Our program continues with tape two. 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. How about if we say there is no inside and outside. There is no with or without. You just use what you've got. Whatever works should be used. I spent time in India and visited all these people and so forth and so on. And I just became convinced that unless you were predisposed to believe in this stuff, that it would never carry you where you wanted it to. And one thing about psychedelics, you don't have to be predisposed. It doesn't work for those who believe it works. It works for those who think it doesn't work. Then one last point and then we'll go on. There's a story, maybe some of you know this story, of a man who lived by the side of a river and he wanted to cross the river. So he practiced a Siddhi of levitation so that he could walk across the water. And it took him 40 years to perfect this Siddhi and finally he could cross the river. And Buddha was preaching in the neighborhood and the guy came to him and he said, "Master, look what I've achieved. I can walk on the water to cross the river." And Buddha said, "Yeah, but the ferry costs a nickel." And that's the thing. I think we're not going to be able to replace this tool without wasting so much time in the act of replacing it, that Armageddon will catch up with us. I think we have to humble ourselves so thoroughly that you have to admit that you can't get where you want to go unless you form a partnership with somebody whose idea of a good time is growing in a cow pie. And if you're willing to partner up with this humble, humble member of the ecosystem, then you and it can fly to glory. Have at it. [Audience member] [indistinct] Yeah, I wouldn't recommend, especially in the late stages of pregnancy, doing anything that is going to wildly perturb you. And you know LSD was discovered in the act of trying to produce better drugs to induce labor. So that's excellent advice. Honor the fetus. Yeah. [Audience member] [indistinct] Well, the true and honest answer is, how the hell can you find out when they won't let you do research? It's totally insidious. We don't know. We don't know because they will not allow the research to be done. This is one of the reasons why I say that you should stick with shamanically sanctioned plants. Because we know, for instance, that people have been taking psilocybin in the Sierra Mazateca of Central Mexico for millennia. They don't show blindness, tumors, miscarriage, madness, cataracts, whatever. That's your human data for that. But you go to, let's talk for a minute about something like ketamine. Nobody knows. Nobody has any data. MDMA seems to be tremendously effective in facilitating interpersonal stuff. That's a psychological issue. Chemically, what kind of data do we have? Six years worth of data gathered under duress. So to be safe, stick with the things that are sanctioned by human use. And then in some more enlightened future, we will explore these synthetics and find out just what the parameters are. Yeah, finish up. [Audience member] [indistinct] No, I'm not saying that. I'm saying take things which have been sanctioned by human usage. I mean, how about a plant like Strychnos nox vomica? I mean, you're dead in a minute and a half. And it's a beautiful, wonderful plant. Why did it kill you? Well, because it's jammed with strychnine. No, it's nothing about its being a plant. It's about having a repeated history of human usage. That's what sanctifies it. The lady in magenta. [Audience member] [indistinct] I've studied plants for the last 23 years, plants and medicine. And what I noticed is that there is a particular co-evolution that happens between the plant and the human. And so what I started to get into the grasp of at one point that the mushrooms are going to catalyze the same kind of consciousness that they always have. But not only do the biological climatic situations determine what is going to happen to that mushroom, how some of its vectors are, but I think that all species are changing consciousness at the same time. So what the generations of mushrooms might have said to me years ago when I was 18 years old, that whole species as a whole might be prepared to teach an entirely different, more evolved lesson at this point. And so I'm just trying to catch up a little. That's really an interesting point. I mean, it never occurred to me, but somebody brought it up to me. They said, "Have you noticed that the trips are changing?" And once you do ask yourself this question, it does seem to be so. And I don't know whether that what's, I mean, that's a deep assertion. I'm not sure exactly what's going on there. For instance, this goddess thing, I don't think people gave the goddess a thought in the early 1970s, late 1960s. Now people have, you know, some of the least likely people report intense encounters with the goddess. So is it amplifying the general mindset of the society? And so there's more goddess stuff there, or I don't really know. It's a very interesting question. There are more questions than answers. I mean, this is definitely wide open stuff. Yeah, yeah. You discussed our sense of health, which certainly makes sense. It's a believable description. And you suggest the use of psychedelics of suicide as an antidote to that. But I have trouble seeing a cause and effect relationship as far as what our youth or more widespread youth might lead to in terms of hearing the path. We're trying to restore the relationship of ego to the other components of the psyche that existed as recently as 12,000 years ago. The ego has become a deadly growth in the historical societies, exacerbated by the phonetic alphabet, monotheism, modern science. This is like you're getting sicker and sicker and sicker as you lay these things on. And so the idea is that if we could restore the original diminished role of the ego that it had for that period, however long it was, that we could begin to solve our problems. Because the problems which face us, put very simply, are going to demand sacrifice. And sacrifice is what the ego doesn't want to hear about. And when you go to somebody and say, "Look, to save this planet, we're going to have to redistribute income radically. That means everybody in this room is going to have less. We're going to have to honor a whole bunch of cultural positions that we previously just were going to bulldoze over." And so forth and so on. So it's the diminishing of ego, by any means necessary, that lies to getting any grip on our problems. I mean, if we continue as we are, I think we have probably less than 30 years before life is irreconcilably screwed up. You know, nobody believes that the future is rosy and wonderful. I mean, if you go to the people at the World Bank and the IMF and these people, who are straight, you know, suits, all of them, they have a set of curves which would stand your hair on end. When they propagate the curve of population, the curve of toxification of the environment, the curve related to the ozone hole disappearing, you see, you know, it's finished sometime in the next 50 years. They don't talk about this because they don't want to panic the vast numbers of people who just go to work and raise their kids and pray somebody smarter is doing something about all this. But they don't believe there is any kind of normal future. And I don't either. I think we're going to-- that it's-- business as usual is not on the menu, folks. We're either going to go into an era of immense resource scarcity, regimentation, governmental interference in our lives, tremendous propagandistic efforts to make us do one thing or another, or we're going to pull the plug on scientism and its stooges and the institutions which feed us, feed it. Capitalism is an interesting problem, more easily discussed now that communism is out of the picture. Capitalism is as anti-human a philosophy as you can possibly conceive because at this very moment, we should be consuming less, manufacturing less, selling less, transporting less. And what's the battle cry? "Free trade everywhere!" What does free trade mean? It means my right to come to your country and sell the most outlandish junk you've ever seen, and you will have no right to turn it away because in the name of free trade, crapola has to go everywhere. It's really-- see, they try to tell you that capitalism and democracy are not at variance. Actually, the whole Marxist-Leninist-Socialist thing was a side dish. The real life-and-death struggle is between capitalism and democracy. Democracy says everybody has an innate worth that must be honored. Capitalism says those who die with the most toys win. You cannot reconcile these two things, and nobody wants to talk about this. We're still having the party over the fall of communism. But you go to the Soviet Union or the former areas of the Soviet Union, and you see that what it was was it was a deep freeze for traditional culture. In Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan, people are basically camel husbandry is what's going on. Now, with communism on the rocks, McDonald's will be there in five years, and Kmart will be following close behind. So I think we're coming to a great crisis of fundamental-- our relation to our own fundamental institutions. I'm not anti-capitalist. I think capitalism needs to sever its connection to materialism. This is, again, why virtual reality is interesting. You sell things made of light, not made of beryllium, metal, brass, steel, and wood, but light. We've got all the light we need, but we have to stop making things out of stuff, or we're not going to be around to tell the tale. [INAUDIBLE] In order to get anywhere, we have to have a major shift in values. You're suggesting that a way to shift our values is to say we're classed as sociologists, which I don't disagree with. But your model has been that everybody in the culture participated in this, and were able to shift their values simultaneously, so they cooperate. Are you suggesting that that's a necessary outcome in this case? No, I think that revolutions are made by percentages. If 15% or 20% changed, then the example would spread. You see, we are not-- psilocybin is the easy way to awaken. Take a psychedelic plant and have an experience and get your act together. But the future is full of sledgehammers. It's not going-- we're not going-- it's not going to end with a whimper. It's going to end with a series of thuds and bangs. It could begin almost any time. I mean, we could get a hot muggy day in Mexico City this summer, and a million people would die. This thing in Los Angeles is a wake-up call. It is going to get uglier and more chaotic and more crazy. There is going to be more starvation, more fascism, more dictatorship, unless we do something, until we do something. And it can-- how bad is it going to have to get before people say, you know, "We're doing something wrong." You know, people dance on the Russians, but you've got to admire people who have the guts to say, "We did it entirely wrong, 100 percent." I mean, can you imagine in this country being able to do-- say-- you know, I mean, it may be coming. It may be coming. This character from Austin is a peculiar item in the mix. You know, I mean, I for years had a fantasy speech, which I always imagined that I would somehow end up giving. But it's the speech where you say, "My fellow Americans, you have been lied to, screwed, and abused by these two criminal parties for a hundred years. And your only hope is to overthrow the Republicrats and create a decent world to live in." Well, no Republican can make that speech. No Democrat can make that speech. And be credible, it has to be somebody who wasn't in bed with either of those forces. So I'm not at all pleased by who apparently will bear the mantle. But on the other hand, if change is what we need, then it's probably not going to be a candidate that you and I can embrace. It's going to be some oddball. So, you know, we have to recognize it when we see it coming. Yeah. [inaudible] No, we don't know what it is. [inaudible] Yeah, the great thing about it is it can talk. [inaudible] Good for you. [inaudible] [laughter] Well, probably half, at least, in the room have the faintest idea what this question is about. I've stayed away from this because this is the personalistic stuff where I've created a certain model of reality based on a new way of looking at time. And I don't want to go into it too much tonight, but I want to suggest something to you tonight, which is that, you know, at the very beginning of this talk, we talked about mutation and natural selection, and that's the Darwin's insight was vast and deep. And what he offered was an explanation for how rainbow trout come to be monarch butterflies, redwood trees, herds of elephants, so forth and so on. What it doesn't address is us. We are the weird bird on the block. I mean, yes, we're some kind of monkey, but when you stand us next to our nearest relative, it's very, very clear that it is not a very near relative. It doesn't look like us much, certainly doesn't act like us. What's the deal with human beings? And I think that, you know how all these religions, these Western religions have built in this idea of the end of the world, and they're always running around expecting the Messiah or something. And this, to the scientific mind, is just the final proof of the pudding that these people have water between the ears, because science just says, you know, that's just ridiculous. I mean, but I wonder, I wonder. I mentioned just a minute ago these curves that when you propagate them into the future, everything leads to the unimaginable, and it's all within the next 50 years. So I sort of think as human beings, as analogous to iron filings on a piece of paper, and you shake these iron filings out of a salt shaker or something, and there they lie, randomly arranged in heaps. Well, then you come underneath the paper with a very powerful magnet, and lo and behold, these little iron filings coherently arrange themselves into this beautiful double mustache pattern, which I'm sure you've all seen. Well, I think that there is an enormous punchline to the historical process that very, very few people suspect, and that what history is, it's what happens to an animal who falls under the influence of a kind of strange attractor, and that we are being pulled into a well of transformative intentionality. History is not pushed by the casuistry of war, migration, imperial dynastic families, and stuff like that. History is pulled toward an unimaginable something, which is continuously trying to mirror itself in us. This is why these Egyptians said, you know, I don't know what it is, but I just think we should really build a big, simple building. I don't know why, but I'm going to enslave 50,000 people and do it, and don't ask me why. And this is the same force that reared Chartres Cathedral. This is the same force that created the space shuttle. We are in a relationship to an unseen something, which we keep trying to image with our mythologies, our religions, our technologies, our epiphanies, and I think that it's not so far away, that it isn't 10,000 years in the future. It is sometime in the next 50 years, and that this is what history was for. You see, history is an incredibly peculiar and brief phenomenon. I mean, viewed from the point of view of biology, it's less time than it takes for a new species to emerge. I mean, let's call history 25,000 years. You know, in frame one, you're chipping flint. In frame two, you're hurling an instrument toward Alpha Centauri. Like that, this happened. Well, what's happening? It's that mind itself is being pulled out of this creature, and it's being given hands and languages and past symbolic systems in order to image the unspeakable. The unspeakable, I call it the transcendental object at the end of time. It casts, and it's in another dimension. It's in a kind of super space, and what it casts into history is the enormous shadow of its eminence. This is what straight people call God. This is what all these visionaries are raving about. It's that when you sink beneath the surface of ordinary causality and mundane hohomism, what you discover is this enormous transcendental object, which you could call it, you know, the sacred heart of Jesus or the flying saucer or the philosopher's stone. It's all of those things and much, much more. It's not only stranger than you suppose. It's stranger than you can suppose, and it has called us out of animal organization. Over a 25,000-year period, we hang in the balance, and then we meet it, and we're going to meet it. That's the light at the end of that birth canal of transcendence that I referred to. And now I see that our song is sung. Our time is done. Thank you very, very much for turning in. [Applause] Thank you. [Indistinct] In the interim, I think that it's worth taking the time for everybody to just make a very brief, very, very brief statement about--you don't have to say who you are if you don't want to, but you can say what you're hoping for or why you're here or what your agenda is, just so that if it turns out we're 80% shrinks or, you know, 80% ceramicists or something, then we turn it that way. And those of you who are undercover, please stay undercover so you don't alarm anybody, especially me, right? So why don't we just start and go across in some reasonably logical fashion, which--yeah? [Indistinct] Well, that tells you what you're worth, doesn't it? Oh, true. No, let's not record it so people-- and also I had at one point thought I would be an art historian. That was one of my real obsessions. So I had had enough art history to be trained in, you know, recognizing the evolution of motifs, how one artist passes on techniques and conceits to his students or his imitators and all this art historical stuff, and I also had been very interested in Jung. And none of this seemed to explain the content of the psychedelic experience. I would get in there and say, "Well, how come I'm not seeing, A, archetypes, B, things which somebody else--you know, I don't know, Dalí, Ensor, Caravaggio, Bosch-- somebody should have seen this stuff and gotten it down." And there didn't seem to be a trail through the history of Western art of the presence of this dimension. So then I thought, "Wow, is it that nobody knew about all this?" I mean, Bosch would have given his right arm for a sheet of blotter, I would think. So it became for me like a mystery. Where is this stuff coming from, and what does it say about our humanness? I've read that Bosch was somewhat of an inkjet by the optimists of his time. They were experimenting with him. Well, there's a lot of ink instilled over Bosch because he is such a startlingly radical painter in the context of his time. Many of his conceits were picked up after his life. Peter Bruegel, the elder, being the foremost exponent of it. He may have been an alchemical guinea pig who--let's see--Frager, I think, wrote a book called The Millennium of Hieronymus Bosch in which he wanted to suggest that maybe de Tours use--that there was a cult called the Brotherhood of the Free Spirit which practiced ritual nudity, which begins to sound something like the orgies we talked about last night. It was a cult of printers, and it may be that the Garden of Earthly Delights was actually painted as an altarpiece for a congregation of the Brotherhood of the Free Spirit, but this is all pretty murky stuff. It's hard to get back to Bosch. He didn't leave any written records. We have his birth is recorded in the parish church of the village where he was born. We know he was born sometime around 1450, died in 1516, but the details are pretty murky. Well, not to belabor Bosch. What I thought would be a reasonable way to do this this morning is to take the most extreme psychedelic case and experience and describe it and talk about it a little and then see what issues that raises, and my experience with this stuff has led me to the conclusion that in a way it's to be thought of, this other dimension, is to be thought of like a mandala, and different psychedelic compounds and generously different kinds of yoga and different kinds of techniques of all sorts land you in different parts of this mandala, but that what you're always trying to do is get to the center of the mandala, and it's simply my bias, my opinion, but I think the center of the mandala is probably the DMT experience for a number of reasons, and so I thought it would be interesting to talk about it this morning. First, let me talk about it physically. DMT is an indole hallucinogen, a beta--no, no, a tryptamine, and it's produced endogenously in the human brain. This is very interesting. Very few psychedelic compounds are produced in the human brain. We don't know what DMT is doing there, but it means essentially that we all are subject to arrest on a technicality because we all are holding a Schedule I drug. It's sort of the ultimate catch-22 where if all else fails, they just say, "Well, you were holding anyway." The interesting thing about DMT--another interesting thing about it is that it's incredibly rapid in its onset and in its disappearance. The whole trip lasts about 15 minutes. This makes it a tremendous tool with which to challenge the critics of our position because if somebody wants to rise up in righteous wrath and condemn psychedelics, then you say, "Well, you have tried them, haven't you?" And of course, they never have. It's like scientific denunciations of astrology. I mean, scientists love to denounce astrology, but find one who can cast a natal horoscope and I'll give you a hen's tooth. So DMT overcomes this objection. The entire experience lasts 15 minutes, so you say to the critic, "You're not going to experience it, and yet you're going to carry on a pogrom against it? You won't invest 15 minutes to checking out what this is about? What kind of scientist are you?" So it has that social efficacy. Now, the fact that it is the strongest of all hallucinogens, at least if there are ones stronger, please keep them away from me. I mean, I don't think anybody needs to get higher than that. I certainly don't. I mean, I've at times come out of those places and said, "This stuff is illegal." You know, it breaks cosmic law. Of course, then Tim Leary told me that cosmic laws are only local ordinances anyway, so it didn't really matter. Okay. Well, good question. Yes, it's the commonest of all hallucinogens in nature. It occurs in many grasses, Phalaris tuberosa, Phalaris arundinaceae. It occurs in a number of leguminous plants, probably the most spectacular being Anadenanthra peregrina, this huge tropical locust-like tree from which the snuff called Neopa or Ipina is made. That's a tough way to get your DMT, let me tell you, because there's so much cellulose and other crap and corruption in the mix that you have to do like a tablespoon up each nostril. And the technique is you get a bamboo tube or a hollow tube about this long, and you pour in this tablespoon of this stuff, and then you squat down on your haunches, and you get a friend, and you put the tube up your nostril, and then the friend blows with the full force of his breath, blows this stuff into your head. Well, you fall, it's like being hit in the face with a two-by-four. I mean, it's like you think he kicked you, and you fall over backwards, you scream, you salivate, you get back up on your haunches, and by this time he has refilled the tube for the other nostril. So, and then after... Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Hm? Neopo, Ipina, Nipa, it depends on the language group, and the Waika, Yanomami, it's also called Vilka in the Karib language. And then after ten minutes or so, it slowly begins to form up in your head, but, you know, God, your sinuses are in stat for sure, and it's not very pleasant. And the other thing is it never reaches the blinding transformative intensity that you can achieve with the chemically pure compound. Oranges? No, no. Good point. If you orally ingest it, it will be destroyed in your guts. It won't work. The Amazon Indians have encountered this problem and created a very sophisticated pharmacological strategy for dealing with this. You've all heard of ayahuasca. Ayahuasca is DMT from one plant combined with another plant, which contains a chemical which is called an MAO inhibitor. MAO is monoamine oxidase, and your gut is full of MAO, and its job is to take monoamines, small molecules, and oxidize them into a harmless byproduct, usually endolacetic acid, which can be shunted to the bladder. Well, when you take DMT orally, these monoamines just-- I mean, these monoamine oxidase compounds just grab onto it and destroy it. But if you take an MAO inhibitor with it, and harmine, which occurs in banisterioxis copy, is an MAO inhibitor, then, lo and behold, it isn't destroyed in your gut. Instead, it passes into the bloodstream. It passes through the blood-brain barrier, which is a very tight chemical filter that keeps the brain from being exposed to toxic materials. But these drugs can cross that barrier. And then what the ayahuasca experience really is, is a slow-release DMT trip that, instead of taking five minutes, takes about two and a half hours. And if you really know your psychedelics and your breath-control techniques, on ayahuasca, over an hour or so, you can work yourself to a place where you say, "Lordy me, it looks just like a DMT flash." And it does, but you've had to do some hard climbing to get there. With DMT itself, once you push the start button, there's no stopping it. And I think it's worth describing it. How many people have had this experience? Uh-huh, well, so they can somewhat anchor it. It's very subjective, obviously, but I will describe what happens to me, and then we can work out from there. One point that I want to make about these things is that the great strength of the psychedelic possibility is it's democratic. It isn't that people of great spiritual advancement attain these states, or people who have studied under some lineage. It's truly available to everyone. When I had my DMT experiences, I realized, you know, either I am incredibly special, which there's no other evidence to support that, or this is something which can happen to anyone. And that's the more interesting possibility. After all, if it can only happen to very, very special people, then that lets most people out. If it's generally available, then it's big, big news about the human condition. Yeah? [Audience member] [indistinct] How did they find DMT in the human brain? Uh, hmm, interesting question. [Audience member] [indistinct] No, I think he means how did they find that it was endogenously produced. Well, I think they were studying-- the group that did this was at the University of Louisiana, Christian and his group. And they were studying fast reactions in the brain. And for fast reactions, you have to look at chemicals that can go through some kind of cycle of structural change and return to their zero point very, very quickly. Their original thought was that DMT mediated attention. I mean, I'm talking to you right now. Suppose there were a loud noise over here. We would all immediately project our mind onto the source of the sound. They thought that that was a neurological function mediated by DMT. Could be. I'm not sure. I suspect it has more to do with the chemistry of dreaming. Once they discovered DMT and began to track it, they discovered that there was a circadian rhythm-- means a daily rhythm-- in its production in the human organism and that it reaches its greatest concentration in the brain around 3.30 a.m. in most people. Well, this is when the deep dreaming and the high REM states are really chugging. And I suspect--I mean, lucid dreamers may want to argue with this-- but I suspect that every night we go deeper places than we can ever speak of, that ordinary dreams are right on the surface of consciousness. Big lucid dreams are an inch deeper, but I think we go 100 feet down every night into places where you cannot say anything about it. Yeah. I wanted to ask you about the availability of DMT for people who can't get DMT. I heard you talk about the system of secretions. Let's make that perspiration. [laughter] Or perhaps lethality for people who live in the States and can't get DMT. It's hard as hell to find DMT, and this is a puzzle, because if you look it up in a standard work on organic chemistry, it presents it as a trivial synthesis, much more simple than LSD, which it always presents as quite a difficult synthesis. But when you actually talk to workbench chemists, it's tricky to make DMT. It's especially tricky to carry out the final crystallization. So what you're usually offered in the underground is some kind of muck, which looks sort of like maple syrup half gone to sugar. I wouldn't get near that, actually. It means they botched their synthesis. What you're hoping for is a white powder. However, in 30 years of chasing this all over the world, I've only seen it as a white powder a couple of times. Usually the synthesis has fallen slightly below that standard, and what you get is a pale yellow powder, sometimes a pale rose or pink powder, and then the real rough trade is orange. And this is what you-- if you've seen it, this is probably what you've seen. It looks like orange mothballs, and it has the smell of indole, this very sharp smell, which if you're not a chemist and you've never smelled indole, when you reach in your mind for what is this like, you'll say, "Well, it's sort of like mothballs." Not quite, but it has that same sharp chemical, you know, and this is what you're going to smoke, see? So a lot of people beef about that and say, "Well, you know, it's like smoking burning plastic." Eh, mas o menos, but it is a little bit like that. The other objection to DMT that has been around since the '60s is people say it destroys brain cells. There's no evidence for or against this, but I would submit to you, and the people who are neurophysiologists can argue with this if they disagree, but I think an excellent index for the low toxicity of a drug is how fast it clears your system, and DMT clears your system in about 15 minutes. If you take some compound drug or whatever and 48 hours later you're still taking hot baths and, you know, wishing you could have a massage and sitting staring at the wall, then this drug is really sticking to your ribs. It means that your metabolic pathways have no way of dealing with it. They can't grab it here, they can't grab it there, and it takes a long time to leave your system. An example of this in the pseudo-psychedelic domain would be ketamine. You know, ketamine, the experience lasts about 45 minutes, but 48 hours later you can feel your knees suddenly go rubbery or you can have what are technically called fugue states, strange states of disconnectedness from what's going on around you. This is not a very good advertisement for a drug. Here, this woman and then you. I'm just curious, with the eye lockdown, how much do you think it takes to change the experience? Well, less because if you smoke DMT, the dose is approximately 50 milligrams, which is like the size of a kitchen match head. If you combine it with an MAO inhibitor and take it orally, you can probably get away with about 35 milligrams of DMT and, oh, I don't know, 100 milligrams of harmoline. Now, harmoline itself is sometimes described as a psychedelic drug. I really think this is sort of misleading. You will have hallucinations if you take pure harmine, but only at doses approaching the toxic dose. Many compounds will give you hallucinations approaching the toxic dose. Bee venom, rattlesnake venom, stuff like this. That doesn't mean it's a hallucinogenic drug. It means you're dying, and you should take steps to correct the situation. Now, yes? You said that there was a short transit time, but how long does the memory of that experience last? Because that would indicate to me that there is still a presence and perhaps a homeopathic dose at that point in the mind, in the brain. Well, DMT, one of the things that has caused me to think that it might have a role in the chemistry of dreaming is that one of the frustrating things about it is you have this experience. Without doubt, the most bizarre, appalling, peculiar experience you could possibly have, that's at minute two. At minute five, you're raving about it. At minute seven, you can't remember it. And so it's literally like gold running through your fingers. You say, "This is the most amazing thing. This is the most amazing thing. What am I talking about?" And you know how you can have a very engaging, complex dream, and the alarm goes off, and by the time your feet hit the floor, you're grasping for it. And it's literally melting before your eyes. That's a very DMT-like presentation. The way a dream melts away is the way a DMT trip melts away, at the same speed. Well, over time and using tricks, you can drag a certain amount of data out of it. What I'll do is I'll describe a DMT trip, and it's a composite of maybe 40 of these trips. And then you can see what you make of it. So this is--I'll just describe it. I'll be the graduate student. You'll be the guy with the clipboard. You're saying to me, "So what happened?" Okay, here's what happened. I took--one takes. Most people can get off in about three to four hits. Now, there's a trick to it. Hash smokers are greatly favored in this endeavor because you really need leather lungs for this. The great problem is that people will cough and not be able to hold it in. You take two hits in a situation where your clothes have been loosened and you can just flop backward when you need to. You take two hits. Now, many people miss the point because after two hits, you feel completely peculiar. You feel as though your body is undergoing some strange kind of anesthesia. All the air has been pumped out of the room. This is the visual acuity thing I talked about last night. The colors jump up. The edges sharpen. At that point, people say, "Whoa, wow, it's really coming on strong." Then what you have to do is you have to take one more enormous hit, and this separates the intrepid from the casual, believe me. The facilitator doesn't want to lean on the person. You say, "Dammit, take the third hit." They say, "No, I feel completely weird." You say, "I know you feel weird, but take the third hit." Well, if you can coax somebody into that, then what happens is you close your eyes and you see the ordinary warm brown back, closed-eyelid scenario, and then these colors begin racing together and it forms this mandalic, floral, slowly rotating thing, which I call the chrysanthemum. This is a place in the trip that you want to see as you go by it. The chrysanthemum forms, and you watch it for like 15 seconds. If it doesn't give way, then you didn't do enough. You have to do more. One more hit usually will do it. Well, then what happens is it physically propels you through this chrysanthemum-like thing, and there's a sound like a saran wrap, bread wrapper, being crumpled up and thrown away, you know, that crackle. A friend of mine says, "This is your radio inflecki leaving through the anterior fontanelle at the top of your head." I don't know what it is, but something is being-- [Audience member] It's the crack that's coming out of your brain. Yeah, right. That's what it is. And then there's this very, very defined sense of bursting through something, a membrane, and on the other side--and this is now, remember, my experience-- on the other side, as you break through, there's a cheer. There's a whole bunch of entities waiting on the other side, and they--you know that Pink Floyd song, "The gnomes have learned a new way to say hooray"? Well, it's that place. It's those gnomes. And you burst into this space, and they're saying, "How wonderful that you're here. You come so rarely. We're so delighted to see you." And one of the things about DMT that's really puzzling is, in a sense, it doesn't affect your mind. In other words, you don't change. For instance, if you take ketamine, the first thing you notice, the very first thing you notice before the trip hits is you notice that you no longer are anxious about having taken ketamine. You just--sort of anxiety leaves you. That means it's affecting your mind. It's doing something to the judgmental machinery. DMT doesn't lay a hand on the judgmental machinery. You break through into that space exactly who you were before breaking through. And the usual reaction of most people is something like-- You know, you think, "God. Heartbeat? Normal. Pulse? Normal. Everything's normal. Yeah, everything's normal. Oh, God." Because these things are there, and they're hammering at you, and they come forward. They're like Jules self-dribbling basketballs. And there are many of them, and they come pounding toward you, and they will stop in front of you and vibrate, but then they do a very disconcerting thing, which is they jump into your body. They jump into your body, and then they jump back out again. And the whole thing is going on in this very high-speed mode where you're being presented with thousands of details per second, and you can't get a hold on-- You say, "My God, what's happening?" And these things are saying, "Don't abandon yourself to amazement," which is exactly what you want to do. You just want to go nuts with how crazy this is. You say, "Don't do that. Don't do that. Pay attention. Pay attention to what we're doing." Well, what are they doing? Well, what they're doing is they're making objects with their voices. They're singing structures into existence. These things are-- And what they will do is they'll come toward you, and then-- And you have to understand, they don't have arms, and they're kind of downloading this into a lower dimension to even describe it. But what they do is they offer things to you. Say, "Look at this. Look at this." And as your attention goes toward these objects, you realize that what you're being shown is impossible. It's impossible. It's not simply intricate, beautiful, and hard to manufacture. It's impossible to make these things. The nearest analogy would be to the Fabergé eggs or something like that. But these things are like the toys that are scattered around the nursery inside a UFO or something, celestial toys. And the toys themselves appear to be somehow alive. The toys themselves can sing other objects into existence. So what's happening is there's just this proliferation of elf gifts, and the elf gifts are moving around, singing, and the whole thing is directed toward-- They're saying, "Do what we are doing." And they're very insistent. They say, "Do it. Do it. Do it." And you feel like a bubble. And now, this is subjective. I mean, only 5% report this, but it happens to me. You feel like some kind of bubble inside your body that's beginning to move up toward your mouth. And when it comes out, it isn't sound. It's vision. You discover that you can pump stuff out of your mouth by singing, and they're urging you to do this. They say, "That's it. That's it. Keep doing it." And the whole thing is like-- We're now at minute 4.5 with this stuff, and you speak in a kind of glossolalia. There's a spontaneous outpouring of syntax unaccompanied by what is normally called meaning. It's sort of-- [speaking in a foreign language] And this is accompanied by a modality, something seen. And they're saying, "Yes, do it. Do it. Do it." And then, after a minute or so of this, the whole thing begins to collapse in on itself, and they literally begin to physically move away from you. And usually, their final shot is they actually wave goodbye, and they say, "Deja vu. Deja vu," which makes no sense at all if you analyze it. So then you come down, and you're now at minute 6 to 7, and you come down, and it's like being more loaded than you've ever been. It's like about a 700-mic acid trip, but you embrace it as totally down. You say, "I'm totally down." I mean, you look like a termite from Arturas, and the room is decorated in Amish quilts, but I'm completely back. And then, over a minute or a minute and a half or so, the room just comes right back together, and four minutes after that, some people can give no account of it whatsoever. They just say, "I don't know. It was the weirdest thing that ever happened to me, and I can't remember it now." So, that's the basic run-through. Now, a lot of stuff is going on in there. First of all, what are these things? And why do they want you to do this strange activity? And what's so great about it? Well, hmm. Well, first of all, who are these things? We can be good scientists and make a list of the possibilities and then see which seems more likely. It could be a disincarnate race of hyperdimensional dwellers who live in some kind of parallel continuum just over some kind of energy barrier, and they're there all the time. You do have the feeling that they're there all the time, that it's ongoing, that you have just cut into their scene. So, that's one possibility. Another possibility is that behind all these psychedelics, and especially DMT, that this is not a drug at all, but it is essentially a pay telephone of some sort to aliens, good old National Enquirer-type aliens who are using this as a communication domain. Say, you know, we can't land on the White House lawn. That would create panic and hysteria. So, let's create a drug which inside the drug we will be able to deal with people. And I was hoping that John Mack, who's an expert on UFO abductions, would be here this weekend. I expected him because I think this whole abduction thing is not going to be illuminated until they start giving abductees DMT and saying, "So, is this what happened to you? Was it like this or was it completely different?" Well, so then those are the two possibilities that I sort of dealt with over the first 10 or 15 years of thinking about this. And then recently... Just one second. So, possibly that experience that people are interpreting as an abduction is just a heightened production of endogenous DMT within the brain. It could be. What puzzles me is that the abduction thing is so non-psychedelic. It's so cut and dried. And all this anal examination stuff with strange machinery, there's nothing comparable to that, I'm happy to report to you, going on in the DMT thing. But it may be, you see. Maybe their filter explains what they've done. Well, I'd be interested in looking at the possibility that DMT, under normal or abnormal conditions, could be sequestered in the human brain and then some unusual stimulus or stress could cause it to suddenly be dumped. I want to share that there have been some migraines that I've had where what you just described about the colors coming in and the stasms happen and it's been so fascinating that I've completely forgotten about the pain about it and just watched it for hours. Well, until I guess I fell asleep, but it sort of struck a note. And I was always under a lot of stress when I got the headache in the first place, and there seems to be a lot of strange things going on with the migraine in the first place. So I'm wondering if that's-- Yeah, that's an interesting possibility. I also have migraines or the kind called cluster headaches. And yes, a lot of the-- The nice thing about DMT is that it's painless, but the sense of being split open and of the traveling scotometer, as they call these hallucinations that migraine people see, it's related in some way. Yeah, yeah. May I bring science into this a little bit? Sure. It involves a principle that is characterized and called phasing, but its basis is sort of what happens on a subatomic level between matter and energy. It turns out there's no fundamental particle at that level. You have this dance between matter and energy. Energy coalesces into a bit of matter, which then becomes energy. And you can look at this matter-energy relationship as having a wavelength or frequency associated with it. Now, granted, this happens on a subatomic level, but if there's something comparable going on on a level at which we seem to exist in the physical form, and it seems to me that there has to be something akin to it, that it may be that we as beings are sort of tuned to a frequency range in this particular form, and that somehow it's possible to shift that or expand it so that what we're actually experiencing is a broader range of frequencies or sort of a shift in wavelength. And I think some of these experiences can be at least explored in that context. There's so much that we don't know about the nature of this cosmos, but we can extrapolate some degree. At least we can use this to take journeys and explore possibilities from what we do know in science, for example, and what happens in a subatomic or an aquanum. I mean, for God's sake, the language of these people is sounding more like sorcerers these days than scientists. And we do seem to at least believe from the evidence that we see that there is this matter-energy interchange on a very fundamental level. Now, if something akin to that is going on on a macro level, there may be this principle of phasing in which we either shift our tuning or we expand it to include a larger spectrum. Yeah, I think--no, I think that that's a very interesting avenue to pursue this thing about frequency. Somebody told me one of the great things about this job is you hear a lot of weird stories. And somebody told me a story recently about--it didn't involve DMT, it involved LSD-- this guy and a friend of his took a quite large dose of LSD, larger than they intended, and they went to a party. And they were so loaded by the time they got to the party that they realized they could not function as partygoers. So they just moved into a corner and sat with their backs to the wall and watched this party rage in front of them. And after about 20 minutes of sitting there, they both simultaneously noticed--it was a dance party-- noticed that the music was sounding really strange and everybody was moving very slowly. And as they watched, the thing came to an absolute halt and people were just frozen and there was absolute silence. And at that point, the door at the other end of the room swung open and an elf entered the room and moved among all these frozen people and then left by the door he came in. And they both saw this and they said that they could tell that it was-- that the people in the room didn't know it happened because for them it occupied a microsecond. But this thing that was--you know, in Carlos Castaneda, who God knows is not the world's most reliable reporter on these things-- nevertheless, there is this thing about stopping the world. So maybe it's something like that, that there is, as you suggest, a frequency phase. Yeah, this sort of leads into the third possibility having to do with the origin of these things. And in a sense, this is the hardest one to swallow, but in another sense, this is the most conservative-- in some crazy notion of conservative-- the most conservative explanation because-- [Audience member] Do you want me to read it? [Rick] Mm-mm. Because we have no evidence other than the tabloids that this world is being visited by friendly visitors from Zineb El-Ghanoubi or Zeta Reticuli or the Pleiades or anywhere else. I mean, to my mind, the evidence that this is happening is vanishingly small and totally underwhelming. The other possibility, that there's some kind of parallel dimension in which these things exist, is also somewhat poorly supported. If we're talking about something which thinks, something which can communicate, something which is intelligent, then we should look to ourselves as the source of it because we are the only intelligent communicating things we know within a certain narrow definition of these things. So that it's occurred to me with greater and greater force and largely prompted by giving DMT occasionally to Tibetans and Amazonian shamans. And when you say to them, you know, to the shamans in the Amazon, when you say to them, "What is happening with this stuff and what are those little things in there?" They say, "Oh, well, those are ancestor spirits. Didn't you know? Haven't you heard? Shamanism is about doing healing through the intercession of ancestor spirits." Say, "Hmm, ancestor spirits, let's get this straight. Dead people is what you're talking about, right? These are dead people." And, you know, maybe because I was raised Catholic, I resisted this like grim death. But I'm beginning to think that what you actually break into in that place is something that we might call an ecology of souls. That is it possible to entertain the notion that at death you actually don't just become worm food but that something survives in some other dimension and that it has this bizarre character to it. And that this explains their peculiar affection for humanity and their involvement somehow in our fate. Well, this is to me fairly mind-bending as a possibility. If what is awaiting us at the end of the 20th century is the erasure of the boundary between the living and the dead, then we've all been too conservative in our projections of what is going on. Isn't that one of the aspects of the return of the Messiah, the digital line? Yes, that there will be some kind of erasure of the boundary between the two. Well, once I had this idea, you know, I mentioned my Jungian and art historical proclivities. And so that means you always look back through tradition and folklore to try and find something analogous to this. Well, there ain't much, but there is one area that seems suggestive to me. And that is, as you all know, the Irish are a fairy-haunted race. They're also an intoxication-obsessed race, at least in stereotype. Well, it turns out that you probably all are familiar with the notion of purgatory. Purgatory is the place where you have to spend a lot of time before you get to heaven if you're not bad enough to go to hell. So you put in a few calculeo-chasms of eternity in purgatory, and then you get let into heaven. Well, I had always assumed that this dogma-- I don't know, I hadn't really thought about it, I just sort of assumed it arose with early Christianity. And when I began looking into this, I discovered that the idea of purgatory was invented by St. Patrick, and it was invented specifically to convert the pagan Irish, because the pagan Irish believed in the land of Fay. They believed there was this nearby dimension full of the souls of the dead surrounding us all the time, and that certain people with the gift of second sight could see this. So Patrick just said to them, "Oh no, that isn't it. It's purgatory," and was able to push that on them so successfully that a later church council adopted it as general dogma for the church to use in converting the pagan Slavs as well. So it's an idea of a nearby dimension inhabited by disincarnate souls that is apparently very old, but very alien to our tradition. There's another notion that comes from quantum physics, and I don't know if it's going to be a gross oversimplification, but it's kind of related, and it has to do with the quantum wave function, which is really kind of a dual wave. It has two parts to it. One part, and they both have a temporal or time-related aspect to them. One part, which is called the ordinary part of the wave, can be seen as a wave propagating forward in time, and the other half of the wave, which is called the complex conjugate, can be seen as propagating backwards in time from some future state, some past state, some future state, emitting waves which at some point interact and produce what is perceived or experienced as a present state, which is really a dynamic process. And to tell there is no absolute present, because as soon as you get out of the mode, it's past. But the interesting thing is that what that implies is that what we experience in the present, whatever they may be, is somehow related to some future state and some past state. But it also means that neither future or past are fixed, and that we could sort of align ourselves with different tracks or vectors. And a slightly different vector, a slightly askew, may produce something totally different than what our ordinary perception is. Well, yeah, this could be. I mean, I've always felt that what biology is is some weird kind of chemical strategy for amplifying quantum mechanical indeterminacy, that macro-physical objects are not subject to quantum mechanical indeterminacy, but organisms apparently are, especially thinking organisms. We don't know. That's our perception. Our perception is that objects on a macro scale, large scale, are not subject to quantum fluctuations. But that's only because of this probability with it in some sense, in that there's a most probable state. And if we happen to exist in that, our perception is that it's more fixed, that there is no indeterminacy, it obeys certain laws that are rather linear in nature. But we really don't know. What you're sort of saying is that natural laws only apply some of the time, which gives them a curious status as laws in that case. Well, that's sort of broadening the notion of relativity. I mean, what happens in a black hole, for example? What is a singularity? It simply means that the laws that normally apply in everyday experience no longer are relevant. Well, one of the problems cosmology is meeting is that there are so many large black holes in the universe that you come up with ten high six singularities. That's a few more singularities than a good theory would tolerate, I would think. I mean, what kind of theory is it that hands you back ten to the ninth singularities, which are exceptions to the theory? That's true, but a lot of that's based on assumptions that are stretches. Ain't that the truth? Language, again, it gets back to a psychedelic experience. It's this whole lower dimensional language slice thing that we seem to have to operate in in order to describe an experience that just does not fit into that slice. We do our best to do it, and sometimes it comes across being very crude and naive. Sometimes we kind of get close to the mark, but it's difficult to know. I mean, the whole notion of black hole singularities is just the present attempt at explaining some experience that is beyond ordinary experience. None of us have encountered a black hole directly, but we know about it. That's true. It seems to me one of the embarrassments of science is that the Big Bang begins with a singularity, and so then you have this whole vast interlocking schema of rational explanation, except that it begins with a hard swallow. You're asked to believe that the entire cosmos of space and time sprang from a point no larger than a cross-section of a gnat's eyelash. Whatever else one could say about that theory, I think you'd agree it's the limit case for credulity. Absolutely. I mean, if you believe that, try to think of something that you would throw up your hands and say, "Well, I'm not buying that." It absolutely--it's sort of like when you join the Catholic Church, you make a declaration of faith. Well, when you join science, you sort of make this declaration of faith that I do believe that the universe sprang in a single instant from an incredibly tiny, hot, dense dot. Unlikely, but who knows? Maybe something else, as you two were dialoguing a bit, I was getting this visualization of you have to look at the pond of reality, so to speak, as not only being the visual of someone throwing a pebble from the top of the pond and creating the ripple effect or the wave effect, but also from the bubbles coming from below. And to me, the deep space that you were talking about is the air inside the bubble coming from below. And so the dimensional reality of that picture is not a linear time perspective. It's something coming from all directions. It is, again, the center of the Mandala effect. Well, this is why I say the psychedelic experience is a boundary-dissolving experience, because it takes away past, present, cause, effect, all of these things disappear. Now, remember I said ayahuasca is a kind of slow-release DMT trip. And one of the really interesting things going on with ayahuasca, to my mind, perhaps the most interesting thing, is that the style in the Amazon of taking ayahuasca is people get together in a darkened hut at night, and they take it and they sing. But the songs, they're selling them at the table back there, the songs, when there's a break in the singing and you hear the people discussing the songs, they don't discuss them like music. They discuss them like sculpture and painting. And they say to the shaman, "I like the part with the gray bars and the blue speckling, but when you brought in the pink in combination with the beige and white, I thought it was too much." Say, "What kind of a discussion is this about a song?" You realize then when you take ayahuasca, they see the songs. And now this is really interesting to me, because you remember in the DMT flash, they wanted you to use your voice to make objects. Well, then in the ayahuasca trance, you use your voice to control these colored modalities, and the whole thing is done that way. Well, so then what it must mean is that the neurophysiology of ayahuasca somehow allows for the ordinary signal processing, which is being shunted into the audio pathway in the brain, is instead being shunted into the optical pathway. This is what's called a synesthesia. These things have been fascinating for hundreds of years to people. But the synesthesia means that, you know, color, sounds are seen. Well, now, is this anything other than a neurophysiological curiosity? Well, I maintain it is, because I think that a language which could be seen would be a kind of telepathic language. If you've thought much about telepathy, you might have naively assumed that telepathy is you hearing me think. That isn't what it is, I think. Telepathy is you seeing what I mean. And it's not something which happens dramatically. It is a function of eloquence, you know. First you have the speaker who is boring you to death. Then you have the speaker who at least holds your attention. Then you have the speaker of whom it is said, "She paints a picture." It means we're moving toward poetry. Well, it's possible to imagine a transformation of the neural processing of language. It may be a behavioral possibility. It may not even require a gene shift, where then we would see what we each mean. You know, there's this persistent idea promulgated by Robert Graves in "The White Goddess," among other people, that there was once what he calls an ursprache, a primal language, so emotionally intense that to be in the presence of poetry declaimed in this language is to see the poetry, and that this is what the lost poetics of the High Paleolithic were about. And probably it was pharmacologically assisted that you could gather people in the presence of a great bard or singer, and that person could then create telepathic modalities. And that telepathic modality, that richer, more unifying language, was the thing which was suppressing the formation of ego. The ego speaks and hears through sound. The super-ego projects images and is perceived as images. Now, it's very interesting, at least to me, that in the pineal gland of ordinary human beings there is a compound called a deneroglomerotropine, which, when analyzed in inorganic, or just in the normal nomenclature of organic chemistry, turns out to be a beta-carboline, closely related to harmoline. Well, is it possible that we are as close as a one-gene mutation away from a shift that would switch our processing of audio input into the visual field, and that then we would cross over into a realm of beheld understanding, and that this is the evolutionary leap that we're trying to make, that it's in the body, not in the technology. In the body, there is actually going to be a minor, a one-gene click to another channel, and then we will be able to see what we mean. And I maintain that if you can see what somebody means, you are that person. Contrast it to ordinary communication. Ordinary communication is achieved through small mouth noises. As primates, we have a throat and voice box arrangement that allows us to produce small mouth noises for hours, if necessary. I'm the living proof of it. But it's not a very efficient mode of communication, because what happens is I have a thought. I look in a culturally sanctioned dictionary, which I have copied into my head. I translate the thought into an acoustical signal using my mouth, which moves across space, which enters your ears. You rush to your interior dictionary, and you construct my meaning out of your dictionary. Now, notice that this process rests on a very shaky assumption. It rests on the assumption that your dictionary and my dictionary were published by the same folks in the same year. If your dictionary is different from mine, you will not correctly reconstruct my meaning, and we will have what we call misunderstanding. Notice how among us, as a species, one of the most bring-down things you can say to somebody is, "Would you please explain to me what I just said?" Because it means, "Oh boy, here comes trouble. Now you're going to find out that, you know, people didn't understand you. They horribly misunderstood, and the communication is very provisional. The amount of noise in the circuit is huge." Well, then contrast this to, "I utter something, and it condenses as a sculpture in the air, and you and I then become its observers, and we rotate this syntactical object, and we look at it, we regard it from many points of view. This is not ambiguous, or it's certainly considerably less ambiguous than this reconstruction from interiorized dictionaries." So perhaps what all this is about is evolutionary pressure on our languages to become visual, and therefore to become more unified and less riddled with noise, which creates misunderstanding, which creates horrible social realities. Yeah? I'm just in the middle of reading a book called "Colorized Universe." Oh, Michael Talbot's book. Uh-huh. He was talking about visual experiences being about 50% based on meaning and additions internally to what's coming through visual. So it sounds like you still have a transmission problem in translation. Yes, although what you could do with a visible language would be very challenging. I mean, we could do many things with it. It's not an outlandish-- it's not a completely outlandish idea. In nature, it occurs. There's a wonderful phenomenon in nature, which is worth talking about to sort of legitimate such a far-out notion, which is, as you all probably know, octopi can change color. This is one of those things you learn on those science specials on TV. This concludes tape two. Our program continues with tape three. {END} Wait Time : 0.00 sec Model Load: 0.71 sec Decoding : 1.74 sec Transcribe: 5618.79 sec Total Time: 5621.24 sec