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840ed292897f-37 | beauty. And I mention this because I believe that many of the people capable of making major contributions to that are in this room or within a hundred miles of this room tonight. And we are people of immense privilege by any way of slicing the planetary demographic. Even the poorest among us who wheedled their way in ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time |
840ed292897f-38 | an obligation to awaken and an obligation to, at the same time, dream. And then the rational mind screams out, “But this is impossible; this is paradox!” But the subtle mind understands that we have now reached square one. By openly confronting the necessity for paradox, and by openly confronting the fact that we can o... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time |
840ed292897f-39 | for the destiny of future generations. This awakening must not be disempowering, and the mantle that can be spread over the awakening to counteract the possibility of disempowerment is this wish to evoke, realize, and serve the project of bringing ever greater amounts of beauty into the world. I think that’s the end of... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time |
840ed292897f-40 | --------
...history of shamanic use in the Andes of South America. People take… you can be a strict constructionist in the matter of psychedelics or you can cast your net widely. There are many substances in nature which alter consciousness. Either stimulate or sedate or
[50:00] | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time |
840ed292897f-41 | create more ambiguous and spectacular effects. I would describe the effects of datura as a deliriant. Now, the shamans who use these things have special techniques, both of preparation and of training that allow them to control or navigate around the more unpleasant aspects of datura. It tends to provoke memory loss, s... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time |
840ed292897f-42 | a substance or a plant should do. It should not inhibit clarity, in other words not episodes of forgetfulness, lack of memory, passing out, or confusion. It shouldn’t interfere with that, and it should transfor thought, and it should be accompanied by visual hallucinations with eyes closed. That’s what I love. That’s w... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time |
840ed292897f-43 | have had bonding experiences, but I’ve found it difficult to get the visions like I wanted them, and the best I worked out with LSD was I would smoke as much Afghani hash as I could at the top of the trip and then it would do the thing, in fact. It would do it. The thing that led me to psilocybin, or to grow mushrooms ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time |
840ed292897f-44 | LSD you get those little things that look sort of like fans that creep across the walls, that’s more like something in the visual cortex than something in the mind, it seems to me. And I was fascinated, and who isn’t, I mean I never hear this question discussed, but to me it was the obvious question about these visions... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time |
840ed292897f-45 | content, you know? Because it’s always individual, and they say, “Well science can’t handle individual phenomena. We measure the properties of large numbers of people.” Well that hopelessly flattens the thing. I know this is a long answer to this question but, it’s worth laying all this out because the ladies question ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time |
840ed292897f-46 | It means lethal dose 50. What does this mean? Well you have twenty rats, and you give them a certain amount of, let’s say, mescaline. When half the rats die, that dose, expressed as milligrams per kilogram of body weight is called the LD50. And when pharmacologists assess the danger in a drug, they ask the following qu... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time |
840ed292897f-47 | which have the better ratios. By that measurement, by that standard, LSD is the most desirable, but the LD50 of psilocybin is very impressive. You can take one-hundred times the effective dose of psilocybin and expect to live. Mescaline, not. Mescaline has a bad profile. As an amphetamine, if you took twenty times the ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time |
840ed292897f-48 | some moron will mess with you, and either lay a suggestion or plant an idea or manipulate you or scare you or turn you in a way that you wouldn’t ordinarily go. And this is why psychedelic etiquette means knowing your tripping partners. | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time |
840ed292897f-49 | [1:00:00] | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time |
840ed292897f-50 | People who take psychedelics with strangers at high dose do come back with wild tales to tell but I don’t think you can do that over and over again without having some horrible thing befall you. My mind is not… I mean some people seem more resilient. I am not. You know, people often ask me to trip them and I won’t and ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time |
840ed292897f-51 | be immeasurably improved by understanding the dynamics of the transference which is quite simple. The book is not that thick. Now to answer the lady’s question, when I took datura I had reality-distorting… strange. And if I had been a personality of a different sort I might have followed it deeper but it appeared to me... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time |
840ed292897f-52 | her but we were both aware that the other one was aware. And midway through my trip I decided I had to go to the bathroom and so I stepped through into this guy’s room and they were in bed together having sex. And I, I guess I went outside and then I, the next morning after sleeping many hours I encountered the guy and... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time |
840ed292897f-53 | Nepali village where I lived --and about a week later I was buying tomatoes in the market and I encountered a different person, but this English friend of mine, and he told me that he’d been taking a lot of datura. And I said, “Oh, well that’s interesting. I took it. I don’t think I’ll be taking it again.” And as the c... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time |
840ed292897f-54 | [audience member]: I hope I can remember what my question was.
[McKenna]: It’s a test.
[audience laughter]
[audience member]: I agree that there’s something sort of mysterious about where these psychedelic effects come from and I refer again to the sort of classic psychedelics-- psilocybin, LSD -- but, the fact that... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time |
840ed292897f-55 | [McKenna]: Oh, I see what you’re saying. Well… yes. I mean, this relates to what I was saying about the Balkanization of epistemology. It’s really strange to me that science is in the act of flinging open the curtains on a staggering vision of what it is to be alive in this cosmos. I mean, we now can look back through ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time |
840ed292897f-56 | The scientific… the makers of new science are going deeper and deeper in a direction that the rest of the public not only cannot follow them into, but is actually headed the other way. And it’s a condemnation of our educational system that people have not understood that science, for all it’s flaws, is the only tool fo... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time |
840ed292897f-57 | you discover your conclusions in paper “A” were completely wrong, you retract paper “A” and issue paper “B” and your fellow scientists say, “This guy does very good work. These are careful thinkers. You can bank on these people. They’re not flakey.” What religion operates like that? You know? Can you imagine coming out... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time |
840ed292897f-58 | [1:10:00] | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time |
840ed292897f-59 | So, you know, it’s uh… I… and then let me return to answer that question based on my original misunderstanding of it. And I would say this: You cannot… it is no reduction of the psychedelic experience to say that it is caused by drugs because they are material, atomic systems and therefore we know all about them. Every... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time |
840ed292897f-60 | theory that makes a prediction down to five or six decimal points, and then you perform an experiment, and it’s spot on, down to five or six decimal points. And then everybody involved in what’s going on has extremely high confidence that they’re on the right track. Well now, only one science is ever that good: physics... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time |
840ed292897f-61 | toward the paradigmatic science, which was physics, and which could produce this incredible congruence of theory and experimental data. Well, so then physics of course charges forward deeper into matter, asking deeper questions. Well, once you pass below the level of the electron it’s, it’s like suddenly… it’s like smo... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time |
840ed292897f-62 | the hell else to do. [audience laughter] And it’s fine, you know, it used to be in physics that they had one singularity. It was called the “big bang.” And so you say, “Well, one singularity.” Essentially what science is saying is, “Give us one free miracle and then we can… we can run it from there.” [audience laughter... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time |
840ed292897f-63 | as well be, you know, channelling Atlantis or something. So, uhm… it troubles me because I think this stuff is rich, that physics is feeding back and that ultimately a model of consciousness will come out of studying the deeper levels of the behavior of matter. But the conclusions are all going to support the non-scien... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time |
840ed292897f-64 | is more like a DMT flash than it is an eighteenth-century garden party, as we were previously assured by the practitioners of science. [audience laughter] Sorry, I think that’s enough ranting on that subject. [points] Yes? If you wanna, excuse me, if you wanna ask a question I guess the, what the consensus of the group... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time |
840ed292897f-65 | [audience member]: That’s why I got up here early.
[McKenna]: Yeah, good. Okay. Thanks for being patient. | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time |
840ed292897f-66 | [audience member]: Thanks Terence. I have a technical question, but I think it’s an interesting one, and may be important. Uh, your name has become identified with the date 2012, because you have said that, uh, at a certain moment in the year 2012 an event will take place of, uh, tremendous, or even infinite, novelty. ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time |
840ed292897f-67 | which only happens every 25,000 years. Uh, roughly 26,000 years. So, the last time that happened our ancestors were painting bison on the walls of caves. It’s a long, long cycle this precession of the equinoxes that brings the winter solstice around the circle of the zodiac every 26,000 years, and you say that this is ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time |
840ed292897f-68 | [1:20:00]
...but right now, as we sit here, the winter solstice is moving into conjunction with the place where the galactic equator crosses the zodiac. This is happening now, 1998, 1999… um, and I’m wondering why you look to this year 2012 and the imprecise conjunction with the galactic center rather than the precise... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time |
840ed292897f-69 | [McKenna]: Yeah. ...that I would disagree with and here’s why. When we say the “galactic center” it turns out when you turn the lights on on that concept that it’s extremely slippery. The galaxy is not a basketball. Uh, it has a center of mass, which we can’t determine from where we are because we’re out on one limb, e... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time |
840ed292897f-70 | sunrises over the next 14 or 15 years, it actually depends on the program you buy, uh… what the contention is that is supported. Uh, this is a deep subject, very interesting, raises issues of bio-astronomy, archeoastronomy, galactic dynamics, complicated issues. A book has come out in the last 6 months called Maya Cosm... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time |
840ed292897f-71 | by 12 years. But on a scale of a thousand years that’s a difference of .12 percent or something. And on a scale of a billion years, what is being off by 12 years? On a scale of a million years, what is being off by 12 years? So it seems crazy to me to have, you know, violent factions for 2012 and and then that… I mean,... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time |
840ed292897f-72 | is we are… we are there. We are there. We are in parking orbit around the eschaton. Uh, and you know, it permeates our lives. All you have to do is sit down, smoke a bomber, and look, and it’s there, you know. It is pregnant, we are pregnant with this eschatological breakthrough. And you know, people want it to arrive ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time |
840ed292897f-73 | the space of… and yet people say, “Well nothing much ever seems to happen,” you know. An incredible ability to not register radical change seems to be a precondition of existing in the presence of radical change. Now for those of you who care about my theories in this area of mathematics and deconstruction of the I-Chi... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time |
840ed292897f-74 | on board is the fact that as you get nearer and nearer the moment in time that we call the present, things become more and more complicated. Now that may seem like a trivial statement, but there’s no reason for the universe to work like that. Why does the universe go from simple to complicated? Why do you get, at first... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time |
840ed292897f-75 | [1:30:00]
in gravitationally aggregated masses called stars, cooks out then heavier elements. They emerge. They were never seen before until fusion began to occur in these hydrogen masses. And these fusion processes cook-out iron, sulfur, carbon, bingo! Carbon. Molecules. Now an order of magnitude in their complexity ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time |
840ed292897f-76 | Now, I said there were two things. The second thing is related to the first. [drinks coffee] Double-shot of espresso… you’re really getting your money’s worth here.
Uh, the second thing which science has refused to take on-board is that this process of complexification that I just described to you, as you approach the... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time |
840ed292897f-77 | So… then, but the implication of that, carried to it’s ultimate extreme, leads to a conclusion most people find too wild to entertain. If the universe is evolving deeper and deeper into complexity, faster and faster, and if, now, in a human lifetime we can see a small portion of this curve… it no longer appears flat to... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time |
840ed292897f-78 | Well, wait a minute. What’s so crazy about this? Let’s look at what the competition is peddling. What the competition would have you believe is that the universe sprang from nothing, in a single moment, for no reason. Well now, whatever you think about that theory, in the interest of being awake, please notice that tha... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time |
840ed292897f-79 | then surely such universes occur in a situation of great complexity. In other words, if we’re going to look for an enormous ruption of emergent phenomena, an enormous, sudden, unexpected download of novelty, we shouldn’t look in a domain of zero-space, zero-time, zero-energy, zero-anti-entropic-organization, that’s the... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time |
840ed292897f-80 | I think that science is extremely hostile to the idea that the universe is complexifying, and complexifying more and more rapidly. Why? It’s just a matter… it’s just a historical issue. It has to do with the fact that nineteenth-century English biology was extremely hostile to what it called “Deism”. Deism was the reig... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time |
840ed292897f-81 | I think we have grown beyond that. And that it’s foolish to wear those tight, nineteenth-century, high-buttoned shoes. We can believe that the universe is following an organizational vector. We can believe that the universe is under the influence of a strange attractor. We can believe that the universe is pulled toward... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time |
840ed292897f-82 | [1:40:00]
Now, why do I spend so much time on this, and what’s so great about all this? Here’s what’s so great about all this. If you will join me in this believe that the universe works as I have described, it’s an engine for the generation of complexity, and it preserves complexity, and it builds on complexity to ev... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time |
840ed292897f-83 | And so, suddenly then, you know, you have a morality, you have an ethical arrow, you have contextualization in the processes of nature, you have meaning. You have authenticity. You have hope. You have the cancelation of existentialism and positivism and all that late-twentieth-century crapola that people used to entert... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time |
840ed292897f-84 | But now, history, which lasts twenty-five thousand years, is this weird period where you’re neither fish nor fowl. You know, you’re not the hunting ape anymore, but you are not yet the sixteen dimensional digital god. You know? And in that transition phase there is confusion, there is angst. But now, we’re at the end. ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time |
840ed292897f-85 | [audience member]: And I’d like to hear maybe just a little more about DMT.
[McKenna]: Okay. Well first thing, let me say, which is a piece of practical advice, um… the psychedelic community is cleverly invisible because our choices in gender expression, fashion, so forth and so on, have, by crypto-osmosis come to dom... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time |
840ed292897f-86 | [McKenna]: The man in the black and red poncho. Uh… yeah, I mean, in a way it’s impossible to talk about DMT, but on the other hand, it’s fun to try to talk about it because it pushes the horse of language into a lather. Basically, when you smoke DMT, what happens is pure confoundment. And, you know, I’m trying to spea... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time |
840ed292897f-87 | [1:50:00]
You know, and you deliver that line, and then people laugh… except the people who’ve done DMT don’t laugh because they understand, you know, death by astonishment is no remote possibility. Death by astonishment is right there. You know, when was the last time you were astonished? Unless I smoke DMT it doesn’... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time |
840ed292897f-88 | patrón
of the ranch is there, and this terrified guy is there in this serape, and he can only point to the forest and sort of make a croaking sound. And that’s what English allows you to do with the experience of DMT. You just come down a sputtering mess, if it works. You just come down saying, you know, “My god! It’s... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time |
840ed292897f-89 | And I… to me it’s a miracle, because my intellectual arrow and how I brought myself up in terms of all these things was, I am a rationalist, and I am interested in testing, and verifying, and proceeding to define truth by non-exotic means. In other words, no arch-angels, no… none of that. And as I matured intellectuall... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time |
840ed292897f-90 | And what makes me wild about this is we’re not talking about something that you have to go five-hundred miles up a jungle river and live with primitive people and study techniques for thirty years… We’re talking about something which, if I had a pipe loaded with it in my hand, each one of you would be thirty seconds aw... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Dreaming+Awake+at+the+End+of+Time |
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Terence McKenna with Lost at Last
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12 December 1998
Maritime Hall, San Francisco, California
129
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Interview Hawaii
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October 1998
Hawaii
51
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Esalen In-House Get-Together
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4 August 1998
Esalen, CA
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Techno-Pagans at the End of History
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August 1998
Esalen Institute, Big Sur, California
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The World Wide Web and the Millenium
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1 August 1998
Omega Institute, Rhinebeck, New York
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Live at Wetlands Preserve, NYC
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28 July 1998
Wetlands Preserve, New York New York
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. And, what can I sa... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Live+at+Wetlands+Preserve%2C+NYC |
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Trialogues at the Edge of the Millenium
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May 6, 1998
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The Future of Art
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August 7, 1998
Esalen Institute
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In the Valley of Novelty
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Summer 1998
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The original prediction was that there would be a deep plunge into n... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty |
dcc6bfab9a83-1 | And then within 8 days of that announcement was the announcement of Dolly, the cloning of the sheep in England – which again, if certain scenarios come to pass, that will be a moment – you know, the point the human race passed from which there was no going back, then, because basically if you can clone a sheep you can ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty |
dcc6bfab9a83-2 | Question from audience: I wanted to ask you about novelty and psychedelics, and the language that changes through the use of them. I remember reading Maria Sabina saying that the mushrooms spoke a different language to her after people like Wasson came down and began to use them – they went from Spanish to English, fro... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty |
dcc6bfab9a83-3 | On DMT, and on psilocybin – and they are closely related, psilocybin being 4-phosphoryloxy-N,N-dimethyltryptamine, the phosphorylated form of DMT, though they do not degrade into one pathway in the body – it’s a parallel pathway: DMT is N,N-dimethyltryptamine. These psychedelics particularly seem to impact the language... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty |
dcc6bfab9a83-4 | On DMT, these entities – these machine-like, diminutive, shape-shifting, faceted machine elf type creatures that come bounding out of the state – they come bounding out of my stereo speakers, if I have my eyes open – they are like, you know, they are elfin embodiments of syntactical intent. Somehow syntax, which is nor... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty |
dcc6bfab9a83-5 | What they’re like is – and in fact, this is probably what they are – what they’re like is, they’re like three- and four- and five-dimensional puns. And you know how the pleasure of a pun lies in the fact that it is… it’s not that the meaning flickers from A to B; it’s that it’s simultaneously A and B, and when the pun ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty |
dcc6bfab9a83-6 | Well, so these syntactical animals, or these linguistic elves, are pulling this stuff out and gesturing with it; pushing it in your face, saying “Look at this! Look at this!” And you are fascinated, you know – pulled into it. Because each one is [gasps] What? – you know, How can this be happening?We’re not in the world... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty |
dcc6bfab9a83-7 | Question from audience
Well somebody once asked me, you know, “Is it dangerous?” And the answer is, only if you fear death by astonishment. But death by astonishment is entirely possible! I’m not kidding! I mean, you are so fucking astonished that you’ve never felt your astonishment circuits get a workout like that be... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty |
dcc6bfab9a83-8 | And you can see it – that’s the amazing thing. It is not to be heard, even though it is carried as an acoustical signal; its meaning resides in what happens to it when the acoustical signal is processed by the visual cortex. That’s the important thing. It is a new kind of language. It’s a visible, three-dimensional lan... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty |
dcc6bfab9a83-9 | And I didn’t mention ayahuasca in this rap, but ayahuasca, being – along with the mushrooms – a natural and shamanically used for many millennia doorway into these places, and what you find in ayahuasca groups in up-river tribal situation is people – the whole way the ayahuasca-taking is set up is to facilitate singing... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty |
dcc6bfab9a83-10 | And it’s not that surprising, when you think of it, because obviously the world arrives at the surface of our skin as a seamless body of electromagnetic and acoustical and pheromonal data. It’s just that our eyes, our nostrils, our ears, our skin, we break up this incoming flow of data. And now we’re close to McLuhan c... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty |
dcc6bfab9a83-11 | Well, I’ve actually seen this happen in psychedelic states, where you will be lying in silent darkness; you hear distant music; and as the music gets closer, it’s like a band with lights and drums coming over a hill. As the music gets louder, it seems to physically approach and a confusion of light turns into, you know... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty |
dcc6bfab9a83-12 | And I see this, then, also reinforced and accelerated by the evolution of media, you know? In the last 150 years, we go from photography to colour photography, to moving coloured photography, with sound, with stereophonic sound, and – you know – pointing toward virtual reality, with more and more money to be made at ea... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty |
dcc6bfab9a83-13 | Yeah, Julian Haines, it didn’t win him too many friends, but he wrote a big book and had this theory that this thing which we call the ego is so recent in human beings that it actually didn’t exist at the time of Homer. And he goes into Homer, and he shows that the god always breaks through in situations of crisis and ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty |
dcc6bfab9a83-14 | One of the conclusions that novelty theory leads to, in terms of its feedback into social here-and-now stuff, is the idea that culture is not your friend. That culture is an impediment to understanding what’s going on. That’s why, to my mind, the word “cult” and the word “culture” have a direct relationship to each oth... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty |
dcc6bfab9a83-15 | So, you know, part of what psychedelics do is they decondition you from cultural values. This is what makes it such a political hot potato. You know, if there is anything… since all culture is a kind of con game, the most dangerous candy you can hand out is candy which causes people to start questioning the rules of th... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty |
dcc6bfab9a83-16 | Question from audience: One of the big ideas that seems to be in the notion of the Archaic Revival is that the whole big thing is really conscious and alive – the universe, the galaxy, the larger entities – and that’s interesting, because it’s a traditional belief that’s held by non-modern, non-scientific, cultures. An... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty |
dcc6bfab9a83-17 | comes down to whether or not these larger things have in fact some kind of direction behind it, which is I think what your work and observations imply. And so I thought one day about how to understand that, and I have a question, which is whether or not you can talk about creativity as having a fractal nature? – since ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty |
dcc6bfab9a83-18 | comment on that, but also in relation to the idea that was also contained in evolution about the origin of language, because some of the things you’re speaking about from your DMT experiences have a funny resonance with Creation stories, like Adam and Eve naming the animals. I mean, I’ve never really been all that comf... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty |
dcc6bfab9a83-19 | and precisely because it could manifest form? Or something like that? In terms of how new species come into being. The only idea that we ever get to allow into the theory of evolution is that it’s an accident, that there will be a mutation and a new species similar to another species will be born, and it will survive, ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty |
dcc6bfab9a83-20 | developed and designed, and the whole way in which they integrate themselves into existing ecosystems, etc, somehow or other it all gets worked out, and there’s a mystery then, we don’t see and don’t understand, by which these new forms come into being. Maybe they all come into being at once, with a thousand or a milli... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty |
dcc6bfab9a83-21 | Well, all this raises a lot of stuff, most of which I can’t remember because of my devotion to cannabis. But let’s go back to the thing about language, and – yeah, the origins of language, let’s talk about that for a minute. I think that – I’ve been thinking about this, because I’ve been writing about it, and here’s wh... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty |
dcc6bfab9a83-22 | What is not deep in nature is speech. Speech is as artificial as the water wheel, the bicycle pump, the Tessler coil and the space shuttle. Somebody figured this out somewhere. Well, so then people say, “But this is hard to understand. It’s hard to picture how it could happen.” Well, here’s how I think it happened. My ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty |
dcc6bfab9a83-23 | So, for example, before speech among human beings, I think it was probably very touchy-feely. If you watch monkeys, you see this: they touch each other. They stroke, they grunt, they groom, they goose, they push, they do all of these things. The repertoire of this kind of behaviour, if you’re good at it, may be on the ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty |
dcc6bfab9a83-24 | What does this mean? Well, it means that the gestural capacity is deeper than the ability to verbalise, and hence probably older. So I think there was a gestural language as complex as standard English, probably, in place before anyone ever uttered a word. Now, what the psychedelics seem to suggest is that you can get ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty |
dcc6bfab9a83-25 | It’s amazing to me that the straight linguist, you know, if you go to an academic university and study linguistics, will teach you that language is no more than 35-40,000 years old. I mean, that’s like yesterday! I mean, we – fire is half a million years; chipped flint, a million and a half years; language, 35,000 year... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty |
dcc6bfab9a83-26 | And of course, the picture-writing, we understand; but similar to the breakthrough to speech, is the breakthrough to a phonetic alphabet, where you see: “Ah! We don’t have to portray the thing we intend; all we have to portray is the sound of the word that signifies the thing we intend!” And then, you know, you’re just... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty |
dcc6bfab9a83-27 | The thing that I tried to talk about this morning, that we need to map into our maps of reality, is the acceleration. I think it’s a really weird idea to talk about a thousand years in the future; I mean, good grief! A thousand years in the future, what do you imagine will be left standing that you call home? What – ca... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty |
dcc6bfab9a83-28 | Well, certainly the West has built its house on a narrow foundation, denying these other possibilities. On the other hand, if… well, you get into all kinds of difficulties here. How do you judge whether or not a civilisation has assimilated or explored the domains it’s named its own? One way is by looking at the techno... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty |
dcc6bfab9a83-29 | Well, definitely, what you’re getting at is that technology itself is a kind of psychedelic drug; that, you know, by chance or design, the proponents of psychedelica have figured out that it’s totally acceptable to this culture if you disguise it as electronic entertainment and put it out that way. So the web is incred... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty |
dcc6bfab9a83-30 | We think the inside of our heads are all the same, but you know when I say to you that when I smoke DMT it unleashes a Niagara of alien beauty, if I had spent the last 30 years building that Niagara of alien beauty so that you could just strap on the goggles and go, then we would have a very different kind of dialogue ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty |
dcc6bfab9a83-31 | Question from audience comparing LSD insights with meditational experience
Well, in the interest of keeping the number of singularities to a minimum, the most elegant thing to do is to wrap the theory around and say that the starting-point and the ending-point are the same place. Yeah, it’s the place where all is co-t... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty |
dcc6bfab9a83-32 | Question from audience about expression of information using new technologies that may replicate the psychedelic state
I’m all for it; I just haven’t seen anything that convinced me that anybody had achieved it to any degree of significance. Yeah, you know, imagine a drug that did nothing more than allow you to rememb... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty |
dcc6bfab9a83-33 | A couple of situations, I’ve had telepathic things. I’ve had, in group situations, very quasi-telepathic social interactions. What I mean by that is, I’m recalling an evening many years ago taking ayahuasca with these people and they had a weird scene going. The shaman was a good guy, and a good shaman, but he had a ne... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty |
dcc6bfab9a83-34 | – knock it off”. So, 30 people – 30 Peruvian campesinos – were witnessing this sing-against, and the woman I was with at the time very much didn’t’ like what was going on, and at the end of this, this nephew, this sobrino, at the end of his song of raucous interruption, I looked up just as he ended – the room was almos... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty |
dcc6bfab9a83-35 | to say “Wait a minute, folks! – something paranormal just happened here, I want to interview everybody, get your impression” – it’s never, you know, when it’s real, it’s always caught up in the on-moving flow of events. | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty |
dcc6bfab9a83-36 | Question from audience
Well, if you’ve taken – what you don’t want to do is take… here’s – this is reasonable advice, too, I think. Where the problem area lies, people think it lies in taking too much. It lies in taking too little. Because if you take too little, you can resist it. You can struggle with it, and then i... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty |
dcc6bfab9a83-37 | But the way I do it is, I take the mushroom (or the ayahuasca), and then I sit and I roll bombers, so I’ll have them ready if I need them, and I just sit as I’m going to sit during the trip, and I’ve unplugged the telephone, and I’ve gotten everything squared away, and it begins to come on at about the 40-minute or the... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty |
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