[00:00:00 - 00:00:03] I will summarize the state of the art thus. [00:00:03 - 00:00:12] Current thinking concludes that the peak of the emergence of intelligence in the galaxy was achieved 10 to 100 million years ago. [00:00:12 - 00:00:17] That most races in the galaxy are very old and very sophisticated. [00:00:17 - 00:00:24] We cannot expect such races to appear with a trumpet blast over every city on Earth. [00:00:24 - 00:00:31] Such an entry into history is tantamount to crashing into someone's house completely unannounced. [00:00:31 - 00:00:38] Hardly the sort of thing that one would expect from a subtle and ancient galactic civilization. [00:00:38 - 00:00:42] Rather, they have always been here. [00:00:42 - 00:00:47] Or rather, their presence has always been here in the Hall of Senogens. [00:00:47 - 00:00:55] When we understand this on our own, we will be signaling to them that we are now ready for the contact. [00:00:55 - 00:01:04] We can send that signal only by following the instructions of the seeded genes and building the necessary apparatus. [00:01:04 - 00:01:16] When that is done, somewhere in the galaxy lights will flash the message that yet another of the millions upon millions of seeded planets in the galaxy [00:01:16 - 00:01:20] has achieved the threshold of galactic citizenship. [00:01:20 - 00:01:31] Current estimates are that even in a galaxy teeming with intelligence, such a threshold is passed by an intelligent species only every hundred or thousand years. [00:01:31 - 00:01:35] It is a joyous moment even for the galacterians. [00:01:35 - 00:01:45] If such a speculation has any validity at all, then its very articulation signifies the final moment of the pre-contact phase [00:01:45 - 00:01:52] and signifies also the pressing need to attempt to explore the psilocybin trance [00:01:52 - 00:02:00] and to understand the role that Stropharia cubensis is playing in the psychology of the human species. [00:02:00 - 00:02:07] Recently, a new light has been thrown on the phenomenon of voices heard in the head [00:02:07 - 00:02:11] and the role that they may play in the evolution of consciousness. [00:02:11 - 00:02:16] Julian Jaynes of Princeton has written a most provocative book, [00:02:16 - 00:02:21] "The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind." [00:02:21 - 00:02:35] Jaynes uses 445 pages to lay out his ideas concerning the role that hallucinations, especially audio hallucinations, have played in the structuring of mind. [00:02:35 - 00:02:42] Briefly, Jaynes believes that until the time of roughly the Iliad, around 1400 BC, [00:02:42 - 00:02:48] nothing at all like modern ego-centered and individuated consciousness existed. [00:02:48 - 00:02:58] Instead, he argues that people behaved like automata or social insects, unconsciously going about the tasks of the hive. [00:02:58 - 00:03:04] Only in moments of great stress and personal danger was this regimen broken. [00:03:04 - 00:03:13] In such moments, an impersonal mind, outside the usual experience of the world, became manifest as a voice. [00:03:13 - 00:03:20] According to Jaynes' theory, such voices were the guiding lights of human society, perhaps for millennia, [00:03:20 - 00:03:29] whether they were understood to be the voice of an absent but living king, or a dead king, an omnipresent god, or a personal deity. [00:03:29 - 00:03:39] Migrations and the breakdown of the cultural insularity of the early human civilizations brought an end to man's relations to the bicameral mind, [00:03:39 - 00:03:47] which is Jaynes' term for the cybernetic godlike presence felt behind the hallucinated voices. [00:03:47 - 00:03:55] Selective pressures and social prejudices against having a relationship with the bicameral mind in a modern context [00:03:55 - 00:04:05] have made hearing voices into a mystical phenomenon or a serious mental aberration, in any case something very rare. [00:04:05 - 00:04:12] The interested reader should study Jaynes' case carefully, although his book is exasperating, [00:04:12 - 00:04:16] since in a treatise on the role of hallucinations in human history, [00:04:16 - 00:04:22] he fails to offer any serious discussion of hallucinogenic plant use at all. [00:04:22 - 00:04:31] This is a serious failing, especially if the effect triggered by psilocybin is not, as I have suggested, [00:04:31 - 00:04:36] a contact with an intelligence entirely distinct from ourselves. [00:04:36 - 00:04:44] Jaynes' theory opens up the possibility that psilocybin returns one to rapport with the personified other [00:04:44 - 00:04:52] in a way that duplicates on some level the state of mind that was characteristic of early human civilizations. [00:04:52 - 00:05:00] It is reasonable to suggest that a voice in the head, interpreted by ancient man as a god, [00:05:00 - 00:05:08] might be interpreted by a naive modern person as a telepathic contact with extraterrestrials. [00:05:08 - 00:05:19] Whatever facts may eventually be known, psilocybin offers a tool that allows direct experience of this voice that explains all things, [00:05:19 - 00:05:22] this logos of the other. [00:05:22 - 00:05:32] [water gurgling] [00:05:32 - 00:05:42] [water gurgling] [00:05:42 - 00:05:52] [water gurgling] [00:05:52 - 00:06:02] [water gurgling] [00:06:02 - 00:06:12] [water gurgling] [00:06:12 - 00:06:22] [water gurgling] [00:06:22 - 00:06:32] [water gurgling] [00:06:32 - 00:06:42] [water gurgling] [00:06:42 - 00:06:52] [water gurgling] [00:06:52 - 00:07:02] [water gurgling] [00:07:02 - 00:07:12] [water gurgling] [00:07:12 - 00:07:22] [water gurgling] [00:07:22 - 00:07:32] [water gurgling] [00:07:32 - 00:07:42] [water gurgling] [00:07:42 - 00:07:52] [water gurgling] [00:07:52 - 00:08:02] [water gurgling] [00:08:02 - 00:08:12] [water gurgling] [00:08:12 - 00:08:22] [water gurgling] [00:08:22 - 00:08:32] [water gurgling] [00:08:32 - 00:08:42] [water gurgling] [00:08:42 - 00:08:52] [water gurgling] [00:08:52 - 00:08:58] [water gurgling] [00:08:58 - 00:09:03] Chapter 19 The Hawaiian Connection [00:09:03 - 00:09:09] The fall of 1975 was a time of personal change and consolidation. [00:09:09 - 00:09:15] My old friend met years before in Jerusalem during my opium and Kabbalah phase, [00:09:15 - 00:09:19] became at last my lover, tide pool traveler. [00:09:19 - 00:09:25] The mushroom had made good its promise to send a partner to share the ongoing journey [00:09:25 - 00:09:27] through the interior world. [00:09:27 - 00:09:35] In October we went to Hawaii to write and to plan a trip to the Peruvian Amazon in early '76. [00:09:35 - 00:09:42] We had rented a house on the remote and desolate Kau district of the Big Island of Hawaii. [00:09:42 - 00:09:46] It was an area of twisted lava flows of all ages. [00:09:46 - 00:09:52] Kapukas, islanded areas of ancient forest, were the only vegetation [00:09:52 - 00:09:56] and were surrounded by frothy seas of hardened rock [00:09:56 - 00:10:00] that had killed all low-lying and less fortunate life. [00:10:00 - 00:10:08] Slowly, nearly imperceptibly, Mauna Loa rose up to 14,000 feet in the distance behind us. [00:10:08 - 00:10:13] [music] [00:10:13 - 00:10:17] We were at about 2,500 feet ourselves. [00:10:17 - 00:10:21] Our small house fronted the vast and forbidding cinder fields, [00:10:21 - 00:10:28] but the lot ran back into a kapuka whose enclosing shade and many birds and insects [00:10:28 - 00:10:35] provided welcome contrast to the primal devastation that stretched in all directions for miles. [00:10:35 - 00:10:37] Our life was leisurely. [00:10:37 - 00:10:42] I wrote and did some experiments with further aspects of mushroom cultivation. [00:10:42 - 00:10:49] Kat was immersed in doing the line drawings for the book on Stropharia cubensis growing. [00:10:49 - 00:10:55] We were isolated as we both loved to be, and we took mushrooms together and often. [00:10:55 - 00:11:01] It was during that time in Hawaii that I determined to return again to the Amazon [00:11:01 - 00:11:05] to track down Banisteriopsis kapi in its native setting [00:11:05 - 00:11:12] and to satisfy myself as to the role that it and the beta-carboline hallucinogens it contains [00:11:12 - 00:11:16] played in the experience at La Churrera. [00:11:16 - 00:11:21] I was especially interested to know if other chemically different aboriginal hallucinogens [00:11:21 - 00:11:26] provoked the same experience as did the mushroom psilocybin. [00:11:26 - 00:11:32] I wanted to determine if our experiences were part of the general phenomenology of hallucinogens [00:11:32 - 00:11:35] or were unique to psilocybin. [00:11:35 - 00:11:39] Throughout that October and November in Hawaii, [00:11:39 - 00:11:44] we took the Stropharia that we had grown at weekly or 10-day intervals. [00:11:44 - 00:11:48] This was an amazing series of experiences. [00:11:48 - 00:11:55] The psilocybin definitely conveys the impression that sometimes the hallucinations one is seeing [00:11:55 - 00:12:00] are being seen with equal clarity by the other people around one. [00:12:00 - 00:12:08] Kat and I satisfied ourselves that this was true by describing in turn the images in which we were immersed. [00:12:08 - 00:12:13] At those times when the flow of images had a certain electric intensity, [00:12:13 - 00:12:17] there was no doubt that we were seeing the same things. [00:12:17 - 00:12:22] The relationship of the psyche to the surface of the body, the skin, [00:12:22 - 00:12:25] is amazing under the influence of psilocybin. [00:12:25 - 00:12:33] By having large areas of skin in contact, we seem to somehow obviate the usual psychic individuality [00:12:33 - 00:12:40] and integrity of the body and would melt into each other's minds in a way that was immensely pleasant [00:12:40 - 00:12:46] and full of unplumbed potential for human growth and parapsychological studies. [00:12:46 - 00:12:52] It was wonderful to have someone to share the mushroom with, for until Kat had joined me, [00:12:52 - 00:13:00] most of my mushroom experiences had been entirely alone, one soul adrift in the cosmic ocean. [00:13:00 - 00:13:08] Happily, there were now two of us navigating together through the billows of jeweled and synesthesia geometries. [00:13:08 - 00:13:14] Two of those mushroom trips stand out as especially memorable. [00:13:14 - 00:13:19] The first occurred the evening of the 28th of November, 1975. [00:13:19 - 00:13:25] We each ate five dried grams of Stropharia and then sat inside by the fire [00:13:25 - 00:13:30] watching the slow upwelling of hallucinations from behind closed eyelids. [00:13:30 - 00:13:37] I seemed to see fleeting but prophetic images of the trip that we were planning into the Amazon.