Some of you may have seen, I don't, years and years ago, this B movie about a guy who has a big ranch in Mexico
 and one of the campesinos comes rushing back from having encountered a brontosaur in the forest
 and he can only point inarticulately at the woods and say, "Something! Something! Something! Something!"
 And that's what I am. I'm a monkey and I've come back to the troop and I'm telling you
 there's something over the next hill that is off the scale, off the scale, and I have made it my business
 to delve. I'm a delver, I'm a noetic archaeologist. The obscure heresies and strange rites and all of
 the stuff, been there, done that, it's all pale soup compared to this. And so I hype it to you
 simply to try and inspire you to explore it. We are at the present state in the position of
 explorers of the new world, 50 years after Columbus. We have notebook entries, we have
 partial maps, but we don't have a complete map of what this thing is. It's another dimension.
 It is literally another dimension. I took DMT to a llama of great accomplishment, not one of the
 grab-ass, can-of-budweiser-welded-to-the-good-right-hand llamas, but a real llama. This guy was over 90
 when he smoked DMT, and he sensed his wheel has turned. And he said to me, he said, "It's the lesser
 lights." He said, "You can't go further into the bardo and return." And so I think that we stand at
 the brink of an enormous frontier. Call it incorporeality, call it non-material existence,
 or, you know, bite the bullet. Call it death. But this is the frontier that we stand on the edge of.
 This is what history has been about. History has been some kind of suicide plot for 15,000 years,
 not a moment past, that the plot was not advanced closer and closer and closer and closer to
 completion. And now in the 20th century, you know, we see that this thing, this transcendental object
 at the end of time, this attractor has been, that chose us out of the animal kingdom and sculpted
 the neocortex, opposed the thumb, stood us on our hind legs, gave us binocular vision. This thing
 is calling us toward itself across eons of cosmic time. We are asked to mirror it, and as we mirror
 it, we become more of its essence. And as we become more of its essence, we leave behind the animal
 organization that we were cast in in the beginning. And what this is about, who knows? Is this a drama
 of cosmic redemption? Is it the transcendental other at the end of time? Is it a Gnostic demon?
 Is it Ildaboth? What is it? We do not know. But I really believe we are in the era when we will
 come to know. And what the psychedelics are, are periscopes in the temporal dimension. If you want
 to see a little bit into the future, elevate your psychedelic periscope outside of the three-dimensional
 continuum and peer around. For thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years, we have been pulled
 toward this omega point. The earth is like an egg. It has come to its moment of fructification.
 The dawn that has been anticipated since we were herding our cattle across the plains of Africa
 is now upon us. The east is streaked with the blush of rosy dawn. It is coming upon us. And I think
 that it will redeem history. That history is not a nightmare. It is a passage. It is an initiation.
 Think of the fetus in the womb at the moment of transition. Surely it must despair. The walls
 are closing in. It's being crushed and strangled. Gone are the endless amniotic oceans of a few
 months before. The weightlessness, the effortless delivery of food through the umbilical cord.
 Suddenly it's just boundaries and agony and crushing pressure. That's where we are. And we
 are going to have to shed history like a snake sheds its skin if we want to slip off into hyperspace
 where I think all of magical humanity is awaiting us and cheering us on, lending their weight.
 They're all out there, you know, Proclus and Plotinus and Plato and Hypatia and Henry Cornelius
 Agrippa and John Dee and Robert Flood and Eliaphus Levy. They're all out there pulling for us. And
 every shaman and shamaness, every magician practitioner as far back in time as you go,
 was part of the plan, the conjuration, the great work, the distillation of the quintessence.
 History is a magical invocation. And at the end of that invocation, if it is correctly done,
 all boundaries will dissolve into the stone, the lapis, a transdimensional vehicle that can move
 through space and time that is the collectivity of all human souls free at last in what William
 Blake called the divine imagination. And you don't have to wait for the general dispensation.
 You can join up anytime by hyperspatializing your metaphors and your point of view through
 psychedelic symbiosis with the plants that are pouring this hyperdimensional Gaian vision into
 the minds of anyone who will detoxify themselves from history and linear thinking and but open
 themselves to the presence of the transformative mystery that is going to leave this planet
 unrecognizable to us within our lifetimes. So that's the basic spiel.
 And I think it raises a lot of questions and yours is first.
 The answer is yes, yes. The question is are there herbs in the temperate zone that contain DMT?
 And yes, there are certain grasses, Phalaris arundinacea, Phalaris tuberosa. These can be
 ordered from plant dealers or gotten, ironically enough, from agricultural experiment stations
 because these are pasture-age grasses. A lot of people are doing wonderful work right now
 learning how to make DMT preparations out of native plants. The mature Phalaris grass,
 it's very diffuse, the DMT. So what people are doing is they're getting the seeds and they're
 sprouting them in a sprouter and then they're taking the sprouted seeds and air drying them.
 Well, you can imagine how powdery sprouts become if you air dry them. Well, then you can powder up
 a handful of these sprouts and twist that into a bomber and come very, very close to the flashpoint.
 The other thing, I mean, since I'm talking to recipe-oriented magicians, the other thing you
 need to understand if you want to work in this area is that the DMT can ordinarily not be taken
 orally because there is an enzyme system in your intestines called the monoamine oxidase system.
 Then it will destroy the DMT. But the good news is there are certain compounds called
 monoamine oxidase inhibitors. Didn't you know it? If you take a monoamine oxidase inhibitor
 and then you take DMT, the DMT will survive the gut and pass into the bloodstream and pass the
 blood-brain barrier. So here is a very important piece of practical information I'm about to give
 you. If you want to inhibit your monoamine oxidase in order to make DMT trips longer or mushroom trips
 longer and more intense or to activate DMT if you only have a little bit of it,
 then what you should get are the seeds of pergamum harmala. P-E-R-G-A-M-U-M, pergamum
 harmala, H-A-R-M-A-L-A. You can either order it under that name from seed dealers or go to an
 Iranian market and buy what is called Hormal, H-U-R-M-A-L. This is simply pergamum harmala
 seeds. They use it as an incense to fumigate rooms. But two grams, don't take more, two grams of this
 macerated in a mortar and pestle with spring water taken from a spring at the new moon near a crossroads
 will inhibit your MAO. It will inhibit your MAO. Consequently, then when you smoke the bomber of
 phalaris dust, it will grab on. Or you can even smoke mushrooms then and they will grab on. So
 knowing how to inhibit MAO is one of the key techniques in this kind of herbal shamanic
 magic. Other plants that contain DMT, and here's one you all should be aware of because it's
 probably right around here, is Desmanthus ellenoyensis, Illinois bundle weed. It's a rank
 weed. I've not seen it except in the dried form, but people have grown hundreds of pounds of this
 stuff in a few months. And the root bark has the highest concentration of DMT ever measured in any
 plant. It's higher than the ayahuasca admixtures used in the Amazon. Pardon? In the root bark,
 the root bark, which you dry the root and then scrape the bark off and you'll get this reddish
 root bark. The red is actually the DMT. Varroa trees in the Amazon shed DMT in their sap and
 it's always a blood red sap. And to show you how strong it is, the Indians in the Amazon, some of
 the tribes, they roll their arrow points directly into that sap and it's a paralytic poison in the
 bloodstream of monkeys and small animals. So there is a great deal of work is being done right now
 and you should, if you're of an experimental and herbal and alchemical and magical bent,
 people are creating what they call ayahuasca analogs. This is where you use local plants
 to create a brew, which is chemically equivalent to an Amazonian hallucinogen. And of course,
 you have the satisfaction that it's yours. It's your magical recipe. No one on earth is doing
 quite what you've got. And it's very, a lot of interesting work is being done and you'll hear
 more about this. In fact, Jonathan Ott just wrote a book called Ayahuasca Analogs, in which the
 state of the art is spelled out. And it would be worth your while to check that out if you're an
 experimentalist. Yeah. The question is, is there a more, is there a simple reagent test for the
 presence of DMT? The answer is sort of. You can do a paper chromatographic test and all you need
 is a little UV light and some chromatography paper and some solvent dishes. I mean, it's at the level
 of a seventh grade science project. Yes. I don't know how much I should say on this subject. I'm
 probably about to say too much. But at one gathering I go to, one of the people who's a
 very regular part of that particular posse is a wheat breeder. So when he heard about the Phalaris,
 he was a geneticist and a wheat breeder. And he has been working very quietly on his own
 to produce super strains of Phalaris. And I think we will soon see super strains because
 the underground community is incredibly creative in this area. The compound I talked about yesterday,
 salvia divinorum, that's all underground work. Brett Blosser, the anthropologist who discovered
 it, is a complete freak. The guy, the chemist who extracted it, who would prefer I don't put out his
 name, is a complete freak. And the people who then did the confirmation studies, my brother and his
 band of performing pharmacologists, all freaks. So we actually, we do not take ourselves seriously
 enough. I mean we have our scientists, we have our philosophers, we have our thinkers, our legal
 experts. We are a complete community. And it's no longer in my mind even necessary to publish in
 straight journals and to seek a pat on the head from the American pharmacology community.
 They don't understand what these things are for anyway. Yes?
 Yes, I'll repeat this and strengthen once again my case to the guy who owns the company that he
 should pay me for God's sake. If you want a catalog of extremely rare and useful psychoactive
 and magical plants, probably the most complete in the world, the company is called Of The Jungle,
 P.O. Box 1801, Sebastopol, S-E-B-A-S-T-O-P-O-L, California 95472. Write and ask for a catalog
 and tell them George Bush sent you. No, I'm teasing. Don't tell them that,
 they won't send you the catalog.
 Well, let me, I didn't mean to dis-castaneda as a metaphor maker. No, I think The Teachings of
 Don Juan is a tremendous book. I'm very suspicious of some of his later stuff. It's interesting what
 you said because you know the famous crow transformation in The Teachings of Don Juan
 has been traced, and I'm sure many of you know this book, has been traced to George McDonald's
 book Through the Gates of the Silver Key. And George McDonald was a friend of Evans Vance.
 So I think what we're getting here is a mining of late 19th century English folklore by Castaneda.
 Nevertheless, the presence of these small entities has been a part of folklore for a long,
 long time. Elementals, tykes. What puzzled me about, what puzzles me, I guess, is I've spent a
 lot of time in this magical literature and art historical area, and the descriptions don't quite
 match. I can't quite convince myself that the sprites, the aphrites, the nixies, the djinns,
 that these creatures of the woodland fae are the same thing. Or I don't know whether I am
 contaminated by early love of science fiction. Well, again, close but no banana. All these
 popular aliens that are running around, you know, the Whitley Streeboids and all these things,
 are much more mundane than what I encountered. I mean, what I encountered was terrifyingly not
 human, terrifyingly alien. And I just do not quite get, and Madame Blavatsky was into it,
 and they're always saying, you know, I don't know, they're very sort of cut and dried about it.
 And when I encounter an extraterrestrial alien or a creature from another dimension,
 the main thing that's happening for me is the implications are blowing my mind.
 They seem totally immune to the implications. Yeah.
 Well, a sufficient amount of DMT is smoked west of the Pacific Coast Highway that it wouldn't
 surprise me if the writers of Star Trek were onto this. Yes, what is not much talked about,
 the part of the experience which is anomalous, and maybe people who know more about magical
 literature than I do can correct me, but what the elves are really interested in is this stuff which
 I call visible language. That's the whole point of the encounter, is to exhibit it and to get you
 to do it. Well, now, first of all, think for a minute about ordinary language. It's really weird.
 It's the weirdest thing we do. I mean, if you were looking for the thumbprint of God
 on creation, human language would be a good candidate because, look, we're supposed to be
 some kind of animal who just went a little further than the next guy. But to get out of that
 Shakespeare and Milton is a pretty amazing accomplishment, hardly to speak of the
 mathematical languages that we generate. So something happened. Some people think only
 35,000 years ago. Imagine if that's true. I mean, I don't care. Some people say 150,000 years ago.
 But to speak, to take small mouth noises and to turn them into signifiers for symbols and
 relationships, in spite of some people's enthusiasm for cetaceans and dolphins, I just am not
 overwhelmed by the evidence. I mean, to me, it is a miracle to be able to speak poetry.
 It is a miracle. I mean, when Coleridge wrote, "And south and south and southward I we fled,
 and it grew wondrous cold, and ice-mast high went floating by as green as emerald."
 I mean, that's language. And it's magic. And we have a fascination, then we also paint,
 then we sculpt, then we write, then we create electronic databases, then film, television.
 Clearly, what we want to do is we want to communicate visually. And these things are saying
 there's a way to do it. Do it. And I don't understand. Do we all have to be loaded on DMT
 all the time? Can you learn to do this? The gentleman who asked about dreams,
 here is a piece of information that is critical in this jigsaw puzzle. If you have smoked DMT
 at any time in the past, it is possible to have a dream in which people are running around and
 you're checked into the Mars Hotel and the luggage is lost and this and that, and in the middle of
 all that, someone drags out a little glass pipe and hands it to you. It will happen. It will happen
 in the dream. Not a memory, not a simulacrum, it will really happen. Well, now, to me, that's an
 amazing piece of data, because what it's saying is you can do it on the natch. You may have to be
 dead asleep, but still, on the natch, this can be done. And the lucid dreamers, the biofeedback
 people, the people who claim these wonderful things that you can do with sleep and dream
 and programming, I challenge them. Teach people to have DMT dreams in their sleep. And then let's
 figure out how to drag that puppy into the light so that we can do it at will, on the natch.
 Just one second. One thing that I have come to believe is that we remember no more than 5%
 of our dreams, and it's the most mundane 5%. I think, and there's scientific evidence to support
 this. Remember I said DMT is in the human brain? Well, it concentrates in the human cerebrospinal
 fluid on a 24-hour cycle, and it reaches its peak of concentration between 3 and 4 a.m. in most
 people. That's when the deep REM sleep is happening. When you give somebody DMT, they lay back,
 they close their eyes, and the way you, the guide, the sitter, I don't like the word guide,
 you the sitter, the way you can tell that they're getting off is their eyes dart wildly behind their
 closed eyelids. It means they're in REM. They're in REM sleep. They've been immediately shoved
 into deep dreaming. So I believe that what DMT is doing in normal human metabolism is
 it mediates the descent, the spiral descent into dream, and that every single night we are reunited
 with the boundaryless oceanic mystery of being that we are so frantic about in waking life and
 so distant from, and that if we could in fact just engineer a drug that would allow us to remain
 fully conscious as we drift deeper into dream, we would need no other drug or substance,
 that that's where we want to go, and I think that's where history is headed. What the archaic
 revival is about is a revivification of the aboriginal dream time. We are going to live
 in the imagination. We are preparing to decamp from three-dimensional space. I mean, yes,
 the earth is the cradle of the human race, but you don't stay in the cradle forever, you know,
 and it's something like going into dream. It's something like taking the hyper-technical
 virtual reality internet head of the snake and inserting the shamanic, late paleolithic,
 ecstatic, orgiastic tale of the snake, and then you have the ouroboric completion. Then you have
 the quintessence and the work is complete and history ends, and we live then in the light of
 the stone made manifest. Well, it definitely has something, this mystery that we're talking about,
 it definitely has something to do with sound and the magical role of sound.
 Ayahuasca is a sort of different way of sectioning the DMT experience because Ayahuasca
 is orally active, unfolds over hours, is not as dramatic as DMT, but the people who use Ayahuasca
 as a ritual on a weekly basis, what their practice consists of is they take this stuff and then they
 sing. They sing like crazy and then when they stop singing and people light a cigarette and take a
 leak and so forth and you're listening to these conversations, you hear people say stuff about
 the shaman-like, "I like the part with the olive drab and the silver, but when it became magenta
 and moved toward orange, I thought he was over the top." What kind of a criticism of a song
 is that? And the answer is sound has become a visually beheld medium.
 Yes, so the reason I'm interested in something as techno-nerdy as virtual reality
 is because you could program a virtual reality so that when you went,
 "Ahhhhhh," an iridescent blue line would be keyed to that to descend into the space.
 And I'm very interested in environmental and electronic simulations of psychedelic states,
 but we're not going to do better than the psychedelics. If we can do as well, it will be
 a miracle. I mean, you see more beauty in a first wave of psilocybin than the human race has
 produced in the past 5,000 years. And who are you? Yes. No, I promised this guy, "Ben, you,"
 and I felt his flash of loathing.
 I hadn't considered that, but that sounds possible. I mean, we're definitely coming
 to some enormous cusp. And whether you think it's the cusp of cusps or just a big cusp,
 it's hard to say. Somebody faxed me. I got a fax right before I came here. I don't know who sent
 it to me. It was just an anonymous fax, but in huge letters it said, "When you strip away the hype,
 it's just another concrescence." Yes.
 It's interesting, and that's a good question. The answer is yes and no. Obviously, there's
 hardly anything more personal than a psychedelic experience. It is a kind of summation of who you
 are, and it's viewed through the filters of your personality. Nevertheless, when you put a whole
 bunch of DMT trips together, certain things seem to emerge. My notion, coming at it from a sort of
 Jungian attitude, is if we had to say, "What is the archetype of DMT?" The archetype is the circus.
 It's the circus. And let me say why. First of all, a circus is a place of wild, exotic activity.
 And clowns are... You don't have a circus without clowns. And clowns are wonderful for children.
 A circus is a wonderful place for a child. DMT, there is something very, very weirdly childlike
 about it, in a very un-childish way. Some of you may know the 52nd fragment of Heraclitus,
 where he says, "The Aeon is a child at play with colored balls." The Aeon is the child that you
 encounter in the Elf Dome. But the circus has other connotations than simply the three rings
 and the clowns. Eros is present, entwined with Thanatos, in the form of the nearly naked lady
 in the tiny spangled costume, who is working without nets, hanging by her teeth, up near the
 top of the big tent. And personally, my earliest experience of Eros was that lady in the tiny
 spangled costume. I was so small, I was wrapped up in something and being held, and I was horny as
 hell. So there's that. And then, there is also, radiating off from the central ring, the freak
 show. The goat-faced boy, the lady in the bottle, and the three-toed alligator kid, and all of that.
 That's there. The wiggy, weird, kinky, strange, alien stuff. And then, if you think about the
 archetype, not so much of the circus, but of the carnival. The carnival represents a breakthrough
 from another dimension. Because you live in some jerkwater town, in some, I almost said,
 Iowa. And it's like, normal. And then, the carnival comes to town, and children are told,
 "You can't stay out and play. The carny people are in town." And what does it mean? Well, they may
 fuck differently than we do. They may steal things. They're not like us. They've had more
 than one marriage, some of them. And then, the carnival people are there, and the hoochie-coochie
 dancers, and the whole thing. And then, they fold it up, and they go away, just like a DMT trip.
 And every little boy and girl in the world, worth their salt, wants to join the circus.
 Of course! And go away with the tattooed lady, and the tigers, and all that. So, it is the
 archetype of the circus. So then, I've seen many, many people take DMT, and some get what I get,
 which is, it's sort of gone beyond the circus. It's the circus, but the circus as presented on
 Zaneble Gnubi Prime, or something like that. But one woman, who was an anthropologist, who I think
 got a sub-threshold dose, she had a very interesting trip, because it was a light trip. But with no
 prompting from me, she said, "I was at a carnival midway, but it was after hours, and there was
 nobody there, and there were just those ice cream, those square papers for holding ice cream, were
 just blowing in the wind, and getting caught in chain-link fences. It was like a sub-threshold
 dose. Well, then if she'd done more, she would have arrived there eight hours earlier, when the
 thing was happening. And if she'd done yet another toke, it would have moved off into the zone of
 the truly weird. That's why I love the film of Federico Fellini, because here was a circus man,
 for sure. Yeah. A way to get the DMT? Well, you could conceivably inhibit your MAO.
 I don't want to tell you to do it nasally, because it might be a really stinging experience.
 Well, then you could do it. I'm working on something. I'll describe it to you.
 I'm having a glassblower make a thing, which has a chamber with a pipe stem coming off it,
 but it has another stem, 180 degrees around the chamber, coming off it, that breaks into two
 prongs. And what you do is you heat the DMT, you insert the two prongs up your nose,
 and you have a friend blow on the other outlet, and it will force the entire contents of the vessel,
 the entire load of white smoke. But don't try this at home, folks. Pardon me?
 I'd go light the first time. There are old pharmacologists and bold pharmacologists,
 but there are no old bold pharmacologists. Yes.
 There are antidepressants that are MAO inhibitors. That's right. But I wouldn't
 use them for this purpose, because what you want is what's called a reversible MAO inhibitor.
 And Harmine, or Harmoline, which is in the Syrian Rue, is a reversible MAO inhibitor,
 reversible in four to six hours. Some of these antidepressants inhibit every molecule of MAO
 in your body for up to three weeks. And that's why when they give you those antidepressants,
 they tell you the long list of don'ts, you know, no chocolate, no red wine, no soft cheese,
 no lentils, no... That's a list of alkaloid-containing foods. And if you are on those
 monoamine oxidase-inhibiting antidepressants, and you eat a bunch of camembert with your yuppie
 friends, you'll probably have to be roped down for a while before you straighten out.
 Just to sum this up and put a kind of a classifier on it, I am not very interested in drugs, per se.
 I've done a lot of them, bad ones, good ones. People do drugs for fun and for stupid reasons.
 But there is this tiny chemical family, the tryptamine-halosinogens, psilocybin and DMT,
 and then some artificial cogeners, and 5-methoxy is in there too, which I'm not that fond of.
 But this is the doorway. It's the umbilicus of this world. These are things which are called
 drugs, because that's the category we have for things which make the world unrecognizable.
 But these are not drugs. They are magical doorways into staggeringly titanic dimensions of gnosis,
 power, information, understanding, and dimensions filled with affection for humanity.
 People say, "Well, you advocate, you think drugs should be legalized." Yeah, but that's
 a political opinion of Terrence McKenna, who's just a guy like you. But this stuff about the
 tryptamines is a real discovery, and you can think what you like about me and my take on it.
 In fact, please do. But check it out. Check it out, because I've checked out lots of stuff,
 and this is the only thing I'm interested in telling you. Check it out.
 No, I don't understand the answer to that question. It's magical. It is a secret which
 keeps itself. I mean, here I am. There are 200 people here, whatever, and I do this all the time,
 and I have not, so far as I can tell, been able to launch an avalanche of DMT. I'm trying. Do I
 have to put it any more plainly? Is there a chemist in the house who will go home and make this stuff
 so that we can find our way there, or grow the plants, or go to South America, or get with lucid
 dreaming and behavioral modification, or explore the outer edges of orgasm, which I think has
 something to do with DMT and probably runs on it. Somehow we need to beach this whale. Yeah.
 It's not difficult to make. Compared to cocaine or LSD, it's a walkover. It is a reasonable
 exam question for a second-year student of organic chemistry to be told, "Synthesize and
 chromatograph five grams of DMT and submit your sample with your chromatographic data
 to my office Monday morning."


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