Yeah, is the sound comfortable for everyone? Is the light comfortable for everyone? And are you comfortable? Well, you shouldn't be. The planet's going to shit in a handbag. No, I'm... That's just my John Lilly imitation. It's not me at all. In order to make sure we all understand the domain we're operating from here, I would like to talk a little about what it's like to be loaded. Because I think that's the ground zero of what we're talking about. Psychedelics are like any other social phenomena. There are a lot of wannabes. There are a lot of people who are along for the ride. I'm sure the pagan community is no stranger to this phenomenon because there are certain residual spin-offs, if you proclaim yourself pagan, that are hard to obtain any other way. Similarly for being psychedelic. My notion of the psychedelic monogamy, if you want to think of it that way, is it's like a bullseye. It's like a series of concentric circles and various substances place you in various quadrants of that mandala at various distances from ground zero, which is at the absolute center. And nature in her bounty has provided various coordination points. I mean there's the cannabis coordination point, the opiate coordination point, the tropanes that were so important in European witchcraft, the solanaceous plants, hyalcyamine, those things. That's a different chemical family and a different group of plant families that these compounds occur in. And in, you know, I've been at this fairly steadily since 1964 and have tried to do everything with a certain level of attention and reverence, because I think that, you know, it's all very fine to go armed with the knowledge of pharmacology, dose response, LD50 and all that. But I think as pagans and magicians, we really understand that the mind can do anything. And there's a horribly frightening little passage in Jung somewhere where he says "The unconscious has a thousand ways to terminate a life that has become meaningless." Meaning, you know, you'll step in front of a streetcar or something. So in my lifetime of looking at these things and being interested in many other things as well, heresies, obscure backwaters of art history and literature, peculiar philosophies that rose and fell centuries ago in obscure parts of the world. My theory of life's exploration is to run edges. And I've mellowed over the years, but I used to say if a book isn't a hundred years old, you shouldn't read it. If a person isn't dead, you shouldn't worry about them. If they wrote in English, you shouldn't bother with them. So forth and so on. In the course of sorting out the, as many peculiar and bizarre possibilities as life could offer me in many places, my attitude was always critical. My attitude was always a show-me attitude. I don't believe in faith. I don't believe in belief. My favorite gospel story is the story of the Apostle Thomas, who was not present when Christ came the first time after the resurrection to the upper room. And then later Thomas came to the Apostles and they said, "The Master has been here." And he said, "You guys have been smoking too much of that red lab." And then Christ came again. But in this conversation with the Apostles, Thomas said, "Unless I put my hand into the wound, I will not believe it." And then time passed and then Christ came again to the upper room and he said, "Thomas, come forward. Put your hand into the wound." And he did and then he said, "Lord, I am not worthy," so forth and so on. My conclusion about this story is that alone, among all humanity in all times and places, only one person ever touched the incorporeal body of God. Thomas the doubter touched because he doubted. It was not necessary that the believers should be vouchsafed such a boon, but the doubter was awarded the supreme enlightenment. Okay, so much for that. So my thing has always been, whether you present me with a diet, a social arrangement, a society, a sexual conundrum, a work of art, my criteria is, "Is it shit or is it shinola?" And I'm happy to give you the benefit of my personal life's experience proceeding along those lines. I want to talk about what to my mind is the quintessential hallucinogen and consequently the quintessential spiritual and magical tool of this dimension, and that is DMT, dimethyltryptamine, a compound that occurs in the human nervous system. It occurs in many, many plants. It is the commonest hallucinogen in all of nature. And I don't know how you got to where you are this afternoon, but the way I got here is by testing and by hoping and by pursuing a magical, if that's the word, a miraculous, a transcendental ideal that over the course of life experience strips from you. You know, you have to get a job. Your first love is not your last love. Slowly this pristine, shining belief in perfectibility is eroded by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. You know, the dark oxen that turn the millstones of the world. But I am here to tell you that it is real. There is a doorway into another dimension. Aladdin's lamp is real. Fairyland is real. Magic is real in the most real sense. In the same sense that what we call reality is real. And I learned this through this compound. And one of the great puzzles about this compound is why more people don't know about it. No, no brotherhood initiated me. No lineage reaching back to the fall of Atlantis brought me into its circle. Therefore, I feel completely free to say anything I want. Nobody has ever come to me and said, "You are spilling the beans. You are telling the secret." A long, long time ago, and you know, we all have different opinions. This is mine. I hope it doesn't offend. But a long, long time ago, I took an oath to tell all secrets that came my way. Don't tell me a secret. I won't keep it. I'm against secrets. I'm against hierarchies, lineages, all assumption of special knowledge on the part of anyone in the presence of anyone else is abhorrent to me. I mean, I am a true anarchist first and foremost. So, DMT, like all things in this world, has a physical body, a presence and a presentation. In this case, it looks rather like earwax. It is orange. It is crystalline. It smells vaguely of mothballs. For my money, it is the lapis, the quintessence, the universal panacea at the end of time has sent a reflection back through the temporal labyrinth and wherever this touches, wherever this concretes, the mystery is fully present. So, what is it then? Well, it's an experience and I maintain it's the most intense experience you can have this side of the yawning grave, without doubt. I mean, people say, "Is it dangerous?" Well, the answer is only if you fear death by astonishment. Yes, that's a joke here. It's not a joke there, because you find yourself literally holding your heart to verify that you have not in fact had a coronary thrombosis induced by wonder, terror, reverence and astonishment. So, here it is, the quintessence, the orange thing. Was it transponded in from Arturus? Was it handed down through some ancient eldritch brotherhood that found this secret before the pyramids were built? Who can say? Whatever it is, wherever it comes from, here's what happens when you allow it to pass through the blood-brain barrier of your own alchemical vessel, which is your body. The first thing that happens is that there is a sense as though all the air in the room had been sucked out, all the colors brighten. This is that increase in visual acuity that I made so much of yesterday. All edges become sharp, distant things stand out in their clarity. This is at one toke. At two tokes, you close your eyes, you feel a sense of anesthesia seeping through your body. You close your eyes and you see a floral pattern rotating in space, usually yellow-orange. People who do this occasionally, and nobody does it a lot, call it the chrysanthemum. It's a floral pattern, like a pattern in a Chinese brocade. This forms and stabilizes, and then you either break through it, or you require one more toke. And these are matters of physiology, shamanic intent, so forth and so on. The leather-lunged hash smokers among us have a leg up in this department. This is a spiritual discipline where the ability not to cough makes the difference between shunyata and, you know, try again, Sam. So, you take, let us assume, a third toke, long and slow, through a glass pipe. Pure, you vaporize this stuff. You don't mix it with weed or oregano or any of that, which was done in the past. You want the pure stuff, and you take it in and in and in, and there is definitely somewhere in here a threshold, a threshold which you must exceed. And when you do that, this membrane-like thing, this chrysanthemum, will actually part, and there is a sound like the crumpling of a plastic bread wrapper, or the crackling of flame. A friend of mine says, "This is the radio-intellect-y of your soul exiting through the anterior fontanelle at the top of your head." Could be, in any case, this crackling sound and a tone, a tone, a [hums] And then, there's this impression of transition, and you're now 20 seconds deep into this experience. There's an impression of transition. There, it's as though there were a series of tunnels or chambers that you are tumbling down, being propelled by some kind of muscle behind you that is pushing you. I mean, yes, earth canal, yes, yes, of course. But anyway, a tunnel, and what I've noticed about this tunnel is the walls and ceiling flux and come down to meet each other, and where they touch, they pull apart with a [hums] And then you're propelled into the next space, and then the next, and then the next, and there is this [hums] Right. And then you are there. And this is what I want to talk to you about, because of all communities, I hope, perhaps, collectively, singly, someone can say something enlightening about this. Then you are there, and where is there? It's underground. How you know this, you cannot say, but there is an irreconcilable sense of enormous mass surrounding you. In other words, you are underground. You're at the center of a mountain or something, and you're in a room which aficionados call the dome, and people will ask each other, "Did you see the dome? Were you there?" It's softly lit, indirectly lit, and the the walls, if such they be, are crawling with geometric hallucinations, very brightly colored, very indecent with deep sheens and very high reflective surfaces. Everything is machine-like and polished and throbbing with energy, but that is not what immediately arrests my attention. What arrests my attention is the fact that this space is inhabited, that the immediate impression as you break into it is there is a cheer. The gnomes have learned a new way to say, "Hooray!" You break in to this space and are immediately swarmed by squeaking, self-transforming elf machines. These things which are made of light and grammar and sound that come chirping and squealing and tumbling toward you, and they say, "Hooray! Welcome! You're here, and in my case you send so many, you come so rarely!" And my immediate impression, no matter how many times I do this, and I've done it maybe 30 or 40 times, which isn't a lot in a lifetime of worshipping it, my immediate impression is that they are welcoming. There is something going on which I've over the years come to call love, L-U-V, not light utility vehicle, but love that is not like eros or not like sexual attraction. I don't know what it's like exactly. It's almost like a physical thing. It's like a glue that pours out into this space, and my immediate impression in there is I'm appalled. I'm appalled at how far I've come, and one of the strange things about DMT is that it does not affect your mind in the ordinary sense, in that you know, drugs, they make you giggly, they frighten you, they stimulate you, they depress you. DMT does none of this. You go to that place with all your groceries, you're there, and you're there thinking, "Jesus H. fucking Christ, what is this? What is it?" And you're thinking, "I must be dead. I've done it this time. The psychedelic mantra, 'I've done it this time.' I must be dead." And so you, you know, you think heart, heart, yes, hmm, heart, hmm, hmm, hmm, pulse, pulse, yes, yes, and meanwhile these things are literally in your face, and what they do is they jump into your chest, and then they jump out again, and what they're doing, and this is the point, I think, what they're doing is they are singing, chanting, speaking in some kind of language that is very bizarre to hear, but what is far more important is that you can see it. They speak in a language which you see, and this is completely confounding, because syntax is not something you ordinarily reach out and touch, and in this space that's what's happening. And so like jeweled, self-dribbling basketballs, these things come running forward, and what they are doing with this visible language that they create is they are making gifts. They're making gifts for you, and they will say, [speaking in a foreign language] which condenses as something which looks like a cross between a sopwith camel, a Havana cigar, a piece of abalone, an opal, and a nookie, and they offer it to you. And you're looking at this thing, and as you look at it, it also transforms, changes, speaks, sings, undergoes metastasis, undergoes metamorphosis, and these things are just accumulating, and each elf machine creature elbows others aside, says, "Look at this, look at this, take this, choose me." And as you direct your attention into these things, you have the overwhelming conviction that if you could bring a single one of these objects back to this world, that somehow you wouldn't have to say anything. You would just walk up to people and say, "Friend?" And people would say, "Oh my God!" You know, you got a piece of the action, the real action. So this state of ecstatic frenzy, and it's like a Bugs Bunny cartoon running backwards in cyberspace or something, this state of incredible frenzy goes on for about three minutes, and all the time the elves are saying, "Don't give way to wonder. Do not abandon yourself to amazement. Pay attention. Pay attention. Look at what we're doing. Look at what we're doing, and then do it. Do it!" And it's this thing where then everything stops, and they wait, and you feel like a torch, a spark lit in your belly that begins to move up your esophagus, and eventually when it reaches your mouth, your mouth just flies open, and this language-like stuff comes out. Acoustically, it's [chanting] But what you're not hearing it, the startled friends who sent you to this place, or putting up with this. What you're experiencing is a visual modality where these tones are surfaces, shading, colors, insets, jewels. You are making something. [chanting] You know, erase, move forward, add cerulean, put in stippling. It's that sort of thing. And they go mad with joy when you do this. And then this goes on for about 30 seconds, and then there is like a ripple through the system, and you realize these two continua are being pulled apart. And I had one trip where the, and often it's very erotic, although I'm not sure that's the word, but it's something, it's almost like sex is the surface of something of which this is the volume. And I'm a great fan of sex. I don't mean to denigrate it. I mean to raise DMT to a very high status. But it's, it's astonishing. And one trip as the pull-away maneuver began, all the elves turned simultaneously and looked at me and said, "Deja vu. Deja vu." So, this is an experience which in some form, I mean it will be different for each one of you, but in some form at least what will be similar to my description is how dramatic it will be. It will hit you as hard as it hit me if you do it right. This, to me, this experience is of a fundamentally different order than any other experience this side of the yawning grave. And why religions have not been built around it, why empires have not risen and fallen around the control of its sources, why theology has not enshrined it as its central exhibit for the presence of the other in the human world, I don't know. I can tell the secret as you notice. Nothing shuts me up. But why this is not four-inch headlines on every newspaper on the planet, I cannot understand because I don't know what news you were waiting for, but this is the news that I was waiting for. And it's an incredible challenge to, to human understanding, to try and make sense of this. And I started out, you know, reading Jung, doing my Hindu, you know, getting up to speed with all that, studying Zen Buddhism, studying shamanism. The thing that puzzles me about DMT is how little trace there is of it in the human world. I can't point to a period in European art or the art of some group of islanders somewhere and say that is very much like DMT. It isn't. And yet the DMT thing is, it's like an avalanche of orgasmic beauty, but a certain kind of beauty. The only words that I can find for the kind of beauty that it is, is bizarre, alien, outlandish, outre, freaky, and at the very edge of what the human mind seems to be able to hold. Well, where is this coming from? And what is happening? And, and this is what I like to discuss with people such as yourselves who have wide experience in the world and in the realms of the unseen. This has to be taken seriously. In other words, the "it's only a hallucination" thing, that horseshit is just passe. I mean, reality is only a hallucination for crying out loud. Haven't you heard? So that takes care of that. It's only a hallucination. What we've got here, folks, is an intelligent intellect of some sort that is frantic to communicate with human beings for some reason. And the possibilities can be logically enumerated. I mean, what we've got here is either, "This is an extraterrestrial," you know, "evolved in a, around a different star, possibly with a different biology, may not even be made of matter, came across an enormous distance sometime maybe long ago, has some agenda which we may or may not be able to conceive of. This is it, the real thing." As the little girl said in Poltergeist, "They're here." So that's one possibility. That's just one possibility. And I present these without judgment because I'm not sure. If an extraterrestrial wanted to interact with a human society and it had ethics that forbade it from landing trillion-ton beryllium ships on the United Nations Plaza, in other words, if it were subtle, I can see hiding yourself inside a shamanic intoxication. You would say, "Let's analyze these people. Okay, they're kind of hard-headed rationalists, except they have this phenomenon called 'getting loaded,' and when they get loaded, they accept whatever happens to them. So let's hide inside the load, and we'll talk to them from there, and they'll never realize that we're of a different status than pink elephants." Okay, that's one possibility. Now another possibility is that this is not about extraterrestrials, flight, and enormous technologies and distant homelands, that— and this is maybe closer to friendlier to pagan notions—that there is a parallel continuum nearby, essentially right here, and call it fairyland, call it the Western Realm, whatever you like, but you don't go there in starships. You go there through magical doorways, which are opened via ritual and things like that. That is a possibility as well. Certainly, human folklore in all times and places, except Western Europe for the last 300 years, has insisted that these parallel domains of intelligence and organization exist. There is a third possibility, which I leave it to you to decide whether this is the more conservative position or the more radical position. And I reached this reluctantly, and I'm not sure this is my position, but these things have a weird—these tykes, as I call them, these self-transforming machine elves, these syntactical homunculi, have a very weird relationship to human beings. First of all, they love us. They care for some reason. Whoever and whatever they are, they're far more aware of us than we are aware of them. I mean, witness the fact that they welcome me. So, is it possible that at the end of the 20th century, at the end of 500 years of materialism, reductionism, positivism, what we're about to discover is probably the least likely denouement any of us expected out of our dilemma. What we're about to discover is that death has no sting. That what you penetrate on DMT is an ecology of human souls in another dimension of some sort. I mean, this is hair-raising to me, and I spent my whole adolescence and early adulthood getting free from Catholicism and its assumptions, and I never imagined that a thorough exploration of life's mysteries would lead to the conclusion that, in fact, this is but a prelude. We are in a very tiny womb of some sort. Our lives are gestations, and this is not where we are destined to unfold ourselves into what it means to be human. This is some kind of a metamorphic stage, like the pupa of a butterfly. And so, this is deep water, because, you know, we are fairly agitated over the fact that we fear the planet is dying, and us with it. This stuff raises the issue that you don't know what dying is. Therefore, it's very uncertain exactly what sort of an attitude we should take to it. And as I say, I am not advocating a position. Mysteries are not unsolved problems. They are mysteries. When you stand naked in the presence of the mystery, it is still utterly and completely mysterious. But I enjoy talking to people about this, because I think that the human body, the human mind, these are tools for the soul to use in the effort to unlock its meaning and its destiny. And millions of people, perhaps billions of people, have gone to the grave without knowing that this is possible, this experience that I've just described to you. And it's perfectly harmless. I mean, I think that if science would back out of politics and do its work, we could establish that DMT is the most harmless, the safest, of all hallucinogens. The fact that it occurs naturally in the human brain is the first clue to its - the fact that it's benign. The second clue is the fact that it only lasts eight to twelve minutes. What that means to a pharmacologist is the body perfectly understands what to do with this compound. You take a hit of DMT and your body says, "Oh, I recognize this. Activate deanimation cycle, activate demethylation cycle, activate..." It knows what to do. And so within ten minutes you're down. A drug that you take and 48 hours later you're lying around in warm baths and refusing telephone calls is a drug you shouldn't have taken because it's hitting you too hard. That's not - it's not clean. It's not smooth. DMT, the most powerful hallucinogen known to man and science, clears your system in 15 minutes. I mean, you're so down you can't - you don't have a small headache or need to take a nap or anything. You're ready to do phone calls. So how can it be then that a compound which each of us carries right here, right in the pineal gland, right in the Ajna chakra, the philosopher's stone is no further away than that? How can this be secret from us? How can we be trapped in a dimension of such limitation and such mundane-ness when our own nervous systems and the ecology around us and our own history over the past half million years argues that this is what we were born and bred for. This is where we belong. This is what at play in the fields of the goddess must mean. And somehow history has made us dysfunctional, buried the mystery, made it if at best a piece of secret knowledge jealously guarded by somebody. I mean, I don't know. There are lots of mystery cults and secret societies in the world. I don't know if any of them are guarding DMT as a secret. Maybe so. No one told me to keep my mouth shut. If a very suggestive short story, I'm sure many of you know and love the Argentine surrealist writer, Jorge Luis Borges. Well, Borges has a book, I believe it's called Labyrinths, and in Labyrinths there is a short story called The Sect of the Phoenix and it says there is a sacrament older than mankind. The sectarians have been the victims of every persecution in human history and the sectarians have been the purveyors of every persecution in history. These sectarians are not identifiable by race or place or language or time. To the adept the mystery appears ridiculous, yet they do not speak of it. One child can initiate another. It is orange. Ruins are propitious places. Do it in the moonlight, at the thresholds of buildings. And that's all it said. It's a page and a half and it suggests and see, here's the thing. I mean, I am not as articulate on this subject as I wish I could be. If this is not the secret that these lineages are guarding, then they're guarding an empty house. This is the secret. It is. It is. It cannot be anything else. It is the Neoplatonic One. It is the transubstantient object, the Panis Supersubstantialis of the Alchemists. And it's and and I'm not saying that people have known about this for a long time. DMT is in many plants as I said, but spread very thinly and we don't have historical records of anyone ever concentrating it. I've done the DMT plant preparations of the Amazon, the snuffs and the ayahuasca. And on ayahuasca, if it is heavily laced with the DMT containing plant, after hours of breath work and drumming alone in the jungle, you can begin to open it up to the place the DMT will carry you to in 45 seconds in an Upper East Side apartment, whether you like it or not. {END} Wait Time : 0.00 sec Model Load: 0.65 sec Decoding : 3.19 sec Transcribe: 2405.29 sec Total Time: 2409.13 sec