Yes, Argyria nervosa, if you're an enthusiast of obscure hallucinogens, this is one to reckon with. Possibly, gram for gram, it is the most powerful plant hallucinogen on the planet. And yet, though there are 13 species of Argyria, all containing psychoactive compounds, spread from Kerala in India down through Micronesia, there's no history of human usage in that entire cultural area. So there are mysteries about who knows these things. You know, when you go to the Amazon, most people have a kind of noble savage prejudice, and they think that it has to be the naked people who are off river, who are very wild and woolly, and then they make the good ayahuasca. Often this is not the case. Often it's the guy who lives on the edge of Iquitos or Pucallpa, who tends his garden and is fairly conversant with the modern world. Some of you may know Manuel Corde-- F. Bruce Lamb's book Rio Tigre and Beyond. He describes a situation in there where a man who had in his youth been kidnapped by Indians and learned to make very good ayahuasca. Later he encounters another tribe of Indians. He's on a rosewood collecting expedition to a remote part of the jungle, and he encounters these Indians and they invite him to take ayahuasca with them. And it's just garbage as far as this guy can tell. So he says, "I'll show you how they do it where I come from," and makes it for these people and literally becomes a culture hero overnight, is hailed as the great reformer of their ritual, just simply because he showed them how to get really, really smashed on it. And yeah, the DMT is in the Desmanthus and the and the Pagamin contains the MAO-inhibiting harmaline. No, it's in the root bark scrapings and the harmaline in Pagamin harmaline is spread throughout the plant and concentrated in the little black seeds. If you don't want to drive out to Elko, find an Iranian market here in LA and tell them that you want to buy Harmal, H-U-R-M-A-L, and they will sell you the seeds of Pagamin harmaline. It's used in Iranian households as a fumigant, an incense. You just throw some on a charcoal, on a bed of coals, and it makes this wonderful incense-like smoke, which is actually intoxicating. I mean, a wonderful thing to do if you want to do some exploratory chemistry is take half a dose, take half a dose of mushrooms, and then after a couple of hours, smoke some Pagamin harmaline in a bong or a pipe. The MAO inhibiting characteristic of the harmaline will immediately lift the curtain for about 15 minutes on a very spectacular series of very cool hallucinations. In other words, they're hallucinations where you can just sit and look, thinking, "My goodness, this is fascinating and compelling," rather than the other kind of hallucination where you're, "Ahh!" We call this mushroom plus Pagamin harmaline a combination vegetable television because it's approximately that engaging, but very, very non-threatening and reassuring for beginners. That's a dose of mushrooms after an hour and a half smoke a quarter of a teaspoon of Pagamin harmaline seeds. Oh yeah, they're very small and hard and black and you'll want to get a brawn coffee grinder. A brawn coffee grinder is a great tool for the would-be psycho activist. It will grind, it will flour nutmeg, reduce nutmeg to flour. Nutmeg's fascinating. I used to take it when I was in high school. I used to take it at night and I would stay up late and study. It would sort of wire me and then I would sleep, but when I would wake up in the morning I would be absolutely smashed. I didn't even know what it really was. It was almost before I smoked cannabis, so I was dealing with these walks to school in the morning where all the colors were bright, a song on my lips, a skip in my step. I could hardly, and you can also reduce morning glory seeds to flour in one of those brawn grinders. So that's a very good kit. Yeah. No, I ground it in a mortar and pestle fairly crudely at that phase, but what you do is you just cap it up, flour it and cap it up. You know it contains myristicin, which is psychoactive and which is a precursor for MDMA and is quite a nice thing. I mean it's not going to shake the foundations of the planet, but it's very good. What? A couple. Not a lot. Oh, that's what I should say. Do not, you know, people sometimes with plants, they get the attitude that you need to do a lot because it's spread thin. In most cases that's true, but in the case of nutmeg it isn't true. It's a cap, a double-O capsule. No, it does. Same, same. Yeah, well the reason I preferred grinding the whole nutmeg was because it's obviously fresher. If it's ground, and you can buy whole nutmeg at Safeway. Prisoners know this. If you'd done more hard time, you wouldn't be asking these questions. Well, let me say a little bit more about this. The Zoroastrian religion is generally considered to precede the Vedic religion of Soma. Soma is this mysterious Vedic intoxicant of great antiquity. The ninth mandala of the Rig Veda is this enormous hymn of praise to Soma, "Greater than Indra," it says. Unbroken throughout the history of the Zoroastrian religion is the sacrament of Haoma, H-A-O-M-A. Haoma and Soma appear to be historically related, and Haoma is Pagamon Harmala. If you're interested in reading about all this, there's a book called Haoma and Harmaline by David Flattery. It's Near East publication number 23, and it's available from the Near East Studies Department of UC Berkeley. Fascinating book. I mean, you learn, for instance, that in the classic phase of the Zoroastrian religion, the only method for gaining knowledge about the invisible world was the use of drugs. Any other method was scorned as completely preposterous, and since this is rather close to my own position, I'm pleased to find it in place early. They talk in that book, they discuss how there is this concept in Zoroastrianism of what is called the Menang, the Menang world, and the Menang world is only accessible through Haoma. It's only accessible through pharmacological means. That's the dogma. Yeah. Morning glory seeds, yes. Now this is something that's accessible, and that those of you who find yourselves bemoaning the lack of availability could overcome. The heavenly blue morning glory with the heart-shaped leaf, that's important because I see around here, I see blue morning glories with a leaf that looks like a grape leaf. That's not it, folks. That won't do it. It has to have a valentine-shaped leaf, and this brilliant blue or white or white and blue flowers are hybrids. The blue is the wild type. It's called heavenly blue. The white is called pearly gates, and the white and blue is called flying saucer. These guys must have been doing more than that. Now, listen carefully and I'll avoid a lawsuit and you'll avoid a tummy ache. The morning glory seeds which are sold in garden stores here are the morning glory that you want, the blue, heavenly blue morning glory, but seed companies have dipped these seeds in a poison specifically to keep you from getting high off these morning glory seeds. So what you have to do then is overcome this by stealth, always our best weapon. Stealth means buy the morning glories and grow them and produce an uncontaminated crop of your own. Now the morning glory seeds that you will produce by this means you have to take around 250 for a person of ordinary body weight. So if you are low or high, make the adjustment accordingly. The morning glory seeds can be flowered in your brawn grinder and then mixed into applesauce or a milkshake or some thick medium because actually it's pretty disgusting. Now there's a slight problem here which is the seed also contains estercoumarin which is a nematic and makes your stomach cramp. So that will leave after about an hour. So you can either pay your dues and sit there with a terrible tummy ache for this very critical hour or there are strategies for getting that estercoumarin out of there with solvent washes. I don't want to give the details because too many people blow themselves to kingdom come. High molecular weight solvents like chloroform and petroleum ether tend to be slightly tricky for the non-chemist to work with. So but if you are a chemist go go to the literature and you'll figure it out. A solvent which which sometimes works which is non-explosive relatively is a grain alcohol. But grain alcohol the reason chemists don't use it is because it's not it's not very efficient. You'll get like 60 to 70 percent of a sample where if you go to chloroform or pet ether you can push that up to 96, 97 percent. If you get the seed again treat it like the morning glory. Flour it in a in a very fine grinder. Those seeds are hard as hell so you've got to do that. Flour it, soak it in water, shake the water vigorously several times. A fairly large the larger the volume of water the more efficient the filtration there the extraction will be. And then pour all the water through a Melitta filter and then collect the the you know the water and and take it. I don't think it would be a good idea to try to concentrate that by by heat or you'll destroy the active principle. These beta carbolines, harmine, harmaline, they all have a there is a slight stomach thing. They come on in about an hour. There's what's called visual streaming. I am assuming first of all I'm making a number of assumptions here that you are sitting in silent darkness and that you are have an empty stomach and then you get visual streaming which if you've never seen this it's basically it looks like you're driving through a bunch of after images. You're driving, there are these purple and chartreuse lights sliding past and when you stare forward you can see them sliding past. After about 10 minutes of that and possibly a hit of cannabis it becomes more explicit and you move into the realm of what's called hypnagogia. Hypnagogia are dancing mice, little colored candies, pieces of ribbons, gears, screws, the trivia, the impedimentia of the phantasmagoria of your mind. Then after about 10 minutes of that and of course what's happening if you have a pharmacological vision of this is thousands of these molecules are arriving at the synaptic site of activity, elbowing aside the local population of endogenous neurotransmitters, getting them out of the way, plugging themselves into the receptor site and beginning to lift the electron spin resonance levels and push them in new directions and you can almost hear it doing this and then beyond the hypnagogia there is the actual trip and it usually is encountered, you have to go through what Marcella called the rupture of the mundane plane. This means that the world has to fall, it like falls apart or explodes or settles down on you. There's a sense of a rupture of plane and then the visually coherent, emotionally laden, information laden, high content hallucinations occur and many people have taken psychedelic drugs and never gotten past the hypnagogia. They don't know that there's something out there besides dancing mice and spinning geometric wheels and stuff like that but beyond that you cross over and that's the typical model of a trip. Now what happens with all of these things to greater and lesser degrees, LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, ayahuasca is and I've never actually ever heard an explanation for this. For some reason the experience comes in waves. There's the first wave, that makes sense, that's the drug taking hold but why then after 20 minutes of unbelievably outlandish hallucination will it like all stop? You know and it's like a moment ago you were screaming for mercy, now you look around you say I'm down. Am I down? I seem to be down. You know and sometimes you seem to come all the way down like on LSD it's like it totally turns off sometimes and then about five minutes later it comes again and you get another wave and if you've taken a really dedicated hit of ayahuasca for example you will get like as many as five or six of these waves throughout the evening and the first one is usually the strongest. If you take a effective but not strong dose of ayahuasca you will get one pass and often and then if you take slightly less you'll get one pass and it will be weak. So if you take ayahuasca at all times pay attention because you may be looking at something thinking well this is not so interesting I'm sure it's going to be much better in an hour and you may actually be looking at as good as it's going to get that evening and psilocybin also comes in waves like this. LSD very dramatically. DMT not because DMT is one enormous brief wave. I mean DMT sort of brings all the issues together and and I the way I think of these psychedelics experientially is as a series of concentric circles maybe like the outer circle is mescaline and the next circle in is LSD and the next circle in is psilocybin and the next circle in is DMT. It's almost as though the psychedelic experience is whatever drug or whatever substance you take it leads you deeper and deeper in the in the same direction and of course with DMT you not only hear the aliens you see the aliens you not only see the aliens you become an alien it seems to be the most radical of all of these things in terms of the experience it's also the most natural of all of these things. It also is the safest. It stands the ordinary standards of courage and risk on their head because here it is it's the most terrifying the most spectacular and the safest. None of us including myself have fully come to grips with this paradox. We would rather do less safe less scary drugs I think. DMT is is pretty impressive in most situations. Are you against meditation? Do you think it doesn't work as well as hallucination? Well no I just I think they're completely different realms of human activity. I can't I mean meditation you don't hallucinate you don't they say you do but they aren't very convincing and plus the monks then rush over and explain that you're doing it wrong so you know what's the deal? I think I if if by meditation you mean lying down and closing your eyes or sitting up and closing your eyes a lot I do that a lot and I like it but I would never confuse it with the psychedelic enterprise. Pardon me? I it's only my opinion but I really don't. I think that it's that that all of these spiritual techniques are not substitutions for the psychedelic experience but trade-offs you know I mean organized religion is as concerned with controlling social groups as organized politics is and the the the visionary or ecstatic experience is unsettling to the religious mentality you know even among fundamentalist Christians if you're not one they all seem more or less alike but if you move into that world you discover that they are very strongly polarized in two directions those who are scripturalists and those who are experientialists the glossolalia is the speaking in tongues the holy rollers that sort of thing and the scripturalists are very uncomfortable around the experientialist because to them it looks like demonic possession and they get really agitated about that I think that medicine and meditation work very well together. I'll take ayahuasca or psilocybin and sit in the lotus position for many hours and it's incredible how they work well together. And then after the experience is over, the next time I meditate I feel like I'm still doing the medicine. Yeah well I think that all of these techniques like mantra, yantra, tantra, whatever, they work incredibly well in the presence of psychedelics leading me to suppose that what these are are tools that were developed in the paleolithic world of psychedelic magic and all we have now are these tools but we don't have the original engine that drove them. Yes, I am very bored by spiritual practice unless I've taken a psychedelic and then you know mantric chanting is beyond the power of mind to encompass or describe. Sex isn't bad either and you know it seems to be a general functional enhancer is what it is. Yeah. What about drums? Acoustical driving is also a tried-and-true tradition but see it's not about the exclusivity of method but the combination of method. I mean what you want to do is beat your drum while sitting in yab yum while stoned on X while at the holy mountain while the astrological configuration is correct and then you know you know line it all up and then push it through. That's the way to do it I think. Yeah. Well it again it goes back to this function of boundary dissolution. Creativity if you analyze what do what do we mean when we say that it basically means being able to transcend the ordinary. You see it in a way nobody else ever saw it whatever it is and so that's creativity. Psychedelics by dissolving the boundaries of cultural expectation let you see things in new ways. I was in a situation recently where it was evening and silhouetted against the sky were flame cypress trees but they were all black and I was looking at them I've seen flame cypress trees against twilight skies many times you all have as well and suddenly it was like there was this shift and I didn't see it as a flame cypress tree anymore. I saw it as black dust pouring out of a certain point of the sky and cascading like a waterfall and I was looking at three waterfalls of micro fine black powder pouring out of points about 60 feet above the ground. Well I was I didn't even mention it to the person I was with but I just noticed this psychedelic perception. The other night this was really interesting to me the other night just as I was falling asleep a phrase came into my mind that I I liked but I didn't understand it. In fact I didn't think it meant anything I just thought it was an interesting phrase and and I thought about it for about a minute and then it did this same thing that the flame cypress tree did it went ploink and this other dimension sprouted out of it and I understood it and I thought this is a very interesting idea and I've never thought it before. The thought was if time or space then history is a cobweb. That was all it was but I don't take these leaps very often so I was delighted because I knew a moment would come when I could lay it on a group of people like I've just done. So it's a catalyst for cognitive activity that's what the mushroom is. Dance, drama, song, painting, body expression, creativity and simply the passive act of understanding. It this is what it does for us and this is what we love to do I mean we are creatures of the mind you know they talk about virtual reality as some future technology that's going to change everything. We've been living in a virtual reality for the past 6,000 years. I mean look at cities like New York and London and Los Angeles I mean the every nature has disappeared. Everything you see is a human idea downloaded into material existence. It's entirely virtual. It doesn't disappear at the punch of a dial but it is as virtual as the virtual realities that will eventually be made out of out of light behind goggles. Culture the whole thing is that culture and language tend to become traps and yet they can be the platforms for enormous freedom if you understand what it's all about and what it's all about is you. You are the center of the mandala. You are not marginalized in any way and the message that the culture gives us is that we are marginal. It doesn't matter whether you if you've got a hundred million dollars. The fortune magazine will inform you that so do 10,000 other people on the North American continent. There's nothing special about you. It's and so we are constantly this is part of the democratic legacy. We are constantly told you're not special. Special isn't special. Anybody could do it. What the psychedelic and so then when you look for guidance, direction, mentorship, we always look toward institutions. Well I'll go to the university or I'll go to the army or I'll do something. Somebody will tell me will give me a larger purpose. But it's really yourself that is the final arbiter and if you keep yourself as the final arbiter you will be less susceptible to infection by cultural illusion. Now the problem with this is that it makes you feel bad to not be infected by cultural illusion because it's called alienation. You know but this is like I can't solve all problems. The reason we feel alienated is because the society is infantile, trivial, and stupid. So the cost of sanity in this society is a certain level of alienation. I grapple with this because I'm a parent and I think anybody who has children you come to this realization you know what will it be? Alienated, cynical, intellectual, or slack-jawed, half-wit consumer of the horseshit being handed down from on high. There is not much choice in there you see and and we all want our children to be well adjusted. It's unfortunately there's nothing to be well adjusted to so that's a real problem. Yeah yeah I think well and I really believe that extra environmentalism which is a nicer though longer word for alienation is defensible and shouldn't be thought of as pathological. What I noticed in going to the Amazon in Indonesia and these places is that the person you want to get to is the shaman and but the shaman is different from everybody else. Like when you go into an Amazonian tribe that's way up river or something the people behave the way you would expect naive untraveled people to behave. They want to touch your cortex and you know look at your camera and and look through the binoculars and fiddle with the can opener and all this. No shaman would ever stoop to such behavior. A shaman is not knows that cultures are provisional and is interested in you as a person. The other people don't even see you as a person because you're huge, white, strange, smelling, and incomprehensible. The shaman sees you as a person and it's because he is alienated. The reason shamans can do their magic is because they are outside the belief system. I really think that that's true. Everyone else believes you know that the guy in the other village can send the mojo and mess with you. The shaman knows that that's not quite how it works and so then he as it were can go behind the board and fix the cultural TV that everybody else is just watching. So I think alienation, extra environmentalism, shamanism, whatever you want to call it, is simply individualism in the context of cultures that don't value individualism and cultures don't. You know it said nature acts to preserve the species, cultures act to preserve the illusions of the population. They're not interested in you if you're an Einstein or a Jackson Pollock or unless they can fit you in to the pre-established systems of commerce and canons of aesthetic order and so forth and so on and then that's called being civilized. Okay, anything else? Yeah? I don't think I did but if you say I did I did. Oh could I? Well yes let me explain the question is what's with licking frogs? I'm not sure I got it right but well you know you kiss a lot of frogs before you find a prince and you probably lick a lot more. Toads, not frogs, let's give the devil his due here. Toads of certain species produce a relative of DMT in large glands in their necks. Why this is is not clear considering that this exudate or this material will kill a dog if a dog picks up a toad like that in his mouth within minutes. It's pretty spectacular. It's reasonable to suppose that then this is just a defense that has been evolved. Some of you may have seen the dinosaur in Jurassic Park that spits poison in your face. We're talking something like that. The toad creates this DM or this 5-methoxy DMT in this gland and when the glands are squeezed it comes out on the surface of the toad skin. It's a near relative of DMT. Speaking from my personal battery of many prejudices, I would say I don't care for it. It complicates my job enormously because people do this stuff and they think A) that it is DMT or B) if they're slightly better informed that it's just like DMT. It is in fact chemically called 5- methoxy DMT. However, it is nothing like DMT. It's as much like DMT as radio is like television and that's where the difference lies. The 5-MEO does not trigger the most spectacular effect associated with DMT which is these three-dimensional crawling hallucinations that come out of the woodwork and reveal the true nature of reality to you. When you take 5-MEO DMT you have all of the physical presentation of DMT. There's a sense of a kind of light anesthesia through the limbs. There's a sense of falling forward into a void. There's a sense of losing body boundary. Now at that point in DMT those symptoms would give way to the trip. At that point in 5-MEO DMT those symptoms give way to the beginning of the come down. And if you people who have never taken DMT sometimes rave about 5-MEO and say you know this was the most astonishing thing I've ever happened with. People who are familiar with DMT can yawn their way all the way through it because you're braced for the DMT thing. I mean you think oh my god it feels just like it. Here it comes. It's going to be upon me. 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, plus 1, plus 2, plus 3, plus 4, plus 5. It's not coming in. It doesn't come in. And so and then 5-MEO is fatal in sheep as well as dogs. Spectacularly fatal in sheep. And so I guess if you're a sheep that's counter-indicated doesn't seem to be harmful in human beings with but with so little data available I think maybe we should you know there are old psychedelicists and bold psychedelicists but there are no old bold psychedelicists. There might be a few. Of course getting them to speak ordinary English is a real choice. Don't point at me. I'm a child. A mere stripling. Okay. Well anybody else? You can we can do this till doomsday. I may never get to my agenda. Not to discourage you. Well, yeah? Have I had any contact with the government? Not exactly. Well, up until a week ago the answer to this question was yes. I mean no. When I got home from Esalen the last time there was a really funny letter which I haven't quite figured out how to respond to. Dear Mr. McKenna, I'm an officer of the California State Police. Fascinated with DMT and recently read the interview with you in the San Francisco Chronicle. I wonder if you would be willing to meet with me and have coffee so we can discuss this at your earliest possible convenience. So I what I did was fairly chicken shit actually. I found a copy of Food of the Gods and I sent it off and I said this is my latest book or this is a book of mine it deals in part with DMT. Give it a quick read and if you're still interested in a get-together call me. So once you establish that you're an intellectual they just... Harmless. A nut of some sort. Yeah, now I'm a rapper. Now I'm making Leary's mistake. The 25 year old, the 15 to 25 year old crowd. But I've got news for you. Next year Invisible Landscape is coming out. It was the book my brother and I originally wrote and when that book comes out all my books will be in the public domain or you know available. Sound photosynthesis has at least 70 of my tapes. Dolphin tapes has 40 more. Then there's a scattering of other people with a few. I am not going to do this till health freezes over. I have a whole other plan for myself and I think also you know once you crusade for ten years if you haven't captured Jerusalem you better go back to farming in Provence and and that's more or less metaphorically what I intend to do. Pardon me? No it's I'll tell you some of my plans briefly because it doesn't relate to this. 220 species of Trilobite occur in the shales of southern Bohemia. I plan to go to Prague and organize the peasants of Bohemia to collect these various species of Trilobites, ship them into a central warehouse in Prague while we will identify, photograph them and issue a very high-end catalog for collectors of rare fossils and I will become the Trilobite maven of Prague 6 and disappear from this domain because I think I've said all I have to say. I mean not today, thank God, but in the course of doing all this. Yeah? I've heard you mention that you see Prague as becoming a real central point for thinkers and poets and radical ideas to kind of coalesce and be the fulcrum to kind of bring this country into a new flowering if that's it. Well I think that the you know the greatest period of American creativity in literature and in other areas too arguably was that in the 20th century was the 20s and that's because an expatriate community conducted the critique of American society from a foreign vantage point in that case Paris and I think that that in spite of the Clinton hiatus that the politics of light have not yet come to settle on the land of Jefferson and that we should be prepared on a moment's notice basically to yes to decamp to Prague and and conduct all this from there. Also you know Prague was the capital of European civilization before the 30 Years War before the rise of modern science. It's an Italianate city untouched by either world war it's a it's a beautiful place. I don't like the part of what I do that is a cult of personality. I don't like it that a white guy sits at the front of the room and pontificates and I don't know if you figured out this shuffle but I have and I know that I don't know anything more than you know really and that it's just a funny circumstance of fate that you sit and listen and I speak because there are no experts and there is only you know the integrity of doing and having done and really if you get the message you you will be able to transcend the need for any more of this because it's really a message of self-trust and self-empowerment and then what I'm also trying to create is a community of shared associations about these weird states so that we don't have to all privately think we're losing our marbles you know let those who talk to the elves find each other and band together I am not one I am basically a scientist without portfolio because no academic institution would ever trust me with a portfolio but I I move in the domain of the gurus the channelers the pontificators and those with secret revealed knowledge from Atlantis and Lemuria but I have contempt for all of that whether it's true or not because they got there the wrong way you know you have to come through the rules of evidence and reason reason is not science don't confuse them I'm very much a critic of science and the scientific method but I don't think reason can be tossed out with that bathwater what is being proposed here is that we are on the brink of the discovery of another world a world as potentially transforming of our world as the discovery of the Western Hemisphere transformed European civilization in the 1500s but the world that we're about to discover is inside the mind it's mental real estate we who have made consciousness our game by building cities elaborating literatures tossing up religions and setting armies marching we who have made consciousness our game have barely scratched the surface of human consciousness and it's not like we haven't had a crack at it I mean these yogins have been over there digging away for millennia Egyptian religion kabbalism alchemy Western traditions of mysticism and I am a connoisseur of all that don't get me wrong but what astonishes me is how embryonic it all is we are not the tired inheritors of an ancient and sophisticated civilization in its twilight which is what they're all telling us we are the know-nothing fresh scrub babes who are the new kids on the block who haven't got a clue as to what the human enterprise could really be about and we are coming now through a very narrow historical neck where the accumulated stupidity of the last 5,000 years is the dues now have to be paid it ain't fair we didn't do it you know we didn't bring the slaves from Africa we didn't invent oligarchy we didn't do all these things nobody's interested in our whining about how we didn't do it it's in your face and it's clearly a crisis of two things of consciousness and of conditioning these are the two things that the psychedelics attack we have the technological power the engineering skills to save our planet to cure disease to feed the hungry to end war but we lack the intellectual vision the ability to change our minds we must decondition ourselves from 10,000 years of bad behavior and it's not easy I mean imagine I don't know how many of you have ever confronted the fact that you were addicted to something and some addictions are really serious if you've ever been addicted to tobacco or heroin I'm sure you know what I mean well then imagine a global population addicted to a drug the use of which is killing us but we can't there's no there's no doctor saying you should there's no rehab clinic to go to when you're a species we are on an absolutely destructive bender that will end with the death of the earth the impoverishment of its animal and plant population and the collapse of our civilization into scarcity unless unless we can somehow restructure our psychology and and get hold of ourselves and psychedelics are the only thing I've ever seen work on an individual level to do that you know in the early 60s they were curing seventy four five percent of chronic alcoholism cases that they treated with LSD they were curing with one dose of LSD one five hundred microgram dose well now obviously LSD is not a magic bullet for alcoholism that's a preposterous idea it's simply that you take LSD and if you're a chronic alcoholic you review your life and you notice that you're killing yourself and then you say my god I am killing myself if I don't stop what I'm doing I will be dead that's the strongest motivation to character rehabilitation there is and that's what we have to carry into the domain of public debate I can't believe how constipated American institutions are I mean here we are under the aegis of a great crusading reformer from Arkansas a new order in human affairs has dawned but they suggest closing an airbase out at Sacramento and their editorials as to whether we can survive the shock of this massive change well I've got news for you you better do your change related calisthenics if that was heavy lifting because what you've got coming at you is is something very very different we are now in a position to actually make something of ourselves extend the design process to human destiny and and produce something that will redeem 10,000 years of pogroms and migrations and attempted genocides and pointless wars and stupid religions that make people hate themselves and all the rest of it if we're going to redeem that legacy then we have to do something quite spectacular now I want to totally contradict myself this is not only everybody's prerogative but it's your obligation if you don't contradict yourself your position isn't complex enough I I will talk a little bit about what I've learned from psychedelics I feel self-conscious doing it but on the other hand wouldn't it be stupid for me to talk about what you've learned from psychedelics that would add presumption to the sins already arrayed here there are different models about what's how what the psychedelic experience is here's a couple building on Western psychotherapy as elaborated by Freud and Jung one view of what psychedelics are is it's the part of your mind that you'd rather not do business with it's the memories of childhood neglect or abuse it's repressed kinky fantasies it's in other words the the Freudian idea of the unconscious that somehow these are drugs which dissolve the boundary between conscious and unconscious mind and then you can do accelerated psychotherapy because resistances have been pharmacologically overcome that's one model it's good as far as it goes it just doesn't go far enough then there's another model which I would call the traditional or shamanic model and it says the cosmos is a series of levels and these levels are connected by vertical routes of access which can be thought of as simply flights through space or magical trees or magical ladders anyway there's an an image of ascent and ordinary people exist on only one of these levels but a shaman is not an ordinary person a shaman is a superhuman person who has the power of animal allies behind them and they can go up and down in these elevators that move between levels and they can therefore recover lost souls see social hanky-panky theft and adultery see the causes behind that see the causes behind disease so forth and so on that would be the traditional one that what I have concluded after 25 years of fiddling with this is that both of those ideas have a certain something to recommend them but that they don't go far enough and that we get more to the meat of this if we leave off psychological the first explanation or sociological the second explanation and actually go for something a little more formal to wit a mathematical model of what shamanism is and what I mean by that is let's think about what shamans do they cure disease and another way of putting that is they have a remarkable facility for choosing patients who will recover they predict weather they're very important they tell where game has gone the movement of game and they seem to have an paranormal ability to look into questions as I mentioned who's sleeping with who who stole the chicken who you know social transgressions are an open book to them well thinking about this from a mathematician's point of view a an all encompassing explanation that would explain how all these magical feats are done is simply to suppose that the shaman is somehow able to project his consciousness his or her consciousness into a higher dimension not metaphorically as in Sylvester Stallone has many dimensions not metaphorically but literally as in one dimension two dimension three dimensions and four because if you could move into the fourth dimension the meant the dimension orthogonal to Newtonian space-time seeing what the weather is going to be next week is as easy as seeing what the weather is now seeing where the game went is as easy as seeing where the game are knowing who stole the chicken is simply defined by looking to see who stole the chicken and I have noticed that all of biology not simply shamanism within the context of human society but all of biology is in a sense a conquest of dimensionality that as we ascend the phylogeny of organic life what animals are are a strategy for conquering space-time and complex animals do it better than simpler animals and we do it better than any complex animal and we 20th century people do it better than any people in any previous century because we can bind data in so many ways that they couldn't electronically on film on tape so forth and so on so the the progress of organic life is deeper and deeper into dimensional conquest well from that point of view then the shaman begin to look like the advance guard of a new kind of human being a human being that is as advanced over where we are as we are advanced over people a million years ago because we have you know very elaborate strategies for coding the past it's a dimensional conquest so that's part of what I've learned about psychedelics and I could have left it there but I never do {END} Wait Time : 0.00 sec Model Load: 0.62 sec Decoding : 5.80 sec Transcribe: 3268.50 sec Total Time: 3274.92 sec