You mentioned that you mushroomed alone in the dark.
 What is the effect of being with people who are either observers or participants in the...
 Oh, well for me, I mean I'm, you have to understand, I mean I'm a double Scorpio and a kind of reclusive type anyway.
 The reason I don't particularly like tripping with people is because I just worry. I'm a worrier.
 And if I'm stoned and somebody else is stoned, then I worry. And I listen to their breathing, and I wonder,
 and I wonder how they're doing, and I wonder if I should ask how they're doing, and I just lose all spontaneity,
 and I become completely the victim of my imagined concern for this other person.
 Well then, if they're... And then the other thing that happens is people are the weirdest objects in the universe.
 And if you're stoned and you come upon another person stoned, I mean they can just unleash something you could never have imagined or conceived of.
 I remember, I think I learned this lesson the hard way in India, but years ago once at Sarnath,
 and it happened many times, but this was typical. Sarnath is the place where the Buddha taught his first sermon after attaining enlightenment.
 He walked from Bodhgaya to Sarnath. So I took mescaline there with these two women who were friends of mine,
 and it's all nicely green and sculpted, and we were sitting there under a tree, and I swear, 500 yards away,
 there were these two Indian guys walking across my field of vision. And I was sitting there, and I was loaded,
 and I was watching the traceries, and then I looked out across my field of vision, and I saw these two Indian guys
 drop dead in the center of my field of vision. And then they said something to each other, and then they turned 90 degrees,
 so they were now facing me, and they began walking toward me. And I was horrified.
 And I looked down, I said, I can't, I was so horrified that I said, I can't believe this is happening.
 I refuse to believe this is happening. I will just look at the ground in front of me like this.
 So I started looking at the ground in front of me, and I looked and looked and looked and looked,
 until two pairs of brown feet appeared in my field of vision. And then I looked up at these guys,
 and they had caught the vibe, and they wanted to know what was going on.
 And several experiences like this caused me to believe that you should really bury it deep before you take it into public.
 The other thing I've noticed is, if you're stoned in a confined space, there's a certain amount of control of synchronicity.
 I mean, there's rustling in the corners and batting at the windows and so forth, but this you can handle.
 But if you take it out into public, God, it's just absolutely uncontrollable.
 I mean, you could be struck by a meteorite. You could be abducted by extraterrestrials.
 A safe could fall on you. Anything could happen, because the statistical disruption of ordinary probability is so great.
 What did I say? Oh, I remember what I said. I looked up and I said, "I cannot be interrogated."
 It was good, but it didn't work. Say, "How long have you been in this place? You're coming from which place?"
 No, what I found in India was people were telepathic, but it didn't make them like you any better.
 It just gave them a fantastic kind of in.
 But I think group psychedelic taking is very promising, and people who can do it, groups that can do it and stick with it over years,
 log amazing experiences, but it's very hard, because what immediately emerges if you have a group of people doing this stuff
 is it will veer off in some weird direction. One person will get a "funny idea," and then the funny idea,
 and then everybody polarizes for and against the funny idea.
 Then they have to decide, "Well, they're losing so-and-so's losing their mind. They're in too deep with this."
 Say, "No, no, this is the answer, and we're moving." Quickly, cognitive dissonance builds up, and it's very, very hard.
 I have a correspondent in the Midwest, a group of psychiatrists who over six years took mushrooms once a month together,
 and they went through amazing contortions of wife trading and not speaking and speaking and denouncing and embracing,
 because it just unleashes this stuff, and then it crawls around.
 So I prefer to do it by myself and then get all combed and pinned back together before I present myself to the troops in the morning,
 because in the height of the thing, you could proclaim anything.
 Do you think it's possible for a group of people who have been fairly experienced with psychedelics to get together,
 wanting to do this very wonderful telepathic thing, and to create what they think, at least to try to anticipate
 what might be things that would pull it apart, that would unplug one?
 It's hard to anticipate. I mean, I've really found that the way the mushroom works is it reads you perfectly,
 much better than you can read yourself, and then it comes at you with the one thing that you are vulnerable to,
 because it knows you like an open book and can lead you practically any direction that it wants.
 But I think group work is interesting and should be pursued, and couple work is very interesting and should be pursued.
 I'm very conservative. I mean, my approach to it is I basically turn it on, and then I back off and watch.
 That's all I ever do. And I've seen... I don't have the magical mentality.
 I don't want to get something or take control of someone or a situation for good or ill,
 but people who do make great progress in all of these areas, you know.
 I mean, people who want to design electronic circuits or play Bach on the piano.
 But I don't do anything. I'm interested kind of in the essence of the thing, what it is, the ding on cich,
 the thing in itself. And that's why I don't listen to music. This horrifies some people.
 So you don't listen to music? No, I mean, I have listened to music. I know what it does to music.
 It makes it the best thing in the world. But without music, it also can do that.
 And so I sit in silent darkness, and I maintain that's where the essence of the thing is.
 Then it's not colored by sound or light or expectation. I'm trying to see beyond the mask,
 see what this thing is in itself, for itself. Anybody else? Anything else?
 You mean in terms of the proximity to the trip? A lot of people like to fast.
 I don't particularly say you should fast. I just say you should have an empty stomach.
 Five hours without eating is good. You should just be cleaned out, you know.
 Bring a certain amount of attention and respect to it. And it's very, very kind to beginners.
 The complexity comes later in the unfolding of the kinks of the personality.
 But I think it's very gentle to beginners. What's the Ayahuasca diet?
 You mean actually what does it consist of? It's no sugar, no alcohol, no salt, sexual abstinence.
 It's basically a diet of manioc and certain fish, and I don't think many greens. Is that it, Ken?
 Bananas, plantainose. It's probably analyzed nutritionally. It's probably a serotonin loaded diet
 because of the large amount of plantainose in it. But it's a bland diet. It's just setting you up
 to be sensitive, I think, to the uptake of the alkaloids. So it's an MAO inhibitor?
 That's an MAO inhibiting... So it's Ayahuasca? Yes, Ayahuasca works through inhibition of MAO.
 Good point. You see, normally DMT would be destroyed in the gut, but if you inhibit monoamine oxidase
 somehow, then it passes through the gut and is absorbed and passes into the blood. This was not known
 by Western pharmacology until the mid-1950s, but it's always been known in the Amazon. So the strategy,
 you see, what Ayahuasca is, really, is a slow release DMT trip where you take a plant that contains DMT
 and you combine it with an MAO inhibitor. And then when you take these together, the DMT slowly releases
 and you get the equivalent of a DMT flash, but stretched out over about an hour and a half.
 And so you can watch it more carefully. And some people say that I overstress the visual side of things,
 that all kinds of things go on on psychedelic drugs. Insights, conceptual breakthroughs, weird distortions
 of body image and this sort of thing. And this is all true, but to my mind, the visual thing is the most
 striking because it is so other. It is so highly organized, so demonstrably the product of intelligence.
 I mean, it's not a feeling, some weird feeling, you know, nausea or sub-threshold poisoning or all of these
 things. These are feelings. But it's simply the release of understanding and somehow visually processed
 understanding.
 Ken?
 In addition to the other three possibilities, the souls of the dead and extraterrestrial and all that,
 would you entertain the idea that what we're saying might be simply constructs from the subconscious?
 Yes, well, that's the other possibility. Carl Jung had this wonderful phrase in talking about elves and
 fairies. And he said, "Autonomous psychic components escape from the ego's control and present themselves
 as independent beings." Well, that's just a description of a pretty twisted around state of mind.
 It's the idea, you know, that you see the self in the mirror and then you bring the mirror down and shatter
 it and suddenly there are hundreds of selves. Each fragment of the mirror reflects a self. This would be
 a conservative theory of what these things are, except that they don't look very much like the self.
 The shock in DMT is, if this is myself, then I don't know who I am. But yeah, one thing I've thought of
 in an effort to explain it is that they are fractally parts of the personality. That an elf is, you know,
 you put ten elves together and you have a personality or something like that. And so these elves are
 literally autonomous psychic components that have broken free from the control of the ego. We say we've
 fallen to pieces, always talking about the psychedelic as a boundary dissolver. Well, maybe what happens
 when you smoke DMT is the boundary dissolves so quickly that you can say of the situation, "That's me
 all over," because you're literally bouncing off the walls and visible to yourself. The illusion that you
 are stitched together within a body has been shattered and your several or multiple personality
 components are jumping around the room. I think the most extreme case of that that I ever saw was once
 I used to smoke, I don't recommend this, but in my vanished youth I used to smoke DMT. And I smoked
 the DMT and it was wild. It went on for a long, long time and was very intense anyway. And suddenly right
 in the middle of this trip, this woman came back from Easter vacation, came charging up onto the front
 porch of this house and threw open the front door and ran into my bedroom door and started beating on
 my door furiously. Well, being a double Scorpio and secretive anyway, I just was like had a heart attack
 and I jumped off the bed right out of this DMT flash. I jumped out and I landed on my feet in the middle
 of this room and something about moving so suddenly had shattered the distinction between the two
 continua and I carried it all into the room with me. And so the room was then filled with elves and they
 were hanging off my arms and spinning me around and there was this geometric object in the room that
 was spinning and clicking and every time it would click it would hurl a plastic chit across the room
 that had a letter in an alien language written on it. And these elves were screaming and bouncing off
 the walls, this machine was spinning in the air, these chits were ricocheting off the walls and I was
 trying to deal with Rosemary in the middle of this and it was a too muchness. It was a case of seeing
 too deeply into it and you have too many of those stacked up and then you become reluctant. And this
 is why I'm very cautious with it. The notion of having enough chutzpah or will or something to want
 to try and use this stuff, I can hardly imagine using it. I mean, every time I encounter it my wish
 is to not be destroyed by it and the idea of using it for anything just seems like blasphemy and
 probably is blasphemy. It's probably a good way to get cut down to size. Yeah.
 Last night you were talking about how certain times harken back to other times. Right.
 According to this formula. And in the beginning of this weekend you were talking about the archaic
 revival going towards or through and I thought you were talking about going back to the time of
 that city in Turkey, you know that 30,000 years. Çatalhöyük. Could you say a few words about that?
 Is that connected? Well, no. That's the basic notion that somehow our future lies in our past.
 Right. And shamanism. Well, the particular past that I wanted to concentrate on was this period of
 time after the melting of the last glacier 20,000 years ago and for the 10,000 years following that
 when there were pastoral populations in Africa and leaving Africa that had developed this
 ecological balance and this shamanic doorway to nature. See, at every, oh, the computer isn't here,
 but at every glaciation human populations were bottled up in Africa during the time when the ice
 pack was thick. Nobody was getting out. But only the last time were the people, was pastoralism
 developed in the intervening period. So it was 20,000 years ago, those people leaving Africa were
 herders of domesticated cattle and all previous radiations out of Africa had been hunter-gatherers.
 But the Minoan civilization was much more recent.
 Yeah, the Minoan civilization, Çatalhöyük ended in 6500 BC, but what's interesting is this is when
 you get the earliest Minoan settlements and they carry the pottery motifs and building styles of
 central Anatolia to Crete. So it appears that what happened was Çatalhöyük was like the last
 outpost of this goddess culture and when these wheeled chariot Indo-European folks came down,
 the survivors of that actually went to Crete and Crete became this weird institutionalized
 backwater where literally for three millennia the fossilized social forms of the previous
 matrilineal society were kept intact. While on Asia Minor, on the mainland, it all became about
 kingship, male lines of descent and all that. It wasn't actually until that turning point at the
 top of the wave in 980 BC that the last vestiges of this goddess culture were crushed in Crete.
 And even then, you see the strain of mystical, of deep psychedelic mysticism that enters Greek
 religion is all imported from Crete. The northern Thracian strain in Greek religion is rational
 and airy and oriented toward physical space, but out of Crete came rites three, four, five
 thousand years old and it was always said, even up until classical times, that the rites that
 were celebrated in secret at Eleusis were celebrated openly at Heracleion and Gnosis.
 So that's the connection. My fantasy about all this is, you see, Catalhoyuk represents
 such an advanced civilization over anything else existing that, and it can be traced back
 a thousand years to Jericho. The people who built Jericho built a round tower there that
 was the absolute glory of the engineering world of 8000 BC and it was a grain storage tower.
 But then these Jericho people, it's hard to trace where they came from. What I think
 happened is that when you look at the stratigraphy of the Nile Valley, you discover that actually
 there weren't people in the Nile Valley much before 10,500 BC. Then suddenly, these
 people appear who are called Natoufian and they build under the overhanging lips of
 cliffs and have a certain style of fetal burial in a honeypot and certain other characteristics.
 Natoufians, and they appear out of nowhere. Well, anybody who studied them has wanted
 to connect them to the culture of old Europe that Maria Gambutis talks about, simply based
 on the fact that they were so culturally advanced that the bias of all these scholars is to
 say, "Well, they must have come from the Balkans." But when you look at them as a cultural
 horizon, you see, to my mind, that they are unmistakably African and that when you go
 to the Tsele Plateau in southern Algeria, you find the same style of building, of living
 under the lips of caves, and the same coarse-grained black pottery called Sudanese ware. The pottery,
 the animal motifs, the fixation on the vulture, the jackal, and the cow, these are all African
 animals that occur at Chattel, seems to suggest that there was actually a sweep of African
 civilization, and out of Africa into the Middle East around 10,000 BC, and these people built
 Jericho a thousand years after that, and settled southern Anatolia a thousand years after that.
 Well, what this suggests then is that you could go out to the Tsele Plateau with sufficient
 resources, and conduct an archaeological survey, and the ultimate payoff in this fantasy is
 that you would unearth the archaeological equivalent of Eden. In other words, you would
 discover the Ur-spot from which the Chattel civilization came, the site of this mushroom-using,
 goddess-Chattel civilization. And when you read the accounts of the Tsele Plateau, there's
 every reason to think that this strategy would work. It's a windswept sandstone escarpment,
 and Henri Lot, who did the preliminary exploration out there, said that in these arroyos where
 the sand has been cleared away by the wind, there would be Neolithic stone chippings and
 detritus, sometimes up to half a meter thick, indicating thousands and thousands of years
 of continuous habitation when this was all green. There is an enormous unexcavated tell
 out there that has never been dated, that is just carried on the archaeological surveys
 as presumed pre-Islamic. It's enormous. So digging out there might be a very useful thing
 to do. It's from that area that we get these 9,000-year-old images of shamans with mushrooms
 sprouting out of their bodies, shamans carrying mushrooms over their heads and running in
 long chains with strange geometric motifs trailing along beside them. So it would be
 a kind of recovery. I think archaeology will play a big role in the archaic revival, that
 part of our cultural dilemma and our political infantilism comes from the fact that we don't
 know any history. So we're easily led. I mean, we don't even really understand the history
 of the 20th century. I mean, you ask somebody who Joseph Goebbels was and they think he
 served in the Nixon cabinet. I mean, so hardly to speak of who was Suleiman the Magnificent
 and just exactly what was Frederick Barbarossa's role in European history and so forth and
 so on. But recovering this is like waking up, gaining control. And you know, I said
 yesterday, it's only been 1,500 generations of people that have walked us into this dilemma.
 But the archaic revival is a huge paradigm shift. You can imagine, remember the example
 I gave about the shift from the Renaissance, from the medieval to the Renaissance, which
 really was a giving up of the universal power of the church, the philosophical certitude
 of giving your allegiance to the Holy Father in Rome and setting out into the pure existential
 universe. I mean, Marcello Ficino said, "Man is to be the measure of all things." Well,
 this sounds like old hat in 1990, but in 1480, this was such a dizzying notion that it can
 hardly be imagined. Giordano Bruno went to the stake, was burned at the stake for insisting
 that the universe was infinite in all directions. He said, "No, the stars and planets go on
 to infinity." And they just said, "This is off the wall. Only a demon could inspire a
 thought like this." But the transition that we're asked to make, that was a transition
 you see from the certitude of dogma to secular existentialism. The transition that we're
 being asked to make is somewhat similar, but to my mind, deeper, more challenging, more
 profound. It's the shift from scientific certitude, scientific certitude, to a complete embracing
 of non-closure, to actually begin... It's a kind of maturity. What we're being asked
 to do is to grow up and realize that there ain't no free lunch. There aren't always happy
 endings. Not every story ends with the German shepherd running in and licking grandpa's
 face and everybody laughing, and so forth and so on. Hard truths. This lack of closure
 thing, I mean, I feel it in myself. And I assume that ontogeny recapitulates and so
 forth. So that the struggle to become a real human being is the struggle to give up having
 it actually make any sense, ultimately. Where I think it was, of all people, Robert Frost
 who said, "The secret of a happy life is learning to enjoy people you don't approve of." Well,
 there's something... What that means is you're surrendering to life. You're just saying,
 "It's bigger than I am. I may not like drag queens, but there they are, and I should get
 used to it. I should make the adjustment." This kind of thing. In other words, recognizing
 the complexity of the situation. And science has been like a centuries-long bender to exercise,
 precisely, exorcise, precisely this kind of uncertainty from life. And to reduce it
 all to atoms blindly running under the control of mathematically describable fields of force.
 The problem is all the higher order phenomena, sociological, political, aesthetic, human
 organizational, got shoved off to one side and just sort of festered there for a long
 time. Well, technology perfected itself, mass production, mass media, information transfer.
 But the human dimension lagged, and now there is this tremendous imbalance between the technological
 descriptive power of the culture and its moral and ethical power to direct itself toward
 any kind of rational goal. Well, when this happens in a society, or even in a personality,
 you can sort of make a Jungian model of this, you get what's called compensatory phenomena,
 or at least that's what it used to be called. Means eruptions of material from the unconscious
 that is organized and constellated like a message, like an attention-claiming thing.
 In a person, in a personality, it ruptures as a symptom. It may be an attention-getting
 symptom to then bring other people into the caregiving loop, or something like that. In
 a society like our own, a scientific society, it takes the form of the irrational, the irrational
 appearing in strange forms. A good example of this in the past is the birth of Christianity
 in the center of the late Roman Empire, or the early middle Roman Empire, where the people
 who were administering the world at that time were Romans educated by Greeks who were epicurean
 anatomists, not Platonists, not followers of Heraclitus or Pythagoras or any of the
 flashy folks we're into. They were democratian anatomists, rationalists, materialists, would
 have been very comfortable in a modern chemical engineering company. And they could not conceive
 that the irrational could hold any threat to their world. Meanwhile, they had dark-skinned
 servants in the kitchens and in the gardens, Jews, Greeks, Phoenicians, people brought
 from the eastern Mediterranean. And among these people, specifically the Jews, this
 rumor began to tear loose about a Galilean politician who had somehow tweaked the Romans
 and then risen from the dead. Well, any Roman administrator listening to his illiterate
 cook or gardener babble out this story would just think, "These folks is getting stranger
 every day." But what was actually happening was a message was being enunciated, which
 within 50 years would be hammering at the gate, well, make it 90 years, would be hammering
 at the gates of Rome with all the power of an invading army. In a similar way, the kinds
 of eruptions from the unconscious that characterize the 20th century are trying to serve a similar
 function. Well, I don't know where you want to put it, but like, for instance, the eruption
 of the beast man in the episodes of persecution that happened in Europe during the 20th century,
 persecution of Jews and Gypsies and Slavs. This was tremendously shocking to the sensibilities
 of so-called civilized people, because people said, "My God, we thought that ended with
 Frederick Barbarossa, or we thought that ended with Nero. How can 20th century people, the
 neatly clipped and manicured cities of prosperous intellectual Germany, how could it spawn a
 thing like this?" Well, the answers are complex and multileveled, but from a very broad perspective,
 what is happening is the unconscious is erupting into history, leaping onto the stage of history,
 claiming the undivided attention of people in a way that surrealism, which was a limp-wristed
 artistic movement by comparison to fascism, never could. Similarly, you get that under
 control, the beast is supposedly suppressed by making notice a pact with a greater beast
 that a demon can be summoned from the heart of matter with the purpose of wasting the
 cities of Germany, but then it arrives too late for that, but then it's good for the
 Japanese. So it's this opera about how evil begets greater evil and people are reaching
 for ever greater weapons. Then the intrusion of the atomic bomb into history sort of halts
 that cycle. Everyone stands back and goes for a middle class existence, and suddenly
 the skies of the planet are filled with the craft of meddling extraterrestrials who are
 obligingly dying in the desert and turning up on blocks of ice for Eisenhower to inspect
 and all this whole crazy story. Well, clearly what this is is the unconscious will not go
 away in the 20th century. Now the wheat fields of England lay down in hieroglyphic patterns
 to try and shake awake the dreaming primates. It's as though the whole of nature is infused
 with a linguistic intent to communicate. I mean, I think this is one of the things you
 learn on psychedelics, that everything has a story, everything has a lesson, and it's
 not abstract or remote or removed. I mean, to the degree that you can hold your ego aside,
 nature can teach you almost anything you want to know. I mean, you can learn hydrology by
 staring into a mud puddle, you know. I mean, it is all happening right there. But ego is
 a very subtly interfering factor. I always think, in my own experience at one time in
 the Amazon, when I was at my most illuminated, I could walk into the jungle and invite butterflies
 to come down and settle on my outstretched hands like St. Francis of Assisi, you know.
 And I would do this, and it would bring tears of joy and affirmation to my eyes. And then
 it would go on and on, and the tears of joy and affirmation would clear from my eyes.
 And in the midst of this pure, unadulterated ecstasy, a tiny thought would form, which
 was, "Wouldn't it be nice to show this to somebody else so they could see how great
 I am?" So then, you know, dismiss the butterflies, scurry back to the camp, gather up a skeptical
 colleague, bring them back to the clearing, and march out into the clearing with outstretched
 hands, to just have nothing happen, except people just turn away.
 "My God, what an embarrassment you've become, that it's all going to end like this. Better
 you should be eaten by termites. It's a better story."
 So, you know, it's weird. I mean, Tao is like that. You can't push it, you can't use it.
 Somebody asked me once, "Was I worried that the mushroom could be used for evil somehow?"
 And, actually, early on, this occurred to me, and I put it to the mushroom. And it basically
 said, you know, "You can't grasp it. It isn't even there if you have wrong intent. You can't
 even perceive it. It's very selective." And it must be so, because one of the puzzles
 for me, being in the communication business, is how it spreads, how the tree of information
 spreads, where it's tolerated, where it's repressed, where it's embraced. It's very
 interesting. You may have noticed mushrooms get extraordinary good press, or none at all.
 Even in the height of drug war hysteria, the image of mushrooms is largely neutral, unformed
 in any direction, otherwise viewed as rather comical, harmless, humorous. It is somehow
 hardwired into our consciousness, connected into an archetype that we are inherently friendly
 toward as primates. Probably this has to do with this deep food programming that went
 on for a long, long time. We literally cannot bite the hand that feeds us. So we have a
 kind of intellectual blind spot to this. Nevertheless, of course, it is a highly repressed Schedule
 1 drug, viewed in the same category as heroin, cocaine, and what have you. This is because
 it has, quote, unquote, "no recognized medical application." I don't know. It depends on
 what you think of as mental health. I would argue that it's an enzyme for the imagination,
 without which, as the sign says on the blackboard, you're not yourself. I don't know who wrote
 that up there, but they must have heard an old tape of mine. This was a graffiti on a
 wall in Cali, in Columbia. Without this, you are not yourself. Elf. The elf. The self.
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