[00:00:00 - 00:00:09] Mystic Fire Video and Audio proudly presents Terrence McKenna, History Ends in Green. [00:00:09 - 00:00:13] This is tape three of a six cassette series. [00:00:13 - 00:00:34] [Music] [00:00:34 - 00:00:40] So there were questions outstanding when we parted this morning. [00:00:40 - 00:00:43] So why don't we just take that up then. [00:00:43 - 00:01:00] [Inaudible] [00:01:00 - 00:01:11] [Inaudible] [00:01:11 - 00:01:29] Well, I mean, as somebody who lived through all that, I guess it was the hardest lesson that we had to learn was how big a revolution you can have and how quickly they can toss water on it and have business as usual. [00:01:29 - 00:01:34] Eric Yonch introduced me to the term metastable. [00:01:34 - 00:01:39] And it certainly is true that many, many things are metastable. [00:01:39 - 00:01:42] You think it looks easy to push it over. [00:01:42 - 00:01:55] But when you start pushing, you discover that the Leaning Tower of Pisa goes 800 feet underground or something and it's not moving anywhere. [00:01:55 - 00:01:56] I don't know. [00:01:56 - 00:02:01] I think that there's a real constipation in the historical process. [00:02:01 - 00:02:08] We talk about how the 20th century is this century of tremendous change and innovation. [00:02:08 - 00:02:19] But actually, they've been remarkably successful in forestalling any true outbreak of the future. [00:02:19 - 00:02:29] I mean, the most science fiction moment in the 20th century, or one of the most science fiction moments to date, is probably 1939. [00:02:29 - 00:02:45] And if you think about 1939, if you think about the V2 rockets raining down on London and Germany and the grip of a leader with a genetic race theory that he plans to establish for a thousand years, [00:02:45 - 00:02:52] this is science fiction style talk, rocket bombs and master races and robot armies and all that stuff. [00:02:52 - 00:02:55] Well, so then it was quenched. [00:02:55 - 00:02:58] Fascism was sort of quenched. [00:02:58 - 00:03:03] Actually, it infected everybody who got near it to the point that everybody was a fascist. [00:03:03 - 00:03:11] But also, everybody went back to work realizing very self-centered ideals. [00:03:11 - 00:03:21] In the United States, what had happened was that paradise had been promised the generation that would defeat fascism. [00:03:21 - 00:03:28] But because it isn't easy to deliver paradise, it had to be tacky. [00:03:28 - 00:03:36] So then you get Levittown and the suburbs and modular building and Bauhaus styles of design. [00:03:36 - 00:03:41] This is an effort to create a proletarian paradise. [00:03:41 - 00:03:49] The Marxists talked proletarian paradise, but the American middle class actually created it during the 50s. [00:03:49 - 00:04:04] Then in the 60s, what happened was, well, the precondition for social upheaval seemed to be an extremely unpopular war being prosecuted thousands and thousands of miles from home. [00:04:04 - 00:04:14] And then LSD, which was a unique phenomenon because so much could be made so easily. [00:04:14 - 00:04:19] I mean, there are few weapons on earth, even gas. [00:04:19 - 00:04:24] It's hard to create enough poison gas to kill a million people. [00:04:24 - 00:04:31] A guy with a small bathroom can create enough LSD to stone a million people. [00:04:31 - 00:04:45] But I think that what the lesson I drew from the 60s is that history can't be rushed and that history is not made by individuals, even righteous individuals. [00:04:45 - 00:04:53] That you know what Shakespeare said, all the world's a stage and its people merely players. [00:04:53 - 00:04:58] They have their entrances and their exits and each man in his time plays many parts. [00:04:58 - 00:05:02] It is a work of literature somehow. [00:05:02 - 00:05:13] And the 60s, for all of what it was, it must be that it was only prelude and they managed to get the lid back on. [00:05:13 - 00:05:22] But I think at great detriment to themselves because what's the change is like a gas. [00:05:22 - 00:05:26] You know, if you plug the keyhole, it comes in under the door. [00:05:26 - 00:05:30] If you plug under the door, it comes in over the transom. [00:05:30 - 00:05:32] There's no end to it. [00:05:32 - 00:05:37] And and forestalling it makes it more violent. [00:05:37 - 00:05:48] I mean, what I would like to see would be a conscious engineering of change where you actually anticipate social change and try and make it easier. [00:05:48 - 00:05:53] As a perfect example is the stupid situation now in the Middle East. [00:05:53 - 00:06:05] It's been known since the early Carter administration that we should put policies in place which de-emphasize our need for Middle East oil. [00:06:05 - 00:06:09] So for 20 years, they looked at that situation and never did anything. [00:06:09 - 00:06:13] Now they say they have to fight a world war because of that. [00:06:13 - 00:06:18] Well, it's just bad management is what it is. [00:06:18 - 00:06:31] But I think I think that this crisis in the Soviet Union and in the East Bloc countries, which was presented as a crisis of Marxism, [00:06:31 - 00:06:44] is actually a crisis of centralized institutional control everywhere and that a lot of America's assumptions will be swept away. [00:06:44 - 00:06:49] It came first to places like Czechoslovakia and Poland. [00:06:49 - 00:06:59] But do you think that the United Arab Emirates and Qatar and places like this can be far behind? [00:06:59 - 00:07:06] I mean, these are oligarchic states ruled by single families, dynastic lines. [00:07:06 - 00:07:11] It's the most reactionary form of government you can have. [00:07:11 - 00:07:21] So what I see happening in the world is fragmentation on a vast scale to be applauded in all cases. [00:07:21 - 00:07:25] This is not a bad thing. This is what McLuhan said would happen. [00:07:25 - 00:07:33] It isn't going to be a world federal estate ruled from Geneva with a spaceport in Antarctica and all that malarkey. [00:07:33 - 00:07:40] It's just going to be, you know, thousands and thousands of local and somewhat integrated. [00:07:40 - 00:07:49] Like the European model is interesting because there it's simultaneously falling to pieces and integrating itself at the same time. [00:07:49 - 00:08:01] Integration of currency and economics, but preservation of cultural diversity and that sort of thing seems to me to be what's happening. [00:08:01 - 00:08:08] But nobody has to shout and nobody has to go into the streets. It's much bigger than that. [00:08:08 - 00:08:18] And as far as the thing in the Middle East is concerned, I think probably, well, I'll talk more about it this afternoon. [00:08:18 - 00:08:24] But it has an inevitability to it that is huge. [00:08:24 - 00:08:33] The United States is in the process of, you know, playing a fairly desperate hand. [00:08:33 - 00:08:45] They could just stand so much of all that disarmament and troop reduction stuff and then they just finally couldn't stand it anymore. [00:08:45 - 00:08:59] And I think it's good news that nobody is in charge of the historical process because even the best motivated people have the wrong idea. [00:08:59 - 00:09:06] You know, more faith in the unconscious. It's gotten us this far. God knows. [00:09:06 - 00:09:08] Yeah. [00:09:08 - 00:09:16] You were talking about syntax and language and being able to go back on the other side and look at it. [00:09:16 - 00:09:21] Chomsky, I think, wrote some books about what that syntax all looks like. [00:09:21 - 00:09:25] I was just wondering what you saw when you went on the other side. [00:09:25 - 00:09:35] Well, Chomsky's idea, which he called transformational grammar, was he eventually he dreamed of being able to write the rules not only for all, [00:09:35 - 00:09:44] not only for English, but for all rationally apprehendable languages. And he felt there were 15 rules of deep structure. [00:09:44 - 00:09:52] I never could really understand the fine print on Chomsky. It seemed pretty tormented to me. [00:09:52 - 00:10:06] What I discovered most spectacularly in the DMT state is there are these entities there, which I call self-transforming machine elves. [00:10:06 - 00:10:15] And they look sort of like self-dribbling jeweled basketballs. And they have a linguistic intentionality. [00:10:15 - 00:10:25] They want to communicate. The songs that they sing condense as objects in three-dimensional space. [00:10:25 - 00:10:34] I've compared them to the eggs of Fabregé, but that does them, they're much more interesting than that. [00:10:34 - 00:10:46] They are like crystalline jeweled semi see-through opaque movemented things, which look like sculptures, [00:10:46 - 00:10:50] but you can tell when you're looking at them, they're actually sentences. [00:10:50 - 00:10:55] And the sentences are saying themselves in some weird way. [00:10:55 - 00:11:06] And in the way that a good sentence, a good long sentence has all its clauses operating and its articles rotating smoothly [00:11:06 - 00:11:14] and its gerunds running up and down their tracks and everything, in the same way that a good sentence does that, [00:11:14 - 00:11:20] these little objects have this same kind of linguistic coherency. [00:11:20 - 00:11:31] Well, then what the entities in this space are doing is they're urging me, the recipient, to explore this and to do it, [00:11:31 - 00:11:36] to sing these songs, to make these objects condense. [00:11:36 - 00:11:47] And I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out what this could possibly be about in terms of new ideas about it. [00:11:47 - 00:11:55] The only new idea I've had about it is it's occurred to me with some force over the past year and a half or so [00:11:55 - 00:12:03] that the conclusion that I never looked at carefully because my mind tried to shy away from it [00:12:03 - 00:12:13] was that maybe these things have something to do with the dead, that if you were to ask a shaman what these entities were, [00:12:13 - 00:12:23] he would just say without hesitation, "Oh, well, these are the ancestors. These are the spirits of the ancestors." [00:12:23 - 00:12:34] There's a hair-raising quality to contacting these things. They are both very familiar and yet somehow freakishly bizarre. [00:12:34 - 00:12:47] And the presence of the familiarity with the bizarre creates a kind of cognitive dissonance that's very, well, there's just nothing else that feels quite like that. [00:12:47 - 00:12:56] I wrote an introduction recently for a reprint of Evans Vence's book, "The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries," [00:12:56 - 00:13:08] and I discovered when I reread that book that the doctrine of purgatory, which is good church doctrine, [00:13:08 - 00:13:16] it's a realm where souls go to be cleansed for a few millennia. They're not so sinful that they go to hell, [00:13:16 - 00:13:21] but they go to purgatory for a few thousand years before they enter heaven. [00:13:21 - 00:13:32] Well, I always assumed that this idea came out of the Roman contact with gnostic ideas, [00:13:32 - 00:13:42] but I discovered in writing the introduction for "The Fairy Faith" that St. Patrick invented the idea of purgatory, [00:13:42 - 00:13:56] and he invented it when he was converting the Irish to Christianity. He did it as a way to Christianize the notion of the "fay," of fairyland. [00:13:56 - 00:14:07] And the Celtic pure belief is that the dead go to a realm that is co-present all around us. [00:14:07 - 00:14:16] We can't see them, but all around us is just jammed with souls in wild states of activity, [00:14:16 - 00:14:23] and that if you have the eye, you know, a certain talent, you can see these things. [00:14:23 - 00:14:33] Well, Patrick, in order to have an appeal to these Celtic peasants, made purgatory part of the Christian cosmogonic scheme, [00:14:33 - 00:14:47] but when you actually smoke DMT, you burst into a space which seems very much to fit the description of this elfin inhabited space, [00:14:47 - 00:14:54] because if you think about what is the gnosis of elves, elves are artificers. [00:14:54 - 00:14:58] They make things in metal and jewels and glass. [00:14:58 - 00:15:06] This is the archetype of the elves, that they are underground craftsmen, and they are humorous, [00:15:06 - 00:15:14] but their humor is highly unpredictable and sort of not necessarily running in your favor. [00:15:14 - 00:15:20] They're somewhat cruel and boisterous and like that. [00:15:20 - 00:15:30] Well, when you break into this space, you discover, you know, that you're in fairyland, you're in fairyland as much as Darby O'Gill [00:15:30 - 00:15:40] or any of the rest of these people who ever made it across, and the secret of the elves, what they really fabricate is language. [00:15:40 - 00:15:47] This is why in Irish mythology, if you can get elves on your side, you can make great poetry, [00:15:47 - 00:15:57] because they're the keepers of linguistic artifice, and getting elves on your side makes you into a master poet. [00:15:57 - 00:16:06] Well, it's interesting then that in the Amazon, where there's a tradition of taking DMT, there are these things called Hirooki, [00:16:06 - 00:16:14] and they're actually described as bouncing demons, and the Hirooki, you're supposed to get, [00:16:14 - 00:16:19] they come into being when you're stoned, and you're supposed to get them into your chest, [00:16:19 - 00:16:22] you're supposed to invite them into your chest somehow. [00:16:22 - 00:16:30] Well, then the number of these things you have inside of you determines what kind of a real man you are, [00:16:30 - 00:16:32] and this is generally a male practice. [00:16:32 - 00:16:40] Well, I notice that these DMT tykes, as I call them, they jump in and out of your body too. [00:16:40 - 00:16:48] They seem to be trying to teach you something about the body image, or their relationship to your self-identity, [00:16:48 - 00:16:54] and all the time they're saying, you know, make these objects, do what we're doing. [00:16:54 - 00:17:04] Well, then you go down to the Amazon, to the Ikaro singing Ayahuascaros, and they are using voice to make objects. [00:17:04 - 00:17:15] So, what we're on the track of here is a physiological ability, or a pharmac-driven physiological ability, [00:17:15 - 00:17:19] to transduce language as something seen. [00:17:19 - 00:17:28] Well, now you see, if you could see what I mean, it would be as though we were the same person. [00:17:28 - 00:17:37] Seeing what I mean is a much more intimate relationship to my intent than hearing what I mean. [00:17:37 - 00:17:43] You can hear what I mean and go and look it up in your little dictionary, [00:17:43 - 00:17:47] and get it all wrong if your dictionary and mine are different. [00:17:47 - 00:17:53] But if you see what I mean, we will be in agreement, because I see what I mean too. [00:17:53 - 00:17:58] So, if meaning were something that one could sculpturally command in three-dimensional space, [00:17:58 - 00:18:01] and we would walk around and look at it. [00:18:01 - 00:18:11] Well, part of what I was doing in Linz, in Austria, was trying to get these virtual reality people hooked into this as a concept. [00:18:11 - 00:18:16] Because you see, with the present virtual reality, do you all know what virtual reality is? [00:18:16 - 00:18:18] Everybody knows what it is. [00:18:18 - 00:18:25] Virtual reality is a technology where you put on a helmet, and you have a little, and then you think you're in this place, [00:18:25 - 00:18:28] some other place, under engineering control. [00:18:28 - 00:18:35] Well, what you could do is you could slave the parts of English speech to geometric objects. [00:18:35 - 00:18:43] So that, for instance, every time you use the word "and," a rotating turquoise dodecahedron appeared over your left shoulder. [00:18:43 - 00:18:52] Similarly, all the parts of the dictionary could be slaved to physically, or to visually beholdable objects. [00:18:52 - 00:19:01] Well then, as I would speak, this thing would be happening over my left shoulder, a kind of self-constructing grammatical tinker toy. [00:19:01 - 00:19:10] Well, I maintain that very quickly people would stop listening and start looking, and that they would be getting it. [00:19:10 - 00:19:18] In fact, they would be getting more than if they were listening, because the way in which these syntactically visible parts of speech [00:19:18 - 00:19:29] can be connected and shaded and presented and emphasized and italicized and underlined and brightly colored and set in different fonts and so forth. [00:19:29 - 00:19:37] In other words, many more dimensions to the intent to communicate can be brought into play. [00:19:37 - 00:19:46] And I think this is what technology is probably driving for and what the psychedelic experience will inspire, [00:19:46 - 00:19:54] is this kind of sculptural linguistic modality where meaning is something that we behold. [00:19:54 - 00:20:02] [INAUDIBLE] [00:20:02 - 00:20:08] Well, we have to find out whether there are visual types and audio types, [00:20:08 - 00:20:15] or whether there are generalized human biases embedded in cultural conventions. [00:20:15 - 00:20:26] You know, McLuhan talked about how at the inventing of printing, there was a shift from the eye culture, as he called it, to the ear culture. [00:20:26 - 00:20:35] That before printing, if somebody gave you a piece of manuscript, it was in cannabula. [00:20:35 - 00:20:41] It was written, it was a manuscript, and therefore you had to look at it. [00:20:41 - 00:20:51] After printing was invented, every E looked like every other E, and so print acquired uniformity. [00:20:51 - 00:20:56] And uniformity, you don't, when we read, we do not look. [00:20:56 - 00:21:00] You don't look at the page, you read it, and your eye rips through it. [00:21:00 - 00:21:08] You don't linger over each letter and try to piece out how it's different from the other Fs on that line and stuff like that. [00:21:08 - 00:21:10] But in manuscript culture, you do. [00:21:10 - 00:21:22] Similarly, print created an expectation then of uniformity in the way that the eye expected the letters to always present a uniform appearance. [00:21:22 - 00:21:26] There began to be the idea of uniformity of social appearances. [00:21:26 - 00:21:34] And previously, the largest social class had been the guild. [00:21:34 - 00:21:43] But suddenly you get people talking about the ruling class, the middle class, the lower class, white collar, blue collar. [00:21:43 - 00:21:51] These are linear uniform terms for describing lots of non-linear, non-uniform phenomena. [00:21:51 - 00:21:59] And then finally, of course, with the machine age, you get the idea of interchangeability of parts. [00:21:59 - 00:22:05] This is an idea that would never emerge in a, could only emerge in a print culture. [00:22:05 - 00:22:13] Because in a print culture, the interchangeability of the parts of print becomes an established convention. [00:22:13 - 00:22:17] So you say, well, we want to make tractors or hay mowers. [00:22:17 - 00:22:27] So let's not just make one hay mower, let's make 50 of them and let's make them all at once and let's lay out the pieces and then let's assemble them in teams. [00:22:27 - 00:22:33] This kind of thinking arises out of the bias of a technology. [00:22:33 - 00:22:36] McLuhan talked a lot about technological biases. [00:22:36 - 00:22:54] Isn't this going back to the Chinese ideogram where they had 50,000 symbols at one time and now they have only about 5,000 newspapers and the average person only knows that much? [00:22:54 - 00:22:58] Well, yeah, I mean, language is becoming more glyphic. [00:22:58 - 00:23:01] Reality is becoming more iconic. [00:23:01 - 00:23:12] When you travel in Europe, you're aware that you're skating along on a thin surface of icons that if you're careful will never break through and let you down. [00:23:12 - 00:23:23] You know, you can read all this international jargon about where the dog can poop and not to smoke and not to open the window and so forth and so on. [00:23:23 - 00:23:29] Yeah, we need an iconic language and we're tending back toward it. [00:23:29 - 00:23:37] Now, an iconic language like Chinese has also undergone huge amounts of local conventionalization. [00:23:37 - 00:23:45] So I don't think we're all going to end up learning Chinese unless it's going to return more to its ancient form. [00:23:45 - 00:23:58] Mayan is an interesting case because Mayan is a rebus language where you use icons not to symbolize things but sounds. [00:23:58 - 00:24:00] Do you see the difference? [00:24:00 - 00:24:15] So, for instance, if we want to in rebus language, you would put a picture of an eye, a saw going through wood, an ant running across the ground and a rose. [00:24:15 - 00:24:20] And that would be a sign which said I saw ant rose. [00:24:20 - 00:24:22] The icons symbolize sounds. [00:24:22 - 00:24:25] They don't symbolize meaning. [00:24:25 - 00:24:38] And that makes it hellishly difficult to reconstruct a lost language that is written this way because the language, what you have are the symbols of sounds and you don't have the sounds anymore. [00:24:38 - 00:24:40] So how can you reconstruct the language? [00:24:40 - 00:24:46] This is the problem Mayan decipherment has had to grapple with. [00:24:46 - 00:24:47] Yeah. [00:24:47 - 00:24:48] I'm thinking about visual language. [00:24:48 - 00:24:51] I keep thinking of the prism of deaf people. [00:24:51 - 00:24:53] They process language in a lot of different spheres. [00:24:53 - 00:24:55] And they want to use visual and spatial. [00:24:55 - 00:24:59] And they interpret language in a visual and spatial way. [00:24:59 - 00:25:03] And when they try to teach you sign language, they keep saying, "Think in pictures. [00:25:03 - 00:25:04] Stop thinking in words. [00:25:04 - 00:25:05] Think in pictures." [00:25:05 - 00:25:09] Have you ever had any contact with deaf people or deaf community? [00:25:09 - 00:25:10] Not with the community. [00:25:10 - 00:25:12] I've known deaf people. [00:25:12 - 00:25:13] And yes, you're right. [00:25:13 - 00:25:21] This thinking in pictures, and this is something that happens at a certain point in most psychedelic experiences. [00:25:21 - 00:25:30] You realize that the quality of our ordinary thought, or at least in my case, it is language. [00:25:30 - 00:25:32] It's a stream of words. [00:25:32 - 00:25:40] And then it can become this much richer, fuller, imagistic type thinking. [00:25:40 - 00:25:42] This is very elusive. [00:25:42 - 00:25:49] I mean, it's so close to the level of human organization that probably there are some people in this room who are doing it right now. [00:25:49 - 00:25:58] There are art movements like the pre-Raphaelites or the Romantics that put great stress on this kind of thing. [00:25:58 - 00:26:03] Even had exercises to elicit this kind of thinking. [00:26:03 - 00:26:09] I mean, I think that we're -- and you know, and McLuhan is trying to get at this by talking about the effects of technology. [00:26:09 - 00:26:16] It's that we haven't realized just how fluid the mental modality is. [00:26:16 - 00:26:24] You know, Thomas Aquinas in the Middle Ages was thought to be a great saint. [00:26:24 - 00:26:34] And he would prove his sainthood by -- they would come to him with a Bible or a work of theology. [00:26:34 - 00:26:43] And they would open it in front of him and let him look at it for a few minutes and then close it and question him about it. [00:26:43 - 00:26:45] And he could answer questions. [00:26:45 - 00:26:50] And they thought this was a proof of his sanctity. [00:26:50 - 00:26:53] And all he was doing was silently reading. [00:26:53 - 00:26:57] He was the only man in Europe who could silently read. [00:26:57 - 00:27:01] And everybody else had to sound the words. [00:27:01 - 00:27:08] Well, we can't quite wrap our mind around that because for us this is just something you do. [00:27:08 - 00:27:12] You know, it's not even as hard as riding a bicycle. [00:27:12 - 00:27:23] Well, how many things are there where we are down between narrow walls of expectation and just a little tweak of our programming would make a real difference? [00:27:23 - 00:27:31] One of the things that fascinates me about the psychedelics that we haven't talked about at all this morning because it's kind of on a technical bent, [00:27:31 - 00:27:37] is how close the most interesting ones are to ordinary brain chemistry. [00:27:37 - 00:27:45] It isn't that the strangest, weirdest drugs give the strangest, weirdest experiences. [00:27:45 - 00:27:54] You know, the drugs that are most like what you have in your brain at this moment give the strangest, weirdest experiences. [00:27:54 - 00:28:05] The ones that are just one tweaked atom away from ordinary consciousness are the ones that give the profound world dissolving experiences. [00:28:05 - 00:28:20] So this suggests to me that what we deal with when we deal with psychedelics is future chemical states of mind, future ratios of neurotransmitters in the human brain. [00:28:20 - 00:28:40] Is it that the 5-HT2 and A receptors for serotonin are slowly over time, centuries, being swapped out for a receptor that will accept a more energetic molecule like DMT? [00:28:40 - 00:28:46] We know that DMT occurs in ordinary human metabolism, but we don't know why. [00:28:46 - 00:28:48] Is it increasing over time? [00:28:48 - 00:28:52] We don't know because we've only been measuring it 20 or 30 years. [00:28:52 - 00:29:08] I mean, the place where evolution is going to be visible is in consciousness because this is where the chemistry is most delicately poised to augment or suppress function. [00:29:08 - 00:29:16] So, you know, we are very well set up to observe evolution and shift in conscious modalities. [00:29:16 - 00:29:21] And this is no neutral, cooled out scientific endeavor. [00:29:21 - 00:29:30] The rate at which we can do this probably determines the rate at which we can save ourselves and the planet from ruin. [00:29:30 - 00:29:40] Music. You haven't mentioned the function of music in your non-linear communication group. [00:29:40 - 00:29:49] Well, music is, you know, this very old form of art which appeals to this thing I'm talking about, [00:29:49 - 00:29:57] not quite with the kind of linguistic specificity that maybe we would desire ultimately. [00:29:57 - 00:30:10] But music is a language of emotion that hovers between the seen and the heard pretty ambiguously. [00:30:10 - 00:30:17] I mean, for the romantics, you know, they were one of these groups of people who talked about synesthesia. [00:30:17 - 00:30:28] This is this technical term for the senses moving from one modality to another, tasting colors, feeling music, hearing light. [00:30:28 - 00:30:45] And a lot of the talk in the 19th century among symbolists and pre-Raphaelites and romantics was about these synesthesias and how to trigger them. [00:30:45 - 00:30:53] Strangely enough, this led to the first bout of psychedelic, quote unquote, psychedelic drug experimentation. [00:30:53 - 00:31:05] It was the romantic pursuit of synesthesia through opium that created the first wave of opium addiction in literate English society. [00:31:05 - 00:31:20] I mean, Coleridge and DeQuincy and these people were quite consciously trying to use drugs to create and push the definitions of art out further. [00:31:20 - 00:31:39] Somebody said architecture is frozen music from which it must follow then that music is unfrozen architecture. [00:31:39 - 00:31:43] Liquid architecture. [00:31:43 - 00:31:51] The architectonic quality of hallucinations when they're driven by music is very striking. [00:31:51 - 00:31:58] And the way in which all these things come together, it has almost a kind of gothic elegance. [00:31:58 - 00:32:07] The way tone can be used to create impressions of large vaulted space and this sort of thing. [00:32:07 - 00:32:20] I mean, it's really an unexplored thing, and I think technology is going to teach us a lot about making that kind of art in particular. [00:32:20 - 00:32:21] Yeah. [00:32:21 - 00:32:30] You talked about being a technologist. Did you get an opportunity to talk with or study with the teachings of Vaclav Havel? [00:32:30 - 00:32:41] Vaclav Havel couldn't see me because he had Margaret Thatcher. It's true. [00:32:41 - 00:32:42] Frozen architecture. [00:32:42 - 00:32:44] Frozen architecture. [00:32:44 - 00:32:50] No, I mean, Czechoslovakia is an interesting case because you can see, you know, [00:32:50 - 00:32:56] Prague's reputation before the revolution was that it was the gloomiest city in Europe. [00:32:56 - 00:33:08] And you can certainly see that it would have been a gloomy city if people had been marching around in uniforms and there had been bread lines and fear and loathing. [00:33:08 - 00:33:18] With communism gone, people stay up all night and dance in the streets and suddenly it just looks charming and unwashed. [00:33:18 - 00:33:30] And we just need to get the soot and industrial grime off all this Jürgen Stiele and Art Deco architecture and it will be just fine. [00:33:30 - 00:33:43] The thing about Czechoslovakia is, you know, if you scratch a Czech, you find a Celt because the Celts were there a long, long time ago building fortresses on all the hills. [00:33:43 - 00:33:52] And and when you look at the people in large crowds of which, my God, do they know how to get crowds together? [00:33:52 - 00:34:02] There are crowds of them everywhere. They have that same Celtic cast that you get at a West Coast Grateful Dead concert. [00:34:02 - 00:34:07] I mean, everybody has brown hair. [00:34:07 - 00:34:20] Czechoslovakia was exciting because all these places have an opportunity to redefine freedom, to be even more free, you know, to push it further. [00:34:20 - 00:34:36] And what I was doing there to have a mission, have a reason to be there, was visiting the National Museum Department of Mycology and leaving off spore prints and growers guides with people in the department [00:34:36 - 00:34:49] who I thought might like to grow psilocybin mushrooms and being good Slavs, they were very open to this and very excited by the idea of growing mushrooms. [00:34:49 - 00:35:01] You know, cultures can be divided into mycophilic and mycophobic and mycophobic cultures are like the English for whom all mushrooms are toadstools. [00:35:01 - 00:35:07] And you should put it down because you don't know where it's been. This is the basic English attitude. [00:35:07 - 00:35:17] Well, then Slavs and and Celts, there are hundreds of words in these languages for mushrooms and mushroom outings. [00:35:17 - 00:35:23] And people go out on on Saturdays on mushroom forays in Czechoslovakia. [00:35:23 - 00:35:32] Czechoslovakia, a national bestseller is a guide to the mushrooms of Czechoslovakia. No home can be without it. [00:35:32 - 00:35:41] So you can imagine that it's a different a different attitude. Prague is further west than Vienna. [00:35:41 - 00:36:00] It's the real center of old Europe. And of course, because of the court of Rudolf the second, it was the court of all this alchemical Protestant alchemical political plotting and lots of intrigue. [00:36:00 - 00:36:11] That's why we're called the Bohemians is because that radical style of free thought began in the principalities of Bohemia, [00:36:11 - 00:36:18] with people deciding nobody should wear clothes or we should get rid of money. [00:36:18 - 00:36:26] And then everybody would do this, you know, until the local bishop would get an army together and come and kick some sense into everybody. [00:36:26 - 00:36:34] But over and over in Bohemia, this kind of outbreak of radical free thought was typical. [00:36:34 - 00:36:42] Yeah. A year ago, I was fortunate enough to see this in my Luskin company. [00:36:42 - 00:36:45] The first part of it was in rapture of these glorious visions. [00:36:45 - 00:36:57] And then there was a sudden shift of perspective and I realized suddenly the visions were all taking place inside of the snake, a large giant snake. [00:36:57 - 00:36:59] The visions were actually being projected on its skin. The snakes got it riding and moving. [00:36:59 - 00:37:03] Later, I found that most of the other people in the circle were having visions of snakes too. [00:37:03 - 00:37:11] And then recently in Schaman's drama, the latest Schaman's drama, there's a series of wonderful Ayahuasca paintings and almost all of them have snakes in them. [00:37:11 - 00:37:15] Is that a common thing with Ayahuasca? [00:37:15 - 00:37:23] Well, it's an interesting question. Why do drugs have identities like this and do they have them? [00:37:23 - 00:37:26] And the answer is yes, they certainly do. [00:37:26 - 00:37:35] And it's one of the puzzling pieces of information that I always keep in front of myself when trying to understand these things. [00:37:35 - 00:37:48] That it's irrational that for instance, no matter who you are, you know, Viennese Jew, Icelandic ski instructor, Irish pub owner, [00:37:48 - 00:37:57] if you take Ayahuasca, you will see large snakes, large cats and dancing black people. [00:37:57 - 00:38:07] In this order of statistical frequency with black people being not as common as cats and snakes, cats being not as common as snakes, snakes being the most common. [00:38:07 - 00:38:17] What's going on here? How can it be that a chemical compound that can be defined down to the quantum mechanical positions of the atoms [00:38:17 - 00:38:23] nevertheless seems to have, carry informational content of some sort? [00:38:23 - 00:38:31] Well, I don't know, but here is one possibility and maybe there are others. [00:38:31 - 00:38:43] Maybe this is support for Sheldrake's hypothesis of formative causation that actually around the drug, [00:38:43 - 00:38:50] a complex of ideas has accreted itself in some kind of psychological hyperspace. [00:38:50 - 00:38:58] A pattern has been worn in hyperspace which is the pattern of how this drug works. [00:38:58 - 00:39:06] And it's really in some sense a composite of all the trips of all the people who ever took it. [00:39:06 - 00:39:17] Well, since for the first 20,000 years, all the people who ever took Ayahuasca had snake and jaguar fear as a major source of anxiety. [00:39:17 - 00:39:27] We discover that up front. But of course now why the dancing black people? This becomes less easy to understand. [00:39:27 - 00:39:31] [inaudible] [00:39:31 - 00:39:39] Well, this is the other possibility, see, that the reason these things are so message specific is that this is the plant. [00:39:39 - 00:39:51] This is its presentation. Like with Ayahuasca particularly, its language is visual. [00:39:51 - 00:39:56] I mean after a strong Ayahuasca session, your eyes are bugging out of your head. [00:39:56 - 00:40:00] It's like a visit to Madison Avenue to buy prints. [00:40:00 - 00:40:06] I mean you just looked at so many prints and looked and looked and compared the Bruegel to the Bosch [00:40:06 - 00:40:09] and the Bosch to the Buffon, all this stuff. [00:40:09 - 00:40:18] You know, look, look, look. But then for instance with mushrooms, it's actually verbal. [00:40:18 - 00:40:28] It speaks. It tells you things in plain English in a conversational mode. [00:40:28 - 00:40:40] I don't understand. The more I live, the longer I see of all this stuff, the less I feel that I understand of what is going on. [00:40:40 - 00:40:44] Don't you think there's a consciousness in the plant? [00:40:44 - 00:40:46] You mean a psychedelic plant like that? [00:40:46 - 00:40:50] Well, maybe all sorts of plants. I don't know. [00:40:50 - 00:40:56] Yeah, but why would it have one presentational mode over another? [00:40:56 - 00:41:06] Because it's a particular chemical composite that becomes its own unique life force or composite of biology or whatever. [00:41:06 - 00:41:08] But in that it has its own consciousness. [00:41:08 - 00:41:16] Well, I guess this is what we're left with, that these are the masks by which we understand these things. [00:41:16 - 00:41:22] What happens with the mushroom is it always has a presentational personality. [00:41:22 - 00:41:33] But then when you inquire, you discover that this presentational personality is created for your convenience and that behind it lurks God knows what. [00:41:33 - 00:41:45] And then when you begin to talk to it about that, that's when the trip turns off to the left and begins to get peculiar because you're inquiring into its inner nature. [00:41:45 - 00:41:52] I mean, with the mushroom, you can actually say, show me more of what you really are. [00:41:52 - 00:42:09] And immediately the trip will take a turn away from the dancing mice and all that cheerful, hypnagogic riffraff and towards something, you know, whoo, say, OK, that's enough of who you really are. [00:42:09 - 00:42:13] You know, reassure me now. [00:42:13 - 00:42:16] These things are like personalities, minds. [00:42:16 - 00:42:29] But the question for me is, you know, it's such a strange way to communicate that here is a life form that it can't communicate unless you eat it, unless it's inside you. [00:42:29 - 00:42:36] And then somehow the moray of its being and your being mesh together. [00:42:36 - 00:42:40] And then these images spring into being. [00:42:40 - 00:42:48] But it is in the very act of passing away, being consumed in your metabolism. [00:42:48 - 00:42:51] It's like some kind of act of love or something. [00:42:51 - 00:42:58] You ever ask what it's like having eaten you or being digested? [00:42:58 - 00:43:01] What is it like to take a person? [00:43:01 - 00:43:02] Yes. [00:43:02 - 00:43:10] Well, I asked it once what it wanted to be called and it said, call me Dorothy. [00:43:10 - 00:43:13] And I, Dorothy. [00:43:13 - 00:43:15] And I said, why? [00:43:15 - 00:43:21] And it said, because this seems like Oz to me. [00:43:21 - 00:43:23] I just report these things. [00:43:23 - 00:43:27] I don't know why it wanted to be called Dorothy. [00:43:27 - 00:43:34] When you say it turns left when you take that point of inquiry, you know, the trip goes. [00:43:34 - 00:43:37] And then you've had enough, aren't you? [00:43:37 - 00:43:39] So I already got comfort. [00:43:39 - 00:43:41] Could you say a little more about that? [00:43:41 - 00:43:44] You mean how to steer it through these places? [00:43:44 - 00:43:47] Or why do you want to turn back or what's that? [00:43:47 - 00:43:54] Well, you have the feeling it's a very complex feeling when you deal with the other. [00:43:54 - 00:43:58] It's your friend, sort of. [00:43:58 - 00:44:01] And it's predictable, sort of. [00:44:01 - 00:44:06] But everything has this vibe about it where you don't want to push too much. [00:44:06 - 00:44:15] I mean, I've given a lot of thought to trying to think about where you have had this feeling that I have when I meet the DMT elves. [00:44:15 - 00:44:22] And it's a feeling of exhilaration, but caution, accomplishment, but doubt. [00:44:22 - 00:44:31] And I decided that where I knew this feeling from was you're my dissolute youth as a leader in the back streets of Bombay. [00:44:31 - 00:44:41] Into these labyrinths where these guys with shining eyes and deformed limbs would take us back into these warrens of streets. [00:44:41 - 00:44:49] And they would know that we had enough money on our body to ransom them all for five years income. [00:44:49 - 00:44:51] And we would know that they knew. [00:44:51 - 00:44:57] And yet we would be there to conclude a business deal over a psychedelic substance. [00:44:57 - 00:45:01] This concludes side A. [00:45:01 - 00:45:05] And this feeling of meeting the mean traders. [00:45:05 - 00:45:11] And they would always say, they had this wonderful line calculated to put you completely at your ease. [00:45:11 - 00:45:14] They would say, I am your friend. [00:45:14 - 00:45:17] I am not like all the others. [00:45:17 - 00:45:25] Oh, great. Wonderful. [00:45:25 - 00:45:30] I feel so much better. [00:45:30 - 00:45:33] And that's what these elves are saying. [00:45:33 - 00:45:35] They're saying, you know, don't listen to him or her. [00:45:35 - 00:45:37] I'm your friend. [00:45:37 - 00:45:39] I'm not like all the others. [00:45:39 - 00:45:42] And, you know, you're clearly the new kid in town. [00:45:42 - 00:45:49] You can barely sit up and they're able to pick your pocket from 10 dimensions you don't even know exist. [00:45:49 - 00:45:56] So you're trying to sort this out in in in good order. [00:45:56 - 00:46:02] I wanted to go back to the idea of assimilation that in order to have this experience. [00:46:02 - 00:46:06] And so far, I've said it tonight, it's a process of digestion and assimilation. [00:46:06 - 00:46:12] And that really is true of getting yourself to that consciousness. [00:46:12 - 00:46:15] And that's actually true of all the experiences one has. [00:46:15 - 00:46:19] I mean, if you're reading a book, if you really want to get into it, you have to totally digest it. [00:46:19 - 00:46:20] I mean, it's not literal. [00:46:20 - 00:46:25] Obviously, you don't need the pages necessarily because you're starving. [00:46:25 - 00:46:27] But anyway, it is everything that you do. [00:46:27 - 00:46:32] They have made real efforts to digest. [00:46:32 - 00:46:43] Well, maybe this has to do with the notion of boundary dissolution, that to be digested by something is to actually become it. [00:46:43 - 00:46:45] It becomes you. [00:46:45 - 00:46:51] And, you know, Yates said, we become what we behold. [00:46:51 - 00:46:56] And yeah, I mean, it's fairly profound when you think about it. [00:46:56 - 00:46:59] I didn't really lean on this thing this morning. [00:46:59 - 00:47:04] Well, I mentioned it about the diet and the copulation and the religion and the psilocybin. [00:47:04 - 00:47:18] But the notion here is that feminism is actually a state of dietary neuro regulation in the species, if you want. [00:47:18 - 00:47:42] And that because the feminine, I associate with this state of boundary dissolution or potential state of boundary dissolution because feminine sexuality is based on the acceptance of penetration and the experience of giving birth is the experience of heavy boundary reorganization and so forth. [00:47:42 - 00:47:50] So the Earth actually talked to the human beings through the diet. [00:47:50 - 00:47:54] I mean, it's crude and awful to say it that way. [00:47:54 - 00:48:12] But you see, because the psilocybin was in the diet, because the people were tribal, because there was pressure on hunting success and sexual success and all this, the people were in a state of maximum attention directed toward the environment. [00:48:12 - 00:48:19] And coming at them out of the environment was a mind, not an abstract mind. [00:48:19 - 00:48:24] Not as we imagine God, an old man with a beard and abstract principle, all of this. [00:48:24 - 00:48:39] But actually, you know, a friend and a comfort of a feminine thing, not remote at all, not the creature of theology, but a creature of experience. [00:48:39 - 00:48:55] And these feminine values were the values of the human group, and they were a kind of objectification, realization of the values in nature itself. [00:48:55 - 00:49:04] And getting away from that broke this bond that was very real. [00:49:04 - 00:49:08] And this breaking of this bond traumatized us. [00:49:08 - 00:49:19] I mean, you can even use the language of dysfunctional relationships, childhood trauma, abuse, that sort of thing. [00:49:19 - 00:49:38] That in the infancy of the human species, there is a tremendous traumatic event, the tearing away of the human tribal family from this embeddedness in larger vegetable nature. [00:49:38 - 00:49:43] And then once that happened, we had to make it up by ourselves. [00:49:43 - 00:49:47] And we did a botched job of it. [00:49:47 - 00:49:53] Religion just became a way of berating people. Ethics became control. [00:49:53 - 00:50:01] Government became coercion. Education became the invocation of past mistakes, so forth and so on. [00:50:01 - 00:50:10] Understandably, because we were, you could almost think of us as an ant society whose queen had been killed. [00:50:10 - 00:50:14] But we don't notice it because it's not part of our species. [00:50:14 - 00:50:19] We actually were an incipient symbiote to this invisible thing. [00:50:19 - 00:50:27] And it still exists. It still exists in whatever dimensions are its own. [00:50:27 - 00:50:32] I mean, is it the mushroom? Is it the sum total of organic life on the planet? [00:50:32 - 00:50:39] Is it an extraterrestrial mind somehow here so long that it's as old as the continents? [00:50:39 - 00:50:42] Whatever it is, it's still there. [00:50:42 - 00:50:50] Well, then what human history and outbreaks of messianic hysteria and the prompting of visionary dreams [00:50:50 - 00:50:56] and all of this stuff that sets us sitting bolt upright in the middle of the night is, [00:50:56 - 00:51:06] you know, this thing can reach into the human world haltingly, hesitatingly, but plaintively, probingly, [00:51:06 - 00:51:20] trying to bring us back, calling us to some kind of return, trying to reconnect the broken circuit of history. [00:51:20 - 00:51:28] And this is what is the cause of all the nostalgia for paradise, you know, the belief in a vanished Eden, [00:51:28 - 00:51:33] a lost Atlantis, so forth and so on, and all the utopian yearning, [00:51:33 - 00:51:38] the belief that, you know, the extraterrestrials will come and kiss it and make it well, [00:51:38 - 00:51:47] that we will somehow be rescued from our own folly, that dead Galilean politicians will walk again among us. [00:51:47 - 00:52:00] All of these ideas that are overthrow of natural law for the purpose of saving us in a drama of cosmic redemption. [00:52:00 - 00:52:10] Well, it's like a psychological process. It's like somebody digging into their stuff. [00:52:10 - 00:52:17] And, you know, we all start out with the assumption that our childhood was perfectly normal and our parents were fine people, [00:52:17 - 00:52:24] and then you start digging and separating and working and looking, and then the picture becomes much more complicated. [00:52:24 - 00:52:34] And I think the human attitude toward drugs, the fact that we can addict to 40 or 50 substances and do, [00:52:34 - 00:52:40] I mean, yes, other animals form addictions of various sorts, but nothing like this. [00:52:40 - 00:52:45] I mean, clearly we are in a state of permanent chemical disequilibrium. [00:52:45 - 00:52:54] I mean, we will nod door handles, sniff paint thinner, you know, tobacco, heroin, you name it, thousands of alkaloids, [00:52:54 - 00:53:01] you know, dig up stuff the pig wouldn't eat and then pickle that and then eat that. [00:53:01 - 00:53:09] I mean, all this anxiety and disease around the problem of food is that we're looking. [00:53:09 - 00:53:22] We're looking for something. Well, then every time somebody finds it, then a huge shriek goes up from the body politic that it's illegal what you found. [00:53:22 - 00:53:27] It's unacceptable. You know, this behavior cannot be tolerated. [00:53:27 - 00:53:38] People who smoke joints of marijuana, the chief of police in Los Angeles wants them shot like dogs in public places [00:53:38 - 00:53:48] in order to keep public order. Well, what we've got here, folks, is a lot of serious anxiety around states of mind, clearly. [00:53:48 - 00:53:54] And it's a rupture from the synthetic. I mean, it's a rupture from the organic. [00:53:54 - 00:54:01] It's part of what happens when you're separated from the organic. [00:54:01 - 00:54:04] You mean a rupture into history of this material? [00:54:04 - 00:54:13] Well, I mean, because they have been separated from psychedelics and from the orthics, like being separated from the organic life. [00:54:13 - 00:54:20] And the same thing as being separated from nature, from themselves. And then they're open to the synthetic realities. [00:54:20 - 00:54:27] Well, it's an extreme, an extreme case of alienation over like a thousand years. [00:54:27 - 00:54:32] I mean, yes, we're so alienated. We don't even know how alienated we are. [00:54:32 - 00:54:42] I mean, things built into our language like the subject object dualism, the assumption of science, you know, that spirit exists. [00:54:42 - 00:54:48] This is what they've been busy at for the last 400 years is exercising spirit. [00:54:48 - 00:54:59] From the late medieval cosmology, we inherit a world entirely animate with spirit and angelic beings running up ladders [00:54:59 - 00:55:09] and performing all kinds of miraculous tasks. And then with Descartes, you know, you get this grudging admission that, well, [00:55:09 - 00:55:16] maybe the soul touches matter at just one place in the pineal gland of each one of us. [00:55:16 - 00:55:24] There's this magic trip hammer and there the little angel performs the forbidden transduction. [00:55:24 - 00:55:31] And so and then 50 years after Descartes, then they say, well, no, no, that was the naive part of his thinking. [00:55:31 - 00:55:38] We're going to get rid of that. And now we understand that spirit was an illusion of the ontologically naive mind. [00:55:38 - 00:55:48] And there's only force and momentum. And then you have permission to commit all kinds of atrocities against nature, [00:55:48 - 00:55:56] although the permission to commit these atrocities has been present in the Western tradition for a very, very long time. [00:55:56 - 00:56:08] I mean, you go back to Gilgamesh and you discover what's going on in Gilgamesh is that Gilgamesh rejects the goddess [00:56:08 - 00:56:17] and the goddess sends the bull as her emissary to Gilgamesh, which I take to be a symbol of the mushroom, obviously. [00:56:17 - 00:56:27] And Gilgamesh rejects the cosmic bull, rejects the goddess. And then he gets his shaman friend, Enkidu, who's very reluctant about this enterprise. [00:56:27 - 00:56:37] And he says, you know what we need to do? I have a great idea. Let's go into the wilderness and you'll help me and we'll cut down the tree of life. [00:56:37 - 00:56:47] And this is what they do. This is some cuneiform tablets that are dug out of the Ur level of our civilization. [00:56:47 - 00:56:55] And what they're plotting and scheming is two clowns want to cut down the tree of life. So this alienation goes very deep. [00:56:55 - 00:57:12] That's why the psychedelic experience is illegal and repressed and suspect. It's because nothing less than the whole kit and caboodle of this civilization hangs in the balance against it. [00:57:12 - 00:57:20] It is forbidden to know that the dynamics of the mind have such depth and breadth. [00:57:20 - 00:57:33] We are supposed to live in a narrow canyon of consciousness, walled in between awake and asleep. And anything else is considered pathological. [00:57:33 - 00:57:42] And we make a little place for artists as long as they don't get too uppity or obscene. And otherwise, it's all closed off. [00:57:42 - 00:57:54] Well, you know, breaking into this is breaking through this is this recapturing of the birthright that I've been talking about. [00:57:54 - 00:58:04] Other other comments. Yeah. Every time I eat mushrooms, I go through three things that happen to me that invariably happen. [00:58:04 - 00:58:12] Physical things. And I wonder what you make of that. Or if you have one. I know you have a couple. One is the cheering. I always cheer. [00:58:12 - 00:58:21] And then I always do a school of plays where I start to yawn. And then I start making a sound. [00:58:21 - 00:58:34] But my head becomes an echo chamber. And it always happens to me. And I play with that sound a lot. And then I heard the Yodo monks. And I go, that's the sound. Same sound. [00:58:34 - 00:58:45] And I've heard you discuss the sound before. Well, even in the in the pharmacology textbooks, the yawning gets in for psilocybin. [00:58:45 - 00:58:57] It makes you yawn, they say. And it certainly does make you yawn. The tearing. It also makes you tear. It makes your nose run a little bit about the 40 minute mark. [00:58:57 - 00:59:07] The tearing I associate with the actual moments when the visions are occurring. It seems as though your eyes produce a lot of water. [00:59:07 - 00:59:24] And the tone is, yeah, pretty basic to the presentation of these things. The way it works for me usually is I take it on an empty stomach in silent darkness. [00:59:24 - 00:59:36] And at about the hour and 10 minute mark, there's visual streaming. Nothing much before. I mean, running nose, restlessness, need to go to the bathroom. [00:59:36 - 00:59:44] One of the things you don't want to do is once it begins, I think it's very important to stay still. [00:59:44 - 00:59:53] And you will get into loops where it would be better to be downstairs. It would be better to be on the other side of the room. [00:59:53 - 01:00:06] It would be better. This is the small, tinny voice of true madness trying to push you off your point. And you just say, no, no, it wouldn't be better downstairs. [01:00:06 - 01:00:14] And it wouldn't be better across the room. And it's better right here. And then at an hour and 20 minutes, you get visual streaming, which are these. [01:00:14 - 01:00:25] I've also noticed they occur after orgasm. They're like purple after image kind of amorphous jelly bean shaped lights that are passing by. [01:00:25 - 01:00:35] Not very interesting, but they indicate the onset of something is happening. The synapse is coming to the potential for the thing. [01:00:35 - 01:00:52] And then I usually smoke cannabis to sort of push it over the edge. And at a certain point, I know that if I now will take a huge hit of cannabis, the whole thing will just come apart over moments. [01:00:52 - 01:01:06] And then it does. And it usually is you sort of see it coming, you know, like a sandstorm or something. I mean, it's 10 miles high and 100 miles wide. [01:01:06 - 01:01:16] It just rolls toward you and there's nowhere to run. And I usually just have a few moments to lie down is what I basically do. [01:01:16 - 01:01:28] That seems a good strategy at that point. A plan. I lie down. [01:01:28 - 01:01:35] So then I do that and that sort of helps a little and it just hits. [01:01:35 - 01:01:47] And you would swear that, you know, everybody from Vancouver to San Diego just hurl themselves underneath their desk because it's like an asteroid striking the earth or something. [01:01:47 - 01:01:59] I mean, everything gives way. You have these images of first there's light, then there's heat, then the instruments which record light and heat themselves, disintegrate and vaporize and begin to move outward. [01:01:59 - 01:02:07] And it's just, you know, a linguistic zero zone where, you know, language will not operate. [01:02:07 - 01:02:11] It's like ground zero. And then this goes on for a long, long time. [01:02:11 - 01:02:20] And the viewpoint keeps telescoping back until finally the viewpoint is outside the blast zone. [01:02:20 - 01:02:28] And then you can begin an inward description of it. Say, you know, oh, it's like this. It's like that. It's telling me this. It's telling me that. [01:02:28 - 01:02:40] Other times it's this Irish Elfin band thing where they come literally tiptoeing through the tulips, you know, and you hear it far off like the tinkling of bells. [01:02:40 - 01:02:47] And then it just gets louder and louder and nearer and nearer. And then you see it and then it's around you. [01:02:47 - 01:02:58] And it's, you know, like that's like, well, it's like a Bugs Bunny cartoon directed by Tristan Zara or something like that. [01:02:58 - 01:03:05] I mean, it's quite zany, unpredictable. [01:03:05 - 01:03:12] The thing that always impressed me about psychedelics was the way in which it could convince you that you could never think of this. [01:03:12 - 01:03:27] You know, and that was the stamp of authenticity, the fact that it was moving faster than your own imagination, astonishing you, making you laugh, frightening you, leading you on, teasing you. [01:03:27 - 01:03:41] It's very strange. I mean, there's nothing else like it. It's like, you know, the Arabs used to say of the city of Isfahan in Iran in the 10th century that it was half the world. [01:03:41 - 01:03:50] Because of its vaulted domes and minarets. But if you hadn't seen Isfahan, half the world laid before you. [01:03:50 - 01:04:01] Well, it's literally true of psychedelics. I mean, half at least of the world lies over yonder in these strange dimensions. [01:04:01 - 01:04:11] And they're not inaccessible, you know, they're very accessible. You don't have to spend 20 years around the ashram. [01:04:11 - 01:04:22] And yet, my goodness, we maintain decorum around them and don't break protocol and behave ourselves in the presence of it. [01:04:22 - 01:04:35] I mean, even those of us who are supposed experts or accounted great explorers of it spend nine times as much time talking about it as doing it, you may be sure. [01:04:35 - 01:04:46] So, you know, it's just a kind of a cultural blind spot into a person like myself, very important, to someone else extraordinarily trivial. [01:04:46 - 01:04:57] I mean, there was even a book published on the drug problem recently called America's Great Drug War by Treadlock, Treadwell, who's a good guy. [01:04:57 - 01:05:07] He wants legalization. He's a good guy. But there's no entry for psychedelic drugs, no entry for LSD, no entry for mescaline. [01:05:07 - 01:05:12] It's not what they're talking about, not what they're worrying about. [01:05:12 - 01:05:30] Even the people who want drugs legalized do it with this kind of, "Okay, you know, this attitude, we're defeated. We'll legalize drugs. Screw it. That's it. Go ruin yourselves now." [01:05:30 - 01:05:39] There's no notion of hope, no notion of the pharmacological engineering of consciousness to any reasonable end. [01:05:39 - 01:05:48] It's just, you know, if you're not willing to go it alone with God's grace, well, then you just consigned to the road to hell. [01:05:48 - 01:05:49] Yeah. [01:05:49 - 01:05:59] I had some friends that have used MDMA with ketamine and 2C-B. I'm wondering if anyone has used that. I'm sure someone has used it with mushrooms. [01:05:59 - 01:06:01] That's crazy. You've heard of it. [01:06:01 - 01:06:04] MDMA with mushrooms? [01:06:04 - 01:06:14] Let me see if I can remember. I can't really remember anybody specifically doing that. All these things get done. [01:06:14 - 01:06:30] I always, I sort of try to warn people off of these things and I'm a terrible party pooper because I'm just such an obsessed person that all I really care about is this very narrow psychedelic effect. [01:06:30 - 01:06:44] There are a lot of weird altered states of consciousness around, many of them, you know, drug induced and a whole spectrum of them alcohol induced. [01:06:44 - 01:06:47] I can just add a combination of like, that's the mushroom. [01:06:47 - 01:06:48] How was that? [01:06:48 - 01:06:55] Well, I felt that right away that like, the mushroom was just, felt sullied. [01:06:55 - 01:06:56] Sullied. [01:06:56 - 01:07:05] I felt like I violated this relationship. I cultivated this relationship with the mushroom. I said, what is this doing here? [01:07:05 - 01:07:12] Who is this Kate Trollope that you've drugged here? [01:07:12 - 01:07:18] It wasn't pleasant because it looked weird at first. And it's just an energy block. [01:07:18 - 01:07:29] Now synergies are a sort of unexplored area because there are so many of them. You all understand synergies are what happens when you rub two drugs or more together. [01:07:29 - 01:07:36] And very weird things happen, but they're not very controllable or repeatable. [01:07:36 - 01:07:49] What I always say to people about choosing drugs and strategies for bringing drugs into your life and your program of spiritual development or self exploration or whatever is, [01:07:49 - 01:07:55] the most interesting drugs are the ones that occur in plants. [01:07:55 - 01:08:07] That the occurrence of a drug in a plant shows that it has a certain affinity to organic life. But that doesn't mean that there aren't hellacious toxins in some plants. [01:08:07 - 01:08:14] I mean, there's curare, there's strychnine, there's cyanide. These are plant byproducts as well. [01:08:14 - 01:08:19] But nevertheless, as a first pass, it's important that a compound occur in a plant. [01:08:19 - 01:08:29] Well, then the next thing is, does it have a history of human usage? And the interesting ones almost all do. [01:08:29 - 01:08:41] Psilocybin used in Mexico for millennia. Other parts of the world, it's probably for a very long time, although the evidence is less clear. [01:08:41 - 01:08:51] Mespheote has a long history of usage in the American Southwest. Cannabis goes back millennia, so does opiate use. [01:08:51 - 01:08:57] So then do these things have a history of human usage and even specifically shamanic usage? [01:08:57 - 01:09:05] And then to my mind, the really interesting question, do they have an affinity to ordinary brain chemistry? [01:09:05 - 01:09:15] Do they? Because, and I mentioned this this morning, the strongest drugs are the ones most like ordinary brain chemistry. [01:09:15 - 01:09:30] The most extreme case being DMT. DMT only lasts seven to 10 minutes, and yet it's the most profound dislocation of reality that you can undergo. [01:09:30 - 01:09:37] Well, why is it that it is both so profound and so quickly quenched in the organism? [01:09:37 - 01:09:53] It's because in the human brain, biopathways exist which recognize and degrade this very readily because they are there all the time performing this function on DMT. [01:09:53 - 01:10:05] So to my mind, you know, it isn't that you sail out toward the most synthetic or complex or chelated molecules, but that in fact these things are highly suspect. [01:10:05 - 01:10:19] That what we're trying to do is actually tweak consciousness, do reverence to the physical brain, but tweak consciousness as little as possible to get the desired effect. [01:10:19 - 01:10:29] One of the really fascinating things about DMT, I think, is that once someone has smoked it, once someone has had this experience, [01:10:29 - 01:10:43] you can have a dream in which it is introduced into the dream as a theme, DMT, and then you actually smoke it in the dream and it actually happens in the dream. [01:10:43 - 01:10:53] And I don't know of any other drug that this is true of and it's what it says to me is that even though this is an extremely radical psychedelic experience, [01:10:53 - 01:11:04] apparently the chemistry that is the precondition for it is just under the surface almost within reach of conscious awareness. [01:11:04 - 01:11:17] I mean, I sat down at times and thought about smoking DMT and tried to invoke it and never succeeded the way I've succeeded in a lucid dream doing that. [01:11:17 - 01:11:22] But it shows, I think, that the chemistry is very close to ordinary metabolism. [01:11:22 - 01:11:29] I'm interested in knowing about DMT. It's not the same thing in mushrooms, I mean, organically you have... [01:11:29 - 01:11:42] Yes, it's closely related. In the chemical families of the hallucinogens, you have the indole family, which is a fairly large family, [01:11:42 - 01:11:58] and it includes the lysergemides that are the LSD-type drugs, the beta-carbolines, which are MAO inhibitors and occur in banisteriopsis copy, [01:11:58 - 01:12:08] and the aboga alkaloids, which are psychedelic aphrodisiacs from West Africa, and then the tryptamine group. [01:12:08 - 01:12:21] And the tryptamine group is the largest group and it comprises psilocybin in the mushroom and DMT in the leaves of certain bushes [01:12:21 - 01:12:30] and in the barks of certain South American trees, and then it also occurs in other plant genera but not in very high concentration. [01:12:30 - 01:12:32] And in toads also. [01:12:32 - 01:12:41] Five-methoxy DMT occurs in toads. Five-methoxy DMT is interesting. [01:12:41 - 01:12:52] It's recently had a kind of vogue because people discovered they could collect the exudate from the toad and dry it on their windshield [01:12:52 - 01:12:58] and scrape it off and then smoke it up or sell it for about $80 a gram. [01:12:58 - 01:13:00] That's a big thing in Florida. [01:13:00 - 01:13:01] It's a big thing in Florida. [01:13:01 - 01:13:06] They're usually looking for mushrooms and now they're out in the pharmacy, they're out there licking toads. [01:13:06 - 01:13:12] Well, nobody actually licks toads. That's just a slander. [01:13:12 - 01:13:20] What you do is you milk the toad onto the glass of your four-wheel drive vehicle windshield and then let it dry in the sun [01:13:20 - 01:13:24] and then scrape it up and collect it in a film canister. [01:13:24 - 01:13:29] I know people who really like five-meo DMT. I don't care for it. [01:13:29 - 01:13:32] I find it weirdly empty. [01:13:32 - 01:13:35] It's not visionary like DMT. [01:13:35 - 01:13:39] DMT is a chaos of hallucination. [01:13:39 - 01:13:43] It is the most hallucinogenic compound there is. [01:13:43 - 01:13:48] I mean, it's just hallucinations stacked on top of each other. [01:13:48 - 01:13:58] I mean, in every angle, tiny demons are seen to be performing elaborate calisthenic exercises and much else is happening. [01:13:58 - 01:14:14] But when you do five-meo DMT, for me at any rate, it was like this feeling, yes, it feels like DMT, yes, my heart is racing just like DMT, yes, yes, yes, no, no. [01:14:14 - 01:14:18] Nothing happened. It didn't do the thing. [01:14:18 - 01:14:31] The other piece of information that I feel obligated to pass on to you as a spoiled sport is that five-meo is fatal in sheep. [01:14:31 - 01:14:36] They just fall over with their little pointed feet trembling in the air. [01:14:36 - 01:14:43] And, you know, I guess it's a way to tell whether or not you're a sheep. [01:14:43 - 01:14:59] But it's a little alarming that a mammalian species of so substantial and woolly and so forth falls over dead when exposed to this stuff that you and your friends are furiously smoking up in the den. [01:14:59 - 01:15:03] Why? They don't know exactly. It's neurotoxic. [01:15:03 - 01:15:08] These neurotransmitters fall into narrow ranges. [01:15:08 - 01:15:25] Sheep are sensitive to a lot of stuff. That's why they're always dropping nerve gas on them and stuff like that, because they seem to have a fairly narrow tolerance to neurotoxin. [01:15:25 - 01:15:33] It's somewhat alarming, you know, not five-meo DMT, not DMT. [01:15:33 - 01:15:38] Well, just the difference of that methoxy group in the five position. [01:15:38 - 01:15:49] But, you know, this is why sheep get staggers and die because they're eating filaris species, grass species with low amounts of five-meo in them. [01:15:49 - 01:15:55] And they're always getting staggers and getting problems with that. [01:15:55 - 01:15:57] Anything else? [01:15:57 - 01:15:59] Yeah. [01:15:59 - 01:16:02] Physical side effects from the mushrooms. [01:16:02 - 01:16:11] One of the things you have to understand is that research on psychedelics is illegal and not even encouraged among professionals. [01:16:11 - 01:16:16] So a lot of what's known is anecdotal. [01:16:16 - 01:16:27] Whenever you talk about the side effects of any drug, you have to realize that people are highly variable. [01:16:27 - 01:16:36] So tolerance and drugs are the area where these differences between people show up dramatically. [01:16:36 - 01:16:41] Generally, psilocybin is thought to be a fairly safe compound. [01:16:41 - 01:16:45] In terms of crude measures of its safety, it's very safe. [01:16:45 - 01:16:53] I mean, for instance, the way pharmacologists talk about drugs is they talk about what's called the LD50. [01:16:53 - 01:17:04] This is the horrible concept of if you have a hundred mice, how much of this drug do you have to give these hundred mice so that fifty die? [01:17:04 - 01:17:08] The LD50, the lethal dose 50. [01:17:08 - 01:17:10] Well, for psilocybin, it's huge. [01:17:10 - 01:17:15] I mean, hundreds of milligrams per kilogram of body weight. [01:17:15 - 01:17:18] So that's not a possibility. [01:17:18 - 01:17:23] That's the cheerful news from the world of reductionist pharmacology. [01:17:23 - 01:17:32] The problem is that when you get out there, the whole religion of taking these things holds that science doesn't know what it's talking about. [01:17:32 - 01:17:42] So when you get out there and you have the complete and total conviction that you're dying, then you have to grapple with this. [01:17:42 - 01:17:46] And the thing is, it's always completely convincing. [01:17:46 - 01:17:52] And this is just something that it seems to put one through occasionally. [01:17:52 - 01:17:55] You don't get much sympathy from straight people. [01:17:55 - 01:17:59] I mean, they say, well, psychedelic drugs, isn't that the bit? [01:17:59 - 01:18:04] You think you're in heaven, then you think you're dying, then you think you're God, then you think you're dying. [01:18:04 - 01:18:06] I thought that was what is supposed to happen. [01:18:06 - 01:18:10] Well, as we know, you try to steer around that. [01:18:10 - 01:18:20] If there are episodes of fear, the only thing you can do is sit it out and breathe it out and sing it out. [01:18:20 - 01:18:28] The one thing people shouldn't do is clench up and hunker down and just go into the fetal position. [01:18:28 - 01:18:35] What you want to do is circulate a huge amount of energy and oxygen through your body by singing. [01:18:35 - 01:18:39] This is what shamans do when they get into difficult places. [01:18:39 - 01:18:42] They sing their way through it. [01:18:42 - 01:18:47] And it is ambiguous. [01:18:47 - 01:18:50] It is complicated to go into these places. [01:18:50 - 01:19:00] I don't think anybody voyages repeatedly into these psychedelic spaces without getting into some fairly weird stuff. [01:19:00 - 01:19:02] What kind of songs do you sing? [01:19:02 - 01:19:05] What kind of songs do I sing? [01:19:05 - 01:19:17] They're usually based pretty much on the tonality of the situation and finding a tone that I can ride out of the situation. [01:19:17 - 01:19:37] And they're synesthesia. I mean, a tone like... [01:19:37 - 01:19:46] You know, you're feeling it's doing something to you and you can steer your way through weird stuff with this. [01:19:46 - 01:19:53] Then usually you become distracted by the act of making the sound itself. [01:19:53 - 01:20:03] Because the sound, first of all, you either have or have the illusion that you have tremendous control over the production of tone. [01:20:03 - 01:20:09] Your ear gives you a tremendous ability to differentiate these tones. [01:20:09 - 01:20:14] And they're appearing in front of you as colors if you're loaded enough. [01:20:14 - 01:20:19] So this is the modality in which you can experiment with the visible language. [01:20:19 - 01:20:31] You try to syntactically construct out of tonality and glossolalia some kind of convincing modality. [01:20:31 - 01:20:35] Most of you have probably heard ayahuasca songs. [01:20:35 - 01:20:47] I mean, wane wane wane te, singi te, singi singi singi te. [01:20:47 - 01:20:52] They're driving is what they are. They're repetitious and they're driving. [01:20:52 - 01:20:58] And you discover in yourself, you know, the capacity for glossolalia, which you can ride. [01:20:58 - 01:21:07] You can lift the meaning governor off of the language machinery and just let it spin. [01:21:07 - 01:21:17] And it's indefensible as art, but ecstatic to do, you know. [01:21:17 - 01:21:22] I mean, I tend to do glossolalia, which are more conversational. [01:21:22 - 01:21:26] And I like them because they play with meaning. [01:21:26 - 01:21:44] So that kind of stuff sort of sounds like e de je gem wa hua xi ke pi ping e nui dem wa hua de e ke ba mang hua he de ni je ke pi ting di. [01:21:44 - 01:21:47] Yeah, I do this alone in the dark. [01:21:47 - 01:22:01] And what it is is it's it places an edge for the light to follow and you discover meaning in the absence of context. [01:22:01 - 01:22:07] And you discover like the source of meaning before it is contextually located. [01:22:07 - 01:22:10] Don't ask me what this kind of these kinds of words mean. [01:22:10 - 01:22:15] This is what I how I learned to talk, hanging out with these semiotics people. [01:22:15 - 01:22:18] But it's something like that, you know. [01:22:18 - 01:22:25] And I think people did this for hundreds of thousands of years for each other as a form of performance art. [01:22:25 - 01:22:39] Long before somebody got the nuts and bolts notion that you could connect an action in the world or as linguistic intent to a sound. [01:22:39 - 01:22:44] That we just set up for this, these small mouth noises. [01:22:44 - 01:22:49] And it's tremendously under the influence of psychedelics. [01:22:49 - 01:22:53] You know, you can make language get up and walk around. [01:22:53 - 01:22:59] I mean, you can literally peel it off the ceiling and set it dancing in your presence. [01:22:59 - 01:23:13] If any of you have read Robert Graves book, The White Goddess, he talks in there about what he calls an ursprach, a visibly beheld language of primal poetry. [01:23:13 - 01:23:20] And he thinks our anxiety has to do with the fact that we have lost the true speech. [01:23:20 - 01:23:27] And that if you speak the true language, the ursprach, it's a beheld language. [01:23:27 - 01:23:32] It doesn't require the conventionalization of dictionaries. [01:23:32 - 01:23:44] You know what you mean. And that the loss of this genetic language is what made us so maladaptive and at unease with ourselves. [01:23:44 - 01:23:59] Yeah. [01:23:59 - 01:24:10] I don't know. I mean, the way I mean, I am always I always go into it with knees knocking and just terrifying to me. [01:24:10 - 01:24:19] I know somebody who says the attitude they take mushrooms with is that each time they pray that they can stand more. [01:24:19 - 01:24:27] And and then some people don't feel that and say that it's easy, that it's silly, Simon. [01:24:27 - 01:24:37] But it isn't all silly, Simon. I mean, it isn't all dancing bunnies and all that stuff. [01:24:37 - 01:24:42] You have any idea what makes the difference between people of those two types? [01:24:42 - 01:24:51] Oh, it's all it's very complex. It's almost you know, it's almost an X-ray of your horoscope. [01:24:51 - 01:24:55] It's your own expectation. The time can be wrong. [01:24:55 - 01:25:03] I'm convinced that if the time is wrong, you can be a saint and it will shake your teeth out. [01:25:03 - 01:25:07] You know, and yet what is the wrong time? How do you find it? [01:25:07 - 01:25:17] I used to always throw the chain going into it. And if the chain said don't do it, I just wouldn't do it. [01:25:17 - 01:25:22] There's this psychic weather. There's low energy. There's personal anxiety. [01:25:22 - 01:25:31] There's also even, I think, the state of the collectivity that, you know, go into it when half the world is on the brink of war. [01:25:31 - 01:25:41] And, you know, the why it's complex and it's getting more complex in there because of all this knitted together stuff. [01:25:41 - 01:25:51] So it's delicate. It's like skin diving or sailing or one of these things where you have to carefully judge the initial conditions. [01:25:51 - 01:25:57] The initial conditions largely determine the end state. [01:25:57 - 01:26:03] And then this is what shamanism is, is this ability to judge those conditions and call it right. [01:26:03 - 01:26:10] Can you think that as an ayahuasca diet helps? [01:26:10 - 01:26:21] Yeah, I think that what Ken's referring to is in the areas where ayahuasca is a happening thing indigenously, [01:26:21 - 01:26:31] the shamans say that the diet is the real precondition for doing it and how long you've kept this diet. [01:26:31 - 01:26:46] And yeah, I think that shamanism, psychedelically practiced, is the art and science of human physiological transformation, you know. [01:26:46 - 01:27:00] And that with with by manipulating indoles and manipulating growth hormones and all of these things, a kind of superhuman condition becomes available. [01:27:00 - 01:27:04] And this is what these people figured out in these climax rainforests. [01:27:04 - 01:27:08] They had nothing else going. They weren't into metallurgy. [01:27:08 - 01:27:12] They weren't into the purification of chemical elements. [01:27:12 - 01:27:18] These other directions that we followed were alien to them. [01:27:18 - 01:27:31] And what they gained was a tremendous facility with natural chemistry and diet using the human body as the primary retort, the baseline, [01:27:31 - 01:27:36] the alchemical furnace in which all these transformations were going on. [01:27:36 - 01:27:43] I'm convinced that in its native setting, ayahuasca is a telepathic drug. [01:27:43 - 01:27:55] I mean, people, small groups of tribal people are taking this thing and making group decisions based on group hallucinations, [01:27:55 - 01:28:01] based on the collective database of the of the tribal group. [01:28:01 - 01:28:05] They're seeing the information from a higher dimensional space. [01:28:05 - 01:28:08] But this is a kind of telepathic. [01:28:10 - 01:28:13] Please continue to tape 4.