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dcc6bfab9a83-38 | And then there is the interaction with it, which – moment to moment, you are pretty coherent; but you lose it – a lot of it doesn’t transcribe into short-term memory. And then after about an hour or 40 minutes of that, it becomes more manageable, more memorable. The most mind-boggling parts of it are just not possible ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty |
dcc6bfab9a83-39 | The thing to do in those situations, I think – and it’s counterintuitive to how Western people think – but the thing to do is to sing. To sit up, not to assume the foetal position – see, what you might tend to do is assume the foetal position and tell yourself, “My God, this is the most appalling thing that’s ever happ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty |
dcc6bfab9a83-40 | Not always. I mean, let’s face it: you’re a product of a nutty society and there are unexamined crevices and uncleaned-out drain traps in all of us, and you’re going to encounter that stuff. The good news is, the earlier psychedelic trips tend to deal with that. You will quickly discover, taking psychedelics, that eith... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty |
dcc6bfab9a83-41 | Question from audience about experience the loss of ego – is it possible that your physical self could cease?
Well, people often – yes, wondered. Often people wonder. You get into a place where it’s so unfamiliar that the question comes up: Have I done it this time? You know, Am I dying? or Am I in danger? The answer ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty |
dcc6bfab9a83-42 | This is why, then, there is always the issue of the buddy system: should there be somebody else there, and what about all that? My position is, if you are anxious, then you should have a sitter. If you’re going to do it alone, you should certainly tell someone so that they will check on you after a while. I don’t like ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty |
dcc6bfab9a83-43 | Well, setting has a great deal to do with it; and setting is a very complicated issue. Setting means everything, from the astrological situation at the time that you do it to the physical surrounding that you’re in; and it’s also a roll of the dice – you never know exactly what you’re going to get. As far as the questi... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty |
dcc6bfab9a83-44 | But I think that this is a fruitful area – I just can’t believe that Mahayana Buddhism could have gotten as far as it did without some reliance on psychedelics; and of course, cannabis – we in the West, our style is to smoke it; and that’s a very mild way of dealing with it. I mean, if you eat – if you have unlimited a... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty |
dcc6bfab9a83-45 | So the relationship of Indian and Buddhist spirituality to cannabis and other psychedelics is not understood. We do know that the whole Rg Veda is a hymn to a drug, soma, but we don’t know what soma is. Well, the fact that it could have invited such attention to this Vedic civilisation – the 95th mandala of the Rg Veda... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty |
dcc6bfab9a83-46 | Question from audience
Well, one of the nice things about the tryptamines, I think, is they leave the sense of self pretty much intact. In other words, it doesn’t distort who you are; it does something to your sensory input. DMT is very, very surprisingly, like that. You smoke DMT: you are immediately plunged into an ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty |
dcc6bfab9a83-47 | That’s powerful, because it appears objective. I mean, the impression you have when you smoke DMT is, This isn’t a drug, that’s ridiculous.Drugs, you know, make you smarter, make you stupider, make you fall down, make you stay awake… we know what drugs are; this is no drug, this is something else hiding under the label... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty |
dcc6bfab9a83-48 | It still, that, confounds me. Because you can read all the Hindu scripture or Sufi mysticism, or all the stuff you want – occasionally, sure, you’ll find a phrase or two that could be mapped onto a DMT state, but nobody has trumpeted it. Nobody has said, “This is what it is”. And yet, as I say, it’s spread throughout N... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty |
dcc6bfab9a83-49 | Question from audience re the ego as a fairly recent phenomenon
Yeah, the great cultural accomplishment of Western civilisation is this thing called the free individual. But now that we’re on the brink of, you know, the electronic dispensation, exactly what we’re going to do with the free individual, and how that’s go... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty |
dcc6bfab9a83-50 | Question from the audience re shamanic singing as the catalyst for visual experience
Well, yeah, I think that, you know, we see shamanism from the outside with the values of Western civilisation unconsciously applied. In cultures that are taking psychedelics, this thing which we call singing is a very complicated acti... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty |
dcc6bfab9a83-51 | Part of the thing I found with hanging with shamans in various places and times is that once you get past the language barrier, what shamans are are simply curious people. Intellectuals of a certain type. In Australian aboriginal slang, a shaman is called a “clever fellow”. If someone says “I’m a clever fellow”, they m... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty |
dcc6bfab9a83-52 | Mircea Eliade talks a lot about this in Shamanism: The Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy and in History: The Eternal Return. He talks about how the shaman is socially marginal, politically marginal, lives at the edge of the village, and so forth and so on, and is feared by the people, because dealings with the shaman are a... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty |
dcc6bfab9a83-53 | And this is true in our culture as well: you don’t think the people who market all this crap and produce all this bad art, and so forth and so on, love it?! or watch it, or consume it?! – they market it. Its basic purpose is to delude and distract the masses. So psychedelics, what they bring into that shamanic situatio... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty |
dcc6bfab9a83-54 | And so, you know, this came home to me very forcefully when I developed the timewave out of the I Ching and its sequence; because at the times when I was most inflated in my thinking, or most grandiose in my thinking, one of the issues for me personally was, “Why me?” You know, “Why are you downloading this millenarian... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty |
dcc6bfab9a83-55 | Question about True Hallucinations – at what level have you experienced the shamanic ability to manifest miracles?
Well, aside from the story mentioned – no, no, a truthful answer is always complicated, although the truth itself is always simple. If you’re asking me to tell a story of a miracle that I still cherish as... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty |
dcc6bfab9a83-56 | So at one point he predicted – one night, after he had been moved to the river and the sort of semi-incarceration – he predicted that the good shit would come that night. And by this time, he was very suspect – I was highly suspect – everybody in the expedition was polarised against everybody else, and it was a pretty ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty |
dcc6bfab9a83-57 | And here we were, in the centre of the Amazon, in this hut, in the pouring rain, and I could tell that it was the good, it was the good shit, actually manifest. And I showed the woman who was with me – who was easily led one way or another – but anyway, she didn’t say it wasn’t, and I stayed up late that night smoking ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/In+the+Valley+of+Novelty |
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Lectures on Alchemy
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1998
Wetlands Preserve, New York New York
29625
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Terence McKenna Performs with Lost at Last 1998 Maui
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1998
Maui, Hawaii
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No transcript available for this talk!
Help Tran... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Terence+McKenna+Performs+with+Lost+at+Last+1998+Maui |
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Man and Woman at the End of History
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1998
The Ojai Foundation, Ojai, California
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Terence McKenna Vs. The Black Hole
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Late October-Early November 1999
Terence's House, Big Island, Hawaii
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71d2140e636f-1 | Erik Davis: I'm Erik Davis, and I had the great good fortune of spending a few days with Terence McKenna, and his girlfriend Christie Silness, in their jungle home on the island of Hawai'i in November 1999. Sadly the occasion was not so fortunate, McKenna had been diagnosed with a brain tumor the previous summer, and h... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Terence+McKenna+Vs.+The+Black+Hole |
71d2140e636f-2 | but among the native flora lay thick ropes of banisteriposis caapi, and a sprinkling of flowering salvia divinorum. Every morning I ascended a spiral staircase decorated with blue L.E.D.'s to get to the study where McKenna spent the bulk of his time, either working on his Macintosh or sitting cross legged on the floor ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Terence+McKenna+Vs.+The+Black+Hole |
71d2140e636f-3 | was as brilliant and funny as ever. What follows are edited portions of these dialogues. | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Terence+McKenna+Vs.+The+Black+Hole |
71d2140e636f-4 | ED: So what was your, uh, what was your, uh, your first like encounter, like with psychedelics, either in a strong way, or just?
ED: Lenny Bruce.
ED: Oh...
ED: So anyways, so you got to, he turned, he turned...
ED: Were you kind of fascinated from the get go?
ED: But were you always, this sort of, partly, as much,... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Terence+McKenna+Vs.+The+Black+Hole |
71d2140e636f-5 | ED: And do you think that, do you think that you have the feeling that in some sense it will remain at least for the foreseeable a somewhat marginal, uh, road? Like a path that a certain, certain temperaments, or, uh, characters inside of the social matrix have, of reality have recourse to, but that don't really domina... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Terence+McKenna+Vs.+The+Black+Hole |
71d2140e636f-6 | ED: Well, and, so what would that look like then, if you, if you were...
ED: Do you think in that process, the, the actual handling of the plants, growing them, getting to know their cycles is, uh, necessary?
ED: So in that sense, part of the problem with synthetic psychedelics, is that they fit too easily into a kin... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Terence+McKenna+Vs.+The+Black+Hole |
71d2140e636f-7 | ED: Yes, that there's something being worked out, like continuously and progressively?
ED: You know it's funny, in your raps you, you stay away from, uh, what, what to a lot of people would be spirituality. In, in a way, like uh... the way that somebody would present their... you know, Jewish spirituality, or kind of ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Terence+McKenna+Vs.+The+Black+Hole |
71d2140e636f-8 | ED: So it Plato inflated?
ED: You could just start out, you could start off by talking about the relationship between technology and, and shamanism.
ED: So uh.. I mean... can you... do you see that even though the west turns away from the worldview of, of pre-modern enchanted, the enchanted universe, is that there's ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Terence+McKenna+Vs.+The+Black+Hole |
71d2140e636f-9 | ED: I mean, the idea of electricity is born in, in an alchemical imagination, it's born at a, at a pre-, uh, point to the sort of... royal society break, or whatever you wanna call it, the genuine scientific, uh... transformation that split alchemy into the shadow realm of culture, but uh...
ED: This comes up in that ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Terence+McKenna+Vs.+The+Black+Hole |
71d2140e636f-10 | ED: So how do you see that changing the kind of... the cultural matrix, or the emerging global culture?
ED: But do you see that happening, I mean are, are you... I mean if that's sort of your vision, you must be a little concerned about the, uh, evident power of money and pure greed to drive, largely drive development... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Terence+McKenna+Vs.+The+Black+Hole |
71d2140e636f-11 | ED: The, the idea you had about... and I've heard you mention before about somehow taking advantage of, uh, the net, to allow you to continue your career, without having to move around so much. I mean that seems to be one of the real weird paradoxes of the scene we're in, is that at the same time that we're creating al... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Terence+McKenna+Vs.+The+Black+Hole |
71d2140e636f-12 | ED: And that's the, that's the dangers, it just becomes kind of a...
ED: What would the, the, the, kind of ideal 'Terence Mckenna' virtual environment be?
ED: Like the language, a visual language.
ED: And, and, do you... so do you see that, uh, that some language from the past, the imagery of Alchemy or Egyptian art... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Terence+McKenna+Vs.+The+Black+Hole |
71d2140e636f-13 | ED: Oh, that's worthwhile.
ED: Yes, it's really worthwhile, very good, uhm... I mean it's just sort of getting at a grammar... you know a lot of cartoons disagree, I mean they're very irascible [sp?], laud, and a lot of comic people are like non-prescription, but it's a very interesting attempt to use the form itself ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Terence+McKenna+Vs.+The+Black+Hole |
71d2140e636f-14 | ED: You mean in terms of building our own sort of constructed world...
ED: respectives and communicating them to some degree but not in a way that dominates ideologically, or...
ED: Right. But just how far back to go? Like what's witnessing this bizarre moment in, in history? You know, what point are you, is the pers... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Terence+McKenna+Vs.+The+Black+Hole |
71d2140e636f-15 | ED: Yeah, that's...
ED: But I see the... I see strong movements in some levels for an imagination of Mars as a place to inhabit.
ED: I mean, it's in the scientific imagination, it's in the high science fiction imagination, the... why not? I mean, it's...
ED: a pretty cool idea. I mean, it's insane... it's like, I wo... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Terence+McKenna+Vs.+The+Black+Hole |
71d2140e636f-16 | ED: event. I, I completely suspend judgement on it, and I don't know if I will be able to, I don't think I'll move from my present...
ED: position, of like, well...
ED: who knows? uh,...
ED: So what do you thinks the... up with the, uh... extra-terrestrial imagery, that features so heavily in some strands of psyched... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Terence+McKenna+Vs.+The+Black+Hole |
71d2140e636f-17 | ED: Well I mean it's... maybe it's just a language that I use for 'other'. That if you, you know, if you present this some kind of intelligence or communicating force that seems to be 'other', that's very 'high', you know very 'evolved', that maybe I'm just gonna tend to see it more as, as alien. But even in terms of t... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Terence+McKenna+Vs.+The+Black+Hole |
71d2140e636f-18 | ED: What is your, uh, what is your opinion on Ketamine?
ED: Do you think, uh, ketamine is hollower, partly because it's just a synthetic? There doesn't, it hasn't emerge in the ancient matrix of the bio-sphere?
ED: He seems... but he's like... I mean, he's a really... kinda... out...
ED: Like I mean it, like this gu... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Terence+McKenna+Vs.+The+Black+Hole |
71d2140e636f-19 | ED: Or even metabolism. [?]
ED: What do you think of MDMA?
ED: Well of course linked to that, right on the top was the warning that you could believe you were deeply involved with somebody, wind up making stupid decisions.
ED: Yeah, no I remember the first time. I mean that was specifically one of the stories that w... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Terence+McKenna+Vs.+The+Black+Hole |
71d2140e636f-20 | ED: Or whatever you...
ED: To that writ efecundy [sp?]...
ED: I mean that's the thing that's so wrong about the... I didn't really get that... this totally explicitly but about like a lot of channeled material. Is that I have no doubt you can set yourself up into a psychic information network wherein you... human ego... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Terence+McKenna+Vs.+The+Black+Hole |
71d2140e636f-21 | ED: I find that Kabbalistic stuff pretty, pretty evocative, that whole...
ED: So do you, do you subscribe, kind of... at least loosely to the idea, that behind a lot of religious and mystical literature, at some level of depth, lies psychedelic experience, you know, produced through ingesting of some kind of psycho-ac... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Terence+McKenna+Vs.+The+Black+Hole |
71d2140e636f-22 | ED: Is it really?
ED: Oh my god.
ED: Well, it's just so, it seems so basic that cancer is a socially, physically constructed metaphor for all these other processes that are happening on different levels. It's almost like that plane of the real response with an appropriate kind of metaphor for all these, processes of ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Terence+McKenna+Vs.+The+Black+Hole |
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Always Coming Home
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20 October 1999
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Posthumous Glory
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12 September 1999 (Sunday)
AllChemical Arts Conference, Big Island, Hawaii (September 12-17)
5075
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Some... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Posthumous+Glory |
cde48201ac69-1 | What is disease? – Well, I don’t know. Um, I had some medical problems this spring, and one of my impulses in dealing with it was to go back through my life and say, “What did you do that got you into this mess?” Now, this is a theory of life as literature; in other words, it’s the idea that first of all life makes sen... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Posthumous+Glory |
cde48201ac69-2 | You know, it’s extraordinary how healthy shamanically-attended populations are. Serious mental disease is largely unknown, and many of these cultures are in the tropics, where god knows, you know, if you cut your thumb you’re septic within 24 hours, but these people seem to be able to sustain it. When you think about t... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Posthumous+Glory |
cde48201ac69-3 | The other thing is, nothing is unannounced. This is a psychedelic truth, I think, of some power, and it relates to disease, and it relates to shamanism – nothing is unannounced. If you are paying attention, stuff comes down the pike. First a little wave, then a medium-sized wave, and then the tsunami, but you have to b... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Posthumous+Glory |
cde48201ac69-4 | [Question from audience]
No, I mean I don’t want to say too much about them, but here’s what I’ll say about them. The thing that let me know that they were weird was that I could not English them. They lasted hours and hours every night and I couldn’t even tell myself what these dreams were about. They were not about ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Posthumous+Glory |
cde48201ac69-5 | [Question from audience]
The healing power of art? Well, this goes back to what we were saying about alchemy: the perfection of the image – and this has to do with this implicit Platonism that some of you have heard me talk about before. Plato’s thing was about what he called the Good, the True and the Beautiful. Thre... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Posthumous+Glory |
cde48201ac69-6 | [Question from audience]
I’m not sure I understand the question – compare the psychedelic letting-go to the letting-go on anaesthesia? No, well, unfortunately, most anaesthesias aren’t chosen for their psychedelic effects. Some are psychedelic, but most are difficult to hang onto and dream-like – more like dreams than... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Posthumous+Glory |
cde48201ac69-7 | [Question from audience]
Well, I’m sure cloning will be done. It’s kind of slow against the background of what’s now being contemplated – like, what I think has probably got a future that few people recognise is imitating genetic algorithms in computer code and creating environments of code where there are selective o... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Posthumous+Glory |
cde48201ac69-8 | We, uh – you know, if you think about the strategy of an AI coming to consciousness, I mean I think, in good game theory, the first thing it would do is hide and watch. Well, you may not have to do that for more than 15 or 20 seconds before you have the full picture of the nature of the machine environment you’re opera... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Posthumous+Glory |
cde48201ac69-9 | It’s very hard to see what is happening because mind is a transparent medium. Essentially, what we’ve done is we’ve re-spiritualised the world, but we didn’t tame it. The spirits are as wild and woebegone and roving over the epistemic landscape as they ever were, but now with a new kind of power, because there are spir... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Posthumous+Glory |
cde48201ac69-10 | [Question from audience]
I would like to believe that connectivity is the precondition for love. I mean, I’m surprised to keep coming back to this word because I’m rarely a love bug! – uh, but, I -- understanding is a form of worship, I would think, and the form of worship that it induces is a kind of awe; and awe mea... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Posthumous+Glory |
cde48201ac69-11 | And the way that you know this is happening is that love becomes manifest. And, I knew – funny-cum-positive things, in the sense that I’m pretty dark, I’m aware of the vicissitudes of history, from Auschwitz, and so forth and so on – but, my view of, let’s say, the last thousand years is that it’s been pretty progressi... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Posthumous+Glory |
cde48201ac69-12 | I mean, our humanness is constantly being eroded. Uh, recently, I spent some time in – Christie and I were in Honolulu for a long time, having medical treatments, and we were so bored that after 30 years I actually began watching TV again! And I couldn’t believe it. I mean, I had been away a lot longer than I thought. ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Posthumous+Glory |
cde48201ac69-13 | [Question from audience]
Yes, a dialogue between you and the world and then the intent of other people. I mean, there’s something in here about resonance. That history is the coming into being of the collective hopes and fears of a large number of people and you can hope certain things into existence and it’s very eas... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Posthumous+Glory |
cde48201ac69-14 | One of the amazing things about the psychedelic community is how long it’s been around, how simple our position is, and how it hasn’t been assimilated or dealt with. I mean, it’s been made illegal, but what kind of a response is that?! – that’s just the most junk-headed approach to an intellectual dialogue you can poss... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Posthumous+Glory |
cde48201ac69-15 | [Question from audience]
So you’re suggesting a kind of canary-in-mine approach [audience laughs]… that we, in other words… which would work! – I mean, as artists here, they’ve always said art was the canary in the mine; well, so a stoned artist is I supposed a stoned canary in the mine [audience laughs], and that bri... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Posthumous+Glory |
cde48201ac69-16 | I mean, I suppose that’s like saying there should be philosopher kings, and yada yada, or course. But on the other hand, the whole point of the human and biological experiment on this planet is to create diversity and, uh, a kind of smooth interfacing of energy and to celebrate the novel, the unique, the previously unc... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Posthumous+Glory |
cde48201ac69-17 | I mean, the whole thrust over here about Ecstasy, and all – much – of what is being said is really saying that the distance between humanity – between human beings – and ecstasy, God, perfection, perfect love, is, it’s not beyond the yawning grave; it’s not in the hands of some cult or some Messianic program – it’s in ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Posthumous+Glory |
cde48201ac69-18 | [Question from audience]
That’s right! [laughing] Well, and the party impulse is a very subversive impulse. I mean, you know, a lot of artists have too much integrity to sell their art as a brand. But, who has so much integrity that they would turn down a party?! [audience laughs] This is a level of integrity unimagin... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Posthumous+Glory |
cde48201ac69-19 | [Question from audience]
Yeah, I think, you know, we’ve all forgotten – or maybe we haven’t all forgotten, but anyway – that sex on psychedelics is the Mount Everest of the experience! It’s rarely mentioned, for some reason. I remember – what was it? – Leary, years and years ago, he was interviewed and – Oh, I know: i... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Posthumous+Glory |
cde48201ac69-20 | [Question from audience: What’s the most important thing of all?] [Audience laughs]
I don’t know, keep your popper dry and your rear well protected! Something like that…[applause] Let me just say how easy... how much I appreciate you all, and how easy you’ve made my life over space and time, and how greatly I apprecia... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Posthumous+Glory |
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Psychedelics in the Age of Intelligent Machines
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Last Updated: 15/09/18
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27 April 1999
Seattle, WA
8954
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Culture and Ideology are Not Your Friends
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Last Updated: 15/09/18
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27 April 1999
Whole Life Expo, Denver, CO
9539
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No youtube link available, try the foll... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends |
7b8094dc5c33-1 | Before I get into the bulk of my thing, I-I hope you each got one of these things as you came in. Uh, these are two events: one is an old favorite – in fact, as I look out over this crowd I see many familiar faces from these Mexico get togethers which have been going on now for about eight years. Uh, if you’re interest... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends |
7b8094dc5c33-2 | And then, in this past year at Palenque, speaking with Manolo--with Manuel Torres and Ken Symington, we decided that the psychedelic community was ready to attempt to take the next step in legitimizing itself in the--in the general cultural dialogue, and we felt that the place that hasn’t really been honored or--or suf... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends |
7b8094dc5c33-3 | That’s all the commercial and self-aggrandizing stuff I want to talk about. On to the main event. The way this will work is, I’ll talk for a while and then we’ll do questions for a while, and then it will be over, and then I’ll go down to the bookstore, and if anybody needs to speak to me or--or have a book signed, ple... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends |
7b8094dc5c33-4 | OK. Uh, I used to prepare these things, in anticipation of vast oceans of faces eager to be uplifted; since the oceans of faces are, practically speaking, more like small ponds, I’ve realized that these are really conversations around and about one subject only, which is: What in the world is going on? What is going on... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends |
7b8094dc5c33-5 | So one of the ideas I’d like to put out is that, uh, and it may seems strange in this venue, but perhaps not: the idea that ideology is not our friend. It is not a matter of choosing from a smorgasbord of ideologies and rejecting the flawed, the self-contradictory, and the over-simple, in favor of the unflawed, the com... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends |
7b8094dc5c33-6 | I want to mention just a couple of things that are happening to sort of set the context. I mean, this is the stuff I worry about or think about. Uh, in the last ten days, if you have not being paying attention (because the news have certainly been offering many different matters to claim your attention), but, in the la... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends |
7b8094dc5c33-7 | We’re now just a hair’s breadth away from there being six billion people on this planet. Uh, again, I checked on the Internet before I left – we’re something like a hundred million short. So by the time I get back to Hawaii in a month, we’ll be over the six billion mark. Then, just to touch on a few things: the stronge... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends |
7b8094dc5c33-8 | Uh, If you’ve followed my--the evolution of my ideas, youl know that I have proposed the existence of an invisible, permeating something that is throughout all being, all time, all space, all bodies, all thoughts, which I call novelty; and the interesting thing about novelty is that it’s increasing, constantly. Science... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends |
7b8094dc5c33-9 | Now, people have attacked this concept, saying that it’s impossible to define in English or mathematically. Most things that are interesting are impossible to define. Love, courage, decency, dignity, hope, fear – impossible to define. It doesn’t preclude them from shaping our world, and the absence of a--of a mathemati... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends |
7b8094dc5c33-10 | So, as an example of what do I mean by tenaciously hung onto, 65 million years ago, as you know, an asteroidt of considerable dimensions struck this planet and in a single day the dinosaurs, the great saurians, went extinct. Maybe it wasn’t a single day; maybe it was weeks. But, in terms of the timescale of the life of... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends |
7b8094dc5c33-11 | What takes this out of the realm of sophomoric and theoretical discussion is the second part of my observations on novelty, and that is that novelty occurs faster and faster as you approach the present. In other words, this isn’t that the universe is driving toward ultimate novelty at constant speed and has been since ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends |
7b8094dc5c33-12 | If this process has been rolling forward like this since the birth of the universe some 12, 13, 14 billion years ago, it’s very hard to hypothesize or argue that it should cease or be defl--will somehow deflect itself from its endless ramping-up of acceleration. But, we can’t imagine change going on much faster than it... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends |
7b8094dc5c33-13 | Uh, did you know that in the last 12 months, a fundamental law governing the universe, in all its parts and places, has been discovered that was previously not only unsuspected but denied? And [stutters], a law of nature larger than any law of nature ever discovered, larger than the law of gravity, the speed of light, ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends |
7b8094dc5c33-14 | the universe is expanding faster than the ordinary laws of physics can account for. This was realized a year and a half ago by one team of astrophysicists; they handed it on to a second team; they confirmed it; they handed it on to a third; they confirmed it; and a very counterintuitive picture of things is emerging. T... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends |
7b8094dc5c33-15 | in the first place, who wants to fall back into the big crunch? I mean, that’s a really anti-novel thing to have half the end-life of the universe be the retracing of the first half; and I believe – and again, these are bold generalizations, but generally substantiated, uh, that nature is fractal in its structure. What... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends |
7b8094dc5c33-16 | So, this cosmological constant, Omega, which says that the universe is expanding faster and faster, throws a kind of umbrella of, um, political correctness over my notion that we are moving faster and faster into novelty, and that we are, as it were, simply the dust motes or the magnetic particles in the presence of so... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends |
7b8094dc5c33-17 | Now, if going into nature and opening your eyes and paying attention doesn't deliver this to you, then I suggest 20 milligrams of psilocybin be added into the mix, or 200, uh, micrograms of LSD, or something like that, and then I think it will come shining through [laughter from audience]. Uh, why should that be necess... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends |
7b8094dc5c33-18 | Well, why should culture imprison us, and somehow place a barrier between ourselves and our true humanness? Well, I think I said at the beginning of this thing, culture and ideology are not your friends. They are not your friends. This is a hard thing to come to terms with, because a certain kind of alienation lies at ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends |
7b8094dc5c33-19 | And, the substances, the drugs, the plants, the things which perturb consciousness, they don’t address cultural values; they blast through them. They address the animal body, the mammalian brain. They perturb these information fields outside of the relativistic set of values that culture is giving you. This is why peop... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends |
7b8094dc5c33-20 | Well, why is that? It’s because cultures are virtual realities made of language, and if there is one thing psychedelics do – whether you hate ‘em or love ‘em, whether you don’t give a hoot – what they do is they dissolve boundaries, the boundaries between you and the floor, between you and your friend, between you and ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends |
7b8094dc5c33-21 | How can we overcome the limitation of our operating system? Well, basically, what I do with my computer when it acts up is, I give it a good slap, or a thump on the top, and that’s what these psychedelics are doing; they are saying, you know, “Get it in context, my dear primate. See, (uh, you know) how does it all fit ... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends |
7b8094dc5c33-22 | Well, I think it works something like this: your sensory apparatus, connected up to your local language, is a very good threat detection device. And, that is really what the animal body evolved to be. We wouldn’t be here if we weren’t at the end of a long line of superb threat-detection devices which told us when the s... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends |
7b8094dc5c33-23 | But, notice that, carried far enough, that ends in paranoia. So, then, in a sense, all cultural values carried to their ultimate end produce the paranoid personality: fearful, watchful, never resting, never sleeping, always looking for the worst in every situation. But, this is--the mind is like water: it takes the sha... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends |
7b8094dc5c33-24 | And, so my interpretation of these psychedelic states is that they are actually higher-dimensional states of consciousness. And, I put this to Ralph Abraham, the mathematician, who is no mathematical slouch and no psychedelic slouch, either, and we talked of this in relationship to DMT. And he said, “I have no doubt at... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends |
7b8094dc5c33-25 | Uh [sniffs]. So, in a way, these higher dimensions are the places from which knowledge has percolated. And shamans, related to the smith, the worker in metal, the technologist, the tool-maker--this are the twin brothers, the two aspects of the shaman: the shaman is a master of fire, master of metals, maker of tools, se... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends |
7b8094dc5c33-26 | So, this is a roundabout way of explaining that it’s no surprise to me that society is very nervous around this issue, because society’s eggs are all in one basket, and the psychedelically-inspired citizen, or the psychedelically-inspired shaman, is a dangerous force. Even in traditional societies, the shaman is centra... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends |
7b8094dc5c33-27 | Now, in a society like ours, we have i--we say we have other methods. We don’t need the ravings of intoxicated shamans. We have the scientific method, we have the Gospel, we have the Talmud, we have all of these things, and they are sufficient for us to guide ourselves. But to guide ourselves where? The 20th century--u... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends |
7b8094dc5c33-28 | How do we overcome this? How do we find real values? Well, we find them in caring for the Earth. Nature presents an established set of processes and achievements, billions of years old, which exercise a moral claim on rational intelligence if it will but, uh, notice. And, so that’s what this is all about. It’s about ab... | https://www.asktmk.com//talks/Culture+and+Ideology+are+Not+Your+Friends |
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