Dream the dream. Yeah. Do you think that's what virtual reality is heading towards or trying to express? I mean, I'm curious what your opinion is about the impact virtual reality will be on culture. Yeah, well I... Yes. Do you all know what virtual reality is? I don't. Virtual reality is a technology. Remember, you heard it here first. Virtual reality is a technology which is developing at lightning speed, and it basically involves a helmet and a glove. And you put on the helmet and you put on the glove and you throw a switch and you're in another reality, a virtual reality. And you can feel objects in this reality through your glove because the glove has sensors embedded into it which react to a complex computer program which tells the glove to bend as though it were gripping a ball. And then you feel a doorknob in the virtual reality and you open a door and walk through and so forth. The people who are developing this have great hopes for it, clearly to make money, which it obviously will. But we here under this tree are sophisticated McLuhanists and understand that media always has a feedback loop into cultural self-image and that we cannot put on a Dior gown without feeling like a party where that would be appropriate. And what virtual reality holds out the possibility of that these people have clearly grasped is we are going to be able to show each other our fantasies. Of course, yes, all the trivial ones first, but then everything else. And here is a tremendous dimension in which art can function. Imagine if we each could show each other our dreams, what an enriching thing that would be for design, in other words, for the topological manifold of visible culture because we see all these things in our dreams. But I think that this is only a trivial aspect of what virtual reality will make possible because the people who are associated with it are no strangers, I think, to psychedelic perspectives. One of the strange things that happens in the DMT intoxication is this language which is seen, not heard. These elf-like creatures in this other dimension have a syntactical way of communicating which is visible. They don't communicate with sound, they communicate with light which condenses into these crystalline, toy-like, semi-organic, self-transforming, highly colored things. Those are syntactical structures of some sort. They mean something. Well, you've heard me talk about the communication systems of octopi, that octopi have this very highly evolved nervous system and all over the surface of their skin there are what are called chromatophores, specialized cells which can change color. And octopi, when they wish to communicate, they have traveling bars, blushes, dots, stripes, all this stuff flowing over the surface of their skin. Well, notice that they become their syntactical intent. That's what's actually happening here. They are not, as we do, our method of communication is to make small mouth noises which are transduced across space as sound, reconstructed in the brain of the hearer and then a dictionary is consulted and the commonest meaning chosen for the incoming sound. As ways of conveying information go, this is what you call a very low-grade signal. It's a miserable way to transfer data. But if you could see what I mean, if I could literally cause my concrescent intention to appear before us and rotate like an object in space, we could take a step forward toward telepathy. Well, in the virtual reality, paint boxes and tool kits are being created in the software realm that will allow people, Jared Lanier, the great brain behind some of this, is interested in what he calls non-symbolic communication. Non-symbolic communication and the more perfect logos of the DMT ecstasis are the same thing. It's a moving, visible modality of intent that you see, you don't hear. So I think the virtual reality opens up the possibility that, you know, my mother used to say, "If wishes were horses, beggars would ride." I actually look forward to that day. I believe that that's within reach, you know. Anybody else? What's "gylanic"? Gylanic. It's a term that Rian Eisler introduced in her book, "The Chalice and the Blade," and it means related to Gaia, related to the goddess. Have you all read "The Chalice and the Blade"? No. It does all this spade work for me. Rian and I appeared right here a year ago. She's a brilliant woman. She's born in Vienna, an archaeologist, has given her life to understanding Middle Eastern prehistory, the archaeology of it. And it is, when we talk of dominator versus partnership societies, we're using Rian Eisler's words. You see, we want to get completely away from the gender polarity of talking about a matriarchy versus a patriarchy. First of all, there is very little evidence for a true matriarchy. What seems to have happened is that there was this thing called a partnership society, which gave way to male dominance, dominator society. But in the original hunting-gathering thing, that equation was fairly well balanced. The men hunted, the women gathered. There was pressure on the women to develop language. This they did. This allowed them the notion of agriculture and pastoralism and the husbandry of cattle. And a cycle of nomadism based on mushroom use, husbandry of cattle, and a mixed hunting and gathering ecology was what existed in Eden, really. And then the story I told you of the drying. You know, if you look at the story of Genesis, it is very clearly the story of a drug bust. I mean, this woman ate of the fruit of the tree of life and she gave it to her husband. And then there was this problem. And Jehovah, musing to himself, says, "They must not do this, because if they do, they will become as we are." Not it's bad or it's poisonous or they'll make themselves sick. But they will become as we are. Well, how plain does it have to be, people? I mean, it's right there, embedded in the ur-text of Western civilization. The story of the woman's fascination with the dimension brought by the plant and how this had to be suppressed in order that everything could be a bring-down for thousands of years. But Terrence, there are two, I know of two tribes still in existence, which are matriarchal in Paraguay. Yes, I think it happens. It's not a hard and fast rule. But as a matter of fact, they're in terrible trouble if they still exist, because the Amish went in and took them over. The Amish. And they were so confused. So last I heard, they were in very bad shape, psychologically. Yes, well, wherever these dominator philosophies have gone. And, you know, I wrap monotheism very heavily. But I also think, you know, modern science is the bastard child of Christian theology. I mean, all that rummaging around by Thomas Aquinas and Francis Bacon entirely set the stage for modern science. I mean, here is Francis Bacon on nature. Nature must be put on the rack that we may torture from her, her secrets. This is Francis Bacon, the father of modern science. I mean, is this a dominator, woman-hating, misogynist vision, or what? And this was done, you know, and the secrets were tortured. And now we hold, you know, the power to light the fire of stars on the cities of our enemies. But to what end? Here, this gentleman. You mentioned traitors, people, when you get into this alternate state. I always saw that as kind of pirates. Pirates. Pirates, little pirates. That's absolutely right on. And they're very much a competition for ideas. But they never let you kind of keep up. You just kind of get a taste of what this thing could be like. Well, see, the goal of my life was to escape from the fairy mountain with fairy gold. And I think I did it. I mean, I may be deluded by the time spent in fairy mountain, but this time wave thing that I am so concerned to communicate is like a piece of the fairy action. And as to what they took from me for that, I don't know, probably the I Ching. Probably they looked into my head and said, "Hmm, you know, crude, but the workmanship is interesting, a fascinating primitive piece," and made the switcheroo. But did you feel at all that you were part of their play? Oh, definitely. I thought that definitely. Okay, that leads me to my next question. You mentioned the plant. You alluded to the plant bringing us to consciousness. And the question for me is why. Why would the plant lead us to consciousness? Why would the plant call us into consciousness? Well, you know, or maybe you don't know, but in the introduction to the book that Dennis and I wrote on how to grow mushrooms, the mushroom makes a little speech there. It says, "I am old, fifty times older than thought in your species. I come from the stars, yet I've been on earth for ages," so forth and so on. And there it says, "What you have that I want is hands. You have hands. You can move matter. I am like a cobweb spread through the soil. I am so diaphanous. I touch the earth so lightly." And then why? What are these hands for? Well, then you touch on this peculiar theme in the mushroom, which is its apocalyptic tendencies, its millenarian tendencies. It sees the solar life as circumscribed. It thinks in terms of a galactic radiation of its genes through space and time. It doesn't want to be trapped on one mud ball when the star that it's orbiting goes up. This question of the dynamics of the sun is very interesting. I don't know why, you know, the alien thing that it is, why it would call us forth into organization. There are some things that are hard that we can't comprehend. I mean, when you confront the other and you begin to dialogue with it about these things and it begins to lift the veil on these vistas, it becomes unbearable. Ultimately symbiotic. Ultimately symbiotic and ultimately somehow for purposes of departure, the theme of departure, whether it's to another continuum, that a doorway will open and we'll go, or down into the crystalline substructure of the planet, or into the wind. But the theme is that we are finished here. It's interesting that these plants have these messages because I don't get this from ayahuasca. To me, ayahuasca is maternal and the river, and I often see flow, sediment, the rivers, the sediment, the overturning of minerals, life and death, but not this let us go where no one has ever gone before. On your feet, mankind, the great adventure. And it begins to march out into this inflated, but perhaps true, vision of a destiny for us. That we have a destiny, that there is more for us than saving this planet. That must be done. But maybe it's a test, you know, save your planet and then we'll talk to you. I don't suppose you have on your agenda a debate with the drug czar? Actually, within the last three hours, the very possibility was raised to showing that we all resonate together. I suggested to Joan and to Gigi that the drug czar be invited here. And that we, I'm a great, I believe you should meet with your enemies. I love this idea. If any of you have read "Encounters with the Arch Druid" by John McPhee, it's about David Brower, the great conservationist, who was such a radical conservationist that the Sierra Club threw him out. They just couldn't take this guy. And he went down the Grand Canyon with the head of the Bureau of Reclamation, who built Glen Canyon Dam. And they hated each other. They had sworn death practically on each other. And they went down the Grand Canyon together, and each night at the campfire they would set a bottle of scotch between them and work on it and rave. And it's fascinating. It's wonderful. And I would love to talk to these people, because you see, I'm as concerned as anyone else about the fact that we're drugging ourselves to death because we can't find what we're looking for. We are dysfunctional. And like an alcoholic or a junkie, we take drugs to forget. We do everything to forget. Because had we been in balance over the last few centuries, we never would have gotten into this mess. We're the generation that's having to pay the bills. But these bad habits have been in place for centuries. And the answer to the drug problem lies in psychedelic, self-directed psychedelic therapy is the only way I can say it. And if you ask, "What can you do? Straighten yourself out," is one answer. And how to do it, that's how to do it. Yes. Didn't you have a question? No. Sorry. There's one. Yes. Could you comment on partnership and friendship in shamanic healing? I asked Nicole and she said you know that. Partnership and friendship. As themes of shamanic healing. Well, shamans are fairly irascible people, I've noticed. Mercier Léod talks about this in his great study of shamanism. And I think the phrase he finally settles on is, "Essential but peripheral." In other words, the shaman lives in a little house at the edge of the village or a short distance from the village into the forest. And as the keeper of the doorway to these fairly terrifying dimensions that involve life and death, he's a fairly remote character. The friends of shamans are usually shamans themselves. The apprentice relationship is a whole other issue. And in my estimation has been very perverted in the Eastern way of doing things. What I found in the Amazon was that these people were very willing to share most of the secrets that I wanted to know. You had to know a lot to ask the wrong question. And eventually we got to the wrong questions. And they were bewildering. I mean, like I was very interested, of course, in intensifying and intensifying and intensifying this encounter with the DMT thing. So I kept asking my shaman teacher about these plants that he was reluctant to talk about that I knew were stronger. And finally he said, "It's comida de perro. It's food for dogs." And I didn't know, since my Spanish is so terrible, whether this was an idiom or literal. And he said, "It's mal y bizarro, strange and evil, and not for Christians." And what he was talking about was simply a more intensified state than what he was working with and curing with in the ayahuasca sessions. So, you know, it's a gradient. It's a thing. I saw a shaman once who had been practicing shamanism for 25 years in the Amazon have an ayahuasca trip where he said after it was over with he'd never do it again. That was it. So, you know, pride goeth before a fall. On the other hand, it's very kind and forgiving and user-friendly to beginners. It's a relationship. It's not a thing. It's a somebody. And if you approach it as a somebody rather than a thing, you will have a much richer time for it, I think. Yes? Well, this question always comes up and I'm famous for my answer, so I might as well give it again. No? Well, see, I mean, everybody always says, "But surely yoga and the Sufis and this and that." Well, who knows? I haven't had time to check all this out. I did check out yoga. I feel fairly confident in saying that 95% of yoga is absolute hokum. The other 5% is pure gold. But sorting it out among these Babas and, you know, keeping your guts intact is just, you know, really a daunting task. However, there is a concept in Hindu thought that I'm interested in. It's the concept of tantra, usually associated with sexual yoga. But for my purposes, I'm simply interested in the meaning of tantra. It means shortcut way. It means it takes the notion that in a single lifetime, you can attain some kind of tremendous reconstruction of your internal horizon of transcendence. A way of saying enlightened without saying it. In a single lifetime. And I'm not enough convinced of any of these theories of reincarnation and so forth to be willing to just write off this lifetime if I make a botch of it. So I'm not interested, not only interested in ways that work, but ways which work quickly, quickly. And nothing can come close to this psychedelic thing. I mean, this is it. Imagine getting to a place with your spiritual quest where the problem is to hold it down. Well, everybody who takes psychedelics reaches that place. I mean, the, you know, a way that I've gotten this into a formula for myself is to say, once you come upon this psychedelic issue, you are no longer involved in the process of seeking any spiritual answer. You are now confronted with facing the answer. You wanted a tool for spiritual transcendence. Here is a spiritual of tool transcendence, the likes of which you can barely wrap your mind around. If there are other ways to do this, I can't conceive of it. I mean, perhaps ordeals and things that are tremendously stressful. Anytime you make somebody think they're going to die and then they snatch life from the jaws of death, that's a shedding of crap. But that's no, that's the, it's no fun, right? And yet, you know, in the privacy of your own home with five grams of mushrooms, you join Magellan and Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart. I mean, you're out there. That's the real frontier. That's not, there's no safety in that zone. It's your, it's authentic exploration of reality. Yeah. Thank you. [inaudible] Thank you, Lola. Well, what LSD brought to the psychedelic experience was millions upon millions of experiences. No other psychedelic has ever been produced in such volume. Surely, even in today's world, 90% of the people who've had a psychedelic experience, it must have been LSD as far as its superiority or-- In terms of a teaching from a different perspective, like a piece of the lesson that may not be there with the plants, is there something that you found with that? Nobody's ever asked me this question. A unique contribution of LSD. I don't know. I'm not a great, I'm not the greatest of enthusiasts for it. I thank God for it. I mean, it created me and my friends and my worldview. I don't, I can't really think of anything it does that something else doesn't do. The way I ended up using LSD was as a magnifying glass to inspect other psychedelics. You know, 100 gamma of LSD and 60 milligrams of mescaline. Or 100 gamma of LSD and smoking DMT. 100 gamma by itself is not much, but it seemed to work as a kind of source of energy to inflate these other states. The original so-called psychedelic experience that the people were working with at Harvard in the famous experiments there, was this combo of mescaline and LSD. That gave them the best results. And that is highly visionary. I mean, that is just a kaleidoscope of three-dimensional vision. Tim Leary said a wonderful thing about LSD. Actually, I asked him if he'd said it. He couldn't remember ever saying it. But it certainly described my experience with LSD. He said, "LSD is a psychoactive drug which causes, occasionally causes psychotic behavior in people who haven't taken it." And I witnessed psychotic behavior all around me in people who hadn't taken it. [Audience member] With mushrooms, LSD and mushrooms, what sort of a... I never did that. Scratch my back and you'll discover a hard-bitten conservative. Yeah, somebody else. Yeah. [Audience member] I was wondering, in terms of the ayahuasca, you mentioned some of the conditions you might want to take it under, but obtaining it or any safeguards in terms of who you would obtain it from. You mentioned that it really varies in terms of the dosage, in terms of who makes it. It's a real problem. You're going to have to deal with other people and their motives and motivations. The problem always with ayahuasca is to get it good. And you never know, you know, until you're out there, whether it's going to be good or not. So all I can say to you is, you know, hone all the social skills you need anyway to get ahead in life, and it will aid you in discerning shit from Shinola and the realm of ayahuasca as well. [Audience member] By good, do you mean intense? Good ayahuasca? Yes, strong visions. You want it to be strong. If it isn't visionary, I would be skeptical of everything being said around it and about it, because that's what it must be. That's the quintessence. [Audience member] In the Amazonian society, the shamans are one, you know, if they're a minority within the culture, then there's one in each group. How do you see that role in the context of, you know, there's a new society where leucine drugs are more widely available in use. How do you see that role being in our culture and in China? Well, the obvious institution which is in place to do something with this is psychotherapy in some form. But I don't know, psychotherapy is so wrong-headed, whether it can be reclaimed or not. I spend a lot of time talking to psychotherapists, because they're front-line workers in the realm of the mind. A professional class has to be created of people who do it and who then provide guidance to other people. And people should self-select for this, in the same way that some people want to be bartenders and some people Air Force generals. It's a calling. And in the traditional societies that Nicole and I were involved with in South America, there's always elder shamans who are able to pass this stuff down. Now our problem is we have to make it up. We have to create or amalgamate or bring together from many sources a coherent shamanism. I think we're doing this, but we're bootstrapping it. It's slow. It isn't easy. As far as the legality of all this, I think people should be free to do what they want with their minds. It seems to me it's already covered in the Life, Liberty and Pursuit of Happiness clause of the Bill of Rights. Pursuit of Happiness. I mean, Hamilton wanted it to say right to own property. And they said, "No, no, that'll make all kinds of problems." "Well, how about the pursuit of happiness?" "Okay, well, that legitimizes this intent." My position on this psychedelic thing, the reason I'm involved in it is because, politically speaking, it seems to me it lies on a direct line of development from the signing of the Magna Carta, the freeing of slaves, the emancipation of women, the emancipation of gays. In other words, deciding that people can take any drug they damn well please is part of the task of creating a sane and rational society that places the values of the individual first. Once we get through this drug war crap that we're having to put up with, and all drugs are freely legal and very few people take them and it's all settled down, people will look back and say of us, as we say of people who kept slaves on their plantations, "What a bunch of barbarians." Can you imagine in the 20th century, a president of the United States stood up before his nation and advocated pissing in bottles by the citizenry in order to determine who was taking what drugs? It's no weirder than, you know, they hung a pig for murder in Amsterdam in 1544. It'll be told like that. Anecdotes about the quaint medieval practices of the benighted past. Isn't that right, Nicole? Yes. But there's one aspect of shamanism we haven't touched, and that is the ordeal preparation. Why don't you mention a lot of that? Well, I think it's one thing that deters a lot of people from becoming shamans. I think you're right. Because it's pretty routine that they must go through very severe ordeals of denial of... Well, the average one goes into the jungle alone in some quite remote area and lives for six months a year up to the longest one I've heard of, with 19 months. They almost starve to death. They allow themselves an extremely limited diet. And they have no contact with friends at all, in most cases. Some will have certain foods brought to them that they are allowed to eat, yucca, which is the staple starchy food like potatoes. And others really just go out there and stay there, and that's it. And they eat what they can kill with their hands and what they can catch in the rivers. And they come back in very bad shape. They don't wait until they're incapacitated, but the ones who stayed the longest come back in very emaciated, very weakened. But they have learned, and they feel much... In some senses, they seem to be much stronger than anyone else. And they speak of it... Many of them have had the experience of... They start at the foot of a tree, a lupuna usually, and they are lifted up as time goes on. And then when they get to reach a certain level is when the plants begin to tell them how to come to them. The mother of the plant will come. That's the spirit of the plant. It gives them instruction on their use. Have you found that, too, of most of the shamans you've known? Yes, I think so. And you know, in Madagascar, they have ordeal poisons. They're not psychoactive, but they make you think you're going to die, but then you don't. But it's specifically so awful that it's used as an initiation. Well, they do this, and all the shamans I've known have gone through this. The diet, it's called. The diet. Well, the diet, but it's also the solitude. Have you talked to Eduardo Luna about this? Because he feels that the great secret of ayahuasca that remains to be discovered is what it's like if you keep these specialized diets and load your system with serotonin via plantains. They live practically on plantains. Yes, and there is a specialized diet, and often shamanic power is judged by how long a man claims to have kept this diet. Now, this is an area none of us have explored. Rare enough here is the person who-- Well, Eduardo went into it in a small way. He did it for about ten days or so, but they-- You see, I haven't had a chance to talk to him much. I saw him only very briefly when I was in Peru in January. So here's a frontier for self-experiment. What is it like to keep these high-star-- That's certainly accessible. Well, the diet is plantains, which are these cookable bananas, and a very little bit of fish and yuca, and that's basically it. No greens, no sugar, no alcohol, an extremely minimal diet. I mean, almost as spare as a Tibetan diet. No fruit. No fruit. No anything except those things. And a lot of ayahuasca in isolation. Daily dosing. Yes. And living in a little hut, being served by a child who's the only person you see. If they are served, some of them don't even have that contact. But they do consider the plant the mother. No, it's not just that. They speak of the spirit of the plant, and there's a very strong animist belief, which you can find pretty easy to share when you get in there. And they call it the mother of the plant. I don't know why, but la madre de la plant dice. The mother of the plant will tell you. What so much interests me is that in Western culture, the idea that a young man in the mythology has to go out and leave his mother and leave all the feminine in order to become strong and be a man. Well, they do that in the initiation period in a number of tribes in South America, I think. But it's a brief period. Well, this experience of dissolution is experience of dissolution into the maternal matrix. I'm sure it's felt like that. It's a dying and a being reborn. And surely these early people and people on that level of culture today must have experienced it that way as a death and a rebirth. How is the plantain prepared? Boiled. Occasionally roasted. Sometimes roasted. Sometimes roasted. Never fried. Never fried, because they haven't any fat. One reason that Indian-- One of the reasons, I think, is-- Have you ever seen a really fat Indian? I haven't. First, they probably haven't got the genes for it. But also, their food is practically fat-free because jungle animals are running. They have-- It's lean meat. The fish they have, there are very few fat fishes. And they have no source for fat. They don't use the palm fats except when they eat certain palm fruits. And so they don't fry anything. Yes, people have the wrong idea about the jungle in the sense that people think, "Well, it's so much vegetation. There must be a lot of food." But you see-- You can starve. You can starve. People have. The evolution has been so tight for so long that no excess protein is being produced. And if it is produced, a bird, a monkey, an ant is gobbling it up long before you get near it. You gobble up the bird, monkey, or ant. That's right. Especially those ants with the big behind. Yes, were you ever among the Mu'inani? They stick straws down into the anthills and all the ants latch on and these Mu'inani children would pull these things out of the anthills and put the ants in bowls of water and smash it up with a-- No, I haven't seen that. Yeah, it was delicious. I've seen them-- But the worst thing I had was having to eat live termites. Live termites. Yes. They're a great delicacy because it's orange tree termites. And when they come out of the tree on their nuptial flight-- They live only in orange trees. The kids catch them with a gourd full of water and as they crawl out, they brush them into the water and of course they're stuck there. And so it's a great treat to them. So when they offered me some, I naturally felt I had to accept. And I picked one up and the wings came off. And that rather upset me because my idea of a good time is not pulling wings off flies. [laughter] But I learned later they just come off then anyway because pretty soon they're going to stop flying. And the kid said, "Well, the wings don't taste good anyway. Go ahead, eat it." So I did. Though the taste wasn't too bad. They were rather like weak orangeade. But it was the most-- I can take Masato and quantity, love it. Don't you? I learned to like it. Masato is this foaming yucca beer that after you've walked miles through the jungle and you arrive at some place-- The best thing ever. --they meet you with a foaming gourd of this stuff. And it's chewed by the elderly women in the village. It's cooked yucca chewed. And they spit it. The mouth enzymes, the sugars work on it and then it's fermented. And if you really want to gain their confidence, you knock back a huge gourd of this stuff and then call for more. Yes. And you have them. Actually, if you can eat yogurt, it tastes quite good. And you just have to hold to the thought-- I used to repeat as some people repeat their beads in Catholics. The fermentation process destroys all pathogenic bacteria. It destroys all pathogenic bacteria. Say it over and over and over. I didn't know that. So my mantra was, "It is good to challenge the immune system." It is good to challenge the immune system. Did you ever see, Nicole, the people around La Charrera, the Huitoto there, had this really unnerving habit. There are these large metallic wood borers, buprestid beetles, about this long, very brightly colored. I don't know those beetles. They make a very loud noise. And you would be talking to one of these Huitoto and one of these things would fly into the scene and slap against the tree trunk. And they would, without breaking stride, reach out, grab this thing, wrench the soft parts out of it. [ Silence ] {END} Wait Time : 0.00 sec Model Load: 0.69 sec Decoding : 2.05 sec Transcribe: 2647.73 sec Total Time: 2650.46 sec