chemically...
 well, it's hard to put it into words exactly
 especially when you try to do it for the first time
 obviously the difference between a living person and a dead person
 there is a way of thinking about that
 where you would say the difference is a chemical one
 in one case metabolism is going on, in the other case not
 I am beginning to think that this narrowing of our conscious focus
 into three dimensions for survival purposes
 that I mentioned a few minutes ago
 may have actually cut us off
 not only from where the game will be next month
 or who stole the chicken
 but it also may have cut us off from contact with the after death world
 because it has no efficacy in the very nitty gritty blood and muscle problem
 of day to day survival
 and that what we have discovered in DMT
 is literally a chemical doorway to the bardo
 and that this, I think, is an even more confounding notion
 than the notion that we are being pheromonally managed
 by zeta reticulums or something like that
 I mean, after all, if that were the case
 it would probably just be one of many programs of social manipulation
 that are administered by some hideous bureaucracy
 somewhere beyond Agol
 and there's careerism and blunders and budget overruns
 in other words, it sort of comes back down into
 that's what the problem I have with all extraterrestrial scenarios
 is the extraterrestrial seems so much like ourselves
 I think probably it's that we have found the pharmacological key to the bardo
 and that this is going to overturn civilization so completely
 that we might as well just call an end to it
 and recess the meeting
 and if you ask shamans about this
 you say, what is this all about
 they will tell you, well we do all our work through ancestor magic
 well ancestor is a very sanitized term
 because not too many people when they hear the word ancestor
 realize that we're talking dead people here
 so when a shaman tells you he works with the ancestors
 he's saying he works with dead people
 well, if that's the case, then we are close to being able to secure
 in a rational sense
 the answer to one of the questions that has driven us most buggy
 throughout history
 which is, is there continuity of something after the body dissolves
 and I am the last person to ever carry this message into society
 I was raised Catholic
 I rejected it at age 14
 Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Genet, Friedrich Nietzsche
 these were my gods
 and I felt that moral responsibility, existential honesty
 demands that we put aside the cheerful fairy tales
 the more naive levels of culture
 and that anybody who wants to talk to you about the dear departed and all that
 is in the grip of menopausal mysticism or something
 or just hasn't carried out a rational analysis of what he is
 now, I think, these religions have all made hay
 and hash, I might add
 out of their imagined franchise of the after death world
 because they use it to beat you on the head
 with some moral laundry list of do's and don'ts
 that's very dear to them
 and it can be anything as nuts as that you shouldn't be born to
 who knows what, you know
 and all sides of the world and has only been thrown into question
 by the scientific high tech democracies in the last 500 years or so
 and for them, only among a secular educated elite
 the premise that is that there is something that persists beyond life
 and I think that part of the profligate irresponsibility of modern life
 arises from the fact that we don't think we have dues to pay
 we think there's an easy way out
 and that you can be a jerk and then just become food for worms
 and nobody will ever get on your case about it
 and so moral relativism has come into play
 but if in fact we are securing in some form the notion
 that the human personality or some portion of it persists after death
 and that there is an ecology of souls
 and that we must in some sense share this planet with them
 because after all when you smoke DMT you don't go anywhere physically
 you simply see your nearby environment from a different dimension
 through different eyes
 then it means that we represent a tiny minority of the human beings
 who care about this planet
 we the living are just a tiny slice of who cares
 and who is active in the situation
 and somehow we are being through chance which I don't believe in
 or through design which seems everywhere around us
 we are being brought up short and told that
 in order for the earth to survive
 we must join everyone else in this other place
 and that it is not to be conceived of as dissolution
 it is to be conceived of as disembodiment
 this is the only thing I can figure out that is going on
 there is some kind of project underway
 to transfer the lumpen living into the realm of the grateful dead
 and the anxiety that we feel about death
 is an anxiety born essentially of ignorance
 and this ignorance is understandable
 because we have suppressed, repressed and denied shamanism
 the leadership role that it should have in metaphysics of all sorts
 and so now we are about to become extinct
 and you can like it or you can not like it
 you can decry it as the greatest tragedy ever to befall us
 or this planet, although I suspect the planet will heave an enormous sigh of relief
 but there is a perspective in which it can actually be seen as progress
 that we are all at once going to transit into this bardo realm
 now this may not be it, it may not be a simple die off
 it may be that somehow a dialogue can be set up with these souls
 or their representatives or whatever they are in this other place
 and that a world can be established which is neither quite theirs nor quite ours
 in other words that the difference between being alive and being dead
 which seems to us fairly fundamental
 could in fact turn out to be fairly minor and erasable
 or the boundary could be moved from where it is to somewhere else
 we, this stuff is hackle raising in its weirdness
 but if you are going to be true to the content of the experience
 then I think you are pushed in these kinds of directions
 and the attractor at the end of history
 that seems to be pulling the human world certainly
 if not all of space and time into its domain
 is in the act of realizing itself
 going to obliterate the kind of distinctions that we have grown used to
 excuse me, even on such fundamental issues as life and death
 that's the grandest conception that I've been able to come up with
 and it doesn't require friendly, altruistic, extraterrestrial
 flying in from the Betelgeuse
 and it doesn't involve nanotechnological downloading of everybody
 into a gold deterbium cube buried on the back side of the moon
 and it doesn't involve the human enterprise
 simply becoming a layer in shale somewhere in the strata
 of the paleontological record of life on this planet
 it is a fitting denouement for the mess that we have wandered into
 it does require unlimbering of the imagination to come to terms with this
 because we are in great denial over the possibility
 that the world could really be transforming itself
 I mean about as far as most of us can go without getting metaphysically uncomfortable
 is to embrace recycling and population control
 but I doubt that such cheerful diddling with the machinery
 will be able to swerve us from our path
 I think like it or not
 we are going into a world that we literally as we sit here
 cannot conceive of
 a world so different from ordinary reality
 that to discuss whether we will be alive or dead in that world
 is mere quibbling
 there's one point I wanted to clarify real quick
 I didn't see this launch of the alien psychedelic war template
 as a bureaucratic enterprise
 I almost always envisioned it as a real provisional underground thing
 maybe done by a small minority of shamans
 in a desperate hope to somehow propagate their origins
 you mean alien shamans?
 yeah
 it could be that
 I sense a crisis in the physics of the matrix itself
 in other words I think that this is not only happening to human beings
 I'm serious when I say
 there's only 20 years of history left
 and we still have half of it to do
 we're going to have to do some pretty fast scapping
 I mean what we took 50,000 years to do
 that we must now do in 20 years
 I think that
 that space and time and the physical body and the planet
 and that everything is essentially some kind of an illusion
 it's not real
 what is real, what is truly bedrock
 and I guess this comes close to being of the Buddhist position
 this is all provisional
 this is not what the universe is
 the universe is something else
 you know the Buddhists have a doctrine
 that if a single person will attain enlightenment
 then the illusion will collapse instantly
 all beings will be sucked into the post-enlightenment state
 and the illusion of space and time of becoming an entity
 will all be obviated at the snap of a finger
 well we tend to disbelieve this
 because no matter how metaphysical we are
 we may even call ourselves Buddhists
 we really believe that Andromeda is 250,000 light years away
 we can't conceive of a light year
 but we actually believe what the scientists tell us
 and yet my God
 when you start carrying out a critique of modern science
 you cannot believe what fluff this stuff is built on
 I heard an analogy recently which I thought was very interesting
 our entire picture of the so-called distant universe
 is built up by the science of radio-telescopy
 the use of radio-telescopes to study deep space
 this science has been in existence since about 1950
 if you were to take all the radio signals
 that have been analyzed by radio astronomy since 1950
 and characterize them as energy
 it would be the amount of energy that is released by a cigarette ash
 falling a distance of two feet
 so this is the thinness of the data
 out of which we have created these incredibly grandiose conceptions
 of what is happening
 science is just whistling past the graveyard
 don't forget that the telescope is about 500 years old this year
 so to believe that the story science tells us is true
 when we can't understand the mathematics
 we cannot build the instruments ourselves
 we cannot analyze the data
 we are under the thumb of a priesthood
 more domineering
 more removed from the ordinary concerns of ordinary people
 than any priesthood of any religion in the past ever was
 I think we should hold all that in abeyance
 I'm not saying it's not true
 I'm saying it's not possible to tell whether it's true or not
 one thing psychedelics will do for you for sure
 is to convince you that what's real
 is what I call the felt presence of immediate experience
 that's what's real
 what you think, what you feel, what you see now
 is what's real
 even your own memories are so shifting and elusive
 and subject to psychological transformation
 based on your own inner and unconscious dynamics and kinks
 that to believe what somebody else is telling you
 about the temperature of bagel juice or something like that
 or the charge of the top quark
 means you've moved off into some kind of private Idaho
 crazy people rave about stuff like this
 but I think people who are rooted in a good philosophical method
 will not give much credence to anything out of reach of their good right arm
 and the psychedelic experience is an experience
 you know, I didn't present you with a set of tensor equations
 or a tape of electromagnetic data
 interpreted through the Fishie formula
 we're talking experience here
 and this experience, if made commiserate with ordinary experience
 I think leads to the conclusion that
 this is, I said this the other night
 this is as dead as you'll ever be
 this is as low as you can go
 this is as confined a mode of existence as it's possible to know
 and it's all up from here folks
 it's a kind of Gnostic vision
 it sees our present circumstance as the low rung of a ladder
 of transformational distillation
 and we come from we know not where
 I mean we have, yes, the details on the fertilization of the egg
 by the sperm and so forth and so on
 where the form comes from we don't know
 this is the mystery of morphogenesis
 and then where the form goes to we do not know
 I mean I now think that the proper way to think about biology
 is biological objects
 plants, animals, fungi, bacteria, amoebas and human beings
 biological objects are hyperdimensional objects
 you can tell that that's true because whenever you
 what is the sine qua non of a biological object
 meaning what is the thing it must have to be biological
 it must metabolize
 that's the essence of life
 the form is stable but the matter and the energy
 which compose the form are in constant cycling
 the form stabilizes but the energy is flowing through it
 which stabilizes it
 well when we use phrases like cycling through it
 flowing through it
 these are words which imply a temporal dimension
 if you have a chair and you cut into it
 it doesn't bleed, it doesn't squirm away
 it doesn't begin to rot and fall over
 if you cut into a living object
 it undergoes all kinds of changes
 this is because you have destroyed one of the dimensions
 necessary for its manifestation
 the temporal dimension
 the living body has a relationship to time
 which the chair doesn't have
 the chair is born along in the stream of time
 the biological object is made of time itself
 as much as it's made of space and matter
 and so really what birth is
 is the descent of this mysterious entity called the form
 into matter
 it clothes itself with matter and energy
 through a process of gestation, unfoldment
 separation from the environment of gestation and unfoldment
 which is the mother's body
 and then it has an autonomous existence
 but what is generally true
 true of all life in the phylogenetic
 I'm sorry, in the ontogenetic expression
 what's true is that it has finite duration
 everything dies
 the individual dinosaur, the individual elephant
 the individual human being, they die
 that means that the form eventually withdraws itself
 from the domain of matter and energy
 and it then presumably exists as it existed before
 having added whatever adumbrations
 three-dimensional experience has given to it
 so I've come to see the body
 as basically the placenta of the soul
 and you know, that's a way of thinking about it
 that makes dying not so terrifying
 I mean, it's as terrifying as smoking PMT
 but it's nothing to claw the walls about
 the body is the placenta of the soul
 for the individual
 well then it's just a short step
 to realizing that we are now called upon
 as a species
 to abandon the body
 the body is the collective body
 is the collective placenta of the species
 and you don't do a war dance around the placenta
 once it's served its function
 which is to bring the forming fetus
 to the point where it can exist and sustain itself
 in the dimension for which it is destined
 in the case of ordinary birth
 that's three-dimensional space and time
 in the case of this metaphor
 it's the hyperspace beyond space and time
 once we are ready to exist in that dimension
 it's time to undergo the journey down the birth canal
 and bury the placenta under the old apple tree
 and forget it and move on
 and you know, I grant you
 the analogy isn't perfect
 I mean, where is the midwife?
 where is the waving bassinet?
 but perhaps the answer to that is
 the midwife is waving in these intimations
 of the friendly alien presence
 it may be an aspect of humanness
 that awaits us just over the great divide
 and so we are going to have to
 you know, I think you probably now
 at every talk I give
 I make the analogy to birth
 that this is what we in the 20th century
 are experiencing
 the 20th century is analogous
 to the birth canal of human history
 and so, you know
 the wonderful swim in the amniotic ocean is over
 the fool's paradise
 of the fetal life is ending
 now, the walls are literally closing in
 we can't get enough oxygen
 we are using up our food
 the walls are strangling us
 there is no room on this planet for all of us
 and for us it's a catastrophe
 but I imagine when a woman goes into transition
 that the fetus, if it's not a metaphysician
 must be fairly alarmed by the situation
 it must just say, well I guess this is it
 it's all over, I'm going to be strangled
 suffocated and simultaneously choked to death
 in this situation
 it would take a far-seeing fetus indeed
 to embrace the journey down the birth canal
 as the road toward, you know
 a split-level ranch house
 in the middle of Malibu
 if you play your cards right
 surely that gets the idea across
 yes
 could you say more about your content of your story?
 I was really fascinated
 and it seemed like there were some qualities to it
 that I wanted to know, hear more about
 well, sure
 DMT, if you take it orally
 is destroyed by enzymes in your gut
 so it has to be smoked
 unless you have a chemical strategy
 for inactivating those enzymes
 so assuming you smoke it
 it comes on in about 30 seconds
 and if you're a leather-lunged Hashashin
 you can maybe get it in one swell foot
 but it takes most people about three hits
 and the first thing you notice
 is that it's as though all the air
 has been drawn out of the room you're in
 suddenly the colors come forward
 the edges sharpen
 this is really happening
 it has an extraordinary effect
 at low doses on visual acuity
 so does psilocybin
 and then you close your eyes
 you feel very peculiar
 a kind of anesthesia sweeps through your body
 a kind of numbing and yet a sense of
 a building bubble of energy
 you close your eyes
 and after a few seconds you see
 forming in front of you
 what I call the chrysanthemum
 it's a floral mandala
 usually in yellow and orange
 most people say
 and it's slowly turning
 it's like a wall
 but it's a hallucination
 but it's right here, right in front of you
 and you watch it for about 15 seconds
 if it stabilizes
 you need one more hit
 what usually happens
 is that after about 15 seconds
 of contemplating this thing
 it's as though suddenly
 whatever was holding you back
 the cable is cut
 and you are just propelled through
 this membrane
 and you hear a sound
 like a bread wrapper being crumpled
 a cellophane bread wrapper being crumpled
 and thrown away
 and it explains
 this is, according to a friend of mine
 your radio intellect
 exiting the anterior fontanelle
 at the top of your head
 but he could be wrong
 but whatever it is
 and then you hear a tone
 which is, it could be reproduced
 on a synthesizer
 it's that
 [synthesizer sound]
 you know, but it keeps going
 and becomes hypersonic, supersonic, subsonic
 I don't know
 and there is a sense of
 literally a membrane is ruptured
 and now you're there
 and what happens to me is
 the first thing I hear is a cheer
 a yell of greeting
 it's, on their second album
 the Pink Floyd have a song
 in which they sing
 the gnomes have a new way
 to say hooray
 well, you break into this gnomeness
 and it's a very
 specifically characterized place
 it is domed
 it's indirectly lit
 not brightly lit
 but it's soffited lighting of some sort
 it's comfortable
 and, but all of that is
 hard to focus on
 and relatively inconsequential
 because the main thing that's happening is
 these things come bounding towards you
 like greyhounds
 and there are many of them
 these jeweled, self-dribbling
 transforming basketballs
 which look like iridescent electric radiolaria
 or something
 I mean, they are diatomaceous neon transforms
 made of syntax
 or some damn thing like that
 and they come towards you
 and you have to deal with yourself
 in this situation
 because most people
 their reaction is absolute amazement
 complete hysterical disbelief
 I mean, you just say
 my God, what is happening?
 it comes so quickly
 that it isn't like a drug
 where you deep breathe
 and you close your eyes
 and you wait for an hour
 and you slowly summon it
 out of its crevice
 it's not like that
 it's like you were struck by lightning
 in fact, some people think
 they have been struck by lightning
 that they never got to the drug
 that just as they raised it to their lips
 they were struck by lightning
 or a jet fighter fell out of the sky
 or something
 and then you have to ask yourself
 is this okay?
 because it's so radical
 and it happens so quickly
 and your eyes are wide open
 and you don't see anything recognizable
 three dimensional space
 the room you were in
 everything, it's gone
 instead, this place
 and then they tell you
 they try to reassure you
 although they are not very reassuring
 what they say is
 don't give way to amazement
 don't abandon yourself to wonder
 basically, don't be a jerk and a rude
 you know
 pay attention
 pay attention to what is happening
 and then they proceed
 to do a very intense form of team teaching
 they come bounding up
 they present themselves
 they also do this weird thing
 where they jump into your chest
 and then they jump back out
 so you are having this sucking
 in and out of your body
 they jump in and out of your chest
 and they are singing
 and squeaking and squealing
 in some kind of elf glossolalia
 which you can see
 this is very important
 they speak a language which you look at
 you don't hear
 and they make objects
 which are like super puns
 of some sort
 in that the object is not one thing
 it is somehow several things simultaneously
 a pun attains its effect
 by being simultaneously more than one thing
 but these are not verbal puns
 these are objectified puns
 in three dimensional space
 and they are funny
 and the whole thing is pervaded by
 the word zany
 is what I use
 it is a form of humor
 it is a form of merriment
 but you can't entirely relax around it
 because you can't entirely be sure
 that you are getting the joke
 it is like a humor with an edge to it
 and they are showing you these jeweled
 I have compared them to Faberge eggs
 and when they show you these things
 you can tell by looking at them
 that if you could bring a single one of these objects
 no larger than an orange
 into this world
 it would end the debate
 I mean all you would have to do is show it to somebody
 and they would say
 that's impossible but yet it's happening
 so therefore my reality is dissolving
 I mean it's somehow to gaze upon these objects
 is to be forever corrupted
 for ordinary consciousness
 make them with their voices
 these objects are quasi alive
 the objects themselves can sing
 and make other objects
 so you are just being
 you are like in this
 a cross between Santa's workshop
 Tiffany's and the basement of the Metropolitan Museum
 and they are offering you all this time
 I have somehow stretched the thread too tightly
 and now I am never going to make my way back
 and they are saying
 no, no, can that, that's not what's happening
 this is what's happening, pay attention
 look, look, look
 and then it just fades very suddenly
 and they sense it coming
 they have urgency
 because they know the window
 is tremendously narrow
 and in the final moments
 in some cases I recall
 they literally
 it recedes away
 or you pull away from it
 and they say, "deja vu"
 "deja vu"
 and then you open your eyes
 and you are in the room you left
 it's like a thousand mics of LSD or something
 you are more loaded
 than you have ever been in your life
 and you immediately proclaim
 my God, I am completely down
 and you know, the walls are rubbery
 the Persian carpet is crawling around
 your friends have faceted faces
 and look like they just climbed out of one of
 Billy Meyer's starships
 but you are absolutely completely down
 you accept this as ordinary
 it's all you can do to keep from kissing the good earth
 because where you were
 was so much removed from that
 there is no comparison
 well, now after doing this a number of times
 because the first time you do it
 the goal is pretty much to live through it
 I mean, it's like being shot out of a
 I read, I think it was Tim Leary's metaphor
 he said it's like being shot out of a cannon
 with baroque barreling
 and afterwards people want you to draw the barreling
 what you were trying to do was live through the experience
 but after you do it
 many, many times
 in 10, 15, it depends on how bright you are
 and how able to resist freaking out you are
 my impression became
 and this is astonishing to me
 based on what I've said so far
 this is someone's
 someone very strange
 it's someone's idea
 of a reassuring environment for a human being
 this place you end up
 which is the weirdest place you could ever conceive of or imagine
 has been specifically designed by someone
 to be as mundane, ordinary
 and like this world as they could possibly make it
 not only that
 the impression that I have is
 the vibe of this place, if you will
 is, it's a nursery
 it's a playpen, in fact
 and these toys, these things, these elves
 are nothing more than the equivalent of stringing
 a string of colored plastic objects over a bassinet
 there to teach you spatial relationships
 and hand-eye coordination
 you are briefly in
 a nursery for receiving
 human beings who have just crossed over from hyperspace
 well, imagine if all you knew about this world
 was a nursery and a maternity ward
 or a home somewhere
 and you're trying to deduce the nature of the universe
 from a 30-second visit to a human nursery
 that's the kind of position we're in
 and I think that is what gave me the notion
 that this has to do with the after-death state
 apparently, the soul is literally being born
 into this other dimension
 and the soul is not
 it's exactly like this world
 when you're born into this world
 you're just a little worm of a thing
 you have to be held by your mother
 you have to be swaddled
 you have to be kept away from bright lights
 breezes, men with cigars, and so forth
 and the soul, as it transits into that place
 you immediately meet the
 just-extended existence of your soul
 in an entirely new domain
 how?
 everyone's got to be trapped in that place
 down on the earth
 you mean stayed in that place?
 yeah
 no
 and it seems to me unlikely that anyone would
 because interesting about DMT
 is that it occurs naturally in the human brain
 we all make it, all the time
 and so in a sense, this is not a drug at all
 this is a human metabolite
 that you're getting a tremendous overdose of
 but the fact that it occurs naturally in the human brain
 means that you have chemical pathways
 biosynthetic pathways
 that can deal with it
 that's why it lasts so short a time
 one way of talking about the toxicity of a drug
 is to ask the question
 how long before you feel perfectly normal
 after taking this drug?
 if you have a drug that
 24 or 48 hours after you take it
 you still have lower back pain
 and you're lying in warm baths
 and avoiding ringing telephones
 and don't want to talk to anybody
 that's a toxic drug
 I don't care whether it's coke, mephedrine or LSD
 you shouldn't... that's not good
 DMT
 it...
 10 minutes
 within 10 to 15 minutes after taking it
 you not only are down
 you can't tell you did it
 there's no residual
 no lingering headache
 no dryness of mouth
 no dilated pupils
 nothing
 it's like you took an ice cube
 and hurled it into a blast furnace
 and then you went looking for it 15 minutes later
 it's not to be found
 it ain't there
 well, this is amazing
 because this is the strongest psychedelic there is
 you'd think that you'd have to put ice packs on your head
 for a week after this
 and instead it's completely gone
 so Rupert and I in talking about this
 he developed the idea of what he called
 a necrophic compound
 he thinks that DMT
 that at death
 you flood your system
 with DMT
 that this is what these pathways exist for
 and that it sets you up for
 for dying
 and that
 if you can...
 and I gave DMT once
 to a Tibetan Lama
 who
 a very old one
 not one of these
 alcoholic fundraising Lamas
 the real thing
 the real thing
 and the guy took it like a man
 he was probably 92
 and afterwards he said
 it's the lesser life
 he said you can't...
 he said if you go further
 you can't return
 that's the limit
 and that there is no failsafe
 and he was perfectly matter of fact about it
 and I took him at his word
 if anybody should have known
 this was to do
 and
 I think it's a tremendous argument for hope
 and you see
 it's not only an argument for hope
 it means that if we could get the...
 well
 the infantile
 shit-brained
 drug-phobic
 yahoos
 sent back to wherever it is
 that they are going to be sent
 to practice their family values
 then
 we could actually do significant research
 and find out what's going on here
 it's an object of legitimate research
 we don't have to genuflect in front of this
 like it's a religious mystery
 and we'll always be unknowable
 in principle
 what we need to do is
 you explore this dimension
 the way you explore any unknown dimension
 you send people of great courage
 and descriptive skill
 in
 with their notebooks
 their telescopes
 their tape recorders
 or whatever is the equivalent for this job
 and then you find out what it is
 and
 I think that the destiny of the species
 may be
 spun into this
 it may not be
 it may be
 that this transition into hyperspace
 is not as inevitable
 as I previously assured you
 it may be that we have to do something
 on this side
 we have to meet them halfway through the mountain
 they're boring toward us
 we have to alert ourselves
 to the fact that a tunnel is possible
 and then get cracking, you know
 with dynamite
 which is an analogam for DMT
 yeah
 Terence, can you go into
 quickly say something about
 the distinction now between
 what you have spoke about the last ten minutes
 with talk
 the distinction between
 Faberge eggs and
 basketballs and self-transforming machine elves
 and that
 that one may occur by going into the Amazon canopy
 and experiencing some type of preparation prepared by the natives
 is that organically mixed
 earthly-based
 high
 similar to the synthesized DMT
 now I have taken DMT
 many, many years ago
 but it would seem that
 the natives may
 say, describe it at least in a much different fashion than yourself
 what is the distinction
 and then also
 if you can hit on after that
 the distinction between that and suicide
 well, the difference is not
 as great as maybe your question implies
 first of all
 the thing that is so interesting about DMT is
 if the only requirement is
 that you be able to hold the toque
 and if you cough and lose it
 then it's murky and mucked up
 in the case of ayahuasca
 which is what you're asking about
 it's a
 well, I'll explain to the group
 remember how I said that DMT is destroyed in your gut
 so you have to smoke it
 but then I added the caveat that
 unless you
 somehow inactivate this enzyme system in your gut
 which will destroy it
 the DMT
 well, it turns out there's a way to do that
 the enzyme system
 is called monoamine oxidase
 and there are compounds called monoamine oxidase inhibitors
 if you take a monoamine oxidase
 or MAO inhibitor
 then
 and follow it with oral DMT
 then the DMT will not be destroyed in your gut
 it will actually be absorbed into the lining of the small intestine
 a large intestine
 and then passed into the bloodstream
 and you will have a psychedelic intoxication
 well, in the Amazon
 this has been understood
 by the shamans for a long long time
 and so they take two plants
 one
 Banisteriopsis capi
 a large woody vine
 a twining liana
 and it actually contains
 a powerful short-acting
 monoamine oxidase inhibitor
 and they take this vine
 and they pulverize it
 and they combine it
 in a large pot of water
 with the leaves of another plant
 which contains DMT
 it may be one of several plants
 it's usually Secotria viridis
 then they boil these two things together
 and then for hours
 and then they pour the water off
 and save it in a jug
 and put fresh water on this
 this mess of two different plants
 and boil it again for hours
 and then they pour the two water fractions together
 and they get rid of all the solid matter
 they throw it away
 it's now been cooked for six to eight hours
 and they take this watery fraction
 several gallons
 and they drive it down over a hot fire
 until they get something
 a dark brown thick liquid
 that is truly horrifying
 to ingest because the taste is so ghastly
 because all the salts and sugars
 and God knows what else have been concentrated into this stuff
 but this is now a beverage
 a liquid
 I love it that in the literature
 they call it a psychoactive beverage
 and when you drink it
 the compound from the woody vine
 harming
 inhibits the MAO
 and the DMT passes through
 and enters the blood stream
 and instead of a ten minute experience
 that reaches the apex of intensity in two minutes
 you get an experience which is drawn out
 stretched out over about four to six hours
 now usually this is not
 it's a psychedelic experience
 it's similar to mushrooms in some way
 but if you really make it stiff
 if you really put the pedal to the metal
 on the amount of psychotria viridis
 or DMT containing leaf
 that you put into this stuff
 then after about two hours
 you can slowly
 by sitting in darkness
 by practicing breath control
 you can slowly manipulate it into a place
 where you then say
 by gosh and by golly
 we've made it to the elf nest
 here it is
 so I think that
 great shamans
 courageous shamans
 have always been able to make their way
 into the presence of this thing
 but I put the great qualifier
 in front of the word shaman
 because in my actual field experience
 in the Amazon
 what I discovered was
 once it got you loaded enough
 to be comparable to say
 four grams of mushrooms
 most of these guys would look at you in horror
 if you suggested that it was only twice as strong
 as it should be
 shamans all over the world
 have an ambivalent attitude
 toward these dimensions they go into
 very few just hurl themselves
 delightedly into complete boundary dissolution
 I had a guy tell me once
 he said you think just because we run around
 wearing penis sheaths
 that this stuff is easy for us to do
 well I've got news for you
 it's as hard for us
 as it is for anybody
 it's hard for human beings
 to surrender to something so strange
 I could never get ayahuasca to carry me
 into the DMT nest
 until I made it myself
 and then with nobody
 you know
 holding my elbow
 and keeping me
 and telling me how much
 potry of a rivet I should put in
 I was able to jack it up
 and jack it up
 until finally it was truly horrifyingly strong
 and that's what you want
 and we're not interested in
 colored lights and dancing mice here
 so
 now let me see
 did I cover the waterfront?
 no
 comparison to DMT
 to psilocybin
 in that you explained one time
 in one of your past lectures
 that the earthly or UFO type images
 that appear from psilocybin
 is supposed to be more earthly
 mother of god is connection of the ayahuasca
 but I think if you push the ayahuasca hard
 it all begins to migrate
 in this direction
 psilocybin you know I advocate
 5 dry grams in silent darkness
 8 dry grams in silent darkness
 will give you the indistinguishable
 from a DMT flash
 the problem is
 you know one thing about DMT
 that is both frustrating and liberating
 is that it's so brief
 basically it's like a rollercoaster
 the great consolation is
 this is only going to last for 5 minutes
 if you climbed on a rollercoaster
 of super intensity
 and as they dropped the bar over your lap
 they said oh yeah
 this is the 4 hour trip
 then you would say
 oh god
 it does appear though that by IV
 which is mostly how I did it years ago
 that it seemed that it was extended to about
 30 to 40 minutes
 IV DMT?
 yeah
 you mean that you shot it in the venus
 you don't mean that it was a
 a perfusion pump
 no
 no
 well see I've talked to
 to people who've done research on DMT
 and a surprising conclusion that comes out
 of those discussions
 is that shooting it is not as intense
 as smoking it
 shooting it
 is not as intense
 well yeah it sounds fairly intense
 but people who do both
 say shooting it can't play a candle to
 and this is a funny thing
 I'll just mention it as an aside
 drug researchers
 love to shoot drugs
 into their experimental subjects
 they love the syringe
 as the route of administration
 because you get better numerical data
 because you can measure the dose absolutely
 and then you hit them
 and you know they got it
 if you smoke something
 you may, you know, obviously
 when you can hold your breath no longer
 and you exhale
 smoke comes into the room
 that's not part of your dose
 and sometimes there's a residuum
 in the bottom of the pipe
 that's not part of your dose
 so in the name of precision
 people who've done research on DMT
 have always shot it
 even the recent study
 out of the University of New Mexico
 it was by injection
 I tried to persuade them
 to do a section
 with smoking
 but this argument for numerical precision
 carried the day
 but the effect of relying on
 intravenous injection like that
 is that no one in the clinical situation
 has ever observed or experienced
 the flash that I'm talking about
 I don't think you can attain it
 except by smoking
 How about the penis snuffs
 that the other models are making
 very consistently?
 No, I've done those
 and that is
 no, well
 tell the truth
 let the chips fall where they may
 highly overrated
 for several reasons
 first of all
 you have to snuff
 close to a tablespoon
 of these toasted and powdered
 if anadinanseroparigrine seeds
 and there's a lot of
 cellulose there
 and so you do not
 absorb it instantly
 the other thing is
 it's so physically unpleasant
 to do it
 that there's a tendency
 to cut low on the dose
 because the standard method
 of administering adenine
 is you have a hollow reed
 like a bamboo reed
 about this long
 you fill it
 with this powdered
 toasted sawdust
 essentially that has been reduced
 to flour
 and you get up on your haunches
 and your friend comes over
 and you put the tube
 up your nostril
 and he blows
 he takes a huge
 lump full of air
 and he just blows
 as hard as he can
 well, the effect is like
 being hit in the face
 with a two by four
 I mean, you stagger backwards
 you salivate
 it's intensely painful
 you scream
 you squirm around in the dirt
 and then you get back up
 on your haunches
 and by that time
 he has loaded the tube
 for the second nostril
 and then the whole thing
 happens all over again
 except now you're salivating
 your eye is swollen up
 your sinuses are filled
 with this gunk
 and you do it again
 same thing
 scream, squirm in the dirt
 so forth and so on
 then you stagger over
 out of the sun
 into the shade
 and sit
 with this
 with his saliva
 just pouring out of your mouth
 and after about five minutes
 you begin to drift into
 a psychedelic state
 of some sort
 but there is no sense
 of a rush
 of a
 splitting of the world
 into two halves
 it's not an effective
 route of administration
 what do you call it?
 the chorus spirits?
 oh well, once they get
 once they get intoxicated
 then they play this strange game
 which is almost characteristic
 of this white
 Yanomamo
 cultural group
 guys square off
 they stand about three feet
 apart from each other
 and by some means
 equivalent of tossing a coin
 it's been decided
 who will go first
 so the guy who goes first
 is totally loaded on the stuff
 and he has mucus
 running out of his mouth
 saliva running out of his mouth
 his eyes are swollen
 practically swollen shut
 he pulls back his hand
 and he hits the other guy
 right in the center of the chest
 as hard as he can
 so the guy
 either loses his feet
 or does in many ways
 he grunts like a bull
 and stands there
 he also is in the same state
 then he pulls back
 and then he does it
 and they keep doing this
 until somebody is knocked off
 their spot
 and when you interview them
 later about this
 what you're told is
 your ability to stand on your spot
 depends on how many of these
 Hikuli spirits
 you have inside your chest
 and so this is some kind of
 Yanomamo
 psychology
 meeting the raw data
 of the DMT experience
 I don't know what they're talking about
 but it has something to do
 with the DMT things
 that jump in and out of your chest
 when you smoke it
 they believe that
 they say the demon from the tree
 will live in your chest
 and the more of these tree demons
 inside your chest you have
 the more physically able to resist
 being knocked off your spot you are
 and the more shamanically empowered you are
 but this goes to a point
 I often make with my groups
 which is
 one ethnic group or one culture's drug
 is another person's pain in the neck
 I've taken awful drugs
 that the people after it was over with
 they would say
 God you guys do this all the time
 it's really kind of...
 and they say yeah well it takes getting used to
 and we really don't do it all that often
 only...
 ceremonies and you're right
 most people are glad to get it over with
 and go back to the palm beer
 so your experience is basically
 that it's too caveman-like
 it's very hard on the system biologically
 and it makes it so that the
 time that you could be having
 exploring these strange dimensions
 is somehow inhibited
 yeah I don't think in the
 bina-taking situation that you ever
 get enough all at once
 to the synapses in sufficient concentration
 to deliver you over
 into what I'm describing occurring on the...
 I took ayahuasca and linked it to snuff
 right after I drank the ayahuasca
 strangely enough though
 those cultural groups do not overlap
 you know where there is ayahuasca
 there is never athena
 where there is athena
 if there is ayahuasca there never is...
 there's no ethnography done right now on that
 that may be an area where someone
 would want to explore by bringing in
 non-indigenous...
 sources of ayahuasca into the
 mammal area
 well people are...
 you know traditional people are
 surprisingly conservative
 I mean I've sat with ayahuasqueros
 and done their brew
 and talked to them about DMT
 and then they say well describe it
 and so then I will describe it
 as I described it to you here
 and then my best guy said
 well...
 I don't know it sounds a little intense
 I think I'll take a pass on it
 you know and he was my mentor
 in the domain of ayahuasca
 it's pretty stout stuff
 I think that you know
 shamans have always
 you know looked over the fence
 looked through the keyhole
 stepped through the doorway
 but I think DMT
 pure crystal DMT
 or ayahuasca specifically brewed
 to reality obliterating doses
 is the only way you can approach this place
 yeah
 I'm wondering
 on the experience you talked about
 you're being taught
 you mentioned that
 yes
 yeah the second part would be how
 have you done this?
 I've done it maybe 30 times
 I haven't done it for a couple of years
 DMT or DMT?
 no DMT
 I'm...
 sometimes I think it's a young man's game
 or sometimes I'm just getting chicken shit
 you know
 this is not a drug of abuse
 let me tell you
 I know people who say it's their favorite drug
 and you say well when was the last time you did it?
 and they say 1968
 and they're still processing
 to feel no need to go back and have a second look
 what was the first part of your question?
 what kind of knowledge?
 ah the knowledge
 the knowledge is interesting
 the knowledge is
 they want you
 they want me
 to
 make language that you can see
 they absolutely are convinced
 that this ability to make things visible with sound
 can be taught
 and that's what they want you to do
 they demonstrate it
 they say see what we're doing
 now do it
 and you say but
 and say no excuses
 we don't have a lot of time
 it's almost over
 do it
 do it
 then you attempt to do it
 and you discover in that place
 you can do this
 but why this is so important
 because when you come back to this world
 and listen to tape recordings of yourself doing it
 it's gibberish of some sort
 it's a kind of neurologically driven glossolalia
 it's like
 it's a language unhinged from the necessity of meaning
 and yet it is true that when you do it in that place
 it's absolutely ecstatic
 it's like sex
 but sex is sort of like a white light
 kind of thing
 this is like a colored spectrum
 if you could put the sexual experience through a prism
 and change the purity of orgasm
 into a spectrum of stuff
 then it would be like this language
 it's pure poetry
 it's poetry so thick you can literally cut it with a knife
 and they want you to do this
 and they are absolutely passionate
 about this is what we are here to teach you
 how to speak in a language that can be seen
 and a language which could be seen
 would be a kind of telepathy
 if you could see what I mean
 you would see my thoughts
 the way we communicate
 small mouth noises
 and the assumption of shared dictionaries
 an assumption which is never borne out by careful questioning
 is a miserable way to communicate
 if we could see our linguistic intentionality
 it would be the equivalent of seeing our mind
 and so this is what they want us to do
 now maybe if one were truly dead
 they wouldn't be so urgent about it
 and they would be like a relative leaning over a bassinet
 and holding up objects and saying
 look at this baby
 look at this
 this is a bell or something
 but definitely what they teach is in the domain of language
 and it's not a teaching which can be said
 like love one another or you know
 if it's juicy eat it over the sink
 it's more an ability locked in your physiological structure
 that we are not using
 they want us to speak in colored lights
 and it's their agenda
 it's not mine
 I have the faintest idea why that is so compelling
 well that's a little unfair
 I've given a lot of thought to it
 but initially I couldn't figure it out
 we'll I'm sure get more into this this afternoon
 it is the little self-transforming elf machine informs me
 lunch time
 thank you for putting up with this
 I appreciate your silent scorn
 or whatever it is
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