Sounds True presents In Search of the Original Tree of Knowledge, a weekend workshop with Terence McKenna. Researcher, author, and philosopher, Terence McKenna has spent 25 years studying the foundations of shamanism and the ethno-pharmacology of spiritual transformation. His books include Food of the Gods and the Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide, and most recently, The Archaic Revival. He is also the founder of Botanical Dimensions, a non-profit botanical research project. In this weekend workshop, Terence McKenna examines time and its mysteries, the nature of language, and the techniques of ecstasy that have developed in non-western societies to navigate to and from invisible worlds. And now, recorded live in Boulder, Colorado, In Search of the Original Tree of Knowledge, a weekend workshop with Terence McKenna. How to slice into this pie. I try to never do it the same way because I don't want to get bored, but that lays a sort of obligation on me that I'm not always able to meet. Two things I think are going on inside this wrap as currently packaged. First of all, I'm very interested in talking about the impact of psilocybin on human evolution and values and institutions. And then, so that you don't think we've just fallen into fringe anthropology 101, I'm interested in taking the insights from that discussion and trying to apply it to the modern or postmodern, as the case may be, dilemma. Trying to draw some implication from looking at human prehistory and the set of factors that were in place at the moment of human emergence. Since I feel pretty much among friends and fringes here, it doesn't trouble me to confess that my book, Food of the Gods, I really conceived of as a kind of intellectual Trojan horse. It's written as though it were a scientific study, footnotes, bibliography, citations of impossible-to-obtain books, and so forth and so on. But this is simply to assuage and calm the academic anthropologists. The idea is to leave this thing on their doorstep, rather like an abandoned baby or a Trojan horse. And they will open their doors to it and take it inside, only to discover that out of this very staid, rational discourse pour the transforming elf machines from hyperspace with their own agenda. I feel like I should say this. It's more for my ease than yours, that I reached the conclusions that I now espouse through skepticism, reason, rationalism, and tough argument. So it may sound ditzy, flaky, and soft-headed, but that's just because you're hearing it wrong. The the guiding input was experience, and in a way what we're gathered here to talk about tonight is an experience, which is not only rare, transformative, challenging, but also for reasons which we'll probably get around to, illegal. So it's it's a very peculiar situation. Very few experiences are illegal and our models of the world are built up based on our experience. So if you make an experience illegal, you're essentially saying it is off-limits for model building. You can't include that in your model because it isn't really there in some sense. And this is the situation in Western society vis-a-vis the psychedelic experience. To my mind, the psychedelic experience is as much a part of being human as sexuality, personal independence, child-rearing. These are the things which are scripted into us as opportunities for exercising our peculiar situation vis-a-vis the phenomenon of being. And a society which would deny that is a society whose secret, or maybe not so secret, agenda is the infantilization of its citizens. I mean if we are not capable of dealing with these things, then who is? And are the people who made the rules? Did they carefully, conscientiously, and at depth explore these dimensions and decide they were unfit for human consumption? Or was it done more hastily, more mindlessly, and with more fear? I would submit to you that it's the latter. Well, first of all, I want to talk about the impact of psychedelics, especially in this case psilocybin, on humanness. And then if there's time, maybe we can talk a little bit about what is so great about it. I had a philosophy professor once, Paul Feyerabend, some of you may know his books, and he opened his epistemology 101 course by saying, "I'm going to teach you what truth is, and then I'm going to teach you what's so great about it." Well, I won't claim to teach what the psychedelic experience is. That you will have to find out on your own. But I think it is legitimate to discuss what's so great about it. You know, are we, by any measurable index, superior or inferior to people who do not have this experience? Because if not, then really the psychedelic position is no more than a kind of cult to be lined up along with Roman Catholicism and all the other cults out there. Speaking as a former member, of course. [laughter] Well, my my notion of the way to legitimate the importance of psychedelics is by showing, and I think one can show in fairly short order, that these things are not alien to the human experience, or ancillary, or the province of educated little brown people down in the rainforest, or anything like that. I submit to you that the psychedelic experience and the impact of psychedelic plants on human beings is central to understanding who we are and how we got this way. And if we can explore this issue and convince ourselves that there's some merit in this point of view, then it will simply, it will do more than rewrite the annals of a staid science like anthropology. It will actually change how we relate to each other and to the planet that we're in the process of grinding into pollution. So, that's the resendetra for the politics behind it. Now, here's the spiel. Sometime in the last three million years, the proto, our remote ancestors, the proto-hominids, were disrupted in their evolutionary climax in the canopies of the great forests of Africa. You see, most animal species evolve into a niche tighter and tighter and tighter. We see this with termites and cockroaches and most life-forms. This is what happens to them. Only if the niche is somehow disrupted or destroyed does the game veer away from its tendency toward closure. And this is what happened to us. Our remote ancestors would have lived happily in the climaxed rainforests of Africa in the same way that primates to this day live happily in the climaxed rainforests of Indonesia and South America. But for the fact that the dynamics of the planet, and this ultimately is, if we're looking for a cause, or some people would say a villain, then it's the climatological dynamics of the planet which began to limit these rainforest habitats. And a new kind of habitat began to form in Africa, which was grassland. It's very recent. And under nutritional pressure and under a pressure that was the result of this retreating environment, our remote ancestors descended from the trees and began to adapt themselves to the new world of the grassland. And they did this over a period of probably a couple of million years. Now, I maintain, and if any of you are evolutionary biologists or anthropologists, this is the nub of my position. Here's what's new scientifically. What they teach you about evolution is that it's caused by mutation, which is a random process, which then meets another random process, which is natural selection. And out of these two random processes, lo and behold, you get sea urchins, birds of paradise, gray whales, and human beings. Now, when you inquire as to what is the source of this mutation, you will be told it's cosmic rays, incident incoming hard radiation, which can disrupt chromosomes. And then most of these mutations are lethal, some huge percentage of them. But a vanishingly small number of them actually confer adaptive advantage, and they are then preserved in the genome and passed on. Now, what I want to suggest, and I've never seen it thoroughly treated by evolutionary thinkers, is that food is the unexamined source of evolutionary pressure. It can be. If you know anything about animal species, you know that most animals tend to specialize their diet. Insects are famous for this. If you find a caterpillar and you want to raise it in a jar, you must give it the food plant you found it on, because they don't just eat leaves. It doesn't work like that. They have species-specific adaptations. Now, why is this? It's because it's a strategy to limit exposure to toxic and mutagenic chemicals that other life forms are sequestering in their tissue to discourage predation, essentially. Well, so then what happens when a animal population, such as our remote ancestors, comes under pressure from a dwindling habitat or a limited availability of food? Well, what happens, if you have any sense, is you start experimenting. You start digging up roots you never thought about before and chewing on them. You start eating leaves. You start eating insect protein. You experiment with the slaughter of small animals and so forth and so on. And this is precisely what our remote ancestors did. This is the much lamented transition from fruititarian holiness to predatory carnivorous messiness. But had we not been willing to lower our gourmet standards, we would have entered the fossil record at that point. So, so here we have these protohominids foraging into this new grassland environment, beginning to beat on prairie dogs and stuff like that. And, and simultaneously, as we all know, evolving in this African belt environment were great herds of ungulate animals, proto-cattle, bison, wildebeest, antelopes, many, many different kinds of animals. And one of the curiosities of nature is that many mushrooms prefer the dung of ungulate animals to just going out and making a deal with the raw natural environment. They like the leavening that goes on with vegetable material when it passes through the double stomach of an ungulate animal. As a headline, what this means is mushrooms grow in manure. And so our remote ancestors testing for insects and eating small animals would certainly have encountered the so-called coprophytic or coprophilic, the dung-loving mushrooms. And they would have tested them for food. Years ago when I was in Kenya, I observed baboon troops in this very environment we're discussing. And their habit was they were very interested in cow pies because they had learned from experience that if you rush over to a relatively old cow pie and flip it over, there's a high probability of beetles or beetle grubs under there. And so these were vectors for food getting. Well in the end, I did not observe mushrooms in Africa, but I observed mushrooms in the Amazon and they can attain the size of a dinner plate. I've never seen them in cultivation quite that large. But you know you come out after a hard rain and these things are landed like little flying saucers or frisbees in the meadows. They would certainly have been tested for their nutritional potential. And psilocybin, different from all other chemicals in nature, including as far as I can tell all other hallucinogenic chemicals in nature, psilocybin has a unique set of characteristics which implicated to my mind very strongly in the realizing of the emergence of humanness out of proto hominid and hominid organization. And it works like this. It's very relatively easy to understand as major scientific breakthroughs go. At least you're not going to be asked to do any partial differential equations this evening. Psilocybin in very low doses, doses so low that if you were to take a dose this low you could conceivably forget you had done it and just go out and shop and fiddle around. But at doses so low that they do not register as a psychedelic experience, psilocybin imparts measurable improvement in visual acuity. Roland Fisher did this work in the late 50s and early 60s and they had they built an experimental device where a person who could not be seen by turning a crank there were two parallel bars and by turning a crank this person could rotate one of the parallel bars so that it was no longer parallel. And lacking talking rats, they went to the next preferred experimental animal which is graduate students and they would sit a graduate student down in front of this device, give them a very low dose of psilocybin and then put a buzzer in their hand and say when the two bars are no longer parallel push the buzzer. And Fisher collected large amounts of data which showed that the people who had taken the psilocybin and the other people were given placebo, of course, could detect this deformation long before the unstoned subjects were able to do so. And Fisher, who was a totally straight European scientist, in fact a Viennese, when I talked to him about this stuff, he was very cagey and he said he was funny. In fact, he said, "Well, you see, it's very interesting. Apparently here we have data which argues significantly that we are perceiving reality better with the drug than without the drug." Yes, yes. For him that was a joke. I mean he never did anything with it. It was just a throwaway line, but it stuck with me. And I don't think you have to be a rocket scientist to see that if you are a hunting animal in a situation of nutritional pressure, as our remote ancestors were, and there is a food in that environment which will give you better vision than by God, the animals which accept that item into their diet are going to be more successful hunters than the ones that do not. And consequently, they will outbreed those members of the population that have some aversion to this exotic food. Either they don't like the look of it, or they don't like that it grows in manure, and they don't like the taste of it. But those who accept it as a dietary item will be more successful at getting food and consequently more successful at raising their offspring to sexual maturity. And that's the name of the game in Darwinian evolution. You must raise your offspring to sexual maturity. Then the genes flow forward. If you fail in that, you get an F in the evolution game. Well, okay, so visual acuity, that's all very fine. But psilocybin has other properties which build on that initial pharmacological peculiarity. If you take slightly larger doses of psilocybin, and this is typical of many indoles, you get, with many of which are hallucinogens, you get what is called CNS arousal. Central central nervous system arousal. You all know this feeling. It's the feeling of two double cappuccinos in short order. It's that you do not sleep, you are very restless, you are very alert, your attention is scanning, scanning, scanning, and in highly sexed animals like primates arousal means exactly what it sounds like. It means erection in the male animal. And now, isn't that interesting? That is a second factor feeding back into this increased success with offspring business. Not only are you a benter hunter, but you're a more highly sexed creature and you're having more of what straight anthropologists refer to as successful copulations. An amazing phrase actually. Meaning of course that impregnation is a consequence of these of this sexual activity. Now the other thing that psilocybin does at or slightly above this arousal level, and this is very important for the argument, is it creates, it causes what I call boundary dissolution or and boundary dissolution in human beings like you and me means ego loss. And I believe that this would have promoted a social and sexual style based not on monogamous pairing, but on orgy. The scenario is fairly easy to imagine. It's that these remote ancestors of ours would take these mushrooms and they probably at the new and full moon, the thinking is that ritual was originally lunar timed and then they would, and these are we're talking about nomadic groups of people probably no more than 80 to 100 people and then there would be group sexual activity. Now an interesting social consequence of orgiastic social styles besides a whole lot of fun of course, is it's impossible to trace lines of male paternity in that kind of a situation. You see women know whose children are whose because they see the child come out of their body and they nurse the child. But men do not in that situation have their children, my children. What they have are our children, the tribal group. And this boundary dissolving thing, let's dwell on this for a moment because this is central to my argument and it has political consequences for our own lives. All primates clear back down into squirrel monkeys and lemurs. All primates have what are called male dominance hierarchies. And what this means is that the most the males with the longest claws, the hardest muscles and the meanest dispositions take control of everybody else. Women, children, weaker males, everybody comes under the thumb of the alpha males of the pack. This is true as I said of squirrel monkeys, howler monkeys, so forth and so on. It is also true of us sitting here in this room. This is a male dominance society. I mean there's a lot of complaining and hair pulling about it and there's a political alternative in the form of the women's movement and feminist sensitivities. But for most people male dominance is the rule. Well, I would like to suggest that our peculiarly comforted relationship to reality is a consequence of the fact that for a long period of time perhaps as short as 20,000 years, perhaps as long as a million years, as a species and not consciously we accepted into our diet a drug that had the consequences of suppressing male dominance. That this was the social consequence of accepting psilocybin into the diet. The ego is a structure that forms in the psyche like a calcareous tumor or a growth. If you do not have regular recourse to the cure and the cure is psilocybin and the boundary dissolving sexual and social style which it carried in its wake. So the reason that we as a people are haunted by the idea of a lost paradise, a perfect world sometime in the misty past is not you know, Mercier Lallard called it the nostalgia for paradise and thought it was a kind of a longing that had no basis. But I think that it's entirely a memory of a period when male dominance was chemically suppressed, ego was chemically suppressed and by male dominance and ego I don't mean to lay this entirely on men. I mean I would wager probably everyone in this room has more ego than they need certainly starting with me. And that's part of the paradox that you're supposed to enjoy in this. You know the ambiguity of me preaching the loss of ego. So essentially, you know what happened was chemically, a chemically driven leap in evolution as a consequence of the suppression of these behaviors that favored male dominance. As a species we would have continued with male dominance forever had it not been for psilocybin in the diet and it established a situation in which in less than two million years the human brain size doubled. This is without contest the greatest mystery in the whole of evolutionary theory. Lumsden who is a brilliant evolutionary biologist called the doubling of the human brain size in two million years the most spectacular transformation of a major organ of a higher animal in the entire fossil record. Well now it would be spectacular enough if it were the liver of an otter or the pancreas of an elephant. But notice that it is the organ which created the theory of evolution itself and all other theories. So that we're getting a little tautological here folks. There's something fishy going on. What was it that caused this explosive doubling in human brain size? Well, I maintain that it was the new behaviors that emerged with the suppression of ego and their reinforcement in this situation of nomadic pastoralism and that there was a period let's call it from the from the melting of the last glaciers in tell Chattel here yuck 5500 BC there was a period when men and women were in balance with each other children and children and adults were at peace with each other and human beings and the planet were at peace with each other and then it was lost and we fell into history you know the long slog toward Armageddon is what was initiated in its place. Well now if it was so wonderful, why would anybody ever let go of it? Why was it lost? well We have to go back to the very forces which created this situation Remember I said it was called the climatological dynamics of the planet created the grasslands in place of the rainforest continuation of those processes turned those grasslands into desert and where there once were waterholes running rivers grasslands and vast herds of animals and their human symbiotes Suddenly there was encroaching desert fewer waterholes the mushrooms began to be seasonal began to be located only in the rain shadows of mountains the great mushroom festivals which had been at the new and full moon became solsticial and then equinoctial and then you know biennial or something anyway you get the picture it was fading and I don't think people took this lying down No pun intended. I think that there was great anxiety about the fading of the mushroom and the loss of the sacrament and so these people searched for a strategy for preservation well in a world without Refrigeration there is only one well no there are two strategies for preservation of a delicate food like that one is air Drying which is not terribly satisfying because as soon as a rain cloud comes along your dry stuff absorbs moisture out of the air and turns yuck and So the real the only real option is preservation in honey And this was done. I'm sure it's still done in Mexico to this day in remote mushroom using villages people preserve it in honey now the problem here and this is a lot of my book goes into this kind of thing a lot because Food of the gods because what food of the gods is really about Are the hidden? Factors that drugs lay upon us that we are not even aware of and if you are attempting to preserve a hallucinogenic Mushroom in honey what you have to be aware of is that honey itself is Potentially a psychoactive drug honey will turn into mead it will ferment into a crude kind of honeyed alcohol well if the mushroom brings Suppression of ego a Group sexual activity and the formation of group values. What does alcohol bring? Alcohol has two effects primarily it lowers sensitivity to social cueing at the same time that it confers an exaggerated sense of verbal facility In other words people turn into jerks Behind I mean you only have to go to a busy singles bar somewhere here in Boulder And you will see the alcohol ambiance being acted out Right in front of you, so and and you know it's perhaps not so true of our generation But I think probably for a thousand years nobody got laid in Western civilization unless they were juiced Because Christianity was laying such a heavy trip on everybody and you know people barely took their clothes in other words you had to become blindly intoxicated to do what comes naturally and I think up until very recently how many women Have their first sexual imprinting in an atmosphere of alcohol Abuse I mean I would some huge percentage I imagine so that is the story basically of the fall into history the loss of this mushroom cult happened right at the time that we were inventing agriculture and Agriculture and the suppression of orgy have something in relationship to each other on two unrelated levels First of all you suppress orgy because once you have agriculture It's no more about psyching yourself up for the great hunt It's all about getting up before dawn and going out and hoeing the weeds out of the crops So it doesn't promote a party mentality The other thing is that as human mental Capacity was evolving remember that exploding brain size as human mental capacity was evolving women in these nomadic groups began to notice a Curious fact which was every year they would return roughly to the same place as they had been the year before and in the Discards from last year's camp in the midden they would discover food plants growing and Some brilliant woman or group of women put it together and said aha We buried food here last year and now there is food here Must be something about putting food into the ground gets you food in other words They were able to cognize a cause and effect relationship that were separated over many months of time At the same time that women were putting this together men were noticing that the act of sex Had certain consequences nine months later the same perception had different impacts on both sexes, but it was an ability to coordinate a Temporally separated cause and effect well once men got on to the notion of male paternity They realized that these aren't our children Some are mine Some are somebody else's and from that notion you go to my child to my woman to my hunting area to my weapons to my Sib group you get it all you see the ego is born And it is born in an atmosphere of complete paranoia the first consequence of agriculture Well, it has a number of consequences, but one consequence is It's a tremendously efficient way of producing food. That's obviously why people got into it. What is efficiency mean? surplus What does surplus mean? halves and have-nots the old the most spectacular architectural edifice of 8,000 BC on this planet was the grain tower at Jericho It was had thick walls to hold the grain and it had high walls So you could climb up on top of it and drop rocks on the people who were trying to get into it The surplus makes nomadism impossible because you can't drag this huge amount of grain with you So you get sedentary Populations and then since the people who want the grain are killing your people in fury when they can't get the grain you decide to Put a wall around the whole encampment Now you have a small town now you have urbanism now you have the division between nature and secular Society you have classes you've got it all and I maintain that this is the long march into hell and our particular obsession with drugs as A species I maintain can be traced back to this transition That you know, yes elephants love fermented papayas and so do butterflies and so forth and so on but this kind of Intoxication is not what we're about we addict Severely to several dozen substances less severely to probably a hundred more and We addict to everything This is you know what we call romantic love Shows a lot of similarities to hard drug addiction when you separate the lovers, you know sleeplessness Suicidal tendencies bursting into tears hysteria Loss of weight you can't tell whether this person is getting off heroin or has separated from their partner Well, if you take an individual who is Alcoholic or or has some kind of serious drug problem Current thinking is this can be traced to traumatic abuse in childhood This is what happened to us traumatic abuse in childhood We were literally torn out of a symbiotic relationship to the earth by the forces of male dominance Agriculture's sedentary living so forth and so on and we've been trying to Scratch an itch that we can't find ever since and it has you know money doesn't do it Power doesn't do it. Nothing seems to do it. We cannot we seem to be the unhappy monkey and we take this unhappiness out on each other with a vengeance and You see what happened was when the mushroom faded the million years of pharmacologically interrupted patterns of male dominance Disserted themselves, but it was no more a foraging monkey with this style. It was a creature with language tools music social organization and suddenly it got very ugly and People weren't interested people began fighting over the women so we don't want to have orgies anymore This woman is my woman touch her you die and so forth and so on and we are living out the legacy of this well before I talk about the The social consequences of it for us. I want to go back to the question. What was so great about it I mean we've talked about orgy, but you can have orgy without psilocybin. What was so wonderful about that? Proto-historical mode well, this is where it becomes slightly more woo-woo Because what we have to talk about is what is the psychedelic experience Anyway, and I maintain that if we're talking about psilocybin And we're talking about taking it in nature as these people did that you know yes First come the dancing mice the little candies the colored grids and so forth and so on but what eventually happens quickly like ten minutes later is There is an entity in the trance in the vision there is a mind there waiting that speaks good English and invites you up into its room and once there you Realize that this is what all the hoopla about the guy in Mind and the rebirth of the goddess and all that is about it's not a metaphor folks It's a headline in biology We are not the only intelligent minded species Occupying this planet we may be the only bipedal hairless mammal with intelligence on this planet But there is something out there Spread through the grasses the forests the rivers and the oceans Our own emergence into intelligence took less than two million years Life has been on this planet for a billion and a half years And we don't know how many strange Pathways beckon but at some point a kind of mind came into existence And it is real it's what lies behind the religious impulse in our species There really is somebody else Sharing the local mind space and I don't believe we're talking Theology here in other words. This is not You know in Milton's wonderful phrase the God who hung the stars like lamps in heaven It's not about that for me. That's a big question mark But it is the God goddess of this earth It is the biological mind it is that all Boundaries are illusions and that life is a thinking feeling Intellect key of some sort and we are just like a little droplet That has somehow escaped from the river of cognition and now imagine that we're the only water in the cosmos Not so it turns out what the reason the psychedelic experience is so baffling and transformative even as we sit here with your heads full of Heidegger and Husserl and I Don't know Wilson Phillips and all this stuff is because In the face in contact with that we have no more sophistication than our Orgiastic mushroom munching ancestors civilization doesn't give you a leg up on this stuff in fact It makes it harder to figure out what's going on because we have defined nature is dead You know Atoms screaming through empty space ruled by tensor equations of the third degree That's our picture of what nature is that isn't what it is. It's a mind of some sort Okay, what is the implication of all this is this just some kind of fringe? Oh? anthropological revisionism no it isn't because the the fall into history and its Consequences is at this point a loaded gun held to the head of the entire planet we are about to pull over the soup cauldron and if we do this then two and a half billion years of Evolutionary advance will be shot Nobody else ever dropped the ball So you know we appear to be vying for this peculiar honor if we do not awaken to the consequences of ego Then we are going to run this system right over the edge the whole thing which Characterizes our dilemma as a global society is our inability to feel feel The consequences of what we are doing you know we've got the data The ozone hole is disappearing the planktonic life in the sea will die if it does that will disrupt the food chain The world food supply will drop by 60% everybody who isn't white as a sheet will have to starve in that case and So forth and so on I mean we actually toy not only with our own extinction But with the extinction of all life on the planet and with the extinction of the idea of dignity and decency itself Well, I'm not in this psychedelic game because I think it's easy or because I think it's going to be a cinch I'm in it because I think it's the only game in town You know if portatory preaching could have done the trick then the sermon on the mount would have turned the corner if if Cautionary data flowing back to its ruling institutions could do the trick then sometime After Thomas Malthus people would have begun to hit the brakes Nothing seems to work. We're sick. We need pharmacological intervention the ego is Permitting us to slowly not so slowly commit suicide and You know the fact that we cannot act collectively that we are suspicious of all forms of collectivism that we Really are all for one and one for all is not our style instead what we have going is a catfight and You know no less a straight person than Arthur Kessler in a book called the ghost in the machine Said humans are so wired for beating the brains out of woolly Mastodons, that's what evolution has equipped us to do not negotiate weapons treaties and destroy bacteriological Factories we have to force our evolution we have to chemically Restructure the primate brain so that we do not commit suicide and the only way to do it in the time left is for the psychedelic community to stand up on its hind legs and roar and you know maybe they'll build camps for us and but The point being I think there's a moral imperative To try what works. I mean you know in the 60s psychedelics were called consciousness expanding drugs a good old phenomenological description well if Consciousness does not loom large in the future history of our species Then what the hell kind of future is it going to be? No future at all I maintain so if there is even the slightest iota of Possibility that these things do what I'm saying they do then we need to get Johnny quick on it and check it out Because we may be beyond the point of no return right now Nobody knows how bad this ozone hole thing is or what's locked up at Rocky Flats or behind the Iron Curtain or? Dumped in the Arctic Ocean we may be past the failsafe point right now folks. There is no time To lose it is time to engage The powers that be in a little more serious dialogue than the just say no horse ship That's been peddled recently Because we're talking about the survival of life on the only planet that we are at certain that has life on It this may be the site of a cosmic experiment with universal communications and it rests in our hands Everybody here tonight is here because a whole bunch of people Didn't drop the ball and you know you think you've got problems Nine times in the last million years the ice has moved south from the poles miles thick no antibiotics No electronic communication nothing And I'm sure these people were miserable and they dragged through it and they lived and they passed It on now. We're it and we will be judged the lamest of the lame If we cannot come to terms with this and begin to talk about what is going on This is not obscure as I said I view the psychedelic experience as central to humanness as our sexuality we cannot allow dominator institutions to infantile Infantilize us and to tell you where your mind can and cannot go We even have a piece of paper locked up in a vault in Washington DC that guarantees the life Liberty and the pursuit of happiness Well now what could the pursuit of happiness? possibly mean if it doesn't mean the freedom to Practice your own relationship to nature and its gifts So I think we have been entirely too casual about the importance of the psychedelic experience This is for one reason because we cannot publicly get together and discuss it in detail And one of the things that I think is very important about get-togethers like this is if you will look around You'll notice that we cannot really be distinguished from the rest of society Some of us live under bridges some of us clip coupons you know, there's a wide spectrum of people here, but This is your affinity group. This is your community someone in this room actually has what you need and you know I Have acted as a filter so out of millions Living along the front range here. We've gotten it down to 200. I can't go any further than that folks The rest is up to you Well, I Guess the last thing I want to say and then we'll take a little intermission and and And then come back and do questions afterwards, which is my favorite part But I want to just for a minute invoke the psychedelic experience Without regard to the evolutionary forces that created it or the political institutions that suppress it and So forth and just say in case there's some soul in this room who's never had this experience that This is extraordinary news We are not talking about something like a dream. It is not like meditation No, you can't get there by yourself and Babaji is equally useless because you and Babaji are starting from the same place in this game it requires Pharmacological perturbation of ordinary neurochemistry in order to see this mystery and It is a mystery. It is not going to be reduced to the firing of synapses or repressed sexual desires or day residues or anything like that it is The very thing which all these religions are yammering about it's there. It's real I mean if you think that the world is empty of adventure Then you just haven't been hanging out with the right crowd. I mean on a Saturday night Within the confines of your own apartment on five grams of psilocybin mushrooms in silent darkness I guarantee you you will believe that Ferdinand Magellan should take second place to you You will see things Which no human being has ever seen before and that no human being will ever see again That's how big that universe is The can the incredibly constricted space-time Locus of the here and now that evolution has forced upon us for survival purposes is simply one point in an apparently infinite hologram of Explorable data that is the human world I mean the you know the entire world of every science fiction novel and story ever written is miniscule compared to the universes of strangeness and peculiarity that are Accessible to any one of us if you will but apply the method and if you're not willing to apply the method Then you know you're going to sweep up around the ashram till hell freezes over Not understand what is going on I Mean I think you know I'm sorry to be so hard on religion. I think it has its place Its place is the inspiration of ethical behavior You know religion should teach ethical behavior but it has very very little to say about the mystery of being other than that it's there and That's not practicing religion practicing religion is dancing with the mystery Losing and finding yourself in the mystery and people often say to me You know well is this how does this relate to other forms of spiritual work the answer is? Maybe not at all. I mean I've certainly taken a lot of psychedelics, and I think I see no sign of spiritual attainment or Ethical perfection or anything so la-di-da as that I don't know what this is all about, but I do know it's ours it belongs to us we are the creatures of mind and 95% of what mind is lies on the other side of the psychedelic boundary ordinary consciousness is just like keeping the accounts of Life, but there's more to life than the account books I mean everything else is out there the color the affection the humor the terror the mystery The incredible strangeness of it all this is the domain that we want to claim and explore and if we can find the collective Institutional courage to do it. I think this current planetary crisis Will be seen for what it really is and what it is is it's not a dying These are not the last rights for intelligence. This is a birth process I mean if you were to come around if you've never seen somebody give birth and you came around the corner And it was in progress You would be thoroughly Profoundly alarmed I mean it looks like an enormous tumor is making its way out of somebody and they are being split in two and blood is being shed and there's pleading and Screaming and thrashing it would be a real leap of understanding For you to say oh how wonderful new life is emerging This is the way we do it well. This is the way we do it I mean we are in the birth canal right now of a planetary civilization literally the amniotic oceans of 500 years ago, that's all gone. There is no frontier There is no going back the the piece of the fetal Environment is gone and now in transition literally the walls are closing in you can't breathe You can't eat you can't find your way It appears to be the end But there's light at the end of the tunnel the problem is that tunnel is in the back of your mind And if you don't go to the back side of your mind You will never see the light at the end of the tunnel and once you see it Then the task becomes to empower it in yourself and other people spread it as a reality God did not retire to the seventh heaven God is some kind of lost continent in the human mind And if we will but explore the human mind we can reclaim these relationships with our own authenticity and shed the childishness of historical existence and Gender politics and all the rest of it and move on to the real business of establishing a real civilization Thank you very much Does anyone want to ask a question or is it all just perfectly clear utterly convincing and yeah Of psilocybin bad effects Somebody once said what's wrong with DMT and I said well nothing unless you fear death by astonishment But but your question is a good one first of all You know I talked a lot about how what we have to do is destroy and ablate ego However, there is a very small percentage of us who have a hard time creating any ego whatsoever And the for these people boundary dissolution is no problem their boundaries are dissolving all the time on them I would say that they are at the contraindicated end of the spectrum that if you're fearful already and Fighting to keep from being overwhelmed by confusion at what's going on in your life at the paper box factory or something then probably tossing in mega doses of hallucinogens is not the way for you to Do it or if you do if you're just bent on doing that then I would say Do it in the presence of some kind of professional and how you find a professional in this legal climate You'll have to discuss with me privately I don't want to make it sound though. I mean it's a tricky thing I don't want to make it sound like it's absolutely riskless Physically, I think it's pretty safe Unless you have are odd in some way, but you need to know you know you don't want to find out You're odd an hour and a half into it, but the the the problem comes With the mind You know if if you are delicately balanced if your whole life has been about not looking at that Or that or that then this is not your game you know you should go back to watching Jeopardy and The the kind of person The kind of person who is called to this is a person who has an exploring soul, I mean my I am not a Courageous person in the sense that you won't find me shooting whitewater You don't see me You know repelling down the faces of cliffs But from the time I was at the tiniest little kid I was into the weird What's weird weird is? The compass heading and if you keep your compass always pointed toward the peculiar the ultra the bizarre The unspeakably alien then you know you'll find these places the people The people who think life is all cut and dried and are perfectly happy to have Carl Sagan and George Bush explain all of reality Have never left the broad swift stream of mundane Thinking but you know off in the byways and tributaries There's a wonderful alchemical saying Which I generally mangle, but I think it goes something like this the tallest mountains the oldest books the widest deserts There you will find the stone and what it is is it's a prescription for exploring weirdness That's all it's not going to be on MTV. It's not going to be in God forbid Esquire It's going to come From you know doing your homework visiting strange people in strange lands and checking it out the What I can't give you to return to your question is I can't give you a guarantee that it will be fun You know the Rolling Stones have that wonderful line you don't get what you want you get what you need This stuff is ruthless And if there's something that you're trying not to look at it's going to get you for sure But ask the veterans most people will tell you you learn more from the bad trips Than you do from the good ones the good ones are Ecstatic and connect you up to nature and other people the bad ones show you Your your kinks and your limitations and your thought Errors and that sort of thing it's not an easy row to hoe. That's why I think There's a little bit of social confusion about it one of the things I should make clear is I really advocate high doses Rarely, I think the worst thing you can do is get into a style of psychedelic Diddling where you know you take half a gram every day all this is doing is Giving you a tolerance to psilocybin You're not having the psilocybin experience you're having the tolerance to psilocybin experience the really the way to do these things is to Do them rarely so that your whole system can reassert itself and come to equilibrium and then just slam it This is amazing. I mean, I think I think that this works for all these psychedelics. I'm I'm an inveterate Cannabis user and I wish in a way that I could get a slightly better Grip on my cannabis use because the I think the real way to do cannabis is like once a week by yourself in Silent darkness with the strongest stuff you can get and then immense amounts of it and you know People call it a recreational drug and a this and a that hey done that way it will Catapult you into places where it's I love it the great place to get to on cannabis and some people never in their whole Life touch it is the place where you say my god. I've done too much It's not easy folks, but it's worth shooting for Basically what what you should do is is you know do some homework read some books Talk to your friends and then hang on Hannah. It's like You know, it's very much like riding an enormous roller coaster You know once that baby rolls out of the station Do not stand up do not try to climb out of your car Shut up and hang on with the faith that most people have lived through this Somebody else yeah the purple Well having just heard that I'm a pothead please ask them one at a time What Is your first literary question I Don't mean to imply that people first used it in low doses and then middle and then higher over time What I mean what I meant to imply I think they were using low middle and high doses from the very get-go but they were using low doses to hunt middle range doses for Orgy and ceremony and truly high doses for this boundary dissolving tremendous second literary question When I read about chattel hyacinth Uh-huh I liked you picking up on Malire and Eisler And I liked your use of dominator and partnership terminology That was wonderful But I disagreed When you said that the cows were an indirect expression of the fungus Kind of in the air there I found that to be kind of a lethal reply But I can't decide if that's a valid reason or not I can't Well I'm not wedded to that First of all chattel hyacinth for those of you who haven't read the book or know about chattel Was this immensely sophisticated civilization That existed in the 7th millennium BC We're talking 3,000 we're talking 6,000 years before Uh, zero This civilization existed and was destroyed And the characteristic of it is Shrines dedicated to chattel And in my book I argue that this was probably the last outpost of this partnership society But it was still I think the real golden age of mushroom use Was probably from about 30,000 years ago To about 15,000 years ago And by the time chattel comes along It's a fading or yearly or seasonal thing And the last question is the important one One of the assertions that you made earlier Was that these indole based plant hallucinogens Actually change people that use them And the unfortunate thing that I observed Is I can't agree with that assertion It seems that many people It seems like only a really few people are changed by it Only those who are predisposed to change And I'd like One of the questions you ask doesn't make us better Doesn't make us different And I'm just not convinced at all People take a mushroom and go around And change things And just being a jerk is their work I mean, you know, and I'm going And judging the mushroom plants And I don't see it happening Well, I My argument would be That people don't take it enough And they don't take it frequently enough That there are a lot of people Who really would rather not get loaded But who feel they must take some psychedelic drug In order to keep membership in their peer group So what they do You know, you can always spot these people Because their first question at the get go is Will I be able to drive? I love this question Because, you know, it indicates You've got a real tough nut on your hand In every sense of the word No, you will not be able to drive So, you know, I One of the things that inspires me to do this Is I want to get to the people Who've taken three grams of mushrooms And the people who've taken a hundred and fifty Mikes of LSD And I want to convince those people That they never got close to what I'm talking about Even though they had a life transforming experience And saw things totally differently They never got close to what I'm talking about And so what you have to do is convince people To take high doses And then that's to break them through And then frequently enough That they don't forget what the deal is So I think if you take a psychedelic population And divide it into those who have done Five grams and above Then you will see an exceptional Slice But not the dabblers The dabblers don't count And we all can be At times guilty of this And then Is that your last question? Does that do it for you? Or do you want to be thought psychotic? You choose I love competition I mean I The competition is terrible That's the entire basis of my success Yeah You because you were before If you still wish I hear the way you understand things You like to understand Dark and gloom, quiet, can't close your eyes And I love the fact that we're in a world where We can't really live in a place So we have to look for the dead And we're going to be a lot more About the things we miss And a lot of people think We should play chess and have fun And why I guess you think your way is preferable Why? Because I don't know if it's preferable But here's the thing People are going to think you're a nut If you come down and say That Johann Sebastian Bach Or Jerry Garcia is God And this is what you will have to say If you listen to the dead Or the B minor mass So what I'm interested in Is I want to know the thing in itself Not what it does to Bach Not what it does to a river Flowing through a forested valley I want to see what it can do With darkness and silence And I think most people think It will be boring Probably because they've been hanging out With these BDI gurus meditating And God knows there's nothing more boring On earth than most meditations However, psychedelic Sitting in a darkened room On five dried grams of psilocybin mushrooms Is nothing like meditating And that's where it can get at you My relationship to it is always one of I want to know what it is And so I think this sensory deprivation method Is the only way to get at that Other people might not like that People say, well you mean you put down The whole thing of going into nature Isn't nature the great affirmation in all this And the answer is, yeah but it works for me Sort of without the drugs Plus, and this is just maybe my own weirdness But I'll share it with you I have noticed that these things are Incredibly disruptive of The ordinary flow of kazooistry You all know the concept of synchronicity Well, if you don't stay in your room With the lights out and the phone unplugged And the damnedest things will happen to you I mean, you couldn't pay me To go into an American city Even mildly loaded Because adventures beckon Now some people like that You know, some people say, you know Let's take 500 mics and go meet weird people Uh uh, not this cookie Yeah In response to your statement What I find happens there Is that you create an experience Where you are taking other people's dogma You know, you're bringing in something That's already done And I feel like the key to experience Can create something new And something new expression From the deaf Which is why I don't have baby dogs sometimes But one thing that I did learn Is that the high doses are very interesting And we're taking way far Beyond the small doses And I understand that there's a goal For mental health and Mental health and mental health work That's potentially going to be more on medicine But in terms of psychedelics If you take that into And my question is coming next, sorry If you take that into a situation Where you can move the whole molecular pattern Of degenerative homeopathy Do you think that there could be A more potent experience through that? Are you asking me Do I think a homeopathic preparation Of a psychedelic would be effective? It would be homeopathically effective I wouldn't expect it to be Experientially effective I would expect that Since what we do out here Is a direct creation Of what we are inside That's the current paradigm I understand That if you do change it In the same manner that you change the homeopathy Which is changing the experience So that you then create the real experience That it would be even more potent And even more immediate That you're really discussing that reality But don't you think that If that were true And since in a high dilution like that No molecular trace of the original compound remains That you have then just found the solution To the legalization conundrum I'm kind of reading that Because one thing that's out I'm noticing in the field of criminal medicine now Is that we're getting a lot of Political flack for having medicines out there But homeopathy is seemingly A criminalist state that's happened in years Because in a materialist world It's assumed to be bogus Right Yeah Well In order to go back to the family study Well this seems to me Not an abstract proposition at all Let the best homeopaths Succuss the strongest hallucinogens And set them out And Let's give it a whirl Over on this side Yeah This question may be too personal And embarrassing to answer But I'm just going to Oh I can hardly wait Why are you in jail? Ah Why am I not in jail Hmm Well that's an interesting question And I Number one I don't know Here's what I've come up with Notice that I use big words I don't boil I don't try to boil it down To a shoutable slogan Like turn on, tune in, drop out Uh uh, that, that, then they come They come So that's one possibility That simply if you are defined in their eyes As an intellectual Then they automatically put you in the harmless category And send resources elsewhere That's one possibility Now the other possibility is slightly more disturbing But in the interest of thoroughness Let me raise it Uh, perhaps I'm sanctioned Perhaps they decided We don't really understand what this stuff is And we can't have a mass movement But let one guy Just kind of keep the pilot light on In case we ever change our minds about this He will have kept the pilot light on Uh, and the other possibility Which is probably too naive But in the interest again of exhaustive thoroughness Maybe they just haven't noticed yet You know, Tim Leary, who's a friend of mine Would address 25,000 people at a throw My crowds are, you know, a couple of times a year They creep over a thousand And I think the key is to keep it low key And we don't want to, you know, Dodger Stadium Filled and, or anything like that It's very good to atomize it and spread it through Now the other thing is, you know I advocate plant hallucinogens And people always say, well, what about LSD? I mean, didn't LSD change your life? Didn't it change all our lives? Why aren't you into LSD? And the answer is certainly yes and yes The reason I'm not into LSD is a Not having to do with the effects of LSD Which I think are marvelous But with the fact that a couple of enterprising Second year biochemistry students Can produce six or seven million hits in a long weekend Six or seven million hits of an illegal drug Suddenly, this is the realm of governments And criminal syndicates And revolutionary disruption of populations My brother and I wrote Psilocybin The Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide If you work like a dog for six months Maybe you can produce two or three thousand hits So that's the thing LSD had chemical qualities that made it terrifying to the government Anybody with fifty thousand dollars worth of backing And two years of biochemistry Could turn themselves into a major threat To political stability in this country So they slammed that They're not going to put up with that The thing I love about the mushrooms is If you're a dedicated mushroom grower You produce this piddling amount And if they come and drag you away Because it is illegal All they get is you No syndicate collapses No pyramid disappears So it's invasive And low-key And slowly spreading The other thing is Mushrooms are This is a cultural thing Mushrooms are inherently non-threatening They're absurd You know They're what we put decals of on serving trays And bath towels bear mushrooms on them It's a kind of silly thing And so I think that they don't really understand What a powerful hallucinogen this is Well that's enough on why I'm not in the can This woman Yeah I was wondering if you could talk about the evolutionary process And how it was disturbed by the absence of the mushrooms Don't you think that it would be a more creative and beneficial process If we worked on evolving our minds without using an external drug What happens if government does come in and decides to completely wipe it out Or if things happen where we can't access that thing's consciousness anymore And then things, you know, they just step back again Wouldn't it be so much more productive to teach people how to get a sense of drugs? Absolutely if we could do it I mean I'm not yet convinced, see I mean you've got your gurus But if you ever get close to any of these people in these guru scenes Close enough where you can just say to them Look, level with me Is this stuff as good as 5 grams in silent darkness? And they say, are you serious? The other possibility is technology On two fronts, mind machines The problem with mind machines is, you know You have to smoke a bomber to put up with it more than 10 minutes I mean you quickly satisfy yourself that this can't possibly be it Because it is light, but it is contentless Well, the psychedelic experience is all content The other possibility, and I've put in some time in this beat Is virtual reality And I have more hope for virtual reality Because virtual reality is a technology for showing That would allow us to show each other the inside of our heads Our dreams, our visions And I think that sufficiently perfected It might have the consequences of these psychedelics The problem is, it carries a huge amount of negative freight You know that it's not going to be a tool for us to show each other the inside of our minds It's going to be a tool to sell us crap that we don't want It's going to be a tool for yet more realistic, vicarious and gratuitous violence It's going to be a tool for more pornographic degradation of women So it seems to me, while it holds out the possibility of a technically driven psychedelic It has a lot of negative freight I agree with your premise But I'm driven by a tremendous sense of urgency I mean, why try to create a technical alternative to psilocybin When you've got psilocybin I'm not a technical alternative I'm saying, like, I think that people should use mushrooms as a step And once you get there, you try and you keep going without that tool I mean, because what we want I mean, we want to transcend this plane We want to be on a higher plane, a higher state of awareness You're not going to get to that plane ultimately If you have to keep coming back into the plane To get yourself to get out of the plane again Well, how about this Maybe there's something wrong with that metaphor Because notice it has to do with planes and transitions It's an inherently dualist metaphor This concludes tape one Our program continues with take two. {END} Wait Time : 0.00 sec Model Load: 0.52 sec Decoding : 1.76 sec Transcribe: 5372.56 sec Total Time: 5374.84 sec