I'm not saying that you can't push consciousness around, and I'm not saying that you cannot
 induce psycholytic states, states of self-recognition, states of abandonment of neurotic behavior
 patterns and that sort of thing.
 Certainly these things happen, but this informing impossible mystery, this thing which need
 not exist at all, so far as we can tell, it is entirely a gratuitous mystery.
 This informing sense of the other that approaches us with poetry and jeweled machines and visionary
 vistas of the far future and lost races in space and biological destinies possible but
 untried, that is not approachable any other way.
 And I think, you know, that all this lineage mumbo-jumbo and the close holding of secrets
 means you don't have a strong hand.
 If you're holding your hand close to your chest, it's because you're afraid to play it.
 And the shamanism that is happening at the most primitive cultural level is shamanism
 that is willing to show its hand.
 I mean, they don't tell you that you're not pure enough or celibate enough or haven't
 mastered textual proficiency enough.
 They just say, "Yes, come with us into the woods and we will show you what we know.
 And what we know is that we don't know nothing.
 And this is how we found that out.
 We found it out by putting ourselves at the mercy of something that we absolutely cannot
 understand, something which cannot be boiled down to serve ideology.
 This horse cannot be broken.
 Any priest who tries to ride it will be thrown for a loop.
 Any politician who tries to ride it will be trampled beneath it.
 It is a true mystery.
 And the male ego, that reductionist, Newtonian, Cartesian, positivist approach always pushes
 for closure.
 There is never satisfaction unless there is explanation.
 And yet, explanation is a fool's game.
 Anybody can create an explanation.
 The history of thought is the history of one cock-eyed explanation after another, which
 is immediately perceived as ludicrous once it becomes outmoded.
 So the mystery is not an unsolved problem.
 It is a true mystery.
 Nobody knows what is going on.
 I don't think any tradition has taken the measure of this or operates in the light of
 it.
 The people who actually handle the molten alchemical ore that pours out of the furnaces
 of hyperspace have very little to say about it, have no interpretation to offer.
 It's the public relations people and the priestcraft people and the people who have a book, who
 have a book they're selling, they are just full of information, explanation, denunciation,
 adoration, so forth and so on.
 But the people who stand close to the mystery are silent.
 And what I would like to put across, and what I'm always trying to put across, and what
 is very hard to put across, even though we say it over and over again, is how real what
 we're talking about is.
 It is real.
 It can just shake your teeth out.
 It is very fine to sit under the teaching tree and talk about psychedelic drugs.
 Do you know how much this is like being smashed on a psychedelic drug?
 Not at all.
 Not one iota.
 Because what is required in the actual confrontation of the thing is that all this theory, all
 this tradition, all this self-examination is brought in to the focus of the moment.
 It is existentially real.
 You are being tried and you are being tested by a thing and an agency that you cannot know.
 And this is very different from getting a laugh from an audience or a paycheck from
 an institution or your book reviewed in the newspaper.
 That is all dross and foolishness, because we all know that there are weasels everywhere
 and that your position in human society is no indication of your existential validity.
 But if you can pass through the fire of the psychedelic experience, and it is a fire,
 the hexagram "Lee," the clinging is the sign of the psychedelic experience.
 It is the noetic fire.
 It's the fire that descended on Pentecost and gave language to the apostles.
 If you can pass through that fire, then you have made a pact outside of history, outside
 of the validations and value systems of men and women.
 You have found authentic being.
 And it's a great challenge, a great controversy.
 People react differently.
 They want to preserve this particular tradition, which mitigates against it, that particular
 tradition, which mitigates against it.
 The fact is, we can only say what we know, and I diligently sought existential validity
 in the various rumored Sothic oases in the landscape of human aspirations, such as yoga,
 such as sitting, such as, such as.
 And it's just a matter of shopping around, you know, and finding out what actually sets
 your knees knocking, what actually makes tears of joy run down your face spontaneously, what
 actually can make you grovel and plead for mercy.
 And it is this force, this real invocation of real spirit.
 It is a dark night of the soul.
 It is an ecstasy, apotheosis, apocatastasis.
 It even happens outside of Greek.
 It is pure challenge met and overcome, pure self-authentication.
 And in a world where we are just buffeted, used, set against one another, misled, misconstrued,
 lied to and controlled, nevertheless, you can just push between the tents of Carnival
 Row and walk out into the woods, and there you find the spiritual life waiting.
 There you find the limpid Sothic waters of the Tao that were always there.
 And it's a matter of courage, not of finding the guru, not of seeking the answer.
 Anybody who is seeking the answer is in flight from the answer, because the answer is not
 sought, it is faced.
 You know what it is, you just have to face the demands that it will make upon you, because
 it isn't easy.
 Reality isn't going to pass by your prostrate form and touch you on the head and tell you
 you're enlightened.
 It's going to be burned out of you the way the dross is burned away from the precious
 metal in the alchemical furnace.
 It takes courage and commitment and a willingness to make what Plotinus called the flight of
 the alone to the alone.
 This is what shamanism is about.
 We do have a good time with each other.
 We do have a good time with all these drugs and copulating furiously upon them and making
 metaphors with them.
 But the truth is that it is the narrow neck that challenges us, and the narrow neck that
 authenticates us.
 When you pass through it, each time you come to the other side, you've taken a step along
 the path of knowledge that is irrevocable.
 You are not set back.
 Nature loves courage.
 Nature is an infinitude of doorways opening into authentic being, calling to us with the
 voice of our ancestors, the spirits of the planet, the time travelers that rove the centuries
 ahead of us, and who knows what else.
 The whole fact of being is a palpable, ongoing, continuous miracle.
 And we know this.
 We feel it.
 But we are the programmed victims of a death-dealing society.
 So our task becomes, I think, to use the empowerment that these kind of gatherings give us.
 And to use the self-recognition that we can each have here that we are not alone.
 That I'm saying this because I'm glib, but we all know it.
 That's how I'm able to say it.
 It is elicited from the group mind.
 If it weren't in you, I would be incomprehensible.
 So we form, then, an understanding.
 And then we each are strengthened in the private trials of our souls when we go to meet these
 things, when we try to hammer out a relationship to the ally, when we try to hammer out a relationship
 to the denizens of our own unconscious.
 This is life authentically lived.
 And I'm sure that you're probably like me in that you come to these kind of gathering
 points from a much more mundane life.
 A life of a scramble for sustenance and whatever career-mongering we're all doing.
 I mean, very few of us have a chance to keep the white-hot image of ourselves as a skywalker
 in front of us.
 But nevertheless, this is the fact.
 This is the internal myth that drives us and delivers knowledge and delivers authentic
 being.
 And it takes a very, very small number of people to make a change, especially when the
 change is not resisted.
 Because what we're saying is not menacing to the establishment.
 It's utterly incomprehensible to the establishment.
 So we can formulate in our benign neglect, we can formulate our own self-image.
 And when finally in the chaos of the world, we are asked for what our answer would be,
 what solution we would propose, it will be all there, all finished, ready and waiting.
 This is how mutation, real mutation, occurs in biological populations.
 It isn't that there's a mutation and suddenly it works better and so it takes over.
 No, it's that the mutation is always there in the background and is never significant
 until the conditions change.
 It gets dry.
 It gets wet.
 Suddenly those mutant genes that allowed an organism to survive in wetter or drier
 conditions make all the difference.
 So we are a residual mutation that will not die, that is carried along in the bloodstream
 of the beast.
 And every 20 or 30 years or so, like the hatch of locusts or the coming of some other natural
 phenomenon in the ecosystem of the planet, there are waves of reform and of transcendent
 hope.
 It begins in America with the transcendentalists.
 As part of that now, we have only to bide our time.
 This shamanic model is at the very centerpiece of the new society that will be constellated
 if there is to be any future society at all.
 That's it, I think.
 Well now we should talk more.
 I mean, that's just my, it's like a summation or what I wanted to do out of it.
 So now we should react against this and to...
 Let me give you also...
 Without this in front of you.
 Okay, when you talk, to be honest, let me just take a few minutes, not long, to give
 you one other mythic image to think about that I recently come into focus again, which
 relates very much to the kind of apocalyptic millennial types of discussions and images
 that Terence has been conjuring.
 And that's the story of Kali in Hindu mythology.
 Ajit Mukherjee, who is a scholar of Indian tantric art, especially, has just produced
 another one of his extraordinary books and it's called Kali, the Feminine Force.
 In Hinduism, especially Hindu tantrism, the goddess is regarded as the dynamic life force.
 Consciousness is thought of as basically inert and needing to be galvanized into life by
 the dance and the power of the Shakti, which is the female power.
 And you get these symbolic images of Kali dancing on the inert body, lying prone on
 the ground, sometimes with an erection of Shiva and sometimes just lying as if dead
 and she's dancing on his body.
 That's their picture of the entire universe process.
 So as you know, they also have this vision of four descending world ages of increasing
 density, tightness and darkness and evil and degradation and degeneration, after which the
 whole cycle starts over again.
 And we're now in the middle or end phase of the Kali Yuga, the fourth and tightest and
 most grimaced phase of the cycle.
 And the story that relates to that is that Kali is born out of the head of Durga, who
 is herself the feminine form of Shiva as the destroyer transformer, who is a warrior goddess,
 Durga, and she goes around slaying demons.
 And there comes a time in which the Asuras, who are basically demons, and they're male
 demons, the Asuras sometimes referred to as violent gods or jealous titans or something
 analogous to titans in Greek mythology and the closest to anything that the Hindus have
 in terms of something like the devil.
 There isn't one figure that incarnates evil.
 The Asuras are sort of like a cosmic mafia.
 They basically break all the rules and do everything opposite to the gods.
 The gods are trying to help the evolutionary process along and then the Asuras are trying
 to do the opposite.
 They're into power and violence.
 And the humans are of course caught between these two factions, plus the animals and so
 on, the Asuras have got their own trip going.
 So there is this time that comes when the Asuras, the activities of the Asuras, the
 violent fighting and control trips that the Asuras, the fighters, the warriors, the militarists,
 male, run on each other and on other people, other beings in the world, gets totally out
 of hand and the gods become alarmed.
 Like in the story of Gilgamesh, they say, "We've got to do something.
 These Asuras are getting out of hand.
 The world itself is being threatened.
 This could have repercussions on other systems."
 And the gods go to Durga and Durga says, "Okay, it's time for Kali."
 Produces Kali out of her head and Kali proceeds to deal with the situation by devouring all
 of the male demons, the Asuras.
 And you see these pictures of their bodies, heads and arms cut off, flying through the
 air and Kali just shoveling them in.
 So what is that image?
 This is the image that some people, New Age people refer to as Gaia, the earth, doing
 the corrective action needed in order to deal with the imbalance created by an amok technology
 applied by paranoid militarists.
 And the kind of devouring, that's in fact what is happening.
 Asuras, as well as of course many humans, are being devoured.
 Heads and arms and limbs are flying through the air.
 War, torture, famine, pestilence, famine, all the four horsemen of the apocalypse, that's
 all the Kali age.
 That's the balancing process of the earth going on.
 And I'll just give you one other reflection connected to that, which is this theme that
 the earth is redressing the balance.
 You get this out of a lot of the Indian prophecies, the Hopi prophecies.
 The earth is going to go through this time of purification and then there's various myths
 about the elect being able to take off in time and so forth, which needn't concern us,
 but the emphasis on the purification.
 So what form does that take?
 And one of the things that I was shown in one vision was that if it got to the point,
 if the environmental, the ecosystem degradation got to the point that a violent reaction became
 necessary to turn the thing around before it being blown up, let's say, then what would
 happen would be an ecological disaster on this planet.
 That would be the earth's response.
 An ecological disaster of such proportions, global proportions, that it would take the
 entire combined cooperative use of all of human resources of all countries and nations
 simultaneously, divert it away from a military technology, which is where the bulk of it
 presently goes, in a concerted effort to deal with the problem, forcing people to cooperate
 against a common enemy.
 And that is in fact what I think is going to happen.
 And I think it's going to happen during the next 10, 20 years.
 The ecological crisis will grow to the point where many people feel, myself included, that's
 already reached that point, where it is an unmitigated worldwide disaster that dwarfs
 everything else, including nuclear war, because nuclear war, after all, is a threat.
 It's a possibility.
 It may never happen.
 The eco disaster is already happening.
 It's in full swing.
 The greenhouse effect and the population explosion are only the two last factors that have largely
 dawning into people's consciousness as adding and multiplying the factor even far beyond
 everything else.
 The greenhouse effect, which is really misnamed because greenhouse suggests something positive
 that promotes growth, the greenhouse effect is actually a heat trap, a planetary heat
 trap or fever condition of the planet that we're in and that we have no way of stopping.
 The best we can do now, according to the latest computer projections, is to slow it down,
 to slow the inevitable rise of at least one degree overall global temperature, which could
 result in major disasters worldwide, including the desertification of the entire American
 Midwest grain basket.
 That'll either take 20 years or 15 years or 25 years, depending on the kind of action
 we take.
 So this is the significance of the Kali, the myth of Kali, which is Gaia, which is the
 Earth correcting herself and redressing the balance, purifying herself, doing a corrective
 action.
 So I wanted to share that with you for further reflection.
 The image that I always hold of all of this, because I try to be a rationalist and an optimist,
 and it's very difficult to be both, I think, but I don't think we ever slipped out from
 beneath the control of nature, that man is not some kind of abomination run amuck inside
 what would otherwise be a very ordered and pleasant situation.
 It's that the planet itself is destabilizing.
 The last 10 million years have been more unstable, with more glaciations than the previous 100
 million years.
 And the appearance of human populations is simply, to the present moment, the most extreme
 example of the destabilizing forces loose on the planet.
 But evolution does not proceed at a steady rate.
 It appears to go faster and faster.
 And historical time is like the career of intelligence just putting the pedal to the
 floor and you're pushed back in your seat and you begin to accelerate.
 This is what history is, and we are now accelerating at such a rate that, as Ralph very eloquently
 pointed out, there are processes in motion that are real and measurable that show beyond
 the shadow of any controversy that we are living in times such as have never been known
 before.
 The dissolution of the ozone in the atmosphere, the clearing of the Amazon, the pandemic spread
 of diseases and information, the complete globalizing of the whole human family so that
 we essentially do live in a global village.
 What happens in Bangladesh and Argentina and Anchorage is all reported everywhere in the
 same day.
 The kind of ecotastrophes that Ralph mentioned, the AIDS epidemic is one of these.
 The AIDS epidemic, like the spread of nuclear weapons, another epidemic, have been a wonderful
 stimulus to sober thought about our condition.
 And I believe that the Chernobyl disaster in the Soviet Union was really what turned
 the Kremlin leadership toward rethinking their foreign policy because the explosion of a
 single power plant was like dropping a drop of ink in a glass of water and watching the
 entire glass of water turn slightly gray.
 And we're talking about the atmosphere of the only planet suitable for human life that
 we know of.
 And people just said, "My God, when Three Mile Island nearly melted down, if it had
 melted down and the federal capital of the United States of America had had to be relocated
 a hundred miles to the south, this would be a more ecology-conscious nation today."
 We got through by the skin of our teeth.
 But the image that I think is large enough to contain the violence and the desperation
 of the situation and still offer some hope is the image of birth, that we are somehow
 the children of the planet.
 We are somehow its finest hour.
 And this may grate on some people as anthropocentrism, but I actually espouse a certain kind of modified
 anthropocentrism because I don't think we're like fruit flies and giraffes and even, God
 save us, dolphins and chimpanzees.
 There is something different about this species.
 The evolutionary biologists say what it is is that we are omni-adaptive.
 The strategy of other animal species is to define a niche, a tight set of conditions,
 and then to perfectly occupy that niche.
 We don't do that.
 What we do is we redefine niches.
 We remake things so that we can go there.
 We dress ourselves so that we can inhabit the Arctic.
 We invent fire so that we can keep it with us, so forth and so on.
 We are some kind of experiment that nature is indulging herself in, an experiment with
 the efficacy of epigenetic codes.
 Previously the coding system that has been ubiquitous throughout nature has been the
 evolutionary code of the nucleotides that form the codons of DNA, the code for the structure
 of proteins that then compete in a kind of structural environment of adaptability.
 But the epigenetic information that we carry through song, through writing, through dance,
 storytelling and electronic media is a whole different ballgame.
 We do not forget.
 We bind time.
 We bind the past.
 We anticipate the future.
 We are going hyperspatial.
 We are claiming a whole new dimension for biology that it never claimed before, always
 before biology has operated within the confines of the immediate moment.
 But with the invention of writing and mnemonic skills and still more so with the proliferation
 of electronic media, we are actually becoming a fourth dimensional kind of creature.
 Our past lives.
 Our future is somehow with us.
 And you'll recall early on I said that the shaman journeys through time.
 The shaman is the paradigmatic figure for the future state of all humanity.
 What is happening is a birth process and in the same way that a fetus and its maternal
 matrix eventually must be parted or else toxemias sets in and threatens the life of the mother
 and the infant, in that same way we seem to have been groomed for metamorphosis into our
 own imaginations.
 This is where we are going and this is what our peculiar cerebral self-reflective property
 is about.
 Now history is a wink of God's eye.
 25,000 years maximum, a geological instant which begins with people chipping stone flint
 and which ends with people walking through a violet doorway into what?
 Galactic citizenship.
 A super civilization spread throughout space and time and through levels and continue I
 that we can barely conceive of or imagine.
 I mean we are like paleolithic man staring dumbly into his campfire and seeing there
 the shimmering towers of Babylon and Memphis and Athens and Rome and New York and saying,
 you know, what is it?
 What is it?
 What is it?
 It seems so important, it looks so familiar and yet it's utterly incomprehensible.
 Our future is our mystery.
 Our destiny is to live in the imagination and the historical process that we are going
 through is not, I think, cause for despair but it is a major transition point in the
 life of the entire planet.
 And I would like to think that a thousand years from now the planet will be empty of
 human life, that, you know, the forests will be creeping out into the grasslands, the animal
 populations will be stabilized, the sequestering of heavy metals will have been completed and
 the planet, like a woman who has just given birth to an 11 pound baby, will just breathe
 an enormous sigh of relief.
 And we, following our shamanic inclinations, following the self-transcending image of shamanic
 flight that leads us to build space shuttles and starships and L5 colonies, we will have
 followed our imagination into the unimaginable vistas of artistic creation that are our true
 destiny and home.
 And we are now in transition, the most difficult part of any birth process.
 Blood is being shed, there's screaming and groveling and waves of tension sweeping through
 the planet, sweeping through the human population, but it is an anticipation of a higher, wider,
 freer, kinder kind of being that we have always held up as an ideal for ourselves with the
 notion of the shaman, the superman or woman who knows the secrets of the animals, moves
 with the subtlety of the wind, is always capable of appropriate behavior, is at home everywhere
 and leaves no mark.
 It's our aspiration, it's our guiding image.
 What we need to do, I think, is articulate.
 You leave works of art.
 Leaves works of art.
 Yes, it sheds works of art.
 It's records.
 We excrete ideas.
 We leave a contrail of artifacts as we move through time.
 And they're rotting in the jungles of Belize and Guatemala, they're parched on the sands
 of Egypt and Iran, and there are more artifacts ahead of us, an endless shedding of our architectonic
 and imaginary dreams as we move toward the quintessence, which is the self, which is
 this transcendent object at the end of time that has cast this vast shadow over our dreams,
 our poetry, our aspirations, our art, our self-image.
 And we can each know this, here and now.
 The psychedelics put you in on the joke.
 You no longer are caught in the unfolding drama.
 You have seen the end.
 You have acted as a go-between.
 You have discovered the way in which the world actually works.
 Well now I'd like to hear from some of you, if we can tie this up for people.
 Sure.
 This gentleman.
 Oh, yes, microphone.
 Well, I basically agree with a lot of things that you have been talking about, Terence.
 And giving the mass of thoughts and information, I'm trying to just answer and put some points
 out that I feel are important in the whole context that you are talking about.
 One is just a simple thing in the beginning.
 You talking about psychedelics, I didn't quite get whether you make a distinction between
 synthetic psychedelics and organically grown.
 No, I make a definite distinction.
 Yes, I know that you make the difference, but within your talk, you mentioned LSD several
 times in a way that I got the impression that you look at LSD as something that is not synthetic.
 Well, LSD is kind of a borderline case.
 I'm probably under the spell of Albert Hoffman's recent visit.
 LSD-like compounds occur in morning glories and were the basis for certain hallucinogenic
 rites among the Mayans and the Toltecs.
 LSD is a sort of a hybrid.
 Ultimately, I suppose I would be sort of anti-LSD because the problem with LSD is it's so easy
 to make a million hits.
 And a million hits is not a party.
 A million hits is a governmental problem.
 And that's what undid LSD, was the fact that it was so easy to manufacture truly society-disrupting
 amounts of it.
 And that was its main function, most likely.
 Well, but don't you think a burrowing from within strategy might have gotten further?
 Like I believe that the reason Leary decided to use LSD in the Harvard experiments was
 because Michael Hollingshead made the case to him that they could manufacture so much
 of it.
 Leary's original inspiration was psilocybin, but there were physical constraints on its
 manufacture.
 Oh, yeah.
 The facts are just saying that, you know, I might not have done it that way, but that's
 the way it happened.
 And that seems to have been what the historical process came...
 That was what the historical process came up with, something that could be manufactured,
 could be in large amounts, giving hundreds of thousands of people access to an experience
 that before only a few had had.
 So, like, reaching that kind of hundredth monkey mass quantum mass action threshold.
 I mean, thinking in these quantitative terms, it's a very male thing.
 And I just wanted to put this question because my experience with my own experience as well
 as what I have seen in many other cases where other people are taking LSD, that it is extremely
 affecting your body and that it is, well, creating confusion, possibly, and that you
 should at least take into consideration that it is developed by a Swiss company and even
 Albert Hoffman, who I really appreciate as a wise, nice old man, is a man still.
 And it is done in the whole context of patriarchal chemical work.
 Sundance is destroying the river Rhine and besides all these things, they have developed
 LSD.
 Yes, well, I tried to be...
 I just wanted to mention that very briefly.
 It's not the main point that I wanted to come to.
 Can I answer it anyway?
 Sure.
 Well, frankly, I agree with you.
 I bend over backwards to be liberal because I, you know, Ralph once accused me of being
 the most conservative person he knew.
 But I think you're right, that the fact that it can be manufactured means it can be manufactured
 badly.
 And what you want when you take a psychedelic is something that you know where it came from,
 you know what it is, and you don't have to worry about, you know, were people orphaned
 or did evil people manufacture this or is the money being used to hold down black South
 Africans or...
 So I think plants, my advice to someone who takes it seriously, who wants to get right
 on this issue, is grow your own mushrooms.
 You should grow your own mushrooms for several different reasons.
 First of all, if you can successfully grow mushrooms, you probably can take them because
 in the process of growing them, it has taught you cleanliness, punctuality, attention to
 detail, all these traits which are very useful then when you take it.
 And then you know what you have.
 You've watched grain, rye, a human food turn into pure psilocybin and it all happened in
 your own basement.
 So no middlemen, no question of sources, no question of international chemical companies,
 so forth and so on.
 No, I think you're right to be very sensitive to this issue of synthesis, origins and the
 karma of these things.
 But now go on.
 Your answer is even an answer to my next point, which is that we have been talking a lot about
 whether or not taking drugs, which is from my impression not even a serious question
 for most of the people here.
 But the more important question that I found was not dealt with enough is the question
 how we take it.
 We live in a culture where we have not many tools or transmissions of knowledge how to
 use properly plants and what you're just saying about mushrooms is a very good point how we
 can learn to deal with something properly instead of just buying it and consuming it.
 And the last remark to this question of how, where I would like to hear maybe a few sentences
 from both of you is the point that, because I think Ralf mentioned the mysteries of Aloysius
 at a certain point.
 And what I know or one point that I remember is that people were only allowed once in their
 life to get this visionary experience.
 And you pointing out that the visionary experience is maybe the most important.
 I would say, I mean, in shamanic cultures quite often it was just the shaman who would
 go for the visionary experience and then had the challenge to share that with his people
 and not everybody was just going for a visionary experience.
 And what happened in the psychedelic movement was that everybody was going for visionary
 experience again and again and again and again without or even by doing that losing his motivation
 of bringing his vision back to his life and to his people.
 Well people don't know how to do it.
 You're right.
 And so maybe it's useful.
 I mean, this is certainly tying up loose ends.
 I feel like this is where we really soar out toward the edge and stretch the envelope of
 the institution.
 But you must know how to do it, right?
 And so how you do it, in my humble opinion, but based on experience, is you, first of
 all, you take a committed dose.
 You don't take some namby-pamby, piddling, testing it out, toe in the water kind of dose.
 Because even in the Christian, in the gospel, Christ says, "It's the lukewarm that I vomit
 out of my mouth.
 Don't bring me any dilettantes, no dabblers, no drugstore cowboys."
 So you take a committed dose.
 What is a committed dose?
 A dose that when you think about taking it, you feel fear.
 That's a committed dose.
 So you take a committed dose.
 And then you take it on an empty stomach.
 And then you take it in silent darkness.
 Leave your Walkman alone.
 Forget Mozart.
 Forget the Pink Floyd.
 Forget Bach's choral preludes.
 It's ridiculous.
 All that stuff sounds fine without these things.
 And this is heresy to some people.
 I mean, to some people, it's all about choosing the music.
 Again, this selling out, you know, what the hell?
 You can't illuminate your mind without having a synthesizer diddling in the background.
 So silent darkness, committed dose, empty stomach.
 And then, it's very simple.
 You lay down.
 You shut up.
 You close your eyes.
 And you look at the back of your eyelids with the expectation that you may see something.
 Now, people have described, in describing this back to me, people have called that the
 McKenna Method.
 Which seems to me just, you know, you must be nuts to think of it that way.
 Because I talked to someone, I won't name him, but a great researcher, widely published
 researcher in psilocybin.
 And he'd done 80 trips and given it to 25,000 people and so forth.
 And I said, "Well, what did you make of the hallucinations?"
 And he said, "I never closed my eyes."
 And I realized, you know, that these guys are just quaking with terror.
 And a lot of people, the main reason in the '60s, I saw a lot of people who took LSD
 for one reason only.
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