Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
PROGRAM NOTES:
(Minutes : Seconds into program)
04:11Terence McKenna:“My normal lectures deal with the psychedelic experience as a generalized and historical phenomenon, but this effort at communication is slightly more personal in that it’s an effort to impart [just] one idea that came out of an involvement with psychedelic substances.”
09:42 Terence McKenna: “This is a think-along lecture, by-the-way, and you’re free to think-along at any point that you feel so moved to do so.”
11:53 Terence begins telling the story of how the Timewave Zero hypothesis came to him during a long meditation on the King Wen sequence of the I Ching.
20:36 Terence McKenna: “We can understand first of all that what is happening in the world of becoming, the world we all experience as beings, is that novelty is entering into being, and it is changing the modalities of the real world toward greater and greater levels of integration.”
27:33 Terence McKenna: “But what I really am interested in is not the end of the world but everything which precedes it.”
32:29 Terence McKenna: “We are living in a very pivotal time. The time that we inherit from science is a time to humble you, to dwarf you. It tells you that the sun will not fluxuate for another billion years, that species come and go, and, in other words, on a temporal scale you don’t matter. And that now doesn’t matter. But when you look at the release of energy, the asymptotic speeding up of processes, we tend to be xenophobically oriented toward the human.”
41:50 Terence McKenna: “This rising global humanism is, in fact, the rising into consciousness of a tribal god similar to the kind of tribal god that functioned in these pre-Hellenic societies.”
35:41 Terence McKenna: “And the psychedelics, I believe, are the key to moving from wearing culture like cloths to recognizing that culture is this intensifying reflection of an aspect of the self and integrating it into the self.”
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I wanted to try asking this question again as it is particularly relevant to some research I’m doing at the moment:
Does anybody have any insight what he’s referring to when he says (around 29:30): “we’ve settled on a date, WHICH I DISCUSSED A LITTLE BIT LAST TIME, which is November 12, 2012 and SOMEONE BROUGHT UP that the Mayan calendar also predicts the end of the world, whatever that means.”
Does anybody have any clue what this earlier talk from “last time” that he is referencing might be?
[COMMENT by Lorenzo: My guess is that he is referring to an earlier talk that he gave to the same group, but not necessarily one that was recorded. I do know that his first pass on the Timewave had it ending in November 2012. But a written note that Bruce Damer has from correspondence between Terence and the person who created the Timewave software, indicates that Terence decided to select December 21, 2012 subsequent to the November date that he first arrived at.]
Lorenzo,
what happened to the Laird Scranton interview you mentioned? Did you publish it yet somewhere?
[COMMENT by Lorenzo: Unfortunately, that was one of my early attempts at conducting an interview, and I failed to get a decent recording of our interview.]
Yea…that story’s definitely getting around a lot right now. It doesn’t necessarily seem to be making a lot of headway among professional Mayanists, but it’s certainly making its way through the memesphere. I’ll be interested to hear that upcoming podcast…Thanks Lorenzo!
I am just now working on podcast #250, which should be out early next week. In it Terence gives what I think is his most concise explanation of how he developed the Timewave.
The workshop was held in the Spring of 1986 and in it he very clearly states that when he first aligned the wave with the August 6, 1945 date that it came to an end in late November 2012. Then he went on to say that approximately two years later he was told about the Mayan date and adjusted it then.
Another interesting thing that is happening is that there is now some question as to whether the 2012 date was properly interrupted by the early Mayan scholars. SEE: 2012 Doomsday Date May Be Wrong
http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/mayan-calendars-2012-doomsday-prophecy-wrong/story?id=11926347
does the recording just end??? And Lorenzo, yes Terence does often talk about novelty as density of connectedness…this makes sense in context of his understanding that nature conserves and builds upon complexity. Things that are more densely connected (i.e. complexified), in Terence’s understanding, would show a greater development of novelty (from earlier, less complex novelty) and, most likely, a more recent development within the historical continuum. Do we have any more of this presentation or any of the earlier one? Thanks again!
Does anybody have any insight what he’s referring to when he says (around 29:30): “we’ve settled on a date, WHICH I DISCUSSED A LITTLE BIT LAST TIME, which is November 12, 2012 and SOMEONE BROUGHT UP that the Mayan calendar also predicts the end of the world, whatever that means.”
Does anybody have any clue what this earlier talk might be? Is this something that we have access to, whether via Lorenzo’s wonderful Psychedelic Salon, or anywhere else or in anyone’s personal collection? I would be VERY, VERY interested to obtain this earlier talk. I’m eagerly searching for early McKenna stuff where he talks about 2012 and the Mayan calendar (for my own historical research). I’m trying to figure exactly when he found out about the Mayan calendar and when he made the change to the Dec. solstice date. By 1985 he appears to have already started using the Dec. 21 date. But, here he’s still using the Nov. 12, date….even though he mentions the Mayan calendar, though he doesn’t mention a specific date associated with it. Anyways, thoughts, comments…help with finding earlier recordings…
When Terence was still figuring out how to map the Timewave over history, he eventually decided upon a strategy of finding a particularly novel moment in the not-too-distant past history to anchor a final 67-year period into the eschaton. In the original, 1975, 1st edition of ‘The Invisible Landscape’ only the year 2012 is mentioned in two places, with no mention of a specific associated date. The anchor was eventually set as the bombing of Hiroshima in 1945. With this placement of the Timewave over history, the end-date landed at the Nov. 12, 2012 date that Terence mentions in this talk. It was only after enjoying the significance of the Maya calendar synchronicity and the thought that both he and the Maya might have been led to that time period by the guidance of the mushroom, in addition to the added astrological significance, that he changed it to the Dec. solstice date in 2012. He had arrived at the Nov. date after several earlier proposed end-dates had failed.
Comments from original blog page: http://www.matrixmasters.net/blogs/?p=231
Eliazar Salvinorin E
Hey Lorenzo, I just cued this up and found I’ve actually got an older mp3 of it (with far less in the way of sound quality). It’s called “Syntax of Psychedelic Time”, and it used to be available for download on the old mckenna.psychedelic-library.org site. I’ve got an old edition of “Psilocybin: Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide” with ads in the back for this and many others offered for sale through Lux Natura; the listing only gives the date of the talk as 1983, though.
Finding any or all of those is a challenge at best, but I do have an even older one from 1982 called “New and Old Maps of Hyperspace” on a 90-minute tape. The quality of that one’s nothing to write home about either, but it’s all yours if you want it. Feel free to mail me at eliazar_salvia@yahoo.com for further details.
Jay
HI Lorenzo and Saloners..
Wow, nothing as exciting as Eliazar’s offer to mention! (looking forward to THAT!)
Just wanted to say that I did notice the November 2012 date mentioned by Terence in the above podcast, rather than the usual December 21 we’ve all heard as the end date of the timewave.
Some refinement made by Terence back in the mid 80’s perhaps?
And while I’m at it; a thought just occurred to me about something Terence has said in a few of the recordings Ive heard here and around the place. And it is a question which I put out there for anyone inclined to answer. It’s about an idea that helped him in the early formation of the timewave theory. He mentions how he had something of a realization regarding creation and existence of objects in the physical world being subject to the process of time and necessarily bearing the mark of it’s creator. (or something like that!) An example he gives is sand dunes. He says that sand dunes look like wind because wind creates them. He then goes on…, but the example kinda stuck me….
Well, at first I couldn’t visualise wind at all. Then I thought of weather maps and pressure systems which I have glanced at before, but never really got into really understanding, which I guess could resemble the topographical form of dunes or hills ? I wonder if anyone could shed some perspective on this matter, possibly rather trivial, but it has kinda got me wondering….
Thanks for your great work Lorenzo!