And we haven't screened the pile, so we're just going to go through them and I'll read them aloud.
 Normally I give long answers, but there's such a stack of questions here, I'll try and be General Neal and keep it short.
 [laughter]
 Or General Brief and keep it Neal.
 Since DMT is present in the brain, does the introduction of excess DMT shut down the production of natural DMT in the way that the body stops producing opiates during opium usage?
 If so, what are the effects? Is DMT really so perfectly chemically benign?
 The first point to make is that many of your questions cannot be answered because research into these areas is not allowed.
 So often we can't answer your question. This question, does the introduction of excess DMT limit endogenous production, I can say with fair confidence that that's never been studied.
 My guess would be that it does not, because the DMT is in no sense of the word do you become habituated to DMT.
 I mean, a person who does DMT once a year is a fanatically heavy user, I would say.
 And the question, is DMT really so chemically benign, again this has not been studied the way you would study with rats and so forth to determine it.
 But experientially speaking, the amazing thing about DMT is the speed with which you return to normal.
 You return to the baseline of consciousness in under 10 minutes.
 Well, that tells you that the brain is very well able to deal with this compound.
 One way of judging how toxic a drug or a plant is, is to ask yourself the question, how long after I take it do I feel completely normal?
 And with DMT you feel completely normal 15 minutes after taking it. It's the shortest recovery time of any drug.
 This question is concerning the bundle weed, while it does not directly meet the criteria of long-term use, is it to be considered safe?
 I'd say the way to answer that question is to do a chemical analysis of the bundle weed.
 If there's nothing present but DMT in it, I would think it should be considered safe.
 Now there may be other compounds present. In South America it's possible to contrast two plants,
 Cycotria viridis, which has almost entirely nothing in it except DMT as the portion of its alkaloid fraction,
 or Varroa cathagenensis, which is used in the making of snuff, and chemically it's a mess.
 It looks like they swept the floor. You've got NNDMT, 5-MeO-DMT, alpha-methyltryptamine, monomethyltryptamine, 6-hydroxylmethyltryptamine,
 all of this you don't want. You want a narrow, a surgical strike on the synapse is what you're going for.
 Not splattering all kinds of junk all over the place.
 What is the best medium for psilocybin spore germination? Potato agar or what?
 The best medium is rye malt agar, no question about it. Go with rye.
 Organic rye malt extract.
 In today's climate, talk about access to shamanic pharmaceuticals for the average person.
 This is the "where do I get it?" question, dressed up in respectable terms.
 Well, without being too self-serving, let me say my brother and I wrote a book on cultivating mushrooms
 called "Psilocybin, the Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide" by Othios and O.N. Neerik.
 I'm Othios, as you can see.
 I really believe in growing mushrooms.
 If you are, as you sit here, not psychically strong enough or balanced enough to take psilocybin,
 then if you learn to grow it at the end of that process, you will be.
 Because growing the mushroom teaches you cleanliness, punctuality, attention to detail, steadiness,
 all of these virtues, which are the very virtues you need to travel smoothly in that dimension.
 Other shamanic hallucinogens that you will find easily available to you without breaking any laws,
 the heavenly blue morning glories sold in every seed store and garden store are not to be taken.
 Do not take them. They have been dipped in a fungicide that will make you sick.
 Grow them and collect your crop and take that.
 And this is a major hallucinogen of great antiquity, extremely visionary.
 The Hawaiian wood rose, you can obtain this from people who make dried flower arrangements,
 often have these. Pay attention, you want the Hawaiian baby wood rose.
 If they try to give you something called Hawaiian wood rose, a big clunky thing, that is inactive and won't do it.
 The detours are freely available. I do not recommend them. I recommend against them.
 But they're a common landscaping plant in Southern California.
 And the Jimson weed, of course, is growing out in the desert, out around Lancaster and other places like that.
 There are a couple of companies which have very forthrightly decided to sell plants with a history of shamanic involvement.
 I have owned no stock in these companies, so I can recommend them without fear or favoritism.
 One is called Of the Jungle up in Sebastopol, California, and the other one is called Dream Gardens.
 And I think it's here in Santa Monica. Both of these groups publish astonishingly complete catalogs of psychoactive and shamanically important plants.
 That's access without going to the streets or committing crimes.
 Can you tell us any more about Illinois bundle weed? I just did.
 And that's really all I can tell you about it.
 All these questions are the same question.
 Having convinced us of the wonder of DMT, what would be the easiest and quickest way to obtain it?
 How does one acquire DMT?
 Comment about the Supreme Court ruling against the use of peyote by North American Indians.
 Very bad law, obviously. Law so bad that the National Council of Churches, the National Jewish Affairs Committee, and some very large Catholic organization all filed briefs protesting this thing.
 And I think that it was actually realized that it was a goof and it will be brought back.
 You can't bring something back to the Supreme Court in a hurry because then that's unseemly.
 But I would bet that within five to ten years this will be overturned because a close reading of this law means that wine for Pesach or communion could be construed as a psychoactive substance.
 And the whole thing was just bad law, bad idea.
 Has consideration been given to the possibility that in the case of certain plants which are recounted in writings but the identity is unknown,
 that the reason they are unknown is because shamans purposefully kept their identity a secret.
 Perhaps such secrets are still being kept.
 This goes to this question I raised this morning, how can a powerful hallucinogen once discovered ever be lost?
 And I've only been able to figure out one scenario in which this could happen.
 It happens like this.
 People discover a wonderful plant that imparts visions or insight or something.
 And everybody takes it and enjoys it and then slowly a hierarchy emerges, a professional class, priests.
 And only they, they decree that only they will be allowed to take it.
 And then they lord it over the rest of society with an iron hand.
 And then the rest of the society gets fed up with that.
 And there's a slave revolt and everybody in the ruling class is killed and the sacrament is lost.
 I can't figure out any other way that it could happen.
 And the Vedic thing, this seems quite reasonable.
 Obviously, Soma was being more and more confined in its use to a single class.
 And then that class became viewed as obnoxious.
 And its overthrow and the death of this sacrament then follow each other.
 Perhaps such secrets are still being kept.
 Perhaps they are.
 The fact that this bundle weed could turn up at so late a date probably means that there are shamanic lineages with secrets that we don't know.
 As a field ethnobotanist and an explorer, I'm always interested in the unconfirmable rumor.
 And there are some doozies.
 The mysterious beetle from eastern Brazil which causes intense hallucinogens if eaten.
 Here's a career for somebody.
 No hallucinogenic insect has ever been found.
 And yet there are persistent rumors in different parts of the world of either a butterfly or a beetle that is hallucinogenic.
 Most shamans in the Amazon, if you spend five or six weeks with them and take ayahuasca with them and trompe around with them,
 when you finally get to know them, they will allow as how there is another magic which they call the magic of the big trees.
 And I've spent half my life trying to find out the names of the big trees and I'm still working on it.
 We have collectors in Peru and nothing is more exciting than a clump of rootstock or a seed packet that comes across our desk labeled "suspect hallucinogen."
 That gets me to the edge of my chair.
 What do you think of Robert Monroe, the journey out of the body man?
 Well, this is a good time to discuss what do I think of all these other things on the spiritual market.
 I don't know what to think about them. I'm not a spiritual consumer.
 I've never been to a workshop that wasn't my own unless it was free.
 And there's a lot of stuff out there, astral traveling, channeling, all of this stuff.
 And I tend to either believe it's bogus or it's for people with a psychic constitution considerably different from my own.
 Sometimes people say to me, "Well, these states that you're talking about, can't they be achieved without drugs?"
 Well, the answer to that is, "My God, who would want to?"
 What would be proved by achieving these things without drugs?
 If the things I'm talking about began to happen to me without drugs, I would be very, very concerned and alarmed.
 Because, you know, I just don't... And also, I think there's something to be said for admitting that we cannot do it alone.
 That if you want this spiritual insight, if you want the Gaia and Matrix to welcome you,
 then humble yourself to the point of making a deal with a plant.
 That's the key. You can't enter the bank without the key to the bank.
 The key to the bank is a plant.
 Jumping up and down outside the bank and exhorting the banker to recognize your inner worth and open the door is just not going to do it.
 I can understand that psychoactive alkaloids are a survival mechanism for the plants.
 Why is that effect psychoactive in man or perhaps animal?
 Well, first of all, maybe we have to argue with your premise.
 You're right that a lot of these so-called secondary and tertiary compounds are elaborated supposedly to make things taste bad,
 so that birds will spit out things and stuff like that.
 But on the other hand, they've studied this question fairly closely,
 and a lot of these alkaloids are produced specifically to attract animals,
 to bring them in to nectaries and as pollinators and that sort of thing.
 Old-style botany always believes these compounds are what's called tertiary to metabolism,
 meaning they're kind of like waste products and not very important garbage.
 But when you look carefully at a psychoactive plant, invariably what you see is that the psychoactive chemistry is going on where metabolism is most active.
 This is an indication that actually these things aren't tertiary at all.
 They are doing something for the plant, but we don't know what it is.
 As to why they have this peculiar effect that they do in us,
 I think that's because there was anciently and over the evolutionary life of human beings,
 actually a connection between us and nature,
 and that these drugs are the antenna that switch us back toward the logos of the natural world.
 I suspect that all of nature is a seamless web of pheromonally mediated connections and interactions,
 and that we are just not yet at a sufficient level of analysis and observation to see this interconnected web.
 Our idea of nature is that it's all tooth and claw.
 Survival is the fittest and the devil takes the hindmost.
 The new version of evolution is entirely different.
 It says the way you attain survival is by making yourself indispensable to everybody else.
 So it's not by triumphing over the ecosystem, but by integrating yourself so thoroughly into it that it can't function without you.
 Then you're on your way to being a dominant species, not by crushing the opposition.
 Let's see how we're doing here.
 What are deconstructionists doing to our understanding of the language?
 Is it helpful?
 By deconstructionists I suppose you mean Jacques Derrida and that crowd.
 Well, I think deconstruction serves a very useful function.
 I think we are unaware of how thoroughly language is the medium in which we swim, how thoroughly our world is built of language.
 In a way, the boundary-dissolving character of the plant hallucinogens is a dissolving of language barriers.
 They show you that the surface of reality was not the surface of reality, it was the surface of your local language.
 And now it's gone, and here is what lies beneath it.
 At what point in the evolution of organic matter on Earth do psychoactive plants appear and why?
 Interesting question.
 If we're talking about psychoactive fungi, we're severely limited by the fossil record,
 because no fossil mushroom has ever been found older than 40 million years.
 This is because fossil mushrooms are very soft-bodied, ephemeral kind of things.
 As primary decomposers, which is what fungi are doing on this Earth,
 it's reasonable to assume that they must have been here from the very beginning of the conquest of the land,
 but proof in the fossil record has not been forthcoming.
 Now, if we're talking about higher plants, flowering plants, which is mostly what we're talking about here,
 then no flowering plants existed before 65 million years ago.
 Flowering plants emerged out of the same catastrophe that destroyed the dinosaurs
 and set the stage for the emergence of the mammals.
 This is something people don't realize.
 Flowering plants are as recent as mammals.
 If you look at the period of life on Earth is visualized as a yardstick,
 the period of the flowering plants is the last inch and a half.
 And it's also the rise of the mammals occurs in that last inch and a half.
 So before that, the plant life on the Earth was of a very different sort,
 and we know nothing about its chemistry.
 Here's someone who asked a Zen question.
 What would make the present government interested in the study of psychedelics?
 I don't know.
 They could make a buck out of it.
 I don't think they're very interested in psychedelics.
 I don't think any political--what?
 The CIA, they were very interested in psychedelics.
 Except that they abandoned it.
 Yes, MKULTRA, for those of you who don't know, stands for Mind Control,
 spelled the Southern way.
 Mind Control Ultra was a program the CIA pursued in the 1960s
 where they tried out all kinds of psychedelic drugs,
 and they also worked with it in combination with hypnosis.
 They were trying to make what they called the Trojan Horse.
 This was somebody who would be an assassin but not even know it.
 And how far they got with all of this, we will never know,
 because, of course, it all disappears behind the walls of secrecy.
 But the declassified history of the CIA and LSD is very interesting.
 Some of you may know the book Acid Dreams by Martin Lee,
 fascinating history of the way the government tried,
 and really failed, I think, to use psychedelics.
 The government's initial approach to LSD was, "This is great.
 This is a truth serum.
 We can give this to enemy agents, and they'll tell us all we know."
 Well, a few months of following that path, they decided, "No.
 This is an obscurity drug.
 We can give this to our agents, and they can take it if they're captured,
 and no one can learn anything from it."
 And, you know, clearly this was not a fruitful path either.
 And I don't fault the government.
 I don't really fault the government for this.
 After all, the government is in the business of being the government.
 I don't think any institution can inculcate psychedelics into its own program,
 because psychedelics destroy institutions, all institutions.
 I mean, it's like trying to move an acid around that corrodes whatever pipes you pour it through.
 Because the boundary-dissolving quality of psychedelics is precisely the quality that government is involved in resisting.
 Government builds up labels, pans out role models, explains how everything is,
 and this stuff just then melts that back into a primal chaos.
 So it's pretty corrosive of any social values that don't arise spontaneously out of biological organization.
 It's anarchist. It's the acid of anarchy in a way.
 All right, we're never going to get through this list, but it's gratifying to know it's here if we need it.
 Here's a question about the time wave, which I'm going to skip,
 because we're not talking about the time wave today, and pity the poor soul who's never heard of it.
 Know of any herbal sources to raise serotonin as a treatment for depression.
 No, I don't know a lot about herbal medicine and that sort of thing,
 but raising serotonin level as a treatment for depression seems like a pretty good strategy.
 I don't know of herbs. Usually inhibition of serotonin is what's going on,
 and with these psychedelics, they do compete with serotonin for the bond site.
 That's what it's all about at the atomic level, is in your synaptic cleft,
 in the synaptic clefts of your neurons, there are what are called receptors,
 and if you were to fly down and look at these things, they look like complex locks.
 There are hooks, protuberances, little drawers and pit in places.
 Well, then the drug molecule is carried into the synaptic cleft by the bloodstream,
 and it seeks to what's called occupy the bond site, or simply bond, and it's trying to fit in.
 Well, the normal thing which fits in those bonding sites is serotonin,
 but some of these hallucinogens are much better fits than natural serotonin.
 They are what pharmacologists say competitive at the bond site,
 and so they literally elbow the serotonin out of the way,
 and then they fit themselves into the receptor.
 Well, once the receptor and its fit, its agonist, are in place,
 then the bio-dynamic, the bio-electric field of the synapse can be activated.
 Well, if you swap out serotonin for an exotic molecule like harmine or mescaline or something like that,
 well, then this shifts the mode of this molecular level electrical environment,
 and I believe that that is what then registers as a higher cortical experience that we call the trip.
 It's the experience of hundreds of millions of these introduced molecules displacing the normal serotonin,
 and then broadcasting this signal in a slightly different way than it is normally perceived.
 So there's a molecular connection. There's a connection down into the molecular level.
 This will be our last one this morning.
 Language transcendence. Huxley, Young, and others often mention liberating and enlightening epiphanies
 as beyond language and iconic imagery. You yourself mention this.
 Can you explain further the use of transcendental language?
 Yeah, and we might talk about that a little this afternoon.
 I sort of alluded to it this morning.
 My idea is that language is a process that is half-completed in us as we sit here,
 and that language is really something which wants to be seen, not heard,
 but that we are on our way to evolving toward this visible language,
 and we currently are operating with these somewhat substandard acoustical codes
 that make small mouth noises. They go through the air. They strike your ear.
 You look in a culturally validated dictionary.
 If your dictionary is like my dictionary, and you understand what's in your dictionary,
 then we say we are communicating.
 But in a visual language, in a visibly beheld language, there is no culturally validated dictionary.
 It's simply a hard-wired kind of animal language that we all understand instantly from birth
 without any cultural acclamation to it because it is the natural language of human beings.
 It's the natural language of getting out, revealing, defining, refining this natural language.
 The place where the psychedelics impact upon us as social creatures is the language domain.
 I mean, you may have tremendous parophanies and breakthroughs,
 but if you can't talk about it or paint about it or dance about it
 or in any way communicate it to anybody, then it is not efficacious for the species.
 It's just your private entertainment.
 So the domain of language is where the collective impact is coming.
 And one of the things I think about psychedelics is that they are probably capable of helping us
 force the evolution of language because we cannot move into the future
 any faster than our language of description for the future.
 So if we're interested in streamlining culture and getting away from this sort of random walk
 style of cultural evolution, then we have to look at rationally interfacing with the evolution of language.
 And maybe we can talk about that when we come back.
 Thanks very much. I appreciate your sitting for this.
 [Applause]


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