Psychedelic Salon 121-122 and 124-126
Trialogue-1991 (five parts)

FIRST TWO PARTS

This is a two tape set in a series of trialogue tapes that were recorded in September 1991 at a private recording session with Rupert Sheldrake, Ralph Abraham, and Terence McKenna. Their first conversation is titled âGrass Roots Scienceâ and then they begin with a new topic, introduced by Terence McKenna and his plan for âSaving the Worldâ.

Some excerpts from this two part Trialogue set:

Rupert Sheldrake: âEspecially in Brittain, this declining confidence in science, and this declining funding of science has let to a reduction of scientific morale. Fewer and fewer people want to study science in schools or go into it as graduate students. . . . It looks as if the great golden days, the golden age of the sixties and seventies of endless expansion, is over, perhaps forever.â

Rupert Sheldrake: âSo morphic resonance research has turned out to be cheap, indeed, almost free in some cases. And much of the leading research has been done by students as projects. And this has made it clear to me that students, who do tens of thousands of projects around the world are quite capable of doing leading-edge research. They are actually doing it in the realm of morphic resonance.â

Terence McKenna: âI think that science has not only moved from the easy problems to the hard problems, in its evolution over the past thousand years, itâs also moved from the cheap problems to the expensive problems.â

Terence McKenna: âScience is not done in the spirit of Greek curiosity about the order of nature. Science is done to make money on a vast scale.â

Terence McKenna: âI think science has been vastly transformed from the simple impulse to understand the natural world around us into a kind of hellish marriage with capitalism, technology, enormous instruments, and the military/industrial complex.â

Terence McKenna: âAnd I believe, I absolutely agree with you, there should be no such thing as classified scientific data. Thatâs an obscene concept.â

Rupert Sheldrake: âThe vast majority of psychedelic research, 99.999% at least, which has a lot to say, as I suppose you would agree, about the nature of consciousness, the range of imagination, and the powers of the human mind, etc. is not funded at all by official agencies. In fact, every effort is made to suppress it.â

[NOTE: All quotes below are by Terence McKenna.]

âIf mere speaking about saving the world could do the job it would have been saved quite some time ago.â

âAs I look at the various factors which seem to be pushing the world toward ruin, the one I come back to again and again as being central to any social program which would create a sane and caring future for our children and lessen the impact of human beings on the environment is the problem of over-population. All other social problems can be seen as being driven by the excess of human population on the Earth.â

âFirst of all, letâs just take it at face value: Each woman should bear only one natural child. Now what would be the demographic consequences of this? Startlingly, within fifty years the population of the Earth would be cut in half, without war, epidemic, forced migration, government programs of sterilization, and so forth and so on.â

âA child born to a woman in a high-tech, industrial society, in the upper class of that society, will have between 800 and 1,000 times greater negative impact on the resources and carrying capacity of this planet than a child born to a woman in Bangladesh or Zaire. This is something we are not often told.â

âNotice that you can say to this college-educated, upper-class woman, âHow would you like to have more leisure time, save a pile of money, and be hailed as a political hero? All you have to do is limit your reproductive activity to one child.â â

âI donât think that the preservation of capitalism is a sufficient reason to ruin the world and rob ourselves and our children of a sane future.â

. . . and from there, Ralph and Rupert point out a few of the problems with Terenceâs plan and go on to propose yet another clever solution for saving the world.

PART 3: ON CANNABIS

Terence McKenna: “In the absence of cannabis the dream life seems to become much richer. This causes me to sort of form a theory, just for my own edification, that cannabis must in some sense thin the boundary between the conscious and unconscious mind. … And if you smoke cannabis, the energy which would normally be channeled into dreams is instead manifest in the reveries of the cannabis intoxication.”

Terence McKenna: “And what I really value about cannabis is the way in which it allows one to be taken by surprise by unexpected ideas.”

Terence McKenna: “Alcohol, on the other hand, is demonstrably one of the most destructive of all social habits. What a bright world it would be if every alcoholic were a pothead.”

Terence McKenna: “For the 19th century, and for all of European civilization, cannabis was something that was eaten in the form of various sugared confections that were prepared. And this method of ingestion changes cannabis into an extremely powerful psychedelic experience. … For the serious eater of hashish, it is the portal into a true artificial paradise whose length and breadth is equal to that of any of the artificial paradises that we’ve discovered in modern psychedelic pharmacology.”

Terence McKenna: “To my mind, the whole of Indian and Middle Eastern civilization is steeped in the ambiance of hashish.”

Terence McKenna: “Hashish, cannabis, has an ambiance of its own. It has a morphogenetic field, and if you enter into that morphogenic field you enter into an androgynous, softened, abstract, colorful, and extraordinarily beautiful world.”

Terence McKenna: “There’s a deeper issue which is the zeitgeist, if you will, of cannabis, which carries a certain implied danger to establishment values which put such a premium on clear-eyed hard work and Presbyterian rectitude.”

Ralph Abraham: “It [cannabis] is medicine for cultural evolution.”

Terence McKenna: “If I judiciously control my intake of cannabis, it like gives me a second wind and a third wind to go forward with creative activity.”

Terence McKenna: “It can turn you into a stupor, sort of lazy, loutish person. On the other hand, it can allow you to do very hard work for very long periods of time. So you sort of have to manage it, and I think a lot of people don’t learn to manage it.”

Terence McKenna: “We [the U.S.A.] represent values which are incomprehensible to educated Europeans.”

Terence McKenna: “Governments have always been, and continue to this day to be, the major purveyor of drugs, worldwide.”

Terence McKenna: “The day the Russians left [Afghanistan], the hashish market in Northern California collapsed catastrophically and has never been able to build itself back to previous levels.”

PART 4: ON CROP CIRCLES

[NOTE: These comments were recorded on September 3, 1991, and the opinions expressed by the participants in this podcast may have changed in subsequent years.]

Rupert Sheldrake: “If it were just one (crop circle), the hoax theory would be very plausible, but a phenomenon over such a long time period, now with ones turning up in other parts of the world as well, increasing levels – 400 of them last year [1990] in different parts of Britton, this requires quite a large effort.”

Rupert Sheldrake: “The alien theory [about the formation of crop circles] is a very rare one among the theories encountered. The one I think is most popular among people who take seriously the phenomenon and think that the hoax theory is not the only possible explanation is that the spirit of the land itself, or Earth mysteries long embedded in these ancient megalithic monuments are sort of coming back to life again and somehow are being reactivated in Brittan’s hour of need, or that Gaia or the Gaian intelligence or the Gaian mind itself is involved in some ongoing dialogue or communication which principally has the effect, year by year, of attracting more and more attention. And the message year by year seems to be ‘Watch This Space’.”

Ralph Abraham: “I think we should bet on the red and we should bet on the black. Probably you are right. Probably it’s a hoax. In case it’s a hoax, probably military, all right. But just as the fanatics of this phenomenon can’t dis the hoaxes theory to zero, neither can we reduce the non-hoax theory to zero, therefore, we have to keep our eyes open in case it actually begins to say some understandable intelligence to us. We can’t dismiss it completely.”

Rupert Sheldrake: “I think this is the only rational position to adopt, namely to treat it as a natural historical phenomena, or at least a phenomenon. Let’s just say a phenomenon, to investigate it emphatically, I think, is Bacon Ian science.”

Terence McKenna: “I’m claiming that orthodoxy is defending itself against magic. It’s a war between reason and magic. … It’s a desperate struggle between rational orthodoxy and magic.”

PART FIVE: ON PSYCHEDELICS AND THE COMPUTER REVOLUTION

Terence McKenna: “But in fact it seems that the ouroboros has taken its tail in its mouth and these two concerns psychedelics and computers] are seen to be simply different approaches to the completion of the same program of knowledge.”

Terence McKenna: “The citizen is an interchangeable part in the body politic.”

Terence McKenna: “Yes, I mean television certainly has an influence on the mass mind, but on the creative, cutting-edge of the civilization it’s psychedelics. Television influences culture, but if you watch television it’s psychedelics that shape the agenda of television.”

Terence McKenna: “As a global society, possessing DNA sequencers and thermonuclear delivery systems and so forth and so on, we cannot have the luxury of an unconscious mind. That’s something that may or may not have some appropriateness if you’re hunting wooly mastedons and that sort of thing, but an integrated global culture cannot have the luxury of a large portion of its mind inaccessible to itself and somehow occluded.”

Terence McKenna: “Technology, the evolution of languages and so forth have taken a turn toward ‘outing’ the unconscious. And computers are a wonderful tool for this, as are psychedelic drugs.”

Terence McKenna: “High definition TV may give a surprising shot in the arm to the, at this point on-the-ropes linear uniform unitarians, because it’s going to be much more like cinema and photography. And it’s not going to have to be deciphered. It can be looked at, and this will have unexpected consequences on the sense ratios and assumptions operating within society.”

Ralph Abraham (in 1991): “Video is doomed not because of a resolution limitation but because it’s not interactive. Interactive computer graphic games where you can watch the soap opera but also play with it to change the script, and so on, is bound to be much more interesting just because of interaction than video or cinema.”

Terence McKenna: “So the conclusion is that civilization which welcomes psychedelics is the civilization that will lead and rule the planet.”

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