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 Greetings from cyberdelic space.
 This is Lorenzo and I'm your host here in the psychedelic salon.
 And today we have William C. to thank for his donation to help pay some of the expenses here in the salon.
 So, hey, thank you very much William. I really appreciate your support.
 Now, where are we?
 Well, after last week's podcast, with what was for me a new Terrence McKenna talk,
 I just couldn't resist the temptation to begin listening to one of the tapes in the box of McKenna material
 that my friend Diana Slattery sent to me a couple of months back.
 Now, Diana and I had reconnected at the psychedelic science conference after having not seen one another for a while.
 And, in fact, I can't even remember if we were last together at Burning Man or at a salon or another conference.
 Seems like we've known each other for a long time.
 But, anyway, after talking with Diana, she said she had all these tapes of Terrence McKenna.
 She'd be happy to give to me. And so I got this big box filled with tapes from her.
 And some of them are talks that we've already heard.
 And there were a few professional recordings that were copyrighted that I didn't want to use here.
 But there were also a lot of old cassette tapes that she'd obviously recorded herself over the years.
 And it's one of those tapes that I'm going to begin the Diana Slattery phase of the McKenna material,
 for lack of a better description.
 So, hey, thanks again, Diana.
 Your years of recording and hauling these tapes around the country are finally going to pay off
 by you knowing that, quite literally, thousands of others of us are now the beneficiaries of your labors.
 Now, the first set of tapes that I digitized and will be playing this week
 is a three-tape set that's simply labeled "Shamanology, Mill Valley, 1984."
 Now, considering that this was recorded on a personal cassette player back in '84,
 I think the sound quality cleaned up pretty well, well enough to use here in the salon,
 and hopefully you'll agree.
 Now, one of my favorite things about this particular recording, by the way,
 comes right at the beginning when Terrence actually had to introduce himself
 and said that he was a philosophical gadfly and a shamanologist.
 But as you'll hear in just a moment, back in the early days of his workshops--
 and this is one of those times before--
 or it was right about the time he was becoming the persona that we now think of as Terrence McKenna.
 But back in the '80s, when there was really no World Wide Web,
 very little information on the net about psychedelics,
 he was probably the world's main source of information about psychedelic substances in general,
 and ayahuasca in particular.
 So you'll hear now how there were a lot of questions about the nuts and bolts
 of the psychedelic experience back then,
 but these are things, of course, you can find answers to now at erowid.org.
 Anyway, now let's join an intimate little group of early Terrence McKenna fans
 and hear the great bard for ourselves at a time when he was just beginning
 to become a well-known personality on the psychedelic scene.
 And keep in mind as we listen to this talk that there weren't all that many people
 who were as experienced and knowledgeable about psychedelics back then as you are today.
 You know, back in 1984--
 [laughs]
 All of a sudden I'm thinking of the George Orwell book, too.
 It's funny to say "back in 1984," but in a way doesn't it feel like we are back in 1984?
 Anyhow, back then, Terrence's workshops were probably the main source of information.
 Now compare that state of affairs to the spread of this information today,
 and I think you may agree that it was a combination of Terrence McKenna and the Internet, maybe,
 that we have to thank for the resurgence of knowledge about the role of sacred medicines
 in the formation of human civilization.
 At least that's my take on it, but enough of me.
 Now here's Terrence McKenna.
 My name is Terrence McKenna, and I'm a philosophical gadfly and shamanologist, writer and lecturer.
 [laughs]
 Ruth assured me that you were so familiar with my work that probably we could handle this meeting as a dialogue
 after a short introduction to some of the things that I'm interested in.
 So we'll attempt that.
 I'll talk for a few minutes, and then we'll see if we just can't sustain that conversation
 about the aspects of these things that interest you.
 If any of you have read The Invisible Landscape, which I am the co-author of with my brother,
 you know that it ranges over fairly hardcore chemistry and neurophysiology
 through the phenomenology of shamanism and on into a fairly extensive discussion
 of principles of ordering and being changed.
 But what I seem to find myself publicly lecturing about is the relationship of hallucinogens,
 especially plant hallucinogens, to shamanic healing in the context where use of hallucinogens
 is associated with shamanism.
 If you look at the worldwide distribution of hallucinogens, you immediately notice
 that there are several unexplained anomalies.
 Why is it that fully 80% of the world's known plant hallucinogens are concentrated in the Amazon basin,
 even though the flora of the old world jungle of Indonesia is equally rich?
 And Weston Labar and a number of people have written about this, trying to say that perhaps it is because
 the people of the Amazon are closer to the hunting and gathering pre-agricultural mode
 than anywhere else in the world.
 But for whatever reason, the peoples of the Amazon have developed the use of hallucinogens
 in Turian and shamanism to a very high degree.
 And while a number of plant species are involved in the production of these various drugs,
 the chemistry of them is more simple than the botany.
 In other words, almost all of the hallucinogens in use in the Amazon rely on a mononucleotide
 inhibition to potentiate dimethyltryptamine.
 Now, in other words, monoamine oxidase is the enzyme system in the body which degrades monoamines,
 which would be serotonin, but also any introduced monoamines, which would be all alkaloids and many drugs.
 When the monoamine oxidase is inhibited chemically, it can no longer do its job of deactivating these compounds,
 and consequently you get an accumulation of them at the synapse.
 And this is thought to be the mechanic by which the hallucinogenic experience is induced with these drugs.
 Since so many people here seem interested in curing, I think this morning I will, in these brief remarks,
 concentrate on one ethnomedical system, and then if your questions range out beyond that, that's fine.
 But I want to concentrate on this one ethnomedical system because part of what I am trying to do
 is to get researchers like yourselves to look more closely at this.
 There are a number of unanswered questions. In fact, I would say more is not known than known.
 The system that I refer to is the endemic use of ayahuasca throughout Bolivia, Peru, southern Colombia,
 portions of Ecuador and Brazil. Very briefly, ayahuasca is a combinatory drug made out of the boiled leaves
 and stems of a malfagacious woody climber called Banisteriopsis tapii,
 a huge woody vine that sometimes reaches 200 meters in length in the jungle.
 And it is boiled to make a hot water infusion, and then to this is added a small amount of the DMT-containing leaves
 of some other plant, either Banisteriopsis diplateris tabarana or Cicotria viridis.
 Now, my brother has just finished his work toward the PhD at the University of British Columbia,
 and much of what his thesis consisted of was looking at drug and plant samples that we collected in the Amazon in 1982
 when we went down there. For over 10 years, Schultes and Bo Holmstedt of the Karolinska Institute
 had published theories of the activity of ayahuasca, which stated that they believed it worked through monoamine oxidase inhibition,
 but this had never really been tested. Now it has been looked at in the laboratory
 and essentially confirmed that this is precisely what's happening.
 And it's a very interesting comment on ethnomedicine, because unlike peyote or Amanita muscaria
 or the psilocybin mushrooms of Mexico, ayahuasca is a combinatory drug. It is prepared.
 It is not simply picked and eaten. So as a consequence of this, it can be made either well or badly.
 And as a consequence of that, the personality of the shaman becomes far more important
 in the ayahuasca cult than in the cults that revolve around the use of plant drugs,
 where no preparation is involved. Now at the beginning of this, I mentioned that
 all the hallucinogenic drugs of the Amazon are based on this tryptamine-beta-carboline interaction.
 What we were doing in 1982 was looking at a much more endemic and restricted drug complex,
 which is for over 30 years there have been persistent reports in the ethnographic literature
 that there was an orally active DMT drug, which was very interesting to pharmacologists
 because there is large amounts of monoamine oxidase in the human gut,
 assumed by evolutionary biologists to be there to degrade potentially dangerous or toxic monoamines
 that might be taken in through the diet. So it's very interesting to pharmacologists
 to hear that there is an orally active DMT drug because it flies in the face of pharmacological theory.
 It should be impossible. And the pharmacologists said that if there was an orally active DMT drug,
 then it must be complexed with an MAO inhibitor to make it work.
 So what we were doing was going down there and visiting various shamans in various places,
 persuading them to make the paste for us, making voucher specimens of the plants that went into it
 and then taking the voucher specimens, the pickled material, the air-dried material,
 all of this stuff back to Canada. And our assumption was that we would pretty much confirm
 Homestead and Schulte's assertion that this drug also worked by monoamine oxidase inhibition.
 It now appears not to be so. It also appears to be...
 There are questions about the composition of the drug.
 The people who used this drug were disrupted in the 1930s.
 There was a dispute between Colombia and Peru, and when the new boundary was drawn,
 these people felt they were in the wrong country.
 They felt Peruvian, but they ended up on the Colombian side of the line.
 The Putumayo River was set as the new border, and they undertook then a kind of exodus
 in which 10,000 to 15,000 of them moved about 100 miles across the Putumayo River
 to the present center where they're located.
 And in that process, we believe that the knowledge of the drug was severely compromised.
 The reason for this is because samples of the drug that we collected north of the Putumayo River in 1971
 actually did show the presence of beta-carbolines in them,
 but samples prepared below the Putumayo River had no trace of beta-carbolines in them,
 and in fact, in bioassay, seemed--that means when we took it--
 seemed either inactive or toxic, and it's well known that the trees from which this drug is prepared
 is also the source of an arrow poison.
 And in fact, among the Yanomamo, if they are--if the men are on a hunting expedition
 and they run out of the supply of the drug,
 they are persistently reported to scrape the arrow poison off their quill arrows and to sniff that.
 So what exactly is going on is not clear.
 I think we took turns doing the bioassays with the drugs in Peru,
 and I think my brother got the most powerful and frightening sample,
 and it sounded from his account like a paralytic poison.
 He felt numbing which began around the lips and proceeded down his throat.
 His breathing became very shallow and labored.
 His mind was racing, but he couldn't move.
 There was no--there was no edetic or hypnagogic imagery.
 There was simply a massive sense of respiratory depression.
 And when he recovered from this and questioned the shaman who had made the drug,
 he saw my comment was, "But it does take getting used to."
 [laughter]
 But I'm not sure that we'll repeat the experiment.
 So I mention that because here is an unsolved problem.
 We took the best suggestion of the generation of researchers ahead of us
 and went to the Amazon and ran their suggestion to ground,
 and it appears not to--their conjecture was incorrect.
 These varolapase drugs don't work through MAO inhibition.
 So here is the continuing unsolved pharmacological problem,
 which if any of you find yourselves doing fieldwork in the Amazon,
 this is the one to bear in mind.
 The ayahuasca complex that I mentioned earlier is much more accessible
 and in fact is perhaps the most widely distributed
 psychedelic drug-taking complex in the world.
 It involves millions and millions of people who on a regular basis,
 approximately weekly, gather together,
 usually in windowless, corrugated roofed sheds and the local ayahuasquero.
 And in these areas, ayahuasquero and shaman mean the same thing.
 He leads the group in the taking of this drug.
 And a number of people come to these sessions
 because they have medical or psychological problems.
 Either is--there is no distinction made.
 Many people come to these sessions out of curiosity.
 A certain percentage come with the attitude
 that they're going to take a psychedelic drug,
 in other words, that this is a visionary experience.
 And this phenomenon of taking the drug is completely embedded in the people's lives
 and very, very efficaciously so.
 They call it la purga.
 And in fact, harmine, the main monoamine oxidase-inhibiting constituent of ayahuasca,
 actually is a strong anti-worm remedy.
 And this is important and definitely gives the people taking ayahuasca
 an adaptive leg up on everybody else
 because intestinal worms are an endemic problem in these areas.
 And I believe there's no question that if you're taking ayahuasca every couple of weeks,
 you're probably staying fairly free of this.
 The curing scenario of the ayahuasca is easily identified
 to the curing scenario of shamans worldwide.
 In other words, it consists of magical songs,
 the blowing of tobacco smoke over the body of the patient,
 the laying on of hands,
 the sucking on the afflicted part of the body
 to remove a magical object which may or may not be visible,
 the interpreting of visions, and this sort of thing.
 The ayahuasca really functions as the hierophant for these groups of country people.
 And I might say a word about the context in which all this is happening.
 Though ayahuasca is used by deep forest Indians
 and they have their own folk ways about it,
 it's really a mass phenomenon of displaced Indian and mixed mestizo population.
 What you have in the Amazon are relatively new cities,
 new if we mean by new built within this century.
 Iquitos in Peru arose first as a consequence of the rubber boom.
 Many of you who saw Herzog's film "Burden of Dreams"
 and not Fitzcarraldo got a good idea of what Iquitos is like.
 Cucaracha is a much newer city in the south of Peru
 and it's essentially 50,000 Indians have come out of the jungle
 to work in the saw mills
 and to create a tremendous pocket of syncretic foment
 where folk beliefs, shamanistic practices, languages
 are all in a state of homogenation
 and very rich, very rich for those people to live in,
 very rich to do research in.
 And it was there that we found the ayahuasquero
 who came to us to have the most, as they say in Hebrew,
 he was mimosh, he was real,
 he had a sense of existential authenticity about him
 and then in the laboratory we backed that up.
 His stuff was consistently stronger and better made than anyone else's.
 So Cat and I spent six or seven weeks with these people,
 we just moved in with them
 and we took ayahuasca as often as we could arrange to do
 which was at least once a week and sometimes twice a week
 and we can attest to its curative powers
 because the peaks of ayahuasca taking
 were interspersed with the trenches of salmonella infection
 and each time we got salmonella
 we would ask the shaman to move up the next ayahuasca taking day
 and that would give us about three days grace
 before the next bout of salmonella.
 It was a terrific problem.
 If you know what it is, you know what I mean.
 If you don't, you're lucky.
 So I can answer questions about this on many different levels.
 I guess before I open it for discussion,
 since so many of you seem to be interested in curing,
 I should describe and maybe Cat can help us with our impression
 of what is going on in the curing.
 Naturally, well, you have to talk about psychedelic drugs.
 I think the word psychedelic is maybe too broad
 because it includes things which are very different from each other.
 It can include things as different as ketamine and mescaline
 and certainly the tryptamine intoxication,
 if we can use that word advisedly,
 is very distinct from the intoxication
 or the immersion in the phenomenology of LSD or mescaline,
 something like that.
 In our cultural context, DMT is almost never encountered
 and when it is encountered, it is usually smoked
 and it's very, very brief.
 It onsets in about 45 seconds.
 It lasts 100 to 300 seconds and then it fades in a few minutes
 and it's this tremendously intense visual hallucinogen.
 Very difficult, in fact, to imagine anything more intense than that.
 Now, psilocybin, which is the active hallucinogen in mushrooms,
 is 4-phosphoryloxy-NM-dimethyltryptamine.
 It's well understood that the phosphoryl group is removed
 as it crosses the blood-brain barrier.
 This turns it into psilocin, 5-hydroxy-NM-dimethyltryptamine,
 I mean 4-hydroxy-NM-dimethyltryptamine,
 and this is very close to serotonin,
 so close that it's reasonable to assume that these compounds
 are competing for the same sites of activity at the synapse.
 Now, though psilocybin cannot be directly changed into DMT,
 it's a two-step process,
 the structural affinities of them are very clear.
 What seems to be happening in ayahuasca is a very small amount of DMT
 and a lot of MAO inhibitors being used to activate it,
 and I should talk about these MAO inhibitors in ayahuasca.
 They are harmine, harmaline, tetrahydroharman,
 the family of compounds known as beta-carbolines.
 Now, beta-carbolines are psychoactive in their own right,
 but not hallucinogenic.
 Some of you may know the work of Claudio Naranjo,
 who used harmine and harmaline in therapy,
 but if you study his work on the subject very carefully,
 it becomes clear that fully half of all the human descriptions
 of the psychoactivity of beta-carbolines come from one subject,
 and massive doses had to be given.
 They were giving 10 milligrams per kilogram in some cases
 to elucidate even low edetic activity behind closed eyelids.
 So to call it a hallucinogen is perhaps a misnomer.
 One of the things that my brother discovered that seems fascinating to me
 is that in in vitro systems, meaning in test tubes,
 ayahuasca brews that we brought from the Amazon
 were found to be a million times stronger for MAO inhibition
 than they needed to be,
 and he diluted these things to one millionth the strength
 that the people were taking them in the Amazon
 who were still getting 80% MAO inhibition.
 So what seems to be happening, if we can extrapolate from in vitro to in vivo,
 is that they are way overdoing the amount of MAO inhibitor you need
 and just barely sidling up to enough tryptamine
 to potentiate the hallucinogenic activity.
 When you take ayahuasca, first after about 30 minutes,
 you feel a kind of calmative effect,
 which if you've taken a large amount of it,
 can actually become almost the beginnings of a light anesthesia.
 And then in darkness, under the influence of these iteros,
 these magical songs, the hypnagogia begins to weave itself,
 and it is not sharp-edged, bright, geometric kinds of hallucinations.
 It's much more, as he says in his thesis,
 the colors of the forest floor, rich ochres, olive drabs,
 warm browns, dusty oranges,
 all very impressionistically put together
 and very much subject to audio control.
 The iteros, the magical songs, are actually technical tools
 for controlling the fabric of the hallucination.
 And this is very interesting to me,
 because as some of you may know who have heard me lecture before,
 I'm interested in the effect of these things on the language centers
 and the relationship of visual modalities to spoken modalities.
 And definitely this is what's happening in ayahuasca.
 The songs are being used to control the visions.
 Perhaps this is what's happening in peyote circles as well.
 I don't have great familiarity with that,
 but I do know that there's great stress on attaining these magical songs,
 which are not produced from the ego.
 They are spontaneous outbursts of linguistic order
 that affect the visual cortex and control the fabric of the hallucinations.
 And the shaman can use this to, in his own language,
 to look into the body.
 He can see into the body.
 And I would say of ayahuasca it's the most,
 I don't want to say health-oriented,
 but it's definitely somatically oriented.
 You feel how you feel on it,
 and you see into yourself,
 and you can actually direct energy in a visual way
 that is way more intense than mere metaphor.
 And if a person such as myself can do this,
 you can imagine someone who's given their life to manipulating these states,
 how intense it must be.
 And they see into the body,
 and they direct sound into the body,
 and by this means energy blockages can be broken up,
 diseases diagnosed,
 psychological conditions addressed,
 all kinds of things go on.
 And our attitude in looking at this
 was not the attitude of representatives of a superior culture
 studying the quaint folkways of preliterate peoples.
 It seems very clear that this health-care delivery system
 is very effective, perhaps more effective than our own,
 especially in the treating of psychological disorders,
 of which there are a number in Peru
 that only these populations are subject to.
 I am not an anthropologist or a sociologist,
 and not particularly interested in phenomenological descriptions of these things.
 I really believe that there is a potential impact on our own society from all of this,
 that if we could understand what was happening,
 we would have a much better chance of being able to orient our own health-care delivery system
 to be more effective.
 A friend of ours, an anthropologist who lives in Finland,
 Lewis Luna, who showed his film in Vancouver last year,
 he is completely convinced that the real mastery of ayahuasca
 lays in following a very rigorous diet,
 which the deep forest ayahuasqueros use,
 and this may be true.
 I mean, definitely beta-carbolines are endogenously produced in human metabolism.
 So are beta-carbolines, and so are tryptamines.
 And the peculiar diet in the Amazon anyway,
 which is high starch, low protein, high sugar,
 very few green vegetables kind of diet,
 predisposed these people to accessing ayahuasca more easily.
 Kat had no trouble getting off when we were being dosed down there.
 I had more trouble, and I think it was simply a matter of the ratio of the compound to body weight.
 I was definitely the largest person in any of these sessions,
 and the same amount is doled out to each person,
 and you're not in a context where you can say,
 "I'd like to take more, please."
 You just have to go with what's going on.
 But we also, our informant prepared several bottles of ayahuasca for us,
 and in a series of experiments in the United States, when we got back,
 we verified that it is not only a hallucinogen,
 but it can be a terrifyingly intense hallucinogen
 if errors in dosage are made.
 It can be, well, I said after I made my error of dosage,
 I never hoped to be more stoned than that.
 So that's what I offer to you as interesting, perhaps to you in your own field.
 You must be aware that I have other wrinkles,
 the extraterrestrial angle, the end of history angle, several different things,
 but all of these things were inspired by our belief
 that these Amazon peoples have a technology for exploring the modalities of the unconscious
 that is centuries ahead of us.
 I mean, we are at the very beginning of exploring the unconscious.
 The Freudian and Jungian models, which you can think of the Freudian model
 as embedded like a black dot in the center of the Jungian bullseye,
 each theory of the unconscious claims more and more territory as its own.
 But what I have become convinced of from using these hallucinogenic drugs
 is that the major portion of the unconscious has very little to do with human beings.
 It is simply a modality, an interior landscape,
 and large portions of it are not human.
 You could almost make the cybernetic metaphor of ROM portions of the unconscious.
 ROM stands for read-only memory.
 This means that if you have a computer with read-only memory,
 you can read what is in that section of memory,
 but you cannot change it or input into it.
 And I believe there are read-only portions of memory
 that no human being has ever inputted into.
 So they bear no trace of humanness, but they can be contemplated.
 And this is the idea of the alien other,
 a tension that appears in modern society.
 It has appeared before, for instance, in Hellenistic society.
 As techniques are developed for exploring consciousness,
 these transhuman, nonhuman dimensions slowly come into view.
 It appears to be a co-equal dimension of existential validity,
 which our cultural and linguistic programming has blinded us to rather severely.
 Now, of course, we're returning to look at it again
 in the larger context of the entire intellectual thrust of the 20th century
 being an effort to recapture and understand archaic forms of thought.
 This is why our fascination with the unconscious, with drugs, with shamanism,
 with the forms of art like cubism and this sort of thing,
 because we are trying to give ourselves cultural balance
 by harking back to a time, umilio tempore, a sacral time, a time before history.
 And these drugs are the means to do that, properly understood.
 Our problems on this end are simply the baggage of cultural and legal
 and conventional assumptions about what these things are.
 I think there's a great deal to be learned from these shamanic societies and conventions.
 However, I'm not a... I call myself a shamanologist
 to set myself aside from the people who claim to be shaman.
 Shamans.
 I don't... I think that there's a great deal to be learned from shamanism,
 but that there is a great deal that can be extrapolated from it,
 that we need to create our own shamanism, and that we will.
 When you're sitting in these cult huts in utter darkness
 with people vomiting and singing and undergoing these things,
 and you are still trying to perform the edetic reduction,
 still thinking about Husserl and Heidegger and Heintzell,
 you realize that your mental insides are too different to ever stand in their shoes.
 You have to make your own shoes.
 So let's talk about all this.
 But then you said that mushrooms are metabolized into chitinine-type stuff,
 and so I wasn't clear as to...
 No, well, either I wasn't clear or you misunderstood me.
 What...
 So, mescaline, which is the active constituent of peyote, is not a tryptamine.
 It's a kind of amphetamine.
 Oh, no, I meant mushrooms.
 Mushrooms.
 Psilocybin is an interesting compound.
 It is the only four-substituted indolepamine that occurs in nature.
 So it's unique.
 And in another context, this is one of the reasons we were led to suggest
 that it might be an extraterrestrial gene inserted from the outside,
 because you just don't get single instances of a compound occurring in organic nature.
 Serotonin, for instance, which is very closely related to psilocybin,
 occurs in everything from planaria to man.
 It occurs virtually in all known living systems.
 Psilocybin only is known to occur in a very limited number of fungi.
 It is a phosphorylated tryptamine.
 The tryptamines, then, that occur in the virolas in these trees used to make the paste
 or in the admixture plants of ayahuasca,
 these are not phosphorylated tryptamines.
 These are things like an endomethyltryptamine itself
 and 5-methoxy-MEO.
 The emphasis of progroup is stripped off.
 No, it was never there in those cases.
 No, no, I mean in Russia it's stripped off, it's metabolized.
 So is the end result of subjective experiences similar between psilocybin and ayahuasca?
 Yes, they are very, very similar, with one exception, I think.
 Maybe more.
 The major difference is that unlike psilocybin,
 psilocybin has one very curious property, which is that it seems animate.
 You contact an organized intellect of some sort very easily.
 It speaks to you.
 I've compared it to the logos of Hellenistic syncretism.
 It seems to be a psychic component not under the control of the ego.
 And this is very curious, frightening to some people.
 When I was with Albert Hoffman at that Entheogen conference in Santa Barbara,
 I asked him, you know, he discovered LSD and he characterized psilocybin,
 and I asked him which he preferred to take,
 and he said he preferred LSD, and I said why,
 and he said there's something too animate about psilocybin.
 And closer questioning showed that this was unsettling to him.
 It's too much like the orthodox notion of madness.
 Having a dialogue with an independent voice in your head
 is quite unsettling to a certain sort of person, I think.
 And you don't have the same experience with ayahuasca.
 It teaches. Do you want to say something?
 Yes, I think that ayahuasca has the feeling of some kind of energy in it as well,
 but it doesn't particularize like the little creatures who can come at you
 and bombard you or whatever, and psilocybin is sort of more a mark that's very large and very gentle.
 And so if mine had experiences where, I think Dennis did as well,
 where I was led through the forest by someone so much bigger than me that I couldn't see him or her,
 but taught about the plants along the way and the jungle, what they were,
 or once I saw a huge hand dangling above my head that was all black with jewels in the crevices,
 and that's just that kind of entity.
 Not frightening, though. I didn't ever find that frightening.
 The rushing, the coming of it at the beginning when people vomit,
 when they have a very strong seasickness, that's what they call it,
 when they have a very strong seasickness at the beginning, that's scary.
 Thank you so much.
 And you quake, and they seem to encourage that.
 For instance, this shed where we would do it had a corrugated roof and no windows,
 but it was up on short stilts.
 The shaman would stand up and put his hands in front of him and tremble,
 and he would transmit this trembling into the floor and shake the entire building.
 And several times, the protocol is when you feel that you're going to vomit,
 you just go outside and vomit, and people are coming and going all the time.
 We didn't vomit that much, which was very puzzling to them.
 They really stress vomiting, and they identify the vomiting with the purgative effects of it,
 and when we would not vomit, they'd say, "Oh, you must live very cleanly.
 You must be in very good shape."
 But actually, all that was happening, I think, was that we were following the rules they laid down,
 and they were not.
 Like they would say, you know, "Never eat pork before doing it.
 Don't eat anything for six hours before doing it.
 No salt, no alcohol."
 And we would do this and be fine, and they would just be--
 Even the shaman would be--
 --kicking out ten different ways and getting sick.
 But the entity in ayahuasca, it teaches by showing.
 The visions teach.
 The thing in psilocybin is much more puzzling.
 I mean, it's a harangue.
 You actually have, you know, psychic arm wrestling
 with somebody who wants to--who loves controversy and rhetoric
 and is well able to express itself and present itself.
 That's a very puzzling thing that could lead one far afield
 if you sought a reasonable explanation.
 So those are the major differences, I think.
 I think ayahuasca lends itself to be a better healing drug than psilocybin
 because it is gentler, because you can still communicate with the other people.
 It's very close.
 It's like this number of people in this smaller space, you know,
 and you can--it can flow back and forth,
 whereas psilocybin, through the experience, you know, it just sort of blasts off.
 So maybe you can do personal healing on psilocybin,
 but collective healing, I think, ayahuasca is really beautiful.
 It's so beautiful.
 It's very Earth-centered.
 I mean, even taking ayahuasca up where we live in Sonoma County,
 immediately as it comes on, it's about sunlight on brown water,
 huge twining--in other words, it creates the jungle.
 It is the jungle in some strange way.
 The psilocybin entity is Gnostic.
 It points to the center of the galaxy.
 It talks about ending history.
 It's full of a sense of crisis and the need for activity and humor,
 but this intense desire for change, it is not a drug of acceptance, you know.
 It wants transformation of a very radical sort.
 The ayahuasca seems to create--to integrate, especially into that environment.
 You know, the major alkaloid fraction of ayahuasca is harmin,
 which was a beta-carboline, which was first isolated from Syrian rue,
 the giant Syrian rue, pergamen harmala, and that's why it's called harmin.
 Before enough was known about the compound to realize--the compound in ayahuasca--
 to realize that it was the same as the compound in pergamen harmala,
 it was called telepathine,
 because the early explorers, Viva Ascensio and Koch-Gruenberg
 in the early years of the century,
 reported that the people were inducing states of mass telepathy,
 and there is some reason to think that this might be true in some sense.
 In other words, these people live in a state of semi-telepathy anyway.
 If you can imagine a hunting-gathering tribe of 30 people
 moving through a vast rainforest with their children and their elders,
 the notion of the super-expressed individual that we take for granted is not really there.
 There is more a sense of the unity of the group.
 Then, when the elders get together and take ayahuasca,
 there is a kind of melding together to obtain consensus
 and also information impossible to obtain any other way.
 For instance, weather information.
 Shamanism is always related to weather prophecy,
 and it's always been assumed that this was just a wing and a prayer,
 or that they were super-sensitized to environmental clues about weather change.
 But also things like game movement.
 This is very important to know.
 And for all of these things, ayahuasca was invoked and used.
 I want to go back to something you said about the personality of mushrooms.
 I think it's an interesting political comment that mushrooms should be growing here in this country,
 which is so apathetic and we need to kick in the ass to do something,
 that we don't have a more gentle type of drug here in the country.
 And also we don't have a collective format to use it in.
 People have to experiment individually and gradually to get a decision.
 Two things.
 Let's see.
 One is, you described to me your brother's experience,
 reminded me of Michael Harner's description of his ayahuasca experience.
 And he said, after I guess going through a kind of death-like experience,
 that that's why he called it the Little Death.
 And the other thing was that he said that in their preparation of ayahuasca,
 there was some tree deterrent.
 Did you find that?
 Tree deterrents, arboreal deterrents in the subfamily Brugmansia,
 are used in certain areas rarely and not in these public gatherings of people.
 Tropane alkaloids are notoriously difficult to control,
 and that would be more within a context of brujería, of real sorcery and witchcraft,
 but generally tends to be more montane, a phenomenon of the mountains,
 especially around the valley of the Sibundoy and those places.
 We never--we grew Brugmansias and have them, of course,
 but we never combined it with ayahuasca because knowing just what the tropanes are like on their own,
 it seemed very dangerous.
 You know, some tropanes make you sweat and your heart race.
 Other tropanes make you fall asleep and your body temperature drops and your respiration falls,
 and it just seemed like a dangerous area.
 There are a number.
 One of the interesting chemical frontiers of all this is these admixtures.
 In other words, you have the basic ayahuasca, the boiled stems of Banisteriopsis capi.
 Normally what's added to that are the leaves of Cicotria viridis,
 a rubiaceous bush related to coffee, which has a great deal of DMT in the leaves.
 In the northern part of the range where this drug is being made,
 where it is called not ayahuasca but yaje,
 Brunfelsias, which are also solanaceous plants with very high molecular weight tropanes
 that have defied characterization.
 They are sometimes used, but we knew Tim Plowman,
 and he's the only non-Indian person ever to take Brunfelsia,
 and his description of it, it sounded like, you know, his life hung in the balance for 36 hours,
 and he didn't know whether he would make it or not.
 So we didn't go too deeply into that.
 What we did do was we always asked our informants what other plants are sometimes used in ayahuasca,
 and they would usually name them, and we would collect vouchers of nine unusual admixture plants
 that we collected only one, a menosperm, which is this very small family of plants.
 A menosperm, our Butygrandifolia, was definitely alkaloid positive,
 and there's more work to be done there.
 But this technology of admixtures is very interesting and not well understood,
 and that kind of thing could be worked out up here in the laboratory
 if you could get and grow all these things.
 Also, there was that area where the question about mixtures hasn't really been asked yet, right?
 That's right.
 But people could go and investigate and learn.
 Andy Weil was saying that he felt that the significance of the admixtures
 had to do with the synergistic effect of the multiple alkaloids,
 and it made an incredible amount of difference to the person who was going through this thing.
 Yes. Well, that's a weaker way of saying what I said.
 I mean, ayahuasca is not effective without an admixture.
 It's an odd experience, but it's not an effective trance-inducing compound
 or visionary compound without an admixture.
 You have to have it.
 Could you contrast what you've been saying with the muscaria?
 Amanita muscaria?
 Well, that's an entirely different situation.
 For those of you who aren't familiar with it, I'll review it briefly.
 Amanita muscaria is a mushroom that has a mycorrhizal relationship to birch trees
 that is distributed throughout the world at altitudes above 5,000--
 well, no, actually it occurs at sea level, too.
 But anyway, it is highly variable, both geographically and seasonally.
 And in Siberia, in the Amur River Basin, the Yakut shamans
 and a couple of other tribes have utilized this for a long, long time.
 Gordon Wasson wrote a book in which he tried to suggest
 that amanita muscaria may have been the basis of the Vedic hallucinogen soma.
 The problem with amanita muscaria, which he freely admitted,
 is it is very hard to get satisfyingly loaded on it.
 It is not consistent, and we don't know--
 there have been various suggestions made that you must roast it over a fire
 to create a change in its chemistry, that it must be pounded with milk curd.
 Apparently, readings of the Vedas seem to suggest that whatever soma was,
 it was pounded with milk curd.
 People have even come forth with chemical theories to show
 that the active agent in amanita muscaria, which is muscamole,
 is very closely related to the active toxin in amanita muscaria,
 muscarine.
 You can decarboxylate muscarine to muscamole using the enzymes in sour milk.
 So it might be possible to incubate amanita muscaria in sour milk
 and turn the toxin into more of the active agent.
 Is that also toxic?
 Well, any--I mean, sure, you have with any alkaloid or what's called an LD50,
 which is the horrifying concept that--
 I don't need to go into that.
 One thing on other mushrooms, often in the specific reaction of the person
 relates to their own biochemistry,
 and especially what they've eaten within the last 48 hours before you ingest it,
 you can get semi-toxic effects from certain mushrooms.
 For example, if you drink wine, even very common ones like Morel's,
 that it varies from person to person.
 So that could be an additional factor, too.
 That's right. There's a lepiotis species, which if you eat it, it's perfectly harmless.
 But if you have very much alcohol in your system, it's fatal and irreversible.
 Another thing to bear in mind is that there are a number of monoamine oxidase inhibitors
 that occur in foods.
 Certain foods are high in these things.
 For instance, soft cheeses, bries, and camomile are just loaded with tyramine,
 which is a monoamine oxidase inhibitor.
 This is why certain antipsychotic drugs,
 this is an admonition that they must not be given.
 And I think it would be murder to take ayahuasca
 on top of a typical diet of camembert and brie.
 Fortunately, these things are unknown in the Amazon.
 In Berkeley, they're a real hard time.
 Yes, in Berkeley, it would be tricky to keep track of yourself.
 But I definitely felt when we were in the Amazon,
 the diet is so strange and you cannot avoid it
 because everything you carry in goes on your back
 or on the back of an Indian who you are paying,
 and it may not seem like much, but over days and days.
 So there's always an effort to eat off the land.
 And my God, you know, if you've never been in a tropical jungle,
 people have the notion about a tropical jungle that it's just full of food,
 wonderful things to eat, all these plants and things.
 But you see, the Amazon has been above water 220 million years.
 That's 220 million years of uninterrupted evolution
 of a tropical ecosystem with ample water supply.
 So that means every ecological niche is occupied.
 Protein is at such a premium that there is no protein.
 You could starve to death in the Amazon.
 There is no protein.
 Chambers, who's the world's expert on the tropical rainforest,
 estimates that in the Amazon, 96% of all utilizable organic material
 at any given moment is in the living system.
 In other words, only 4% of the organic material
 is not at any one given time in an organic system.
 What that means in practical terms is that a leaf falls.
 Ten minutes later, it's gone.
 The leaf cutting ends, the this, the that, it just sucks it right up, you know.
 And minerals in free suspension in rainwater,
 they estimate the average flow distance of an ion in rainwater
 is something like a centimeter before it's uptaken into a living system.
 So there is no food in the Amazon.
 And this is one of the reasons why coca is so popular.
 Coca in the Amazon is not a drug.
 It's one, a food, and two, an appetite depressant.
 And this is what they are, you know,
 and people, no matter how deeply you go into the Amazon,
 people are outraged at the notion that coca could be thought a drug.
 A drug is something bad.
 Coca is wonderful, you know.
 So it's a very tight ecosystem with very little elaboration of protein.
 And that's why the search for food plants has been so intense,
 and perhaps why so many drug plants have been discovered,
 because every single thing has been tested again and again
 for its effect as a food, a poison, a hallucinogen,
 because everything is to be utilized.
 When you mentioned the use of the magic songs
 and the directing of the group experience in the Amazon,
 you mentioned that you're interested in the relationship
 between the visual experience and language.
 Do you think that it's the linguistics, per se,
 or do you think it's sound, I mean, as in frequency,
 versus linguistics in terms of semantics,
 that has the guiding power?
 Do you have a feeling for that distinction?
 Well, is it possible for a human being to make sounds
 which do not reflect syntactical deep structure of language?
 I mean, in other words, we're so hardwired for language
 that in any extended vocalizing, a Chomskyite would be able to come
 and find the linguistic structure of it.
 I'm not sure.
 I think this is a really interesting question
 because you have input through the senses.
 You have one sense per sector which is geared to transduce audio input,
 and one which is set to transduce visual input.
 But it's probably something about the way these perceptual systems have evolved
 that they divide the incoming input.
 Actually, all that's happening is that you're moving through
 a multileveled wave system of various kinds of inputs
 which you are transducing into tactility, vision, and sound.
 I think this is a very interesting area for research.
 Just recently, someone sent me an article
 which I thought was very, very suggestive.
 It occurred in no less respectable a place than Martin Gardner's
 or the amateur scientist's column in Scientific American.
 But they were pointing out in there that if you can sustain
 a 100 hertz hum with your voice,
 you can actually make an electric fan appear to slow down and stop.
 You can also cause roll lines to appear on a TV set.
 Now, what exactly is happening here?
 It isn't that the fan slows down or that the roll lines appear on the TV.
 The scientific explanation which they put forth was
 that a well-sustained 100 hertz hum actually vibrates your eyeballs
 so that they become like strobes and you can freeze motion
 and you can slow things down and start them up again.
 Other people aren't able to perceive it.
 No, other people don't perceive it, but you perceive it.
 It tells--there were anecdotes about airplane mechanics
 who can look at a spinning propeller and tell if it's flawed
 by jerking their head back and forth very quickly.
 And this is very interesting because here is a way to use your voice
 to control your visual input and to actually gain secret information.
 If we had written a secret word on that propeller,
 you could win bets in a bar.
 So I think this needs to be looked into.
 What can we learn about the world by subjecting our bodies
 to different kinds of self-generated vibrations?
 And, you know, without the backup of someone like Martin Gardner,
 I'm sure people would dismiss a rap like that as pure fancy, utterly preposterous.
 The guy who wrote the article said it was very hard for him.
 He didn't have perfect pitch.
 It was very hard for him to maintain this 100 hertz hum.
 So what he did was he got a wave generator which would perfectly generate the hum,
 and then he modified a football helmet so that he could strap it to his stereo speaker
 so he would rest his chin on his speaker and run this thing up to 100 hertz
 and then stop the motion of the fan.
 Well, this is just an example of peripheral human abilities that we have not explored.
 I'm sure you all on LSD have experienced the time-smearing effect of motion
 where you move your hand and it just leaves it hanging there in all of its stages,
 and people will say, well, your retinas are simply not quenching the previous image.
 There's some problem in the something or other.
 But the effect is to smear the psyche in time
 because the psyche is defined largely by the way the sensory inputs are interpreted.
 So I think these linguistic phenomena are very suggestive of special abilities.
 I have said many times, you've probably all heard me say it,
 Philo Judeus, who was an exact contemporary of Christ, born before, died after,
 was on a bug about what he called the more perfect logos,
 and he said the more perfect logos will be beheld rather than heard,
 but it will go from being heard to being seen without ever crossing over a quantized point of division.
 Now, that suggests that hearing and seeing are just two ends of a continuum
 and that your eyes slot you into part of that spectrum, your ears slot you into another,
 but that it's really a continuing spectrum.
 And the evolution of this more perfect logos is my hope for psilocybin,
 that this can become an experience for people, a kind of ersprach.
 You may be aware of Robert Graves' book The White Goddess,
 where he talks about a perfect poetic language that predates history,
 a language of poetry so intense that to hear it was to understand it.
 It required no conventionalizing of cultural context and dictionary.
 It was so laden with existential validity that to hear it was to understand it.
 We have very few articulations like that left.
 Perhaps moans, screams, and howls are the only words.
 I think the Icaros.
 The Icaros.
 And they're in varied Peruvian Indian dialects,
 and yet when you're taking ayahuasca and they're taking it and singing them,
 you can understand them even though you've never heard the language before.
 Did you get validation from the other people?
 Yes, all of us who couldn't understand the language all felt very deeply
 that we were having images which jive with each other that we were getting.
 And did they then jive with the images that the people--
 That's harder.
 It's hard for them to talk about that, those people,
 because they are magical tongues.
 They don't analyze them in non-magical time.
 Did you get any cross-validation?
 Yes, yes, we did.
 We had--back to you talking about telepathic aspects
 of the telepathic moments.
 It had to do with the song to meditate the vision.
 But we all recognized at one point--
 we and the environment outside all recognized the encroaching presence of death,
 some kind of death element that was just outside the building.
 The baby cried, the dog howled, the clouds went over the moon,
 and everybody got a big chill.
 I just did.
 And the shaman jumped up and commanded all of us in a way to go with him
 and then began hooting it away.
 And it took some minutes, and then it was gone in one moment.
 Everyone just laid back and he decided to leave.
 That was a very telepathic moment that was not conducted in any language
 common to everyone there.
 What was your experience when you took it after having Samanala?
 And what experience that will connect to having had Samanala?
 You mean just what did it feel like when you'd have Samanala and then take ayahuasca?
 Yeah, I'm wondering if there were things that you experienced during the ayahuasca trance
 that for you definitely connected to having Samanala and resulting in the--
 Oh, yes, traveling through your organs, traveling through your bloodstream,
 being in your stomach and your gut, recognizing, like on a tiny level,
 being a molecule, traveling through, seeing the little yellow enemies or whatever,
 all of those things happen, the healing on that level, you can do it yourself very well.
 And it just felt like it just flushed it all out, like the awareness,
 the deep awareness that you got in ayahuasca made all the bad invaders go away.
 And then they would be gone until we ate the food.
 It's very much like what palatarians do in the UC in their behavioral medicine clinic,
 but they're not using drug-induced trance as meditation.
 Yes.
 Yes.
 I wonder if you'd comment on the relationship of what you're talking about to psychedelic synesthesia,
 let's say things like LSD.
 You mean by psychedelic synesthesia, you mean fusing of the sensorium under psychedelic drugs?
 The initiation of a visual phenomenon by sound.
 You mean do I think that happens on LSD?
 I mean analogous to what you're talking about in ayahuasca.
 Yes, pretty much, except that it's controllable, you know.
 And in fact, that's almost too restrictive a term.
 It isn't that the sound controls the visions, it's that the sound is the vision.
 And if you want to change the vision, you must change the sound.
 And so you actually can take control.
 Ayahuasca is wonderfully suggestive and can be led in a way that these other things sometimes can't be.
 For instance, one of the most puzzling things that it can do is that you can suggest a motif, for instance, Art Deco,
 and it will just go to that and flood you with millions and millions and millions of objects,
 all perfectly exemplifying this very constrained artistic style.
 And then you can say, no, attic vases, let's do attic vases, thousands of them, more than there must be.
 And then you can say, okay, now do one that now surprised me.
 And it will produce an equally aesthetically coherent stream of images that are not referent to any historical period.
 And this raises questions, you know, what is fashion? What is style?
 What are these collective image systems which come out of nowhere, gain great power, and then fade away?
 And how is it that a drug can command them out of the single human mind?
 What does it mean that on a psychedelic drug one person can see more art in an hour than the species has produced in 10,000 years?
 What does that say about how effectively we are accessing our souls?
 It means, I mean, the potential then is so great.
 I mean, you prove it to yourself, you know.
 I mean, it's very frustrating to imagine that that kind of beauty, those depths of ecstatic revelation,
 are that accessible to the individual and so totally hidden from us as a group.
 How can the potential be kept in our time?
 By evolving language, by recognizing that reality is created by language
 and no longer accepting the natural evolution of language,
 but actually going to work to evolve language ever more rapidly so that we can communicate these modalities.
 I think that's a lot of what's happening here,
 and it's a kind of means of trying to put together someone who's expressing these experiences
 that doesn't totally violate them and rip them apart.
 It's a very long process creating a new language.
 You mentioned at one point transcending the ego,
 what some of these people experience,
 whether they're in a specific healing event for each person
 or a collective event that happens when you get off.
 I ask this because I think it's very intimately connected with what you just mentioned here,
 that's to do with evolution of language and the tapping of our potential has to do with transcending the ego.
 Transcending the ego and its expectation and its linguistic set, mainly.
 And its control over what we experience.
 Yes, language has not been examined enough, it seems to me.
 All the argument over man's place in nature and that sort of thing doesn't take cognizance of the fact
 that if you want a miracle, then language is the thing to look at,
 because we know that our genetic component is only 3% or something removed from chimpanzees and this and that.
 But this thing that we do with sound and meaning is of an ontologically different order.
 And I am not sympathetic with the people who want to blur the distinctions
 and say that dolphins talk, ants talk, bees talk.
 They may communicate, but this is a very different thing what man is able to do,
 because for 50,000 years or so, the species has not been evolving in the somatype.
 Somatype is relatively steady.
 What is evolving is culture and what culture is, really, is language.
 Culture is merely the epiphenomenal accompaniment of language.
 So it is the evolution of language that is changing.
 And all our ontological, all our religious ontologies in the Western tradition,
 the insistence on the coming of the word into the world, the word becoming flesh,
 in a sense, man is the word become flesh.
 And what all this leads to, I'm not sure.
 I often like to think that our map of the world is so wrong
 that where we have centered physics, we should actually place literature
 as the central metaphor that we want to work out from.
 Because I think literature occupies the same relationship to life that life occupies to death.
 And I don't think very many people have thought of it in those--
 You might. Elaborate, please, on that one.
 It's a true testimony of a word for it.
 Well, in the sense that a book is life with one dimension pulled out of it.
 And life is something which lacks a dimension which death will give it.
 I imagine death to be a kind of release into the imagination
 in the sense that for characters in a book,
 what we experience is an unimaginable dimension of freedom.
 And this is why people like James Joyce,
 though arcane and difficult to pierce, seem to me central to understanding this.
 Because they're saying something about the relationship of books, reality, and death.
 That this is a cycle of expansion and understanding that is happening through language.
 At one time there were no books.
 I think what you're saying is extremely perceptive.
 At the same time, I think there's a meta problem with it,
 which is that if you take a metaphor of literature,
 what you've done is you do the same thing that we're doing all the time,
 which is trying to abstract one element that is the central metaphor.
 It seems to me the central problem we're in is that it's very difficult for us
 to give equal emphasis to all possible metaphors,
 all possible physical metaphor, biological metaphor, psychological literary metaphor.
 The problem is we focus too much on one thing.
 We're unable to express, well, not unable,
 but having great difficulty expressing a totality.
 Well, see, what you want is a theory of being true to experience.
 And what we have by centering physics is a theory of being true to itself.
 Meaning physics doesn't contradict itself.
 They go to great pains to make sure that doesn't happen.
 On the other hand, the models that it offers bear no relationship to anything.
 Anybody can see, experience, know, or understand.
 So somehow an explanatory vehicle was chosen, which explains something,
 but nothing with any immediacy.
 Well, what I'm saying is to draw in other things,
 but not to push out the quantum physics model,
 but to integrate all of them so that you've got a more comprehensive view
 and not trying to select one over the other.
 Yes, but you want it to be true to experience.
 And the entire set of objects manipulated by physics are unseen, unknown.
 I mean, to take as simple an object in physics as the electron,
 it seems more remote than the resurrected Christ to me.
 And yet by invoking those notions, we've then created them.
 You don't want to try and find further and further particles.
 We created them. That's right.
 Do these new creations then reflect back on experience?
 Do we learn then to be better people or more at ease with ourselves?
 And it seems the answer is no.
 We just unlock more and more demonic levels of power.
 But that's the contradiction that physics produces in itself,
 you know, how they're trying to find a unified field theory for it.
 But what we need is a unified social theory so that we don't cause our extinction.
 You're listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
 where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
 A uniform social theory so that we don't cause our extinction.
 Now, hey, that's something that, as Terence said,
 we should have our best people working on.
 And I guess that is exactly what you are doing right now.
 So press on.
 Just be sure that it includes having some fun,
 because sometimes these head trips can wear us out, don't you think?
 Now, since you may not remember it from one of my earlier podcasts,
 but at least once before I've mentioned the story that Paul Stamets told
 about the Amanita muscaria mushrooms.
 I wish I had permission to tell the whole story of how he learned this fact,
 because it's one of the funniest mushroom stories I've heard.
 But the bottom line is that apparently the active ingredient in the Amanita
 is not always equally distributed in the cap.
 As I remember the story, you could have three quarters of a mushroom cap be totally inactive,
 but the other one quarter could knock your socks off.
 And, of course, you can find a lot more about this at arrowid.org,
 should you be interested, arrowid.org.
 Now, rather than add any more of my own comments right now,
 I'm going to first pass along a couple of announcements,
 and then get on with the editing of the next tape in this series
 and see if I can get it out before another week passes.
 But here is part of an email I received from Brian Duffy,
 and I think it may be of interest to some of our fellow sauners, maybe even to you.
 Here's part of what Brian had to say.
 "I am an avid follower of the Psychedelic Salon podcast and a big fan of Terrence McKenna.
 After listening to dozens of hours of tapes and reading all of his books,
 I started to wonder why none of his fellow scholars had attempted any sort of big Terrence McKenna biography.
 There's plenty to piece together from his talks and books,
 but only small paragraphs of actual biographical material out there.
 Are you aware of anything more substantial?"
 Well, as I told Brian, I'm not personally aware of any efforts like that at this time,
 but I'm passing this request along to see if maybe some of our fellow sauners,
 or even you know something like that, might be in the works.
 Now, my final announcement is one that I hope you take action on.
 This is my 240th podcast from here in the Psychedelic Salon,
 and on each and every one of them there's been another person whose voice you've heard in the background.
 And that's my dear friend, Jacques Oliver.
 And as you know, Jacques is the man behind the musical group Chateau Hayouk,
 whose song "El Alien" is our theme song here in the salon.
 Now what you may not know is that Jacques is also the caretaker gardener at Terrence McKenna's old house on Hawaii.
 And along with Finn, they're restoring the garden to its original condition.
 However, due to a stroke of bad luck, Jacques now needs to raise some money in a hurry,
 and is trying to do so by selling his new CD titled "Nature Loves Courage."
 And that's all one word, by the way, "Nature Loves Courage."
 And it's available as an MP3 download at www.cdbaby.com.
 All one word, c-d-b-a-b-y dot com, which is a musician's site there.
 And I'll put a link directly through to the CD with the program notes for this podcast.
 But over the years I've had a lot of requests about Jacques' music,
 and his Chateau Hayouk CD that our theme music came from is out of print.
 But at last now you have a chance to hear what he's been up to these past few years.
 By the way, there's even a trance mix of our theme song on his new CD.
 So if you can, it would be really cool if you can give Jacques a helping hand,
 and I'm also sure that you're going to enjoy his new music.
 And as soon as I can get my own act together, I hope to do an interview with Jacques from Terrence's house,
 and also get a preview of his music for you as well.
 Well, that's going to have to do it for today,
 so I'll close today's podcast by reminding you once again that this and most of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon
 are freely available for you to use in your own audio projects under the
 Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial ShareAlike 3.0 License.
 And if you have any questions about that, just click the Creative Commons link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage,
 which you can get to via psychedelicsalon.org.
 And if you're interested in the philosophy behind the salon, you can hear a lot about it in my novel,
 The Genesis Generation, which is available as an audiobook that you can download at genesisgeneration.us.
 And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from psychedelic space.
 Be well, my friends.
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