Plants Consciousness And Transformation

Okay, well welcome to plants consciousness and transformation

I'm Terence McKenna. I know many of you

We will meet here today and tomorrow 10 to noon 1 30 to 5 and

Basically, this is a workshop to discuss the interaction between plants and human beings

specifically the psychological and mental

Interpenetration of these two very different kinds of life forms and

Those of you who are writing who are concerned about a paper that you may write relative to this class

I'll say a few words about that before the afternoon session

So don't fret about it. It will all come clear

in time

I think of this

course as plants and mind and

The way I like to teach is to just begin to lay out the basic pieces of what is a very complex

interdisciplinary puzzle

and hopefully at some point

your

Specialties your passions your

Interests will ignite the whole thing and it will have then a dynamic of its own

We could discuss these matters for two days five days ten days or as I've done for about 40 years 35 years

There is no end to it and very few

areas of human endeavor

Of human endeavor

Dissolve the disciplinary boundaries of Western academia as

thoroughly as

The study of human and psychoactive plant interactions do

There are important issues here

There are important issues here in biology and botany

in

biogeography in

ethnography and ethnology in

psychology and

neurophysiology in

the study of

symbols

The

The number of disciplines that have to be brought to bear on this subject

is I think a central clue to how important

it is

to

understanding

our

humanness

and

I

represent

a

radical

point of view

on these matters

and I

don't imagine I was invited here to dumb it down

so

you know if you had Darwin you'd get natural selection

if you had Freud you'd get sexual repression

so you've got McKenna so you're going to get

a

psychoactive

catalysis

of consciousness

because that's basically

why I think these ideas are so important

but before we get to that let me just lay out

some of the

the field

Human beings began

their career well

we can trace it back to the primordial slime I suppose

but

our

our animal career

be

was a career of

insectivorous

vegetarian

and

fruititarianism

lived out

in the arboreal canopies

of tropical

rainforests

and

all

all animal species

indeed all life

tends to

uh

occupy an evolutionary

niche

and

then

stabilize itself

in that niche

uh

termites

cockroaches

these sorts of organisms

found their niche

hundreds of millions of years ago

and

filled it

to perfection

and have occupied it ever since

generally

nature

is not progressive

in its particulars

overall

nature

is progressive

but its particulars

uh

seek

equilibrium

and so

it would have been

in the case

of our

primate

ancestors

they

achieved

uh

dynamical balance

as i said

a diet of insects

and fruit

a canopy

habitat

uh

language of pack

signaling

designed to convey

danger

and information

about food sources

and so forth

and so on

and there they would

have remained

uh

had it not been

for the larger

ecodynamics

of the planet

ecodynamics

which are still

shaping

uh

human

habitat

in Africa

because what

has been

going on

in Africa

for at least five

million years

is a slow

drying

of

the continent

and

it disrupted

this

uh

rainforest

ecology

so that about

two to four

million years ago

I mean these are vast

spans of time

we're talking about

the rainforest

began to island

itself

and to be restricted

to the wetter

areas

of Africa

and into the new

environment

the more

xerophitic

or arid environment

that was coming

into being

uh

a very diminished

plant community

took hold

a community

of

uh

opportunistic

grasses

uh

annuals

heavy cedars

this sort of thing

now we know

that the

rainforest

was primary

because the

rainforest

just to give you

a broad notion

might

consist of

uh

over a hundred thousand

plant species

the grassland ecosystem

might well consist

of under

five hundred

species

and all

five hundred

grassland species

can be found

as rare

members

of the flora

of the rainforest

so clearly

what we have

are the survivors

of a process

of clearing

and there is

argument

among botanists

about this

but Carl Sauer

who was a great

geographer

and thinker

on these matters

held

that there is no

such thing

as a natural

grassland

that grasslands

are the

earliest

artifacts

of human

impact

on the planet

grasslands

are created

by burning

uh

they promote

the growth

of cereals

uh

and so

play

feed in

to the human

uh

food chain

so

our

uh

primate

ancestors

ecological adaptation

to arboreal

life

was interrupted

by this

process

uh

and

key to my

thinking

about

all this

and

those of you who are

going to have careers

in all this

I hope some of you will

take it up

contemplate it

I think the great

overlooked

factor

in any model

of human evolution

and indeed in

uh

evolutionary models

of many other species

is

we have not given

enough

uh

emphasis

to diet

when we talk about

natural selection

of an animal species

we tend to

think

that

uh

the genome

expresses

uh

physical type

and the phenotype

is then

subject

to selection

by natural

environment

some biologists

have

seen

the

thinness

of this

understanding

L.L. White

wrote a book

called

Internal Factors

in which he pointed out

that

the womb

is itself

an

environment

that makes

a very heavy

selection

before

an organism

is ever born

into the theater

of Darwinian

selection

so it isn't

a tabla rasa

that you're born

into the theater

of natural selection

you have been

subject to natural selection

from the very

earliest moments

of the existence

of the

zygote

uh

so that's one

factor

uh

but what I have

emphasized

is diet

diet

is

uh

an input

of

potentially

mutagenic

factors

into the body

that can have

enormous consequences

uh

on the health

of an individual

or the general

evolution

uh

of a population

and

I've

used

the

toolbox

of ideas

that I'm going to put

forward here

today and tomorrow

to try and address

what seems to me

to be

one of the most

centrally interesting

questions

uh

to be asked

of this world

and that is

what is

human consciousness

where did it come from

and why does it exist

at all

uh

and I believe

that we can

by thinking

about psychoactive

plants

diet

and the early

human evolutionary

situation

we can

make a lot of progress

uh

on this question

and

we can illuminate

some of our

political dilemmas

that persist

to this day

the

gender

friction

uh

that typifies

human society

the hierarchy

structures

and the tensions

they create

so forth

and so on

so let me

run through

this

and get it off

my chest

and then

we can

talk about

the larger

uh

materia

medica

of

uh

psychoactive

change

relative

to

plants

as the

rainforest

retreated

our

remote

primate

ancestors

came under

nutritional pressure

obviously

because their

area for gathering

food

was being

physically

diminished

now

when a

uh

as you probably know

or have observed

most animal species

are very particular

about their

food

intake

and if you've ever

tried to

tried to raise

butterflies

or something

for your children

uh

you know that if you

capture a caterpillar

in the wild

but don't

pay close attention

to the plant

you find it on

you can't just

put grass

in a peanut butter

jar

with a caterpillar

and expect great

success

animals

are highly

specialized

in their

choice of

foods

why is this

well

as near as we can

tell

uh

eating all kinds of foods

from an evolutionary

point of view

is a very

reckless

move

indeed

because

plants represent

um

uh

chemical smorgasbords

of various types

that have

accumulated over

time

in the genome

of a particular

organism

if you

have a very

broad based

diet

you are exposing

yourself

to many different

kinds

of mutagenic

influences

as a strategy

for survival

of a species

this is not good

uh

much better

to specialize

to evolve

special enzymatic

pathways

to deal

with toxins

so for instance

we know certain animals

can eat

things that other animals

would become ill from

or even die

uh

and this is the way

it's done

and all animal species

tend to evolve

toward these

very

bland

uh

mono diets

now

what happens

when

uh

there is an upheaval

in an environment

uh

geomagnetic reversal

a volcanic eruption

a drought

something like that

and ordinary sources of

nutrition

become restricted

then

an organism

has basically

two choices

it

can

uh

go extinct

starve itself

out of existence

or

if it has more

flexible behaviors

it can begin

to experiment

with

previously

rejected

potential foods

in the environment

rejected

probably

because

of

uh

strong taste

or something like that

which are clues

to the presence

of

marginally

acceptable

chemical compounds

of

some sort

our remote

canopy living ancestors

as I mentioned

were fruititarian

insectivores

they

under

nutritional

pressure

began to

expand

their repertoire

of foods

they also

began to

explore the grassland

environment

and

I mentioned

that the grassland

environment

is much poorer

in

total number of plant

species

than the rain forest

thus

and logically

the potential number

of

food sources

is also

limited

baboons

and

chimpanzees

will dig

with sticks

for the corms

the swollen roots

of

grasses

uh

so as

our

remote ancestors

began to explore

this new

environment

of the grasslands

they also began

to explore

new

dietary

items

uh

and

one of the items

that they would

surely

have

uh

observed

are

coprophytic

mushrooms

which prefer

dung

as their environment

coprophilic

or coprophytic

is the word

for this

many of these

species of coprophytic

mushrooms

elaborate psilocybin

which as I

assume you know

is

uh

one of the major

psychoactive

alkaloids

uh

psilocybin

occurs in

many species of

mushroom

it's unknown

outside

of

the

fungi

uh

and

but I maintain

that in a sense

psilocybin

is the

uh

best model

for human interaction

with the

psychedelic

or that all

other

psychoactive

plant usages

are an

effort to

duplicate

return

to

or somehow

evoke

the original

human

relationship

uh

to psilocybin

and here

is

uh

it is not

simply

it's psychoactive

properties

that make

psilocybin

a potential

catalyst

for human

consciousness

it is

it's psychoactive

properties

in combination

with certain

other properties

that make it

uh

uniquely suited

to carry out

the role

of

catalysis

of consciousness

in a higher

animal

what are

these unique

characteristics

well

first of all

uh

in very low

doses

psilocybin

uh

increases

visual acuity

if you want

to go back

into the literature

Roland Fisher

uh

in the middle

sixties

uh

took graduate

students

and

gave them small

amounts of

psilocybin

or placebo

and he built

an apparatus

where two

parallel strips

of metal

could be

deformed

uh

by winding

a crank

and he asked

people to

uh

push a button

when the two

strips seem

to them

to cease

to be parallel

and he demonstrated

that

edge

detection

is enhanced

by small amounts

of psilocybin

well

you don't have to be

a rocket scientist

to realize

that edge

detection

is at a very high

premium

in any grassland

situation

where predation

is taking place

the

the lion moving

in the grass

300 yards away

as it creeps

upon your

camp

or

the gazelle

trying to

slip away

through the tall grass

from your hunting party

edge detection

is the key to success

or failure

in hunting

in that kind

of a situation

and

uh

it's extraordinary

uh

that

uh

we can

statistically demonstrate

this improved

visual acuity

occurring

uh

in the presence

of psilocybin

what it would have done

you see

is

these proto-hominids

who would accept

the psilocybin

into their diet

would have a

slightly

enhanced

success

in hunting

that

slightly

enhanced

hunting success

would mean more

nutritional resources

available

for them

and their

offspring

presumably

inculcated into

the habit of also

eating the mushrooms

so what we have here

is a slight

favoring

then

of those

animals

in the population

that would accept

psilocybin

into the diet

uh

at

slightly

higher levels

psilocybin

is

uh

like all

cns

stimulants

uh

causes

arousal

and arousal

is simply a

unfocused

restlessness

you know

it's that

too

espresso

feeling

uh

sleep

is

impossible

hands

are

busy

at

small tasks

one is aware

of

one's

sphere of awareness

extends out

somewhat further

uh

and in highly

sexed animals

like primates

arousal means

erection

as we not only have to account for human consciousness

but we have to account for the peculiar dislocation

that human consciousness seems to carry with it

that we are both of nature

yet not of nature

somehow creatures with one foot in nature and one foot in heaven

and how does this

uh

come about

uh

i believe

and i'm

you know willing to argue it against all comers

that a key

element to understanding our

social our sociology and our sexual politics and all that

is

to realize

that

psilocybin had two

effects in the early human populations that were using it

one

we are very familiar with

if we're psychedelic

sophisticates

ourselves

it's the psychedelic

experience

the boundary

dissolving

hallucinatory

shamanic

uh

apotheosis

that occurs

with psilocybin

but the other effect

is

to

uh

medicate

the tendency

to form

dominance

hierarchies

and this is very

controversial

in other words

what i'm saying

is

that all primates

form

dominance hierarchies

and what that means

just to remind you

is that the hard-bodied

long-fanged

young males

take control

of the group

they control the children

the women

they order the old

the homosexual

and the young

among

everybody

is under their

thumb

and

uh

part of our

dilemma

as a

global

society

is that though we

claim great

sophistication

we still live

under male

dominance hierarchies

corporations

universities

family structures

you know

long-fanged males

are still ordering

around the elderly

the weak

and the female

among us

and it is

and as we are

conscious beings

and reflect

upon this

it creates great

social dislocation

and political

unhappiness

and tension

in relationships

and so forth

and so on

I believe

that our unique

position

in the animal

world

arose

as a consequence

of a chemical

suppression

of a natural

behavior pattern

the pattern

of male

dominance

of forming

dominance

hierarchies

was interrupted

by an item

in the diet

psilocybin

and into this

chaos

this egalitarian

chaos

which resulted

was

a situation

in which

everything

about us

that we

treasure

and hold up

as human

was put in

place

in other words

theater

language

dance

story

altruism

ethics

metaphysics

did I say

poetry

everything

that makes us

human

came into being

roughly

a hundred thousand

in the last

well from a hundred thousand

to about fifteen thousand

years ago

people lived

in balance

with the earth

with the larger

biome

in which they

were embedded

there was not

product fetishism

ushering into

enormous

toxic

processes

involving

the smelting

of metals

or the

extraction

of rare

elements

from the earth

now you could

object and say

well but they just

simply weren't

sophisticated enough

to do those

things

I maintain that

our technical

sophistication

is a very

specialized form

of cultural adaptation

and that

comparing us

and finding us

favorably

compared

to the

civilization

of Homer

or

Altamira

is

is simply a form

of cultural

chauvinism

okay

but

psilocybin

had other

effects

besides

this suppression

of male dominance

that I mentioned

and this increased

sexual

thing which I did

mention but I didn't

draw the correct

conclusion there

if you have

something in your

food

which is

to put it crudely

acting as an

aphrodisiac

then it is

reasonable to expect

that you will have

more pregnancies

and reasonable to expect

that you will therefore

have

again

a tendency to

outbreed

the non-psilocybin

using

members

of the population

so we have

two factors

here

increased visual acuity

which gives

greater

food gathering

capacity

increased sexual activity

which tends to

outbreed

the non-psilocybin

imbibing

members

of the group

and then

on top

of all this

you have

this

ecstatic

internal

state

for which

we

with all

our cultural

and epistemic

sophistication

are still

unable

to come

to terms

the mystery

of the psychedelic

experience

now

these things

taken together

with other factors

working in parallel

created

I think

the dilemma

and the glory

and the opportunity

of

humanness

once

we began

under nutritional

pressure

to

expand

our diet

we

were

delicately

poised

on the edge

of

omnivorous

because recall

in the canopy

situation

we were

insectivores

our remote ancestors

we were not

simply vegetarians

we were insectivores

in the grassland

environment

we began

probably

to

originally

to

follow along

behind lion

kills

and that sort

of thing

and eat

carrion

one evolutionary

theory says

that our

suppressed

olfactory

apparatus

the fact that we have

a very limited

sense of smell

is because

there was a period

in our evolution

when we did a lot of

rooting around

in carcasses

this is not

the noble

image

we might have

wished

but

there it is

if you need a

countervailing theory

because you don't like

that one

the other theory is

no

we lost our sense of smell

we stood upright

we got our faces

up off the ground

and that's where the smells

are anyway

so it all sort of became

useless equipment

and we dropped it

a point that I've become convinced of

in the last couple of years

that is definitely not PC

is that I've noticed

this

and my attention was called to it

by

Philippe de Vauchelet

who's a friend of mine

carnivores

are the most conscious

of animals

cows

have very little interest

in the habits

of chipmunks

or birds

or anything else

all they do

is munch grass

carnivores

on the other hand

have an acute interest

in the behavior

of other animals

and in fact

I'm on the brink

of willing to argue

that the earliest consciousness

was not self consciousness

it was consciousness

of how dinner thought

because if you can think

like your dinner

you can go out

and plant yourself

in its path

of behavior

and have dinner

you see

and if you will

if you will look

at the difference

between

oh I don't know

a gerbil

and a house cat

the intelligence level

is striking

and I think

that

this attention

to the behavior

of other animals

on the part

of an emerging habit

of carnivorous behavior

is going to have to be

taken

into consideration

it's interesting

that shamanism

which is

in a sense

the earliest

intellectual pursuit

emerges

in its early phase

as a technique

for identifying

with animals

hunting magic

is what we're talking

about here

and so

I think

that there is

was a very interesting

mix

of

factors

and

players

in the early

human

evolutionary situation

first of all

a canopy

dwelling primate

with a

pack

signaling repertoire

is forced

into a grassland

environment

where psilocybin mushrooms

occur

where small

and large

animals

are predating

upon each other

and where

nutritional options

are highly

restricted

and as the

as this animal

makes its

adaptive

choices

it moves deeper

and deeper

into the realm

of mind

first

the modeling

of the behaviors

of other animals

and the behaviors

of plants

because in a hunting

gathering situation

when plants produce fruit

what environments

they prefer

what other plants

they grow in association

with

what soil types

they prefer

all of these

things

are cofactors

feeding in

to an image

with the two

and the image

.

of the world and this image of the world by its accuracy or falsity decrees life

or death upon those who carry it the omnivorousness forced us into an

awareness of other animals that made us that put us on the level of intelligence

of a hunting cat or something like that but the psilocybin experience at higher

doses and obviously by this time inculcated for sexual and ritual and

hunting purposes into the society also impels you into a non-local invisible

magical world that is to use a Jungian term highly numinous highly charged

with the energy of the archetype of the archetypal world and as I said to this

day we are not able to come to terms with this no matter how much Derrida or

Husserl or Wittgenstein you've imbibed it still is a very challenging thing to

dissolve your ordinary state of consciousness and abandon yourself to

the dynamic of the larger mind that we find ourselves embedded in for a long

time therefore up let's say I mean numbers are numbers but let's say from 50,000

years ago to 12,000 years ago there was a kind of paradise on this planet poetry

coexisted with a balanced ecosystem observational sciences astronomy botany biology taxonomy the

observational sciences co-existed with the natural world and then the same factors

which created this Edenic situation which remember what they were it was the drying of

the African continent that caused the rainforest retreat that same process had been

going on slowly inevitably endlessly and about between well after the last glacial melt which began 20 to

17,000 years ago Africa went dramatically dry and the Sahara Desert began to form where there had been a vast

grassland dotted by sandstone pinnacles cut by rushing streams and crowded with vast

herds of game and that was the theater of human emergence but when it began to go dry it went dry rather

dramatically these ice cores coming out of Iceland make this clear nevertheless as late as Roman times the Roman historian Pliny

referred to North Africa as the bread basket of Rome because they were growing wheat in vast amounts in North Africa as

recently as 2,000 years ago in areas now where there is nothing well that this paradisiacal African

psilocybin matriarchal partnership psychedelic shamanic archaic whatever you want to call it society

was then pushed into crisis and a number of things happened first of all migrations of people out of Africa

this happens every time there's a glacial melt human populations were trapped or proto hominid populations get trapped during the glacial

because the last glacial period the glaciers came as far south as northern Israel

so human populations get trapped and then in the inter glacial during the melt they radiate outward

people began leaving the Sahara settling in the Nile Valley and the use this shamanic use of psilocybin was disrupted

because the environment which made it possible was disrupted and when that happened and this I'm closing the loop here for you

few of my wraps are so sustained

when that happened the pattern of male dominance the pattern that was genetically never removed but which had been

pharmacologically suppressed for over a hundred thousand years perhaps reasserted itself with a vengeance

it was always there it had never been bred out and it must have been an era of enormous brutality

when people's sense of things was that people were turning bad

suddenly we get a whole bunch of things come at once an end to nomadism the beginnings of sedentary agriculture

agriculture

city building

standing armies

slavery

male kingship

dominance

all of these things appear just almost

overnight they spring up

and I maintain they are what

a monkey

would build as a

civilization if suddenly

all of its worst behavioral

tendencies

came to the forefront

with a vengeance

and that's precisely what happened

in the period when we were self-medicating ourselves with psilocybin

we passed from being an animal

into being the peculiarly spiritual entity that we are

we elaborated

observational techniques

theories of magic

language

but when the psilocybin

was withdrawn

these tools which had been

our glory

became instead our curse

because instead of using them to produce

theater and dance

and ecstatic social interaction

we began to use them

to support

the new

and older

the new

agenda

of male dominance

and it's a frightening thing you know

to think people following their cattle across the African plain

eating the mushrooms

seeing the mushrooms as part

of the output of the cattle

in the same way that

meat and milk

and manure were output

of the cattle

a mother goddess

religion

a religion of the land

that moves lightly over the soil

no evidence of

intergroup conflict

so forth and so on

and somehow

then this process

which took a long time of domesticating

cattle

what I'm sure you see

you can see how it all worked

how these factors were disparate

and then they flowed together

human beings followed cattle

because they were following

uh

kills of lions

uh

you follow the cattle

in the same way that the jackals

follow the cattle

to deal with the lion kills

made by large predators

in the course of this

you encounter

uh

weakened animals

or abandoned

uh infant animals

and you care for them

and over 20,000 years

this turns into

domestication of animals

husbandry of cattle

and I think this is a frightening

thing to contemplate

the earliest cities

I will argue

were pens

for human beings

that's what a city is

it's a pen for human beings

some of these dominant males

if we don't control cattle

why shouldn't we

control human beings

in the same way

why shouldn't a king

order his people

with the same impunity

that he orders the slaughter

and the movement

of herds of goats

and cattle

and all of the institutions

were under

came into being

at this moment of transition

from the late Neolithic

or from the Paleolithic

to the Neolithic

to the agricultural situation

the reason for this

I believe

can be traced to

consciousness

I mean consciousness is a double-edged sword

at the very

one of the factors

I think that contributed

to the re-emergence of male dominance

was that at some point

human intellectual capacity

reached the point

where a distant cause

could be connected

to an effect

and the effect and cause

that were being observed

was the sex act

at some point

men and women presumably

but men must have understood

that an act of copulation

if carried out successfully

and in the right

rhythm to the moon

will result in a child

nine months later

if you don't have that understanding

you have no sense of male paternity

so you have a very tight social bond

because for men

the children are our children

the children of the group

once you have a sense of male paternity

then you have ownership

and this then

becomes very problematic

at the very moment that men

were figuring this out

women were noticing

that in the yearly round

of following the cattle

when they would return

to the kitchen middens

and fire pits

abandoned a year previously

that there would be food

in those areas

an abundance of food plants

from cast off kernels of cereals

and so forth and so on

so then there is this awareness

if we bury food

if we bury food sources

then food will come

out of the ground

the problem with agriculture

in the early phase

is that it is hideously efficient

and what it does

is it immediately creates

such a surplus

that you have to stop moving

nomadism has to be abandoned

you till fields

and you overproduce

and then you must store

and defend your overproduction

against less fortunate human groups

in the area

the most advanced building

on this planet

in 10,000

8,000 B.C.

was the grain tower

at Jericho

and what was it?

the grain tower

and it had a staircase

so that you could carry large rocks

up onto the parapet

so that you could drop them

onto the heads of enemies

who were trying to batter their way

into your grain tower

so I've spent some time on this

because this could be taught

this course

without any reference

to our contemporary dilemma

which is the

and by that dilemma

I mean the dilemma

of gender difference

male dominance

underutilization

of females

in society

underutilization

of feminine points of view

in society

but obviously there is a lot of tension

in our society

around the issue of

though there is a growing awareness

among sophisticated people

that the case

is almost entirely emotional

in other words

we tolerate outlandish

toxic drugs

alcohol

tobacco

we're willing to make a trade-off

of 70,000 deaths

a year in this country

of driving the automobile

so forth and so on

we tolerate

very toxic practices

if they are seen to be

somehow supportive

of the agenda being handed down

from the top

psychedelics are not

tremendously disruptive

and yet

as the ethnographic

and pharmacological data

comes in

they are among the most benign

substances in the world

and

their history of human usage

is almost universal

and then the question is

do these intoxications

limit

the spectrum of consciousness

and allow hierarchical models

to be handed down

and brainwashed

into the doubters

or do these states of consciousness

dissolve cultural assumptions

and cast

the individual

into an ocean

of existential perplexity

out of which they have to build

their own model

of how the world works

well

I believe the reason

for this tension

in our society

and anxiety

and suppression

furious suppression

of these things

is because

we sense

that this addresses

origins

in the same way

that it took a long time

to overcome

our

queasiness

about discussing

sexuality

there's something about

the origin

subjects

that make us

very very

nervous

ok

so that's a very linear

discussion

of the role of one

psychoactive plant

in human history

psilocybin

and as I say

I think it was uniquely

chemically

botanically

uh

positioned

to play

that

role

in human consciousness

uh

now

the contemporary

situation

worldwide

is

that we find

uh

many forms

of shamanism

from the arctic

to the rainforest

tropics

and

shamanism

always

depends

for its

uh

efficacy

on a

dislocation

or a

transformation

of ordinary

consciousness

and

we see this

achieved

in many different

ways

uh

through fasting

through

ordeal

meaning abandonment

in the wilderness

or

flagellation

uh

through

uh

elaborate

theatrical

effects

special effects

uh

through

the use of

of

substances

in plants

and

there has been

a

controversy

in anthropology

never resolved

uh

over the past

forty years

uh

what is the

authentic

shamanism

and

those of you

who are

anthropologists

know that

uh

who was one of the

great

uh

experts in this

field

claimed

he called

use of plants

in a shamanic context

decadent

he called

the use

of such

plants

narcotic

well first of all

the use of the word

narcotic

in that context

shows you don't know

what you're talking about

in terms of

pharmacology

that's a totally

obsolete

and silly

category

and

not true

to boot

psychedelics are

in no sense

narcotic

uh

Gordon

Wasson

on the other hand

who was a

brilliant amateur

and the discoverer

of the psilocybin cults

in Mexico

along with his

partner

and wife

Valentina Wasson

took just the opposite

position

and said no

use of plants

to transform consciousness

is the primary

method

where there are

is resort

to

ordeal

fasting

wilderness

abandonment

uh

so forth

and so on

this

is the derivative

late arriving

decadent

shamanism

in fact

this is shamanism

on its way

to turning

into religion

of the ordinary

sort

and in fact

if we look at

religion of the ordinary

sort

we see that it does

have a place

for fasting

it does have a place

for self-flagellation

uh

it does

it does have

it does admit

those techniques

but no

organized religion

of any size

tolerates

the use of

psychedelics

in consciousness

transforming

amounts

and that little

parenthetical phrase

is there

because one of the things

that you should know

and remember

and keep always

in front of you

is that

that if you wish to

control

someone

or if you want

to brainwash

somebody

the way you do it

is with

small amounts

of drugs

and large amounts

of your message

whatever it is

so

uh

you know

but if you give people

large amounts

of a psychedelic

your message

will take

its place

in the

parade

of ideas

and find

its relative

importance

uh

so

so using drugs

does not mean

if you come upon

a cult

or a group

or an individual

using psychedelic

substance

it doesn't necessarily

mean

that they are

on a path

of spiritual

and shamanic

transformation

it may be

self enforcing

some private

Idaho

of illusion

in which they

choose to live

but if

large doses

are being

taken

and by large

I simply mean

effective

full spectrum

doses

one of the wonderful

things about

these substances

is that the

effective dose

is a long ways

away from

a dangerous

dose

the LD50

in other words

is very

favorable

the boundary

well

so then let me

talk for a minute

about the character

of this experience

generally

what is

the plant

hallucinogen

experience

in all times

and all places

for all people

I mean

I don't know

if you can be that general

but it's important

to try

what it is

is it's an experience

of boundary

dissolution

it's an experience

of having

categories

obliterated

of having

previously

defined

boundaries

and differences

eliminated

the enterprise

of being

and the enterprise

of language

is basically

an enterprise

of defining

boundaries

I am myself

you are you

this is now

that was then

we are here

they are there

these are provisional

distinctions

about reality

that make it necessary

that are necessary

for us to keep track

of and manipulate

our animal body

as a machine

in Newtonian space

but when a shaman

takes a psychoactive plant

at an effective dose

he or she

falls

into trance

becomes

immobile

and then

the

geometry of consciousness

if you wish

is

melted

and

recast

in a different

geometry

and

I use these

mathematical terms

because I really

sincerely believe

that

at some hypothetical

future date

when this is all

sorted out

what we are going to

realize about the

psychedelic experience

is

that it is

the

experience

of

the fact

of

the higher geometry

of the universe

in which we live

in other words

it is very easy

to see

that ordinary

consciousness

evolved

to

well

let me put it this way

it is a wonderful aphorism

consciousness

takes the contours

of the vessel

into which it is poured

it is like

water

it always takes

the shape of the vessel

into which it is poured

and so

what are we?

we are

on

the

large scale

we are animals

in

three-dimensional

space

given to

hunting and given

to being

hunted

so what has

consciousness

done?

it has evolved

into a kind of

threat

anticipation

detection

and

avoidance

machine

the purpose of

consciousness

the purpose of

your eyes

the coordination

of your

sense

is to

navigate you

through the world

without dying

without being

ripped apart by

predators

or being caught

in landslides

or rushing rivers

so forth

and so on

and consciousness

fills that need

ordinary consciousness

very well

but

because

the body

has

a locus

in three-dimensional

space

consciousness

of the

ordinary sort

tends

to

surround

the body

as an

object of

concern

in other words

if

you're worried about

being hit

by traffic

you're not

worried about being

hit by traffic

in Berkeley

you're worried about being

hit in traffic

in San Francisco

because that's where you happen to be

so consciousness

of the ordinary sort

tends to cluster

around

the physical body

but when consciousness

is

dissolved

of that concern

and dissolved

of the programming

in language

that that concern

has

built up

over

ages

it

recrystallizes

in

a higher

dimension

literally

a kind

of

hyperspace

and if you will think

for a moment

about shamanism

I think you'll see

how literally

we can take

this mathematical

metaphor

of the psychedelic

experience

what is a

classic

shaman

expected

to do

and be

well

shamans

predict

hunting

they

see

where the game

will be

shamans

predict

weather

they

can

tell

what the weather

will be

shamans

are

brought in

to mediate

complex

social

hassles

of the

who is sleeping

with my woman

who stole

the chicken

you know

who shat in the stream

kind of

social hassles

shamans are brought in for this

these kinds of purposes

and then finally

and most importantly

shamans cure

they cure

sometimes

well

now

these things

predicting the weather

seeing where the game went

curing

and

having a deep

insight

into social

interaction

these are things

which become

completely

non-mysterious

if we

hypothesize

that the shaman

has a

hyperspatial

point of view

you know

if you went into

a mathematical

hype

if we had a

safe

here

and we could go

into hyperspace

we would discover

that the safe

is open

that there is

a

words are difficult

here but there is

a side

of the safe

or let's say

a dimension

to the safe

which isn't locked

in the same way

that if a

hyperspatial

entity

were

looking down

on San Francisco

it could reach

into this room

without coming

through the door

and rearrange

things

in other words

everything that we call

magic

seeing the future

seeing into

locked boxes

knowing what is going

to happen

becomes

utterly

non-mysterious

if you

hypothesize

that consciousness

can unfold itself

under

this peculiar

pharmacodynamic

situation

into a higher

dimensional

space

and that becomes

important

in the modern

context

more than

in the archaic

context

because

the collective

future

has become

for us

a focus

of major

anxiety

we need to know

where we're going

you know

Marshall McLuhan

said

the way we run

our societies

is like driving

an automobile

using only the rear

view mirror

well

in shamanically

guided societies

they actually

turn on

the headlights

running

by the rear view

mirror means

you only

have past

experience

to guide you

running

with the headlights

on

means you actually

have an insight

into the forward

dimension

into what

into which

you're moving

ok

so

that is

sort of

a broad

sketch

of

how one

plant

psilocybin

may have

catalyzed

shaped

impacted

human consciousness

how the abandonment

of that

archaic

shamanic

style

through

climatic

change

created the

fall into

history

how the fall

into history

is the absence

of this hyper

dimensional

point of

view

and then

what we'll

talk about

when we come back

after the break

is

how can we

utilize

the botanical

and ethnographic

and pharmacological

data

that we have

garnered

in the last hundred

years

to

recapture

revivify

and

explore

this dimension

of human potential

in such a way

that we can

actually

inject

some hope

into our

political

circumstances

I don't believe

if we remain

as we are

half

hierarchies

ruled by the most

ruthless

among us

that we have

much of a future

on the evolutionary

stage

but I think

that if we can

recapture

the lost

symbiosis

with these

psychoactive

plants

that we will

in fact

be

recovering

a lost portion

of ourselves

that history

is a progressive

dehumanizing

of the human

experience

and we have

now in the

twentieth century

reached the level

of dehumanizing

where you've got

the holocaust

the thermal

potential thermal

nuclear war

Bosnia

Rwanda

you name it

I mean the scale

of brutality

brutal

brutalness

bruteness

in the twentieth century

indicates to me

that the struggle

for the soul

of humanity

is reaching an incredibly intense crescendo.

And I really believe that the path forward is backward,

that we need an archaic revival,

and that central to that revival

will be the personality and the technology of shamanism.

And when we analyze that technology for its effectiveness,

we will discover that the most interesting things

in the shamanic toolbox are the plants

which directly intervene in the functioning of human consciousness.

So let's just take a stand-up five-minute break

so you can stretch.

And then I've talked without questions this session.

I'm perfectly happy to entertain questions.

If you want to control the agenda,

you're going to have to make some noise.

So are there questions to this point?

Or shall I just keep plodding?

Yes.

The idea of the thinking towards male dominance

that suppressed chemically

which allows for a matriculatural sort of existence

only under a chemical sort of suppression

that we weren't able to read out over thousands of years.

What is that?

I mean, do we have to mainline man for the rest

throughout the journey?

Well, I think the implication is yes.

In other words, had we remained monkeys,

we never would have gotten into this crazy situation.

We became human by forming a relationship,

a symbiotic relationship with a psychoactive plant.

And then we became semi-human when we abandoned it.

And that's what we are now, semi-human.

You know, we're capable of enormous acts of kindness

and appalling acts of brutality.

I think conscious self-reflection can help here.

I mean, if you know this story and believe it,

and if evidence, God knows what evidence would look like,

but if evidence could be found to support it,

then it makes it easier to understand our dilemma.

I mean, men don't want to dominate,

and it's not a man-woman issue either.

The ego is a sort of genderless way of attacking this thing.

The ego was suppressed by psilocybin.

And in the absence of psilocybin,

men and women became much more egocentric.

And that egocentricity created all kinds of institutions

which are very unflattering to us.

So we need, I think, to...

If this idea were accepted that this is what happened,

this is why we're conscious,

this is why we're so uncomfortable with consciousness,

and this is where we are,

and somehow this dialogue could go on

outside the distorting effects of Christianity,

male anxiety, and so forth and so on,

then I think the conclusion would be

we need some very radical social reforms,

not simply, obviously,

the legalization of spiritual transformation

through substances,

but all of our institutions have been built up

on the assumption of ego and dominance hierarchy.

And deconstructing that is really what the future is all about,

I think, and it's a challenge.

Does that go to it sufficiently?

Don't be shy.

It does, except for, I feel like,

well, I also feel like, just in general,

in this theory of the evolution of consciousness

is female, is left out.

I mean, here we have a theory of

erection and arousal

and male dominance

sort of tendency.

I guess it's just that if a matrifocal culture

can exist only under chemicals,

what is the implication of that?

I guess transformation is necessary.

Well, I don't call it matrifocal.

I call it partnership.

I don't think there's a pendulum swing

between patriarchy and matriarchy.

I think there is partnership,

which is appropriate role expression.

Everybody does what is appropriate

to their position.

And then there is the assigned role

of the hierarchical situation.

I think it was in science last week.

Here is a frontier that is breaking right now,

which is, it's just being realized

that men and women

are incredibly different anatomically.

And at the micro-anatomical level,

I think there was a list

of 40 physical differences

between the brains of men and women.

And in a sense,

and this is pure speculation,

but I believe that,

especially in the archaic situation,

well, we don't even have to talk

about the archaic situation.

In 1800,

the average American woman

gave birth 13 times.

The average American woman in 1800.

So, you put a statistic like that

against the phenomenon of menstruation,

and what you have then

when you look at women

is a life absolutely rooted

in the rhythms

and the fact of nature.

Men are sort of,

it's more like a closed system.

It's sealed off.

And there isn't this connection

into the biological world.

So, men are potentially more capable

of getting off the track,

if you want to put it that way,

meaning leaving this Gaian creode

of symbiotic self-reinforcement.

It's very obvious

in the years I've been doing this,

this looks to me

like a fairly balanced group.

But my groups tend to be

heavily male.

And women,

in my own experience,

tend to be far more casual,

psychedelic users

than men.

If you just look at cannabis use,

usually women are very casual.

A woman who is truly a smoker

is a rare, rare thing.

Well, that would go along

with menstruation

and birth

and breastfeeding.

Women are involved

in biology

in a way

that men

need not be.

They can choose,

you know,

and that's why abstraction

is the great realm

of male activity

and so forth.

I guess I want to

pick up

your example

of women in the 1800s

giving birth

so many times

and point out

that that also

was an aberration

that came from

what I consider

to be

the learned behavior

of males

into domination.

That when women

were in control

of their own

reproductive cycle,

there was not

that many births.

they were appropriately

spaced

because the sexual

activity

was not dominant

and the women

determined

when sexual activity

would take place

based on what

was best

for the community

and the offspring.

No, you're right.

I probably

yield on that.

I guess then,

but I try to save

the point

by saying this.

You're right.

Probably in this

archaic situation,

women had knowledge

of plant contraceptives

and they were

well in control

of...

were not forced

into sexual activity

which was an

important piece

of the domination

cycle.

That women

controlled the

reproductive cycle

and the sexual cycle

and so children

were saved.

It was when

the concept

of domination

began

that they lost

power over

when they could,

when they would

have sex

and then also

how often

they would have

babies.

And that was

a real turning

point in that

reproductive aspect.

But don't you

imagine that

in a world

without anesthetic,

even if you

gave birth

only three

or four times

in your life,

these would be

immense boundary

dissolving

psychedelic

extravaganzas.

I don't have

any problem

with the

conclusion,

it's just

sort of

the pathway

there

and what

the constructs

were before

that.

I think you're

right that such

a large number

of pregnancies

and births

indicates a

pattern of

subjugation.

There was something

else I wanted to

say about that.

Well, it'll come

back.

Yeah?

I'd just like to

add something

about gender.

I think we need

to be really

aware of how

biochemically

mediated it is.

I have a friend

who went to

a hormonal

change, became

a woman over

a five-month

period hormonally

and he'd feel

his aggressions

drop away

and then five

months later

he'd change

his mind

back.

He hates

being generous

and loving.

That's

it's off of

me.

You can feel

the aggression

coming back

and now he's

in a really

actually quite

beautiful

entourage

in his face.

Well, now I'm

seeing him

from both

senses.

I really

understand

how

you can feel.

I don't want

to spend too

much time on

it but you

should be

aware of

this.

It's

interesting.

It's always

fun to talk

about sexuality

and so

forth and

so on.

But you're

probably aware

of these

things called

bonubos,

these so-called

pygmy

chimpanzees.

They're

actually not

noticeably

smaller than

ordinary

chimpanzees

but they

are a

distinct

species.

First of

all, we

differ from

chimpanzees

by 2%

of our

genome.

98% of

us is

chimpanzee.

We differ

from the

bonubos in

about the

same amount.

Chimpanzees

are male

dominant,

highly

monogamous,

very

territorial,

so forth

and so

on.

The

bonubos,

which are

to a

non-zoologist

indistinguishable

from the

chimpanzees,

all aggression

is mediated

through sex.

Incredible.

I don't

even, I'm

surprised such

animals can

exist because I

would have

thought a

virus would

have jumped

into this

situation.

But the

bonubos are

incredibly

highly

sexed

animals.

All

forms of

sexual

activity are

going on

almost

constantly.

And all

aggression and

all social

difference and

everything is

ameliorated by

sexual activity,

usually initiated

by the

females.

Well, if you

look at these

two animals,

chimpanzee and

bonubo, you

can't tell them

apart.

I think what

it means is

that this

matter of

our sexual

expression and

dominance and

so forth and

so on is

riding on a

cusp of some

sort.

We can go

either way.

That's why we're

the only animal

species where

there is no

defined style

of pairing.

In other

words, we

have monogamy

in some

societies,

polygamy,

polyandry,

a whole smorgasbord

of social and

sexual arrangements

that we will

tolerate.

No other

creature is

like that.

And I think it

indicates that

we are in a

zone of

ambiguity on

this matter.

And that

means we

have a lot

of leeway.

We can

send ourselves

one way or

the other.

We can build

a nightmarish,

male-dominated,

crypto-fascist

kind of

situation.

Or we can

go the

other way.

Bonubo or

chimpanzee,

we're looking

down both

those roads.

Are you

saying that

basically as

species we

have not

been stabilized

such as

the

dog

or the

school?

Well, we've

been destabilized.

I think we

were stabilized

in the

chimpanzee

dominator mode

and then

100,000 years

of psilocybin

use put us

closer to the

bonubos.

Now, the

bonubos are

almost extinct.

There's only a

few thousand

of them left.

They need to

be studied.

There was a

paper recently,

I can't give

you the

citation,

but if you

write me,

I can't,

studying

chimpanzees

in Africa.

They would

only leave

the nest,

they would

only leave

the trees

and descend

down onto

the ground

to forage,

but the

only thing

they would

do this

for were

mushrooms.

The pygmy

chimps are

really the

only animal

where any

success has

been gleaned

in the

sign language

communications

and the

more modern

versions of

that.

But the

pygmy chimps

are the

ones which

can use the

message board

to actually

have some

effectiveness.

The only

ones that

have language

ability,

you know

the hopes

for dolphins,

whales,

and regular

chimps,

it's still a

blank.

But the pygmy

chimps,

they're doing

it.

So here

we have

the language

thing on

the cusp

for them.

So it

would be

very

interesting

to know

if

psilocybin,

I mean

they might

be an

image of

us half

a million

years ago.

In other

words,

were we

to go

extinct and

the

bonubos

to flourish,

there might

be another

anthropoid

species

take the

stage in

a million

or two

years.

Yeah?

This is

for the

question

to

mainline

psilocybin.

In my

experience,

I've seen

many men,

especially

a lot of

heavy hitters

in the

psychedelic

movement,

take high

doses and

don't care

about gender

issues or

justice or

equality.

So I'm

not sure

that that

has,

I think

the psychedelic

experience

can mean

in force,

all the

oppressions

that

psilocybin

itself

can't

necessarily

open you

up,

melt down

and have

to seek

out

justice.

Well,

I guess

I'm more

of a

believer

than you

are.

I just

say they

didn't

take

enough.

And the

other thing

is,

you mentioned

these were

heavy hitters

in the

male heavy

hitters in

the psychedelic

movement.

It may

just be

that some

people

can't

be saved,

that Christ

himself

couldn't

lift some

people out

of chaos.

I haven't

had that

experience.

I mean,

I think

that...

Well,

I think

it was

interesting

to ask

the women

in the

psychedelic

movement

about their

experience,

because,

I mean,

you come

from the

perspective

of male

dominators,

and you

check it

out.

What

specifically

should I

ask them

about their

experience?

if they

feel that

the men

in their

lives

change

through

strictly

high doses

of

psilocybin

or other

psychedelic

youth,

that there's

more justice...

I mean,

my thing

is that

family is

the most

interesting

political

stage there

is.

Is there

justice

in their

family?

Is there

a partnership

model happening

in the

family?

Is the

father actively

taking care

of the

children

in the

family?

Well,

that's

sort of a

different

question.

I liked

your first

in their

lives

a tendency

toward a

softening

or justice.

But the

stage of

that is

really

a relationship

and it's

a family.

Yeah,

the problem

I have

with that

is I

think the

modern

family is

first of

all a

very

modern

invention

and

basically

a

cauldron

for the

production

of

neuroses.

But that's

what we

have to

work with.

Well,

let's ask

these

this

proposition

that

psychedelics

make

men

smoother,

evener,

more.

Does

anyone

want

to

that

has

been

effective?

Not

on that

scale.

I've

read

through

books

like

the

archaic

revival

with

the

Timothy

Larry

pastor

of

saving

all

the

children

to

reach

everybody

and

as

opposed

to

that

maybe

reaching

the

people

that

want

to

be

out of

the

same

story

teaching.

You have

to

not

dominating

teaching

on

either

side

of

male

or

female

but

some

people

who

now

comprehend

the

kind

of

oneness

basically.

You mean there

has to be a

supportive

of the

story.

Yeah,

there has to be

some

sort of

part of

what

complicates

it is

notice that

the male

dominator

society

we're

living in

is just

fanatically

concerned

to

suppress

this

and to

me

that's

a sign

that it

must

threaten

it

at a

very

basic

level

and yet

it

seems

silly

I mean

they're

more

grinding

everybody

else

down

particularly

as

women

there

are

men

out

there

who

have

worked

out

relationships

with

women

and

with

other

men

that

are

cooperative

partnerships

well

a lot

of them

never

took

suicide

well

you

live

in a

society

you

take

upon

yourself

the

tone

of

the

time

I

getting

it

into

a

gender

thing

I

really

think

ego

here's

the

way

I

put

it

ego

is

like

a

cyst

which

will

begin

to

grow

in

you

whether

you

are

male

or

female

unless

you

take

a

psychedelic

the

psychedelic

is

that

it

will

dissolve

this

cyst

the

cyst

is

in

your

personality

it's

a

tumor

it

shouldn't

be

there

I

mean

we

do

need

to

have

egos

little

egos

so

that

when

I

take

you

out

to

dinner

I

put

the

food

I

order

in

my

mouth

you

put

the

food

you

order

in

your

mouth

that's

what

an

ego

is

for

but

if

are

hard

driving

egomaniacal

ambitious

it's

a

bad

style

and

men

may

be

born

into

it

and

women

may

be

infected

by

it

but

there's

plenty

of

it

and

the

person

who's

willing

to

do

that

is

the

solution

of

the

ego

and

it

has

reverberations

for people

who

won't

or aren't

in a

position

to do

that

or

they're

so

involved

in

protecting

your

ego

that

they're

not

in

that

place

yet

but

that

both

men

and

women

benefit

from

that

and

it

goes

beyond

that

for

people

who

will

not

use

that

yeah

that's

a

good

should

take

psychedelic

plants

well

then

the

question

automatically

follows

well

who

shouldn't

well

in

practical

terms

we

all

know

people

who

are

likely

here

who

have

diminished

self-esteem

so

forth

and

so

on

they

are

for

them

ego

dissolution

is not

the

goal

they

have

been

so

victimized

by

egomaniacs

that

they

have

no

sense

of

self

so

for

them

they

should

be

encouraged

to

build

up

an

internal

structure

in

their

personality

and

a

coherent

reference

point

in

the

self

but

that

is

a

state

of

dis-ease

that

most

of us

are not

like

that

most

of us

are

ordinary

or

more

toward

the

spectrum

of

profit

from

the

psychedelic

experience

women

I

think

are

less

excited

by

psychedelics

because

they

experience

by

and

large

it

has

less

of

an

I

stayed

with

a

group

for

about

three

months

and

I

found

it

to be

a

very

male

dominated

aggressive

culture

and

yet

they

were

using

shamanic

and

psychedelic

plans

for

ritual

and

ceremony

well

here's

what I

think

once

this

African

paradisical

partnership

thing

was

disrupted

and

people

were

scattered

to the

four

corners

of the

earth

the

memory

never

was

lost

and

there

is

even

what's

called

a

nostalgia

for

paradise

today

throughout

time

the

belief

that

in the

past

it

was

better

and

since

the

renaissance

it's

been

fashionable

to

dismiss

this

as

a

kind

of

naivete

you know

the grass

is

greener

kind

of

thing

but

I

think

probably

things

were

better

and

that

our

nostalgia

for

paradise

is

what

has

caused

us

to

be

so

subject

to

abuse

and

use

of

drugs

you

know

no

other

animal

shares

this

pattern

of

behavior

sometimes

elephants

will push

down

fences

to

get

to

rotting

fruit

and

birds

get

drunk

and

fall

down

on

their

little

feeders

and

this

sort

of

thing

but

human

beings

addict

to

a

startling

spectrum

not only

of

substances

but

of

behaviors

we

addict

to

each

other

I

mean

heroin

withdrawal

and a

broken

heart

look

and

feel

exactly

the

man

bursting

into

tears

insomnia

inability

to

eat

I

mean

does

this

person

have

a

broken

heart

or

are

they

getting

off

junk

you

can't

tell

and

we

tend

to

addict

and

I

think

this

is

a

kind

of

we

feel

in

ourselves

a

certain

incompleteness

since

the

breakup

of the

African

partnership

society

and

you

know

alcohol

doesn't

quite

do

it

cannabis

is

good

but

doesn't

quite

go

far

enough

we've

tried

all

kinds

of

things

and

interestingly

in the

last

hundred

years

the

science

of

ethnography

and

anthropology

has

scoured

the world

and brought

back

to us

data

which we

didn't

have

a hundred

hundred

and twenty

years

ago

data

about

peyote

ayahuasca

datura

psilocybin

morning glory

so forth

and so

on

the

materia

medica

of the

remote

human

cultures

of the

planet

is

now

available

and

I

think

it

comes

not a

moment

too

late

that's

why I

called

my

book

the

archaic

revival

I

really

see

the

whole

cultural

impulse

of the

20th

century

as

an

impulse

toward

the

archaic

in

other

words

if

impressionism

except

LSD

30 minutes

in

other

words

the

sharpness

goes

the

colors

brighten

everything

begins

to

blur

the

boundaries

are

beginning

to

dissolve

it's

contentless

it's

I mean

it's

ideologically

empty

it's

just

how

things

look

they

look

this

certain

way

well

then

minutes

later

ideas

are

beginning

to

accompany

this

melting

and

flowing

of

perception

we've

now

reached

surrealism

and

Freud

and

Jung

the

discovery

of

the

unconscious

well

then

it

keeps

going

it

gets

more

and

more

intense

now

we

don't

see

dreamscapes

distorted

gargoyle

like

figures

melting

watches

and

burning

giraffes

that

has

all

been

now

replaced

by

just

a

blur

an

energy

storm

now

we're

in

energy

is

flinging

itself

around

and

at the

same

time

things

like

jazz

which

carried

with it

a heavy

content

of

sexual

looseness

the

flapper

era

that

whole

thing

people

weren't

Victorian

ladies

and

gentlemen

that

they

had

the

cannibalistic

drive

the

edible

drive

the

this

drive

the

Hitler

proved

that

you know

years

of

western

ethics

have

you

shoving

people

into

ovens

as a

political

course

of

action

the

whole

of

the

20th

century

has

been

an

exploration

of

the

archaic

and

then

in

the

60s

LSD

appeared

but

without

the

rhetoric

of

shamanism

LSD

for those

of us

who

lived

through

it

was

presented

as

the

latest

thing

after

penicillin

and

birth

control

it

was

better

living

through

chemistry

it

was

now

we

have

penicillin

and

now

we

have

orthonovum

and

now

we

have

LSD

was

better

living

through

chemistry

you've

all

seen

the

poster

of

the

kids

in

the

hate

holding

the

banner

in

the

70s

it

was

realized

that

the

psychedelic

experience

need

not

be

confined

to

LSD

it

was

generally

realized

and

that

there

were

all

these

ethnographic

usages

ayahuasca

peyote

detoura

morning

glories

so forth

and so

on

and

then

late

in the

70s

the

shaman

became

the

paradigmatic

figure

for cultural

emulation

and that's

basically

where we

are now

the

nation

state

is

dissolving

it's

a

creation

of

renaissance

rationalism

electronic

media

is

re-tribalizing

the

world

pharmacology

is

throwing

open a

vast

cornucopia

of

psychoactive

substances

and

the

legacy

of

psychoanalysis

modern art

quantum

physics

and

phenomenology

have propelled

us to the

brink

of

a

neo-archaic

understanding

of our

world

and now

it has to

become more

explicit

I mean I don't think

there's much chance

of survival

without

a

major

effort

to

re-establish

archaic

styles

and

institutions

and it's not

an easy

thing to do

I mean if

you're

idealizing

naked

people

with no

physical

culture

who are

following

along

behind

their

cattle

on the

plains

of

Africa

and

you

want

to

take

their

social

institution

psychology

philosophy

and

aesthetic

and lay

it

on

to

a

global

level

electronic culture of seven billion you're going to have to there's going to be some creative

twisting and turning in all of that nevertheless i believe it can be done now there's one more

aspect of this that i want to touch on that's sort of philosophical in general and that is

we've talked about the psychedelic experience we've talked about how it dissolves boundaries

and changes cultural values and so forth but what we haven't talked about is what is it exactly i

mean what's so great about it if you read a description of a psychedelic experience it sounds

sort of like uh well everything dissolves you see a lot of bright colors you have funny ideas and

then you have to rest for a day well what is so great about that i mean why should that be a

cultural culturally transforming issue well i i believe that that we misperceive the psychedelic

substances if we simply think of them as an inert substance in a plant which when taken by a human

being dissolves programming and shows you the basement of your mind essentially that isn't

what's going on i believe here is much closer to what's going on psychedelics convey information

the other kind of chemicals in nature that we're familiar with that convey information aside from dna

are pheromones pheromones are aromatic compounds released by plants and animals usually to carry a

message within the species so ants as you know lay down chemical trails that other ants sense and can

follow well uh in a sense hallucinogens are are intraspecies pheromones of some sort they carry

information across species lines and uh the kind of information that they carry the message

is one of harmony balance and uh integration and so a human population with a with a psychedelic

institution or sacrament will in its pristine form tend to be nomadic have very little physical cultural

expression uh tend to have a very loose family structure an extended family structure and child rearing

uh arrangement and i believe that this is where we can introduce the concept of the guy in mind

the reason the psychedelic experience is so paradigm shattering is because we believe that we are alone

in intelligence on this planet and what the psychedelics show is no there is a much larger field of mind

than we ever could suspect in our ordinary state of consciousness nature herself is a minded

entity and information is flowing between species between biosystems across biota gradients of light

chemical release water so forth and so on all of nature is a vast communicating mind of some sort

and the only portion of that vast system that is out of alignment is the human world because we we closed the channel

we closed the channel by abandoning the shamanic institutions in many many human languages the word shaman means go

go between go between go between we'll go between what and what is the question well the answer is go between the safe pedestrian

assumptions of an organized society and the vast churning ocean of mystery that is real being and every society is an illusion

reared against the mystery of real being and pursued in ignorance of it so the psyche the the shaman mediates

between these two worlds the ordinary world people have to live in in order to catch fish and have children and form relationships

and bury the dead and bury the dead and another unseen dynamic world of energy of process of

strange attractors of the great unknown but it isn't an abstraction its nature and history is the consequence of an animal species

creating its connection to the guy in mind and instead of then a guy in the agenda

integration unity cooperation

you get an ego

agenda

dominance

resource extraction

territorial acquisition

control of other human beings

and resources

so when shamanism died when hallucinogens became stigmatized when the climate changed

we literally fell

into history we became a different kind of animal

and the consequences of

untrammeled historicity being practiced for 12,000 years is to bring us to our present

situation

where we have immense intellectual understanding of some aspects of nature

we have an immense ability to coordinate group activity in certain areas like building a bridge but not disarming

for example

uh... but we have no ability whatsoever to control this darker self

that sort of drew itself up to the campfire 12,000 years

and said you know you have you banished me into the darkness

for a million years

while you lived in the psilocybin driven paradise

but here i am again and the piper must be paid

now

all the cards are on the table

and it's up to us

we who live on this planet at the end of the

of the 20th century

to try and do something

with these facts

if we go extinct

if we wreck the planet and toxify the environment

it will be a tremendous tragedy

because there are ways out

there are answers

but how much of the baggage we've accumulated over the past 4,000 years

are we going to be able to take with us into that new world

bloody little

i maintain

our music

our mathematics

our dance

our theater

through serious downsizing and detoxification

so really

the discovery in the 19th and 20th century of these ancient ways of relating to plants

it's not just a curiosity of anthropology

or an exciting subfield of botany

it is in fact

very central to the human drama of our salvation

i don't think we can fix ourselves

through rhetoric

if we could fix ourselves through rhetoric

then buddha and christ would have done the job

uh... we can only fix ourselves by consciously analyzing our dilemma

and then intervening

and i believe these

uh... cultures that have existed in a kind of suspended animation

forests of the world

while western european civilization charged

through its merry adventure

the uh...

raison d'etre

for the existence of those aboriginal civilizations

is that they carry

the archaic gnosis

it's all still intact

for maybe 30 or 40 more years

if we act quickly

the material is there

the techniques are there

uh...

it can be saved

but it has to be brought

into modern civilization

and so

you know

classes like this

yeah

if it is

um...

if it is that Gaia

kind of gets to the equilibrium

and there's some

certain type of consciousness

that humans need to have

in order to

bring about that equilibrium

why is it then

that Gaia

uh...

has made

these passages

taste so bad

it's a great question

hmmm

well

i have

here

here's an answer

and then

the essential thing we all need

is courage

and most of us don't have it

under every circumstance

that's a good answer

really

that's very deep

and i will say

i'm going to do this

because my life is depending on it

where my future is

whether it is an existential future

whatever

i don't want to go to hell

i want to

uplift myself

and i'm going to do this

because i know there's love in the world

and i'm going to prove it

i'm going to be it

and i will now offer a tremendously down interpretation

of the same thing

it

these things are all alkaloids

it may just be

that in this universe

alkaloids

they're always bitter

so that Gaia herself

you know

it's like

can God make an object

God can't lift

can Gaia make an alkaloid

that isn't bitter

i don't know

it's a challenge

i don't know

i know that alkaloids

it's bad

my question is

that

are these alkaloids

something that we really should

think

i'm trying to figure out the role

of these physicians

in our consciousness

i see

you know

i don't doubt

that when we were pre-humanoids

and we were running through the fields

and we were like

okay

i can see it

it literally looks like something i can eat

it doesn't have the spine

it's not running away

i don't doubt it

it probably even tastes it good

now

we see fruit

and it's colorful

it's sweet

and maybe

the consciousness that it has

when we eat fruit

is just a different consciousness

than we would have

if we eat mushrooms

but i know

the mushrooms take that

the aliens take that

that twerp

practically kills everyone

that doesn't die from it

and

there's a recommendation

and

you know

every reason

well i think we have

tremendous

i think we have tremendous

resistance

i think

the private issue

certainly for me

and for

probably most of you

it's easy to take psychedelics

the first time

because you don't know what you're getting into

ever after

that

you have to

really have a little chat

with yourself

and

the

there are barriers

to overcome

i have to think about this question

of sweetness

yeah

i think

you made a point there

you know

we see fruit

and its color

and all that

i think we're very conditioned

in our

eating habits

and everything

like we said

we're almost over civilized

to

specifically

you know

teeth

touch

smell

oriented

realm of foods

basically

and i think that probably

our ancestors

were not that

you know

they ate insects

they went from insects

to mushrooms

to meat

it was more

sensual

and a lot less

with all of the

language

build up there

you know

i mean

you mean

that good and bad

is an aesthetic judgment

when you're a hungry

primate

it either

kills you or

it doesn't

there's another issue

around

the taste of our thoughts

the bitter taste

has a very

therapeutic role

quite apart from

psychotic

there's

six or seven

physiological

responses

when you taste

something bitter

all of which

are vital to

immune response

in general

and from

holistic medicine

you can really

say that

some of the

causes of the

explosion of

autoimmune diseases

and degenerative diseases

that we don't

let the bitter taste

of people

there's a

cultural bias

as well

well

sometimes it's good

hearing it

because you

say it

louder

um

when

you taste something

bitter on the back

of a tunnel

there's

a series of reflexes

that are triggered off

by the brain

one of which is

the stimulation of all

the digestive enzymes

being released

there's one of the

exocrine glands

the liver is stimulated

to work a little bit

more efficiently

there are certain

balls of depression

which are lifted

the whole range

of things like that

so

just because they

taste bad

to our culturally

conditioned

sense of what is

good and bad

taste

doesn't mean that

their biologically

is increasingly

becoming

things that taste like

that

are actually very very

important to

humeous status

and holiness

in general

yeah I just wanted to

elaborate on that

this is a cultural

condition

I know in Chinese

medicine

there's the different

tastes

sweet and salty

bitter

these are all essential

you know to do this

for balance

it's a book I think

by Timothy Johns

has to do with

it's a whole book

on bitterness

and the kind of biases

that are against that

are called

yeah I mean because

think about the taste

of scotch

or anchovies

or something like that

and clearly we can

train ourselves

into these things

and cultural values

have a great deal to do

with it

you'd be amazed

what you can eat

if everybody else

is eating it

and in the case of

the psilocybin mushroom

which is the

ur halicinogen

or at least I'm arguing

it is here

when I first encountered it

it took years for me

to build up a gag reflex

I really liked it

in nature

it didn't taste bad

I used to say

it tastes like cold water

that's what it tasted

like to me

now I do have a gag reflex

but I think that

has to do with

you know

accumulated association

to it

yeah

the most

or one of the most

benign substances

chemicals

that you could do

in the brain

or the body

as a whole

it was very rewarding

but after waiting

for the first 90 pages

of the invisible landscape

I think the stuff

that I can understand

some of that was mentioned

in there

and you can elaborate on it

well I guess it's important

to talk about toxicity

this is an issue

and drugs

what you have to understand

is all substances

are potentially toxic

you can kill yourself

with water

if you will

drink enough of it

in the case of drugs

the toxicity

usually lies

much closer

to the effective dose

than it does with water

pharmacologists

have a concept

called LD50

which is a horrifying idea

but you should know it

LD50 is if you have a hundred rats

and you give them a drug

the LD50 dose

is the dose

at which half the rats die

and what you want

in a drug

whether it's a psychoactive drug

or a cancer drug

or anything

what you want

is a drug

where the effective dose

is many many times lower

than the LD50

the LD50

now by that standard

LSD is the safest drug

there is

because you can feel

50 micrograms

of LSD

and 200 micrograms

of LSD

is quite a full menu

but to kill yourself

with LSD

nobody knows

how much it would take

the LD50 for LSD

has never been determined

it's so high

that's good news

now

psilocybin is a mid-range

in this way of classification

the effective dose of psilocybin

is 15 to 30 milligrams

a fatal dose

of psilocybin

is around 150 milligrams

per kilogram

of body weight

so you can figure out

what that is

that's thousands of times

or several thousand times

the effective dose

well then something like mescaline

the LD50 is only about

40 times the effective dose

but so and by that measurement

then you would have to say

mescaline is a rather toxic compound

and it is in fact

you have to take 700 milligrams

this is the other

another way of talking about toxicity

how much do you have to take

if you have mescaline

you have to take 700 milligrams

that's damn near a triple zero cap

filled with pure alkaloid

LSD

to a hundred micrograms

you can lose it on the head of a pin

easily

so that's

that's another way

of thinking about the toxicity and effectiveness

just and then there's one other parameter

how long

does the drug last

if you

if you take a substance

and 48 hours later

you still have your phone turned off

and you're lying around in warm baths

and wishing for a massage

then you took a toxic substance

it's not supposed to do that to you

it's not supposed to leave you with back aches

and insomnia

and a wreck

well by that

criteria

then

DMT must be

one of the safest drugs there are

because it carries you to a titanically psychedelic

state of mind

and returns you in under 10 minutes

to the baseline

of consciousness

uh...

now it takes 70 milligrams

of DMT

to do that

uh...

so then that's

you know it takes a lot more than it does LSD

now

interestingly

and then I'll let you go to lunch

we ran a little over

so we'll go to 1230

here's some new data

that you may not have

uh...

a new psychoactive plant

has come onto the scene

with a new psychoactive substance in it

previously unknown to science

in a chemical family

previously unknown to contain

psychoactive compounds

and this new compound

can justly claim

though very little is known about it

at the moment

and the experience itself

is absolutely

white knuckle terrifying

uh...

can claim to be

the safest

psychedelic

in the world

because

it only takes

um...

a thousand micrograms

one milligram

of this substance

now remember

it took

seventy milligrams

of LSD

one

or fifty

to seventy

one milligram

of

salvanorine

alpha

smoked

will deliver

you into

a freakishly

alien

reality

for about

fifteen minutes

and then

you will return

and

we know almost

nothing about

this drug

at this point

we don't know

it's LD50

but it's the

only the second compound

ever discovered

that is active

in the microgram range

it is an isoquinoline

it is in a chemical family

unknown

to contain psychoactive drugs

they've all been

alkaloids

or

tropanes

or something like that

suddenly

late

in the game

here is

a plant

you can get

high on the plant

although you have to work at it

and it's not dramatic

it's like

the first half hour of ayahuasca

or something

but if you isolate this compound

and smoke it

it'll turn you every way but loose

and this is new data

that has just come out

it should inspire those of you who are field botanists or ethnographers

there is a vast number of plants in the literature

that are listed as suspect hallucinogens

what that means is somebody said

or some Indian told some botanist

we take this and we see things at night

or something

salvia divinorum was known for 20 years

but nobody could find the compound

and nobody could get off on it

well

now

people are getting off

and the compound has been discovered

and they're looking at near relatives of salvia divinorum

including a Ukrainian mint

and some coleus species

and we're finding in microgram

and smaller amounts

a whole family

of these new psychedelic isoquinolines

and what they will mean for us

it's hard to say

I mean

previously DMT

held all honors

for

you know

weirdness

the depth of the

of the call

as Heidegger likes to say

now

Salvinari Nalpha

is

is on stage

and there's lots of work to be done

yeah

I mean I think it's fairly logic

it seems reasonable to say that

first of all you don't want to insult the physical brain

in any time

any how

because you only have one or two

so

you have to keep care of your brain

the

it's very interesting

that the most dramatic

hallucinogen

and now I'm talking about DMT

let's leave Salvinari Nalpha out of this

because not enough is known about it

but the most powerful hallucinogen

actually occurs in human metabolism

every single one of us as we sit here is elaborating DMT

in tiny amounts

we're also elaborating 5-hydroxytryptamine or serotonin

in quite extensive amounts

so I believe that ayahuasca from this standard of judgment

is probably among the safest of the hallucinogens

because it's essentially brain soup

there's nothing in it that you don't already have in your brain

it's just got more of it and in a different proportion

oh yes

they occur in the

in the pineal gland

6-adenaroglomerotropane

is actually

5-hydroxytryptamine

6-hydroxytryptamine

so a lot of these compounds are elaborated in the brain

LSD is not

Salvinari Nalpha is not

ketamine is not

mescaline

close

but not

I mean there are amphetamine like compounds in normal metabolism

but that isn't one of them

yeah

just to give you a question

that you might want to do after

or when we come back

but I have two bold questions

one is

what is your opinion

as to how these different substances

open up different aspects

you know each has their own little niche

and more specifically

if you could give me any point of view

as to the differences in three

what opens up between the mushrooms

and the mushroom experience

and the ayahuasca experience

how do they differ

and do you have any point of view

as to the different windows

or the different dimensions

that different drugs open

sure

I mean it seems to me

and somebody with equal experience

might differ

but it seems to me

it seems to me

that the best model

is like a target

or a bullseye

the various substances

exhibit more and more of their unique character

the more you take

in other words

if you take a low dose

of something

that's psychedelic

it will clarify your vision

stimulate you

and then

and you can't really tell

whether you've taken psilocybin

LSD

mescaline

or what have you

as the dose increases

the specific characteristics

of these substances

begin to emerge

and often

they're contraintuitive

to a chemical way of thinking

for example

ayahuasca

and mushrooms

psilocybin is

4-phosphoroloxy

and then

dimethyltryptamine

when you remove

the phosphorus group

which happens

as it crosses the blood-brain barrier

you get something

very much like DMT

however

when you take psilocybin

you don't get something

like a DMT trip

you

you get

in the case of psilocybin

the most

startling

um

quality of it

is that it speaks

it speaks

it speaks in English

it

it tells you things

I mean this sounds preposterous

unless you've had the experience

it sounded preposterous

to me for years

I just could not imagine

what my friends meant

when they said

these plants talk to you

until I

had a conversation

with it

uh

so psilocybin speaks

and it's a kind of a

it's a kind of a

Spockian

kind of message

it's about

enormous machines

in orbit

around alien planets

it's about

galactarian destiny

and the history

of the local cluster

over the last

half billion years

and it

it's an enormous scale

and it's about

races

worlds

technologies

civilizations

on

and on

switch over to ayahuasca

which is chemically

almost

the same animal

and it's

about

the waters

it's about

birth

death

femininity

uh

health and disease

uh

relationships

energy flows

between people

it's very human

it's very

feminine

it's very

organic

and

uh

enclosing

well

these are

quite different

messages

I mean if you had one

in the absence of the other

you would have an

unbalanced view

I think

of what is going on

however

then

if you take these things

and push them all

do double doses

or triple doses

you

I'm not recommending this, but I'm just saying it has been done and we have the data.

What begins to happen is everything migrates toward the DMT flash.

The DMT flash seems to be sort of like the center of the bullseye.

Now, I haven't personally had enough guts to smoke Salvinorine Alpha.

I've watched people do it, and if you're going to do it,

I suggest you don't watch people do it.

Because I was gung-ho till then.

But assuming it lies somewhere on this spectrum,

what seems to be happening is all of these things propel you

toward deeper and deeper states of boundary dissolution.

At the first level, you simply dissolve the boundary between yourself

and the part of yourself you don't want to look at.

That's called dealing with your stuff.

At the next level, you dissolve the boundary between yourself and other people.

And this is the bonding situations and that sort of thing.

At the next level, boundary between yourself and your memories of the past.

All of your experience is returned to you.

And beyond that, you dissolve then into what Jung called the collective unconscious or something like that.

And then beyond that, Gaian mind, cosmic mind.

I mean, I'm no fan of these hierarchies of named, hypostatized spiritual entities.

But that's the basic idea.

And finally, and astonishingly, you know,

I think the elf workshop of the DMT flash lies very close to the center

of the experience, of what is possible.

It is not simply, as you might have gotten the idea from reading the literature.

You see, in the 60s, they wanted to map it over Buddhism or Eastern religion.

And they wanted to say that as the dose increases, somehow Satori or Shunyata or Nirvana

or the white light or the great void or something like that.

I never had that experience.

As I raised the dose, the complexity of the state complexified.

It never simplified.

It never became neoplatonic.

It always, it just, it became Borgesian and, you know,

the universe is full of a number of things.

So, I don't think we can, you know, some, this is maybe time to stop,

but I'm reluctant to connect this entire enterprise to what is popularly called spiritual growth.

I just think it's more like about growth.

And spirit implies some weird anti-materialist bias or something like that.

These, you know, I was raised Catholic.

So, to me, spirituality means, do you visit the sick and imprisoned?

Do you clothe the naked?

Do you feed the hungry?

Do you bury the dead?

Do you comfort the afflicted?

This is what's, that, when I see somebody doing those things,

I say, this is a spiritually evolving person.

When I see somebody taking psilocybin, I say, there is an explorer.

But I don't try to lay on some moral judgment about good and evil.

I think that's, that's inappropriate.

Spiritual accomplishment is manifested by moral action.

And the role these psychedelics play is they may make moral action easier

because they show you your memories and your depths and your mistakes.

But intrinsically, they are not tools for spiritual development.

They are tools for the exploration of mind.

And we don't know what that is.

And we probably won't figure it out this afternoon.

But anyhow, we'll come back here.

And since it's now 12.30, let's come back at 2 o'clock.

We'll place two announcements, actually.

The first one is the constraints and the rules on the paper.

Those of you who are taking this for credit,

we will meet at break tomorrow morning and discuss that.

So don't worry about it until then.

But it will be discussed.

This is for those of you who are writing a paper.

And the other announcement is Sound Photosynthesis,

which distributes my tapes and videos and a lot of other people's tapes and videos,

are taping this event.

And we'll provide those of you who want it with a tape of this event when it's finished,

for a fee, of course.

And they also have many books, videos, and recordings back there

that deal with this subject or are my books.

And sometimes these things are hard to find.

So if you're looking for something and you see it,

buy it because you can't always be sure that it'll come back around.

And they've gone to the effort of bringing all these things in for you.

Okay, we'll go to 5.

So at 3.30 or roughly, we'll do a little break.

Well, you all went off to lunch somewhere.

Not where I was, so I don't know where you went.

You found the restaurant I couldn't find.

But are there issues outstanding from this morning

or a direction you want to send us off in?

Well, I was just talking to this reporter.

From the Sacramento Bee about this very thing.

I think if you're stupid, there's just no hope.

You have been afflicted with a terrible circumstance

and you have to struggle with that.

A lot of people took LSD in the 60s

and it seemed to have no effect whatsoever on them.

I mean, a lot of pretty colors and this and that.

And then they went out to be war planners

and corporate executives and so forth.

I think it's very important to talk about and analyze your experience.

There is no communication even within the confines of your own mind

if you can't describe what's going on.

And so, you know, the idea here is not that you should take psilocybin day in and day out

or week in and week out,

but that when you do it,

you should do it with dedication and attention and pre-planning

and while it's happening you must pay attention

and after it's over you must analyze it.

You must understand it.

You must try.

It's a tool for thought.

It's a tool for understanding.

And as far as education is concerned,

you know, I think one of the reasons I keep coming back to CIIS

is because unspoken in what's going on here

is the idea that modern psychotherapy of the transpersonal sort

is an embryonic kind of neo-archaic shamanism.

And there is something to be said for judicious use of the concept of the guide.

I think that the guide should first of all be very psychedelically experienced.

A therapist who has never taken these substances can't guide you

because they've never been there.

But in the presence of a skilled therapist,

all kinds of progress in dealing with personal issues and complexes can be made.

People say this stuff is escapist,

but nobody who's ever taken it will line up behind that.

It's too difficult.

I mean, I've had people say to me,

I've heard people refer to psilocybin as psilocybin

and said, I've never had a bad trip on psilocybin.

And I think to myself, gee, I wish I were you

because I don't think the goal with this stuff

is to get through it without ever having a bad moment

sort of unscathed with the parental seal of approval

stamped across your chest.

The goal is to learn.

And learning is often painful.

And the most important lessons are often the most painful.

And if you're going to have to drop an attitude

or a way of relating to somebody

or an opinion about yourself or something,

these things are painful.

And often you don't just say at the height of the psychedelic,

oh, I see, I should change my mind.

And no, often there's tears and soul-searching

and then a sense of dawning light

and then the conversion.

This is not easy work to do.

It's not easy for anybody to do.

I had a guy tell me once in the Amazon,

he said, don't think because we wear penis sheaves

and live in the rainforest

that this is easier for us than it is for you.

It's not.

It's as challenging to your humanness.

It challenges your humanness

no matter where you start out from.

So you have to bring something to it.

But if you bring something to it,

it will work for you.

And I'm of the opinion,

and I get a lot of flack from this,

and you're perfectly free to pile on,

that many other spiritual techniques of advancement

don't work.

Even if you are intelligent,

dedicated,

attentive,

they just don't work.

Or they didn't work for me,

that's all I can say.

This will work.

And if you bring sincerity and integrity to it,

it will respond beyond your wildest dreams.

Yes, did you want to say?

Along these lines,

I was thinking,

there was a thought that came to my mind

while I was at lunch.

I'm going to call it

embodying the love.

And I'm not sure that phrasing is correct.

I'm not even sure I know exactly

what I'm talking about.

But it connected it with something

that you said earlier,

about,

it takes a little bit of burden.

and connects us with the idea

that you and less means

that the strength of the ego.

So,

I'm not used to talking in front of you,

so I get all nervous about it.

I think that there's a certain quality

of you saying

it has to be brought to your experience

in order for what you think of any value.

I mean,

now I can get really bloated

and see all kinds of things you said

and come back

and not be substantially different

unless I'm willing

and in some way or other

it begins to embody

what it is,

the gnosis that I saw.

And that,

at that point,

begins to change

the direction of the core of the body.

And it's really the question,

I think,

that's reported

that what we're dealing with

is how are we,

as a species,

I mean,

it's non-sexual.

And the question is

how do we embody this?

What I see in our culture

is that we have managed

to totally undo

any kind of

historical connection

which would give us

this tradition

within which we could offer

to a kind of

long study from scratch

and borrowing bits and pieces

from our case.

At this point

that you just brought up

about

kind of first

it's a complex.

I agree with you.

This is the direction

of the moving axis.

It's not really so much

of discovering something new

but recovering something

which is from the law.

Right?

Yes, absolutely.

Yes.

Well,

I don't really hear a question.

I agree with what you're saying.

It is a...

What do you have to offer

in terms of

your experience

about how do you get

to the body?

Well,

it's a complicated question.

I'm an alienated intellectual.

Probably most of you

are as well.

I may have been that

before I ever reached

psychedelics.

Basically,

I think that

it almost comes down

to practicing

a noisy form

of aesthetic criticism

of the society.

If something is stupid,

you should say so.

And if something is tasteless

or brutal

or insulting

or demeaning,

we just have to say so.

Now,

the problem is

there is so much

that is tasteless,

insulting,

and demeaning

that you would spend

your entire time

doing that.

Well,

isn't that

what the counter-cultural

milieu is?

I think

it's a group of people

who to greater

or lesser degrees

are entirely

uncomfortable

with the

official culture

and then

try to embody

an alternative culture.

And it's a culture

of tolerance,

of

broad-mindedness,

of

immediate experience.

It's not

a work ethic culture.

It's not

a pile-up

wealth

kind of culture.

It's a culture

that lives

in the moment.

I mean,

and to my mind,

what we can do

is be more

adamantly

counter-cultural

and creative.

That's why

I'm so happy

to see

something like

rave

and house

and ambient music

come along

because,

you know,

rock and roll,

which was

previously

the sustaining

thing of the

counter-culture

was totally

co-opted.

And

the official

culture

turns all

criticism

into a fashion

statement.

That seems to be

how it operates.

So,

in terms of

embodiment,

I think what we have to do

is be creative.

At lunch,

I was saying,

you know,

the culture,

the crisis

that we're in

as a planetary society

is a culture

of consciousness.

There ain't

enough of it.

That's what happens

when women

are raped

in Bosnia.

That's a failure

of consciousness.

That's what happens

when rivers

are polluted

with DDT.

It's a failure

of consciousness,

a failure

to correctly

appreciate

cause and effect.

And

if there is

anything

which increases

our consciousness,

I don't care

if it's a religion,

a food,

a drug,

a sexual product,

a magazine,

if there is

anything

which increases

our consciousness,

we should find out

what it is

and get with it.

And once you've

increased your

consciousness,

a little,

a lot,

some,

it's not doing

any good then

unless it is

embodied.

And the way

it's embodied,

I think,

is by pushing

the art pedal

to the floor.

It's the only

pedal which we

have been allowed

to touch

we don't get

to touch the

international investment

profile pedal

or the international

diplomacy pedal.

Those are all

reserved for

the masters.

But art has been

ceded

to us.

And art

can either be

fawning

and sycophantic

or it can be

radical

and challenging

or it can be

transcendental

and inspiring.

And I think

what we've accepted

in the arts

in the last

20 years

is the idea

of immense

fragmentation

and personal

expression.

This is

exactly the

wrong thing

because what that

is is ego.

We don't care

what Jeff Koons

thinks about

the person

he's sleeping

with and all

this other stuff.

This is just

self-indulgent

nonsense.

The idea

that art

should save

humanity

is very

out of fashion

in the cynical

90s.

But I believe

it.

And I believe

that the

technologists

who are working

at our elbows

are giving us

tools more

powerful

than we

or our

critics

ever imagined

could exist.

And if we

use those

tools

for the

explicit

purpose

of creating

a new

cultural

agenda

it will

be done.

You know

we're all

a little

confused

about this

but those

folks over

on the

extreme

right wing

the Pat

Buchanons

of this

world

they know

exactly

what's going

on

and they

call it

cultural war

and while

they're moving

up their

tanks

and digging

foxholes

what are

we doing

you know

wandering

around

asking

what's

happening

cultural

war

is

very

real

and

the

people

who

are

you know

I realized

sometime

in the last

48 hours

that when

fascism

comes to

America

it will

be called

traditionalism

that seems

to be

how it's

going to

present

itself

so

I think

art

is our

great

our great

ace

in this

game

right now

the most

yeah

well one

more thing

I was going

to say

right now

the most

exciting

cultural

frontier

to my

mind

on this

planet

is the

internet

and the

world wide

web

and

that is

a beast

which escaped

from the

control

of the

dominator

institutions

it was built

to wage

thermal nuclear

war and

to be

indestructible

well when

thermal nuclear

war ceased

to be a

hot option

the

indestructibility

of it remained

and now it

can't be turned

off

it can't be

controlled

it can't be

regulated

and look who's

on there

I mean guys with

long hair and

girls with short

hair and this

drives the

masters crazy

so I

look at the

internet

as

a

vast

canvas

and

to which

we are

each

invited

to make

our own

contribution

and

if

we

seed

3D

to the

orthodox

culture

then we

should make

cyberspace

our own

one of the

things that

I didn't

stress enough

this morning

was

the visual

acuity

empowered

by

psilocybin

leads to

hunting

success

but the

higher doses

of psilocybin

propel you

past

observation

of animal

habits

and environments

and into

the imagination

and I

think you

know that

the cultural

compass

of this

species

points

toward the

imagination

that's where

we're going

to live

in the

future

that's

what we

were born

for

that's

where

we

are

at

our

best

in

3D

well as

James Joyce

says in

Finnegan's

Wake

here in

Moikane

we flop

on the

seamy

side

Moikane

being the

red light

district

of Dublin

but

up

nient

prospector

you

sprout

all your

worth

and you

woof

your wings

well

up

nient

is

spelled

these

days

HTTP

colon

double

back

slash

WWW

yak

right

in other

words

the

imagination

is being

turned into

a piece

of real

estate

and

the

faster

we can

occupy it

and give

it

yeah

specifically

around

psychological

substance

I wanted

to ask

about

intention

I

noticed

in

journeys

that I

had

that

intentions

were

important

and they

shaded

the experience

and

filtered

the experience

and sometimes

very strongly

and sometimes

hardly

at all

but

that's not

what I

noticed

I

am curious

in

comments

you have

an issue

about

intention

and also

intention

as it relates

to different

substances

you get

the same result

you get the same

influence

with the various

substances

with intention

well I

would sort

of agree

with you

and sort

of differ

I

remember

once

I was

at some

impasse

in my

personal

life

and I

decided

I should

take a

psychedelic

and pose

a question

you know

and they

sometimes

say

you should

pose

a question

and I

had

never

done

that

so

the

question

was

am I

doing

the

to ask

a

galactarian

intelligence

well I

suppose

that was

the answer

I needed

to hear

it put

my

problems

in perspective

I realized

you know

you don't

ask

Freud

to clip

your fingernails

for God's

sake

so

in that

sense

I'm not

sure

about

intention

but

the

way

I

understand

intention

is

that

you

should

very

conscientiously

control

set

and

setting

going

into

it

don't

take

these

things

in

crowded

noisy

socially

complex

environments

on an

empty

stomach

with people

you don't

know

that

this is

definitely

a bad

strategy

to follow

and

it's

you know

going

dancing

your ass

off

in a

noisy

environment

is a

perfect

strategy

for clearing

your system

of a drug

I mean

if you take

a drug

you don't

like

what do

you do

you go

outside

and chop

a wood

for three

hours

and then

you feel

much

going to

stronger

to stronger

doses

not

recklessly

high

doses

but what

I call

effective

doses

alone

and this

last thing

just seems

to throw

people

this alone

it tells

me what a

triple

Scorpio

I must

be

that so many

people are

absolutely

horrified of

the idea

of taking

a psychedelic

alone

when

you'd have

to twist

my arm

to get

me

to take

it

with

someone

because

if I

take

it

with

someone

it's

inevitably

going to

be

about

them

and I

may not

want

that

much

of

them

in

I

can't

hear

them

breathing

but

now

so maybe

they're

dead

but

maybe

they

maybe

I

just

can't

hear

them

so

if

I

disturb

them

that's

not

cool

on the

other hand

if they're

dying

and

as a

courtesy

and then

my mind

just

you know

it just

goes

into

a tizzy

well

maybe

you're

not

as

neurotic

as

I

and

I

used

to

adhere

to

a

similar

model

in terms

of

phytosis

use

on my

own

and

then

became

involved

in

the

roquette

type

group

which

for a

variety

of reasons

I've

left

including

I guess

there's

another

part

of

that

which

is

that

there

was

a

tremendous

demand

of

undercurrent

deception

and

guru

abuse

in the

group

which

do you

all

understand

what

he's

referring

to

by

the

roquette

type

model

he's

referring

to

a

person

a

psychiatrist

Salvador

Roquette

who

operated

in

Mexico

for

years

I've

never

met

him

so

correct

me

if

I'm

not

doing

it

justice

but

as

I

understand

it

this

is

basically

the

assault

theory

of

psychedelics

where

you

give

people

first

of

all

you

give

them

multiple

substances

it

Jewish

housewives

from

long

island

and

showed

them

holocaust

footage

well

that

well

it

depends

on

what

you're

after

here

I

mean

if

you're

trying

to

break

people

down

this

sounds

like

it would

break

me

down

I

would

not

know

how

I

could

even

survive

something

like

that

but

I

think

my

theory

is

almost

exactly

the

opposite

I

say

there

should

be

very

little

input

I

don't

think

you

need

to

go

out

and

buy

a

lily

tank

for

your

basement

but

as

close

to

that

as

you

something

it

took

me

years

to

be

able

to

articulate

this

because

I

thought

everybody

did

this

but

apparently

not

I

once

talked

to

Roland

Fisher

the guy

I

mentioned

this

morning

he'd

given

psilocybin

to

2,500

grad

students

he'd

taken

it

times

himself

and

I

said

I

said

well

Roland

what

do

you

make

of

these

hallucinations

of

these

volleys

of

visual

hallucination

and

he

said

I

never

closed

I

was

floored

I

mean

that

is

so

antithetical

to

my

instinct

with

the

stuff

that

I

couldn't

even

imagine

it

then

your

question

about

guru

abuse

I

don't

know

what

it

is

in

me

I

guess

it

just

deep

cynicism

I

discussed

this

once

with

the

mushroom

and

what

I

was

told

was

simply

this

for

one

human

being

to

assume

that

they

could

attain

enlightenment

from

another

human

being

is

like

a

grain

of

sand

on

the

beach

assuming

that

it

can

attain

enlightenment

from

another

grain

of

sand

on

the

beach

in

other

words

all

grains

of

sand

are

alike

didn't

you

know

that

and

all

people

in

this

particular

area

are

alike

how

many

gurus

have

to

be

caught

with

their

hand

in

the

cookie

jar

or

the

nook

of

the

jar or whatever it is before you get the message they are just like us and that may be granting

them a level of moral sophistication they lack as a class what i truly believe is nobody knows

anything the more generous position is you know well the buddhists have a piece of the action and

the mormons know something and everybody has a piece of the action the mushroom says nobody has a piece of

the action that no one knows anything and that's tremendously liberating and it carries a

responsibility for you to take yourself seriously you have no other source everything else is going to

be hearsay secondhand rumor thrice told your self is your instrument for the exploration of these

dimensions there is spread through the world a lot of what i call and i hate the gender bias in calling

it this but it would be dishonest to change it i i call it wise old man woman wise old man knowledge

it could be wise old woman knowledge there's a lot of this all over the world if you go to asia you

will see men sitting in doorways at evening smoking their pipes and watching the sunset as their

grandchildren play at their feet it's a safe bet this person never took lsd or psilocybin and yet

they've attained a certain kind of existential validity wisdom comfort with the phenomenon

of their own being and that can be taught and handed down and talked about and inculcated and cultivated but this psychedelic

thing is something very different i don't i don't think anyone can lead because i don't think anyone is in a position to

lead if you counter by saying what am i doing i'm pointing toward an open door that's all the the method and the material

is what you need to take away from this weekend the opinions of terence mckenna are simply that and worth

just that much but if you take the techniques and the materials you can create your own world of of meaning and

and and coherence yeah

for thoseiah

five if you weigh a hundred and forty five pounds five dried grams weigh it

this is the other thing people

uh don't weigh their doses they eyeball it

Well, the ego, in a frantic effort to save itself, has an amazing ability to under, to overestimate the weight of mushrooms.

When you actually show somebody five dried grams lying on a plate, they usually pale visibly at the very thought that that's what you're talking about.

Yeah?

I just wanted to add that there are species that are quite a bit stronger than that.

Yes, good point.

When I say five dried grams, I mean stropharia cubensis, which is the commercially cultivated one, the large, silvery, stipe, golden-capped mushroom.

Some of the Pacific Northwestern species are twice as strong, or three times as strong.

But if you were to have just applied this literally across the board, you'd probably get further faster than if you are careful.

What about taking out some yields around in the area?

Well, you know what they say, there are old mycologists and bold mycologists.

But there are no old, bold mycologists.

If you're going to do that, learn your taxonomy or join the San Francisco Mycological Society or something.

Many of these things are hard to confuse with anything else.

But Psilocybe semilanciata is, in fact, easily confused with a species of gallerina that you don't even know there's a problem until 12 hours after you've eaten them.

And at that point, you're dead on arrival. There's nothing science can do for you. Your liver has just turned to mush.

So, what I believe people should do is cultivate mushrooms.

I mean, you want to take the alchemical path.

The cultivation of mushrooms is an incredible spiritual and physical discipline.

It will teach you all those good Lutheran values, cleanliness, punctuality, attention to detail, how to keep a clean workspace, for God's sake.

And then you are absolutely confident.

And you have also obtained karma-free mushrooms outside of the cycle of inevitable criminal syndicalism and the karma that carries with it.

And I've participated in it plenty myself, so I'm not knocking it.

But it would be nice if people would produce their own mushrooms because inevitably you produce more than you can use

and then, you know, can help people out down in 5B or something. Yeah.

And how long does it take to grow mushrooms?

Oh, start to finish six to seven weeks.

It's not like growing any plant you've ever grown. Mushrooms are not a plant.

It requires, you know, the sophistication normally reserved for an eighth grade science project.

You have to be able to cook petri dishes and this sort of thing.

And then?

How long does it take fresh?

Fresh.

If you will dehydrate the mushrooms, you'll discover they're 90% water.

So five dried grams becomes 50 wet grams.

And again, this is a plateful.

So figure ten times more than if it's dried.

Or if you're a little conservative, eight times more than if it's dried.

Yeah.

Is there any books that you can recommend in that whole season?

Current growth?

Or really?

Well, two books I would recommend.

The book I wrote with my brother called Psilocybin Magic Mushroom Growers Guide is still in print from Quick Press.

They have an 800 number here in the city.

Quick Trade.

I'm sorry.

Not Quick Press.

Quick Trade.

And then Paul Stamath's book, The Mushroom Cultivators Encyclopedia, is a very good book.

If you are serious about this, try and find someone who's done it and get them to teach you.

Because it's very easy to do, but doing it without being shown by someone is a little like trying to assemble a complex toy on Christmas Eve.

You know, flap F into slot P, that kind of thing.

It's much easier to just be taught by someone.

Yeah.

I had a dream that I slept in the early part of the evening to wake up at midnight to do mushrooms at one.

It was like, I had a dream about that.

I'm wondering about doing it in the same thing of the night.

I always do it at night.

Yeah, that's the best part.

And the reason is a practical one.

And that is, and this gets into another realm, but I'm a hallucination sharpener.

I really like hallucination.

To me, the hallucination is the proof that I am connected to the other.

And so, if I take a low dose and don't hallucinate, even though I may have insights and write paid cover pages with ideas and so forth,

I consider the trip to be somewhat of a failure.

Hallucination is what's important.

Now, what was the other part of your question?

Night time or day time.

The hallucinations are reluctant to form in light, I've found.

That's not true of everything.

For instance, DMT.

I prefer to, my ideal site for smoking DMT would be a grassy sloping hillside somewhere in Marin County or something.

Perfect in bright sun.

But all other hallucinogens seem to prefer darkness and can organize themselves in darkness much better.

It's quieter, although, boy, there are some weird sounds in the middle of the night.

It sounds like the entire house has been surrounded by a motorized platoon or something.

Yeah.

I don't know if I can go on to the religious level.

I'm trying to think about where Christians fit into a religious spiritual pathway.

And I was reading about, and I know there's a lot of controversy about, but he talks about an idea of an eagle and an eagle ship.

Ideas that I've read in Eastern traditions about immortality and certain, you know,

certain hallucinogens lead people to a certain way that they can be so that they can, you know, get by the eagle.

I know that, you know, I was thinking just some of the stuff that, you know,

that that tour that you do since your body seems to get into it out loud,

and I think different, you know, different plants fit in a different way.

Or with your own ideas of not simply just using it as a healing tool for a society,

as a healing tool for a person, and not only using it as just expanding and connecting up your mind

and other people's mind or the world mind or guiding the consciousness,

but also in relation to, you know, more out there, stuff like a religious power.

Well, I think the sincerest form of religious worship is an act of understanding.

That the universe wants to be understood by its creation.

There is a need for dialogue.

So, when you take psychedelics, the way I think of it is once you get past the personal stuff,

then the model for the psychedelic voyager that I use is the fisherman for ideas.

Ideas are the proof of the pudding.

And so you put your little boat out on the sea of mind and let down your nets.

And what you're hoping for is that minnows don't swim through the net.

Minnows are ideas that have a certain striking peculiarity but are utterly, ultimately unsatisfying.

An example would be to spend much time meditating on why your little finger just fits your nostril.

You know, it's an interesting insight, but you can't build on that much, I think.

And if an idea is too large, it'll rend your nets and you won't be able to wrestle it into the boat.

And in fact, you and your nets and your boat will be dragged into the ocean

and we'll just put you in a corner somewhere and look in on you once a week.

So, what you want is middle-sized ideas.

And they can be, any idea counts.

It can be an idea for how to reorganize an investment plan

or what quantum physics is really trying to say

or, you know, the structure of cytochrome C.

It's a specific problem with an answer.

And I really believe that salvation is an act of understanding.

That the moral life is a precondition for salvation.

But that the final step is an act of understanding.

So, I take seriously the idea that these things are consciousness expanding

and that we should use them to add to the storehouse of culturally validated ideas.

Yeah?

I've been wrestling with an issue since lunch and I'm just trying to think how to articulate it to you.

I'm wondering about how age and intention come into the use of psychedelics.

And I know when I was a lot younger and I was using LSD and mushrooms,

I didn't have the intention to really use them for personal growth or for understanding.

I did just to kind of have a good time.

And as I got older and my own awareness increased, my use of them changed.

And I'm wondering what your views are or if you have any insight on

is there a certain age when you think it's appropriate to use these as part of the process for personal growth

as opposed to abuse which a lot of children...

I think it's more about the culture in which you're embedded.

In other words, I'm obviously considerably older than you.

In the 60s, we actually did it with fairly high purpose and did it at fairly high doses.

I mean, you weren't even getting into the game if you didn't take 500 micrograms.

Now people take 70 micrograms and feel that they can hold forth on the subject of what is LSD.

I think what happened was in the 70s and then in the 80s, the dose was dialed down

and it permitted people to take it less seriously.

And so you didn't take it as a fun thing because you were young.

You took it as a fun thing because you were young in the 80s.

And that was how the 80s dealt with it.

You can dismiss LSD as just kind of a fun thing if you keep the dose down under 100.

But once it starts climbing, it begins to be more and more profound.

I have noticed as I age and my peers age that we seem to get more sensitive to it,

which is not to say that we don't need to take it,

but that when we do take it, we don't need to take quite such flattening amounts as in the old days.

But I think once you are conscious of your identity and of the world you're in, sometime around 16 or so,

then I think it becomes just a matter of circumstance and predilection and intelligence.

I don't think, you know, psychedelics work with intelligence, but they can't increase it beyond a certain point.

And some people are just, I almost said shallow, and then I decided simple.

And some people just are beyond the reach of these things somehow.

It just doesn't address their agenda.

What this seems mostly to have an appeal for is slightly culturally alienated members of a ruling elite.

Where are the black people who should be at this thing?

Where are the Latino people who should be here?

These things are inevitably incredibly white and male.

Why is that? Well, I'm not sure. Yeah?

What about in nature?

That's a good one.

What I would say is just make sure you are really in nature.

Because the reason I stopped taking LSD outside, or psychedelics outside,

was because every time I would take it, something so weird would happen that I just could not stand it.

Usually having to do with another person, usually a stranger.

I mean, you can go up to the top of Mount Whitney, look around, make sure nobody is there, drop,

and within 15 minutes, the ranger wants to see the camping permit, the army is doing helicopter maneuvers,

30 cup scouts show up.

I mean, it's uncanny.

So I, I, and some people like to do that.

I mean, some people's idea of a good time is to take 500 mics of LSD

and wander around lower Manhattan meeting people.

Listen.

On people that take psychoactive drugs around a lot of people,

to absorb, like, a learning experience from interaction with other people,

say like mine, a similar mind.

Well, these have to be small doses, because that effective doses, you're lying on the floor as dead.

So, yeah, I mean, and you learn what you can handle.

You know, I mean, some people can take vast amounts of LSD,

and it would never enter your mind that they're loaded at all.

And other people, you look over at them, and they're bursting into laughter and can't behave themselves.

Well, I think DMT is, if DMT didn't exist, we would have to invent it.

It's sort of, there has to be something in the world.

There has to be a weirdest thing.

Once we have the concept weird, there has to be a weirdest thing.

And DMT is simply it.

DMT is that thing which, above all other things, you have convinced yourself doesn't exist.

It's the one thing you are certain is impossible.

That's how it seemed to me.

It completely deconstructs reality in a completely unexpected way.

In other words, reality can come apart many different ways.

And if it begins to come apart, you hope it will begin to move along some traditionally sanctioned spiritual arc, you know,

toward Jesus or heaven or hell or something identifiable.

What happens with DMT is there is an eruption of the unexpected.

It seems to be in its nature to be unexpected.

And it seems to carry the message with incredible intensity that everything you know about reality is wrong.

It isn't what you think it is.

When you smoke DMT, when I smoke DMT, and according to Rick Strassman's research out at New Mexico, when most people are exposed to DMT,

very quickly, like within 30 seconds to a minute, you are conveyed into an inconceivably alien and dramatic environment of 100% hallucination.

Nothing you have ever seen before is there.

There is nothing there that the English language can describe.

Because there is nothing there that any English speaking person ever has encountered before.

Or German or French or Swahili.

You are conveyed into not a unitary world, not the white light, the one, or any of that, but a complex, multiplistic world of motion, light, color, depth, interaction.

And none of it makes very much sense at all.

It is a metaphor for what I am talking about.

Imagine that you were a Paleolithic person getting loaded around a campfire somewhere on the grasslands of Africa.

And imagine that for a minute and a half you suddenly found yourself standing in Times Square at rush hour.

Well, you could sort of make sense of it.

When you came back you would say, well, there were people, sort of, there were sort of people,

and then there was a lot of motion, and then there was a lot of verticality,

but basically you are just thrashing and clawing the air in front of your companions.

They are not getting a picture of Times Square at rush hour from this description.

DMT is like that.

It seems to punch through to an impossible world, a parallel dimension.

And it would be shocking enough if it were purely incomprehensible.

The problem is, it is not quite purely incomprehensible.

There is a 2% residuum that you seem to be able to relate to.

These self-dribbling basketball-like entities that I call Tykes that come bounding up and leap into your body and crawl all over you and jump in and out of your chest cavity.

They are singing in some kind of language that you don't hear but see.

And so they are singing objects into existence.

Some kind of musical grammar is condensing small pieces of furniture around you.

And you have to remember, 30 seconds before you were in some shabby apartment, you and your strange friends fiddling with some drug,

and now that is all gone and you are not sleepy, you are not dazed, you are absolutely who you were.

That is the strange thing.

DMT does not affect the part that we call ourselves.

Say, I am who I was, I am exactly who I was.

But what the hell has happened to reality?

And it has been entirely replaced by something that I never saw in any science fiction film,

never heard about in any fairy tale, never dreamed of, never hinted of.

And now I am fully there.

And these little entities are dancing around your attention and then they want you to do something.

They want you to sing objects into existence with your voice.

And they are doing it.

They are showing you how it is done.

They somehow, grammar is seen in that world.

It is as though a switch has been thrown in your neurophysiological machinery.

And language, which you used to hear, you now see.

And these things are putting a lot of pressure on you.

Saying, do it, do it, don't question, don't think, don't reflect, just do it.

And I sort of feel something cross between heartburn and satori begin to move its way up my chest.

And when it comes, when it reaches my mouth, my mouth flies open.

And this glossolalia-like linguistic stuff begins to happen, which is like language, like liquid, like silk, I can see it.

And it's colored and it's complicated.

And now I do not understand what this is for.

I can join you in speculating.

It looks to me like, first of all, language itself is a mysterious activity.

A behavior, which we participate on the body of nature.

Human language is the place to look.

It is not anticipated in other forms of animal organization.

And in us, it reaches this excruciating level of expression.

And with it, we have created culture, which is a virtual reality that we surround ourselves with,

not only of ideologies, Marxism, democracy, monarchy, but buildings, highways, infrastructure.

So it's almost as though language is an alien artifact of some sort.

You remember Bill Burroughs said it's a virus from outer space.

Well, this is sort of like that idea.

But language is obviously not something that is a finished enterprise.

And I think that we are approaching, either through our own, the natural evolution of the soma, of the body,

or through technology, or through some combination of the two.

We are approaching a place where we are going to switch channels

and switch the language channel into a more broad bandwidth mode.

And we are going to see what we mean instead of hear what we mean.

That the convention of using small mouth noises to symbolically indicate objects in the world

so that those who share the same set of linguistic assumptions can download this acoustical babble

and reconstruct the thought out of it is going to be traded in for something more like a direct acoustical hologram,

where then ambiguity is much less prevalent.

You know, if I read you a paragraph from Proust, we can spend the rest of the afternoon discussing what did the author mean.

You've all been in those situations.

What did the author mean?

But if I show you a sculpture by Brancusi, we just walk around and look at it.

It self-evidently is what it is.

It does not have the ambiguity that adheres to written and spoken language.

And I think this ambiguity has allowed misunderstanding and misunderstanding has allowed pain and agony.

So, it may be that we are on the brink of a higher form of language, the descent of the Logos.

This would be it, the manifestation of the Logos and the psychedelics,

by allowing a look through the hyperspatial window at future states of human organization,

as I argued this morning, is actually giving us a taste of a human future that may be far in the future,

in the same way that if you had smoked DMT 20,000 years ago, you might have landed in Times Square circa 1960.

It's an insight into a future development in the physiology and mind of man,

and makes it very suggestive then that DMT is being elaborated in our brains as part of normal metabolism.

We have genes that produce DMT.

Well, what if those genes were to be switched on in a more dramatic way?

Then what would the quality of culture be?

If culture is the serotonin trip,

then what kind of culture would we live in if the serotonin were backed out in favor of a DMT-maintained neural substrate?

I don't know, lots of hands up.

You've been patient.

It speaks to you in your own language.

Let me tell you a story which seems to me really a strange story, but it happened to me, so I'll tell it.

When I...

When I first started growing mushrooms, I was testing all these batches and taking it quite a bit of the time.

And one evening, I got locked into this voice thing, and it was singing a little song.

And the song was something like this.

Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-saes.

Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-saes.

It ended each line with the word says.

So I thought, interesting.

Then I went back and listened to Maria Sabina's Mushroom Vallada, where she's singing in Tzatzil, which is a mountain Indian language of central Mexico.

She's singing in Tzatzil, and the interlinear translation is right there on the page.

this word means says

so I thought

this thing can do it

in any language

it is apparently

omnilingual

yes

I said DMT naturally occurs

in the human brain

well there's a lot of anecdotal

talk about this but I don't think

there's ever been a statistically

coherent study

coming out of the 60s of course

there was a rash of LSD

babies and some of those

LSD babies are now

19, 25 years old

and they are perhaps in this room

and can speak for themselves

but it's never been studied

it would be an interesting thing to look at

if you could follow up

the idea that LSD breaks chromosomes

was simply a government lie

a smear

that to this day survives

in certain portions of the literature

it is not true

it is not even a little true

it is 100%

horseshit

it just doesn't do that

aspirin and caffeine

break chromosomes

with an order of magnitude

more alacrity

than LSD

that's right

my brother did a study

actually

Lawrence Rockefeller

paid for much of it

a study of these

maestres

in Brazil

these Santo Daime people

who've taken

Unial

Unial du Vegetal

these people who had taken

ayahuasca

weekly

for 40 years

and they did blood studies

and tissue studies

and they're fine

in fact

they are slightly

above normal

in certain indices

it just has

hasn't been studied

many of these LSD babies

were also born

into very loving

communal

neo-archaic

kind of settings

and they had lots

of unconventional

nurturing

and raising

too

so it's very hard

to separate

all these

to tease

these factors

apart

yeah

uh-huh

how did you bring about

true shamanism

within our modern culture

without it

falling into

that kind of thing

like people start

to idolize

an individual

and yet

still bring

someone

like a shaman

into a community

and

in business

tribe shamanism

they're often

not necessarily

idealized

like they are

in a groovy situation

but

they're respected

and they thought

of as being

more learning

and

they often have

the

archive of knowledge

well you know

Merseliad

in his

great book

on shamanism

he subtitled it

the archaic

techniques

of ecstasy

what

a shaman

is in command

of

are techniques

and they're not

based on

his personality

that's where

it's different

from the guru

if once

the shaman

has told you

his techniques

he's told you

all he can tell you

and

you then

have to apply

the techniques

that

ideology

is fairly

absent

in shamanism

at a practical

level

it's

it's basically

about

experience

not about

an ideological

preconception

of things

the way

I handle

gurus

is just

to simply

say

what can

you show

me

and then

if you're

told

well you

have to

sweep up

around the

ashram

here

12 years

or so

and do

daily

prostrations

and then

we'll cut

you in

on the

good

you just

can pick

up your

knapsack

and keep

going

because

real

the real

stuff is

not hidden

like that

when I

went to

South

America

and people

said

I said

what can

you show

me

and they

said

well let's

just sharpen

our machetes

and go

out here

into the

woods

a half

a mile

and cut

some vine

and bring

it back

and boil

it up

and I'll

show you

what I'll

show you

I'm very

suspicious

of lineages

and secret

knowledge

and situations

where somebody

decides

where somebody

else is

worthy

to ascend

to the

next level

because

you know

man for

man and

woman for

woman

there doesn't

seem to

be a more

scheming

tawdry

and venal

subclass

on this

planet

than

gurus

I mean

there may

be some

good ones

but my

god

they keep

bad

company

yeah

I heard

Brad

I was

speaking up

about

I heard

what I

am saying

in my

mind

kinesthesia

sort of

characteristics

when you

were describing

the DMT

the hearing

of colors

or speaking

words

words that

became

colors

clearly it is

a sense

so

okay so

can that

and you might

want to go

into that

for other

people

but I'm

really into

this whole

can that

happen

and occur

with other

with the

mushrooms

say

or another

hallucinogen

than

the DMT

well

no I

think

you know

if you

take

enough

psilocybin

it begins

to look

like

DMT

if you

take

an 8

or 9

gram

dose

of

psilocybin

at about

the 2

hour mark

it'll be

indistinguishable

from

DMT

to address

this question

of synesthesia

obviously

the world

is a

unity

and it

arrives at

the surface

of your

body

as a

unity

of

electromagnetic

vibrations

and light

and so

forth

but your

senses

break it

up at

that point

your eyes

tell you

about light

that's a

certain

range of

electromagnetic

radiation

your ears

measure

pressure waves

in the air

the acoustical

range

your

hands

inform you

about the

tactility

of the world

but the world

is one thing

so

it's almost

as though

the senses

are reunified

in

synesthesia

in a way

that may have

been originally

intended

and has

for some

reason

fallen out

of our

physiological

repertoire

or perhaps

exist

as a

future

state

but yes

tasting

shapes

seeing

colors

feeling

music

there are

people who

have

unusual

neurological

conditions

who live

in these

kinds of

spaces

and it's

very hard

to

some of

you may

know

the guy

who wrote

Oliver Sacks

book

The Man

Who Mistook

His Wife

for a

Hat

it's a

wonderful

book

and the

man who

tasted

shapes

that's

right

yes I'm

a little

embarrassed

by it

because it

it breaks

my

proletarian

mold

there were

only 70

copies of

that book

and it

costs

about

$1500

and what

it is

it's a

showcase

for an

artist

named

Tim

Eli

who is

very famous

in the

world

of

made

books

and he's

at the

top of

the

made

books

thing

so I

contributed

a text

he made

the paper

and the

binding

and set

the print

and painted

on each

page of

each book

in a

special

unique

way

and

it's

an

art

marked

object

yeah

your book

on cultivating

psilocybin

mushrooms

has a

very strong

impact

in terms

of the

accessibility

of mushrooms

and DMT

is much

harder

to obtain

than mushrooms

and I

know

people

have

explored

Jonathan

on

analog

and

you

did

review

which

is

very

mixed

success

and I'm

wondering

if you

have any

thoughts

about

similarly

accessible

ways

of

making

it

become

magnificent

yeah

well

I don't

advocate

if you're

not

at least

a third

or fourth

year

biochemist

you shouldn't

attempt

it

because it

involves

in the

laboratory

because it

involves

the use

of

LIAH

here's a

book

called

psychedelic

shamanism

that has

recipes

but

LIAH

is

lithium

aluminum

hydride

is

very

explosive

and

don't

make

a fuel

of

yourself

the

other

approach

is to

try to

find

a

weak

source

in

nature

and

concentrate

it

and

phalaris

grasses

phalaris

tuberosa

and

arundinacee

you can

grow

them

and

do

a

low

tech

water

extraction

I'm

not

sure

nobody

has

ever

handed

me

a

gram

of

DMT

created

by

these

techniques

this is

all

sort

of

backyard

theory

but in

theory

it should

be able

to do

this

there's

also

a

plant

called

Desmantha

solenoensis

that grows

in the

Midwest

that has

a very

high

concentration

of

DMT

in the

root

bark

it's

interesting

to talk

about

that

plant

for

a

moment

because

it's

only

been

known

that

it

contained

DMT

in the

root

bark

for

about

five

years

but

it

could

have

been

used

by

the

North

American

Plains

Indians

to

produce

some

kind

of

a

shamanic

hallucinogen

but

never

was

as far

as

we

can

tell

and

this

is

an

interesting

question

those

of

you

and

not

others

it

simply

isn't

a

matter

of

availability

for

example

second

only

to

the

Mexican

concentration

of

species

in

Oaxaca

and

the

Sierra

Mazateca

is

the

concentration

of

over

known

species

in

the

Pacific

Northwest

yet

evidence

of

use

of

those

mushrooms

by

the

Tlingit

Chimsham

and

the

Northwest

Coast

Indians

is

very

hard

to

come

by

ranging

from

maybe

none

to

maybe

a

little

tiny

bit

but

by

no

means

is

it

established

that

they

did

this

desmanthus

thing

is another

thing

why

was

it

never

utilized

this

new

chemical

and

plant

that

I

talked

about

this

morning

has

an

interesting

relationship

to all

this

salvia

divinorum

this

Mexican

mint

that

contains

salva

norine

alpha

it's

used

only

by

two

fairly

small

language

groups

the

tzotzil

and

the

tzotol

and

they

call

it

ojas

de la

pastora

the

leaves

of

the

shepherdess

but

when

you

ask

them

well

what

do

you

call

it

in

sotsil

what

do

you

call

it

in

your

language

they

say

we

have

no

name

for

this

plant

in

our

language

well

that's

impossible

if

they've

been

using

it

for

any

length

of

time

so

is

it

that

these

people

discovered

this

plant

as

recently

maybe

as

or

years

ago

and

having

a

tradition

of

plant

use

they

inculcated

this

one

into

it

there's

a

similar

case

in

Africa

you

probably

all

know

about

Iboga

Tabernanza

Iboga

which

is

the

only

religion

in

Gabon

and

Zaire

called

Bawiti

and

interesting

on this

gender

issue

just

as

an

aside

this

stuff

is

used

to

hold

relationships

together

it's

well

understood

that

that's

what

it's

for

is

to

bond

people

but

and

these

people

who

use

it

the

fang

people

they

say

they

got

it

from

the

pygmies

but

what's

strange

about

Iboga

is

there

is

no

record

of

anybody

using

it

before

anywhere

this

is

very

puzzling

because

the

Portuguese

had

been

into

West

Africa

since

the

1440s

and

trading

and

buying

slaves

and

bringing

back

artifacts

and

this

sort

of

thing

no

record

of

Iboga

use

before

so

we

can't

assume

always

that

these

things

are

ancient

there's

a lot

of

controversy

about

peyote

if you're

not

looked

into

the

matter

you

might

assume

this

is

this

ancient

hallucinogen

but

in fact

the

most

of

the

evidence

argues

that

until

the

1880s

Sephora

secundifolia

beans

were the

preferred

shamanic

intoxicant

of the

Rio Grande

drainage

well

now

today

Sephora

secundifolia

is

considered

a

poison

it

has

cytosine

in it

it's

a

terrible

thing

to

take

this

is

another

thing

I mean

as long

as I'm

just

riffing

on

these

things

you

have

to

realize

that

intoxication

is

a

culturally

defined

situation

for

example

in

Madagascar

the

Malagasy

Republic

the

large

island

off

eastern

Africa

there

are

no

major

psychedelics

but

there

are

what

are

called

ordeal

poisons

these

are

plants

where

you

take

it

you

think

you're

going

to

die

you

beg

to

die

and

then

you

get

better

and

are

fine

well

people

come

out

of

that

reborn

rededicated

to

their

families

and

their

professions

and

their

position

in

society

why

not

because

it

was

psychedelic

but

because

a

near

death

experience

is

intrinsically

an

experience

which

a

couple

years

ago

that

popular

underground

designer

drug in

Japan

or

something

that

invoked

a

certain

kind

of

near

death

experience

with

something

that

was

described

as being

a

kind

of

neurological

state

that

the

body

doesn't

go

and

takes

a

very

catastrophic

end

basically

gives you

a certain

kind

experience

of a

violent

kind

of

demise

and

that

has

some

kind

of

popular

use

it's

not

true

it

probably

will

be

in

time

some

people

have

nominated

DMT

for that

role

my

friend

Rupert

Sheldrake

he

calls

it

a

thanatoptogen

he

says

when

you

really

die

when

you

are

beyond

any

returning

DMT

floods

the

dying

brain

and

the

only

way

you

can

have

that

experience

without

dying

is to

artificially

induce

it

this

may

be

so

I

mean

one

of

the

most

challenging

things

about

DMT

and we

might as

well

you know

it's

the

afternoon

of

hallucination

we

whose

lives

are

built

on

hallucination

or

what

is

to be

made

of that

what

kind

of

an

entity

can

have

a

mind

but

not

a

body

and be

loose

inside

your

mind

I

think

that

possibly

I

mean

this

is

sort

of

the

most

woo

place

we'll

pass

through

unless

you

bait

me

but

if

you

ask

shamans

worldwide

how do

you do

what

you

do

they

will

say

well

we

use

ancestor

spirits

the

ancestor

spirits

help

us

well

you

know

you

may

think

you're

counter

cultural

but

most

people

hearing

about

ancestor

spirits

are

able

to

dumb

that

down

into

oh

these

naive

charming

Indians

you

know

that

sort

of

thing

but

what

if

there

is

actually

something

which

survives

bodily

death

that

is

actually

continues

to

exist

in a

dimension

which

we

would

have

to

call

mental

or

trans

real

and

what

if

you

can

come

and

go

from

that

dimension

using

shamanic

techniques

well

that

is

in

fact

what

shamanism

has

always

claimed

to

anyone

who

would

listen

they

say

you

know

the

shaman

passes

back

and

forth

through

the

same

doorway

through

which

the

dead

pass

but

they

do

not

return

the

superhuman

condition

of the

shaman

his or

her

ability

to

cure

to

handle

fire

to

drive

metal

objects

through

flesh

all of

this

is

to show

that they

are of

both worlds

that they

partake in the

antos of

normal being

but they

also partake

in the

antos of

transcendental

being

and I think

it would be

the most

astonishing

cultural

development

of the

last

years

if we

were to

actually

learn

something

about

the

after

death

that

would

strip

away

our

materialist

and

cheerful

assumptions

that when

you go

into the

ground

you're

nothing

but

compost

in a

way

that

belief

has

been

the

permission

for

all

of

our

dumbing

down

and

devaluing

of

ourselves

our

society

each

other

and

the

planet

the

belief

that

well

ultimately

it

doesn't

amount

to

anything

anyway

well

what

if

ultimately

you

don't

know

what

is

it

now

there

isn't

any

bug

taken

there

but

we

have

had

and

I

witnessed

the

verdict

on

experiences

of the

ancestors

saying

people

were

all

saying

they

were

kept it

and

one

afterwards

we were

going around

the room

the

experiences

were

all

remarkable

and

I

don't

know

if that's

true

it's a

professional

calling

I mean

I think

everybody

should have

a psychedelic

experience

but to

professionally

dedicate

yourself

to a

lifetime

you

experience

if you

can

concur

with

that

and

I

want

to

get to

a

question

about

the

book

earlier

that

you

mentioned

well

first let me

deal with

the

timelessness

this

metaphor

that I

tried to

put out

this

morning

about

how

the

shaman

goes

to

hyperspace

and

therefore

can

see

next week's

weather

next week's

hunting

who's

going to

recover

from

illness

and

who

isn't

what

going

into

the

fourth

dimension

means

is

all

time

becomes

co-present

you know

there's

that piece

of

doggerel

poetry

I

dreamed

I

saw

eternity

the

other

night

an

endless

golden

ring

in other

words

eternity

is

all

time

in a

completed

form

and

I

think

timelessness

stopping

the

world

as

Castaneda

said

this

is

an

indication

that

you

have

truly

crossed

the

boundary

out

of

three

dimensional

Newtonian

space

and

into

this

hyperspatial

dimension

I

really

I

can't

say

enough

about

this

because

I

think

this

is

the

key

that

life

is

a

process

that

conquers

dimensionality

it

always

has

been

the

earliest

forms

of

life

were

fixed

slimes

they

had

no

motility

they

had

an

existence

as

points

later

they

acquired

motility

the

ability

to

swim

around

and

were

aware

then

of the

concept

here

and

there

and

then

really

the

entire

evolution

of life

on

this

planet

is

simply

to

develop

better

organs

for

moving

around

in

three

dimensional

space

stronger

legs

stronger

arms

better

binocular

vision

so forth

and so

on

until

you get

to

human

beings

and

we

invent

language

and

what

is

language

it's

a

strategy

for

escaping

from

the

narrowness

of

the

present

moment

because

if

you

have

language

you

can

say

I

remember

the

time

or

you

can

say

why

don't

we

plan

on

doing

so

and

so

in

other

words

you

ask

and

when

you

get

written

language

then

you

get

history

then

there

is

in a

way

the

past

never

goes

away

the

past

changes

into

history

and

in

that

form

or

the

present

changes

into

history

and

in

that

form

it

stays

with

us

and

now

culture

electronic

culture

we dream

of an

information

lossless

society

where

no

information

is

lost

and

then

that

means

in

a

sense

where

no

time

passes

away

you

know

we'll

have

Marilyn

with

us

and

JFK

everybody

a

kind

of

eternity

so

and

so

language

is

then

seen

as

a

strategy

for

the

further

overcoming

of

dimensional

limitation

and

now

with

the

internet

about

to go

visual

and

all

that

it

seems

like

we're

again

about

to

take

another

step

deeper

into

the

conquest

of

dimensionality

but

there's

nothing

new

in

all

this

is

the

business

that

biology

has

been

about

since

day

one

and

then

the

glossolalia

there's

a

feeling

it's

you know

not to be

crude

but it's

somewhat

like a

belch

or

something

it's

like a

bubble

something

moving

up

and

then

when

it

actually

gets

to your

mouth

it

manifests

as

a

deep

air

passing

from

my

awareness

what

do I

do

with

vibration

of

energy

which is

somehow

and I don't

know how

it's done

but

somehow

through some

sort of

activity

that's actually

taking place

in me

something

changes

and this

becomes

what

you're

describing

as

language

to see

that's

sound

from your

ears

are you

and I'm

looking at

frequencies of

vibration

that's one

what one

kind of energy

and there's another

kind of energy

that's behind that

that could be

what we call

the ancient

meaning

okay

well

there's

sound

and

meaning

and they

are

not

necessarily

related

yes

I mean

I've had

I always

my technique

or my

intellectual

style

though it

may not

seem like

it

is to

always

seek

for a

rational

explanation

first

and then

from there

more and

more

exotic

explanations

so

I was

really

floored

by

this tyke thing,

because that seemed to me unambiguously

not something which was supposed to happen

in the universe as I was told it,

that there were supposed to be

small non-human intelligences

leaping in and out of my chest.

And one idea that's occurred to me,

and since some of you are interested in psychology,

it's maybe worth talking about,

plus we get to inject a buzzword here,

which is, as you know,

it is now understood that

we are really not one person.

We have many personalities.

Multiple personality disorder

is simply when you manifest this

on a level that irritates other people.

Multiple personality order

is when you have them all lined up in a row

and the right ones always talk to the same people

and so the illusion is maintained.

Well, in the same way that,

you know, if you had a big mirror,

you look in the mirror

and you see a reflection of yourself.

But now if you lift the mirror up

and bring it down on the ground

and shatter it,

what you see now

is not a shattered reflection of yourself,

but hundreds of little reflections of yourself,

each one whole.

Well, may it not be then

that what DMT does

is it shatters the illusion of the self

and says,

you're not a self,

you're a tribe of selves.

And here they are,

dancing,

performing,

singing.

They are the fractal adumbrations

of the personality.

That was the buzzword

that I wanted to get in.

They are the fractal adumbrations

of personality.

That's one possibility.

The other possibility,

souls.

Like I said,

an ecology of souls.

That is the conservative explanation.

Why is it the conservative explanation?

Well, because we are here

and so if we think of them

as human beings of some sort,

they just happen to be dead human beings.

Nevertheless,

we see that there are human beings

so perhaps there is a residuum

that survives death

and that is what these things are.

Other possibilities

must range more further afield.

A parallel continuum

actually inhabited by these things.

That they are not human beings

in any form.

That they are autonomous entities

with their own universe.

That's one possibility.

Another possibility is

that these are the long-sought extraterrestrials.

That they don't come in beryllium ships

the size of Manhattan

to take control of our gross industrial output.

That that's a crazy way of thinking

about extraterrestrials.

That they come through

a technology of mind.

That they come

by collapsing space

across mega parsecs

and appearing in the mind

as a hallucinogenic experience.

But then, of course,

the question is

why?

And why this sense of familiarity?

And why this deep affection

and concern for suffering humanity?

I don't have answers.

But I know that these questions

need to be answered.

The domain is real.

Yeah, we'll do a question

and then it's break time.

I just wonder

if there's really

that much of a difference.

I mean, you're presenting

these alternatives

maybe for clarity

as completely separate.

But the idea

of autonomous entities

living in some hyper-eventual space

versus the idea

of our separate personalities

versus the idea

of other beings

that maybe have a more

traditional existence

but just very far away.

Are they really all that separate?

It seems to me

that if the mind

actually makes its home

at least in large part

in hyper-space

in the everyday world

of the mind

and if that's where

our thoughts live

then

if we take these drugs

they transport us

to a place

where we see that

through another filter.

In this hyper-space

that's where

the other minds live

presumably

there may not be

that much of a difference

between those three alternatives

you actually compose.

It may be

the ego

that you talked about earlier

that is

causing the confusion here.

We think of ourselves

wrapped in this skin

living at this point

and then all this stuff

is very confusing.

But if we expand

our definition of mind

to be

what you've earlier

said it to be

then perhaps

these entities

I mean,

they're fascinating

but they're not so mysterious

outside the domain

of where they should be.

well, yeah,

I mean,

you're right

although

well, let's take

two of the possibilities.

If it's an ecology

of souls

we're dealing with

then

there should be

they should have

complete knowledge

of the history

of the planet

and everything

that's ever gone on

and so forth

but they won't have

a complete

encyclopedia

of galactic history

or something like that

I think that

well, frankly

I don't know

what I think

it depends on

how recently

I've smoked DMT

the overwhelming impression

is of

cognitive dissonance

occasioned by

the simultaneous

perception

of alienness

and familiarity

these are the most

alien things

you've ever seen

and you know

you've been here before

and you know

it's very important

and you know

it's basic

to who you are

but if it's

the self

then what have we done

to the definition

of the self

the self is supposed

to mean

that which is most

familiar to me

if the concept self

can also include

the notion

that which is least

familiar to me

then it's almost

too broad

a concept

to use

I think

what we need

is scientists

meaning you don't

have to wear

a white coat

but you do have

to have the

scientific attitude

rolling up their

sleeves

and going in there

with the same

attitude that

Wallace went

to the Amazon

and that Darwin

went to the Galapagos

and let's figure out

let's map

the flora

and fauna

let's get a taxonomy

of these tykes

let's try and figure out

where they're coming from

and what their purpose is

shamanism

I believe

is the study

of this

dimension

and

it's not reached

any conclusions

at this point

it is

a phenomenology

not a science

and so

the Amazon shaman

he has a language

of control

and description

which is satisfying

in his context

and to his people

but it may not

be satisfying

in your context

and to your people

even if you

assimilate it perfectly

now it's like

physicists

talk about

charm

and strangeness

of quarks

but this has nothing

to do with

strangeness

or charm

in ordinary speech

these are very

very complicated

concepts

where the technical

gloss

has been

to call it

strangeness

and when a shaman

tells you

he deals

with ancestor

spirits

you

for whom

Caspar the

friendly ghost

is the image

of an ancestor

spirit

definitely get

a cockamamie

notion

then

when you try

and map

Caspar the

friendly ghost

onto the Amazon

shaman's notion

of an ancestor

spirit

these concepts

require a lifetime

of manipulation

and familiarity

before you

understand

where the

boundaries

will lie

well

why don't we

take a

five minute

ten minute

break here

and then

we'll come back

kinds of

details

there's the

details

of shamanic

usage

descriptions

of ethnographic

material

how

ayahuasca

is used

how

there's a whole

neurophysiological

world

of discussion

what happens

to these

molecules

once they get

inside your

body

where do they

go

in the body

and in the

brain

and

why

are they

able to

do

what they

do

what

molecular

species

are they

competitive

with

so forth

and so on

issues

of botany

taxonomy

biogeography

so forth

and so on

so I

want you

to direct

it where

you want

it to go

in some

of these

areas

I'm more

competent

than in

others

but if I'm

incompetent

I can

usually

bring myself

to say so

and name

a book

that will

help you

out

with this

stuff

so don't

be shy

about

jerking

us

one way

and then

another

yeah

well let me

background

the question

relates

to

an incident

told

about

in both

my book

with Dennis

Invisible

Landscape

and in

True

Hallucination

creatively

agitated

under the

influence

of mushrooms

announced

that he

could

do

something

which is

very hard

to describe

what it

was

it was

sort of

like

turn

himself

inside

out

trigger

the

end

of

the

world

open

a

doorway

into

hyperspace

something

like that

anyway

some

highly

touted

dramatic

thing

he

organized

an

experiment

to test

the

theory

and

the

result

of the

experiment

was

not

nothing

which

was

what

I

was

betting

on

not

what

he

said

would

happen

which

what

he

was

but

a

very

peculiar

incident

then

was

generated

where

he

seemed

to

lose

his

mind

to put

it

simply

for

about

three

weeks

but

in

a

very

specialized

and

orderly

way

and

I

seemed

to

also

undergo

a

parallel

but

different

kind

of

transformation

and

the

theory

that

was

being

manipulated

was

a

theory

that

involved

using

vocally

produced

tones

to

acoustically

cancel

metabolizing

psychedelic

molecules

in the

body

so that

they

would

bond

as

dimers

into

DNA

in

other

words

so that

they

would

intercalate

into

DNA

the

hypothesis

which

lie

behind

all

this

was

that

DNA

must

be

the

storage

the

physical

storage

site

for

memory

this

is

not

a

popular

idea

this

is

a

sneered

at

idea

but

memory

is a

great

problem

for

modern

science

you

know

we've

decoded

DNA

we've

got

the

top

quark

we've

measured

the

core

temperature

of

betel

juice

we

have

no

idea

how

memory

works

it's

absolutely

confounding

because

a woman

a man

of 90

years

old

can

remember

the

way

their

great

grandmother

skirts

smelled

when they

used to

crawl up

into her

lap

when they

were

four

years

old

it was

years

ago

during

that

time

every

molecule

in the

body

has been

cycled

out

every

five

to

seven

years

so

it's

ten

bodies

away

is the

body

that

crawled up

into

that

woman's

lap

and

could

smell

the

here

where

are

the

memories

and

as

you

know

experiments

have been

done

with

ablating

large

parts

of

the

brain

or

studying

people

who are

the

unfortunate

victims

of very

traumatic

head

injuries

and

there

are

cases

in

the

medical

literature

of

people

who

have

fully

80%

of

their

physical

brain

destroyed

and

no

memory

impairment

whatsoever

so

where

are

the

memories

well

there

are

a

number

of

theories

but

there

is

nothing

more

than

theory

at

this

point

Dennis

said

let's

assume

nature

is

conservative

for a

moment

we know

that

nature

stores

protein

code

in

DNA

and

we

know

that

DNA

has

large

silent

portions

and

in fact

some

of

you

may

have

seen

the

data

which

came

out

just

recently

that

those

large

silent

portions

of

the

DNA

exhibit

the

same

mathematical

properties

as

language

did

you

all

read

this

oh

this

is

hot

as

you

know

DNA

codes

for

protein

that

code

is

only

about

6%

of

the

DNA

chain

the

rest

of the

DNA

the

other

94%

is

called

silent

DNA

or

by

some

people

junk

DNA

because

it

doesn't

code

for

protein

so

what

does

it

do

well

recently

they've

been

sequencing

this

junk

DNA

and

then

studying

it

with

algorithms

used

by

the

CIA

to

detect

code

in

noise

and

they

discover

that

these

silent

portions

of

the

DNA

fit

all

the

necessary

criterion

of

language

they have

syntactical

structure

this

seems to

support

Dennis'

contention

which

was

and

it's

very

would

be

very

controversial

you see

because

it's

a

Lamarckian

mechanism

it's

saying

that

experience

can

modify

nuclear

DNA

which

is

denied

by

anti

Lamarckian

evolution

that's

not

the way

it's

supposed

to

work

according

to

Darwin

and

the

neo

Darwinians

nevertheless

if we

don't

believe

that

the only

part

of

the

body

which

is

not

traded

out

many

times

over

the

only

part

of

the

body

which

you

are

born

with

and

die

with

is

neural

DNA

neural

DNA

what

you're

born

with

you

keep

therefore

it's

reasonable

following

good

scientific

method

to

hypothesize

that the

neural

DNA

must be

where

the

memories

are

well

then

Dennis'

idea

was

that

ordinary

experience

has

to

do

with

serotonin

dropping

into

a

relationship

of

bonding

with

DNA

and

giving

off

a

signal

like

a

radio

transmitter

of

the

structural

hyperfine

ESR

of the

DNA

and

that

then

constitutes

the

electro

biochemical

foundation

of the

experience

of thought

and

so

what

he

was

saying

was

then

what

these

psychedelics

are

is

they're

like

different

kinds

of

transmitters

stronger

or

transmitting

in

different

wavelengths

or

transmitting

with a

higher

bandwidth

and

it

is

known

in

fact

that

these

psychedelic

molecules

do

compete

with

serotonin

they are

serotonergic

competitors

so

visualize

the

DNA

in

the

course

of

metabolism

unfolding

and

folding

itself

to

expose

various

runs

of

nucleotides

to

ribosomal

coding

into

RNA

and

in

this

molecular

environment

these

drug

molecules

are

whirling

around

and

by

Brownian

motion

or

by

enzymatic

delivery

the

details

don't

matter

these

molecules

intercalate

meaning

they

slip

neatly

between

the

nucleotides

many

drugs

do

this

is

known

but

most

drugs

or

compounds

when

they

intercalate

into

DNA

they

distort

the

twisting

of it

and

it's

dysfunctional

it messes

up

the

thing

can't

transcript

anymore

these

drug

molecules

if

you

look

at

them

they're

usually

a

pentexel

five-sided

central

group

with

two

benzene

rings

or a

benzene

ring

and a

partial

benzene

ring

hanging

off

of

this

thing

and

they're

flat

they're

planar

it

means

if

you

could

blow

up

a

psilocybin

molecule

to

the

size

of

a

cutting

board

it

would

be

about

as

thin

as

a

cutting

board

and

as

wide

and

as

long

those

flat

molecules

fit

right

in

and

as

in

and

you

can

measure

the

hyper

fin

ESR

signature

of

DNA

in

an

in

vitro

laboratory

situation

this is

not

mysterious

so

the

idea

then

is

that

we

have

a

family

of

molecules

endogenous

neurotransmitters

like

serotonin

acetylcholine

and so

forth

and so on

and

exogenous

neurotransmitters

like

psilocybin

DNA

I'm

sorry

psilocybin

mescaline

and then

exogenous

endogenous

like

DMT

found inside

and outside

the body

and it

may be

that

what

the

evolution

of

consciousness

is

the

slow

trading

in

of

low

gain

molecular

transceivers

like

serotonin

for

much

more

broad

band

high

gain

molecular

transceivers

like

DMT

so

Dennis's

idea

was

to

take

all

this

theory

that

I

just

laid

out

and

then

use

acoustically

produced

vocal

sound

to

cancel

the

charge

of

these

molecules

and

as

you

probably

know

or

maybe

you

don't

know

when

they

when

the

when

a

molecule

becomes

superconducting

it will

bond

into

anything

it

becomes

a

hyperbonding

molecule

it will

bond

anywhere

so

theoretically

if you

could

cause

psychedelic

molecules

during

their

act

of

being

intercalated

into

your

genetic

material

to

become

superconducting

even

for a

moment

they

would

lock

in

permanently

and

you

would

begin

to

have

a

very

deep

a

much

deeper

experience

of

consciousness

it would

be much

broader

much

deeper

he

claimed

he

could

do

this

but

he

also

went

further

and

claimed

and

this

is

where

I

am

not

good

at

explaining

it

because

I

didn't

understand

it

then

and

I

don't

understand

it

now

but

he

claimed

that

in

the

act

of

becoming

superconducting

and

intercalating

this

thing

would

cause

the

molecule

to

undergo

something

which

he

simply

that

it

would

turn

inside

out

and

he

said

then

that

you

would

produce

something

and

you

know

I'm

embarrassed

at the

strangeness

of the

concept

but

that

you

could

in

some

sense

give

birth

to

your

own

soul

that

something

could

yourself

it

would

be

he

made

analogies

to

the

philosopher's

stone

to

the

flying

saucer

to

the

birth

of

an

idea

it's

the

idea

that

you

could

create

what

he

called

translinguistic

matter

that

means

a

form

of

an

ontological

form

of

being

which

looks

like

matter

but

which

behaves

like

mind

and

that

somehow

this

would

trigger

the

collapse

of

the

illusion

of

history

and

everything

would

be

swept

into

the

presence

of

almighty

god

upon

her

throne

or

something

like

that

anyway

that

was

the

notion

and

in

proceeding

to

carry

out

this

experiment

which

I

just

thought

was

madness

and

would

result

in

nothing

and

then

we

could

go

back

to

botanizing

instead

it

in a

sense

it

seemed

to

work

the

condensation

of the

philosopher's

stone

and the

collapse

of the

historical

state

vector

is

slightly

delayed

but

the

rest

of it

seems

right

on

track

in

that

when

he

began

when

he

threw

the

switch

as

he

said

the

harming

switch

he

went

bonkers

basically

for about

21 days

in a

very

complicated

way

which

he

had

anticipated

he

said

there

is

a

small

chance

that

I

will

be

turned

inside

out

not

my

body

but

my

mind

and

it

seemed

as

though

that

was

precisely

what

had

happened

he

could

recite

the

alphabet

backwards

he

spoke

in a

language

which

if

you

got

him

to

spell

it

you

could

turn

it

around

and

you

could

see

these

were

full

sentences

but

spoken

backwards

in

other

words

he

truly

seemed

to

be

running

backwards

while

we

were

all

the

rest

of

us

were

running

forward

well

after

about

days

that

faded

and

he

got

his

act

together

and

went

back

to

get

multiple

PhDs

in

molecular

biology

pharmacognosy

and

what

have

you

coincident

with

the

throwing

of

the

switch

I

who

had

been

the

skeptic

noticed

that

it was

as though

a switch

had been

thrown

in me

and

I

began

to

understand

it

was not

like

any

drug

I'd

ever

taken

it

was

not

like

psilocybin

or

ayahuasca

there

were

no

hallucinations

but

what

began

to

happen

was

I

simply

began

to

understand

faster

and

faster

and

faster

and

faster

so

fast

that

I

was

just

walking

around

on

these

jungle

trails

holding

my

landing

settled

down

into

the

theory

of

the

time

wave

which

I

will

not

slay

you

with

because

this

is a

course

in

psychobotany

not

a

course

in

megalomania

revealed

but

what I

finally

came to

rest

with

was

a

complete

model

of

space

and

time

as

which

is

what

you

would

end

up

with

if

space

and

end

history

and

everyone

would

leave

their

factories

and

offices

and

discard

their

clothes

and

with

tears

of

joy

streaming

down

their

faces

begin

to

that

offered

me

a

complete

model

of

space

and

time

and

the

future

and

the

past

and

has

continued

to be

the

touchstone

of

my

intellectual

life

so

I

think

that

we

can

argue

for

hours

although

it's

probably

not

worth

doing

about

whether

anything

at

all

happened

at

La

Chirera

I

was

there

I

should

mention

I

didn't

sleep

for

days

and

it

was

the

most

amazing

days

I

have

ever

had

I

was

absolutely

ecstatic

I

barely

ate

and

I

was

full

of

compassion

and

understanding

for

everyone

and their

limitations

in this

terrible

dilemma

because

we

were

a

thousand

miles

up

the

Rio

baboon

asshole

with

no

airplanes

and

no

radios

and

here

my

brother

proceeds

to

go

nuts

and

I

saying

it's

okay

but

the

world

may

end

in

a

few

days

and

on

and

on

it

took

me

about

five

years

to

get

myself

publicly

presentable

in

that

time

my

I

was

a

burden

to

my

friends

and

stretch

with

a

wrap

so

alarming

and

appalling

that

people

would

just

back

to

the

wall

to

wait

to

see

if

I

was

going

to

explode

it

was

simply

it

takes

a

long

time

you

have

to

leaven it

with

humor

and

self

criticism

and

convince

people

that

you

don't

take

yourself

seriously

and

all

these

things

to

make

it

palatable

yeah

that

is

true

hallucinations

and

I

think

that

you

know

if

you

want

to

read

an

eye

opening

book

if

you

haven't

read

it

read

Thomas

Kuhn's

book

The

Structure

of

Scientific

Revolution

because

what

you'll

learn

there

to

your

amazement

is

that

these

great

intellectual

breakthroughs

like

Newton

and

Einstein

and

Planck

and

so

forth

they

don't

come

out

of

careful

examination

of

the

evidence

and

conservative

adumbration

of

theories

and

all

no

they

don't

come

like

that

they

come

like

revelation

you know

completely

and then

you

argue

backward

to

convince

your

colleagues

you

go

out

and

you

get

the

evidence

and

you

argue

backward

and

you

convince

everybody

and

then

everybody

says

well

it

was

obvious

all

the

time

and

anyway

they

knew

it

years

earlier

and

on

and

on

and

on

to

do

so

I

have

stuck

with

this

my

devotion

to

psychedelics

because

it

gave

me

really

my

greatest

wish, which was, I want to have a complete understanding of how things work. That doesn't

mean there is no more surprises, but it means you at least have a structure that you can

pour it into. And I think this is what shamans do. They create a personal ideology sufficient

to their needs. And my needs are complex because I live in a society where I'm going to be

talking to quantum physicists, mathematicians, historians of science, epistemologists, so

forth and so on. So it had to perform at top speed. If you're in the rainforest situation

in a culture, in a monoculture, then it is perhaps not so challenging. But the point

of all this is catalysis of ideas. Culture can evolve no faster than its language. It

can evolve no faster than the models that it can set up for itself to achieve. And that

requires language. So I take the psychedelics to be catalysts of language. They probably

caused it to come into existence in the first place. And then they continue to push it forward

into new domains. And this great period of creativity that we're living through now in the sciences,

in the arts, in the implementation of exotic technologies, I think this is the real legacy of the 60s.

The people who run these fancy computer companies and the World Wide Web and the Net and CERN and all

that, they're all freaks. They're all people who came up through the 60s and have somehow fitted

themselves into straight society. But the great bulk of creative work in the society in those areas is

being done by people who took psychedelics. And in fact, arguably, the scientists of today, the

technological implementers of today, are in fact shamans. And we are creating a kind of culturally

validated shamanic super space, except we call it cyberspace. But all we're doing with the creation of

cyberspace is hardwiring in a male way, what has always been there in a female way. I mean, the

the web of invisible hidden associations that make us the cosmos instead of the chaos. Well, that seems to

be an over-long answer to a question that I've forgotten. Yeah.

Well, first let me talk about morphogenetic fields. For those of you who don't recognize the term,

this is an idea which has been developed by Rupert Sheldrake, who's a theoretical biologist in England.

It's a very simple idea with very revolutionary implications. The idea can be simply stated like

this. Things happen the way they happen, because that's how they happened before.

That may not sound terribly challenging, but here then is an example of the consequences if you believe

that. If you believe that, then it should be possible to teach rats to run a maze in Cambridge,

we'll say. And once they know how to run that maze, it should take rats in Australia less time to learn to

run the same maze, because it's been done before. In other words, this is a theory which says it's very

hard for something to happen the first time, and slightly easier the second, and more easy the third,

and inevitable by the 10 trillionth time it happens. Science doesn't recognize this. This is madness

from the point of view of science, and yet there are many phenomena which can only be explained in this

way. Well, the way this relates to psychedelics, I think, is that on psychedelics essentially you feel,

or you see, the morphogenetic fields that surround objects. You see not the ordinary, see the ordinary

experience is, time is sliced as a moment, a moving moment of infinite thinness that is moving through

time. On psychedelics, the past seems somehow present in the present. And one of Sheldrake's books is

called The Presence of the Past. So in a way, the idea that I developed, the time wave, is an attempt to

mathematicize his conversational model of a morphogenetic field. The universe, to me, is self-evidently

moving between narrower and narrower walls. That's not orthodox. Orthodoxy says the universe is a random walk.

There are no constraints. There is no telos, is the way a scientist would put this. Telos is the Greek word for

purpose. The universe does not have a purpose. We are not evolving toward some idealized future state.

I think we are. I think that self-evidently, nature conserves complexity.

And if you define complexity as the number of points cotangent in a system, then obviously

ultimate complexity is achieved when all points are cotangent with all other points.

And that is a state of hyperdimensionality. And I think that's what we're migrating toward.

That's why boundary dissolution is so important. Because ultimately, all boundaries will be dissolved.

I mean, we quibble about a boundary like the difference between men and women. That's a

political boundary. The differences in which we treat men and women, that's a political boundary.

But eventually, all boundaries are destined to be dissolved. The boundaries between men and women,

the boundaries between young and old, but then the boundaries between people and nature,

the boundaries between plant and animal, and then even more ultimate boundaries. The boundary between

life and death, the boundary between earth and space. All boundaries will be dissolved in the universal

process of complexification that is leading toward all points being cotangent. And the psychedelics,

because they give you a little bit of hyper-dimensional vision, show you this cohering

process, which I call concrescence, using the terminology that Alfred North Whitehead popularized. The universe

is growing toward concrescence. This is an interesting idea, because it's very counter to what we've been taught.

We've been taught that the universe is basically incomprehensible, unimaginable in its size. We are

somewhere in it very typical. Everything about us is typical. Our star is typical, our planet is typical,

we are typical, and therefore no value should be conferred on our existence. But this is just simply

somebody's idea. Measurements have only been carried out on this planet and in this solar system and for one

century. So upon what basis do we generalize from these measurements to a statement about the character

of the kiliochasm? It seems ridiculous. I think that the presence of evolution, traceable in the

paleontological record of this planet, and then the presence of ourselves emerging out of animal

organization and moving rapidly toward a disincarnate, electronic, global civilization,

must mean that we are being channeled into deeper and deeper complexity at a faster and faster rate.

And when you penetrate hyperspace, this is the landscape you see. You see the funnel that is

channeling us towards a kind of hyper-dimensional nexus point beyond which we can't project because our

intellectual equipment can't be pushed past that point. Yeah. Can you envision this as what's

happening until 2012? And what do you think, what your idea was going to happen in 2012?

All points will become cotangent in a super-space. Can't say. Not that we don't know. Can't say. Language is not

capable of describing a cotangent hyperspace. Well, that's not always all the dimensions or? Yeah, basically

you will be everybody. Everybody will be you. You will be everywhere. You will be every when. You will be

every which. And every when, which, and where will be you. All assumptions of distinctness will be

illusory. And so we can see this happening. I mean, people are fond of saying the earth has shrunk to a

point under the influence of electronic technology. It's a nice way of putting it, but it's just beginning. The

world wide web further shrinks it. And when the world wide web is virtual and an implant behind your eyelids

and, and, and, I mean, you can carry out these fantasies for yourself.

A little bit. Crazy. Coming a little bit more sooner than Tipperer sees.

Yeah. Mine's the earliest of all of the non-completely insane people. Or the latest of the

completely insane people. Yeah. Well, there are shamans from the, they, um, in the 17,000 seats,

they, according to their prophecy, which they're in the direct community of the Inca, they said that

in 1995, they are coming out of the mountains because it's part of their prophecy, that they

come and teach the earth how to shift into planetary consciousness, which is evolving at the beginning

this year. And then we'll shift into the next millennium. And then the body of it will come

out of North America because we have done so much destruction. And also because we know how to

manifest in the body, that the intellect will come from Europe and then the heart and soul will come

from South America. And then they're coming down to teach how to begin to move into these other

consciousness. Well, there is, you know, there is a lot of this kind of anticipation of a great

shift. And I think there's more to it than simply the, the pressure, the millennial turn of the calendar

puts on us. This garden party is over. You know, there's nothing but crumpled plates and stabbed out

cigarette butts in Aspic. Now it's over. The party's over. And where we're headed now is not clear,

but we have finished our sojourn in three dimensional space and historical time. And

our technology and our dreams are about to carry us further. What this means for the rest of the earth

is hard to say. Life once left the ocean. Life once elaborated oxygen to the point where it

threatened its own survival on the planet. Dan Joy once said to me, once you strip away the hype,

it's just another concrescence. Quite true. But the hype is major because, you know,

we haven't seen a turning point like this since before the bust up of Pangea. And that was 275 million

years ago. This is bigger than that. And it's mind shedding matter. Matter was the vehicle that could

carry mind a certain distance in its self-revelation. But now clearly we have become a toxic drag on the

rest of nature. And it means it's time to move on. The womb would like to expel this puppy into whatever

hyperspace awaits us. But clearly, if we remain in the womb of three-dimensional space and time,

we're just going to mess the joint up, toxify it, wreck the oceans, and ultimately pollute ourselves and

everything else to death. So the time has come to move on. And hey, we're moving on. Yeah.

What responsibilities do we personally have? I spoke earlier, it's not necessarily being so optimistic that we'll be able to make it into the space.

I think the responsibility that we have is to spread reasonable hope. In other words,

a lot of people are becoming frightened and a lot of people will be more frightened. We haven't hit

the white water yet. It's coming. But this is the long garden party before the white water. And

there are going to be a lot of doomsayers. There's going to be a lot of ugliness like Rwanda, Bosnia,

this sort of thing. Much reason for despair unless you have the broad picture. But I think that our

purpose is to educate ourselves about the situation. And that when that task is completed, you will be

filled with hope and then to spread that hope. There is no other ideology of hope on this planet.

Christianity is so dramatically on the ascendant because it offers otherworldly hope. It denies this

world. It consigns it to the flames and asks you to seek salvation in some other world. Secular

humanism and its various forms. Capitalism and so forth and so on offers nothing but more stuff.

You know, they are willing to hasten the end in order to keep people playing deck tennis while the

Titanic goes down. There is no sanctionable position of hope except the belief that history is ending.

And that the acceleration of novelty which we see happening back and back, the further back in time you go,

the less novel things are and the slower time moves. Now we have come to the place where time is moving

very quickly. So that by a moment in the future as near as 2012, we may traverse as much distance as we've

traversed from the big bang to this afternoon in terms of how quickly things are going to unfold.

James Joyce said, man will be dirigible. It's a wonderful thing to hope for.

One thing that, I mean, I've been fascinated with the time wave since I first heard about it, but do you

have, one that's really bothered me is, uh, is there some objective way to quantify this novelty?

I mean, um, other than by asking Terence or someone else looking at the wave to say, whoa,

well, here's a big fall and obviously there was novelty at this time. If we just look back here,

we'd find, aha, that's when Poland fell to the Germans, you know? I mean, can we somehow work the

other way and, and look at a historical record, plot out the novelty without reference to the time wave,

and then look back at the time wave and see if we were right? The problem is, you see, that history is

not a quantifiable entity. There's no theory that agrees on how we quantify history. I mean,

do we give the War of the Roses a 10 and the Thirty Years' War a 42? How do we do that? Uh, I maintain

that we can't scientifically prove it, but we can make a very strong case because the ebb and flow of

novelty, uh, continues. And we can look back in the past and see that where there were

vast descents into novelty, novelty certainly occurred. I'm willing to go out on a limb because

next year is a very dramatic descent into novelty on the time wave. I'm willing to go out on a limb and

say if next year doesn't deliver, I'll be willing to seriously talk about cashing it in. Uh, because

next year is predicted by the time wave to be an enormously dramatic year. And in a sense, we can

already see the prophecy fulfilling itself. We know there will be a presidential election next year. We

know that society will go mad and rip itself apart for months over that. We also know that there will be a

presidential election in Russia next year. They will probably put our act in the shade when they begin to rip

their society apart. Uh, revolution in China, that would affect a third of mankind. That's scheduled,

that's on the menu. Uh, it's possible that next year is the year when even doubters realize that global

warming is upon us. In other words, worldwide climate upheaval. So we're going to have

some, if not all, of those things next year. And I maintain it could even be the unexpected.

As I said to somebody today, you know, if the Kobe earthquake had been Tokyo, the capital

retraction from the rest of the world by Japanese banks would have sent us into the Stone Age.

And, you know, uh, there are, uh, this gas attack. It was designed to kill millions. It just happened

to be botched. The attack on the World Trade Center was designed to kill hundreds of thousands of people.

It happened to be botched. But they're not all going to be botched. The nuts are out there. And, uh, so I,

I, I think that what we are seeing is a recapitulation of much of the past several thousand years of

history in a very compressed form as we get closer and closer to the transcendental object at the end of

time. And shamanism has always been the technique for anticipating and mapping this transcendental object.

In a pre-scientific world, you get a vocabulary that is religious. That, you know, there is a force

in the universe, not a sparrow falls, but that this force doesn't take note of it. This force is love.

This force created everything. This force cares for us. We are its children. It is calling us to return to its

essence. I mean, this is a religious vocabulary. But in the 20th century, we, we've gone beyond

that. We're no longer moving in a, in a coinage of emotional terms. We can say, you know, God is physics.

God is the universe trying to birth itself into a higher dimension. God is the, is the universe's

appetite for self-reflective complexity coming into its fullest flower. And then the different,

the distinctions between science and religion are seen to be small potatoes. Indeed, I mean,

we can calculate our way towards the second coming, I maintain. Well, this is somewhat far afield of

most people's ideas of what constitutes botanical shamanism, but not mine, because I think

that we could have lived in the light of this gnosis and never made the descent into history that we made

with the abandonment of partnership, society, psychedelic religion, pastoralism, and so forth. We were

designed to live in paradise until the coming of the kingdom, but instead we fell into history,

which is a kind of hell where the animal nature was able to reassert its power over the human dream. And

we have lived in that, with that paradox now for some 12,000 years, and it's left us fairly frazzled and

sketched out, I think. Well, if this is what is on a macro scale happening to the human race,

and this goes back to the question some time ago of what should be done, if this is what's happening on a

fractal macrocosm, then what you can do to aid this process is just accelerate your own arrival at the

omega point. And what that means is psychedelicize yourself, begin to deconstruct the hold over your

freedom that culture, history, biology has on you, and begin to experiment with the concept of yourself

as a being trembling on the edge of true liberation, because I think that's probably what you really are.

Yeah?

What do you see as you travel around the world, the dynamics between the mainstream dominator and what could be

looked at as an emerging psychedelic culture? What kind of connection do you see among this emerging culture?

the dynamics that happen? It's kind of a large question there.

Well, there are a lot of things going on. The collapse of Marxism was really the collapse of everything,

because Marxism and capitalism were balanced against each other like a house of cards. In the absence of any

intellectual critique of capitalism, capitalism has asserted itself with a vengeance. And what we see

happening in the world, what the new world order is, is a new corporate order. Some things about it are good and some

things are bad. For instance, when the world was ruled by nation states driven by ideologies, and remember that was as

recently as seven years ago, when the world was ruled by nation states driven by ideologies, war was a frequent

instrument of national policy. Racism was tolerated as a reflection of national identity. Nuclear arsenals and a mutual

standoff in that area was tolerated. Suddenly, now, a new gang is in charge. Marxism is gone. Racism in the

institutionalized form known as apartheid is gone. Trade barriers are being lowered all over the world. And if you look at

governments in the United States, in England, in France, Germany and Japan, they are universally, and Italy, they are

universally characterized by being staffed and run by jackasses. In other words, high caliber talent isn't going into

government. Government is a place where the Jesse Helms of this world hang out. And when was the last time an

official of the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund felt the need to threaten the life of an

American president? It won't happen. Those people are heavy hitters. Only a hysterical powerless yahoo would

behave that way. All right, why don't we sort of slowly roll into this? I'm always amazed that so many people can get their

act together on a Sunday morning. I know. What happened to the complacencies of the

Penoir and all that? Okay, I have a couple of announcements. First of all, I think you found on your chair when you came in a

sound photosynthesis order blank. That's if you're just dying to have more tapes of lectures. They have a huge selection, more than anybody else. And you can deal with that. And there's a sticker on those things that begins with the words HTTP. Those who know, know that this is a website address. Those who don't know soon will.

So if you want to check out sound photosynthesis website address, that's the URL, the universal resource locator, which I wish I had one now. Okay. In case I forget, remind me at the break, and David will be here to help, that we'll go over the paper requirements for the folks who are going to do a paper for this.

If we're going to do a paper for this class. And I think that's that. Oh, there you are on time as promised. I was just saying that at the break, we'll go over the paper constraints.

Well, I don't want to spend the whole time this morning in Q&A, but we'll do it for a few minutes to let stragglers find their way in. And then I'll flail you with my agenda for a while.

If there are, oh, yes. Oh, that's a good question. There are a number. First of all, the alt.drugs conference. Most people know about this. There are thousands, a couple of thousand people participating in that.

And it's now fragmented into alt.psilocybin, alt.psychedelic, alt.mescaline. You know, there's a whole subset of those. If you don't like news groups, there is an email conference. Anybody here in that email conference?

Hmm. Well, I can't remember. I was in it. But the problem with these email conferences is, you know, you think, oh, great, I'll meet some people interested in what I'm interested in.

You join, and the next day, there are 80 messages in your email, and you spend hours a day pouring through the email. I just joined a conference where I get dispatches from the front in Chiapas, including all the latest statements from subcommandante Marcos.

I just picked up the mail. There were 130 messages, half in a language I barely read. So, you know, but there's a lot of action on the net. I have a website, too, but I'm not going to give out the public number yet because it's not cool enough yet.

It's more like a construction zone with yellow ribbon strung around and a sign which says, someday something really cool will be here. That's how a lot of the internet is. It's a vast, vast construction zone, but that's probably enough on that.

If you're using the internet, you should use it more.

not using it you should really put that at the top of your agenda because it's

going to become increasingly indispensable as a part of your cultural

toolbox if I have to pay 35 cents a minute to reach the internet because I'm

on a cellular modem from US Cellular at 7200 baud and I still spend far more

time and money than I should there yeah well this question always comes up and

my answer is the answer of a fanatic and a purist not really I mean the best

substitute for psychedelics which takes a lot more time energy and dedication is

penniless travel in Asian countries but it's not nearly as pleasant and the risk

to your gastrointestinal tract is orders of magnitude greater it's an

interesting question I mean and I may be a special case more lumpen than others I

mean naturally in this business all the time I meet people who say I hallucinate

hallucinate all the time I I don't understand what the excitement is about

well it's a very hard thing because you're can you either have to say you

don't know what I'm talking about or you have to define yourself ever after as an

impoverished individual with the genetic constitution that places this out of your

reach if I had psychedelic experiences not in the presence of psychedelic

substances I would be alarmed I'm not shooting for being high on the natch why

when the substances work perfectly well and being high on the natch indicates a

physiological situation that may be problematic or or could be problematic I

I practiced yoga and silent sitting and I find all these things very very

interesting but pretty non competitive with psychoactive one of the things that

was so astonishing to me when I first got into all this my original impulse at

university was toward art history well art history you study the evolution of style and

motif over space and time that's basically what it's about and a good art historian has a fairly come

complete inventory of world style which I felt I did well then I took DMT and it was

absolutely unfamiliar you know I could make no comparisons it wasn't like Tibetan

tantric painting it wasn't like Amazonian bark cloth painting it wasn't like Jan van Eyck it wasn't

like Hieronymus Bosch or Jackson Pollock or anybody else and I thought how extraordinary if you take the

Jungian view that art is the function of artist is to explore and communicate the

unconscious to the rest of us then how bizarre that three thousand years of eastern and western art and

nobody passed very close at all to the DMT space that's why and yet it is without contest I think a Niagara of

orgasmic beauty I mean if I had to say one thing that DMT is it's it's alien beauty well if the purpose of art and those who follow

Aristotelian and platonic aesthetics believe that art the purpose of art is the communication of the beautiful well why is it then that so little of this has been communicated I mean I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that at the peak of a

psychedelic experience you see more art in a half an hour than the human race has produced in the last thousand years you little you will the relationship then of the individual to genius is very puzzling any one of us is the

yes if we could just get the door jammed open would then become a Duchamp a Da Vinci in other words a major formative force on their contemporaries I'm hoping we'll be able to do that with virtual reality I mean I see virtual reality as a technology that will allow one person to show another the contents of their mind and that when we get the cross fertilization and creativity

that will flow from that will create art that will make everything done to this point look like scratchings in the dirt I mean at least that's my my hope

yeah

so you get points for that I mean they put it many ways but not like that I don't think the last word has been said on this subject in science news last week or the week before there are a hundred and twenty anatomical differences between the brains of men and women that are not genital related

yeah

I don't I think that we're on the brink of a whole frontier of discovering who and what women are

they were just thought to be soft boys up until fairly recently and the most enthusiastic proponents of feminism I think don't understand how deep a subject they've grabbed onto

in a way I would sort of plead guilty to your metaphor that I do sort of see women as out of history they are an historical creatures and men invented history lost themselves in it and femininity if you want to call it that guy unconsciousness if you want to call it that

psychedelic spirituality if you want to call it that is beckoning does sort of hold the high ground and is drawing history back toward a feminizing archaic mode but you know you race is a phenomenon of groups of people in a sense so is femininity as an individual you

you have to deal with the cards you have to deal with the cards you're dealt and we all have a feminine a masculine and androgynous and so forth and so on component in our psyche but in a sense I guess I'm a conservative because I don't see history doing anything other than recapturing what once was and which once was definitely under the aegis of the feminine like for instance the world

the world wide web this vast technological artifact that's being put in place all it is is a hard wiring of female intuition you know it's the engineering mentality is catching up with the feminine outlook

but your question disquiets me I'm not sure again it's important as an individual not to identify with the characteristics of a group this is and it's very tricky because you're constantly dinned into thinking of yourself as black gay white poor you know but those are those are not really qualities of individuals individuals are more complex than that I mean you may

you may have a gay component you may have a black portion of your genetic heritage but don't define yourself as a group that's a trick that was launched by print in the act of creating this peculiar entity called the public the public is a fiction of the print created galaxy you are not a citizen and you are not part of the public unless you seriously

do damage to your humanness in order to fit yourself into such a narrow definition yeah

the chemical act on the brain those females have this huge hormonal swing way I find that I have certain experiences during certain times in the mind that I would consider losing again it and it's a mystery to me about women and men there is a difference just in the

well you know we can talk about this but since this is a room full of aspiring professionals this is obviously an area where incredibly good work could be done using ordinary scientific sampling techniques you probably know it's a scandal how much medicine can be done using ordinary scientific sampling techniques you probably know it's a scandal how much medicine can be done by

medical research is done on male human subjects and then extrapolated to all human subjects I would be willing to bet you just sitting here that in thirty years of research on psychedelics there has never been a study which attempted to differentiate the difference in the response of men and women to the substance it's like step one but it's never been done

how does menstruation affect this how does menstruation affect this how does menopause affect this how does the chemo the postpartum chemistry affect these are easily answered scientific questions that have never been looked at because of gender bias in the scientific establishment

that's the way of putting that driving that

oh

well that's an interesting so that's a very straightforward theory if psychedelics inhibit and compete with testosterone obviously their impact on men is going to be much more profound than their impact on women right there you have a hypothesis you could

well my question was is there have been any research on that or has anyone looked at the

the

no

the amount of research you know the first psilocybin project was is underway now

the first one in thirty years and they're just trying to define the basic pharmacodynamics of the substance they haven't looked at this stuff i should say to you you know you know the

I'm urging you aspiring young professionals into these fields.

Let me caution.

That's because I'm an enthusiast

and I want to know the answers to these questions.

Professionally, it's a life of hell.

You will not be promoted.

Your colleagues will look upon you as a freak.

You will find yourself...

My brother can talk to this point.

It's not a pleasant thing to associate yourself

with psychedelics professionally.

Yeah.

I guess something that I feel like

you need to take responsibility for

is the use of words like profound and transformative

because what is profound and transformative for a male,

if it's more profound for a male,

it might be just a different profound and transformative

that's not on the male scale

of what is profound and transformative

and I think that it's irresponsible to say

that it's more profound for a male,

especially when no research has been done

on the way in which these drugs affect...

Well, I guess what I meant by more profound

is that I think the average male

is set down further from where he started

than the average female is

at the conclusion of a psychedelic experience.

One of the things...

Let me mention this as long as we're on this subject.

This is just throwing this out.

But one of the things that's always fascinated me

is the difference between male and female orgasm

and how male orgasm...

Here's a place where it seems to be reversed.

Male orgasm seems to lie fairly close to the surface

and be a fairly unspectacular event most of the time

where why is the female sexual response

so much more dramatic

and why is there an orgasmic response at all?

In other words, many animals don't have such a response.

You can build an urge,

you can build a sexual urge into an organism

without this payoff of immediate experiential fireworks.

There are species of fish where the female lays the eggs

and the male swims over them and releases the sperm

and that's sex in that species.

I sense, and I've never been able to articulate it,

that the DMT flash is very orgasmic in some sense.

It's somewhat like a full-body orgasm,

but it has components in it

which are only encountered otherwise in orgasm.

And I wonder what this orgasmic response is for,

what evolutionary role it fulfills.

It seems to emerge late in animal organization.

This is not something you trace back to flatworms or something.

Sexual orgasm, it seems most intensified in the primate.

And, you know, again, I have no answers,

but I would bet when this is all teased apart,

the chemistry of orgasm

and the neurochemistry of orgasm

and the chemistry of the DMT flash

are going to be found to be at least cousins of each other

in some sense.

Yeah.

I wanted to make a comment about the gender issue

that's been coming up.

And I think that in my experience with psilocybin

is that it has had an effect of healing

and bringing back to wholeness, of balancing.

So if you have too much testosterone that you brought up

or if you have, you know, too much one thing,

it will bring you back and direct you and center you.

And since males usually do all the talking,

that's why we said psilocybin has had a feminizing effect.

Well, it has a feminizing effect

on most of the people who have been doing the talking

who take, you know, take psilocybin.

I've also had experiences where I've been very,

you know, at times when I've been depressed and weak

where psilocybin has not made me very feminine.

It's actually given me, you know, power.

I felt very, like, I don't remember one time

I went out and really liked the sound of bottles breaking.

And I would break the bottle and go, yeah!

It would make me feel really good.

Build up, almost the building up of an ego

when my ego was down.

And when my ego was too big, it would fall back down again.

So that would then, you know, what Katie was saying,

that would then fit in, you know,

that everyone who takes it will be balanced,

will be kind of redirected and, you know,

led further along.

So it's a kind of regulator, is what you're saying.

Yeah, it's getting back in tune with what's real.

And, you know, extreme feminism and extreme axonism

are far neither of them are real.

They're both extremes.

And it'll bring you back into a more integral fullness

of the way the world is.

Well, I would certainly agree with that

as a description of ayahuasca.

There's a lot of work being done right now.

I mean, I'm sure you all have heard of Prozac,

which is the most widely prescribed antidepressant

in the world now.

And six or seven years ago, it didn't even exist.

Well, what's interesting about Prozac is

that it is a serotonergic competitor.

This is the same system that the psychedelics are working on.

And I think probably we're converging on some kind of a breakthrough

where sexual dysfunction, depression, psychedelic states

are all going to be seen to be various twiddlings

of the serotonergic system.

And probably whole new families of drugs will come out of this.

I have never taken any antidepressant.

And my brother's urging, I took Prozac.

And I've always been contemptuous of all of the Valium,

that whole thing.

That's not our church, for sure.

But I was very, very impressed with what Prozac was doing.

And in a way, it was a strangely painless kind of psychedelic.

What Prozac seems to do is put you where ayahuasca puts you

four days after the trip.

In other words, there's no dramatic episode of intoxication.

There's just a slow kind of getting real,

which means dropping your illusions,

which are usually what is depressing you.

I think Prozac is being misprescribed

in the sense that it's thought of as an antidepressant.

I don't think that's quite correct.

I think it's the cure for seasonal light deficit syndrome.

I think that as tropical primates,

we paid a terrible price for conquering the temperate

and subarctic zones of the world.

And that is six months of kind of downness out of the year.

And that can be chemically corrected.

Our genetics are designed for the arboreal tropics,

and yet we insist in living in places like Boston and Hamburg,

which are so far north, you know,

that you're physiologically dysfunctional

seven months out of the year,

and you don't know it because so is everybody else there.

In conjunction with MDMA,

sort of offset some of the,

you know, MDMA get real speedy.

Prozac helps to tell them that they don't

do you work with that at all?

There may be a confusion here.

The way I'm familiar with Prozac

being mentioned in connection with MDMA

is that MDMA has a toxic effect

on the dendritic spines of the nerves.

This is part of what you buy into with MDMA.

But strangely enough,

if you pre-dose yourself with Prozac,

not as Prozac is supposed to be taken for depression,

where you take it for 30 days and then like that,

but if you just take a 20 milligram capsule of Prozac

six hours before you take MDMA,

it absolutely blocks this toxic effect.

I have mixed feelings about mixing drugs

and handing this information on,

but on the other hand,

this is a group of professionals.

You should know this.

It's a fact.

It was published in Brain,

in the Journal of Neurophysiology

and so forth and so on.

MDMA by itself

has a physiological profile

that causes me to stay away from it.

I have no quarrel with the effect,

the experience,

but when you can see histological damage

to macro structures in the nerve,

you want to slow down a little

and send a few tens of thousands ahead of you.

Is that just doing it once

that you'll have that sort of damage?

Well, every time you take it,

it has this effect.

Oh, well, but let me say something

about this damage that MDMA does.

It does damage.

You can see it.

However, there is no behavioral sequela.

What does this mean?

It means you don't act funny.

You don't fall down twitching

or your eyes go out of focus

or become manic.

So you can have two opinions about this.

Well, if it destroys a structure

that then there's no behavioral consequence,

you must not have needed that structure.

However, when we start tossing out

chunks of our brain

based on our own judgment,

you have to wonder about that,

you can always take psilocybin

and say to it

in the middle of the second hour,

B-M-D-M-A.

And that's how I do my MDMA.

I'm sure it works with healing plants

and his method is to communicate

with a plant,

he says the plants are bursting

to tell us what their purpose is,

how they can help us.

We just have to learn how to listen.

So in the same way that you're saying

that he sees a communication

and information.

But what he does,

once the shaman has made contact

with the plant,

he doesn't have to give that plant

to the person,

he can use a messenger plant, and they use Moxa in a homeopathic picture.

And because he knows the information of the plant,

he can send the messenger for the information

without actually having to give the plant itself.

And I'm wondering whether anybody's done that with psychedelics

or whether you see that that's feasible to do with psychedelics.

I assume, being a practical person,

that it must not be feasible,

because, as you know, in the highly succussed homeopathic preparations,

no physical trace of the original material can be found.

If there were such a thing as homeopathic psychedelics,

they would be impossible to prosecute under the drug laws.

What are you asking?

I'm asking, seeing it as information,

that you can actually have a messenger plant.

Like you were saying, the shaman is the messenger between the worlds.

What he's doing is using a fairly inoculant plant

as a messenger between the information of the huge array of pharmacokers

for what plants can do,

and using just a draw of that messenger

to be able to give an experience.

Well, in a sense, there's a parallel idea in the Amazon,

which is shamans take ayahuasca,

and then they take very, very minuscule amounts of other plants

that they want to learn about,

and they say that the ayahuasca then informs them

of the properties of the other plant.

This whole business of information

and how it moves around in nature

is an area where we are uniquely ill-fitted to understand it

because we are objective materialists.

And it's very hard for us to understand

and operate on the assumption that the world is made of language.

We may say it so,

but we don't know how to operationally operate with that perception.

As we learn how to do that,

I agree with you,

not only plants,

everything seeks to communicate.

Everything is somehow completed

in an act of mutual recognition and understanding.

Nature is alive,

not only biological nature,

but the atoms and the continents

and everything seeks to communicate.

I think what psychedelics are

is a kind of opening of our portals

to this constant stream of communication

that evolutionary necessity

has shut us away from.

Yeah.

Plants.

Why does it speak in such galactic terms?

Because when I'm dosed really high,

I've had visions of UFOs

and things that are not of this earth.

Very similar to the DMT flash,

like you said.

Oh, yeah.

I actually would have had

precisely the same hallucinations at times.

That's the way I see heavy doses of psilocybin

speaking to me,

not really about things here on this planet.

Well, I agree with you.

That's my experience.

And in trying to account for it,

you know,

you have to look at fungi.

Fungi are primary decomposers.

That means they can only live on decaying life.

That suggests to me

that they are late evolving

or at least not early evolving.

Mushrooms are very soft-bodied

and so are all fungi.

There is no record,

no fossil record of a mushroom

older than 40 million years.

Well, that's a tiny fraction

of the time life has been on the earth.

Now, when I asked a paleontologist about this,

he said,

well, they're soft-bodied

and they don't fossilize easily.

But, hey, we have flatworms

from the Gunflint Church of South Africa

that are 4.3 billion years old.

If they left a trace in the fossil record,

you'd think there would be more

of a trace of mushrooms.

If you decondition your presuppositions

and just look at the mushroom,

it looks to me, number one,

as though it is capable of...

surviving an extraterrestrial environment in other words if you have mushroom spores and you want to

store them for long-term longevity you seek an environment as much like outer space as you can

find you store them in liquid nitrogen at minus 200 degrees and they will last virtually forever

if you look at the color of stropharia cubensis spores that's in the brown gild mushroom family

the spores are deep purple almost black that's the color you would paint a spacecraft if you wanted to

absorb long long wave radiation if you look at the spore you know what is it it's a packet of

crystallized dna a single mature stropharia cubensis mushroom when it's sporulating will shed up to

three million spores a minute for up to two weeks three million spores a minute for two weeks

and these things are microscopic so small that the perturbations and agitation of air molecules which

are called brownian motion can actually percolate these things into the outer atmosphere where then

energetic cosmic events can actually detach them from the terrestrial medium and they slowly like

planetary dandruff or something drift off into space well I always it seems so obvious to me maybe it's because

that the most predictable major revolution in biology that you can imagine is of course

within a few years it will be realized that the earth is an island that's all that the biota that is present here

much of it probably drifted in in cosmic debris when stars go supernova planets are destroyed it's a cliche of

cosmic consciousness to say you know the atoms in your body were once in the hearts of distant stars

well if that's true then some of the atoms in your body were once in the uh a part of distant planets and

some vanishingly small fraction may have been part of the biota of extraterrestrial ecosystems the other

the other thing about the mushroom that's very suggestive to me is it appears to be or or there is a place a

perspective from which you can look at it that it appears to be not an organism but an artifact

it is incredibly well designed uh at a very high level of design criteria for example on this planet

uh one of the most advanced ethical systems we've been able to evolve is buddhism which teaches

vegetarianism uh if a buddhist could design their own genome they would become a fungus

because a fungus is a primary decomposer it's the only carmelous place in the entire food chain

there is no karma for the fungi they don't destroy any life whatsoever so and so here you have this thing

designed to traverse extraterrestrial space occupying a carmelous niche in the ecosystem

and when complex with a mammalian nervous system a galactarian archive of historical data becomes accessible

we have only known about dna since 1950 less than 50 years and we're already confidently talking about

completely redesigning the human genome and so forth and so on well if we pursue along these

lines for 500 years we will look the way we want to look and you know you trivially we may all want to be

keanu reeves or something but once the cultural agenda cuts in uh if say buddhism took over in the presence of an

advanced molecular genetics then we could design ourselves into a carmelous niche in the universe

i i wish that we could bring i don't know who it is but the content of the mushroom experience which was

what launched your question is so evidently alien and non-human and self-referential to a world we don't know

that to me uh it would require a commission and several years of study to decide that this thing is not

an extraterrestrial our notions of extraterrestrials to this point have been incredibly self-reflexive

uh i the once you have fully in grasp the size of the universe and the amount of time

that is available then the idea that someone would come in a mental in a metal ship with an interest in your

gross industrial output and a desire to cure cancer is absolutely preposterous that's such a culture

bound notion it's like expecting them to arrive with a load of pizzas ready for delivery

uh the trick uh the trick is going to be to recognize the extraterrestrial the very notion alien means unfamiliar so it's it's it's not going to

be like we think it is the real task will be to recognize it and uh we have discovered after only a thousand years

that uh toxic metal based technologies are fatal and we have pushed our entire planet into planetary crisis

by coming to this realization rather late in the game if if long-term survival is the name of the game for

intelligent life in the universe then the way we're doing it is not the way to do it it's going to have to

be non-polluting biologically based molecularly based so forth and so on and as you run down the list

the mushroom begins to look more and more like the real thing and then of course the content

of the of the experience is so different from other psychedelics and so it's so

other oriented that i i am puzzled that we've been at this now nearly 30 years and we still don't have a

consensus i don't think i don't know what it is is it that when you take the mushroom you lose all ability

to then operate in the world of straight judgments and understanding uh it's very puzzling but i think

probably the biota of the earth is riddled with extraterrestrial genes if not organisms and possibly

intelligences but they're not interested in your fetal tissue or uh putting implants in you or taking

you up and slicing you up on in very large scale surgical wards i find all that paranoid and

pathological i can talk about that if you want but it's not really our subject yes um there are

different ways to look for extraterrestrials one way is to build a vast radio telescope and search for a

signal the way i would do it if i were in charge of things is i would search the terrestrial

ecosystem for anomalous molecules molecules that have no near relatives or history of evolutionary

development in terrestrial organisms well it turns out you don't have to look far it's psilocybin

psilocybin is four phosphoryloxy nn dimethyltryptamine it's the only four phosphorylated indole in nature

the only one okay well here you have a pentaxel group it's a five-sided thing and then you have a

benzene molecule off it and these molecules have numbered positions one through six and then you have a

phosphorus group it can attach at any one of those six positions attached in the four position this is

unheard of it only occurs in this one case well that's very odd i mean if we believe nature is a

continuum of evolutionary adumbration then have suddenly out of nowhere a completely anomalous

molecule sticking up suggest it may have come in from somewhere else yeah it's similar i mean serotonin is

five hydroxy tryptamine uh serotonin is ubiquitous in life on this planet from flat worms to man it's in

every organism there is well the one that yoga comes on your brain yeah the structure yes i mean

here's the thing serotonin is five hydroxy tryptamine psilocybin is four phosphoryloxy nn

dimethyltryptamine you've got then is uh uh uh uh uh four and then dimethyltryptamine as opposed to five

hydroxy tryptamine yeah these these things are uh a chemical family yeah

about this alien ufo people's experience with the psilocybin having that sort of galactic experience

and since we're talking about purchases and transformation what role do you think that

either the psilocybin bringing these images in or this sort of cultural mythology around you know

close encounters what what role do you think that's playing why is that coming up in terms of the

consciousness shift that we're trying to make what's that about well if you want i mean if you're

interested in ufos one of the first books ever written is i think one of the best it's called modern

it's called flying saucers a modern myth of things seen in the sky by jung and what he says is that

i hope i don't have to do too much backgrounding for an audience like this but as you know jung analyzed

alchemy and said that in the presence of a psyche epistemologically naive about the real nature of

matter the contents of the unconscious will be projected upon chemical processes well our level of naivete

about the cosmic environment is approximately at the same level of sophistication as the 16th century's

grasp of matter was and so jung said that he talked about what in alchemy what's called the rotundum

that which spins and he said the spinning rotundum is a symbol of the psyche uh the the flying saucer i

believe is a symbol of the eschatological object at the end of time that we are being pulled into a

confrontation with call it the other call it the ancestors call it jesus call it galactarian civilization

it's all and more than any of these things and i believe and i'm fairly alone in this i think

that uh the the pressure and the chaos that we're experiencing at the end of the 20th century

is because we are drawing near to a bifurcation point in the in the there's not even words for it in the

dimensionality of our cosmos i mean we're very close to some kind of cusp some kind of breakthrough point

history is in fact the enunciation that an animal is standing too close to the transcendental object and

is in fact beginning to be transformed into a partial simulacrum of the transcendental object

that's what we are half beast half angel you know one foot in the slime one foot in the platonic super

spaces uh as far i mean i suppose we have to talk at least briefly about the abduction thing i i think

that this isn't much ado about nothing uh it's very clear to me that every abduction case around except

for a vanishingly small number that we can put in the classical category of stigmata can be explained by one

simple fact people are losing the ability to distinguish dreams from memories that's all that's all

if you lose the ability to distinguish dreams from memories you'll have a very strange history to

recite to people uh and i think this is a a cause by television it's caused by a number of things i grew up

during the 50s when movies like the day the earth stood still invasion of the body snatchers and so

forth were coming out and i distinctly remember a fever that i had when i was about 12 in which i had a

horrifyingly real dream of gray-faced cat-eyed aliens who were doing something to me that i didn't care for

and so forth and so on well if i were to be placed into the hands of an obsessive hypnotherapist

i guarantee you in two weeks we'd come out with the realization that it wasn't a dream that it actually

happened but that that's uh that's uh and also the content if you analyze the content of the abduction

scenario it's pure paranoia and i can get off on this but i i don't really want to the normal rules of

evidence are not being applied here's let me go off on this just a little bit to say you know how do

you live your life uh in the light of a universe that is strange and vast well you can just believe

anything anybody tells you in which case you know fetal removal by extraterrestrials vies with your

attention as you seek elvis in the aisles of the local supermarket as you worry about the fall of

atlantis and so forth and so on but over time there has been something evolved called the rules of

evidence colloquially known as how to tell shift from shinola and uh the first thing is there should be

an economy an economy of explanation this is called occam's razor in other words hypotheses should be no more

complex than is necessary to explain whatever it is you're trying to explain so if inability to tell

dreams from memories explains abduction why do we have to reach for the idea that uh uh geneticists from

zinebel ganubi are moving secretly among us with a surgical agenda and also carry out unscheduled proctological

examinations in the middle of the night i mean really now uh and what i want to say about that

is i got where i am whether it is enviable or not but i got where i am by being tough not by being

gullible and so i've rejected vast amounts of things uh not only dubious things but i've probably tossed a few

babies out with the bath water as well but uh ask tough questions make it make sense uh and be as they say in

hawaii be akamai be smart uh understand the subtleties and the potential degradation of language and then trust

trust only yourself trust only yourself uh photographs are useless anecdotes are useless what happened to

your best friend last weekend when you weren't there is useless you can entertain all that information

but what you have to given the slipperiness of language given uh the limitations of the human organism

you have to stay with primary experience and extrapolate out from there and if you

have had fetal tissue removed then you have to deal with it but the testimony of 700 people you don't know

doesn't have to bother you at all yeah in light of your dialogue with the measuring how do you see

sort of the big picture of the agenda if this is an extraterrestrial force that catalyzes consciousness on

the planet what's what do you think you mean what's happening i i think that nature

nature well i mentioned this yesterday that that biology let's leave nature out of this for a minute

biology is some kind of chemical strategy for the conquest of dimensionality

i said this yesterday but i'm not sure i was understood and what i mean by that is the entire

history of biology from the first uh naked dna to this moment is a history of progressively taking more

and more control of more and more dimension first primitive life moved it had no eyes it simply felt its way

that means it was like uh one uh one two-dimensional life it just feels its way down a linear

creode of sensation defecating eating undergoing mitosis and so forth and so on but it's a it's a two-dimensional

thing well then life acquired light sensitive chemistry which it's sequestered on the surface of itself

driven by serotonin interestingly enough and this light sensitive chemistry gave the idea of a gradient

the organism had however dimly the notion here and there and to have the notion of going from here to there

you have to add in the notion now and then and what these notions being added in are dimensional vectors

into the reality space well then the entire history of life from let's say the crossocterigian fishes to

homo habilis is simply the history of developing more efficient organs of motion

motion in the three-dimensional world better eyes better arms better legs uh mobility motility

so forth and so on then with the appearance of true human beings and language an entirely new dimension

let's call it the fourth dimension of time begins to be invaded in a very subtle way it's that monkeys

human beings can't tell stories to each other about past experiences or hoped for uh denouements

human beings can that act of linguistic recollection is a small conquest of dimensionality

well once you invent writing then all of the past can in a sense be kept in the present the present is

not a narrow slice of experience fading off into the past and the future it becomes instead like a train

moving into the future the future is unknowable but the past can be recollected and uh analyzed and

if the analysis is sophisticated enough one can begin to triangulate outward toward the future

uh the history of science is uh the history of uh the history of prediction well what is prediction it's

that taking control of a previously uncontrolled dimension the future and uh i think that the rise of

electronic technology the rise of extremely complex language using societies means that we're about to

uh go wholly in to the fourth dimension the temporal dimension and we see ourselves as distinct from our

technologies you see we like when you are in a car you think i am a human being driving a human invention but

there is a point of view from which no you are just a human being who has put on another level of

humanness which happens to have wheels under it and is rolling along in other words genetics that

changes the stuff of our bodies epigenetics which we call ideology and technology changes the environment

in which our bodies operate and i think we're getting set basically to decamp into the imagination

that the imagination is as real a place as across the river is if you've just acquired eyes it's something

you're seeing for the first time and then generating an appetite to go into and this has been kicking

around for 15 or 20 000 years a shaman is a seer is a prophet is a higher dimensional mathematician

and they may not you know use tensor equations to express what they're doing but mathematics before symbols is

experience and so uh i i i really believe history is ending very soon i cannot conceive of a hundred years

in the future at the present accelerated rate of development uh we have unleashed such novelty that i think

we're in the terminal phase of decamping from three-dimensional space we are leaving the womb of newtonian

being for something else the imagination and the birth is tumultuous an entire planet is at risk and

eventually you know toxemia seems to be setting in we've used up all the nutritional resources in the

womb the walls are closing in we're suffocating our political systems don't work our social systems are

breaking down if you're a realist a pessimist then you just say well this is it folks this is the smash

up the party lasted 20 000 years and here comes the bill but you might think that if you were a fetus

trapped in a collapsing womb at transition you could not conceive of the stock broker fashion designer or

whatever that you are going to be in another dimension in another reality that you're being born into

and i think we our aspiration is the conquest of death our religions promise it and if our gods can't

deliver we'll elbow them aside and do it ourselves thank you uh and you know these things aren't decisions

made by a single person or even a group of people they come from the bone it's it's who we are we aspire to be

magic and we probably uh given our track record will achieve it as i said yesterday james joyce said man

will be dirigible a humorous thing to say but yes you mean by that like even for the birth of imagination

you mean like a star trek episode where they have no bodies and the guy like makes himself a big cat

well one of the nice things about my position is i don't have to entirely understand myself

because i'm self-defined as a primitive uh i it when we talk about decamping from newtonian space and

you're asking me what would it look like uh i'm as puzzled as you are i don't know is it nanotech are we

going to become anti and all live in one acre of the rain forest are we going to uh

uh find a way to completely transpose ourselves into the net and just shed our bodies the way we

once shed the placenta that connected us i i once said the body is the placenta of the soul

but is that a religious statement or a technological goal what do we mean the body is the placenta of the

soul and then people get really agitated because a lot of people and i include myself among them rather

like the body and you can imagine a debate in the archaeozoic ocean when people said when people of a

very scaly and lantern jawed type said listen we're leaving for the land you cannot live on the land

there's no water on the land the land is our whole being we're defined by the water the joy of swimming

the great you know on and on and on well some organisms turned their back on that and so then we had the

conquest of the land it's a big thing it's a big thing because what we're being asked is what is

humanness what can you discard and still be human can you can we discard our bodies and still be human

can we discard our ethics and still be human i'd rather keep my ethics and get rid of the body

but you know we are sexual creatures what is life what is sex without a body for crying out loud

uh how does that work and look uh but it is really not ours to decide we have grabbed hold of a tiger

several billion years ago nature is a bootstrapping process and it seems fairly unsentimental you know

there's no tears shed for for for the great sauropods that once stalked the planet they there they were

wiped out in an asteroid impact that allowed the the arise of the angiosperms and the mammals we are the

children and the inheritors of a planetary

catastrophe if this planet hadn't been wrecked 65 million years ago we'd still

be here we wouldn't be here well then what is our position on planetary

catastrophe we're in the process of making one is it so that 65 million years

in the future an organism filled with love and justice and intelligence will

look back at our skeletons in the shale and say well they had a good thing going

but if it hadn't been for their extinction we wouldn't be here the very large scale

is very large indeed one of the things that's so interesting about the

visionary plants is that they give you a large large picture I think the

vegetable mind views death in a different way it is vegetables are eternal in a

sense through vegetative propagation they can live virtually forever life lies

very close to the surface in us and if it's crushed out we're we're very

alarmed we our sense of uniqueness is so highly evolved that our own death becomes

for us the most universal tragedy we can conceive of that's a serious ego

so dislocation I maintain yes

one of the discussions that I know it takes place in the western

um becoming um kind of culture um zero state culture what about these other cultures that never embraces this

this way of life is to you and not like people who love you they don't have access to these technologies maybe it's what they would probably have to know to be finding a lot of pain in them

well nature has two impulses

uh in the particular case the impulse is always toward equilibrium

uh animal species seek to establish niches for themselves in ecosystems that can then be maintained indefinitely just the way you seek a job

where you'll then get money and without working too hard or eating too much excrement you'll be able to maintain yourself

uh indefinitely if you look at all of nature right now the only uh the human species is where the evolutionary cutting edge has become concentrated

and then if you look at the human species the place where the changing novelty has been concentrated is in uh high-tech industrial democratic civilization

i don't call it western anymore because its leading exponent is japan

but high-tech industrial democracies are the only social systems that are still evolving and changing

so uh i think

they also serve who only stand and wait

uh these traditional societies perform the role very much

of a of an animal species at equilibrium in an ecosystem they preserve values related to stability and homeostasis

meanwhile uh in these places where these creative uh creodes have begun to cascade novelty is what's being explored but the novelty feeds back

and changes the context in which these equilibrium seeking systems operate

uh the universe i believe is an engine for the production and conservation of novelty

the universe will

will sacrifice everything achieved to achieve something new

you can see that in looking at this asteroid impact 65 million years ago

i mean this this was a climaxed planetary ecosystem of tropical forests from pole to pole

filled with complex animals and ecosystems and many phyla represented but it was all thrown away

to make way to make way for the mammals and the angiosperms i mean speaking teleologically

so i i think novelty is what nature values above all else and that interestingly leads on to the notion

of an ethic for us because that confers immediate central importance on the human enterprise

the orthodox view is that we're a chance anomaly an eccentricity in the cosmic game

but if the conservation of novelty is what the universe is about then we are it's pride and joy

it's crown jewel the firstborn son and heir apparent uh and the other thing is this this

this ingression or this movement into novelty it has been going on since the beginning of the universe

but always ever faster ever faster so in the in the early universe once things settled down after the big

bang it was dull for a long long time i mean there wasn't much happening there weren't even stars there was

just hydrogen aggregating and then eventually there were aggregates of hydrogen so large that the

pressures at the centers of those aggregates of hydrogen caused a new property to emerge fusion

and fusion cooks out uh heavy elements like iron and sulfur and carbon and when carbon cooks out new

emergent properties become possible molecular chemistry rather than simple atomic systems comes into play well

then elaborate that for a few billion years and you get long chain polymers they're like super molecules

and they have the quality or the ability to template and reproduce themselves well so suddenly you get a whole new

uh emergent uh domain uh domain in nature the the domain of the self-copying self-replicating molecules

and then they begin to embed themselves in membranes and so forth and then you get uh nucleated cells and then

colonies of nucleated cells and from there to advanced mammals it's just a matter of time and and then

uh the uh the the organs of locomotion seem to have been perfected uh you know the fastest animal in

the world can run 70 miles an hour something like that and so then the development seems to concentrate in the in the nervous system

the the coordination no longer of of space but of information information becomes the new coinage

advanced binocular vision systems evolve pack signaling systems evolve in social animals and then at some

point the level of complexity is sufficient to cross a boundary into true language true representation of

the past in the present through symbolic activity uh in each case these stages are happening faster and faster and

faster language may is probably less than 100 000 years old it may be half that age well good grief

that's less than five that's less than three thousand generations in the past language that's yesterday

and and yet since the inception of language look at what has happened you know urbanism global

conquest of the environment uh mathematical conquest of nature we can call down the fires

that burn in the hearts of stars to the deserts of this planet or if necessary necessary down upon the heads

of our enemies that's an extraordinary feat for protoplasm to be able to uh undertake

extraordinary uh and and and and and so i i think this accelerating novelty indicates that we are on the brink

of just going down the novelty well and becoming as unrecognizable to ourselves as we would be to

tyrannosaurus rex if it were introduced to us as the heirs to its struggle and dreams yeah

uh it was one of the most interesting things to me the landscape at the end and the other correct

devices that was incorrect um and among all we'll talk about what it might look like i think there was

one line that said is it was december 21st 2012 and the 22nd may look there for the 21st if there may be

no change on the circle it may look the same and i'm sure it's how that fits all the questions

well you know are are we going to be walking around a small yard or are we going to be self-driven

things that you talked about yesterday or is it going to is that day going to pass by and i don't

know there's one percent see it and 99 percent doesn't or is it going to be that 100 percent doesn't

see it or is there probably well one way it could happen is that as we get closer and closer to it

our ability to accept these strange things becomes broader and broader so when the moment finally comes

yes you are a self-dribbling jeweled basketball but hey it ain't no big deal and you saw it coming years

ago so what uh i i i don't know i i vacillate on all of this because as a rationalist i'm very puzzled by

my intellectual burden of a completely irrational revelation i would never have wished this upon

myself i'm much more comfortable as a as a fairly hard-nosed skeptical thinker yet i've spent so much

time with this idea that i guess i have become infected with it it now seems to me as reasonable as anything

else there is unremarked by science a universal tendency toward complexity through time it's a law

as as real as the law of the speed of light of the segregation of genes but science has never said that

because science is as practiced out of the 19th century is militantly anti-teleological in other

words it denies any end goal any goal any purpose any predefined end state it it science just thinks the

universe is a random walk but i i can't i i think it's becoming harder and harder to maintain that idea

in the face of the evidence there are too many choices if you have a protein of several thousand

atoms it has 10 high 16 folding configurations it can choose from if it if it worked through those things

by trial and error it would take the life of the universe for that molecule to figure out its minimum

energy configuration and assume it so there is a kind of logic or there are constraints that we

aren't aware of that push processes toward completion and i think you know the new sciences of of chaos

theory dynamics complexity fractals strange attractors are going to deliver this into our

uh understanding it's a very exciting time i mean we're taking the first intellectual steps toward the

real re-understanding of nature since at least the invention of the calculus and probably the

invention of greek mathematics yeah

this model that you're talking about sounds a little bit to me um like a phase transition that

that's in consciousness when it reaches the point of complexity and then there's a transition

but it seems completely we're all connected on some level with the morphic field and all but that

may just you know you will start and then it's just like popular all of a sudden everyone

like a chain reaction yeah well you put your finger on it the key word is connectedness uh i i'm very

interested in the philosophical if you want to put it that way implications of the world wide web

and the internet i mean the internet is a fascinating thing you can't see it therefore if you're not into

it the world appears to have remained the same nothing has changed uh and yet actually the largest human

human artifact ever created has sprung into being in the last five years it's as big as this planet

and uh nobody controls it it has no central control no one can decide that it shall be this

or shall be that there are certain areas under limited control well but what does the internet

do well it connects us together it it uh uh broadens and deepens and makes more immediate the cultural

database that we're all swimming in and uh i i i think that probably it is a model for or not a model

but it is an anticipation of this transcendental object at the end of time i mean i have said in these

lectures you know my idea of the future perfect state is a world of 500 million human beings of all races

genders sexual persuasion so forth and so on 500 million well-fed healthy people living mostly in warm

climate largely naked very little physical cultural manifestation but if you could project yourself into

one of these people's minds or bodies you would see that when they close their eyes there are menus

hanging in space those menus are there because at age three there was a surgical implant behind the eyelids

of something like a very small contact lens and that is the philosopher's stone that is the culmination of

10 000 years of technical evolution and engineering dreams and what it boils down to is a little black

disc that's surgically implanted behind your eyelid and that's your interface to the culture and you can

move into the net which is of course virtually implemented it's not text it's not even hypertext

it's a three-dimensional non-material world ruled by the laws not of physics but the imagination

and i call this turning the body inside out this is what the cultural enterprise is for

we want we want we want to live in the imagination with the body as a freely commandable object in the

imagination in other words replace the laws of physics with the laws of of uh dream or imagination this is

culturally within our reach right now i mean if it were as important as piling up nuclear stockpiles or

screwing people over in a hundred different ways we'd have it in five years not 17 as it is we'll probably

have to wait 17 years but that that the fact that we can make a model like that that's a bridge from where

we're sitting to a spiritually transcendental realm that's within reach is i think very positive now all we

have to do is fill in the blanks keep taking psychedelics so that our engineering standards stay

high so that we stay focused on the goals that we're trying to maximize and then try to

promote the idea that anxiety is inappropriate anxiety poisons the will to action and i really think that

this is going to be the the task of the high-tech um alternative culture is to provide an optimistic vision

because you see the people who run the world are becoming more and more panic-stricken because a world is

ending their world is ending the world of the shell game and the international corporation and the

propagandized passive electorate and all these things that have been that game is ending and there there is

no substitute vision being discussed at the upper echelons of the control mechanism of this society it's

it's coming from the grassroots the people at the top are too paralyzed with the poisons they've imbibed by

feeding at the trough of the old order they can't think their way out of their dilemma in fact they have to

pay guys with ponytails just to turn on the machines in the morning they're so distanced from the things

they rule you see yeah i'm wondering that like in my experience and other people talking to me about

taking hallucinogens you talk about dissolving the boundaries another way to look at it is um you talk

about anxiety it's anxiety or fear eventually goes away of the other which if we have a boundary there is

another and um in terms of like men and women if women are more other for men than vice versa that on a

hallucinogen a man can um get to a place where he observes and goes beyond the boundaries to know that it's not the

other and if a woman is in that place what i for my own personal experience and from other people

talking to me and so women kind of find their voice in the way of the world to say well it's okay

not to have always experience with the other and um and at some hope of things accelerating my mother was born in 1921 and

very conservative kind of comes to the point where she's only three years old or whatever and has a 77

year old boyfriend and at dinner in the third town and laughing and says well i'm living do you think your

mother would say that and i don't know i i kind of like to hear what you would say about in terms of

otherness and how psychedelics can what the dissolving the boundaries does and how we carry that to other

people yeah well first of all uh it's important in all these discussions to remember there is nothing

on earth as much like a woman as a man uh the the next species over whatever it is the difference is enormous

the other thing to remember is if if you believe in evolutionary theory then this has always amazed me

women are the creation of choices made by men men are the creation of choices made by women

the aesthetic difference is striking i mean apparently men prefer smooth gentle uh nurturing curvaceous forms and

apparently women their aesthetic is fulfilled by a rougher cut uh we are reflections of the desires of the

opposite gender because we've been subject to selection in the sexual process that way uh as far as everybody

is struggling to keep up with the evolution of the culture i experienced this same thing i mean my father

is a very conservative character and uh uh he's now 80 and he seems to go out of his way to be outrageous

and uh i i it's maybe the one good thing television is doing is that straight people and by that i don't mean

non-gay i mean in the sense of non-psychedelic straight people can't escape from the weirdness of the

culture you know no matter who you are you have to look at this stuff it's in your face and eventually

you bend uh so approaching the other is a process of redefining yourself to be more acceptable

to it you know there's a coming to meet it becomes more familiar as you become more familiar with it

but the truly other what rudolph auto called the the totally other is other in principle it's like

the archetype of the other and it can't be assimilated but wherever the other is particularized in a

person a work of art a place uh it can be approached through a process of templating yourself to it you

know we become what we behold no matter how bizarre what we behold may be well uh it's a little past time

to take a break let's take a break those of you who are doing uh a paper why don't you gather up here

and david and i will lay out the guidelines the rest of you why don't you give us just a little bit of

space so we can work this academic thing out let's see i have uh some guidelines and david has this

civilization lose a piece of knowledge that's central to its functioning well the only scenario i can come

up with is uh an increasingly autocratic elite ordering everybody around until finally there is a populist

revolt and those people and their books and their buildings are all put to death and burned this may

be a similar thing may have happened to the maya you know the mayan civilization looking at the archaeological

evidence was an incredibly steep social pyramid so steep that it's conceivable the execution of a a few

thousand people would essentially disembowel uh the accomplishments of the civilization kill the

architects the scientists the astronomers the scribes and the artisans and what you've got left are

rainforest swidden farmers and then they go and do what they've always known how to do i i i don't believe

in the case of soma that it could have been a matter of it being available and then slowly uh disappearing i

mean the the rick veda speaks of intoxicating hundreds of people a day it speaks of the of the soma

gushing from the soma presses in these enormous amounts well clearly it was something easily available

obtained and processed and yet it died out completely and was not really replaced with anything else

so why i think cultural institutions are more fragile uh than we imagine in the scenario and and this

brings up the issue of substitutes uh in the scenario i told you yesterday about psilocybin in the sahara

and how it created a partnership paradise which then faded as the mushroom faded i am my as i try to imagine how

that would have felt i think probably what happened was

was at some point in the african past the mushroom was everywhere on the grasslands uh whenever it

rained it appeared it rained frequently the cattle the dung of the cattle was everywhere the mushroom was

everywhere well then it began to uh dry up and the first thing that would happen and we're talking

millennia in each step the first thing that would happen is the mushroom would become seasonal so then

you would have great mushroom festivals once a year rather than continuous mushroom taking

seasonal the next thing is as the drying continues it would retreat into the rain shadows of mountains

seasons seasonally now you have to make pilgrimages long distances seasonally to the mushroom place well

in parallel with this diminishing supply of mushrooms would logically be a rising anxiety about that

so what would you do well you would create strategies for the preservation of it in times of scarcity

smoking meat burying eggs the primitive you know aboriginal peoples know how to do these things

the obvious method of preserving mushrooms still used to this day in in the sierra mazateka in a world without

refrigeration is to put them into honey honey is a an antiseptic medium and the sugar in honey will draw

water out of a fragile thing like a mushroom and tend to preserve it the problem is if you've ever dealt

with aboriginal honeys you know they're not like the stuff we get in the little plastic bears

aboriginal honey is very watery and what what the consequences of this are is that the preserving

medium honey itself has the capacity to transmute into a psychoactive substance alcohol

so suddenly you see people of good intention

trying to preserve their mushrooms but unbeknownst to themselves they're turning into an alcohol cult

because fewer mushrooms more and more honey then uh uh and as the as the supply continues to shrink

finally you give up on intoxicating everybody and you just say we're going to establish a professional

class of people shamans and they will take the mushroom since we can't all take it so then you have

knowledge of it retreating into a professional class and these in aboriginal society these professional

classes are always hedged about with secrecy so then you actually have a situation where there is a body

of cultural knowledge which not everybody possesses in fact which very few people possess well at that point

through war epidemic schism or natural catastrophe you could lose that core of experts and then you you

would simply be uh adrift so it's it's a very it's a very complicated issue and the history of each one of these

things is fought with the these kinds of episodes the other thing is you know just to keep the complexity ever

before you um styles of usage change

I mentioned that that the 19th century eight hashish

we smoke it and

It has very different impacts on our

Psychologies and our art and so forth and so on

Another example is a good example close to home

LSD in the 60s

You couldn't play the game unless you took 500 mikes

These days you split a half a blotter

It's probably 70 mikes and that is what people call an LSD trip

It's half an order of magnitude smaller than what was being done 30 years ago

Well, so naturally people say entirely different things about LSD now than they did

then

the other thing that makes this very complicated I mean nature is not cutting you any slack here if you can have a

species of a plant

Genetically fairly defined and taxonomically fairly defined and it can have a horrific number of variables

bearing upon it the favorite example here would be

amanita muscaria

More ink has been spilled over amanita muscaria than almost any other plant I can think of it

Wasson identified it as soma the subject matter of these ecstatic

hymns of praise that filled the Rick Vedas

But when you actually take

Amanita muscaria if you only get a bellyache you're lucky

This is not at all a reliable

Intoxicant well, what's going on here? Well, here's what's going on

Amanita muscaria because of its genetic makeup is

Is subject to geographical variance that means the siberian amanita the new mexico amanita and the andean amanita are

experientially different creatures, so

geographical variation

then there is a

Edathically induced variation depending on the soil and the mycorrhizal host the chemistry of the mushroom will be different

Well, then there's brood

Differentiation the first flush

Will have a different chemistry than the third fourth or fifth flush of the same organism again

This is where shaman where the guru may have a role to play

You shouldn't take amanita muscaria

Unless you are with someone who says I have taken these

Mushrooms from this place at this time of year in this fashion and attain success

But if you just go out and eat the first dominina muscaria you find your experience could range from

Nothing to a medical emergency and very few people who have just gone out and eaten

Amanita muscaria have any kind of experience that could be mapped over an ecstatic

hallucinogenic experience, but a

Occasionally you will hear a story so wild

That you can tell under certain very narrowly defined conditions. This thing must be tremendously

Effective, but what those conditions are

We don't know

I think it was Watson that wrote about, I guess it's the regmaid, the regmaid, talking about drinking the piss of shiva and soma and this whole thing and his interpretation, maybe it was more than interpretation, the evidence showed that they would drink the urine of the animals that ate the mushrooms, like the antelope or the reindeer or the cows, because that way it was purified of the animals that ate the mushrooms, like the antelope or the reindeer or the cows, because that way it was purified of these

Toxins through the animals' systems, and they would drink a potion that was

Well

Yes, I mean

I really respect Gordon Wasson, but in this particular area, I think he spread more confusion than light

It is certainly true that Amanita muscaria is a shamanic

Intoxicant of great age used among the Arctic peoples of Siberia in the Tunguska and Amur River Basin

but

And it is true that

One of the great hazards of Amanita taking in that area is that when you go out on a snowy night to take a whiz

It is

These reindeer come and knock you over head first in order to get to the yellow snow because they're

So into it

But reindeer are not cattle and there are no reindeer in India

And

Cattle don't seek out mushrooms to eat them

The thing that to my mind breaks down Wasson's theory is

First of all, the inadequate intoxication

But second of all, you can tell from the Rig Veda that hundreds of people were being intoxicated with this stuff

That basically people were just lining up and passing through a line and it was being labeled out

Well Amanita muscaria has a mycorrhizal relationship to birch and spruce

That means it grows only in association with the roots of those plants

To this day no mycologist has ever successfully cultivated it on the natch

So when you find it, it's a rare thing

To find one or two is cause for rejoicing

To find half a dozen is a miracle

I've never heard of anybody finding more than that

I've seen other Amanitas in great abundance

If you're an Amanita fan

Check out Baker's Beach

In January

Do you all know where it is?

It's at the bottom of 25th Avenue

The number of Amanita pantherinas that come up in that sandy soil down there

You can literally gather a couple of grocery bags of it

But even at that, how far will a couple of grocery bags go

If you have several hundred people to intoxicate

So I don't see how it could possibly have been Amanita muscaria

I think a whole bunch of mistakes were made by Wasson and the people who followed him

In arguing so strenuously for that

Wasson himself admitted that he never obtained a satisfactory intoxication from Amanita

So again, you have to be aware of all of these variables

And I think it's fine to respect those who have preceded us into this

Lots of hard work has been done

But on the other hand

They're just fallible, career-mongering human beings

Like all the rest of us

And it never hurts

To double-check

I mean, what you haven't confirmed for yourself

You should view as simply informed speculation

But you do need to check for yourself

Yeah

I mean, the pure compound?

Frankly, in 30 years there has been very, very little chemically purified psilocybin

I

Once took a small white capsule that was said to be pure psilocybin

It may have been

It was it was like a very warm and friendly flavor of LSD

But it didn't have the voice

Now there's a famous story that when Hoffman isolated psilocybin

He then to prove the isolation

He manufactured some

And then he and Wasson took it back with them to Watla

And they gave it to Maria Sabina

And she said the spirit of the mushroom is in the little pill

But let's face it

Maria Sabina was a sly old woman

Who really knew how to play on the gringo's harp

And I don't think it's the last word that she said that

I mean, the implication may have been

And so why don't you go back to Basel and leave us alone

For crying out loud

Haven't you done enough good here?

Um, yeah

The synchronicity surrounding the use of mushrooms

And her like story about the

Are you pulling his restaurant?

Oh, yeah

The Rod Steiger story

Well, yes

I mean, I don't know quite what to make of this

Again, there are more questions than answers

But one of the things that you will quickly experience

If you get into this

And most of you probably already know

Is that rational

And by that I mean statistically extrapolatable expectations

Seem to be superseded on these trips

By a kind of magical connectedness

All kinds of strange things happen on trips

That really happen

It's not hallucination

These things really happen

It's almost as though the ordinary laws of causality

Are obviated

And you become a magnet for the strange

The peculiar

And sometimes these synchronicities are trivial

Sometimes they're the difference between life and death

As an example of the latter

I've told this story before

But one time years ago

Dennis and a girlfriend of his

Went up into the mountains behind a boulder

And they took

Argyria nervosa

Hawaiian baby woodrose

And it was much stronger than they expected

And it lasted much longer than they expected

And so night fell

And behind boulder up around Nederland

It's 12,000 feet

I mean when night falls

The temperature plummets

You're immediately in a situation of crisis

Night fell

They were completely lost

They had no clue where they were

Or how to get back to the car

And it looked grim

And so they're looking out over these valleys

And mountains and so forth

Trying to spot something

And finally across the valley

They see what my brother assumes is a car

Come around the corner

Because they see the headlights

And so they descend down into this canyon

It takes them an hour

It's pitch dark

To climb up the other side

And they arrive

To arrive in a parking lot

To find their car

Not only to find their car

But to find that the lights are on

Well they had left the car some 12 hours before

The battery would have been run down

If the lights had been on all that time

It means the lights

They saw the lights

Come on

When they looked out across the valley

Full of fear

Wondering where they were

So you know, it's just a story

Unless you're the person

Whose life was saved

By this incident

So, and you can see then

Why aboriginal people

Would have this faith

In the primacy of mind

Probably because mind is in fact

Primary

And it's only because we've locked ourselves down

Into a set of reductionist expectations

That we live in a world

So brutally

Under the aegis

Of laws like entropy

And seriality

And so forth and so on

Yeah

Something that Sasha said in book cycle

That you and him have a disagreement about

Synthesizing masculine

Saying that

Similar to her question about

Synthesizing

Do you still hold that?

Yeah, and that that plant spirit

Doesn't really speak to you

Unless you use the plant itself

Rather than the compound

I don't know

Much has been made about

This difference we had

I don't recall the conversation

And haven't read the account of it

If Rupert's theory holds any water

It's the same thing

And we can both still believe

Whatever we like to believe

And I think that without argument though

Generally the plant experiences are richer

And it's not difficult to see why

If you take mescaline

You have a mescaline trip

If you take peyote

You have a mescaline

Plus thirteen other

Mescaline-like alkaloids

Anhalamine, Anhaloene

Peyote

Loafel-4

And there's a whole spectrum

Of these things in there

And I think that gives

A more

A richer experience

I don't

It's not an absolute ontological difference

Between Sasha and I on that issue

Where I might argue

That there is a real difference

Is between

Drugs created yesterday

In the laboratory

And drugs that have a huge

History behind them

Because I believe that in some sense

I mean this is not rationally defendable

But it's an intuition

In some sense when you take a plant

It takes you

And you

Make a contribution

To the high

A tiny

You know it's like you add one brick

To the wall

So that then when

Essentially when you take psilocybin

You are experiencing

All the previous psilocybin trips

That ever were

That's what the psilocybin trip is

So I remember once when I

Years ago the first time I did ketamine

Ketamine

My impression was

It's an empty vessel

It's an unfurnished hotel

It's a blank canvas

It's a psychedelic experience

But it's incredibly impoverished

In that not enough people have done it

To fill the space with stuff

For the rest of us

Now in a thousand years

Ketamine may be a very rich

Experience

Because so many people

Will have carved their initials

On that tree

But I think you know

As we learn from the plants

The plants learn from us

And they adjust

The content

So I'm not

I don't

I'm not of this school

That says what we need

Is a drug we don't have

You know

Somebody wrote an essay called

What we need is a new drug

Quoting the lyrics of the song

I think that we have

The substances we need

What we don't have

Are the techniques and the intelligence

To know what to do with them

Because that is the act of the breathing

And they do seem to give

Completely different parts

Well not if you take enough ayahuasca

If you take really a lot

And sit and breathe

And work with it for an hour or so

You can eventually get to a place

Where you just say

This looks like a DMT flash to me

But that's a lip numbing dose of ayahuasca

You know

Harmine has a slightly anesthetic effect

So if you take a dose of ayahuasca

And your lips go numb

You are definitely topping out

That's an effective dose

Many people have never felt that

But it's a sign that you're approaching

The effective limit

Yeah

Are you familiar with the alleged

CIA testing daily on people in a mental hospital

Hospital in Menlo Park in the 60's

That can keep you to part in?

The Langley-Porter experiments

Yes

I was very frustrated

What happened with those studies

What the government found

From those in relation

You were saying that

These studies in the University of New Mexico

Were going to be

The new studies

What came out of those

I can't really answer in detail

Those were not

Pharmacodynamical studies

They were more like psychotherapeutic studies

They were giving mescaline to people

And working with states of dysfunction

But they weren't trying to understand

The physiological parameters of it

Joe Adam

And the guy who became the regent

Willis Harmon

All of those people were associated with those experiments

Mescaline was well studied during the 20's

I mean if you've not read Heinrich Kluver's book

On Hallucination

It's a very nice piece of work

And done very early

And he actually tried to create a vocabulary of hallucination

I mean it's kind of silly

But you know

He taught his subjects to identify colors

By their place in the spectrum

So people would say

You know

Spiked basketball

Moving at 4 o'clock

700 nanometers

Shifting toward 800 nanometers

And

This sort of thing

Which it just

It doesn't quite give you the flavor

I'm afraid

Yeah

We were in the

Dave's

The definition of hallucination came up

And Ralph Messner's

He was saying

For him the distinction between

A hallucination

Which means something which isn't there

And the experience that you have on psychedelics

Where you're having what you were talking about

Or did I imagine that

No

I wanted to figure it out

Yeah, no, that's worth talking about

Because I use the vocabulary in a specific sense

And if I don't explain it

I'm not really understood

There is a definite distinction

I mean most people who've never taken these things

Think

Well don't you see colors

And isn't it like that

There are three

At least three

Discussable stages here

First of all there's what's technically called hypnagogia

Hypnagogia is when you close your eyes

And you see little lights and stars

And drifting debris

And that sort of thing

That's hypnagogia

Then there's what I would call

I guess

Hallucination

And there's a spectrum

And it's very interesting

When they simulate or talk about hallucinations

They only talk about the onset of hallucination

When you take a psychedelic

Here's the timeline

Let's say it's psilocybin

At one hour

You begin to feel the state of arousal

Give or take a few minutes

Well then when you close your eyes

There's this black background

That is typical of the baseline of consciousness

Well then after a few minutes

There are these sort of amoeboid

After image colored lights

That come toward you and stream past you

And this is actually called streaming

This is how it's referred to

And these things are either

That after image violet

Or that after image chartreuse

That we all know

And these things sort of come

But and if you don't take a sufficient dose

That's it with theme and variation

And now we're in the land of the famous geometric grids

Floating shapes

This sort of thing

But that is not the payoff of psychedelics

The real payoff is vision

And visions are not dancing mice

And rows of little candies doing calisthenics

And all that detritus

Vision is something which has emotional content

That's why light shows

And fancy computer graphics and all that

They stop short at this point

Because no matter how visually complicated something is

Going on a screen

If it doesn't somehow touch your heart and your soul

Then it's just a complicated pattern of some sort

But if it also contains information

Specific to your circumstance

Then it's completely engaging

And that's what I shoot for

And consider the visionary trip

It's coherent

It's not like a dream

It's not that coherent

It's not a little story

In which you appear in a strange circumstance

With odd people

It's not like that

But it is not

Simply a visual experience

The content is multidimensional

And deeply mental

And largely informational

And that's the proof of the pudding

And there is no way to achieve it

Any other way that I've ever noticed

Relative to my remarks this morning

About orgasm

And this is part of the clue

I've noticed

That in the post-coital

Aura

If you want to put it that way

There are these blue and green lights

Streaming past

Usually not for very long

Maybe a minute's worth

After a completely satisfying

Sexual release

But it doesn't go to the next level

Which it always does do

With the psychedelic

But the fact that they share that phenomenon

For a moment

Suggests something

Suggests that it's both

And I used to think not

I used to think it was entirely dose

But I've realized from talking to people

That what seems natural and obvious to me

Seems odd to some people

What you have to do

Is you have to look at the back of your eyelids

With the expectation that you will see something

And it's a plane in the field

Now if you're in front of the plane

That means you're thinking

Oh, I'm getting high

I feel weird

My agenda is this

I need to think about that

Do I need to go to the bathroom

Where is the water?

Your attention is here

If your attention is beyond it

You also won't see it

Like I've noticed

You can't talk and see it

At the same time

The act of verbalizing

Requires so much mental focus

That you can't see this stuff

So what you have to do

Is look at the back of your eyelids

As though it were a flat surface

And just keep looking at it

And keep looking at it

And if there's any flicker

Of color or light or movement

Concentrate and keep looking

And it usually doesn't take more than a minute or two

Of that for it to completely open up

In front of you

The other thing is

I plead with it

I address it

And I say

Do what you will

I'm entirely yours

Please don't hurt me

But do with me what you will

And if that invoking

That announcing

That you are ready

Is very important

In this matter of the speech

Of the mushrooms

The reason a lot of people

Don't have that experience

Is because you have to initiate

The conversation

You can be loaded for hours

On mushrooms

And if you will never say

In the silence of your mind

It doesn't have to be spoken

If you say

Hello

It will never directly address you

It's shy

But if you will say hello

It's there

It says yes

And you're off

And you know another thing

We're so defensive

And locked down

Another thing that's very important

And all Aboriginal people know this

Is the importance of chant and song

If you get into a hard place

The western reflex

Seems to be

To assume the fetal position

And wait

With the belief

That in some hours

If you don't go mad

This hell

Whatever it is

Will be lifted off of you

Well this is the worst thing

You could possibly do

In that situation

If you get into a place

That is difficult

Sit up

Gulp air

And sing

And the reasons for this

Are obvious

On different levels

First of all

It's an assertion

Of your existential right to be

You don't just whimper and fold

You sit up

You sing

Second of all

You

It oxygenates your brain

And mental though these places may be

They have some root

In matter and physiology

Flood your brain

With oxygen

And the demon

Whatever it is

Will be washed away

Or at least transformed

And so

By techniques

Of invocation

Of chant

Of song

Of concentration

Self-discipline

And I don't mean rigorous self-discipline

Nothing like what yoga demands

I just mean

Pull yourself together

For God's sake

And pay attention

To what's going on

You can make it your vehicle

And then the other thing

Which I always do

But I

It's controversial

I suppose to say it

Is cannabis

Cannabis is the rudder

On your ship

If you come into a place

That you don't care for

Just take a hit of cannabis

And then do your chanting

And you will move through it

But don't clench

Realize that you are an energetic system

And the addition of cannabis

Or oxygen

Or water

Is going to change the situation

So take responsibility

And then finally

You know

You have to discipline your hindbrain

In the presence of the strange

And the overwhelming

The primate locks into a fight or flight

Syndrome

But it's an adrenal

It's an adrenaline release

And adrenaline is a very short act

It's a very short act

compound

all you have to do is wait

and the fear will come

and it will

spike and if you don't

go mad and start screaming

or tear your clothes off and run

into the street but if you just sit

it can't sustain

the spike, it chemically

is impossible to remain

petrified

for very long

eventually you just say

well, alright, so I'm terrified

so what about it

and then you begin to drift down

so it's not an easy

thing but it

can be mastered and it's mainly

practical

attention

the more exotic techniques

mantra, yantra

physiologically

unlikely positions and so forth

that all works as well

but I think just breath

and sound

and cannabis

and intent

will carry you through

through most difficulties

yeah

I had a question about

about cannabis

when I was younger

I could smoke

very easily

readily

at any time

whether I was

sitting in class

or playing soccer

any time

and it would feel

very good

calming

and I'd just kind of be

stoned

and after a while

and now I can barely

smoke anymore

because I get really

just kind of sketched out

and not really paranoid

but a little bit like that

I'm just wondering

would

you mean you feel

uncomfortable with yourself

in social situations

you don't know what to do

yeah

sometimes when I'm alone

funny more

but even when I'm alone

like I have to be

I can't just sit

I usually like end up

I don't know

wanting to go mountain

but I can't just run up a hill

well

I mean I think

our responses

change

over life

not only to drugs

but to other things

I think also

you have to find

what works

for you

I know people

who

take LSD

in small amounts

very often

because they say

they can work

better on it

I tried it

I tried to

I felt

I wasn't getting

enough work done

and they said

oh well you'll be able

to do 12 hours

of work a day

if you just take

50 mics

after breakfast

I couldn't do it

I mean it

sketched me out

I found myself

pacing the floor

and you know

just it was madness

I on the other hand

can before breakfast

smoke enough cannabis

that most people

would simply

go back to bed

and that sets me up

for hours and hours

of work

so you sort of

have to learn

yourself

these people

who are these

enthusiasts for

Datura

they've got to be

some different

kind of person

than I am

and because they

genuinely take

pleasure in something

which would just

drive me

right up

my tree

so

one of the things

that you have to

honor in this

domain

more than in most

human endeavors

is our human

uniqueness

I remember

years ago

I took a course

it was a funny

course too

it was called

forensic pathology

if you can imagine

and it was taught

by

if you can imagine

Sasha

Shulgin

forensic pathology

right

so one of the

things he did

in this class

is he brought

in a little

vial of

some substance

and there were

500 people

in this class

it was at

Cal

so we

passed it

around

no big deal

you sniff it

a kind of

a nondescript

odor

pass it on

to the next

person

out of the

500 people

three

had an

incredibly

violent

reaction

to this

stuff

and then

Sasha

explained

there is a

known gene

for reacting

to this

thing

people who

have this

gene

are 50,000

times more

sensitive

to this

substance

than people

without it

well just

extrapolate

that range

to every

substance

in nature

and

and you

will see

why

in a

sense

learning

what

drugs

you

should

and

shouldn't

take

is as

big a

task

as

deciding

what

kind

and

you

honor

your

individuality

the shamans

say

you know

if the

plant

wants

you

it

will

take

you

will

know

if

there

is

a lock

and key

fit

and

and I

think

part

of

late

adolescence

is

drug

experimentation

for this

purpose

I think

if you

go through

life

taking

vast amounts

of drugs

of all

sorts

then

you

didn't

quite

get it

right

the

idea

is

to

find

what

works

for

you

and

then

put

the

pedal

to

the

metal

you know

and if

it's

LSD

you know

and if

it

or

whatever

it is

because

the

things

have

personalities

it's

like

making

a

friendship

and

some

people

are

going

to

want

to

be

your

friend

and

some

people

are

going

to

think

you're

a

jerk

and

you

don't

want

to

hang

out

with

those

people

because

they

make

you

feel

bad

all

these

other

subjective

things

would

you

come

into

it

against

an

argument

like

that

right

forgive me

I can't

remember

the book

no

I'll

reconstitute

it

for you

yes

in one

of my

books

I said

if you're

thinking

of taking

a

substance

you should

ask

yourself

three

questions

first

of all

does

it

is

not

toxic

to

organic

systems

does

it

occur

in

a

plant

second

question

does

it

occur

in

a

plant

with

a

history

of

human

usage

if

the

answer

is

yes

then

you

have

your

human

data

sample

if

people

somewhere

have

been

taking

this

plant

for

millennia

then

you

know

that

it

doesn't

cause

blindness

miscarriages

madness

tumors

so

forth

and

narrowest

gate

is

does

it

have

an

affinity

a

relationship

to

ordinary

brain

chemistry

cause

you

don't

want

to

insult

the

physical

brain

you

don't

want

to

damage

yourself

in

this

enterprise

psilocybin

will

pass

this

test

stretching

the rules

a bit

LSD

will

pass

this

test

in

compounds

that

have

been

used

for

a

long

time

whether

or

not

it's

a

constituent

of

brain

chemistry

is

debatable

but

now

the

interesting

thing

about

applying

this

test

you

might

say

oh

well

what

a

downer

everything

is

getting

tossed

out

no

the

strongest

stuff

remains

DMT

passes

this

test

with

flying

colors

it's

already

in

your

brain

just

as

you

sit

here

it

has

a

long

history

of

human

usage

in

many

parts

of

the

world

and

it

occurs

in

many

species

of

plants

and

it

is

the

strongest

hallucinogen

known

so

this is a

reasonable

test

to

first

of

all

does

it

occur

in

a

plant

because

that

tells

you

that

at

least

it

is

not

toxic

to

organic

system

does

it

occur

in

a

plant

second

question

does

it

occur

in

a

plant

with

a

history

of

human

usage

if

the

answer

is

yes

then

you

have

your

human

data

sample

if

people

somewhere

have been

taking

this

miscarriages

madness

tumors

so

forth

and so

on

and

the

third

and

narrowest

gate

is

does

it

have

a

an

affinity

a

relationship

to

ordinary

brain

chemistry

because

you

don't

want

to

insult

the

physical

brain

you

don't

want

to

stretching

the

rules

a

bit

LSD

will

pass

this

test

in

other

words

LSD

is

a

relative

of

compounds

that

have

been

used

for

a

long

time

whether

or

not

it's

a

constituent

of

brain

chemistry

is

debatable

but

now

the

interesting

thing

about

applying

this

test

you

might

say

oh

well

what

a

downer

everything

is

getting

tossed

out

no

the

strongest

stuff

remains

DMT

passes

this

test

with

flying

colors

it's

already

in

your

brain

just

as

you

sit

here

it

has

a

long

history

of

human

usage

in

many

parts

of

the

world

and

it

occurs

in

many

species

of

plants

and

it

is

the

strongest

hallucinogen

known

so

this

is

a

reasonable

test

to

apply

that

to

avoid

basically

danger

and

damage

then

once

you've

done

that

you

have

your

friend

who

you

have

an

affinity

for

all

right

why don't

we break

now

and

you're

going to

final

here

as

old

pilots

like to

say

so

you

should

now

be

in

the

last

crack

mood

meaning

that

you're

getting

your

last

crack

at

me

what

turns

have

been

left

on

stones

and

what

stones

left

unturned

yes

i don't

really

know

anything

about

it

i

do

think

i

it's

puzzling

when

you

feel

that

the

initial

conditions

have

been

recreated

but

the

results

you

get

are

completely

different

and

astrology

then

offers

itself

as

an

explanation

well

the

last

time

you

did

it

the

moon

was

in

Taurus

now

it's

in

something

else

again

this

is

something

that

could

be

looked

at

is

there

a

time

i

i don't

believe

everything

the mushroom

tells me

i just

treat it

like

everybody

else

you know

you can't

trust anybody

a hundred

percent

but but the

mushroom does

seem to have the

idea that

it's good

when the moon

is in

scorpio

i've just

experientially

noticed that

that

things

seem

to go

better

in the

psychedelic

realm

when the

moon

is in

scorpio

i'm a

triple

scorpio

hey

yes

hey

wait a

minute

here

yeah

well

they're

probably

smoking

canick

and

aboriginal

tobaccos

and

various

things

you know

it's a

very odd

thing

i mean

you talk

about

cultural

evolution

and that

sort

of

thing

did

you

know

that

smoking

was

unknown

in

europe

and

asia

until

it was

brought

from

the

new

world

at

the

time

of

the

spanish

conquest

rome

never

smoked

its

opium

it

put it

in

wine

opium

was

never

smoked

in

china

until

after

tobacco

was

introduced

in

fact

the

smoking

of

opium

in

china

arose

largely

as a

result

of

trying

to

drive

out

tobacco

smoking

as

a

habit

this

method

of

drug

delivery

which

you

would

assume

was

paleolithic

was

unknown

to

the

civilization

that

we

evolved

in

the

new

world

seems

particularly

expertise

in

these

dimensions

for

example

enemas

are

one

of

the

very

few

things

that

we

can

that

have

entered

our

culture

as

a

cultural

contribution

unique

to

the

amazon

basin

enemas

are

they

had

rubber

they

had

natural

rubber

and

they

discovered

that

some

substances

were

so

toxic

that

you

didn't

want

to

put

them

into

your

stomach

but

that

they

would

be

active

if

you

would

directly

insert

them

and

so

the

enema

was

invented

millennia

ago

in

South

America

but

was

a

mad

idea

from the

point of

view

of

European

medicine

until

it

was

tried

and

then

of course

it

became

the

rage

and

there

are

then

successive

rages

of

upper

colon

focus

that

sweep

through

our

society

every

once

in a

while

yeah

that

was

an

essay

that

originally

appeared

in

Whole

Earth

Review

I

think

called

Plant

Plan

Planet

and

what

I

was

trying

to

say

there

was

there

is

a

great

deal

to

be

learned

from

emulating

plants

especially

in the

culture

of

crisis

that

we're

in

first

of

all

plants

they

have

to

deal

with

their

toxic

byproducts

because

they

can't

move

away

from

them

the

way

we

do

and

move

into

new

niches

plants

are

homeostatically

self

regulating

plants

are

degrees

notice

that

we

do

our

technologies

operate

at

degrees

and

up

and

then

produce

all

kinds

of

heavy metal

toxins

and

poisons

and this

sort of

thing

also

in a

sense

the

dowel

like

passivity

of

plants

the

way

in

which

they

accept

their

circumstances

essentially

an

animal

is

an

organism

that

can

move

away

from

the

circumstances

of

its

own

being

and

so

for

all

of

these

reasons

plants

seem

like

an

excellent

model

for

the

kind

of

future

that

we

should

be

building

we

organic

starting

and

ending

materials

in

industrial

processes

we

want

to

create

a

kind

of

integrated

homeostatic

cohesion

in our

societies

in all

these

cases

and

a

solar

based

society

in all

these

cases

the

plants

provide

the

model

they've

been

showing

how

to

do

these

things

very

time

yeah

are you

familiar

with

Rick

Tarnas

and

Roth

when they

get

together

on

the

whole

archetypal

archology

that

is

specific

related

to

the

planets

and

how

doing

people's

transits

or

charts

seems

to be

the

only

predictor

to be

very

heard

that

from

Rick

it's

very

interesting

I

haven't

actually

looked

at

the

data

the

only

reason

astrology

is

not

scientifically

respectable

is because

no one

can

hypothesize

how

the

coupling

takes

place

in

other

words

how

can

the

transit

of

mercury

be

coupled

to

an

event

system

on

this

planet

but

don't

despair

we

know

that

the

sun

radically

affects

the

weather

on

the

earth

but

no

coupling

system

has

ever

been

proven

for

that

either

it's

just

the

statistical

correlations

are so

overwhelming

that

it's

impossible

to

ignore

I

astrology

to

understand

it

to

something

like

fractal

resonance

the

reason

the

pattern

in

the

stars

is

repeated

in

the

pattern

of

your

life

is

because

there's

only

one

pattern

to

begin

with

it

isn't

that

the

stars

cause

you

to

be

the

way

you

are

any

more

than

that

you

cause

the

stars

to

be

the

way

they

are

there

is

not

a

causal

relationship

here

what

there

is

a

series

of

adumbrations

and

reflections

that

are

this

is

you

know

a

great

discovery

that

has

been

made

in

the

past

ten

years

one

of

the

greatest

intellectual

steps

ever

taken

by

human

beings

a

new

law

of

nature

is

now

discernible

and

I

across

scales

do you

understand

what

that

means

it

explains

why

an

atom

looks

like

a

solar

system

and

why

they

both

look

like

a

galaxy

because

nature

is

self

similar

across

scales

it

means

that

you

know

if

a

certain

architectural

conceit

works

on

one

level

nature

will

use

it

on

any

other

level

where

it

seems

appropriate

and

so

on

many

levels

the

same

patterns

repeat

and

so

it

wouldn't

surprise

me

at

all

if

in

the

next

while

we

got

the

equivalent

of

astrology

but

quantum

ology

quantum

ology

where

instead

of

calculating

downward

from

the

stars

to

the

context

of

human

fate

you

calculate

upward

from

the

atom

to

the

context

of

human

fate

and

if

you

keep

calculating

you

can

go

from

quantum

ology

to

astrology

and

leave

out

sociology

and

show

you know

that

these

things

are

reciprocal

reflections

of

each

other

then

the

mystery

and

the

woo

of

astrology

I

think

would

just

simply

disappear

and

be

replaced

by

an

of

course

how

could it

be

otherwise

kind

of

understanding

yeah

well

you know

somebody

said

the thing

that has

changed

least

in

western

civilization

in the

last

years

is the

classroom

I mean

this could

be

you know

I mean

everything else

has changed

but what

do we

do

we come

with

sharpened

pencils

and sit

and listen

to

elderly

lecherous

professionals

and

to

try

and

stay

out

of

their

clutches

long

enough

to

get

a

degree

and

then

we

go

out

and

play

the

game

I

think

that

this

is

somewhat

a

field

but

something

very

profound

is

happening

in

the

way

in

which

we

modern

people

process

information

I

don't

know

how

many

of

you

are

familiar

with

Marshall

McLuhan

but

McLuhan

argued

that

an

equally

profound

transition

occurred

with

the

introduction

of

print

is

not

simply

writing

that's

easy

to

read

and

reproduce

print

is

an

entirely

different

creature

than

anything

that

had

been

produced

before

it

has

qualities

that

no

other

medium

has

specifically

it's

linearity

it's

uniformity

it's

interchangeability

and what

I mean

by that

is

that

every

A

every

capital

A

looks

like

every

other

capital

A

they

are

interchangeable

when

you

when

a

friend

of

yours

writes

you

a

note

you

look

at

it

that's

the

precondition

to

reading

it

when

you

open

a

book

you

immediately

read

it

you

don't

look

at

it

at

all

very

age

with

that

white

back

no

we

just

read

and

the

difference

between

looking

and

reading

is

very

great

he

McLuhan

called it

the

contrast

between

a

manuscript

culture

which

is

ear

oriented

and

an

eye

oriented

visual

culture

well

now

what's

happening

to

us

and

I

was

talking

to

somebody

about

this

at

the

break

is

the

rise

of

the

image

the

image

is

in

the

ascendant

ever

since

the

invention

of

photography

let's

say

in the

middle

19th

century

followed

by

color

photography

followed

by

color

lithography

followed

by

moving

pictures

followed

by

television

followed

by

the

internet

VR

stereograms

and all

the rest

of it

something

is

happening

we

are

our

culture

is

forcing

our

visual

education

and

I

think

one

of

the

problems

with

education

is

that

we

are

trying

to

use

a

print

created

institution

to

educate

electronically

biased

human

beings

and

it's

created

a

kind

of

a

speed

bump

of

illiteracy

one

of

the

things

that

is

put

against

your

generation

you

generation

xers

here

is

that

you're

not

literary

you're

not

a

literary

culture

but

I

and

it's

true

don't

deny it

none

of

you

can

quote

Milton

but

but I

also think

it's a

temporary

thing

your

children

will

not

be

like

you

your

children

will

be

fully

visually

literate

they

will

have

assimilated

this

new

medium

and

operate

under

its

aegis

while

you

are

in

a

transition

phase

and

so

the

kind

of

dumbing

down

of

culture

that

has

had

to

occur

as we

go

from

a

fully

literate

culture

to a

fully

electronic

culture

is

I

think

transitional

I

mean

everybody

says

you

know

people

learn

everything

from

TV

kids

know

every

star

every

show

every

plot

and

say

why

do

they

know

that

junk

when

they

can't

memorize

the

sequence

of

US

presidents

well

make

a

good

enough

TV

show

about

it

and

they

probably

will

not

that

I'm

a

fan

of

TV

but

I

am

a

fan

of

the

visual

image

and

I

think

TV

betrays

it

to

some

degree

HDTV

may

correct

that

but

it

gives

psychedelics

an

interesting

role

because

they

are

such

stimulants

to

the

visual

imagination

it's

almost

like

they

lead us

deeper

in

this

cultural

direction

that

we

have

great

appetite

for

and

now

you

know

with

CD-ROMs

and

multimedia

and

websites

and all

that

we

just

show

each

other

stuff

everybody

is

building

a

website

everybody

wants

to

invite

you

over

to

see

their

latest

visual

creation

and

I

think

that

language

itself

is

headed

in

this

direction

that

our

language

is

literally

becoming

more

colorful

more

sparkling

more

engaging

and

it's

because

it's

becoming

more

visual

and

eventually

it may

be an

entirely

visual

exercise

the rise

of

icons

is an

interesting

example

of this

but now

wherever you

go in

the world

if you

will push

yourself

just a

little bit

you can

understand

what's

going on

because

signage

is so

iconographic

it doesn't

matter

whether you're

in Germany

or France

or Argentina

or where

you are

the signage

is in an

international

language

of visible

symbols

that unite

us all

you see

the thing

is

the word

is ambiguous

to a far

greater degree

than the

image

and so

when we

communicate

in words

we communicate

incompletely

if we communicate

in images

it's much

closer

to

fulfilling

the intent

of communication

which is

to erase

the boundaries

between

the messenger

and those

the messages

being sent

to

yeah

what you're

saying

it's like

I feel

it's a return

to the archaic

because there was

a time

when people

didn't read

and they had

to get

their information

by one image

whether it was

going to the church

and seeing a

thing about

it's not gonna

work

but if it was

fulfilled

then like

a picture

worth a thousand

words

you know

looking at

if each

one could just

be a visual

image

then you could

have done

that quickly

well that's why

I called my book

one of my books

the archaic revival

because you see

I really think

the thing that

McLuhan was

trying to say

was

that every

medium

be it

print

even treated

the electric

light

as a medium

every medium

has

a hidden

agenda

which

you're not

the users

of the medium

are not

aware of

until it's

too late

for instance

in his

discussion

of the automobile

it was

invented

to convey

people

from place

to place

in practical

terms

what it

was

was a

bedroom

away

from home

and

a whole

generation

of people

discovered

sexuality

much earlier

than they

would have

because of

the automobile

that wasn't

its intent

but that

was

its effect

similarly

McLuhan

says

you could

need

have the concept of the citizen if you were if it was not preceded by the invention of movable type

because the citizen is an

interchangeable social unit the way a letter is an interchangeable unit in

topography also

the linearity of Western thought is a product of the fact that when we communicate in print we arrange our thoughts in

lines that isn't done in some in some languages but in ours it is well then we impute that quality of our

communication method to

reality itself

My hope is that through holography and virtual reality and

HDTV and a deep awareness of McLuhan that we could create what I would call a

bias-less media in other words it would be a media that would do to you exactly what reality does to you

instead of pushing you in some other direction and it would be then a return to the archaic and it might be

technically very

sophisticated but the final impression must be I am NOT looking at a screen

I am NOT turning the pages of a book I am NOT listening to earphones I am really

having this experience and it is really real I've never heard the VR

profits talk about it as a bias-less form of media but I think that's what we're headed for well when media becomes

bias-less

media becomes reality and

we you know this is this is within reach now

I don't know about HDTV it seems slow coming I

saw it in Frankfurt and I was shocked have you seen it

it it it's not at all what I expected I expected you know they the hype is it's just like a movie it's that clear

high-definition television it's an entirely different way of doing TV well it's much weirder than film it's a window it's

freakishly

three-dimensional I mean you can't tear your eyes off of it you can't believe how

intensely real it is in fact it's sort of hyper real in some way it's to the issue of virtual reality

I don't know I was a speaker at Seagrath

last August and at one point I turned to Brenda Laurel and I said I think we can stop hyping virtual reality

it appears to have attained lift off speed because you know soft image

the

Disney micro they were all there with mega million dollar outlays and they haven't yet figured out

how to deliver it but it may not it it it may be cheap it may come over the wire it may cost you a quarter

it may not be the fantasy of the virtual reality

reality salon

in your house it may just simply come over the wire I don't I think the economics of it may delay or

accelerate it but that the appetite for it is so great that it is for sure on its way

what's holding it back is is the technology

technology because the demands that we make of our hardware when we move to VR are incredible

I mean look at these eucalyptus trees blowing in the wind out here look at how each leaf has a unique

reflective index of its own which is changing in time think of the computational

energy that would have to be brought to bear to convincingly reproduce that in a VR environment

I mean it's orders of magnitude more computationally demanding than anything

currently being done however

you know it's said of the computer well it's said of the automobile if it had evolved at the same rate as the computer

they would now a car would now go three hundred and seventy five thousand miles an hour on a nickel's worth of gas and cost you two hundred bucks

so

we shouldn't assume at all that we're reaching the limits of the put the potential limits of the computer

I'd say we're probably about halfway there

there is right now a fiber optic

experimental line between the university of michigan and the university of minnesota

that is able to transfer

630 gigabytes per second

that's the encyclopedia britannica in under a 30th of a second

that's bandwidth

that can handle anything

we just have to run that experimental cable into every city and home on the planet and

and and then we'll have it you know mcleughan had an interesting idea mcleughan's a weird character because a very advanced thinker

but a convert to catholicism

so forth and so on he finally concluded that electricity

is

the physical descent of the holy ghost into history

uh that as that as the planet

as our cities turn to light and everything is linked together informationally

that this is uh this is the enfolding presence of the third person of the trinity

and you know since electricity is a fairly mysterious item anyway

uh who is to say not in practical terms it may lead to something very very much like that a gathering

of us all together uh in cyber hyper shimano space

yeah

sure i'll describe it briefly i've tried to stay off it because i tried to keep this botanically focused

for those of you who don't know it i'm

i'm i have other burdens to bear other than my psychedelic advocacy and one of them is

is that uh

uh

i

am the purveyor of a theory

of history

which has many different aspects

about it and i've used some of the terms like novelty and aggression of novelty

concrescence

but i i i believe that i uh have discovered or was told a mathematical algorithm that allows us to

replace probability theory with a with a wave form that predicts where in time novelty will cluster

and where in time uh very probable events should be assumed to to concentrate it's a very neat mathematical

theory it's all very solid and so forth and so on but it has as all theories do what i call a hard swallow built in

to illustrate what i mean the hard swallow in normal cosmology is called the big bang

you know if you can believe that you'll believe anything this is the idea that the universe sprang from

nothing in a single moment for no reason notice that whether that's true or not it's the limit case for credulity

i mean if you can believe that it's a little hard to know what you would dig your heels in on

uh the hard swallow in my theory is that it seems to all calculate out to prove that uh we're less than 18 years away

from an event as dramatic as the big bang but sort of the big bang in reverse what i call the big surprise

that this process of boundary dissolution that we are have been experiencing in our historical and

cultural adventure is accelerating by a factor such that uh half of the history of the universe is going to

unfold in the next 17 years as much will happen in other words in the next 17 years has happened in the

previous 17 or 20 billion years that in fact history is the phenomenon which immediately precedes

this event sort of in the way that the dilation of the cervix is the phenomenon which immediately

precedes the birth of an infant history is the indicator event that says the transcendental object

hidden in the protean depths of nature is about to shed all its foils and emerge in its hyperdimensional

nakedness at the end of time and the it would be a mad thing to hypothesize except that the mathematical

algorithm allows very accurate predictions of the past now at first that may sound silly but notice

it's easy to predict the future who the hell can may say it it's very difficult to predict the past because

it's already happened so whether you were right or wrong or not is going to be immediately

determinable and i believe based on this theory's ability to describe the past that we should take very

seriously the idea that we are in fact the carriers of a process of universal metamorphosis that is reaching its culmination

you may find that impossible to imagine that in 18 years the world will turn itself inside out

but i think if you sit with it a while try to imagine that not happening

try to imagine this world 500 years from now if we continue with business as usual and no vertical gain

it's inconceivable we have painted ourselves into some kind of a corner i grant you my schedule is a little

breathtaking breathtaking only 18 years but i'll bet you if my schedule were a hundred years you'd feel that it was uncomfortably long viewed

sometime in the next little while it's going to be apparent to everybody that the human adventure is building towards some kind of quantized

transition point uh we are not going to wander in the miasma of of techno worship male dominance resource exploitation and

ever burgeoning human population forever it's impossible it's a self-limiting exercise and to the degree that we can

educate ourselves and communicate with each other we can we can hasten

this process or at least uh make it easier uh for the planetary culture to go through

yeah so given that metaphor of preparing for another bird would it be presumptuous to look at

the plants coming into this north american culture and sort of like like when i when i was getting ready

to birth for about four hours before i started getting flooded with visions and hallucinations and going

into the other world and i'm seeing that the plans in this culture and their reawakening in the last 30 years

could be sort of that momentum to help move us into this new birth process oh i think so because i think what

we're we're we're going to history is ending but time will continue well what is time without history for

human beings well it's the archaion we're going back into the archaic and apparently as central to the

archaic as uh nuclear physics and economics is to our world with shamanism and hallucinogenic plants so i think we're

we're preparing to to make a return nothing happens without a reason and nothing is unannounced this is

something the mushroom told me i i it's a very interesting idea nothing is unannounced if you

are sensitive enough you can never be taken by surprise because there is always the the wave which

precedes the actual arrival of the event and a lot of people talk about the end of the world

but it's almost entirely couched negatively i feel that i am without a doubt the most optimistic person

i have ever met or heard of and yet after i give some of my lectures people come up to me and say

it was frightening it was an appalling vision of what he said you missed the point i'm telling you

you know god's kingdom is 18 years away how could you possibly interpret that as negative and say well

but aren't you saying that everything will be changed and transformed and swept away well yes but

you know that's the way of it you want a psychedelic truth you know 30 years of psychedelic

voyaging i can distill it for you this is not a psychedelic truth this is truth here it is yes

and you can learn this from drugs you can learn it from life you can learn it from death you can learn

it any way you like but by god you will learn it nothing lasts nothing lasts not your enemies

not your friends not your youth not your dreams not your fears not your hopes not even yourself

nothing lasts nothing lasts i mean this has been said often but felt rarely you know heraclitus said

all flows and and the lie of western psychology is that something is stable god's nature

the equinoctial points uh something lasts and and because of this lie we are perpetually in a state of

anxiety because the truth of our experience is nothing lasts and yet the truth that our culture tells us

is you know save your immortal soul make a contribution preserve protect conserve

stabilize retain it it's pointless and and so the central truth of being is the felt presence of

immediate reality that's all you will ever have and so the quality of the felt presence of immediate

experience is uh what you want to impact and determine and everything else is rumor hearsay hope

dream memory projection but the felt presence of immediate experience if that is not

satisfying to you you have to change your life you have to do something and uh

uh the fact that western western psychology and civilization is a vast exercise in delayed gratification

and the consequences of that are endless unhappiness and neurosis and fetish substitution

and so forth and so on for reality it it should be liberating to know that nothing lasts but instead it paralyzes with a sense of uh

ephemerality when what it should do is empower an enormous sense of freedom and i think this ability to accept

the inevitable passing and coming to be of phenomena is what psychedelic wisdom is really about

anybody anything hit me yeah

you mean my views on the web where did i learn my views from well ralph abraham you should visit his website

um it's um it's uh http colon double backslash hypathea at u c s c dot edu dot org well it's hi it's basically it's just a url

it's a it's a it's a funny question i'm puzzled because i never thought of these as my views on the net aren't these the views of the net i mean is anybody saying anything different

i mean i assume this is what unites the faithful in the religion of net worship

but maybe i'm wrong well that's more alarming the the businessmen

will wherever you know wherever there is a frontier i mean first come the explorers then come the

missionaries then come the hookers and the businessmen uh and we've got plenty of hookers and plenty of

businessmen on the internet now i it's the content i'm i'm McLuhan enough to not so much be obsessed with

the content it's not what is on the net that's important it's the net itself it's what it is it's

the fact that if you want to find something out you now can it's the greatest democratization

of information that's ever occurred i mean the head of the cia under jimmy carter didn't have

intelligence as good as i do because i can go on to the net and and access uh these various uh you know

databases so uh the thing that is so empowering about the net i think is you know tim leary had a

slogan back in the 60s he used to tell his audiences find the others find the others

well how do you find the others in the 60s you put a flower in your hair and headed for san francisco

today you just you go on to the net and go to the well and you can find the others it doesn't matter how

obscure peculiar or bizarre your interest is i guarantee you you can find 10 or 15 people who

passionately share this thing and and that empowers you and it builds communities and community

is the enemy of authoritarian organization because community springs from the heart authority springs

from theory keeping us in a decommunal state is a major part of the agenda of anybody controlling us

that's why the internet is so terrifying to people because obviously it strengthens dissidents

it uh and uh you know just last week this stupid thing happened in congress the the digital decency act

ask yourself how many times have you been told that child pornography bestiality so forth and so on

is being purveyed to thousands of people on the net uh then if you have any experience of the net you realize that that's like thinking of san francisco

as that one corner at broadway and columbus where they peddle girly mags that's just a part of san francisco

it's a complex civilization we have all kinds of people everybody should be able to do what they want

but to define san francisco that way would then lead you to the conclusion well maybe we better seal off

san francisco and clean up this hideous evil that's breaking loose this is what's being done on the web

the public is being manipulated by major media to think that the web is just swarming with pederous fetish

but please restrict the web and to get regulation and put cops on every node and so forth and so on

and this this is very bad it should be resisted it probably will succeed i don't think it will destroy

the web i think it'll be a speed bump but please know that a war is going on for your uh loyalty

in this issue and don't allow uh you know uh pornograph uh uh pornograph uh uh phobes and people like

that to stampede you into the idea that the web is a tremendous social evil poised at the souls of our

children i mean my god you have to have ten thousand dollars of equipment and an engineering degree to

make your way into these places i don't think there are too many eight-year-olds uh wandering

around traumatized by what they're finding at adult alt dot pix dot erotic seems idiotic to me

yeah

in terms of the dea there are a lot of discussions going on because the government seems to condition a

lot of our lives around usage of the sick black clients there are different discussions going on

in the bay area about just how to deal with some people advocating going public coming out and which

uh i like to not agree with other people around the beginning uh the first amendment challenge and

having a number of cases coming up which was certainly constructed and i'm wondering if you have any thoughts about uh

any sort of general uh social way about how to deal with these governmental or on track issues

it's a complicated thing because there are two levels there is there is first of all the drug problem we

are told we have which is too many people are taking too many bad drugs and committing crimes in order

to obtain money to buy drugs or committing crimes in order to transport manufacture and deal drugs and this

has dehumanized our society and it's a terrible scourge and we have to do something about it that's level

one of the drug problem what you are not told is that governments are the chief offenders

most drugs in the world are either produced by governments or produced with the connivance of

governments and the our our little bailiwick the psychedelics don't even figure in this issue because

not enough money is being made the only psychedelic that ever made anybody any money was lsd

and on a scale where we're talking about methamphetamine cocaine and heroin the fortunes made off of lsd

were minuscule the drug thing is a con governments need vast amounts of untraceable cash they believe

because they turn it over to their secret police agencies who then pursue secret agendas

where they try to control events by illicit and non-sanctioned means and by that i mean rigging elections

murdering labor leaders hounding liberal editors into retirement smearing people so forth and so on

uh the the major the hard drug markets of this world are entirely in the hands of governments

you know somebody pulls a stunt in kuwait and we're there in a moment we send troops to haiti but these

mysterious uh um jungle warlords in burma seem untouchable nothing can be done

they're beyond the reach of any army any aerial bombing campaign it's just mysteriously uh uh indestructible

these warlords in burma well it's because they are the producing end of an illicit world girdling

organization whose purpose is to deliver drugs to the market and i i believe that the cia got into this

game because for you could almost say for good reasons from their point of view the cia in the middle 60s as

long as well as the rest of the american establishment was confronted with the spectacle of uh black people

determined to burn down the core of every city in america until they got social justice

the decision was made to bring uh hundreds of tons of chemically pharmaceutically pure china white number

three heroin into those ghettos and just basically dump it on the ground and see what happens and it totally broke the back

of black radicalism and turned everybody into a junkie or a gangster somewhere uh in that system well then when

we lost the vietnam war um the way the geopolitical thing came down was khomeini got the heroin industry

and china white was traded in for for iranian brown a lower grade of heroin well since khomeini is not a nice

man in our pantheon uh heroin suddenly became you know uh highly repressed but at the same time as the vietnam war

and wound down uh these insurgencies in south america

were being started up, and cocaine was brought on to the scene.

And I can remember in like 72, 73, 74,

a particular cover of Time magazine,

cocaine, the new drug of choice.

And it was just this far short of an endorsement.

It was all about movie stars were doing it,

and everybody was doing it.

The huge picture of lines on the cover,

that's a decision to sell.

That's an ad campaign, a very high-profile ad campaign.

Well, I think I said to you yesterday,

in the international drug trade,

the real cost of these drugs is in transporting them.

Because you have to pay somebody

to bring 10 kilos of heroin into the United States,

unless you know fools,

you're going to have to pay them $40,000 or $50,000,

a fraction of the worth of that heroin.

But nevertheless, if you haven't sold it yet,

it may be tricky to get that kind of scratch together.

Well, that's for 10 kilos of junk.

You have to pay $50,000 to transport it.

But if you have a C-130,

you can bring 50,000 pounds of heroin,

and it will cost you far less per unit volume.

So the CIA had all these airplanes,

and they simply diverted them to the drug trade.

You probably have been following this recent scandal

involving the U.S. Forest Service.

Has this been in the papers here?

It's been well rehearsed in Hawaii.

Well, as you know,

the U.S. Forest Service uses C-130s

to drop fire-retardant chemicals on forest fires.

When the Air Force was downsizing three years ago,

the Forest Service requisitioned 15 C-130s.

By manipulating paperwork and painting out serial numbers

and painting on other serial numbers,

only three of those C-130s ever reached the Forest Service.

The other 12 mysteriously disappeared.

Do you know what a C-130 looks like?

Do you know how hard it is to lose one of those puppies?

Twelve of them disappeared without a trace.

Well, guess where?

And guess what they're lugging back and forth.

Now, the CIA itself is addicted to the money.

The original impulse,

break the back of black radicalism,

has been replaced by a more obvious impulse,

make a lot of money.

Where do you get a quick billion dollars

if you need it in a hurry?

It's called, you take a floater on drugs.

That's what you do.

And the amount of money is so great

that anyone can be corrupted.

These boats that come up from Columbia

that lie off the coast of Florida,

the so-called motherships,

a guy with a fast cigarette boat

can make three trips to and from

one of those motherships on a cloudy night.

The standard pay for one of those trips,

which takes about 40 minutes,

is $125,000.

You can make $375,000 a night doing this,

and you're not a player,

you're not a kingpin,

you're not a major figure,

you're a totally disposable peon.

So imagine how much money

there is to be made at the top.

Who can refuse a $10 million bribe?

People come in and say,

listen, we'd like to give you $10 million,

and we've bought a house for you

in the highlands of Malaysia

and a Ferrari,

and we'd just like you to go and live there

and do whatever you want.

And the choice is a bullet in the head.

So which would you prefer?

We're perfectly at ease either way,

so you figure it out and call us back.

Nobody can resist that kind of thing.

So we're in a situation

where we are being radically manipulated

by governments

because they are addicted

to a style of piratical rogue capitalism

that is just simply

the greatest windfall ever imagined.

I mean, there has never been anything

like the modern drug,

illicit drug trade

in the history of the world.

Ten years ago,

the drug trade

and the international arms trade

were on a par

with each other.

Today,

the international drug trade

makes ten times as much money

as the international arms trade,

and there's no end in sight.

There's a case

that you're in a process

of becoming

psychologists, clinicians

who want to work with psychedelics

and yet feel that

their careers would be destroyed

if they were to do so

or if they were to do something in court.

And the general social times

or the governmental pressures on that.

Here are some thoughts

about

in the 60s,

one group was tried

and the commuceration

goes now

because when are you getting

blood fed

how people could approach

the psychedelic situation now?

Well,

some of you may know

Bobby Faust

in New York.

He's an interesting guy.

He has an idea.

He says

that

he advocates something

which he calls

civil obedience.

He says

not civil disobedience

but civil obedience.

He says

everybody

who smokes pot

should take their pot

on a certain day

and march down

to the cop shop

and demand

that justice be done.

And that

if everybody

who smoked pot

did that

the courts

would be so clogged

the entire

madness

of the whole thing

would be exposed

for everyone

to see

and it would just

be impossible

to enforce.

That's a strategic idea.

It might work.

From observing

American society

as long as I have

it's very clear to me

they don't hand out

rights

around here.

The only people

who have any rights

are people

who demand them.

And you can look

at how black people

broke free

in the 60s.

You can look

at how the gay

community

got itself

together

in the 70s

and 80s

and apparently

unless you're

willing to

stand up

for what you are

you're going

to be forever

stigmatized.

It was

you know

black people

they couldn't

escape it.

The reflectivity

of their skin

marked them.

But it was

very very

courageous

for gay people

many of whom

were way

in the closet

and doing well

in straight society

to risk

all that

and say

no look

this is what's

going on

this is who I am.

Now if there's a problem

it's your problem

not my problem.

And homosexuality

was a crime

in many states

in most states

just as drugs are.

So I think

really

if we're serious

we're going to

have to risk

something.

We're going to

have to risk

our jobs

our reputations

perhaps some

of our friendships

and just say

look

this is what

it is.

Now

if you don't

like it

don't do it

but don't

legislate

for the rest

of us.

Society

is a very

complex

enterprise

and what's

good for you

may not be

good for me.

And if it's

to be done

in mass action

that's better.

We all feel

better if we

march in a group

than if we

march alone.

But we

drug people

are incredibly

we fold

too easily

I think.

I think we

feel great

shame

on some

level

about what

we've done.

I mean it's

very hard to

stand up to

a really

straight

person

and say

yeah

no no

I didn't

try it

I just

did it

ten minutes

ago.

We're not

talking about

my wild

college days

we're talking

about 35

seconds

before I

stood in

your presence

and see

I'm not

falling down

I'm not

about to

commit murder

I'm just

like you

are

except I

have this

different

preference

and force

that

and

it's the

task of

a generation

you know

the right

wing

they understand

far better

than we do

I mean

when Pat

Buchanan

says it's

cultural war

he's talking

about us

we're the

counterculture

we're the

enemy

and

the

response

of a

desperate

foe

is an

ever more

desperate

lashing out

and

Christianity

is not

going to

go quietly

into that

good night

it's going

to get

nuttier

as it

approaches

its terminal

delirium

the killing

of abortion

doctors

is a good

example

what does

that do

for the

right to

life movement

it totally

discredits

them

to just

nuts

we no

longer

have to

make

any kind

of effort

to sway

those people

or come

to terms

with them

they're

crazy

people

and you

would no

more try

to convert

them to

your point

of view

than you

would try

to convert

somebody

who pulled

a gun

on you

in an

alley

yeah

obviously

it's probably

not much

of trade

right now

because

it seems

to be

a very

elusive

substance

and outfit

though

one would

probably argue

that more

people should

use it

and see it

and this

experience

you mean

do I think

there will be

more of it

and how that

will progress

will it become

something

you know

like mushroom

mushroom industry

is fairly well

developed

because it's a

very profitable

type of thing

and it

seems to be

a

to a large

extent

a

money driven

type of

occupation

that people

go into

going into

money

and about

money

well yes

I mean

the mushroom

thing is a

little different

in the sense

that a

dedicated

mushroom grower

who works

day and

night

can produce

maybe

10,000

hits of

mushrooms

in a

year

a chemist

working with

sufficient

material

can produce

millions

of doses

of a

pure

compound

I think

the reason

mushrooms

have

flourished

in such

and have

you noticed

how

mushrooms

have been

around

since

have you

noticed

how the

press

never

writes

about it

never

interviews

with

underground

mushroom

growers

never

exposes

it

never

talks

about

it

that's

I believe

because

to expose

it is to

inspire ever

more people

to do it

it's very

easy to do

you don't have

to have a lot

of capital

backing

you don't have

to have a degree

in biochemistry

you don't have

to be able

to handle

explosive

materials

it's a very

quiet

calm

cottage

industry

kind of

thing

I think

DMT

well

first of all

I know

there's more

DMT

around

in the last

year and a half

than in the

previous

20 years

I don't know

who's making it

or where it's

coming from

but I'm

certainly

more and more

one thing

about DMT

that holds

it back

as a

commercial

commodity

is

if you sell

somebody

a gram

you may not

see them

for a year

if you sell

somebody a gram

of cocaine

they'll be back

8 hours

later

the speed

at which people

consume

their DMT

once

I mean

I know

somebody who has

2 grams

of DMT

and I said

you're not

using it

very fast

and he said

yes

well I'm

saving it

for my

grandchildren

I said

you're not

even married

for God's

sake

so

it's

more an

act of

love

and dedication

but I think

there are

enough

people

out there

who care

more for

hell raising

and outrage

than money

that we can

depend on them

to produce

some of this

stuff

and some

people make

it simply

in order to

have it

for themselves

and then of

course

they overproduced

by a factor

of a thousand

so they might

as well dump

the rest

of that

stuff

but I

would love

to see

a national

it's always

puzzled me

why

there aren't

four inch

headlines

on every

newspaper

on the

planet

saying

you know

drug

discovered

which

opens

doorway

to hyperspace

how can

they keep

it secret

how can

it be

a secret

I mean

we live

in a culture

where people

regularly

jump out

of airplanes

for recreational

pleasure

that's the kind

of culture

we live in

and yet

DMT

has not

made its way

very deeply

into that culture

I mean

if what people

want is

thrills

my god

are there

thrills

still untapped

however

I've noticed

the surrender

issue

works here

I've talked

to people

who

sailed

solo

around the

world

climbed

the north

face

of Everest

shot

the rapids

on the

Mekong

and so forth

say

oh well

you're a real

hairy chested

guy

would you like

to smoke

some DMT

and you know

absolutely

ashen

no

absolutely

not

are you

crazy

that stuff

is dangerous

I said

well

what about

the time

you parachuted

into

Kilimanjaro

at the

22,000

foot level

I said

well

I knew

what I was

doing

I was

so

I don't

know

different

thrills

for

different

folks

yeah

oh yeah

no

that's

a very

serious

thing

see

when

here's

the legal

history

of how

this

all

went

down

in

the

middle

60s

it must

have been

around

somebody

somewhere

jumped

out of

a window

on

LSD

and managed

to kill

themselves

every

newspaper

in the

country

if not

the

planet

did

in-depth

detailed

background

you know

maps

how he

walked

to the

balcony

the

arrow

the whole

thing

and

LSD

was legal

at that

time

so then

there was

a huge

hue and

cry

about how

it had

to be

made

illegal

and

this was

in

California

and the

California

state

legislature

with

almost

no

debate

with

no

professional

witnesses

with no

scientific

evidence

placed

before

them

not only

made

LSD

illegal

they

made

psilocybin

DMT

ebogain

and

figure this

one out

bufotinin

was made

schedule

one

now

guess

this

bufotinin

is inactive

in human

beings

why was

it made

schedule

one

because

two weeks

before this

debate

took place

a paper

was published

suggesting that

it might

cause

hallucinations

in human

beings

in other

words

they just

went through

the scientific

literature

and anything

described as

a hallucination

hallucinogen

was poured

in to

this

California

drug

bill

well

and so

then it

was

passed

well then

six weeks

later

somebody

jumps out

of a window

somewhere else

this time

it's not even

clear drugs

are involved

but the mere

suggestion

that they might

have been

involved

is enough

to create

a national

debate

and the

congress

rather than

hold hearings

and adduce

scientific evidence

says

just take

the California

statute

and federalize

it

and so

that was

done

so

what the

consequences

of this

are

is

in the

case

of

a drug

substance

like

psilocybin

no

scientific

evidence

has ever

been offered

to any

legislative

body

saying

there was

anything

wrong

with it

it

was

specifically

made

illegal

simply

because

it

causes

hallucinations

no

health

risk

is

involved

nothing

was

known

about

psilocybin

at that

time

so

that's

the

first

attack

on

these

laws

they

were

not

properly

formulated

in the

first

place

they

were

not

based

on

reality

or

social

need

second

of

all

DMT

it

is

now

subsequently

become

known

is an

ordinary

constituent

of human

metabolism

how

can

you

make

possession

of this

substance

illegal

when

every

man

woman

and

child

on

earth

is

holding

it's

like

the

ultimate

catch

we

are

all

criminals

all

the

time

they

don't

have

to

throw

pot

around

your

apartment

they

can

just

draw

blood

from

your

good

right

arm

and

there's

the

damning

evidence

right

there

so

in the

light

of

all

this

silliness

it

would

seem

logical

I

think

to go

back

and have

a scientific

review

and a

complete

revision

of the

scheduling

of these

drugs

look at the

scheduling

anyway

schedule

one

what is

it

compounds

with

absolutely

no

medical

use

whatsoever

cannabis

is in

there

even

though

it's

the

preferred

treatment

for

glaucoma

and

for

chemotherapy

to

suppress

nausea

in

chemotherapy

heroin

is in

there

and

then

all

psychedelics

you

move

to

schedule

two

and

the

first

thing

that

jumps

out

of you

is

cocaine

is

schedule

two

marijuana

is

considered

to be

a more

dangerous

and

devastating

drug

than

cocaine

why

because

by the

rules

of the

game

cocaine

is

used

in

certain

medical

procedures

to

anesthetize

the

optic

nerves

sometimes

and to

anesthetize

nerves

in the

throat

for

certain

forms

of

surgery

so

because

it

has

this

obscure

medical

use

it's

scheduled

two

and

this

doesn't

make

any

sense

at

all

these

drug

laws

have

never

been

rationally

put in

place

the

original

stigmatization

of

cannabis

was

carried

on

by

the

Hearst

newspapers

because

they

spent a

huge amount

of money

buying

Canadian

forest

for

newsprint

just

as

the

hemp

industry

was

beginning

to

develop

as

a

supplier

for

paper

and

when

they

realized

that

they

had

badly

invested

in

Canadian

timber

they

decided

that

they

out

of

business

and

so

they

discovered

that

it's

marijuana

among

those

wily

dark

skinned

folks

south

of

the

border

who

are

so

unclean

and

peculiar

and

they

began

to

attach

it

to

a

stigmatized

racial

group

and

managed

to

hound

it

out

of

existence

this

game

has

never

been

played

fairly

it

has

always

been

played

to

benefit

markets

capitalists

and

producers

it

has

never

been

handled

in a

rational

and

scientific

manner

and

it

should

be

because

there's

very

little

doubt

that

the

future

holds

an

endless

cornucopia

of

psychoactive

drugs

this

thing

I

told

you

about

yesterday

salvorine

alpha

what's

to

become

of

this

I

have

some

friends

who

have

a

church

and

a

bunch

of

pagan

folk

and

I

told

them

about

this

and

they

immediately

filed

it

as

a

sacrament

of

their

church

now

they

couldn't

have

done

this

if

it

were

illegal

but

it's

at

the

moment

legal

and

so

they

proclaimed

it

a

sacrament

of

their

church

and

are

using

it

ritually

and

hope

that

when

it

inevitably

becomes

illegal

they

will

be

in a

position

to

argue

that

it

was

legal

and

they

drugs

of

all

types

and

we

just

simply

need

a

rational

process

that

serves

who

that

serves

the

user

not

the

producer

the

purveyor

but

these

are

medicines

they

should

be

subject

to

the

same

standards

of purity

and so

forth

that the

pharmaceutical

industry

what's

always

put

against

drugs

is

that

they're

unclean

and

dirty

but

that's

because

they're

made

in

illicit

clandestine

labs

that have

been

forced

underground

by

witless

government

policies

and

now

it's

not

even

a

matter

of

debate

we've

got

the

Dutch

data

we've

got

we

know

that

when

you

legalize

drugs

people

don't

immediately

start

smoking

reefer

hours

a

day

and

committing

acts

of

that

hasn't

happened

anywhere

that's

a

fantasy

of

the

Christian

right

wing

no

all

that

happens

when

you

legalize

drugs

is

that

people

continue

to

do

what

they've

been

doing

whether

they

use

drugs

or

not

so

it's

a

shell

game

and

if

any

of

and

rationalize

it

because

it's

one

of

the

great

unregulated

scams

on the

planet

and

millions

and millions

of people

are being

victimized

third world

poverty

is being

exacerbated

criminal

syndicalism

is

flourishing

ordinary

law abiding

people

are being

criminalized

people

are being

made

to feel

guilty

about

simply

trying

to

understand

their

own

spiritual

yearnings

and their

own

place

in the

cosmos

it's

a

tragic

situation

and it's

retarding

cultural

transformation

yeah

oh

yeah

oh

absolutely

I mean

Germany

for

example

I've been

coming and

going from

Germany

for seven

or eight

years

it's always

been

loose

I mean

you could

always

sit

in a

reasonably

sleazy

restaurant

after dinner

and make

a spliff

and hand

it around

and nobody

would say

anything

but

and

now

the

hemp laws

have been

declared

unconstitutional

they're more

liberal than I

would be

in Germany

in other words

they say

that you can

possess

a gram

of heroin

every 24

hours

without legal

consequences

that seems

to me

a little

loose

I mean

maybe

I've known

more junkies

than the head

of the German

Supreme Court

but

it seems

a little

loose

you can

possess up

to 40

grams

of hashish

for your own

personal use

and

you can

grow up

to 12

plants

without

stigma

and

it's

interesting

I was

in Germany

in May

of this

year

and this

law

had just

been passed

six weeks

before

and I

was staying

in Berlin

and Berlin

like San

Francisco

has many

residential

districts

that are

high

narrow

three story

houses

you could

look down

these

streets

and there

are all

these balconies

and just

peeking

above

every

balcony

were the

heads

of the

allowed

cannabis

plants

per person

and you

could see

that the

entire

city

of Berlin

was just

slowly

turning

green

and

while I

was there

I saw

an interview

with the

chief of

police

and he

said

yeah

we love

this new

cannabis

law

I've been

able to

assign

real crime

problems

and look

at our

statistics

on how

few

stolen

car

deals

there have

been

you know

the police

are now

freed to

do what

they should

be doing

which is

maintain

public

order

not

messing

around

with what

people are

doing

in the

confines

of their

own

minds

if it

weren't

for

Europe

I

you

know

we

are

we

I

had

always

traveled

all over

the world

but I

never

really

been

to

Europe

until

about

eight

years

ago

and

when

you

go

there

you

discover

what

some

people

say

it

was

de

Tocqueville

and

some

people

say

Charles

de Gaulle

but

someone

said

America

it's

a footnote

on

European

civilization

and

you

go

there

and

you

discover

oh

this

is

where

it

all

came

from

this

is

where

they

invented

all

of

this

stuff

what

peculiarly

complicates

our

situation

is

Europe

is a

genuinely

secular

society

and

the

concept

of

a

Christian

right

wing

being

able

to

dominate

the

political

agendas

it's

inconceivable

to

them

I

of

course

but

it's

a

curiosity

a

testament

to

their

tolerance

not

a

knife

poised

at

the

heart

of

political

dialogue

the

way

it

is

in

this

country

we

have

allowed

ourselves

to

become

too

rigidified

in

this

meddling

sort

of

neo

Lutheran

attitude

toward

each

other

don't

people

understand

that

the

essence

of

sophistication

is

tolerance

that's

all

Robert

Frost

once

said

the

secret

of

happiness

is

learning

to

enjoy

people

you

don't

approve

of

and

I

would

add

and

the

second

secret

is

learning

the

only

place

where

it's

illegal

it's

not

just

psychoactive

plans

which

is

suppressed

it's

the

use

of

any

by

an

ordinary

person

someone

who

hasn't been

given

authority

and

I

think

Americans

are

paranoid

of

nature

our

history

is

one

of

conquest

and

we

though

we

slaughtered

a lot

of

Indians

we

never

tell

it

that

way

we

say

we

tamed

the

frontier

and

so

nature herself is set up as the enemy of American destiny.

And that's why, you know, the incredible artificiality of our culture

and our incredible anxiety in the face of chaos.

We're order freaks.

That's why it's so disturbing to people to imagine that people around them might be stoned

because they don't know what stoned is.

So that terra incognito becomes frightening to them.

We're a very infantile society.

I had some German friends visit me in Hawaii and they wanted to go to the beach.

And so we all went down to the beach and we're laying out the towels and everything.

And my friend whipped her top off.

I said, you can't do that here.

And she said, you're not serious.

And I said, well, didn't you know that you can't go topless on American beaches?

And she said, well, I'd heard that, but I just didn't believe it.

I thought they meant some American.

I said, no, this is over the top.

Well, I can't imagine that that will change before the end of the world.

This society is so rigid that, you know, the sight of a tit shakes the entire social edifice from foundation to top.

That's how paranoid, how clenched, how fragilely balanced the American enterprise is.

But it's a craziness.

It's a cultural craziness to people who come from outside of it.

They can't believe it.

And so she put her top on, but just shaking her head, you know, oh.

Because up to that point, she thought it was just sort of like Europe, but exotic and interesting.

But suddenly she realized, oh, no, these people are cannibals.

And best watch what you say and do.

I'm not a vegetarian, and it shocks many people.

And my riposte is simply, the most intelligent beings I've ever met are plants.

So why shouldn't I eat meat?

You know, you want me to chow down on a turnip in good conscience?

You can't be serious.

What was the other part?

Oh, the toad foam.

I have been vegetarian for long periods in my life.

Now I sort of follow the hippie philosophy that your body knows what it wants,

even if it's a snicker.

The deeper wisdom of the body.

As far as toad foam, it isn't toad skin.

So we don't have to worry about the fate of this.

The toad is not sacrificed in this process, unless your milking technique is excessively vigorous.

The substance is 5-methoxy-DMT, and many people like it.

I don't prefer it, simply because it's just like DMT, except there's no vision.

And that's a little like saying, it's just like the Philadelphia Philharmonic, only there's no orchestra.

But it is a huge tryptamine-like feeling.

Because it's not been studied, the toxicology of it is not well understood.

And I've seen people get pretty uncomfortable with it.

I've never seen anybody vomit on DMT.

I have seen it repeatedly on 5-MeO.

One piece of information about 5-MeO, which don't draw any conclusions, but it's worth knowing,

it's fatal to sheep.

I mean, if you inject a sheep with 5-methoxy-DMT,

they fall down and their little legs shake in the air, and that's all she wrote.

Well, we're not sheep, but if you think you might be one,

I would suggest that you don't try this stuff.

Well, I think we're at the end of the road here.

I feel a little guilty that there wasn't more hard botany,

but I feel confident that David and Ralph and the other people participating in this course

will get this to you.

There's a great deal to be learned.

There's a great deal of camaraderie among the people who do this work.

I think most people who work in this field feel that we're struggling

at the frontier of the envelope of human potential,

and that great good is potentially here,

and that part of the saving of the planet

and the saving of human-ness

involves saving these plants

and the shamanic dimensions that they throw open to us.

Gaia wishes to communicate,

and these are the channels of communication

by which she reaches us

through and around our own fears and silliness.

And to the degree that we can rescue this tradition,

save these species,

legitimize this research,

and carry ourselves deeper

into the endless riches of the world of the spirit,

to the degree that we do these things,

I feel we've advanced the universal project

of bringing the good to manifestation.

So I wish you all luck in your professions.

I hope that you take your chosen field by storm.

If any of you need to reach me,

come through a friend or through the CIIS front office.

David usually knows where I am.

If you think I can help you

by introducing you to someone

or pointing you toward a reference

or in any other way,

feel free.

This is very important work.

Whether we succeed or fail,

it would be tragic not to make the effort

because I think we really align ourselves

with the Gaian intent

when we bring these things to the community

and share them.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.