Mckenna & Sasha Shulgin

I'll have to begin by correcting Rob.

Actually, Jonathan Ott wrote

Halicinogens of North America.

I wrote Psilocybin, the Magic Mushroom Growers Guide

in corroboration with my brother.

I was originally going to call this talk

Monkeys Discover Hyperspace,

but I decided that that was a little outrageous

and I settled on Halicinogens to be Foreign Actors

of Psychology.

So before I dig into that subject,

I'll say a bit about how I come to have an interest

in these substances and their very peculiar effects.

Years and years ago, after an LSD trip,

I imagined that I perceived a relationship

between the LSD experience

and the motifs of Tibetan religious art.

And accordingly, I went to Nepal

and took up residence in a village of Tibetan refugees

and I quickly learned that the shamanism

that I wanted to study

was inaccessible for reasons of language,

for reasons such as that the Buddhists

who were teaching me Tibetan

looked askance at the shaman

that I wanted to associate with.

And I realized then that the association

between shamanism and halicinogens is such

that both, in a way, are taboo.

And when you deal with pre-literate cultures,

you discover that the shaman is a very peculiar figure.

He is critical to the functioning of the psychological and social life of his community,

but in a way, he's always peripheral to us.

He lives at the edge of the village.

He is only called upon in matters of great social crisis.

He is feared and respected.

And this might be a description of these halicinogenic substances.

They are feared and respected.

They are misunderstood.

They are only called upon often in moments of great crisis.

And they are a persistent but always peripheral part of the community.

And I saw this in Nepal, among Tungpo Tibetan shamanism,

which is a non-halicinogen-based shamanism.

I saw it in Indonesia, where techniques had been developed to induce trance

that were non-chemical techniques, specifically dance,

in the case of Bali and Lompoc.

And I saw it, finally, in the Amazon, where I think I contacted the primal shamanism.

As you know, there's a division of opinion on the matter of whether narcotic,

or as I call it, hallucinogenic shamanism, is decadent or, in fact, primary.

And Miss Deliade took the position that hallucinogenic shamanism was decadent.

And Gordon Wasson, very rightly, I believe, contravened its view and held that actually

it was very probably the presence of the hallucinogenic drug experience in the life of early man

that lay the very basis for the idea of the spirit.

Well, as I made my way through these various cultures and various hallucinogenic substances,

it came to my attention that, in my opinion, and I believe in the opinion of Gordon Wasson

and other scholars, Henry Munn comes to mind.

He wrote a marvelous essay called The Mushrooms of Language.

But in the minds of those who associated themselves with the mushroom, there were certain assumptions

about psilocybin that were different from the mythos that was arising around some of the

other hallucinogens.

Psilocybin, I think, of the more commonly available hallucinogens, is the most visual.

And it is certainly visual if it is done in the traditional manner.

And I'm always amazed at how little understood or practiced the traditional manner is, so I'll

sketch it for you.

The traditional manner of taking psilocybin is to take a very healthy, effective dose in

the vicinity of 15 milligrams, on an empty stomach, in total darkness.

You've been there.

And in that situation, which is, in a sense, a situation of sensory deprivation, the psilocybin

is able to exfoliate itself to the fullest degree and to show you what it is, not against the

background of the reality that ordinarily surrounds us, but against the background of

darkness, so that the pure essence of the thing can be shown.

And it is extraordinarily bizarre, extraordinarily difficult, I believe, to assimilate into your

worldview.

And this is whether you're a Bora youth undergoing initiation, or whether you're a college student

or a research chemist.

These things do not lend themselves well to integration into language.

If they did, they wouldn't occupy this peripheral position after 10,000 years of human culture.

But above and beyond the visual intensity of psilocybin, the thing that sets it apart, I believe, is

a phenomenon that might be described as an induction of audio hallucination, but in fact, to describe

it that way is to fall back on a kind of medical jargon reductionism, because what it really is,

is a voice in the head that is separate from the perceived ego function.

In other words, a voice speaks.

You hear it, and it seems to be operating independent of the ego.

It operates in a psychopompic role, as a teacher, as the narrator of the vision which is revealed,

much in the same way that Virgil led Dante through the circles of hell.

And the modern intellectual equipage is not capable of assimilating this.

This is the sort of thing that we associate with psychopathology.

We can hardly imagine anything more alien to modern consciousness than a disembodied voice

in the head.

However, if you familiarize yourself with Western thought on a scale of millennia, you discover

that not only is this not an alien phenomenon, but for much of human history, it has been

inimical to the human experience.

And it is called, relying on the Greek, the Logos.

The Logos is a voice heard in the head, and the Logos was the hand on the rudder of human civilization

for centuries, up until, in fact, the collapse of the ancient mystery religions and the ascendancy

of Christianity to the status of a world religion.

I'm sure many of you are familiar with the story in Petarch of the fisherman who heard

a great noise and saw something fall into the sea and heard a voice in the sky saying that

Great Pan was dead, that, in other words, the ancient gods had been eclipsed, and, in fact,

in Jungian terms, the ancient god, by falling into the sea, had been submerged in the fawnic unconscious

and disappeared from the experience of ordinary people.

From that period on, it was 15 to 17 centuries, while Christianity worked out the implications

of its message, how science spun away from Christianity and created its own set of modes, the new world

world was discovered, reason was enthroned, scientific method was enthroned, and the civilization

that we know arose around us, but then, in 1953, Valentina and Gordon Watson went to Guadalupe de

Jimenez in the Sierra Mazatez of Oaxaca, and they discovered this mushroom cult.

And it's my belief that, to this day, we do not know what exactly it was that they stumbled upon

mushroom, drug, cult, all of these ideas about what it was rest on the assumption that we know what we're

talking about when we talk about mind. And, in fact, everything that has been said at this conference has

rested on the assumption that we know what we're talking about when we invoke a concept like mind.

But the truth of the matter is, ladies and gentlemen, that after 2,000 years of grappling with the problem,

scientists cannot even tell you how you can form the conception that you will change your open hand

into a closed fist, and it will happen. This is an intervention of mind into the world of matter,

that no philosopher has been able to give a satisfactory account of. Now, with the hallucinogens,

this intervention of one realm into another, of mind into matter, or matter into mind,

is raised to a pitch of excruciating intensity. And it's my belief that one of the unconscious reasons

which underlies the odd attitude of the establishment toward hallucinogens is the fact that they

bring the mystery to the surface as an individual experience. In other words, you do not understand

the psychedelic experience by getting a report from Time Magazine or even The Economist. You only understand

the psychedelic experience by having it. And therefore, to understand it is to embark on a course of action

of self-education outside the context of your culture, because your culture has no answers about what this

thing might be. Okay, so much to that. But psilocybin and BMT to a lesser extent, although it is so brief and so

intense that it's sometimes hard to sort these things out, invokes the logo or reintroduces the phenomenon

of the logo into the experience of modern people. So what can we make of this? I think we have to take it very seriously.

I think that the culture crisis that we are involved in has to do, and by that I mean the entire global

cultural crisis leading possibly to the extinction of the species, has to do with the fact that our models

developed over the last 500 to 1,000 years have played us fault. They aren't working. And the cultures that we have

have conquered with capitalism and technology, we have repressed their connection into these intuitive realms.

We have established one method for the arbitration of truth, and everything that does not pass through that

narrow gate is relegated to the realm of mythology or worse, cultural immaturity. And yet we are the culture

that is in crisis. When you go to the rainforest, you don't find cultures in crisis, except to the degree

that they are being impacted by us. So I believe that it is no coincidence that in this moment of maximum

cultural crisis, which we call the 20th century, the hallucinogens, the entheogens, have emerged in Western culture.

It is no accident that Watson made his trip to Central Mexico and contacted the mushrooms. What he discovered

in the mountains of Mexico was nothing less than Eros, sleeping but alive, the body of Osiris preserved over

an entire astrological age, metaphorically speaking. In other words, that to take the mushroom was to transcend

the cultural momentum of the past couple of millennia and return to a world where the Logos was a realized phenomenon.

And we heard from Carl Ruck last night about the Ellicinian mystery. This was not a minor phenomenon. Over a period

of 2,000 years, everyone who was anyone made the pilgrimage to Erosis and had the experience. And it put the stamp

on Greek drama, Greek philosophy, later Roman politics. All of these things were influenced by the hallucinogenic

experience. So our culture, spiritually, has played the role of the prodigal son. We, for reasons of ideology,

botanical geography, other factors, have not had visionary ecstatic hallucinogens installed in our culture,

as we perhaps could have over the last several hundred years. Now that is changing. And in order to understand

what the change means, you have to look further back in time, in fact, past history to prehistory, again

to the model of the shaman. Not the shaman as anthropologists describe him, but the shaman as shaman

dean him. Because every shaman looks back toward an archetypal first shaman who was superhuman, who did go to the stars,

who could go to the bottom of the ocean, who could move through the gates of death and return with a lost soul.

Now it seems to me, when you pull back to the perspective of several thousand years, all of history can be seen as an

adumbration on this wish, expectation, hope for a superhuman condition, for a transcending of the laws of gravity,

of the laws of life and death, into a superhuman condition that was solitary for mankind as a whole. In other words, the shaman

of the archetypal perfected man. Now, this afternoon you heard Messner refer to alchemy as one of the

reflections of this concern with the perfection of the spirit. It is about the projecting of a perfect substance,

which is the self, purified, but it also led to the rise of modern science, basically through a misunderstanding.

Now, it seems to me, what's happening now, is that what Massiliad calls the human desire for self-transcendence, expressed through

the motif of magical flight, has been taken up by the technological society as the idea of space flight. And I'm sure if Tim Leary

were here, he could speak to this more eloquently than I can. Space flight is nothing less than the exterior metaphor for the

shamanic voyage. In other words, in our terms, for the hallucinogenic drug experience. This is the way that

engineers get high. They go to the moon. What we need to do to transcend our cultural schizophrenia,

and to heal the risk between spirit and soul, or world and self, is to realize something which we all pay lip service

to, at least I'm sure all the people in this room pay lip service to, which is the idea that the inside and

the outside are really the same thing. But I don't think the cultural implications of that have been clearly drawn.

What it means, really, is that all our dreams of transformation have to be realized at the same time. And that we cannot go to space

with our feet with our feet in the mud. Nor can we, in fact, turn ourselves into an echo-sensitive, hallucinogenic-based culture on Earth, unless we

see these dichotomous opposites. It is only in a coincidencia positorum, a union of opposites, that does not strive for closure, that we are going to find cultural sanity. And this is a

thing that the infeogenes, the hallucinogens deliver with such clarity and regularity. They raise paradox to a level of intensity that no one can evade. And in doing that, they set the stage for putting yourself into the kind of person who does not insist on having it either or by

black or white. And a culture composed of those kinds of people will be a culture more civilized than any that we have seen so far.

If I can paraphrase Teilhard de Chardin for a moment, he said, or I will paraphrase in this way,

when the human race understands the potential of the hallucinogenic drug experience, it will have discovered fire for the second time.

And this is what we are waiting for. We are waiting for the discovery of fire so that we can transcend the monkey business and get on with the great business of inhabiting our own imagination.

And it's impossible to take that position without someone saying, Manichean, dualist, enemy of the body.

Perhaps, but since the very beginning of culture, what we seem to be are animals which take in raw material and excuse it, imprinted with ideas.

And we do this on a larger and larger scale, looking toward the day when all physical constraints can be lifted off of us as they are in our imagination.

And we can erect the kind of civilization that we want to erect.

And this vision was anticipated by no less a seer than James Joyce.

He said, If you want to be phoenix, come and be polished.

Up in the end, prospector...

Here in Moitaine, we flop on the phoenix side.

Moitaine is the red-light district of Dublin.

But up in the end, prospector, you sprout all your worth and whiff your wings.

This was part of his program.

He hoped that man would become dirigible, as he put it.

And he didn't live to see the revolution of the hallucinogens.

But I think, had he, he would have felt that man was well on his way to becoming dirigible.

And it seems to me that we stand at an enormous threshold.

The future of the human mind must loom large in the future of the human species.

If it doesn't loom large in the, in the future of the human species, then we are in very big trouble.

Now, a term that has been applied, or was early on applied, though I haven't heard it used at this conference, to hallucinogens, was consciousness-expanding drugs.

And this may not be automataic, but it's certainly phenomenologically accurate and neutral.

They are consciousness-expanding drugs.

And the question, what is consciousness, cannot be divided away from the question, is man good?

And this is a question that we have to answer for ourselves, because I believe that we are not going to extinguish ourselves.

That we are going to evade the, uh, the manic obstacles that are so obviously ahead of us in the next few years.

We are going to reach the threshold of the galaxy, but in what form?

And in order for the form in which we reach the edge of the galaxy and present ourselves to the hegemony of organized intelligence that must exist there,

in order for that form to be worthy, we are going to have to go with our minds fully illuminated in front of us.

And that means that we can have no more trust with the idea of an unconscious,

of an inaccessible and dark part of the human psyche that cannot be controlled.

That is obviously a description of the childhood of an intelligent species.

And I believe that these hallucinogens signal the end of that childhood.

There have always been individual shamans who have made that transition.

And in that sense, the taking of hallucinogens is an unhistorical phenomenon.

It has always been going on.

But the idea of psychedelic societies is something new.

And it doesn't necessarily mean that everyone takes the drug.

It merely means that the complexities and the mysteriousness of mind are centered in the consciousness of the civilization

as the mystery which it comes from and which it must relate to in order to be relevant.

So I'll take a couple of questions.

...of the utilization of material that would allow you to hang on to whatever perceptions I may have triggered in you.

I wouldn't presume to answer that question, but I'll answer another one that might relate to it.

Because I think that when you take hallucinogens, you should take an effective dose.

And I can't stress enough the importance of lying down and being still in darkness on an empty stomach.

I mean, if you want an oral empowerment, that's it.

Nothing could be simpler.

And yet you would be amazed at the number of people who, when you mention psilocybin,

the first question that occurs to them is, will I be able to drive?

This is one more.

And with regard to what?

Well, MBA, the word impasthenogen or impasthenogen seems to me very appropriate.

It is not a powerful visual hallucinogen.

I'm very interested in the visual hallucinogens because it seems to me they pose certain fundamental questions about information theory and that kind of thing.

For instance, you know, where do these hallucinations come from?

These extremely intricate, far more intricate than any visual scene that your eye falls upon in ordinary reality.

These interesting, shifting information patterns.

I don't believe that they can be reduced to spirals, lines and dots.

What I see isn't like that.

It's more as though you had a holographic hyperspatial radio and you just tune down the dial.

And here's a desert world in a triple star system.

And here is a city somewhere inhabited by insectile creatures with a machine symbiosis.

Here is something else.

And it's just flipping by.

I would prefer to believe that the human imagination is the holographic organ of the human body and that we don't imagine anything.

We simply see things so far away that there is no possibility of validating or invalidating their existence.

These short-acting drugs have a profound lasting effect.

No, I think it certainly has a profound and lasting effect.

The very brevity of it serves to convince you that it isn't a drug at all, but that it's carried you into another dimension and back again.

And that alone is something to ponder.

Well, I thank you for your attention.

I was at the meeting last year when Dr. Hoffman came and his opening sentence was,

You expected the shame and you're going to get a chemist.

When I actually, when I was first asked by Dr. Robert Gordon McCutcheon to come here tonight and talk about whatever I wanted to do,

My first impression, as long as I allowed my first impression, was to decline.

I had, after all, I am a student of chemistry and of pharmacology and not really a student of philosophy and religion.

And I felt I had probably contributed as much as I could last year when I took chalk to blackboard and do hexagons and tryptamine rings and gave my impression of what on a molecule caused it to do what.

But my wife intervened. Why not tell them just why you do what you do?

Well, it got me lost into an interesting question.

I never had actually spoken to myself and said, you know, why do you do what you do?

The flippant answer is always at hand.

Well, one does it because it's there to be done.

The Mount Everest routine.

I climb the mountain because it's there to be climbed.

But that is, of course, not the reason I do the research I do.

Whenever this question would come up in a seminar or during a panel discussion,

I'd place special emphasis on the word psychotomimetic.

The word has been used quite a bit today.

A term that is usually used by the scientific community when they wish to speak about the psychedelic drugs.

The term psychedelic does not find a good audience in the psychiatric or in the chemical or in the medical literature.

It carries a metamessage of drug use, drug encouragement, drug proselytizing.

And as a result, the word is not often encountered.

In its origin, as was pointed out, it comes from psychoto, meaning in essence psychosis,

and minutus, meaning the imitation of.

And this, indeed, is a term that very early in the work in this area,

there had been given these materials because they had been cast in the role of causing syndrome,

causing symptoms that would reflect the character of mental illness.

And as felt by studying the effects of these materials in normal subjects,

you might be able to glean some insight as to the mechanisms or at least the descriptions

and definitions of this syndrome when seen in people who are spontaneously ill.

This explanation, the search for new psychotomimetics for materials that would be more exact in the definition of psychosis,

is completely logical in that most of the hallucinogenics, the psychedelics that are known,

can be classified into materials that are indoles, and there are many in this area,

the tryptamines, the more convoluted carbolines, LSD as an ergot-type indole,

or it can be classified as phenethylamines.

And there are perhaps some three or four scores that are in this classification.

The analogs of mesclin compounds have been mentioned several times,

or the substitution of variants of mesclin,

or the alpha-methyl compounds that have given rise to the materials that are lumped chemically together as the amphetamines.

And there are two principal neurotransmitters in the brain.

One is an indole, and this is serotonin.

One is a phenethylamine, namely dopamine.

And it's very desirable from the point of the neurochemist to find pigeonholes that can classify things.

Here we have a group of psychedelics that are all indoles,

and we have a neurotransmitter that's indolic, serotonin.

Here's a group that are all phenethylamines,

and we have a neurotransmitter that's phenethylamine.

All we have to do is understand why all of these work here, and all of those work there,

and we still now know how the neurotransmitters work in the brain.

Unless we know that, we'll be able to cure mental illness.

Well, it's an appealing, and it has not been a particularly rewarding classification.

And the explanation, besides being logical, is quite safe,

because it's an unthreatening explanation.

It's easily accepted by the academic and administrative community.

But the explanation is still not the explanation of why I do what I do.

My work is indeed dedicated to the development of tools, but tools for quite a different purpose.

And here is where I want to get quite a way from chemistry and into some of my own personal thoughts.

I'd like to lay a little background to establish a framework for these tools,

and in part to define them, and in part to give emphasis to an urgency

that I really feel associated with them.

First, I am a very firm believer in the reality of a balance in all aspects of the human theater.

When there seems to be a development of move that-a-way,

somehow, very shortly, or almost in concert, there is a move this-a-way

that keeps things in some delicate balance.

If there must be a dichotomization of concepts into good and evil,

then all good seems to contain its unexpressed evil,

and all evil is unexpressed good.

Within the human mind, there coexists the eros,

the life-loving, the self-perpetrating force,

with the thanatos, the self-destructive death wish.

Both are present in each of us,

but are usually separated by a very difficult wall,

a very difficult-to-penetrate wall of the unconscious.

One definition of the tools I seek is that they may allow words of a vocabulary,

a vocabulary which might allow each human being to more consciously and more clearly

communicate with the interior of his own mind and psyche.

This may be called a vocabulary of awareness.

A person who becomes increasingly aware of, and so begins to acknowledge,

the existence of the two opposite contributors to his motives and decisions

may begin to make choices which are knowledgeable.

And the learning process that follows such choices, the path that leads to wisdom.

But just as there is a balance within the mind that needs establishment,

there is an interesting record of balances of the same sort in society.

Let's look for a few minutes at some of the coincidences

that have kept our human race in a rather precarious balance.

Throughout the early centuries of the current millennium,

there were carried out some of the most viciously inhuman wars that were known to man,

all in the name of the forces of religion,

and the horrors of the Inquisition, with its lethal intolerance of heresy.

And yet, it was during these dark years that the structure of alchemy was established.

Not to change base metals into noble ones, as it was often thought,

but to acquire knowledge through the study of matter.

The work of the alchemists extended up to the age of enlightenment,

with the urges of rationalism and of skepticism.

And it was always directed toward the learning process.

The reward of alchemistic effort has been simply stated

as the effort to achieve the transmutation of base metals into gold.

But as Ralph pointed out just a bit ago,

this is not the actual reward.

The value was the doing and the redoing and the redoing of the process of distillation,

of sublimation, of condensation, of precipitation.

It was a continual, ever more exact effort to understand these processes,

that from the learning of the process,

one would be able to find a unity between the physical and the spiritual world.

It was the doing and the redoing itself that was the reward.

In the last hundred years or so,

this learning process has evolved into what we call science.

However, there has been a subtle shift in the goal,

from the process itself to the results of the process.

In this age of science, it is only the end result, the gold, that really matters.

It is not the act of achieving, but the achievement itself that brings one the acknowledgement of his peers,

that brings recognition from the outside world,

that results in wealth and influence and in power.

And these end achievements, these results,

show the same dichotomy of directions which was so evident in the previous centuries.

For years, there had been no separation of values.

Neither direction had taken the colors of good, or for evil.

But still, there were incredible coincidences of timing.

For example, in 1895,

Wilhelm Conrad von Lincoln observed that when electricity was applied to an evacuated tube

containing certain gases,

a nearby plate covered with barium,

platinocyanide, emitted a visible glow.

And the next year, in 1896,

Antoine-Henri Becquerel

found that these same metal-producing emanations

were being emitted from uranium,

where your activity had been discovered.

But it was just in the following year,

at 11.45 a.m. on the 23rd of November of 1897,

that Arthur Hefter consumed an alkaloid

that he had isolated from the peyote, dumping cactus,

brought to the Western world by the irrepressible pharmacologist,

Louis Levine.

As Hefter wrote in his notes,

and this is a quotation following 150 milligrams,

of mescaline.

From time to time,

dots with the most brilliant colors

floated across the field of vision.

Later on, landscapes,

halls,

architectural scenes also appeared.

Mescaline had also been discovered.

During the 1920s and 1930s, both worlds,

that of the physical sciences involving radiation

and that of the psychopharmacological sciences involving psychotropic materials,

continued to develop without any clear sense of polarity,

without the mine is good and yours is evil duality that was soon to come.

Radioactivity and radiation were becoming the mainstays of medicine.

X-ray photography was invaluable in diagnosis,

and radium therapy was broadly used in treatment.

Controlled and localized radiation could destroy malignant tissue,

prospering the host.

And in the area of psychology,

there were parallel developments.

The theories of Freud and Jung were being developed

into increasingly useful clinical tools and approaches to mental illness.

And on the basis of experimental psychology,

it was laid in the pioneering studies of Pavlov.

Another coincidence in timing,

which in retrospect started a dividing of science

on a separate path,

occurred during World War II.

In the late 1942,

Enrico Fermi and several other scientists

at the University of Chicago

demonstrated for the first time ever

that nuclear fission could be achieved

and could be controlled by man.

The age of unlimited power and freedom

from dependency upon our dwindling fossil reserves

had begun.

Just the next year,

at 4.20 p.m. on the 19th of April,

Albert Hoffman consumed a measured amount of a compound

which he had first synthesized some five years earlier.

As Hoffman subsequently reported,

as a quotation following 250 micrograms,

after the crisis of confusion and despair,

I began to enjoy the unprecedented colors

and plays of shapes that persisted.

Kaleidoscopic, fantastic images surged in on me,

alternating, variegated,

opening and closing themselves

in circles and spirals.

LSB has also been discovered.

But then, still,

and up until the last decade,

it was the rich promise of the nuclear age,

first with the power and potential of fission,

and later with the virtually limitless potential

of fusion energy

that carried the banner and the hopes of man.

And the area of the hallucinogenics was categorized as negative,

psychosis-imitating,

psychotomimetic.

It was not until someone in the 1970s,

sometime in the 1970s,

that a strange and a fascinating

and a rather frightening reversal of roles

took place.

The knowledge of nuclear fission and fusion

took on a death-loving aspect,

with country after country joining the fraternity

of those skilled in the capacity

for the eradication of the human experiment.

And to have such power

leads to the threat to use such power,

which in time will actually lead to its use.

But, as I said earlier,

when one thing develops,

there seems to spring forth

the balancing of compensatory counterpart.

This balance can be realized

with the psychedelic drugs.

What had been simply tools

for the study of psychosis, at best,

or for escapist self-gratification, at worst,

suddenly assumed the character

of tools of enlightenment

and of some form of transcendental communication.

If man's alter ego, his thanakos,

had been entrusted with imperpetual knowledge

of how he can completely destroy himself

and this extraordinary experiment,

then some development will,

must occur at the eros side of his psyche

that will and must afford

the learning of how to live

with his professional knowledge.

It is a communication

between these two sides of the mind

that requires an extraordinary vocabulary.

Where do these words come from?

The words of this vocabulary.

All depend upon an intimate insight

into the working of the human mind.

But this can be approached in many ways.

The study of religion,

of meditation,

of self-yielding,

provides a peace.

But in my mind,

also tends toward a retreat

and hence a capitulation.

The efforts to amalgamate

the two sides of the mind

as seen in the Tao of physics

and the rich findings of parallelisms

between the Eastern and Western philosophies

may eventually explain all

and allow some unification

for the human purpose.

But I feel,

along with many others,

that the efforts

being invested

in the technology of destruction

does not allow sufficient time.

It is possibly only

with the psychedelic drugs

that words of vocabulary

can be established

which might tunnel through

the subconscious

between the conflicting aspects

of the mind and psyche.

It is here that I feel

my skill lies.

And this is exactly

why I do what I do.

Where do we stand

as of today?

In the last handful of years,

the forces of government

and nationalism

have amassed

an unprecedented arsenal

of destructive power.

The power is in the current arsenals

of the world

if restructured

into Hiroshima-strength weapons

to detonate one bomb

every minute

on the minute

for the next two years.

And the rationalization,

the rationalized need

to do so

is becoming manifest

at a frightening pace.

But in the last handful of years,

a number of tools

of communication

have increased

at a like rate.

There are currently

nearly 200 psychedelic drugs

known and described

some touching at one,

some at another

of the fibers

that unify our minds.

By learning

each of the structures

of sensory communication

in turn,

we might find

a form of communication

that would disarm

our destructive compulsion.

And indeed,

what form of tools

are now available to us?

Some of the tools

that are available

or rather

that have been available

are the widely publicized

drugs of psychopharmacology

such as mesclate,

psilocybin,

DOM,

LSD,

these drugs

played a role

in defining

the transition

between drugs

as entertainment,

escape,

turn-on,

and drugs

as instructive vehicles

for learning,

enlightenment,

and insight,

but at quite a price.

They had a high profile

at the time

that the scheduled

drug laws were written

and thus

were made illegal

and are not available.

However,

in their place

there are now

many, many other materials,

some more limited

in their instructive capacity

and some perhaps

even richer.

And for everyone today

there will be

ten tomorrow.

Let me describe

a small sampling

of the recently born materials

a bit more in detail.

These are examples

with some quotations

in some instances

of experiments

in which there have been

actually definitions

of some aspect

of sensory teasing apart

of the complex

sensorim attack

and effects

that these materials

can have.

DIPT

is an abbreviation

of NN-diastropropylcryptamine,

a drug unique

among the psychedelics

in that it expresses

a distortion in

or to an extent

a synthesis

with the process

of auditory interview.

It is perhaps

one of the less

available senses

to be teased apart

for special studies.

Many of the close relatives

as you well know

deal with the audit

with the visual process

and in some way

will change

or synthesize

or modify

the visual integrity

but a rather

interesting distinction

between the drug

induced psychosis

and endogenous

schizophrenia

is that very often

in the latter

the primary

sensory

character

that is affected

is the auditory

influence.

A quotation

following 20 milligrams

of DIPT

The telephone sounds

partly underwater

Here are signs

of a pitch change

on radio

The absolute pitch

down a major third

Chord on the piano

sounds out of tune

quite flat

Music terrible

unlistenable

The other senses

seem to know

if I were deaf

I would have thought

this an inactive drug

Several hours

after ingestion

of the material

this note

Hearing normal

piano back in tune

MDMA

or MDA

is abbreviation

for 3,4-methalindoxy

methamphetamine

It's a tool

of communication

that has shown

in recent years

an extraordinary

utility in opening

communication

between individuals

This has promoted

its use in psychotherapy

but has given

promise as well

as a vehicle

for interpersonal

intrapersonal

communication

This particular drug

has been used

clinically

in many applications

and these today

in probably a number

in the thousands

and it has commanded

a remarkably good

record of positive results

A quotation

following 120 milligrams

We kept up

a lively conversation

covering many

interesting aspects

of our various

family relationships

The conversation

was unusually insightful

and free of defensiveness

And following

a 40 milligram

supplement

at the two hour point

Gene glowed

with energy

became very beautiful

We talked freely

and openly

Every bush and plant

looks utterly alive

I am entranced

by a large rock

As I look

at its surface

I see the surface

of a planet

with mountains

and valleys

Little crystals

of mica

are like jewels

Another material

2CB

is the abbreviation

for 2,5-dimethoxy

4-bromophenethalimine

A tool

and a word

of vocabulary

which ties

the mental process

directly and constructively

into the physical soma

The analgesic effects

experienced with many

if not most

of the psychedelic drugs

are not present

with 2CB

On the contrary

there is an increased

body awareness

of every kind

including skin sensitivity

heightened responsiveness

to smells

tastes

to sexual stimulation

When experiences

increased consciousness

of physical health

and energy

on the other hand

sharpened awareness

of any body

imbalance

or discomfort

2CB

allows rich visual imagery

and intense

eyes closed fantasy

without cluttering up

of the metal field

of too many elaborations

A quotation

following 20 milligrams

Along with the awareness

of the body

and the ability

to deeply enjoy

the fact

that one is a physical

as well as a spiritual being

the experience

of 2CB

allows exploration

as far

as one needs

to go

There is at all times

full connection

with all parts

of oneself

the emotional

and the intellectual

the intuitive

and the instinctual

It is a superb tool

for learning

and for growth

and 2CB

allows one

to recover baseline

within 6 to 8 hours

using a maximum dosage

of 25 milligrams

usually lower

in the area

of 18 to 20

Another drug

mentioned earlier

ketamine

is abbreviation

for 2-orthochlorophenyl

2-methylaminocyclohexanone

the antithesis

of 2CB

in that it effectively

separates the mind

and the body

This allows the mind

a separate

and constructive state

apart from the

physical groundings

of the body

Although the primary

clinical application

of ketamine

is as a dissociative

anesthetic

an increasingly important

direction of study

the logical loosening

that it allows

MAL and CPM

are abbreviations

of the compounds

that are fascinating

analogs of mescaline

namely 4-methyl-3-5-dimethoxyfenethylamine

and 4-cyclopropyl-methyl-3-5-dimethoxyfenethylamine

two compounds

that activate

opposite sides

of the sensorium

The former

provokes

an intense visual distortion

at the retinal level

with consequential

bizarre interpretations

The latter

displays its effectiveness

in the fantasy

counterpart

seen only

with the eyes closed

Following

65 milligrams

of MAL

A quotation

Within 2 hours

intense effect

Beautiful

diuretic

Good connections

between parts

of myself

Continual fantasy

and imagery

Lovely experience

of the erotic

with husband

Around 12 hours

Excellent solid sleep

with clear

balanced dreams

Following

70 milligrams

of CPM

A 2 hours

strong effect

but no visual

Wonderful

locking into music

Deep loving

Erotic

Very good

With eyes closed

Intense

colorful fantasy

Much like LSD

at times

No sleep

before 18 hours

Lest anyone

should have the impression

by the way

that research

in this area

leads always

to God

and to insight

and to deeper

experiences

and loving

Let me mention

an example

of a compound

called 4-TASB

which is

4-thioethyl-3-ethoxy-5-methoxyfinethylamine

following 100 milligram

exposure

at about 2 hours

pleasant and positive

peaceful feelings

very good humored

Later

sleep impossible

until early morning

and then only

about 2 hours

All next day

could not rest

or sleep

feeling of nerve endings

raw and active

anxiety over heartbeat

frightening effects

on nervous system

depression

back of neck

sore from tension

my first experience

of being able

to detect

what felt

like continual

electrical impulses

between nerve endings

had the impression

that if I allowed

the wrong sequence

of images

to flow in my mind

I might experience

some sort of convulsion

or might at least

a kind

or at least

a kind of mental shock

or shorting out

When I tried to sleep

eyes closed

fantasies became

intensely negative

and threatening

I could not smooth

out the nervous system

felt very vulnerable

do not repeat

Alpha-O-DMS

is an abbreviation

of 5-methoxy

alpha-methylcryptamine

an analog of

a neurotransmitter

serotonin

that has been

tailored chemically

to allow it

to enter into the

CNS

into the brain

There is a very

potent endo

psychedelic

that touches

closely on those

areas involved

with primal energies

Several researchers

experienced dreams

of catastrophic

events

after exploring

this material

One researcher

however

had a dream

which involved

as a complete

science fiction

scenario

he found it

absolutely enjoyable

and is still

thinking of

writing it up

and sending it

into a publisher

These are only

about a half

a dozen or so

of many scores

of fascinating

compounds

that are now

available for the

study of this

developing vocabulary

This is where

we are at the

moment

Some materials

show incredible

promise

and some

suggest caution

science fiction

But what might

we expect to

emerge in the

future

Let's look at

the past history

of other areas

of psychotropic

chemistry

A few decades

ago it was

marveled at

that drugs

such as the

opiates

including morphine

and heroin

and meperidine

could have such

an exacting

influence on the

brain's integrity

Then it became

known that there

were natural

factors in the

brain that had

these actions

and that there

were specific

sites in the

brain that were

pre-designed to

respond to them

There were the

encephalins and

their fragmented

portions known as

the endorphins

which were derived

from the cephalic

process and related

to morphine

These met a

person's need for

the suppression of

pain

Perhaps there are

encephalins from

the psychedelics

and specific

enescalins from

mescaline yet to

be discovered

that might relate

to these

communicative

factors which

might be the

natural

which might be

connected and

eventually

related to the

natural receptor

sites in the

brain for

transcendental

communication

Their structures

may someday be

known, their

functions may

someday be

understood

There are a

multitude of

tenuous threads

that tie together

the fragile

structure of the

human spirit

The life-giving

with the death

demanding side

The exalted

voice with the

mundane

The strongly

centered self

with the drive

toward dispersion

and loss of

center

These all

coexist in all of

us but there

is an essential

blockade between

these inner worlds

which I truly feel

can be penetrated

only with the

words and the

tools and the

understanding that

may be most easily

obtained through the

area of psychedelic

experiences

William Blake said

in the marriage of

heaven and hell

Man has no body

distinct from the

soul

for that called

body is a

portion of soul

discerned by the

five senses

The chief inlets of

soul in this age

energy is the only

life and is from

the body and

reason is the

bound or outward

circumference of

energy energy is

eternal delight

These are responses

to a heartfelt need

for some vocabulary

to allow the

establishment of a

dialogue that might

diffuse the

accelerating mad

moves toward

extinction

My personal

philosophy might

well be lifted

directly from

Blake I must

create a system

or be slaved

by another man

I may be wrong

but I must do

what I'm doing

and I will do

what I can

stop

that

time