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Theres nothing like the smell of a late-summer New York club crowd to get the old blood pounding, isthere? Its a pleasure to be in Manhattan; Manhattan is my second-most favorite island in the world only

because I live on Hawaii. I feel more affinity to this island than to the other Hawaiian islands (which havevarious cultural extremes Im not really capable of relating to. But youll hear more about that.) Anyway,its great to be here. Its great to see so many familiar faces. Its a pleasure to be here. I always feel when Icome to Wetlands that Im checking in with sort of my home base congregation.About five years ago I moved out to Hawaii for the specific purpose of looking back at this scene and

putting in a full-time effort to understand it. (Of course this tells you I didnt have a job! I still dont butif youre a cultural commentator, who needs a job, right? The glory alone is sufficient to pave ones way.)And I probably like you, here at the end of the Twentieth Century, having lived long enough to go atleast once or twice around the block Im noticing that the strangeness is not receding. The strangenessseems to be accelerating.The theme of this evening is Logos meets Eros. Well I dont know a lot about Eros I do think if yousmoke after sex youre probably doing it too quickly. But otherwise my expertise lies in another direction. Istarted out in psychedelic drugs, and people said it was a flight from reality. It still is a flight from reality,

but I think reality is now a bit more scary than the drugs we used to fly from it, so long ago. Is that thevictory of a cultural meme, or is that just the yawning grave opening ahead of us?My thing is to be amazed at the world as given by nature, but ever more, as we approach this millennialspeedbump in our cultural highway, to be amazed at people , and about the direction that mass psychologyseems to be taking. And since I assume everybody here is a shaper of this mass psychology in theextremely powerful media-based jobs that you all occupy, it might be worth talking about that a little bittonight.I spent all afternoon at MOMA , as I always do when I come to town, (I know its a thing but I do itanyway) worshiping at the altar of modernism, so relieved now that its almost over. Because its going to

be bracketed in this century, the Twentieth Century. Its almost over. Theres very little left to run a fewis to be dotted, a few codas to be played, but essentially its a done deal. This end-of-the-century

psychology is a psychology of hysterical conclusionism and summation and, to some degree, a rhetoric of fear that we can ever outdo ourselves. And I think it probably felt the same way a hundred years ago, if youhad been in Vienna in 1899, when Jugendstil was bursting at its seams and Freud was beginning histheories and the Paris air show of 1905 was in the planning. There has always been a sense of fatalistic andapocalyptic excitement at the end of a century, and always throughout a culture at the edge of itstechnologies. To my mind the interesting technologies of the Twentieth Century have all beencommunication technologies. And I extend that to LSD , DVD , HDTV , GHB, 5-methoxy-DMT all

communication technologies for the purpose of transforming languages, transforming understanding.And now it seems to me weve struck the main vein. Maybe its just that I live up on my mountain, andonce a year, in pursuit of money, journey to cities not like this; there are no cities like this, but the lesser lights to gather the gold. I have this sense now of palpable acceleration, and it has many qualities, butthe quality that fascinates me most is one I hadnt predicted: its getting funnier . Its getting funnier

because everybodys categories are disintegrating, and the cult of political correctness dictates that wenever point out that other people dont make sense. So not making sense has become enshrined as a domainof cultural activity and god knows Ive mined that.Somebody once said actually it was the mushroom itself, it wasnt somebody somebody whohappened to be a mushroom once said what did they say? If youre not part of the problem youre partof the solution. [laughter] No. What was said was that culture is the shockwave of eschatology . Nothing isunannounced. This is like a weird quality of experience, you cant learn this from physics or economics.(Maybe you can learn it from economics.) Nothing is unannounced. Everything is preceded by the

shockwave of its coming. So somehow the spreading zaniness of reality is part of the boundary-dissolvingqualities that are going to make up this new cultural mix of disembodied human beings,nanotechnologically-maintained environments, dissolved self-definitions, people living at many levels atthe same time; intelligence as a kind of free-flowing nonlocal resource that comes and goes as needed;

prosthesis, implant, boundary dissolution these things are usually presented as fairly terrifying. But infact I think behind it all lurks, you know, the demons who do calisthenics in the angles of every room onthis planet to keep it all from collapsing into a flat line.In other words, the thing which lies at the end of any epistemic investigation of what reality is, is surprise ,astonishment. Not religious awe, not that kind of astonishment, but actually like pie-in-the-face hysteria,foodfights and falling anvils, explosions! This is what lies at the end of the epistemic enterprise. WHY is

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that? Well I think it has something to do with the fact that we are simply loaded monkeys , that our belief that we were proceeding as Gods messengers, or his research assistants, was somehow ill-contrived,misbegotten. What weve shipped for is not a voyage of discovery, its more like a ship of fools . Itssomething which Hieronymous Bosch or Pieter Brueghel the Elder could appreciate. Its probably bestsummed up in the work of Groucho Marx, but unfortunately he cant be here tonight .So I exist in this matrix, as you exist in this matrix, making our way through our lives, our affairs, our careers, our disasters. The thing that has struck me about it, for some time and dont bother telling meits a symptom of serious mental meltdown, I know that, Ive lived with it but the thing thats struck mefor some time is the artificiality of everything, hows its like plotted , how its constructed, artificial. Itcant be that this is the first iteration. This is not the first take. There have been many takes. Thefingerprints of the editing suite are all over this scene. If you dont notice that it must be because you takeyour life for granted. And if you take your life for granted and you think it makes perfect sense that youredoing whatever you do, this isnt an issue for you. But for those of us who never thought that we wouldgaze on the things weve gazed upon, be the people weve become, see the things weve seen, the wholething has this extravagant Pynchonesque kind of efflorescence about it that rides right on the edge of insanity (dare we say it).The interesting thing is I dont need drugs anymore! I need them to get away from this, this sense of everything opening into everything else. You know that thing that W. H. Auden said , about how theglacier knocks in the cupboard / the desert sighs in the bed / and the crack in the teacup opens / a door tothe land of the dead? Well I first heard that maybe 30 or 40 years ago. (He used to wander around thisneighborhood.) Back then I thought it was about acid because thats what I thought everything wasabout at that time but now that Ive replayed it to myself I see that its like an alchemical insight. Its theinsight that everything gives way to everything else. Everything is connected. We know this clichimported from Malibu and Santa Fe, but its connected in a way that isnt really, I think, sensed there.Everything is connected in that its emotionally accessible.This is what the Eros part of this thing means to me, if Im to make any stab at it at all. When I was veryyoung I must have had a very non-traumatic upbringing, because I discovered early in life a stunning truththats made my life very complicated in its wake, (but that I still think is true) and its that people are veryeasy to love. In fact, you can love anybody if you are not constrained by expectation, class, themomentum of History, race, gender For a child to make this discovery, and recall it, stick with it, be ableto mnemonically pull it up at such situations like this, I think is extraordinary. And I stand outside it, I dontdraw any conclusions from it. It hasnt made me a nicer person ; dont try to buy me a drink based on it!Somebody said, loves Mankind, loathes individual human beings. I dont loathe individual human

beings, but I do enjoy things the further I stand back from them. This is the Hawaiian perspective, themotivation for being the hermit with the nightclub career.What this is, is an effort to generalize from one persons life to everybodys life, because the only thing Ireally bring to the party is a lot of experience and some ability to articulate it. Its like its not my story, or its somebody elses story I tell, its just The Story. And this story is the literary net of synchronisticconnectivity that makes life something other than the laws of physics, particles flinging themselves throughnothingness, waves dying out in empty space this isnt our experience of being. Our experience of beingis meaning . Thats my experience. And the meaning is not always pleasant or life-affirming or even exactlyrationally apprehensible. Sometimes meaning is a palpable thing: like liquid being poured through crackingice, language moves ahead of its intent; it encloses its object and gives you almost a reverse casting of thething intended. There are many ways for words to fits themselves over the contours of intentionality.So personality becomes an issue, because in the future personality (if it exists at all) is going to be a veryfluid, dynamic thing. One of our hangups is the idea that we come with one body/one mind, or one body

and a mind split into two parts. All these are social fables, illusions. The fabric of reality is defined bywhatever large numbers of people believe about it, and now in the absence of an overarching metaphor that can claim everybodys allegiance reality is actually fracturing. Ive called it the balkanization of epistemology. Ive poked fun at the abductees and made jokes about pro-bono proctologists from nearbystart systems [laughter]What this fracturing means is permission to manifest opinion as Art. Thats really all there is; there is notruth that is different from opinion, nothing is secure. Even mathematics, if you understand Kurt Gdel and

people like this, even mathematics is an uncertain enterprise. Even common arithmetic is an uncertainenterprise.

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So, what are we left with? When I argued a few weeks ago with Sheldrake and Abraham about this, I said,We have to look at our messengers. We have to look at the people who bring the news of the pro bono

proctologists from nearby star systems, who bring the news of military establishments trading human body parts for fiber optic technology. We have to examine the messengers. Well they quickly stomped on thatand said no, that wont work, because when you go back into the history of ideas, lots of screwballs haveobtained great success with their ideas you dont want to look too hard at Newton or Wagner or ThomasAquinas , or anybody else. So the squirrel test, or the fluff test is insufficient. So then what are you leftwith? Well, basically, a sense of humor and a battered sense of aesthetics, I think!

Now I dont know how loose-headed the heads in this town are. I rather suspect theyre screwed moretightly than the situation further west, and screwed more loosely than the situation further east. But Imtelling you, as the world reforms itself in these islands of defined opinion, the only thing which is going tomake sense is sense which is conferred . So it becomes about Beauty, I think. Beauty. Beauty is an easier-to-realize value than Political Correctness, Bodhisattva Compassion I mean what are these things? Whoknows! The rancorous debates start as soon as theyre mentioned. Beauty is self-defined, perceived andunderstood without ambiguity. Beauty is the stuff that lies under the skins of our individual existences.James Joyce said in Finnegans Wake , Here we moult in Moy Kain (meaning in the red light district of Dublin) and flop on the seemy side But upmeyant, Prospector, you sprout all your abel and woof your wings. Well you dont have to go upmayent, Prospector, because right here, right now is a good enough

place to do this.Our past is disappearing. Its almost closing behind us. At the MOMA today we were looking at thisRussian avante-garde stuff, and I was thinking, It seems so far away. They seem almost like messages asdistant as messages from the Sixteenth Century or the Fourteenth Century. I mean, what does it mean to us,the struggle between Fascism and Bolshevism, the struggle between the European banks and emergingsocialist ideas in the 20s and the 30s? This stuff arrives absolutely as ancient as the cave paintings atLascaux Our past is all becoming more and more somebody elses past, irrelevant to the enterprise of thefuture. Oh yeah, I know that if you dont learn from history youre bound to repeat its errors, but the mostimportant thing to learn from History is not to do it at all, that its a very bad idea, History. Look where itgot us!The only way we can essentially redeem what History has done to us, is to carry the understanding that itwrought back into the enterprise of the Human, creating sane systems of education, of resource extraction,of healthcare and community value. If we dont carry the experience of History back into those domains,History will continue. I remember once when I was a fighting radical in the streets of Berkeley, andsomeone had let a banner down over front of a building. It was a quote from Jean-Paul Sartre. It said,

Socialism will not be transcended until we transcend the conditions which created it. True; History, evenmore true. The dialogue about the transformation of the species, the integration of communicationtechnologies, biotechnology all this stuff, how its going to work out is in the hands of shortsighted

profiteering institutions, that are not particularly interested in your welfare or my welfare. In fact, I dontknow if youve noticed, but nobody is particularly interested in your welfare or my welfare, in terms of theintellectual environment of risk through which you move every day. The number of cons youre offered,the number of people who prey upon you, all of these things indicate that the culture has not yet realizedthe power of its own possibilities.How will it realize the power of its own possibilities? Im at this point pretty fatalistic: through time. Idont feel I have to be here tonight or you have to listen tonight for us to come around any kind of corner.The momentum now is inevitable. Now its about each of us individually arranging the furniture of our own mind to deal with what has become inevitable. It wasnt inevitable, but the Twentieth Century made itinevitable, through the Holocaust, Modernism , psychedelic drugs , syncopated music, the dislocation of

time and space through media all of that has now made this transformation inevitable. The human being,adapted to the savannas of Africa of 120 thousand years ago, is just dragged forward into the future by allof this. If you can get through life without trauma, heartbreak, agony, murderous rage, fury, betrayal, etc.etc., youre a better man or woman than I am, for sure. I dont think anybody can get through the narrowneck of first of all, incarnation in a body, but more trying incarnation inside a Historical society thatis cannibalistic, low intentioned, and with values that are completely formed and modeled on themarketplace.So I think about all of this all the time, and I feel great change. I try to monitor it, especially in the realm of society and technology. Everything is redefined every 30 days, every 60 days, redefined toward some kindof singularity, some kind of extra-ordinary moment in the fractal pattern of Historical unfoldment. You

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know, fractals are always repetitious, always low levels build to higher levels, but nevertheless,intrinsically to the pattern, there comes a moment where there is an apotheosis, a breakthrough to a newlevel of understanding. And then whatever the old world was, it simply dissipates. It goes away. Not thatthere isnt political struggle, but once the (lets call it) karmic underpinnings of a historical position especially an oppressive historical position once those underpinnings are articulated, revealed, shown inthe light of day, then the game cannot continue.I feel like in this calendrical moment, we can experience the calendars transformation, or we can use it, asothers are using it, to put forward the idea that certain things are now obsolete, no longer to be practicedoutside the confines of the Twentieth Century, not part of the Third Millennium. Im thinking of fascism,sexism, racism all the division-based consequences of old-style politics.People say, Where then do psychedelic drugs fit into all of this? or Do they fit into it? Of course theyfit into it, because the felt presence of experience the reclaiming of the body thats the critical

political battleground. Your mind is now your own, in some sense. It was a mistake ; it wasnt supposed tohappen that way. But the acceleration of psychedelic use in the Twentieth Century, the explosive spread of the Internet in some sense its as though we have broken from the slaves quarters and are alreadymilling in the streets. But we dont yet have the power or the understanding to know where the centers of

power are, and how it is that they disempower and manipulate us. Thats because we havent focused onthe body. (This is, I suppose, the thing which gives the Eros thing cogency.)The body is the battleground for these various definitions of Human-ness. Eros representing the eroticcelebration of diversity is a terrifying specter to hold up in front of the order-crazed, constipatedhierarchists who actually have the illusion that they own the enterprise. Nevertheless, this is what theyrelooking toward. This is what was made inevitable by their own rapaciousness in the past, that they paintedus so quickly into a corner of resource extraction and disgust with media manipulation that a breakout wasinevitable, had to come.My doctor brought it home to me. He was saying to me as I buttoned up recently after an examination

he said, You know, in the Nineteenth Century, most people your age were dead. This is true. Im soonto be 52; very few people, statistically, reached that level. I think part of whats happening and its oddto address an audience so young on this matter, but heres something your parents may not be telling you

culture as a con is only good for about 35 years on average. Some people are impressed with culture tillthey go to the grave at 90; some people are thoroughly apprised of the fact that its horseshit by the timetheyre 19. But the average persons experience with culture lasts about 35 or 40 years. In the past, that wasenough. Most people then were ready to die without ever blowing their whistle on the game. What ishappening here is we are living past the age by the millions where cultural values make any sense at

all. They simply are, after the ten thousandth piece of apple pie, the sixteenth Mercedes, the five hundredthwhatever its just seen to be intolerable, unbearable, the agony that resides in matter that the Surrealistswere so prescient in insisting upon.So culture generally is an infantilizing process. And some French people have mentioned this, but theydidnt really put it in a historical context: that this neotenizing trick now so useful to advertising tocreate youth-crazed values in everybody it hastens the end of this culture game. It hastens the awakeningof many people to the fact that the felt presence of immediate experience is not negotiable. It has no price.And yet this is whats taken from you when you go to the Job, when you dress for the image, when you kissup to the power establishment. When your time is turned into money, the felt presence of immediateexperience is analogous to being enslaved lets be frank about it is enslavement. Its simply that therules of the game have been changed. [applause] Of course its easy to say if youre unemployed like me.On the other hand, Im meeting my obligations, somehow always have without ever truly working,without ever putting my shoulder to the wheel for the Man. (Of course I had to deal dope to do this! Once

Id gone past that, it worked.)Well, I could go on in this vein for some time, as you see, but the thoughts that I wanted to leave you withtonight on this, because I feel like I am checking in, in some weird way, with my peer group and maybemy most critical group as well, which is fine. We dont need any gurus here, we dont need any LayingDown of the Law. Anybody who tells you they have a clue as to whats happening should be suspect for mental illness and delusions of grandeur. The thought is (and I havent said this yet but this is theconclusion from all of this): culture is an effort to satisfy this weird desire human beings have to close off experience, to live with closure, to force closure. Thats why cultural trips are so bizarre, why they dontmake sense to anybody but the Witoto or the Waorani or the Americans or the Japanese; if youre notinside the culture it seems crazy. The cultures dont make sense because theyre not trying to make sense.

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What theyre trying to do is produce closure, which then somehow makes a human being, who is living inthe light of closure, a more manipulateable, a more malleable, a lesser thing.So if the experience of the Twentieth Century didnt do it for you, if psychedelics didnt do it for you, Idont know what could do it for you! The message coming back at all of us is: live without closure. Thatsthe honest position, given that you are some kind of a talking monkey, some kind of a primate, some kindof creature, on a planet, in an animal body, incarnate in a time and space. In the face of that, life withoutclosure is the only kind of intellectual honesty there is. If you have to inoculate yourself against the variousmemes of closure that are around, psychedelics do that. Thats why they are so politically controversial and

potent because more than any other single act that you may voluntarily undertake they pull the plugon the myth of cultural meaning. They show that these things are provisional, and that beneath the level of culture there is lurking this erotic, time-and-space-bound, feeling-defined, pre-linguistic mode of being,which is real being . Not becoming, not caught in the various fetishistic forms of tension thatcommodification of culture and delayed gratification and all these other buzzwords create, but a deeper level of authentic feeling. And it was there all the time, but is denied by the culture.If we dont come back to that, if we dont re-access that, then this Historical thing, which grinds so many

people down none of whom are here tonight, I might add. They are lost in the barrios of third-worldcities and in the disrupted environments created by this system History will continue. Im fond of quoting Stephen Daedelus (Joyces character) where he says, History is the nightmare from which I amtrying to awaken. But nightmare is not a strong enough metaphor. Its a narcoleptic paralysis . Its thathorrible thing that happens at the edge of sleep its that place where the pro bono proctologists fromother star systems get their wedge into the seam, you know? If youve never had that paralysis at the edgeof sleep, you dont know the panic, the constriction, that it engenders.Were really at a very terminal point on the process of our historical unfoldment, in the same way that our hunter-gatherer phase led into agriculture and advanced role specialization and urbanization and all that.

Now were ready to make another leap. But this time its going to be done in the light of consciousness, because consciousness is what was garnered in the last leap. How this is done depends essentially on thecollective state of mind how malleable it is, how phobic of closure it is, how open it is to the Logos, tothe downloading of universal intent into Human understanding (which is what I would call the Logos), andfinally, how deeply it operates in the light of Eros. How much love is there in this culture? How much lovehas been carried intact from the plains of Africa through the Minoan civilization and the Medieval periodand the spread of people around the planet? How much of what we call true Human-ness made the journeywith us to this new time? Were going to find out. Were going to find out by pooling the love that is ineach of us, in a form in which it is coextensively shared by all of us. There may be many ways to talk about

what this will feel like, what it will look like but what it will BE, if it works, is Love. If it isnt Love,than its less than a perfect sublimation of the alchemical purpose and less-than-perfect is now off themenu. So the only way up is out. Up and out!

Q & AS nippets of conversation recorded as Terence was pinned to the wall by Novelty fans. TM: We dont have to worry about magicians without power who have desire for power, because itsnever going to come to that. Its the magician who can actually manifest power and usually thats so

sobering that that person gives up any wish to control anybody. I mean, Ive seen weird shit go down, andit didnt make me want to take hold of that energy. Somebody else it mightveI like really clear hallucinations, that are somewhat distant from me. What happens on DMT that is sofreaky is: you see the hallucinations, and if youre a practiced head you can sort of stand that. But at higher doses, you become the hallucination. And this is much harder to put up with, much harder to stay calm in

the presence of, because youre no longer looking at something weird, you have become something weird.Im convinced that the hallucinogens touch the language the thing inside us which describes reality,which is constantly explaining to you whats going on once its contaminated, or once its affected bythe psychedelic, then you enter into a world where you dont know whats going on, where you cant tellwhat is hallucinationQ : Is that when youre doing the visible language youve talked about, or singing?TM: Its just slightly past that. I think I do that (those language activities) to try to channel and confine thatDMT-like energy. Because when it really comes over you, its like having your camera melt. Theres nolonger a picture, theres no longer a channel. Its gotten behind what was looking at it, and now you reallydont know

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Q : Have you had your camera melted?TM: O h yeah! And what I do is, I just try to sing my way through it. One of the things that happens amongEuropean people, is when they feel threatened by being loaded, they just assume the fetal position, andtheir theory is, If I can live through it, it will be alright. If I can stand it. What you should do is sit up andsing! Just sing! Sing! Sing! Oxygenate your brain, force energy through your body. Then everything willrearrange itself. I think when people have bad trips it often means theyre not breathing enough.Q : How do you compare salvia [divinorum] to DMT ? I know that DMT is weirder, the way it soundsTM: Some people dont think so. I think so. To me, salvia seems like a strong hallucinogenic drug, but itsnot as hard for me to explain to myself whats going on as with DMT. DMT, if it works, pushes me into a

place where I just have to admit that I dont know what Im talking about. All these metaphors that have been spun out, in books, and onstage, were just shadow play. The real thing is so appalling, soconfounding, its just, you know, may the baby Jesus shut your mouth and open your mind!Q : Did you ever smoke salvinorin-A ?TM: The pure compound? I did smoke it once. It came on so fast, that I found myself on it; I had noimpression of getting high at all. I found it happening to me.I was expecting it to be weirder than DMT. To me it didnt seem to be weirder. To me it seems liked a veryaccelerated ayahuasca rush of some kind. It definitely distorts your body image in some way. People havethese weird things where theyre half in and half out of something, and they talk about it and they try tocrawl into it or crawl out of it I liked it, I like the leaf. The way I do it is I take 35gms of leaf and I liedown in the dark, and I chew it. At about the 15 minute mark it begins afterimage streaming, you know,lights past the eyes. Then I just spit it out into a Kleenex without holding it. Its a big mouthful.Q : Youve talked about plants as teachers. Would you say the same thing about ketamine ? Even though itisnt a plant, do you think it can teach you things?TM: The thing about ketamine is that its active over a very large range. In other words, as little as 40mL isactive, and yet people shoot 150, 200, without a problem. Ive only done it about five times. I shot it everytime, and I shot 140mL. At that dose, its not a very useful drug, because you cant remember fuckinganything . I really like drugs that you can remember.TM: The other night I searched (the Web) for self-transforming elf machines . There were 36 hits! Itsurprised me. I sort of use the search engine like an oracle. Ive used the phrase for DMT, Arabianhyperspace. So I thought of this, and then I searched it, Arabian hyperspace , in quotes. And it took meright to a transcript of the talk in which Id said the thing! You can find your own mind on the Internet. Imvery grateful to the people who type up my talks and then post them at their websites.Q [Abrupt] : I have a question about a theme in your work. Its actually an absence, and Im curious as to

why. Its the similarity that I sense with some of your visions of History, the visions of that process, andthose I found in the work of de Chardin at least The Phenomenon of Man . Ive never heard it mentioned

by you or in talks about you, as far as I know.TM: I have talked about him. I did read Phenomenon of Man and Alpha- O mega . I have no knock onChardin. I think that he got there first, and its all basically there. Maybe the reason I dont mention it isthat my mother was very big on pushing it on me! Yeah, he is the guy. He and McLuhan . If you take deChardin and McLuhan together, theres not much to add to all that.Q [Abrupt] : Its the visual aspect of his writing, that to me links him to what you say. And you bring in somany references to other writers that it seemed a little like a hole there.TM: Theres sort of a hole there. Considering the amount of time I spent reading him, it is a hole, youreright. Olaf Stapleton is another influence, but that was thoroughly rehearsed on the Novelty List. H. G.Wells was an influence.What I like is big-picture thinkers. I like to think in terms of a thousand years, a million years probably

because when I was growing up in western Colorado, what I got into early in life was fossil collecting. Wewould find dinosaur bones and 200-million-year-old clam shells and stuff. And when I finally figured outthat a million years is a thousand years a thousand times , it was like an epiphany. It just opened upunderneath my feet, how fucking old its possible for things to be!