basically the idea is to push people toward imagining what they've never imagined and feeling what they've never felt before he's an old friend of all of ours, so i'd like you all to welcome.. timothy leary yeah i for one, am overjoyed to be here this is one of those special, special evenings that we will all treasure terence mckenna means a great deal to me i would say he's one of the 5 or 6 most important people on the planet
i can't even think of any others.. short term memory loss, but.. terence and i keep meeting in the most wonderful, mythic, adventurous places i was doing a wild tour through germany about a year ago we came to heidelberg and we were being guested by some people that came right out of hermann hesse.. i mean wizards and gnomes and you know that sort of thing, heidelberg! and there was terence mckenna
and it was just so perfectly hesse, journey to the east, yeah.. and so we meet again here tonight you know.. i was talking to terence backstage before we began and we both agree that what he'll be saying tonight has been said over and over again at all those high moments in human history when those who have gone within and understood about the brain
and the inner treasures we all come back and pretty much say the same thing but the problem is though that once you say it, you know you can't go on saying it and saying it and saying it and when terence came along a few years ago and was saying what i've been trying to say but naturally better, upgraded, up to date i was so overwhelmed with gratitude and i publicly thank you for that, terence
by the way the role that terence is playing right now is one that takes not only vision, but it also takes fucking courage we were saying backstage that that terence and i are a small group of philosophers who make our living not in the ivory tower -to call it living, but uh..- just speaking it chatting it, raving it..
ranting it and no one has ever done it with more poetry and elegance than the speaker tonight i'm gonna say one more thing and then we will have what we've all been waiting for terence reminds us that all human wisdom, all energy comes from our beloved synergetic partners the vegetable queendom
it all comes from the plants now a round of applause to the vegetables! now we all know that the human body, we have to have food it comes from vegetables we've used vegetables over the years the essence of vegetables in the form of wood to develop fire, gas, oil, so forth
but what we forget and what we look to terence for tonight is to be reminded that plants have given us an even more important gift they give us the gift of vision they give us the illumination and throughout human history they're at the ease and the pandoras usually it's a woman
who takes this wonderful vegetable and gives it to humanity and says be illuminated and now for our illumination and our pleasure please join me in welcoming terence mckenna well i wanna thank tim that was a wonderful introduction i'm sure i wouldn't, i know i wouldn't be here tonight if it weren't for tim leary
he was the pathfinder he cut the way through the woods he gave us all permission to be very much the people that we are tonight and it's wonderful that one irishman can hand it on to another and that we can keep it in the bardic tradition wonderful i can hardly believe i'm here i made it past the camaro raffle
i survived the offer for reconstructive cosmetic surgery and i've had my smart drugs for this evening, so.. glad to be here! well until a few minutes ago i thought that this was a 45 minute gig, so.. you get to see grace under pressure this evening naturally i'm kidding, it doesn't matter how long it goes we could never get to the bottom of this stuff nor would we wish to, i think
by coincidence merely, i became 45 yesterday so.. sort of a good moment to do some summing up so in thinking about this talk and knowing as i did who would be here i thought that i would sort of orient the theme toward distilling the psychedelic mind which is a way of talking about the psychedelic mind
but also trying to, uh.. considering the amount of money you paid for this session give you the entire shtick in one fell swoop so that you would never have to attend a terence mckenna lecture or workshop again you can just move past that turn the page on that kind of thing in your life
with me in the studio is terence mckenna author, lecturer, explorer and philosopher terence is the co-author with his brother dennis mckenna of a book called 'the invisible landscape: mind, hallucinogens, and the i ching' he is also the co-author of 'psilocybin: magic mushroom grower's guide' he is the author of a computer program called timewave zero and he is the co-founder and president of an organisation called botanical dimensions
which devotes itself to saving botanical plants used in shamanistic traditions throughout the world welcome terence it's a pleasure to be here it's a pleasure to have you here well i think the most profound cultural development it is possible to make the case that language itself is an ability, that was coaxed out of an
evolving primate species by virtue of the fact that there were hallucinogenic plants in the diet of that creature you see, psilocybin has been shown in low doses to actually increase visual acuity well at the stage of evolution where human beings encountered psilocybin mushrooms we were essentially, baboon-like, pack-hunting, hoards of velt-living creatures in africa
in that situation, a compound which increases visual acuity will give a tremendous adaptive advantage to the animals that are including it in their diet and those animals not including it in their diet will be quickly eliminated by the process of natural selection from the evolutionary scenario so it's possible to argue that this mind manifesting quality of the psychedelics
actually conferred an evolutionary advantage on certain primates who then were able to bootstrap themselves to higher and higher states of reflective self awareness this may lie behind the very early coincidence of cattle, goddesses and mushrooms in the apparent obsessions of early man as reflected by the cave paintings on the algerian plateau and in southern france and spain
we always find the notion of the mystery circa 18 thousand years ago connected with the idea of cattle and we always find the cattle connected with the notion of the great goddess now it may be that the hidden and third member of this trinity was a hallucinogenic mushroom of some sort we've got only about 2 minutes left but i wonder what the connection, i don't quite see it between the mushroom, the cattle and the goddess
the mushrooms grow in the manure of the cattle when the hunting packs of early primates followed along behind the cattle, they inevitably encountered the mushroom ate it, had their visual skills thereby increased, bred more readily therefore and survived more easily than their non-mushroom eating cousins and so the eating of mushrooms and the development of higher aspects of consciousness including self-reflection, were thereby enforced leading to the conclusion that it was actually
a symbiotic relationship between early primates and these hallucinogenic plants that laid the basis for the appearance of what we call human beings well terence mckenna, this is a very interesting discussion you seem to be suggesting that our evolution, i suppose from the animal kingdom into the human kingdom itself was catalysed or triggered by our encounter with these hallucinogenics yes, we are an ape with a symbiotic relationship
to a mushroom and that has given us self-reflection, language, religion and all the spectrum of effects that flow from these things and one can only wonder how these hallucinogens might affect our future evolution as well they've brought us to this point, and as we make our relationship to them conscious we may be able to take control of our future evolutionary path in the 120 years from 1500 to the beginning of the 30 years war
europe was caught in a number of conspiracies and political intrigues directed toward moving europe toward a magical and alchemicly based society the protestant princes of the northern league of germany especially frederick the elector palatine came to culminate this movement but its roots lie further back in the 1580s of the 16th century it was in this period that the english astrologer, astronomer, mathematician, navigator and expert of espionage, john dee launched his famous and mysterious mission to bohemia a little-known incident in european history
which holds clues to understanding the faith and evolution of modern science and the nature of a lost world of magical and alchemical thinking that once claimed the attention of the european imagination john dee the greatest mind of the elizabethan era friend of queen elizabeth colleague of sir philip sidney converser with angels mathematician par excellence
determined under the influence of the mysterious edward kelley that he was to be the center of an alchemical renaissance and a secret society that would lay the groundwork for the continuation of the dream of austria the dream built around the elizabethan queen, elizabeth i he associated himself intensely with the arthurian mythical and mystical side of the elizabethan idea of british empire he was a welshman, like the queen, he was so intensely devoted too and like her, he shared the renaissance mood of saturnian melancholy
a collector of books, a builder of scientific instruments, a composer of codes and cyphers fascinated with alchemy dee was both the figure of the introspective melancholic and the world-planning, empire-building political visionary dee was under the patrionage of the earl of northtumberland and it was northtumberland who looted the catholic monestaries at the time of henry viii we have reason to believe that john dee had virtual carte blanche in selecting
manuscripts from those libraries that interested him not only was dee a scholar of the classics and the magical past but he was an intimate friend with some of the great movers and shakers of his own time particularly sir philip sidney and the entire catorioue of poets and artists who had gathered themselves around elizabeth, austria to celebrate her reign and to make of her, the paradigmatic sovereign of europe that dee believed led the way toward the establishing of a universal alchemical monarchy it was essentially a poetic enterprise
as alchemy always is merlin in the arthurian legends has come down to us basically disguised as john dee the image we have of merlin is dee's image so, dee possessed an enormous power over the imagination of his contemporaries they were in awe of his learning perhaps we are the naive ones perhaps we too quickly assumed that we had understood all there was to know about matter
after all, even to this moment we cannot locate the seat of the imagination in matter we cannot trace the evolution of a human thought or hope it's almost as though the alchemists through their humility, had a deeper insight into the workings of the world than we have achieved today this is ground zero for the rosicrucian enlightenment
standing here, in the alchemical laboratory of the palace in heidelberg we are essentially at the center of the alchemical hopes of the rosicrucian enlightenment it was here in the years before the adventure in bohemia, that frederick's alchemists, astrologers and suit-sayers toiled directly under the king's observation and control here came michael maier heinrich khunrath
the great names of alchemy it's entirely possible that john dee was in this room it's entirely possible that edward kelley stood were i am standing now it's almost impossible to conceive of the hopes and the fantasies and the labours and the dreams that have been generated by and are centered on this room and the objects in it
this is the last alchemical laboratory in the world to fully function before the rise of modern science and these tools in many ways reflect the internal cosmology of the man and woman who used them this, for example, a typical alchemical distillery is called the pelican another example of the colourful nature of alchemical vocabulary it's called the pelican because it is associated with the myth of a bird which plucks blood from its own breast the prima materia
feces, black coal, charcoal, salt nitrate heated in here brought to a high temperature, a fevered colouric state rises into the higher emporium of the vessel and there, rarified, it condenses liquifies and flows down into the cooler domain of the child of the pelican here the essence is collected, the quint-essence and always the hope was that
the next experiment, the next combination of materials would yield the elixir vitae the lapis philosophorum the completion that the alchemists sought and so all this fantastic apparatus that we see around us is really not so much in the service of channeling liquids, gasses but in the service of channeling spirit
out of matter and into the higher realms where it then can be refluxed, recondensed and the lapis philosophorum the stone of the philosophers the central mystery brought to completion the transformation of matter
into a universal panacea for the redemption of mankind this was dee's great passion this was the overarching theme of his life a deep, deep commitment to the reformation of society and a deep, deep exhaustion and rejection of the values of christendom that he saw betrayed all about him and then by distillation and then by coagulation
and then by concentration through firing the alchemical body is brought to completion these are processes that go on both within the chemical retort, the alembic, in the alchemist's laboratory and they're processes which go on in the heart and mind of the alchemist one process dissolves another process separates the dross,
the gross matter from the precious another concentrates the subtle essence another raises the subtle essence to another level of refinement and over time the great friend of the alchemist this process of rarifaction and growth both metallic and psychological both internal and external
both personal and impersonal proceeds and feeds upon itself and eventually, not through an illogic discernable to the scientific mind there is a kind of miracle the production of the stone the union of spirit and matter the fusion of these two contradictory aspects of the universe into a new and third thing the quintessence the rubedo
the aqua vitae the nostre lapis philosophorum devici one of the most famous of all alchemical axioms is as above, so below meaning always that in every small part of reality there is a tiny reflection of the great over structure of reality and in the larger structures are hidden the secrets of the smallest
and vice versa we have unconsciously imbibed the ontology of science where we have mind firmly separated out from the world but in an earlier age mind and matter were seem to be out loyed together throughout nature and i think it's very interesting that at this very high-tech moment in our adventure the plants return and almost stand before us as a beacon and a promise
they stand for absolute tao they stand for the correct way for life to relate to its environment this is one of the most interesting new psychedelics in the world this is salvia divinorum and it is definitely one of the plants which will shape the next few decades of the new millenium this is a coleus it's ironic that these plants
which have been in our kitchens and in our windowsill flowerbeds for generations turn out to contain psycho-active compounds as powerful as any known to science these are not particularly interesting in terms of drugs but they're certainly bizarre climb up here, with me this is one of the most interesting plants in the garden this is psychotria viridis this is the plant which causes the vision when taken with ayahuasca
when taken as a liquid the experience lasts about 4-6 hours it's not as intense as smoking it smoking it is the most intense experience this side of the yawning grave when i take psychedelics i always do it in a shamanic style usually at night usually alone in nature, if possible
and then i watch i pay very close attention i use my mind as an alchemical vessel for carrying out observations on the union of spirit my spirit, my personality and matter the physical matter of the substance that i'm ingesting
building on western psychotherapy as elaborated by freud and jung one view of what psychedelics are is, it's the part of your mind that you'd rather not do business with it's the memories of childhood neglect or abuse, it's uh, repressed kinky fantasies in other words, the freudian idea of the unconscious that somehow these are drugs which dissolve the boundary between conscious and unconscious mind and then you can do excellerated psychotherapy cause resistances have been pharmacologically overcome
that's one model it's good as far as it goes, it just doesn't go far enough then there's another model which i would call the traditional or shamanic model and it says the cosmos is a series of levels and these levels are connected by vertical routes of access which can be thought of as simply flights through space, or magical trees,
or magical ladders, anyway, there's an image of ascent and ordinary people exist on only one of these levels but a shaman is not an ordinary person, a shaman is a superhuman person who has the power of animal allies behind them and they can go up and down in these elevators that move between levels and they can therefore recover lost souls, see social hanky panky, theft and adultery, see the causes behind that,
see the causes behind disease so forth and so on that would be the traditional one well, thinking about this from a mathematicians' point of view an all-encompassing explanation that would explain how all these magical feats are done is simply to suppose that the shaman is somehow able to project his consciousness, his or her consciousness, into a higher dimension not metaphorically, as in 'sylvester stallone has many dimensions'
not metaphorically but literally, as in 'one dimension, two dimensions, three dimensions and four.. then i have noticed that all of biology not simply shamanism within the context of human society but all of biology is, in a sense, a conquest of dimensionality that, as we ascend the phylogeny of organic life, what animals are, are a strategy for conquering space-time
and complex animals do it better than simpler animals and we do it better than any complex animal, and we, 20th-century people do it better than any people in any previous century because we combined data in so many ways that they couldn't: electronically, on film, on tape, so forth and so on
|
|
>>Play Movie Now! |
