Okay, well welcome to plants consciousness and transformation I'm Terence McKenna. I know many of you We will meet here today and tomorrow 10 to noon 1:30 to 5 and Basically this is a workshop to discuss the interaction between plants and human beings specifically the psychological and mental interpenetration of these two very different kinds of life forms and Those of you who are writing who are concerned about a paper that you may write relative to this class I'll say a few words about that before the afternoon session So don't fret about it. It will all come clear in time I think of this course as plants and mind and The way I like to teach is to just begin to lay out the basic pieces of what is a very complex interdisciplinary puzzle and hopefully at some point your specialties your passions your Interests will ignite the whole thing and it will have then a dynamic of its own We could discuss these matters for two days five days ten days or as I've done for about 40 years 35 years there is no end to it and very few areas of human endeavor Dissolve the disciplinary boundaries of Western academia as thoroughly as the study of human and psychoactive plant Interactions do there are important issues here in biology and botany in biogeography in ethnography and ethnology in psychology and neurophysiology in the study of symbols The the number of disciplines that have to be brought to bear on this subject is I think a central clue to how important it is to understanding our our humaneness and I represent a Radical point of view on these matters, and I don't imagine I was invited here to dumb it down so You know if you had Darwin you'd get natural selection if you had Freud you'd get sexual repression So you've got McKenna, so you're going to get psychoactive catalysis of consciousness Because that's basically Why I think these ideas are so important, but before we get to that let me just lay out some of the the field Human Beings began Their career well We can trace it back to the primordial slime. I suppose but our our animal career be was a career of insectivorous vegetarian and fruititarianism lived out in the arboreal canopies of tropical rainforests and all All animal species indeed all life tends to Occupy an evolutionary niche and then stabilize itself in that niche termites cockroaches these sorts of organisms found their niche hundreds of millions of years ago and Filled it to perfection and have occupied it ever since Generally nature is not progressive in its particulars overall Nature is progressive, but its particulars seek equilibrium and so it would have been in the case of our primate ancestors they achieved a Dynamical balance as I said a diet of insects and fruit a canopy habitat Language of packs signaling designed to convey danger and Information about food sources and so forth and so on and there they would have remained Had it not been for the larger Ecodynamics of the planet Ecodynamics which are still shaping the human habitat in Africa because what has been going on in Africa for at least five million years is a slow drying of the continent and it disrupted this Rainforest ecology so that about two to four million years ago. I mean these are vast spans of time We're talking about the rainforest began to island itself and to be restricted to the wetter areas of Africa and into the new Environment the more xerophytic or arid environment that was coming into being a very diminished plant community took hold a community of opportunistic grasses Annuals heavy cedars this sort of thing now. We know that the rainforest was primary because the rainforest Just to give you a broad notion might consist of over a hundred thousand plant species the grassland ecosystem Might well consist of under 500 species and all 500 Grassland species can be found as rare members of the flora of the rainforest So clearly what we have are the survivors of a process of clearing and there is argument among botanists About this but Carl Sauer who was a great Geographer and thinker on these matters held that there is no such thing as a natural grassland That grasslands are the earliest artifacts of human Impact on the planet grasslands are created by burning They promote the growth of cereals and and so feed in to the human food chain so our primate ancestors ecological adaptation to arboreal life was interrupted by this process and key to my thinking About all this and those of you who are going to have careers in all this I hope some of you will take it up and add them braided I think the great overlooked factor in any model of human evolution and indeed in Evolutionary models of many other species is we have not given enough emphasis to diet when we talk about natural selection of an animal species we tend to think that the genome expresses Physical type and the phenotype is then subject to selection by natural environment Some biologists have seen the the thinness of this Understanding LL. White wrote a book called internal factors in evolution in which he pointed out that the womb is itself an Environment that makes a very heavy selection Before an organism is ever born into the theater of Darwinian Selection so it isn't a tabla Rasa That you're born into the theater of natural selection you have been subject to natural selection From the very earliest moments of the existence of the zygote So that's one factor But what I have emphasized is diet diet is an input of potentially mutagenic factors into the body that can have enormous consequences on the health of an individual or the general evolution of a population and I've used the The Toolbox of ideas that I'm going to put forward here today and tomorrow To try and address what seems to me to be one of the most centrally interesting questions To be asked of this world and that is what is human consciousness? Where did it come from and why does it exist at all? And I believe that we can by thinking about psychoactive plants diet and the early human evolutionary situation We can make a lot of progress on this question And we can illuminate some of our political dilemmas that persist to this day the gender friction that typifies human society the Hierarchy structures and the tensions they create so forth and so on So let me run through this and get it off my chest and then we can talk about the larger Materia Medica of Psychoactive change relative to to plants As the rainforest retreated our remote primate ancestors came under nutritional pressure obviously because their area for gathering food was being physically diminished now when a As you probably know or have observed most animal species are very particular about their food Intake and if you've ever tried to try to raise butterflies or something for your children You know that if you capture a caterpillar in the wild But don't pay close attention to the plant you find it on you can't just put grass In a peanut butter jar with a caterpillar and expect great success Animals are highly specialized in their choice of foods. Why is this? Well as near as we can tell Eating all kinds of foods from an evolutionary point of view is a very reckless move indeed because plants represent biochemical smorgasbord of various types that have accumulated over time in the genome of a particular Organism if you have a very broad based diet you are exposing yourself to many different kinds of mutagenic Influences as a strategy for survival of a species. This is not good Much better to specialize to evolve special enzymatic pathways to deal with toxins So for instance, we know certain animals can eat things that other animals would become ill from or even die And this is the way it's done and all animal species tend to evolve toward these very bland Mono-diets now what happens when? There is an upheaval in an environment Geomagnetic reversal of volcanic eruption a drought something like that and ordinary sources of nutrition become Restricted then an organism has basically two choices it can Go extinct starve itself out of existence or If it has more flexible behaviors it can begin to experiment with previously rejected potential foods in the environment rejected probably because of strong taste or something like that which are clues to the presence of marginally acceptable chemical compounds of some sort Our remote canopy living ancestors as I mentioned were fruit a Terian insectivores They under nutritional pressure began to expand their repertoire of foods they also began to explore the grassland environment and I mentioned that the grassland environment is much poorer in total number of plant species than the rainforest thus and Logically the potential number of food sources is also limited baboons and chimpanzees will dig with sticks for the corms the swollen roots of grasses So as our remote ancestors began to explore this new environment of the grasslands They also began to explore new dietary items and one of the items that they would surely have observed are coprophytic mushrooms Mushrooms which preferred dung as their environment coprophilic or coprophytic is the word for this many of these species of coprophytic mushrooms Collaborate psilocybin, which as I assume you know is one of the major psychoactive alkaloids Psilocybin occurs in many species of mushroom. It's unknown outside of the the fungi And but I maintain that in a sense psilocybin is the is the best model for human interaction with a psychedelic or that all other psychoactive plant usages are an effort to duplicate return to or somehow evoke the original human relationship to psilocybin and here is This and and it is not simply its psychoactive properties That makes psilocybin a potential catalyst For human consciousness it is its psychoactive properties in combination with certain other properties that make it uniquely suited to carry out the role of Catalysis of consciousness in a higher animal. What are these unique? characteristics well first of all in very low doses psilocybin increases visual acuity If you want to go back into the literature Roland Fisher in the middle 60s took graduate students and gave them small amounts of psilocybin or placebo and he built an apparatus where two parallel strips of metal could be deformed by winding a crank and he asked people to Push a button when the two strips seem to them to cease to be parallel and he demonstrated that edge detection is Enhanced by small amounts of psilocybin Well, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to realize that edge detection is at a very high premium in any grassland situation where predation is taking place the the lion moving in the grass 300 yards away as it creeps upon your camp or The gazelle trying to slip away through the tall grass from your hunting party edge Detection is the key to success or failure in hunting in that kind of a situation and It's extraordinary that we can Statistically demonstrate this improved visual acuity occurring in the presence of psilocybin what it would have done you see is These protohominids who would accept the psilocybin into their diet would have a slightly enhanced success in hunting That slightly enhanced hunting success would mean more nutritional resources available for them and their offspring Offspring presumably inculcated into the habit of also eating the mushrooms. So what we have here is a slight Favoring then of those animals in the population that would accept psilocybin into the diet at slightly higher levels Psilocybin is like all CNS stimulants causes arousal and Arousal is simply a feeling of unfocused restlessness. You know, it's that to espresso feeling Sleep is impossible Hands are busy at small tasks. So one is aware of one's sphere of awareness extends out somewhat further and in highly sexed animals like primates arousal means erection in the male and This is very important for this theory because we not only have to account for human consciousness But we have to account for the peculiar Dislocation that human consciousness seems to carry with it that we are both of nature Yet not of nature somehow creatures with one foot in nature and one foot in Heaven and how does this? come about I Believe and I'm you know willing to argue it against all comers that a key element to understanding our social our sociology and our sexual politics and all that is to realize that Psilocybin had two effects in the early human populations that were using it one We're very familiar with if we're psychedelic Sophisticates ourselves. It's the psychedelic experience the boundary dissolving hallucinatory shamanic Apotheosis that occurs with psilocybin, but the other effect is to Medicate the tendency to form dominance hierarchies and this is very Controversial in other words what I'm saying is that all primates form dominance Hierarchies and what that means just to remind you is that the hard-bodied long-fanged young males Take control of the group They control the children the women they order the old the homosexual and the young everybody is under their thumb and Part of our dilemma as a global Society is that though we claim great sophistication. We still live under male dominance hierarchies corporations universities Family structures, you know long fanged males are still ordering around the elderly the weak and the female among us And it is and as we are conscious beings and reflect upon this it creates great social dislocation and political unhappiness and tension in Relationships and so forth and so on I believe that our unique position in the animal world arose as a consequence of a chemical suppression of a natural behavior pattern The pattern of male dominance of forming dominance hierarchies was interrupted by an item in the diet assignment and into this chaos this egalitarian chaos which resulted was a Situation in which everything about us that we treasure and hold up as human was put in place in other words theater language dance story altruism ethics Metaphysics did I say poetry? Everything that makes us human came into being roughly a hundred thousand in the last well from a hundred thousand to about 15,000 years ago people lived in balance with the earth with the larger biome in which they were embedded There was not product fetishism ushering into enormous toxic Processes involving the smelting of metals or the extraction of rare elements from the earth Now you could object and say well, but they just simply weren't Sophisticated enough to do those things. I maintain that our technical sophistication is a very specialized form of cultural adaptation and that comparing us and finding us favorably compared to the civilization of Homer or Catalya yoke or Alta Mira is is simply a form of cultural chauvinism Okay but Psilocybin had other effects Besides this suppression of male dominance that I mentioned and this increased sexual thing Which I did mention, but I didn't draw the correct conclusion there if you have a Something in your food, which is to put it crudely acting as an aphrodisiac then it is reasonable to expect that you will have more pregnancies and reasonable to expect that you will therefore have Again a tendency to outbreed the non-psilocybin using members of the population So we have two factors here increased visual acuity, which gives greater food gathering Capacity increased sexual activity which tends to outbreed the non Psilocybin imbibing members of the group and then on top of all this you have this ecstatic internal state For which we with all our cultural and epistemic Sophistication are still unable to come to terms the mystery of the psychedelic experience now These things taken together with other factors working in parallel created I think the dilemma and the glory and the opportunity of humanness Once we began under nutritional pressure to expand our diet we were delicately poised on the edge of Omnivorousness because recall in the canopy situation we were Insectivores our remote ancestors we were not simply vegetarians We were insectivores in the grassland environment. We began probably to Originally To Follow along behind lion kills and that sort of thing and eat carrion one evolutionary theory says that our suppressed olfactory apparatus the fact that we have a very limited sense of smell is Because there was a period in our evolution when we did a lot of rooting around in carcasses This is not the noble image We might have wished but there it is if you need a countervailing theory because you don't like that one The other theory is no we lost our sense of smell because when we stood upright We got our faces up off the ground and that's where the smells are anyway so it all sort of became useless equipment and we dropped it a Point that I've become convinced of in the last couple of years that is definitely not PC is that I've Noticed and my attention was called to it by Philippe de Beaujolais who's a friend of mine? Carnivores are the most conscious of animals Cows Have very little interest in the habits of chipmunks or birds or anything else All they do is much grass Carnivores on the other hand have an acute interest in the behavior of other animals And in fact, I'm on the brink of willing to argue that the earliest consciousness Was not Consciousness it was consciousness of how dinner thought Because if you can think like your dinner You can go out and plant yourself in its path of behavior and have dinner you see and if you will if you will look at the difference between oh, I don't know a gerbil and a house cat The intelligence level is striking and I think that that this attention to the behavior of other animals on the part of an emerging habit of Carnivorous behavior is going to have to be taken into consideration It's interesting that shamanism which is in a sense the earliest intellectual pursuit Emerges in its early phase as a technique for identifying with animals Hunting magic is what we're talking about here and so I think that there is was a very interesting mix of factors and players in the early human evolutionary situation First of all a canopy dwelling primate with a pack Signaling repertoire is forced into a grassland environment Where psilocybin mushrooms occur where small and large animals are predating upon each other and where nutritional options are highly restricted and as the as this animal makes its Adaptive choices it moves deeper and deeper into the realm of mind first the Modeling of the behaviors of other animals and the behaviors of plants because in a hunting gathering Situation when plants produce fruit what environments they prefer what other plants they grow in Association with what soil types they prefer all of these things are Co-factors feeding in to an image of the world and this image of the world by its accuracy or falsity Decrease life or death upon those Who carry it The omnivorousness Forced us into an awareness of other animals that made us That put us on the level of intelligence of a hunting cat or something like that But the psilocybin experience at higher doses and obviously by this time Dedicated for sexual and ritual and hunting purposes into the society also Impels you into a non local invisible Magical world that is to use a union term highly numinous highly charged with the energy of the archetype of the archetypal world and As I said to this day we are not able to come to terms with this no matter how much Derrida or husserl or Wittgenstein you've imbibed It still is a very challenging thing to dissolve your ordinary state of consciousness and abandon Yourself to the dynamic of the larger mind that we find ourselves embedded in for a long time therefore up let's say I mean numbers are numbers, but let's say from 50,000 years ago to 12,000 years ago There was a kind of paradise on this planet poetry coexisted with a balanced ecosystem Observational sciences astronomy botany geology taxonomy the observational sciences coexisted with the natural world and then The same factors which created this edemic situation which remember what they were it was the drying of the African continent That caused the rainforest retreat that same process Had been going on slowly inevitably endlessly and about between Well after the last glacial melt which began 20 to 17 thousand years ago Africa went dramatically dry And the Sahara Desert began to form where there had been a vast grassland dotted by sandstone pinnacles cut by rushing streams and crowded with vast herds of game and that was the theater of human emergence But when it began to go dry it went dry rather dramatically these ice cores coming out of Iceland make this clear Nevertheless as late as Roman times the Roman historian Pliny Referred to North Africa as the breadbasket of Rome Because they were growing wheat in vast amounts in North Africa as recently as two thousand years ago in areas now where there is nothing well the this paradisiacal African psilocybin matriarchal partnership psychedelic shamanic Archaic whatever you want to call it society was then pushed into crisis and A number of things happened first of all migrations of people out of Africa This happens every time there's a glacial melt human populations were trapped or proto hominid populations get trapped during the glacials because The last glacial period the glaciers came as far south as as northern Israel So human populations get trapped and then in the interglacials during the melt They radiate outward people began leaving the Sahara settling in the Nile Valley and the use this shamanic use of psilocybin was disrupted because the Environment which made it possible was disrupted and when that happened and this I'm closing The loop here for you few of my raps are so sustained When that happened the pattern of male dominance the pattern that was genetically never removed, but which had been pharmacologically suppressed for over a hundred thousand years perhaps Reasserted itself with a vengeance. It was always there It had never been bred out and it must have been an era of enormous brutality When people's sense of things was that people were turning bad? suddenly we get a whole bunch of things come at once an end to nomadism the beginnings of sedentary agriculture city building Standing armies slavery male kingship Dominance all of these things appear just almost overnight They spring up and I maintain they are what a monkey would build as a civilization If suddenly all of its worst behavioral tendencies came to the forefront with a vengeance and That's precisely what happened in the period when we were Indicating ourselves with psilocybin we passed from being an animal into being the peculiarly spiritual entity that we are we elaborated observational techniques theories of magic language But when the psilocybin was withdrawn these tools which had been our glory Became instead our curse because instead of using them to produce theater and dance and ecstatic social interaction we began to use them to support the new and older agenda of male dominance And it's a frightening thing you know to think people following their cattle across the African plain eating the mushrooms seeing the mushrooms as part of the output of the cattle in the same way that Meat and milk and manure were output of the cattle a mother goddess Religion a religion of the land that moves lightly over the soil no evidence of intergroup conflict so forth and so on and somehow Then this process which took a long time of domesticating Cattle because I'm sure you see you can see how it all worked how these factors were disparate And then they flowed together human beings followed cattle because they were following Kills of lions You follow the cattle in the same way that the jackals Follow the cattle to deal with the lion kills made by large predators Well, then you in the course of this you encounter weakened animals or abandoned infant animals and you care for them and over 20,000 years this turns into Domestication of animals husbandry of cattle, but you take away the Psilocybin, and I think this is a frightening thing to contemplate the earliest cities I will argue were pens for human beings That's what a city is. It's a pen for human beings some of these dominant males said well We control cattle. Why shouldn't we? Control human beings in the same way. Why shouldn't a king? Order his people in with the same impunity that he orders the slaughter and the movement of herds of goats and cattle and all of the institutions that we labor under Came into being at this moment of transition from the late Neolithic or from the Paleolithic to the Neolithic to the agricultural situation The reason for this I believe can be traced to evolve the evolution of Consciousness, I mean consciousness is a double-edged sword at the very One of the factors I think that contributed to the reemergence of male dominance was that at some point? human intellectual capacity reached the point where a distant cause Could be connected to an effect and the effect and cause that were being observed was the sex act at Some point men and women presumably, but men must have understood That an act of copulation if carried out successfully and in the right Rhythm to the moon will result in a child nine months later if you don't have that understanding You have no sense of male paternity So you have a very tight social bond because for men the children are our children the children of the group Once you have a sense of male paternity Then you have ownership and this then becomes very problematic At the very moment that men were figuring this out women were noticing that in the yearly round of following the cattle when they would return to the kitchen middens and firepits abandoned a year previously That there would be food in those areas an abundance of food plants from cast-off Kernels of cereals and so forth and so on so then there is this awareness if we bury food If we bury food sources, then food will come out of the ground the problem with Agriculture in the early phase is that it's hideously efficient And what it does is it immediately creates such a surplus that you have to stop moving Nomadism has to be abandoned you till fields and you overproduce and then you must store and defend your overproduction Against less fortunate human groups in the area The most advanced building on this planet in ten thousand 8,000 BC was the grain tower at Jericho and What was it? It was a grain storage tower and it had a staircase so that you could carry large rocks Up onto the parapet so that you could drop them onto the heads of Enemies who were trying to batter their way into your grain tower so I've spent some time on this because This could be taught this course without any reference to our contemporary dilemma, which is the And by that dilemma, I mean the dilemma of gender difference male dominance underutilization of females in society under utilization of feminine points of view in society, but Obviously, there is a lot of tension in our society around the issue of psychedelic Intoxication around the issue of these shamanic plants though There is a growing awareness among sophisticated people that the case is almost entirely Emotional in other words we tolerate outlandish Lee toxic drugs alcohol tobacco We're willing to make a trade-off of 70,000 deaths a year in this country for the privilege of driving the automobile so forth and so on we tolerate very toxic Practices if they are seen to be somehow supportive of the Agenda being handed down from the top Psychedelics are not and they are seen as tremendously disruptive and yet as the ethnographic and Pharmacological data comes in they are among the most benign Substances in the world and Their history of human usage is almost universal and then the question is do these intoxications? limit the spectrum of consciousness and allow Hierarchical models to be handed down and brainwashed into the doubters Or do these states of consciousness? dissolve cultural assumptions and cast the individual into an ocean of existential perplexity Out of which they have to build their own Model of how the world works well I believe the reason for this tension in our society and anxiety and suppression Furious suppression of these things is because we sense that this addresses origins in the same way that it took a long time to overcome our Queasiness about discussing sexuality. There's something about the origin Subjects that make us very very nervous Okay, so that's a very linear Discussion of the role of one psychoactive plant in human history Psilocybin and as I say, I think it was uniquely chemically botanically Positioned to play that role in human consciousness Now the contemporary situation Worldwide is that we find many forms of shamanism from the Arctic to the rainforest tropics and shamanism always depends for its efficacy on a dislocation or a transformation of ordinary consciousness and We see this achieved in many different ways Through fasting through ordeal meaning abandonment in the wilderness or flagellation Through elaborate theatrical effects special effects Through the use of substances in plants and there has been a Controversy in anthropology never resolved over the past 40 years What is the authentic? Shamanism and those of you who are anthropologists know that mercy Leod who was one of the great Experts in this field claimed He called use of plants in a shamanic context decadent He called these the use of such plants Narcotic well first of all the use of the word narcotic in that context shows You don't know what you're talking about in terms of pharmacology. That's a totally obsolete and silly Category and not true to boot psychedelics are in no sense narcotic Gordon Watson on the other hand who was a Brilliant amateur and the discoverer of the psilocybin cults in Mexico along with his partner and wife Valentino Watson Took just the opposite position and said no Use of plants to transform consciousness is the primary Method where there are is resort to ordeal fasting wilderness abandonment So forth and so on this is the derivative late arriving Decadent shamanism in fact this is shamanism on its way to turning into religion of the ordinary Sort and in fact if we look at religion of the ordinary sort we see that it does have a place for fasting It does have a place for self flagellation It does have it does admit those techniques, but no organized religion of any size tolerates the use of psychedelics in consciousness transforming amounts and that little Parenthetical phrase is there because one of the things that you should know and remember and keep always in front of you is That if you wish to control someone or if you want to brainwash somebody the way you do it is with small amounts of drugs and large amounts of your message Whatever it is so You know, but but if you give people large amounts of a psychedelic your message will take its place in the Parade of ideas and find its relative importance So so using drugs it does not mean if you come upon a cult or a group or an individual Using psychedelic substance. It doesn't necessarily mean that they are on a path of spiritual and shamanic Transformation it may be that they just are self-enforcing some private Idaho of illusion in which they choose to live but if Large doses are being taken and by large. I simply mean effective full spectrum doses One of the wonderful things about these substances is that the effective dose is a long ways away from a dangerous Dose the LD 50 in other words is very favorable The boundary this well, so then let me talk for a minute about the character of this experience generally What is the plant? Halosinogen experience in all times and all places for all people I mean, I don't know if you can be that general but it's important to try what it is is it's an experience of boundary dissolution It's an experience of having categories Reiterated of having previously defined boundaries and differences Eliminated The enterprise of being and the enterprise of language is basically an enterprise of defining Boundaries I am myself you are you this is now that was then We are here. They are there. These are provisional Distinctions about reality that make it necessary that are necessary for us to keep track of and manipulate our animal body as a machine in Newtonian space but when a shaman takes a Psychoactive plant at an effective dose he or she falls into trance becomes immobile and then the geometry of consciousness if you wish is Melted and recast in a different geometry and And I use these mathematical terms because I really Sincerely believe that at some hypothetical future date when this is all sorted out What we're going to realize about the psychedelic experience is that it is the experience of the fact of the higher geometry of The universe in which we live in other words. It's very easy to see that ordinary consciousness Evolved - well, let me put it this way as a wonderful aphorism Consciousness takes the contours of the vessel into which it is poured It's like water it always takes the shape of the vessel into which it is poured And so what are we we are? on on the large scale We are animals in three-dimensional space Given to hunting and given to being hunted So what has consciousness done it has evolved into a kind of threat anticipation detection and avoidance Machine the purpose of consciousness the purpose of your eyes the coordination of your sensor is To navigate you through the world without dying Without being ripped apart by predators or being caught in landslides or rushing rivers So forth and so on and consciousness fills that need ordinary consciousness very well, but it Because the body is has a locus in three-dimensional space consciousness of the ordinary sort tends to surround The body as an object of concern in other words If you're worried about trap being hit by traffic, you're not being you're not worried about being hit by traffic in Berkeley You're worried about being hit in traffic in San Francisco because that's where you happen to be So consciousness of the ordinary sort tends to cluster around the physical body but when consciousness is dissolved of that concern and Dissolved of the programming in language that that concern has built up over ages it materializes in a higher dimension Literally a kind of hyperspace and if you will think for a moment about shamanism, I Think you'll see how literally we can take this mathematical metaphor of the psychedelic experience What is a classic shaman? expected to do and be well shamans predict hunting they see where the game will be Shamans predict weather They they can tell what the weather will be Shamans are brought in to mediate complex social hassles of the who is sleeping with my woman who stole the chicken You know who shat in the stream kind of social hassles Shamans are brought in for this these kinds of purposes and then finally and most importantly shamans cure they cure sometimes Well now these things predicting the weather seeing where the game went Curing and Having a deep insight into social interaction These are things which become completely non mysterious if we hypothesize That the shaman has a hyperspatial point of view you know if you went into a mathematical hype if we had a safe here and We could go into hyperspace We would discover that the safe is open that there is a Words are difficult here, but there is a side of the safe or let's say a dimension to the safe Which isn't locked in the same way that if a hyperspatial entity were Looking down on San Francisco. It could reach into this room without coming through the door and Rearrange things in other words Everything that we call magic seeing the future seeing into locked boxes Knowing what is going to happen becomes utterly non mysterious if you hypothesize That consciousness can unfold itself under this peculiar Pharmacodynamic situation into a higher dimensional space and that becomes important In the modern context more than in the archaic context because the the collective future has become for us a Focus of major anxiety we need to know where we're going You know Marshall McLuhan said the way we run our societies is like driving an automobile using only the rearview mirror Well in shamanically guided societies they actually turn on the headlights Running by the rearview mirror means you you only have past experience To guide you running with the headlights on means you actually have an insight into the forward Dimension into what into which you're moving okay, so That is sort of a broad sketch of how one plant psilocybin may have catalyzed shaped impacted human consciousness how the abandonment of that archaic shamanic style through Climatic change created the fall into history how the fall into history is the absence of this hyper dimensional point of view and then What we'll talk about when we come back after the break is How can we utilize the botanical and ethnographic and pharmacological data that we have garnered in the last hundred years To recapture vivify and explore this dimension of human potential in such a way that we can actually Inject some hope into our political circumstances. I don't believe if we remain as we are half angel half monkey ruled by dominance Hierarchies ruled by the most ruthless Among us that we have much of a future on the evolutionary stage But I think that if we can recapture the lost symbiosis with these psychoactive plants that we will in fact be recovering a lost portion of ourselves That history is a progressive Dehumanizing of the human experience and we have now in the 20th century Reached the level of dehumanizing where you've got the Holocaust thermal new potential thermonuclear war Bosnia Rwanda you name it. I mean the scale of brutality brutalness Bruteness in the 20th century indicates to me that the struggle for the soul of humanity is reaching an incredibly intense crescendo and I Really believe that the path forward is backward that we need an archaic revival and that central to that revival will be the personality and the technology of shamanism and when we analyze that technology for its effectiveness we will discover that the most interesting things in the shamanic toolbox are the plants which directly intervene in the functioning of human consciousness So let's just take a stand-up five-minute break so you can stretch and then I've talked without Questions this session. I'm perfectly happy to entertain questions If you want to control the agenda, you're going to have to make some noise so So why are there questions to this point or shall I just keep plodding yes Suppressed chemically We weren't able to read out over What is that I mean we have to make my man for the rest Well, I think the implication is yes in other words Had we remained monkeys we never would have gotten into this crazy situation we became human by forming a relationship a symbiotic relationship with a Psychoactive plant and then we became semi human when we abandoned it and that's what we are now Semi-human, you know, we're capable of enormous acts of kindness and appalling acts of brutality I Think conscious self reflection can help here I mean if you know this story and believe it and if evidence God knows what evidence would look like But if evidence could be found to support it, then it makes it easier to understand our dilemma I mean men don't want it dominate and it's not a man-woman issue either Personality the the ego Is a sort of genderless way of attacking this thing The ego was suppressed by psilocybin and in the absence of psilocybin men and women became much more egocentric and that egocentricity created all kinds of institutions which are very Unflattering to us so We need I think to if this idea were accepted that this is what happened this is why we're conscious This is why we're so uncomfortable with consciousness and this is where we are And somehow this dialogue could go on outside the distorting effects of Christianity male Anxiety and so forth and so on then I think the conclusion would be we need some very radical social reforms Not simply obviously the legalization of spiritual transformation through substances but all of our institutions have been built up on the assumption of ego and and dominance hierarchy and Deconstructing that is really what the future is all about. I think and it's a it's a challenge. Does that go to it? Sufficiently don't be shy Except for I feel like Well, I also feel like just in general and then this theory of the evolution of consciousness Female is left out. I mean here we have a series of erection and arousal and male dominance Sort of Tendency I Guess it's just that if a matriarchal Culture can exist only under chemicals. What is the implication of? Well, I don't call it matter focal I call it Partnership, I don't think there's a pendulum swing between patriarchy and matriarchy I think there is partnership which is appropriate role expression everybody does what is appropriate to their Position and then there is the assigned role of the of the of the hierarchical situation I think it was in science last week. Here is the frontier that is breaking right now, which is It's just being realized that men and women are incredibly different Anatomically and at the micro anatomical level I think there was a list of 40 physical differences in the between the brains of men and women and in a sense and I'm this is pure speculation, but I believe that especially in the archaic situation Well, we don't even have to talk about the archaic situation in 1800 the average American woman gave birth 13 times the average American woman in 1800 so you put a statistic like that against the phenomenon of Migration and what you have then when you look at women is a life absolutely rooted in the rhythms and the fact of nature Men are sort of it's more like a closed system. It's sealed off And there isn't this connection into the biological world So men are potentially more capable of getting off the track if you want to put it That way meaning leaving this guy and creode of symbiotic self-reinforcement It's very obvious in the years. I've been doing this this looks to me like a fairly balanced group but my groups are tend to be heavily male and women In my own experience tend to be far more casual psychedelic users than men if you just look at cannabis use usually women are very casual a Woman who is truly a smoker is a rare rare thing Well that would go along with menstruation and birth and breastfeeding There is women are involved in biology in a way that men Need not be they can choose, you know, and that's why abstraction is the great realm of male activity and and so forth That also was an aberration that came from what I consider to be the learned behavior of males into domination That when women were in control of their own reproductive cycle, there was not that many births They were appropriately safe because the sexual activity was not dominant and the women determined when sexual activity would take place Based on what was best for the community and the offspring. No, you're right I probably yield on that I guess them but I try to save the point by saying this You're right probably in this archaic situation women have knowledge of plant contraceptives and they were well in control of Forced into sexual activity, which was an important piece of the domination cycle that women control the reproductive Cycle in the sexual cycle and so children were safe It was when the concept of domination began that they lost power over when they could when they would have sex and then also how often they would have babies and That was a real turning point in that reproduction aspect But don't you imagine that in a world without? Anesthetic even if you gave birth only three or four times in your life These would be immense boundary dissolving psychedelic extravagances Problem is in conclusion. It's just sort of the pathway there and what the constructs were before that No, well, I think you're right. There's such a large number of pregnancies and births indicates a pattern of subjugation There was something else. I wanted to say about that Well, it'll come back. Yeah I have a friend who went to a hormonal change became a woman over a five month period Hormonally, he'd feel his aggression drop away Then five months later he changed his mind and came back He hates being generous and loving He has to talk to me You can feel the aggression coming back and now he's in a really actually quite beautiful and rising state Well now I'm seen from both ends of the bag Oh, I know what I wanted to say about this and I want to spend too much time on it But you should be aware of this and it's interesting It's always fun to talk about sexuality and so forth and so on but you're probably aware of these things called bonobos these so-called Pygmy chimpanzees, they're actually not Noticeably smaller than ordinary chimpanzees, but they are a distinct species First of all, we differ from chimpanzees by 2% of our genome 98% of us is chimpanzee. We differ from the bonobos in about the same amount chimpanzees are male dominant highly Monogamous very territorial so forth and so on the bonobos Which are to a non zoologist indistinguishable from the chimpanzees all Aggression is mediated through sex Incredible I don't even I'm surprised such animals can exist because I would have thought a virus would have jumped into this situation But the bonobos are incredibly highly sexed animals all forms of sexual activity are going on almost Constantly and all aggression and all social difference and everything is Ameliorated by sexual activity usually initiated by the females Well, if you look at these two animals chimpanzee and bonobo, they you can't tell them apart I think what it means is that this matter of our sexual expression and dominance and so forth and so on Is riding on a cusp of some sort we can go either way That's why we're the only animal species where there is no defined Style of pairing in other words. We have monogamy in some societies polygamy Polyandry a whole smorgasbord of social and sexual arrangements that we will tolerate No other creature is like that. And I think it indicates that we are in a zone of ambiguity on this matter and That means we have a lot of leeway we can send ourselves one way or the other, you know, we can build a nightmarish male dominated Crypto-fascist kind of situation or we can go the other way bonobo or chimpanzee. We're looking down both those roads Are you saying that basically as a species we have non-extinct ones which are the non-boreal for the school? Well, we've been destabilized I think we were stabilized in the chimpanzee Dominator mode and then a hundred thousand years of psilocybin use put us Closer to the bonobos now the bonobos are almost extinct. There's only a few thousand of them left They need to be studied. There was a paper recently. I can't give you the citation, but if you write me I can't Studying Chimpanzees in Africa they would only leave the nest they would only leave the trees and Descend down onto the ground to forage, but the only thing they would do this for were mushrooms Pygmy chimps are really the only animal where any success has been gleaned in Sign language communications and the more modern versions of that But the the pygmy chimps are the ones which can use the message boards actually to some effectiveness The only ones that can have language ability, you know, the hopes for dolphins whales and regular chimps But pygmy chimps they're doing it. So here we have the language thing come on the cusp for them So it would be very interesting to know if psilocybin I mean they might be an image of us half a million years ago You know, I mean in other words were we to go extinct and the bonobos to flourish there might be another Anthropoid species take the stage in a million or two years Yeah In my experience I've seen many men especially a lot of educators in the psychedelic movement take high doses and don't care one bit about gender issues or justice or equality So I'm not sure that that has been I think the psychedelic experience can reinforce all the oppressions But psilocybin itself can't necessarily open you up, melt down your Have to seek out justice Well, I guess I'm more of a believer than you are. I just say they didn't take enough and and the other thing is You mentioned these were heavy hitters in the male heavy hitters in the psychedelic movement It may just be that some people can't be saved that that Christ himself Couldn't lift some people out of chaos I Haven't had that experience. I mean, I I think that What specifically should I ask them about their experience if they feel that the men in their lives change to strictly high doses of psilocybin or other psychedelic use that there's more justice. I mean my thing is that the family is the most interesting political stage There is. Is there justice in the family? Is there a partnership one happening in the family? Is the father actively taking care of the children in the family? Well, that's a sort of a different question. I liked your first question better Do they see in the man in their lives a tendency toward a softening or justice? But the state of that is really a relationship, you know, the family Yeah the problem I have with that is I think the modern family is first of all a very modern invention and basically a cauldron for the production of neurosis But that's what we have to work with (laughter) That's what we have to work with Well, let's ask these women How about this proposition that psychedelics make men smoother, evener, more... does anybody want to denounce that? Yeah In my experience, and I agree with the word "rage" because that's the culture that I've been involved with for the last few years With combined, the psychedelic spread combined with the information as you were speaking, the reinforcement of the issues, the teaching of the balance, that has been effective. Not on that scale, I read a book last night, "The Archaic Revival" with the Timothy Leary chapter of saving all the children, they'll reach everybody and as opposed to that, maybe reaching the people that want to be reached, basically the creators, the artists, the philosophers of the time I have seen that experience and very positive effects But my argument is the intention There has to be, I think there has to be back up to some sort of teaching Not some sort of dominating teaching on either side, male or female, but from people who now comprehend the kind of wonder, basically You mean there has to be a supportive bonding on the story Yeah, there has to be some sort of... Yeah, and part of what complicates it is notice that the male dominated society we're living in is just fanatically concerned to suppress this and to me that's a sign that it must threaten it at a very basic level and yet it seems silly, I mean they're more concerned about suppressing psilocybin than all kinds of obviously greater social ills Why? Well, it's because it disrupts their model of how things should be run I was just going to say, I hope that we can assume that there are some men out there who aren't dominators and trying to sort of grind everybody else down, particularly women There are men out there who have worked out relationships with women and with other men that are cooperative in partnerships, etc. A lot of them never took psilocybin Well, you live in a society, you take upon yourself the tone of the time I mean a lot of people wear tie-dye who never took LSD You sort of take upon yourself the ambiance of your time I don't really like the getting into a gender thing I really think ego, here's the way I put it Ego is like a cyst which will begin to grow in you whether you are male or female, unless you take a psychedelic The psychedelic will dissolve this cyst The cyst is in your personality, it's a tumor, it shouldn't be there I mean we do need to have egos, little egos so that when I take you out to dinner, I put the food I order in my mouth You put the food you order in your mouth, that's what an ego is for But if I start giving you orders, then that's completely inappropriate So rather than genderize it, which I think is a mistake because let's face it, after thousands of years of this maladaptive cultural style many women are hard-driving, egomaniacal, ambitious It's a bad style, and men may be born into it and women may be infected by it but there's plenty of it around in men and women I've been involved in the psychedelic sort of therapy and basically people are drawn to it if they're willing to look at their own shit and that's what the mushroom does and here's an effect that comes from it and the person who's willing to do that is like the dissolution of the ego and it has reverberations for people who aren't in a position to do that or they're so involved in protecting their ego that they're not in that place yet but both men and women benefit from that and it goes beyond that for people who will or will not use that Yeah, that's a good point and I would at some point in all of this say obviously not everyone should take psychedelic plans well then the question automatically follows well, who shouldn't? Well, in practical terms, we all know people who are likely here who have diminished self-esteem, so forth and so on for them the ego dissolution is not the goal they have been so victimized by egomaniacs that they have no sense of self so for them they should be encouraged to build up an internal structure in their personality and a coherent reference point in the self but that is a state of dis-ease that most of us are not like that most of us are ordinary or more toward the spectrum of ego dominance and we profit from the psychedelic experience women I think are less excited by psychedelics because they experience by and large it has less of an impact I mean I've seen many, many people change their lives on a dime like after a big LSD trip but most of those people were men I wanted to ask, what do you think about traditional indigenous cultures such as the aborigines in Australia I've been in a group for about three months now and I found it to be a very male-dominated, aggressive culture and yet they were using shamanic and psychedelic plans for ritual and ceremony well, here's what I think once this African paradisical partnership thing was disrupted and people were scattered to the four corners of the earth the memory never was lost and there is even what's called a nostalgia for paradise today throughout time, the belief that in the past it was better and since the renaissance it's been fashionable to dismiss this as a kind of naivete you know, the grass is greener kind of thing but I think probably things were better and that our nostalgia for paradise is what has caused us to be so subject to abuse and use of drugs you know, no other animal shares this pattern of behavior sometimes elephants will push down fences to get to rotting fruit birds get drunk and fall down on their little feeders and this sort of thing but human beings addict to a startling spectrum not only of substances but of behaviors we addict to each other I mean, heroin withdrawal and a broken heart look and feel exactly the same way you know, abandonment, bursting into tears, insomnia, inability to eat I mean, does this person have a broken heart or are they getting off junk? you can't tell and we tend to addict and I think this is a kind of, we feel in ourselves a certain incompleteness since the breakup of the African partnership society and you know, alcohol doesn't quite do it cannabis is good but doesn't quite go far enough we've tried all kinds of things and interestingly in the last hundred years the science of ethnography and anthropology has scoured the world and brought back to us data which we didn't have a hundred, hundred and twenty years ago data about peyote, ayahuasca, detoura, psilocybin, morning glory, so forth and so on the materia medica of the remote human cultures of the planet is now available and I think it comes not a moment too late that's why I called my book "The Archaic Revival" I really see the whole cultural impulse of the 20th century as an impulse toward the archaic in other words, if you think about it it begins with impressionism what is impressionism except LSD 30 minutes in? in other words, the sharpness goes, the colors brighten everything begins to blur, the boundaries are beginning to dissolve it's contentless, it's ideologically empty it's just how things look, they look this certain way well then, 20 minutes later ideas are beginning to accompany this melting and flowing of perception we've now reached surrealism and Freud and Jung, the discovery of the unconscious well then, it keeps going, it gets more and more intense now we don't see dreamscapes, distorted gargoyle-like figures melting watches and burning giraffes that has all been now replaced by just a blur, an energy storm now we're in a Pollock of some sort we're down at the quantum mechanical level where energy is flinging itself around and at the same time, things like jazz which carried with it a heavy content of sexual looseness the flapper era, that whole thing people weren't Victorian, ladies and gentlemen that they had the cannibalistic drive, the Oedipal drive, the this drive Hitler proved that 500 years of western ethics have you shoving people into ovens as a political course of action the whole of the 20th century has been an exploration of the archaic and then in the 60s, LSD appeared but without the rhetoric of shamanism LSD, for those of us who lived through it was presented as the latest thing after penicillin and birth control, it was better living through chemistry it was now we have penicillin, and now we have orthonovum and now we have LSD, it was better living through chemistry you've all seen the poster of the kids in the hate holding the banner in the 70s, it was realized that the psychedelic experience need not be confined to LSD, it was generally realized and that there were all these ethnographic usages ayahuasca, peyote, detoura, morning glories, so forth and so on and then late in the 70s, the shaman became the paradigmatic figure for cultural emulation, and that's basically where we are now the nation state is dissolving, it's a creation of renaissance rationalism electronic media is retribalizing the world pharmacology is throwing open a vast cornucopia of psychoactive substances and the legacy of psychoanalysis, modern art, quantum physics and phenomenology have propelled us to the brink of a neo-archaic understanding of our world and now it has to become more explicit I don't think there's much chance of survival without a major effort to re-establish archaic styles and institutions and it's not an easy thing to do if you're idealizing 70 naked people with no physical culture who are following along behind their cattle on the plains of Africa and you want to take their social institutions, psychology, philosophy and aesthetic and lay it on to a global electronic culture of 7 billion you're going to have to, there's going to be some creative twisting and turning in all of that nevertheless, I believe it can be done now there's one more aspect of this that I want to touch on that's sort of philosophical in general and that is, we've talked about the psychedelic experience we've talked about how it dissolves boundaries and changes cultural values and so forth but what we haven't talked about is, what is it exactly? I mean, what's so great about it? if you read a description of a psychedelic experience it sounds sort of like, well, everything dissolves you see a lot of bright colors, you have funny ideas and then you have to rest for a day well, what is so great about that? I mean, why should that be a culturally transforming issue? well, I believe that we misperceive the psychedelic substances if we simply think of them as an inert substance in a plant which when taken by a human being, dissolves programming and shows you the basement of your mind, essentially that isn't what's going on I believe, here is much closer to what's going on psychedelics convey information the other kind of chemicals in nature that we're familiar with that convey information, aside from DNA, are pheromones pheromones are aromatic compounds released by plants and animals usually to carry a message within the species so ants, as you know, lay down chemical trails that other ants sense and can follow well, in a sense, hallucinogens are intraspecies pheromones of some sort, they carry information across species lines and the kind of information that they carry the message is one of harmony, balance and integration and so a human population with a psychedelic institution or sacrament will, in its pristine form, tend to be nomadic have very little physical, cultural expression tend to have a very loose family structure an extended family structure and child-rearing arrangement and I believe that this is where we can introduce the concept of the Gaian mind the reason the psychedelic experience is so paradigm shattering is because we believe that we are alone in intelligence on this planet and what the psychedelics show is no, there is a much larger field of mind than we ever could suspect in our ordinary state of consciousness nature herself is a minded entity and information is flowing between species, between biosystems, across biota gradients of light, chemical release, water, so forth and so on all of nature is a vast communicating mind of some sort and the only portion of that vast system that is out of alignment is the human world, because we closed the channel we closed the channel by abandoning the shamanic institutions in many, many human languages the word shaman means go between go between, well go between what and what is the question well the answer is go between the safe pedestrian assumptions of an organized society and the vast churning ocean of mystery that is real being and every society is an illusion reared against the mystery of real being and pursued in ignorance of it so the shaman mediates between these two worlds the ordinary world people have to live in in order to catch fish and have children and form relationships and bury the dead and another unseen dynamic world of energy, of process, of strange attractors of the great unknown, but it isn't an abstraction, it's nature and history is the consequence of an animal species losing its connection to the Gaian mind and instead of then a Gaian agenda, integration, unity, cooperation you get an ego agenda, dominance, resource extraction, territorial acquisition control of other human beings and resources so when shamanism died, when hallucinogens became stigmatized when the climate changed, we literally fell into history we became a different kind of animal and the consequences of untrammeled historicity being practiced for 12,000 years is to bring us to our present situation where we have immense intellectual understanding of some aspects of nature we have an immense ability to coordinate group activity in certain areas like building a bridge, but not disarming for example but we have no ability whatsoever to control this darker self that sort of drew itself up to the campfire 12,000 years and said, you know, you banished me into the darkness for a million years while you lived in a psilocybin driven paradise but here I am again and the piper must be paid now, all the cards are on the table and it's up to us, we who live on this planet at the end of the 20th century to try and do something with these facts if we go extinct, if we wreck the planet and toxify the environment it will be a tremendous tragedy because there are ways out, there are answers but how much of the baggage we've accumulated over the past 4,000 years are we going to be able to take with us into that new world? bloody little, I maintain, our music, our mathematics, our dance, our theater I don't think our technologies are going to be able to come with us unless they go through serious downsizing and detoxification so really, the discovery in the 19th and 20th century of these ancient ways of relating to plants it's not just a curiosity of anthropology or an exciting subfield of botany it is in fact very central to the human drama of our salvation because I don't think we can fix ourselves through rhetoric if we could fix ourselves through rhetoric then Buddha and Christ would have done the job we can only fix ourselves by consciously analyzing our dilemma and then intervening and I believe these cultures that have existed in a kind of suspended animation in the rain forests of the world while western European civilization charged through its merry adventure the raison d'etre for the existence of those aboriginal civilizations is that they carry the archaic gnosis it's all still intact for maybe 30 or 40 more years if we act quickly the material is there, the techniques are there it can be saved but it has to be brought into modern civilization and so, classes like this yeah I have one question if it is the guide of the equilibrium there is some certain type of consciousness that humans need to have in order to bring about that equilibrium why is it then that Gaia has made these hallucinogens taste so bad? it's a great question well here's the answer and then I have it because the essential thing we all need is courage and most of us don't have it under every circumstance that's a good answer really, it's very deep you have to say I'm going to do this because my life is dependent on it where my future is, whether it is an existential future I don't want to go to hell I want to uplift myself and I'm going to do this because I know there's love in the world and I'm going to prove it I'm going to be it and I will now offer a tremendously down interpretation of the same thing these things are all alkaloids it may just be that in this universe alkaloids are always bitter so that Gaia herself it's like can God make an object that God can't lift? can Gaia make an alkaloid that isn't bitter? I don't know, it's a challenge I know that alkaloids taste bad but my question is that are these alkaloids something that we really should think about? how do we figure out the role of these glycogens in our consciousness? I don't doubt that when we were pre-humanoid and we were running through the fields and we saw a mushroom and we were like ok, I can see it, it visually looks like something I can eat it doesn't have a spine, it's not running away I don't doubt that it's probably been tasted but now we see fruit and it's colorful, it's sweet so maybe the consciousness that we have when we eat fruit is just a different consciousness than we have when we eat mushrooms but I know that mushrooms taste bad, kaley tastes bad that twerp practically kills everyone that doesn't die from it and that is a recommendation and every week? well I think we have tremendous resistance I think the private issue certainly for me and for probably most of you it's easy to take psychedelics the first time because you don't know what you're getting into ever after that you have to really have a little chat with yourself and there are barriers to overcome I have to think about this question of sweetness I think you made a point there we see fruit and it's color and all that I think we're very conditioned in our eating habits we're almost over-civilized to eat a very specific taste, touch, smell, oriented realm of foods and I think that probably our ancestors who probably did this in the first place were not that, they ate insects and mushrooms and meat it was more instinctual and a lot less with all of the language built up there where you're sitting and analyzing something you mean that good and bad is a specific judgment when you're a hungry crime-maker it either kills you or it doesn't there's another issue around bitterness the taste of alcohol the bitter taste has a very important therapeutic role apart from psychotic effects of some of the alcohol there's six or seven physiological responses when you taste something bitter all of which are vital to immune function and hunger in general and from holistic medicine you can really say that some of the causes of the explosion of autoimmune diseases and degenerative diseases is that we don't let bitter taste really quickly let us eat and yes, that becomes bad I think there's a cultural bias there as well well, it's not just good hearing it it could be a little louder a little bit when you taste something bitter on the back of the tongue bitter is sentenced there's a series of reflexes that are triggered off by the brain one of which is the stimulation of all these digestive enzymes being released or the exocrine gland is stimulated the liver is stimulated to work a little bit more efficiently there are several forms of depression which are linked there's a whole range of things like that so just because they taste bad to our culturally conditioned sense of what is good and bad in taste doesn't mean that they're biologically inequal it's increasingly becoming clear that things that taste like that are actually very, very important to homosexuals and homos in general I just wanted to elaborate on that it is a cultural condition I know in Chinese medicine there's a different taste the sweet, the salty, the bitter and they're all essential to do these rebalances there's a book I think by Timothy Johns McGill it has to do with it's a whole book on bitterness and the kind of biases that are against that are culturally significant yeah, I mean because think about the taste of scotch or anchovies or something like that clearly we can train ourselves into these things and cultural values have a great deal to do with it you'd be amazed what you can eat if everybody else is eating it it's pretty simple to just say that it's a flag I mean, the reason that they're bitter is because you don't consume 50 times the dose accidentally if they were tasted like nothing or if they tasted really sweet our response would be over-consumed and we might just blow our brains so the people who survived were the people who definitely knew what they were getting into when they were taking it and in the case of the psilocybin mushroom which is the er halicinogen or at least I'm arguing it is here when I first encountered it it took years for me to build up a gag reflex I really liked it in nature it didn't taste bad I used to say it tastes like cold water that's what it tasted like to me now I do have a gag reflex but I think that has to do with accumulated association to it yeah could you talk a little more about you referred to I think probably the mushroom in particular as being the most or one of the most benign substances, chemicals that you could do on the brain or the body as a whole it was very rewarding but after waiting the first 90 pages of the Invisible Landscape and the stuff that I can understand some of that was mentioned in there and you can maybe elaborate on it a little well, I guess it's important to talk about toxicity this is an issue and drugs what you have to understand is all substances are potentially toxic you can kill yourself with water if you will drink enough of it in the case of drugs the toxicity usually lies much closer to the effective dose than it does with water pharmacologists have a concept called LD50 which is a horrifying idea but you should know it LD50 is if you have a hundred rats and you give them a drug the LD50 dose is the dose at which half the rats die and what you want in a drug whether it's a psychoactive drug or a cancer drug or anything what you want is a drug where the effective dose is many, many times lower than the LD50 now, by that standard LSD is the safest drug there is because you can feel 50 micrograms of LSD and 200 micrograms of LSD is quite a full menu but to kill yourself with LSD nobody knows how much it would take the LD50 for LSD has never been determined it's so high that's good news now, psilocybin is a mid-range in this way of classification the effective dose of psilocybin is 15 to 30 milligrams a fatal dose of psilocybin is around 150 milligrams per kilogram of body weight so you can figure out what that is that's thousands of times or several thousand times the effective dose well, then something like mescaline the LD50 is only about 40 times the effective dose and by that measurement then you would have to say mescaline is a rather toxic compound and it is in fact you have to take 700 milligrams this is another way of talking about toxicity how much do you have to take? mescaline, you have to take 700 milligrams that's damn near a triple zero cap filled with pure alkaloid LSD, 200 micrograms you can lose it on the head of a pin easily so that's another way of thinking about toxicity and effectiveness and then there's one other parameter how long does the drug last? if you take a substance and 48 hours later you still have your phone turned off and you're lying around in warm baths and wishing for a massage then you took a toxic substance it's not supposed to do that it's not supposed to leave you with backaches and insomnia and a wreck well, by that criteria then DMT must be one of the safest drugs there are because it carries you to a titanically psychedelic state of mind and returns you in under 10 minutes to the baseline of consciousness now it takes 70 milligrams of DMT to do that so then it takes a lot more than it does LSD now, interestingly, and then I'll let you go to lunch we ran a little over so we'll go to 12.30 here's some new data that you may not have a new psychoactive plant has come onto the scene with a new psychoactive substance in it previously unknown to science in a chemical family previously unknown to contain psychoactive compounds and this new compound can justly claim though very little is known about it at the moment and the experience itself is absolutely white knuckle terrifying can claim to be the safest psychedelic in the world because it only takes a thousand micrograms one milligram of this substance now remember it took 70 milligrams of LSD one milligram, or 50 to 70 one milligram of Salvonorin Alpha smoked will deliver you into a freakishly alien reality for about 15 minutes and then you'll return we know almost nothing about this drug at this point we don't know it's LD50 but it's only the second compound ever discovered that is active in the microgram range it is an isoquinoline it is in a chemical family unknown to contain psychoactive drugs they've all been alkaloids or tropanes or something like that suddenly late in the game here is a plant you can get high on the plant although you have to work at it and it's not dramatic it's like the first half hour of ayahuasca or something but if you isolate this compound and smoke it it'll turn you every way but loose and this is new data that has just come out it should inspire those of you who are field botanists or ethnographers there is a vast number of plants in the literature that are listed as suspect hallucinogens what that means is somebody said or some Indian told some botanist we take this and we see things at night or something salvia divinorum was known for 20 years but nobody could find the compound and nobody could get off on it well, now people are getting off and the compound has been discovered and they're looking at near relatives of salvia divinorum including a Ukrainian mint and some coleus species and we're finding in microgram and smaller amounts a whole family of these new psychedelic isoquinolines and what they will mean for us, it's hard to say previously DMT held all honors for weirdness the death of the call as Heidegger likes to say now salvinorin alpha is on stage and there's lots of work to be done [inaudible] yeah, I mean I think it's fairly logical it seems reasonable to say that first of all you don't want to insult the physical brain in any time anyhow because you only have one or two so you have to keep care of your brain it's very interesting that the most dramatic hallucinogen and now I'm talking about DMT let's leave salvinorin alpha out of this because not enough is known about it but the most powerful hallucinogen actually occurs in human metabolism every single one of us as we sit here is elaborating DMT in tiny amounts we're also elaborating 5-hydroxytryptamine or serotonin in quite extensive amounts so I believe that ayahuasca from this standard of judgment is probably among the safest of the hallucinogens because it's essentially brain soup there's nothing in it that you don't already have in your brain it's just got more of it and in a different proportion [inaudible] oh yes, they occur in the pineal gland 6-adenoglomerotropane is actually 5-hydroxytryptamine 6-hydroxytryptamine so a lot of these compounds are elaborated in the brain LSD is not, salvinorin alpha is not, ketamine is not mescaline, close, but not I mean there are amphetamine-like compounds in normal metabolism but that isn't one of them, yeah [inaudible] I have a couple of questions one is, what is your opinion as to how these different substances open up different aspects you know, each has their own little niche and more specifically, if you could give me any point of view as to the differences between what opens up between a mushroom experience and an ayahuasca experience how do they differ, and do you have any point of view as to the different windows or the different dimensions of different broad sultans? sure, I mean it seems to me, and somebody with equal experience might differ but it seems to me that the best model is like a target or a bullseye the various substances exhibit more and more of their unique character the more you take in other words, if you take a low dose of something that's psychedelic it will clarify your vision, stimulate you and you can't really tell whether you've taken psilocybin, LSD, mescaline, or what have you as the dose increases, the specific characteristics of these substances begin to emerge and often they're contraintuitive to a chemical way of thinking for example, ayahuasca and mushrooms psilocybin is 4-phosphoryloxane and dimethyltryptamine when you remove the phosphorus group which happens as it crosses the blood-brain barrier you get something very much like DMT however, when you take psilocybin, you don't get something like a DMT trip you get, in the case of psilocybin the most startling quality of it is that it speaks it speaks in English it tells you things I mean, this sounds preposterous, unless you've had the experience it sounded preposterous to me for years I just could not imagine what my friends meant when they said "these plants talk to you" until I had a conversation with it so psilocybin speaks and it's a kind of a Spockian kind of message it's about enormous machines in orbit around alien planets it's about galactarian destiny and the history of the local cluster over the last half billion years it's an enormous scale and it's about races, worlds, technologies, civilizations, on and on and on switch over to ayahuasca which is chemically almost the same animal and it's about the waters it's about birth, death, femininity, health and disease relationships, energy flows between people it's very human, it's very feminine it's very organic and enclosing well, these are quite different messages I mean, if you had one in the absence of the other you would have an unbalanced view, I think, of what is going on however, then, if you take these things and push them all do double doses or triple doses I'm not recommending this, but I'm just saying it has been done and we have the data what begins to happen is everything migrates toward the DMT flash the DMT flash seems to be sort of like the center of the bullseye now, I haven't personally had enough guts to smoke salvinorin alpha I've watched people do it and if you're going to do it, I suggest you don't watch people do it because I was gung-ho till then but assuming it lies somewhere on this spectrum what seems to be happening is all of these things propel you toward deeper and deeper states of boundary dissolution at the first level, you simply dissolve the boundary between yourself and the part of yourself you don't want to look at that's called dealing with your stuff at the next level, you dissolve the boundary between yourself and other people and this is the bonding situation, and that sort of thing at the next level, boundary between yourself and your memories of the past all of your experience is returned to you and beyond that, you dissolve then into what Jung called the collective unconscious or something like that, and then beyond that, Gaian mind, cosmic mind I mean, I'm no fan of these hierarchies of named, hypostatized spiritual entities but that's the basic idea and finally, and astonishingly, I think the elf workshop of the DMT flash lies very close to the center of the experience, of what is possible it is not simply, as you might have gotten the idea from reading the literature you see, in the 60s, they wanted to map it over Buddhism or Eastern religion and they wanted to say that as the dose increases, somehow Satori or Shunyata or Nirvana or the white light or the great void or something like that I never had that experience as I raised the dose, the complexity of the state complexified it never simplified, it never became neo-platonic it always, it just became Borgesian and the universe is full of a number of things so I don't think we can, this is maybe time to stop but I'm reluctant to connect this entire enterprise to what is popularly called spiritual growth I just think it's more like about growth and spirit implies some weird anti-materialist bias or something like that I was raised Catholic, so to me, spirituality means do you visit the sick and imprisoned? do you clothe the naked? do you feed the hungry? do you bury the dead? do you comfort the afflicted? when I see somebody doing those things, I say this is a spiritually evolving person when I see somebody taking psilocybin, I say there is an explorer but I don't try to lay on some moral judgment about good and evil I think that's inappropriate spiritual accomplishment is manifested by moral action the role these psychedelics play is they may make moral action easier because they show you your memories and your debts and your mistakes but intrinsically, they are not tools for spiritual development they are tools for the exploration of mind and we don't know what that is and we probably won't figure it out this afternoon but anyhow, we'll come back here and since it's now 12.30 let's come back at 2 o'clock there are two announcements actually the first one is the constraints and the rules on the paper those of you who are taking this for credit we'll meet at break tomorrow morning and discuss that so don't worry about it until then but it will be discussed, this is for those of you who are writing a paper and the other announcement is sound photosynthesis which distributes my tapes and videos and a lot of other people's tapes and videos are taping this event and we'll provide those of you who want it with a tape of this event when it's finished for a fee of course and they also have many books, videos and recordings back there that deal with this subject or are my books and sometimes these things are hard to find so if you're looking for something and you see it buy it because you can't always be sure that it'll come back around and they've gone to the effort of bringing all these things in for you ok, we'll go to 5 so at 3.30 or roughly we'll do a little break well, is there... you all went off to lunch somewhere not where I was, so I don't know where you went you found the restaurant I couldn't find but did you... are there issues outstanding from this morning or a direction you want to send us off in? yeah I think that maybe psychedelics should be used more for teaching rather than continued use in terms of what in later they were saying about needing to be mainlined all the time I can't speak about what the purpose is maybe once you learn the territory, you learn the state that the onus is on you then to operate from this more and more and more and more rather than simply taking more psychedelics well, I was just talking to this reporter from the San Francisco Bee or from the Sacramento Bee about this very thing I think if you're stupid, there's just no hope you have been afflicted with a terrible circumstance and you have to struggle with that a lot of people took LSD in the 60s and it seemed to have no effect whatsoever on them I mean, a lot of pretty colors and this and that and then they went out to be war planners and corporate executives and so forth I think it's very important to talk about and analyze your experience there is no communication even within the confines of your own mind if you can't describe what's going on and so, the idea here is not that you should take psilocybin day in and day out or week in and week out but that when you do it, you should do it with dedication and attention and pre-planning and while it's happening, you must pay attention and after it's over, you must analyze it you must understand it you must try... it's a tool for thought it's a tool for understanding and as far as education is concerned I think one of the reasons I keep coming back to CIIS is because unspoken in what's going on here is the idea that modern psychotherapy of the transpersonal sort is an embryonic kind of neo-archaic shamanism and there is something to be said for judicious use of the concept of the guide I think that the guide should first of all be very psychedelically experienced a therapist who has never taken these substances can't guide you because they've never been there but in the presence of a skilled therapist all kinds of progress in dealing with personal issues and complexes can be made people say this stuff is escapist but nobody who's ever taken it will line up behind that it's too difficult I mean, I've had people say to me I've heard people refer to psilocybin as silly-cybin and said I've never had a bad trip on psilocybin and I think to myself, gee, I wish I were you because I don't think the goal with this stuff is to get through it without ever having a bad moment sort of unscathed with the parental seal of approval stamped across your chest the goal is to learn and learning is often painful and the most important lessons are often the most painful and if you're going to have to drop an attitude or a way of relating to somebody or an opinion about yourself or something these things are painful and often you don't just say at the height of the psychedelic oh, I see, I should change my mind no, often there's tears and soul-searching and then a sense of dawning light and then the conversion this is not easy work to do it's not easy for anybody to do I had a guy tell me once in the Amazon he said don't think because we wear penis sheaths and live in the rainforest that this is easier for us than it is for you it's not, it's as challenging to your humanness it challenges your humanness no matter where you start out from so you have to bring something to it but if you bring something to it it will work for you and I'm of the opinion and I get a lot of flack from this and you're perfectly free to pile on that many other spiritual techniques of advancement don't work even if you are intelligent, dedicated, attentive they just don't work or they didn't work for me, that's all I can say this will work and if you bring sincerity and integrity to it it will respond beyond your wildest dreams yes, did you want to say something? [inaudible] I'm not used to talking in front of people so I get all nervous [inaudible] it seems to me that there is a certain quality like you were saying, it has to be brought to the experience in order for it to be as effective I mean now I can get really loaded and see all kinds of things you said and come back and not be substantially different unless I'm willing in some way or other to begin to embody what it is, the gnosis that I saw and that, at that point, begins to change the direction of the whole of the mind and it's really the question I think as before, what we're dealing with is how are we as species going to get beyond the secular and past and future the question is how do we embody this what I see in our culture is that we have managed to totally undo any kind of historical connection we can give us a tradition within which we bond so we're kind of starting from scratch and borrowing bits and pieces from archaic culture so this point that you just brought up about transversal psychology, I agree with you it's just the direction we're moving in it's not really so much discovering something new but discovering something new that's just gone wrong right? yes, absolutely yes well, I don't really hear a question I agree with what you're saying it is a... how do we do that? what does that offer in terms of some insights from your experience about how do we get to the body? well, it's a complicated question I'm an alienated intellectual probably most of you are as well I may have been that before I ever reached psychedelics basically I think that it almost comes down to practicing a noisy form of aesthetic criticism of the society if something is stupid, you should say so and if something is tasteless or brutal or insulting or demeaning we just have to say so now the problem is there is so much that is tasteless, insulting and demeaning that you would spend your entire time doing that well, isn't that what the countercultural milieu is? I think it's a group of people who to greater or lesser degrees are entirely uncomfortable with the official culture and then try to embody an alternative culture and it's a culture of tolerance of broad-mindedness of immediate experience it's not a work ethic culture it's not a pile-up wealth kind of culture it's a culture that lives in the moment and to my mind what we can do is be more adamantly countercultural and creative that's why I'm so happy to see something like Rave and House and Ambient Music come along because you know, rock and roll which was previously the sustaining thing of the counterculture was totally co-opted and the official culture turns all criticism into a fashion statement that seems to be how it operates so in terms of embodiment I think what we have to do is be creative at lunch I was saying the crisis that we're in as a planetary society is a culture of consciousness there ain't enough of it that's what happens when women are raped in Bosnia that's a failure of consciousness that's what happens when rivers are polluted with DDT it's a failure of consciousness a failure to correctly appreciate cause and effect and if there is anything which increases our consciousness I don't care if it's a religion, a food, a drug, a sexual product a magazine, if there is anything which increases our consciousness we should find out what it is and get with it and once you've increased your consciousness a little, a lot, some it's not doing any good then unless it is embodied and the way it's embodied I think is by pushing the art pedal to the floor it's the only pedal which we have been allowed to touch we don't get to touch the international investment profile pedal or the international diplomacy pedal those are all reserved for the masters but art has been ceded to us and art can either be fawning and sycophantic or it can be radical and challenging or it can be transcendental and inspiring and I think what we've accepted in the arts in the last 20 years is the idea of immense fragmentation and personal expression this is exactly the wrong thing because what that is, is ego we don't care what Jeff Koons thinks about the person he's sleeping with and all this other stuff, this is just self-indulgent nonsense the idea that art should save humanity is very out of fashion in the cynical 90s but I believe it and I believe that the technologists who are working at our elbows are giving us tools more powerful than we or our critics ever imagined could exist and if we use those tools for the explicit purpose of creating a new cultural agenda it will be done we're all a little confused about this but those folks over on the extreme right wing, the Pat Buchanans of this world they know exactly what's going on and they call it cultural war and while they're moving up their tanks and digging foxholes what are we doing? you know, wandering around asking what's happening cultural war is very real and the people who are, you know I realized sometime in the last 48 hours that when fascism comes to America it will be called traditionalism that seems to be how it's going to present itself so I think art is our great ace in this game right now the most, yeah well, one more thing I was going to say right now the most exciting cultural frontier to my mind on this planet is the internet and the world wide web and that is a beast which escaped from the control of the dominator institutions it was built to wage thermonuclear war and to be indestructible well, when thermonuclear war ceased to be a hot option the indestructibility of it remained and now it can't be turned off, it can't be controlled it can't be regulated and look who's on there I mean guys with long hair and girls with short hair and this drives the masters crazy so I look at the internet as a vast canvas and to which we are each invited to make our own contribution and if we see 3D to the orthodox culture then we should make cyberspace our own one of the things that I didn't stress enough this morning was the visual acuity empowered by psilocybin leads to hunting success but the higher doses of psilocybin propel you past observation of animal habits and environments and into the imagination and I think that the cultural compass of this species points toward the imagination that's where we are going to live in the future that's what we were born for, that's where we are at our best in 3D, well as James Joyce says in Finnegan's Wake here in Moycane we flop on the scenic side Moycane being the red light district of Dublin but up n'yent, prospector, you sprout all your worth and you woof your wings well up n'yent is spelled these days h-t-t-p colon double backslash w-w-w yak yak yak, right? in other words the imagination is being turned into a piece of real estate and the faster we can occupy it and give it the caring, boundaryless, psychedelic, communal tone of our community the closer we are then to having a foothold or a grasp of a real solution I wanted to ask about intention I noticed in journeys that I've had with the Viooxcans that intentions were an important component and they shaded the experience and filtered the experience and sometimes very strongly and sometimes hardly at all, but it's not what I noticed I'm curious if you have an issue about intention and also intention as it relates to different substances do you get the same result, do you get the same influence with the various substances you've mentioned? well I would sort of agree with you and sort of differ I remember once I was at some impasse in my personal life and I decided I should take a psychedelic and pose a question you know, they sometimes say you should pose a question and I had never done that, so the question was am I doing the right thing about my life? and well the answer came back, what kind of a chicken shit question is that to ask a galactarian intelligence? well I suppose that was the answer I needed to hear to put my problems in perspective I realized you don't ask Freud to clip your fingernails for God's sake so in that sense I'm not sure about intention but the way I understand intention is that you should very conscientiously control set and setting going into it don't take these things in crowded, noisy, socially complex environments on an empty stomach with people you don't know this is definitely a bad strategy to follow and you know, dancing your ass off in a noisy environment is a perfect strategy for clearing your system of a drug I mean, if you take a drug you don't like, what do you do? you go outside and chop wood for three hours and then you feel much better because you physically worked it off the way I like to do these things is in silent darkness on an empty stomach at high, at strong to stronger doses not recklessly high doses, but what I call effective doses alone and this last thing just seems to throw people, this alone it tells me what a triple Scorpio I must be that so many people are absolutely horrified of the idea of taking a psychedelic alone when I wouldn't, you'd have to twist my arm to get me to take it with someone because if I take it with someone, it's inevitably going to be about them and I may not want that much of them in my life even if I take it with someone and they never say a word and we both lie side by side not touching I don't drift deeply into my trip, I find myself listening are they breathing? I can't hear them breathing so maybe they're dead, but maybe I just can't hear them so if I disturb them, that's not cool on the other hand, if they're dying, as a courtesy and then my mind just goes into a tizzy well maybe you're not as neurotic as I am but, yeah I have a question related to what you were saying around methodology of this usage and I used to adhere to a similar model in terms of high dosage use on my own and then became involved in the Roquette type group which for a variety of reasons I've left, including I guess there's another part of that which is that there was a tremendous amount of undercurrent perception and guru abuse in the group which unfortunately I didn't become aware of until quite a while later so I guess it's a question, now I've returned back to the previous model, basically thinking by myself so I'm wondering what you think of a highly structured Roquette type model and secondly, whether you have any thoughts about guru abuse and the use of psychedelics do you all understand what he's referring to by the Roquette type model? he's referring to a person, a psychiatrist, Salvador Roquette who's operated in Mexico for years I've never met him, so correct me if I'm not doing it justice but as I understand it, this is basically the assault theory of psychedelics where you give people, first of all, you give them multiple substances it may be LSD, it may be LSD with ketamine a lot of substances, and then a lot of input it can be music, but I've heard of cases where he took a group of Jewish housewives from Long Island and showed them Holocaust footage well, it depends on what you're after here I mean, if you're trying to break people down this sounds like it would break me down I would not know how I could even survive something like that but I think my theory is almost exactly the opposite I say there should be very little input I don't think you need to go out and buy a lily tank for your basement but as close to that as you can get is good in other words, I lie on a bed, silent, darkness and look at the back of your eyelids with the expectation of seeing something it took me years to be able to articulate this because I thought everybody did this but apparently not, I once talked to Roland Fisher the guy I mentioned this morning he'd given psilocybin to 2500 grad students he'd taken it 20 times himself and I said, well Roland, what do you make of these hallucinations of these volleys of visual hallucinations and he said, I never closed my eyes I was floored I mean, that is so antithetical to my instincts with the stuff that I couldn't even imagine it then your question about guru abuse I don't know what it is in me I guess it's just deep cynicism I discussed this once with the mushroom and what I was told was simply this for one human being to assume that they could attain enlightenment from another human being is like a grain of sand on the beach assuming that it can attain enlightenment from another grain of sand on the beach in other words, all grains of sand are alike didn't you know that? and all people in this particular area are alike how many gurus have to be caught with their hand in the cookie jar or the nookie jar or whatever it is before you get the message they are just like us and that may be granting them a level of moral sophistication they lack as a class what I truly believe is nobody knows anything the more generous position is well, the buddhists have a piece of the action and the mormons know something and everybody has a piece of the action the mushroom says nobody has a piece of the action but no one knows anything and that's tremendously liberating and it carries a responsibility for you to take yourself seriously you have no other source everything else is going to be hearsay second hand, rumor, thrice told your self is your instrument for the exploration of these dimensions there is spread through the world a lot of what I call and I hate the gender bias in calling it this but it would be dishonest to change it I call it wise old man woman wise old man knowledge it could be wise old woman knowledge there is a lot of this all over the world if you go to Asia you will see men sitting in doorways at evening smoking their pipes watching the sunset as their grandchildren play at their feet it's a safe bet, this person never took LSD or psilocybin and yet they've attained a certain kind of existential validity wisdom, comfort with the phenomenon of their own being and that can be taught and handed down and talked about and inculcated and cultivated but this psychedelic thing is something very different I don't think anyone can lead because I don't think anyone is in a position to lead if you counter by saying what am I doing I'm pointing toward an open door that's all the method and the material is what you need to take away from this weekend the opinions of Terence McKenna are simply that and worth just that much but if you take the techniques and the materials you can create your own world of meaning and coherence yeah [inaudible question] fine if you weigh 145 pounds, 5 dried grams weigh it this is the other thing people don't weigh their doses they eyeball it well the ego in a frantic effort to save itself has an amazing ability to overestimate the weight of mushrooms when you actually show somebody 5 dried grams lying on a plate they usually pale visibly at the very thought that that's what you're talking about [inaudible question] that doesn't matter I just wanted to add that there are species that are quite a bit stronger than that yeah, good point when I say 5 dried grams I mean Stropharycubensis Psilocybe cubensis which is the commercially cultivated one the large silvery, stipe, golden capped mushroom some of the Pacific Northwestern species are twice as strong or three times as strong but if you were to have just applied this literally across the board you'd probably get further faster than if you are careful [inaudible question] well you know what they say there are old mycologists and bold mycologists there are no old bold mycologists if you're going to do that learn your taxonomy or join the San Francisco Mycological Society or something many of these things are hard to confuse with anything else but Psilocybe semilanceata is in fact easily confused with a species of Galerina that you don't even know there's a problem until 12 hours after you've eaten them and at that point you're dead on arrival there's nothing science can do for you your liver has just turned to mush so what I believe people should do is cultivate mushrooms you want to take the alchemical path the cultivation of mushrooms is an incredible spiritual and physical discipline it will teach you all those good Lutheran values cleanliness, punctuality, attention to detail how to keep a clean work space for God's sake and then you are absolutely confident and you have also obtained karma free mushrooms outside of the cycle of inevitable criminal syndicalism and the karma that carries with it and I participated in it plenty myself so I'm not knocking it but it would be nice if people would produce their own mushrooms because inevitably you produce more than you can use and then you know can help people out down in 5B or something yeah how long does it take to grow mushrooms? oh start to finish 6 to 7 weeks it's not like growing any plant you've ever grown mushrooms are not a plant it requires you know the sophistication normally reserved for an 8th grade science project you have to be able to cook petri dishes and this sort of thing and then how many days fresh? fresh if you will dehydrate the mushrooms you'll discover they're 90% water so 5 dried grams becomes 50 wet grams and again this is a plate full so figure 10 times more than if it's dried or if you're a little conservative 8 times more than if it's dried yeah is there any book that you can recommend that involves the species? well two books I would recommend the book I wrote with my brother called Psilocybin Magic Mushroom Growers Guide is still in print from QuickPress and they have an 800 number here in the city QuickTrade I'm sorry not QuickPress QuickTrade and then Paul Stamets book The Mushroom Cultivator's Encyclopedia is a very good book if you are serious about this try and find someone who's done it and get them to teach you because it's very easy to do but doing it without being shown by someone is a little like trying to assemble a complex toy on Christmas Eve you know flap F into slot P that kind of thing it's much easier to just be taught by someone yeah I had a dream that I slept in the early part of the evening to wake up at midnight to then do mushrooms at once I had a dream about that I'm wondering about doing it in the middle of the night or during the day I always do it at night yeah that's a good point and the reason is a practical one and that is and this gets us into another realm but I'm a hallucination chauvinist I really like hallucinations to me the hallucination is the proof that I am connected to the other and so if I take a low dose and don't hallucinate even though I may have insights and write cover pages with ideas and so forth I consider the trip to be somewhat of a failure hallucination is what's important now what was the other part of your question? night time or day time night time or day time the hallucinations are reluctant to form in light I found that's not true of everything for instance DMT I prefer to my ideal site for smoking DMT would be a grassy sloping hillside somewhere in Marin County or something perfect in bright sun but all other hallucinations seem to prefer darkness and can organize themselves in darkness much better so what is the actual sound that happens in daytime so that everybody sleeps, it's quiet it's quieter although boy there are some weird sounds in the middle of the night it sounds like the entire house has been surrounded by a motorized platoon or something yeah I have a question on a religious model I was trying to think about where hallucinations fit into a religious spiritual path and I was reading Keith Kastaneda about I know there's a lot of controversy but he talks about his ideas of an evil and an evil gift ideas that are brought in certain traditions about immortality and certain, you know, the concept of this Kastaneda idea of an evil gift and certain hallucinations lead people to certain ways that they can lead so that they can get by the evil and I was thinking just some of the stuff that you know that tour that you do, sense your body seems to fit into that well and just different different plants fit in different ways of knowing what your pain is or what your own ideas are not simply just using it as a healing as a healing tool for society as a healing tool for a person it is just expanding and connecting up your mind and other people's minds in the world are guiding consciousness but also in relation to even more obvious stuff like a religious power Well, I think the sincerest form of religious worship is an act of understanding that the universe wants to be understood by its creation there is a need for dialogue so when you take psychedelics the way I think of it is once you get past the personal stuff then the model for the psychedelic voyager that I use is the fisherman for ideas ideas are the proof of the pudding and so you put your little boat out on the sea of mind and let down your nets and what you are hoping for is that minnows don't swim through the net minnows are ideas that have a certain striking peculiarity but are ultimately unsatisfying an example would be to spend much time meditating on why your little finger just fits your nostril it's an interesting insight but you can't build on that much I think and if an idea is too large it will rend your nets and you won't be able to wrestle it into the boat and in fact you and your nets and your boat will be dragged into the ocean and we'll just put you in a corner somewhere and look in on you once a week so what you want is middle sized ideas and they can be, any idea counts it can be an idea for how to reorganize an investment plan or what quantum physics is really trying to say or the structure of cytochrome c it's a specific problem with an answer and I really believe that salvation is an act of understanding that the moral life is a precondition for salvation but that the final step is an act of understanding so I take seriously the idea that these things are consciousness expanding and that we should use them to add to the storehouse of culturally validated ideas I've been wrestling with some issues since lunch and I'm just trying to think how to articulate it I'm wondering about how age and intention come into the use of psychedelics and I know when I was a lot younger and I was using LSD and mushrooms I didn't have the intention to really use them for personal growth but for understanding and I did it just to kind of have a good time and as I got older and my own awareness increased my use of them changed and I'm wondering what your views are or if you have any insight on is there a certain age when you think it's appropriate to use these as part of the process for personal growth as opposed to abuse, which a lot of children and teenagers I think it's more about the culture in which you're embedded in other words, I'm obviously considerably older than you in the 60s we actually did it with fairly high purpose and did it at fairly high doses I mean you weren't even getting into the game if you didn't take 500 micrograms now people take 70 micrograms and feel that they can hold forth on the subject of what is LSD I think what happened was in the 70s and then in the 80s the dose was dialed down and it permitted people to take it less seriously and so you didn't take it as a fun thing because you were young you took it as a fun thing because you were young in the 80s and that was how the 80s dealt with it you can dismiss LSD as just kind of a fun thing if you keep the dose down under 100 but once it starts climbing it begins to be more and more profound I have noticed as I age and my peers age that we seem to get more sensitive to it which is not to say that we don't need to take it but that when we do take it we don't need to take quite such flattening amounts as in the old days but I think once you are conscious of your identity and of the world you're in sometime around 16 or so then I think it becomes just a matter of circumstance and predilection and intelligence I don't think, you know, psychedelics work with intelligence but they can't increase it beyond a certain point and some people are just, I almost said shallow and then I decided simple and some people just are beyond the reach of these things somehow it just doesn't address their agenda what this seems mostly to have an appeal for is slightly culturally alienated members of a ruling elite where are the black people who should be at this thing? where are the Latino people who should be here? these things are inevitably incredibly white and male why is that? well I'm not sure what about in nature? that's a good one what I would say is just make sure you are really in nature because the reason I stopped taking LSD outside or psychedelics outside was because every time I would take them something so weird would happen that I just could not stand it usually having to do with another person usually a stranger I mean you can go up to the top of Mount Whitney look around, make sure nobody is there drop and within 15 minutes the ranger wants to see the camping permit the army is doing helicopter maneuvers 30 cup scouts show up I mean it's uncanny and some people like to do that I mean some people's idea of a good time is to take 500 mikes of LSD and wander around lower Manhattan meeting people listen what do you think on people that take psychedelic drugs around a lot of people to absorb learning experience from interaction with other people say like mine, a similar mind well these have to be small doses if you get effective doses you are lying on the floor as dead so yeah, I mean and you learn what you can handle I mean some people can take vast amounts of LSD and it would never enter your mind that they are loaded at all and other people you look over at them and they are bursting into laughter and can't behave themselves I heard the letter where DMT is an inside experience well I think DMT is if DMT didn't exist we would have to invent it sort of there has to be something in the world there has to be a weirdest thing once we have the concept weird there has to be a weirdest thing and DMT is simply it DMT is that thing which above all other things you have convinced yourself doesn't exist it's the one thing you are certain is impossible that's how it seems to me it completely deconstructs reality in a completely unexpected way in other words, reality can come apart many different ways and once it begins to come apart you hope it will begin to move along some traditionally sanctioned spiritual arc you know, toward Jesus or heaven or hell or something identifiable what happens with DMT is there is an eruption of the unexpected it seems to be in its nature to be unexpected and it seems to carry the message with incredible intensity that everything you know about reality is wrong it isn't what you think it is when you smoke DMT, when I smoke DMT and according to Rick Strassman's research out at New Mexico when most people are exposed to DMT very quickly, like within 30 seconds to a minute you are conveyed into an inconceivably alien and dramatic environment of 100% hallucination nothing you have ever seen before is there there is nothing there that the English language can describe because there is nothing there that any English speaking person ever has encountered before or German or French or Swahili you are conveyed into not a unitary world not the white light, the one or any of that but a complex, multiplistic world of motion, light, color, depth, interaction and none of it makes very much sense at all it's a metaphor for what I'm talking about imagine that you were a paleolithic person getting loaded around a campfire somewhere on the grasslands of Africa and imagine that for a minute and a half you suddenly found yourself standing in Times Square at rush hour well, you could sort of make sense of it I mean when you came back you would say well there were people, sort of there were sort of people and then there was a lot of motion and then there was a lot of verticality but basically you're just thrashing and clawing the air in front of your companions they are not getting a picture of Times Square at rush hour from this description DMP is like that it seems to punch through to an impossible world, a parallel dimension and it would be shocking enough if it were purely incomprehensible the problem is it's not quite purely incomprehensible there's a 2% residuum that you seem to be able to relate to these self-dribbling basketball-like entities that I call tykes that come bounding up and leap into your body and crawl all over you and jump in and out of your chest cavity they are singing in some kind of language that you don't hear but see and so they're singing objects into existence some kind of musical grammar is condensing small pieces of furniture around you and you have to remember 30 seconds before you were in some shabby apartment you and your strange friends fiddling with some drug and now that's all gone and you're not sleepy, you're not dazed you're absolutely who you were that's the strange thing DMP doesn't affect the part that we call ourself say "I am who I was, I'm exactly who I was" but what the hell has happened to reality? it's been entirely replaced by something that I never saw in any science fiction film never heard about in any fairy tale never dreamed of, never hinted of and now I'm fully there and these little entities are dancing around your attention and then they want you to do something they want you to sing objects into existence with your voice and they're doing it, they're showing you how it's done the somehow grammar is seen in that world it's as though a switch has been thrown in your neurophysiological machinery and language which you used to hear, you now see and these things are putting a lot of pressure on you saying "do it, do it, don't question, don't think, don't reflect, just do it" and I sort of feel something, a cross between heartburn and satori begin to move its way up my chest and when it reaches my mouth, my mouth flies open and this glossolalia-like linguistic stuff begins to happen which is like language, like liquid, like silk I can see it, and it's colored, and it's complicated and now I do not understand what this is for I can join you in speculating it looks to me like, first of all, language itself is a mysterious activity a behavior which we participate in God on the body of nature, human language is the place to look it is not anticipated in other forms of animal organization and in us it reaches this excruciating level of expression and with it we have created culture which is a virtual reality that we surround ourselves with not only of ideologies, Marxism, democracy, monarchy but buildings, highways, infrastructure so it's almost as though language is an alien artifact of some sort you remember Bill Burroughs said it's a virus from outer space well this is sort of like that idea but language is obviously not something that is a finished enterprise and I think that we are approaching either through our own natural evolution of the soma, of the body or through technology, or through some combination of the two we're approaching a place where we're going to switch channels and switch the language channel into a more broad bandwidth mode and we're going to see what we mean instead of hear what we mean the convention of using small mouth noises to symbolically indicate objects in the world so that those who share the same set of linguistic assumptions can download this acoustical babble and reconstruct the thought out of it is going to be traded in for something more like a direct acoustical hologram where then ambiguity is much less prevalent you know, if I read you a paragraph from Proust we can spend the rest of the afternoon discussing what did the author mean you've all been in those situations what did the author mean? but if I show you a sculpture by Brancuzzi we just walk around and look at it it self-evidently is what it is it does not have the ambiguity that adheres to written and spoken language and I think this ambiguity has allowed misunderstanding and misunderstanding has allowed pain and agony so it may be that we're on the brink of a higher form of language the descent of the logos this would be it, the manifestation of the logos and the psychedelics by allowing a look through the hyperspatial window at future states of human organization as I argued this morning is actually giving us a taste of a human future that may be far in the future in the same way that if you had smoked DMT 20,000 years ago you might have landed in Times Square circa 1960 it's an insight into a future development in the physiology and mind of man and makes it very suggestive then that DMT is being elaborated in our brains as part of normal metabolism we have genes that produce DMT well what if those genes were to be switched on in a more dramatic way then what would the quality of culture be? if culture is the serotonin trip then what kind of culture would we live in if the serotonin were backed out in favor of a DMT maintained neural substrate I don't know, lots of hands up, you've been patient I have two questions pertaining to maybe a test you said that when you take the courage about a soul-siren it speaks to you in English and I know this is a human ability but what about people who speak other languages are you saying that it speaks back to you so that you may understand it? it speaks to you in your own language let me tell you a story which seems to me really a strange story it happened to me so I'll tell it when I first started growing mushrooms I was taking I was testing all these batches and taking it quite a bit of the time and one evening I got locked into this voice thing and it was singing a little song and the song was something like this that darathitharathitharathitha says that are the data that are the says it ended each line with the word says so I thought interesting then I went back and listened to Maria Sabina's mushroom velada where she's singing in Tzotzil which is a mountain Indian language of central Mexico she's singing in Tzotzil and the interlinear translation is right there on the page that are the data that are the data so that are the data that are the data so this word means says in Tzotzil so I thought aha this thing is can can do it in any language it it is apparently omnilingual yes and I said DMT naturally occurs in the human well there's a lot of anecdotal talk about this but I don't think there's ever been a statistically coherent study coming out of the 60s of course there was a rash of LSD babies and some of those LSD babies are now 19 25 years old and they are perhaps in this room and can speak for themselves but it's never been studied it would be an interesting thing to look at if you could follow up the idea that LSD breaks chromosomes was simply a government lie a smear that to this day survives in certain portions of the literature it is not true it is not even a little true it is 100% horseshit it just doesn't do that aspirin and caffeine break chromosomes with an order of magnitude more alacrity than LSD that's right my brother did a study actually Lawrence Rockefeller paid for much of it a study of these maestres in Brazil these Santo Daime people who've taken Unhal de Vegetal these people who had taken ayahuasca weekly for 40 years and they did blood studies and tissue studies and they're fine in fact they are slightly above normal in certain indices it just hasn't been studied these many of these LSD babies were also born into very loving communal neo-archaic kind of settings and they had lots of unconventional nurturing and raising too so it's very hard to separate all these to tease these factors apart yeah back to what you're saying about his question on movement it seems to me that if we're truly to have an archaic revival and the whole study of shamanism revivalism how do you bring about true shamanism within our modern culture without it falling into that kind of thing where people start to idolize an individual and yet still bring someone like a shaman into a community and indigenous tribes shamans are often not necessarily idolized like they are in gruey situations but they're respected and they're thought of as being more learned and they often have the archive of knowledge that often not everyone in the tribe has well you know Mersiliad in his great book on shamanism he subtitled it the archaic techniques of ecstasy what a shaman is in command of are techniques and they're not based on his personality that's where it's different from the guru if once the shaman has told you his techniques he's told you all he can tell you and you then have to apply the techniques ideology is fairly absent in shamanism at a practical level it's basically about experience not about an ideological preconception of things the way I handle gurus is just to simply say what can you show me and then if you're told well you have to sweep up around the ashram here 12 years or so and do daily prostrations and then we'll cut you in on the good you just can pick up your knapsack and keep going because the real stuff is not hidden like that when I went to South America and people said I said what can you show me and they said well let's just sharpen our machetes and go out here into the woods a half a mile and cut some vine and bring it back and boil it up and I'll show you what I'll show you I'm very suspicious of lineages and secret knowledge and situations where somebody decides where somebody else is worthy to ascend to the next level because man for man and woman for woman there doesn't seem to be a more scheming, tawdry and venal subclass on this planet than gurus I mean there may be some good ones but my god they keep bad company I heard what I'm saying in my mind, kinesthesia, sort of characteristics when you were describing the DMT the hearing of colors or speaking words that became colors clearly it is a synesthesia so ok so can that, and you might want to go into that for other people but I'm really into this whole thing now I'm really excited about it can that happen and occur with other, with the mushroom say or another hallucinogen than the DMT? well, no I think you know if you take enough psilocybin it begins to look like DMT if you take an 8 or 9 gram dose of psilocybin at about the 2 hour mark it'll be indistinguishable from DMT to address this question of synesthesia obviously the world is a unity and it arrives at the surface of your body as a unity of electromagnetic vibrations and light and so forth but your senses break it up at that point your eyes tell you about light, that's a certain range of electromagnetic radiation your ears measure pressure waves in the air, the acoustical range your hands inform you about the tactility of the world but the world is one thing, so it's almost as though the senses are reunified in synesthesia in a way that may have been originally intended and is for some reason fallen out of our physiological repertoire or perhaps exists as a future state but yes, tasting shapes, seeing colors, feeling music there are people who have unusual neurological conditions who live in these kinds of spaces and it's very hard to, some of you may know the guy who wrote Oliver Sacks book the man who mistook his wife for a hat, it's a wonderful book and the man who tasted shapes, that's right you have a book called Synesthesia, don't you? yes, I'm a little embarrassed by it because it breaks my proletarian mold there were only 70 copies of that book and it costs about $1500 and what it is, it's a showcase for an artist named Tim Eli who is very famous in the world of made books and he's at the top of the made books thing so I contributed a text, he made the paper and the binding and set the print and painted on each page of each book in a special unique way and it's an art, mart, object you book on cultivating a small side of mushrooms has a very strong impact in terms of the accessibility of mushrooms and DFT is much harder to obtain than mushrooms and I know people have explored Jonathan Arnt, Iowa Analog and you did a review of the Pochis Raffaellaris with very mixed success and I'm wondering if you have any thoughts about the similarly accessible ways of making DFT come to existence yeah, well I don't advocate if you're not at least a third or fourth year biochemist you shouldn't attempt it in the laboratory because it involves the use of LIAH here's a book called Psychedelic Shamanism that has recipes but LIAH, Lithium Aluminum Hydride is very explosive and don't make a fuel of yourself the other approach is to try to find a weak source in nature and concentrate it and Phalaris grasses, Phalaris tuberosa and Arundenaceae you can grow them and do a low-tech water extraction I'm not sure, nobody has ever handed me a gram of DMT created by these techniques this is all sort of backyard theory but in theory it should be able to do this there's also a plant called Desmanthus solenoensis that grows in the Midwest that has a very high concentration of DMT in the root bark it's interesting to talk about that plant for a moment because it's only been known that it contained DMT in the root bark for about five years but it could have been used by the North American Plains Indians to produce some kind of a shamanic halocinogen but never was as far as we can tell and this is an interesting question those of you who may be going on to ethnography or something like that why do some people use halocinogens and not others? it simply isn't a matter of availability for example, second only to the Mexican concentration of species in Oaxaca and the Sierra Mazateca is the concentration of over 35 known species in the Pacific Northwest yet evidence of use of those mushrooms by the Tlingit, Chimcham and the Northwest Coast Indians is very hard to come by ranging from maybe none to maybe a little tiny bit but by no means is it established that they did this this Desmanthus thing is another thing why was it never utilized? this new chemical and plant that I talked about this morning has an interesting relationship to all this Salvia Divinorum this Mexican mint that contains Salvinorin Alpha it's used only by two fairly small language groups the Tzotzil and the Tzotal and they call it Ojas de la Pastora the leaves of the shepherdess but when you ask them, well what do you call it in Tzotzil? what do you call it in your language? they say we have no name for this plant in our language well that's impossible if they've been using it for any length of time at all it seems to suggest and they say that this is a new plant but what's puzzling about that is it's known from nowhere else on earth so is it that these people discovered this plant as recently maybe as 50 or 60 years ago and having a tradition of plant use they inculcated this one into it there's a similar case in Africa you probably all know about Iboga, Tabernanthe Iboga which is the only really major African alkaloid containing plant and it's the basis of a religion in Gabon and Zaire called Bawiti and interesting on this gender issue, just as an aside this stuff is used to hold relationships together it's well understood that that's what it's for, is to bond people and these people who use it, the Fang people they say they got it from the Pygmies but what's strange about Iboga is there is no record of anybody using it before 1870, anywhere this is very puzzling because the Portuguese had been into West Africa since the 1440s and trading and buying slaves and bringing back artifacts and this sort of thing no record of Iboga use before 1860 so we can't assume always that these things are ancient there's a lot of controversy about peyote peyote, if you're not looked into the matter you might assume this is this ancient hallucinogen but in fact, most of the evidence argues that until the 1880s, Sephora secundifolia beans were the preferred shamanic intoxicant of the Rio Grande drainage well now, today, Sephora secundifolia is considered a poison it has cytosine in it, it's a terrible thing to take this is another thing, as long as I'm just riffing on these things you have to realize that intoxication is a culturally defined situation for example, in Madagascar, the Malagasy Republic the large island off Eastern Africa there are no major psychedelics but there are what are called ordeal poisons these are plants where you take it you think you're going to die you beg to die and then you get better and are fine well, people come out of that reborn rededicated to their families and their professions and their position in society why? not because it was psychedelic but because a near-death experience is intrinsically an experience which causes you to re-examine and re-evaluate your relationships to the world and other people yeah I heard a couple of years ago that a popular underground designer growing up in Japan or something invoked a certain kind of near-death experience which is something that is described as being a kind of neurological state that the body then goes and takes a very catastrophic end basically and gives you a certain kind of experience of a life and a kind of demise and that has some kind of popular use it's not true, it probably will be in time some people have nominated DMT for that role my friend Rupert Sheldrake, he calls it a thanatoptogen he says when you really die when you are beyond any returning DMT floods the dying brain and the only way you can have that experience without dying is to artificially induce it this may be so I mean one of the most challenging things about DMT and we might as well, you know, it's the afternoon of the first day so we might as well dig into it what about these entities that I talked about? what about the types, the self-transforming machine elves the jeweled geometric basketballs are we to just dismiss this as hallucination? lives are built on hallucination? or what is to be made of that? what kind of an entity can have a mind but not a body and be loose inside your mind? I think that possibly I mean this is sort of the most woo-woo place we'll pass through unless you bait me but if you ask shamans worldwide how do you do what you do? they will say well we use ancestor spirits the ancestor spirits help us well, you know, you may think you're counter-cultural but most people hearing about ancestor spirits are able to dumb that down into oh these naive charming Indians you know, that sort of thing but what if there is actually something which survives bodily death that is actually continues to exist in a dimension which we would have to call mental or trans-real and what if you can come and go from that dimension using shamanic techniques well, that is in fact what shamanism has always claimed to anyone who would listen they say, you know, the shaman passes back and forth through the same doorway through which the dead pass but they do not return the superhuman condition of the shaman his or her ability to cure, to handle fire to drive metal objects through flesh all of this is to show that they are of both worlds that they partake in the ontos of normal being but they also partake in the ontos of transcendental being and I think it would be the most astonishing cultural development of the last 500 years if we were to actually learn something about the after death that would strip away our materialist and cheerful assumptions that when you go into the ground you are nothing but compost in a way, that belief has been the permission for all of our dumbing down and devaluing of ourselves our society, each other and the planet the belief that, well, ultimately it does not amount to anything anyway well, what if ultimately, you do not know what you are talking about then you have to come to terms with that well, it is interesting, there are a couple of points you made I have done a lot of psychedelic quite quick I have spent a period of time just in the bi-obvious and recently, in the last few years I have been doing a lot of religious research I have been doing religious research in France and in the US now, there is not any front page in there but we have had, and I have witnessed this at various points experiences with the Ancestors and 15 people in the room all saying they were a Catholic and what afterwards, when you get around the room the experiences were all remarkably similar and I do not know if that is true of the Federal Jury but I just had to ask, and they said, ah, wow it was very interesting so there is, I think there is out of tradition I do not know if it has changed over time, etc. but I do believe that psychedelics open up the door for a lot of people, they open the door, it is open so you can access it very easily it is a professional calling I mean, I think everybody should have a psychedelic experience but to professionally dedicate yourself to a lifetime you have to have a particularly intense 12th house configuration of some sort, I think, yeah I have spent a long time, since I have been away since I have been in Chicago but as I recall, the thing that struck me most about it was that time stopped that was my experience, that I was in a state of time-off and, ok, so this is one of them if you have had similar kinds of experiences like he did you can concur with that and I want to get to the question about the Botelia discrimination first let me deal with the timelessness this metaphor that I tried to put out this morning about how the shaman goes to hyperspace and therefore can see next week's weather next week's hunting, who is going to recover from illness and who isn't what going into the fourth dimension means is all time becomes co-present you know, there is that piece of dogger-roll poetry I dreamed I saw eternity the other night an endless golden ring in other words, eternity is all time in a completed form and I think, you know, timelessness stopping the world, as Castaneda said this is an indication that you have truly crossed the boundary out of three-dimensional Newtonian space and into this hyper-spatial dimension really I can't say enough about this because I think this is the key that life is a process that conquers dimensionality it always has been the earliest forms of life were fixed slimes they had no motility they had an existence as points later they acquired motility the ability to swim around and were aware then of the concept here and there and then really the entire evolution of life on this planet is simply to develop better organs for moving around in three-dimensional space stronger legs, stronger arms better binocular vision, so forth and so on until you get to human beings and we invent language and what is language? it's a strategy for escaping from the narrowness of the present moment because if you have language, you can say I remember the time, so and so or you can say, why don't we plan on doing so and so in other words, when you get written language then you get history then there is, in a way, the past never goes away the past changes into history or the present changes into history and in that form it stays with us and now, electronic culture we dream of an information lossless society where no information is lost and then that means, in a sense, where no time passes away we'll have Marilyn with us and JFK, everybody a kind of eternity and so language is then seen as a strategy for the further overcoming of dimensional limitation and now, with the internet about to go visual and all that it seems like we're again about to take another step deeper into the conquest of dimensionality but there's nothing new in all this this is the business that biology has been about since day one and then the glossolalia in your description of this experience, of the dimension we think literally, actually, the sound that you made there's a feeling it's, you know, not to be crude but it's somewhat like a belch or something it's like a bubble of something moving up and then when it gets to your, when it actually gets to your mouth it manifests as it is what I'm getting at here is my experience of that is you need not necessarily really do air passing through my lens what I do need to do is a kind of vibration of energy which is somehow, and I don't know how it's done but somehow, by some, what we call magic through some sort of activity that's actually taking place in me something changes and this becomes what you're describing as language of speech it seems to manifest as this one does that sound familiar? are you, and I'm trying to find out if you're really talking about I'm making really clear connection between using voice and frequencies of vibration that's one kind of energy and there's another kind of energy that's behind that that could be what we could call the energy of meaning well, there's sound and meaning and they are not necessarily related they may not be related but what we're getting at here is this question of how is it that your little type manifests itself into that body it manifests apparently the whole whole realm of it, right? but somehow or other they are transforming energy yes, I mean, I've had I always, my technique or my intellectual style though it may not seem like it is to always seek for a rational explanation first and then from there more and more exotic explanations so I was really floored by this type thing because that seemed to me unambiguously not something which was supposed to happen in the universe as I was told it that there were supposed to be small non-human intelligences leaping in and out of my chest and one idea that's occurred to me and since some of you are interested in psychology it's maybe worth talking about plus we get to inject a buzzword here which is, as you know, it is now understood that we are really not one person we have many personalities multiple personality disorder is simply when you manifest this on a level that irritates other people multiple personality order is when you have them all lined up in a row and the right ones always talk to the same people and so the illusion is maintained well, in the same way that, you know, if you had a big mirror you look in the mirror and you see a reflection of yourself but now if you lift the mirror up and bring it down on the ground and shatter it what you see now is not a shattered reflection of yourself but hundreds of little reflections of yourself each one whole well, may it not be then that what DMT does is it shatters the illusion of the self and says, you're not a self you're a tribe of selves and here they are, dancing, performing, singing they are the fractal adumbrations of the personality that was the buzzword that I wanted to get in they are the fractal adumbrations of personality that's one possibility the other possibility, souls, like I said an ecology of souls that is the conservative explanation why is it the conservative explanation? well, because we are here and so if we think of them as human beings of some sort they just happen to be dead human beings nevertheless, we see that there are human beings so perhaps there is a residuum that survives death and that is what these things are other possibilities must range more further afield a parallel continuum actually inhabited by these things that they are not human beings in any form that they are autonomous entities with their own universe that's one possibility another possibility is that these are the long-thought extraterrestrials that they don't come in beryllium ships the size of Manhattan to take control of our gross industrial output that that's a crazy way of thinking about extraterrestrials that they come through a technology of mind that they come by collapsing space across megaparsecs and appearing in the mind as a hallucinogenic experience but then of course the question is why? and why this sense of familiarity? and why this deep affection and concern for suffering humanity? I don't have answers but I know that these questions need to be answered the domain is real yeah, we'll do a question and then it's break time I just wonder if there's really that much of a difference if you're presenting these alternatives maybe for clarity as completely separate but the idea of autonomous entities living in some hyperdimensional space versus the idea of our separate personalities versus the idea of other beings that maybe have a more traditional existence but just very far away are they really all that separate? it seems to me that if the mind actually makes its home at least in large part in hyperspace in the everyday world of the mind and if that's where our thoughts live then if we take these drugs they transport us to a place where we see that through another filter in this hyperspace, that's where the other minds live presumably there may not be that much of a difference between those three alternatives you actually propose it may be the ego, which you talked about earlier that is causing the confusion here we think of ourselves wrapped in this skin living at this point and then all this stuff is very confusing but if we expand our definition of mind to be what you've earlier said it to be then perhaps these entities, I mean they're fascinating but they're not so mysterious they're outside the domain of where we should be well, yeah, I mean, you're right although, well, let's take two of the possibilities if it's an ecology of souls we're dealing with then they should have complete knowledge of the history of the planet and everything that's ever gone on and so forth but they won't have a complete encyclopedia of galactic history or something like that I think that, well, frankly, I don't know what I think it depends on how recently I've smoked DMT the overwhelming impression is of cognitive dissonance occasioned by the simultaneous perception of alienness and familiarity these are the most alien things you've ever seen and you know you've been here before and you know it's very important and you know it's basic to who you are but if it's the self, then what have we done to the definition of the self? the self is supposed to mean that which is most familiar to me if the concept self can also include the notion that which is least familiar to me then it's almost too broad a concept to use I think what we need is scientists meaning you don't have to wear a white coat but you do have to have the scientific attitude rolling up their sleeves and going in there with the same attitude that Wallace went to the Amazon and that Darwin went to the Galapagos and let's figure out, let's map the flora and fauna let's get a taxonomy of these types let's try and figure out where they're coming from and what their purpose is shamanism, I believe, is the study of this dimension and it's not reached any conclusions at this point it is a phenomenology not a science and so the Amazon shaman, he has a language of control and description which is satisfying in his context and to his people but it may not be satisfying in your context and to your people even if you assimilate it perfectly it's like physicists talk about charm and strangeness of quarks but this has nothing to do with strangeness or charm in ordinary speech these are very, very complicated concepts where the technical gloss has been to call it strangeness and when a shaman tells you he deals with ancestor spirits you, for whom Casper the friendly ghost is the image of an ancestor spirit definitely get a cockamamie notion then when you try and map Casper the friendly ghost onto the Amazon shaman's notion of an ancestor spirit these concepts require a lifetime of manipulation and familiarity before you understand where the boundaries will lie well, why don't we take a 5-10 minute break here and then we'll come back kinds of details, there's the details of shamanic usage descriptions of ethnographic material how ayahuasca is used, how papyrus is used there's a whole neurophysiological world of discussion what happens to these molecules once they get inside your body where do they go in the body and in the brain and why are they able to do what they do what molecular species are they competitive with, so forth and so on issues of botany, taxonomy, biogeography, so forth and so on so I want you to direct it where you want it to go in some of these areas I'm more competent than in others but if I'm incompetent I can usually bring myself to say so and name a book that will help you out so I want it to fulfill your needs and that's based probably on your professional orientation and where you want to go with this stuff I'm not shy about jerking us one way and then another I wanted to ask you about in the physical landscape you talked about extensive transcases masses, whatever, like 21 days it seems like that ayahuasca, that you suggested, had nothing to do with the duration of that transcase that if I'm understanding you correctly, it had to do with some sort of artificially invisible thing that you did that created that ESR is that my understanding correctly? well, let me background it the question relates to an incident told about in both my book with Dennis, Invisible Landscape and in True Hallucination that creatively agitated under the influence of mushrooms announced that he could do something which is very hard to describe what it was it was sort of like turn himself inside out trigger the end of the world open a doorway into hyperspace something like that, anyway, some highly touted dramatic thing he organized an experiment to test the theory and the result of the experiment was not nothing, which was what I was betting on not what he said would happen, which what he was betting on but a very peculiar incident then was generated where he seemed to lose his mind, to put it simply for about three weeks but in a very specialized and orderly way and I seemed to also undergo a parallel but different kind of transformation and the theory that was being manipulated was a theory that involved using vocally produced tones to acoustically cancel metabolizing psychedelic molecules in the body so that they would bond as dimers into DNA in other words, so that they would intercalate into DNA the hypothesis which lie behind all this was that DNA must be the physical storage site for memory this is not a popular idea, this is a sneered at idea but memory is a great problem for modern science we've decoded DNA, we've got the top quark we've measured the core temperature of Betelgeuse we have no idea how memory works it's absolutely confounding because a woman, a man of 90 years old can remember the way their great grandmother's skirts smelled when they used to crawl up into her lap when they were 4 years old it was 86 years ago during that time every molecule in the body has been cycled out every 5 to 7 years so it's 10 bodies away is the body that crawled up into that woman's lap and could smell the starch in her skirts and yet the memory is completely clear where are the memories? and as you know, experiments have been done with ablating large parts of the brain or studying people who are the unfortunate victims of very traumatic head injuries and there are cases in the medical literature of people who have fully 80% of their physical brain destroyed and no memory impairment whatsoever so where are the memories? well, there are a number of theories but there is nothing more than theory at this point Dennis said, let's assume nature is conservative for a moment we know that nature stores protein code in DNA and we know that DNA has large silent portions and in fact some of you may have seen the data which came out just recently that those large silent portions of the DNA exhibit the same mathematical properties as language did you all read this? oh, this is hot news, folks as you know, DNA codes for protein that code is only about 6% of the DNA chain the rest of the DNA, the other 94% is called silent DNA or by some people, junk DNA because it doesn't code for protein so what does it do? well, recently they've been sequencing this junk DNA and then studying it with algorithms used by the CIA to detect code in noise and they discover that the silent portions of the DNA fit all the necessary criterion of language they have syntactical structure this seems to support Dennis's contention which was and it's very, would be very controversial you see because it's a Lamarckian mechanism it's saying that experience can modify nuclear DNA which is denied by anti-Lamarckian evolution that's not the way it's supposed to work according to Darwin and the Neo-Darwinians nevertheless, if we don't believe that the only part of the body which is not traded out many times over the course of a long lifetime the only part of the body which you are born with and die with is neural DNA neural DNA, what you're born with, you keep therefore, it's reasonable following good scientific method to hypothesize that the neural DNA must be where the memories are well then Dennis's idea was that ordinary experience has to do with serotonin dropping into a relationship of bonding with DNA and giving off a signal like a radio transmitter of the structural hyperfine ESR of the DNA and that then constitutes the electro-biochemical foundation of the experience of thought and so what he was saying was then what these psychedelics are is they're like different kinds of transmitters stronger or transmitting in different wavelengths or transmitting with a higher bandwidth and it is known in fact that these psychedelic molecules do compete with serotonin they are serotonergic competitors so visualize the DNA in the course of metabolism unfolding and folding itself to expose various runs of nucleotides to ribosomal coding into RNA and in this molecular environment these drug molecules are whirling around and by Brownian motion or by enzymatic delivery because the details don't matter these molecules intercalate meaning they slip neatly between the nucleotides many drugs do this, this is known but most drugs or compounds when they intercalate into DNA they distort the twisting of it and it's dysfunctional, it messes up the thing can't transcript anymore these drug molecules, if you look at them they're usually a pentaxyl five-sided central group with two benzene rings or a benzene ring and a partial benzene ring hanging off of this thing and they're flat, they're planar it means if you could blow up a psilocybin molecule to the size of a cutting board it would be about as thin as a cutting board and as wide and as long those flat molecules fit right in between the nucleotides and when this happens the electron spin resonance signal is amplified just as though a more efficient transceiver had been dropped into place and you can measure the hyperfine ESR signature of DNA in an in vitro laboratory situation this is not mysterious so the idea then is that we have a family of molecules endogenous neurotransmitters like serotonin, acetylcholine and so forth and so on and exogenous neurotransmitters like psilocybin, DNA I'm sorry, psilocybin, mescaline and then exogenous endogenous like DMT found inside and outside the body and it may be that what the evolution of consciousness is is the slow trading in of low gain molecular transceivers like serotonin for much more broadband high gain molecular transceivers like DMT so Dennis's idea was to take all this theory that I just laid out and then use acoustically produced vocal sound to cancel the charge of these molecules and as you probably know or maybe you don't know when a molecule becomes superconducting it will bond into anything it becomes a hyper bonding molecule it will bond anywhere so theoretically if you could cause psychedelic molecules during their act of being intercalated into your genetic material to become superconducting even for a moment they would lock in permanently and you would begin to have a very deep a much deeper experience of consciousness it would be much broader, much deeper he claimed he could do this but he also went further and claimed and this is where I am not good at explaining it because I didn't understand it then and I don't understand it now but he claimed that in the act of becoming superconducting and intercalating this thing would cause the molecule to undergo something which he named he called it dextrorotary hyper dextrorotation which means simply that it would turn inside out and he said then that you would produce something and you know I'm embarrassed at the strangeness of the concept but that you could in some sense give birth to your own soul that something could be generated out of your body which you would have a high degree of personal identification with because it would in fact be the central essence of yourself it would be, he made analogies to the philosopher's stone to the flying saucer, to the birth of an idea it's the idea that you could create what he called translinguistic matter that means a form of an ontological form of being which looks like matter but which behaves like mind and that somehow this would trigger the collapse of the illusion of history and everything would be swept into the presence of almighty God upon her throne or something like that anyway that was the notion and in proceeding to carry out this experiment which I just thought was madness and would result in nothing and then we could go back to botanizing instead in a sense it seemed to work the condensation of the philosopher's stone and the collapse of the historical state vector is slightly delayed but the rest of it seems right on track in that when he began, when he threw the switch as he said, the harming switch he went bonkers basically for about 21 days in a very complicated way which he had anticipated he said there is a small chance that I will be turned inside out not my body but my mind and it seemed as though that was precisely what had happened he could recite the alphabet backwards he spoke in a language which if you got him to spell it you could turn it around and you could see these were full sentences but spoken backwards in other words he truly seemed to be running backwards while we were all, the rest of us were running forward well after about 21 days that faded and he got his act together and went back to get multiple PhDs in molecular biology, pharmacognosy and what have you coincident with the throwing of the switch I who had been the skeptic noticed that it was as though a switch had been thrown in me and I began to understand it was not like any drug I'd ever taken it was not like psilocybin or ayahuasca there were no hallucinations but what began to happen was I simply began to understand faster and faster and faster and faster so fast that I was just walking around on these jungle trails holding my head going uh-huh I see yes uh-huh uh-huh and it was opening up ahead of me and I eventually this understanding settled down into the theory of the time wave which I will not slay you with because this is a course in psychobotany not a course in megalomania revealed but what I finally came to rest with was a complete model of space and time which is what you would end up with if he had succeeded he said it would condense into three-dimensional space and end history and everyone would leave their factories and offices and discard their clothes and with tears of joy streaming down their faces begin to form the cosmic round dance that precedes the departure for Alpha in Sagittaria well that remains a future promise to be redeemed but what happened to me was I obtained this strange idea out of the Qing that offered me a complete model of space and time and the future and the past and has continued to be the touchstone of my intellectual life so I think that we can argue for hours although it's probably not worth doing about whether anything at all happened at La Charrera when I was there I should mention I didn't sleep for 11 days and it was the most amazing 11 days I've ever had I was absolutely ecstatic I barely ate and I was full of compassion and understanding for everyone and their limitations in this terrible dilemma because we were a thousand miles up the real baboon asshole with no airplanes and no radios and here my brother proceeds to go nuts and I'm saying it's okay but the world may end in a few days and on and on it took me about five years to get myself publicly presentable in that time I was a burden to my friends and a joy to my enemies because I just appeared to be a social menace I could back people into a Denny's and hold them there for 16 hours at a stretch with a wrap so alarming and appalling that people would just back to the wall to wait to see if I was going to explode it was simply, it takes a long time you have to leaven it with humor and self-criticism and convince people that you don't take yourself seriously and all these things to make it palatable yeah that is true hallucination and I think that if you want to read an eye-opening book if you haven't read it, read Thomas Kuhn's book The Structure of Scientific Revolution because what you'll learn there to your amazement is these great intellectual breakthroughs like Newton and Einstein and Planck and so forth they don't come out of careful examination of the evidence and conservative adumbration of theories no they don't come like that they come like revelations you know completely and then you argue backward to convince your colleagues you get the evidence and you argue backward and you convince everybody and then everybody says well it was obvious all the time and anyway they knew it 50 years earlier and on and on and on but that's what you have to do so I have stuck with this, my devotion to psychedelics because it gave me really my greatest wish was I want to have a complete understanding of how things work that doesn't mean there is no more surprises but it means you at least have a structure that you can pour it into and I think this is what shamans do they create a personal ideology sufficient to their needs and my needs are complex because I live in a society where I'm going to be talking to quantum physicists, mathematicians, historians of science epistemologists, so forth and so on so it had to perform at top speed if you're in a rainforest situation in a culture, in a monoculture then it is perhaps not so challenging but the point of all this is catalysis of ideas you know, culture can evolve no faster than its language it can evolve no faster than the models that it can set up for itself to achieve and that requires language so I take the psychedelics to be catalysts of language they probably caused it to come into existence in the first place and then they continue to push it forward into new domains and this great period of creativity that we're living through now in the sciences, in the arts, in the implementation of exotic technologies I think this is the real legacy of the 60s the people who run these fancy computer companies and the World Wide Web and the net and CERN and all that they're all freaks they're all people who came up through the 60s and have somehow fitted themselves into straight society but the great bulk of creative work in the society in those areas is being done by people who took psychedelics and in fact arguably the scientists of today the technological implementers of today are in fact shamans and we are creating a kind of culturally validated shamanic super space except we call it cyber space but all we're doing with the creation of cyber space is hard wiring in a male way what has always been there in a female way I mean the web of invisible hidden associations that make us a cosmos instead of a chaos well that seems to be an over long answer to a question I've forgotten yeah [inaudible] well first let me talk about morphogenetic fields for those of you who don't recognize the term this is an idea which has been developed by Rupert Sheldrake who's a theoretical biologist in England it's a very simple idea with very revolutionary implications the idea can be simply stated like this things happen the way they happen because that's how they happened before that may not sound terribly challenging but here then is an example of the consequences if you believe that if you believe that then it should be possible to teach rats to run a maze in Cambridge we'll say and once they know how to run that maze it should take rats in Australia less time to learn to run the same maze because it's been done before in other words this is a theory which says it's very hard for something to happen the first time and slightly easier the second and more easy the third and inevitable by the 10 trillionth time it happens science doesn't recognize this this is madness from the point of view of science and yet there are many phenomena which can only be explained in this way well the way this relates to psychedelics I think is that on psychedelics essentially you feel or you see the morphogenetic fields that surround objects you see the ordinary experiences time is sliced as a moment a moving moment of infinite thinness that is moving through time on psychedelics the past seems somehow present in the present and one of Sheldrake's books is called The Presence of the Past so in a way the idea that I developed the time wave is an attempt to mathematicize his conversational model of a morphogenetic field the universe to me is self-evidently moving between narrower and narrower walls that's not orthodox orthodoxy says the universe is a random walk there are no constraints there is no telos is the way a scientist would put this telos is the greek word for purpose the universe does not have a purpose we are not evolving toward some idealized future state I think we are I think that self-evidently nature conserves complexity and if you define complexity as the number of points cotangent in a system then obviously ultimate complexity is achieved when all points are cotangent with all other points and that is a state of hyper-dimensionality and I think that's what we're migrating toward that's why boundary dissolution is so important because ultimately all boundaries will be dissolved I mean we quibble about a boundary like the difference between men and women that's a political boundary the way we, the differences in which we treat men and women that's a political boundary but eventually all boundaries are destined to be dissolved the boundaries between men and women the boundaries between young and old but then the boundaries between people and nature the boundaries between plant and animal and then even more ultimate boundaries the boundary between life and death the boundary between earth and space all boundaries will be dissolved in the universal process of complexification that is leading toward all points being cotangent and the psychedelics because they give you a little bit of hyper-dimensional vision show you this cohering process which I call concrescence using the terminology that Alfred North Whitehead popularized the universe is growing toward concrescence this is an interesting idea because it's very counter what we've been taught we've been taught that the universe is basically incomprehensible unimaginable in its size we are somewhere in it very typical everything about us is typical our star is typical, our planet is typical we are typical and therefore no value should be conferred on our existence but this is just simply somebody's idea measurements have only been carried out on this planet and in this solar system and for one century so upon what basis do we generalize from these measurements to a statement about the character of the Achilleocasm it seems ridiculous I think that the presence of evolution traceable in the paleontological record of this planet and then the presence of ourselves emerging out of animal organization and moving rapidly toward a disincarnate electronic global civilization must mean that we are being channeled into deeper and deeper complexity at a faster and faster rate and when you penetrate hyperspace this is the landscape you see you see the funnel that is channeling us toward a kind of hyperdimensional nexus point beyond which we can't project because our intellectual equipment can't be pushed past that point yeah Do you envision this as what's happening until 2012? and what do you think, what's your idea of what's going to happen in 2012? all points will become cotangent in a super space can't say, not that we don't know, can't say language is not capable of describing a cotangent hyperspace will that suck over all dimensions? yeah, basically you will be everybody everybody will be you you will be everywhere you will be every when you will be every which and every when, which and where will be you all assumptions of distinctness will be illusory and so we can see this happening I mean, people are fond of saying the earth has shrunk to a point under the influence of electronic technology it's a nice way of putting it but it's just beginning the world wide web further shrinks it and when the world wide web is virtual and an implant behind your eyelids and, and, and I mean, you can carry out these fantasies for yourself coming a little bit more sooner than Tipler sees his yeah, mine's the earliest of all of the non-completely insane people or the latest of the completely insane people well, Cameron Shauman from the, the, in the end, 17000 C they, according to their prophecy which they're the direct lineage of the Inca they said that in 1995 they are coming out of the mountains because it's part of their prophecy that they will come and teach the earth how to shift into planetary consciousness which is evolving and beginning this year and then will shift into the next millennium and that the body of it will come out of North America because we have done so much destruction and also because we know how it manifests into the body that the intellect will come from Europe and that the heart and soul will come from South America and then they're coming down to teach how to begin to move into this type of consciousness well, there is, you know, there is a lot of this kind of anticipation of a great shift and I think there's more to it than simply the, the pressure the millennial turn of the calendar puts on us this garden party is over you know, there's nothing but crumpled plates and stabbed out cigarette butts in aspic now it's over, the party's over and where we're headed now is not clear but we have finished our sojourn in three-dimensional space and historical time and our technology and our dreams are about to carry us further what this means for the rest of the earth is hard to say life once left the ocean life once elaborated oxygen to the point where it threatened its own survival on the planet Dan Joy once said to me once you strip away the hype it's just another concrescence quite true, but the hype is major because, you know, we haven't seen a turning point like this since before the bust up of Pangaea and that was 275 million years ago this is bigger than that and it's mind shedding matter matter was the vehicle that could carry mind a certain distance in its self-revelation but now, clearly we have become a toxic drag on the rest of nature and it means it's time to move on the womb would like to expel this puppy into whatever hyperspace awaits us but clearly if we remain in the womb of 3 dimensional space and time we're just going to mess the joint up toxify it, wreck the oceans and ultimately pollute ourselves and everything else to death so the time has come to move on and hey, we're moving on what responsibility do we personally have as you spoke earlier, not necessarily being so optimistic that we'll be able to make it through the next... I think the responsibility that we have is to spread reasonable hope in other words, a lot of people are becoming frightened and a lot of people will be more frightened we haven't hit the white water yet it's coming but this is the long garden party before the white water and there are going to be a lot of doom sayers there's going to be a lot of ugliness like Rwanda, Bosnia, this sort of thing much reason for despair unless you have the broad picture but I think that our purpose is to educate ourselves about the situation and that when that task is completed you will be filled with hope and then to spread that hope there is no other ideology of hope on this planet Christianity is so dramatically on the ascendant because it offers otherworldly hope it denies this world it consigns it to the flames and asks you to seek salvation in some other world secular humanism and its various forms capitalism, so forth and so on offers nothing but more stuff they are willing to hasten the end in order to keep people playing deck tennis while the Titanic goes down there is no sanctionable position of hope except the belief that history is ending and that the acceleration of novelty which we see happening back and back the further back in time you go the less novel things are and the slower time moves now we have come to the place where time is moving very quickly so that by a moment in the future as near as 2012 we may traverse as much distance as we've traversed from the Big Bang to this afternoon in terms of how quickly things are going to unfold as Marx said, "man will be dirigible" it's a wonderful thing to hope for I've been fascinated with the time wave since I first heard about it but what has always bothered me is there some objective way to quantify this novelty other than by asking Terence or someone else looking at the wave to say, "well, well" "it's a big ball and obviously there was novelty at this time" "if we just look back here we find, aha, that's when Poland fell to the Germans" "can we somehow work the other way and look at a historical record" "plot out the novelty without reference to the time wave" "and then look back to the time wave and see if we were right?" the problem is, you see, that history is not a quantifiable entity there's no theory that agrees on how we quantify history I mean, do we give the War of the Roses a 10 and the 30 Years War a 42? how do we do that? I maintain that we can't scientifically prove it but we can make a very strong case because the ebb and flow of novelty continues and we can look back in the past and see that where there were vast descents into novelty, novelty certainly occurred I'm willing to go out on a limb because next year is a very dramatic descent into novelty on the time wave I'm willing to go out on a limb and say if next year doesn't deliver I'll be willing to seriously talk about cashing it in because next year is predicted by the time wave to be an enormously dramatic year and in a sense we can already see the prophecy fulfilling itself we know there will be a presidential election next year we know this society will go mad and rip itself apart for months over that we also know that there will be a presidential election in Russia next year they will probably put our act in the shade when they begin to rip their society apart a revolution in China, that would affect a third of mankind that's scheduled, that's on the menu it's possible that next year is the year when even doubters realize that global warming is upon us in other words, worldwide climate upheaval so we're going to have some if not all of those things next year and I maintain it could even be the unexpected as I said to somebody today, if the Kobe earthquake had been Tokyo the capital retraction from the rest of the world by Japanese banks would have sent us into the stone age and this gas attack it was designed to kill millions, it just happened to be botched the attack on the world trade center was designed to kill hundreds of thousands of people happened to be botched, but they're not all going to be botched the nuts are out there and so I think that what we are seeing is a recapitulation of much of the past several thousand years of history in a very compressed form as we get closer and closer to the transcendental object at the end of time and shamanism has always been the technique for anticipating and mapping this transcendental object in a pre-scientific world, you get a vocabulary that is religious there is a force in the universe, not a sparrow falls but that this force doesn't take note of it this force is love, this force created everything this force cares for us, we are its children it is calling us to return to its essence this is a religious vocabulary but in the 20th century we've gone beyond that we are no longer moving in a coinage of emotional terms we can say, you know, God is physics God is the universe trying to birth itself into a higher dimension God is the universe's appetite for self-reflective complexity coming into its fullest flower and then the distinctions between science and religion are seen to be small potatoes indeed I mean we can calculate our way towards the second coming I maintain, well this is somewhat far afield of most people's ideas of what constitutes botanical shamanism but not mine, because I think that we could have lived in the light of this gnosis and never made the descent into history that we made with the abandonment of partnership society, psychedelic religion, pastoralism and so forth we were designed to live in paradise until the coming of the kingdom but instead we fell into history, which is a kind of hell where the animal nature was able to reassert its power over the human dream and we have lived with that paradox now for some 12,000 years and it's left us fairly frazzled and sketched out, I think well, if this is what is on a macro scale happening to the human race and this goes back to the question some time ago of what should be done if this is what's happening on a fractal macrocosm then what you can do to aid this process is just accelerate your own arrival at the omega point and what that means is, psychedelicize yourself begin to deconstruct the hold over your freedom that culture, history, biology has on you and begin to experiment with the concept of yourself as a being trembling on the edge of true liberation because I think that's probably what you really are yeah what you see as you travel around the world is the dynamics between the mainstream dominator and what can be looked at as an emerging psychedelicized culture what kind of fashion do you see among this emerging culture what kind of dynamics do you see happening it's kind of a large question well, there are a lot of things going on the collapse of Marxism was really the collapse of everything because Marxism and capitalism were balanced against each other like a house of cards in the absence of any intellectual critique of capitalism capitalism is beginning to, has asserted itself with a vengeance and what we see happening in the world what the new world order is, is a new corporate order some things about it are good and some things are bad for instance, when the world was ruled by nation states driven by ideologies and remember that was as recently as seven years ago when the world was ruled by nation states driven by ideologies war was a frequent instrument of national policy racism was tolerated as a reflection of national identity nuclear arsenals and a mutual standoff in that area was tolerated suddenly now a new gang is in charge Marxism is gone racism in the institutionalized form known as apartheid is gone trade barriers are being lowered all over the world and if you look at governments in the United States, in England, in France, Germany and Japan they are universally, in Italy, they are universally characterized by being staffed and run by jackasses in other words, high caliber talent isn't going into government government is a place where the Jesse Helms of this world hang out when was the last time an official of the world bank or the international monetary fund felt the need to threaten the life of an American president it won't happen, those people are heavy hitters only a hysterical powerless yahoo would behave that way {END} Wait Time : 0.00 sec Model Load: 0.65 sec Decoding : 5.10 sec 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