and I want to thank all the women who
support me I have wonderful support
systems from women of all times who seemed dedicated to the notion that Terence McKenna
can always be improved extremely
grateful for the frontier reserved
enormous and then she okay what I want
to talk about tonight is the notion or
the idea is a Psychedelic Society when I
spoke at Santa Barbara the psychedelics
conference whenever it was last many
year ago my contact lenses failed me at
a critical point in my lecture and I
simply had to wing it and later than I
played this tape back I heard this
phrase psychedelic society and I never
used it consciously and electric but
because I had said it and because there
in in a ripple of resonance to it from
the crowd of people there I am again to
think about it and this evening I would
just generally assess what it might mean
for us I'm definitely a pioneer in this
field I'm sure you're all familiar with
the book of megatrends which is making
quite an impression at the moment well
megatrends nowhere mentions the eminent
transformation of human society through
the application of psychedelic drugs
they were thinking what I think is
psychedelic society what that notion
means or implies to me in terms of
ideology is the idea of creating a
society which always lives in the light
of the mystery of being in other words
that solutions should be displaced from
the central role that they have had in
social organization and mysteries
irreducible mysteries should be put in
their place
the British entomologist JBS Haldane in
the 1920s an essay said the universe may
not only be stranger than we suppose it
may be stranger than we can suppose and
I suggest to you that as we look back
over human history every tentacle of
civilization whether it be Miami
greco-roman ordered some dynasty has
believed that it was in possession of an
accurate description of the cosmos and a
man's relationship to it this seems to
go this seems to go along with the full
flowering of a civilization but from the
point of view of our present
civilization we regard all those
conceptions as at worst quaint at best
half right and congratulate ourselves
that our civilization at last has its
finger on the Regal description what is
going on
but I think that this is not true and
that actually what blinds us or what
makes historical progress very difficult
is our lack of awareness of arguments
and that beliefs should be put
assignment and that a psychedelic
society would abandon belief systems for
direct experience and this is I think a
much a problem of the modern dilemma is
the direct experience has been
discounted and in its place all kinds of
belief systems have been erected I would
prefer a kind of intellectual and Anki
where whatever was pragmatically after
the war was brought to bear on any
situation but where the lead was
understood as a self limiting function
because you see if you believe something
you're automatically precluded from
believing its opposite which means that
a degree of your human freedom has been
forfeited in the act of committing
yourself to this belief and I maintain
that it's plenteous to have beliefs in a
sense because the universe really is
stranger than we suppose and what we
need is a return to what in the 16th
century was called with a cunning method
which means not the elaboration
fantastic thought constructs which
explain but merely a phenomenological
cataloguing of what we experienced
computer networks and psychedelic drugs
and the increased availability of
information in the world have actually
made possible the evolution of new alien
information states which never existed
before and we are processing these
things but at a very slow rate because
we are hindered by ideology you know I
mentioned in an earlier workshop this
afternoon that
Freudian models Jungian models of the
psychedelic experience which saw it as
somehow as stripping away of resistance
and a revealing of complex and hidden
emotions and motives and belief systems
has been replaced in last of ten five to
ten years with the shamanic model of
cousin Jimmy and shamanic experience
this model holds that archaic peoples
have deputized special people to probe
hidden information fields using
psychedelic drugs and that leaves the
information extracted from these
information fields is then used to guide
and direct the society now I'm
interested in the second model and spent
time in the Amazon and familiar with the
operational mechanics of shamanism and
shamanic personalities and that sort of
thing but I believe actually that the
psychedelic experience looms larger than
the institution of shamanism and that we
hold a unique opportunity which is sort
of the flipside of the culture crisis
our ability to destroy ourselves is the
mirror image of our ability to
save ourselves and what is lacking is a
clear vision of what should be done what
should be done is certainly not the
accumulation of ever larger nuclear
arsenals and the promotion of all kinds
of primate again playing the sort of
team Leary is well-versed in denouncing
what needs to be done is that
fundamental ontological conceptions
about reality have to read be remade
we need a new language and in order to
have them in language we must have a new
reality it's almost a kind of or
awarding equation or a bootstrap
situation a new reality will generate a
new language a new language will fix a
new reality and make it part of this
reality these psychedelic drugs are can
be conceived of as points on an
informational grid they providing new
perspectives on reality and it is when
you connect all the points of
perspective that you have one reality
that a reasonably applicable model of it
begins to appear and I think this
reasonably applicable model what Vic and
Stein called something which is true
enough is what we're looking for the
true enough mapping of experience onto
theory is what we're looking for
but experience must be made primary the
language of the self must be made
primary and anarchy carries this
responsibility even when it's only
political monarchy what I'm advocating
is that we each take responsibility for
the cultural transformation by realizing
that it is not something which will be
disseminated from the top down it is
something which each of us can
contribute to by attempting to live thus
far into the miniature as possible you
know we must get rid of the conceptions
of the forties fifties sixties the
seventies the 80s and 90s we must smear
the historical moment and become
exemplars of the humanity of the end
time and those of you who attended Milan
to this afternoon about time know that I
believe that liberation or let's even
say decency as a human quality is an
actual resonance and anticipation of
this future perfected state of humanity
and we can will the perfect future into
being by becoming microcosms of the
perfect future and no longer casting
blame outward on institutions or
hierarchies of responsibility and
control but by realizing that the
opportunity is here the responsibility
is here and the two may never be
congruent again and the salvation of
your immortal soul may depend on what
you do with the opportunity so what do
you do with the opportunity what does it
mean to say in operational terms live as
far into the future as you can live it
means taking the position needs to be
this emergent type
dimensional reality it does not
necessarily mean becoming a psychedelic
drug user
yourself but it means admitting to
yourself the possibility and if you feel
that heroic potential within yourself to
be one of the experiencers one of the
pioneers then you know what to do if on
the other hand you feared to be lost in
the abyss you fear what William Blake
called falling into eternal death
falling from the spiral of being which
connects one reincarnation to another
and falling into the realm of eternal
death then you orient yourself towards
the psychedelic experience towards the
psychedelic phenomenon as a source of
information a mirror image of the
psychedelic experience in hardware are
computer networks computer networks
paradoxically enough are a deeply
feminizing influence on society where in
Hardware the unconscious is actually
being created it's as though we took the
platonic bond mum about how it God did
not exist man would invent him and say
if the unconscious does not exist
Humanity will invent it in the form of
these vast networks able to transfer and
transform information this is in fact
what we are caught up in is a
transforming of information we have not
physically changed in the last 40,000
years the human type was established the
at the end of the last glaciation but
change
which was previously operable in the
biological realm is now operable in the
realm of the culture and we are shedding
cultural and abrasions of our vision of
the Unitarian mystery but a faster and
faster rate as we try to accommodate
ourselves and mirror ourselves to the
mystery which lies ahead of us in time
and which is throwing this vast shadow
fated nasai ryx perience of human
history for everyone who has lived in it
and previous to our own in Europe
the only control language which could be
applied to this thing which was bringing
people together and causing birth and
death and tearing down a reckoning
civilizations was God and it was an
imagined as a self conscious force that
was leaning into the world like a cat
into a fishbowl and making things happen
now we have a different notion the
notion of a vector system where forces
over a large area are oriented toward a
very small space and this is what
history is it's an in rushing toward
what the Buddhists call the realm of the
densely packed a train a
transformational realm where the
opposites are unified and the way I
characterize this union of opposites is
to say it is that realm where the body
is finally interior rised the mind is
finally an exterior eyes the way I think
of the mind is as the fourth dimensional
a fourth dimensional organ of your body
you can't see it because it's in the
fourth dimension
but you experienced a sectioning of it
in the phenomenon of consciousness but
that is only a partial sectioning of it
the way the plane is a partial picture
of the comb when it truncates it the
growth of information systems is only a
mirroring
in masculine hardware of what already
exists in nature as a fact and it is up
to us to hone our intuitions and to
become aware of this pre-existent system
of communication and wiring so that we
can step away from the dualisms which
separate us from each other and from the
world we need to realize that there is a
gene swarm on so species on the earth
that half the time when you think you're
thinking you're actually listening and
that ideas are remarkably slippery
things and they're very difficult to
trace to their origins and that we
really are one on one and all together
in a dimension that is not as accessible
as you might wish to be congealed around
the psychedelics are a red-hot social
issue social issue ethical issue
whatever the term for it is and it is
precisely because they are
deconditioning agents they will cast
doubt in you if you're a Hasidic rabbi a
Marxist anthropologist or an altar boy
their business is to dissolve belief
systems and they do this very well and
then they leave you with the raw data of
experience what William James called and
talking of infant's a blooming buzzing
confusion is what they leave you with
the raw data and experience and out of
that you'll be construct the world and
you need to understand that it is by
dialogue where your decisions the
projection of your grammar on to the
intellectual space in front of you is
going to gel into a mode of being we
actually all create our own universe
because we are all operating with our
own private languages which are only
very crudely translatable into any other
person's language there's even a
physical analog to this which will
further reinforce this notion of
alienation it is that your picture of
the world impinging on your audience is
made of photons photons are tiny wave
packets so closely circumscribed
energetically that they can be thought
of particles thought of as particles
that means that every single photon
which falls on the back of my eye is
different from every single photon which
falls on the back of any one of your
lives this means that I am using 100% a
different section of the world than any
one of you is to get a picture of the
world and yet we are sitting here with
the naive assumption that our pictures
of the world differ only by our
perspective within the space of the room
and we have numerous extremely naive
assumptions
as built-in to our thinking and our most
venerable explanatory engines such as
silence happen also to be our oldest
explanatory engines and therefore they
have built into them
the most naive unexamined assumptions
for instance science we can demolish it
in 30 seconds science tells you that a
set of conditions will create a given
effect and that every time that set of
conditions is in place that effect will
be found to obtain well the only place
this happens is in laboratories in our
experience it isn't like that
ia contact with a person is always
different experience of making love
having a meal riding the bus these
things are always different it is their
uniqueness in fact than the uniqueness
that pervades all the beating but makes
it bearable at all yet science is really
to tell you that the only things worth
describing are those phenomena that can
be repeatedly triggered this is because
these are the only phenomena science can
describe and that's the name of the game
as far as they are concerned but we to
claim our freedom to take advantage of
the tiny moment between immense misses
of unknowability perhaps death perhaps
other leading carnations
perhaps transitions into other life
forms these things we don't know but in
the moment of being human we have a
unique opportunity to figure things out
and I have the faith that it is possible
sometimes somewhere to have a
conversation
perhaps no progress would be made until
the ninth hour but to have it
conversation in which reality could be
literally pulled to pieces beyond the
point of reconstructing I have a friend
I'm not sure this is dreaming so I had
him back in the 60s the one day on LSD
took a toothpick and he sent recording
solid hours of the toothpick and a large
red bridge and he demolished it reduced
this toothpick and a standard not long
after the toothpick was gone and this is
what we have to do inherent to the
ideological concrete in what in which we
are set we have to claim a monkey and it
realize that systems have a power life
of their own that is anti humanists
there is definitely an anti humans
tendency in all systems ludwig von
bertalanffy who was the inventor of
general Systems Theory said you know
people are not machines but in every
situation where they are given the
choice they will behave like machines we
all fall into patterns we all then hold
those patents ever more tightly they
cannot be violated and this happens on
the thought level and we are a
depressing wave of a historical wave of
this kind of up tightness that stretches
back millennia
and I think that we have now come to the
end of this phase whether you buy into
my own peculiar apocalyptic alien
transformative vision involving 2012 or
whether you just can tell by looking
around you that the shit may soon hit
the fan I think we can agree that we
could come to some kind of a panis and
what it's going to come out of it is
either going to be a great deal of this
in the biosphere the invalidation of
intelligence as an adaptation of biology
and our extinction or we are going to
become as James Joyce dreamed we could
man-made dirty book is how he put it in
other words the exteriorization
of the soul the interiorization of the
body and in this process everything is
going to be challenged the very notion
of humaneness is going to be challenged
because we are on the break through
genetic manipulation of DNA actually
taking control of the human form of
being able to extend the notion of art
inward into the human body and form our
we classicists shall we each be an
Adonis and Persephone or are we what are
we are we surrealist shall I be a potato
and you'll burn and electric these are
the see chance which will have to be
made these are the important questions
and this vertical game which we see in
the metaphors that are applauded too
psychedelic drugs consciousness
expansion getting high psychedelic trip
and shamanic flight all of these things
are being parallel it's like the drugs
are the suspend software formative
leading edge of what is happening coming
along behind that is the hardware
engineering masculine mentality that is
processing all this stuff into hardware
and this will continue until the leading
edge out distances the engineering
mentality through breakthrough and this
is what I think the shamanic hope is
that we can find a way to use chemicals
in our bodies and our voices and our
thoughts and our hands upon ourselves
and each other to transform ourselves
without technology to move into the
realm of the imagination on the gnash as
it were with an interior
psychopharmacological applied technology
that frees us in the imagination at the
same time that this is going on the
engineering mentality is going to set
human societies in orbit around the
earth and the moon and the near planets
but there's a catch here for the
engineering mentality which is that the
very void which surrounds the planet
exemplifies this infolding of this soul
fanon element it is the mysterious mama
matrix of Finnegan's Wake
the mysterious mama matrix is the
universe and there is no escaping that
fact so that I think the engineering
mentality which will seek to change man
into his machines will have to be
countered forest by the psychedelic
birth oriented imagination oriented side
of things which will create then the
potential for the spiritual marriage
that will be the alchemical perfection
of a new form of humanity and this is
not far away it can't be far away it
must be now and soon and it is as I said
it is a personal responsibility
incumbent upon all of us to act there is
definitely an obligation to examine the
possibility of action and to think
clearly about self and other language
and world past and future because too
much we have lived in the light of the
idea that your ideology will be dictated
to you essentially by geography and if
you're born in India you'll find out
that the cosmos is one way if you're
born in Brooklyn you find out it's
another way what we need to do is
transcend these localized grids of fate
which make us what we are but don't want
to be because you claim this higher
level of freedom by the simple act of
applying attention to be the experience
of being the primacy of experience this
is why I can get along with these people
in the Amazon who do these drugs because
though my Spanish is terrible and often
theirs is worse because they're gonna be
like speedy ncic and yes we understand
we know and he says you know because
we're posing usually as scientists of
some sort
you're from the survival university you
will return to this laboratory you show
me this paper which has the name of my
friend and because he helped you last
year but I say to you experience is the
thing and the only thing you can say to
that is we know it is we must begin to
send out ideological visions rather than
be the consumers of them we need to turn
off the metaphorical televisions which
are cooking us in to the network of
cultural assumptions dictated from the
Pentagon to Madison Avenue and what have
you we need instead to turn on our
terminals and to begin to interact with
like-minded people throughout the world
and establish this new intellectual
order which will lead in the salvation
of mankind I firmly believe because it
is a collectivities and people will then
feel the interrelatedness of their face
feel that interrelatedness as a things
transcends national divisions
ideological divisions feel the primacy
of being part of the human family and I
think that it will not be done without
psychedelics because we have drifted so
long without them surely we are the
culture that has gone longest without
psychedelics in any cultural situation
throughout the world it's been 2,000
years since the mystery was real and
elusive and in that 2,000 years we have
wandered far far into confusion but we
are the prodigal sons we can redeem the
ideal of shamaness
from pre technological social stasis and
actually project it perfect it and send
it out to the stars and if we don't do
this everything is lost there is no
standing still
there is only risk and commitment to
these millennium long cultural goals
that will restore meaning and direction
to our civilization or we will fritter
it away into chaos and destruction and
the horrors of the typical future
scenario thank you
question three third year fourth you
mentioned the expression jeans warm
pretty extreme yes I talked about this
in the workshop this afternoon pointing
out that the notion of species is simply
a 17th century convention of biological
classification begun by Linnaeus because
when you visually look around with no
awareness awareness of geological time
you do seem to see distinct plants and
animals but now that we are aware of
such things as bacterial transfer of
genes from one organism to another and
this sort of thing we realized that the
apparent fixity of the species is an
illusion and that actually there is only
in jeans worn on the planet and it
coagulates and dissenters the densest
kind of Center it modulates into we call
an organism but it also coagulates into
more loosely bound systems such as
symbiotic relationships or yet more
loosely bound relationships ever Thomas
and biospheres and the really there are
just from any given Biological Center
there is just a series of concentric
shells of influence going both
directions outward and that's a more
trivial with the situation on the planet
than the notion that they're a distinct
species so that here is either the
actual organisms and all that is being
all the genes swarm expressing itself as
an interaction with the environment that
particular moment yes they're temporary
aggregates like genetic material marry
well it turns out when you start I don't
wanna get too deeply into it because
it's a song line but when you start
looking at the way as the genetic
material is transferred around there are
all kinds of ways there's even been an
kind of termite found in Africa where
the mating carry the activity is so
furious that and the sexual organ of the
male and sex so sharp that they actually
pierce the body cavity not only of
females but also of other males and by
marking the the sperm of these insects
and prominent you can discover that some
male individuals are transferring sperm
to females that is not their sperm and
absolutely violates the central dogma of
Darwinian evolution which is that the
genetic material the transferability and
adaptability of the genetic material is
directly linked to the adaptability of
its carrier but throughout the situation
where the honor the sperm may be dead
because he was non-adaptive but the
sperm because it's in the body of a more
adaptive insect is actually had an
impact on the expression of the feat of
time so that was very technical but
anyway genetic material moves around in
all kinds of ways and I'm sure there in
Norway is soon to be discovered
great say you know our culture
well if I came back to my notion that
the responsibility always rests on us
and you don't want to go out and
immediately form a movement to change
those guys or that Bureau I think the
thing that should be done is people who
are involved in psychedelics she lived
lives of such exemplary and
impeccability that the notion that there
was anything shady or wrong or curious
about this phenomenon would be ludicrous
thank you very much how do you see a
society in that if you were able to
demolish a lot of belief systems that we
do operate under what would relate to
one another how did you see that vision
unfolded okay well there was a French
sociologist about 15 years ago who had
some role in the fate of Seema's but his
name is Jacques and he was a book called
the technological society and in there
he had a maximum and the axiom was there
are no political solutions only
technological ones
the rest is propaganda what a
psychedelic society to do I think is it
would rationally solve problems the
first thing to notice is
that we could pave the streets with
golden if we just illuminate defensemen
in other words our limited energy
resources are not being allocated in
such a way as to move us towards
survival we have to begin to solve our
problems using solutions that are
present at hand no matter who they
offend about uses a humanist value
system it's very interesting that to me
that the women from Islamic majority
that the way which they name their
enemies is secular humanists this is the
only intelligent thing they ever say
it's the only intelligent phrase in
their entire repertoire but it's
fascinating
we are secular humanists that's
precisely what we are we believe that
human beings are to be the measure of
all things that there is no other
standard not a class of society or God
Almighty there is no other standard but
man humanity people and this is a
Renaissance ideal it was first
enunciated by Marshall Fujino in 1510
but we have not acted upon it we have
not up to this time hand a secular
humanist society we have this curious
mix of medieval remnants in the
religious department gangster capitalism
and the economic department stasis
seeking Marxism as the counter ploy is
to that we have never rationally tried
to solve our problems and we have never
rationally
trying to solve our problems on a
personal level Intel the advent of what
psychology in the modern sense people
never examined the center they thought
of the center as a mirror lead and that
the student asked questions about the
self or motive or the relationship of
your worldview to a trauma expectation
class level only all of these things we
have become aware as we have steadily
retreated from the illusion of a have a
world deployed in three-dimensional
space and we're only at the beginning of
this process for instance I mean I I
don't say this to not Gessle and I say
that as an example I think Esalen is
definitely the cutting edge of things
and has been for some time but isn't it
protesters that SLM operates under the
laws of the United States which make
taking these drugs illegal they must do
that they must do they have no choice
whatever their private opinions may be
and all institutions are in that to find
there's no such thing as a revolutionary
institution there are only revolutionary
people and this is why this D emphasis
on belief systems and they their support
systems which are institutions seems to
mean the essence of the psychedelic
message it's it says be against method
don't be enslaved to method embrace an
rocki rocki has a bad name
in political arena is a we remember but
in in philosophy in science in love in
human relations generally it seems to me
it is the most respectable system based
on well this is a gaming complain yes I
mean he give his view that was very
correct there are these lines that can
be traced back gnosis I didn't use this
word tonight no system nor did I use the
word logos but at least this notion of
an accessible truth which is
self-evidently true than heard in a very
close to the notion of the collectivity
of the psychedelic society my idea is
that we could change the most logos of
the mystery religions from a religious
mystery into a social reality and that
would be a social transformation because
it would essentially sacral is the
secular humanist society that I
mentioned yeah I've been picking up a
sort of emergency we kind of do it and
do it now type of thing as far as Gina's
and
decision I I couldn't quite understand
why I can't sit back in my stupidity and
continue this you know happy is it
because we're coming to man can destroy
the world you know it may be related to
that we can't know about that but for
sure what it's related to is that your
human existence is a unique opportunity
so it's only the opportunity there is no
great purposes or if you see it's not a
matter of we got to do it now because we
ourselves into a pipeline and if we
don't forget the realization there are
the knowledge if we don't do it someone
else will that's my faith but there's
only one game in town
and if you want to be part of the
adventure of being you have to get your
feet wet and that means you're to get
committed and something so he's talked
about now we've done a hundred years ago
this is coming on this way that's been
rolling toward completion since before
the breakup of Pangaea this is the big
picture yes it's coming the monkeys are
going to the stars weather smoothly or
not so smoothly is not clear but the
monkeys are going to the stars and
they're going to take everyone with them
and it can be a relatively smooth birth
with no tearing and no bleeding and
everything just moving around a lot or
it can be holy you know neither the
smoking cinder before it's over with but
the monkey thing the information
creature is definitely long as well to
the stars but I think anything can stop
that if you wanted to stop that you had
to get back
before appearance
