Manifesting the Mind

in Eucharist promises a lot and delivers very little. You have to believe. Faith is not necessary

to experience what psychedelics have to teach. You don't have to believe. You can be as skeptical as

you want. The famous ethnologist, Merciliade, called it the archaic techniques of ecstasy.

And it certainly is archaic in the sense that it's probably our oldest religion.

But it's much more than a religion. It's actually a set of practices for achieving altered states

of consciousness, whether with the use of drugs or the use of other kinds of techniques like

ecstatic drumming and sometimes self-flagellation or sometimes different types of physical stress.

But the basic idea of shamanism is to achieve an altered state of consciousness.

And not simply to have the experience, the shaman actually uses the altered state to access

a transpersonal realm, a realm of spirits or supernatural forces, which can maybe be allies

of some kind, which he or she can manipulate, communicate with, obtain information from to help

their, the community, or an individual.

Shamans are medicine men, I guess, in western parlance. And they, so shamanism is what shamans do.

They beat drums, they take drugs, they dance, and they try to cure, they cure people or they attempt to

cure people. They interpret dreams, they find lost objects.

It harkens back to a time when things like psychotherapy and medicine and magic and religion and all of these

things weren't even, you know, fully formed concepts. So the shaman kind of combines all of these roles

of, he's a priest or, and a doctor and a psychotherapist and also often a poet and an artist and someone

that gives expression to the concept.

So, you know, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's,

cultural, you know, myth of the culture.

So he's a, like he was saying, he, and that...

It's, it should be clear, there are shamanesses as well or shaman, women

shamans, it's not a gender specific kind of thing.

But, but the figure of the shaman is a, you know, important spiritual figure in

these nontraditional societies, in these traditional societies.

traditional societies, in these indigenous societies, respected and a little bit feared,

you know, because the shaman is the odd person, the shaman is the person who is in direct

contact with the transpersonal and is kind of the interface for the culture and the rest

of the people.

He or she is the person that gets to actually dialogue and travel in these realms and they

often use psychotropic plants to do this, not invariably, but quite often.

It's quite clear that different kinds of hallucinogenic plants and substances were used, including

from the Bufo toad.

Peter I did some examination of this among the Olmec people, so this is before the classic

Maya civilization, back around 1200 BC.

And the Bufo toad can be the kind of a...

A 5-MeO-DMT can be extracted from the glands on the shoulder of the toad.

You know, there's another compound out there called bufotinine, which was first discovered

in frog skin, actually.

And it's got some kind of psychoactivity, it's a little hard to really pin that down.

It's a naturally occurring, you know, tryptamine as well, though, it's found in blood and brain

and cerebrospinal fluid and urine, any body fluid in animals in which it's been looked

for.

So, they were clearly using psilocybin mushrooms, they were clearly using the 5-MeO-DMT extracted

from the Bufo toad, and possibly a more close analog of DMT itself.

I mean, there's some discussion around the difference between 5-MeO-DMT and regular DMT,

but actually modern explorers...

Yeah.

...with these substances have reported that there are qualitatively different experiences,

but both can be pretty soul-shaking.

So I think within this context, then, you had a whole array of other hallucinogenic

plants being used, the morning glory.

The Mazatec Indians today, when Gordon Wasson visited the Mazatec and Miche regions of Oaxaca

in the 1950s...

Yeah.

...it started this whole revolution in understanding the scope and the depth of the sacred plants

that were being used.

So you have salvia divinorum, for example, is a plant that was used by the Mazatec Indians,

and it's still used today.

That's also where the sacred mushroom cult, the psilocybin mushroom cult, was rediscovered,

a place where the sacred mushroom cult apparently survived up until modern times.

Part of the fear that society at large has of psychedelic drugs is that the only framework

that we have to process these experiences through in Western culture is that of competitive

drinking.

Competitive drinking is sort of the standard that we use to measure what it's like to alter

consciousness, and I think the shamanistic perspective or shamanistic worldview can give

us a new perspective.

Yeah.

The shamanic perspective essentially would say that drugs are not the ideal way to alter

your consciousness, and you shouldn't alter your consciousness with any of these types

of substance until you at least first master altering your consciousness through other

means, such as the use of drums, dancing, paying attention to your dreams.

There's all sorts of different ways of attaining altered consciousness.

Go to the United States, through plants and drugs, through trance, meditation, hypnosis,

drumming, starvation, fasting, un-exhaustive exercise, all kinds of things.

Yeah.

And in terms of an entheogen, what I would define as an entheogen, I'm not fond of the

term, because it kind of requires that you have a belief in theos, which is god or divinity,

I think that the term psychedelic is just a bit more descriptive of what these drugs or plants, you know, do or what they manifest.

You know, psychedelic means, you know, mind manifesting, mind manifesting.

And, you know, one could argue that the phenomena one encounters on a psychedelic drug experience are either internally generated or are externally independent and freestanding.

I think it still kind of dispenses with theological problems that are accompanied by calling a drug something that generates, you know, divinity within, if you don't believe in divinity.

It means God within, generating God within.

And inside theos, God and gen, generate, so that which generates God inside a person.

So, and it's a class of drugs, formerly called psychedelic, but it's a way of sort of softening the bad press of the word psychedelic.

And especially it's to separate it from sort of the party aspect of taking a drug and going crazy,

and showing that these drugs exist.

And these drugs have a spiritual side to them, if you can find it.

A term that I prefer is shamanic plant or shamanic medicine.

Because it's a plant, a psychoactive plant, usually a psychedelic or a hallucinogen, that is used in one of these shamanic traditions, right?

So it's appropriate to call it a shamanic medicine.

Although the same, the very same plant and the very same substance could be not shamanic if you're not using it in a shamanic context.

If you're using it recreationally or taking it in a rave or some other situation, it's not really a shamanic medicine anymore.

It's still the same substance, but if you're talking about substances that are used specifically sort of in this shamanic context, then I like shamanic medicine.

I have problems with the term entheogen, although I know that it's gotten, you know, more popular.

After Karl Ruck, who was a classicist, and Jonathan Ott and some other people proposed it as an alternative to hallucinogen.

Entheogen means manifesting the God within, entheos, within and God.

And that's fine.

But they don't always do that.

I don't like the word because I'm a Buddhist and I don't believe in gods, you know.

So, you know, it's, to me, it's something which helps you to reach your full potential.

You don't need to introduce the idea of God.

I like the term because I have turned very mystical, you know, since taking LSD.

And so my outlook is more skewed in that direction.

I think that what Groff said was that it was a non-specific amplifier of your mental states.

The psychedelic or hallucinogen or fantastica, you know, the psychotomimetic, you know, all of these qualities.

That have been ascribed to the same class of sacraments that we now refer to as entheogens.

I think it's closer for me to the ultimate purpose for which these substances can be used.

The capacity for the human being to experience infinite love.

And total self-forgiveness.

A sense of deep interconnectedness with the planet and with all people and with the cosmos.

This plasticity of our identity.

And helping us to see into realms that

perhaps

are both ancient

because they're the archetypal divine imagination

and they're ever fresh.

You know, because it is transcendental presence that is the creator.

The artist.

The cosmic artist, you know.

Entheogen.

It means connecting with God.

I've been searching for God all my life.

I was a practicing Catholic for many, many years.

And you would think that psychedelics, you know, being mind manifesting,

would show you the God you've been worshipping.

The closest I ever got to God was that,

Hey, Nick, you're God.

You're an aspect of divinity that's looking out at this.

You know, a little spy for God.

And so enjoy it.

I said, well, that's a twist.

I've been looking for a God outside me.

And here I learned that I'm one of God.

And that I'm one of God's apostles in a way.

What a surprise.

So that's what I learned from psychedelics.

At least that's a hypothesis.

So pay attention.

You know, that was the message.

Pay attention, Nick.

You're collecting data for God.

Look with God's eyes upon the world.

So the term hallucinogen is inaccurate.

The term psychotomimetic is inaccurate.

The term entheogen is inaccurate.

It's, you know, it all depends on circumstances.

My personal preference is I like psychedelic.

Because even though the term carries all this cultural baggage,

you know, and everything's psychedelic,

that's kind of something left over from the 60s.

But in the strict sense, psychedelic means mind manifesting.

And I like the term because it leaves it open.

I mean, these substances certainly manifest the mind.

They manifest the mind in some aspect.

And we don't have, you know, we don't have any argument with that.

But how they manifest it, you know, depends on the set and setting.

And like these other terms, you know, sort of are more specifically related to set and setting.

And they also show how difficult it is to really linguistically kind of put this in a box,

you know, characterize what they do.

You know, sometimes they're mystical.

Sometimes they're induced psychosis.

Sometimes they don't do much of anything at all, you know.

But they always manifest the mind in some way.

So I like psychedelic if it could just be divorced from, you know,

all the connotations that it's come to have in our culture.

I think it's almost inevitable that psychedelics have been playing a part

in religious, mystical experiences since the beginning of time.

They are a powerful way for human beings to blow their little egos out of the water

and contact the divine.

I mean, one thing, you know, the whole of spirituality has its roots,

ancient roots, in the shamanic traditions.

We still have those traditions.

And a huge number of them are based on whatever the indigenous psychedelic happens to be in that area.

Because what could be more natural than you pick up a mushroom or something like that,

you ingest it, and my God, you're having visions.

You're seeing life in a new way.

You're seeing through the appearances.

You have a greater understanding, or at least your, your,

the confines of your common sense understanding has exploded.

And it's transformational.

They elicit a whole spectrum of psychological effects.

Probably the ones that people find most interesting as far as alterations of consciousness.

They have profound perceptual effects, emotional effects,

cognitive effects.

They have effects on your sense of self and on your relationship to your body and to your will.

You know, so they kind of cut across the entire spectrum of human consciousness.

It's rare that people rush to repeat it, you know, over and over again regularly.

It's not that you have a craving to take the drug.

You have a curiosity about the experience.

And you often have to overcome your reluctance to take the drug in order to have that.

You see this with ayahuasca very strongly.

You know, if you drink lots of ayahuasca, you actually develop a physiological aversion syndrome.

You know, and this is well known where, with other substances,

where it tastes so bad and you get sick and all that.

And you actually, you know, really don't want to consume it, you know.

But you do.

And somehow you always get it down.

And you're always glad you did.

You know, because you overcome the aversion and you learn so much from it.

You know, but it's definitely not addicting.

Quite the opposite.

I think it is possible for people.

To have an abusive relationship with a psychedelic drug.

Although compared to the other drugs of abuse.

That's certainly a lot less common.

For example, the kinds of relationships that most people have with heroin or alcohol or tobacco.

Those kinds of drugs.

You know, psychedelics, as a rule anyway, tend to be taken sparingly.

You know, once a week, once a month, once a year.

As opposed to daily.

And in fact, in the case of most of the classical psychedelic drugs.

Like LSD, psilocybin, DMT.

If you take them regularly, you quickly develop tolerance.

And you stop responding.

Especially strongly after the second or third day that you take a psychedelic drug.

That's not quite the case with DMT.

But, you know, the debilitating effects of DMT.

You know, tend to limit its repetitive habitual use as well.

No, there's no evidence that antigen are addictive.

I mean, ayahuasca or mushrooms or peyote are definitely.

Or iboga are definitely not addictive substances.

I mean, you can take them and not take them again for years.

I mean, they can be a little bit psychologically addictive.

Like any experience.

If somebody really loves it.

They may want to go back and have the experience again and again.

But generally, you really don't find abusive patterns with people who make use of these substances.

Look in your own pharmacopoeia, you know.

Look at the drugs that you're taking.

And note their side effects.

And how many people a year have died from inhaling marijuana.

Goose egg.

Now, look at how many people die from drinking alcohol.

You know, you've got hundreds and thousands of people.

You've got the people who are completely distraught over the alcohol addiction and things like this.

It's countless billions of dollars and millions of lives.

Or, you know, think of the people that get creamed when the drunk driver, you know, hurts someone.

So there's so many repercussions that are much worse with alcohol and yet it's legal.

And so the idiocy of our current position on cannabis is really sad.

But my prayer is that the grassroots movement will continue to show its obvious advantage.

To our culture.

By a kind of strict integration.

And taxing.

And, you know, so making it a legally available substance.

Which I think would also make us a little more willing to note the importance of the entheogens.

Because in a sense, it's a mild entheogen.

Cannabis.

At the same time, we've conflated them with other substances like heroin, and speed, and cocaine.

Which are more addictive, more artificial, where we've taken, in the case of heroin and cocaine,

we took naturally occurring plant substances but then we did a chemical process to them

to, kind of, amp up the active component and separate it.

So I have a friend, Morgan is an herbalist.

And he makes a distinction.

makes a distinction between, you know, the whole plant medicine approach that

indigenous people were mostly, you know, using and our kind of attitude of just

isolating the agent that causes a certain reaction and then amplifying

that effect so that it leads to addictive patterns. A culture is what it

eats and an individual's personality is often largely a reflection of their diet.

There has not been a human culture that did not bear upon it the stamp of its

relationship to certain plants which altered the individual and mass psyche.

We can think of numerous examples. The influence, for instance, of sugar on the

growth of 19th century mercantilism or the way in which the British manipulated

opium policy in the Far East.

Or, as you mentioned, alcohol, which has always been the drug of choice in Western

culture. Who can imagine modern industrial office culture without coffee?

These are major drug dependencies that have placed their stamp on the lives of

millions and millions of people. It's simply that we choose to linguistically

define it in such a way that the

effect is not something most people are cognizant of.

It's funny that all of these things are lumped under one label, drugs. I come

from a sort of a peasant family. Both my parents were farmers and were just

immigrants basically. And when my mother found out that I was in California that

I took drugs, it broke her heart. And there was no way that I could

explain to her what it was I was doing. Because that word drug just had such an impact on her

mind that it was about the worst thing her firstborn son could ever do.

It was one of the saddest things of my life that I could not explain to mom what it was

I was doing. Mom was a very religious person. She went to Catholic church every day. I could

not find a way to tell her that I was doing the same thing that she was doing.

And I still, you know, would not know how to tell mom, you know, what the difference

was between her going to church and me taking entheogens, searching for God through chemicals.

There's no such thing as a bad drug, right? Because a drug is just a drug. It's a substance

with certain properties. It has no moral qualities. The only thing that has moral qualities is

human behavior.

And there is lots of

bad human behavior with respect to drugs. And there's lots of bad human behavior with

respect to all kinds of things. And good human behavior, too. I mean, again, this comes

back to the context. So the whole war on drugs idea and the idea, you know, it has

nothing to do with protecting people from toxic substances, you know. If that were

the purpose of the war on drugs, tobacco and alcohol, you know, would be prohibited. Tomorrow,

and yet the structure of the law, not that prohibition would do any good, and I'm not

advocating that, right? But if that were really the agenda for drug control, they would say,

well, these are clearly the most harmful drugs. These are the ones that are killing

the most people. So they should be strictly regulated. But in fact, the way the law is

set up, the FDA is not even allowed to classify tobacco and alcohol as a drug.

There are these science fiction cliches like, there is some knowledge man should not know.

So probably, there are probably horrible things like huge devils or places where you shouldn't

go. You know, viruses that would kill all life on Earth or huge, like, things that

make the atomic bomb. There's terrible things. So what does our, our society has a right

to make those things not investigatable by science.

They're too dangerous. So our society decides that among those things is marijuana. That

scientists should not be able to explore marijuana and MDMA and LSD and these certain molecules

because there are things men should not know. And I think that's, as a scientist, that's

laughable. And as I often like to say, I got my degree in nuclear physics and I like to

say, if they trusted me with plutonium, why not LSD?

My gosh. So this makes no sense. So, okay, if that's, if the war on drugs is not about

protecting people from harmful substances, what is it about? Why are all these substances

illegal? It's about control. And ultimately, it's about control of what people can think.

And it's the control of experience. It's essentially the state arrogating itself

to the point where it says, you know, certain states of consciousness are allowed and other

states of consciousness are not allowed. And that's really what it comes down to. This

is about cognitive liberty.

There are these, you know, plants that have these molecules that humans may have used

for thousands of years that produce visions and so on and are often considered to be healing.

In our cultures, we've demonized some of these substances.

And made them illegal, which I would consider to be unfortunate.

It's the state saying, you know, don't go there because if you take this in theogen

or you take this psychedelic, you're going to have funny ideas. And funny ideas are very

dangerous, especially if they don't fit in with, you know, what we're saying should be,

you know, kind of the accepted cultural zeitgeist.

So, that's the danger of psychedelics is they actually cause people to question the

cultural paradigms and say, well, you know, maybe this is not consistent with, you know,

maybe the revelations of psychedelics are not consistent with what Hollywood and Wall

Street and the government and Main Street and, you know, religions and all these institutions

are describing.

So, the war on drugs is really a war on consciousness and who's allowed to think what.

More importantly, I personally don't believe that anybody has the right to tell you what

to do with your own body or what thoughts that you can think. That if you do not have

the freedom to decide what happens to your own body and your own mind, that you really

don't have freedom at its most basic level.

You know, I think it's really ridiculous that they won't allow terminal cancer patients

to take whatever fucking drug they want. I mean, you can't argue it's going to be, if

you're going to die anyway, why can't you take any drug you like? And the extension

of that is once you pass a certain age, I don't know quite what that age should be,

you should be able to do anything you fucking want to your body without being prosecuted.

So scientists and old people should have free access to any drugs they want.

I think I qualify in both camps. I don't even think that's enlightened. I think that's

common sense. An enlightened society would take a look at these drugs objectively and

say which ones can help promote and do we want a society based on alcohol and cocaine

or do you want a society based on LSD, MDMA, ayahuasca? Which of the drugs are we going

to promote?

Our society has picked for some reason the absolute worst drugs to make as its standards.

Potentially psychedelic drugs could be for psychology what the telescope became for

the science of astronomy.

In the right setting, with the right kind of psychotherapy support or religious support

or whatever the context of the support is.

Most importantly, what the person's intention is,

when they take it, if they're an addict or an alcoholic,

they can take ayahuasca, they can take peyote,

they can take these substances,

and it will definitely help them to get over that.

And in the case of something like ibogaine,

it's even more specific.

I mean, there's other things going on with ibogaine

that might interrupt the addiction syndrome

on a physical level.

For many people, actually, who were alcoholics

and things like that, many have been cured

by their use of psychedelics.

So in some ways, it's the opposite of addiction.

Entheogens actually are almost the opposite

of an addicting drug, in that sometimes a person

will only take an entheogen once

and have a very powerful experience

and actually be freed

from some other addictions or habits

that he or she might have.

And in fact, in some ibogaine research,

an African drug called ibogaine,

people are being taken off of heroin and alcohol

with some good success, where other methods have failed.

I discovered ibogaine pretty much 11 years ago

on the internet back home to a friend of mine,

who was a drug addict.

He was the first young man who was addicted to ibogaine.

He was taking ibogaine, which I gave a treatment.

It was in an area of the area addicted.

So I treat him with the roots,

because I never used ibogaine for the detox.

No, I always use a straight root.

So when he went back to his country,

that's how he learned about ibogaine,

and he sent me an email.

I'm like, wow, that's very interesting.

So ibogaine is a,

an extraction from Iboga. So he take the rooty stuff, he do the extraction and it

became the first like a total Acoid. Ibogaine is very effective at treating

certain kinds of addiction, opiates, methamphetamines, cocaine and alcohol.

Ibogaine has five different therapies that we basically became aware in their

use. One is in an initiatory, an initiatory aspect which is the

psycho-spiritual where you get into the deepening dreaming aspects but you have

no active addiction in the body. The second is for physical healing, things

like herpes, asthma, lung problems, blocked energies in the system, scar

tissue. Then there is also a mental treatment for disabilities around

depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, trauma,

anxiety, depression, depression, trauma, anxiety, depression, trauma,

sexual abuse. Then there's a reset therapy that we do with alcohol, cocaine

and methamphetamine. We separate that because those those substances need to

be out of the body for 24 to 72 hours prior to treatment. And then there's

opiate. And in opiate detox we can begin 12 hours after last administering of an

opiate and within 45 minutes it will completely control any symptoms of

withdrawals. I even do

the healing for let's say for women who want to have kids. And let's say they try

in hospital, you know, and the doctor there say, you know, you can't have kids anymore.

But the woman is normal. It's like nothing is missing in her tummy. Why she can't have

kids? How do you do healing of that Ebola? Something that's been discovered recently

by Dr. Deborah Mash and others is that there is a new neurotransmitter created in the brain

after taking ibogaine called norebogaine. And it can stay in your system for up to four months.

And that's the substance that they theorize is continually working on your

psyche to make that reduction of cravings stay in place. So that, you know,

over the long term you have time to break out of that cycle of addiction and

become

a new person. Not only is

it address the symptoms of withdrawals and discomfort,

but it also works in the craving center of the mind. So the individual, by the time

they've completed treatment, has no desire whatsoever

within a 10 days to two week period to touch opiates.

See, that's pretty much the reason why I'm here in the West. I didn't just decide to come here.

I love my country and we're really peaceful there.

Life is also great like here in Mexico.

You know, I would not just like leave my people, whatever I was doing, my family, just to come

here to hang out.

I had a call from the Spirit to spray the woods the word of the word iboga.

Which is like talking with Ibogaine.

To spray in the world cause it's not just for Africans. It's for anybody who needs it.

If it was just up to me I would just say,

let's go from city to city clean up the streets clean up the houses you know we're gonna find

those guys you know with drug addict we're gonna find them and heal them all because that's the

only way this that iboga and and abogan is a last call for anybody we really want to get help

you don't have to spend like thousands and thousands of dollars or or spend months in a

clinic rehab and go back tomorrow and using the drugs no it takes just a couple days to get here

and i'm ready to do you know to do that to have anybody wants to take it just one decision that's

it that's all it takes but the thing is i've also known many people who take a lot of psychedelics

and they're heroin addicts they're alcoholics it hasn't helped them a bit so you know honesty

behooves me to say that this is not

a miracle cure for addiction all these things can do is like open up an opportunity for the person

to examine their lives and resolve to change if that's what they want to do but it won't

compel them to change you know it's not going to force anybody off off drugs um so you know

it's like a lot of other techniques for treating addiction talk therapy or

whatever they work in some people and not in other people since it's illegal in the united

states the only options that an addict has is to go out of the country or to do it illegally

in the united states and there are some people in the united states who are treating addicts

illegally you know they're breaking the law by healing these people however most people

are not sick they're not going to be treated the way they should be they're not going to be

treated they're not going to be treated the way they should be and that's why i'm so excited

about the idea of taking ibogaine and the other countries to take ibogaine i personally i went to

mexico around the puerto vallarta area with a organization called awakeninginthedream.com

and that was a great experience for me and the people there were super nice and it was in a

setting that i think was beneficial to the ibogaine experience in other words it wasn't in a clinic it

completely safe um but there are several clinics in mexico doing this some of them are just right

across the border in tijuana and there's lots of clinics around the world that will take your money

and give you ibogaine they've never taken ibogaine they don't know anything about drug addiction and

they have no idea what that individual is going through in that process you know and that just

frightens the hell out of me i mean in comparison to what the model in the united states this is

not a return visit um a revolving door therapy house we're hoping you can come here once get rid

of that addiction and when you come back again to do more work with the ibogaine if it benefited you

you know without an addiction in the body because then you can go to the next level and then you

work to the next level and this could be a real supportive you know this isn't like going to

meetings every day and believing that you're never going to be anything less than what you are

this confirms that you are no longer

you

in the body energetically there is no physical addiction existing in the system it enables them

to release from the addictive need actually they found themselves after their trips

without the desire for junk and they were all shocked you know like oh my god this is a

you know because they were like waiting for the other shoe to drop

uh

but then they actually felt like wow i am not hooked you know so there was something immediately

uh engaging about it on the other hand it was also very psychologically challenging to begin

with uh and you know it took one into a very deep inner world you maybe you were going to face some

of the shadows that has uh been part of your addictive process this really

sort of crosses over into the shamanic use

of these things i mean the shaman is a person who learns through discipline to navigate in these

realms and this is the realm of you know he learns to pass through both ways through the

doors that the dead pass daily um i think that's high doses of uh psychedelic

uh and i think that's a very powerful way to be able to take on that瘤

ability to do what he wants um but you know i think it's a very powerful way to be able to take on

i think the other way around um so i think that when we go back to this uh level of uh

or something like DMT is very close, probably.

I mean, I've never had a near-death experience.

I hope never to have one until I'm actually dying, you know.

But people who have had them say that they're very similar to high doses of DMT.

And there's even reason to think that the DMT, which our own bodies make,

may be involved in the near-death experience.

That, you know, in the state of stress on the mind and body that is produced when you're dying,

it's not inconceivable that your brain releases a massive flood of DMT and you have this experience.

But all this still is mostly within the realm of speculation.

We still don't really know enough about the normal concentrations of DMT in the body.

And what situations increase it, and in what sorts of conditions the levels are decreased.

Where is DMT found in nature?

Well, a better question would be, where is it not found in nature?

I mean, this is really interesting to me.

The fact that DMT is so ubiquitous in nature.

It is, from the chemical standpoint, structurally, it's the simplest of the psychedelics.

It's a very, very simple compound.

And in terms of biochemistry, it's only two steps away from tryptophan.

Tryptophan is an amino acid.

It's one of the essential amino acids.

So it is universal.

All living things have tryptophan.

Now, not all living things have DMT, probably.

But the enzymes that convert tryptophan to DMT, there are two main enzymes in this process, are also universal.

I mean, I don't know how chemical we want to get here.

But the basic idea is that there's an enzyme that takes off the acid group of the amino acid.

So it turns it from an amino.

And then there's another enzyme that puts methyl groups onto the amines.

So you get, first you get tryptophan, and then you get tryptamine, and then you get dimethyltryptamine, which is what DMT is.

And this goes on, I think, very commonly.

Well, these enzymes are certainly common.

I mean, they're common in all cells, practically.

Do all organisms have DMT?

Do all organisms contain DMT?

I think it's possible that all organisms might contain traces of DMT.

There are many plants that contain DMT.

We know of at least a couple hundred.

And that's only because we've looked.

You know, there are probably thousands of plants.

In fact, my suspicion is that because tryptophan is so easily converted to DMT,

I think if you went out with a sufficient amount of DMT,

a sufficiently sensitive instrument, mass spectrometer or whatever,

and just started sampling plants at random

and shoving those through your gas chromatograph or whatever you're using,

you would find traces of DMT in every plant.

And you would also find it, we know it's very widespread in animals, too.

So we know it's in amphibians, we know it's in mammals, including us.

We know it's in marine organisms.

We know it's in fish.

So it's, yeah, it's odd that, well, maybe it's not odd.

It's just a fact of nature that it's all over the place.

And probably is about as close to being universal as anything is.

It's also related to serotonin.

Serotonin is a neurotransmitter which occurs in all life forms.

It occurs in all life and is most concentrated in the higher primates

and most concentrated there in man.

It is 5-hydroxytryptamine,

while DMT is, as you mentioned, NN-dimethyltryptamine.

So there is a very close structural affinity

between this extremely potent and exotic hallucinogen

and the very common basis for ordinary consciousness, serotonin.

DMT and phybotoxy-DMT and even beta-carbolines,

which are the other component of the ayahuasca combination,

do occur in the human brain and may occur in other places in the human body,

in the adrenal glands, for instance, probably in the gut.

But they definitely occur in the human brain,

especially in the pineal gland.

Especially in the pineal gland.

There are other forms of DMT other than the smokable kind.

In fact, those other forms are the more traditionally used forms of DMT,

such as ayahuasca.

Ayahuasca is remarkable because, as you probably know,

it's combined from these two distinct plant species.

Its two principal ingredients are themselves inactive,

except in the presence of each other.

So what we have in the case of ayahuasca

is an example of a highly evolved folk pharmacology.

And how a discovery like this was ever made in the first place

is one of the challenging questions that anthropologists have to deal with.

After all, in a square mile of Amazonian rainforest,

it is not unusual to encounter 50,000 people,

50,000 distinct species of plants.

How then did these so-called primitive or preliterate people

make the connection between the combining of the bark of one

with the leaves of another,

boiled and put through a number of procedures

to produce an intense visionary hallucinogen?

This is an extremely interesting and, to this day, unanswered question.

It tastes horrible, by the way.

It tastes...

My version of what it tastes like is

maybe four-day-old espresso

that someone had put out a cigarette in

with a dash of lemon.

And so you gag it down, and...

Then, after a while, your mind starts to have a plasticity and an openness,

and it remains that way for about four or five hours,

which can be quite beautiful.

If you've seen any of the tapestries of the Inner Mind Cathedral

in the DMT state,

that extends it for hours.

So it's kind of a shame not to take ayahuasca

if you're going to do DMT,

because, geez, you can extend the journey to several hours.

Well, DMT is a tryptamine.

So is LSD.

LSD is a laboratory invention.

It's a chemical modification of an ergot alkaloid.

But in terms of their...

You know, pharmacology, they're quite similar.

They both impact certain kinds of serotonin receptors in the brain,

through which most people propose that these drugs have their effects.

You know, the...

I would say the main difference is that DMT is quite short-acting,

and LSD is quite long-acting.

But in terms of the...

On the spectrum of effects,

they're quite comparable,

in terms of the perceptual and emotional

and the cognitive responses to consuming the drug or the compound.

Also, DMT is a compound that is found in all kinds of animals and plants,

and LSD isn't a natural product.

It isn't found in the animal kingdom or the plant kingdom.

In ayahuasca, the effects of DMT begin a lot slower,

probably within a half hour, maybe an hour,

and they peak in around two to three hours,

and they're usually resolved between around six hours or so.

So even though it's a slower effect,

the quality of the response is the same.

LSD was always a bit of a commitment,

because you've got at least eight hours

that you're committed to this altered state,

and so you have to arrange your life,

wisely, to support that.

And this is just a little more manageable, I think,

in some ways.

It's also very clean and very clear,

and you don't feel any body load afterward.

You feel uplifted.

You feel, like, vitalized.

You feel like you need less sleep, you know?

And you feel that you've addressed yourself on a deep level.

A lot of deep issues came up for me.

Yeah, well, I've had experiences with ayahuasca and ibogaine.

They've been very profound and important experiences in my life.

And they've helped me, I feel, to grow on many levels.

I've written about them extensively in my books,

Breaking Open the Head and 2012, The Return of Quetzalcoatl.

I feel like they gave me insights into my personal psychology,

visions about better paths to take.

They kind of acted as kind of antidepressants

that lifted my spirits up.

Made me see these other layers or possibilities of reality.

So they've been very important experiences for me.

Telepathic and group mind states are induced

by this particular plant mixture.

And it's particularly interesting in the light of the fact

that the chemical constituents which make it go

are in fact found endogenously in the human brain.

These are not exotic compounds from the point of view

of ordinary human brain chemistry.

So there is a suggestion there that manipulation

of neurohumeral compounds, brain neurotransmitters

and that sort of thing may in fact open the door

to untapped areas of human potential.

One of the games my brother liked to play with the mushrooms

was, you know, in this dialogue situation,

he was always saying,

tell me something I can't possibly know, right?

And that will validate that it's not me, you know,

that this is coming from.

I don't know that he ever succeeded in getting it.

It's very cagey, you know, they're very tricky that way.

It's, you know, but occasionally they do seem to tell people

things that they can't possibly know

or that they've never thought about in quite that way.

Now it's come out, for example, that, you know,

Crick's insight into the structure of DNA

was assisted by LSD, you know,

and he reluctantly but finally admitted

that that was a big influence.

And many computer scientists, you know, Steve Jobs has said

LSD's been very useful for his creativity.

Terry Mullis, the Nobel Prize winner

who figured out the PCR chain reaction

has been quite upfront about it.

LSD gave him the ability to get down with the molecules

and see what's happening.

In some sense, there is a communication.

In some sense, the question isn't even valid

because where do the boundaries between the self and the world exist?

You know, we're not really separate.

I mean, we're part of this information field.

And, you know, this notion that consciousness,

I mean, I do think that consciousness does,

it's like a property of the continuum.

It's like the old physical physicist concept

of the ether or something.

It kind of permeates everything.

And it's not really localized in the human brain

or necessarily even generated by the human brain.

Why does the brain require DMT for normal function

if, you know, this is indeed true?

Yeah, and it's hard to say.

I mean, I think that perhaps one of the functions

of ordinary levels of DMT is kind of like a,

you know, kind of reality thermostat.

If you have a certain kind of narrow window

of levels of DMT in the brain,

it maintains this ordinary level of, you know, perceptual,

you know, consensus reality that most of us live in.

You know, kind of like the endo-matrix in a way,

as opposed to like an externally applied, you know,

psychological or, you know, consciousness kind of matrix

like in the movie.

You know, this is one that's internally generated.

But it may be that the brain is a place

where it becomes focused and concentrated.

You know, the brain may be as much a receiver

of the signal as it is a generator of the signal.

You know, nobody can really say,

but that model in some ways appeals more to me

than the notion that it's all coming from the brain.

The brain is more like a node, you know,

and there's this sort of field of consciousness

that permeates everything,

and to a certain degree, everything is conscious.

I think of the shaman as entering into this net of being

in the higher worlds, in the heaven worlds,

and that's why I've personified the net of being,

this painting behind us,

as this continuum of heads

interlocking infinitely in all directions,

because that points to being as a continuum,

as a network, in a sense, to an infinite realm.

And this is a part of the deep fabric of our being, I think.

Because we sense ourselves as souls related to many.

There is this everyday world,

but you can be in a place where there is no you

and still perceive the world.

That scared me.

Losing my ego was the scariest thing,

and I still don't like it.

A profound state which may be reached

by use of these entheogens, psychedelics, hallucinogens,

whatever you're going to call them,

which is known as ego loss or ego death.

Unfortunately, subsequent to the coinage of this term,

ego has come to be used in a completely other sense.

It has been used in the sense of pride.

And that is not what ego death is about.

Ego death would mean you lose your sense of I for good.

And that's not what happens.

They mean a temporary suspension of the ego,

when ego death is spoken of.

Ego death means the death of you as a concept,

whereas we walk around thinking of ourselves as things.

We think of, I am sitting in the chair.

Therefore, you know, I am a thing.

The chair is a thing.

When we reach the realm of ego death,

or ego dissolution, or whatever you're going to call it,

there is no longer any perceived boundary

between oneself and the chair.

In this state, there are no things.

There is just one continuous experience.

In some sense, all of experience

is an illusion, you know.

Everything that we experience in the here and now

and our state of being is a hallucination,

an elaborate hallucination that our brains construct.

We happen to call it consensus reality.

But it's still, I mean, physics tells us that,

you know, the picture of reality that we build

so that we can navigate through the world,

and not step in front of buses and stuff like that

and do all those, you know,

the world doesn't really look like this at all.

You know, the brain constructs a model of reality

that more or less maps onto reality.

It's good enough that we can survive.

But we're focused in a kind of, you know,

constricted dimensional awareness of reality.

And, you know, for safety reasons mostly, you know,

and we don't necessarily want to know

that we are actual one consciousness

with all beings and things at all times.

So, nevertheless, those dimensions

are all open to our being.

You know, we have a complete freedom

of the continuum of being.

If we change the nature, you know,

we have the model and we have the real world out here

and we have the sensory neural interface

that's taking this information in,

interpreting it, and giving us the model.

If we change the nature of the sensory neural interface

a little or a lot,

if we substitute, say, DMT for serotonin,

you know, the model of the world that we get

changes radically.

And who's to say that that's any less valid

than the model that, you know,

the brain constructs for, you know,

for everyday purposes?

So this idea that, you know,

I mean, it's all illusion.

It's all hallucination.

That's what experience is, you know.

I mean, that's why in some ways

I sometimes get a little impatient

with people that say, you know,

well, a drug experience cannot possibly have

any spiritual validity.

Well, I'm here to tell you that all experience

is a drug experience, you know.

We're all on drugs all the time,

largely because we're made of drugs, you know.

And that's what drives us, you know.

Experience is, you know, sort of the,

what issues out of this biochemical process

of, you know, all these neurotransmitters

and hormones moving around our brain.

I mean, it's drugs.

We've gotten very stuck on the idea

that, like, we're conscious and sentient

and, you know, intelligent and have knowledge

and that nothing else in the world of nature

really is like that.

But actually, you know, we're a very young

experiment on the planet.

We're a young species.

And the plant world has been around

for a really long time.

The fungus world even longer than that.

And they've developed, you know,

symbiotic meshworks

of species interrelationship,

very complicated diplomacy,

interspecies diplomacy.

And it may be that certain plants

have been kind of anointed

or given the role to be the diplomats

and the teachers who work with

the human species to help us

to see if we can evolve

to be less destructive

before we sort of just lose our shit

and top off the biosphere.

Maybe the ubiquity of DMT is,

you know, signature of consciousness in nature

or nature sending a message to,

you know, the big-brained stupid primates,

you know, wake up, look around.

It's everywhere.

You know, mind is everywhere.

I think that their message is,

wake up, dummy, you know,

before you kill us all here,

on one hand.

And the other hand, they're saying,

wake up to your own divinity.

Wake up to your higher capacities.

So they're talking to us every day,

which is true.

But no, we don't, we're not listening

because it's like when you get up in the morning,

you go straight to work,

you work after, after, after, you know,

your day, you get off, you go home,

or you stop at the restaurant,

eat a good meal and go home.

That's it, you go to sleep.

Next day, you do the same thing.

So to answer your question,

herbs, our spirit talking to us every day.

Just be ready.

And to, you know, to know,

what is it?

What is it trying to tell me?

I mean, you have these experiences

and you seem to have a communication, right?

And very often they present themselves

as an intelligence,

something outside yourself, you know,

and you're communicating with it.

You're having a dialogue

or some feeling of, you know,

an other that you're interacting with.

Whether it is a illusion or not,

it's hard to,

it's really hard to know.

Psychedelics sort of make people aware

of realms that are less material,

you know, that the real sort of,

the really rewarding experiences

are not necessarily what Wall Street

or Madison Avenue or Hollywood

wants to be.

What they want is to deliver to you.

I mean, they,

those experiences,

and they're synthetic experiences

just as much as a drug experience

is a synthetic experience.

But they're usually tied with some

consumerist, you know, agenda.

And, I mean,

this is part of the,

the sort of the,

the inconsistent attitude of,

of society.

I mean, they want they,

I don't know,

the corporate hegemony or whatever.

I mean, they want people to be addicted to things.

They want people to consume things.

Not necessarily to drugs,

but drugs will do.

I mean, they want people to drink

and smoke and all these things,

you know,

and they,

and they want people to be addicted to their,

to their cars and computers

and TV and all that.

So, you know,

a lot of what it's about

is kind of keeping people entertained

and focused on these sort of corporate,

corporately massaged,

corporately created versions of,

of reality.

The business of culture,

any culture,

is to perpetuate its cultural models.

And if the hallucinogenic plants

have not been integrated into the cultural model,

then they are definitely seen

as dangerous forces

for an unpredictable sort of social change.

Now, if the hallucinogenic plants

have been integrated into the cultural model,

this is not then a problem.

And this is the case with shamanism.

Shamanism is the culturally sanctified institution

of inner exploration

via psychoactive,

psychoactive plants.

Where psychoactive plants are not present,

shamanic institutions tend to become vitiated,

to rely on ritual or ordeals

or other methods of eluciting,

eliciting these ecstatic states.

Well, the contemporary artist,

therefore,

has felt a great kinship with the shaman

because the archetype of the contemporary artist

is that they stand askance from

or ajar from conventional culture.

And therefore,

these are the creative artists, we hope,

therefore they contribute

a different perspective on ourselves

and something that we can learn from.

And I think that

that's part of the role of sacred art,

ultimately,

is to show us a higher model of what we can be

so that we're pulled toward our highest potential

rather than having our negative

or materialist sense reinforced.

We get that through a lot of our other materialist

and very rational culture.

And theogens are inherently

threatening to the culture.

I mean, that's, I think, one reason that

they're brutally suppressed,

both when capitalist cultures

or dominant cultures

come on indigenous cultures.

You know, they're usually bringing

another religion, an outside religion,

Christianity or whatever,

usually incompatible with the indigenous practices.

So that's the first thing to go

and the first thing to be attacked.

And along with that goes the knowledge

of these plants.

The church was concerned that

the magic of the witches

be seen as real, number one,

and number two, entirely caused

by the agency of the devil himself.

And so the church downplayed

the operational role that plants had

in inducing these states

because, after all, if the devil

cannot lead you astray

without the use of plants,

why, what kind of devil is it?

So in our own historical tradition,

there is a curious blindness

to the efficacy of hallucinogenic plants.

You know, it is possible

that as the visionary experience

becomes more acceptable

in our contemporary postmodern culture,

more and more people may gravitate

to those types of experience.

And at the same time, we can already see

that the traditional religious structures

are in a lot of trouble.

They're causing a lot of trouble in the world.

It probably would be beneficial

for there to be a kind of consciousness evolution

out of fundamentalist belief systems.

And, you know, I think that

the shamanic experience might be helpful

in that evolutionary process.

As institutions, what they have in common is

they discourage individual thought

and they discourage critical thinking

and they discourage questions, questioning.

They encourage that,

okay, here is a body of beliefs

or cultural norms or, you know,

largely accepted beliefs

and you're just supposed to accept it.

You know, don't ask questions.

Sit down and shut up.

You know, accept it

and integrate it

and be a good, you know, citizen, consumer,

whatever role is decided.

And theogens are inherently threatening

because they enable people

or sometimes they compel people to reject that.

You know, and say, well, maybe there's more to life

than, you know, working in a cubicle

for some faceless corporation

so I can, you know, not have health insurance

and die sick

and, you know, without a pension

and, you know, and just spend my time with that.

Maybe it encourages people to, you know,

look for different purposes in life than that.

So that's really, I think, what's going on.

The problem with the psychedelics

is that they dissolve cultural programming

and hence, inherently,

have a political charge about them.

And actually, that's the weakness, you know,

of what I am sort of beginning to call the death culture,

you know.

And these things then actually become,

in a sense, our own bioweapons.

Or if we're on the other side of this divide,

then these plants,

you know, especially the plants,

become very dangerous in this context.

You know, they're trying to suppress them,

but you can't suppress them.

And they're, you know,

they're ways of changing hearts and minds,

so they are definitely very, very dangerous.

But they can be used in a creative way

to counteract kind of the toxic message

that the mainstream culture puts out.

I put a lot of time into making sacred art

in order to download the shamanic

and theogenic and meditative

and, you know, just grace and dream

and shamanic journey

and all of these kinds of modes

of and highly rational thinking about

philosophically what are the implications

of the worldview that I'm expressing

and things like that.

Because for me,

the artist, perhaps at their best,

could be, I love that word,

scintilla.

You know, Terence always used,

could be the scintilla of evolving consciousness.

As we all can be, you know.

But they could express it visually.

And in fact, there are images

that appear to be of the fly agaric mushroom

in some early Christian art.

The fresco at Plain Corral

is one example of this.

And it appears to be Adam and Eve

standing next to this big fly agaric mushroom

that has sprouts coming off of it.

It's not depicted in a way

exactly the way a fly agaric grows,

but the stalk is there

and the cap of the mushroom

and it has white flecks on top.

It looks very much like

an Amanita muscaria mushroom.

Now this has been debated by art scholars

saying that no, this is just the style

that was used, a figurative style,

a way to paint trees.

Why though, you have to ask,

would you start painting trees

that looked like mushrooms?

Unless perhaps you were trying to get across

another message in that painting.

The ceiling of the Hildesheim Cathedral in Germany,

painted I think in 1100 this era,

there's a striking image similar,

very similar to the Plain Corral fresco

of Adam and Eve again standing

not next to a tree like Amanita,

but standing in front of what looks like

a fly agaric cap behind them,

tilted on so it's facing the viewer.

So it's round like this

and Adam and Eve are standing in front of it.

Not only is it perfectly round

like an Amanita cap,

not only does it have white spots,

these actually are silver spots

spread out over like the veil remnants,

white veil remnants on an Amanita cap,

but these are actually metallic hemispheres,

silver metallic hemispheres

that are attached to the painting.

So they're actually raised bumps

just like you'll find on the cap of a mushroom.

The veil remnants are white flecks

that can even be removed.

So this was, in my opinion,

this was an intentional clue

by the artist to show people

what was really being shown here,

what the fruit of the Garden of Eden

really was according to the artist

and according to Allegro

and Wasson as well,

that the fruit of the Garden of Eden

was in fact the fly agaric mushroom.

It's just such a damn attractive mushroom,

I have to say.

It distinguishes itself by its beauty.

I can't think of a more beautiful mushroom, really.

At the same time,

I can think of one that takes you a lot higher

in terms of its psychedelic potency

and entheogenic potential.

I've never had much of a holy experience

on an amanita.

It was slightly more of a deliriant

and a body wank

than a, you know,

something that would elevate you

to the heavenly spheres, you know.

It's the iconic mushroom in a sense.

I mean, it's the archetypal mushroom

that goes way, way back

to at least the Paleolithic.

We know that Siberian shamanism

is where the whole thing is thought to have originated

and that that was...

a lot of that constellated around amanita.

And, you know,

the classic shamanic motifs

of the ascending the world tree

and having the axis mundi

that links the celestial and the earthly

and the underground realms

and in Siberian shamanism,

this is often depicted as a mushroom.

I've encountered the amanita muscaria mushroom

and its symbolism

actually in the material

around the Finnish Kalevala,

the national epic of Finland.

It was collected together

as an oral tradition in the 19th century

and was called the Kalevala.

And it's the ancient legends of Finland.

And there's an artifact or an idea

or a concept in the Kalevala

called the sampo.

And the sampo is kind of this magic mill

that's capable of producing anything you wish.

And it's really a cosmological metaphor

for the starry sky centered on the pole star.

And the stars are called the ciphered cover,

so it's envisioned as this huge sort of umbrella-like thing

that spins slowly with the central axis coming down.

So it's also a huge image

of the amanita muscaria mushroom.

As a cosmological metaphor.

Muscimol,

which is the active,

main psychoactive principle in amanita muscaria,

is a very potent GABA agonist.

So it interacts specifically with these receptors

and not much,

not at all with the serotonin receptors,

except possibly indirectly.

So how can amanita muscaria

produce these transcendent experiences

and there are several possible answers.

Maybe they don't.

I personally am not familiar enough

with amanita muscaria to say that they do.

My own experience with amanita was very limited

because I didn't enjoy it.

But I also,

it didn't seem like a transcendent experience at all.

It seemed like a cheap drunk in a way.

But I,

dealt with,

you know,

I was eating fresh mushrooms

and it's almost always taken dry.

I think there's a great deal of chemical variation

in the mushrooms,

both geographically.

There are many,

there's geographic variation.

The mushrooms in the Himalayas and in Siberia

may not be the same as the ones in Colorado,

just from a chemical angle.

There's,

you know,

so there are many chemical races,

you know,

of these mushrooms.

Some of them may contain true psychedelics.

Some of them may contain tryptamines

and or beta-carbolines.

There is some evidence that they do,

these DMT and this kind of thing,

do show up in some of these things,

some of these amanitas.

It's a complicated picture.

Nobody has sorted out,

you know,

I mean,

somebody really needs to go through

and do two things.

They need to collect mushrooms

very carefully from different parts of the world

and do chemical profiles

to see if they can define a chemical race

or are there certain races that are high

in these tryptamines.

They also,

someone also needs to look at the way

that they're prepared

because I think

I've talked with people

and you have two probably

who insist

that they are really very psychedelic

but you have to dry them a certain way

and they have to be dried over a fire,

they have to be,

you know,

and the fresh mushrooms

don't get it,

you know.

The phyagaric mushroom,

unlike, say,

psilocybe species,

the psilocybin mushroom,

where you can pretty much rely on,

you can go by weight

on if you can take the mushroom,

a certain amount will give you

pretty much a certain experience,

level of experience.

With the phyagaric,

you have no such guarantee.

You can have a mushroom

as big as a dinner plate

that will give you virtually no experience at all

or you can have one much smaller

that can knock your socks off,

metaphorically speaking.

It's because the mushroom contains

both muscimol,

which is the active ingredient,

and a substance called

ebotenic acid,

which is far, far less active

but much more toxic.

Once it reaches your liver,

the liver starts dismantling it

and the first thing it does

is a decarboxylation process

which turns it into muscimol

and then it excretes it.

So you can actually,

depending on the amount of ebotenic acid

in the initial sample,

you can actually excrete

more of the active principle, muscimol,

than you ate.

And so if you were to pass on

your urine to somebody else,

he'd get higher than you did.

Purely because,

and of course he'll pass on

some ebotenic acid too,

which he will metabolize into muscimol.

And so in Siberia,

this is passed from person to person,

rather than being recycled.

And they get,

five or six people high

on the same mushroom.

This is very important.

This may be the secret of Amanita

because it seems to me,

from what you were saying,

that it's not simply that it goes through,

there's a filtering,

there's a detoxification process.

So the first collection

after you eat it

has probably got a lot of things

cleaned out of it

that might make for an uncomfortable trip.

It may also,

I mean this is pure speculation,

but it's possible that

some of the downstream effects

of taking these GABA agonists,

which is what the Amanita,

it might induce the production

of endogenous tryptamines,

DMT plus beta-carbolines,

so that the person

who ate that urine

or drank that urine

after this process

might be getting a lot of things

that is not in the mushrooms,

but actually secondary metabolites

that are produced

by the eating of the mushrooms.

So you get the mushrooms,

you eat the mushrooms,

and you get all these feedback loops happening

and you get possibly things

excreted in the urine.

Possibly these tryptamines

and beta-carbolines.

I don't know that this is possible,

but it's completely reasonable to speculate.

There is actually a Tibetan text

which is a retelling

of the Hindu myth

of how Amrita was first made

by churning the ocean.

But in the Tibetan version,

the Bodhisattva

who's supposed to be looking after the Amrita,

doesn't look after it very well

and this demon comes along

and steals it.

And he doesn't just drink it all,

he drinks it

and replaces it

with his own urine.

And then the Buddhas

decide that the Bodhisattva,

Vajrapani,

who was looking after it,

should drink the urine.

And he does.

And he becomes dark blue,

surrounded by flames

and ornamented with snakes.

Stepping out.

That's what the mystical experience is.

It's one of ecstasy.

And whilst it's difficult to look at the,

specifically the Gnostic and Pagan initiations

and go, oh, this was what was used.

We don't have that.

We can guess.

What we do know is that an initiation,

well, first of all, the word,

certainly in the Greek word that gets used,

doesn't mean, like our word,

the start of something.

It comes from telos

and it means kind of a glimpse

of the end of something.

So what's happening to you

in an initiation

is that you're getting an experience

of where you're going.

So you, oh,

and then you come back

and then you make the journey

back to that place

and you're finding it in yourself.

Now, one of the things

that psychedelics does

is it gives you a glimpse

of something which has been

kind of given to you

from the outside in.

You've needed to ingest this thing

and something's happened

to your consciousness.

It's a very powerful way of doing that.

So the idea that you could have

an initiation, a glimpse of the end

through something which is taken into you

through psychedelics

or also through the influence

of a teacher or a ritual

or maybe all of it,

and then you're on the journey

to find that in yourself

because it's already in you.

That's what I think's going on.

One way or another.

It may be the case

that there were mystery traditions

that made use of psychedelics.

And so, you know,

we've lost track

in our official history

of what that use was

and what went on.

You know, we don't know

what they were doing in Egypt.

We don't know what the Jews were doing

in Sinai.

You know, so there's a lot of

kind of alternative archaeology

and anthropology,

sort of tries to work through

these possibilities.

And it may be that early Christianity

had, you know,

aspects of a mushroom cult,

you know, that may have appeared

in these artworks,

which definitely are, you know,

some of them really are

very suggestive of mushrooms.

However, I think that sometimes

there's a tendency

in the psychedelic community

to almost become like, you know,

entheogenic fundamentalists

and think that all visionary experience,

you know, was mediated

by the psychedelic plants

and that the origin of all religions

was based in, you know,

the experience of using these substances.

And it may be the case.

We just don't know.

And it may not be the case

because people have

visionary experiences, you know,

without psychedelics.

I mean, diet, you know, fasting, drumming.

You know, there are all sorts.

There's a whole range.

You know, yoga.

There's a whole range

of types of experiences

that produce mystical visions,

sense of unity with the cosmos.

So I'm a little resistant

to a strain that I often encounter

in the psychedelic underground

of like kind of fundamentalism

around these experiences.

They were the origin

of all genuine religion or whatever.

So, but they probably played

more of a part

than the official story

gives credit to.

When religions come in contact

with a real mystery, you know,

with a really numinous thing,

they don't like that

because numinous things

are inherently dangerous and threatening.

And a lot of religion has to do

with controlling people.

And, you know, there needs to be

a distance between God

or the numinous archetype,

whatever that is, and the people.

And that's usually the priestly hierarchy

and the, you know,

the infrastructure around that

and, you know, the sort of infrastructure

that filters the message.

One of the things that stood out

in my research in Christianity

was the use of the Eucharist.

That is, going back to the Last Supper

and Jesus' purported words at the time

when he dipped the bread

and said,

This is my body.

Eat it and have life in you.

Unless you eat this,

you will not have life in you.

This is my blood.

And he handed the cup of supposed wine

and said,

This is my blood,

and unless you drink this blood,

you will not have life in you.

Unless you eat my body

and drink my blood,

you will not have life in you.

And this is stressed over and over,

especially in John,

the book of John in the New Testament.

So what could this mean?

Is this all mere symbol?

Why degrade,

ostensibly degrade,

a high spiritual experience

by likening it to eating the flesh and blood

of another human being?

That seems counterintuitive

and completely beside the point.

Unless these were symbols

for something else,

for another substance.

The Christian Eucharist promises a lot

and delivers very little

in terms of,

you know,

in other words,

you have to believe

to get much out of the Christian Eucharist.

And if you believe,

then you may get,

I mean,

you won't get a psychedelic experience,

but you will get something,

you know,

an affirmation of faith

or a feeling that you're,

you know,

in communication with the Creator.

I mean, frankly,

to be honest,

I don't believe.

I mean, I was raised Catholic,

but it never made any sense to me.

And so I don't believe.

So I can't really tell you

what a devout Christian gets

from the Eucharist.

What's different about psychedelics is

they do deliver something.

They deliver an experience

if they're taken

in the right set and setting.

And I think one of the main things

that sets them aside from,

or that distinguishes them

from the Eucharist is

you don't have to believe,

you know.

In fact,

I tell people

faith is not necessary,

you know,

to experience

what psychedelics have to teach.

In fact, that's an impediment.

Get rid of your faith.

Approach it like a scientist,

you know.

You don't have to believe.

You can be as skeptical as you want.

You can take the substance in,

you can experience it,

and you can make your own judgments

what it's about.

If Paul and other people are

eating the body of the God

and having an incredible visionary...

I mean, Paul says, again,

it just completely contradicts

the idea of a historical Jesus,

because he says,

everything I know about Jesus

came to me by revelation.

Where is this coming from?

What is the source of his experiences?

I wouldn't be at all surprised.

I mean,

a chap called John Allegra

many years ago

wrote a book,

The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross,

which was about precisely this.

He believes that

the cultic meal

of sharing the book

was people getting together

and eating some psychoactive

substance together

and having revelations

of the Holy Spirit,

what have you.

So, I'm open

to any investigations

and whatever evidence comes up.

I think it's,

through personal experience,

myself,

one of the most powerful ways

to...

Well, Aldous Huxley himself

went in, is it Heaven and Hell?

Doors of Perception.

When he looks at the bamboo chair,

I think it is,

and he says,

I suddenly...

And this is a man

who spent his entire life

writing about

the religious traditions

of the world,

the mystical traditions

of the world,

but he never actually

had any experience.

And here he was

on Meskinen,

I believe,

looking at this chair

suffused with light

and he says,

hear all these words

that people had used before,

like grace

and all these...

Suddenly,

I was having that experience.

Alan Watts, the same.

Again, a great scholar,

actually had the experience

in this way.

So, if that's happening

to people today,

I think we can safely assume

it's been happening to people

for a very, very long time.

Yeah.

I think that the world

is a universal human dispensation

wherever people live

in connection

with their native land.

It doesn't have to be

through plants either.

There are tribes

that don't use plants

that just do

all-night ceremonies,

ritualistic drumming.

There are all sorts

of different ways

to get people

into altered states.

And actually,

we're learning more and more

about brainwave patterns

and theta states

and alpha states

and so on.

So, yeah,

and I think that

as Andrew Weil talks about,

the desire,

almost the necessity

for people to change

their consciousness

and experience

other states of consciousness

seems to be very basic

to our human nature.

And if people aren't given

constructive and creative outlets

for those types of experience,

they'll choose destructive

and negative ones

just because it's almost natural

that we would want to have

different types of

consciousness experience.

Anybody's experience,

their subjective,

personal experience

of the mystical

has to be considered valid

in some respect.

They may have

a different terministic screen

of a set of words

that they use

to describe

these mystical experiences.

And maybe sometimes

we don't always agree with those

because of the baggage

that's associated with them.

But we still have to be open

to the truth

from those experiences.

Before we completely

just throw the baby out

with the bath water.

A mystical experience

by any means whatsoever,

you know.

And if you can do

Sufi dancing

and attain a state

of mystic bliss

by finding your center

and having a,

being a vortex,

like a gyroscope of being,

you know.

I think there are numerous ways

that people sort of,

sort of align themselves

with this mystic reality.

But I happen to think

that entheogens

and psychedelics

are a powerful way

that could more safely

be integrated into,

you know,

sort of initiatory experiences

that people call into their lives

and stuff.

And I think that the usefulness

of the substances

may eventually,

as if humanity can evolve itself

and mature itself,

there may be an application

in the future

for these substances.

And it's that ability

to take what works

and leave behind.

That's what the evolution

of culture is.

But you don't abandon the past.

All the beautiful music

and the buildings

and the traditions,

we just see it differently.

When the Spanish Inquisition

got to the New World

and they found these Aztecs,

you know,

eating mushrooms

and having a jolly old time

and having these ecstatic experiences

and all that,

I mean,

as if that wasn't bad enough.

But then they were calling it

the flesh of the gods.

Te anana cotl

was the Aztec term

for the mushrooms,

which meant flesh of the gods.

And this just enraged

the clerics.

And they just,

you know,

this was like so blasphemous,

it couldn't be tolerated.

And so they really,

you know,

reacted more brutally

than they might have otherwise reacted

to try to suppress this thing.

Because, you know,

we just couldn't,

they just couldn't have

this kind of thing.

The parallels were too striking.

And their Eucharist didn't do much

and the Aztec Eucharist,

you know,

delivered big time.

So that was another reason

why it had to be suppressed.

With the communion

where you take the wine

and the bread,

it works with people

because it's done

in a ritual context.

People do have profound experiences,

but I think very often,

certainly over time,

you know,

it's a bit of a let down really.

What is probably the case originally

is that the wine would have been

suffused with something.

And also that the bread itself,

there's a psychedelic fungi.

Well that's where LSD is synthesized

from ergot of rye.

And they believe that at certain points

when the bread was infected

and the medieval

St. Vitus dance,

for example,

if the fungus has attacked the crop

before it's turned into bread,

the bread itself becomes psychedelic.

And there were many eruptions

in the Middle Ages,

in particularly damp summers

when the ergot would flourish,

when people would go kind of crazy.

If Jesus, say,

were a shaman

or a hierophant,

which in the Greek term

is what he was,

a revealer of the mysteries,

and he had a mystery.

He said,

I have a mystery.

And he reveals his mystery

to whom he chooses.

Well,

so he acted like a shaman

and perhaps even a higher stage,

higher than a shaman

because shamans aren't necessarily spiritual

in my understanding

and often aren't.

But Jesus' mission

was intensely spiritual

and he wanted to take people to heaven

because he said,

where I go, you will go also.

The things I do,

you will do also

and greater things even than I do.

So the fact that you could take this mushroom,

this flesh and blood like mushroom,

and ascend to a heaven of light

and love and bliss

makes a very literal connection for me

to Christianity

and to the secret message

that I think Jesus was handing out,

not to the mass,

not to the masses,

but to the inner circle.

And this is the problem

with the ancient pagan mysteries in general.

They were mysteries.

Everybody who participated

was sworn to secrecy.

And what's incredible,

the mysteries of Eleusis

were celebrated for a thousand years

in the Greek world.

Many people,

Roman emperors,

Cicero,

Seneca,

all the greats

were initiates.

None of them broke their oath

and told us what happened.

But we know

that initiates drank a drink

before they began on the sacred way to Eleusis,

which was a painful purgatorial process.

They were beaten by people with rods.

It was meant to be

a visceral physical experience.

And it was certainly heightened by fasting.

So whatever,

if they did take anything then,

we know that that would have been intensified

because it always is

when you fast beforehand.

Archaeologists have found opium pipes at Eleusis.

So we've got enough hints to know.

And the ancients were master pharmacopoeists.

They knew all of the intoxicated.

And as Tim says,

it came out of the shamanic tradition.

In the heart of the Greek mysteries,

you know,

the cradle of Western civilization,

there was the Eleusinian mystery cult,

you know.

And you had the enactment of,

I guess,

Demeter and Persephone

and all this going into the underworld.

And then at the height of this

maybe six-day ceremony or something,

they took a psychedelic,

which they called the kykeon.

There is an illustration.

It's used on Robert Graves' Greek myths,

which is one maenad

who were the female followers of Dionysus

holding up a mushroom.

That's true.

Yeah.

So there are numerous hints

that this was going on.

I wouldn't be at all surprised if it's...

I'd go further.

I'd say,

really,

I'd be surprised if it wasn't true.

Yeah.

What we can't say

and the reason that Peter and I

haven't pushed it in our research

is because if you're coming out and saying,

Jesus doesn't exist,

it's such a confronting thing for most people

that we've tried to keep to everything

we can absolutely meticulously back up.

But here is another possibility

which others have looked into

much more deeply than we have.

And yet, really,

it would be such a surprise

to see such a powerfully transformative process going on

that didn't draw on this in some way

because they didn't have the same taboos

which we've now got around changing consciousness.

Yeah.

And now you can look at, like,

Socrates' whole allegory of the cave

and things like that

and you can, you know,

where people say,

where people were just being in their cave

and noticing the shadows

and thinking that was the world

and then somebody turned around

and they went outside

and they saw the sun

and, you know, it's like,

oh, my God, he came back

and wanted to tell all of his friends about it

and they absolutely wouldn't look toward the light,

you know, no matter what he did.

You know, they just wanted to stay entranced

in their shadow worlds.

We are in this cave.

We are watching shadows on the wall

and mistaking them for reality

whilst the true source of light

is from the mouth of the cave.

And Plato even says what would happen

if a wise person came from the sunlight

into the cave and said to people,

look, you're just looking at shadows.

This is not the real world.

And then he says they would probably kill him.

So they say basically that's what happens

with the mystic, you know,

and they've seen the light

in a sense,

and they're trying to tell their brothers and sisters,

you know, about the reality

of their own sort of higher dimensions.

The way to understand religion

is you've gone from

a powerfully transformative event

where you would take these psychoactives

in a ritual context,

probably alongside some sort of ritual death,

and

your state of consciousness

would be utterly transformed

to

a little bit of white wafer

and some tiny sip of wine

in a context where you're going to go back

and sing...

Well, I think it must always be the function

of organised religion

to neuter,

to emasculate

the mystical experience.

Because what you don't want

is people having their own access

to the divine.

So if people are taking the divine

and then having their own personal act,

they don't need you.

The whole point of organised religion

is to mediate the divine.

They are the intermediaries

between you and God.

That's the way organised religion works.

So it must always...

And I think it happened in Hinduism with Soma.

We were looking at the

fly agaric mushroom

at which Gordon Wasson believed was

the

Soma.

But at any rate,

whatever Soma is,

and I don't believe it's the

Muscimol.

I really don't.

I believe it's more like psilocybin.

Or Steve Hager has even said

it's cannabis.

If you read about it,

it's obviously cannabis.

So at any rate,

it was some kind of psychedelic.

And it was a

way for

them to basically

make contact with the divine.

The ninth mandala of the Rig Veda

is entirely devoted to singing

the praises of Soma.

And yet we do not know

what Soma is or was.

Our Gordon Wasson spent

a considerable portion of his life

researching this problem

and reached the conclusion that

Soma was

Amanita muscaria,

a mushroom that is symbiotic

to pine and birch trees

throughout much of the

North Temperate Zone.

However,

scholars have cast doubt

on his identification of Soma.

It's quite possible that

there were several

different psychoactive plants

used in sacramental forms

in ancient India.

In the most

developed forms

of Vajrayana Buddhism,

the amrita that was used

was called pancha amrita,

which means the fivefold amrita.

So there were five separate plants,

I think.

In the literature,

in the scriptures,

we're told of five different meats.

Horse,

cow,

dog,

elephant,

and man,

the great meat.

But,

I believe that these were different

plants.

And that when you

had the fivefold

elixir

to drink,

and you also ate,

in ritual context,

ate a bite of the

five meats,

I think that was really

drinking a concoction

of five different plants

and eating a little

of the raw plant.

And I believe

that they were

all different psychoactives.

Some sort of plant substance

was prepared

and ingested

by a priesthood

who then used

the ecstatic experience

induced by that plant

as the basis

for all of their

metaphysical

and philosophical speculations

on the nature

of the universe.

If you read the Rigveda,

all the Vedic hymns,

out of a thousand,

I think 990

are hymns to Soma.

It is the blood of the gods,

it's the vision of eternity,

it's the white gleaming

swan of eternity.

It's like,

but now in Hindu culture,

Soma is just a milky drink.

And I think the same process

has gone on.

People have realized

if you want to actually

control people,

you have to shut down

their access.

And it's certainly what happened

with Gnosticism.

Gnosticism said,

no, God is in you.

Like Paul said,

Christ is in you.

That's fatal

for organized religion

because then everybody

can have their own

personal relationship

with Christ.

Why do I need to go to church

to experience Christ?

I can do it on my own.

We are somehow told

we are infantilized.

We're told,

you know,

to wander around

within the

of ordinary

over here if you want.

Society is oppressed

as any society

in the past.