Our program continues with tape four. So that's an example of you know magical power condensed onto the material plane. Yeah. [inaudible] Clearly the same the same phenomenon. Yeah. First of all I have to ask a little question. Did the man, did the counter singing after that? He actually didn't come back after that evening. Then the other question or actually a perspective is I've done extensive work with iodology to the point that I could understand where the limitations in that science were blatantly obvious because it's not so much the physical characteristics of the eye as what is transmitted from the mind through the pupil or the sensor of that filter that is really being accessed by someone who is discerning and that's what will give you the blueprint that you're looking for. And so I feel that that power and that transmission of mind so many times is carried from that energy that goes back and forth through the eye. And I wondered if you had any more thoughts on that. Well it seems to imply that we are all potentially linked together in many ways that civilization has suppressed. We are no longer telepathic. We are no longer able to reach out and tap somebody with a glance like that. And I think we do. And I think we do all the time. But somehow our perception of what's been going on is skewed. Now you know Rupert and I talked a lot about this. He had the idea that he said you know the search for a psychic the search for proof of psychic power has not been a very happy story with card flipping and this sort of thing. And Rupert had the genius to realize that what is the commonest psychic power that we all believe exists and have experienced and so forth that science is utterly unable to explain that could be statistically studied. Well what it is is the sense that someone is looking at you. You know and you could test this and in fact we did tests where you would choose one person and put them at the front of a room full of people and then you would tell people either look at your lap or look at the back of this person's head and you would be asked are people looking at you or are people looking at the back of looking at their lap. And certain people you could quickly satisfy yourself were able to detect this a phenomenal amount of the time well beyond statistical you know the rules of probability. So I think we're surrounded by subliminal abilities that we can't really understand. I mean I from years of traveling in Asia I have an amazing psychic power which is I can tell when food shouldn't be eaten you know and it will happen to me you know in very good restaurants and if I go against it you know I'll spend the evening over the toilet because I couldn't believe that Shay so-and-so would serve poisoned food because it was costing me so much money. But then when I get back to the hotel room sure enough by overriding my own instincts I get into trouble. I think psychic ability well this is worth talking about that we cannot be or how can I put it we cannot evolve beyond the confines of our language and if you have a language that makes telepathy impossible then telepathy will be impossible inside that culture. You see we all pay lip service to the idea that language and culture create each other but we actually act as though culture is real and it isn't. I learned this you know in Peru very dramatically because in the Peruvian Amazon there's a disease which people are very very concerned about called Susto. Have all of you heard of this? Susto only affects Peruvians. This is the first clue that something weird is going on and its major manifestation is bad luck. But if you get it and you're a Peruvian you prepare to cash in your chips. You know it's as horrible as melanoma. You know you're doomed if you have this stuff and you have to go to a shaman and get it taken care of or you're dead within six months. But I can't get Susto. It's a linguistic disease of some sort. It travels around inside the confines of mestizo Spanish and nowhere else. It's the evil eye isn't it also? It's the equation in the deep south of our country. Well people have these ideas yeah and you know like people say well magic is accomplished because the person the magic is being done to knows that it's happening and therefore they unconsciously participate in their own demise. But I've observed these shamans in the Amazon and they will go if a shaman has decided to actually get somebody then he will go to incredible lengths to conceal what he's doing so that the person never knows and never knows how to blame. So it isn't some kind of psychological co-option that's happening. It's something a good deal more complex than that. Yeah. A while back you were talking about a period of time where a human man was walking inside out and that made me think about some of the things you've been saying. For example we have all these myths about fairies and elves and magic and perhaps at one time the world was like that but it is not like that now. Here you're talking about a social context that does not include telepathy generates a culture without people experiencing telepathy. And yet we have all these myths. We have all the fairy tales. Now that you're talking about self-transforming and machine elves would you have any comment on this? Well I'm not sure that you got it into a question that I can respond to. Try again. Okay. So our culture then is very science oriented and the whole idea of magic, things like the existence of elves, fin porn people laugh at that unless they're on supposed fringes. Do you think that this kind of thing could come back? Do you think that we will have, for our eyes for example, experiences with these kind of things? Yes, sure, because what you have to do is you have to shift the locus I mean it's kind of hard to explain but every civilization has a locus and we have disempowered ourselves by shifting the locus to an imagined class of experts. We have an incredibly peculiar version of how the universe is put together. First of all we rely a lot of the time on the notion of the incy bincy. Genes, viruses, atoms, elementary particles. These are the things which shape our world. We tell each other. And yet who has ever seen any of these things? I mean a virus maybe a few people have seen. A hydrogen atom, it's a pretty airy fairy concept. And when you start talking about the anti-new mason and stuff like that where you can only approach it through an arcane mathematical language the reality, whatever that means, of these things becomes pretty questionable. See one of the things I think that psychedelics could do is give back to us what I call the immediacy of felt experience. Since the rise of Cartesian analysis in the 17th century everything that we experience has been defined as what are called secondary characteristics. Color, a secondary characteristic. Feeling, and what's real is mass, momentum, charge, spin, stuff like this. Which these are the primary qualities of the universe. Whoever encounters it deals with them. We need to model reality so that it is understandable to us. I mean that statement should even have to be made shows how far off track we are. Our current model of reality is excellent for describing the behavior of hydrogen at the center of stars or something like that. Terrible for explaining to you how you're supposed to stay tuned to your girlfriend. So somehow we have sold out to abstraction. And this is something about science, you know, and the demonic power of numerical analysis and stuff like this. I think that part of what the psychedelic revolution is and why it is so politically threatening is because a psychedelic person does not believe anything they cannot confirm for themselves through thought, intuition, or feeling. And a non-psychedelic person joins up with the quantum physicists or the Hasidic Jews or some group of people who've already got it packaged and figured out. I mean the UFO thing is a good example. Everybody's interested in UFOs and, you know, are there space people, are there not? And I think most people think that the news will come, that the way you encounter a UFO, the way most of us will encounter a UFO, is that the president will call a press conference and say, you know, that the time has come to speak frankly about certain declassified material and that yes, in fact, it has been going on. I mean that's not how it's going to happen. The way it's going to happen is on five grams in silent darkness in your living room. And that's real. You know, if flying saucers were to land on the south lawn of the White House tomorrow, it would be minor news compared to what can happen to you a minute and a half after smoking DMT. We don't realize that we are not real unless we are the center of our own private mandala. And so we look to media, to experts. You know, maybe the Dalai Lama can clarify it or Mother Teresa or Stephen Hawking. Well, forget all that. Those are just linguistic concepts as far as you're concerned. The only thing that's real to you is yourself and your immediate surroundings. And if we could empower that, you know, our political problems would disappear overnight. We are infantile and we do love it. We don't really try to claim our existential validity. And those who do are called mad because they depart from the sanctioned paradigm. Over here, somebody. Yeah. [Audience member] It just struck me that one of the things that you seem real good at is bringing that personal experience into language and being able to communicate it, which creates the same kind of reality that you appear to be decrying of a shared linguistic reality where we can discuss the experience that we've had. Its value becomes elevated. When we talk about it. I mean, one of the most satisfying experiences that I have as a public speaker is sometimes after speaking to groups like last night, somebody will come up afterward and say, I thought I was crazy until I heard you speak. Now I know there are at least two of us. And the truth is, you know, there are more than two of us. There are thousands. If you, you know, it's a delusion if it happens to one person. It's a cult if it happens to 20 people. And it's true if it happens to 10,000 people. Well, this is a strange way to have epistemological authenticity conferred upon something. We vote on it, you know. So I would like competition. I mean, I feel pretty lonely out here. I'm surprised nobody has followed me into this. There must be other people who can articulate these things as well or better than I can. But boy, they don't seem to come forth. And I really don't know why that is, because what I say is not all that exceptional. It's just the sum total of it is kind of eerie. But if we don't, that's why I was saying, you know, we cannot evolve faster than we evolve our language. Our language is like the collective skin of our culture. So, you know, until you say the words self-transforming elf machines from hyperspace, then there aren't such things. Once you say it, it has gained a certain kind of ontological currency. Why aren't you arguing the opposite point, you know, when you talk about becoming a quantum physicist or a PhD student or a candidate? Well, see, people are buying other people's experience. I mean, if you're not a quantum physicist, why in the world should you take those people seriously? They're talking gibberish. What power does it have over you except that it comes presented on the platter of science? So you must believe this. If you don't believe this, you're not a well-educated, trendy, withered person. We can just say, well, malarkey, didn't you people believe something completely different 15 years ago? You say, yes, but now we've got it. Say, well, am I supposed to take that assertion seriously? You change your mind every six months. But our experience during the psychedelic experience, before we bring it to language, is ungraspable, very frustrating once we lose it. And we can't settle down until we bring it to language. That's what they've done with their experience. They've brought it to language, and they can kind of settle down and play with it. So we seem to be caught in this thing of if we're having a true experience of prelinguistic, beyond concept, once we conceptualize it, it becomes not quite an experience, but the experience really changes. And it becomes something that we can then tokenize and pass to each other and have a good social time with. But we're missing it. Well, every entity has a value dark dimension. I mean, surely only the most naive of quantum physicists believe that the quantum electrodynamic description of the electron is all there is to say about the electron, because biology is made out of electrons, and you can't reason from quantum electrodynamics to the rainforest. Obviously, other factors are present which are escaping this particular linguistic model. So being able to talk about something doesn't rob it of its mystery. It merely is a sectioning through it that gives you a kind of a lower dimensional map of it, but the mystery remains intact. Wittgenstein talks about what he called the unspeakable. The unspeakable is the true domain of being, and then within that there is a very small subset of those things which can actually be captured in language, but they're a vanishingly small set of the whole thing. Mostly it's all mystery. I don't know why this is so surprising to people. I mean, where is it writ large that bipedal primates with binocular vision are supposed to be carrying around in their heads true models of the cosmos? I mean, would you expect an apple tree or a monarch butterfly to have a true map of the cosmos inside them? No more than that we should have. So I think all knowledge is provisional, and I think the new science will honor this. This is why the rise in the use of the word model. They no longer believe they're giving a complete explanation of phenomenon. They just say, well, here's a model, and next year we'll get a better model, and we'll keep modeling, and our models will get better and better, but they will never be more than crude approximations to an unspeakable mystery. Do you find that tragic? No, I find it exhilarating. I think part of the male or part of the ego-dominator pathology is to demand closure out of everything. There is no closure. You have to learn to sit with the messiness of the mystery. It's this thing we said this morning. The bigger you build the bonfire of understanding, the more darkness is revealed to your startled eye. So, no, I think it's open-ended and exhilarating and tremendously exciting that that's the kind of universe we're living in. Ted, I think the thing about mystery is that I find it fascinating. I think up until just a few months ago when they were trying to understand, trying to understand, I don't know, I read something somewhere, some little sentence that said, "I'm not trying to understand mystery anymore. I'm just trying to have a relationship with it." That's right. It clicked me into a whole different place. Well, you know, this is not merely the stoned ravings of the psilocybin brigade. Do you all know or have you ever heard of Gödel's incommensurability theorem? This sounds daunting and disturbing. Have you ever heard of this? Does anybody have a clue what I'm talking about? Okay, well, that in itself is a measure of the kind of society we're living in, because to my mind, more important than Einstein or Schrodinger or any of those people was Kurt Gödel, a German mathematician. He began by studying the calculus, and he had a very funny method. What he did was he would number every operation in a partial differential equation, and these numbers are called Gödel numbers. G-O-U-M-L-O-T-E-L, Kurt Gödel. And what he showed, and I think this is maybe the most important intellectual step taken in the 20th century, he showed that any formal system will produce true statements which are not provable within the confines of the formal system itself. Now, what this actually means is that mathematics can fail. It means that there is no closure. He proved this logically, showed that closure is impossible, that everything-- he showed it for arithmetic, the most secure of all intellectual edifices. Essentially what he showed was that 2 plus 2 equals 4 is a very strong tendency, not a law. And this incommensurability theorem means that no program of formal analysis will ever completely exhaust its subject. There will always be a residuum of mystery, and we need to come to terms with this. I mean, it's taken us 80 years to get Einstein under our belts, and that's a simple notion compared to what Gödel is saying, because what he's saying is not about the distortion of space-time near massive objects, but something which actually affects our own lives on a day-to-day basis. And if you live for closure, you're beating your head against a stone wall, and your head will wear out long before the stone wall will. There's a kind of an appreciation for the mystery needs to replace the attitude that the mystery is an unsolved problem. Mysteries have no relationship whatsoever to unsolved problems. Yeah? I'm just wondering about the motivation of the explorer going into the dark continent, wanting to draw a map of the river so that he can eventually build a railroad, etc., etc. You go through a lot of pain, a lot of difficulty as a pioneer to get the map back. If your primary assumption is that this map will never be drawn completely, where's the motivation? What does it then become? You don't need a complete map. I mean, I am not such a fan of Wittgenstein, but he seems to have raised his ugly head here. Wittgenstein used to say, "We do not seek statements which are true. We seek statements which are true enough." That's this genuflection to the incommensurability theorem. That's as good as it gets, folks. True enough. Beyond that, there's just the airy realm of metaphysics, which will never be plumbed. So what we're trying to do is refine our model, make it more responsive to what we want the model to tell us. But you don't want to confuse the model with the phenomenon being modeled, because it will always have dimensions which exceed the grasp of the theory. So that's what the probability of the phenomenon is, as well. It says that there's a tendency for a particular state to exist. That's as good as it gets. Yes, although I have real problems with probability theory, which we'll probably get into tomorrow, I think that in a sense probability theory has made it almost impossible for us to think clearly about anything, because it contains certain insidious built-in assumptions that are purely assumptions. For instance, probability theory tells you that when you flip a coin, the odds of it being heads or tails are 50/50. If, in fact, that were true, the coin would land on its edge every single time. So what we need, you see, is not a theory of what is possible. That's science. If you want to know if something is possible, you find a scientist, and they're always perfectly happy to fulfill this function and tell you whether this is possible or not. What we completely lack as a civilization is a theory that explains to us how it is, out of the vast class of possible things, certain things undergo what Alfred North Whitehead called "the formality of actually occurring." We have no theory. I mean, science can say, "Well, it's probable that it'll be this, but it's also 40% probable that it'll be that." Which will it be? Say, "Well, I just told you the probabilities." Say, "That's not good enough. I want to know." Say, we have no theory of selecting among the probabilities. The other problem that haunts probability theory is that it assumes that time is an absolute flat plane. It assumes that no physicist tells you in his lab notes, "Please perform my experiment on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays because it won't work any other time." In other words, the assumption is made that the experiment will produce the data predicted by theory no matter when the experiment is performed. In other words, it's assumed that the phenomena is time independent. But that's just an assumption that Newton got into, proving that phenomena are time independent is absolutely beyond our intellectual reach. It can't be done. A curious thing about probability theory is, say you want to know how much current is flowing through a wire. Here's how probability theory finds out. It measures the current flowing through the wire with a meter. It measures it a thousand times. It takes those values and adds them together. Then it divides by 1,000. Then it tells you this is how much current is flowing through the wire. You look at the value they've given you and you say, "But we took a thousand measurements and we never got this number." Say, "Well, that's because you didn't average the probability." "Well, if we took a thousand measurements and not one is the value you're offering, why should we believe that this is the amount of current flowing through the wire?" Well, then there's a bunch of hand-waving and epistemic foot-stamping and so forth. Science is an incredibly fragile edifice, which if it weren't for its ability to hand its findings on to technologists who make pretty things, it would have to take its place somewhere to the left of, I don't know, homeopathy, acupressure, something like that. In other words, it is not a meta-theory. It has not got truth by the jugular. It has a bunch of fishy mathematical formula which it's flailing you with. But I don't think--I think that serious revision of probability theory is going to have to take place. I think you've given probability theory much more than it's really there. Inherently, what it's all about is simply acknowledging the fact that there are variables in anything that we can't know and we don't know. There's really nothing more than that. Which brings you back to just the access to the present moment. Well, but for instance, if the odds that the coin comes up heads or tails are 50/50, why doesn't it land on its edge every single time? I don't see how it's related to that, the landing on its edge. It's simply what happens with a coin where it ends up lying, basically, whether it's face up or down. Well, you know, another thing probability theory says is the chance has no memory. And so they always--in first-year statistics, they say, "If you flip a coin and it comes up heads 49 times, what are the odds it will come up heads the 50th time?" The answer is 50/50. But any gambler would tell you that, you know, if it comes up heads five times in a row, bet on heads for crying out loud. So there's something-- I'm not an acolyte of probability or statistics, but I think a lot is done or inferred from them that just doesn't exist. I agree. At the same time, really, all that's at the basis is the notion that there are things going on here that we can't know, even though that's not acknowledged by most people who are practicing it. That's the reality of the statistics. But don't you think the other assumption is that time is a non-inputting-- it's not a variable, you know, that you don't say the odds of the coin coming up heads or tails are 50/50 in Canada, but 48/52 in Bolivia. That's one of the variables that's sort of smeared out simply because it can't be characterized the way people-- people who are doing that like to tend to characterize things. But underlying the whole thing is still the notion that you're dealing with unknowables. And I'm not saying that those who are deeply immersed in practicing probability and statistics hold this view, but the reality is underlying this sort of-- underpinning the whole thing is the notion that there are things going on here that we can't know. Oh, well, I don't have any trouble with that. I understand why science latched on to probability with such a vengeance. It's because, you know, thanks to William of Ockham, there is this notion called Ockham's razor, which is this idea that is most simply stated as hypotheses should not be multiplied without necessity. So since the idea that time is a flat invariant is the simplest assumption, try it first and see if it works. But I maintain that, you know, science has in certain areas been very slow to make progress in the social domain, in econometrics, in the, you know, multiple body problems and stuff like that. Well, I think this is because this simple assumption that time is an invariant has to be reexamined. I would almost read-- I would offer a new definition of science. Science is that field of human endeavor which studies phenomenon so crude that they are time invariant. You know, the hydrogen atom cleaves from the oxygen atom, the same way every time. But love affairs don't come apart the same way every time. Bankruptcies don't occur the same way every time. These are complex compound phenomena that are then influenced by the temporal variables and the variables embedded in the environment around them. Now, the problem is these are the things we're interested in, love affairs, bankruptcies, and the establishment of empires. Very few people have a passionate interest in the dynamics of the water molecule. Except that those-- that equipment over there was produced by those-- those mobile computers, the software that you're running. Oh, now I know I have you on the run because this is a "but it makes pretty things" argument. No, I'm just saying-- I'm not commenting on the value of it or not. I mean, each person has to assess that for himself. Well, see, I think science is a great enterprise and noble, but not the arbiter of truth. There are no arbiters of truth. The truth of the tarot, the truth of quantum physics, these are truths in the supermarket of truth. But there's no-- there's no top end to that process. There may not even be one truth. But what if you go out and pull a hidden situation? In a given situation. If you're flipping coins, probability theory is probably a good guide. You wouldn't want to run your love affair on probability theory. So you have to choose the domain. You have to recognize the applicable models, the applicable tools for whatever domain you're looking at. Well, I do have this culture of science as an overarching truth or a noble-- Well, you're allowed to be a heretic. You just don't get paid well. That's the price you pay for that. Still, yeah. Kind of tying this into what you were talking about last night about how messed up everything is since our ancestors got away from the mushroom celebrations and all that. It seems like you were saying that we are tied into time and we're being pulled towards a certain something like this dimension being destroyed or we're not really being able to live. And I'm wondering, is that-- it seems like you looked at that as that. And then on a different perspective, it's good because we're discovering that we're being pulled towards something that's maybe bigger and more wonderful. How does that tie in? Are you saying that this is bad, what we're discovering, so we need to hang on to our past or are you saying-- No, no. --that we can go into a different dimension or-- No, I don't think it's bad. I'm entirely in support of whatever the universe is in the process of trying to do here. I think that history is ending and that it was a temporary perturbation of the system and that we can anchor ourselves through this chaostrophy or whatever it is by going back to archaic models. But I think that-- and this is what we'll talk about tomorrow when we get the computer because I don't merely talk about it even though I've been flailing the mathematicians. Ultimately, I too come to rest with a fishy formula. I think that the universe is some kind-- I think that there's something that has been overlooked by science called-- and I'll name it--it's called novelty. The universe is a novelty-conserving engine of some sort. From the very first nanoseconds after the Big Bang, novelty has been conserving itself and building newer and deeper levels of novelty already achieved so that in the first few--I mean, you have the Big Bang. Then you have this era called the pre-physical era. It's brief. It lasts the amount of time it takes light to cross a distance equivalent to the diameter of the proton, electron, something dinky for sure. That's called the era before physics. Then physics begins one jiffy after that. The original universe was so hot that it was a plasma of free electrons. Since it was a plasma, there was nothing that you could call atomic physics because the ambient temperature was so high that electrons could not settle down into stable orbitals around nuclei. As the temperature of the universe fell, atomic systems crystallized out of that plasmic environment. Then further cooling of the universe leads to more complex kinds of bonds and the cooking out of complex elements from stars. The original universe was made entirely of hydrogen. This hydrogen aggregated into masses so large that at their centers there was actually--and if you think I'm not nervous doing this in front of you, you're crazy--these aggregates of hydrogen at the center, it was so massive in temperature and pressure that fusion could actually begin and fusion cooked out heavier elements, iron, sulfur, and eventually carbon. When you get four-valent carbon, this throws open the doorway to tremendous new novelty. You get now for the first time not atomic systems but molecular systems. These molecular systems lead into protobiological systems. Protobiological systems lead into prokaryotes, then eukaryotes, then true higher multicellular animals, then mammals, then human beings, then electronic culture, then the big surprise. Now the thing to notice about all this is that novelty keeps building on novelty already achieved. It crosses biological lines, atomic lines, molecular lines. It is a law of the universe I'm proposing that novelty is conserved. So then what we represent is the kind of ultimate nexus of novelty. I believe that we are being wound tighter and tighter and tighter into a confrontation with the equivalent of the singularity at the center of a black hole, but it isn't a gravitational singularity that I'm talking about. It's a novelty singularity. So the universe is growing toward some kind of ultimate state of boundaryless hyperconnectivity, and when that is achieved, the process will cease to be describable in the locus of ordinary space, time, and energy. Now science has no notion of this concept of novelty. In the East, there is such a concept. It's called Tao, and Tao builds things up and pulls them down according to its own mysterious laws. Tomorrow I will argue when we get the computer that its laws are not in fact entirely mysterious and that we can discover the nature of the novelty constant, and instead of treating space-time as an absolutely featureless plane, we can take that zero value, which is how that shows up in the Newtonian mechanics, and substitute instead a fractal dimension number, which will be some kind of decimal fraction between 1 and 2, and then this will allow us to do things previously inconceivable, like predict the future and stuff like that. See, one thing I guess I should say since we've sort of drifted into this fairly rappy place is the idea that the universe is... the universe is growing toward itself. It's not moving outward from its origin. It's moving toward its completion, and this is called teleology. It's very unwelcome in most scientific modeling, but that's a legacy from the 19th century where they were so concerned to get God out of the picture that they wanted everything to happen through one random process colliding with another random process and flipping out mule, deer, elephants, and redwood trees. But in principle, we don't have to believe in God to believe in an attractor at the end of the process. We see many kinds of attractors in the natural world. One way that I think of the psychedelic experience is, you know, you've heard me talk about hyperspace, superspace, this kind of thing. It really does seem to me that reality is some kind of a very complex geometric object of some sort, and you know how they teach you in trigonometry that all possible ellipses can be obtained by sectioning a cone and that if you take the infinite set of ellipses and reconstruct them, you can reconstruct the cone. Well, the way I think of psychedelics and psychedelic tripping is you are sectioning a hyperdimensional object, and what you're coming back with is a lower dimensional map of this higher dimensional object. Well, everybody has a different map in the same way that there are an infinite number of elliptical sections of a cone, but they're all generated by the same object. And if it's a mystery to you how a simple finite object like a cone can generate an infinite number of elliptical sections, then it's going to be hard for you to understand how everybody can have a different psychedelic trip and yet be actually dealing with the same reality in hyperspace. Yeah. You talked about the universe being attracted towards completion. And I'm not trying to trick you with the semantics of that, but would it also be moving towards its own closure at that point? You mean its completion closure? Yeah. Well, what does closure mean to you? Well, I was relating it back to where we were talking before about closure not really existing. Well, maybe what we should say is there's only one closure and all others are false closure. Closure isn't really the word I would use. I steal shamelessly from Alfred North Whitehead and probably others as well, but I'm willing to cop to that. He has this notion called concrescence, which I think is a great idea. He says everything grows toward a nexus of concrescence. So complexification is at the service of concrescence. We can see how this planet is caught in a concrescent process. A hundred years ago, you know, it took three months to go around the world. Now it takes a third of a second. A hundred years ago, a newspaper carried local news. Now local news means the news of this planet. We can telephone Prague or Shanghai by just going outside to the phone booth. We are being knitted more and more tightly together. Now most people think this is a human world phenomenon and it will stop at some point with everybody connected to everybody else, I guess. I don't think it is a process of the human world. I think we're embedded in a collapse of physical law. This is a fairly pathological notion from the point of view of most scientists because they believe that the universe will exist for, you know, millennia or millions of years into the future. But I think our presence on this planet indicates that we're deep into Act 3 of the cosmic drama. Yeah. Well, if you look to the universe as a session for souls that result in the fall back to Godhead, when all the souls we know are going to be gone, whatever the answer is, then that's the situation now that we're in the future of the universe. Yes. I mean, in a way, the problem is not the end of the universe, but why it existed in the first place. What happened to flaw the original nothingness to contort itself into this fantastic cascade of interconnected complexity? It's very, very tricky, this stuff. I mean, you know, well, without dragging that in, it's tricky enough, so let's leave it at that. Yeah. The philosophy and the thought science are pretty interesting, but I really came here to learn more about using that list of facts. Oh, well, ask a question. Seize the tiller. Everything you described, you've taken a full dose all along. Is that the best way to do it? Sometimes I've taken four minutes to start and then three more later after that. Oh, I see what you're asking. Should you boost it? I don't like doing that simply because I like to get... I think the real action is in the flash, and the flash comes by getting as much of the material to the synapses in as coherent a wave front as possible. So I tend not to do that, but to take an initial large dose. Of course, if you take an initial dose and it doesn't do anything, then you could follow it up. What about EboGain? Pardon? EboGain, right? You mean just to discuss it generally? Do you all know what EboGain is? It's a psychedelic. It's an interesting one. One of the things interesting about it is how little people are aware of its existence. It comes...it's the root scrapings of an African small tree or bush called Tabernanthe boga. And interestingly enough, it's a true aphrodisiac, perhaps the only real aphrodisiac in the world, because what are called aphrodisiacs are usually either just stimulants or things which cause genital itching. But EboGain actually seems to be...works on the psychology of sexual drive in some way. It's a powerful hallucinogen. One of the puzzling things about EboGain is that we can't confirm its use by human beings before 1850. And, you know, the Portuguese were into the areas of Africa where this is happening. They've been in there since the 1430s. So it probably is a new pattern of drug use that has arisen. And it's a major force among the Fang people of Zaire and Gabon holding back Christianity and mission culture. And it's a visionary hallucinogen without doubt. I-B-O-G-A-I-N-E. Probably in the future, eventually society will get around to exploiting this particular one just like it does everything else. Is this a Latin name or just a nickname coming in? The drug is EboGain. The plant it comes from is Tabernanthe Eboga. Yeah? You mentioned combining DMT with hormone. What is the experience...what is the change in your experience? Well, that's what ayahuasca is, you see. DMT is then not destroyed in your intestine, and so you have a slow-release DMT trip by doing that. Is that done with smoking DMT after ingesting hormone? In theory and probably in fact, that would be a tremendously successful way to get very loaded. The problem is it might be a too successful way. You want to be very careful with these MAO inhibitors. There are MAO inhibitors that drug companies have produced where a single dose inhibits all the MAO in your body for up to a month. This would be murder if you got around some DMT on that. The nice thing about harmin is that it's fully reversible in four to six hours. So it's a gentle MAO inhibitor. But yes, this is the strategy. This is why you could conceivably take the seeds of a plant like pergamum harmala, which grows around here more or less and contains harmin, and combine it with a plant like desmanthus selenoyensis, which contains DMT, and come up with a North American pseudo-ayahuasca of some sort. People are doing this, and if you think it takes courage to just do these compounds naturally, imagine the kind of courage it takes to diddle with recipes and to do your own bioassay, which you must do, because the cook must taste the soup. What was the plant? Pergamum harmala, P-E-G-A-M-U-M, pergamum harmala in the zygophyllaceae. How does it contribute to the experiment? I was wondering if you and Dennis ever tried the experiment again, and if not, why not again? What do you think? Well, we never tried the experiment again, because Dennis felt that he'd really made the maximum contribution to the effort. There are many experiments, though, which could be tried, which would put no human being in danger. For instance, you could use square wave generators, which are acoustical generators, to try and drive these drug molecules into DNA in vitro in a test tube. What you would do is you would simply put the denatured DNA into solution, and DMT into the solution, shake it furiously, ultracentrifuge the mix to get the loose DMT out, and then weigh the DNA and see if its weight had increased by a number which was magically divisible by the molecular weight of the DMT molecule. These kinds of studies have been done, and show that DMT does intercalate and locate itself into DNA. So, yeah, there are a lot of different things like that that could be done that wouldn't put anyone at risk. So Dennis really felt that he was at risk in a very serious way. Well, he doesn't remember it very clearly. His impression was that it lasted about five days. It actually lasted three weeks. So the real stuff that would have alarmed him, he fortunately was too out of it to see or remember. But I was there throughout the whole thing and saw it. And I think it would be nice to understand the parameters of the effect a little more clearly before we charge off and try that particular trick again. Yeah. [Audience member] What did you think he felt about that? Well, this is what's being referred to in "True Hallucinations," which is a tape set which will be published as a book next year. It describes an expedition to the Amazon in 1971, which was really where we got the whammy. I mean, I'm still running on what happened from the 28th of February 1971 to the 21st of March. The rest of my life is pretty much throwaway. But what he--I don't know. It was weirder than flying saucer abduction because that now there's a whole form for it. It was hard to say. Something was waiting for us down in the Amazon. And as soon as we started taking these mushrooms, it began making suggestions about how you could use the mushroom and your voice and certain other materials present at hand in that environment to essentially-- well, there aren't even words to say what it was-- condense the soul into three-dimensional space or create the philosopher's stone inside your body and then give birth to it or, in other words, some radical transformation of the ontology of being human was held out as a possibility. And it all came down to an experiment that he wanted to perform that seemed to me so unlikely to have any effect whatsoever that I felt it was perfectly all right to let this experiment go forward because I would have bet dollars to donuts that nothing would happen. Instead, all hell broke loose at the conclusion of this experiment. And, you know, he claimed at the time that what he had done was bonded into my DNA enough psilocybin in a superconducting kind of bond, which if you know how superconductivity works, a superconductive bond is very hard to disrupt. It's not like an ordinary chemical bond. And he felt that you could do what he called "Bell the Cat," that you could actually hang a transceiver around the neck of the Logos itself. And from then on, it would talk to you constantly in the confines of your own mind. And it just seemed so wildly improbable to me that it went forward. But in fact, at the conclusion of the experiment, something changed in me. And I essentially became who I now appear to be. But before that, I wasn't. I was sort of a wastrel and an undirected person of some sort. And then tomorrow you will see when we get the computer what the bottom line of this is, because what was eventually revealed was a kind of mathematical mandala of space and time that rested on it for its veracity on the fact that it allowed-- that it made prediction of the future possible. And tomorrow afternoon, I will display this thing for you, and you can judge for yourself whether this is the product of a pathological incident or in fact an intellectual leap comparable to Newton's laws of motion or something like that. I think in principle all this is possible. I think transforming--part of what human history's conclusion will be is what I call turning the human body inside out. We want the soul to become visible. We want the body to become an idea freely commanded in the imagination. And then at that point, as James Joyce said, man will be dirigible. That's as close as he could get in 1939 to saying you'll turn into a flying saucer. He knew it was an airship. He knew it was oblate, but he thought it was dirigible. Anyway, enough about La Charrera. Maybe we'll get into that tomorrow. Yeah. [Audience member] I've made a question about the Ayahuasca. You said that it has the beans to gain no harm in us. [Rick] Yes. [Audience member] What was the vine? The vine has that? [Rick] No. Good point. One plant contains the harming. Another plant contains the DMT. This makes Ayahuasca unique among these shamanic tools because you see all the rest of them-- peyote, mushrooms, San Pedro, ibogaine, morning glories, and whatever else, cannabis-- are simply plants which you ingest. Ayahuasca is a drug, a product, something made by pharmacologists. I mean pharmacologists who wear penis sheaths, but pharmacologists nevertheless, you see. So suddenly the human dimension enters into it. Not all Ayahuasca is alike. Ayahuasca depends on the personality of the person who made it. So it's not about a relationship between you and a plant. When you take Ayahuasca, between you and the plants, there stands a human being. And, you know, if you're headed down there to seriously get into this, don't give up in a hurry. You will drink a lot of swill before you find someone who is conscientious enough, honest enough, and cares about you enough to not shortchange you in some way. How did you speak of telepathy? Telepathy, yes. Ayahuasca was discovered by Richard Spruce in 1853, and then in the early years of the 20th century, the German ethnographer Theodor Koch-Gruenberg brought a lot of it back to Berlin, and Louis Lewin and his group characterized an alkaloid which they named telepathy. But it was not realized then until, I think, 1957 by the chemists Hochstein and Paradis that harmine or that telepathine was exactly the same compound as an earlier compound isolated from the Syrian rue named harmine. And since the rules of chemical nomenclature are that the first compound, the first name takes precedent, telepathine had to be dropped and harmine substituted. But it tells you how convinced these early ethnographers were that this stuff was exciting paranormal mental abilities. Were they taking it with EMT or were they taking it by some-- The harmaline? Oh, well, no, no. See, what happened was that what Koch-Gruenberg took back to Berlin was the liana, the vine, Banisteriopsis coffee. The other active ingredient in ayahuasca was not isolated chemically until 1956. But, you took the vine back and put a plane of the vine. The vine doesn't contain DMT. But the harmine and harmaline itself-- Well, yes, has an effect. At high doses, it can cause hallucination by itself. The plant which contains the DMT, normally, there are a couple of possible substitutes. But normally what's used in the Amazon is cicotria viridis. This is a little coffee-like plant that contains DMT in the roots. One of the great mysteries of ayahuasca is how, out of 475,000 species of plants in the Amazon, these people figured out that you pound the vine and combine it with the leaves and then go through this elaborate boiling and concentrating, and then you get this fantastic visionary beverage. If you ask them how they figured it out, they say, "The plants told us," which is so far the best answer anybody has come up with. In 1962, Melvin Bristol, who was a graduate student of Richard Evans Schulte's at Harvard, was studying ayahuasca among the Subundoy Indians. He took ayahuasca, and during the trip, a plant was revealed to him, and he was told that it would be alkaloid positive. And it was alkaloid positive. Well, this is now anecdotally embedded in the literature. Was it dumb luck? Was it synchronicity? Or was it that plants tell you about other plants? The way ayahuasca is used by research pharmacologists in these Amazon tribes is they brew a standard brew, and then if they have a plant that they, for some reason, suspect might have some medical usage, they will put a little bit of that plant into the ayahuasca, and then the ayahuasca will give them a readout on it and explain what it is. I had one of the longest evenings I've ever put in where I took half a dose of ayahuasca and half a dose of mushrooms, and it was absolutely god-awful. It was different than any bad trip I've ever had. It didn't seem to be about my personality. It seemed to be about core processes. There was a little Pac-Man thing, and I could see it moving through my memory, just choo-choo, choo-choo, choo, and I didn't know-- You know that horrifying scene in 2001 where the guy is outside the spaceship and he says, "Open the pod doors, Hal. Open the pod doors, Hal." Well, that's how I felt. I felt--I could almost see the molecular machinery had jammed, and I said, "Oh, my God, it's not going to de-animate or de-alkylate. It's somehow caught in some kind of a loop." And I sweated bullets for an hour and a half with it. It was really horrible. And then it finally released and let me go. But as I sat in that chair, I said, "You know, if I can't pull out of this place, then there's a room in a back ward somewhere, and they will just sit me there and look in on me every 12 or 14 hours, and that'll be my story." Yeah. You said earlier you were surprised that you had no competitors. Right. But you understand that we have a political climate that's not congenial to exploring. True. So why are you surprised? Because I don't feel particularly courageous. I don't feel that this is unusual, what we're doing here. Am I crazy? Could be. It would seem to me knowing what I know, which is no more than a thousand other people know, I couldn't live with myself if I didn't talk about these things because our problem is we're disempowered, unhappy, and disconnected from ourselves and each other. Here's the solution. It's a political obligation or it's a moral obligation to try and at least inform people. They don't have to take it, but they should at least have the facts of the matter in front of them as they live their lives. So I just do it because I couldn't do it any other way, and I'm puzzled that nobody else feels this imperative because the people I talk to, you know, a thousand people have told me psychedelics were the most important thing that ever happened to them, but not one of those thousand people ever said, and I've scheduled a speaking tour to do the same thing that you're doing, so I don't know. You know, there's fear and paranoia. I hear there have been people who are afraid to come to this for revealing their interests. Wow. Well, either I'm crazy or they are. I don't know. See, I think that, you know how if you confront certain--well, butterflies or deer, there are certain kinds of animals that if you move slowly enough, they can't tell you're there because they're set up for edge detection, and if you move slowly enough, they don't register the edge transiting, so you can actually walk right up to them and grab them if you know how to do it. Lizards are like this, cats. So I think that by moving with stealth rather than going to Harvard or Berkeley and inviting the freshman class to pour into the street and smash bank windows, that we can actually slip this thing along. I think that eventually such desperation is going to strike straight institutions that they will come to us and ask. They're going to try everything when the going gets rough, and when they finally decide to drop all their pretension, we'll be perfectly willing to have a dialogue. I'm sorry to hear that people felt that paranoid about it. I don't think the political climate is that repressive. I think people are doing the work of the man for the man by being that paranoid. In the book "From Chocolate to Morphine," you just published this author, Dr. Counterpressures. Well, Counterpressures, this book was banned in Florida, but for crying out loud, look at the Russians. They were able to toss out the Communist Party. Well, now that's a pretty scary thing to go up against. We don't have anything comparable to that in terms of its depth of penetration into our lives, and yet they were able to do that. I think there's more to life than hiding out. You've got to make the grand gesture at a certain point and then let the chips fall where they may. Brave words, oh boy. Do you have something for your audiences, an organization, or something that they can support in raising consciousness and changing legislation? Basically, I think people should see these kinds of meetings as a tremendous opportunity to form local alliances. The last thing on earth we want here is a Terence McKenna cult. That would just be the stupidest resolution of the whole thing. The whole message is you don't need me or Tim or anybody else. Just take a little metaphysical responsibility upon yourself. Realize you are the microcosm of the macrocosm, and then get with like-minded people and proceed. I mean, this is how political revolutions are made, is by people just ignoring as irrelevant, outmoded social forms and structures and insisting on their own authenticity. So mentioning maps or Hoffman Foundation would sort of help? Oh, it might help people. I mean, how would it help? Strength in numbers. Strength in numbers. Well, I think people should support psychedelic communities, archival projects, legalization moves, yes. But mainly I think what we all need to do is get more loaded, you know, deeper trips, higher doses. See, it's not that we want to convert the entire planet to taking mushrooms. It's that we just want to be left alone to do what we want to do. The mushroom, if it's as great as I say it is, then it doesn't need a mob clearing the way for it. It's perfectly able to advance its own agenda. The thing is just not to yield to fear, because as I said, if you yield to fear, you do the man's work for the man, and that makes you the man. So what you have to do is just say, "Well, you know, this is what we do, and eventually it will change." I mean, gay people is a good example. I mean, in our own lifetimes, we've seen this go from, you know, an unspeakable crime against nature, which decent people took care to not even be informed of, to, you know, a political subculture with its own agenda and its own press and its own political clout. Well, we are not as under the thumb as gay people were, say, in the early '50s or something. If they can do it, we can do it. If black people can go from slavery to a legitimate claim on full social integration into the body politic, then we can do it too, but not if we-- In America, nobody gets nothing unless they demand it. So as long as we bow our heads and hide our stash and are looking over our shoulder, well, then they've got us on the run. But we just have to say, "Look, this is it. This is who I am." If this doesn't jive with your political agenda, adjust your political agenda, because this is who we are. Well, now let's knock off and regroup for tomorrow on that point. Thanks very much. Well, before we get into this morning's rigid agenda, where were we yesterday? I recall there were hands up. Do the people who belong to those hands still have the concerns that went with them? [Audience member] How about forming local alliances and psychedelic communities? Talk about forming local alliances and psychedelic communities? Well, I think, you know, as I said, this is your affinity group. You can't recognize psychedelic people walking around on the street because our victory in the area of fashion has been so total that now even creeps look like freaks. So, yeah, I've been in a number of places where people organized-- I don't know what you would call them--discussion groups, affinity groups, in the wake of it, it's something you sort of have to self-organize. Maybe in the period after the close this afternoon, the people who are into that should exchange names and get something going. I mean, obviously, it's a delicate thing, but on the other hand-- [Audience member] You mentioned you were in the Philistine One-Tip today, and I wanted to know what role that has played for you. For me? [Audience member] Just the dress code. Well, a lot of people feel more secure doing journeys if they have some kind of ground control, and in the most casual form, that can just be your best friend who doesn't do it, but you do. Or if you suspect that fairly deep and charged issues are going to arise out of it, why you want it to be someone with some psychotherapeutic experience. But on the other hand, you're in such a vulnerable state in that dimension that you really want to choose the facilitator carefully and have some kind of set of agreements worked out before. The psychedelic trip doesn't always take the direction you want it to. You write down before you take it that you want to deal with some episode of childhood trauma or abandonment, then you get loaded, and it seems so preposterous that you can hardly contemplate the notion without laughing aloud, and the facilitator keeps trying to bring you back, say, "Well, you're not doing the work. We're here to do the work." Well, then you say, "Well, having a knockdown drag-out fight while somebody's loaded isn't exactly the way to go either." You sort of have to feel into that issue. As I said yesterday, I can't get where I want to go in the presence of somebody else because they hold me to the surface. If I were to have my idea of the perfect facilitator situation is that they're two rooms away, and you have something equivalent of a beeper, and then you can beep them, and they'll come in and pat you on the head and tell you that it's all right if you need that, but otherwise they stay completely out of it. It's really nice to follow your own thought, and I think we change in the presence of another person. We create a persona, and it takes a lot of energy to maintain the persona, and in that situation there's no reason, so why do it? [Audience member] I was wondering, as you visited the hospital so frequently through psychedelics, have you been in a situation where you need to look out for them? I don't know, you're tired or meditating or trying to chill them out? Well, not exactly. I mean, people always say, "Can you do it on the natch?" and I sort of feel like if I could do it on the natch, I'd be alarmed enough to check myself in for some serious mental health care. It's too radical. You don't want to be able to do that on the natch. It's a wonderful control on it to know that it won't happen unless you take the stuff, because it's not a mood shift or a subtle refocusing from foreground to background. It's an absolutely ontology-peeling breakthrough. [Audience member] Do you feel you can't mentally change your body chemistry to actually go to that stage, not like drugs? In principle, I agree with that, and I'm fascinated to try anything anybody has in mind, but you have to be very demanding, and I think too many people are not demanding at all. I mean, you sit people down in a room and tell them we're going to repeat "Om Ah Hum" 500 times, and at the end of it, they come to you with tears of joy in their eyes and tell you it was the most profound thing that's ever happened to them. I don't understand where those people could be coming from, you know? I can sit down and think about being stoned on DMT, and I can give myself the butterflies with that exercise, but not much else. That's as far as I get, you know? Persistently, these various traditions claim that they can deliver the goods, but when you look at the art, which is the paper trail that they leave, it doesn't look like what I'm talking about. I went through--for a while, I was a professional art buyer for Tibetan art, tankas and that kind of thing, and I interiorized all of that iconography, but it isn't very much like what we're seeing. There are a number of highly idiosyncratic artists scattered through the history of art-- Gustave Moreau, James Ensor, we mentioned Hieronymus Bosch, Matej Klarvijn, but I'm trying to think of older ones. These seem to be unique visions, but not exactly the vision that seems to come out of this stuff. Part of what's so interesting to me is how alien it is, how if the artist is supposed to be the antenna of society, anticipating the visions which will later become the paradigms, then they're not doing the job very well in this psychedelic domain. Yeah, did you have a follow-up? In other words, it's a lot of distance, and if you do get to that level, it's kind of like you sculpted your present moment, and you have that level, and you can stay there, whereas, I don't know, I see a way sometimes, because you're going in and you come back, you're going in and you come back, and you're always back to where you started from. Well, but this is where the action is. You know, it has to make sense in the world. Now, I don't want to suggest, I mean, I think, like in the case of psilocybin, I have no doubt whatsoever that if you take five grams of psilocybin every four days, for let's say 40 days, then you will have nothing whatsoever to say to the rest of us. You know, if what you see, the thing is, in the spiritual quest, all these methods, yoga and mantra, and then, you know, all the new versions of this, the whole stance of the spiritual quester is accelerator to the floor all the time. When you switch over to this method, it's the brake pads that are going to get the work out. We don't, we psychedelic people do not strenuously exert ourselves to attain peculiar states of mind. We strenuously exert ourselves to keep the states of mind from becoming too peculiar. Why? Because it can become so peculiar that, that, that, I don't know why. Yes, that's it. It can become so peculiar that it is unspeakable. And if it's unspeakable, it's just dropped out of the social contract, you know. Really, the reason to maintain it is so that you can get back into the sociological state and communicate. But what I'm thinking is that I'm sure that there are people who have pursued it to the point that they just walked out of its existence and didn't come back. Yes, well, that's what I wanted to say. If you want to be the guy on Cold Mountain who is covered with hair, who the village people occasionally see when the mist clears, when he descends to the lower levels to cut wood, you can become that Taoist immortal. You know, what I like to say about psychedelics is once you get to this, it's no longer about seeking the answer. It's now a tougher go. Now you have to face the answer. And it's so easy to seek, you know, this Rishi, that Roshi, that Geshe, that Guru, and all the wonderful people, and the gossip and hijinks around the ashram, and all that malarkey. But once you get to this and it's just you and it, you know, it's a whole different ballgame. You mean you have to keep on going with your life, at least at that level? Well, we're talking, there are two things. The experience and the wisdom and maturity that comes from the experience. You don't have to keep dosing to do that, but to attain, maintain, and work out the implications of that. But you have to keep dosing to keep encountering the unspeakable thing that is the source of all that maturation and so forth. My gosh, everybody's agitated here, yeah. I wondered if in your experience in the Amazon or otherwise with Shamanic culture groups, if you found that they were able to do this without drugs or whether they were even interested? No, largely not. In the Amazon, I mean, I discussed this with people and they said, "No, you must, the plant is the teacher." I mentioned, or maybe I didn't, but there's an interesting book called Haoma and Harmeline by Flattery and Schwartz, and it discusses the ambiance of the religious attitudes of early Zoroastrianism. And they believed in what they called the Minang existence. And we're talking 2000 BC here, and they believed there was no possible way of accessing the spiritual dimension except drugs. That was the entire way to do it. And I think it's a kind of pharmacological and energy barrier. It's good that these things are isolated from ordinary experience by the formality of having to take the compound. If they weren't, it would be flooding in upon us all the time, and we would have a hard time indeed. Well, you just speak about people taking the psychedelics or pleasantly entertaining the priest in that. And then there are these other people, like for example, men who take them and do sadhus and so forth and practice meditation. I read somewhere recently that when people in the Amazon, I think Ayahuasca, is recommended that they, as an initial effects come on, that they practice mind control. And what I haven't seen very much is the combination of mental practices and the combination of that plus taking the psychedelics, like suicide drugs. And you talked a little bit about this, about what we do in preparation for the experience. But for us, it's... This concludes tape four. Our program continues with tape five. 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