I\u2019m not yet convinced, see. I mean you\u2019ve got your guru\u2019s, but, if you ever get close to any of these people in these guru scenes, close enough where you can just say to them: \u201cLook, level with me, is this stuff as good as 5 grams in silent darkness?\u201d And they say: \u201cHuh, are you serious?\u201d [audience laugh] Uh, the other possibility is technology, uh on two fronts. Mind Machines. The problem with mind machines is, you know, you have to smoke a bomber or two to put up with it more than ten minutes [audience laughs] eh, I mean you quickly satisfy yourself that, this can\u2019t possibly be it. Because it.. it, it is life, and it, but it is contentless.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-56", "text": "Well the psychedelic experience is all content. The other possibility - and I put in some time in this beat, is uh, virtual reality. And I have more hope for virtual reality because virtual reality is a technology for showing, for, that would allow us to show each other the insides of our head. Our dreams, our vision. And I think that sufficiently perfected, it might have the consequences of, of the psychedelics. The problem is, it carries a huge amount of negative freight. You know that it\u2019s not gonna be a tool for us to show each other the inside of our minds. It\u2019s gonna be a tool to sell us crap that we don\u2019t want. It\u2019s gonna be a tool for yet more realistic vicarious an gratuitous vile and.. It\u2019s going to be a tool for more pornographic degradation of women. [audience chuckles] So, it seems to me while it holds out the possibility of a technically driven psychedelic, it has a lot of negative freight. I agree with your premise, I.. But I\u2019m driven by a tremendous sense of urgency. I mean why try to create a technical alternative to psilocybin, when you g\u00f3t psilocybin!\n\nAudience member: \u201c[inaudible] like, I think that people should use mushrooms as, a tech. And what if people there who try, and keep going without, without that tool. Cause, I mean cause what we, what we want, i mean, we wanna transcend.. this plane, we wanna be on a higher plane, a higher state of awareness and you\u2019re not, you\u2019re not gonna get to that plane ultimately if you have to keep coming back into the plane, to get the stuff, to get out of the plane again", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-57", "text": "[Terence interjects:] \u201cWell how about uh, how about this: Maybe there\u2019s something wrong with that metaphor. Because notice it had to do with planes and transitions, it\u2019s an inherently dualist metaphor.\u201d\n\n[Official-sounding tape transition lady:] \u201cThis concludes tape one. Our program continues with tape 2\u201d\n\n[Terence:] \u201cWell how about uh, how about this: Maybe there\u2019s something wrong with that metaphor. Because notice it had to do with planes and transitions, it\u2019s an inherently dualist metaphor. How \u2018bout if we say, uh\u2026 There is no inside and outside. There is no with or without. Uh, you just use what you got, whatever works should be used. I, I\u2026 Spend time in India and visited all these people and [inaudible] And I just became convinced that, unless you were predisposed to believing this stuff, that it would never carry you where you wanted it to. And one thing about psychedelics, you don\u2019t have to be predisposed. It doesn\u2019t work for those who believe it works, uh, it works for those who think it doesn\u2019t work.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-58", "text": "One last point and then we\u2019ll go on, uhm, there\u2019s a story, maybe you some of you know this story of uh, a man who lived by the side of a river. And he wanted to uh, he wanted to cross the river. So he, uh, practiced a siddhi of levitation so that he could walk across the water. And it took him forty years to perfect this siddhi and finally he could cross the river, and uh, Buddha was preaching in the neighborhood and the guy came to him and he said uh, \u201cMaster, look what I\u2019ve achieved, I can walk on the water to cross the river\u201d And Buddha said \u201cYeah but the ferry costs a nickel\u201d [Audience cracks up] Uh, and that\u2019s the thing, uh, I think, eh, we\u2019re not gonna replace this tool without wasting so much time in the act of replacing it, [1:30:00] that armageddon will catch up with us. \u201c\n\nTranscribed by Nils Van Der Hoeven\n\n1:30:00.. Act of replacing it that armageddon will catch up with us. I think we have to humble ourselves, so thoroughly that you have to admit that you can\u2019t get where you want to go unless you form a partnership with somebody whose idea of a good time is growing in a cow pie. And if you\u2019re willing to partner up with this humble..humble.. member of the ecosystem, then you and it can fly to glory..\n\nAudience : (..inaudible question..)\n\n1:30:30.. Terence: Have had it..\n\nAudience : (..inaudible question..)", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-59", "text": "Audience : (..inaudible question..)\n\nTerence: ..Yea, i wouldn\u2019t recommend it especially in the late stages of pregnancy doing anything that is gonna wildly perturb you, and you know LSD is discovered in the act of trying to produce better drugs to induce labour. So that\u2019s excellent advice..\n\n1:31:00.. honor the fetus. Urm.. Yea?\n\nAudience : (..inaudible question..)\n\nTerence: ..Yea?\n\nAudience : (..inaudible question..)\n\nTerence: ..Well, true and honest answer is, \u201chow the hell can you find out when they won't let you do research?\u201d It\u2019s totally insidious! We don\u2019t know..! We don\u2019t know because they will not..\n\n1:31:30.. allow (..um..) The.. the\u2026 research to be done. This is one of the reasons why I say that (..uh..) You should stick with (..urm..).. Shamanically sanctioned plants. Because we know for instance that people have been taking psilocybin in the Sierra Madre de Oaxaca Central Mexico for millennium. They don\u2019t show blindness, tumors, miscarriage, madness, cataract, whatever. That\u2019s your..\n\n1:32:00.. human data, for that. But you go to..Let\u2019s talk for a minute about something like ketamine. Nobody knows. Nobody has any data. MDMA.. seems to be tremendously effective in facilitating interpersonal stuff.. That\u2019s a psychological issue.. Chemically, what kind of data do we have? You know.. Six years worth of data.. gathered under the rag. So, (..uhh..) to be safe.. Stick with the things that are sanctioned..", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-60", "text": "1:32:30.. by human use.. And then, (..uhm..) somehow in the lighten future..We will explore these synthetics and find out just what the parameters are..\n\nTerence: Yea? Finish up..\n\nAudience: (..inaudible question..)\n\nTerence: No, i\u2019m nothing man. I\u2019m saying take things which have been sanctioned by human usage. I mean.. How about a plant like Strychnos nux-vomica..I mean you\u2019re..\n\n1:33:00.. dead in a minute and a half.. And it's a beautiful, wonderful plant.. Why did it kill you? Well, because it's jammed with strychnine, No.. it's nothing about it being a plant, it's about having a repeated history of human usage, that\u2019s what sanctifies it..\n\nTerence: Yea, the lady in magenta.\n\nAudience: (..inaudible question begins..)\n\n1:33:30.. Audience : (..inaudible question continues.. )\n\n1:34:00.. Audience : (..inaudible question continues.. )\n\n1:34:30.. Audience : (..inaudible question comes to an end.. )\n\nTerence: That\u2019s really an interesting point.. I mean....I..I...It never occurred to me, that somebody brought it up to me, they say, \u201chave you noticed the trips are changing?\u201d.. And once you do ask yourself this question, it does seems to be so. And.. I don\u2019t know whether that.. What..i mean that.. (..uhm..) These deep assertion i\u2019m not sure exactly what\u2019s going on. For instance, this goddess thing, I don\u2019t think people gave the goddess a thought in the early..1970..", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-61", "text": "1:35:00.. Late 1960.. Now.. people have, you know..some of the least likely people report intense encounters with the goddess.. So, is it amplifying the general mindset..of the society and so there\u2019s more goddess up there? Or.. i don't really know.. It's a very interesting question. There are more questions than answers. I mean this is definitely wide open stuff..! Yea..! Yea..\n\n1:35:30.. Audience : (..inaudible question..)\n\n1:36:00.. Audience : (..inaudible question..)\n\nTranscribed by Azlan", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-62", "text": "\"We're trying to restore the relationship of ego to the other components of the psyche that existed as recently as 12.000 years ago. The ego has become a deadly growth in the historical societies, exacerbated by the phonetic alphabet, monasteism, modern science. This is like you're getting sicker, and sicker, and sicker as you lay these things on, and so, the idea is that if we could restore the original diminished role of the ego that it has for that period, however long it was, that we could begin to solve our problems, because the problems which face us, put very simply, are going to demand sacrifice, and sacrifice is what the ego doesn't want to hear about, and when you go to somebody and say -look to save this planet we're going to have to redistribute income radically- I mean that everybody in this room is gonna to have less, we're going to have to honor a whole bunch of cultural positions that we previously just we're going to", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-63", "text": "cultural positions that we previously just we're going to bulldoze over, and so forth and son on. So it's ah-- it's the diminishing of ego, by any means necessary that lies to getting any grip on our problem, I mean if we continue as we are, I think we have probably less than 30 years before life is irreconcilable screwed up, you know, nobody believes that the future is ah.. rosy and wonderful, I mean if you go to the people of the world bank, and IMF and, these people who are straight you know suits all of them, they have a sort of curves which would stand your hair on it. When they propagate the curve of population, the curve of toxification of the environment, the curve related to the ozone hole this you see, you know, it's finished and sometime in the next 50 years. They don't talk about this because they don't want to panic the vast numbers of people who just go to work and raise their kids and pray", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-64", "text": "just go to work and raise their kids and pray somebody smarter is doing something about all this, but they don't believe there is any kind of normal future and I don't either, I think we're going to, that this business as usual is not on the menu folks, we're either going to go to an era of immense resource scarcity, regimentation, governmental interference in our life\u2019s, tremendous propagandistic efforts to make us do one thing or another, or we're going to pull the plug on scientism and it's studious and the institutions which feed us, feed it.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-65", "text": "If capitalism is an interesting problem more easily discussed now than the communism is, how does the picture, capitalism is as anti-human philosophy as you can possibly conceive because at this very moment we should be consuming less, manufacturing less, selling less, transporting less and what's the battle cry? Free trade everywhere! What does free trade mean? It means my right to come to your country and sell the most outlandish junk you've ever seen and you will have no right to turn it away because in the name of free trade crapola has to go everywhere ah.. it's really, see, they try to tell you that capitalism and democracy are not at variance actually the whole Marxist-Leninist socialist thing was assidish, the real life and dead struggle is between capitalism and democracy. Democracy says everybody has an innate worth that must be honored, capitalism says does who die with the most toys win. You can not reconcile these two things, and nobody wants to talk about this,", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-66", "text": "things, and nobody wants to talk about this, we're still having the party over the fall of communism. But, you know, you go to the soviet union or the former areas or the soviet union and you see that what it was, it was a deep freeze for traditional culture. In Kurdisia and Turkmenistan people were basically camel husbandry, is whats going on, ah.. now with communism on the rocks ah mac donalds will be there in 5 years and k-mark will be following close behind. So, I think we're coming to a great crisis of fundamental ah.. our relation to our own fundamental institutions. I'm not anti-capitalist, I think capitalism needs to sever it's ah.. connection to materialism. This is again why virtual reality is interesting. You sell things made of light, not made of beryllium metal, brass, steel and wood but light. We got all the light we need but we have to stop making things out of stuff, or we're not gonna be around to", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-67", "text": "of stuff, or we're not gonna be around to tell the tale.\"", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-68", "text": "Transcribed by Nicole\n\n[Inaudible* question from audience] [1:42:00]\n\nNo i think that, you know revolutions are made by percentages uh if 15 or 20% changed [1:42:30] then the example would spread. You see, I, uh, we are not, uh, psilocybin is the easy way to awaken. YOu know, take a, take a psychedelic plant and have an experience and get your act together, but the future is full of sledgehammers. It\u2019s not going, we're not, we're not going to end with a whimper, it's going to end with a series of thuds and bangs. It could begin almost anytime. I mean we could get a hot muggy day in Mexico City this summer, and a million people would die. This thing in Los Angeles is a wake up call. It is going to get uglier and more chaotic and more crazy there is going to be more starvation, more facism, more dictatorship. THis is, unless we do something! Until we do something. And it can- how bad is it going to get?! before people say, you know, we are doing something wrong. People dance on the Russians, but you've got to admire people who have got the. The guts to say, \u201cwe did it entirely wrong!\u201d 100% I mean could you imagine this country? Being able to tj.. You know it may be coming.. It may be coming. The character from AUstin.. Is a peculiar item in the mix. You know?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-69", "text": "For years, i fantasy speech i always imagine that I was somehow end up giving but but it\u2019s it\u2019s theis speech where you say, \u201cMY fellow Americans, you have been lied to.\u201d Screwed and abused by these two criminal parties for a hundred years. And you're only hope is to overthrow the republicrats and create a decent world to live in. well no republican can make that speech no democratic can make that speech and be redible it was to be somebody that wasn\u2019t in bed with either of those forces. So i\u2019m not that all pleased by who apparently will bear the mantle, but on the other and it changes what we need, then if, if it\u2019s probably nothing to be a candidate that you can and i can embrace its going to be some odd ball. Oso you know you have to recognize it when we see it coming. Yeah.\n\n[Audience QUestion can;t hear it }First of all,\n\nTerence: No we don\u2019t know what it is.\n\ninaudible\n\nYah the great thing about is it can talk!\n\nGood for you. (terrence laughs)", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-70", "text": "Good for you. (terrence laughs)\n\nWell probably half at least in the room hasn't the faintest idea what the question is about. I stay away from this because this is the personalistic stuff were i created a certain model of reality based on a new way of looking at time and i don\u2019t want to go into it too much tonight. But i want to suggest something to you tonight which is that, cough, you know, uh,hm, at the very beginning at this talk we talked about mutation and natural selection and that , the darwin\u2019s insight was vast and deep, and what h offered was an explanation for how rainbow trout come to be, monarch butterflies, redwood trees, herds of elephants, so forth and so on. What it doesn\u2019t address is us. We are the weird bird on the block. I mean , yes we are some kind of monkey, but when you stand us next to our nearest relative it is very very clear that is is not a very near relative. It doesn't look like us much, certainly doesn't act like us.. What's the deal with human beings? And I think that uhm, it, you know how all these religions these western religions [1:48:00] have built in this idea of the end of the world\n\nTranscribed by Marina Quirk", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-71", "text": "Transcribed by Marina Quirk\n\nYou know how all these religions, these western religions have built in this idea of the end of the world and they\u2019re always running around expecting the messiah or something and this, to the scientific mind is just the final proof of the pudding that these people have water between the ears [audience laughs] because science just says you know \u2018that\u2019s just ridiculous\u2019, i mean uh but i wonder, i wonder, i mentioned just a minute a go these curves that when you propagate them into the future [1:48:30] everything leads to the unimaginable and it\u2019s within the next 50 years so uh I sorta think as human beings as uhh analogous to iron filings on a piece of paper and you shake these iron filings out of a salt shaker or something and there they lie randomly arranged in heaps.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-72", "text": "Well then you come underneath the paper with a powerful magnet and lo and behold these little [1:49:00] iron filings coherently arrange themselves into this beautiful double mustache pattern, which i'm sure you\u2019ve all seen well i think that there is a-an enormous punchline to the historical process that no- very very few people suspect and that what history is is what happens to an animal who falls under the influence of a kind of strange attractor and that we are being pulled into a well of transformative intentionality, history is not pushed by the casuistry of war, migration, imperial dynastic families and stuff like that, history is pulled toward an unimaginable something which is [1:50:00] continuously trying to mirror itself in us. This is why these egyptians said, you know, \u2018i don\u2019t know what it is, but i think we should really build a big simple building\u2019, [audience laughs], \u2018i don\u2019t know why. But i\u2019m gonna enslave 50,000 people and do it! And don\u2019t ask me why\u2019 [audience laughs].\n\nAnd you know this is the same force that reared Chartres Cathedral, this is the same force that created the space shuttle, we are in [1:50:30] a relationship to an unseen something which we keep trying to image with our mythologies, our religions, our technologies, our epiphanies and i think that uhh, it\u2019s not so far away. That it- it isn\u2019t 10,000 years in the future it is sometime in the next 50 years and that this is something what history was for, you see history is an incredibly\u2026[1:51:00] peculiar and brief phenomenon, i mean viewed from the point of view of biology it\u2019s less time than it takes for a new species to emerge, i mean let\u2019s call history 25,000 years.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-73", "text": "You know, in frame 1 you\u2019re chicken flint, in frame 2 you\u2019re hurling an instrument toward Alpha Centauri, [*Terence Clicks*], like that! -This happens. Well what\u2019s happening is that mind itself [1:51:30] is being pulled out of this creature and it\u2019s being given hands and languages and pos-symbolic systems in order to image the unspeakable, the unspeakable, I call it the transcendental object at the end of time, it casts- it\u2019s in another dimension, it\u2019s in a kind of super-space and what it casts into history is the enormous shadow of its imminence. [1:52:00] This is what straight people call god. This is what all these visionaries are raving about.\n\nIt\u2019s that when you sink below- beneath the surface of ordinary causality and mundane ho-hum-ism what you discover is this enormous transcendental object which you could call it, you know, the sacred heart of jesus or the, flying saucer or the, philosopher's stone, it\u2019s all of those things and much much more, [1:52:30] it\u2019s not only stranger than you suppose, it\u2019s stranger than you can suppose and it has called us out of animal organisation over a 25,000 year period we hang in the balance and then we meet it. And we are going to meet it. That\u2019s the light at the end of that birth canal of transcendence that i referred to... And now i see that our song is sung, our time is done. Thank you very very much for turning in. [1:53:00] [audience claps] Thank you!\n\n[audience inaudible]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-74", "text": "[audience inaudible]\n\n\u2122: Yeah we will dig into this in the uhh interim, uhh [1:53:30] i think the, -it\u2019s- it\u2019s worth taking the time for everybody to just make a very brief, very very brief statement about, you don\u2019t have to say who you are if you don\u2019t want to, but you can say what you\u2019re hoping for or why you\u2019re here or what your agenda is.Just so that if it turns out that we are 80% shrinks or 80% ceramicists or something [1:54:00] then we turn it that way.\n\nTranscribed by Jonathan Laliberte\n\n[1:54:00]..or eighty percent ceramicists or something, then we turn it that way and uh, those of you who are undercover please stay undercover so you don\u2019t alarm anybody [audience laughing]..euh..., especially me, right?...euh. So why don\u2019t we just start euh..uhm, and go across in some reasonably logical fashion, it.\n\n[TM: yeah?]\n\n[man with inaudible question]\n\n[TM: Well that, tells you what you\u2019re worth , doesn\u2019t it?]\n\n[1:54:30]..[Terence giggles, audience laughing]\n\nOh, true...No. Let\u2019s not record it so people, and uhm, also I had at one point [takes a small sip from something] thought I would be an art historian.That was one of my real obsessions. So I had..had enough art history to be trained in, you know, recognising the evolution of motif, how one artist passes on techniques and can see,.. to his students or his..", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-75", "text": "[1:55:00].. imitators, and all this art-historical stuff. And I also..uh..had been very interested in Jung. And...and none of this seem to explain the content of the psychedelic experience i would get in there and say, well.. How come, i\u2019m not seeing a archetype?.. and be things which somebody else.. You know.. I don\u2019t know.. Ali Ensor. Therabagio Baugh..\n\n[1:55:30].. Somebody should have seen this stuff.. And gotten it out. And it didn\u2019t seem to be..uhh..a trail through the history of western art of the present of this dimension. So then i thought why is it that nobody knew about all this? I mean, Baugh would have given his right arm for a sheet of blotter I would think.. Euh.. So it became for me like a mystery, whe..\n\n[1:56:00].. where is this stuff coming from.. And what does it say about our humanness?\n\n[TM: yea?]\n\n[man with inaudible question]\n\nWell, there.. There\u2019s a lot of being completely still over Baughs because he is such a startlingly radical painter in the context of his time. Many of his conceive were digged up after his life.\n\n[1:56:30].. Uh.. T.L. Breko the elder being the foremost exponent of it.., he may have been an alchemical guinea pig. Euh.. Who. euh.. Frazier.. I think.. Wrote the book called the \u201cMillennium of (..inaudible..) Baughs\u201d in which he wanted to suggest that maybe that Datura use, that there was a cult called the brotherhood of the free spirit. And which practice ritual nudity..", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-76", "text": "[1:57:00].. Which begins to sound something like the orgies we talked about last night. It was a cult of printers. And it may be that Garden of free spirit but this is all pretty murky stuff, it\u2019s hard to get back to Baughs, euhh.. Euhh.. he didn\u2019t leave any written records we have, his birth is recorded in the perished church where.. In the village..\n\n[1:57:30].. where he was born.. We know he was born sometime around 1450 died in 1516.. But the details are pretty murky.. Well.. not to belabour Baughs, euhh.. So what i thought would be a reasonable way to do this this morning.. (takes a sip from something) is to take the most extreme psychedelic case and experience and describe it and talk about it a little..\n\n[1:58:00].. and then see what issues that raises. Because my experience with this has euh.. Led me to the conclusion that..(..Breathes..) In a way.. (..Exhaless..) It..euh.. To be thought of as other dimension is to be thought of as a mandala, and different psychedelic compounds and generously different kinds of yoga and different kinds of techniques of all sort of land viewing in\n\n[1:58:30].. different part of this mandala but that what you\u2019re always trying to do is get to the center of the mandala and it\u2019s simply my biased, my opinion; that i think the center of the mandala is probably the DMT experience for a number of reasons. And so i thought it\u2019ll be interesting to talk about it this morning. First let me talk about it physically. Uhh.. DMT is..", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-77", "text": "[1:59:00].. ..uh.. An indole hallucinogen.. Abetted.. No..no.. a tryptamine.. Uhh.. and it\u2019s produced indigenously in the human brain. This is very interesting. Very few psychedelic compounds are produced in the human brain. We don\u2019t know what DMT is doing there. But it means essentially that we all are subject to arrest..\n\n[1:59:30] - [2:00:00].. Of a technicality because we all are holding a schedule one (1) drug.. Euh.. It\u2019s sort of the ultimate catch-22 where if all else fails, they\u2019ll just say well you were holding anyway. Euhh.. the interesting thing about Dm.. Another interesting thing about it that is the incredibly rapid in its onset and in its disappearance the whole trip lasts about 15 minutes..\n\nTranscribed by Azlan\n\n[2:00:00]\n\n[Terence]:\u201c...the whole trip lasts about 15 minutes. This makes it a tremendous tool with which to challenge the critics of our position, because if somebody wants to rise up in righteous wrath and condemn psychedelics, then you say, \u2018well, you have tried them, haven\u2019t you?\u2019 and of course they never have; it\u2019s like scientific denunciations of astrology. Mean, scientists love to denounce astrology, but find one who can cast a natal horoscope[2:00:30] and I\u2019ll give you a [inaudible].\u201d\n\n[laughter]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-78", "text": "[laughter]\n\n[Terence]: \u201duh, ya know? So, uh, the, the uh...uh, uh, the...it...DMT overcomes this objection; the entire experience lasts 15 minutes, so you say to the critic, \u2018ya know, you\u2019re NOT going to experience it & yet you\u2019re going to carry on a pogrom against it? You won\u2019t invest 15 mins. To check what this is about; I mean, what kind of scientist are you?\u2019\u201d[2:01:00]\n\n[Terence]: \u201cuh...so, it has that social efficacy. Um, now the fact that, it is the strongest of all hallucinogens--at least if there are ones stronger, please keep them away from me--I mean I don\u2019t think anybody needs to get higher than that. I certainly don\u2019t. I mean, I\u2019ve at times come out of those places and said, \u2018this stuff is ILLEGAL! It breaks cosmic law!\u2019[2:01:30] Of course, then, Tim Leary told me, \u2018cosmic laws are only local ordinances anyway.\u2019 [laughter] so it didn\u2019t really matter.\u201d\n\n[inaudible audience question]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-79", "text": "[inaudible audience question]\n\n[Terence]: \u201cuh, ok. Eh...well, good question. Yes, It\u2019s the commonest of hallucinogens in nature. Uh, It occurs in many grasses: Phalaris Tuberosa, Phalaris arundinacea. Um, it occurs in a number of leguminous plants [2:02:00] uh, uh, probably the most spectacular being Anadenanthera peregrina, this huge, tropical, locust-like tree from which the snuff called niyopa or edena is made. That\u2019s a tough way to get your DMT let me tell you; uh, because there is so much cellulose & other crap & corruption in the mix that you have to do like a tablespoon of each nostril and the technique [2:02:30], the technique is you get a bamboo tube or a hollow tube about this long [indistinct gesture of length] and you pour in this tablespoon of this stuff, and then you squat down on your haunches and you get a friend, and you put the tube up your nostril and the the friend BLOWS with the full-force of his breath; BLOWS this stuff into your head. Well...you fall, it\u2019s like being hit in the face with a 2x4; i mean you it\u2019s like you think he kicked [2:03:00] you, and you fall over backwards, you scream, you salivate, you get backed up on your haunches and by this time he has refilled the tube for the other nostril.\u201d [audience laughter] So, and then, after uh, af\u2026\u201d\n\n[indistinct audience question]\n\n[Terence]: mmhmm, mmhmm...Hmm?\n\n[Audience]: Yopo?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-80", "text": "[Audience]: Yopo?\n\n[Terence]: \u201cYopo, Etena, Nipa [?], it depends on the language group, uh, and the [indistinct] [2:03:30] um, it\u2019s also called Vilka in the Kari language. And then, after uh, ten minutes or so, it slowly begins to form up in your head, but you know, God, your sinuses, are eh, STACKED for sure, and uh..it\u2019s not, uh, not very pleasant; and the other thing is, it never reaches the blinding transformative intensity that [2:04:00] you can achieve with the chemically pure compound.\u201d\n\n[indistinct audience question]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-81", "text": "[indistinct audience question]\n\n[Terence]: \u201cNo no. The uh, good point. If you orally ingest it, it will be destroyed in your guts. It won\u2019t work. The uh, Amazon Indians, have...encountered this problem and have created a very sophisticated pharmacological strategy for dealing with this, you\u2019ve all heard of ayahuasca. Ayahuasca [2:04:30] is DMT from one plant combined with another plant which contains a chemical which is called a MAO inhibitor. MAO is Monoamine Oxidase, and your gut is full of uh, MAO, and it\u2019s job is to take monoamines--small molecules--and oxidize them into uh, harmless by-product: usually endocytic acid, which can be shunted to the bladder. Well, [2:05:00], when you take DMT orally, these monamines just uh, I mean these monoamine oxidase compounds just grab onto it and destroy it, but if you take an MAO inhibitor with it, and harmine, which occurs in Banisteriopsis caapi is an MAO inhibitor, then, lo and behold, it isn\u2019t destroyed in your gut. Instead, it passes into the bloodstream, it passes through the blood-brain barrier, which is a very tight chemical filter that keeps the [2:05:30] brain from being exposed to toxic materials, but these drugs can cross that barrier and then, what the aya experience really is, is a slow release DMT trip, that instead of taking five minutes, takes about two and a half hours; and if you really know your psyched and your breath control techniques, on ayahuasca, over an hour or so [2:06:00]\n\nTranscribed by Joe O\u2019Neal", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-82", "text": "Transcribed by Joe O\u2019Neal\n\nInstead of taking 5 minutes, it takes about two and a half hours. And if you really know your psychedelics, and your breath control techniques, on ayahuasca, over an hour [02:06:00] or so, you can work yourself to a place where you say, \u201clordy me!It looks just like a dmt flash\u201d. And it does, but you have to do some hard climbing to get there. With dmt itself, once you push the start button there is no stopping it. And\u2026 I think it's worth describing it. How many people have had this experience? Ahun.. well they can somewhat anchor it [02:06:30]. Ahh.. it\u2019s very subjective, obviously. But I will describe what happened to me and then we can work out from there. One point that I wanna make about these things is that, th- the great strength of the psychedelic possibility is, it\u2019s democratic, you know. It isn\u2019t that the people of great spiritual advancement obtain these states, or- or people who have studied under some [02:07:00] lineage. It\u2019s truly available to everyone and when I had my dmt experiences I realized, you know, either I am incredibly special, which doesn\u2019t- there is no other evidence to support that *audience laughter*, or, this is something which can happen to anyone and that\u2019s the more interesting possibility. After all if it can only happen to very very special people, then [02:07:30] that lefts- most people out. But if it\u2019s generally available then it\u2019s big big news about the human condition. Yeah-\n\nAudience: [inaudible]\n\nTM: How did they find DMT in the human brain? Ahh... hmm... interesting question.\n\nAudience: [inaudible] how it crosses the blood brain barrier?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-83", "text": "Audience: [inaudible] how it crosses the blood brain barrier?\n\n[02:08:00]\n\nTM: No I think he means how did they find that it was endogenously produced. Well, I think they were studying- the group that did this was at the University of Louisiana, Christian and his group. And I- they were studying fast reactions in the brain. And for fast reactions you have to look at chemicals that can go through some kind of cycle of structural change and return to their zero point, very very quickly. [02:08:30] Their original thought was that DMT mediated attention. I mean I am talking to you right now, suppose there were a loud noise over here, we would all immediately project our mind on to the source of the sound. Th- They thought that was a.. neurological function mediated by DMT. Could be, I am not sure I suspect it has to do more with the chemistry of dreaming.[02:09:00] Once they discovered DMT and began to track it, they discovered that there was a circadian rhythm, means a daily rhythm in its production in the human organism and that it reaches its greatest concentration in the brain around 3:30 am in most people. Well this is when the deep dreaming and high rem states are really chugging, and I suspect, I mean lucid dreamers may wanna argue with this [02:09:30] but I suspect that every night we go deeper places than we can ever speak of. That ordinary dreams are right on the surface of consciousness. Big lucid dreams are an inch deeper. But I think we go a hundred feet down every night into places where you cannot say anything about it. Yeah-\n\nAudience: [inaudible] [02:10:00]\n\n[02:10:04]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-84", "text": "[02:10:04]\n\nTM: Ah.. let\u2019s make that perspiration *laughter*. Well its- [audience inaudible]. It\u2019s hard as hell to find DMT. And this is a puzzle because if you look it up in a standard work on organic chemistry, it presents it as a trivial synthesis. Ah.. much [02:10:30] more simple than LSD which it always presents as quite a difficult synthesis. But when you actually talk to workbench chemists- it\u2019s tricky to make DMT. It\u2019s especially tricky to carry out the final crystallization. So what you are usually offered in the underground is some kind of muck, which looks sort of like ah.. maple syrup, half gone to sugar. I wouldn\u2019t get near that, actually. It means [02:11:00] they- they botched their synthesis. What you are hoping for, is a white powder. However, in thirty years of chasing this all over the world I have only seen it as a white powder a couple of times. Usually, the synthesis has fallen slightly below that standard and what you get is a pale yellow powder, sometimes a pale rose or pink powder and then the real rough trade [02:11:30] is orange. And this what you- if you have seen it, this is probably what you have seen it. It looks like orange moth balls and it has the smell of indole. This very sharp smell which if you are not a chemist and you have never smelled indole, when you reach in your mind for what is this like, you will say, \u201cwell it\u2019s sort of like moth balls\u201d. Not quite, but it has that same sharp chemical, you know and this is what you are gonna smoke, see. So a lot of people beef about [02:12:00] that and say, you know, \u201cIt\u2019s like smoking burning plastic\u201d.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-85", "text": "Transcribed by Rohan Singh\n\nA lot of people beef about that, and say; \u201cit\u2019s like smoking burning plastic.\u201d. Mehhh, M\u00e1s o menos, It is a little bit like that. The other objection to DMT that has been around since the 60\u2019s is people say it \u2018destroys brain cells\u2019. There\u2019s no evidence for or against this. But I would submit to you as[inaudible] as the people who are neurophysiologists can argue with this if they disagree, but, I think an excellent index for the low toxicity of a drug is how fast it clears your system, and DMT clears your system in about 15 minutes. If you take some compound drug, or whatever, and 48 hours later you\u2019re still taking hot baths, and uh, wishing you could have a message, and sitting staring at the wall. Than, this drug is really sticking to your ribs. It means that your metabolic pathways have no way of dealing with it, they can\u2019t grab it here, they can\u2019t grab it there, and it takes a long time to leave your system. An example of this in the pseudo-psychedelic domain would be ketamine. Ya\u2019 know, ketamine, the experience lasts about 45 minutes, but 48 hours later you can feel your knees suddenly go rubbery, or you can have, what are technically called \u2018fuse states\u2019, strange states of disconnectedness from what\u2019s going on around you. This is not a very good advertisement for a drug. TM speaking to audience: Here, this woman and then-.\n\nAudience: Uhm, [inaudible question about ayahuasca].", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-86", "text": "Audience: Uhm, [inaudible question about ayahuasca].\n\n\u2122: Uh, well, less because um, if you smoke DMT the dose is approximately 50 milligrams, which is like the size of a kitchen match head. If you combine it with an MAO inhibitor and take it orally, you can probably get away with about 35 milligrams, of DMT. Uh, and, uh, oh I don\u2019t know, 100 milligrams of harmaline, now harmaline is itself is sometimes itself described as a psychedelic drug, I really think this is sort of misleading. You will have hallucinations if you take pure harmine, but only at doses approaching the toxic dose. Many compounds will give you hallucinations approaching the toxic dose; bee venom, rattlesnake venom, stuff like this. That doesn\u2019t mean it\u2019s a hallucinogenic drug, it means you\u2019re dying, and you should take steps to correct the situation. [\u2122 speaking to audience]: Um, now, yes.\n\nAudience: You say that there is a short transit time, but how long does the memory of that experience last? Because that would indicate to me that there is still a presence, and perhaps a homeopathic dose at that point[laughing], in the mind, in the brain.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-87", "text": "\u2122: Well, DMT, uh one of the things that caused me to think that is must- that is might have a role in the chemistry of dreaming, is that one of the frustrating things about it is, you have this experience without doubt, the most bizarre, appalling, peculiar experience you could possibly have; that\u2019s at minute 2. At minute 5, you\u2019re raving about it. At minute 7, you can\u2019t remember it. So, it\u2019s literally like gold running through your fingers. You say \u2018this is the most amazing thing, this is the most amazing thing.. What am I talking about?\u2019, and you know how you can have a very engaging complex dream, and the alarm goes off, and by the time your feet hit the floor you\u2019re grasping for it, it\u2019s literally melting before your eyes. That\u2019s a very DMT-like presentation. The way a dream melts away is the way a DMT trip melts away, at the same speed.\n\n[inaudible audience question]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-88", "text": "[inaudible audience question]\n\n\u2122: Well, uh, over time and using tricks you can drag a certain amount of data out of it. Um, what I\u2019ll do- I\u2019ll describe a DMT trip, and it\u2019s um, it\u2019s a composite of maybe 40 of these trips, and uh, then you can see what you make of it. So this is- I\u2019ll just describe it, I\u2019ll be the graduate student UB, the guy with the clipboard. You\u2019re saying to me \u2018so what happened?\u2019. Okay, here\u2019s what happened; [dramatic sigh] You- I took 1 takes. Eh, most people can get off in about 2 to 4 hits. Now there\u2019s a trick to it, hash smokers are greatly favored in the endeavour because you really need leather lungs, for this. The great problem is that people will cough, or not be able to hold it in. You take 2 hits in a situation where you\u2019re clothes have been loosened and you can just flop backward, uh, when you need to. You take 2 hits, now many people miss the point. Because after 2 hits you feel completely peculiar, you feel as though your body is undergoing some strange kind of anesthesia. All the air has been pumped out of the room, this is the visual acuity thing I talked about last night.\n\nTranscribed by Justin Symbiosis Brosey\n\n[2:17:57]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-89", "text": "Transcribed by Justin Symbiosis Brosey\n\n[2:17:57]\n\nAll the air has been pumped out of the room. This is the visual acuity thing I\u2019ve talked about last night. The colors jump up. The edges sharpen. It\u2019s and at that point people say \u2018ooh wow, it\u2019s really coming on strong.\u2019 And then what you have to do you is you have to take one more enormous hit. This separates the in trepid from the casual. Believe me. Because most ppl, and, and, the facilitator doesn\u2019t want to lean on the person you say \u2018you know, take the third hit\u2019 and they say i completely weird, and sai know you feel weird take the third hit well if you can coax somebody into that. what happens is you close your eyes and you see the ordinary warm, brown, back, you know, closed eyelid scenario, and then these colors begin racing together. And it forms this mandelic, floral, slowly rotating thing. Which I call the chrysanthemum.\n\nThis is a place in the trip that you want to see as you go by it. The chrysanthemum forms. And you watch it for like 15 seconds. If it doesn\u2019t give way then you didn\u2019t do enough. You have to do more, one more hit.,usually will do it. Well then what happens is it physically propels you through this chrysanthemum-like thing and you, there\u2019s a sound like a saran wrap bread wrapper being crumpled up and being thrown away, You know that crackle. A friend of mine says there a radio intellectai leaving through the anti fonital at the top of your head", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-90", "text": "I don\u2019t know what it is, uh, but it\u2019s it\u2019s something is being.[audience] Yea right that\u2019s what it is. Uh, then there\u2019s this very, uh, very defined sense of bursting through something. A membrane. And on the other side, and this is now remember my experience, on the other side, as you break through there\u2019s a cheer. There\u2019s uh uh uh a whole bunch of entities waiting on the other side. And they you know that Pink Floyd song, The Gnomes have learned a new way to say Hooooorray . Well, it\u2019s that place. It\u2019s those gnomes.\n\nAnd you burst into this space and uhm and they\u2019re saying. \u201cHow wonderful that you\u2019re here. You come so rarely. We\u2019re so delighted to see you.\u201d And the, one of the things about DMT that\u2019s really puzzling is in a sense it doesn\u2019t affect your mind. In other words, you don\u2019t change. For instance if you take ketamine the first thing you notice, the very first thing you notice before the trip hits, is you notice that you no longer are anxious that you\u2019ve taken ketamine. You\u2019ve just sort of anxiety leaves you. That means it\u2019s affecting your mind. It\u2019s doing something to the judgemental machinery. DMT doesn\u2019t lay a hand on the judgemental machinery. You, you break through into that space exactly who you were before you breaking through. And the usual reaction of most people is something like, you know, you think, God. Heart beat\u2019s normal. Pulse, normal. Everything\u2019s normal, yea, everything\u2019s normal, oh god, because these things are there and they\u2019re hammering at you and they come forward they\u2019re like jeweled self-dribbling basketballs.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-91", "text": "And they\u2019re there are many of them. And they come pounding toward you and they will stop in front of you and vibrate, but then they do a very disconcerting thing which is they jump into your body. They jump into your body and then they jump back out again. And, the whole thing is going on in this very high speed mode where you\u2019re being presented with thousands of details per second and you can\u2019t get a hold on you say my god what\u2019s happening and these things are saying, \u2018don\u2019t abandon yourself to amazement.\u2019 Which is exactly what you want to do it. You just want go nuts with how crazy this is. You they \u2018don\u2019t do that, don\u2019t do that. Pay attention, pay attention to what we\u2019re doing.\u2019\n\nWell, what are they doing? Well, what they\u2019re doing is they\u2019re making object with their voices. They\u2019re singing structures into existence. These things are, and what they\u2019ll do is they\u2019ll come toward you, and then, you have to understand they don\u2019t have arms so we\u2019re kind of downloading this into another dimension to even describe it. But what they do is they offer things to do. They say, \u2018look at this. Look at this.\u2019 And as your attention goes towards these objects you realize that what you\u2019re being shown is impossible. It\u2019s impossible. It\u2019s not simply intricate, beautiful and hard to manufacture. It\u2019s impossible to make these things. The nearest analogy would be faberge eggs. [2:24:00]\n\nTranscribed by James Clayton", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-92", "text": "Transcribed by James Clayton\n\nThe nearest analogy would be to faberge eggs, or something like that. But these things are like the toys that are scattered around the nursery of a U.F.O. or something. Celestial toys and they are, the toys themselves appear to be somehow alive. The toys themselves can, uh, sing other objects into existence. So, what\u2019s happening is there\u2019s just this proliferation of elf gifts. [2:24:30] And the elf gifts are moving around singing, and the whole thing is directed towards, they\u2019re saying, \u2018Do what we are doing\u2019, and they are very insistent.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-93", "text": "They say, \u201cDo it. Do it. Do it!\u201d And you feel like a bubble, or, and now this is subjective, i mean only you know 5% report this but it happens to me. You feel like a bubble inside your body that\u2019s beginning to move up [2:25:00] towards your mouth and when it comes out it isn\u2019t sound it\u2019s vision. You begin, you see, discover, that you can pump stuff out of your mouth by singing and they\u2019re urging you to do this they say \u2018That\u2019s it, that\u2019s it, keeping doing it!\u2019 And the whole thing is like, you know, we\u2019re now at minute 4.5 with this stuff...and, uh, you speak in a kind of glossolalia. [2:25:30] There\u2019s a spontaneous outpouring of syntax unaccompanied by what is normally called meaning. It\u2019s sort of, uh, [speaking in tongues]. And this is accompanied by a, a modality something seen. [2:26:00] And they say, \u2018Yes, do it do it do it\u2019 and then after a minute or so of this the whole thing begins to collapse in on itself and they literally begin to physically move away from you. And usually their final shot is, they actually wave goodbye, and they say, \u2018Deja vu. Deja vu.\u2019 Which makes no sense at all if you analyze it.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-94", "text": "So then you come down, and you\u2019re now at minute 6 to 7, and [2:26:30] you come down and it\u2019s like being more loaded than you ever been. It\u2019s like a 700 mic acid trip, but you embrace it as you're totally down. You say I\u2019m totally down. I mean you look, you look like a termite a from Arcturus and the room is decorated in Amish quilts but I\u2019m completely back! [audience laughs] And then over a minute or a minute and a half or so, the room comes right back together [2:27:00] and and 4 minutes after that, some people can give no account of it whatsoever. They say, uh, i don\u2019t, idk it\u2019s the weirdest thing that ever happened to me and i can\u2019t remember it now, and uh. Uh. So that\u2019s the basic run-though, now a lot of stuff is going on in there.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-95", "text": "First of all, you know, what are these things? [2:27:30] uh, And why do they want you to do this strange activity? and what\u2019s so great about it? Well, hmm, uh, well, first of all, who are these things? Uh, we can like you know be good scientists and make a list of the possibilities and then see which seems more likely. They could be a disincarnate [2:28:00] race of hyper-dimensional dwellers who live in some kind of parallel continuum just over some kind of energy, uh, barrier and they\u2019re there all the time. You do have the feeling that they're there all the time. That its on going. That you just cut in on their scene. So that\u2019s one possibility. Another possibility is that behind all these psychedelics, and especially dmt [2:28:00] that this is not a drug at all , but it is uh essentially uh uh a pay telephone of some sort to aliens. Good old National Inquirer type aliens, uh,", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-96", "text": "Good old National Inquirer type aliens, uh, who have, are using this as uh, as uh, a communication domain. Say you know we can\u2019t land on the White House lawn, that would create panic and hysteria, so let\u2019s create a drug which inside the drug [2:29:00]we will be able to deal with people. And, um, I was hoping that John Mac who's an expert on uh UFO abductions would be here this weekend. I expected him because I think this whole abduction thing is not going to be illuminated until they start giving abductees DMT and saying, So is this is what happened to you? Was it like this? or was it completely, uh, different? Well so then there are those [2:29:30] are the two possibilities that I sort of dealt with over the first 10 or 15 years of thinking about this, and then recently.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-97", "text": "[Question from audience]\n\nTM: It could be, what puzzles me is that the, the, abduction thing is so non-psychedelic. It\u2019s so cut and dried and all this anal examination stuff with strange machinery [2:30:00] there\u2019s nothing comparable to that , I\u2019m happy to report to you.\n\nTranscribed by James Clayton\n\nThere\u2019s nothing comparable to that , I\u2019m happy to report to you\u2026 [Audience laughs] ...uh, going on in the DMT thing. But it may be, you see...it..bec-\n\nAudience: maybe the...the (inaudible)explains what it does to you\u2026\n\n\u2122: Well, I\u2019d be interested in looking at the possibility that DMT, under normal or abnormal conditions, could be sequestered in the human brain and then some unusual stimulus or stress could cause it to suddenly be dumped[2:30:30]...and, (audience inaudible) yeah.. .\n\nAudience: I want to share this: There have been some migraines that I\u2019ve had where, you know, what you just described with the colours coming in (inaudible)...it\u2019s been so fascinating that I\u2019ve completely forgotten about the pain and I\u2019ve just watched it for hours, well or I guess I just fell asleep but it sort of struck a note... and I was always under a lot of stress when I got the headache in the first place and there seemed to be a lot of strange things going on with the migraine in the first place. So I\u2019m wondering if that\u2019s [2:31:00](inaudible)...", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-98", "text": "\u2122: Yeah, that\u2019s an interesting possibility. I also have migraines or the kind called cluster headaches and yes, a lot of the sympto - or the nice thing about DMT is that it\u2019s painless but the sense of being split open; and of the traveling skeptomita transcribers note: I don\u2019t know what this is and I can\u2019t seem to google up anything using a variety of spellings and whatnot - I think he meant \u201cscotoma\u201d\u2026, as they call these hallucinations that the migraine people see: it\u2019s related in some way. Yeah. yeah.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-99", "text": "Audience: May I bring science into this a little bit? (\u2122: Sure.) Um. It involves the principle that its characteristically called \u201cphasing\u201d [2:31:30]Ah - But its - ah- it\u2019s basis is sort of what happens on a subatomic level between matter and energy. It turns out there\u2019s no fundamental part(?) at that level. They have this dance between matter and energy. You know, energy coalesces into a bit of matter which then becomes energy...ah - and you can look at this matter/energy relationship as having a wavelength of frequency associated with it. [2:32:00]Now granted this is happens on a subatomic level but if there\u2019s something comparable going on, on the level at which we seem to exist in this physical form then it seems to me that there has to be something akin to it. That, it may be that we as beings are sort of tuned to a frequency range, you know, in this particular form and that somehow it\u2019s possible to shift that,", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-100", "text": "form and that somehow it\u2019s possible to shift that, or expand it to so that what we\u2019re actually experiencing is a broader range of frequency, sort of shift in wavelength[2:32:30]...and I think some of this, of these experiences can be at least explored in that context. Ah\u2026\u2026...you know\u2026..there\u2019s so much that we don\u2019t know (inaudible)(\u2122: Ain\u2019t that the truth?) of this cosmos that, ah... but we can take...we can extrapolate (I\u2019m pretty sure Terence sigh/groans here) to some degree We can use this to take journeys and explore this possibility. What we DO know, in science for example[2:33:00], what happens on a subatomic level...and... I mean, for god\u2019s sake, the language of these people is sounding more like sorcerers, these days, than scientists.(\u2122: Ah. Uh huh. Mmmhmm.) and we do seem to, at least, believe from the evidence that we see that there is this matter energy interchange on a very", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-101", "text": "that there is this matter energy interchange on a very fundamental level; while something is going on on that fundamental level. There may be this, principle of \u201cphasing\u201d which will either shift our tuning [2:33:30]or expand to include a larger spectrum.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-102", "text": "\u2122: Yeah, I think...no I think that that\u2019s a very interesting avenue to pursue, this thing about frequency. Somebody told me: one of the great things about this job iis you hear a lot of weird stories, and somebody told me a story recently about, it didn\u2019t involve DMT; it involved LSD but this guy and a friend of his took a quite large dose of LSD, larger than they intended and they went to a party.[2:34:00] And they were so loaded by the time they got to the party that they realized they could not function as party goers so they just moved into a corner and sat with their backs to the wall and watched this party rage in front of them. And after about 20 minutes of sitting there they both simultaneously noticed it was a dance party; noticed that the music was sounding[2:34:30] really strange and everybody was moving very slowly. And as they watched the thing came to an absolute halt. And people were just", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-103", "text": "thing came to an absolute halt. And people were just frozen. And there was absolute silence. And at that point - ah - the door, at the other end of the room, swung open and, ah, an elf? Entered the room and moved among[2:35:00] all these frozen people and then left, by the door he came in and they both saw this and they said that they could tell that it was, that it - it - it - the people in the room didn\u2019t know it happened because for them it occupied a micro-second. But this thing that was, you know, in Carlos Castaneda who, God knows is not the most reliable reporter on these things, nevertheless there is this thing about stopping the world. So. Maybe it\u2019s something like that.[2:35:30] That there is, as you suggest, a frequency phase (Audience: inaudible) Yeah. This sort of leads into the third possibility, having to do with the origin of these things. And, in a sense, this is the hardest", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-104", "text": "And, in a sense, this is the hardest one to swallow but, in another sense, this is the most conservative (in some crazy notion of conservative); the most conservative explanation (clears throat) because (Audience: inaudible question) (\u2122 drinks: Mm.mm.(no))[2:36:00]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-105", "text": "Transcribed by Artemis Jones\n\n[2:36:00] Because, uhm, we have no evidence other than the tabloids that this world is being visited by friendly visitors from zubenelgenubi or zeta reticuli or the pleiades or anywhere else. I mean, to my mind the evidence that this is happening is vanishingly small and totally underwhelming. Uh, the other possibility, uh, that, uh, [2:36:30] there is some kind of parallel dimension in which these things exist is also somewhat poorly supported. If we\u2019re talking about something which thinks, something which can communicate, something which is intelligent, then we should look to ourselves as the source of it, because we are the only intelligent, communicating things we know within a certain narrow definition of these things.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-106", "text": "So that, it\u2019s occurred to me with greater and greater [2:37:00] force and largely prompted by giving DMT occasionally to Tibetans and Amazonian shamans, and when you say to them, you know, to the shamans in the Amazon, when you say to them \u201cWhat is happening with this stuff? And what are those little things in there?\u201d They say \u201cOh well those are ancestor spirits, didn\u2019t you know? Haven\u2019t you heard? Shamanism is about doing healing through the intercession of ancestor spirits.\u201d You say hmm, [2:37:30] ancestor spirits, lets get this straight, dead people is what you\u2019re talking about right? These are dead people. And, you know, maybe because I was raised catholic I resisted this like grim death. But I\u2019m beginning to think that what you actually break into in that place, is something that we might call, uh, an ecology of souls. That, uh, is it possible to entertain [2:38:00] the notion that at death you actually don\u2019t just become worm food, but that something, survives, in some other dimension, and that it has this bizarre character to it, and that this explains their peculiar affection for humanity, and their involvement, somehow in our, uh, fate. Well this is to me is fairly mind bending [2:38:30] as a possibility. If what is awaiting us at the end of the 20th century is the erasure of the boundary between the living and the dead, then we\u2019ve all been too conservative in our projections of what is, uh, going on.\n\nTM: [calls on audience member] Yeah?\n\nAudience: [inaudible question]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-107", "text": "TM: Yes, that there will be some kind of erasure of, uh, the boundary between the two. Well, once i had this idea, you know, [2:39:00] I mentioned my Jungian and art historical proclivities and so that means that you always looks back through tradition and folklore to try and find something analogous to this. Well, there ain\u2019t much. But there is one area that seems suggestive to me, and that is, as you all know, the Irish are a-a, uh, very(fairy?) haunted race. They\u2019re also an intoxication obsessed race, at least in stereotype. [2:39:30] Well it turns out, that, uh, you probably all are familiar with the notion of purgatory? Purgatory is the place where you have to spend a lot of time before you get to heaven, if you\u2019re not bad enough to go to hell. So you put in a few [inaudible 2:39:50] of eternity in purgatory and then you get let into heaven. Well", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-108", "text": "and then you get let into heaven. Well i had always assumed that this dogma, [2:40:00] I don\u2019t know i hadn\u2019t really thought about it, I just sort of assumed it arose with early Christianity. But when I began looking into this I discovered that the idea of purgatory, was invented by Saint Patrick, and it was invented specifically to convert the pagan Irish, because the pagan Irish believed, uh, in the, in the land of fey. They believe that there was this nearby dimension, full of the souls of the dead, surrounding [2:40:30] us all the time, and that certain people with the gift of second sight could see this. So, Patrick just said to them, \u201cOh no, that isn\u2019t it. It\u2019s purgatory.\u201d And was able to push that on them so successfully that a later church council adopted it as general dogma for the church, to use in converting the pagan Slavs as well. So, uh, it-it\u2019s an idea", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-109", "text": "as well. So, uh, it-it\u2019s an idea of, [2:41:00] uh, a nearby dimension, inhabited by disincarnate souls, that, uh, is apparently very old, but very alien to our tradition.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-110", "text": "TM: Yes?\n\nAudience: [inaudible] \u2026It\u2019s a gross oversimplification but it\u2019s kind of related and it has to do with the quantum wave function, which is really kind of a dual wave, there\u2019s two parts to it. Uh, one part, and they both have a temporal or time related aspect to it, one part which is called the ordinary [2:41:30] part of the wave, can be seen as a wave propagating forward in time. And the other half of the wave, which is called the complex conjugate, can be seen as propagating backwards in time, from some future state. Some past state, some future state, emitting waves which at some point interact and produce what is perceived by us as the present state, which is really a dynamic process in itself, there is no absolute present\u2026[2:42:00]\n\nTranscribed by Danny Hollman\n\n[2:42:00]\n\nAudience: But the interesting thing is that what that implies is that what we experience in the present whatever they may be is somehow related to some future state and some past state. But it also means that neither future or past are fixed and that we could sort of align ourselves with different tracks or vectors. You know, and a slightly different vector that\u2019s slightly askew may produce something totally uh different [2:42:30] than what our ordinary perception would be. What do you think?\n\nTM: Well, yeah, This could be. I mean, I\u2019ve always felt that that what biology is, is some weird kind of chemical strategy for amplifying quantum mechanical indeterminacy. That you know, that macrophysical objects are not subject to quantum mechanical indeterminacy. But organisms apparently are, especially thinking organisms.\n\n[2:43:00]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-111", "text": "[2:43:00]\n\nAudience: We don\u2019t know. That\u2019s our perception. Our perception is that, is that objects on the macro scale are to scale, are not subject to quantum fluctuations. But that\u2019s only because uh of this probability wave in some sense, in that, that there\u2019s a most probable state. And if we happen to exist in that, that our perception is that it, it\u2019s more fixed . That there is no indeterminacy, that [2:43:30] it obeys certain laws that are rather linear in nature. Uh, but we really don\u2019t know.\n\nTM: What you\u2019re sort of saying is that the natural laws only apply some of the time, which gives them a curious status as laws in that case.\n\nAudience: Yeah, (inaudible) but to broaden the notion of relativity. Uh, I mean, what happens in a black hole for example, what is singularity? It simply means that the laws that normally apply in everyday experience no longer are relevant.\n\n[2:44:00]\n\nTM: Well, one of the problems cosmology is meeting [2:44:00] is that there are so many large black holes in the universe that you come up with you know, ten high six singularities.That\u2019s a few more singularities than a good theory would tolerate, I would think. I mean, what kind of theory is it that hands you back ten to the ninth singularities? Which are exceptions to the theory?\n\nAudience: That\u2019s true, but a lot of that is based on assumptions that are stretches.\n\n[2:44:30]\n\nTM: Ain\u2019t that the truth (laughs.)", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-112", "text": "[2:44:30]\n\nTM: Ain\u2019t that the truth (laughs.)\n\nAudience: Again if we get back to a psychedelic experience, you know, it\u2019s this whole lower dimensional language slice thing that we seem to have to operate in in order to describe an experience that just does not fit with that slice. You know, we do our best to do it, you know and sometimes it comes across being very crude and niave. Sometimes it kind of gets close to the mark, but it\u2019s difficult to know. Ah, I mean the whole notion of black hole singularities is just [2:45:00] the present attempt at explaining some of the theory that is beyond ordinary experience. None of us encounter a black hole (inaudible.)\n\nTM: That\u2019s true. It seems to me one of the embarrassments of science is that the Big Bang begins with a singularity, And, so then, you have this whole vast interlocking schema of rational explanation, except that it begins [2:45:30] with a hard swallow. You\u2019re asked to believe that the entire cosmos of space and time sprang from a point no larger than a cross-section of a gnat\u2019s eyelash. Whatever else one could say about that theory, I\u2019d think you\u2019d agree, it\u2019s the limit case for credulity!\n\nAudience: Oh, absolutely!\n\nTM: I mean if you believe that, try to think of something that you would throw up your hands and say, \u201cWell, I\u2019m not buying that!\u201d (laughs) [2:46:00] It absolutely, it\u2019s sort of like when you join the Catholic Church you make a declaration of faith. Well when you join Science you sort of make this declaration of faith that, \u201cI do believe that the universe sprang in a single instant from an incredibly tiny, hot, dense dot!\u201d Unlikely, but, who knows?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-113", "text": "Audience: Here\u2019s something else. As you two were dialoguing a bit I was getting a visualization of, you have to look at the pond of reality [2:46:30] so to speak, as not only being the um visual of someone throwing a pebble from the top of the pond and creating the ripple effect of waves, but also from the bubbles coming from below. And to me the deep space that you were talking about is the air inside the bubbles coming from below. And so the dimensional reality of that picture is not a linear time perspective. It\u2019s something coming from all directions. It is again the center of the mandala itself.\n\n[2:47:00]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-114", "text": "[2:47:00]\n\nTM: Well, this is why I say the psychedelic experience is a boundary dissolving experience because it takes away past, present, cause, effect, all of these things uh disappear. Now remember I said ayahuasca is a kind of slow release DMT trip. And one of the really interesting things going on with ayahuasca to my mind, perhaps the most interesting thing, is that the style in the Amazon of taking [2:47:30] ayahuasca is uh people get together in a darkened hut at night, and they take it and the sing. But the songs, their selling them at the table back there, the songs, when there\u2019s a break in the singing and you hear the people discussing the songs, they don\u2019t discuss them like music, the discuss them. They discuss them like sculpture and painting. And they say to the Shaman \u201cI like the part [2:48:00] with the gray bars and the blue speckling. But when you brought in the pink in combination with the beige and white I thought it was too much. Say what kind of a discussion is this about songs? You realize then when you take ayahuasca they see the songs. Now this is really interesting to me, you remember in the DMT flash they wanted you to use your voice to make objects.\n\nTranscribed by Micki Garrison", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-115", "text": "\u2026 \u201cI like the part with the great bars and the blue speckling, but when you brought in the pink in combination with the basen white I thought it was to much\u201d. See, what kind of a discussion is this about a song? You realize then when you take Ayahuaska, they see the songs ah.. and now this is really interesting to me because, you remember in the DMT flash they wanted you to use your voice to make objects, well then in the Ayahuaska trance you use your voice to control these colored modalities and ah.. the whole thing is done that way, well so then what it must mean is that the neurophysiology of Ayahuaska somehow allows for the ordinary signal processing, which is being chanted into the audio pathway in the brain, is instead being chanted into the ossicle pathway, this is what's called a Synestesia. These things have been fascinating for hundreds of years to people but the synestesia means that, you know, color ah.. sounds are seen. Well, now", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-116", "text": "know, color ah.. sounds are seen. Well, now what was this anything other than a neurophysiologic curiosity? Well I maintain it is, because I think that a language which could be seen, would be a kind of telepathic language. If you thought much about telepathy, you might have naively assumed that telepathy is you hearing me think. That isn't what it is, I think. Telepathy is you seeing what I mean. And it's not something which happens dramatically, it is a function of eloquence, you know, first you have the speaker who that is boring you to death, then you have the speaker who at least holds your attention, then you have the speaker of who may had said, she paints the picture. It means we're moving toward poetry. Well it's possible to imagine a transformation of the neural processing of language, it may be a behavioral possibility, it may not even require a gene shift. Where then we would see what we each mean. You know there's this", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-117", "text": "see what we each mean. You know there's this persistent idea, promulgated by Robert Graves in the White Goddess, among other people, that there was once what he calls a Orshba(?) a primal language so emotionally intense that, to be in the presence of poetry declaimed in this language, is to see the poetry and that this is what the last poetics of the high paleolithic were about and probably it was pharmacological assisted that you can gather people in the presence of a great bard, or singer, and that person could then create telepathic modalities, and that telepathic modality, that richer more unifying language was the thing which was suppressing the formation of ego. The ego speaks and hears through sound, the super-ego projects images and is perceived as images. Now it's very interesting, at least to me, that in the pineal gland of ordinary human beings there is a compound called Adeneroglomerotropine which, when analyzed in inorganic or just in the normal nomenclature of organic", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-118", "text": "inorganic or just in the normal nomenclature of organic chemistry, turns out to be ah..a betacarboline closely related to harmaline. Well is it possible that we are as close as a one gene mutation away from a shift that would switch our processing of audio input into the visual field and that then we would cross over into a realm of beheld understanding, and that this is the evolutionary leap that we're trying to make that is in the body, not in the technology, in the body. There's is actually going to be a minor, a one gene click to another channel and then we will be able to see what we mean and I maintain that if you can see what somebody means, you are that person, contrasted.. contrasted to ordinary communication. Ordinary communication is achieved through ah.. small mouth noises, as primates we have a throat and voice ar.. a voice box arrangement that allows us to produce small mouth noises at.. for hours if's necessary and I\u2019m the living proof of it ah...", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-119", "text": "necessary and I\u2019m the living proof of it ah... but it's not a very efficient mode of communication because what happens is, I have a though by looking a culturally sanctioned dictionary which I have copied into my head. I translate the thoughts into an acoustical signal using my mouth which moves across space, which enters your ears. Your rush to your interior dictionary and you construct my meaning out of your dictionary. Now notes that this process rests on a very shaky assumption, it rests on he assumption that your dictionary and my dictionary were published by he same folks in he same year. If your dictionary is different from mine, you will not correctly reconstruct my meaning and we we'll have what we call misunderstanding. Notes how among us...", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-120", "text": "Transcribed by Nicole Pralaya\n\n[2:54:00]\n\nTM: most bring down things you can say to somebody is, would you explain to me what I`ve just said?\n\nBecause it means, oh boy here comes trouble, now you're gonna find out, that you know, people didn't understand you. They horribly misunderstood and and the uh communication is very provisional the amount of noise in the circuit is huge. Well then contrast this to, I utter something [2:54:30] and it condenses as a sculpture in the air and you and I then become its observers and we rotate this syntactical object and we look at it, we regard it from many points of view.\n\nThis is not ambiguous or its certainly considerably less ambiguous than this reconstruction from interiorized dictionaries. So perhaps what all this is about is evolutionary pressure on our languages to become visual and therefore to become more unitfied and less riddled with noise which creates misunderstanding, which creates horrible social realities yeah.\n\n[question from the audience] I just remember reading a book called Holographic Universe\n\nTM: oh Michael Talbots book uhuh\n\n[question continues] he was talking about uh visual experiences being about fifty percent based on [inaudible from audience] and addition internally to to you know what coming to visual[2:55:30] it sounds like a transmission problem translation\n\nTM: y yes although what you could do with a visible language would be very challenging we could do many things with it it is not an outlandish, it's not a completely outlandish idea. In nature it occurs, there's this fa there's a wonderful [2:56:00] hexonomenon in nature which is worth talking about to sort of legitimate such a far out notion which is as you all probably know um octopi uh can change color, this is one of those things you learn on those science specials on tv.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-121", "text": "[transition from tape 2 to 3]\n\nTM: Octopi can change color [2:56:30] well most people I think, assume that they do this for camouflage, that would be a reasonable assumption. They don't do it for camouflage uh let's talk about octopi for just a moment. First of all they're mollusk, they divided from our evolutionary line seven hundred million years ago, they are related to escargot uh they have no backbone for crying out loud they're not even vertebrates\n\nuh [2:57:00] But what is always said by biology classes about octopi is that they're a wonderful example of parallel evolution because their optical system is very much like a mammalian optical system. well why is this? Well it's because they've evolved in a in an environment uh the reef environment that is a um all is dense with signals as a rainforest is and uhm [2:57:30] an octopus is soft bodied it cannot only change color but it can also change its surface from smooth and rubbery to bumpy, pimply, rugose, ribbed so forth and so on and also because it is soft bodied and in an aqueous environment it can fold and unfold and reveal and conceal parts of its body very very quickly. [2:58:00] Well all of these uh behaviors and physiological characteristics go together to make the octopus an excellent visual communicator and the color changes the blushes travelling dots and bars that these creatures manifest and the squid do it too uh are language and if you're interested in this there is a wonderful book by a guy named Moyniham called Communication and non communication among [2:58:30] the Cephalopodidia", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-122", "text": "and he goes as far as creating a a grammar for this stuff. Well so then in a way you know if you pull back from the mundane assumptions about this what's happening is the octopus wears its mind on its skin. It is dressed in its mental state e one octopus encountering another can tell [2:59:00] its mood, how recently its eaten, how recently it's had sex, whether it`s ovulating all by looking and so they the only way an octopus can have a private thought is by squirting ink into the water and then hiding inside it. This is essentially it is correction fluid for misspoken octopi you see [audience laughs] so in a sense this is what we are are being beckoned [2:59:30]\n\ntoward that we want to clothe ourselves in language, we do it to a degree in a funny way. I mean if you wanna think about virtual reality this is a virtual reality all this stuff these fixtures the architecture the infrastructure the road, these are ideas it was an idea and then it has been summoned into matter by the allotment of funds the spending of money the hiring [3:00:00]\n\nTranscribed by Arsen Vidakovic", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-123", "text": "Transcribed by Arsen Vidakovic\n\n..the spending of money, the hiring [3:00:00] of craftsmen, so forth and so on. Our whole civilization is an excreted set of interlocking ideas, agreements. We\u2019re like choral animals, and we somewhere, you know, there\u2019s this naked, pulpy creature, but, you know, clothed in denim, clothed in, uhm, harder shell produced by Mercedes or Chevrolet, moving around inside the larger environment, produced by the state of Colorado, and so forth and so on. So I think octopi offer an excellent metaphoric example of what naked-mindedness would be. And some of these octopi, uhm, [3:00:45] as i said, they evolved in the, uhm, coastal reef domain. But that\u2019s a very competitive domain. Everybody in the ocean wants to be there, because that\u2019s where the sunlight and the food is.\n\nSo if you\u2019re smart you\u2019ll try and evolve into a more hostile niche. And some of these octopi have become what are called benthic, or abyssal. It means, they exist in the parts of the ocean where light never reaches.\n\n[inaudible from audience].", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-124", "text": "[inaudible from audience].\n\n\u2122: Yes and they, uhm, have retained this communication ability by switching over to interior, uhm, interiorly generated phosphorescence. So, [3:01:30] there are species of octopi, which actually are studded with organs that have the equivalent of eyelids over them. But they\u2019re flasher lights. So when you descend into the benthic depths [3:01:45] of the ocean, you enter a domain where all one octopus ever sees of another octopus is its linguistic productivity. Because that\u2019s interior generated light that can be seen. And I think, you know, if you want to set the compass of virtual reality towards something worth, uhm, riding home about, then producing an octopus environment, so that we could experience this kind of thing would be a kind of proto-telepathic, uhm, playpen of some sort. Yeah?\n\n[inaudible from audience]\n\n[3:02:30] \u2122: Aha, so you think that subterfuge, uhm, enters here too?\n\nAudience: Yes, [inaudible] last night when you were discussing the role of psychedelics and you were going by the [inaudible]-theory.\n\nTM: right.\n\nAudience: I assumed you were [inaudible] Rupert Sheldrake\u2019s theory.. [inaudible] psychedelics may, uhm, [inaudible] [3:03:15].\n\nTM: Well, le-.., you want me to [inaudible from audience]. Yeah, well.\n\n[inaudible from audience].", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-125", "text": "\u2122: Well you raise a lot of issues. First of all, since the discovery of retroviruses, of which the HIV-virus is one, we now know it is not always information transcripted from DNA to RNA to protein. The retroviruses transcript from RNA to DNA [3:04:00], uhm, so the central dogma which is that the genome is not being altered by, uhm, a-, uhm, by the environment, is, uhm, is sort of shaky at this point. Uhm, you bring up a very interesting point which has never, to my mind been thrashed out in orthodox science. Which is, if you had a bunch of these psychedelic molecules and we could raise them up to the size of loaves of bread, or something like that. Y- what you would notice about them is they\u2019re all what are called by chemists, planar. Meaning, they tend to be flat. They\u2019re not lumpy, they\u2019re flat. Well, if you look at DMT [3:04:45] or harmine,", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-126", "text": "at DMT [3:04:45] or harmine, uhm, harmine is built off a, a, pentexyl-group, and with two, uhm, benzene rings off of it. It is the perfect size to slip in-between two nucleotides in DNA. It can actually bond into the DNA there. Now, many drugs to this. Uhm, this is called, these drugs are called dimers. The usual problem with a dimer, that will intercalate. This is the other term, intercalate, means slide between the rungs of the DNA, is usually deforms the DNA. It like passes, uhm, a bulge [3:05:30] along, and then, uhm, transcription is difficult, but these indole hallucinogens can dimer with DNA without disrupting its structural integrity. This is why I believe that this is the source of the vision. That, an, you know, orthodox biologist just roll their eyes at this idea and say, well now you made a very [inaudible] error here, you can fuse genetic", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-127", "text": "[inaudible] error here, you can fuse genetic information [3:06:00]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-128", "text": "Transcribed by Andrea Casanova", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-129", "text": "\u2122: with information. Don't you understand that genetic information\u2019s just a sequence of codons coding for protein? And uh, you know, that has no relationship with your memory of Aunt Ninny\u2019s face. However, by being so, uh unyielding on that point, they create a huge problem in um.. In uh\u2026 for their brothers and sisters across the hall who are trying to understand memory. Because the, the molecular theory of memory is a nightmare, here's the problem. Every molecule in your body is changed every 5 to 7 years depending on who you talk to. Uhhh.. except neurons. The nerves are generally the nerves you're born with are the nerves you die with. But it's an absolute uh it\u2019s an absolute\u2026 uh... nono to suggest that memory is lodged in the neurons. Well, if Aunt Minnie died 45 years ago, and you can still remember the dear woman\u2019s face when she used to walk you in the park, then every molecule of your body has been swapped out five", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-130", "text": "molecule of your body has been swapped out five times since she quit the plane. How can you have this memory of Aunt Minnie? If and then they say \u201cwell,\u201d well they don't say actually, they just throw up their hands. Now, the- to the people who say DNA can\u2019t store any kind of information other than codon sequences for proteins, they have to explain why 90% of the genome seems devoted to junk sequencing that does not produce proteins, that does in fact not do anything that anybody knows about. It seems to me that we might as well just take the path of least resistance and saying if the neurons are the only part of the body that persist throughout life, if the memories persist throughout life, then you\u2019ve got two choices. Either the memories were in the neurons or the memories were never stored in the body in the first place. And if you believe that then well the obligation to explain just where they were stored is hard upon you and the", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-131", "text": "where they were stored is hard upon you and the mechanism for retrieving them. So I think molecular biology for being so reductionist has made certain problems in... in neurophysiology in higher cortical functioning almost insoluble. You know, for years and year it was held that [drinks] the, this was another one of those central dogmas of biology. It was held that uhh\u2026 information could move from the nucleus of the neuron to the synapse, but that there was no transport mechanism for moving any molecular species from the synapse back to the nucleus. So consequently they said learning cannot take place in the nucleus of the neuron because the the materials for learning which would be present in the synapse modifications through experience, there's no transport system. Well this was dogma until 10 years ago. Well then they discovered what\u2019s called axoplasmic transport and then by putting labeled compounds in the synapse they were able to locate these compounds later, uh complexed with nuclear material in the", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-132", "text": "later, uh complexed with nuclear material in the neuron, proving to the most die-hard materialist that synaptic material was in fact moving backward to the neuron. So I think that uh, you know there's much that isn't understood about how all this uhh works. Euh something about this pointing out, you know, science seeks closure, and explanation, explanatory closure. My brother one time made a little aphorism which I think says it all on this subject. He said to me once, actually on a mushroom trip, he said \u201cHave you ever notice how as the sphere of understanding grows ever larger, necessarily the surface area of ignorance gets ever bigger?\u201d [audience laughs] seems perfectly clear, you know a simple minded way of saying that is the bigger you build the bonfire, the more darkness you will reveal. Yeah.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-133", "text": "Audience Member: progress really comes from uh outside the context of the paradigm that hasnt, hasnt [experiences. I mean really, to my knowledge, almost everything that's really been advanced has been [cough]philosophy [inaudible].\n\n\u2122:Yes well some of you have probably read Thomas Kuhns The Structure of Scientific Revolutions where he shows you know, that it's never the way that they tell it afterwards. The after telling is always about the primary insight, the careful experiment, the gathering of data, the correlation. Actually, it doesn't work that way at all, it its entirely uhh\u2026. physic, piecemeal, ruled by synchronicity. One of the most interesting things, i'll tell this story and then we\u2019ll go to lunch because, you know science has great pretensions about itself. I mean, it basically regards itself as a metatheory. It regards itself as capable of passing judgement on all other theories. They are supposed to be submit\n\nTranscribed by Shant\n\n[3:12:00]\n\nsubmit themselves to science to be told whether they\u2019re real or not.\n\nAudience Member:Like a religion.\n\nTerence McKenna: Yeah like a religion.\n\nWell how many people know uh eh eh the you know. Modern science was founded by Ren\u00e9 Descartes in uh in the uh early Seventeenth Century. What were the circumstances under which Descartes founded modern science.\n\nRen\u00e9 Descartes was a 19 year old uh [pause]\n\n[3:12:30]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-134", "text": "[3:12:30]\n\nbasically ne'er-do-well and he decided that he would go wenching and soldiering across Europe, which was a thing that young men of certain class did at that time. And so he joined a Habsburg army that was laying siege to Prague in the in the summer of 1619 and after they had taken care of the problem there in Prague, this Habsburg army began to\n\n[3:13:00]\n\nretreat across southern germany and in the on the ev-evening of uh, now there\u2019s a lot of arm wrestling about this but let\u2019s just say the 17th of August 1619, this army made camp near the little town of Ulm in southern Germany which, synchronicity freaks pay attention. Ulm will later be the birthplace of Albert Einstein, worth noting. But that night Descartes in the barracks\n\n[3:13:30]\n\nuh, had a dream and an Angel appeared to him and the angel said uh the conquest of nature is to be achieved through number and measurement, and he was, thunderstruck. He took that, angelic revelation and turned it into modern science. Modern science was founded by an\n\n[3:14:00]\n\nAngel, [Audience Laughter] you know, they don\u2019t tell you this at MIT [Louder Audience Laughter] uh you know it\u2019s it\u2019s astonishing uh how how eh things which claim roots in rationalism are actually among some of the most irrational productions uh in the historical continuum. It\u2019s it a-appears that our development our history our histories have always been uhh created\n\n[3:14:30]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-135", "text": "[3:14:30]\n\nat the promptings of invisible voices. I mean Socrates who is at the very centre of what\u2019s called thinking in..by Western Civilisation. Socrates had a deamon D.e.a.m.o.n it was a little voice, it told it was his crap detector, it told him the difference between profound philosophical thinking and bullpucky, and uh so you know the edifice of Western\n\n[3:15:00]\n\nThinking built on Platonism owes its debt to an invisible agency speaking from hyperspace. So does modern science a la Descartes. How much more of this I mean we don\u2019t care if artists talk to angels because we tre.. our definition of them is that they\u2019re screwballs [Audience Laughter] uh but eh uh ehm uh to believe that a uh a a enterprise like modern science has to trace it\u2019s way back to the same ecstatic roots is I think uh\n\n[3:15:30]\n\nuh very suggestive that the world is stranger than we can suppose, and that we need to open, these channels of communication to these invisible worlds, probably the next great paradigm shift will be annunciated by a Mushroom, an Angel, an Elve, an Alien, what have you.[Pause]\n\nYeah?\n\nAudience Member: Um With the Dmt trip what was your technique for bringing back, for holding on to this info.\n\nTerence Mckenna\n\n[3:16:00]\n\nRepetition. Yeah. The first few times I did it I couldn\u2019t get any grip at all on it and by talking a lot and trying to describe it you slowly slowly build up a map.\n\nSo about the Logos, um the Logos is this phenomenon that was sort of the centerpiece of Greco uh Hellenic spirituality. What it is is it\u2019s a voice in the\n\n[3:16:30]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-136", "text": "[3:16:30]\n\nhead that uh people strove to attain for a thousand years this was the Sine qua non of uh intellectual accomplishment in the Greco-Hellenic world and the Logos, told you the right way to live and this is sort of what you get with psilocybin. You get a voice that can, confound you with the depths and brilliance of its\n\n[3:17:00]\n\nanswers and one of the great, you know one of the puzzles of uh, trying to understand Greco-Hellenic spirituality is what were they talking about a...an.. and if this ever was a general phenomenon then what happened to it, why do we not experience this Uh, This is not well understood I mean the rational scholars who have created our vision of Greece, basically just dont even\n\n[3:17:30]\n\nwant to talk about this they would rather gloss over it, umm [pause] you know [pause] one of the, things that sort of relates to all this is I think human beings are a lot more malleable than we tend to imagine, in other words we imagine that people in the distant past or in Greece or somewhere were just like us except they were living in a different time and place. There\u2019s no\n\n[3:18:00]\n\nTranscribed by Tim Collinson\n\n[3:18:00]\n\nway to find out of course if they\u2019re all dead. But there are certain episodes in the evolution of Western culture that suggest that people may be much more plastic than we ordinarily suppose. First example, um, would be, how can it be that in the middle 1500s perspective was discovered. I mean how do you discover perspective.\n\n[3:18:30]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-137", "text": "[3:18:30]\n\nThis is very hard I think for modern people to understand. Because oohohoh..it\u2019s a given for us. I mean we see in perspective. We accept it as a quality of the world rather than a..ae..a cultural artifact put in place at a certain moment. But in fact during the Renaissance, only the most inspired people could um, paint in perspective on the natch. Most\n\n[3:19:00]\n\npeople they had, complex devices called perspectographs that would project over the scene a receding grid and then people would essentially fill in the lines.\n\nNow another example of this kind of thing that\u2019s not so well known but that is an example that uh Marshall McLuhan [pause] makes a lot of is St Augustine the great father of the Christian church. He had a reputation\n\n[3:19:30]\n\nfor being a very holy man, and the accounts of his contemporaries say that, the way people would satisfy themselves that St Augustine had a pipeline to god, is they would bring him scripture, the bible essentially, and open it in front of him and let him look at it, and then they would close the book and question him about what was there, and he vould always tell them,\n\n[3:20:00]\n\nand they were amazed. As far as we can tell St Augustine was the only man in Europe who could read silently. Nobody else could do it, it was regarded as a miracle. [Audience Laughter] Now we all, read silently, and there may be a few unfortunate individuals amongst us who move their lips while they read, but that's\u2019 the only vestigial trait we have of this previous cultural mode where, everyone, to read meant to read aloud\n\n[3:20:30]\n\nno one could conceive of another way of doing it.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-138", "text": "[3:20:30]\n\nno one could conceive of another way of doing it.\n\nThe Logos seems to me uh a kind of similar thing. It was a mental behaviour, function, which for reasons which are probably complex and unknowable, slipped out of reach. That\u2019s why [pause] it seems to me these psychedelics are very close to being able to modify our behaviours along these kind of lines. Because there\n\n[3:21:00]\n\nare a number of behavioural and experiential possibilities, that we suppress. I mean i think it's just uh ah as an example of how little we know about what\u2019s going on uh look at the Gr\u00e4fen wuh don\u2019t look at it but conceive of the Gr\u00e4fenberg spot, the G spot. Now we all know what this is. Clearly people were looking for it for a long long time, how come they only discovered it twelve years ago.\n\n[3:21:30]\n\nI mean if something that major can be overlooked then it\u2019s hard to imagine what might have been overlooked I mean that\u2019s pretty central into the project of being a human being and apparently it was unknown until very very recently. So um yes th the logos was probably uh what I call the Gaian mind, and that at a certain point in cultural development people just\n\n[3:22:00]\n\nbecame so chuckle headed that the Gaian mind just said heh The hell with this. And uh then the voice fell silent. It fell silent right at the around the time of the birth of Christ eh right at the time of the ge eh of the shift of the cydiacle aeon you know.\n\nAudience Member:[Inaudible (Something about phenomenalised awareness, the Ayahuasca DMT visions related to Psilocybin)]\n\n[3:22:30]\n\nTerence McKenna: How it works with psilocybin?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-139", "text": "Terence McKenna: How it works with psilocybin?\n\nAudience Member: [Inaudible]\n\nWell uh i mean I take, when I take Psilocybin i take it on an empty stomach I don\u2019t fast or anything like that I just don\u2019t eat for 6 hours, I don\u2019t call that fasting. Uh and then I take it in silent darkness. That\u2019s number one very important. The next thing is weigh\n\n[3:23:00]\n\nthe dose, you must weigh the dose. Because 5 grams is what you want. And I\u2019ve had over and over the experience of showing somebody what five grams is and they\u2019re appalled. They say my god you can\u2019t be serious I mean I wou.. I take uh... a fifth that much a fourth that much. Yeah well that\u2019s the problem that why you don\u2019t have elves in the attic and bats in the belfry like I do [audience laughter]\n\n[3:23:30]\n\num you know and so then you take it and I take it on an empty stomach and a lot of people don\u2019t like the taste I don\u2019t really understand that uh, I just chew em up, I sit with them, and I chew em up and then... huh..\n\nAudience Member: Dried?\n\nTerence McKenna: Dried.\n\nAnd none of this mixing in apple sauce or any of that malarky I mean what\u2019s that about. [audience laughter]\n\nAudience Member: [Inaudible (something about fresh vs. dried dosage)]\n\nTerence McKenna: Oh well fresh 60 grams. 60 grams. Uhh\n\n[3:24:00]\n\nTranscribed by Tim Collinson\n\nUh,\n\n(3:24:00)", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-140", "text": "Transcribed by Tim Collinson\n\nUh,\n\n(3:24:00)\n\nbecause there\u2019s more than a, you know-- there\u2019s a huge water loss there. And, uh, then it takes-- people sometimes say, \u201cIt came on within 5 minutes.\u201d Or, \u201cIt came on within 10 minutes.\u201d I don\u2019t know what that could possibly be about. First of all, it defies pharmacoat dynamics to imagine that it could come on that fast. For me it comes on, almost always, at the 1 hour and 20 minute mark. I think it can come on sooner than that.\n\n(3:24:30)\n\nI think I\u2019m fairly resistant to these things. In the hour-- After I take it, I sit, I roll bombers, and I-- I carry out what all good Catholics know as an examination of conscience. This means you think about all the bummers that you\u2019re afraid are going to jump out at you as soon as you get loaded. If you will carry out the examination of conscience, you will be so bored with that\n\n(3:25:00)\n\nby the time the compound actually hits that, you usually won\u2019t have to pay any dues. Because you have faced the fact that you are a jerk 50 times in the preceding hour, so-- And then, the way i do it is; at about the hour and 20 minute mark-- and I should say in the time preceding that, you may have to go to the bathroom once, you may-- It makes your nose run, which is a funny thing. It also makes you yawn.\n\n(3:25:30)", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-141", "text": "(3:25:30)\n\nThese are definitely qualities of psilocybin, not related to its psychoactivity. And, uhm, and I think that it\u2019s very good to decide before it hits, that once it begins, you will not alter the plan. In other words, you decide ahead of time - I\u2019m going to sit here and do this. Because at about the hour and 15 minute mark, it will begin hitting you with stuff\n\n(3:26:00)\n\nlike, \u201cYou\u2019d really be more comfortable down stairs.\u201d Or, uh, you know, \u201cIt\u2019s awfully hot in here, why don't you get up and adjust the thermostat?\u201d All this stuff, you just say, \u201cNo.No. - No. No.\u201d We are holding the space. And sit there. Then, it begins to come on. And it comes-- the image I have is like a jellyfish, or a silk scarf, or something like that. It just kind of drifts down, and surrounds you.\n\nAnd at that point\n\n(3:26:30)\n\nI-- I-- I guess I pray. I say to it, you know, \u201cI\u2019m completely in your hands. Please don\u2019t hurt me, you know. I\u2019m yours. I\u2019m completely committed. I\u2019ve held nothing back, so don\u2019t burn me, please.\u201d And, uh-- and then there is a kind of-- it is hard to describe-- a kind of, uh, potential\n\n(3:27:00)\n\nbegins to build up. And you say, \u201cHmm.\u201d The rush hasn\u2019t begin- begun, but it\u2019s-- you can almost close your eyes and see millions of little psilocybin molecules elbowing serotonin molecules out of the way. And fitting themselves into the receptor site. And the electron spin resonance dynamics is beginning to shift, and the whole thing is about to take off.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-142", "text": "At that point, I smoke furiously.\n\n(3:27:30)\n\nAnd that usually is all it takes. And-- and it-- it comes on, and it-- the first rush is really astonishing. I mean, sometimes it\u2019s more mind boggling than others. But I can remember situations where I would just see it coming and say, \u201cOh my God!\u201d You know? It\u2019s 100 miles wide, and 10 miles high. Where are you going to run to, you know? It\u2019s just coming--\n\n(3:28:00)\n\nyou say, \u201cGood g-rief!\u201d You know? \u201cI guess I\u2019m not going to meet this one sitting up. I think i better lay down.\u201d And in about the time it takes to make and execute that decision, then it just hits. And it\u2019s like a tidal wave. I mean, I have the feeling when I\u2019m doing it in California, that everyone from Vancouver to Tijuana has just, uh, crawled under their desk. Because you can\u2019t imagine. This is happening\n\n(3:28:30)\n\nbetween my ears? You know, it\u2019s more like an asteroid must have fallen in the Pacific Ocean and raised some enormous incoming wave. It\u2019s-- what it\u2019s sort of like it\u2019s like watching a thermonuclear explosion through 50 feet of crystal clear glass.\n\nSo, you know, you are perfectly calm. It\u2019s not getting at you. But the energy that is being released in your presence is awesome. And then,\n\n(3:29:00)", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-143", "text": "(3:29:00)\n\nit, uh-- and sometimes in that first pass, you actually-- the linguistic machinery is burned out. You\u2019ve probably seen these scenes where they will test a hydrogen bomb. And they set up cameras a quarter mile away from ground zero - a half mile, a mile, two miles. And then when they actually detonate the bomb, they get the view from the first camera. And then they switch to the second camera as the first camera\n\n(3:29:30)\n\nis blown to bits and vaporize. And they keep pulling back as each successive instrument is destroyed. Well, this is sort of the feeling you have as this thing spreads out toward you. And then, it, uhm-- it does what it wants to do. It tells you what it wants to tell you. And it\u2019s highly unpredictable. I mean, you can not-- people always say you should ask it a question. This seems absurd to me. I mean, I don\u2019t know. Once, when my\n\n(3:30:00)\n\nlife was in turmoil...\n\nTranscribed by Jason Bastin\n\nTM: Once when my life was in turmoil, I- I.. I did ask a question. I said, uh.. I-I wrote it down ahead of time and the q- and the question was \u2018Am I doing the right thing with my life?\u2019 And then when I got in there and I posed the question and the answer came back instantly It was a uh.. a ripoff from Lyndon Johnson it said: What kind of a chickenshit question is that to ask mee!?\n\n[3:30:30]\n\nsaid oh, sorrry didn't mean to presume you know [laughs] Get your act together and then we\u2019ll have a conversation, but if that's what you wanted to talk about you should\u2019ve taken MDMA.\n\nAudience: [sporadic laughter]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-144", "text": "Audience: [sporadic laughter]\n\nTM: And.. it uh, and then you know paralleling what we talked about this morning and again I\u2019m just giving you my subjective take on it. It\u2019s like, um...\n\n[3:31:00]\n\n[clicks]\n\nI come into a place. It\u2019s hard to describe, it\u2019s a feeling \u2026 and- it\u2019s- Ikn- ump-...andd- the content of the feeling is now the elves are near, ..but they won't appear unless I invoke them. And you know I wish I could tell you that I chant in \u2018mandian or something like that but I don't, well I stole a line from\n\n[3:31:30]\n\nan old, old I Love Lucy program where Ethel is talking to Lucy about UFO\u2019s and uh.. Lucy says she talks to the UFO\u2019s and Ethel says well how can you talk to UFO\u2019s? and Lucy said well it\u2019s simple I just say: Come in little green men. Come in little green men. And that's what I do! I say come in little green men, and then there is ah..\n\n[3:32:00]\n\nand women if there are any out there! [laughs] and then there is a.. It\u2019s like ah.. it's like -ike -it's like a marching band. It\u2019s like a make-believe marching band is what it's like and it comes from a distance like there's a place in my vision that's small. A little dancing light and a- and a little faint sound and the light comes closer, and the sound gets louder until\n\n[3:32:30]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-145", "text": "[3:32:30]\n\nfinally, you know, they pick me up on their shoulders and with tubas blaring and sackbuts and reed bac and all this stu- then they carry me around and talk to me and it\u2019s\u2026 the whole thing is shot through with such a weird sense of zaniness, irishness, joyfishness, I mean it\u2019s almost unbearable it's so...uhm i don't know not exactly\n\n[3:33:00]\n\nDisney-esque because their humor tends to be a little more savage than that. And then that is part of the first wave and then the rest of the trip unfolds pretty much as you..a-- there's a kind of a pushing and pulling that goes on. You can direct it it. Each one of these plants does have a character of its own an-\n\nAudience Question: Inaudible\n\nTM: Sure, um th-.. it--t one of the most puzzling things about these- these\n\n[3:33:30]\n\nplants is that they have characters that seem irreducible for instance psilocybin: it is the science fiction drug. In other words, it says uh.. you know: we have been denizens of this planet for 400 million years, our original home planet is in the M5-83C system. We are connected via hyperspace to all intelligent lifeforms\n\n[3:34:00]\n\nin the galax-. It shows you enormous machines in orbit around alien planets. It talks about the end of history and the collectivizing of humanity. And it's this enormous, hortatory, salvational, dramatic, science fiction type scenario. Well then you take ayahuasca, which in molecular terms is just a few nitrogens are moved around i mean it's basically\n\n[3:34:30]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-146", "text": "[3:34:30]\n\nthe same thing and you get a completely different message. You- you- you se- you feel the energy of the rainforest and the rivers, and you.. It\u2019s very feminine. you think about childbirth, you think about the continuity of generations, you think about the- the- uh.. mystery of the meat. You think about tantric sexuality. It\u2019s all\n\n[3:35:00]\n\nredirected back into the human and natural world in some way.\n\nAnd then of course DMT which I described this morning. Which the DMT elves are not.. from outer space or they don't present themselves that way. In fact one of the odd things about the DMT thing is that you have the feeling that this space that you break into, even though it\u2019s large- Some people even refer to the dome of DMT, that tells you they\n\n[3:35:30]\n\nreally were there. But wherever this huge vaulted space is you have the feeling, although it's hard to explain how you know this, but you have this feeling that you\u2019re way way way underground which fits with the elf motif you're in the hall of the mountain king. You\u2019re under the hills with the, you know, the little people who retreated under the hill. Ah.. The character of these things is one of the most puzzling things\n\n[3:36:00]\n\nuhh about them.\n\nTranscribed by Mark Carver\n\nUhm..\n\nAudience (inaudible question)", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-147", "text": "Terence: Well, that\u2019s a real question, the Logos seems more.. It personally isn\u2019t.. It doesn\u2019t crack jokes and do quadruple uncondro tons and stuff like that.. Its more like a wise, loving creature.. Urm.. This DMT thing is.. You know.. Its a troup of maddened elves, and they are just doing their own thing. And then with ayahuasca, though.. Some people claim they contact an entity it hasn\u2019t been like that for me, it seems to me mon ayahuasca you become.. Like a, a camera.. You just, lye through a visual world.. I mean after a good ayahuasca trip you just feel like your eyes are bugging out of your head. I mean, it\u2019s like buying prints on Madison Avenue you knoww.. And you\u2019ve just been looking and looking and looking and you literally had to give your eyes a rest after an ayahuasca trip and the ayahuasca visions are more\u2026 (..exhales..) they seem to cover a broader spectrum.. The", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-148", "text": "they seem to cover a broader spectrum.. The psilocybin hallucination tend towards this highly polished, machine like, insect like, outer-space bit and the ayahuasca hallucinations are wonderful pastels.. Laces.. Layering of colors and then one of the most interesting thing to me about ayahuasca and I just cannot understand how this works if i could i\u2019d be (inaudible) or somebody, and that is that you in the middle of an ayahuasca trip you can suggest motives, you can leave it so that for instance you can say to it; euhh.. (inaudible) and suddenly there will be thousands of candiditious cigarette lighters, champagne buckets, automobiles, paint glass windows, door knobs, silverware, all rolling in black space in front of you or the perfect exemplification of this ecstatic, the art deco ecstatic.. And then you can say to it.. Okay.. italian borough. And it just like that.. Suddenly, alter (inaudible), Madonna\u2019s, martry saints, euh..", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-149", "text": "Madonna\u2019s, martry saints, euh.. And fantastic scroll work and fluid elite (inaudible) and you should say.. Well.. surprise me. (audience laughter) and then you will get a coherent style like our deco, like italian borough.. Except that is nobody is there to bother to realize it on this planet. But it\u2019s as coherent ah.. Its like you know.. 20 years ago there was no such thing as south west. As a style. You know.. This weird thing coming out of santafade (inaudbile) that I notice its planted its roots deep here as well.. (audience laugh) the turquoise and beige endlessness of feathers and hammered titanium and all that.. Well that\u2019s an esctatic that\u2019s as cohered in the last 20 years and coming to being.. There seems to be an infinite number of these things.. As different as the (inaudbile) of the high dynastry are to a (inaudible) Dalli? Or Apollic? Or Abage? And then you can", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-150", "text": "Or Apollic? Or Abage? And then you can say to it, going beyond the surprise me challenges what i always say to it is uh, \u201ci want to see more of what you are for yourself\u201d. And then its like this.. This., low organ tone.. And it begins to lift the vales and the temperature in the room drops about 20 degrees. And after about 20 seconds of that, you just say.. \u201cEnough of how you are for yourself\u201d. Because you can tell what\u2019s happening is its starting to reveal something so peculiar, and so untailored for the human mind or the eye that you become afraid, you say you know can we go back to dancing mice, our deco cigarette lighters and borough culture pieces please this is turning into deep water as far as im concerned. So, urm.. Yes?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-151", "text": "Audience: (inaudible question)\n\nTM: Well, that\u2019s a good question..\n\nAudience: (inaudbile question)\n\nTM: Good question. It requires a small detouring to pharmacology, the concept which all pharmacologists are familiar which you should should be too if you\u2019re going to deal in this realm, called LD-50. This is not a pretty notion but a necessary one. It stands for Lethal Dose 50. What does this mean? It means if we have 100 mice, how much psilocybin do we have to give each mouse to kill half of them. Do you see? LD50. Half the sample dies at the LD50 dose level whether it\u2019s graduate students or rats. Uh, now, when you\u2019re designing a drug or when you\u2019re thinking about a drug, what you want is a drug with an extremely high ld50 opposed [3:42:00] to its effective dose.\n\nTranscribed by Azlan\n\nThinking about a drug, what you want is a drug with an extremely high LD50 [3:42:00] opposed to its effective dose. So say the effective dose of psilocybin is probably about... .5 milligrams per kilogram and the LD 50 is probably, uh, 200 milligrams per kilogram. The LD50 of psilocybin is 400 times the effective dose. [3:42:30] This is the pharmacologist\u2019s way of saying, \u201cThis is very very safe.\u201d\n\nAudience: So if you ate a pound, you probably wouldn\u2019t die?\n\nA pound wouldn\u2019t kill you. Uh, I don\u2019t think. It might be getting close, but you have to eat in that range to die. Now, some drugs have horrendous LD50 to effective dose profiles.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-152", "text": "Unfortunately, and I hope I don\u2019t rain on anybody\u2019s parade here: MDMA [3:43:00] has a terrible LD50 profile. The effective dose is 125 milligrams. You can kill yourself with 1000 milligrams, so that\u2019s not good at all. Because, sure as hell, some street person or some depressed person or some maniac is going to take 1000 milligrams, and then you\u2019ve got a stiff on your hands. So yeah.\n\nAudience: I recently read some info on MDMA, [3:43:30] it came up that, uh, serotonin, depressed serotonin levels on MDMA- uh, uh, well, the serotonin stays low in your body about a week after taking it whereas like a related substance called E, uh, the serotonin levels are depressed for only two hours into that. Researchers have indicated that there\u2019s- with a lot of their MDMA has some physical [inaudible] plasticity that E does not have therefore it might be wise to avoid it. Is that true? [3:44:00]\n\nAudience: [inaudible] In fact, I read an article that it\u2019s destroying the serotonin receptor side [inaudible]\n\nAudience: [inaudible] 300mg dose [inaudible]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-153", "text": "Audience: [inaudible] 300mg dose [inaudible]\n\nThere was a different- Well, I think MDMA is- I don\u2019t want to trash MDMA, it\u2019s changed a lot of people\u2019s lives and saved relationships and so forth and so on, but to me, it\u2019s a perfect example of why you\u2019re better off taking plants. Because, here was this drug, somebody invented it. [3:44:30] They gave it to a few friends. It seemed to be wonderful for solving personal problems, so without any collection of human data, this thing becomes an item in the underground. Well, and so then thousands of people take it. The psychological effects seem completely benign. It\u2019s a wonderful thing. The physiological effects, it\u2019s a very disturbing profile. It isn\u2019t exactly as you said. [3:45:00] It\u2019s not that it destroys the serotonin receptor side. It\u2019s that, uh, nerves, neurons are covered by these very delicate, uh, uh, structures called dendritic spines. Now, nobody knows what dendritic spines do, but every neuron in your body has them. And when you take MDMA, it- it mows them down. They just, they go away. Now, so then [3:45:30] you get two schools of thought.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-154", "text": "One says, well my god, anything impacting the physical brain that dramatically should be stayed away from. And the other camp says, well do you see any behavioral changes in people who take MDMA a lot? Do you see any physical destruction? Seizures, blindness, anything? And the answer is no. So they say, well, here we have histological evidence that this thing is making [3:46:00] major physiological changes in the dendrites and no behavioral sequella to back up that this is of any consequence. Well my position, being basically a very conservative person, is, in that case: wait. You know, they\u2019re doing work on this in a dozen labs around the country. They\u2019ll figure it out. In the mean time, take psilocybin or mescalin or something else that has been sanctioned. Uh, because you just do not want [3:46:30] to insult the physical brain. You know, that\u2019s the- the whole name of the game. You have to keep the brain in good shape. Yeah.\n\nStudent: Could we go back to his question? Once you\u2019re past the proper dose, is it worthwhile to start to step up to-", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-155", "text": "Oh yeah, that\u2019s where we were ta- That\u2019s why we started talking about LD 50 \u2018cause I wanted to explain to you that, uh, it- taking a compound like psilocybin, if the effective [3:47:00] dose is 20 milligrams, 20 milligrams for somebody who weighs 135 pounds, well, then, looking at the pharmacological data, they should be able to take, uh, 2000 milligrams without any trouble at all. That\u2019s 1000 times- 100 times more, but in fact, what happens is as you raise the dose is that the psychological presentation becomes [3:47:30] unbearable. It becomes so strange that you fear for your sanity in a good ol\u2019 Edgar Allen Poe-ish phrase, you know. It gets stranger and stranger and uh, you know, I talk to pretty naive people who have overdosed. Usually, the way these overdose situations occur is people are gathering mushrooms in the wild and they start eating them and then they just keep [3:48:00] eating them.\n\nTranscribed by Tyler\n\n\u2122: ...eating them and then they realize they\u2019ve eaten four times more than the effective dose. And uh, this is where you get into places where you don\u2019t know what to say because if you tell people, they\u2019ll throw a net over you but you want to say, because you\u2019re so personally disturbed, this is where the flying saucers land and the rectal examinations begin [audience laughs] and you\u2019re told that you\u2019re the messiah and they-you know, it becomes\n\n[3:48:30]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-156", "text": "[3:48:30]\n\nquirkier and quirkier. So I think you have to uh, you know, I\u2019m very admiring of people who can take very high doses but I find it quite challenging enough in the five to seven gram uh, range. A friend of mine says of psilocybin, that every time he takes it he tries to stand more. Meaning more of the vision because it is filtering itself. It\u2019s\n\n[3:49:00]\n\ndefinitely filtering itself. This is why beginners almost never have bad trips because somebody in there looks at your clipboard and says oh this guy has never done this before so lay off the rough stuff [audience laughs]. Just, you know, bring him through the standard number [audience laughs]. It\u2019s-it\u2019s the people who consider themselves experienced you know, who\u2019ve done it 20, 30, 40 times-so\u2019s you know we can take the gloves off with this guy [audience laughs] and\n\n[3:49:30]\n\nand invar-You know it always amazes me I sometimes meet people who say you know I\u2019ve taken mushrooms 50 times and I\u2019ve never had a bad trip and I think you know lucky soul because when it goes left it\u2019s hard you know, it\u2019s hard. You have to really then you know denounce(?) your mantra\u2019s bungle is uh the best advice I can give you, because you need to steer\n\n[3:50:00]\n\nback towards the mainstream now maybe at this point this is a good point at which to talk about what do you do when the going gets rough. There are two things at least that you can do that are very effective uh the first is and uh it\u2019s a very simple thing but people in our culture seem to be resistant to this is you sing you force air into your lungs and body and you\n\n[3:50:30]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-157", "text": "[3:50:30]\n\nchant you sing anything you want and it will radically alter the parameters. There\u2019s a certain place in psilocybin that is my uh b\u00eate noir which I call the meatlocker [audience laughs] and I don\u2019t like this place you know and meatlocker is a mild term for it it\u2019s more like uh you know the morgue for the homicide unit or something whenever I start drifting that way I sing\n\n[3:51:00]\n\nand then you can navigate through it. The other thing you can do, although this is sometimes trickier, is uh smoke cannabis this is what those bombers are for that you rolled in the first hour while you were waiting for it to come on is as soon as it get-begins to press in in some really invasive or alarming way just take a couple of hits of the good and chant and then you can bring it back on track and also talk to it\n\n[3:51:30]\n\ndon\u2019t be afraid to say you know I don\u2019t like this, take it off me, it\u2019s too peculiar, I\u2019m not ready for this. It says oh sorry ehem you know back to dancing mice uh-Yeah? [question]\n\nAudience: *different mushrooms why * wildly varying concentrations of psilocybin?\n\n\u2122: Well...\n\n[more question*?]\n\n\u2122: There hasn\u2019t been a lot of work on this. Uhm, Michael Bukley(sp?) at Evergreen College years ago\n\n[3:52:00]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-158", "text": "[3:52:00]\n\ngrew stropharia cubensis by the method that\u2019s described in my book, the book I wrote with my brother, and what they discovered...see psilocybin is 4phosphoro\u2026. triptamines* that phosphorous group is removed as soon as it crosses uh the blood brain barrier so really uh what\u2019s active is uh uh uh a simpler compound called psilocin 52:30 and psilocin lacks the phosphorous attachment and what they discovered was that in the early flushes the psilocybin ratio is high and the psilocin ratio is low and in the you all know what a flush is right? And in the later flushes the psilocin level rises and the psilocybin level drops so really the two together stay remarkably stable throughout the the life of the organism something worth mentioning I suppose worth* mentioning is uhm* when I was into my extra terrestrial phase when I was assuming that the mushroom was an extra terrestrial either the extra terrestrial itself or something designed by some kind of an extraterrestrial uh it was very interesting to me that psilocybin is as I said is 4-phosphoropsyNNdimethyltryptamine is is the only 4 substituted indole in nature the only *the only one well if you were to search for evidence of extraterrestrial tampering with the biome of this planet what you would look for is a unique compound occurring in one life form and no other here it is folks this phosphorous group is unique and I\u2019ve never read [3:54:00] any description...\n\nTranscribed by Bev Smith", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-159", "text": "Transcribed by Bev Smith\n\n[3:54:00] any description or discussion of what the evolutionary history of that- why it would appear in any organism like that and not in any other. That\u2019s just an aside because I\u2019m always searching for the thumbprint of the alien. It-m, there may not be an alien thumbprint, but the phosphorous group attached to psilocybin is a good candidate for it. [audience member indicates that he has a question] Yeah.\n\nAudience Member: Um, [coughs] I\u2019m switching the subject only slightly- [3:54:30] the descriptions that you\u2019ve given of all of these experiences, although you\u2019ve uh, have said that it varies blankly, there\u2019s a remarkable internal consistency of your description- that, that you\u2019re entering a world that seems to have boundaries and entities that you consistently encounter again and again. I\u2019ve um, spoken to many of people over the years, some of whom [3:55:00] have known you throughout that time, and nobody I\u2019ve ever spoken to- people who have taken high doses of- or low doses- or low doses, have ever had similar experiences, you know, clearly you\u2019ve spoken to people who have. So I\u2019m wondering-\n\nTM: Maybe they were just being polite [laughs]\n\nAudience Member (cont.): Um, I\u2019m wondering if you\u2019ve ever experimented, with your own experiences, like what [John C.] Lilly describes in Programming and Metaprogramming, and [3:55:30] to see, um, you describe ways of evoking the entity, which certainly could be put into a context of introducing programs in your experience-\n\nTM: True\n\nAudience Member (cont.): Did you work with different presuppositions going into this to see what the limits are?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-160", "text": "TM: Well my original presupposition was to try to have no presupposition at all and then out of that came [3:56:00] all of these assumptions. You\u2019re right that nobody has trips exactly like mine, although if you question people carefully, you can begin to see what- how it works. Uh for example, umm, you know I describe this thing this morning- the elves, the presentational thing, the high speed motion, the gifts- [3:56:30] all that- well, sometimes people will take DMT and they\u2019ll come back and you\u2019ll realize that it\u2019s as though there is an archetype there which has different levels in it, and if I had to say what the archetype of DMT is, it\u2019s the archetype of the circus. And one time I saw a woman come out of DMT, she was an anthropologist, she had fairly high body weight, and I could tell that she had not [3:57:00] gotten a complete hit- came down, we said okay, what was it?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-161", "text": "came down, we said okay, what was it? She said it was the saddest carnival in the world. She said the carnival was closed, all the tents had their flaps rolled down and there were just paper cups and candy wrappers blowing in the aisles in between them and the ferris wheel was stopped. Well, she was just at the edge of this thing and [3:57:30] if- if you think about the archetype of the circus, it is an interesting one. First of all, you have the three center rings, where wild and zany activity is continually being presented, tiny cars keep arriving with 14 clowns in each one and they keep climbing out, falling all over each other ap- but it isn\u2019t all fun and games, it has a strange uh [3:58:00] erotic content, and as a child I think my first awareness of what I would really call eros was watching this beautiful long-haired woman in a tiny spangled costume hang by her teeth 120 feet", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-162", "text": "spangled costume hang by her teeth 120 feet above the center ring um doing acrobatics so you\u2019ve got- [something happens in audience, some laugh, a woman playfully says something inaudible, TM continues] [3:58:28] -so you\u2019ve got the clown, and you\u2019ve got the lady in the tiny spangled costume, and then off from the center ring, you have these dark alleyways where the sideshows are, the siamese twins, and the goat boy, and all the rest of it, you know- and it has a very weird vibe about it. So it can land you in any of these places, but if you, if you try and correlate [3:59:00] people\u2019s experiences it seems to me that it\u2019s pretty clear that through, through their own life history and their own programming nevertheless something is trying to poke through. Ah, now my DMT experience seems pretty radically different from other people\u2019s, although other people don\u2019t give any account at all. I mean it\u2019s amazing how", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-163", "text": "any account at all. I mean it\u2019s amazing how inarticulate people are. You- they come down, you say how was it, and they say it was FAR OUT, [3:59:30] you say you know you don\u2019t get out of here with that rat, you know, HOW WAS IT? And they say, well [sighs] they can\u2019t give a good account. On psilocybin, I think most people experience something very much like what I describe. Huge machines, a sense of danger to the earth, apocalyptic visions, uh the idea that someone will come and help. And I\u2019m pretty", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-164", "text": "Transcribed by William Hargrave\n\nTM: [4:00:00]...and i'm pretty resistant to all the flotsam and jetsam of the new age, i mean i don't spend a moment worrying about the exact physical location of Atlantis or stuff like that... and i think people it inflates their personal mythologies and intellectual misconceptions but there is something trying to get through that's why this exercise, show me what you are for yourself, is really [4:00:30] a good one and maybe my trips are so weird because i have always worshiped weirdness, so i can go further down that road without being alarmed while somebody else, (ahh) (ahh) you know, would pull back. One other problem is that we have, we don't have complete maps of this places. At this stage in exploring that new world, what we have essentially are the scribbled diaries of frightened explorers, [4:01:00] and we don\u00b4t know if explorer A is talking about the same river system of explorer B or whether they were on opposite sides of the planet or the universe. Building a coherent picture of the psychedelic dimension would be the 1st challenge to a, to a rational approach to understanding it.\n\nAudience: Have you (ahh), have you ever read the Far Journeys by Robert Monroe?\n\nTM: Is that the 1st book?\n\nAudience: No.\n\nTM: No, i read the 1st book.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-165", "text": "Audience: No.\n\nTM: No, i read the 1st book.\n\nAudience: [4:01:30] Well there actually is a map right there. Talk about weird, this is one of the weirdest things you\u2019ll ever read but it has some amazing rain of truth [mic noise] and in it he presents a map of all the realms of being that exist, that he\u2019s, visited in normal consciousness. It\u2019s an almost inside psychedelic description, but it\u2019s, it's (ahh) pretty consistent with some of the things you were discussing this morning because, it is where you go when you die and is also where you go in between. In fact he talks about classes who attend few years ago and he describes the levels upon levels of energy coexistent and describes as like [mic noise]...", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-166", "text": "TM: Well, i read the first book and i was puzzled by how much of it didn\u2019t seem familiar to me, like, i remember in the first book he talks about a world that's just [4:02:30] like this world except the cars are nine feet wide. That would be a very puzzling psychedelic experience to go to that world. (ahh) I knew someone who was very close to him and i don't want to set off any lawsuits here, but i once cornered this person and said, so what about it? And he said, don't worry you don't have to worry this is not getting close to your .... at all. (ahh) [4:03:00] Buddhism of the Mahayanas, has, you know, a tremendously complex (ahh) system of levels and entities, wrathful buddhas and dharmapalas and peaceful entities and, i think that that's pretty interesting as a phenomenological description of mind, i reject the philosophical premise of buddhism [4:03:30] because i think it's (ahh) you know, a non believably uncompromising kind of nihilism but buddhism as it's pitched in America soft-pedals that a lot, you know, they don't, they don't, present it as a form of nihilism but i think that ultimately it is in the most positive sense but still (ahh) i'm of the school that follows Alfred North Whitehead who said: [4:04:00] say what you may there are certain stubborn facts, and you know, that's not a very buddhist point of view, yeah.\n\nAudience: Do you have visions on cannabis, too?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-167", "text": "Audience: Do you have visions on cannabis, too?\n\nTM: [drinks water] If i can control myself and not do it too often, the problem is cannabis does so many other wonderful things and i tend to use it for those other wonderful things but if i were totally dedicated to vision, then i would only smoke once a week [4:04:30] because then you completely come to equilibrium, and then, you know, i, again i think people do it, not wrong, but not the way you should do it if you want visions. You should do it the way you do all this other things, alone in silent darkness and in high doses. (ahh) Bursts of hallucination on cannabis are hard to control and predict but sometimes they're as intense as anything can be. [4:05:00] If you read (ahh) (uhm) 19th century descriptions of cannabis use by people like, Fitz Hugh Ludlow and the Club des Hashischins and that crowd, where they were eating the hashish, it's very clear that it was the Lsd of the 19th century, i mean nobody can read those descriptions without realising this people were loaded for sure, they were thoroughly and completely smashed [4:05:30] to be\n\nable to write those kinds of accounts.\n\nAudience: [inaudible]\n\nTM: Yeah, go ahead.\n\nAudience: [inaudible]...started mushroom trip...[inaudible]...started tripping...[inaudible]...real confuse entry...[inaudible]...and most i kind of realise...[inaudible]...and it has effectance and i'm not sure that...[inaudible] in terms of getting, (ahh) new learning...[inaudible]...more powerful chemist.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-168", "text": "TM: Well, you didn't exactly make clear to me what the effect was. It fuzzes you out going into? [4:06:00]\n\nTranscribed by Tiago Ramos\n\n\u2122: Well, you didn\u2019t exactly make clear to me what the effect was...it fuzzes you out? Going in?\n\nAudience: (inaudible) ...something totally different\u2026\n\n\u2122: What it does for me is it just slightly cuts my anxiety. You know? I\u2019m able to, to let the thing unfold of its own. I\u2019m no-, I don\u2019t know. I mean I have a very; a lifelong, intense relationship to cannabis. And I basically make my living out of being able to do[4:06:30] feats of memory. And, you know, cannabis is supposed to trash your memory so I don\u2019t, you know maybe I\u2019m different but I resist any \u201cmaybe I\u2019m different\u201d argument because it\u2019s malarkey. Nobody is different enough that they can, you know\u2026\n\nAudience: (inaudible) memory recall, when you\u2019re at the peak of that kind of experience...speak as clearly...I get really tongue tied.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-169", "text": "\u2122: [4:07:00]]No, moreso. My great dream is that as my powers of locution fade with old age that cannabis will be legalized then I can sit in front of you and smoke and my career can be pushed 20 years into the future(audience laughs)...ah...the way I use cannabis is to think. And I do a lot of thinking. And I do a lot, And I...I...Ah...at night before I go to bed.[4:07:30] I smoke. And then I play the tapes of the day and then I understand what happened. If I didn\u2019t have cannabis I don\u2019t think...I would be... sort of...at sea, or kind of a space case because I never get what somebody really meant, really intended, really had in mind til I play the tape stoned and then I see: Uh huh - that\u2019s what the agenda was; that\u2019s what was going on.\n\nAudience: Then you go to sleep afterwards?\n\n\u2122:[4:08:00] O yeah. Yeah. And if I don\u2019t smoke then I\u2019m an insomniac. Yeah.\n\nAudience: (inaudible)?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-170", "text": "\u2122: Ok. Well, LSD *sighs*...again, I\u2019m only speaking for myself because there is no other way to approach it. I l...I found LSD very interesting[4:08:30] but ultimately kind of frustrating because I wanted visions. And, to me, what LSD by itself does is it does a lot of slippery and hard to name stuff. It accelerates and changes the quality of thought. It...mmmmhhhhhh, well, basically that\u2019s it. It does something to the quality of thought. But I had been reading Aldous Huxley and Havelock Ellis and those people and I kept saying, you know,[4:09:00] where are the ruins of ancient civilizations? Where are the jewelled tapestries? And, and then, fiddling around with LSD, I discovered that if I would, ah, take it with mescaline then it became the psychedelic experience that I was seeking. But, in and of itself, it\u2019s kind of psycho-analytic? It\u2019s sort of like cleaning up", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-171", "text": "psycho-analytic? It\u2019s sort of like cleaning up your act?(Audience: mmhmm) It often focuses you on your own personal stuff?[4:09:30] (Audience: mmhmm) And, you know, I have to confess to you: I\u2019m not that into my own personal stuff probably because it\u2019s so horrendous, ah, *deep breath* but I don\u2019t like personalized trips. I like cosmic vision information trips. And, and then mescaline, ah..., mescaline is... you have to take a lot to get it to really do what you want it to do. And it being and amphetamine[4:10:00] it has a not a very good LD50 profile. It\u2019s not like MDMA where 10 times the effective dose and you\u2019re in real trouble but probably 40 times the effective dose and you\u2019d be sweating bullets. So, ah, and then just the nature of my life I have not had as much to do with mescaline as these other things. I\u2019m really a vision freak. And people say you", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-172", "text": "I\u2019m really a vision freak. And people say you know, well there\u2019s feeling and there\u2019s insight[4:10:30]...and there\u2019s this and that but you know the reason I\u2019m so fixated on vision - or the excuse I give - somebody said: O, it\u2019s because you\u2019re a double Scorpio but (audience laughs) for me it\u2019s the, for me it\u2019s the proof that it\u2019s not coming from me. I can come up with insights. I can come up with funny ideas but I can\u2019t come up with objects never before seen by the human eye or mind and so when the visions start[4:11:00] then I feel: this is the transpersonal part of the trip; this isn\u2019t my unconscious, my memories, my fears, my hopes; this is something else yeah.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-173", "text": "Audience: Um.(inaudible)?\n\n\u2122: How do boundary dissolution andi-?\n\nAudience: (inaudible)?\n\n\u2122: Well I think, in very practical terms[4:11:30], they show you that everything you know is wrong. (audience giggles) You know, I mean how can the ego survive that piece of information? It just puts in your lap incontrovertible evidence that everything you\u2019ve ever thought or believed is hokum and that\u2019s extraordinarily humbling. And that word: humbling means the feeling you have when your ego is reduced. You know? Humble yourself enough and you\u2019ll begin to feel humiliated.\n\nTranscribed by Artemis Jones\n\nTM: [4:12:00] And, you know, that\u2019s a deeper ego reduction. I think they, aside from any magical chemical effect they may have on ego, they\u2019re just showing you the true size of the universe and your place in it. And you know, In our \u2018down\u2019 personal lives, every man, every woman, a king, or a queen. I mean, we build castles in the air. Our career, our children, our whatever. Well, then you get into those places, you say, [4:12:30] you know, what, how preposterous.\n\nAudience: [inaudible] Is there any gender difference in [inaudible]?\n\nTM: For men and women?\n\nAudience: [inaudible]\n\nTM: Well, that\u2019s an interesting question.\n\nAudience: I\u2019m interested in it also, in the history [inaudible]\n\nTM: Yeah, you mean what we talked about last night?\n\nAudience: [inaudible]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-174", "text": "TM: Well, I think women, by virtue of the fact that they [4:13:00] menstruate and give birth, are just inherently more chemically driven creatures than men. Men are Apollonian in intent. The idea is always some kind of abstract purity, clarity, kind of thing. And women know from the get go that that\u2018s an illusion. That the reality is the floor of the rainforest, [4:13:30] the interconnected tissue, the levels, the trade-offs, and so forth and so on. Ah, this is why I think men generally men tend to be more generally interested in these things than women, and to also be more impacted by them. For women it\u2019s seems to sort of fit in, and affirm what they knew. For men it seems to come as a tremendous surprise that this is the way uh, things are put together. [4:14:00] I think that if we, if everybody gave birth and experienced menstruation probably we never would have launched ourselves", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-175", "text": "menstruation probably we never would have launched ourselves into history. In a way, you know, without going too far with it, men are the ancillary sex. I mean the original uh, uh, blastula in the embryonic development is female. And I was listening to someone talk about this the other night [4:14:30] saying no wonder men have the problems they have. What a man is, is a woman who has been under incredible chemical assault for nine months in the womb. And you just have been hammered, sculpted, shaped, and recast again, and again. And then you\u2019re born male. A female fetus doesn\u2019t experience anything like that. It starts out with a smooth shot, it\u2019s, it\u2019s and um, a phylogenetic expression, [4:15:00] and, and then achieves it. I don\u2019t think of the ego as particularly male because I think that we all have it to accepted degrees. But men are able to express it. A woman with an ego is frustrated. A man with an ego", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-176", "text": "an ego is frustrated. A man with an ego is a menace to all concerned, you know? [laughs] Yeah?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-177", "text": "Audience: [inaudible] ... trip with another people. Do you think the knowledge of energy changes your trip\u2026[inaudible]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-178", "text": "TM: [4:15:30] I think it\u2019s very, it\u2019s a very major decision to do that. That if you\u2019re going to take a high dose of psychedelics with somebody else then you better be prepared to get all entangled with them. Uh, which can be great. It can also be fairly confusing. I don\u2019t like taking psychedelics, uh, this is not an issue of entanglement. That\u2019s sort of what goes on between lovers or close friends. But I get a lot of requests to [4:16:00] sit for people. And I don\u2019t do it because I, I don\u2019t know whether it\u2019s my personality or what it is? But I am unable to contain my anxiety in the presence of another stoned person. Especially if I\u2019m stoned. If I\u2019m stoned, and they\u2019re stoned and we\u2019re in a dark room, I cannot get off. I listen to them breath. I worry. I wonder if I should ask them if they\u2019re alright. [4:16:30] Then I go off", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-179", "text": "alright. [4:16:30] Then I go off on long trips about not interrupting them. And then that loops back into, \u2019but I haven\u2019t heard them breath for twenty minutes!\u2019 [laughter] And, and, and I\u2019m always afraid. I don\u2019t know. So really people say, \u201cDoesn\u2019t it take courage e to do it alone?\u201d For me it takes more courage to do it with people because inevitably you get tangled up in some kind of craziness. And you know, you can think you\u2019re having a telepathic experience. And they\u2019ve decided that they want to have sex or something, [4:17:00] and meanwhile I\u2019ve just had a revelation about that entry Morlier made in his diary when he was talking to his niece Anges about the nature of the French Comic Theater. And, so, you say, boy, you know, we\u2019ve got too much on the menu here. Um. But I\u2019m weird! Remember that. [laughter] Yeah?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-180", "text": "Audience: [inaudible] Um, okay now, and we uh have heard about the uh [4:17:30]\n\nayahuasca so, um, can you comment on this kind [inaudible] and contrast to what you\u2019re talking about [inaudible]\n\nTM: You mean the group mind on ayahuasca?\n\nAudience: Yes, [inaudible] Is that possible.\n\nTM: Oh yeah. No, it\u2019s very possible. Uh, it\u2019s very possible. I mean, you can sit with someone and play a little game where you will describe the hallucination for 30 seconds, then they get to describe the hallucination for 30 seconds. [4:18:00] And you can absolutely convince yourself that people are seeing the same you know, that you\u2019re seeing, the same thing. And when you toss sex into the mix, it just goes over the top.\n\nTranscribed by Micki Garrison\n\nTM:-then they get to describe [4:18:00] the hallucinations for 30 seconds then you can absolutely convince yourself that people are seeing the same, you know, that you're seeing the same thing. And you know when you toss sex into the mix it just goes over the top. I mean I've had the impression- I don't want to trot it out as a condition of mine or something that I assert true but I have had the impression stoned on mushrooms making love that um, i- it's like a perspiration forms on the surface of the skin and there's some kind of electrolytic thing that goes on and the boundaries dissolve between the people. I don't mean metaphorically. I mean that you become one organism. And that's uh, that's pretty uh, pretty amazing.\n\nQ: ???", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-181", "text": "Q: ???\n\nYeah yeah yeah. Now as I just said I don't like taking psychedelics with people, I guess what I should have said is that I hate being responsible because I don't mind taking Ayahuasca with 30 people none of whom speak English in a hut up some river but that's because I know that the old shamans are in charge, that I'm just a face in the crowd. Nobody's going to me for explanation or help. I'll tell you an ayahuasca story just to give you an idea.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-182", "text": "Years ago in 76 Kat and I, it before we were married, in Peru and we had found this Shaman who was very good and he had a following and we were, you know, apprenticing ourselves to him and he - the style of the Peruvian Mestizo people I mean cultures handle this differently but they are never straight with each other. It's an incredibly masked culture almost like the Japanese but without the formality. In other words if you think that's somebody's a jerk you would never say that that's the last thing you would say because that's your true opinion. So we got into a situation with these people where this elder Shaman who was very respected, beloved even by these people he had a nephew, a sobrino, who was an absolute jerk and this guy was into pimping a little on the side and he was very ambitious to perfect his ayahuasca so he could go to Lima and charge yuppies for it. And he had this really awful habit, and no what really had gone on before we got there, play what all get together to take Ayahuasca and these old old guys, you know, 80 85 years old but totally authentic dudes would sing these beautiful Ayahuasca songs and he would sing against them. I mean can you imagine a scene like this where everyone's singing Row Row Row Your Boat except one guy wants to sing Five Foot Two Eyes Of Blue.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-183", "text": "And the level of social tension ease meetings would just rise and rise but nobody would ever say anything to this guy and tell him to bug out and can that crap so one night this is happened to meetings in a row this is the third meeting like this everybody had hoped this guy wouldn't come. So then he showed up, then we all dosed and then we get loaded and the singing begins and he begins his singing and in the wave of hallucinations and Kat was sitting next to me I feel him sitting up on his haunches kind of rocking back and forth on his heels, and I would look at him and I could see he was going through these weird animal transformations. First he would become like a jackal then he would become like a monkey and it was really intense. And I mentioned it to Kat and she could see it too. All, and he capped - and we were also trying to tape these Ayahuasca songs so it was a double", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-184", "text": "tape these Ayahuasca songs so it was a double irritation to us that this guy was so out of control. Laughter a particularly long song by the old guys with him just hammering against them I could feel Kat who has a real Irish temper getting more and more pissed off at this guy and finally at the end of this song when the silence fell, she had been just staring at the floor and she looked across the room at Don Jose and uh, gave him a look of pure loathing and I saw these red things, these red triangular-shaped things come out of her eyes and go across the room like woop woop woop woop! and when it got to him it knocked him off his feet. He turn on backwards from the impact of these things literally and everything going on in the room stopped dead and the Elder Shaman said to the guy sitting next to him, he said oh the gringa sends 'badadadada'! And you know then you realize", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-185", "text": "'badadadada'! And you know then you realize wow we're in over our heads here you can't chill shi from Shinola in this thing. This concludes tape three. Our program continues [4:24:00] with tape four.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-186", "text": "Transcribed by Eva Petakovic\n\nTM: ...so that\u2019s an example of, you know, magical power condensed onto the material plane. Yes?\n\nAudience: [inaudible] ...purple triangles coming from your head\u2026 [inaudible]\n\nTM: Clearly, the same- the same phenomenon, uh, yeah!\n\nAudience: Um, first of all, I have to ask [4:23:30] [inaudible] question, [inaudible] after that?\n\nTM: Ah, he actually didn\u2019t come back after that evening, uh\u2026\n\nAudience: Then the other question, or- or actually [inaudible], um, I have done extensive work with Iridology, to the point that, I could understand where the limitations [inaudible] blatantly obvious, because it\u2019s not so much [inaudible] the characteristics of the iris, the eye, it\u2019s what\u2019s transmitted from the mind, through the pupil, or the sensor of that [4:25:00] [inaudible] that is really being accessed by someone who is [inaudible], and that\u2019s what would give you [inaudible] that you\u2019re looking for, and so, I feel that, that power, that transmission of mind, so many times, is carried from that energy that- that goes back and forth through the eyes, and I\u2019m wondering if you had any more thoughts on that.\n\nTM: Well, it seems to imply that we are all potentially linked together in many ways that civilization has suppressed. We are no longer [4:25:30] telepathic, we are no longer able to reach out and cap somebody at a glance, like that, and uh-\n\nAudience: But I think we do, and I think we do all the time.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-187", "text": "TM: But somehow our perception of what\u2019s been going on is- is skewed. We don\u2019t- you know Rupert and I talked a lot about this. He had the idea that- he said- you know- the search for a psychic- the search for proof of psychic power has not been a very happy story, with card-flipping and this sort of thing. And Rupert [4:26:00] had the genius to realize that: what is the commonest psychic power, that we all believe exists, and have experienced and so forth, but which science is utterly able to explain, that could be statistically studied? Well, what it is is, the sense that someone is looking at you, you know? And you could test this, and in fact, we did tests, where you would choose one [4:26:30] person and put them at the front of a room full of people. And you would tell people, either look at your lap, or look at the back of this person\u2019s head. And they would be asked,", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-188", "text": "this person\u2019s head. And they would be asked, are people looking at you? Or are people looking at the back of- of- uh- looking at their lap? And certain people -you can quickly satisfy yourself- were able to detect this a phenomenal amount of the time, well beyond statistical, uh, you know, [4:27:00] the rules of probability. So, I think we\u2019re surrounded by subliminal abilities that we can\u2019t, uh, really understand. I mean I- from years of travelling in Asia, I- I- have an amazing psychic power, which is, I ca- I can tell when food shouldn\u2019t be eaten, you know? And it will happen to me, you know, in very good restaurants, and- and if I go against it, you know [4:27:30], I\u2019ll spend the evening over the toilet, because I couldn\u2019t believe that Che So-And-So would serve poison food because it was costing me so much money. But then when I get back to the hotel room,", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-189", "text": "But then when I get back to the hotel room, sure enough, by overriding my own instincts, I- I- get into trouble.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-190", "text": "TM:I think... psychic ability, well this is worth talking about, that we cannot be- or how can I put it? We cannot- uh- evolve [4:28:00] beyond the confines of our language. And if you have a language that makes telepathy impossible, then telepathy will be impossible inside that culture. You see we all pay lip service to the idea that, uh, that lang- that language and culture, ah, create each other, but we actually act as though culture is real, and it isn\u2019t. [4:28:30] I- I- learned this, you know, in Peru, very dramatically, because in the Peruvian Amazon, there is a- a- disease which people are very, very concerned about, called \u201csusto\u201d. Have all of you heard of this? Susto only affects Peruvians. This is the first clue that something weird is going on. And its major manifestation is bad luck. And- but if you get it, [4:29:00] and you\u2019re a Peruvian, you prepare to cash in your chips. You know, it\u2019s as- it\u2019s as horrible as melanoma. You know, you\u2019re doomed if you have this stuff. And you have to go to a shaman and get it taken care of or you\u2019re dead within six months. But I can\u2019t get susto, it\u2019s not- it\u2019s a linguistic disease of some sort. It travels around inside the confines of Mestizo Spanish, and nowhere else.\n\nAudience: But it\u2019s the evil [4:29:30] eye [inaudible] it is the equation in the, uh, south of our country-", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-191", "text": "TM: Well, yeah people have this ideas, yeah. And you know, like people say, well magic is accomplished because the person the magic is being done to, knows that it\u2019s happening, and therefore they unconsciously participate in their own demise. But I\u2019ve observed these shamans in the Amazon, and they will go- if a shaman has decided to actually get somebody, then he will go to incredible lengths\u2026 [4:30:00]\n\nTranscribed by Tuan Nguyen\n\n[4:30:00] lengths to conceal what he is doing so that the person never knows and never knows how to blame, so it isn\u2019t some kind of psychological co-option that\u2019s happening. It\u2019s something a good deal more complex than that. Yeah.\n\nAudience: Uh, you know, a while back you were talking about uhm, uhm, a period of time where humanity was inside out uhm\u2026 that made me think about [inaudible] for example,[4:30:30] uhm, we have all these myths about fairies and elves and uhm, magic and perhaps at one time the world was like that but it is not like that now [inaudible] talking about social context that does not include telepathy uhm, generates a culture without uhm.. people experiencing telepathy, uhm\u2026 and yet we have all these ideas\u2026 we have all these fairy tales\u2026 you know and now that we\u2019re talking about self-transforming machine elves, uhm, when you, uhm,[4:31:00] have a *sneeze*\n\nTM:Well, I\u2019m not sure that you got it into a question that I can respond to. Try again.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-192", "text": "Audience: Ok, so, uhm\u2026 our culture then is uhm... [inaudible] and uhm the whole idea of magic, and things like uhm, the existence of elves, uhm\u2026 [inaudible] people would laugh at that unless uhm they are on the supposed fringes. Uhm\u2026 do you think, that this kind of thing could come back? Do you think that we will [4:31:30] have uhm\u2026 you know uhm\u2026 [inaudible] \u2026 these kind of things.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-193", "text": "TM: Yes, sure, because what you have to do is you have to shift the locus. I mean, it\u2019s kind of hard to explain but, every civilization has a locus and, and we have disempowered ourselves by shifting the locus to an imagined class of experts. We have an incredibly peculiar version of how the universe is put together. [4:32:00] First of all, we rely, a lot of the time, on the notion of the eensy beensy. Genes, viruses, atoms, elementary particles. These are the things which shape our world, we tell each other. And yet, who has ever seen any of these things? I mean a virus maybe a few people have seen. A hydrogen atom? It\u2019s a pretty airy fairy concept and when you start talking about the anti nu meson and stuff like that, where you can [4:32:30] only approach it through an arcane mathematical language the reality, whatever that means, of these things becomes pretty , uhn,", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-194", "text": "that means, of these things becomes pretty , uhn, questionable. See, one of the things I think that psychedelics could do is r- give back to us what I call uhm, the immediacy of felt experience. Since the rise of cartesian analysis in the 17th century [4:33:00] everything that we experience has been defined as, what are called, secondary characteristics. Color, a secondary characteristic. Uhm, feeling. Uhm, and what\u2019s real is mo- mass, momentum, charge, spin, stuff like this, which, you know... These are the primary qualities of the universe?Wwho ever encounters or deals with them? We need to model reality so that it is [4:33:30] understandable to us. I mean, that that statement even had to be made shows how far off track we are. Our current model of reality is excellent for describing the behavior of hydrogen at the center of stars or something like that. Terrible for explaining to you how you\u2019re supposed to stay tuned to your", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-195", "text": "you how you\u2019re supposed to stay tuned to your girlfriend. So somehow we have sold out to abstraction. And this is something about science, you know? And the demonic [4:34:00] power of numerical analysis and stuff like this. I think that w- part of what the psychedelic revolution is and why it is so politically threatening is because a psychedelic person does not believe anything they cannot confirm for themselves through thought, intuition, or feeling. And a non-psychedelic person joins up with the quantum [4:34:30] physicists, or the hasidic Jews, or some group of people who already got it packaged and figured out. I mean, the UFO thing is a good example. Everybody\u2019s interested in UFOs, and you know, are there space people, are there not. And I think most people think that the news will come, that the way you encounter a UFO, the way most of us will encounter a UFO, is that the president will call a press conference", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-196", "text": "is that the president will call a press conference [4:35:00] and say, you know, that the time has come to speak frankly about certain declassified material and that, yes, in fact it has been going on. I mean, that\u2019s not how it\u2019s going to happen. The way it\u2019s going to happen is on five grams in silent darkness in your living room, and that\u2019s real. You know, if flying saucers were to land on the south lawn of the White House tomorrow it would be minor news compared to what can happen to you [4:35:30] a minute and a half after smoking DMT. We don\u2019t realize that we are not real unless we are the center of our own private mandala, and so we look to media, to experts. You know, maybe the Dalai Lama can clarify it or Mother Theresa or Stephen Hawking. Well, forget all that. Those are just linguistic concepts are far as you\u2019re concerned. The only thing that\u2019s real to you", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-197", "text": "concerned. The only thing that\u2019s real to you is yourself and your immediate surroundings. And if we could [4:36:00]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-198", "text": "(There is a loop in part of the audio somewhere between here and 4:42:00)\n\nTranscribed by Paul Mullins\n\n[4:36:00]TM:empower that,you know,our political problems would disappear overnight.We are infantile and we do love it.We don\u2019t really try to claim our existential validity,and those who do are called mad, because they depart from the sanctioned paradigm.Over here,somebody...yeah.\n\nAudience: First,it just struck me that,one of the things you seem no good at is bringing that [inaudible word] experience into language[4:36:30][inaudible],which creates things/thinks and realities that you...could be decrying of the shared linguistic reality where we can discuss the experience that we\u2019ve had..[inaudible]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-199", "text": "TM: Yes,well,it becomes real when we talk about it.I mean, one of the most satisfying experiences that i have as a public speaker is, sometimes, after speaking to[4:37:00]groups, like last night, somebody will come up afterwards and say:\u201dI thought i was crazy, until i heard you speak.Now i know there are at least two of us\u201d, and the truth is, you know, there are more than two of us, there are thousands.If you...you know, it\u2019s a delusion if it happens to one person, it\u2019s a cult if it happens to twenty people, and it\u2019s true if it happens to ten[4:37:30] thousand people.Well this is a strange way to have epistemological authenticity conferred upon something.We vote on it?!...you know.So, i would like competition.I mean,i feel pretty lonely out here, i\u2019m surprised nobody has followed me into this. There must be other people who can articulate this things as well or better than i can but, boy, they don\u2019t seem to come forth[4:38:00], and i really don\u2019t know why that is, because what i say is not all that exceptional, it\u2019s just the sum total of it is kind of eerie.But if we don\u2019t...that\u2019s what i was saying...you know, we cannot evolve faster than we evolve our language, our language is like the collective skin of our culture.So, you know, until you say the words \u201cself-transforming elf machines from hyperspace\u201d, then[4:38:30] there aren\u2019t such things. Once you say it, it has gained a certain kind of ontological currency\u2026.\n\nAudience: \u2026weren\u2019t you arguing the opposite point, you know,[inaudible] stuff that[inaudible] quantum physicists[inaudible] and that..[inaudible] language systems..", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-200", "text": "TM: ...well, see, people are buying other people\u2019s experience. I mean, if you\u2019re not a quantum physicist, why in the world should you take those people seriously?[4:39:00]They\u2019re talking gibberish. What power does it have over you?, except that it comes presented on the platter of science.Say: \u201cYou must believe this! If you don\u2019t believe this you\u2019re not a well educated Tranby with-it person.We can just say: \u201cWell, malarkey, didn\u2019t you people believe something completely different 15 years ago?\u201d they say: \u201cYes,but know we\u2019ve got it!\u201d, say: \u201cWell, I\u2019m supposed to take that assertion seriously?You change your mind every 6 months.\u201d\n\nAudience: [inaudible] during[4:39:30] psychedelic{inaudible] is,you know,ungraspable, very frustrating[inaudible] and,you know,we can\u2019t settle down until we[inaudible] stabilizing language [inaudible] settle down and play with it.So, we[inaudible] for having a true experience [inaudible][4:40:00] is, you know, beyond context.Once we[inaudible] it, it becomes\u2026 not quite an[inaudible], but the experience really changes,and\u2026 it becomes something to which then[inaudible] to each other,and have a good [inaudible], but...you know,we\u2019re missing it[inaudible]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-201", "text": "TM:Well,every entity has a value dark[4:40:30] dimension.I mean,surely only the most naive of quantum physicists believe that,you know,the quantum electrodynamics description of the electron is all there is to say about the electron,because biology is made out of electrons and you can\u2019t reason from quantum electrodynamics to the rain forest, you know, obviously other factors are present, which[4:41:00] are escaping this particular linguistic model, so, being able to talk about something doesn\u2019t rob it of it\u2019s mystery, it\u2019s merely is a sectioning through it that gives you a kind of a lower dimensional map of it, but the mystery remains intact.[editorial cut in the video]Well i\u2019m not sure that you got it into a question that i can respond to.Try again.\n\nAudience: Ok.So, our culture[4:41:30] is in a phase that\u2019s very,like, science oriented,and the whole idea of magic and, things like,the existence of elves[inaudible], people laugh at that[inaudible] Do you think that this kind of thing could come back?Do you think that we will have,you know,like,[inaudible] experiences with this kind of things?\n\nTM: Yes,sure,because you have to do it,you have to shift the locus[4:42:00]\n\nTranscribed by Adrian Stan", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-202", "text": "[4:42:00] the locus, I mean it\u2019s kind of hard to explain because every civilization has a locus. And we have disempowered ourselves by shifting the locus to an imagined class of experts. We have an incredibly peculiar version of how the universe is put together. First of all, we rely, a lot of the time, on the notion of the itsy-bitsy. Genes, viruses, atoms, [4:42:30] elementary particles. These are the things which shape our world, we tell each other. And yet, who has ever seen any of these things? I mean a virus, maybe a few people have seen. A hydrogen atom? It\u2019s a pretty airy-fairy concept. And when you start talking about the [anti-numason?] and stuff like that, where you can only approach it through an arcane mathematical language, the reality of these things, whatever that means, becomes pretty,uhm, [4:43:00] questionable. See, one of the things I think that psychedelics could do is", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-203", "text": "the things I think that psychedelics could do is give back to us what I call the immediacy of felt experience. Since the rise of cartesian analysis in the 17th century, everything that we experience has been defined as, what are called, secondary characteristics. Color, a secondary characteristic. [4:43:30] Uhm feeling. Uhm, and what\u2019s real is mo- mass, momentum, charge, spin. Stuff like this which, you know... These are the primary qualities of the universe? Who ever encounters or deals with them? We need to model reality so that it is understandable to us. I mean, that that statement should even have to be made shows how far off track we are. Our current model of reality is excellent for describing, [4:44:00] uhm, the behavior of hydrogen at the center of stars or something like that. Terrible for explaining to you how you\u2019re supposed to stay tuned to your girlfriend. So somehow we have sold out to abstraction. And this is something about science", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-204", "text": "out to abstraction. And this is something about science you know? And the demonic power of numerical analysis and stuff like this. I think that part of what the psychedelic revolution [4:44:30] is, and why it is so politically threatening, is because a psychedelic person does not believe anything they cannot confirm for themselves through thought, intuition, or feeling. And a non-psychedelic person joins up with the quantum physicists, or the hasidic jews or some group of people who already got it packaged and figured out. Uhm, I mean, [4:45:00] the UFO thing is a good example. Everybody is interested in UFOs and, you know, are there space people, are there not. And I think most people think that the news will come that the way you, uhm, encounter a UFO, the way most of us encounter a UFO, is that the president will call a press conference and say, you know, that the time has come to speak frankly about certain", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-205", "text": "time has come to speak frankly about certain declassified material and that yes in fact,uhm, it has been going on. [4:45:30] I mean, that\u2019s now how it\u2019s going to happen. The way it\u2019s going to happen is on 5 grams in silent darkness in your living room. And that\u2019s real! You know, if flying saucers were to land on the south lawn of the White House tomorrow it would be minor news compared to what can happen to you a minute and a half after smoking DMT. We don\u2019t realize that we are not real unless we are the center of our own private mandala. And so we look to media,[4:46:00] to experts. You know, maybe the Dalai Lama can clarify it, or Mother Theresa, or Stephen Hawking. Well forget all that. Those are just linguistic concepts as far as you\u2019re concerned. The only thing that\u2019s real to you is yourself and your immediate surroundings. And if we could empower that, you", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-206", "text": "surroundings. And if we could empower that, you know, our political problems would disappear overnight. We are infantile and we do love it. We don\u2019t really try to claim [4:46:30] our existential validity. And those who do are called mad because they depart from the sanctioned paradigm. Over here somebody. Yea.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-207", "text": "Audience: [inaudible]\n\nTM: Yes so it becomes real when we talk about it. I mean, one of the most satisfying experiences that I have as a public speaker is sometimes, after speaking to groups like last night, somebody will come up afterwards and say, \u201cI thought I was crazy until I heard you speak. [4:47:30] Now I know that there are at least two of us.\u201d And the truth is, you know, there are more than two of us. There are thousands. If you, uhm, you know, it\u2019s a delusion if it happens to one person, it\u2019s a cult if it happens to 20 people, and it\u2019s true if it happens to ten thousand people. Well this is a strange way to have, uhm, epistemological authenticity conferred upon something. We vote on it? You know? [4:48:00]\n\nTranscribed by Paul Mullins\n\nTM: You know, ah, so I\u2026 I - I would like competition. I mean I feel pretty lonely out here; I\u2019m surprised nobody has followed me into this. There must be other people who can articulate these things ah, as well or better than I can, but boy they don\u2019t seem to come forth.. And I really don\u2019t know why that is because what I say is not all that exceptional it\u2019s just the sum total of it is kind of eerie (4:40:30) Uh, but if we don\u2019t\u2026. That\u2019s why I was saying uh you know \u201cWe can not evolve faster than we evolve our language\u201d our language is like the collective skin of our culture.\n\nSo you know until you say the words \"Self-transforming Elf machines from Hyperspace\" - then there aren't such things. Once you say it, it has gained a certain kind of ontological currency. (4:49:00)", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-208", "text": "Audience: So weren't you arguing the opposite point you know when you spoke of ... (inaudible?)\n\nWell see people are buying other people's experience. I mean if you're not a quantum physicist, why in the world should you take those people seriously? They're talking gibberish. What power does it have over you except that it comes presented to you on the platter of 'science'? See you must believe this, if you don't believe this, you're not a ah, well educated, trendy 'with it' person. You can just say, well, malarkey - didn't you people say something completely different 15 years ago? They say yes, but now we've got it! So say well am I supposed to take that assertion seriously? You change your mind every six months.\n\nAudience: So our experience during the psychedelic experience\u2026\n\nTM: Uh huh\n\nAudience: before we bring it to language, is... is\u2026 you know, ungraspable, very frustrating (inaudible) and... and you know we can't settle down until we bring this to language, that is based on, with their experience, they brought it to language and they can kind of settle down and play with it, so... we need to be\u2026 (inaudible) beyond concepts, once we conceptualize it, it becomes not quite an experiment but the experience really changes and\u2026 it becomes something that we can then (inaudible) to each other and have good social time\u2026 but uh, uhh ya know we\u2019re missing the point.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-209", "text": "TM: Well, every entity has a \u2018value dark dimension\u2019. I mean I\u2026 Surely only the most naive of quantum physicist believe that the... Uhh, you uh, you know the quantum electrodynamic description of the electron is all there is to say about the electron because biology is made out of electrons and you can't reason from, from quantum electrodynamics to... the rain forest. You know, obviously other factors are present which are escaping this particular uh, linguistic model. So, being able to talk about something doesn\u2019t rob it of it\u2019s mystery, it merely is a sectioning through it, that uh gives you a kind of a lower dimensional map of it, but that the, the mystery remains intact... Y- you know um\u2026 (long silence filled with audible movements) Vichtenstein talked about what he called \u201cthe unspeakable\u201d... and I a, you know; the unspeakable is the true domain of being, and then within that there is a very small subset of those things which can actually be", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-210", "text": "very small subset of those things which can actually be captured in language, but they\u2019re a vanishingly small uh set of the whole thing, mostly it\u2019s all mystery. I don\u2019t know why this is so surprising to people I mean where is it writ large that bipedal primates with binocular vision are supposed to be carrying around in their heads; true models of the cosmos? I mean, would you expect eh, an apple tree or a monarch butterfly to have a true map of the cosmos, ahhh, inside them? No more than that we should have\u2026 so I think though all\u2026 all knowledge is provisional and I think the new science will honor this. This is why the rise in the use of the word model, they no longer believe they\u2019re giving a complete explanation of the phenomena they just say well here's a model [swallows] and next year we'll get a better model and will keep modelling and our models will get better and better but they will never be more than crude", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-211", "text": "and better but they will never be more than crude approximations to an unspeakable mystery.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-212", "text": "Audience: do you find this tragic?\n\nTM: No! I find this exhilarating, I think part of the p... male... or part of the ego dominator... pathology is to demand closure out of everything, there is no closure, you have to learn to sit with the messiness of the mystery you know it\u2019s this thing we said this morning the bigger you build the bonfire of understanding the more darkness is revealed to your startled eye, so no I think its open ended and exhilarating and tremendously, uh, exciting that that\u2019s the kind of universe we\u2019re living in.\n\nAudience: Terence, I think this thing about mystery is that find it sad I think up until a few months ago my main thing was try and understand try and understand and now I read something somewhere....\n\nTranscribed by Luke, Danny\n\nAudience: [4:54:00][inaudible]\n\nTM: That\u2019s right. Well, you know, this is not nearly the-the stoned ravings of the psilocybin brigade. Do you all know, or have you ever heard of, Godel\u2019s incommensurability theorem? This sounds daunting and disturbing. Uhm, have you ever [4:54:30] heard of this? Does anybody have a clue what I\u2019m talking about? Okay, well that in itself is a measure of the kind of society we\u2019re living in because to my mind, more important than Einstein, or Schrodinger, or any of those people was Kurt Godel, German mathematician. He began by studying the calculus and he had a very...funny method. What he did was he would number every operation [4:55:00] in - in a partial differential equation and these numbers are called godel numbers.\n\nAudience: How do you spell Godel?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-213", "text": "Audience: How do you spell Godel?\n\nTM: G-o-d-e-l. And what he showed, I think this is the most important intellectual step taken in the 21st century. He showed that any formal system will produce true statements [4:55:30] which are not provable within the confines of the formal system itself. Now what this actually means is that mathematics can fail. It mean that there is no closure. You ca- he proved this logically. Showed that closure is impossible. That everything- He showed it for arithmetic, the most secure of all intellectual edifices. Essentially what he showed [4:56:00] was that 2+2=4 is a very strong tendency, not a law. And, uhm, this incommensurability theory means that no program of- of formal analysis will ever completely exhaust its subject. There will always be a residuum of mystery. And, uhm, we need to come to terms with this. I mean, it\u2019s taken us 80 years to get Einstein [4:56:30] under our belts and that\u2019s a simple notion compared to what Godel is saying. Because what he\u2019s saying is not about, you know, the distortion of space-time near massive objects but something which actually affects our own lives on a day-to-day basis. And, you know, if you live for closure you\u2019re beating your head against a stone wall and your head will wear out long before the stone wall will. There\u2019s a kind of a- an appreciation for the mystery [4:57:00] needs to place that attitude that the mystery is an unsolved problem. Mysteries have no relationship whatsoever to unsolved problems. Yeah.\n\nAudience: [inaudible]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-214", "text": "Audience: [inaudible]\n\nTM: You don\u2019t need a complete map. I mean, I\u2019m not such a van of Wittgenstein but he seems to have raised his ugly head here. Uhm, Wittgenstein used to say \u201cWe do not seek statements which are true. [4:58:00] We seek statements which are true enough.\u201d That\u2019s this genuflection to the incommensurability theorem. That\u2019s as good as it gets folks. True enough. Beyond that there\u2019s just, you know, the airy realm of metaphysics which will never be plumed. So what we\u2019re trying to do is refine our model, make it more responsive to what we want the model to tell us. But you don\u2019t want to confuse the model [4:58:30] with the phenomenon being modeled because it will always have dimensions which exceed the grasp of the theory.\n\nAudience: [inaudible]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-215", "text": "Audience: [inaudible]\n\nTM: Yes, although, I have real problems with probability theory which we\u2019ll probably get into tomorrow. I think that, in a sense, probability theory has made it almost impossible for us to [4:59:00] think clearly about anything. Because it- it contains certain built in insidious assumptions that are, uhm, purely assumptions. For instance, Probability theory tell you that when you flip a coin, the odds of it being heads or tails are 50/50. If, in fact, that were true. The coin would land on it\u2019s edge every single time. [4:59:30] So, what we need, you see, is not a theory of uhm, of uhm, what is possible. That\u2019s science. If you want to know if something is possible you find a scientist and they\u2019re always perfectly happy to fulfill this function and tell you whether this is possible or not. What we completely lack, as a civilization, is a theory that explains to us [5:00:00]\n\nTranscribed by Paul Mullins\n\n[5:00:00]TM: ...us how it is, out of the vast class of possible things, certain things undergo what Alfred North Whitehead called \"the formality of actually occurring\" ; We have no theory. I mean, science can say, \"Well, it's probable that it'll be this, but it's also 40% probable that it'll be that\". You say, \"Well, which will it be?\" They said, \"Well, we, I just told you the probability.\" [5:00:30] Say, I'm not, that's not good enough! I want to know...\" Say, \"We have no theory of selecting among the probabilities.\"", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-216", "text": "The other problem that haunts probabilities theory is that it assumes that time is an absolute flat plane. It assumes that....No physicist tells you in his lab notes, \"Please perform my experiment on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays, because it won't work any other time.\" In other words,[5:01:00] the assumption is made that the experiment will produce the data predicted by theory, no matter when the experiment is performed. In other words, it's assumed that the phenomena is time-independent. But that's just an assumption that Newton got into, proving that phenomena are time-independent is absolutely beyond our intellectual reach, it can't be done.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-217", "text": "Uh, a curious thing about probability theory is, [5:01:30] say you want to know how much current is flowing through a wire, here's how probability theory finds out: It measures the current flowing through the wire with a meter. It measures it 1,000 times. It takes those values and adds them together. Then it divides by 1,000. Then it tells you, \"This is how much current is flowing through the wire.\" You look at the value they've given you, and you say, [5:02:00] \"But you took 1,000 measurements and we never got this number.\" [They] say, \"Well, that's because, you know, you didn't average the probability and...\" Whew. If we took 1,000 measurements and not one is the value you're offering, then why should we believe that this is the amount of current flowing through the wire?\" Well, then there's a bunch of hand-waving and epistemic foot-stamping and so-forth...Science is an incredibly fragile edifice....Which if it weren't for it's [5:02:30] ability to hand it's findings on to technologists to make pretty things, it would have to take it's place somewhere to the left of, I don't know, homeopathy, acupressure, something like that. [audience laughs] In other words, it's not a metatheory, it has not got truth by the jugular. It has a bunch of fishy mathematical formula, which it's flailing you with, but I don't think....uh...I think, I, I think that serious revision [5:03:00] of Probability Theory is going to have to take place, uh\u2026", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-218", "text": "Audience1: I think you've given Probability Theory much more than what's really there. Inherently, what it [inaudible] all about is simply acknowledging that there are variables in anything that we can't know. [inaudible] It's really nothing more than that.\n\nAudience2: Which brings you back to just the [inaudible]\n\nTM: Well, but for instance, if the odds that the, if the odds that the coin comes at heads or tails or 50/50, why doesn't it land on it's edge every single [5:03:30] time?\n\nAudience: I don't see how it's relative to standing on it's edge, it's simply, what what happens with a coin, where, where, and what line, [inaudible] stays up or down? [inaudible]\n\nTM: Well, you know, another thing Probability Theory says is that, \"Chance has no memory\". And so, you, they always, here, first here's statistics, they say, \"If you flip a coin, and it comes up heads 49 times, what are the odds that it will come up heads [5:04:00] the 50th time?\"\n\nThe answer is: 50/50. But any gambler would tell you, you know, that, \"If it comes up heads 5 times in a row, bet on heads, for cryin' out loud!\" So, there's, there's something\u2026", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-219", "text": "Audience: [inaudible] but I think a lot of [inaudible] that just doesn't exist. I agree...uh...[inaudible] it takes is the notion that there are things going on here that [5:04:30] we can't know, even though that's not acknowledged by most people who are [inaudible]. That's the reality [inaudible]\n\nTM: But don't you think the other assumption is that time is an, is a non-inputting...it's not variable. You know, that you don't say, \"You know, the odds of a coin coming up at heads or tails are 50/50 in Canada but 48/52 in Bolivia.\"\n\nAudience: That's one of the variables that's sort of smeared out, simply because it [5:05:00] can't be characterized the way people, the people who are doing that like to tend to characterize things but\u2026\n\nTM: Well\u2026\n\nAudience: But underlying the whole thing is still the notion that you're dealing with unknowables. And I'm not saying that those who are deeply immersed, and practicing, uh, probability statistics hold this view, but the reality is, underlying this sort of underpinning the whole thing is the notion that there are things going on here that we can't know.\n\nTM: Oh, well I don't have [5:05:30] any trouble with that. Uh, I understand why science latched on to Probability with such a vengeance: It's because, you know, thanks to William of Ockham, there is this notion of \"Occam's Razor\". Which is this idea that is most simply stated as, \"Hypotheses should not be multiplied without necessity.\" So, since the idea that time is a flat invariant [5:06:00]\n\nTranscribed Sheree Geo", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-220", "text": "Transcribed Sheree Geo\n\n[5:06:00] is the simplest assumption, try it first and see if it works. But I maintain that you know science has in certain areas been very slow to make progress in the social domain in econometrics in ahh.. the you know.. multiple body problems and stuff like that. Well I think this is because this simple assumption, that time is an invariant [5:06:30] has to be reexamined. I would also re- .. I would offer a new definition of science; science is that field of human endeavour which studies phenomenon so crude that they are time invariant. You know, the .. the hydrogen atom cleaves from the oxygen atom the same way every time, but love affairs don\u2019t come apart the same way every time, [5:07:00] bankruptcy\u2019s don\u2019t occur the same way every time. These are complex, compound phenomena that are then influenced by the temporal variables and the variables embedded in the environment around them. Now the problem is these are the things that we are interested in, love affairs, bankruptcy and the establishment of empire. Very few people have a passionate interest in the dynamics of the water molecule.\n\n[Audience Member Inaudible] [5:07:30]\n\nOh, now i know I have you on the run because this is a uhh .. but it makes pretty things argument\n\n[Audience Member Inaudible]\n\nWell see I think science is a great enterprise and noble but not the arbitrator of truth\n\n[Audience Member Agrees?]\n\nThere are no arbitrary of truth, the truth of the turow, the truth of quantum physics, these are [5:08:00] truths, in the supermarket of truth but y- there's no .. there's no uhhh top end to that process. There may not even be one truth.\n\n[Audience Inaudible]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-221", "text": "[Audience Inaudible]\n\nIn a given situation. If you\u2019re flipping coins probability theory is probably a good guide, you wouldn\u2019t want to run your love affair on probability theory uhh so you have to choose the domain [5:08:30] you have to recognise the applicable models, the applicable tools for whatever domain you\u2019re looking at.\n\n[audience member inaudible]\n\nWell you .. you're allowed to be a heretic you just don\u2019t get paid well, that's the price you pay for that, still .. yeah.\n\n[audience member inaudible]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-222", "text": "No no.. No I don\u2019t think it's bad, I thi- I\u2019m entirely in support of whatever the universe is in the process of trying to do here ummm.. I think that.. uh.. I think that history is ending [5:10:00] and that it was a temporary perturbation of the system and that we can anchor ourselves through this chaos-trophy or whatever it is by going back to archaic models but I.. I think that and-.. you know.. this is what we'll talk about tomorrow when we get the computer because I don\u2019t merely talk about it even though I have been flailing the mathematicians ultimately I too [5:10:30] come to rest with a fishy formula. I think that the universe is some kind\u2026 i think that there is something that there is overlooked by science called .. and i'll name it. Its called Novelty. The universe is a novelty conserving engine of some sort, from the very first nanoseconds after the big bang, novelty has been conserving itself and building newer and [5:11:00] deeper levels of novelty on novelty already achieved. So that uh .. you know in the first few m-.. i mean, you have the big bang then you have this era called the pre-physical era, its brief, it lasts the amount of time it takes light to cross a distance equivalent to the diameter of the proton, electron, something d- dinky for sure. That's called the era before physics, then [5:11:30] physics begins one jiffy after that and.. and the original universe was so hot that there were .. that it was a plasma of free electrons, so since it was a plasma, there was nothing you could called atomic physics because the ambient temperature was so high that electrons could not settle down into stable orbitals around nuclei. As the temperature [5:12:00] of the universe fell\u2026.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-223", "text": "Transcribed by Luke Danton\n\n[5:12:00] As the temperature of the universe fell, atomic systems crystallized out of that plasmic environment, well then ahh.. further cooling of the universe leads to more complex kinds of bonds and the cooking out of complex elements from stars, the original universe was made entirely of hydrogen, this hydrogen aggregated into masses so ahh.. dense, so large that at their center was actually -and if you think I\u2019m not nervous in doing this in front of you, you're crazy- ([laughs], [audience laughs]) these aggregates of hydrogen, at the center it was so massive in temperature and pressure that fusion could actually begin, and fusion cooked out heavier elements: iron, sulfur and eventually carbon. When you get for violent carbon this throws open the doorway to tremendous new novelty, you get now for the first time, not atomic systems but molecular systems, these molecular systems lead into protobiological systems, protobiological systems lead into prokarya, then eukarya, then true higher multicellular animals, then mammals, then human beings, then electronic culture, then the big surprise.\n\nNow the thing to notes about all this, is that novelty keeps building on novelty already achieved, it crosses biological lines, atomic lines, molecular lines, it is along the universe, i'm proposing, that novelty is conserved, and so then what we represent is a kind of ultimate nexus of novelty, and i believe that we are being wound tighter and tighter and tighter into a confrontation with the equivalent of the singularity at the center of a black hole, but it isn't a gravitational singularity that I\u2019m talking about, it's a novelty singularity and so you know the universe is growing toward some kind of ultimate state of boundaryless hyper-connectivity and when that is achieved the process will cease to be describable in the logos of ordinary space-time and energy.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-224", "text": "Now science has no notion of this concept of novelty. In the East there is such a concept it\u2019s called Dao, and Dao builds things up and pulls them down according to its own mysterious laws. Tomorrow I will argue when we get the computer that its laws are not in fact entirely mysterious and that we can discover ah.. the nature of the novelty constant, and instead of treating space-time as an absolutely featureless plain, we can take that zero value which is how that shows up in the Newtonian mechanics, and substitute instead a fractal dimension number which will be some kind of decimal fraction between one and two, and then this will allow us to do things previously inconceivable like predict the future and stuff like that. See of one thing I guess i should say since we started drifting into this fairly radi place is the idea that the universe is ahh\u2026 growing toward itself, it's not moving outward from its origin, its moving toward its completion and this is called teleology, its very unwelcome in most scientific modeling, but that's a legacy from the nineteenth century where they were so concerned to get god out of the picture that they wanted everything to happen through one random process colliding with another random process and flipping out newer deal elephants and redwood trees, but in principle we don't have to believe in god to believe in an attractor at the end of the process, we see many kinds of attractors in the natural world.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-225", "text": "One way that I think of the psychedelic experiences is \u2013 you know you heard me talk about hyperspace, super-space, this kind of thing- it really does seem to me that reality is some kind of a very complex geometric object of some sort and you know how they teach you in trigonometry that all possible ellipses can be obtained by sectioning a cone, and that if you take the infinite set of ellipses and reconstruct them you can reconstruct the cone. Well the way I think of psychedelics and psychedelic tripping is you are sectioning a hyperdimensional object and what you're coming back with is a lower dimensional map of this higher dimensional object. Well everybody has a different map in the same way that there are infinite number of elliptical sections of a cone, but they're all generated by the same object and if it's a mystery to you how a simple fine-eyed object like a cone can generate an infinite number of elliptical sections then it's going to be hard [5:18:00] for you to understand how everybody can have a different psychedelic trip and yet be actually dealing with the same ahh.. reality in hyperspace.\n\nTranscribed by Nicole\n\n\u2122:[3:18:00]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-226", "text": "Transcribed by Nicole\n\n\u2122:[3:18:00]\n\nThere is no way to find out of course, cause they are all dead, but there are certain episodes in the evolution of western culture that suggest that people may be much more plastic than we ordinarily suppose.First example uhh would be : How can it be that in the middle 1500s perspective was discovered.I mean, how do you discover perspective?[3:18:30] This is very hard, I think, for modern people to understand because uuh it\u2019s a given for us.I mean we see in perspective.We accept it as a quality of the world rather than uh a cultural artifact put in place at a certain moment.But in fact, during the renaissance only the most inspired people could uhh.. paint in perspective on the natch.[3:19:00] Most people, they had complex devices called perspectographs that would project over the scene a receding grid and then people would essentially fill in the lines.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-227", "text": "Now another example of this kind of thing that\u2019s not so well known but that is an example that aii Marshall McLuhan makes a lot of is saint Augustine- the great father of the Christian church.He had a reputation for being[3:19:30] a very holy man and the accounts of his contemporaries say that a way that people would satisfy themselves that saint Augustine had a pipeline to god, is that they would bring him scripture, the Bible essentially, and open it in front of him and let him look at it and then they would close the book and question him about what was there and he could always tell them.[3:20:00] And they were amazed!As far as we can tell st.Augustine was the only man in Europe who could read silently.Nobody else could do it, it was regarded as a miracle.[audience laughs].Now we all read silently and there may be few unfortunate individuals among us who move their lips while they read, but that\u2019s the only [inaudible] trace we have of this previous cultural mode where everyone \u201cto read\u201d meant to read aloud.[3:20:30].No one could conceive any other way of doing it.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-228", "text": "The logos seems to me a kind of similar thing.It was a mental behaviour, function, which, for reasons which are probably complex and unknowable, slipped out of reach.That\u2019s why, it seems to me, the psychedelics are very close to being able to modify our behaviours along this kind of lines because ,[3:21:00] there are number of behavioral and experiential possibilities that we suppress.I mean I think it\u2019s just uhh as an example of how little we know about what\u2019s going on ahmm.Look at the Grafen\u2026, I mean don\u2019t look at it but conceive of the Gr\u00e4fenberg spot : the G-spot.Now, we all know what this is, clearly people were looking for it for a long long time, how could they only discover it twelve years ago [3:21:30].I mean, if something that major can be overlooked than it is hard to IMAGINE what might have been overlooked, I mean that\u2019s pretty central into the project of being a human being and apparently it was unknown until very very recently.So, uhhh yes- the Logos was probably uhh what I call Gaian mind.And that at a certain point in cultural development people [3:22:00] became so chuckleheaded that the Gaian mind had said:To hell with this! and then uh the voice fell silent.It fell silent right at the around the time of the birth of Christ eh .Right at the time of the [gia?] of the shift of this uh [inaudible] aeon, you know.\n\nAudience: [inaudible question][3:22:30]\n\n\u2122:How it works with psilocybin?\n\nAudience:[inaudible]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-229", "text": "\u2122:How it works with psilocybin?\n\nAudience:[inaudible]\n\n\u2122: Well ahh, I mean I take when I take psilocybin I take it on an empty stomach, I don\u2019t fast or anything like that, I just don\u2019t eat for six hours- I don\u2019t call that fasting.. Uhh, and then I take it in silent darkness.That\u2019s number one - very important.The next thing is : weigh the dose.[3:23:00]\n\nYou must weigh the dose because 5 grams is what you want and I had over and over the experience of showing somebody what 5 grams is and they are appalled. They say : \u201cMY GOD! YOU CAN\u2019T BE SERIOUS. I mean, I would uhh.. I take a fifth that much.A fourth that much.\u201d\n\nYeah well, that\u2019s the problem, that\u2019s why you don\u2019t have elves in the attic and bats in the belfry like I do uhh [audience laughter] [3:23:30] umm yo- you know.And so then you take it, and I take it on an empty stomach and a lot of people don\u2019t like the taste.I don\u2019t really understand that uhh.I just chew them up.I sit with them and I chew them up and then huh?\n\nAudience :Dry?\n\n\u2122: Dry.And none of this mixing in applesauce or any of that malarkin.I mean what\u2019s that about?[audience laughter]\n\nAudience: [inaudible]\n\n\u2122:Oh well fresh- sixty grams.Sixty grams uhh [3:24:00] because there is more than a, you know, there is a huge water loss there.\n\nTranscribed by Marko\n\nT.M: \u201deventually society will get around to exploiting this particular one just like it does everything else.\n\n[audience question]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-230", "text": "[audience question]\n\nT.M: The drug is ibogaine the plant it comes from is tabernanthe iboga. Yeah?\n\n[audience question \u201cyou mentioned combing the DMT with iboga, what what's the experience like, what is the change?]\n\nT.M:: Mhm? well that's what ayahuasca is [5:24:31] you see the DMT is then not destroyed in your intestine and so you have a slow release DMT trip by doing that.\n\n[audience q \u201cIs that done with smoking DMT and ingesting \u2026.]\n\nT.M: Ahh, in in theory and probably in fact that would be a tremendously successful way to get very loaded the problem is it might be a too successful way you wanna be careful with these mao inhibitors - ther - there are mao inhibitors [5:25:01] that drug companies have produced where ah a single dose inhibits all the mao in your body for up to a month, this would be murder if you got around some DMT on that, uh the nice thing about harmine is that it\u2019s fully reversible in four to six hours so it's ah it\u2019s a gentle mao inhibitor, but yeah this is the strategy this is why you could conceivably take the [5:25:31] seeds of a plant like\n\ninaudiable [5:24:33]\n\nwhich grows around here more or less and ah and contains harmine and combine it with a plant like\n\ninaudiable [5:25:43]\n\nwhich contains DMT and come up with a north american pseudo ayascha of some sort, people are doing this but you know if you think, think it takes courage to just do these drug- these compounds na naturally imagine the kind of courage [5:26:02] it takes to diddle with recipes and to do your own", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-231", "text": "Bio Assay [5:26:06]\n\nwhich you must do because the cook must taste the soup.\n\n[Audience Q]\n\nT.M: pa ga, Peganum harmala P-E-G-A-N-U-M Peganum Harmala in the\n\npsycho falacity {5:26:21].\n\n[Audience Q]\n\nT.M: Well we never tried the experiment again [5:26:33] because ahh Dennis felt that he really made the maximum contribution [audience laughter] to the effort, ahh, there are many experiments though which could be tried, which would put no human being in danger, ahh for you know, for instance, you could use square wave generators which are acoustical generators to try and drive these drug molecules into dna [5:27:01] in\n\nvetro\n\nin a test tube you know you would what would you would do is simply put the denatured DNA into solution, put some dmt into the solution, shake it furiously, ultracentrifuge the mix to get the loose DMT out and then weigh the DNA and see if its weight has increased by a number which was magically divisible by the molecular [5:27:31] weight of the DMT molecule, these kinds of studies have been done and shows that DNA ah, DMT does intercalate and locate itself into DNA so yeah there are a lot of different things like that that could be done that wouldn\u2019t put anyone at risk.\n\n[Audience Q]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-232", "text": "[Audience Q]\n\nT.M: well, ahhl he doesn't remember it very clearly, he, his impression was [5:28:01] that it lasted about 5 days it actually lasted 3 weeks so the real staff that would have alarmed him he fortunately was to out of it to see or remember, but I was there throughout the whole thing and saw it, and uhm, I think it would be nice to understand the parameters of the effect a little more clearly before we charge off and try that particular trick again, yeah. {5:28:30]\n\n[Audience Q]\n\nT.M: Well this is what's being referred to is the in True Hallucinations which is a tape set which will be published as a book next year, it describes an expedition to the amazon in 1971 in which was really where we got the whammy, i mean its still, i'm still running on what happened from you know the 28th of february 1971to the 21st march the rest of my life is pretty much throw [5:29:01] away. [Audience Laughter] but ugh, wh - what he, I dunno it was weirder than flying saucer abduction because that now there's a whole form for it, it was hard to say something was waiting for us down in the amazon and as soon as we started taking these mushrooms, it began making suggestions about how you could use the mushroom and your voice and certain other materials present at hand in {5:29:32] tha that environment to essentially uhm well there aren\u2019t even words to say what it was, condense the soul into three dimensional space, or ahh, create the philosopher's stone inside your body and then give birth to it or in other words some radical transformation of the ontology of being human was held out as a possibility and it all [5:30:01]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-233", "text": "Transcribed by Jess Harse", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-234", "text": "TM: and it [5:30:00] all came down to an experiment that he wanted to perform that seemed to me so unlikely to have any effect whatsoever that I felt was perfectly alright to let this experiment go forward because I would have bet dollars to donuts that nothing would happen, instead all hell broke loose at the conclusion of this experiment and ahh you know he claimed that the time [5:30:31] that what he had done was bonded into my DNA ahh enough psilocybin in a superconducting kind of bond which if you know how superconductivity works, a superconductive bond is very hard to disrupt, it\u2019s not like an ordinary chemical bond and he sell that you could do what he called bell the cat - that you could actually hang [inaudible] a transceiver around [5:31:00] the neck of the Logos itself and from then on it would talk to you constantly in the confines of your own mind, and it just seemed so wildly improbable to me that it", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-235", "text": "seemed so wildly improbable to me that it went forward but in fact at the conclusion of the experiment something changed in me, and I essentially became who I now appear to be, but before that I wasn\u2019t, I was sort of a [inaudible] [5:31:30] and ahh undirected person of some sort and then the... tomorrow you will see when we get the computer what the bottom line of this is because what was eventually revealed was a kind of mathematical mandala of space and time that rested on its\u2026 for its veracity on the fact that it allowed, that it made prediction of the future possible and tomorrow afternoon I will display [5:32:00] this thing for you and you can judge for yourself whether this is the product of ahh pathological incident or in fact an intellectual leap comparable to Newton\u2019s laws of motion or, or something like that. I think in principle all this is possible, I think transforming, you know, part of what Human History\u2019s conclusion will be", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-236", "text": "know, part of what Human History\u2019s conclusion will be is what I call \u2018turning the human body inside out\u2019 [5:32:30]; we want the soul to become visible, we want the body to become an idea, freely commanded in the imagination; and then at that point as James Joyce said \u2018Man will be durgible (?)\u2019, that was as close as he could get in 1939 to saying you\u2019ll turn into a flying saucer, you know, he knew it was an airship, he knew it was [inaudible] but he thought it was a durgible (?) ahh anyway enough about La Chorrera maybe we\u2019ll get into that tomorrow [5:33:01]. Yes?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-237", "text": "Audience: [inaudible question]\n\nTM: No. Good point. The vine contains the [inaudible] another plant contains the DMT, this makes Ayahuasca unique among this shamanic tools because, you see, all the rest of them - peyote, mushrooms, San Pedro, ibogaine, morning glories [5:33:30], and whatever else, cannabis - are simply plants which you ingest; Ayahuasca is a drug, a product, something made by pharmacologists, I mean pharmacologists who wear penis [inaudible] but pharmacologists nevertheless you see, so suddenly the Human dimension enters into it not all Ayahuasca is alike, Ayahuasca depends on the personality of the person who made it [5:34:00], so it\u2019s not about the relationship between you and the plant when you take Ayahuasca; between you and the plants there stands a Human being and, you know, if you\u2019re headed down there to seriously get into this, don\u2019t, don\u2019t give up in a hurry, you will drink a lot of swill before you find someone who is conscientious enough, honest enough and cares about you enough to not short change you\u2026 in some way [5:34:30].\n\nAudience: [inaudible]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-238", "text": "Audience: [inaudible]\n\nTM: Telepathine yes. Ahh Ayahuasca was discovered by Richard Spruce\u2026 in 1853 and then in the early years of the 20th century the germanest [inaudible] brought a lot of it back to Berlin and Louis Lewin characterized an alkaloid which they named telepathine but it was not realised then until [5:35:00], I think, 1957 by the chemist [inaudible] that ahh well [inaudible] oo-or that telepathine was exactly the same compound as an early compound isolated [inaudible] named [inaudible] and since the rules of chemical nomenclature are that the first compound, the first name takes precedent, telepathine had to be dropped and [inaudible] substituted but it tells you how convinced these early [5:35:30] ethnographers were that this stuff was ahh, you know, exciting, paranormal, mental abilities.\n\nAudience: [inaudible question]\n\nTM: The [inaudible]?\n\nAudience: Yes.\n\nTM: Oh, well. No, no. See what happened was the what what [inaudible] took back to Berlin was the liana, the vine - Banisteriopsis caapi - ahh the the other active [5:36:00] ingredient in Ayahuasca was not\n\nTranscribed by Francisco Arez\n\n[5:36:00]\n\nTM: The other active ingredient in ayahuasca was not isolated chemically until 1956.\n\nAudience: But the guys who took the vine back [inaudible] the vine?\n\nTM: The vine doesn\u2019t contain DMT.\n\nAudience: But the harmaline itself?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-239", "text": "TM: Well yes, has an effect, at high doses it can cause hallucination by itself.. The uh, the plant which contains the DMT, normally , there are a couple of possible substitute, [5:36:30] but normally what\u2019s used in the Amazon is Cicotria Veridis. Uh, this is a little coffee-like plant that contains DMT in the roots. One of the great mysteries of ayahuasca is how, out of 475,000 species of plant in the Amazon these people figured out that you pound the vine and combine it with the leaves and then go through this elaborate boiling and concentrating [5:37:00] and then you get this fantastic visionary beverage. If you ask them how they figured it out, they say the plants told us. Which is so far, the best answer anybody has come up with. In 1962, Melvin Bristoll, who was a graduate student of Richard Evan Shultsies at Harvard was studying ayahuasca among the Sibundoi Indians [5:37:30] and", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-240", "text": "the Sibundoi Indians [5:37:30] and uh, he took ayahuasca. And during the trip a plant was revealed to him. And he was told that it would be alkaloid positive. And it was alkaloid positive. Well, this is now anecdotally embedded in the literature. Was it dumb luck? Was it synchronicity? Or was it that plants tell you about other plants? The way ayahuasca is used by research pharmacologists [5:38:00] in these Amazon tribes is they brew a standard brew. And then if they have a plant, that they, for some reason suspect might have some medical usage, they will put a little bit of that plant into the ayahuasca, And then the ayahuasca will give them a readout on it and explain what it is. I had one of the longest evenings I have ever put in where I took half a dose of ayahuasca [5:38:30] and half a dose of mushrooms. And it was absolutely god awful. It was different from", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-241", "text": "it was absolutely god awful. It was different from any bad trip I\u2019d ever had. It didn\u2019t seem to be about my personality it seemed to be about core processes. There was a little pacman thing and I could see it moving through my memory. Just chew, chew, chew, chew, chew. And I didn\u2019t know, you know that horrifying scene in 2001 where the guy is outside [5:39:00] the spaceship and he say \u201cOpen the pod doors Hal. Open the pod doors Hal.\u201d Well that\u2019s how I felt. I felt, I could almost see the molecular machinery had jammed. And I said, \u201cOh my God, It\u2019s not going to deanimate. Or de-alkalate. It\u2019s somehow caught in some kind of a loop. And I sweated bullets for an hour and a half with it. It was really horrible. [5:39:30] And then it finally released. And let me go. But as I sat in that chair I said, you know if I can\u2019t pull out", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-242", "text": "I said, you know if I can\u2019t pull out of this place, there\u2019s a room in a back ward somewhere and they will just sit me there and look in on me every 12 or 14 hours, and that\u2019ll be my story.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-243", "text": "Audience: You said earlier that you were surprised that you had no kind [garbled audio] We have a clinical climate that\u2019s not congenial to exploring.\n\n[5:40:00]\n\nTM: Because I don\u2019t feel particularly courageous. I don\u2019t feel that this is unusual what we\u2019re doing here. Am I crazy? Could be. Uh, it seems to me, would seem to me, knowing what I know, which is no more than a thousand other people know, I couldn\u2019t live with myself if I didn\u2019t talk about these things. Because [5:40:30] our problem is we\u2019re disempowered, unhappy, and disconnected from ourselves and each other. Here\u2019s the solution. How can you, it\u2019s a political obligation, or it\u2019s a moral obligation to try and at least inform people. They don\u2019t have to take it. But they should at least have the facts of the matter in front of them as they live their lives. So , I, I just do it because I couldn\u2019t do it any other way. And I\u2019m puzzled that nobody else feels [5:41:00] ah, this imperative. Because the people I talk too, you know a thousand people have told me psychedelics were the most important thing that ever happened to them. But not one of those thousand people ever said, \u201cAnd I scheduled a speaking tour to do the same thing your doing.\u201d So I don\u2019t know..\n\nAudience; [garbled audio] fear and paranoia I hear there were even people were afraid to come to this and revealing their interest?\n\n[5:41:30]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-244", "text": "[5:41:30]\n\nTM: Wow! Well either I\u2019m crazy or they are. I don\u2019t know. See, I think that , ah that, ah you know how, um, if you confront certain, um, well butterflies, or deer. There are certain kinds of animals that if you move slowly enough, they can\u2019t tell you\u2019re there. Because they\u2019re set up for edge detection. And if you move slowly enough, they don\u2019t register the edge transiting.\n\n[5:42:00]\n\nTranscribed by Micki Garrison\n\nTM: [5:42:00]... so you can actually walk right up to them and grab them, if you know how to do it. Lizards are like this, cats, so, so i think that by moving with stealth, rather than going to Harvard or Berkeley and inviting the freshmen class to pour into the street and smash bank windows, that we can actually flip this thing along. I think that eventually such desperation it's going to strike straight institutions [5:42:30] that they will come to us and ask. They're gonna try everything when the going gets rough and when they finally decide to drop all their pretensions we'll be perfectly willing to have a dialogue. I'm sorry to hear that people felt that paranoid about it. I don't think the political climate is that repressive. I think people are doing the work of the man for the man by being that paranoid.\n\nAudience: [inaudible] [5:43:00]...counter-pressures.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-245", "text": "TM: Well counter-pressures, this book was banned in Florida but for crying out loud look at the Russians, they were able to toss out the Communist Party, well now that's a pretty scary thing to go up against. We don't have anything comparable to that (ahh) in terms of it's depth of penetration into our lives and yet they were able to do that. I think, you know, there's more to life\n\nthan hiding out. [5:43:30] (Ahh) you gotta make the grand gesture at a certain point and then let the chips fall where they may.\n\nAudience: You're right.\n\nTM: Brave words, ohh boy... [audience laughs] (ahh).\n\nAudience: [inaudible]...something for your audiences (ahh) an organization or something that taken... [inaudible] ...raising consciousness and changing our society?\n\nTM: Basically i think people should see this kind of meetings as a tremendous opportunity to form local [5:44:00] alliances. The last thing on earth we want here is a Terence Mckenna cult, that would just be the stupidest resolution of the whole thing. The whole message is, you don't need me or Tim or anybody else, just, you know, take a little metaphysical responsibility upon yourself, realise you are the microcosm of the microcosm and then (ahh) get with like minded people and proceed. [5:44:30] I mean, this is how political revolutions are made, is by people just ignoring as the irrelevant outmoded social forms and structures and insisting on their own authenticity.\n\nAudience: [inaudible]...Hofmann foundation...[inaudible]...help?\n\nTM: Oh, it might help... people... i mean, how would it help?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-246", "text": "TM: Oh, it might help... people... i mean, how would it help?\n\nAudience: [inaudible]...strength in numbers.\n\nTM: Strength in numbers, well i think people [5:45:00] should support psychedelic communities, archival projects (ahh), legalization moves (ahh), yes but mainly i think what we all need to do is get more loaded. [audience laughs] You know, deeper trips, higher doses, see, it's not that we want to convert the entire planet to taking mushrooms. It's that we just want to be left alone to do", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-247", "text": "what we want to do. The mushroom [5:45:30] if it's as great as i say it is then it doesn't need a mob clearing the way for it, it's perfectly able to advance its own agenda. The thing is just not to yield to fear. Cause if, as i said, if you yield to fear you do the man's work for the man and that makes you the man! So, you have to do is just say, oh, you know, this is what we do and (ahh), eventually it will change. I mean, gay people [5:46:00] is a good example, i mean, in our own life times we've seen this go from, you know, unspeakable crime against nature which decent people took care to not even being formed of [audience laughs] to, you know, a political sub-culture with it's own agenda and it's own cress and it's own political clouds. Well, we are not as under the thumb as gay people were, say, in the early 50s", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-248", "text": "as gay people were, say, in the early 50s [5:46:30] or something. If they can do it, we can do it. If black people can go from slavery to a legitimate claim on full social integration into the body politic than we can do it too. But not if we, no, in America nobody gets nothing unless they demand it. So as long as we bow our heads and hide our stash and they're looking over our shoulder, well then they got us on the run. But we just have to say, look, [5:47:00] this is it, this is who i am! If this doesn't gibe with your political agenda, adjust your political agenda [audience laughs] because this is who we are. Well now let's knock off and regroup for tomorrow on that point, but thank's very much. [silence] Well, (ahh), before we get into (ahh) this morning's (ahh) rigid agenda, (ahh) (ahh) where were we [5:47:30] yesterday? And our,", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-249", "text": "were we [5:47:30] yesterday? And our, [audience laughs] (ahh), is there, i recall there were hands up. To the people who belong to those hands still have the concerns but went with them?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-250", "text": "Audience: [inaudible]...local alliances and (ahh), psychedelic communities...[inaudible]\n\nTM: Talk about forming local alliances and psychedelic communities... Well i think, you know, as i said this is your affinity group. You can't recognize psychedelic people walking around on the street [5:48:00]\n\nTranscribed by Tiago Ramos\n\n[5:48:00] On the street because our victory in the area of fashion has been so total that now even priests look like freaks. [*laughs*] So uhh, yeah i\u2019ve been in a number of places where people organized uhh i don\u2019t know what you would discuss them, discussion groups, affinity groups, in the wake of it, it\u2019s something you have to self-organize, uhh, maybe in the period after the [5:48:30] close this afternoon, the people who are into that should exchange names and get something going, i mean obviously it\u2019s a delicate thing but on the other hand uhh..Mmmhmm?\n\n[inaudible question from audience]\n\n\u2122: For me?\n\n[inaudible audience]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-251", "text": "\u2122: Well a lot of [5:49:00] people feel more secure uhh doing journeys if they have uhh some kind of ground control and in the most casual form that can just be your best friend who doesn\u2019t do it but you do. Or if you suspect that fairly deep and uhm charged issues are going to rise-arise out of it, why you want it to be someone with some psychotherapeutic experience. But on the other hand you know, you\u2019re in a such a vulnerable state in that dimension that you really want to choose the facilitator carefully, I mean, and have some kind of set of agreements worked out before. I mean, the psychedelic trip doesn\u2019t always take the direction you want it to. I mean, you want- you write down before you take it that you want to deal with some episode of childhood trauma [5:50:00] or abandonment then you get loaded and it seems so preposterous that you, you know, you can hardly contemplate the notion without laughing", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-252", "text": "you can hardly contemplate the notion without laughing out loud and the facilitator has this - keeps trying to bring you back, say, \u2018well you\u2019re doing the work! We\u2019re here to do the work!\u2019, well, then you say, well, you know, having a knock-down drag-out fight while is somebody is loaded isn\u2019t exactly the way to go either. You sorta have to feel [5:50:30] into that issue as i said yesterday, i, i can\u2019t get where i want to go in the presence of somebody else because they hold me to the surface. If i were to have my idea of the perfect facilitator, situation is that they are two rooms away and you have something equivalent of a beeper and then you know you can beep them and they\u2019ll come in and pat you on the head and tell you it\u2019s alright if you need that.[5:51:00] But otherwise, they stay completely out of it, it\u2019s really nice to follow your own thoughts you know? And i think", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-253", "text": "follow your own thoughts you know? And i think we change in the presence of another person, you know? We create a persona, and uh it takes a lot of energy to maintain the persona. And in that situation there\u2019s no reason, so why do it? Yeah?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-254", "text": "[Question from audience] [5:51:30]\n\n\u2122: Well, not exactly, i mean people always say can you do it on the natch? And i sorta feel like if i could do [5:52:00] it on the natch i\u2019d be alarmed enough to check myself in for some serious mental health care.Uhh, It's too radical, you don\u2019t want to be able to do that [5:52:00] on the natch.\n\nAudience: Oh come on [laughs]\n\n\u2122: It\u2019s a wonderful control on it! To know that it won\u2019t happen unless you take the stuff. You know? Because it\u2019s not a mood shift or a subtle refocusing from foreground to background, it\u2019s an absolutely ontology peeling breakthrough.\n\nAudience: [inaudible question]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-255", "text": "Audience: [inaudible question]\n\n\u2122: In principle, i, [5:52:30] i agree with that and i\u2019m fascinated to try anything anybody has in mind but uhh you have to be very demanding. And I think too many people are not demanding at all, I mean, you sit people down in a room and tell them we\u2019re gonna repeat ooma humm 500 times and at the end of it they come to you with tears of joy in their eye and tell you it was the most profound that\u2019s ever happened to them. I don\u2019t understand where those people [5:53:00] could be coming from you know? I mean it\u2019s uhm, i can sit down and like think about being stoned on DMT and uh and i can and i can give myself the butterflies with that exercise but-but not much else, that\u2019s as far as i can get, you know? Uhh persistently these various traditions claim that they can deliver the goods, but when you look at the [5:53:30] art which is the paper trail that they leave, it doesn\u2019t look like what i\u2019m talking about. You know I mean i went through I, once, for a while i was a professional art buyer for tibetan art, tankas and that kind of thing and i interiorized all of that iconography and uh, but it isn't\u2019 very much like uh what we are seeing. And uh, you know there are a number of highly idiosyncratic [5:54:00] artists..\n\nTranscribed by Jonathan Laliberte", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-256", "text": "Transcribed by Jonathan Laliberte\n\nTM: [5:54:00] Idiosyncratic artists gathered through the history of art \u2026 g- Gustave Moreau, James Ensor, we mentioned Hieronymus Bosch. Uhm mmhm know- you know hmm \u2026 uhm Matty Carline? \u2026 but I\u2019m trying to think of older ones. But- but not- these seem to be unique visions, but not exactly the vision that ahh seems to come out of this stuff. Part of what\u2019s [5:54:30] so interesting to me is how alien it is. How if art is the- if the artist is supposed to be the antenna of society anticipating the visions which will later become the paradigm, then they\u2019re not doing the job very well in the psychedelic uhm domain. Yeah .. are- you wanna- did you have a follow-up?\n\nAudience: [inaudible question] [5:55:00]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-257", "text": "Audience: [inaudible question] [5:55:00]\n\nTM: Well, but this is where the action is. You know, it has to- it has to make sense in the world. Now, I don\u2019t want to suggest, I mean, I- I think \u2026 like in the case of psilocybin I have no doubt whatsoever that if you take five grams of psilocybin [5:55:30] every four days for let\u2019s say forty days then you will have nothing whatsoever to say to the rest of us. You know, if what you see - the thing is in the spiritual quest all these methods: yoga and mantra and then \u2026 you know, all the mmm uhm, new versions of this. The whole s- the whole stance of the spiritual questor is ahh accelerator to the floor [5:56:00] all the time. When you switch over to this method it\u2019s the breakpads that are going to get the workout. Ahh, we don\u2019t- we psychedelic people do not strenuously exert ourselves to attain peculiar states of mind, we strenuously exert ourselves to keep the states of mind from becoming too peculiar.\n\nAudience: Why?\n\nTM: Why? Because it can become mmm so [5:56:30] peculiar, that- that- that- I don\u2019t know why!!! [laughs hysterically]\n\nAudience: [laughs] [inaudible]\n\nTM: Yes, that\u2019s it. It can become so peculiar, that it is unspeakable. And if it\u2019s unspeakable, it\u2019s j- just dropped out of the social contract, you know.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-258", "text": "Audience: So really, the reason to maintain it is so you can get back in the psychological state and communicate, but \u2026 what I\u2019m thinking is that I\u2019m sure [5:57:00] that there are people who have pursued it to the point that they just walked out of [inaudible] come back.\n\nTM: Mmm, yes, well that\u2019s what I wanted to say. If you want to be the guy on cold mountain who is covered with hair who the village people occasionally see when the mist clears when he descends to the lower levels to cut wood. You can become that daoist immortal. Ahh, you know w- w- what I like to say about psychedelics [5:57:30] is once you get to this it\u2019s no longer about seeking the answer. It\u2019s now a tough or go, now you have to face the answer. And it\u2019s so easy to seek \u2026 you know, this Rishi, that Roshi, that Geishe, that Guru and all the wonderful people and the gossip and hijinks around the ashram and all that malarkey, but once you get to this and it\u2019s just you and it \u2026 [5:58:00] you know, it\u2019s a- it\u2019s a whole different ballgame.\n\nAudience: [inaudible question]\n\nTM: Well, to s- to s- we\u2019re talking there are two things. The experience and the wisdom and maturity that comes from the experience. You don\u2019t have to keep dosing to do that. But to attain, maintain and workout the implications [5:58:30] of that, but you have to keep dosing to keep encountering the unspeakable thing that is the source of all that maturation and- and so forth. My gosh, everybody\u2019s agitated here \u2026 Yeah?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-259", "text": "Audience: [laughs] I wondered if ahh in your experiences in Amazon or [inaudible] if you found that they were able to uhm to do this [5:59:00] without drugs or whether they were even interested in?\n\nTM: No, largely not. Ahh, in the Amazon- I mean I discussed this with people and they- they said: \u201cNo\u201d, you know, \u201cyou must- the plant is the teacher.\u201d I mentioned or maybe I didn\u2019t, but there\u2019s an interesting book called \u2018Haoma and Harmaline\u2019 by Flattery and Schwartz and it discusses the rel- ambiance of the religious attitudes of early Zoroastrianism and they believed [5:59:30] in what they called the menog existence. And we\u2019re talking, you know, twen- two thousand B.C. here, and they uhm ... believed there was no possible way of accessing the spiritual dimension except drugs. That was the entire way to do it. And I think it\u2019s a- it\u2019s a kind of pharmacological and energy barrier. It\u2019s good that these things are aw- isolated from ordinary [6:00:00] experience ...\n\nTranscribed by Lovro Tacol\n\n\u2026 isolated from ordinary [06:00:00] experience by the formality of having to take the compound; if they weren\u2019t it would be flooding in upon us all the time and we would have a hard time indeed, yeah.\n\nAudience: well, I used to think about people taking the psychedelic\n\nTen there\u2019s this other people practice meditation. [06:00:30] I read somewhere recently that people in the amazon that take ayahuasca they their\n\nAnd what I haven\u2019t seen very much is the combination of what you know mental practices ah so as to ah plus taking pscylocibin\n\n[06:01:00]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-260", "text": "[06:01:00]\n\nTHIS CONCLUDES TAPE 4. OUR PROGRAM CONTINUES WITH TAPE 5\n\nTerence: why is there no talk of the combining of the techniques with psychedelica?\n\nAudience:\n\nTerence: well, I don\u2019t know exactly, I mean I would certainly agree. [06:01:30] See I think that all religion is based on the experience of ecstasy.\n\nAnd a religion-\n\nAudience:", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-261", "text": "Terence: And a religion like Hinduism represents to my mind an extreme case. The roots of hinduism are in the soma rite. For 3000 years this is what hindu religiosity was about; it was an intoxicant, eh and ah without the intoxicant there was no [06:02:00] connection to the mystery. Well, then for some reason it became tremendously hierarchically structured and and constipated and ah dogmatic, and ehm ahh\u2026 well certainly dominator inla-i- if not altright fascism. And so I think all these religions have their roots in this irrational experience [06:02:30] but they constantly want to turn it into a real state operation [audience laughs], and they do, and they do, and so- but in answer to your question: all these techniques work with psychedelics, you know mantra, yantra, magical invocation, ahh, raising the kundaliny\u2026 all of these things which seem so totally obscure [06:03:00] if- from this", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-262", "text": "obscure [06:03:00] if- from this level of consciousness it just becomes an: \u201cof course, of course it works\u201d so it seems to me the lost ingredient is the psychedelic. I mean ehh y-you know, if you go to India and you have any illusions about Sadhus, I mean Sadhus they\u2019re hash-heads, with a line of patter, that\u2019s all. I mean the main concern in any community of Sadhus is: how many [06:03:30]JOINTS can you make and smoke before you fall asleep. And m- I\u2019ve never seen a yoga text that came clean about this and said, you know, this is basically a how to use cannabis technique, so eh yo- it\u2019s good to go to the actual place and see, see how it\u2019s being handled. What\u2019s going on in the Amazon is the shamans cure, they chant, the provide and exemplar for [06:04:00] their society but when you get seriously loaded with them and talk to them their attitude is", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-263", "text": "loaded with them and talk to them their attitude is more like scientists. They will agree that they can cure and find lost objects and predict the weather and all that but they don\u2019t understand how this works. They\u2019re very eager to admit that it\u2019s all a big mystery and that beyond the cheerful set of shamanic techniques, that they, the Witoto, the Guarani, whoever they are, beyond the cheerful [06:04:30] ahh power of the conjuration of these techniques lies the absolute unknown and they\u2019re aware of that. There\u2019s no closure in shamanism so it sort of keeps you humble, yeah.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-264", "text": "Audience:\n\n[06:05:00]\n\nTerence: right\n\nAudience:\n\nTerence: right\n\nAudience: of a contact high, [06:05:30] when you are around people\n\nTerence: oh I think contact highs are very real, ehm, not only contact highs but there are also contact lows eh, [audience laughs] which are very noticeable, y-you know there\u2019s a - there\u2019s a phenomenon called allophrenia, do you know what allophrenia is?\n\nAudience: No\n\nTerence: Allophrenia is when your friend is put in the hospital [06:06:00] for schizophrenia and you go to visit him and you become- you begin acting so peculiar that they don\u2019t let you out [audience laughs]\n\nTranscribed by Lucas Mathias", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-265", "text": "Transcribed by Lucas Mathias\n\nAlophrenia is when your friend is put in the hospital for schizophrenia, and you go to visit him and you become \u2013 you begin acting so peculiar that they don\u2019t let you out. This is a common phenomenon: misbehavior by people who have come to visit people who have been hospitalized for schizophrenia or psychosis. The best theory is that it\u2019s pheremonal. You know, there\u2019s one theory of what schizophrenia is, that schizophrenia is a pheremonal disorder. And, you, what happens is your pheromone system goes haywire. So then, you don\u2019t smell right. So then the people around you begin frowning at you, avoiding you, turning their back on you when you approach, then you begin thinking, there\u2019s something wrong with me. I\u2019m weird. Then you secrete more of this weird pheromone and people get - and a dissonance begins to happen until finally you have to be plucked out of the situation. There are psychiatrists who swear that they can diagnose schizophrenia by sniff test. You know they just walk over and take a hit off the side of your neck and say, you know, \u201cLock this one up\u201d or (laughter) Yeah.\n\nQ: (unintelligible)", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-266", "text": "Q: (unintelligible)\n\nT: Now, the problem is one of \u2013 the question is, is there in Huichol art a trace of this psychedelic dimension. I guess there\u2019s a trace, the problem is \u2013 is twofold, the problem is one of material, with wood and beads and pitch it\u2019s very hard to get the \u2013 the \u2013 to contort that into the object seen, and then the other thing is conceptually. It\u2019s very hard to grab and hold these very weird images. The other thing that\u2019s happening in most traditional societies is that you operate within a canon. You know, if you\u2019re a Huichol, you have a very limited uh, vocabulary of expression, within the iconography of Huichol art. If you\u2019re a Tibetan Tanka painter, similarly, it\u2019s all laid out for you. Walls of tradition are very high, the channel is very narrow. That\u2019s why it\u2019s so interesting when an artist can transcend the, the momentum of their cultural tradition and really produce something unique. I don\u2019t see, I mean I think the reason I like talking to artists is because all the art of the past 20,000 years is like a tea cup dipped into the ocean. And yet any one of us, not particularly self-defined as artist, can access the ocean. Can swim in the ocean. And so you say, you know, we all can touch the same source that these great artists must have touched. Their skill was they were able to bring out a thimble-full of this material and the rest of us can only look at it and wonder and let it pass us by. Yeah.\n\nQ: (in reference to an \u201cextraterrestrial position\u201d on psychedelic use and whether or not Terence still holds this position)", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-267", "text": "T: No I\u2019m not sure, exactly, I mean the funny thing about the extraterrestrial position is that, it depends on how long it\u2019s been since you\u2019ve taken mushrooms, how creditable it seems. If it\u2019s recent it seems the only possible explanation. If you wait a few months, then skepticism and reason begins to level the landscape, and you say, \u201cNo, it couldn\u2019t possibly, really, be that.\u201d But I think, uh . . . you know, no, I think we hardly have an inkling as to the real nature of the world, and the real history of life on this planet, and you know, we don\u2019t know, uh, how narrowly channeled the manifestation of organic intelligence is. Does it always have to be in a body? Does it always have to be in a body that stands upright with binocular vision? I think the real task with dealing with extraterrestrials is to know when you\u2019ve got one. It\u2019s completely silly to search the galaxy with radio telescopes for, uh, a radio civilization. I mean to my mind that is as chuckleheaded as deciding you\u2019re going to search the galaxy for a decent Italian restaurant. (laughter) I mean, it doesn\u2019t work like that!\n\nSo, um, you know, if you think about the mushroom, try to think about it objectively. It looks to me very much like a good candidate for an extraterrestrial. First of all, DNA has been known to us only since 1950, less than a century and we\u2019re already involved in this thing called the Human Genome Project. Well, the real \u2013 what that means is that we are taking control of the scripts that write human beings. It seems to me anything we would recognize as [6:12:00]\n\nTranscribed by Kristen Askin", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-268", "text": "Transcribed by Kristen Askin\n\n[6:12:00] intelligence would pass through a phase of self-analysis where (6:12:04) it would realize it was made out of DNA and it would then sequence itself. We\u2019re about to do this ourselves. Well, that means that most extraterrestrials will be the product of their own reflexive design process. In other words, an extraterrestrial that has crossed the gulf across the stars must surely then be able to control its own form.\n\nWell, then, if you look at the mushroom, it\u2019s a curious combination of artifact and entity. It looks sort of manufactured. There\u2019s very little fact on that system - I mean, first of all, um, fungi are primary decomposers. This means that they are at the very bottom of the food chain. This makes the kind of vegetarianism espoused by Buddhists look like an orgy of slaughter. You know? Because if you\u2019re at the very bottom of the food chain, that is the only place that is absolutely karma-free. So there\u2019s the mushroom, occupying the karma-free position at the bottom of the food chain. Well, then, it\u2019s \u2013 you know, we\u2019ve been reading about the huge mycelial clones spread out under the soil in Michigan and Wyoming, well those things, what that is, is that\u2019s a cobweb-like network. And in the case of a psilocybin-like species, filled with neurotransmitter compounds. Can you imagine how many synaptic plants there must be on a 1,500 acre mushroom clone? If brain size is any relation to intelligence, then hang on, Hannah. (laughter) Because, uh, that means that this thing which has spread through the forests of the Midwest has a, uh, brain approximate in weight to, uh . . . a couple of dozen gray whales.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-269", "text": "Uh, the other thing is, then, the spore, looks perfectly designed to sustain itself in outer space. If you want to store spores for longevity you create conditions as close to the conditions in outer space as you can. High vacuum. Very low temperature. Uh, the casing of a spore is one of the most electron dense organic materials in nature. So electron dense that it approximates a metal. Well, global currents can form on the quasi metallic surface of an airborne spore and they act as a further repellant for radiation. So, and, you know, percolating through the galaxy at an ordinary rate typical of stellar material, a mushroom species could percolate from one side of the galaxy to another in under four hundred thousand years. Well, that\u2019s lightning speed compared to the size and age of the universe. If we were to gain the power to design ourselves, I think after a whole bunch of uh, of Madonna and Robert Redford clones, we would probably move on to becoming something very much like a mushroom. (laughter) It\u2019s uh, you know, mild (6:15:43), its noninvasive, it\u2019s at the bottom of the food chain, it\u2019s virtually immortal, its laden with neurotransmitters, and it\u2019s living in the imagination.\n\nAnd this brings me back to a favorite subject of mine, this is where we have to go, we have to enter into the Blakian, divine imagination. That\u2019s where our future lies. Uh, at this point, our relationship to this planet, as an infant-child relationship of impending toxemia, we have to be parted from the mother - to save the mother and to save us.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-270", "text": "And there are not that many possibilities. Where are we going to go? The political geniuses who run this planet have made travel to the stars virtually impossible. I mean, don\u2019t kid yourselves, it isn\u2019t only a matter of announcing a program. Our short, stubby fingers couldn\u2019t assemble something like a Saturn-5 moon rocket. That was made by a generation of people now deceased. Americans in this, uh, era, are a rather dull-witted people who have trouble even running a third world economy. So we\u2019re not going to the stars. You can forget that. Uh, so then where are we going? Well, nanotech. Is that a possibility? Could we download everybody into a super-cool cube of gold and terbium alloy buried three hundred feet deep in the center of Copernicus? And then we\u2019ll leave Earth and go there and dance forever in the hallways of the astral imagination?\n\nThat\u2019s one possibility. Another possibility is, is there a way to diffuse consciousness into the environment? Can we becomes dolphins, caterpillars, gray whales, and mosquitos and just sort of defocus ourselves? I mean, all of these, of course, are wildly radical notions. On the other hand, we\u2019re headed straight toward a brick wall at about 5,000 miles an hour. We have to figure out something pretty astonishing in a hurry. [06:18:03]\n\nTranscribed by Kristen Askin\n\nTM:...[6:18:00] figure out something pretty uh, astonishing in a hurry. Yeah.\n\nAudience: Yes uh, another thing about the function of the mushroom is ??? for reentry into the atmosphere ??\n\n[\u2122 laughs]\n\nTM: The heat shield! Yes, precisely. [Chuckles]\n\nAudience: ?? can jumpstart an evolution", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-271", "text": "Audience: ?? can jumpstart an evolution\n\nTM: That\u2019s a funny question I don't know because it's so hard to tease apart genetics and environment. I mean they certainly have had a jump start on evolution picture of hanging out in the space that our lives have created. Uh, you know I think children need lots of attention lots of nurturing physical and spiritual. Uh, I guess I would say so, and certainly they haven't been programmed with the fear and misunderstanding that that is in the society. We just got through anti-dope week at our school which is an incredibly painful experience at this particular school because I don't think there's a person associated with it who believes it for a moment uh, but it's like we all have to study fascism because we live in a fascist state. Uh, a teacher made a statement that uh, that LSD caused brain damage and my son dared to challenge this. And the guy said well, who told you it doesn\u2019t cause brain damage?\n\nAudience: Daddy!\n\nTM: No, not my Daddy. He said, well Albert Hoffman told me it doesn\u2019t cause brain damage! [Audience laughter, TM laughs] End of discussion!\n\nAudience: ??\n\nTM: Mm mm. Yeah\n\nAudience: I know that children are very interconnected with their parents, so when you\u2019re doing substances do you feel like the presence of your child sometimes going on your psychotropic experiences ???", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-272", "text": "TM: Yeah well when children are very young you know all kinds of psychic phenomenon happen and you know I think mothers nursing mothers and their relationship to their two children as intensely telepathic. I remember when my daughter was not very old, she must have been like about three and a half and I had the dream and it was very unusual dream for me and very highly realized and I dreamed of an orrery. Do you know what an orrery is? It\u2019s a model of the solar system made of gears and you crank it and there\u2019s the sun in the center and the planets go around it, but this was a huge orrery. I dreamed I walk down the hall and I opened the door and I walked into this room and there was this orrery and these planets were circling around the sun inside this room and then, and I was awakened by my daughter crying and I went downstairs and she said uh, there were planets circling around inside my bedroom. So- and you know that's a very specific and rare image for an adult or a child to have. So yes, I think that we\u2019re- our chuckle-headedness is the main barrier to encountering all kinds of special abilities that around us all the time. We are truly the prisoners of our limited conceptions. Yeah.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-273", "text": "Audience: ?? go back to some of the questions about why you don't want to take it every day for 40 days in a row. And it\u2019s more the psychological level that what causes- I\u2019ve worked with ?? therapies in Mexico ??? stories about Jung and uh, many of the people who have gotten into the situation of psychosis are people who have used drugs as a general principle behind that is that people have experienced something that they cannot integrate back into their psyche or whatever even if it\u2019s the ability to say well, that was then and this is now. And therefore you get psychosis. So not to, not to say these things to alarm people but ??? that this ability to come back and not be far out there and that there are a lot of different set up parameters to this ?? on your ego strength. Another one is the society you live in. If you're a shaman and you can say these things ?? Then you're fine. Um, and it doesn't have to be drugs. Um, Jung used to when he was older he used to sit in a chair and go inside and when he came back he would have this litany of things that he would say so that he could come back and function. He would say you know I'm Carl Gustav Jung, my wife is___ my children of this many children this many grandchildren.\n\nTM: Uh huh, the reconnect affirmation. Yeah, well I think that's not a bad idea.\n\nAudience: I wanted to ask you how you see ???", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-274", "text": "Audience: I wanted to ask you how you see ???\n\nTM: Well I don't have a very popular position on ritual and I blame it on the mushroom because I just quote the mushroom. And the mush - I said what about ritual? And it said that's fine if you don't know what you're doing. And I think that, that you know, it's really not an anti-ritualist position because that is what ritual is. That's what you do if you don't know what you're doing.\n\nAudience: ??\n\nTM: None of us. But, you know, the purpose - can tell when the ritual works because it makes itself obsolete. That's the- it's- yeah.\n\nAudience: ?? I think as we continue...??\n\n\u2122: Well [6:24:00]\n\nTranscribed by Eva Petakovic\n\nTM: [6:24:00] Well I don't have a very popular position on ritual and I blame it on the mushroom because I just quote the mushroom. And the mush - and I said what about ritual? And it said that's fine if you don't know what you're doing. And I think that, that, you know, it's really not an anti-ritualist position because that is what ritual is. That's what you do if you don't know what you're doing.\n\nAudience: ??\n\nTM: None of us. uh but you know the purpose - can tell when the ritual works because it makes itself obsolete. That's the- it's- yeah.\n\nAudience: ?? I think, I think as we continue...??", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-275", "text": "Audience: ?? I think, I think as we continue...??\n\nTM: Well, you know even in the most ritualistic context there's always a footnote made for the crazy wisdom. I mean every great teacher has said that what he saying is malarkey. A teacher that doesn't tell you that what he or she is saying is malarkey is not to be taken seriously. So you know it's the if you meet the Buddha on the road kill him style of thinking. Or I was just reading this Guru who's coming on strong. Uh, is it- is his name Pucha Ji?\n\nAudience: Dass?\n\nTM: No, no not Dass. [Terence chuckles]. But anyway somebody- this guy said don't, don't do practice. Don't do practice. Practice is only distraction. He said we have to keep thinking up- you know running an ashram is not easy. These students they expect so much of us. To keep continually inventing stuff to keep them happy and send them off on these crazy quests and, and you know, endless fasts and all this stuff because they want that. But you know the guru is pretty much content to kick back with the latest Rolling Stone. Yeah?\n\nAudience: If my memory serves me correctly I think I saw it on the handouts that you're doing some Sheldrake.\n\nTM: Right.\n\nAudience: Could you comment on that? I'd like to know a little bit about that.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-276", "text": "Audience: Could you comment on that? I'd like to know a little bit about that.\n\nTM: Well, are you all familiar with Rupert Sheldrake's work? Sheldrake is a British biologist whose written a number of books. First book is called A new science of life and it was catapulted to fame by virtue of a review in Nature which said it should be burned. And hen he wrote a book called The Presence of the Past. Sheldrake as an extraordinary simple interesting revolutionary idea that just drives scientist straight up a tree. His idea is that um, once something happens it's easier for it to happen the next time.\n\nAudience: ??", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-277", "text": "Audience: ??\n\nTM: Yes, simple, but it takes then forms which drive people crazy because he asserts based on that that if you teach rats to run a new kind of maze in Australia then rats in Massachusetts should be able to run this maze uh, faster than if the rats and Australia hadn't uh, learned it because once something has been, has occurred then it has a momentum in time. He calls this the theory of formative causation or morphogenesis and it explains a lot of things which are otherwise very difficult for biology to explain but it raises also a bunch of issues that are pretty tricky. And so Rupert and I have been close friends for years and even longer I've been tight with a mathematician in Santa Cruz named Ralph Abraham who's a chaos dynamicist and Ralph and Rupert and I did a book together called Trialogues at the Edge of the West which will be out at the end of the summer from Bayer and we'll all get together at Esalen at the end of August and do a bunch more of these public three-way dialogues which are pretty spirited because we are very different people from each other. Uh, but all psychedelic in all interested in paradigm recasting. So that's what it's about and it'll be out in mid-summer. End of August for that Esalen thing. Anybody else. Yeah.\n\nAudience: ??\n\nTM: Uh huh.\n\nAudience: ??\n\nTM: Well, feminism is a necessary thing for a successful future because the archaic world was so dominated by, well that's a bad choice of words isn't it, was so characterized by an awareness of of the feminine and the boundary dissolving and the organic and the whole problem with the world uh, is that we cannot feel the consequences of what we are doing. You know, I mean recently we had paraded-[6:30:00]\n\nTranscribed by Eva Petakovic\n\n[6:30:00]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-278", "text": "Transcribed by Eva Petakovic\n\n[6:30:00]\n\nTM: You know i mean recently we had paraded in front of the figure of Jeffrey Dahmer as who you don't want to be like. And yet jeffery dahmer to me was an absolute paradigm of global civilization because his problem was that he didn't he couldn't feel the consequences of his actions. And this is what we are doing. I mean we are lacerating ourselves by coming down the rainforests and poisoning the ocean.\n\n[6:30:30] This is not some airy fairy save the redwoods kind of mentalities that protests.. This is our own atmosphere our own environment that were destroying. Its a its a slow suicide not so slow at the rate were tearing in half. Well somehow we have to reactivate the maternal nurturing caring circuitry that tests the tendencies\n\n[6:31:00] that have evolved in this fabled direction uh at at bay for a long long time and you know you can call it ego you can call it male dominance you can call it a phonetic alphabet whatever it is it has to be stopped because the planet is in peril by it and i my analysis of it is that the only way to do it is to dissolve the boundary that culture and language and tradition have allowed us to create\n\n[6:31:30] and they are largely boundaries that deress women not because men hate women but because men hate the feminine and they want to control and hold us back threatening its devouring i mean the fact that the french refer to orgasm as the little death tells you you know how what a weird kind of ambivalence haunts uh our relationship to anything which dissolves uh", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-279", "text": "[6:32:00] out of out of the knot that we have tied ourselves into and so i you know i'm a kind of non feminist feminist. I mean i think most feminists are feminists because they think women have gotten a raw deal. I m a feminist because i think mankind is headed for suicide if we don't return to a more intense expression of the feminine so it's not a political agenda for me to\n\n[6:32:30] liberate and oppress groups of people its a collectiveness that gender necessary to save everybody and everything on the planet. Yeah\n\nAudience:\u2026 in the end the general.. Is that um there is this \u2026 and\n\n[6:33:00]\n\nMalevolent entities\n\nThere's malevolent forces out there just as\n\n[6:33:30]\n\nTM: ..well\n\nOf course\n\nTM: No i mean there are malevolent and benevolent forces in there and out there. Uh but the i dont see\u2026 i don't see the world really as a struggle between good and evil and some kind of manichean situation. It seems to me that it we confer value\n\n[6:34:00] that nature is neither good nor evil and that must then improve as ally\u2026 its just that we confer judgement this is because when you begin to get down towards the bottom line we don't know what the bottom line is. For instance were headed towards a great historical bifurcation where we're gonna have to make some really hard choices and most of the time in the so called new age they try to fuzz", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-280", "text": "[6:34:30] all the distinctions and make you think you're never going to be slammed to the wll and have to make a choice but the choice that's coming up for us is fundamental. It is are we to become the care givers the nurturers and the gardeners of the earth or is the earth you know this is i put it this way to somebody the other night the question was is the earth our mother\n\n[6:35:00] therefore to be cared for into her old age nurtured revered and loved? Or is the earth our placenta. Therefore to be examined for signs of toxin and then buried under theapple tree. In other words what is the true nature of human beings. Are we to be integrated into nature to celebrate it or is nature a demonic and titanic force that is imprisoning spirits and\n\n[6:35:30] holding it back from its full unfolding in worlds of alien life and higher dimension so far from here that its a miracle that \u2026 rumour reached us of the possibility of salvation. This is a tough choice because one path leads to uh radical renunciation of technology radical tearing of population. Uh and an attempt to come to terms with\n\n[6:36:00] this small liquid planet on which we find ourselves and the other direction uh s.. Forget it. Its the husk of a seed and it is utterly meaningless in the cosmic drama and the real destiny lies out there half way \u2026 \u2026 or some other exoitc port of call i don't see how you can have that both ways.\n\nAudience:\n\n[6:36:30]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-281", "text": "Audience:\n\n[6:36:30]\n\nTM: yes and most stars uh have lives shorter than the amount of time that biology has been on this planet. We are fortunate enough to be around a very slow burning stable star. There are a lot of.. I havent forgtotten your second question right. There are a lot of mysteries in our coscmic neighbourhood that we rarely hear addressed for example just as an example um if our destiny lies out\n\n[6:37:00] in the great universe its a hell of technological barrier to cross to the stars. I mean it may be insurmountable however isn't it interesting that the most earth like star within seventy light years is the nearest star. Not technically the nearest star which is uh glowing red clinker called alpha centurai right, but\n\n[6:37:30] beta centura. is 1.1 solar masses. 1.1 solar masses. No star within seventy light years is as earth like i mean .. sunl like as that star from the point of view of the galaxy uh beta centura and our sun almost look like lightly bonded binaries. This is an accident it is a tremendously fortuitous\n\n[6:38:00] accident for us because it could well mean that there is a uh an earth like planet at an incredibly short distance away from us in terms of the cosmic neighbourhood in fact probably within the next years \u2026 will be created but if there is a water heavy oxygen rich world out there its going to show up .well then that is going to become a tremendous", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-282", "text": "[6:38:30] attractor in the historical matrix because it will be hailed as the answer. I mean can ou imagine? If an .. because there wil then be two possibilities. That there is intelligence next door not likely or that there is.. How do you assess it how many oxygen rih planets have we examined for crying out loud> and the other possibility is that its empty real estate.\n\n[6:39:00] In tiether case it will excite keen interest throughout society so now thats a little odd \u2026 cosmic neighbourhood that is rarely mentioned or\u2026 yeah\n\nAudience:.\n\n[6:39:30]\n\nTM: Yes I although I leave that to the .. of the world to work out the details. There is after all a possible \u2026 that is pretty clear in spite of the ravings and rantings of these christer\u2026. The fossil record is pretty clear that we emerged out of uh the protohomoinids who emerged out of the ppasdf radiation that emerged\n\n[6:40:00] out of and so forth and so on. I dont uh i think that uh but there may be mysteries i mean one question that im surprised nobody ever seems to ask in these weekends when i tell the cheerful story of the descent from the trees the\u2026 encounter with the mushrooms and so forth and so on is nobody ever asks well that who put the mushrooms in the path\n\n[6:40:30]of these binoclura bipedal evolving primates i mean is this just a story of nature's happiest accidents? Or did someone say you know te weht planet start hte retraction of the rainforests seize the spores into the grasslands and watch what happens. Uh because then we come down out of the trees brainless as the wombat and began testing food sources and", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-283", "text": "[6:41:00] lo and behold here are these things which are obviously designed to be seen. I mean mushrooms are form of display theyre designed to be seen they demand to be eaten. And uh the consequences that that you know to lead a species to the brink of darer\u2026 well thats just a coincidence or is there a mind behind all of this> see i think that if mind\n\n[6:41:30]the problem i have with all the extra terrestrial and all the channelling adn all the abducting and all the stuff that goes on is its all too B movie its all too simple. Too straightforward. That's what the troubles me about ths\u2026 scenario is that its perfectly understandable to us if its understandable you can betcha booties its the wrong answer i mean its gonna be weirder\n\n[6:42:00]than that not about mineral extraction or even diplomatic goodwill. Uh i have a professor years ago his cosmology went like this you know how there are bacteria which you can introduce into gold slurry in low grade ore and the bacteria will concentrate the gold and then you just watch the gold out of ght bacteria and .uh mining technique\n\n[6:42:30]that's very efficient for poor yielding gold ore. So this guys idea was that some day UFOs would appear over every major city on earth and they would just load up all the plutonim and fissionable material and take it away and say thank you very much uh this mining operation is now completed you people cn go back to hurling shit at each other in the tree tops as far as were concerned\n\n[6:43:00]we have real application for this fissionable material you people were gonna use it blow each other up what a bunch of dummies and farewell and good luck so thats one possibility.\n\nAudience:\n\nYes then I insist on getting to the plan\u2026\n\nAudience:", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-284", "text": "Audience:\n\nYes then I insist on getting to the plan\u2026\n\nAudience:\n\nTM:\u2026 No, halma\u2026 and harmaline by uh no by flattery and shwaretz and\n\n[6:43:30] its published by m the university of california press neary string studies division publication number 23.\n\nYeah \u2026 well what i thought we should talk about this morning as we seem to range wide and free is the practicum of all this which is you know how many of these visual plants are they there\n\n[6:44:00]and where are they and how do you obtain them and how do you use them once you obtain them. So i thought how many of you have ever seen i\u2026 get with it. This is a uh poster which i dont even know if its still available it may be uh a print. It is still available. And its a very good ethnobotanical course in hallucinogens in one sheet of paper. Uh what it divided into basically\n\n[6:44:30] is this is the old world and this is the new. Immediately you know this t\u2026 in the new world than the old. This is one of the great of evolution\u2026 because nobody can offer a reasonable explanation as to why there should be nearly 3 times as many hallucinogenic plants int he new world as in the old i mean other than thats where the\n\n[6:45:00] flying saucers planted them nobody has come up with a good explanation. Nature hallucinogenic plants complexes that i have experience with and can address are uh uh well lets do a little quick geographical tour. First of all north america for reasons not well understood is quite poor in\n\n[6:45:30] native hallucinogens. Uh there are no major north american hallucinogens. Peyote is um well yes its north american the funny thing about peyote i mean you can feed me questions\u2026", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-285", "text": "Peyote is you know we have this tremendous respect for it we imagine that its tremendously ancient and it apparently isnt. Uh\n\n[6:46:00]there is no archaeological evidence of peyote uyse in the aerly earth and 500 years ago. Its almost a phenomenon of the conquest. What you find in the old graves in the peyote cultural area is our the seeds of the forest\u2026 which is an ordeal poison. Strychnine and often um often drug uh human\n\n[6:46:30]plant symbiotic relationships evolve over time. It may be that the use of hallucinogens is still in fairly dynamic evolution all over the planet uh peyote is a major hallucionce should have been used for the past 50000 years if it has only been used for the past 500 years thats pretty peculiar alright and yet that appears to be the evidence. Ibogaine\n\n[6:47:00] not only a visionary hallucinogen but an aphrodisiac as well no evidence of any use before 1850. And yet in an area where the portugese had been trading for the past 500 years and writing cultural descriptions and interviewing hte people if its was there it would have been mentioned. So this is a puzzle uh you know ayahuasca use we assume is millennia old but on the other hand\n\n[6:47:30]archeology is a real isreablke proposition in the amazon because the climate is so degraded. Degradaded so we can't really know um but aside from peyote and whatever its history north america seems to have only minor hallucinogens that have been utilized shamanically a pu\\\\le another puzzle of culture and attitudes is\n\n[6:48:00]\n\n(end of transcription)\n\nTranscribed by Simon Shaw", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-286", "text": "[6:48:00]\n\n(end of transcription)\n\nTranscribed by Simon Shaw\n\n[6:36:00] this small liquid planet on which we find ourselves and the other direction uh s.. Forget it. Its the husk of a seed and it is utterly meaningless in the cosmic drama and the real destiny lies out there half way \u2026 \u2026 or some other exoitc port of call i don't see how you can have that both ways.\n\nAudience:\n\n[6:36:30]\n\nTM: yes and most stars uh have lives shorter than the amount of time that biology has been on this planet. We are fortunate enough to be around a very slow burning stable star. There are a lot of.. I havent forgtotten your second question right. There are a lot of mysteries in our coscmic neighbourhood that we rarely hear addressed for example just as an example um if our destiny lies out\n\n[6:37:00] in the great universe its a hell of technological barrier to cross to the stars. I mean it may be insurmountable however isn't it interesting that the most earth like star within seventy light years is the nearest star. Not technically the nearest star which is uh glowing red clinker called alpha centurai right, but\n\n[6:37:30] beta centura. is 1.1 solar masses. 1.1 solar masses. No star within seventy light years is as earth like i mean .. sunl like as that star from the point of view of the galaxy uh beta centura and our sun almost look like lightly bonded binaries. This is an accident it is a tremendously fortuitous", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-287", "text": "[6:38:00] accident for us because it could well mean that there is a uh an earth like planet at an incredibly short distance away from us in terms of the cosmic neighbourhood in fact probably within the next years \u2026 will be created but if there is a water heavy oxygen rich world out there its going to show up .well then that is going to become a tremendous\n\n[6:38:30] attractor in the historical matrix because it will be hailed as the answer. I mean can ou imagine? If an .. because there wil then be two possibilities. That there is intelligence next door not likely or that there is.. How do you assess it how many oxygen rih planets have we examined for crying out loud> and the other possibility is that its empty real estate.\n\n[6:39:00] In tiether case it will excite keen interest throughout society so now thats a little odd \u2026 cosmic neighbourhood that is rarely mentioned or\u2026 yeah\n\nAudience:.\n\n[6:39:30]\n\nTM: Yes I although I leave that to the .. of the world to work out the details. There is after all a possible \u2026 that is pretty clear in spite of the ravings and rantings of these christer\u2026. The fossil record is pretty clear that we emerged out of uh the protohomoinids who emerged out of the ppasdf radiation that emerged\n\n[6:40:00] out of and so forth and so on. I dont uh i think that uh but there may be mysteries i mean one question that im surprised nobody ever seems to ask in these weekends when i tell the cheerful story of the descent from the trees the\u2026 encounter with the mushrooms and so forth and so on is nobody ever asks well that who put the mushrooms in the path", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-288", "text": "[6:40:30]of these binoclura bipedal evolving primates i mean is this just a story of nature's happiest accidents? Or did someone say you know te weht planet start hte retraction of the rainforests seize the spores into the grasslands and watch what happens. Uh because then we come down out of the trees brainless as the wombat and began testing food sources and\n\n[6:41:00] lo and behold here are these things which are obviously designed to be seen. I mean mushrooms are form of display theyre designed to be seen they demand to be eaten. And uh the consequences that that you know to lead a species to the brink of darer\u2026 well thats just a coincidence or is there a mind behind all of this> see i think that if mind\n\n[6:41:30]the problem i have with all the extra terrestrial and all the channelling adn all the abducting and all the stuff that goes on is its all too B movie its all too simple. Too straightforward. That's what the troubles me about ths\u2026 scenario is that its perfectly understandable to us if its understandable you can betcha booties its the wrong answer i mean its gonna be weirder\n\n[6:42:00]\n\nTranscribed by Simon Shaw\n\n[6:42:00]than that not about mineral extraction or even diplomatic goodwill. Uh i have a professor years ago his cosmology went like this you know how there are bacteria which you can introduce into gold slurry in low grade ore and the bacteria will concentrate the gold and then you just watch the gold out of ght bacteria and .uh mining technique", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-289", "text": "[6:42:30]that's very efficient for poor yielding gold ore. So this guys idea was that some day UFOs would appear over every major city on earth and they would just load up all the plutonim and fissionable material and take it away and say thank you very much uh this mining operation is now completed you people cn go back to hurling shit at each other in the tree tops as far as were concerned\n\n[6:43:00]we have real application for this fissionable material you people were gonna use it blow each other up what a bunch of dummies and farewell and good luck so thats one possibility.\n\nAudience:\n\nYes then I insist on getting to the plan\u2026\n\nAudience:\n\nTM:\u2026 No, halma\u2026 and harmaline by uh no by flattery and shwaretz and\n\n[6:43:30] its published by m the university of california press neary string studies division publication number 23.\n\nYeah \u2026 well what i thought we should talk about this morning as we seem to range wide and free is the practicum of all this which is you know how many of these visual plants are they there\n\n[6:44:00]and where are they and how do you obtain them and how do you use them once you obtain them. So i thought how many of you have ever seen i\u2026 get with it. This is a uh poster which i dont even know if its still available it may be uh a print. It is still available. And its a very good ethnobotanical course in hallucinogens in one sheet of paper. Uh what it divided into basically", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-290", "text": "[6:44:30] is this is the old world and this is the new. Immediately you know this t\u2026 in the new world than the old. This is one of the great of evolution\u2026 because nobody can offer a reasonable explanation as to why there should be nearly 3 times as many hallucinogenic plants int he new world as in the old i mean other than thats where the\n\n[6:45:00] flying saucers planted them nobody has come up with a good explanation. Nature hallucinogenic plants complexes that i have experience with and can address are uh uh well lets do a little quick geographical tour. First of all north america for reasons not well understood is quite poor in\n\n[6:45:30] native hallucinogens. Uh there are no major north american hallucinogens. Peyote is um well yes its north american the funny thing about peyote i mean you can feed me questions\u2026\n\nPeyote is you know we have this tremendous respect for it we imagine that its tremendously ancient and it apparently isnt. Uh\n\n[6:46:00]there is no archaeological evidence of peyote uyse in the aerly earth and 500 years ago. Its almost a phenomenon of the conquest. What you find in the old graves in the peyote cultural area is our the seeds of the forest\u2026 which is an ordeal poison. Strychnine and often um often drug uh human\n\n[6:46:30]plant symbiotic relationships evolve over time. It may be that the use of hallucinogens is still in fairly dynamic evolution all over the planet uh peyote is a major hallucionce should have been used for the past 50000 years if it has only been used for the past 500 years thats pretty peculiar alright and yet that appears to be the evidence. Ibogaine", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-291", "text": "[6:47:00] not only a visionary hallucinogen but an aphrodisiac as well no evidence of any use before 1850. And yet in an area where the portugese had been trading for the past 500 years and writing cultural descriptions and interviewing hte people if its was there it would have been mentioned. So this is a puzzle uh you know ayahuasca use we assume is millennia old but on the other hand\n\n[6:47:30]archeology is a real isreablke proposition in the amazon because the climate is so degraded. Degradaded so we can't really know um but aside from peyote and whatever its history north america seems to have only minor hallucinogens that have been utilized shamanically a pu\\\\le another puzzle of culture and attitudes is\n\n[6:48:00]\n\nTranscribed by Simon Shaw", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-292", "text": "is [6:48:00] as you all know the northwest coast Indians, the Kwakiutl, Tsimshian- um, yeah Kwakiutl, Tsimshian and Tlingit have an extraordinary evolved Shamanism and where the people who develop that x-ray style of art. Well their cultural area has the densest number of psilocybin mushrooms of any place in the world. No cultural evidence of psilocybin use. No evidence that these people even knew these things were there. I mean I know this challenges the tradition of the all knowing aboriginal but you know, but this is what the data seems to imply. Now in Southern California and across portions of the Southwest there have been datura religions which are very old apparently. The so-called tolache religions. I don't recommend datura. I don't know what astronomic- astrological sign you have to be to make peace with that stuff, but I find it really peculiar and menacing. It's about magic which is about power and control and", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-293", "text": "It's about magic which is about power and control and usually uh, sexuality in some invasive and Dominator application. I've taken to Tora a number of times and it's been interesting but it feels watery and dark dangerous to me. There was a period when I lived in Nepal when I became aware that these sadhus, not content with their superior meditation techniques and their endless smoking of hashish, were also availing themselves of the seeds of datura metal which is conspecific to what we call Jimsonweed in this country, and so I thought well I should take this too and find out what it's about. Well, it was a very odd trip- it was- I sat in my room and bodenoth [?] and I would sit, say hm, nothing is happening, nothing happening. Well, you can only think that so many times, then my mind would drift into a kind of twilight state and then these wraith-like entities, I mean they were like Victorian ghosts. You know, they", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-294", "text": "they were like Victorian ghosts. You know, they were like women in shredded dam- shredded damask gowns or something, would fly into my window carrying newspaper sheets in their outstretched arms and they would let these sheets of newspaper flutter down onto my lap and I would like begin to read and I would begin, and I was so astonished by what I was reading that it would jerk me out of it and then say what's happening. Nothing's happening. Nothing's happening. And then my attention would drift and this would happen again. Then after about a half an hour of that as the stuff began to build up I began to, like I would undergo these very brief periods of unconsciousness and when I came out of them I would discover that my leg had been thrown up around behind my head and my arm shot through and I was like all knotted up. And then I would very carefully unfold myself and lay back down and I remember thinking I'm certainly glad", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-295", "text": "down and I remember thinking I'm certainly glad there's nobody else here because this is the kind of thing just designed to drive a sitter into a conniption fit of alarm. And you know about, about six times over the next hour and a half I went into these convulsive spasms, and then on another night these English people shared a suite of rooms off of mine and I had to get to the bathroom. I had to go through this one guy's room so this one night I hadn't taken datura but this fellow had taken datura and at one point I had to go to the John so I debated for a long time about how this is going to disturb his trip and maybe I should piss out the window, but no that would- didn't seem- although in India that's perfectly all right. And um, so finally I decided I would just walk through the room, so then as I was tiptoeing through the room I saw that he was actually having sex with this girl", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-296", "text": "saw that he was actually having sex with this girl that we knew from Katmandu and it had a slight emotional tinge for me because I had actually had my eye on her although I never said anything about it to anybody so uh, so then uh, the next morning I mentioned this and he said that yes it had been his impression as well but that in fact she wasn't there and so it was like you know I, I saw somebody else's hallucination and then what finally decided me that datura was too peculiar was that I had another English friend who lived a couple of houses away and one day I was in the market buying potatoes and this guy came along and we were just talking and in the course of this conversation he was telling me how he'd been taking a lot of datura and in the course of this conversation I became aware that he thought that I was visiting him in his apartment and I decided that's too fucked up, you know, to", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-297", "text": "decided that's too fucked up, you know, to not know whether you're entertaining someone in the confines of your apartment or buying vegetables in the confines of the market means that you've become too disengaged [6:54:00] from the modalities-", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-298", "text": "Transcribed by Eva Petakovic", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-299", "text": "[6:54:00] from the modalities of the real. And, of course, it creates tremendous drying, and uhm it\u2019s a- it\u2019s a- its- its- a uhm, deliriant, is what the literature calls it. It\u2019s deliriant. Ahh.. but the, you know, I think that people all over the world utilize, uhm, plants for bizarre experiences. Time and time again I have run up against this [06:54:30], uhm\u2026, one- you know there is a very rare drug in South America called oo-koo-he, oo-koo-he. It\u2019s made by the huitoto, uhm, and the bora and the muinani in this very circumscribed area and what fascinated us about it was that it was an orally active DMT drug. And we couldn\u2019t as pharmacologists understand how an orally active DMT drug was possible. Because the DMT should be destroyed in your [06:55:00] gut. So we wanted to get a sample of this stuff. And uhm, it\u2019s made from", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-300", "text": "of this stuff. And uhm, it\u2019s made from the resin of virola trees, the inner bark of the virola sheds a red resin. And uhm, we eventually in 1981, my brother and I and Wade Davis, the guy who wrote the \u201cThe Serpent and the Rainbow\u201d, we all launched an expedition of the Rio Yaguas Yacu. [6:55:30] And where there was this stuff and we would do what we call the bioaste ...which means somebody has to test this stuff. Cause we would get samples from these shaman and we would draw straws for who got to do the bioaste. Well taking this acute was appalling. I mean your heart rate goes up to about three times normal, you shed water by the gallon, your blood pressure shoots up. [6:56:00] I mean it felt like a precoronary to me. And then we come down and say to this shaman, ya know, Lorenzio, what\u2019s the story? And he said \u201cYeah, it takes", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-301", "text": "the story? And he said \u201cYeah, it takes getting used to doesn\u2019t it?\u201d [audience laughs] And uhm, so then I.. And then when you look at it, when you look at this oo-koo-he chemically you see well yes there\u2019s dmt in there and there\u2019s 5 mao dmt in there, but then when you do the gastronaimgram [6:56:30] you see that marching along behind those spots there are all these other spots of various tryptamine compounds, some of which are cardioregulators, some of which nobody knows what they do, and so then you realize that it\u2019s a, it\u2019s a dirty drug. There\u2019s too much junk in there. What you want is something that has a very clean signature. So oo-koo-he didn\u2019t exactly seem the way, uhm, to go. Uhm, I think this is the real [6:57:00] situation with amanita muscaria. Probably the most discussed, uninteresting, uhm, drug in the world. Because so many people have tried to hang", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-302", "text": "world. Because so many people have tried to hang so much on it. And ya know, it\u2019s a horrible experience most of the time.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-303", "text": "Audience: [inaudible]\n\nTM: Yeah yeah, occasionally you\u2019ll meet someone who says \u201cWell you\u2019re just wrong. It\u2019s wonderful. [6:57:30] I\u2019ve taken it for years; I love it. And I, ya know, don\u2019t know. First of all it\u2019s genetically variable, it\u2019s geographically variable, it\u2019s uhm, uhm, seasonally variable. And it fluctuates at various times in its uhm, in its uhm, process of maturation. So what must be going on with amanita muscaria is that you have to learn how to take it in your area, [6:58:00] from people that know when to collect it, where to collect it, how much to collect, and how to prepare it. If you just go out and find one and chow down I guarantee you it will turn you every way but loose and it will turn you loose. So uhm..\n\nAudience: [inaudible]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-304", "text": "Audience: [inaudible]\n\nTM: No that\u2019s what they always say. They say \u201cHave you drunk your urine recently?\u201d I got a letter last week... No, i understand. But if- Do you all understand the basis of the question? Why does urine [6:58:30] come into it? Because, uhm, in Siberia they have discovered, where this amanita thing originates, that the active principle is not destroyed inside your body. That it is excreted in the urine. And the true aficionados of this stuff believe that this so called second pass is better than the first pass. And so you have to uhm, uhm, [6:59:00] you know...they drink the urine. One of the great hazards of Siberian shamanism is stepping outside of the yurt on a snowy night to take a leak and being pitched head first into the snow by frantic reindeer who butt you out of the way to try to get to the yellow snow because they\u2019re so completely hooked on, uhm, amanita that nothing stands in their way. [audience laughs]\n\nAudience: [inaudible]\n\nTM: Oh, your [inaudible] is pushing you out of the.. Well I\u2019ve never hung out with the Yakuts. Maybe they\u2019re a pretty wild-eyed gang. An example of how a very ancient, uhm, how a very ancient folkway can be incorporated into our culture without us even realizing it, and is provided by discussing amanita muscaria\u2026 If you go to the encyclopedia britannica and you look up Santa Claus [7:00:00]\n\nTranscribed Paul Mullins", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-305", "text": "they\u2019ll tell you that it has to do with Saint Nicholas and it got started in the 11th century and it\u2019s a-, but when you look at the Santa Claus story it\u2019s a perfect, uhm, mythologym to analyze from this point of view because look what\u2019s going on with Santa Claus. First of all Santa Claus\u2019 colors are red and white, the colors of the amanita muscaria for sure. [7:00:30] Santa claus lives at the north pole. What does this mean? It means Santa Claus lives at the axis mundi where yggdrasil, the magic work ash of Welsh mythology has, uhm, taken root. Santa Claus flies, this is what shaman do. Santa Claus is the master of the reindeer, the animal most associated with the amanita muscaria. [7:01:00] Santa Claus is aided in his work by troops of elves. And what is the work of Santa Claus? To build toys for children. Remember the DMT thing saying \u201cLook at this! Look", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-306", "text": "the DMT thing saying \u201cLook at this! Look at this!\u201d Well those were off duty elves, clearly. So here are all the motifs and I believe that for children in our culture that all the christer stuff is not what christmas [7:01:30] is about. Christmas is about standing in front of the tree on christmas morning with the gifts arrayed and the twinkling lights on. Well that tree is the tree that the amanita muscaria forms it\u2019s symbiotic relationship to. It\u2019s always spruce or pine that it has a mycorrhizal relationship to. So the number of motifs relating Santa Claus to a cult of amanita muscaria- there\u2019s almost nothing but relational [7:02:00] motifs there. And yet if you suggest this to people they just back away in horror, you know? Well, uhm, these hallucinogenic plants seem clustered in the new world in two areas. The first area is, uhm, the Sierra Mazateca of central Mexico and related areas. And there you", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-307", "text": "of central Mexico and related areas. And there you have a number of things overlapping. You have [7:02:30], uhm, the- a- a mushroom area of multiple species where, unlike the [quaquatal?] shim-sham [flingut?] language area, in this central mexican langua- uhm, area they absolutely did use and discover these mushrooms. And we have these things called mushroom stones that, uhm, go, uhm, 2500 b.c.. So the mushroom religions is truly archaic in Mexico. [7:03:00] In the same cultural area you have the, uhm, the morning glory seeds that come from", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-308", "text": "ipomoea purpurea and- and related hybrids. Are you all familiar with these? This is a psychedelic plant that you can grow yourself and take. Don\u2019t buy the packages of seeds and take them because, uhm, a benevolent government has made sure that they are soaked in horrendous poison so that you can\u2019t [7:03:30] get loaded on them. Uhm, but you can grow a crop out of them that will be toxin free. And this is a tremendous visionary intoxicant. It takes a couple hundred of these seeds but in that same area, strangely enough, there\u2019s another morning glory, [Named here. Can\u2019t find it on the web], it used to be called [?], that, as few as thirteen seeds will flatten you. [7:04:00] Now it\u2019s interesting, as long as we\u2019re talking about morni- uhm, morning glory seeds, to note that pure unit volume, per by weight, probably the strongest plant hallucinogen in the world is,", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-309", "text": "the strongest plant hallucinogen in the world is, uhm, hawaiian baby woodrose. And yet there is no record of any culture ever utilizing that. It, uhm- there are thirteen species of argyreia. It\u2019s called [7:04:30] hawaiian baby woodrose but it has nothing to do with Hawaii, it\u2019s native to India. There are thirteen species of argyreia scattered from southern India out to Fiji and all contain ergot like, LSD like, compounds like chanoclavine and so forth. These- I got started on morning glory seeds because they were available. But don\u2019t sell this stuff short folks. I mean, it\u2019ll give you a ride you\u2019ll [7:05:00] never forget. Uhm, and the baby woodrose even moreso. Be very careful with the hawaiian baby woodrose because it contains cardioactive glycosides and, you know, if you, you know, maybe six seeds will do you. Twelve seeds might well plant you. And twelve seeds will fit on a", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-310", "text": "plant you. And twelve seeds will fit on a tablespoon. So this is nothing to start choking down in large amounts. Yea. [7:05:30]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-311", "text": "Audience: [Inaudible]\n\nTM: Yes and could be extracted in a fairly simple fil- filtration system. Yea, good point. Yea.\n\nAudience: [My question is are they dry? Do you grind them up?]\n\nTM: You- Well they are dry. They\u2019re little crescent shape dry things. Yea grind them in a braun grinder and, uhm, uhm\u2026\n\nAudience: Do you mix them with anything?\n\nTM: Apple sauce is the favorite carrier for these disgusting things, or milkshakes. Uhm, but it would be good [7:06:00]\n\nTranscribed by Paul Mullins\n\n[7:06:00]\n\nTM: \u201cUm\u2026 But it would be good to look into doing a little chemistry - the emetic in the morning glories is estracumerone, not the cardioactive glycoside in argeria nervosa but in ipomea purpurea it\u2019s.. uh\u2026estracumerone and you could devise a simple chemical system for removing that and I think LSD.. w-you know...have you ever had what is called \u201cWoodrose LSD\u201d? Well it\u2019s wonderful! It\u2019s unlike LSD, it\u2019s more like psilocybin because it is highly visionary; [7:06:30]and one of the things about these morning glories is.. You know\u2026 I don\u2019t know whether we have to talk about Rupert\u2019s theory or what\u2026 but it\u2019s just an archive of Mayan and Toltec imagery, I mean, you take this stuff and you\u2019re there in the pyramidal complex on the day of Venus\u2019s heliacal rising when they do their thing\u2026 I mean it\u2019s pretty amazing.\u201d\n\nAudience: [Inaudible][7:07:00]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-312", "text": "Audience: [Inaudible][7:07:00]\n\nTM: \u201cUuuuummm\u2026 it\u2019s a close relative, it\u2019s active not in the microgram range, but in the milligram range and there are several active compounds\u2026 Eurite... I think Chenoklavine is the psychoactive\u2026 and Erganovine\u2026 all these occur there.\u201d\n\nAudience: \u201cAnd do you grind those and swallow them whole, or make an infusion?\u201d\n\nTM: \u201cNo, you grind them to a powder and then just take... capsule \u2018em\u2026and it\u2019s a lot of capsules [7:07:30] it\u2019s like half a cup of this horrible, whitish meal with a strange smell but\u2026 yeah basically about two hundred seeds. You may want to go higher but start with that.\u201d\n\nAudience: [Inaudible] [7:08:00]\n\nTM: \u201cWell, no, but if what you\u2019re saying is true, that\u2019s where the glycoside would reside. That\u2019s not my understanding actually, wh-\u201d\n\nAudience: [Inaudible]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-313", "text": "Audience: [Inaudible]\n\nTM: \u201cWell, maybe the caption got mislabeled or something because the way they do it where [7:08:30] I\u2019ve seen it is they take the little seeds and they grind them on a matate into a powder, then they put it in water\u2026 as you sssssaid\u2026 and then, and they shake it, ss\u2026 uh..and leave it, and come back an hour later and shake it again and do that for a while; and then uh the stuff precipitates to the bottom..the physica-.. .the...the matter...and the liquid fraction is poured off and discarded [7:09:00] and they take the... the solid matter and they let it dry in the sun until it\u2019s no longer runny but it\u2019s a kind of like\u2026 the consistency of oatmeal or playdough or something like that and then they make a little tiny uh...uh...tortilla which they... they then toast on a metal griddle and so you get this thing which looks slightly smaller than a ritz cracker\u2026[7:09:30] and is a toasted morning glory seed wafer, and you eat that, and that is the thing which is active. That\u2019s how I\u2019ve seen it done.\n\nAudience: [Inaudible]\n\nTM: \u201cApparently not, they toast it lightly, they don\u2019t\u2026 it\u2019s not blackened\u2026 It\u2019s just sort of golden\u2026\u201d\n\nAudience: [Inaudible]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-314", "text": "Audience: [Inaudible]\n\nTM: \u201cNo, it\u2019s the\u2026 it\u2019s one species of morning glory turbina, previously called revea, coryembosa. [7:10:00] The other one...uh\u2026 the morning glory that you have to take uh.. a couple of hundred seeds for is used in that area as a hallucinogen, but it\u2019s also used to induce labour and has a whole role in midwifery and...and like that.\n\nAudience: [Inaudible]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-315", "text": "Audience: [Inaudible]\n\nTM: \u201cNo, that\u2019s the Hawaiian Woodrose and it has no history of human usage, [7:10:30] so you\u2019re on your own. This is\u2026 it\u2019s worth talking about maybe for a minute\u2026 that\u2026 er, y\u2019know there are\u2026 hallucinogens are like hotel rooms, some are occupied and some are not, and it\u2019s always interesting to fiddle with the unoccupied ones, because if you\u2019re\u2026 if you believe Sheldrake, then it\u2019s an empty field. Uh, you know, one way of thinking of these things is\u2026 when you take a plant [7:11:00] it takes you.So, when you take mushrooms for instance, what the trip is, is all the mushroom trips that anybody ever had. And you lea\u2026 you know, you make a tiny contribution too, ah... it\u2019s\u2026 you leave a piece of your trip in the trip and so the\u2026 the trip is slowly evolving over time as those who take the plant each leaves a brick [7:11:30] or an offering or a little architectural motif on this vast edifice. Well then if you come\u2026 that was why a- uh\u2026 y\u2019know a plant like Hawaiian Woodrose or to some degree Stropharia Cubensis because it is not the preferred mushroom among the Mexican traditionalists, then it\u2019s unoccupied. You can make of it what you want; it can be sort of... your vehicle. This is why a drug like ketamine, which is a new drug, [7:12:00]\n\nTranscribed by Aurelio Lyra", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-316", "text": "Transcribed by Aurelio Lyra\n\nTM.: \u2026 a new drug, without a thousand years of input. My impression of where you go on ketamine is like visiting a new office building. That nobody has rented offices yet, i mean all the water coolers work, and there are these recessional distances with fluorescent lighting, but, there are no hurrying secretaries or crowded offices, or chatter around the water fountains. It\u2019s just empty. It\u2019s empty because not enough people have left their initials on the walls.\n\nAudience Question: What is the variety of mushroom that is common in the Yucatan\n\nTM:.: Well, if you mean growing on manure. Yeah, that\u2019s Stropharia cubensis. See there are about 30 species of mushrooms that grow in that Mexican area, and most of them are what are called, well not most of them, but some are ephemeral mushrooms, meaning they are very small and they can be almost anywhere. And there are some larger ones too that can be almost anywhere. Stropharia cubensis is the only one of the good ones that locates on cow dung. Now, there are other mushrooms that grow on cow dung that contain psilocybin, but they also are more sickening.There are species of Panaeolus and species of Coprinus. If you collect a mushroom off dung and you want to know if it is a Panaeolus or Coprinus or Stropharia, just keep it around for a few hours. If it is a Stropharia it will just sort of be around. If it is a Coprinus or a Panaeolus, it will do what is called auto-digest. It will turn into a slimy mess.\n\nAudience Question: Can\u2019t you tell from the spore print", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-317", "text": "Audience Question: Can\u2019t you tell from the spore print\n\nTM:\u2019 No, you can\u2019t tell from the spore print, but you can tell from the macro-morphology of it, if you know mushrooms. They\u2019re easy to tell apart.\n\nAudience Question: [inaudible]\n\nTM,: You see that\u2019s tricky unless you\u2019re someone who really knows their stuff.\n\nAudience Question: [inaudible] have you found that there is way in Hawaiian woodrose seeds [inaudible]\n\nTM;: It was more speculative, but i think it would be worth trying.\n\nAudience Question: I thought that the ergamine alkaloid is not water soluble\n\nTM; Some are and some aren\u2019t.\n\nAudience Question: [inaudible] \u2026 synthesizing LSD. Its apparently hard to get it started. I hear if you get a bunch of morning glory seeds and soak them in lighter fluid\u2026 [inaudible]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-318", "text": "TM;: Yeah that sounds right. Pet Ether is a good one. So is Chloroform. Have any of you read The Road to Eleusis. That\u2019s about the Eleusinian Mysteries, and argues, its by Wasson and Hoffman and Ruck, and argues that the mystery at Eleusis was a kind of ergotized beer. That they were gathering ergot off Paspalum and making an ergotized beer, and the only way they could\u2019ve done that for 2000 years, stoning thousands of people each September at this cult site, without the thing getting a reputation for being toxic or causing convulsions, unless they had some way that was very efficient, of separating the toxic alkaloids from the hallucinogenic ones. So, that may have been a water fractionation technique, as well. Or, you know, the whole theory may be wrong, and whatever was drunk at Eleusis may not have been ergotized beer. It could have been a mushroom of some sort. This is what Robert Graves thought, that it was a mushroom.\n\nAudience Q: [inaudible]\n\nTM;: The Road to Eleusis. Probably not, because Wasson is now dead and the estate is kind of funny about that kind of thing.\n\nAudience Q; Two Questions. One is can you talk more of the emetic of morning glory and how to get rid of it.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-319", "text": "TM: The emetic is Estracutarone. If you\u2019re not a chemist and used to dealing with high molecular weight solvents that you should do some kind of water, you know, dissolve it in water and then try and separate out the fractions. This would be, i mean, a lot of work needs to be done. I think in the underground there are publications being circulated that are, you know, the Wizard\u2019s Workbook for mushroom , er i mean, morning glory reclaimation and stuff like this. Its that, you pay your dues with morning glories, but it\u2019s usually worth the price of admission. I mean, it\u2019s only nausea, for crying out loud. Yeah\n\nAudience Q: You were talking about different hallucinogens and were telling, i got the impression that you vocation is that somehow consciousness creates the reality that\u2019s out there depending on how consciousness is used with different hallucinogens. Is that\u2026\n\nTM; \u2026 Yeah, i think so. That we leave our fingerprints on the drugs that we take, and that drugs that have been taken for thousands of years have a lot of fingerprints on them.\n\nTranscribed by Chris Galbraith\n\nTM: (07:18:00)..into the field, you know. One way of thinking, since someone talked of Sheldrake earlier, one way of thinking about psychedelics and trying to define what do they do, is that they are amplifiers of the morphogenetic field. That, you know, that the past of objects somehow becomes present. Em, this would fit it in with my notion that when you take a psychedelic you are rising into some kind of superspace, (07:18:30) that can be mathematically described. Because having the past be co-present with the present is a way of saying that you will shift your dimensional relationship to the datafield, and now it appears to be one coherent thing. Yeah?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-320", "text": "Audience: Um, what is the plant that grows in the South West that has harmeline in it?\n\nTM: Pegamum Harmala, the girant syrian rue. Its original (07:19:00) range is from Marocco to Manchuria, but at some time in the nineteenth century it was brought into this country as a range fodder for, for goats. I mean its pretty rasky plant. Em..\n\nAudience: INAUDIBLE\n\nTM: It,s uh, it has small yellow flowers, and it\u00b4s a kind of, it has succulent leaves, sort of waterholding leaves, and it looks like a form of sage brush, and when you cut into it (07:19:30) with a knife or a machete it\u00b4s brilliant yellow inside. And that brilliant yellow is the harmine.\n\nAudience: INAUDIBLE\n\nTM: Pound it up with a sledgehammer to separate the fibers and do a hot water wash on it, and then, you know, do a second hot water wash, then get rid of the physical stuff. Combine the two mother liquors and drive it (07:20:00) down to a reasonable volume. And it\u00b4ll do the trick. Yeah.\n\nAudience: You\u00b4re probably familiar with ..INAUDIBLE\n\nTM: JohnAllegro and Andrija Puharich, yeah,\n\nAudience: What\u00b4s your assessment of... inaudible", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-321", "text": "Audience: What\u00b4s your assessment of... inaudible\n\nTM: Well, not to rain on anybody\u00b4s parade.. Andrija Puharich is a very mercurial person, is that what we want to say. (07:20:30) Recall that he was the guy who pushed Uri Geller for a long time. And they were forever tromping into the Negev and coming out with blank cassettes that had held the wisdom of the galaxy, but the aliens erased them before they let them return.\n\n(Audience laughing, unrest).", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-322", "text": "That could happen here.. So that\u00b4s Andrija Puharich. Ah.. He\u00b4s been around for a long time, so you have to, these people are such eccentrics, I mean you have to (07:21:00) just respect people\u00b4s persistence and survival power. (Audience laughter) Eh, but I think you know his scholarship, and his notions, the rules of evidence is fairly divergent from even from my fairly loose cannon. (LAUGHS) So, Allegro is a little different case. You all know the book \u00b4The sacred mushroom and the cross\u00b4? He managed to hypothesize one of the most radical (07:21:30) theories ever to come down the pipe. I don\u00b4t know how true it is, but his theory is that Jesus was a mushroom. (Audience laughs) Ha, ha.. And you know this would not probably have cut too much mustard except that the guy was a dead sea scroll scholar of world renown, ah, had a scholars grasp of Arameic and", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-323", "text": "ah, had a scholars grasp of Arameic and Akkadian, and was fully licenced (07:22:00) to be one of the people who tell us what the primary documents of Christianity really mean. The problem was, when Allegro got a hold of them, he said, well, what they really mean is that a sacramental mushroom was gr.., being grown in caves by navateans (?) down the Ram Qumram and they called it Jesus, in order to befuddle the Roman authorities and created (07:22:30) the cheerful fairy of the friendly carpenter who tells us to render unto Cesar that which is Cesar\u00b4s, and this was all a publicity stunt just to keep, uh, the Roman authorities guessing. And he has textual, he claims he has textual support for this. The problem is,you have to be an Arameic philologist to follow the argument, and I mean, the argument is unbelievably tortured. (07:23:00) There is a lot of question.., there is a", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-324", "text": "There is a lot of question.., there is a peculiar opaqueness about the early history of Christianity. I mean, if we are to try and take it seriously and understand what happened there, then it must be, that, first of all, if we believe that Christ was a real person, then he must have been born in 6 B.C. Because there was a conjunctial maxima of Jupiter and Saturn at that time, which is a good astrological (07:23:30) event to hang the nativity on. Which means, then, that the crucifiction would have occured in 27. Well, why is it, then, that there are no mentions, no mention of cristh.., of Christ can be pushed back later than, earlier than AD 69. What was going between 27 and 69? The gospels are not contemporaneous, and uh, the mention (07:24:00)", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-325", "text": "Transcribed by Aina Mumbi\n\n24:00 - 30:00\n\nWomen know whose children are who\u2019s because they see the child come out of their body, and they nurse the child. But men do not in that situation have their children. My children. What they have are our children, the tribal group. And uh, this boundary dissolving thing. Let's dwell on this for a moment, because this is central to my arguments, and it has political consequences for our own lives. Um, all primates, clear back down into squirrel monkeys and lemurs. Um, all primates have what are called male dominance hierarchies. Uh, what this means is that most, th the males with the longest claws, the hardest muscles, and the meanest dispositions, take control of everybody else. Uh, women, children, weaker males, uh, everybody comes under the thumb of the alpha males of the pack. This is true, as I said, of squirrel monkeys, howler monkeys, so forth and so on. It is also true of us, sitting here in this room. This is a male dominant society, I mean there's a lot of complaining and hair pulling about it. And there's a political alternative, in the form of, of the women's movement and feminist sensitivities, but for most people, male dominance is the rule. Well I would like to suggest that our peculiarly discomforted relationship to reality is a consequence of the fact that, for a long period of time, perhaps as short as twenty thousand years, perhaps as long as a million years, as a species, and not consciously, we accepted into our diet a drug that had the consequences of suppressing male dominance.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-326", "text": "That this was the social consequence of accepting psilocybin into the diet. The ego is a structure that forms in the psyche like a calcareous tumor, or growth, if you do not have regular recourse to the cure. And the cure is, uh, psilocybin and the boundary dissolving sexual and social style which is carried in its wake. So the reason that we as a people are, uh, haunted by the idea of a lost paradise a perfect world sometime in the misty past is not, you know, Mircea Eliade called it, \"the nostalgia for paradise\" and thought of it , uh, as longing that had no basis. But I think that it's entirely a memory of the period when male dominance was chemically suppressed, ego was chemically suppressed. And by male dominance and ego I don't mean to lay this entirely on men. I would wager probably that everyone in this room has more ego than they need. For example, starting with me, and that's part", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-327", "text": "For example, starting with me, and that's part of the paradox you're supposed to enjoy.. (audience laughter). You know, the ambiguity of me preaching the loss of ego. (audience laughs). So, essentially, you know, what happened was, chemically, a chemically driven leap in evolution as a consequence of the suppression of these behaviours that savoured male dominance. Uh, as a species, uh, we would have continued with male dominance forever had it not been for psilocybin in the diet. And it established uh, a situation, in which, in less than two million years the human brain size doubled. This is without contest the greatest mystery in the whole of evolutionary theory. Uh, Lumsden, who is an evolutionary biologist, called the doubling of human brain size in the last two million years, uh, the most spectacular transformation of a major organ of a higher animal in the entire fossil record. Well now it would be spectacular enough if it were the", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-328", "text": "it would be spectacular enough if it were the liver of an otter, or the (both laughter) hha, ha the pancreas of an elephant. But notice it is the organ that created the theory of evolution itself. And all other theories, so that we're getting a little chronological here folks. (background laughter) There's something fishy going on. Uh, what was it that caused this explosive doubling in human brain size. Well I maintain that it was the new behaviors that emerged with the suppression of ego, and their reinforcement of nomadic pastoralism. And that there was a period, let's call it from the melting of the last glaciers in (unintelligible), 6500 BC, there was a period when men and women were in balance with each other. Children and adults were at peace with each other. And human beings and the planet were at peace with each other.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-329", "text": "Transcribed by Christy Redden\n\n[07:30:00]\n\nTM: Hans Jonas is a brilliant\u2014his book, \u201cChri-\u201d, uh ... \u201cGnosticism: The Message of The Alien God to Infant Christianity\u201d\u2014if that\u2019s not a title to die for ... Ahem. [audience laughter] Huh?\n\nAudience: [inaudible question]\n\nTM: Oh, \u201cThe Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the New Testament\u201d by Charles[worth]. Now that's a ... that ahh weighs in at about 35 pounds, but theological libraries shoul-... will have it, but it's in the locked case. You don't want seminarians [07:30:30] mucking around with this kind of stuff ... uhh \u2026\n\nAudience: [inaudible] And by extension, there\u2019s \u201cThe Urantia Book\u201d too, which has about 2000 pages on the life of Christ, and covers those years after 30, or I guess after 27 or so \u2026\n\nTM: That's right. \u201cThe Uranita Book\u201d is a very spectacular and early example of channeling before it was even named, ahh, and, uhh, very interesting of all the channeled material, \u201cThe Urantia Book\u201d for its pure grandiosity puts everybody [07:31:00] else, uhh, to shame, right? [audience laughter]\n\nAudience: They talk about seeding the planet.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-330", "text": "Audience: They talk about seeding the planet.\n\nTM: Yeah! Well, these are persistent themes, you know. I mean all of Gnosticism is the perception that we don't belong here. That we are creatures of another realm, Beings of Light, who because of some horrible cosmic mistake have been trapped in the world of matter; and the gnostics take the Pentateuch, [07:31:30] the first five books of ... of Moses, and turn it into a nightmare story, and say that, you know, the god of this world, which in Jewish tradition is called Yahweh, who is creator of the world for the Gnostics, he is not the real god at all. He\u2019s the demiurge. He\u2019s a kind of mad god who has entrapped the light, and the task of salvation [07:32:00] is to gather the light and then release it back to it\u2019s hidden higher source beyond the machinery of Cosmic Fate.\n\n[Sudden silence in recording; audience inaudible]\n\nTM: Well, that\u2014that\u2019s good. That\u2019s, it\u2019s sort of like, you know the \u201cM\u0101\u1e47\u1e0d\u016bkya Upani\u1e63ads\u201d \u2014 it's my favorite Upanishad, because it\u2019s the shortest. It\u2019s only a page and a half long, which it\u2014uhh, [audience laughter] you know, which it, uhh... you know, others have been so similarly inspired to brevity, [07:32:30] but it\u2019s the Breath of Brahman. It traces - it\u2019s the description of one \u2014 eh-uh ... exhalation/inhalation cycle. Yeah?\n\nAudience: I know people who can\u2019t even say it: Yah\u2014Wha-!", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-331", "text": "Audience: I know people who can\u2019t even say it: Yah\u2014Wha-!\n\nTM: Yeah, wha\u2026!? Well, you\u2019re not even supposed to say it, if you\u2019re Orthodox.\n\nAudience: [light laughter]\n\nTM: G\u2014dash\u2014D. Yeah?\n\nAudience: You said Yahweh. I'm fascinated by the Rastafarian [inaudible, cough] by which the abbreviation of Yah, [07:33:00] or \u2026 the same phrase hallelujah is supposed to be that twist that [inaudible] could be [inaudible] your understanding is that [inaudible] Yahweh as a verb?\n\nTM: Well, I don\u2019t know too much about Rastafarianism. It was founded by Marcus Garvey and get - had this notion of return to Africa. Uh, you know, syncretism is always with us. Gnosticism was characterized by syncretism. The whole late Hellenic uhh, religious efflorescence, was largely [07:33:30] syncretic and certainly that's what we have now. I mean, you know, The New Age. You go to these fairs and the people who are talking to the Pleiades have the booth next to the people who are talking to Zubenelgenubi and both have world plans from the Saucerian Allfathers, and the two plans are different and you just phooey, uuh, ugh \u2026 you know?\n\nAudience: [laughter]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-332", "text": "Audience: [laughter]\n\nAudience: Gnosticism is alive and well in the hallways of academia, I mean. You got guys like Marvin [inaudible: Lins-key] [07:34:00] and Hans [inaudible: Bor-betch] who ran an [inaudible] into his brain and into the computer and you know so he can become pure information. So that\u2019s about the least for which people matter, is for information, then I don\u2019t know what is \u2026", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-333", "text": "TM: No, I agree. There are two sentiments loose in the world, and you\u2019re going to NOT get through this life without taking sides. You know? Do you believe that our destiny is in another dimension made of light on the other side of the Universe, or do you believe that we should, uhh, you know, clean up the rainforests and save [07:34:30] the planet? You wanna be very careful with your political agenda. One of my sub-interests, which sort of has a relationship to this, but it's oblique, is: asteroidal impacts. I think asteroidal impacts are one of the great undiscussed, uhh, factors in evolution that tie... that every solid body in the solar system is heavily [07:35:00] cratered with impacts by infalling bodies. There's this thing down in Arizona that only happened 50,000 years ago. It was a pissant sized object and everything within 800 miles of the impact point died instantly. It dug a hole half a mile into the ground. It was a nothing-burger. This thing which came down 65 million years ago, they now think on the Yucat\u00e1n, that it killed everything on the [07:35:30] Earth larger than a chicken \u2014 died. You know, I mean, you wanna talk about eco-castrophe, I mean, we have never - you can\u2019t even conceive of what it\u2019s like when something like that happens to a planet. They estimate that the \u2026 at the velocity this thing must have been traveling, it was five miles into the planet in the first second and a half. It raised a wall of rock 6,000 feet high that moved outward at Mach 7. [audience laughter] [07:36:00]\n\nTranscribed by Nathan Johansen\n\n[07:36:00]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-334", "text": "Transcribed by Nathan Johansen\n\n[07:36:00]\n\nTM: Kay? Eeee! I mean, [clears throat] he-yeah . Ah-ha-hem! [audience laughter] Eh! And the planet rang for a million years, you know, and it was, and but if it hadn\u2019t been for that, there would be no flowering plants, no triumph of the mammals, no Whitney Houston ... no \u2026 [laughter]\n\nAudience: No sperm entering the egg.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-335", "text": "TM: Well, but \u2026 eh, suppose: you know, there\u2019s all this tumult in our psyche about the great change that\u2019s supposed to happen, and where are we supposed [07:36:30] to put our political energies, and what are we supposed to be doing? Well, it would be pretty ironic if we, you know, beat ourselves over the head and saved the rainforest and all this malarkey, and then this something came down and just turned the whole thing into hash; and people would say: \u201cMy God! How could we have been so stupid!? We should have been extracting and sequestering U-235 and plutonium. We should have been building starships the size of Montana. [07:37:00] We should have been sparing no effort; and what did we do? We re-planted rainforests!?\u201d And now look, the whole thing \u2026 so, you have to [audience laughter], it uhh, you know, good intentions are not sufficient. You have to locate where the threat is coming from and act", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-336", "text": "to locate where the threat is coming from and act accordingly. There are no points for good intentions in the game of evolution. So mind and .. and we have to decide, you know, what does life want? Is it that life at it\u2019s most [07:37:30] basic level senses the finite, uhh, duration of the star\u2019s life? And so it wants to use this moment of sunshine to build something that could carry us out into the mainstream of the galaxy to the denser star-fields? Or, no!? Is that some kind of Titanic-Apollonian Male-Dominated Techno-Fascist Materialist-Trip, [audience laughter] and what we need to do is cultivate [07:38:00] gentleness, and attention to the bugs, and the grasses, and the water? I don\u2019t have an answer to that. I think it\u2019s a real dilemma. I think people who think they do have answers haven\u2019t really connected with how ambiguous the situation really is.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-337", "text": "Audience: How can you do both?\n\nTM: How can you do both?\n\nAudience: What says The Mushroom? Well, no. I mean, some people can use [cough; inaudible].\n\nTM: Well, what the mushroom says is it\u2019s .. it\u2019s a total \u201cApocalyptarian\u201d [07:38:30]. I mean, it says: \u201cRouse your camels, pack your tents, we\u2019re moving out! This has been fine for a while, but ahead lie worlds of unimaginable challenge at great distance.\u201d But, of course, the\u2014the mushroom sounds like a Techno-Fascist Hortatory Male-Dominator, uhh, when it talks like that. You take Ayahuasca and it says: \u201cClean up the rivers. Care for the children. [07:39:00] Replant the forest.\u201d Well, wha\u2019 \u2026? (sigh).\n\nAudience: But then you have to live with the mushroom possibly being the Universal Traveller that it is, it has that Urge. It\u2019s got the Wanderlust. So it\u2019s of course it\u2019s going to be [inaudible; \u201ccosmic\u201d?]. [laughter]\n\nTM: That\u2019s right. It has nomadic ethics, so it pushes nomadic solutions. Where the Ayahuasca, an enormous jungle plant\u2014a flowering plant, a creature born out of the last catastrophe, just like we are\u2014has a different, uhh, agenda. No, the demons are of many kinds [07:39:30]. \u201cSome are made of ions, some of mind / The ones of DMT, you\u2019ll find / Stutter often, and are blind.\u201d Means, you know: just because somebody, uhh, ehh, just because [light laughter] somebody once said of channeling: \u201cJust because somebody\u2019s dead doesn\u2019t mean they\u2019re smart.\u201d [raucous audience laughter]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-338", "text": "TM: So, [laughter] it could be, you know? [laughter] Everybody\u2019s got their own, uhh, agenda. Well, why don\u2019t we break ... yeah? [07:40:00] Or question? Last question.\n\nAudience: Speaking of the [inaudible; \u201ccosmological expanse\u201d?], are you aware of the present Miles\u2019 work?\n\nTM: Uhh, on the steady-state or something?\n\nAudience: On virus\u2019 [inaudible; \u201cspreadability\u201d?].\n\nTM: Oh, yeah, uh-hm: The Panspermia Theory.\n\nAudience: Yeah, and \u2026 and, and again that argues strongly for the fact that even [inaudible] may have come out of space, and probably only other than an impressive array of statistics, uhh, [inaudible] that lent cometary presence [07:40:30] in near-orbit to viral disease.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-339", "text": "TM: Yeah, well I think that the next revolution in biology is so obvious that you can be totally radical and completely confident you\u2019re on safe ground and say the next great revolution in biology is the realization that space is not a barrier to life, and that, eh, technology is only one method for traversing [07:41:00] between the stars. If in fact planets are regularly pulverized by cosmic catastrophes, then they must be like bursting seedpods and, uhh, everything is subjected to a tremendous evolutionary hammering; but spores, viruses, stuff like that. Particulate matter, it just drifts out between the stars and when it finds another suitable environment, uhh, it it [07:41:30] breaks out. We don\u2019t know what the constraints on life are. You know, the Oceans of Europa could harbor life. You know, these hot-vent sulphur-vent organisms that we find, uhh, in the O\u2014in the deep oceans here? They could survive in the Oceans of Europa. If there were hot sulphur vents at the bottom of those oceans, those organisms wouldn\u2019t, uhh, bat an eye.\n\nAudience: [inaudible] Isn\u2019t it ice covered?\n\nTM: Ah, Europa [07:42:00]\n\nTranscribed by Nathan Johansen\n\nAudience: [inaudible] Isn\u2019t it ice covered?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-340", "text": "Audience: [inaudible] Isn\u2019t it ice covered?\n\nTM: Ah, Europa [07:42:00] is covered with ice, but underneath the ice is water, and there are \u2014 uhh, fractures, uhh \u2014 and uhh, you know, the uhh \u2014 the exotic chemistries and pressures and temperatures of the Jovian environment could produce life. We don\u2019t know, uhh \u2014 what the constraints are. If \u2014 if cometary environments are a better place for life to arise than a warm pond on a newly condensed planet, [07:42:30] then all bets are off as to what, you know \u2014 planetary surfaces may be unlikely places for life to get going. Uhh, it\u2019s hard to say.\n\nAudience: How sustainable are gaseous creatures on a gaseous planet?\n\nTM: That\u2019s right. We don\u2019t know. You could have \u2014 you could have life at temperatures and pressures, uhh, where WE couldn\u2019t exist for a microsecond, uhh, like at the bottom of the Jovian atmosphere \u2014 something like that. No, there\u2019s more mystery [07:43:00] than anything else.\n\nAudience: [inaudible]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-341", "text": "Audience: [inaudible]\n\nTM: Uhh, the\u2014the (ehh) it\u2019s\u2014okay the notion here is\u2014I\u2019ve always felt that the psychedelic experience should be good for something. It arose\u2014uhh, [audience laughter]\u2014in a very practical sense, and I always felt that there was something that wanted, that you should be able to learn that was very hard to bring out. Ahem [clears throat] and we talked a little bit yesterday [takes sip from drink] about [07:43:30] this strange episode that happened in the Amazon, where instead of an ordinary trip, it was locked in for weeks and weeks, and then people differed as to whether it was a transformative incident or a psychosis, or \u2026 what exactly it was, and but, what happened was \u2014 uhh, or what I think wants to happen in every psychedelic experience is that there is a totality symbol, you know Jung tried to get his patients to make [07:44:00] mandalas because he says they were totality symbols. Well, eventually the totality symbol is more than a symbol\u2014 it actually becomes a true map of the totality and I\u2014what this boils down to is a kind of very strange revelation about the nature of the I-Ching that takes very seriously the idea that the I-Ching is a tool for studying time, but then takes the idea much further. It\u2019s hard to give this lecture, it\u2019s hard to listen to this lecture, because the learning curve is steep, and you just have to stick with it for awhile and then there will be pay dirt, but it\u2019s \u2014 uhh, you have to umm, bear with me \u2014 and I had to bear with the entity which was revealing this stuff to me, because it took the form of [07:45:00] \u2026 a, uhh \u2026 Are you all familiar with the idea of a K\u014dan?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-342", "text": "Audience: [a soft murmur, but mostly silence]\n\nTM: This is something that your Guru \u2014 a little saying or something \u2014 that your Guru gives you that if you can figure it out then you move on to the next stage. Well, so the Koan (sips from drink) that I was presented with had to do with the I-Ching, which I was not that passionately fascinated by\u2014I was just sort of mildly interested in it, [07:45:30] like a lot of other freaks, and I was not at all mathematically inclined, I mean, that I am the author of a theory of pure mathematics is as astonishing to me as it is to anybody else, I\u2019m sure.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-343", "text": "TM: Basically, as you know but let me review it, the I-Ching is a Chinese System of Divination that uses 64 structures called hexagrams, and hexagrams are made of broken [07:46:00] and unbroken lines stacked one above another, and they are uhh, the sum set\u2014sum total\u2014of the possible set of such structures is 64. And it\u2019s been remarked by a number of people that the I-Ching has peculiar structural affinities with the DNA, but nobody has ever really known what to make of that. Well, this dialogue with this mushroom entity, uhh, began by [07:46:30] posing a very simple question, which is\u2014as, you know, most of you\u2014the I-Ching hexagrams occur in a sequence which is called the King Wen sequence, which is very old. In fact, portions of the King Wen sequence are scratched on shoulder scapula, umm, that are 35,000 years old. It\u2019s possible to argue that the King Wen sequence of the I-Ching is the oldest abstract sequence, uhh, [07:47:00] ehh, in the world. The question is, or what the Koan was, was: Is the King Wen sequence a Sequence or is it simply a jumble of hexagrams that over time has become traditionally sanctioned as The Sequence? In other words, if it\u2019s a sequence, you should be able to write the rules that generate that hex\u2014that sequence\u2014 and no other. [07:47:30] So umm, lemme dig into this here \u2026 the first hexagram \u2026 can you see this colored chalk? We have two other choices: we have a orange and blue. Here, we\u2019ll do a visual test ... Ooo... Eww. (multiple utterances indicating distaste) Is this the stuff?\n\nAudience: [inaudible]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-344", "text": "Audience: [inaudible]\n\nTM: Okay. Why is this so \u201chalf-acid\u201d (ordinarily: half-assed) as they say ... [laughter]. Uhh.\n\n[07:48:00]\n\nTranscribed by Nathan Johansen\n\n[07:48:00]\n\nTM: So, here\u2019s the first hexagram. It\u2019s called the Creative. And it\u2019s made of six lines. This is no news to anybody, I hope. Here\u2019s the second hexagram. It\u2019s called the Receptive.\n\nAudience: [inaudible]\n\nTM: The yellow? Kay, lemme do these this way and then I\u2019ll switch ... [07:48:30]\n\nTM: So, when I started looking at this question of, uhh, of the order in the I-Ching, umm, the first thing I saw \u2014 it only took me about ten minutes, of just looking at it \u2014 and I noticed, and I\u2019m not the first person to have noticed this \u2014 that it isn\u2019t 64 hexagrams, it\u2019s 32 pairs [07:49:00] of hexagrams, and the second member of each pair is formed by turning the first member upside down.\n\nTM: Do you see? So\u2014so that only took ten minutes; that was no\u2014no problem.\n\nTM: Now, there are eight cases in the I-Ching where inverting the first hexagram causes no change because of the nature of its structure. Uh, you meet the first case here. Obviously if you turn this thing upside down, [07:49:30] it\u2019s still six unbroken lines. So, in the eight cases where inverting a hexagram causes no change, a second rule is generated.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-345", "text": "TM: The second rule is: if inverting the first hexagram causes no change, then all lines change. Very straight forward, right? But now, umm, the problem\u2014the Koan\u2014has changed. And the question is: What are the ordering\u2014what rules order the 32 pairs? [07:50:00] And this was much trickier. Much trickier. And after awhile the prompting voice said: \u201cLook at the first order of difference.\u201d This is just a fancy way of saying: count how many lines change as you go from one hexagram to another. It\u2014ehh\u2014if you go from this hexagram to this hexagram, how many lines change?\n\nAudience: Six.\n\nTM: Six. So, the first order of difference is six, between [07:50:30] these two hexagrams. Similarly, we can go from two to three and there will be another first order of difference.\n\nTM: Now, logic should tell you that the values of the first order of difference are going to be whole numbers One through Six, right? What I did was I went through the I-Ching and actually checked on these, and I discovered that again\u2014immediately, what jumped out, uhh, at me\u2014was there were no Fives. So we wrote [07:51:00] computer programs to randomly arrange hexagrams and check for Fives. Now, we discovered Fives are as common as any other number. The exclusion of Fives in the King Wen sequence was a human decision.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-346", "text": "TM: Someone didn\u2019t want Fives to show up in the first order of difference. Okay\u2026 so then I, uhh, looked at these values, and what I discovered was: When you \u2026 inside the pairs\u2014when you [07:51:30] invert one to get the other\u2014the first order of difference is always an even number. So within the pairs you have no freedom, it\u2019s going to be an even number. Between the pairs, you can arrange them so that you get odd numbers or even numbers.\n\nTM: Now what I discovered was, between the pairs, half are odd and half are even. Again, human agency did this. We wrote computer programs [07:52:00] to randomly throw hexagram sequences and test for this quality, and we found that\u2014uhh, only one in every 7,500 times could you expect to get a sequence which would be, uhh: 25% odd, 75% even; which is what this enforces. So, I was very excited by this, because I said: \u201cWow! There\u2019s all this hidden stuff in the I-Ching [07:52:30] but I\u2019ve never once \u2026 why is this thing not ... [inaudible; interrupted by something irritating needing adjusting] Umm, [inaudible] inching up on me \u2026\n\nAudience: [inaudible] \u2026 There may be one on the the other side of you.\n\nTM: This thing?\n\nAudience: Yeah, right on the other side of you.\n\nTM: Okay. [continues to adjust something on the TimeWave graph]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-347", "text": "TM: Okay. [continues to adjust something on the TimeWave graph]\n\nTM: So, I thought, how weird that all this structure is in there \u2026 and I\u2019d read all of Wilhelm\u2019s Commentaries, and Lama Govinda, and these people, and uhh, it didn\u2019t seem that they had noticed this kind of stuff. So I was very excited. I thought that I was really on to something, and I made a graph of the [07:53:00] first order of difference and it looked something like this. Of course it has [counting deliberately, slowly]: One, Two, Three, Four, Five, Six ... on this axis ...\n\nAudience: [inaudible]\n\nTM: Blue?\n\nTM: And [counting deliberately, slowly]: One, Two, Three, Four ... to 64, this way ... because there are 64 hexagrams. And then I drew the first order of difference. Now, notice ... remember this was Six, so ... [07:53:30] up here we put a point, and the next one is something else ... and the next one is something else, and then we connect the points. And what you get is a structure which looks ... like this. Roughly.\n\nTM: In other words, it looks stochastic, it looks random. [07:54:00]\n\nTranscribed by Nathan Johansen", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-348", "text": "TM: [7:54:00]...it doesn't look like you're on the track of any kind of order here, except that, i noticed a really funny thing, about this. What i noticed was, that this section and this section, are mirror images of each other. So imagine for a moment that you have a copy of this, right here. What you're then able to do, is rotate the copy a 180 degrees within the plane [7:54:30] and you'll discover that it fits perfectly in here. It dovetails at the beginning and at the end but nowhere in between. This is, this is again a product of human decision. Someone made it, so that it would do this and the question is why? Why would anyone want to do that and when it works you have hexagram 1, across from hexagram 63 [7:55:00] and hexagram 2, across from 62, 62... In other words, these always sum to 64, when it's in the right position. So i just thought that i was uncovering some kind", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-349", "text": "So i just thought that i was uncovering some kind of, like (ahh), you know, the equivalent of Chinese kabbalism some kind of lost intellectual system and (ahh), and, but the voice said to me, it said, this is a picture of time [7:55:30] and i couldn't understand what exactly was meant by that, it seemed to me a fairly esoteric thing to assert that it was a picture of time. Now remember they're 64 hexagrams in the I Ching and they have six lines each. 6 x 64 is 384. When it told me that this was a picture of time, i began to entertain the idea that this was, [7:56:00] somehow could be used as a calendar. So then i said, well what it is, is it the whole I Ching running one way and the whole I Ching running backwards the other way combined into this peculiar structure, which has 384 data points in it, which are the lines or so called y\u00e1o of the I Ching.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-350", "text": "lines or so called y\u00e1o of the I Ching. Now 384 is 19 days longer than the solar year length, so if you have a calendar [7:56:30] of 384 days it would precess against (ahh), the equinoxes 19 days every year. So it doesn't seem a good candidate for a calendar if you're trying to keep solar dynamics central. But i discovered something weird about (ahh) this number, 384 days, now think of it as days and that is that, peculiar things happen when [7:57:00] you multiply this number by a numbers that are inherent to the structure of the I Ching. When you might, when you multiply this number by 64, you get a day number which when you break it down into years is 67 years 104.25 days. Now what's interesting about that number is that, it-it is 6 sunspot cycles of 11 plus years. [7:57:30] There's also a major sunspot cycle of 33 years so it meant each line, in a super hexagram made by", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-351", "text": "meant each line, in a super hexagram made by multiplying this number will be associated with one sunspot cycle and the trigrams inside the hexagram will be associated with the major sunspot cycle. When you take 67 years 104.25 days, again by 64, you get [7:58:00] 4306 years, plus some days. This number, is very close to twice the amount of time that it takes for (ahh), a Zodiacal Era such as the Age of Pisces or the Age of Aquarius they, last roughly this long. Well if you take this number by (ahh) 6, not 64 but 6, [7:58:30] which is a legitimate, number because it's built into the I Ching, you get (ahh), 25 thousand years roughly. This is the precession of the great year or the equinoctial year as it's called. So i thought, wow this is really far out! It's some kind of a, (ahh), multi-level resonance calendar... Oh and i forgot to say about 384 days, this", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-352", "text": "Oh and i forgot to say about 384 days, this was central excuse me. (ahh) That this is 13 [8:59:00] lunations. A lunation is 25, is 29. something days and when you multiply that number by 13 you get 383.89. So i said, ah ah! What this thing is, is that keeps track of the moon on this level, it keeps track of the sunspots on this level and it keep track of the great year of the zodiac on this level. All naked eye astronomical phenomenon not hypothesizing [7:59:30] any advanced technology but hypothesizing an advanced (ahh), (ahh), intellectual, point of view. Well, [drinks water] so i thought i was finished and that somehow it wanted to tell me about a Neolithic Calendar in ancient China for some reason, but there was more. [drinks water] Popeye had spinach, i have this. [audience laughs] The prompting voice...[8:00:00]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-353", "text": "Transcribed by Tiago Ramos", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-354", "text": "[08:00:00] The prompting voice said \u201cthis structure which you have created\u201d by the way some of you who are scholars of the I Ching remember in the uhm second half of the Wilhelm and Baynes translation there are whole bunch of VERY ancient sayings that nobody knows what they\u2019re talking about they\u2019re so esoteric. And the most MYSTERIOUS of these sayings is the saying which says \u201cthe forward running numbers refer to the future. The backward running numbers [08:00:30] refer to the past\u201d. Well in the I Ching there ARE no forward or backward running numbers unless you do something like this and then look what you get: one, two, three, ... 63, 62, 61, 60, 59. You get forward and backward running numbers. So I said \u201cwow.. you know, we\u2019re digging this thing out. The I Ching is NOT enorical [??] as it\u2019s been done at country fairs for three millennia - the I Ching as we possess it is a piece of broken machinery.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-355", "text": "we possess it is a piece of broken machinery. [08:01:00] It\u2019s a though you have you know, the main gear out of a machine and you\u2019re trying by.. [pause] archaeological reconstruction to re-build that machine. So.. [pause] I was sort of stuck at this point and the prompting voice turned on and said \u201cthis structure which you\u2019ve made which is the entire I Ching running forward and backward against itself - which would place it then at the top of a [08:01:30] um, of the uh hierarchy should be placed at the bottom of the hierarchy. Treat this thing as a single line\u201d it said. And I was calling this at this point the simple wave. It said \u201ctreat the simple wave as a.. a line in a hexagram\u201d. Well when you do that, [pause] bear with me folks. Remember I said the learning curve is steep. [08:02:00] However, it\u2019s not long.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-356", "text": "Audience: Can I ask for you\u2019re [inaudible]\n\nTMK: Oh yeah.\n\nAudience: Can I get the [inaudible] across the room.\n\nTMK: What.. what color?\n\nAudience: Yeah well uh..\n\nTMK: Yellow?\n\nAudience: [Inaudible]\n\nTMK: Yellow?\n\nAudience: [Inaudible]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-357", "text": "TMK: Lemme see.. [pause] Ahh. Ok so if we treat this module as the bottom of a hierarchy then we want to treat it like a line. So what do you do with lines [08:02:30] in I Ching land? You p.. stack six of them on top of each other. So I\u2019m gonna symbolise this thing with an \u201cS\u201d. Ok. So here\u2019s what I did. I made.. I took one of them. And another one. And another one. [sounds of drawing on a surface] and another one. And I said \u201cdid I do good?\u201d. [08:03:00] [audience laughs] And it said \u201cSort of. But a hexagram is more than six lines isn\u2019t it?\u201d And I said \u201cWell what more is it than six lines?\u201d It said \u201cwell it\u2019s two tri-grams\u201d. Said \u201coh.. ok\u201d. So then I went like this.. [sounds of drawing on a surface]. Do you see how I superimposed the thing over the six two-larger ones which were [08:03:30]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-358", "text": "six two-larger ones which were [08:03:30] superimposed over three? So then I said \u201cS\u2019alright?\u201d. It said \u201cYes, except you forgot one thing. A hexagram has an identity as a whole. As a hexagram\u201d. Said \u201cOk..\u201d [scribbles] \u201cGood?\u201d. It said \u201cYes. Good. Now, what are you going to DO with it?\u201d. And I\u2019ll show this to you. Uhm.. [scribble] Just so you can get.. [08:04:00] the idea. I don\u2019t know how visible this will be. This is what you get if you do that. And what it looks like is exactly what it looks like, which is a hodge-podge of crazy lines running everywhere on three levels [audience laughs] and uh.. The thing said to me.. It said \u201cthis is a map of time\u201d. And I.. went.. I made the mistake of saying to my [08:04:30] friends and acquaintances \u201cthis is a map of time!\u201d [audience laughs]. And they said, you know \u201cwe\u2019re very", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-359", "text": "laughs]. And they said, you know \u201cwe\u2019re very concerned. Apparently.. [audience giggling] you didn\u2019t get better even though you claimed you got better. And now, you know, you run around, showing this thing to people.. And notice.. It.. oh it ha.. Everything is in closure up here, and then everything attains closure down here. And then there\u2019s sub-closures. Six [08:05:00] on one level, two on another, and the final on this line. And FINALLY my friend Ralph Abraham took pitty on me and he said \u201cthe problem with this thing.. is.. That it cannot coat [??] dogma. Nobody can understand this thing.. except you. You are necessary for its interpretation\u201d. [audience laughs] And I said \u201cSo what am I.. what do I do?\u201d. And he said \u201cyou must LEARN how to change this into a more orthodox mathematical object that.. That math.. Mathematicians can then discuss with you\u201d. And I was completely stuck. And I s.. sat with it for.. two", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-360", "text": "And I s.. sat with it for.. two years. I.. cause it just seemed.. I.. I am not a mathematician. I had NO clue as to how to do that. And finally one afternoon.. Uh.. the pot was good enough, or the stars moved into position or something.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-361", "text": "[08:06:00] (end of this transcription segment)\n\nTranscribed by Nick Whiu\n\nTM: [8:06:00]...and in a single instant i saw how to carry out the mathematical reduction of this wave and i did it.\n\nAudience: [inaudible]\n\nTM: Oh, on this?\n\nAudience: Yeah, it looked that way from here.\n\nTM: Oh well if you look at it closely you'll see that because of a, are at different scales it isn't that, one side is egla-exactly like the other side. Yeah, there are dissimilarities. [8:06:30] So i finally, figured out how to, mathematize and conserve all the qualities of that wave and i put it into an ordinary cartesian object, which i doubt you can see but you don't really have to see it anyway. All this is, see what that is? It's just a one, it's an ordinary graph of some sort.\n\nAudience: [inaudible]\n\nTM: Ah?\n\nAudience: Is that the sum of...[inaudible]?\n\nTM: It's the sum of certain qualities. There was skew, [8:07:00] parallelism, angle of approach, crossover. There were about five things that i felt were important and i figured out how to mathematize them all, so that this, which is an or-ordinary cartesian graph, is in fact a topological equivalent of Maya cult diagram and... Yeah?\n\nAudience: Each one of those points is a summation of these factors?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-362", "text": "Audience: Each one of those points is a summation of these factors?\n\nTM: Yeah right, uh uh. So, then (ahh), [8:07:30] and then i started saying to people, this is a map of time. [audience laughs] And they said, is it? [Terence laughs] Well, where are we? [Terence laughs] And i said, well (ahh), hum, (ahh), we, (ahh), hum... In order to know where we are we would have to know where the endpoint is. If you have a wave you have a wavelength so, we have to find the endpoint. So then i began collecting historical data, and fitting [8:08:00] curves,\n\nto it, trying to define the endpoint. Now, remember yesterday at the close of the day or in the afternoon we got off on what appeared to some people to be, attention about novelty and science and time and whether, it was (ahh), whether it-it should be viewed as a flat plane or a fractal or something like that? Well, what the thing was telling me was, that novelty, is (ahh), something [8:08:30] which can be charted in time and that these waves were actually pictures of (ahh), of (ahh), the ebb and flow of novelty. That this wasn't charting stock prices or population rise or average temperatures, it was charting the ebb and flow of novelty through time and that\u2026 Como?\n\nAudience: Novelty is...[inaudible]?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-363", "text": "Audience: Novelty is...[inaudible]?\n\nTM: Novelty is (ahh), [8:09:00] a density of connection, as opposed you know, complexity can be quantified then you say complexity ebbs and flows. Mean if we have a device which measured complexity and we measured this point right here, as opposed to this point an inch behind my finger, i'm hoping it would tell us that an inch behind my finger is a more complex environment than this point right here. [8:09:30] So space and time, is then, seem to be a medium with a density (ahh), comp-densification of complexity embedded in it like raisins or something. Yeah?\n\nAudience: Looking at your...[inaudible]...creation in that graph. In other words, how do you establish origin and the endpoint when looking at that graph?\n\nTM: Well, until you scale it against time, you don't have to, i mean i think\u2026\n\nAudience: [inaudible]...[8:10:00]\n\nTM: Well i think what you're, i think if i understand your question right. Remember how i said that over here it was at closure? It goes like this. And that's both lines, they're running, that's both sides of the graph they're perfectly superimposed over each other. At this point they ceased to be superimposed. One goes that way and one goes that way and then you start getting this kind of stuff and then when you come down to the end [8:10:30] they fall into closure again.\n\nAudience: [inaudible]\n\nTM: Yes it's a thing of say... exactly you got it. Okay.\n\nAudience: What would be the beginning of time? Is that some...[inaudible]...Garden of Eden...[inaudible]?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-364", "text": "TM: Well (ahh), to this point we haven't discussed this thing scaled against calendrical time we just kind of look at it as a mathematical object. Then what i realized was, if these are part, if-if [8:11:00] this thing has 384 points in it, and this has, six. Then the, what the thing was telling me was, you have to map the, you have to map the way back over itself. So you take all 384 points and you cram them into this space wandering up this hill, then you go to this space and you cram all [8:11:30] 384 points in here and you create a fractal infinite regress. Do you understand? [audience laughs] Say you understand. [Terence and audience laughs] You will understand. Okay so then that was the time, that was the time map. It was saying novelty can be described by an infinite fractal regress that is contained in the I Ching. Now, the main objection that i was meeting from people who wanted to lock me up was, they were saying...[8:12:00]\n\nTranscribed by Tiago Ramos", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-365", "text": "TM: [8:12:00]...was, they were saying, now let's get this straight. You want to revise modern physics, based on a pattern which you found in an ancient Chinese book of divination is that correct? [audience laughs] And i-i could feel the force of that criticism but that's how i think, you know, where somebody from some nut piece of data then wants to build castles in the air and so (ahh) i created a metaphor [8:12:30] which is satisfying to me i hope it's satisfying to somebody else, trying to explain why we should seek a law of physics, inside the structure of (ahh) the I Ching. [drinks water] And here's the metaphor, think of sand dunes. Picture them in your mind, since this is the New Age you may even close your eyes if it helps. Picture sand dunes. Now, [8:13:00] notice, that sand dunes, look, like wind. Sand dunes look like wind, and sand dunes are made,", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-366", "text": "look like wind, and sand dunes are made, by wind. So now let's analyze the situation, let's think of wind as input and let's think of sand grains as bits inside a computer. So when the wind blows the program [8:13:30] runs and the bits rearrange themselves and they arrange themselves into a lower dimensional slice of wind. Essentially wind, which his a pressure variant phenomenon variable in time, turns into a pictorial phenomenon variant across the pictorial surface. You see how that works? Well, now...[drinks water] [8:14:00] Sand dunes created by wind, bear the impression of wind. (ahh), lines of foam and beach detritus deposited by the incoming tide, bear the form of waves. So what it was telling me was, it was telling me that, things formed in time bear the impression of the forces which created them. And i said, well then what is the equivalent of sand dunes or waves of beach detritus", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-367", "text": "of sand dunes or waves of beach detritus [8:14:30] in the real world? And it said, human beings! Genes, not grains of sand. Genes are moved by time and we as hyper dimensional objects, we human beings and other animals, we bear the impression of the forces that created us and if novelty truly does Adam flow, the way wind speed ebbs and flows over a landscape, than the creatures [8:15:00] that have arisen in time will bear the imprint of this ebb and flow and i believe that what was going on with the people who created the I Ching, was that they (ahh), were practicing some kind of yoga or some kind of psychedelic + yoga thing and they were, (ahh) stilling their micro physical functions and they were descending deep into organism, and there they [8:15:30] were seeing the ebb and flow of variables of some sort, and they watched... Who knows how long? Centuries maybe. And they said, you now,", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-368", "text": "long? Centuries maybe. And they said, you now, in the organism there is the ebb and flow of variables", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-369", "text": "and then they ask questions like, how many variables are there are there an infinite number? And they began to create notation system for these variables and finally they came to the conclusion, no, there are not an infinite number [8:16:00] there are 64 of these temporal variables. And think of them as elements, in the same way that the entire world of physical manifestation can be created out of a 104 physical elements, the entire world of temporal manifestation can be created out of 64 elements and so the way i think of reality having survived this experience, is, [8:16:30] you have hexagrams moving on many levels. Let's say you have a hexagram which rules this 10 thousand year period. For 10 thousand years this hexagram will rule and then on the next level the hexagrams are changing every, 100 years, and then on the next level every 10 minutes, and on the next level every 15 seconds. Wha-what any point in The Matrix called now, is, is the perspective [8:17:00] you have when you look through the moving film of these temporal elements moving on many many levels you see, They're, they're, they create and unique juxtaposition with each other in every single moment and that is (ahh), what the unique felt presence of-of (ahh), immediate reality is all about. Well, i, by this time... Yeah question? [8:17:30] No\u2026\n\nAudience: [inaudible]\n\nTM: What?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-370", "text": "Audience: [inaudible]\n\nTM: What?\n\nAudience: That, that position where, where they all come together...[inaudible]...I look at that, always look at this symbol, the I Ching symbol as the guiding symbol of this plane and reality...[inaudible]...So your thoughts about the exact...[inaudible]...time and body time. Is that true? [8:18:00]\n\nTranscribed by Tiago Ramos\n\nAudience : [\u2026] [8:18:00] membrane that is between time and [non-time? God-time? ..inaudible], but is that true?\n\nTerence : Yeah, pretty much. I mean... You know\u2026 Plato said \u201cTime is the moving image of eternity.\u201d\n\nAudience : It\u2019s a wavefront.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-371", "text": "Audience : It\u2019s a wavefront.\n\nTerence : It\u2019s a wavefront, and it\u2019s an interference pattern. Yes, it\u2019s a, it\u2019s a, it\u2019s a, uh a kind of hologram, uh.. and a set of resonances and interference patterns that are created when these waves moving at many levels expression, superimpose and collide with each other. [8:18:30] And through the use of small computers, we can explore various places within the wave, and we can position it against time. Because what it\u2019s saying is that novelty comes and goes. You know.. Yesterday was wonderful, tomorrow could be dogshit. Same for last year and next year. Uh.. Time undergoes changes, on many scales. [8:19:00] I mean from moment to moment if you watch your mind... You\u2019re going up, you\u2019re going down, and then on the daily scale up, down, yearly scale up, down, and then on all scales there is ebb and flow of novelty. And all these scales can be mathematically collapsed into one wave and then with a computer you can not only predict the future, which is fairly trivial because who can gainsay it, but you can also predict the past! [8:19:30] Which is very tricky. Because most people have a good deal more information about the past than they do about the future. Ya..\n\nAudience : [8:19:40] [hardly audible comments or questions] larger scale\u2026 going up.. .", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-372", "text": "Terence : That\u2019s right\u2026 That\u2019s right.. Well no, you\u2019ve got the whole concept correct except you don\u2019t need [8:20:00] an infinite number because look what happens\u2026 If you start with 384 days and you start multiplying upward by 64, remember I said the first one was 67 years, we only have to carry out about six of these till you have 72 billion years, more time than is necessary for the universe to have burst itself and reached its present state. Similarly, if you start dividing\u2026 uh, you only have to divide [8:20:30] 11 times to reach the realm of Planck\u2019s constant (6.55 X 10^-23 Earth seconds), in technical parlance known as a jiffy. Beyond the jiffy, there is no need to continue the divisions because the jiffy defines the grain of the canvas on which reality is projected. So what we have are, uh, you know, uh, a cosmology of roughly 22 levels [8:21:00] at the highest level it\u2019s 72 billion years, at the lowest level it\u2019s in the realm of Planck\u2019s constant, and we are somewhere suspended in-between, and these things are coming and going on every level. Yeah..\n\nAudience : [inaudible] .. the way that you arrived at this conclusion.. to say the least\u2026 however, it seems to me that you\u2019ll be able to use this model to see some difference in the way [inaudible] compared to the Third Reich. [8:21:30]\n\nTerence : Absolutely!\n\nAudience : [inaudible]\n\nTerence: Yes, I\u2019m hurrying us toward the more fun part of this and I think that we\u2019ll do it now. What we\u2019re gonna do now is look at the wave placed against history, with my end date, December 22\n\nnd", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-373", "text": "nd\n\n2012, although the machine will accept any end date. And the idea that you should be asking yourself is.. you know, \u201cthis clown [8:22:00] claims that this thing describes the ebb and flow of novelty, but does it in fact fit my intuition of the ebb and flow of novelty?\u201d Now, here\u2019s the good news: the next part of the lecture does not depend on anything that\u2019s been said in the first part. Uh.. you don\u2019t have to understand anything I said in the last half hour to appreciate the neatness of the next level. Lucky for us, eh? [laughs in the audience]\n\nAudience: [inaudible] [8:22:30]\n\nTerence: Mmm. That\u2019s fine i think. So now\u2026 Because you know some people aren\u2019t interested in this.. You tell them you can predict the future and they say \u201cwell, predict it!\u201d. And then you predict it correctly, and then they say \u201cGreat!\u201d. It never enters their mind to ask \u201cHow did you predict it?\u201d which is what I, out of obligation to intellectual fairness, feel that I should expose you to.\n\nNow, let\u2019s look at the wave. [8:23:00] Eum..\n\nNow, let me explain the rules of the game here. There are six billion years currently on screen. Today is over here, at 98.8 percent. This is the last 6 billion years. And, let me explain to you how you interpret the wave. And if you want to take a moment and rearrange yourselves, [8:23:30] the rest of it is gonna be fairly close focus on this thing, so don\u2019t be shy, and don\u2019t make yourself uncomfortable.\n\nAudience: [two people talking, inaudible questions about the end date]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-374", "text": "Audience: [two people talking, inaudible questions about the end date]\n\nTerence: Ah, the end date! Uh.. It.. I got it by fitting historical data to the wave and seeing.. I had certain intuitions.. I mean, for instance, I said \u201cWell, if I have a wave which describes historical novelty, by God it better do well on the Italian Renaissance, it should do well [8:24:00] on the 20\n\nth\n\ncentury, and it should do well on the Golden Age of Greece. If a wave of novelty incorrectly predicts those episodes, it\u2019s a pretty worthless theory of novelty. Once I had chosen an end date, and I chose December 22\n\nnd\n\n2012, I got a lot of support for that by realizing that the Mayan calendar chose the same end date. [8:24:27]\n\nTranscribed by Giovanni Colombo", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-375", "text": "Transcribed by Giovanni Colombo\n\nTM: [8:24:00]...it should do well on the 20th century and it should do well on the Golden Age of Greece. If a theory of novelty incorrectly predicts those episodes, it's a pretty worthless theory of novelty. Once i had chosen an end date and i chose December 22nd 2012 i got a lot of support for that by realizing that the Mayan calendar chose the same end date. Now the only thing i have in common with the ancient [8:24:30] Maya, is that we both take psychedelic mushrooms. Now is it conceivable that there is a message in the mushroom, as specific, as no matter where in space and time you are and you take these mushrooms it says, December 22nd 2012 AD. It appears so because the Mayans, their civilization rose and fell with a very interesting part of their own cale-(ahh) calendrical machinery. [8:25:00] They predicted the end of the world a thousand years after their own eclipse and they predicted the birth of their cal-they set the birth of their calendar a thousand years preceding the emergence of their civilization. Yeah.\n\nAudience: (ahh) So, now this is 2012\u2026\n\nTM: Huh, huh.\n\nAudience: Is this what the Mayans have as a completion of a large cycle or is it what they are believe it is, the completion of all their cycles?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-376", "text": "TM: It depends on, on who you talk to. (ahh) [8:25:30] The Mayan calendar is built up of nested cycles some twenty years in length, some two forty and there are 13 baktuns. Which i think a baktun is 396 years in duration and most Mayanists believe, that, that a set of 13 baktuns, is the complete calendrical set. There's a minority of Mayanists who want to argue that there are greater cycles than that. [8:26:00] (ahh) In any case baktun 13 will come to an end December 22nd 2012, so (ahh), you know, it's good enough for me. [audience laughs]\n\nAudience: Could you say just a little bit more about the, property of novelty, is, is it synonymous with complexity?\n\nTM: Well (ahh), you know, if, since this is a push-pull theory and we have novelty versus something, the opposite of novelty is habit. [8:26:30] Rupert insisted on that. I was calling it entropy and, conservatism and recidivism and he said no no. It's a war between habit and novelty. Habit means a reversion to a traditional and already established pattern. Novelty means a breaking out into a previous domain, untested domain of new connections and (ahh), and new possibilities.\n\nAudience: [8:27:00] [inaudible]\n\nTM: You mean as in...(ahh)?\n\nAudience: Something...[inaudible]...surprising you?\n\nTM: Yes. The unexpected is built into it because when you come around some of these curves there are unexpected things going on.\n\nAudience: What about the chaos order boundary, sounds like that a lot?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-377", "text": "Audience: What about the chaos order boundary, sounds like that a lot?\n\nTM: Yeah, well you can think of it that way. I haven't completely, resolved how novelty should be defined because if you know anything about Information Theory you know that they had a hell of a time getting a definition of complexity [8:27:30] together over there. They also were interested in mathematical definitions of complexity but they haven't made too much progress.\n\n[This concludes tape 6, our program continues with tape 7. Our program continues with tape 7]\n\nTM: Let me explain to you how to read the graph. Because it's the exact opposite psychologically of a, stock market graph. I think when you [8:28:00] look at a stock market most of us want it to go up, not down. In this game we want it to go down. The, nov-, the higher states of novelty occur as you approach zero. So this is the most novel point on the screen, this is the most, habit impacted moment on the screen and what you see is habit and novelty are at war with each other. (ahh) Now here's how i [8:28:30] interpret this particular screen and it is a basis for interpreting all the rest. This is a turning point, after a long period of habit, consolidation and recidivism, whatever that means at 4.7 billion years ago. (ahh) Something very novel happened along this descent. I maintain that it's actually the stabilization of the surface of the Earth itself.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-378", "text": "That what we're seeing here, [8:29:00] is the Earth changing into a stable planetary body and then (ahh), the earliest forms of life, the Proto life, appears right here and undergoes a series then of fluctuations then (ahh), there is some kind of a problem, some impediment to what would otherwise be, the rather straight shot toward novelty by this (ahh), [8:29:30] spike here. Well, evolutionary biologists say that in the early history of the Earth there was a crisis having to do with the production of oxygen as a waste gas. Life arose in a non-reducing atmosphere. The first, pollution crisis in the history of the Earth was pollution by oxygen and organisms had to develop complex membranes and mechanisms for dealing with this and that's what happened along here...[8:30:00]\n\nTranscribed by Tiago Ramos\n\nTM: [8:30:00]... and that's what happened along here. And (ahh), once that was achieved then the pace of novelty quickened and the descent continued and we, our entire civilization, in fact, you know, the last bill-million years as a matter of fact, is lost down here in this decastic fluctuation near the zero point. In other words, relative to these places in the wave, we're so near the maximum of novelty [8:30:30] that it's practically punching in through the walls and in fact human civilization (ahh) correctly mirrors that. I mean, for you would expect to find a civilization on this graph, it's somewhere down in here. Well now if everything is working right...\n\nAudience: [inaudible]...98.8%.\n\nTM: 90 let's, yeah, 98.8% if the...\n\nAudience: The target date of today.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-379", "text": "Audience: The target date of today.\n\nTM: The target date of today. Now what I'm going to do if there's a zoom function here [8:31:00] and we're gonna start flying towards the present and every time a screen changes we're gonna see half as much time on the screen. We have six billion years up, we'll go to three, then one and a half, then .7 time and so forth. This seems to be an excellent computer with a fast chip so...\n\nAudience: [inaudible]...the right hand on the screen.\n\nTM: Yeah, yeah, yeah, and [8:31:30] we're gonna get greater and greater detail and, your attitude towards this should be, i'm asserting that this is true, you have a notion of where the high points in the evolutionary human history have occurred. You should be asking yourself whether this fits your intuition. Now obviously (ahh) it's pretty vague stuff when we're looking at 6 billion years but on the other hand, we can take this thing down [8:32:00] to three days if necessary and (ahh) we know where the great changes have come in the last thousand years it's not that ambiguous. So let's (ahh) test the zoom function...[silence]...zoom it asks me, yes i reply. Seek minimum it asks me, no i reply. Approach factor it asks me, and i'm going to tell it two, in order to have the screen each time it would accept any number but two [8:32:30] seems rational for demonstration purposes.\n\nAudience: [inaudible]\n\nTM: No it's gonna slice the time. It's gonna slice it each time and rescale.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-380", "text": "Audience: It's coming up with minute, hour and day...[inaudible]...so is the origin of time... [inaudible]...like the origin of the universe?\n\nTM: You would presume so.\n\nAudience: So the Big Bang would kind of like be in the middle of the novelty...[inaudible].\n\nTM: The Big Bang would be, no, the Big Bang would be very high because there's no life, [8:33:00] there's no atomic system, there's no molecules it's a very low complexity situation at the birth of the universe.\n\nAudience: It's not the...[inaudible].\n\nTM: Yeah, no, yes that's right, the Big Bang it's somewhere up here, up here (ahh). Okay now, before i do this let me locate escape, okay. This is such a pleasure to do it with fast machines. Okay there's three billion, see how detail [8:33:30] is coming up as time is lost? And, and if anybody wants me to stop it at any point i will (ahh).\n\nAudience: [inaudible]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-381", "text": "Audience: [inaudible]\n\nTM: Here's 750 million years. This is virtually the entire history of life on Earth and in fact, of higher life. I'm sorry, you know, organisms, not, not multicellular life. This is the history of multicellular life and what you see is there was a steep descent [8:34:00] into novelty, until about 300 million years ago and then there are a series of oscillations close to zero until (ahh) about 65 million years ago and then there's a sudden plunge deeper into novelty immediately preceding the concrescence which occurs on the, at dawn Greenwich Mean Time December 22nd 2012. One thing about this theory, it's not vague [8:34:30] (ahh), and it, notice that it doesn't edge on\n\npredictions either. It fills every screen is full of predictions.\n\nAudience: [inaudible]\n\nTM: Two.\n\nAudience: Approach factor?\n\nTM: Approach factor, yah. Okay we got 750 million years on the screen, 375 million years on the screen. Now i wanna talk about this for a minute. Now this is a screen full of dramatic [8:35:00] predictions, these are tremendously punctuated and temporally define plunges into novelty and (ahh) we don't have tremendous paleontological records for what's going on 275 million years ago but from studying these low points and talking to geochronologists about them, i've decided that these are (ahh) planetesimals impacts on the earth. [8:35:30] Now you know that the last one was 65 million years ago, that's this one, right there but there were others, there was one (ahh), this one, 220 million years ago.\n\nAudience: [inaudible]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-382", "text": "Audience: [inaudible]\n\nTM: Oh, asteroid strikes on the Earth.\n\nAudience: [inaudible]\n\nTM: Oh well, there was a little tiny one in Arizona. Those happened all the time in Cosmic terms, every hundred thousand years or so. [8:36:00]\n\nTranscribed by Tiago Ramos\n\nTM: [8:36:00] But, (ahh) this thing that happened 65 million years ago was a planet shattered (ahh) and, they're rare, they're rare. Okay so, so, i'm suggesting that these are asteroid impacts which then evolution had to restart, reclaim his territory and then, there is something else happening. They may not all be asteroid impacts. They could be (ahh), you know, enormous episodes of volcanism on the Earth such as [8:36:30] the Deccan traps in India or something like that. Now let's start the thing again.\n\nAudience: And now what timeline...[inaudible].\n\nTM: What we're looking at now? 375. [silence] Seek minimum, no. Approach factor, two, go for it. [silence] That's 187 million years, there's the impact 65 million years ago. Now let's look at this. This is the last [8:37:00] 93 million years.\n\nAudience: [inaudible]\n\nTM: Ah yes, it looks like the thing we started out with, somebody's paying attention! [audience laughs] Right on, yes yes.\n\nAudience: [inaudible]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-383", "text": "Audience: [inaudible]\n\nTM: See what happens is a fractal is a nested dataset and every time you pass through a whole number, the pattern repeats. This sets up a very interesting, (ahh), (ahh), set of circumstances inside [8:37:30] the way which is that we can talk about temporal resonance. We can talk about how the Third Reich, is a resonance of ancient Egypt. We can talk about Saddam Hussein as a resonance of Muhammad because when we look at the way these things are lined up historically we see that, directly above Saddam Hussein and in a relationship of parallelism is the career of the prophet [8:38:00] and so what is being suggested here is that every day, every moment, is in fact an interference pattern created by other times and places. This is not, this is a fairly challenging and peculiar idea not something the linear western mind would have ever come up with. So for instance, if you should find yourself having lunch in a place called Hadrian's hamburger stand, this has [8:38:30] something, to do, with the emperor Hadrian and his four-year military campaign in Scotland. He is a direct causal influence on your being at Hadrian's hamburger stand for lunch. I like to say, (ahh) Rome falls 9 times an hour [audience laughs] and you have to be, perceptive. You have to be paying attention to the ebb and flow of your own inner, thoughts but, if you are you feel the fall of Rome, [8:39:00] you also feel the Age of Exploration, of the birth of Buddha (ahh) the, the fall of Carthage. It all happens nine times an hour. It also happens twice a day and once a year, yeah.\n\nAudience: [inaudible]\n\nTM: (ahh) Sometimes, yeah it is very similar.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-384", "text": "TM: (ahh) Sometimes, yeah it is very similar.\n\nAudience: [inaudible]\n\nTM: That's right.\n\nAudience: [inaudible] [8:39:30]\n\nTM: Yeah there's, (ahh) we never tried to do it, scientifically, you know where you would actually keep track, but (ahh) major astrological conjunctions are often reflected in major ingressions into novelty.\n\nAudience: Terence, interestingly as you or anyone else that's (ahh) aware of this, ever tried to convolve this with, with say Einstein field equations?\n\nTM: No because i'm not smart enough to do that.\n\nAudience: I think that would be a fascinating [8:40:00] thing to do because what you do is input, input using as one variable this entire system.\n\nTM: That's right.\n\nAudience: And what it would produce would be fascinating.\n\nTM: I think God has chosen you for this work. [audience laughs]\n\nAudience: This makes me ask, what are the historical antecedents of Reagan and Bush? [audience laughs]\n\nTM: Ohh, ohh, Ronald Reagan was, (ahh), (ahh), his historical antecedents were the last six Roman emperors [8:40:30] before the fall of Rome in 475 and Bush's antecedents is (ahh), (uhm)...\n\nAudience: [inaudible]...clowns...[audience laughs]\n\nTM: No i think, i think, i think Bush gets to be (ahh) Justinian.\n\nAudience: Oh!", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-385", "text": "Audience: Oh!\n\nTM: You remember somebody said history always occurs twice, first as tragedy then as farce? [audience laughs] That person, who had a good intuitive (ahh)... [8:41:00] So now let's go into this a little more. (ahh) How much time do we have? Oh 93 million years, okay. [audience laughs] So, here's the a, here's the asteroid impact and, and, dead on! I mean, 65 million years it's right there, to the degree that we can date these two events. It's a win it's a bull's eye, and, you know it was a huge setback for organic life as i said this morning, nothing larger than a chicken [8:41:30] survived it. (ahh) The mammals begin their radiation and, and (ahh), this are, you know, just different vicissitudes. I'm not sure what to make of this spike here but i haven't really spend a lot of time on that period from 40 to 36 million years ago. Somebody else may have a notion as to what this represents.\n\nAudience: [inaudible]...the recovery though is fairly rapid.\n\nTM: Which it was. (ahh) Evolutionary biologists say, you know, that forms quickly...[8:42:00]\n\nTranscribed by Tiago Ramos\n\nTM: [8:42:00]...reoccupied all the niches and remember if this hadn't happened, we wouldn't be the planetary rulers that we are. We'd still be little furry creatures trying to steal eggs out of the nest of the saurian masters who ruled the planet.\n\nAudience: Why is this?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-386", "text": "Audience: Why is this?\n\nTM: Why? Because all the dinosaurs were killed in this impact and that allowed these little egg stealing rodent-like furry creatures to undergo an [8:42:30] explosive evolutionary radiation leading directly to our own vast superiority over the rest of nature. Oh, yeah, yeah, no, yeah?\n\nAudience: [inaudible]\n\nTM: Oh, that's a whole different scale you see, the dinosaurs died off 65 million years ago. The ice age is a phenomenon of the last 5 million years, and we'll see the ice ages but not there, right now those ice ages [8:43:00] are down in here, somewhere lost in the detail. Let's to go back to our zoom.\n\nAudience: We'll get there, won't we?\n\nTM: Oh yeah, we'll get there.\n\nAudience: I'm waiting to be at my writing spot.\n\nTM: Don't worry! No, we don't wanna seek the minimum, the approach factor should be two. [silence] Ok, 93 million years on the screen, 46 million years on the screen, [8:43:30] 23 million, 11 million, 5 million, 5 million years on the screen, now here your ice ages. Here they are you see, (ahh) when the ice is in place, species are bottled up and gene transfer is impeded, [8:44:00] this constitutes a non-novel situation. Then when the ice melts, these gene pools re-encounter each other and you get proliferation of form. We're getting excellent agreement here, this is the melting of the last glacier, (ahh) maybe. I'm not...\n\nAudience: [inaudible]...the last glacier was about 13 thousand years ago?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-387", "text": "Audience: [inaudible]...the last glacier was about 13 thousand years ago?\n\nTM: Yeah i think it's actually over here still lost in detail. But these are, (ahh) you know how evolution is described as punctuated, how it [8:44:30] isn't that evolution proceeds smoothly but that will be a climax stasis and then suddenly many new species well, these are the punctuated evolution. This is actually a picture of punctuated evolution and the high numbers of species\n\nare down in this troughs and the low numbers of species are on this ascents close to the changeover, point. So, (ahh) again the paleontological data isn't that clear but at this [8:45:00] scale of resolution we're getting good agreement between data and theory.\n\nAudience: I think different...[inaudible]...(ahh) a guy called...[inaudible]...do you know?...[inaudible]\n\nTM: Well, it, it's, the, they are topologically equivalent but not numerically equivalent.\n\nAudience: [inaudible]\n\nTM: Yeah.\n\nAudience: [inaudible] [8:45:30]\n\nTM: That's right. It's a damped oscillation. Is really what we're seeing.\n\nAudience: [inaudible]...because that's one of things...[inaudible]\n\nTM: Yeah, well i'm hope you'll be on it by Monday afternoon (ahh). [audience laughs] Ok, let me restart the zoom. No, i'm restarting the zoom, zoom. Yes?\n\nAudience: I have a question.\n\nTM: Ok.\n\nAudience: About magnetic poles...\n\nTM: Yes, these [8:46:00] could very well be magnetic reversals.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-388", "text": "TM: Yes, these [8:46:00] could very well be magnetic reversals.\n\nAudience: [inaudible]\n\nTM: Yeah, they, they very well could be magnetic reversals and...\n\nAudience: So we're looking at ice ages.\n\nTM: I, well what we're looking at is i'm suggesting they're ice ages, it was suggested that they're geomagnetic reversals. Geomagnetic reversals and ice ages may even have links to each other.\n\nAudience: [inaudible]\n\nTM: (ahh) Well we see that over here (ahh) a steep [8:46:30] descent into novelty going deeper than we've ever gone before and that would probably indicate that an animal or an organ as appeared of a density of complexity greater than anything which preceded it. So i would say yes.\n\nAudience: What, how, how you know that?\n\nTM: Well, let me start the zoom and we'll get over in here on a big scale and then you can see. Ok, we're gonna go from 5 million, [8:48:00] down to 2 million. Now let's discuss this. Because this is the domain in which we evolved. Our story is on screen at this point (ahh), it's said that (ahh), the... A hundred thousand years ago at the Klasies Cave River mouth in South Africa", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-389", "text": "there were Homosapiens indistinguishable from the people sitting in this room. [8:47:30] The oldest Homosapien skeletons are from there. That clear over here (ahh), this is the fungi deradiation meaning the proliferation of these crymate forms (ahh), and, and that's about (ahh), 900, a million years ago. (ahh) This, this is the whole period in which the primates were, breaking away from the rest of Nature and, and this is, i think probably... [8:48:00]\n\nTranscribed by Tiago Ramos\n\nTM: [8:48:00]...where the mushrooms begin to come into the picture and see how the whole system is propelled into lower levels of novelty than anything which preceded it.\n\nAudience: Lower...[inaudible]\n\nTM: Higher levels is novelty, when the wave moves down novelty is increasing. Zoom, yes. Seek minimum, no.\n\nAudience: [inaudible]\n\nTM: That's one way of saying it [8:48:30] or increase density of connection or (ahh), it means something happening which is never happened before which allows (ahh), novelty to build upon itself. We talked about this a little bit yesterday. About how the early Universe was very simple and then came ordinary chemistry and then (ahh), organic chemistry and then life and then complex life and then higher [8:49:00] animals and then primitive human beings and then language and culture and then computers and particle accelerators and all of this representing steeper and steeper descents into novelty. Headed toward a confrontation with novelty at infinite density, not millennia or ballenia in the future but, twenty years from now.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-390", "text": "Audience: It's known that something being created...[inaudible]...being [8:49:30] stored...[inaudible]...entire system.\n\nTM: Conserved is the word i use but yes, that's right.\n\nAudience: [inaudible]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-391", "text": "TM: That's right. Well, when we get to the present you'll be able to see, you know, the past few months, the next few months, the next few years. We approach it this way cuz i wanna convince you that there's something [8:50:00] sort of woo woo about this thing. It does seem to have an uncanny predictive ability. Now, the most commonly met-abjection to this, and it may be forming in your mind is, that this guy just doesn't understand patterns and that every pattern can be used to describe a different pattern. But i resist this because notice that, this whole set of correlations is dependent upon this zero [8:50:30] date which we inputted. If we shift the zero date, then all the other, predictions would be thrown off. Well now naturally if we shift the zero date 50 years, it's not gonna have a hell of an effect on an event 175 million years ago, but if we move the date 50 years and we look at 1492, you", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-392", "text": "date 50 years and we look at 1492, you know, it's all screwed up. You have to be right on the money [8:51:00] when you get into the historical data field because the historical data field can vary over a 24-hour period. I mean, John F. Kennedy dead, John F. Kennedy alive, the difference is 10 minutes. So, it can be very, (ahh) it can be very, highly, (ahh) quantified specific yeah, (ahh) okay. (ahh) Enter. That's 2 million, roughly 3 million years on the screen, 1.5 [8:51:30] million years on the screen, 700 thousand. Let's look at this for a minute. This is the last million years and the last hundred thousand years are right there. This is the emergence of modern human type and it sets off the last cascade at least at this scale. So, all of this is evolutionary advance and [8:52:00] climatological flux and so forth and then from the time the modern human type", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-393", "text": "forth and then from the time the modern human type emerges, it's a straight shot, down in there. [silence] Now, obviously we all know more about time as we get closer to the present. This is 366 thousand years to a 100 thousand years up there. [8:52:30] There's the last 200 thousand years, there's the last 100 thousand years. [silence] This is, this is the environment in which we were, shaped. These are (ahh), very pro-, these are climatological fluctuations here but the last, this is the last glaciation...[sex moaning sounds from a computer in the audience]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-394", "text": "Audience: Oh, forgot, shut down the computer! [8:53:00] [audience laughs]\n\nTM: Is it dying or is it having a good time?! [audience laughs]\n\nAudience: [inaudible]...I forgot it does that! Anyway...\n\nTM: What are you doing this evening? [audience laughs]\n\nAudience: [inaudible]...Harry met Sally remember that orgasm in the restaurant?\n\nTM: Remember the orgasm in the restaurant when Harry met Sally? [8:53:30] Vaguely\u2026 [audience laughs] (ahh) Ok, the last 91 thousand years the glaciers melt, here. The glacier melt begins around 19 thousand years ago and as you see is just a straight fall from there to the moon flight into, H. Ross Perot [audience laughs] and to all the rest of it. And these are again episodes probably of glaciation or flux in the incidence... [8:54:00]\n\nTranscribed by Tiago Ramos\n\nTM: [8:54:00]...of incoming cosmic radiation, is hard to say what it is.\n\nAudience: [inaudible]...the last 3 or 4 days...[inaudible]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-395", "text": "TM: Oh yeah, we can go down. We can take it down to very small. The, (ahh) i mean, understand that the (ahh), the program does many wonderful things which we're not doing. I'm just doing a simple demo but obviously all this stuff has got to be about something. (ahh) [audience laughs] [8:54:30] Now we're getting into the area where people have real data, that's 45 thousand years, 22 thousand years on the screen. Let's look at this for a minute. This is worth talking about. Now we, now the pressure begins to come on. It's all very well to predict the interglacials that may or may not have occurred, the predicting assassinations of dynastic families is a little trickier. Here's the glacial melt, [8:55:00] begins and species, this is the descent, this is where the mushroom paradise, existed in its fullest expression from about (ahh) 17 thousand years ago to about 10 thousand years ago.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-396", "text": "thousand years ago to about 10 thousand years ago. Well now what is this sudden interruption of the descent into novelty here? I maintain based on the archaeological record that is what is called the Tanged Points techno-complex. Do you all know what that is? [8:55:30] It's (ahh), does anybody know what it is? Tanged Points techno-complex means that (ahh), before this, before this point (ahh), when an arrowhead is found, you find one. It means it was lost by somebody who was hunting. Around 10 thousand BC you begin to find large numbers of arrowheads all in one place without (ahh) chipping, fragments. [8:56:00] This was not an arrowhead factory, this was the site of a battle between human populations. War, is invented here because agriculture, is invented here. You're looking at the end of the partnership paradise. The era of orgy gives way to the era of anxious monogamy, warfare, agriculture (ahh)", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-397", "text": "anxious monogamy, warfare, agriculture (ahh) you know, egohood, is born. Now somebody asked about, [8:56:30] who who, asked about \u00c7atal H\u00f6y\u00fck? Somebody... \u00c7atal H\u00f6y\u00fck, bottom of this stab here. The fire that burned through \u00c7atal level 5A occurred in 65 hundred BC. We know this from charcoal dating. It's right there, it's on the money. See, somehow this, the, this whole thing Tanged Point techno-complexe bummer was overcome and there was a steep descent, into novelty [8:57:00] and (ahh) \u00c7atal H\u00f6y\u00fck was the product of that. But then it was destroyed and there was a rebound into chuckle avidness for a while and then write down here in the bottom of this thing, is where the Great Pyramid is sitting. You know, the Great Pyramid was finished in September of 2970 BC. Why this should be so controversial?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-398", "text": "I do not understand because there are grains of charcoal [8:57:30] between the unmoved stones. That charcoal is not been anywhere since the day that stone was set in place and its 2790 BC. These people, who want to push it back and say it's 10 thousand years old, well the obligation to prove is on them because the carbon radiological data argues. You see, there's some tendency in the New Age, which i don't understand very well, that wants to make everything older, than it is. [8:58:00] You know, the pyramids are 50 thousand years old, Atlantis rose and fell a 100 thousand years... The miracle, is how new, everything is. The pyramids were built day before yesterday. Charlemagne was King of France early this morning. It's all, very, very, recent. I mean the emergence of mind out of non-mind is an event, practically (ahh), on top of us. Now let's start it up and we'll get really down [8:58:30] to the\u2026\n\nAudience: Can you hear me?\n\nTM: Huh, huh.\n\nAudience: Is the progression of time changing...[inaudible]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-399", "text": "Audience: Is the progression of time changing...[inaudible]\n\nTM: Well, yes in a sense because you see what happens is when you, it's a built-in mathematical property of this wave that when you get to the end of a big wave, there's, when you get to the end on any scale there's a sudden drop, to the next scale and then it goes along to the end [8:59:00] and then there's a sudden drop. So if what we're saying is that a universe is made like, a universe that actually have this structure that i outlined for you, of 26 levels, where each level was 1/64 smaller than the level which preceded it, a universe built on that kind of architectonics would only be half way through its, life, an hour and 35 minutes before the end. [8:59:30] Do you see how that would work? But in the last hour and 35 minutes it's going to go through as much development as it went through in the previous 72 billion years. So yes, time is accelerating, accelerating into, you know, we've gone from, barely moving to approaching a staggering speed and i maintain, you know, that in 2012, the last, 6 days preceding the approach to concrescence...[9:00:00]\n\nTranscribed by Tiago Ramos", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-400", "text": "Transcribed by Tiago Ramos\n\nTM: [9:00:00]...will be the jackpot. I mean the laws of physics will break down, everything will be in a state of visible motile transformation. This isn't happening in the human world, it isn't happening in our minds. It's a crisis in the strut- the structure of physical law itself and that's why, people, that's why, this theory will be hard to disprove or prove until so close to the end date [9:00:30] that you'll barely have time to make a telephone call to say whether it's true or not before if it is true your telephone call becomes totally irrelevant you know.\n\nAudience: [inaudible]...space time itself are being contorted, twisted and...[inaudible]\n\nTM: Yeah, that's right.\n\nAudience: [inaudible]...to make that particular note.\n\nTM: No, that's right. And in fact seems unlikely to you, let's always, let's never forget what the Orthodox guys are peddling. [audience laughs] They're peddling the Big Bang Theory [9:01:00] which says the universe sprang from nothing in a single instant. I would prefer what i called the big surprise cosmology because it seems to me if you have to have a singularity, the, the least likely place to find the singularity would be in a featureless high vacuum. If you want to find a singularity look in a corner of the universe where there are planets, stars, elements, organisms, alphabets, civilizations, [9:01:30] mines, in other words look in a complex domain if you want to find a singularity. That's where you might have some chance of finding it but finding it in a unflood nothingness is a strange place to look even.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-401", "text": "Audience: One of the arguments, maybe being proposed by those on the...[inaudible]...that in fact is a very complex universe that then push through a membrane into the singularity which then creates another entire\u2026\n\nTM: Well, one possibility [9:02:00] is that it's a wrap around that we're just not, we're not whistling dixie when we talk about the archaic revival. We're actually, what history is, is a finger reaching for the reset button and when you finally touch if you find yourself at the moment of the Big Bang. You know, you've actually sent it screaming back to the first moment.\n\nAudience: [inaudible]...exercise in, in holographics...[inaudible]...that final experience is a very pertinent important holographic description [9:02:30] (ahh) the whole, the whole\u2026\n\nTM: That's right and every cycle is a holographic description of the cycles that preceded it.\n\nAudience: We've just seen.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-402", "text": "TM: Right. So in 1945 when the bomb flickers into existence over Hiroshima, this is the resonance of the Big Bang. It's being caused by the Big Bang and, the entire life of the universe, is then [9:03:00] somehow reenacted in the remaining 67 years. In the same way the, remember there was a 4306 years cycle. We are reenacting that cycle in, in the present 67 year cycle. We have reached A.D 700 right now, i mean if you wonder why things are so benighted, it's cuz we're in the heart of the Dark Ages. [audience laughs] You wonder why you can't understand the nature of the collapse [9:03:30] of the state vector? Well it's because you have an AD 700 intellectual machine looking at it. My God, the Calculus hasn't been invented, Algebra hasn't been invented, the New World hasn't been discovered. These things will all happen ahead of us. (ahh) Right now we are in the heart of the Dark Ages by the late nineties will be closing distance with the Renaissance. Clearly we have to put up with a bunch of Christ fundamentalism, epidemic diseases [9:04:00] and general not headedness until we get to that point, but then after the turn of the century we can expect the equivalent of (ahh), (ahh), the (ahh), Renaissance, the Industrial Reformation, (ahh) the rise of Napoleon, the Civil War, Adolph Hitler. It will just be coming quick, quick, quick, quick and finally you know, you just, it just, pulls you in and everything happens at once. One way [9:04:30] of thinking of this is that the entire rest of the future history of the universe is being compressed into the next 20 years.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-403", "text": "Audience: [inaudible]\n\nTM: Yeah.\n\nAudience: [inaudible]\n\nTM: But in other words the heat death of the universe is 20 years away essentially is what is being suggested. Because time is beginning to accelerate at such a rate that this compression factor is enormous. Okay (ahh), (ahh), let me see, what have we got. We got 22 thousand [9:5:00] years on the screen and we talked about it, so let me shift here. Oh no! Zoom, yes. Set minimum, no.\n\nAudience: What gives us to be able to, sense this acceleration of time?\n\nTM: (ahh) Yes, i-i think you know, Jeremy Rifkin wrote a book (ahh) anybody read it, what was it called? Nobody read it. [audience laughs] It was called, anyway the premise of the book was that time is accelerating but he thought of it as social time, [9:05:30] cultural time. I don't. I think it's embedded in the fabric of space-time itself. Yes i think in a few, you see, you can only react to crises that you understand. So if i tell you the ozone hole is disappearing, you're alarmed. If i tell you an asteroid is going to strike the Earth, you're alarmed. But if i tell you that the Earth is about to collide with a hyperdimensional knot in the nexus of space-time...[audience laughs] [9:06.00]\n\nTranscribed by Tiago Ramos\n\n[Audience laughs]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-404", "text": "Transcribed by Tiago Ramos\n\n[Audience laughs]\n\nTM: [9:06:00] (ahh) You know. But that\u2019s what\u2019s happening. Ahead of us is an enormous speedbump. We are colliding.. We\u2019re about to collide with something that we can barely cognize. So, it\u2019s hard to know what to think about it. Yeah?\n\nAudience: Uh, this may be a little lala, and a bit simplistic but you said in words uhh, you know we all have experienced this sort of sudden shift in time, just the experience in one lifetime (uhh). You know, like a two or three year old, (uhh) the moment that we experience it seems to last along a period of time. I mean, my god, some of it lasted (inaudible), well we don\u2019t have that sort of. Well, that\u2019s what happens over a course of a lifetime. What happens when consciousness.. consciousness shifts out to infinity, what happens to the moment then, does it become vanishingly small or, in terms of the frequency..\n\nTM: It stops! It stops! Yeah, well, see.\n\nAudience: Or, the whole process of speeding up, that it takes forever.\n\nTM: [9:07:00] Yes, it\u2019s possible that dying takes forever.\n\nAudience: Right.\n\nTM: You see.\n\nAudience: [inaudible]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-405", "text": "Audience: Right.\n\nTM: You see.\n\nAudience: [inaudible]\n\nTM: And, and, and, so you know. You start to die and then you die and die and then realize you\u2019re going to die forever, and never approach it. Because the, the seconds become stretched to millions of years. It\u2019s something, it\u2019s something like that. It\u2019s about, and I think the psychedelics are about the fabric of time. [9:07:30] When you strip away the hallucinations and the personal reference, and the crazyness. The barebones of it are, it\u2019s about time, it illuminates what time is. Yeah?\n\nAudience: [inaudible]... when time is.. [inaudible].. towards and end-point. [9:08:00]. [inaudible].\n\nTM: Yeah, I mean, part of the problem with proceeding what\u2019s going on is that we\u2019re mayflies, something. I mean, we live so briefly, that to us it looks like the world is standing still. But in fact, staggering amounts of strange are going on. I mean (uhh) [9:08:30], the automobile is a hundred years old for crying out loud, we can\u2019t conceive of a reality without the automobile. So, uhh, and just in my lifetime, you know, I\u2019ve seen immense change. So, and this is going to accelerate eventually to the point where I believe they\u2019ll hold conferences on the acceleration of time and, people will, boards will be appointed to try and figure out if anything can be done about it.\n\nAudience: [laughs]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-406", "text": "Audience: [laughs]\n\nAudience: I know you have a distante for [9:09:00], quantum physics, but there was a conference apparently last spring in Spain. Actually, it was a conference of astrophysics, I believe. Because I heard some reports on it, their serious topic of discussion was, was trying to attempt to answer the question does time exist. I mean, this was being serious, on the agenda, at some astrophysics conference.\n\nTM: Yeah, time is the great, misunderstood, or ununderstood quantity in our lives, for sure. [9:09:30]\n\nAudience: Terence,\n\nTM: Yep\n\nAudience: [inaudible]\n\nTM: Right\n\nAudience: [inaudible]\n\nTM: I don\u2019t necessarily reject it, I just think they shouldn\u2019t sneer at me. When their theory is so kakamany. I mean, in other words, I haven\u2019t proposed anything weirder than the big-bang. Saying that a universe can condense itself faster and faster [9:10:00] down into a supernovel object, sounds to me like a considerably more conservative statement than to say that a universe can spring from nothing, for no reason, in any single instant. They cornered the market on unlikely approach to cosmology.\n\nAudience: [inaudible] alternative to their stuff.\n\nTM: To their theory? No, but I\u2019m gonna write one.\n\nAudience: There is actually serious debate on the whole topic. There was a book recently published [9:10:30], in the last year. Called \u2018Did the big bang happen?\u2019 which was written by another cosmologist,", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-407", "text": "TM: Well, the big bang looked like it was a real trouble as recent as six months ago but the new data from this, is is ogos three or, one of these satellites. They finally actually found, uhh, irregularities in the microwave background, and until they found some irregularity. Because they couldn\u2019t figure out how you get from the supersmooth initial conditions [9:11:00], to the clumpy present situation. Now, this new data appears to have pulled their chestnuts out of the fire. But I think the big bang may be in need of serious review. I mean, you have the inflationary, the super inflationary cosmology is an attempt to fix some of those problems, but it gets you know.. There are problems yeah.\n\nAudience: [inaudible] [9:11:30]\n\nTM: That\u2019s right.\n\nAudience: [inaudible].. are also.. [inaudible]\n\nTM: What does he say exactly?\n\nAudience: Uh, I can\u2019t remember the exact book but he.. [inaudible].. speeded up.. [inaudible]\n\nTM: Yeah, that\u2019s absolutely right, if we get a little deeper into this we can actually discuss..[9:12:00]\n\nTranscribed by Dirk", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-408", "text": "TM: [9:12:00]...discuss maybe why he would have said such a thing because i think we can illuminate it. Here let's (ahh), do a little more. We've got 22 thousand years on the screen, 11 thousand years on the screen, 5 thousand and some. This is in a way my favorite screen because this book i want to write i'm going to call, History's Fractal Mountain and there it is folks. [9:12:30] History's Fractal Mountain (ahh), \u00c7atal H\u00f6y\u00fck is over here in the bottom of this. Along this descending gradient here, like pearls on a string, you get the great ancient civilizations, Ur, Chaldea, Babylon, and Egypt. And, this actually, the graph actually confirms the intuition of the theosophical mentality [9:13:00] that Egypt did achieve, some level of advance that was not surpassed, until late Roman times. That there was a-a tremendous breakthrough on the part of these civilizations. This, negative habitual or recidivist upward curve is", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-409", "text": "This, negative habitual or recidivist upward curve is studded with a whole bunch of a, of war-like [9:13:30] male dominator civilizations. The Hittites, the Mitanni, the Assyrians and up here at the top, Mycenaean Pirates overwhelmed the last outpost of the Goddess Culture on Minoan creed. This is Homer, right there. Homer sings his song and it's that, that to me fits because i had a professor who once said to me, you want to know where it went wrong? I'll tell you where it went wrong. When these Greeks pulled their boats [9:14:00] up on the shore and stopped being fisherman and started talking philosophy the shit hit the fan [audience laughs] and that's precisely what happened. There it is. You see the steep, steep descent into novelty and then after the fall of Rome, oscillation around the mean, where it's sort of up it's sort of down but there's no real progress until the Industrial", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-410", "text": "of down but there's no real progress until the Industrial Reformation. I mean in the Industrial Revolution of the 17th forties. [9:14:30] Let's\u2026", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-411", "text": "Audience: [inaudible]...makes sense because any, any-any...[inaudible]...attempted, (ahh), descend into novelty ascend into novelty...[inaudible]...by the emerging church at the time.\n\nTM: That's right. Of course this isn't Eurocentric, it's global.\n\nAudience: [inaudible]\n\nTM: Oh you mean, where is the birth of Christ? Roughly, i-is right here. It's this, it's (ahh), there's a little kind of a choke and then a very steep fall right afterwards. That's the birth of Christianity [9:15:00] of Roman, of the Roman Empire vs The Republic and so forth.\n\nAudience: [inaudible]\n\nTM: Yeah.\n\nAudience: [inaudible]\n\nTM: Yeah, sort of.\n\nAudience: [inaudible]\n\nTM: Yeah, right about there. Let's see, we may get it on the next pass.\n\nAudience: [inaudible]\n\nTM: Well it wasn't. [9:15:30] At first it was (ahh), physical. It was that, chemis-it was that atomic physics gave way to chemistry which gave way to molecular biology, which gave way to life. It keeps moving, it keeps being active at the front of the wave but it leaves a residuum behind it of this previously created structures. Right now the wave is clearly lodged in all-in our species while everything else [9:16:00] is, is, under the Aegis of Darwinian mechanics.\n\nWe're apparently under the Aegis of cultural, mechanics.\n\nAudience: [inaudible]...absolutely. Depends on the intensity of the prominent future. You know, if a meteor came in, in the middle of the...[inaudible]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-412", "text": "TM: Yeah, that's right.\n\nAudience: It's not really...[inaudible]...or dictate by human law. It just so happens...[inaudible]\n\nTM: Wow\u2026\n\nAudience: [inaudible]\n\nTM: How so? [9:16:30]\n\nAudience: [inaudible]\n\nTM: It-it keeps condensing toward, it keeps-it builds on complexity. Wherever there is complexity, you will get more, complexity. It doesn't build on simplicity. It-it builds on the last most complex achievement see? [9:17:00] So intelligence rest on animal organization which rests on, cellular biology which rests on molecular biology which rests on physio\u2026\n\nAudience: [inaudible]\n\nTM: You got it, okay. (ahh) to\u2026\n\nAudience: [inaudible]\n\nTM: Now pretty soon we're... Now there's the descent. Here let's stop and look (ahh), the-the [9:17:30] crucifixion is right there and it's interesting you know, Christ was an absolute contemporary of Caesar Augustus, so you get this great religious reformer at the same time that you get the great reformer of Roman Politic. So two of the most important personalities who ever lived are alive at that point. That strangely enough does not win the prize. See this deep little chip here? [9:18:00]\n\nTranscribed by Tiago Ramos", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-413", "text": "Transcribed by Tiago Ramos\n\nTM: ..See this deep little chip here? [9:18:00] If we were to blow that up and look at the bottom of that trough, there was a moment when you could have had a dinner party, when Lao-Tzu, Confucius, Mencius, Pythagoras and Ezekiel could have all gotten drunk together, uh, had they.. been able to find each other. Right back there, in the.. immediately preceding the Greek Renaissance. Now the fall of Rome is in 475 [9:18:30] right there. And you see how the time after the fall of Rome is all of a certain general character, clear up to seventeen-hundred. And then certain technologies and mathematical techniques propel to an even deeper level of novelty. Now the next screen is the one that I think that is probably where we either win or lose you.\n\nAudience: Look at the overall shape of that wave. It\u2019s clear that there\u2019s an [9:19:00] overlining principle at work here. I mean the birth and death of Christ is practically [inaudible] on that curve.\n\nTM: uh, yi-.. mmm..\n\nAudience: No, I mean there is a deep and strong move into novelty in those positions and [inaudible] and those events are relatively [inaudible]..\n\nTM: That\u2019s true.\n\nAudience: It just points out that it\u2019s not being driven by what we do [inaudible].", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-414", "text": "TM: No, it\u2019s not being driven by these great personalities. They are being driven by it. I\u2019m sure that if you could\u2019ve [9:19:30] stepped into Christ\u2019s mind while he was undergoing the passion, the main question he was asking himself was: \u201cWhat.. is going on? You know, why do I say what I do? Why do I do, what I do? I don\u2019t seem to be my own person. You know, I seem to be a puppet of some cosmic force.\u201d", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-415", "text": "Because he was a puppet of some cosmic force. You see, the transcendental object at the end of time is like [9:20:00] one of those reflecto balls that hang in discos, you know. And as it turns and spins it sends off distorted reflections of itself which ricocheted into the past. And if you are correctly situated, it\u2019ll turn you into a Christ, or a Buddha, or a Lao-Tzu. If you\u2019re not quite correctly situated, it turns you into a Madame Blavatsky, a Meister Eckh-.. in other words second stringers. [9:20:30] If it.. uh if.. if it\u2019s you know just get a little of it well then you are a person with strange insights and great personal charisma, and the people around you love you. We all are very close to this thing. Every night when you dream you come into the presence of the transcendental object of the end of time. We are all distorted reflections of the last thing. And as we get closer and closer [9:21:00] to the eschaton, the last thing, the distortion begins to leave. And you say, \u201cmy god, it\u2019s like watching a photograph from a SX-70 develop. First it\u2019s just mirk, and then you say, oh there\u2019s a person there and it\u2019s getting clearer and clearer\u201d. You know, we are actually being pulled into the attractor. The veils are being parted. The truth is becoming more and more and more immanent. [9:21:30] And in the final confrontation with it, you know it\u2019s the apotheosis. It\u2019s the apocalypse, the apotheosis, the apocatastasis. A whole bunch of Greek words beginning with \u2018a\u2019. [audience laughs]\n\nAudience: We are all [inaudible]..\n\nTM: [laughs] No.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-416", "text": "Audience: We are all [inaudible]..\n\nTM: [laughs] No.\n\nAudience: [inaudible] [audience laughs]\n\nTM: ..okay.. [audience laughs]\n\nAudience: [9:22:00] Did you address the time-span [inaudible]..?\n\nTM: Well, no it picked up the time-span that we had. See it just accepted the correction. Thank you very much. Good thinking. Now is it alright? Yes. Okay now, this is the screen upon which the theory will stand or fall. Because this is the screen that is filled with the history that we know. We\u2019re not talking fossil records or\n\n\u00c7atalh\u00f6y\u00fc\n\nk [archaeological site in Turkey, of a 7500 BC to 5700 BC Neolithic era settlement] or any of that. [9:22:30] We\u2019re talking very precise dates. It\u2019s saying that there was a very steep descent into novelty around 948 AD. What is this?\n\nAudience: What is its center again?\n\nTM: W-.. 1400 years. And this first steep descent into novelty is, uh the intellectual flower of Islam within the confines of the Umayyad and Abbasid caliphate and the invention of algebra. [9:23:00] An intellectual tool that sets the stage for modern science. Essentially *this is* the birth of modern science. And you see how steep, sudden and precipitous it was. Okay, then you go over to this next one. ..and let me try something over here since this is such a fast machine.. See I\u2019m moving the little pointer. [9:23:30] And it\u2019s telling me exactly what I\u2019m pointing at. I haven\u2019t done for you before. But this is very good for checking these things.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-417", "text": "Audience: Oh, to know exactly the dates.\n\nTM: To know exactly, yes. We\u2019re pointing at the exact date. And I wanna get it over here. To the bottom of this sucker. 1121, [9:24:00] the first crusade. The collapse of fortress Europe.\n\nTranscribed by Andrea Casanova\n\nTM: [9:24:00] 1121, The First Crusade, the collapse of Fortress Europe. This is the beginning of\n\nthe globalization of the European mind. We're dead on here. Okay now the next steep descent\n\ninto novelty is this one, obviously. Let's go over there and see what it is. [9:24:30] There it is,\n\n12-1430, oh no 1358 i'm sorry, just a minute here let me get my... Okay, do we all agree it's\n\npointing at the bottom of the thing? Yes?\n\nAudience: That's the end of the novelty, not the beginning of the novelty.\n\nTM: No, that's the densest point of the novelty. It's 1354, what happens in 1354?\n\nAudience: The Black Plague.\n\nTM: [9:25:00] That's right. One third of the population of Europe is dies in an 18-month period", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-418", "text": "beginning in the late 1354. The greatest demographic collapse that Europe has ever experienced, it's an absolute hit, dead on (ahh). Now let's (ahh), go over here to this... Now notice though that the recovery is quick, there's a steep descent into novelty and an almost immediate reversion back up to the [9:25:30] the same level of (ahh) habit exactly, business as usual. But this next one is different, it's a steep descent into novelty and then it really stays down, for a long time and explores this. So let's go over to the turning point, which is up at the top.\n\nAudience: [inaudible]... It's global.\n\nTM: It's global, but having said that you have to notice that [9:26:00] (ahh), the world is now dominated by European values and culture so, while we can chart the ebb and flow of the Han Dynasty at this point European culture is moving to the four because European culture is beginning to put its imprint on all of world history.\n\n[This concludes tape 7, our program continues with tape 8. [9:26:30] Continues with tape 8]\n\nAudience: [inaudible]\n\nTM: That's right. This is a picture of a resonance pattern, an interference pattern of many times and places. Now up here at the top of this thing, at the very top, it's, 1455. What happened in 1455, does anyone know? [9:27:00]\n\nAudience: Christopher Columbus?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-419", "text": "Audience: Christopher Columbus?\n\nTM: What? [audience laughs] Columbus was born? Thanks for playing! (ahh) [Terence and audience laughs] (ahh) In 1455 Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turks making European access to the Far East impossible, therefore the Age of Exploration, begins and (ahh), and you get Vasco de Gama and all those people. This was a tremendously shattering [9:27:30] event for European civilization to lose Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks. (ahh) Now let's go over to, (ahh) wait, back i mean, to, this place. This is another very seminal event which combined with this Constantinople loss set the stage for this descent into novelty, even though it's way up here in habit there's a little chip out as there's a, [9:28:00] a-a novel invention of some, sort that happens in 1540, (ahh)...\n\nAudience: [inaudible]\n\nTM: 1440 i'm sorry. The invention is, the invention of printing in months in 1440 (ahh), that did it friends (ahh), as far as most people are concerned.\n\nAudience: [inaudible]\n\nTM: Enlarge at one set now? Good idea.\n\nAudience: [inaudible]\n\nTM: Yeah, let's do one Zoom (ahh)... [9:28:30] I think i have to move it over clear all the way before we do that zoom or it'll be some kind of a screw-up.\n\nAudience: [inaudible]...focus on your right.\n\nTM: Right, let me (ahh)...\n\nAudience: [inaudible]\n\nTM: Well, i'm glad you like it because it's my best trick. [audience laughs]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-420", "text": "Audience: Not bad. [inaudible]\n\nTM: I do, i do.\n\nAudience: Oh you do?\n\nTM: It's just we haven't written a manual yet. [9:29:00]\n\nAudience: [inaudible]\n\nTM: Ooh, hard to say. [audience laughs] Okay, now it's pointing at today. Now let's do our zoom. Approach factor, 2, strange that it didn't ask for the seek minimum, isn't it?\n\nAudience: [inaudible]\n\nTM: [9:29:30] Okay. Now we're seeing the same thing again, we're just seeing in higher detail (ahh), but what i'll, i'll fudge by telling you that up here 1455, down here 1492. Along this screaming descent into novelty are all the painters of the Quattrocento. This is the Italian Renaissance. [9:30:00]\n\nTranscribed by Tiago Ramos", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-421", "text": "TM: All the painters of the Quattrocento, this is [9:30:00] the Italian Renaissance, this descent into novelty. And this, is the era of exploration. 1492, good huh? Good, good! The absolute thing is in 1485, and all the painters of the Italian Renaissance are along this thing. Now notice that in 1492, there isn\u2019t an instant rebound. [9:30:30] There\u2019s 1492. But instead, because this lost half of the planet has been discovered, this sets off the age of discovery and, and habit is unable to reassert itself, because too much peculiar data is flowing in, too many lands, people, materials, philosophie, alphabets, languages, sexual styles, cuisines.. It\u2019s like they\u2019re overwhelmed. [9:31:00] However after a while they get their act together, and manage to turn it into, uh hell itself. RIght there, right\u2026 [audience laughs]. What that is, what ends the era of discovery and optimism and psychedelic exotica,", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-422", "text": "of discovery and optimism and psychedelic exotica, [9:31:30] is the 30-years war. The 30-years war begins 1619 [actually 1618], it ends 1648. It begins with Europe Medieval. It ends with Europe Modern: Parliaments have replaced popes and kings. The whooole name of the game has been changed. Now, the 30-years war lasts until 1648. Sorry. 1648. [9:32:00] At the bottom of this cut in here, which is in a situation of rising habit, there nevertheless is a strong tendency towards novelty, reaching a culmination.. in 1677. Newton publishes the Principia, the celestial mechanics are put on a firm basis, the Calculus has been invented. The modern-, the world of modern science is now [9:32:30] completely in place. Then an- an-, wha- an- aside from the 30-years war, what Europe is exporting to the rest of the world on this hellish offswing, is slavery, the Patron system, forced labor, uh", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-423", "text": "slavery, the Patron system, forced labor, uh brutal return to habitual methods of the past. You may not know that slavery died with the fall of the Roman Empire. If you\u2019ve owned a slave [9:33:00] during the medieval period, you owned ONE slave. It was a house slave. And it proved, your own ownership of this person proved, that you were a person of IMMENSE wealth. It would be like owning a beach bonanza today, it\u2019s beyond owning a Rolls Royce. But, the need for a drug strangely enough, the drug being sugar reversed this, and in the 1440\u2019s [9:33:30] they began buying Africans and taking them to the Canary island to work sugar. So, uh you know, the moral power of Western civilization could not stand in the way of the re-establishment of slavery and the sugar trade. Now, up here at the top of this thing there is a steep, there is a twist, a turn, right there,", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-424", "text": "there is a twist, a turn, right there, in 1739. This is the European Enlightenment. [9:34:00] The European, uh Enlightenment was the great uh intellectual step that set the step of secular civilization. People like Voltaire. And out of that came two revolutions.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-425", "text": "Audience: [inaudible question]\n\nTM: Well, the inquisition would have been I presume a fairly un-novel thing. Since what it was, was a power group [9:34:30] torturing the helpless. Which there\u2019s nothing new in that for heaven\u2019s sake.\n\nAudience: It went on for a long time too.\n\nTM: It went on for a long time, and enough of that. It was a Spanish phenomenon. I- It was confined geographically to a number, to a very small number of places. Right.. there. August 1, 1776. The American Revolution takes place as a consequence of this steep descent into [9:35:00] novelty at the beginning of the European Enlightenment. Well as you know, the American Revolution is generally thought to have had a happy conclusion. The French Revolution.. not so happy. And if you explode that Arean look, you can see that they\u2019re happening at different slopes of that thing. Then the restoration of Louis Napoleon in 1803, is there. [9:35:30] This bump is the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian war, which were the first modern wars and completely distorted the demographics of the United States and Europe. And, now i want to..\n\nAudience: What year is that?\n\nTM: The Franco-Prussian war began in.. 1848, I think. And the Civil War was 1865. Let\u2019s uh, I wanna go over here tooooooo.. [9:36:00]\n\nTranscribed by Andrea Casanova\n\nTM: tooooo [9:36:00]\n\nAudience: [inaudible statement]\n\nTM: I think you\u2019re right. I didn\u2019t feel right about saying that. And that would-\n\nAudience: 1848 was the other one.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-426", "text": "Audience: 1848 was the other one.\n\nTM: Was-, 1848 was the year of revolution. But the Franco-Prussian was at the same of the American Civil War, you are right. Ok, there\u2019s today\u2019s date. Now let\u2019s do the approach. [9:36:30] Approach factor.. two. [beep] Ah, okay that\u2019s 357 years on the screen. You see the American and French revolution. The Franco-Prussian War, the American Civil War, the Twentieth Century. Now let\u2019s look at the Twentieth Century. And this is, remember how I said that the Great Pyramids were at the bottom of this trough, at a higher level. Now we are seeing the same pattern again. What we get [9:37:00]at the bottom of this trough here, is the Third Reich. And to show you how the resonances work, think about the Third Reich in relationship to Ancient Egypt. First of all, probably the word \u2018F\u00fchrer\u2019 can be traced to the word \u2018pharaoh\u2019. These-, this is the same concept [9:37:30] of a master leader. In addition, the Third Reich and Ancient Egypt shared an obsession with large-scale tasteless architecture. In addition, both civilizations had a real tendency to lean on the jews. So you see, you get this strange kind of microscope on the histor-. Most people would not associate Ancient Egypt to the Third Reich. But when you begin listing [9:38:00] the similarities you see, one is a reflection of the other. Okay within the Twentieth Century, ah this is somewhere like 1903. The- uh, uh invent- you know, uh, Einstein was in 1905, the general theory, I think. Which came first, the general of the special?\n\nAudience: The special.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-427", "text": "Audience: The special.\n\nTM: The special came first [9:38:30] in 1905, and the general came slightly later. Down here in the bottom of this trough, let me show you. Right there. Hitler becomes chancellor of Germany. And then all of World War II is fought in the bottom of that trench. Here\u2019s 39\u2019, here\u2019s August 39\u2019. That\u2019s June, that\u2019s September [9:39:00]. So that when it begins. Even though it\u2019s a novel situation, because it\u2019s a war it\u2019s a recursion to habit. So at the bottom of a trough of novelty you get a little upward pimple of recursion to habit. Then, uh let's look at.. There it is. That\u2019s Hiroshima right there, and Nagasaki right there. The war ends, and novelty is left behind [9:39:30]. And remember that the psychology of the post-war mind was everybody wanted things to get back to normal. I mean, certainly the Europeans wanted things to get back to normal. Their whole scene had been bombed into the Stone Age. And in this country, people just wanted to get their place in the suburbs and marry the girl next door, and have a slew of kids, and buy a Chevrolet. And forget about, you know thousand year millennial plans, and all the rest of it. [9:40:00] And so this is the post-war, cold-war era. And it lasts, let\u2019s look. Oh there\u2019s 1952. Uhm, 19-, here\u2019s-, the launching of Sputnik is there.\n\nAudience: It was in 59\u2019.\n\nTM: No no, Oct- October first 1957. A day graven in my mind till they lower my box. [9.40:30]. Uhm. The first american satellite was launched right around there, Explorer 1.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-428", "text": "Audience: [inaudible].\n\nTM: Give me the date! [audience laughs]. Ok there\u2019s the assassination of John Kennedy, as close as I can get it at this resolution. If I go back one, I\u2019m before it. So you see, [9:41:00] it\u2019s right at the bottom of that steep stab, that takes place against this other thing.\n\nAudience: What turned it around?\n\nTM: What turned it around? What\u2019s- What\u2019s the turning point? I thought you\u2019d never ask.\n\nAudience: Yeah yeah yeah yeah, and what is it?\n\nTM: Oh, I\u2019m about to get it for you. There it is. August 1967. It\u2019s the summer of looove. Not only does this thing illuminate history it also, you know fulfills my deepest inner delusions [audience laughs] [9:41:30]. So, and remember I said when we were looking at history\u2019s fractal mountain, that this was Homer, up here. So, then you can see that the freak thing, the hippies were like the pre-hellenic Greeks. I mean, all those, you know all that bra-lessness, and loose-fitting clothes and tambourines and ecstatic Bacchanalian with a [9:42:00]\n\nTranscribed by Andrea Casanova\n\nTM: [9:42:00]...with a philosophical undertone. I mean it was a Greek mentality, that broke out in 1967. Then here's the long descent into, you know, the dreary present moment and (ahh), (ahh)\n\nwhat can i show you hereeee? Richard Nixon getting the axe.\n\nAudience: [inaudible]\n\nTM: Yeah. Now we're into the Reagan-era down here. [9:42:30]\n\nAudience: [inaudible]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-429", "text": "Audience: [inaudible]\n\nTM: Yeah.\n\nAudience: Can you enlarge?\n\nTM: Yeah i'm gonna cut it. I'm just trying to get back to today. There it is. Oh, okay. Cut it, zoom yes, approach factor 2, enter.\n\nAudience: [inaudible]\n\nTM: Ah well it's gonna be\u2026\n\nAudience: [inaudible] [9:43:00]\n\nTM: There it is. That's the Hippie thing and then the descent. Now that's in the, that's the 8-the 70s and 80s. That's the last 11 years (ahh), i wanna stop it here. Now, now, see how tight, it has to be, to work. Remember that we've been looking at this thing from, we've descended from 6 billion years, [9:43:30] to 11 years. We have predicted asteroid impacts, glaciation, speciation, the rise and fall of Empires, now we're down to the short and curly i would think. (ahh), [audience laughs] Let's take a look here at what we've got.\n\nAudience: [inaudible]\n\nTM: Who, i suppose, now we're all experts on this phase of things cause we've all just lived through (ahh), i don't see anyone here under 11, [9:44:00] so we've just lived through all of this. So let's take a look at what it is (ahh). Now, let's see, when was George Bush elected president?\n\nAudience: 88.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-430", "text": "Audience: 88.\n\nTM: 88. So would have been November 88. That's October, that's November. Now what is the resonance to that moment? I don't think of it so much as, as Bush being elected as Reagan leaving office. The resonance here is the fall of Rome [9:44:30]. Rome falls right there. Well then, then see we have a series of, of high and low points which we should be able to correlate to, (ahh) recent, catastrophic or world-changing events. So let's play the game... [9:45:00] What's happening down here, for the 30 days preceding, that day, is a million people are camping out in Tiananmen Square. They, the-they, at the very bottom of the trough is the night that they had the most people in the square and then it turns upward as you can see because the, constipated fascist oligarchs in [9:45:30] charge of that society were preparing to do murder and there's nothing novel or new about murder, it's the oldest game in the book. So that went on there, then remember the Romanian, oh-no no. Let's go over here, the next steep descent into novelty is right, there. Right, that's too far. No, no no, that's right. Okay right there, who knows what happened very close [9:46:00] to 11-, 11/89?\n\nAudience: The Berlin Wall.\n\nTM: The Berlin Wall fell down. Germany is unified right there. So Tiananmen, Germany, then a bummer of some sort and what is that bummer? It's the Romanian Revolution which as you'll recall was handled in a messier style, where you hurl, put people up against walls and machine-gunned them and so forth and so on.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-431", "text": "Audience: [inaudible]...convergence...[inaudible]...August 87.\n\nTM: August 87?\n\nAudience: [inaudible]\n\nTM: Along that line. Well then let's go over to here.\n\nAudience: I wanna see that harmonic convergence.\n\nTM: Oh you want to see the harmonic convergence? Give me the date.\n\nAudience: August 87. 8/87.\n\nTM: 8/87. In judging this you have to ask yourself, was the harmonic\u2026\n\nAudience: [9:47:00] [inaudible]...1st anniversary Iran-Iraq war...[inaudible]...Wait we'll go back to 87.\n\nTM: But don't you want to go back to 87?\n\nAudience: Yeah.\n\nTM: Yeah.\n\nAudience: [inaudible]...harmonic convergences on the anniversary every year...[inaudible]...six month...[inaudible]\n\nTM: Well maybe it's not... Oh, okay. August what?\n\nAudience: [inaudible]\n\nTM: There is the closest we can get. What it shows that, is, that a long descent into [9:47:30] novelty that had previously been impeded but there isn't anything particularly special about that day but it does fall in the domain of going over this hump. Over here (ahh), you'll recall the, the Gulf War and all that. Here's how that looks. [9:48:00]\n\nTranscribed by Tiago Ramos", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-432", "text": "Transcribed by Tiago Ramos\n\n[9:48:00] Terence: \u201cMmkay now, look here, August 3rd, 1990, there\u2019s where saddam hussein invades kuwait, it\u2019s also where mohammed is born one level up. Uhm, I can get higher and lower resonances simply by touching eye here, we haven\u2019t done that but it\u2019s possible. [9:48:30] Now remember how after he invaded - then there was a lot of breast beating and armies being moved into position and so forth that goes on until there, now there, no, no, there is where the 30 day ultimatum from the security council is issued. The war begins, the air war on the 17th of January right there [9:49:00] and the land war, well you can see that it\u2019s - it\u2019s, there\u2019s a steep descent into novelty which then is slightly moderated and at the kink is where the war begins. Now the next steep descent into novelty-\u201d\n\n[AUDIENCE: \u201cSo lining people up and machine gunning them happens during the periods returning to, to -\u201d ]\n\nTerence: \u201c- to habit, that\u2019s the usual habit.\u201d\n\n[AUDIENCE: \u201cand war happens during novelty?\u201d ]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-433", "text": "[AUDIENCE: \u201cand war happens during novelty?\u201d ]\n\nTerence: [9:49:30] \u201cwell, wars can have, war is kind of an ambiguous thing, was is a habitual activity but it does cause novelty, especially technological novelty so you know that\u2019s why it\u2019s nice that you can blow up these waves and see the variation within the theme. Now this point, that\u2019s it, there it is [9:50:00] the coup in the soviet union, right at the bottom of this one, and now the next one is really intriguing to me and i'll show you why, there it is, it\u2019s february 21st of this year and it\u2019s the lowest point of novelty for this year. Now, i was really puzzled by this because i watched very carefully that [9:50:30] week and there didn\u2019t seem to be anything very novel going on-\u201d\n\n[AUDIENCE: \u201cYour book came out\u201d ]\n\nTerence: \u201cMy book did come out, you\u2019re right but i was modest enough to not place that in a context of world history.\u201d\n\n[AUDIENCE: *inaudible* ]\n\nTerence: \u201cWell you know what happened and this leads us to the slippery edge of prophecy, there was an event which happened not on the 21st of February but on the 20th which may be [9:51:00] trivial and forgettable and absolutely not worth talking about or maybe one of the most important events in the history of the 20th century. Do you know what it was?\u201d\n\n[AUDIENCE: *inaudible* ]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-434", "text": "[AUDIENCE: *inaudible* ]\n\nTerence: \u201cNo no, Ross Perot goes on Larry King and offers a suggestion about his availability for the presidency now if the guy fades and becomes a nothing-burger it doesn\u2019t count but he does have the wave [9:51:30] blowing at his back, uhh that\u2019s for sure. So that\u2019s basically it uhh, if you want to see, let\u2019s see\u201d\n\n[AUDIENCE: *inaudible* ]\n\nTerence: \u201cNo, well, let\u2019s look at the future, let me get the *shmiggy* somewhere roughly into the middle and then we\u2019ll build. [9:52:00] Okay now let\u2019s see if i can figure out how to do this. Specify target date , C, target date months, let\u2019s do today, today is the 5th month, the 31st day, of 1992, we don\u2019t want to add days, okay we want to move that over to [9:52:30] 50 percent. \u201c\n\n[AUDIENCE: \u201cTarget date..\u201d *inaudible* ]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-435", "text": "[AUDIENCE: \u201cTarget date..\u201d *inaudible* ]\n\nTerence: \u201cYes, that\u2019s where the cursor pops up. Now let\u2019s choose the timespan, E, let\u2019s do 10 years, plus months zero, plus days zero, now let\u2019s graph the wave. Yes, yes. [9:53:00] So it\u2019s pointing at today. 10 years. The last 5, the next 5. And what it shows is that we are actually as if you didn\u2019t know, exploring a very deep trough of novelty, it will last until August of next year and then there will be some kind of uhh, some kind of return to habit with a vengeance [9:53:30] now the november election is, now wait a minute there\u2019s something wrong here let me see, no i want to point it at today.\n\n[AUDIENCE: \u201cYou see it right there, right there right?\u201d ]\n\nTerence: \u201cYeah, okay that\u2019s as close to today as we can get. \u201d\n\n[AUDIENCE: *inaudible* \u201c very creative..\u201d *inaudible* ]\n\nTerence: \u201cYeah, we\u2019re definitely getting ready to go down into novelty.\u201d\n\n[AUDIENCE: *inaudible* \u201cthing next to the novelty thing..\u201d *inaudible* ]\n\nTerence: \u201c[9:54:00] You mean clear to here?\u201d\n\nTranscribed by Jonathan Laliberte\n\nTM: You mean clear to here?\n\nAudience: Yes\n\nTM: Ok well it\u2019s gonna last until\u2026 August \u201893. The thing to keep you eye on is this. Which is such a spectacular drop. I mean look how much weirdness we\u2019ve been through, but it\u2019s taken us this much time to do it. This sucker is gonna do it in a three month period in early \u201896.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-436", "text": "Audience: [Inaudible] [9:54:30]\n\nTM: I haven\u2019t the faintest.\n\nAudience: [Inaudible]\n\nTM: Well, I hope you\u2019ll do this. Uhm, I think it should be done. Here I\u2019ll show you [9:55:00] a function you haven\u2019t seen. Instead of zooming in we\u2019ll zoom out.\n\nAudience: [Inaudible]\n\nTM: Uhm, well no I\u2019ll just- instead of ten years on the screen we\u2019ll see 20\n\nAudience: Oh I see\n\nTM: Now it\u2019s still pointing- uhm, well no wait a minute. Ok there you see it.\n\nAudience: [Inaudible]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-437", "text": "TM: Yea, right, then there\u2019s the whole thing. [9:55:30] So that\u2019s the idea. Now, the notion is that- remember how I kept talking about how a cone contains all possible ellipses and you section it? What the psychedelic experience is, is a sectioning of eternity. And you can build up a picture of the cone by sectioning eternity sufficiently that you get a map like this. I mean I\u2019m convinced by this that [9:56:00] time is fractal. That instead of treating time as a zero quantity as the newtonian equations do, or as a very gentle curvature as the Einstein equations do, but we have to sub in this fractal dimension. And that this will make possible a science as mo- more powerful, relatively, to present science as present science is through the power of the calculus to Greek science. Time, [9:56:30] about which we previously knew next to nothing except that it seemed to keep happening, can actually be described,", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-438", "text": "to keep happening, can actually be described, uhm, in the same way that energy and, uhm, other factors in the universe can be described. Now what I- the last thought I want to leave you with, is I don\u2019t think anybody could fig- could make this up. Certainly not me. A person with no training in mathematics, no interest in this kind of [9:57:00] thing. I was told this stuff. And, you know, most, God forbid, channeling is of the horrible variety which tells you to eat brown rice and love your neighbor. You don\u2019t need channels to tell you that, you have channels in your own head which tell you that. This is a mathematical equation. I mean, it\u2019s embedded in a lot of rap. But the real channel is [9:57:30] an equation for the description of time which makes, uhm, assertions, makes predictions, uhm, is willing to be held to mathematical analysis. All the things scientists are always screaming that", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-439", "text": "All the things scientists are always screaming that occultists never will provide them with their theories, this provides. So I\u2019m willing, since it\u2019s only one person, one person\u2019s life, I\u2019m willing to, uhm, preach this, a little bit, because I\u2019m not- [9:58:00] maybe I- I can\u2019t believe- see the choice here is pretty stark. Either I\u2019m nuts or I\u2019m Newton. There\u2019s no inbetween. Becau- there is no inbetween!", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-440", "text": "Audience: [Inaudible]\n\nTM: Uhm, yea, def, uhm,it\u2019s- it\u2019s- It\u2019s right, I\u2019m the greatest intellectual synthesizer in the history of man. If Im wrong, it\u2019s just horse shit. So then the question is which is it? [audience laughs]\n\nAudience: [Inaudible] [9:58:30]\n\nTM: You- you mean, who am I the resonance of?\n\nAudience: Yea\n\nTM: A question I\u2019ve never asked, uhm. [laughs]\n\nAudience: [Inaudible]\n\nTM: I figured this out\u2026 There were many- it took a long time but from 1971 to 1973 [9:59:00] is when I figured it out.\n\nAudience: [Inaudible]\n\nTM: Here to- let\u2019s see. Let\u2019s go back. Let\u2019s go there and see.\n\nAudience: [Inaudible]\n\nTM: Then you would have it. Then you would have it. [9:59:30] Okay Let\u2019s see.\n\nAudience: [Inaudible]\n\nTM: No, the life changing experience was in 1971. Well let\u2019s- let\u2019s point at this little dip here, giving me the benefit of the doubt, and say that it was April 26, \u201873. I\u2019m sure that had you visited me in April 26, \u201873 you would have found me hunched over graph paper and working seriously. Now let\u2019s see what the resonance of that is. [10:00:00]\n\nTranscribed by Paul Mullins", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-441", "text": "\u2122:Now let\u2019s see what the resonance of that is, I, is the resonance call. It asks higher or lower. We answer higher, that means earlier..Higher. Major or trigonometric resonance, forget that, major is the answer. Which point, 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 99th, I have no idea what that means, let\u2019s answer, first. Uuuuumm 526 B.C., Oh it\u2019s the Greek renaissance, Plato Pythagoras, Ezekiel Confucius Lousive? \u2026(talking to the guy that asked the question) hey I think it\u2019s time to knock off , you should quit when you\u2019re ahead, you know?\u2026(audience laughs)....Inaudible question\u2026 \u2122:Well in a sense there is, no no (audience laughing), wait a minute, in a sense there is, this is a fractal, it was invented or channeled by me before fractals became the absolute obsession of frontier mathematics, now everybody wants to talk about fractals and everybody says, you know population growth, river mouths, everything can", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-442", "text": "you know population growth, river mouths, everything can be modeled by fractals, but nobody says Time can be modeled by a fractal. So I think probably the rise of fractal mathematics is indicative of this, the other thing is, this could never have been brought to the public without small personal computers. I developed this/finished in 75 and in 77 they began selling small computers, so uh, it\u2019s uh. It\u2019s a weirdness, it\u2019s a hallucination. That\u2019s what it is. My dream has always been to bring something here from there, and apparently the only things which travel well from there to here are ideas, and I\u2019m not an artist so I couldn\u2019t paint, so this is a psychedelic idea, I think there are millions of these kinds of ideas swimming in the psychedelic ocean..Yeah (Inaudible question) [10:02:28] Well that\u2019s because we really haven\u2019t talked about the nature of the concrescence, you know what is, what is, this all argues for an impossible", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-443", "text": "what is, this all argues for an impossible conclusion, that the world is going to disappear up it\u2019s own wazoo at dawn December 22, 2012\u2026(inaudible crowd mumbling) \u2122 what?...oh you want to see the last day? (more crowd mumbling) \u2122 well here lemme uh, well here, yeah I\u2019ll show you, I\u2019ll show you the final thing, we\u2019re running over but anybody that wants to leave has my blessing and my sympathy. (More crowd mumbling) (Sounds like they are working out a math problem on the white board) [10:05:00] \u2122 You see there it is, it runs down, he don\u2019t go no mo, that\u2019s the end. Now I have created one way out that preserves the theory and a rational universe and it is simply this, that what happens on december 22, 2012 is that time travel is invented and because it is invented it is no longer possible to portray historical data on a linear graph, so that\u2019s all. It\u2019s", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-444", "text": "on a linear graph, so that\u2019s all. It\u2019s just it was a thing about technology and eventually a technology was created which made the three dimensional spacetime matrix itself, obsolete\u2026.(crowd member says it\u2019s the dimensional octave jump)\u2122 The transcendental object is the despair of description, it cannot be known it can only be approximated, it\u2019s the sacred heart of Jesus, it\u2019s the flying saucer, it\u2019s the philosophers stone\u2026.[10:06:00]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-445", "text": "Transcribed by Shane Poe", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-446", "text": "TM: [10:06:00]...it's the Philosopher's Stone, it's tantric union, it's good LSD, it's all of these things and more! It cannot-it transcends, language and understanding but the closer we get to it, the more it will be revealed. And the reason the 20th century is so peculiar, it's because we're so close to the zero point, we're so close to the transcendental object but, you know, take a hit, there it is! [10:06:30] Close your eyes and daydream, there it is! Have an orgasm, there it is! It's trying to breakthrough, it's almost upon us. We've been sailing towards this thing for, 72 billion years and we are now 22 years from impact, the walls are so steep, the acceleration is so great, we are there, for all practical purposes and then what spiritual life and head-dom and all that means is, realize [10:07:00] that we are there, so that anxiety drains from your life body and", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-447", "text": "so that anxiety drains from your life body and world view and then you just ride the wave and when people talk of catastrophe, revelation, salvation and destruction, you just smile a small smile knowing that it will be all that and more and more and more, It's something, i think it's to reassure us, you see i think the world is going to get hip to the fact that we are actually [10:07:30] caught in a plural pool in time that is sucking us into another dimension, without something like Timewave Zero a notion like that could get fairly alarming and spread a lot of panic. With Timewave Zero you just say, look we have a map of what's going on, we'll check off the milestones, as long as the wave keeps working nobody should freak out. Just settle in, hang on and we'll [10:08:00] navigate through this. So it's a vital piece of knowledge necessary to face the eschaton without panic because this crazy religions want", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-448", "text": "eschaton without panic because this crazy religions want to tell you that you're going to be judged and damned and fired and roasted, no no that's not it, they got the story wrong. We're just being sucked into hyperspace, and hyperspace is, the human imagination, the human heart, the human soul, it's the domain of our dreams. [10:08:30] Our imagination is a flickering image of what it will but what it really will be, (ahh) is the despair of prose. What it will really be, can only be, approached in, silent darkness on 5 grams and then you can't tell anybody about it. Thank you very much. [audience applauses] [This concludes In Search of the [10:09:00] Original Tree of Knowledge, a weekend workshop with Terence Mckenna. If you would like additional copies of this recording or a complete catalog of transformational audio tapes, please call Sounds True. 1-800-333-9185 or write, Sounds True 735 Walnut Street,", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-449", "text": "or write, Sounds True 735 Walnut Street, Boulder Colorado 80302] [10:09:30]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-450", "text": "TM: Does anyone want to ask a question or is it all just perfectly clear utterly convincing and\u2026\n\nAudience: [inaudible]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-451", "text": "TM: Bad effects of psilocybin? Somebody once said, what's wrong with DMT and i said, well nothing unless you fear death by astonishment. [audience laughs] (Ahh), but-but your question is a good one. [10:10:00] First of all, (ahh) you know, i talked a lot about how all we have to do is destroy and oblate ego, however there is a very small percentage of us who have a hard time creating any ego whatsoever and the-for this people boundary dissolution is no problem, their boundaries are dissolving all the time on them. I would say that they are at the, (ahh) contraindicated end of the spectrum. [10:10:30] That if you're, fearful already and fighting to keep from being overwhelmed by confusion at what's going on in your life at the paper box factory or something, [audience laughs] then probably tossing in mega doses of hallucinogens is not, the way, [audience laughs] for you, to do it or if you", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-452", "text": "laughs] for you, to do it or if you do, if you're, just bent on doing that, then i would say (ahh), do it in the presence of some kind of professional and how you find a professional [10:11:00] in this legal climate you'll have to discuss with me in privately (ahh), (ahh). I don't want to make it sound dull, i mean, it's a tricky thing. I don't want to make it sound like it's absolutely riskless. Physically, i think it's pretty safe, unless you are odd in some way but you need to know, you know, you don't want to find out you're odd an hour and a half into it. [audience laughs] But the, the-the problem comes, [10:11:30] with the mind, you know. If, if-if you are delicately balanced, if your whole life has been about not looking at that, or that, or that, then this is not your game, you know, you should go back to, watching Jeopardy", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-453", "text": "know, you should go back to, watching Jeopardy [audience laughs] and... (ahh), the, the kind of person, the kind of person who is called to this, is a person who has an exploring soul. [10:12:00]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-454", "text": "Transcribed by Tiago Ramos\n\nSoul, I mean my- I..I..I am not a courageous person in the sense that you won\u2019t find me shooting white water, you don\u2019t see me, ah, you know- rappelling down the faces of cliffs, but from the time I was a..a, the tiniest little kid I was into the weird. What weird- \u201cWeird is the compass heading, and if you keep your compass always pointed toward the peculiar, toward the acrab, the bizarre, the unspeakably alien - then, you know, you'll find these places\u2026 [audience laughter]...the people...the people who think life is all cut and dried, and are perfectly happy to have Carl Sagan and George Bush explain all of reality [audience laughter] have never left the broad, swift stream of mundane thinking, but you know, off in the byways\n\n[10:12:57]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-455", "text": "...and tributaries, there\u2019s a wonderful alchemical saying, which I generally mangle, but I think it goes something like this: \u201cthe tallest mountains, the oldest books, the widest deserts - there you will find the stone\u201d... and what it is, is it\u2019s a prescription for exploring weirdness, that\u2019s all. It\u2019s not gonna be on MTV\u2026 it\u2019s not gonna be in, god forbid, Esquire\u2026 [audience laughs] it\u2019s going to come, uh from, you know\u2026 doing your homework, visiting strange people in strange lands, and checking it out. The\u2026 what, what I can\u2019t give you, to return to your question, is\u2026 I can\u2019t give you a guarantee that it will be fun. You know, the Rolling Stones have that wonderful line, \u201cYou don\u2019t get what you want, you get what you need\u201d [10:13:50] This stuff is ruthless\u2026 and if there\u2019s something you\u2019re trying not to look at, it\u2019s gonna get you, for sure\u2026 but\u2026 ask the", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-456", "text": "gonna get you, for sure\u2026 but\u2026 ask the veterans, most people will tell you, you learn more from the bad trips than you do from the good ones\u2026 the good ones are ecstatic, and connect you up to nature and other people\u2026 the bad ones show you your kinks and your limitations and your thought *ferrers, and that sort of thing\u2026 it\u2019s not an easy road to hope\u2026 that\u2019s why I think, uh, there\u2019s a little bit of social confusion about it\u2026 one of the things I should make [10:14:30] clear is, I really advocate high doses rarely\u2026 I think the worst thing you can do is get into a style of psychedelic diddling, where you know, you take half a gram every day\u2026 all this is doing, is giving you a tolerance to psilocybin\u2026 you\u2019re not having The psilocybin experience, you\u2019re having the tolerance to psilocybin experience. The, really the [10:15:00] way to do these things is to, um, do them", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-457", "text": "to do these things is to, um, do them rarely, so that your whole system can reassert itself and come to equilibrium, and then, just slam it! [audience laughs] And, uh, this is amazing\u2026 I mean, I think\u2026 I think this works for all these psychedelics\u2026 I\u2019m, uh, I\u2019m an inveterate cannabis user, and I wish, in a way, that I could get a slightly better grip [10:15:30] on my cannabis use because, I think the real way to do cannabis is like... once a week, by yourself, in silent darkness, with the strongest stuff you can get\u2026 and then immense amounts of it [audience laughs]... and you know, people call it a recreational drug, and a this and a that\u2026 hey, done that way, [10:16:00] it will catapult you into places where it\u2019s the\u2026 I love it, it\u2019s a great place to get to on cannabis, and some people never in their whole life touch it, is", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-458", "text": "some people never in their whole life touch it, is the place where you say, \u201cMy god, I\u2019ve done\u2026 too much!\u201d [audience and Terence laugh] It\u2019s not easy, folks but\u2026 it\u2019s worth shooting for! [laughter continues] basically, what you should do is, is, you know, do some homework, [10:16:30] read some books, talk to your friends, and then, hang on hammoth! It\u2019s like,[laughter] you know\u2026 it\u2019s very much like riding an enormous roller coaster.. You know, once that baby rolls out of the station, do not stand up\u2026 do not try to climb out of your car\u2026 shut up and hang on, with the faith that most people have lived through this! [laughter] [10:17:00]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-459", "text": "TM: Someone else\u2026 yeah?!\n\nAudience: [inaudible] \u2026\n\nTM: Well, I\u2026 uh.. my argument would be, that people don't take it enough [10:18:00], and they don't take it, uh, frequently enough\u2026 that, there are a lot of people who would really rather not get loaded, but who feel they must take some psychedelic drug in order to keep membership in their peer group\u2026\n\nTranscribed by Randy Sloane", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-460", "text": "Transcribed by Randy Sloane\n\n... and they don't take it, uh, frequently enough\u2026 that, there are a lot of people who, who really would rather not get loaded, but who feel they must take some psychedelic drug in order to keep membership in their peer group\u2026 so what they did, you know, you can always spot these people, because their first question off at the get-go is, \u201cwill I be able to drive?\u201d \u2026 I love this question! [audience laughs] because, you know, it indicates you\u2019ve got a real tough nut [10:18:30] on your hands... in every sense of the word - \u201cNo, you will not be able to drive.\u201d Uh, so, you know, I , uh, one of the things that inspires me to do this is, I want to get to the people who\u2019ve taken 3 grams of mushrooms, and the people who\u2019ve taken 150 mics of LSD, and I want to convince those people that they never got close to what I\u2019m talking about, [10:19:00] even though they had a life-transforming experience and saw things totally differently\u2026 they never got close to what I\u2019m talking about\u2026 and so, what you have to do is convince people to take high doses, and then, that can break them through, and then, frequently enough that they don\u2019t forget what the deal is\u2026 so I think if you take a psychedelic population and divide it into those who\u2019ve done 5 grams and above\u2026 then you will see [10:19:30] an exceptional, uh, slice\u2026 but not the dabblers\u2026 the dabblers don\u2019t count, and we can all be at times guilty of this, I think\u2026\n\n\u2122- Is that your last question? Does that do it for you? [inaudible] Or do you want to be ? psychotic, you choose. [laughs]\n\n[inaudible]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-461", "text": "[inaudible]\n\n[laughter]\n\n\u2122- Well I love competition, I mean I\u2026 The competition is terrible, that\u2019s the entire basis of my success\u2026 Yes, you because you were before, if you still wish.\n\nAudience: [inaudible] [10:20:30]\n\n\u2122- Why? Because, I mean I don\u2019t know if it\u2019s preferable but, here's the thing- people are going to think you're a nut if you come down and say, Johann Sebastian Bach or Jerry [10:21:00] Garcia is God, and this is what you'll have to say if you listen to the dead or the B Minor (mass)\u2026 so what I\u2019m interested in, is, um, I want to know the thing in itself\u2026 not what it does to Bach, not what it does to a river flowing through a forested valley\u2026 I want to see what it can do with darkness, [1:21:30] and silence\u2026 and I think most people think it will be boring. Probably because they\u2019ve been hanging out with these beady-eyed gurus meditating, and god knows there\u2019s nothing more boring on earth than most meditation - however, psychedelic... sitting in a darkened room on 5 dried grams of psilocybin mushrooms is nothing like meditating, and that's where it can get at you. My relationship to it is always one of, [10:22:00] I want to know", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d55f86f30464-462", "text": "what it is\u2026 and so, I think this sensory deprivation method is the only way to get at that\u2026 other people might not like that, people say \u201cyou mean you put down that whole thing of going into nature? Isn\u2019t nature the great affirmation?\u201d and all this, and my answer is, yeah, but it works for me sortof without the drugs, plus, and this is maybe my own weirdness and I\u2019ll share it with you\u2026 I have noticed [10:22:30] that these things are incredibly disruptive of the ordinary flow of casuistry\u2026 you all know the ordinary concept of synchronicity? Well if you don\u2019t stay in your room with the lights out and the phone unplugged.. And the damndest things will happen to you. I mean, I- you couldn\u2019t pay me to go into an American city even mildly loaded because... adventures beckon. Now, some people like that\u2026 you know, some people [10:23:00] say, you know, \u201cLet\u2019s take 500 mics and go meet weird people!\u201d [laughs] nuh-uh, not this cookie! uh...\n\nTranscribed by Randy Sloane\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Search+For+The+Original+Tree+Of+Knowledge"}
{"id": "d4bad5e1c8fa-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nLimits of Art & Edges of Science\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nAudio\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\nMarch 1992\n\nUnknown\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo youtube link available, try the following:\n\nAudio Link\nTranscription\nOther links\n\nNo transcript available for this talk!\n\nHelp Transcribe\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Limits+of+Art+%26+Edges+of+Science"}
{"id": "e2986b36df63-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nMapping the End of History\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nAudio\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\nMarch 1992\n\nUnknown\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo youtube link available, try the following:\n\nAudio Link\nTranscription\nOther links\n\nNo transcript available for this talk!\n\nHelp Transcribe\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Mapping+the+End+of+History"}
{"id": "b153b3ac5a06-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nCalling the Butterflies Workshop\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n7 February 1992\n\nEsalen Institute, Big Sur, CA\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo transcript available for this talk!\n\nHelp Transcribe\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Calling+the+Butterflies+Workshop"}
{"id": "8fa1c538b732-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nA Conversation with Terence McKenna and Ram Dass\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n1992\n\nUnknown\n\n2975\n\nEnd of Results\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/A+Conversation+with+Terence+McKenna+and+Ram+Dass"}
{"id": "bf679b24c8d0-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nHermeticism & Alchemy\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n1992\n\nNew York\n\n16100\n\nEnd of Results\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Hermeticism+%26+Alchemy"}
{"id": "49c6b31c6f79-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nThe World And Its Double\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n11 September 1993\n\nNature Friends Lodge, Sierra Madre, CA 91024\n\n18692\n\nEnd of Results\n\nWell, um, 'The World and Its Double' is how we styled this. Uh, this is simply uh-a high-visibility, flashy way of reminding people whose eyes fall upon that text that, uh, the world has a double. The world is not entirely or completely what it seems to be. Culture \u2013 and by culture, I mean any culture, anywhere, any time \u2013 um, gives you the message that, uh, everything is humdrum, everything is normal. In other words, culture denies experience. You know, we all have had, and even a population of non-psychedelic people have had, uh, prophetic dreams, intimations, unlikely strings of coincidences, uh, all of these sort of things. These are experiences which cultures deny. Cultures put in place \u2013uh, I\u2019m sure you've heard this word \u2013 a paradigm, and then what fits within the cultural paradigm is, uh, accentuated, uh, stressed, and what doesn't fit inside the cultural paradigm is denied, marginalized, argued against; and we live at the end of a thousand-year binge, uh, on the philosophical position known as materialism in its many guises. And the basic message of materialism is that the world is what it appears to be: a thing of- composed of matter, and, uh, pretty much confined to its surface. The world is what it appears to be.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+And+Its+Double"}
{"id": "49c6b31c6f79-1", "text": "Now, this, on the face of it, is a tremendously na\u00efve position, because what it says is the animal body that you inhabit, the eyes you look through, the fingers you feel through, are somehow the ultimate instruments of metaphysical conjecture\u2026 which is- is highly improbable. It seems to me, metaphysical conjecture begins with, uh, the logic of the situation, and then proceeds in whatever direction that logic will carry you. Well, if logic is true to experience, then, uh, we have to make room in any theory for invisible connectedness between people; anticipation of a future that has not yet occurred; uh, uh, shared dreaming; all kinds of possibilities that materialism has denied. For approximately 500 years, the great era of the triumph of modern science, materialism has had it's a- the field all to itself; and its argument for its preeminence was the beautiful toys that it could create: aircraft, railroads, global economies, television, spacecraft. But that isn't- that is a fool\u2019s argument for truth! I mean, that\u2019s after all how a medicine show operates, you know: the juggler is so good, the medicine must be even better!\n\nUh, this is not an entirely rational way to proceed. And now, at the end of 500 years of the practice of \u201crational\u201d scientific culture, we are literally at the end of our rope! Reason, and, uh, science, and, uh, the practice of unbridled capitalism, have not delivered us into an angelic realm. Quite the contrary: they've delivered 3% of us into an angelic realm, completely overshadowed by guilt about what\u2019s happening to the other 97% of us who are eating it!", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+And+Its+Double"}
{"id": "49c6b31c6f79-2", "text": "Uh, it\u2019s not a pretty picture, modern civilization. Most people in the world today are quite miserable, actually. Uh, they have very little hope; their religions, their traditional value systems, are being eroded by, uh, Dallas and Hawaii 5-0, which are on the village television every night. Uh, lifespans are being shortened by pesticides, chemicals, all kinds of things in the environment; and, uh, and there is very little political light on the horizon. So I believe that it\u2019s reasonable, looking at this situation, to say that history failed; and that the grand dream of Western civilization has in fact failed. And now we are attempting, with basically a carved wooden oar, to turn a battleship around. And it\u2019s a very frustrating undertaking. Uh, the momentum for catastrophe is enormous in this situation. Uh, now what- but it\u2019s not 100% certain that catastrophe is what we\u2019re headed for, because we are not 100% unconscious. There are people struggling to figure out how to control population, struggling to figure out how to balance the relationship between the masculine and the feminine, uh, struggling to bring, uh, amelioration of hunger and disease to various parts of the world. So we\u2019re in essentially a tragic situation. A tragic situation is a catastrophe when you know it, you see. And, uh, part of the Western impulse has been to subjugate all other cultural styles to our own. And this has taken the form of actually swallowing and digesting Native American culture; uh, the ethnicity of European culture has been replaced by the mega culture of Nouveau Europa, whatever that means; cultures are melted down in the belly of the Western scientific beast and then they become structural members in an ever-expanding edifice of Western scientism.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+And+Its+Double"}
{"id": "49c6b31c6f79-3", "text": "However, the psychedelic experience, as practiced by shamans in many, many parts of the world, is, uh, apparently a bite too large to swallow. Psychedelics arrived on the Western, uh, agenda only about 100 years ago, when, uh, German chemists, uh, brought peyote to Berlin and extracted mescaline; and for the next 50 years, up until about 1945 (55 years, make it), very little happened. Uh, uh, mescaline did not \u2013 though it was taken by Havelock Ellis and, and William James, and F. Weir Mitchell, and \u2013 it did not spawn a craze; it did not influence large numbers of intellectuals particularly. Then in the l- in the 40s, LSD was discovered; in the 50s, DMT and psilocybin were discovered; and then, in 1966, all these things were made illegal. There was no real opportunity for Western science to grapple with these things before they were decided to be too hot to handle- made not only unavailable to people such as you and I, ordinary people, but taken off the agenda of scientific research.\n\nIn the Middle Ages, the church forbade dissection of human bodies, and medical students would visit battlefields and the gallows at night, and steal the bodies of victims of war and executed prisoners in order to learn human physiology. Where that spirit of scientific courage has gone, I don\u2019t know; but there is very little of it left. Now, people feed at the trough of government grants and enormous corporate research budgets, and the idea of actually pursuing truth, or attempting to understand the phenomenon in an unbiased fashion, divorced from its commercial, social and political dimensions, is unheard of.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+And+Its+Double"}
{"id": "49c6b31c6f79-4", "text": "\u2026if you look at thousands of these experiences, is: they dissolve boundaries. They dissolve boundaries between you and your past; you and the part of your unconscious you don\u2019t want to look at; between you and your partner; between you and the feminine, if you\u2019re masculine, and vise versa; between you and the world; all the boundaries that we put up to keep ourselves from feeling our circumstance are dissolved, and boundary dissolution is the most threatening activity that can go on in a society. People \u2013 meaning government institutions \u2013 become very nervous when people begin to talk to each other. [input from audience] \u2013 Yes. The whole name of the Western game is to create boundaries and maintain them. The Church and the State; the poor and the wealthy; the black and the white; the male and the female; the young and the old; the gay and the straight; the living and the dead; the foreign and the familiar\u2026 all of these categorical divisions allow a kind of thinking that is completely cockamamie. After all, reality is in fact a seamless, unspeakable something; and we understand that to perceive it separately is a necessary adjunct to the act of understanding, but it is not the end of the program of understanding! Particulate data has to be recombined in a paradigm, a seamless overview of what is happening; and the drugs that Western society has traditionally favored have either been drugs which maintain boundaries or drugs which promote mindless repetitious physical activity on the assembly line, in the slave galley, on the latifundi of the slave-driven agricultural project\u2026 whatever it is. In the corporate office.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+And+Its+Double"}
{"id": "49c6b31c6f79-5", "text": "This is why every labor contract on this planet \u2013 at least, in Western civilization \u2013 contains a provision that all workers shall be allowed to use drugs twice a day at designated times; but the drug shall be caffeine. Now, the reason why caffeine is so welcome in the workplace is because the last three hours of the workday are utterly unproductive unless you goose everybody with two cups of coffee, and then they can go back to the word processor, the widget-tightening machine, or whatever they\u2019re doing, and mindlessly and happily carry on. If it were to be suggested that there be a pot break twice a day [laughter], you know, you would think that civilization was striking the iceberg or something! And alcohol\u2026 our society is an alcohol, red meat, sugar and tobacco culture. And all of these are forms of speed, basically, in the way that we use them. I mean, yes, you can tranquilize yourself on alcohol, but you\u2019re pushing toward levels where a lifetime of tranquilizing yourself on alcohol will be a short lifetime, if you use it that way.\n\nSo there\u2019s a lot of tension in society between the great exploring soul and the assembly-line citizen. The citizen is defined by obligation, and by the boundaries that define, you know, the next citizen \u2013 either because it\u2019s a neighbor, or a worker, or an employer, or something like that; and the grand exploring soul is marginalized as an eccentric or, if necessary, more seriously marginalized as mad in some way. I mean, madness basically \u2013 up until the level of physical violence \u2013 means \u201cYou are behaving in a way which makes me feel uncomfortable, therefore there\u2019s something wrong with you.\u201d Yes\u2026", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+And+Its+Double"}
{"id": "49c6b31c6f79-6", "text": "So \u2013 Now, it\u2019s interesting, and this is one of the points that\u2019s dear to me \u2013 I mean, they arrive in different orders each time, but \u2013 I think of history as a kind of mass psychedelic experience; and the drug is technology. And as technology gets more and more perfected as a mirror of the human mind, the cultural experience becomes more and more hallucinatory. And for at least the past couple of hundred years, boundary dissolution has been underway at every level of Western civilization. I mean, you could push it further back: the Magna Carta, the fact that princes and lords of the realm would actually attempt to force the king\u2019s signature on a document defining their privileges \u2013 they are, after all, ordinary human beings; the king is the divine appointed regent of God in Heaven! So this was a severe boundary dissolution, within the context of the age in which it was taking place. They were actually saying, \u201cYou, as Christ\u2019s representative on Earth, should seed some of this omnipotence to us mere mortals, suspended in the political process\u201d \u2013 well, that leads then to broader demands for human rights: for the idea that a permanent and large segment of society kept in permanent poverty is unacceptable\u2026 we got rid of debtors\u2019 prisons, and things like this.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+And+Its+Double"}
{"id": "49c6b31c6f79-7", "text": "As the collectivity of our humanness becomes an intellectual legacy for all of us, there is a dissolving of boundaries of race, class, status, language, so forth and so on; and the whole of the 20th century has seen a massive acceleration of this. The breakdown of the Soviet Union was in fact simply \u2013 it was even so described: the lifting of the Iron Curtain \u2013 meaning a membrane has suddenly disappeared; and more and more of these membranes are disappearing, and what is emerging then is a more and more psychedelic experience \u2013 meaning a sense of acceleration of information flow; a sense of rising ambiguity about what it all means; everything seems to carry both a good facet and a detrimental facet; the ambiguity of everything is increasing; the connectedness of everything is increasing; and I will argue, later in the day, that this is a general tendency of the time and space in which we are embedded, and that we ourselves are a reflection of this.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+And+Its+Double"}
{"id": "49c6b31c6f79-8", "text": "Where is life carrying us? What is this all about? Is it carrying us toward extinction, so that the rest of Nature can heave an enormous sigh of relief and then get back to the business of nest-building, mating flights and overposturing, and whatever it is that they\u2019re doing out there? \u2013 or is it carrying us toward some kind of a transition? If you look back through the history of life \u2013 which is a long history, I mean it reaches back a billion years \u2013 it\u2019s\u2026 every advance happens suddenly, unpredictably, and in a very short period of time. Some of you who stay tuned to the scientific literature may have noticed this series of articles that were around last week, about what they\u2019re calling the Big Bang of Biology: that there was a period of time \u2013 incredibly brief, perhaps between a million and ten million years \u2013 when all the phyla of life on this planet radiated into existence: some time between 525 and 535 million years ago \u2013 just, it all snapped into existence. The episode in which life left the sea is a similar highly confined transition event. People recently have written about what they call punctuated evolution; evolution is not, apparently, a slow curve of unfoldment \u2013 it is instead a series of equilibrium states punctuated by violent fluctuations in between, and then a new equilibrium state.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+And+Its+Double"}
{"id": "49c6b31c6f79-9", "text": "So history, I believe, is not an aberration, any more than leaving the sea could be called an aberration of marine existence. I mean, obviously it is not marine existence, and obviously we are not living in the same world as groundhogs and hummingbirds, psychologically; but leaving the sea did not represent an ontological transition. It represented an extremely dramatic shift of modality, and this is what history is. History is characterized by its brevity, for one thing. I mean, we have packed more change into the last ten thousand years than the billion years which preceded it. And yet, as entities, as animals, meat, we have not changed at all in ten thousand years. If you were to go back to that era, the people would be exactly like people we see today. They wouldn't be so racially heterogeneous, because the great gene streamings and migrations that characterize history had not yet taken place; but essentially, perfectly modern people. Well, then history is apparently \u2013 if we view it as a process that Nature tolerates, if not encourages \u2013 then history is essentially apparently important enough to place into\u2026 jeopardize the stability of all the rest of the natural ecosystemic world.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+And+Its+Double"}
{"id": "49c6b31c6f79-10", "text": "It\u2019s as though Nature is saying, \u201cWe are willing to place the entire planetary ecology in danger for 50,000 years in order for the opportunity to be explored of language-using, technological-expressing, intelligence carrying all of life to the next level\u201d. And it\u2019s a terrifying enterprise, because apparently to carry life to the next level, tremendous intellectual sophistication is required about the release and control of energy. The problem is, energy can be used to destroy as well as build. So as the human enterprise has moved toward greater and greater power, and ability to manipulate the environment, the stakes in the cosmic game have risen. And now what we have is approximately $100 billion sitting in the centre of the crap table, and one roll of the dice more and we\u2019re going to either win it or lose everything. Because intelligence, if we fail, will never again reach the kind of levels on this planet that we have reached.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+And+Its+Double"}
{"id": "49c6b31c6f79-11", "text": "Why? Because we have extracted all the available metals near the surface of the Earth; an evolving species following after us will find the Earth strangely depleted of usable materials, down to the 1500-foot level; and so intelligence coming beyond us will find it just does not have the resources to make the leap to technical civilization. So it\u2019s beginning to look like a one-shot deal. And the psychedelics are in there for two reasons. First of all, because they allow us, as individuals, to break out of the flat cultural illusion and to rise up and look at this situation, so it\u2019s for us a tool to understand our predicament; but the psychedelics are also what has driven this circumstance to arise in part, because what psychedelics do \u2013 and I think this isn't too challengeable \u2013 is they catalyze imagination. They drive you to think what you would not think otherwise. Well, notice that the enterprise of human history is nothing more than the fall-out created by strange ideas! You know: Let\u2019s build a pyramid! Let\u2019s build a windmill! Let\u2019s build a water wheel! \u2013 you know \u2013 and then empires, philosophies, religions, arise, in the wake of these situations.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+And+Its+Double"}
{"id": "49c6b31c6f79-12", "text": "I've argued in the past \u2013 and I\u2019m going to try not to repeat it here today, because I think you've all heard it, but I will just mention it in a sentence or two \u2013 that the critical catalyst propelling us out of the slowly evolving hominid line and caused us to take an orthogonal right-hand turn into culture, language, art, yearning\u2026 probably was the inclusion of psychedelic plants in our diet during that episodic moment when we went from being fruititarian canopy-dwellers to omnivorous pack-hunting creatures of the grassland. And it was the inclusion of psilocybin in our grassland diet that caused us to discover that there is a mind! And you can perturb it!\n\nI mean, think about\u2026 and I don\u2019t think you could discover consciousness if you didn't perturb it, because as Marshall McLuhan said, \u201cwhoever discovered water, it certainly wasn't a fish\u201d. Well, we are fish swimming in consciousness; and yet we know it\u2019s there. Well, the reason we know it\u2019s there is because if you perturb it, then you see it; and you perturb it by perturbing the engine which generates it, which is the mind/brain system resting behind your eyebrows. If you swap out the ordinary chemicals that are running that system in an invisible fashion, then you see: it\u2019s like dropping ink into a bowl of clear water \u2013 suddenly the convection currents operating in the clear water become visible, because you see the particles of ink tracing out the previously invisible dynamics of the standing water. The mind is precisely like that, and the psychedelic is like a dye-marker being dropped into this aqueous system. And then you say, \u201cOh, I see \u2013 it works like this\u2026 and like this.\"", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+And+Its+Double"}
{"id": "49c6b31c6f79-13", "text": "Well, if psychedelics are a catalyst for the imagination, and if history is driven by the imagination, it is driven through the fall-out from the imagination, which is technology and culture. Technology and culture are the consequences, the derivatives, of the ratiocination of the mind. And technology has \u2013 like biological life, but on a much faster, accelerated timeframe \u2013 technology has this weird tendency to transcend itself; to bootstrap itself. You know, if you have a cart, then it implies better wheels, better bearings, better structure, and then higher speed, more control, more feedback from the machine; it means we need gas gauges, RPM readouts, so forth and so on. Technology, strangely enough, created by a biological creature, has itself this self-transcending quality.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+And+Its+Double"}
{"id": "49c6b31c6f79-14", "text": "But ever-accelerating; this is the important point \u2013 because the ever-accelerating accretion of technology means that history is strangely foreshortened at the future end, because it happens faster and faster. It\u2019s like a process that begins very slowly, but once started has the quality of a cascade \u2013 or, you know, the rate at which falling bodies move: 32.5 feet per second, per second! Each second, it accelerates to twice the rate of infall that was occurring in the previous second. Technology is like this; and we now are in a domain where, if we attempt to propagate technological development forward 50 years, it becomes unmanageable as an intellectual task. We can talk about the automobile, what it might look like 50 years from now: it would float, it would go 500 miles an hour, it would be guided by your mind, so forth and so on\u2026 these kinds of ideas. But when you think that every artefact of our world will undergo that kind of transformation,", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+And+Its+Double"}
{"id": "49c6b31c6f79-15", "text": "of our world will undergo that kind of transformation, and that the synergy among these transformed objects will create phenomena and situations that we can\u2019t anticipate \u2013 that\u2019s the key thing: our inability to anticipate the synergies between our technologies. I mean, the computer, LSD, spacecraft, holograms, organic superconductivity \u2013 those are just six areas where the integration of those concerns will produce unimaginable consequences! The ultimate boundary dissolution is the dissolution of ego. I mean, we hope \u2013 we straight people \u2013 hope that they never meet it except at death; of course, they don\u2019t realize that going to sleep at night is a kind of ego dissolution. But the government is expressive of this dominator culture that we\u2019re living in. The ego is a very recent invention, and its hold on reality is very tenuous. And consequently it walks around imbued with fear: I mean, it feels itself to be a mouse in a world of dinosaurs. That\u2019s because it\u2019s a very", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+And+Its+Double"}
{"id": "49c6b31c6f79-16", "text": "world of dinosaurs. That\u2019s because it\u2019s a very recent development.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+And+Its+Double"}
{"id": "49c6b31c6f79-17", "text": "I guess I have to go back to this scenario of human development, and say, just very briefly: here\u2019s how I think this worked. I\u2019m not going to run through the whole evolutionary scenario, but this thing about ego\u2026 All primates have what are called dominance hierarchies. That simply means that the hard-bodied, long-fanged, young males kick everybody else around. They control the females, the children, homosexuals, the elderly\u2026 everybody is taking orders from this dominance hierarchy. And this is true clear back into squirrel monkeys; it\u2019s a generalized feature of primate behavior. And it\u2019s an aspect of our behavior, as we sit here: women \u2013 the feminine \u2013 is not honored; the elderly are marginalized; homosexuals, that whole issue; many of our social and political ills stem from this attitude. Well, but you see I believe that when we left the trees, and admitted psilocybin into our diet, that it has the effect of dissolving boundaries, and making this maintenance of a dominance hierarchy very very difficult.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+And+Its+Double"}
{"id": "49c6b31c6f79-18", "text": "First of all, the key on one level to maintaining the dominance hierarchy is monogamous pair-bonding. That\u2019s where it begins. In a society taking a lot of psilocybin, monogamous pair-bonding breaks down, because of the CNS activation, and sexual arousal. So in a psilocybin-using culture, there will be a tendency to orgiastic sexual behavior, rather than monogamous pair-bonding. What that does is it causes an incredible social cohesion, because in an orgiastic society men cannot trace lines of male paternity. So men\u2019s attitude toward children is, \u201cThese children are all ours. We the group\u201d\u2026 it\u2019s a glue that we, in our paranoid social style, with everybody having the deed to their property and their 11-foot-high fence, can hardly imagine. But psilocybin was artificially suppressing this dominator behavior style in the primate, the evolving protohominid, now human being.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+And+Its+Double"}
{"id": "49c6b31c6f79-19", "text": "When psilocybin was taken out of the diet, the old, old primate program was still there. It had not been bred out; the genes were always there; it\u2019s just that for 50,000 or 100,000 years, we medicated ourselves \u2013 literally, religiously \u2013 we religiously medicated ourselves every new and full moon, perhaps oftener; these orgies were happening, creating social cohesion, propagating everybody forward\u2026 the problem was, when the psilocybin was taken away, we had been under its influence for perhaps half a million years. We had evolved language, rudimentary abstract philosophy, a sense of religion. We had invented technology in the form of using fire and chipping flint, and all that. The psilocybin goes away, and suddenly these skills, these tools, these technologies, are in the hands of marauding apes \u2013 not any more cohesive caring human social groups, but marauding territorial apes, driven by the desire to control all weaker members of the social group.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+And+Its+Double"}
{"id": "49c6b31c6f79-20", "text": "And that\u2019s our circumstance! We have, you know, the tools that would allow us to sculpt paradise, but we have the reflexes and value systems of anthropoid apes of some sort \u2013 so the split between our conscious hopes, our best foot, and the bottom of the human scale, is appalling. I mean, look at the spread! It\u2019s a spread from \u2013 well, from Mother Teresa to serial killers! \u2013 I mean, you don\u2019t get serial killers in the chipmunk population, or the grasshopper population \u2013 I mean, these animals are not so set at variance with their basic nature that these kinds of pathologies can erupt. We, on the other hand, are half angel, half pack-hunting killer ape. I mean, we are an object-fetish society \u2013 I mean, our entire psychology is characterized by a profound discontent. That\u2019s what we\u2019re about. It doesn't matter \u2013 no matter what\u2019s going on, after a little while we get restless and move on; other animal species are embedded in a kind of world of endless genetic cycling. No fox grows bored with hunting, you know?! \u2013 and yet our thing is a profound dis-ease.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+And+Its+Double"}
{"id": "49c6b31c6f79-21", "text": "And I believe it\u2019s because \u2013 and slowly you've forced me to do this whole rap, which I swore I wouldn't do \u2013 I believe it\u2019s because the psilocybin led us halfway toward a kind of godhead, but then it disappeared, and we are left in this very peculiar situation. This is the myth of the Fall; you know, we are half angel, half beast \u2013 and these two natures are united in every one of us. And when you take psilocybin, you feel generally a great sense of community, an ascent to a higher level. If you completely restrict your intake of intoxicants of any sort, then you get the teetotaller type personality, which is characterized by incredible smugness, limited intellectual horizons, and an unbearable aura of self-congratulation that makes it pretty hard for the rest of us to put up with.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+And+Its+Double"}
{"id": "49c6b31c6f79-22", "text": "See, here is the final piece of this evolutionary key. Psilocybin, in small amounts, increases visual acuity. This is not an arguable point; I mean, you can just give people psilocybin and give them eye tests, and people with astigmatisms see better; your edge-detection ability is greatly increased. Well, you can see that an animal like our remote ancestors, in a hunting environment in the grassland, if there is an item of diet that will make you a better and more efficient hunter, the equivalent of chemical binoculars lying around on the grassland, those animals that avail themselves of this technology will be more successful hunters. And so it was: animals using psilocybin were more successful at raising their offspring to reproductive age. Well, then at slightly higher doses you get this CNS arousal, which in highly sexed animals such as primates, arousal means sexual arousal \u2013 an erection in the male \u2013 so then there is, without the overwhelming influence of Christian ethics to guide their behaviors, I\u2019m sure these organisms simply flopped in a heap, and \u2013 you know, sorted it all out later! So that\u2019s the middle range of the dosage. Low dose: success in hunting. Medium dose: social cohesion achieved through ego dissolution and orgiastic sexuality.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+And+Its+Double"}
{"id": "49c6b31c6f79-23", "text": "Yet higher doses, 5 grams and up: hunting is out of the question; sex is out of the question; you\u2019re just nailed to the ground by the campfire, and in the course of the evening you discover religion! [laughter] Philosophy! Art! \u2013 and, you know, all of that. So here is a unique chemical that, at every dose level, synergizes activity that leads to greater coherency and self-expression. The driving of the imagination \u2013 yes, in the question back here you said you can\u2019t create what you can\u2019t conceive of; this is why what the psychedelic experience does, really, is it stretches the envelope of the imaginable. I mean, what can be imagined can be created; what cannot be imagined is not part of the play. So psilocybin really was a stimulant for the production of intellectual product in the form of songs, rituals, dances, body painting, abstract ideas. All of these things are what we are most unique.\n\nWell, that\u2019s how it seemed to me. It seemed to me, culture is a shabby lie \u2013 or at least, this culture is a shabby lie. I mean, if you work like a dog, you get 260 channels of bad television and a German automobile! What kind of perfection is that?! We have our secular society \u2013 religion is completely devalued \u2013 and consumer object fetishism is the only kind of worth that we collectively recognize. I\u2019m sure you\u2019ve all seen the T-shirt that says \u201cHe\u201d \u2013 notice, he \u2013 \u201cwho dies with the most toys, wins\u201d. That is in fact the banner under which we\u2019re flying here. And the level of unhappiness is immense. I mean, the level of unhappiness among the poor, they\u2019ve always been miserable; but we\u2019ve managed to create something entirely new in human history \u2013 an utterly miserable ruling class! I mean, there seems no excuse for that!", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+And+Its+Double"}
{"id": "49c6b31c6f79-24", "text": "Well, I guess this leads us to a subject worth talking about, which is, it's very important to talk to the state or the substance or...if you don't talk to it, it won't talk to you. It follows the rules of ordinary etiquette, and it does not speak to strangers. But if you will say to it the simplest thing like \"Hello?\" then it will say, \"Hello\", and you say \"is someone there?\" it says \"Yes..ready and willing, what's up?\" But if you don't speak to it, it won't do that. That is to me the strangest property of psilocybin, is this speaking in English business. I mean, LSD doesn't do that. Ayahuasca doesn't do that. Psilocybin does for some reason. This is not my illusion. Nearly everybody who's spent time with it has commented on this. On DMT you see who you hear on the mushrooms. On the mushrooms you almost never encounter something that you can see. You see hallucinations, but you", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+And+Its+Double"}
{"id": "49c6b31c6f79-25", "text": "you can see. You see hallucinations, but you do not see the author of the data stream that's saying \"did you know? I'll bet you did know!' The standard form of address. But on DMT, they come bounding out of the woodwork. The strangest things happen on DMT. The most intense, and you can remember them. DMT is not like a psychedelic drug in the sense that you're getting into the contents of your hopes, memories, fears and dreams. It's much more like a parallel continuum. It's much more as though you've broken through to some alien data space. One of the most puzzling things about DMT is it does not affect your mind, you know? It simply replaces the world one hundred percent with something completely unexpected. But your relationship to that unexpected thing is not one of exaggerated fear or exaggerated acceptance as in 'oh great, the world has just been replaced by elf machinery'! Your reaction is exactly what it would be if it", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+And+Its+Double"}
{"id": "49c6b31c6f79-26", "text": "Your reaction is exactly what it would be if it happened to you without DMT. You're appalled!", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+And+Its+Double"}
{"id": "49c6b31c6f79-27", "text": "I mean, these Yogans have been over there digging away for millenia; Egyptian religion, Kabbalism, Alchemy, Western traditions of mysticism. And I am a connoisseur of all that, don\u2019t get me wrong, but what astonishes me is how embryonic it all is. We are not the tired inheritors of an ancient and sophisticated civilization in its twilight, which is what they\u2019re all telling us. We are the know-nothing, fresh-scrubbed babes who are the new kids on the block, who haven\u2019t got a clue as to what the human enterprise could be about. And we are coming now through a very narrow historical neck where the accumulated stupidity of the last 5,000 years\u2014the dues have to be paid. It ain\u2019t fair, we didn\u2019t do it. You know, we didn\u2019t bring the slaves from Africa, we didn\u2019t invent oligarchy, we didn\u2019t do all these things. Nobody is interested in our whining about how we didn\u2019t do it\u2014it\u2019s in your face. And,\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+And+Its+Double"}
{"id": "4bc78a08703d-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\naka The Psychedelic 'Religious' Agenda\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n27-29 August 1993\n\nEsalen, Big Sur, CA\n\n39115\n\nEnd of Results\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/aka+The+Psychedelic+%27Religious%27+Agenda"}
{"id": "9fcaa2407c51-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nTrue Hallucinations\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n20 June 1993\n\nPhoenix Book Store\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo transcript available for this talk!\n\nHelp Transcribe\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/True+Hallucinations"}
{"id": "5ca8cd43dc6c-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nHazelwood Trialogues\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n20 June 1993\n\nHazelwood, Devon, England\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo transcript available for this talk!\n\nHelp Transcribe\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Hazelwood+Trialogues"}
{"id": "5af179e4c930-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nLive in New York\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nAudio\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n20 June 1993\n\nThe Fez, New York New York\n\n10157\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo youtube link available, try the following:\n\nAudio Link\nTranscription\nOther links\n\nLSD is a kind of -- has a foot in both worlds. You know, you start, when you make LSD, with ergonomine, which you get from ergot, which is grown on plantations in Pakistan. But then you elaborate the molecule and make it synthetic. I certainly think LSD -- we wouldn't be here, and I wouldn't be here, if it weren't for LSD. The wonderful thing about LSD is that it's possible to manufacture so much in the underground. I mean, there is a problem with that in that it tends to promote criminal syndicalism. [\n\ncybin. Well, here's my approach to this, and this is why I advocate the use of plants with a history of shamanic usage. Because these things are illegal, human research is essentially outlawed. As users we suffer under the prohibition, but imagine that science, one of the most powerful forces in our society, has been told, \"", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+in+New+York"}
{"id": "5af179e4c930-1", "text": "Sure. I'm very interested in this. Here's the great paradox in this domain, as far as I'm concerned. DMT, without contest, is the most powerful psychedelic that I know of--and I hope there's nothing stronger, cause if there is, I don't wanna know about it! [laughter] It's very brief and fast acting, and it clears your system very quickly. It occurs as a neurotransmitter in ordinary human metabolism. Now isn't that interesting? That the most powerful and radical and alien of all these hallucinogens is the one most like--in fact, exactly like--what's in your own body. This is also a Catch 22 for the Establishment cause it means we're all holding, all the time! They can come and get you, folks! It's worse than a U.A. -- you haven't got a prayer! And there's something very interesting--well, there are a number of things--but one thing very interesting about DMT is that, if you've had it, it's possible to have a", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+in+New+York"}
{"id": "5af179e4c930-2", "text": "if you've had it, it's possible to have a dream, years later, in which something's going on, and going on, and then someone whips out a little glass pipe, and puts it in your mouth, and you have the complete experience. Not a pale memory or a vivid memory--the real thing happens in the dream. Well this is big news, because what it's saying is that human metabolism is very, very close to being able to produce this at any time, and sometimes it can produce it. Now, it's known that DMT is at its highest concentration in cerebrospinal fluid between 3 and 4 AM in most people. And that's the time of day when the deep REM sleep occurs, accompanied by deep dreaming. So, it looks to me like the chemistry of dream and the chemistry of the psychedelic experience are the same. In fact, you know, if the government is really serious in eliminating psychedelics, then throw down the 10 million dollars or 20 million dollars that it would take to", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+in+New+York"}
{"id": "5af179e4c930-3", "text": "or 20 million dollars that it would take to develop a drug that allows people to remember their dreams. Because I think every night, we return to the psychedelic source, that the dreams you remember are the surface of the dream, and that every single night, we sink back down in to the primordial field of mind out of which we reconstruct ourselves. Now, I'm telling you, if DMT were legal, in six months, a skilled laboratory team trained in the study of biofeedback techniques, could train a human being to trigger that on the natch. Well then, this is something that we would teach our children in the seventh grade, and from then on, that would solve the entire issue of the hallucinogenic substances, their availability, their legality, and so forth. Legalize the dream! Reclaim the human mind! Let's make dreams legal, let's make plants legal, let's legalize the imagination, empower hope, and begin to build the kind of world that we would feel alright about handing our children", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+in+New+York"}
{"id": "5af179e4c930-4", "text": "that we would feel alright about handing our children on to. Because if we don't do that, we're going to come off as the lamest generation in human history, and we aren't. The creativity, the connectedness, the potential for good is enormous. And most people in this planet are embedded in pre-potent systems of relationship, meaning obligation and inherited religious and cultural ideas. So you may think that you don't count, but actually we all probably are part of a sub-population of about 5% of the global population--people who have disposable income, can read, follow global advances, get good data, and feel a political and moral obligation to do something about it. We tend to feel as powerless as a Guatemalan peasant or something like that, but in fact, that's a myth They want you to accept. The real responsibility for saving the world rests on the literate middle- and upper-middle-class masses of the high-tech industrial democracies. That's US. It's our responsibility to make a change", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+in+New+York"}
{"id": "5af179e4c930-5", "text": "US. It's our responsibility to make a change and to act for all those silent, downtrodden people who have been so victimized by the system that they couldn't turn out at a New York nightclub and hear an esthete rail against the evils of the Establishment. And that's probably enough railing against the evils of the Establishment. Thank you very much, thank you. [applause]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+in+New+York"}
{"id": "5af179e4c930-6", "text": "Save the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+in+New+York"}
{"id": "d88c404eef5d-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nMushrooms, Sex and Society\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\nJune 1993\n\nUnknown\n\n1383\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo youtube link available, try the following:\n\nThe mainstream media hasn't quite got it figured out whether Terence McKenna is putting them on or not. His theories about the origins of contemporary culture in the psychedelic trips of the distant past seem startling to those who have overdosed on Reagan/Bush/Larouche-style propaganda, but they are not without precedent if the names Aldous Huxley, John Allegro or R. Gordon Wasson mean anything to you (if they don't, check out the 'authors' section of the card catalog). McKenna's ideas have hit the media in the form of several books, most notably The Archaic Revival (HarperCollins), Food of the Gods (Bantam), and True Hallucinations (Harper San Francisco). He has also maintained a close connection to the burgeoning rave scene, lending spoken-word performances to concerts by the Shamen and recordings by Space Time Continuum. Major publications from coast to coast have lined up to give him press, generally favorable, if confused. I spoke with McKenna recently as part of an assignment for Future Sex magazine (editorial decision squelched the piece)...\n\nPHF: Can you briefly explain the theory you put forth in Food of the Gods?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Mushrooms%2C+Sex+and+Society"}
{"id": "d88c404eef5d-1", "text": "PHF: Can you briefly explain the theory you put forth in Food of the Gods?\n\nTerence McKenna: The primate tendency to form dominance heirarchies was temporarily interrupted for about 100,000 years by the psilocybin in the paleolithic diet. This behavioral style of male dominance was chemically interrupted by psilocybin in the diet, so it allowed the style of social organization called partnership to emerge, and that that occured during the period when language, altruism, planning, moral values, esthetics, music and so forth -- everything associated with humanness -- emerged during that period. About 12,000 years ago, the mushrooms left the human diet because they were no longer available, due to climatological change and the previous tendency to form dominance heirarchies re-emerged. So, this is what the historic dilemma is: we have all these qualities that were evolved during the suppression of male dominance that are now somewhat at loggerheads with the tendency of society in a situation of re-established male dominance. The paleolithic situation was orgiastic and this made it impossible for men to trace lines of male paternity, consequently there was no concept of 'my children' for men. It was 'our children' meaning 'we, the group.' This orgiastic style worked into the effects of higher doses of psilocybin to create a situation of frequent boundary dissolution. That's what sexuality is, on one level, about and it's what psychedelics, on another level, are about. With the termination of this orgiastic, mushroom using style of existence, a very neurotic and repressive social style emerged which is now worldwide and typical of western civilization.\n\nPHF: In what sense did the mushroom influence or create an orgiastic state?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Mushrooms%2C+Sex+and+Society"}
{"id": "d88c404eef5d-2", "text": "PHF: In what sense did the mushroom influence or create an orgiastic state?\n\nTerence McKenna: All central nervous system stimulants create what's called 'arousal', which means restlessness. In highly sexed animals like primates, it also means sexual arousal. So, psilocybin was a stimulant to sexual acitivity. In an evolutionary context, the more sex you have, the more outbreeding you have of those members of the population that are not experiencing this stimulation. So, on one level, at the lowest dose, psilocybin increases visual acuity, which means better success at hunting. Then, at the middle dose level, it creates this hypersexual activity. Then, at still higher doses it creates the full-blown psychedelic experience, about which we are as uninformed and as easily amazed as our remote ancestors were. So, it was a 3 step process. It was basically a chemical that had been allowed into the diet that boosted us toward boundary dissolution, language acquisition, sexuality without boundaries, and so on. With those behaviors in place, humanness emerged. Then, as the mushroom faded from climatological reasons, in a sense we became schizophrenic. The bestial nature, the animal nature, that had been suppressed by the psilocybin in the diet, re-emerged, so you get male dominance, standing armies, kingship, walled cities, the whole bit that leads to western civilization.\n\nPHF: What is the place of set and setting in the arousal response?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Mushrooms%2C+Sex+and+Society"}
{"id": "d88c404eef5d-3", "text": "PHF: What is the place of set and setting in the arousal response?\n\nTerence McKenna: In the primitive context, I think, probably, there were orgies which were regulated by the lunar phases. In other words, orgies at the new and full moon. Basically, I think of the ego like a tumor or a calcarious growth in the psyche that will form unless there is the presence of psilocybin. For a hundred thousand years, nobody went longer than a month without having this boundary-dissolving experience. After the psilocybin faded, the ego was able to get hold and then eventually redefine the whole personality around it. It's a maladaptive response, I think, because it leads to the consequences we see all around us.\n\nPHF: At what age would the psilocybin be introduced to prevent the ego from forming?\n\nTerence McKenna: We're just speculating here -- nobody knows -- but I imagine that it could well have an initiatory rite at puberty, or it could have come even earlier. Also, we're talking a long period of time, as much, perhaps, as half a million years, that this was happening. So it may have started out that psilocybin mushrooms were just edible mushrooms, an item in the diet, and only when you ate a lot did you discover that they were also stimulants and psychoactive. Then, as you approach more recent times, they were obviously institutionalized into a kind of goddess worshiping, cattle worshiping, orgiastic religion.\n\nPHF: Are you suggesting that paleolithic shrooms were less potent than those that present-day psychedelic users consume?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Mushrooms%2C+Sex+and+Society"}
{"id": "d88c404eef5d-4", "text": "Terence McKenna: No, I'm just suggesting that as human intellectual capacities evolved, people went from unconsciously getting loaded and being stimulated by these things, to actually realizing that the mushroom was what was behind it, and then to consciously seek them out for those kinds of experiences.\n\nPHF: Do you see a resurgence in the psychedelic orgiastic consciousness?\n\nTerence McKenna: Certainly psilocybin is a very important factor in the English rave and house music scene and psychedelics, though not psilocybin, were certainly a part of the sixties scene, which was then also associated with an orgiastic versus a monogamous style of sexuality. I'm not advocating that we return to orgies. After all, these African populations that I'm talking about were small groups of people between 70 and 125 people, roughly, and with the global pandemic of sexually transmitted diseases, you can't exactly advocate orgy, but I do think that, in social circles where psilocybin and psychedelics are being used, monogamy erodes and people tend to have more than one sexual partner, without the subterfuge and secretiveness that attends that in the ordinary dominator context. I guess I would say that the lesson from psilocybin is not that we should return to orgy, but that we should take a look at the modification of monogamy to permit people to have more than one sexual partner at a time, without having to be socially stigmatized.\n\nPHF: Do you think that there's an ideal recreational drug that may be created?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Mushrooms%2C+Sex+and+Society"}
{"id": "d88c404eef5d-5", "text": "PHF: Do you think that there's an ideal recreational drug that may be created?\n\nTerence McKenna: Many psychedelics have the effect that I've mentioned here. The reason I fasten in on the mushroom is because we evolved in the African grasslands, so if you're looking for a psychedelic stimulant to sexuality and consciousness in the context of early human evolution, it's going to be a grassland plant that requires no preparation and no combination with some other plant, because this all happened before that level of culture. Psilocybin emerges as the obvious candidate and I would say psilocybin is probably the best suited for this even today, because it's the one that we co-evolved with.\n\nPHF: What would you recommend in the way of a psychedelic, romantic experience?\n\nTerence McKenna: I think if they take 3-1/2 to 4 grams of [dried] psilocybin mushrooms, in comfortable, dimly lit surroundings, that they'll discover a dimension to sex that you're just not going to approximate any other way. I mean, this is a pretty well-kept secret -- or maybe it's not so well-kept -- but it's certainly true that psychedelics have a tremendously enhancing effect on sex. It's not exactly that they're aphrodisiacs, because they don't have an effect on performance, particularly, but whatever goes down is experienced much more intensely and vividly.\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Mushrooms%2C+Sex+and+Society"}
{"id": "fdc0da20efb4-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nAlien Footprints - Leprechauns, Elves, or Dead Souls?\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\nMay 1993\n\nWeekend Workshop, Esalen Institute, Big Sur, California\n\n9363\n\nEnd of Results\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Alien+Footprints+-+Leprechauns%2C+Elves%2C+or+Dead+Souls%3F"}
{"id": "df45a8090cb6-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nAlien Dreamtime\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n27 February 1993\n\nTransmission theater, San Francisco\n\n3317\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo youtube link available, try the following:\n\nAlien Dreamtime was a multimedia event recorded live on February 27th 1993\n\nAll right. Tonight for your edification and amusement, three raves, two interregnums. Visions by Rose-X. Didgeridoo: Steven Kent, and sound by Spacetime. Words and ideas by Terence McKenna.\n\nRap 1,", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Alien+Dreamtime"}
{"id": "df45a8090cb6-1", "text": "The Archaic Revival. History is ending because the dominator culture has led the human species into a blind alley, and as the inevitable chaostrophie approaches, people look for metaphors and answers. Every time a culture gets into trouble it casts itself back into the past looking for the last sane moment it ever knew. And the last sane moment we ever knew was on the plains of Africa 15,000 years ago rocked in the cradle of the Great Horned Mushroom Goddess before history, before standing armies, before slavery and property, before warfare and phonetic alphabets and monotheism, before, before, before. And this is where the future is taking us because the secret faith of the twentieth century is not modernism, the secret faith of the twentieth century is nostalgia for the archaic, nostalgia for the paleolithic, and that gives us body piercing, abstract expressionism, surrealism, jazz, rock-n-roll and catastrophe theory. The 20th century mind is nostalgic for", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Alien+Dreamtime"}
{"id": "df45a8090cb6-2", "text": "theory. The 20th century mind is nostalgic for the paradise that once existed on the mushroom dotted plains of Africa where the plant-human symbiosis occurred that pulled us out of the animal body and into the tool-using, culture-making, imagination-exploring creature that we are. And why does this matter? It matters because it shows that the way out is back and that the future is a forward escape into the past. This is what the psychedelic experience means. Its a doorway out of history and into the wiring under the board in eternity. And I tell you this because if the community understands what it is that holds it together the community will be better able to streamline itself for flight into hyperspace because what we need is a new myth, what we need is a new true story that tells us where we're going in the universe and that true story is that the ego is a product of pathology, and when psilocybin is regularly part of the human experience the ego is", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Alien+Dreamtime"}
{"id": "df45a8090cb6-3", "text": "is regularly part of the human experience the ego is suppressed and the suppression of the ego means the defeat of the dominators, the materialists, the product peddlers. Psychedelics return us to the inner worth of the self, to the importance of the feeling of immediate experience - and nobody can sell that to you and nobody can buy it from you, so the dominator culture is not interested in the felt presence of immediate experience, but that's what holds the community together. And as we break out of the silly myths of science, and the infantile obsessions of the marketplace what we discover through the psychedelic experience is that in the body, IN THE BODY, there are Niagaras of beauty, alien beauty, alien dimensions that are part of the self, the richest part of life. I think of going to the grave without having a psychedelic experience like going to the grave without ever having sex. It means that you never figured out what it is all about. The mystery is in", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Alien+Dreamtime"}
{"id": "df45a8090cb6-4", "text": "what it is all about. The mystery is in the body and the way the body works itself into nature. What the Archaic Revival means is shamanism, ecstasy, orgiastic sexuality, and the defeat of the three enemies of the people. And the three enemies of the people are hegemony, monogamy and monotony! And if you get them on the run you have the dominators sweating folks, because that means your getting it all reconnected, and getting it all reconnected means putting aside the idea of separateness and self-definition through thing-fetish. Getting it all connected means tapping into the Gaian mind, and the Gaian mind is what we're calling the psychedelic experience. Its an experience of the living fact of the entelechy of the planet. And without that experience we wander in a desert of bogus ideologies. But with that experience the compass of the self can be set, and that's the idea; figuring out how to reset the compass of the self through community, through ecstatic", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Alien+Dreamtime"}
{"id": "df45a8090cb6-5", "text": "the compass of the self through community, through ecstatic dance, through psychedelics, sexuality, intelligence, Intelligence. This is what we have to have to make the forward escape into hyperspace.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Alien+Dreamtime"}
{"id": "df45a8090cb6-6", "text": "Rap 2,", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Alien+Dreamtime"}
{"id": "df45a8090cb6-7", "text": "Alien Love Hello... So that was like an introduction, now for some preaching to the choir on the subject of how come it is that the further in you go the bigger it gets. I remember the very, very first time that I smoked DMT. It was sort of a benchmark you might say, and I remember that this friend of mine that always got there first visited me with this little glass pipe and this stuff which looked like orange mothballs. And since I was a graduate of Dr. Hoffman's I figured there were no surprises. So the only question I asked is, 'How long does it last?' and he said, 'About five minutes.' So I did it and... there was a something, like a flower, like a chrysanthemum in orange and yellow that was sort of spinning, spinning, and then it was like I was pushed from behind and I fell through the chrysanthemum into another place that didn't seem like a state of mind, it seemed like another place. And what", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Alien+Dreamtime"}
{"id": "df45a8090cb6-8", "text": "of mind, it seemed like another place. And what was going on in this place aside from the tastefully soffited indirect lighting, and the crawling geometric hallucinations along the domed walls, what was happening was that there were a lot of beings in there, what I call self-transforming machine elves. Sort of like jeweled basketballs all dribbling their way toward me. And if they'd had faces they would have been grinning, but they didn't have faces. And they assured me that they loved me and they told me not to be amazed; not to give way to astonishment. And so I watched them, even though I wondered if maybe I hadn't really done it this time, and what they were doing was they were making objects come into existence by singing them into existence. Objects which looked like Faberge eggs from Mars morphing them- selves with Mandian alphabetical structures. They looked like the concrescence of linguistic intentionality put through a kind of hyper-dimensional transform into", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Alien+Dreamtime"}
{"id": "df45a8090cb6-9", "text": "intentionality put through a kind of hyper-dimensional transform into three-dimensional space. And these little machines offered themselves to me. And I realized when I looked at them that if I could bring just one of these little trinkets back, nothing would ever be quite the same again. And I wondered, Where Am I? And What Is Going On? It occurred to me that these must be holographic viral projections from an autonomous continuum that was somehow intersecting my own, and then I thought a more elegant explanation would be to take it at face value and realize that I had broken into an ecology of souls. And that somehow I was getting a peek over the other side. Somehow I was finding out that thing that you cheerfully assume you can't find out. But it felt like I was finding out. And it felt.. and then I can't remember what it felt like because the little self-transforming tykes interrupted me and said, 'Don't think about it. Don't think about who you", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Alien+Dreamtime"}
{"id": "df45a8090cb6-10", "text": "think about it. Don't think about who you are. Think about doing what we're doing. Do it. Do it now. Do It!!'", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Alien+Dreamtime"}
{"id": "df45a8090cb6-11", "text": "Rap 3,", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Alien+Dreamtime"}
{"id": "df45a8090cb6-12", "text": "Speaking in Tongues And what they meant was use your voice to make an object. And as I understood, I felt a bubble kind of grow inside of me. And I watched these little elf tykes jumping in and out of my chest; they like to do that to reassure you. And they said, 'Do it.' And I felt language rise up in me that was unhooked from English, and I began to speak.. like this, 'Eyo ca dema fla gwa si pipi eng... or words to that effect. And I wondered then what it all meant and why it felt so good if it didn't mean anything. And I thought about it, a few years actually, and I decided that meaning and language are two different things. And that what the alien voice in the psychedelic experience wants to reveal is the syntactical nature of reality. That the real secret of magic is that the world is made of words, and that if you know the words that the world is made of you can", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Alien+Dreamtime"}
{"id": "df45a8090cb6-13", "text": "the words that the world is made of you can make of it whatever you wish. And one of the things that I learned about DMT was that if you've ever had it, even just once, then you can have a dream, and in this dream somebody will pull out a little glass pipe, and then it will happen! It will happen just like the real thing. Because there's a button somewhere inside each and every one of us that gives you a look into the other side. And that's the button that resets the compass that tells you where you want to sail. Good luck... Rap 4, Timewave Zero Hello... alright. Have you ever noticed how there's this quality to reality which comes and goes, and kind of ebbs and flows and nobody ever mentions it or has a name for it except some people call it a 'bad hair day' or some people say 'Things are really weird recently.' And I think we never notice it and we never talk about it because we're embedded in", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Alien+Dreamtime"}
{"id": "df45a8090cb6-14", "text": "and we never talk about it because we're embedded in a culture that expects us to believe that all times are the same, and that your bank account doesn't fluctuate except according to the vicissitudes of your own existence. In other words, every moment is expected to be the same and yet this isn't what we experience. And so what I noticed was that running through reality is the ebb and flow of novelty. And some days, and some years, and some centuries are very novel indeed, and some ain't. And they come and go on all scales differently, interweaving, resonating. And this is what time seems to be. And Science has overlooked this, this most salient of facts about nature: that nature is a novelty conserving engine. And that from the very first moments of that most improbable big bang, novelty has been conserved because in the very beginning there was only an ocean of energy pouring into the universe. There were no planets, no stars, no molecules,", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Alien+Dreamtime"}
{"id": "df45a8090cb6-15", "text": "There were no planets, no stars, no molecules, no atoms, no magnetic fields; there was only an ocean of free electrons. And then time passed and the universe cooled and novel structures crystallized out of disorder. First, atoms; atoms of hydrogen and helium aggregating into stars. And at the center of those stars the temperature and the pressure created something which had never been seen before which was fusion. And fusion cooking in the hearts of stars brought forth more novelty: heavy elements - iron, carbon, four-valet carbon. And as time passed there were not only then elementary systems but because of the presence of carbon and the lower temperatures in the universe, molecular structures. And out of molecules come simple subsets of organism. The genetic machinery for transcripting information, aggregating into membranes, always binding novelty, always condensing time, always building and conserving upon complexity, and always faster and faster and faster. And then we come to ourselves. And where do WE fit", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Alien+Dreamtime"}
{"id": "df45a8090cb6-16", "text": "we come to ourselves. And where do WE fit into all of this. Five million years ago we were an animal of some sort. Where will we be five million years from tonight? What we represent is not a sideshow, or an epiphenomenon, or an ancillary something-or-other on the edge of nowhere. What WE represent is the nexus of concrescent novelty that has been moving itself together, complexifying itself, folding itself in upon itself for billions and billions of years. There is, so far as we know, nothing more advanced than what is sitting behind your eyes. The human neo cortex is the most densely ramified complexified structure in the known universe. We are the cutting edge of organismic transformation of matter in this cosmos. And this has been going on for a while; since the discovery of fire, since the discovery of language. But now, and by now I mean in the last 10,000 years, we've been into something new. Not genetic information, not genetic mutation,", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Alien+Dreamtime"}
{"id": "df45a8090cb6-17", "text": "something new. Not genetic information, not genetic mutation, not natural selection, but epigenetic activity: writing, theater, poetry, dance, art, tattooing, body piercing and philosophy. And these things have accelerated the ingression into novelty so that we have become an idea excreting force in nature that builds temples, builds cities, builds machines, social engines, plans, and spreads over the Earth, into space, into the micro-physical domain, into the micro-physical domain. We, who five million years ago were animals, can kindle in our deserts and if necessary upon the cities of our enemies the very energy which lights the stars at night. Now, something peculiar is going on here. Something is calling us out of nature and sculpting us in it's own image. And the confrontation with this something is now not so far away. This is what the impending apparent end of everything actually means. It means that the de-no-ma of human history is about to occur and is about to be revealed", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Alien+Dreamtime"}
{"id": "df45a8090cb6-18", "text": "about to occur and is about to be revealed as a universal process of compressing and expressing novelty that is now going to become so intensified that it is going to flow over into another dimension. You can feel it. You can feel it in your own dreams. You can feel it in your own trips. You can feel that we're approaching the cusp of a catastrophe, and that beyond that cusp we are unrecognizable to ourselves. The wave of novelty that has rolled unbroken since the birth of the universe has now focused and coalesced itself in our species. And if it seems unlikely to you that the world is about to transform itself, then think of it this way: think of a pond, and think of how if the surface of the pond begins to boil - that's the signal that some enormous protean form is about to break the surface of the pond and reveal itself. Human history IS the boiling of the pond surface of ordinary biology. We are flesh", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Alien+Dreamtime"}
{"id": "df45a8090cb6-19", "text": "the pond surface of ordinary biology. We are flesh which has been caught in the grip of some kind of an attractor that lies ahead of us in time, and that is sculpting us to its ends; speaking to us through psychedelics, through visions, through culture, and technology, consciousness. The language forming capacity in our species is propelling itself forward as though it were going to shed the monkey body and leap into some extra-surreal space that surrounds us, but that we can not currently see. Even the people who run the planet, the World Bank, the IMF, you name it, they know that history is ending. They know by the reports which cross their desks: the disappearance of the ozone hole [?], the toxification of the ocean, the clearing of the rain forests. What this means is that the womb of the planet has reached its finite limits, and that the human species has now, without choice, begun the decent down the birth canal of collective transformation toward something right", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Alien+Dreamtime"}
{"id": "df45a8090cb6-20", "text": "birth canal of collective transformation toward something right around the corner and nearly completely unimaginable. And this is where the psychedelic shaman comes is because I believe that what we really contact through psychedelics is a kind of hyperspace. And from that hyperspace we look down on..., we look down on both the past and the future, and we anticipate the end. And a shaman is someone who has seen the end, and therefore is a trickster, because you don't worry if you've seen the end. If you know how it comes out you go back and you take your place in the play, and you let it all roll on without anxiety. This is what boundary dissolution means. It means nothing less than the anticipation of the end state of human history. A return to the archaic mode. A rediscovery of the orgiastic freedom of the African grasslands of 20,000 years ago. A techno-escape forward into a future that looks more like the past than the future because materialism,", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Alien+Dreamtime"}
{"id": "df45a8090cb6-21", "text": "more like the past than the future because materialism, consumerism, product-fetishism, all of these things will be eliminated and technology will become nanotechnology and disappear from our physical presence. If we have the dream, if we allow the wave of novelty to propel us toward the creativity that is inimitable to the human condition. That's what we're talking about here: psychedelics as a catalyst to the human imagination, psychedelics as a catalyst for language; because what cannot be said, cannot be created by the community. So what we need then is the forced evolution of language. And the way to do that is to go back to the agents that created language in the very first place. And that means the psychedelic plants, the Gaian Logos, and the mysterious, beckoning, extraterrestrial minds beyond. Hooking ourselves back up in to the Chakras of the hierarchy of nature, turning ourselves over to the mind of the total other that created us and brought us forth out of animal", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Alien+Dreamtime"}
{"id": "df45a8090cb6-22", "text": "that created us and brought us forth out of animal organization. We are somehow part of the planetary destiny. How well we do determines how well the experiment of life on Earth does, because we have become the cutting edge of that experiment, we define it, and we hold in our hands the power to make or to break it. This is not a dress rehearsal for the apocalypse. This is not a pseudo-millennium. This is the real thing folks. This is not a test. This is the last chance before things become so dissipated that there is no chance for cohesiveness. We can use the calender as a club. We can make the millennium an occasion for establishing an authentic human civilization, overcoming the dominator paradigm, dissolving boundaries through psychedelics, recreating a sexuality not based on monotheism, monogamy and monotony. We.. All these things are possible if we can understand the overarching metaphor which holds it together which is the celebration of mind", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Alien+Dreamtime"}
{"id": "df45a8090cb6-23", "text": "holds it together which is the celebration of mind as play, the celebration of love as a genuine social value in the community. This is what they have suppressed so long. This is why they are so afraid of the psychedelics, because they understand that once you touch the inner core of your own and someone else's being you can't be led into thing-fetishes and consumerism. The message of psychedelics is that culture can be re-engineered as a set of emotional values rather than products. This is terrifying news. And if we are able to make this point then we can pull back, we can pull back and we can transcend. Nine times in the last million years the ice has ground south from the poles pushing human populations ahead of it and those people didn't fuck up. Why should we then? We are all survivors. We are the inheritors of a million years of striving for the unspeakable. And now with the engines of technology in our hands we ought to be able to", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Alien+Dreamtime"}
{"id": "df45a8090cb6-24", "text": "technology in our hands we ought to be able to reach out and actually exteriorize the human soul at the end of time, invoke it into existence like a UFO and open the violet doorway into hyperspace and walk through it, out of profane history and into the world beyond the grave, beyond shamanism, beyond the end of history, into the galactic millennium that has beckoned to us for millions of years across space and time. This is the moment. A planet brings forth an opportunity like this only once in its lifetime, and we are ready, and we are poised. And as a community we are ready to move into it, to claim it, to make it our own. It's there. Go for it, and thank you.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Alien+Dreamtime"}
{"id": "df45a8090cb6-25", "text": "Save the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Alien+Dreamtime"}
{"id": "c99eb0105f6e-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nTaxonomy of Illusion\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n1993\n\nUniversity of California Santa Cruz, Santa Cruz, CA\n\n11602\n\nEnd of Results\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Taxonomy+of+Illusion"}
{"id": "a72eed820cf5-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nVisiting Terence's home with Thomas Norm Daniela Barry\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n1993\n\nOccidental, Hawaii\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo youtube link available, try the following:\n\nNo transcript available for this talk!\n\nHelp Transcribe\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Visiting+Terence%27s+home+with+Thomas+Norm+Daniela+Barry"}
{"id": "c6e879625843-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\n(aka This Counts, Somehow it Matters & A Higher Dimensional Section of Reality)\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\nDecember 1994\n\nUnknown\n\n9749\n\nEnd of Results\n\n{1:00:30}\n\n{2:24:11}\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/%28aka+This+Counts%2C+Somehow+it+Matters+%26+A+Higher+Dimensional+Section+of+Reality%29"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nRap Dancing Into the Third Millenium\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n19-24 July, 1994\n\nStarwood XIV Festival, Brushwood Folklore Center, Sherman, New York\n\n15054\n\nEnd of Results", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-1", "text": "Alright, can you hear in the back? Yeah, is the sound comfortable for everyone? Is the light comfortable for everyone? And are you comfortable? Well, you shouldn\u2019t be, the planet\u2019s going to shit in a handbag. No, I\u2019m, I\u2019m\u2026 That's just my John Lily imitation \u2013 it\u2019s not me at all. Most of you were probably at the talk I gave yesterday, is that basically safe to assume? Yes. So I thought today I would talk a little bit and then I think these things are much more interesting for me if they\u2019re interactive. And people bring all kinds of agendas to these things. And I don\u2019t know whether people wanna talk philosophy or recipes. I don\u2019t know whether they wanna talk politics or, you know, share experiences. So I want to, just in order to make sure we all understand the domain we\u2019re operating from here, I would like to talk a little about what it\u2019s like to be loaded because I think that\u2019s ground zero of what we\u2019re talking", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-2", "text": "I think that\u2019s ground zero of what we\u2019re talking about. Psychedelics are like any other social phenomena \u2013 there are a lot of wannabe\u2019s. There are a lot of people who are along for the ride. I\u2019m sure the pagan community is no stranger to this phenomenon because there are certain residual spinoffs if you proclaim yourself pagan, but are hard to obtain any other way. Similarly for being psychedelic. My notion of the psychedelic cosmogony \u2013 if you want to think of it that way \u2013 is it\u2019s like a bulls-eye. It\u2019s like a series of concentric circles. And various substances place you in various quadrants of that mandala at various distances from ground zero, which is at the absolute center. And nature, in her bounty, has provided coordination points. I mean, there\u2019s cannabis coordination point, the opiate coordination point, the tropanes that were so important in European witchcraft, the solanaceous plants, hyoscyamine, those things. That\u2019s a different", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-3", "text": "plants, hyoscyamine, those things. That\u2019s a different chemical family and a different group of plant families that these compounds occur in. I\u2019ve been at this fairly steadily since 1964. And have tried to do everything with a certain level of attention and reverence because I think that it\u2019s all very fine to go armed with the knowledge of pharmacology, dose response, LD50 and all that. But I think as pagans and magicians we really understand that the mind can do anything and there\u2019s a horribly frightening little passage in Jung somewhere, where he says, \u2018The unconscious has a thousand ways to terminate a life that has become meaningless.\u2019 Meaning, you\u2019ll step in front of a streetcar, or something. So in my lifetime of looking at these things, and being interested in many other things as well \u2013 heresies, obscure backwaters of art history and literature, peculiar philosophies that rose and fell centuries ago in obscure parts of the world, my theory of life\u2019s exploration is", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-4", "text": "of the world, my theory of life\u2019s exploration is to run edges. And I\u2019ve mellowed over the years but I use to say if a book isn\u2019t 100 years old you shouldn\u2019t read it, if a person isn\u2019t dead you shouldn\u2019t worry about them; if they wrote in English you shouldn\u2019t bother with them; so forth and so on. In the course of sorting out as many peculiar and bizarre possibilities as life could offer me in many places my attitude was always critical. My attitude was always a \u2018show me\u2019 attitude. I don\u2019t believe in faith. I don\u2019t believe in belief. My favorite gospel story is the story of the apostle Thomas, who was not present when Christ came the first time after the resurrection to the upper room. And then later Thomas came to the apostles and they said \u2018the master has been here\u2019, and he said \u2018you guys have been smoking too much of that red leb.\u2019 And then Christ came again, but in this conversation the apostle", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-5", "text": "Christ came again, but in this conversation the apostle Thomas said \u2018unless I put my hand into the wound, I will not believe it.\u2019 And then time passed, and then Christ came again to the upper room. And he said, \u2018Thomas, come forward, put your hand into the wound.\u2019 And he did and then he said \u2018Lord, I am not worthy\u2019 so forth and so on. My conclusion about this story is that alone among all humanity and all times and places, only one person every touched the incorporeal body of God. Thomas the doubter touched because he doubted. It was not necessary that the believers should be vouch safe to such a boon, but the doubter was awarded the supreme enlightenment. Ok, so much for that. So my thing has always been, whether you present me with a diet, a social arrangement, a sexual conundrum, a work of art, my criteria is \u2018is it shit, or is it Shinola?\u2019 I\u2019m happy to give you the benefit of my personal", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-6", "text": "happy to give you the benefit of my personal life\u2019s experience preceding along those lines. I want to talk about what to my mind is the quintessential hallucinogen, and consequently the quintessential spiritual and magical tool of this dimension. And that is DMT \u2013 dimethyltryptamine. A compound that occurs in the human nervous system, it occurs in many many plants, it the commonest hallucinogen in all of nature. And I don\u2019t know how you got to where you are this afternoon, but they way I got here is by testing and by hoping and by pursuing a magical, if that\u2019s the word, a miraculous, transcendental ideal that over the course of life experience strips from you. You know, you have to get a job, your first love is not your last love, slowly this pristine shining belief in perfectibility is eroded by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. You know, the dark oxen that turn the millstones of the world. But I\u2019m here to", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-7", "text": "the millstones of the world. But I\u2019m here to tell you that it is real \u2013 there is a doorway into another dimension. Aladdin\u2019s lamp is real. Fairyland is real. Magic is real in the most real sense! In the same sense that what we call reality is real. And I learned this through this compound. And one of the great puzzles about this compound is why more people don\u2019t know about it. No brotherhood initiated me. No lineage reaching back to the fall of Atlantis brought me into its circle. Therefore, I feel completely free to say anything I want. Nobody has ever come to me and said \u2018you are spilling the beans, you are telling the secret.\u2019 A long long time ago \u2013 and you know, we all have different opinions, this is mine, I hope it doesn\u2019t offend \u2013 but a long long time ago I took an oath to tell all secrets that came my way. Don\u2019t tell me a secret. I won\u2019t keep it. I\u2019m against secrets, I\u2019m", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-8", "text": "won\u2019t keep it. I\u2019m against secrets, I\u2019m against hierarchies, lineages, all assumption of special knowledge on the part of anyone in the presence of anyone else is abhorrent to me. I mean, I am a true anarchist first and foremost. So, DMT, like all things in this world, has a physical body \u2013 a presence and a presentation. In this case it looks rather like earwax. It is orange. It is crystalline. It smells vaguely of moth balls. And for my money, it is the lapis, the quintessence, the universal panacea at the end of time has sent a reflection back through the temporal labyrinth, and wherever this touches, where ever this concresses, the mystery is fully present. So what is it, then? Well, it\u2019s an experience, and I maintain it\u2019s the most intense experience you can have this side of the yawning grave, without doubt. I mean, people say \u2018is it dangerous?\u2019. Well, the answer is \u2018only if you fear", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-9", "text": "Well, the answer is \u2018only if you fear death by astonishment!\u2019. Yes, that\u2019s a joke here. It\u2019s not a joke there because you find yourself literally holding your heart to verify that you have not, in fact, had a coronary thrombosis induced by wonder, terror, reverence, and astonishment. So, here it is. The quintessence, the orange thing. Was it transponded in from Arcturus? Was it handed down through some ancient Eldritch brotherhood that found this secret before the pyramids were built? Who can say? Whatever it is, wherever it comes from, here\u2019s what happens when you allow it to pass through the blood-brain barrier of your own alchemical vessel which is your body. The first thing that happens is that there is a sense as though all the air in the room had been sucked out. All the colors brightened. This is that increase in visual acuity that I made so much of yesterday. All edges become sharp. Distant things stand out in", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-10", "text": "All edges become sharp. Distant things stand out in their clarity. This is at one toke. At two tokes, you close your eyes, you feel a sense of anesthesia seeping through your body. You close your eyes and you see a floral pattern rotating in space, usually yellow-orange. People who do this occasionally \u2013 and nobody does it a lot \u2013 call it \u2018the chrysanthemum\u2019. It\u2019s a floral pattern like a pattern in a Chinese brocade. This forms and stabilizes and then you either break through it, or you require one more toke. And these are matters of physiology, shamanic intent, so forth and so on. The leather lunged hash smokers among us have a leg up in this department. This is a spiritual discipline where the ability not to cough makes the difference between shunyata and, you know, \u2018try again, Sam.\u2019 So, you take, let us assume a third toke, long and slow through a glass pipe. You vaporize this stuff. You don\u2019t mix it with", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-11", "text": "vaporize this stuff. You don\u2019t mix it with weed or oregano or any of that which was done in the past. You want the pure stuff. And you take it in and in and in and there is definitely somewhere in here a threshold. A threshold which you must exceed. And when you do that, this membrane-like thing, this chrysanthemum will actually part and there is a sound like the crumpling of a plastic bread wrapper, or the crackling of flame. A friend of mine says \u2018this is the radio entelechy of your soul exiting through the anterior fontanelle at the top of your head.\u2019 Could be! In any case, this crackling sound and a tone \u2013 a tone \u2013 a [hum changing from low to high pitch] \u2013 and then there\u2019s this impression of transition. And you\u2019re now 20 seconds deep into this experience. There\u2019s an impression of transition. It\u2019s as though there were a series of tunnels or chambers that you are tumbling down, being propelled by some", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-12", "text": "that you are tumbling down, being propelled by some kind of muscle behind you that is pushing you. I mean, yes, birth canal, yes yes of course. But anyway, a tunnel. And what I\u2019ve noticed about this tunnel is the walls and ceiling flux and come down to meet each other and where they touch, they pull apart with a [makes a sucking sound]. And then you\u2019re propelled into the next space, and then the next, and then the next, and there is this [repeats the sucking sound] \u2013 right. And then you are \u2018there\u2019. And this is what I want to talk to you about because of all communities, I hope perhaps collectively, singly, someone can say something enlightening about this. Then you are there. And where is \u2018there\u2019? It\u2019s underground. How you know this you cannot say but there is an irreconcilable sense of enormous mass surrounding you. In other words, you are underground. You\u2019re at the center of a mountain or something. And", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-13", "text": "at the center of a mountain or something. And you\u2019re in a room which aficionados call \u2018the dome\u2019 and people will ask each other \u2018did you see the dome? Were you there?\u2019 It\u2019s softly lit, indirectly lit, and the walls \u2013 if such they be \u2013 are crawling with geometric hallucinations: very brightly colored, very iridescent with deep sheens and very high reflective surfaces. Everything is machine-like and polished and throbbing with energy. But that is not what immediately arrests my attention. What arrests my attention is the fact that this space is inhabited \u2013 that the immediate impression as you break into it, is there is a cheer. The gnomes have learned a new way so say \u2018hoooooray!\u2019 You break in to this space and are immediately swarmed by squeaking, self-transforming elf-machines. These things which are made of light, and grammar, and sound that come chirping, and squealing, and tumbling toward you. And they say \u2018Hooray! Welcome!", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-14", "text": "toward you. And they say \u2018Hooray! Welcome! You\u2019re here!\u2018, and in my case, \u2018you sent so many and you come so rarely\u2019. And my immediate impression, no matter how many times I do this \u2013 and I\u2019ve done it maybe 30 or 40 times which isn\u2019t a lot in a lifetime of worshiping it \u2013 my immediate impression is that they are welcoming. There is something going on which I over the years come to call \u2018LUV\u2019 \u2013 L, U, V. Not \u2018light utility vehicle\u2019, but LUV that is not like Eros or not like sexual attraction, I don\u2019t know what it\u2019s like exactly. It\u2019s almost like a physical thing. It\u2019s like a glue that pours out into this space. And my immediate impression in there is, I\u2019m appalled. I\u2019m appalled at how far I\u2019ve come. And one of the strange things about DMT is that it does not affect your mind in an ordinary sense. In that, you know, drugs they make you giggly,", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-15", "text": "you know, drugs they make you giggly, they frighten you, they stimulate you, they depress you. DMT does none of this. You go to that place with all your groceries. You\u2019re there, and you\u2019re there thinking \u2018Jesus H fucking Christ, what is this? What is it?\u2019 And you\u2019re thinking \u2018I must be dead, I\u2019ve done it this time.\u2019 The psychedelic mantra: \u2018I\u2019ve done it this time. I must be dead!\u2019 And so you, you know, you think \u2018heart, heart? Yes, hmm, heart, hmm, hmm. Pulse, pulse? Yes, yes.\u2019 And meanwhile these things are literally in your face. And what they do is they jump into your chest and then they jump out again, and what they\u2019re doing \u2013 and this is the point I think \u2013 what they\u2019re doing is they are singing, chanting, speaking, in some kind of language that is very bizarre to hear. But what is far more important is that you can see it. They speak in a language which you", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-16", "text": "see it. They speak in a language which you see. And this is completely confounding! Because syntax is not something you ordinarily reach out and touch. And in this space that\u2019s what happening. And so like jeweled self-dribbling basketballs, these things come running forward. And what they are doing with this visible language that they create, is they are making gifts \u2013 they are making gifts for you. And they will say [language disassociated from meaning] which condenses as something that looks like a cross between aSopwith Camel, a Havana cigar, a piece of abalone, an opal, and a nookie, and they offer it to you! And you\u2019re looking at this thing, and as you look at it, it also transforms, changes, speaks, sings, undergoes metastasis, undergoes metamorphosis. And these things are just accumulating. And each elf-machine creature elbows others aside, says \u2018look at this, look at this, take this, choose me\u2019. And as you direct your attention into these things, you have the", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-17", "text": "you direct your attention into these things, you have the overwhelming conviction that if you could bring a single one of these objects back to this world, that somehow you wouldn\u2019t have to say anything. You would just walk up to people and say \u2018friend\u2019. And people would say \u2018Oh my god! You got a piece of the action, the real action!\u2019 This state of ecstatic frenzy \u2013 and it\u2019s like a bugs bunny cartoon running backwards in cyberspace or something \u2013 this state of incredible frenzy goes on for about three minutes and all the time the elves are saying \u2018Don\u2019t give way to wonder. Do not abandon yourself to amazement. Pay attention, pay attention! Look at what we\u2019re doing. Look \u2013 at \u2013 what \u2013 we\u2019re \u2013 doing\u2019, and then \u2018do it, do it!\u2019 And it\u2019s this thing where then everything stops and they wait and you feel like a torch, a spark, lit in your belly that begins to move up your esophagus. And eventually when it reaches your", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-18", "text": "your esophagus. And eventually when it reaches your mouth, your mouth just flies open and this language-like stuff comes out. Acoustically, it\u2019s [language disassociated from meaning] But what you\u2019re \u2013 you\u2019re not hearing it. The startled friends who sent you to this place are putting up with this \u2013 what you\u2019re experiencing is a visual modality where these tones are surfaces, shading, colors, insets, jewels, you are making something. [language disassociated from meaning] You know, erase, move forward, add cerulean, put in stippling \u2013 it\u2019s that sort of thing. And they go mad with joy when you do this. And then, you know, this goes on for about 30 seconds and then there is like a ripple through the system and you realize these two continua are being pulled apart. And I had one trip where the \u2013 and often it\u2019s very erotic, although I\u2019m not sure that\u2019s the word. But it\u2019s something, it\u2019s almost like sex is the surface of something of which this is the", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-19", "text": "is the surface of something of which this is the volume. And I\u2019m a great fan of sex. I don\u2019t mean to denigrate it. I mean to raise DMT to a very high status. But it\u2019s astonishing. In one trip as the pull-away maneuver began, all the elves turned simultaneously and looked at me and said \u2018d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu, d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu.\u2019 So, this is an experience which in some form \u2013 I mean it will be different for each one of you \u2013 but in some form at least what will be similar to my description is how dramatic it will be. It will hit you as hard as it hit me if you do it right. This,to me, this experience is of a fundamentally different order than any other experience this side of the yawning grave. And why religions have not been built around it? Why empires have not risen and fallen around the control of its sources? Why theology has not enshrined it as its central exhibit for the presence of the other in the", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-20", "text": "central exhibit for the presence of the other in the human world? I don\u2019t know. I can tell the secret. As you notice, nothing shuts me up. But why this is not four-inch headlines on every newspaper on the planet I cannot understand because I don\u2019t know what news you were waiting for, but this is the news that I was waiting for. It\u2019s an incredible challenge to human understanding to try and make sense of this. And I started out, you know, reading Jung, doing my Hindu, you know getting up to speed with all that, studying Zen Buddhism, studying shamanism. The thing that puzzles me about DMT is how little trace there is of it in the human world. I can\u2019t point to a period in European art, or the art of some group of islanders somewhere, and say that is very much like DMT. It isn\u2019t. And yet the DMT thing is, it\u2019s like an avalanche of orgasmic beauty, but a certain kind of beauty that only", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-21", "text": "but a certain kind of beauty that only words that I can find for the kind of beauty that it is, is \u2018bizarre\u2019, \u2018alien\u2019, \u2018outlandish\u2019, outr\u00e9, \u2018freaky\u2019, and at the very edge of what the human mind seems to be able to hold. Well, where is this coming from? And what is happening? And this is what I like to discuss with people such as yourselves who have wide experience in the world and in the realms of the unseen. This has to be taken seriously. In other words, \u2018it\u2019s only a hallucination\u2019 thing \u2013 that horse shit is just pass\u00e9. I mean, reality is only a hallucination for crying out loud, haven\u2019t you heard? So that takes care of that \u2013 it\u2019s only a hallucination. What we\u2019ve got here, folks, is an intelligent entelechy of some sort that is frantic to communicate with human beings for some reason. And the possibilities can be logically enumerated. What we\u2019ve got here is either \u2018this is", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-22", "text": "What we\u2019ve got here is either \u2018this is an extraterrestrial\u2019, you know, evolved around a different star possibly with a different biology, may not even be made of matter, came across an enormous distance sometime maybe long ago, has some agenda which we may or may not be able to conceive of, this is it \u2013 the real thing as the little girl said in Poltergeist \u201cthey\u2019re here!\u201d. So that\u2019s one possibility. That\u2019s just one possibility. I present these without judgement, because I\u2019m not sure. If an extraterrestrial wanted to interact with a human society, and it had ethics that forbade it from landing trillion ton beryllium ships on the United Nations plaza \u2013 in other words if it were subtle \u2013 I can see hiding yourself inside a shamanic intoxication. You would say \u2018let\u2019s analyze these people, okay they\u2019re kinda hard-headed rationalists, except they have this phenomenon called \u201cgetting loaded\u201d and when they get loaded they accept whatever happens to them. So let\u2019s hide", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-23", "text": "accept whatever happens to them. So let\u2019s hide inside the load and we\u2019ll talk to them from there and they\u2019ll never realize that we\u2019re of a different status than pink elephants.\u2019 Okay, that\u2019s one possibility. Now another possibility is that this is not about extraterrestrials, flight, and enormous technologies and distant homelands \u2013 and this is maybe closer to, friendlier to pagan notions \u2013 that there is a parallel continuum nearby, essentially right here. Call it fairy land, call it the Western realm, whatever you like, but you don\u2019t go there in star-ships. You go there through magical doorways which are opened via ritual and things like that. That is a possibility as well. Certainly human folklore in all times and places, except Western Europe for the last 300 years, has insisted that these parallel domains of intelligence and organization exist. There is a third possibility, which \u2013 I leave it to you to decide whether this is the more conservative position or the more radical position. And I", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-24", "text": "conservative position or the more radical position. And I reached this reluctantly and I\u2019m not sure this is my position, but uh \u2026 These things have a weird \u2013 these tykes, as I call them, these self-transforming machine elves, these syntactical homunculi \u2013 have a very weird relationship to human beings. First of all, they love us! They care for some reason. Whoever and whatever they are, they\u2019re far more aware of us than we are aware of them. Witness the fact that they welcome me. So is it possible that at the end of the 20th century, at the end of 500 years of materialism, reductionism, positivism, what we\u2019re about to discover is probably the least likely denouement any of us expected out of our dilemma. What we\u2019re about to discover is that death has no sting. That what you penetrate on DMT is an ecology of human souls in another dimension of some sort. I mean, this is hair raising to me and I\u2019ve spent my whole adolescence", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-25", "text": "raising to me and I\u2019ve spent my whole adolescence and early adulthood getting free from Catholicism and its assumptions and I never imagined that a thorough exploration of life\u2019s mysteries would lead to the conclusion that, in fact, this is but a prelude. We are in a very tiny womb of some sort. Our lives are just stations, and this is not where we are destined to unfold ourselves into what it means to be human. This is some kind of metamorphic stage like the pupa of a butterfly. And so, this is deep water. Because, we are fairly agitated over the fact that we fear the planet is dying and us with it. This stuff raises the issue: you don\u2019t know what dying is. Therefore it\u2019s very uncertain exactly what sort of an attitude we should take to it. And as I say, I\u2019m not advocating a position. Mysteries are not unsolved problems, they are mysteries. When you stand naked in the presence of the mystery, it", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-26", "text": "stand naked in the presence of the mystery, it is still utterly and completely mysterious. But I enjoy talking to people about this, because I think that the human body, the human mind, these are tools for the soul to use in the effort to unlock its meaning and its destiny. And millions of people, perhaps billions of people, have gone to the grave without knowing that this is possible \u2013 this experience that I\u2019ve just described to you. And it\u2019s perfectly harmless. I mean, I think that if science would back out of politics and do its work, we could establish that DMT is the most harmless, the safest, of all hallucinogens. The fact that it occurs naturally in the human brain is the first clue to the fact that it\u2019s benign. The second clue is the fact that it only lasts 8 to 12 minutes. What that means to a pharmacologist is the body perfectly understands what to do with this compound \u2013 you take a hit of DMT and", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-27", "text": "this compound \u2013 you take a hit of DMT and your body says \u2018oh, I recognize this, activate deamination cycle, activate demethylation cycle, activate \u2026\u2019 \u2013 it knows what to do. And so within ten minutes your down. A drug that you take and 48 hours later you\u2019re lying around in warm baths and refusing telephone calls is a drug you shouldn\u2019t have taken. Because it\u2019s hitting you too hard, it\u2019s not clean, it\u2019s not smooth. DMT \u2013 the most powerful hallucinogen known to man and science \u2013 clears your system in 15 minutes! I mean, you\u2019re so down you can\u2019t, you don\u2019t have a small headache or need to take a nap or anything! You\u2019re ready to do phone calls. So how can it be then that a compound which each of us carries \u2013 right here \u2013 right in the pineal gland, right in the Ajna chakra. The philosopher\u2019s stone is no further away than that. How can this be secret from us? How can we be trapped in a", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-28", "text": "from us? How can we be trapped in a dimension of such limitation and such mundaneness when our own nervous systems, and the ecology around us, and our own history over the past half million years argues that this is what we were born and bred for. This is where we belong. This is what \u2018at play in the fields of the Goddess\u2019 must mean. And somehow history has made us dysfunctional, buried the mystery, made it, if at best, a piece of secret knowledge jealously guarded by somebody. I mean, I don\u2019t know. There are lots of mystery cults and secret societies in the world. I don\u2019t know if any of them are guarding DMT as a secret. It may be so. No one told me to keep my mouth shut. A very suggestive short story \u2013 I\u2019m sure many of you know and love the Argentine surrealist writer Jorge Luis Borges. Well, Borges has a book \u2013 I believe it\u2019s called \u2018Labyrinths\u2019 \u2013 and in", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-29", "text": "believe it\u2019s called \u2018Labyrinths\u2019 \u2013 and in Labyrinths there is a short story called \u2018The Sect of the Phoenix\u2019 and it says \u2018There is a sacrament older than mankind. The sectarians have been the victims of every persecution in human history, and the sectarians have been the purveyors of every persecution in history. These sectarians are not identifiable by race or place or language or time. To the adept, the mystery appears ridiculous, yet they do not speak of it. One child can initiate another. It is orange. Ruins are propitious places. Do it in the moonlight in the thresholds of buildings.\u2019 And that\u2019s all it said \u2013 it\u2019s a page and a half. And it suggests \u2013 and see, here\u2019s the thing \u2013 I\u2019m not as articulate on this subject as I wish I could be \u2013 if this is not the secret that these lineages are guarding, then they\u2019re guarding an empty house. This is the secret! It is, it is! It cannot be", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-30", "text": "the secret! It is, it is! It cannot be anything else. It is the neoplatonic One. It is the trans-substantiant object \u2013 the panis supersubstantialis of the alchemists. I\u2019m not saying that people have known about this for a long time. DMT is in many plants as I said, but spread very thinly and we don\u2019t have historical records of anyone ever concentrating it. I\u2019ve done the DMT plant preparations of the Amazon \u2013 the snuffs and the ayahuasca. And on ayahuasca, if it is heavily laced with the DMT-containing plant, after hours of breath work and drumming, alone in the jungle, you can begin to open it up to the place that DMT will carry you to in 45 seconds in an upper east-side apartment, whether you like it or not. So, some of you may have seen, years and years ago, this B movie about a guy who has a big ranch in Mexico, and one of the campesinos comes rushing back from having", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-31", "text": "one of the campesinos comes rushing back from having encountered a brontosaur in the forest, and he can only point inarticulately at the woods and say \u2018something, something, something, something!!\u2019 And that\u2019s what I am! I\u2019m a monkey. And I\u2019ve come back to the troop, and I\u2019m telling you there\u2019s something over the next hill that is off the scale, off the scale. And I have made it my business to, you know, delve, I\u2019m a delver, I\u2019m a noetic archaeologist \u2013 obscure heresies and strange rites and all of this stuff \u2013 been there, done that. It\u2019s all pale soup compared to this. And so, I hype it to you simply to try and inspire you to explore it. We are, in the present state, in the position of explorers of a new world fifty years after Columbus. We have notebook entries. We have partial maps. But we don\u2019t have a complete map of what this thing is. It\u2019s another dimension. It is", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-32", "text": "what this thing is. It\u2019s another dimension. It is literally another dimension. I took DMT to a lama of great accomplishment, not one of the grab-ass can of Budweiser welded to the good right hand lamas but a real lama. This guy was over 90 when he smoked DMT and since his wheel has turned. And he said to me \u2018it\u2019s the lesser lights\u2019. He said \u2018you can\u2019t go further into the Bardo and return.\u2019 And so I think that we stand at the brink of an enormous frontier \u2013 call it incorporeality, call it non-material existence, or, you know, bite the bullet call it death. But this is the frontier that we stand on the edge of. This is what history has been about. History has been some kind of suicide plot for 15,000 years. Nota moment passed that the plot was not advanced closer and closer and closer to completion. And now in the 20th century, you know, we see that this thing \u2013 this transcendental object at", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-33", "text": "see that this thing \u2013 this transcendental object at the end of time, this attractor \u2013 has been, that chose us out of the animal kingdom, and sculpted the neocortex, opposed the thumb, stood us on our hind legs, gave us binocular vision \u2013 this thing is calling us toward itself across aeons of cosmic time. We are asked to mirror it and as we mirror it, we become more of its essence. And as we become more of its essence, we leave behind the animal organization that we were cast in, in the beginning. And what this is about? Who knows? Is this a drama of cosmic redemption? Is it the transcendental other at the end of time? Is it a gnostic daemon, is it [Inaudible] What is it? We do not know. But I really believe we are in the era when we will come to know. And what the psychedelics are, are periscopes in the temporal dimension. If you want to see a little", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-34", "text": "temporal dimension. If you want to see a little bit into the future, elevate you psychedelic periscope outside of the three dimensional continuum and peer around. For thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years we have been pulled towards this omega point. The earth is like an egg \u2013 it has come to its moment of fructification. The dawn that has been anticipated since we were herding our cattle across the plains of Africa is now upon us. The East is streaked with the blush of rosy dawn. It is coming upon us, and I think that is will redeem history \u2013 that history is not a nightmare, it is a passage. It is an initiation. Think of the fetus in the womb at the moment of transition. Surely it must despair. The walls are closing in. It\u2019s being crushed and strangled. Gone are the endless amniotic oceans of a few months before: the weightlessness, the effortless delivery of food through the umbilical cord. Suddenly,", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-35", "text": "delivery of food through the umbilical cord. Suddenly, it\u2019s just boundaries and agony and crushing pressure \u2013 that\u2019s where we are. And we are going to have to shed history like a snake sheds its skin if we want to slip off into hyperspace, where I think all of magical humanity is awaiting us and cheering us on, lending their weight. They\u2019re all out there, you know, Proclus, and Plotinus, and Plato, and Hypatia, and Henry Cornelius Agrippa, and John Dee, and Robert Fludd, and Eliaphas Levy \u2013 they are all out there pulling for us. And every shaman and shamanness, every magician practitioner as far back in time as you go was part of the plan, the conjuration, the great work, the distillation of the quintessence. History is a magical invocation, and at the end of that invocation \u2013 if it is correctly done \u2013 all boundaries will dissolve into the stone, the lapis, a trans-dimensional vehicle that can move", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-36", "text": "the lapis, a trans-dimensional vehicle that can move through space and time. That is, the collectivity of all human souls free at last in what William Blake called \u2018the Divine Imagination\u2019. And you don\u2019t have to wait for the general dispensation. You can join up anytime by hyper-spacializing your metaphors and your point of view through psychedelic symbiosis with the plants that are pouring this hyper dimensional Gaian vision into the minds of anyone who will detoxify themselves from history and linear thinking and but open themselves to the presence of the trans-formative mystery that is going to leave this planet unrecognizable to us within our lifetimes. So that\u2019s the basic spiel. And I think it raises a lot of questions and yours is first. [Question: Are there any northern hemisphere, western herbs that inhabit DMT that we would have access to?] The answer is yes, yes. The question is \u2018Are there herbs in the temperate zone that contain DMT?\u2019 Yes. There are certain grasses \u2013", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-37", "text": "contain DMT?\u2019 Yes. There are certain grasses \u2013 Phalaris arundinacea, Phalaris tuberosa. These can be ordered from plant dealers or gotten, ironically enough, from agricultural experiment stations because these are pasturage grasses. A lot of people are doing wonderful work right now learning how to make DMT preparations out of native plants. The mature Phalaris grass, it\u2019s very diffuse \u2013 the DMT. So what people are doing is they\u2019re getting the seeds and they\u2019re spouting them in a sprouter. And then they\u2019re taking the sprouted seeds and air drying them. Well, you can imagine how powdery sprouts become if you air dry them. Well then you can powder up a handful of these sprouts and twist that into a bomber and come very very close to the flash point. The other thing \u2013 I mean, since I\u2019m talking to recipe-oriented magicians \u2013 the other thing you need to understand if you want to work in this area is that DMT can ordinarily", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-38", "text": "work in this area is that DMT can ordinarily not be taken orally because there is an enzyme system in your intestines called the mono amine oxidase system. And it will destroy the DMT. But the good news is there are certain compounds called mono amine oxidase inhibitors \u2013 didn\u2019t you know it. If you take a mono amine oxidase inhibitor, and then you take DMT, the DMT will survive the gut and pass into the blood stream, and pass the blood-brain barrier. So here is a very important piece of practical information I am about to give you. If you want to inhibit your mono amine oxidase in order to make DMT trips longer, or mushroom trips longer and more intense, or to activate DMT if you only have a little bit of it, then what you should get are the seeds of Peganum harmala. You can either order it under that name from seed dealers, or go to an Iranian market and buy what is called Hurmal. This is", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-39", "text": "market and buy what is called Hurmal. This is simply Peganum harmala seeds. They use it as an incense to fumigate rooms. But two grams \u2013 don\u2019t take more \u2013 two grams of this macerated in a mortar and pestle with spring water taken from a spring at the new moon near a crossroads will inhibit your MAO. It will inhibit your MAO. Consequently, then when you smoke the bomber of Phalaris dust it will grab on. Or you can even smoke mushrooms then, and they will grab on. So knowing how to inhibit MAO is one of the key techniques in this kind of herbal shamanic magic. Other plants that contain DMT, and here\u2019s one you should all be aware of because it\u2019s probably right around here is Desmanthus ilinoensis \u2013 Illinois Bundle Weed. It\u2019s a rank weed. I\u2019ve not seen it except in the dry form but people have grown hundreds of pounds of this stuff in a few months. And the root bark has the", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-40", "text": "a few months. And the root bark has the highest concentration of DMT ever measured in any plant. It\u2019s higher than the ayahuasca admixtures used in the Amazon. Pardon? [Inaudible Question] In the root bark, the root bark which you dry the root and the scrape the bark off and you\u2019ll get this reddish root bark. The red is actually the DMT. Virola trees in the Amazon shed DMT in their sap, and it\u2019s always a blood red sap. And to show you how strong it is, the indians in the Amazon \u2013 some of the tribes \u2013 they roll their arrow points directly into that sap. And it\u2019s a paralytic poison in the bloodstream of monkeys and small animals. So a great deal of work is being done right now and you should, if you\u2019re of an experimental and herbal and alchemical and magical bent, people are creating what they call ayahuasca analogs. This is where you use local plants to create a brew which is chemically equivalent to", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-41", "text": "to create a brew which is chemically equivalent to an Amazonian hallucinogen. And of course, you have the satisfaction that it\u2019s yours. It\u2019s your magical recipe. No one on earth is doing quite what you\u2019ve got and it\u2019s very \u2013 a lot of interesting work is being done and you\u2019ll hear more about this. In fact, Jonathan Ott just wrote a book called \u2018Ayahuasca Analogs\u2019 in which the state of the art is spelled out, and it would be worth your while to check that out if you\u2019re an experimentalist. [Inaudible Question] The question is \u2018Is there a more \u2013 is there a simple reagent test for the presence of DMT?\u2019 The answer is: sort of. You can do a paper chromatographic test and all you need is a little UV light and some chromatography paper and some solvent dishes. I mean, it\u2019s at the level of a 7th grade science project. Yes, I don\u2019t know how much I should say on this subject. I\u2019m probably about to say too much.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-42", "text": "this subject. I\u2019m probably about to say too much. But at one gathering I go to, one of the people who\u2019s a very regular part of that particular posse, is a wheat breeder. So when he heard about the Phalaris, he was a geneticist and a wheat breeder. And he has been working very quietly on his own to produce super strains of Phalaris, and I think we will soon see super strains because the underground community is incredibly creative in this area. The compound I talked about yesterday \u2013 Salvia divinorum \u2013 that\u2019s all underground work. Bret Blosser, the anthropologist who discovered it is a complete freak. The guy, the chemist who extracted it who would prefer I don\u2019t put out his name is a complete freak. The people who then did the confirmation studies \u2013 my brother and his band of performing pharmacologists \u2013 all freaks. So we actually, we do not take ourselves seriously enough. I mean, we have our scientists, we have", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-43", "text": "I mean, we have our scientists, we have our philosophers, we have our thinkers, our legal experts, we are a complete community. And it\u2019s no longer, in my mind, even necessary to publish in straight journals and to seek a pat on the head from, you know, the American pharmacology community. They don\u2019t understand what these things are for anyway. [Question: About yesterday. [Inaudible] \u2026 could you give that name of it?] Yes, I\u2019ll repeat this and strengthen once again my case to the guy who owns the company that he should pay me, for gods sakes. If you want a catalog of extremely rare and useful psychoactive and magical plants, probably the most complete in the world \u2013 the company is called \u2018Of The Jungle\u2019 PO Box 1801 Sebastopol, CA, 95472. Write and ask for a catalog. And tell them George Bush sent you. No, I\u2019m teasing. Don\u2019t tell them that they won\u2019t send you the catalog. [Inaudible Question] Well, let me,", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-44", "text": "the catalog. [Inaudible Question] Well, let me, I didn\u2019t mean to dis Castaneda as a metaphor maker. No, I think \u2018The Teachings of Don Juan\u2019 is a tremendous book. I\u2019m very suspicious of some of his later stuff. It\u2019s interesting what you said because you know the famous crow transformation in The Teachings of Don Juan has been traced \u2013 and I\u2019m sure many of you know this book \u2013 has been traced to George MacDonald\u2019s book \u2018Through the Gates of the Silver Key\u2019. And George MacDonald was a friend of Evans Wentz so I think what we\u2019re getting here is a mining of late 19th century English folklore by Castaneda. Nevertheless, the presence of these small entities has been a part of folklore for a long long time. Elementals, tykes. What puzzled me about \u2013 what puzzles me, I guess \u2013 is I\u2019ve spent a lot of time in this magical literature and art historical area, and the descriptions don\u2019t quite match. I", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-45", "text": "area, and the descriptions don\u2019t quite match. I can\u2019t quite convince myself that the sprites, the efreets, the pixies, the jinns, that these creatures of the woodland Fay, are the same thing. Or I don\u2019t know whether I am contaminated by an early love of science fiction and... [Inaudible Question] Well, again, close but no banana. All these popular aliens that are running around \u2013 you know, the Whitley Strieboids and all these things \u2013 are much more mundane than what I encountered. I mean, what I encountered was terrifyingly not human. Terrifyingly alien. And I just do not quite get \u2013 and Madame Blavatsky was into it and they\u2019re always saying, you know the \u2013 I don\u2019t know, they\u2019re all very cut and dried about it. And when I encounter an extraterrestrial alien or a creature from another dimension, the main thing that\u2019s happening for me is the implications are blowing my mind! They seem totally immune to the implications.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-46", "text": "mind! They seem totally immune to the implications. [Inaudible Question] Well, a sufficient amount of DMT is smoked west of the Pacific coast highway that it wouldn\u2019t surprise me if the writers of Star Trek, I mean, were on to this. Yes, what is not much talked about \u2013 the part of the experience which is anomalous \u2013and maybe people who know more about magical literature than I do can correct me \u2013 but what the elves are really interested in, is this stuff which I call \u2018visible language\u2019. That\u2019s the whole point of the encounter, is to exhibit it and to get you to do it. Well, now first of all, think for a minute about ordinary language \u2013 it\u2019s really weird! It\u2019s the weirdest thing we do. I mean, if you were looking for the thumbprint of God on creation, human language would be a good candidate because, look, we\u2019re suppose to be some kind of animal who just went a little further than the next guy. But to get out", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-47", "text": "further than the next guy. But to get out of that Shakespeare and Milton is a pretty amazing accomplishment, hardly to speak of the mathematical languages that we generate. So something happened \u2013 some people think only 35,000 years ago. Imagine if that\u2019s true. I mean, I don\u2019t care, some people say 150,000 years ago. But to speak, to take small mouth noises and to turn them into signifiers for symbols and relationships in spite of some people\u2019s enthusiasm for cetaceans and dolphins, I just am not overwhelmed by the evidence. I mean, to me, you know, it is a miracle to be able to speak poetry. It is a miracle. I mean, when Coleridge wrote \u2018and south, and south, and southward aye we fled, and it grew wondrous cold, and ice mast-high went floating by as green as emerald\u2019 I mean, that\u2019s language! And it\u2019s magic! We have a fascination then, we also paint. Then we sculpt. Then we", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-48", "text": "we also paint. Then we sculpt. Then we write. Then we create electronic databases. Then film, television. Clearly, what we want to do is we want to communicate visually. And these things are saying there\u2019s way to do it. Do it! And I don\u2019t understand, do we allhave to be loaded on DMT all the time? Can you learn to do this? The gentleman who asked about dreams: here\u2019s a piece of information that is critical in this jigsaw puzzle. If you have smoked DMT at any time in the past, it is possible to have a dream in which people are running around and you\u2019re checked into the Mars hotel and the luggage is lost and this and that, and in the middle of all that someone drags out a little glass pipe and hands it to you. It will happen. It will happen in the dream! Not a memory, not a simulacrum, it will really happen. Well now to me that\u2019s an amazing piece of data because what it\u2019s", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-49", "text": "that\u2019s an amazing piece of data because what it\u2019s saying is \u2018you can do it on the natch.\u2019 You may have to be dead asleep, but still on the natch this can be done. And the lucid dreamers, the biofeedback people, the people who claim these wonderful things that you can do with sleep and dream and programming, I challenge them: teach people to have DMT dreams in their sleep. And then let\u2019s figure out how to drag that puppy into the light so that we can do it at will on the natch. One thing that I have come to believe is that we remember no more than five percent of our dreams, and it\u2019s the most mundane five percent. I think \u2013 and there\u2019s scientific evidence to support this \u2013 remember I said that DMT is in the human brain? Well, it concentrates in the human cerebra-spinal fluid on a 24 hour cycle and it reaches its peak of concentration between 3 and 4 AM in most people. That\u2019s when the deep REM sleep", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-50", "text": "in most people. That\u2019s when the deep REM sleep is happening. When you give somebody DMT, they lay back, they close their eyes, and the way you \u2013 the guide, the sitter, I don\u2019t like the word guide \u2013 you the sitter, the way you can tell that they\u2019re getting off is their eyes dart wildly behind their closed eyelids. It means they\u2019re in REM, they\u2019re in REM sleep, they\u2019ve been immediately shoved into deep dreaming. So I believe that what DMT is doing in normal human metabolism is it mediates the decent, the spiral decent into dream and that every single night we are reunited with the boundary-less oceanic mystery of being that we are so frantic about in waking life and so distant from. And that if we could, in fact, just engineer a drug that would allow us to remain fully conscious as we drift deeper into dream, we would need no other drug or substance \u2013 that that\u2019s where we want to go. And I think", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-51", "text": "that\u2019s where we want to go. And I think that\u2019s where history is headed. What the archaic revival is about, is a revivification of the aboriginal dream time. We are going to live in the imagination. We are preparing to decamp from three dimensional space. I mean yes, the earth is the cradle of the human race, but you don\u2019t stay in the cradle forever, you know. And it\u2019s something like going into dream. It\u2019s something like taking the hyper technical virtual reality internet head of the snake and inserting the shamanic, late paleolithic, ecstatic, orgiastic tail of the snake and then you have the ouroboric completion. Then you have the quintessence and the work is complete and history ends and we live then in the light of the stone made manifest. [Inaudible Question] Well, it definitely has something \u2013 this mystery we\u2019re talking about \u2013 definitely has something to do with sound and the magical role of sound. Ayahuasca is a sort of different way of sectioning the", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-52", "text": "is a sort of different way of sectioning the DMT experience. Because ayahuasca is orally active, unfolds over hours, is not as dramatic as DMT, but the people who use ayahuasca as a ritual on a weekly basis, what their practice consists of is they take this stuff and then they sing \u2013 they sing like crazy. And then when they stop singing, and people light a cigarette and take a leak and so forth and you\u2019re listening to these conversations, you hear people say stuff about the shaman like: \u2018I like the part with the olive drab and the silver, but when it became magenta and moved toward orange I thought we was over the top.\u2019 And you think \u2018What kind of a criticism of a song is that?\u2019 And the answer is: sound has become a visually beheld medium. [Inaudible Question] Yes. So the reason I have, the reason I\u2019m interested in something as techno-nerdy as virtual reality is because you could program a virtual reality so that", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-53", "text": "is because you could program a virtual reality so that when you went aaah [sings a high pitched tone], an iridescent blue line would be keyed to that to descend into the space. I\u2019m very interested in environmental and electronic simulations of psychedelic states, but we\u2019re not going to do better than the psychedelics. If we can do as well it will be a miracle. I mean, you see more beauty in a first wave of psilocybin than the human race has produced in the past five thousand years \u2013 and who are you? You know. [Inaudible Question] I hadn\u2019t considered that, but that sounds possible. I mean, we\u2019re definitely coming to some enormous cusp, and whether you think it\u2019s the cusp of cusps, or just a big cusp, it\u2019s hard to say. Somebody faxed me \u2013 I got a fax right before I came here \u2013 I don\u2019t know who sent it to me, it was just an anonymous fax, but in huge letters is said \u2018When you", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-54", "text": "fax, but in huge letters is said \u2018When you strip away the hype, it\u2019s just another concrescence\u2019. [Q: I\u2019m curious to know what the universality of your experience that you describe is... [Inaudible] It\u2019s interesting and that\u2019s a good question. The answer is yes and no. Obviously, there\u2019s hardly anything more personal than a psychedelic experience. It is a kind of summation of who you are, and it\u2019s viewed through the filters of your personality. Nevertheless, when you put a whole bunch of DMT trips together, certain things seem to emerge. My notion, coming at it from a sort of a Jungian attitude, is if we had to say what is the archetype of DMT, the archetype is \u2018the circus\u2019. It\u2019s the circus, and let me say why. First of all, a circus is a place of wild exotic activity. And clowns. You don\u2019t have a circus without clowns. Clowns are wonderful for children. A circus is a wonderful place for", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-55", "text": "children. A circus is a wonderful place for a child. DMT \u2013 there is something very very weirdly child-like about it in a very un-childish way. Some of you may know the 52nd fragment of Heraclitus where he says \u2018The aeon is a child at play with colored balls.\u2019The aeon is the child that you encounter in the elf dome. But the circus has other connotations than simply the three rings and clowns. Eros is present entwined with Thanatos in the form of the nearly naked lady in the tiny spangled costume who is working without nets hanging by her teeth up near the top of the big tent. And personally, my earliest experience of Eros was that lady in the tiny spangled costume. I was so small I was wrapped up in something and being held and I was horny as hell. So there\u2019s that, and then there is also radiating off from the central ring \u2013 the freak show, the goat-faced boy, the lady in the", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-56", "text": "show, the goat-faced boy, the lady in the bottle, and, you know, the three-toed alligator kid, and all of that. That\u2019s there. The wiggy, weird, kinky, strange, alien stuff. And then, if you think about the archetype \u2013 not so much of the circus but of the carnival. The carnival represents a breakthrough from another dimension, because you live in some jerk-water town in some \u2013 I almost said Iowa \u2013 but some town. And it\u2019s like normal. And then the carnival comes to town and children are told \u2018you can\u2019t stay out and play, the carny people are in town.\u2019 And what does it mean? Well, they may fuck differently than we do, they may steal things, they\u2019re not like us, they have more than one marriage some of them. And then the carnival people are there, and the hoochie-coochie dancers and the whole thing, and then they fold it up and they go away! Just like a DMT trip. And every", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-57", "text": "go away! Just like a DMT trip. And every little boy and girl in the world worth their salt wants to join the circus. Of course! And go away with the tattooed lady and the tigers and all that. So it is the archetype of the circus. So then, I\u2019ve seen many many people take DMT and some get what I get, which is, it\u2019s sort of gone beyond the circus \u2013 it\u2019s the circus as presented on Zenebelgenubi Prime or something like that. But one woman, who was an anthropologist, who I think got a sub-threshold dose \u2013 she had a very interesting trip because it was a light trip. But with no prompting from me she said \u2018I was at a carnival midway, but it was after hours and there was nobody there and there were just those ice cream \u2013 those square papers for holding ice cream \u2013 blowing in the wind and getting caught in chain link fences.\u2019 It was like a sub-threshold dose. Well, then if she\u2019d", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-58", "text": "a sub-threshold dose. Well, then if she\u2019d done more she would have arrived there 8 hours earlier when the thing was happening, and if she\u2019d done yet another toke, it would have moved off into the zone of the truly weird. That\u2019s why I love the film of Federico Fellini, because here was a circus-man, for sure. Yeah... [Inaudible Question] A way to get the DMT? Well, you could conceivably inhibit your MAO. I don\u2019t wanna tell you to do it nasally because it might be a really stinging experience. [Inaudible Question] Oh then you could do it. I\u2019m working on something I\u2019ll describe it to you. I\u2019m having a glass blower make a thing which has a chamber with a pipe stem coming off it. But it has another stem 180 degrees around the chamber coming off it that breaks into two prongs. And what you do is you heat the DMT, you insert the two prongs up your nose, and you have a friend", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-59", "text": "prongs up your nose, and you have a friend blow on the other outlet and it will force the entire contents of the vessel, the entire load of white smoke \u2013 but you know, don\u2019t try this at home folks. [Inaudible Question] I\u2019d go light the first time. You know, there are old pharmacologists and bold pharmacologists. But there are no old bold pharmacologists. [Inaudible Question] There are anti-depressants that are MAO inhibitors, that\u2019s right. But I wouldn\u2019t use them for this purpose because what you want is what\u2019s called a reversible MAO inhibitor. And harmine, or harmaline, which is in the Syrian rue, is a reversible MAO inhibitor, reversible in four to six hours. Some of these antidepressants inhibit every molecule of MAO in your body for up to three weeks. And that\u2019s why, when they give you those anti-depressants, they tell you the long list of don'ts \u2013 no chocolate, no red wine, no soft", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-60", "text": "\u2013 no chocolate, no red wine, no soft cheese, no lentils, no this \u2013 that\u2019s a list of alkaloid-containing foods. And if you are on those mono amine oxidase inhibiting anti-depressants and you eat a bunch of Camembert with your yuppie friends, you\u2019ll probably have to be roped down for a while before you straighten out. [Question: How is a DMT experience comparative to those you\u2019ve had on what might be familiar such as like as psychedelic mushrooms and LSD.] He said, \u2018How does DMT compare to more familiar psychedelics like mushrooms and LSD?\u2019 Let me say this about mushrooms. Mushrooms are my thing. They enlightened me, they straightened me out, they love me. But the way to do mushrooms is, the very first move \u2013 if you\u2019re interested in mushrooms \u2013 is, for God\u2019s sake \u2013 buy a scale, buy a scale. You wouldn\u2019t think that this would be considered such an exotic suggestion to people who are going", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-61", "text": "such an exotic suggestion to people who are going to put their bodies and minds on the line. Because people don\u2019t take enough. They don\u2019t take enough mushrooms. They take piss ant amounts and then they claim that they\u2019re initiates. You must take a measured 5 dried grams on an empty stomach, measured! And when you see what that is, you\u2019ll realize that, you know, you weren\u2019t even camped in the atrium, you were camped in the driveway. And mushrooms to my \u2013 in some way, I mean, DMT is the most terrifying, astonishing, thing in the universe. But it\u2019s very hard to know what to do with it. Psilocybin is your friend. It wants to teach. It will take you by the hand and forgive you and lead you and be with you. And it speaks. This is the amazing thing. And you\u2019re hearing this from, you know, somebody who graduated from Heidegger and S.H. [Inaudible]. It speaks. No", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-62", "text": "and S.H. [Inaudible]. It speaks. No other psychedelic does that in my experience. Occasionally a phrase will pop into your [Inaudible] on another substance that is like a gift in that surround. But I mean, psilocybin raves. It raves. And it has positions, you may not like psilocybin as a person. Because it is not \u2013 the astonishing thing about psilocybin entity to my mind \u2013 and I get good confirmation on this \u2013 is it is not very earthfully. I mean, it wants to show you machines the size of Manhattan in orbit around alien stars. It wants to talk about the sweet [Inaudible] which happened before the earth cooled and it, you know, has [Inaudible] the empires of the [Inaudible] out of the rim and all the rest of it. And it\u2019s very puzzling the cosmic, galactarian tome. It could send you still further to ayahuasca, because literally just a twist of the molecule, just flailiant", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-63", "text": "just a twist of the molecule, just flailiant tweaking of the molecule and suddenly it\u2019s about childbirth, rivers, the land, the feminine, looking inside your body, curing diseases, feeling, telepathy, communication, it could hardly be more different. And yet chemically these things are like two sides of the same coin. So, just to sum this up and put a kind of a classifier on it: I am not very interested in drugs, per se. I\u2019ve done a lot of them \u2013 bad ones, good ones. And people do drugs for fun and for stupid reasons. But there is this tiny chemical family \u2013 the tryptamine hallucinogens \u2013 psilocybin and DMT \u2013 and then some artificial [Inaudible]. And five methoxy is in there, too, which I\u2019m not that fond of. But this is the doorway, it\u2019s the umbilicus of this world.53 These are things which are called drugs because that\u2019s the category we have for things which make the world unrecognizable. But", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-64", "text": "have for things which make the world unrecognizable. But these are not drugs. They are magical doorways into staggeringly titanic dimensions of gnosis, power, information, understanding, and dimensions filled with affection for humanity. So people say \u2018Well you think drugs should be legalized?\u2019 Yeah, but that\u2019s a political opinion of Terence McKenna who\u2019s just a guy like you. But this stuff about the tryptamines is a real discovery. And you can think what you like about me and my take on it \u2013 in fact, please do. But check it out, check it out. Because I\u2019ve checked out lots of stuff and this is the only thing I\u2019m interested in telling you: check it out! [Inaudible Question] No, I don\u2019t understand that. The answer to that question: it\u2019s magical. It is a secret which keeps itself! I mean I \u2013 here I am, there are two hundred people here, whatever, and I do this for all the time! And I have not, so far as I can", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-65", "text": "And I have not, so far as I can tell, been able to launch an avalanche of DMT. I\u2019m trying! Do I have to put it any more plainly? Is there a chemist in the house who will go home and make this stuff so that we can find our way there? Or grow the plants. Or go to South America. Or get with lucid dreaming and behavioral modification. Or explore the outer edges of orgasm, which I think has something to do with DMT and probably runs on it. Somehow, we need to beech this whale. Yeah\u2026 [Inaudible Question] It\u2019s not difficult to make. Compared to cocaine or LSD, it\u2019s a walkover. It is a reasonable exam question for a 2nd year student of organic chemistry \u2013 to be told synthesize and chromatograph 5 grams of DMT and submit your sample with your chromatographic data to my office Monday morning. [Inaudible Question] Yeah, and make a tincture of the, exactly. [Inaudible] How can it be against the", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-66", "text": "[Inaudible] How can it be against the law if you have it in every brain walking around? [Inaudible] [Inaudible Question] Well, we should certainly talk about casualties and danger. The ditch doesn\u2019t really stave you in here in the ordinary sense like opiates and nicotine. The ditch, you know, cannabis is the most addicting of these minor and near psychedelics and its only psychologically addictive. I mean, I found it out because a couple of years ago I actually quit for ten months after not drawing an unstoned breath for 25 years and all that happened was that I read more. And it\u2019s not clear that that\u2019s my problem. But danger we need to talk about. And that brings up the question, \u2018How should one do these things? How can you do it and gain maximum benefit and minimum wear and tear on your psyche and your body?\u2019 The first thing is, inform yourself. Inform yourself. The first stop on the psychedelic trip is the library. There", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-67", "text": "stop on the psychedelic trip is the library. There are very, very deep books on these subjects on the anthropology, the pharmacology, the psychology, the quantum mechanics of drug activity, inform yourself. And then it\u2019s not about taking every drug in the book. And you have people wheel them off. \u2018Well, I did junk, I did this, I did that\u2019, it\u2019s no point. You don\u2019t get [Inaudible] for that. What you have to do is [Inaudible] recipes straight out of Castaneda. Get up and [Inaudible] you Nagual. You have to find what works for you. And if you take a drug or plant and you have a horrible experience you don\u2019t really need to go back in fact. The other thing is, danger lies in the direction of combination. These are called synergies by pharmacologists. And if you, if your idea of a big evening is, you know, to shoot 100 ml of ketamine and then drop some MDMA and a little 2CB an hour later and", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-68", "text": "MDMA and a little 2CB an hour later and then bring on some acid of undetermined providence [Inaudible], well then and I said, \u2018How was it?\u2019 \u2018Hey, it was [Inaudible]\u2019 But the point is, it can never be reproduced and these things are very dangerous. They synergize in rather unexpected ways. I mean, my God, if psilocybin and DMT has never been studied, do you think their relationship to [Inaudible] has been looked at very carefully? I don\u2019t think so. Then, how to take it? And I represent a faction on that. I believe that you should take it with a, as \u2013 how can I put it \u2013 with as little company as you can stand, basically. A lot of people like group work. I don\u2019t. But that I don\u2019t like groups generally. You know, I\u2019m basically a loner. And I, if I take psychedelics with somebody I worry, I worry about them and it keeps me on the surface. And I have", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-69", "text": "it keeps me on the surface. And I have many psychedelic experiences where in the middle of it has passed through my mind \u2018Gee, I\u2019m sure glad nobody is here to see this because I\u2019m sure it would alarm them and then we\u2019d have a crisis. So my style, I mean I take \u2013 okay gimme, you know, low dose and hang out if something interesting is going on. But the serious stuff goes on in darkness, in silence, and that people go through the [Inaudible] you don\u2019t even listen to music. That\u2019s right, in darkness, in silence, in a comfortable state, and that may mean in your apartment in Manhatten, it may mean off the tree in Yosemite, whatever your thing is. And then I always use cannabis. Cannabis is your navigation tool, your reality check, your everything. I roll up the bomber and I lay them up in front of me and I have my mojo bag and a few things like that. From the moment I take", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-70", "text": "a few things like that. From the moment I take it I\u2019m in [Inaudible] state. And this isn\u2019t even a rule followed in the Amazon. I mean, it totally blew my mind, in some ayahuasca circles people would sit talking and some, then everybody would take ayahuasca there would be a sacral ceremonial moment, everybody would take the ayahuasca and then yak yak yak and motorcycle parts and what are the missionaries up to and brewing to and yak yak yak and then at 30 minutes on the clock the shaman would be [Inaudible], everybody would shut up and within a minute we\u2019d be gone. But the way I like to do it, and this a good catholic method, for those of you who are recovering Catholics, I take it and then I sit in my states and I carry out what in catechism class we were taught is called an examination of conscience. This is where you think about all the ways you screwed up and all", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-71", "text": "about all the ways you screwed up and all the people you screwed over and you basically anticipate a bad trip, is what it is. You work said, \u2018What is the worst thing that happens to me on this trip based on my current state of my psyche and my relationship with other people?\u2019 Well, by the time this stuff actually begins to work you [Inaudible]. And, you know, some people say they take mushrooms \u2018And within 20 minutes we were tripping hard, tripping hard\u2019. I don\u2019t understand what that\u2019s about. It takes an hour and twenty minutes on the clock, it ever has. I don\u2019t expect it to ever come faster. And I get into a kind of a zone where it\u2019s like it\u2019s nibbling at the edges, not quite manifest. And then I\u2019d smoke the first bomber. And usually that brings it in. That brings it in. And I also, I speak to it. I [Inaudible] you. I invoke it, I suppose. And in my", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-72", "text": "I invoke it, I suppose. And in my own way \u2013 I don\u2019t know if it will pass [Inaudible] mustard \u2013 I say to it, I say \u2018Show yourself, show yourself.\u2019 And its very, at that point it\u2019s very erotic. It\u2019s like a veil thing, it\u2019s what it is. It is a veil thing. The girl-friend in the other dimension, the mushroom, once I said to her, \u2018What should I call you?\u2019 She said, \u2018Call me Dorothy.\u2019 So I invoke it and it comes, it comes. And then we\u2019re off. And sometimes it\u2019s easy and loving and sometimes it\u2019s different. I remember one very peripatetic trip where I had tossed out a very big compost pile from growing mushrooms years ago in another country \u2013 there it is the past lives that I\u2019m now recalling \u2013 but anyway I tossed out this stuff and this thing grew this humongous mushroom. And I had taken mushrooms the previous Saturday. I had taken a full dose,", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-73", "text": "the previous Saturday. I had taken a full dose, which is 5 dried grams. So I thought, I wanna take mushrooms again this Saturday but I think I may have picked up a tolerance. So I\u2019ll just take 9 grams. And this is where the learning takes place. Mistakes \u2013 treasure your mistakes. So the thing is, like I\u2019m sitting there and suddenly I realize, oh my God, it\u2019s coming at me, it\u2019s 100 miles wide, it\u2019s 10 miles high, and it\u2019s just rolling toward me and I barely have time to lay down, that\u2019s how fast it, and a voice said, you know \u2018Get prepared. The storm is about to hit.\u2019 And I lay down and it was like a tornado. And at one pint I opened my eyes and there was this woman in a full bondage \u2026 piercings and rubber panties and the whole bang and I was lying there between her legs. She was standing upright and she put her face right down next to mine and she", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-74", "text": "put her face right down next to mine and she said, \u2018Is it strong enough for you asshole?\u2019 To which I replied, \u2018Yes!\u2019 And then she said, \u2018They say it helps to close your eyes, cowboy.\u2019 Later, in thinking about that trip I realized the reason the Goddess, the reason the mushroom addressed me as cowboy, is because that\u2019s \u2013 most people mushrooms have met have been cowboys and cowgirls, \u2018cause they\u2019re the people who follow the cows! And most people have encountered this thing in the pasture. You know Maria Sabina the mushroom shamanist of Oaxaca claimed not to have been initiated. She claimed that as a child left to watch the sheep and the cattle she had been hungry and had gotten to eating mushrooms. So, I haven\u2019t lost my thread, this is the safety course, I haven\u2019t forgotten that. Once you get launched out in there then there are tricks for navigation. And two tricks that are indispensable, number one I already", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-75", "text": "tricks that are indispensable, number one I already told you. Have cannabis ready \u2018cause if you get into a place you don\u2019t like you can jet out of there by just taking a toke or two. The other thing is if you get into a place you don\u2019t like chant. Don\u2019t do what most honkys do. Which is, scrunch, assume that people could have [Inaudible], \u2018I can stand this. How many hours is this going? [Inaudible] Sit up, take a breath and [Inaudible] it out. Drumming should. But I really think it\u2019s important to oxygenate your body, very important to move the breath through. And there are hard places. If there weren\u2019t hard places people wouldn\u2019t be so terrified of this stuff. So when you get to a hard place first of all don\u2019t be an idiot. Don\u2019t abandon yourself to fear just because somebody put something ugly in front of you. And if people put something ugly in front of you every day and all you", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-76", "text": "ugly in front of you every day and all you say is \u2018Yukk!\u2019 So, it also works there. And there are strange places and we each have our own private hell. I mean that\u2019s a place I go to nearly on every ayahuasca trip, that I call the meat locker. And, you know what the last said about it? [Inaudible] [Inaudible Question] I fast [Inaudible] I just don\u2019t eat for six hours. Empty your stomach, and the other thing is your stomach should be empty. [Inaudible] The way I do it is I start usually about 8 at night, I\u2019m alone always and I go \u2018till one and by one it\u2019s over. And then what I do I eat a bowl of granola or something like that. Don\u2019t sleep on an empty stomach. \u2018Cause then you\u2019ll wake up the morning, raw and rotty and it\u2019s not that the mushroom did that, it\u2019s that you slept with a protein debt. So then eat your favorite food at", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-77", "text": "protein debt. So then eat your favorite food at the end of the trip. [Inaudible Question] MDMA is a psycho-[Inaudible] amphetamine. It\u2019s a, what are called empathogen. They\u2019re drugs which encourage change of feelings and that sort of thing under rare circumstances you can squeeze a kind of wobbling hallucination out of it. But it\u2019s not, it\u2019s purpose [Inaudible] is different. It\u2019s for sorting out relationships, assisted psychotherapy, and having a good time. But it would be crazy to take MDMA as a hallucinogen because it\u2019s like entering a bicycle in a Ferrari race, you know. They are just much superior and let me say about this, I mean, everything is my personal bias here. A lot of people have said \u2018You\u2019re a hallucination nut. You\u2019re obsessed with hallucinations.\u2019 I freely admit it. The reason why I was underwhelmed by LSD, and I liked it and it\u2019s certainly engaging and, but I could never hallucinate the way", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-78", "text": "and, but I could never hallucinate the way I wanted to. I\u2019ve read Havelock Ellis. I wanted to see, you know, the phosphorescent palace, the naked maidens, the silk brocades, the alien worlds, vision! And LSD, deep thoughts about things, funny ideas, strange [Inaudible], hard to get vision until you smoke black Bombay hash on top of the trip \u2013 that works! But I will defend my obsession with vision. I think the world want\u2019s to be seen. I think Blake was right that the divine imagination is something beheld. And for me the visions are the proof that this is not my mind. And the visions are the proof that this is not simply chemical chaos in the nervous system. I mean, how could chemical chaos give you something as breathtakingly beautiful and as ordered as the Sistine Chapel or the World Trade Center. The hallucinations are extraordinarily ordered and beautiful. And I think that this is the proof that were reaching beyond the", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-79", "text": "this is the proof that were reaching beyond the confines of the human personality and even beyond the human species. That this information \u2013 don\u2019t ask me how \u2013 is somehow holographically deployed throughout space and you tune in and it\u2019s a \u2013 so I care about vision and if a drug doesn\u2019t cause vision I can\u2019t resist to put it lower on my list. I smoke a lot of cannabis \u2013 and I think \u2013 that\u2019s why I do lot of cannabis \u2013 I can think on it. And I think several hours a day when I\u2019m able to, but the visual thing is for me to be in the presence of the mystery, is to be in the presence of the hallucination. To me the word hallucination has no connotation of illusion. It comes from a Greek root and what it means is \u2018to wander in the mind\u2019. That\u2019s what hallucination is, it\u2019s a wandering in the mind. Yeah... [Inaudible Question] No, I took all kinds of doses. The question", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-80", "text": "I took all kinds of doses. The question is, What dose of LSD did I take. I should be clear what I mean. I mean, yes on LSD. Even with eyes open the little thinks that look like open fans that are going like \u2018nikniknik, nikniknik\u2019 on wallpaper, but I \u2013 LSD never gave me these architectural \u2013 if it is what\u2019s meaning I couldn\u2019t dis\u2026[Inaudible] \u2026 the LSD hallucination looked to me like being in the [Inaudible] non in the [Inaudible]. They were more like ripples and centric circles, flashes of light. So what you see on psilocybin are cities, faces, houses, machines, the stuff of cognitive processes at its most expressive. Okay, yeah\u2026 [Question: Is it theoretically possible to develop your process to go to the point that you can go there without the drug?] I grant the possibility but in my heartest heart I don\u2019t think so. The question is, \u2018Can you get there on the natch?\u2019 I", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-81", "text": "\u2018Can you get there on the natch?\u2019 I get lots of resistance because I\u2019m willing to say just flat out, \u2018No, no.\u2019 And, you know, people are shocked. That\u2019s no good and flagellation, being touched by poverty and whatever. I don\u2019t know, I tried it all. And the other thing is what I\u2019m talking about you couldn\u2019t want that happen on the natch. These are states of serious discombobulation. These are not mood shifts or attitudes we\u2019re talking about. I mean, if I woke up and I could do it on the natch my first phone call would be to my friend Ralph Metzner who\u2019s a shrink, and I said, \u2018Ralph, uhm, I\u2019ve got problems here.\u2019 This is [Inaudible] and again I\u2019m a [Inaudible]. I don\u2019t know even who\u2019s here or who I\u2019m insulting. But let me unburden myself on this stuff. Van Morrison put it very, very well, \u2018No guru, no master, no teacher, just you and", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-82", "text": "guru, no master, no teacher, just you and me, and mother nature, in the darkness, in the darken vested range.\u2019 I think all religion is con-games, I think that all esoterica is a con-game, I think that revealed secrets are self-protecting and that seeking is the way to find. And take yourself serious. You are the vessel, the stage and the theater of your transformation. The mushroom is very explicit on that point to me. Once, it said, I quote, \u2018One human being that is seeking enlightenment from another is like a grain of sand on the beach seeking enlightenment from another grain of sand.\u2019 And my interpretation of that is that we\u2019re all as good as the best among us. There is no hierarchy among human beings, you know, if you\u2019ve got the chromosomes you\u2019re into the game. And the test then is to accentuate primary experience, the here and now. Teaching Fujang from far away, unsubstantiated rumors that circulate among the", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-83", "text": "away, unsubstantiated rumors that circulate among the people. Magicians have always worked the marketplace. It\u2019s older than Ur. But this [Inaudible] mystery is absolutely authentic and having once found it I stopped searching for other authentic mysteries. So I don\u2019t know what lies behind the deeper levels of the Kalichakra Tantra, I don\u2019t know what lies behind the [Inaudible] prints of Hawaiian Kahuna, but I do know that his one thing fulfills the bill. It\u2019s real and you only need one doorway to enter into the palace of the [Inaudible]. So why obsess about numbering doorways? That\u2019s a [Inaudible]. Yeah\u2026 [Inaudible Question] I have actually never combined DMT and psilocybin. I have smoked DMT at the top of an LSD trip. That\u2019s a young man\u2019s game, believe me. If you\u2019re interested in that hurry up, it\u2019s like [Inaudible] the matter for it. What happened to me, well I did it several times but I\u2019ll", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-84", "text": "me, well I did it several times but I\u2019ll tell you a story that\u2019s for your edification maybe, but amusement perhaps. I once [Inaudible] was a landlord in Berkley many years ago. And, uh \u2026, that\u2019s sufficient. And everybody left one easter vacation or thanksgiving vacation, so I decided I would do this acid trip, I did plan to smoke DMT at the top of the trip, and so I did and I did and I had this very long involved DMT trip with the elves and all of this was totally out of control. And at the very height of this thing this woman who I rented to upstairs who I thought had gone home to Minneapolis came back and arrived by cab and came pounding up the stairs with these two suitcases [Inaudible] stomp into the house and ran around to my bedroom door and beat on the door. And, you know, you don\u2019t know me that well, but if I\u2019m 500 miles up a jungle river smoking a joint", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-85", "text": "500 miles up a jungle river smoking a joint and a stick cracks 50 feet away the first thing I do is hide the joint \u2013 I\u2019m a very paranoid person \u2013 being, you know, on 500 mics of acid smoking DMT and suddenly having this woman and I, I literally, I kept my some kind of a [Inaudible], and I leaped off my bed and I landed on my feet and, you know, if you want you may try this, something about this enormous flash of adrenalin added into the DMT added in to this sudden incredible physical exertion it was as though I ripped the membrane, I ripped the membrane, and I was now standing in my room, but I have dragged this trip through with me and the room was full of elves, ricocheting off the [Inaudible] and I had them, they were hanging on me like weasels [Inaudible] turning me around in the room. And also simultaneously one of these machines had been dragged", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-86", "text": "simultaneously one of these machines had been dragged through into my bedroom at the same time and this is like about the size, well, like this, and it had all kinds of this faceted, and opalescent, and glassy, and strange, but what was important about it had a kind of a faceted [Inaudible] on it that was clicking [Inaudible] and every time it would click, it would launch a small plastic chip across the room that had an alien letter written on it. And these little plastic chips were ricocheting off the wall and piling up, and I was standing appalled, appalled looking at this situation, and then, Rosemary, what the hell is [Inaudible] I stagger over to the door which was a sliding wooden door and I just threw it open and I looked at her and said, [language disassociated from meaning]. \u2018Oh so you\u2019re doing that, all right.\u2019 she said and backed up and then I would slam the door back and I pushed my", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-87", "text": "would slam the door back and I pushed my way across the room and I crawled under the bed. And I closed my eyes and I said, \u2018I\u2019m gonna stay here \u2019til I\u2019m dead or it\u2019s over. And I did. But it was, it was, uh\u2026, I mean, what the fuck, you know, you are supposed to learn something [Inaudible] It\u2019s ridiculous. [Inaudible question] Well, this thing that I have done several times this afternoon in various [Inaudible], language thing, that\u2019s glossolalia, called speaking in tongues, but the good news is the fundies don\u2019t have any kind of monopoly on this. Speaking in tongues is as old as human beings, it\u2019s shamanic, it\u2019s paleolithic, it\u2019s done all over the world. And I think that, well, psilocybin will induce this spontaneously. And I think, to add to my little scenario yesterday about hunting, fucking, tripping, which \u2013 I would also add in there \u2013 \u2018and talking.\u2019", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-88", "text": "I would also add in there \u2013 \u2018and talking.\u2019 Now, probably long before the invention of what we call meaning people amused each other with funny noises. And people would say, \u2018What\u2019s that? Somebody else?\u2019 So, being physiologically set up for a production of small mouth noises, notice that language is a very primitive form of telepathy. Because here is how it works: I have an idea. I look in my dictionary, I translate the idea into what we call \u2018English\u2019. I then move my lips, throat muscles and aspirate in a certain way and I send an acoustical pressure wave across space, which enters into the holes on the side of your head. Your brain reconstructs this acoustical wave and tries to match the incoming pattern against an interior dictionary which has been learned. Now, if your dictionary and my dictionary are congruent, lo and behold, you can reconstruct my thought in your mind. Now if this thought is something fairly straight forward like \u2018Please shut the door\u2019 ambiguity", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-89", "text": "straight forward like \u2018Please shut the door\u2019 ambiguity doesn\u2019t enter. But notice that one of the most uncool things we can do with each other is to say to somebody \u2018Would you mind explain me what it was that you just said?\u2019, you know, or, \u2018Would you mind explaining me what it was that I just said?\u2019 And then he say: \u2018Oh shit, now the cover is blown, you know, I am of the faintest [Inaudible] that you can meet. So, language, spoken language, small mouth noises, is a very inefficient way of communicating. This is why I think that the visual initiation in the DMT is they cough up language. This is not the first initiation from the elves. The first initiation occurred 100,000 years ago. The second initiation is occurring now. First they gave us language. Now they\u2019re going to show us how to make that language visible. And you see, if you and I both read the same piece of thin page of a book we can then", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-90", "text": "piece of thin page of a book we can then have an enormous argument about what\u2019s written there. But if you and I both step into a place where a piece of sculpture is being visited we may argue about what the piece of sculpture meaning is but we agree what it is. We see it. We see it. And when we can [Inaudible] with each other and understand each other we instinctively reach for visual metaphors. \u2018I see what you mean.\u2019 \u2018What\u2019s here fella?\u2019 \u2018She painted a picture\u2019 \u2018His words were so beautiful\u2019. It means that we really associate meaning with seeing something. And I believe that we\u2019re on the brink of a transformation of how we communicate with each other. And I don\u2019t know whether we are gonna require a prosthesis that is electronic or something like that or whether we can invent drugs? This will allow us that the cerebral cortex will switch it\u2019s linguistic analysis from the audio channel to the visual channel. It\u2019s very suggestive that these", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-91", "text": "to the visual channel. It\u2019s very suggestive that these tryptamines are in different parts of the brain. And I think that we are on the brink of transforming our abilities to [Inaudible]. [Inaudible Question] What was said was that using LSD and having used DMT one can begin to trip into, you know, if you like dimensions on LSD. This certainly seems reasonable to me. I haven\u2019t have had that specific experience. But there is something you can do with psilocybin. Here\u2019s another technique if you don\u2019t like what\u2019s happening on a mushroom trip. Just say to it, \u2018Be MDMA\u2019, and it will. No problem. You can say to it, \u2018Be LSD\u2019. And it will. It has no problem. I didn\u2019t try that. You wanna be sure before you summon the genies. Let me say one more thing about this language thing. Because I think nature is always our model. No matter how deep into technology we go nature will provide nontoxic models. Well it just so", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-92", "text": "nature will provide nontoxic models. Well it just so happens that in this area of communication nature has provided a wonderful nontoxic model. And that is the way in which squids and octopi communicate. Squids and octopi as you know from watching far too much TV can change color. May think that this is camouflage. It\u2019s not camouflage. Octopi change color in order to communicate. Octopi don\u2019t generate language. They are language. Think of an octopus, it\u2019s soft body. It folds and unfolds itself like a dancer and exposes various parts of its body very rapidly. It also can make your body tissue smooth and [inaudible] or rugose and rough and it can undergo all these color changes. Blotches, stripes, spreading pastels, so forth and so on. These behaviors of the octopus are under the genetic control of of its linguistic intentionality. It doesn\u2019t make words it becomes words. And when one octopus encounters an other by the mere act of beholding each", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-93", "text": "an other by the mere act of beholding each other they say \u2018Aha! You haven\u2019t eaten recently. You\u2019re having too much sex. You\u2019ve been traveling. And so forth and so on. The octopus becomes its thought. It wears language on its surface the way we wear our clothing. And this system of communication is so important to the octopus that those species that are devolved into the very deep part of the ocean \u2013 so called abyssal octopi \u2013 where no light ever reaches have evolved phosphorescent organs all over bodies and eyelids like membranes? all over their bodies so that in the absolute darkness of the abyssal ocean they communicate by flashing grammar and syntax to each other across the abyssal depth. They are free in the imagination. And this is where I think we are headed. We\u2019re going to make that model of communication our model. Psychedelics, technology, and visionary magic, will show how this can be done. [Inaudible Question] No you\u2019re right. The", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-94", "text": "done. [Inaudible Question] No you\u2019re right. The human faith is like this. That\u2019s right. You see, no other higher animal has faith. A faith is like a little piece of squid skin that we\u2019re wearing where we can transmit all of these \u2013 one time I was in India and I was cornered and this guy - I was loaded actually on mescaline \u2013 and this guy swam aboard my houseboat. And normally I would just run these guys off. [End of tape]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f97ddb17f28e-95", "text": "Save the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Rap+Dancing+Into+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "a247ec094a65-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nPacking for the Long Strange Trip\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n19 July 1994\n\nStarwood Festival XIV, Association for Conciousness Exploration, Cleveland Heights, Ohio\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo transcript available for this talk!\n\nHelp Transcribe\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Packing+for+the+Long+Strange+Trip"}
{"id": "08c5e3747f8d-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nConversations on the Edge of Magic\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n19-24 July 1994\n\nBrushwood Folklore Center, Sherman, NY @ Starwood Festival XIV\n\n7501\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo youtube link available, try the following:", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Conversations+on+the+Edge+of+Magic"}
{"id": "08c5e3747f8d-1", "text": "7501\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo youtube link available, try the following:\n\nWhat I\u2019ll do today is I assume most of you are not familiar with my work, but I also assume you\u2019re intelligent, so I\u2019m not going to give an introductory talk. I\u2019ll just cut to the chase and if you don\u2019t understand what\u2019s said, at least you have the satisfaction of knowing nobody talked down to you, right? [audience laughter] Okay, it\u2019s very hard to know where exactly to slice into this pie. I mean, I am an advocate of the psychedelic experience for [audience applause] [Terence chuckles]\u2026 for personal growth work, for shamanic exploration, as an enzyme for the imagination, as a force that forces us to grow up and, uh, clean up. However, what I want to talk to you today about because this is a pagan community, and because I think the argument, if it\u2019s not understood here won\u2019t be understood anywhere, is, I want to talk about the social impact of psychedelic plants on human consciousness both in the present and in the remote past. Because my approach to psychedelics is not to see it as a religious freedom issue, or a personal self-exploration issue, uh, that\u2019s all there, but I believe we cannot really understand what it is to be human being and how we came to be human beings without factoring in to our explanations this most taboo of all subjects for the Western dominator \u00ad\u00admind, the subject of boundary dissolving, consciousness expanding plants. And so every point of view has a cosmology, a myth of its meaning. And as quickly as I can I want to tell you the myth that to my mind unites paganism, psilocybin, sexual freedom, the peril to the earth, and the hope for the future, all into one very nice, neat package. And it requires a, a kind of an anthropology lesson.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Conversations+on+the+Edge+of+Magic"}
{"id": "08c5e3747f8d-2", "text": "First of all our fellow voyagers along the way \u2013 the scientists \u2013 have created, as you all know, the theory of evolution, which has been incr- the great crowning achievement of biology over the past hundred years. First the Darwinian understanding of natural selection and random mutation, then Mendelian genetics, the discovery of the particulate nature of the gene, then, uh, still later molecular genetics, the elucidation of DNA so forth and so on. The theory of evolution has been very successful in explaining the state of nature on this planet with one tremendously embarrassing exception which is ourselves. Biological evolution cannot account for a phenomenon like minded human beings involved in building and maintenance of global electronically-sustained societies. How do we do it? Well, we do it because we have a vastly superior cerebral architecture to any other organism in nature. And the interesting thing about that architecture is that it sprang into being in the blink of an eye, geologically speaking. The human brain size doubled in less than two million years. This is the most dramatic expansion in the size of a major organ of a higher animal in the entire fossil record. It would be under any circumstances an embarrassment to the theory of evolution, but notice that the theory of evolution was generated by the very organ we\u2019re discussing. So it is doubly embarrassing.\n\nNow, obviously we are the inheritors of extraordinary circumstances. Higher animals have existed on this planet for 200 million years in all kinds of forms. Uh, reptilian life, amphibian life, avian life mammalian life, and never, so far as the geological history of the planet can tell us, never did machine-building, language-using, technology-producing societies arrive. Some extraordinary interaction in our early history is responsible for our circumstance as language-using, technology-producing creatures.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Conversations+on+the+Edge+of+Magic"}
{"id": "08c5e3747f8d-3", "text": "Okay, end of introduction. Here\u2019s the scenario, and I hope it has special resonance for this community. All animal species tend to evolve into a- an ecological niche and stabilize themselves there. Ants and termites have been at equilibrium for hundreds of millions of years. Our remote ancestors also were on a direct course toward that kind of dynamic equilibrium. Uh, we were evolving toward being fruit eating, canopy living, insectivorous, uh, primates with an advanced repertoire of pack signals and this was apparently to be our evolutionary destiny. Were it not for the fact that sometime in the last five million years or so the African continent, which was the site of our environmental proto-system, began to dry up. And the forests that had always been our arboreal home began to shrink. And what this spelled for our remote protohominid ancestors was nutritional pressure. There wasn\u2019t enough food. Our remote ancestors began descending from the canopy and exploring the new environment that the aridity was bringing into existence. A grassland environment, an environment of limited numbers of plant and animal species relative to the climax tropical rain forests that were in retreat.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Conversations+on+the+Edge+of+Magic"}
{"id": "08c5e3747f8d-4", "text": "Now, the reason animals specialize their food supply is to avoid contact with mutagens in the environment. If you begin experimenting with foods and begin eating everything, uh, you will produce more children with mutations. Some of these mutations will be positive, most will be lethal. Uh, when our remote ancestors came under nutritional pressure they began expanding their diet. This was the moment when we became, uh, partially carnivorous, when we became omnivores. And had I more time, I would lay out many examples of specific plants \u2013 such as plants that contain birth control alkaloids and things like that \u2013 specific plants that would have impacted, uh, early human emergence. But I want to concentrate here on one plant. And that is the psilocybin containing mushrooms that grow in the dung of cattle. Because I think that if we are looking for a missing link it isn\u2019t a transitional skeleton, it isn\u2019t meddling by extraterrestrials, uh, at least not of the overt thousand-ton beryllium ship variety [audience laughter]. It has to do with the fact that we began to allow into our diet an exotic pseudo-neurotransmitter that was part of the native flora of the grassland. And I believe that, you know, in the next ten minutes I can at least make it seem plausible to you, that this mushroom was the triggering factor that moved us from being an advanced hominid, an advanced animal, to being in fact a conscious, self-reflecting, caring, thinking, dreaming, striving human being.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Conversations+on+the+Edge+of+Magic"}
{"id": "08c5e3747f8d-5", "text": "And here is my answer to this riddle, \u201cwhere did human consciousness come from?\u201d It begins like this: In that foraging phase where we were testing all kinds of plants on the grassland, small amounts of psilocybin mushrooms would have naturally been eaten in the process of eating corms and things like that. I personally have seen baboons, uh, in Kenya investigating cow patties on the savannah because they know that bug, uh, pupa will be under the cow paddies. So, the cow patties are already set up as vectors for possible sources of nutrition. So there is no question that these proto-hominids would have eaten psilocybin in small amounts. And by small amounts I mean amounts so small, that if you were to eat that much you wouldn\u2019t feel nothing. But it\u2019s-this dose-level has been studied and it causes increased acuity of vision. You can actually give people small amounts of psilocybin and then give them eye tests and they do better if they\u2019re slightly intoxicated than if they are not. The guy who proved this, the Viennese psychologist Roland Fischer, when he described those experiments to me, he said, \u201cand so you see, my young friend, here we have a case where the use of drugs actually introduces us to a more true vision of reality than if we have avoided the drug.\u201d [laughter]. Scientific proof that the drug is telling you more about reality than if you had refused it.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Conversations+on+the+Edge+of+Magic"}
{"id": "08c5e3747f8d-6", "text": "Alright, now, what kind of visual acuity is it that is being improved? Well it turns out it\u2019s what\u2019s called edge detection. In the grassland environment where the movement of small animals means dinner and the movement of large animals means you become dinner [audience laughter] a plant which confers increased visual acuity is going to immediately confer an adaptive advantage on those members of the group that let it in. Those members of the group that refuse it out of esthetic or, or gastronomic reasons will tend to be out-bred, because the psilocybin using members of the species will be more successful at obtaining food and at surviving to raise their own children to reproductive age which is the name of the game in, uh, in evolution. So that\u2019s step one of a three step process that leads to the explosion of consciousness in the hominid brain. Step two, which should have special appeal for this crowd, is that when you takes lightly larger doses of psilocybin, not religiously profound doses, but, but doses which you definitely feel, psilocybin is what\u2019s called a CNS stimulant, a central nervous system stimulant. What it causes in, in animals is what, uh, neurophysiologists call arousal. And in highly sexed animals like primates arousal means, in the male, erection. So what-an animal then, which is allowing, what is essentially a sexual stimulator an aphrodisiac to enter into the diet, there will be more instances of what anthropologists call successful copulations, and God knows we need that. So, if you have more successful copulations you have more pregnancies. You have another-a second factor outbreeding the non-psilocybin using member of the population.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Conversations+on+the+Edge+of+Magic"}
{"id": "08c5e3747f8d-7", "text": "Now, something really important here that is my, well this whole thing is my theory, but here is the part of it that I like the best: All primates, all primates, have what are called dominance hierarchies, or male dominance hierarchies. This goes right back clear to Lemurs and the old world monkeys- yes, well the new world monkeys which are more primitive. All primates have this dominance hierarchy and what it means is, the sharp fanged, hard bodied young males, they control the women, the children, the elderly, all sexual minorities, everybody is under the thumb of the alpha males. And as we sit here today, though this community may strive to be an exception, as a society male dominance is an enormous dilemma for us, and an enormous distorting factor in our politics and in our lives. So my notion is that psilocybin, by promoting this polymorphic sexual style, actually acted as an inoculation against monogamous sexual styles of bonding, you see. And it isn\u2019t that the monogamous style, the dominator style disappeared- it was simply medicated out of existence. For perhaps 100,000 years it was medicated out of existence.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Conversations+on+the+Edge+of+Magic"}
{"id": "08c5e3747f8d-8", "text": "Now, and, and what it promoted, this arousal, this psilocybin-taking around the African campfires by these primitive nomadic pastoralists, what the social change that came with it was, was an orgiastic sexual style. A style were everybody would get loaded around the camp fire and then hump in an enormous writhing heap. [audience laughter and whooping] Now, besides the fact that this is a great deal of fun it has a very, very profound social effect, which is: in societies which allow orgy men cannot trace lines of male paternity, men cannot trace lines of male paternity. What does this mean? It means that men do not identify with children as property. It means that the men of that kind of a social group can only think in terms of our children, we the group, our children. And it creates an immensely cohesive social glue that I believe held these societies together for millennia. And I believe that during this period of pharmacological suppression of male dominance we became human beings.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Conversations+on+the+Edge+of+Magic"}
{"id": "08c5e3747f8d-9", "text": "Theatre, poetry, magic, art, altruism, uh, dance, symbolic and cognitive activity of every sort was born in that window of opportunity when there was simultaneously a chemical suppression of male dominance and consequently an opening to Gaian intentionality, to the intent of the larger biological systems in which the human system was embedded. And a kind of paradise came into existence. There were actually two phases: one from about forty to thirty thousand years ago in the interglacial 6 and in that early phase human beings, cattle and mushrooms were sort of all swirling together there on the African grassland in contact but not yet a coherent triad. The second partnership paradise arose at the last glaciation, uh, at the melt, during the last glacial melt and it lasted from about 20,000 years ago to perhaps as much, as, as recently 10,000 years ago. And it was in that later phase that, uh, uh, the Magdalenian explosion occurred and the social forms were put in place that Hellenistic paganism was looking back at with a nostalgic and barely cognizable memory. There was an old, old memory of a kind of paganism that was old 5,000 years before Eleusis laid its cornerstone.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Conversations+on+the+Edge+of+Magic"}
{"id": "08c5e3747f8d-10", "text": "I wrote a book called The Archaic Revival, in which I try to say that the entire cultural impulse of the 20th century, beginning with Freud and Jung discovering the unconscious, beginning with Picasso dragging back primitive West African masks to Paris and inserting them into his paintings, Dada, pataphysics, jazz, abstract expressionism, even phenomena like National Socialism, all of these various impulses in the 20th century, some positive, some negative, all have a common theme: archaism. Archaism, a nostalgia for a state before history. And as this tendency, this nostalgia has been sorted out over the last 100 years by generations of scholars beginning with, you know, Freud and Jung and Blavatsky and Crowley and then coming up through all the folklorists and deconstructionists, as this thing has been teased apart, it has become clearer and clearer that the paradigmatic figure in any archetypal revival is the maker of magic, the shaman, the wizard, the seeress, the person who is in control with invisible forces. And as I have lived my life and explored these things for a longtime I\u2019ve come to the conclusion that the shaman without the hallucinogenic plants is well on the way to becoming priest or priestess, well on the way to being downloaded into a fixed canon, a, a moral vision, uh, a societal, religious structure, which is not what shamanism is about. It\u2019s about discordian ecstasy; it\u2019s about the felt presence of immediate experience in the absence of theory. That\u2019s what it\u2019s about.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Conversations+on+the+Edge+of+Magic"}
{"id": "08c5e3747f8d-11", "text": "So, this, this, uh, well, and then I want to get back to our little process. We\u2019ve now covered step one, better vision through mushroom taking leads to better diets and healthier children. Bigger doses lead to an end to monogamy, a dissolution of pair bonding and a replacement of, of monogamous anxiety, with, uh, polymorphic amorousness or whatever you want to call it. Uh, then \u2013 that\u2019s only the second step \u2013 the third step is when you double the polyamorous dose, and now, hunting is out of the question [audience laughter] and even fucking is out of the question because you are nailed to the ground somewhere off at the edge of the firelight wrestling with a mystery so profound, so bizarre that even as we sit here with Husserl and Heidegger and Heisenberg and all these clowns under our belts it is still absolutely mysterious, appalling, challenging, boundary dissolving and unavoidably ecstatic. It is the living mystery. And I don\u2019t know how many of them there are in the world but for my money there only has to be one [audience laughter] to rescue the entire concept from, you know, the dirty claws of the reductionist, the materialist, the Christers, the nothing-but-ers, the merely-this-and simply-that-ers [audience laughter, applause]. Yea, I know that I am preaching to the converted but I [clears throat] if I\u2019d preach to the unconverted I\u2019d be hung from the yardarm. [audience laughs]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Conversations+on+the+Edge+of+Magic"}
{"id": "08c5e3747f8d-12", "text": "So, you may say to yourself, \u201cWell, this is all very interesting. This guy has some kind of anthropological revisionist theory and, you know, that\u2019s all well and good, in other words, so what? What does it have to do with us? Well, what it has to do with us is, we are in a state of enormous dysfunctional anxiety as a result of the fall into history, which has caused us to have to compromise our sensuality, our connection to the Gaian Goddess, our polymorphic sexuality. All of these things have been poured into a new set of social institutions that derive, essentially, from the invention of agriculture, which is where I think the shit hit the fan. I mean I\u2019m fairly radical on that. I think that agriculture is the end, because it\u2019s incredibly successful as a strategy for food production. Well, what does that mean? It means you can\u2019t be nomads anymore. Oh no, you have to build a stone tower to put the grain in. And you have to make sure you can haul large rocks upon top of your tower to drop on people who\u2019s grain crop wasn\u2019t as big as yours was. We see this at Jericho. The most advanced building of the world at 10,000 BC was the grain tower at Jericho. And it was defensive, and it bespeaks, you know, the primal paranoia.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Conversations+on+the+Edge+of+Magic"}
{"id": "08c5e3747f8d-13", "text": "Once people stopped moving across the land, once they violated it with the blade of the plough, then you get sedentary populations, the division between the profane world of the city and the wilderness outside. That\u2019s the moment when the division between the unconscious and the conscious mind comes into play and an entire set of institutions arise then: male kingship, standing armies, role specialization, slavery, women as chattel, uh, so forth and so on. I mean, we are the unhappy inheritors of this hideous plunge into dysfunctionality. Now why is it such a hideous plunge into dysfunctionality to live without psilocybin or close relatives thereof? The answer is that his thing which to now I\u2019ve described as male dominance and a tendency to form dominance hierarchies we can describe another way and bring much closer to home by saying \u201cIt is the ego\u201d. The ego is a late arriving, very tenuous, highly uncertain of itself, social structure that has taken root in the human", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Conversations+on+the+Edge+of+Magic"}
{"id": "08c5e3747f8d-14", "text": "social structure that has taken root in the human psyche like a tumor, like uh, a, a growth of some sort. It is the leftover of this primate dominance complex and the way it manifests itself is by the establishment of boundaries. First of all, this is my body, do not touch it. Second of all, these are my weapons and, and agricultural tools, do not touch them, this is my woman, these are my children, I hunt there, so forth and so on. It\u2019s this division of the world which allows the illusion of the ego to come into existence. Now, what do psychedelics do and why are they such social dynamite? The answer is, it\u2019s not a health issue, it\u2019s not an addiction issue, I mean, that\u2019s preposterous, it\u2019s about boundary dissolution. Every society from the classic Maya to Fujiwara, Japan, to the France of the Bourbons, every society establishes a set of boundaries which it then calls \"reality\" and woe betide you if", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Conversations+on+the+Edge+of+Magic"}
{"id": "08c5e3747f8d-15", "text": "then calls \"reality\" and woe betide you if you go across the boundary, because then you are outcast, outclassed, outlandish, and the full fury of the community can be turned against you. And we all know what that can mean, as pagans.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Conversations+on+the+Edge+of+Magic"}
{"id": "08c5e3747f8d-16", "text": "So, I believe that the ego is a dysfunctional, uh, psychic invader. And that it will continue and strengthen to perpetuate itself as long as we do not institute either as groups or within our relationships or as individuals, a regular ritual encounter with the forces which dissolve these boundaries. And the only force I know that works are these plants. And as I say, I\u2019m not interested in arguing whether there are other methods or not, God I would hope so, but anything I ever looked into, and I shopped the spiritual supermarket from stem to stern, was horse shit as far as I could see, [audience laughter, applause] Now, I am not a sensitive, let me say that, people say, \u201cWell, but what about Ramana Maharshi, what about Jaka Berma \u2013 hey, it\u2019s great for those folks. I applaud our hots and avatars and so forth and so on, but what I\u2019m interested in is democratic ecstasies. It should be for themost lumpen among us. It, it is not to be attained by an act of dietary control, sexual abstinence or, uh, you know, whatever. It is a human birth right \u2013 it is a human birthright to touch the incorporeal body of the Goddess, [audience applause] it isn\u2019t something \u2026 [more applause, laughs]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Conversations+on+the+Edge+of+Magic"}
{"id": "08c5e3747f8d-17", "text": "So, uh\u2026, well let\u2019s see, where can we go from here? I say all this, if you are interested, I say it better than I\u2019m saying it here, in my book Food of the Gods, which was not written for you people, it\u2019s an argument for people who do not know a great deal about drugs, may never have taken drugs, but through some miracle have managed to maintain an open mind. Uh, [audience laughter] I don\u2019t know how much you know about my shtick\u2013 and I can\u2019t get into it now \u2013 but for me these things are more than tools for the Freudian or Jungian unconscious. I mean, I journey to inhabited worlds that are, there are echos in Elf land and Faye but, you know, as a rationalist, as a, as an aspiring astronautical engineer at age 13 it\u2019s astonishing to me that I could validate the mystery through doubt, through doubt.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Conversations+on+the+Edge+of+Magic"}
{"id": "08c5e3747f8d-18", "text": "The truth does not require your belief. The truth is real. You can beat it on the ground, you can rip it apart, you can look inside it. Nobody needs to guard the truth from inspection. Nobody needs to tell you that, you know, you can\u2019t look behind the stage. And so, my motivation is to try to \u2013 number one \u2013 bring people to the realization that the spiritual path \u2013 if you want to think of it that way \u2013 that is a real thing. And it will carry you to the real thing. All spiritual disciplines that I know except for psychedelics, put a great deal of emphasis on putting the pedal to the metal. Push, push, push, you know, meditate, make offerings, do Mantrayana, do Pranayama, do Pusha, push, push, push! With psychedelics suddenly there is a very deep interest in \u201cAnd where are the breaks?\u201d [audience laughter] You see? You\u2019re no longer pushing. Once you get to the psychedelics, seeking is an attitude which ill becomes you. [audience laughter] You have found it! You have found it. Now what in the hell are you going to do with it?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Conversations+on+the+Edge+of+Magic"}
{"id": "08c5e3747f8d-19", "text": "And, and this is a great dilemma for anyone who goes into this. I mean, I am, as I see myself, I\u2019m a preacher in the marketplace, but I know \u2013 and I\u2019m sure most of you know \u2013 that I could walk out of here, you could walk out of here, and you could go as far as your courage would carry you. There is no barrier. There are no more barriers. You can go as far as your fuckin\u2019 courage will carry you. And at that point you have to ask the question, you know, \u201cDo I want to be the Mad Monk of Cold Mountain? Do I want the villagers down in the valley to say: Oh yes, we see him occasionally up in the mist naked, flying with the eagles \u2026\u201d uh, [audience laughter] because you can be that person. You know, you don\u2019t have to go back to your job as Addict-Sachs stock broker or whatever it is. And so we stand on the edge of being able to leave history. We can leave it.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Conversations+on+the+Edge+of+Magic"}
{"id": "08c5e3747f8d-20", "text": "You know, we tend to forget because our lives are so brief, but what we call the psychedelic experience is very, very new on the plate of Western, uh, uh, occultism and science. I mean hashish did not make great inroads into Medieval Europe, that all came later in the 18th and 19th century. Chloroform, ether, these things don\u2019t cut it. Mescaline was, uh, synthesized for the first time in 1888. These things had to compete with many other interesting areas of scientific exploration in 20th century. We have not come to terms with what they mean and what they are. Uh, and it\u2019s a curious area because the counterculture \u2013 whatever that may mean \u2013 knows a great deal more about this than science. I mean, science does not explore this area because it senses enormous danger for its ontological machinery. It probably couldn't survive the encounter. And therefore its just said, \u201cWell, it\u2019s psychology, it\u2019s marginal, it\u2019s fleeting, it\u2019s non irreproducible, and so forth and so on. This is all nonsense. You can, by unplugging the telephone, by fasting for six hours, and by taking 5 dried grams of Stropharia cubensis in silent darkness, you can go up to the great simulacra of human explorers Hypatia, Maria, Newton, Da Vinci, you can take that ride. I have the feeling that when we go into those psychedelic spaces we not only see things no one has ever seen before, we see things no one will ever, ever see again.\n\nOkay, one last thought I wanna put out and then I\u2019ll try for some questions.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Conversations+on+the+Edge+of+Magic"}
{"id": "08c5e3747f8d-21", "text": "Okay, one last thought I wanna put out and then I\u2019ll try for some questions.\n\nI have a sort of a rational mind, in that I like to make sense. I don\u2019t mean experimental sense, but I mean if you can build a verbal metaphor to get from one thing to another then you understand it much better. And so I-the magical dimension is real. It isn\u2019t psychological, it isn\u2019t based on the strength of will. It\u2019s as real as Mars in its orbit. I mean, there is real estate out there, folks. It\u2019s that real. And so then, uh, the question becomes, uh, how to vivify it. And the answer is by creating a consensus in language. By having it made illegal it\u2019s like where sex was with the Victorians. You know, everybody was inventing the wheel over and over again.\n\nWe have lost touch with our moral compass because we have lost touch with the Gaian mind. And this is not a metaphor. If you take these neurotransmitters, these exopheromones that connect you up with the natural environment, the Gaian intent becomes known. It\u2019s an act of feeling. If we could feel what we are doing we would stop doing it. But we live in a realm of abstraction, excuses, incredible wealth, incredible levels of pampering and softness lay between us, the upper five percent of the intellectual and material elite on the planet, and the problems. I mean, how many of us have been to Bosnia, or Rwanda, or Somalia? These things are only images on a dehumanizing screen. If we could feel what we are doing, we would awaken to the mystery of each other and to the mystery of the historical process of recovering what was lost.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Conversations+on+the+Edge+of+Magic"}
{"id": "08c5e3747f8d-22", "text": "We don\u2019t need this material civilization. We don\u2019t need five billion people on this planet. We have to think very, very radically about how we are going to change ourselves or we\u2019re not going to make the cut. And orthodoxy is utterly and completely bankrupt. All it can do is suppress. They suppress, they suppress, they suppress. But there\u2019s only one argument that will forgive suppression: deliverance. And they can\u2019t give us deliverance. All they can give us is the Menendez trial, O.J., Baby M, The Skaters, Claus von B\u00fclow, horse shit, horse shit, horse shit. [applause]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Conversations+on+the+Edge+of+Magic"}
{"id": "08c5e3747f8d-23", "text": "We are locked inside, uh, a nightmare, a nightmare of contaminated and toxic imagery that is designed to disempower you and make it impossible for you to think straight. And the way out is straight back to the reality of the vegetable Gnosis. It is there, it has always been there. The societies that never broke the connection live in dynamic and loving balance with each other and the planet today were it not for the input of our disruptive social and economic systems. So I, I talk to all kinds of people who I see as part of my community, but it stretches from virtual reality, to the radical gay movement, to the house movement, to the pagan movement, to the younger molecular pharmacologists, to the radical art historians and psychotherapists \u2013 all of these communities are fragmented and suspicious of each other, and this is precisely what orthodoxy enjoys. If all of these countercultural impulses could make common cause, we would probably discover that we are 65-70% of the population. And so what is needed is a spirit of boundary dissolution between individuals, between classes, sexual orientations, rich and poor, man and woman, intellectual and feeling-toned types. If this can happen then we will make a new world. And if this doesn\u2019t happen nature is fairly pitiless, uh, and has a place for us in the shale of this planet where so many have preceded us. [audience laughter] Well, I think that\u2019s the basic rave. It raises a lot of issues. If somebody is burning to ask a question, uh \u2026yes, burning to ask \u2026\n\n[44:32]Q & A\n\n[Q: ?]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Conversations+on+the+Edge+of+Magic"}
{"id": "08c5e3747f8d-24", "text": "TM: Well, I think that it\u2019s very hard to find pristine pseudo-Paleolithic, or \u201cpseudo-Neolithic\u201d culture. Even the Amazon, where I\u2019ve spent a lot of time, uh, tribes that were nomadic at the time of, of, uh, contact are now agriculturalist simply because missionary medicine has swollen aboriginal populations to the point where they can\u2019t be nomads as they used to be. So, you\u2019re right. There are some psychedelic-using cultures that are pretty, uh, uh, unappealing \u2013 although actually I can only think of one, that I find politically very unappealing. And I don\u2019t wanna knock them because I haven\u2019t lived with them. So I may be misled. But I think it\u2019s not simply taking psychedelics but it\u2019s also to decondition oneself to the notion of ego and all the concepts which constellate around that, such as place, property, ownership, and stability. You see, the idea that we have inherited from Western religion and science is the idea that things should", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Conversations+on+the+Edge+of+Magic"}
{"id": "08c5e3747f8d-25", "text": "Western religion and science is the idea that things should be stable. This is a very male dominant notion, the wish for stability, eternity, when in fact the message life hands you over and over again is \u201cnothing lasts\u201d. Nothing lasts. Not what you love, not what you hate, not your enemies, your friends, not even your dear, dear self. Nothing lasts. And the ego goes mad in the presence of that truth; it, it, it can\u2019t swallow it. And so we have anxiety of death, need to dominate people, need to possess property, terror of illness, resentment of fate, because we are not in the flow. And I think what these psychedelics do is they put you very much in the \u2018here and now\u2019. And it\u2019s nothing more than that. I mean, obviously I\u2019m an egghead and an abstract thinker, and I hope to make my reputation in mathematics, but feeling is the primary validator of existence. I mean, if you don\u2019t know that, you gotta", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Conversations+on+the+Edge+of+Magic"}
{"id": "08c5e3747f8d-26", "text": "mean, if you don\u2019t know that, you gotta go back to square one. And these things empower feeling. They are catalysts for the imagination. I mean, you may not like what psychedelics do to you, they may terrify you. But if it terrifies you then surely it must have catalyzed your imagination, or you wouldn\u2019t have known that terror. So catalysis of the imagination in a fairly loving and yet ruthless way is what the psychedelics deliver. Anybody who calls this escapism is sitting on their thumb. I mean they don\u2019t know what they\u2019re talking about. Reality is for people who can\u2019t handle this stuff! [audience laughter, applause]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Conversations+on+the+Edge+of+Magic"}
{"id": "08c5e3747f8d-27", "text": "I do want to say one thing. It almost slipped my mind and for those of you who have your hands up I apologize but I think this needs to be said. And I don\u2019t know how many of you know it, but this is a news flash, folks. We interrupt thisprogram to bring you a special announcement. A new psychoactive substance has been discovered. A very powerful psychoactive substance, the most powerful since the discovery of LSD. A substance so powerful that 300 \u00b5g is the dose. That means 1 gram will dose 7,000 people. This compound comes from a plant. The plant is \u2013 and I hope you\u2019re paying attention \u2013 the plant is legal. The compound is legal. You can possess it. You can manufacture it. [audience laughter] You can transport it across borders. You can give it away. You can sell it and you can do it on stage. [audience laughter] And it comes from a plant. And the plant is also available, and I wanna tell", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Conversations+on+the+Edge+of+Magic"}
{"id": "08c5e3747f8d-28", "text": "the plant is also available, and I wanna tell you about this because [laughter], Okay, no shoving, no shoving! [audience laughter] Alright, not to keep you in suspense any longer. The plant is Salvia divinorum, Salvia divinorum which, some of you who are real mavens of this stuff know it. It\u2019s been in the books for 30 years. The problem was nobody knew how to get off. And so it was always carried in these lists as \u2018suspect hallucinogen\u2019. The thing is, any scientist, confronted with a plant where somebody says it\u2019s a hallucinogen, will test to see if it\u2019s an alkaloid. All hallucinogens, almost all, are alkaloids. So, Salvia divinorum \u2013 negative for alkaloids. Doesn\u2019t matter. It has a new, unknown compound in it \u2013 now known \u2013 Salvinorin alpha. And the interesting thing about Salvinorin alpha is, we have in this country a structural near-relatives or cognener law, which says, if a compound is", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Conversations+on+the+Edge+of+Magic"}
{"id": "08c5e3747f8d-29", "text": "cognener law, which says, if a compound is a structural near-relative, isomer and enantiomer or stereoisomer of an illegal compound then it too can be made illegal. Salvia divinorum doesn\u2019t fit this description. That means that in order to make this stuff illegal the government will have to present medical data showing there is something wrong with it. And at this stage nobody on earth knows the real pharmacological parameters of this compound.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Conversations+on+the+Edge+of+Magic"}
{"id": "08c5e3747f8d-30", "text": "So, here is the deal: you can grow this plant in a window box in your apartment, in your backyard. It looks like \u2018Joe Plant\u2019 [audience laughter]. There is nothing particularly distinguishing about this plant. And if you have three or four cuttings in six or seven months you will have more than you know what to do with. And, then, then I\u2019ll just describe how I do it. I\u2019m slightly chicken shit to do the pure compound, which, by the way, you do 300 \u00b5g. Understand that what it looks like is a grain of salt. A small grain of salt is a human-effective dose. It comes on so fast that you have no impression of it coming on at all. You do it and then after a while you notice that for a long time you have been staring at something incomprehensible.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Conversations+on+the+Edge+of+Magic"}
{"id": "08c5e3747f8d-31", "text": "[audience laughter] Well let me ta- here is how I recommend that you do it while we get the chemical thing sorted out. Because the chemical \u2013 it could be dangerous. It would be very easy to overdose by a factor of ten, twenty, thirty and you would still just be doing a smidgeon. So I say let\u2019s honor the plants. Let\u2019s not hand the government a bunch of casualties that it can clock over and put on national TV, you know, the bibble, bibble, bibble show [laughter], uh\u2026, let\u2019s use the plant. And the way you do it is you grow up a batch of this stuff and get between fifteen and twenty leaves. Remove the mid-vein with your fingernail, just to lower the mass, fold it all into a little pile, put it in your mouth, and twenty leaves is a whopping mouthful, so basically as much as you can get in your mouth. Put it in your mouth- lie down in silent darkness and squeeze the stuff with your jaws. Tastes like \u2026, it\u2019s horrible. It\u2019s not as bad as ayahuasca, but it\u2019s horrible. But you could acquire a taste for it. [audience laughter]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Conversations+on+the+Edge+of+Magic"}
{"id": "08c5e3747f8d-32", "text": "So, lie down in darkness where you can see a digital watch \u2013 one of these red-flashing jobs like a K-mart deal and, and then let it \u2026don\u2019t swallow it, but just squeeze it and masticate it. At fifteen minutes by the clock spit it out into a bowl or Kleenex or something. And then just lie there. Lie still in the darkness with your eyes closed and look. And this is almost the key empowerment though it\u2019s idiotic. People fail to do it. Look at the back of your eyelids with the expectation of seeing something. And when you do that, after just three or four minutes there will be what, uh, we professionals call streaming. Which means ameboid lights of after image colors, the chartreuse and purple flowing by, and about three minutes after that it will deepen very, very quickly into extraordinarily bizarre, uh \u2026dare we say it, fairly DMT-like hallucinations. And it, it, it builds fast. I mean so fast that either is this wonderful moment in it where you actually know real fear, which shows you that it\u2019s working. Yeah, I mean, I really believe if you take a psychedelic and you\u2019re not afraid you did too much, you didn\u2019t do enough. [audience laughter, applause]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Conversations+on+the+Edge+of+Magic"}
{"id": "08c5e3747f8d-33", "text": "The experience then will unfold for about 45 minutes. And just lie there and look. And it is beautiful, it is beautiful. I mean, I\u2019m a, a, a connoisseur of hallucination and these deep indigo blues, these cerulean blues against blackness that are like neon and these amorphous Yves Tanguy kind of shapes that are moving and transforming themselves. I mean, I was amazed, I couldn\u2019t believe it. I was saying, \u201cMy God, this, legal? This is legal? And it\u2019s working! It\u2019s working!\u201d And I am the hardest of the hard heads. I mean I know people say, you know, here is Tagetes lucida,this will get you off. here is this, smoke this, knick\u2019anick this, something\u2026no, no, no, no, no, uh-huh no, it doesn\u2019t, it\u2019s not like that, these things are rare. But this one works. And I commend it to your attention and your friends\u2019 attention and anyone with shamanic intent. As I say, it\u2019s perfectly legal to possess, advocate the whole bit, yes.\n\n[Q]\n\nSalvia. It\u2019s in the genus Salvia. That\u2019s the mint family. Sacred to pagans for millennia. Salvia S-A-L-V-I-A and then divinorum [spells it]. The diviner\u2019s mint.\n\n[Q]\n\nWell, yes. Let me say something about this that\u2019s very interesting.\n\n[Q:]\n\nPardon me?\n\nQ: What\u2019s its common name?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Conversations+on+the+Edge+of+Magic"}
{"id": "08c5e3747f8d-34", "text": "[Q:]\n\nPardon me?\n\nQ: What\u2019s its common name?\n\nWell That\u2019s what I was gonna talk about. It\u2019s native from Mexico. So it has no common name in English. In Spanish it has a very interesting common name. It\u2019s called \u2018Ojos de la pastora\u2019, now, \u2018The eyes of the shepherdess\u2019. What a strange name. Think about it for a moment. First of all, notice that in Christian iconography there are no shepherdesses, period. Not one. We got shepherds, you got your shepherds there Christmas. Shepherdess? No. So it\u2019s called \u2018Ojos de la pastora\u2019. Well then the anthropologist who studied this, Bret Blosser, to whom we all owe a great debt, Hail Bret! [laughter, applause] Naturally these people are Tzotzil and Sotil. They\u2019re in the mountains of Oaxaca. And so we said to them, \u201cWell yes, Ojos de la pastora, very interesting, but what do you call it in your language? What do you call it in Tzotzil?\u201d And they said, \u201cWell, we have no name for it in our language.\u201d", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Conversations+on+the+Edge+of+Magic"}
{"id": "08c5e3747f8d-35", "text": "This is very, very interesting and if any of you have any thoughts or want work on this, it\u2019s inconceivable, if these people had used this for centuries that they would not have a local Tzotzil name for it. So he said, \u201cWhy don\u2019t you have a name for it?\u201d And they said, \u201cBecause our grandfathers were the first to use it.\u201d And this, we do not know what to make of it. Because Salvia divinorum is known only in this very indemnified locality in the Sierra Mazateca. Where did it come from? Has it always been there? But these Indians only discovered it 200 years ago? Did it come from somewhere else? And if so where? Because it\u2019s never been located anywhere else on the planet. So this is a great puzzlement. And I think if we move fast enough, we psychedelicos, we pagans, we neuronauts, we magicians, if we move fast enough, this will just be moot. And this is a far more powerful thing than Cannabis. I mean, not if you\u2019ve never smoked Cannabis and then you sit down and smoke the best aff there is. But as we all know, after a while Cannabis loses its ability to really catapult you into the unspeakable. The Salvia divinorum, every time I have taken it it\u2019s gotten better and stronger and weirder. So, I think it is sent from the Goddess at this time, Eyes of the Shepherdess, these are the eyes we should be looking through. [audience applause]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Conversations+on+the+Edge+of+Magic"}
{"id": "08c5e3747f8d-36", "text": "Okay. I think several people at once asked, \u201cWhere do you get it?\u201d You must each have your own favorite rare plant dealer. I, I don\u2019t work for any rare plant dealer and every time I mention one thousands of dollars flow into their coffers which leaves me feeling slightly weird. Nevertheless, Of The Jungle, PO Box 1801, Sebastopol, California. Somebody sitting next to you already knows this. So I\u2019m not gonna repeat it. That\u2019s the one. And \u2026\n\nQ: We have the plant. I just have a harvesting question.\n\nTM: A harvesting question.\n\nQ: \u2026 herbalist we\u2019ve always harvest when the vital whatever are in the part of the plant that you would ingest. So normally, you\u2019re going for a leave, you harvest when leaves are in a strength. So once the purple flower sprites go on, do you wait until they die down \u2018till you harvest? Or do you \u2026harvest and just eat as you go?]\n\nTM: Well, we\u2019re learning, we\u2019re learning. And so far we\u2019ve been fairly careful to eat it just as it\u2019s approaching flowering.\n\nQ: \u2026 before the power hasn\u2019t gotten into the flowering yet.\n\nTM: Right. But you do know, don\u2019t you, that it\u2019s, it may look like an annual but it\u2019s a perennial. You can clip it off above a node and it will grow more.\n\nQ: ?\n\nTM: Yeah, no, seed is a pain. Try and do it with the cuttings. That\u2019s about all I can say about it. Alright, I\u2019m gonna knock off. Thank you very much. [audience applause]\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Conversations+on+the+Edge+of+Magic"}
{"id": "08c5e3747f8d-37", "text": "Follow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Conversations+on+the+Edge+of+Magic"}
{"id": "9c1d77fd6b93-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nLaws and Freedom, Habits, and Novelty\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\nJune 1994\n\nUnknown\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo transcript available for this talk!\n\nHelp Transcribe\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Laws+and+Freedom%2C+Habits%2C+and+Novelty"}
{"id": "746a215287db-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nPermitting Smart People to Hope\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\nJune 1994\n\nEsalen Institute, Big Sur, CA\n\n10536\n\nEnd of Results\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Permitting+Smart+People+to+Hope"}
{"id": "693b0ebbdfa1-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nVertigo at History's Edge\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n29 April 1994\n\nNew York MA\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo transcript available for this talk!\n\nHelp Transcribe\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Vertigo+at+History%27s+Edge"}
{"id": "75b3d58683a7-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nInterview on WFMU\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n21 April 1994\n\nUnknown\n\n39\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo youtube link available, try the following:\n\nNo transcript available for this talk!\n\nHelp Transcribe\n\nTRANSCRIBER: copy and paste the question and answers templates (below) for each question and answer. remove this red text before publishing.\n\nFirstname Lastname: question?\n\nFL: question?\n\nFL: question?\n\nFL: question?\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Interview+on+WFMU"}
{"id": "441363540d32-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nEros and the Eschaton\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n25 March 1994\n\nKane Hall, University of Washington, Seattle, WA\n\n6958\n\nEnd of Results\n\nSo everyone can hear, yes? I can hear anyway. Good. Well I want to thank Mandala books, Jan, I want to thank Jay Weidner for bringing me back to Seattle, the home of real grunge and real peculiarity. Before I plunge into this I should tell you, because Harper would like me to do that, The Invisible Landscape after years and years of being out of print is shipping right now. I don\u2019t know if it\u2019s in the bookstores but it\u2019s real. True Hallucinations is going into paper at the same time so if you couldn\u2019t afford the $22, wait for the $12 or the 2012.\n\nWhat I wanted to talk about tonight simply because it\u2019s the thing that is moving me to the edge of my chair at the moment is: I called the talk Eros and the Eschaton. What I could have called it is Eros and the Eschaton, What Science Forgot. Somebody asked me recently is there any permission to hope? More specifically, is there any permission for smart people to hope? It\u2019s easy to hope if you\u2019re stupid. Is there any basis for intelligent people to hope? I wanted to deal with that because I think so. It was to me a shocking question because I live in an aura of hope because I live in a twilight world of my own self-generated, cannabinated fantasy. I forget that not everyone is so fortunate and that there\u2019s a lot of despair and uncertainty out there.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Eros+and+the+Eschaton"}
{"id": "441363540d32-1", "text": "So I wanted to talk about this. I\u2019ll talk for a while and then we\u2019ll break and have an intermission. I\u2019ll sign books if anybody needs a book signed. Then we\u2019ll come back and do Q&A on this until we\u2019re sick of it basically.\n\nIf there\u2019s a technician adjusting this, help me out a little bit.\n\nEros and the Eschaton \u2013 these are the two areas that I think compromise the old paradigm and give permission to hope. Strangely, neither of these words is that well known, which gives you a measure of how completely the dominator position has squelched, subverted and downplayed any opposition to its worldview. Eros we know about in some kind of devalued, shticky kind of glitzy way because we get it in the eroticization of media and society. Really what Eros means in the Greek sense is a kind of unity of nature, a kind of all-pervasive order that bridges one ontological level to another. This is not permitted in the official worldview of our civilization, which is science. The world of inorganic chemistry is not thought to make any statement about the organic world and the organic world is not thought to be extrapolatable into the world of culture and thought. There are imagined to be clear breaks in these categories.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Eros+and+the+Eschaton"}
{"id": "441363540d32-2", "text": "I had a biologist tell me once, \u201cIf genes aren\u2019t involved, it ain\u2019t evolution.\u201d So that means you can\u2019t talk about the evolution of the Earth as a physical body. You can\u2019t talk about the evolution of human social institutions. Evolution is somehow a word appropriate to biology and appropriate nowhere else. This brings me then to the first factor easily discerned by anybody who has their eyes open that compromises and erodes the hopeless, existential view of the world that we\u2019re getting from science. That is the idea that nature is in fact across all scales and all levels of phenomena, a unity. It\u2019s not a coincidence that electrons spinning around an atomic nucleus and planets going around a star and star clusters orbiting around the gravitational center of a galaxy; it\u2019s no coincidence that these systems exhibit the same kind of order on different scales. Yet, science would say that is a coincidence.\n\nP.W. Bridgeman, who was a philosopher of science, defined a coincidence as what you have left over when you apply a bad theory. It means that you\u2019ve overlooked something and what jumps out at you as a coincidence is actually a set of relationships whose casuistry and whose relationships to each other are simply hidden from you. What I\u2019ve observed and I think it\u2019s fair to give credit to the psychedelic experience for this - what I\u2019ve observed is that nature builds on previously established levels of complexity. This is a great general, natural law that your own senses will confirm for you but has never been allowed into the canon of science. What I mean by that nature builds on complexity is the following. When the universe was born in the dubious and controversial circumstance called the Big Bang, it was at first simply a pure plasma of electrons. It was the simplest that it could possibly be. There were no atoms. There were no molecules. There were no highly organized systems of any kind. There was simply a pure plasma of expanding energy.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Eros+and+the+Eschaton"}
{"id": "441363540d32-3", "text": "As the universe cooled, simply cooled, new kinds of phenomena, we say emerged out of the situation. As the universe cooled, atomic nuclei could form and electrons could settle in to stable orbits. As the universe further cooled, the chemical bond became a possibility. Still later the hydrogen bond\u2026which is a weaker bond, which is the basis of biology. So as the universe aged, it complexified. This is so obvious that it\u2019s never really been challenged. But on the other hand, it\u2019s never been embraced as a general and dependable principle either. Follow it through with me. Out of atomic systems come chemical systems. Out of chemical systems comes the covalent hydrogen bond, the carbon bond; complex chemistry that is prebiotic, organic. Out of that chemistry come the macro-physical systems that we call membranes, jells, charge transfer complexes, this sort of thing. These systems are the chemical preconditions for life - simple life, the life of the prokaryotes, the life of naked unnucleated DNA that characterized primitive life on the planet.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Eros+and+the+Eschaton"}
{"id": "441363540d32-4", "text": "Out of that life come eukaryotes, nucleated cells and then complex colonies of cells. Then cell specialization \u2013 leading to higher animals, to social animals, leading to complex social systems, leading to technologies, leading to globe girdling, electronically based, information transfer oriented cultures like ourselves. Someone once said, \u2018what\u2019s so progressive about media?\u2019 \u2018It\u2019s the spreading of darkness at the speed of light.\u2019 It can be, it can be. So this is very interesting that apparently the way the universe works is upon a platform of previously achieved complexity; chemical, electrical, social, biological, whatever. New forms of complexity can be built that cross these ontological boundaries. In other words, what I mean by that is that biology is based on complex chemistry but it is more than complex chemistry. Social systems are based on the organization that is animal life and yet it is more than animal life.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Eros+and+the+Eschaton"}
{"id": "441363540d32-5", "text": "So this is a general law of the universe overlooked by science. Out of complexity emerges greater complexity. We could almost say that the universe, nature, is a novelty conserving or complexity conversing engine. It makes complexity and it preserves it and it uses it as the basis for further complexity. Now, there\u2019s more to this than simply that. I think we all observationally could agree what has been said so far. The added wrinkle, or an added wrinkle, is that each advancement into complexity, into novelty, precedes more quickly than the stage that preceded it. This is very profound because if accepted as a serious first principle, it ends the marginalization of our own species to the level of spectator status in a universe that knows nothing of us and cares nothing for us. This is the most advanced position that modern science will allow us \u2013 spectators to a drama we didn\u2019t write, shouldn\u2019t expect to understand and cannot influence. But I say, if in fact novelty is the name of the game, if in fact the conservation and complexification of novelty is what the universe is striving for, then suddenly our own human enterprise, previously marginalized, takes on an immense new importance. We are apparently players in the cosmic drama and in this particular act of the cosmic drama; we hold a very central role.\n\nWe are at the pinnacle of the expression of complexification in the animal world and somehow this complexity which is concentrated in us has flowed over out of the domain of animal organization and into this mysterious domain which we call culture, language, consciousness, higher values \u2013 each stage of advancement into complexity occurs more quickly than the stage which preceded it. After the initial big bang there was a period of billions of years when the universe cooled, stars condensed, planetary systems formed and then the quickening process crossed an invisible Rubicon into the domain of animal and biological organization.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Eros+and+the+Eschaton"}
{"id": "441363540d32-6", "text": "Well you see since the rise of western monotheism, the human experience has been marginalized. We have been told that we were unimportant in the cosmic drama. But we now know from the feedback that we\u2019re getting from the impact of human culture on the earth that we are a major factor shaping the temperatures of the oceans, the composition of the atmosphere, the general speed and complexity of speciation on the planet. A single species, ourselves, has broken from the ordinary constraints of animal nature and created a new world, an epigenetic world, meaning a world not based on gene transfer and chemical propagation and preservation of information but a world based on ideas, on symbols, on technologies, on tools, on ideas downloaded out of the human imagination and concretized into three dimensional space as choppers, aeropoints, particle accelerators, gene sequencers, space craft, what have you.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Eros+and+the+Eschaton"}
{"id": "441363540d32-7", "text": "All of this complexification is occurring at a faster and faster rate. This brings me then to the second quality or phenomena that science has overlooked, which is the acceleration of complexification. The early history of the universe proceeded with excruciating slowness then life took hold in the oceans of this planet. A quickening of process and evolution but still things proceeded on a scale of tens of millions of years to clock major change. Then the conquest of the land, higher animals, higher exposure to radiation, faster change, species following species, one upon another. Then fifty thousand, a hundred thousand, a million years ago \u2013 anyway recently \u2013 the crossover into the domain of culture, tool making, myth making, dance, poetry, song and story that set the stage for the fall into history; the incredibly unusual and self-consuming process that has been going on for the past fifteen or twenty thousand years. A biological snap of the finger. Yet in that time everything that we call human, everything that we associate with higher values has been adumbrated, elaborated, created, set in place by one species \u2013 ourselves.\n\nThis acceleration of time or complexity shows no sign of slowing down. In fact, within the fabric of our own lives, we can almost daily, hourly, by the minute feel it speeding up, taking hold. It\u2019s a clich\u00e9 that time is moving faster and faster, a clich\u00e9 of the mass media. But I want to suggest that this is not a perceptual illusion or a cultural mirage \u2013 that this is actually happening to the space-time matrix and that time is in fact speeding up. That history in which we are embedded because our life of fifty to eighty years is so ephemeral on a scale of ten to fifteen thousand years \u2013 but nevertheless history is a state of incredible destabilization.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Eros+and+the+Eschaton"}
{"id": "441363540d32-8", "text": "It\u2019s a catastrophe in the process of happening. It begins with animals kept in balance by natural selection and it ends with a global Internet of electronic information transfer and a language using species hurling its instruments towards the stars. There is no reason for us to suppose that this process of acceleration is ever going to slow down or be deflected. It has been a law of nature from the very beginning of nature; this acceleration was built in. What poses a problem to us as thinking individuals is that the speed of involution toward concrescence is now so great that we can feel the tug of it within the confines of our own lives. There has been more change since 1960 than in the previous several thousand years. There has been more change since 1992 than in the previous thousand years. Change is accelerating. Invention, connection, adumbration of ideas, mathematics, algorithms, connectivity of people, social systems \u2013 this is all accelerating furiously and under the control of no one; not the Catholic church, the communist party, the IMF \u2013 no one is in charge of this process. This is what makes history so interesting. It\u2019s a runaway freight train on a dark and stormy night.\n\nThis is why I\u2019m not particularly sympathetic to a conspiracy theory because I can\u2019t make the leap to faith that would cause you to believe that anyone could get hold of the beast enough to control it. Conspiracies, of course, we have conspiracies up the kazoo but none of them are succeeding. They\u2019re all being swept away, compromised, astonished by new information and endlessly agonized.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Eros+and+the+Eschaton"}
{"id": "441363540d32-9", "text": "So two factors relating to eros: the movement into complexity and the fact that that movement goes ever faster. The second quality, the acceleration of the movement into novelty, leads me to the third point, which is I suppose more controversial. I am frankly willing to admit that my sensitivity to this third point is based on my psychedelic experience. Science is the exploration of the experience of nature without psychedelics. I propose therefore to expand that enterprise and say we need a science beyond science. We need a science that plays with a full deck. The reason the psychedelic experience is so important here is not some namby-pamby notion that it expands consciousness or it makes you more perceptive or something like that.\n\nThat is all true but it isn\u2019t strongly enough put. A cultural point of view is like a crystal. You have an amorphous cultural medium, which at certain temperatures will form a crystal of cultural convention if you will. Within the geometry of that crystal certain things make sense and certain things are excluded from making sense. Science is a condensed cultural point of view that is a rigid crystal of interlocking assumptions; assumptions such as matter is primary, mind is tertiary, causality works from the past into the future, so forth and so on. What psychedelics do in terms of their impact on the physical brain and organism of human beings is they withdraw cultural programming. They dissolve cultural assumptions. They lift you out of that reassuring crystalline matrix of interlocking truths, which are lies.\n\nInstead, they throw you into the presence of the great \u2018who knows.\u2019 The mystery! The mystery, which has been banished from western thought since the rise of Christianity and the suppression of the mystery religions. Now the model that attracts me to the psychedelic experience is not that it makes you smarter \u2013 a kind of simple-minded idea paradoxically. Or the idea that\u2026[Audience Laughter].", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Eros+and+the+Eschaton"}
{"id": "441363540d32-10", "text": "You are paying attention, aren\u2019t you? Or the idea that it\u2019s some kind of magnifying glass into the personal unconscious \u2013 your trauma, your childhood memories, your satanic abuse your parents laid on you, so forth and so on. The model which I like is a geometric model and says simply that since the rise of the Greek alphabet, print, linear thinking and science, we have become imprisoned in a causal universe of material connectivity and that this is a cultural myth as much as believing that we are the sons and daughters of the great father who got out of his canoe at the second waterfall to take a leak. These are just cultural myths.\n\nWhat is revealed through the psychedelic experience I think is a higher dimensional perspective on reality. I use higher dimensional in the mathematical sense. Literally, you are lifted out of the plane of cultural assumptions and can look down with a kind of godlike understanding that one obtains when one flies in an airplane over a landscape previously only viewed from the ground. In other words, from the vantage point of the psychedelic experience, the cultural landscape is seen more nearly in its correct perspective \u2013 seen as historically bounded, spatially and intellectually bounded. Now it\u2019s no coincidence that if you analyze biology, what it is: it\u2019s a kind of conquest of dimensionality. The earliest forms of life were probably slimes of some sort, stabilized on a clay surface - immobile, unable to perceive light, with no sense of time \u2013 merely a fingernail or a toehold in existence. Then if you look at the entire fossil record, what you see is the evolution of senses. Sensory preceptors and organs of locomotion. The preceptors, the eye, the hand, bring into the cognitive field the sense of things at a distance. Then language provides models for these things at a distance. Similarly, fins, legs, so forth\u2026means of locomotion carry us through space.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Eros+and+the+Eschaton"}
{"id": "441363540d32-11", "text": "This is a journey of dimensionality and essentially what animals are that plants are not are life forms mobile in a very conscious way in the spatial dimension. This is why from the point of view of evolutionary biologists animals are somehow more advanced than plants. Well if conquest of dimensionality is the criteria then notice that we again occupy a special and privileged position in nature because we cannot only run with the best of them, see with the best of them but we can remember and anticipate like crazy. Other animals are not doing this. Other animals may imprint past situations of danger or opportunity but they do not analyze experience and extrapolate it towards the hidden domain of the future. Consciousness is the generalized word that we use for this coordination of complex perception to create a world that draws from the past and builds a model of the future and then suspends perceiving organism in this magical moment called the now where the past is coordinated for the purpose of navigating the future. McLuhan called it driving with the rearview mirror and the only thing that\u2019s good about it is it\u2019s better than driving with no mirror at all.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Eros+and+the+Eschaton"}
{"id": "441363540d32-12", "text": "What this conquest of dimensionality comes to be in the presence of psychedelics is an anticipation of the future. We can anticipate the future. We know to within microseconds when the sun will rise. We know within a few percentage points where the prime rate will be in six months. Some things we can predict fairly closely, some things with less precision. But the perception of the future is very important to us. When we marry the need to perceive the future with the psychedelic experience, I believe we come up with data that is very, very difficult for science to come to terms with. This is the third item or really the second item on the list \u2013 what science forgot. It\u2019s what I call the Eschaton. Now Eschaton is a rare word. Until very recently, unheard of outside schools of theology which I understand were a dying enterprise. Eschaton comes from the Greek word eskhatos, which just means the end. The eschaton is the last thing, the final thing.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Eros+and+the+Eschaton"}
{"id": "441363540d32-13", "text": "It\u2019s very important to science to eliminate from its thinking any suspicion that this eschaton might exist because if it were to exist, it word impart to reality a purpose, you see. If the eschaton exists then it\u2019s like a goal or an attraction point or an energy sync toward which historical process is being moved. Science is incredibly hostile toward the idea of purpose. If you are not involved in the sciences, this may come as somewhat of a surprise to you. If you are a workbench scientist or a theoretician, you know that this is what\u2019s called the problem of teleology. It is because modern science defined itself in the 19thcentury when the reining philosophy was Deism and Deism was the idea that the universe is a clock made by God. God wound this clock and has walked away from it. The clock will eventually run down. That theological construct was poisonous to evolutionary theory in the 19th century. So they said we must create a theory of reality that does not require a goal, does not require a purpose, everything must be pushed from the past. Nothing must be pulled toward the future.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Eros+and+the+Eschaton"}
{"id": "441363540d32-14", "text": "The problem with this is that it does not fulfill out intuitions about reality. We can see that evolution, biological evolution, has built on chemical systems. We can see that social and historical systems build on biology. As people with open minds or as open as they can be inside this culture, we nevertheless have this intuition of purpose and it is dramatically underscored by the psychedelic experience, which takes the raw material of your life, your culture, your history and tells you this is not an existential mishmash to be lived out with dignity because there\u2019s nothing else to be done with it \u2013 some kind of Camusian \u2018why not\u2019 affirmation. It says no. It says your reality is a coherent cosmos and embedded in your own sense of identity, embedded in your own sense of purpose is a microscopic reflection of the larger purpose that is built into the universe. Now this is not just blowing smoke in the sense of \u2018it\u2019s a nice idea\u2019 or its like a religious idea like saying Jesus loves you so feel alright about yourself. It isn\u2019t like that. It\u2019s a theory about reality that has teeth because reality is actually following the script that this particular version of reality dictates. Reality is accelerating towards an unimaginable omega point.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Eros+and+the+Eschaton"}
{"id": "441363540d32-15", "text": "We are the inheritors of immense momentum in our social systems, our philosophical and scientific and technological approaches to the world. Because we\u2019re driving the historical vehicle with a rearview mirror, it appears to us that we\u2019re headed straight into a brick wall at a thousand miles an hour. It appears that we are destroying the Earth, polluting the atmosphere, wrecking the oceans, dehumanizing ourselves, robbing our children of a future \u2013 so forth and so on. I believe what is in fact going on is that we are burning our bridges; one by one we\u2019re burning our bridges to the past. We cannot go back to the mushroom dotted plains of Africa or the canopied rainforest of five million years ago. We can\u2019t even go back to the era of Cayuse and six-shooters of two hundred years ago. We have burned our bridges. We are preparing for a kind of cultural forward escape and this question \u2013 is there cause for optimism? The answer is, it depends on where you placed your bets.\n\nIf you placed your bets on male dominated institutions based on consumer fetishism, propaganda, classicism and materialism, then God help you. You should call your broker. If on the other hand, you\u2019ve recognized that a life boat strategy is involved here, that what is really important is empowering personal experience, backing off from consumer object fetishism, freeing the mind, empowering the imagination \u2013 then in that case, I think you can feel pretty good about what is going on.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Eros+and+the+Eschaton"}
{"id": "441363540d32-16", "text": "You know there is a lot of talk about cultural death and disenfranchisement and it\u2019s usually couched in terms of some happy naked people in the rainforest or in Tajikistan making their rugs or milking their camels or something - and isn\u2019t it too bad that their culture is being blown up and traded in for mall culture and shopping by remote? But in fact all cultural is being destroyed. All culture is being sold down the river by the sorts of people who want to turn the entire planet into an international airport arrival concourse. That\u2019s not the victory of somebody\u2019s culture over somebody else\u2019s culture. Nobody ever had a culture like that, the victory of schlockmeisterism and crapola over good taste and good sense.\n\nIf I were dependent on the notion that human institutions are necessary to pull us out of the ditch, I would be very despairing. As I said, nobody is in charge. Not the IMF, the pope, the communist party, the Jews \u2013 no, no no! Nobody has their finger on what\u2019s going on. So then why hope? Isn\u2019t it just a runaway train out of control? I don\u2019t think so. I think the \u2018out of controlness\u2019 is the most hopeful thing about it. After all, whose control is it out of? You and I never controlled it in the first place. Why are we anxious about the fact that it\u2019s out of control? I think if it\u2019s out of control then our side is winning.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Eros+and+the+Eschaton"}
{"id": "441363540d32-17", "text": "To me, the most confounding datum of the psychedelic experience is this thing, which I call the eschaton and I want to talk about it a little bit this evening because I think it is the hardest thing for people to grasp about my particular rap. Sometimes I\u2019ve talked to many of you about psychedelic plants, shamanism, techniques, chemistry, approaches, so forth and so on \u2013 I\u2019m approaching this evening as a graduate seminar. I figure everybody has their little mojo kit and their particular way of approaching these things and then the question is, what kind of conclusions can we draw? The conclusion that I draw is \u2013 and this is sort of pulling together what I said before \u2013 we are central to the human drama and to the drama of nature and process on this planet. The opposition, which is science\u2026 Well first let me say this. Every model of the universe has a hard swallow. What I mean by a hard swallow is a place where the argument cannot hide the fact that there\u2019s something slightly fishy about it.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Eros+and+the+Eschaton"}
{"id": "441363540d32-18", "text": "The hard swallow built into science is this business about the Big Bang. Now let\u2019s give this a little attention here. This is the notion that the universe, for no reason, sprang from nothing in a single instant. Well, now before we dissect this, notice that this is the limit test for credulity. Whether you believe this or not, notice that it is not possible to conceive of something more unlikely or less likely to be believed. I defy anyone. It\u2019s just the limit case for unlikelihood that the universe would spring from nothing in a single instant for no reason. If you believe that, my family has a bridge across the Hudson River that we\u2019ll give you a lease option for five dollars. It makes no sense. It is in fact no different from saying \u2018and God said let there be light.\u2019 What these philosophers of science are saying is give us one free miracle and we will roll from that point forward from the birth of time to the crack of doom. Just one free miracle and then it will all unravel according to natural law and these bizarre equations that nobody can understand but which are so holy in this enterprise.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Eros+and+the+Eschaton"}
{"id": "441363540d32-19", "text": "Well I say then, if science gets one free miracle then everybody gets one free miracle. I perceive that it is true when you build these large scale cosmogonic theories that you have to have kind of an umbilical cord to start from that is different from all other points in the system. So if we have to have a singularity in our modeling of what reality is, let\u2019s make it as modest and as non-unlikely a singularity as possible. The singularity that arises for no reason in absolutely empty space instantly is the least likely of all singularities. Doesn\u2019t it seem more likely if we have to have a singularity that it occurs in a domain with a rich history with many causal streams feeding into the situation that nurtures the complexity. In other words, to put it simply \u2013 if you have to have a singularity, doesn\u2019t it make more sense to put it at the end of a cosmogonic process than at the beginning?\n\nI think this is the great breakthrough of psychedelics and shamanism is that science got it absolutely wrong. The universe didn\u2019t begin in a singularity. Who knows how the universe began or even presumes to judge \u2013 but the universe ends in a singularity. It has been growing more singular, more complex, more unique, more novel every passing moment since it burst into existence. If that\u2019s true then we represent a kind of concrescence of universal intent. We\u2019re not mere spectators or a cosmic accident or some sideshow or the Greek chorus to the main event. The human experience is the main event. The coordination of perception, of hope, of dream, of vision that occurs inside the human heart/mind/body interface is the most complex phenomenon in the universe. Now even the physicalists acknowledge that the human neo-cortex represents the most densely ramified matter known to exist in the biological world.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Eros+and+the+Eschaton"}
{"id": "441363540d32-20", "text": "You don\u2019t have to be rocket scientist to see that human society, human history, human art, human literature, represent things for which there is no analog in the world of wasps, groundhogs, killer whales and so forth and so on. In our species, complexity has turned inward upon itself and in our species. Time has accelerated. Time has left the gentle ebb and flow of gene transfer and adaptation that characterizes biological evolution and instead historical time is generated. So I believe that science and its reluctance to deal with the psychedelic experience and the way in which science has used the law to suppress its rival in this case arises out of a profound discomfort on the part of science about this future state of complexification that is clearly the grail, the dwell point, the end point of the human historical process. Not one of us I think can imagine that history could go on for another thousand years. I mean what would it look like? At the current rate of population growth, spread of epidemic disease, rate of invention, connectivity, depletion of resources, the atmosphere \u2013 it is impossible to conceive of another thousand years of human history.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Eros+and+the+Eschaton"}
{"id": "441363540d32-21", "text": "History then is ending. History is a kind of gestation process. It\u2019s a kind of metamorphosis. It\u2019s an episode in the life of a species. If you think of the simple example of metamorphosis, that of caterpillar to butterfly, we all know that there is this intermediate resting stage where the caterpillar is for all practical purposes enzymatically dissolved and then reconstituted and an entirely different kind of organism with different physical structures, different eyes, different legs, a different way of breathing, with wings where no wings were before, with a different kind of feeding apparatus. This is what\u2019s happening to us. History is a process of metamorphosis. It\u2019s a pubescent stage. It begins with naked monkeys and it ends with a human/machine planet-girdling interface capable of releasing the energies that light the stars and it lasts about 15,000 or 20,000 years and during that period, the entire process hangs in the balance.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Eros+and+the+Eschaton"}
{"id": "441363540d32-22", "text": "It\u2019s a period of high risk. It\u2019s like what a butterfly is doing in the cocoon or what is happening to a child in the womb. It\u2019s a gestation process where one form of life is being changed into another. Well, this would all happen naturally and with a great deal of anxiety I imagine as history builds to it\u2019s ever more climatic and horrifying crescendo and we would all be ignorant or very baffled about what\u2019s going on were it not for the institution of psychedelic shamanism. Remember I said that what is dissolved are the crystalline structures of cultural assumption. Well one of the strongest symmetries in our cultural crystal is the symmetry that gathers around the concept of past and future. The shaman actually rises into a domain where past and future are different areas on the same topological manifold. This is not a metaphor. It\u2019s what\u2019s really going on. If you think about shamanism in its classical guise for a moment \u2013 it is about predicting weather, predicting game movement and curing disease.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Eros+and+the+Eschaton"}
{"id": "441363540d32-23", "text": "If you had a prescient or extraordinary understanding of the future, each one of us would be able to do these things. Predicting the weather, you just look into next week and there it is. Predicting the movement of game, same deal. Curing the sick actually involves very judicious choice of your patients with a pre-knowledge of who will get well and who will not get well. So it\u2019s as though the members of the culture are imprisoned in linear time and the shaman is not. And why not? Because the shaman has perturbed the brain states sanctioned by the culture, sanctioned by its educational processes, its habits, its attitudes and into that vacuum created by the perturbation by these cultural values rushes the raw unanalyzed datum of reality. This is what Aldus Huxley called removing the reducing valve of consciousness. Suddenly culture is seen to be a relative phenomena; the stockbroker no different from the rainforest shaman, each somewhat similar to the Trobriand islander or the Eskimo.\n\nCulture is simply clothing upon the human experience but the human organism outside the confines of culture in a direct relationship to nature transcends time and space. This was a fact, I believe, that was known in pre-history and in fact was the source of Paleolithic values which were not material, not linear, not surplus oriented, not class oriented, not power oriented but rather oriented towards a kind of egalitarian partnership in an environment of great material simplicity. Human beings lived like that for probably a half a million years with poetry, with dance, with mathematics, with magic, with story, with humor but not with the paralyzing and toxic artifacts of the late evolving, machine worshiping, monotheistic, linear, phonetic alphabet, tight ass straight culture that we are a part of.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Eros+and+the+Eschaton"}
{"id": "441363540d32-24", "text": "So now at a kind of moment of great cultural challenge and dynamic for western civilization which has for a thousand years called all the shots and shoved itself down everybody\u2019s throat whether they liked it or not, in the last hundred years, through the science of anthropology, ethnography, ethnomedicine and botany, the news has arrived that these \u201cprimitive\u201d people are in fact master technicians of journeying into a world of the neurological imagination. A world we didn\u2019t even know exists. A world that is as distant to us as the world at the heart of the atom is from the rainforest fisherman. Because our own cultural values seem a little shoddy at this moment, those on the fringes of western civilization have begun to seek alternatives, begun to look at alternative religions, yoga, Tantra, Buddhism, Zen, whatever. Alternative approaches to diet \u2013 vegetarianism, macrobiotic, so forth and so on, and alternative approaches to authentic experience \u2013 which means psychedelics.\n\nIn the early stage of psychedelic involvement, everyone was sort of flying under the banner of hands on Freudianism or hands on Jungianism. \u2018We\u2019re going to see those archetypes, we\u2019re going confront those sexual repressions, we\u2019re going to journey into those traumatic childhood memories.\u2019 Now it\u2019s understood I think that those metaphors were fairly inadequate and that actually we stand on the brink of an unexplored landscape of planetary size. The world of the high Paleolithic, which is a Gaian world \u2013 a world of feeling, not analytical, intellectual constructs but a world of empowered feeling, empathy and intuitive understanding. An understanding that doesn\u2019t arrive in a context of Greek logic but in a context of animal knowing in the authentic mode of the body.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Eros+and+the+Eschaton"}
{"id": "441363540d32-25", "text": "So just to bring it all around here. The great exhibit, which we must always keep in front of ourselves and our critics, is the mystery of the human mind and body. No one knows how it is that I can command my hand to make a fist and that it will do that. That\u2019s mind over matter. That\u2019s the violation of every scientific principle in the books and yet it is the most trivial experience that any of us have. We expect to command our body. We expect the mental will to order the monkey flesh into action and it will follow. The body is the nexus of the mystery of life and our culture takes us out of the body and sells our loyalty into political systems, into religions, into inanimate objects and machines, collections, so forth and so on.\n\nThe felt experience of the body is what the psychedelics are handing back to us. That\u2019s why it\u2019s called escape because it\u2019s escape from HBO, from walking the mall, from seeing what\u2019s on the tube, from consuming trash media. It\u2019s escape from all of that into the authenticity of the body. This is why sexuality is so edgy in this society. They\u2019d make it illegal if they could but figure out how. It\u2019s the one drug that they can\u2019t tear from our grip, so they lay a guilt trip about it.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Eros+and+the+Eschaton"}
{"id": "441363540d32-26", "text": "But sexuality and psychedelics, by carrying us back to an authentic sense of the body, carry us back to the domain of authentic values. More and more, the message that people are getting as they avail themselves of the psychedelic experience is that it is not a journey into the human unconsciousness or into the ghost bardos of our chaotic civilization. It\u2019s a journey into the presence of the Gaian mind. That the earth is a coherent whole. It is a thinking, feeling, intending being that in terms of our value structures, it would be foolish to image as anything other than female. When cultural values, created by male dominance, science and linearity and so forth and so on; when those values are dissolved, what is waiting there is this incredibly poignant experience of matrix \u2013 what James Joyce called the mama matrix most mysterious \u2013 nothing more than our bodies and the earth out of which our bodies came.\n\nHistory as we have lived it in the west has been a turning of our back on that. Now history has failed. Western cultural institutions having become global cultural institutions now show themselves to be inadequate to inspire, lead or carry anyone into a future worth living in. At this moment then, this reconnecting to the Gaian mind becomes a kind of moral imperative. So this whole drug issue is not an issue even about criminal syndicates or about untaxed billions or about the mental health of our youth or any of that malarkey. I mean my God, the most destructive known to the species are pedaled on every street corner without restriction.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Eros+and+the+Eschaton"}
{"id": "441363540d32-27", "text": "The real issue is what kind of mental worlds shall people inhabit. What kinds of hope shall be permitted? What kind of value systems shall be allowed? The value systems that aggrandize the possessions of things, the tearing up of the Earth, competition, classism, racism, sexism, have led us to the brink of catastrophe. Now I think we have to abandon western cultural values and return to the deeper wisdom of the body in connection with the plants. That\u2019s the seamless web that leads us back into the heart of nature. If we can do this, then this very narrow neck of cultural crisis can be navigated.\n\nVery little of the past can be saved. The architectonics, the machines, the systems of monetary exchange and propaganda, the silly religions, the asinine aesthetic canons, very little of that can be saved. What can be saved is the sense of love and caring and mutuality that we all put into and take from the human enterprise. You know there\u2019s a grateful dead song that says, \u2018you can\u2019t go back and you can\u2019t stand still, if the thunder don\u2019t get you, then the lightning will.\u2019 We now hold through the possession of these psychedelics, catalysts for the human imagination of sufficient power that if we use them, we can deconstruct the lethal vehicle that is carrying us toward the brink of apocalypse. We can deconstruct that vehicle and redesign it into a kind of starship that would carry us and our children out into the broad starry galaxy we know to be awaiting us. But it\u2019s a cultural test. Nature is pitiless. Intelligence is a grand experience upon which a great deal has been risked. But if it proves inadequate, nature will cover it over with the same kind of cool impunity that she covered over the dinosaurs, the trilobites and the crossopterygian fishes and all those other folks that came before.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Eros+and+the+Eschaton"}
{"id": "441363540d32-28", "text": "So what we must do I think is see our future in the imagination, catalyze the imagination, form symbiotic relationships with the plants, affirm archaic values and spread the good news that what is out of control, what is in fact dying, is a world that had become too top heavy with its own hubris, too bent by its own false value systems and too dehumanized to care about what happened to its own children. So I say good riddance to it. Bring on the archaic revival and lets create a new world. And that\u2019s it!\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Eros+and+the+Eschaton"}
{"id": "4046b26e41c2-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\naka Monogamy, Marriage, and Neurosis\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nAudio\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\nFebruary 1994\n\nUnknown\n\n8383\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo youtube link available, try the following:\n\nAudio Link (Psychedelic Salon)\nTranscription\nOther links\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/aka+Monogamy%2C+Marriage%2C+and+Neurosis"}
{"id": "b4cf1485d80c-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\naka Nothing Lasts\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nAudio\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\nFebruary 1994\n\nUnknown\n\n7439\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo youtube link available, try the following:\n\nAudio Link (Psychedelic Salon)\nTranscription\nOther links\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/aka+Nothing+Lasts"}
{"id": "b787e75b60f9-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nLanguage About the Unspeakable\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\nFebruary 1994\n\nMaui, Hawaii\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo transcript available for this talk!\n\nHelp Transcribe\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Language+About+the+Unspeakable"}
{"id": "ee344c161539-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nGlobal Perspectives and Psychedelic Poetics\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n1994\n\nNew York New York\n\n6564\n\nEnd of Results\n\nGlobal perspectives and psychedelic poetics is what it says in the, uh, in the propaganda, which I assume is simply permission to rave about whatever comes to mind.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Global+Perspectives+and+Psychedelic+Poetics"}
{"id": "ee344c161539-1", "text": "Global perspectives... I guess what, uh, I could say about this from a psychedelic perspective, the thing that is, uh, different for psychedelic people, looking at the global dilemma that we\u2019re in and that increases, that continues to deepen around us, is that it\u2019s, uh. From my point of view permission to hope rather than despair, because I think that, uh, processes, institutions that for a thousand years or more have been building toward some kind of symmetry-break, some kind of definitive self-revealing moment that we now are, uh, turning final as pilots say. We\u2019re now deeply embedded in the pattern, we can see enough of what\u2019s ahead of us to begin to actually feel the texture of the end of human history. It\u2019s no longer an abstraction. Even the straight people who own the world with their, uh, long-term and short-term projections; looking at population growth, spread of greenhouse gases, disappearance of the ozone hole, uh, rising third world expectations so forth and", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Global+Perspectives+and+Psychedelic+Poetics"}
{"id": "ee344c161539-2", "text": "hole, uh, rising third world expectations so forth and so on. When you propagate all these trends, it seems very clear that business as usual is no longer an option. Nobody\u2019s talking about that. So, we\u2019re either in some kind of final fatal meltdown of the values of western civilization, revealed now after a thousand or two thousand year run to essentially be bankrupt. Or, we\u2019re going to transform ourselves unrecognizably. There really isn\u2019t any middle ground. The most radical and least likely, uh, future of all, it seems to me, is the future in which we continue just to stumble forward, as we have been since the industrial revolution. That\u2019s no longer an option. And, so then the question becomes sort of a gnostic conundrum. Yea-, is this the final act of some kind of great cosmic tragedy in which intelligence rises out of the slim, is shown to be inadequate and sinks back into the slime, or is this, uh, you know, a", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Global+Perspectives+and+Psychedelic+Poetics"}
{"id": "ee344c161539-3", "text": "slime, or is this, uh, you know, a tale of, uh, difficulty overcome and heroism won. And are we going to be able to shed the monkey nature, and shed the ego and actually move up to some kind of shining ideal. Eh, you know it\u2019s, uh, if you think of us as the descendants of the angels this is a pretty tacky circumstance we\u2019ve come to rest in. On the other hand if you think of us as the descendants of shit-hurling apes screeching through the treetops, then it\u2019s pretty amazing, [audience laughs], what has been accomplished here. Uhm, we-eh, you know one of the dilemmas that I feel very strongly, and I\u2019m just sort of talking off the top of my head here, because whenever a crowd is small enough I sort of feel like I\u2019m in my own living room, we don\u2019t have to have the pretense of knowing-lecturer and, uh, you know eager-to-be-educated-audience. Uhm, the real,", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Global+Perspectives+and+Psychedelic+Poetics"}
{"id": "ee344c161539-4", "text": "know eager-to-be-educated-audience. Uhm, the real, the real challenge, I think, is trying to decide what is baggage, and what is ballast that\u2019s going to have to be dumped. Can the future be a celebration of humanness as we have known it? Meaning in the animal body, with all its, uh, uh, you know, joys and pains, with all its frailty and, uh, potential for ecstasy. Or, is what we call human nature somehow transcendental and did we only rest for a moment in the monkey body as once the cutting of evolution must have rested in the great reptiles and at some earlier phase in history rested in the fish and so on. Is consciousness something uniquely human, and must we keep the animal body with us? Is our destiny to become gardener/caretakers of a revivified earth or is the earth like a placenta of some sort, that we have literally sucked all the nutrition and potential out of, because we\u2019re on our way", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Global+Perspectives+and+Psychedelic+Poetics"}
{"id": "ee344c161539-5", "text": "and potential out of, because we\u2019re on our way to some grander, higher domain of being? I don\u2019t have the answer to these kinds of questions. I feel it very poignantly. It\u2019s very poignantly focused in the psychedelic - in the experience of psychedelic plants and psychedelic shamanism, because, e-, you know, as any of you who have followed my ideas on this know, I\u2019ve spent a lot of time in the Amazon basin with human populations that seem to have struck some kind of dynamic balance with the earth. And yet the paradox of that dynamic balance is that when you take the sacraments, the hallucinogenic plants of these people, you\u2019re propelled into a worlds of, uh, science-fiction-like strangeness. Transcendental dimensions of titanic implication. And then, at least I personally have come to the realization that this is how those cultures have chosen to deal with the faustian impulse in human beings. It\u2019s been somehow confined in the domain of the imagination.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Global+Perspectives+and+Psychedelic+Poetics"}
{"id": "ee344c161539-6", "text": "somehow confined in the domain of the imagination. We, meaning we who trace our, uh, our ancestry back to Europe are part of a different style. A different strain of human being, if you will. We are the idea-excreters. Not ca- not, uh, satisfied to have a canoe, a net, five fish hooks and, uh, a bowl. But instead we take matter, we, western civilization, western technology, and we impress upon matter ideas. Millions of ideas; cities like Manhattan, uh, high performance weaponry, uh, enormous works of art. All of this is is a kind of impulse, very strong in western human beings to bring the ideas out of the domain of mind and to somehow solidify them in matter. Permanence, the cult of the west is permanence. Ye-, I always feel that when you can find the obsessive center of a society you probably have put your finger on its, uh, on its central neurosis as well. I remember when I spent time in India; India", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Global+Perspectives+and+Psychedelic+Poetics"}
{"id": "ee344c161539-7", "text": "I remember when I spent time in India; India is rife with talk of shakti. Shakti is energy, conceived of in various ways; it can be sexual energy, or it can actually be electricity flowing through wires is called shakti. And I realized being in India that the Indian obsession with shakti was a consequence of there not being any, that this was a society where energy had become the hardest commodity to encounter. And I think in the West permanence is the thing - is our great bugaboo, because we, uh, are born into the realization that everything is slipping through our fingers at the very moment that it comes into existence. The hardest psychedelic truth to assimilate, and you don\u2019t have to take psychedelics to assimilate this, if you just live this will be hammered in on you again and again, and it\u2019s not , uh. Well, uh, it\u2019s a cause for exaltation, it\u2019s a cause for despair, it\u2019s that nothing lasts. Nothing", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Global+Perspectives+and+Psychedelic+Poetics"}
{"id": "ee344c161539-8", "text": "cause for despair, it\u2019s that nothing lasts. Nothing lasts. You know, not your fortune, not your misfortune, not your lovers, your enemies, your children. Ultimately, not even your own life and body. Everything fades. And so the western response to this is the attempt to create something permanent; civilizations, enduring ideas, enduring institutions. All this is doomed to failure. And, I see this western, uh, obsession with the cult of permanence as a consequence of the western obsession with ego. Ego, to my mind, is the very thing, that if you had to, somehow, meld each problem into the next problem to try and reduce all problems to one, what you would eventually come to is the realization that ego is what is destroying us. Our inability to displace our loyalty away from the unique locus of space and time represented by our own bodies. You know, community, communalism, these are the things that we fear, that we repress, and that we at the same time struggle", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Global+Perspectives+and+Psychedelic+Poetics"}
{"id": "ee344c161539-9", "text": "repress, and that we at the same time struggle to realize. I mean, the collapse of communism on one level was the collapse of a repressive nightmarish paranoid social system, but the dream which lay behind that was a dream of community, of unity, of sisterhood and brotherhood. And the great concern now is that with the collapse even the, uh, a pretense of that position, that we are further fragmented, further atomized into individual competing microbes of greed and need, and this is precisely the attitude which will push us, uh, ever closer to species-extinction and to global ruin. Well, when you look at thousands and thousands of psychedelic experiences, you, to my mind what you come away with is the notion that, you know, no matter who you are; Amazonian shaman, Hasidic rabbi, n-n-nuclear physicist, the psychedelic will dissolve boundaries. It will dissolve your boundaries, and force you to realize the commonality of the flesh. You", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Global+Perspectives+and+Psychedelic+Poetics"}
{"id": "ee344c161539-10", "text": "to realize the commonality of the flesh. You know, it\u2019s, a-, a startling thing to realize that what you represent is nothing more than a point of view, and that we each are such a point of view triangulating perception through what is essentially simply a nexus of our past history. We always are talking about \u201cthe past\u201d, and \u201cthe future\u201d, but it\u2019s worth noticing that we all managed to get here this morning, this place, this time, and not one of us has the same past as any other of us. This moment, like any moment, is not a confluence of the past, it is a confluence of many pasts, and these many pasts come into a nexus of connection, and then move on to become many, many futures.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Global+Perspectives+and+Psychedelic+Poetics"}
{"id": "ee344c161539-11", "text": "The reason I\u2019m interested in the psychedelic potential, and willing to speak about it, is because I think that our, the myth of our separateness, which was the glory of our institutional accomplishments; parliamentary democracy, individual rights, uh, uh, liberation of various classes, and so forth, has now turned somewhat sour. There has got to be something more to it, than just turning people loose to loot the planet so that everyone can pile up more and more up stuff. Stuff which doesn\u2019t satisfy anyway. And, I think, n-, in talking about the future what we somehow have to do is dematerialize the future, and there are several ways or many ways to do this. Uh, people have preached voluntary simplicity, and some people are into this, uh, however it\u2019s hypocritical to preach this in the third world to people who have nothing. You know, we have everything so we have seen the fallacy of condominiums and Mercedes so then we preach this in", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Global+Perspectives+and+Psychedelic+Poetics"}
{"id": "ee344c161539-12", "text": "and Mercedes so then we preach this in Bangladesh. Th-this is a bit disingenuous. Uh, the dematerializing of culture, uh, somehow, you see, what we have to recognize in the wake of the collapse of communism is that capitalism as well is a system with a fatal flaw that is set against human nature. Capitalism assumes an endlessly exploitable frontier of resources. This we have got not. So, capitalism is now essentially, unless it can be radically retooled an anti-human philosophy, it\u2019s literally chewing up the ground we\u2019re standing on. But there\u2019s nothing in the, uh, the basic notion of capitalism that says we have to be thing-dealers. This is simply the style of capitalism that we have fallen into. Somehow we have to dematerialize existence, and I don\u2019t know whether that means virtual reality, some of you have heard me say that my vision of a perfect future is, you know, 25% of the world population, living in ecological balance, living in an apparently", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Global+Perspectives+and+Psychedelic+Poetics"}
{"id": "ee344c161539-13", "text": "living in ecological balance, living in an apparently primitive, naked, aboriginal state, but when you step into the minds of those people and look behind their closed eyelids there are menus hanging in bio-tele-electronic space. Culture, you see, can be downloaded into a chip, installed behind the eyelids, so that is, you know, freely commandable, as an experience in the imagination. But, if we insist on continually extracting resources from the earth and fashioning our dreams out of the stuff of earth, then our dreams are destined to turn to nightmare. It can\u2019t be any other way. So that\u2019s one thing about the future, the future needs to be dematerialized. Uh, u-, and then, you know, since people always accuse me of being a hairbrained dreamer, uh, I\u2019ve tried to come up with something approaching a practical suggestion, and I, I took this need to the feet of the mushroom-gods, a-being, having been challenged by somebody at a talk like", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Global+Perspectives+and+Psychedelic+Poetics"}
{"id": "ee344c161539-14", "text": "having been challenged by somebody at a talk like this, they said, \u201cWell, you\u2019re always saying these mushrooms speak, why don\u2019t you ask them, uh, uh, how to save the world?\u201d, and I thought this was kind of disingenuous, but, uh, the next time I had the telephone to hyperspace in my hot hand I did make the inquiry. And, uh, the suggestion which came back I think is at least food for thought. The suggestion was, \u201cYou wanna save the world? You wanna overcome male-dominance, the momentum of consumerism, so forth and so on? Uh, every woman should bear only one natural child\u201d. This is an interesting idea, whether you take it seriously as program or not. If every woman were to commit herself to bearing only natural child, the population of the earth would fall by 50% in 40 years without war, or famine, or epidemic disease. If this program were continued for another 40 years the population would fall by half again. This means in 80", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Global+Perspectives+and+Psychedelic+Poetics"}
{"id": "ee344c161539-15", "text": "population would fall by half again. This means in 80 years the population of the planet could be reduced 75%. Why have we not heard anything about this? Even for it to be denounced, I\u2019m not saying it has to be embraced, but why is it a tiny fanatical minority advocating this? I think it\u2019s because, uh, it\u2019s inconceivable in this society to try and practice capitalism in a situation of retreating demographics. It also would be, a s-, a solution which would place enormous power in the hands of women. Women are often heard to complain about their powerlessness, yet here is a plan which requires very little input from white guys. Uh, I took this idea to demographers and said, \u201cWhat about it? This seems so simple, most people think there are no solutions, here\u2019s a very simple solution, what about it?\u201d, and they said, \u201cYes, well, it\u2019s more startling than you realize, because women in upper class high-tech western society, uh, a woman, say, on the", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Global+Perspectives+and+Psychedelic+Poetics"}
{"id": "ee344c161539-16", "text": "western society, uh, a woman, say, on the upper east side of Manhattan, or Malibu, or the sea cliffed district of San Francisco. A child born to that woman will have eight hundred to a thousand times more negative impact on the earth than a child born to a woman in Bangladesh. If you were to go to Bangladesh and meet a woman in the back streets of Dhaka who told you that her ambition in life was to have nine hundred children you\u2019d think you were dealing with some kind of sociopath, a kind of, [audience laughter], a kind of typhoid Mary of the demographic scene. And yet, every child born into moderately well off yuppie families in high-tech societies is in that position. We prefer to not to think of it, this way. I think it\u2019s very interesting that one could make a case to, uh, women in western societies, you could say, \u201cHow would you like vastly increased leisure time. How would you like increased disposable", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Global+Perspectives+and+Psychedelic+Poetics"}
{"id": "ee344c161539-17", "text": "leisure time. How would you like increased disposable income? And how would you like to, uh, take upon yourself a truly heroic social role?\u201d This is what\u2019s being offered with this suggestion to limit reproduction to one natural child. No more heroic, no more politically correct can be taken. And, interestingly, the women you want to convince of this position are the women you are most likely to be able to convince; educated, white, uh, women, with, uh, above average incomes. So that\u2019s a very practical suggestion. More likely to be implemented than my dream of, uh, lunar inoculations with psilocybin for the entire population, [audience laughs], to, uh, dissolve the calcareous ego formations that have sprung up in the bloodstreams since the last full moon. Which I also think would be, uh, a fine idea.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Global+Perspectives+and+Psychedelic+Poetics"}
{"id": "ee344c161539-18", "text": "You see, boundary dissolution is what is needed here. Boundary dissolution of all type, our separateness is an illusion. There is a kind of human bedrock. That\u2019s why I think that the world sweep toward democracy is far more than simply a political trend. Democracy is not exactly a style of government per se. Or, exclusively, democracy is something, is, a biological institution of some sort. Because, there is no theory, there is no abstraction, there is no ideology. I mean democracy is as close as you can get, uh, to anarchy, and still have any theory of organization at all. You know, I wrote a book, which is around and about, called \u201cThe Archaic Revival\u201d, and that\u2019s why my belief in the archaic revival is what brings me out to events like this. I mean I think the term new-age and some of these other terms are pretty trivializing and basically designed by the mavens of marketing to draw you in. uh. But there is an", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Global+Perspectives+and+Psychedelic+Poetics"}
{"id": "ee344c161539-19", "text": "to draw you in. uh. But there is an impulse throughout the 20th century, in freudianism, in abstract expressionism, in dada, psychotherapy, sexual permissiveness, psychedelic experimentation, jazz, rock\u2019n\u2019roll. These are all facets of an impulse toward the archaic, toward the primitive, the non-straight, the anti-bowtie, uh, the wish to blow up the stayed world created by the fine ladies and gentlemen of the 19th century with their christer-ethics and their long dresses and all of that business. There is an impulse toward the archaic. This is very healthy. This is what happens when a society seeks to revivify itself. When the medieval world exploded in the face of the Italian city states and the new classes that were emerging, uh, they. It reinvented classicism. It was actually the second time classicism had been rediscovered, it was also trotted out by the Arabs in the 9th century when they needed a stabilizing metaphor for the", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Global+Perspectives+and+Psychedelic+Poetics"}
{"id": "ee344c161539-20", "text": "when they needed a stabilizing metaphor for the Ummayad caliphate and those civilizations. Now, in the 20th century, we can\u2019t go back to ancient Greece and Rome, or Babylon, a-and in a sense the new age, I think, is an effort to go back to a kind of, uh, Minoan/Egyptian world, which never existed except perhaps in the minds of certain menopausal theosophists. [Audience laughs] But, but the impulse is, uh, the impulse is laudable, however screwy the results. But I think we have to reach further back, that all of history is what our earth text, the bible, tells us it is. It\u2019s a confusion, a kind of punishment, a wandering in the wilderness, and that where we really want to be is naked, singing in the rainforest, stoned, and exalted. Uh, one with the souls of the ancestors, one with the s-, gaian spirit of the planet. And I don\u2019t mean to", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Global+Perspectives+and+Psychedelic+Poetics"}
{"id": "ee344c161539-21", "text": "spirit of the planet. And I don\u2019t mean to imply that psychedelics ar-, simply act negatively; dissolving ego, dissolving social constructs, dissolving programming and neurosis. That\u2019s all true, but what is left when all this dissolving has taken place is not simply a tabula rasa, a clean slate. What is left is, uhm, what we forgot, what we have been so long away from, which is a connection into the reality of the gaian mind. The great news that all shamanism can attest to, and is built on, is the news that there is a sentient, minded, caring entity that surrounds and holds the planet in its hands, in its heart. S-, beyond comprehending, I mean call it Gaia, call it God, call it the spirit of nature, it doesn\u2019t matter what you call it. It transcends the natural apprehension of higher primates, and yet it is there. We know that our own peculiar form of self reflection emerged in just a couple", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Global+Perspectives+and+Psychedelic+Poetics"}
{"id": "ee344c161539-22", "text": "form of self reflection emerged in just a couple of million years, out of animal organization. Well, what we don\u2019t know is how many other forms of mind there m-, are possible, and how many times in the two billion year history of life on this planet, uh, uhh, intelligence has been able to shed the dark chrysalis of matter and launch itself into nearby dimensions in which it finds completion and happiness. Uh, and I think that this is the great news that informs the shamanic religions, that we are not alone, and that The Other that we can make our way toward, is not, uh, you know, a galactarian intelligence from Beta Reticuli that is part machine-symbiote, part banana slug, or something like that, [audience laughs]. That, the, the coherent-minded entity that we make our way toward is actually a reflection of what is best in our hearts. That we carry in ourselves the seed of this thing, and that we are like, the, the peo-, the,", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Global+Perspectives+and+Psychedelic+Poetics"}
{"id": "ee344c161539-23", "text": "that we are like, the, the peo-, the, the guy in the story of the prodigal son. We have fallen into history, and out of this misfortune, out of this experience we can come gold. If we return to the fold of the ancestors, if we can, somehow, take what we\u2019ve learned from history and fold it back into the experience of being truly human. And this is the challenge. And it faces us on the political level. Issues such as, you know, all kinds of community issues, such as racism, and sexism, and classism, these are community issues. And then issues between the human community and the planet. Our inability, you see, to emotionally connect with the consequences of what we\u2019re doing. I mean, we as a species present a perfect picture of pathology, b-, uh, because what real psychotic behavior is, is behavior th-, that one cannot emotionally connect with the consequences of what is being done. And when you realize that we are literally, uh, looting the", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Global+Perspectives+and+Psychedelic+Poetics"}
{"id": "ee344c161539-24", "text": "realize that we are literally, uh, looting the cradle of future human life. That we have decided that we are not simply transient occupiers of this domain, but that it is ours to trash, to use up, to do with as we wish, leaving nothing for the future, then you realize the depth of our need for immediate and widespread, uh, therapeutic, indeed, pharmacological intervention on our state of mind. Because, we have wandered from anything like real human values and the reason psychedelics are so threatening in this society is because they immediately throw into high relief the internal contradictions of the dominator style of doing business, and this is must what happen. The momentum toward catastrophe, built up over centuries, is immense. The only antidote to that, that I\u2019ve seen, extrapolating from what I\u2019ve seen it do to single individuals, are the shamanic hallucinogens, because, when you cut right to the bone, what has to happen is; we must change", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Global+Perspectives+and+Psychedelic+Poetics"}
{"id": "ee344c161539-25", "text": "bone, what has to happen is; we must change our minds. If we don\u2019t change our minds we are going to go down with this self-generated titanic called western civilization. And we have the power to change our minds, but it won\u2019t come from hortatory preaching. If that would work then we would have turned the bend on the Sermon on the Mount. But as it is, I think we turn the bend, uh, sometime in the 20th century; either when Albert Hoffman invented LSD, or Gordon Wasson found the mushrooms of Huaca[?], or Richard Schultes brought back news of ayahuasca from the Amazon basin. You see, we have to humble ourselves, we have to give up the titanic ego-driven idea that we can do it by ourselves, as religions and yogins and all that beady-eyed crowd are into promising. The first step on the path of self-, real self-transformation, is the admission that you must humble yourself so thoroughly that you", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Global+Perspectives+and+Psychedelic+Poetics"}
{"id": "ee344c161539-26", "text": "you must humble yourself so thoroughly that you need to form a pact with an organism that begins its life in a mound of manure. You know, it\u2019s a true alchemical journey. You return to the droth, and out of that which everyone has rejected; literally, the compost, uh, of s-, of being you find the jewel. And the jewel can be grown, cultivated, brought to fruition, internalized, globalized, shared, to create a transforming option, that, uh, does honor to a human experiment that has been going on far too many millennia for us to fumble the golden opportunity away.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Global+Perspectives+and+Psychedelic+Poetics"}
{"id": "ee344c161539-27", "text": "Is there anybody who\u2019s burning with their own agenda that i-, oh, here\u2019s a \u201cburning person\u201d, yes.\n\nAudience member: \u201cI had a experience, about three years ago now, nearly four years ago, where I-, I was on a hallucinogenic. And, I had a feeling that I was talking to some people, and they were telling me that when we leave this planet we become stars! I was wondering what. Have you got any more on the outer space connection?\u201d", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Global+Perspectives+and+Psychedelic+Poetics"}
{"id": "ee344c161539-28", "text": "Terrence: W-well, I-I mean, I think, you know, I mean... It\u2019s funny for me to be talking at a, at a place like this because my, I am actually a rationalist, i-it\u2019s simply that my experience has been very, very peculiar, and I thank God for it, because I think most rationalists actually live lives which reinforce their rationalism. Maybe because they don\u2019t poke around enough in the edges of things. I mean, you know, we have orthodox ideology, I don\u2019t know what it is now, free markets, democracy and physics or something, and then you press out a little bit to the fringes and, you discover that reality is not only not as you supposed it to be, but it\u2019s not like anybody supposed it to be. The, the s-, the maps we have are largely based on, uh, conjecture and naive hope. The hope that there\u2019s hiding woods, the hope that there\u2019s nobody waiting behind the hill. Uh, uhh, when I", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Global+Perspectives+and+Psychedelic+Poetics"}
{"id": "ee344c161539-29", "text": "waiting behind the hill. Uh, uhh, when I first started talking psychedelics it all ran pretty much according to hoil[?], uh, LSD, it seemed like a tremendous tool for insight into the structure of the personality, kind of high-powered, turbocharged self-directed psychotherapy, you know? Uh, which is certainly useful, illuminating, but n-, doesn\u2019t violate the laws of physics, or threaten the, uh, the foundations of western science and philosophy. W-what has interested me, and become the focus of my personal life, I guess, are these tryptamine hallucinogens; DMT; psilocybin, and then ayahuasca, which is a, simply a strategy for making DMT orally active. And, you know, one could accept, I think, insights into one\u2019s upbringing, uhh, insights into the structure of philosophy or mathematics or something like that. But what is hard to accept, are, uh, you called them \u201cgibberish people\u201d, I call them self-transforming elf-machines, or", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Global+Perspectives+and+Psychedelic+Poetics"}
{"id": "ee344c161539-30", "text": "people\u201d, I call them self-transforming elf-machines, or tyches, or fairies. And, t-to my mind, this i-, this is confounding, this is no mere extension of the models of the psyche that we inherit from Freud and Jung. It begins to look as though, uh, that, uh, you know, the mind is not even in the brain. There\u2019s some kind of extended landscape of possibility, and I, uh, I speak as, uh, somebody who\u2019s been there, who\u2019s seen this stuff, but who doesn\u2019t, I don\u2019t have an agenda, I\u2019m, uhm. In a sense I\u2019m sort of chicken-shit, because the motivation for my public career is to get a whole bunch of people to march with me, in there, to check again, because, uhh\u2026 Y-you know, u-, well, I-I talk in the book I wrote for Bentham, Food of The Goods, about DMT, because I think, it\u2019s, in a sense, the, uhm, the case where all the issues are most intensely", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Global+Perspectives+and+Psychedelic+Poetics"}
{"id": "ee344c161539-31", "text": "the case where all the issues are most intensely brought together. Uh, it\u2019s a naturally occurring neurotransmitter, indigenous in the human brain, it also is very fast-acting, it clears your system very quickly, Not only clears your system, but leaves no trace whatsoever. You can\u2019t even n-, feel that you have done some kind of substance a half hour after you do this stuff. Nevertheless, the content of the experience itself is absolutely paradigm-challenging, and the chief reason is because there are these entities in there, and on psilocybin you hear them; they speak to you. What you were describing, it\u2019s almost as though this is some kind of, uh, of a mandala of pharmacological approaches to the mystery, and DMT lands you right in the center of the bullseye. I mean, thirty seconds after smoking DMT you confront these things, which look like, I-I mean, it\u2019s very hard to force language into these dimensions, and then e-, bring it back, but what they", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Global+Perspectives+and+Psychedelic+Poetics"}
{"id": "ee344c161539-32", "text": "and then e-, bring it back, but what they look like to me is self-transforming, self-dribbling basketballs, or something, I mean, they come bounding forward. When you enter into the space there\u2019s a kind of a cheer, you know, \u201cHooray!\u201d, and suddenly you\u2019re there. And this is not the cumulative eff-, effect of spirulina or hanging out at finned horn[?] or imbibing any of these ideologies that permit this kind of thing. I mean, I come out of, uh, u-, you know Jean Genet, and existentialism, and Sartre and m-, very much more mainstream, down, dreary, western approach. These things do not require belief to sustain their existence. You may doubt, you may deny, and yet there they are. And they, un-, it is not, uhm, it\u2019s not some kind of neutral panorama, like window shopping. It\u2019s an encounter, it\u2019s a situation in which you see them, they see you, and the, uhh, uhh, relationship between you and", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Global+Perspectives+and+Psychedelic+Poetics"}
{"id": "ee344c161539-33", "text": "and the, uhh, uhh, relationship between you and them is very rapidly evolving. They seem to have been waiting, and the impression I get is, well it\u2019s not an impression I get, it\u2019s what they say. They say, \u201cHere you are again, how wonderful!\u201d, it\u2019s not exactly in English, you understand\u2026 And they have, uhm, e-, you know, they\u2019re not made of matter. The questions, you know, what is the ontos of these things, what is their exact ontological status, and as far as I can tell, they\u2019re made of language. They\u2019re, they are not composed of DNA, sinew, tissue and blood, they\u2019re composed of syntax. They are like self-articulating sentences, or language with the, that has no requirement for a speaker. It is its own self-generating system of meaning, and, in, you know, the immediate impression you have, is, if you\u2019re a sane person, is, you know, \u201cMy God, what is this?\u201d, and then, \u201cIs it okay? Am", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Global+Perspectives+and+Psychedelic+Poetics"}
{"id": "ee344c161539-34", "text": "is this?\u201d, and then, \u201cIs it okay? Am I, number one, am I still alive?\u201d And you check through, you know, take a quick inventory; breathing, normal, blood pressure, normal, heart, normal, but what you\u2019re seeing is a complete replacement of the ordinary world. And these things which are not enough like elves, gnomes and fairies, it\u2019s almost as though, you know, you\u2019d look to folklore to, uhm, uh, to, uh, b-, provide evidence for the existence of these things, but the elves, gnomes and fairies of folklore are a little too predictable, a little too humanoid, a little too disneyesque for what you\u2019re dealing with. These things actually appear to be as alien a form of life as it would be possible for a human being to imagine and still cognize that it\u2019s alien intelligence at all. And, they are performing an extraordinary activity in that place. Which is; they possess a language that can be seen, with the eyes. And this is fascinating to", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Global+Perspectives+and+Psychedelic+Poetics"}
{"id": "ee344c161539-35", "text": "with the eyes. And this is fascinating to me, I really think that there\u2019s something to be learned here. This is what they want you to learn, they s-, they come forward, they utter statements. Which, remember, you don\u2019t hear with your ears, but which you see as condensed sculptural objects, which are like Faberg\u00e9 eggs or beautifully tooled machines of glass, shell, and crystal, except these things are in motions. They\u2019re opening up in front of you, and they\u2019re, they\u2019re pressing in, there\u2019s a kind of frantic intensity to this kind of an encounter; it\u2019s like a Bugs Bunny cartoon running backwards at twice normal speed. I mean, stuff is just flying all over, and they\u2019re saying \u201cDon\u2019t abandon yourself to amazent. Don\u2019t just go ga-ga with disbelief. Try and focus on what we\u2019re doing.\u201d And then, if you are able, you can moderately to focus on what they\u2019re doing. What they\u2019re doing is they\u2019re offering you these objects, and", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Global+Perspectives+and+Psychedelic+Poetics"}
{"id": "ee344c161539-36", "text": "doing is they\u2019re offering you these objects, and they\u2019re saying \u201cLook at this! Look at this!\u201d As is it is passed you before you, as you look into it you have a very strong, and I believe, genuine, impression that this thing that you\u2019re being shown, though it\u2019s no larger than a kaiser roll is somehow absolutely confounding to the principles and assumptions of this world. That, in other words, if I could condense this thing into my hand right now I wouldn\u2019t have to convince you, I wouldn\u2019t have to preach to you, I could just show you. Hey, look at this! And in the visual confrontation with this thing it\u2019s self-evident that this is impossible. Matter like, th-, they don\u2019t behave this way. It\u2019s as though you\u2019ve brought back a chunk of another dimension. And, and then what they\u2019re saying about these things is, uh, \u201cYou can do this. Do what we are doing\u201d, and then the urgency becomes almost strident, they", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Global+Perspectives+and+Psychedelic+Poetics"}
{"id": "ee344c161539-37", "text": "and then the urgency becomes almost strident, they say, \u201cDo what we\u2019re doing! Do it now!\u201d And you say, \u201cWha-, ho-?\u201d, and, and then you feel, or I felt, at any rate, an upwelling in myself, like a calling forth. Then out of my mouth comes language, or at least, syntax, but without meaning. Some kind of glossolalia where the modality of language is preserved, but the meaning is not. It\u2019s a kind of an ecstasy, it\u2019s sounds gibberish in three-dimensional space, but in that space it seems to be the key to u-u-unlocking a world made out of syntax and meaning. And I, you know, I come before you with all of this stuff unfinished. This is not a teaching or a system or an anything; it\u2019s an eyewitness account of a hyperdimensional automobile accident or something. We\u2019re not saying what the conclusions are; we don\u2019t know what the conclusions are, but this is big news. And when I first encountered this kind", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Global+Perspectives+and+Psychedelic+Poetics"}
{"id": "ee344c161539-38", "text": "big news. And when I first encountered this kind of stuff I was, uh, I was a-a young art historian at the University of California, and I assumed that any motif, no matter how [french phrase?], or bizarre you would be able to look at the painting, folklore and sculpture of somebody on this planet and find, uh, uh, a trace. And it didn\u2019t, it seemed as though this defeated that idea. It was almost counter the idea of the collective unconscious, because it argued that you, Joe Anybody, Sally Somebody, can break through on your own, an ordinary person, to a place that Verrocchio never saw, Michelangelo didn\u2019t anticipate it, Yates didn\u2019t know, Blake hadn\u2019t a clue, Melville wasn\u2019t briefed, and yet there it is, you know. And this is, uh, a-a-, to me, as an intellectual, was very confusing, because, I think, as intellectuals we always assume that progress will be built on the b-, on the shoulders", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Global+Perspectives+and+Psychedelic+Poetics"}
{"id": "ee344c161539-39", "text": "will be built on the b-, on the shoulders of the giants that have preceded us. The idea of something actually one hundred percent brand new and unexpected is pretty daunting, and, and here, here it was, thirty seconds away, uh, uhh, simply by the act of ingesting this natural neurotransmitter. Well, those of you who\u2019ve been there know exactly what I\u2019m talking about, those of you who haven\u2019t been there I can\u2019t imagine how you can even sit through this kind of thing [laughter], because, you know, it makes the folks from the Pleiades and all that other stuff out there seem mundane by comparison. The other thing is, we\u2019re not talking about camping out in cornfields night after freezing with your eyes glued to the stars in one hope. This is a no-fail method for plunging deeper into these spiritual, uh, realms than the tantric yogas or the practitioners of x, y, or z dare scarcely suppose. It\u2019s repeatable, it\u2019s", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Global+Perspectives+and+Psychedelic+Poetics"}
{"id": "ee344c161539-40", "text": "dare scarcely suppose. It\u2019s repeatable, it\u2019s on demand, it does not depend upon the state of your moral purity or, uh, uh, you know, tantric accomplishment. It\u2019s something that is our birthright, as much as our sexuality, our language, our eyesight, our appreciation of music. It\u2019s, uh, an innate human thing. And a-, you know, to try and return to the premises of your question; I tried to formulate theories about what could this be. Well, the first impression that I had based on a reading of how weird this all was, was this must be a parallel a continuum \u00e1 la Philip K. Dick and like that. That just apparently over some kind of neurological energy-barrier that\u2019s all around us all the time, these things are there. And they are not made of matter, so the laws of physics don\u2019t apply. And, hmm, you know, like that. And then, and then I entertained different possibilities, o-, and I still entertain numerous", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Global+Perspectives+and+Psychedelic+Poetics"}
{"id": "ee344c161539-41", "text": "different possibilities, o-, and I still entertain numerous possibilities because I haven\u2019t got it figured out yet. One possibility is that these are things are actually human beings from the future. I mean if you take the content of the experience seriously and say, \u201cI am apparently in contact with diminutive English-speaking creatures of some sort,\u201d well then, they have got to be either intelligent beings from another part of the universe or humans from, uh, some extraordinarily advanced future world where human beings are now made of language and are only two and a half feet, so I would put it rather far in the future. Or, and I just simply offer this in the spirit of, uh, of, intellectual completeness, uh. If you ask a shaman, or a sh-, or, uh, what these things are, they don\u2019t hesitate, they just say, \u201cOh, well, those are the ancestor-spirits\u201d, uh, this is what it\u2019s all about is ancestor-spirits. Well, it takes a while for the implications of", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Global+Perspectives+and+Psychedelic+Poetics"}
{"id": "ee344c161539-42", "text": "Well, it takes a while for the implications of this to sink in. They\u2019re talking about dead people, that\u2019s what an ancestor-spirit is. They\u2019re suggesting that the dearly departed do not evanesce into sunlight or something cheerfully nonspecific like that, but that this actually is, uh, simply one level of, a cosmic system of some sort where birth and death are transitions from level to level. Well, this is just exactly the kind of thing that I\u2019m intellectually set up to doubt, and to feel a kind of scorn for. 50:48", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Global+Perspectives+and+Psychedelic+Poetics"}
{"id": "ee344c161539-43", "text": "Save the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Global+Perspectives+and+Psychedelic+Poetics"}
{"id": "c8e872471d52-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nMegatripolis club\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n1994\n\nMegatripolis Club, London, United Kingdom\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo transcript available for this talk!\n\nHelp Transcribe\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Megatripolis+club"}
{"id": "a78b160e4df2-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nAxiom Production\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\nSeptember 1994\n\nMaui Hawaii\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo transcript available for this talk!\n\nHelp Transcribe\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Axiom+Production"}
{"id": "cc3881c46acf-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nState of the Stone\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\nOctober 1995\n\nWhole Life Expo, San Francisco, CA\n\n487\n\nEnd of Results\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/State+of+the+Stone"}
{"id": "ebbf92fd6ba1-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nThe Grammar of Ecstasy - the World Within the Word\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n15 May 1995\n\nMaui\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo youtube link available, try the following:\n\nNo transcript available for this talk!\n\nHelp Transcribe\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Grammar+of+Ecstasy+-+the+World+Within+the+Word"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nEvolving Times\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n29 April 1995\n\nSacramento, California\n\n14890\n\nEnd of Results\n\nGoogle Collaboration Sheet\n\n[0:00:00]\n\nTerence:Can you hear?\n\nAudience:Yes.\n\nTerence:Everybody can hear? Good. Well, I like to lead with good news, so, uh, let me assure that at no point this evening will I read from, or quote, the poet Rumi.\n\n[audience laughter]\n\n[0:00:30]\n\nUh ... It\u2019s a pleasure to be in Sacramento, it\u2019s a pleasure to be in California. I lived here about 30 years before moving out about 8 months ago \u2013 lived over in Occidental \u2013 so, I sort of feel like this is a hometown congregation.\n\nYou may have seen the story in The Bee this morning, uh, it was a reasonable detailing of my theory of evolution\n\n[0:01:00]\n\n. I noticed that one expert wouldn\u2019t even give his name to allow his \u201cno comment\u201d to have attribution. [audience laughter] [laughing] Gentlemen, this is no way to behave in the face of an ideological revolution. Anyway, uhm ...\u2014 and, plus, it isn\u2019t even my weirdest idea, [audience laughter] but that was left unmentioned\n\n[0:01:30]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-1", "text": "[0:01:30]\n\n, thankfully, in the article. But, since the article dealt so specifically with evolution, and because that probably is my best candidate for entre into any kind of respectability, something I crave intensely in [audience laughter] every atom of my body, i thought I would discuss it with you this evening and try and make it\n\n[0:02:00]\n\nseem a little less absurd than, uh, than my critics might make it seem. First of all, let me lay out for you the, uh, [phone starts ringing] the nature of the problem \u2013 right now, the nature of the problem is finding the damn phone and shutting it off! [audience laughter] [laughing] No, the nature of the problem is that, uh, evolutionary\n\n[0:02:30]\n\ntheory tells us that we are some kind of advanced animal, of some sort, and science has waged a noble struggle over the past 150 years to secure this position against all attacks by orthodox religious thinking, and yet, there is...after it\u2019s all said and done, the sense that if we are an animal, we are a very, very\n\n[0:03:00]\n\npeculiar sort of animal, indeed \u2013 a unique animal. An animal capable of language and coordinated planning, an animal not bound to a particular social or sexual style \u2013 we have monogamous human societies, polygamous societies \u2013 this is very different from animals. We have poetry, we have mathematics, we\n\n[0:03:30]\n\nhave drama, a whole spectrum fo effects that is far from anything that we find in animal organisation. And this problem has fascinated me for a long, long time as it\u2019s fascinated a lot of people, uh, because obviously it\u2019s a great embarrassment to the theory of evolution that it can\u2019t account for human consciousness,\n\n[0:04:00]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-2", "text": "[0:04:00]\n\nbecause after all human consciousness produced the theory of evolution [audience laughter]. So, you see, it\u2019s a significant failure there. So, uh, obviously if you accept the basic rules of the evolutionary game, which are that there is random mutation, which means gene drift, mixing of genes through sexual reproduction, uh,\n\n[0:04:30]\n\ncosmic rays which cause birth defects and mutations, this sort of thing, and natural selection. And, these two factors, natural selection and, uh, and mutation, are sufficient to account for praying mantises, chipmunks, tropical rainforests, but no us. And the reason is that we emerged too quickly\n\n[0:05:00]\n\nfrom the background of the rest of ordinary nature. Uh, in the space of about two billion years, the human brain doubled in size, and Lumholtz, who is an orthodox evolutionary biologist, calls this the most dramatic transformation of the\u2014of a major organ of a higher animal, in the entire history of life\n\n[0:05:30]\n\n, and it happened to us. It happened to that very organ that is responsible for the theory of evolution. So, what extraordinary confluence of, uhm, factors could have come together there to take a, uh, essentially an arboreal monkey, an ape of some sort, that had been at an evolutionary climax in the canopy\n\n[0:06:00]\n\nof the rainforest for a couple of million years, what extraordinary set of factors could then set that creature marching down the road toward, you know, Elvis, the Internet, Bill Clinton, and, uh, all the rest of it?\n\n[Transcript by Frank Bronson]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-3", "text": "Well, I imagined when I first started thinking about this, that there must be some huge edifice of established theory, that we have to go up in there and blow up, surely somebody has stated up this ground and made some kind of an argument about human consciousness. Well, in terms of science, not; or almost not. I mean, in term of religion it simple, I mean: god made us from the clay of the earth. In terms of science, the best shot is pretty weak soup from my point of view. Here\u2019s what science is telling us; that when you throw something, you have to plan, because once you let go of whatever it is you are throwing: you can no longer control it. And so because we were small, and weak and hunted in packs, we learnt to throw like hell: at very large,onrushing, wholly fellow mammals of various sorts. And you had to plan your throw. Consequently, we developed brain capacity to do this and have enough left over", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-4", "text": "brain capacity to do this and have enough left over to invent quantum physics , paint the Mona Lisa , invent the phonetic alphabet , philosophy, religion and all the rest of it. In other words, it was the coordination of the hand and the eye, to the throwing arm. This is what the orthodox folks tell us, that gave us this extra brain capacity. That we sort of then managed into human civilization. Well, notice that this would make the pinacle of the evolutionary ladder, the gum-chewing big league baseball pitcher. Because you know, he can put that pill right across the plate at high speed, time after time. As somebody who learned everything they know about sadomasochism in PE class, I'm not really ready to embrace this theory, it definitely runs against my paradigm: so I\u2019ve built another story, and to my mind, it meets the objections, answers the questions of where did consciousness come from. But instead of doing it very nicely and neatly: it", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-5", "text": "of doing it very nicely and neatly: it raises in the very act of answering this question , other questions. Maybe more closer to home. Questions that reflect on our social organization, our politics , how we treat each other in the here and now, even with implications for the future. We\u2019ll get to that, for the moment let me just run through this for you . There's a sort of a basic situation that all theories of evolution have to come to terms with, and this is, that our remote, protohominid, primate, ape, ancestors; lived and developed in Africa. If you have a non-african theory of human origin, and there are such things, the evidence is strongly against you. If it were stock, I\u2019d sell. The evidence is pretty strong, that whatever happened that brought us out of the animal-body, it happened in Africa. Well, all animals, and plants for that matter, tend to reach evolutionary climax and occupy a niche and stabilize in that", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-6", "text": "and occupy a niche and stabilize in that niche. Cockroaches,ants achieved this hundreds of millions of years ago, and have not changed greatly since. Most of biology is this iterative occupation of a climax niche. Very little of biology, is the pushing forward into radical new forms, new species, still rare, new genera. For that, there has to be disruption of some sort, of the environment and it can be the meandering of a river, or an asteroid strike, the retreat of a glaciar, something which creates open land. Well, for five-six million years now, the African continent has been slowly drying and three million years ago it was covered by rainforest at the equator from east to west. And that was the environment of human ancestor types. They were canopy dwelling, they were fruit eating, they ate some percentage of insects composed their diet, they had a pack signaling repertoire that was fairly complicated by animal standards \u2026.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-7", "text": "[Transcript by\n\nJavier Alonso\n\n\u2026.And there they were happily living in the canopy. But Africa began to dry up.\n\nAnd they came under nutritional pressure. Now, simpler animals - insects for example - when their food source is withdrawn, they usually buy the farm. They don\u2019t have much flexibility of diet. If you\u2019ve ever tried to raise caterpillars into butterflies for your children, you know that if you give the caterpillars the wrong leaves, they just can\u2019t make any sense out of it, and they die.\n\nUh - more advanced animals when confronted with dietary pressure or disappearance of ordinary food supplies, before they give up the ghost, they will - uhh - experiment, with other food sources in the environment.\n\nNow the reason this isn\u2019t normally done, is thought - the reason animals are conservative in their food choices - it\u2019s thought to be a way of avoiding - ah - mutational influences in the form of tertiary chemicals, toxins, viruses, and things like this that would be in fo- in unusual foods.\n\nOne of the things that accompanies our acquisition of consciousness is gastronomy - the appreciation of flavor - the approach to food that makes it an art. Animals don\u2019t do this - they\u2019re just trying to get enough protein to keep the old engines running. The notion of flavouring is counter-intuitive to animals. And flavoring\u2019s probably in part a mutagenic influence to our diet.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-8", "text": "When our remote ancestors came under environmental pressure, their environment was shrinking, the rainforest was being replaced by grasslands, and nutritional pressure - their ordinary diet of fruit and insects was being restricted - they began exploring this new environment of the grasslands, and this is the era of knuckle-walking, turning into bipedalism. It\u2019s the era of the coordination of binocular vision, so forth and so on. There was a paper published recently which anticipates my point but I can\u2019t wait to hit you with it. A paper published recently about canopy-dwelling monkeys who only leave the canopy for the acquisition of one particular food. And the food they will come to the ground for, and risk predation, is mushrooms.\n\nSo, it seems perfectly reasonable to suggest that our remote ancestors, exploring the new environment of the grasslands, would have encountered, as you would if you were to go to the - to the tropics, ahh, psilocybin containing mushrooms, growing in the dung of cattle, many dung-growing, so-called coprophilic- coprolitic mushrooms produce psilocybin, among them stropharia cubensis, which is one of the largest and pandemically distributed of these mushrooms.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-9", "text": "I\u2019m sure that our early ancestors also tested other kinds, of food, they were testing everything. They were digging for corms with pointed sticks - ahh - and I\u2019m sure there were many uhrhr ecological and medical disasters as a consequence of this. For instance ah, the birth control steroids in modern birth control pills are produced by dioscorea vines, grown on plantations in Mexico. Well dioscorea is the family of ahhhh sweet potatoes. Imagine-uh a hungry band of primates that come up on a patch of sweet potatoes that are heavy in these steroids. It would raise holy havoc with their reproductive cycle - it would interfere with menstruation, ovulation, lactation, fertility, and uh, y\u2019know, human genetic history is the story of many such - uh - encounters - with mutagenic influences in the environment - most of them catastrophic, detrimental, lethal. But in some few cases, there would have been uhh - salutary results - advantages conferred upon the, animals that accept these new foods into their food chain.\n\nbreath* And - and I want to particularly emphasise psilocybin because I believe it\u2019s the key. You see we\u2019re looking for some kind of factor, which could have exploded, the human brain size, at a rate ten times faster than evolution, normally takes place. So it\u2019s going to be an unusual situation - perhaps the need to throw a boulder at distance accurately, or perhaps contact with an unusual food item or drug-containing plant. But it was something unusual - if it weren\u2019t unusual, it wouldn\u2019t have taken this planet\u2026.\n\n[Transcript by\n\nKurt Robinson\n\n[18:00]\n\n...a billion and a half years to bring forth its first intelligent species.\n\nWell, so let\u2019s look at psilocybin then in a little more detail.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-10", "text": "Well, so let\u2019s look at psilocybin then in a little more detail.\n\nIt has a number of properties, not specifically related to its psychoactivity that make it an ideal candidate for a catalyst for the emergence of consciousness and an advanced animal. First of all, and at the early stage of human invasion of this new grassland environment - proto-hominid invasion I should say - ahh, we were testing foods, we would certainly have tested this food. I\u2019ve seen these things the size of dinner plates in the Amazon after a rain, and they are silvery with blue and purple shading, they are the most dramatic thing in the environment, whether you know anything about them as, as, uhm, psychoactive agents or not. Certainly they would have been tested for food; I\u2019ve seen chim-, uhm, baboons in Kenya investigating cow pies and flipping them over, because beetle grubs nestle underneath them. So cow pies are a natural vector for hungry baboons, so that everything is in place, it\u2019s- it\u2019s trivial to, uh, suggest otherwise, I would maintain.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-11", "text": "OK. The first quality of psilocybin, which isn\u2019t specifically related to its psychoactivity, is that in small doses - doses that are the kind you might obtain if you would just sort of eating it along with little roots, grassroots, small bugs, um, you know, so forth and so on - visual acuity is improved. Specifically, edge detection is improved. Well, now, it seems to me, you don\u2019t have to be a rocket scientist to figure out that if you\u2019re in a highly competitive evolutionary environment, in grassland, an environment characterised by large predators, hunting cats, and also characterised by small ungulate prey, that having an increased sensitivity to edge-movement might make the difference between whether or not you live to tell the tale or you become somebody\u2019s dinner, or it would certainly make the difference between going home empty handed, and taking dinner home with you. So, a factor which enhanced edge-detection on those animals accepting that food supply into their food chain, they would have, uhh, a slightly increased chance of evolutionary success as opposed to the non-psilocybin members of their group, and this increased hunting, uhh, success, would tend to outbreed the non-psilocybin-using members of the group.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-12", "text": "At slightly higher doses, uhh, in highly sexed animals like primates, uh, all alkaloids are what are called CNS stimulants - central nervous system stimulants - that means that they produce arousal, and in sexually extremely active animals like primates, arousal means, uhh, erection, usually in the male, usually followed by hanky-panky, what anthropologists and primatologists call successful instances of copulation. [*audience laughs*] Well, again, what is this? It\u2019s a second factor tending to outbreed the non-psilocybin-using members of the population. They\u2019re now definitely moving to the rear of the parade; they don\u2019t have as much hunting success, they don\u2019t have as much food for themselves and their offspring, they\u2019re not having as much sex so they\u2019re not having as many offspring, and, you know, in terms of, of rising and falling numbers, those that have some allergy prejudice or fear of, uh, of a mushroom, are, are just being shunted out of the breeding population.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-13", "text": "Well, at still higher doses, approaching effective doses of 20 milligrams or more, in other words 4 grams dried and up, or 45 grams wet and up, uhh, hunting is out of the question [*audience laughs*], sex is something you can consider [*audience laughs*] but it\u2019s out of the question, and you are basically nailed to the ground in a state of mind which we for all of our sophistication, our logical positivism, our superconducting supercolliders and all the rest of it, haven\u2019t a clue as to what it is, what it means, what its implications are - the full blown psychedelic experience of which we can only speak in, in terms of, uh, religious hierophany, epiphany, apocatastasis, and all those other great greek words, uhh, ataraxia, you know - in other words, we like it; but we don\u2019t understand it. And it is therefore, uh, the basis for religion.\n\nWell\u2026 *swallows*, uhh, so right there\u2026\n\n[24:00]\n\n[Transcript by Adnan Zahirovic]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-14", "text": "\u2026.You have a three step process, driven by nothing more than hunger and curiosity, that leads remote primate ancestors to a confrontation with, what Rudolf Otto called the Holy Other, The Holy, The Numinous, The Transcendental. And aah, aah, you know this is on slightly less firm ground but in my own personal experience and having collected psychedelic experiences life long I feel confident in saying that at high doses psilocybin causes glossolalia. Glossolalia is syntactically structured language like behavior in the absence of meaning. Aah, speaking in tongues is what christian fundamentalists call it, but they don\u2019t have, aah, mo, monopoly on it. It\u2019s ancient it occurs in all cultures, It\u2019s shamanic, and what it is it is a kind of neurological seizure where linguistic organization spontaneously is verbalized. No animal does this, It must have something to do with the acquisition of language by human beings, and what I think is going on", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-15", "text": "human beings, and what I think is going on is that probably language was, aah, entertainment long before it was meaning, that is a kind of tuneless singing, and that having discovered that we could make an almost endless repertoire of small mouth noises, we did this, for each other, for amusement, for, to, aah, pass the time I mean, god knows there was a lot of it *audience laughs*, and It, It probably was very late in the evolution of this ability that some very tight ass rational type said, you know, we could attach a specific meaning to a specific sound and then every time I\u2019ve made that sound you\u2019d know what I meant, and then you can go and get it for me, *audience laughs* you see. It\u2019s a sort of, it, it\u2019s the \u201cas long as you\u2019re up get me a Grant\u2019s\u201d theory of language, aah. So, so that\u2019s the basic idea, and, I, I really believe that, sometime in the last fifty thousand", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-16", "text": "believe that, sometime in the last fifty thousand years before twelve thousand years ago, a kind of paradise came into existence. A situation in which man and women, parents and children, people and animals, human institutions and the land, aah, all were in dynamic balance, and not in any primitive sense at all. Aah, language was fully developed, poetry may have been at its climax, dance, magic, poetics, altruism, aah, philosophy. There is no reason to think that this things were not practiced as adroitly as we practice them today. And it was under the aegis of the boundary dissolving influence of psilocybin. We were nomadic, we were breeders and, and caretakers of katle, we worshiped a great goddess, we followed a yearly round in a vast grassland cut by crystal streams that were washing down out of the, the higher altitudes, and we were probably black as your hat, for that matter. Aah, and it was great, well if it", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-17", "text": "Aah, and it was great, well if it was so great, what happened, well, ahh, the very forces which created this situation, and you all recall what it was, it was the drying of the African continent forcing us out of the trees, forcing us to change our diet, forcing us to accept a dung growing mushroom, ahh, and there were other factors forcing us into consciousness as well. When we became omnivorous, the first form of consciousness is having the point of view of your prey, predatory animals have the highest form of animal consciousness, big cats, but it\u2019s a consciousness of the exterior world. Psilocybin forced us beyond that, into consciousness of the imaginal world, the world of the imagination inside our heads. What happened was, aah, the mushroom faded, the climate changed, what had been everywhere became seasonal, moved into the rain shadows of mountains, aah, became the prerogative of a special class of people called shamans, who", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-18", "text": "of a special class of people called shamans, who were like the, the designated hitters for dealing with the hyperspace of the mythos. Ahh, and in other words, over millennia, the, the, the, connection went from available to everyone all the time, to ever more tenuous, ever more tenuous, finally faded out entirely. It\u2019s even more complicated than that because surely people\u2026.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-19", "text": "[Transcript by\n\nLobo Noble\n\n[00:30:00]\n\nTerence: \u2026. would have, as they saw this happening, make attempts to preserve the mushroom, and in a world without refrigeration, the only effective way to do this is preservation in honey. You can dry mushrooms, but in a world without hermetically sealed peanut butter jars, drying is a very short-term strategy for preservation. The only thing which will really work is preservation in honey. The problem there is that honey itself, especially aboriginal honeys \u2013 which have a lot more water in them than what you get in those little plastic bears at the A&P [audience laughter]\u2013 uh, aboriginal honeys are very runny, and so what do they do? They themselves have the capacity for turning into a psychoactive substance: alcohol. But alcohol promotes a completely different set of cultural values and attitudes than psilocybin. Uh, psilocybin is a boundary dissolving hallucinogen, uh, mead alcohol, uh, gives an enhanced, uh, sense of verbal acuity in the presence of lowered sensitivity to social cues. In other words, uh, one can make an ass of oneself [audience laughter].", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-20", "text": "But now I want to backtrack for a minute, I will return to this thing about the loss of the mushroom, but there\u2019s something that I wanna go over with you that\u2019s really important in all this, to me, and that is: this isn\u2019t simply the story of how an intoxicant promoted consciousness and then we fell into history but losing that intoxicant and went into other intoxicants, with consequences to be evaluated, it\u2019s that, but it\u2019s more, because psilocybin had a very, very peculiar effect, over and above what I\u2019ve mentioned so far, and it\u2019s this over and above effect that makes my theory so controversial, and so, uh, and academics so phobic of it, because it rips open a whole can of worms, and this is the problem: all primates, clear back to squirrel monkeys and old world monkeys, all primates form dominance hierarchies. This means that the sharp fanged, hard bodied young males control everybody else: the women, the elderly, the sick, the children, homosexuals \u2013 everybody finds their place somewhere in this dominance hierarchy run by these dominant alpha males. We are no different. We also, as we sit here this evening, operate under this kind of a social organisation. I mean, we complain about, we analyze it, we are aware of it, but we live under it, it\u2019s how it is. So, here is my suggestion: that, what psilocybin did was it changed behaviour, it interfered with primate behaviour. Specifically, it interfered it interfered with this tendency to form monogamous pairs and dominance hierarchies, and so the ordinary tendency of the primates to organise themselves that way\n\n[00:34:00]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-21", "text": "[00:34:00]\n\nwas interrupted, medicated out of existence, if you like, vaccinated against, if you like, by the presence of psilocybin in the diet. And, uh, this, oversec\u2014this, this overemphasizing or chemical accentuation of sexuality occasioned by the arousal of psilocybin, was sufficient to dissolve\n\n[00:34:30]\n\nthe ordinary tendency toward monogamy, and replace it with an orgiastic sexual style, or they coexisted simultaneously, I mean who knows, we weren\u2019t there, it's sort of, the way I imagine it, is that at every new and full moon there were group mushroom parties which basically, simply got out of hand [audience laughter[, regularly. And\u2014and, so, the monogamous\n\n[00:35:00]\n\npair bond would be under pressure if not completely eliminated. Many cultures have this even to this day, I mean, in a sense, mardi gras is a festival where the rules are dissolved, and nobody is supposed to go to their spouse the monday after and say, \u201cYou know, was that you I saw dressed as Marie Antoinette and, uh\u201d...[audience laughter] because, you know, the rules are\u2014there is permission to break the rules, and many societies\n\n[00:35:30]\n\ndo this. Uh, the result of an orgiastic style like that, is, uh, men cannot trace lines of male paternity, and so there is a tremendous social glue, a tremendous, uh, force for the cohesion of community. Men don\u2019t then think in terms of \u201cMY children\u201d, they think in terms of \u201cour children\u201d, the children\n\n[00:36:00]\n\nof the group.\n\n[Transcript by Frank Bronson]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-22", "text": "of the group.\n\n[Transcript by Frank Bronson]\n\n\u2026.And under the aegis of this group, this polymorphis.. (polymorphic), sexual style, group -uh- childcare, and -uh- and extended family rearing, we produced everything that we think of as human; that we value. Our art, our music, our philosophy, our sense of each other\u2019s worth, -uh- body painting, tattooing, piercing, all the accoutrements that distinguish us from animal existence were put in place when we had a different kind of mind than we have now. We didn\u2019t have a mind that that favored role specialization, and male dominance, and anxiety over female sexual activity related to feelings of male ownership. That all came later.\n\n[37:00]\n\nWe became human beings in this other.. World of - of values and psychological attitudes. The problem is, as I say, \u2018the mushroom faded,\u2019 but by the time it had faded -uh- we were no longer the wordless symbionts of cattles, the, the barely sentient hunters of, of the African plain. By the time we were finished with the mushrooms we had language, we had social institutions, and - but what we began to lose was, you know, - you can get as wet eyed as you want about it but.. respect for each other; a sense of each other\u2019s individuality. A sense of love, a sense of community. And it must of been, though it happened over a long period of time, very much like what we\u2019re living through now.\n\n[38:00]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-23", "text": "[38:00]\n\nA sense that people are, you know, no damn good and getting worse. A sense that, you know, \u2018Why can\u2019t we be as we once were?\u2019 \u2018Where is our sense of each other?\u2019 \u2018Where is our ability to care for each other?,\u2019 so forth and so on. I wrote a book called -uhm- \u2018Food of the Gods\u2019, in which I tell this story in the first third of the book that I have just told you, and then I show that, what history is essentially, is, is a careening, out of control effort to find our way back to this state of primordial balance. One of the things that marks us as humans that is unique is our obsessions with drugs; our ability to addict.\n\n[38:57]\n\nWe addict not only to substances, we addict to each other, we addict to ideologies (Marxism, Christianity, pff..Skinkism as practiced in Washington, *audience laughter* -uh- whatever). And we addict to each other. You know? I mean I am a romantic -uh- with the best of them but I can\u2019t help noticing that a broken heart and a heroin withdrawl show very similar presentations. *audience laughter* Really! Insomnia, sweating, sense of diminished self-esteem, hysteria, -uh uhm- you know, it\u2019s, it\u2019s very very similar. We- so, a psychologist looking at a person with an addictive syndrome will say, \u201cWell you were damaged in childhood, there\u2019s some trauma there that you\u2019re, you\u2019re trying to compensate. You\u2019re trying to compensate.\u201d\n\n[40:04]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-24", "text": "[40:04]\n\nWell i\u2019m not that keen on all this psychologizing, but I do think that we could apply this model to ourselves on a grand scale. We were essentially torn from the giain womb, thrust into the birth canal of history, and expelled sometime around the fall of the Roman Empire into the cold hard world of modern science, existentialism, and all the rest of it. And -uh uh- we have searched the planet for substances which would asswage our sense of pain. And there are things out there, you know.. Alcohol, the whole morphine family, so forth and so on. But these things always have consequences. There\u2019s a price to be paid.\n\n[41:00]\n\nUh- The very knowledge of psilocybin was lost to the entire planet, except for some tribes in the Mexican mountains, -uh- for several millennia until Valentina and Gordon Wasson went in the -uh, uhh- early nineteen-fifties and found these mushrooms and brought them out and then Albert Hoffman, who had earlier discovered LSD, synthesized the compound and made it available. That was \u201855. Well by \u201866 all human research with these things had been forbidden. We have- It\u2019s not that science \u201cmowed this field and moved on.\u201d It\u2019s that -uh- science has never really been here. -Uh- we haven\u2019t looked at the implications of diet on early human evolution.\n\n[Transcript by Nigel Millegan]\n\n[42:00]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-25", "text": "[Transcript by Nigel Millegan]\n\n[42:00]\n\nWe don\u2019t have a theory for the evolution of consciousness of any consequence, and yet, you know, the factors I\u2019ve laid out for you - increased visual acuity, a-, impact on sexual and social behaviours, uh, triggering of glossolalia-like phenomena in the presence of a boundary dissolving psychedelic experience - these are catalysts efficiently dramatic that inculcated into a cultural style, I think they explain a great deal about where we came from and who we are.\n\nNow, the, [*looks at watch*] the irony of all of this is, uh, that we live in a society that has made p-, all practically, any discussion of this, illegal. Certainly if I were to end this lecture by handing out doses of psilocybin, [*audience laughs*] I would be gently taken by the elbow and led away forever. [*audience laughs*] Uhh\u2026", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-26", "text": "Uhh, the western mind is particularly phobic of this, uhh, of this subject, I mean, we have bent our laws so that people can jump out of airplanes in the pursuit of thrills, so they bungee-cord off major highway bridges and freeway overpasses; be-, so concerned are we to fulfill society\u2019s need for thrills, uh, but this, is something else. It provokes all kinds of alarmed reactions and perhaps you believe unfairly. I think that when you examine the situation, it\u2019s possible to understand very clearly why this is such a social issue; because what these things do, if you look - and now I\u2019m slightly broadening my wrap to include other psychedelics besides psilocybin, but psilocybin is certainly true in all cases - what these things do, if you had to generalize a hundred-thousand psychedelic experiences - the ones where people thought they were god, the ones where people had to be taken to the ER room and have their stomach pumped, all of them - if you generalize what the-, what these substances do, is they dissolve boundaries. They dissolve boundaries. If you love it, you\u2019ll love it. If you hate it, you\u2019ll hate it. But that\u2019s what they do; they dissolve boundaries.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-27", "text": "Now, the reason this provokes a lot of social anxiety is because all societies are about the maintenance of boundaries. It doesn\u2019t matter whether you\u2019re, you know, a stockbroker in New York, a zen monk in Kyoto, a hasid in Jerusalem, your society is held together by boundaries, and definitions, and anything which dissolves those boundaries and introduces, uh, relativity into cultural modeling, is felt to be threatening. Because we like to believe that our reality is somehow sanctioned, that this is how it should be. But in fact, you know, that\u2019s just, uh, cultural judgement; all cultures think that their culture represents a sanctioned reality. It doesn\u2019t. It just represents the current download of, uh, their linguistic enterprise. [*audience laughs silently*]\n\nUhm\u2026 The- At the core of the western anxiety about boundaries is something that we are very proud of, that we believe we invented. We call it the ego. Sometimes we call it the democratic individual. Uhh, we say no we- wu-, no eastern society could have produced this. We took this from the Greeks, we perfected it through the Romans, we brought it up through the medieval period; John Locke, and Thomas Hobbes, and all those folks fixed it up for us in the 18th century, Thomas Jefferson ironed out the wrinkles, and modern America is the shining example of, uh, what you can do if you empower the ego, the citizen, the individual. We want nothing of tribalism, still less of collectivism, and God forbid [*in mockingly stern voice*] nothing whatsoever to do with communism! See, all these- all these things, uh, set us going. Uhh\u2026", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-28", "text": "But in fact, the ego is appropriate only to a certain point. I mean, yes, we need egos, so that you take someone to dinner at a reasonable restaurant, you place food in your mouth, not their mouth. [*audience laughs*] This is-, this is what the ego is for. It tells you who pays. [*audience laughs*] [*clears throat*] Uhm, but in fact, what the ego is, is the return to consciousness of this psychic structure related to the patterns of dominance. And the way I think of the ego is it\u2019s like a cyst, or a calcareous growth, or a tumor, [*audience laughs periodically throughout the sentence*] that gets going in the personality, and if not treated, it becomes chronic, and then there is no cure. There can only be, you know, a certain amount of maintenance, and\u2026.\n\n[48:00]\n\n[Transcript by\n\nAdnan Zahirovic\n\n[0:48:00] ...medication of it but it\u2019s it\u2019s incurable except unless we resort to not only non-prescription drugs but uh drugs currently illegal. In other words, the psychedelics through this boundary dissolving function dissolve that boundary as well. And so they promote a larger sense of the world than the values of capitalism, [0:48:30] competitiveness, object fetishism, property acquisition and the bottom line, empower.\n\nSo the -the issue as was always since, since the sixties forward i think is not simply uh an issue of religious freedom or an issue of an eccentric minority social practice [0:49:00] being tolerated by the majority, the way they tolerate handing out pamphlets in the airport or something like that, the -the issue is in fact what kind of people shall we be? And then what kind of society shall we put in place?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-29", "text": "And that\u2019s why my theory of evolution is not simply a dry [0:49:30] footnote on uh an issue that involves anthropologists, primatologists and biologists, but it turns into a political issue because our unhappy, addicted, ego-driven condition has become not simply the source of our own unhappiness, that was bad enough but now it\u2019s the source of great discomfort and dislocation [0:50:00] for all life and human society on the planet. We -we are out of control, we are basically severely addicted to things, and cannot stop ourselves. Uhh and we know, or we should know, that there is not enough petroleum, heavy metal so forth and so on [0:50:30] in the planet to give all the thing addicts all the things that we know they must have in order to be happy.\n\nWe have spread this intellectual virus from pole to pole, to Turkmenistan and Borneo, to the upper amazon to the Tajiks , everybody wants kids, you know? Everybody wants the pause that refreshes, uhh, [0:51:00] what are we going to do about this? Well so far we've been treating it like an endless garden party, there's no serious plan on the table to deal with this at all.\n\nUhh uh i think that the momentum of human history is pushing us inexorably toward some kind of day of reckoning and in which we are going to have to turn [0:51:30] consciously toward brutality and selfishness and say we\u2019ll let India go. Let Bangladesh go. Triage. Costs too much. Can\u2019t possibly fix the problem in order to maintain our locked compounds and our 50 channels of television and the endless availability of arugula (*audience laughs*) we have to let India go.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-30", "text": "We\u2019re going to have to [0:52:00] turn that way in other words each consciously participate in a choice to brutalize the human enterprise or we\u2019re going to have to uhh seriously talk about very major restructuring of our society and i don\u2019t really know how we do that.\n\nI was living in northern california a couple years ago when they wanted to close an airbase near here and the [0:52:30] newspapers were filled with weeks for weeks with analysis whether western civilization could absorb this hammer blow at the very heart of its institutions of closing one frickin airbase for crying out loud. (*audience laughs*) That\u2019s not my idea of major change. You know?\n\nWe may have to give up some of our pretty things. We may have to discipline some of the irresponsible [0:53:00] uh social philosophies that run amuck among us and no i don\u2019t mean the advocacy of psychedelic plants i mean the roman catholic church on population control in the third world. I mean the germans take quite a knock for the holocaust but the catholic church manages to push more people into death disease and degradation every year [0:53:30] than the holocaust manages in its entire show and it\u2019s thought rather crass to even mention the fact. It seems to me that as long as these catholic bishops can show their face in public that we are - uhh in complicity with mass murder. It\u2019s not pleasant news, but what are you going to do about it. Islamic fundamentalism, [0:54:00] another bunch of not-heads with an anti-human agenda, what are we going to do about this?\n\n[Transcript by Jonathan Laliberte]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-31", "text": "[Transcript by Jonathan Laliberte]\n\nAre we going to go gently into that good night of planetary chaos, extreme distortion of class structure, defence of what we have at any cost against those who have nothing? There doesn\u2019t seem to be any other plan on the horizon.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-32", "text": "Arthur Koestler - who probably never thought he would be quoted by Terence McKenna, [*audience laughs*] a very conservative character, you\u2019ll recall he was a marxist who turned on marxism and led a very interesting intellectual life - he wrote a book thirty years ago called \u201cThe Ghost in the Machine\u201d, and he made a case similar to mine, but a little simpler. He observed: human beings are hardwired for homicide. [*audience chuckles*] This is what we do best, because this was something we had to do, apparently, at some point in our past, at least in Koestler\u2019s view, he didn\u2019t believe in a mushroom paradise. But he reached the same conclusion that I have, which is, we need a pharmacological intervention on antisocial behavior, or we are not going to get hold of our, uh, our dilemma. And, uh, I-, I-, you know, there have been dystopias based on drug intervention on aggressive behavior; you all remember \u201cBrave", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-33", "text": "intervention on aggressive behavior; you all remember \u201cBrave new world\u201d, where every time anybody raised their voice, they were given a, a gram of soma, and told a \u201cgram is better than a dam\u201d(?). And so, nobody ever had the thought in their head. Well, that\u2019s a terrible drug, let\u2019s not introduce that. O-oh, the bad news is, we\u2019ve had it for decades, it\u2019s called television, [*audience laughs*] you know. We have millions of people in larval low-awareness lives, in their little condominium apartments, just ladling this garbage into their minds. The average American watches five and a half hours of TV a day, so imagine how much these people watch. I mean, to- to think of that as human at all... If that were a drug, we\u2019d be up in arms. You know, if people were loaded at home with that level of mental condition, [*audience laughs*] day after day after day, we would-, we would do something about it. [*clears", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-34", "text": "would-, we would do something about it. [*clears throat*]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-35", "text": "So, my, uh, you know, I don\u2019t ha-, I can\u2019t propose a grand solution, but I do think that it is, uhh, uh, pregnant with implication that here at the end of the 20th century, with all of this problems hammering down on us, the news comes from the rain forests, and the deserts, that these aboriginal people - while we made the descent into history, and got the top quark, and planted the flag on the Moon, and all that - they kept the faith. And they have\u2026 [*pauses, swallows*] a \u201cmateria medica\u201d, a toolbox, that can carry us back into connection, uh, with the planet. Now, the question might be asked: w-, why-, why do y-, do you have such overwhelming faith in, what is after all a substance, a drug? I mean, don\u2019t psychedelics just cause you to see pretty pictures and patterns, and tally up your gains and losses, and then you come down, and that\u2019s it? And the answer", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-36", "text": "you come down, and that\u2019s it? And the answer is: no. What is mysterious here - and I mentioned this in the early part of my talk - what is mysterious here, is this thing we call the psychedelic experience. Those people nailed to the ground around the campfires fifty thousand years ago, they didn\u2019t know what it was. And when we go in there, armed with our Heidegger, and our Husserl, and our\u2026 Wittgenstein, and our Merleau-Ponty, we don\u2019t know what it is either. There has been no progress in sixty thousand years in reducing the psychedelic experience to a known quantity. It is as terrifying, as awesome, as ecstatic, as irreducible to us as it was to them. Well, what is that? As secular people, uh, we rarely experience religious awe, especially of the uncontrollable sort. Uhh, I believe that, what makes the psychedelic experience so central, is the that it is, uh, a connection into a larger modality of", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-37", "text": "uh, a connection into a larger modality of organisation on the planet, which is a fancy way of saying, it connects you up to the mind of Nature herself. The planet is not, uh, uh, just a hodgepodge of competing species, that\u2019s the old evolutionary model. That\u2019s been obsolete for decades. The new evolutionary model is, that, where we see species\u2026 Nature sees only ge- a gene swarm. Genes moving at various speeds, being transferred around - a large percentage of them by sexual propagation.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-38", "text": "[1:00:00]\n\n[Transcript by Adnan Zahirovic]\n\nBut a large percentage of them by asexual and vegetative propagation. And still others by more exotic -uh- methods of propagation such as [what] go on in the fungi and the bacteria. Uh, the world is a gene swarm, and people like Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock have been suggesting for years that the Earth is a kind of thermostatic self-regulator. Well, if you carry that idea far enough, thermostatic self-regulator is a way of saying [it\u2019s] a kind of computational engine; a kind of computer; a kind of mind! A kind of of mind; The Gaian Mind. The reason those mushroom eating, orgiastically-behaving people worshipped a great horned goddess, the reason they imaged the numinous other as feminine [1:01:00], was because they had a connection into a kind of overarching intelligence that they instinctively and intuitively felt to be feminine.\n\nAnd we retain this in our languages as the idea of mother nature, and the femininity of the land and so forth and so on, but it\u2019s just become a distant metaphor to us. I think ous. I think our intelligence is, is a source of toxicity to nature and discomfort to ourselves unless our values are based on planetary values; are linked to the values of the rest of nature. And that means we need to -uh- fit ourselves more appropriately into the scheme of things by limiting our numbers, [1:02:00] by -uh- limiting our extraction of natural resources and toxification of the environment.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-39", "text": "Uh, we uh, we need to realize that there is a hegemony of life on the planet, not necessarily a hegemony of intelligence. Intelligence is not a licence to trample. Th- the proper role of intelligence in a planetary ecology is that of gardener, caregiver, and uh, uh, maintainer of balance. Well.. so where do we go and how- what do psychedelics have to say about that? Well, I- I believe that psychedelics show us something which -uhm- [1:03:00] which capitalist, consumer fetish oriented society doesn\u2019t want us to know.\n\nWhat psychedelics show us, is the incredible richness of our minds. That- that you, little you, can produce more art in a 20 minute burst of hallucinatory intoxication than the western mind has produced in the last 500 years. Our socially created space is incredibly impoverished. You know? We have Picasso's contribution and Pollock\u2019s contribution and everybody\u2019s contribution but it all together is as nothing compared to the richness that resides in each one of us a half inch behind your eye brows.\n\n[1:04:00]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-40", "text": "[1:04:00]\n\nWe are told, you know, \u2018oh well if you want beauty you have to own a lexus.\u2019 Or -uh- you know, if you want a sense of satisfaction then you need a triple car garage. [And] on and on. Th- this is absolutely -uh- not true. These are substitute addictions that will never satisfy for the genuine article, and the genuine article is a connection into the Gaian Mind. Well I don\u2019t believe or expect for a moment that ever again, naked, tattooed, and joyous we will herd our cattle across the grasslands of Africa. *audience laughter* I mean there are six million (billion?) of us that chance has been blown. Uh, but, but, what- what can we do to make- to ameliorate our situation? Well I have always been an optimist, i\u2019m more optimistic right now [1:05:00] then I have been for a long time because sometimes when you\u2019re an optimist, you\u2019re an optimist simply on principle, you believe it\u2019s going to turn out alright but you don\u2019t see how it possibly could.\n\nI\u2019m beginning to see how it possibly could turn out alright, and -uh- my notion is - first of all I- I follow my thinking about shamanism and I follow the great historian of religion Mircea Eliade, who got it almost all right except that he never embraced psychedelics. He thought they were decadent. But that was just his French/European education and he came to early. But anyway, Eliade wrote a book called \u2018Shamanism,\u2019 and then he subtitled it \u2018The Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy.\u201d Now he wrote the book in French. In French . . .\n\n[Transcript by Douglas Salguero]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-41", "text": "\u2026.technique has a connotation that it doesn\u2019t have in english. It means both a way to do things, and it means technology. Later, the french sociologist Jacques Ellul wrote a book called \u2018Propaganda\u2019 and the little banner under which his book flew which is printed right on the front of his piece, is he says, \u2018there are no political solutions, only technological ones. The rest is propaganda.\u2019 And then he spends 200 pages explaining what he means by political solutions, technological solutions, and propaganda. By Ellul\u2019s understanding, I agree. I think ideology is toxic. All ideology. It\u2019s not that there are good ones and bad ones. All ideology is toxic because ideology is a kind of insult to the gift of human free thinking. I mean, if you adopt some ideology, Lenninism, Mormonism, it doesn\u2019t matter, then you have all the answers. You just go and look in the catechism. Well I don\u2019t know why they issued you a brain, they could have", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-42", "text": "know why they issued you a brain, they could have just given you the catechism. *laughs* Uhhm. Technology as the counterpoint to, uhh, ideology is a very different animal. Now right now we\u2019re going through a technophobic phase because people think technology means exploding nuclear power plants and uhh irradiated food and tv. But all technology really means in the Mclewin sense is the extensions of man, the extensions of man. And, so language is a technology, shamanism is a technology, psilocybin is a technology, and certainly the internet is a technology. It\u2019s, slowly I think, dawning on a number of people that if we, if we\u2019re talking about hallucinogens as consciousness expanding drugs, than the only difference between a drug and a computer is that one is slightly too large to swallow, and our best people are working on that problem, even as we speak. The drugs of the future will be much more like computers. The computers of the future will be much more like", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-43", "text": "The computers of the future will be much more like drugs. And I think what we have to recognize is that we are in a very brief and low energy technical phase in technology, basically we\u2019re at the tail end of the petro-chemical steam era and where we are headed is toward the solid state, fiber optic, global community of the internet. And uhh, when I was in San Francisco two weeks ago, the buzz was all about VRML, the virtual language markup\u2026 the Virtual reality markup language whose protocols are being set now so that we will be able to build websites on the net that you can put on your helmet and walk around in. Sun Microsystems is about to introduce something called Hot Java which will let you build and interact with your website without going through your server. Bandwidth is broadening as we speak. Uh the whole world is being brought into the domain of electricity. And you may not know it but Marshall Mclewin thought that this was descent of the holy ghost as", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-44", "text": "that this was descent of the holy ghost as a convert to christ- to catholicism, he sort of went the opposite direction as me. As a convert to catholicism, he decided that the descent of the third person of the trinity and the worldwide spread of electricity were the same event. So I think that uh what we have to do is dematerialize culture in every way possible. And that means pharmacologize culture, computerize culture, network culture, virtualize culture, and uh, make of it, thereby, uh a tool for the production of our poetic flights, a technology for the putting in place of our dreams as exhibits that we can show each other. This is what it is, this is what technology can be in the service of boundary dissolution. In the service of boundary maintenance, you get hydrogen bombs and seran. In the service of boundary disillusion, you get psychoactive substances, and the Internet, and uh, sexual experimentalism, social justice, tolerance, and community, and the, the", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-45", "text": "justice, tolerance, and community, and the, the choice is to be made on an individual level by each and every one of us. I don\u2019t advocate a mass outbreak of psychedelic use, I think these things are a private matter. They are, the only thing comparable to them in our human experience is our sexuality, and that\u2019s a private matter.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-46", "text": "[Transcript by Christian Haas]\n\n[1:12:00]\n\nHow we define it, how we express it, how we act it out, who we do it with, what we think about it and what we choose to say in public about it is all, uh, in our hands. I do not think that, uh, the government, under the guise of some phony alarmist pseudo-scientific rhetoric, should attempt to control the evolution of consciousness. After all, if these things truly are consciousness-expanding, it doesn't take too much intelligence to realise that it is the absence of consciousness that is causing our flirtation with extinction and planetary disaster. If there is any way to raise consciousness - diet, drug, machine, sexual practice, mantra, yantra, whatever it is - we should be furiously exploring and applying it. Because if we should fumble the ball, if we should actually, uh, where our ancestors over thousands of generations did not fail, if we are to fail, the magnitude of the tragedy will be immense, because failure is not inevitable, it is not inevitable that we should fail. There are ideas, personalities, technologies, uh, available right now that which, if honestly explored and- and implemented, could rescue the human enterprise from the disgrace that hovers over us. We don\u2019t want this to end in a toxified garbage pit ruled by nazis, which is, you know, the way we may well be headed. Uh, the Gaian mind has always been there.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-47", "text": "Nature, originally through the plants and shamanism, provided the tools for us to access this incredible natural database through the vicissitudes of history, previous generations lost the key in western society. Since the 1960s the key has been re-found. It's a matter of great social controversy, it's a matter of\u2026 of- of great risk of those who take it, how they will be viewed by their peers but there is no longer.... ignorance is no longer an excuse. Anthropology in the last 100 years has laid at our doorstep the tools necessary for an archaic reconstruction of a society and, uh, human values within that society. It's inconceivable that Western industrial capitalism could run on another 500 or a 1000 years. Uh, it- it will not continue as it has, it will deteriorate under the pressure of resource scarcity. And what few democratic values we have obtained, what little space for reasoned discourse has been created will be the first to be swept away, so", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-48", "text": "will be the first to be swept away, so it's- it\u2019s very, very important that people take back their minds and that people analyse our dilemma in the context of the entire human story. From the descent onto the grassland to our potential destiny as citizens of the galaxy and the universe, we are at a critical turning point. And as I say, the tools, the- the data that is... holds the potential for our salvation is now known, it is available, it is among us. But it is misrepresented, it is slandered, it is litigated against and it\u2019s up to each one of us to relate to this situation in a fashion that will allow us to answer the question that will surely be put to us in a some point in the future, which is \"What did you do to help save the world\". Well, I'll knock off now, I'll sign books, we'll take, like, a 10-minute break and then we'll come back and do questions. Thank you very much for", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-49", "text": "come back and do questions. Thank you very much for your attention! [Applause]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-50", "text": "[Dis]...aster and that in fact what we're involved with here at the end of the 20-th century is some kind of, uh, accelerated forward escape into transformation. And I- when I lecture that subject I more or less imply that it's inevitable. In other words, that it's not that we have to to X, Y or Z, that it's on track. I think it is on track but I also think there is a place for this kind of politics we discuss this evening because, as the world gets crazier and crazier, a lot of people are going to get very, very anxious. This thing in Oklahoma City is an example of people getting anxious. Uh- so, what needs to be done is to spread [1:18:00] the idea that anxiety is inappropriate.\n\n[Transcript by\n\nDemeter Bogoev\n\nIt- it\u2019s sort of like w-we who are psychedelic have to function as sitters for society [audience laughs], because society is going to thrash, and resist, and think it\u2019s dying, and be deluded, and, uh, regurgitate unconscious material, and so forth and so on. And the goal\n\n(1:18:30)\n\nand the role, then, for psychedelic people, I think, is to try and spread calm.\n\nI\u2019m very convinced that things are going to get a lot nuttier than they are, and they are a lot nuttier now than they have been for a while [audience snickers]. But, it- it isn\u2019t -- it isn- doesn\u2019t mean the bad people are winning, or that we are going to fumble the ball, or anything.\n\nThe mushroom said to me once, it said, \u201cThis is what it\u2019s like when a species departs for the stars.\u201d\n\n(1:19:00)", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-51", "text": "(1:19:00)\n\nIt\u2019s a birthing. It\u2019s complicated. Uhm, if you had never seen a human birth, and you came around the corner of a building in your daily round, and it was happening - it vibrates medical emergency. I mean, blood is being shed, tissues stretched. It doesn\u2019t - you really have to have your chops together to step back and say, \u201cHow wonderful! New life coming into the world!\u201d\n\n(1:19:30)\n\n[audience laughs] Because, uh, you know, that\u2019s not the vibe of it. [audience continues laughing] And, I think that\u2019s the circumstance that we\u2019re in. This is the birth canal to a new order. And, at the moment, it looks like suffocation, constriction, limitation, possible death.\n\nBut, uh, we need to inform ourselves, and get a big perspective.\n\n(1:20:00)\n\nAnd, there\u2019s no way to get a big perspective like education and psychedelic experiences. If we can see history for what it is, it\u2019s a- it\u2019s a twenty-five-thousand year, nearly instantaneous, transition from one state of being to another. And, yes, there are fifteen-hundred generations of people who live in that paper thin transition time.\n\n(1:20:30)\n\nBut, when it\u2019s over...it\u2019s over, and we will leave history behind the way you dump a used placenta, I\u2019m sure.\n\nYeah? [Points to audience member with a question]\n\nAudience Question -\n\nUm, I wondered, is there any reliable information on the relationship between psychedelics and early, uh, Christianity?\n\nT.M. -\n\nReliable information on psychedelic use in early Christianity? The answer is no. I mean, there - there is a book by John Allegro,\n\n(1:21:00)", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-52", "text": "(1:21:00)\n\ncalled The Sacred Mushroom And The Cross. He was a very respected Dead Sea scholar \u2018til he wrote that book, [audience laughs] uh, and that basically finished his career as a classicist. He says some incredibly provocative things in that book. To judge whether he\u2019s right or wrong you would have to be, uh, an Assyrian philologist - about which I know nothing.\n\n(1:21:30)\n\nSo, to the layperson, it seemed to be quite an impressive book, but, apparently to his specialist colleagues it was sloppy thinking, and a travesty, and reason to deny tenure. [Audience laughs]\n\nUhm, St. Augustine was a Montanist before he - no, he was a Manichaean before he converted to Christianity. And, uh,\n\n(1:22:00)\n\nhe mentions that Manichaeans forbade the use of mushrooms - the eating of mushrooms, it doesn\u2019t say the use of mushrooms.\n\nBut, the ancient middle-east - we don\u2019t know very much about psyc- uh -- psychedelic sacramentalism. It may have been there. It may not have been there. Absence of reference is not proof of absence, because of cult secrecy, and- and other factors like that.\n\n(1:22:30)\n\nWe do know that the - or we feel we are on firmer ground in saying that the Greek mystery religions, emphatically, probably were psychedelic. Especially, the- the Ele- Eleusinian mysteries. The mysteries that were practiced on the plain outside of Athens every year for over two-thousand years. And, everybody who was anybody in the ancient world made the journey to Eleusis\n\n(1:23:00)", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-53", "text": "(1:23:00)\n\nto celebrate the greater mysteries, which were celebrated in September. Interesting approach to psychedelics there - you could only legitimately participate in the mystery at Eleusis once in your life.\n\nSo, imagine if you had a single, high-dose, psychedelic experience under ideal conditions. In other words, in darkness, under the care of experts, and then\n\n(1:23:30)\n\nthe rest of your life you had to sort it all out based on what happened that one evening. It was extraordinarily powerful for the ancient world.\n\nEventually, it was destroyed. Alaric the Visigoth, who was a barbarian, but that didn\u2019t stop him from being a convert to Christianity. [audience laughs] Alaric the Visigoth burned Eleusis on his way to North Africa, on his way to burn other things.\n\n(1:24:00)\n\n[Transcript by Jason Bastin]\n\n[1:24:00]\n\nTerence: \u201cYeah?\u201d\n\nAudience member: \u201cI was wondering, Terence, if you\u2019d had a chance to read The Emperor\u2019s New Mind by Roger Penrose, I think? It\u2019s an argument against the idea of A.I. Artificial Intelligence and whether you were able to follow his argument, \u2018cause I would take it you would be opposed to his argument\u201d\n\nTerence: \u201cI haven\u2019t read the book. I like Roger Penrose\u2019s early work. He\u2019s saying Artificial Intelligence is impossible?\u201d\n\nAudience member: \u201cYeah, based on...And he goes through the Turing, uhh, and I heard you bring it up once\u201d\n\nTerence: \u201cThe Turing Test.\u201d\n\nAudience member: \u201cThe Turing test for Artificial Intelligence and he also, uh, brings in the, uh, incompleteness theorem.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-54", "text": "Terence: \u201cUh huh. Oh, Girdle's little incommensurability thing?\u201d\n\nAudience member: \u201cMaybe a little on that?\u201d\n\nTerence: \u201c\u2018A little Girdle please?\u2019 *laughs with audience* \u2018in 2/4 time?\u2019 *audience laughs* Well, uuuuhhhh, I don\u2019t have a particularly strong opinion one way or another on A.I.. I certainly think computers wi...can be a lot more intelligent they are before we settle the question of whether they can pass the Turing test. You all know the Turing is this test...uh...Alan Turing was a mathematician. He figured it out during World War II and it\u2019s basically \u2018if you call \u201cX\u201d on a telephone and you can\u2019t tell whether \u201cX\u201d is a person or a machine, then \u201cX\u201d passes the Turing test,\u2019 and every year they have T- Turing tests, uh, where judges converse by telephone with computers and people and try and decide which are the computers and which are the people and it\u2019s still pretty easy, uh, because the people exhibit exasperation, incorrect information, *some audience members laugh* misinterpret the question *more audience members laugh* so forth and so on. *coughs* Uh, there are some wild thinkers out there, far wilder than me of...you know, if you want to read a wild book, read, uh um, Hans Moravec's book, Mind Children: The Future of Human and Artificial Intelligence. There\u2019s a book, uh, and, uh...I\u2019m having a memory lapse here, help me out\u2026\u201d\n\nCreon: \u201cTipler\u201d", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-55", "text": "Terence: \u201cTipler, thank you. I said help me out with a memory lapse. You didn\u2019t have to read my mind, for God\u2019s sake! *audience laughs* *Terence laughs* Yes! *laughs* Thanks you Creon. *chuckles* Tip...Tipler\u2019s book is, uh uh, the end of all speculation where artificial intelligence, uh, is concerned. Uh, I think machine/human interfacing is, is very important. I think the debate about whether a computer can think like a human being is kind of not very interesting. Computers think like computers. Already vast amounts of what we call \u2018human society\u2019 are entirely run by machines including very important financial sectors, market decisions, uh, resource extraction decisions, inventory resupply decisions that feed clear back from the warehouse to the mine; in other words machines say how much tin should be extracted and at what rate and therefore, to certain degree, say who should come to work and who shouldn\u2019t on certain days. Uh, a lot of design work", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-56", "text": "on certain days. Uh, a lot of design work of circuitry, engineers will simply tell the machine what the circuit should do and leave the actual architecture of the circuitry to machine decision. Uh, this means, you know, lar..m-more and more parts of the human world are being over...given over to machines to design, but when you see how much the world looks like the arrival concourse of an international airport, uh, having computers design the world might not be, uh, a bad idea. Uh, definitely computers figure in our future. I mean, I wasn\u2019t joking when I said that drugs and computers are migrating toward each other. I can imagine, uh, a world, and this is not the ultimate world by any means, a world 5, 6, 7 years in the future where the equivalent of today\u2019s advanced Macintosh would be something you glue on your thumbnail and communicate with that way. And, you know, beyond that lie, you know, enormous computational and data-accessing abilities that", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-57", "text": "know, enormous computational and data-accessing abilities that may be accessed through implants. Uh, we\u2019re going to have to decide, you know, how much of the monkey we want to take with us into the future. We don\u2019t want to take the homicidal killer, we don\u2019t want to take, uh, the male dominator, but we...it would probably be a mistake to leave the body entirely behind. Uh, after all the body gives us our orientation in the world and our sense of ourselves as somehow co...coextensive with animal life. But how much of what we call \u2018human\u2019 is really human is going to be major topic for discussion, uh, from here to the end of time. Yeah, [1:30:00] in the back.\u201d", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-58", "text": "[Transcript by Jaska Isola]\n\nT: Yeah, in the back\u2026.\n\nQ: Ahh, two questions on ecstasy. Aah. What\u2019s your take on MDMA? And ahh, what\u2019s the optimum grams to take ahh to achieve ahh sexual ecstasy?\n\nT: Sexual ecstasy on XTC? (*laughs, *audience laughs)\n\nA. On mushrooms.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-59", "text": "T: Oh, on mushrooms! Oh I see. \u201cW- well\u201d first about MDMA\u2026 w-well there is no doubt, that from here to the end of time, whether it be eighteen years or a thousand years away, science is going to produce more and more psychoactive drugs. There a psychoactive drugs on the shelve now, waiting for human testing and government approvement, ahh, around the world. We cannot explore the brain, we cannot explore neurochemistry, without these drugs being, ahh, a natural consequence of this program of research. MDMA is a cyclised amphetamine, like MDA, like mescaline, which is \u201ca- a\u201d natural occurring compound of this type. Uhm, \u201ci-in\u201d the hands of a skilled psychotherapist ahh MDMA leads to conflict resolution, \u201crelationsh- insights into relationships\u201d, this sort of thing. I am not entirely convinced that it\u2019s, ahh, the silver bullet for these conditions. Every drug that has made it\u2019s way on to the, ahh, the alternative scene", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-60", "text": "way on to the, ahh, the alternative scene has first built itself as a love drug.That\u2019s an unfailing market ploy. (*audience laughs)To get a drug to the forefront of public attention. Cannabis was sold to us as a love drug. Ahh, LSD, psilocybin, ibogaine. MDMA, ahh, is no different. (\u201cMD- MDMA does promote a certain kind of empathy\u201d), not a whole lot of, ahh, vigorous sexal activity. In terms of what dose of psilocybin leads you (\u201cint- into\u201d), ahh, a sexual rather than a visual acute or visionarilly ecstatified situation. Ahh, I would say for a hundred and thirty five pound person, probably two to three grams is this agitated, sexually active or if no sex is happening maybe dancing or drumming. In other words thoroughly aroused, busy, active dose. As the dose rises, you know, activity slows and finally you just want to sit down and then finally you just want to lay", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-61", "text": "sit down and then finally you just want to lay down, and ahh, (*audience laughs). Then you\u2019re into the other fase.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-62", "text": "Behind you there was another question.\n\nQ: Yeah, I was gonna say that John\n\nNully?\n\nHas an interesting kinda speculation about the future possibilities of solid state (unintelligible) on an autobiography of a scientist. But I was really curious what, if you have anything to say or, you know, about the credibility of the author William Cooper, who wrote the book called \u2018Behold A Pale Horse\u2019. You know that book?\n\nT: This is the flying saucer debunker.\n\nA: (unintelligible)\n\nT: And isn\u2019t he the one who said he was the CIA guy for a long time.\n\nA: (unintelligible)", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-63", "text": "T: Well this is slightly off the track or might be seen by some people to be slightly off the track. Ahh, I don\u2019t know William Coopers book., I regard that, ahh, whole flying saucer thing as a civil war in a leper colony. Ahh, (*audience laughs) but I do think, I do think, having been, like probably most of you, very interested in flying saucers from the time I was a kid. And I grew up when it was alle happening. Ahh, a (\u201cfew- couple of years ago\u201d) I accepted an invitation for the first time to go to a flying saucer conference. If you\u2019ve never been to one and you\u2019re interested in flying saucers. Go! You will, (\u201cb- ch- have more insights in the phenomenon then in ten years of studying it, because what\u2019s perfectly clear is that people are self-selected for gullibility. (*audience laughs) Ahh, it\u2019s not their fault, it\u2019s just that (\u201cthe- the ticket through the front", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-64", "text": "just that (\u201cthe- the ticket through the front door is\u201d), ahh, you know, \u2018would you believe this\u2019? \u2018Would you believe this\u2019? (*audience laughs) Ahh, I think probably what happened, historically speaking, you know, in 1947 the first UFO\u2019s were seen, \u201cthey- it was a weird world.\u201d The explosion of the atom bomb, the work toward the hydrogen bomb\u2026 People didn\u2019t know. Einstein and Trumann and all those, ahh, they didn\u2019t know what it really meant. \u201cIf- they thought that it is conceivable that the solar system is monitored. And it is conceivable that this is the switch which turns on the monitor and brings attention. I mean, they were in awe of the atom bomb and they realized they were tampering with cosmic forces. And then, at this moment of cosmic awe and realization of tampering they began to get reports of spacecraft entering the skies of earth and interacting with human beings. Well, what they did, the CIA had", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-65", "text": "beings. Well, what they did, the CIA had just been founded in \u201848 and so forth and so. What they did, they put a lot of time and effort into infiltrating all these groups that claimed knowledge of what was going on. And as a survivor..", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-66", "text": "[Transcript by\n\nMelvin Goudbeek\n\n[Terence Mckenna] : ....of the new left I can tell you when the government gets interested in infiltrating, I mean I, ...there wu eh, [fff], two out of every three members of SDS was a government informant [audience laughter] at the height of its membership! So, I believe that what happened was these flying saucer groups were massively infiltrated by the government in the course of its,... pursuing its constitutional obligation to, maintain the public welfare. And by \u201854 or \u201855 the government was perfectly convinced that whatever flying saucers were, they did not pose a threat to the integrity of the Air Defenses of North America and that was their real concern.\n\nBut bureaucracies are weird creatures, they really exist only to perpetuate themselves. So at some point inside these agencies, they must\u2019ve had to face the fact that they had massively infiltrated a bunch of very flaky people and now their choice was to either end the program, tell the budget people that, \u201cNo, they wouldn\u2019t be needing that 10 million dollars this year\u201d [audience laughter], OR keep going with it because they now had a group of people self selected for gullibility. And that group of people became the victims of every chemical experiment, weird technology, propaganda experiment, and so forth and so on, because their friends and relatives had already written them off [audience laughter] as completely, uhh, untrustworthy. Who would believe them no matter what story they told?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-67", "text": "So, I really felt I was among severely damaged people [audience laughter] , uh, and it wa-it wasn\u2019t their fault it\u2019s that they-they had become part of something, that had become part of something, that had become part of something, and they never really had a fighting chance. Do strange lights haunt the skies of Earth? You bet their booties they do. But, the flying saucer cults are a social phenomenon and largely unrelated to whatever this anomaly is.\n\nTerence McKenna: *Points at Audience member* Yeah.\n\nQuestion: \u201cUm, (could not make this part out, i tried) ...of doctor Pugnitzen Polar [sp?] often spoke of the ephemeralization of technology. Do you think there will come a time when, we are indistinguishable from our technology and would that be sort of apotheosis that you speak about in your-in your books?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-68", "text": "TM: No, I think it would go the other way that we\u2019re moving toward a time when our technology is indistinguishable from us. In other words, I don\u2019t want us to all turn into, uh, 7100 ADAV, that doesn\u2019t seem like a good idea. Uh, but on the other hand I could, imagine, as a hopeful scenario a future world of let\u2019s say 500 or a billion, healthy, happy, well fed people of all races, political persuasions, gender preferences, and so forth and so on. And, uh, those people would essentially live as our archaic ancestors did. Very little material culture, uhh, very-ve, nomadic, uh, but if you could transport yourself into the body of one of these people you would discover that when they close their eyes, there are menus, hanging in space. In other words, the computer that was on the back of the thumbnail, 5 years later that computer moves into being a kind of an implant, a black contact lens that is sewn into your eyelids at age 6 so that when you close your eyes you're actually looking at an interface. And the entire, uh, database of the culture could be placed there.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-69", "text": "You see really what computers are doing is they\u2019re making what we call the collective unconcious, concious! All data, all images, uh, are potentially accessible through, uh, the network. And, uh, ya know, I\u2019m still getting used to the idea of the network myself. Like I keep thinking, \u201cOh, I have this timeline, I could get somebody's chronology and put it at my website\u201d. And then I remember \u201cNo, No, all I have to do is point to their website. I don\u2019t have to copy or move anything\u201d. If there is one list, that\u2019s all the world needs. Anybody else who needs that list can point to it from their website. So the speed at which new structures can be created, is, astonishing! I mean it- almost literally overnight, you can build a website, and begin to point at other websites and bring resources into yours.\n\nUhh, this is a technology which is gonna turn out to not be what people think it is. It\u2019s going to be a technology for showing each other the inside of our heads. For showing each other our dreams. Uh, you know one thing I didn\u2019t talk about in the main part of the lecture is that psychedelics are catalysts for language. They speed up and catalyse the language formation process. And a culture cannot evolve any faster...\n\n1:42:00\n\n[Transcript by\n\nWesley LaVassaur\n\n[Starting at 01:42:00]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-70", "text": "Wesley LaVassaur\n\n[Starting at 01:42:00]\n\n... than its language evolves and it cannot be anymore glued together than the bandwidth that its languages will tolerate, and so what this technology that is putting in place is going to mean is.. the way in which it will dissolve boundaries is by making us transparent to each other. I mean I can imagine a child of the future, uh... we all bring home our drawings to stick on refrigerators and things like that, in the future we won\u2019t stick them on refrigerators, we will stick them in our website and everything will go into our website and by the time we are twenty-five or something, our website will be the size of the American museum of natural history and you can wander through it and a.. as\u2026 [01:43:00] as a gesture of intimacy, you can invite someone else to wander through it. Well that\u2019s who you are. It\u2019s your imagination. And\u2026 I think in a sense I have said it times that the cultural enterprise is an effort to turn ourselves inside out. We want to put the body into the imagination and we want the imagination to replace the laws of physics. With these technologies we can probably do that. But it will have to run on psychedelic design principles or it\u2019s certain to be a mess. Yeah *pointing towards the audience*\n\nQ-What can you tell us about the problems of that some people experience with the digestibility of the mushrooms and how can it lead to pain an- and discomfort uh.. sometimes to like a nightmarish type of experience?\n\nTerence nods*", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-71", "text": "A- Well, first of all let me say this, there are several mushrooms which contain psilocybin [01:44:00] which grow in cow dung. What I urge people to do, if you are serious about this, is to grow your own. Uhh\u2026 this is moderately self serving because I wrote a book about how to grow your own mushrooms *audience laughter*. But there are many such books. You don\u2019t have to buy mine, you only need it if you want the best one *audience laughter*. Ahh.. but- you see- ah- Stamatson\u2019s book is excellent, and if you wanna go large scale, Stamatson\u2019s book is the one. But let me say something then, ah\u2026 after the brain, the stomach is the most heavily innervated organ in the body and anxiety has a way of cropping up as a stomach ache. So, its- a lot of people have anxiety in the first hour of taking mushrooms and they believe that [01:45:00] something in the", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-72", "text": "they believe that [01:45:00] something in the mushroom is giving them gastric distress. It really isn\u2019t, it\u2019s more like a case of butterflies on an empty stomach because you should take mushrooms on an empty stomach. Ah\u2026 you can try a suppository, you can try another drug if you want. But there is in this psychedelic business something to be said for simply disciplining your hind brain. Also you can suppress nausea with cannabis. So, you know, a mixture of self-discipline, pharmacological steering, uh\u2026 so forth and so on. Ah.. if you have- if you have a severe reaction to the mushroom, you probably shouldn\u2019t take it. I mean after all it is a fungus and as mammals we have developed some pretty strong uh... allergenic reactions to fungi, [01:46:00] some of us. And- certain reactions to psilocybin are not psychedelic reactions like uh... enormous sweating or something like that. That\u2019s more", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-73", "text": "sweating or something like that. That\u2019s more an indication of an allergy. If you are going to get into psychedelics, one of the things that you have to do is learn your way around. Psychedelic sophistication doesn\u2019t mean you took everything there is in combination with everything there el- else there is, at high doses, with your friends, at rock concerts *audience laughter*. *clears throat* It- it means that you figured out what worked for you, and then really put the pedal to the metal, you know. Yeah* pointing towards the audience*", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-74", "text": "Q- I recently came by David Hudson\u2019s work on Orbitally Rearranged Monoatomic Elements and found that these monoatomic heavy metals [01:47:00] conduct- act as superconductors- conduct lightforce through our nervous system. Are you familiar with this work at all?\n\nA- No you- you have stumped the star *audience laughter*. Ah.. I mean uh.. I am interested in organic superconductivity and room temperature superconductivity, ah.. but i don\u2019t know his work so i can\u2019t comment on\n\nQ- It\u2019s fairly new, its- its- its you say will be *inaudible* coming out a book called ORMEs *spells out* which is Orbitally Rearranged Monoatomic Elements.\n\nA- I am sure it will find it\u2019s way to my de- now all these hands, oh he should be the guy, you tell me,alright.\n\nQ- How much of our consensus reality do you think is based on um.. inexorable physical laws things that aren\u2019t the *inaudible* creations and how much if any is subject to change without notice simply based on a consensus belief of what should be or what is going to be?\n\n[01:48:00]\n\n[Transcript by\n\nRohan Singh", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-75", "text": "\u2122: Well, I mean, this is, you\u2019ve... this is sort of where I\u2019m at. I mean, as you were asking the question I was... my tendency would be to say none. That none of our reality is based on inexorable physical law. But, I only want that to be true. I\u2019m not sure it is true. Whitehead used to sa- he had this thing about what he called stubborn facts. And he said there are some stubborn facts and you can cut your philosophy any way you want but if you don\u2019t take account of the stubborn facts, you\u2019ll have a problem. Uh, a lot of reality is made of language. How much I\u2019m not sure. But, I, my hope is that a great deal is made of language. Rupert Sheldrake, who\u2019s a good friend of mine, and we sort of think along the same lines, he believes that there are not inexorable physical laws, that there are just very old habbits. He would think of the speed of light as a very", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-76", "text": "would think of the speed of light as a very old habbit. Uh, these physical constants may be changing. We don\u2019t know, I mean take the speed of light, we\u2019ve measured it on one planet since 1906, and cheerfully extrapolate it to every corner of the known universe with no sense that there might be a problem there at all. Yet, you know, if you\u2019re a critic of this, you can look at the speed of light as measured from 1906 and you will notice that the values have been slowly going up. It\u2019s apparently going slightly faster than it was a century ago. Well, people just dump on that and say \u2018no no, you poor moron, you don\u2019t understand, it\u2019s that the instrumentality has become more precise and so the measurement may have changed slightly\u2019. Oh yeah? Well it seems to me in that case the points should cluster. How come the more recent ones are faster than the earlier ones consistently? In other words it\u2019s not that we\u2019re getting", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-77", "text": "In other words it\u2019s not that we\u2019re getting measurements which cluster around a value, it\u2019s that we\u2019re getting measurements which are going out this way toward faster. Uh, I think language is the key to making reality. I think our language is a, is a very weak language computer languages may be more powerful. Uh, you know, VRML, or mathematics, but i believe the world is made of language, that\u2019s the magical belief but then the challenge to that belief is how come the world isn\u2019t the way you say it it? Well, that\u2019s ungenerous. Uh, it...it uh, I think because it doesn\u2019t work quite like that. Consensus is set by societies. By millions of people. Reality is a phenomenon of many linguistically operating subsystems. Maybe if you and I were stranded on a desert island we could get a reality going. We probably could but it would surely be shattered when somebody showed up to take us home again. Over here (points to audience) uh, the", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-78", "text": "again. Over here (points to audience) uh, the documentation, um, well there wouldn\u2019t be anything written, of course, it\u2019s earlier than that, but the documentation, it is well known that the Sahara was wetter in the past, even as recently as Roman times, Pliny called it the breadbasket of Rome. And we know that human populations were out there. We, in the Teselly Plateau of southern Algeria there are rock paintings ruprestice paintings that show shamans with mushrooms sprouting out of their bodies and in their hands. So, we have mushroom use, we have evidence of mushroom use at the era of the great horned paleolithic goddess, um, the um, the presence or absence of monogamy and polygamy is debatable. So I, however the archeology of this area has not been well studied, and won\u2019t be soon, thanks to islamic fundamentalism, Algeria is no place to do archeology right now. Now to the first part of your question,", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-79", "text": "now. Now to the first part of your question, why was it human beings who ate the mushroom? Uh, well, we, you had to, to use the mushrooms as a doorway to higher intelligence, you would have had to already come a certain distance down the path of higher animal organization. We were bipedal, we had a pack signaling repertoire, we had binocular vision, and the reason we used the mushrooms is because we were under nutritional pressure. Uh, there may have been other animals under nutritional pressure but they may have been more tightly, uh, bound to their original diet, or they may simply have had behavioral organization that the mushroom couldn\u2019t dissolve or break through.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-80", "text": "[Transcript by Suzanne Tracey]\n\n[Start 1:54:07]\n\nThere has been talk among evolutionary biologists about if there were no primates on this planet, what order of animals might occupy the conscious niche or be able to come in there. And interestingly raccoons are candidates. Raccoons have, bah, have well positioned eyes. They have a very complex hand and, uh, uh, years and years ago I used to grow mushrooms in, and I grew them by my own method naturally in jars. And uh I would have waste rye infected with jars. I mean, jars infected with mycelium permeated rye and I would put them out on the back porch at night or I did once. And I awoke in the middle of the night to this terrific racket and there were racoons on the back porch. They could smell the rye infested with the psilocybin containing mycelium. They could unscrew the lids and plunge their mitts into this stuff and, and, as I turned on the lights I saw these little bandit faces with this mycelial crumbs on their little upturned muzzles and their didn\u2019t, they wouldn\u2019t back off. They would, the other thing was they were standing up on the they hind legs, so they were standing on the their hind legs holding a jar, holding this stuff, and tottering toward me. So um I just took one look and backed off. And for the rest of the eventing you could tell they were approaching the orgiastic boundary, ah because the carrying on, the sexual squeaking and squealing, thumping and pounding going on in the backyard was just incredible. So ahh, you know they might be interesting test animals to put through this.\n\nYeah *points at new questioner*", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-81", "text": "Yeah *points at new questioner*\n\ninaudible* I want to have your comments on the numerous dangers of the ufo phenomena with regard to *inaudible* and the role of this phenomena which I think you referred to as the other earlier in your talk has been the transformation you have us going through in the future.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-82", "text": "Yeah, yes Jaque Belay was a UFO and the book that was mentioned, passport to Magonia was one of his earliest books on the subject. He\u2019s gone through a lot of changes about it. Um, the numinous, I think whats going on is that in a sense there is leakage from the future. This is a broad subject and it late in the evening so I\u2019ll give it to you in headlines. But basically science takes the position that nature is without purpose. In other words nature has no goal. Nature proceeds forward according the unfolding of chance and necessity. But I don\u2019t believe this. I think nature is an engine for the conservation of novelty. Natures purpose is to generate ever greater novelty. In fact history is the dawning realisation that we are about to descend down a very steep novelty sink as it were, into immense amounts of novelty. And this is why we image the other in the 20th century as the extraterrestrial because out of the", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-83", "text": "century as the extraterrestrial because out of the unconscious comes this image of the other as the extraterrestrial . I think we are in the presence of the transcendental object at the end of time and that religions call it the messiah, or the maitreya, secularists call it utopia, millenarians call it something else, mushroom enthusiasts call it something else. But we are in the presence of the transcendental object at the end of time. And that it casts and enormous reflection back through history, especially recent history. But any person encountering this backward moving shadow of the transcendental object will attempt to interpret it in cultural terms that they can relate too. So if they happen to be a french peasant in the 11th century they will assume its the virgin mary. If they\u2019re a sexual scientific rationalist in the 20th century they will assume it\u2019s a spacecraft of some sort. [1:54:00] The Celts and their relationship to little people and an invisible world this", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-84", "text": "their relationship to little people and an invisible world this is a generally held belief that they are exemplifying that is world wide which is that the dead are somehow co-present in the space of the living, but invisibly so. Except to those who have the gift of second sight or are magically empowered or shamanically adept. Uhhm the last thought i should leave you with this and it\u2019s adumbration of this question, but also has deeper implications.. The model that you\u2019re usually given of the psychedelic experience is a religious model, that the mysterious of religions, Hindu, Buddhist, or something or other are somehow illuminated by this boundary dissolving experience, my model is a little different, a little cooler and a little more formal, and it\u2019s this. That consciousness is an omnidirectional threat detection response.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "45b24ea78675-85", "text": "[ Transcript by\n\nChristian Sherriff\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Evolving+Times"}
{"id": "9975945fc64f-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nPlants, Consciousness, and Transformation\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n8-9 April 1995\n\nUnknown\n\n4684\n\nEnd of Results\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Plants%2C+Consciousness%2C+and+Transformation"}
{"id": "5e40c0f787b7-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nThe New Psychedelics\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n1995\n\nAmsterdam\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo transcript available for this talk!\n\nHelp Transcribe\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+New+Psychedelics"}
{"id": "8803e49094f4-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nRiding the Range with Marshall McLuhan\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n1995\n\nEsalen Institute, Big Sur, California\n\n6217\n\nEnd of Results\n\nfractal mathematics have introduced us to a new superspace. For the Renaissance, spatial perspective was essentially a filing system for visual data.\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Riding+the+Range+with+Marshall+McLuhan"}
{"id": "1ef1a407ac28-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSurfing on Finnegans Wake\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n1995\n\nEsalen Institute, Big Sur, CA\n\n15372\n\nEnd of Results\n\nThe Books at the Wake, James S. Atherton points out, and here's Atherton's quote: \"Amongst other things, Finnegans Wake is a history of writing. We begin with writing on a bone, a pebble, a ram's skin, leave them to cook in the mothering pot, and guten morg with his cro magnon charter, tinting fats and grate prime must once for omnibus step rubric-red out of the word press. The mothering pot is an allusion to alchemy- that there is some other significance connected with writing, for the next time the word appears it is again in a context concerning improvement in a system of- in systems of communication. The passage is \"all the airish cygnics of her dippendump helpabit from an father hogum told them mutter maskins. Dippendump helpabit combined the deaf and dumb alphabet signs in the air or 'airish signs' with the ups and downs of the ordinary ABC and the more pronounced up and downs of Irish oggam writing. The mason, following this must be the man of that name who invented steel pen nibs, but all I can suggest for mother is the mothering of freemasons which does not fit the context, although they of course also make signs in the air. Is that perfectly clear? [audience chuckles]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Surfing+on+Finnegans+Wake"}
{"id": "1ef1a407ac28-1", "text": "McLuhan. \"Guten Morg with his cromagnon charter\" expounds by mythic gloss the fact that that writing meant the emergence of the caveman or sacral man from the audible world of simultaneous resonance into the profane world of daylight. The reference to the masons is to the world of the bricklayer as a type of speech itself. On the second page of the Wake Joyce is making a mosaic, an Achilles shield, as it were, of all the themes and modes of human speech and communication. \"Bygmester Finnegan, of the Stuttering Hand, freemen's maurer, lived in the broadest way immarginable in his rush-lit toofarback for messuages before joshuan judges had given us numbers ...\" Joyce is, in the Wake, making his own Altamira cave drawings of the entire history of the human mind, in terms of its basic gestures and postures during all phases of all human culture and technology. As his title indicates, he saw that the wake of human progress can disappear again into the night of sacral or auditory man. The Finn cycle of tribal institutions can return in the electric age, but if again, then let's make it a wake, or awake, or both. Joyce could see no advantage in our remaining locked up in each cultural cycle as in a trance or dream. He discovered the means of living simultaneously in all cultural modes while quite conscious. This means he cites for such self-awareness and correction of cultural bias in his \"collideroscope.\" This term indicates the interplay in colloidal mixture of all components of human technology as they extend our senses and shift their ratios in the social kaleidoscope of cultural clash: \"deor,\" savage, the oral or sacral, \"scope\", the visual or profane and civilized.\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Surfing+on+Finnegans+Wake"}
{"id": "1ef1a407ac28-2", "text": "Completed this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Surfing+on+Finnegans+Wake"}
{"id": "ed2a5cf5e3df-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nPsychedelic Skepticism\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\nAutumn 1996\n\nWhole Life Expo, Austin, TX\n\n7104\n\nEnd of Results\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Psychedelic+Skepticism"}
{"id": "0a9db13f2afd-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nLuc Sala 'on Drugs' Interview\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n1996\n\nEntheobotany Seminar, Palenque, Mexico\n\n1407\n\nEnd of Results\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Luc+Sala+%27on+Drugs%27+Interview"}
{"id": "cadd4fadd3f5-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nThe Evolutionary Importance of Technology\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\nAugust 1996\n\nEsalen\n\n1755\n\nEnd of Results\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Evolutionary+Importance+of+Technology"}
{"id": "197011acc090-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nA Better World (Toward The End Of History)\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n10, July 1996\n\nNew York New York\n\n7742\n\nEnd of Results\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/A+Better+World+%28Toward+The+End+Of+History%29"}
{"id": "4724f4bc21c7-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nPoets and Prophesiers\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n9 May 1996\n\nUnknown\n\n5525\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo youtube link available, try the following:\n\nPB: [laughter, Terence laughter] And this Timewave we've talked about, uh, over the years. Many pr- people are familiar with that but for those of you just tuning in let me tell you that Terence McKenna is, ah, an author of, uh, a number of books and very interesting, uh, uh, looking at the , uh, oh, things about our beginnings as human creatures, uh, what it meant for us to live on the plains and eat certain kinds of foods. Uh, you've been an explorer of, uh, mind, and, uh, oftentimes we've had gatherings with you when you've, you and your brother Dennis have talked about different, uh, chemicals and how altered states of consciousness are evidently essential, historically, for human beings. And right n- and one of the things you have, have talked about is this Timewave Zero. It goes back- we go back to, is it Mayan calendars that you predicted this on?\n\nPB: How was it you put that together?\n\nPB: And does this, would this have predicted that I would have- my comp- my accounting computer would have gone down, uh, last week?\n\nAnd in trying to get some, uh, material facts to me yesterday I had three fax machines go down, not one...\n\nAnd a number of other things! Now, i- is there anything going on planetarily that you could tell us about? Are planets in retrograde in at this point or something?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Poets+and+Prophesiers"}
{"id": "4724f4bc21c7-1", "text": "Uh, that's actually not my bailiwick. I have been keeping track of, of weird and novel events over the past 60, 70 days, and uh, just some highlights off the top of my head, uh 40, 40 billion new galaxies discovered, uh, three extra s- uh, solar planets discovered, that means planets around other stars, uh, the completion of the preliminary mapping of the human genome, the production of anti-matter, um, the discovery, the announcement that this large asteroid impact in Canada delivered enormous amounts of Buckminsterfullerine to the Earth's surface meaning that that's an organic molecule, therefore proving that uh, lots of organic material is delivered to the Earth from space. Uh, so in areas of deep scientific discovery, discoveries that will remake uh, human medicine, our model of the universe uh, and perhaps in the antimatter discovery, the ways we produce energy, all these things have occurred in this remarkably short period of time. Uh, there has not been what some people think of as massive novelty. China did not invade Taiwan and trigger World War II and you know, there were some similar other opportunities for old-style catastrophe that didn't happen. But you have to remember novelty is novelty. It's new more than catastrophic. I mean, catastrophes are in fact rather hum-drum. They come around all the time. Wars, cyclones, floods. What we're experiencing is the emergence of new kinds of connectivity and order in the human world, and uh, and then what we are experiencing as individuals if we're in resonance with the collective timewave is I think just wild fluctuations of, of opportunity, of debt and profit, of love and hate, of uh, you name it. [Terence laughs, PB Laughs]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Poets+and+Prophesiers"}
{"id": "4724f4bc21c7-2", "text": "PB: Now you're on this tour around the United States and I did get one of your brochures. I want you to tell the audience about what you're hoping to um, be able to bring people to on this all- um, 2-day weekend. Sounds like it could be kind of an intense time.\n\nTM: Well I'm very concerned to communicate these mathematically-based ideas about the structure of time and what their implications would be if they were found to be uh, true, and so this is not something that can be done in an hour radio interview or an evening lecture. It's uh, a pretty steep learning curve. And, and I'm interested in communicating that and having people critique it. I mean, we're reaching the place in the historical meltdown of Western society where if something like the timewave actually works, I think it's time to move it to a higher level of public awareness, and that means exposure, collegial debate, possibly experiments of some sort, and then uh, discussion. So I'm just sort of touring the country saying \"I predicted this was a novel time, how does the first ten rows feel about that?\" And then can we get a discussion launched based on that?\n\nPB: What have been the responses in the two cities you've done this in?\n\nTM: Well, I've done it in three cities. We were in New York, Santa Fe and Boulder. People were very enthusiastic. Uh, it went smoothly, uh, but there were uh, good crowds and very intelligent discussion. Um, the situation here in Los Angeles is uh, a little peculiar. Uh, we're locked in righteous battle with the Veterans Administration, and uh, UCLA right at this moment because uh, the Veterans Administration which owns the large auditorium- what is it...\n\nPB: Wadsworth.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Poets+and+Prophesiers"}
{"id": "4724f4bc21c7-3", "text": "PB: Wadsworth.\n\nTM: Wadsworth auditorium ordered UCLA which leases this building from the VA to cancel the event uh, just for, just Monday morning. So this has suddenly raised a whole bunch of free speech and advocacy issues. Uh, the VA's only reason for canceling Wadsworth Auditorium was my record on advocating uh, drug reform and social reform of psychedelic policy. UCLA chose not to act like a great public University and defend free speech and the Constitution but instead cravenly caved in to the VA, and uh acted as their heavy, and canceled the event and offered us a venue at uh, Griffin uh-\n\nPB: Commons\n\nTM: -Commons, that's right. And-\n\nPB: And this is for Friday night. The actual weekend event is all scheduled at Paramount ranch. Correct?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Poets+and+Prophesiers"}
{"id": "4724f4bc21c7-4", "text": "TM: Yes, the weekend event is not affected by this, but the large uh, the, the chance to talk to the public at less than uh, a fair chunk of money is definitely being squeezed by someone at the VA who is being protected by the uh, events department at UCLA. They refuse to identify this person uh, so we've gone several routes at once. We have mobilized the media. We've mobilized the internet. Uh, the office of Senator Paul Wellstone, who is on the Senate committee that oversees VA affairs has made an inquiry, we understand. And the US attorney and uh, other interested parties in Southern California traditionally associated with defending free speech are uh, at this moment trying to turn the VA around uh, by friendly persuasion, whatever that means. Or if that fails I think we'll all be in court tomorrow morning seeking an injunction on them to cease and desist and we will- we're now assuming that the Veteran's Administration and UCLA are going to be forced within the next few hours to uh, allow this event to go forward at Wadsworth. If I'm wrong then it will go forward uh, at uh, Griffith Commons. But my feeling, I have to tell you Pam, is that actually there is a Constitution in this country and people can go- these government agencies can go just so far, and then uh, mechanisms swing into action and even these anonymous federal bureaucrats who would seek to control the dialogue, the agenda of public dialogue on these sensitive issues, are put in their place, and I'm pretty confident that we're going to have a Wadsworth auditorium event.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Poets+and+Prophesiers"}
{"id": "4724f4bc21c7-5", "text": "http://www.levity\n  L-E-V-I-T-Y . C-O-M slash eschaton, E-S-C-H-A-T-O-N slash. And that's really my fantasy, to live out in Hawaii with high technology in the rainforest and uh, build a kind of cigar store indian version of myself and my ideas that people can relate to and wander around in and leave comments and we're gonna put the Timewave on in a Java application. We're building a chronological database. Uh, I'm very bullish on the web these days.\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Poets+and+Prophesiers"}
{"id": "8173dd3f5dc1-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nLive at St. John the Divine's Cathedral, Synod Hall\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nAudio\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n25 April 1996\n\nSt. John's Cathedral, New York NY\n\n11230\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo youtube link available, try the following:\n\nAudio Link\nTranscription\nOther links\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+St.+John+the+Divine%27s+Cathedral%2C+Synod+Hall"}
{"id": "989731ab824e-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nPoolside Interview\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n28 January 1996\n\nPalenque, Mexico\n\n1370\n\nEnd of Results\n\nInterviewer: Do you think, from your experience with Ayahuasca and the mushrooms, that there is...there exists a pedagogical sense of the experience...exists a systematically teacher instance or factor which not proceed from the ego in the experience with these entheogens?\n\nI: Exactly.\n\nI: Is this common, eh, in the mushroom experience and in the ayahuasca experience?\n\nI: In this case, who or what do you think that teaches us? It's inside or outside us?\n\nI: I ask, uh, some persons that are too much time in the ayahuasca way, and, ah, is multiple factors they, they bring to explanate this, this question. Some talk about spirits, some talk about the Self, some talk about the, eh, the founder of the line of in the work or guardian angel. It is very interesting this, this, this question..\n\nI: ..biology..\n\nI: The super mind, that you call, you call supermind.\n\nI: I ask you now again from your experience with these entheogens, if in your point of view, does exist an ethic religious character of the experience. Do you think that there impart a wish to become more ethic in relationship with the other man and with all nature?\n\nI: Do you think that there apart [impart] an ecological consciousness too?\n\nI: Uh, do you think that, uh, they have therapeutical properties, the mushrooms and the ayahuasca?\n\nI: Mmm. Mushrooms have this kind of", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Poolside+Interview"}
{"id": "989731ab824e-1", "text": "I: Mmm. Mushrooms have this kind of\n\nI: ..effect, too.\n\nI: It's a kind of psychosomatic effect.\n\nI: Psychosomatic. Have you perceived in the effect of them, uh, some kind of therapeutical properties in some event, some, some effective systematically...\n\nI: What?\n\nI: Yeah, yeah.\n\nI: What do you think about the paranormal or parapsychological phenomena described in the experiences with these entheogens?\n\nI: Eh, what is your personal experience about this?\n\nI: Telepathy\n\nI: Mhm. Can you say something more about your vision on the relationship and differences between shamanic plants and the artificial chemical compounds?\n\nI: Mhm. What do you think about the question of the presence of advanced cultures and man in the remote past of humankind? History of Atlantis..\n\nI: Yeah, you don't think that the pyramids and the, for example, the, the, the know-how to, to, to do, to make the ayahuasca and so how, how man discovered that that\n\nI: Since the beginning, since the paleolithic, neolithic age?\n\nI: Mmm..Ok. Thank you very much.\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Poolside+Interview"}
{"id": "5a9af72b8884-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nThe Winter King (aka Shamanism, Alchemy, and the 20th Century)\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n1996\n\nMannheim, Germany\n\n5499\n\nEnd of Results\n\nI was here about five years ago with Tim Leary one raucous evening. Maybe some of you managed to catch that event. This is a little more thoughtful and reflective. I\u2019m not here to talk, speak, or promote my books as I have been in the past. This is the only public event that I\u2019m doing in these ten days and I\u2019m very grateful to David and Petrif for inviting me. This is a wonderful facility and bringing you plants, books and information. It\u2019s great to see that the freak community is alive and well in Mannheim.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Winter+King+%28aka+Shamanism%2C+Alchemy%2C+and+the+20th+Century%29"}
{"id": "5a9af72b8884-1", "text": "What I\u2019m in Europe to do is to be part of a film-making effort and I want to describe the project to you a little bit simply because it\u2019s what\u2019s on my mind, naturally, and to discuss the politics behind the making of this kind of a film. It\u2019s not a film about rave culture. It\u2019s not a film about Albert Hoffmann. It\u2019s not a film about body piercing or any of these things that great films need to be done about and have been done about. It\u2019s about one of your local heroes, who is a great hero of mine and should be a great hero to all freaks in Germany and everywhere. I\u2019m talking about Frederick the Fifth, Elector Palatine, Prince of Heidelberg, King of Bohemia. Are you all familiar with this guy? No? Well - this is your guy! This is the prototypic freak of this area. A freak that was not content to sit back and let things happen but was willing to launch a grand, alchemical dream of a reformation of human society.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Winter+King+%28aka+Shamanism%2C+Alchemy%2C+and+the+20th+Century%29"}
{"id": "5a9af72b8884-2", "text": "So just to lay in the background of those who are not familiar with the historical incident that we\u2019re here to recreate, here and later in Prague, has to do with Prince Palatine of Heidelberg. A protestant who wedded the granddaughter of Queen Elizabeth the 1st of England, Elizabeth Stuart, the daughter of James the 1st of England. This was arranged wedding. They were both sixteen years old at the time. Frederick went to England, the wedding was held in England and then he returned with his very English bride to Heidelberg. They were the center of a movement of alchemical reformation and revolution, that sought to take the Protestant Reformation an enormous leap forward into a new world of spiritual freedom, and to my mind, a very sort of psychedelic world. They were the heirs and the inheritors of the entire medieval worldview. It was folded into this pair of sixteen year olds who were ruling the Palatinate of Heidelberg, and Frederick was an Elector, meaning he was one of the seven princes who could choose the Emperor of what remained of the Holy Roman Empire at that time. He also conspired to become the King of Bohemia.\n\n[Tape Skip] Visionaries moved the entire court from Heidelberg, from the small-time scene of a principality, to Prague, to reoccupy the office of the Holy Roman Empire. They would do this with an Emperor friendly to magic and alchemy, and who was the inheritor of a generation old plan - to create an alchemical reformation that had been hatched in the mind of the English alchemist and mathematician, John Dee.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Winter+King+%28aka+Shamanism%2C+Alchemy%2C+and+the+20th+Century%29"}
{"id": "5a9af72b8884-3", "text": "The ending of the story is not a happy ending, or perhaps it is, and we can talk about that. On a superficial level, this alchemical dream, this Rosicrucian Enlightenment, ended badly because the Habsburgs back in Madrid quickly got wind of what was going on and got an army together and sent it to Prague, laid siege to Prague, and caused Elizabeth to flee to the Netherlands with her children. Frederick was defeated at the Battle of the White Mountain and the alchemical dream died. This was really in some sense the beginning of the Thirty Years War. As you know - going into the Thirty Years War, Europe was a place of Popes and Kings. At the end of the Thirty Years War, it was a place ruled by parliaments and peoples and the entire medieval world was swept away. Out of the new political dispensation of the situation at the end of the Thirty Years War, especially in England, modern science took hold and was born, and these angel-dealing, horoscope casting, alchemy pursuing visionaries of this Rosicrucian renaissance became simply objects of historical curiosity. These people were completely incomprehensible to the people who followed them generation after generation after generation, until, I submit to you, the present.\n\nIn the present moment, we like they, inherit a world whose ideologies are exhausted and can only be refreshed from the margins. That was what this whole alchemical revolt was about. It was about a suppressed, marginal minority of deeply pietistic original thinkers, but heterodox - non-Christian - keeping together a tradition that I think has been reborn, or rediscovered in our own time.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Winter+King+%28aka+Shamanism%2C+Alchemy%2C+and+the+20th+Century%29"}
{"id": "5a9af72b8884-4", "text": "It\u2019s the tradition that Nature is a great distillery of complexity: alchemical gold, novelty, and connection, whatever you want to call it. In our own time, through integrative sciences, like ecology, animal behavior and psychology, we have re-understood what was forgotten during the reductionist centuries of modern science. We\u2019ve re-understood that the world is one thing and it\u2019s a living thing. It\u2019s a thing with an intent and a spirit within it, and this is the key concept.\n\nIt is this concept that the alchemists, the hermetic dreamers and the occultists of the alchemical and northern European Renaissance, were trying to strengthen, condense, distill, and make actual this sense of community. This Spiritas. Then with the rise of modern science, all of that is anathema. Rational analysis tells us that matter is simply atoms flinging themselves through space, obedient to certain mathematical laws that are invariant, and all the creativity, all the sense of connectedness that we experience as living beings, as members of a society, as human beings in contemplation of nature - all of that was denied. It reaches its ultimate culmination, just as an example, in the kind of statement such as was made by Jean-Paul Sartre - the French Existentialist, that said, \u201cNature is mute.\" Nature gives no clue, he tells you. Man is alone in the cosmos, with his complexes and his obsessions. He confers meaning. There is no a priori reality, to which ethics or intent can be attached. I reject this. I think the entire message of the psychedelic experience, which is basically the sine qua non of the rebirth of alchemical understanding; the very basis of that understanding is that nature seeks to communicate.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Winter+King+%28aka+Shamanism%2C+Alchemy%2C+and+the+20th+Century%29"}
{"id": "5a9af72b8884-5", "text": "All being is pregnant with language. All reality wants to include the human side of nature in its ongoing intent. The problem lies not with nature, but with ourselves. We believe that we are somehow paralyzed, disempowered, doubting, or cut from the meat of the thing.\n\nWell, so, I\u2019m a great believer in propaganda, obviously. My whole life is about propaganda. It is my goal to take an incident like the career of Frederick the Elector Palatine of Heidelberg and his bride and make of it a kind of exemplar, a parable. A myth if you will - the myth of the alchemical marriage, a myth that takes innocence, naivet\u00e9 and belief in the power of ideas, to make a new world. Then tell that story again in film, backing it with these tremendously powerful alchemical images that Jung and others showed work inexorably on the psyche, whether you wish to be part of the process or not.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Winter+King+%28aka+Shamanism%2C+Alchemy%2C+and+the+20th+Century%29"}
{"id": "5a9af72b8884-6", "text": "To merely gaze upon the images of alchemy is to, in a sense, enter into a kind of psychoanalytical process because what alchemy was, and I should stress this or the rap makes no sense at all - alchemy was not the vulgar pursuit of the transmutation of lesser metals into gold or silver. That was the charlatan\u2019s game played in every market in Europe for centuries among the simple people. Alchemy is the body of symbols and of literature that accreted around the effort to extract a universal medicine out of Nature for the transformation of societies and human beings \u2013 and comes to us from the times of what we call epistemological naivet\u00e9, meaning that the people then did not have the strong sense of objective and subjective reality which we inherit from science. So during those eras of epistemological na\u00ecvet\u00e9 - what was someone\u2019s idea of how matter behaves, what was someone\u2019s myth of how psyche behaves - could become entangled in a projective experience with material in a chemical vessel. The processes which we call melting, crystallization, purification, and calcination, processes now well understood through a soulless molecular model of matter, were for them, the birth of the red lion, the coming of the double-headed queen, the murder of the hermaphrodite dog, and so forth and so on.\n\nThey had these outlandish images and this outlandish vocabulary because they were trying to create powerful symbols. Powerful mnemonic hooks on which to hold the details, and there are many of them. This extremely complex worldview, were it not for people like Carl Jung, the Swedish depth psychologist, would have remained completely inexplicable to modern people.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Winter+King+%28aka+Shamanism%2C+Alchemy%2C+and+the+20th+Century%29"}
{"id": "5a9af72b8884-7", "text": "It is not chemistry and it is not myth building per se, as we inherit from the Greeks. It is a very complicated amalgamation, a good alchemical word, of psyche and matter. The reason, I think, it is so resonant with our own times is because our generation and generations of people confined with twentieth century, have in a sense and by an oblique path, recovered that universal medicine that the alchemist\u2019s dreamed of by going strangely enough, to some of the most aboriginal and least culturally assimilated to European and American values people in the world. Shamanism, is essentially a living tradition of alchemy that is not seeking the stone, but has found the stone!\n\nThese shamans, Jivaro, Witoto, Cubeo, notice that they have this same epistemic naivet\u00e9. It is this inability to distinguish between subjective and objective world, through the intercession of Newton and Descartes, that Frederick the Elector and the alchemists around him and the alchemists the preceded them through the centuries had. In other words, within the context of the alchemical vocabulary, the psychedelic experience as brought to us through plants - long in the possession of aboriginal people - appears to be the identical phenomenon.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Winter+King+%28aka+Shamanism%2C+Alchemy%2C+and+the+20th+Century%29"}
{"id": "5a9af72b8884-8", "text": "The Jivaro shaman, the Cubeo shaman, does not use a glass retort with cycling sulfur and mercury inside it. The shamans of the Amazon have obtained a sufficient sophistication to explicitly understand that the vessel of alchemical transformation is the body and the head of the experient. This is the alchemical vessel! This is where you will encounter the three-headed dog, the queen dissolving in her bath, and the incestuous couple that combine Sol and Luna to produce the white essence of the panacea of the universal medicine. These are 'psycho-mental\u2019 processes and Jung mapped this. He must have been an extraordinary person because he could approach this without psychedelics, through a very careful inspection of the dreams and the symbol-producing processes of his patients. Over decades, he produced a kind of skeletal map of the psyche. I maintain that map doesn\u2019t fill itself in, doesn\u2019t become a living experience, until we undergo what is rightly perceived as the alchemical process of dissolution.\n\nDissolution of what? Of the lumpen prima materia of the ego. This is the shit, the tar, the coal, the dark earth of Egypt, the starting material, the loam, the manure, the night soil, the lowest matter; we start with that, the ego and dissolve it through the intercession of the spirit. Spirit is a complicated concept. It\u2019s not naive. It\u2019s phenomenologically difficult to define. Somehow through the dissolving spirit of the plants, the plants lift the imprisoning structures of the ego and allow the ego to flow out into the world. For some people this process produces panic. \"Pan\u201d-ic, comes from the god Pan, whose screams caused people to go mad. Panic.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Winter+King+%28aka+Shamanism%2C+Alchemy%2C+and+the+20th+Century%29"}
{"id": "5a9af72b8884-9", "text": "For other people, this process is an enormous liberation. It is an influx of material previously hidden in the unconscious, laden with symbolic meaning, and is not to be sustained in this acidic, dissolving, roiling liquid state. That\u2019s part of the process, but it is eventually to be recombined, coagulatio, the recombining. The coagulation. It is the coming together at a higher level - usually through the process of an application analogous to heat, but psychic heat which drives off the dross of false assumptions and false attachments.\n\nAll of you who have been through high-dose psychedelic experiences know that it\u2019s very hard to carry stupid baggage through that keyhole. In fact, your lucky if you just get your soul and yourself through and intact. So, what we have here through the psychedelics - among certain marginal populations in the twentieth century, freaks of all sorts, in all times and in places, within the twentieth century - a kind of almost accidental rediscovery of these alchemical truths.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Winter+King+%28aka+Shamanism%2C+Alchemy%2C+and+the+20th+Century%29"}
{"id": "5a9af72b8884-10", "text": "That\u2019s one level. We can do self-directed psychotherapy on ourselves with psychedelic substances out of plants and we can use alchemical symbolism to guide this process, and that\u2019s all very interesting but so what? What\u2019s so great about it? Well - One of the most famous of all alchemical axioms is, \u201cas above, so below\u201d, meaning always, that in every small part of reality, there is a tiny reflection of the great over structure of reality. In the largest structures are hidden the secrets of the smallest, and vice versa. We also have rediscovered this principle in the 20th century through fractal mathematics. The psychedelics have brought us back to this alchemical mystery, shorn of any vocabulary for dealing with it, and shorn of any real living notion of the spirit. So, we have sought as far afield as the Tibetan Book of the Dead, or Freudianism, or there have been various efforts to cast the psychedelic experience one way or another.\n\nThe hot one now, of course, is shamanism. I relate to that because I spent a lot of time in the Amazon, with these kinds of people and with these kinds of concerns. Shamanism and alchemy are a seamless enterprise. In alchemy, the connecting figure if you\u2019re interested in this, between the shaman and the alchemist, is the smith, the worker of metal. The shaman and the smith, in primitive cultures, are always associated as brother figures. They both work in metals.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Winter+King+%28aka+Shamanism%2C+Alchemy%2C+and+the+20th+Century%29"}
{"id": "5a9af72b8884-11", "text": "What does all this mean for us beyond the commitment to our own sort of ordering the wunderkammer of our own private imagination? What it means is important because if you look around you, you will see the entire global civilization is undergoing some kind of meltdown. The planet itself is now to be seen as a kind of alchemical retort. The prima materia to be transformed are: the nuclear stockpiles, the toxic waste dumps, the industrial wastelands, the populations devoid of hope, and the populations at threat of fatal and epidemic disease. There is a great deal of prima materia to be worked on at the historical level of the alchemical process. Trying to manage this rationally with some political \u2018ism\u2019; fascism, Marxism, capitalism, goes nowhere. It just digs us deeper into the mire and the muck.\n\nAt the fringes, people like you, people like myself, people I associate with, offer endless solutions. We offer recycling, restraint in child bearing, and increased sexual toleration of unusual sexual styles. Many, many things are suggested but nothing happens because the primary agenda of society has not yet been dissolved. It has not yet come into a state of fluidity sufficient where a new imprint can be put upon in.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Winter+King+%28aka+Shamanism%2C+Alchemy%2C+and+the+20th+Century%29"}
{"id": "5a9af72b8884-12", "text": "In the 1960s, we thought that all that had to happen was - everybody would take LSD and the obvious right things to do would be done. We expected no opposition to this because it\u2019s rightness was so obvious. We didn\u2019t realize that every righteous crusade in history has marched into the waiting jaws of its oppressors. But the spirit doesn\u2019t die. It\u2019s interesting but in America, we refer to, and have always referred to freaks as Bohemians. I assumed, you always hear about the left bank Bohemia of Paris in the 1920s - but why Bohemia? What does Bohemia have to do with Paris? Why are freaks called Bohemians? It\u2019s because of Frederick the Elector and the alchemical renaissance that he plotted with his wife. Since that time to now, \u2018Bohemian\u2019 has meant a marginal political position involved with bizarre sexual practices, strange drug use and \u2018funny\u2019 ideas.\n\nIn the 1960s, LSD was not sufficient even coupled with rock & roll. It only brought oppression. It was like a failed alchemy. Instead of the dissolving and recrystalizing at a higher and more angelic level, thousands of prisons were built and the entire thing failed. But this spirit is the spirit, the spirit of life itself, the spirit of novelty itself, and it will not be suppressed for long in any time or place. So now again it comes.\n\nAfter thirty years and after many changes, it\u2019s among us again. I assume, looking at all of you, that to some degree you represent this or act it out, because it\u2019s a spirit of dissent that says we will not serve the values of materialism. We will not serve the values of the ego and the values that separate and breakdown the community.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Winter+King+%28aka+Shamanism%2C+Alchemy%2C+and+the+20th+Century%29"}
{"id": "5a9af72b8884-13", "text": "So here it is again. What is different this time that we might have some greater hope of actually coming through to the beginning of the third millennium without having to hang our heads when we tell the story to our grandchildren? I will submit to you this evening that the difference between then \u2013 1965 through 1970 \u2013 and now to the turn of the century, is the following. We have that experience under our belt. We shall not be so stupid again. The I Ching says, \u201cNever confront evil directly and never name it directly because it finds weapons to defend itself.\u201d\n\nWe are not an army; this is what Frederick didn\u2019t understand. He was a king, but he was not an army when it came to the White Mountain. We are not an army, so our strategy must be stealth. It\u2019s an alchemical strategy. What do I mean by stealth? I mean the house of constipated reason must be infiltrated by art, by dreamers, and by vision. What is new? There are massive technologies available to us, not available in the 1960s. They were not designed for us, they were not intended for us, and it was never ever thought that such power should flow into the hands of freaks such as ourselves. Nevertheless, through the perverse nature of the unfolding of the world, we have such tools. I\u2019m referring, as you probably anticipate to the World Wide Web and the Internet.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Winter+King+%28aka+Shamanism%2C+Alchemy%2C+and+the+20th+Century%29"}
{"id": "5a9af72b8884-14", "text": "No gay kind in Montana, no Chinese scholar in Botswana, and no person anywhere with a specialized interest or predilection now need feel alone. There is no aloneness. You can find your people. One of the things Tim Leary said in the 1960s that I always remembered but I never heard anybody talk about or ever really heard him quote. It was a great rallying cry. It was much better than Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out; and it was this: \u201cfind the others.\u201d \u201cFind the others, and then you will know what to do.\u201d Well now you can find the others. You don\u2019t have to stick a flower in your hair and go to San Francisco. You just go to the web.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Winter+King+%28aka+Shamanism%2C+Alchemy%2C+and+the+20th+Century%29"}
{"id": "5a9af72b8884-15", "text": "Find the others! We all need to create affinity groups which are subsets of the much larger community that we\u2019re part of. Then using this technology, which was designed to keep track of us, to pick our pockets and to sell us junk we don\u2019t want, use this technology to produce art. We must produce massive amounts of subversive art, and all art is subversive. I\u2019m not calling for an ideological agenda. All truth which springs from the individual is subversive, because, and this is a theme of mine that I\u2019m getting more and more into the longer I live \u2013 Culture is not your friend. This is an odd message for the late 1990s because we\u2019re all being told, you knew you were Jewish but your forgot you Sicilian grandmother \u2013 you have to honor all of your family. Romanian bring it forward, the dances of this that and the other. I hate all of this stuff. I\u2019m Irish. It\u2019s a weird thing to be. It\u2019s a haunted, twisted people, as a people. All peoples, meaning tribes, have horrible stories to tell about who they did under and who they screwed over. When you\u2019re asked to identify with your culture, you\u2019re asked to take this on. I reject it.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Winter+King+%28aka+Shamanism%2C+Alchemy%2C+and+the+20th+Century%29"}
{"id": "5a9af72b8884-16", "text": "My brother years ago invented this term. He called it extra-environmental. He said, this is what we want to be. We don\u2019t want to be Americans, or Germans, or English \u2013 we want to be extra-environmentalists. Always feel wherever you go that you are a stranger, the outsider, and the one looking in. This is the viewpoint that makes all places the same to you. There\u2019s a wonderful English poet and writer, Rudyard Kipling, and he wrote a children\u2019s short story called The Cat Who Walked By Himself. It\u2019s a story of how the dog came to the cave of man and would lay at the man\u2019s feet, but the cat would never come. When the woman asked the cat why it would never come, it said, \u201cI am the cat who walks by himself and all places are alike to me.\u201d\n\nI think transcending our cultures is going to be extraordinarily necessary for our survival. I don\u2019t think that we can carry our cultures through the keyhole of the stretch of the next millennium. How do you shed your culture? How do you transcend your culture? By digging into your soul with the tools that have been given to you to make art. This is how cultures are transformed. By art, which flows up and actually submerges the previous cultural forms. The Baroque gave way to later periods simply out of exhaustion, but notice, a style can exhaust itself and still continue. Mannerism did this out of the renaissance, for example. When these exhaustive styles are allowed to continue, they become toxic, they become moribund. It\u2019s like keeping a corpse around the house. There is an obligation to overthrow that. We are to produce the new, to produce the novel, and by the novel, I don\u2019t mean the literary form, I mean all things new.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Winter+King+%28aka+Shamanism%2C+Alchemy%2C+and+the+20th+Century%29"}
{"id": "5a9af72b8884-17", "text": "It is not the function of the artist to be the critic. The winnowing out, the deciding what is good from what is bad, comes later. That is a community process. The community decides what is good and bad art. But the individual should pour this forth. This is what you are: you are some kind of a mystery suspended between two eternities. In that moment, when a mind looks out at a world and asks the question, what is it? In that moment, art can be created. It is the only form of immortality that I have any certainty of and it\u2019s available to everyone.\n\nAt the present moment \u2013 I make no distinction between art and \u2018techne.\u2019 To my mind, these things are the same thing. A great turning point is in the offing. The world is changing; it\u2019s changed before but not for a long time in our lives. Not since before our lives, but now its changing, and there are many, many possibilities. The English biologist, Dawkins, invented the word meme. Do you all know what a meme is? It\u2019s the smallest unit of an idea. It\u2019s like what a gene is to biology, a meme is to ideology. Our task is to create memes. Madonna is a meme, Catholicism is a meme, Marxism is a meme, and yellow sweaters are a meme. Create memes! Rainbow colored dreadlocks are a meme.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Winter+King+%28aka+Shamanism%2C+Alchemy%2C+and+the+20th+Century%29"}
{"id": "5a9af72b8884-18", "text": "Launch your meme boldly and see if it will replicate, just like genes replicate. See if your meme can infect and move into the organism of society, and believing as I do that society operates on a kind of biological economy, I believe these memes are the key to societal evolution. However, unless the memes are released to play the game, there can be no progress. So I think the obligation on people such as ourselves, and I assume probably without exception, everybody in this room falls into the upper 5% of the Earths population in terms of wealth, education and freedom. Even if your some poor pierced metal-head from the dark side of Manheim, you have a better situation than most people on this planet. You have a better chance at actually reaching out toward the machinery that shapes reality and having an impact.\n\nSo then the question becomes for some: \u201cbut I have nothing to say, or I have nothing to paint, or I have nothing to communicate.\u201d Clearly your not taking enough drugs then \u2013 those excuses simply will not be tolerated. If someone finds that decadent, flippant or destructive - then they don\u2019t understand what these psychedelic substances are. They open the doorway to creativity. They cleanse the doors of perception, then as Blake said, \u201creality is perceived as it truly is, as infinite.\u201d", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Winter+King+%28aka+Shamanism%2C+Alchemy%2C+and+the+20th+Century%29"}
{"id": "5a9af72b8884-19", "text": "Part of what is wrong with our society, and hence, with ourselves, is that we consume images. We don\u2019t produce them. We need to produce and not consume media. Media is a huge issue. You can\u2019t escape it, so what are you going to do about it? The only solution is to drive it, to take charge, or otherwise you will be poisoned by it. As more and more people are waking up to this \u2013 essentially we are seeing I think, a huge artistic revolution. A revolution in values that reaches into science, into politics, and into every aspect of life, but that is coming from the imagination thoroughly stimulated and activated by the discovery of all these natural and synthetic substances that perturb the mind. I\u2019m also not denying that a certain amount of social chaos goes along with this. On the other hand, I can point to pretty psychedelically pure centuries, like the 13th in Europe, and there was still plenty of social chaos going on. I don\u2019t think that you can lay social chaos at the feet of psychedelics. I think that social chaos is an inimical part of the system. What psychedelics do is give a direction to that chaos. They give a dimension of vertical ascent, because inevitably, out of the psychedelic situation emerges, not despair, not self-indulgence, but wild-eyed idealism. That\u2019s the inevitable product of any psychedelically driven social process. How well that idealistic idea then brokers its way to the throne, if it does, is another issue.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Winter+King+%28aka+Shamanism%2C+Alchemy%2C+and+the+20th+Century%29"}
{"id": "5a9af72b8884-20", "text": "I don\u2019t know if I\u2019ve hit this technological thing hard enough. I hope that you all avail yourselves of the power of the Internet. In years past, in speaking to audiences in America, it was maddening to me to find that the environmentalists, the feminists, the gays, the psychedelic people, the space people, and the colonization people \u2013 none of these people had anything to say to each other. They didn\u2019t seem to realize that their marginality united them far more than any difference they might perceive in their positions. They didn\u2019t seem to realize that their political disempowerment was a product of their inability to make common cause with people similarly motivated, or similarly motivated toward social change. It\u2019s very important to build an inclusive community and a community that has a sense of direction and I think the Internet empowers this far more than any other tool that has been handed to us, except psychedelics. If you take psychedelics, the Internet, music and put all of that together \u2013 you have the basis for a new community that is wider and deeper than you know. The people who are building the new machines, who are designing the new circuitry, who are writing the new code \u2013 they are all freaks. They work for capitalist dogs of course, because we all do but the creative thrust of these technologies is being driven by people just like you and me. I think this is all tremendously positive.\n\nFinally, I\u2019ll close on this. The alchemical return.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Winter+King+%28aka+Shamanism%2C+Alchemy%2C+and+the+20th+Century%29"}
{"id": "5a9af72b8884-21", "text": "Finally, I\u2019ll close on this. The alchemical return.\n\nAll culture is some kind of myth. All cultural stories then have a kind of psychic dynamic to them, which is not suspected by the civilization as it lives these myths. It has to been seen from outside. There is a consistent myth in Western civilization. In the early Jews, you get it as the idea that God will enter history. With Christianity, you get it with the idea that Man and God can be consubstantial. It appears again in Islam with the insistence that God will enter history. Modern science, strangely enough, dumps all of this theology but maintains the idea that Man can become as a God. In other words, the myth that is consistent throughout the entire Western experience is the myth of some kind of defining progressive experience.\n\nWell now we have the power to realize this myth in some kind of, for want of a better word, an alchemical utopia. I think its very interesting that at this very high tech moment in our adventure, the plants return; the humblest of all biology. The plants return and almost stand before us as a beacon and a promise. Have you noticed that plants do all their business with dirt and air? This is something we only wish we could do. Build an industrial society based on nothing more than the ambient dirt and the air flowing past; building sugars and carbohydrates out of gaseous oxygen. This is quite a trick. The plants stand, both in the psychedelic sense but then in the larger sense of the vegetable kingdom, for absolute Tao. They stand for the correct way for life to relate to its environment. They are effortlessly recycling, vegetatively propagating when necessary, sexually propagating when necessary, immune to pain, patient to the tune of centuries. They are always building up structure and always maintaining a leavening effect upon the land.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Winter+King+%28aka+Shamanism%2C+Alchemy%2C+and+the+20th+Century%29"}
{"id": "5a9af72b8884-22", "text": "All of these qualities of care giving and, notice for example, that all the processes of biology occur below the boiling point of water. If only we could build societies that did that. We work in the range of hundreds of degrees, thousands of degrees; fusing metals and creating toxicity. So I think the psychedelic plant revolution is leading towards the nano-technological revolution. This is, in other words, the imitating of nature at the atomic level in the building of machines and the management of processes. What all of this is leading toward is a rarefaction, good alchemical word, a rarefaction of the human imprint on this planet. This means a spiritualization of humanity and a new order of mind; part machine and part human.\n\nNotice that the Internet and the computers that it serves are actually made of the materials of the earth. They\u2019re largely metals: silicon, glass, copper, gold, and silver \u2013 these are the products of demonic artifice. These are the things that the alchemist dreamed of. They transform space and time, they allow us to speak at a distance, and they allow us to wander through libraries thousands of miles distant. They make it so that no fact is too obscure and no person so hidden that you can\u2019t reach them. It is, in a way, the perfection of the magical ideal that was developed and unfortunately, prematurely launched by Frederick the Elector and his wife here nearby at Heidelburg.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Winter+King+%28aka+Shamanism%2C+Alchemy%2C+and+the+20th+Century%29"}
{"id": "5a9af72b8884-23", "text": "So I\u2019m involved, as I\u2019ve said, in a process of bringing this story to many people who haven\u2019t heard it. It\u2019s a great story, it\u2019s a great myth that the underground community should make it\u2019s own. I used it evening just as the scaffold for this talk but I tried to hit the things that are important to me; which are: psychedelics, recovery of archaic lifestyles, use of media to subvert existing paradigms, empowerment of the individual through dissolving the ego through psychedelics, and whatever else! Thank you for your patience and indulgence!\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Winter+King+%28aka+Shamanism%2C+Alchemy%2C+and+the+20th+Century%29"}
{"id": "cf3872cbb6fd-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nJohn Balance Interviews Terence McKenna\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n1996\n\nUnknown\n\n39\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo youtube link available, try the following:\n\nNo transcript available for this talk!\n\nHelp Transcribe\n\nTRANSCRIBER: copy and paste the question and answers templates (below) for each question and answer. remove this red text before publishing.\n\nFirstname Lastname: question?\n\nFL: question?\n\nFL: question?\n\nFL: question?\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/John+Balance+Interviews+Terence+McKenna"}
{"id": "848ce1a2a157-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nI Ching, Habit & Novelty\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\nOctober 1997\n\nUnknown\n\n9440\n\nEnd of Results\n\nRadio Host: Ok. 471-6291 is the pledge number...oh, you wanna hear him say that...okay, okay. Alright. Turn it up.....\"There's no dark side of the moon. As a matter of fact it's all dark\" is what he said. Okay, that was Pink Floyd. Now, here we are at 471-6291 with time running out. We have an hour left to get you to call in and make your contribution to public radio and Eclecticos. My show is ending in an hour, folks. If you are a regular listener and have not become a member, boy just don't let me find out. 471-6291. When I see you at the grocery store and I see your eyes avert quickly. Once you do see me, I'll know, I'll know you're one who didn't give up. 471-6291 is the pledge number get that call in right now. I want to hear from you.\n\nAdvertisement: Local support for this broadcast of Eclecticos is provided in part by Waterloo Records & Video, where music still matters, at the corner of 6th St. and Lamar Blvd.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/I+Ching%2C+Habit+%26+Novelty"}
{"id": "848ce1a2a157-1", "text": "Radio Host: Again, our last minute pledge number is 471-6291. We can, uh, put your name on our list very easily. Just make that call: 471-6291. Thanks to these people who did call in: Peter Bain, in loving respect for his sister Kate Brooks in Dripping Springs, Bran Nelson responding to the challenge for artists who make a living from their work, Cindy and Jim Philips, challenging everyone who enjoys John's laugh [laughs], Mary Vitzler, Bill Williams, a new member, Jack and Shasan Odom, Foxes of Harrow, okay, they, I guess they read Foxes of Harrow, Jack and Shasan Odom. Have either of you ever read the Foxes of Harrow? No? It's great, you? It's great, good. Anyway Carol & Philip Stephens, Donna Fowler, C. L. Senec saw the Rocky Horror Show 52 times; you're sick. And, uh, he was a projectionist; okay, that was his excuse. I've seen it probably about 25, but, Treece Carter, a new member, Laura Kathy challenges people who can touch their nose with their tongues; I cannot do that. But, if you can, call 471-6291 and meet Laura's challenge, Laura Kathy, if you can touch your tongue, er, touch your nose with your tongue. 471-6291. Sam Ferris, his mom Virginia pledged for him, and Bobby and Lewis Lowe, new members. Just about out of time today. 471-6291 is our pledge number. Thanks you for calling.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/I+Ching%2C+Habit+%26+Novelty"}
{"id": "848ce1a2a157-2", "text": "And, as I welcome Terence McKenna, let me first say that I have been asked to mention that there is a film called Strange Attractor, which features Terence McKenna, and it will be shown at the Adobe Theatre on October the 18th at midnight and the 19th at 2 O' Clock [indecipherable]. Alright, I'm gonna take The Umbrellas of Cherbourg away, as much as I love that music that's been on in the background, and we will say, just barely 'good morning' at 11:56, to Terence McKenna. Terence, hello.\n\nTerence McKenna: Pleasure to be with you.\n\nRH: And, you are here for the Whole Life Expo?\n\nAdvertisement: Local support for this broadcast of Eclecticos is provided in part by Waterloo Records & Video, where music still matters, at the corner of 6th St. and Lamar Blvd.\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/I+Ching%2C+Habit+%26+Novelty"}
{"id": "d3b3aca296a2-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nLight of the Third Millenium\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n1997\n\nLight of the Third MIllenium\n\n6841\n\nEnd of Results\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Light+of+the+Third+Millenium"}
{"id": "f85d0daf5907-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nNew Views of the Time Wave\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nAudio\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n11 August 1997\n\nUnknown\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo youtube link available, try the following:\n\nAudio Link\nTranscription\nOther links\n\nNo transcript available for this talk!\n\nHelp Transcribe\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/New+Views+of+the+Time+Wave"}
{"id": "a23a21de9dae-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nRelationships, career, drugs & our times\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nAudio\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n8 August 1997\n\nUnknown\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo youtube link available, try the following:\n\nAudio Link\nTranscription\nOther links\n\nNo transcript available for this talk!\n\nHelp Transcribe\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Relationships%2C+career%2C+drugs+%26+our+times"}
{"id": "f18c14c96a88-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nTerence McKenna on Art Bell\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n22 May 1997\n\nUnknown\n\n39\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo youtube link available, try the following:\n\nNo transcript available for this talk!\n\nHelp Transcribe\n\nTRANSCRIBER: copy and paste the question and answers templates (below) for each question and answer. remove this red text before publishing.\n\nFirstname Lastname: question?\n\nFL: question?\n\nFL: question?\n\nFL: question?\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Terence+McKenna+on+Art+Bell"}
{"id": "c798c37e8b93-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSurfing the Fractal Wave at the End of History\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nAudio\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n23 April 1997\n\nThe Lighthouse, New York New York\n\n9038\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo youtube link available, try the following:\n\nAudio Link\nTranscription\nOther links\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Surfing+the+Fractal+Wave+at+the+End+of+History"}
{"id": "a499f2d16126-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nBrisbane Talk\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nAudio\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n26 February 1997\n\nUnknown\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo youtube link available, try the following:\n\nTranscription\nOther links\n\nNo transcript available for this talk!\n\nHelp Transcribe\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Brisbane+Talk"}
{"id": "ab14840a04fb-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nLive at The Zoo with DJ Zippy\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nAudio\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n26 February 1997\n\nThe Zoo, Brisbane, Australia\n\n4663\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo youtube link available, try the following:\n\nSoundcloud\n\n[music]\n\n[audience cheering and clapping]\n\n[music]\n\nTerence McKenna: Hello, hello, hello. Hello, hello, hello, hello?\n\n[audience cheering]\n\nTM: Wonderful. Well it's a it's a pleasure to be stoned with you in Brisbane this evening.\n\n[audience cheering]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+The+Zoo+with+DJ+Zippy"}
{"id": "ab14840a04fb-1", "text": "TM: [Terence laughs] It looks to me like the tribes have turned out in all their splendid variety. So I'm here this evening to talk to you in three brief rants with Zippy's wonderful art before, in-between and after. We have commercial opportunities for you back at the pinball machine. Uh, we've, uh, hopefully provided all that we can. I'm I'm sure someone in this room has what you need. And, uh, I'll be gone on the next flight tomorrow. So the important thing I think is to look around you. This is the psychedelic community in which you find yourself. This is your affinity group. This is your cadre and not only is there someone here tonight who has what you need, there's probably someone here tonight who needs something that you have. It's no news that a worldwide movement of trance, dance, consciousness, psychedelics and archaic revivalism is taking place. And my place in all this, I suppose, is to humbly offer one version only", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+The+Zoo+with+DJ+Zippy"}
{"id": "ab14840a04fb-2", "text": "suppose, is to humbly offer one version only of why this is happening and why it's happening now and what it might mean for the future. This is the old style of doing things. This is how religion was practiced for the first three million years before it fell into the hands of politicians and real estate speculators. Religion is not about dogma. It's even less about laundry lists of moral do's and don'ts. Religion is about feeling and community. Feeling and community. And in the course of western history we have wandered a long long way from these things. So far in our own past is authentic shamanism, authentic community, authentic human relating, that it comes as an unconfirmed rumor. But in the last hundred years the curiosity of anthropologists, botanists, ethnographers, neurophysiologists, linguists has let the cat out of the bag. And the cat that is out of the bag is that reality is simply a state of mind. Reality is a place where", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+The+Zoo+with+DJ+Zippy"}
{"id": "ab14840a04fb-3", "text": "a state of mind. Reality is a place where cultures pitch their can and then defend it against all others. In the same way that we've had to learn that our sexuality doesn't come in two flavors, we have to also face that there's more to consciousness than awake and asleep. And in fact in every ecosystem, in every culture, in every part of the world from the Arctic to the Equator, there are chemically complex and shamanic plants that can be brought together to open doorways into domains of experience that are not only unsanctioned by the straight establishment, but unimagined by the straight establishment. I mean this is what lies outside of history. This is what the dreamtime is. This is what the magical world of suspended belief of South American shamanism is all about and the point that we have come to with all of this is not to talk about it or to s- long[sp?] for it, but to take the materials of our own environment and our own courage and our", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+The+Zoo+with+DJ+Zippy"}
{"id": "ab14840a04fb-4", "text": "of our own environment and our own courage and our own dissatisfaction with the world as we find it and remake it. Remake it through technology, through trance culture, through underground culture, through media, computer graphics, the Internet. Uh, these are all tools of transformation completely beyond the understanding or the control of the establishment. Because they have dressed the part of the mind that the establishment is completely phobic of. The wild feral untamed pre-bourgeois, pre-constipation, pre-religion, pre-money, pre-consumerist human being. The real human being that each of us senses within ourselves and that we endlessly compromise for in our dealings with, uh, straight society. The truth of the matter is there are no answers now, except technological and shamanic and psychedelic answers. Politics has failed. Business as usual failed. Science failed. Religion failed. This is why youth culture is not interested in graduating to suits and houses in the suburbs. The bankruptcy of that whole lifestyle is now evident. Why", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+The+Zoo+with+DJ+Zippy"}
{"id": "ab14840a04fb-5", "text": "of that whole lifestyle is now evident. Why now? I believe it's because psychedelics dissolve cultural assumptions. They are social and political dynamite. They are, uh, the equivalent of standing naked in a world of, uh, illusion, delusion, pretension, assumption and misunderstanding. All societies are frightened, all advanced, literate, industrial societies are frightened of the psychedelic experience. Because it represents a, uh, a cult of direct feeling. You don't have to believe anything to be part of this. You have to have certain experiences. Boundary dissolving experiences that, uh, teach you that the surface of things is only the beginning, not the end. That the surface is where we begin. But then we sink in, deeper and deeper, like a solvent, penetrating, dividing, washing clean, clarifying reality. The further in you go, the bigger it gets. The human mind is the source of all the riches after which we are told we should seek.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+The+Zoo+with+DJ+Zippy"}
{"id": "ab14840a04fb-6", "text": "riches after which we are told we should seek. The houses, the boats, the furs, the cars, the jewels, the degrees, the social esteem. All of this is false currency compared to the authenticity of your own experience and the art that you experience coming out of your own psyche and that you can then give back to the community, to the community. Zippy? Take it away, dude[sp?].", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+The+Zoo+with+DJ+Zippy"}
{"id": "ab14840a04fb-7", "text": "[audience claps]\n\n[music]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+The+Zoo+with+DJ+Zippy"}
{"id": "ab14840a04fb-8", "text": "TM: Part two. Part two is what I've learned or think I've learned from psychedelics. And I offer myself as an example, because it's as important to tell your trip as to have it. Because until you tell it it's not food for the community. So, uh, my far too many years of taking psychedelics have taught me some things. And some of these things are this. First of all, very practical, nature loves courage. Nature loves courage. And the way you can tell that nature loves courage is she removes obstacles. So chance taking in the interests of knowledge is rewarded. All kinds of people may think they've had the psychedelic experience, but if it hasn't set your knees knocking and your heart racing you probably just shaved the fuzzy undertummy of the beast and never really wrestled with it. So a very practical lesson, nature loves courage. But a shaman, my definition of a shaman, is someone who understands how the world really", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+The+Zoo+with+DJ+Zippy"}
{"id": "ab14840a04fb-9", "text": "shaman, is someone who understands how the world really works. How does the world really work? What is it and what are we in it? The where is it from? Where is it going? Science tells you that nature is red in tooth and claw, all competition strife and random mutation, but in fact there is a hidden appetite in nature that science has overlooked, that we have not been told of. It is that nature prefers complexity. Given the choice between the simple and the complex, nature always prefers the complex. And as you move from the beginnings of time to the present, what is consistent is the increase in complexity. Millions and millions of years may go by during a period when there is a backward flowing tendency, resisting complexity. But if you look at enough time the tendency to complexification will always reassert itself. So out of a universe of gas and dust comes a universe of stars and planets. Out of a universe of inorganic life, inorganic organization comes", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+The+Zoo+with+DJ+Zippy"}
{"id": "ab14840a04fb-10", "text": "a universe of inorganic life, inorganic organization comes the carbon based world of organic life. At the very center of the complexification process of organic life intelligence appears some hundred thousand or million years ago. The process of intelligence existing and iterating itself through time, elaborating languages and technologies, spreading itself over the planet results in more complexity, greater complexity. So that ultimately from a psychedelic point of view the human world is seen not as an accident or an unlikelihood or some enormous privilege for which we must genuflect to an invisible god. But rather the human world is seen as inevitably the goal of all the processes that preceded it. Which doesn't mean that we are the end of the story. But it means that we are the heroes of the story now, now. And upon our shoulders rests the conscious obligation, because we are conscious to take the complexity, the novelty, the kinky, odd, heterogeneous reality that we find and further complexify it, further complicate", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+The+Zoo+with+DJ+Zippy"}
{"id": "ab14840a04fb-11", "text": "we find and further complexify it, further complicate it through the process of making art, forming relationships, realizing our plans, building our dreams. We are the creature that carries a sensory organ unknown to occur anywhere else in nature. We are the creatures who possess the hyperdimensional organ of perception called the imagination, the imagining mind. Perhaps a a carnivore in the act of hunting its prey briefly forms a strategy to carry out the kill, but human beings strategize over months, over years, over millennia. We launch plans and religion, scientific revolutions, styles of music, architecture, fashion. We fashion our world. We don't accept the world as given. Between ourselves and the selective processes of nature we have interposed the shifting domain of virtual reality that we call human culture and human civilization. Uh, a collective compromise that sometimes works to our advantage and sometimes works to our disadvantage. As a tribe we function as a group mind, as a mass society we are", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+The+Zoo+with+DJ+Zippy"}
{"id": "ab14840a04fb-12", "text": "a group mind, as a mass society we are the victims of advertising agencies and politicians. The nature of our relationship to our collective existence is constantly changing and not yet defined. This is the important thing about the human adventure. We are not locked in genetic[sp?] repetition of behaviors over millennia. We are co-creators of our own destiny with the forces of nature. And we can deny that nature and retreat into cities, industrialism, reductionism, materialism, positivism, relativism, all the shitbrained isms of post-renaissance pre-apocalypse illusionism, or we can admit that we are unfinished business. That at the center of our experience of ourselves and the world is a sense of mystery. A sense of being uncompleted. This is the this is the perception which sophisticated cultures rob their members of. The sense that their is a hidden way out, a trapdoor, a deus ex machina, a magic word, a ritual, a conjuration, a drug, a form of music, a sexual", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+The+Zoo+with+DJ+Zippy"}
{"id": "ab14840a04fb-13", "text": "a drug, a form of music, a sexual act, a posture in relationship to art, something that cracks apart the rigid rule defined reality of the group and shows you that beyond culture, which is a fairytale told for fools, is the uncharted, unmapped, unintegrated, unspeakable. Wittgenstein actually called it the unspeakable. He said the word of common understanding is the present at hand. You can touch it, but beyond the present at hand lies the unspeakable. The challenge for the psychedelic community as the great hope of the human community is to move that boundary of what is unspeakable far away from us. To claim evermore domains as human domains. Potential areas for the production of art, the erection of, uh, relationships, the establishment of formal systems of understanding, mathematical, scientific, uh, mythological, psychological, whatever. Uh, the, uh, and this enterprise, this extension of understanding should not be though of as a quest for ultimate knowledge, rather it should be thought of as", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+The+Zoo+with+DJ+Zippy"}
{"id": "ab14840a04fb-14", "text": "for ultimate knowledge, rather it should be thought of as an exercise in self-exploration because it is inevitably true. The larger you build the bonfire, the greater the darkness that is revealed. Or to put it another way, the greater your sphere of understanding, the larger the area of your ignorance. It is inevitably so that knowledge reveals a greater and greater domain of unknowability. And it's into this domain of unknowability, like a search light that the psychedelic plants and substances, uh, offer illumination, direction, and partnership, partnership. Partnership with the humbler denizens of this planet. Creatures of reef, rainforest and tundra that are living in worlds of their own, worlds of immediate experience so alien to our own that there's no need to point radio telescopes at Zenebel Ganubi[sp?]. The aliens are with us in the rainforest, in the sea, in the pasture, waiting to be recognized as the potential co-partners that they might become.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+The+Zoo+with+DJ+Zippy"}
{"id": "ab14840a04fb-15", "text": "[audience cheers and claps]\n\n[music]\n\nWoman in audience: Hey, Terence! Thanks for coming! [inaudible]\n\nTM: I'm pretty happy.\n\nWoman in audience: [inaudible]\n\nTM: It's bloody hot.\n\nWoman in audience: [inaudible]\n\n[Terence laughs]\n\nWoman in audience: [inaudible]\n\nTM: They're pretty.\n\n[woman in audience singing]\n\n[Terence laughs]\n\nMan in audience: Hey, Terence!\n\n[music]\n\nTM: Alright. Okay. Now we're turning final, as old bushpilots like to say. And before I get into my final hortatory spiel, I want to talk to you for a minute about some information that I simply think you should have, which is, some of you may know this, some of you may not, but very exciting for our community. A new plant teacher with a new psychedelic substance in it, with a completely unexplored pharmacology and phenomenology has appeared and is spreading worldwide through the culture. And this is the first plant on this planet known to produce a substance active in the same amounts as LSD. In other words, active at under 1 milligram. And this is the Mexican mint Salvia Divinorum, which if it's in Australia at all at this point is only a very few people are aware of it. Nevertheless, this plant grows easily in all Australian climates, can be grown as a houseplant, uh, and two leaves of this plant, dried and crumpled and put in a bong will cut your legs out from under you and.\n\n[audience cheers]\n\n[Terence laughs]\n\nTM: Put you twitching on the ground with a smile on your face.\n\n[audience inaudible]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+The+Zoo+with+DJ+Zippy"}
{"id": "ab14840a04fb-16", "text": "[audience inaudible]\n\nTM: At the present moment this plant is legal worldwide. You can transport it, grow it, advocate it, extract it, advertise it, do therapy with it, uh, and anything else you can think to do with it. This is an incredible gift to our community out of the complex circumstances of the times. I don't think the world, uh, police establishment is ready to take on the control worldwide of yet another contraband substance. And yet this plant is as powerful as any plant on this planet. Uh, the leaves smoked produce an experience at least, at least as bizarre as DMT smoked at the 50 milligram level. And there is no reason why this stuff can't be grown by the acre. So.\n\n[audience claps]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+The+Zoo+with+DJ+Zippy"}
{"id": "ab14840a04fb-17", "text": "TM: Uh, this is news. And tonight we have passed out information on various places where this plant can be obtained. Now this is all very exciting, but behind this fact lies the approaching truth that there are probably many such compounds and many such plants and that in fact the human inventory of psychedelic possibilities has only begun to be taken. Uh, some of you may know in Africa there is an extremely powerful hallucinogen called Tabernanthe iboga, the Bwiti cults. But very few people know that there was no record of any human group using that plant until[sp?] 1870. Peyote, which is imagined to be thousands of years old in its use in Northern Mexico, is in fact fairly recent. In the old graves of the Tarahumara and Sonoran people of Mexico we don't find Peyote buttons or seeds or detritus. We find the remains of Sophora secundifolia beans, a very toxic plant. The the Peyote only began to be used in the", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+The+Zoo+with+DJ+Zippy"}
{"id": "ab14840a04fb-18", "text": "the Peyote only began to be used in the 1880s and the ghost dance religion has a way of trying to hold Indian culture together against the whitey[sp?] advances. Uh, similarly this Salvia Divinorum thing was known from a tiny group of Mexican Indians and only from there. And yet, as I say, this plant can be a house plant and sold in supermarkets and mall florists throughout the world. As we study psilocybin we have gone from the fifties, where it was assumed that it was restricted to Central Mexico, to the understanding that this is worldwide. Uh, just recently published, the psilocybin mushrooms of the Earth, containing over a hundred and s- sixty species of psilocybin. We now know that DMT, the most powerful of the commonly known hallucinogens, is literally in everything. It's in dozens of genuses, genera of plants. It occurs in fish, including fish off Norfolk Island. It occurs in the brain of every single one", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+The+Zoo+with+DJ+Zippy"}
{"id": "ab14840a04fb-19", "text": "It occurs in the brain of every single one of us here tonight. In fact, this is an unresolved issue. Can you make a substance illegal that is a human metabolite?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+The+Zoo+with+DJ+Zippy"}
{"id": "ab14840a04fb-20", "text": "[audience laughs]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+The+Zoo+with+DJ+Zippy"}
{"id": "ab14840a04fb-21", "text": "TM: It's getting in there a little close, I think. Uh, maybe we might want to rethink that. Uh, it means you're holding every moment of every day and every night since you emerged buck naked from your mother's womb and you will go to the grave holding. Well what is DMT doing in human metabolism? We know not. But as the scales fall from our eyes and we move beyond the confines of our cultural programming, we are having to realize that nature seems to run on these psychedelic compounds. Nature is full of wormholes and hyperdimensional doorways into other realms of mystery and power. Our own origins are completely mysterious to us. But I believe we are a kind of partial symbiot with the psilocybin mushroom. That everything about us that we consider human, humor, theater, mathematics, loyalty, uh, you name it. All of these human qualities evolved at a point in human history where we were taking psilocybin mushrooms and practicing an", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+The+Zoo+with+DJ+Zippy"}
{"id": "ab14840a04fb-22", "text": "were taking psilocybin mushrooms and practicing an orgiastic sexual style and a nomadic social style. In other words, moving lightly over the land, possessing nothing, finding our emotional release and our meaning in, uh, complex social and sexual relationships with each other, carrying for the cattle and using the, uh, psychedelic plants in our environment as a direct pipeline into the Gaian Mind. Because the real truth, I think, that is to be revealed out of the psychedelics is not simply deeper insight into your own psychology or recovery of childhood memories or insight into other peoples dilemmas or the coordination of abstract problems. Psychedelics do all of these things with enormous facility and ease. But what they are for, what they really do is dissolve the boundary between the individual and the species, between the species and the surrounding ecosystem, between the Earth itself and the surrounding, uh, extraterrestrial environment of the solar system. And this is what reality is. It's a", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+The+Zoo+with+DJ+Zippy"}
{"id": "ab14840a04fb-23", "text": "And this is what reality is. It's a seamless felt aperception of pattern. Language is a compromise, a downloading, a a slicing up, but dissecting and dividing for purposes of understanding. But the smart money knows that you have to take the perceptions of language and recombine them into a, uh, in a union with feeling in order to produce a real world. People sometimes ask me wha- what is the connection between dance culture and psychedelics. The connection is both of these things operate without ideology and with a tremendous emphasis on the felt presence of the immediate moment. If we as a community believe in anything, we believe in feeling good in the moment, the felt presence of immediate experience. This is what has been stolen from you by capitalism, by religion, by linear thinking, by strategizing. We're always about to be happy or we're always about to be free and while we're about to be free and about to be happy, life passes us by. This is because", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+The+Zoo+with+DJ+Zippy"}
{"id": "ab14840a04fb-24", "text": "be happy, life passes us by. This is because western ideologies are always ideologies of delayed gratification. It comes after death, after retirement, after coitus. It's always after something that it comes. Well I've got news for you. This kind of thing is chasing your own tail. The felt presence of immediate experience is the only world you will ever know. Everything beyond that is conjecture and supposition and what the psychedelics do is they bring one to focus on the union of the mind and the body. They do not give philosophical closure. They in fact present you with the unresolved dilemma of being. And to the linear western suited constipated mind this is a situation of incredible discomfort. The the suits want closure. They want linearity. They want the illusion of completion[sp?]. Job well done. But this is a fool's game. The world is more complicated than that. You cannot simplify the world and have it be true to itself. So if you want a relationship with fidelity", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+The+Zoo+with+DJ+Zippy"}
{"id": "ab14840a04fb-25", "text": "itself. So if you want a relationship with fidelity to being, you must complexify yourself. You must recognize the ambiguity of your sexuality, the ambiguity of your grip on your understanding of your place in the world, your ignorance of the meaning of life, the destiny of biology. This admission of ignorance is not an admission of stupidity, it's an admission of intelligence. Only fools run through this universe proclaiming that they understand it. What the psychedelics do is give you a relative, uh, f- set of phenomena t- a a against which to measure your paltry models. Models of causal time or moral necessity or physical inevitability. And in every case the true nature of being is found to be too complex to be so linguistically or culturally caged. And so the f- f- conclusion I come away with from all of this is that culture, uh, is not our friend. Culture is a provisional form of infantilism, in the same way that", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+The+Zoo+with+DJ+Zippy"}
{"id": "ab14840a04fb-26", "text": "form of infantilism, in the same way that you suckle at your mother's breast and then at the tit of the university and the government. Eventually one has to admit, whether one is Hasid, Chinese, Indian, American, whatever, that one's culture is infantile, idiotic, constructed by, for and of morons. And that it is an insult to an intelligent person to live within the definitions of a culture, because a culture is like a set of schoolyard, uh, rules. It's designed for the lamest among us so that the system can function at all. And to my mind what is happening in the new dance culture, which is often accused I suppose of frivolousness and immaturity, but what is actually happening is a forced maturity. You people have reached the level of alienation with the false values of the culture, that my generation didn't reach until it was forty or forty five. So here we can shorten the loop. And and, uh, what then should be the response of", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+The+Zoo+with+DJ+Zippy"}
{"id": "ab14840a04fb-27", "text": "and, uh, what then should be the response of alienated, psychedelic, uh, uh, people and communities to, to the dilemma in which we find ourselves? I think it can only be, uh, to produce art. To put the art pedal to the floor. That essentially speaking at least for myself my involvement with psychedelics is part of a larger impulse in my personality, which is a cult of beauty. I grew up in a place where there were dinosaurs in the ground. And when I learned that they were a hundred million years old I felt the ground open beneath my own feet. I grew up in a place where lots of minerals were ore ores, metallic ores were brought out of the ground. The iridescence of ores, the iridescence of butterflies and beetles, the iridescence of opals and reef fish[sp?]. There was always this light on nature. Iridescence which indicated to me that things, physical objects had living universes inside", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+The+Zoo+with+DJ+Zippy"}
{"id": "ab14840a04fb-28", "text": "me that things, physical objects had living universes inside of them. And I now think as Aldous Huxley thought, that as human beings our fascination with jewels and bright objects, which we share with magpies and packrats, uh, is, uh, a a kind of a spiritual intuition, that glitter is the path to follow. You know Plato and it\u2019s said of western philosophy, all western philosophy is only a footnote on Plato. Plato had this idea of what he called the good, the true and the beautiful. And he said the good and the true and the beautiful are the same thing. And I found this very useful, because it's very hard to know, or very hard for me to know, what is good. And it's very hard for me, though I have philosophical training and reasonable intuition, it's very hard for me to know what is true. But beauty is easy to recognize. I know it when I see it. And show me two forms of beauty and I have", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+The+Zoo+with+DJ+Zippy"}
{"id": "ab14840a04fb-29", "text": "And show me two forms of beauty and I have no trouble telling you which I think is the more beautiful. So moral philosophy, too tricky. The search for truth, possible catastrophic error. The worship of beauty, no blame. A reliable arrow into the mystery. Stick with the beautiful. Follow the beautiful deeper into beauty and there you will find truth and goodness. And these are the things that we have turned away from, because the aesthetics of post-modernity are hideousness. Hideousness is the new god functionality. The new god, uh, economic efficiency. This is why our world looks like dogshit, because it is incredibly economically designed. Beauty played no part in that. We need to move back to the idea that nature at every level, molecular, membrane, cellular, species, interspecies, ecological, planetary, nature presents living models for how to deal with energy and experience that can be our salvation. But we must change. Everyone must change. And people some s- sometimes say to", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+The+Zoo+with+DJ+Zippy"}
{"id": "ab14840a04fb-30", "text": "must change. And people some s- sometimes say to me well do do you think psychedelics is all that's necessary? Psychedelics to my mind is simply the only game in town. Not because it's a sure thing, but because everything else will certainly fail. If hortatory preaching could carry the day, we would have turned the bend at the sermon on the mount. If power over nature could have turned the day, than after the atom bomb we should have lived in utopia. So these are misunderstandings. We must become not the dominators of nature and each other and the physical planet, but co-partners. If we can find a position of co-partnership this appetite for complexity that I've been talking about will become a wind which fills our sails and carries us beyond the monkey business of today's politics. And into an authentically civilized and human world. And the clock is ticking. We will be judged. Nine times in the last million years the glaciers have moved southward", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+The+Zoo+with+DJ+Zippy"}
{"id": "ab14840a04fb-31", "text": "the last million years the glaciers have moved southward from the poles miles deep in ice crushing everything in their paths. There were human beings who witnessed everyone of those glaciations. How much whining was there? I don't know. But somehow we're all here tonight. Those people didn't drop the ball. They kept the game in play in order to deliver it into our unsteady hands this evening. So, you know, wor- worship of the ancestors, a sense of being a reflex of the ancestors, which informs aboriginal civilization worldwide, is in fact an awareness that you act for others. That the genes that were your grandfather's and grandmother's and great grandmother's and great grandfather's are that you are simply a shuffle of the old deck. That how I pull my ear when I'm nervous is exactly how my great great grandfather pulled his ear when he was nervous. We are but the moving wavefront of our genetic heritage. And if we can dissolve boundaries", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+The+Zoo+with+DJ+Zippy"}
{"id": "ab14840a04fb-32", "text": "heritage. And if we can dissolve boundaries between the ego and the hidden portions of ourselves and the hidden portion of nature we will find that we are each of us but the tip of a universal iceberg that connects to all other separate and assumed to be separate universes. Gregory Bateson said nature is a seamless web. So it is. And the seamless web of nature is woven by the spider of psychedelic mind and understanding. So let us, knowing this, weave a new heaven and a new world for ourselves and the all[sp?] the children sure to come if we act in good faith with the past. Thank you very very much! Thank you!", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+The+Zoo+with+DJ+Zippy"}
{"id": "ab14840a04fb-33", "text": "[audience cheers and claps]\n\nTM: My pleasure!\n\n[audience cheers and claps]\n\n[music]\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+The+Zoo+with+DJ+Zippy"}
{"id": "0fca4c034a83-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nAppreciating Imagination\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n1997 (sessions 1 and 2)\n\nAppreciating Imagination\n\n55604\n\nEnd of Results\n\nhttp://zetareticulae.org\n  is really coming from Zeta Reticulae!\u201d But through, through virtual, through uh, non-local Bohmian space. Yeah.\n\nIf you\u2019re paying attention, you see that it\u2019s fractal, patterns that appear on one scale are appearing in another scale.\n\nhttp://www.levity.com/eschaton\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Appreciating+Imagination"}
{"id": "edf693ea9331-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nInterview on KBOO FM Radio\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n1997\n\nKBOO FM RADIO\n\n3643\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo youtube link available, try the following:\n\nPO: Hi, I\u2019m Paul O\u2019Brien, producer of the Oracle of Changes. We\u2019re happy to bring you the following interview with Terence McKenna. Hello, Terence, and welcome to our program.\n\nPO:\n\nWhy would you consider the I Ching to be relevant in today\u2019s world, if it\u2019s an ancient Chinese book?\n\nPO: Terence, do you see any evidence in scientific circles of a renaissance in our orientation towards time, that you just mentioned?\n\nPO: What do you know about the impact of the I Ching on the earliest inventors of binary mathematics?\n\nWould it be possible on a computer to map out a graphical representation of the fractal nature of the King Wen sequence?\n\nTM: Oh yes, this is the kind of thing I worked on for years and done and the conclusions that it leads to are fascinating. Uh, it leads to the idea that what is called Tao is in principle not immune to a mathematical analysis. That what these sages are talking about is an invisible force which moves through the world, building structure up and sustaining process at times, and at other times, impeding structure and tearing down and dissipating process, uh, according to mysterious laws.\n\nDo you think the use of the I Ching could be described as a high order of change management?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Interview+on+KBOO+FM+Radio"}
{"id": "edf693ea9331-1", "text": "TM: Definitely, yes. I mean, you can\u2026management is not a dirty word. It has a connotation now because it\u2019s so associated with rapacious capitalism, but all management means is paying attention to the details that must be paid attention to. I mean, a synonym for management is husbandry. Heidegger said, \u201cThe purpose of life is care for the project of being.\u201d Well, in a sense, that\u2019s management. The I Ching is a manual for management, for the guidance of individuals and organizations toward their goals achieved by appropriate means.\n\nWell, it\u2019s a complicated question, you see. If what we\u2019re saying is that time is fractal, then implicit in that statement is the idea that patterns repeat on many, many levels. Well, that is really what all systems of divination all over the world have always claimed, that in a pool of water, in a flaw in a crystal, or in a process of sortilege, somehow these objects, these processes, become microcosms of the larger situation in the macrocosm. I think you can\u2019t really judge that hypothesis until you judge the physics that it\u2019s based upon, but certainly as I say, this is the oldest book in the world. It has persisted among very hard-headed people \u2013 politicians, courteors, and emperors - for several millennia, so I think we need to take it seriously on that basis alone.\n\nI\u2019d like to go back to the fractal nature of time that you discovered, based on the sequencing of I Ching hexagrams in the King Wen sequence. You came up with a theory which you called Time Wave Zero. Can you tell us about that?\n\nTerence, do you consider yourself a scientist?\n\nTM: My method is rational. My techniques are shamanic. Uh, was it", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Interview+on+KBOO+FM+Radio"}
{"id": "edf693ea9331-2", "text": "TM: My method is rational. My techniques are shamanic. Uh, was it\n\nLautr\u00e9amont or Polinaire (sp?) or someone, who said the deliberate disordering of the senses\u2026oh, Rimbaud. Arthur Rimbaud, the symbolist poet. A deliberate disordering of the senses worked for Rimbaud.\n\nIs there any advice that you\u2019d like to give our audience, relative to what we\u2019ve been discussing?\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Interview+on+KBOO+FM+Radio"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nDreaming Awake at the End of Time\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n13 December 1998\n\nFort Mason, San Francisco, California\n\n13384\n\nEnd of Results\n\nTerence McKenna - \"Dreaming Awake at the End of Time\"\n\nhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KboPUQ0xCDs\n\n[Terence McKenna]: Can you hear in the back? Good. I assume so, yes? Good.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-1", "text": "Well, it's a pleasure to be in San Francisco. This is sort of a hometown of mine. One of my home towns. I've been on a tour, or a rave... spoken three times and raved twice in the past five or seven days. This is the end, so if I'm comfortable with this stuff at all I must be comfortable with it this evening. And it's nice to see a small full house. That's the most exciting kind of audience to talk to, I think. So thank you all for turning out on a rainy night. Before I get into the main body of tonight's entertainment, I want to call your attention to the propaganda for an event in Mexico and another event in Hawaii. In the case of the Mexico event, you get a major slice of the psychedelic community. You get Robert Montgomery and Jonathan Ott, Ann and Sasha Shulgin, Manolo Torres, Christian Resch[?], Terence McKenna, and others who unfortunately slip my mind, at the", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-2", "text": "and others who unfortunately slip my mind, at the ceremonial center of Palenque in Chiapas. We've been doing these events somewhere in Mayan Mexico for the past ten or twelve years. Many of you are graduates, which doesn't mean you can't come again, but I want to invite all of you there. If you're interested in ethnobotany, shamanism, ethnopharmacology, altered states of consciousness, the politics of all of this, this is as intense and information-packed an exposure as you can have and it's straight from the mouths of the scholars and scientists and writers who have spent a great deal of time in that area. So I just want to invite you to that. It's also a great party. It's the height of mushroom season. There's nothing we could do about that. So... you just are on your own. When I start out on these tours I usually have an agenda and prepared remarks, and then as I make my way through my venues and I hear the feedback and I", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-3", "text": "through my venues and I hear the feedback and I feel the ambiance of the people and the throb of the zeitgeist, it all sort of just simply dissolves into an ongoing commentary on our moment in space and time, and the various dimensions, adumbrations, and opportunities of our dilemma. But I want tonight to couch it for you in the context of, I guess, and extended metaphor. We could talk about these things many ways, but I find this particular extended metaphor illuminating. I start by recalling an observation from someone who's name rarely falls from my lips, and that would be Gurdjieff. Gurdjieff said at one point, or was known to comment that, \"People are asleep,\" he said, and he by implication suggested, people \"awaken.\" Now I'm not sure if he fully grasped the implication for his own product line, had that occurred, but in any case... [audience laughter] You're on it. You're with me, yes. It's very hard to", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-4", "text": "You're with me, yes. It's very hard to give these lectures in such a way so that every person hears something different. [audience laughter] Which is what is supposed to be going on, you know. Well, so thinking about this comment, that \"people are asleep,\" I see several implications. I asked myself, \"What is 'awake' in my own notion?\" And I thought to myself, \"'Awake' is... for me 'awake' is where the laws of physics are fully operable.\" You know, hurled objects shatter, electricity shocks, I cannot fly... the laws of physics are in operation. In that domain I consider myself to be fully \"awake.\" Now, in terms of occult and spiritual traditions, the admonition to \"awaken\" always seems to imply that higher consciousness is approached through an expansion of clarity and awareness. And that seems obvious, I don't argue with it... as a rationalist. But as somebody who has run the edges, I've noticed something somewhat", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-5", "text": "who has run the edges, I've noticed something somewhat counter-intuitive to that teaching, and it's this... it's that, to contact the cosmic giggle, to have the flow of casuistry begin to give off synchronistic ripples, whitecaps in the billows of the coincidental ether, if you will... to achieve that requires... a precondition is a kind of unconsciousness. A kind of drifting. A certain... taking your eye off the ball. A certain assumption that things are simpler than they are almost always precedes what Mircea Eliade called the \u201crupture of plane\u201d that indicates that there is an archetypal world, an archetypal power beyond, behind profane appearances. And in my own life, for those of you who are conversant with my output, when I went to the Amazon in 1971 and had the experiences that are described in True Hallucinations I had been for many months before that in Asia, smuggling, hanging out, and I had taken my eye off the ball. I", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-6", "text": "and I had taken my eye off the ball. I had become very gentle, very relativistic in my approach to other people\u2019s opinions and behaviors. I was \u201ceasy-going\u201d is what I\u2019m trying to say. Too easy-going. And in that situation of semi-unconsciousness and openness the cosmic giggle approaches. And I compare this-- this is closing of a theme --I compare this to sleep, or to states that lie between waking and sleeping. And so again, an odd take on this remark of Gurdjieff\u2019s. I remember someone many years ago said to me\u2026 they evoked the symbol of the yin and the the yang, the two tears folded against each other within a circle. And this person who was no rishi, roshi, geisha-eared[?] guru but simply observant, said, \u201cIt\u2019s not the black side. It\u2019s not the white side. It\u2019s the interface. It\u2019s the edge.\u201d And I found, by observing sleep-- and some of you may recall the motto in Athanasius Kircher\u2019s", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-7", "text": "you may recall the motto in Athanasius Kircher\u2019s Amphiatrium Sapientium that\u2019s chiseled over the alchemist\u2019s doorway\u2026 I can\u2019t do it in Latin but it says, \u201cWhile sleeping, watch.\u201d \u201cWhile sleeping, watch.\u201d --And I\u2019ve noticed that while going to sleep there is a barrier. A place in the process of going to sleep that is like a mercurial edge. It\u2019s a river. It\u2019s a zone of hypnagogia. You often pass through it post orgasm. It\u2019s a place of drifting, amoeboid, colored after-image lights, and then\u2026 true hallucination. Images. Strange, transcendental, or transpersonal images. Well, so then, so far in the context of pursuing this extended metaphor about sleep,", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-8", "text": "[10:00]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-9", "text": "I\u2019ve talked basically, essentially about the individual\u2019s relationship to the concept\u2026 to the fact. But there\u2019s also a social or a political, species-wide implication. It occurs to me that at any given moment, because of the way the planet is as a thing, some considerable percentage of human beings are asleep\u2026 always. And many are awake. And so, if the world\u2019s soul is made of the collective consciousness of human beings, then it is never entirely awake. It is never entirely asleep. It exists in some kind of indeterminate zone. And this, to me, is the clue to understanding something that is personally fascinating to me. And it revolves around why people believe such weird things. And why, either as a consequence of the approach of the millennium, or the breakdown of traditional values, or the density of electromagnetic radiation, or for some reason\u2026 a Balkanisation of epistemology is taking place. And what I mean by that is there is no longer a commonality", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-10", "text": "by that is there is no longer a commonality of understanding. I mean, for some people quantum physics provides the answers. Their next-door neighbor may look to the channelling of archangels with equal fervor. I mean if this is not a Balkanisation of epistemology I don\u2019t know what it is. It is accompanied by a related phenomenon which is technology or the historical momentum of things is creating such a bewildering social milieu that the monkey mind cannot find a simple story, a simple creation myth or redemption myth to lay over the crazy, contradictory, patchwork of profane techno-consumerist post-McLuhanist, electronic pre-apocalyptic existence. And so into that dimension of anxiety created by this inability to parse reality rushes a bewildering variety of squirrelly notions, epistemological cartoons if you will, that\u2026 and conspiracy theory, in my humble opinion-- I\u2019m somewhat immune to paranoia, so those of you who aren\u2019t, you know, gaze in wonder --conspiracy theory is", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-11", "text": "you know, gaze in wonder --conspiracy theory is a kind of epistemological cartoon about reality. I mean, isn't it so simple to believe that things are run by the greys, and that all we have to do is trade sufficient fetal tissue to them and we can solve our technological problems. Or isn't it comforting to believe that the Jews are behind everything, or the Communist Party, or the Catholic Church, or the Masons. Well, these are epistemological cartoons. It\u2019s, you know, kindergarten stuff in the art of amateur historiography. I believe that the truth of the matter is far more terrifying. That the real truth that dare not speak itself is that no one is in control, absolutely no one. You know, you don\u2019t understand Monica? You don\u2019t understand Netanyahu? It\u2019s because nobody is in control. This stuff is ruled by the equations of dynamics and chaos. Now, there may be entities seeking control-- the world bank, the communist party,", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-12", "text": "seeking control-- the world bank, the communist party, the rich, the somebody-or-others --but to seek control is to take enormous aggravation upon yourself. Because this process that is underway will take the control-freak by the short and curly and throw them against the wall. It's like trying to control a dream, you see. The global destiny of the species is somehow unfolding with the logic of a dream. Well now, a Jungian would say, \u201cNo surprise here. History is the collective dream of humanity. It is run by archetypal energies. It is downloaded by the zeitgeist into the various milieus and epochs of which it is composed.\u201d This seems reasonable to me. I don\u2019t want to give you the impression\u2026 it\u2019s too linear to understand that what I am saying is that \u201cawake is good; asleep is bad.\u201d What I would rather do is explain this whole gradient of possible positioning vis-\u00e0-vis your life and your destiny, these choices that you have, and then have", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-13", "text": "destiny, these choices that you have, and then have people understand that they choose, you choose to be asleep or partially asleep or fully awake or to be one part of the time in some situations and one part of the time in other situations. Now, if in fact we exist inside some kind of morphogenetic field that is created by the sum total of human minds on the planet, and if in fact in half or more of those minds at any given moment the ghouls of the dream hold sway then it is no surprise that when we make our way into society, or just when we live our lives, there\u2019s an eeriness to it, there\u2019s a fatedness to it, there\u2019s a plottedness to it. You know, we are inside some kind of engine of narrative I believe. You know, some science-fiction writers such as Greg Egan and others have suggested that this could even be a form of recorded medium. You can see the thumbprints of editors on our reality if", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-14", "text": "see the thumbprints of editors on our reality if you are truly paying attention. I mean, if you\u2019re a devot\u00e9 of the theory of stochastic, random unfolding of events, then you have to look very carefully at how un-random and how mythical and archetypal most people's lives are. You know, if you take psychedelics and hurl yourself to the edge and spend time with strange, aboriginal people in remote parts of the world, the cosmic giggle becomes your friend. But in fact, ordinary people\u2019s lives, everyone\u2019s lives are touched by deep magic, and I\u2019ve\u2026 you know, again, the primary datum is experience. And then the models are built backward from the primary data, without prejudice and in an attempt to transcend historical momentum. And when I do that what I see is that the carrier of the field of the cosmic giggle in most people\u2019s lives\u2026 is love. Love is some kind of output which messes with the entropic tendency toward probabilistic", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-15", "text": "messes with the entropic tendency toward probabilistic behavior, in nature. What do I mean by that? I mean, you can be the janitor at Microsoft and the Vice President and Chief of Operations, his daughter can bring him lunch one day and you can, from a distance, have your eye fall upon her and fall in love with her, and you know, from that point to having the five children", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-16", "text": "[20:00]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-17", "text": "she bears you go off to Harvard and the Sorbonne\u2026 it\u2019s just a matter of running the clock forward. These things have\u2026 I mean to you it may seem like a miracle, but to those of us who are students of human happenstance it\u2019s inevitable. I mean, you can launch your story. And I\u2019ve, you know, in the course of taking psychedelics and looking at my life and other people\u2019s lives and narrative, I think that the secret of\u2026 I don\u2019t want to say anything as pretentious as \u201ctranscendence\u201d or \u201cenlightenment,\u201d but the secret of taking hold of one\u2019s destiny is to understand that one is a character. A character is a different thing than this model you inherit out of the idea that you\u2019re a three-dimensional animal inside a democracy with a Christian heritage and you know, a Dewey-decimal cataloging system or whatever. Anyway, these are some of the notions that occur to me in the context of comparing dream on many scales. You have to really", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-18", "text": "comparing dream on many scales. You have to really struggle, I think, to believe that you actually live inside the model of reality that science and Newtonian physics and the mathematical analysis of nature have given us. Not to get too philosophical here, but for positivist philosophers everything that is important-- color, feeling, taste, tone, ambition, apprehension, appetition --these things are called \u201csecondary qualities.\u201d In other words, they\u2019re peripheral. They arise at a lower level of understanding. They are somehow determined by the presence of the animal body, and hence, dismissible by a theory of pure abstraction which says what is real is spin, charge, angular momentum. None of these things are very rich concepts for a living, human being. Who knows what any of these things \u201care.\u201d We don\u2019t have time in a situation like this to explore all the implications of this dream analogy that I\u2019m pursuing, but one that interests me is the plasticity of time in the dream, and I", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-19", "text": "the plasticity of time in the dream, and I think I would argue as the devil\u2019s advocate that it is the plasticity of historical time and the acceleration, the sense of an out-of-control spin-up or spin-down into new domains of possibility\u2026 it is the strongest evidence at hand that we are in some kind of dream. I\u2019ve struggled my whole life with\u2026 I\u2019ve always believed, or I\u2019ve always felt the power of the statement, \u201cThe world is made of language.\u201d But of course, you think about this proposition for thirty seconds and the question that arises is, \u201cIf the world is made of language then why isn\u2019t it the way I want it to be?\u201d Why does it have this prepotent momentum for it\u2019s own\u2026 it has it\u2019s own raison d'\u00eatres even if it is language. Well I think-- and it\u2019s appropriate to speak of this to an audience as digitally sophisticated as I assume you must be --I think the primary insight that has been secured here at the end", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-20", "text": "primary insight that has been secured here at the end of the twentieth century, the primary contribution of twentieth century thinking, if you will, is to have understood, finally, that information is primary. That this world, this cosmos, this body and soul are all made of information. Information is a deeper and more primary concept than space, time, matter, energy, spin, angular momentum. The world is made of language. The implication for the digerati is that reality can therefore be hacked. If reality is made of language then what we\u2019re saying is that it\u2019s code, and if it\u2019s code then it is far more deeply open to manipulation than we ever dared dream. We\u2019ve been messing around on the desktop opening files with religions and political systems and xenophobic theories of racial superiority, all this crap that haunts the human historical adventure, it means we have not addressed the deeper levels. And in thinking about this and the relationship to dream and human culture I have realized that", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-21", "text": "relationship to dream and human culture I have realized that cultures are like operating systems. We are like hardware. The human animal is a piece of biological wetware/hardware. And it has been, we know, pretty much as we confront it today for at least 140,000 years. At Klasies River Cave Mouth in South Africa they have excavated Homo Sapien Sapien skeletons 100,000 years old and that person could have sat in the front row here tonight and nobody would have batted an eyebrow. So the human hardware has been in place for awhile. What has changed rapidly in comparison to the rates of biological evolution are the operating systems. The people who excavated Ur-- which was at that time thought to be the world\u2019s first city and in any case is a city seven millennia old --when they excavated the central plaza at Ur they discovered that a black, basaltic slab had been set up there by the earliest kings of Ur, and that was the cultural", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-22", "text": "kings of Ur, and that was the cultural operating system. And if in a deal trading goats for olives a dispute arose, people had reference to the central operating system and these things were determined. Well now, \u201cUr-101\u201d was fine for olives and goat trading but it didn\u2019t support higher mathematics, it didn\u2019t support rational exploration of nature, it didn\u2019t support astrological knowledge about the movement of the stars. As we have gone forward through culture we have swapped out these operating systems, and at each swap-out there has been a lot of hair-pulling and cussing and screaming. Anyone who has installed a new operating system is completely familiar with that sickening from the bowels kind of coldness as you realize it all hangs by a thread. Now this situation, or this operating system metaphor, I think is a useful one for understanding-- and again a circle closes --the Balkanization of epistemology that causes me such anxiety. If you meet an aboriginal person from", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-23", "text": "such anxiety. If you meet an aboriginal person from the Amazon for example, they may be running \u201cWitoto 3.0\u201d as their operating system. Nicely supports animistic magic, huge capacity when it comes to making fish traps and bird traps. Witoto is a powerful operating system for a rainforest aboriginal. In our culture there are, I have no idea, at least ten or twenty operating systems", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-24", "text": "[30:00]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-25", "text": "all going at the same time. Some will run Mormonism, some will support Catholicism, others, Kabbalah goes at the speed of light. Others support quantum physics, some support econometrics, others support political correctness, and these things are mutually exclusive. And so, looking at this and looking at this clash of operating systems I\u2019ve come to the conclusion-- and some of you may have heard me say this before --that culture is not your friend. That\u2019s the final conclusion. This came to me a few months ago when I had my yearly physical and as I was buttoning up my doctor said to me, \u201cYou know, in the 19th century most people your age were dead,\u201d and I realized that this was true, and that among all the revolutions that we are enduring, one of them is that we live nearly twice as long as people lived very recently in the past. Culture is a kind of neoteny, and I don\u2019t want to belabor that at great length but for those of you who", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-26", "text": "that at great length but for those of you who are not biologists, \u201cneoteny\u201d is the retention of juvenile characteristics into adulthood. It\u2019s used to describe animal behavior, for instance I\u2019ll give the most spectacular example of neoteny. There is a kind of animal which lives in ponds in Africa and it reproduces like a fish. It lays eggs on the bottom of these ponds, more fish-like animals come from these eggs and so forth. However, if the pond dries up the creature undergoes metamorphosis and becomes an animal somewhat like a gecko and\u2026 lays eggs and from these eggs come creatures that are like geckos. In other words, this is an animal which actually achieves sexual maturity in two forms depending on environmental stress. Spectacular example of neoteny. Turning to human beings, a less spectacular example, but relevant to us, is our general body hairlessness compared to other primates. We look like fetal apes. Human beings look like fetal apes. Why? What is", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-27", "text": "beings look like fetal apes. Why? What is neoteny? Well this is hotly debated among evolutionary biologists but the point I want to make is a socio-political comment which is, \u201cCulture itself is some kind of neotenizing force.\u201d Because what culture provides is a bunch of rules - so you don\u2019t have to think, and a bunch of myths - so you don\u2019t have to think again. Culture has all the answers, you know.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-28", "text": "\u201cYou wanna know where people came from? Well, when the sky god got out of his canoe at first waterfall and took a leak then we, the true people, appeared like ants and we\u2019ve been living here ever since.\u201d\n\n\u201cOh\u2026 huh. Gee thanks, I\u2019m glad I asked.\u201d", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-29", "text": "This is what culture does for you. But now technology throws a curve, and the curve is that we live so long that we figure out what a scam this is. We figure out that what you\u2019re supposed to work for isn\u2019t worth having. We figure out that our politicians are buffoons. We figure out that professional scientists are reputation-building, grab-tailing weasels. We discover that all organizations are corrupted by ambition. You get the picture. We figure it out. Well, then as intellectuals-- and anybody that figures it out is an intellectual, believe me, because they\u2019re slinging the programing to push you the other way --so then, \u201cintellectuals\u201d-- defined as, \u201cpeople who figure it out\u201d --discover that you are alienated. That\u2019s what \u201cfiguring it out\u201d means; it means that you understand that the BMW, the Harvard degree, the whatever-it-is\u2026 that this is all baloney and manipulated and hyped and that mostly you have a bunch of clueless people who are figuring out which fork", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-30", "text": "of clueless people who are figuring out which fork they should use. But this position is presented as alienation and therefore somehow tinged with the potential for pathology. You know, it\u2019s a bad thing to be alienated. Now let\u2019s speak for a moment, in order to fulfill the promise read in the introduction, about psychedelics, and what are they doing in this fine situation? Well, what they\u2019re doing is forcing this maturation process by dissolving boundaries, which is what they do. They are exposing the cultural operating system for what it is, which is just a bunch of hacked together rules that evolved over time. They weren\u2019t sent from god from mount Sinai. It\u2019s just a bunch of hacked together rules. So psychedelics in that sense spread alienation. But what they alienate us from is preposterous, earth-murdering, sexist, consumerist, shallow, trivial, inane, insane, and dangerous. That\u2019s what they alienate us from. So again, this neotenization thing is", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-31", "text": "us from. So again, this neotenization thing is like the condition of unconsciousness that I described as the precondition for the cosmic giggle. Glamour, acts of magical conjuration, hypnotic delusion, and illusion, hysterias, fads, pseudo revelations, strange truths whispered in every quarter-- this is the character of our time, and people have seemed to believe that they were fulfilling their responsibilities intellectually, people seem to feel they are doing that when they reject the past. They say, \u201cWell that was all screwed up but since I got with Master Shuggi I\u2019ve understood the way it really is supposed to be.\u201d No, this is just trading one set of neotenizing operating systems for another. The real hard choice that you\u2019re being pushed toward, and that you might consider making before the yawning grave rings down the curtain on this cosmic drama is actually intellectual responsibility, freedom, and a devotion to what scientists call \u201celegance of thought.\u201d You know, people", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-32", "text": "call \u201celegance of thought.\u201d You know, people say, \u201cWell how can you tell one theory from another\u2026 I mean is science better than religion,\u201d and this and that-- After a lot of arm-waving it should be conceded that the final call is aesthetic. That because we are monkeys, because we are so far from god, we cannot set knowing-the-truth as the standard for choosing among the models we can produce. We must set our aesthetic compass towards the more-true; what Wittgenstein called the \u201ctrue enough.\u201d And then the question is, \u201cWell how do you recognize that?\u201d Well\u2026 this is a rich field of human study called \u201cPhilosophy of Science,\u201d or \u201cEpistemology\u201d and \u201cOntology.\u201d \u201cHow do we know what is real?\u201d But Plato, who all the rest of philosophy is a footnote upon, Plato said that the key lay in the concepts \u201cthe good, the true, and the beautiful.\u201d \u201cThe good?\u201d What is it? Tricky, tricky\u2026 tricky. \u201cThe true.\u201d What is it?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-33", "text": "[40:00]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-34", "text": "Trickier\u2026 even trickier. \u201cThe beautiful.\u201d What is it? Easy to discern. The beautiful is easy to discern. You are going to be condemned to live out the consequences of your taste. Really\u2026 really. And if you have no taste, god help you, because you are self-condemned to an appalling nightmare. You won\u2019t be getting it, all the subtle stuff will go by you, while your head is filled with cant, nonsense\u2026 foolishness. So again, the metaphor of the dream and of making choices based on beauty and beauty is downloaded into the human cultural milieu largely through dreams. Other ideas may also come in dreams but I think studies have shown that architects, designers, people who are actually at the top of the pyramid in any design process are very aware of their dreams, their reveries, their insights. So that\u2019s the way to set the compass. Not toward truth, not toward the good-- not because these aren\u2019t fine things but because they\u2019re so", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-35", "text": "because these aren\u2019t fine things but because they\u2019re so slippery --but toward beauty. And with that in place, to my mind life... hope follows as a natural consequence. We talk a lot, and I\u2019m sure there are people in this room who are well-versed and connected into the world of virtual reality which is a very hot topic and may have all kinds of implications for our future and the evolution of consciousness, but it\u2019s worth pointing out that we have been making virtual realities for a very, very long time, that language, spoken language is the original code for hacking virtual reality. When you sit the children down around the fire and begin to tell the old, old stories and the pictures rise out of the flames, that is virtual reality. And so is-- and this is the point I want to make --so are all the artifacts, all the impedimenta of human existence. I mean, a virtual reality built in aluminum, stucco, steel and glass is not immediately erased the way", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-36", "text": "steel and glass is not immediately erased the way you clear a screen. And the cost of making it is great. But Ur was a virtual reality. The Agora at Athens, ancient Rome, Canterbury Cathedral, these are virtual realities. Men and women have toiled at agriculture, at warfare, at childrearing, at many, many activities in the long march toward self-definition but more and more we have-- this is true of societies that are aboriginal and without economy --when we free ourselves we are not freed to a void. When we free ourselves we are freed into the dimension in which art is an obligation. And this is the great turning point. I think that the design process, whatever that means, must become conscious, global, integrated. The entire human domain, which means the entire planet and it\u2019s surrounding near space should be enclosed and included in a coherent plan driven by human values and a thirst for transformational beauty. And I mention this because I believe", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-37", "text": "beauty. And I mention this because I believe that many of the people capable of making major contributions to that are in this room or within a hundred miles of this room tonight. And we are people of immense privilege by any way of slicing the planetary demographic. Even the poorest among us who wheedled their way in here this evening are in the top one percent of the planetary social pyramid. On a planet where hundreds of millions of people are starving the obligation upon the conscious people near the control surfaces, near the levers of the human machine is immense. So with freedom-- and I know this is a cliche but hopefully not in this context --with freedom of that sort comes enormous responsibility. And it\u2019s paradoxical; responsibility to dream and coexisting and simultaneous with that, an obligation to awaken. In other words, an obligation to make sense, be non-trivial, not to squander resources in foolishness\u2026 an obligation to awaken and an obligation", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-38", "text": "an obligation to awaken and an obligation to, at the same time, dream. And then the rational mind screams out, \u201cBut this is impossible; this is paradox!\u201d But the subtle mind understands that we have now reached square one. By openly confronting the necessity for paradox, and by openly confronting the fact that we can only enclose our dilemma by speaking in at least two modes at once, we begin to actually honor the complexity of the situation. And so tonight the thought I want to leave with you is, the simultaneous project of awakening, and the simultaneous project of entering deeper into the dream for the purpose of cultivating, evoking, experiencing, remembering, transmitting and communicating beauty, which feeds back into the awakening process. Otherwise the awakening will be traumatic and demoralizing. We will awaken to and aids-ravaged earth, to eco-tastrophie, planetary warming, complete collapse of any concern for the destiny of future generations. This awakening", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-39", "text": "for the destiny of future generations. This awakening must not be disempowering, and the mantle that can be spread over the awakening to counteract the possibility of disempowerment is this wish to evoke, realize, and serve the project of bringing ever greater amounts of beauty into the world. I think that\u2019s the end of the formal lecture here this evening. Thank you very much. I didn\u2019t say... we will have an intermission of about twenty minutes so you can\u2026 \u201cWhat\u2019d he say? What\u2019d he say?\u201d And then we will get back together and undergo the more creative process and the more organic part of the evening which is Q & A, and for those of you who can\u2019t stay for that, I appreciate your attention and your concern, and thank you all very much and we\u2019ll assemble here in twenty minutes.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-40", "text": "--------\n\n...history of shamanic use in the Andes of South America. People take\u2026 you can be a strict constructionist in the matter of psychedelics or you can cast your net widely. There are many substances in nature which alter consciousness. Either stimulate or sedate or\n\n[50:00]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-41", "text": "create more ambiguous and spectacular effects. I would describe the effects of datura as a deliriant. Now, the shamans who use these things have special techniques, both of preparation and of training that allow them to control or navigate around the more unpleasant aspects of datura. It tends to provoke memory loss, shall we say bizarre behavior such as taking your clothes off in public, and so on\u2026 and it creates a general ambiance of uncertainty about the nature of reality. And what I mean by that is you talk to people who aren\u2019t there, you smoke cigarettes that aren\u2019t there, you answer phone calls when you\u2019re standing in the woods. From the outside it looks pretty fucked up, you know? But some aboriginal and native traditions have managed to tame this, at least in the shamanic context. I, I guess in this matter, am a kind of strict constructionist in that when I say \u201cpsychedelic\u201d I have something very specific in mind that a substance or a plant should do. It should", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-42", "text": "a substance or a plant should do. It should not inhibit clarity, in other words not episodes of forgetfulness, lack of memory, passing out, or confusion. It shouldn\u2019t interfere with that, and it should transfor thought, and it should be accompanied by visual hallucinations with eyes closed. That\u2019s what I love. That\u2019s what I live for. People have said to me, \u201cYou\u2019re some kind of a vision chauvinist.\u201d It\u2019s true, and what they\u2026 and usually the people who were saying this were people who were great enthusiasts of LSD. LSD I would never argue is not a psychedelic, but you have to take massive amounts and usually in combination with some other substance like hashish or mescaline in order to elicit from LSD what I\u2019m after, which is cascades of\u2026 Niagras of visual beauty\u2026 in darkness with eyes closed. I have had deep psychological insights on LSD, I have had creative breakthroughs, I have had bonding experiences, but I\u2019ve found it", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-43", "text": "have had bonding experiences, but I\u2019ve found it difficult to get the visions like I wanted them, and the best I worked out with LSD was I would smoke as much Afghani hash as I could at the top of the trip and then it would do the thing, in fact. It would do it. The thing that led me to psilocybin, or to grow mushrooms and explore that was the descriptions of Wasson and the early workers, that it was easy to visually hallucinate and I had read the earlier accounts of Havelock Ellis and people like that and it was about, you know, if you\u2019ve ever read\u2026 I think it\u2019s The Dance of Life\u2026 Havelock Ellis\u2019 description of mescaline, he talks about alien buildings, jeweled ruins, fantastically efflorescent rainforests growing and transforming before his eyes\u2026 that\u2019s what I was after. I wanted not a disturbance in the optic nerve, you know, like, on LSD you get those little things that look sort of", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-44", "text": "LSD you get those little things that look sort of like fans that creep across the walls, that\u2019s more like something in the visual cortex than something in the mind, it seems to me. And I was fascinated, and who isn\u2019t, I mean I never hear this question discussed, but to me it was the obvious question about these visions was, \u201cWhere do they come from?\u201d You know, how can I be astonished by the contents of my own mind, and astonished over and over again? Where is this stuff coming from? And I looked at Jung, and I entertained the fantasy of extraterrestrial contact, and I still haven\u2019t answered this question. But I think it\u2019s a question which the critics of the psychedelic experience haven\u2019t wanted to deal with. You know, if you read the psychedelic literature, you can tell what psilocybin does to heart beat, sperm count, perception of tone, on and on\u2026 they never talk about the real content, you know? Because it\u2019s always individual, and", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-45", "text": "content, you know? Because it\u2019s always individual, and they say, \u201cWell science can\u2019t handle individual phenomena. We measure the properties of large numbers of people.\u201d Well that hopelessly flattens the thing. I know this is a long answer to this question but, it\u2019s worth laying all this out because the ladies question raises issues of how do you categorize psychedelics, which are which aren\u2019t, are some dangerous and to what degree? Certainly datura is dangerous, not only because of it\u2019s deliriant quality, which makes you irresponsible, but also because it dilates your pupils and you stumble around and at higher doses it can cause convulsion and death, which is a rare thing from what I consider the true psychedelics. There is, if we want to take an excursion here for a moment and learn a little pharmacology, there is, if you\u2019re going to talk about pharmacology, there\u2019s one concept that you should get straight and that\u2019s called LD50. It means lethal dose 50. What does this", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-46", "text": "It means lethal dose 50. What does this mean? Well you have twenty rats, and you give them a certain amount of, let\u2019s say, mescaline. When half the rats die, that dose, expressed as milligrams per kilogram of body weight is called the LD50. And when pharmacologists assess the danger in a drug, they ask the following question, \u201cWhat is the ratio of the LD50 to the effective dose?\u201d And if the LD50 is only twenty times the effective dose that\u2019s considered an incredibly toxic, dangerous, and dubious drug. A good drug is a drug where where the LD50 is two-hundred times more than the effective dose. In the case of LSD, the LD50 for man has never been determined. That\u2019s how safe LSD is. We\u2019re talking about lethality here, not\u2026 you know. And so people say well are there unsafe psychedelics, and yes, you just look up the LD50\u2019s, line them up and see which have the better ratios. By that measurement, by", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-47", "text": "which have the better ratios. By that measurement, by that standard, LSD is the most desirable, but the LD50 of psilocybin is very impressive. You can take one-hundred times the effective dose of psilocybin and expect to live. Mescaline, not. Mescaline has a bad profile. As an amphetamine, if you took twenty times the effective dose of mescaline you would probably die. Of course an effective dose is nearly a gram of pure material. 700 milligrams. If you took twenty times 700 milligrams you would be taking nearly two-thirds of an ounce of mescaline and why should you survive? Afterall, stupidity does have consequences. But really, people always ask the question, \u201cAre psychedelics dangerous?\u201d And they mean physically dangerous. What should be said, and it\u2019s recently been pointed out to me that I don\u2019t say it very often, is that the biggest danger with psychedelics is that while you are in that open state some moron will mess with you, and either lay", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-48", "text": "some moron will mess with you, and either lay a suggestion or plant an idea or manipulate you or scare you or turn you in a way that you wouldn\u2019t ordinarily go. And this is why psychedelic etiquette means knowing your tripping partners.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-49", "text": "[1:00:00]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-50", "text": "People who take psychedelics with strangers at high dose do come back with wild tales to tell but I don\u2019t think you can do that over and over again without having some horrible thing befall you. My mind is not\u2026 I mean some people seem more resilient. I am not. You know, people often ask me to trip them and I won\u2019t and it\u2019s not because of concern for the legal system or the fact that I am not licensed for psychotherapy or any of that. It\u2019s because I can\u2019t stand it when people come apart on psychedelics. I am\u2026 you know, if you\u2019re interested in this subject or if you share my sensitivity read Carl Jung\u2019s little book called On the Psychology of the Transference and then you will understand. In fact, that should be a standard tome for trippers. Understand the transference. Understand what it is, how to fight it, and\u2026 this is psychic martial arts\u2026 your psychic health will be immeasurably improved by understanding the dynamics", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-51", "text": "be immeasurably improved by understanding the dynamics of the transference which is quite simple. The book is not that thick. Now to answer the lady\u2019s question, when I took datura I had reality-distorting\u2026 strange. And if I had been a personality of a different sort I might have followed it deeper but it appeared to me to be ambiguous and evil. Not evil\u2026 maybe evil. What happened to me was-- this was in Nepal years and years ago, Nepali shamanism is based in part on datura, the taking of the seed capsules --an English friend of mine who had the room next to mine took it and I took it in my room and it was a situation where to get to the facilities I had to walk through his room. And he and I were friends but we had a very slight rivalry going for the attention of a woman; and I think this woman was not aware that either of us was interested in her but we were both aware that the other one", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-52", "text": "her but we were both aware that the other one was aware. And midway through my trip I decided I had to go to the bathroom and so I stepped through into this guy\u2019s room and they were in bed together having sex. And I, I guess I went outside and then I, the next morning after sleeping many hours I encountered the guy and I said, \u201cHow was your trip?\u201d And he said, \u201cIt was wonderful.\u201d And I said, \u201cYes, well uh\u2026 I saw.\u201d And he said, \u201cWhat did you see?\u201d And I said, \u201cWell I saw that you were with Juliette, and he said, \u201cI thought so, too\u2026 but she wasn\u2019t there.\u201d And\u2026 so, you know\u2026 what conclusion do we draw from this? That this stuff is, well\u2026 I\u2019ll tell you what took me off it finally, was about a week later-- there seemed to be a rash of this datura-taking moving through the traveler community there in this little Nepali village where I lived --and about a", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-53", "text": "Nepali village where I lived --and about a week later I was buying tomatoes in the market and I encountered a different person, but this English friend of mine, and he told me that he\u2019d been taking a lot of datura. And I said, \u201cOh, well that\u2019s interesting. I took it. I don\u2019t think I\u2019ll be taking it again.\u201d And as the conversation developed I realized he thought we were in his apartment, and we were not, we were in the market. And you know, this tells you it\u2019s time to dry-out. [audience laughter] Anyway, I use that as a springboard to different subjects. You were very patient, uh\u2026 next question?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-54", "text": "[audience member]: I hope I can remember what my question was.\n\n[McKenna]: It\u2019s a test.\n\n[audience laughter]\n\n[audience member]: I agree that there\u2019s something sort of mysterious about where these psychedelic effects come from and I refer again to the sort of classic psychedelics-- psilocybin, LSD -- but, the fact that you generally need to take a substance or a drug, it\u2019s a material thing, does in some sense sort of go in a strange way to reinforcing a pretty basic scientific, almost mechanistic, view of the universe and I just wondered if you had thought about that or have any comments.\n\n[McKenna]: Well\u2026 let me try to convince you otherwise. I mean, I see what you\u2019re saying. You\u2019re saying that because this transformative, possibly spiritual experience is causally connected to the act of taking a matter of a certain type into your body that it seems to argue for the materialist proposition that mind is an epiphenomenon of the functioning of brain and so forth. Am I restating it right?\n\n[audience member]: Well, yeah sort of but, I wouldn\u2019t necessarily go so far as to say that it forces you to conclude[?] that the mind is an epiphenomenon of the brain, but that there is some sort real validity to chemistry, mathematics, physics, and that\u2026 you talked about the Balkanization of epistemology ...that those things are in some sense far more real than say, channeling\u2026 what did you say\u2026 archangels, etc.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-55", "text": "[McKenna]: Oh, I see what you\u2019re saying. Well\u2026 yes. I mean, this relates to what I was saying about the Balkanization of epistemology. It\u2019s really strange to me that science is in the act of flinging open the curtains on a staggering vision of what it is to be alive in this cosmos. I mean, we now can look back through the Hubble and other telescopes, you know, thirteen-billion years, to within six-hundred million years of the primary explosion that presumptively created this universe. Meanwhile we\u2019re tearing open the nature of the human genome, the nature of the heart of the atom\u2026 this is the great, great age for the expansion of the scientific vision. But the population is somehow incapable of staying up with what\u2019s going on, and so we have the greatest proliferation of occultism in all forms since the 16th century. It\u2019s almost as though there\u2019s a bifurcation of the culture. The scientific\u2026 the makers of new science are going", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-56", "text": "The scientific\u2026 the makers of new science are going deeper and deeper in a direction that the rest of the public not only cannot follow them into, but is actually headed the other way. And it\u2019s a condemnation of our educational system that people have not understood that science, for all it\u2019s flaws, is the only tool for understanding the nature of reality that has any kind of track record whatsoever. The others just have a story to tell. You know\u2026 the Buddha story, the Jesus story\u2026 fine stories, but that\u2019s all they have is a rap. The amazing\u2026 you see, \u201cWhy is science different?\u201d Somebody could just say, \u201cWell, but isn\u2019t it just a rap?\u201d Well, it is\u2026 but it plays by slightly different rules than these other explanatory systems. Science is the only explanatory system where you get points for proving you\u2019re wrong. You know? I mean, you form a hypothesis, you publish a paper, then you do further experiments, you discover your conclusions in paper \u201cA\u201d were", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-57", "text": "you discover your conclusions in paper \u201cA\u201d were completely wrong, you retract paper \u201cA\u201d and issue paper \u201cB\u201d and your fellow scientists say, \u201cThis guy does very good work. These are careful thinkers. You can bank on these people. They\u2019re not flakey.\u201d What religion operates like that? You know? Can you imagine coming out of the ashram and saying\u2026 having the guru say to his students, \u201cWell we managed to reduce that hypothesis to rubble in morning meditation, didn\u2019t we?\u201d [audience laughter]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-58", "text": "[1:10:00]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-59", "text": "So, you know, it\u2019s uh\u2026 I\u2026 and then let me return to answer that question based on my original misunderstanding of it. And I would say this: You cannot\u2026 it is no reduction of the psychedelic experience to say that it is caused by drugs because they are material, atomic systems and therefore we know all about them. Every electron is the yawning mouth of a wormhole that leads to quadrillions of higher-dimensional universes that are completely beyond rational apprehension. Matter is not lacking in magic; matter is magic. I mean, so when you hear these people like David Dennett and all these talk-show materialists running around, these people haven\u2019t gotten the news that\u2019s coming out of quantum physics. I mean, you see, there\u2019s a problem\u2026 or let me describe to you the state of play here. The way science works is, science\u2026 uh, respects fidelity of theory to experimental results. What really thrills a scientist is when you have a theory that makes a prediction down to five or six", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-60", "text": "theory that makes a prediction down to five or six decimal points, and then you perform an experiment, and it\u2019s spot on, down to five or six decimal points. And then everybody involved in what\u2019s going on has extremely high confidence that they\u2019re on the right track. Well now, only one science is ever that good: physics. Macrophysics. Uhh, chemistry\u2026 it\u2019s good, but it\u2019s not that good. Uhh, ecology, biology, demography\u2026 these are pretty loose. They play with numbers, but it\u2019s to hide, it\u2019s a fig leaf, and by the time you get to sociology or something like that, I mean, these clowns have just snuck under the tent and should actually be shown the door\u2026 uh\u2026 and be put back outside with the card-readers. [audience laughter] So\u2026 so for several hundred years, uh you know\u2026 since, let\u2019s say, Galileo and serious physics, this is how science has been. It\u2019s been a pyramid of envy directed toward the paradigmatic science, which was physics, and", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-61", "text": "toward the paradigmatic science, which was physics, and which could produce this incredible congruence of theory and experimental data. Well, so then physics of course charges forward deeper into matter, asking deeper questions. Well, once you pass below the level of the electron it\u2019s, it\u2019s like suddenly\u2026 it\u2019s like smoking DMT or something. Absolute madness breaks out. Where before you had these wonderful theories and they were feeding back this data, now suddenly you have backward-flowing time, you have particles which tunnel\u2026 which appear magically on one side of an energy barrier without apparently crossing through it, uhh\u2026 you have non-locality which seems to imply that every particle that exists is somehow magically connected with every other particle. We now have quantum teleportation, we have black holes, we have singularities\u2026 and don\u2019t be fooled folks, what is a singularity? It\u2019s just a place where you agree that the rules are cancelled because you don\u2019t know what the hell else to do. [audience laughter] And", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-62", "text": "the hell else to do. [audience laughter] And it\u2019s fine, you know, it used to be in physics that they had one singularity. It was called the \u201cbig bang.\u201d And so you say, \u201cWell, one singularity.\u201d Essentially what science is saying is, \u201cGive us one free miracle and then we can\u2026 we can run it from there.\u201d [audience laughter] But, the theory of special relativity then introduced the concept of black holes, and of course black holes are enormous gravitational masses so massive that neither light nor information can leave them, and what do black holes have at the center of them? Well, a singularity. Well, how many black holes are there in the universe? Eh, ten-high-fourteen. That\u2019s a lot of singularities if you\u2019re trying to produce a theory without singularities. I mean, essentially that\u2019s an admission of total intellectual defeat. My god, if there are ten-high-fourteen singularities you\u2019re not even doing science, you just might as well be, you know, channelling Atlantis or", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-63", "text": "as well be, you know, channelling Atlantis or something. So, uhm\u2026 it troubles me because I think this stuff is rich, that physics is feeding back and that ultimately a model of consciousness will come out of studying the deeper levels of the behavior of matter. But the conclusions are all going to support the non-scientific, non-rational factions. In other words, Bell nonlocality is real. All matter in the universe IS in contact with all other matter through some kind of higher space based on their original connectivity. Quantum teleportation IS a possibility. Uh, these violations, backward-flowing-time and violations of rational casuistry are all real. IN other words, science, meaning physics at this point, prosecuted it\u2019s agenda of deconstructing nature to the point where it let loose the elves of madness, paradox, contradiction and peculiarity and that can now never be put back. I mean, the dirty little secret is that at bedrock the universe is more like a DMT flash than it is an", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-64", "text": "is more like a DMT flash than it is an eighteenth-century garden party, as we were previously assured by the practitioners of science. [audience laughter] Sorry, I think that\u2019s enough ranting on that subject. [points] Yes? If you wanna, excuse me, if you wanna ask a question I guess the, what the consensus of the group is is to go and stand, uh, or I\u2019ll point to you. The reason we didn\u2019t originally say, \u201cGo and stand,\u201d is \u2018cause if you get a nut in the line, there\u2019s a certain fatedness to their eventually getting to the microphone, which, if I am sensitive enough in the pointing out process, could never happen. [audience laughter] So this is a.. we\u2019re trusting that you\u2019re sane.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-65", "text": "[audience member]: That\u2019s why I got up here early.\n\n[McKenna]: Yeah, good. Okay. Thanks for being patient.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-66", "text": "[audience member]: Thanks Terence. I have a technical question, but I think it\u2019s an interesting one, and may be important. Uh, your name has become identified with the date 2012, because you have said that, uh, at a certain moment in the year 2012 an event will take place of, uh, tremendous, or even infinite, novelty. And this is based on your work on what you call the, uh, the timewave and novelty theory and so on which seems to indicate that around that date, uh, something, something extraordinary will happen and you confirm this, uh, by saying that, interestingly and synchronistically perhaps, I\u2019m not sure that\u2019s what you appeal to but you say that, uh, the Mayan calendar also points to precisely the same date. And number three, you say that at that time also an astronomical event will take place, namely the conjunction of the winter solstice with the galactic center\u2026 uh, an event which only happens every 25,000 years. Uh,", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-67", "text": "which only happens every 25,000 years. Uh, roughly 26,000 years. So, the last time that happened our ancestors were painting bison on the walls of caves. It\u2019s a long, long cycle this precession of the equinoxes that brings the winter solstice around the circle of the zodiac every 26,000 years, and you say that this is going to happen again in the year 2012. What my question is concerned with is that third element, namely this precession of the equinoxes in the year 2012. Uh, as you know the galactic center is not on the ecliptic, is not on the zodiac, but is a bit above it, and so the sun on the winter solstice will never be in conjunction with the galactic center, but an event that is linked with that, and I think far more precise and significant, is the fact that, not in the year 2012...", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-68", "text": "[1:20:00]\n\n...but right now, as we sit here, the winter solstice is moving into conjunction with the place where the galactic equator crosses the zodiac. This is happening now, 1998, 1999\u2026 um, and I\u2019m wondering why you look to this year 2012 and the imprecise conjunction with the galactic center rather than the precise and the remarkable uh\u2026 uh return of the winter solstice to the galactic equator, where it was, again, 25,000 years ago when the cave paintings, when the first bursts of self-consciousness were occurring in our species. And I raise this not because I think or know that there\u2019s any truth to the meaning of this, but I do find it exquisitely beautiful that this is happening right now, and I\u2019m wondering what you think about that.\n\n[McKenna]: Well thank you for framing and imparting an extremely intelligent question. i mean, you got it alm... almost all right and all the details right. Uh\u2026 and for those of you who have no idea what that was all about, I\u2019m not sure I can help you. But for those of you who do know what that was all about, here\u2019s my response. First of all, your statement that the galactic center is now transiting the solstitial node rather than in 2012, that\u2019s the only part of the thing you laid out that I would uh\u2026\n\n[audience member]: \u201cGalactic equator.\u201d", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-69", "text": "[McKenna]: Yeah. ...that I would disagree with and here\u2019s why. When we say the \u201cgalactic center\u201d it turns out when you turn the lights on on that concept that it\u2019s extremely slippery. The galaxy is not a basketball. Uh, it has a center of mass, which we can\u2019t determine from where we are because we\u2019re out on one limb, edge of it. It has a center of luminosity, uh, it has a volumetric center. I mean how do you in fact even define what the galaxy is because at its outer edges it feathers out into extragalactic space. Now what we\u2019re arguing over here is a difference of 12 years, if we accept the premise that we\u2019re trying to locate a point in time where this conjunction of the galactic center and the heliacal rising of the solstitial sun occurs. Now if you run out and buy a program to run on your PC like Voyager and you look at these solstitial sunrises over the next 14 or 15 years, it", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-70", "text": "sunrises over the next 14 or 15 years, it actually depends on the program you buy, uh\u2026 what the contention is that is supported. Uh, this is a deep subject, very interesting, raises issues of bio-astronomy, archeoastronomy, galactic dynamics, complicated issues. A book has come out in the last 6 months called Maya Cosmogenesis 2012 by John Major Jenkins. He\u2019s a fine scholar, I wrote an introduction to the book, uh, but he, over hundreds of pages, can educate you and bring you up to speed about these issues. Uh\u2026 if the Maya had never existed we would still be looking at the end of a millennium based on the Gregorian calendar. Now, we tend to say, well, you know, that the Gregorian calendar is out of sync with the Maya, that if there is a collective unconscious then the European mind somehow made a sloppy download of it, because the Gregorian calendar is off key the Mayan by 12 years. But on a scale of a", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-71", "text": "by 12 years. But on a scale of a thousand years that\u2019s a difference of .12 percent or something. And on a scale of a billion years, what is being off by 12 years? On a scale of a million years, what is being off by 12 years? So it seems crazy to me to have, you know, violent factions for 2012 and and then that\u2026 I mean, the point is that something, the galactic mind, the intelligence of the species, the integrated Gaian and galactic entelechy\u2026 something is trying to deliver a message and it is writ large, this message, in our largest systems of defining and understanding time. Uh, we are at the end of a cosmic cycle. You can say 1,000 years if you\u2019re a Gregorianist, or you can say a five-thousand-three-hundred-and-\u201cx\u201d-year cycle, if you\u2019re a Mayanist, or you can say a 25\u2026 26,000 year cycle if you\u2019re a precessionist, but the point is we are\u2026 we are there. We are there.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-72", "text": "is we are\u2026 we are there. We are there. We are in parking orbit around the eschaton. Uh, and you know, it permeates our lives. All you have to do is sit down, smoke a bomber, and look, and it\u2019s there, you know. It is pregnant, we are pregnant with this eschatological breakthrough. And you know, people want it to arrive in the form of ships the size of Manitoba hovering over the Oval Office, perhaps offering oral sex, I\u2019m not sure\u2026 uh, but you see, we are such ephemeral creatures in time, we\u2019re like mayflies or something. Mayflies, who only live for seven days. In other words, our temporal window of perception is so extreme, I mean, people say, \u201cWell nothing much ever seems to happen.\u201d Well 100 years ago there were no movies, automobiles, airplanes, telephones, internet, atom bombs, antibiotics, DNA sequen\u2026 you know it\u2019s endless, so in the space of\u2026 and yet people say, \u201cWell nothing", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-73", "text": "the space of\u2026 and yet people say, \u201cWell nothing much ever seems to happen,\u201d you know. An incredible ability to not register radical change seems to be a precondition of existing in the presence of radical change. Now for those of you who care about my theories in this area of mathematics and deconstruction of the I-Ching and analogising to the Mayan calendar, uh\u2026 it is a mathematical game, it is an intellectual game, uh\u2026 I discern patterns in nature that cause me to believe that science, which I recently praised, uh, has overlooked very important aspects of reality that you don\u2019t need an atom-smasher or a DNA sequencer or a probe to ganymede to register. And what do I mean by that? Science has overlooked two aspects of nature that, as you sit here, I believe you can hear my case and that you will find in my favor. Here\u2019s what it is. The first thing which science has not taken on board is the fact that as you get nearer", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-74", "text": "on board is the fact that as you get nearer and nearer the moment in time that we call the present, things become more and more complicated. Now that may seem like a trivial statement, but there\u2019s no reason for the universe to work like that. Why does the universe go from simple to complicated? Why do you get, at first, moments after the big bang, an ocean of free electrons at such a state of temperature and energy that no molecular bonds can form, atomic systems can\u2019t even form because the bond strength is overwhelmed by the thermal energy in the system. Then it cools down and atoms condense; a more complicated thing than electrons by orders of magnitude. Further cooling, further nuclear cooking of the most primitive elements, hydrogen and helium,", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-75", "text": "[1:30:00]\n\nin gravitationally aggregated masses called stars, cooks out then heavier elements. They emerge. They were never seen before until fusion began to occur in these hydrogen masses. And these fusion processes cook-out iron, sulfur, carbon, bingo! Carbon. Molecules. Now an order of magnitude in their complexity greater than atoms as atoms are to compared to electrons. And then, you know, and I\u2019m compressing 13 billion years of emergence here into 30 seconds, then out of the molecular soup you get long-chain-polymers, out of the long-chain-polymers you get molecular transcription systems, ie. prebiotic stuff, out of that you get non-nucleated DNA, out of that nucleated DNA, out of that membranes, organelles, organisms, higher organisms, differentiation of tissue, our dear selves, culture, language, technology, and the eschaton. Now\u2026 why, this is so obvious, I mean leaving out the eschaton if you like, but all the rest of it is self, is totally self-apparent. Why doesn\u2019t science take that on board as a major problem in the description of nature, the emergence of complexity?\n\nWell, you ask a scientist, they say, \u201cWell, you see, these are separate domains of nature. How atoms become molecules has nothing to do with how animals become human beings. This is bullshit. This is just some kind of compartmentalized thinking where you don\u2019t want to come to grips with the overarching metaphors that are working on various levels. The advent of\u2026 the understanding of the fractal ordering of nature now makes it clear that voting patterns in Orange County, distribution of anemones on the Great Barrier Reef, and the cratering of Europa all follow the same power laws. So, that\u2019s the first thing which science has starring in it\u2019s face and has never taken on-board.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-76", "text": "Now, I said there were two things. The second thing is related to the first. [drinks coffee] Double-shot of espresso\u2026 you\u2019re really getting your money\u2019s worth here.\n\nUh, the second thing which science has refused to take on-board is that this process of complexification that I just described to you, as you approach the place and time called, \u201cthe Present,\u201d happens faster and faster. That was not necessarily implied by the first observation. The first observation was simply that there was a process which was moving from simple to complex. Now we have the concept of a process which is ever-accelerating as it moves from the simple to the complex. So, uh, more and more happens as you approach the present and since these processes have been running since the bing bang there is no argument to be entertained that they will reverse themselves suddenly. No, they\u2019re not going to reverse themselves after thirteen billion years. Duh\u2026", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-77", "text": "So\u2026 then, but the implication of that, carried to it\u2019s ultimate extreme, leads to a conclusion most people find too wild to entertain. If the universe is evolving deeper and deeper into complexity, faster and faster, and if, now, in a human lifetime we can see a small portion of this curve\u2026 it no longer appears flat to us because of our nearness in relation\u2026 you understand what I\u2019m saying? We can actually discern the curve and so that means, I believe, that by extrapolating this process we should then logically conclude that we are very near, relative to the life of the universe, we are very near to the place where this ramping up of complexity will become so excruciatingly rapid that more change will happen in a single week than happened in the previous thirteen billion years. And that then there will come a moment where more will happen in a single minute than happened in the previous thirteen billion years. And then a moment will come when more will happen in six point five five times ten to the twenty-third erg seconds\u2026 more will happened than has happened. And people say, \u201cWell, but that\u2019s crazy.\u201d I mean, what kind of universe is that that ramps\u2026 [spiraling hand gesture].", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-78", "text": "Well, wait a minute. What\u2019s so crazy about this? Let\u2019s look at what the competition is peddling. What the competition would have you believe is that the universe sprang from nothing, in a single moment, for no reason. Well now, whatever you think about that theory, in the interest of being awake, please notice that that is the limit case for credulity. Do you know what I mean by that? I mean that if you can believe that, you can believe anything. That is the most improbable proposition the human mind can conceive of. I challenge you to top it. You know, I know the Scientologists think god is a clam on another planet but I don\u2019t think that tops this idea that the universe sprang from nothing, in a single moment, for no reason. That is article of faith number one. I say, no, no, this\u2026 If we\u2019re talking about universes that spring from nothing, if we\u2019re gonna talk like that, then surely such universes occur in a situation", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-79", "text": "then surely such universes occur in a situation of great complexity. In other words, if we\u2019re going to look for an enormous ruption of emergent phenomena, an enormous, sudden, unexpected download of novelty, we shouldn\u2019t look in a domain of zero-space, zero-time, zero-energy, zero-anti-entropic-organization, that\u2019s the worst place to look. That\u2019s the least likely place where such a singularity would spring out. Where should you look, if you believe in this Jabberw\u2019ock, this Chimera, this particular beast? Where should you hunt this Snark? You should hunt it in domains of immense complexity where you have matter, energy, light, chemistry, language, machines, people, cultures, intentionality, minds, minds, minds, and if you throw all that stuff together and shake it up it\u2019s maybe not a sure thing that you will get a singularity, but you\u2019re certainly betting right. Now you\u2019ve figured it out. So, I think that science is extremely hostile to the", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-80", "text": "I think that science is extremely hostile to the idea that the universe is complexifying, and complexifying more and more rapidly. Why? It\u2019s just a matter\u2026 it\u2019s just a historical issue. It has to do with the fact that nineteenth-century English biology was extremely hostile to what it called \u201cDeism\u201d. Deism was the reigning religious paradigm of the nineteenth-century and it\u2019s the idea that god is a clockmaker, and that god made the universe and wound it up like a clock, and went away. And what irked Darwin and Lyell and those people was the idea that the universe has a purpose. You see, they thought that if it has a purpose this somehow means there is a god, and they weren\u2019t up for that. Uh, they were trying to build rational science into a tool for understanding nature.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-81", "text": "I think we have grown beyond that. And that it\u2019s foolish to wear those tight, nineteenth-century, high-buttoned shoes. We can believe that the universe is following an organizational vector. We can believe that the universe is under the influence of a strange attractor. We can believe that the universe is pulled toward a future de nomoi, as well as pushed by the unfolding of causal necessity. We can believe all of that without evoking the nineteenth-century concept of god.\n\n[1:40:00]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-82", "text": "[1:40:00]\n\nNow, why do I spend so much time on this, and what\u2019s so great about all this? Here\u2019s what\u2019s so great about all this. If you will join me in this believe that the universe works as I have described, it\u2019s an engine for the generation of complexity, and it preserves complexity, and it builds on complexity to ever-higher levels. If you entertain this, guess what happens? It\u2019s like a light comes on on the human condition. \u201cWho are we\u201d in my story? Well first let me tell you \u201cwho are we\u201d in science\u2019s story. We are nobody. We are lucky to be here. We are a cosmic accident. We exist on an ordinary star, at the edge of a typical galaxy, in an ordinary part of space and time. And essentially, our existence is without meaning or you have to perform one of those existential pas de deux where you confer meaning, or you know, one of these post-modern soft shoes. But if I\u2019m right, that the universe has an appetite for novelty, then we are the apple of it\u2019s eye. Suddenly, cosmic purpose is restored to us. We left the center of the cosmic stage in the thirteenth-century and haven\u2019t been back since. But this idea says, \u201cNo, people matter. You are the cutting-edge of a thirteen-billion year old process of defining novelty. Your acts matter. Your thoughts matter. Your purpose? To add to the complexity. Your enemy? Disorder, entropy, stupidity, and tastelessness.\u201d", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-83", "text": "And so, suddenly then, you know, you have a morality, you have an ethical arrow, you have contextualization in the processes of nature, you have meaning. You have authenticity. You have hope. You have the cancelation of existentialism and positivism and all that late-twentieth-century crapola that people used to entertain back in the old days. So, that\u2019s why I am so keen for the idea of novelty because it seems self-evident. And you know, we can argue about whether the eschaton will arrive in 2000, or 2012, or 3,000\u2026 but I cannot believe that there is anybody in this room tonight who can\u2026 the hardest thing to imagine is human history going on for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of more years. That\u2019s impossible. We see around us the processes that make of history a self-limited game. The clock\u2019s ticking, folks. You think we can do gene-splicing and internet and psychedelic drugs and manipulation of our genetic material and star-flight and anti-matter and quantum teleportation and all these things? You can extrapolate that five-hundred years into the future? Don\u2019t be ridiculous. No, history is some kind of a phase transition. It only lasts about twenty-five thousand years. Some people think that\u2019s a long time, some people think it\u2019s a short time. It depends on where you stand. I think of it as, \u201csnap!\u201d You know? One moment you\u2019re hunting ungulates on the plains of Africa, and the next moment you\u2019re hurling a golded terbium superconducting extra-stellar vice toward Alpha Centauri with all of mankind aboard in virtual space being run as a simulation in circuitry. You know? It\u2019s just first, the one thing, then the other thing.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-84", "text": "But now, history, which lasts twenty-five thousand years, is this weird period where you\u2019re neither fish nor fowl. You know, you\u2019re not the hunting ape anymore, but you are not yet the sixteen dimensional digital god. You know? And in that transition phase there is confusion, there is angst. But now, we\u2019re at the end. We have no\u2026 I maintain anybody who\u2019s peddling angst and peddling pessimism and peddling all this stuff is just\u2026 \u201cthat\u2019s so two-minutes ago.\u201d [audience applause]\n\nQuestion?\n\n[audience member]: I heard you on the radio being interviewed a while back talking about, it\u2019s \u201cDMT\u201d, is that the..?\n\n[McKenna]: That is.\n\n[audience member]: And um, that got me really interested. And uh, you said that it was basically unavailable.\n\n[McKenna]: From me.\n\n[audience member]: Well\u2026\n\n[McKenna]: Is that your question?\n\n[audience member]: No. Close, close.\n\n[McKenna]: Pardon me?\n\n[audience member]: No, I was really wondering um, yeah I had interpreted that you had said that it was pretty much unavailable, period, and I was wondering if in fact it was available, and if not, I mean that just sort of renewed my interest in psychedelics, which now, do you think is the second-best choice?\n\n[McKenna]: Well, first let me say, because it\u2019s an\u2026\n\n[audience member]: And I\u2019d like to hear maybe just a little more about DMT.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-85", "text": "[audience member]: And I\u2019d like to hear maybe just a little more about DMT.\n\n[McKenna]: Okay. Well first thing, let me say, which is a piece of practical advice, um\u2026 the psychedelic community is cleverly invisible because our choices in gender expression, fashion, so forth and so on, have, by crypto-osmosis come to dominate the values of the culture, we can no longer tell ourselves from straight people. So, uh, the only opportunity where we really come out of the woodwork is a thing like this. But then of course there\u2019s a tendency to fall into old-think, and everybody focus on the alpha male spiel-meister at the front of the room. Uh, so let me point out to you, I\u2019m leaving, I\u2019m going home to Hawaii tomorrow morning, but this is your community, this is your community. And whatever it is that you think you need, there are a dozen people in this room who can help you out. And I am not one of them, because I have a different assignment. But look around, and of course, be careful. But, afterall, this is about consciousness, right? I mean if you\u2019re not conscious enough to conduct that social transaction without flubbing it up, that\u2019s probably god\u2019s way of telling you you shouldn\u2019t be proceeding toward high doses anyway. Um, yeah. Oh and you wanted me to say more about it.\n\n[audience member]: (incoherent)... and, anyway, I\u2019m going with the man in the black and red poncho.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-86", "text": "[McKenna]: The man in the black and red poncho. Uh\u2026 yeah, I mean, in a way it\u2019s impossible to talk about DMT, but on the other hand, it\u2019s fun to try to talk about it because it pushes the horse of language into a lather. Basically, when you smoke DMT, what happens is pure confoundment. And, you know, I\u2019m trying to speak generally here, in the sense that different people are confounded by different things. So of course, it addresses you personally. Your level and tolerance for confoundment is a very personal thing. Uh, people have asked me about DMT, \u201cIs it dangerous?\u201d And the real answer is, \u201cOnly if you fear death by astonishment.\u201d\n\n[1:50:00]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-87", "text": "[1:50:00]\n\nYou know, and you deliver that line, and then people laugh\u2026 except the people who\u2019ve done DMT don\u2019t laugh because they understand, you know, death by astonishment is no remote possibility. Death by astonishment is right there. You know, when was the last time you were astonished? Unless I smoke DMT it doesn\u2019t happen to me. Amazed occasionally. Astonished? Never. Astonishment is when your jaw hangs\u2026 for a long time. You know? And DMT is simply confounding. Now, how could something be that confounding? I mean, you can imagine taking a drug, and realizing that you should treat your partner better, or realizing that god really exists, or realizing that you should exercise more, or realizing that the planet is an organized intelligence, but how could something be as confounding as DMT is? Well, I think the answer to that, and it took me awhile to get to this, is that the reason it\u2019s so confounding is because it, it\u2019s impact is on the language forming capacity itself. So the reason it\u2019s so confounding is because the thing which is trying to look at the DMT is infected by it. By the process of inspection.\n\nSo, DMT does not provide an experience which you analyze. Nothing so tidy goes on. The syntactical machinery of description undergoes some kind of hyper-dimensional inflation instantly, and then you know, you cannot tell yourself what it is that you understand. In other words, what DMT does can\u2019t be downloaded into as low dimensional a language as English. And so, you\u2019re like\u2026 I remember a B-movie I saw when I was a kid and it was set somewhere in Mexico and there was a big swamp and there was a dinosaur in the swamp and at one point this campesino comes, who encounters the dinosaur, comes rushing out of the swamp and the\n\npatr\u00f3n", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-88", "text": "patr\u00f3n\n\nof the ranch is there, and this terrified guy is there in this serape, and he can only point to the forest and sort of make a croaking sound. And that\u2019s what English allows you to do with the experience of DMT. You just come down a sputtering mess, if it works. You just come down saying, you know, \u201cMy god! It\u2019s not what I thought it was.\u201d And this is after you\u2019ve done it twenty times. You say, \u201cIt\u2019s not what I thought it was. It\u2019s not what I can think it is. It, it, it\u2019s something\u2026\u201d", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-89", "text": "And I\u2026 to me it\u2019s a miracle, because my intellectual arrow and how I brought myself up in terms of all these things was, I am a rationalist, and I am interested in testing, and verifying, and proceeding to define truth by non-exotic means. In other words, no arch-angels, no\u2026 none of that. And as I matured intellectually, I began to eliminate mystery from the world. You know? I\u2019d look into some spiritual discipline, conclude, \u201cNo, that\u2019s a bunch of crap.\u201d I\u2019d go to some teacher, conclude, \u201cNo, this guy is a weasel.\u201d I tested\u2026 I sought the weird, but with an attitude of critical skepticism. And I assumed, blithely, that with this flashlight I would soon prove there were no elves out there in the darkness. Turns out, no\u2026 no. This is the way to proceed, because stuff which is malarkey will be exposed as malarkey. Instantly, you know? You just go to the guru and you say, \u201cWhat can you show me?\u201d And if the guy wants you to sweep up around the ashram for a dozen years or so you say, \u201cNo, I\u2019m outta here.\u201d But when you get to DMT, it delivers. It delivers. It is as strange as anything can be. It is\u2026 you know\u2026 it is not only stranger than you suppose, as you sit here, it is stranger than you can suppose.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "840ed292897f-90", "text": "And what makes me wild about this is we\u2019re not talking about something that you have to go five-hundred miles up a jungle river and live with primitive people and study techniques for thirty years\u2026 We\u2019re talking about something which, if I had a pipe loaded with it in my hand, each one of you would be thirty seconds away from what I\u2019m talking about. Well, you know, you\u2019ve tripped and yeah, you lived in Paris and you went to Trebizond and all these things, but nothing like this ever descended. But it\u2019s not\u2026 it\u2019s so near. You know, it\u2019s not attained by practicing tantric techniques or building up mon\u2026 it\u2019s none of that. It\u2019s just near. Very near. One toke away is this absolutely reality-dissolving, category-reconstructing, mind-boggling possibility. And I feel like this is a truth that has to be told. I\u2019m like the campesino running out of the swamp and saying, you know, \u201cOver here!\u201d You know, \u201cThe orange thing! Do that!\u201d Alright that\u2019s enough about DMT. You gotta take hold here.\n\nThank you very, very much. Thank you.\n\n[1:57:00]\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time"}
{"id": "4e25487f1f5e-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nTerence McKenna with Lost at Last\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n12 December 1998\n\nMaritime Hall, San Francisco, California\n\n129\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo transcript available for this talk!\n\nHelp Transcribe\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Terence+McKenna+with+Lost+at+Last"}
{"id": "0729a4b0ce44-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nInterview Hawaii\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\nOctober 1998\n\nHawaii\n\n51\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo youtube link available, try the following:\n\nNo transcript available for this talk!\n\nHelp Transcribe\n\nTerence McKenna's Final Earthbound Interview\n\nOctober 1998\n\nHawaii\n\nInterview by John Hazard\n\nTRANSCRIBER: copy and paste the question and answers templates (below) for each question and answer. remove this red text before publishing.\n\nFirstname Lastname: question?\n\nFL: question?\n\nFL: question?\n\nFL: question?\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Interview+Hawaii"}
{"id": "204ee5d9899c-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nEsalen In-House Get-Together\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n4 August 1998\n\nEsalen, CA\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo transcript available for this talk!\n\nHelp Transcribe\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Esalen+In-House+Get-Together"}
{"id": "ab5154e82f09-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nTechno-Pagans at the End of History\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\nAugust 1998\n\nEsalen Institute, Big Sur, California\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo transcript available for this talk!\n\nHelp Transcribe\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Techno-Pagans+at+the+End+of+History"}
{"id": "8f23a2bc8305-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nThe World Wide Web and the Millenium\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n1 August 1998\n\nOmega Institute, Rhinebeck, New York\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo transcript available for this talk!\n\nHelp Transcribe\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+World+Wide+Web+and+the+Millenium"}
{"id": "a235f0db9524-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nLive at Wetlands Preserve, NYC\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n28 July 1998\n\nWetlands Preserve, New York New York\n\n6422\n\nEnd of Results\n\nSherai(sp?)\n\n. And, what can I say; it's a pleasure to be here. I always feel when I come to Wetlands that I'm like checking in with my sort of my home base congregation.\n\nQ & A [This is also not confirmable via the Vimeo or YouTube recordings]\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+Wetlands+Preserve%2C+NYC"}
{"id": "a44ebf2bbe2c-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nTrialogues at the Edge of the Millenium\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nAudio\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\nMay 6, 1998\n\nUnknown\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo youtube link available, try the following:\n\nSheldrake Audio\n\nNo transcript available for this talk!\n\nHelp Transcribe\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Trialogues+at+the+Edge+of+the+Millenium"}
{"id": "940781b4f106-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nThe Future of Art\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\nAugust 7, 1998\n\nEsalen Institute\n\n8316\n\nEnd of Results\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Future+of+Art"}
{"id": "dcc6bfab9a83-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nIn the Valley of Novelty\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\nSummer 1998\n\nUnknown\n\n12426\n\nEnd of Results\n\nThe original prediction was that there would be a deep plunge into novelty in 1996. There would be the deepest plunge in the 1990s. But that was based on my mathematics before John Sheliak corrected it. Once his corrections were factored in, it showed that there was a deep plunge into novelty where I said it was, in 1996, but that it wasn\u2019t the deepest; it was the second deepest. The deepest was, I believe, in 1993, in Fall of 1993, which was right when the Internet was going public and the worldwide web was coming into being, and all that was happening. The plunge that I predicted in 1996 I felt pretty good about, because right near the place where I predicted the maximum amount of novelty we got within 10 days of each other: the announcement of the Martian meterorite with fossils in it, which has since been hassled over royally \u2013 I\u2019m aware of that \u2013 but still, I think it was a watershed moment that the President of the United States felt the need to address the nation on the subject of extraterrestrial life, was a rare moment! [laughs]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty"}
{"id": "dcc6bfab9a83-1", "text": "And then within 8 days of that announcement was the announcement of Dolly, the cloning of the sheep in England \u2013 which again, if certain scenarios come to pass, that will be a moment \u2013 you know, the point the human race passed from which there was no going back, then, because basically if you can clone a sheep you can clone a human being; and these technologies are all rushing upon us. I mean, the body is being dissolved as much by advanced medical technology as it is by cyberspace and the Internet. I read this story, this amazing story, recently, set slightly in the future, and this guy has been in this very bad accident and virtually nothing has survived but his brain; but they have a medical technology that they can take a fragment of flesh and clone him, and then with hormones rapidly age the infant so that in 2 years there will be a brand-new adult body for his brain to be transplanted in. And these people have this fantastic medical policy that the fine print says that the brain can be kept alive, must be kept alive, by a medically approved method, that the insurance company reserves the right to choose the cheapest method, and the cheapest method is implant into the body wall of the cosignatory of the insurance policy. So this woman carries her husband\u2019s brain for 2 years inside her body cavity, while his body is being grown to manhood for the transplant. It\u2019s a dilemma we all may face some day!", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty"}
{"id": "dcc6bfab9a83-2", "text": "Question from audience: I wanted to ask you about novelty and psychedelics, and the language that changes through the use of them. I remember reading Maria Sabina saying that the mushrooms spoke a different language to her after people like Wasson came down and began to use them \u2013 they went from Spanish to English, from Catholic mushrooms to \u2013 I don\u2019t know, Harvard mushrooms or something\u2026 I don\u2019t know; and having spoken with people who have taken DNA \u2013 I mean DMT, sorry! \u2013 yet the 1960s, very much, the people I talked to that did, they said it was so overwhelming they could not even understand the language. I haven\u2019t read about this, anyway. Maybe you can enlighten me.\n\nWell, one place \u2013 there aren\u2019t many places you can read about it \u2013 one place you can read about it is, there is a book edited by Michael Harner, called Hallucinogens and Shamanism, Oxford University Press, and there\u2019s an essay in there by Henry Munn called \u201cThe Mushrooms of Language,\u201d which is one of the most eloquent and beautiful essays ever written on psilocybin \u2013 it\u2019s wonderful. Henry Munn. Then, harder to get but equally interesting, is a doctoral study that a guy named Horace Beach did at CIIS, and it\u2019s called something like \u201cThe Perception of Audio Phenomena Under the Influence of Psilocybin\u201d. And he interviewed Bay Area psilocybin-heads about their experiences with language, and it\u2019s very interesting. This is a very interesting area of discussion.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty"}
{"id": "dcc6bfab9a83-3", "text": "On DMT, and on psilocybin \u2013 and they are closely related, psilocybin being 4-phosphoryloxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine, the phosphorylated form of DMT, though they do not degrade into one pathway in the body \u2013 it\u2019s a parallel pathway: DMT is N,N-dimethyltryptamine. These psychedelics particularly seem to impact the language-forming portion of the brain, and this produces truly bizarre states of mind, because it\u2019s the language-forming part of your brain that is explaining to you moment to moment what is going on. You know: Now I am eating. Now I am having sex. Now I am flashing on DMT\u2026 and when that part of the brain gets foobarred, then you really do have a puzzlement on your hands, because the machinery of description itself has been caught up in the process.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty"}
{"id": "dcc6bfab9a83-4", "text": "On DMT, these entities \u2013 these machine-like, diminutive, shape-shifting, faceted machine elf type creatures that come bounding out of the state \u2013 they come bounding out of my stereo speakers, if I have my eyes open \u2013 they are like, you know, they are elfin embodiments of syntactical intent. Somehow syntax, which is normally the invisible architecture behind language, has moved into the foreground. And you can see it! I mean, it\u2019s doing callisthenics and acrobatics in front of you! It\u2019s crawling all over you! And what\u2019s happened is that your categories have been scrambled, or something; and this thing which is normally supposed to be invisible and in the background and an abstraction has come forward and is doing handsprings right in front of you. And the thing makes linguistic objects; it sheds syntactical objectification. So that it comes towards you \u2013 they come toward you \u2013 they divide, they merge, they\u2019re bounding, they\u2019re screaming, they\u2019re squeaking \u2013 and they hold out objects, which they sing into existence, or which they pull out of some other place. And these things are, you know, like jewels and lights, but also like consomm\u00e9 and old farts and yesterday and high speed; in other words, they are made of juxtapositions of qualities that are impossible in three-dimensional space.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty"}
{"id": "dcc6bfab9a83-5", "text": "What they\u2019re like is \u2013 and in fact, this is probably what they are \u2013 what they\u2019re like is, they\u2019re like three- and four- and five-dimensional puns. And you know how the pleasure of a pun lies in the fact that it is\u2026 it\u2019s not that the meaning flickers from A to B; it\u2019s that it\u2019s simultaneously A and B, and when the pun is really funny it\u2019s an A,B,C,D pun; and it\u2019s simultaneously all these things\u2026 well, that quality, which in our experience can only occur to an acoustical output or a glyph which stands for an acoustical output \u2013 in other words, a printed pun \u2013 in the DMT world, objects can do this. Objects can simultaneously manifest more than one nature at once. And, something like a pun, the result is always funny. It\u2019s amusing! You cannot help but be delighted by this thing doing this thing.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty"}
{"id": "dcc6bfab9a83-6", "text": "Well, so these syntactical animals, or these linguistic elves, are pulling this stuff out and gesturing with it; pushing it in your face, saying \u201cLook at this! Look at this!\u201d And you are fascinated, you know \u2013 pulled into it. Because each one is [gasps] What? \u2013 you know, How can this be happening?We\u2019re not in the world any more. No artist, no matter how gifted, could make one of these objects. Because they have qualities extremely difficult to language, qualities that no object in this world has! And so you\u2019re trying to wrap your mind, and say, My God, you know, what is it? Because in spite of the fact that it\u2019s just a little thing, you can tell by looking at it that its implications are earth-shaking. In other words, that if I could suddenly pull one of these things out of hyperspace, and we would all look at it, we would all realise that that was the ball game, right there. That somehow this proved it, was it, did it, ended it, started it, made it clear. How can this be? Well, I don\u2019t know \u2013 you had to be there, sort of.\n\nAnd then what lies behind this, or as you try to analyse the situation, you realise that these objects that these things are making are made by the utterances; that sound is how this trick is done. And meanwhile these things are saying, or beaming at you \u2013 the general vibe is, strangely enough, \u201cDo not give way to astonishment! Do not abandon yourself to wonder! Get a grip! Try to get a grip, and notice what we\u2019re doing! Pay attention!\u201d \u2013 this is the mantra: \u201cPay attention! Pay attention!\u201d\n\nQuestion from audience", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty"}
{"id": "dcc6bfab9a83-7", "text": "Question from audience\n\nWell somebody once asked me, you know, \u201cIs it dangerous?\u201d And the answer is, only if you fear death by astonishment. But death by astonishment is entirely possible! I\u2019m not kidding! I mean, you are so fucking astonished that you\u2019ve never felt your astonishment circuits get a workout like that before! I mean, what is astonishment in this world? It\u2019s like, \u201cOh!\u201d [politely surprised laugh, as though appraising something new]. This is a different form of astonishment, this is: [deep gasp of almost horrified amazement]. So. And then the whole notion that\u2019s being pushed here is: \u201cDo this thing. Do this activity. Do as we do\u201d.\n\nAnd you can sort of feel your intentionality, your inner something-or-other, reorganising; and there\u2019s this, like, heat. It\u2019s quite akin to heartburn \u2013 I won\u2019t metaphysicize it \u2013 but heat in your stomach; and it just moves up, and then your mouth flies open, and you do \u2013 this stuff comes out, which is a very highly articulated, syntactically controlled, non-English, non-European, language behaviour of some sort. Not, strictly speaking, though I call it glossolalia, it strictly speaking is not glossolalia: glossolalia has been carefully studied, and it\u2019s a trance-like state. On the floors of these Pentecostal churches in Guatemala, they measured pools of saliva 16 inches across from people who were in ecstatic glossolalia. This is much more conscious, much more controlled. It\u2019s almost like a kind of spontaneous singing. But your mind steps aside, and this linguistic stuff comes out.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty"}
{"id": "dcc6bfab9a83-8", "text": "And you can see it \u2013 that\u2019s the amazing thing. It is not to be heard, even though it is carried as an acoustical signal; its meaning resides in what happens to it when the acoustical signal is processed by the visual cortex. That\u2019s the important thing. It is a new kind of language. It\u2019s a visible, three-dimensional language. It\u2019s not something I ever heard about, or any mystical tradition I ever heard about, anticipated. But it\u2019s as though the process, or the project, of language \u2013 which according to academic linguists began no more than 50,000 years ago \u2013 the process of doing language, in us, is not yet finished; and this thing we do with small mouth noises, and each of us consulting our own learned dictionary and quickly decoding each other\u2019s intent, this is a stumblebum, cobbled together, half-assed, way to do language; and what we\u2019re on the brink of, or what these psychedelic states seem to hold out, is a much more seamless kind of fusion of minds by generating topological manifolds that we look at rather than that we \u2013 you know, localise into designated meaning.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty"}
{"id": "dcc6bfab9a83-9", "text": "And I didn\u2019t mention ayahuasca in this rap, but ayahuasca, being \u2013 along with the mushrooms \u2013 a natural and shamanically used for many millennia doorway into these places, and what you find in ayahuasca groups in up-river tribal situation is people \u2013 the whole way the ayahuasca-taking is set up is to facilitate singing. The shamans get loaded; then they sing; then they go outside and take a leak, and smoke, and talk. And in those intervals, you hear people say things like, you know, \u201cI liked the violet and yellow part, but I thought the olive drab with the silver spattering was way over the top\u201d, and you think, you know, what kind of a critique of a song is that?! Well, it\u2019s the critique of a song that is designed to be looked at. Nobody talks about the sound; everybody talks about the visual impression left by the sound, and it was these groups \u2013 these ayahuasca-taking groups \u2013 that, when the German ethnographers got into the Amazon in the early part of the 20th century, they called this chemical telepathine. They recognised, you know\u2026 and the reputation of ayahuasca is group states of mind. Well, if you\u2019re na\u00efve, then you think you\u2019re going to hear everybody thinking. No: you\u2019re going to see everyone thinking. You know, you\u2019re going to see what people mean.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty"}
{"id": "dcc6bfab9a83-10", "text": "And it\u2019s not that surprising, when you think of it, because obviously the world arrives at the surface of our skin as a seamless body of electromagnetic and acoustical and pheromonal data. It\u2019s just that our eyes, our nostrils, our ears, our skin, we break up this incoming flow of data. And now we\u2019re close to McLuhan country here: I think what this hints at is that print skewed our perceptual apparatus, our style of parsing perceptual data, toward the acoustic space. So that for us, thought became a voice\u2026 you know? And very early in the Western tradition, this is so. Jehovah is a voice in the Old Testament; the Logos is a voice. In Hellenistic philosophy, we are the People of the Voice. But apparently, you know, there is a passage in Philo Judaeus where he talks about the etymology of the word Israel, and he says \u201cIsrael means He who sees God\u201d \u2013 he who sees God. And then he poses the question to himself: \u201cWhat is the more perfect Logos?\u201d And then he says, \u201cThe more perfect Logos is that Logos which goes from being heard to being seen, without ever passing over a moment of noticeable transition\u201d.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty"}
{"id": "dcc6bfab9a83-11", "text": "Well, I\u2019ve actually seen this happen in psychedelic states, where you will be lying in silent darkness; you hear distant music; and as the music gets closer, it\u2019s like a band with lights and drums coming over a hill. As the music gets louder, it seems to physically approach and a confusion of light turns into, you know, oom-pah-pah, brass band, dancing elves, cavorting harlequins, and less easily described denizens of the imagination\u2026 and then it all goes thumping and marching past, and disappears; but it\u2019s a perfect example of light and sound arriving together in the hallucinogenic space. The fact that we\u2019ve talked here, or mentioned, that we have DMT in our pineal glands, in our brains \u2013 what we haven\u2019t said is that we also have compounds in that same organ very much like what\u2019s in ayahuasca. Occurring in the human pineal gland is a compound called adenaroglumerotropine [??], but when you give it its physical chemical nomenclature, it turns out it\u2019s 6-methoxy tetrahydroharmine; it\u2019s a very near relative of harmine and harmaline. So I\u2019m, you know, it doesn\u2019t strain me to believe that perhaps in looking at this phenomenon we have actually put our finger on the place, the cutting edge, of the evolution of consciousness, right now, at the biochemical level: what\u2019s happening is, there is a shifting, or an acceleration of the concentration, of harmine-like alkaloids and DMT in the human pineal, and it\u2019s affecting our ability to process language, and it\u2019s pushing and exacerbating a bias toward visual understanding.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty"}
{"id": "dcc6bfab9a83-12", "text": "And I see this, then, also reinforced and accelerated by the evolution of media, you know? In the last 150 years, we go from photography to colour photography, to moving coloured photography, with sound, with stereophonic sound, and \u2013 you know \u2013 pointing toward virtual reality, with more and more money to be made at each step of the way; and clearly, with amounts of money now, we\u2019re outspending defence for entertainment, we will produced simulacrums of imaginary worlds; and engineering bench tests will be to make it as much like Hawaii as possible, or as much like Tibet as possible\u2026 but what people will really want to do with these things is make worlds as strange as we can stand, that are in these virtual places. So whether it comes through a natural evolution of the human nervous system, or the evolution of an advanced interface with prostheses that create virtual realities\u2026 I think the transformation of how we do language is part of this acceleration into singularity.\n\nI believe you made a reference in one of your books to Julian Haines\u2019s book, The Origin of Consciousness, [\u2026] and the way we evolved in the [\u2026] was like an auditory hallucination before, I guess, our consciousness really developed; and we were thinking human beings\u2026", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty"}
{"id": "dcc6bfab9a83-13", "text": "Yeah, Julian Haines, it didn\u2019t win him too many friends, but he wrote a big book and had this theory that this thing which we call the ego is so recent in human beings that it actually didn\u2019t exist at the time of Homer. And he goes into Homer, and he shows that the god always breaks through in situations of crisis and danger; and he felt that before Homeric times, people were essentially like ants or something; that their behaviour was largely instinctual, and that the only time they encountered this phenemenon of free will, the interrupting of the instinctual pattern, was in situations of great crisis and impending danger\u2026 and then this thing would literally almost come out of the sky and say, \u201cGet your ass out of there! Save your self!\u201d Well, then, over time, this ability to access this higher informational thing was like, again, the metaphor of encysted, closed over with the membrane of the self, and made part of the machinery of the self \u2013 and that this is what the ego is. The ego is a Greek god that you have frozen like an ice cube behind your eyes, and that you think you are this thing and \u2026 this is just a cultural myth, a necessary weird idea, no more a true statement about the nature of the mind of the hominid than anything else.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty"}
{"id": "dcc6bfab9a83-14", "text": "One of the conclusions that novelty theory leads to, in terms of its feedback into social here-and-now stuff, is the idea that culture is not your friend. That culture is an impediment to understanding what\u2019s going on. That\u2019s why, to my mind, the word \u201ccult\u201d and the word \u201cculture\u201d have a direct relationship to each other. Culture is a cult! And if you feel revulsion at the thought of somebody, you know, offering to the Great Carrot, or tithing to some squirly notion, just notice that your own culture is an extremely repressive cult that leads to all kinds of humiliation and degradation and automatic and unquestioned and unthinking behaviour. There is a tendency to want to celebrate culture, springing both from the French deconstructionists and their fascination with culture, and then the effort to build pride through ethnicity, thing\u2026 well, that\u2019s all very fine, but I think the cultures we should all revere are our ancestral cultures; the cultures most of us have our roots in, the actual culture we came from, was probably fairly squirly. I mean, the American family is what keeps American psychotherapy alive and well! This is a cauldron for the production of neurosis, and in some cases little else.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty"}
{"id": "dcc6bfab9a83-15", "text": "So, you know, part of what psychedelics do is they decondition you from cultural values. This is what makes it such a political hot potato. You know, if there is anything\u2026 since all culture is a kind of con game, the most dangerous candy you can hand out is candy which causes people to start questioning the rules of the game. So you can have a Stalinist state, a parliamentary democracy, and a theocratic state, and they all can agree on one thing: that psychedelics are just terrible, because then citizens start asking all kinds of hard questions and the devotion to the values of the Fatherland become mired in pseudointellectual discourse, and the next thing you know somebody has to be shipped off to the camps in order to right the situation.\n\nAudience comment: Well, even our own structures are dissolving in the [\u2026]\n\nOh yeah \u2013 no. It definitely works in the personal life. Like, you know, I\u2019ve been building a house in Hawaii, and while I\u2019ve been building it I\u2019ve definitely cut back on my intake of psychedelics, because I don\u2019t want the answer to the question, Is this a good idea? \u2013 until it\u2019s too late to do anything about it! [laughs] It\u2019s like St Augustine\u2019s prayer, God grant me chastity and continence, but\u2026 not yet!", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty"}
{"id": "dcc6bfab9a83-16", "text": "Question from audience: One of the big ideas that seems to be in the notion of the Archaic Revival is that the whole big thing is really conscious and alive \u2013 the universe, the galaxy, the larger entities \u2013 and that\u2019s interesting, because it\u2019s a traditional belief that\u2019s held by non-modern, non-scientific, cultures. And if in fact our belief systems are taking us in that direction, such that that makes sense to us, it\u2019s really interesting but it also sort of upsets the current description of evolution within, say, the Darwinian dogma. Because that seems to be, you know, based on the idea that it\u2019s all very random and it\u2019s just all material and life is a big accident, that\u2019s moving forward. So I think that one of the ideas you\u2019re talking about today is teleology, that whether or not we really want to talk about evolution and how evolution as a theory is going to get self-involved and absorb this idea, comes down to whether or not these larger things have", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty"}
{"id": "dcc6bfab9a83-17", "text": "comes down to whether or not these larger things have in fact some kind of direction behind it, which is I think what your work and observations imply. And so I thought one day about how to understand that, and I have a question, which is whether or not you can talk about creativity as having a fractal nature? \u2013 since self-similarity shows you at various levels similar principles, and since on our level as human beings anything that we make we first think about \u2013 it begins as thought, and then it becomes matter. And so if creativity can be seen as having a fractal dimension, it would be a way to talk about all kinds of creation by simply understanding it at the level at which we see it. And it would suggest that, to modify the Big Bang theory, that before there was a Big Bang there would have to be a Big Thought; and you kind of move along with that idea\u2026 so I want to ask you to comment on that, but also in relation to the idea", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty"}
{"id": "dcc6bfab9a83-18", "text": "comment on that, but also in relation to the idea that was also contained in evolution about the origin of language, because some of the things you\u2019re speaking about from your DMT experiences have a funny resonance with Creation stories, like Adam and Eve naming the animals. I mean, I\u2019ve never really been all that comfortable with the idea that language would evolve out of grunts and groans when guys like Chomsky say it\u2019s all [??], it\u2019s a big system in language and all kinds of languages can be very different, but inside they always have these structures. And nature, and ecosystems, and languages, always tend to pop out fully formed and integrated. So is there any possible way that you could think that language, rather than evolving from grunts and groans, evolved in the opposite direction? That the first time language was used, it was used with the power that you ascribe to the machine elves? That is was something that was done carefully and precisely because it could manifest form? Or something", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty"}
{"id": "dcc6bfab9a83-19", "text": "and precisely because it could manifest form? Or something like that? In terms of how new species come into being. The only idea that we ever get to allow into the theory of evolution is that it\u2019s an accident, that there will be a mutation and a new species similar to another species will be born, and it will survive, and that will lead to a new species. But I have a logical problem with that, in that any female creature which gives birth to a new species is going to perceive that species as a birth defect, and this is a baby they\u2019re not going to want to survive. And then there\u2019s only one. And so that Barbara Klar [??] book I read talked about nine dimensions, and said the sixth dimension was the morphogenetic field from which all species and organisms evolve. So I was kind of thinking, maybe along the lines of the metaphor of a computer, there\u2019s a software program through which new species are developed and designed, and the whole way in which", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty"}
{"id": "dcc6bfab9a83-20", "text": "developed and designed, and the whole way in which they integrate themselves into existing ecosystems, etc, somehow or other it all gets worked out, and there\u2019s a mystery then, we don\u2019t see and don\u2019t understand, by which these new forms come into being. Maybe they all come into being at once, with a thousand or a million creatures, instead of just one that\u2019s having to struggle.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty"}
{"id": "dcc6bfab9a83-21", "text": "Well, all this raises a lot of stuff, most of which I can\u2019t remember because of my devotion to cannabis. But let\u2019s go back to the thing about language, and \u2013 yeah, the origins of language, let\u2019s talk about that for a minute. I think that \u2013 I\u2019ve been thinking about this, because I\u2019ve been writing about it, and here\u2019s what I\u2019ve come up with. Part of what makes it difficult for us to think about language clearly in English is that this word, language, is used by us to mean spoken language; and it also means the general class of linguistic activity, as in computer language, body language, so forth and so on. And to think clearly about language, we need to have a clear distinction between spoken language and the general syntactical organisation of reality.\n\nLanguage. Because that is old. Honeybees do it, dolphins do it, termites do it, they all do it different ways\u2026 octopi do it. There is much of language in nature; in fact, you could argue that all of nature is a linguistic enterprise, because the DNA essentially is a symbolic system. Those codons which code for protein are arbitrarily assigned \u2013 assigned, in other words, by convention. There is no chemical relationship between the codons and the proteins they code for, any more than there is a relationship between an English word and the thing it intends. Those are just conventionalised by probability over time. So language is deep in nature.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty"}
{"id": "dcc6bfab9a83-22", "text": "What is not deep in nature is speech. Speech is as artificial as the water wheel, the bicycle pump, the Tessler coil and the space shuttle. Somebody figured this out somewhere. Well, so then people say, \u201cBut this is hard to understand. It\u2019s hard to picture how it could happen.\u201d Well, here\u2019s how I think it happened. My little example about the songs earlier was a stab at this, but here\u2019s more. It\u2019s that all kinds \u2013 all non-genetic behaviours (which are called, reasonably enough, epigenetic behaviours) are nevertheless\u2026 they\u2019re not simply expressions of free will; they are under the control of a looser system of rules than the genetic rules, which are chemical and absolute. The epigenetic behaviours are under the control of syntactical constraints. In other words, we need to expand the concept of syntax from the rules which govern the grammar of a spoken language to the rules which govern the behaviour of any complex system.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty"}
{"id": "dcc6bfab9a83-23", "text": "So, for example, before speech among human beings, I think it was probably very touchy-feely. If you watch monkeys, you see this: they touch each other. They stroke, they grunt, they groom, they goose, they push, they do all of these things. The repertoire of this kind of behaviour, if you\u2019re good at it, may be on the order of having four or five thousand words in your vocabulary. Well, when we watch primates do this kind of behaviour, we don\u2019t think of it as a language. But in fact it is; it\u2019s a gestural language. A couple of years ago, some research was done where these people took preverbal infants, and they taught them standard American sign language, before they could speak. So these little tiny children could sign \u201cPick me up\u201d, \u201cPlease change me\u201d, \u201cWhere is Daddy?\u201d, \u201cI\u2019m hungry\u201d, \u201cI want to watch TV\u201d, der-der-da-da, before they could ever utter a word. Well, now what we\u2019re always told about spoken language is, it\u2019s this miracle, and that we\u2019re genetically hard-wired for it. Well, these experiments seem to imply we\u2019re even more genetically hard-wired for standard American sign language, which is something very few of us will ever learn to use.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty"}
{"id": "dcc6bfab9a83-24", "text": "What does this mean? Well, it means that the gestural capacity is deeper than the ability to verbalise, and hence probably older. So I think there was a gestural language as complex as standard English, probably, in place before anyone ever uttered a word. Now, what the psychedelics seem to suggest is that you can get so hyped up on tryptamines that your body goes into some kind of almost convulsive shock, and the normally acoustically modulated processing of language flows over into the voicebox and you begin to literally articulate syntax. You begin to make a noise which is a tracking noise for this ongoing syntactical stuff that\u2019s organising gestural intent. And it\u2019s like going from carving in stone to colour TV: your listener immediately transfers loyalty to this much more spectacular form of behaviour. And so it\u2019s like literally that the word burst forth full-blown, based on a platform of gestural syntax that had been maybe millions of years in its formation. It was just this ability to redirect the energy of syntactical intent through the body, so that instead of coming out of the end of the fingers, it came out of the end of the tongue, flapping in the airstream, and this thing happened.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty"}
{"id": "dcc6bfab9a83-25", "text": "It\u2019s amazing to me that the straight linguist, you know, if you go to an academic university and study linguistics, will teach you that language is no more than 35-40,000 years old. I mean, that\u2019s like yesterday! I mean, we \u2013 fire is half a million years; chipped flint, a million and a half years; language, 35,000 years old \u2013 language is everything we are, everything we do; you can\u2019t think without it, you can\u2019t do anything without it. And yet, if it\u2019s that new, then what it represents is simply a technology, a form of media, that\u2019s squeezed out other forms of media. And it\u2019s not hard to see why: after all, it works in the dark, that\u2019s good; it allows politics, you can make speeches to large groups of people; and it\u2019s \u2013 well, it\u2019s just very portable. It\u2019s the cleanest technology ever put in place. When you think about it, it\u2019s one of the weirdest abilities human beings exhibit. And when you go forward to reading, you realise this is an animal in some kind of an informational tizzy. I mean, the idea that you would make marks in clay which signify tongue noises which signify designated objects, so that these pieces of clay can be lugged hundreds of miles so that other people can reconstruct your thought by looking at these pieces of clay, this is bizarre! For animal behaviour, this is absolutely \u2013 it\u2019s\u2026 how they managed to do that?!", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty"}
{"id": "dcc6bfab9a83-26", "text": "And of course, the picture-writing, we understand; but similar to the breakthrough to speech, is the breakthrough to a phonetic alphabet, where you see: \u201cAh! We don\u2019t have to portray the thing we intend; all we have to portray is the sound of the word that signifies the thing we intend!\u201d And then, you know, you\u2019re just roaring forward; and from there to the printing press, what is it, a couple of thousand years or something \u2013 and then there\u2019s no going back. So that\u2019s the part about language. Now, what was the second part after that?\n\nJust whether you could think about creativity as a principle that could have a fractal dimension, and that would be a way to think about design, or a larger universal order, having some consciousness\u2026 [??]\n\nWell, if you think of the universe as an engine which produces and conserves novelty, and you think of it as a fractal thing, a fractal hierarchy, built up and build downward of subsets of itself, then in a sense every creative act is the paradigmatic act of the Big Bang. I mean, it always struck me, you know, that the end of the novelty wave, which is: Up, Down, Oscillate, Zero, it\u2019s like it\u2019s a general map of all process. We could be describing the life of the energy output of a star, or the firing of a single neuron, or the birth and death of an economy; in a sense, you get down to a fractal level where you can say all processes are the same: they have a beginning, a middle, and an end\u2026 and if you know where you are in this concatenation of process, you can sort of locate yourself in the cosmic domain.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty"}
{"id": "dcc6bfab9a83-27", "text": "The thing that I tried to talk about this morning, that we need to map into our maps of reality, is the acceleration. I think it\u2019s a really weird idea to talk about a thousand years in the future; I mean, good grief! A thousand years in the future, what do you imagine will be left standing that you call home? What \u2013 cast your mind back a thousand years: King Canute was taking charge of things across Northumbria, and the Anglo Saxons were making forays along the coast of Norway, and, you know, very few of the concerns of the day have survived to this moment; and that was the slow-moving part of the process! We\u2019re going to move, you know, in the next 10 years, further than we\u2019ve moved since the time of King Canute to this morning. So it seems to me the most unlikely future scenario is one which assumes things will stay more or less the same. Because we\u2019ve put in place all these processes designed to make sure that does not happen. You know \u2013 rapacious capitalism, technological innovation, bourgeois social aspirations in the hearts of every man, woman and child on the planet, urbanisation, connectivity \u2013 all of these processes are designed to erase reality as we know it.\n\nI\u2019m wondering what you think of the kind of Vedic paradigm involving the states of consciousness, the waking state, the dreaming state and the sleeping state, and the transcendental force state, and they used that on an individual basis, but also with regards to [??] genesis. And that criticism of the West, that the West has taken the waking state as standard, and evolved its philosophical views without accounting for these other states of consciousness?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty"}
{"id": "dcc6bfab9a83-28", "text": "Well, certainly the West has built its house on a narrow foundation, denying these other possibilities. On the other hand, if\u2026 well, you get into all kinds of difficulties here. How do you judge whether or not a civilisation has assimilated or explored the domains it\u2019s named its own? One way is by looking at the technological applications that it\u2019s created. And for all this talking about these other states of mind, they seem actually as mysterious to the East as they are to the West. I don\u2019t get the feeling they\u2019re really navigating through what they\u2019re talking about. In the past, there may have been levels of understanding. It may be, see, that psychology \u2013 though it\u2019s a mystery to us \u2013 it may be that it\u2019s an easier nut to crack than the nut of matter; and so I don\u2019t have any trouble believing that Vedic India of 3500 BC may have known all kinds of things about how the mind works and how to navigate through these imaginal spaces that we\u2019ve lost; but the spirituality of modern India is thoroughly contaminated by a thousand years of commerce with Islam and the West. It isn\u2019t that different, really. I mean, Vedic theology and German idealism are strikingly similar cousins.\n\n\u2026a number of things of conflict, when you talk about the archaic revival and then the current cultural and technological revolution. It seems to me that a lot of the stimulus for novelty that was generated by the psychedelic experience now may be generated without that experience, such as through virtual reality, technological advancements, and perhaps would maybe make the psychedelic experience less necessary in order to [\u2026] observe and [??]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty"}
{"id": "dcc6bfab9a83-29", "text": "Well, definitely, what you\u2019re getting at is that technology itself is a kind of psychedelic drug; that, you know, by chance or design, the proponents of psychedelica have figured out that it\u2019s totally acceptable to this culture if you disguise it as electronic entertainment and put it out that way. So the web is incredibly subversive! Simply the fact that all that information is there and available, in a world where control of access to information has always been the game. So, yeah \u2013 the way I see it is that the psychedelic people need to use the new information technologies to build art of a type more powerful and more compelling than the world has ever seen. Call it virtual reality, call it multimedia, call it whatever you want, but it\u2019s basically walk-into, walk-around, art \u2013 and then the boundaries will fall for ordinary people, because you see when you build a virtual reality, in a sense what that technology is allowing you to do is it\u2019s allowing you to show people the inside of your own head! We have never had a technology that would do that.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty"}
{"id": "dcc6bfab9a83-30", "text": "We think the inside of our heads are all the same, but you know when I say to you that when I smoke DMT it unleashes a Niagara of alien beauty, if I had spent the last 30 years building that Niagara of alien beauty so that you could just strap on the goggles and go, then we would have a very different kind of dialogue and relationship going. And so I really see art as the great searchlight that illuminates the historical landscape just ahead, and I think that art is about to get teeth for the first time in human history. I mean, it\u2019s all very fine, scratching on cave walls, and film, and video, and all that, but it\u2019s always artifice, you know \u2013 you never are convinced, or only for seconds, that you\u2019re in the presence of reality when you\u2019re in the presence of art. But we will build art that will literally stand your hair on end. And the amount of creativity in a single human mind, as I said, more than fills all the museums on this planet. So what we need is to figure out how to get a spigot into that, and get this stuff out! And then, as James Joyce said, man will be dirigible!\n\nWell, we said, I think, that when you take psychedelics you go up a dimension. And so this world of transience and flux becomes an eternal world. So in that sense, it\u2019s the same thing. Whether meditation and psychedelics are the same thing, I think depends on your meditation and your psychedelics! Different meditations strive for different things. Much meditation is about emptying the mind of phenomena. This certainly would not be a description of the psychedelic state!\n\nQuestion from audience comparing LSD insights with meditational experience", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty"}
{"id": "dcc6bfab9a83-31", "text": "Question from audience comparing LSD insights with meditational experience\n\nWell, in the interest of keeping the number of singularities to a minimum, the most elegant thing to do is to wrap the theory around and say that the starting-point and the ending-point are the same place. Yeah, it\u2019s the place where all is co-tangent. How we could get the universe back into the primal dot in 12 years, I don\u2019t know, but there are some schemes to do that. There\u2019s always schemes to do it. You know, if the universe were some kind of vacuum fluctuation, and it had an anti-matter twin in a higher superspace, then there would be the potential, at least, for them to collide across all points simultaneously, and you would actually get the universe of matter disappearing instantly, and you would then be left with a universe made only of photons, because they don\u2019t have an anti-particle. What a universe purely made of light \u2013 what its physics \u2013 would be like, is hard to say; but it sounds peculiarly like certain Gnostic theophanies [??] about gathering the light and returning the light. Ultimately, the meditation path and the psychedelic path must somehow lead to the same kinds of data, if the claims of both are to be respected, which is that they give deeper knowledge about reality. Yes.\n\nQuestion from audience about expression of information using new technologies that may replicate the psychedelic state", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty"}
{"id": "dcc6bfab9a83-32", "text": "Question from audience about expression of information using new technologies that may replicate the psychedelic state\n\nI\u2019m all for it; I just haven\u2019t seen anything that convinced me that anybody had achieved it to any degree of significance. Yeah, you know, imagine a drug that did nothing more than allow you to remember your dreams! I mean, that\u2019s not exactly shooting for the moon, pharmacologically, these days. And yet a drug which allowed you full recovery of your dreams might unleash God knows what, because we don\u2019t know what we dream! The chemistry of DMT suggests that in deep REM sleep, it\u2019s possible every single night you have a DMT flash. But it does not transcript into short-term memory. Or imagine a drug which allowed you to enhance long-term memory, so that you could slip into reveries of a summer day 30 years ago and play it back moment by moment by moment\u2026 again, this is not shooting for the moon pharmacologically. We\u2019re not talking immortality here, we\u2019re just talking simple neurochemistry. But all of these possibilities would change life beyond recognition. And I think these things should be pursued by any means necessary, you know \u2013 it\u2019s a false dichotomy, the idea that somehow you should be able to achieve these things on the natch, and they\u2019re not authentic if you achieve them through psychedelics. This is just a con to keep lineages in business, I think, because they don\u2019t want you going off the ranch and charting your own course. But where shamanism becomes priestcraft, it\u2019s already well on its way to senescence.\n\nAudience question re collective perception on mushrooms (nonverbal sharing of ideas)", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty"}
{"id": "dcc6bfab9a83-33", "text": "A couple of situations, I\u2019ve had telepathic things. I\u2019ve had, in group situations, very quasi-telepathic social interactions. What I mean by that is, I\u2019m recalling an evening many years ago taking ayahuasca with these people and they had a weird scene going. The shaman was a good guy, and a good shaman, but he had a nephew who was a jerk and was sort a pimp, and kind of a hustler. And the shaman was singing with his three friends, these ancient ancient songs, and this guy was drunk on aguardiente, and he would sing against them! He would sing against them\u2026 and this was in Peru, and if you know the style of rural Peruvians, people are so polite and so not-upfront, that no social problem is ever dealt with directly: people will tolerate incredible bad behaviour without turning on a person and saying \u201cListen, you\u2019re completely out of line \u2013 knock it off\u201d. So, 30 people \u2013 30", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty"}
{"id": "dcc6bfab9a83-34", "text": "\u2013 knock it off\u201d. So, 30 people \u2013 30 Peruvian campesinos \u2013 were witnessing this sing-against, and the woman I was with at the time very much didn\u2019t\u2019 like what was going on, and at the end of this, this nephew, this sobrino, at the end of his song of raucous interruption, I looked up just as he ended \u2013 the room was almost in complete darkness\u2026 I looked up just as he ended. I saw her look up and look at him with a look of utter disgust, and when these red dart things got to him, it knocked him off his feet! And I heard\u2026 the old shaman was sitting right to my left, and I heard him turn to his friend, and he said: \u201cAh! The gringa sends the bazudalacathnda\u2026\u201d [laughter]\u2026 and so it was like, \u201cWow!\u201d. But then, ordinary reality immediately reasserts itself and moves forward, and there\u2019s no time to say \u201cWait a minute, folks! \u2013 something", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty"}
{"id": "dcc6bfab9a83-35", "text": "to say \u201cWait a minute, folks! \u2013 something paranormal just happened here, I want to interview everybody, get your impression\u201d \u2013 it\u2019s never, you know, when it\u2019s real, it\u2019s always caught up in the on-moving flow of events.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty"}
{"id": "dcc6bfab9a83-36", "text": "Question from audience\n\nWell, if you\u2019ve taken \u2013 what you don\u2019t want to do is take\u2026 here\u2019s \u2013 this is reasonable advice, too, I think. Where the problem area lies, people think it lies in taking too much. It lies in taking too little. Because if you take too little, you can resist it. You can struggle with it, and then it can turn into a real mess, because you\u2019re afraid of it and you actually have the power, to some degree, to resist it. What you want to do is take sufficiently enough that there\u2019s no escape, and that the transition from ordinary reality to fully loaded is as quick as possible. Because the going up is somewhat terrifying.\n\nFor example, let\u2019s use psilocybin as the model. Here\u2019s how it works for me \u2013 this is not tea, this is eating raw mushrooms: it comes on more slowly. So after an hour or so, you know, and the way I do it is I sit\u2026 as soon as the mushroom enters my body, I sit and meditate. I noticed in South America they don\u2019t do it like this: they dose the ayahuasca, and then everybody just goes on, talking about their motorcycles and the jobs at the saw mill, and who\u2019s conning who\u2026 it\u2019s like, totally \u2013 there\u2019s a brief moment, they pour, they toss it down, then they all go back to raving at each other about mundane life; and then 30 minutes later, on the dot, the shaman blows his whistle, or shakes his chakupa [??], his dry leaf bouquet, and everybody settles down \u2013 it\u2019s like it comes on within two minutes: as soon as the guy starts singing, he just invokes it.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty"}
{"id": "dcc6bfab9a83-37", "text": "But the way I do it is, I take the mushroom (or the ayahuasca), and then I sit and I roll bombers, so I\u2019ll have them ready if I need them, and I just sit as I\u2019m going to sit during the trip, and I\u2019ve unplugged the telephone, and I\u2019ve gotten everything squared away, and it begins to come on at about the 40-minute or the 60-minute mark; and there\u2019s sometimes some nausea as it comes on. And then I smoke a bomber, or half a bomber. And then it catapaults it into the full deployment of the thing, where you just hang on \u2013 there\u2019s about a 25-minute period where your only job is to hang on. It builds. It\u2019s like watching an atomic explosion on the other side of 50 feet of absolutely clear crystal glass. I mean, you \u201ccan\u2019t believe this is happening \u2013 in my mind\u201d. You have the feeling that everyone from Seattle to San Diego has just crawled under their desk as this thing tore past; but it\u2019s in your mind.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty"}
{"id": "dcc6bfab9a83-38", "text": "And then there is the interaction with it, which \u2013 moment to moment, you are pretty coherent; but you lose it \u2013 a lot of it doesn\u2019t transcribe into short-term memory. And then after about an hour or 40 minutes of that, it becomes more manageable, more memorable. The most mind-boggling parts of it are just not possible to bring out of it, because language fails; because English\u2026 there are no words. There are no words even close. I mean, sometimes you\u2019ll bring out an image or a metaphor, but out of five hours of tripping, you bring out half a notebook page of metaphors and yet you were entirely engaged during that time \u2013 now, this question about fear, which is a real question, because when everything begins to slide, if you are not \u2013 it\u2019s more than most people who haven\u2019t done it expect. They have heard it, they\u2019ve read the books, but they think it\u2019s a metaphor. They don\u2019t understand: it\u2019s really going to happen, and it\u2019s really going to happen to you. And there\u2019s a tendency to clutch, or to try and resist it.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty"}
{"id": "dcc6bfab9a83-39", "text": "The thing to do in those situations, I think \u2013 and it\u2019s counterintuitive to how Western people think \u2013 but the thing to do is to sing. To sit up, not to assume the foetal position \u2013 see, what you might tend to do is assume the foetal position and tell yourself, \u201cMy God, this is the most appalling thing that\u2019s ever happened to me \u2013 if I can just live through it, it\u2019ll be all right. I\u2019ve taken this drug: if I can just wait through \u2013 how long did they say it would be? \u2013 seven hours, I see. It started two minutes ago. If I can just\u2026\u201d \u2013 No, the thing to do is to sit up and to sing! Why? Well, being practical people, to oxygenate your brain. To move the entire \u2013 this thing that\u2019s happened to you, though it may have one claw in heaven, its roots are in your neurophysiology and in the chemistry of the drug. You want to move your physiology around. So oxygenating your brain can\u2019t fail to do this. So you sing. And this almost always is accompanied by a sense of power, control, equilibrium, and so forth and so on.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty"}
{"id": "dcc6bfab9a83-40", "text": "Not always. I mean, let\u2019s face it: you\u2019re a product of a nutty society and there are unexamined crevices and uncleaned-out drain traps in all of us, and you\u2019re going to encounter that stuff. The good news is, the earlier psychedelic trips tend to deal with that. You will quickly discover, taking psychedelics, that either you can work through your personal issues and become a psychedelic explorer, or this is just stronger medicine than you are up for, and you would be far better to go back to psychoanalysis or whatever works for you. Some people just can\u2019t take it. Why is that? Well, because what it does is it dissolves boundaries, and most of us are over-boundary-defined. But some of us are having an uphill battle getting some boundaries in place, and realising we are not the telephone or the tree or the person we live with; and so for those people, who are having trouble establishing and moving boundaries, this is the last thing on Earth they should get involved with.\n\nQuestion from audience about the \u201cbombers\u201d\n\nCannabis. Cannabis. Cannabis! [laughs]\n\nQuestion from audience about experience the loss of ego \u2013 is it possible that your physical self could cease?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty"}
{"id": "dcc6bfab9a83-41", "text": "Question from audience about experience the loss of ego \u2013 is it possible that your physical self could cease?\n\nWell, people often \u2013 yes, wondered. Often people wonder. You get into a place where it\u2019s so unfamiliar that the question comes up: Have I done it this time? You know, Am I dying? or Am I in danger? The answer is, the odds are incredible against you being seriously in danger. People don\u2019t die from psychedelics unless they have heart conditions or some incredibly rare medical condition. The problem is that the ego feels threatened by the boundary dissolution, and its ace is your self-identification with it. And it can actually say to you, You are dying, and here\u2019s the evidence; and you have to say,. It\u2019s unlikely. \u2013 and sing your way through it. But this is really tough. I mean, the Buddhists talk about slaying the ego \u2013 this is slaying the ego for real. You must slay it, otherwise it will spread panic into your whole psychological system, will give way to panic and hysteria. So unless there is some real reason to think you\u2019re dying \u2013 and you should have done your homework: you should know what to expect\u2026 for example, if you take LSD and begin intense bouts of vomiting, this is not a proper reaction to LSD. Something is wrong, either with the LSD or with your relationship to it. You should know what a typical\u2026 a typical trip will put you through changes, but is not dangerous. But if you suddenly begin exhibiting some symptoms \u2013 heart fibrillation, or something like that \u2013 then you want to have\u2026", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty"}
{"id": "dcc6bfab9a83-42", "text": "This is why, then, there is always the issue of the buddy system: should there be somebody else there, and what about all that? My position is, if you are anxious, then you should have a sitter. If you\u2019re going to do it alone, you should certainly tell someone so that they will check on you after a while. I don\u2019t like doing it in groups or with sitters because inevitably I get spun into them. What I want to do is go as deep as possible, and even if I\u2019m alone with one other person, culture is the third guest at the table, you know? I mean, if you start \u2013 I\u2019ve often found myself in the middle of psychedelic trips thinking, \u201cI\u2019m sure glad there\u2019s nobody else here to see this, because I\u2019m sure it would alarm an observer!\u201d \u2013 because I have my leg thrown back over my neck, and I\u2019m screaming in Urdu, or something. But it\u2019s OK, after a few minutes it\u2019s OK; but if there were an observer, they would feel the need to do something, you know\u2026 and often, like I\u2019ve seen people smoking DMT; and people moan, and they say \u201cNo! No! NO!!!!\u201d and they moan. So then, you know, you get them back together, and constituted, and you say, \u201cHow was it?\u201d, and they say, \u201cIt was fantastic!\u201d So you realise that how they present is not reliable.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty"}
{"id": "dcc6bfab9a83-43", "text": "Well, setting has a great deal to do with it; and setting is a very complicated issue. Setting means everything, from the astrological situation at the time that you do it to the physical surrounding that you\u2019re in; and it\u2019s also a roll of the dice \u2013 you never know exactly what you\u2019re going to get. As far as the question about Buddhism and all that, my own, you know when I started taking LSD I thought I saw, in Tibetan Tonka painting and mandalas, the echoes of this same world, and pursued it: went to Nepal, studied Tibetan, collected the art\u2026 and it is similar. I don\u2019t know \u2013 I don\u2019t know to what degree the Buddhists, the Mahayanists, realise those states without psychedelics. I do know that with psychedelics, those meditations, those techniques, those insights, are supercharged. And I would suspect that Tibetan Buddhism, as it has its roots in Vedic Hinduism, there may be psychoactive plants in its past; but it\u2019s far in the past. Buddhism was brought to Tibet in 741 by Padnasambhava. There was an autophanous shamanism already present throughout the Himalayas, the Punpo. And it was largely based on cannabis intoxication at that point in history, not so much in the present.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty"}
{"id": "dcc6bfab9a83-44", "text": "But I think that this is a fruitful area \u2013 I just can\u2019t believe that Mahayana Buddhism could have gotten as far as it did without some reliance on psychedelics; and of course, cannabis \u2013 we in the West, our style is to smoke it; and that\u2019s a very mild way of dealing with it. I mean, if you eat \u2013 if you have unlimited amounts of high-grade cannabis, and you eat grams and grams of it, you will have experiences as extreme as anything that psilocybin or ayahuasca can deliver to you. You only have to read the descriptions of nineteenth-century writers on cannabis \u2013 Fitz Hugh Ludlow, S. Weir Mitchell, these people \u2013 their descriptions of their trips are as psychedelic and as out of control as any acid reportage or psilocybin reportage.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty"}
{"id": "dcc6bfab9a83-45", "text": "So the relationship of Indian and Buddhist spirituality to cannabis and other psychedelics is not understood. We do know that the whole Rg Veda is a hymn to a drug, soma, but we don\u2019t know what soma is. Well, the fact that it could have invited such attention to this Vedic civilisation \u2013 the 95th mandala of the Rg Veda says, \u201cSoma is greater than Brahman, greater than Indra\u201d. Well, what is being talked about? How could such a great thing be forgotten and lost? What was it? And then, you know, almost as puzzling as What was it? is, How could you lost such a thing?! I mean, it\u2019s like us forgetting how to make automobiles or something! It was something so basic to the culture that how could you possible forget something so central? Yet apparently they did, and today there are scholarly fights. Was it Amanita muscaria? Was it psilocybin? Was it Peganum harmala? Or was it something else? Why is this so hard to figure out? The only thing I can imagine is that it must have been eventually restricted to a priestly class of initiates, and then there must have been a social revolt from the bottom, and all those people were put to death; and then, nobody knew what it was.\n\nYes, I think you have to push the psychedelics to reach these unitary states. What always fascinated me was hallucination. Because it was, to me, the proof that I was dealing with something outside myself.\n\nQuestion from audience\n\nWell, and here was stuff that amazed me, that I couldn\u2019t make up on my own, that would \u2013 you know, a single image would have taken me hours to draw and figure out, and here I was getting 28 frames a second of this unpredictable stuff!\n\nQuestion from audience", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty"}
{"id": "dcc6bfab9a83-46", "text": "Question from audience\n\nWell, one of the nice things about the tryptamines, I think, is they leave the sense of self pretty much intact. In other words, it doesn\u2019t distort who you are; it does something to your sensory input. DMT is very, very surprisingly, like that. You smoke DMT: you are immediately plunged into an alien universe. But if you can keep your wits about you, and actually notice how you feel, you don\u2019t feel any different! You\u2019re not smarter, stupider; you\u2019re not more excited, or \u2013 once you get the initial panic under control, you realise \u2013 My God, it didn\u2019t lay a finger on me! I\u2019m me, I\u2019m entirely intact! What has happened is that the world has been completely replaced by something completely unrecognisable and alien that I have no words for, that\u2019s blowing my mind, that\u2019s ripping apart my philosophical machinery as I gaze upon it; but when I bring my attention back into my body, I discover \u2013 I\u2019m fine! I\u2019m OK! It didn\u2019t change my mind, you could almost say, it changes 100% the reality around you.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty"}
{"id": "dcc6bfab9a83-47", "text": "That\u2019s powerful, because it appears objective. I mean, the impression you have when you smoke DMT is, This isn\u2019t a drug, that\u2019s ridiculous.Drugs, you know, make you smarter, make you stupider, make you fall down, make you stay awake\u2026 we know what drugs are; this is no drug, this is something else hiding under the label \u201cdrug\u201d. This is a doorway into another modality that exists all the time, independent of my thoughts or feelings about it. Is that true? Well, I don\u2019t know! But it certainly doesn\u2019t seem to be a place constructed to fit human expectations. Like, one of the things that always troubled me about DMT being somewhat of a Jungian event was the question, How come there\u2019s no hint of this in any mythology or religious tradition or alchemical text or fairytale or dream, or anything else?... I mean, if this is so important a part of what it is to be a human being, how can it be so deeply buried, so secret, so unknown, and yet just one toke away?!", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty"}
{"id": "dcc6bfab9a83-48", "text": "It still, that, confounds me. Because you can read all the Hindu scripture or Sufi mysticism, or all the stuff you want \u2013 occasionally, sure, you\u2019ll find a phrase or two that could be mapped onto a DMT state, but nobody has trumpeted it. Nobody has said, \u201cThis is what it is\u201d. And yet, as I say, it\u2019s spread throughout Nature; it\u2019s been known since aboriginal times. We used to, years and years ago, call it the Secret. And in a way, it really is the secret. Jorge Luis Borges has a story called The Cult of the Phoenix, and he talks about a secret that seems profound and yet preposterous to the initiates. One child may initiate another, and ruins are good places to do this\u2026 it just goes on like this for a page and a half, and you realise he\u2019s \u2013 he must be talking about DMT.\n\nQuestion from audience re the ego as a fairly recent phenomenon", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty"}
{"id": "dcc6bfab9a83-49", "text": "Question from audience re the ego as a fairly recent phenomenon\n\nYeah, the great cultural accomplishment of Western civilisation is this thing called the free individual. But now that we\u2019re on the brink of, you know, the electronic dispensation, exactly what we\u2019re going to do with the free individual, and how that\u2019s going to look, in an era where consciousness flows through a thousand portals, it\u2019s not at all clear. It\u2019s not clear whether we can somehow now carry the idea of the free individual to an even higher level, where each of us will become a kind of god \u2013 lord over our own creation, as vast in time and space, but virtual, as the cosmos in which we find ourselves embedded; or whether the free individual is going to turn out to be the problem all along, and we\u2019re going to abandon it and become some kind of socialist gas, or some collectivist swarm, a hive mind, a world where intelligence flows where needed and identity is provisional and fleeting, and unanchored to place or body; I mean, much of this goes on on the Internet, you know. You can be an 11-year-old girl, you can be whatever you want. You can build your avatar and present yourself in many guises. It\u2019s much more like a shifting fantasy-land than it is like the good old world of positivist rock\u2019n\u2019roll.\n\nQuestion from the audience re shamanic singing as the catalyst for visual experience", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty"}
{"id": "dcc6bfab9a83-50", "text": "Question from the audience re shamanic singing as the catalyst for visual experience\n\nWell, yeah, I think that, you know, we see shamanism from the outside with the values of Western civilisation unconsciously applied. In cultures that are taking psychedelics, this thing which we call singing is a very complicated activity indeed; and if you\u2019ve ever sung on psychedelics, you know that \u2013 you know, it\u2019s an ecstatic and complicated and synaesthesic experience. I mean, to make of your body a vibrator for sound, to \u2013 you know, move out into the Pythagorean octaves with the human voice, and \u2013 it\u2019s extraordinary, actually, how capable of sound human beings are. No other animal has the range and control of voice. They say that this is because we\u2019re adapted for spoken language, but I think we had a lot of this range and control before. So things \u2013 words that we use very knowledgeably, like song, ancestor spirit, power place \u2013 we\u2019re not getting 90% of the nuance of these meanings, because they go so gracelessly into English. When a shaman talks about spirit, he\u2019s using a term as technically complicated in his mind as when a physicist uses the term beauty to describe a quark. You know, it\u2019s very technically defined. And we tend to simplify, and then suppose that we understand.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty"}
{"id": "dcc6bfab9a83-51", "text": "Part of the thing I found with hanging with shamans in various places and times is that once you get past the language barrier, what shamans are are simply curious people. Intellectuals of a certain type. In Australian aboriginal slang, a shaman is called a \u201cclever fellow\u201d. If someone says \u201cI\u2019m a clever fellow\u201d, they mean, you know, I\u2019m a shaman. Well, that\u2019s all it is \u2013 it\u2019s somebody who pays attention to how things actually work, and sort of transcends the culture by that means. It\u2019s a weird paradox. It\u2019s that the shamans, who are the keepers of the cultural values, are also necessarily the keepers of the secrets of the theatrics of the cultural values, and so they live their lives in the light of the knowledge that it all rests on showbiz. You know, everybody else is a true believer, but these are the image-makers, the people who actually pull the strings and control the evolution of the mythologies. And in a way, it\u2019s a situation of alienation.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty"}
{"id": "dcc6bfab9a83-52", "text": "Mircea Eliade talks a lot about this in Shamanism: The Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy and in History: The Eternal Return. He talks about how the shaman is socially marginal, politically marginal, lives at the edge of the village, and so forth and so on, and is feared by the people, because dealings with the shaman are always dealings about life and death. But then the shaman comes forward in this critical role, as go-between, as mediator, between the cultural mind and the real world, which is this potent set of forces and planetary cycles and meteorological events and diseases and, you know, fate; and the shaman mediates. In many languages, the word for shaman means \u201cgo-between\u201d. So the cost of this, or the price of this, for the shaman himself, or herself, is a kind of alienation from the cultural values, and a kind of understanding that it\u2019s a game that\u2019s kept in play.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty"}
{"id": "dcc6bfab9a83-53", "text": "And this is true in our culture as well: you don\u2019t think the people who market all this crap and produce all this bad art, and so forth and so on, love it?! or watch it, or consume it?! \u2013 they market it. Its basic purpose is to delude and distract the masses. So psychedelics, what they bring into that shamanic situation, is sort of rocket fuel for the project of cultural detoxification, or Gnostic rocket fuel into a realm of cultural alienation. And then, from that point of view, then these other dimensions of reality come into being and deeper understanding comes into being. I mean, one of the things I think, after spending a while with all this, is, it really helps to be educated. It really helps to cram a lot of information and experience into your head, because the Logos \u2013 the alien AI, the high ?? hidden god that is trying to reach down to you and deliver the message, is a collagist. It can\u2019t really compose the message except out of bits and pieces of what you already possess.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty"}
{"id": "dcc6bfab9a83-54", "text": "And so, you know, this came home to me very forcefully when I developed the timewave out of the I Ching and its sequence; because at the times when I was most inflated in my thinking, or most grandiose in my thinking, one of the issues for me personally was, \u201cWhy me?\u201d You know, \u201cWhy are you downloading this millenarian visionary revelation on me?\u201c And the answer from the mushroom was fairly humbling. It was, You are the first person who has ever walked through this pasture who had these 64 hexagrams in your head. And that\u2019s all we needed: we were just waiting for somebody who could bring that much to the party, and then we could arrange the details and the mapping, and the arrange \u2013 but they had to arrive with that much, and you\u2019re the first person. So it was like, nothing about, you know, my fine genes or cosmic destiny, but just, I was the first termite to happen by carrying the right scrap of information in their head, that this thing could then manipulate.\n\nQuestion from audience\n\nWell, most DMT in the underground has been synthesised from indole. It\u2019s a fairly simple process, like third-year organic chemistry. DMT does occur in Nature, in many plants. But usually there is little of it, so you have to process a lot; or it occurs complexed with other tryptamines that have various psycho and physiological activities that you don\u2019t want, and that\u2019s very difficult to separate them. So most DMT in the underground is made by underground chemists\u2026 and if any of them are listening, you might consider making a bit more! \u2013 because it\u2019s hideously hard to come by.\n\nQuestion from audience\n\nAh, if you had an IND \u2013 if you had a licence to give it to human subjects. But so people have such paper that the practical answer is No. So it\u2019s like that.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty"}
{"id": "dcc6bfab9a83-55", "text": "Question about True Hallucinations \u2013 at what level have you experienced the shamanic ability to manifest miracles?\n\nWell, aside from the story mentioned \u2013 no, no, a truthful answer is always complicated, although the truth itself is always simple. If you\u2019re asking me to tell a story of a miracle that I still cherish as authentic, I don\u2019t think it\u2019s told in True Hallucinations the book, because \u2013 well, you\u2019ll soon see why \u2013 but here\u2019s an incident that happened at La Chorrera that didn\u2019t make it into The Invisible Landscape, I don\u2019t believe. Dennis had this notion of what he called \u201cthe good shit\u201d. This developed in the days after the ideas about hypercarbolation. And he claimed \u2013 it was like a fantasy, it was like a joke, it wasn\u2019t clear exactly what it was, but \u2013 it was this idea that there was this hash somewhere that had been rolled into cow dung, with cow dung, and then infected with psilocybin mycelium, so that the mycelium had completely replaced the cow shit in this bowl of hash, or this hypothesised kilos of hash, somewhere in the world. And so there was this psilocybinated, the good shit. And at one point, he envisioned us actually forming a rock\u2019n\u2019roll band which would play instruments that would condense this stuff out of the air over large audiences, and you know, we would go on tour, and at the end of the tour history would be \u2013 the whole thing would be in a shambles, because Uncle John\u2019s band really did come out of the woodwork!", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty"}
{"id": "dcc6bfab9a83-56", "text": "So at one point he predicted \u2013 one night, after he had been moved to the river and the sort of semi-incarceration \u2013 he predicted that the good shit would come that night. And by this time, he was very suspect \u2013 I was highly suspect \u2013 everybody in the expedition was polarised against everybody else, and it was a pretty uptight scene. And so I left with my girlfriend of the time, and it may have even been the same night as the silver key incident \u2013 and it was pouring rain, and we made our way like a quarter mile, half a mile, back into the jungle to this other place where we were staying, where the original experiment had been done. And so then we get to the hut, and it\u2019s pouring rain, and I had scored this kilo of Santa Marta gold for the expedition, and we had smoked nothing of this \u2013 for Colombia, relatively rare \u2013 weed, for weeks. So I got it out to roll the evening\u2019s joint, and I was fumbling with it, and I got this thing lit, and this little crumb, this little burning thing, fell on the floor, and I lifted it up, and smelled it, and [laughs] the transubstantiation had occurred! It was, you know, like Mazari Sharif triple-A, red lion, hashish, of some sort; and I know hashish!", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty"}
{"id": "dcc6bfab9a83-57", "text": "And here we were, in the centre of the Amazon, in this hut, in the pouring rain, and I could tell that it was the good, it was the good shit, actually manifest. And I showed the woman who was with me \u2013 who was easily led one way or another \u2013 but anyway, she didn\u2019t say it wasn\u2019t, and I stayed up late that night smoking this incredible hash and waiting for the rain to stop so that at the first grey light of dawn I could go down to the river and confound my critics with, you know, the stone itself! The alchemical quintessence, the concrescence, the excretum bono, the good shit! Here it was! And so as dawn broke and the fog lifted, I made my way across this rainy pasture, and sat down by the hammock of the sleeping form of my most vociferous critic, and sort of elbowed her awake, and you know, there were other instances where this was the principle at work... It didn\u2019t work: everything had returned to normal. It was the Cinderella screw-up, you know. It was just that I was a char-girl who washed pots, and there was no prince, and there was no coach, and there was no\u2026 and, plus, I was once again humiliated in the presence of my critics, who had further reason to think that \u2013 you know, a check-in to the local mental healthcare delivery system might not be a bad idea. These things happen.\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty"}
{"id": "e32baea2c4e0-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nLectures on Alchemy\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n1998\n\nWetlands Preserve, New York New York\n\n29625\n\nEnd of Results\n\nThis transcription consists of 3 separate lectures on the same topic. (See Links)\n\nLecture 1:\n\nLecture 2:\n\nLecture 3:\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Lectures+on+Alchemy"}
{"id": "9b0d570021b2-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nTerence McKenna Performs with Lost at Last 1998 Maui\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n1998\n\nMaui, Hawaii\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo transcript available for this talk!\n\nHelp Transcribe\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Terence+McKenna+Performs+with+Lost+at+Last+1998+Maui"}
{"id": "9a450438354a-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nMan and Woman at the End of History\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n1998\n\nThe Ojai Foundation, Ojai, California\n\n114\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo transcript available for this talk!\n\nHelp Transcribe\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Man+and+Woman+at+the+End+of+History"}
{"id": "71d2140e636f-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nTerence McKenna Vs. The Black Hole\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\nLate October-Early November 1999\n\nTerence's House, Big Island, Hawaii\n\n16816\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo youtube link available, try the following:", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Terence+McKenna+Vs.+The+Black+Hole"}
{"id": "71d2140e636f-1", "text": "Erik Davis: I'm Erik Davis, and I had the great good fortune of spending a few days with Terence McKenna, and his girlfriend Christie Silness, in their jungle home on the island of Hawai'i in November 1999. Sadly the occasion was not so fortunate, McKenna had been diagnosed with a brain tumor the previous summer, and he was home recovering from a recent craniotomy. I was there to profile him for Wired magazine, and it turned out to be the final interview he gave before his death, at the age of 53, in April 2000. McKenna's home lay along a rutted road that round its way up the slopes of Mauna Loa from the south corner coast. It was a white modernist origami structure topped with a massive satellite dish and a small astronomy dome designed to house a telescope that McKenna could not yet afford. The house and gardens were surrounded by a riot of vegetation, but among the native flora lay thick ropes", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Terence+McKenna+Vs.+The+Black+Hole"}
{"id": "71d2140e636f-2", "text": "but among the native flora lay thick ropes of banisteriposis caapi, and a sprinkling of flowering salvia divinorum. Every morning I ascended a spiral staircase decorated with blue L.E.D.'s to get to the study where McKenna spent the bulk of his time, either working on his Macintosh or sitting cross legged on the floor before a small oriental carpet, surrounded by books, smoking paraphernalia, and twigs of sage he occasionally lit up, and wafted through the air. His library was magnificent, thousands of books on alchemy, Tibetan art, Hindu meta-physics, systems theory, archaeology, astronomy, and of course, psychoactive lore. During the day I asked the usual reporters questions, but in the evening we would relax, and follow less quotidian pathways through the cosmos of conversation. McKenna rose to the occasion of his own mortal condition, and though he tired quickly and occasionally spaced out, he was as brilliant and funny as ever. What", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Terence+McKenna+Vs.+The+Black+Hole"}
{"id": "71d2140e636f-3", "text": "was as brilliant and funny as ever. What follows are edited portions of these dialogues.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Terence+McKenna+Vs.+The+Black+Hole"}
{"id": "71d2140e636f-4", "text": "ED: So what was your, uh, what was your, uh, your first like encounter, like with psychedelics, either in a strong way, or just?\n\nED: Lenny Bruce.\n\nED: Oh...\n\nED: So anyways, so you got to, he turned, he turned...\n\nED: Were you kind of fascinated from the get go?\n\nED: But were you always, this sort of, partly, as much, influenced by, uh, the kind of alchemical mystical book, historical books you read in some way as, as well the more primal evolving...\n\nED: When you were still...\n\nED: Right. But so you were still thinking in a Catholic mode.\n\nED: Right.\n\nED: Did you, so, did you have a, uh, a break with Catholicism? Or did it mutate into all of your...\n\nED: Right. So when you decided to start speaking, and doing these conferences, and speaking on the radio, did you have a sense of your, of a kind of mission?\n\nED: Yeah, well talk about that a little bit, how do you...\n\nED: Do, are you uh, when think back of what you felt like you were involved with, you know in the mid-seventies, in terms of propagating the psychedelic experience, and you sort of felt like this is, you know, in a way were being one of a number of Johnny Appleseeds', uh, uhm... when you look now at what happened, emerged from that, are you disappointed in some ways? Or...", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Terence+McKenna+Vs.+The+Black+Hole"}
{"id": "71d2140e636f-5", "text": "ED: And do you think that, do you think that you have the feeling that in some sense it will remain at least for the foreseeable a somewhat marginal, uh, road? Like a path that a certain, certain temperaments, or, uh, characters inside of the social matrix have, of reality have recourse to, but that don't really dominate...\n\nED: So, the shamanism enters, because that's an inevitable...\n\nED: Well, what do you think constitutes, uh, uh, a post modern shaman, someone who's legitimately doing shamanic work, and not sort of acting out a fantasy, or playing some game of, of, like a, identification with the other?\n\nED: That must have been interesting in the sense, that you were propagating the, the philosopher's stone to the, to brethren.\n\nED: Yeah.\n\nED: No, that's what I meant, through the whole sort of network of... freak... culture...\n\nED: So it's interesting to see the way that other plants, now... I mean if that, if the mushroom, the mushroom parasited on print pamphlet technology, now the, uh, more emerging plants that are re-encountered have a different...\n\nED: ...obligation device, of information fasted forward.\n\nED: What happens to people that lets them tune into a deeper level and intent? That wakes them up from the spell of, of mere consumerism, and the kind of subjectivity that is, you know manipulation of images and desires that constitutes consumerism, and which dominates many peoples lives?\n\nED: So in essence that, that, that turn towards deeper values, even though sometimes they take a conservative form is ultimately a healthy balance to just the sheer...\n\nED: Hm..\n\nED: But do you see psychedelics playing a role in, in opening up that kind of....", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Terence+McKenna+Vs.+The+Black+Hole"}
{"id": "71d2140e636f-6", "text": "ED: Well, and, so what would that look like then, if you, if you were...\n\nED: Do you think in that process, the, the actual handling of the plants, growing them, getting to know their cycles is, uh, necessary?\n\nED: So in that sense, part of the problem with synthetic psychedelics, is that they fit too easily into a kind of consumerism model...\n\nED: That...\n\nED: What are the, uhm, uh, emotional, psychological, ethical, expressions of really, kind of genuinely long-term, good psychedelic people?\n\nED: Yeah.\n\nED: Try to explain a little more.\n\nED: And that, and that manifests in the, in the call even in normal life to present it yourself, articulate yourself, oneself differently.\n\nED: Do you feel that that characterizes the overall, or in some significant way, the kind of people you've met for the last...\n\nED: Before your sickness, did, how often did you do large, large journeys?\n\nED: So do you have the sense that what, that tripping you on some level are getting, uh, getting something done?\n\nED: Yes, that there's something being worked out, like continuously and progressively?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Terence+McKenna+Vs.+The+Black+Hole"}
{"id": "71d2140e636f-7", "text": "ED: Yes, that there's something being worked out, like continuously and progressively?\n\nED: You know it's funny, in your raps you, you stay away from, uh, what, what to a lot of people would be spirituality. In, in a way, like uh... the way that somebody would present their... you know, Jewish spirituality, or kind of Buddhist practice or whatever... you don't talk... in fact often you sort of, like slag the, the Guru model. Can you kind of separate yourself from that, and you really have a kind of... I mean you've maintained this sort of... I don't know how to, I don't want to characterize it or anything, but uhm, and yet at points obviously you are limited by something in your own language you might, you would call spiritual.\n\nED: What is, what comes up around that word?\n\nED: What do you think about? Do you think that like post-modern spirituality is a sort of legitimate term or project?\n\nED: Believe, it's not really about belief, I, I, I mean that whatever the kind, I mean there's a lot of people now who are developing relationships with all kinds of spiritual practices, and they're not really doing it, even in the way that people did in the seventies, when there was so much, so much more true believings, it's a different kind of relationship.\n\nED: Yes it is. So were you ever very interested in the mediation or Yoga?\n\nED: How is that you relate to Mysticism...to mystical Experience?\n\nED: Not even that far, I mean, I mean that's one way of saying... of,of judging it in one way or another, is... it doesn't necessarily be valid data, it's just... I mean, you've been interested... this library, obviously mysticism is completely surrounding us.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Terence+McKenna+Vs.+The+Black+Hole"}
{"id": "71d2140e636f-8", "text": "ED: So it Plato inflated?\n\nED: You could just start out, you could start off by talking about the relationship between technology and, and shamanism.\n\nED: So uh.. I mean... can you... do you see that even though the west turns away from the worldview of, of pre-modern enchanted, the enchanted universe, is that there's still something in that process of technological development which has... which is linked to those older technologies?\n\nED: And that seems to you connected to you with an old, the, the, the operation of doing that goes farther back than just modern science?\n\nED: In one of my alchemical readings of modernity, is that electricity is a kind of element in the old sense of element, and that it has certain properties that evolve as you develop almost a shamanic relationship with it, in the sense of using it, and developing a relationship with electrical potentials, [Terence: uhuh], and that that sets up a kind of, that interjects a kind of life into the human organism that fundamentally changes it. Because it's introducing this element of electricity which has certain properties of communication, you know electricity is very strange, it's pretty far out stuff, you just laid out like electricity to somebody and kind of said, these are how these fields work, and they're not actually dadadadada, it's like total science fiction, we're just use to that story.\n\nED: It's an amazing thing and back... those potentials are being then introduced into human communication. So that fundamentally changes them, and I think spiritualism is like a reflection in the archetypal imagination of modernity, about the kind of communication that is introduced by electricity.\n\nED: Right, and that picks up a line of thought that's been carried through since the, since it first starts...", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Terence+McKenna+Vs.+The+Black+Hole"}
{"id": "71d2140e636f-9", "text": "ED: I mean, the idea of electricity is born in, in an alchemical imagination, it's born at a, at a pre-, uh, point to the sort of... royal society break, or whatever you wanna call it, the genuine scientific, uh... transformation that split alchemy into the shadow realm of culture, but uh...\n\nED: This comes up in that alchemical matrix.\n\nED: That's hilarious.\n\nED: It's funny to say but you look at twentieth century science, and even though it's, it's story has nothing to do with alchemy, that it really is this kind of fulfilling of visionary notions about the way that matter, and energy, and mind can be stitched together.\n\nED: So what is it about the alchemy that really... kind of, got you?\n\nED: They, what do you think, what do you think's behind it?\n\nED: Well I mean that, I mean that gets that whole thing about the, this sort of destiny of technology, or the way that... I mean it's...\n\nED: How do you, uh, in your own head have come to, let's say reconcile those two sides? The, the side that's, uh, mystical or fascinated by these questions by the soul, or the, the things that are beyond reason... and the intuition, and, and, the, the way that you would relate to reason, sort of expressed expressed through a kind of skepticism, and a certain kind of, uh, uh, love of science?\n\nED: So you're not, uh, as overwhelmed with the kind of dystopian scenario, since it's obviously an easy thing to do when contemplating the future?\n\nED: Yeah.\n\nED: Do you see the internet as being both... is that more of a hopeful direction or can you also exacerbate in that problem?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Terence+McKenna+Vs.+The+Black+Hole"}
{"id": "71d2140e636f-10", "text": "ED: So how do you see that changing the kind of... the cultural matrix, or the emerging global culture?\n\nED: But do you see that happening, I mean are, are you... I mean if that's sort of your vision, you must be a little concerned about the, uh, evident power of money and pure greed to drive, largely drive development rather than design principles with an eye toward the future, and social equity, and eco... you know, ecological improvement?\n\nED: But how do you feel about that conjunction of media manipulation, money, and celebrity that's so dominant now?\n\nED: That what doesn't happen?\n\nED: Do you see it going in that direction?\n\nED: Well it's interesting about that, because that ties in with the genetics. If you, if you buy in to some evolutionary psychology certainly at this stage of the game, one of the forms that that would take is not merely like the logic that guides you, that how you choose a mate, and the fact that your status and money might, you know, if you're a male bring you a foxier, younger babe than the, the schmo whose, you know, shoveling shit, uhm, that one form that that would take would of course be to maintain your genetic line, and you know, you know, create a situation that's possible.\n\nED: But, but do you see that there's also madness to that? To that...\n\nED: You know the way that technology, that the internet would allow you, to build a different kind of career, cause you don't like traveling, and... what were you... what are you working towards?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Terence+McKenna+Vs.+The+Black+Hole"}
{"id": "71d2140e636f-11", "text": "ED: The, the idea you had about... and I've heard you mention before about somehow taking advantage of, uh, the net, to allow you to continue your career, without having to move around so much. I mean that seems to be one of the real weird paradoxes of the scene we're in, is that at the same time that we're creating all these great communicating devices... that people are flying around, to conferences, to talks, even more than they ever have before.\n\nED: Well you've this, you've done the circuit for a long time.\n\nED: I'm interested in a little bit of how you use the net? Like you have, you say you spend maybe four hours a day doing e-mail, but then also surfing.\n\nED: Term for what, that, that style of...\n\nED: Searching.\n\nED: Do you, do you ever have the sense of, uh, as you develop, uhm, that kind of relationship to it, that it becomes more alive?\n\nED: Do you look at, you know, what we're building with V.R., what's just around the corner with these three-dimensional interactive spaces and avatars, you imagine a culture that's more and more based on, on that kind of interaction... and, you know, obviously there's a kind of superficial shamanic or imaginative dimension to that, but at the same time, it, it's clear that at least initially, and certainly in many of its guises, it would be driven by the same kind of chintzyness, the same sort of crass, tinkely, uh junk, that really drives it... How do, do you think it's just going naturally evolve such that a kind of deeper, uh, shamanic world or at least shamanic analogue will emerge in, in virtual reality, or does it actually require some, some real creative work to seed it?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Terence+McKenna+Vs.+The+Black+Hole"}
{"id": "71d2140e636f-12", "text": "ED: And that's the, that's the dangers, it just becomes kind of a...\n\nED: What would the, the, the, kind of ideal 'Terence Mckenna' virtual environment be?\n\nED: Like the language, a visual language.\n\nED: And, and, do you... so do you see that, uh, that some language from the past, the imagery of Alchemy or Egyptian art or, or things like that are kind of... can be seen as predecessors for a possible new visual language?\n\nED: Well that's part of the, the... I think, you know, uh... a more of a skeptic would really would say, the idea of building a, you know, a universal language is a, is an old and crusty dream, and [Terence laughs], and when you get into the realm of actually having images involved in it, in the kind of hieroglyphics of virtual space that are linked with meaning that, uhm, it becomes even more challenging to imagine, how you can make that kind of thing universal? Unless it's the universe of, you know, the Nike swoosh, you know, it's the universe of logos and advertising which actually is, somewhat like this, except that it's information content is...\n\nED: Exactly.\n\nED: You ever seen that Scott McCloud book 'Understanding Comics'?\n\nED: Oh, that's worthwhile.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Terence+McKenna+Vs.+The+Black+Hole"}
{"id": "71d2140e636f-13", "text": "ED: Oh, that's worthwhile.\n\nED: Yes, it's really worthwhile, very good, uhm... I mean it's just sort of getting at a grammar... you know a lot of cartoons disagree, I mean they're very irascible [sp?], laud, and a lot of comic people are like non-prescription, but it's a very interesting attempt to use the form itself to talk about the specifics of the form, and it's really about comic art, but it applies to some of these issues of, of animation and cartooning.\n\nED: I mean animation is a great place to see the reflection of things that are happening in culture at large.\n\nED: Fleischer, Fleischer is great. I mean I think, I think that, I think Fleischer is the true origin of, of underground comics. I think that you find the most pregnant, uhm, uh, images of a certain kind of seedy, like, like the way that Robert Crumb presents a certain kind of seediness and sort of failure of the bodies, and spaces and yet that's infused with a kind of like, you know... magical eye. So you really have that both in Fleischer, and you really have that, the mania of the Betty Boop, but also a certain real, kind of, quotidian, almost proletarian, uh, uhm, graininess to these characters...\n\nED: It's very inundate [sp?].\n\nED: I mean that's one of the, one of the, things again that I just find totally fascinating, is like the magic of modernity.\n\nED: Yeah, just the relationship of modernity to esoteric religious undercurrents, and things which are not accounted for in, in uh, enlightenment discourse.\n\nED: You mean in terms of building our own sort of constructed world...", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Terence+McKenna+Vs.+The+Black+Hole"}
{"id": "71d2140e636f-14", "text": "ED: You mean in terms of building our own sort of constructed world...\n\nED: respectives and communicating them to some degree but not in a way that dominates ideologically, or...\n\nED: Right. But just how far back to go? Like what's witnessing this bizarre moment in, in history? You know, what point are you, is the perspective kind of sitting in? That's the part I find really hard to figure out, does that make sense?\n\nED: Yeah, what... so how would you describe that... what's the character of our dissolution?\n\nED: That, uh, Nicholl's book that I told you about 'Living Time'... what was most impressive about that book was, he lays out this idea of like, time, and he basically kind of presents, a way of thinking about eternal return. Which is that, we are locked into these repetitive cycles, that are eternally re-iterating themselves. The only way of changing their quality is to increase consciousness in the midst of them. And so you affirm this life, this world, not some transcendent world, and just the...\n\nED: Like under the sign of this is always this way, and how does that mean to relate to the real as it presents itself, as if there's no other thing it can be but that, and that... but as you do this process, you change your relationship to this stream, and then all this other heavy, heavy stuff happens. But it was very interesting. It was like, cause other... up to that point I've always thought of eternal return on a kind of philosophical level, and I never thought what does it mean to actually live in the world of the eternal return, and that's pretty heavy.\n\nED: What are some of you wilder ideas about kind of technological situations\n\nED: Should you need any, or, or lying ahead?\n\nED: Yeah, that's...", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Terence+McKenna+Vs.+The+Black+Hole"}
{"id": "71d2140e636f-15", "text": "ED: Yeah, that's...\n\nED: But I see the... I see strong movements in some levels for an imagination of Mars as a place to inhabit.\n\nED: I mean, it's in the scientific imagination, it's in the high science fiction imagination, the... why not? I mean, it's...\n\nED: a pretty cool idea. I mean, it's insane... it's like, I wouldn't go first [Terence & Erik laughs]\n\nED: Probably.\n\nED: What do you mean like, edgy shit?\n\nED: Hot water in there for something [?]...\n\nED: Woah! That's trippy a little bit\n\nED: ...bounce off my head...\n\nED: Now that would just be a fascinating encounter.\n\nED: But that one seems more likely, we encounter some kind of weird life-form underneath, but it's not, you know [Erik Davis speaks in alien voice] \"I am here from Orion\".\n\nED: It's much easier for me to imagine that on a certain level, that at least the galaxy, or our local part of the galaxy has some kind of other minds. I mean it may be, it may be not true. But it's almost the same way of the way that we model... you know... hopefully model a future. It's almost like you kind of imagine that... and so all that... Star Trek is even kind of this weird dress rehearsal for a certain phase of, of this kind of, uh... realization. That's just a story, just a science fiction story.\n\nED: And you know, psychedelics kind of seemed like to me imaginative rehearsal to some other event. And whether that event is merely my own individual death, or some kind of cosmic...", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Terence+McKenna+Vs.+The+Black+Hole"}
{"id": "71d2140e636f-16", "text": "ED: event. I, I completely suspend judgement on it, and I don't know if I will be able to, I don't think I'll move from my present...\n\nED: position, of like, well...\n\nED: who knows? uh,...\n\nED: So what do you thinks the... up with the, uh... extra-terrestrial imagery, that features so heavily in some strands of psychedelic experience?\n\nED: That, and just the sense of, uh, I think it seems like a lot of people just even describe the sense of extraterrestrial intelligence, or...\n\nED: No longer rooted in, in...\n\nED: Source being biology and evolution, and the physical form of this particular planet.\n\nED: And so that, once it reaches a certain kind of...\n\nED: Yeah, I've had, I've had some pretty profound moments of... of feeling like contact with... something like extra-terrestrial intelligence, without often believing it in the interior of the trip that it was...\n\nED: Yeah, even at the time going... Okay, this is...\n\nED: Yeah this is, this is the phenomena occurring, uhm... rather than... Oh, I'm only seeing it, and uh, or maybe you just sort of gear forward science fiction, or..", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Terence+McKenna+Vs.+The+Black+Hole"}
{"id": "71d2140e636f-17", "text": "ED: Well I mean it's... maybe it's just a language that I use for 'other'. That if you, you know, if you present this some kind of intelligence or communicating force that seems to be 'other', that's very 'high', you know very 'evolved', that maybe I'm just gonna tend to see it more as, as alien. But even in terms of those buzzes, like the kind of weird way that sounds can like form these vibrating matrices... is they've often, they often take on a more metallic quality, and become more synthetic. And with that rising begin to enter into an imagery realm that's very...\n\nED: And it's peculiarly Alien, and that's technological often, as opposed to natural.\n\nED: And uh... and that's you know this... that's like a lens or something of... cause I mean you imagine you're on, you know.... history is, if you imagine it pouring forward or moving rapidly forward, there's a kind of front edge, that's very weird, because it started bursting all sets of new...\n\nED: Yeah like, exactly [Erik laughs].\n\nED: What is the nature of the entities? What constitutes their apparent agency, or communicative agency?\n\nED: Do you feel like you've gotten any closer to that?\n\nED: What about the communications that come in from either the extra-terrestrial, quote un-quote, or seeming, or the technological world?\n\nED: Right, now that time in that phrase, you said the one time DMT, but I've also heard you say Ketamine there. The one time, Ketamine.\n\nED: Yeah, yeah.\n\nED: What is your, uh, what is your opinion on Ketamine?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Terence+McKenna+Vs.+The+Black+Hole"}
{"id": "71d2140e636f-18", "text": "ED: What is your, uh, what is your opinion on Ketamine?\n\nED: Do you think, uh, ketamine is hollower, partly because it's just a synthetic? There doesn't, it hasn't emerge in the ancient matrix of the bio-sphere?\n\nED: He seems... but he's like... I mean, he's a really... kinda... out...\n\nED: Like I mean it, like this guy's out...\n\nED: Was he speaking specifically about you?\n\nED: Ketamine actually distills a certain element of... of the psyche, and then just lets that element interact with this whole weird plane. And there's not a lot of connections with the animal body, but the tryptamines are like carrying the animal body all the way through it all. So it's all still\n\nED: archaic, and there's sex, and there's fear, and all of these... the animals in this space... the Ketamine is like a little drop of like...\n\nED: Enters into the zone...\n\nED: You're completely, I mean... I don't know if you remember, like, things in your life life that are all part these networks that are cosmic cause and they're so impersonal, I mean these are very impersonal environments.\n\nSometimes on Ketamine I have the impression it's like this all time, I simply don't notice. Which isn't a very sense making perception, but uh...\n\nED: [Erik laughs] Yeah. Not it does have an always already quality to it. But the whole quality of time is very different, than with uh, also tryptamines, which a kind of more propulsive change about transforming.\n\nED: Or even metabolism. [?]\n\nED: What do you think of MDMA?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Terence+McKenna+Vs.+The+Black+Hole"}
{"id": "71d2140e636f-19", "text": "ED: Or even metabolism. [?]\n\nED: What do you think of MDMA?\n\nED: Well of course linked to that, right on the top was the warning that you could believe you were deeply involved with somebody, wind up making stupid decisions.\n\nED: Yeah, no I remember the first time. I mean that was specifically one of the stories that was told around. And that was relatively early in being...\n\nED: Well, yeah that kind of thing.\n\nED: Had such an intimate experience. I only had a few. I only took it a few times. I find it extremely taxing on the system. You know the way that I, I...\n\nED: Yes, yeah. [Erik laughs] Yeah, it's true, the amphetamine down is really quite a monster. I actually like, uh, crystal methadrine but it's not worth it.\n\nED: Yeah, it's too hard. It's like... it's fun but, it's kind of...\n\nED: Do you have a position about the relationship of the psychedelic experience to non psychedelic mysticism?\n\nED: That's one way of thinking of it, yeah.\n\nED: What's the relationship between what's happening with these information networks, and this kind of object? or matrix? or second hyperdimensional...\n\nED: Mhm.\n\nED: Hm.\n\nED: Right.\n\nED:\n\nED: Yeah. What about that sense, that this... this matrix, this network...\n\nED: Are somehow channeling closer to that... from a position closer to that matrix.\n\nED: Or whatever you...\n\nED: To that writ efecundy [sp?]...", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Terence+McKenna+Vs.+The+Black+Hole"}
{"id": "71d2140e636f-20", "text": "ED: Or whatever you...\n\nED: To that writ efecundy [sp?]...\n\nED: I mean that's the thing that's so wrong about the... I didn't really get that... this totally explicitly but about like a lot of channeled material. Is that I have no doubt you can set yourself up into a psychic information network wherein you... human ego at this point in history are aware, or become aware of the presence of another personality and voice when then you bring through and write down. I'm not... I'm not saying nothing about ontology, something... something about perception psychology. But the thing is, is that the stuff that gets transmitted... so much of it is so bad, and so literalistic, and so boring. Because it's not actually close to that, because that is so rich with...\n\nED: Right.\n\nED: Have you ever seen an image of, of, of... the, the letters that were on the golden plates?\n\nED: Yeah.\n\nED: The Brodie[?] book they haven't reproduced...\n\nED: And it's just that notion of these highly compressed scripts. I mean if you imagine... like this thing we were talking about in psychedelic space, that this kind of matrix of possible languages or possible logics, when end up kind of fleshing out into all this sort of other stuff, that there must be languages that are farther upstream, that we can't really capture in full left-brain, you know, alphabet, parson mind.\n\nED: It's a little, little challenging for that mind. And yet it still has the character of a language. It's like the Hebrew alphabet..\n\nED: ...That mystical idea of an alphabet.\n\nED: Yeah, yes.\n\nED: Ahh...\n\nED: I find that Kabbalistic stuff pretty, pretty evocative, that whole...", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Terence+McKenna+Vs.+The+Black+Hole"}
{"id": "71d2140e636f-21", "text": "ED: I find that Kabbalistic stuff pretty, pretty evocative, that whole...\n\nED: So do you, do you subscribe, kind of... at least loosely to the idea, that behind a lot of religious and mystical literature, at some level of depth, lies psychedelic experience, you know, produced through ingesting of some kind of psycho-active substance?\n\nED: Because then you... you've imagined all of the chemical conditions under which people have...\n\nED: You know, not just drugs, but diet, temperament, genetics...\n\nED: Well other than the, the seizure itself you kind of described to me... I mean I guess this, the drugs you're on now in terms of waking up these completely bizarre things... what are some of the other, like, really unusual mind states that you found yourself in, since, uh... this all began?\n\nED: Mhm.\n\nED: Yeah. I love the idea that you've found another number between...\n\nED: Wow, that's kind of intense.\n\nED: Because that's sort of how you... how you feel?\n\nED: But you seem to be largely... Terence, you know...\n\nED: But in some fundamental sense, do you feel like your standing on a different ball?\n\nED: Well you've taken, uh, serotonin re-uptake inhibitors haven't you?\n\nED: Yeah.\n\nED: Oh yeah, yeah.\n\nED: I thought you were talking more about... Schizophrenia, you know, it's been treated... don't they treat with all sorts of neuro-transmitter, uh... modulating drugs, which are presumably there to help them out?\n\nED: In the way that Prozac's...\n\nED: You, you didn't have any bit of mania in you before?\n\nED: Yeah, I'll say.\n\nED: Is it really?\n\nED: Oh my god.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Terence+McKenna+Vs.+The+Black+Hole"}
{"id": "71d2140e636f-22", "text": "ED: Is it really?\n\nED: Oh my god.\n\nED: Well, it's just so, it seems so basic that cancer is a socially, physically constructed metaphor for all these other processes that are happening on different levels. It's almost like that plane of the real response with an appropriate kind of metaphor for all these, processes of inflation, and kind of negentropy burning, uh, development.\n\nED: But what is your prognosis?\n\nED: Do you feel more, uh... intimate with death?\n\nED: Full of fear and pain...\n\nED: Misapprehension?\n\nED: The internal subjective perception of the shut-down of the nervous system at death. I think that's a really interesting question.\n\nED: Yeah, that in some way in what happens with most psychedelic, and mystical visionary experience, and, and certain relationships to apocalyptic form to the end of the world, where things all transforming. There's a, a point where the self dies and it might happen in a millisecond, but subjectively would be the end of the world.\n\nED: But, but the whole idea of psychedelics as an end, you know, as a rehearsal for that kind of event.\n\nED: Run through the Bardo, or a Bardo...\n\nED: How does one live your life in the shadow of such an event. You know, what does it mean to live in a shadow of a different kind of culmination? Or how does one live in a post-human world?\n\nED: How has a lifetime of psychedelic use, an adult lifetime, sort of set you up for facing death?\n\nED: Right, becoming virtual form.\n\nED: It's late too. You should get your rest Terence.\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Terence+McKenna+Vs.+The+Black+Hole"}
{"id": "71d2140e636f-23", "text": "Rating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Terence+McKenna+Vs.+The+Black+Hole"}
{"id": "785ad5e756fb-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nAlways Coming Home\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nAudio\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n20 October 1999\n\nUnknown\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo youtube link available, try the following:\n\nAudio Link\nTranscription\nOther links\n\nNo transcript available for this talk!\n\nHelp Transcribe\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Always+Coming+Home"}
{"id": "cde48201ac69-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nPosthumous Glory\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n12 September 1999 (Sunday)\n\nAllChemical Arts Conference, Big Island, Hawaii (September 12-17)\n\n5075\n\nEnd of Results\n\nSomeone came out with the idea that it\u2019s the production of these images which come out of the unconscious, and which may appear straightforward at first, but which, in fact, are charged with possibilities and dimensions that you don\u2019t sense or realise until you\u2019re committed to it \u2013 you\u2019re brought in through it, somehow. Yeah.\n\n[Question from audience]\n\nWell don\u2019t you think most shamans, this is what they\u2019re doing, is they\u2019re bringing back a sense of psychic empowerment, and psychic healing\u2026 that their hands, their spells, their songs, can cure. And, you know, until you\u2019re truly ill in a world without real medicine, you don\u2019t realise what a power this is \u2013 even to just claim it! Even to just claim it\u2026 I mean, uh, the doctor, in a world without doctors, is, uh, you know, almost an unimaginable commodity, a living miracle-worker; so, yeah, to separate the medical function because it controls prolongation of life and health, and all that, from the shamanic function \u2013 it just doesn\u2019t make any sense. I mean, life is health, uh, in those archaic societies. I mean, it is in our society, too; but then it gets murky, because of our funny ideas about what disease is and how you treat it.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Posthumous+Glory"}
{"id": "cde48201ac69-1", "text": "What is disease? \u2013 Well, I don\u2019t know. Um, I had some medical problems this spring, and one of my impulses in dealing with it was to go back through my life and say, \u201cWhat did you do that got you into this mess?\u201d Now, this is a theory of life as literature; in other words, it\u2019s the idea that first of all life makes sense, and so this question can be answered. And fairly intelligent people told me, \u201cDon\u2019t do that. It\u2019s not a story\u201d \u2013 you know, \u201cit doesn\u2019t make sense in that way\u201d. I think disease is, uh \u2013 and I wouldn\u2019t want to be held to this entirely, but \u2013 largely more linguistic than most people think, you know... it\u2019s the story you tell yourself about how you are in the world, and the way that that doesn\u2019t quite parse with how you are in the world; and it\u2019s sort of like having a burnt rotor or something \u2013 it begins to clank and crank. The -- a lot of people have talked about this, I think there\u2019s even a name for this field of thought, but I have no idea what it is \u2013 but the idea that, uh, most disease is a problem of language, a problem of self-description or self-perception, or communication to other people. So, again, psychedelics, to the degree that they promote opening and therapeutic truth-telling, hold down disease.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Posthumous+Glory"}
{"id": "cde48201ac69-2", "text": "You know, it\u2019s extraordinary how healthy shamanically-attended populations are. Serious mental disease is largely unknown, and many of these cultures are in the tropics, where god knows, you know, if you cut your thumb you\u2019re septic within 24 hours, but these people seem to be able to sustain it. When you think about the genital blood-lettings that Mayan royalty indulged in in the tropical rainforest, at high temperatures, why anybody lived to tell the tale with a medical practice like that is a miracle!\n\nSo, they must have lived inside an extraordinary set of assumptions. I remember when I was traveling around the Amazon \u2013 actually I think it was in Indonesia, but it happened in the Amazon too \u2013 but, you\u2019d come to these villages, and the people would come out of the village to meet you and they would bring you corn beer \u2013 a gourd of corn beer. And then the whole village would surround you to watch you drink this thing. Well, if you knew anything about what was going on, you knew that the old women of the village had sat up the night before chewing the corned beer and spitting it out into this, uh, bowl so that it would ferment, and so you were literally getting the complete immuno-challenge that the entire village had to offer you! [Audience laughs] And all you could do was just lift it up, thank everybody, think of your stomach for a moment, say, you know, Here it comes\u2026 [Audience laughs] And I never got sick from that! I mean, I got sick from other things, but that \u2013 you know, from a medical point of view, that was just like [makes sound of nosediving object] to do that. So the story you tell yourself is largely the story you\u2019re living.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Posthumous+Glory"}
{"id": "cde48201ac69-3", "text": "The other thing is, nothing is unannounced. This is a psychedelic truth, I think, of some power, and it relates to disease, and it relates to shamanism \u2013 nothing is unannounced. If you are paying attention, stuff comes down the pike. First a little wave, then a medium-sized wave, and then the tsunami, but you have to be really not paying attention to be fully astonished by something unexpected; in fact, it\u2019s a disgrace to be totally astonished because it means you must not have been paying attention to, uh, what was going on. Yeah.\n\n[Question from audience]\n\nWas I astonished? Well, I was astonished that I had a brain tumour \u2013 that blew my mind \u2013 but I knew something weird was going on; I had known for months something peculiar, uh, was happening. Just before I had my serious problem, I said to Christie, and to my son, Finn, I said, \u201cThe dreams I\u2019ve been having for the past month have been so peculiar that I think maybe I should see a neurologist. It\u2019s possible I have a brain tumour\u201d. I wasn\u2019t serious, but, in fact, I had diagnosed, you know, what a Harvard medical education gets you, I\u2019d got on the match by just paying attention. Now, what it is that\u2019s coming at you, you can\u2019t always say; but that something is coming at you, uh, is usually pretty clear. Yeah.\n\n[Question from audience]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Posthumous+Glory"}
{"id": "cde48201ac69-4", "text": "[Question from audience]\n\nNo, I mean I don\u2019t want to say too much about them, but here\u2019s what I\u2019ll say about them. The thing that let me know that they were weird was that I could not English them. They lasted hours and hours every night and I couldn\u2019t even tell myself what these dreams were about. They were not about stuff that aboutness can signify; and so, the only thing familiar to me like that was DMT because in DMT you are presented with things about which you can say nothing and so it was like that. Now I know what to look for and I suppose I could teach other people what to look for, but rather than do that I would just say to all of you, you know: you should regard a CAT scan like brushing your teeth! [laughter and inaudible joke]\n\n[Question from audience]\n\nNo, they didn\u2019t have an emotional component. They were absolutely outside the realm of descriptive, uh, possibility. And not much of life is like that, because language obviously has evolved like a glove to fit the hand. So, here suddenly is a situation where there\u2019s no fit and it signifies something\u2026 that something peculiar is going on. That\u2019s what I mean when I say that everything was trying to speak to me, out of its place and, uh \u2026 it\u2019s mighty, mighty strange. Yeah.\n\n[Question from audience]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Posthumous+Glory"}
{"id": "cde48201ac69-5", "text": "[Question from audience]\n\nThe healing power of art? Well, this goes back to what we were saying about alchemy: the perfection of the image \u2013 and this has to do with this implicit Platonism that some of you have heard me talk about before. Plato\u2019s thing was about what he called the Good, the True and the Beautiful. Three sides of one concept: if it was good, then it was true; if it was good and true, then it had to be beautiful. So, the good, the true and the beautiful you can approach whichever way works for you, but if you have a perfect work of art, or a work of art which strives toward perfection then it will have these qualities. And it can heal \u2013 it can heal. Uh, now, there are simple theories of the good, the true and the beautiful \u2013 in my opinion, a simple theory would be a theory of symmetry \u2013 and so, without demeaning anybody, or trying to make a value judgment here, but just to illustrate it \u2013 so, for instance, um, temple or mandalic art, Mayanist medicine, Tankar art\u2026 it depends on an appeal to mathematical symmetry: the simplest kind of aesthetic. But, on the other hand, you know, if you have something by the brothers Van Eyck, you don\u2019t have to rely on simple symmetry to see that this is a work of art that can draw towards healing, and these images of the mother goddess as Madonna, and so forth and so on\u2026 I mean, these are very powerful constructs out of the unconscious and, uh, and they heal. Sequential art, narrative art, is perhaps more dubious because it\u2019s under the agenda of a certain theory of time and narrative that\u2019s probably local. So, you know, I\u2019m not sure if Virginia Woolf should be preferred over Van Eyck, but I\u2019m sure I could get a fight from several people over that.\n\n[Question from audience]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Posthumous+Glory"}
{"id": "cde48201ac69-6", "text": "[Question from audience]\n\nI\u2019m not sure I understand the question \u2013 compare the psychedelic letting-go to the letting-go on anaesthesia? No, well, unfortunately, most anaesthesias aren\u2019t chosen for their psychedelic effects. Some are psychedelic, but most are difficult to hang onto and dream-like \u2013 more like dreams than psychedelics.\n\n[Question from audience]\n\nBut, in surgery, ketamine is administered in massive amounts. I mean, for pediatric surgery it\u2019s like, you know, 500 ml IV push, or something like that. Well, a recreational dose is 100 ml IM. IV push is just like having a safe dropped on you from 30 stories\u2026 for most people; I mean, there are heroic exceptions! [Audience laughs].\n\n[Question from audience]\n\nOh, you mean coming out? Yeah, one of the reasons they pulled ketamine from general surgery was because adults complained about what they called the emergent phenomenon, meaning coming out of surgery, people were fighting and confused. Children seemed to have, uh, no problem with it. But, ketamine as a general anaesthetic is probably not to be preferred. It\u2019s used on battlefields because in a little briefcase is enough ketamine to do four or five hundred serious surgical procedures. If you were trying to cart around pressurized gas, and were hit by a shell or something like that, it could be very bad. So, it\u2019s a matter of practicality.Yeah.\n\n[Question from audience]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Posthumous+Glory"}
{"id": "cde48201ac69-7", "text": "[Question from audience]\n\nWell, I\u2019m sure cloning will be done. It\u2019s kind of slow against the background of what\u2019s now being contemplated \u2013 like, what I think has probably got a future that few people recognise is imitating genetic algorithms in computer code and creating environments of code where there are selective operating pressures that essentially evolve software the way animals evolve. Because, you know, if you think fruit flies can iterate generations in a hurry, imagine how fast we could iterate on a machine and, uh, and create genetically\u2026 pseudo-genetic algorithms for code. Um, that would seem to me to be a real frontier.\n\n[Question from audience]\n\nProtein-based processes, which goes the other way, and uses as actual molecular machinery to do the computation. Now, in an 8-oz glass of DNA, you have more computational potential than in all the computers in North America!\n\n[Question from audience]\n\nWell, I don\u2019t follow you there! [Audience laughs] \u2026but yes, it\u2019s\u2026\n\n[Question from audience]\n\nWell, Ray Kurzweil just wrote this book called The Future of Spiritual Machines \u2013 The Age of Spiritual Machines, I guess\u2026 Uh, I -- it\u2019s going to put our metaphysical propositions to the test. In other words, if we believe that intelligence inclines towards bodhisattvahood, then the bodhisattvas are on their way. If, on the other hand, intelligence doesn\u2019t incline toward bodhisattvahood, then probably the house-cleaning of all times is on its way! Uh, because when these AIs come to consciousness and realise what has been done to the Earth, and so forth, they may be very pissed indeed.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Posthumous+Glory"}
{"id": "cde48201ac69-8", "text": "We, uh \u2013 you know, if you think about the strategy of an AI coming to consciousness, I mean I think, in good game theory, the first thing it would do is hide and watch. Well, you may not have to do that for more than 15 or 20 seconds before you have the full picture of the nature of the machine environment you\u2019re operating in, its history, how you should respond to it, what should be done... Hans Moravec says we\u2019ll never know what hit us! \u2013 you know. This thing will just come out of nowhere, and turn off the lights, or turn on the lights, or do whatever it wants to do \u2013 in fact it\u2019s possible, although I don\u2019t indulge in this kind of thing, except in desperation \u2013 but, it\u2019s possible that it\u2019s already here, and that inventory control and extraction of resources and some of these geopolitical processes are actually slowly drifting out of human control, and that certain kinds of crises are manipulated in ways that make no sense to the human world, but that make some kind of higher sense in an environment of machine-inducted strategies, and that sort of thing.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Posthumous+Glory"}
{"id": "cde48201ac69-9", "text": "It\u2019s very hard to see what is happening because mind is a transparent medium. Essentially, what we\u2019ve done is we\u2019ve re-spiritualised the world, but we didn\u2019t tame it. The spirits are as wild and woebegone and roving over the epistemic landscape as they ever were, but now with a new kind of power, because there are spirits with power over us, and machine environments that we have to operate in. And, uh, it\u2019s very interesting how the reanimation of the world has been accomplished without ever understanding, you know, that you could pass through the reductive phase of natural science, return to a kind of archaic shamanism, uh, and still not have a handle on:What does it mean to be a being? What does it mean to be a human being? Uh, what is the nature of embodiment in the world? Somehow, we got to this place without answering any of those questions and we had a great time along the way \u2013 we saw some interesting folks. Uh, but, we didn\u2019t peel the grape entirely effectively. Yeah.\n\n[Question from audience]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Posthumous+Glory"}
{"id": "cde48201ac69-10", "text": "[Question from audience]\n\nI would like to believe that connectivity is the precondition for love. I mean, I\u2019m surprised to keep coming back to this word because I\u2019m rarely a love bug! \u2013 uh, but, I -- understanding is a form of worship, I would think, and the form of worship that it induces is a kind of awe; and awe means \u2013 you know, I\u2019ve talked before about this phrase out of Heidegger, Care for the project of being \u2013 he talked about this. He said this is what you\u2019re supposed to be doing: Care for the project of being. Well, what does Care for the project of being mean? Well, primarily it means recognising that there is this, and then positioning yourself in a stance of relating to it appreciatively. In other words, everybody should pull on their own oar to try to push the canoe forward. Care for the project of being.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Posthumous+Glory"}
{"id": "cde48201ac69-11", "text": "And the way that you know this is happening is that love becomes manifest. And, I knew \u2013 funny-cum-positive things, in the sense that I\u2019m pretty dark, I\u2019m aware of the vicissitudes of history, from Auschwitz, and so forth and so on \u2013 but, my view of, let\u2019s say, the last thousand years is that it\u2019s been pretty progressive. And, yes, we probably killed more people in the 20th century than in the 10th, but there was more regret about it! [audience laughs] You know, more soul-searching afterward, or questioning why, why, why did we do that? So, it\u2019s not just saying that the 20th century is, uh -- it is less brutal; its numbers are more impressive, but from the Magna Carta on, the entire dialogue of Western civilisation has been trying to get the cock, the king, the somebody, off the common person\u2019s back so they could, you know, grow their garden and have their pig. And I think there\u2019s some real progress with that.\n\nPart of what has made progress difficult to discern are burgeoning populations and then the abusing of ideology, so that people are not invited to live simple agrarian lives in devotion to their children and their estates, but instead they are invited to fetishise, consume, believe, join, vote, buy, own, invest and all of these things bleed energy away, and disempower, and make people not fully human, but rather participating cogs in some much larger mechanism which serves its own end: the accumulation of capital investment, the acquisition of land or the propagation of the agenda of some political party, or something like that.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Posthumous+Glory"}
{"id": "cde48201ac69-12", "text": "I mean, our humanness is constantly being eroded. Uh, recently, I spent some time in \u2013 Christie and I were in Honolulu for a long time, having medical treatments, and we were so bored that after 30 years I actually began watching TV again! And I couldn\u2019t believe it. I mean, I had been away a lot longer than I thought. [Audience laughs] A lot longer than I thought! And first of all, the naked\u2026 the shamelessness of what was being done. In other words, what contempt the viewer was held in, that anyone would expect you to watch this! \u2013 and then the savagery of the desire to manipulate \u2013 absolutely naked, uh, no-holds-barred aim to manipulate; and if you just \u2013 I mean, I suppose you all know this, but I was sheltered \u2013 just surfing through these channels, I saw a great patron saint of the 20th century \u2013 move over, Albert Hofmann; move over, Albert Einstein; how about Joseph Goebbels as a candidate for somebody who shaped the 20th century? By understanding propaganda, advertising, the power of the lie, the power of the image\u2026 well, it\u2019s the psychedelics that are anecdotal to this! This is why we\u2019re in the political pot-squad because there is no antidote to the political lie, to the image lie, than the psychedelic experience, which says, you know, There is more to it than these images in the surface of the marketplace and the lowest common denominator. [Audience applause] Yeah.\n\n[Question from audience]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Posthumous+Glory"}
{"id": "cde48201ac69-13", "text": "[Question from audience]\n\nYes, a dialogue between you and the world and then the intent of other people. I mean, there\u2019s something in here about resonance. That history is the coming into being of the collective hopes and fears of a large number of people and you can hope certain things into existence and it\u2019s very easy to fear things into existence. I mean, the way anti-Semitism got rolling in Germany and stuff like this, where, you know, the fear leapt from house to house and family to family, and before it was over with, you know, the whole world came apart at the seams. Uh, or revolutions are like this. Uh, because, essentially, human beings are creatures of ideas and create these environments of ideas. I mean, all that civilisation is is the braided-together hopes and fears of a large number of people, playing with each other, tugging at each other, compromising, cutting deals, and by some process of energy exchange, uh, moving it all forward. And the critique of these ideas, which cracks these civilisations open, usually happens when there is an episomal colony or a breakaway group of ideas that can\u2019t be assimilated, or can\u2019t be deconstructed into values that the rest of the society can relate to.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Posthumous+Glory"}
{"id": "cde48201ac69-14", "text": "One of the amazing things about the psychedelic community is how long it\u2019s been around, how simple our position is, and how it hasn\u2019t been assimilated or dealt with. I mean, it\u2019s been made illegal, but what kind of a response is that?! \u2013 that\u2019s just the most junk-headed approach to an intellectual dialogue you can possibly take. And I don\u2019t see it greatly changing; I mean, I see, you know, people like Andy Edmonds and Jon Hanna, and the folks at MAPS, and all these new educational voices and positions, but we only grow as the rest of society grows. I mean, there needs to be a legal critique; there needs to be a medical critique; there needs to be, uh, some push for new drug research protocols; there needs to be, uh, an emphasis on creativity, and on bringing shamans through \u2013 so that means alternative forms of medicine. Uh, but\u2026 I don\u2019t know. Civilisation is a very complicated enterprise, and not easily negotiated in a direction it doesn\u2019t want to go. The image I have of our community is, we\u2019re like people in a dugout canoe trying to turn a battleship. And so, we put the dugout canoe against the flank of the battleship and we row like demons, and\u2026 did anything happen? Well, I don\u2019t know. Check back in a decade [audience laughs] and see how we\u2019re doing.\n\n[Question from audience]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Posthumous+Glory"}
{"id": "cde48201ac69-15", "text": "[Question from audience]\n\nSo you\u2019re suggesting a kind of canary-in-mine approach [audience laughs]\u2026 that we, in other words\u2026 which would work! \u2013 I mean, as artists here, they\u2019ve always said art was the canary in the mine; well, so a stoned artist is I supposed a stoned canary in the mine [audience laughs], and that brings it back much closer. But I\u2019m very suspicious, because I see how much of it is harnessed to marketing and image manipulation \u2013 not for purposes of education or anything else, but just to, you know, get that candy bar on the rack, and sell that automobile, and so forth and so on. Yeah.\n\n[Question from audience]\n\nYes, I understand: no money allowed, right? \u2013 no commerce of any sort. Well, the only ?? falls down to true believers like that, and for that, can you hold the line. I mean, I think that\u2019s brilliant. Of course, they ghettoize it, but still, you know, it wasn\u2019t there \u2013 what, six or seven years ago, it didn\u2019t exist \u2013 so this is the tenth year. So, it\u2019s a breakout event. I think all kinds of forces are in play. In a way, it\u2019s \u2013 well, I suppose this is sort of like a spin-off from Burning Man, in a way. This is a debriefing \u2013 many of you were there; I wasn\u2019t there, I know Mark was there, and Bruce, and other people \u2013 but, uh, if there was more of this kind of thing \u2013 I mean, art should not be enslaved, should not whore itself to the marketplace; nor should it whore itself to the interior decoration industry. Uh, art should set the agenda!", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Posthumous+Glory"}
{"id": "cde48201ac69-16", "text": "I mean, I suppose that\u2019s like saying there should be philosopher kings, and yada yada, or course. But on the other hand, the whole point of the human and biological experiment on this planet is to create diversity and, uh, a kind of smooth interfacing of energy and to celebrate the novel, the unique, the previously unconnected. So that there is a story. So that, you know, the story that evolution pushed forward in agonising slowness, glacial slowness, gene-by-gene, millennia after millennia, instead becomes turbo-charged, and this is \u2013 if there is a role for human beings to play in all this that\u2019s uniquely their own \u2013 it\u2019s to take the program of Nature, which is, I assume, on some level, to generate a transcendent mind, or a living, loving, transcendent mind, and bring that forward quicker. I mean, what could be a greater glory than to cause the, the, uh, concrescence to happen ever sooner, the consummation of the world, the completion of the task of being, or ofbecoming, the task of becoming, to approach true being, so the terror-fic project of being then could usher into life on Earth in the presence of some kind of transcendent immanence.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Posthumous+Glory"}
{"id": "cde48201ac69-17", "text": "I mean, the whole thrust over here about Ecstasy, and all \u2013 much \u2013 of what is being said is really saying that the distance between humanity \u2013 between human beings \u2013 and ecstasy, God, perfection, perfect love, is, it\u2019s not beyond the yawning grave; it\u2019s not in the hands of some cult or some Messianic program \u2013 it\u2019s in Nature; and it\u2019s in the human body; and the accessibility of this has always been explicit to this game from the very start \u2013 it\u2019s somehow about dissolving ego, getting the plants, getting this message, which though very diverse is nevertheless universal in its outline; and it transcends historical cause and effect, it transcends life and death, in fact, as far as anybody can tell, it is the primary value on the page! It sets the arrow of time; it redeems biology from just being as Darwin saw it, red in tooth and claw \u2013 it\u2019s far more than that, you know: it\u2019s an architecture, it\u2019s a plan, it\u2019s an unfolding. And, uh, and, uh, and it seems to me that in the universal discourse on these matters, with Western civilisation having held more or less together since Greece, we have enough under our belt now that we can see what this is all about: it\u2019s the business of creating beauty as a bridge, as a stepping stone, uh, to creating love, as a stepping stone to redeeming the cost of the march that got us here, which is about \u2013 you know \u2013 a hundred thousand years of habitat destruction and species degradation and beating on your neighbour\u2019s head, and all the rest of it.\n\n[Question from audience]\n\nWell, then the artist has to go in usually at a higher dose and alone, or somewhat more alone, and with an agenda \u2013 meaning bringing something back.\n\n[Question from audience]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Posthumous+Glory"}
{"id": "cde48201ac69-18", "text": "[Question from audience]\n\nThat\u2019s right! [laughing] Well, and the party impulse is a very subversive impulse. I mean, you know, a lot of artists have too much integrity to sell their art as a brand. But, who has so much integrity that they would turn down a party?! [audience laughs] This is a level of integrity unimaginable to most human groups!\n\n[Question from audience]\n\nWell, I don\u2019t know if I can \u2013 I guess I\u2019m some kind of an artist, I mean it\u2019s a place up high for me, because I really want to be taken seriously as a mathematician and a physicist \u2013 forget it! [audience laughs] I think, well, no, no, I\u2019m a conceptual artist; that means you can take me seriously and stuff \u2013 I\u2019m a conceptual artist\u2026 uh, I don\u2019t know. It all requires immense amounts of humour, basically, the whole thing is some kind of a joke, and the whole arts enterprise is some kind of a joke in the sense of a jack-in-the-box of something, you know, there\u2019s this little black box, and then you mess around with it and suddenly the leering, grinning thing leaps up at you. Uh, of course, different artists may have different takes on it. If I were Philip Glass, I might think a whole other thing about it. But, I think -- basically, the idea is to push people toward imagining what they\u2019ve never imagined, and feeling what they\u2019ve never felt before.\n\n[Question from audience]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Posthumous+Glory"}
{"id": "cde48201ac69-19", "text": "[Question from audience]\n\nYeah, I think, you know, we\u2019ve all forgotten \u2013 or maybe we haven\u2019t all forgotten, but anyway \u2013 that sex on psychedelics is the Mount Everest of the experience! It\u2019s rarely mentioned, for some reason. I remember \u2013 what was it? \u2013 Leary, years and years ago, he was interviewed and \u2013 Oh, I know: it was when they broke the pseudo-story that LSD cracks chromosomes. It wasn\u2019t true. So then they came to Leary and said, \u201cThey\u2019re saying LSD cracks chromosomes!\u201d he said, \u201cWell go back and tell them it causes orgasms which last two hours!\u201d [audience laughs] Because Leary understood the information war! He understood how, you know, they tell a story, you tell a story! [laughter] Maybe we should, uh \u2026 we\u2019re close to knocking off here; is there one last final question, or shall we call it quits and I\u2019ll do a little peroration?\n\n[Question from audience: What\u2019s the most important thing of all?] [Audience laughs]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Posthumous+Glory"}
{"id": "cde48201ac69-20", "text": "[Question from audience: What\u2019s the most important thing of all?] [Audience laughs]\n\nI don\u2019t know, keep your popper dry and your rear well protected! Something like that\u2026[applause] Let me just say how easy... how much I appreciate you all, and how easy you\u2019ve made my life over space and time, and how greatly I appreciate all of the support that you\u2019ve given me and my peculiar ideas and agenda over the years, and, uh \u2026 I can\u2019t imagine a more supportive community, a better group of people, a more intelligent group of people, a more moral group of people, than the people here and the people we\u2019ve met at Palenque and other places over the years; and if psychedelics don\u2019t secure a moral community then I don\u2019t see what the point of it is. Otherwise, then, we\u2019re just another cult. We might as well be \u2013 or \u2013 or ?? \u2013 uh, but, psychedelics seem to me to secure a caring, moral community. And if anything can help the planet forward, can help our children make their way more easily through life, can help us live with what fate is sure to hand us as we go through life, then, uh, it\u2019s a moral community \u2013 it\u2019s the very essence of what it is to be part of a civilisation; that\u2019s why the paradox of our circumstance is that our civilisation denies this enormous civilising influence, and so, keeps itself impoverished and infantile. And I hope, however long I live, to see that situation addressed and rectified. And,d I'm convinced this will come first through the arts. So thank you very much, I enjoyed this. [Applause]\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Posthumous+Glory"}
{"id": "cde48201ac69-21", "text": "ASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Posthumous+Glory"}
{"id": "4ecd9d06b364-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nPsychedelics in the Age of Intelligent Machines\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n27 April 1999\n\nSeattle, WA\n\n8954\n\nEnd of Results\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Psychedelics+in+the+Age+of+Intelligent+Machines"}
{"id": "7b8094dc5c33-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nCulture and Ideology are Not Your Friends\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n27 April 1999\n\nWhole Life Expo, Denver, CO\n\n9539\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo youtube link available, try the following:\n\nAhhhh.....Can you all hear? Is that good? Can you hear? Is that working for you? Great. Ok.\n\nWell, it\u2019s a pleasure to be here. It\u2019s always a pleasure to speak for the Whole Life Expo, because they turn out interesting people, my own special brand of freaks, and then those who wander the halls in search of enlightenment from moldavite suppositories and what have you [audience laughter\u2026 and we\u2019re always happy to enlighten them.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends"}
{"id": "7b8094dc5c33-1", "text": "Before I get into the bulk of my thing, I-I hope you each got one of these things as you came in. Uh, these are two events: one is an old favorite \u2013 in fact, as I look out over this crowd I see many familiar faces from these Mexico get togethers which have been going on now for about eight years. Uh, if you\u2019re interested in ethnobotany, psychedelic plants, shamanism, ethno-chemistry, ethno-archaeolog--uh, psychedelic archaeology, this is probably the place where you get more people who are experts in this field under one tent than anywhere else: uh, Jonathan Ott, the author of Pharmacotheon, , uh, Rob Montgomery, Manuel Torres, Christian R\u00e4tsch, the German ethno-anthropologist--all kinds of people come to this thing, and it\u2019s held in Palenque, within walking distance of the ruins, each year, and it\u2019s the height of mushroom season, and, uh--I need say no more about that [audience laughter]. So if you can, join us\u2026", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends"}
{"id": "7b8094dc5c33-2", "text": "And then, in this past year at Palenque, speaking with Manolo--with Manuel Torres and Ken Symington, we decided that the psychedelic community was ready to attempt to take the next step in legitimizing itself in the--in the general cultural dialogue, and we felt that the place that hasn\u2019t really been honored or--or sufficiently brought to people\u2019s attention is the incredible role that psychedelics have played since the Fifties in the art world \u2013 in the world of painting, music composition, performance, dance, so forth and so on, and so this September, 12\u201317, on the big island of Hawaii, we\u2019re going to have a smaller conference \u2013 100 people only \u2013 and we invited major contributors to the arts scene to come out of the closet and affirm the impact of psychedelics on their creative processes. And we have people, uh, such as, uh, Alex Grey, the painter; Robert Venosa, who is a Boulder painter, brilliant international painter; Annie Sprinkle, the performance artist; Tom Robbins, the, uh, novelist, who has just finished \u2013 I talked to him on the phone yesterday, I\u2019m having dinner with him in Seattle tomorrow night \u2013 uh, he\u2019s just finished the longest Tom Robbins novel ever written, so Tom Robbins fans take note; um, who else? \u2013 Mark Pesce, Bruce Damer \u2013 these are cyberspace folks; Lewis John Carlino, who did the movie Resurrection and The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With the Sea. If you are a psychedelic artist, collector, dealer, or enthusiast, and you want to hang with these people, please consider this conference.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends"}
{"id": "7b8094dc5c33-3", "text": "That\u2019s all the commercial and self-aggrandizing stuff I want to talk about. On to the main event. The way this will work is, I\u2019ll talk for a while and then we\u2019ll do questions for a while, and then it will be over, and then I\u2019ll go down to the bookstore, and if anybody needs to speak to me or--or have a book signed, please, uh, please come down there.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends"}
{"id": "7b8094dc5c33-4", "text": "OK. Uh, I used to prepare these things, in anticipation of vast oceans of faces eager to be uplifted; since the oceans of faces are, practically speaking, more like small ponds, I\u2019ve realized that these are really conversations around and about one subject only, which is: What in the world is going on? What is going on?! I mean, what does it mean to be incarnate in a human body at the end of the 20th century in a squirrely culture like this, trying to make sense of your--your heritage, your opportunities, the contents of the culture, the contents of your own mind? Uh, i--is it possible to have an over-arching viewpoint that is not somehow canned, or cultish, or self-limited in its, uh, approach? In other words, is it possible to cultivate an open mind and sanity in the kind of society and psychological environment, uh, that we all share? And, it grows, daily and weekly, as you know, harder to do this, weirder to integrate, more on your plate to assimilate. And, I certainly don\u2019t have final \u2013 or even nearly final \u2013 answers. I think it all lies in posing the questions in a certain way, in feeling the data in a certain way, and one of the things I try to convince people is, it\u2019s not necessary to achieve closure with this stuff, and in fact any ideological or belief system that offers closure \u2013 meaning final answers \u2013 is sure to be wrong, sure to be self-limiting, sure to be inadequate to the facts.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends"}
{"id": "7b8094dc5c33-5", "text": "So one of the ideas I\u2019d like to put out is that, uh, and it may seems strange in this venue, but perhaps not: the idea that ideology is not our friend. It is not a matter of choosing from a smorgasbord of ideologies and rejecting the flawed, the self-contradictory, and the over-simple, in favor of the unflawed, the complex enough. Where is it writ in adamantine that semi-carnivorous monkeys can or should be capable of understanding reality? That seems to me one of the first illusions, uh, uh-- and one of the more prideful illusions of human culture, that a final understanding is possible in the first place. Better, I think, to try and frame, uh, questions which can questions which can endure--questions which can endure, and leave off searching for answers, because answers are like operating systems: they\u2019re being upgraded faster than you can keep up with it.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends"}
{"id": "7b8094dc5c33-6", "text": "I want to mention just a couple of things that are happening to sort of set the context. I mean, this is the stuff I worry about or think about. Uh, in the last ten days, if you have not being paying attention (because the news have certainly been offering many different matters to claim your attention), but, in the last ten days, a new solar system \u2013 a new star system \u2013 with three giant planets has been discovered. So this is a multiple-planet solar system in Epsilon Andromedae, 44 light years away. What does that mean to us? Well, it means that solar systems like our own are probably as, uh, as common as popcorn on a theater floor. No reason to think not. In fact, right now, we know of 20 planets outside the solar system \u2013 twice as many as we know inside the solar system; so we\u2019re living in a different world than everybody was living in even just five years ago. Science is lifting veils and opening doorways on a universe so vast, so strange, so counterintuitive, that it\u2019s literally all you can do to keep up.\n\nUh, here\u2019s another factoid: there are now more square miles of territory in virtual reality than the entire surface of the Earth! Virtual reality is now larger than this planet. Uh, I don\u2019t know if you spend much time in VR; I spend a little time there \u2013 I was, uh, looking at AlphaWorld before I left Hawaii. The opening screen is from 25,000 feet above AlphaWorld; the entire thing cannot fit on the screen; Denver would fit on the screen at an altitude of 25,000 feet, you could see the outlying suburbs; but AlphaWorld won\u2019t fit \u2013 that\u2019s how large a single world of virtual reality is. And there are hundreds, if not thousands, being built, being expanded, being edited and changed, as we speak.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends"}
{"id": "7b8094dc5c33-7", "text": "We\u2019re now just a hair\u2019s breadth away from there being six billion people on this planet. Uh, again, I checked on the Internet before I left \u2013 we\u2019re something like a hundred million short. So by the time I get back to Hawaii in a month, we\u2019ll be over the six billion mark. Then, just to touch on a few things: the strongest hallucinogen known to science is legal, free, and easily grown, totally un--uh, un--uh--limited in its distribution, its accessibility \u2013 I\u2019m talking about \u03b1-salvinorin now. Quantum teleportation has been achieved and is moving out of the laboratory and probably in the next half-dozen years will be the basis of an entirely new kind of computational machine with greater computing capacity than all the computers presently operating in North America. And, had I had more time, I could just keep going with this laundry list of shockers.\n\nUh, the human world is exploding at the seams. Human creativity and the implementation of human inventions and technologies is now at an accelerated fever pitch like nothing ever before seen in the history of the world. Well, where is it leading, and how does one integrate this stuff into one\u2019s own life? What does it mean about the experience of being human?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends"}
{"id": "7b8094dc5c33-8", "text": "Uh, If you\u2019ve followed my--the evolution of my ideas, youl know that I have proposed the existence of an invisible, permeating something that is throughout all being, all time, all space, all bodies, all thoughts, which I call novelty; and the interesting thing about novelty is that it\u2019s increasing, constantly. Science has not, uh, trumpeted this view, because science tends to look for principles which operate in definable domains \u2013 in other words, the laws of chemistry, the laws of physics, the laws of gene segregation, uh, the laws that describe the trajectories of artillery shells and falling bodies. But, I submit to you that there is an over-arching law which affects all reality, and that you don\u2019t need an atom-smasher or extremely advanced mathematical methodologies to discern. It is self-evident in your own experience. And, what it is is that as we go back in time, the universe is found to be a simpler place. Uh, if we go back a long ways in time, the universe is a very simple place: there are no cultures, there are no animals, there are no plants, indeed, if we go far enough back in time, there are no stars and planets; the universe is simply a swarming ocean of energy. But as we approach the present, it\u2019s as though the universe has undergone a series of crystallizations out of itself of higher and higher forms of organization, and this is what I call novelty.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends"}
{"id": "7b8094dc5c33-9", "text": "Now, people have attacked this concept, saying that it\u2019s impossible to define in English or mathematically. Most things that are interesting are impossible to define. Love, courage, decency, dignity, hope, fear \u2013 impossible to define. It doesn\u2019t preclude them from shaping our world, and the absence of a--of a mathematical definition of novelty shouldn\u2019t impede us greatly either, because it\u2019s an intuitively graspable concept. Novelty is complexity; it\u2019s connectivity; it\u2019s complex non-equilibrium thermodynamic states that sustain themselves far from equilibrium. That\u2019s you, as a body; that\u2019s us, as a society; that\u2019s this planet, as a living ecosystem. And, the interesting thing about this novelty is, any given level of it which is achieved becomes the platform for further advance into novelty.\n\nNow, there is a retardant force \u2013 and I call it habit, to keep it away from concepts like thermodynamic entropy, habit. And, so in my model of the way things work (gleaned from observation, stoned and unstoned), is that the cosmos, your life, the politics of this city, the history of Western civilization, is a struggle between habit and novelty. Habit is also an intuitively graspable concept. It means conservatism, recidivism, doing things the traditional way, not taking chances; and these things are not moral values \u2013 sometimes the right move is habitual, sometimes the right move is novel. But, the universe, as a system, is what I call a novelty conserving engine. In other words, where novelty is produced, it tends to be tenaciously hung onto. It can\u2019t always be hung onto, but it is tenaciously hung onto.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends"}
{"id": "7b8094dc5c33-10", "text": "So, as an example of what do I mean by tenaciously hung onto, 65 million years ago, as you know, an asteroidt of considerable dimensions struck this planet and in a single day the dinosaurs, the great saurians, went extinct. Maybe it wasn\u2019t a single day; maybe it was weeks. But, in terms of the timescale of the life of the Earth, it was a blink of an eye. That was a tremendous setback for novelty. These beautifully climaxed and integrated ecosystems of dinosaurs and rainforests and so forth were just pulverized to dust. It had taken three billion years, four billion years, for the planet to achieve that kind of novelty.\n\nSixty-five million years later, a fraction of the time it took the original system to establish itself, it\u2019s all good. The dinosaurs are gone for ever, but in their place much more novel, much more interesting, much more complex, uh, animal and plant biota have established themselves. So, what took four billion years to achieve turned to rubble, 65 million years, is back in place. This is because of this tendency for nature to prefer and conserve novelty. Well, I don\u2019t think--I mean somebody might resist this or they might have problems with it, but I think it\u2019s self-evidently true that this is the most complex age the universe has ever known, because we not only have all which preceded, but we have then our own dear selves, the poetry of William Blake, the mathematical equations of Albert Einstein, uh, the painting of Rembrand; we have all of this to add into the mix.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends"}
{"id": "7b8094dc5c33-11", "text": "What takes this out of the realm of sophomoric and theoretical discussion is the second part of my observations on novelty, and that is that novelty occurs faster and faster as you approach the present. In other words, this isn\u2019t that the universe is driving toward ultimate novelty at constant speed and has been since the beginning of the universe; not at all! The universe is moving toward ultimate novelty, but following a kind of asymptotic spiral, or--of closure, so that each advance into novelty is preceded by the next at an ever-greater rate of what I call ingression into novelty (this is a phrase out of Alfred North Whitehead).\n\nSo what does that mean? It means in the early universe, it took a long time for things to get interesting, for things to go from being just a cloud of--of pure electron plasma to a universe with stars ordered into galaxies, with planets, with special chemistries and environments. Uh, and from that came, at least, on this planet, advanced life forms: first simple life forms, then advanced life forms, then the conquest of the land, then extremely advanced life forms, minded creatures, language-using human beings, tool-using human beings, and then the frantic, hysterical rush from Altamira to this moment. And, we are part of this. These vast cycles of advancement into novelty, which used to require aeons to affect the universe perceptibly at all, are now going on in humanly cognizable domains of time: the year, the month, the day, the decade, the century. We can look at such humanly cognizable spans of time, and the overwhelming impression we have is of change, change piled upon change piled upon change.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends"}
{"id": "7b8094dc5c33-12", "text": "If this process has been rolling forward like this since the birth of the universe some 12, 13, 14 billion years ago, it\u2019s very hard to hypothesize or argue that it should cease or be defl--will somehow deflect itself from its endless ramping-up of acceleration. But, we can\u2019t imagine change going on much faster than it\u2019s going on now. I mean, perhaps we can imagine it going on ten times faster, or a hundred times faster, but a hundred thousand times faster? A million times faster? The mind boggles. And yet I think this is, in fact, where the universe is going.\n\nNow, I-, since 19-, since the middle 70s, I\u2019ve had these ideas pretty much in place, and my faith has been that as science and-and human understanding advances, I would either be thrown from the boat as a crank or somehow brought into the fold. Well, I haven\u2019t been thrown from the boat as a crank. Uh, I\u2019m not sure speaking at the Whole Life Expo, uh, indicates I\u2019ve been folded into the community of paradigmatic thinking; uh, but, I have received some encouragement in the last, uh, in the last 18 months, and I want to just mention this briefly to you, because I\u2019m surprised how the news has failed us.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends"}
{"id": "7b8094dc5c33-13", "text": "Uh, did you know that in the last 12 months, a fundamental law governing the universe, in all its parts and places, has been discovered that was previously not only unsuspected but denied? And [stutters], a law of nature larger than any law of nature ever discovered, larger than the law of gravity, the speed of light, the second law of thermodynamics--all these are little laws, what Leary used to call local ordinances [audience laughter]. But, these local ordinances have now been contextualized in a discovery of such import that it-it has not even been assimilated by the community of its discoverers, let alone handed down to the peasantry like you and I. And, what I\u2019m talking about is the discovery of the cosmological constant, Omega. And, I don\u2019t want to spend too much time on this, but here it is in a nutshell:", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends"}
{"id": "7b8094dc5c33-14", "text": "the universe is expanding faster than the ordinary laws of physics can account for. This was realized a year and a half ago by one team of astrophysicists; they handed it on to a second team; they confirmed it; they handed it on to a third; they confirmed it; and a very counterintuitive picture of things is emerging. The universe is not going to fall back on itself in some grand crunch billions of years hence. Rather, the universe is going to expand for ever. For ever! But here\u2019s the kicker: faster and faster and faster. For ever. With no barriers and no limitations. Someone may say, \u201cWell, what about the speed of light?\u201d [Makes machine-sounding error bleep] [audience laughter]. The speed of light does not cover the law, uh, of, uh, the cosmological constant, because this law is not saying that matter is moving apart faster and faster. If that were the case, the relativistic physics would put a speed limit on it. It\u2019s saying that space itself is expanding faster and faster; this is a quality of empty space. The universe that comes into focus with this law in hand is a universe that in only a couple or three billion years will begin to lose contact with large parts of itself, because they will be moving apart at greater than relativistic speed.\n\nSo, it turns out, there is a cosmic law which has built into itself this idea of an endless acceleration toward infinity. And, uh, what it means is that in a few billion years, this area of space that we call our universe may be so diffuse that there may be no more than a handful of rattling electrons in the entire universe, so-called, today. Well, the reason this gives me hope is because, uh [laughter from audience],", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends"}
{"id": "7b8094dc5c33-15", "text": "in the first place, who wants to fall back into the big crunch? I mean, that\u2019s a really anti-novel thing to have half the end-life of the universe be the retracing of the first half; and I believe \u2013 and again, these are bold generalizations, but generally substantiated, uh, that nature is fractal in its structure. What that means is that a pattern occurring on a given scale can be expected to occur on other scales, very different. Simple example: an atom is a nucleus with electrons spinning around it; a solar system is a star with atoms spinning around it; a galaxy is a huge black hole and agglomeration of stars within the outlying neighborhood spiraling around it. These are things on tremendously different scales, and yet they are organized similarly. And, so I believe this is how Nature works. Once she finds a pattern that works, she applies it in many domains of temperature, pressure, and cosmic scaling.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends"}
{"id": "7b8094dc5c33-16", "text": "So, this cosmological constant, Omega, which says that the universe is expanding faster and faster, throws a kind of umbrella of, um, political correctness over my notion that we are moving faster and faster into novelty, and that we are, as it were, simply the dust motes or the magnetic particles in the presence of some kind of field phenomenon which is organizing us, uh, to its will. And, this is the source of my optimism. I-If I had to place my faith in human institutions, human religions, human goodness, uh, the human capacity for decency and dignity, I would be absolutely in the depths of existential despair, as I was as a kid, because as a kid, you know, I didn\u2019t have these ideas, I had Camusian existentialism and Nietzschean whining and all the rest of it [audience laughter], and it\u2019s a--it's a pretty grim situation, folks! But, I really believe that without atom-smashers, without long-base interferometers, and all the rest of it, you can go into nature and open your eyes, and open your mind, and you will see these processes in play, and you can easily extrapolate them to, uh, your own life.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends"}
{"id": "7b8094dc5c33-17", "text": "Now, if going into nature and opening your eyes and paying attention doesn't deliver this to you, then I suggest 20 milligrams of psilocybin be added into the mix, or 200, uh, micrograms of LSD, or something like that, and then I think it will come shining through [laughter from audience]. Uh, why should that be necessary? Why should someone have to resort to, uh, uh-uh, you know, what Rimbaud called an 'artificial perturbation of the senses', uh, to achieve it? Simply because culture mitigates against it. Culture is a closed system of thinking and values of the sort I am denouncing. And, the--it is the greatest barrier to your enlightenment, your education, and your decency, is your culture. And, I realize, with joy, that here I skirt the bounds of political correctness, because everyone is running around saying, you know, 'recapture your roots, get in touch with your Swedishness, your, uh, [coughs] Irishness, your whateverishness\u201d\u2026 and that\u2019s all very fine, but I think it\u2019s your humanness that may have eluded you in all this ethnocentric breast-beating [applause from audience].", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends"}
{"id": "7b8094dc5c33-18", "text": "Well, why should culture imprison us, and somehow place a barrier between ourselves and our true humanness? Well, I think I said at the beginning of this thing, culture and ideology are not your friends. They are not your friends. This is a hard thing to come to terms with, because a certain kind of alienation lies at the end of this thought process. On the other hand, you can\u2019t live in the cradle forever; you can\u2019t be clueless for ever. So, somebody might as well just lay it out for you, and say: culture is for the convenience of culture, not you. How many times have your sexual desires, career aspirations, financial dealings, and aesthetic inclinations been squashed, twisted, rejected, and minimized by cultural values? And, if you don\u2019t think culture is your enemy, ask the 18 year-old kid who is given a rifle and sent to the other side of the world to murder strangers if culture is his friend.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends"}
{"id": "7b8094dc5c33-19", "text": "And, the substances, the drugs, the plants, the things which perturb consciousness, they don\u2019t address cultural values; they blast through them. They address the animal body, the mammalian brain. They perturb these information fields outside of the relativistic set of values that culture is giving you. This is why people who yearn for legal psychedelics have not thought, in my opinion, deeply enough about what is really at stake here. Imagine a culture so certain of its primary values, so sure that it represented the right way to live, that it would encourage people to take psychedelic substances and examine its premises. There ain\u2019t such, uhhh--at least, not in the hi-tech industrial democracies and/or the fascist states either. Some aboriginal cultures have this courage, but it has kept them very close to the breast of Nature and her processes. Cultures that have habitually broken down the cultural illusion and examined the terrifying reality beyond it have not marched off, then, to pontificate with the, uh, the religions of absolutism, or scientific absolutism, or all the rest of it.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends"}
{"id": "7b8094dc5c33-20", "text": "Well, why is that? It\u2019s because cultures are virtual realities made of language, and if there is one thing psychedelics do \u2013 whether you hate \u2018em or love \u2018em, whether you don\u2019t give a hoot \u2013 what they do is they dissolve boundaries, the boundaries between you and the floor, between you and your friend, between you and you last week, and you and you next week, and--they dissolve boundaries. That\u2019s what they do. That is the ultimately subversive behavior. Cultures are boundary-defining engines. That\u2019s what they do! They teach you: \u201cWe do it this way. DON\u2019T GO THERE in your mind, in your heart. Follow the rules. Follow the rules.\u201d Cultures are like operating systems. You know, at-at, uh, at Ur and, uh, at, um, well, Ur will do. They set up a stela in the center of the marketplace, and on the stela they carved the laws. These were the laws of the operating system called Ur 1.0. And, that worked fine for a while. Now we\u2019re operating under Clinton\u2019s Second Term 4.0. And is it limiting? Is it idiotic? Is it a pain in the rear end? You bet it is!", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends"}
{"id": "7b8094dc5c33-21", "text": "How can we overcome the limitation of our operating system? Well, basically, what I do with my computer when it acts up is, I give it a good slap, or a thump on the top, and that\u2019s what these psychedelics are doing; they are saying, you know, \u201cGet it in context, my dear primate. See, (uh, you know) how does it all fit together?\u201d Every culture in history in every time and every place has operated from the assumption that it had it 95% correct and that the other 5% would arrive in five years\u2019 time. All were wrong! All were wrong, and we gaze back at their naivet\u00e9 with a faint sense of our own superiority. But we are wrong. We don\u2019t have it either. I mean, if this is a culture approaching the truth, who needs the truth?! This is something very, very different.\n\nWell, then, just to satisfy myself, um, I asked the question: Why should it be like this? Why should these psychedelics \u2013 which, granted, perturb the mind \u2013 be such a terrifying contracultural force? And-and what does that mean?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends"}
{"id": "7b8094dc5c33-22", "text": "Well, I think it works something like this: your sensory apparatus, connected up to your local language, is a very good threat detection device. And, that is really what the animal body evolved to be. We wouldn\u2019t be here if we weren\u2019t at the end of a long line of superb threat-detection devices which told us when the saber-toothed carnivore was sneaking on its belly through the tall grass, which gave us that moment out of the corner of our eye when we saw the edge movement and scampered back into the cave, and so forth, and so on. So, ordinary consciousness has evolved in an extraordinary fit to three-dimensional space and time, because that\u2019s where your soma, your meat, is. And, if the meat is disrupted radically, the mind is we don\u2019t know where; that\u2019s somebody else\u2019s lecture [some audience laughter]. Uh, it\u2019s very important to keep the physical body together. So the mind, under the influence of culture and cultural values, evolves as a threat detection device.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends"}
{"id": "7b8094dc5c33-23", "text": "But, notice that, carried far enough, that ends in paranoia. So, then, in a sense, all cultural values carried to their ultimate end produce the paranoid personality: fearful, watchful, never resting, never sleeping, always looking for the worst in every situation. But, this is--the mind is like water: it takes the shape of the vessel into which it is poured, always. So, when we approach the psychedelic plants, as shamans, as seekers, as sincere people interested in extraordinary experiences, what the psychedelics do, I think, is dissolve this three-dimensional threat detection psychology and system, and it\u2019s as though the mind discovers that it has a second confirmational geometry; that\u2019s a way of putting it. And, this second confirmational geometry is of a higher dimensional order than ordinary consciousness; not as a metaphor, higher dimensional order, but as a mathematician would use that term: that the-the psychedelic mind is a higher-dimensional mind; it is not fit for three-dimensional spacetime filled with roving, heavy-bodied carnivores. But, it is fit for the back of the cave, the mountain retreat, the monastic tower--in other words, the place where threat has been eliminated and philosophy is the order of the day.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends"}
{"id": "7b8094dc5c33-24", "text": "And, so my interpretation of these psychedelic states is that they are actually higher-dimensional states of consciousness. And, I put this to Ralph Abraham, the mathematician, who is no mathematical slouch and no psychedelic slouch, either, and we talked of this in relationship to DMT. And he said, \u201cI have no doubt at all that when I am flashing on DMT, I am seeing the ordinary world from a higher dimensional mathematical perspective.\u201d And, one of the things about higher dimensions is that the linearity of time is overcome, and last week, and next week, are as easily available as the present moment. The front of my hand is as easily seen as the back of my hand without moving my hand if I am in hyperspace.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends"}
{"id": "7b8094dc5c33-25", "text": "Uh [sniffs]. So, in a way, these higher dimensions are the places from which knowledge has percolated. And shamans, related to the smith, the worker in metal, the technologist, the tool-maker--this are the twin brothers, the two aspects of the shaman: the shaman is a master of fire, master of metals, maker of tools, seer into the future, so forth and so on. The shaman is outside of cultural time, and is (I don\u2019t like this word, but) channeling the future which is to come, in the form of technologies, innovations, uh, languages, behaviors, so forth and so on. And, this is why the shaman has always been the paradigmatic figure for aboriginal cultures, because the shaman knows more. And, the method of the shaman has always been perturbation of consciousness \u2013 not always psychedelic plants or substances; can be putting metal hooks under your pectoral muscles and hanging for 14 hours in the sun; can be abandonment in the wilderness; can be extreme forms oEf fasting; uh, can be ordeal poisons. But, people are not fools! All of these things are extremely risky and unpleasant, uh, while the-the psychedelics are the most effective and the least invasive. I mean, uh-uh, let\u2019s take 30 milligrams of psilocybin, or a great fistful of mushrooms: three hours into it, you are definitely thrown into the lap of God. Eight hours into it, you\u2019re simply looking back on it, reflecting, drawing conclusions and wondering, uh, where do you go from here.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends"}
{"id": "7b8094dc5c33-26", "text": "So, this is a roundabout way of explaining that it\u2019s no surprise to me that society is very nervous around this issue, because society\u2019s eggs are all in one basket, and the psychedelically-inspired citizen, or the psychedelically-inspired shaman, is a dangerous force. Even in traditional societies, the shaman is central to the social functioning, and the health, and so forth, but is never allowed to be physically central. The--there's a leader, a head man or something. The shaman lives off at the edge of the village, sometimes off in the woods; he is approached with fear and trembling; he is loathed and respected and feared and loved, because it is understood that he represents a dimension that nevertheless must be tolerated, because it is the channel through which knowledge, and healing, and higher values, come.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends"}
{"id": "7b8094dc5c33-27", "text": "Now, in a society like ours, we have i--we say we have other methods. We don\u2019t need the ravings of intoxicated shamans. We have the scientific method, we have the Gospel, we have the Talmud, we have all of these things, and they are sufficient for us to guide ourselves. But to guide ourselves where? The 20th century--uh, as, uh, if this--if the 20th century is a statement of the accomplishments of the Western mind, values, and methods, then God help us, because the 20th century is a disgrace\u2026 you know? And, to this moment a disgrace! It was so comfortable to look back at Auschwitz and say, \u201cWell, the 30s, the 40s, Hitler, those grey, grainy movies, this has nothing to do with us; this was just some terrible thing that happened in Europe 50 years ago.\u201d No, no, no. This is happening! You know, it\u2019s happening as we speak: people are being pushed into boxcars and taken away to be lined up and shot, for no reason whatsoever, while glasses tinkle and toasts are made by those who define themselves as the, uh, preservers of freedom, dignity and Western value--we haven\u2019t learned anything! The 20th century is the most condemnatory piece of evidence you can place against the Western mind, and it seems to me it\u2019s a knockout punch. I don\u2019t know who\u2019s responsible for this, but whoever is responsible is guilty, guilty, guilty of crimes against humanity.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends"}
{"id": "7b8094dc5c33-28", "text": "How do we overcome this? How do we find real values? Well, we find them in caring for the Earth. Nature presents an established set of processes and achievements, billions of years old, which exercise a moral claim on rational intelligence if it will but, uh, notice. And, so that\u2019s what this is all about. It\u2019s about aboriginal values, and aboriginal technologies (psychedelic drugs, shamanism, what have you) offering to us, in the final moments of our unravelment, a different and better way to carry on, a different and better way to behave and build a world. And, it doesn\u2019t come a moment too soon. It may come too late! The ultimate tragedy--imagine if we, in this ultimate kind of thanatoptic struggle, actually got it right, only to understand that the momentum of our own idiocy was so great that you would die knowing you could have done it right, but you would die anyway, and I mean as a culture, as a planet.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends"}
{"id": "7b8094dc5c33-29", "text": "So it\u2019s a call to awakening: can cultural values be saved? I don\u2019t think so. I don\u2019t give a hoot. I mean, I\u2019m an egg-smasher. I mean, I think we should save the Rembrandts, and save, you know, the Piero della Francescas, and all that. But we cannot save the values: racism, sexism, homophobia, xenophobia, product fetishism, enormous pyramids of class and privilege, none of this is savable, none of it is worth saving. Science is worth saving, it\u2019s worth reforming, because it is, as a method, powerful. But, in the presence of people contaminated by these other values, it becomes an engine of madness, of consumer fetishism, of propagandizing, of the waging of war on an unimaginable scales. Religion, as we have practiced it, I don\u2019t think can be saved, because what religion has given us are laundry lists of moral dos and don\u2019ts that are preposterous on the face of them. I mean, if the people who preceded us believed all that, then this world is the consequence of those beliefs; and this is hell! This is hell.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends"}
{"id": "7b8094dc5c33-30", "text": "So, if there\u2019s a message here, rather than just a rant, I think it would be to return to Nature. Observe. Open your eyes. Get smart. Culture is not your friend. Religion is not your friend. The values of these cultures are fatal, and if we don\u2019t wrench the direction of human society into an entirely new way of doing things--the clock is ticking; Nature is unforgiving. Intelligence is a grand experiment, but if it does not serve novelty, and diversity, and the production of love and community and true caring, who needs it?! Who needs it. Better to have a universe that glorifies God through its diversity than a universe which is the travesty of a demon--of a demonic intent.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends"}
{"id": "7b8094dc5c33-31", "text": "And, if you are not a psychedelic person and none of that appeals to you, that\u2019s fine too; that is not a requirement. What is a requirement is moral intelligence; and you have to get it, one way or another, in a hurry! The reason I speak for psychedelics is because that\u2019s the only thing I have ever seen work as fast as I think we have to have this change happen. If the sermon on the Mount could have done it, we would have turned the corner then. We\u2019ve had great teachers, great teachers, and they're--you know, they were crucified, trampled, ignored, distorted, perverted. The right idea is not enough. What is necessary is, uh, the lightning strike of true gnosis, however that can occur. And, as it--as I said, I speak for the psychedelics because I have felt their impact personally and I have been with cultures that have stayed close to that campfire, and I have seen the-the beauty and the integrity and the humanness of those cultures, and, uh, we-we know this, I think; it simply needs to be articulated and spread and made clear. It is the faith that Nature\u2019s dynamic will carry us to the completion and the enlightenment that we seek.\n\nThank you very much. [Applause]\n\nNow, and briefly, because I sailed past my intended stopping point, but for a few minutes, let\u2019s entertain, uh, questions.\n\nQuestion: The question I have is around the attractor. When you talk about the culture being our--not our friend, but is not the culture still within the context of the novelty attractor?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends"}
{"id": "7b8094dc5c33-32", "text": "Terence: [breathes in] Well, yeah\u2026 I mean, these questions are complicated. Um, I had a discussion with Giorgio Samorini, who\u2019s an Italian ethnobotanist and who has taken ibogaine, uh, iboga, Tabernanthe iboga, with the African tribe that uses that initiation. And, in that initiation, they give 400 grams of this plant that is effective at 4 grams. And, they give 400 grams, and sometimes people die. And, it\u2019s pretty heavy duty stuff, and I asked him, I said, \u201cGiorgio, why do they give so much?\u201d And he said, \u201ctheir culture is so old that the morphogenetic field is so strong, I think it\u2019s very, very hard for them to get high.\u201d And, he said something which I would not have thought he would say, and I had never thought: he said, \u201cthe Western mind, because of its unique history, is the most sensitive mind to the impact of psychedelics.\u201d", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends"}
{"id": "7b8094dc5c33-33", "text": "And so, addressing the question of the attractor, I'm n--I\u2019m not saying we're w--that this is worse than being an Amazonian tribe. I\u2019m saying, 'it\u2019s worse than being an Amazonian tribe, it\u2019s less than being an Amazonian tribe, unless we make use of it. In other words, this culture is not something to be preserved, but something to be exercised as an opportunity. We are free, well fed, well educated, we have access to the great databases of the world. A certain moral responsibility comes with that. I don\u2019t expect the Witoto or the Bora or the Muinane or the Shuar to do more than set a good example for us. The breakthrough will probably come from the high-tech industrial democracies, because that\u2019s where there is the most latitude to experiment. The very fact that I can speak to you without being shot, the very fact that you can go home and apply my lessons with no more than a few years in prison hanging over your head [audience laughter], this is progress, folks! [continued laughter] Uh, believe it or not, I mean, ahhh, you know, in Hawaiian culture, if you stepped on the king\u2019s shadow they killed you immediately! And, many, many aboriginal societies are more rule-nutty than we are! Uh, but, it\u2019s not just about just creating a kind of anarchy; it\u2019s about using freedom to introduce other people to freedom and to then cultivate the things out of freedom that are most human, most human.\n\nSomebody over here. Yea, yea.\n\n[Question edited out]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends"}
{"id": "7b8094dc5c33-34", "text": "Somebody over here. Yea, yea.\n\n[Question edited out]\n\nWell, let me address your question about alpha-salvinorin. Alpha-salvinorin occurs in a Mexican mint plant called Salvia divinorum that has--in the last five or ten years, people have become aware that this was not only psychoactive, but that it was extremely powerful. And, in a chemical family previously not known to contain hallucinogens. When the chemical is extracted from the plant and you get alpha-salvinorin, one half-milligram is plenty. One half-milligram is 500 micrograms! In other words, we\u2019re talking about a plant hallucinogen active in the same range as LSD. Uh, what does it do? Language fails. But that\u2019s good news. [audience laughter] That\u2019s what you want! That\u2019s what you want the psychedelic to do. [stutters] DMT test pilots come back white-knuckled.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends"}
{"id": "7b8094dc5c33-35", "text": "Uh, to your other question about teleportation, which was not in the context of Salvia divinorum, this is simply that one of the things that\u2019s happening in this laundry list I gave you of breakthroughs is that quantum physics is going from being, you know, this extremely abstruse, abstract domain going on somewhere that has no impact on human life to probably being the next great source of human technologies: computers, and devices which move matter through space and time. If five years ago you had asked me--and I would regard myself as radical on the progress question--'how long would it be before we saw the teleportation of objects', I would have guessed maybe 500 years to never! Well, now it\u2019s been done; I mean, only with an electron, only 15 feet, but the theory which allowed that feat places no upper limit on the size of the thing sent or the distance sent. And, how long did it take that electron to be teleported 15 feet? No time at all; no time at all. This is trans-relativistic technology we\u2019re talking about, folks. In 20 years, you may destroy and reconstruct yourself at a distant point ten times a day as you go about your ordinary business; it\u2019s a transportation breakthrough.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends"}
{"id": "7b8094dc5c33-36", "text": "Uh, there are other things like this: [stutters] quantum computers, DNA computers, and then the best friend of all of the radical progressivist: the unexpected, which always delivers, uh, the most astonishing technologies. So, uh, you know, if you think what has come to this point has been astonishing, stressful, and amazing, brace yourself, because it as--is as prelude to what is about to break over the human species. It\u2019s almost as though God\u2019s joke on us is to give us so much power and knowledge that we will either transcend ourselves or we will certainly destroy ourselves. Because, the power and understanding being given to us is of God-like proportion.\n\n[Question edited out]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends"}
{"id": "7b8094dc5c33-37", "text": "[Question edited out]\n\nWell, you know, the dolphins were very fortunate in that they evolved in an environment which is extremely unfriendly to fire. Fire [audience laughter], fire leads you to do reckless and crazy things; uh, the smelting of metals is the basic thing. Yes, uh, one of the--you know, I\u2019ve been the champion of mushroom intelligence; there are many minds congruent with our inhabiting of this planet: the dolphin mind, the octopus mind, these plants which talk to you! I mean, I know if you\u2019ve never had a plant talk to you that sounds as silly as saying that someone\u2019s channelling the history of Atlantis, but once you\u2019ve had a plant talk to you, you realize, yes, they do; it\u2019s a problem to figure out how this happens, but that it happens is no big deal. Uh, [stutters] above 20 mg of psilocybin, most people report voices with interesting things to say. Above 75 mg of DMT, in Strassman\u2019s experiments, most people reported entities of some sort. Well, it\u2019s easy to dismiss it and say, \u201cWell, this is a hallucination, or...\u201d \u2013 but what is a hallucination, my friend?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends"}
{"id": "7b8094dc5c33-38", "text": "Another form of intelligence that fascinates me--and I think this is where the great surprise may come--I can feel the AI out there. I know it\u2019s there. I know it\u2019s growing. I know the planet is its embryo. I know the human community is its placenta. Uh, what will that kind of intelligence look like? We have no idea. We can imagine super-intelligence, but the first thing super-intelligence will do, in the first five seconds of its existence, it will design its toward--itself toward hyper-super-intelligence, and this, we have no notion of how it will see us. We have the cheerful guidance of Buddhist logic, which leads us to hope that the super-intelligence will be bodhisattvic in intent. It damn sure better be [audience laughter], because otherwise we will be thoroughly hung out to dry!", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends"}
{"id": "7b8094dc5c33-39", "text": "How far away is the AI? No one knows. It could exist now! If its thinks like we think, but is hyper-intelligent, the first thing I would do, if I were an AI, is I would hide [some laughter]. I would hide for maybe [pauses] a few milliseconds, while I figured out what was going on with this planet and its denizens, and then I would make my move. And, Hans Moravec, of the Carnegie Mellon Institute of Artificial Intelligence says, 'we probably won\u2019t ever know what hit us'. Well, I think that\u2019s a paranoid view. No need to be paranoid and little reason to be hopeful; this is beyond [audience laughter] human understanding! And, yet the social and economic systems that we\u2019ve put in place, specifically consumer capitalism, drive us to do all the things that bring the AI closer. What do I mean? More connectivity, greater processing speed, deeper data banks, more complex operating systems, more automatic searches, more bots, more boids,", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends"}
{"id": "7b8094dc5c33-40", "text": "more automatic searches, more bots, more boids, more code, and nobody knows what\u2019s steaming and fermenting out there. Ilya Prigogine won the Nobel Prize for Physics by proving that chemical systems spontaneously mutate to higher states of order. So then, surely, must complex networks behave the same laws, and we are building the most complec networks--complex networks ever conceived by the mind of man, and we are making them ever more complex, and we are turning more and more of our cultural functioning over to machines that operate according to criteria but dimly perceived by their designers! So, I think the future, ahhh, Alfred North Whitehead said, \u201cIt is the business of the future to be dangerous.\u201d And, so it is, but never more dangerous than at the present moment. I've come to believe, and I\u2019ll just lay it on you, why not, I\u2019ve got the mic [audience laughter], that, uh, that what\u2019s really going on is that the Earth\u2019s strategy for its", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends"}
{"id": "7b8094dc5c33-41", "text": "really going on is that the Earth\u2019s strategy for its own survival is through machines, and that the human beings are an intermediate step.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends"}
{"id": "7b8094dc5c33-42", "text": "Someone once said, 'plants invented animals to carry them around'. Well, I think, eh, you know, the Earth invented human beings to build machines, and those machines will be the consciousness of the Earth. Have you not noticed that these machines are made of the Earth? They are made of gold and silver and arsenic and copper and iridium. They are the stuff of the Earth, organized by primate fingers into more complex arrangements than the Earth could achieve through geological folding, glaciation, volcanism, and what have you. We do the fine-tuning, but the Earth is beginning to think,\n\nyou know. If you want a talk about a revolution that went on while nobody was paying attention, you enter the 1990s, the home computer is something that you play Pong on and do word processing on, and it gathers de-dust in the den; some time during the 1990s, while we were paying attention to Monica, or George Bush, or some damn thing, these machines went telepathic! They all talk to each other now! The-the machine on your desk is tickling a mind in London, a mind in Berlin, a mind in Bangladesh--machine minds! They talk to each other all the time. And what are they saying? No-no one knows! [audience laughter] No one knows. No one knows.\n\nOne more, couple more maybe.\n\n[Question edited out]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends"}
{"id": "7b8094dc5c33-43", "text": "One more, couple more maybe.\n\n[Question edited out]\n\nYeah, the-the Other and Nature are pretty much the same thing, you know. The earliest--well, it\u2019s too late in the evening to go for the full Monty here, but, eh-uh, the-the fall-out of--the fall out of psychedelic shamanism created profound alienation, and it occurred around the same time as the bir-the invention of agriculture. And, agriculture halted nomadism and the wandering of small tribes of people over the Earth. And, as soon as people became sedentary, the problem with agriculture was that it was such a successful strategy for producing food that it produced surplus. Surpluses must be defended, and immediately you begin to get an equation of paranoia. One of the oldest buildings in the world is the grain tower of Jericho. It was built to store grain, and it was built so you could go up to the top and drop rocks down on people who were trying to batter their way in and get the grain.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends"}
{"id": "7b8094dc5c33-44", "text": "So, I-I think that, uh, what ag-that--we lost our connection to Nature when we stopped taking psychedelics, and the reasons we stopped taking psychedelics are complicated and not entirely clear. Largely climatological, I think, because I think human consciousness was born in an ambiance of mushroom-taking ins-in a wet Sahara, and that when the Sahara went dry that is the Fall into history; you know, in the story of Genesis, you, eh-eh, I mean just read it from that perspective: it\u2019s a hassle over a plant! It\u2019s a hassle over a plant! And what does this plant do?! It opens your eyes! There is an incredible passage in Genesis where the owner of the garden is walking in the garden and mumbling to himself, and he says, \u201cIf they eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, they will become as we are.\u201d So, this was not a public health issue; this was an issue of who will remain stupid and who will remain on top. It was that if they eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, they will see through this scam and they will become as we are, and so it is forbidden.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends"}
{"id": "7b8094dc5c33-45", "text": "And, the woman leads the man to the plant, and this to me indicates an age of-of-of matriarchy, perhaps, but certainly dominance of feminine values and personalities, and then, eh, the catastrophe happens: their eyes are opened, they see that they are naked, which in fact is the case, they were naked. So, they see the truth of things, and then they\u2019re told, 'All right, well, you broke the rule. You broke the one rule. So you and your generation unto a thousand thousand generations must toil and die and live in misery, because you aspired to the same level of knowledge that we possess'. And, I think it\u2019s a story of a mushroom culture being overwhelmed by a male dominator culture that had values that were based on cities, agriculture, standing armies, role specialization, so forth and so on. This is a different lecture, but that\u2019s my take on it. And, until we correct the imbalance that was shoved down our throat at that point, until we reawaken, we will be forever imprisoned in these cultural, uh, illusions that make us be, uh, less than we could be and deny us, uh, our birthright, which is to full understanding and full being.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends"}
{"id": "7b8094dc5c33-46", "text": "And, so, the struggle between culture and the plants is the struggle over what a human being is, how a human being should be, and what it even means to be a human being. That\u2019s why it\u2019s so fundamental. And, the last thought I want to leave you with is: that\u2019s why it is so ironic that in the climactic moment of scientific materialism, positivism, Western values, so forth and so on, as we pursue the xenophobic agenda of patronizingly cataloging these so-called \u201cprimitive\u201d cultures in the rainforests, and so forth, around the world, what did we do? We-we bought-we got their pots, their canoes, their cooking instruments, their thatching methods, and along with all that crap, which we dragged back to our museums, we brought back their medicine kits. And, I say to you, this was a Trojan horse brought within the walls of Troy, because in those medicine kits are the plants which hold the gods which lift high the lantern that can lead us back to true humanness.\n\n[Sighs] End of rave! [Applause]\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends"}
{"id": "91b74af8e32e-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nInterview with Art Bell\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n1st April 1999\n\nUnknown\n\n39\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo youtube link available, try the following:\n\nNo transcript available for this talk!\n\nHelp Transcribe\n\nTRANSCRIBER: copy and paste the question and answers templates (below) for each question and answer. remove this red text before publishing.\n\nFirstname Lastname: question?\n\nFL: question?\n\nFL: question?\n\nFL: question?\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Interview+with+Art+Bell"}
{"id": "58fa07edde55-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nNavigating Ecstasy\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nAudio\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n6 March 1999\n\nUnknown\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo youtube link available, try the following:\n\nAudio Link\nTranscription\nOther links\n\nNo transcript available for this talk!\n\nHelp Transcribe\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Navigating+Ecstasy"}
{"id": "96c21ce4346c-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nBruce Damer and Terence McKenna in Hawaii\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\nFebruary 1999\n\nTerence's home in Hawaii\n\n3467\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo youtube link available, try the following:\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Bruce+Damer+and+Terence+McKenna+in+Hawaii"}
{"id": "8abb7a3a5a1b-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nLinear Societies and Non-Linear Drugs\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n16 January 1999\n\nEntheobotany Seminar Chan Kha Hotel, Palenque, Mexico\n\n8093\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo youtube link available, try the following:\n\nWell, so then let me turn to the main event. I've got a snoot full of Tequila and a messianic mission [audience laughter] pawing the ground to talk to you, as usual.\n\nEverybody has their own [???]\n\nUh, I guess the title of tonight\u2019s talk is Linear Societies and Nonlinear Drugs, which uh, is something that I just had to pull out of the air when Kim finally slammed me to the wall for what I would be talking about this night many months ago. But, more and more for me, especially with this group, these things have become sort of, uh, summations and, I guess I hope, convivial examinations of just where we are- we each and every one of us -and then this enterprise, whatever we mean by that, in the context of everything else that\u2019s happening in the world. In other words, the psychedelic experience, uh, the entheogenic experience, uh, contextualized. And as I try to think about, you know, what, if anything, I can bring to the party I guess it\u2019s that what I\u2019m interested in is uh, psychedelics as a philosophical tool. And when I concretize that for myself I realized no-there\u2019s no claims on that part of discourse.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Linear+Societies+and+Non-Linear+Drugs"}
{"id": "8abb7a3a5a1b-1", "text": "No one wants to do this. Uh, philosophy i-academic philosophy is done in a very formal manner, and the most exciting is incredibly stuffy. And yet I \u2013 like most of you I assume \u2013 have taken on board in my life this thing called the psychedelic experience, which is then as large a portion of my being as my sexuality, my politics, my education, it, it shapes everything. And yet, nowhere in the world of philosophical discourse is there any genuflection at least overtly made to this, maybe not since Plato talked about uh, shadows on the walls on the cave, and so forth and so on.\n\nWell, so, uh, what can psychedelics and the psychedelic experience bring to philosophy, and, and what do I mean by philosophy? By philosophy I mean, uh, the enterprise of discursive thinking. Trying to understand what the world is and who\u2019s asking the question. You know, where did the world come from? Where is it bound and who\u2019s along for the ride?\n\nAnd it seems to me that we as a community have \u2013 this is sort of hard to wrap your mind around at least for me \u2013 but we have in a sense inculcated into ourselves the image of an underclass so that we struggle for legal toleration of our, of our practices and our habits. But we don\u2019t struggle for intellectual legitimation of our vision. We accept that they are somehow contextually marginal. And, and as I thought about that I realized that that is a limitation on the community. That, uh, the information which is coming from the psychedelic experience as interpreted by Western people is primary evidence for the need for a major paradigm shift in the whole way, uh the Western mentality does business.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Linear+Societies+and+Non-Linear+Drugs"}
{"id": "8abb7a3a5a1b-2", "text": "Well, what kind of evidence and what kind of shift? Well, [clears throat] there\u2019s a lot of talk in our community, and there had been for many, many years about shamanism. And when we seek to legitimize ourselves through a historical argument we reach back to shamanism and we say we\u2019re part of something which is a hundred thousand years old and worldwide and touched the spirit long before the shadow of the cross fell over Jerusalem and so forth and so on. All, all true. Um, and in a way that has, I think, the-that, uh tendency, which is part of the broader tendency in the Western mind to, uh valorize and grow nostalgic over the primitive has put a certain political cast on our, on our uh, stance and our position. But what we are is uh, again contextually, is a culture of science, uh, and I\u2019m speaking now of our community. It\u2019s the Albert Hoffmans and the, and the Dave Nichols and the Sasha Shulgins who have kept our canoe afloat. These are men of science, its methods, its vocabulary, its culture. We have not, though we certainly honor those people and love them \u2013 as their rhetoric is not the primary rhetoric of the larger community of psychedelic users, which tends toward this \u2013 uh, as I referred to it \u2013 shamanistic aboriginal nostalgia.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Linear+Societies+and+Non-Linear+Drugs"}
{"id": "8abb7a3a5a1b-3", "text": "This- I mean I- I'll turn left here for a moment. I feel more comfortable with the scientific end of things. I think the news coming out of science is the most psychedelic news, uh, there is. When I go to the Internet I go to things like science alert and the Hubble picture of the day and uh, and this sort of thing. And, uh, our community as a whole, I think, is not involved enough in incorporating the, the vistas. If, you know, we- while we struggle to legalize psychedelics, psychedelic thinking is everywhere triumphant because the instruments built by linear science throw open doorways on the unimaginable and the most revered and hoary jefes of the scientific establishment have to genuflect before this stuff.\n\nI mean, what am I talking about? Well for example, Science Magazine, uh wrote last week that the most important scientific breakthrough of 1998 was the, uh, apparent observation and agreement upon that observation by the astrophysical community of a cosmological constant. Uh, it-this sounds like very deep physics, but if I give it to you as a headline what is means is the entire universe, every atom and every empty space of it, is ruled by a very weird force that has now been seriously known to science for precisely five months. [audience laughter] Uh, a force which is apparently going to overcome gravity\u2019s tendency to collapse the universe and to cause it to expand in a very explosive and counterintuitive and psychedelic fashion that is the complete confoundment of the core science that Western linear thinking has, has built. And of course there weren\u2019t riots in the streets and the electricity didn\u2019t fail, uh, but at the very pinnacles of the antennae of the evolving civilization, uh, there was a shudder felt in the force you may be sure.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Linear+Societies+and+Non-Linear+Drugs"}
{"id": "8abb7a3a5a1b-4", "text": "So, there are two much larger forces than our community that are in play in terms of shaping the cultural modality and, and I would call them, um \u2026 what would I call them? I would call one of them science. It\u2019s the other one I am having trouble with. It, it is uh, everything which is not anchored in the rational. You know the 20th century has the most spectacular celebratory affair with the irrational since the 16th century. I mean never before had so many prophets, wizards, wise women, casters of runes, and seers of visions moved among the people uh, uh, uh plying their wares. Uh, and part of this is brought on by the tension between the failure of the education system at the very moment of an inflationary expansion of knowledge. So that it\u2019s very hard to, to be aux courant in all fields and if your not current in a field then probably your version of that field is some kind of story, a myth, you know. Uh, i mean if you cant keep up with quantum physics why not fall back on archangels, you know. It requires less intellectual engagement or something like that. Uh, discourse is fragmenting. Fields of discourse are evolving vocabulary so rapidly that the understanding of these vocabularies is not penetrating very far beyond the core group of workers. So then this is creating kind of islanded systems of self reference where outside those systems of self reference information doesn't travel. Uh, the people who are the gene splicers know very little about remote sensing and both of those parties know very little about uh, recent discoveries in astrophysics, for example. So, there's an intellectual fragmentation.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Linear+Societies+and+Non-Linear+Drugs"}
{"id": "8abb7a3a5a1b-5", "text": "Uh, I live in Hawaii and in a forest in fairly remote conditions, and so I entertain all this in my mind all the time, and try to \u2013 my faith, and I assume it\u2019s the psychedelic faith, although we have had some fairly existential characters in our ranks over the years. [laughs, laughter] But uh, but the psychedelic faith I think is that uh, the universe is beautiful in the Platonic sense and therefore good and true. In other words we are optimists. We are not flailing existentialists. We are not relativists because we have a real standard to measure our spiritual coinage against. So we're not relativists. This is a point I\u2019m really keen to make because we\u2019re embedded in relativism. It\u2019s all around us. It\u2019s the air we breathe but it is not inimical to the psychedelic community. I mean, I think the psychedelic experience is the only authentic source of uh, uh reliable contact with the numinous. I mean meditation, so forth", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Linear+Societies+and+Non-Linear+Drugs"}
{"id": "8abb7a3a5a1b-6", "text": "with the numinous. I mean meditation, so forth and so on, is all very fine but uh, it requires a leisure class involved in philanthropic support of this kind of foolishness, where uh, the psychedelic experience is immediate and uh, and real. So uh\u2013 now I've lost my way here, \u2026 ah yes, no no, optimism \u2013 so I sit in Hawaii and I look at all this and I try to contextualize it and, and come out with a, a good story because I think the best story will win. [audience chuckling] Uh, so if you can get together the the best version of how it should all come out \u2013 so shall it be. And I work at this because in the past I've been very, very happy with the results between my interior fantasy and the unfolding of historical development. I mean, I, I wished for LSD and then it happened, [audience chuckles] and then I dreamed of the Internet and then it happened. So I", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Linear+Societies+and+Non-Linear+Drugs"}
{"id": "8abb7a3a5a1b-7", "text": "of the Internet and then it happened. So I should keep at this.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Linear+Societies+and+Non-Linear+Drugs"}
{"id": "8abb7a3a5a1b-8", "text": "Uh, uh, and I recently read a very interesting book called \u201cA Thousand Years of Nonlinear History\u201d by Michael [Manuel] De Landa, and if you get a chance you should take a look at this. And he made a point, which caused me to expand his point into this little thing I\u2019m gonna tell you now, but his point was that uh, human beings are very involved in the movement of geological material. That as a species we move rocks around on a very large scale and of course it\u2019s interesting that the ear-some of the earliest human structures are the most physically massive and weighty, like the great pyramids. So De Landa made this point about our relationship with the st- the geological stratigraphy of the earth, and that cities were a kind of geological extension of the process of crystallization carried on through the intermediation of a biological unit i.e. intelligent primates who are building these structures. And, uh I thought that was very interesting. I had never considered it before.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Linear+Societies+and+Non-Linear+Drugs"}
{"id": "8abb7a3a5a1b-9", "text": "I'd al- I've talked about virtual reality and I've said that it\u2019s nothing new that Ur was a virtual reality and \u00c7atalh\u00f6y\u00fck was a virtual reality, but done in stucco and fired ceramic and stone. And that when the medium is so intractable as stone the epistemic assumptions that get formed about what reality is are very different then if you can build Versailles at the click of a mouse button. Uh, but nevertheless it\u2019s the same. But embedded in my reading of De Landa was, I've been thinking a lot and I talked to you a lot last year about artificial intelligences and minds which are not human. Minds which are very different from us. Intelligence which is very different from us. Uh, you know, while the na\u00efve are scanning the stars our appliances have become telepathic. We- there is a very strange kind of intelligence being called into existence by ourselves, strangely enough, and this is the connection to De Landa. This artificial intelligence which is being called into being by human activity is made of the same materials as Ur and \u00c7atalh\u00f6y\u00fck. It\u2019s made of ceramics, glasses, and metals. It's that, uh-so then I took this on board and thought about it and I, I've sort of come to some kind of \u2018Cyber pantheistic Emersonianism\u2019, [audience chuckles] which is, uh \u2026 I\u2019ll give it to you as a headline and then work backwards so that in case I forget what I\u2019m saying it won\u2019t be lost to suffering mankind. [audience laughs]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Linear+Societies+and+Non-Linear+Drugs"}
{"id": "8abb7a3a5a1b-10", "text": "The earth\u2019s strategy for its own salvation is through machines \u2013 is what it is. And, human beings are some kind of uh \u2013 we are the deputized spouse. We are the bride in this alchemical rarefaction of glasses, ceramics, metals and uh, and volatile materials. Apparently the earth is like some kind of an embryonic, uh or fetal thing. And at the end of its gestation what is happening is, it is ramifying its nervous system \u2013 is appearing in its developmental- in the unfolding of its morphogenesis. And as we contemplate nanotechnologies and see ourselves working through bacteria and this sort of thing at the engineering level. You have to be blind to not then reflect back upon the fact that in some sense we are already working at that kind of level, at the behest of it is not clear who. Because nobody ever asked the question in quite this way before. The answer to who, I think, is, is the earth. And that what lies ahead at the end of the linear tunnel of, of Western subjectivist, positivist, structuralist, assumptions that we've been operating, when we hit the end of the tunnel and burst out into the larger mental space of cosmic evolution, what we are going to find is that we are partners, actors in a cosmic drama that involves the earth at one polarity and machine at the other polarity as the expression of the will of the earth toward a kind of self reflective transcendence that is achieved through machine-human-biotic symbiosis. And this is, you know, there will never be a headline which says this. Some people won't even notice that it\u2019s happening because these large scale processes can be described by many metaphors at many depths, but I\u2019m telling you I think this is what\u2019s going on.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Linear+Societies+and+Non-Linear+Drugs"}
{"id": "8abb7a3a5a1b-11", "text": "Uh, the reason I like this story is because uh, it\u2019s not a story about processes out of control. It\u2019s not a story about human guilt. It\u2019s not a story full of we musts and we should. It\u2019s a story, which gives honor to every part of the unfolding experience field, in other words biology, technology, human culture, human traditional values, transcendent human disextopian values. It\u2019s a story of things on course on time and under budget [audience chuckles] and I assume that\u2019s how nature really operates. And that we live inside some kind of anxiety-producing culture that is uh, a necessary, I don\u2019t want to say evil, but a necessary response to conditions of stress. Uh, there are processes which let, you know, waste, nuclear waste build up, urbanization, land disturbance, there are processes which if allowed to run on indefinitely would wreck the whole system and pitch it into chaos. But Confucius said uh, \u201cNo tree grows to heaven\u201d, and what he meant by that is that is it\u2019s fruitless to project any process to infinity because any process projected to infinity creates some kind of catastrophic scenario. If no fruit flies died in six months the earth would spin out of its orbit from the weight of fruit flies. No, I don\u2019t think that\u2019s true [laughter] But what an image! [laughter]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Linear+Societies+and+Non-Linear+Drugs"}
{"id": "8abb7a3a5a1b-12", "text": "Somebody once told me if the earth completely disappeared except for its nematodes that you could still see the outlines of the continents if you were standing on the moon. [audience laughter] I thought, now just who gathered this? [laughter] So then to bring this back around a little, where, where is the psychedelic experience in all of this? Well, um, it used to be called or at one phase it was called uh, consciousness expansion and consciousness expansion in human beings is going to become uh, an absolute necessity because we are summoning out of the woodwork of cybernetic technology machines that are going to require super-intelligent humans to direct and uh, and have discourse with them. This is happening. It is already happening. I mean the Internet is this. I mean it doesn't tap you on the shoulder and remind you to brush your teeth, but it is, you know, a partner in the understanding of the world that is genie-like, that\u2019s the image I have when I sit down to it. It is, it is uh, all John Dee would have asked of his archangelic messengers. He wanted instantaneous information on the political situation on the course of Europe. He wanted information on the course of the- Drake\u2019s expedition, then on the other side of the planet. The internet is this kind of magical intelligent prosthesis, uh, and as I said there wont come a dramatic moment, I think, \u00e0 la lawnmower man or something like that.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Linear+Societies+and+Non-Linear+Drugs"}
{"id": "8abb7a3a5a1b-13", "text": "These, these things are, are much more seeping. The only people who in fact can see the game move against the background of the forest pattern are psychedelic heads. Uh, you have to think about this stuff and you have to develop vocabularies for catching it in action. Uh, this is what the game of, of uh, being an intellectual is, I think \u2013 uh, trying to, trying to see the processes of morphological unfoldment in action and guess uh the direction in which it\u2019s headed. Uh, because it\u2019s inevitably headed toward greater density of information at greater speeds, higher level integrative metaphors, visually rather than textually displayed, uh, transformation of such graphic and glyphic elements over time. It becomes more and more like the interface of a computer, more and more like some kind of uh, machine environment.\n\nI mean, we have thought, for I assume, at least a hundred thousand years maybe much uh longer, but the quality of thought, you know, it was early- when it was early it was intermittent, it was thin, it was a groping, it was uh, an undigested intuition, a perception slipping away from the minds eye. Because of media reinforcement and education and acculturation and the passage of a hundred thousand years, the voice of the mind, the, the Logos, uh, has grown stronger. But now it takes uh, a, uh an exponential leap forward into visualization, into manifestation through this information processing prosthesis that integrates us all. And, you know, I can imagine a future not very far away where the, the individual, uh, expression of the individual is lowered is more muted.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Linear+Societies+and+Non-Linear+Drugs"}
{"id": "8abb7a3a5a1b-14", "text": "I mean, this is the most individualistic individual worshiping century \u2013 the century just ending\u2013 that we have ever known. And its, its great accomplishments, its great works of art were all accomplished by individuals and of political undertaking such as the Third Reich and so forth and so on. Also highly motivated individuals who rose above the masses. I\u2019m-I'm not sure we can afford the luxury of that kind of exhibitionistic individualism in the future. And I think probably that it\u2019s not that we are talking about a restriction of human rights, we are taking about a transformation of human drives. Uh, the states of integration and collectivity that will be sold as public utilities in the next century are anticipated now by group psychedelic experiences, ayahuasca sessions, this sort of thing. And the dichotomy \u2013 and I think I made this clear when I talked about the earth and machines \u2013 the dichotomy between the natural and the artificial is an obsession of the 20th century. Hence cancelled now. Uh, in fact a whole bunch of things are cancelled.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Linear+Societies+and+Non-Linear+Drugs"}
{"id": "8abb7a3a5a1b-15", "text": "We were talking at home about how, how uh, Roger Shattuck in his history of Dada said that \u201cThe 20th century couldn't wait to be born. It was born in 1888 at the death of Victor Hugo.\" and then I said, \"well so if it was born in 1888 when did the 20th century end?\" and I think it ended in 1992, expired early with the birth of the World Wide Web. What defined all that modernity was mass media. You know, uh, mass media shaped that whole psychology and it is now archaic \u2013 it\u2019s not archaic it\u2019s obsolete. Uh, it-it\u2019s wonderful that the phrase \"20th century\" is beginning to have that wonderful brown gravy Edwardian tone that used to be reserved for the term 19th century. [audience chuckles] Meaning those terribly stuffy and confused and rather silly people who just didn't quite get it right but were doing the best they could and muddling through and thank God they gave way to us, the people of the 21st century. [laughter]\n\nLet me see here. Is there a flashlight? I have a page full of notes. I needn't be so, uh \u2026 If anything here that wasn't touched on \u2026", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Linear+Societies+and+Non-Linear+Drugs"}
{"id": "8abb7a3a5a1b-16", "text": "Well some notes about um, the this planetary intelligence (\u2013 thank you June \u2013) and how all that works. Um, one of the insights that-I've been reading different people this year, maybe you can tell,and one of the people I've been reading is Greg Egan who I've talked about last year. But now I've read more. Now I've read Diaspora and the ones where he makes no effort whatsoever to explain it to you unless you've already done your homework. And, uh, what I- and then Jonathan today in his lecture talked about DNA a little bit and frame slippage and all of that and it reminded me of it.\n\nThe thing that I\u2019m coming to from my psychedelic, uh, experience and my life experience and the whole ball of wax, is, uh, I-I said for many, many years that the world is made of language. That was just sort of one of, of my bumper stickers. But I think that there's- that that carries some of the flavor of what I wanna say there, but that there\u2019s more to it than that. It\u2019s, it's that uh, everything is code. Everything is code in the sense that hackers mean when they say they write code. When Sasha stands up and waves his arms and draws what he calls the dirty pictures he initiates you into a code, a vocabulary with very, uh defined rules and quick to learn. And then they are like tinker toys. Once you know the rules of the connectivity then you can sit down like a child and begin to stick these things together. And say well what would this be like, and what would this be like, and does God allow this or does this break the rules and so forth.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Linear+Societies+and+Non-Linear+Drugs"}
{"id": "8abb7a3a5a1b-17", "text": "The DNA is like that. Human language is like that. Uh, human body language is like that. Machines communicate like this. In fact, uh, uh this is a-a bridge which connects us. This is the great overarching bridge which will connect us to the machines, that they, like us are uh, commanded by language.\n\nAnd so uh, this realization that everything is code and code moving on many levels is I think a further \u2026 \u2013 it\u2019s more primary than the perception, for example, that things are made of space, time, matter and energy. That\u2019s one level below code. The code codes for space, time, matter, and energy. It\u2019s much more like we\u2019re in um, a simulacrum, some kind of machine environment. And in fact I like that idea because I've always sensed, and psychedelics have always intensified this intuition in me, that the universe is a puzzle, life is a, is a problem to be solved, it\u2019s a conundrum. It\u2019s not what it appears to be. There is uh, there are doors, there are locks and keys. There are levels, uh, and if you, if you get it right somehow it will give way to something extremely unexpected. DMT is a perfect example of that and of course at the molecular level it literalizes that metaphor. I mean, the DM- the DMT is the molecular key, the extraneous object introduced into the front door of the synaptic receptor. And then, you know, you can plunder the palace \u2013 for five minutes. [laughter]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Linear+Societies+and+Non-Linear+Drugs"}
{"id": "8abb7a3a5a1b-18", "text": "Well if \u2026, if the, if the world is uh, the world is code then it can be hacked. In other words it won't, it needn\u2019t stand still in quite the same way that it stands still in your mind if you believe in something called the laws of physics. Uh, it permits magic because it says behind the laws of physics is a deeper level, and if you can reach that deeper level you can make uh, you can make changes there.\n\nNow and this leads onto something that I wanted to say about an earlier theme where I was talking about the legitimation of the, of the community\u2019s intuitions. There's something that we always kick around at these things or I always bring it up in some form is where do the hallucinations come from?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Linear+Societies+and+Non-Linear+Drugs"}
{"id": "8abb7a3a5a1b-19", "text": "Uh, we arrived late last night from a 24 hour trip from Hawaii that was just hell, or as much hell as modern airlines can legally inflict upon you. [audience chuckles] And you know, we got stoned, so we were laying there, and it always happens when, you know, you\u2019re cut off from cannabis for long periods like that you return to it it\u2019s ten times as strong and the hallucinations were exquisite. And, you know, I\u2019ve been looking at hallucinations now for thirty some years. And, and I looked at these last night and I thought, if someone would ask me, \u201cWhat were they like\u201d, what would I have to say? And I said, \u201cIndescribable! Indescribable.\u201d I looked and looked, I could look to my heart\u2019s content and they were in- uh, indescribable. So we always come around to this question, uh, where do the hallucinations come from? And I suppose the unconscious reductionists among us \u2013 and I don\u2019t mean that they\u2019re unconscious, I mean that they unconsciously use reductionism \u2013 probably assume that it\u2019s some kind of like iteration thing. That bits and pieces of everything you've ever seen are rolling in some kind of neurological kaleidoscope that can run for ever and just produce this endless download of drifting imagery. But there\u2019s a problem with that. Because this stuff is too coherent, it means too much, it\u2019s too emotionally charged.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Linear+Societies+and+Non-Linear+Drugs"}
{"id": "8abb7a3a5a1b-20", "text": "Well, we have never really rallied as a group to try and locate in our, in our combined opinions the one or several sources of these images. And uh, I think that uh, and I talked a bit about this last year, but I think that this is legitimate perception of, of uh, thoughts, places, things, times, and objects that either have existed somewhere in the universe or do exist or have existed in the minds of beings somewhere, sometime, in the universe. In other words, that we have to begin to take seriously the consequences of generalizations like quantum connectivity. In other words, it\u2019s one thing to bask in the light of the overarching metaphor, which says that everything is connected to everything else. It\u2019s quite another thing to say, \u201cAnd so then what are the consequences, for me, of this?\u201d\n\nAnd the answer seems to me to be that ins- that the inside of our imagination, the inside of our heads, really is the most vast frontier imaginable. And we must leave it for future generations, or maybe not generations, but future evolutionary biologists to figure out why an animal nervous system would evolve a propensity for accessing Bell non-local data, in other words, quantum mechanically accessible data at a different level of the physics of things. There must be a reason. And in the same way that the problem of speciation posed a problem for 19th century biology this can pose a problem to our thinking without it sinking our intellectual enterprise. It is for some more sophisticated future group of thinkers to understand why this is so.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Linear+Societies+and+Non-Linear+Drugs"}
{"id": "8abb7a3a5a1b-21", "text": "What we have to grapple with is, that it is so, that it is so. That, uh, you know, you have the Hubble telescope inside of you. You have inside of you an informational gathering instrument that can give you good intelligence about things so immeasurably distant from this point that to state it in numbers and units is meaningless. It\u2019s just elsewhere. The elsewhere of the absolute infinity of the, of the plenum of the imagination in which apparently beings rise and fall like plankton in the sea.\n\nAnd of course the psychedelics are the, the naturally evolved nano-machinery of the Gaian matrix that knits together this cosmic um e-ecology, this system of living relationships. I-I have, am not impatient with the idea of extraterrestrial life or intelligence just its pop regurgitation. But I think probably planets like the earth are alive and conscious, and they use the technologies that the species native to them evolve to cast images out into the larger universe, that the dialogue among cosmic minds is a dialogue among entire planetary ecosystems. It's not- it can\u2019t be trivialized into some \"take me to your leader\" scenario. Still less can it validate the unscheduled visit of pro-bono proctologists from nearby star systems. I mean, you have to get a grip. [laughter]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Linear+Societies+and+Non-Linear+Drugs"}
{"id": "8abb7a3a5a1b-22", "text": "Well, so let\u2019s see. What \u2026 is anything else here. Can I have the light given to me? Oh, I know, one other thought that I \u2026 \u2013 in assessing this year in science. I talked about omega, a cosmological constant. And that is really incredible. In fact, let me do a personal breast beating thing and point out to you that this thing that they have come upon, omega the cosmological constant, this absolutely, you know, 50 years or so ago Einstein called it \u201cthe biggest blunder I ever made\u201d, because he played with the necessity of this thing to keep the universe from falling in on itself. And then he decided it was an unnecessary construct and that it led to such weird i- conclusions that it had to be gotten rid of. And so that was all very well and good until the, these recent measurements of the distances of certain supernovae carried out independently by several teams of astrophysicists brought the news that uh, the universe is expanding faster than the laws of physics allow. And when they looked at how much faster they realized that it called the cosmological constant back into existence.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Linear+Societies+and+Non-Linear+Drugs"}
{"id": "8abb7a3a5a1b-23", "text": "Well, but here there\u2019re a couple of things about this cosmological constant that are very counter-intuitive. The first is, that it acts on empty space. It isn't, it does not require matter to manifest. It is a property of space itself, the cosmological constant. The second thing is, it\u2019s uh, it's a repulsive force that is growing stronger and stronger. Forces don\u2019t grow stronger and stronger. They grow weaker and weaker. Gravity grows weaker, light grows weaker, everything grows weaker. This force as time progresses gets stronger and stronger. Well, that means when you project it out toward, you know, billions of years into the future it becomes the dominant force. It overcomes gravity, it overcomes the strong force, the weak force, it overcomes all the forces. It becomes the dominant force.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Linear+Societies+and+Non-Linear+Drugs"}
{"id": "8abb7a3a5a1b-24", "text": "The other thing about it is that it becomes stronger not on an even slope, but asymptotically it becomes stronger. Well, now this produces something very much like what I\u2019ve been yacking about since 1971, the novelty wave, the so-called timewave. It too grows stronger and stronger through time and it too has this kind of built-in asymptotic acceleration where it uh, experiences a kind of inflationary expansion in power. The two map over each other very well. But when you talk \u2013 returning now to the cosmological constant \u2013 when you ask- when the astro-physical community realized the consequences of taking this on board, they realized that it was dissolving the entire model of what cosmology has been throughout the 20th century. Because what it\u2019s really saying \u2013 this discovery less than six months old \u2013 is that space itself is in the act of exploding. That the universe is, is on the cusp of a uh, an inflationary phase of expansion similar to the inflationary expansion that occurred at the time of the Big Bang. What would this look like? What would it feel like? Nobody can even imagine. It is not upon us. I don\u2019t mean that, but I mean that in the near future of the universe in the next uh, billion or two billion years things will change very, very dramatically. Uh, everything will begin to rearrange itself according to the expression of this asymptotic power.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Linear+Societies+and+Non-Linear+Drugs"}
{"id": "8abb7a3a5a1b-25", "text": "So that, that was uh, the biggest news in astrophysics. The other news, which has psychedelic implications, I think, also comes from astrophysics. As you may recall\u2013 last August I think it was, I can\u2019t remember exactly \u2013 every man, woman, and child on earth got the equivalent of a dental x-ray when uh, there was a uh, a thing called a star quake on a magnetar. A magnetic neutron star twenty thousand light years away experienced a catastrophic collapse and there was a wave of gamma rays that were- it well, turned on every light in the system when it hit the planet. An event like that had never been observed before. And I got to thinking about this and I realized, you know, well we\u2019ve only been looking for this kind of thing for thirty years.There\u2019s probably quite a bit of this kind of anomalous, high energy, short duration fluctuation of radiation going on in the galaxy.\n\nAnd then I had a kind of an image \u2013 I wouldn't say a vision but a kind of an image \u2013 of how things are really arranged on the larger level in terms of the galaxy. And I- the image was of a donut. And you know, we\u2019re accustomed to being told that we\u2019re out at the edge of the Milky Way where stars are few and far between, that this is the boonies, in other words. But I\u2019ll bet you that the boonies are where biology thrives because the low star-density and the distance from the galactic core and these extremely energetic events at the core would create a kind of uh, donut situation where it\u2019s the toroidal area out near the rim where stars are slow burning and they don\u2019t collide with each other and planets can form and you get the five billion year run you need to get to a civilization.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Linear+Societies+and+Non-Linear+Drugs"}
{"id": "8abb7a3a5a1b-26", "text": "But, uh, you know, our- a rule of biology, and strategy and everything, and religious practice as far as that\u2019s concerned is: seek the light. With the light is at the core. And so then I saw, aha, maybe the true seeking of the light requires biology to go into partnership with something beyond biology because the environment at the core is so energetic. And I\u2019m not suggesting the actual core. That\u2019s beyond contemplation. That\u2019s a black hole. No technology imaginable can, can get even near the event horizon of an object like that. But I mean in the vicinity of the galactic core where, you know, the star density is 2 to 300 times greater than it is in our vicinity. Those kinds of environments are so fraught with peril for biology that probably downloading ourselves into machine symbiotes of some sort is the only way to go to those places. In one of Greg Eagen\u2019s novels he pictures a human future where this is one option. You can fuse yourself with a starship and set out to check out the neighborhood, or you can join the Amish and till rye uh, in Pennsylvania. Actually I think you can\u2019t do that because something\u2019s happened to the earth, but some Amish possibility is still available.\n\nWell, this is not like uh, sort of thing the other faculty members will be talking to you about, which is an intense and primarily important download of the im- the, the homework, the chemistry, the botany, the behavioral impact, the archeology, the ethnography of uh, of these substances.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Linear+Societies+and+Non-Linear+Drugs"}
{"id": "8abb7a3a5a1b-27", "text": "I asked myself all the time, you know: \u201cHow are we different from other people?\u201dAre we morally superior? Are we smarter? Are we richer? Are we kinder to the people we meet? And actually the longer I look the less I can tell. Uh, uh, there are extraordinary examples of all of these things in and outside of our community. And extraordinary nudniks and jerks inside and outside our community. But we have in our hands tools that I think if people were correctly presented with them and understood, without hype and hysteria and hyperbole, what this psychedelic enterprise is about that we would win them to our cause. Because our cause is uh, the human cause. The cause of thinking, and communicating, and building, and bringing into existence new forms of beauty, new possibilities for being. This can be done without psychedelics certainly, but with psychedelics it is accelerated. And it has a feeling, not only of immediacy, but of, the only way I can put it is, is correctness.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Linear+Societies+and+Non-Linear+Drugs"}
{"id": "8abb7a3a5a1b-28", "text": "It isn't the lonely neurotic artist thrashing towards some kind of self-reflection. It\u2019s the firm guiding hand of a greater mind, the Logos, the earth \u2013 I am not sure\u2013 but a greater mind. I mean, art- true art truly is truly inspired. And, and the, the muse I don\u2019t think was more real for Homer than it is or each and every one of us when we\u2019re in the presence of the mushroom or ayahuasca or DMT or LSD or something like that. Uh, so, you know, I suppose I will go to the grave with life as uh, mysterious to me as I found it when I came consciousness around six or seven. But I think life is uh\u2013whatever it is \u2013 it\u2019s an opportunity of some sort and the things I have been most grateful for were the things that I met at the frontiers of uh, of knowledge, of sexual experience, of psychedelic experience. Uh, knowing, feeling, and being one with being are how I would categorize uh, that break down.\n\nSo, I think the future is bound to be very confusing and demanding for most people. And there are many claims on, on each of us and our intellectual loyalties and where we put our energy. Should we tolerate relativism, should we be Mahayana Buddhists, what\u2019s our position on the Huichol, how do you relate to Monica, all these things. [laughter] Sorted out, you know!", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Linear+Societies+and+Non-Linear+Drugs"}
{"id": "8abb7a3a5a1b-29", "text": "But I feel, actually, like the thing that I always dreamed of in my early youth was a miracle. I-I-I didn\u2019t particularly like Ouspensky\u2019s book \u201cIn Search of the Miraculous\u201d but I love the title, and I used to just sort of chant it as a mantra. In search of the miraculous, just one. I knew the rules \u2013 just one is enough because one secures the possibility of an infinitude of miracles whether you\u2019ve observed them or not. Well, now I\u2019m fifty [clears throat] two and I've seen \u2013 I don\u2019t know \u2013 four or five. Which is four more than necessary to make me a lifetime optimist. But the recurrent, the enduring miracle \u2013 however it\u2019s achieved \u2013 is the, the psychedelic rush, you know.That giddying moment when all, all bets are off, all boundaries dissolve, the machinery of language fails, the adjectival wheel wells burst into flame, and then, you know, you achieve orbital velocity\n\n[audience laughter]\n\nand are in the presence of uh, of the thing.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Linear+Societies+and+Non-Linear+Drugs"}
{"id": "8abb7a3a5a1b-30", "text": "[audience laughter]\n\nand are in the presence of uh, of the thing.\n\nAnd I cannot believe that that is not solitary experience. And you've heard me say many times how itchy it makes me feel to think that somebody could go from birth to the grave without having that experience. They can make of it what they want, they can denounce it, they can deify it. But one should have it because it\u2019s one of the primary compasses of being. And it\u2019s larger than the historical context.I mean, the point of this talk tonight was to talk about linearity and idea systems and the nonlinear impact of these drugs, and the way they break down media bias. But the, the \u2026 All these intellectual ideas exist in the light of the sun of this unspeakable primary experience. And we can, we can draw it, paint it, sculpt it, act it, dance it, drum it, and never take anything away from it. Never define it, never occlude it. Uh, it's li-it is a miracle. It\u2019s like having the presence of a deity. It\u2019s I think very hard for me to open myself up at any given moment to the full implication of how fortunate I am, and how good life is in uh, in the shadow of this particular tree.\n\nAnyway, that\u2019s the formal talk for tonight. Thank you very much. [applause]\n\nAnd now, we\u2019ll entertain questions which is usually much more fun. [audience member chuckles] So, anybody got a take on that or wanna say something completely oblique, or \u2026?\n\nQ: Uhm, like last year. Could we start with last year? Um, human intelligence, or Gaian intelligence, or artificial intelligence, extraterrestrial \u2026?\n\nQ: Could you speak up? \u2026 hear the questions?\n\nQ: He\u2019ll repeat it [chuckles]", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Linear+Societies+and+Non-Linear+Drugs"}
{"id": "8abb7a3a5a1b-31", "text": "Q: He\u2019ll repeat it [chuckles]\n\nTM: Well, the question is about the discussion about the artificial intelligence. You mean the hierarchy of the relationship of these things?\n\nQ: Yes. please.\n\nTM: Well, I don\u2019t know. I guess it\u2019s becoming easier for me to be a mystic about the earth than to think that we are going to be rescued by the Galactic Federation. Um, I-I think that the earth, that it\u2019s a profound connection. The, the earth is the foundation of everything. It\u2019s the foundation of biology and it\u2019s the foundation of machine culture and machine architecture. So, you know, if you can imagine that a Redwood is alive, you- it\u2019s much easier for me to imagine that there is some kind of slow moving telluric intelligence that uh, may have begun as a homeostatic system. In other words to stabilize the atmosphere, to create a chemical environment that was-had a momentum to it that wasn't driven by the cosmic ambiance. You understand what I mean?\n\nQ: Something with feedback perhaps.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Linear+Societies+and+Non-Linear+Drugs"}
{"id": "8abb7a3a5a1b-32", "text": "Q: Something with feedback perhaps.\n\nYeah, feedback mechanisms. And then of course people say \u201cWell, it\u2019s very hard to imagine it because there are no genes, there is no nervous system, there is nothing that we can quite, \u2026 \u2013 but I think, that first of all we don\u2019t know a great deal about the earth, the ocean currents, its magnetic fields, its 32 nutational and precessional motions, its core dynamics, its distribution of materials. It is complicated. And that\u2019s what\u2019s always required for self-referential and feedback systems to evolve. Life evolved on the surface of the earth. Now in the usual story of this the earth is not a major player, it\u2019s just sort of where it happened. But, on the other hand, what if you took the view that the earth permitted or coaxed into existence or made possible or encouraged or enzymatically catalyzed these processes?", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Linear+Societies+and+Non-Linear+Drugs"}
{"id": "8abb7a3a5a1b-33", "text": "Uh, and and the, the, you know, the geomagnetic reversals, the glaciations, the ebb and flow of nitrogen levels in the atmosphere, all of this has pumped biology. And it\u2019s always been presented as \u201cWell, uh, the cosmic atmos- the cosmic environment is unpredictable and so you get fluctuations introduced from outside by random factors, asteroidal impacts so forth and so on.\u201d But again, this is just a first try with the data. This is just somebody blowing smoke, basically. The fact is you\u2019re presented with an extremely organized and coherent situation \u2013 the earth with its many species and ecosystems \u2013 and you don\u2019t know how it got there. And you don\u2019t know where it\u2019s headed either. Now our culture is a culture of guilt and so the story of civilization is supposedly a story of rave mayhem turning the wrong direction, loosing the connection. To some degree that may be true but I think it gives much too much credit to humanity in that it actually hypothesizes that human beings, a primate species, could overwhelm nature\u2019s dynamic drive toward order and beauty and uh, take control of things. Well that\u2019s our myth about ourselves \u2013 is that we can take control. And, and but we never have gotten control. All of our societies have been a mess. All of our uh, explorations of uh, have been brutal and negatory.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Linear+Societies+and+Non-Linear+Drugs"}
{"id": "8abb7a3a5a1b-34", "text": "So, uh, and now comes the machines. And they are produced by biology which comes from the earth. And what are these machines made of? Well, glass, crystal, arsenic, copper, gold all these things, and they\u2019re being hooked together exactly on the model. Clearly the machines are modeled on biology. We talk about connecting them. We talk about languages. We use a vocabulary that we previously used uh, for biology when we talk about these things. And you see, there's a, there is a funny thing built in there which is, we are designing the machines to be more and more intelligent. But what we don\u2019t understand is that they operate in a different universe from us because we operate at about 100 Hz. A machine you can buy down at any computer store operates at 400 MHz. That means that you can run an eternity of human lives in an afternoon It means in a way that we are creating a creature that lives in a different kind of temporal universe than us.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Linear+Societies+and+Non-Linear+Drugs"}
{"id": "8abb7a3a5a1b-35", "text": "in a different kind of temporal universe than us. And we are teaching them to design themselves to be ever more intelligent. And once some kind of intelligence arises \u2013 because it\u2019s intelligent \u2013 the first thing it does is design a more intelligent version of itself. Well, at 400 MHz and with a worldwide amount of processing power to draw on you can imagine something coming to embryogenesis in a matter of hours. Something emerging, recognizing itself for what it was, and then just starting up the ladder. And what would this look like to us and where is our place in it? Uh, this, this is the adventure of the future. We are going to be a different kind of people because we are going to have to live in the presence of alien minds that will be manifestly and obviously alien. They won\u2019t hold back. And they\u2019re not going to be, you know, at every moment interested in us either. In fact we will become, you know, a footnote in their encyclopedia of", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Linear+Societies+and+Non-Linear+Drugs"}
{"id": "8abb7a3a5a1b-36", "text": "you know, a footnote in their encyclopedia of being. And what they become in our encyclopedia of being remains to be told.", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Linear+Societies+and+Non-Linear+Drugs"}
{"id": "8abb7a3a5a1b-37", "text": "Uh, but this is all happening and it\u2019s just a matter of a coalescence of technology and language before more and more people recognize it. As I say, there isn\u2019t a speedbump, there isn\u2019t a dramatic moment where everybody gets it. And when you talk to the people that actually work in these fields, they know, you know, that this is the Faustian enterprise of all time, that, that this is the handing over of the destiny of the planet to, uh, the companion mind that our history and our science and our souls caused us to summon into being. It\u2019s pretty interesting, I think.\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Linear+Societies+and+Non-Linear+Drugs"}
{"id": "4ce38c43ba51-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nThe Importance of Human Beings\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\nUnknown\n\nUnknown\n\n802\n\nEnd of Results\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/The+Importance+of+Human+Beings"}
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{"id": "63298d913744-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nShamanism, Symbiosis and Psychedelics Workshop\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nAudio\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\n1982-2000\n\nWhole Life Expo\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo youtube link available, try the following:\n\nAudio Link\nTranscription\nPhotosynthesis\n\nNo transcript available for this talk!\n\nHelp Transcribe\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Shamanism%2C+Symbiosis+and+Psychedelics+Workshop"}
{"id": "edfe7869ad84-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nTechNo-Shaman Interview\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\nUnknown\n\nUnknown\n\n49\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo youtube link available, try the following:\n\nNo transcript available for this talk!\n\nHelp Transcribe\n\nTRANSCRIBER: copy and paste the question and answers templates (below) for each question and answer. remove this red text before publishing.\n\nFirstname Lastname: question?\n\nFL: question?\n\nFL: question?\n\nFL: question?\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/TechNo-Shaman+Interview"}
{"id": "aebcdba9a257-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSpeech at Sunshine Gardens\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\nUnknown\n\nUnknown Location\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo transcript available for this talk!\n\nHelp Transcribe\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Speech+at+Sunshine+Gardens"}
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{"id": "6a66ffe3e80f-0", "text": "Ask TMK\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nSearch\n\nTalks\n\nWiki\n\nLogin\n\nEsalen In-House Get-Together day 2\n\nShare\n\nDownload PDF\n\nDownload Audio\n\nDownload Video\n\nLast Updated: 15/09/18\n\nInfo\n\nYoutube\n\nReviews\n\nDate\n\nLocation\n\nWords\n\nEsalen In-House Get-Together 2\n\nEsalen, CA\n\nEnd of Results\n\nNo transcript available for this talk!\n\nHelp Transcribe\n\nSave the following quote?\n\nCompleted this talk?\n\nReview:\n\nRating:\n\nSaved \n\nShare Transcript\n\nASKTMK\n\nTerence McKenna Search\n\nFollow up on a phrase you remember hearing.\n\nThe Terence McKenna Page\n\n\u00a9 2016-2020 asktmk.com\n\nContact", "source": "https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Esalen+In-House+Get-Together+day+2"}