[00:00:00 - 00:00:06] Good evening ladies and gentlemen. I'd like to welcome you to the Phoenix Bookstore. Terence [00:00:06 - 00:00:12] McKennas is here tonight and we do have copies of many of his different books here and if you want [00:00:12 - 00:00:18] to purchase them after the talk you can bring it up and have them sign it. Also there will be audio [00:00:18 - 00:00:25] recordings of this talk available very shortly after it's done. This afternoon I got a phone [00:00:25 - 00:00:31] call from a friend who said, "Turn on KFI right now on Darryl Gates." Terence McKennas is on here [00:00:31 - 00:00:39] with Darryl Gates, the guy who wants to shoot pot smokers in the back and he did an excellent [00:00:39 - 00:00:48] job I must say. I did call my dad and make sure he was listening too. Anyway I think all of you [00:00:48 - 00:00:56] know who he is so I'm just going to turn this over to him. Terence McKennas. [00:00:56 - 00:01:08] Can everybody hear? Good. Well it's great to be here. It's always fun to come to the west side [00:01:08 - 00:01:20] and see the usual suspects all assembled. I'm here to flog a new book. It seems like they're coming [00:01:20 - 00:01:27] out about once a year and that will continue on into next year. The object of attention at the [00:01:27 - 00:01:39] moment is true hallucinations and I'm very up for this because my other books were basically [00:01:39 - 00:01:48] speculation, philosophy, ideas, art historical comment on psychedelics, so forth and so on. [00:01:48 - 00:02:00] This is autobiography narrative. It has action, heartbreak, erotic outrage, climax, [00:02:00 - 00:02:07] denouement, all those good literary type things and I wrote it basically because [00:02:07 - 00:02:17] a lot of people have said it seemed to them incomprehensible how my brother and I got to [00:02:17 - 00:02:27] where we are in terms of the way in which we furnished our heads and this is basically the [00:02:27 - 00:02:40] story of the formative two weeks in our lives. In 1971 I was 23, my brother was 19. I'd spent [00:02:40 - 00:02:49] several years in Asia already having been run out of Berkeley because of the revolution and we [00:02:49 - 00:03:00] were graduates of the LSD revolution but it had left us wanting more, specifically wanting the [00:03:00 - 00:03:09] kinds of experiences that the classical commentators on psychedelics described and by that I mean [00:03:09 - 00:03:19] people like Havelock Ellis in The Dance of Life or S. Weir Mitchell who wrote about masculine. LSD [00:03:19 - 00:03:29] for us never delivered visions. It delivered insight and feelings and complex thoughts but not [00:03:29 - 00:03:37] visions, not activity in the visual cortex that these classical commentators had led us to expect [00:03:38 - 00:03:45] and I had been in India for a number of years and pretty well managed to convince myself that [00:03:45 - 00:03:54] whatever spirituality had ever been there it had evaporated thousands of years ago and that what [00:03:54 - 00:04:02] we were left with was a very grasping and mendacious priestly hierarchy that was about as [00:04:02 - 00:04:07] cynical as religion gets and I was raised Catholic so I know what I'm talking about. [00:04:08 - 00:04:17] And so then we decided well where the gnosis must be is in the Amazon where we knew there was a [00:04:17 - 00:04:29] pristine aboriginal shamanism based on hallucinogen and I stress our youth because I think people [00:04:29 - 00:04:37] imagine that you can only make contributions if you're old and laden with degrees and that sort [00:04:37 - 00:04:45] of thing and basically our pure reckless inventiveness carried us further into the [00:04:45 - 00:04:51] heart of the mystery than I would ever have believed possible and I should say a little [00:04:51 - 00:05:03] bit about the method because I think it's important rationalism in confrontation with the weird edges [00:05:04 - 00:05:09] is what's always worked for me in other words if you're a true believer if you have some [00:05:09 - 00:05:17] pre-packaged philosophy then you're going to miss a great deal because you're pre-programmed to [00:05:17 - 00:05:26] ignore what doesn't fit into your model and it doesn't matter what your model is but if you are [00:05:26 - 00:05:37] simply the open-minded skeptic slash witness and then if you push at the edges of the phenomenal [00:05:37 - 00:05:47] world you know go to the highest mountains the oldest cities the deepest deserts the most remote [00:05:47 - 00:05:56] jungles and just simply put yourself in these circumstances the cosmic giggle can get at you [00:05:56 - 00:06:03] you know it can't get at you if you're pursuing your job delivering messages for Matthew and [00:06:03 - 00:06:11] Son or whatever it is you've got going but if you will tear the human atom of your individuality [00:06:11 - 00:06:18] out of the collectivity and set yourself into a wilderness a desert an uninhabited island [00:06:18 - 00:06:27] then this thing can rise out of the depths and communicate if it chooses shape your life for [00:06:27 - 00:06:37] sure blow your mind and there's almost a kind of unconsciousness which is the precondition for [00:06:37 - 00:06:46] success in this area when you are superbly educated and completely alert to all possibilities and [00:06:46 - 00:06:54] scanning the horizon for action this is the equivalent of watching a pot to wait for it to boil [00:06:54 - 00:07:03] it won't happen it's when you become preoccupied broke a touch of dysentery a little confusion in [00:07:03 - 00:07:12] the mix and then it can sink its teeth into you so I thought Harper who published this and I [00:07:12 - 00:07:21] think did a beautiful job with the production of it has informed me that I by joining up with them [00:07:21 - 00:07:31] I'm no more the cheerful extemporaneous ad-lib artist of the past that I have been elevated into [00:07:31 - 00:07:40] the high and holy realm of being a literature and what that means is you have to read and it's not [00:07:40 - 00:07:50] really my metier but it pleases them no end back where they cut the checks so I will in fact read [00:07:50 - 00:08:02] to you from my new book and I should say a bit about our goal you can't just willy-nilly head off [00:08:02 - 00:08:10] to sit in the desert you have to have an agenda however flimsy and based on misinformation the [00:08:10 - 00:08:17] agenda tells you what you're supposed to do next so our agenda was we had been interested as I'm [00:08:17 - 00:08:24] sure many of you have been and are in the psychedelic flash that accompanies dmt [00:08:24 - 00:08:33] which is extraordinarily brief it's like a minute and a half two minutes tops and we have the notion [00:08:33 - 00:08:40] that if you could get in there for a half an hour you might be able to bring back something really [00:08:40 - 00:08:48] astonishing for the rest of the gang to puzzle over of course you might leave your mind behind [00:08:48 - 00:08:55] in the process but you know nothing is for sure right so it turned out that uh [00:08:55 - 00:09:04] richard evans schultes the great doyen of psychedelic botany had reported a few years ago [00:09:04 - 00:09:13] a psychedelic plant complex called ukku which was used by a dwindling tribe of indians called wii [00:09:13 - 00:09:20] toto and it was orally active it was a little pill that they made out of the resin of a tree [00:09:20 - 00:09:29] and the literature insisted that they used this suku hey to speak with little men well you can [00:09:29 - 00:09:36] imagine the effect that had on us i mean after all speaking with little men is something that's [00:09:36 - 00:09:45] very dear to our hearts hardly to speak of speaking with little women so uh we set off for [00:09:45 - 00:09:54] the amazon to contact this indian tribe to try and uh see if we couldn't persuade them to reveal how [00:09:54 - 00:10:03] they made this stuff or at least to score from them if all else failed and uh and what this meant [00:10:03 - 00:10:13] then in practical terms was going to a place called la chorera um you you like that choro [00:10:13 - 00:10:24] is a funny word in spanish um it's not exactly a waterfall it's not that steep it's where a river [00:10:24 - 00:10:33] goes at about a 45 or steeper colloquially it refers to the angle of the dangle on uh [00:10:33 - 00:10:45] male liquid evacuation is i think the proper way to put it so a choro is a stream at a 45 degree [00:10:45 - 00:10:52] angle that's moving very rapidly and uh this place la chorera about which we knew practically [00:10:52 - 00:11:01] nothing except these indians were there turned out not to be your ordinary anonymous jungle mission [00:11:01 - 00:11:08] out there in the big green it turned out this place had a hellacious history attached to it [00:11:08 - 00:11:16] because it was the place from which the putumayo rubber boom was administered not very many people [00:11:16 - 00:11:30] know or recall that before waco before uh talzah tar before auschwitz before gurnica before armenia [00:11:30 - 00:11:37] before these great episodes and spasms of extinction in the 20th century it was all [00:11:37 - 00:11:47] rehearsed between 1912 and 17 in the peruvian amazon when british banks bankrolled essentially [00:11:47 - 00:11:56] peruvian mafias to wage a war of terror on these indians and the issue was rubber for the world war [00:11:56 - 00:12:02] this was before synthetic rubber had been invented and these indians were told you bring in x number [00:12:02 - 00:12:11] of kilos of rubber per month and whatever you fall below your quota that weight in your own flesh [00:12:11 - 00:12:21] will be removed by machete and these indians went from 45 000 to 3500 by the time we got there so [00:12:21 - 00:12:28] in spite of this beautiful climaxed rainforest and you know we were actually moving through a [00:12:28 - 00:12:36] landscape of ghosts and catastrophe and when you would walk these jungle trails in the afternoon [00:12:36 - 00:12:46] with the sunlight slanting in you would swear you could hear the the the footfalls of manacled [00:12:46 - 00:12:56] foots feet and low voices conversing i mean it was a very strange place so here's a picture of it [00:12:58 - 00:13:05] most of the amazon basin is made up of alluvial deposits from the andes la chorera is different [00:13:05 - 00:13:14] a river the agaraparaná flows and into a crack it becomes very rapid then drops over an edge a lip [00:13:14 - 00:13:21] creating not exactly a waterfall but a narrow channel of water a flume whose violent outpouring [00:13:21 - 00:13:29] has made a sizable lake la chorera is a paradisical place you push very hard and [00:13:29 - 00:13:36] suddenly you are there there are no stinging or biting insects in the evening mist drifts across [00:13:36 - 00:13:43] a large pasture creating a beautiful pastoral scene there is the mission the foam fleck lake [00:13:43 - 00:13:51] below the jungle surrounding and much to my surprise white cattle the afternoon following [00:13:51 - 00:13:56] our arrival at the edge of the pasture which had been cleared by the spanish priests who had [00:13:56 - 00:14:03] managed mission la chorera since its establishment in the 20s i held and turned over in my hand [00:14:03 - 00:14:10] perfect specimens of the same species of mushroom i had eaten near florencia just a few a week or [00:14:10 - 00:14:17] two before in the pasture before me were dozens of these mushrooms after examining several my [00:14:17 - 00:14:24] brother concurred pronounced them the same stropharia cubensis we had found before one [00:14:24 - 00:14:32] of the largest strongest and certainly most widely distributed of any of the known psilocybin mushrooms [00:14:32 - 00:14:41] what to do we have no data on the proper dosage of psilocybin our expeditions thin down drug and [00:14:41 - 00:14:49] plant file was concerned with flowering plants not fungi collectively we seem to remember that [00:14:49 - 00:14:55] in the wahak and mushroom ritual described by gordon wassen mushrooms were always eaten in [00:14:55 - 00:15:03] pears with several pears consumed we determined to eat six mushrooms each that same evening [00:15:04 - 00:15:14] and then here is my journal entry for this day february 23rd 1971 are we indeed now in some way [00:15:14 - 00:15:21] camped on the edge of another dimension yesterday afternoon dave discovered stropharia cubensis in [00:15:21 - 00:15:27] the damp pastures behind the house where we had hung our hammocks he and i gathered 30 delicious [00:15:27 - 00:15:35] psilocybin saturated specimens in about half an hour we ate we each ate six and spent last night [00:15:35 - 00:15:44] on an enormously rich and alive yet gentle and elusive trip in between strange lights in the [00:15:44 - 00:15:50] pasture and discussion of our project i am left with the sense that by penetrating the local [00:15:50 - 00:15:58] psychedelic flora this way we have taken a giant step toward deeper understanding multifaceted and [00:15:58 - 00:16:07] benevolent as complex as masculine as intense as lsd the mushroom as is said of peyote teaches the [00:16:07 - 00:16:13] right way to live this particular mushroom species is unclaimed so far as i know by any [00:16:13 - 00:16:20] aboriginal people anywhere and thus is neutral ground in the tryptamine dimension we are [00:16:20 - 00:16:27] exploring through this unclaimed vegetable teacher one can gain entry into the world of the elf [00:16:27 - 00:16:33] chemists the experience of the mushroom is subtle but can reach out to the depth and breadth of a [00:16:33 - 00:16:41] truly intense psychedelic experience it is however extremely mercurial and difficult to catch at work [00:16:42 - 00:16:49] dennis and i through a staggered description of our visions noticed a similarity of content that [00:16:49 - 00:16:55] seemed to suggest a telepathic phenomenon or some sort of simultaneous perception of the same [00:16:55 - 00:17:02] invisible landscape a tight headache accompanied the experience in its final stages but this was [00:17:02 - 00:17:10] quick to fade and the body strain and exhaustion often met with in unextracted vegetable drugs [00:17:10 - 00:17:18] was not present the mushroom is a transdimensional doorway which sly fairies have left slightly a jar [00:17:18 - 00:17:27] for anyone to enter into who can find the key and who wishes to use this power the power of vision [00:17:27 - 00:17:35] to explore this peculiar and naturally occurring psychoactive complex we are closing distance with [00:17:35 - 00:17:43] the most profound event a planetary ecology can encounter the emergence of life from the dark [00:17:43 - 00:17:54] chrysalis of matter that was after one trip you know i was i got it and the lock began to tighten [00:17:54 - 00:18:04] and so then much of the rest of the story with a few flashbacks and some philosophical musing on [00:18:04 - 00:18:13] the content deals with a series of ideas which dennis began to develop based around the question [00:18:13 - 00:18:20] do you know what we could do with this stuff and then he proceeded to answer his own question [00:18:20 - 00:18:27] and he had an idea which i do confess i find rather hard to put out in 10 minutes and feel [00:18:27 - 00:18:34] that i've done an adequate job that's what the book is for i think in the 10 minute version [00:18:34 - 00:18:42] it sounds fascinating but preposterous in the book i think we make it fascinating and entirely [00:18:42 - 00:18:53] credible and the concept was he he seemed to have gotten a very deep connection into this logos like [00:18:53 - 00:19:03] gnosis conveying force in the mushroom and it began talking about how you could use this thing [00:19:04 - 00:19:16] to um essentially give birth to your own soul as a physical object you know we all have a mind or [00:19:16 - 00:19:23] or a soul but it's an invisible organ it isn't like your left hand or your nose we never see [00:19:23 - 00:19:29] it and we don't know whether it's in the brain or it surrounds the body but it's very real to us we [00:19:29 - 00:19:37] think with it so he was suggesting that there is a way to and some of you heard me say this in the [00:19:37 - 00:19:45] past that we need to turn the body inside out make the soul visible make the body something commanded [00:19:45 - 00:19:53] in the imagination well he took this as a set of engineering specs and set to work to figure out [00:19:53 - 00:20:02] how to do it and the method is given uh in here i had to arm wrestle harper fairly strenuously [00:20:02 - 00:20:12] because they said you know these notes of your brothers i mean they're overstated uh scientifically [00:20:12 - 00:20:21] specious riddled with the incomprehensible so forth and said yes but it worked and driven by [00:20:21 - 00:20:28] the thought that there may be someone who will read this book who is far smarter than dennis or i [00:20:28 - 00:20:35] then all the details must be here if you want to read it as an adventure story that's fine you just [00:20:35 - 00:20:43] skip over dennis's notebook entries but if you see it as a recipe book then that's where you want to [00:20:43 - 00:20:51] place your attention so he became very highly agitated and irascible and just obsessed by this [00:20:51 - 00:21:00] idea of this experiment to condense the mind give birth to the soul emanatize the eschaton call down [00:21:00 - 00:21:08] the flying saucers fuse spirit with matter create the universal panacea at the end of time and lead [00:21:08 - 00:21:19] a triumphant humanity into hyperspace or something like that and my attitude was hell there's no [00:21:19 - 00:21:28] swerving him from this he can talk of nothing else so let's just cut to the chase and do the damn [00:21:28 - 00:21:34] experiment and surely nothing will happen and then we can you know he can make of that what he [00:21:34 - 00:21:40] wishes and the rest of us will go back to botanizing trying to get tight with these indians [00:21:40 - 00:21:47] and push forward this program to get this dmt thing because essentially the presence of these [00:21:47 - 00:21:57] mushrooms has totally overturned our original agenda well then he performed the experiment [00:21:58 - 00:22:05] and uh to the point that he performed the experiment i had been what i thought of as [00:22:05 - 00:22:16] the indulgent fair-minded witness he performed the experiment and promptly went bananas [00:22:16 - 00:22:25] he had said before that he might experience what he called a psychic reversal but i had just you [00:22:25 - 00:22:32] know he'd said a lot of things going into this and i hadn't weighed it that heavily within minutes of [00:22:32 - 00:22:42] finishing this experiment it became clear that not only was he highly agitated and raving constantly [00:22:42 - 00:22:48] but he also didn't seem to be able to hear other people he talked right through people and when [00:22:48 - 00:22:52] you would point out to him that this was an incredibly rude thing to do then there would [00:22:52 - 00:23:00] just be a huge amount of confusion and apologizing and he seemed genuinely not to be able to hear [00:23:00 - 00:23:08] other people and was raving constantly meanwhile at the moment the experiment was performed i who [00:23:08 - 00:23:17] had to this point just been sort of playing along it was as though he reached into my deepest plumbing [00:23:18 - 00:23:32] and he just threw a switch and um this channel opened and it began to inform me it was not like [00:23:32 - 00:23:38] any drug i've ever taken it was not like any experience i'd ever had there was no hallucination [00:23:38 - 00:23:47] what there was was what i would describe as pure understanding understanding that amplified itself [00:23:48 - 00:23:56] every hour every minute i mean i had only to take a cup and dip up a glass of water from the spring [00:23:56 - 00:24:05] and pour it past my eyes and i could say i understand water or pick up a leaf and look at it [00:24:05 - 00:24:15] and have some kind of huge wordless but very emotionally deep understanding of the ecosystem [00:24:15 - 00:24:23] the jungle the connections to the planet i mean it seemed to me that i was very close to what looked [00:24:23 - 00:24:31] like enlightenment of some sort i mean just an ability to be absolutely at peace fully in the [00:24:31 - 00:24:40] moment and just everything became a teacher everything was able to communicate to me its [00:24:40 - 00:24:49] uh essence but what was bringing me down in this situation was that dennis's condition was creating [00:24:49 - 00:25:00] a huge wave of accusation and confusion in our small expedition some people thought he should [00:25:00 - 00:25:07] be airlifted to a hospital other people thought we should simply wait for him to ascend into heaven [00:25:07 - 00:25:16] and it's hard to reconcile that kind of thing you know and many many strange things went on [00:25:16 - 00:25:22] and i'll give you a flavor of our our psychology at this time [00:25:22 - 00:25:33] the the day after the experiment or the evening following the experiment the experiment was [00:25:33 - 00:25:40] done sometime around dawn in the early morning hours of march 5th 1971 the evening of march 5th [00:25:40 - 00:25:48] we all hung our hammocks together in this hut and i got up in the middle of the night to take a leak [00:25:48 - 00:25:54] because of the condensed milk that you have to drink when you're an explorer and i checked [00:25:54 - 00:26:00] everybody out and everybody seemed to be sleeping soundly and then i lay in my hammock a long long [00:26:00 - 00:26:09] time and everything seemed peaceful and still but as breakfast unfolded the following morning the [00:26:09 - 00:26:16] 6th of march the morning after this it became clear that the restful sleep i had imagined we [00:26:16 - 00:26:24] had all shared had been anything but that from dennis still disorganized but expansive comments [00:26:24 - 00:26:32] emerged that he had or imagined he had a very active night upon close questioning it came out [00:26:32 - 00:26:38] that he was completely convinced that sometime during the night he had arisen and dressed and [00:26:38 - 00:26:45] then in a series of nocturnal adventure and then had a series of nocturnal adventures these involved [00:26:45 - 00:26:51] going alone in the darkness to the thundering immensity of the choro over a mile away then [00:26:51 - 00:26:58] returning to climb and spend some time in a large tree near the edge of the mission then making his [00:26:58 - 00:27:05] way back across the pasture and returning to his hammock strung among all the others the thought [00:27:05 - 00:27:12] of him wandering around during the night on those trails without his glasses which he had thrown [00:27:12 - 00:27:18] away in the first minutes after the experiment he announced that they were no longer necessary and [00:27:18 - 00:27:25] and just flung them away he also had thrown away all of his clothes and methodically smashed on [00:27:25 - 00:27:37] everybody's watch without his glasses falling in and out of shamanic ecstasy perhaps howling [00:27:37 - 00:27:45] and otherwise paleolithicly comporting himself was too much for me it was a breach of the collective [00:27:45 - 00:27:53] cool even though i was 90 percent certain that it had never really happened i was determined to [00:27:53 - 00:28:01] eliminate all possibility of such rambles in the future dennis's story was the classic description [00:28:01 - 00:28:07] of a shamanic night journey he said that he had gone to the choro and had meditated in the mission [00:28:07 - 00:28:13] cemetery we had visited before he had begun to return to the camp when he confronted a particularly [00:28:13 - 00:28:21] large enga tree near where the path skirted the edge of the mission on impulse he had climbed it [00:28:21 - 00:28:27] aware as he did that the ascent of the world tree is the central motif of the siberian shamanic [00:28:27 - 00:28:34] journey as he climbed the tree he felt the flickering polarities of many archetypes and as [00:28:34 - 00:28:41] he reached the highest point in his ascent something that he called the vortex opened ahead of him [00:28:41 - 00:28:49] a swirling enormous doorway into time he could see the cyclopean megaliths of stonehenge and beyond [00:28:49 - 00:28:56] them revolving at a different speed and at a higher plane the outlines of the pyramids gleaming [00:28:56 - 00:29:03] and marble faceted as they have not been since the days of pharaonic egypt and yet further into [00:29:03 - 00:29:10] the turbulent maw of the vortex he saw mysteries that were ancient long before the advent of man [00:29:11 - 00:29:19] titanic archetypal forms on worlds unimagined by us the arcane machineries of sentient agencies [00:29:19 - 00:29:26] that swept through this part of the galaxy when our planet was young and its surface barely cooled [00:29:26 - 00:29:33] this machinery these gibbering abysses touched with the cold of interstellar space and aeon [00:29:33 - 00:29:42] consuming time rushed down upon him he fainted and time who can say how much passed him by [00:29:42 - 00:29:48] so this is the kind of stuff we were dealing with and [00:29:48 - 00:29:56] my point in writing the book i mean there are many stories of people going bananas and then there are [00:29:56 - 00:30:03] many stories where there's a very radical break with reality and you either have to believe it or [00:30:03 - 00:30:08] not believe it and i'm thinking of carlos castaneda whitley streiber [00:30:08 - 00:30:18] i mean after all proctological examinations carried out in your bedroom by gray-faced [00:30:18 - 00:30:22] aliens from another world that's a pretty radical break with my reality [00:30:22 - 00:30:33] but here it rides the edge because this is a true story it is to the best of my ability [00:30:33 - 00:30:40] unembellished but it argues that guys like streiber and castaneda actually do have their [00:30:40 - 00:30:50] their finger on something it is rare to violate the laws of physics and you know universal [00:30:50 - 00:30:57] expectation based on experience but it's not impossible it happened to us there were several [00:30:57 - 00:31:07] things that can be isolated out of our story that simply secure answers to certain questions that [00:31:07 - 00:31:15] people have asked since time immemorial for example we had telepathic experiences that [00:31:15 - 00:31:25] absolutely satisfy me that under some conditions one person can not only penetrate another person's [00:31:25 - 00:31:33] thought but what he did was much more spectacular than that he penetrated into my memory he was able [00:31:33 - 00:31:40] to talk about things that had happened to me that i had never told him about and that i was not [00:31:40 - 00:31:47] consciously thinking about so it was as though somehow our minds had become fused there were [00:31:47 - 00:31:54] numerous other things unfortunately there isn't time uh to get into all of this but the point is [00:31:54 - 00:32:06] and i started out by saying this rationalism and the investigation of the unusual with a fair and [00:32:06 - 00:32:16] open mind is the working prescription for uh securing for yourself that the world is stranger [00:32:16 - 00:32:23] than we can suppose and certainly stranger than science can suppose certainly stranger than the [00:32:23 - 00:32:32] cultural myths that we are living under dare to suppose and i don't know where all this goes you [00:32:32 - 00:32:40] know because this story happened to real people every single one of whom is still alive as we [00:32:40 - 00:32:53] speak uh there was no happily ever after except in the sense that the logos promised that the the [00:32:53 - 00:33:01] point of view i guess is the way to put it would spread would become generalized and when i recall [00:33:01 - 00:33:12] that in 1971 i was penniless wanted by interpol careerless and you know pretty much the amazon [00:33:12 - 00:33:20] was the end of the line for me i spent all my money going in to la charrera i did not have a [00:33:20 - 00:33:28] clue i was at the end of my rope and now this strange meme based on psilocybin elf machines [00:33:28 - 00:33:36] in hyperspace the collapse of the vectors of history in 2012 the whisperings from the [00:33:36 - 00:33:44] transmundane other this whole thing that we've released seems to be sustaining itself basically [00:33:44 - 00:33:52] because of people like you because somehow we're all part of this story i really believe that this [00:33:52 - 00:34:03] is about a discovery of some sort so huge that we can't even put a name to it i mean columbus could [00:34:03 - 00:34:15] say i found land and galileo could say there are mountains on the moon i you know is it then for me [00:34:15 - 00:34:25] to say there are elves inside our head our collective head and that somehow this is going to [00:34:25 - 00:34:32] have an impact i'm convinced of it that it is for a purpose that the entire ecology of the planet [00:34:32 - 00:34:41] is attempting to communicate ever more exotic messages to us as the culture crisis deepens [00:34:42 - 00:34:48] and it's too much for one person or one small group of people to try to come to terms with it [00:34:48 - 00:34:55] has to be laid before the bar of public opinion and people have to deal with this in the context [00:34:55 - 00:35:03] of their own psychedelic experiences and their own hopes and fears and perhaps you know if this [00:35:03 - 00:35:11] is done and we can reach a consensus then we may well discover that the hallucinations that have [00:35:12 - 00:35:22] prompted us into religion and art and music and mathematics over millennia of time actually were [00:35:22 - 00:35:30] true hallucinations all the time well that's all i have to say about that i'll answer some [00:35:30 - 00:35:36] questions and i understand you're going to read them yep thank you very much i appreciate it [00:35:36 - 00:35:46] [Applause] [00:35:46 - 00:35:52] somehow i think you wrote this one i wrote it sounds like something you would write [00:35:52 - 00:35:59] is the tv computer satellite that surrounds the whole planet have a collective psychedelic effect [00:35:59 - 00:36:05] on the world population are psychedelics a mirror of this or an antidote or an anesthetic to the [00:36:05 - 00:36:11] environment why do you think i would ask a question i don't know [00:36:11 - 00:36:20] what's the wording i guess i don't know i mean in a sense it seems to me that what's happening is [00:36:20 - 00:36:26] in our minds and outside our minds if there isn't outside our minds but in the three-dimensional [00:36:26 - 00:36:40] space of culture we're undergoing an informational revolution of some sort all data is rising to the [00:36:40 - 00:36:49] surface nine million computers a month are being connected into networks worldwide at the very [00:36:49 - 00:36:57] moment that some unknown number of people because we can't get data on this are taking psychedelics [00:36:57 - 00:37:07] per month and clearly the thing that is unique about us as a species is that we have made much [00:37:07 - 00:37:14] of information you know ants have scripted it down into a few uh pheromonal signals [00:37:16 - 00:37:24] coyote packs have a kind of a pre-language you can make what you wish of the dolphins and the whales [00:37:24 - 00:37:32] but no species has ever grabbed on to information the way we have and i believe that history is a [00:37:32 - 00:37:42] self-limiting process that we are coming to the end of it that um business as usual has been taken [00:37:42 - 00:37:52] off the menu and that if you take all these curves the curve of petroleum extraction the curve of the [00:37:52 - 00:38:00] spread of epidemic diseases the curve of the dissolution of the ozone hole the curve of the [00:38:00 - 00:38:07] rise of global population if you plot all these curves together you reach the conclusion that [00:38:07 - 00:38:15] sometime in the second decade of the next century the contradictions become so excruciating that the [00:38:15 - 00:38:23] entire thing is going to be forced into some kind of phase transition it may be extinction it may be [00:38:23 - 00:38:32] a planetary bosnia or it could be something positive but business as usual is off the menu [00:38:32 - 00:38:42] and the uh the psychedelics connect you up to this looming event because we are now having [00:38:42 - 00:38:51] journeyed toward it for at least 10 000 years we're less than 20 years away from it so it is [00:38:51 - 00:38:57] imminent in every sense of the word and to contact it all you have to do is close your eyes [00:38:57 - 00:39:06] smoke a bomber eat a mushroom sit in yoga for a moment i mean it is very very near the energy [00:39:06 - 00:39:14] threshold between us and the transcendental object is very very thin and that's why things are so [00:39:14 - 00:39:22] peculiar because the architecture of our collective lives and the architecture of our individual lives [00:39:22 - 00:39:29] are have fallen under the domain of a kind of attractor and this is the attractor which [00:39:29 - 00:39:39] when it penetrated into our primate ancestors it drew out of a higher animal ourselves we are [00:39:39 - 00:39:46] literally being sculpted on a scale of a million years an animal species some kind of advanced [00:39:46 - 00:39:54] monkey is being turned into the carrier for a projection from the transmundane that leaves us [00:39:54 - 00:40:02] with one foot in the primate world and one foot firmly planted in the angelic world we are a [00:40:02 - 00:40:09] species in the process of being alchemically transformed by the other and we can't know what [00:40:09 - 00:40:17] that means for ourselves for the fate of the planet uh it is an absolute mystery it is the mystery of [00:40:17 - 00:40:26] our own becoming i don't know if that was the answer to the question but the supreme court [00:40:26 - 00:40:35] in a picky the supreme court has ruled against the native american church use of peyote how will this [00:40:35 - 00:40:42] impact other people's use of the sacrament well not at all i hope yeah i mean yeah [00:40:42 - 00:40:52] progress of human civilization in the area of defining human freedom is not made from the top [00:40:52 - 00:40:59] down no king no government no parliament ever extended to the people more rights than the people [00:40:59 - 00:41:08] insisted upon and i think we've come to a place with this psychedelic thing and we have the gay [00:41:08 - 00:41:15] community as a model and all the other communities the ethnic communities we simply have to say look [00:41:15 - 00:41:22] lsd has been around for 50 years now we just celebrated the birthday it ain't going away [00:41:22 - 00:41:30] we are not going away we are not slack-jawed dazed glazed unemployable psychotic creeps [00:41:30 - 00:41:37] we are pillars of society you can't run your computers your fashion houses your publishing [00:41:37 - 00:41:44] houses your damn magazines you can't do anything in culture without psychedelic people in key [00:41:44 - 00:41:56] positions and this is the great unspoken truth of american creativity and so i think it's time [00:41:56 - 00:42:04] basically to come out of the closet and just say you know i'm stoned and i'm proud so [00:42:04 - 00:42:12] if that's a problem for you you got a problem fella [00:42:14 - 00:42:29] yeah talk about hemp and its possibilities for our future hemp yes well this is interesting [00:42:29 - 00:42:37] and you all know the basic pitch for hemp and i um wouldn't be what i am if it weren't for cannabis [00:42:39 - 00:42:46] i think and i want to see it legalized although i'm very very skeptical i don't think even i [00:42:46 - 00:42:53] don't think the people who want it legalized have fairly confronted what it really is the [00:42:53 - 00:43:01] the argument is twofold as i understand it for legalizing hemp is number one a lot of [00:43:01 - 00:43:08] money could be made off all these wonderful cloths and products and lubricants and so and [00:43:08 - 00:43:13] medicines and so forth and the other argument relates to its psychoactivity and the argument [00:43:13 - 00:43:21] made there is it's no big deal it's no big deal well i actually think it is somewhat of a big deal [00:43:21 - 00:43:28] and i think the people who don't want to see it legalized see it that way cultures are shaped by [00:43:28 - 00:43:36] the drugs that they take and that they suppress we are a sugar red meat and alcohol culture [00:43:36 - 00:43:48] primarily with tobacco and alcohol to shore all that up to think for a minute about a drug like [00:43:48 - 00:43:58] coffee caffeine every labor contract in western civilization contains a clause which secures the [00:43:58 - 00:44:07] worker's right to halt the assembly line twice a day to fuel up on a drug known to cause limit [00:44:07 - 00:44:14] liver damage and all kinds of problems well now why isn't there a cannabis break the reason is [00:44:14 - 00:44:22] that caffeine perfectly uh fits in to a program that would have you [00:44:22 - 00:44:30] busily screwing widgets onto wonkets and moving them along the assembly line in other words it [00:44:30 - 00:44:38] promotes capitalist values performing repetitious tasks in a state of sort of glazed acceptance [00:44:38 - 00:44:47] cannabis on the other hand what is always said about it makes you inefficient lazy [00:44:47 - 00:44:56] uninterested in earning your mercedes and your house fighting the war yeah so uh i think that [00:44:56 - 00:45:03] if we could i i'm very interested in this cannabis thing i i think it may be the wedge through which [00:45:03 - 00:45:09] we can push the whole psychedelic agenda but i guarantee you if it's legalized it will be [00:45:09 - 00:45:20] a tremendous big deal because cannabis promotes uh feminist values anti-capitalist values values [00:45:20 - 00:45:28] that promote introspection rather than manic uh social values of the sort that you see alcohol [00:45:28 - 00:45:34] promoting it would make an immense change uh in the architecture of the culture [00:45:37 - 00:45:43] who deciphered the voynich manuscript for 25 000 dollars [00:45:43 - 00:45:52] uh well uh for those of you who don't know what the question is about it refers to a very [00:45:52 - 00:46:00] interesting manuscript that i've written about that is an unread or unreadable book it's written [00:46:00 - 00:46:09] in an unknown language no other example of this language has ever been found and the cia spent a [00:46:09 - 00:46:16] lot of time trying to decipher this book because it's at least 500 years old and it drove them [00:46:16 - 00:46:24] bonkers to believe that modern code cracking machinery could not deal with a medieval [00:46:24 - 00:46:31] manuscript i mean modern code making is orders of magnitude more sophisticated than anything [00:46:31 - 00:46:37] that the 14th or 15th century possessed so they spent a lot of money trying to understand this [00:46:37 - 00:46:45] code and essentially failed now very recently a gentleman on the east coast named dr leo levitov [00:46:45 - 00:46:50] and this is the answer to the question leo levitov wrote a book called the solution to [00:46:50 - 00:46:59] the vonage manuscript and he has he believes figured out what it is and the reason the cia [00:46:59 - 00:47:06] couldn't decipher it according to levitov is because it was never encrypted in the first place [00:47:06 - 00:47:16] he says it isn't an encrypted manuscript it's an artificial alphabet being used to write down a uh [00:47:16 - 00:47:26] a rural form of polyglot medieval flemish with a huge number of old french and old high german [00:47:26 - 00:47:37] loan words so there you have it folks do you know if illinois bunchweed is it bunchweed or bundle [00:47:37 - 00:47:45] weed i think it's bundle bundle is available from any commercial nursery i believe it's available [00:47:45 - 00:47:53] from of the jungle in sebastopol california i'm not their sales rep so i don't keep weekly track [00:47:53 - 00:48:00] on their inventory but i believe it's available from of the jungle call information yeah what [00:48:00 - 00:48:08] future modifications to the time wave software are ideally in store oh what a great question [00:48:10 - 00:48:17] well the time wave software is being put out both in an ms dos version and a mac version [00:48:17 - 00:48:24] and they're both pretty flashy and in a sense that is finishes the program of bringing to the public [00:48:24 - 00:48:34] the time wave in its raw and sort of naked form what we're moving on to now is a a [00:48:36 - 00:48:44] sort of a game which would be a time travel simulator it would be created in an immersive [00:48:44 - 00:48:50] technology this is this phrase immersive technology now replaces previous buzzwords [00:48:50 - 00:48:59] virtual reality dump that only outsiders call it that now it's called immersive technology [00:48:59 - 00:49:10] and in the idea is to build a on a in a cd rom environment a huge visual database to accompany [00:49:10 - 00:49:18] the time wave and and then the time wave could easily be configured into a game where in a [00:49:18 - 00:49:24] certain historical period if you encountered some difficulty and you mastered it you would be [00:49:24 - 00:49:32] catapulted forward one resonance and the idea would be to move from the big bang to the transcendental [00:49:32 - 00:49:40] object at the end of time and and beat out the competition and it's a very sly way i mean i'm not [00:49:40 - 00:49:47] big on products or games but it's a very sly way of teaching people history and you could make so [00:49:47 - 00:49:54] many paths through the data that the game would never play the same way twice or it would take [00:49:54 - 00:50:02] thousands of times to do that and a lot of talent seems to have come forward for this so that's that [00:50:02 - 00:50:11] looms what happened to your theory about change versus non-change and the cataclysmic events to [00:50:11 - 00:50:19] comes did that begin to come did that become the time wait time wave continuum yeah that's right [00:50:20 - 00:50:25] i referred to this a little earlier when i was talking about how business as usual is off the [00:50:25 - 00:50:33] menu and all these curves are converging i i really believe that the core insight for me of [00:50:33 - 00:50:43] the psychedelic experience and and i believe that it is objectively real is the discovery that history [00:50:43 - 00:50:53] is a finite uh phenomenon of some sort it began 8 000 years ago and it will end at some point in [00:50:53 - 00:51:00] the future well that's not terribly upsetting or challenging unless one specifies at what point [00:51:00 - 00:51:08] in the future and i maintain for reasons most of whom are too most of which are too complicated to [00:51:08 - 00:51:16] go into here that it is about 20 years in the future that the planet can no longer sustain us [00:51:16 - 00:51:24] we can no longer create any kind of existence that we could consider uh humane and that [00:51:24 - 00:51:32] technology population the way in which psychedelics are stimulating the imagination [00:51:32 - 00:51:38] the way in which culture generally is driving the imagination that we are on the brink of being able [00:51:38 - 00:51:47] to design ourselves and place ourselves into a new world of some sort and i'm vague on the details [00:51:47 - 00:52:01] it's not outer space it's not um you know some kind of a managed orwellian collectivist paradise [00:52:01 - 00:52:08] it's something more profound than that we are perhaps going to download ourselves into a gold [00:52:08 - 00:52:16] ytterbium cube that we will super cool and bury a thousand feet beneath capernicus and there all [00:52:16 - 00:52:26] walk on the virtual beaches barefoot and alive i don't know but what is happening here at the end [00:52:26 - 00:52:35] of the 20th century you see is a kind of birth process we you know i mean think of the fetal [00:52:35 - 00:52:44] life in the womb it's an it's your endlessly adrift in the amniotic ocean uh weightless [00:52:44 - 00:52:51] food and oxygen are being delivered without even your awareness through the umbilical cord it is [00:52:51 - 00:52:57] paradise and if you were there and you were in control of your fate you would choose to prolong [00:52:57 - 00:53:08] it forever but what happens instead is that you get squeezed into the birth canal then the paradise [00:53:08 - 00:53:17] turns into hell strangulation pressure you are literally being squeezed to death to ask the fetus [00:53:17 - 00:53:24] at that point to conceive of the wonderful satisfying life that it is going to have 40 [00:53:24 - 00:53:32] years hence as a stockbroker living in bel air and collecting minor works of cubist art is [00:53:32 - 00:53:40] ridiculous because you know that's not where we're at at the moment and so i believe that [00:53:41 - 00:53:48] culturally we are in the birth canal and everything is appears to be being destroyed [00:53:48 - 00:53:53] the oceans the atmosphere the very integrity of our own bodies because of all these diseases [00:53:53 - 00:54:02] ideological contamination you name it but we simply must push forward it's a forward escape [00:54:03 - 00:54:11] we can never go back you know to the game dotted plains of archaic africa that's gone it's all gone [00:54:11 - 00:54:19] the only way out is forward it's called a forward escape and i'm interested in propagating this [00:54:19 - 00:54:28] notion because number one i believe it and number two it is a message of hope without which i think [00:54:28 - 00:54:36] people are going to be very challenged because things are going to get worse apparently much [00:54:36 - 00:54:44] worse i mean it would not cause me to break stride if the mess in bosnia spread until it stretched [00:54:44 - 00:54:50] from the arctic circle to turkey and from vienna to vladivostok i mean those people are setting [00:54:50 - 00:54:56] themselves up for hell on earth and we will be dragged into it in some fashion even if we only [00:54:56 - 00:55:05] have to witness it so history is turning into a white knuckle ride for sure and without the faith [00:55:05 - 00:55:15] in some kind of transcendental phase transition i think there's a tendency to despair and to panic [00:55:15 - 00:55:22] and to nihilism and religion has failed you know what religion gives us is what we saw last week [00:55:22 - 00:55:32] in texas they can only conceive a phase transition as apocalypse as ragnarok the twilight of the gods [00:55:32 - 00:55:41] that isn't what it is we are closing distance with the first moments of true human civilization [00:55:41 - 00:55:48] you know when people actually do treat each other with respect when there actually is a place made [00:55:48 - 00:55:55] for the celebration of human differences when we actually do feel the suffering of the people around [00:55:55 - 00:56:04] us and respond to that so without psychedelics and the models that they make possible hope is i think [00:56:04 - 00:56:12] a very very fragile thing and that's why i take the position that i do because i think that we are on [00:56:12 - 00:56:22] the brink of the adventure for which we left the trees and left the african plain but it's not a [00:56:22 - 00:56:32] sure thing it rests in our hands as it always has i mean remember that in the last million years nine [00:56:32 - 00:56:42] times the ice has moved south from the poles miles high pushing before it our ancestors people [00:56:42 - 00:56:51] wrapped in skin naked as j birds marginal as can be no antibiotics no global weather forecasting [00:56:51 - 00:56:57] no nothing and they didn't drop the ball they survived they took care of their children and [00:56:57 - 00:57:04] their elderly they passed the skills and the technologies and the insights and the songs [00:57:04 - 00:57:13] down the long stream of time can we do any less we who have in our hands the power to shape the [00:57:13 - 00:57:19] planet for good or evil we who can communicate with each other globally in a moment it would be [00:57:19 - 00:57:27] a pretty sad commentary on the notion of cultural progress and intelligence if they could keep the [00:57:27 - 00:57:38] faith and we can't so it all went for this it will all be made clear in the lifetime of most of us [00:57:38 - 00:57:47] and so i just want to uh sort of close on that note invite you to keep the faith invite you to [00:57:47 - 00:57:57] explore the edges and to make of yourself a a vessel a conduit for the world transforming logos [00:57:57 - 00:58:06] that is trying to speak to all of us to create a sane and viable and celebratory world for our [00:58:06 - 00:58:20] children and their children thank you very much