[Pause]
 The spectrum of alkaloids working on you from ten different directions in the middle of this.
 The wonderful thing about chacruna, the cicotria viridis, the admixture, the normal admixture to ayahuasca,
 is when you do an HPLC or a mass spec on that, it's just DMT.
 It's a pure spike of N, N-dimethyltryptamine, nothing else hanging onto it.
 And I think they are such subtle folk chemists that they have discerned this,
 not only located every possible source of DMT in this ecosystem of several hundred thousand species,
 but then discerningly focused in on those that have the cleanest of these signatures.
 So it's a very impressive thing.
 And to what end, you may ask.
 I mean, somebody asked me, do they just take these things for fun?
 And the answer is not at all.
 They are regulating their psychic world.
 They are this--you know, when ayahuasca was first described by people like Richard Spruce and Theodor Koch-Gruenberg
 and these early people into the Amazon, they spoke in terms of a telepathic drug.
 They felt that these small groups of deep forest Indians were actually entering into group states of mind with this stuff.
 Well, then, in the sort of hard reductionist era of pharmacology, this was, of course, completely poo-pooed and dismissed.
 But now, with our planet in crisis, I think we need to go back and look at this.
 I have had extraordinary experiences in ayahuasca sessions.
 Kat isn't here, so she can't tell the story, but some of you may recall the story.
 In Don Fidelmo Samvita's circle, he had a nephew.
 This guy was worthless.
 He was a small-time weed dealer, part-time pimp, mostly ne'er-do-well.
 But because he was the shaman's sobrino, the shaman's nephew, he couldn't just be tossed out.
 And he would come to these ayahuasca sessions, and the shaman, Don Fidel, Don Jose, the old guys, would sing these beautiful songs in Quechua.
 And he would sing against them.
 He would sing while they were singing. He would sing a different song.
 And these people, I don't know how true it is generally in Peru, but these Loretanos, the people of Loreto, are such fine people.
 They will never directly confront a social outrage.
 So everybody in the circle was uncomfortable with this guy, didn't want him back.
 It was the main topic of conversation when we all weren't loaded.
 But when we were loaded, there he would be, hassling the group.
 So finally, after about the third time this came, there were about 30 of us in the shed.
 Don Jose, this older guy, had made the ayahuasca, and he was quite proud of it.
 He was showing it off, and it was god-awful strong.
 [PAUSE]
 And Don Jose, the sobrino, was sitting across from me, and as these waves of hallucination would come,
 I would see him, and he would turn into like a monkey, a howler monkey, or a monkey with a dog's face.
 And just these weird animal transformations, and everybody else was staying the same.
 Well, Cath, who is a little less mealy-mouthed than I am, finally had had all she was going to take of this guy.
 And we were all sitting there, and she just looked across the room.
 She just gave him what in English parlance is called a look that would kill.
 And he physically staggered backwards.
 And what I saw was these red darts come out of her eyes and go across the room.
 The singing stopped.
 Yes, the singing stopped instantly, and Don Fidel turned to one of the old guys and said,
 "She sends the zmum-mum-mum-mum-mum." And the other guy said, "Yes!" And it was just this... it was a telepathic group experience
 where someone had been able to zing somebody else, and 30 people had seen it as a real thing.
 Well, I think the potential for this kind of thing for problem-solving is immense.
 I think I used to be in politics, as we have them today.
 Do you want to say something? No?
 Well, and you see, what they'll tell you in the Amazon, these ayahuasqueros, is the purpose of each journey, when it is not to cure.
 And the shaman I spent the most time with, he did public curing sessions on Saturday nights.
 And everyone was welcome.
 On Wednesday nights, he took double doses, and it was a very small, intimate group, and he said, "This is for knowing.
 Now we don't cure. This is to know and to see."
 And what this consisted of was the recovery out of the hallucinogenic state of what are called "icaros."
 Icaros are magical songs, and the more of them you have, they are taught to you by the plant spirit.
 And the more of them you have, the more powerful a shaman you are.
 Well, these icaros, when you listen to recordings of them, they're quite beautiful, quite extraordinary.
 But when you're with the people, it's made very clear that an icaro is not something you listen to.
 An icaro is something you look at. You look at it. It is to be seen.
 Even though it is made out of sound, as a composition, as a work of art, it is offered more in the vein of a painting than a song or a poem.
 What is happening is that in this group state of mind, the intentionality of the singer is beheld as a three-dimensional modality of light and of color.
 Well, this is like an ontological transformation of language itself.
 Language, you see, we have eyes, ears, and tactile sensory receptors.
 They break the world of incoming perception.
 The electromagnetic radiation and the acoustical waveforms falling on our bodies are canalized by the senses into these narrow streams of input.
 The visual input, the audio input, the tactile input.
 In the ayahuasca state, a synesthesia comes into being.
 Well, synesthesia in our context is a rare medical word.
 But if you know anything about Romanticism and the literary movements of the 19th century,
 the pursuit of synesthesia is what drove the French symbolists and the Romantics.
 They saw this melding of the senses as a higher transformation of the ontos of art.
 And I believe it so to be.
 I think that what history is for is to give us a technology that will allow us to share our hallucinations.
 And they, the people of the Amazon, these Los Tribus, the tribal groups, have perfected a shamanic technology that allows them to do the same thing.
 It's this ability to display to your intimates the contents of your own head that creates a larger organism than simply the ego.
 And there are so many problems here with translating these concepts from language to language.
 The shamans of the Amazon may not even grok fully that it is this collective state of mind that is so empowering to them and that we don't have.
 How do you know what it's like to be inside the clothing of another culture?
 Well, you don't know. But the modality, the benchmark that the pharmacological fact of the chemistry of consciousness gives you
 allows you to work out from a given a kind of map of what must be going on.
 That's why the shaman's remark that it's so hard to take ukuhe was interesting.
 It meant that, you know, he was making a statement about the human condition.
 He was saying, "It's hard for us to do this just the way it's hard for you to do this."
 I've discussed this with the mushroom shamans in Mexico and ayahuasqueros in South America.
 They say, "It is not easy to do this. It is not easy to plunge into this hallucinogenic maelstrom."
 No culture prepares you for the modalities of the psychedelic experience.
 A culture can give you personal authenticity, self-control and courage.
 These things will serve you well, but in terms of preparing you for what you will experience, it's virtually inconceivable.
 I think that the great gift that is going to come out of ayahuasca is the ability to open our heads to each other,
 to truly de-individuate, to truly create for ourselves a group mind, and now on a global scale.
 You see, the masculine engineering mentality is just running along behind the feminist shamanist parade, hardwiring all the changes into technology.
 The engineering mentality doesn't believe it unless it turns on with a red light when you hit the button.
 But all that the engineering mentality can dream of or ever accomplish, it's in place in this vegetable matrix,
 this other way of doing it that doesn't give you much to show.
 No Amazonian shaman can point to an edifice like the World Trade Center or an atom smasher or a moon probe
 and say the genius of my worldview allowed me to create these things.
 But the genius of their worldview allows them to create authentic caring,
 reasonable transmission of gnosis from one generation to another, an ability to walk lightly on the earth,
 an ability to intuit the needs and feelings of other people.
 And this is what we lack, is any sort of emotional sensitivity,
 any sort of ability to call on the racial mind at its roots to authenticate us personally in moments of stress and crisis.
 The ego really is a poor substitute for authentic being.
 And it's the poor substitute for authentic being that we have each and every one of us opted for.
 Man, woman, oldster, child.
 The neurotic programming is so deep that it is very difficult to transcend it.
 You see, I think, and Nicole is certainly a part of this phenomenon,
 that what really has happened, let's say, well, let's just say in the 20th century,
 it is that anthropologists, ethnographers, botanists, geographers, linguists have gone out to the four corners of the globe,
 the wastes of the Kalahari, the Amazon jungles, the storm-beaten shores of Kerguelen,
 all of these places, and they have come back with information.
 These people copulate in this position. These people intoxicate with this kind of thing.
 These people treat wealthy people this way. These people treat homosexuals this way.
 These people believe identical twins are this and that.
 All these ideas, ideas and technologies in the form of drugs, basically,
 and every jungle has consciousness-transforming potential within it, not all equally,
 but no jungle, no ecosystem is so poor that you can't find a consciousness-transforming element in it.
 Well, as we now sort through this vast smorgasbord of options,
 you know, should we practice the oracular systems of the Azande?
 Shall we all become Mahayanas? Shall we take up Sufi practices?
 What is our relationship to the shamanism of Tierra del Fuego?
 As all of this is sorted out in a kind of evolutionary fury, certain things are going to come to the fore.
 And I think it's not the form, not the ritual, but the way in which these things empower being,
 empower the physiology, the felt experience of being,
 and empower the cognitive processing and the integrative processing that goes on between people.
 And in the world of paradisical Taoistic integration that I hypothesize preceded history,
 still exists in the Amazon, in these, basically in the Ayahuasca complex,
 but then in all the other complexes that are the feathering out of the edges of that.
 The archaic consciousness lives.
 This is why I think we are so strongly drawn to involve ourselves with these archaic people,
 because we recognize that they have answers to questions that we couldn't even ask until the 1960s.
 Do you want to say anything about any of this, Nicole?
 Or shall we ask people for questions?
 I would like to be asked questions.
 I like even to be interrupted when I'm talking and asked questions.
 What do you mean by that?
 What is your experience with the Ayahuasca?
 What?
 What is your experience with Ayahuasca?
 Well, it's about the usual, I would say.
 Actually, they usually don't give me a strong enough dose,
 because they think I'm, you know, an old lady in delicate or something.
 And so I haven't had such vivid experiences so frequently or such enduring experiences.
 I just get pleasures on and off, usually.
 It's very hard for me to convince anybody that I'm really a very couple lady.
 And so they give me... I have... mine have been oddly disappointing, usually.
 For example, one night I couldn't see anything except the temples in Thailand.
 And I'd seen those already, so I wanted to see something new.
 And they're elaborate, Indonesian architecture.
 That wasn't what I wanted.
 And I kept saying, "Senorita Ayahuasca," because that's the way you must address her,
 "Please, turn it off and get me something else."
 But incidentally, the respect for such plants must always be shown,
 not only in your mind, but verbally and in the handling.
 When a witch doctor friend gave him that, he sang a song to it when he dug it up.
 And he sang, "Dear Senorita Ayahuasca, I am very sorry to have you leave me,
 but you are going to Senorita Nicole. She will be good to you.
 She is a good person. You will love her. She will love you very much.
 Please grow big and strong and active."
 And that is the way you must turn to that. Did you do that with yours?
 Oh, yes, and I blow tobacco smoke and the whole bit.
 Very impressive.
 But there are extremely well-crafted sensitivity, of course, and must always respect it.
 And the echoes, these magical songs, are so much a part.
 I was sometimes told that they didn't think the plants would work for me,
 especially when it was something they didn't want to give me, because it was taboo,
 because I didn't know the song.
 Or if I knew it, I couldn't sing it properly, because nobody could.
 It was not a ridoto, for example.
 Oh, yes, and they are very proud of the difficulty of these languages.
 These languages are extremely difficult to learn.
 Nicole's experience of finding it difficult to get thoroughly loaded is somewhat typical.
 There are a lot of problems.
 It took me a long time to get stoned in a native situation,
 because they always gave me too little, because they're all little.
 And they had a notion of the dose, and it just would barely rock my boat
 when it was clearly very intense for them.
 If you find yourself in South America sometime pursuing these mysteries,
 you may have to resign yourself to drinking a lot of swill before you get to something swell.
 I didn't really understand ayahuasca till I made it, till I was able to repeatedly make it
 and each time add more cicotria viridis to intensify the visions,
 and finally I got it where I wanted it.
 You see, there are so many things about ayahuasca that are interesting.
 It really is a unique thing.
 First of all, it is technically a drug, in the sense that it's not a plant.
 It's not just one plant with morning glory seeds, with peyote, with mushrooms, with detoura, with cannabis.
 This is one plant.
 Ayahuasca is a binary weapon.
 You have two things which have to be combined for it to be effective.
 Well, now that not only means that it is a combinatory thing,
 potentially different each time because the ratios are potentially different,
 it also brings the human element in very strongly
 because it's going to be about who made it,
 in the same way that a souffle is about who made it,
 while a glass of water is not about who made it.
 And so personalities become involved here.
 Well, then, because it's something made, it can be made strong or weak.
 It can be diluted.
 Now, if you're into it for the money, all you have to do is cut it 50%,
 and you've got twice as much money, and the stuff is half as good.
 This is familiar to all of you, I'm sure, who've dealt street drugs, this equation.
 If you cut it by half, you make more money, but the stuff is garbage.
 Even liquor, the horror of cutting fine liquor and what that does to it.
 So you really have to know your guy or gal,
 if it is the rare case when the ayahuasquera comes into the picture.
 There are ayahuasqueras.
 When Cat and I were in the Amazon in '76,
 we tracked down and spent time with Manuel Cordova-Rios,
 who some of you may know his book,
 "The Wizard of the Upper Amazon," by Bruce Lamb, is about Manuel Cordova-Rios.
 Well, when we met him in '76, he was 93.
 He looked 55, but he did die a couple of years later.
 But he was still curing people and seeing people.
 He was a cure-and-datter. He was an awful liar.
 Well, that reflects on my story.
 Nicole says he was an awful liar.
 We went to him. He was in Iquitos.
 And we said, "We want real ayahuasca. We want the real thing."
 He said, "You have to leave Iquitos. Everyone here is a liar, a mentirosa."
 So he said, "There is a woman, Juana Gonzales-Opi."
 Have you ever heard of her?
 No.
 And his story was that as a 17-year-old girl, many years before,
 she had contracted leprosy.
 And there was no cure available to her except that he cured her with ayahuasca,
 but not before she lost her hands and feet.
 So she was clearly a heavy-duty person and had a great reputation.
 And we pursued her to Pucallpa, to Llarina Cocha.
 We finally actually found her relatives,
 but she had gone to the Andes for a few months to cure.
 But in the process of trying to find Juana Gonzales-Opi,
 we met all these other curanderos.
 And this is often the way of it in the Amazon.
 You look for one thing only to have a reason for being there
 and what you really are fated to find is something far different.
 Serendipity is Amazon travel.
 Yes, for sure.
 It is.
 And you'd better be good at it.
 Isn't it time for lunch or something?
 I think we're getting tired of sitting.
 It's getting close.
 Maybe we should break for lunch.
 Does anybody have any questions?
 Yeah, we could take a couple more questions.
 We were talking about admixtures.
 Did you have any comment about admixtures of toros into the aneurysm or Brugmansia?
 Not Brugmansia.
 Did you ever deal with Brugmansia?
 I've heard of it being used in it, but I'm scared of Brugmansia.
 I have known personally one case in which it cured so many brain cells,
 the cortical cells, that the man was totally incurable.
 None of those, nobody could help.
 Yes, besides the DMT, which is added to the ayahuasca to make it highly visionary,
 then there are what's called tertiary admixtures, a third component.
 And this is what Ken is asking about.
 There are many, many of these tertiary admixtures.
 I have 20 or 30 listed.
 And most of them, when you get them into the lab, are chemically complex.
 They are probably--
 Some are quite useless.
 Some are useless, but some, I'm sure, push it all over the map.
 And detour is certainly one.
 Brugmansia is one.
 There are a buta species.
 There are a number of these.
 But I'm still trying to master the two.
 I have in Hawaii many of these tertiary admixtures, but I'm a little--
 That's real magic.
 That you don't get.
 You have to test those things before you use them.
 Yes, because they could be mutagenic.
 And a lot of people--
 Really terrible things go on in Peru.
 I mean, you have to be sure of your ayahuasquero.
 I had some friends who went to Lamas near Tarapoto,
 and they documented an ayahuasquero there who, when his ayahuasca was all done,
 just to give it the proper zing, he would hit it with a tablespoon of creosote.
 Well, creosote is not only awful, paint it on a mouse's ears,
 and two weeks later the mouse will have tumors on its ears.
 It's about the worst thing you could possibly come up with.
 There are all sorts of things. I know of one that would put kerosene in.
 Yeah, kerosene.
 Kerosene, of course, is considered a great cure for snakebite.
 Right. They always want to--
 I remember landing in a village where--
 If anybody was sick, because I had a lot of good medicines with me,
 in the early days when I didn't know so much about plant--
 didn't believe in plant medicines.
 And they said, "Yes, there was a man there who had been bitten by a snake
 a few weeks before, and he still wasn't well,
 and he'd had two whole bottles of kerosene."
 [laughter]
 Yeah.
 I have a question. I remember that John Wann would teach Carlos
 about singing songs with mescaline and with the ayahuasca, their songs.
 Are there songs to learn with the magic mushroom?
 Yes. I think singing is sound, and language is what this is all about.
 I mean, we are not given to this, or I suppose I shouldn't make a generalized statement,
 but it's not my general tendency to burst into joyful song.
 But on the mushroom, voice, the purity of tone, the control,
 the almost synthesizer-like stability of the tone is shocking.
 Plus, you can see it. You know, you swipe this way, and you leave a chartreuse trail.
 You come down through it this way with a magenta stripe.
 You are sculpting in this audio dimension.
 Yes, all of the-- this small family of hallucinogens that I talk of with such enthusiasm,
 all related, psilocybin is a tryptamine.
 Ayahuasca is a pharmaceutical strategy, pharmacological strategy for activating DMT.
 The snuffs from the kumala trees are DMT and 5-MeO-DMT.
 The drugs, the compounds that interest me are vanishingly small
 compared to the whole cornucopia of pharmaceutical nature.
 I'm not into, you know, the whole cyclosized amphetamine series, including MDMA and MDA.
 I find that not very compelling.
 The short-acting anesthetics ultimately seem to me to be somewhat uninteresting.
 I'm just a fanatic for this one thing because I want to very strongly make the point that, you know,
 altered states, there are just thousands of altered states,
 panic, love, despair, hatred, loathing, anxiety, and boredom, and drug states, you know,
 two scotches, two scotches and an Irish coffee, all of this stuff.
 But what I'm interested in is this very specific thing that is, seems to me, so transcendental and peculiar.
 It isn't a mirror to self.
 These tryptamines ultimately will be superseded in psychotherapy by something else
 because they're not the best instrument for looking at the cracked personality.
 What they are is a tremendous instrument for looking at the invisible dimensions of the larger universe of mind.
 That's what they are for.
 So I think people should be, you should be through your stuff before you come to this.
 It will psycholitically clean you out.
 The first few trips will then be directed toward your stuff.
 And many people never push beyond that.
 They just say, "My God, it was so horrible dealing with my fears and anxieties and stupidities and self-betrayals
 that I'm never going to go back."
 But if you will persist, eventually it no longer becomes about you.
 You become the small figure in the foreground of a vast and unfolding cosmic drama, not a personal drama.
 And that's the shamanic perspective.
 And every shaman must go through this shedding of personal identity to then reach an accommodation with it.
 That's why when I encounter the mind behind the plant, what I always say to it is, you know,
 "Show yourself. Reveal yourself. Let me see as much of you as I can stand.
 Don't make it, don't tailor it for me.
 Don't kowtow to my needs. Push me to the limit.
 Let me see as much of your quintessence as I can imbibe without overflowing."
 Well, we'll talk more about this this afternoon.
 Thank you very much.
 [Applause]
 [Unclear]
 dealt with. Yeah.
 You suggested shamanism is like the way to get man into harmony with earth and sort of back to nature sort of thing.
 Are there other ways? And if there are, do they have any commonalities?
 Well, I guess shamanism is what has been focused in on as the overarching metaphor
 because all of these potential responses seem to lead somehow in that direction.
 I mean, the concept of shamans spans the notion in the modern usage from manager to poet.
 So it's a pretty broadly based concept.
 It's exalting a superior form of planning, which we could use some of at this point here.
 Okay. Well, what we thought we would do this afternoon is I would talk for a little bit
 and then maybe Nicole would respond to that if she felt like it.
 And then we would leave more time for questions than we left in the morning.
 I think both Nicole and I feel that the fruitful thing, the most interesting thing is the questions
 left unquestioned, I tend to fall into my own creodes of habit and just repeat certain favorite numbers.
 But if you want to jog it in some different direction or cast it in a different light,
 then the question thing is good for that.
 The subject matter of this weekend is Amazonian shamanism, specifically named in the title.
 And I think this gives us permission to talk more about some of the details of shamanism
 in the Amazonian situation than we might in a weekend that was devoted to the planetary crisis generally
 or some of the broader cosmic themes that I sometimes deal with.
 But I think one thing that is a common thread from the cosmic view to the particularized sensitivity
 to what is happening in the Amazon is the content as we can describe it of what these shamans are experiencing.
 Can we build a common language about this other dimension?
 And if we can, what does this common language begin to look like?
 So I thought this afternoon I would just remind you of some of the old metaphors for this alternative dimension,
 the beta matrix, the other realm, and then some possible new wrinkles on it.
 And I'm speaking now particularly of the intensified states that are associated with this shamanic complex
 of plants based on tryptamine.
 So it's a worldwide phenomenon. DMT is rarely distributed in any plant in sufficient quantity
 that it can trigger an unambiguous intoxication without somehow being concentrated.
 Either you have to extract and concentrate the bark or you have to do a hot water extraction of the leaf
 or in some way it has to be concentrated.
 Yet nevertheless, over the millennia, people have located the sources of this phenomenon
 and spared no effort to make it available in a religious and shamanic context.
 Well, so what is it?
 The experience can be very compressed and brief.
 In a typical DMT experience where it has been smoked,
 the onset of the experience is on the order of 30 seconds and the duration on the order of 5 to 7 minutes.
 With ayahuasca, and sometimes the way the tribal people do it, is they boost it.
 They take a second hit some hours into the thing.
 You can prolong these states of intense visionary synesthesia for hours.
 But, yeah?
 Is the DMT content in the secretion of the marita enough to get off the smoked leaf?
 No, I don't think so.
 A typical dose of ayahuasca that would be highly visionary will have 85 wet weight grams of Secotria viridis in it.
 I would estimate that to be close to maybe 15 dry grams, dry weight, of Secotria.
 And that amount of DMT, if smoked by itself, not in the presence of an MAO inhibitor, would not be effective.
 You see, the genius of the ayahuasca pharmacology is that beta-carboline alkaloids like harmine and harmaline
 are being used to lower the threshold of sensitivity to DMT,
 so that a dose of DMT that would normally be not perceived is, in fact, absolutely flattens you,
 because your sensitivity has been raised by the inhibition of these enzyme systems.
 Well, what is this like experientially?
 Well, it's as though, in the first five seconds, the room clears of air.
 Everything, all colors brighten.
 It's as though the air has been sucked out of the room.
 Everything brightens.
 There's a generalized feeling of anesthesia, perhaps localized in the skin.
 And then you close your eyes, and there is a mandolic formation of undifferentiated red and orange.
 Some kind of--what you're actually seeing is the bow shock of this gradient of unusual neurochemistry
 hitting the synaptic membrane.
 One by one, the synapses are giving up their normal affinity for serotonin
 and instead converting over to the bioelectric dynamic molecule that is being suddenly offered to them.
 And as this occurs on a scale of millions and then tens of millions of synaptic locations,
 a higher cortical experience comes into being.
 There is a sound like the compression of a cellophane wrapper, a kind of crackling sound,
 and then a penetration into this alternative reality, some kind of--a modality of light and distance and dimensionality
 that is somehow inhabited.
 This is the real shocker for the modern positivist, reductionist mind,
 that it is a world of spirit, of animate intelligence, of comprehending and relating
 that suffuses every atom of existence.
 And if you ask a shaman, "What is this?" he will answer without hesitation,
 "Oh, well, it's the realm of the dead. It's the afterlife. These are our ancestors."
 What he doesn't explain is why one's ancestors should look like they're made out of golden brass
 and be puttering around like jeweled basketballs,
 speaking in hyperdimensional syntactical languages which condense on the floor in front of you.
 Apparently, these are questions which are reserved for a deeper level of initiation.
 But in any case, they say, "Oh, these are the ancestors."
 Well, this is a--you know, I've been in this biz for 20 years,
 and at some time in the past I must have faced this and repressed it.
 But recently it has come to me what a stunning denouement this would actually be
 if this is truly and in fact what shamanism is about,
 and that we merely have to open ourselves to what these people are saying.
 And what they are saying is there is a chemical technology for accessing the beyond,
 this higher mathematical manifold where that which has been and that which will be is somehow kept,
 you know, some Blakeian domain of potentiality that can be accessed.
 This would explain this hair-raising sense of familiarity
 that attends the contact with the utterly bizarre and unexpected,
 so that when the cognitive dissonance that accretes itself around this ecstasy is composed of two parts.
 It is that, "My God, I can't believe this is happening," or even that I could perceive it if it were.
 And the second part is, "This is totally familiar to me.
 This is more familiar than any other part of my life.
 This is my place."
 And the cognitive dissonance that ricochets between those places approaches unbearable.
 I was talking with a chemist a few weeks ago, an old friend of mine,
 and he was saying, "Well, what do you think about DMT in terms of risk?"
 And I said, "Well, the risk is death by astonishment.
 That's what you're really courting."
 And if you don't think that's possible, it's because you've never done this,
 because you pass that close.
 I mean, you just say, "This is amazement on a spectrum which could kill you
 if you let it run out of control," because it is so intense.
 It is so improbable and yet so familiar.
 Well, if it were somehow tied in to this after-world domain,
 this would all begin to make a certain weird kind of sense.
 Rupert Sheldrake has suggested what he calls "necrotic biochemistry,"
 that the dying process is actually the process of release of tryptamines
 into deep brain structure.
 Well, okay, so you've got this modality and there's stuff going on there.
 Well, what kind of stuff is it?
 Well, chiefly it seems to be a kind of domain where information is being passed around.
 Information is being offered and it's being traded.
 And I've often tried in reconstructing these experiences to feel into
 where have I had this feeling before,
 this feeling which I now have.
 [ Silence ]


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