Our program continues with tape three Octopi can change color. Well most people I think assume that they do this for camouflage That would be a reasonable assumption. They don't do it for camouflage Let's talk about octopi for just a moment. First of all, they're mollusks They divided from our evolutionary lines 700 million years ago. They're related to Escargot They have no backbone for crying out loud. They're not even vertebrates But what is always said in biology classes about octopi is that they're a wonderful example of parallel evolution Because their optical system is very much like a mammalian Optical system. Well, why is this? Well, it's because they evolved in a in an environment the reef environment that is that environment all as dense with signals as a rainforest is and An octopus is soft-bodied It can not only change color But it can also change its surface from smooth and rubbery to bumpy Pimply rugose ribbed so forth and so on and also because it is soft-bodied and in an aqueous Environment it can fold and unfold and reveal and conceal parts of its body very very quickly well all of these behaviors and physiological characteristics go together to make the octopus an excellent visual communicator and the color changes the blushes Traveling dots and bars that these creatures manifest and the squids do it, too our language and If you're interested in this there's a wonderful book by a guy named Monahan called communication and non communication among the cephalopoidea and He goes as far as creating a grammar for this stuff well, so then in a way, you know if you pull back from the Mundane assumptions about this what's happening is the octopus wears? Its mind on its skin It is dressed in its mental state One octopus encountering another can tell its mood how recently it's eaten how recently it's had sex whether it's ovulating all by looking and So they the only way an octopus can have a private thought is by squirting Ink into the water and then hiding inside it. This is essentially its correction fluid for misspoken octopi you see So in a sense, this is what I think we are are being beckoned toward that We want to clothe ourselves in language. We do it in a to a degree in a funny way I mean if you want to think about virtual reality This is a virtual reality all this stuff these fixtures the architecture the infrastructure the road These are ideas It was an idea and it has then been summoned into matter by the allotment of funds the spending of money the hiring of Craftsmen so forth and so on our whole civilization is an excreted set of interlocking ideas Agreements we're like coral animals and we somewhere, you know, there's this naked pulpy creature But you know clothed in denim clothed in a harder shell produced by Mercedes or Chevrolet moving around inside a larger environment produced by the state of Colorado and so forth and so on so I think octopi offer an excellent metaphoric example of what naked mindedness would be and it's some of these octopi as I said they evolved in the coastal reef Domain, but that's a very competitive domain Everybody in the ocean wants to be there because that's where the sunlight and the food is So if you're smart, you'll try and evolve into a more Hostile niche and some of these octopi have become what are called benthic or abyssal It means they exist in the parts of the ocean where light never reaches yes, and they Have retained this communication ability by switching over to interior interiorly generated Phosphorescence so there are species of octopi which actually are studded with organs that have the equivalent of eyelids Over them, but they're flasher lights So when you descend into the benthic depths of the ocean you enter a domain where all One octopus ever sees of another octopus is its linguistic productivity Because that's interior generated light that can be seen and I think you know If you want to set the compass of virtual reality towards something worth writing home about Then producing an octopus Environment so that we could experience this kind of thing would be a kind of proto telepathic Clayton of some sort yeah Aha, so you think that subterfuge answers here, too Yeah, that was my real question. My real question is last night when you were discussing the role of psychedelics in human evolution and you were drawn by a strictly Darwinian theory I assume since you were so familiar with Huber-Sheldrick and various others that you've entertained other theories and if so have you considered the possibility that psychedelics may have a direct influence on evolution and the evolution of human kind in a very direct way in other words, have a direct impact upon DNA so that this collection well, you want me to It's a simple dogma of biology that information can get out of DNA but can't get back in directly It can only be collected for over a period of generations. Have you played around with this? Yeah, well Does it make this a trigger-awesome information acquisition theory? Well, you raise a lot of issues. First of all since the discovery of retroviruses of which the HIV virus is one we now know that it is not always information transcripted from DNA to RNA to protein. The retrovirus is transcript from RNA to DNA So the central dogma which is that the genome is not being altered by by the environment is sort of shaky at this point You bring up a very interesting point which has never to my mind been really thrashed out in orthodox science which is if you had a bunch of these psychedelic molecules and we could raise them up to the size of loaves of bread or something like that, what you would notice about them is they're all what are called by chemists planar, meaning they tend to be flat. They're not lumpy, they're flat Well, if you look at DMT or harmin, harmin is built off a pentexal group and with two benzene rings off of it. It is the perfect size to slip in between two nucleotides in DNA It can actually bond into the DNA there. Now many drugs do this These drugs are called dimers. The usual problem with a dimer that will intercalate this is the other term intercalate means slide between the rungs of the DNA is it usually deforms the DNA. It like passes a bulge along it and then transcription is difficult but these indole hallucinogens can dimer with DNA without disrupting its structural integrity. This is why I believe that this is the source of the visions that and you know orthodox biologists just roll their eyes at this idea and say well now you've made a very big error here. You've confused genetic information with information. Don't you understand that genetic information is just a sequence of codons coding for protein and you know that has no relationship to your memory of antimony space. However by being so unyielding on that point they create a huge problem in for their brothers and sisters across the hall who are trying to understand memory because the molecular theory of memory is a nightmare and here's the problem. Every molecule in your body is changed every five to seven years depending on who you talk to except neurons. The nerves are generally the nerves you're born with or the nerves you die with but it's an absolute no-no to suggest that memory is lodged in the neurons well but if aunt mini died 45 years ago and you can still remember the dear woman's face when she used to walk you in the park then every molecule of your body has been swapped out five times since she quit the plane. How can you have this memory of aunt mini and then they say well they don't say actually they just throw up their hands. Now to the people who say DNA can't store any kind of information other than codon sequences for proteins they have to explain why then 90% of the genome seems devoted to junk sequencing that does not produce protein that does in fact not do anything that anybody knows about it seems to me that we might as well just take the path of least resistance and say if the neurons are the only part of the body that persists throughout life if the memories persist throughout life then you've got two choices either the memories are in the neurons or the memories were never stored in the body in the first place and if you believe that well then the obligation to explain just where they were stored is hard upon you and the mechanism for retrieving them so I think molecular biology by being so reductionist has made certain problems in neurophysiology and higher cortical functioning almost insoluble you know for years and years it was held that the this was another one of these central dogmas of biology it was held that information could move from the nucleus of the neuron to the synapse but that there was no transport mechanism for moving any molecular species from the synapse back to the nucleus so consequently they said learning cannot take place in the nucleus of the neuron because the the materials for learning which would be present in the synapse modifications through experience there's no transport system and this was dogma until ten years ago well then they discovered what's called axial plasmic transport and they by putting labeled compounds in the synapse they were able to locate these labeled compounds later complexed with nuclear material in the neuron proving to the most diehard materialist that synaptic material was in fact moving backward to the neuron so I think that you know there's much that isn't understood about how all this works something worth pointing out you know science seeks closure and explanation explanatory closure my brother one time made a little aphorism which I think says it all on this subject he said to me once actually on a mushroom trip he said have you ever noticed how as the sphere of understanding grows ever larger necessarily the surface area of ignorance gets ever bigger seems perfectly clear you know a simple-minded way of saying that is the bigger you build the bonfire the more darkness you will reveal yeah and also any progress really comes from outside the context of the paradigm as having experience I mean it really to my knowledge almost everything that's really been advanced in science or philosophy it's really something that comes from outside the context of the paradigm yes well some of you have probably read Thomas Kuhn's book the structure of scientific revolutions where he shows you know that it's never the way they tell it afterwards the after telling is always about the primary insight the careful experiment the gathering of data the correlation actually it doesn't work like that at all it's entirely psychic piecemeal ruled by synchronicity one of the most interesting things I'll tell this story and then we can go to lunch because I think you know science has great pretensions about itself I mean it basically regards itself as a meta theory it regards itself as capable of passing judgment on all other theories they are supposed to submit themselves to science to be told whether they're real or not yeah like a religion well how many people know that you know modern science was founded by Rene Descartes in the early 17th century what were the circumstances under which Descartes founded modern science Rene Descartes was a 19 year old basically ne'er do well and he decided that he would go winching and soldiering across Europe which was a thing that young men of certain class did at that time and so he joined a Hapsburg army that was laying siege to Prague in the summer of 1619 and after they had taken care of the problem there in Prague this Hapsburg army began to retreat across southern Germany and in the evening of... now there's a lot of arm wrestling about this but let's just say the 17th of August 1619 this army made camp near the little town of Ulm in southern Germany which synchronicity freaks pay attention Ulm will later be the birthplace of Albert Einstein worth noting but that night Descartes in the barracks had a dream and an angel appeared to him and the angel said the conquest of nature is to be achieved through number and measurement and he was thunderstruck he took that angelic revelation and turned it into modern science modern science was founded by an angel you know they don't tell you this at MIT you know it's astonishing how things which claim roots in rationalism are actually among some of the most irrational productions in the historical continuum it appears that our development, our history, our histories have always been created at the promptings of invisible voices I mean Socrates who is at the very center of what's called thinking by Western civilization Socrates had a demon, D-E-A-M-O-N it was a little voice, it was his crap detector it told him the difference between profound philosophical thinking and bullpucky and so you know the edifice of Western thinking built on Platonism owes its debt to an invisible agency speaking from hyperspace so does modern science a la Descartes how much more of this, I mean we don't care if artists talk to angels because we've, our definition of them is that they're screwballs but to believe that an enterprise like modern science has to trace its way back to the same ecstatic roots is I think very suggestive that the world is stranger than we can suppose and that we need to open these channels of communication to these invisible worlds probably the next great paradigm shift will be enunciated by a mushroom, an angel, an elf, an alien, what have you yeah [inaudible] repetition, yeah the first few times I did it I couldn't get any grip at all on it and by talking a lot and trying to describe it you slowly slowly build up a map so about the Logos the Logos is this phenomenon that was sort of the centerpiece of Greco-Hellenic spirituality and what it is is it's a voice in the head that people strove to attain for a thousand years this was the sine qua non of intellectual accomplishment in the Greco-Roman world and the Logos told you the right way to live and this is sort of what you get with psilocybin you get a voice that can confound you with the depth and brilliance of its answers and one of the great, you know, one of the puzzles of trying to understand Greco-Hellenic spirituality is what were they talking about and if this ever was a general phenomenon then what happened to it why do we not experience this this is not well understood I mean the rational scholars who have created our vision of Greece basically just don't even want to talk about this they would rather gloss over it you know, one of the things that sort of relates to all this is I think human beings are a lot more malleable than we tend to imagine in other words, we imagine that people in the distant past or in Greece or somewhere were just like us except they were living in a different time and place there's no way to find out of course, because they're all dead but there are certain episodes in the evolution of Western culture that suggest that people may be much more plastic than we ordinarily suppose first example would be how can it be that in the middle 1500s perspective was discovered I mean, how do you discover perspective this is very hard, I think, for modern people to understand because it's a given for us I mean, we see in perspective we accept it as a quality of the world rather than a cultural artifact put in place at a certain moment but in fact, during the Renaissance only the most inspired people could paint in perspective on the natch most people, they had complex devices called perspectographs that would project over the scene a receding grid and then people would essentially fill in the lines now another example of this kind of thing that's not so well known but that is an example that Marshall McLuhan makes a lot of is St. Augustine, the great father of the Christian church he had a reputation for being a very holy man and the accounts of his contemporaries say that the way people would satisfy themselves that St. Augustine had a pipeline to God is they would bring him scripture, the Bible essentially and open it in front of him and let him look at it and then they would close the book and question him about what was there and he could always tell them, and they were amazed as far as we can tell, St. Augustine was the only man in Europe who could read silently nobody else could do it, it was regarded as a miracle now we all read silently and there may be a few unfortunate individuals among us who move their lips while they read but that's the only vestigial trace we have of this previous cultural mode where everyone, to read meant to read aloud no one could conceive of any other way of doing it the Logos seems to me a kind of similar thing it was a mental behavior, function which for reasons which are probably complex and unknowable slipped out of reach that's why it seems to me these psychedelics are very close to being able to modify our behaviors along these kinds of lines because there are a number of behavioral and experiential possibilities that we suppress I mean I think it's just as an example of how little we know about what's going on look at the Gaffenberg, don't look at it, but conceive of the Gaffenberg spot the G spot now we all know what this is clearly people were looking for it for a long, long time how come they only discovered it 12 years ago? I mean if something that major can be overlooked then it's hard to imagine what might have been overlooked I mean that's pretty central into the project of being a human being and apparently it was unknown until very, very recently so yes, the Logos was probably what I call the guy in mind and that at a certain point in cultural development people just became so chuckle-headed that the guy in mind just said, "What the hell with this?" and then the voice fell silent it fell silent right around the time of the birth of Christ right at the time of the shift of the zodiacal aeon, you know Would you consider maybe giving us a phenomenological answer like you did with the ayahuasca or the DMT vision? Or else just to have this, you know, from your experience with other people that you've talked to, just how this... How it works with psilocybin? Yeah, I mean, yeah, what you experienced when you talked to me Well, I mean, I take, when I take psilocybin I take it on an empty stomach, I don't fast or anything like that I just don't eat for six hours, I don't call that fasting and then I take it in silent darkness that's number one, very important the next thing is, weigh the dose you must weigh the dose because five grams is what you want and I've had over and over the experience of showing somebody what five grams is and they're appalled they say, "My God, you can't be serious!" I mean, I take a fifth that much, a fourth that much Yeah, well, that's the problem, that's why you don't have elves in the attic and bats in the belfry like I do, you know and so then you take it and I take it on an empty stomach and a lot of people don't like the taste I don't really understand that I just chew them up, I sit with them and I chew them up and then, huh? Dried, none of this mixing in applesauce or any of that malarkey I mean, what's that about? Oh, well, fresh, 60 grams 60 grams, because there's more than a, you know there's a huge water loss there and then it takes, people sometimes say it came on within five minutes or it came on within ten minutes I don't know what that could possibly be about First of all, it defies pharmacodynamics to imagine that it could come on that fast For me, it comes on almost always at the one hour and 20 minute mark I think it can come on sooner than that I think I'm fairly resistant to these things After I take it, I sit, I roll bombers and I carry out what all good Catholics know as an examination of conscience This means you think about all the bombers that you're afraid are going to jump out at you as soon as you get loaded If you will carry out the examination of conscience you'll be so bored with that by the time the compound actually hits that you usually don't have to pay any dues because you've faced the fact that you're a jerk 50 times in the preceding hours And then, the way I do it is at about the hour and 20 minute mark and I should say in the time preceding that you may have to go to the bathroom once you may... it makes your nose run which is a funny thing It also makes you yawn These are definitely qualities of suicide but not related to its psychoactivity And I think that it's very good to decide before it hits that once it begins you will not alter the plan In other words, you decide ahead of time I'm going to sit here and do this because at about the hour and 15 minute mark it will begin hitting you with stuff like you'd really be more comfortable downstairs or, you know, it's awfully hot in here Why don't you get up and adjust the thermostat All this stuff You say, "No, no, no, no We're holding the space and sit there" And then it begins to come on And it comes... the image I have is like a jellyfish or a silk scarf or something like that It just kind of drifts down and surrounds you And at that point I... I guess I pray I say to it, you know "I'm completely in your hands Please don't hurt me, you know I'm yours, I'm completely committed I've held nothing back, so don't burn me, please" And... and then there is a kind of... it's hard to describe a kind of potential begins to build up And you say, "Hmm, the rush hasn't begun but it's... you can almost close your eyes and see millions of little psilocybin molecules elbowing serotonin molecules out of the way and fitting themselves into the receptor site and the electron spin resonance dynamics is beginning to shift and the whole thing is about to take off" At that point I smoke furiously and that usually is all it takes And it comes on and it... the first rush is really astonishing I mean, sometimes it's more mind-boggling than others but I can remember situations where I would just see it coming and say "Oh my God, you know it's... it's a hundred miles wide and ten miles high Where are you going to run to?" You know, it's just... you say, "Good grief you know, I guess I'm not going to meet this one sitting up I think I'd better lay down and in about the time it takes to make and execute that decision then it just hits and it's like a tidal wave I mean, I have the feeling when I'm doing it in California that everybody from Vancouver to Tijuana has just crawled under their desk because you can't imagine this is happening between my ears you know, it's more like an asteroid must have fallen in the Pacific Ocean and raised some enormous incoming wave it's... what it's sort of like it's like watching a thermonuclear explosion through fifty feet of crystal clear glass so you know, you're perfectly calm it's not getting at you but the energy that is being released in your presence is awesome and then it... and sometimes in that first pass you actually... the linguistic machinery is burned out you've probably seen these scenes where they will test a hydrogen bomb and they set up cameras a quarter mile from ground zero a half mile, a mile, two miles and then when they actually detonate the bomb they get the view from the first camera and then they switch to the second camera as the first camera is blown to bits and vaporized and they keep pulling back as each successive instrument is destroyed well, this is sort of the feeling you have as this thing spreads out toward you and then it... it does what it wants to do it tells you what it wants to tell you and it's highly unpredictable I mean, you cannot... people always say you should ask it a question this seems absurd to me I mean, I don't know once when my life was in turmoil I did ask a question I said... I wrote it down ahead of time and the question was am I doing the right thing with my life? and then when I got in there and I posed the question and the answer came back instantly it was a rip-off from Lyndon Johnson it said what kind of a chicken shit question is that to ask me? I said, oh, sorry I didn't mean to presume, you know I said, get your act together and then we'll have a conversation but if that's what you want to talk about you should have taken MDMA and it... and then, you know paralleling what we talked about this morning and again, I'm just giving you my subjective take on it it's like... I come into a place it's hard to describe it's a feeling and it's... the content of the feeling is now the elves are near but they won't appear unless I invoke them and, you know I wish I could tell you that I chant in Mandaean or something like that but I don't I stole a line from an old, old I Love Lucy program where Ethel is talking to Lucy about UFOs and Lucy says she talks to the UFOs and Ethel says well, how can you talk to UFOs? and Lucy said well, it's simple I just say come in, little green men come in, little green men and that's what I do I say come in, little green men and then there is a... and women if there are any out there and then there is a... it's like a... it's like... it's like a marching band it's like a Nepalese marching band is what it's like and it comes from a distance like there's a place in my vision that's small a little dancing light and a little faint sound and the light comes closer and the sound gets louder until finally they pick me up on their shoulders and with tubas blaring and sac butt and rebec and all of this stuff and then they carry me around and talk to me and it's... the whole thing is shot through with such a weird sense of zaniness Irishness Joyceishness I mean it's almost unbearable it's so... I don't know not exactly Disney-esque because their humor tends to be a little more savage than that and then that is part of the first wave and then the rest of the trip unfolds pretty much as you... there's a kind of a... pushing and pulling that goes on you can direct it each one of these plants does have a character of its own sure one of the most puzzling things about these plants is that they have characters that seem irreducible for instance, psilocybin it is the science fiction drug in other words it says you know we have been denizens of this planet for 400 million years our original home planet is in the M5-83C system we are connected via hyperspace to all intelligent life forms in the galaxy it shows you enormous machines in orbit around alien planets it talks about the end of history and the collectivizing of humanity and it's this enormous hortatory, salvational dramatic science fiction type scenario well then you take ayahuasca which in molecular terms is just a few nitrogens are moved around I mean it's basically the same thing and you get a completely different message you feel the energy of the rainforest and the rivers and it's very feminine you think about childbirth you think about the continuity of generations you think about the mystery of the meat you think about tantric sexuality it's all redirected back into the human and natural world in some way and then of course DMT which I described this morning which the DMT elves are not from outer space they don't present themselves that way in fact one of the odd things about the DMT thing is that you have the feeling that this space that you break into even though it's large some people even refer to the dome of DMT that tells you they really were there but wherever this huge vaulted space is you have the feeling although it's hard to explain how you know this but you have the feeling that you're way, way, way underground which fits with the elf motif you're in the hall of the mountain king you're under the hills with the little people who retreated under the hills the character of these things is one of the most puzzling things about them How do you relate all these different species of gremlins to the Logos that shows the part of this one? Well that's a real question the Logos seems more first of all it doesn't crack jokes and do quadruple entendre puns and stuff like that it's more like a wise and loving teacher these DMT things are you know, it's a troop of maddened elves and they are just doing their own thing and then with Ayahuasca though some people claim they contact an entity it hasn't been like that for me it seems to me that on Ayahuasca you become like a camera you just fly through a visual world I mean after a good Ayahuasca trip you just feel like your eyes are bugging out of your head I mean it's like buying prints on Madison Avenue you know, and you've just been looking and looking and looking and you literally have to give your eyes a rest after an Ayahuasca trip and the Ayahuasca visions are more they seem to cover a broader spectrum the psilocybin hallucinations tend toward this highly polished, machine-like, insect-like outer space bit and the Ayahuasca hallucinations are wonderful pastels, laces layering of colors and then one of the most interesting things to me about Ayahuasca and I just cannot understand how this works if I could, I'd be Erte or somebody and that is that you, in the middle of the Ayahuasca trip you can suggest motifs you can lead it so that for instance you can say to it art deco and suddenly there will be thousands of candy dishes cigarette lighters champagne buckets, automobiles stained glass windows, doorknobs silverware all rolling in black space in front of you all the perfect exemplification of this aesthetic the art deco aesthetic and then you can say to it okay, Italian Baroque and it's just like that suddenly, altar pieces, madonnas martyred saints and fantastic scroll work and fleur de lis and you can say well, surprise me and then you will get a coherent style like art deco, like Italian Baroque except that nobody's ever bothered to realize it on this planet but it's as coherent it's like, you know, 20 years ago there was no such thing as southwest as a style you know, this weird thing coming out of Santa Fe that I noticed has planted its roots deep here as well the turquoise and beige endlessness of feathers and hammered titanium and all that well, that's an aesthetic that has cohered in the last 20 years and come into being there seem to be an infinite number of these things as different as the bronzes of the Han dynasty are to a Dali or a Pollock or a Bosch and then you can say to it going beyond the surprise me challenges what I always say to it is I want to see more of what you are for yourself and then it's like there's this low organ tone and it begins to lift the veils and the temperature in the room drops about 20 degrees and after about 20 seconds of that you just say enough of how you are for yourself because you can tell what's happening is it's starting to reveal something so peculiar and so untailored for the human mind or eye that you become afraid you say, you know, can we go back to dancing mice art deco cigarette lighters and to baroque altarpieces please this is turning into deep water as far as I'm concerned so, yes what happens on higher than, if anything, higher than five grams of lead? oh, that's a good question good question it requires a small detour into pharmacology the concept which all pharmacologists are familiar with and which you should be too if you're going to deal in this realm called LD50 this is not a pretty notion but a necessary one it stands for lethal dose 50 what does this mean? it means if we have a hundred mice how much psilocybin do we have to give each mouse to kill half of them? do you see? LD50 half the sample dies at the LD50 dose level whether it's graduate students or rats now, when you're designing a drug or when you're thinking about a drug what you want is a drug with an extremely high LD50 opposed to its effective dose so say the effective dose of psilocybin is probably about 0.5 milligrams per kilogram and the LD50 is probably 200 milligrams per kilogram the LD50 of psilocybin is 400 times the effective dose this is a pharmacologist's way of saying this is very, very safe a pound wouldn't kill you I don't think it might be getting close but you'd have to eat in that range to die now, some drugs have horrendous LD50 to effective dose profiles unfortunately, and I hope I don't rain on anybody's parade here MDMA has a terrible LD50 profile the effective dose is 125 milligrams you can kill yourself with a thousand milligrams so that's not good at all because sure as hell some street person or some depressed person or some maniac is going to take a thousand milligrams and then you've got a stiff on your hands so, yeah I recently read some info on MDMA indicating that depressed serotonin levels on MDMA the serotonin stays low in your body for about a week after taking it whereas with a related substance called E the serotonin levels are depressed for only two hours and the researcher indicated that his conclusion was that MDMA has some physiological toxicity that E does not have and therefore it might be wise to avoid it for that reason in fact, I've read an article that it's destroying the serotonin receptor site I thought about liver tests before and after and I was like, "Oh, that makes a difference?" there was a difference well, I think MDMA is... I don't want to trash MDMA it's changed a lot of people's lives and saved relationships and so forth and so on but to me it's a perfect example of why you're better off taking plants because here was this drug, somebody invented it they gave it to a few friends it seemed to be wonderful for solving personal problems so without any collection of human data this thing becomes an item in the underground well, and so then thousands of people take it the psychological effects seem completely benign it's a wonderful thing the physiological effects, it's a very disturbing profile it isn't exactly as you said it's not that it destroys the serotonin receptor site it's that nerves, neurons are covered by these very delicate structures called dendritic spines now nobody knows what dendritic spines do but every neuron in your body has them and when you take MDMA, it mows them down they just... they go away now, so then you get two schools of thought one says, well my God, anything impacting the physical brain that dramatically should be stayed away from and the other camp says, well do you see any behavioral changes in people who take MDMA a lot? do you see any physical destruction, seizures, blindness, anything? and the answer is no so they say, well here we have histological evidence that this thing is making major physiological changes in the dendrites and no behavioral sequelae to back up that this is of any consequence well my position, being basically a very conservative person is in that case, wait you know, they're doing work on this in a dozen labs around the country they'll figure it out in the meantime, take psilocybin or mescaline or something else that has been sanctioned because you just do not want to insult the physical brain you know, that's the whole name of the game you have to keep the brain in good shape can we go back to his question? once you're past the trigger dose, is it worthwhile to start to step up to... oh yeah, that's why we started talking about LD50 because I wanted to explain to you that taking a drug like, a compound like psilocybin if the effective dose is 20 milligrams 20 milligrams for somebody who weighs 135 pounds well then, looking at the pharmacological data they should be able to take 2,000 milligrams without any trouble at all that's a hundred times more but in fact, what happens is, as you raise the dose is that the psychological presentation becomes unbearable it becomes so strange that you fear for your sanity in a good old Edgar Allen Poe-ish phrase it gets stranger and stranger and I've talked to pretty naive people who have overdosed usually the way these overdose situations occur is people are gathering mushrooms in the wild and they start eating them and then they just keep eating them and then they realize they've eaten four times more than the effective dose and this is where you get into places where you don't know what to say because if you tell people, they'll throw a net over you but you want to say, because you're so personally disturbed this is where the flying saucers land and the rectal examinations begin and you're told that you're the messiah and it becomes quirkier and quirkier so I think you have to you know, I'm very admiring of people who can take very high doses but I find it quite challenging enough in the five to seven gram range a friend of mine says of psilocybin that every time he takes it he tries to stand more meaning more of the vision because it is filtering itself it's definitely filtering itself this is why beginners almost never have bad trips because somebody in there looks at your clipboard and says, oh this guy has never done this before so lay off the rough stuff just bring him through the standard number it's the people who consider themselves experienced who've done it 20, 30, 40 times says, you know, we can take the gloves off with this guy and it always amazes me I sometimes meet people who say I've taken mushrooms 50 times and I've never had a bad trip and I think, you know, lucky soul because when it goes left it's hard, you know, it's hard you have to really then do not your mantras bungle is the best advice I can give you because you need to steer back towards the mainstream now maybe at this point this is a good point at which to talk about what do you do when the going gets rough there are two things at least that you can do that are very effective the first is, and it's a very simple thing but people in our culture seem to be resistant to this is you sing you force air into your lungs and body and you chant, you sing anything you want and it will radically alter the parameters there's a certain place in psilocybin that is my bete noire which I call the meat locker and I don't like this place, you know and meat locker is a mild term for it it's more like, you know the morgue for the homicide unit or something whenever I start drifting that way I sing and then you can navigate through it the other thing you can do although this is sometimes trickier is smoke cannabis this is what those bombers are for that you rolled in the first hour while you were waiting for it to come on as soon as it begins to press in in some really invasive or alarming way just take a couple of hits of the good and chant and then you can bring it back on track and also talk to it don't be afraid to say you know, I don't like this take it off me it's too peculiar I'm not ready for this and says, oh sorry you know, back to dancing mice yeah do different facets of mushrooms have wildly varying concentrations of psilocybin? well there hasn't been a lot of work on this Michael Buechley at Evergreen College years ago grew Stropharyocubensis by the method that's described in my book the book I wrote with my brother and what they discovered see, psilocybin is 4-phosphoryloxy-N-N-dimethyltryptamine that phosphorus group is removed as soon as it crosses the blood-brain barrier so really what's active is a simpler compound called psilocin and psilocin lacks the phosphorus attachment and what they discovered was that in the early flushes the psilocybin ratio is high and the psilocin ratio is low and you all know what a flush is, right? and in the later flushes the psilocin level rises and the psilocybin level drops so really the two together stay remarkably stable throughout the life of the organism something worth mentioning I suppose it's worth mentioning is when I was into my extraterrestrial phase when I was assuming that the mushroom was an extraterrestrial either the extraterrestrial itself or something designed by some kind of an extraterrestrial it was very interesting to me that psilocybin is, as I said 4-phosphoryloxy-N-N-dimethyltryptamine it is the only 4-substituted indole in nature the only one well, if you were to search for evidence of extraterrestrial tampering with the biome of this planet what you would look for is a unique compound occurring in one life form and no other here it is, folks this phosphorus group is unique and I've never read any description or discussion of what the evolutionary history of that why it would appear in an organism like that and not in any other that's just an aside because I'm always searching for the thumbprint of the alien there may not be an alien thumbprint but the phosphorus group attached to psilocybin is a good candidate for it yeah um switching the subject only slightly the descriptions that you've given of all of these experiences although you have said that it varies widely there is a remarkable internal consistency of your description that you're entering a world that seems to have boundaries and entities that you consistently encounter again and again I've spoken to many medical reviewers some of whom have known you a long time and nobody I've ever spoken to people who've taken high doses or low doses have ever had similar experiences now clearly you've talked to people who have maybe they were just being polite I'm wondering if you've ever experimented with your own experiences like what Lily describes in Programming in Medical Research and to see you describe ways of evoking the entities which certainly could be put into the context of introducing programming into your experience true have you worked with different presuppositions going into this to see what the limits are well my original presupposition was to try to have no presupposition at all and then out of that came all of these assumptions you're right that nobody has trips exactly like mine although if you question people carefully you can begin to see how it works for example you know I described this thing this morning the elves the presentational thing the high speed motion the gifts all that well sometimes people will take DMT and they will come back and you'll realize that it's as though there is an archetype there which has different levels in it and if I had to say what the archetype of DMT is it's the archetype of the circus and one time I saw a woman come out of DMT she was an anthropologist she had fairly high body weight and I could tell that she had not gotten a complete hit came down and said okay what was it she said it was the saddest carnival in the world she said the carnival was closed all the tents had their flaps rolled down and there were just paper cups and candy wrappers blowing in the aisles in between them and the ferris wheel was stopped well she was just at the edge of this thing and if you think about the archetype of the circus it is an interesting one first of all you have the three center rings where wild and zany activity is continuously being presented tiny cars keep arriving with 14 clowns in each one and they keep climbing out falling all over each other but it isn't all fun and games it has a strange erotic content and as a child I think my first awareness of what I would really call eros was watching this beautiful long haired woman in a tiny spangled costume hang by her teeth 120 feet above the center ring doing acrobatics so you've got so you've got the clown and you've got the lady in the tiny spangled costume and then off from the center ring you have these dark alleyways where the sideshows are the Siamese twins and the goat boy and all the rest of it and it has a very weird vibe about it so it can land you in any of these places but if you try and correlate people's experiences it seems to me that it's pretty clear that through their own life history and their own programming nevertheless something is trying to poke through now my DMT experience seems pretty radically different from other people's although other people don't give any account at all I mean it's amazing how inarticulate people are they come down and you say how was it and they say it was far out and you say you don't get out of here with that rap how was it? and you say well they can't give a good account on psilocybin I think most people experience something very much like what I describe huge machines a sense of danger to the earth apocalyptic visions the idea that someone will come and help and I'm pretty resistant to all the flotsam and jetsam of the new age I mean I don't spend a moment worrying about the exact physical location of Atlantis or stuff like that and I think people it inflates their personal mythologies and intellectual misconceptions but there is something trying to get through that's why this exercise show me what you are for yourself is really a good one and maybe my trips are so weird because I have always worshipped weirdness so I can go further down that road without being alarmed while somebody else you know would pull back one of the problems is that we don't have complete maps of these places and at this stage in exploring that new world what we have essentially are the scribbled diaries of frightened explorers and we don't know if explorer A is talking about the same river system as explorer B or whether they were on opposite sides of the planet or the universe building a coherent picture of the psychedelic dimension would be the first challenge to a rational approach to understanding it have you ever read "Five Journeys" by Robert Monroe? is that the first book? no, I read the first book well it actually is a map talk about weirdness is one of the weirdest things you would ever read but it has an amazing ring of truth in it and in it you present a map of all of the realms of beings that exist but he's visited just normal consciousness it's almost an anti-psychedelic description but it's pretty consistent with some of the things you were discussing this morning because this is where you go when you die and it's also where you go when you sleep in fact he talks about classes you attend in your sleep and he describes these levels upon levels of entities co-existence and he describes it like what happens when you're dropping into this world? well I read the first book and I was puzzled by how much of it didn't seem familiar to me like I remember in the first book he talks about a world that's just like this world except the cars are nine feet wide that would be a very puzzling psychedelic experience to go to that world I knew someone who was very close to him and I don't want to set off any lawsuits here but I once cornered this person and said so what about it? and he said don't worry you don't have to worry this is not getting close to your bailiwick at all Buddhism of the Mahayanas has a tremendously complex system of levels and entities wrathful Buddhas and Dharmapalas and peaceful entities and I think that that's pretty interesting as a phenomenological description of mind I reject the philosophical premise of Buddhism because I think it's you know an unbelievably uncompromising kind of nihilism but Buddhism as it's pitched in America soft pedals that a lot you know they don't present it as a form of nihilism but I think ultimately it is in the most positive sense but still I'm of the school that follows Alfred North Whitehead who said say what you may there are certain stubborn facts and you know that's not a very Buddhist point of view yeah Do you have visions on cannabis too? If I can control myself and not do it too often the problem is cannabis does so many other wonderful things and I tend to use it for those other wonderful things but if I were totally dedicated to vision then I would only smoke once a week because then you completely come to equilibrium and then you know again I think people do it not wrong but not the way you should do it if you want visions you should do it the way you do all these other things alone in silent darkness and at high doses bursts of hallucination on cannabis are hard to control and predict but sometimes they're as intense as anything can be if you read 19th century descriptions of cannabis use by people like Fitzhugh Ludlow and the Club du Hashashin and that crowd where they were eating the hashish it's very clear that it was the LSD of the 19th century I mean nobody can read those descriptions without realizing these people were loaded for sure they were thoroughly and completely smashed to be able to write those kinds of accounts yeah, go ahead so I was interested in what you said you smoke a lot at the start of the mushroom trip and a lot of people at the start of the trip tend to really confuse entry and then it's like realizing well, it has an effect which and I'm not sure that's a good effect in terms of getting the learning choice and the low-power kind of stuff well, you didn't exactly make clear to me what the effect was it fuzzes you out going into... well, it depends on the smoke I suppose if you have a very top-grade sense of mood it would be one thing if you smoke a lot and get a little bit something totally different what it does to me is it just slightly cuts my anxiety you know, I'm able to let the thing unfold of its own I don't know, I mean I have a very a lifelong, intense relationship to cannabis and I basically make my living out of being able to do feats of memory and you know, cannabis is supposed to trash your memory so I don't, you know, maybe I'm different but I resist any "maybe I'm different" argument because it's malarkey nobody's different enough that they can, you know in terms of your articulateness and memory recall when you're at the peak of that experience is it still as, you know, speak as clearly then? you know, you're a little tongue-tied no, more so my great dream is that as my powers of locution fade with old age that cannabis will be legalized then I can sit in front of you and smoke and my career can be pushed 20 years further into the future the way I use cannabis is to think and I do a lot of thinking I do a lot, and I at night, before I go to bed I smoke, and then I play the tapes of the day and then I understand what happened if I didn't have cannabis I don't think I would be sort of at sea, or a kind of a space case because I never get what somebody really meant really intended, really had in mind till I play the tapes stoned and then I see, aha that's what the agenda was that's what was going on do you ever go to sleep after this? oh yeah, yeah and if I don't smoke, then I'm insomniac yeah I don't know how far you want to go with all this but I'm really interested in how you compare the natural and all the experiences together that you talked about ok, well LSD again, you remember I'm only speaking for myself because there is no other way to approach it I found LSD very interesting but ultimately kind of frustrating because I wanted visions and to me, what LSD by itself does is it does a lot of slippery and hard to name stuff it accelerates and changes the quality of thought it hmm well, basically that's it it does something to the quality of thought but I had been reading Aldous Huxley and Havelock Ellis and those people and I kept saying, you know where are the ruins of alien civilizations? where are the jeweled tapestries? and then, fiddling around with LSD I discovered that if I would take it with mescaline then it became the psychedelic experience that I was seeking but in and of itself it's kind of psychoanalytic it's sort of like cleaning up your act it often focuses you on your own personal stuff and, you know, I have to confess to you I'm not that interested in my own personal stuff probably because it's so horrendous but I don't like personalized trips I like cosmic vision information trips and then mescaline mescaline is... you have to take a lot to get it to really do what you want it to do and it being an amphetamine has not a very good LD50 profile it's not like MDMA where 10 times the effective dose you're in real trouble but probably 40 times the effective dose and you'd be sweating bullets so... and then just the nature of my life I've not had as much to do with mescaline as these other things I'm really a vision freak and people say, you know, well there's feeling and there's insight and there's this and that but the reason I'm so fixated on vision or the excuse I give somebody said it's because you're a double Scorpio but to me it's the... to me it's the proof that it's not coming from me I can come up with insights I can come up with funny ideas but I can't come up with objects never before seen by the human eye or mind and so when the vision starts then I feel this is the transpersonal part of the trip this isn't my unconscious my memories, my fears, my hopes this is something else yeah last night you were talking about boundary dissolution and ego reduction and what you described this morning I'm thinking how do they relate? how do boundary dissolution and... how do your descriptions of the trip this morning relate particularly to ego and... well I think in very practical terms they show you that everything you know is wrong you know I mean how can the ego survive that piece of information it just puts in your lap incontrovertible evidence that everything you ever thought or believed is hokum and that's extraordinarily humbling and that word humbling means the feeling you have when your ego is reduced you know humble yourself enough and you'll begin to feel humiliated and you know that's a deeper ego reduction I think they... aside from any magical chemical effect they might have on ego they're just simply showing you the true size of the universe and your place in it and you know in our down personal lives every man, every woman, a king or a queen I mean we build castles in the air our career, our children, our whatever well then you get into those places you just say you know what, how preposterous this is a dangerous kind of question is there any gender difference in the schools? for men and women? I only know being... well that's an interesting question I'm interested in that also in terms of the history yeah you mean what we talked about last night the living being perhaps a male created well I think women by virtue of the fact that they menstruate and give birth are just inherently more chemically driven creatures than men men are Apollonian in intent the idea is always some kind of abstract purity, clarity kind of thing and women know from the get go that that's an illusion that the reality is the floor of the rainforest the interconnected tissue the levels, the trade-offs and so forth and so on this is why I think generally men tend to be more interested in these things than women and to also be more impacted by them for women it seems to sort of fit in and affirm what they knew for men it seems to come as a tremendous surprise that this is the way things are put together I think that if everybody gave birth and experienced menstruation probably we never would have launched ourselves into history in a way you know without going too far with it men are the ancillary sex I mean the original blastula in the embryonic development is female and I was listening to somebody the other night talk about this saying no wonder men have the problems they have what a man is, is a woman who has been under incredible chemical assault for nine months in the womb and you just have been hammered, sculpted shaped and recast again and again and then you're born male a female fetus doesn't experience anything like that it starts out with a smooth shot and phylogenetic expression and then achieves it I don't think of the ego as particularly male because I think we all have it to excessive degrees but men are able to express it a woman with an ego is frustrated a man with an ego is a menace to all concerned yeah How do you feel about taking a trip with another or other people? Do you think the question of energy and personalities changes your trip? I think it's a very major decision to do that that if you're going to take a high dose of psychedelics with somebody else then you better be prepared to get all entangled with them which can be great it can also be fairly confusing I don't like taking psychedelics this is not an issue of entanglement that's sort of what goes on between lovers or close friends but I get a lot of requests to sit for people and I don't do it because I don't know whether it's my personality or what it is but I am unable to contain my anxiety in the presence of another stoned person especially if I'm stoned if I'm stoned and they're stoned and we're in a dark room I cannot get off I listen to them breathe I worry I wonder if I should ask them if they're alright then I go off on long trips about not interrupting them and then that loops back into but I haven't heard them breathe for 20 minutes and I'm always afraid I don't know so really people say doesn't it take courage to do it alone? for me it takes more courage to do it with people because inevitably then you get tangled up into some kind of craziness and you can think you're having a telepathic experience and they've decided that they want to have sex or something and meanwhile I've just had a revelation about that entry Moliere made in his diary when he was talking to his niece Agnes about the nature of the French comic theatre and so you say boy, we've got too much on the menu here but I'm weird, remember that yeah okay, now and we have heard about the common vision shared by the book in Ayahuasca so can you comment on this kind of thing in contrast to what you're talking about which is the exhuming of the body you mean the group mind on Ayahuasca? yes is that possible? oh yeah, no, it's very possible it's very possible I mean you can sit with someone and play a little game where you will describe the hallucinations for 30 seconds then they get to describe the hallucinations for 30 seconds and you can absolutely convince yourself that people are seeing the same that you're seeing the same thing and when you toss sex into the mix it goes over the top I mean I've had the impression I don't want to trot it out as a position of mine or something that I assert as true but I have had the impression stoned on mushrooms making love that it's like perspiration forms on the surface of the skin and there's some kind of electrolytic thing that goes on and the boundaries dissolve between the people I don't mean metaphorically I mean that you become one organism and that's pretty amazing that's where the department feels it yeah, yeah, yeah now after I just said I don't like taking psychedelics with people I guess what I should have said is I hate being responsible because I don't mind taking ayahuasca with 30 people none of whom speak English in a hut up some river but that's because I know that the old shamans are in charge that I'm just a face in the crowd nobody's going to turn to me for explanation or help I'll tell you an ayahuasca story just to give you an idea of the kind of stuff that goes on in these sessions years ago in '76 Kat and I it was before we were married were in Peru and we had found this shaman who was very good and he had a following and we were you know, apprenticing ourselves to him and he, the style of these Peruvian mestizo people is that, I mean, cultures handle this differently but they are never straight with each other it's an incredibly masked culture almost like the Japanese but without the formality in other words, if you think somebody is a jerk you would never say that that's the last thing you would say because that's your true opinion so we got into a situation with these people where this elder shaman who was very respected beloved even by these people he had a nephew, a sobrino who was an absolute jerk I mean, this guy was into pimping a little on the side and he was very ambitious to perfect his ayahuasca so he could go to Lima and charge yuppies a bunch of money for taking it and so forth and he had this really awful habit and I don't know what really had gone on before we got there but they would all get together to take ayahuasca and these old, old guys you know, 80, 85 years old the totally authentic dudes would sing these beautiful ayahuasca songs and he would sing against them I mean, can you imagine a scene like this where everybody is singing "Row, Row, Row Your Boat" one guy wants to sing "Five Foot Two Eyes of Blue" and does and the level of social tension in these meetings would just rise and rise but nobody would ever say anything to this guy and tell him to bug out and can that crap so one night, this had happened two meetings in a row it was the third meeting like this everybody hoped this guy wouldn't come so then he showed up so then we all dose then we get loaded and the singing begins and he begins his singing and in the wave of hallucinations and Cat was sitting next to me he was sitting up on his haunches kind of rocking back and forth on his heels and I would look at him and I could see he was going through these weird animal transformations first he would become like a jackal then he would become like a monkey and it was really intense and I mentioned it to Cat so Cat could see it too so then he kept and we were also trying to tape these ayahuasca songs so it was a double irritation to us that this guy was so out of control so after a particularly long song by the old guys with him just hammering against them I could feel Cat who has a real Irish temper getting more and more pissed off at this guy and finally at the end of this song when the silence fell she had been just staring at the floor and she looked across the room at Don Jose and gave him a look of pure loathing and I saw these red things these red triangular shaped things come out of her eyes and go across the room like and when it got to him it knocked him off his feet he was thrown backwards from the impact of these things literally and everything going on in the room stopped dead and the elder shaman said to the guy sitting next to him he said "Oh, the gringa sends the badadada" and you know, then you realize wow, we're in over our heads here you can't tell shit from Shinola in this scene This concludes tape three Our program continues with tape four {END} Wait Time : 0.00 sec Model Load: 0.54 sec Decoding : 1.69 sec Transcribe: 5418.29 sec Total Time: 5420.53 sec