Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I'm your host here in the psychedelic
 salon. First of all, let me thank those of you who sent me emails to let me know that
 you're enjoying these podcasts. I do read all of them, but you'll have to forgive me
 for not being too good at responding. I do the best I can, but as much as I'd like to
 answer each of you, I found that it was just taking too much of my time away from a new
 book I'm working on. So until I get that project finished, I hope you don't feel too bad that
 I haven't answered each of you personally. But as you can probably see, I am listening
 to your requests, particularly the loud and clear request I just recently got to hear
 more of the Terrence McKenna seminar from the summer of 1998. And so, without any further
 need for an introduction on my part, here's a continuation of last week's podcast of the
 Terrence McKenna workshop, where he was waxing eloquently about all things novel.
 Well, we said, I think, that when you take psychedelics, you go up a dimension. And so
 this world of transience and flux becomes an eternal world. So in that sense, it's the
 same thing. Whether meditation and psychedelics are the same thing, I think, depends on your
 meditation and your psychedelics. Different meditations strive for different things. Much
 meditation is about emptying the mind of phenomena. This certainly would not be a description
 of the psychedelic state.
 In my experience, the highest psychedelic states have been complete emergence, complete
 ego loss, and becoming an oneness. It does have been both with emotions and with the
 state. Now, through my highest meditation experiences, it has been very similar, where
 there is no sense of self and otherness. It's just a flash of everythingness and nothingness.
 It's non-dual. It's seemingly the center of singularity, where poles clash into each other,
 where we're into another dimension.
 Well, in the interest of keeping the number of singularities to a minimum, the most elegant
 thing to do is to wrap the theory around and say that the starting point and the ending
 point are the same place. Yeah, it's the place where all is cotangent. How we could get the
 universe back into the primal dot in 12 years, I don't know. But there are some schemes to
 do that. There's always schemes to do it. If the universe were some kind of vacuum fluctuation,
 and it had an anti-matter twin in a higher super space, then there would be the potential,
 at least, for them to collide across all points simultaneously. And you would actually get
 the universe of matter disappearing instantly. And you would then be left with a universe
 made only of photons, because they don't have an antiparticle. What a universe purely made
 of light, what its physics would be like, is hard to say. But it sounds peculiarly like
 certain Gnostic hierophanies about gathering the light and returning the light.
 Ultimately, the meditation path and the psychedelic path must somehow lead to the same kinds of
 data if the claims of both are to be respected, which is that they give deeper knowledge about
 reality. Yeah.
 [Audience member] I was wondering, as a kind of connection between that and the point that
 you were just making previously about the expression of those interstates through art,
 what your view might be on the use of some of the technologies today that are aimed at
 providing access to those interstates in and out, and I'm more, I don't want to say more,
 but you've mentioned about the psychedelic one of the problems is bringing back the information.
 And so I'm thinking here about some of the machines and particularly the technology of
 Robert Monroe aimed at providing access consciously to those states such that you can bring that
 information back to the rest of the world.
 I'm all for it, I just haven't seen anything that convinced me that anybody had achieved
 it to any degree of significance. Yeah, you know, imagine a drug that did nothing more
 than allow you to remember your dreams. I mean, that's not exactly shooting for the
 moon pharmacologically these days, and yet a drug which allowed you full recovery of
 your dreams might unleash God knows what, because we don't know what we dream.
 The chemistry of DMT suggests that in deep REM sleep it's possible every single night
 you have a DMT flash, but it does not transcript into short-term memory.
 So, or imagine a drug which allowed you to enhance long-term memory, so that you could
 slip into reveries of a summer day 30 years ago and play it back moment by moment by moment.
 These, again, this is not shooting for the moon pharmacologically, we're not talking
 immortality here, we're just talking simple neurochemistry, but all of these possibilities
 would change life beyond recognition. And I think these things should be pursued
 by any means necessary. You know, it's a false dichotomy, the idea that somehow you
 should be able to achieve these things on the natch, and they're not authentic if you
 achieve them through psychedelics. This is just a con to keep lineages in business,
 I think, because they don't want you going off the ranch and charting your own course.
 But where shamanism becomes priestcraft, it's already well on its way to senescence.
 [Question]
 In couple situations, I've had telepathic things. I've had in group situations, very
 quasi-telepathic social interactions. What I mean by that is I'm recalling an evening
 many years ago, taking ayahuasca with these people, and they had a weird scene going.
 The shaman was a good guy and a good shaman, but he had a nephew who was a jerk, and was
 sort of a pimp and kind of a hustler. And the shaman was singing with his three friends
 these ancient, ancient songs, and this guy was drunk on aguardiente, and he would sing
 against them. He would sing against them. And this was in Peru, and if you know the
 style of rural Peruvians, people are so polite and so not up front that no social problem
 is ever dealt with directly. People will tolerate incredible bad behavior without turning on
 the person and saying, "Listen, you're completely out of line. Knock it off." So,
 30 people, 30 Peruvian campesinos were witnessing this sing against, and the woman I was with
 at the time very much didn't like what was going on. And at the end of this nephew, the
 sobrino, at the end of his song of raucous interruption, I looked up just as he ended.
 The room was almost complete darkness. I looked up just as he ended. I saw her look up and
 look at him with a look of utter disgust. And when these red dot, dark things got to
 him, it knocked him off his feet. And I heard the old shaman was sitting right to my left,
 and I heard him turn to his friend, and he said, "Ah, the gringa sends the bzudu."
 And so it was like, "Wow." But then ordinary reality immediately reasserts itself and moves
 forward, and there's no time to say, "Wait a minute, folks. Something paranormal just
 happened here. I want to interview everybody, get your impression." It's never, when it's
 real, it's always caught up in the on-moving flow of events.
 You're resisting and fearful, in other words, to resist what comes forward.
 Well, if you've taken, what you don't want to do is take, this is reasonable advice,
 too, I think, where the problem area lies, people think it lies in taking too much. It
 lies in taking too little, because if you take too little, you can resist it. You can
 struggle with it, and then it can turn into a real mess, because you're afraid of it,
 and you actually have the power, to some degree, to resist it.
 What you want to do is take sufficiently enough that there's no escape, and that the transition
 from ordinary reality to fully loaded is as quick as possible, because the going up is
 somewhat terrifying. For example, let's use psilocybin as the model. Here's how it works
 for me. This is not tea. This is eating raw mushrooms. It comes on more slowly.
 So, after an hour or so, and the way I do it is, I sit, as soon as the mushroom enters
 my body, I sit and meditate. I noticed in South America, they don't do it like this.
 They dose the ayahuasca, and then everybody just goes on, talking about their motorcycles
 and the jobs at the sawmill, and who's conning who. It's like, totally, they toss it. There's
 a brief moment, they pour, they toss it down, then they all go back to raving at each other
 about mundane life, and then 30 minutes later, on the dot, the shaman blows his whistle,
 or shakes his shakipa, his leaf, dry leaf bouquet, and everybody settles down, and it's
 like it comes on within two minutes, as soon as the guy starts singing. He just invokes
 it. The way I do it is, I take the mushroom, or the ayahuasca, and then I sit and I roll
 the bombers, so I'll have them ready if I need them, and I just sit, as I'm going to
 sit during the trip, and I've unplugged the telephone, and I've gotten everything squared
 away, and it begins to come on at about the 40 minute or the 60 minute mark, and there's
 sometimes some nausea as it comes on, and then I smoke a bomber, or half a bomber, and
 then it catapults it into the full deployment of the thing, where you just hang on. There's
 about a 25 minute period where all your only job is to hang on. It builds. It's like watching
 an atomic explosion on the other side of 50 feet of absolutely clear crystal glass. You
 can't believe this is happening "in my mind." You have the feeling that everybody from Seattle
 to San Diego has just crawled under their desk as this thing tore past, but it's in
 your mind, and then there is the interaction with it, which moment to moment, you are pretty
 coherent, but you lose it. A lot of it does not transcribe into short term memory, and
 then after about an hour or 40 minutes of that, it becomes more manageable, more memorable.
 The most mind-boggling parts of it are just not possible to bring out of it, because language
 fails, because English, there are no words. There are no words even close. Sometimes you'll
 bring out an image or a metaphor, but out of five hours of tripping, you bring out half
 a notebook page of metaphors, and yet you were entirely engaged during that time. Now,
 this question about fear, which is a real question, because when everything begins to
 slide, it's more than most people who haven't done it expect. They have heard it, they've
 read the books, but they think it's a metaphor. They don't understand it's really going to
 happen, and it's really going to happen to you, and there's a tendency to clutch or to
 try and resist it. The thing to do in those situations, I think, and it's counterintuitive
 to how Western people think, but the thing to do is to sing, to sit up, not to assume
 the fetal position. See, what you might tend to do is assume the fetal position and tell
 yourself, "My God, this is the most appalling thing that's ever happened to me. If I can
 just live through it, it'll be all right. I've taken this drug. If I can just wait through
 it." How long did they say it will be? Seven hours. I see it started two minutes ago. If
 I can just... No, the thing to do is to sit up and to sing. Why? Well, being practical
 people, to oxygenate your brain, to move this thing that's happened to you, though it may
 have one claw in heaven, its roots are in your neurophysiology and in the chemistry
 of the drug. You want to move your physiology around, so oxygenating your brain can't fail
 to do this. So you sing, and this almost always is accompanied by a sense of power, control,
 equilibrium, and so forth and so on. Not always. I mean, let's face it, you're a product of
 a nutty society and there are unexamined crevices and uncleaned out drain traps in all of us,
 and you're going to encounter that stuff. The good news is the earlier psychedelic trips
 tend to deal with that. You will quickly discover taking psychedelics that either you can work
 through your personal issues and become a psychedelic explorer, or this is just stronger
 medicine than you are up for and you would be far better to go back to psychoanalysis
 or whatever works for you. Some people just can't take it. Why is that? Well, because
 what it does is it dissolves boundaries, and most of us are over-boundary defined, but
 some of us are having an uphill battle getting some boundaries in place and realizing we
 are not the telephone or the tree or the person we live with. And so for those people who
 are having trouble establishing and maintaining boundaries, this is the last thing on earth
 they should get involved.
 What's in the box?
 Cannabis. Cannabis. Cannabis.
 When you're in the state that you're experiencing the total loss of ego or boundaries, is it
 possible that your physical self could just literally stop?
 Where people often, yes, wonder. Often people wonder. You get into a place where it's so
 unfamiliar that the question comes up, "Have I done it this time?" You know? "Am I dying
 or am I in danger?" The answer is, the odds are incredibly against you being seriously
 in danger. People don't die from psychedelics unless they have heart conditions or some
 incredibly rare medical condition. The problem is that the ego feels threatened by the boundary
 dissolution, and its ace is your self-identification with it, and it can actually say to you, "You
 are dying, and here's the evidence." And you have to say, "No, it's unlikely," and sing
 your way through it. But this is really tough. The Buddhists talk about slaying the ego.
 This is slaying the ego for real. You must slay it, otherwise it will spread panic into
 the whole psychological system, will give way to panic and hysteria. So unless there
 is some real reason to think you're dying, and you should have done your homework, you
 should know what to expect. For example, if you take LSD and begin intense bouts of vomiting,
 this is not a proper reaction to LSD. Something is wrong, either with the LSD or with your
 relationship to it. You should know what a typical trip will put you through changes,
 but is not dangerous. But if you suddenly begin exhibiting some symptom, heart fibrillation
 or something like that, then you want to have... This is why there's always the issue of the
 buddy system. Should there be somebody else there, and what about all that? My position
 is, if you're anxious, then you should have a sitter. If you're going to do it alone,
 you should certainly tell someone, so that they will check on you after a while. I don't
 like doing it in groups or with sitters, because inevitably I get spun into them. What I want
 to do is go as deep as possible, and even if I'm alone with one other person, culture
 is the third guest at the table. I've often found myself in the middle of psychedelic
 trips thinking, "I'm sure glad there's nobody else here to see this, because I'm sure it
 would alarm an observer, because I have my leg thrown back up over my neck, and I'm screaming
 in urdu or something." But it's okay. After a few minutes, it's okay. But if there were
 an observer, they would feel the need to do something. And often, like I've seen people
 smoking DMT, and people moan, and they say, "No! No! No!" And they moan. So then you get
 them back together and constituted, and you say, "How was it?" And they say, "It was fantastic."
 So you realize how they present is not reliable. Well, setting has a great deal to do with
 it, and setting is a very complicated issue. Setting means everything from the astrological
 situation at the time that you do it, to the physical surrounding that you're in. And it's
 also, it's a roll of the dice. You never know exactly what you're going to get. As far as
 the question about Buddhism and all that, my own... When I started taking LSD, I thought
 I saw in Tibetan thangka painting and mandalas, the echoes of the same world, and pursued
 it. Went to Nepal, studied Tibetan, collected the art. And it is similar. I don't know to
 what degree the Buddhists, the Mahayanas, realize those states without psychedelics.
 I do know that with psychedelics, those meditations, those techniques, those insights are supercharged.
 And I would suspect that Tibetan Buddhism, as it has its roots in Vedic Hinduism, there
 may be psychoactive plants in its past, but it's far in the past. Buddhism was brought
 to Tibet in 741 by Padmasambhava. There was an autothonous shamanism already present throughout
 the Himalayas, the Punpo. And it was largely based on cannabis intoxication at that point
 in history, not so much in the present. But I think that this is a fruitful area. I just
 can't believe that Mahayana Buddhism could have gotten as far as it did without some
 reliance on psychedelics. And of course, cannabis, we in the West, our style is to smoke it.
 And that's a very mild way of dealing with it. I mean, if you eat, if you have unlimited
 amounts of high-grade cannabis, and you eat grams and grams of it, you will have experiences
 as extreme as anything that psilocybin or ayahuasca can deliver to you. You only have
 to read the descriptions of 19th century writers on cannabis. Fitzhugh Ludlow, S. Weir Mitchell,
 these people, their descriptions of their trips are as psychedelic and as out of control
 as any acid repertoire or psilocybin repertoire. So the relationship of Indian and Buddhist
 spirituality to cannabis and other psychedelics is not well understood. We do know that the
 whole Rig Veda is a hymn to a drug, Soma. But we don't know what Soma is. Well, the
 fact that it could have invited such attention to this Vedic civilization, the 95th mandala
 of the Rig Veda says Soma is greater than Brahman, greater than Indra. Well, what is
 being talked about? How could such a great thing be forgotten and lost? What was it?
 And then, almost as puzzling as what was it, was how could you lose such a thing? I mean,
 it's like us forgetting how to make automobiles or something. It was something so basic to
 the culture that how could you possibly forget something so central? Yet, apparently, they
 did. And today there's scholarly fights. Was it Amanita muscaria? Was it psilocybin? Was
 it the gamanarmala? Or was it something else? And why is this so hard to figure out? The
 only thing I can imagine is that it must have been eventually restricted to a priestly class
 of initiates. And then there must have been a social revolt from the bottom and all those
 people were put to death. And then nobody knew what it was. Yeah. Yeah, I think you
 have to push these psychedelics to reach these unitary states. What always fascinated me
 was hallucination. Because it was, to me, the proof that I was dealing with something
 outside myself. Well, and here was stuff that amazed me, that I couldn't make up on my own.
 Or that would, a single image would have taken me hours to draw and figure out. And here
 I was getting 28 frames a second of this unpredictable stuff.
 Who was the me in that experience? The me witnessing those hallucinations? I guess that's...
 One of the nice things about the tryptamines, I think, is they leave the sense of self pretty
 much intact. In other words, it doesn't distort who you are. It does something to your sensory
 input. DMT is very surprisingly like that. You smoke DMT, you are immediately plunged
 into an alien universe. But if you can keep your wits about you and actually notice how
 you feel, you don't feel any different. You're not smarter, stupider, you're not more excited.
 Once you get the initial panic under control, you realize, "My God, it didn't lay a finger
 on me. I'm me. I'm entirely intact." What has happened is that the world has been completely
 replaced by something completely unrecognizable, an alien that I have no words for, that's
 blowing my mind, that's ripping apart my philosophical machinery as I gaze upon it. But when I bring
 my attention back into my body, I discover, "I'm fine. I'm okay." It didn't change my
 mind, you could almost say. It changes 100% the reality around you. That's powerful, because
 it appears objective. The impression you have when you smoke DMT is, "This isn't a drug.
 That's ridiculous. Drugs make you smarter, make you stupider, make you fall down, make
 you stay awake. We know what drugs are. This is no drug. This is something else, hiding
 under the label drug. This is a doorway into another modality that exists all the time,
 independent of my thoughts or feelings about it." Is that true? Well, I don't know. But
 it certainly doesn't seem to be a place constructed to fit human expectations. Like, one of the
 things that always troubled me about DMT being somewhat of a Jungian bent was the question,
 "How come there's no hint of this in any mythology or religious tradition or alchemical text
 or fairy tale or dream or anything else?" I mean, if this is so important a part of
 what it is to be a human being, how can it be so deeply buried, so secret, so unknown,
 and yet just one toke away? It's still, that confounds me. Because you can read all the
 Hindu scripture or Sufi mysticism or all the stuff you want. Occasionally, sure, you'll
 find a phrase or two that could be mapped onto a DMT state, but nobody has trumpeted
 it. Nobody has said, "This is what it is." And yet, as I say, it's spread throughout
 nature. It's been known since aboriginal times. We used to, years and years ago, call it the
 secret. And in a way, it really is the secret. Jorge Luis Borges has a story called "The
 Fault of the Phoenix," and he talks about a secret that seems profound and yet preposterous
 to the initiates. One child may initiate another, and ruins are good places to do this. He just
 goes on like this for a page and a half. Well, you realize he must be talking about DMT.
 Yeah?
 Just getting back to what you were saying, the sense of, as you brought up before, talking
 about the ego and the consciousnesses and the camera line, whatever, that if we're looking
 at the ego as a fairly recent phenomenon, and the ego, the way I'm sensing it, the ego
 is the sense of self. And it really is that construct where you think, "This is me, this
 is what I know." And does the mystic tradition say the true, so-called enlightened state
 is the deconstruction of the sense of self. So, doesn't it seem that the, this is what
 I'm getting from the journey I'm taking. I'm getting intimation, not of the loss of myself,
 but it is a sense of the loss of myself, in fact. It's like intimation of the future where
 we're functioning on such a different level that it's beyond that ego construct. You know,
 we're really telepathically in connection. The whole sense of self as being just a limitation
 of, "This is me, this is what I know, my history is gone."
 Yeah, the great cultural accomplishment of Western civilization is this thing called
 the free individual. But now that we're on the brink of the electronic dispensation,
 exactly what we're going to do with the free individual and how that's going to look in
 an era where consciousness flows through a thousand portals, it's not at all clear. It's
 not clear whether we can somehow now carry the idea of the free individual to an even
 higher level where each of us will become a kind of God, Lord over our own creation,
 as vast in time and space, but virtual as the cosmos in which we find ourselves embedded,
 or whether the free individual is going to turn out to have been the problem all along
 and we're going to abandon it and become some kind of socialist gas or some collectivist
 swarm, a hive mind, a world where intelligence flows where needed and identity is provisional
 and fleeting and unanchored to place or body. Much of this goes on on the internet. You
 can be an 11-year-old girl, you can be whatever you want, you can build your avatar and present
 yourself in many guises. It's much more like a shifting fantasy land than it is like the
 good old world of positivist rock and roll.
 I was wondering what the connection is between the singing of shamanism and shamanism as
 a catalyst for visionary experience, and if there's any corollary to the munchies.
 I think that we see shamanism from the outside with the values of Western civilization unconsciously
 applied. In cultures that are taking psychedelics, this thing which we call singing is a very
 complicated activity indeed. If you've ever sung on psychedelics, you know that it's an
 ecstatic and complicated and synesthetic experience. To make of your body a vibrator for sound,
 to move out into the Pythagorean octaves with the human voice, it's extraordinary actually
 how capable of sound human beings are. No other animal has the range and control. Of
 course they say, "Well, this is because we're adapted for spoken language." But I think
 we had a lot of this range and control before.
 Words that we use very knowledgably like "song," "ancestor spirit," "power place," we're not
 getting 90% of the nuance of these meanings because they go so gracelessly into English.
 When a shaman talks about spirit, he's using a term as technically complicated in his mind
 as when a physicist uses the term "beauty" to describe a quark. It's very technically
 defined and we tend to simplify and then suppose that we understand. Part of the thing I found
 with hanging with shamans in various places and times is that once you get past the language
 barrier, what shamans are are simply curious people, intellectuals of a certain type. In
 Australian Aboriginal slang, a shaman is called a "clever fella." If someone says, "I'm a
 clever fella," they mean, "I'm a shaman." Well, that's all it is. It's somebody who pays attention
 to how things actually work and transcends the culture by that means. It's a weird paradox.
 It's that the shamans who are the keepers of the cultural values are also necessarily
 the keepers of the secrets of the theatrics of the cultural values. And so they live their
 lives in the light of the knowledge that it all rests on showbiz. Everybody else is a
 true believer, but these are the image makers, the people who actually pull the strings and
 control the evolution of the mythologies. And in a way, it's a situation of alienation.
 Mercilion talks a lot about this in Shamanism, the archaic techniques of ecstasy, and in
 history, the eternal return. Talks about how the shaman is socially marginal, politically
 marginal, lives at the edge of the village and so forth and so on, and is feared by the
 people because due dealings with the shaman are always dealings about life and death.
 But then the shaman comes forward in this critical role as go-between, as mediator,
 between the cultural mind and the real world, which is this potent set of forces and planetary
 cycles and meteorological events and diseases and fate. And the shaman mediates. In many
 languages the word for shaman means go-between. So the cost of this, or the price of this,
 for the shaman himself or herself, is a kind of alienation from the cultural values, and
 a kind of understanding that it's a game that's kept in play. And this is true in our culture
 as well. You don't think the people who market all this crap and produce all this bad art
 and so forth and so on love it, or watch it, or consume it. They market it. Its basic purpose
 is to delude and distract the masses. So the psychedelics, what they bring into that shamanic
 situation is sort of rocket fuel for the project of cultural detoxification, or Gnostic rocket
 fuel into a realm of cultural alienation. And from that point of view then these other
 dimensions of reality come into being and deeper understanding comes into being.
 One of the things I think after spending a while with all this is it really helps to
 be educated. It really helps to cram a lot of information and experience into your head
 because the logos, the alien AI, the higher and hidden god that is trying to reach down
 to you and deliver the message is a collagist. It can't really compose the message except
 out of bits and pieces of what you already possess. And so this came home to me very
 forcefully when I developed the time wave out of the Qing and its sequence. Because
 at the times when I was most inflated in my thinking or most grandiose in my thinking,
 one of the issues for me personally was, "Why me?" You know, "Why are you downloading this
 millenarian visionary revelation on me?" And the answer from the mushroom was fairly humbling.
 It was, "You are the first person who has ever walked through this pasture who had these
 64 hexagrams in your head." And that's all we needed. We were just waiting for somebody
 who could bring that much to the party and then we could arrange the details and the
 mapping and the arranging. But they had to arrive with that much and you're the first
 person. So it was like nothing about my fine genes or cosmic destiny, but just I was the
 first termite to happen by carrying the right scrap of information in their head that this
 thing could then manipulate.
 Is that something that is clinically extracted?
 Well most DMT in the underground has been synthesized from indole. It's a fairly simple
 process like third year organic chemistry. DMT does occur in nature in many plants, but
 usually there is little of it, so you have to process a lot, or it occurs complexed with
 other tryptamines that have various psycho and physiological activities that you don't
 want and that's very difficult to separate them. So most DMT in the underground is made
 by underground chemists. And if any of them are listening, you might consider making a
 bit more because it's hideously hard to come by.
 If you had an IND, if you had a license to give it to human subjects, but so few people
 have such paper that the practical answer is no.
 So it's like that.
 At what level have you experienced shamanic ability to manifest these miracles at a rush
 hour, hamburger stand level?
 Well aside from the story you mentioned...
 Or is this all put on?
 No, no. The truthful answer is always complicated, although the truth itself is always simple.
 If you're asking me to tell a story of a miracle that I still cherish as authentic, I don't
 think it's told in "True Hallucinations," the book, because it involves... Well, you'll
 soon see why. But here's an incident that happened at La Charrera that didn't make it
 into the invisible landscape, I don't believe.
 Dennis had this notion of what he called the good shit. This developed in the days after
 the ideas about hypercarbohydration. And he claimed it was like a fantasy, it was like
 a joke, it wasn't clear exactly what it was, but it was this idea that there was this hash
 somewhere that had been rolled into cow dung, and cut with cow dung, and then infected with
 psilocybin mycelium, so that the mycelium had completely replaced the cow shit in this
 ball of hash, or this hypothesized kilos of hash somewhere in the world. And so there
 was this psilocybinated, the good shit. And at one point he envisioned us actually forming
 a rock and roll band, which would play instruments that would condense this stuff out of the
 air over large audiences. And we would go on tour, and at the end of the tour, history
 would be... The whole thing would be in a shambles, because Uncle John's band really
 did come out of the woodwork.
 But so at one point, he predicted, one night after he had been moved to the river and was
 sort of in semi-incarceration, he predicted that the good shit would come that night.
 And by this time he was very suspect, I was highly suspect, everybody in the expedition
 was polarized against everybody else, and it was a pretty uptight scene. And so I left
 with my girlfriend of the time, and it may have even been the same night as the Silver
 Key incident, and it was pouring rain. And we made our way like a quarter mile, half
 a mile back into the jungle to this other place where we were staying, where the original
 experiment had been done. And so then we get to the hut and it's pouring rain, and I had
 scored this kilo of Santa Marta gold for the expedition, and we had smoked nothing but
 this, for Columbia, relatively reg weed for weeks. So I got it out to roll the evening's
 joint, and I was fumbling with it and I got this thing lit, and this little crumb, this
 little burning thing fell on the floor, and I lifted it up and smelled it. And the transubstantiation
 had occurred. It was like Mazar-e-Sharif, AAA, Red Lion, hashish of some sort, and I
 know hashish. And here we were in the center of the Amazon, in this hut, in this pouring
 rain, and I could tell that it was the good. It was the good shit. It had actually manifest.
 And I showed the woman who was with me, who was easily led one way or another, but anyway,
 she didn't say it wasn't, and I stayed up late that night smoking this incredible hash
 and waiting for the rain to stop so that at the first gray light of dawn, I could go down
 to the river and confound my critics with the stone itself, the alchemical quintessence,
 the concrescence, the excreta bonum, the good shit. Here it was. And so as dawn broke and
 the fog lifted, I made my way across this rainy pasture and sat down by the hammock
 of the sleeping form of my most vociferous critic and sort of elbowed her awake. And
 there were other instances where this was the principle at work. It didn't work. Everything
 had returned to normal. It was the Cinderella screw up. It was just that I was a char girl
 who washed pots and there was no prince and there was no coach and there was no... And
 plus I was once again humiliated in the presence of my critics who had further reason to think
 that a check into the local mental health care delivery system might not be a bad idea.
 These things happen. Ah, the story of the good shit. Now, if that isn't a perfect example
 of an Irish bard at the top of his form, then I don't know what is. That was really, really
 classic Terrence McKenna, you know, from meditation to the story of the good shit. What a delightful
 morning that was. I don't know about you, but I thought Terrence was correct in what
 he said about the authenticity of the psychedelic experience relative to achieving enlightenment
 on the natch, as he calls meditation. If you missed that, you ought to maybe go back and
 replay it. I think it's around the seven minute mark of this podcast. I also thought it was
 pretty cool to hear Terrence admit that going up on a psychedelic journey can be quite terrifying.
 On several other occasions I heard him say that if you weren't somewhat scared before
 a major psychedelic journey, then you really didn't know what you were doing. I completely
 agree with that. These sacred medicines are not just little Fourth of July fireworks,
 they're atomic bombs and you darn sure better know what you're doing before you start playing
 with them. Those of you who are regulars here in the psychedelic salon, of course, probably
 know what I'm going to say next, and that is always begin every cosmic exploration involving
 plants or chemicals at Erowid. That's E-R-O-W-I-D dot org. That's the first stop on every journey
 a professional psychonaut takes. Start at Erowid. Enough said. Be very careful. Always,
 as you know, err on the side of caution. But hey, you guys already know that, otherwise
 you wouldn't be hanging around here in the psychedelic salon. I want to thank you again
 for being here. Glad you stopped by. And dear Terrence, wherever you may be, thank you so
 much for everything that you've given to us all. And I want you to know, by the way, that
 I really enjoyed your rap about virtual reality and the possibility of a hive mind on the
 internet. In case you guys missed that, that's around 33 minutes into this podcast. So check
 it out if you were thinking about something else while he was on that little roll. And
 as most of you already know, our music here in the psychedelic salon is compliments of
 Shatul Hayyuk. Thanks again, you guys. Appreciate it. And for now, this is Lorenzo, signing
 off from cyberdelic space. Be well, my friends.
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