[inaudible from audience].

™: 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’re 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’s 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?

[inaudible from audience]

[3:02:30] ™: Aha, so you think that subterfuge, uhm, enters here too?

Audience: Yes, [inaudible] last night when you were discussing the role of psychedelics and you were going by the [inaudible]-theory.

TM: right.

Audience: I assumed you were [inaudible] Rupert Sheldrake’s theory.. [inaudible] psychedelics may, uhm, [inaudible] [3:03:15].

TM: Well, le-.., you want me to [inaudible from audience]. Yeah, well.

[inaudible from audience].


™: 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’re all what are called by chemists, planar. Meaning, they tend to be flat. They’re not lumpy, they’re flat. Well, if you look at DMT [3:04:45] or harmine,


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


[inaudible] error here, you can fuse genetic information [3:06:00]


Transcribed by Andrea Casanova


™: with information. Don't you understand that genetic information’s just a sequence of codons coding for protein? And uh, you know, that has no relationship with your memory of Aunt Ninny’s face. However, by being so, uh unyielding on that point, they create a huge problem in um.. In uh… 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’s an absolute… 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’s face when she used to walk you in the park, then every molecule of your body has been swapped out five


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 “well,” well they don't say actually, they just throw up their hands. Now, the- to the people who say DNA can’t 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’ve 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


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… 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’s 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


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 “Have you ever notice how as the sphere of understanding grows ever larger, necessarily the surface area of ignorance gets ever bigger?” [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.


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].

™: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…. physic, piecemeal, ruled by synchronicity. One of the most interesting things, i'll tell this story and then we’ll 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

Transcribed by Shant

[3:12:00]

submit themselves to science to be told whether they’re real or not.

Audience Member:Like a religion.

Terence McKenna: Yeah like a religion.

Well how many people know uh eh eh the you know. Modern science was founded by René Descartes in uh in the uh early Seventeenth Century. What were the circumstances under which Descartes founded modern science.

René Descartes was a 19 year old uh [pause]

[3:12:30]


[3:12:30]

basically 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

[3:13:00]

retreat across southern germany and in the on the ev-evening of uh, now there’s a lot of arm wrestling about this but let’s 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

[3:13:30]

uh, 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

[3:14:00]

Angel, [Audience Laughter] you know, they don’t tell you this at MIT [Louder Audience Laughter] uh you know it’s it’s 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’s it a-appears that our development our history our histories have always been uhh created

[3:14:30]


[3:14:30]

at the promptings of invisible voices. I mean Socrates who is at the very centre of what’s 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

[3:15:00]

Thinking 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’t care if artists talk to angels because we tre.. our definition of them is that they’re screwballs [Audience Laughter] uh but eh uh ehm uh to believe that a uh a a enterprise like modern science has to trace it’s way back to the same ecstatic roots is I think uh

[3:15:30]

uh 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]

Yeah?

Audience Member: Um With the Dmt trip what was your technique for bringing back, for holding on to this info.

Terence Mckenna

[3:16:00]

Repetition. Yeah. The first few times I did it I couldn’t get any grip at all on it and by talking a lot and trying to describe it you slowly slowly build up a map.

So 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’s a voice in the

[3:16:30]


[3:16:30]

head 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

[3:17:00]

answers 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

[3:17:30]

want 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’s no

[3:18:00]

Transcribed by Tim Collinson

[3:18:00]

way to find out of course if they’re 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.

[3:18:30]


[3:18:30]

This is very hard I think for modern people to understand. Because oohohoh..it’s 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

[3:19:00]

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.

Now another example of this kind of thing that’s 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

[3:19:30]

for 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,

[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 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’ the only vestigial trait we have of this previous cultural mode where, everyone, to read meant to read aloud

[3:20:30]

no one could conceive of another way of doing it.


[3:20:30]

no one could conceive of another way of doing it.

The 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’s 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

[3:21:00]

are 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’s going on uh look at the Gräfen wuh don’t look at it but conceive of the Gräfenberg 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.

[3:21:30]

I mean if something that major can be overlooked then it’s hard to imagine what might have been overlooked I mean that’s 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

[3:22:00]

became 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.

Audience Member:[Inaudible (Something about phenomenalised awareness, the Ayahuasca DMT visions related to Psilocybin)]

[3:22:30]

Terence McKenna: How it works with psilocybin?


Terence McKenna: How it works with psilocybin?

Audience Member: [Inaudible]

Well uh i mean I take, when I take Psilocybin i take it on an empty stomach I don’t fast or anything like that I just don’t eat for 6 hours, I don’t call that fasting. Uh and then I take it in silent darkness. That’s number one very important. The next thing is weigh

[3:23:00]

the dose, you must weigh the dose. Because 5 grams is what you want. And I’ve had over and over the experience of showing somebody what five grams is and they’re appalled. They say my god you can’t be serious I mean I wou.. I take uh... a fifth that much a fourth that much. Yeah well that’s the problem that why you don’t have elves in the attic and bats in the belfry like I do [audience laughter]

[3:23:30]

um you know and so then you take it and I take it on an empty stomach and a lot of people don’t like the taste I don’t really understand that uh, I just chew em up, I sit with them, and I chew em up and then... huh..

Audience Member: Dried?

Terence McKenna: Dried.

And none of this mixing in apple sauce or any of that malarky I mean what’s that about. [audience laughter]

Audience Member: [Inaudible (something about fresh vs. dried dosage)]

Terence McKenna: Oh well fresh 60 grams. 60 grams. Uhh

[3:24:00]

Transcribed by Tim Collinson

Uh,

(3:24:00)


Transcribed by Tim Collinson

Uh,

(3:24:00)

because there’s more than a, you know-- there’s a huge water loss there. And, uh, then it takes-- people sometimes say, “It came on within 5 minutes.” Or, “It came on within 10 minutes.” I don’t 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.

(3:24:30)

I think I’m 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’re 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

(3:25:00)

by the time the compound actually hits that, you usually won’t 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.

(3:25:30)


(3:25:30)

These are definitely qualities of psilocybin, not related to its psychoactivity. And, uhm, and I think that it’s 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’m going to sit here and do this. Because at about the hour and 15 minute mark, it will begin hitting you with stuff

(3:26:00)

like, “You’d really be more comfortable down stairs.” Or, uh, you know, “It’s awfully hot in here, why don't you get up and adjust the thermostat?” All this stuff, you just say, “No.No. - No. No.” 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.

And at that point

(3:26:30)

I-- I-- I guess I pray. I say to it, you know, “I’m completely in your hands. Please don’t hurt me, you know. I’m yours. I’m completely committed. I’ve held nothing back, so don’t burn me, please.” And, uh-- and then there is a kind of-- it is hard to describe-- a kind of, uh, potential

(3:27:00)

begins to build up. And you say, “Hmm.” The rush hasn’t begin- begun, but it’s-- 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.


At that point, I smoke furiously.

(3:27:30)

And that usually is all it takes. And-- and it-- it comes on, and it-- the first rush is really astonishing. I mean, sometimes it’s more mind boggling than others. But I can remember situations where I would just see it coming and say, “Oh my God!” You know? It’s 100 miles wide, and 10 miles high. Where are you going to run to, you know? It’s just coming--

(3:28:00)

you say, “Good g-rief!” You know? “I guess I’m not going to meet this one sitting up. I think i better lay down.” And in about the time it takes to make and execute that decision, then it just hits. And it’s like a tidal wave. I mean, I have the feeling when I’m doing it in California, that everyone from Vancouver to Tijuana has just, uh, crawled under their desk. Because you can’t imagine. This is happening

(3:28:30)

between my ears? You know, it’s more like an asteroid must have fallen in the Pacific Ocean and raised some enormous incoming wave. It’s-- what it’s sort of like it’s like watching a thermonuclear explosion through 50 feet of crystal clear glass.

So, you know, you are perfectly calm. It’s not getting at you. But the energy that is being released in your presence is awesome. And then,

(3:29:00)


(3:29:00)

it, uh-- and sometimes in that first pass, you actually-- the linguistic machinery is burned out. You’ve 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

(3:29:30)

is 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’s 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’t know. Once, when my

(3:30:00)

life was in turmoil...

Transcribed by Jason Bastin

TM: 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 ‘Am I doing the right thing with my life?’ 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!?

[3:30:30]

said oh, sorrry didn't mean to presume you know [laughs] Get your act together and then we’ll have a conversation, but if that's what you wanted to talk about you should’ve taken MDMA.

Audience: [sporadic laughter]


Audience: [sporadic laughter]

TM: And.. it uh, and then you know paralleling what we talked about this morning and again I’m just giving you my subjective take on it. It’s like, um...

[3:31:00]

[clicks]

I come into a place. It’s hard to describe, it’s a feeling … and- it’s- 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 ‘mandian or something like that but I don't, well I stole a line from

[3:31:30]

an old, old I Love Lucy program where Ethel is talking to Lucy about UFO’s and uh.. Lucy says she talks to the UFO’s and Ethel says well how can you talk to UFO’s? and Lucy said well it’s 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..

[3:32:00]

and women if there are any out there! [laughs] and then there is a.. It’s like ah.. it's like -ike -it's like a marching band. It’s 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

[3:32:30]


[3:32:30]

finally, 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’s… the whole thing is shot through with such a weird sense of zaniness, irishness, joyfishness, I mean it’s almost unbearable it's so...uhm i don't know not exactly

[3:33:00]

Disney-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-

Audience Question: Inaudible

TM: Sure, um th-.. it--t one of the most puzzling things about these- these

[3:33:30]

plants 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

[3:34:00]

in 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

[3:34:30]


[3:34:30]

the 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’s 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’s all

[3:35:00]

redirected back into the human and natural world in some way.

And 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’s large- Some people even refer to the dome of DMT, that tells you they

[3:35:30]

really 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’re way way way underground which fits with the elf motif you're in the hall of the mountain king. You’re 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

[3:36:00]

uhh about them.

Transcribed by Mark Carver

Uhm..

Audience (inaudible question)


Terence: Well, that’s a real question, the Logos seems more.. It personally isn’t.. It doesn’t 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’t 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’s like buying prints on Madison Avenue you knoww.. And you’ve 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… (..exhales..) they seem to cover a broader spectrum.. The


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’d 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’s, martry saints, euh..


Madonna’s, 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’s 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’s an esctatic that’s 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


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, “i want to see more of what you are for yourself”. 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.. “Enough of how you are for yourself”. Because you can tell what’s 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?


Audience: (inaudible question)

TM: Well, that’s a good question..

Audience: (inaudbile question)

TM: Good question. It requires a small detouring to pharmacology, the concept which all pharmacologists are familiar which you should should be too if you’re 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’s graduate students or rats. Uh, now, when you’re designing a drug or when you’re thinking about a drug, what you want is a drug with an extremely high ld50 opposed [3:42:00] to its effective dose.

Transcribed by Azlan

Thinking 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’s way of saying, “This is very very safe.”

Audience: So if you ate a pound, you probably wouldn’t die?

A pound wouldn’t kill you. Uh, I don’t 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.


Unfortunately, and I hope I don’t rain on anybody’s 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’s 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’ve got a stiff on your hands. So yeah.

Audience: 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’s- 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]

Audience: [inaudible] In fact, I read an article that it’s destroying the serotonin receptor side [inaudible]

Audience: [inaudible] 300mg dose [inaudible]


Audience: [inaudible] 300mg dose [inaudible]

There was a different- Well, I think MDMA is- I don’t want to trash MDMA, it’s changed a lot of people’s lives and saved relationships and so forth and so on, but to me, it’s a perfect example of why you’re 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’s a wonderful thing. The physiological effects, it’s a very disturbing profile. It isn’t exactly as you said. [3:45:00] It’s not that it destroys the serotonin receptor side. It’s 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.


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’re doing work on this in a dozen labs around the country. They’ll 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’s the- the whole name of the game. You have to keep the brain in good shape. Yeah.

Student: Could we go back to his question? Once you’re past the proper dose, is it worthwhile to start to step up to-


Oh yeah, that’s where we were ta- That’s why we started talking about LD 50 ‘cause 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’s 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’ 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.

Transcribed by Tyler

™: ...eating them and then they realize they’ve eaten four times more than the effective dose. And uh, this is where you get into places where you don’t know what to say because if you tell people, they’ll throw a net over you but you want to say, because you’re so personally disturbed, this is where the flying saucers land and the rectal examinations begin [audience laughs] and you’re told that you’re the messiah and they-you know, it becomes

[3:48:30]


[3:48:30]

quirkier and quirkier. So I think you have to uh, you know, I’m 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’s

[3:49:00]

definitely 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’s-it’s the people who consider themselves experienced you know, who’ve done it 20, 30, 40 times-so’s you know we can take the gloves off with this guy [audience laughs] and

[3:49:30]

and invar-You know it always amazes me I sometimes meet people who say you know I’ve taken mushrooms 50 times and I’ve never had a bad trip and I think you know lucky soul because when it goes left it’s hard you know, it’s hard. You have to really then you know denounce(?) your mantra’s bungle is uh the best advice I can give you, because you need to steer

[3:50:00]

back 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’s 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

[3:50:30]


[3:50:30]

chant you sing anything you want and it will radically alter the parameters. There’s a certain place in psilocybin that is my uh bête noir which I call the meatlocker [audience laughs] and I don’t like this place you know and meatlocker is a mild term for it it’s more like uh you know the morgue for the homicide unit or something whenever I start drifting that way I sing

[3:51:00]

and 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

[3:51:30]

don’t be afraid to say you know I don’t like this, take it off me, it’s too peculiar, I’m not ready for this. It says oh sorry ehem you know back to dancing mice uh-Yeah? [question]

Audience: *different mushrooms why * wildly varying concentrations of psilocybin?

™: Well...

[more question*?]

™: There hasn’t been a lot of work on this. Uhm, Michael Bukley(sp?) at Evergreen College years ago

[3:52:00]


[3:52:00]

grew stropharia cubensis by the method that’s described in my book, the book I wrote with my brother, and what they discovered...see psilocybin is 4phosphoro…. triptamines* that phosphorous group is removed as soon as it crosses uh the blood brain barrier so really uh what’s 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’ve never read [3:54:00] any description...

Transcribed by Bev Smith


Transcribed by Bev Smith

[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’s just an aside because I’m 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.

Audience Member: Um, [coughs] I’m switching the subject only slightly- [3:54:30] the descriptions that you’ve given of all of these experiences, although you’ve uh, have said that it varies blankly, there’s a remarkable internal consistency of your description- that, that you’re entering a world that seems to have boundaries and entities that you consistently encounter again and again. I’ve um, spoken to many of people over the years, some of whom [3:55:00] have known you throughout that time, and nobody I’ve 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’ve spoken to people who have. So I’m wondering-

TM: Maybe they were just being polite [laughs]

Audience Member (cont.): Um, I’m wondering if you’ve 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-

TM: True

Audience Member (cont.): Did you work with different presuppositions going into this to see what the limits are?


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’re 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’ll come back and you’ll realize that it’s 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’s 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?


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’t 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


spangled costume hang by her teeth 120 feet above the center ring um doing acrobatics so you’ve got- [something happens in audience, some laugh, a woman playfully says something inaudible, TM continues] [3:58:28] -so you’ve got the clown, and you’ve 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’s experiences it seems to me that it’s 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’s, although other people don’t give any account at all. I mean it’s amazing how


any account at all. I mean it’s 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’t get out of here with that rat, you know, HOW WAS IT? And they say, well [sighs] they can’t 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’m pretty


Transcribed by William Hargrave

TM: [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´t 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.

Audience: Have you (ahh), have you ever read the Far Journeys by Robert Monroe?

TM: Is that the 1st book?

Audience: No.

TM: No, i read the 1st book.


Audience: No.

TM: No, i read the 1st book.

Audience: [4:01:30] Well there actually is a map right there. Talk about weird, this is one of the weirdest things you’ll 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’s, visited in normal consciousness. It’s an almost inside psychedelic description, but it’s, 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]...


TM: Well, i read the first book and i was puzzled by how much of it didn’t 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.

Audience: Do you have visions on cannabis, too?


Audience: Do you have visions on cannabis, too?

TM: [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

able to write those kinds of accounts.

Audience: [inaudible]

TM: Yeah, go ahead.

Audience: [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.


TM: Well, you didn't exactly make clear to me what the effect was. It fuzzes you out going into? [4:06:00]

Transcribed by Tiago Ramos

™: Well, you didn’t exactly make clear to me what the effect was...it fuzzes you out? Going in?

Audience: (inaudible) ...something totally different…

™: What it does for me is it just slightly cuts my anxiety. You know? I’m able to, to let the thing unfold of its own. I’m no-, I don’t 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’t, you know maybe I’m different but I resist any “maybe I’m different” argument because it’s malarkey. Nobody is different enough that they can, you know…

Audience: (inaudible) memory recall, when you’re at the peak of that kind of experience...speak as clearly...I get really tongue tied.


™: [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’t have cannabis I don’t 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’s what the agenda was; that’s what was going on.

Audience: Then you go to sleep afterwards?

™:[4:08:00] O yeah. Yeah. And if I don’t smoke then I’m an insomniac. Yeah.

Audience: (inaudible)?


™: Ok. Well, LSD *sighs*...again, I’m 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’s 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’s kind of psycho-analytic? It’s sort of like cleaning up


psycho-analytic? It’s 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’m not that into my own personal stuff probably because it’s so horrendous, ah, *deep breath* but I don’t 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’s not like MDMA where 10 times the effective dose and you’re in real trouble but probably 40 times the effective dose and you’d 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’m really a vision freak. And people say you


I’m really a vision freak. And people say you know, well there’s feeling and there’s insight[4:10:30]...and there’s this and that but you know the reason I’m so fixated on vision - or the excuse I give - somebody said: O, it’s because you’re a double Scorpio but (audience laughs) for me it’s the, for me it’s the proof that it’s not coming from me. I can come up with insights. I can come up with funny ideas but I can’t 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’t my unconscious, my memories, my fears, my hopes; this is something else yeah.


Audience: Um.(inaudible)?

™: How do boundary dissolution andi-?

Audience: (inaudible)?

™: 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’ve ever thought or believed is hokum and that’s extraordinarily humbling. And that word: humbling means the feeling you have when your ego is reduced. You know? Humble yourself enough and you’ll begin to feel humiliated.

Transcribed by Artemis Jones

TM: [4:12:00] And, you know, that’s a deeper ego reduction. I think they, aside from any magical chemical effect they may have on ego, they’re just showing you the true size of the universe and your place in it. And you know, In our ‘down’ 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.

Audience: [inaudible] Is there any gender difference in [inaudible]?

TM: For men and women?

Audience: [inaudible]

TM: Well, that’s an interesting question.

Audience: I’m interested in it also, in the history [inaudible]

TM: Yeah, you mean what we talked about last night?

Audience: [inaudible]


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‘s 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’s 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


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’re born male. A female fetus doesn’t experience anything like that. It starts out with a smooth shot, it’s, it’s and um, a phylogenetic expression, [4:15:00] and, and then achieves it. I don’t 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


an ego is frustrated. A man with an ego is a menace to all concerned, you know? [laughs] Yeah?


Audience: [inaudible] ... trip with another people. Do you think the knowledge of energy changes your trip…[inaudible]


TM: [4:15:30] I think it’s very, it’s a very major decision to do that. That if you’re 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’t like taking psychedelics, uh, this is not an issue of entanglement. That’s 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’t do it because I, I don’t know whether it’s my personality or what it is? But I am unable to contain my anxiety in the presence of another stoned person. Especially if I’m stoned. If I’m stoned, and they’re stoned and we’re in a dark room, I cannot get off. I listen to them breath. I worry. I wonder if I should ask them if they’re alright. [4:16:30] Then I go off


alright. [4:16:30] Then I go off on long trips about not interrupting them. And then that loops back into, ’but I haven’t heard them breath for twenty minutes!’ [laughter] And, and, and I’m always afraid. I don’t know. So really people say, “Doesn’t it take courage e to do it alone?” 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’re having a telepathic experience. And they’ve decided that they want to have sex or something, [4:17:00] and meanwhile I’ve 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’ve got too much on the menu here. Um. But I’m weird! Remember that. [laughter] Yeah?


Audience: [inaudible] Um, okay now, and we uh have heard about the uh [4:17:30]

ayahuasca so, um, can you comment on this kind [inaudible] and contrast to what you’re talking about [inaudible]

TM: You mean the group mind on ayahuasca?

Audience: Yes, [inaudible] Is that possible.

TM: Oh yeah. No, it’s very possible. Uh, it’s 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’re seeing, the same thing. And when you toss sex into the mix, it just goes over the top.

Transcribed by Micki Garrison

TM:-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.

Q: ???


Q: ???

Yeah 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.


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.


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


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


'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.


Transcribed by Eva Petakovic

TM: ...so that’s an example of, you know, magical power condensed onto the material plane. Yes?

Audience: [inaudible] ...purple triangles coming from your head… [inaudible]

TM: Clearly, the same- the same phenomenon, uh, yeah!

Audience: Um, first of all, I have to ask [4:23:30] [inaudible] question, [inaudible] after that?

TM: Ah, he actually didn’t come back after that evening, uh…

Audience: 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’s not so much [inaudible] the characteristics of the iris, the eye, it’s what’s 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’s what would give you [inaudible] that you’re 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’m wondering if you had any more thoughts on that.

TM: 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-

Audience: But I think we do, and I think we do all the time.


TM: But somehow our perception of what’s been going on is- is skewed. We don’t- 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’s head. And they would be asked,


this person’s 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’re surrounded by subliminal abilities that we can’t, 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’t 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’ll spend the evening over the toilet, because I couldn’t 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,


But then when I get back to the hotel room, sure enough, by overriding my own instincts, I- I- get into trouble.


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’t. [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 “susto”. 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’re a Peruvian, you prepare to cash in your chips. You know, it’s as- it’s as horrible as melanoma. You know, you’re doomed if you have this stuff. And you have to go to a shaman and get it taken care of or you’re dead within six months. But I can’t get susto, it’s not- it’s a linguistic disease of some sort. It travels around inside the confines of Mestizo Spanish, and nowhere else.

Audience: But it’s the evil [4:29:30] eye [inaudible] it is the equation in the, uh, south of our country-


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’s happening, and therefore they unconsciously participate in their own demise. But I’ve 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… [4:30:00]

Transcribed by Tuan Nguyen

[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’t some kind of psychological co-option that’s happening. It’s something a good deal more complex than that. Yeah.

Audience: Uh, you know, a while back you were talking about uhm, uhm, a period of time where humanity was inside out uhm… 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… and yet we have all these ideas… we have all these fairy tales… you know and now that we’re talking about self-transforming machine elves, uhm, when you, uhm,[4:31:00] have a *sneeze*

TM:Well, I’m not sure that you got it into a question that I can respond to. Try again.


Audience: Ok, so, uhm… our culture then is uhm... [inaudible] and uhm the whole idea of magic, and things like uhm, the existence of elves, uhm… [inaudible] people would laugh at that unless uhm they are on the supposed fringes. Uhm… do you think, that this kind of thing could come back? Do you think that we will [4:31:30] have uhm… you know uhm… [inaudible] … these kind of things.


TM: Yes, sure, because what you have to do is you have to shift the locus. I mean, it’s 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’s 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,


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’s 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’re supposed to stay tuned to your


you how you’re 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’s 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


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’s not how it’s going to happen. The way it’s going to happen is on five grams in silent darkness in your living room, and that’s 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’t 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’re concerned. The only thing that’s real to you


concerned. The only thing that’s real to you is yourself and your immediate surroundings. And if we could [4:36:00]


(There is a loop in part of the audio somewhere between here and 4:42:00)

Transcribed by Paul Mullins

[4:36:00]TM:empower that,you know,our political problems would disappear overnight.We are infantile and we do love it.We don’t 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.

Audience: 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’ve had..[inaudible]


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:”I thought i was crazy, until i heard you speak.Now i know there are at least two of us”, and the truth is, you know, there are more than two of us, there are thousands.If you...you know, it’s a delusion if it happens to one person, it’s a cult if it happens to twenty people, and it’s 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’m 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’t seem to come forth[4:38:00], and i really don’t know why that is, because what i say is not all that exceptional, it’s just the sum total of it is kind of eerie.But if we don’t...that’s 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 “self-transforming elf machines from hyperspace”, then[4:38:30] there aren’t such things. Once you say it, it has gained a certain kind of ontological currency….

Audience: …weren’t you arguing the opposite point, you know,[inaudible] stuff that[inaudible] quantum physicists[inaudible] and that..[inaudible] language systems..


TM: ...well, 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?[4:39:00]They’re talking gibberish. What power does it have over you?, except that it comes presented on the platter of science.Say: “You must believe this! If you don’t believe this you’re not a well educated Tranby with-it person.We can just say: “Well, malarkey, didn’t you people believe something completely different 15 years ago?” they say: “Yes,but know we’ve got it!”, say: “Well, I’m supposed to take that assertion seriously?You change your mind every 6 months.”

Audience: [inaudible] during[4:39:30] psychedelic{inaudible] is,you know,ungraspable, very frustrating[inaudible] and,you know,we can’t 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… not quite an[inaudible], but the experience really changes,and… it becomes something to which then[inaudible] to each other,and have a good [inaudible], but...you know,we’re missing it[inaudible]


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’t 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’t rob it of it’s mystery, it’s 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’m not sure that you got it into a question that i can respond to.Try again.

Audience: Ok.So, our culture[4:41:30] is in a phase that’s 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?

TM: Yes,sure,because you have to do it,you have to shift the locus[4:42:00]

Transcribed by Adrian Stan


[4:42:00] the locus, I mean it’s 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’s 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


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’s 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’re supposed to stay tuned to your girlfriend. So somehow we have sold out to abstraction. And this is something about science


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


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’s now how it’s going to happen. The way it’s going to happen is on 5 grams in silent darkness in your living room. And that’s 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’t 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’re concerned. The only thing that’s real to you is yourself and your immediate surroundings. And if we could empower that, you


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’t 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.


Audience: [inaudible]

TM: 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, “I thought I was crazy until I heard you speak. [4:47:30] Now I know that there are at least two of us.” And the truth is, you know, there are more than two of us. There are thousands. If you, uhm, you know, it’s a delusion if it happens to one person, it’s a cult if it happens to 20 people, and it’s 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]

Transcribed by Paul Mullins

TM: You know, ah, so I… I - I would like competition. I mean I feel pretty lonely out here; I’m 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’t seem to come forth.. And I really don’t know why that is because what I say is not all that exceptional it’s just the sum total of it is kind of eerie (4:40:30) Uh, but if we don’t…. That’s why I was saying uh you know “We can not 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 "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)


Audience: So weren't you arguing the opposite point you know when you spoke of ... (inaudible?)

Well 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.

Audience: So our experience during the psychedelic experience…

TM: Uh huh

Audience: before we bring it to language, is... is… 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… (inaudible) beyond concepts, once we conceptualize it, it becomes not quite an experiment but the experience really changes and… it becomes something that we can then (inaudible) to each other and have good social time… but uh, uhh ya know we’re missing the point.


TM: Well, every entity has a ‘value dark dimension’. I mean I… 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’t rob it of it’s 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… (long silence filled with audible movements) Vichtenstein talked about what he called “the unspeakable”... 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


very small subset of those things which can actually be captured in language, but they’re a vanishingly small uh set of the whole thing, mostly it’s all mystery. I don’t 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… so I think though all… 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’re 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


and better but they will never be more than crude approximations to an unspeakable mystery.


Audience: do you find this tragic?

TM: 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’s 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’s the kind of universe we’re living in.

Audience: 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....

Transcribed by Luke, Danny

Audience: [4:54:00][inaudible]

TM: That’s 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’s incommensurability theorem? This sounds daunting and disturbing. Uhm, have you ever [4:54:30] heard of this? Does anybody have a clue what I’m talking about? Okay, well that in itself is a measure of the kind of society we’re 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.

Audience: How do you spell Godel?


Audience: How do you spell Godel?

TM: 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’s taken us 80 years to get Einstein [4:56:30] under our belts and that’s a simple notion compared to what Godel is saying. Because what he’s 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’re beating your head against a stone wall and your head will wear out long before the stone wall will. There’s 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.

Audience: [inaudible]


Audience: [inaudible]

TM: You don’t need a complete map. I mean, I’m not such a van of Wittgenstein but he seems to have raised his ugly head here. Uhm, Wittgenstein used to say “We do not seek statements which are true. [4:58:00] We seek statements which are true enough.” That’s this genuflection to the incommensurability theorem. That’s as good as it gets folks. True enough. Beyond that there’s just, you know, the airy realm of metaphysics which will never be plumed. So what we’re trying to do is refine our model, make it more responsive to what we want the model to tell us. But you don’t 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.

Audience: [inaudible]


Audience: [inaudible]

TM: Yes, although, I have real problems with probability theory which we’ll 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’s 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’s science. If you want to know if something is possible you find a scientist and they’re 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]

Transcribed by Paul Mullins

[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."


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.


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…


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.

Audience2: Which brings you back to just the [inaudible]

TM: 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?

Audience: 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]

TM: 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?"

The 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…


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]

TM: 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."

Audience: 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…

TM: Well…

Audience: 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.

TM: 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]

Transcribed Sheree Geo