Okay, well moving on then from Eurasia, and I'm sure I'm missing different things But if I missed your favorite thing bring it up in the question period to the North American continent and the North American continent is I almost said similarly cursed like Europe But that's just my prejudice the North American continent is similarly poor in hallucinogens There are no very interesting hallucinogens in North America and North American Indians North American culture did not avail itself of this Ecstatic plant induced shamanism it tended more to go for what's called ordeal shamanism the Sundance thing where you hang yourself by your Pectorals on hooks and stuff like that. I mean there are other ways to attain these visions But you see that absence of good hallucinogens in North America just Reinforced that whole beer and woolen and uptight thing that came from Europe the only major hallucinogen to have a role in Native American culture is of course peyote and Many people without informing themselves Imagine that peyote is something which goes Millennia into the past and that it and this is absolutely not true Peyote use may well be less than a thousand years old among Native Americans when you go back into the old graves and the old Burial sites in the Rio Grande Valley and South you don't find peyote What you find are the beans of Sephora secunda folia You all probably know this plant though. You may not know its name It's the plant that produces the very hard red and black bean that they can constrain If you all know what color in a sorry, these are erythrinas which are related to these things. Okay, that stuff contains Cytosine and cysteine this is These are what are called ordeal poisons and it might be worthwhile to just talk for a minute about ordeal poisons I said there's more than one way to skin a cat There's more than one way to have this experience that shoves you through to an awareness of the numinous That's what we're trying to do is have an awareness of the numinous Well in certain parts of the world where hallucinogens were not present in the biome people concentrated on ordeal poisons and what an ordeal poison is is it's a chemical compound that you take it and You think you're going to die and you beg for death and you do not die You get better you're fine, and you're so damn glad to be alive That you undergo an ab reaction you get straight you shed some of your Complexes and you make a you turn over a new leaf. This is What it is. Well in Madagascar these ordeal poisons have been brought to a high state of perfection also in Malaya There's a poison complex that replaces a hallucinogenic drug complex and these are horrific Poisons, so what apparently was going on in the Rio Grande Valley was after centuries of this Sephora Secunda folia cult someone discovered peyote and said You know, thank God and then the other the other plant which was big in the in the Southern California northern Mexico and across the southwest were the Tropane containing detour is the so-called to latch religion of Southern, California. Well, these are deliriant Confusions that are unless you have a psychic constitution that is not like mine You can't take these things. They're too I just found them Confusing it was like a kind of madness and also physically very difficult to handle I experimented I had a phase with these things when I was in Nepal because there are Sadhus holy men in the Kathmandu Valley who swear by this stuff And if you're in Kathmandu, you may notice in the gutter or you'll notice plenty in the gutter But you may also notice these detour a pods Empty detour a pods and I noticed them and started asking questions and then out at the Kings game preserve past Pasha Patti not I found a bunch of these things and laid in a supply And but it is an occult watery It's a dimension of confusion not a dimension of high awareness and I think some of you have heard me tell the story about the reason I gave it up was an Englishman a friend of mine who lived in this little village in Nepal where I lived He was also experimenting with this stuff And one day I was buying potatoes and tomatoes in the market and I ran into him and we started having a conversation And in the course of the conversation he revealed that he believed we were in his apartment And then I knew That you know, we weren't we were losing hold on our grounding So I don't recommend that I don't have a whole lot to say about it Apparently it's a it's a thing for magic power magic and I've never been particularly Interested in that because I'm afraid of it. I'm I'm a watcher. I like to look I like to get very close to it and watch it, but I'm not into Grabbing it or doing anything with it. I I have a feeling that would lead to catastrophe for me personally Okay, where are we now northern Mexico now we've gone all around we started in Europe We went down into Africa across the Eurasian continent North America northern Mexico now things get interesting Because as you leave the Sonoran uplands and go south in the Sierra Mazateca It is this mushroom complex Which Valentina and Gordon Wasson discovered in the 1953s? 17 to 22 species it depends on who's counting of extremely endemic meaning very localized species of mushrooms all producing psilocybin a coincident with the Mayan the cultural side of the Mayan mixtec and Mazatecan civilizations and this is psilocybin an extraordinarily powerful visionary and benign hallucinogenic metabolite once the Wasson's Had nailed down this Mexican mushroom complex Then people started checking and they discovered these mushrooms or conspecific species in many localities Two that are worth mentioning are the Pacific Northwest, Oregon, Washington and British Columbia Which appears to be the world's center for species density of the psilocybin gene and strangely enough? Very good ethnographic research turns up no hint that these Coquettal shim sham Tlingit and other people had any hint of this they lived in the center of the psilocybin Distribution complex and as far as we can tell their shamanism, which was highly evolved never Discovered or made use of this not so these civilizations of Mesoamerica the other place where these mushrooms have now been discovered and the range seems to be extending every year is Europe the tragedy of European civilization is that the logos was apparently there all the time? The English countryside I understand is now practically a scene of annual mushroom runs That are not unlike the lemming runs of Scandinavia and everybody pours out to to collect the semi Lusiata mushrooms the I've been told I haven't been to these sites, but I've been told that Ionia where the book of Kells was composed and where St. Columba went is covered with mushrooms. It's very clearly any mushroom ecology attention graduate students the tracing of mushroom motifs in European art and Civilization and culture is an extremely rich untapped field If you need some clues Look at family Ascensions look at family crests In France in France and the Italian parts of France the morele a family Has the morale on their? Ascension there are other mushroom families and mushroom Names so there may have been you know, this may have been the struggle between paganism and Christianity may have revolved Around a mushroom. We know Druids were into plants. We know they were into oak groves but The plant that is always mentioned as the druidic psychedelic psychic plant of choice is mistletoe But mistletoe is chemically very disappointing and I've wondered if mistletoe is not It wasn't the plant they wanted to symbolize they wanted to symbolize the symbiosis of one plant upon another It's that the mistletoe symbolizes at the fitic existence Anyway, this is an un an untapped area Once you get into the New World tropics, then you are in the great domain of of the hallucinogenic plants and no one knows Why it is that the tropics of the New World are? tremendously rich in Hallucinogens, I mean, I don't know how many of you are botanists or or biologists, but try to imagine Figuring out a set of evolutionary constraints that were operating on one side of the planet, but not on the other you know when we take for instance the jungles of Southern Columbia and Compare them with let us say the jungles of New Guinea These are both continental floras both equatorial both climaxed at a species rich climax and One has dozens of hallucinogens in it and the other has none none This is not well understood. I mean theories range as wildly as obviously that South America must be where the flying saucer landed and You know, that's where the genes were seeded I Confess I'm not sure why it is At first I thought that it had to do with the extremely primitive state So-called primitive these extremely archaic state of culture in the South American jungles That they represent a real Stone Age culture where when you go into Indonesia it may look primitive to you, but the Dutch were there before the English arrived in North America It is it has had centuries and centuries for which in which these things could be forgotten But of course then come the botanists who care nothing for ethnographic data and who simply carry out plant surveys and chemical analysis of plants They can't find these hallucinogens either. So this is a great mystery in the tropics of the Mesoamerica and and The equatorial tropics of the New World. There's a vast Panoply of hallucinogens not only the mushroom complex, but then also this ayahuasca or Yahe Complex that we've referred to several times This is a huge jungle vine and as we cross into the yahe area We also cross we we cross an interesting Barrier Because we move from plants single plants which are hallucinogenically active into the realm of Preparations we're on the threshold of the concept drug here because what ayahuasca is is two plants Which are not active unless brought into combination with each other one plant contains a monoamine oxidase Inhibitor and the other plant contains DMT Which would be destroyed in the gut if taken orally Unless it were taken orally in the presence of an MAO inhibitor Well, this was not understood by Western pharmacology until 1956 but it was understood by Amazonian shamans millennia ago so they bring these two things together and by varying the ratio between the plant containing the beta carbolines that inhibit MAO and the plants that contain DMT they can intensify or De-emphasize the visions. Well most of the Most of the hallucinogens in the Amazon Basin run on tryptamine of some sort Usually DMT in the upper basin of Colombia Ecuador Peru like that you get these banisteria these Yahi ayahuasca Beverages, these are things you drink and then it comes on You know these outlandish trips as you go down into the lower basin The banisteria opsis cult gives way to these snuff cults Ibina and neopo depending on the languages these are Don't depend on an MAO inhibitor for their activity because they're absorbed through the sub nasal Mucosa, which is an extremely effective way for getting drugs Into the system the problem with these with that complex the snuff complex is that we are just physically such delicate and Wimpy people that we can't stand that root route of drug Administration because what they do is they toast these seeds of an adenanthra Peregrina this huge leguminous tree, which is the source of the seeds they toast these seeds and powder them So what you get is a kind of rough cross between sawdust and charcoal and then they have a hollow tube about this long and they load it up with this stuff and You squat down and put the nostril the tube into your nostril and your friend your friend Not you because you would not do it hard enough your friend then takes a huge breath of air and And it's just like being hit in the face with a two by four I mean, it's like being hit in the face and you fall over backwards you scream you salivate you Squirm around there in the dirt for a minute or two and then you sit back up and by that time The tube has been reloaded for the other nostril And then you know in your eyes your sinuses can't believe what's happening to you So you have to sort out this whole sinus Shock, which is going on in parallel within an evolving strange state of mind Which is beginning to take over and and clarify everything and then there are numerous minor variations on these themes Might talk just a little bit about the chemistry of these things and the chemistry of hallucinogens generally my attitude toward these this question of plants compounds drugs Should these things be used for spiritual growth? If the answer is no then that finishes you don't have to go any further if the answer is maybe or yes, then other questions arise which Compounds out of this whole survey and at what frequency and at what dosage and under what? Circumstances and Over the years I've sort of evolved a three-way test that I will share with you because I think it's maybe them Operationally the most useful thing you'll hear this weekend. And that is if you are contemplating some Some compound some plant then the first thing to ask yourself is Does it occur in nature? Does it have some? Tangentiality to what is already existing because obviously what exists that's nature Has undergone some vast winnowing process out of the set of all things which might Exist in that wonderful phrase of Alfred North whiteheads Certain things have undergone the formality of actually occurring You know and and and so certain Certain compounds have undergone the formality of actually occurring in the biological matrix and so they should be they should be our pool out of which our Experimental compound should be drawn, but this is thousands of compounds. How can we further narrow it? Well an excellent way of narrowing it further is to ask the question of this compound Does it have a history of human usage? Does it have a history of human usage? That is your FDA approval Because if you can point to a tribe of people who have been taking this plant or mushroom or whatever it is for millennia and They don't have miscarriages tumors cataracts blindness Down syndrome Eight fingers on the left hand or whatever it is Then you can be fairly confident that this thing is benign that these people have observed its action on Pregnant women the elderly the those with you know, and and that it has passed that test Then finally the more the narrowest gate through which a compound has to go To to intersect my precious body is it has to have an affinity to ordinary brain chemistry It has to have an affinity to ordinary brain chemistry We don't want to launch something on your brain that it can't recognize at all that it has no biosynthetic pathways to degrade that it has no receptors for just some crazy thing, you know five amino three Triethyl phenthyo anoxidine or something. We don't want that. There's not the spirit that we're acting in here So if the compound can get through those three barriers, then it's an excellent candidate for Providing spiritual gain at low physiological Impact. Well now some people may say oh well You've taken all the fun out of it All the good things have been tossed aside in this mad rush to purity or something Not at all The very best stuff was retained in this process because In terms of relative strength and Bizarreness of effect and so forth the strangest the most powerful the most transformative of all halocinogens in nature or out is dimethyltryptamine DMT and It's worth talking about DMT for a moment because it will raise certain issues and distinctions that you may not have been aware of First of all DMT is hands-down the most powerful of all halocinogens I mean it is so powerful that whatever is in second place is lost over the horizon yet yet It is the most benign of all halocinogens Because it occurs as an endogenous neurotransmitter in the normal human brain We every single one of us at this moment have an end I methyltryptamine being synthesized activated and degraded in our synaptic Membrane, so this is almost a paradox The most benign of all halocinogens the most fast acting I should also add is also the most Harmless the the easiest to take it sort of remove it sort of puts a certain obligation on the Experient because there is no reason to hold back Except that there is this question Does it drive you mad and then the more serious version of that question? What about the possibility of death by astonishment? This is no joke Death by astonishment is I think probably the major risk we run with this stuff because the impact of the breakthrough is is so total so complete so unexpected and in a way this sort of brings me back around to my theme because I Encountered DMT LSD all of these things in that very period when I was getting set to take flight as a Jungian analyst and what Completely blew my mind about DMT and I mentioned it and again Here's an opportunity for research is how trans here's a heretical construction how trans? archetypal the content of the flash Seemed I was appalled Because not only had I a certain amount of interest in Jung and proclivity along those lines But my original major had been art history Art historians what we're trained to do is to be able to look at a motif and say oh, yes I'm familiar from with this from ceramic from second millennia Peru and also Mandaean Embroidery work we know motifs. We're trained to recognize and connect disparate Aesthetic domains. Well when I smoked DMT and came down I said, you know, this is not on the map I can't believe it that this doesn't connect up to anything How can there be domains of the human mind that do not? announce themselves in folklore fairy tales dreams or mandala painting that are so removed from the ven of what is human that they are apparently not accessible in structuring our Maps of our self and our psyche and that for me was the contact with what I call and I didn't call it This Rudolph Otto called it this and this term influenced Jung Otto preceded Jung was it is the holy other And if there is an archetype of the holy other then this is it but perhaps the holy other transcends the archetypes this may Explain to some degree Jung's interest in Gnosticism Especially the Valentinian school of Gnosticism which holds, you know that there is a higher and hidden father all God who is outside the machinery of Cosmic fate and it seemed to me that in those extremely profound DMT flashes I was actually witnessing a domain Outside the machinery of the archetypes, which is for us as moderns That's what the machinery of fate is. It's not zodiacal machinery It's hard wiring in our psychology and our genes that gives us our fate Well, so having said that I've not only made the the Survey, but also brought us to by ending with DMT the subject matter of this quest and I want to make it clear I speak about the power of the psychedelic experience Because I think people should be informed of their birthright and I feel very antsy Around the notion that someone might go from birth to the grave without ever having a Psychedelic experience it makes me as antsy as the notion that somebody might go from birth to the grave without having a sexual experience it's a strange kind of Protective denial or a Kind of expression of fear. This is our birthright This is part of what it means to be human these altered states of consciousness I think are pretty much scripted in to the existence of women because they Most of them will give birth which is an organically scripted psychedelic experience from which there is no escape unless of course you go for the Drug knockout the spinal and then you miss everything but biologically Physiologically women are set up for this experience men are not it's possible to build such barriers against Overwhelm that it never happens in your whole life, and I believe that if we psychologically analyze the effects of these Psychedelics what they do is they dissolve boundaries That's all I mean if you interview ten thousand people who've had the psychedelic trip each one has their own Paraphernalia their own heroes gamas that unfolded for them But the sum total of it is boundaries dissolve and then whatever's on the other side of your boundary comes flooding in to claim you and And to reshape and remake your psyche. Well, I see the entire illness of our civilization as an as an ego inflationary Illness we have gone so sick with ego that we are literally murdering the planet rather than confronting the consequences of our psychic imbalance and The psychedelics act to redress this they are almost an inoculation Against the ego and I I see the ego as a phenomenon arising in historical time or rather actually history is caused by the ego, but the ego is a component of the psyche that arose in the post archaic phase in the post psychedelic phase It's entirely a modern Intervention. It's less than 15,000 years old and the assumptions of the ego are the source of our Neurosis our disequilibrium, why did the ego arise? it arose because of the Climatologically enforced abandonment of these Psychedelic religions of the archaic period in other words, here is the scenario as I see it Primates even primitive even I don't non advanced primates like squirrel monkeys howler monkeys these kinds of primates all Have male dominance hierarchies the whole thing with primates is about male dominance, but a lot of things about human beings Marcus as the most unique member of the primate group Obviously we look Different from any other monkeys even the stranger monkeys look more like the normal monkeys than then We look like them or they like look like thus us our upright posture The other thing about us is our suppressed estrus cycle. We cannot tell at a glance whether a woman is In heat or not and yet obviously that had a tremendous shaping force on the social psychology of of the primates I believe that Everything about us that is noble and worth saving Occurs against the grain That if we had followed the grain we would still be competing with jackals for the carcasses left by lions of large game kills on the plains of Africa But when the African continent began to dry up and we were forced out of the trees where we had an arboreal vegetarian lifestyle we came under great pressure to expand our diet and The I believe that the great Unstudied factor in human evolution and human emergence is the effect of a complex diet on our emerging species and it's not only the presence of hallucinogens such as Psilocybin in the in the diet, but other things as well Psilocybin is the most spectacular case and you know, if you came to see Darwin you'd have to hear about evolution So you came to see me so you have to hear this little theory about human Emergence that most of you can probably recite it by heart now But it's a three-step It's a three-step feedback loop from a fairly bright monkey to a fairly stupid human being and The way it works like this these monkeys come down out of the trees. They're predating on on kills of Ungulate mammals made by lions. They're competing with jackals they're testing all the foods in the environment and Lo and behold in the manure of these ungulate mammals that are irradiating across the African continent there are what are called coprophytic mushrooms and the Presence of large amounts of tryptophan in manure as a substrate means that these coprophytic mushrooms elaborate Psilocybin so here in this new grassland environment are the psilocybin mushrooms. Well these proto-hominid Creatures testing foods for their diet would reach the psilocybin and would test it Well, then this three-part feedback loop to humanness then comes into play and it works like this very very light Doses of psilocybin so light that you cannot an hour and a half or two hours later Tell you've taken anything you say I don't feel it. I feel completely normal I must not have taken enough that dose if you would submit yourself to being tested by an Optometric apparatus we could show you that your vision has improved slightly This is an effect of eating small amounts of psychoactive amines Increase of visual acuity. Well, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to know that if you're a hunting animal Competing in a highly competitive environment and suddenly somebody hands you a pair of chemical binoculars You are going to be a more successful hunter than other members of your Species who are not availing themselves of this food item. So there was reinforcement there Aha, if we eat these mushrooms in small amounts, we will be more successful hunters Or maybe it was never raised to consciousness as an if-then Relationship, it was just we eat mushrooms. We hunt well kind of thing Then If you eat slightly more of the psilocybin if you bring slightly more of it into your diet It's what's called a CNS stimulator central nervous system stimulant an effect of all CNS stimulants is what's called arousal and Arousal means simply that you can't sit still you're very restless You're very energetic and often in the male animal you have an erection. It's an overall systemic arousal arousal and if you if you Give if you witness this situation in monkeys monkeys are very hang loose kind of characters And so then they just all fall together in a heap and make love and this Increases what anthropologists and primatologists like to call successful instances of copulation this means that this increased in interest in sex in combination with an increased success in obtaining food is Creating the perfect situation in which there will be a population boom of these creatures They're eating better and they're enjoying themselves more and they have better relationships with each other So population boom is on the way Well, then the next and final level is when you raise the dose higher So you're no longer restless or interested in sex or any of that, but you're flattened with the ecstatic unfolding of the full numinous hallucinogenic rupture of plane then and this occurs, you know in the tribal context then there is boundary dissolution Group sexual activity and group bonding and identification and this is where this telepathic coherence this inner dynamic of Cohesion and caring that we see in primitive people to some small degree and that we imagine What must once have been our birthright? This is where it came to be and at those higher levels of psilocybin Most of you probably know language is formed by an organ on one side of the brain called Broca's area Broca's area the brain being always Symmetrically constructed Broca's area has a twin on the opposite side of the brain, but no one knows what's going on there It's apparently a silent area of the brain. Well when you take psilocybin, there is spontaneous linguistic activity Glossolalia Henry Munn has written about this in his essay the mushrooms of language. It's almost as though psilocybin is a pheromone that promotes linguistic activity an effort to take verbal intentionality and Connect it up to the on toasts of being in some way and then it's almost as though words are born out of you you give birth to words and These concrescences of meaning then create a kind of unitary ambiance, which we call Understanding language is a miracle. I mean make no mistake about it. I don't think any amount of Dissection of monkeys or human cadavers will give you any insight into language language is a behavior of some sort so bizarre so many orders of magnitude more complex than anything else we Do that for all practical purposes? This is the thumbprint of God upon creation? human language and it's a self Transforming thing it keeps bootstrapping itself to higher and higher levels and it creates for us the entire ambiance of Reality once we had words we quickly replaced Reality with them and so I'm I believe that what psilocybin promotes is cognitive activity the coordination of visual input with plans and strategies for hunting or acquisition or whatever It promotes this increased arousal which really in a way We as moderns are Absolutely as in awe of as our mushroom munching ancestors 25,000 years ago, we can't reduce it. We don't know what it is You know Jung was always so concerned that people say it's only Psychological it's only the psyche. I've got news for you it may only be the psyche, but the psyche is all there is and As as we came into a relationship with the mushroom humaneness emerged on the African belt and was able to stabilize itself for a few millennia and then We fell into history because of climatological change for many reasons But we literally fell into history and now we operate in this lower domain a domain of limitation of misunderstanding of low-grade languages But the and and we are neurotic we are unhappy we are Dysfunctional and I believe this is because our connection to the logos to the informing voice that gives meaning to being Has been broken over 10,000 years it's fallen away and all we're left with is our spiritual yearnings our nostalgia for paradise and our our pathologies and Miraculously, we are left with the time capsule of preservation represented by the rainforest shamanic cultures that use hallucinogens There lies our answer, but it's like the oroboric serpent Taking its tail in its mouth The the salvation of the super future of the planet lies in a recovery of the values modalities and religious practices of 25 to 50 thousand years ago break break break *applause* *applause continues* *applause continues* (applause) [APPLAUSE] {END} Wait Time : 0.00 sec Model Load: 0.65 sec Decoding : 3.07 sec Transcribe: 2552.89 sec Total Time: 2556.61 sec