News with tape 5. Why is there no talk of the combining of the techniques with
 psychedelic? Well I don't know exactly I mean I would certainly agree. See I think
 that all religion is based on the experience of ecstasy and a religion and
 a religion like Hinduism represents to my mind an extreme case. The roots of
 Hinduism are in the Soma right. For 3,000 years this is what Hindu religiosity
 was about. It was an intoxicant and without the intoxicant there was no
 connection to the mystery. Well then for some reason it became tremendously
 hierarchically structured and and constipated and dogmatic and well
 certainly dominator in if not outright fascism and so I think all these
 religions have their roots in this irrational experience but they
 constantly want to turn it into a real estate operation and they do and they do
 and so but in answer to your question all these techniques work with
 psychedelics you know mantra yantra magical invocation raising the
 Kundalini all of these things which seems so totally obscure if from this
 level of consciousness it just becomes an of course of course it works so it
 seems to me the lost ingredient is the psychedelic. I mean you know if you go to
 India and you have any illusions about sadhus I mean sadhus are hash heads with
 a line of patter that's all I mean the main concern in any community of sadhus
 is how many chillums can you make and smoke before you fall asleep and I've
 never seen a yoga text that came clean about this and said you know this is
 basically a how to use cannabis technique so you it's good to go to the
 actual place and see see how it's being handled what's going on in the Amazon is
 the shamans cure they chant they provide an exemplar for their society but when
 you get seriously loaded with them and talk to them their attitude is more like
 scientists they will agree that they can cure and find lost objects and predict
 the weather and all that but they don't understand how this works they're very
 eager to admit that it's all a big mystery and that beyond the cheerful set
 of shamanic techniques that they the we toto the warani whoever they are beyond
 the cheerful power of the conjuration of these techniques lies the absolute
 unknown and they're aware of that there's no closure in shamanism so it
 sort of keeps you humble yeah
 the subject of Friday night on into today the subject of naturally altered
 states and I've come to the understanding that your question is for vision right
 and not the feeling right and one of the most interesting things about
 psychedelic experience to me in my my drug of preference of course LSD is the
 fueling part of the experience and it seems to tap me into a psychic level of
 information that's not available to me normally my question is what do you
 think about the phenomenon that that I experienced and I don't know whether it's
 because of my programming or because I'm a good receptor of a contact high
 when you're around people who are tripping you don't get the depth of their
 experience but you definitely feel like you're in an altered state if you try to.
 Oh I think contact highs are very real not only contact highs but there are also
 contact lows which are very noticeable you know there's a there's a phenomenon
 called alophrenia do you know what alophrenia is alophrenia is when your
 friend is put in the hospital for schizophrenia and you go to visit him
 and you become you begin acting so peculiar that they don't let you out
 this is a common phenomenon misbehavior by people who have come to visit people
 who have been hospitalized for schizophrenia or psychosis the best
 theory is that it's pheromonal you know there's one theory of what
 schizophrenia is that schizophrenia is a pheromonal disorder and you what happens
 is your pheromone system goes haywire so then you don't smell right so then the
 people around you begin frowning at you avoiding you turning their back on you
 when you approach then you begin thinking there's something wrong with me
 I'm weird then you secrete more of this weird pheromone and people get more and
 a dissonance that begins to happen until finally you have to be plucked out of
 the situation there are psychiatrists who swear that they can diagnose
 schizophrenia by a sniff test you know they just walk over and take a hit off
 the side of your neck and then say you know lock this one up put this one on
 yeah I assume that you've seen Huichol art I'm wondering whether or not you see in any of that anything close to what you're supposed to do and I realize it's from a different plant but...
 no the problem is one of the question is is there in Huichol art a trace of this
 psychedelic dimension I guess there's a trace the problem isn't is is twofold the
 problem is one of material that with wood and beads and pitch it's very hard
 to to get the the to contort that into the object scene and then the other
 thing is conceptually you know that it's very hard to grab and hold these very
 weird images the other thing is that's happening in most traditional societies
 is that you operate within a canon you know if you're a Huichol you have a
 very limited vocabulary of expression within the iconography of Huichol art
 if you're a Tibetan Tonka painter similarly it's all laid out for you the
 walls of tradition are very high the channel is very narrow that's why it's
 so interesting when an artist can transcend the the momentum of their
 cultural position and really produce something unique I don't see I mean I
 think you know the reason I like talking to artists is because all the art of the
 past 20,000 years is like a teacup dipped into the ocean and yet any one of
 us not particularly self-defined as artists most of us can access the ocean
 can swim in the ocean and so you say you know it's we all can touch the same
 source that these great artists must have touched their skill was that they
 were able to bring out a thimble full of this material and the rest of us can
 only look at it in wonder and then it passes by yeah yeah
 reference to when I was into the trend of extraterrestrial reference to psychedelic use
 I was wondering if you don't hold that position anymore?
 no I'm not sure exactly I mean the funny thing about the extraterrestrial
 position is that it depends on how long it's been since you've taken mushrooms
 how creditable it seems if it's recent it seems the only possible explanation
 if you wait a few months then skepticism and reason begins to level the
 landscape and you say well no it couldn't possibly really be that but I
 think you know no I think that we hardly have an inkling as to the real nature of
 the world and the real history of life on this planet and you know we don't
 know how narrowly channeled the manifestation of organic intelligence is
 does it always have to be in a body does it always have to be in a body that
 stands upright with binocular vision I think the real task with dealing with
 extraterrestrials is to know when you've got one it's completely silly to search
 the galaxy with radio telescopes for a radio civilization I mean to my mind
 that is as chuckle-headed as deciding you're going to search the galaxy for a
 decent Italian restaurant I mean it doesn't work like that you know that if
 you think about the mushroom try to think about it objectively it looks to
 me very much like a good candidate for an extraterrestrial first of all you
 know DNA has been known to us only since 1950 less than a century and we're
 already involved in this thing called the human genome project well the real
 what that means is we are taking control of the scripts that write human beings
 it seems to me anything we would recognize as intelligence would pass
 through a phase of self-analysis where it would realize that it was made out of
 DNA and would then sequence itself we're about to do this ourselves well that
 means that most extraterrestrials will be the product of their own reflexive
 design process in other words an extraterrestrial that can cross the Gulf
 between the stars must surely then be able to control its own form well then
 if you look at the mushroom it's a curious combination of artifact and
 entity it looks sort of manufactured there's very little fat on that system I
 mean first of all fungi or primary decomposers this means that they are at
 the very bottom of the food chain this makes the kind of vegetarianism espoused
 by Buddhists look like an orgy of slaughter you know because if you're if
 you're at the very bottom of the food chain that is the only place that is
 absolutely karma free so there's the mushroom in the occupying the karma free
 position in the food chain well then it's you know we've been reading about
 these huge mycelial clones spread under acres of soil in Michigan and Wyoming
 well those things what that is is that's a cobweb like network and in the case of
 a psilocybin species filled with neurotransmitter like compounds can you
 imagine how many synaptic clamps there must be in a 1500 acre mushroom clone if
 if brain size is any relationship to intelligence then hang on Hannah because
 it means that this thing spread through the forests of the Midwest has you know
 a brain approximate in weight to a couple of dozen gray whales the other
 thing is then the spore looks perfectly designed to sustain itself in outer
 space if you want to store spores for longevity you create conditions as close
 to the conditions in outer space as you possibly can high vacuum very low
 temperature the casing of a spore is what is one of the most electron dense
 organic materials in nature so electron dense that it approximates a metal well
 global currents can form on the quasi metallic surface of an airborne spore
 and they act as a further repellent for hard radiation so and you know
 percolating through the galaxy at an ordinary rate typical of stellar
 material mushroom species could percolate from one side of the galaxy to
 the other in under 400,000 years well that's lightning speed compared to the
 size and age of the universe if we were to gain the power to design ourselves I
 think after a whole bunch of you know Madonna and Robert Redford clones we
 would probably move on to becoming something very much like a mushroom
 it's you know mild it's non-invasive it's at the bottom of the food chain
 it's virtually immortal it's laden with neurotransmitters and it's living in the
 imagination and this you know brings me to a favorite subject of mine this is
 where we have to go we have to enter into the Blakey and divine imagination
 that's where our future lies at this point our relationship to this planet as
 infant to child is a relationship of impending toxemia we have to be parted
 from the mother to save the mother and to save us and there are not that many
 possibilities where are we going to go the political geniuses who run this
 planet have made migration to the stars virtually impossible I mean don't kid
 yourself it isn't only a matter of announcing a program our short stubby
 fingers couldn't assemble something like a Saturn 5 moon rocket that was made by
 a generation of people now deceased Americans in this era are you know rather
 dull-witted people who have a good deal of trouble even running a third world
 economy so we're not going to the stars you can forget that so then where are we
 going well nanotech is that a possibility could can we download
 everybody into a supercooled cube of gold deterium alloy buried 500 feet deep
 in the center of Copernicus and then we'll go there and leave the earth and
 dance forever in the hallways of the astral imagination that's one
 possibility another possibility is is there a way to diffuse consciousness
 into the environment can we become dolphins caterpillars gray whales and
 mosquitoes and just sort of defocus ourselves and I mean all of these are of
 course wildly radical notions but on the other hand we're headed straight toward
 a brick wall at about 5,000 miles an hour we have to figure out something
 pretty astonishing in a hurry yeah
 the heat shield yes precisely that's a funny question I I don't know because
 it's so hard to tease apart genetics and environment I mean they certainly have
 had a jumpstart on evolution by virtue of hanging out in the space that our
 lives have created you know I think children need lots of attention lots of
 nurturing physical and spiritual I guess I would say so it's certainly they
 haven't been programmed with the fear and misunderstanding that that is in the
 society we just got through anti-dope week at our school which is an
 incredibly painful experience at this particular school because I don't think
 there's a person associated with it who believes it for a moment but it's like
 we all have to study fascism because we live in a fascist state a teacher made a
 statement that that LSD caused brain damage and my son dared to challenge
 this and the guy said well who told you it doesn't cause brain damage no not my
 daddy he said well Albert Hoffman told me it doesn't cause brain damage end of
 discussion yeah yes well when children are very young you know
 all kinds of psychic phenomenon happen and you know I think mothers nursing
 mothers and their relationship to their children is intensely telepathic I
 remember when my daughter was not very old she must have been like about three
 and a half and I had a dream and it was a very unusual dream for me and very
 highly realized and I dreamed of an orrery do you know what an orrery is
 it's a model of the solar system made of gears and you crank it and there's the
 Sun in the center and the planets go around it but this was a huge or I
 dreamed I walked down a hall and I opened a door and I walked into this
 room and there was this orrery and these planets were circling around the Sun
 inside this room and then and I was awakened by my daughter crying and I
 went downstairs and she said there were planets circling around inside my
 bedroom so and you know that's a very specific and rare image for an adult or
 a child to have so yes I think we're simple that our chuckle headedness is
 the main barrier to our encountering all kinds of special abilities that move
 around us all the time we are truly the prisoners of our limited conception
 yeah
 take it every day for 40 days in a row and it's more than psychological level
 that what causes I've worked with someone who has done drug therapies in Mexico
 and also have a little story about you and many of the people who have gotten
 into the situation of psychosis are people who have used drugs and the
 general principle behind that is that people have experienced something that
 they cannot integrate back into their psyche or whatever even if it's the
 ability to say well that was then and this is now and therefore you get
 psychosis so not to not to say these things to alarm people but just for
 respect that there has to be this ability to come back and not be far out
 there and what there are a lot of different parameters to this one is
 your own ego strength another one is the society you live in you're a shaman and
 you can say these things and have them be accepted and you're fine and it
 doesn't have to be drugs you know used to older when he was older he used to
 sit in a chair and just go inside and when he came back he would have this
 litany of things that he would say so that he could come back and function he
 would say you know I'm Carl Gustav Jung my wife is so and so my children I have
 this many children as many grandchildren yeah uh-huh the the reconnect
 affirmation yeah well I think that's not a bad idea
 I want to ask you how do you see the role of ritual?
 well I don't have a very popular position on ritual and I blame it on the
 mushroom because I just quote the mushroom and the mushroom I said what
 about ritual and and it said that's fine if you don't know what you're doing and I
 think that that you know it's it's really not an anti-ritualist position
 because that is what ritual is that's what you do if you don't know what
 you're doing none of us but you know the purpose that you can tell when ritual
 works because it be it makes itself obsolete that's the it's it's yeah
 [inaudible]
 well you know even in the most ritualistic context there's always a
 footnote made for the crazy wisdom I mean every great teacher has said that
 what he's saying is malarkey a teacher who doesn't tell you that what he or she
 is saying is malarkey is not to be taken seriously so you know it's the if you
 meet the Buddha on the road kill him style of thinking or I was just reading
 this guru who's coming on strong is it his name Pooja Ji no no not dogs but
 anyway somebody this guy said don't don't do practice don't do practice
 practice is only distraction said we have to keep thinking up said you know
 running an ashram isn't easy these students they expect so much of us we
 have to continually keep inventing stuff to keep them happy and send them off on
 these crazy quests and and you know endless fasts and all this stuff because
 they want that but you know the guru is pretty much content to kick back with
 the latest Rolling Stone yeah right well are you all familiar with Rupert
 Sheldrake's work Sheldrake is a British biologist who's written a number of
 books his first book was called a new science of life and it was catapulted to
 fame by virtue of a review in nature which said that it should be burned and
 then he wrote a book called the presence of the past Sheldrake has an
 extraordinarily simple interesting revolutionary idea that just drives
 scientists straight up a tree his idea is that once something happens it's
 easier for it to happen the next time yes simple but it takes then forms
 which drive people crazy because he asserts based on that that if you teach
 rats to run a new kind of maze in Australia then rats in Massachusetts
 should be able to run this maze faster than if the rats in Australia hadn't
 learned it because once something has been has occurred then it has a momentum
 in time he calls this the theory of formative causation or morphogenesis and
 it explains a lot of things which are otherwise very difficult for biology to
 explain but it raises also a bunch of issues that are pretty tricky and so
 Rupert and I have been close friends for years and even longer I've been tight
 with a mathematician in Santa Cruz named Ralph Abraham who's a chaos
 dynamicist and Ralph and Rupert and I did a book together called trilogues at
 the edge of the West which will be out at the end of the summer from bear and
 we'll all get together at Esalen the end of August and do a bunch more of these
 public three-way dialogues which are pretty spirited because we are very
 different people from each other but all psychedelic and all interested in
 paradigm recasting so that's what it's about and it'll be out in midsummer end
 of August for that Esalen thing anybody else yeah
 I'm trying to see the plants in places you've gone and how the people that live there experience them and their relationships with plants and other things. I heard that feminism is related to the necessary things for the rest of the people. How do you explain more about that?
 Well feminism is a necessary thing for a successful future because the archaic world was so dominated by well that's a bad choice of words isn't it was so characterized by an awareness of the feminine and the boundary dissolving and the organic the whole problem with the world is that we cannot feel the consequences of what we are doing
 you know I mean recently we had paraded in front of us the figure of Jeffrey Dahmer
 as who you don't want to be like and yet Jeffrey Dahmer to me was an absolute
 paradigm of global civilization because his problem was that he didn't he
 couldn't feel the consequences of his actions and this is what we are doing I
 mean we are lacerating ourselves by cutting down the rainforest and poisoning the oceans this is not some airy fairy save the redwoods kind of mentality that protests against this this is our own atmosphere our own environment that we're destroying it's a slow suicide not so slow at the rate that we're carrying it out well somehow we have to reactivate the
 maternal nurturing caring circuitry that kept the tendencies that have evolved in this fatal direction at bay for a long long time and you know you can call it ego you can call it male dominance you can call it the phonetic alphabet whatever it is it has to be stopped because the planet is imperiled by it and I my analysis of it is that the only way to stop it is to stop it
 is that the only way to do it is to dissolve the boundaries that culture and language and tradition have allowed us to create and they are largely boundaries that suppress women not because men hate women but because men hate the feminine and they want to control and hold it back it's threatening it's devouring I mean the fact that the French refer to orgasm as the little death tells you you know how
 what a weird kind of ambivalence haunts our relationship to anything which dissolves us out of our out of the knot that we have tied ourselves into so I you know I'm a kind of non feminist feminist I mean I think most feminists are feminist because they think women have gotten a raw deal I'm a feminist because I think mankind is headed for something else
 mankind is headed for suicide if we don't return to a more intense expression of the feminine so it's not a political agenda for me to liberate an oppressed group of people it's a collectivist agenda necessary to save everybody and everything on the planet
 one of the things that's implicit in your general work is that there exists allies allies in the form of the plant and when we look at the draft from partnership to dominator society in my mind one of the things that would become implicit would be that there are not only allies but there are malevolent entities out there that kind of the dominator force becomes so powerful
 and then when I get into that line of thought I get into this whole demi-urge clash of the titans kind of notion and sometimes the allies notion is very attractive but in my mind it always implies there's malevolent forces out there just as there are benevolent ones
 well no I mean there are both there are malevolent and benevolent forces in there and out there but the I don't see the world really as a struggle between good and evil in some kind of manichaean situation it seems to me that we confer value
 that you know nature is neither good nor evil and that must then include all these allies it's just that we confer judgment this is because when you begin to get down toward the bottom line we don't know what the bottom line is for instance we're headed toward a great historical bifurcation where we're going to have to make some really hard choices
 and most of the time in the so-called new age they try to fuzz all the distinctions and make you think you're never going to be slammed to the wall and have to make a choice but the choice that's coming up for us is fundamental it is are we to become the caregivers the nurturers and the and the gardeners of the earth
 or is the earth you know this is I put it this way to somebody the other night the question was is the earth our mother therefore to be cared for into her old age nurtured revered and loved or is the earth our placenta therefore to be examined for signs of toxin and then buried under the apple tree
 in other words what is the true nature of human beings are we to be integrated into nature and to celebrate it or is nature a demonic and titanic force that is imprisoning spirit and holding it back from its full unfolding in worlds of alien light and higher dimension so far from here that it's a miracle that even rumor reached us of the possibility of salvation
 this is a tough choice because one path that leads to radical renunciation of technology radical pairing of population and an attempt to come to terms with this small liquid planet on which we find ourselves and the other direction says you know forget it it's the husk of a seed
 and it is utterly meaningless in the cosmic drama and the real destiny lies out there halfway to the Nebula new beer zeta reticuli or some other exotic port of call I don't see how you can have that both ways
 yes and most stars have lives shorter than the amount of time that biology has been on this planet we are fortunate enough to be around a very slow burning stable star there are a lot of mystery I haven't forgotten your second question there are a lot of mysteries in our cosmic neighborhood that we rarely hear addressed for example I mean just as an example
 if our destiny lies out in the great universe it's a hell of a technological barrier to cross to the stars I mean it may be insurmountable however isn't it interesting that the most earth-like star within 70 light years is the nearest star
 not technically the nearest star which is a glowing red clinker called Alpha Centauri right but Beta Centauri is 1.1 solar masses 1.1 solar masses no star within 70 light years is this earth-like I mean as star sunlight as that star from the point of view of the galaxy
 Beta Centauri and our Sun almost look like lightly bounded binaries if this is an accident it's a tremendously fortuitous accident for us because it may well mean that there is an earth-like planet at an incredibly short distance away from us in terms of the cosmic neighborhood
 in fact probably within the next 10 years telescopes of sufficient resolving power will be created that if there is a water-heavy oxygen-rich world out there it's going to show up well then that is going to become a tremendous attractor in the historical matrix because it will be hailed as the answer
 I mean can you imagine if and because there will then be two possibilities that there is intelligence next door not likely or that there is but likely how do you assess it how many water-heavy oxygen-rich planets have we examined for crying out loud and the other possibility is that it's empty real estate in either case it will excite keen interest throughout society
 so you know that's a little oddness in our cosmic neighborhood that is rarely mentioned or taken account of
 yeah
 yes although I leave that to the Jeremiah Sitchins of the world to work out the details there is after all a fossil record that is pretty clear in spite of the ravings and rantings of these Christers the fossil record is pretty clear that we emerged out of the proto hominids who emerged out of the Pongy radiation that emerged out of and so forth and so on
 I don't I think that but there may be mysteries I mean one question that I'm surprised nobody ever seems to ask in these weekends when I tell the cheerful story of the descent from the trees the ape encounter with the mushrooms and so forth and so on is nobody ever asks well but who put the mushrooms in the path of these binocular bi-pied creatures
 I mean is this just the story of nature's happiest accident or did someone say you know tweak the planet start the retraction of the rain forests seed the spores into the grasslands and watch what happens because then we come down out of the trees brainless as a wombat and begin testing food sources and lo and behold it's a bird
 testing food sources and lo and behold here are these things which are obviously designed to be seen I mean mushrooms are a form of display they're designed to be seen they demand to be eaten and the consequences of that you know are to lead a species to the brink of star flight well is that just a coincidence or is there a mind behind all of this
 see I think that it mind the problem I have with all the extraterrestrial scenarios and all the channeling and all the abducting and all this stuff that goes on is it's all to be movie it's all too simple too straightforward that's what troubles me about the sit-chin scenario is that it's perfectly understandable to us if it's understandable to us you can bet your booties
 it's the wrong answer I mean it's gonna be weirder than that it's not about mineral extraction or even diplomatic goodwill I had a professor years ago his cosmology went like this he you know how there are bacteria which you can introduce into gold slurry in low-grade gold ore and the bacteria will concentrate the gold and then you just wash the gold
 out of the bacteria and it's a mining technique that's very efficient for poor yielding gold ore so this guy's idea was that someday UFOs would appear over every major city on earth and they would just load up all the plutonium and fissionable material and take it away and say thank you very much this mining operation is now concluded you people can go home
 you people can go back to hurling shit at each other in the treetops as far as we're concerned we have real application for this fissionable material you people were going to use it to blow each other up what a bunch of dummies and farewell and good luck so that's one possibility
 yes then I insist on getting to these plans no Haoma haoma and harmony by no by flattery and Schwartz and it's published by the University of California Press Near Eastern Studies Division publication number 23
 yeah isn't that a grabber well what I thought we should talk about this morning since we seem to range wide and free is the practicum of all this which is you know how many of these vision plants are there and where are they and how do you obtain them and how do you use them once you obtain them so I thought how many of you have ever seen
 can you all here let me get with it this is a poster which I don't even know if it's still available it may be out of print it is still available and it's a very good ethno botanical course in hallucinogens on one sheet of paper what it's divided into basically is this is the old world and this is the new
 immediately you notice that there are a lot more hallucinogens in the new world than the old this is one of the great puzzles of evolutionary botany because nobody can offer a reasonable explanation as to why there should be nearly three times as many hallucinogenic plants in the new world as in the old I mean other than that's where the flying saucers planted them nobody has come up with a good
 explanation major hallucinogenic plant complexes that I've had experience with and can address are well let's do a little quick geographical tour first of all North America for reasons not well understood is quite poor in native hallucinogens
 there are no major North American hallucinogens peyote is well yes it's North American the funny thing about peyote I mean you can feed me questions as long as we stick to the subject the thing about peyote is you know we have this tremendous respect for it we imagine that it's tremendously ancient and it apparently isn't
 there is no archaeological evidence of peyote use any earlier than 500 years ago it's almost a phenomenon of the conquest what you find in the old graves in the peyote cultural area is are the seeds of Sephora secundifolia which is an ordeal poison
 strychnine and often often drug human plant symbiotic relationships evolve over time it may be that the use of hallucinogens is still in in fairly dynamic evolution all over the planet peyote is a major hallucinogen should have been used for the past 50,000
 years if it has only been used for the past 500 years that's pretty peculiar all right and yet that appears to be the evidence ibogaine not only a visionary hallucinogen but an aphrodisiac as well no evidence of any use before 1850 and yet in an area where the Portuguese had been trading for the past 500 years and writing cultural descriptions and interviewing the people
 and he would if it was there it would have been mentioned so that this is a puzzle you know ayahuasca use we assume is millennia old but on the other hand archaeology is a real miserable proposition in the Amazon because the climate is so degraded degradative so we can't really know but aside from peyote and whatever its history
 North America seems to have only minor hallucinogens that have been utilized shamanically a puzzle another puzzle about culture and attitudes is as you all know the Northwest Coast Indians the Kwaku'utl Shimsham and Tlingit language groups have an extraordinarily evolved shamanism and were the people who developed that x-ray
 vision style of art well their cultural area has the densest number of psilocybin mushrooms of any place in the world no cultural evidence of psilocybin use no evidence that these people even knew these things were there I mean I know this challenges the tradition of the all-knowing
 aboriginal but you know that this is what the data seems to imply now in Southern California and across portions of the southwest there have been detourer religions which are very old apparently the so-called to latch religion I don't recommend detourer I don't know what astronomical astrological sign you have to be to make your peace with that stuff but I find it really
 peculiar and menacing in it's it's about magic which is about power and control and usually sexuality and some invasive and dominator application I've taken detour a number of times and it's been interesting but it feels watery and dark and dangerous to me
 there was a period when I lived in Nepal when I became aware that these sadhus not content with their superior meditation techniques and their endless smoking of hashish were also availing themselves of the seeds of detour a metal which is conspecific to what we call
 Jimson weed in this country and so I thought well I should take this too and find out what it's about well it was a very odd trip it was I sat in my room in Bodenoth and I would sit and say nothing is happening nothing is happening well you can only think that so many times then my mind would drift into a kind of twilight state and then these
 wraith-like entities I mean they were like Victorian ghosts you know they were
 like women in shredded dam shredded damask gowns or something would fly into my
 window carrying newspaper sheets in their outstretched arms and they would let
 these sheets of newspaper flutter down onto my lap and I would like begin to
 read and I would begin and I would be so astonished by what I was reading that it
 would jerk me out of it and I say what's happening nothing's happening nothing's
 happening and then my attention would drift and this would happen again well
 then after about a half an hour of that as the stuff began to build up I began
 to like I would undergo these very brief periods of unconsciousness and when I
 came out of them I would discover that my leg had been thrown up around behind
 my head and my arm shot through I was like all knotted up then I would very
 carefully unfold myself and lay back down and I remember thinking I'm
 certainly glad there's nobody else here because this is the kind of thing just
 designed to drive a sitter into a conniption fit of alarm and you know
 about about six times over the next hour and a half I went into these convulsive
 spasms and you know then on another night I these English people shared a
 suite of rooms off of mine and I had to get to the bathroom I had to go through
 this one guy's room so this one night I hadn't taken detour but this fellow had
 taken detour and at one point I had to go to the John's so I debated for a long
 time about how this was going to disturb his trip and maybe I should piss out the
 window but no that one didn't seem although in India it's perfectly all
 right and so finally I decided I would just walk through the room so then as I
 was tiptoeing through the room I saw that he was actually having sex with
 this girl that we knew from Kathmandu and it had a slight emotional tinge for
 me because I had actually had my eye on her although I had never said anything
 about it to anybody so so then the next morning I I mentioned this and he said
 that yes it had been his impression as well but that in fact she wasn't there
 and so it was like you know I saw somebody else's hallucination and then
 what finally decided me that detour was too peculiar was I had another English
 friend who lived a couple of houses away and one day I was in the market buying
 potatoes and this guy came along and we were just talking and in the course of
 this conversation he was telling me how he'd been taking a lot of detour and in
 the course of this conversation I became aware that he thought that I was
 visiting him in his apartment and I decided that's too fucked up you know to
 not know whether you're entertaining someone in the confines of your
 apartment or buying vegetables in the market means that you have become too
 disengaged from the modalities of the real and of course it creates tremendous
 drying and it's a deliriant is what the literature calls it it's a deliriant but
 these you know I think that people all over the world utilize plants for bizarre
 experiences time and time again I've run up against this one you know there's a
 very rare drug in South America called ukuhe it's made by the
 witoto and the bora and the muinani in this very circumscribed area and what
 fascinated us about it was that it was an orally active DMT drug and we
 couldn't as pharmacologists understand how an orally active DMT drug was
 possible because the DMT should be destroyed in your gut so we wanted to
 get a sample of this stuff and it's made from the resin of varrola trees the
 inner bark of the varrola sheds a red resin and we eventually in 1981 my
 brother and I and Wade Davis the guy who wrote the Serpent and the Rainbow we all
 launched an expedition up the Rio Yagwis Yassu and where there was this stuff and
 we would do what we called bioassays which means somebody has to test this
 stuff because we would get samples from these shaman and we would draw straws to
 for who got to do the bioassay well taking this ukuhe was appalling I mean
 your heart rate goes up to about three times normal you shed water by the
 gallon your blood pressure shoots up I mean felt like a pre-coronary to me and
 then we come down and say to this shaman you know Lorenzio what's the story and he
 said yeah takes getting used to doesn't it and so then I and then when you look
 at it when you look at this ukuhe chemically you see well yes there's DMT
 in there and there's 5 mao DMT in there but then when you do the gas
 chromatogram you see that marching along behind those spots are all these other
 spots of various tryptamine compounds some of which are cardio regulators some
 of which nobody knows what they do and so then you realize that it's it's a
 dirty drug there's too much junk in there what you want is something that
 has a very clean signature so ukuhe didn't exactly seem the way to go I
 think that this is the real situation with amanita muscaria probably the most
 discussed uninteresting drug in the world because so many people have tried
 to hang so much on it and you know it's a horrible experience most of the time I
 mean it yeah yeah and occasionally you'll meet someone who says well you're
 just wrong it's wonderful I've taken it for years I love it and I you know don't
 know first of all it's genetically variable it's geographically variable
 it's seasonally variable and it fluctuates at various times in its in
 its process of maturation so what must be going on with amanita muscaria is you
 have to learn how to take it in your area from people who know where to
 collect it when to collect it how much to collect and how to prepare it but if
 you just go out and find one and chow down I guarantee you it'll turn you
 every way but loose and then it'll turn you loose so no that's what they always
 say they say have you drunk your urine recently I got a letter last week no I
 understand that it do you all understand the basis of the question why does urine
 come into it because in Siberia they have discovered which is where this
 amanita thing originates that the active principle is not destroyed inside your
 body that it is excreted in the urine and the true aficionados of this stuff
 believe that the so-called second pass is better than the first pass and so you
 have to you know they drink the urine one of the great hazards of Siberian
 shamanism is stepping outside of the yurt on a snowy night to take a leak and
 being pitched headfirst into the snow by frantic reindeer who but you out of the
 way to try to get to the yellow snow because they're so completely hooked on
 amanita that nothing stands in their way oh your students pushing you out of them
 well I've never hung out with the yakuts maybe they are pretty wild-eyed gang an
 example of how a very ancient how a very ancient folk way can be incorporated
 into our culture without us even realizing it and is provided by
 discussing amanita muscaria if you go to the Encyclopedia Britannica and you look
 up Santa Claus they'll tell you that it has to do with st. Nicholas and it got
 started in the 11th century and it's a but when you look at the Santa Claus
 story it's a perfect mythologian to analyze from this point of view because
 look what's going on with Santa Claus first of all Santa Claus his colors are
 red and white the colors of the amanita muscaria for sure Santa Claus lives at
 the North Pole what does this mean it means that Santa Claus lives at the
 axis Mundi where Yggdrasil the magic world ash of Welch mythology has taken
 root Santa Claus flies this is what shaman do Santa Claus is the master of
 the reindeer the animal most associated with the amanita muscaria Santa Claus is
 aided in his work by troops of elves and what is the work of Santa Claus to
 build toys for children remember the DMT thing saying look at this look at this
 well those were off-duty elves clearly and and so so here are all the motifs
 and I believe that for children in our culture that all the Christer stuff is
 not what Christmas is about Christmas is about standing in front of the tree on
 Christmas morning with the gifts arrayed and the twinkling lights on well that
 tree is the tree that the amanita muscaria forms its symbiotic
 relationship to it's always spruce or pine that it has a mycorrhizal
 relationship to so the number of motifs relating Santa Claus to a cult of
 amanita muscaria there's almost nothing but relational motifs there and yet if
 you suggest this to people they just back away in horror you know well these
 hallucinogenic plants seem clustered in the new world in two areas the first
 area is the Sierra Mazateca of central Mexico and related areas and there you
 have a number of things overlapping you have a mushroom area of multiple
 species where unlike the Coahuilte shimsham tlingit language area in this
 central Mexican language area they absolutely did use and discover these
 mushrooms and we have these things called mushroom stones that go 2,500 BC
 so the mushroom religion is truly archaic in Mexico in the same cultural
 area you have the the morning glory seeds that come from ipumea purpura and
 related hybrids are you all familiar with these this is a psychedelic plant
 that you can grow yourself and take don't buy the packages of seeds and take
 them because a benevolent government has made sure that they are soaked in
 horrendous poison so that you can't get loaded on them but you can grow a crop
 out of them that will be toxin free and this is a tremendous visionary
 intoxicant it takes a couple of hundred of these seeds but in that same area
 strangely enough there's another morning glory turbinic corium bosa it used to be
 called Rivia corium bosa that as few as 13 seeds will flatten you now it's
 interesting as long as we're talking about Martin morning glory seeds to note
 that per unit volume per per by weight probably the strongest plant hallucinogen
 in the world is Hawaiian baby wood rose and yet there is no record of any
 culture ever utilizing that it there are 13 species of our jury it's called
 Hawaiian baby wood rose but it has nothing to do with Hawaii it's native to
 India there are 13 species of our jury a scattered from southern India out to
 Fiji and all contain ergot like LSD like compounds like Chinook Levine and so
 forth these I got started on morning glory seeds because they were available
 but don't sell this stuff short folks I mean it'll give you a ride that you'll
 never forget and the baby wood rose even more so be very careful with the Hawaiian
 baby wood rose because it contains cardioactive glycosides and you know if
 you you know maybe six seeds will do you 12 seeds might well plant you and 12
 seeds will fit on a tablespoon so this is nothing to start choking down in
 large amounts yeah yes and could be extracted in a fairly simple
 filtration system yeah good point yeah you well they are dry their little
 crescent-shaped right yeah grind them in a brawn grinder and
 applesauce is the favorite carrier for these disgusting things or milkshakes
 but it would be good to look into doing a little chemistry the emetic in the
 morning glory is this ester coumarin not the cardioactive glycoside in our jury
 nervosa but in ipomoea purpura it's ester coumarin and you could devise a
 simple chemical system for removing that and I think LSD but you know have you
 ever had what's called wood rose LSD well it's wonderful it's unlike LSD
 it's more like psilocybin because it is highly visionary and one of the things
 about these morning glories is you know I don't know whether we have to talk
 about Rupert's theory or what but it is just an archive of Mayan and Toltec
 imagery I mean you take this stuff and you're there in the pyramidal complex on
 the day of the Venus's heliacal rising when they do their thing I mean it's
 pretty amazing
 it's a close relative it's active not in the microgram range but in the
 milligram range and there are several active compounds you're right and I
 think chinoklavine is psychoactive and ergonovine all these occur there no you
 grind them to a powder and then just take it capsule them it's a lot of
 capsules it's like half a cup of this horrible whitish meal with a strange
 smell but yeah basically about 200 seeds you may want to go higher but start with
 that yeah
 supposedly in the Massachusetts area the levea carlosa seeds are ground up and then they are put into a cold water to make a cold water infusion and then the solids are removed so that there is only a water soluble fraction in the water and then that is run.
 well no but if what you're saying is true that's where the glycoside would reside
 that that's not my understanding actually what well maybe the caption got
 mislabeled or something because what the way they do it where I've seen it is
 they take the the little seeds and they grind them on a matate to powder then
 they put it in water as you said and then and they shake it and leave it and
 come back an hour later and shake it again and do that for a while and then
 the stuff precipitates to the bottom the physic the the matter and the liquid
 fraction is poured off and discarded and they take the the solid matter and they
 let it dry in the Sun until it's no longer runny but it's a kind of like
 the consistency of oatmeal or play-doh or something like that and then they make a
 little tiny tortilla which they which they then toast on a metal griddle and
 so you get this thing which looks slightly smaller than a Ritz cracker and
 is a is a toasted morning glory seed wafer and you eat that and that is the
 thing which is active that's how I've seen it done apparently not they toast
 it lightly they don't it's not blackened it's just sort of golden no it's the
 it's one species of morning glory turbine previously called Rivia corium
 bosa the other one the morning glory that you have to take a couple of
 hundred seeds for is used in that area as a hallucinogen but it's also used to
 induce labor and has a whole role in midwifery and and like that
 no that's the Hawaiian wood rose and it has no history of human usage so you're
 on your own this is it's worth talking about maybe for a minute that you know
 there are hallucinogens are like hotel rooms some are occupied and some are not
 and it's always interesting to fiddle with the unoccupied ones because if you
 are if you believe Sheldrake then it's an empty field you know one way of
 thinking of these things is when you take a plant it takes you so when you
 take mushrooms for instance what the trip is is all the mushroom trips that
 anybody ever had and you leave you know you make a tiny contribution to it's you
 leave a piece of your trip in the trip and so the the trip is slowly evolving
 over time as those who take the plant each leaves a brick or an offering or a
 little architectural motif on this vast edifice well then if you come that was
 why you know a plant like Hawaiian wood rose or to some degree Stropharia
 cubensis because it is not the preferred mushroom among the Mexican traditional
 then it's unoccupied you can make of it what you want it can be sort of your
 vehicle and this is why you know a drug like ketamine which is a new drug a drug
 without a thousand years of input my impression of where you go on ketamine
 is it's like visiting a new office building that nobody has rented offices
 yet I mean all the water coolers work and there are these recessional
 distances with fluorescent lighting but you know there are no hurrying
 secretaries and crowded offices and chatter around the water fountains it's
 just empty it's empty because not enough people have left their initials on the
 walls yeah well if you mean growing on manure yeah that's Stropharia cubensis
 see there are about 30 species of mushrooms that grow in in that Mexican
 area and most of them are what are called well not most some are ephemeral
 mushrooms meaning they're very small and they can be almost anywhere and then
 there are some larger ones too that can be almost anywhere Stropharia cubensis is
 the only one of the good ones that locates on cow dung now there are other
 mushrooms which grow on cow dung that contains psilocybin but they also are
 more sickening there are species of pan eolus and species of coprinus if you
 collect a mushroom off dung and you want to know whether it's a pan eolus or a
 coprinus or a Stropharia just keep it around for a few hours if it's a
 Stropharia it will just sort of be around if it's a coprinus or a
 pan eolus it will do what's called autodigest it will turn into a slimy
 mess and no you can't tell from the spore frame but you can tell from the
 macro morphology of it if you know mushrooms they're easy to tell apart
 yeah well that's tricky you need somebody who really knows their stuff
 mm-hmm
 it was more speculative but I think it would be worth trying yeah yeah some are
 and some aren't yeah that sounds right pet ether is a good one so is
 chloroform have any of you read the road to elusive that's about the Ellisonian
 mysteries and argues it's by Wasson and Hoffman and Ruck and argues that the
 mystery at elusive was a kind of ergotized beer that they were gathering
 ergot off past spallum and making an ergotized beer and the only way they
 could have done that for 2,000 years stoning thousands of people each
 September at this cult site without the thing getting a reputation for being
 toxic or causing convulsions is if they had some way that was very efficient of
 separating the dangerous alkaloids from from the hallucinogenic one so that may
 have been a water fractionation technique as well or you know the whole
 theory may be wrong and whatever was drunk at elusive may not have been
 ergotized beer it could have been a mushroom of some sort this is what
 Robert Graves thought that it was a mushroom the road to elusive probably
 not because Watson is now dead and the estate is kind of funny about that kind
 of thing yeah the emetic is estercoumarone if you're not a chemist
 and used to dealing with high molecular weight solvents then you should do some
 kind of a water you know dissolve it in water and then try to separate out the
 fractions this would be I mean I think a lot of work needs to be done I think in
 the underground there are publications which have circulated that are you know
 the Wizards workbook for mushroom wreck or for morning glory reclamation and
 stuff like this it's a you pay your dues with morning glories but it's usually
 worth the price of admission it's just nausea after all for crying out loud
 yeah I got the impression that the implication is that somehow
 consciousness creates the reality that's put you know that's out there depending
 on how often consciousness is used. Yeah I think so I mean that we leave our
 fingerprints upon the drugs we take and drugs that have been taken for
 thousands of years have a lot of fingerprints on them and you but you
 join up with that you enter into the field you know one way of thinking since
 somebody talked about Sheldrake earlier one way of thinking about psychedelics
 and trying to define what do they do is that they are amplifiers of the
 morphogenetic field that you know the the past of objects somehow becomes
 present this would fit in with my notion that when you take a psychedelic you are
 rising into some kind of super space that can be mathematically described
 because having the past be co-present with the present is a way of saying that
 you have shift your dimensional relationship to the data field and now
 it all appears to be one coherent thing. Yeah. What is the plant that grows in the Southwest that has Harmony in it?
 Pagamon Harmona the giant Syrian rue its original range is from Morocco to
 Manchuria but at some time in the 19th century it was brought into this country
 as a range fodder for goats I mean it's pretty rasty plant and it has small
 yellow flowers and it's a kind of it has succulent leaves sort of water holding
 leaves and it looks like a form of sagebrush and when you cut into it with
 a knife or a machete it's brilliant yellow inside and that brilliant yellow
 is the Harmony.
 Pound it up with a sledgehammer to separate the fibers and do a hot water
 wash on it and then you know do a second hot water wash then get rid of the
 physical stuff combine the two mother liquors and drive it down to a
 reasonable volume and it'll do the trick yeah.
 John Allegro and Andresia Puharich yeah.
 Well not to rain on anybody's parade Andresia Puharich is a very mercurial
 person is that what we want to say recall that he was the guy who pushed
 Yuri Geller for a long time and they were forever tromping into the Negev and
 coming out with blank cassettes that had held the wisdom of the galaxy but the
 aliens erased them before they let them return that could happen here so that's
 Andresia Puharich he's been around for a long time I mean you have to these
 people are such eccentrics I mean you have to just respect people's
 persistence and survival power but I think you know his his scholarship and
 his notion of the rules of evidence is fairly divergent even from my fairly
 loose canon so Allegro is a little different case do you all know the book
 the sacred mushroom and the cross he managed to hypothesize one of the most
 radical theories ever to come down the pike I don't know how true it is but his
 theory is that Jesus was a mushroom and you know this would not probably have
 cut too much mustard except that the guy was a Dead Sea Scrolls scholar of world
 renown had a scholar's grasp of Aramaic and Akkadian and was fully licensed to
 be one of the people who tell us what the primary documents of Christianity
 really mean the problem was when Allegro got a hold of them he said well what
 they really mean is that a sacramental mushroom was being grown in caves
 by Nabataeans down around Qumran and they called it Jesus in order to befuddle
 the Roman authorities and created the cheerful theory of the friendly
 carpenter who tells us to render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's and this
 was all a publicity stunt just to keep the Roman authorities guessing and he
 has textual he claims he has textual support for this the problem is you have
 to be an Aramaic philologist to follow the argument I mean the argument is
 unbelievably tortured there is a lot of question there is a peculiar opaqueness
 about the early history of Christianity I mean if we are to try and take it
 seriously and understand what happened there then it must be that it first of
 all if we believe Christ was a real person then he must have been born in 6
 BC because there was a conunctio maxima of Jupiter and Saturn at that time which
 is a good astrological event to hang the nativity on which means then that the
 crucifixion would have occurred in 27 well why is it then that there are no
 mentions no mention of Chris of Christ can be pushed back later than earlier
 than ad69 what was going on between 27 and 69 the Gospels are not
 contemporaneous and the mention in 69 is not even a sure thing it's in Suetonius
 and he says Jews have recently come to Rome agitating in the name of their
 leader Crespus and that's the reference and you know it's puzzling because it
 take a figure as as minor as man I man I is the founder of Manicheanism he was
 born in Seleucia Tessifon in the in the 700s well God we have man eyes laundry
 bills I mean we know how much he paid in taxes the nickname he had for his dog I
 mean we have a lot of data on man I and so why a figure like Christ should be so
 peculiarly swathed in ambiguity if it was a real person with these people
 eager to chronicle it is a little hard to figure out
 yeah I mean man I got right with it I mean he cultivated the court he knew how
 to get his thing going yeah if any of you are interested in these kinds of
 questions and like your data in novel form read the transmigration of Timothy
 Archer by Philip K Dick which is a wonderful intellectual romp through all
 of these issues it's essentially the fictional telling of the story of James
 Pike who you may remember was the Episcopal Bishop of San Francisco and a
 great enthusiast for LSD and he died in the nega of under very mysterious
 conditions he parked his car and with a roadside map and a bottle of coca-cola
 in 115 degree heat started walking toward the sea the Dead Sea and
 dehydrated and died and he was very close to John Allegro you know I'm not
 given to conspiracy theory but you must have been following this whole hassle
 about the Dead Sea Scrolls well a lot of people think it's because what is written
 there is incommensurate with the Christianity as it has existed for
 1700 years and nobody knows what to do with this stuff I mean it's the
 equivalent of what do you do with the doctrine of the resurrection if somebody
 comes up with the mummy of Christ well that's the kind of situation that these
 Dead Sea Scrolls may place Christian hermeneutics in John Allegro's book no
 John Allegro died recently sacred mushroom oh oh no the book by Philip K
 Dick is called the transmigration of Timothy Archer yeah
 oh yes he's another one yes well the Empire never died which is Philip K
 Dick's motto the Gnostic temperament is alive and well in fact there hasn't been
 a century as friendly to Gnosticism as the 20th since the fourth so there you
 have it
 well this has been suggested what you need to you know to put the put the
 gospel of John in or I mean yes to put the gospel of John in context get to
 Charles's book the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the New Testament
 this concludes tape 5 our program continues with tape 6


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