[00:00:00 - 00:00:19]	 As far as what I can contribute to the ayahuasca discussion, most of the samples that Jonathan discussed this afternoon were actually collected by Cass and myself in '76.
[00:00:19 - 00:00:40]	 And then Dennis wrote that picture using those samples and some that he had obtained earlier that year. They all, most all came from a single shaman, John Fidel Moxandise, who was then at the arena coach near Suculpa.
[00:00:40 - 00:00:58]	 We bioassayed all those brews and they were very strong. When I began making my own ayahuasca, I used those experiences as the benchmark for what I was trying to achieve with my own brews.
[00:00:58 - 00:01:23]	 In terms of recipes, if you want to, rather than trying to substitute an analog, if you're still interested in what goes into a healthy dose of ayahuasca, the way, what I settled with, I had a clone, a single individual plant called Plowman 6041.
[00:01:23 - 00:01:41]	 The Tim Plowman had collected in Yuri Mogless in 1970 that was called the cielo ayahuasca. The ayahuascaras recognized types of ayahuasca more differentiated than the species.
[00:01:41 - 00:02:09]	 They speak of cielo ayahuasca, trompitero ayahuasca, so forth and so on. So this is a cielo ayahuasca, Plowman 6041. I grew it for many years and when I made ayahuasca, I used 500 grams of fresh material per dose and 85 grams of fresh stucco tree of origins per dose.
[00:02:09 - 00:02:27]	 And then prepared it in the standard way, which is to boil the total volume of crushed ayahuasca and stucco tree of origins. You make it in a non-aluminum pot.
[00:02:27 - 00:02:56]	 You don't use aluminum utensils because the aluminum is reactive and will mess with the effectiveness of the ayahuasca. And you layer in to the pot, and pots can be quite large, layer in stucco tree of origins, crushed stucco tree of origins, coffee, the entire plant vigorously smashed with a hardwood club to separate the fibrous material.
[00:02:56 - 00:03:08]	 And then you boil it for four hours at a rolling boil, not an explosive boil, but a constant boil.
[00:03:08 - 00:03:36]	 Pour off the deeply yellow liquid that results, carmine is yellow, and you pour off the mother liquor into another container, replace the first wash with a second wash, boil it four hours more, then discard all the solid material, keep it steaming into the bookshelf.
[00:03:36 - 00:03:52]	 And then you combine the two washes, which is a lot of water, I mean, ten, fifteen gallons of water, and then drive it down to the number of doses that you have pre-calculated.
[00:03:52 - 00:04:17]	 I can make up to twelve to fifteen doses at a time in pots of this size, and I drive it down to one hundred milliliters per dose. In the final evaporation, you want to be careful not to boil it too rapidly, or the sugars which are cooked out of the ayahuasca will tend to caramelize and make it thick.
[00:04:18 - 00:04:39]	 This does not affect the pharmacology of the ayahuasca, it makes it hell to swallow. And if you do it right, you can get it down to a hundred milliliters and it will still pour, it's as thin as water, it won't thicken unless you have boiled it with too hot a flame.
[00:04:40 - 00:04:48]	 Q. So you're not destroying any psychoactive potentials, the more caramelized one and the more liquid one?
[00:04:48 - 00:05:10]	 A. No, it's more like it's an aesthetic thing, it shows that you've hurried it, and if you're giving it to people who are knowledgeable, they will comment on this. The sign of amateurish ayahuasca is ayahuasca that's thick, because it needn't be, those are just sugars, it's not doing any good.
[00:05:10 - 00:05:31]	 My interest in ayahuasca, which I indulge over 25 years or so, began with, and if you haven't read it, you should probably read Burroughs and Ginsburg's book, The Ya'he Letters, The Search for the Blue Flash, is how I think of it.
[00:05:31 - 00:05:56]	 And it sort of initiates the modern era of writing about ayahuasca. The most recent interesting book about ayahuasca, other than Eduardo's Commentaries on the Paintings of Pablo Amarindo, is probably Michael Kauskig's book, Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man, which is just a wonderful book.
[00:05:57 - 00:06:12]	 Even if you don't give a hoot about drugs, I think it's a wonderful book for the richness of the language and the way in which he tells the story of the 20th century history of shamanism in the Fuzumayo region.
[00:06:12 - 00:06:27]	 But my interest in ayahuasca was the same interest that many of the early ethnographers and anthropologists were motivated by, which was persistent rumors of group states of mind.
[00:06:27 - 00:06:46]	 As Jonathan mentioned, the first people to characterize the alkaloid named it telepathy. This was because they had the grandiose hope that this would be a telepathic drug. And in a sense, I think it's too early to dismiss this possibility.
[00:06:46 - 00:07:04]	 Most of us think of telepathy as one person hearing another person think. That I don't think ayahuasca can deliver. But what it can deliver is an incredible ability to see what other people mean.
[00:07:04 - 00:07:33]	 Ayahuasca is driven by sound, by song, by whistling. And its ability to transform sound, including vocal sound, into the visual spectrum indicates that some kind of information processing membrane or boundary is being overcome by the pharmacology of this stuff.
[00:07:33 - 00:07:44]	 And things normally experienced as acoustical experience become instead visibly detailed. And it's quite spectacular.
[00:07:44 - 00:08:05]	 I've had ayahuasca where you can sing a tone and just lay down like a Barnett Newman painting, a chartreuse line an inch and a half wide in the darkness, and then you switch the tone and cross it at a 90 degree angle.
[00:08:05 - 00:08:17]	 And then as you begin to experiment, you discover that the whole modality behind your closed eyes is open to being driven by these sounds.
[00:08:17 - 00:08:33]	 And I think probably a lot of the shamanism, especially the off the main rivers shamanism involving ayahuasca, is this kind of pseudo telepathic involvement with sound.
[00:08:33 - 00:08:44]	 There are a lot of interesting things about ayahuasca, even in distinction or in contrast with other psychoactive plants, for example.
[00:08:44 - 00:08:55]	 It's essentially brain soup. There's nothing in it which doesn't occur naturally in human neural metabolism.
[00:08:55 - 00:09:17]	 When you take ayahuasca, you alter the ratios tremendously and the concentrations. But, you know, mescaline, so far as we know, salvia devinorum, ibogaine, these things don't occur ordinarily in human metabolism.
[00:09:17 - 00:09:28]	 Mescaline might under certain conditions, but the major psychedelic neurotransmitters are what are represented in ayahuasca.
[00:09:28 - 00:09:42]	 So it's the only hallucinogen I know where if it's made right, the next day, the day after the experience, you actually feel better than if you hadn't done it.
[00:09:42 - 00:09:54]	 I mean, even with mushrooms, which is dear to my heart, the day afterwards, I can't keep the phone unplugged and, you know, hot baths and this and that.
[00:09:54 - 00:10:01]	 But on ayahuasca, you're just ready for action at four o'clock the next morning and the next day.
[00:10:01 - 00:10:11]	 And the hallucinations are extraordinary. They seem to occur, in a way it seems more versatile than psilocybin.
[00:10:11 - 00:10:26]	 The hallucinations can range over a wider range. I mean, they can be anything from nature-based, botanical, insectile to just, you know, you name it.
[00:10:26 - 00:10:40]	 I remember one period of hallucination on ayahuasca where it was gold Egyptian hieroglyphics against black moving through these tunnels and this sort of thing.
[00:10:40 - 00:10:56]	 And it's very, I think it's safe. It's probably used by more people than any of its psychedelic plants cult in the world if you don't consider cannabis a plant cult.
[00:10:56 - 00:11:20]	 And as a strong herbacentrum, you know, in Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, down into Bolivia, and then it's made in rugs in the 20th century in a big way into Brazil, portions of Argentina, and then more sophisticated populations all over the world are getting into it.
[00:11:20 - 00:11:23]	 Are there any questions about that?
[00:11:23 - 00:11:26]	 Would it grow in my camera?
[00:11:26 - 00:11:39]	 Oh yeah, it'll grow. It grows well in Hawaii. Many, many plants have more restricted ranges than their natural capacity.
[00:11:39 - 00:11:49]	 Most plants have not occupied their full range. This is a consequence of the glaciers only having melted 20,000 years ago.
[00:11:49 - 00:12:04]	 Ayahuasca, I mean, one of the things that interests me that I've talked to Professor Blucher about is I think that there may be vanisteriopsis of some sort instigated in Mayan religion.
[00:12:04 - 00:12:18]	 Nobody has ever been able to prove this, that there is a whole elaborate kind of Mayan symbolism that you see at Tulum and at other sites that's called umbilical symbolism.
[00:12:18 - 00:12:24]	 And I think these things that have been taken for umbilical course are probably vines of some sort.
[00:12:24 - 00:12:41]	 The last time I was at Tikal, in the ruins themselves, there were many yellow flowers, Malthagasius flowers on the ground that had clearly been shed by large vines, which is a seed going up into the canty.
[00:12:41 - 00:12:51]	 And I collected in the leaves a non-flowering Malthagasius vine that I was unable to distinguish from ayahuasca.
[00:12:51 - 00:13:01]	 So, you know, this may well be happening or could have been happening among the classic Mayans.
[00:13:01 - 00:13:11]	 But I don't know since exactly what their drugs were and who used them, it's pretty expectantly that this could have happened.
[00:13:11 - 00:13:15]	 There's no trace of that in the current Mayan populations?
[00:13:15 - 00:13:19]	 Well, there's, I mean, no trace of vines.
[00:13:19 - 00:13:37]	 The morning glory seed, the mushrooms among the Sierra Mazatec and Indians, the Zapotecs and the Mixtecs, among the Maya, I think the morning glory complex and the Salvia divinorum.
[00:13:37 - 00:13:52]	 But whatever else may have gone on, you know, there's a whole, I mean Jonathan is the expert on this, but there's a whole number of plants which may have been used for their psychoactive effects in Mexico.
[00:13:52 - 00:13:57]	 Various coleus, the Emias salicifolia.
[00:13:57 - 00:14:04]	 Some people believe certain water lilies.
[00:14:04 - 00:14:14]	 Old plants like Quarrera de Fumibre, which is now used as a flavoring for certain kinds of chocolate drinks.
[00:14:14 - 00:14:26]	 Still, there are depictions on pieces of statuary that seem to suggest that maybe this would have a narcotic style of use in the past.
[00:14:26 - 00:14:34]	 I have a question about, you're talking about how the visual experience was driven by sound.
[00:14:34 - 00:14:36]	 Right.
[00:14:36 - 00:14:47]	 Have you found that the visions could be driven by anything else? Any other occurrences besides sound? Touch or...
[00:14:47 - 00:14:57]	 Well, I tend to lie down and sit still in silent darkness. I suppose cannabis helps most of these things.
[00:14:57 - 00:15:08]	 But really the ayahuasca is extraordinary. The last time I took it was in a non-traditional setting, but with one other person.
[00:15:08 - 00:15:18]	 Sitting in completely silent darkness, this guy had these Tibetan chimes, you know, the kind you strike with a piece of deer horn.
[00:15:18 - 00:15:22]	 It would be completely silent and he would strike this thing.
[00:15:22 - 00:15:30]	 It would literally form a piece of jewelry or a thing like a machine in the air.
[00:15:30 - 00:15:39]	 Just this "bing" and this thing would come into being as long as the sound was there and then it would disappear and then he would make another one.
[00:15:39 - 00:15:47]	 And it was very clear that we were seeing the same thing because I commented on it and described what I was seeing.
[00:15:47 - 00:15:53]	 And it looked like a little thing made out of iridescent titanium with brass connectors.
[00:15:53 - 00:15:58]	 And it was like an enormous Laurel birch earring or something like that.
[00:15:58 - 00:16:06]	 It's a very specific kind of object.
[00:16:06 - 00:16:09]	 I think these things are very mysterious.
[00:16:09 - 00:16:25]	 I mean, it was a pity that Rocio's English didn't allow a real discussion of these stories about the people who disappear for days and weeks on end, who go into a parallel world.
[00:16:25 - 00:16:34]	 Because if you just think that these aboriginal people are ignorant savages, well then you can just dismiss it.
[00:16:34 - 00:16:45]	 But if you've gotten this far on the premise that shamans know what they're talking about, well then you have to take very seriously this more outlandish stuff.
[00:16:45 - 00:16:50]	 Where do you draw the line?
[00:16:50 - 00:17:13]	 And ayahuasca is, you know, Eduardo Luna, who some of you know, is very keen to insist that what ayahuasca is really about is where you get on it if you keep these diets for weeks and months and then take it repeatedly over and over in these situations of sensory deprivation.
[00:17:13 - 00:17:28]	 And I think these people are basically erasing ordinary linguistic structures and they live in a world perhaps more than half hallucination.
[00:17:28 - 00:17:45]	 And their fears of magical attack and their relationships to invisible beings and all this is a kind of, I suppose in Western terms, the only thing you could say is it's a kind of self-generated, self-controlled schizophrenia.
[00:17:45 - 00:17:48]	 But that's just the word "psychopremia."
[00:17:48 - 00:18:00]	 I mean what it is is it's a self-generated, self-controlled immersion in a non-causal parallel construct of some sort.
[00:18:00 - 00:18:17]	 And the reason shamans live in isolation and on the periphery of modern and high density urban civilization is essentially so that they can build these castles in the air that they inhabit.
[00:18:17 - 00:18:25]	 They build unique mythological structures that are like accretions of their very powerful personalities.
[00:18:25 - 00:18:28]	 That's what all this storytelling is about.
[00:18:28 - 00:18:36]	 It's these stories are the contextual, define the contextual limits of what is possible.
[00:18:36 - 00:18:55]	 And if you live in a culture where night after night, year after year, you've grown up around the fire, hearing the most respected people in the group tell these outlandish stories, then for you it legitimizes the search for a doorway out of mundane experience.
[00:18:55 - 00:19:00]	 And that's really the only precondition for finding such a doorway.
[00:19:00 - 00:19:13]	 I mean if you love the weird and you probe it often enough, deeply enough, eventually you'll hit the jackpot, you know, and the door will swing open.
[00:19:13 - 00:19:20]	 And ayahuasca is definitely very effective for doing that.
[00:19:20 - 00:19:22]	 Yes?
[00:19:22 - 00:19:30]	 I guess the icaros really generate a lot of visions, the song sung, and some of those are available on cassette.
[00:19:30 - 00:19:39]	 Do you think that kind of visionary generation would come through on a cassette if you did an ayahuasca analog?
[00:19:39 - 00:19:47]	 Well, if you listen to music on ayahuasca, it transforms the music.
[00:19:47 - 00:19:49]	 You have to be very careful.
[00:19:49 - 00:20:00]	 I recall many years ago it was the night of a total eclipse, there's some hellish thing in the sky, a total eclipse at some time.
[00:20:00 - 00:20:11]	 And Sunwater and Adele, who some of you may know, and I decided that we would do the ayahuasca that I'd had in the back of the refrigerator for years.
[00:20:11 - 00:20:25]	 And this was like a long time ago, maybe eight years ago, and I got it out and I couldn't remember whether John Fidel had said, "Always shake the bottle or never shake the bottle before you fall."
[00:20:25 - 00:20:31]	 So, as well to be safe, we should shake the bottle, in case that's what he did say.
[00:20:31 - 00:20:45]	 So I did, and I've never had it hit me so hard, and I had put on a record which I had previously found mildly entertaining.
[00:20:45 - 00:20:54]	 And the goal of the first 40 minutes of the ayahuasca trip became to survive the playing of this record.
[00:20:54 - 00:21:08]	 And it was so, I don't know, I've had other experiences. A friend of mine brought me a tape from tribal Afghanistan that I listened to one night in Hawaii on ayahuasca.
[00:21:08 - 00:21:16]	 And I became so alarmed and freaked out, and I could hear something in this music that just shouldn't have been there.
[00:21:16 - 00:21:28]	 I could hear that this wasn't whizzing rag heads and mud huts somewhere, that these guys had connections into the Martian musician's union of people.
[00:21:28 - 00:21:38]	 It was highly agitating. So I think the ayahuasca songs are probably tailored to create a certain aura of confidence.
[00:21:38 - 00:21:46]	 They're reassuring. It's nice to sit with these old guys and watch them make beautiful music.
[00:21:46 - 00:21:55]	 And when you're alone, you can sing too. I mean, it's very important to sing, especially if you become afraid or alarmed.
[00:21:55 - 00:22:02]	 This is the key. If you get into deep water with these substances, this is true of psilocon as well.
[00:22:02 - 00:22:09]	 You don't want to clench. You don't want to assume the fetal position and stop breathing.
[00:22:09 - 00:22:18]	 And you want to sit up straight and breathe and sing and sing it back. And it will step back.
[00:22:18 - 00:22:25]	 You can take control of your situation most of the time.
[00:22:25 - 00:22:36]	 I wanted to ask about the parallel universe. American Indian storytelling and mythology have a great deal to say about these things.
[00:22:36 - 00:22:42]	 There are adventure myths about the two young guys that go out and get the tea cakes and disappear for twelve years.
[00:22:42 - 00:23:01]	 This is a common enduring theme, but it's nice to hear your position that this kind of prosthetics is. I could expound a little bit about when you get into that place, what level of various you find yourself in giving it.
[00:23:01 - 00:23:16]	 Well, I'm very, very careful. I mean, the way I do these things normally is alone and I unplug the telephone and I don't tell anybody I'm going to do it.
[00:23:16 - 00:23:22]	 And I do it in darkness. And I roll joints in front of me so I don't even have to move.
[00:23:22 - 00:23:32]	 And basically once it gets going, I don't do anything because I'm so aware of how involved in it is.
[00:23:32 - 00:23:42]	 I mean, I don't I think you have to be almost a damn fool to just grab hold of this stuff and start flailing it around.
[00:23:42 - 00:23:57]	 I mean, for me, it's like I creep up to the abyss and hang my head over and look and then I edge back. The idea of trying to actually do something is terrifying because it'll work.
[00:23:57 - 00:24:07]	 I mean, you can do it, but you don't understand what you're doing. So I'm I like to look.
[00:24:07 - 00:24:17]	 But you're showing that the purpose for what you're doing is to make sure and make the information.
[00:24:17 - 00:24:27]	 But the main thing, I mean, I think the getting information thing is sort of overstressed because it's astonishing and it proves that it's a higher dimension.
[00:24:27 - 00:24:37]	 Somebody really can see who stole the chicken and they really can see that even though it's a trivial matter about a chicken,
[00:24:37 - 00:24:47]	 not there's nothing trivial about the fact that they are exhibiting a paranormal ability which seems to involve the contradiction of cause and effect.
[00:24:47 - 00:24:50]	 How can they see who stole the chicken?
[00:24:50 - 00:24:57]	 Number one, the chicken has already been stolen by the time the question is asked of the shaman.
[00:24:57 - 00:25:01]	 Well, so then does the shaman travel back in time?
[00:25:01 - 00:25:09]	 Does the shaman read the minds of everyone in the tribe and look and find who stole the chicken that way?
[00:25:09 - 00:25:15]	 Or is it just an inspired guess backed up by social pressure?
[00:25:15 - 00:25:18]	 What exactly is going on here?
[00:25:18 - 00:25:31]	 I mean, when you turn toward the future, it becomes even more mysterious because many of these shamanic things are about deciding where the hunting will take place and saying, you know,
[00:25:31 - 00:25:37]	 if we go to the second waterfall, then there will be Tatebari to be killed.
[00:25:37 - 00:25:40]	 And then they go and there is and they do.
[00:25:40 - 00:25:53]	 And if you believe that this person actually saw the future, then you're coming perilously close to some kind of determinism, which is, you know, not supportable philosophically.
[00:25:53 - 00:25:59]	 I mean, if the universe is absolutely determined, then thinking has no meaning.
[00:25:59 - 00:26:06]	 Because if the universe is determined, then you think what you think because you couldn't think anything else.
[00:26:06 - 00:26:11]	 So thinking suddenly is divorced from the anthropocritic of knowing reality.
[00:26:11 - 00:26:18]	 And that's a little discouraging to those of us who butter our bread in the fields of philosophy.
[00:26:18 - 00:26:22]	 So I think, you know, it's very mysterious.
[00:26:22 - 00:26:35]	 The model that I use for all of these psychedelics is a mathematical model, not a psychological model or a spiritual model, but a mathematical model.
[00:26:35 - 00:26:44]	 Mind, under the pressure of evolution, under the pressure of the need to defend self and offspring,
[00:26:44 - 00:26:52]	 has folded itself down into the three dimensional space time matrix of the body.
[00:26:52 - 00:27:00]	 Mind has sort of has crippled itself in order to care take the body and the here and now.
[00:27:00 - 00:27:08]	 Well, when you take these psychedelics, it's like it's severed. The mind is severed from the physical envelope.
[00:27:08 - 00:27:19]	 And you wander in a much larger dimension. And it is a dimension. It is literally a higher dimensional manifold.
[00:27:19 - 00:27:23]	 And that's how these apparently miraculous and magical things.
[00:27:23 - 00:27:33]	 That's why the shaman can see into a human body, because in a higher dimension, the inside and the outside is the same place.
[00:27:33 - 00:27:44]	 There is no distinction. So it's an inner sensorium that has a higher dimensional character to it.
[00:27:44 - 00:27:50]	 It's a great mystery, you know, and it doesn't mean to detain us here, but it's a great mystery.
[00:27:50 - 00:27:56]	 The relationship of consciousness to number and of nature to number.
[00:27:56 - 00:28:07]	 After all, nature is nature, the deployed three dimensional physical world in its dynamic numbers are abstractions generated.
[00:28:07 - 00:28:13]	 So far as we know, only by the human mind, they are inventions of the human mind.
[00:28:13 - 00:28:23]	 And yet nothing is as descriptive of nature, no tool is as powerful as the scripture of nature as mathematics.
[00:28:23 - 00:28:36]	 Why is this? Well, Iowasca seems to say it's because the mathematical, the higher mathematical dimensions of the world are objects,
[00:28:36 - 00:28:45]	 not merely for abstract, deductive discovery, but for experiential encounters.
[00:28:45 - 00:28:58]	 And then if this is true, then our world as we experience it in the here and now and day to day is hopelessly limited and circumscribed.
[00:28:58 - 00:29:09]	 This is a very limited world that we're operating in, inside our culture, inside our language, inside our body, and so forth and so on.
[00:29:09 - 00:29:19]	 And in the silence, in the darkness, swept away by these alien outflowers and the planned mind behind them,
[00:29:19 - 00:29:28]	 you find out a truth that can barely be told, and most of it can't be told.
[00:29:28 - 00:29:40]	 What about your sense of self in the Iowasca system?
[00:29:40 - 00:29:42]	 Yeah, in the ego in general.
[00:29:42 - 00:29:54]	 Well, I think that these things are very humbling, it's very hard to do if you have an ego that's very...
[00:29:54 - 00:30:06]	 For instance, if you're the kind of person that other people consider a jackass, it's pretty hard to do these things if other people's judgement on you is correct.
[00:30:06 - 00:30:17]	 The person who can dominate a noisy bar is not probably a good candidate for Iowasca.
[00:30:17 - 00:30:30]	 That kind of bravado and machismo... Iowasca loves to take prideful people and rub their nose in it.
[00:30:30 - 00:30:38]	 I mean, it can make you beg for mercy like nothing. You have to really approach it humbly.
[00:30:38 - 00:30:51]	 I mean, I speak from experience, as I think you know, I probably am easily betrayed into assuming I know what I'm doing, and that's the moment when catastrophe strikes.
[00:30:51 - 00:31:01]	 What I always say to it when I go into it is I say, you know, I'm going to take a big dose, so please don't kill me.
[00:31:01 - 00:31:14]	 Here I am, I'm yours, I surrender, I hold nothing back, I didn't cut the dose, I didn't water the tea, so please don't kill me.
[00:31:14 - 00:31:24]	 And then it usually responds by not killing you, if it's so amused as it is.
[00:31:24 - 00:31:36]	 You can't demand it. The real bad just comes when you try to put the squeeze on it, when you try to force a piece of information.
[00:31:36 - 00:31:46]	 And that's the different thoughts in the cultural context of Iowasca, in many areas where there's been a lot of social disruption,
[00:31:46 - 00:31:56]	 the fear of the roads, or hundreds of years of missionary influence, and what is still remaining in the Iowasca culture is that the people always think it was some kind of
[00:31:56 - 00:32:06]	 intention either to heal someone or to send a star, to kill someone or something. They don't just take it just to completely threaten themselves with a plague.
[00:32:06 - 00:32:12]	 I mean they do too, during their initiation and stuff, but once they get the shaman, they get the...
[00:32:12 - 00:32:19]	 Even a lot of the young people really, they'll just take it with something in mind, you know. Of course there's exceptions, so the difference with that is that
[00:32:19 - 00:32:31]	 a lot of times, you hear a lot of weird stories about young upstart shamans, or like, have like a light and go "Tap them, or treat them."
[00:32:31 - 00:32:39]	 There's a lot of weird black magic that goes on too, because a lot of people just don't really feel healed.
[00:32:39 - 00:32:45]	 So a lot of death though should be due to Iowasca, due to black magic or...
[00:32:45 - 00:33:03]	 And I think a lot of shamans are... they like to just graze the underbelly of the thing. They're really concerned about their community and healing sick people and holding it all together.
[00:33:03 - 00:33:19]	 It's an exceptional personality in any society, Amazonian or urban American, who is a go for the gusto kind of person, who just wants to get as loaded as they possibly can.
[00:33:19 - 00:33:38]	 This shaman that I studied with in Peru, the Iowasca that we would take on Saturday nights for curing would be only about two-thirds as strong, and then every Wednesday night we would take it just he and a couple of other people.
[00:33:38 - 00:33:52]	 He said, "This was our school," he said. "This is when we learn." On Saturday nights we cure the people, but on Wednesday nights we plunge to the death.
[00:33:52 - 00:34:01]	 And it was a much more intense, quiet, inward kind of driving in those situations.
[00:34:01 - 00:34:09]	 So if we took Iowasca on a Wednesday, would we have a simultaneous experience with the shaman?
[00:34:09 - 00:34:13]	 Quite so. Every Wednesday.
[00:34:13 - 00:34:15]	 Every day of the week.
[00:34:15 - 00:34:19]	 The way the company is loaded.
[00:34:19 - 00:34:28]	 How would you compare the nature of reality or perceived reality under Iowasca and under mushrooms?
[00:34:28 - 00:34:41]	 Well, the thing about psilocybin that is so extraordinary, and I think enough people have experienced this now that we can make a generalization about it, the mushrooms talk.
[00:34:41 - 00:34:47]	 They speak to you in your native tongue and that conversational speed.
[00:34:47 - 00:34:49]	 And it's, you know, the damnedest thing.
[00:34:49 - 00:34:53]	 Until it happens to you, you can't imagine what somebody could be talking about.
[00:34:53 - 00:34:57]	 Once it happens to you, you know exactly what they mean.
[00:34:57 - 00:35:04]	 The mushroom is animate and articulate and also kind of extraterrestrial.
[00:35:04 - 00:35:17]	 Its hallucinations tend to the grandiose, the history ending, the galactarian destiny that awaits the biological overmind.
[00:35:17 - 00:35:21]	 It's this "da-da, da-da" kind of thing.
[00:35:21 - 00:35:31]	 Iowasca is biological and organic and you feel the spirit of the forest, like Rocio said.
[00:35:31 - 00:35:35]	 It's more feminine.
[00:35:35 - 00:35:45]	 And after a good Iowasca trip, you feel like your eyes are just bugging out of your head because you've spent so much time looking.
[00:35:45 - 00:35:48]	 The language of Iowasca is visual.
[00:35:48 - 00:35:53]	 It shows you and shows you and shows you and shows you.
[00:35:53 - 00:35:58]	 And once this showing gets going, it's hard to shut it off.
[00:35:58 - 00:36:06]	 I mean, it really wants to show, but it silently spills out this cornucopia of images.
[00:36:06 - 00:36:14]	 And you sing and you manipulate them, where the mushroom is highly articulate.
[00:36:14 - 00:36:21]	 It also is visual, but it also can talk, which is just such an astonishing thing for a Western.
[00:36:21 - 00:36:25]	 I mean, we are just not prepared for talking fungi.
[00:36:25 - 00:36:27]	 Have you tried the two together?
[00:36:27 - 00:36:28]	 The two together?
[00:36:28 - 00:36:40]	 I wouldn't do that, actually, because I think the monoamine oxidase inhibiting properties of the harvane would so intensify and synergize the psilocybin
[00:36:40 - 00:36:46]	 that you might find yourself swinging from the chandelier.
[00:36:46 - 00:36:50]	 And the shamans don't do that either.
[00:36:50 - 00:36:57]	 In the Amazon, you can rarely get an Iowasca to give you the time of day regarding mushrooms.
[00:36:57 - 00:37:02]	 They always say, "Well, we use mushrooms when we don't have Iowasca."
[00:37:02 - 00:37:07]	 But the caveat is that we always have Iowasca.
[00:37:08 - 00:37:17]	 Is it common for women to, I mean, stand in a jungle, women taking Iowasca, or is it really because of the lighting?
[00:37:17 - 00:37:25]	 It depends on the tribal, it depends on the people, but around Kukafa, there were women in the circles.
[00:37:25 - 00:37:35]	 There was this woman, this ancient woman, Nisraura Angulo, who just, you know, she drank with the best of them,
[00:37:35 - 00:37:42]	 and would recount outrageous visions, and this lady must have weighed under 100 pounds.
[00:37:42 - 00:37:54]	 One of the shamanesses, or female shamans that we tried to contact in '76, is this famous woman who studied with Manuel Cardal Barrios,
[00:37:54 - 00:37:59]	 the guy who wrote Wizard of the Upper End, and her name was Juana González Ope.
[00:37:59 - 00:38:15]	 He told us about her. She had come to him as a girl of 25 with leprosy, and he had taken her into the woods for six months and cured her of leprosy,
[00:38:15 - 00:38:21]	 which, if you can cure leprosy with Iowasca, is definitely an unorthodox idea.
[00:38:21 - 00:38:35]	 She became a major Iowasca-era in this area, and her stuff was said to be the best, but she had lost her hands and her feet,
[00:38:35 - 00:38:46]	 so the experience of taking Iowasca with her was fraught with her presence, which was freaky, extremely extreme,
[00:38:46 - 00:38:53]	 especially in the flickering firelight.
[00:38:53 - 00:39:02]	 There's a new field of this, and healing sounds, in which a person's voice is analyzed, a spectrum analyzer,
[00:39:02 - 00:39:08]	 and the missing notes are provided to that person, either by singing or humming.
[00:39:08 - 00:39:14]	 To get the person to just match the notes that he's missing, apparently, will heal all kinds of ailments.
[00:39:14 - 00:39:23]	 I'm wondering if you can see sounds, if the pure neuro just can see by the sound that person's voice is making,
[00:39:23 - 00:39:28]	 what's totally missing in his picture, as in singing or humming.
[00:39:28 - 00:39:39]	 Well, obviously, there's some kind of diagnostic sensitivity to invisible stuff that we don't or narrowly perceive.
[00:39:39 - 00:39:45]	 We were talking last week, some of you may have seen this, I mention it because I'm trying to confirm it.
[00:39:45 - 00:39:55]	 I've seen on three occasions in my life, at about this life level, sitting watching someone in profile,
[00:39:55 - 00:40:06]	 as you're watching me, on a very slight dose of mushrooms, there's something that goes on in front of the person's mouth.
[00:40:06 - 00:40:19]	 It looks like oil in water, and my rational explanation for what this is, is that you pull air into your lungs,
[00:40:19 - 00:40:28]	 and it is heated, and therefore it has a slightly different refractive index than the cold air in front of your face.
[00:40:28 - 00:40:38]	 And so when you speak, the mixing of the hot and cold air can be perceived under some conditions, and I was photographed under some conditions,
[00:40:38 - 00:40:45]	 as a kind of oily, turbulent something in front of your mouth.
[00:40:45 - 00:40:51]	 Well, is that cheerful explanation correct, or are we on the brink of something else,
[00:40:51 - 00:41:00]	 some more demanding or exotic phenomena? I don't know.
[00:41:00 - 00:41:07]	 Going back just a little bit, I should probably mention a friend and I have been growing ayahuasca clones,
[00:41:07 - 00:41:11]	 I guess it's from your clone actually, for three years.
[00:41:11 - 00:41:22]	 And in the lack of the stachycerin or DMT additives, my friend has reported numerous successes with shrooms.
[00:41:22 - 00:41:25]	 Adding the shrooms to the ayahuasca? Yes.
[00:41:25 - 00:41:28]	 What proportion do you know? Not sure.
[00:41:28 - 00:41:33]	 It would be interesting to know. I think you might get away with that.
[00:41:33 - 00:41:39]	 Probably what it would be is a fair bit of ayahuasca and a tiny bit of mushrooms.
[00:41:39 - 00:41:51]	 One of the longest, hardest evenings I ever spent was I got the idea I would take half a dose of ayahuasca and half a dose of mushrooms,
[00:41:51 - 00:42:00]	 and I felt like I was battling demons to return with a shred of my sanity.
[00:42:00 - 00:42:06]	 I mean, it was just ghastly. I was pretty phobic of that combo.
[00:42:06 - 00:42:08]	 You took them at different times?
[00:42:08 - 00:42:18]	 No, I took them together. Two and a half grams of mushrooms and a half a dose of ayahuasca, and it turned me every way but loose.
[00:42:18 - 00:42:25]	 It was unpleasant. I mean, I really thought I had done it this time. What it did was it interfered.
[00:42:25 - 00:42:29]	 It was very clear what was happening. It was very clear.
[00:42:29 - 00:42:36]	 What seemed to be happening was that it was interrupting RNA transcription of short-term memory.
[00:42:36 - 00:42:48]	 So I knew who I was and my history and how I had gotten into this situation, but I couldn't remember the last three minutes at all.
[00:42:48 - 00:42:56]	 This would create this anxiety in me, and then I would forget why I was anxious.
[00:42:56 - 00:43:08]	 That would create more anxiety, and I was into some kind of intellectual regress. I was just riveted in this chair,
[00:43:08 - 00:43:18]	 and I thought, "If this doesn't unsmap itself, they'll just put me in a ward somewhere. I'll just be carried out of here."
[00:43:18 - 00:43:30]	 It felt like that scene in 2001 when the guy is outside making the repair, and then he comes back and says, "Open the pod door, Hal."
[00:43:30 - 00:43:33]	 I can't do that, Dave.
[00:43:33 - 00:43:48]	 I could almost see the jam in the mathematics machinery in the synapse. I mean, I had this very clear vision of, "Oh, God, it's gone down the wrong pathway.
[00:43:48 - 00:43:53]	 The degradated enzyme has somehow been locked out of the process."
[00:43:53 - 00:44:09]	 And here we are, folks, circling the airfield, running out of fuel, zero visibility down below, and after about two or three hours of this, it's invasive.
[00:44:09 - 00:44:11]	 Well, you should show your funds.
[00:44:11 - 00:44:16]	 It doesn't preclude continuing this. It will just jack it to a higher level.
[00:44:16 - 00:44:18]	 Cool.
[00:44:18 - 00:44:28]	 [BLANK_AUDIO]