The Dizziness of Things Unsaid

Summary

This talk combines a memorial reflection, a philosophical lecture, and a closing set of reading recommendations. It begins with Lorenzo greeting listeners from “cyberdelic space,” thanking two new lifetime members, Rudemont and Dax, and noting that he has stopped using email. He then pauses to honor Ray Tomlinson, the inventor of email, describing him as a soft-spoken and brilliant engineer whom he knew from work at BBN, a major early Internet institution. Tomlinson’s death becomes a brief meditation on the history of the Internet and on the personal impact of meeting one of its key pioneers. The main body of the transcript shifts to Terrence McKenna’s May 1991 workshop on alchemy, hermeticism, and related traditions. McKenna discusses the tension between the human being as “brother of God” and as “errant beast,” using Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan to illustrate the duality of human nature. He argues that alchemical imagery—dragons, dogs, pigs, and angelic figures—symbolizes the effort to separate the gold from the dross within the self. He then expands into a historical survey of philosophical traditions, especially Plato, Neoplatonism, and late antique mystical cosmologies associated with Plotinus, Porphyry, and Proclus. He emphasizes the long historical distance between Plato and the later Neoplatonists, and notes that the Chaldean Oracles, the Corpus Hermeticum, and related Alexandrian and Byzantine traditions formed a dense and often lost intellectual world. McKenna repeatedly stresses that these traditions were not abstract curiosities but responses to a collapsing civilization. He describes Alexandria, Rome, Byzantium, and Heliopolis as centers where Christians, Gnostics, Egyptian cults, Indian gymnosophists, and other groups competed and cross-pollinated. He invokes Flaubert’s The Temptation of St. Anthony as a literary way to feel the sensual and intellectual richness of second-century Alexandria. At the same time, he underscores the elitism of these traditions: literacy, money, and education were prerequisites for access, and what survives from a civilization is usually the literature of its elite. A major theme is the comparison between the Roman Empire and the modern world. McKenna describes Rome as a cruel, slave-based empire held together by military force, and he argues that modern society is similarly shaped by propaganda, mass manipulation, and global exploitation. He cites Hans Jonas’s The Phenomenon of Life and its essay on Gnosticism and the modern temper, suggesting that stripped of its mythic imagery, Gnosticism resembles existentialism and the despair of postwar European thought. He also criticizes modern philosophy as spiritually barren, while praising thinkers such as Henri Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead, and Rupert Sheldrake for preserving or reviving a sense of a living cosmos, world soul, or vitalism. McKenna then turns to evolution, arguing that it should not be reduced to genetics alone. He sees evolution as a broader process affecting inorganic, organic, social, and intellectual life, with memes as the cultural counterpart to genes. This broader view, he suggests, can restore optimism and hope. He also links psychedelics to a breakthrough beyond the bleak intellectual atmosphere of his youth, and he criticizes the idea, associated with Sartre, that nature is mute. For him, the cosmos is alive, meaningful, and spiritually charged. The discussion then moves into language, philosophy, and the limits of expression. McKenna argues that language is inherently divisive and therefore partly false, because it creates distinctions in a reality that is ultimately unitary and ineffable. He invokes Plotinus’s phrase “the flight of the alone to the alone,” Wittgenstein’s notion of the unspeakable, and Trumbull Stickney’s poem “Meaning’s Edge” to describe the edge of language where authentic experience begins. He also jokes about philosophy as “verbal and mental masturbation,” emphasizing that philosophical discourse is a vehicle, not the destination. From there, McKenna explores vitalism, the world soul, and the imagination as central to human destiny. He argues that the imagination is the means by which the hidden divine becomes manifest, and he reads a Hermetic passage about seeing God through the “eyes of the mind” as a justification for psychedelic vision. He then quotes a Hermetic text describing the cosmic order of the sun, moon, stars, earth, sea, and fire, interpreting it as an ancient image of the planet seen from space. This leads to Giordano Bruno, whose infinite universe and rejection of medieval celestial shells are presented as a decisive break into modernity. Bruno’s execution is framed as the price of his cosmological insight. The lecture continues into practical and magical techniques: alchemy as projection onto matter, the art of memory, memory palaces, emblemata, astrological decans, talismanic images, and Kabbalah. McKenna explains how Renaissance magi such as Pico della Mirandola, John Dee, and others transformed necromancy into a more philosophical and pious magic. He also discusses magical languages such as Enochian and the role of Hebrew letters in creation. The Picatrix and Francis Yates’s scholarship are used to show how magical utopianism imagined cities protected by images and cosmic correspondences. He connects this to the philosopher’s stone and to utopian social dreaming. The talk closes with a practical and contemporary coda from Lorenzo. He says that although he remains curious about alchemy, McKenna’s readings do not resonate with him as strongly as they once might have, partly because of their religious tone. He recommends continuing to explore alchemy through other routes, such as Toby Hemenway’s Permaculture City, which offers a non-magical path toward a more sustainable and humane society. He also recommends Flaubert’s The Temptation of St. Anthony via Project Gutenberg and promotes the Psychedelic Salon’s Flipboard magazine, which features stories about cannabis legalization, marijuana culture, LSD, painkiller deaths, and related topics. The episode ends with a sign-off from Lorenzo, reinforcing the show’s blend of psychedelia, philosophy, ecology, and countercultural media.