Useful to you. I mean I have nothing against hedonism. Don't get me wrong. I just don't think I just want it clearly understood You know we're going to toot this up and have a good time not that this is part of the spiritual quest and The the most terrifying drugs are the most harmless specifically DMT DMT is so like what's already in your head That it clears within five minutes That's a very good measure of how toxic a compound is is how fast can your body? Identify it Deanimate or dealkylated and return everything to equilibrium Psilocybin is It's you come back into focus after about six hours Ayahuasca which uses DMT and an MAO inhibitor you turn it turns over in about four to six hours, so What bothers me about all these new drugs is That they are Escapes from the obligation to do strong drugs I think that the great popularity of cocaine is because nobody ever disgraced themselves on it You know nobody ever start babbling about how much they regretted what a jackass they were and That's what these psychedelics. Do they make you get down and grovel in the dirt God I had this trip in Hawaii that was just horrible. You know where it was saying You know you think you're such hot stuff. You won't even get off your ass and go shit in the field You know I want to see you grovel man. You sit up in front of all these people and pontificate on how it's all put together Face me now in the darkness and tell me how it's all put together. I just hate it It puts me through the ringer, but nothing else is really useful Adele *inaudible* *inaudible* *inaudible* *inaudible* *inaudible* *inaudible* *inaudible* *inaudible* *inaudible* *inaudible* *inaudible* *inaudible* *inaudible* *inaudible* *inaudible* *inaudible* *inaudible* *inaudible* *inaudible* *inaudible* *inaudible* *inaudible* *inaudible* *inaudible* *inaudible* *inaudible* *inaudible* *inaudible* *inaudible* *inaudible* [INAUDIBLE] Yes, I think you're right. The problem is that it's very, in my experience, it's very prone to abuse. The people who propose it are reluctant to tell you how much they do it because they know how damning that information would be about their position. I mean, I'm not talking about anybody in particular. I've just observed this, that you say, "Well, you're telling me your patients respond wonderfully to this and that you see the dissolution of neuroses and this sort of thing. This is wonderful. By the way, how often do you take it?" "Oh, three times a day." "And you've been at it for a year and a half. I see." You must have your neuroses fairly well dissolved by this time. It's a different issue, I think. Therapeutic compounds in, as Adele says, the correct settings, the hands of skilled therapists, God knows we all are neurotic, and that's fine. But this spiritual dimension, this ingression into these ancient, alien information fields which orient you to the bones of the planet and the plan that has, you know, the galactic plan, if you want. This is a whole different issue. I use Rupert's theory to explain to myself why the organic psychedelics are so much richer. It's just that with the new drugs, they haven't taken enough people yet. And so, to speak to a drug which no one here has yet cared to defend, ketamine. I've done ketamine a number of times, and my impression is always of this marvelous skyscraper filled with these vast kerosene carpeted rooms and water coolers every twenty doorways. But where is the stuff? Where is anything? No one has moved in. Apparently, they're finding it hard to let because it's just empty. And you move from room to room, and the emptiness is a kind of ecstasy and exaltation. I love those angularities and, you know, the ketamine bit. But the final thing, the final conclusion is too heavy a physical impact, too heavy an impact on the immune system, clings to you too long, and too state-bounded. And by state-bounded, I mean how much can you bring out of it? How much can you bring out of it? Not that you have to communicate it to your friends or your lover, but how much of it can you communicate to yourself twenty-four hours after it's happened? The whole goal, it's a shamanic thing. It's to go to the well at the center of the world and recover the pearl and return with the pearl. If you can't return with the pearl, you're not a good shaman. I mean, it was a good try, and nobody makes it every time. But that's the bottom line, yes. I wonder, with the idea of all of continuum based as a database, like the case of plants, water, life, and all that, what are the high secrets, perhaps the main things, that I'm telling you, that you can use to store your rich resources? Well, this is just a part of the history of the development of science. Right now, the hottest thing going in phytochemistry and plant product chemistry is marine biochemistry, which includes marine hallucinogens. None, so far as I know, are known from seaweeds or things like that. But there are a number of fish that are psychedelic and can be cooked and eaten. And there are amazing descriptions in the literature. There's a fish off Norfolk Island, down your way, that this amazing account in Hoffer and Osmond's book, "Hallucinogens," was written about 1960. And this person had this vision. They visited a bronze plaque commemorating the first moon flight. And it just sounded like an off-the-wall experience. Yes, the ocean is a very rich-- And part of your question is a good foil for me to talk about what we're trying to do, what Cat and I are trying to do in our day-to-day lives, and how we've responded to the imperative of all this. We've basically responded to it all with the faith that the drugs of the future are in the forest primeval, that the Faustian scientists, the demonic artificers of the laboratory, the bad little boys of science will eventually understand that nature has outsmarted them, and that with these now super-refined analytical techniques that can pick up just a few molecules of an anomalous compound in a substance, we're seeing that plants are far richer than we supposed, based on the data derived from late 19th century and early 20th century studies of plants. Also, there are amazing hallucinogens about which very, very little is known. And even hallucinogens which are considered relatively well explored. How can you say a hallucinogen is well explored? The ayahuasca complex in the Amazon is fascinating. It appears to be not only a hallucinogen, but a curing force, regardless of the visionary effect. And people are taking it as a purgative, and generating states of equilibrium and good health from it. So, we have some land in Hawaii, and are working with my brother Dennis, and trying to bring as many psychoactive plants together there as we possibly can, to grow them, to have sufficient biomass, so that we can both experiment with them, and also provide living plants to researchers, who otherwise would have to foot the expense of expeditions to Chile, or the Amazon, or the Himalayas. And I think that, you see, what we found doing research in the Amazon, was that it's just a tremendously difficult environment. The people are spread thinly, and consequently you arrive with seven people at a village of twenty people, and the food supply, the psychic state, everything is thrown into wild confusion. And then when they hear that you're there to learn about the secret, unmentionable drug, which the old men used to communicate with the spirits, it's very tricky to... And the notion of being able to take drugs in that situation is almost impossible. So we've taken the time and the effort to transport cuttings, and seeds, and rootstock, to a place like Hawaii, where these things can be worked with. And if any of you have any contribution, financial, physical, or simply in the form of encouragement for this kind of a project, we would appreciate it. We want to set up a data bank that links a number of botanical gardens throughout the world, and then search the herbarium data, and actually get a grip on what is claimed to be hallucinogenic, and then to separate these things out, cultivate them, provide a setting for people to take them in. My... I scoured India, I submitted myself to a number of different disciplines, and I think they are just the dimmest reflections of what is possible on psychedelics. I had an Indian acquaintance last year who took mushrooms for the first time. He had been practicing yoga for years, and years, and years, and he said, "Now I understand why they call yoga 'practice'." Dawn? Morning glory seeds. Oh, I think morning glory seeds are fascinating. You know, there are two kinds that were involved in the Mayan thing. Ipomea purpura is the one with the black crescent-shaped seeds, and you have to take a lot of those, about 200 or more, and that's the one that you can find actually sold as an ornamental seed in seed things, although it's covered with poison, but you can grow them out and get clean ones. But that was the one that they took when they couldn't get the one they were really into, which is called silt liltsen, and is rivia coriambosa. It's been recently reclassified to turbina coriambosa, and there they only take 13 seeds. Another one is argyria nervosa, which is a Polynesian morning glory with no known history of human usage, but actually in terms of per-gram-weight effectiveness, is the strongest plant hallucinogen known. I mean, it only takes eight seeds of argyria nervosa, and if you do ten, there's a cardioactive glycoside that will really make you think that you've tied onto a rattlesnake. So it's not one to push. Yes, when we were in Mexico last winter at the Cenote of Sacrifice at Chichen Itza, there were blue morning glories growing, and I collected a number of seeds, and we're growing it out in Hawaii because Rupert and I have an experiment going to see if in fact the morphogenetic field, that the Mayan consciousness, as expressed in the glyphs and the art and the architecture, is actually resident in the thing, which you would certainly expect it to be. Many people have told me that on peyote you just can't stop the flow of Aztec imagery and that sort of thing. I haven't experienced that, but it certainly is what you would expect if you take Rupert's ideas seriously. So yeah, the morning glories are a very rich field for research. Wouldn't there be some response from the earth or the dirt, or where you put the seed? In other words, you take it out of one... Yes, but as I understand Rupert's theory, repetition is everything. So having grown 50,000 generations at Chichen Itza and one generation at Hawaii, it'll definitely be more Quetzalcoatl than Pele. Sometimes I see methods that are real thick stems and almost all fungus in a tiny little pot, and sometimes caps and stem bottoms, and I'm just wondering if they have different properties or whether they're all grounded together to the same... Nobody knows. See, chemical analysis is not done at that level, certainly. Have you noticed any difference when you take stems and pots or do you just pick thick ones? No, there are strains. There are strains. You can notice differences, but I've never correlated it to physical size and things like that. And also when you say the properties of marijuana and mushrooms, which are inside the drug, you said you had a feeling that you thought were... Oh, the three criteria for a drug? It should come from a plant. It should have a history of shamanic usage. It should be closely related to brain chemistry, chemically. Marijuana isn't a... Yeah, see, serotonin is 5-hydroxytryptamine, and your brain is full of serotonin, and interestingly, the human brain has more serotonin than any other. Serotonin increases as you ascend the mammalian phylogeny, and psilocybin is 4-phosphoryloxy and N-dimethyltryptamine, so when the phosphorus group comes off at the blood-brain barrier, and then it's a very close analog of serotonin, and it's probably antagonistic to serotonin. When you take MAO, when you take ayahuasca with an MAO inhibitor, the MA, it's serotonin that is being inhibited, you know. And the mushroom is similar to brain chemistry, so it's almost a healthy thing to do? Well, no, the mushroom gets it on being from a plant, and having millennia of usage behind it, and then it's sort of murky on the like-brain chemistry thing. Are there any negative implications of that? No, there have been claims, claims that it made you age quickly. Some people find it difficult to take because of stomach cramps. All I can say about that is that next to your brain, your stomach is your most heavily innervated organ of your body, and if we're going to stimulate the central nervous system, there's no way we can't stimulate, we can avoid stimulating the nerves in the wall of the stomach, so people who have this problem, basically, they just have to have a little talk with themselves, and try and work it out. There are no contraindications to psilocybin physically. However, you know, well, there's even argument about that now. The only known case of death from a psilocybin mushroom was a child who ate it, but the original sample was preserved and has since been gone back to, and it is a paneolus, but it doesn't appear to be a psilocybin-containing one. However, that's good enough for me, that one murky case, and I tell my kids, you know, you've got to be 12 or 13 years old. In the Amazon, the shaman, he was giving his child small doses of ayahuasca, and he was five or... Yes, they give it to newborn babies. Although it's not clear that they give an effective dose, they sort of moisten their mouth with it. Yeah, uh-huh, the jívaro, yeah. In your book, you discuss the horrible phenomenon of the 13-year-old mushroom. Right. You talk about matching it with a protocol of 13 years old. Well, that's really my brother's area. He had this idea, which was not a traditional idea. He had this sort of ideological conniption fit, in which he had this notion at a very nuts-and-bolts level of how you could lock in to the Earth signal, if you want to put it that way, or the information channel that is coming through psilocybin, and it had to do with using your voice to harmonically cancel the interiorized tone that is generated sometimes on psilocybin, which he interpreted to be actually the sound of the electron spin resonance of the molecules. Sound is an imprecise term, but the waveform phenomenon given off by the electron spin resonance of the molecules, as they intercalated into their bond sites, he thought he could use his voice to lock it in. And, in fact, if any of you know "True Hallucinations," which is a talking book of eight tapes that we have produced, it tells the story of that expedition and everything that went into it. And the results were ambiguous, but so terrifying that we didn't care to continue. It did appear that you could use self-generated sound to synergize and prolong these drug states, but it also appeared that you were putting your sanity right out on the line, and that we need more data before we plunge into an effort to recreate that kind of an experiment. But that was the dream, you know, to lock in the high, to get the voice and hold it, and to have all the physiological effects fade away, but keep the connection. In the way that Socrates said he had a daemon of a teaching voice, which he could refer to any time. Julian Jaynes' book on "The Origin of Consciousness and the Bicameral Mind" goes into this whole thing about how early primitive people may have had interiorized voices which directed them and their lives, and that it was the incorporation of that function that created the modern psychic function, which we call the ego. The ego is a trapped god, is what it is. We grew so blasé in the face of it that it became a part of ourselves. At least this is Jaynes' theory. Yes? What kind of strategy or right program would you suggest to someone that's willing to use psychedelia in the areas you're discussing that involve the impressive, I think, live-in, in a city kind of setting? What kind of? How do you do it, you mean? Well, yeah, yeah. It's easy to tell you how to do it, and it's amazing how few people do it right. You do it in darkness, on an empty stomach, in silence, and alone. Doesn't sound like much fun, does it? It isn't. Yes, although to really see, psilocybin works in darkness. The visions. I mean, a full moon night is absolutely stunning on a psychedelic, no question about it. But the Mazatecans and Zapotecan Indians, all the ayahuasqueros we ever dealt with in the Amazon, it was all about getting into the hut, closing the door, blankets over the windows, dousing the light. They didn't do it alone. They did it in large groups, and it's all for himself. But if you did it alone, you were considered a shaman, I think. How do you say to take mushrooms back to the country when you're used to the sunlight and the sea air? I think that's a lower dose. Most people who take mushrooms and claim knowledge of what mushrooms are about are talking about the two to three gram level. The game doesn't begin until you reach five grams. And the thing to remember when you're calculating dose, and also once you're loaded, is that it can't kill you. It can only convince you that it can kill you. So, you know, to take six or eight grams is pretty terrifying. There's no reason why you couldn't take 50, 60, 70 grams. I'm not advocating it. I would never do it. But it's because of your mind, not your body. It isn't a danger to your body. In the controversy about MDMA that has gone back and forth many different ways, I said of psilocybin, here's a drug that's perfectly safe and makes you think you're dying every time you take it. MDMA, on the other hand, it never enters anybody's mind that there might be a problem. And actually, they're brushing right up against the Grim Reaper. So that's a funny... And when it convinces you, when psilocybin convinces you that you're dying, there is not one iota of doubt left. It doesn't partially convince you. It entirely convinces you. And then you just go through it, you know. It doesn't always do that. But it's good to expect it to do that because you don't want to be caught by surprise by that particular deal of the deck. What if it happens when people take drugs that are not your birth control? You don't seem to quite comply with that. Is there a line between the two? Well, no. It's real alarming to me if somebody doesn't recover their baseline of consciousness in a pretty big hurry. This is an unknown area. No one knows what schizophrenia is. People may have unusual metabolisms. They may have unusual food habits. They may simply be delicately balanced. If somebody tells me that they have visions on the natch and have all their life dealt with elves and flying saucers, and I don't urge a heavy program of psychedelic involvement, it seems superfluous and maybe destructive. I am just a stone, you know. It takes... I just cling to the baseline of consciousness. It takes a great deal to move me off it. I never hallucinated on LSD unless I would smoke a lot of hash and do a bunch of exercises. It was just very elusive. So I don't advocate, in fact, drug-taking. I think that what we lack is a professional shaman class. And, you know, I won't speak to audiences more larger than this, because I don't want to even be perceived as leading some kind of crusade. I don't think that we should convince people who haven't taken drugs to take them. I think if we think drugs are a good thing, we should take more of them. The real problem is to get people to take enough. The number of people who are running around, passing themselves off as experts on the psychedelic experience, who have never in fact... You know, it's like sex and orgasm. Everybody can have sex and talk about it, but the question is, you know, did you get off? And it's totally subjective and elusive, very hard to talk about, unless you watch somebody who's stoned, you can't tell whether they got off or not. So we need to build a consensus about what the psychedelic experience is. If we had a more tightly shared consensus, these questions about ketamine and MDMA and all this couldn't even arise. They are clearly a different branch of the tree, and not directly related to shamanism, which is about plants. Why try to do it without recourse to the plant spirits? That's what they're for. So... Adele. I think both of you have touched into something that not everybody is familiar with. And most probably what I can tell you is that this is a very important relationship. And we take this as a very rational and balanced relationship. And if you're going to go into the ego to salute things, and you can't get to the ego, then you have to work on the relationship with the ego. That it's really important that we reach the boundaries of this relationship. And the people who go into these relationships without even trying to go through the obstacles are the ones who have the most psychological trauma. And that's what we're talking about here. That's right. Early psychedelic trips for most people tend to be about the junk of your life. And, you know, the people you've wronged, and just the junk of your life. But if you can get through that, it begins to take on a less personal character. And to be more like an invisible landscape. A place that you wander through and that you gain impressions of. But it's only in the early phase. And then once those knots have been untied, then you can voyage and see clearly the invisible landscape. Rather than only see the knotted skein of your own hang-ups. Marty, did you want to say something? Yeah, I want to address the fact that taking a lot and doing it by yourself. The cosmic psyche is changing so fast that that scares me some too. I think in moving from the patriarchal to the matriarchal, we go through what the Buddhists say, not that, not that, not that. And finally we find out who we are. And from the feminine point of view, it's I am that, I am that, I am that. And if you're willing to take a large dose and to meet death, and if you know that death is the invisible landscape, and that you don't know what it is, and do that by yourself and know that you will stay in the darkness and contain, as the feminine says, contain, then do it by yourself. It often is good to have a guide or somebody who would sit outside your door if you don't want them in there, but somebody that would remind you that you decided you want to do this and you don't need to tell the world that death is wonderful or something. That's good advice. What you have to arrange is that the other person is not distracting you. That's all. And that's what I mean by taking it alone. It's just very, like I almost never take psychedelics with anyone other than Kat, because I just worry too much about the other person. I just cannot stop myself from worrying and listening to their breathing, and it just totally hangs me up. And some people don't have that problem. I have friends who are therapists, and I just say, you know, how do you do it? How can you do it? How can you watch somebody go through these things and not be drawn in? So I'm the kind of personality who's subject to the transference, and I don't expose myself to those situations. This trip that I had in Hawaii, I thanked God that somebody was there, that Kat was there specifically, because just the sound of her voice completely ameliorated a whole spectrum of hard to describe but very icky things that were threatening to overwhelm me. And I don't have trips like that very much where I need somebody there, so it was fortunate that it was like that. But no, I'm not advocating that if you've never taken mushrooms, you go up on a mountain in the dark and take eight grams. I mean, it might be good for you, but I'm not advocating it, because it might not be good for you, you know. But eventually, you know, Plotinus called the mystical experience the flight of the alone to the alone, and there is something about that. The last dance you do, you do alone, and it can't be otherwise. The main point out of all these statements about drugs and this and that is, you know, if it doesn't scare you, it's not worth doing. And it certainly scares me every time. I mean, I don't want you to think. There's nothing heroic about it. It's just terrifying, and it's the only form of terror I will submit to. I will not jump from airplanes. I do not shoot the rapids. I do not rock climb. I'm a bookish person. But I will submit to that terror because it seems to make sense. But it isn't unterrifying. It is exceedingly terrifying. That's where I think it lies. And that's why these questions of abuse and all that can't arise. God, nobody abuses these drugs as far as I can find out, unless they do too little, unless they are one-grammers or something. Well, it's 4.44. [laughter] Are there any more questions? Will? Kath, would you like to? Please. [inaudible] That's right. [inaudible] Yes, what you bring to it. [inaudible] It's the great unknown. The thing that is so troubling about our culture is that everything is canned. And even like the UFO issue, most people want to go down to the grocery store and see that both Time and Newsweek have a cover. They have landed. The Secretary General of the United Nations is meeting with them three times a day. And it's all coming down and you wait to hear what it's all about. The fact of the matter is, it's just between you and it. You know, it's not going to come through the Secretary General of the United Nations. It's between you and it. And psychedelics are about the immediacy of experience, not the dull, humdrum, repetitive daily routine of meditation and yoga and all of these things, but the immediacy of experience at a white-hot level, just the very unresolved magma of being, and the notion that millions, billions of people go from birth to the grave without ever touching that, unless they touch it in those last few moments of life, is heart-rending. That's an affront to humanness. If we are going to be human and to experience the modalities of being, and experience is the key word, if we're going to experience the modalities of being, then you have to write these things into your script somewhere. And this is obvious to everyone who's deeply involved with these things. We would meet Ayahuasca heroes off in the bush, and the guy would say, "Señores, you are great doctores, great scientists, but the primary thing is the experience." And we said, "Yes, we know. We'll sit at your feet as you show us how to make it. We have no illusions. We know that the primary thing is the experience." And so it's your own life. It's a dialogue between you and being. It's authentic being, not canned being. It's not an ideology. It's not a teaching that comes from some august being that you can never hope to be like, who's handing it down to you. It's you. You must recognize yourself as the primary focus, the primary vehicle for unraveling what's going on, and then the psychedelics emerge as having major, paramount importance in your life. And if we could authenticate being, if we could insist on pushing back the canned stuff, more and more we would begin to recapture the tremendous authenticity that we sense in these archaic people, like the Maya and the Tibetans and the Wittoto and the Hevaro. It's that they do not, to the degree that they are not involved in 20th century culture, they do not have canned experience. They have real experience, moment to moment in the now. And I said at some point in this lecture, the psychedelics return us to origins. Our origin is in this primary datum of self-experienced being. Civilization has clouded and occluded this. But if you don't recover it, by some means, authentic being will elude you. And authentic being is what the inner health and dynamic harmony that we're all working for is about. Well, thank you very much for your attention and for your peer review. And good luck to all of you. And whether we meet again or not, I hope that you all remain true to the impulse which brought you here today. Because I think it is a true one and a good one. I think this is a path with heart that we have all met at this particular campfire site. And the paths may go off into the bush in many directions. But they're all paths with heart if we can recall that we've shared this kind of moment where there's a search for an authentic understanding of being. So thank you very much. Thank you. [Applause] [Silence] {END} Wait Time : 0.00 sec Model Load: 0.64 sec Decoding : 1.99 sec Transcribe: 3141.09 sec Total Time: 3143.72 sec