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 - The Christian Eucharist promises a lot
 and delivers very little.
 You have to believe.
 Faith is not necessary to experience
 what psychedelics have to teach.
 You don't have to believe.
 You can be as skeptical as you want.
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 - The famous ethnologist, Mursi Leadey,
 called it the archaic techniques of ecstasy.
 And it certainly is archaic in the sense
 that it's probably our oldest religion,
 but it's much more than a religion.
 It's actually a set of practices
 for achieving altered states of consciousness,
 whether with the use of drugs
 or the use of other kinds of techniques
 like ecstatic drumming and sometimes self-flagellation
 or sometimes different types of physical stress.
 But the basic idea of shamanism
 is to achieve an altered state of consciousness
 and not simply to have the experience.
 The shaman actually uses the altered state
 to access a transpersonal realm,
 a realm of spirits or supernatural forces,
 which can maybe allies of some kind,
 which he or she can manipulate,
 communicate with, obtain information from
 to help the community or an individual.
 - Shamans are medicine men, I guess, in Western parlance.
 And they, so shamanism is what shamans do.
 They beat drums, they take drugs, they dance,
 and they try to cure, they cure people
 or they attempt to cure people.
 They interpret dreams, they find lost objects.
 - It harkens back to a time when things like,
 psychotherapy and medicine and magic and religion
 and all of these things weren't even fully formed concepts.
 So the shaman kind of combines all of these roles
 of he's a priest and a doctor and a psychotherapist
 and also often a poet and an artist
 and someone that gives expression
 to the cultural myth of the culture.
 So he's a, and I keep saying he,
 and that's, it should be clear,
 there are shamanesses as well, or shaman, women shaman.
 It's not a gender specific kind of thing.
 But the figure of the shaman is a,
 important spiritual figure in these non-traditional,
 in these traditional societies,
 in these indigenous societies,
 respected and a little bit feared,
 because the shaman is the odd person.
 The shaman is the person who is in direct contact
 with the trans-personal and is kind of the interface
 for the culture and the rest of the people.
 He or she is the person that gets to actually dialogue
 and travel in these realms.
 And they often use psychotropic plants to do this,
 not invariably, but quite often.
 - It's quite clear that different kinds
 of hallucinogenic plants and substances were used,
 including from the bufotoad.
 Peter first did some examination of this
 among the Olmec people.
 So this is before the classic Maya civilization,
 back around 1200 BC.
 And the bufotoad can be the kind of a five MEO DMT
 can be extracted from the glands on the shoulder of the toad.
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 - You know, there's another compound out there
 called bufotanine,
 which was first discovered in frog skin, actually.
 And it's got some kind of psychoactivity.
 It's a little hard to really pin that down.
 It's a naturally occurring, you know,
 tryptamine as well, though.
 It's found in blood and brain and cerebrospinal fluid
 and urine, any body fluid in animals
 in which it's been looked for.
 - So they were clearly using psilocybin mushrooms.
 They were clearly using the five MEO DMT extracted
 from the bufotoad and possibly a more close analog
 of DMT itself.
 I mean, there's some discussion around the difference
 between five MEO DMT and regular DMT.
 But actually modern explorers with these substances
 have reported that there are qualitatively
 different experiences, but both can be pretty soul shaking.
 So I think within this context,
 then you had a whole array of other hallucinogenic plants
 being used, the morning glory.
 The Mazatec Indians today, when Gordon Wasson
 visited the Mazatec and Miche regions of Oaxaca
 in the 1950s, it started this whole revolution
 in understanding the scope and the depth
 of the sacred plants that were being used.
 So you have salvia divinorum, for example,
 is a plant that was used by the Mazatec Indians,
 and it's still used today.
 That's also where the sacred mushroom cult,
 the psilocybin mushroom cult was rediscovered,
 a place where the sacred mushroom cult
 apparently survived up until modern times.
 - Part of the fear that society at large has
 of psychedelic drugs is that the only framework
 that we have to process these experiences through
 in Western culture is that of competitive drinking.
 Competitive drinking is sort of the standard
 that we use to measure what it's like
 to alter consciousness.
 And I think the shamanistic perspective
 or shamanistic worldview can give us a new perspective
 on how to process these experiences
 and show how valuable that they can be.
 The shamanic perspective essentially would say
 that drugs are not the ideal way to alter your consciousness
 and you shouldn't alter your consciousness
 with any of these types of substance
 until you at least first master altering your consciousness
 through other means, such as the use of drums,
 dancing, paying attention to your dreams.
 - There's all sorts of different ways
 of attaining altered states, through plants and drugs,
 through trance, meditation, hypnosis, drumming,
 starvation, fasting, exhaustive exercise,
 all kinds of things.
 - Yeah, and in terms of an entheogen,
 what I would define as an entheogen,
 I'm not fond of the term because it kind of requires
 that you have a belief in theos, which is God or divinity.
 I think that the term psychedelic
 is just a bit more descriptive of what these drugs
 or plants do or what they manifest.
 Psychedelic means mind manifesting, mind manifesting.
 And one could argue that the phenomena one encounters
 on a psychedelic drug experience
 are either internally generated
 or are externally independent and freestanding.
 I think it still kind of dispenses
 with theological problems that are accompanied
 by calling a drug something that generates divinity within,
 if you don't believe in divinity.
 - It means God within, generating God within,
 and inside theos, God and gen, gen, generate,
 so that which generates God inside a person.
 So, and it's a class of drugs formerly called psychedelic,
 but it's a way of sort of softening the bad press
 of the word psychedelic.
 And especially it's to separate it
 from sort of the party aspect of taking a drug
 and going crazy and showing that these drugs
 have a spiritual side to them, if you can find it.
 - A term that I prefer is shamanic plant
 or shamanic medicine, because it's a plant,
 a psychoactive plant, usually a psychedelic
 or a hallucinogen that is used
 in one of these shamanic traditions, right?
 So it's appropriate to call it a shamanic medicine,
 although the same, the very same plant
 and the very same substance could be not shamanic
 if you're not using it in a shamanic context.
 If you're using it recreationally or taking it in a rave
 or some other situation,
 it's not really a shamanic medicine anymore.
 It's still the same substance,
 but if you're talking about substances
 that are used specifically sort of in this shamanic context
 and I like shamanic medicine,
 I have problems with the term entheogen,
 although I know that it's gotten more popular
 after Karl Ruck, who was a classicist
 and Jonathan Ott and some other people proposed it
 as an alternative to hallucinogen.
 And theogen means manifesting the God within,
 in theos, within and God.
 And that's fine, except they don't always do that.
 - I don't like the word because I'm a Buddhist
 and I don't believe in gods.
 So, to me, it's something
 which helps you to reach your full potential.
 You don't need to introduce the idea of God.
 - I like the term because I have turned very mystical,
 since taking LSD.
 And so my outlook is more skewed in that direction.
 I think that what Groff said
 was that it was a non-specific amplifier
 of your mental states,
 the psychedelic or hallucinogen or fantastica,
 the psychotomimetic,
 all of these qualities that have been ascribed
 to the same class of sacraments
 that we now refer to as entheogens.
 I think it's closer for me
 to the ultimate purpose
 for which these substances can be used.
 The capacity for the human being
 to experience infinite love
 and total self-forgiveness.
 A sense of deep interconnectedness
 with the planet and with all people
 and with the cosmos.
 This plasticity of our identity
 and helping us to see into realms
 that perhaps are both ancient
 because they're the archetypal divine imagination
 and they're ever fresh
 because it is transcendental presence
 that is the creator, the artist,
 the cosmic artist.
 - Entheogen, it means connecting with God.
 I've been searching for God all my life.
 I was a practicing Catholic for many, many years.
 And you would think that psychedelics,
 being mind manifesting,
 would show you the God you've been worshiping.
 The closest I ever got to God was that,
 "Hey, Nick, you're God.
 "You're an aspect of divinity
 "that's looking out at this,
 "a little spy for God.
 "And so enjoy it."
 I said, "Well, that's a twist.
 "I've been looking for a God outside me.
 "And here I learned that I'm one of God's
 "apostles in a way.
 "What a surprise."
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 So that's what I learned from psychedelics,
 that at least that's a hypothesis.
 So pay attention, you know, was the message.
 Pay attention, Nick.
 You're collecting data for God.
 Look with God's eyes upon the world.
 - So the term hallucinogen is inaccurate.
 The term psychotomimetic is inaccurate.
 The term entheogen is, you know,
 it all depends on circumstances.
 My personal preference is I like psychedelic
 because even though the term carries
 all this cultural baggage, you know,
 and everything's psychedelic,
 that's kind of something left over from the '60s.
 But in the strict sense,
 psychedelic means mind manifesting.
 And I like the term because it leaves it open.
 I mean, these substances certainly manifest the mind
 in some aspect, and we don't have, you know,
 we don't have any argument with that.
 But how they manifest it, you know,
 depends on the set and setting.
 And like these other terms, you know,
 sort of are more specifically related to set and setting.
 And they also show how difficult it is
 to really linguistically kind of put this in a box,
 you know, characterize what they do.
 You know, sometimes they're mystical.
 Sometimes they're induced psychosis.
 Sometimes they don't do much of anything at all, you know.
 But they always manifest the mind in some way.
 So I like psychedelic if it could just be divorced
 from, you know, all the connotations
 that it's come to have in our culture.
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 I think it's almost inevitable
 that psychedelics have been playing a part
 in religious mystical experiences
 since the beginning of time.
 They are a powerful way for human beings
 to blow their little egos out of the water
 and contact the divine.
 - One thing, you know, the whole of spirituality
 has its roots, ancient roots, in the shamanic traditions.
 We still have those traditions.
 And a huge number of them are based on
 whatever the indigenous psychedelic happens to be
 in that area.
 Because what could be more natural
 than you pick up a mushroom or something like that,
 you ingest it, and my God, you're having visions.
 You're seeing life in a new way.
 You're seeing through the appearances.
 You have a greater understanding,
 or at least the confines of your common sense understanding
 is exploding.
 And it's transformational.
 - They elicit a whole spectrum of psychological effects.
 Probably the ones that people find most interesting
 as far as alterations of consciousness.
 They have profound perceptual effects,
 emotional effects, cognitive effects.
 They have effects on your sense of self
 and on your relationship to your body and to your will.
 So they kind of cut across the entire spectrum
 of human consciousness.
 - It's rare that people rush to repeat it
 over and over again regularly.
 It's not that you have a craving to take the drug.
 You have a curiosity about the experience,
 and you often have to overcome your reluctance
 to take the drug in order to have that.
 You see this with ayahuasca very strongly.
 If you drink lots of ayahuasca,
 you actually develop a physiological aversion syndrome.
 And this is well known with other substances
 where it tastes so bad and you get sick and all that,
 and you actually really don't want to consume it.
 But you do, and somehow you always get it down,
 and you're always glad you did
 because you overcome the aversion
 and you learn so much from it.
 But it's definitely not addicting.
 Quite the opposite.
 - I think it is possible for people
 to have an abusive relationship with a psychedelic drug,
 although compared to the other drugs of abuse,
 that's certainly a lot less common.
 For example, the kinds of relationships
 that most people have with heroin or alcohol or tobacco,
 those kinds of drugs.
 Psychedelics, as a rule anyway,
 tend to be taken sparingly,
 once a week, once a month, once a year,
 as opposed to daily.
 And in fact, in the case of most
 of the classical psychedelic drugs,
 like LSD, psilocybin, DMT,
 if you take them regularly, you quickly develop tolerance
 and you stop responding,
 especially strongly after the second or third day
 that you take a psychedelic drug.
 That's not quite the case with DMT,
 but the debilitating effects of DMT
 tend to limit its repetitive, habitual use as well.
 - No, there's no evidence that antigens are addictive.
 I mean, ayahuasca or mushrooms or peyote
 are definitely, or iboga,
 are definitely not addictive substances.
 I mean, you can take them
 and not take them again for years.
 I mean, they can be a little bit psychologically addictive,
 like any experience.
 If somebody really loves it,
 they may want to go back and have the experience
 again and again.
 But generally, you really don't find abusive patterns
 with people who make use of these substances.
 - Look in your own pharmacopeia, you know.
 Look at the drugs that you're taking
 and note their side effects.
 And how many people a year
 have died from inhaling marijuana?
 Goose egg.
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 Now, look at how many people die from drinking alcohol.
 You know, you've got hundreds and thousands of people.
 You've got the people who are completely distraught
 over the alcohol addiction and things like this.
 It's countless billions of dollars and millions of lives.
 Think of the people that get creamed
 when the drunk driver hurts someone.
 So there's so many repercussions
 that are much worse with alcohol, and yet it's legal.
 And so the idiocy of our current position
 on cannabis is really sad.
 But my prayer is that the grassroots movement
 will continue to show its obvious advantage
 to our culture by a kind of strict integration
 and taxing and, you know,
 so making it a legally available substance,
 which I think would also make us a little more willing
 to note the importance of the entheogens
 because in a sense, it's a mild entheogen, cannabis.
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 At the same time, we've conflated them
 with other substances like heroin and speed and cocaine,
 which are more addictive, more artificial,
 where we've taken, in the case of heroin and cocaine,
 we took naturally occurring plant substances,
 but we did a chemical process to them
 to kind of amp up the active component and separate it.
 So I have a friend, Morgan is an herbalist,
 and he makes a distinction between, you know,
 the whole plant medicine approach
 that indigenous people were mostly using
 and our kind of attitude of just isolating the agent
 that causes a certain reaction
 and then amplifying that effect
 so that it leads to addictive patterns.
 - A culture is what it eats,
 and an individual's personality
 is often largely a reflection of their diet.
 There has not been a human culture
 that did not bear upon it the stamp
 of its relationship to certain plants
 which altered the individual and mass psyche.
 We can think of numerous examples,
 the influence, for instance, of sugar
 on the growth of 19th century mercantilism,
 or the way in which the British manipulated opium policy
 in the Far East, or as you mentioned, alcohol,
 which has always been the drug of choice in Western culture,
 who can imagine modern industrial office culture
 without coffee.
 These are major drug dependencies
 that have placed their stamp
 on the lives of millions and millions of people.
 It's simply that we choose to linguistically define it
 in such a way that the effect
 is not something most people are cognizant of.
 - It's funny that all of these things
 are lumped under one label, drugs.
 I come from sort of a peasant family.
 Both my parents were farmers,
 and were just immigrants, basically.
 And when my mother found out that I was in California,
 that I took drugs, it broke her heart.
 And there was no way that I could explain to her
 what it was I was doing,
 because that word drug just had such an impact on her mind
 that it was about the worst thing
 what her firstborn son could ever do.
 And it was one of the saddest things in my life,
 that I could not explain to mom what it was I was doing.
 Mom was a very religious person.
 She went to Catholic church every day,
 and I could not find a way to tell her
 that I was doing the same thing that she was doing.
 And I still would not know how to tell mom
 what the difference was between her going to church
 and me taking entheogens, searching for God, through chemicals.
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 - There's no such thing as a bad drug, right?
 Because a drug is just a drug.
 It's a substance with certain properties.
 It has no moral qualities.
 The only thing that has moral qualities is human behavior.
 And there is lots of bad human behavior
 with respect to drugs.
 There's lots of bad human behavior
 with respect to all kinds of things,
 and good human behavior too.
 I mean, again, this comes back to the context.
 So the whole war on drugs idea,
 and the idea, it has nothing to do with protecting people
 from toxic substances.
 If that were the purpose of the war on drugs,
 tobacco and alcohol would be prohibited tomorrow.
 And yet the structure of the law,
 not that prohibition would do any good,
 and I'm not advocating that, right?
 But if that were really the agenda for drug control,
 they would say, well, these are clearly
 the most harmful drugs.
 These are the ones that are killing the most people,
 so they should be strictly regulated.
 But in fact, the way the law is set up,
 the FDA is not even allowed to classify
 tobacco and alcohol as a drug.
 There are these science fiction cliches
 like there is some knowledge man should not know.
 So probably there are probably horrible things
 like huge devils or places where you shouldn't go,
 viruses that would kill all life on earth,
 or huge, like things that make the atomic bomb,
 terrible things.
 So what does our society, it has a right
 to make those things not investigatable by science
 'cause they're too dangerous.
 So our society decides that among those things is marijuana,
 that scientists should not be able to explore marijuana
 and MDMA and LSD and these certain molecules
 because they're things men should not know.
 And I think that, as a scientist, that's laughable.
 As I often like to say, I got my degree in nuclear physics,
 and I like to say, if they trusted you with plutonium,
 why not LSD?
 My gosh.
 - So this makes no sense.
 So okay, if the war on drugs is not about protecting people
 from harmful substances, what is it about?
 Why are all these substances illegal?
 It's about control.
 And ultimately it's about control of what people can think.
 And it's the control of experience.
 It's essentially the state irrigating itself
 to the point where it says,
 certain states of consciousness are allowed
 and other states of consciousness are not allowed.
 And that's really what it comes down to.
 This is about cognitive liberty.
 - There are these plants that have these molecules
 that humans may have used for thousands of years
 that produce visions and so on,
 and are often considered to be healing.
 In our cultures, we've demonized some of these substances
 and made them illegal,
 which I would consider to be unfortunate.
 - It's the state saying, don't go there
 because if you take this in theogen
 or you take this psychedelic,
 you're going to have funny ideas.
 And funny ideas are very dangerous,
 especially if they don't fit in with what we're saying
 should be kind of the accepted cultural zeitgeist.
 So that's the danger of psychedelics
 is they actually cause people to question
 the cultural paradigms and say,
 well, maybe this is not consistent with,
 maybe the revelations of psychedelics
 are not consistent with what Hollywood and Wall Street
 and the government and Main Street and religions
 and all these institutions are dishing out.
 - So the war on drugs is really a war on consciousness
 and who's allowed to think what.
 More importantly, I personally don't believe
 that anybody has the right to tell you
 what to do with your own body
 or what thoughts that you can think.
 That if you do not have the freedom
 to decide what happens to your own body and your own mind,
 then you really don't have freedom
 at its most basic essential level.
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 - I think it's really ridiculous
 that they won't allow terminal cancer patients
 to take whatever fucking drug they want.
 I mean, you can't argue it's gonna be,
 if you're gonna die anyway,
 why can't you take any drug you like?
 And the extension of that is once you pass a certain age,
 I don't know quite what that age should be,
 you should be able to do anything you fucking want
 to your body without being prosecuted.
 So scientists and old people
 should have free access to any drugs they want.
 I think I qualify in both camps.
 So, but you know, our society is,
 I don't even think that's enlightened.
 I think that's common sense.
 An enlightened society would take a look
 at these drugs objectively and say,
 which ones can help promote?
 And do we want a society based on alcohol and cocaine?
 Or do you want a society based on LSD, MDMA, ayahuasca?
 Which of the drugs we're gonna promote?
 And our society's picked, for some reason,
 the absolute worst drugs to make as its standards.
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 - Potentially, psychedelic drugs could be, for psychology,
 what the telescope became for the science of astronomy.
 - In the right setting,
 with the right kind of psychotherapy support
 or religious support or whatever the context
 of the support is, and most importantly,
 what the person's intention is when they take it,
 if they're an addict or an alcoholic,
 they can take ayahuasca, they can take peyote,
 they can take these substances,
 and it will definitely help them to get over that.
 And in the case of something like ibogaine,
 it's even more specific.
 I mean, there's other things going on with ibogaine
 that might interrupt the addiction syndrome
 on the physical level.
 - For many people, actually,
 who were alcoholics and things like that,
 many have been cured by their use of psychedelics.
 So in some ways, it's the opposite of addiction.
 - Entheogens actually are almost the opposite
 of an addicting drug,
 in that sometimes a person will only take an entheogen once
 and have a very powerful experience
 and actually be freed from some other addictions
 or habits that he or she might have.
 And in fact, in some ibogaine research,
 an African drug called ibogaine,
 people are being taken off of heroin and alcohol
 with some good success where other methods have failed.
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 - I discovered ibogaine pretty much 11 years ago
 on the internet back home.
 Through a friend of mine, which I gave a treatment.
 It was heroin.
 He was a heroin addict.
 So I treated him with the root,
 'cause I never used ibogaine for detox.
 No, I always used straight root.
 So when he went back to his country,
 that's how he learned about ibogaine,
 and he sent me an email.
 I'm like, "Whoa, that's really interesting."
 So ibogaine is an extraction from iboga.
 So you take the root itself, you do the extraction,
 and it became the first like a total alcohol.
 - Ibogaine is very effective at treating
 certain kinds of addiction, opiates,
 methamphetamines, cocaine, and alcohol.
 - Ibogaine has five different therapies
 that we basically became aware in their use.
 One is an initiatory, an initiatory aspect,
 which is the psychospiritual,
 where you get into the deepening, dreaming aspects,
 but you have no active addiction in the body.
 The second is for physical healing,
 things like herpes, asthma, lung problems,
 blocked energies in the system, scar tissue.
 Then there's also a mental treatment
 for disabilities around depression,
 post-traumatic stress disorder, trauma, sexual abuse.
 Then there's a reset therapy that we do
 with alcohol, cocaine, and methamphetamine.
 We separate that because those substances
 need to be out of the body for 24 to 72 hours
 prior to treatment, and then there's opiate.
 In an opiate detox, we can begin 12 hours
 after last administering of an opiate,
 and within 45 minutes, it will completely control
 any symptoms of withdrawals.
 - I even do the healing for, let's say,
 for women who wanting to have kids.
 And let's say they try in hospital,
 and the doctor there say, "No, you can't have kids anymore."
 But the woman is normal.
 It's like nothing is missing in her tummy.
 Why she can't have kids?
 I do the healing of that Ebola.
 - Something that's been discovered recently
 by Dr. Deborah Mash and others
 is that there is a new neurotransmitter
 created in the brain after taking ibogaine
 called norebogaine, and it can stay in your system
 for up to four months.
 And that's the substance that they theorize
 is continually working on your psyche
 to make that reduction of cravings stay in place,
 so that over the long term,
 you have time to break out of that cycle of addiction
 and become a new person.
 - Not only is it address the symptoms of withdrawals
 and discomfort, but it also works
 in the craving center of the mind.
 So the individual, by the time they've completed treatment,
 has no desire whatsoever within a 10 days
 to two week period to touch opiates.
 - See, that's pretty much the reason why I'm here in the West.
 I didn't just decide to come here.
 I love my country and we really peaceful there.
 Life's also great like here in Mexico.
 You know, I would not just like leave my people,
 whatever I were doing, my family,
 just to come here to hang out.
 Now, I had a call from the spirit to spread the roots,
 the word of the root iboga,
 which is like I'm talking with ibogaine,
 the most common spray in the world
 'cause it's not just for Africans,
 it's for anybody who needs it.
 If it was just up to me, I would just say,
 okay, let's go from city to city,
 clean up the streets, clean up the houses.
 You know, we're gonna find those guys,
 you know, with drug addict.
 We're gonna find them and heal them all.
 'Cause that's the only way.
 Iboga and ibogaine is a last call for anybody
 who really wants to get help.
 You don't have to spend like thousands and thousands of
 dollars or spend months in a clinic rehab
 and go back tomorrow and using the drugs.
 No, it takes just a couple of days to get here
 and I'm ready to do that,
 to help anybody who wants to take it.
 Just one decision, that's it, that's all it takes.
 - But the thing is, I've also known many people
 who take a lot of psychedelics and they're heroin addicts,
 they're alcoholics, it hasn't helped them a bit.
 So, you know, honesty behooves me to say that.
 This is not a miracle cure for addiction.
 All these things can do is like open up an opportunity
 for the person to examine their lives
 and resolve to change if that's what they wanna do.
 But it won't compel them to change, you know,
 it's not gonna force anybody off drugs.
 So, you know, it's like a lot of other techniques
 for treating addiction, talk therapy or whatever.
 They work in some people and not in other people.
 - Since it's illegal in the United States,
 the only options that an addict has is to go out
 of the country or to do it illegally in the United States.
 And there are some people in the United States
 who are treating addicts illegally.
 You know, they're breaking the law by healing these people.
 However, most people go to other countries to take Ibogaine.
 I personally, I went to Mexico around the Puerto Vallarta
 area with a organization called awakeninginthedream.com.
 And that was a great experience for me.
 And the people there were super nice.
 And it was in a setting that I think was beneficial
 to the Ibogaine experience.
 In other words, it wasn't in a clinic, it was in a house.
 And I was with people who were very experienced
 at doing this and I felt completely safe.
 But there are several clinics in Mexico doing this.
 Some of them are just right across the border in Tijuana.
 - And there's lots of clinics around the world
 that will take your money and give you Ibogaine.
 They've never taken Ibogaine.
 They don't know anything about drug addiction
 and they have no idea what that individual's going through
 in that process, you know?
 And that just frightens the hell out of me.
 I mean, in comparison to what the model in the United States
 this is not a return visit,
 a revolving door therapy house.
 We're hoping you can come here once,
 get rid of that addiction.
 And when you come back again to do more work
 with the Ibogaine, if it benefited you,
 without an addiction in the body,
 'cause then you can go to the next level
 and then you work to the next level.
 And this could be a real supportive,
 you know, this isn't like going to meetings every day
 and believing that you're never gonna be anything
 less than what you are.
 This confirms that you are no longer
 in the body, energetically.
 There is no physical addiction existing in the system.
 It enables them to release from the addictive need,
 actually.
 They found themselves after their trips
 without the desire for junk.
 And they were all shocked, you know, like,
 oh my God, this is a, you know,
 'cause they were like waiting for the other shoe to drop,
 but then they actually felt like, wow, I am not hooked.
 You know, so there was something immediately
 engaging about it.
 On the other hand, it was also very psychologically
 challenging to begin with.
 And, you know, it took one into a very deep inner world.
 Maybe you were going to face some of the shadows
 that has been part of your addictive process.
 This really sort of crosses over
 into the shamanic use of these things.
 I mean, the shaman is a person who learns
 through discipline to navigate in these realms.
 And this is the realm of, you know,
 he learns to pass through both ways,
 through the doors that the dead pass daily.
 I think that high doses of psychedelics
 or something like DMT is very close probably.
 I mean, I've never had a near-death experience.
 I hope never to have one until I'm actually dying,
 you know, but people who have had them say
 that they're very similar to high doses of DMT.
 And there's even reason to think that the DMT,
 which our own bodies make,
 may be involved in the near-death experience,
 that, you know, in the state of stress on the mind and body
 that is produced when you're dying,
 it's not inconceivable that your brain releases
 a massive flood of DMT and you have this experience.
 But all this still is mostly
 within the realm of speculation.
 We still don't really know enough
 about the normal concentrations of DMT in the body
 and what situations increase it
 and in what sorts of conditions the levels are decreased.
 Where is DMT found in nature?
 Well, a better question would be,
 where is it not found in nature?
 I mean, this is really interesting to me,
 the fact that DMT is so ubiquitous in nature.
 And it is, from the chemical standpoint,
 structurally, it's the simplest of the psychedelics.
 It's a very, very simple compound.
 And in terms of biochemistry,
 it's only two steps away from tryptophan.
 Tryptophan is an amino acid.
 It's one of the essential amino acids.
 So it is universal.
 All living things have tryptophan.
 Now, not all living things have DMT, probably,
 but the enzymes that convert tryptophan to DMT,
 there are two main enzymes in this process,
 are also universal.
 I mean, I don't know how chemical we wanna get here,
 but the basic idea is there's an enzyme
 that takes off the acid group of the amino acid,
 so it turns it from an amino acid into an amine.
 And then there's another enzyme
 that puts methyl groups onto the amine.
 So first you get tryptophan, and then you get tryptamine,
 and then you get dimethyltryptamine,
 which is what DMT is.
 And this goes on, I think, very commonly.
 Well, these enzymes are certainly common.
 I mean, they're common in all cells, practically.
 Do all organisms contain DMT?
 I think it's possible that all organisms
 might contain traces of DMT.
 There are many plants that contain DMT.
 We know of at least a couple hundred,
 and that's only because we've looked.
 There are probably thousands of plants.
 In fact, my suspicion is that because tryptophan
 is so easily converted to DMT,
 I think if you went out
 with a sufficiently sensitive instrument,
 mass spectrometer or whatever,
 and just started sampling plants at random
 and shoving those through your gas chromatograph
 or whatever you're using,
 you would find traces of DMT in every plant.
 And you would also find it,
 we know it's very widespread in animals, too.
 So we know it's in amphibians,
 we know it's in mammals, including us.
 We know it's in marine organisms.
 We know it's in fish.
 So it's, yeah, it's odd that,
 well, maybe it's not odd.
 It's just a fact of nature that it's all over the place,
 and probably is about as close to being universal
 as anything is.
 - It's also related to serotonin.
 Serotonin is a neurotransmitter which occurs in all life
 and is most concentrated in the higher primates
 and most concentrated there in man.
 It is 5-hydroxytryptamine,
 while DMT is, as you mentioned, NN-dimethyltryptamine.
 So there is a very close structural affinity
 between this extremely potent and exotic hallucinogen
 and the very common basis
 for ordinary consciousness, serotonin.
 - DMT and fibrotoxy DMT and even beta-carbolines,
 which are the other component of the ayahuasca combination,
 do occur in the human brain,
 and they occur in other places in the human body,
 in the adrenal glands, for instance,
 probably in the gut.
 But they definitely occur in the human brain,
 especially in the pineal gland.
 There are other forms of DMT other than the smokable kind.
 In fact, those other forms
 are the more traditionally used forms of DMT,
 such as ayahuasca.
 - Ayahuasca is remarkable because, as you probably know,
 it's combined from these two distinct plant species.
 - Its two principal ingredients are themselves inactive,
 except in the presence of each other.
 So what we have in the case of ayahuasca
 is an example of a highly evolved folk pharmacology.
 And how a discovery like this
 was ever made in the first place
 is one of the challenging questions
 that anthropologists have to deal with.
 After all, in a square mile of Amazonian rainforest,
 it is not unusual to encounter 50,000 distinct species
 of plants.
 How then did these so-called primitive or preliterate people
 make the connection between the combining of the bark of one
 with the leaves of another,
 boiled and put through a number of procedures
 to produce an intense visionary hallucinogen?
 This is an extremely interesting
 and to this day, unanswered question.
 - It tastes horrible, by the way.
 It tastes, my version of what it tastes like
 is maybe four-day-old espresso
 that someone had put out a cigarette in
 with a dash of lemon.
 (laughs)
 And so you gag it down and then
 after a while, your mind starts to have a plasticity
 and an openness and it remains that way
 for about four or five hours,
 which can be quite beautiful
 if you've seen any of the tapestries
 of the Inner Mind Cathedral
 in the DMT state.
 That extends it for hours.
 So it's kind of a shame not to take ayahuasca
 if you're going to do DMT
 because, jeez, you can extend the journey
 to several hours.
 - Well, DMT is a tryptamine, so is LSD.
 LSD is a laboratory invention.
 It's a chemical modification of an ergot alkaloid.
 But in terms of their pharmacology,
 they're quite similar.
 They both impact certain kinds of serotonin receptors
 in the brain, through which most people propose
 that these drugs have their effects.
 I would say the main difference is that DMT
 is quite short-acting and LSD is quite long-acting.
 But in terms of the spectrum of effects,
 they're quite comparable in terms of the perceptual
 and emotional and the cognitive responses
 to consuming the drug or the compound.
 Also, DMT is a compound that is found
 in all kinds of animals and plants,
 and LSD isn't a natural product.
 It isn't found in the animal kingdom or the plant kingdom.
 - In ayahuasca, the effects of DMT begin a lot slower,
 probably within a half hour, maybe an hour,
 and they peak in around two to three hours,
 and they're usually resolved between around
 six hours or so.
 So even though it's a slower effect,
 the quality of the response is the same.
 - LSD was always a bit of a commitment
 because you've got at least eight hours
 that you're committed to this altered state,
 and so you have to arrange your life wisely to support that.
 And this is just a little more manageable, I think,
 in some ways.
 It's also very clean and very clear,
 and you don't feel any body load afterward.
 You feel uplifted.
 You feel like vitalized.
 You feel like you need less sleep, you know?
 And you feel that you've addressed yourself on a deep level.
 A lot of deep issues came up for me.
 - Yeah, well, I've had experiences with ayahuasca
 and ibogaine.
 They've been very profound and important experiences
 in my life, and they've helped me, I feel,
 to grow on many levels.
 I mean, I've written about them extensively in my books,
 Breaking Open the Head, and 2012,
 The Return of Quetzalcoatl.
 I feel like they gave me insight into my personal psychology,
 visions about better paths to take.
 They kind of acted as kind of antidepressants
 that lifted my spirits up and made me see these other layers
 or possibilities of reality.
 So they've been very important experiences for me.
 (dramatic music)
 (air whooshing)
 - Telepathic and group mind states are induced
 by this particular plant mixture.
 And it's particularly interesting in the light of the fact
 that the chemical constituents which make it go
 are in fact found endogenously in the human brain.
 These are not exotic compounds from the point of view
 of ordinary human brain chemistry.
 So there is a suggestion there that manipulation
 of neurohumeral compounds, brain neurotransmitters,
 and that sort of thing may in fact open the door
 to untapped areas of human potential.
 - One of the games my brother liked to play
 with the mushrooms was, you know, in this dialogue situation
 he was always saying,
 "Tell me something I can't possibly know."
 Right?
 "And that will validate that it's not me,
 "you know, that this is coming from."
 I don't know that he ever succeeded in getting it.
 It's very cagey, you know, they're very tricky that way.
 It's, you know, but occasionally they do seem
 to tell people things that they can't possibly know
 or that they've never thought about in quite that way.
 Now it's come out, for example, that, you know,
 Crick's insight into the structure of DNA
 was assisted by LSD, you know,
 and he reluctantly but finally admitted
 that that was a big influence.
 And many computer scientists, you know,
 Steve Jobs has said LSD's been very useful
 for his creativity.
 Kerry Mullis, the Nobel Prize winner
 who figured out the PCR chain reaction
 has been quite upfront about it.
 LSD gave him the ability to get down with the molecules
 and see what's happening.
 In some sense, there is a communication.
 In some sense, the question isn't even valid
 because where do the boundaries
 between the self and the world exist, you know?
 We're not really separate.
 I mean, we're part of this information field
 and, you know, this notion that consciousness,
 I mean, I do think that consciousness does,
 it's like a property of the continuum.
 It's like the old physical physicist's concept
 of the ether or something.
 It kind of permeates everything
 and it's not really localized in the human brain
 or necessarily even generated by the human brain.
 Why does the brain require DMT for normal function
 if, you know, this is indeed true?
 Yeah, and it's hard to say.
 I mean, I think that perhaps one of the functions
 of ordinary levels of DMT is kind of like a,
 you know, kind of reality thermostat.
 If you have a certain kind of narrow window
 of levels of DMT in the brain,
 it maintains this ordinary level of, you know,
 perceptual, you know, consensus reality
 that most of us live in.
 You know, kind of like the endo matrix in a way,
 as opposed to like an externally applied,
 you know, psychological or, you know,
 consciousness kind of matrix like in the movie.
 You know, this is one that's internally generated.
 But it may be that the brain is a place
 where it becomes focused and concentrated.
 You know, the brain may be as much a receiver of the signal
 as it is a generator of the signal.
 You know, nobody can really say,
 but that model in some ways appeals more to me
 than the notion that it's all coming from the brain.
 The brain is more like a node, you know,
 and there's this sort of field of consciousness
 that permeates everything,
 and to a certain degree, everything is conscious.
 - I think of the shaman as entering into this net of being
 in the higher worlds, in the heaven worlds.
 And that's why I've personified the net of being,
 this painting behind us,
 as this continuum of heads interlocking infinitely
 in all directions,
 because that points to being as a continuum,
 as a network, in a sense, to an infinite realm.
 And this is a part of the deep fabric of our being, I think,
 because we sense ourselves as souls related to many.
 - There is this everyday world,
 but you can be in a place where there is no you
 and still perceive the world.
 That scared me.
 Losing my ego was the scariest thing I ever,
 and I still don't like it.
 - A profound state which may be reached
 by use of these entheogens, psychedelics, hallucinogens,
 whatever you're gonna call them,
 which is known as ego loss or ego death.
 Unfortunately, subsequent to the coinage of this term,
 ego has come to be used in a completely other sense.
 It has been used in the sense of pride,
 and that is not what ego death is about.
 - Ego death would mean you lose your sense of I for good,
 and that's not what happens.
 They mean a temporary suspension of the ego
 when ego death is spoken of.
 Ego death means the death of you as a concept,
 whereas we walk around thinking of ourselves as things.
 We think of I am sitting in the chair,
 therefore, I am a thing.
 The chair is a thing.
 When we reach the realm of ego death,
 or ego dissolution, or whatever you're going to call it,
 there is no longer any perceived boundary
 between oneself and the chair.
 In this state, there are no things.
 There is just one continuous experience.
 - In some sense, all of experience is an illusion.
 You know, everything that we experience in the here and now
 in our state of being is a hallucination,
 an elaborate hallucination that our brains construct.
 We happen to call it consensus reality,
 but it's still, I mean, physics tells us
 that the picture of reality that we build
 so that we can navigate through the world
 and not step in front of buses and stuff like that
 and do all those, you know,
 the world doesn't really look like this at all.
 You know, the brain constructs a model of reality
 that more or less maps onto reality.
 It's good enough that we can survive.
 - But we're focused in a kind of, you know,
 constricted dimensional awareness of reality,
 and you know, for safety reasons mostly, you know,
 and we don't necessarily want to know
 that we are actual one consciousness
 with all beings and things at all times.
 So nevertheless, those dimensions are all open to our being.
 You know, we have a complete freedom
 of the continuum of being.
 - If we change the nature, you know,
 we have the model and we have the real world out here
 and we have the sensory neural interface
 that's taking this information in,
 interpreting it, and giving us the model.
 If we change the nature of the sensory neural interface
 a little or a lot, if we substitute, say, DMT for serotonin,
 you know, the model of the world
 that we get changes radically.
 And who's to say that that's any less valid
 than the model that, you know, the brain constructs
 for, you know, for everyday purposes?
 So this idea that, you know,
 I mean, it's all illusion, it's all hallucination.
 That's what experience is, you know?
 I mean, that's why, in some ways,
 I sometimes get a little impatient with people that say,
 you know, well, a drug experience cannot possibly have
 any spiritual validity.
 Well, I'm here to tell you that all experience
 is a drug experience, you know?
 We're all on drugs all the time,
 largely because we're made of drugs, you know?
 And that's what drives us, you know?
 Experience is, you know, sort of the,
 what issues out of this biochemical process of, you know,
 all these neurotransmitters and hormones
 moving around our brain.
 I mean, it's drugs.
 - We've gotten very stuck on the idea
 that, like, we're conscious and sentient and, you know,
 intelligent and have knowledge,
 and that nothing else in the world of nature
 really is like that.
 But actually, you know, we're a very young experiment
 on the planet, we're a young species,
 and this plant world has been around
 for a really long time, the fungus world,
 even longer than that.
 And they've developed, you know,
 symbiotic meshworks of species, interrelationship,
 very complicated diplomacy, interspecies diplomacy.
 And it may be that certain plants
 have been kind of anointed or given the role
 to be the diplomats and the teachers
 who work with the human species
 to help us to see if we can evolve
 to be less destructive before we sort of
 just lose our shit and top off the biosphere.
 - Maybe the ubiquity of DMT is, you know,
 signature of consciousness in nature,
 or nature sending a message to, you know,
 the big brain, stupid primates, you know,
 wake up, look around, it's everywhere.
 You know, mind is everywhere.
 - I think that their message is, wake up, dummy, you know,
 before you kill us all here, on one hand.
 And the other hand, they're saying,
 wake up to your own divinity,
 wake up to your higher capacities.
 - So they're talking to us every day, which is true.
 But no, we're not listening,
 'cause it's like when you get up in the morning,
 you go straight to work, you work after, you know,
 your day, you get off, you go home,
 or you stop at the restaurant, eat a good meal,
 and you go home that day, you go to sleep,
 next day you do the same thing.
 (gentle music)
 So to answer your question, herbs,
 our spirit talking to us every day,
 just be ready, and to know, what is it?
 What it's trying to tell me?
 - I mean, you have these experiences,
 and you seem to have a communication, right?
 And very often, they present themselves as an intelligence,
 something outside yourself, you know,
 and you're communicating with it,
 you're having a dialogue, or some feeling of, you know,
 an other that you're interacting with.
 Whether it is a illusion or not, it's hard to,
 it's really hard to know.
 (gentle music)
 (electronic music)
 Psychedelics sort of make people aware of realms
 that are less material, you know,
 that the real sort of, the really rewarding experiences
 are not necessarily what Wall Street,
 or Madison Avenue, or Hollywood wants to deliver to you.
 I mean, those experiences, and they're synthetic experiences
 just as much as a drug experience is a synthetic experience,
 but they're usually tied with some consumerist,
 you know, agenda.
 And I mean, this is part of the,
 the sort of the inconsistent attitude of society.
 I mean, they want, they, meaning, I don't know,
 the corporate hegemony or whatever,
 I mean, they want people to be addicted to things.
 They want people to consume things,
 not necessarily to drugs, but drugs will do.
 I mean, they want people to drink, and smoke,
 and all these things, you know,
 and they want people to be addicted to their,
 to their cars, and computers, and TV, and all that.
 So, you know, a lot of what it's about
 is kind of keeping people entertained
 and focused on these sort of corporate,
 corporately massaged,
 corporately created versions of reality.
 - The business of culture, any culture,
 is to perpetuate its cultural models.
 And if the hallucinogenic plants
 have not been integrated into the cultural model,
 then they are definitely seen as dangerous forces
 for an unpredictable sort of social change.
 Now, if the hallucinogenic plants
 have been integrated into the cultural model,
 this is not then a problem.
 And this is the case with shamanism.
 Shamanism is the culturally sanctified institution
 of inner exploration via psychoactive plants.
 Where psychoactive plants are not present,
 shamanic institutions tend to become vitiated
 to rely on ritual, or ordeals,
 or other methods of eliciting these ecstatic states.
 - Well, the contemporary artist,
 therefore, has felt a great kinship with the shaman,
 because the archetype of the contemporary artist
 is that they stand askance from,
 or ajar from, conventional culture.
 And therefore, these are the creative artists, we hope,
 therefore, they contribute a different perspective
 on ourselves, and something that we can learn from.
 And I think that that's part of the role of sacred art,
 ultimately, is to show us a higher model of what we can be,
 so that we're pulled toward our highest potential,
 rather than having our negative, or materialist sense,
 reinforced.
 We get that through a lot of our other materialist,
 and very rational culture.
 - And theogens are inherently threatening to the culture.
 I mean, that's, I think, one reason that
 they're brutally suppressed,
 both when capitalist cultures, or dominant cultures,
 come on indigenous cultures, you know,
 they're usually bringing another religion,
 an outside religion, Christianity, or whatever,
 usually incompatible with the indigenous practices,
 so that's the first thing to go,
 and the first thing to be attacked,
 and along with that goes the knowledge of these plants.
 - The church was concerned that the magic of the witches
 be seen as real, number one, and number two,
 entirely caused by the agency of the devil himself.
 And so the church downplayed the operational role
 that plants had in inducing these states,
 because after all, if the devil cannot lead you astray
 without the use of plants, what kind of devil is it?
 So in our own historical tradition,
 there is a curious blindness to the efficacy
 of hallucinogenic plants.
 - You know, it is possible that as the visionary experience
 becomes more acceptable in our contemporary
 postmodern culture, more and more people may gravitate
 to those types of experience, and at the same time,
 we can already see that the traditional religious structures
 are in a lot of trouble, they're causing a lot of trouble
 in the world, it probably would be beneficial
 for there to be a kind of consciousness evolution
 out of fundamentalist belief systems,
 and I think that the shamanic experience might be helpful
 in that evolutionary process.
 - As institutions, what they have in common is
 they discourage individual thought,
 and they discourage critical thinking,
 and they discourage questions, questioning.
 They encourage that, okay, here's a body of beliefs
 or cultural norms or largely accepted beliefs,
 and you're just supposed to accept it.
 Don't ask questions, sit down and shut up.
 Accept it and integrate it and be a good citizen,
 consumer, whatever role is decided.
 Entheogens are inherently threatening
 because they enable people or sometimes they compel people
 to reject that and say, well, maybe there's more to life
 than working in a cubicle for some faceless corporation
 so I can not have health insurance and die sick
 and without a pension and just spend my time with that.
 Maybe it encourages people to look for different purposes
 in life than that, and so that's really,
 I think, what's going on.
 - The problem with the psychedelics is
 that they dissolve cultural programming
 and hence inherently have a political charge about them.
 - And actually, that's the weakness of what I have,
 I'm sort of beginning to call the death culture,
 and these things then actually become, in a sense,
 our own bioweapons or if we're on the other side
 of this divide, then these plants,
 especially the plants, become very dangerous
 in this context.
 They're trying to suppress them, but you can't suppress them
 and they're ways of changing hearts and minds
 so they are definitely very, very dangerous,
 but they can be used in a creative way to counteract
 kind of the toxic message that the mainstream culture
 puts out.
 - I put a lot of time into making sacred art
 in order to download the shamanic and theogenic
 and meditative and just grace and dream
 and shamanic journey and all of these kinds of modes
 and highly rational thinking about philosophically
 what are the implications of the worldview
 that I'm expressing and things like that
 because for me, the artist, perhaps at their best,
 could be, I love that word, scintilla,
 Terrence always used, could be the scintilla
 of evolving consciousness as we all can be,
 but they could express it visually.
 (gentle music)
 - And in fact, there are images that appear to be
 of the fly agaric mushroom in some early Christian art.
 The fresco at Plain Corral is one example of this.
 (gentle music)
 And it appears to be Adam and Eve standing next
 to this big fly agaric mushroom
 that has sprouts coming off of it.
 It's not depicted in exactly the way a fly agaric grows,
 but the stalk is there and the cap of the mushroom
 and it has white flecks on top.
 It looks very much like an Amanita muscaria mushroom.
 Now, this has been debated by art scholars saying that,
 no, this is just the style that was used,
 a figurative style, a way to paint trees.
 Why, though, you have to ask,
 would you start painting trees that looked like mushrooms
 unless perhaps you were trying to get across
 another message in that painting?
 (gentle music)
 The ceiling of the Hildesheim Cathedral in Germany
 was painted, I think, in 1100, this era.
 (gentle music)
 There's a striking image, very similar
 to the Plain Corral fresco of Adam and Eve,
 again, standing not next to a tree-like Amanita,
 but standing in front of what looks like a fly agaric cap
 behind them, tilted on, so it's facing the viewer.
 So it's round like this,
 and Adam and Eve are standing in front of it.
 Not only is it perfectly round, like an Amanita cap,
 not only does it have white spots,
 these actually are silver spots spread out over,
 like the white veil remnants on an Amanita cap,
 but these are actually metallic hemispheres,
 silver metallic hemispheres
 that are attached to the painting.
 So they're actually raised bumps,
 just like you'll find on the cap of a mushroom.
 The veil remnants are white flecks
 that can even be removed.
 So this was, in my opinion,
 this was an intentional clue by the artist
 to show people what was really being shown here,
 what the fruit of the Garden of Eden really was,
 according to the artist,
 and according to Allegro and Wasson as well,
 that the fruit of the Garden of Eden
 was in fact the Flyagaric mushroom.
 - It's just such a damn attractive mushroom, I have to say.
 It distinguishes itself by its beauty.
 I can't think of a more beautiful mushroom, really.
 At the same time, I can think of one
 that takes you a lot higher
 in terms of its psychedelic potency
 and entheogenic potential.
 I've never had much of a holy experience on an Amanita.
 It was slightly more of a deliriant and a body wank
 than something that would elevate you
 to the heavenly spheres.
 - It's the iconic mushroom, in a sense.
 I mean, it's the archetypal mushroom
 that goes way, way back to at least the Paleolithic.
 We know that Siberian shamanism
 is where the whole thing is thought to have originated,
 and that that was, a lot of that constellated around Amanita
 and the classic shamanic motifs
 of the ascending the world tree
 and having the axis mundi that links the celestial
 and the earthly and the underground realms
 and in Siberian shamanism,
 this is often depicted as a mushroom.
 - I've encountered the Amanita muscaria mushroom
 and its symbolism actually in the material
 around the Finnish Kalevala,
 the national epic of Finland.
 It was collected together as an oral tradition
 in the 19th century and was called the Kalevala,
 and it's the ancient legends of Finland.
 And there's an artifact or an idea
 or a concept in the Kalevala called the Sampo,
 and the Sampo is kind of this magic mill
 that's capable of producing anything you wish.
 And it's really a cosmological metaphor
 for the starry sky centered on the pole star,
 and the stars are called the cyphered cover,
 so it's envisioned as this huge sort of umbrella-like thing
 that spins slowly with the central axis coming down.
 So it's also a huge image of the Amanita muscaria mushroom
 as a cosmological metaphor.
 - Muscomel, which is the active,
 main psychoactive principle in Amanita muscaria,
 is a very potent GABA agonist,
 so it interacts specifically with these receptors,
 and not much, not at all with the serotonin receptors,
 except possibly indirectly.
 So how can Amanita muscaria
 produce these transcendent experiences?
 And there are several possible answers.
 Maybe they don't, you know.
 I personally am not familiar enough
 with Amanita muscaria to say that they do.
 My own experience with Amanita was very limited
 because I didn't enjoy it,
 but I also, it didn't seem like
 a transcendent experience at all.
 It seemed like a cheap drunk, in a way,
 but I dealt with, you know, I was eating fresh mushrooms,
 and it's almost always taken dried.
 I think there's a great deal of chemical variation
 in the mushrooms, both geographically.
 There are many, there's geographic variation.
 The mushrooms in the Himalayas and in Siberia
 may not be the same as the ones in Colorado,
 just from a chemical angle.
 So there are many chemical races, you know, of these mushrooms.
 Some of them may contain true psychedelics.
 Some of them may contain tryptamines and/or beta-carbolines.
 There is some evidence that they do,
 these DMT and this kind of thing,
 they do show up in some of these there, some of these Amanitas.
 It's a complicated picture.
 Nobody has sorted out, you know,
 I mean, somebody really needs to go through and do two things.
 They need to collect mushrooms very carefully
 from different parts of the world
 and do chemical profiles to see if they can define a chemical race,
 or are there certain races that are high in these tryptamines.
 They also, someone also needs to look at the way that they're prepared,
 because I think I've talked with people,
 and you have too probably, who insist
 that they are really very psychedelic,
 but you have to dry them a certain way,
 and they have to be dried over a fire,
 they have to be, you know, and the fresh mushrooms don't get it.
 You know, the fly agaric mushroom,
 unlike, say, psilocybin species,
 the psilocybin mushroom,
 where you can pretty much rely on,
 you can go by weight, if you can take the mushroom,
 a certain amount will give you pretty much a certain experience,
 level of experience.
 With the fly agaric, you have no such guarantee.
 You can have a mushroom as big as a dinner plate
 that will give you virtually no experience at all,
 or you can have one much smaller
 that can knock your socks off, metaphorically speaking.
 It's because the mushroom contains both muscimol,
 which is the active ingredient,
 and a substance called the botanic acid,
 which is far, far less active,
 but much more toxic.
 Once it reaches your liver,
 the liver starts dismantling it,
 and the first thing it does is a decarboxylation process,
 which turns it into muscimol,
 and then it excretes it.
 So you can actually,
 depending on the amount of evotonic acid
 in the initial sample,
 you can actually excrete
 more of the active principle, muscimol,
 than you ate.
 And so,
 if you were to pass on your urine to somebody else,
 he'd get higher than you did,
 purely because...
 And of course, you'll pass on some evotonic acid too,
 which he will metabolize into muscimol.
 And so in Siberia, this is passed from person to person,
 not rather than being recycled,
 and they get five or six people
 high on the same mushroom.
 - This is very important.
 This may be the secret of Amanita,
 because it seems to me,
 from what you were saying,
 that it's not simply that it goes through,
 there's a filtering,
 there's a detoxification process.
 So the first collection after you eat it
 has probably got a lot of things
 cleaned out of it
 that might make for an uncomfortable trip.
 It may also,
 um...
 I mean, this is pure speculation,
 but it's possible that some of the downstream effects
 of taking these GABA agonists,
 which is what the Amanita,
 it might induce the production of endogenous tryptamines,
 DMT plus beta-carbolines,
 so that the person who ate that urine,
 or drank that urine,
 after this process might be getting a lot of things
 that is not in the mushrooms,
 but it's actually secondary metabolites
 that are produced by the eating of the mushrooms.
 So you get the mushrooms, you eat the mushrooms,
 and you get all these feedback loops happening,
 and you get possibly things excreted in the urine,
 possibly these tryptamines and beta-carbolines.
 I don't know that this is possible,
 but it's completely reasonable to speculate.
 - There is actually a Tibetan text,
 which is a retelling of the Hindu myth
 of how Amrita was first made, by churning the ocean.
 But in the Tibetan version,
 the Bodhisattva, who's supposed to be looking after
 the Amrita, doesn't look after it very well,
 and this demon comes along and steals it.
 And he doesn't just drink it all,
 he drinks it and replaces it with his own urine.
 And then the Buddhas decide
 that the Bodhisattva, Vajrapani, who was looking after it,
 should drink the urine.
 And he does.
 And he becomes dark blue,
 surrounded by flames, and ornamented with snakes.
 - Stepping out, that's what the mystical experience is.
 It's one of ecstasy.
 - Yeah.
 - And whilst it's difficult to look at the,
 specifically the list of the Gnostic and Pagan initiations
 and go, "Oh, this was what was used,"
 and we don't have that, we can guess, we don't,
 what we do know is that an initiation,
 well, first of all, the word,
 certainly in the Greek word that gets used,
 doesn't mean, like our word, the start of something.
 It comes from telos,
 and it means kind of a glimpse of the end of something.
 So what's happening to you in an initiation
 is that you're getting an experience of where you're going.
 So you, "Oh," and then you come back,
 and then you make the journey back to that place,
 and you're finding it in yourself.
 Now, one of the things that psychedelics does
 is it gives you a glimpse of something,
 which has been kind of given to you from the outside in.
 You've needed to ingest this thing,
 and something's happened to your consciousness.
 It's a very powerful way of doing that.
 So the idea that you could have an initiation,
 a glimpse of the end,
 through something which is taken into you,
 through psychedelics,
 also through the influence of a teacher or a ritual,
 or maybe all of it,
 and then you're on the journey to find that in yourself,
 because it's already in you.
 That's what I think's going on, one way or another.
 - It may be the case that there were mystery traditions
 that made use of psychedelics,
 and so we've lost track in our official history
 of what that use was and what went on.
 We don't know what they were doing in Egypt.
 We don't know what the Jews were doing in the Sinai.
 So there's a lot of alternative archeology and anthropology,
 which would sort of tries to work through
 these possibilities.
 And it may be that early Christianity had
 aspects of a mushroom cults
 that may have appeared in these artworks,
 which definitely are,
 some of them really are very suggestive of mushrooms.
 However, I think that sometimes there's a tendency
 in the psychedelic community to almost become
 like entheogenic fundamentalists,
 and think that all visionary experience
 was mediated by the psychedelic plants,
 and that the origin of all religions was based
 in the experience of using these substances.
 And it may be the case, we just don't know.
 And it may not be the case,
 because people have visionary experiences
 but without psychedelics, I mean, diet, fasting, drumming,
 there are all sorts of, there's a whole range, yoga.
 I mean, there's a whole range of types of experiences
 that produce mystical visions,
 sense of unity with the cosmos.
 So I'm a little resistant to a strain
 that I often encounter in the psychedelic underground
 of like kind of fundamentalism around these experiences,
 that they were the origin of all genuine religion
 or whatever.
 But they probably played more of a part
 than the official story gives credit to.
 - When religions come in contact with a real mystery,
 with a really numinous thing, they don't like that,
 because numinous things are inherently dangerous
 and threatening, and a lot of religion has to do
 with controlling people.
 And there needs to be a distance between God
 or the numinous archetype, whatever that is, and the people.
 And that's usually the priestly hierarchy
 and the infrastructure around that,
 and the sort of infrastructure that filters the message.
 - One of the things that stood out in my research
 in Christianity was the use of the Eucharist.
 That is, going back to the Last Supper
 and Jesus's purported words at the time
 when he dipped the bread and said, "This is my body.
 "Eat it and have life in you.
 "Unless you eat this, you will not have life in you.
 "This is my blood."
 And he handed the cup of supposed wine and said,
 "This is my blood, and unless you drink this blood,
 "you will not have life in you.
 "Unless you eat my body and drink my blood,
 "you will not have life in you."
 And this is stressed over and over,
 especially in John, the book of John in the New Testament.
 So what could this mean?
 What, is this all mere symbol?
 Why degrade, ostensibly degrade a high spiritual experience
 by likening it to eating the flesh and blood
 of another human being?
 That seems counterintuitive and completely beside the point,
 unless these were symbols for something else,
 for another substance.
 - The Christian Eucharist promises a lot
 and delivers very little in terms of,
 in other words, you have to believe
 to get much out of the Christian Eucharist.
 And if you believe, then you may get,
 I mean, you won't get a psychedelic experience,
 but you will get something, an affirmation of faith
 or a feeling that you're in communication with the Creator.
 I mean, frankly, to be honest, I don't believe.
 I mean, I was raised Catholic,
 but it never made any sense to me.
 And so I don't believe, so I can't really tell you
 what a devout Christian gets from the Eucharist.
 What's different about psychedelics is
 they do deliver something, they deliver an experience
 if they're taken in the right set and setting.
 And I think one of the main things that sets them aside
 from, or that distinguishes them from the Eucharist
 is you don't have to believe.
 In fact, I tell people faith is not necessary
 to experience what psychedelics have to teach.
 In fact, that's an impediment.
 Get rid of your faith, approach it like a scientist.
 You don't have to believe.
 You can be as skeptical as you want.
 You can take the substance in, you can experience it,
 and you can make your own judgments what it's about.
 If Paul and other people are eating the body of the God
 and having incredible visionary,
 I mean, Paul says, again,
 it just completely contradicts the idea
 of a historical Jesus, 'cause he says,
 "Everything I know about Jesus came to me by revelation."
 Where's this coming from?
 What is the source of his experiences?
 I wouldn't be at all surprised.
 I mean, a chap called John Allegra many years ago
 wrote a book, "The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross,"
 which was about precisely this.
 He believes that the cultic meal of sharing the book
 was people getting together
 and eating some psychoactive substance together
 and having revelations of the Holy Spirit, what have you.
 So I'm open to any investigations
 and whatever evidence comes up.
 I think it's, through personal experience, myself,
 one of the most powerful ways to,
 well, Aldous Huxley himself, went in, is it "Heaven and Hell"?
 - "Doors of Perception"? - "Doors of Perception,"
 when he looks at the bamboo chair, I think it is,
 and he says, "I suddenly,"
 and this is a man who spent his entire life
 writing about the religious traditions of the world,
 the mystical traditions of the world,
 but he never actually had any experience.
 And here he was on Mescaline, I believe,
 looking at this chair suffused with light,
 and he says, "Here, all these words
 "that people had used before, like grace,
 "and all these mystical,"
 suddenly I was having that experience.
 - Alan Watts the same, again, a great scholar,
 actually had the experience in this way.
 So if that's happening to people today,
 I think we can safely assume it's been happening
 to people for a very, very long time.
 - Shamanism is like a universal human dispensation,
 wherever people live in connection with their native land,
 and it doesn't have to be through plants either.
 There are tribes that don't use plants,
 that just do all-night ceremonies, ritualistic drumming.
 There are all sorts of different ways
 to get people into altered states,
 and actually we're learning more and more
 about brainwave patterns, and theta states,
 and alpha states, and so on.
 So, yeah, and I think that,
 as Andrew Weil talks about, the desire,
 the sort of almost the necessity
 for people to change their consciousness
 and experience other states of consciousness
 seems to be very basic to our human nature.
 And if people aren't given constructive
 and creative outlets for those types of experience,
 they'll choose destructive and negative ones,
 just because it's just almost natural
 that we would wanna have different types
 of consciousness experience.
 - Anybody's experience,
 their subjective, personal experience of the mystical,
 has to be considered valid in some respect.
 They may have a different terministic screen,
 a set of words that they use
 to describe these mystical experiences,
 and maybe sometimes we don't always agree with those
 because of the baggage that's associated with them.
 But we still have to be open to the truth
 from those experiences before we completely
 just throw the baby out with the bath water.
 - A mystical experience by any means whatsoever,
 you know, and if you can do Sufi dancing
 and attain a state of mystic bliss
 by finding your center and having a,
 being a vortex, like a gyroscope of being, you know.
 I think there are numerous ways
 that people sort of align themselves
 with this mystic reality.
 But I happen to think that entheogens and psychedelics
 are a powerful way that could more,
 that could more safely be integrated into,
 you know, sort of initiatory experiences
 that people call into their lives and stuff.
 And I think that the,
 the usefulness of the substances may eventually,
 as if humanity can evolve itself and mature itself,
 there may be an application in the future
 for these substances.
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 - And it's that ability to take what works
 and leave behind, that's what the evolution of culture is.
 But you don't abandon the past.
 All the beautiful music and the buildings
 and the traditions, we just see it differently.
 - When the Spanish Inquisition got to the New World
 and they found these Aztecs, you know, eating mushrooms
 and having a jolly old time
 and having these ecstatic experiences and all that,
 I mean, as if that wasn't bad enough,
 but then they were calling it the flesh of the gods.
 Teyanahtzotl was the Aztec term for the mushrooms,
 which meant flesh of the gods.
 And this just enraged the clerics.
 And they just, you know, this was like so blasphemous,
 it couldn't be tolerated.
 And so they really, you know,
 reacted more brutally than they might have otherwise reacted
 to try to suppress this thing,
 because, you know, we just couldn't,
 they just couldn't have this kind of thing.
 The parallels were too striking.
 And their Eucharist didn't do much
 and the Aztec Eucharist, you know, delivered big time.
 So that was another reason why it had to be suppressed.
 - With the communion where you take the wine and the bread,
 it works with people because it's done in a ritual context.
 People do have profound experiences,
 but I think very often, certainly over time,
 you know, it's a bit of a letdown, really.
 What is probably the case originally
 is that the wine would have been suffused with something.
 And also that the bread itself,
 there's a psychedelic fungi.
 - Well, that's where LSD is synthesized from ergot of rye.
 And they believe that at certain points
 when the bread was infected
 and the medieval St. Vitus dance, for example,
 if the fungus has attacked the crop
 before it's turned into bread,
 the bread itself becomes psychedelic.
 And there were many eruptions in the Middle Ages
 in particularly damp summers when the ergot would flourish,
 when people would go kind of crazy.
 - If Jesus, say, were a shaman or a hierophant,
 which in the Greek terms,
 what he was a revealer of the mysteries.
 And he had a mystery.
 He said, "I have a mystery."
 And he reveals his mystery to whom he chooses.
 Well, so he acted like a shaman
 and perhaps even a higher stage, higher than a shaman,
 because shamans aren't necessarily spiritual
 in my understanding and often aren't.
 But Jesus' mission was intensely spiritual.
 And he wanted to take people to heaven
 because he said, "Where I go, you will go also.
 "The things I do, you will do also.
 "And greater things even than I do."
 So the fact that you could take this mushroom,
 this flesh and blood-like mushroom,
 and ascend to a heaven of light and love and bliss
 makes a very literal connection for me to Christianity
 and to the secret message that I think Jesus was handing out,
 not to the mass, not to the masses,
 but to the inner circle.
 - And this is the problem
 with the ancient pagan mysteries in general.
 They were mysteries.
 Everybody who participated was sworn to secrecy.
 And what's incredible, the mysteries of Eleusis
 were celebrated for a thousand years in the Greek world.
 Many people, Roman emperors, Cicero, Seneca,
 all the greats were initiates.
 None of them broke their oath and told us what happened.
 But we know that initiates drank a drink
 before they began on the sacred way to Eleusis,
 which was a painful purgatorial process.
 They were beaten by people with rods.
 It was meant to be a visceral, physical experience.
 And it was certainly heightened by fasting.
 So whatever, if they did take anything then,
 we know that that would have been intensified
 because it always is when you fast beforehand.
 Archaeologists have found opium pipes at Eleusis.
 So we've got enough hints to know.
 And the ancients were master pharmacopoeists.
 They knew all of the intoxicants.
 And as Tim says, it came out of the shamanic tradition.
 - In the heart of the Greek mysteries,
 the cradle of Western civilization,
 there was the Eleusinian mystery cult, you know?
 And you had the enactment of, I guess, Demeter
 and Persephone and all this going into the underworld.
 And then at the height of this,
 maybe six day ceremony or something,
 they took a psychedelic, which they called the kykeion.
 - There is an illustration.
 It's used on Robert Graves' Greek myths,
 which is one manad, who were the female followers
 of Dionysus, holding up a mushroom.
 So there are numerous hints that this was going on.
 I wouldn't be at all surprised if it's...
 - I'd go further.
 I'd say, really, I'd be surprised if it wasn't true.
 What we can't say, and the reason that Peter and I
 haven't pushed it in our research,
 is because if you're coming out and saying,
 "Jesus doesn't exist."
 It's such a confronting thing for most people,
 that we've tried to keep to everything
 we can absolutely, meticulously back up.
 But here is another possibility,
 which others have looked into much more deeply than we have.
 And yet, really, it would be such a surprise
 to see such a powerfully transformative process going on
 that didn't draw on this in some way,
 because they didn't have the same taboos
 which we've now got around changing consciousness.
 And now you can look at, like,
 Socrates' whole allegory of the cave and things like that,
 and you can, you know, where people were just, look,
 being in their cave and noticing the shadows
 and thinking that was the world.
 And then somebody turned around and they went outside
 and they saw the sun and, you know, it's like,
 "Oh my God, he came back and wanted to tell
 all of his friends about it."
 And they absolutely wouldn't look toward the light,
 you know, no matter what he did, you know,
 they just wanted to stay entranced in their shadow world.
 - We are in this cave, we are watching shadows on the wall
 and mistaking them for reality,
 whilst the true source of light is from the mouth of the cave.
 And Plato even says, "What would happen
 if a wise person came from the sunlight,
 into the cave and said to people,
 'Look, you're just looking at shadows,
 this is not the real world.'"
 And then he says, "They would probably kill him."
 - So they say, basically, that's what happens
 with the mystic, you know,
 and they've seen the light in a sense,
 and they're trying to tell their brothers and sisters,
 you know, about the reality of their own
 sort of higher dimensions.
 - The way to understand religion
 is you've gone from a powerfully transformative event
 where you would take these psychoactives
 in a ritual context,
 probably alongside some sort of ritual death,
 and your state of consciousness, utterly transformed,
 to a little bit of white wafer
 and some tiny sip of wine,
 in a context where you're gonna go back and sing
 "Victoria Hymns." - Well, I think it must
 always be the function of organized religion
 to neuter, to emasculate the mystical experience,
 'cause what you don't want
 is people having their own access to the divine.
 So if people are taking a divine
 and then having their own personal act,
 they don't need you.
 The whole point of organized religion
 is to mediate the divine.
 They are the intermediaries between you and God.
 That's the way organized religion works.
 So it must always,
 and I think it happened in Hinduism with Soma.
 - We were looking at the fly agaric mushroom,
 at which Gordon Wasson believed was the Soma,
 but at any rate, whatever Soma is,
 and I don't believe it's the muscimol, I really don't,
 I believe it's more like psilocybin,
 or Steve Hager has even said it's cannabis.
 If you read about it, it's like, obviously cannabis.
 So at any rate, it was some kind of psychedelic,
 and it was a way for
 them to basically make contact with the divine.
 - The ninth mandala of the Rig Veda
 is entirely devoted to singing the praises
 of Soma, and yet we do not know what Soma is or was.
 Our Gordon Wasson spent a considerable portion
 of his life researching this problem,
 and reached the conclusion that Soma was Amanita muscaria,
 a mushroom that is symbiotic to pine and birch trees
 throughout much of the North temperate zone.
 However, scholars have cast doubt
 on his identification of Soma.
 - It's quite possible that there were several
 different psychoactive plants used
 in sacramental forms in ancient India.
 In the most developed forms
 of Vajrayana Buddhism,
 the amrita that was used was called Panchamrita,
 which means the five-fold amrita.
 So there were five separate plants, I think.
 In the literature, in the scriptures,
 we're told of five different meats,
 horse, cow, dog, elephant,
 and man, the great meat.
 And,
 but,
 I believe that these were different plants,
 and that when you had the five-fold elixir to drink,
 and you also ate, in ritual context,
 ate a bite of each of the five meats,
 I think that was really drinking a concoction
 of five different plants,
 and eating a little of the raw plant.
 And I believe that they were all different psychoactives.
 - Some sort of plant substance was prepared
 and ingested by a priesthood
 who then used the ecstatic experience
 induced by that plant as the basis
 for all of their metaphysical and philosophical speculations
 on the nature of the universe.
 - If you read the Rig Veda, all the Vedic hymns,
 out of 1,000, I think 990 are hymns to Soma.
 It is the blood of the gods, it's the vision of eternity,
 it's the white gleaming swan of eternity, it's like,
 but now in Hindu culture, Soma is just a milky drink.
 And I think the same process has gone on.
 People have realized,
 if you want to actually control people,
 you have to shut down their access,
 and it's certainly what happened with Gnosticism.
 Gnosticism said, no, God is in you,
 like Paul said, Christ is in you.
 That's fatal for organized religion,
 because then everybody can have
 their own personal relationship with Christ.
 Why do I need to go to church to experience Christ?
 I can do it on my own.
 - The psychedelic experience is essential
 to understanding your humanness as having sex,
 or having a child, or having responsibilities,
 or having hopes and dreams, and yet it is illegal.
 We are somehow told we are infantilized.
 We're told, you know, you can wander around
 within the sanctioned playpen of ordinary consciousness,
 and we have some intoxicants over here,
 if you want to mess yourself up.
 We've got some scotch here, and some tobacco,
 and red meat, and some sugar, and a little TV.
 But these boundary-dissolving hallucinogens
 that give you a sense of unity
 with your fellow man and nature are somehow forbidden.
 This is an outrage.
 It's a sign of cultural immaturity,
 and the fact that we tolerate it
 is a sign that we are living in a society
 as oppressed as any society in the past.
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