Sacred Plants As Guides

So without further ado, I want you to welcome ethnobotanist, shamanologist, and visionary Terence McKenna.

It's a pleasure to be in Southern California and in Claremont addressing the Jung Society.

Before we get into the main body of all this, I will personally introduce myself to some of you who may not know me.

I started out my academic career as an art historian with a major in Asian languages, and that took me to Asia and sort of disillusioned me with traditional spiritual approaches in the Asian style.

And I reconnected then with my childhood love of nature and pretty much abandoned the humanities and went into the sciences.

But by then it was too late to become a real scientist, and I was too tainted by my time, again, among the poets and the artists.

So I had to become a very soft, hard scientist.

So I got a degree in conservation of natural resources, about as soft a science as you'll ever hope to touch.

And I did a lot of traveling around looking for a viable, vibrant, numinous approach to spiritual reality.

And the only place I found it was in the Amazon basin, where, as you know, there are extremely archaic groups of people,

people who never submitted themselves to the historical process the way the peoples of the Middle East and Europe did.

And there, there flourishes through the use of chemically complex plants, techniques and traditions for accessing a world invisible to the rest of us,

a world of forces and information that is transhuman, supernatural, if the word means anything.

But this, this supernatural dimension is anchored in the plants that live in our world.

And my brother was a botanist, and I had botanical training as we studied the psychoactive plants of the world,

especially the New World tropics, where they seem to be concentrated.

We were simultaneously exalted by the realization that we had found a doorway, a real doorway into hyperspace.

And at the same time, tremendously upset and alarmed by the fact that this doorway is in the process of being dismantled

by the forces of human ignorance that are not even aware of its existence.

So, this was the impulse behind the decision on the part of my partner, Kat, and I, that these plants must be saved.

They must be preserved in germplasm repositories or botanical gardens or something like that,

toward a day when they can be studied and the power, the dimensions within them, can be given their real weight.

So, to this end, we founded a botanical garden in Hawaii that is specifically dedicated to preserving plants

with a history of shamanic importance.

And I mention this because this is the real-world political work that we do,

and everything else I will say today will be barely anchored in any world familiar to most of us.

But there is a political anchoring.

There is a place where it all comes tangential to the World Bank and the IMF and the host governments and so forth and so on.

It is tremendously important to preserve this shamanic option if for no other reason than we do not know what it is.

We do not know what it is.

Well, so at the break, if you come up, the newsletter of our botanical garden is the large stack of beige paper,

and there are 300 copies of that, so I hope there's enough for everyone.

We do exist on donations, so if any of you are philanthropists, we can certainly tell you how to spend your money.

We have many plans for your money.

Okay, I wasn't kidding about what an honor I think it is to address the Jung Society.

At one point in my life, my greatest desire was to become a Jungian analyst.

And I had the good fortune of coming upon Jung very young.

I was about 15 when a very precocious friend of mine brought psychology and alchemy in the Cary F. Baines translation.

I think it had just been brought out.

And we were stunned.

And we read it from cover to cover and then went on to Mysterium Cununctionis, Ion, the studies in the Phenomenology of the Self.

I said to someone yesterday, we read all the books of Jung that the Jungians never read.

They seem to stop up there toward the front of the line with the archetypes of the collective unconscious and the personality type.

But to my mind, it was the late stuff that was fascinating.

And I am slightly puzzled, and we were talking about it last night, at the distance between the Jungian community and the psychedelic community.

Because they seem to me, the unschooled observer, to be definitely sharing the same concerns.

And strangely enough, they share much of the same history and geography.

Basel was, of course, Jung's hometown.

It was Albert Hoffman's hometown.

Did one half of town know what the other half was doing?

I'm not sure.

The relationship of Jung to the collective unconscious as its discoverer has been always somewhat puzzling to me.

Because, of course, if you know the history of 20th century art, you know that Dada,

which was the great prefigurative movement for surrealism, rose in Zurich.

So, you know, we've got LSD, the schools of modern art that laid great stress on the irrational,

and the great schools of psychology that extended the boundaries of the unconscious,

all raffling around in these little Swiss towns.

And it's interesting to imagine conversations or meetings that might have taken place

when people slightly left their ordinary habits and wandered into bars they didn't know

and drank with people they'd never met before.

Because Jung provided maps of the unconscious.

And at 16, when we were beginning to experiment with this,

and let me stress, this was before the great social waves of LSD taking of the 1960s,

just preceding that, from about 1963 to 65,

we were frantic for maps of the unconscious.

And Freud was useless.

I mean, the notion that the contents of the psychedelic experience could be reduced

to what Freud called day residues,

and repressed sexual desires, and stuff like that, didn't wash.

Within 10 minutes, you could tell that was not a serviceable metaphor.

Jung, on the other hand, offered a vast pantheon of gods and archetypes and psychic complexes

forgotten or abandoned.

I mean, I thought of Jung basically as what I call a noetic archaeologist,

someone who goes with toothbrush and nutpick to dig away the detritus

from the bones of vanished idea systems.

And if any of you have ever read the works of Jung in the Bollingen set,

you know that the richness of it is all in the footnotes.

I mean, here was a man who raised the footnote to a high art

and who was aware of a literature

that nobody else, to my mind, seemed to know about.

That Jung's references reach a thousand years deep into the past

with great density of reference.

I mean, this is where I learned about Macrobius and Docetheus

and Dionysius, the Pseudo Areopagus and all those folks

that you just never hear about.

It was my introduction to the underbelly of Western civilization

was through Jung.

Well, to my mind,

and now I'll theme this in to today's theme.

I think Maria mentioned that

Jung did not have a lot to say about shamanism.

He came to it late in his life

and he had already worked through the massive,

the exegesis of the symbol systems of the European mind.

And so he was sort of content to indicate shamanism

as an area of where more work was to be done.

And then the great follow-on scholar was Mersiliad,

who then actually studied shamanism,

showed what its archetypal underpinnings were

in all times and places.

And the combination of Jung and Iliad,

I think, pretty much delivered us

as firm a map of the psyche,

as dependable a map of the psychic geography

as we can expect to have

until we make the trip ourselves

and, you know, readjust the landscape

with our own notes and observations.

For Jung, the great path into the unconscious

was alchemy.

And alchemy is an interesting, pivotal domain

because I think we could, in a way,

say it lies halfway between the concerns

of an archaic shamanism

and halfway between the concerns

of a quasi-scientific, psychedelic attempt

to explore consciousness.

Mersiliad wrote a brilliant book on alchemy

called The Forge and the Crucible,

which is the bridge to show you

how you go from Jungian psychology

into an understanding of alchemy

that approximates Iliad.

The notion for the alchemists

that Jung brought forth very strongly

was the idea of projection of psychic contents,

projection of the active imagination

onto processes and objects

in the exterior world.

In the case of the alchemists,

it was the swirling chemical processes

in their alembics,

in their alchemical vessels,

that they projected the great round

of the archetypes

onto these chemical processes.

They saw crystallization,

sublimation, separation

as statements about the contents

of the psyche

as much as statements

about the exterior world

because for them,

the firm division

between mind and matter,

the firm ontological division

between mind and matter

that is built into Western thinking now

did not exist.

That comes with René Descartes

with the invention

of what's called

the res extensa,

the extended world,

and the resverens,

the interior world,

which has no spatial extension.

So for the alchemists,

mind and matter

were two terms

whose mutual exclusivity

could be blurred

under certain circumstances

and the terms of one

could migrate toward the other.

Well, now we as moderns

ordinarily only experience this state

when we are intoxicated

by hallucinogenic drugs

or when we are in a state

of severe psychic weakness

when there is then

overwhelmment from the unconscious

that is not with the permission

of the ego

as happens in the psychedelic experience.

Well, all of these various ways

of approaching the psyche

seem fairly abstract

and bloodless

and removed from daily existence

unless the psychedelic experience

is present.

And then it vivifies

these metaphors.

It makes clear

what these various perennial traditions

are talking about.

So what I thought

I would try to do today

and you're welcome

to try and steer it

other directions

in the question and answer period

is the workshop is

Sacred Plants as Guides.

A lot of information

has to be imparted

if we're going to satisfy

my pedagogical urge here

because I would really like

to leave you with information

that you didn't have before

some of which may have

practical efficacy

in your own life.

So in thinking about

this very large issue

Sacred Plants as Guides

I basically break it down

into three categories

for ease of handling

in a context like this.

And they are

a kind of survey

how many of these plants

are there

what are the chemicals

that drive them

and what is their

geographical distribution.

In other words

just what are the

botanical facts

of the matter.

And then

secondly

I think in order

to understand

what these things mean

for spiritual growth

and psychic development

you have to place

them in the context.

and the context

is chronological

and historical.

Have these things

always been around?

Have shamans

always been taking them?

How do they relate

to the synthetic drugs

that have been developed

in the last couple

of centuries?

So the history

of our relationship

to the pharmacologically

induced ecstasy

and then finally

and probably we'll get

to this

this afternoon

the phenomenology

of the experience

and the techniques

for achieving

and controlling it

because this is

a practical

there is a practicum

here.

This is not

a course

in Mongolian philology

or something like that.

The ultimate idea

is to get

those

who feel called

to the task

sufficiently informed

and psychically empowered

that they can push off

into the oceans

of mind

in the interior

with some fair amount

of confidence

that they'll return

to port

with all hands.

Let's start

sort of with a survey.

Let me see.

I'm going to talk

until 11.30.

So let's start

with the survey then

and just talk about

what the options are

and this will be

sort of unstructured

and conversational

with forays

into other areas.

First of all,

the striking thing

when you want

to study

psychoactive drugs

and plants

and their impact

on human culture

and that's really

what interests me

is how drugs

affect culture.

After I went

through Jung

and Iliad,

my next port of call

was McLuhan

and I absorbed

very deeply

the notion

that media

structure

civilizations

in ways

that the civilizations

are never aware of

and Jung of course

talked about print

and manuscript

and electronic culture.

He did not talk

about drugs

but drugs

are a form

of media

because

information

travels

through the drug

to the mind.

That's a medium

of communication

and various societies

wear drugs

like clothing

with no awareness

of their existence

at all

somewhat in the way

that a fish

relates to water

so that for instance

if you're in Dublin

you are swimming

in the ambiance

of an alcohol culture.

You don't have to be drunk

to be in Dublin

although it helps

but the entire society

is premised

on the possibility.

The entire society

is premised

on the possibility.

In India

the entire society

is premised

on the possibility

of hashish

intoxication

and social

mores

building

design

everything

takes account

of this.

Cultures

don't see this.

We do not

think of ourselves

as a meat

sugar

alcohol culture.

People do not

walk around

saying

oh wow

I'm so high

on meat

alcohol

and sugar

you know

I can hardly

stand it

but they are

and certain

consequences

flow from that.

So as I make

my way

through this survey

you need to

bear in mind

that a culture

takes its tone

its clothing

from the drugs

that it admits

and you can

know a great deal

about a culture

from the drugs

that it excludes

the drugs

that it excoriates

and fears

because various

drugs

accentuate

and suppress

different parts

of the psyche

so these are

statements

about anxiety

about various

parts of the psyche.

The striking

thing when you

set out

to do a cultural

survey like

this

is you discover

that our

culture

the culture

of Europe

for most of us

some of us

are black

some of us

are Asian

but largely

the roots

of American culture

lie in Europe

this is the most

pharmacologically

impoverished

cultural area

on the entire

planet.

It has the

longest history

of

disconnection

from any kind

of ecstatic

intoxication

and the

cultural forms

of Europe

linear

abstract

narcissistic

and promoting

of male

dominance

are to my

mind

exactly what

you would expect

in a culture

long deprived

of the

boundary

dissolving

numinous

encounter

with the

vegetable

mind

so

a lot

of the

cultural problems

we're dealing

with are based

on the fact

that we as

Europeans

have no place

for drugs

we don't really

know

quite

what to do

with that

as you move

south from

Europe

into the

continent

of human

origins

Africa

you discover

that while

Africa supports

a tropical

ecosystem

which because

that means

increased speciation

of plants

you would think

would indicate

an increased

number of

hallucinogens

Africa is

surprisingly poor

in

hallucinogens

this is not

well understood

as we go

through this

survey I will

make reference

to numerous

unsolved mysteries

in the field

and I always try

to do this

because I'm hoping

that there are

graduate students

listening

who are looking

for research

topics

and there are

numerous research

areas where

important work

can be done

one of them

is

this question

of the poverty

of hallucinogens

in Africa

why

does it have

something to do

with the extreme

length of time

that Africa

has been subject

to human impact

probably

because Africa

is species

poor generally

for a tropical

continent

however

in the interest

of thoroughness

there is one

hallucinogenic

drug complex

that should be

mentioned

because it

raises issues

that are important

for the broader

context

and that is

Ibogaine

or Tabernantha Iboga

the so-called

Bawiti cults

of Zaire and Gabon

now this is

the psychedelic

about which

we in the West

probably know

the least

it has spawned

no waves

of social hysteria

it has not

been the subject

of pogroms

or media

freakout

but it's

and it's

a powerful

hallucinogen

and it's not only

a powerful

hallucinogen

but it has

a component

of sexual

excitation

which is

ancillary

and unusual

if you actually

have ever looked

into the

aphrodisiac

there are

things that cause

genital chaining

and prolonged

erection

and so forth

but a true

aphrodisiac

a chemical

which would

impel you

to want

to have

sex

there's nothing

quite like

that

except

this

Tabernantha Iboga

is

very interesting

we tend

to think

of an

aphrodisiac

because we

tend to

break our

heart

away from

our genitals

as a kind

of a

as a kind

of a

cold

thing

I think

but when you

talk to these

people who are

taking Ibogaine

they don't talk

about aphrodisiac

they say

this causes

open heartedness

one heartedness

they call it

and one heartedness

is what they

are striving

for in the

Bawiti cult

and they

achieve it

and they

achieve it

and it

allows them

to resist

cultural incursions

by Christian

missionaries

Bawiti

is the main

cultural

force

that is

holding back

conversion

to Christianity

by these

this Ibogaine

it's an

interesting

culture

there's a

great deal

of anxiety

in

Fang

culture

about

divorce

because

and

relationships

between men

and women

divorce

is very

easily

obtained

among

the Fang

but

it's always

followed

by

extremely

lengthy

and

protracted

negotiations

with the

family

of the

divorced

partner

about

return

of dowry

and

a huge

amount

of

neurosis

and

agony

and

murder

and

violence

goes on

over

these

dowry

return

negotiations

the

Ibogaine

stands

right in

the middle

of this

as a

source

of

one-heartedness

making

divorce

less

likely

so

it's

very

important

as a

force

for

social

cohesion

and I

mention

this

because

when we

reach

ayahuasca

we will

see

I mean

when we

reach

South

America

we

will

see

ayahuasca

functioning

not as

an

aphrodisiac

or a

thing

to

unify

couples

but

as

a

kind

of

telepathic

pheromone

that

unifies

whole

small

tribal

groups

together

into

a

one-hearted

one-minded

modality

and

if

we

get

into

a

discussion

of

the

possible

evolutionary

impact

of

hallucinogens

we'll

see

that

it

always

lies

in

the

direction

of

these

collectivized

states

of

mind

and

dissolution

of

boundaries

between

people

other than

Tabernanthia

Boga

Africa's

hallucinogens

are trivial

and I won't mention

them in the time

we have

cannabis

is in Africa

as well

but cannabis

is worldwide

now and probably

has been

for quite some

time

cannabis

cannabis is a

special case

chemically

and culturally

we tend

to think

of cannabis

as a

recreational

drug

but that's

because in

the 20th century

we always

smoke our

cannabis

in the

18th and

19th century

cannabis

was eaten

and

jellied

forms of

cannabis

that were

eaten

judging by

the pros

of people

like

Theodore

Gautier

Baudelaire

Fitzhugh

Ludlow

and people

like that

it was as

powerful

as LSD

without doubt

I mean

these people

were being

swept

into

titanically

alien

dimensions

well

when we

cross

from

Africa

to

India

interestingly

of course

as you

all know

tremendous

depth

of

at least

concern

with the

spiritual

dimension

if not

realization

of it

that's

a tougher

call

India

would be

a likely

place

to look

for

indigenous

hallucinogenic

plant cult

simply because

of the

spiritual

obsession

that characterizes

Indian

thought

when we

look at

the

historical

foundations

of Indian

thought

we find

that it

all rests

on

a group

of texts

composed

between

4,500

and 2,000

years ago

called

the Vedas

and the

Vedas

are nothing

less

but the

world's

longest

continuing

advertisement

for

a

hallucinogenic

plant

the problem

is we

don't know

what this

plant is

this is the

mysterious

Soma

of the

Rick Vedas

and

Mandala

of the

Rick Veda

is

entirely

a hymn

to Soma

Soma

held

Hinduism

of the

Vedic

phase

together

later

it

was

repressed

and

again

graduate

students

pay

attention

one

of the

very

interesting

problems

to be

looked at

by sociologists

social

psychologists

and

anthropologists

is

how

if a

drug

once

discovered

or a

plant

once

discovered

is

so

wonderful

how

can

these

things

ever

be

lost

lost or forgotten. And yet in several instances we deal with literatures

which sing the praises of some plant or drug, the identity of which we cannot

figure out, or it becomes a big arm wrestle between various competing schools of

scholarship. We do not to this day know what SOMA was.

Gordon Wasson, who some of you may know as the discoverer, the modern discoverer of the mushroom cults of Mexico,

founder of the science of ethno-mycology,

believed to his dying breath that SOMA was Amanita muscaria, the red-topped white

speckled Amanita.

This is a mushroom which has a major role in Tungusic and Arctic

shamanism, but to say, as Wasson did, that this is the supreme entheogen of all time

is not supported by the evidence, I think.

Wasson's own efforts to become intoxicated on Amanita muscaria were not successful.

My efforts have not been successful.

Occasionally you will hear anecdotal evidence.

Someone will tell a story about eating Amanita muscaria that obviously they had a

staggering breakthrough to a rupture of plane, as Mersilia in his wonderful phrase, but it's

extremely

dependable. And when you look at the botany of Amanita muscaria, you discover that its chemical constituency is

seasonally variant,

genetically

variant,

geographically

variant, and so forth. So often, I think, as we gain

understanding of a given

shamanism, we will see that it depended on an extremely deep local knowledge, and if you take what a

Yakut shaman says about Amanita muscaria and attempt to apply it in the National Forests of New Mexico,

you know, you could end up with a tag on your toe.

These things, this kind of information doesn't travel well.

One of the, one of the, you know, there are old shamans and bold shamans, but there are no old, bold shamans.

In looking at the Indian subcontinent for other hallucinogens

that may have made a contribution,

the obvious one, to my mind, is

stropharia cubensis, the mushroom which grows in the dung of cows, and that the book my brother and I was

wrote, was about.

Other possibilities, some of you may know that there are a family of the Argyria family of

morning glories, an Asian family of morning glories, distributed from India to Micronesia.

Thirteen species, all containing psychoactive ergot alkaloids,

none

with an

history of human usage.

Now, this is another area which really fascinates me.

Why do some plants become discovered by human beings and become the objects of

cults which last millennia and others are

are never discovered at all in societies absolutely obsessed with spiritual

advancement. This Argyria nervosa is a perfect example because you take the seeds, the seeds are the active part, and

you don't need much of this thing. You need

four or five seeds, less than a tablespoon of

plant material, which I would bet would make it per unit volume, probably one of the most powerful

hallucinogens in nature, and

the hallucinations are absolutely stunning, and

nobody has ever claimed this. It's free

for the taking. This means you can cut a deal with an ally

that doesn't belong to the Hindus, the Mayans, or the somebody else. It's an unoccupied parking space

In hyperspace, in hyperspace, and

it's very interesting. The discoveries are continuous.

Just a year ago,

some phytochemists in the Midwest

discovered a new plant. It's always been there. Nobody's ever taken it very seriously. Treated it like a weed.

Desmanthus

Illinoisensis, the Illinois bundleweed. This is suggestive that it's called bundleweed, because a medicine bundle is, of course, a shaman's mojo bag, you know.

But, so, bundleweed,

six percent by dry weight, NN-dimethyltryptamine, the largest concentration of DMT in any plant, and

unclaimed by native peoples, unknown to the folk medicine of the North American Indians, as far as

we can tell. Well, so this is very interesting.

Continuing our survey, since we're now somewhere on the Eurasian continent, we should mention

Papavar Somoniforum, the opium poppy,

with cannabis. This is probably the oldest

human

narcotic.

NN-noan civilization was entirely based on

opium, on the use of opium. And in fact, when Michael Ventress

translated the tablets, the Linear B tablets,

they got these tallies, and they thought at first that the symbol for opium must be the symbol for wheat,

because the tallies were so huge, of the stuff being moved and sold. And then when they sorted out, they realized, no, in the, for the last thousand years of its existence,

the Minoan civilization

drifted deeper and deeper into an opium narcosis, that was its way, I think, of

anesthetizing

the pain of the death of this last outpost of the goddess religion, because that's what it was. It was a cultural anachronism.

While Asia Minor had gone over to God-Kings,

city-states, and bronze-tipped spears,

the people of Minoan Crete had kept the old, old,

archaic religion that came out of Africa. And then in the last

gasp of that Minoan culture, those mysteries were handed on to the mainland of Greece, and became the mysteries at

at Eleusis and

and other cult sites. It was said by the

commentators, contemporary commentators of the Hellenistic world, the sites, the rites practiced in secret at Eleusis are practiced in

public, at Knossos. And this, this was the difference, you know, the going underground of the old

proto-Minoan

mother religion.

In modern times, we have a horror of opium.

I mean, people are amazed that I even mention it in the same breath, but it doesn't hurt to remind ourselves that

this virulently addictive substance, opium, was not even noticed to be addictive by

anybody until 1627, when the English physician John Playfair, for the first time,

commented that

opium, once taken over a long period of time, then there would be a requirement that it be taken

throughout life.

We're right in the middle of a drug war at the moment, and it's interesting in that context to

notice how the goals of drug wars can change. A hundred years ago,

the British Navy was involved in what we've called the Opium Wars in China.

Very few people in the modern world

have bothered to inform themselves to find out that the Opium Wars

were about the right of the British government to deal opium.

The Emperor of China did not want opium dealt in the ports of China, and

the British government used cannon to enforce their desire to

sell opium in the ports of China. Why were the English trying to sell opium in the ports of China?

Because the tea trade had collapsed through overproduction, and they were stuck with all these tea ships.

They had created a whole global infrastructure for the sale of tea.

When the market fell out on tea, they just turned to opium.

They grew it in Goa, and they sold it in China.

This was government policy less than 120 years ago.

Okay, well, moving on then from Eurasia, and I'm sure I'm missing different things,

but if I missed your favorite thing, bring it up in the question period,

to the North American continent. And the North American continent is,

I almost said similarly cursed like Europe,

but that's just my prejudice. The North American continent is similarly poor in

hallucinogens.

There are no

very interesting

hallucinogens in North America, and North American Indians, North American culture, did not avail itself of this

ecstatic plant-induced shamanism. It tended more to go for what's called ordeal shamanism,

the Sundance thing, where you hang yourself by your pectorals on hooks, and stuff like that.

I mean, there are other ways to attain these visions, but you see that absence of good

hallucinogens in North America just reinforced that whole

beer and woolen and uptight thing that came from Europe.

The only major

hallucinogen to have a role in Native American culture is

of course, peyote. And many people, without informing themselves,

imagine that peyote is something which goes

millennia into the past, and that it, and this is absolutely not true.

Peyote use may well be less than a thousand years old among Native Americans.

When you go back into the old graves and the old

burial sites in the Rio Grande Valley and South, you don't find peyote.

What you find are the beans of Sephora secundifolia.

You all probably know this plant, though you may not know its name.

It's the plant that produces the very hard red and black bean that they can constrain.

If you all know what colorines are, these are erythrinas, which are related to these things.

Okay, that stuff contains cytosine and cysteine.

These are what are called ordeal poisons, and it might be worthwhile to just talk for a minute about ordeal poisons.

I said there's more than one way to skin a cat. There's more than one way to have this experience

that shoves you through to an awareness of the numinous.

That's what we're trying to do, is have an awareness of the numinous.

Well, in certain parts of the world where hallucinogens were not present in the biome,

people concentrated on ordeal poisons.

And what an ordeal poison is, is it's a chemical compound that you take it

and you think you're going to die and you beg for death and you do not die.

You get better, you're fine, and you're so damn glad to be alive

that you undergo an ab reaction, you get straight, you shed some of your complexes,

and you turn over a new leaf, is what it is.

Well, in Madagascar, these ordeal poisons have been brought to a high state of perfection.

Also in Malaya, there's a poison complex that replaces a hallucinogenic drug complex,

and these are horrific poisons.

So, what apparently was going on in the Rio Grande Valley was,

after centuries of this Sephora secundifolia cult,

someone discovered peyote and said,

my god, you know, thank god.

And then the other plant which was big in the southern California,

northern Mexico, and across the southwest,

were the tropane containing detourus,

the so-called tolach religion of southern California.

Well, these are deliriant confusions that are,

unless you have a psychic constitution that is not like mine,

you can't take these things.

They're too, I just found them confusing.

It was like a kind of madness, and also physically very difficult to handle.

I experimented, I had a phase with these things when I was in Nepal,

because there are sadhus, holy men in the Kathmandu Valley,

who swear by this stuff.

And if you're in Kathmandu, you may notice in the gutter,

well, you'll notice plenty in the gutter,

but you may also notice these detouripods, empty detouripods,

and I noticed them and started asking questions,

and then out at the King's Game Preserve,

past Pashupatinath, I found a bunch of these things,

and laid in a supply.

But it is an occult, watery,

it's a dimension of confusion, not a dimension of high awareness.

And I think some of you have heard me tell the story about

the reason I gave it up was an Englishman,

a friend of mine who lived in this little village in Nepal where I lived,

he was also experimenting with this stuff.

One day I was buying potatoes and tomatoes in the market,

and I ran into him, and we started having a conversation.

And in the course of the conversation,

he revealed that he believed we were in his apartment.

And then I knew that we were losing hold on our grounding.

So I don't recommend that.

I don't have a whole lot to say about it.

Apparently, it's a thing for magic, power magic.

And I've never been particularly interested in that,

because I'm afraid of it.

I'm a watcher.

I like to look.

I like to get very close to it and watch it.

But I'm not into grabbing it or doing anything with it.

I have a feeling that would lead to catastrophe for me personally.

Okay, where are we now?

Northern Mexico.

Now we've gone all around.

We started in Europe.

We went down into Africa, across the Eurasian continent,

North America, Northern Mexico.

Now things get interesting.

Because as you leave the Sonoran uplands and go south,

in the Sierra Mazateca is this mushroom complex,

which Valentina and Gordon Wasson discovered in the 1953s.

17 to 22 species, it depends on who's counting,

of extremely endemic, meaning very localized species of mushrooms,

all producing psilocybin, coincident with the Mayan,

the cultural side of the Mayan Mixtec and Mazatecan civilizations.

And this is psilocybin,

an extraordinarily powerful, visionary,

and benign hallucinogenic metabolite.

Once the Wassons had nailed down this Mexican mushroom complex,

then people started checking and they discovered these mushrooms

or conspecific species in many localities.

Two that are worth mentioning are the Pacific Northwest,

Oregon, Washington and British Columbia,

which appears to be the world's center for species density of the psilocybin gene.

And strangely enough, very good ethnographic research turns up no hint

that these Kwakutl, Shimsham, Tlingit, and other people had any hint of this.

They lived in the center of the psilocybin distribution complex,

and as far as we can tell, their shamanism, which was highly evolved,

never discovered or made use of this.

Not so these civilizations of Mesoamerica.

The other place where these mushrooms have now been discovered,

and the range seems to be extending every year, is Europe.

The tragedy of European civilization is that the Logos was apparently there all the time.

The English countryside, I understand, is now practically a scene of annual mushroom runs

that are not unlike the lemming runs of Scandinavia,

and everybody pours out to collect the semi-lanciata mushrooms.

I've been told, I haven't been to these sites, but I've been told that Ionia,

where the Book of Kells was composed, and where St. Columba went,

is covered with mushrooms. It's very clearly a mushroom ecology.

Attention graduate students.

The tracing of mushroom motifs in European art and civilization and culture

is an extremely rich, untapped field.

If you need some clues, look at family escutcheons.

Look at family crests. In France and the Italian parts of France,

the Morelle family has the Morelle on their escutcheon.

There are other mushroom families and mushroom names.

So there may have been, you know, this may have been the struggle between

paganism and Christianity may have revolved around a mushroom.

We know druids were into plants. We know they were into oak groves.

But the plant that is always mentioned as the druidic, psychedelic, psychic plant of choice

is mistletoe. But mistletoe is chemically very disappointing.

And I've wondered if mistletoe is not, it wasn't the plant they wanted to symbolize.

They wanted to symbolize the symbiosis of one plant upon another.

It's that the mistletoe symbolizes epiphytic existence.

Anyway, this is an untapped area.

Once you get into the New World tropics, then you are in the great domain

of the hallucinogenic plants.

And no one knows why it is that the tropics of the New World are tremendously rich in hallucinogens.

I mean, I don't know how many of you are botanists or biologists, but try to imagine

figuring out a set of evolutionary constraints that were operating on one side of the planet,

but not on the other.

When we take, for instance, the jungles of Southern Columbia

and compare them with, let us say, the jungles of New Guinea,

these are both continental floras, both equatorial,

both climaxed at a species-rich climax, and one has dozens of hallucinogens in it,

and the other has none.

None.

This is not well understood.

I mean, theories range as wildly as, obviously, that South America must be where the flying saucer landed.

And, you know, that's where the genes were seeded.

I confess, I'm not sure why it is.

It is, at first I thought that it had to do with the extremely primitive state,

so-called primitive, the extremely archaic state of culture in the South American jungles,

that they represent a real Stone Age culture, where when you go into Indonesia,

it may look primitive to you, but the Dutch were there before the English arrived in North America.

It is, it has had centuries and centuries in which these things could be forgotten.

But, of course, then come the botanists who care nothing for ethnographic data

and who simply carry out plant surveys and chemical analysis of plants.

They can't find these hallucinogens either.

So this is a great mystery.

In the tropics of Mesoamerica and the equatorial tropics of the New World,

there's a vast panoply of hallucinogens, not only the mushroom complex,

but then also this Ayahuasca or Yah-He complex that we've referred to several times.

This is a huge jungle vine.

And as we cross into the Yah-He area,

we also cross, we cross an interesting barrier because we move from plants, single plants,

which are hallucinogenically active, into the realm of preparations.

We're on the threshold of the concept drug here, because what Ayahuasca is, is two plants,

which are not active unless brought into combination with each other.

One plant contains a monoamine oxidase inhibitor,

and the other plant contains DMT, which would be destroyed in the gut if taken orally,

unless it were taken orally in the presence of an MAO inhibitor.

This was not understood by Western pharmacology until 1956,

but it was understood by Amazonian shamans millennia ago.

So they bring these two things together,

and by varying the ratio between the plant containing the beta-carbolines that inhibit MAO,

and the plants that contain DMT, they can intensify or de-emphasize the vision.

Well, most of the hallucinogens in the Amazon basin run on tryptamine of some sort,

usually DMT. In the upper basin of Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, like that,

you get these yahe ayahuasca beverages. These are things you drink,

and then it comes on. You have these outlandish trips. As you go down into the lower basin,

the Banisteriopsis cult gives way to these snuff cults, Ibina and Neopo, depending on the languages.

These don't depend on an MAO inhibitor for their activity because they're absorbed through the subnasal

mucosa, which is an extremely effective way for getting drugs into the system.

The problem with that complex, the snuff complex, is that we are just physically such delicate

and wimpy people that we can't stand that route of drug administration.

Because what they do is they toast these seeds of Anadonanthera peregrina,

this huge leguminous tree, which is the source of the seeds.

They toast these seeds and powder them, so what you get is a kind of rough

cross between sawdust and charcoal, and then they have a hollow tube about this long,

and they load it up with this stuff, and you squat down and put the nostril, the tube into your nostril,

and your friend, your friend, not you, because you would not do it hard enough,

your friend then takes a huge breath of air, and

and it's just like being hit in the face with a two by four. I mean, it's like being hit in the face,

and you fall over backwards, you scream, you salivate, and you squirm around there in the dirt for a minute or two,

and then you sit back up, and by that time, the tube has been reloaded for the other nostril,

and then, you know, and your eyes, your sinuses can't believe what's happening to you.

So you have to sort out this whole sinus shock, which is going on in parallel with then an evolving,

strange state of mind, which is beginning to take over and clarify everything,

and then there are numerous minor variations on these things.

Might talk just a little bit about the chemistry of these things,

and the chemistry of hallucinogens generally.

My attitude toward this question of plants, compounds, drugs,

should these things be used for spiritual growth?

both, if the answer is no, then that finishes, you don't have to go any further. If the answer is maybe,

or yes, then other questions arise. Which compounds out of this whole survey,

survey, and at what frequency, and at what dosage, and under what circumstances.

And over the years, I've sort of evolved a three-way test that I will share with you,

because I think it's maybe the operationally the most useful thing you'll hear this weekend.

And that is, if you are contemplating some, some compound, some plant, then the first thing to ask

yourself is, does it occur in nature? Does it have some tangentiality to what is already existing?

Because obviously, what exists, that's nature, has undergone some vast winnowing process

out of the set of all things which might exist. In that wonderful phrase of Alfred North Whitehead's,

certain things have undergone the formality of actually occurring, you know? And so certain

certain compounds have undergone the formality of actually occurring in the biological matrix. And so

they should be, they should be our pool out of which our experimental compound should be drawn.

But this is thousands of compounds. How can we further narrow it? Well, an excellent way of narrowing

it further is to ask the question of this compound, does it have a history of human usage?

Does it have a history of human usage? That is your FDA approval.

Because if you can point to a tribe of people who have been taking this plant or mushroom or whatever it

is for millennia, and they don't have miscarriages, tumors, cataracts, blindness, Down syndrome, eight

fingers on the left hand, or whatever it is, then you can be fairly confident that this thing is benign,

that these people have

Observed its action on pregnant women the elderly the those with you know, and and that it has passed

that test

Then finally the most the narrowest gate through which a compound has to go to

to intersect my precious body is it has to have an affinity to

To ordinary brain chemistry it has to have an affinity to ordinary brain chemistry

We don't want to launch something on your brain that it can't recognize at all that it has no

Biosynthetic pathways to degrade that it has no receptors for just some crazy thing, you know

5-amino-3-triethyl-finthio-anaxidine or something we don't want that there's not

The spirit that we're acting in here

So if the compound can get through those three barriers, then it's an excellent candidate for

Providing spiritual gain at low

physiological

Impact well now some people may say oh well you've taken all the fun out of it

All the good things have been tossed aside in this mad rush to purity or something

Not at all

The very best stuff was retained in this process because

In terms of relative strength and

Bizarreness of effect and so forth the strangest the most powerful the most

transformative of all

Halicinogens in nature or out is dimethyltryptamine

DMT and

It's worth talking about DMT for a moment because it will raise

certain issues and distinctions

That you may not have been aware of

First of all

DMT is hands down the most powerful of all halicinogens

I mean it is so powerful that whatever is in second place is lost over the horizon

Yet

Yet it is the most benign of all

halicinogens

Because it occurs as an endogenous

neurotransmitter in the normal human brain

We every single one of us at this moment have NN dimethyltryptamine being synthesized activated and degraded in our

synaptic

Membrane so this is almost a paradox the most benign of all halicinogens the most fast-acting

I should also add is also the most

Harmless the the easiest to take it sort of remove it sort of puts a certain obligation

Obligation on the experience because there is no reason to hold back

Except that there is this question

Does it drive you mad and then the more serious version of that question?

What about the possibility of death by astonishment?

This is no joke

Death by astonishment is I think probably the major risk who we run

uh with this stuff because the impact of the breakthrough is

uh is so total so complete so

Unexpected and in a way this sort of brings me back around to my theme because I

Encountered DMT LSD all of these things in that very period when I was getting set to

take flight as a union

analyst and

What completely blew my mind about DMT and I mentioned it and then again

Here's an opportunity for research is

How Tran here's a heretical construction how trans

Archetypal the content of the flash

Seemed I was appalled

Because not only had I a certain amount of interest in young and proclivity along those lines

But my original major had been art history art historians

What we're trained to do is to be able to look at a motif and say oh, yes

I'm familiar from with this from ceramic from second millennia Peru and also men dying

Embroidery work

I mean we know motifs we're trained to recognize and connect disparate

aesthetic domains well when I smoked DMT and came down I said you know this is not on the map

I can't believe it that this doesn't connect up to anything how can there be domains of the human mind that do not

announce themselves in folklore

fairy tales

dreams or mandala painting that are so

Removed from the van of what is human that they are apparently not accessible in

Structuring our

Maps of our self and our psyche and that for me was the contact with what I call and I didn't call it this

Rudolf Otto called it this and this term influenced young Otto proceeded young was it is the holy

other and

If there is an archetype of the holy other then this is it but perhaps the whole the other

transcends the archetypes this may

explain to some degree young's interest in Gnosticism

Especially the Valentinian school of Gnosticism which holds you know that there is a higher and hidden

Father all God who is outside the machinery of

Cosmic fate and it seemed to me that in those extremely profound

DMT flashes I was actually witnessing a domain

outside the machinery of the archetypes which is for us as moderns that's what the machinery of fate is

It's not zodiacal machinery. It's

Hardwiring in our psychology and our genes that gives us our fate

Well, so having said that I've not only made the the

Survey, but also brought us to by ending with DMT

the

Subject matter of this quest and I want to make it clear I

Speak about the power of the psychedelic experience

Because I think people should be informed of their birthright and I feel very antsy

Around the notion that someone might go from birth to the grave

without ever having a

Psychedelic experience it makes me as antsy as the notion that somebody might go from birth to the grave without having a sexual

experience it's a strange kind of

Protective denial or a kind of expression of fear

This is our birthright

This is part of what it means to be human these altered states of consciousness

I think are pretty much scripted in to the existence of women because they

Most of them will give birth

Which is an organically scripted psychedelic experience from which there is no escape unless of course you go for the

Drug knockout the spinal and then you miss

Everything but biologically physiologically women are set up for

This experience men are not it's possible to

Build such barriers against

Overwhelmment that it never happens in your whole life, and I believe that if we psychologically analyze

the effects of these

Psychedelics what they do is they dissolve boundaries

That's all I mean if you interview 10,000 people who've had the psychedelic trip each one has their own

Herophany their own heroes gamos that unfolded for them, but the sum total of it is

Boundaries dissolve and then whatever is on the other side of your boundary

comes flooding in to claim you and

To and to reshape and remake your psyche. Well, I see the entire

illness of our civilization as an as an ego

Inflationary illness

We have gone so sick with ego that we are literally

murdering the planet rather than

confronting the consequences of our

psychic imbalance and

The psychedelics act to redress this they are almost an inoculation

against the ego and I I see the ego as a

phenomenon arising in historical time or

Rather actually history is caused by the ego, but the ego is a component of the psyche

that arose in the post

Archaic phase in the post psychedelic phase

It's entirely a modern invention

It's less than 15,000 years old and the assumptions of the ego are the source of our

Neurosis our

disequilibrium why did the ego arise it arose because of the

The climatologically enforced abandonment of these

Psychedelic religions of the archaic period

In other words, here is the scenario as I see it

Primates even primitive even

I don't

Non-advanced primates like squirrel monkeys howler monkeys these kinds of primates all

All have male dominance

Hierarchies the whole thing with primates is about male dominance

But a lot of things about human beings

Mark us as the most unique member of the primate group

Obviously we look

Different from any other monkeys even the stranger monkeys

Look more like the normal monkeys than then we look like them or they like look like thus us our upright posture

The other thing about us is our suppressed estrus cycle

We cannot tell at a glance whether a woman is

In heat or not and yet obviously that had a tremendous

shaping force on the social psychology of

of

Of the primates I believe that

Everything about us that is noble and worth saving

occurs against the grain

That if we had followed the grain we would still be

competing with jackals for the carcasses left by lions of

of

large game kills on the plains of africa

But when the african continent began to dry up and we were forced out of the trees where we had an arboreal

vegetarian lifestyle we came under great pressure to expand our diet and

the I believe that the great

Unstudied factor in human evolution and human emergence is the effect of a complex diet on our emerging species and

It's not only the presence of halucinogens such as

Psilocybin in the in the diet but other things as well

Psilocybin is the most spectacular case and you know if you came to see Darwin you'd have to hear about evolution

So you came to see me so you have to hear this little theory about human emergence

that most of you can probably recite it by heart now

But it's a three-step

It's a three-step feedback loop from a fairly bright monkey to a fairly stupid human being and

The way it works like this these monkeys come down out of the trees. They're

They're predating on on kills of

Ungulate mammals made by lions. They're competing with jackals

They're testing all the foods in the environment

and

Lo and behold in the manure of these ungulate mammals that are

radiating across the african continent

There are what are called coprophytic mushrooms and the

The presence of large amounts of tryptophan in manure as a substrate means that these coprophytic mushrooms elaborate

psilocybin

So here in this new grassland environment are the psilocybin mushrooms. Well

these proto-hominid creatures

Testing foods for their diet would reach the psilocybin and would test it

Well, then this three-part feedback loop to humanness then comes into play and it works like this

very

very light

doses of psilocybin so light that you cannot an hour and a half or two hours later

Tell you've taken anything you say I don't feel it. I feel completely normal

I must not have taken enough that dose if you would submit yourself to being tested by an

optometric

Apparatus we could show you that your vision has improved slightly

This is an effect of eating small amounts of psychoactive amines

Increase of visual acuity. Well, you don't have to be a rocket scientist to know that if you're a hunting animal

Competing in a highly competitive environment and suddenly somebody hands you a pair of chemical binoculars

You are going to be a more successful hunter than other members of your

Species who are not availing themselves of this food item

So there was reinforcement there aha if we eat these mushrooms in small amounts

We will be more successful hunters or maybe it was never raised to consciousness as an if-then

Relationship it was just we eat mushrooms. We hunt well kind of thing

Then

If you eat slightly more of the psilocybin if you bring slightly more of it into your diet

It's what's called a CNS stimulator central nervous system

Stimulant an effect of all CNS stimulants is what's called

arousal and

Arousal means simply that you can't sit still you're very restless

You're very energetic and often in the male animal you have an erection. It's an overall

systemic arousal

arousal and

if you if you

Give if you witness this situation in monkeys monkeys are very hang loose kind of characters

And so then they just all fall together in a heap and make love

and this

Increases what anthropologists and primatologists like to call successful instances of copulation

This means that this increased in interest in sex in combination with an increased success in obtaining food

is

Creating the perfect situation in which there will be a population boom of these creatures

They're eating better and they're enjoying themselves more and they have better relationships with each other

So population boom is on the way

Well, then the next and final level is when you raise the dose higher

So you're no longer restless or interested in sex or any of that

But you're flattened with the ecstatic unfolding of the full numinous

hallucinogenic rupture of plane

Then and this occurs, you know in the tribal context. Then there is boundary dissolution

Group sexual activity and group bonding and identification and this is where

This telepathic coherence this inner dynamic of

Of cohesion and caring that we see in primitive people to some small degree and that we imagine

What must once have been our birthright?

This is where it came to be and at those higher levels of psilocybin

Most of you probably know language is formed by an organ on one side of the brain called Broca's area

Broca's area the brain being always

Symmetrically constructed Broca's area has a twin on the opposite side of the brain, but no one knows what's going on there

It's apparently a silent area of the brain. Well, when you take psilocybin there is spontaneous

linguistic activity

Glossolalia Henry Munn has written about this in his essay the mushrooms of language. It's almost as though

So psilocybin is a pheromone that promotes

linguistic activity and effort to take

Verbal intentionality and connect it up to the ontos of being in some way

And then it's almost as though words are born out of you. You give birth to words and

These concrescences of meaning then create a kind of unitary ambiance, which we call

understanding

Language is a miracle. I mean make no mistake about it. I don't think any amount of dissection of

monkeys or human cadavers will give you any insight into

Language language is a behavior of some sort

So bizarre so many orders of magnitude more complex than anything else we do

That for all practical purposes. This is the thumbprint of God upon creation

Human language and it's a self

Transforming thing it keeps bootstrapping itself to higher and higher levels and it creates for us

The entire ambiance of reality once we had words we quickly replaced

Reality with them and so I'm I believe that what psilocybin promotes is cognitive

activity the coordination of visual input with

Plans and strategies for hunting or acquisition or whatever

It promotes this increased arousal which really in a way we as moderns are

Absolutely as in awe of as our mushroom munching ancestors

25,000 years ago. We can't reduce it. We don't know what it is

You know young was always so concerned that people say it's only

Psychological it's only the psyche. I've got news for you

It may only be the psyche, but the psyche is all there is and

as as we came into a relationship with the mushroom

humanist

Emerged on the African belt and was able to stabilize itself for a few millennia and then

We fell into history because of climatological change for many reasons

But we literally fell into history and now we operate in this lower domain a domain of limitation of

misunderstanding of low-grade languages

But the and and we are neurotic we are unhappy we are

Dysfunctional and I believe this is because our connection to the logos to the informing voice that gives meaning to being

Has been broken over 10,000 years

It's fallen away and all we're left with is our spiritual yearnings our nostalgia for paradise and

our our pathologies and

Miraculously we are left with the time capsule of preservation represented by the rain forest

Shamanic cultures that use hallucinogens

There lies our answer, but it's like the Ouroboric serpent taking its tail in its mouth

The the salvation of the super future of the planet lies in a recovery of the values

modalities and religious practices of

25 to 50,000 years ago

Break break break break