News with tape 5. Why is there no talk of the combining of the techniques with
 psychedelic? Well I don't know exactly I mean I would certainly agree. See I think
 that all religion is based on the experience of ecstasy and a religion and
 a religion like Hinduism represents to my mind an extreme case. The roots of
 Hinduism are in the Soma right. For 3,000 years this is what Hindu religiosity was
 about. It was an intoxicant and without the intoxicant there was no connection
 to the mystery. Well then for some reason it became tremendously
 hierarchically structured and constipated and dogmatic and well
 certainly dominator in if not outright fascism. And so I think all these
 religions have their roots in this irrational experience but they
 constantly want to turn it into a real estate operation and they do and they do
 and so but in answer to your question all these techniques work with
 psychedelics. You know mantra, yantra, magical invocation, raising the
 kundalini, all of these things which seem so totally obscure if from this level of
 consciousness it just becomes an of course of course it works. So it seems to
 me the lost ingredient is the psychedelic. I mean you know if you go to
 India and you have any illusions about sadhus I mean sadhus are hash heads with
 a line of patter that's all. I mean the main concern in any community of sadhus
 is how many chillums can you make and smoke before you fall asleep and I've
 never seen a yoga text that came clean about this and said you know this is
 basically a how to use cannabis technique. So it's good to go to the
 actual place and see how it's being handled. What's going on in the Amazon is
 the shamans cure, they chant, they provide an exemplar for their society but when
 you get seriously loaded with them and talk to them their attitude is more like
 scientists. They will agree that they can cure and find lost objects and predict
 the weather and all that but they don't understand how this works. They're very
 eager to admit that it's all a big mystery and that beyond the cheerful set
 of shamanic techniques that they the we toto the warani whoever they are beyond
 the cheerful power of the conjuration of these techniques lies the absolute
 unknown and they're aware of that. There's no closure in shamanism so it
 sort of keeps you humble. Yeah.
 The subject of, from Friday night on into today, the subject of naturally altered states.
 And I've come to the understanding that your question is for vision and not for feeling.
 Right.
 And one of the most interesting things about psychedelic experience for me and my drug of preference of course LSD
 is the feeling part of the experience and it seems to tap me into a psychic level of information that's not available to me normally.
 My question is what do you think about the phenomenon that I experience and I don't know whether it's because of my programming or because I'm a good receptor of a contact high.
 Where when you're around people who are tripping you don't get the depth of their experience but you definitely feel like you're in an altered state if you try to.
 Oh I think contact highs are very real.
 Not only contact highs but there are also contact lows which are very noticeable.
 You know there's a there's a phenomenon called allophenia. Do you know what allophenia is?
 Allophenia is when your friend is put in the hospital for schizophrenia and you go to visit him and you become you begin acting so peculiar
 that they don't let you out.
 This is a common phenomenon misbehavior by people who have come to visit people who have been hospitalized for schizophrenia or psychosis.
 The best theory is that it's pheromonal.
 You know there's one theory of what schizophrenia is that schizophrenia is a pheromonal disorder.
 And you what happens is your pheromone system goes haywire.
 So then you don't smell right.
 So then the people around you begin frowning at you avoiding you turning their back on you when you approach.
 Then you begin thinking there's something wrong with me.
 I'm weird.
 Then you secrete more of this weird pheromone and people get more and a dissonance begins to happen until finally you have to be plucked out of the situation.
 There are psychiatrists who swear that they can diagnose schizophrenia by a sniff test.
 You know they just walk over and take a hit off the side of your neck and then say you know lock this one up.
 Put this one on.
 Yeah.
 Now the problem is one of the question is is there in which all art a trace of this psychedelic dimension.
 I guess there is a trace.
 The problem is is is twofold.
 The problem is one of material that with wood and beads and pitch it's very hard to get the the to contort that into the object scene.
 And then the other thing is conceptually you know that it's very hard to grab and hold these very weird images.
 The other thing is that's happening in most traditional societies is that you operate within a canon.
 You know if you're if we show you have a very limited vocabulary of expression within the iconography of which all art.
 If you're a Tibetan tanka painter similarly it's all laid out for you.
 The walls of tradition are very high.
 The channel is very narrow.
 That's why it's so interesting when an artist can transcend the momentum of their cultural position and really produce something unique.
 I don't see. I mean I think you know the reason I like talking to artists is because all the art of the past 20000 years is like a teacup dipped into the ocean.
 And yet any one of us not particularly self-defined as artists.
 Most of us can access the ocean can swim in the ocean.
 And so you say you know it's we all can touch the same source that these great artists must have touched.
 Their skill was that they were able to bring out a thimble full of this material.
 And the rest of us can only look at it in wonder and then it passes by.
 Yeah yeah.
 No I'm not sure exactly.
 I mean the funny thing about the extraterrestrial position is that it depends on how long it's been since you've taken mushrooms how creditable it seems.
 If it's recent it seems the only possible explanation if you wait a few months then skepticism and reason begins to level the landscape and you say well no it couldn't possibly really be that.
 But I think you know no I think that we hardly have an inkling as to the real nature of the world and the real history of life on this planet.
 And you know we don't know how narrowly channeled the manifestation of organic intelligence is.
 Does it always have to be in a body. Does it always have to be in a body that stands upright with binocular vision.
 I think the real task with dealing with extraterrestrials is to know when you've got one.
 It's completely silly to search the galaxy with radio telescopes for a radio civilization.
 I mean to my mind that is as chuckle headed as deciding you're going to search the galaxy for a decent Italian restaurant.
 I mean it doesn't work like that.
 You know that if you think about the mushroom try to think about it objectively it looks to me very much like a good candidate for an extraterrestrial.
 First of all you know DNA has been known to us only since 1950 less than a century.
 And we're already involved in this thing called the human genome project.
 Well the real what that means is we are taking control of the scripts that write human beings.
 It seems to me anything we would recognize as intelligence would pass through a phase of self analysis where it would realize that it was made out of DNA and would then sequence itself.
 We're about to do this ourselves.
 Well that means that most extraterrestrials will be the product of their own reflexive design process.
 In other words an extraterrestrial that can cross the gulf between the stars must surely then be able to control its own form.
 Well then if you look at the mushroom it's a curious combination of artifact and entity.
 It looks sort of manufactured.
 There's very little fat on that system.
 I mean first of all fungi are primary decomposers.
 This means that they are at the very bottom of the food chain.
 This makes the kind of vegetarianism espoused by Buddhists look like an orgy of slaughter.
 You know because if you're if you're at the very bottom of the food chain that is the only place that is absolutely karma free.
 So there's the mushroom in the occupying the karma free position in the food chain.
 Well then it's you know we've been reading about these huge mycelial clones spread under acres of soil in Michigan and Wyoming.
 Well those things what that is is that's a cobweb like network and in the case of a psilocybin species filled with neurotransmitter like compounds.
 Can you imagine how many synaptic clamps there must be in a fifteen hundred acre mushroom clone.
 If if brain size is any relationship to intelligence then hang on Hannah because it means that this thing spread through the forests of the Midwest has you know a brain approximate in weight to a couple of dozen grams.
 Whales.
 The other thing is then the spore looks perfectly designed to sustain itself in outer space.
 If you want to store spores for longevity you create conditions as close to the conditions in outer space as you possibly can.
 High vacuum very low temperature.
 The casing of a spore is what is one of the most electron dense organic materials in nature.
 So electron dense that it approximates a metal.
 Well global currents can form on the quasi metallic surface of an airborne spore and they act as a further repellent for hard radiation.
 So and you know percolating through the galaxy at an ordinary rate typical of stellar material.
 Mushroom species could percolate from one side of the galaxy to the other in under four hundred thousand years.
 Well that's lightning speed compared to the size and age of the universe.
 If we were to gain the power to design ourselves I think after a whole bunch of you know Madonna and Robert Redford clones we would probably move on to becoming something very much like a mushroom.
 It's you know mild it's non invasive it's at the bottom of the food chain it's virtually immortal it's laden with neurotransmitters and it's living in the imagination.
 And this you know brings me to a favorite subject of mine.
 This is where we have to go.
 We have to enter into the Blakey and divine imagination.
 That's where our future lies.
 At this point our relationship to this planet as infant to child is a relationship of impending toxemia.
 We have to be parted from the mother to save the mother and to save us.
 And there are not that many possibilities.
 Where are we going to go.
 The political geniuses who run this planet have made migration to the stars virtually impossible.
 I mean don't kid yourself.
 It isn't only a matter of announcing a program.
 Our short stubby fingers couldn't assemble something like a Saturn five moon rocket.
 That was made by a generation of people now deceased.
 Americans in this era are you know rather dull witted people who have a good deal of trouble even running a third world economy.
 So we're not going to the stars.
 You can forget that.
 So then where are we going.
 Well nanotech.
 Is that a possibility.
 Could can we download everybody into a supercooled cube of gold to Terbia Malloy buried 500 feet deep in the center of Copernicus.
 And then we'll go there and leave the earth and dance forever in the hallways of the astral imagination.
 That's one possibility.
 Another possibility is is there a way to diffuse consciousness into the environment.
 Can we become dolphins caterpillars gray whales and mosquitoes and just sort of defocus ourselves.
 And I mean all of these are of course wildly radical notions.
 But on the other hand we're headed straight toward a brick wall at about 5000 miles an hour.
 We have to figure out something pretty astonishing in a hurry.
 Yeah.
 The heat shield.
 Yes precisely.
 That's a funny question.
 I don't know because it's so hard to tease apart genetics and environment.
 I mean they certainly have had a jump start on evolution by virtue of hanging out in the space that our lives have created.
 You know I think children need lots of attention.
 Lots of nurturing physical and spiritual.
 I guess I would say so.
 Certainly they haven't been programmed with the fear and misunderstanding that that is in the society.
 We just got through anti-dope week at our school which is an incredibly painful experience at this particular school because I don't think there's a person associated with it who believes it for a moment.
 But it's like we all have to study fascism because we live in a fascist state.
 A teacher made a statement that that LSD caused brain damage and my son dared to challenge this.
 And the guy said well who told you it doesn't cause brain damage.
 No not my daddy.
 He said well Albert Hoffman told me it doesn't cause brain damage.
 End of discussion.
 [laughter]
 What about me? You haven't been turned in by Darius.
 Uh uh.
 I have to go along with the question.
 Yeah.
 I know that children are very interconnected with their parents so when you're doing substances do you feel like the presence of your child sometimes going on your psychotropic experiences because I've had that before especially when you're really young.
 Yes well when children are very young you know all kinds of psychic phenomenon happen and you know I think mothers, nursing mothers and their relationship to their children is intensely telepathic.
 I remember when my daughter was not very old she must have been like about three and a half and I had a dream and it was a very unusual dream for me and very highly realized and I dreamed of an orrery.
 Do you know what an orrery is?
 It's a model of the solar system made of gears and you crank it and there's the sun in the center and the planets go around it.
 But this was a huge orrery. I dreamed I walked down a hall and I opened a door and I walked into this room and there was this orrery and these planets were circling around the sun inside this room and then and I was awakened by my daughter crying and I went downstairs and she said there were planets circling around inside my bedroom.
 So and you know that's a very specific and rare image for an adult or a child to have.
 So yes I think we're simple that our chuckle-headedness is the main barrier to our encountering all kinds of special abilities that move around us all the time.
 We are truly the prisoners of our limited conceptions.
 Yeah.
 Well sort of typing what you're saying and also back to some of the questions about why you don't want to take it every day for 40 days in a row and it's more on a psychological level that what causes, I've worked with someone who has done drug therapies in Mexico and also have a little story about Jung and many of the people who have gotten into a situation of psychosis are people who have used drugs
 and the general principle behind that is that people have experienced something that they cannot integrate back into their psyche or whatever even if it's the ability to say well that was then and this is now and therefore you get psychosis.
 So not to say these things to alarm people but just for respect that there has to be this ability to come back and not be far out there and there are a lot of different parameters to this.
 One is your own ego strength.
 Another one is the society you live in.
 If you're a shaman and you can say these things and have them be accepted then you're fine.
 And it doesn't have to be drugs.
 Jung used to, when he was older, he used to sit in a chair and just go inside and when he came back he would have this litany of things that he would say so that he could come back and function.
 He would say, you know, I'm Carl Gustav Jung, my wife is so and so, I have this many children, this many grandchildren.
 He'd teach you.
 Yeah.
 The reconnect affirmation.
 Yeah, well I think that's not a bad idea.
 I wanted to ask you how do you see the role of ritual, specifically in relationship to what she was saying in the tradition of society?
 Well, I don't have a very popular position on ritual and I blame it on the mushroom because I just quote the mushroom.
 And the mushroom, I said what about ritual?
 And it said that's fine if you don't know what you're doing.
 And I think that, you know, it's really not an anti-ritualist position because that is what ritual is.
 That's what you do if you don't know what you're doing.
 None of us really know what we're doing.
 None of us.
 But, you know, the purpose, you can tell when ritual works because it makes itself obsolete.
 That's the, it's, yeah.
 [inaudible]
 Well, you know, even in the most ritualistic context, there's always a footnote made for the crazy wisdom.
 I mean, every great teacher has said that what he's saying is malarkey.
 A teacher who doesn't tell you that what he or she is saying is malarkey is not to be taken seriously.
 So, you know, it's the, if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him style of thinking.
 Or I was just reading this guru who's coming on strong.
 Is it, is his name Pujaji?
 No, no, not Dobbs.
 But anyway, somebody, this guy said don't, don't do practice.
 Don't do practice.
 Practice is only distraction.
 He said we have to keep thinking up.
 He said, you know, running an ashram isn't easy.
 These students, they expect so much of us.
 We have to continually keep inventing stuff to keep them happy and send them off on these crazy quests and, and, you know, endless fasts and all this stuff because they want that.
 But, you know, the guru is pretty much content to kick back with the latest rolling stone.
 Yeah.
 If memory serves me correctly, I think I saw in one of the handouts that you're doing something with the shelter.
 Right.
 Well, are you all familiar with Rupert Sheldrake's work?
 Sheldrake is a British biologist who's written a number of books.
 His first book was called A New Science of Life, and it was catapulted to fame by virtue of a review in Nature, which said that it should be burned.
 And then he wrote a book called The Presence of the Past.
 Sheldrake has an extraordinarily simple, interesting, revolutionary idea that just drives scientists straight up a tree.
 His idea is that once something happens, it's easier for it to happen the next time.
 Yes, simple.
 But it takes then forms which drive people crazy because he asserts based on that that if you teach rats to run a new kind of maze in Australia,
 then rats in Massachusetts should be able to run this maze faster than if the rats in Australia hadn't learned it.
 Because once something has been, has occurred, then it has a momentum in time.
 He calls this the theory of formative causation or morphogenesis,
 and it explains a lot of things which are otherwise very difficult for biology to explain, but it raises also a bunch of issues that are pretty tricky.
 And so Rupert and I have been close friends for years, and even longer.
 I've been tight with a mathematician in Santa Cruz named Ralph Abraham, who's a chaos dynamicist.
 And Ralph and Rupert and I did a book together called Trilogues at the Edge of the West,
 which will be out at the end of the summer from Bayer.
 And we'll all get together at Esalen the end of August and do a bunch more of these public three-way dialogues,
 which are pretty spirited because we are very different people from each other,
 but all psychedelic and all interested in paradigm recasting.
 So that's what it's about. And it'll be out in mid-summer.
 End of August for that Esalen thing. Anybody else? Yeah.
 [inaudible]
 Well, feminism is a necessary thing for a successful future because the archaic world was so dominated by...
 Well, that's a bad choice of words, isn't it?
 Was so characterized by an awareness of the feminine and the boundary dissolving and the organic.
 The whole problem with the world is that we cannot feel the consequences of what we are doing.
 You know, I mean, recently we had paraded in front of us the figure of Jeffrey Dahmer as who you don't want to be like.
 And yet Jeffrey Dahmer to me was an absolute paradigm of global civilization
 because his problem was that he didn't... he couldn't feel the consequences of his actions.
 And this is what we are doing. I mean, we are lacerating ourselves by cutting down the rainforests and poisoning the oceans.
 This is not some airy, fairy, save the redwoods kind of mentality that protests against this.
 This is our own atmosphere, our own environment that we're destroying.
 It's a slow suicide, not so slow at the rate that we're carrying it out.
 Well, somehow we have to reactivate the maternal, nurturing, caring, circuitry
 that kept the tendencies that have evolved in this fatal direction at bay for a long, long time.
 And, you know, you can call it ego, you can call it male dominance, you can call it the phonetic alphabet, whatever it is.
 It has to be stopped because the planet is imperiled by it.
 And I... my analysis of it is that the only way to do it is to dissolve the boundaries
 that culture and language and tradition have allowed us to create.
 And they are largely boundaries that suppress women, not because men hate women, but because men hate the feminine.
 And they want to control and hold it back. It's threatening. It's devouring.
 I mean, the fact that the French refer to orgasm as the little death tells you, you know,
 what a weird kind of ambivalence haunts our relationship to anything which dissolves us out of the knot that we have tied ourselves into.
 So I, you know, I'm a kind of non-feminist feminist.
 I mean, I think most feminists are feminists because they think women have gotten a raw deal.
 I'm a feminist because I think mankind is headed for suicide if we don't return to a more intense expression of the feminine.
 So it's not a political agenda for me to liberate an oppressed group of people.
 It's a collectivist agenda necessary to save everybody and everything on the planet. Yeah.
 One of the things that's implicit in your general work is that there exists allies.
 Allies inform the plan. And when we look at the drop from partnership to dominator society,
 in my mind, one of the things that would become implicit with your thesis would be that there are not only allies,
 but there are malevolent entities out there that have the dominator force become so powerful.
 And then when I get into that line of thought, I get into this whole demi-urge, clash of the titans kind of notion.
 And sometimes the allies notion is very attractive.
 But in my mind, it always implies there's malevolent forces out there just as there are benevolent ones.
 Well, no, I mean, there are both there are malevolent and benevolent forces in there and out there.
 But I don't see the world really as a struggle between good and evil in some kind of manichaean situation.
 It seems to me that we confer value, that nature is neither good nor evil, and that must then include all these allies.
 It's just that we confer judgment. This is because when you begin to get down toward the bottom line,
 we don't know what the bottom line is. For instance, we're headed toward a great historical bifurcation
 where we're going to have to make some really hard choices.
 And most of the time in the so-called New Age, they try to fuzz all the distinctions
 and make you think you're never going to be slammed to the wall and have to make a choice.
 But the choice that's coming up for us is fundamental.
 It is, are we to become the caregivers, the nurturers, and the gardeners of the earth?
 Or is the earth, you know, I put it this way to somebody the other night,
 the question was, is the earth our mother, therefore to be cared for into her old age,
 nurtured, revered, and loved? Or is the earth our placenta, therefore to be examined for signs of toxin
 and then buried under the apple tree? In other words, what is the true nature of human beings?
 Are we to be integrated into nature and to celebrate it? Or is nature a demonic and titanic force
 that is imprisoning spirit and holding it back from its full unfolding in worlds of alien light
 and higher dimension so far from here that it's a miracle that even rumor reached us
 of the possibility of salvation. This is a tough choice because one path leads to
 radical renunciation of technology, radical pairing of population, and an attempt to come to terms
 with this small liquid planet on which we find ourselves. And the other direction says, you know,
 forget it. It's the husk of a seed. And it is utterly meaningless in the cosmic drama.
 And the real destiny lies out there, halfway to the Nebulganubi or Zeta Reticuli or some other
 exotic port of call. I don't see how you can have that both ways.
 - But the star does have a lifetime. - Yes, and most stars have lives shorter than the amount of time
 that biology has been on this planet. We are fortunate enough to be around a very slow-burning, stable star.
 There are a lot of mysteries. I haven't forgotten your second question, Raven.
 There are a lot of mysteries in our cosmic neighborhood that we rarely hear addressed.
 For example, I mean, just as an example, if our destiny lies out in the great universe,
 it's a hell of a technological barrier to cross to the stars. I mean, it may be insurmountable.
 However, isn't it interesting that the most Earth-like star within 70 light-years is the nearest star?
 Not technically the nearest star, which is a glowing red clinker called Alpha Centauri, right?
 But Beta Centauri is 1.1 solar masses. 1.1 solar masses. No star within 70 light-years is as Earth-like,
 I mean, as Sun-like as that star. From the point of view of the galaxy,
 Beta Centauri and our Sun almost look like lightly-bounded binaries.
 If this is an accident, it's a tremendously fortuitous accident for us,
 because it may well mean that there is an Earth-like planet at an incredibly short distance away from us
 in terms of the cosmic neighborhood. In fact, probably within the next 10 years,
 telescopes of sufficient resolving power will be created that if there is a water-heavy, oxygen-rich world
 out there, it's going to show up. Well, then that is going to become a tremendous attractor
 in the historical matrix, because it will be hailed as the answer. I mean, can you imagine?
 Because there will then be two possibilities, that there is intelligence next door, not likely,
 but likely, how do you assess it? How many water-heavy, oxygen-rich planets have we examined, for crying out loud?
 And the other possibility is that it's empty real estate. In either case, it will excite keen interest
 throughout society. So, you know, that's a little oddness in our cosmic neighborhood
 that is rarely mentioned or taken account of. Yeah?
 [Audience member] [inaudible]
 Yes, although I leave that to the Jeremiah Sitchins of the world to work out the details.
 There is, after all, a fossil record that is pretty clear in spite of the ravings and rantings of these Christers.
 The fossil record is pretty clear that we emerged out of the proto-hominids, who emerged out of the
 ponged radiation, that emerged out of, and so forth and so on. I don't, I think that,
 but there may be mysteries. I mean, one question that I'm surprised nobody ever seems to ask
 in these weekends, when I tell the cheerful story of the descent from the trees, the ape encounter
 with the mushrooms, and so forth and so on, is nobody ever asks, well, but who put the mushrooms
 in the path of these binocular, bipedal, evolving primates? I mean, is this just the story of nature's
 happiest accident? Or did someone say, you know, tweak the planet, start the retraction of the rainforests,
 seed the spores into the grasslands, and watch what happens? Because then we come down out of the trees,
 brainless as a wombat, and begin testing food sources, and lo and behold, here are these things,
 which are obviously designed to be seen. I mean, mushrooms are a form of display.
 They're designed to be seen. They demand to be eaten. And the consequences of that, you know,
 are to lead a species to the brink of star flight. Well, is that just a coincidence? Or is there a mind
 behind all of this? See, I think that mind, the problem I have with all the extraterrestrial scenarios
 and all the channeling and all the abducting and all the stuff that goes on, is it's all too B-movie.
 It's all too simple, too straightforward. That's what troubles me about the Sitchin scenario,
 is that it's perfectly understandable to us. If it's understandable to us, you can bet your booties
 it's the wrong answer. I mean, it's going to be weirder than that. It's not about mineral extraction
 or even diplomatic goodwill. I had a professor years ago, his cosmology went like this.
 You know how there are bacteria which you can introduce into gold slurry in low-grade gold ore,
 and the bacteria will concentrate the gold, and then you just wash the gold out of the bacteria,
 and it's a mining technique that's very efficient for poor-yielding gold ore. So this guy's idea was
 that someday UFOs would appear over every major city on Earth, and they would just load up
 all the plutonium and fissionable material and take it away and say, "Thank you very much.
 This mining operation is now concluded. You people can go back to hurling shit at each other
 in the treetops as far as we're concerned. We have real application for this fissionable material.
 You people are going to use it to blow each other up. What a bunch of dummies.
 And farewell and good luck." So that's one possibility.
 Yes, then I insist on getting to these plans.
 You mentioned a book called Something in Harmony by Fletcher?
 No, Haoma, H-A-O-M-A, Haoma and Harmony by...
 Flattery?
 No, by Flattery and Schwartz, and it's published by the University of California Press,
 Near Eastern Studies Division, publication number 23.
 Oh, good.
 Yeah, isn't that a grabber?
 Well, what I thought we should talk about this morning since we seem to range wide and free
 is the practicum of all this, which is, you know, how many of these vision plants are there
 and where are they, and how do you obtain them, and how do you use them once you obtain them?
 So I thought, how many of you have ever seen... Can you all... Here, let me get with it.
 This is a poster, which I don't even know if it's still available. It may be out of print.
 It is still available, and it's a very good ethnobotanical course in hallucinogens on one sheet of paper.
 What it's divided into, basically, is this is the old world, and this is the new.
 Immediately you notice that there are a lot more hallucinogens in the new world than the old.
 This is one of the great puzzles of evolutionary botany,
 because nobody can offer a reasonable explanation as to why there should be
 nearly three times as many hallucinogenic plants in the new world as in the old.
 I mean, other than that's where the flying saucers planted them,
 nobody has come up with a good explanation.
 Major hallucinogenic plant complexes that I've had experience with and can address are...
 Well, let's do a little quick geographical tour.
 First of all, North America, for reasons not well understood, is quite poor in native hallucinogens.
 There are no major North American hallucinogens.
 Peyote is... Well, yes, it's North American.
 The funny thing about peyote... I mean, you can feed me questions as long as we stick to the subject.
 The thing about peyote is, you know, we have this tremendous respect for it.
 We imagine that it's tremendously ancient, and it apparently isn't.
 There is no archaeological evidence of peyote use any earlier than 500 years ago.
 It's almost a phenomenon of the conquest.
 What you find in the old graves in the peyote cultural area are the seeds of Sephora secundifolia,
 which is an ordeal poison, strychnine.
 And often, often, drug-human-plant symbiotic relationships evolve over time.
 It may be that the use of hallucinogens is still in fairly dynamic evolution all over the planet.
 Peyote is a major hallucinogen.
 It should have been used for the past 50,000 years. If it has only been used for the past 500 years,
 that's pretty peculiar, all right, and yet that appears to be the evidence.
 Ibogaine, not only a visionary hallucinogen, but an aphrodisiac as well.
 No evidence of any use before 1850.
 And yet, in an area where the Portuguese had been trading for the past 500 years
 and writing cultural descriptions and interviewing the people,
 I mean, if it was there, it would have been mentioned.
 So this is a puzzle.
 You know, ayahuasca use, we assume, is millennia old,
 but on the other hand, archaeology is a real miserable proposition in the Amazon
 because the climate is so degradative, so we can't really know.
 But aside from Peyote and whatever its history,
 North America seems to have only minor hallucinogens that have been utilized shamanically.
 A puzzle, another puzzle about culture and attitudes is, as you all know,
 the Northwest Coast Indians, the Kwaku'l-Shimsham and Tlingit language groups,
 have an extraordinarily evolved shamanism
 and were the people who developed that x-ray vision style of art.
 Well, their cultural area has the densest number of psilocybin mushrooms of any place in the world.
 No cultural evidence of psilocybin use.
 No evidence that these people even knew these things were there.
 I mean, I know this challenges the tradition of the all-knowing aboriginal,
 but, you know, this is what the data seems to imply.
 Now, in Southern California and across portions of the Southwest,
 there have been detourer religions, which are very old, apparently.
 The so-called T'lach religion.
 I don't recommend detourer.
 I don't know what astrological sign you have to be to make your peace with that stuff.
 But I find it really peculiar and menacing.
 It's about magic, which is about power and control
 and usually sexuality in some invasive and dominator application.
 I've taken detourer a number of times,
 and it's been interesting, but it feels watery and dark and dangerous to me.
 There was a period when I lived in Nepal,
 and I became aware that these sadhus, not content with their superior meditation techniques
 and their endless smoking of hashish,
 were also availing themselves of the seeds of detourer metal,
 which is conspecific to what we call gypsum weed in this country.
 And so I thought, well, I should take this too and find out what it's about.
 Well, it was a very odd trip.
 I sat in my room in Bodhnath, and I would sit and say,
 "Hmm, nothing is happening. Nothing is happening."
 Well, you can only think that so many times.
 Then my mind would drift into a kind of twilight state,
 and then these wraith-like entities--I mean, they were like Victorian ghosts.
 They were like women in shredded damask gowns or something--
 would fly into my window carrying newspaper sheets in their outstretched arms,
 and they would let these sheets of newspaper flutter down onto my lap,
 and I would begin to read, and I would be so astonished by what I was reading
 that it would jerk me out of it, and I would say, "What's happening?
 Nothing's happening. Nothing's happening. Nothing's happening."
 And then my attention would drift, and this would happen again.
 Well, then after about a half an hour of that, as the stuff began to build up,
 I began to--like I would undergo these very brief periods of unconsciousness,
 and when I came out of them, I would discover that my leg
 had been thrown up around behind my head, and my arm shot through,
 and I was like all knotted up.
 Then I would very carefully unfold myself and lay back down,
 and I remember thinking, "I'm certainly glad there's nobody else here,"
 because this is the kind of thing just designed to drive a sitter
 into a conniction fit of alarm.
 And about six times over the next hour and a half, I went into these convulsive spasms,
 and then on another night, these English people shared a suite of rooms off of mine,
 and to get to the bathroom, I had to go through this one guy's room.
 So this one night, I hadn't taken detour, but this fellow had taken detour,
 and at one point, I had to go to the john, so I debated for a long time
 about how this was going to disturb his trip, and maybe I should piss out the window,
 but no, that didn't seem--although in India, it's perfectly all right.
 And so finally, I decided I would just walk through the room.
 So then as I was tiptoeing through the room, I saw that he was actually having sex
 with this girl that we knew from Kathmandu, and it had a slight emotional tinge for me
 because I had actually had my eye on her, although I had never said anything about it to anybody.
 So then the next morning, I mentioned this, and he said that, yes,
 it had been his impression as well, but that in fact, she wasn't there.
 And so it was like I saw somebody else's hallucination,
 and then what finally decided me that detour was too peculiar
 was I had another English friend who lived a couple of houses away,
 and one day, I was in the market buying potatoes, and this guy came along,
 and we were just talking, and in the course of this conversation,
 he was telling me how he'd been taking a lot of detour,
 and in the course of this conversation, I became aware that he thought
 that I was visiting him in his apartment, and I decided that's too fucked up.
 To not know whether you're entertaining someone in the confines of your apartment
 buying vegetables in the market means that you have become too disengaged
 from the modalities of the real, and of course, it creates tremendous drying,
 and it's a deliriant is what the literature calls it.
 It's a deliriant, but I think that people all over the world
 utilize plants for bizarre experiences.
 Time and time again, I've run up against this.
 There's a very rare drug in South America called ukuhe.
 It's made by the Witoto and the Bora and the Muinani in this very circumscribed area,
 and what fascinated us about it was that it was an orally active DMT drug,
 and we couldn't, as pharmacologists, understand how an orally active DMT drug was possible
 because the DMT should be destroyed in your gut, so we wanted to get a sample of this stuff,
 and it's made from the resin of varroa trees.
 The inner bark of the varroa sheds a red resin, and we eventually, in 1981,
 my brother and I and Wade Davis, the guy who wrote The Serpent and the Rainbow,
 we all launched an expedition up the Rio Yagwas Yasu where there was this stuff,
 and we would do what we called bioassays, which means somebody has to test this stuff
 because we would get samples from these shaman, and we would draw straws for who got to do the bioassay.
 Well, taking this ukuhe was appalling.
 I mean, your heart rate goes up to about three times normal.
 You shed water by the gallon.
 Your blood pressure shoots up.
 I mean, it felt like a pre-coronary to me, and then we come down and say to this shaman,
 "Lorenzio, what's the story?"
 And he said, "Yeah, it takes getting used to, doesn't it?"
 And so then when you look at this ukuhe chemically, you see, well, yes, there's DMT in there,
 and there's 5-MAO-DMT in there, but then when you do the gas chromatogram,
 you see that marching along behind those spots are all these other spots of various tryptamine compounds,
 some of which are cardio regulators, some of which nobody knows what they do,
 and so then you realize that it's a dirty drug.
 There's too much junk in there.
 What you want is something that has a very clean signature.
 So ukuhe didn't exactly seem the way to go.
 I think that this is the real situation with Amanita muscaria.
 It's probably the most discussed, uninteresting drug in the world
 because so many people have tried to hang so much on it,
 and, you know, it's a horrible experience most of the time.
 I mean--
 Women have the toxic level really close to the--
 Yeah, yeah.
 And occasionally you'll meet someone who says, "Well, you're just wrong.
 It's wonderful.
 I've taken it for years. I love it."
 And I, you know, don't know.
 First of all, it's genetically variable.
 It's geographically variable.
 It's seasonally variable,
 and it fluctuates at various times in its process of maturation.
 So what must be going on with Amanita muscaria
 is you have to learn how to take it in your area
 from people who know where to collect it, when to collect it,
 how much to collect, and how to prepare it.
 But if you just go out and find one and chow down,
 I guarantee you it'll turn you every way but loose,
 and then it'll turn you loose.
 So--
 But have you done it by drinking urine?
 No, that's what they always say.
 They say, "Have you drunk your urine recently?
 I got a letter last week."
 No, I understand that it--
 Do you all understand the basis of the question?
 Why does urine come into it?
 Because in Siberia, they have discovered,
 which is where this Amanita thing originates,
 that the active principle is not destroyed inside your body,
 that it is excreted in the urine.
 And the true aficionados of this stuff
 believe that the so-called second pass
 is better than the first pass.
 And so you have to--
 You know, they drink the urine.
 One of the great hazards of Siberian shamanism
 is stepping outside of the yurt on a snowy night
 to take a leak and being pitched headfirst into the snow
 by frantic reindeer who will butt you out of the way
 to try to get to the yellow snow
 because they're so completely hooked on Amanita
 that nothing stands in their way of this stuff.
 I thought you were going to say that it's your students.
 Oh, your students pushing you out of it.
 Well, I've never hung out with the Yakuts.
 Maybe they are a pretty wild-eyed gang.
 An example of how a very ancient folkway
 can be incorporated into our culture
 without us even realizing it
 and is provided by discussing Amanita muscaria.
 If you go to the Encyclopedia Britannica
 and you look up Santa Claus,
 they'll tell you that it has to do with St. Nicholas
 and it got started in the 11th century.
 But when you look at the Santa Claus story,
 it's a perfect mythologem
 to analyze from this point of view
 because look what's going on with Santa Claus.
 First of all, Santa Claus's colors are red and white,
 the colors of the Amanita muscaria for sure.
 Santa Claus lives at the North Pole.
 What does this mean?
 It means that Santa Claus lives at the Axis Mundi
 where Yggdrasil, the magic world ash of Welsh mythology,
 has taken root.
 Santa Claus flies.
 This is what shamans do.
 Santa Claus is the master of the reindeer,
 the animal most associated with the Amanita muscaria.
 Santa Claus is aided in his work by troops of elves.
 And what is the work of Santa Claus?
 To build toys for children.
 Remember the DMT thing saying, "Look at this, look at this."
 Well, those were off-duty elves, clearly.
 And so here are all the motifs.
 And I believe that for children in our culture
 that all the Christer stuff is not what Christmas is about.
 Christmas is about standing in front of the tree
 on Christmas morning with the gifts arrayed
 and the twinkling lights on.
 Well, that tree is the tree that the Amanita muscaria
 forms its symbiotic relationship to.
 It's always spruce or pine that it has a mycorrhizal relationship to.
 So the number of motifs relating Santa Claus to a cult of Amanita muscaria,
 there's almost nothing but relational motifs there.
 And yet if you suggest this to people, they just back away in horror.
 Well, these hallucinogenic plants seem clustered in the New World
 in two areas.
 The first area is the Sierra Mazateca of central Mexico
 and related areas.
 And there you have a number of things overlapping.
 You have a mushroom area of multiple species
 where unlike the Coahuilte-Chimcham-Tlingit language area,
 in this central Mexican area,
 they absolutely did use and discover these mushrooms.
 And we have these things called mushroom stones
 that go 2,500 BC.
 So the mushroom religion is truly archaic in Mexico.
 In the same cultural area, you have the morning glory seeds
 that come from Ipomoea purpura and related hybrids.
 Are you all familiar with these?
 This is a psychedelic plant that you can grow yourself and take.
 Don't buy the packages of seeds and take them
 because a benevolent government has made sure that they are soaked in horrendous poison
 so that you can't get loaded on them.
 But you can grow a crop out of them that will be toxin-free.
 And this is a tremendous visionary intoxicant.
 It takes a couple of hundred of these seeds.
 But in that same area, strangely enough,
 there's another morning glory, Turbina coriombosa.
 It used to be called Rivia coriombosa.
 That as few as 13 seeds will flatten you.
 Now, it's interesting as long as we're talking about morning glory seeds
 to note that per unit volume, by weight,
 probably the strongest plant hallucinogen in the world is Hawaiian baby wood rose.
 And yet there is no record of any culture ever utilizing that.
 There are 13 species of argyria.
 It's called Hawaiian baby wood rose, but it has nothing to do with Hawaii.
 It's native to India.
 There are 13 species of argyria scattered from southern India out to Fiji
 and all contain ergot-like, LSD-like compounds like Chinook Levine and so forth.
 These, I got started on morning glory seeds because they were available.
 But don't sell this stuff short, folks.
 I mean, it'll give you a ride that you'll never forget.
 And the baby wood rose even more so.
 Be very careful with the Hawaiian baby wood rose
 because it contains cardioactive glycosides.
 And, you know, if you, you know, maybe six seeds will do you,
 12 seeds might well plant you.
 And 12 seeds will fit on a tablespoon.
 So this is nothing to start choking down in large amounts.
 Yeah.
 [Audience member] Are those cardioactive glycosides water-soluble?
 Yes, and could be extracted in a fairly simple filtration system.
 Yeah, good point. Yeah.
 [Audience member] Morning glory seeds, do you grind them up?
 Well, they are dry. They're little crescent-shaped dry things.
 Yeah, grind them in a brawn grinder.
 And...
 applesauce is the favorite carrier for these disgusting things or milkshakes.
 But it would be good to look into doing a little chemistry.
 The emetic in the morning glories is estercoumarone,
 not the cardioactive glycoside in Arduria nervosa,
 but in Ipomoea purpura, it's estercoumarone.
 And you could devise a simple chemical system for removing that.
 And I think LSD... you know, have you ever had what's called Woodrow's LSD?
 Well, it's wonderful.
 It's unlike LSD. It's more like psilocybin because it is highly visionary.
 And one of the things about these morning glories is, you know,
 I don't know whether we have to talk about Rupert's theory or what,
 but it is just an archive of Mayan and Toltec imagery.
 I mean, you take this stuff and you're there in the pyramidal complex
 on the day of Venus's heliacal rising when they do their thing.
 I mean, it's pretty amazing.
 [Audience] Is the active ingredient like, for example, eclomyme?
 It's a close relative.
 It's active not in the microgram range, but in the milligram range.
 And there are several active compounds.
 You're right, and I think chinoclavine is psychoactive,
 and ergonovine, all these occur there.
 [Audience] So do you grind those and swallow them whole or make infusion?
 No, you grind them to a powder and then just take...
 [Audience] Capsule?
 Capsule them. It's a lot of capsules.
 It's like half a cup of this horrible whitish meal with a strange smell.
 [Audience] Half a cup?
 Yeah, basically. About 200 seeds.
 You may want to go higher, but start with that.
 [Audience] Supposedly, in the mastocyte area,
 the rubea caragosa seeds are ground up and then they are put into a cold water
 and make a cold water infusion.
 And then the solids are removed so that there's only a few water-soluble fractions in the water.
 And then that is run.
 Well, no, but if what you're saying is true,
 that's where the glycoside would reside.
 That's not my understanding, actually.
 [Audience] I just saw a picture of a woman doing that
 in a book like White Schultes or something like that.
 Well, maybe the caption got mislabeled or something
 because the way they do it where I've seen it is they take the little seeds
 and they grind them on a matate to powder.
 Then they put it in water, as you said, and they shake it
 and leave it and come back an hour later and shake it again and do that for a while.
 And then the stuff precipitates to the bottom, the matter,
 and the liquid fraction is poured off and discarded.
 And they take the solid matter and they let it dry in the sun until it's no longer runny,
 but it's a kind of like the consistency of oatmeal or Play-Doh or something like that.
 And then they make a little tiny tortilla, which they then toast on a metal griddle.
 And so you get this thing which looks slightly smaller than a Ritz cracker
 and is a toasted Morning Glory seed wafer.
 And you eat that and that is the thing which is active.
 That's how I've seen it done.
 [Audience] Does it destroy the active compounds?
 Apparently not. They toast it lightly.
 It's not blackened. It's just sort of golden.
 [Audience] Is this the Morning Glory seed compound or the wine seed?
 No, it's one species of Morning Glory, Turbina, previously called Rivia corium bosa.
 The other one, the Morning Glory that you have to take a couple of hundred seeds for,
 is used in that area as a hallucinogen, but it's also used to induce labor
 and has a whole role in midwifery and like that.
 [Audience] Okay, because I got confused. I thought we were talking about this cardiovascular regimen.
 No, that's the Hawaiian Wood Rose and it has no history of human usage.
 So you're on your own.
 It's worth talking about maybe for a minute that hallucinogens are like hotel rooms.
 Some are occupied and some are not.
 And it's always interesting to fiddle with the unoccupied ones
 because if you believe Sheldrake, then it's an empty field.
 You know, one way of thinking of these things is when you take a plant, it takes you.
 So when you take mushrooms, for instance, what the trip is,
 is all the mushroom trips that anybody ever had.
 And you make a tiny contribution, too.
 You leave a piece of your trip in the trip.
 And so the trip is slowly evolving over time as those who take the plant
 each leaves a brick or an offering or a little architectural motif on this vast edifice.
 Well, then if you come--that was why a plant like Hawaiian Wood Rose
 or to some degree, Strepharia cubensis,
 because it is not the preferred mushroom among the Mexican traditionalists,
 then it's unoccupied.
 You can make of it what you want.
 It can be sort of your vehicle.
 And this is why, you know, a drug like ketamine,
 which is a new drug, a drug without a thousand years of input,
 my impression of where you go on ketamine is it's like visiting a new office building
 that nobody has rented offices yet.
 I mean, all the water coolers work,
 and there are these recessional distances with fluorescent lighting.
 But, you know, there are no hurrying secretaries and crowded offices
 and chatter around the water fountains.
 It's just empty.
 It's empty because not enough people have left their initials on the walls.
 Yeah.
 What is the variety that's common--mushroom that's common in the Yucatan, in Miami?
 Well, if you mean growing on manure, yeah, that's Strepharia cubensis.
 See, there are about 30 species of mushrooms that grow in that Mexican area,
 and most of them are what are called--well, not most, some are ephemeral mushrooms,
 meaning they're very small and they can be almost anywhere.
 Then there are some larger ones, too, that can be almost anywhere.
 Strepharia cubensis is the only one of the good ones that locates on cow dung.
 Now, there are other mushrooms which grow on cow dung that contain psilocybin,
 but they also are more sickening.
 There are species of Paneolus and species of Coprinus.
 If you collect a mushroom off dung and you want to know whether it's a Paneolus
 or a Coprinus or a Strepharia, just keep it around for a few hours.
 If it's a Strepharia, it will just sort of be around.
 If it's a Coprinus or a Paneolus, it will do what's called autodigest.
 It will turn into a slimy mess.
 Can you tell from the spore print?
 No, you can't tell from the spore print,
 but you can tell from the macro morphology of it if you know mushrooms.
 They're easy to tell apart.
 I think that the spore print has to have mushrooms.
 Yeah, well, that's tricky. You need somebody who really knows their stuff.
 [Audience member]
 Were you implying that there was a way to--
 like a similar water process for the wine wood rose seeds to remove the stuff?
 It was more speculative, but I think it would be worth trying.
 Yeah, yeah.
 [Audience member]
 Some are and some aren't.
 [Audience member]
 I'm not sure about that. I read some more about synthesizing LSD,
 and it's apparently hard to get to the starting points.
 I heard if you get a bunch of morning glory seeds, it's open to lighter fluids,
 and I heard that gets you halfway there, and then you have to get away from there.
 Yeah, that sounds right.
 I think that ether is a good one. So is chloroform.
 Have any of you read "The Road to Eleusis"?
 That's about the Eleusinian mysteries, and argues--it's by Wasson and Hoffman and Ruck--
 and argues that the mystery at Eleusis was a kind of ergotized beer,
 that they were gathering ergot off pospalum and making an ergotized beer,
 and the only way they could have done that for 2,000 years,
 stoning thousands of people each September at this cult site
 without the thing getting a reputation for being toxic or causing convulsions,
 is if they had some way that was very efficient of separating the dangerous alkaloids
 from the hallucinogenic ones. So that may have been a water fractionation technique as well.
 Or, you know, the whole theory may be wrong, and whatever was drunk at Eleusis
 may not have been ergotized beer. It could have been a mushroom of some sort.
 This is what Robert Graves thought, that it was a mushroom.
 Is that the second print yet?
 "The Road to Eleusis"? Probably not, because Wasson is now dead,
 and the estate is kind of funny about that kind of thing.
 Yeah?
 I have two questions. One, could you talk more about the emetic in Morning Glory
 and how to get rid of that?
 The emetic is estercoumarone. If you're not a chemist and used to dealing with
 high molecular weight solvents, then you should do some kind of a water--
 you dissolve it in water and then try to separate out the fractions.
 This would be-- I mean, I think a lot of work needs to be done.
 I think in the underground there are publications which have circulated
 that are, you know, the wizard's workbook for Mushroom--
 or for Morning Glory reclamation and stuff like this.
 It's a-- you pay your dues with Morning Glories, but it's usually worth the price of admission.
 It's just nausea after all for crying out loud.
 Yeah?
 My second question has to do with what you were saying about different hallucinogens
 and hotel rooms. I got the impression that the implication is that somehow
 consciousness creates the reality that's put-- you know, that's out there,
 depending on whether-- how often consciousness has used these different hallucinogens.
 Is that--
 Yeah, I think so. I mean, that we leave our fingerprints upon the drugs we take,
 and drugs that have been taken for thousands of years have a lot of fingerprints on them,
 and you join up with that. You enter into the field, you know?
 One way of thinking, since somebody talked about Sheldrake earlier,
 one way of thinking about psychedelics and trying to define what do they do
 is that they are amplifiers of the morphogenetic field,
 that, you know, the past of objects somehow becomes present.
 This would fit in with my notion that when you take a psychedelic,
 you are rising into some kind of super space that can be mathematically described,
 because having the past be co-present with the present is a way of saying
 that you have shifted your dimensional relationship to the data field,
 and now it all appears to be one coherent thing.
 Yeah?
 What is the plant that grows in the southwest that has Harmony in it?
 Pagamin Harmala, the giant Syrian rue.
 Its original range is from Morocco to Manchuria,
 but at some time in the 19th century it was brought into this country
 as a range fodder for goats.
 I mean, it's a pretty rasty plant.
 It has small yellow flowers and it's a kind of--
 it has succulent leaves, sort of water-holding leaves,
 and it looks like a form of sagebrush,
 and when you cut into it with a knife or a machete,
 it's brilliant yellow inside, and that brilliant yellow is the Harmony.
 You just take the plant and make a brew of it?
 Pound it up with a sledgehammer to separate the fibers
 and do a hot water wash on it,
 and then do a second hot water wash,
 then get rid of the physical stuff, combine the two mother liquors,
 and drive it down to a reasonable volume, and it'll do the trick.
 You're probably familiar with a couple of different books by Allegro and Puharich.
 John Allegro and Andrzej Puharich, yeah.
 What's your assessment, if there's any value in them?
 Well, not to rain on anybody's parade,
 Andrzej Puharich is a very mercurial person.
 Is that what we want to say?
 Recall that he was the guy who pushed Yuri Geller for a long time,
 and they were forever tromping into the Negev
 and coming out with blank cassettes that had held the wisdom of the galaxy,
 but the aliens erased them before they let them return.
 That could happen here.
 So that's Andrzej Puharich.
 He's been around for a long time.
 I mean, you have to--these people are such eccentrics.
 I mean, you have to just respect people's persistence and survival power.
 But I think his scholarship and his notion of the rules of evidence
 is fairly divergent, even from my fairly loose canon.
 So Allegro is a little different case.
 Do you all know the book "The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross"?
 He managed to hypothesize one of the most radical theories ever to come down the pike.
 I don't know how true it is, but his theory is that Jesus was a mushroom.
 And, you know, this would not probably have cut too much mustard,
 except that the guy was a Dead Sea Scroll scholar of world renown,
 had a scholar's grasp of Aramaic and Akkadian,
 and was fully licensed to be one of the people who tell us
 what the primary documents of Christianity really mean.
 The problem was, when Allegro got a hold of them, he said,
 "Well, what they really mean is that a sacramental mushroom
 is being grown in caves by Nabataeans down around Qumran,
 and they called it Jesus in order to befuddle the Roman authorities
 and created the cheerful theory of the friendly carpenter
 who tells us to render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's."
 And this was all a publicity stunt just to keep the Roman authorities guessing.
 And he has textual--he claims he has textual support for this.
 The problem is, you have to be an Aramaic philologist to follow the argument.
 I mean, the argument is unbelievably tortured.
 There is a lot of question.
 There is a peculiar opaqueness about the early history of Christianity.
 I mean, if we are to try and take it seriously and understand what happened there,
 then it must be that--first of all, if we believe Christ was a real person,
 then he must have been born in 6 BC,
 because there was a coniunctio maxima of Jupiter and Saturn at that time,
 which is a good astrological event to hang the nativity on,
 which means then that the crucifixion would have occurred in 27.
 Now, why is it, then, that there are no mentions--
 no mention of Christ can be pushed back later than--earlier than AD 69?
 What was going on between 27 and 69?
 The Gospels are not contemporaneous.
 And the mention in 69 is not even a sure thing.
 It's in Suetonius.
 And he says, "Jews have recently come to Rome, agitating in the name of their leader Crespus."
 And that's the reference.
 And, you know, it's puzzling, because take a figure as minor as Mani.
 Mani is the founder of Manichaeanism.
 He was born in Seleucia-Tesiphon in the 700s.
 Well, God, we have Mani's laundry bills.
 I mean, we know how much he paid in taxes, the nickname he had for his dog.
 I mean, we have a lot of data on Mani.
 And so why a figure like Christ should be so peculiarly swathed in ambiguity,
 if it was a real person with these people eager to chronicle it,
 is a little hard to figure out.
 Didn't Mani have a big religion going in his own lifetime?
 I mean, he had a big organization.
 Of course, Christ has had 12, you know, guys.
 Yeah, I mean, Mani got right with it.
 I mean, he cultivated the court.
 He knew how to get his thing going, yeah.
 If any of you are interested in these kinds of questions,
 and like your data in novel form,
 read "The Transmigration of Timothy Archer" by Philip K. Dick,
 which is a wonderful intellectual romp through all of these issues.
 It's essentially the fictional telling of the story of James Pike,
 who you may remember was the Episcopal Bishop of San Francisco
 and a great enthusiast for LSD.
 And he died in the Negev under very mysterious conditions.
 He parked his car and with a roadside map and a bottle of Coca-Cola
 in 115 degree heat, started walking toward the Dead Sea
 and dehydrated and died.
 And he was very close to John Allegro.
 You know, I'm not given to conspiracy theory,
 but you must have been following this whole hassle about the Dead Sea Scrolls.
 Well, a lot of people think it's because what is written there
 is incommensurate with Christianity as it has existed for 1700 years.
 And nobody knows what to do with this stuff.
 I mean, it's the equivalent of what do you do with the doctrine of the resurrection
 if somebody comes up with the mummy of Christ?
 Well, that's the kind of situation that these Dead Sea Scrolls
 may place Christian hermeneutics in.
 John Allegro's book?
 No, John Allegro died recently.
 Sacred Mushroom?
 Oh, no, the book by Philip K. Dick is called The Transmigration of Timothy Archer.
 Yeah.
 Are you aware of Edmund Bordeaux's translations?
 Oh, yes, he's another one.
 His really tweaking volume was called How the Great Pan Died.
 Right.
 And it was an expose of Jesus Barabbas versus this, I suppose, Jesus.
 And so, yes.
 Yes, well, the empire never died, which is Philip K. Dick's motto.
 The Gnostic temperament is alive and well.
 In fact, there hasn't been a century as friendly to Gnosticism as the 20th since the 4th.
 So there you have it.
 I've read a little bit of Revelations and it sounds like a description of a burglar's poisoning.
 Well, this has been suggested.
 What you need to put the Gospel of John in context,
 get to Charles' book, The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the New Testament.
 This concludes tape five.
 Our program continues with tape six.


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