we are called to higher things and are passing through a series of bootstrapping self-transitions that are synergized by the psychedelic plants in our environment and whose end state is anticipated in each of us as a microcosm when we surrender our egos and submerge ourselves in the great raging mystery of being that is all around us all the time, everywhere [applause] Wait, let me try and see somebody I can't remember that you were currently... Yes Earlier you mentioned people doing work with Ayahuasca, currently now in the backstage I guess therapeutically and also in some other ways Detail? Who are they? How will they go about it? Ok, the question is that I mentioned that there is therapeutic work going on with Ayahuasca It's very much underground and hush-hush because the legal status of these things has never been defined Let me make that clear They should be, but Ayahuasca is neither illegal nor legal There has never been a case involving it in the United States So it's in a kind of limbo and we should all be discreet about it and let these therapists do their work Eventually of course it will be defined If you're interested in more information about that kind of thing, write me But I will say about it that there's no preconception here of a psychoanalytical theory What I really respect in these therapists is that they are doing it as closely to the way that it's done in the Amazon as they can And really, often in the Amazon the brew is watered or they pull punches on the dosage Because they don't want crazy gringos running amok and blowing their minds So the search for Ayahuasca can be pursued perhaps now in North America with the even greater hope of success than in South America But we always have to be referred back to the shamanic forms because that's the only guidance we have I mean they may not know everything about it but they do have a thousand or more years of tradition that can be our guide Now when you actually deal with these Ayahuascaras you discover they're not like priests They are not dogmatic They're open to experimentation too and you can suggest things And they know the chemicals lie behind this They're not naive but they also know that the spirit lies within it They are also not naive in the way that we are naive So it's a tremendously fertile partnership to deal with these shamans They will share their knowledge and we need not come to them as inferiors or uninitiated people What they really respect are peers And this is what everybody really respects This is why I think the guru-chela relationship is so damaging Because in the first place nobody knows enough to be a guru And nobody knows so little that they should define themselves as a follower It just doesn't work that way Back up a little bit You mentioned earlier, maybe Friday or Saturday, about the political agenda And I'm wondering if that means for you trying to work within the system as it now exists Whether there is any effort to legalize, at least, psychiatric abuse, psychosis, psychosis And basically if you could just outline what you do or your political agenda Well my political agenda is much more modest than that I am just interested in keeping the dialogue going Meeting with groups of people like this And knowing, because we have the support of institutions like OBAI That we can meet and discuss this There does seem to be, apparently, this drug issue is going to be a big deal And lies directly in front of us And what we're being asked to decide in this presidential election upcoming Is do we want to go full steam ahead into total fascism In order to solve the drug problem Or are we willing to think of, God forbid, legalizing some of these things And ceasing to beat upon each other because of the issue of drugs Because I think that the whole thing which is holding back legalization Is the Judeo-Christian uncomfortableness with the notion that somebody might have fun In a way that you disapprove of Because drugs like heroin and cocaine are certainly a social scourge But on the other hand, so is Valium and alcohol And to hold your nose at one and condone the other Is just total cultural schizophrenia So I think what we need to do, and this may be coming out of necessity Is entirely disconnect the drug issue from morality The notion that people who do certain drugs are bad And people who do or do not do certain other drugs are good Is infantile and preposterous What needs to be done, I think, is to, first of all, legalize all plants That's very simple Legalize all plants Okay, then what are we going to do about these synthetic, addictive, hard drugs Like heroin, cocaine, alcohol, so forth They should be decriminalized And if we're going to sell alcohol in this society If we're going to peddle Valium Then we should sell all the rest And tax them very highly And if there's a price to pay in addiction As we go through the process of educating people The taxes from these substances will be used to pay for that education And those addiction centers Because the cost in destroyed lives And ruined societies will be far less Far less Coca was no problem in South America for centuries Now the coca trade is just screwing up everything I cannot go to my favorite areas of the Amazon and botanize Because missionaries who grow cocaine Have given orders to their Indian slaves To shoot anybody who comes into those areas This is a totally culturally corrupting force And it is money, not drugs, money that is corrupting it And the major problem is, as I said a couple of days ago The addiction on the part of governments and intelligence agencies To funny money That's what's going on The whole Vietnam war was a front for a junk running scheme A junk running scheme which made a huge amount of money for a lot of creeps Which destroyed the political will of the ghettos To seek social justice in America That all just fizzled out They killed Martin Luther King and everybody else And then flooded the ghetto with junk The cocaine thing is a direct replay Ronald Reagan is tiptoeing around whether or not he should be friends with Mikhail Gorbachev When look who he is friends with The utter scum of the earth The most outrageous, rag-tag, bandit, fascist, gangster you've ever seen Real sub-human filth They call them authoritarian regimes And make a distinction between them and communism And say, well these authoritarian regimes at least are not communist Well, I'm telling you, it's just a scam to addict a whole bunch of people to drugs And then get the money to support wars in isolated and forgotten parts of the world So, very noticeable in my own area was For years we couldn't get hashish in the Bay Area Or when somebody had it, you know, it was a crumb And suddenly about seven years ago There was all the hashish you wanted And people were quoting prices on tons And then megatons Well, this doesn't mean some hippies broke through This means, you know what it means It means that the Mujahideen needed money to support a war of national liberation Against the Soviet occupation And they had no hard currency All they had was hash And so the hash ships were allowed to unload the megatons of hash And the money was turned into weapons The weapons buyers, the weapons dealers from Israel and South Africa And the United States cashed in and made fortunes And perhaps it was a just war in Afghanistan I love hash, I'm not knocking that But I'm pointing out that that was their way of supporting the Mujahideen Was to just institute this smuggling thing And this has been done again and again And they make no distinction between a harmless drug like hashish And truly horrible drugs such as heroin I mean, heroin is really, I think, a dubious drug I think I've talked to a pretty white, squeaky clean kind of middle class yuppie crowd But I've known junkies, lots of junkies And it would stand your hair on end Here's a drug which turns human beings into cockroaches Literally before your very eyes And you don't need that It's insectoid, programmed, unexamined, machine-like behavior Raised to a degree that's just horrifying So for us, as a psychedelic community We're going to have to mind our P's and Q's Because the issue isn't about us The government isn't trying to get rid of drugs Because it doesn't want people jumping out of buildings It doesn't want people making mega fortunes That it's not getting any tax revenue out of So psychedelics have never been big money makers Nobody is getting rich off psychedelic drugs that I know of I mean, maybe a few people are having modest lives Lived in fear that at any moment A man will kick down the front door And drag them away in front of their wife and child But nobody is getting rich on psychedelic drugs That's all going on in another domain So our problem is a more serious problem It's that the psychedelics are deconditioning agents This is the real, I don't want to use the dominator metaphor But the real knife poised at the heart of the establishment Is the deconditioning potential of psychedelics That's what made the 1960s such a tumultuous thing The CIA didn't care that people were selling acids They cared that LSD was changing people's minds And so the reason I keep speaking and keep talking And hope that you all will keep thinking and speaking and talking Is because we have to build a community that understands itself That understands its members, that understands where we stand Because eventually the psychedelics will have to be dealt with As all these other drug issues will have to be dealt with So now for us is a period of getting to know each other Recognizing who we are, empowering ourselves Getting our rap straight, knowing where we stand On these various issues that will be thrown at us And then speaking and being exemplars I mean I wish that the people who are so concerned to ban drugs Could see this group of people And I think we're quite presentable I think we're making a contribution to society And we are good citizens were it not for this one issue Which then makes us of course a hated outlaw minority And I invite each of you to look around you At the people near you and realize this is your affinity group These are the people who can help you And these are the people who can really blow it for all the rest of us So we, partnership for us is no abstraction As Ben Franklin said, if we don't hang together we'll all hang separately This is a man in the blue jacket I wasn't here the other day and you may have covered it When you take the substance in a silent, dark place I wanted you to go into it a little further from that point on When I took acid years and years ago I had wonderful trips And I heard that there were people around me jumping into buildings Trying to fly Could you get into the process of how you deal with anything that might be uncomfortable I mean what actually happens Yeah, I mean from your experience Well, the model is basically the same for all of these things You fast for six hours until you have an empty stomach It isn't really even fasting, it's simply emptying your stomach And then you take it in silent darkness I always smoke cannabis If that's not your thing you should have some other means of slightly steering the situation It can be singing It can be a meditation Whatever it is that you need to have a small bore that you can dip into the psychic water If you need to shift the tone of things a little bit Then I don't do anything the first hour I just sit there and worry basically about what is about to happen I don't know whether it's harder for me but what I always think about is my public image Because I say, you know, ok, you're Mr. Big Shot, you're Mr. Psychedelic And now it's coming at you And you're always telling everybody how they should do it How the boar ate the cabbage And how it's this and it's that But you know that you don't know jack shit And you also know that now it's just between you and me and it's coming at me And so I think about all of this And then hopefully I get it squared away Usually it just comes down to, well it's too late And thank God nobody is here to see whatever is about to happen And then I just sit and it comes in a wave It comes in waves Sometimes it's gentle, if it's going to be a moderate trip The waves will begin just like incoming surf But sometimes you realize, you know, you see it coming at you And you realize that it's a thousand miles wide and ten miles high And there's nowhere to run And it's just like the rolling shockwave of an atomic blast And you just lay down and hope And many, many times on these psychedelic trips I find Clarity and courage Empowering it in each other Giving permission for it in ourselves And looking toward a future that is endlessly bright With the possibility of human transformation It is in our hands, that's not a metaphor It is literally going to belong to those people Who most earnestly and courageously define the limits of what is possible For the human mind and body and community So you are that And I salute you and I thank you And I hope to see you all soon somewhere else [Applause] This is KPFK Los Angeles We have been listening to Terence McKenna And with him, Rianne Eisler The author of "The Chalice and the Blade" In a June 1988 seminar at the Ojai Foundation in Ojai If you didn't hear the whole thing which we've just concluded It's on five cassettes And you can get the five cassettes for $40 From the Wild Store at the Ojai Foundation Again, the seminar is entitled "Man and Woman at the End of History" With Terence McKenna and Rianne Eisler And that's available from the Wild Store Box 1620 Multicolored, highly polished, contorting Filled with intent, never previously seen And profoundly other And yet, isn't it interesting This is the commonness of all the halucinogens in nature This is the one that is most like what is happening In the metabolism of the ordinary human brain So, to me DMT is a very interesting and profound kind of thing Because it's like a super-convincer This is for people who think that people who talk about The power of psychedelics are soft-headed You can invite any critic to invest five minutes In informing themselves In the facts of the matter I mean, they may have an excuse for why they can't spend nine hours But five minutes? But I take that DMT differs from the effect of 5-MeL DMT Well, whenever you ask someone a question like this What you're going to hear is a subjective answer The question was, how does 5-MeL, 5-methoxy DMT differ from DMT? I've seen people using 5-MeL DMT therapeutically Go through what must have been extremely profound Inner dynamical fluxes My own experience with 5-MeL is it's exactly like DMT Except that you don't hallucinate Which is like saying it was exactly like an Italian dinner Except there was no Italian dinner [Laughter] So what you have with 5-MeL DMT Is you have this enormous emotion This, you know, I think it's called boundary dissolution All boundaries dissolve And there is this enormous emotion of relief Of acceptance Of melting into some kind of unspeakable unitary state But that's all [Laughter] It may be enough Except that if you're braced for the onslaught Of a tidal wave of alien hallucinations You may be sort of, what, what? You know, because this large emotion comes and goes It blows through you like a wind I am interested in 5-MeL There's a fact, and since it's a fact I think I should share it with you That you should know about 5-MeL Which is when you give it to sheep They drop dead [Laughter] So I guess the moral of that is If you're a sheep, you better not do this Are we sheep or are we men? Are we sheep or are we men? [Laughter] But, you know, staggers Is the thing that ranchers, sheep ranchers Have to be aware of Because they come upon their sheep With their little cloven hooves in the air, trembling Well, that's from eating Phalaris arundinacea Which is a range grass that contains 5-MeL DMT And these tryptamines are highly psycho- and physiologically active It's thought that it's tryptamines that control heart rate Not psychoactive tryptamines But an entire other family of tryptamines That are being secreted in the neurospinal fluid So there's a lot about this that isn't understood And work goes forward Not on the psychedelic tryptamines That is, of course, a no-no One of my gripes that I don't know if I got around to in this weekend Is the fact that science prides itself on its open-minded impartiality And yet, psychedelic research is utterly forbidden You can research any horrible thing you want How much ethyl xylene it takes to create tumors in rats And all this horrible stuff But there's no human research being done By or on human beings on this planet to speak of Because it's professionally the kiss of death to become involved with this To my mind, this is like possessing the telescope And refusing to reform astronomy You know, I mean, we come upon these things They are gifts of knowledge And we need to integrate them into our growing paradigm Or else our paradigm will become just another story Back here, yes Does the CIA have extensive data on the surgic acid? The question is, does the CIA have extensive data on the surgic acid? Well, they had a program in the 50s and 60s called MK-Ultra They amassed vast amounts of detail and data on these compounds But we don't really know what they concluded I think that the psychedelics are surprisingly slippery In the hands of the managers of dominator institutions You know, when they first had LSD They thought, oh, this is a truth serum We'll give this to our agents so that they can extract information From people they meet in foreign locations Well, then six months of that theory They changed their minds and said, no What it is, is it's the antidote to a truth serum Give this to somebody and they can't tell you what they know So we'll make all our agents take it when they're captured So nobody can get information from them And then they decided, you know, that it was neither And it was a this and it was a that I have asked this question, because I'm concerned about it Of the voice in the mushroom The question being, what if these things fall into the hands Of people who are not well-intended? And I can only tell you what the mushroom said It's not entirely satisfying to me as a paranoid rationalist But what it said was, this is not your concern These things are of the good And the good, the light cannot be corrupted by the darkness The darkness passes right through it It's as though it didn't even exist And I think there's truth to that People are always asking me, why is it that I'm not Dragged away kicking and screaming? It's because it's utterly unimportant what I'm doing From the point of view of anybody in any position of authority We are all labeled flakes We are all seriously deluded people But as long as we remain less than 5% of the total population There's no problem You know, I mean, democracy is very tolerant It tolerates all kinds of cults, belief systems Sexual orientations and so forth As long as we don't threaten the power structure In ways that it can recognize That's the truth As long as we don't threaten the power structure In ways that it can recognize I don't think there's any problem And I ask you not to worry Yes [inaudible] To talk about peyote a little bit? Well, I mean, this is a... Pardon me? You mean, what are they doing? What is it all about? Well, wherever there's hallucinogenic plant use In a traditional culture, there's shamanism The shamanism of the American Southwest Is a complicated study It's not clear how old the use of peyote is We might like, without examining the facts To think that it's millennia old But the evidence seems to be that thousands of years ago The hallucinogen or the empathogen of choice Was Sephora secundifolia Which comes closer to being an ordeal poison If you're not familiar with the concept of an ordeal poison There are traditional groups of people in the world Whose path of transformation leads them not through hallucinogens But through plants that you take them And you think you're going to die And you have all the convincing symptoms Of the immediate onset of death And then you don't die And you're so damn relieved That you straighten out your life And behave like a decent person So this is the ordeal poison approach And it's very highly evolved in Madagascar and Malaysia And places like that Sephora secundifolia was a kind of ordeal poison And apparently in the last thousand years Which isn't that long It has been replaced by peyote Probably coming out of the Tarahumara Who carried it then to the plains Indians generally If you're interested in this A major landmark in ethnobotanical publishing In the last two months The publication of Omar Stewart Who's an old botanist Very well thought of guy Omar Stewart's life work The Peyote Religion Has just been published by the University of Oklahoma Press Beautiful book I urge you to take a look at it It's called The Peyote Religion by Omar Stewart Yeah I'm interested in... I remember your experience of having a very deep insight And then coming back into my life And seeing that you failed for the humanity thing And having trouble integrating Some of the damages into my life And I'm wondering how you talk about that Or approach that in your current work And so on So the question as I understand it is How do you hang on to what you learn In these peak experiences What? Or give it up gracefully Well or give it up gracefully Although I'm more in sympathy with the questioner Yeah I've always thought of the psychedelic experience As like ocean fishing from a boat And the idea is to let down your net And to bring up something useful And the nights spent on the empty ocean are beautiful But if you return with empty nets Then what have you done for your tribe? But on the other hand Sometimes you let down your nets And something the size of a freight train goes by And you best just row for shore But there are the intermediate catch And I think that this question that you ask Is very important And I don't really have an answer I have techniques But the goal is always to bring back as much as possible Because at the peak of say a six or seven gram mushroom trip You cannot believe what you're seeing And you cannot even in the act of beholding it You cannot imagine what you're seeing I mean finally it actually goes off the scale And you say you know all veils have been ripped away All truths revealed This is it, you wanted it, you've got it But then you know you have to work your way down From that summit over hours And bring back snapshots of it And the only thing I can say is It's a matter of repetition and persistence And using every trick you can think of Including voice operated tape recorders Note taking And when I really have what I think is a slam bang insight I repeat it to myself Like every twenty minutes for the next few hours As I navigate through successively diminished states of higher consciousness Until finally I emerge And I still have understood the mystery Of why my little finger exactly fits my nostril Or whoever In the back Scream How would you recommend taking ayahuasca? Do you need to disguise for this? What's the proper environment? My second question is can you say something about sex drugs? What is it? You've never heard of it? Well I'm not I don't know what it is I understand it is a suicide Oh it's a drug Well hush my mouth To be public humiliating (laughter) How many times in my life will this happen Before I finally shuffle off the stage? (laughter) Uh Two CB's Oh it's two CB's, okay Well first of all to your question about ayahuasca Which requires some explanation for some of the other people here Ayahuasca is a fascinating Combinatory hallucinogenic Substance that is made in the Amazon Over a very wide area And what it is is it's the Monoamine oxidase inhibiting harmine From a very large woody vine Combined with the DMT that occurs in psychotria viridis So it's interesting immediately Because it's a combinatory Shamanic hallucinogen There are very few of these in the world Notice that with peyote, datura, mushrooms, iboga Morning glory seeds It's one plant and the process is to eat it But with ayahuasca it's two plants And the first thing is they must be correctly combined and cooked In certain proportions by a person of good heart and clear intent So unlike any of these other things They bear very intimately upon themselves The stamp of the human being who created them And it's a very intense experience Because it not only is a full fledged visionary hallucinogen But it's also a strong, purgative, and emetic So that you are being cleaned from stem to stem While you are watching these visions roll by And it's taken in the upper Amazon In a ritual setting on a weekly basis Among the mestizo populations there And when made right, it's extremely powerful, lovely experience It's interesting to contrast it with the mushrooms Because the mushrooms have this eerie We came from outer space kind of global science fiction overview Ayahuasca is entirely of the mother It is grounding, it is of the earth The flowing rivers, the dark banks, the jungle The people, the small malocas It just carries you out into the world of the earth and the people upon it But the hallucinations can build So that they have a quality of intensity and concreteness So that you would swear that you had smoked DMT It's just that it took you three or four hours Of careful manipulation of breath and attention To reach where DMT puts you Whether you want it or not in about 30 seconds But this is perhaps a better way to go at it I'm very interested in Ayahuasca And how it has formed culture and civilization in the Amazon And it's unusual that you ask the question even Because so few people have heard of it But it is beginning to be used in psychotherapy in this country In a ritual context very discreetly And I think it holds out great promise The reports coming out of these small groups of people Who take it reverently and ritually Are of tremendous healings and reorientations Of neurotic personality structures and that sort of thing Which is exactly how it works in the context of the Amazonian situation Over here [Audience member] [inaudible] By the revelations of Philip K. Dick Do you mean the incidents that happened to him And that spawned books like Velas and the Divine Invention? Well I won't spend too much time on this Because I don't know how many people know who Philip K. Dick is I think it was Robert Anton Wilson who coined the term "chapel perilous" This is when something happens in your life And it all begins to fit together and make sense Too much sense Because it's coming from the exterior And it seems to either mean that you're losing your mind Or you are somehow the central focus of a universal conspiracy That is leading you towards some unimaginable breakthrough I don't know what that's about I've experienced it Maybe anyone who leads a long and eccentric life Has these periods where they seem to have caught the wave And are being carried toward unimaginable revelations And situations quite beyond their will This is what happened to Dick And the explanation for these kinds of things Would lead us quite far afield I would just say briefly and bravely That I think The vortexes of connectedness seem to haunt time like ghosts And they're not material objects So they're too subtle for science to pick up There's something known to shamans, poets, gamblers People like that And these vortices of coincidence and connectedness Can work either for or against us And if you don't have a model that contains the possibility of these things Then when they come upon you You will become highly agitated And think you're losing your mind Or you're being contacted by aliens Or something like that I call it, and I don't think I'm the first But I call it the cosmic giggle And you know, it comes after you sometimes And you just have to be ready for that And able to wrestle with that particular angel When it turns up on your doorstep Yes, this lady And you can see people that might be able to have these kinds of experiences This type of experience, this plight As well as, you know, the possibility of being able to Have a positive experience And have a positive experience And have a positive experience This type of experience, this plight As well as enlightening Or enlightening kinds of experiences without us And the second part of my question was Is it possible to have, have you run into anyone Who's so sensitive to substances Be they hallucinogenic substances Or just plain food In some instances that they can't tolerate Or would be way over the mark If they were to take Oh yes, absolutely I mean you meet people who are extremely delicately poised And there are people who, you know Well, consciousness can be just synergized Into all kinds of tizzies By things other than these overt hallucinogens I am somewhat thankful that I'm cut From more lumpen stock Because I wouldn't know what to do with myself If I began to have a hallucinogenic experience Not in the presence of a hallucinogen The states of mind that I'm interested in That come out of these shamanic plants Are so radically different From ordinary states of consciousness That I wouldn't care to access them Except through the technology of the plants And I often get asked this question Are there other ways to do it? Certainly claims abound You know, and you meet people who say I don't need drugs I'm seeing little dancing mice And I close my eyes And I say, congratulations But I've never been entirely convinced You know, it's really hard to convince yourself That we're all talking about the same thing That's why I perhaps rattle on more than I should I've had the unsettling experience of And I won't use any names But meeting someone who had done research on psychedelics For 20 years Had given it to over 500 people Who had taken it over 150 times And I said, we discussed the possibility That they were professionals So they had always had off the shelf chemicals And I said, well you should try fresh mushrooms And see if you think there's a difference And the 1960s in large measure With their rhetoric about psychedelic drugs I had no idea And so we have to keep leaning on each other We have to keep comparing notes And make sure we're talking about the same thing We're not talking about I mean, on the way to the mystery Along the way to the mystery Lie the realms of loving everybody Moving fields of geometric color Past lives, you name it But these are just milestones on the way When you finally get to the thing The way you will know that you've arrived Is that you will be struck dumb with wonder That you will say, my God, this is impossible This is inherently impossible This is what impossible was invented to talk about This cannot be And it's then we're in the ballpark Then we're in the presence of the true coincidencia appositorum There are all kinds of drugs and techniques And hot water and massage and this and that And vitamin therapy that moves you all over the map Makes you feel all kinds of different ways And you see people experience all kinds of personal breakthroughs Under massage and rebirthing and all these things But I don't think that's what we're talking about I think we're talking about something profoundly other That it is very hard to get this thing out into the mainstream Because literally words fail us It is a translinguistic object It is the most... If a flying saucer were to land in Central Park tomorrow It would be not as mysterious and challenging to our conception of ourselves As this psychological state is Which lies at the center of all this shamanic dancing around and probing There is something profoundly bizarre accessible to us here and now And it's a complete puzzle to me why there is so little talk about it We live in a society completely obsessed with sensation You know people shoot cocaine, jump out of airplanes Go on tiny rafts across the Pacific Cross the North Pole on a roller skate Whatever it is And yet all in the name of adventure Well you know by God if you want adventure There is adventure out there There is adventure that will sink you to your knees With tears of joy streaming down your face It isn't far away It isn't for people you never heard of or universities You don't need a lot of funding You don't have to be a professional All of this stuff Everybody talks about the mystery within And how it's all right here But I don't think people realize how literal all this stuff is The world is not only stranger than we suppose It's stranger than we can suppose The weirdest, wildest, most bizarre, unearthly thing you can imagine In your most demented state of fantasy Falls far short of the beginnings of the truth I don't know Sure Speak up The question is how do you do it right? You talk about shelf life I've talked to people recently I've said have you taken 5 grams of mushroom? Yeah I walked around a dead show and saw a cartoon No one has said yes except for one person So how to do it right? Yes I saw a voices, yes I saw an alien landscape Well I think the way to do it right And this is self serving advice But nevertheless If not me, who? Is to grow it To grow your sacrament Because then a whole bunch of imponderables are removed The bad karma of dealing with some form of criminal syndicalism The uncertainty of not knowing what it is you actually have on your hands How old it is What conditions of care and attention it was created under Plus the discipline And now I'm speaking of mushrooms Which is what I know very well The discipline of growing mushrooms will itself prepare you to take them If you can grow them You need be a lot less concerned about whether or not you can take them Than the person who simply buys them and takes them Because to grow them You must be clean, conscientious, punctual, attentive, self disciplined Cheerful Able to face adversity Willing to take chances Full of courage These are qualities necessary to grow the mushrooms And of course never leave home Sedentary, hermit like, in love with isolation Perfectly content So if you're all those things And you will not succeed in growing mushrooms unless you are Well then you've already passed through a great initiation And anyway, you know, the living world The satisfaction of working this alchemy I call it the changing of rye into mold And cynical souls have suggested yes And from mold into gold But I wouldn't advocate that step What you don't use you can give to your friends But the growing is a real partnership You will be amazed at the productivity of this organism What a workhorse You give it a hundred and twelve grams of rye in a jar And it will produce close to forty five dried grams of mushrooms That's a conversion rate of close to thirty percent That's an unheard of level of efficiency in a biological process This stuff loves to work with or for human beings And it's a tremendous insight into natural processes If you're alienated from all that And people say, oh well it's terribly technical and this and that It isn't technical, it's no more technical than canning jam It's about at that level It involves hot water, pressure cookers, gas heat, standing around That kind of thing But it is the reenactment It's a real shamanic empowering It's a calling forth of the ally before your eyes And then you see it and then you have it And then you're beholden to no one Plus you've empowered yourself by learning that you can do this thing Someone who hasn't, over here That was actually the question I wanted to ask more or less But short of me Are there other ways not growing it yourself That you can properly prepare yourself for them No matter the shamanistic cultures they have along Do it into proper preparation Well, that was the question How do you obtain it in good karma You're asking the question How do you take it in good karma The advice is pretty straight forward and simple First of all, obviously you have to have an intent To use it properly For spiritual growth and self exploration I think that goes without saying In talking to a group like this But then the practical and operational question is How do you do it Well, here's how you do it You take it on an empty stomach In silent darkness In a place where you are comfortable Now, people don't like this advice It's very simple advice And the number of people who will come to me and say I remember what you said But I took it at 9 o'clock in the morning And I wanted to listen to Mozart And there were people moving around in the house Forget Mozart You know, Mozart is great without the adjunct of these things Mozart can stand on his own My notion of what you're trying to do When you take one of these things Is you want to see the quintessence of what it is You want to see what it is So put darkness behind it So that everything you see is only it Put silence behind it So that everything you hear is only it And then pay attention and sit still And that's all there is to it Sit and watch the back of your closed eyelids With the expectation of seeing something I mean, you've all meditated Oh God, that's the most boring thing on earth This is exactly like that This is exactly like meditation Except instead of that dark ochre background That settles in with the little phosphenes floating by Instead of that is a Niagara of transcendental imagery So I would say that meditation is a great model for it You know, sit down, shut up, breathe deeply And look with attention at the back of your closed eyelids And I guarantee you, it will come It will manifest I don't know, I feel like everybody should get a chance Bertha, you haven't asked a question On your Ayahuasca trip Have you seen any of the archetypes of Ayahuasca As they arise in the traditional tradition? Yes, good question One of the mystiques of Ayahuasca is that There are certain very tightly defined motifs That occur in it And these are being swallowed by an enormous serpent And then somewhat unpredictably Since it's a South American drug The presence of black people And the jaguar motif Those three The serpent, the jaguar and the black person And the answer is yes, very strongly Not only myself but other people This is really interesting to me Because I'm interested in where are these images That's what I've always asked That's why I'm so interested in the hallucinations You see, people, you'll hear spiritual teachers say Well, hallucination is a distraction And that's all lower Bardo stuff And you quickly get past hallucination Not me I'm fascinated by hallucination Because I want to know where it's coming from How can it be that in sitting in silent darkness By myself for half an hour I can see more art than the human race Has produced in 15,000 years That's not trivial You can't dismiss that as an impediment to spiritual progress That's a mystery and a miracle Where are these images coming from? If they're coming from us Why don't we recognize them? Why is the main quality about them Something which astonishes? I could never have thought of that And yet you're seeing it, it's filling your head And so I wonder about the images in Ayahuasca Are they in our bones and our genes? Or is it a morphogenetic field of the local area? Where do these things come from? When Rondo, Bertha referred to him in her question Did experiments with urban Chileans Who had never been to the jungle They also got jaguars, black people And giant serpents And I've taken Ayahuasca in Northern California And the blackness is the most puzzling to me Because the jaguar and the serpent These are power animals But why blackness? And not blackness as honkeys, imagine it I'm convinced it's blackness as black people experience it I mean it's this wonderful It's very alien to an Irish lad like myself I mean it's like going to the Apollo It's what it's like It's like being at the Apollo It's this tremendously warm, open, funny, smart, savvy thing Why? Why should it be there, embedded in that experience Over and over again? I don't know Why should the experience of the alien Be embedded in the psilocybin experience? The sense of this thing which can communicate But which is not human And from another whole order of nature And with an entirely different conception of time and destiny And history Who are these? What are these channels out there? It's a very interesting question To me it implies, what I talked about this morning The existence of another dimension A dimension so vast That it will completely dissolve the concerns of industrial Male dominated scientific civilization We've gone as far as we can with that And we're coming back now to really facing the mystery With the things we learned on the peregrination through history And we're better equipped than ever before to understand these things But nevertheless, as the thing begins to lift the veils You realize that it is still as mysterious as it ever was In the 60s, MDA was thought to maybe help enhance community Can any of these drugs that you're talking about Be used as a tool to help accelerate the partnership spirit In family, in community, in large groups? Good question Do these natural halicinogens, can they be used to facilitate The formation of partnerships and partnership societies? Well, the answer is certainly Ayahuasca is a good case in point The way ayahuasca is used in the Amazon Among the very traditional off-river tribes Is it's used to create states of group-mindedness Among the elders of the tribe To make social decisions for the group In other words, before, when ayahuasca was first encountered The chemical in it was named telepathine This is what these European chemists named it Later it was discovered that it was the same compound As had already been isolated from the giant Syrian rue Called harmin So the rules of nomenclature meant that harmin Would be preferred over telepathine But these states of group-mindedness are very, very real And they occur on psilocybin in my experience as well I didn't talk about it too much this morning In my anthropological rap But you can imagine the power that a kind of group telepathy Would have in ensuring the survival and cohesion Of a primitive group experiencing great pressure from the environment So in a sense that's what these things may be good for It's possible to suggest that our ability to use language Was something originally synergized out of our animal organization By environmental pressures in the presence of hallucinogens There is something about communication And I think, this leads me to a favorite subject of mine I think that the ways in which we communicate with each other Are still evolving and still can gain energy From being explored with psychedelic compounds Some of you I'm sure know my notion about what I call visible language And I referred to it this morning when I said how many could see what I was saying Visible language is the notion that language need not be something heard through the ears Language sufficiently empowered might be beheld with the eyes This is what great poets are able to do And great singers of songs and tellers of stories They're able to use language so creatively That without noticing that anything has happened to you the listener You begin to see what is intended rather than to hear it And I take this very seriously because on psilocybin I have actually both beheld the intent of other people And also been able to cause them to behold my intent It's what Philo Judeus called the more perfect logos He said the more perfect logos is a logos which goes from being heard by the ear To being seen by the eyes without ever crossing over a quantized moment of transition So imagine how much... You know we always think that telepathy would be a situation in which I would think something and you would hear what I was thinking But what if telepathy were that I would say something And we both would see what I mean And could just walk around and look at it And I think we unconsciously anticipate this in the ways in which we talk about communication Because we say she spoke very clearly I see what you mean He painted the picture for us In other words we always reach into the domain of the visual metaphor When we wish to indicate a higher order of clarity in speech And I think from taking ayahuasca in the Amazon with these shamans That what we take to be beautiful shamanic songs Are for the people who are intoxicated on the hallucinogen Not songs at all but works of visual arts That are seen, that are looked at Again the visual metaphor, we talk about a tapestry of sound These really are, these Icaros, these magical songs They really are tapestries of sound And when you use psilocybin you can experiment with your own voice And discover that a certain sound is actually the color violet And another sound is chartreuse shading into lemon yellow In a way I'm trivializing it because it's much more complex than this But what you discover is that sound can be seen And that thought can be beheld I think the evolution of our brain chemistry hovers just under the threshold Of this thing becoming explicit And it's a hard thing to talk about obviously Because we're talking about speech and communication in chant itself But again by looking back into the past We can obtain an image which maybe helps us How did language as we know it and as I am using it at this moment come to be? Must this not have been something which was for thousands and thousands of years Just under the surface of our ability to take hold of it and cognize And then suddenly it gelled There was a phase transition and people got the idea That you could signify with sound That you could cause an image of a thing not present To come into the mind of your hearer by naming it And this is a tremendous, almost a miraculous ability And people talk about gorillas and dolphins and chimpanzees And there is language there But the miracle of human language And the things that we can do with it The way that poetry can set armies marching And the way messiahs take control of the destiny of whole millennia's people It's all through the spoken word It's all through the power of images Beheld in the privacy of the individual mind Somehow linked to little mouth noises And these little mouth noises go across space And enter through the ear of the hearer The hearer consults his or her dictionary And reconstructs a blueprint of the intended thought And this very crude process is what holds us together Our religions, our governments, our hopes, our fears So a transformation in the linguistic domain Would create a great cohesion And I believe that the proper view of these psychedelic compounds Is as enzymes If you're not entirely clear on what an enzyme is An enzyme is an organic catalyst Now what is a catalyst? A catalyst is a compound which causes a certain chemical reaction To progress at a faster rate without the catalyst itself being consumed In other words it drives the chemical process And these hallucinogens in the natural surround Drive and catalyze and synergize the process of consciousness in our species And what it comes down to in practical terms is The synergy of language emergence We cannot move into the future any faster Than the rate at which we transform our language And language transformation and evolution Has up until the present moment been left pretty much to find its own way There has never been really a culture With a conscious intent of transforming its language Yes, Peter I agree with you and I think there's another aspect of it That I've observed in communication And that is there's a... Like listening to Buckminster Fuller is an interesting process for me And I've listened to him lots of times from my early childhood And sometimes when I just... I don't try to understand his words I switch into another mode I've had times when I could understand everything he said Without understanding his words Some of his words So I think there's a lot of communication that goes on in that other place That I think we all have to develop to get beyond the words I agree in the realm of sound At times, I mean, sometimes people criticize me and say You use too many big words You would communicate with more people if you would use simpler words Well, first of all, I love words And second of all, it's always been my faith That if you pronounce the word clearly It will be understood, you know And I don't know if it's working for you or not But it's how I learned all these big words Is somebody said them to me and I knew exactly what they meant So I think we need to fully empower language We get along in day-to-day affairs on probably 10,000 words English has 500,000 That we would all probably recognize So we really need to experience And experiment with empowered speech and what it can do Isn't it interesting that we have millions and millions of words For things like leptons and quarks and ratchets And these kinds of things We have about five words for emotions We have, you know, love, hate, disgust And then, you know, a few others But if you will still your mind for a moment And direct your attention to your heart You will see that your heart is as busy giving out complex vibrations As your mind is The vibration, the complex vibrations given out by your mind You can usually transduce into speech And start saying I want, I think, I know, I know, this and that But when you turn your attention to your heart Most of us are totally inarticulate And even the most articulate among us in matters of the heart Still inherit a tremendously impoverished vocabulary It's very hard to say what you really mean When you're talking about your feelings Because they're such, such feathery, delicate creatures And the words that convey them are such sledgehammers Of statistical averaging and misunderstanding So this is another dimension You know, out of the 60s come concepts Which are always ridiculed by the orthodox Concepts like the vibes and laying an ego trip But what this is, is the first halting steps Toward creating a new language about emotion and feeling And it's too bad that it was broken off Or that it didn't proceed at the rapid rate it began Because we cannot, really the way I see moving into the future It isn't a matter of time passing It's a matter of stretching the envelope of language We can only progress as quickly as we can describe to each other Where it is we want to go This is again like restating the idea that the best idea will win What we need to do is all hone our ideas Clarify our thoughts and then dialogue with each other You know, this was the Greek technique Which created the first philosophical breakthroughs Which were the entire basis for our culture Our culture and much of the rest of world culture So it's always about stretching the envelope of language Seeking to say yet more clearly what we mean To adumbrate and refine and indicate nuance with ever greater clarity That is what communication is And when it's done perfectly It becomes a true partnership in art One example you used before, Terence Is the octopus that you were mentioning Changes its body and communicates physically without verbal connection As a dancer I appreciate that And I thought maybe you could make a comment This is the part of the evening where we start requesting a favorite song [Laughter] The octopus blues, briefly I talked about visible language a little earlier And John reminds me of a wonderful metaphor and insight into all of this Which is, you know, nature always provides models for what we want to do No matter how advanced or unadvanced Nature always provides the model I had this idea about visible language years and years ago But in the past couple of years I've discovered Everybody seems to discover mind in the water For Lily it was dolphins For other people it's been whales For me it was octopi, cephalopods And I'll talk about them a little bit First of all, they have extremely well evolved eyes They have eyes as good as human eyes And in fact it's always held up as a great example of parallel evolution That these two utterly unrelated organisms could have eyes That on the dissecting table you cannot tell a human eye from an octopus eye Unless you're an anatomist So, but who would want to? [Laughter] But octopi are cephalopods They're mollusks They're related to escargot and banana slugs The evolutionary distance between them and us is tremendous I mean their line and our line divided about 780 million years ago Compared to dolphins Dolphins are like the boy and girl next door Compared to this organism This is an alien organism Okay, so it's been known for a long time that these octopi could change color And it was always thought that this was simple camouflage That they change colors and match their background But observation being the key to scientific advance People noticed that, but they don't match their background [Laughter] They generate polka dots and traveling bars And what are called blushes and striping And all of this sort of thing So then it was realized they are communicating with each other This is how octopi communicate They are actually almost like creatures turned inside out Because they have a tremendously advanced nervous system Which is on the surface of their skin And this nervous system controls these specialized cells called chromatophores Which change color So that what an octopus thinks is how an octopus looks In other words they are their own thoughts They are like a naked nervous system They are pure linguistic intent And when you see them they not only are able to change their color But because they are soft bodied They can fold and unfold and reveal So they are like a sematophore They are pure linguistic intent And I think where this reaches its most psychedelic extreme Is in the benthic octopi The very rare deep water octopi that live below 1500 meters In the deep ocean where no light ever penetrates And how have they continued their dialogue into this abyssal darkness? It's by evolving light organs all over their bodies Equipped with eyelid like membranes So that if you see films of these things They are psychedelic idea complexes Transforming themselves, lighting themselves Sending traveling lines of lights and stripes and dots Well, to me this is a model for the human future of communication If you think of the way we seem to require titular animals For instance the titular animal of 19th century industrialism Was the horse realized as the locomotive Which was measured in thousands and thousands of horse power That was very impressive for the 19th century mentality The 20th century mentality realizes its titular animal Which is I think the hawk, the soaring raptor Which is definitely a dominator symbol Is realized in high performance fighter aircraft That is to be like a gigantic bird of prey The titular model, the titular animal for the future Is I would suggest the octopi Because it is probing the frontiers of communication and self reflection In fact the octopus may contain the hint Of what this great phase transition we are approaching is to be It is actually I think an effort to turn ourselves inside out To objectify the mind so that it can be beheld and freely seen So that we can each see the soul of the other And then to interiorize the body So that it is a freely commanded object in the imagination That is I think what we are headed toward And it is anticipated by the psychedelic state And will be hardwired through the feminization of cybernetics And it will release from us the tremendous pressure of limits That is what we really feel is limits And we sense that in the imagination there are no limits We just don't know how you get a 145 pound or 220 pound body Into the imagination Well I think the process is a historical one It is a cultural transformation We have to exteriorize our minds, interiorize our bodies And create a psychedelic, cybernetic, partnership, collectivity That lays the basis for a new self image of what humanness can be This is what I call shedding the monkey We are destined for grander and higher things The promise has always been there In the orgasms which we experience in distinction to most other animals In the religions which we generate in distinction to most other animals In the great collective works of art and social dreams That we generate in distinction to most other animals We are called to higher things And are passing through a series of bootstrapping self transitions That are synergized by the psychedelic plants in our environment And whose end state is anticipated in each of us as a microcosm When we surrender our... {END} Wait Time : 0.00 sec Model Load: 0.91 sec Decoding : 1.67 sec Transcribe: 6929.16 sec Total Time: 6931.73 sec