[no audio] Then, you know, you have to make very clear choices. [no audio] My own approach to this has been to give great force to tradition. That's why we're here talking about shamanically utilized plants, because they are plants with a history of human usage, thousands of years old. We already know that they do not cause tumors or madness or miscarriages, because if that were the case, they would have been pushed aside over millennia of usage. A private prejudice of my own that I urge on people is that the drugs they take should be as much like brain chemistry as possible, as non-invasive of the physical brain as possible. Fortunately, and suggestively, the strongest of all hallucinogens are the ones most like ordinary brain chemistry. Another thing I think that's important is to be sort of pharmacologically monomaniacal. It's good to do, when you find out what works for you, just really do it into the ground, rather than being someone who is always, you know, this week it's 2C-B, and next week it's something else, and then something else. It's much better, I think, if you find an ally who resonates with you, to then utilize that. Ralph, you deal with all this, would you? A couple of things I would just say to that question. One is the first thing we all have to learn to do, I mean, we do it, but we also fall into the habit. Our national culture has this concept of drug, D-R-U-G, you know, the ad that you mentioned, and Nancy Reagan's slogan, "Prefer to drugs." And drugs is a very global category, as anyone knows, as soon as you start to think about it. And law enforcement legislation does not currently, presently, make any distinction between heroin, cocaine, marijuana, LSD, which couldn't be more different. They have completely opposite, sometimes, effects on the brain and nervous system. So that's one thing, be discriminating about what drug you're talking about. And then the other thing is to be aware of the fact that science and scientific information is a controlled process, and it's controlled by a government that has a basically fascist attitude towards foods and drugs. I've often thought the FDA could be an acronym for Fascist Drug Administration. It is. We do have a fascist system within a larger democratic, outwardly democratic process. One of the things that's interesting to realize is that if you have a democracy, you can elect yourself into a fascism, which is what we've done. Yes. Because fascism is the imposition of the opinions and beliefs of a minority on the majority. It's the great danger of democracy, that it will become some kind of fascism of the majority. And so the science, the fascist science, the medical pharmaceutical complex, which is next to the military industrial complex, the largest and most powerful power group in our world, controls what goes out into the media in terms of scientific information. Not only control it, they manipulate it. It becomes more and more of propaganda. So when you read accounts in newspapers and magazines that say, "Such and such a scientist did a study that proved that MDMA lowers serotonin levels," whatever, and therefore damages brain cells, you can't read that and accept it as truth. You have to inform yourself, I would say, become more maniacal about pharmacology in a different sense than Terence. You have to train yourself and read the technical literature. If you really want to know what really goes on, you have to go into the original technical literature yourself, and you have to be able to discriminate between scientific experiments that are done for propaganda purposes and those which are genuine. And the media do not make that distinction, and drug enforcement doesn't make it, legislation doesn't make it. So it's everyone's responsibility, if everyone's going to be their own shaman, it's also their own responsibility to know your drugs, know what your particular body can tolerate as well as what's generally tolerable, or what's toxic, what has undesirable side effects, and be discriminating, use discernment, be impeccable about it, really, and take responsibility. That's part of the whole medical thing. We don't take responsibility for our own health and well-being and getting better. We say, you know, we still have that old, "The doctor knows best," and, you know. And finally, I would say, along with what Terence was saying, is I think the use of the word "drug" is not a good word to use, period. I try to use it less and less and less. And even Hoffman said this years ago in relationship to psychedelics. But if you're talking about plants, visionary plants, sacred plants that have a long, long cultural history, as well as nutritional plants, it ties into the use of herbs rather than synthetic antibiotics or drugs in medicine. And herbal medicine is a huge underground medical system that's basically unrecognized and unacknowledged, just the way psychoactive plants and substances are recognized and unacknowledged. So by focusing on herbs and plants, natural substances, using synthetics only in those cases where something has been discovered that's not known otherwise in the plant or animal kingdom would enable one to bypass much of that whole drug prohibition, paranoia, punitive complex that we live under in this society, which is very, very weird because you have a fascist minority wishing to not only control certain substances, but actually control what you put into your body. And that's going pretty far, when you think about it. I mean, it's not that different from them telling you what you can eat and what you can't eat. Eventually, you see, when we move beyond the current sort of dark age that we're living in, the idea that governments can tell you what drugs you can take will be as bizarre a notion as that governments can buy and sell human beings. Or that there should be recognized a divine right of kings. It's actually a civil rights issue. And, you know, in the 19th century, people's argument against women's suffrage was that it would be unimaginable. That the world would be destroyed if you gave women the vote, that just madness would ensue. This is now the argument against allowing people to make these decisions about their bodies and their spiritual development. And yet science, which just relentlessly rolls forward, creating an endless cornucopia of steroids, hallucinogens, aphrodisiacs, memory enhancers, so forth and so on, is presenting us over and over again with this dilemma of how do we chemically manage ourselves in the kind of world we're living in? And I tried to indicate this morning, I think this is central to understanding what human beings are. That there is no such thing as a person without habitual relationships to plants. And it's tea, coffee, sugar, alcohol, and then a wider spectrum. Cereals. But yes, cereals. We embed ourselves, the very way in which we define good feeling and expression of the self is these various states of mind that we associate with our diet and our habit. People get up the first thing in the morning. Most people do, is choose the first drug of the day. Will it be tea? Will it be coffee? And so forth and so on. There's nothing wrong with this. We apparently, by our ability to collect... And it actually, you know, it all goes back to our omnivorous diet. Most animals are not omnivores. Most animals have a food source, a spectrum of foods that they eat that is very narrow. But if you're an omnivore, if your habit is to eat everything and to test everything in the environment for protein, then you lay yourself open to exposure to vast numbers of mutagens, hallucinogens, tumor-inducing compounds, steroids, galactosides, poisons, all kinds of things. You accept that these things are impinging and selecting on the human genome. And very quickly, we have evolved into this very quirky kind of species that, as I said this morning, addicts to everything. I mean, it is the source of our great anguish and our great grandeur. We can addict to a piece of land and call it the homeland and defend it against all comers and slaughter with impunity anybody who gets near it and claim it after we've been away from it for 10,000 years as ours because we once were there. We can addict to another person. You know, anyone who's experienced heartbreak, real heartbreak, knows, you know, this is like a withdrawal syndrome. I mean, bursting into tears every 20 minutes and not sleeping and vomiting every three hours. I mean, this person has a severe dependency which is being broken in the same way we ideologically enslave ourselves. So there is no percentage in denying this side of ourselves. What we have to do is manage it. Manage it in some way that serves, obviously, community-preserving purposes. And I think that the model is always tradition. That the traditional compounds, the traditional plants of shamanic usage are the ones that we are probably meant to use. They fit our hand the way a tool fits our hand. They were made for us. We co-evolved with these things. I was talking to Lester Grinspoon about this recently and he said the way you can tell how long human beings have been using a drug is by how few side effects that drug has. Because, of course, there is this mutual leveling of the stress of contact. Symbiosis has never been taken seriously by evolutionary biologists. Food, as a mutagenic influence, has never been taken seriously by human evolutionary theorists. And yet, obviously, that is what has driven us to such a rapid state of evolution. Our willingness to expose ourselves to an extremely complex and shifting environment that was, in fact, the things we put into our bodies. Everything else stayed pretty much the same over long periods of time. So, the question which the gentleman asked goes to the whole heart of the matter. To the fact that we are living now in a kind of hysteria about drugs. Tim Leary said LSD was a compound capable of causing psychotic behavior in people who hadn't taken it. This can now be generalized. We see an entire society in a drug-induced frenzy, induced by drugs that they have never taken, you see. One other thing I'd just like to add to that, too, on this theme of the relationship between foods and drugs and the human species. Again, to hammer home this point, you know, the argument has been made that every major civilization is founded on one of the seven sacred grains. There are seven sacred grains. The Chinese is built on rice. The European is built on wheat and rye. The American Indian civilization is based on corn and so forth. And it's interesting to realize that there are these food addictions and food allergies which are connected. And wheat is one of the commonest foods that people get both allergic and addicted to as a food. And what was probably the most prominent plant source of LSD is ergot, which is a fungus that grows on rye and wheat and was probably cultivated in ancient Greece deliberately. The ergot was, as the vision-inducing beverage that was the heart of the Eleusinian Mysteries, if Wasson and Hoffman and Schultes are correct in their theory about this. And so there have been newspaper reports from England of pharmacologists and doctors claiming that people who buy wheat or rye that may be contaminated with ergot may actually be ingesting active doses of LSD-type compounds. So right here in the central supportive grain of the Western civilization, you have a psychoactive vision-inducing plant built in, the knowledge of which disappeared for 2,000 years and is now in the process of being rediscovered. And what that really means for us gives much thought. In hypothesizing about the early dawn of consciousness of mankind, if it were assisted by visionary plants, would this have made a genetic change in the DNA strand rather than just an experience for that hominoid or whoever it was that was enlightened? Could it have made a mutation and then this consciousness was then passed on to their offspring? Well, it's a very complicated situation and where we don't have all the information. But what it looks like happened was there were arboreal canopy-living primates in Africa in a tropical forest similar to the Amazon in extent. And over a long period of time, 100,000 years or so, drying set in and grasslands emerged and the forest retreated and these primates who already had binocular vision and an advanced grasping hand and a social form of existence with group signaling were forced down onto the veld. And there, in a much more restricted environment in terms of numbers of species of plants, they abandoned their previous vegetarian, fruititarian habits and became omnivores, began testing all the food sources in the environment. Co-evolving in this grassland situation were herds of ungulate animals, bison and zebra and this kind of thing. In the manure of these animals was psilocybin-containing mushrooms. Well, you see, the psychedelic to be the trigger for the emergence of human consciousness, it must be African, it must be, it must require no preparation, it must stand out from its environment and it must confer an adaptive advantage. Now, it seems to me the only plant or organism which fulfills all these points is the mushroom. What the mushrooms do in low doses is confer slightly increased visual acuity. Well, you only have to have taken evolution 1A to know that if you have two populations and one of them has something in their food that increases visual acuity, and these are pack-hunting animals, that the ones with this vision-enhancing compound in their diet will have a more successful reproductive strategy than the competitors and it will dominate. Well, at a slightly higher dose, psilocybin like all CNS stimulators can be interpreted as an aphrodisiac. In other words, prolonged erection, prolonged interest in sex, so forth and so on. At a slightly higher level, it flowers out into a visionary experience. So it's like a stair-step process where the deeper the organism imbibes this one item in the food chain, the more payback there seems to be. First, better hunting, then better sex, then great ideas. Who could turn it down? And I've talked, like, you know, when Rian Eisler and I appeared here, Rian is by no stretch of the imagination a psychedelico. I mean, she's a very straight and very wise lady, but not a stoner. But she said, "You're right. There is something going on having to do with pastoralism, having to do with this point in time where the previous pack-hunting primates, instead of killing their prey, began to pen them and began to relate to them, to addict to them, is what it was. And I was saying to someone earlier today, "Here's a test of how conscious of the real world you are. What is the weirdest thing about a cow?" And my victim said, "The eyes." And I said, "No, the weirdest thing about a cow is its tits, obviously." I mean, have you ever seen tits like that anywhere else? These tits are made to fit a human hand. It's obvious. And so this is an example of very old co-evolution, co-adaptation, that human being, the cow, and then less immediately obvious, but nevertheless powerfully present, is the mushroom. Joan referred to this this morning. You see, I think what happened is women outsmarted themselves. The men were off silently hunting and practicing being quiet as they stalked their prey. The women were creating language in order to describe the taxonomy of these various food plants, of which they probably could distinguish four or five hundred plants, seasons, soil conditions, variants, unusual conditions of all sorts, which parts of the plant were edible, which were poisonous, so forth and so on. And as always happens when you succeed in an enterprise where you seek control, you inevitably simplify. So the women became so conversant with the power of plants that they realized they need no longer gather them. They could grow them. And then they realized they wouldn't, of course, grow all the plants they knew about. They would only grow those plants that grew easily, produced large fruit, and had a big payback. And suddenly the women undercut their own power base, and it became possible to silently practice very dulling agriculture. And the gods then became not the gods of the orgy and the hunt and the wild plants, but the gods became corn gods and wheat gods. And it became important to be able to get up early in the morning and walk off to your field and weed, and less important to be able to ecstatically prophesy and have visions. Well, that's just one scenario, but it's worth talking about, I think, because how we image our emergence out of animal organization is going to color very deeply how we image our transition into a transcendental realm. That's why I talk about what I call the archaic revival rather than the new age. All this talk about shamanism is a reaching back 15,000, 25,000 years to those models to steady us. We should go out the way we came in, which means as a partnership society, as a psychedelic society, as a tribal society. And so by thinking about the origins, we actually gain an intimation of the future. Yes? The persecution of witches is what's going on anyway. You know, for those very things you're just describing for women. Oh, yeah. I mean, it is all of a piece. The suppression of women, it's a complicated thing. I mean, it has to do with solar calendars, which gained prominence with the invention of agriculture. See, I think the invention of agriculture was where it began to go wrong. Well, some people say it was the domestication of the horse or cities or this and that. But people idealize the proto-Neolithic and think that this was fine. But I think already in place were notions of hanging on to the land, of storing wealth, of cooperating, coerced cooperation in the production of food, a simplified vocabulary about nature. All of these things were put in place by the Neolithic. But, you know, Arthur Young, some of you may know his theories. He has this idea that every state of freedom is accomplished by a descent into a state of bondage. So that, for instance, you know, molecular chemistry is the product of the molecular bond. If you have chemical systems with so much energy that there can be no molecular bonding, then all you have is atomic chemistry. You have not the possibility of organic chemistry. So the coming and going of the male ego, the coming and going of the repression of women and the feminine seems to be related to how much exposure there is to these wild plant states. Because that, you see, women come up against it because they bury the dead, they birth the living. They know that all is not as it appears to be. They are informed of the fact that culture is a charade. But men believe all this stuff. At least those women that were able to, like the witches were the women who, and a few men, who stayed, who had the wisdom, the wit, the wisdom to stay in touch with the law, the herbal law, the plant law. So they acted as midwives. They helped women have abortions when they wanted to get rid of their children. They acted as midwives. They did healing when the doctors at the time didn't have the knowledge to do so. So the Inquisition was kind of the result of an unholy marriage between the power trips of the medical profession against natural healers, which still exist, and the power trip of the church against the animistic religion. It's that because the church put its whole weight against this thing of the scapegoating process of using women as the scapegoats for everything that was corrupt within the church itself. Because women were sinful and they sold themselves in league to the devil. And so from the church's point of view, they didn't really care about the plant law. It's very interesting that a lot of plant law really went defunct with the elimination and the execution of the witches. Because there was nobody there who was at all interested in preserving it. In fact, witchcraft trials give clear indication that when the women tried to say, well, you know, when they were asked, well, why did you go and fly off and do this thing that was being reported to you? Or why did you fall down on the ground and you were lifeless for three days? And they said, well, it was because we took this little herb. And the inquisitor said, no, no, no, it's because you took the devil. And there's one poignant story actually recorded where the Swiss word for, the German word for herb is krut and the Swiss version of it is krutli. So the Swiss witches that were being prosecuted and the inquisitors said, well, who is your God? What makes you have these visions and these journeys? And they would keep saying krutli. And so the inquisitors wrote in their books, they call their God krutli. They call the devil whom they have intercourse with krutli because he's the one that takes them off on these journeys. So as a result, the knowledge got lost. So the law, the herbal law of the Middle Ages that the witches preserved was completely lost. I mean, the inquisition took place between the 14th and 18th century. So that's comparatively recently. And the scapegoating mechanism, incidentally, there also at play, which is very important, is the same exact mechanism that surfaces later than in the 20th century with the genocide. In that case, it's the Jews who a particular race was singled out as being the scapegoat. And in the earlier inquisition, which has exactly the same pattern of the patriarchal power structure imposing this, Jews picked the women as being the scapegoat at the time. Hopefully, one of the things that has to happen is that we go beyond the need for scapegoating and take responsibility for our own growth and learning. Embedded in all the monotheistic texts are the mention of women as creatures, so she has to be controlled. Right. Right. And Francis Bacon, who initiated the experimental method in science, talked about nature actually having to be violated. We have to force her secrets from her by force, by violence. It's sort of rapacious and violent. Use the metaphor of the torture. The torture, the torture nature to get out of here her secrets. Whereas true science, see there is to me, there is a true science. Much of what we call science is not true. There are a few individual scientists who are true scientists. They are the true, like alchemists, they are lovers of nature. Like Albert Hoffman is a lover of nature. And he who loves nature and approaches nature with love and loving understanding is given nature's secret as a gift, as a grace, as a gift, which is why he was given it. A question on types of leucogens. You mentioned the psilocybin that was good for sex. And mescaline. That's also good for sex. They're all good for sex. I've seen the Yaki's dance and they take mostly peyote, which has mescaline in it, which is nearest methamphetamine. What about scopolamine? What does that do to you? And what about DMT? What does that emphasize? Well, I mean, it's good that these questions are asked. The real source of information is largely folkloric in our own culture because, of course, we live in a society where research is not allowed. So it's all underground and clandestine. But you ask about scopolamine. Scopolamine is, along with alhylcyamine and other things, the active ingredient in gymsin weed, which, because of Carlos Castaneda and the practices of brujería in Mexico, is well known as a psychoactive plant. It certainly is psychoactive, whether it is psychedelic or not. Maybe more like madness? It's a kind of delirious frenzy. You go between delirium and frenzy and you have a great deal of trouble remembering. It's what's called state-bounded. If you try to... or, you know, from my own point of view, if I were to try to describe the ideal shamanic plant, what it would do, it would not interfere with the short-term and long-term memory. It would clear your system very quickly. And it would be highly visionary. I am, I guess, just the kind of personality that values vision. So I really think it's weird when people say they took drug X and it was wonderful, and you say, "Well, did you hallucinate?" And they say, "Well, no." "Well, then what was so wonderful about it?" I mean, there must have been something, a feeling. But for me, what is fascinating is just the indole hallucinogens, a very small family, which includes psilocybin, LSD, ibogaine, harmaline and harmine, the beta-carbolines, did I say DMT? Yeah. And that's it. Not even mescaline, which marks me as a kind of Calvinist in some people's books. I always wonder why the yakis can dance so long. It's because it's an amphetamine. But these indole hallucinogens, what we're trying to get out here is we are trying to appear to be sane and rational people, so we don't seize you by the lapels and shake you. But what we're trying to get out here is that these things contain something that our art, our history, our literature, our religion did not prepare us for. And it appears to be an alien god, an unknown dimension, the edge of our ideological world in some way, big excitement, not prolonged erection or enhanced memory or ability to rave all night or ability to recall instances of molestation in your childhood, which may or may not have even occurred, but something else, something really transcendental, completely astonishing. And as a rationalist, I think we have no right to expect that it exists. Most people don't know that it exists. People go from birth to the grave and never have the faintest inkling that there are these things in the environment which can just turn them upside down, set elves crawling through your drawers and jumping out of-- I mean, really, reality just comes apart. If you've never had that experience, be assured that you could. A lot of people live their lives in the faith that there is no Santa Claus. Well, I've got news for you. One thing I might add about scopolamine is that scopolamine and atropine and hyalcine, which are derived from these nightshades, selenacea nightshades, were important psychoactives in the witches, which is the European medieval shamanic tradition. They seem to produce a kind of visionary, but different than the psilocybin or indole, tryptamine kinds of visions, accompanied by kind of like a twilight sleep, what brain researchers refer to as a theta state, just before sleep, where you get these kind of images, that you get a sequence of images, like dreamlike, and then you kind of fade out. You go into sleep, which is why--and then you may wake up again and have a few more images, and your body feels very heavy and kind of asleep, and yet you're having these visions. It's interesting that--so there's that sense of confusion, you're not quite sure, did you see this, did you dream it, what was it, that kind of thing. And because it's detachment from the body, scopolamine was quite commonly used in childbirth. The generations of women gave birth to children while in this kind of delirial twilight sleep state. It was also used by the SS as a truth serum, because they thought they could extract information. Uh-huh. Thank you. Sure. Care to talk about evil again? Oh, here, this-- In a recent article, the same magazine that Ralph mentioned, Terrence, your mushroom article, Ralph Metzner wrote an article along with another person whose name I don't recall, on MDMA. And my sense was that you, Ralph, pretty much extolled the virtues of MDMA for experiences in the generic kind that we're discussing here today. Terrence, you give criteria when you talk about what you think are useful--a useful criteria for substance selection in terms of what you think would be helpful for people that are interested in choosing or knowing the plants or knowing the substances that they're interested in for consciousness expansion, et cetera. I just wonder if you both could comment on what you think about MDMA. It's had a lot of press. There seems to be certain camps that think it has a great virtue, and some people feel that it's just an excuse to take amphetamine. The up-based cocaine. Do you want to go first? Either way, you go first. Oh, no, you go first. You give him the bad news, I'll give him the good news. Well, it's a complicated question, and so I will give a complicated answer, which is the only answer that is true. First of all, it's a moving situation. Research is going on constantly. A couple of years ago, the question was, "Is MDMA good or bad?" Now I think, although Ralph may disagree, the question has become, "How bad is it?" You have to talk first of all about the psychoactivity and then the physiological activity. The psychoactivity seems entirely solitary. People report tremendous breakthroughs in their personal growth. If it is--and as a drug of abuse, I don't think that's really a problem, although some people have proven that they can take a great deal of it. Where the pharmacology stands as of ten days ago or so is, it does destroy in the rat at fairly low exposures. In other words, only twice a human-level exposure. It destroys certain microscopic structures on the dendrite of the nerve. Now, the problem is, no one knows what these microscopic structures do, and there is no behavioral sequelae--great word-- no behavioral sequelae that accompany the visible destruction of these structures. So there are three possibilities, or there are several possibilities. One is that whatever the structure on the dendrite is, it is not important past puberty. Think of it as a scaffold around a building, which once erected, the scaffold remains but is not performing any function. Therefore, this destruction that we see is not a problem. Or it may be that it's cumulative over a long period. What it basically does is it seems to show aging of brain structure very rapidly. At 120 days, again in the rat, there's no reversal of this. At 240 days, there's no reversal of this. But there is another drug--I think it's called finfluridine--that is used to manage psychotics, and it also destroys in exactly the same way the very same structures. And it has been used with impunity in mental hospitals for 15 years. So what I say about MDMA is that a prudent course would be to wait and see. If it's really bad, they're going to find out. If it remains in this somewhat nebulous place, well, that means the people who think it's bad are actually losing ground. As a general rule, I never was very excited about MDMA because I'm just very suspicious of synthetics. And one of the things that is really terrible about the cultural climate that we're operating in was here was MDMA, a drug with an apparent potential in psychotherapy, that actually became popular in psychotherapy. And because there was no process for legalizing it, it was never tested at all. That's what the FDA gave us with ADAM, was an utterly untested psychoactive drug because they refused to test it. So the fruits of ignorance are dendritic ablation in this case. Well, because they refused to test it, because they couldn't persuade any drug companies to test it, because the drug companies couldn't market it, because the patent had already expired, and it costs the drug company $5 million on the average or more to take a drug through the human and clinical trial necessary before it can be approved and prescribed. But don't you think in a civilized society, if they know people are taking this drug, the government itself should pay for this stuff? Right. And in some other countries, that's exactly what happens. In England, for example, it may still happen that way. England may, in fact, still end up with a legal form of MDMA being possible because they run their sort of system a little differently than we do. I think the only thing I would add to what Terence has said, I mean, I basically share those views. I think that in a kind of a basic sense, if you're talking about the whole spectrum of psychedelic and psychoactive drugs, ADAM is just not that interesting. It happens to be the most effective drug so far discovered for psychotherapy, for helping people sort out their emotional entanglements, emotional attachments, and balancing out the emotional nature. And that sometimes takes one session with MDMA, sometimes two, sometimes half a dozen, in a therapeutic kind of context, and many therapists found that this was the case. And there's a book that we publish called Through the Gateway of the Heart, which is available in the bookstore if you want to read an account, a selection of accounts of experiences that people have had with it in a therapeutic context. And it's not visionary. Myself and somebody else simultaneously independently came up with the term "empathogenic" for it, generating a state of empathy. And it always seems to produce this kind of opening of the heart center from which then people can relate, they can look at their problems with empathy, they can look at other people, their relationships, and they can sort of just balance it out, clear it out. But apart from that, once people have done that, number one, people report that after having done that a few times, they can get to that same state of open-heartedness without it. And number two, that nothing much happens. There's very little content, unless you have a problem to work on, there's really no reason, or somebody that you want to relate to and bond with and explore their relationship, there's really... [silence] {END} Wait Time : 0.00 sec Model Load: 0.65 sec Decoding : 2.08 sec Transcribe: 2687.45 sec Total Time: 2690.17 sec