The Ethnobotony Of Shamanism

Well, because this is a small group and probably self-selected for high interest in these subjects,

why, as much as possible, you should direct me toward whatever your special concerns are

so that for each person, whatever their slant, there's a reasonable payback in information.

And there may be areas where I'm disappointing or unhelpful,

but usually then I can point you toward somebody else or some source.

The first thing this afternoon, I'll bring in some books to show you 10 or 15 source books

that would help you in researching any aspect of this,

whether you are interested in it academically or for personal spiritual growth or whatever.

It's very important to be informed.

And this is an area where it's very hard to bluff it because, you know, on one level, it's a branch of medical science.

I mean, what we're talking about is folk pharmacology and you really should understand certain things about pharmacology,

certain things about physiology, because your life may come to depend on it in some situation.

I mean, it's not casual, you know, you want to be able to assess risk and to make intelligent choices.

So what I usually do in these kinds of situations is go around the circle and try to get a feeling for the backgrounds,

the interests and the concerns of whoever is here and then tailor what is said afterwards to the needs of the group.

So why don't we just do that and you can tell me, you can tell us your name and then your particular concern

or what you hope to get out of this.

Just something which will give me a basis then for structuring what comes afterwards.

So why don't we go around in good, penpo, shamanic fashion, counter-clockwise.

Sorry, but it was you or this poor soul.

Now he can bake and consider which was worse.

Well, my name is Carolyn and I'm interested more in the herbal, more in the herbal outlets, you know, medical use,

I'm interested in the Chinese biology, Western biology.

I have to say I haven't had my coffee that much.

Well, that's pretty good.

How many of you are CIIS students?

And now that everybody is here, how many will write a paper for this course?

So three.

Okay.

Yeah.

My name is Brad and I'm interested in the psychedelic experience and how mankind has used it throughout history

and what it's done for us and I'm interested in herbs and plants in general.

I don't know a lot about them but I'm interested in studying them more and learning a lot more about them

and just present and future applications of how we can heal ourselves and help ourselves spiritually.

I'm Sibylla.

Well, I think the overall interest is that I think that in nature the main secrets of humanity are stored,

whether in stones or in plants or in wells or in practice and I think that to access plants and to know what they carry as main information for us,

that's my interest so to rewrite the relationship not only to myself but to the plants and to nature before we go around it.

That's a great jacket.

You don't see beetles as a fashion motif much in this culture.

In Guatemala they sell little beetles in the market on threads that you pin one end of the thread to your jacket

and then they wander all over you.

They're wonderful.

They glue jewels to their backs.

Yeah.

Sometimes they jewel them up.

What are beetles?

These insects in the pattern of your jacket.

Yes.

My name is John.

I'm very interested also in psychedelic experience.

In 1970 I had a psychedelic experience that pretty much changed my life and way of thinking.

And I've just now in the past couple of years come to understand that.

And I'm really interested in pursuing that mode of thinking that it sets up in your mind.

And I think the psychedelic experience, well I look at the planet and I see what's happening out there

and I think the psychedelic plants and those experiences can help transform way of thinking to more cope with what's going on out there.

My name is Maura and one of the reasons I'm here is the most interesting experience that I've had in my life

come from psychedelics.

And that was like 10 years ago when I was in college.

And I haven't experimented with them since college for a variety of reasons.

And now I'm just one of them.

And I've decided in the past couple of months I've just gotten interested in the subject again.

And I want to find my own source of psychedelics and if it means growing them by myself in my garage or whatever.

That's the way it's going to be or going out in the woods to find them.

And I hope this seminar might point me in some right directions.

My name is Marge and I'm interested in the experience and I'm somewhat of a late bloomer because it's only been a couple of years ago that I first experienced some psychedelics.

And I'm definitely interested in the personal transformation involved there.

And I heard you talk one other time and I'm just generally interested in anything you have to say.

Where did you hear me come?

I think it was at the Whole Life Expo last year on the I Ching.

Oh, uh-huh.

Man, if you came back after that performance, you are dedicated.

Remember that.

I do.

Yeah.

Good.

Well, welcome.

I'm Tom and I had my first psychedelic experience in 69

when I was nine.

Oh, my God.

You remember the Halloween candy?

So that pretty much set the stage for my ongoing interest in altered states of consciousness.

My name is Janie and I came last night, kind of on a lark, really.

I had heard your name before and I was really curious about what you had to say.

I didn't even know this workshop was going to be happening.

But I was really inspired by the things you were saying last night, especially, you know,

the use of psychedelics as a way to overcome the mess we've gotten ourselves in on a worldwide basis.

And that's something that's very interesting to me.

I used psychedelics, I guess, for the first time around 76.

And I haven't used that many psychedelics in the last eight or ten years, but I have done a little mushroom vibing.

So I'm interested as far as personal growth and understanding and breaking through some of the barriers that, you know, I feel like I could break through as far as spiritual growth.

But another main interest of mine is I would very much like to be able to share this experience with other people.

I have access to a computer conferencing system in Sausalito where I'm very active and it's really kind of a nationwide conferencing system.

And a lot of people from a lot of disciplines are involved in it and more people are getting involved in it.

And one thing that I have noticed is that it's a very bright, aware group of people involved in the system, but they seem to be not very clued in to a lot of spiritual matters.

A lot of them are, a lot of deadheads are on it.

Is it the well?

The well, exactly. You talked to Howard last night, right?

No, no, I've been aware of the well.

Oh, okay, good. That's what it is.

Do you think that they're not clued in, I mean, without insulting anybody, is it because they're young?

I'm not sure if, you know, like even the deadheads on the well have done a lot of psychedelics.

But I think there's a certain resistance among many about accepting the unseen and the unknown.

Youth may have something to do with it since they didn't go through the sixties, et cetera.

Also, maybe the stereotypical computer mindset of being kind of linear thinkers.

You know, there are a lot of computer people on there, of course.

But there are also a lot of writers and a lot of artists.

So I don't know if it's just ground that hasn't been tread before and people are afraid to step out in it or exactly what it is.

Well, that's very interesting. I mean, we'll talk a fair bit about computers.

Most software, I think, is written by freaks.

I mean, if you hang around these scenes where it's going on, everybody has hair down to their waist.

But the relationship of psychedelics to computers and of psychedelic people to computer people and all that is very interesting.

So what do you do on the well?

Well, I am just an interested participant.

You know, I just log in frequently and have online discussions with people.

And I'm considering co-hosting the spirituality conference, which is just shaken loose from two very Christian-oriented people.

And what they've done is split out Christianity to another conference.

And now the spirituality conference is kind of wide open.

So I've been kind of a hanger back.

I'm not really wanting to get out there and start, you know, talking a lot.

So it seems like it's a grand opportunity to open up that avenue to people.

But speaking of computers, I'm sure I'm talking a lot for a person who doesn't talk much.

But I've been doing computer work for 20 years.

That's why I've been making a living.

And what I've been trying to do now is find a way to incorporate computers with something that's more esoteric and more aesthetic.

So I'm very interested in your I Ching thing.

I've also worked for I Ching for like 10 or 15 years.

Oh, really?

So I'm very curious about what you're doing with that.

Well, I'll be doing a five-day at Esalen the week after Thanksgiving that'll be entirely devoted to the computer implementation of these ideas about the I Ching.

So if you can get down to that, that would be great.

Yeah, I love the idea of networks, but I find it very hard to force myself to use one.

It's like riding in a taxi is how I feel about it because I'm so aware of the money, which is a silly thing because I use electricity in my house.

And I'm not a, I don't feel like I'm riding in a taxi.

But I got onto the source.

And you know, on the source you can word search the membership for interests.

So I typed up drugs and it came back and said there were 850 people on the network who had written that drugs were an interest of theirs.

So then I started checking and I said, okay, drugs without sex and rock and roll came back for me.

So I didn't solve all my affinity group problems.

Yeah.

My name's Toby.

And I think the, we have a mutual friend, at least one Terrence, Nina Wise, who has been urging me to hear you at the first opportunity because

she says that you have a very original perspective on things.

So that was one reason I came.

And then after hearing you last night, I'm particularly interested in your ideas on the social implications of these psychoactive substances.

And, you know, those as an instrument for social change.

So that's one interest of mine.

And then a second interest is just how, you know, your notion of an archaic revival, how that ties in with one of my basic interests,

which is the perennial philosophy and how those sort of interlace or whatever.

So those are the, I guess the, a couple of central concerns of mine.

So are you a performance artist?

No, I have nothing to do.

I enjoy the kind of work that Nina does, but I'm, I'm more of a philosopher.

It's just, has a lot of different interests.

And that's one.

Yeah.

Well, I've known Nina since we were in high school together.

And she in fact is the person who introduced me to Kat, who is the mother of my children.

So Nina is webbed in there.

Good.

I'm Brian.

We've been recording and working with Terrence for a number of years.

And this is the first time I've heard him bad rap, sex and rock and roll.

And musician and generally the topic is infinitely interesting.

So we're here.

I'm Boston.

I like the fact that Terrence tickles my linguistic fancy and that's why I'm here.

I'm Richard and being an electronic engineer involved in development of advanced television

systems, I'm one of those linear thinker kind of technical types.

So in part, I'm here really for the sort of detail how to aspect of all this rather than

the broad, the broad historic anthropological kind of, of message, which I having attended

your Ohio presentation, I think I have the structure of that pretty well in mind.

So I'm looking for a little more detailed fill in, which I hope this weekend will provide.

So you're looking for filled in detail.

This must be the Holy Grail of your life, Richard.

Richard is involved in high definition television systems and satellite transmission of high definition

video signal.

So the metaphor works on all levels.

It certainly does.

Cameron, do you want to sit in there?

Yes.

There is one empty space.

I think it was safe for you.

I'm Curtis and I recently moved to the Bay Area from Austin, Texas.

It was sort of like coming back home.

This was originally from California.

I was thinking, I got to come here on the spur of the moment.

I came to the lecture last night and were really committed to do something else today and got

home and there was a message on the answering machine saying that that had been canceled.

And so we said, yay, we can go hear Terrence.

And I was thinking about why do I want to do that?

And how does that, how does, you know, why do I have this urge to do that?

And I was thinking that I really spend my life, my professional life at least, working with

people in alternative states of consciousness of one kind or another.

I've spent a great deal of time in the last five or six years working with Stan Groff and

a number of other people getting different perspectives.

And there are a lot of different perspectives on this kind of work.

Stan has a particular kind of model that's very useful for, in terms of the language that

you were talking about last night, of helping people to explain to people what kinds of places

they go into that are accessible when they have these kinds of experiences, regardless

of the vehicle that they use.

I spent a good deal of time working with a woman named Jackie Small, who is one of the, on the

leading edge of chemical dependency work, of all things, and has worked with Stan a great deal

in bringing his model of the breath work out, particularly in the United States and particularly

in the area of chemical dependency.

So that's another point of view.

I've also worked with a number of modern day shamans here in the United States.

And that's another point of view.

The thing that attracts me about Terence's information, which is relatively new to me,

I've heard bits and pieces of it, but it provides me with a more, or I hope can provide me with

a more historical, more organic, more depth to the experience over a period of time, rather

than this kind of relatively closed psychological or transpersonal psychological perspective that

I've had for the last five or six years of how these materials and how these experiences work.

So I'm really looking for, really looking for depth from the experience to see where it came

from over a long period of time, and how that fits in with what I do.

Yeah, good.

And I'll say more about all that, so I'm processing it.

My name is Terri, and I've also moved, just recently moved to the Bay Area from Austin.

I had a lot of experience with psychedelic drugs in the 60s and 70s on a recreational basis.

I've been reintroduced in the last year or two, and I've been doing a lot of personal growth

work and spiritual work, and I'm interested in that.

And I'm interested in psychoactive, legal psychoactive drugs, and growing them and learning

more about it.

My name is Lauren.

I'm a second year student in the anthropology department here.

At first I wasn't going to come to this, this or the lecture, and then my friend Bob here

and another anthropology student said, well, if you're in anthropology, whether you're

interested in psychedelics and shamanism or not, you really should have the information.

So, and I've never taken psychedelics, unless you include marijuana as a psychedelic.

I seem to manufacture my own chemicals.

And I was blown away last night.

It isn't often that I come across an idea or two that's completely new for me that maybe

makes sense, maybe doesn't, but it completely blows away the way I've thought about things.

And your whole idea about the evolution of culture somehow being tied to our relationship

with psychoactive substances and nature is like, fuck, I never thought about that.

And I don't know whether it's true or not.

You know, and I'll take it in and I'll study for the next year or two and see whether any

of it makes any sense or whether it was, you know, from a bad trip.

I mean, I don't know.

Just remember, you heard it here first.

I guess you footnote it over here.

But I really did think there were some brilliant ideas there.

And my interest is in the relationship between culture and psychedelics.

And I had this, not quite a peak experience, I won't say that much, but just a real powerful

period of time last night where I all of a sudden sensed like, you know, like maybe the

things that we find in nature were there for a purpose.

And there's a relationship between human species and our evolution and what's found out here.

And maybe there isn't us versus nature, us versus these psychotropic plants.

It's just like a, you know, like the change, an ongoing changing rhythm, you know, and there's

this, you know, we take something, we eat it, we do something, we put it back, you know,

our ashes go into the soil.

And it was like, I don't know, it must have been a morphogenetic psychedelic field last

night.

It was nice.

That's why I'm here.

Good.

Well, I'm glad you came.

Thanks.

My name's Bob, and I'm also a student here at the school.

And I'm actually pretty new to the psychedelic experience for the last three years.

And for me, it's reached a point where I would like to, perhaps, I reached the point that most

of the work I've done is by myself.

So I'd like to reach a point where I can start finding maps or pathways that can help me to

direct myself toward the spiritual, more of a spiritual understanding.

And I'm very interested in shamanism and how this ties to psychedelics.

And I'm interested to find out how some of these other plants from other parts of the

world can be introduced into this culture and broaden my knowledge.

My name is Allison, and I'd never heard of you before.

I came to California, and I listened to a tape of yours.

And it was really inspiring.

I never realized that psychedelic experiences had such a strong effect before I listened to

you speak on the entire populace of the world.

I wanted to believe that, but I couldn't justify it from just me thinking that.

And the lecture last night was really good.

It took me a really long time to go to sleep.

And usually a person hits the pillow and crashes out.

I'd also like to find out more about pterodactyls.

Because I've had problems with other prehistoric beasts before.

Not particularly those.

And because I'm an artist, and I want to find out more how to use psychedelic experiences

to propagate art.

To propagate art.

Good.

I'm also interested, too, in how we can go about inviting people that have a wall up against

using psychedelics for growth, like family members.

How possibly you can get them, I mean, if there's any way, as you know, of coercing the myths

and people who might not normally feel comfortable doing anything.

I have one member of my family that's interested in trying things, but because they're illegal,

just can't justify it.

And I want to know if there's any way or any place that it is legal or, you know,

helping other people.

Yeah, well, this is a really intense issue for people.

And telling someone that you think they should take a psychedelic compound for purposes of

spiritual growth is usually going to set off some kind of very strong reaction.

I don't need it, is what I...

Yes, or you're saying I'm screwed up, or you're trying to poison me, or you're screwed up,

or you wouldn't be saying this, these kinds of things.

Recently, I had to review Marshall McLuhan's letters.

So I read all these letters that McLuhan wrote.

And one of the things he wrote about was how nervous people got when he tried to discuss the effects of media,

the unconscious effects of media.

And he said that people who were raised in the tradition of phonetic alphabets

were tremendously nervous about having the machinery of reality examined.

And I think the drug thing is even more intensely this kind of issue.

When I was in the 60s, when I went home thinking I would convert my family to taking LSD,

it was very clear with me, to me, as I argued with them about it, that the reason they didn't want to take it

was because they knew damn good and well that they were crazy.

And they didn't want to mess with it.

You know, the last thing on earth they wanted to do was probe and explore the mind.

They have that all nailed down just fine, thank you.

So it is, we will talk about this.

Good. Well, I'm glad you're here.

My name is Kim, and I think the reason that I'm here is that I'm looking for motivation in life.

I think Terrence last night termed it effortless appropriate activity.

And it seems that life would be better lived if there was a clear, or if not clear, at least a feeling

of where we were going and what needed to be done.

And there was some knowledge that we were operating with to give just more meaning in life.

And so I've, I've spent my life looking into different areas.

I studied biology for a time and have gone into, not too deeply into various Sufism for a little bit.

And I'm now doing, I make my living writing computer software.

But I find that currently Terrence seems to be the strongest magnet that I feel can lead me into, hopefully into a path towards knowledge and motivation.

It's a tall order.

For one so unmotivated.

Don't make bet on it. Don't bet the baby.

It's only 40 seconds away from it.

True.

And one federal felony.

My name is Jim.

I had the pleasure of hearing Terrence speak a couple weeks ago in Santa Rosa, as well as listening to most of the tapes.

And I was really interested in the idea of the diets of some of the shamanic cultures that apparently are very rich in the different precursors of brain chemicals.

And I had also heard about MAO inhibitors that were really dangerous with certain amino acids in the system.

Something about fasting.

This is not a very popular thing, but not a certain way.

At least, seeing the results are entirely different.

But I had the ability to use for an effect of this and in some of the random things.

And I had to take a look at it.

And I have to look at it.

But I don't think that is a good idea.

That was fun.

So, I'm not aware of the situation.

I'm aware.

And I'm aware of what I would do.

I'm aware of my son.

I'm aware of the things that help people use all of these people to do,

and I know, and I'm aware of it.

I can't wait for that day.

So, I'm aware of it.

But I've been studying the stats...

I'm aware of it.

I'm aware of what I work with this video.

I'm aware of it.

or that, so I'm interested in that, and I'm happy to talk about it.

And are you an MD?

No.

Yeah, well we'll talk about diet and MAO and all that, I'm sure.

Someone once said that language was created in order to lie.

Well, I think that's very true.

And cultures are the shockwave that forms in the wake of the leading edge of language.

So all cultures are a lie of some sort.

They are, you know, T.S. Eliot in the Wasteland said,

between the hope and the completion falls the shadow.

And I think that the shadow, the personification of the shadow is inevitably the cultural values in which we are embedded.

And breaking through those cultural values seems to be something which can only be done by severely perturbing the neurological basis of cognition.

In other words, by perturbing the neurochemistry of the cognizing brain.

And whether the brain generates or receives cognition doesn't really have to concern us here.

All shamans, all visionary shamans who use plants understand that it is the plants that cause the visions.

That there is a relationship of cause and effect here.

Breaking through to that dimension then to my mind introduces awareness of a reality outside of history.

One way of thinking of shamanism is it is the exploration of hyperspace or the exploration of eternity.

In other words that the shaman is someone who has seen the end, the beginning and the end.

And so has a relationship to time which is characterized by effortless appropriate activity.

Effortless appropriate activity is the consequence of having understood process on all scales of expression.

And this I think is what shamanism is about.

This is why shamans are able to heal.

Because this effortless expression of appropriate activity is the sine qua non for allowing the energy, the chi of heaven, to pass through the body as transmitter and into the world of causal efficacy.

And I think this is what we want for ourselves as a culture somehow.

A return to effortless appropriate activity instead of history which is more like the myth of Sisyphus.

I mean it's tremendously laborious utterly inappropriate activity which grows daily more inappropriate.

How then will the archaic revival deal with the historical momentum of the phonetic alphabet created, printing press reinforced, male dominated set of cultural values that we all have inherited?

Well, I think it has to begin in psychology.

That the psychologists, you know it was Robert Oppenheimer, and perhaps it was apocryphal but I don't think so, who said the physicists, whatever may be said, know guilt.

They know it because of what was done.

He was talking about the bomb.

Well, I think psychology, if not guilt, at least it has known triviality because it has abided in it far too long.

The analogy that I like to make is to the telescope.

The telescope did for astronomy what the psychedelic plants want to do for psychology and the study of cultural history.

But in our case, the inquisition is winning.

In our case, silence is actually being reinforced.

People are afraid to talk about these things.

These matters can only be dealt with in the anthropological context or in the ratomorphic context.

Meaning you can give psychedelics to rats.

You can go and observe people taking psychedelics in God knows where.

But it cannot be brought into the laboratory hardly to speak of the consulting room.

And yet we are going mad with the accumulated pressure of neurotic activity.

We know.

We have the money to feed everyone.

We have the money and the scientific expertise to cure epidemic diseases.

We have the cultural manas to create paradise.

What we do not have is the brains to do it.

The guts to do it.

The imagination to do it.

It is entirely a failure of imagination.

The cultural renaissance that we are awaiting.

The world revolution that we are praying for.

Has got to happen between people's ears.

It isn't that we await a new technology.

Or that we await a breakthrough to vast wealth.

It is that we await a breakthrough to moral decency.

To imagination.

To pragmatism.

To a vision of the bankruptcy of ideology.

This is what we are waiting on.

Well, you know, way back in the middle sixties.

When the psychedelic thing in the form of LSD was getting rolling.

They settled on at first a phenomenological description of these things.

They were simply called consciousness expanding drugs.

No one has ever seriously challenged this assertion.

That the psychedelics allow you.

They expand your peripheral vision.

Trivial thing, but measurable by ophthalmologists.

They increase your visual acuity.

Also measurable.

They inspire linguistic activity.

Managerial envisioning of the control and projection of process and flow and complex activities.

In other words, they synergize all the functions that we associate with consciousness.

And consciousness is what we are lacking.

And I don't, I don't, it's always shocking to me to realize how much consciousness we are lacking.

Because I go from one egghead watering hole to another, you know.

I mean, if not, if not CIIS, then excellent and something else.

But, you know, let's bear in mind that 22% of the American people believe that the sun moves around the earth.

22%!

Those are the people who are going to choose the next president on Tuesday.

So, consciousness expansion.

An enzyme which works on the imagination.

A set of shamanic rituals which connect us back into the local minds of the planet.

Planned hallucinogens which put us in touch with the Akashic records, whatever that may mean.

It seems to mean simply the sum total record of everything that ever happened or might have happened.

An ability to tap into this is of cardinal importance to our recovering materialistic forces.

That a untrammeled history of devotion to monotheism has set loose on this planet.

Partnership, responsibility, caring.

These things which come so hard to us as a species would be second nature.

If we were operating on all cylinders.

And all cylinders mean having correct and true images of what nature is.

Of what this planet is.

Of who we are.

And of where we fit into this thing.

It is not that we are omnipresent, omnipotent, egomaniacal barbarians.

Turned loose to plunder, rape, kill and pile up wealth for ourselves and our descendants.

That model has now become toxic.

And is feeding back into the collectivity very rapidly.

In such a way that it is going to be a photo finish between planetary catastrophe.

And breakthrough to some kind of complete other cultural dimension.

Of values and ways of relating to each other.

And anticipations of the future.

Now traditionally societies have used the hyper dimensional nature of the psychedelic information field.

To navigate themselves into the future.

By stifling that capacity in ourselves.

We are turning ourselves over to people who will navigate the culture using a rear view mirror.

That is really what they are doing.

I mean the politician ideologue.

Which is the old style.

Is pitted against the pragmatic shaman manager.

And the political ideologue always navigates from the past.

Because ideology is the legacy of the past.

Pragmatism is where you just deal with situations as they come up.

In a way that seems equitable.

And there is now a global consensus.

For this kind of equity.

Everybody knows that racism is a bad idea.

Even the people who practice it.

Feel defensive about it.

It is indefensible.

Whether you practice it or not.

It is indefensible.

The repression of the feminine.

Is I think indefensible.

A larger number of people feel guilty about it.

But a larger number of people are practicing suppression of the feminine.

But nobody, actually nobody gets up on a soap box and preaches suppression of the feminine.

I suppose that is going too far in this monkey pack.

But it is absolutely an insane point of view.

Trumpeted only by people who would probably willingly self describe themselves as fanatics.

So there is, you see, a consensus about human values.

Even where human values are betrayed.

And that consensus, global consensus on human values, is the place to begin to build.

And the model that is most inviting, that holds the greatest promise, is the catalytic model that places a re-visioning and a re-understanding of these psychedelics center stage.

The reason for this is, as I said earlier, they are catalysts.

We don't have 500 years to straighten this mess out.

We are caught in some kind of technological singularity.

We are in a vortex of cultural change like nothing that has ever been seen on this planet.

And anyone who talks about long term solutions doesn't understand the depth of the crisis.

There are no long term solutions.

There have to be short term solutions.

Because there is only a short term.

Because history has ineluctably set in motion processes that cannot be stopped.

Like the extraction of metals from the planetary surface.

The expansion of population.

The extraction of petroleum by-products.

The dissolution of the ozone in the atmosphere.

The clearing of land.

The rise in carbon dioxide levels.

It's very, very hard to imagine a scenario where old style solutions will have any impact on these things.

I mean, does someone seriously believe that committees of scientists, managers and capitalists

are going to at the last minute pull this out of the fire?

I don't think so.

I think that rather we are being thrown back on our own devices.

There is going to have to be a radical transformation.

That means it's going to come out of the bone and sinew of the species.

It is not going to come out of the software, the languages, the philosophies, the manipulatory theories.

It's not a software fix we're talking about.

It's a hardware fix.

And no less venerable commentator on culture than Arthur Kessler concluded after a lifetime of dealing with these problems

that probably the only serious solution was some kind of chemical rewiring of the monkey.

that we were simply too aggressive, too into hierarchies, too into enforcing male dominance with violence in child rearing situations, so forth and so on.

Well, I think that this self-medication into sanity should not be turned over to the drug designers and the pharmaceutical companies.

God forbid, because what they will give us are tranquilizers or antidepressants.

That's not what we need.

What we need is a morphogenetic field amplifier that plugs us into the ecological screen that is emanating from the planetary ecology which is imperiled.

And the morphogenetic field amplifiers are these psychoactive substances in plants.

That is in fact what they are doing there, I maintain.

They have synergized the historical process.

They have synergized our language forming and symbol forming capacity for a purpose which is locked somehow to the fate of the planet and all life upon it.

A purpose which may not be cognizable to human beings.

In other words, it is nowhere written adamantine that we are to understand the role we are to play.

Simply that we are to play it.

And what has been unleashed first by life and its ascendancy through higher phylogeny and then by ourselves through the invention of culture, what has been released on this planet is language.

Self-replicating, self-imaging codes, codes running wild.

First the hardware codes of the DNA which create proteins.

And then the epigenetic codes, the codes that are formed by books and paintings and song and dance.

And finally the cybernetic codes which are also epigenetic codes but which expand mind into domains of time that were previously closed to it.

History in a way can be seen as an exercise in the expansion of mnemonic capacity.

Which finally crosses some kind of incredibly quantized barrier with the ability to create solid state databases where essentially no information need necessarily be lost.

So information is self-replicating, self-imaging and loose on this planet.

Biology is its matrix. Culture is its matrix.

But whether it is biological, whether it is culture, we cannot know.

One of the great puzzles then of the psychedelic experience is why then is it experienced as this tremendous release of information.

Information as visual impression, information as audio impression.

It's as though the real nature of reality is as the nature of cognition.

The logos, thought, pure undifferentiated pre-syntactical self-reflection.

And then out of that evolves codes of self-description which create then epiphenomenal codes of commentary upon themselves.

So that really reality is more like literature and its exegesis.

History is like a footnote on biology.

The individual is like a bibliographic addenda upon the main text of humanity.

This informational quality of becoming is reinforced by the psychedelic experience

and feeds back into the eventual perception that we are somehow spirit, image, not things of matter but things of light and position.

In other words, that we are capable as cognitive agents of becoming the thing beheld.

This was the great hope of Aristotelianism so often forgotten in our easy going Platonism.

That the cognitive agent becoming the thing beheld was the apotheosis of the Aristotelian method.

And at the end of history it looms as a cultural program which we could complete if we would but carry it out.

How? This we do not yet know because we are not yet close enough to the final denouement of this play.

But we are definitely deep into the third act.

The elements are assembling, cyberspace, psychedelic, the rediscovery of psychedelic shamanism,

the putting together of a vast network of cybernetic information transfer and control mechanisms on the surface of the planet,

the creation of the global village of information where events in Kabul and Sydney and Tierra del Fuego are conveyed everywhere within minutes after they happen.

What all this is, is the process of spirit separating itself from the placenta of organic organization.

It is what history was for and about. History is some kind of gestation, some kind of pregnancy, of matter, almost an alchemical process

out of which comes the philosopher's stone or the revivified homunculus, a transcendental union of opposites,

a coincidencia oppositorum that somehow then is able to transcend the limitations and dichotomies that comprised its components, you see,

because it is a coincidencia oppositorum. It does maintain within itself the character of contradiction.

You know, Marshall McLuhan said, a pun is a sphere of meaning whose center is nowhere and whose edge is everywhere.

Well, this is a reasonable description of human history as well. As the sphere of understanding expands,

the surface area of ignorance asymptotically expands in front of it. That's what the adventure of becoming is about.

And what I want to place before you tonight is the central role that psychedelic shamanism has played in triggering this process of self-reflection in early primates,

in sustaining the cultural enterprise through its many adumbrations, leading us to make the leap into history, into the realm then of cyberspace, of solid state information transfer,

of being able as cognitive agents to become the thing beheld. This is, I think, the great promise that it holds out for us.

It's also a great challenge and a hell of a fight looms ahead because this is a historical watershed of greater implications than the shift from the manuscript culture of the late medieval period to the world of print,

a greater shift from the hieroglyphic scripts of the ancient Near East to the world of the phonetic alphabet. This is, in fact, the historical payoff, the jackpot that can redeem the historical experience which otherwise has to be assessed as a complete bust.

And it's going to rest upon us, I think, the people alive now and in the next 25 or 30 years to integrate the traditions, figure out what people in all times and places have been trying to say about the other, about the transcendent and the transpersonal,

and then to forge a social philosophy, a shamanic technology of transcendence, whether extraterrestrial or cybernetic or there are many, many possible scenarios,

but the philosophical foundations must rest in doing honour to the integrated and complete face of nature which is ultimately psychedelic, ultimately feminine, ultimately boundary dissolving, ultimately liberating.

So why don't we take a break and I'll answer questions.

Ladies and gentlemen, we're floating in space. Ladies and gentlemen, we're floating in space.

The culture must conventionalize and believe that today is

whatever it is, November 5th or 6th 1988, but some of us are living in the 21st

century and some of us are living in the 18th century and the goal, you know, is to

try and move all this forward. This is why it's funny, certain themes that have

emerged in the Western mind are in fact very psychedelic and one of them is the

notion of progressivism, which is a pretty Western idea and quite psychedelic.

It's the idea that things are getting better or that things can get better.

Most societies look backward toward a paradigm of a past paradise and all

effort is toward recovering this paradise. We're the only people who have this faith

in progress and it's quite strong in us, so strong that we barely question it. I

remember the first time I was in Karachi, Pakistan, I was being hauled around the

city in a rickshaw drawn by a guy with bare feet. I mean it was a human-powered

machine and and he spoke English and we were scoring hash and this and that so we

got to know each other and he said in Pakistan we understand what is wrong with

the world and I said so what's wrong with the world and he said progress that's

what it is. We have to stop progress which for me was quite a revelatory idea. This thing about time,

though, is very interesting and operates on many different levels. Ultimately I think what

the psychedelic experience may be is a higher topological manifold of temporality. That

the reason it is so puzzling and so familiar, so alien and so exalting, is that it is in

fact mundane, it is in fact just us, but us sectioned through some higher spatial dimension. And

if for instance you think about magic for a moment, let's think about the major

focus of identifiers of the magical act such as psychic surgery where your hand is plunged through

the wall of the body cavity of a human being and and a tumorous organ is taken out and no wound is

visible. A typical and form of folk magic much discussed. I'm sure you're all familiar with it. Or the more

typical or another form of magic, stage magic in this case. A word is written on

an envelope and then the envelope is locked in a box and the blindfolded

magician is able to tell the audience what the word is and the envelope in the

box. And these things are miraculous. We cannot conceive of how they could be

done, but if you allow the possibility of a higher spatial dimension then these

things become trivial because it means the body is open. There is a way to that

that from the point of view of this higher spatial dimension the inside and

the outside of the body are on the same side so no problem is posed by

removing this organ. Likewise from the point of view of a higher spatial

dimension the locked box is open on one end, the end that is intersecting that

dimension. So the way you read the message is you just go over and look. It's

completely trivial. A way to make this cogent for people who are now thoroughly

confused is to recall Edwin Abbott's fantasy flatland where he imagined a

world of two dimensions where a house was what in our world is what's called a

blueprint and that was all you needed was the blueprint and you could live in the

blueprint because you walked in and once you had closed the door no one in

flatland could come through that blue line and get at you. But of course to those of

us in three dimensions we just lean over and look at the blueprint and put your

thumb in the inside of the flatlander's living room and from his point of view

from out of nowhere an enormous thumb has magically appeared in his living room.

Well this shows how perfectly mundane situations on one level appear to be

absolute violations of natural law on another level and this is happening very

much in the psychedelic experience because the mind is the cutting edge of the

evolving event system. Yeah?

Can you talk a little bit about the idea of this race that we're in between apocalypse and some kind of

transformational event and how from how the your experience in altered states has has led you

to believe or feel that there's some hope for changing that and why? Well I think it's

clear that we're in a race between apocalypse and and breakthrough and I suppose

breakthrough is the dark horse everything seems to be set up to favor apocalypse it

has the inside track except of course very few people would own up to saying that

they personally want to die you know so why is it if none of us really want to die

why is the overwhelming global cultural image one of inevitable catastrophe I know

I'm very optimistic I really think history was for a purpose I would not have not had it I think it was

useful and that we must have learned something very important what we learned

that was so important I'm not sure but probably when we need it will have it I

mean maybe we need atomic weapons because a large object will be detected hurtling

toward earth and if nature had not split off the monkeys a hundred thousand years

ago and evolved intercontinental missile thermal nuclear weapon delivery systems

that we could use to destroy that asteroid then all life on earth would die so what

appears to us madness our own dedication to the release of larger and larger amounts of

event of energy for no purpose other than to destroy ourselves is suddenly rescued from pathology and shown

to be this tremendously foresight full thing and thank God we did this because otherwise we'd all be dead and

everything else would be dead I don't seriously believe that but I do think that we must have learned something very very important perhaps cybernetics

cybernetics come in here perhaps this exoskeleton of mnemonic material that allows us essentially to freeze and and record our entire culture everything is going into the data banks

uh one way of thinking about what's going on is uh compression of information and history represents a compression of information magnitudes more accelerated than the evolution of life and then 20th century history represents an even greater information compression

information finally compressed to such a degree that it's like the singularity inside a black hole

singularity inside a black hole you know a black hole has at its center a place where the equations don't sum

in other words where it doesn't make any sense and the only conclusion you can reach is that at that point of so-called infinite compression or singularity another universe bursts into being somewhere else in a greater and vast

cosmology and then the energy equations balance well it's as though mind is undergoing this kind of gravitational collapse and information is being compressed to such a degree that eventually it will not all fit in the present and then the information begins to move off into the only dimensions available to it which are the past and the future

exactly as if you fill a glass with more water than it can hold once it has more water in it than it can hold the water begins to flow down the sides and out into the larger domain and so i think that people who try to use history which is usually male egos and male dominated institutions are uh actually tremendously frustrated

frustrated we don't see it that way because to us it looks like they win every battle because they win every election but because they win every election but because they win every election it is their job to manage the situation it's a case of you want it here it is and they have not a clue as to how to manage it so their thing is all about the headaches of ownership

while our political point of view is pretty much about the headaches of disenfranchisement but uh i think that there is some kind of event ahead of us in time not far on the order of twenty to forty years that is casting an enormous shadow back through the lower dimensional slice of being which we call history

so that religions and mystical visions and the and the visions of uh of uh revolutionary leaders are um a response to flickering intimations of this transcendental object that is pulling intelligence out of the organic matrix of life on this planet in a process that is

occupying fifty to a hundred thousand years it's extremely unusual what's happening and a process that uh creates a series of self transforming uh bootstrap steps in a period of a hundred thousand years means it's a unique kind of phenomenon there's never been anything like it on the planet what it is leading toward is hard to say but i know

that uh it's values are the values of life connectedness primacy of experience and caring and it is using the historical process to wire us all together in some way uh control mechanisms are spreading through the society at an enormous rate you know it's interesting one of the horror fantasies of the

the 1950s which was when you know this conservative straight um crew cut point of view was really at its height one of the fears of the future that people would just toss off off handedly was uh well in the future machines will take over and run everything and this notion of uh the control of the planet rested from the sure hands of noble

human beings and instead betrayed into the power of calculating automatons was a great science fiction theme of the 50s but uh it's interesting how impartial computers are they are not ideologues they are not um they're managers and remember i said the struggle was between the shaman manager

uh they are not um they're not um they're the ideologue politician and so i think the cybernetic matrix is a tremendous uh tool for feminizing

uh tool for feminizing and radicalizing and psychedelicizing the social matrix i see computers as entirely feminine i mean people have a reaction to this because they think that because men spend a lot of time around them and seem obsessed with them that somehow it isn't feminine

I mean, people have a reaction to this because they think that because men spend a lot of time around them and seem obsessed with them, that somehow it isn't feminine.

But men have always been obsessed with the feminine.

I mean, I think it was D.H. Lawrence who said, what life is really about is men keeping women from ever suspecting how truly obsessed we are by them.

So, I think, you know, that this linking together, feminizing, cybernetic thing is part of the anticipation of this object at the end of time.

What seems to be happening is we're all flowing together.

I mean, we keep talking about unity, globalism, completion.

Well, you better, you know, you're going to get what you ordered.

And I think what it means is probably the dear individual, which, don't be fooled, is a soft description of the male ego run rampant.

the democratic individual, the citizen, this notion is in fair peril to be replaced by

the person, which is a much more

nubly kind of concept. The person is not an interchangeable part, the citizen is. The

citizen is a model of society based on the industrial revolution of the 18th century,

but the person is a harking back to a pre-print model and this is being set loose. It's what the hippies

were essentially. What they were trying to evoke was this do-your-own-thing idea. But there's a

paradox here. The do-your-own-thing idea is somehow leading to this vectoring toward a unified cultural

state where everybody is involved in everybody else. It's all right that it's paradoxical because

there's no reason that it should be reasonable. Yeah?

I wonder if you could address the difference between the LSD experience and mushroom experience,

if there is a difference, and also your feelings about marijuana as an altered state.

Well, the LSD experience is, I mean, I speak only from my own experience, of course,

but to me it seemed more psychoanalytical than psychedelic. More, I mean, I was in my early 20s

when I encountered LSD. Maybe I had more stuff, as they say, to deal with, but it was not a reliable

visionary drug for me. It caused me to have funny ideas. It seemed mostly to be a thought thing,

but not a visual thing. And somehow, in my education, somewhere along the way, I had picked up this bias

in favor of the visual channel. I wasn't satisfied with LSD. I wanted those things that Havelock Ellis

describes, where he talks about, you know, jeweled ruins and phosphorescent maidens in diaphanous gowns,

howling demon songs beneath a violet moon. And that was what I wanted. Not funny ideas.

And what I found, and I worked pretty diligently at it with LSD, I found that my most satisfying LSD

experiences were while smoking hash. And that then that really did do something interesting,

sent it skittering off in these wonderful visionary directions.

things. But these things do have characters. And this is something probably worth talking about in this

group. That at low doses, everything seems like everything else. In other words,

a little mescaline, a tiny amount of LSD, a little bit of MDMA, a tiny tad of psilocybin,

all of these things simply register as wired, you know, arousal, eager to

hear what's being said, and follow the thread of the argument, and just absolutely fascinated by what's

going on, no matter what's going on. But as you raise the dose, the character of these things

begins to appear. And, for instance, psilocybin is, to my mind, in many ways, the most anomalous.

Because, number one, this thing about how it speaks. It does speak. And none of the others do. I mean,

the others, you may occasionally, in years of fiddling, get a sentence or two. But the mushroom

just is voluble. It just comes on and raves, you know. And sometimes you even, and people have said to

me, it really does rave. I mean, it's not a calm. It's not a, it's not a go with the flow rap.

It's a rap about planetary destiny, and the next 10 million years, and the last 10 million years. And,

you know, the, it's this trumpet blast, Cecil B. DeMille, hyper, you know, real, like that. Well,

then something like ayahuasca, which is this thing these shamans use in the Amazon basin that's based

on DMT and monoamine oxidase inhibitors, you take that, and it's about the rivers, and the jungle,

and these people, and their humility, and dignity, and your humility, and dignity, and the earth,

and plants, and life, and water, and sunlight, and it's this totally earthbound, terrestrial,

life-affirming thing. And it does not speak. But it's an eye. And its language is visual. And it,

after an ayahuasca trip, you just feel like your eyes are literally bulging out of your head. I mean,

you've spent six hours looking, looking, looking, looking, just, you know, not really doing anything

else but looking. Um, well, then, uh, something like Datura has this watery, magical, forgetful, kind of

witchy, occult quality. It's, you know, shadows, shadows. And, and a peculiar quality of erosion of

your own attention. So that, you know, who, no matter who you are, you find yourself wandering through empty

colonnades, and, uh, in, under a sky, pregnant with the possibility of rain. I mean, it's this strange,

de Kierke-esque kind of landscape. Uh, DMT has another quality. It seems to convey you into just, uh,

a world of utter outrage, where all linguistic sensory and analytical machinery is just, uh, brought to a

screeching halt. So, it's interesting, you know, it's important to learn what you like, and to learn

what you can, uh, put up with. Someone at a recent weekend, who, who takes mushrooms quite religiously,

and quite regularly, and I said, you know, does it ever get easier? And he said, no, it never gets easier.

Each time, what I pray, as I go into it, is, please let me be able to stand a little bit more.

Because, you know, finally, you just, it is the real mystery. So, the only way your relationship to it can

end, is by you averting your gaze. Because no human being can gaze into it endlessly. Because it is, uh,

um, you know, it, it is, uh, what it says it is. It is, uh, the other. I was groping for the Hebrew, but not

finding it. Yes. Yeah. Just want to follow up on that question a little bit. Uh, Stan Grof describes LSP as a

non-specific amplifier. And by that he means it amplifies what's already existing in the psyche. And he uses this

metaphor that LSP serves as a kind of telescope, or microscope, in that it does not itself produce

the experience, but rather it enables you to have an experience that's already there in potentia,

latent in your psyche. And I just wonder if you could comment on that, since you just now describe

the various psychoactics as having a character. So, in his framework, would you disagree with it,

or would you say that the, the various telescopes are tinted with a certain lens? Or, or how would you

sort of reconcile? Well, um, at the beginning of your question that you characterized LSD, uh,

it's that it, um, it is a non-specific amplifier. But of the contents of the personal unconscious and the

sensorium, uh, what people notice about LSD is either what's right or wrong with themselves,

or how freaky the world is. You know, uh, a bug, a drop of water, it can be anything. But you discover

the strangest things on LSD, and they're real things. I mean, relationships of reflections and windows, and,

I mean, it basically seems to be a tremendous amplifier of attention and analysis of the input

of attention when directed into the outer world. And when directed into the inner world, uh, it's an

analytical tool for looking at past history of the, of the individual, which is what I call the personal

unconscious. The thing that always puzzled me about enthusiasts of LSD, uh, was

that they claimed that beyond this lie what they called the white light, which they put great store by,

and made all kinds of Buddhist associations to it. I don't know if I've ever had the white light

experience. As I go deeper into strong psychedelics, what happens is multiplicity proliferates. There is

not a simplifying. There is a further and further and further complexifying. And, uh, I was talking to

someone at Ojai Foundation about this, and they said, but surely beyond all this, there is some kind of

simplification and unity. And I said, well, that I wasn't sure that maybe it's just, you know,

an infinite sensoric ocean in all directions, in all dimensions, forever. Uh, ketamine

comes closer to providing a no observer, nothing observed kind of state. But you can't do much with

that. You can have it. But I, and it, there is, of course, with the dropping of all boundaries,

a feeling of release. But, uh, what I'm interested in are, uh, bringing back artifacts to share with

the tribe. And I've accepted that they will come in the form of either things that can be painted,

or things that can be said. And, uh, and since I'm better at the saying than the painting, I work like

that. Uh, Stan is a good friend of mine. We've talked about this over the years. Um, I just don't,

I just can't confirm his maps of the psyche. I don't see those states occurring along a continuum

the way that he says they do. I think it's much more chaotic. And that if, if his categories work

to facilitate psychotherapy, then that's good because that's what he's interested in. In other

words, I see his, his maps as very, very provisional and useless and useful for navigating. But I doubt

that when we get the final maps, if we ever do, that they will bear terrifically much resemblance to

that. And I think he would agree with that. I mean, we don't, we're not, uh, at loggerheads about this.

Anybody who works with psychedelics, their ultimate position is that hell, they don't know.

And on that note, why don't we go to lunch? And, uh, we will reassemble at two o'clock.

If you're new to the neighborhood, uh, Haight Street is two blocks down Ashbury and there's a, a plethora

of restaurants to choose from down there. Okay, I think, uh, I think we're all here. People are pulling

together. So we'll talk for an hour or so and then we'll break and then we'll go to four. Well,

this afternoon I thought, uh, we would, uh, do some operational homework and academic referencing.

One of the most important things about, uh, all of this that we've been discussing is to get the

information straight, to be as well informed as possible. I mean, it's as important to be well

informed in this area if you're going to do it as it is to be well informed about procedures in skin

diving and that sort of thing, uh, if you're going to do that. Uh, does that make you happy?

Yeah, we're okay. Before I talk about that, um, why don't you introduce yourself?

Oh, hi. Um, my name is Steven. I met you at Ralph's wedding.

Right, I remember. Yeah. And, uh, we have a mutual friend in Dr. Marsden who told me about,

uh, some of his experiences. And I have a little bit of a background in academic, uh,

herbology and pharmacognosy. I've studied pharmacy and chemistry and naturopathy. Um, so I've had a long

standing interest in pharmaceuticals and the biochemistry of the brain.

Uh, but, uh, due to my paranoia of my professional license, I let it control me until about six months

ago, uh, when I was in Sedona and, and, uh, started to commune with the goddess and the rocks. And she

said, go for the mushrooms. And so what do you do for a living now?

Well, um, I basically did not tell the department of defense that I'm employed with about these

experiences. I'm the director of pharmacy services for the, uh, military board and the city of Monterey.

Welcome. Maybe you should tell them. I don't think so.

No. Maybe you could spike their punches.

Well, boring from within is always an effective strategy. Maybe the only effective strategy when

you're as few in numbers as we are. Well, welcome. I'm sure that whatever we said that you missed

will be said again and is on today.

Okay. Well, what I thought I'd do at the beginning of this afternoon today,

apropos of this idea that people should inform themselves, uh, about what's going on. Because

though you can't find out everything, you can find out a lot more than most people know.

And it's amazing to me the number of people who would pay a couple of hundred bucks to come to a weekend

with a person like myself to learn about psychedelics when a couple of hundred books would get you quite far, uh, in a bookstore and, uh, uh, you know, the public library is a marvelous resource for this stuff.

So I hauled some titles off my own bookshelf and I'll go through them. This is by no means all.

I just simply chose books that I thought were either important to the field or I felt would be

fairly easy for someone to obtain if they wanted to look into these matters.

Uh, this one some of you may know. This is probably the easiest to obtain and the most compendious.

It's Plants of the Gods by Richard Evans Schultes, who's Professor Emeritus of Botany at Harvard.

And, uh, this is basically the distillation of his life's work. It's filled with pictures. It has all kinds of, uh,

information arranged in this kind of table form where you can look up a plant, get a notion of what it looks like,

what family it belongs to, what its chemical constituents are, and so forth. And it has a very good

bibliography and a chemical appendix. So this is around and highly recommended.

If you want to go slightly deeper than that book goes, this is the academic version of the same book.

This is the botany and chemistry of hallucinogens. This is the bible of this field because it lists,

uh, well, virtually the state of the art circa 1980 and, uh, compendious bibliography and, uh,

unopened mail.

And, uh, this book though is, this is an expensive academic press but highly recommended. If you had to

have just one book on hallucinogens, this would probably be the one to go for. It's also by Richard

Evans Schultes and Albert Hoffman, who some of you may know as the discoverer of LSD and the man who

first characterized and synthesized psilocybin.

Uh, from a slightly more countercultural point of view, the revised edition of the Psychedelics

Encyclopedia by, uh, Peter Stafford, who some of you may know. And again, this is an effort to be

compendious. No one of these books should be taken as gospel. I mean, you want to get it from several

different sources before you conclude any given fact is true. But this book is published by Tarcher

in L.A. I think this is a fairly easily obtained book.

That'll be, yeah, this, this is the second edition. And he's going to do a third edition. Yeah. And he's very

good about keeping up on the, on the literature and, uh, and following it through. This is an interesting book.

Peter Stafford. Then, uh, for those of you who are more inclined to, uh, pharmacology and neurophysiology and

that sort of thing, this is a fairly hard book to obtain. But in a way, it's never been surpassed.

This book is called The Hallucinogens by Hoffer and Osmond. And, uh, the, the, there was never a revised

edition after 1965, uh, discusses a lot about LSD and psychotherapy and also has all kinds of strange

information that was never again mentioned in the literature that was just sort of dropped out.

So you can read here about, for instance, the hallucinogen, uh, dimethyl sulfoxide,

where you drink eight fluid ounces a day for five successive days. And then, uh, the onset of

hallucinations begin that are supposedly quite spectacular. It's just that the notion of drinking

eight fluid ounces of this bizarre chemical compound is not too, uh, too, appetizing.

Peter Stafford.

Peter Stafford. No, I doubt it. I think you probably have to have a scientific book searcher hunt this

one down for you. Hoffer and Osmond, the hallucinogens. And then for sort of the state of the art,

uh, in a simple one between, you know, in one book is Solomon H. Snyder's book, Drugs and the Brain.

And it doesn't simply address hallucinogens. It talks about, uh, uh, all kinds of drugs, but explains the

mechanism of drug activity, uh, the notion of, uh, the lock and key activity of the drug molecule to the

synaptic cleft. And it gives you a, a short basic course in, uh, neurology. And Saul Snyder is one of

the giants of psychopharmacology, Nobel Prize winner, so forth and so on. So, Drugs and the Brain by Solomon

Snyder. Uh, let's see here. Here's another book somewhat on the line of Snyder's book. This is one of

the most recent books written on hallucinogens. It's by, uh, the editor is Barry Jacobs. Hallucinogens,

neurochemical, behavioral, and clinical perspectives. And as my brother said, all of the

uninteresting perspectives are covered here very thoroughly and in detail. And what these books are

good for, uh, besides whatever they say, is that they contain excellent bibliographies. So, uh, tracing

a particular problem, uh, you go to these books and then they direct you to the journal articles that

give you what you want to know. Most of the literature of psychopharmacology is in journals,

which you will never as a layman encounter unless you go to medical libraries and attempt to see

these things, uh, things like Lloydia and, uh, oh, I don't know, Acta Neurologica and all of this,

the journal of, uh, psychopharmacology and this sort of thing. But, uh, you can be directed to the, uh,

I mean, some of these journals cost as much as $200 and $300 a year to subscribe to. So, if you don't

want to do that, the bibliography directs you to the articles you need and you just go to the, uh,

med library and Xerox them out. It's edited by Barry Jacobs. I'm trying to do this in some kind of

reasonable order. Let's see. Um, well, then this sort of bridges the gap between pharmacology,

sociology, and anthropology. This is, uh, Brian Dutoy, I guess. D-U space T-O-I-T. Drugs,

rituals, and altered states of consciousness. And, uh, some of the altered states of consciousness.

Let me see if I can make a quick identification here. I think this is actually Banisteriopsis

Rosbiana, which is a rare, uh, admixture plant, contains DMT, but has the lanceolate leaf end that

distinguishes it from Banisteriopsis copy. Probably could do 10 years for the book. The publisher on

this one is a weird one. It's, uh, B-A-L-K-E-M-A Balkema of Rotterdam. So, it's a Dutch publisher.

The author's name is, uh, Dutoy. D-U-T-O-I-T. Yeah, this is a, this is a good one. And, uh,

so then, sort of, moving out of the realm of, uh, pharmacology and psychology, and into the

specifically anthropological stuff, uh, this is, uh, one that a number of various contributors

alternate states of consciousness, multiple perspectives on the study of consciousness,

edited by Norman Zinberg of Harvard. And this deals not only with shamanic drug usage, but, uh, heroin,

the heroin subculture, and a number of different things. Urban drug cultures are discussed as well,

mostly a sociological perspective here.

Zinberg. And then, uh, moving into the more specifically anthropological stuff,

uh, in what order? Let's see. Well, here's my favorite one. Before he got into drumming,

uh, Michael Harner edited this book, Halicinogens and Shamanism, Oxford University Press, available in

print, in paper. And, uh, a number of writers contributed to this. There are about three articles on

ayahuasca that you just will not find anywhere else, four articles. Uh, articles on peyote,

uh, wonderful article by Henry Munn called The Mushrooms of Language, just a classic article on

mushrooms. So, uh, this I highly recommend. No, Halicinogens and Shamanism.

Is there a book in this, in the Bay, a bookstore in the Bay Area that possibly might have most of these?

Well, to have most of them, that would be a breakthrough. The place I would start would be

Moe's in Berkeley, and then Black Oak in Berkeley, and then Green Apple in the city, and you just

basically, Pellucidar in Albany, the better bookstores with large inventories of used books.

Yeah, they have a drug section at Shambhala. Well, it's because they only have, or mostly have,

in-print books. The, most of these books are not in print and have to be searched for. This may be,

I don't know, I haven't kept up. Um, a sort of similar book, but by a different author,

is Flesh of the Gods, The Ritual Use of Halicinogens by Peter First, who's an anthropologist who,

made his reputation among the Huichol in Mexico, and

this is again articles by Wasson First,

Doug Sharon, William M. Bowden, Fernandez,

Reichel Dolmatoff, the usual names in this ethnobotanical field.

One of the things that's so striking about shamanism in the in the

native context is the absence of mental illness, the absence of

serious neurotic patterns of behavior. This is because this

trans-linguistic reality is allowed to work its will

through shamanism, is allowed to regulate the society. In other words, our model of how society

works is we are at war with nature and we must push it back, seize a beach head,

fortify our position, dig in these kinds of metaphors, metaphors of capture and control.

While the shamanic approach is we must communicate with nature in order that nature can communicate

with us in order that we may know what should be done.

And shamanism as classically practiced is hunting magic, weather magic,

healing magic. In other words, ways of getting into the evolving of state-bound system patterns

within nature. Weather, we would presume, can to some degree be predicted by looking at past weather states.

Hunting can to some degree be predicted by looking at the migration and movement of game in past situations.

So, shamanism then becomes a kind of mnemonic

exercise, where by keeping track of what has happened, you can build up a model of what will happen.

And originally this was done through great mnemonic feats of memory, you know, like the Yugoslavian

folktale singers, or the Homeric epics, or the people who sang the Edith. These were,

you know, works of hundreds of thousands of lines that were passed down virtually without change over millennia.

But there's a strange phenomenon, at least in the evolution of cultures, and perhaps more generally,

which is every step into freedom contains within it the potential for greater bondage.

Now, what I mean by that is, here's an example of it.

Women in charge of the gathering phase, in hunting-gathering cultures, developed

language, I believe, because they had great need of the ability to make fine distinctions.

In other words, here you have 50 grasses, small herbs, shrubs, there are, they have roots, fruits,

berries, seeds, inflorescences. Some of these things are poisonous, some of these things are foods,

some grow in the spring, some in the fall, some along the river courses, some on the hilltops,

so forth and so on. A great many descriptive dimensions come to bear on this. So, consequently,

I think women are to be held responsible for the evolution of language in order to discuss

the extremely important matter of what is good to eat and what is not, and where do you find it,

and how do you preserve it, and what do you combine it with, and so forth and so on. Men,

on the other hand, who were in charge of the hunting because of the different body type and

bladder capacity and so on, the premium there was placed on silence, stoicism, being able to stalk

and, for days, make no noise possibly, and to just, you know, sort of integrate into this

silent kind of thing. Well, this same kind of freedom which binds occurred in the shamanic

effort to steer culture by mnemonic means because eventually even the greatest of the shamanic memory

artists were overwhelmed by the amount of data, by the size of the epics, by the sheer length of these

genealogies. So then symbolic notation is brought in and shamanism turns into scribe craft and signifying

magical forces turns into writing down their names and there is a tremendous binding, a compression,

a limitation of freedom because the strategy of freedom became too successful. So this reaching beyond

ourselves is a process that is continuous. We transcend a state, we then lock ourselves into the transcendent

state, it becomes defined by its own set of limitations, and we move beyond it. And this kind of bootstrapping

mechanism, I think, has been at work throughout the evolution of language, throughout the evolution of

shamanism. Now we have come to a similar kind of bind having to do with the bankruptcy of analytical analysis

and rationalism, which has led us to a pretty complete mastery of inert matter. But when pushed into the quantum

realm, suddenly contradictions begin to multiply and impossible conclusions force themselves upon the

investigator. Well what this means is that rationalism has simply reached its limit. There is nothing, no reason

to think, no reason to think that it doesn't have a limit. It was just the inflated fantasy of the 17th century,

that thought that God's mind must work like the mind of a watchmaker. But in fact, what with chaos theory and

catastrophism and numerous other non-equilibrium partial differential processes in nature,

we now know that nature is extremely unpredictable, highly variable, not subject to analytical

understanding except in very limited domains. What this understanding that quantum physics has brought

the physicists and that the psychedelic state has brought the people who pursue that,

that it has not fed back into the mainstream of society. We're still living in a male-dominated, object-dominated,

subject-other kind of a world model, a world model inherited from the 18th century,

really even more than from the 19th century. Well, is it going to kill us? Is it too late?

What can we do about it? This is what I talked about last night about the archaic revival as the notion of

uh, making a sharp left turn away from the momentum that the historical vehicle wants to follow, which is

thanatoptic. Don't kid yourself. And you cannot have three religions stacked up on top of each other,

stretching back four thousand years, pursuing this monotheistic vision, which ends in an apocalypse,

without building a tremendous morphogenetic predilection for the apocalypse. And our demonic

investigations into matter have led us to create the machinery to produce the apocalypse.

It's interesting, somebody said of the Reagan administration, this was when James Watt was running around saying we didn't have to save the trees

because Jesus was coming anyway, so it didn't matter. And someone said, uh, the jerks want to be in the Bible.

And that's precisely the historical situation. The jerks want to be in the Bible. In other words,

every petty potentate from Frederick Barbarossa to Ronald Reagan

has secretly believed that they were living in the time of the Antichrist and would participate in the scenario of the Book of Revelations.

I mean, this is psychosis if you meet it in a person. If you meet it in a culture, it's called religious piety and conviction.

And it has been going on so long that it has actually created a very narrow neck in the historical process that cannot be avoided.

We now have no choice in the matter of business as usual. There will not apparently be business as usual.

There will either be an apocalyptic destruction of the planet, a kind of Ragnarat, a Gotterdammerung, a complete storm of fire

brought on by the eruption of the psychotic mythologies that have driven

the matter-centered monotheistic male ego culture. Or there will be a plucking of victory from the jaws of that defeat.

And not an apocalypse, but a kind of cultural millennium. A complete breaking out of the pattern into something else.

And some of you may know Rianne Eisler's work, The Chalice and the Blade.

If you haven't read this book, I recommend it to you. For psychedelic people, for feminists, for people concerned with the state of society,

this is certainly an important book. And what she's saying is partnership.

It is not true that the story of the human race is the story of a pendulum swing between matriarchy and patriarchy,

each with its own flaws. Rather, it is that human beings have always lived in an equilibrium-style partnership society,

except during the last 8,000 years, this pattern has been disrupted by the rise of the male ego,

the suppression of the logos-like connection to nature, and a certain evolutionary path taken in the epigenetic coding of information.

In other words, the phonetic alphabet. The phonetic alphabet, which has no reference to the icon of the things expressed,

is utterly cool. Utterly unable, then, to give you any feeling of engagement with what is being described.

This gives permission for analytical science, and the detachment of rationalism, and the sorts of philosophies

that have created the tremendous split between head and heart that characterizes the political systems of

the last several hundred years. Well,

this thing which the shamans are contacting, which we can call another dimension, hyperspace, the collective

unconscious, whatever it is, it is the ground of our becoming. And the only way to sort of unhitch ourselves

from the ego is to open pathways of communication to this invisible field of intentionality in which we are embedded.

And this is a very difficult task, because the culture in which we live denies that this thing even exists.

I mean, if you start saying that you feel the heartbeat of the planet, or that you are

in resonance with the local ecosystem, or still worse, if you say that you hear the voices of elves and fairies,

this is psychopathy. Automatically, you know, you have to be observed, sedated,

and cured, because you're participating in a model of reality that is not consensually validated.

Nevertheless, I think what we're trying to do with meetings like this is empower this particular meme,

empower this idea. I can't remember who developed the idea of memes, but it's basically the notion that

that ideas compete with each other the way animals and plants compete in an ecosystem. That ideas

adapt and spread and occupy niches and defend territory and redefine environments. And so

my mentioning last night of the woman who said to me, I thought I was crazy until I heard you speak.

For me, that is really the nugget of this work and the most satisfying kind of comment that anybody could make,

because what has happened since the 1960s is the straight people all went off together,

and by this I don't refer to sexual preference, I use straight in the earlier sense,

the straight people all went off and became very weird together, you know, with their golden Mercedes

and their Picasso ceramics and all that. The freaks all went off and became strange alone,

each apart in our own way, because community was shattered, affinity groups were suppressed,

people went all kinds of directions. Now, the people who went through the 60s,

approaching or in their 40s, have had 20 years to see how they like that kind of alienated aloneness.

And so, this morning as we went around, I heard many people saying, you know, that they had done

these things in the 60s, but not for a long time, and now they were returning to it. I think this is

because it finally dawns on you that, you know, this may be the only shot you've got at it. I mean,

reincarnation is fine, past lives are fine, but we're all getting daily older,

and we don't know where we came from, you know, what lies beyond the zygote. And we don't know where

we're going, what lies beyond the pine box, who can say. So, out of the incredible mystery of whatever

the universe is, a microsecond of opportunity, against impossible odds, has sprung into being.

We are embedded in that moment of opportunity. So, what are you going to do with it? Are you going to

sweep up around the ashram for 30 years and then decide that that was a mistake? Or, you know,

are you going to just give yourself over to the arms of Holy Mother Church for a lifetime? I mean,

people do this. You cannot escape making some kind of commitment to something. Nobody gets through life

without being asked to sign up, either in their own club or somebody else's. The mushroom said to me

once in the way that it does when it delivers these aphorisms. It said,

you must have a plan. If you have no plan, you will become part of somebody else's plan. You either

have a plan or you are part of somebody else's plan. And so, I think people are waking up

up to the fact that we must use what works. Because you see, someone on this side of the room,

when we went around, talked about yoga and how the, you know, the psychedelic gives the experience on

demand. And, but are we ready? And how do you gain skills? And this sort of thing. To my mind,

the goal is not the psychedelic experience. The beginning of the path is the psychedelic experience.

So, if yoga promises that after 20 years, it will deliver you to the beginning of the path,

then, you know, there's something seriously wrong here. The psychedelic sets you

at the beginning of the path. And then, people do all kinds of things with it. I mean, I am amazed.

I feel there is more variation in how we deal with this than in almost any other phase of human activity.

Because some people seem to have almost no self-reflection. And I've noticed it also touches

sexuality. Because I don't know how many of you have ever encountered the play, the penthouse forum.

But this is where people write into penthouse and detail these astonishing sexual, unpredictable

sexual exploits, threesomes, foursomes, and twelvesomes that just fell upon them. And whenever I

have for some reason some occasion to read these things, what is amazing to me is that this appears

to be descriptions of the behavior of an alien species. Because there is no self-reflection

on what does this mean? You know, what does this mean that I get stuck in an elevator and end up

copulating with 12 stockbrokers? It's just accepted as how it is. Well, you get this same thing with

psychedelics where you say to someone and they say, oh yeah, in the 60s I took psychedelics. You know, wow,

it was really strange. All these colors and voices and apparently no self-reflection. No realization that

this is actually happening to you. This is happening to you. Therefore, the implications must be fairly

central. And then other people immediately get it. They say, you know, my gosh, this plant, this pill,

shows me that reality is at least a thousand times larger than I thought it was, showed me that I don't

know who I am, where I am, what I am, or anything else. And I don't know what it takes to

to instill that in people. Maybe intellectual self-reflection. One of the things that is so puzzling

about shamans when you actually deal with them in the field is they are not like the other people in

the tribe. The other people in the tribe are very tribal people. In other words, they have all the curious

cultural limitations of people in every culture. They think you smell funny. They think you look funny.

Everything you do is amusing. They stand around in small groups giggling and pointing and like that.

The shamans, on the other hand, it's nothing like that. They accept you totally as a person.

They make no cultural judgments. You don't look funny, smell funny, so forth and so on, because they are

what I call extra-environmental, extra-environmentals. They are deconditioned from the assumptions of their

own culture. So, they may be the Witoto shaman, but the Witoto shaman is less Witoto than any other Witoto,

because the Witoto shaman operates in the context of Witoto-ness embedded in the larger reality.

And so, I think what we need to do when we try to revivify shamanism in our own lives is recover

the profound reality of what it's doing. Sometimes I have flashes when I'm giving these talks.

of how different it is to be stoned than to talk about being stoned. I mean, here we sit,

you know, in our cotton underwear, just with our, where we came from, our schedules in front of us.

The mundaneness of it is so all-pervasive. And we could be discussing Gnosticism or a political action

project, but we're discussing instead something really appalling, I think. I mean, we're calmly

discussing the fact that there is another world overlapping our own and very few people will even

admit the fact. So, I always think, and this is my symbol of myself, to myself, I always think of a

wonderful bee science fiction movie I saw when I was a kid, where there's a dinosaur in the swamp. And

it's set somewhere in Mexico. And the typical campesino is sent by the patron of the ranch

to gather firewood in the jungle. And he, of course, encounters this extremely large rubber reptile

roaring around. And then comes back to the ranch and is pointing back in the woods. And is completely

inarticulate, trying to say, you know, a creature from the id, a beast from another dimension is rampaging

around in the forest. Well, they just dismiss him as, you know, these peasants, they believe anything,

you can't trust them for a moment. This is the sort of situation we're in.

The extraterrestrial invasion that so many people anticipate, or the extraterrestrial contact

that so many people hope for, that so many cheap newspapers, is well underway. It's simply that

the words we have to describe it are utterly inadequate. So, words like extraterrestrial invasion,

contact with an intelligent species, end of history, migration into hyperspace,

these are pathetic signifiers of what is actually happening to us. What is actually happening to us is

pretty darn hard to wrap your mind around. We are caught in a vortex of concrescence and compression

that was set in motion at least as early as the melting of the last glaciation. We are reaping

the fruits of 10,000, 50,000 years of sowing of the fields of mind. And it is being dropped into our laps

for us to create, you know, human-machine interfacing, control of genetic material, redefinition

of social reality, re-engineering of languages, re-visioning of the planetary ecology. All these

things fall upon us. And for us to be worthy of it, for us to make sense of it, for us to be anything

other than victimized by the twentieth century. We need, I think, to reach back into time and to

anchor ourselves with the transcendent mystery, which is somehow tied up with our own being,

somehow present on the planet, but mostly a large list of unanswered questions. We don't know what is

going on on this planet. We don't know why there is life here, whether it's an accident, somebody's plan.

We don't know why intelligence is here. Again, accident, plan, if plan, whose plan, if plan, for what,

if plan, where are we in the plan? I mean, we all tend, when we abandon ourselves to cultural values,

to focus in so tightly that we lose the big picture. And if psychedelics are anything, they are a zoom lens

back to the broadest possible point of view. Well, why don't we stop there and take a, just a ten minute

break or something. And then we'll come

back and do dialogue on this. So why don't we use the rest of this morning to

see if we're getting oriented right and to just discuss any questions you have

or anything that comes up for you out of this so far. Does anybody have anything?

Yeah I was curious about what you were talking about with extraterrestrials and not having the

appropriate language to really discuss it and like your view of what's going on

and can you put it in words so that we can... Well it changes for me all the time I mean I'm

not... I don't have a point of view and my primary job is not public speaking or

writing but exploring. When I first started taking mushrooms in and throughout the

70s when we wrote the Mushroom Grower's Guide my... I held several opinions but my

most strongly held opinion was it actually is an extraterrestrial just no

shit flat out it is an extraterrestrial and what's surprising to me is that a

single mushroom trip of a certain sort could probably put me right back there

again getting it worked down to Gaia or the over mind of the species is a kind of

process of coming down from the real un assimilatable context of the of the

experience it's like an extraterrestrial it's I mean I would certainly say this

you know if extraterrestrials appeared over Washington and Moscow tomorrow it

wouldn't make this any less mysterious or puzzling in fact the extraterrestrials

might turn out to be mundane this is not how it speaks this is the most

astonishing thing for me to get used to I mean the visual hallucinations somehow I

can work it around that these are floods of imagery set off from deep

structures of the brain and dumping of memory banks and but that it can just

address you in real time and say Terrence you know and then proceed to blow my

mind the only and now several things may be happening here the only time when we

have the experience of focusing on an incoming message decoding it in real time

and responding to it immediately is when we have a conversation with someone so if

you find yourself responding to a message in real time your brain

automatically thinks you're having a conversation saying you know if it looks

like a duck if it walks like a duck it must be a duck so here I am listening and

responding to someone speaking to me in English therefore this must be a

conversation there are physical arguments for viewing the mushroom as

extraterrestrial first of all what is psilocybin psilocybin is for

all the indole compounds in nature of all the indole compounds in nature only

psilocybin is hydroxylated at the four position well now if you were to design a

computer program to search earth to search the life forms of earth for evidence of

extraterrestrial origin one of the things you would tell this program to do is look

for unusual molecules that have no apparent cousins or relatives among other

organisms well here is psilocybin phosphorylated in the four position nothing else on earth is

a a a material argument for its origin outside of the terrestrial ecosystem a

slightly different argument that would see the mushroom as extraterrestrial is look at

its style for want of a better word I mean what is a mushroom first of all they

reproduce by spores spores are the most economical biological unit imaginable they

can survive the radiation levels of interstellar space they can survive for eons under conditions

very close to those encountered in deep space the mushroom spore falls into an

ecosystem immediately undergoes cell division a fine thread like network full of

neurotransmitters begins to spread itself through the soil it's a very closely

analogous to the neural network of a higher animal including a human being now we're

accustomed to thinking that an extraterrestrial would bear the imprint of the evolutionary situation in which it

came to be in other words if it was if it evolved on a low gravity planet it will be tall and thin if it

evolved in a methane atmosphere it will have an exotic body chemistry and so forth but that's because we

ourselves have possessed the knowledge of how dna works for only about 40 years it's reasonable to

assume i think that if an intelligent species gets a thousand years of study of dna that they can design

themselves to be however they care to be and in fact if you think of the mushroom from that point of view

i think that we might choose that kind of an adaptation if we could have any form we wanted because

it's very non-invasive very humbly insinuates itself into a situation and grows essentially on waste material

in the soil yet when it sporulates it can actually cross spatial the boundary of outer space

and you know great economy great artistry tremendous zen like aesthetics seem expressed in the mushroom

if you view it as a designed piece of work rather than an object in the environment and then finally of

course the the major argument for the extraterrestrial origin of the mushroom but it's an insider argument

is the content of the experience number one it says it's an extraterrestrial organism and it has

the data to back up the claim it can show you movies of desert worlds jungle worlds high pressure high

gravity methane worlds worlds worlds uh planets whose cores are helium four and worlds on where you don't

know whether you're inside an organism or inside some kind of piece of machinery whether you're under the surface

of a planet i mean literally things that our minds just stop in the presence of so to me that's really the

interesting thing about the mushroom is that it can be as friendly as it needs to be and can even reassure

you with a disney-esque burlesque of dancing flowers and pirouetting pink elephants but once you are

comfortable with it and enter the dialogue and begin to get to know it getting to know it is an appalling

experience because you can say to it show me a little more of who you are for yourself

and then you know a veil is lifted and your jaw just drops and then you say show me a little more of who you and

that's enough of who you are for yourself because and you wonder you know while this thing is talking to me

is it talking is how engaged is the mushroom by me is it is all of its attention focused upon me when

i'm talking to it the way all of my attention is focused back on it or is it like a multi-user computer

system is it able to simultaneously deal with huge numbers of organisms what is the relationship of

psilocybin to the inner life of the mushroom is it stoned all the time why does it want why is it so

important that these indole compounds get lodged in the nervous system of mammals it's almost as though

it's a symbiotic relationship that the mushroom does not truly live its life unless it is taken

unless its molecular uh its unique molecular component can find its way into the synapses

of a self-reflecting higher animal well then what is it what are we for for it

and you know you can ask these questions

well it seems that it's for service like they don't you know they don't impose themselves on us

you have to approach them yes they usually one reason i think people have had trouble confirming

the animate and intelligent quality of the mushroom is you must ask you know you just don't take

psilocybin and sit there because it won't do it but if you take psilocybin and call it in in some sense

whatever that means invoke call uh uh try to uh visualize then it will begin to come towards you and lift

these veils and this world of zany pun-like hyperdimensional intelligence that is revealed

is as strange as an extraterrestrial would be this is i guess the final content of evidence

is for the extraterrestrial origin is the fact that it just seems so different from anything one could

conceive of or imagine i mean you cannot in one of these volleys of hallucination

convince yourself this is only me these are my memories or these are distorted transforms of past experience or

because you know i was uh i was trained as an art historian to have an eye for stylistic difference

and cohesion of of a set of aesthetic canons and it just blows my mind i mean there is more art

locked up in these things to be viewed in a single hour than the human race has produced in 10 000 years

i mean an art of a compelling weird breathtaking awesome quality that just breathes in every pore of

itself you know this is the other this is not you don't be deceived my little primate friend

it seems like our popular culture has had an inklings of that because if you look at the movies that

came out you know between 1952 and 1962 so many of those sci-fi movies are about spores from outer

space and plants coming down and these are from very straight people who haven't taken you know

psychedelics at all they're like tuning maybe they're you know tuning into what was about to come 10 or 15 years later

well i think uh and i'm so far as i know pretty alone in this opinion that uh information actually a very small

percentage of information is able to tunnel backward through time that there is a very small counter flow

to the forward movement of causal efficacy and one of the things that shamanism is about

is going into that hyperdimensional place and picking up this thin thin signal from the future

and tuning it in this is why prophecy and seership and all of that has to do with states of ecstasy

and intoxication one way of viewing uh all religion and all uh spiritual metaphor making is as an

anticipation of the future these western religions have this apocalyptic transformation built into them

almost as a self-fulfilling prophecy in other words they believe the world is going to end

because the world is going to end and since the melting of the glaciers people of sufficient sensitivity

have heard through a vast wall of stochastic noise coming from the future the thin reedy broadcast

station of the true vision of the future and this seems to be one of the things that you can do

with these psychedelics is tune this in you know it's a cliche and i'm sure you've heard it

that artists are society's antenna for change that artists are supposed to be somehow

uh more sensitive than the rest of us and and they pick up the new design forms the evolving aesthetic

canons and then translate it into society for the rest of us well that gains a little more bite if you

substitute shaman for artist and realize that this may not be a metaphor it may not be

simply because they pursue bohemian lifestyles and are willing to accept poverty for a life of free

thinking and so forth that isn't what's allowing an anticipation of the future what's happening is there

truly is an anticipation of the future and uh uh visionaries like william blake or or the author of

revelations are actually people who by virtue of some fortuitous confluence of circumstance

space time and genetic constitution are able to draw these messages out what is startling is that

apparently this is fairly ordinary in psychedelic states that in fact uh one way of thinking of

psychedelics is uh you begin to move through time when you put them into your life i don't mean while the

trip is happening i mean ever after i mean if you're living with a 1960s style mind and you have a strong

psychedelic experience you will come down with a 1970s mind or perhaps a 2040 style mind mind is a

temporal style it's like clothing this is what macluhan understood you see that we dress ourselves

out of the closet of ideology and someone says well i'm a cartesian um this is a specific guide the

hallucinogenic plants of north america by jonathan ott and the interesting thing about this is that uh

it's pretty compendious meaning there are things discussed here that you just won't find discussed

anywhere else uh probably because there are so few hallucinogenic plants in north america this guy really had to scratch

to produce a book about it uh but but this is useful for that uh similar but more uh broadly based is this book

narcotic plants terrible title by william m boden but this book has a lot of visuals in it and why i value

this book is because he has a more liberal definition of psychoactivity than most people do so consequently

his species lists are longer than anybody else's so if somebody asks you about an obscure plant is it

psychedelic or not this is this is where i look first because he seems to list many things that nobody else

has ever discussed his name is spelled e-m-b-o-d-e-n william m boden and he teaches i think at riverside

i'm not sure but some of you may know him i don't then um here's another one of these anthologies

of writing about psychedelics also by the same author as flesh of the gods hallucinogens and culture by peter first

and again this has articles on mushrooms on the discovery of lsd on ayahuasca on cannabis and tobacco

the biochemistry of the biochemistry of consciousness shamanism as the ur religion so forth and so on

uh it seems like every one of these authors then goes on to edit a uh book of their own favorite essays

here's another one hallucinogens cross-cultural perspectives by marlene dobkin de rios who is a

woman who's done a great deal of work on ayahuasca published a book called the visionary vine and i

think another book called ayahuasca mestizo curing in an urban setting basically a sociologist also i

think at oh no she's at fullerton cal state fullerton yes her first name is marlene m-a-r-l-e-n-e her

last name is dobkin de rios d-o-b-k-i-n space d-e space r-i-o-s this book is published by the university

of new mexico press um and then this is sort of the the granddaddy of all of these uh anthologies

a very interesting book hard to get but fascinating it's called the ethno-pharmacologic

search for psychoactive drugs and it was the name of a conference that was given in san francisco in

1967 and the plan at the time of the conference was uh to have it occur every year but it never

occurred again because of course everything was made illegal the next year and this faltered but uh

to show you have how to what degree the government was of two minds about psychedelics it says on the

frontispiece of this book sponsored by the pharmacology section psychopharmacology research

branch national institute of mental health united states public health service u.s department of health

education and welfare so it was and it was published at government expense this is in fact uh a technical

publication uh of the national institute of mental health and uh wonderful bibliography extremely

interesting discussion of dmt containing snuffs article on the psychopharmacology of nutmeg that you

just won't find anywhere else articles on kava more unopened mail uh and an article on the history of

research into psychedelic plants that goes clear back to uh uh medieval the medieval herbalists

the title is the ethno-pharmacologic search for psychoactive drugs

the last time we were in the amazon we we christened our expedition in honor of this book the ethno-pharmacologic

search for cold beer

because there ain't any and it becomes an obsession

i mean when you go it's so it's so strange what you miss i mean i don't even drink beer so what do i care

after ten days in the jungle all anybody could talk about was the possibility of cold beer and it was

still four weeks away so then uh for somebody who really is uh serious or or technical or batan or

plotting an expedition or plotting a research project of some sort this is really a pretty

amazing book i mean it's dull as death because it's essentially simply listings from the herbarium

sheets at the harvard museum botanical library it was uh put together by siri von reis atschule who was

one of schulte's graduate students and along with ara de mar de rosienne and marlene dobkin de rios

uh some of the few women who have uh made significant contributions to this field when it was uh firmly in the

hands of uh dominator male types anyway this book is called drugs and foods from little known plants

and they're not whistling dixie when they say little known plants and a typical entry reads something like

this uh let me see what genus we're in here uh 2510 maria beringo panama gilbert white 19 uh collection

number 71 1938 called sigela claimed to be poisonous all we know about this plant

it's folk name its scientific name claimed to be poisonous next entry 2511 maria sessifilo sessiflora honduras

collected by yunker dawson and use collection number 55 54 1936 fruit reported edible when ripe

all we know and you look through this and some say hallucinogen or reported hallucinogen but uh this

touches foods one of the things it's not part of our concern here but one of the things that's so

frustrating when you do ethnobotany is to realize that people can be starving in environments where

there are many food plants but they don't utilize the food plants because they've accepted the

values of a capitalist economy and because the foods cannot be trucked to market or have a short shelf

life they're called pig food and nobody will eat it i mean time and time in the tropics i would come upon

a plant that i knew to be edible and proteinaceous say to your informant or your guide what's the story

on this food for pigs people don't eat it but you know they're buying canned tinned tuna fish and spam

from the priests at the mission so this is a way in which people's folk lore and folk heritage is

distorted anyway harvard university press srivan rai satshul then uh book by a good friend of mine

and if any of you are interested in ayahuasca or plan on going to south america where you may encounter

ayahuasca this book vegetalismo shamanism among the mestizo population of the peruvian amazon

and this is a lovely book this is about the people that i spent most of my field work time with and

you just cannot read this book without coming away with the sense of the depth and complexity of the

ayahuasca worldview it's it's healing classifications the power allies the admixture plants the magical

songs it's by luis eduardo luna who i know has lectured and shown his films here at ciis he's an

excellent person a very good friend of mine to my mind probably the person doing the best

anthropological work on ayahuasca in the world right now the publisher in case you want to try and track

this down is almqvist a-l-m-q-v-i-s-t and vilksell international stockholm it's a swedish publisher

if any of you are just dying to have this book order it from lux natura we have three copies left

and this is not one of them so don't try and buy this one from me well i don't know if anybody

actually wants them you want it's a 20 item okay i'll bring them and you guys can fight over it

decide what you want to do and then this is the last one that i was going to mention uh because this

touches this could have been the title of our weekend this is psychedelic drugs reconsidered by

uh lester grinspoon and james baccalaar lester grinspoon managed to find his way into herb cane as a name

freak when he published a monograph on the dangers of excessive cocaine use truth

grinspoon and james baccalaar also of uh harvard and uh basically this is a very reasoned presentation

of uh why psychedelics should be reconsidered for therapy the case for them the case against them

the nature of the hysteria that placed them off limits he has also written marijuana reconsidered and

is a very nice person and leading the fight to decriminalize drugs for research so um that's all the books

I brought in to show you they are as I say by no means all the only resource

that I would mention for the serious student of these things that I didn't

bring in is nobody should try and find deal with this subject without being

aware of what's called the Harvard Museum botanical leaflets and these are

a series of leaflets that have been published since the 30s by the Peabody

Museum or Peabody Museum in Boston so write to the Boston Museum botanical

garden say you want a list of the leaflets and they cost between a dollar and four

dollars a piece and they deal all of Schulte's papers all kinds of

very hard to recover information is available there and the list there are

about 180 of these reprints on all aspects of all psychedelics and some non

psychedelics as well so it's important to have this information and to have it at

your fingertips people the compartmentalization between areas of

knowledge that impinge on this always amazes me I mean you get psychologists who

don't know what an MAO inhibitor is you get people combining things without knowing how

drugs synergies work you get people you know just not informing themselves on the

importance of set setting dosage psychic predisposition so forth and so on all vital

matters that can impinge on how an experience develops and if if you will take the time to

inform yourself you will feel much more sure of what you're doing and that in

itself can alleviate to confusion and negative reactions well so then I thought what I

would do is sort of go around the world and talk about these things a little to

give you an idea of what is available what's on the menu and and then we'll take a

little break a very short break and then come back and talk about it sure

absolutely

did I hear you correctly that the chemical liquid DMSO drinking five to seven ounces a day for five

days precipitates a psychedelic experience no did I say DMSO that's why I was one graphic is it DMSO

no it isn't DMSO if I said that I didn't mean to it's di ethyl di dimethyl acetamide oh I thought you said sulfoxide

I may have said sulfoxide dimethyl acetamide and I can show you the record here you just while I'm raving you can look it up in there find it and satisfy yourself

yeah yeah could you explain the difference between psychoactive psychotropic and psychedelic

because I don't understand yeah I can psychoactive means exactly what it implies

that you can detect this compound as a higher cortical experience that's all I

mean to my mind a higher cortical experience is a shift of mood depression

elation acute hearing sensitivity to noises all of these things could be classed as psychoactive reactions to a compound

psychotropic is a word that I've never been very fond of and it sort of came in late

psychedelic which is a fairly maligned word but was coined by the psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond means simply mind manifesting

and I like that because it's phenomenologically neutral now some people have tried to push the word entheogen for these things

meaning literally God inducing but to my mind this carries a huge amount of ideological freight that we may not wish to buy into

I mean maybe it's God inducing maybe it isn't but psychedelic meaning mind manifesting is pretty good

and then if all of these make you uncomfortable you can just fall back on a completely phenomenological description and call them consciousness expanding drugs

but there are drugs that I would not I for instance I don't consider well I certainly don't consider alcohol as psychedelic but clearly as psychoactive

well marijuana is one of these things that so widely variant both in how people react to it and how strong it can be

I would call MDMA a psychoactive drug not a psychedelic drug and then I use the word halicinogen a lot and a lot of people don't like that

even people in the field and say well hallucinogen seems to imply that it's an illusion but not in my mind I don't hear that I'm fascinated by hallucinations

I mean to me that is the sine qua non that you're getting somewhere I guess because it's just my philosophical biases

but when but a hallucination it's such an extraordinary concept isn't it to see something which isn't there and I don't mean to misread a surface

so that you think it sticks into the room which in fact sticks out of the room or something I mean seeing something that is not there and then that divides into two classes

seeing an ordinary object which is not there and I think this is what most people think a hallucination is here is a bicycle

is it real or not the drug crazed victim cannot tell but most hallucinations are of things which can only be hallucinations because that's what they are you know

you know and so they have this aura of the unexpected and the other and and the intrusive alienness people have claimed to me that they have seen objects which are not there which are completely ordinary

that is more typical of accounts of detura users people who take high molecular weight tropanes such as occur in jimson weed and those kind of things

but my brief experimentation with that is it is what I call a delirium rather than a psychoactive I mean when you take detura you are so messed up

that you can't you literally lose all discrimination yeah belladonna you can't tell exactly where you are you can't tell thinking about being somewhere from being there

well this you're in no shape to undertake a spiritual quest if you're that discombobulated so what I like are the things which do not destroy

what I call core functions in other words there is still an evidence gathering observing mind left intact and the disruption of perceptual input if you want to put it that way is pretty much confined to the visual cortex and then to the to the metaphor forming capacity that is relating to the visual cortex

to the visual cortex but I don't like things which confuse you which impair judgment

what about sativa divinera?

salvia divinorum

well that's a kind of a that's an obscure one about which not much is known although in the past year they've learned the absolute chemical characterization of the psychoactive compound which is called salvorine alpha

more work has to be done anthropologists who have taken it with Indians in Oaxaca describe a very intense experience when we grew it in Hawaii and took it exactly the way these people said to do it it was an experience but it was not clear whether it was

whether it was psychedelic or merely so physiologically active in such a complex way that you couldn't tell exactly what was going on the impression which was not mine but cats and a beloved Dean

they both experienced flow they described experiences as though you were lying in a dirty ditch with this cold fluid flowing from the top of your head to the bottom of your feet and where this kind of cold clammy fluid encountered energy obstructions in your body it would wash them away but it was a kind of vertigo

kind of vertigo with nausea with nausea with I mean it was a complex experience but it was not largely mental it was more a revisioning of the body image and you know this is another one of these things where no research has been done it isn't illegal salvia divinorum but you're not going to do your career any good to get tangled up

with this so consequently it's pretty much left alone salvorine alpha is extremely unstable and breaks down within 12 hours so that indicates it's probably a polyhydric alcohol or an isoquinone or something like that it's not an indole yeah

I was curious um and Watson talks about entheogens versus hallucinogens and uh he's really against the word hallucinogen yeah he's the one who proposed entheogen

entheogen right and so because his theory was I guess that he thought that a hallucination was something that wasn't there completely and he thought that the experience on the soma or the mushroom was something that you actually are experiencing so it's not a hallucination it's real

yeah that was what he said but if you actually look at the etymology of the word hallucination what it's come to mean in english is a delusion a delusion but what it really means in the original language is to wander in the mind

that's the meaning of hallucination to wander in the mind well that's a pretty good operational description of what's happening and then when you add in the visual component

I don't know it's hard for me to imagine how someone could undervalue hallucinations if they had had them

yeah it sounds like it was reacting to the 60s hoopla a lot the hoopla over LSD and the misreading of what these experiences really were too

well these guys were very uh frustrated with seeing this thing turned into a social hysteria and Wasson you know at times expressed great unhappiness with Tim Leary's approach

and hated going to Mexico and seeing these mushroom villages invaded by graffiti covered vans of filthy freaks from southern California who were disrupting the local ecology

and it was a kind of proprietary approach you know this thing belongs to anthropologists to specialists uh

Wasson was very reticent to to assess his own work some of you may have seen bob forte's interview with him in the that psychedelic issue of revision

where forte asks him how do you assess the historical impact of your work and he said you know i i'll leave that to others to decide he didn't want to

deal with the question of the potential impact on his own society he really looked at it as this exotic foreign kind of thing

these guys were cautious this first generation Hoffman Wasson Schultes

these are these guys are not stoners by any means i mean their approach is cautious and the psychedelic experiences can be counted on the fingers of one hand in a lifetime

so i'm not sure they ever realized the size of the tiger whose tail they had seized

yeah the DMT and the frog whatever it is how is that extracted i mean how that frog slime or whatever it is

toad yeah right okay now i want to know about that

well i haven't had the good fortune to be present at the milking

so i really couldn't say but as i gather you put pressure on the back of the neck in two places

and this exudate emerges exactly where i'm not sure and probably decency should safely scarcely inquire

and then it's dried on sheets of glass and scraped up and packaged and so forth

well let me start through this and give you a notion of what is available

whenever you talk about the distribution and cultural usage of hallucinogens the first thing that you come up against

is a curious unsolved problem in botany which is no one knows why this is and we would be grateful if somebody could figure it out

but for unknown reasons there is a tremendous concentration of psychoactive plants on the South American continent

the South American continent the South American continent has more known hallucinogens than the rest of the planet combined

now why is this after all the climax tropical rainforests of eastern Indonesia are at least as species rich as the Amazon basin

and yet not a single powerful hallucinogen is known with certainty from the old world tropics

all kinds of suggestions have been made that actually there are psychedelic plants common throughout the the tropics of the old world

but the cultures have lost contact with them and forgotten them and hence our anthropologists have not discovered them

or something in the soil of South America very improbable theory

I was talking about this once in a workshop and somebody raised their hand and said well no problem

obviously that's where the spaceships landed

good well we've solved that problem now we can move on

North America is extraordinarily poor in hallucinogens perhaps the poorest of all continents

so that the the psychedelic phobia that Europe created against paganism was completely reinforced

or at least not eroded by the colonization of the New World or of North America

because there were no plants here to challenge that the North American Indians tend to ordeal as a shamanic vehicle

the Sundance thing some of you may be familiar with

or sonic driving which is worldwide in in shamanically oriented cultures without drugs

you should know that not everyone agrees with me that

psychedelics are the sine qua non of shamanism

that's what Wasson thought that you don't have shamanism unless you have psychedelics

if you have people calling themselves shamans and not using psychedelics

then they are cut off from the older level of tradition

and through ritual drumming or deals starvation flagellation

they are creating near psychedelic or pseudo psychedelic states

now a brilliant and respected commentator on comparative religion like Merci Eliade

who I quote whenever it suits my purpose

totally disagreed with this and said no what he called narcotic shamanism

which means psychedelic shamanism the choice of the word tells you that the guy had a problem

narcotic shamanism is decadent shamanism

and the flagellation the starvation the ordeals and the drumming

that's the real shamanism and it's only when the tradition is abandoned and decadent

that that a culture will turn to drugs

I maintain this is nothing more than he was a Romanian who became an academic in Paris

I maintain that this is nothing more than his Western cultural bias operating

also in his youth he was pretty infatuated with yoga

they will insist to you you know that drugs are an inferior path

however if any of you who are scholars of yoga

should know that all yoga is based on the yogic sutras of Patanjali

second century B.C. Hindu Vedic commentator

and Patanjali specifically says there are three paths to the goal of yoga

and they are control of the breath control of posture and light filled herbs

says it right there stanza six of the yogic sutra of Patanjali

it's never discussed again basically in the entire exegesis of the yogic literature

the third path is never mentioned

well is that because it's a secret tradition or what I don't know

when you go to India seeking these yogans practicing these higher yogas

what you find are a bunch of guys smoking as much charis as they possibly can

and the notion that you could do it without that

it just gets a long laugh from everybody down around the burning ghats

I mean they deal with it on a practical level

okay moving out of drug impoverished North America or psychedelic impoverished North America

where there are more than 20 species of indigenous psilocybin containing mushrooms

but and this is interesting no evidence whatsoever for tribal or traditional usage

in other words in this Northwest Coast Indian complex the Shimsham, Klingit, Nootka group

no reason to believe other than our own predilection for romantic fantasy

that these people were using mushrooms in pre-contact times

and yet the mushrooms were there

the complex that we're most familiar with as a North American hallucinogen is in the Southwest of the United States

peyote, Lofoforo williamsii, the peyotal cactus

now the interesting thing here is

we cannot find archaeological evidence of peyote use that is particularly ancient

peyote used as in the Southwest appears to be less than 500 years old

before that what we find in Indian graves of the Tarahumara and so forth

are the seeds of Sephora secundifolia

Sephora secundifolia is a highly poisonous legume that contains cysteine

this is an example of what we call not a psychedelic but an ordeal poison

now in certain parts of the world this approach to spiritual growth has been taken

most notably in on the island of Madagascar off the coast of eastern Africa

what is an ordeal poison?

this is a plant where you take it and you are so convinced that you are dying

that you have an experience of self abandonment

getting straight

surrender

and then you live

and you are fine

you know

but you are absolutely convinced that you are dying

your heart pounds

or fibrillates

or you convulse

or you fall into deep coma

or you become

have tetanus in the limbs

whatever it is

and then you recover

well anybody can tell you this is a kind of psychedelic experience

because you are so damn glad you lived

that you see everything in a new light

you can be kind to your children

and love your wife

and tolerate your relatives

and people say well it made a new man out of him

well yes because he came so close to dying

that he shed neurotic behavior patterns

but this is not a true psychedelic

so what we are assuming is that about 500 or 1000 years ago

sometime in that span

the Sephora cult

was replaced

by the peyote cult

which came from a much smaller usage area

then also in southern California

there were what were called the tolach religions

religions of datura intoxication

initiation of young men

by intoxicating them with datura

and leaving them in the wilderness

to fend for themselves

again this is comes close to being an ordeal poison

although it also has psychoactive properties

but so confusing such a deliriant

that it bears no relationship to the true hallucinogens

which with the exception of mescaline

I believe all fall into the category of the indoles

now mescaline is not an indole

it's an amphetamine

closely related to MDA and MDMA

but it is a true hallucinogen at fairly high doses

the indoles

which are this structurally related small family

they seem to me to be the true visionary ecstatogens

and I will mention as I go through the list

which ones are indoles and which ones are not

you mean which ones are amphetamines?

well no the only one which is an amphetamine

is mescaline

so we need

so we have indole and non-indole cacti

indole and non-indole

a kind of parallel phenomenon to the peyote cult of the southwest

is in the deserts of northwestern Peru

there are very large columnar cacti in the genus trichoceros

that contain mescaline

and they have been used for a long time

a lot longer than peyote

we have mocha ceramic dated to before 1000 BC

which show in fact doesn't somebody wearing

yes this gentleman has the t-shirt

this is a Peruvian design

point out the yes that's the chunk of San Pedro

being held by this dwarf like little demon

this is a fang demon mocha design

1500 years old

now in central Mexico

we come upon the first of these large centers

of hallucinogenic use

in the cultural area

in which the Olmec arose

were subsequently succeeded by the Maya

who were subsequently subjugated by the Toltecs

and the plants that were in use in those situations

were fall into two pretty well defined categories

first of all psilocybin containing mushrooms of several species

and second of all

morning glories

of at least two types

convolvulaceae

which contain LSD

like alkaloids active in the milligram range

that are highly visionary

and there's considerable evidence in the Codex Vinda Benensis

and in some of the Mayan ceramics

that this was a culture that made a very important place for hallucinogens

and that it was the privilege of the priestly class

and that their obsession with calendrics and astronomy

and this sort of thing

was also somehow intimately connected to their interest in the psilocybin mushrooms

and again one of these botanical puzzles

here is a cluster of 10 or 15 species in central Mexico of mushrooms

and a culture builds itself around them

a similar cluster of species on the northwest coast

the culture seems to totally ignore it and have no use for it

and nowhere else on earth

are there clusters of species of psilocybin mushrooms

with a long history of use

naturally the export of cattle throughout the warm tropics

has allowed the coprophytic mushrooms

the mushrooms which grow on manure

to be spread throughout the warm tropics

and then in places like England and France

you get the occurrence of the diminutive psilocybin mushrooms

lanciata

but again only the most unconvincing evidence of traditional use

I mean I am Irish Celtic

I would love to have somebody come up with a bunch of evidence

that ancient Celtic and Druidic art and magic

was somehow related to mushrooms

but to date the efforts have been unconvincing to any skeptic

it may still be there perhaps in heraldic devices

someone should go back and study the escutcheon

of the families of medieval Europe

and you do find for instance the Morel family

Morelli noble Italian family

mushrooms on the family coat of arms

and other families in France

his names escape me

Alize Agar

yeah although that is a coincidence

well I mean not really

yeah but still

that name

Will the sergeant at arm

okay so

well let me say something a little bit more

about the morning glory complex because it's very interesting

LSD

discovered by Albert Hoffman in 1937 and so forth comes from ergot, comes from an

organism called claviceps or claviceps paspale which is a smut which grows on

ergot, a humbler organism. You could hardly imagine, I mean this is basically

yuck is how you would describe this organism if you were to come upon it. It

looks like a mistake because it's just an amorphous slimy black mess growing on

certain cereal grains. One of the fascinating questions to these chemists

once they discover a new compound is to try and figure out does it occur

anywhere else in nature? Some plants, some fish, some something and then they you

know you can form theories and judgments about evolutionary relationships. So

Albert Hoffman the discoverer of LSD was amazed when carrying out analytical

work for Gordon Wasson on magic morning glory seeds that had been sent to Wasson

from Schultes, he discovered the same compounds or very closely related

compounds as he had synthesized to make LSD. I'm gonna slightly jump around here

now and say that in India there are 13 species of morning glories in a different

family not in the family Ipomoea or the family Turbina which are the Mexican

families but in the family Argeria of morning glories which contain these

ergonomine-like compounds and this is the Hawaiian baby wood rose. Again the

interesting thing is there is no evidence that ancient India with its obsession for

altered states of consciousness ever utilized any of these Asian morning glories. So this would be something

somebody would want to look at. Did you want to say something? Just that probably you would

never be able to get any hardcore data on the use of mushrooms in

authorian times but I was delighted to note in the mists of Avalon when

Morgan was supposedly banished one of the little fairies from Avalon left her some

mushrooms to accompany her on some of her journeys. I don't know if you remember

that part. I remember that part. And I went whoa! Well Marian Zimmer Bradley lives in the

hills of Berkeley we can assume she's fully installed and hooked in to the myths of

the counterculture but it would be great. Someone told me that they went to the

island of Iona I think it is which is where the Book of Kells was supposedly

composed and they said there were mushrooms everywhere that it was just to be

there is to be inescapably confronted with mushrooms and yet this doesn't know

tradition no mention yeah off the coast of England it's where St. Columba came St. Columba

came and reintroduced Christianity into England in the 900s Christianity had died

out in England it was only in the advanced Celtic civilizations on the fringes of

of the British landmass that the Christian tradition was preserved. The other

connection this may fascinate you or not but the misinterpretation and deterioration of

the etymology of hallucinogen into its delusional semantic meaning you know kind of

catalyzed in my brain how mythology has devolved into a lie and if you

look up the original meaning of mythology it means the mutterings of eternity. That's a

great meaning. Yes the mutterings of eternity. Myth and mythos and the whole thing with Avalon

being sort of that place between the worlds that one went to the mystical part and then

Glastonbury sort of the other place where all this Christianity existed when I was in a mushroom

experience one time in a circle and said I was a recovering Catholic trying to evolve myself and

find out what my mind was all about and this one man shaman student from down in the Amazon he said well you know if you

eat these mushrooms you're going to be excommunicated because the Christians will tell you that once you eat the mushrooms you're doomed forever to hell and Satan and the devils.

Well I said bullshit you gotta be kidding but I mean where would that come that you

maybe the Christian control looked at these people and said look you know you just like

paganism and everything just like wipe out their their connection with the other world.

Well it's very interesting that when the Jesuits arrived in Mexico and talked to the Indians and found them

eating these mushrooms they said you know what do you call it and they said we call it tiananacatl

well when they got their lexicons out and got that piece together what tiananacatl

means is flesh of the gods. Well the center of the Catholic mystery is the Eucharist. A sacrificial meal where a small

wheaton wafer is believed to be transubstantiated into the body and blood of the Son of God.

son of God so then to place the psychic experience which follows upon a good

holy communion next to the psychic experience which follows on a good dose

of mushrooms clearly these guys said you know this is competition we don't need

we're gonna wipe this out and it is interesting I mean think about this for

a moment we go we grow so inured to these religious forms think about the

notion of instituting at the center of your religion a right where you eat

your God and and that is what is happening in Christianity it suggests that this

sacrificial meal idea which can be traced back to even to pre-exilic traditions in

Judaism is probably a memory of a relationship to some kind of psychedelic

experience of some sort okay well let me continue my survey

and in the early 70s say mushrooms are not illegal in Scotland I don't think they are still but they

weren't in the early 70s and in like 1969 1970 a lot of people started coming to

finhorn and people regularly ate mushrooms and between 1970 and 1973 it was arguably

the most creative time at finhorn books and music was being done and the community was

being built and performing arts and everything and and by 1974 1975 it was no

longer acceptable and they were trying to just be a very proper state community

totally in line with the Christian Scottish environment around even though that

they still weren't illegal in Scotland of course nobody does mushrooms in northern

Scotland but um and it's interesting when I arrived at finhorn in the early 80s

people had even forgotten that that tradition had existed and one person though you

know when I was looking at the old people are so much happier back then it looked like

they're smiling in these old pictures oh everybody was on mushrooms then this was

a man who had lived during that time he says that you know that gradually died out but it's

interesting because he did them for years and years and and at the point that I

talked to him he as well felt like they it was just not it was not proper

spiritual growth and development to be to be using mushrooms yeah well I think

institutions will inevitably substitute a rite or a ritual for the authentic for the real McCoy

because then priests can control the pipeline to God and the parishioner can

approach with offerings and uh but you know if if everybody can uh have a pipeline to deity well then the whole priest scam is put out of business done what what you're

precisely what you're describing suppressing no substituting essentially a ritual i.e. meditation or some kind of trip for the experience and then empower the priests i.e. the kind of buddhist masters in other words is that process that you're

describing in christianity happened happened in buddhism well buddhism uh is a

heresy on hinduism it was hinduism that did the dirty work for buddhism by the time buddha came

along it was all priestcraft was an ancient tradition in india but as i'm sure many of

you know the rig vedas which are these tremendous outpourings of poetry that these indo-aryan

people created as they came out of central asia and into india the rig vedas are entirely devoted

to the praise of of a mysterious plant soma the ninth mandala of the rig veda says soma is greater than indra soma is

greater than vishnu and just lists the entire pantheon says soma is greater than all of these things

by the time buddhism is getting rolling soma is a suppressed ancient tradition and the soma sacrifice

which is still being done is being done with inert materials uh if you want to read on this why read

wasson's book on soma and notice how it traces back to haoma which is this a a yet older strata of

religious ritual practice that was uh zoroastrian and iranian uh in origin and it's very clear

you know that what we're talking about here is an intensely psychoactive plant and there's great

argument about what uh what it was buddhism because of the long historical record in the east arises

entirely within the historical context so uh the the the suppression of of the plant connection

was in the earlier stratum of hinduism okay um we discussed the central mexican complex

it has minor components such as were mentioned here salvia divinorum and there are others

not chemically well understood but also not widely or regularly used but then as you pass

down uh across the darien gap and into south america proper there is just an explosion

of available psychoactives not only the tropane complex of the detouris which now re-emerge in the

subgenus brugmansia the arboreal detouris which we see around town as these ornamentals with the huge

pendulous hanging white flowers all of those tree detouris some with yellow some with orange some with red some

with white some with purple flowers uh originated in a very constrained area in the andes and have been

used for for shamanic purposes for a long long time uh also coca occur is endemic to that part of south

america occurs nowhere else in the world naturally uh but more interesting from my point of view are the

the tremendous proliferation of dmt cults and options uh based around two pharmacological approaches one

you you orally ingest dmt at the same time as you orally ingest an mao inhibitor mao is monoamine oxidase

this is the enzyme system that oxidizes monoamines that means makes them harmless monoamines are

this whole family of drugs we're talking about and many other things as well but if you don't have any

monoamine oxidase in your body then monoamines in your body just stick around because the machinery to degrade

them is inoperable so there are what are called mao inhibitors this means you take this compound and it

causes the monoamine oxidase in your body to be bound it can no longer do its work uh dmt ordinarily would

be destroyed in the gut in the intestine the upper gi tract but if you inhibit all the mao uh in the gi upper

GI tract then uh this the dmt is conveyed into the bloodstream can cross the blood-brain barrier and

initiate a psychedelic experience so this is the strategy of ayahuasca also called yahe north of the

coquetá it's called yahe south of the coquetá it's named in the quechua language ayahuasca now this is a

really fascinating thing for many reasons first of all this begins to look like the world's first

truly designer drug because notice what's happening here all these other things i've been talking about

peyote mushrooms detura cannabis what have you are single plants that require very little preparation

basically find it eat it that's the way you prepare it ayahuasca is very different

it's composed of two plants neither of which is active except in combination with the other

so somebody figured this out well this may not sound like such an accomplishment until you stand

in the amazon basin and look around you and realize we're talking 50 000 species per square mile

and you know 50 million square miles so how did you how did anybody ever figure out that you take the leaves

of the little bush and the bark of the woody vine and combine them in these proportions and boil them

and concentrate it and then you have this fantastic psychedelic drug this is

the only way that i can imagine is uh somebody told them and my experience is uh that these plants talk

that this is does not make sense to the rational and discerning mind but nevertheless it is possible

for one plant to lead you on to another a perfect example of this is actually in the

chemical literature melvin bristol was a student of schulte's in the late 60s and he specialized in the

brugmansias the arboreal deturas and he went to the valley of the sibundoy

and there they actually add the detura to the ayahuasca and he took this ayahuasca and while he

was on it the ayahuasca entity showed him a plant he kept seeing this plant and he couldn't get it out of

his mind and the next day after they came down from the trip he was collecting in the forest with indians

and he came upon the plant the exact plant that he had seen in his vision well he thought that was

pretty strange so he made extensive collections of this plant took it back to harvard analyzed it and

it was in fact psychoactive did contain psychoactive alkaloids so see it's that we're tiptoeing over the

surface of some kind of mystery we we maybe can bring ourselves to accept that a voice could speak

on mushrooms telling you that you should be kinder to your children or or love your mother and not be so

hard on yourself but it's a real leap for us to believe that a plant could tell you you know that plant

over there analyze that sucker and you know in other words real information uh not not information

subject to personal interpretation uh the whole of the amazonian narcotic complex as it's called in the old

literature is based on activation of dmt by one strategy or another either drinking this ghastly beverage

as the literature calls it the psychedelic beverage ayahuasca drinking this beverage or as you go east

into the lowlands uh the ayahuasca complex is replaced by what's called the snuff complex and it is based

around a number of species of meristicaceous trees the meristicaceae is the same family as nutmeg

occurs in though nutmeg is an old world member of the genus but several members of the meristicaceae

contain dmt in the inner bark exudate and these indians uh take the go you go out before dawn before the

first rays of sunlight strike the tree because when that happens this resin retracts so before dawn and

they then strip the bark from the cold side of the tree and they actually put their hands on both sides

and determine the coolest side of the tree then they strip these long strips of bark back then you

take them back to the village build a fire and let it burn to coals and then spread the coals out

lay these long strips of bark on the coals with the wounded side up the clean inner side up

and uh this orange resin will be forced out of the bark and onto the surface and then you can go along

with a scraper of some sort gather the stuff up put it in a pot cook it down grind that in a mortar and

pestle and then you have a dandy paralytic arrow poison which can also be honked up as an outlandish

hallucinogenic snuff and there are many there are many stories of these yanomamo and waika people going

out on the hunt and honking up their supply of drug and just getting their poison arrows out and scraping off

the points so the guys can get a buzz on and won't have to go back to the village well it's very it's a

it's a very interesting complex it hasn't been very much researched by westerners and the reason is easy to

figure out why here's how you take this stuff you get with your buddy and you have a bamboo tube maybe

some of you remember this from the emerald forest you have a bamboo tube about this long you pack

about this much of it with this ground bark exudate and then you hunker down in front of your friend

put the thing with the loaded end into your nostril your friend takes a huge inhalation of air and then

blasts on the end of this thing and just drives this stuff up into your sinus cavities well everything

goes violet you scream you salivate outlandishly you fall over backwards and by the time you've gotten

yourself together your friend has repacked the other side and is ready to give you that

and then you do that it goes purple again you scream you salivate you fall over and then people

usually say something like good

or far out right and then you see i'm sure you guys have seen uh napoleon shagnon did a film and

juan downey did a film this is great filmic material because in these wika villages uh this has actually

become i wouldn't want to say a drug of abuse but it certainly is a recreational drug not only the

shamans are doing this but people just are doing it and you just see people leaning against walls with

a line of saliva coming out of them and people just say oh he's doing the epina oh okay and you know

people in various attitudes of consciousness and unconsciousness and coca of course and at which

there's not a whole lot to say about coca it's an interesting example of a psychoactive non-psychedelic

uh they the minute you hit the amazon forest they are so concerned that you've been misinformed about

coca they say you know not a drug this is not a drug this is a food this is a good food this food makes

us healthy and there is some evidence that this is true that cocaine bears very little resemblance to coca

coca is not a spectacular experience what i found was the way coca works is you're just about to

you've been sitting with these people for hours and they're talking in witoto or some language that

you have no hope of understanding you're just about ready to excuse yourself and go to your hammock

and they drag out the coca and the way you do it and this is an another thing people miss the point in

south america because they have no idea how much you're supposed to do imagine taking a tablespoon

and going into a jar or a sack of flour and getting as much flour as you possibly could on a tablespoon i mean

a high walled tablespoon you know so you get like that much coca you bring it to your mouth you put it

in it's dry as dust and the trick is to slime it over and get it into your cheek and hold it there

all without a break in your conversational flow and you know for a for a honky

the the main effort is not to strangle and disgrace yourself in this scene because it's usually no

women you're in the longhouse with the men and these guys are you know the authentic bare ass scarified

folks and you're trying to fit in and choking to death on this wad of coca well then it dribbles down

your throat and suddenly these people don't seem so bad

this place doesn't seem so filthy and you don't seem so tired and maybe you can make out what

they're saying and in fact maybe you'll just try out a little of what you've picked up on

and you know before you know it you're the life of the party

and then about 20 minutes later you think well maybe now i'll knock off and then like clockwork they

reach for the tin can again and send it around and they will do this until it's uh it's all gone

uh now let's see which way shall we go let's jump across the water now to africa i talked a little

about iboka fascinating cult very very similar to ayahuasca in the uh social patterns that have arisen

around it the way ayahuasca is taken in the amazon in the mestizo populations that luna is talking about

is people get together on saturday nights in windowless sheds uh to about one-third to have the trip

about one-third because they have something physically or psychologically wrong with them that

they want help from the shaman with and about one-third who are wannabes or just hanging in for the social

occasion and uh in in zaire and gabon where the iboga cult is operating this same pattern exists

and these things ayahuasca and iboga in africa are the major forces resisting uh conversion to christianity

i mean they really are the native people's answer to the missionaries and as such they act as a

tremendous force for uh social cohesion uh outside of the iboga complex in africa really we only have

rumors i mean you will meet shamans from this place and that place they even come and have spoken in this

school who claim knowledge of extremely powerful plant hallucinogens but they're not they won't cough up

the name or the species or a sample and until that's done you have to be very very skeptical uh that these

things are real uh one of the things that was so interesting to me and i mentioned this this morning

about how the shamans are like scientists we would take ayahuasca with these people and sing and cure and

go through all these trips and the hallucinations and everything and then uh a few six seven hours later

as dawn was breaking and all but the most hardcore people had gone back to their huts uh the uh assessing

of the trip would begin by everybody and inevitably people would say well this was pretty good but i remember

a time in the rio waizhaga when so and so made it and it was like this and like this and in other words

amazing dope tales amazing stories of other trips in other times and places and what had been achieved

so these shamans were consistently engaged in the search for the perfect high they were not set in a

cultural pattern they were experimentalists always on the outlook for rumors of new plants untried combinations

so forth and so on uh returning then to the african situation uh there are there is a complex of plants

and suspect hallucinogens in southern africa in use among the hottentots uh aboriginal peoples of south africa

and in the family in the family of the mesembryanthemaceae which includes the lithops the haworthias these little

ground growing things that look like stones you know the so-called rock plants well some of those contain

mesembryene mesembryene is an alkaloid of some sort with unresearched psychoactivity

But a persistent enough rumor of its use that it should probably be checked on

well, then when you turn to

the Eurasian continent the largest landmass on the planet you discover what I referred to before this surprising

Poverty of hallucinogenic plants you get the belladonna

complex the tropanes you get them the opium

Complex opium poppies are native to Southeast Asia have been used by people in Eurasia at least as far back as the ancient

Scythians I mean we have accounts in Herodotus which make it clear and in fact there's a considerable amount of

Greek archaeological material that shows opium

Diadems and opium poppies being used as ornaments by various goddesses, so it was understood

That it was psychoactive, yeah

Robert Graves makes mention in one of his books that

He suggests that the ambrosia, the ambrosia of the Greek gods were actually psilocybin mushrooms

Have you ever come across another allusion to that?

Yes, well, it's an interesting question. It has to do with Eleusis and

As you probably know Eleusis was a major prophetic mystery site in classical and ancient Greece

where every September a

Ceremony would be done and the rule was you could only do it once in your life

So you never got a second shot and everybody in the Greek world

Would go at some point in their life? Plato, Aeschylus, Aristotle, the whole gang

Everybody had this experience and at the center of it something was drunk and something happened

and there's been great argument about what was it and what happened and

Wasson and Hoffman and Ruck who's a classicist at Cornell all wanted to argue that it was an ergotized

beer in other words that on the Eleusinian Plain there was a kind of rye

being grown which was infected with a strain of claviceps that

Was mild enough

That it was hallucinogenic without being convulsive or causing miscarriages or something like that because if you just go out and gather

ergot smut

claviceps purpura and

And you should be very careful with it. I mean these are ergot alkaloids can send you into convulsions

Some of them and they're fairly toxic

But it's conceivable that a strain grew on the Eleusinian Plain that was made into a kind of beer

that was then this hallucinogenic

intoxicant but Robert Graves

Who didn't have the kind of public relations machinery that Wasson had?

uh had a different notion and he claimed that

uh

the surviving recipes

of the

Sacrament at Eleusis and there were I think four examples of surviving recipes all called for the same ingredients and don't hold me to it

but I think the ingredients were

uh

barley

honey

water

and

something else

hyssop maybe

and he pointed out that a recipe for beer

in greece

would never specify water

because you understand

that water

is part of beer

so he said these words were code words

and that in Greek

the first initial

of these four words

could be

arranged to spell

uh

the word

muco

which is

mushroom

mucus

the

part of the Indo-European language family believes mushrooms are slimy

this is why the word mucus

can be traced back to the word

myco

mushroom

mykonos

mycenia

in fact means the land of the mushrooms

and so

the role of mushrooms in generating the religions of early greece

is a completely unexplored area

it's never been fully thought through

and

uh

this is called an ogham

by the way

where you take the first letter

of a list

and the first letter of the items of a list spells out a secret meaning

and it was a favorite trick of Irish bardic poets

which Graves was very much into that

but

I

entailed

now here's a great project

for somebody

we need someone

to prove that you can brew

a halicinogen

out of

claviceps on rye

I mean this ergotized beer wrap

it's just a phrase

until somebody puts the stein on the table in front of you

I mean we

it would be

go a great distance toward trying to prove their case

someone should go to the Ellicinian plain

and see if they can still find any cereal grains growing there

and if so

can they infect them with claviceps

or is there claviceps in the area

now there's a problem here

I understand there's an oil refinery

where the Ellicinian mysteries used to be practiced

but one even in California one could at least take a step toward understanding this

because we have in California species of grasses called Spartina

Spartina grows there's quite a population of it on the cliffs above the sea

just north of Santa Cruz

well Spartina could support claviceps purpura as an organism

so why not grow Spartina and attempt to infect it with a mild strain of ergot

which you could get from the American type culture collection or something like that

see if an ergotized beer could be brewed

the absence of mushrooms in these places does not disprove the theory

because all of the Mediterranean has been drying out throughout historical times

and there are Greek vases and friezes which do show mushrooms in situations that are ambiguous

as to whether or not they're being venerated or exactly what is happening

now let me see if I've missed anything

I mentioned the the Argyria complex in India

that's the Hawaiian baby wood rose

now that's an interesting one

and I'm always on the alert for these

I'm interested in unclaimed Indole complexes

in other words why was Argyria nervosa never utilized by anybody

it's extremely powerful

you only have to take eight or nine seeds

and you don't have to prepare it at all

just chew it up and swallow it

how come no cult no impact on the history of ideas

well we don't know those thirteen species of Argyria are spread from India down through Polynesia

and it's called Hawaiian baby wood rose

but it was introduced into Hawaii a hundred years ago

it has nothing to do with Hawaii

the only major complex that I didn't discuss

is the cannabis complex

now this is one that is entire

this is not an Indole

and this is

there are many anomalous things about cannabis

first of all

it's what's called a polyhydric alcohol

the only psychedelic polyhydric alcohol known to science

it's an extremely old plant

I mentioned last night

the relationship of the metaphors of storytelling and weaving and language

and of course hemp is a fiber plant

and we find hemp and mass

go back to as late as PPNB

pre-pottery Neolithic B

at Chatalhöyük

there are hemp mass

well it's very unlikely

with what with tossing waste from weaving into fires

and the oiliness of the seed and so forth

that the psychoactive properties of this thing were not discovered

cannabis originates in Africa

the original

I mean I'm sorry originates in Central Asia

the original species is ruderalis

and then very early in prehistory

it divided into the resin race

indica

and fiber races

and then it was carried across the land bridge

presumably into North America

and that accounts for the sativa variant

and so forth

Herodotus describes interestingly enough

hemp was used

marijuana was used

for thousands and thousands of years before it was smoked

one of the hardest things to wrap your mind around

is the notion that

until Columbus discovered the new world

500 years ago

no one in Europe

had ever smoked

or conceived of smoking anything

it was a new world cultural practice

and if you read Columbus's diary

of when he landed

in the new world

he was amazed

he wrote

the natives drink smoke

that was the only way he could imagine

he said you know

what are you doing?

and then of course

it was less than a hundred years

before it was a major vice

of the sophisticated raconteurs of Europe

within a hundred years

of the introduction of tobacco

into Europe

tobacco was being buried

in the graves of Lapland shamans

above the Arctic Circle

so the shamanic nature of tobacco

was immediately recognized

even in the European context

Herodotus describes

marijuana ingestion

as a process

somewhat like

being in a sweat lodge

and then pouring hemp seeds

and hemp waste

onto the hot rocks

and letting it mingle

with the steam

in this closed space

and deep breathing

but nobody ever had the notion

of a pipe

or anything like this

and it's very interesting

well for many different reasons

one is

that it's a new use

for the human body

less than 500 years old

in European culture

and non knock thought

in northern Thailand

they

and in other Neolithic graves

they have found

long bones

arm and leg bones

with burned out centers

and they don't know

whether this was a

marrow extraction procedure

or it was a chillum

if you know what a chillum is

a chillum is a ceramic tube

narrow at one end

and wide at the other

and you pack it

with hash and tobacco

and then you hold it

and you

do this to it

well it may be that smoking

was known in Asia

in Neolithic times

but somehow died out

in the pre-classical period

and had to be reintroduced

from the new world

Karen, do you want to comment

about Amanita muscaria?

Yes

Good

I'm glad you reminded me

Amanita muscaria is

perhaps the old world

hallucinogen par excellence

at least in the opinion

of Gordon Wasson

and a lot of other scholars

the problem with it is

it's extremely difficult

to get a reliable

positive experience from it

now the reasons for this

are complex

first of all

it's geographically variant

it's seasonally variant

and it's genetically variant

so only if you have lived

in an ecosystem

virtually your entire life

and have inherited

the accumulated knowledge

from the shamanic elders

of your tribe

are you going to know

whether you've got a good one

or not

nevertheless

Gordon Wasson

tried to argue

that it was

the ur-haluscinogen

the prototypic haluscinogen

of prehistory

that was being used

by these Vedic peoples

who invaded India

in fact

he thought it was soma

I think

and I had correspondence

with him about it

before he died

I think the soma question

isn't settled

and it could well have been

a coprophytic mushroom

associated with the dung of cows

after all

the role of cattle

in Indian religion

is very central

and in fact

the role of cattle

in early religion

generally

is extremely central

I mean

you do not get

goddess religion

in the ancient near east

without cattle worship

cattle and goddesses

seem to go very much together

and on the other hand

you know

the Dionysian

Mithraic complex

is a bull cult

and it too

can be traced

back into time

until it's just

lost

in remote antiquity

so yes

that's

that's the arctic

mushroom

used by

Siberian shamans

and it's been made

the prototypic

haluscinogen

because

Siberian shamanism

was made

the prototype

of all other

shamanism

only because

some anthropologists

somewhere

decided that

that would be

a good idea

Australia is again

singularly poor

in known

haluscinogens

I always say

in known

haluscinogens

because somebody

could go out

into these places

and come up

with something

brand new

something that we've

overlooked

this is a great

challenge for

field workers

and then the other

thing I want to say

and then I'll stop

for today

is

just a bit

about this issue

about synthetics

are all psychedelics

the same

are synthetics

in any way

inferior

or superior

to naturally occurring

haluscinogens

and if so

why or why not

this

controversy

began for me

for me

as like

an aesthetic

issue

I just felt

better

about taking

plants

sanctioned

by thousands of

years of use

and

but I didn't

particularly feel

that it was a

strong

distinction

but the more

time I've spent

with it

and the more time

I've spent with

Rupert Sheldrake's

theory of morphogenetic

fields

the more

I come to see

that I really think

there is

a very

large

distinction

between synthetic

and naturally

occurring drugs

now it's not a

distinction

that you're going to get

a chemist

to agree

to

or a

materialist

it is

as far as they're

concerned DMT

from a plant

and DMT

synthesized in the

laboratory

are

exactly

the same thing

and as far as they're

concerned

a synthetic

hallucinogen

such as

oh I don't know

ketamine

let's give it the benefit

of the doubt

for a moment

ketamine

and a natural

hallucinogen

such as

psilocybin

the differences

do not reside

in the fact

that one is

organic

and one is synthetic

but I think

that these

plants

take people

as much as people

take the plants

so that when you

have a mushroom trip

you not only are

having a mushroom trip

you are

contributing

to the future

mushroom trips

of everybody

in the future

who will take

this thing

in other words

you make a small

offering

on the altar

and that henceforth

becomes part

of the setting

of the thing

so that when you take

one

it's like the notion

of the Tao

of the ancestors

when you take

one of these

ancient

hallucinogens

you are locking

into the morphogenetic

fields of all

the people

who ever took it

how else

are we to

explain

the fact that

when you take

morning glory seeds

you are

flooded

with Mayan

imagery

of stair-step cities

and hieroglyph

balustrades

and

people

dressed

in gold

and

Quetzel

finery

and all this

or

that when you take

ayahuasca

even

in this culture

you know there is a

very strong

impression

of the jungle

of jaguars

of rivers

I mean these things

are coded

into

these compounds

somehow

so it seems

to me

it is

without talking

about issues of

toxicity

and pharmacological

uncertainty

it's

the content

of the naturally

occurring

hallucinogens

is

is much

much richer

and then one

last point

that I want to make

to sum up

this geographical

survey

of what is available

is to say

again

another research

frontier

is

China

there is

very little evidence

of any use

of hallucinogens

in China

and yet

there

there is

it is

there are

clues

there are

clues

that mushrooms

were understood

that other plants

may have been used

the knowledge

of which

has been lost

and

the cultural revolution

did a pretty thorough

job

on wiping out

this kind of

traditional

Taoist

shamanic data

but

a

very simple way

of focusing

the problem

is to say

there has never

been reported

from China

a psilocybin

containing mushroom

and yet

I'll bet

if a reasonably

informed

investigator

were to go

to southern

China

and spend

no more than

two or three months

off the beaten path

talking to country

people

I'll bet

you could come up

with half a dozen

psychoactive mushrooms

with a history

of folk usage

it's simply

the question

has not been asked

well

we are going to

not have

a clear understanding

of the historical

development

of Chinese thought

and institutions

unless we know

what their relationship

to the invisible world

precisely was

and I think

the

indigenous tradition

of shamanism

which became

then Taoism

which became

the real substratum

of Chinese religion

while it weathered

various

late grafted

variants

and foreign imports

like Buddhism

but that native

stratum

of Taoistic

shamanism

hints very

very strongly

that there were

psychedelic

usage

of these plants

in ancient

China

okay

that's it

for today

and we'll see you

at 10 o'clock

tomorrow morning

sorry to give you

such a burst of information

but this will lay the basis

I hope

for tomorrow's discussion

so think about

what we didn't cover

what you hope to hear

that you haven't

and then tomorrow

we'll try to tie up

all the loose threads

thanks very much

sure

okay

it looks like

almost everybody is here

there was a woman yesterday

who isn't here

I wonder if she was a one dayer

if she'll show up

do you all remember

her

no one saw her

but me

yes

she sat

yes

oh she will

okay

well

it is

it's always somewhat late

on Sunday morning

so we'll

a couple of people

expressed interest

in

this

week

that I'm doing it

Esalen

so I might describe it a little bit

it's

quite different from this

it's an in-depth involvement

in the mathematics

of the I Ching

and then a theory

that I evolved out of my engagement

with that

that has to do with the structure

of time

and analysis of history

as a predictable phenomenon

it has no connection

with psychedelics

other than

that the entire thing

was dreamed up

under the influence

of psychedelics

but it's

a

stand-alone idea

and

if I'm able to control

the group

I will keep it

quite far from psychedelics

except in moments of

rhetorical desperation

but

if you're

if you're interested

in the I Ching

and don't let the

word mathematics

put you off

I am not a mathematician

and the best mathematicians

aren't either

you

simply

it's just a way

of

talking about it

and doing analysis

that was

very fruitful

so that's

a five-day

from the 28th

of this month

till the 2nd

of December

and Esalen

has given us

the big house

and

a lot of people

will bring their computers

there'll be a lot

of machine implementation people

it'll go from

Taoist scholars

to

assembly language programmers

and everybody

will have

more of a contribution

to make

than they suspect

at the time

so

I'm not sure

they it was filled

and then I think

they switched it

so

because I thought

it was going to be

at Fritz

but

I don't know

call them

and see

that's all I can say

about that

seems like there was

something else

well hopefully

you turned

some of this over

in your mind

in the time

that we've been apart

I certainly did

in the sense

of trying to

figure out

what I had missed

and

whose concerns

had not been met

and what I came up with

was

your interest

in the specifics

of

time place

and manner

which I

which should certainly

be covered

because it's operational

information

talking about

the

the various

plant

visionary

plant complexes

that we talked

about yesterday

each one of these things

has a style

and a set

of demands

that it makes

on its practitioners

and if you look

at the ethnographic

literature

you then see

how

the people

who've used

these things

over millennia

have come to terms

with them

how they have

accommodated themselves

to these things

for instance

in the Iboka cult

of

of Gabon

what is aimed for

is early on

in the involvement

with the plant

a massive

dose

is taken

and

then

and they say

it splits your head

open

and

you never have to

take very much

again

because

somehow

a

creode

or a predilection

has been created

and then you are

initiated

into this

when you

read the

ethnographic literature

it's hard to believe

how much

they say

they are taking

I mean

there's a saying

in Gabon

Bawiti

which is what they call

Iboga

Bawiti begins

at 60

and that means

60 grams

well

even allowing

for the fact

that they're using

fresh root

and you might

get a collapse

rate

of close to

or 75%

that still means

they're saying

Bawiti

begins

at 15

to 20 grams

which

from my own

experience

with this

stuff I can tell you

is

not

even a conceivable

place to begin

that's not a strong

hit

that's an impossible

hit

so

the mushrooms

mushrooms

and

you have to know

pharmacologically

speaking

the

window

of

effective

activity

every

every drug

every compound

has a profile

which you can imagine

as a linear

spectrum

below a certain amount

it's undetectable

above

that amount

it becomes

detectable

first

as this

CNS

arousal

that I mentioned

yesterday

and then

as a full-blown

psychedelic

experience

and then

at higher doses

it begins

to have toxic

effects

all

drugs

are

toxins

and

so

people often

make the mistake

of thinking

that

if you have

a toxic substance

and you take

half

of it

then

it's not toxic

because there is no

register

you don't register

its effects

but of course

everything is

incrementally

toxic

now some things

have

are very safe

you

there is no

it's not toxic

the

things

the

thing

the

thing

you

are

it's not toxic

a great range of effectiveness, well below the range where any toxicity begins

to set in. Other compounds are active as psychedelics at a level just

slightly below the level where you're going to begin to have toxic effects. So

you want to know what the profile is of the particular substance that you're

thinking of taking. In pharmacology, one of the parameters that they establish is

what's called an LD50, which is a fairly unpleasant concept which you should

nevertheless be informed of. LD50 means lethal dose 50. This means we have a

hundred mice. We give them an unknown drug at the point where half of them die, that

is the LD50 dose of that compound. And there's an LD100 and LD10 and so forth.

What you want is for the LD50 to be tremendously high relative to the

effective dose. Now the perfect or model compound in that case is of course LSD.

LSD is active at the 25 microgram range, 25 gamma. A microgram is a millionth of a

gram. It's well below a smidgen. Now the LD50 for lysergic acid has never been

determined. Do you agree? It's never been found how much it takes to kill half of the

test animals. So that makes it a tremendously safe drug if mortality is the only concern.

But of course I think what most psychedelic trippers eventually realize is mortality is rarely

at risk in psychedelic experiences. What's at risk is sanity. And you know, being nuts is not as bad as

being dead, but nevertheless it can spoil your entire day. So and it's very reassuring having taken a compound

philocybin and to have become totally convinced that you are dying, to just remind yourself that the LD50 is 200

times more than you took and therefore it's impossible and you merely have to discipline the hindbrain and

take control of your fear and then you will be all right.

I wish somebody would have told me that.

And you're and you're a pharmacologist.

But when you're in it, you really think you're dying.

When you're in it and you think you're dying, you weren't able to say to yourself now see here no one has ever died at this dose

level and well it is a question.

You start imagining that perhaps there was something in there that wasn't just psilocybin.

Oh yeah, that's a good point.

Or your heart can't bear it. I thought I had tachycardia and I thought my heart was going to explode.

Pound right out of your chest.

That you make a point which I want to elaborate on. We've talked so much about hallucination here.

And always because of my particular bent, which I have unconsciously transferred to you,

we're talking about visual hallucinations. But all psychedelic explorers should be aware of the concept of what is called a cognitive hallucination.

This is a much more insidious phenomenon.

This is quite simply an out and out delusion.

The commonest form of cognitive hallucination goes like this.

You take mushrooms.

An hour and twenty minutes into it, it's getting mighty, mighty strange.

And this is especially a problem with first timers.

And you realize with the force of revelation that you didn't take psilocybin.

You took a poisonous mushroom and now you are going to die.

This is an out and out cognitive hallucination, which is as real as a belief.

But it's not a disturbance in the visual field, it's a disturbance in the cognitive machinery.

A story, a friend of mine had never taken mushrooms and was very concerned about how to do it.

And said, and got the instructions from me, silent darkness, quiet rooms, stay sitting.

And took them in his room in silent darkness and at about the hour and a half point realized with a demonic chuckle that I had been kidding.

I had been putting him on and actually had told him to stay in his room because we were preparing a surprise party for him at the bar two blocks down the street.

And, you know, chuckling to himself with this realization, he showered, dressed, and went down to the bar two blocks down the street, pushed open the door and said, I'm here.

And the guy behind the bar said, oh, really?

Well, the trip got wilder from there because in the wake of disconfirmation of one of these cognitive hallucinations, people tend to become confused, paranoid, and upset.

So, you have to continuously track your mental processes.

And it's really good to stick with whatever rules that you've laid down for yourself.

I actually apply this technique in my own life.

If I get to the place where I cannot understand what is happening, I try to think back to the last moment when I did understand what was happening.

And then do what I said I was going to do then, having given up on understanding it in the moment.

The practical fallout from this in terms of psychedelic research is what we call the chain-to-a-tree technique, which is where you just chain yourself to a tree, and providing you don't hang yourself with the chain, this cuts down the possibility of doing something peculiar.

Psychedelics tend to be, this doesn't tend to be a problem, but, for instance, with detura, the best intended and most together people lose it completely and then come back into it 12 or 24 hours later to just survey the swath of wreckage that they have cut through their own and other people's lives.

I had a friend years ago, a very diminutive, attractive woman, who took detura with a couple of boyfriends, waited hours and hours, nothing happened.

They finally decided to go to their homes.

She walked them down the stairs, said goodbye to them at the top of the stairs.

Because it actually happened in the Haight, and that was the last thing she remembered until she came to on the sixth floor of the federal building in the San Francisco County Jail.

And the charge was assault on the resting officer, and the evidence was the officer's thumb, which had been bitten off.

So, she was, you know, an Antioch PhD in medieval literature.

So, it happens, it happens to the best of us.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, you can, the problem, the ideal situation, and always, I'm only speaking from my own experience, and I may have an odd take on it, because God knows I'm odd, but, to my mind, the ideal situation is to have the sitter two rooms away, and you have a doorbell, or the equivalent.

Because if the sitter is with you, you start to analyze the sitter, and you, and as someone once said to me in India, face is index of mind, and the sitter can just become an existential galaxy of possibilities.

Because, you know, they, you can read their history, their intent, their most secret thoughts, your belief in what is their most secret thoughts.

People are concrescences of ambiguity, that you don't want to get too tangled up with in that state, unless you really are ready for the trip to take that particular direction.

I don't know if it was in this workshop, or the other night, that I mentioned, I recall a trip I took with this English guy, and it took me two weeks to get his voice out of my head.

It just became like this, this accompaniment to consciousness, this stream of sort of understated English upper-class gibberish on all subjects, and I finally, you know, it retracted.

That's called becoming a victim of the transference.

All psychotherapists are aware of this.

The transference is when you get dragged into the other person's system of values or delusion.

There's even a name for this in clinical psychology.

It's called allophrenia.

Allophrenia is schizophrenic behavior on the part of normal people in the presence of schizophrenics.

And this is a real problem.

Your friend is put in the place.

You go to see your friend, to cheer them up.

And your friend is not violently insane, but saying strange things, behaving in strange ways.

And you, in an effort to relate to them, begin saying strange things and behaving in strange ways.

And before you know it, you know, the resident has to break in and escort you to the elevator because you're causing a problem in the ward.

The transference is this phenomenon happening among people who are more or less psychologically healthy.

But still, it can be very disrupting.

I think the sitter should be there only if there's a three-dimensional emergency.

And the sitter, the notion, I like the word sitter because it's operational.

It tells what you should do.

And guide is not such a pleasing word.

This implies control, prior knowledge, hierarchy, so forth and so on.

The best guide sitter I ever knew was a wonderful old guy.

I'm, he's dead now, but I'm not yet ready to say his name in public.

I'm sure some of you know him.

But his style was, he read these paperback trash novels, you know.

And he would just sit down with somebody, give them the stuff, and every once in a while they would fight their way out of this ocean of hallucination to deliver some insight.

And he would just put down his book and turn to them and say, that's nice.

Now go back to the music, pick up his book, and, you know.

This guy could get 600 pages in a situation where he was nominally in charge of a dozen people who were tripping.

So, non-intervention, I think.

And then there's the question of doing it with another person.

And this, then, and then the question is, is it going, meaning that the other person is going to be stoned, too.

And this has its own pitfalls and ambiguities.

If it's your lover, your sexual partner, then, in my opinion, that's probably the best way to spend your time.

If it's not, then, you know, the sky is the limit.

You're going to learn more about this person than perhaps you were prepared to.

Sometimes it's easy.

It's no problem.

Everybody stays who they appeared to be before you took off.

But sometimes, you know, the masks just start being hurled across the room in all directions.

And you don't know where it's going to leave you.

My approach, I guess, is one of two extremes.

I guess I sort of belong to the sensory deprivation school that lie down, shut up, silent darkness, music very judiciously, if at all.

And I always do it at night, which some people find that strange.

But night is quiet.

The energy dies down.

There's calm and still between midnight and 4 a.m.

The other end of the spectrum is someone like Salvador Roquet, who, you know, gives you three drugs, plays heavy metal rock and roll.

Then you get to see the Auschwitz films.

And, no, I'm not kidding.

I'm not kidding.

I mean, it is an effort to, so far as I can tell, drive you absolutely starkers.

You know?

And I would not submit myself to that.

This same polarity exists in therapeutic theories.

Some schools of therapy want you to lose it, want you to weep, lament, rend your clothing, throw yourself on the floor, kick your feet in the air.

And this is called getting out your stuff, or working through your stuff.

What I find about this kind of thing is it resonates too long.

You know?

It doesn't feel like you've gotten clear of it.

It feels like you have simply objectified it.

But, you know, life is an uncompleted puzzle.

I could certainly change my mind.

I have never felt that the primary use of these things was to cure what is called in modern parlance neurosis, what I call unhappiness.

It isn't for that.

It is, and again, this may be the influence of Jung in my background.

You know, Jung felt that there was no such thing as normality.

That life, the task of life, was what he called individuation.

And he felt it really doesn't even begin until you approach middle life.

I mean, you must leave the 20s behind you because they are so socially and hormonally turbulent that you're just basically trying to make sense of it on a day-to-day basis.

But then you settle in, and this unfolding takes place.

And I really assume that we are all beyond neurosis.

Not that we are not neurotic, but that we all have our own strategies and our own take on our own quirks and peculiarities.

The psychedelic thing as tool is more to go beyond the legacy of the normal into the transpersonal or the suprapersonal and really view life as an open-ended domain to be explored.

So, I find myself talking to psychologists a lot, because this is where this has been seized upon, because it does perturb the dynamics of the psyche.

But, for instance, I don't think you should give people hospitalized for psychotic behavior psychedelics.

They're having enough trouble.

They are being overwhelmed by the contents of the unconscious 24 hours a day and have no tool to make sense of it.

The rest of us can make sense of overwhelmment by the unconscious if it doesn't go on too long.

I mean, I don't think there's any one of us who would wish to take mushrooms, arrive at the height, and just stay there.

Because after 48, 72 hours, some situation would arise which would cast us into an extreme state of disequilibrium.

It's more like diving.

A friend of mine said many, many years ago, the yogan and sub-in, shaman, psychedelic voyager, the yogan and the schizophrenic dive in the same motion.

It's just that the yogan remembers to take his tanks along.

And that's what it is, you know.

I mean, there is this possibility of inundation and overwhelmment.

Well, let's return to the matter of dosage and set and setting.

Yeah.

I have a question.

You mentioned yesterday how you favored organic materials over synthetic.

What about, you know, taking organic materials but then refining, you know, narrowing them down, getting rid of all the other ingredients in the plants?

That's our Western tendency is to just take something, refine it down, isolate the active ingredients and then take doses of that.

Do you see that the other natural ingredients that the mushrooms or ayahuasca and whatever it is that provided kind of synergize the active ingredients and make the trip easier or smoother?

Yeah, I think so.

Rarely in a plant where you have a psychoactive compound will it occur all by itself.

For instance, in the peyote cactus, there is mescaline, there's N-methyl mescaline, there's anhalamine, anhaloene, methyl, well, there's a whole family, about a dozen of these things.

Similarly, in the coca bush, cocaine and several other canes and several other active compounds.

So when you take a plant, you're getting a broad spectrum of these active molecules that have a familial relationship to each other.

And no chemist has ever exactly explained to me what's happening.

But I think all chemists and pharmacologists are aware of the fact that natural compounds, even extracted and purified, or let's just say even extracted, are smoother than their synthetic counterpart.

I recently had occasion to relearn this because there's been some amount of experimentation with 5-methoxy-DMT, which is not like DMT, but it is short-acting and creates a profound oceanic emotion.

But it also, in the pure substance, there's a tremendous heart rush in the first 30 seconds.

I mean, you just feel like you're in an up elevator that knows no limit.

And just about the time that you figure you're going to go into some kind of emergency situation, it tends to back off.

So then, recently, there has been this material in the underground called toad foam, which is actually 5-methoxy-DMT extracted from the glands of a large southwestern toad.

Well, when you smoke that, it too is 5-MAO-DMT, but there is no heart rush, and it also doesn't last as long.

It's much more benign and easygoing, even in cases where there isn't a detectably variant spectrum of compounds present.

For instance, in the psilocybin in stropharia cubensis, really, there are only two active principles, psilocybin and psilocin.

And psilocin is the dephosphorylated ester of psilocybin, so they are basically the same compound.

Nevertheless, if you talk to somebody who has only taken Sandoz psilocybin,

it's much less animated and interesting than organic psilocybin.

Now, the counterexample to this is when Hoffman synthesized psilocybin for the first time,

he gave some of it to Wasson, and Wasson took it back to Huatla in the Sierra Mazateca of Oaxaca

and gave it to Maria Sabina.

And Maria Sabina said,

the spirit of the mushroom is in the little pill, and this story has been repeated over and over again.

Well, my assumption simply is, you know, Maria Sabina was a wily old lady.

I mean, it's not writ anywhere that shamans have to always tell you the truth.

And I very seriously doubt that the experience...

I've never had the opportunity to take chemically pure psilocybin.

The difference between the morning glories and LSD is one of animation and color.

The morning glories, you see...

I'm talking now about Ipomoea and Turbina, the Mexican species.

When you take them, there is a flood of Aztec, Toltec, Mayan imagery.

It's just... I mean, it's uncanny.

You can't believe it while it's happening, you know,

that you would see this much glyphs and carved obsidian and quetzal feathers and all of this stuff.

Is it the morphogenetic field?

Is it the broader vegetable spectrum of the alkaloid rather than the synthetic?

Who knows?

These things remain to be looked at.

In terms of the theory of morphogenetic resonance,

it seems to me, you know,

some of you probably follow Rupert's ideas and Rupert himself.

The problem is that the morphogenetic field is very difficult for instruments to detect.

And in fact, I think so far the only instrument that can detect it is the human mind.

And this probably means, you know, that it's perturbing a field

that is very, very far removed from the fields associated with the four or five ordinary forces of nature.

But, for instance, when you go to Tikal or in Guatemala or Borupadur in central Java

or Conorak on the Puri coast of India

and you take these psychedelics, the past is present.

I mean, you see these places at their height.

And you can say, well, it's just suggestion, you know.

But I don't know.

When I take ayahuasca, wherever I take it,

I encounter the motifs typical of Amazonian shamanism.

The jaguar, the giant anaconda.

And to show you that sometimes the iconography of these compounds is not predictable,

black people.

And everyone in the Amazon says this,

that you see black people.

Well, there are no black people in the Amazon.

Not really.

I mean, in the lower Amazon, there are a few.

But in the upper Amazon, a black person is as rare as occurred.

And yet, everybody insists on this.

Well, I have had this experience on ayahuasca.

And to call it seeing black people is a very mild gloss on what it is.

It's like being at the Apollo Ballroom on a hot evening in 1960

and Aretha Franklin is on stage.

I mean, it is deep hit of blackness.

I don't know quite what to make of it, you know.

I don't know why.

And Claudio Naranjo gave the ayahuasca, gave harmaline to urban people in Santiago, Chile,

stockbrokers, and advertising executives, people who had no connection to the jungle.

And they reported jaguars, giant snakes, jungles, and black people.

So, this, to me, is a tremendously fertile area for Jungians, for morphogenetic field people to look into.

Psychics have claimed, since who knows how long, that by holding an object in their hand,

they could penetrate its past states of being.

Well, it's like all these other occult claims, in my experience,

mantra, yantra, yoga posturing, past life recovery.

For me, none of these things are possible unless I'm stoned.

Then they all become possible.

It's just like you just throw the switch.

Suddenly, mantras work.

I can chant mantras until hell freezes over in an un-stoned state.

The precondition for empowering occult idea systems seems to be a shift in brain chemistry.

And it's, you know, to be noted that in these cultures where a lot of magic,

a lot of violation of natural law is going on,

there is a lot of psychedelic stuff going on.

These ayahuasca shamans, say, among the Aguaruna Hivaro, for instance,

which is a very no-nonsense tribe of head-hunting people in the Amazon,

the shamans live continuously in a state of altered consciousness.

I mean, they are taking this stuff all the time.

It is a food item.

And what it would be like to be the shaman of the Aguaruna in the jungle all the time,

taking all this stuff, it's hard to imagine.

Because when you just do it once, all plants have auras.

All plants have songs, which can be extracted out of them.

I mean, they are living literally in some kind of other dimension.

Yeah?

I'd like to play devil's advocate, if I can, for a minute,

about this whole idea of certain plants or certain substances

have certain attributes or certain places that they take people to.

I've had the ideation that you're talking about,

the visualization of the snakes, the cats, the jungle, the pyramids,

the whole, you know, Mayan aspect, jungle, the shamanic routine.

On.

LSD, on mushrooms, on ibogaine, and on yahe.

And I've had clients that had that same ideation doing breath work.

Well, yeah, this raises a real question.

One of the things...

And the black people.

The black people were on ibogaine, which I expected, but not the other people.

No, I don't understand exactly how this works.

I will join your side for a moment, because there's a phenomenon I've noticed,

and some of you have heard me talk about it.

It's possible to do this on psilocybin, it's really easy to do it on ayahuasca.

Ayahuasca, in a way, is somehow more open to suggestion.

These other things have their own agenda.

Ayahuasca will work with you.

But one of the bizarre things that you can do on ayahuasca is you can suggest a period,

like, let's say, Italian Baroque.

You just say it in your mind.

And paintings, altar pieces, architectural spaces, balustrades,

vehicles, armament, saddlery, clothing, serving utensils, bowls, pewter, candelabra,

all of this stuff will begin drifting toward, and it's just, and it is high Baroque.

In fact, it is more Baroque than the Baroque.

It's obviously what they were shooting for, you know?

And then you just say, dynastic Egypt.

A hawk-headed guy.

And you just, and then you say, Art Deco.

And thousands of cigarette lighters, coffee tables.

Yeah.

And more intensely realized than you ever actually encounter these things in real life.

Well, now what does that mean?

I have no idea, first of all.

The possibilities seem to be that what we call styles, or what we call motifs,

are actually categories in the unconscious.

But the amazing thing about it is, having looked at the Italian Baroque, dynastic Egypt, and Art Deco,

you can also say to it, so surprise me.

And suddenly, it can surprise you a hundred percent.

It can show you objects that you cannot place to any set of motifs, any historical period, past, present, or future.

And then you can say to it, surprise me again.

And it gives you surprise B, which is completely different from surprise A,

and also not related to any known style.

So then you say, well, are styles categories in the unconscious?

And how many of them are there?

And what does it mean, then, for a group of people in 1680 or 1930,

to suddenly find one of these places, and punch into it?

And then, another question is, is there a necessary historical progression?

Or is it by chance?

In other words, could the world, could the political world of the 16th century

have lived with the design motifs of Art Deco?

Could we have had Columbus arriving in America in a ship consonant with the best cannons of Bauhaus design?

Strange questions, friends.

Is there succession, necessary succession in style?

Or are these things pure chance?

So, I don't know, returning to and responding to your demonic advocacy,

it may be that going to Tikal preconditions you,

that that pushes the button, and then when you take the psychedelic,

you discover that the high Mayan, the classic Mayan button had been set,

and then you find all this stuff.

It's a little more bewildering to have it happen in your living room.

So...

My feeling about it is that those experiences are available to anybody

in various states, and there are various ways to get there.

In my hand, I don't feel that it's mutually exclusive to say that

that some substances do seem to have a certain predilection for certain kinds of experiences.

I've had both feelings about it.

That range of experiences, that band of experiences available,

and some things are more likely to put me there than others.

Well, LSD is a relative of morning glories.

So, if you got Mexican imagery off LSD, that would be understandable.

It may be that all the indoles resonate together.

And, you know, Rupert's fond of saying the morphogenetic,

or the thing which is most impinging on the present,

is the immediate and most closely related past.

But also impinging is the related past moments,

and the related contingencies.

Perhaps all of the indoles can access each other.

One thing that I've done on psilocybin, and you might try this.

This is an interesting experiment.

Once you get it up and running smoothly,

then you can say to it,

Be MDMA.

And it will be it.

And you can say to it,

Be LSD.

And it loves to do imitations of other psychoactive drugs.

Well, I don't know.

I don't think you can say to MDMA,

Be DMT.

And it will move.

You hope not, don't you?

And it would move over into that space.

But, see, obviously it's some kind of freely commanded modality in the psyche,

with which we can have a relationship,

if we will but evolve a control language and a dialogue.

And it remains mysterious.

It is a point that I made yesterday that I think is worth repeating.

The psychedelic experience is the beginning of the spiritual path.

That's why it's not important that yogans claim that they can deliver you the psychedelic experience.

Because it begins with the psychedelic experience.

And then you go from there.

I said something like this a few weeks ago at the John Ford Theater in L.A.

And this guy got up and said,

So why don't you take more?

Which I think is a very interesting question.

Very valid for me personally.

And the answer is our whole lives we conceive of spiritual development as looking for the answer.

You know, is it Taoism?

Is it diet?

Is it Tantra?

We look for the answer.

And I think we have become so accustomed to looking for the answer

that it's never really entered our minds what it would be like to find it.

To have it, yes.

And once you come face to face with these psychedelics,

the trail ends that you have found the answer.

Not because you are...

I mean perhaps because you're smart.

Perhaps because you're lucky.

Perhaps because you deserved it.

Because you hang out with the right people.

You have found the answer.

Now the question is,

What the hell do you do with it?

Because the answer is going to make hash out of your life.

Because your life is based on living without the answer.

So suddenly it's not, you know,

I want to be an enlightened being.

I want to be a shaman.

I want to be a Daoist.

I want to be a yoga.

Be it.

See how you like it.

So the answer to the question,

Why don't I take more?

Is because I don't...

I'm...

Attached.

Basically.

It is entirely my own attachments

that now impede my spiritual growth.

Nobody's holding me back.

Nothing is holding me back.

Except my sense of the awesomeness of what is now possible.

And this is true of everybody who reaches a certain point.

Think of the Daoist sage on Cold Mountain,

who has been up there in the fog and the mist and the rock escarpments for 30, 40, 50 years.

And the people in the village occasionally mention him to each other.

And say, you know, is old Fusi still alive?

Has anyone seen him recently?

And someone will say,

Oh yes, I saw him three years ago across a valley gathering wood.

But when I approached, he ran further up the mountain and disappeared.

To be Fusi is entirely possible.

You know, to actually attain what we have previously thought of as unattainable spiritual accomplishments.

But I don't foresee...

I don't think it can happen without leaving everything.

You know, do you really want to be a Daoist hermit circulating the light for 200 years

in a cave high up above Timberline?

You can, you know.

There's nothing stopping you once you understand that this psychedelic vehicle is available.

I'm appalled at that.

I mean, it's one thing to change your life to be nicer to your co-workers.

It's quite another to change your life to be incomprehensible to 99.9% of all humanity.

So, once you have the psychedelic tool in hand, then real choices have to be made.

What is this to you?

Is it simply something that you do once or twice a year to affirm to yourself that it's possible?

Or is it something that you can use in some way for your good and the world's?

That's sort of where I have come to rest.

And I hope it's not a delusion.

But I think that there are ideas out there.

And that they don't do any good out there.

That they only have efficacy if brought into three dimensions.

And there are all kinds of ideas.

In fact, they are all ideas.

So, we're talking about a more efficient internal combustion engine.

How people can learn to love each other.

How to save the planet.

The most efficient way of packing crackers in a box for long shelf life and low destruction of their structural integrity.

It doesn't matter what the problem is.

The answer can be found out there.

Well, it puts people who are into this psychedelic thing in an entirely different stance from all other spiritual seekers.

Because all other spiritual seekers are furiously seeking.

Psychedelic people are holding it back with all their power.

Because they are in the presence of the mystery.

And then the trick is to get a spigot on it.

So that it can be turned on and off.

Rather than just coming at you like a tidal wave a mile high and 20 miles wide.

So, it's a different problem.

An embarrassment of riches.

An embarrassment of access to past, present, future.

Alien dimensions.

Mantra hoarding elves.

And promise bearing demons.

And so, strangely enough, it creates a certain kind of conservatism.

Now, I don't think that everybody realizes this.

Many people take psychedelics in order to prove to themselves that they can.

And then gain acceptance from their social group.

It's a way of fitting in.

But those people, you can always evade the mystery.

Not always.

But if you're trying to, from the get-go, you can evade fully confronting the mystery.

And, but if it's what you want, you will quickly discover that, you know, you have hit the main vein.

And that changes the rules of the game pretty entirely.

They'll do it up to a point.

And then a particularly sophisticated psychologist and people like that that say,

well, it'll take you so far, but then there's something else.

And you have to quit doing this and give it up and do something else.

And, you know, my experience is what that is.

It's not true that if you want to keep doing it, it'll take it as far as you want to go.

That's what I think.

I think people who quit doing it, see something, detect.

Because what it is, is if you think of the self as a diamond, and you begin to,

and then what the psychedelic is, is pressure on the diamond.

Well, you can raise the pressure to a thousand pounds per square inch, and there are no structural flaws.

But if you raise the pressure to ten thousand pounds per square inch,

micro flaws begin to show and sheer lines appear.

And because everything will fly apart at a certain level,

one cannot encompass this mystery.

I mean, I think finally you have to avert your eyes and just, you know, adore is a strange word,

and worship is also a strange word, but certainly give credit to.

It is not a program that you finish.

And yes, people who say, I learned all I could from it,

probably learned mostly that they shouldn't do more of it.

It threatens to put them out of a job, especially if they're psychotherapists.

Well, it threatens to put anybody out of a job,

because eventually the contradictions of living in this low-level slice of reality

will just become unbearable.

And you'll, I mean, this actually happened in the sixties.

I mean, many people quit and dropped out for many reasons,

but the seed of all that talk about, is, you just say, you know, this is absurd.

I am going to sit.

That's not absurd.

But, you know, what about your stock brokerage?

What about your portfolio?

What about your divorce in progress?

All of this stuff, you know, you can't...

No, I think that the depth of this cannot be taken.

And eventually, the male ego, in every single one of us, regardless of our gender, will feel threatened.

Because it's hardly different from death.

You know, because you're not going to recognize yourself.

That's the point that I wanted to make in talking about the guy up on Cold Mountain.

You know, once he ran a gas station.

Once he followed the Dodgers.

But then, it all began to slide in this certain direction, and he is no longer recognizable to himself.

Carlos Castaneda has Don Juan say, you must lose your personal history.

Well, I don't know whether Don Juan is a real person, or whether he ever said that.

But it's interesting, that notion.

How many of us would be willing to become unrecognizable to ourselves?

And yet, obviously, that's the path that one is on.

And so then you just decide, well, is there an obligation to go to the end?

Do I have to become a genie?

Do I have to become a Taoist sage, an immortal?

And I think the answer is no.

You know, one doesn't have to do that.

Buddhism creates the notion of the bodhisattva.

That is, in a way, this same thing.

It's where you're just about to go over the hill into incomprehensibility.

And then you say, wait a minute.

What about the people in the prisons?

The naked, the hungry, the oppressed.

And you pull back and say, no.

I forswear enlightenment until the last being attains enlightenment.

Well, it's a noble gesture.

But I'll bet these bodhisattvas make this vow with a tremendous sigh of relief.

Now they know what they're going to do with their lives.

Oh, good.

I'm going to work in prisons and counsel the dying and get into political action.

Geez, for a minute I thought I was going to go straight into the light.

And become unrecognizable to myself and lose my definitions and so forth and so on.

I will.

Okay.

The comment, the two words that struck me interesting was adore and worship.

I don't know if I got it right.

Matthew Fox Friday nights quoted some theologian.

I think it was .

Mm-hm.

And it struck me interesting because you said that we have come to a point in history

now where we must either find some form of meaningful worship or commit suicide.

Somehow that quote came back when you mentioned when one may reach that point of the penultimate

truth of the unspeakable or the formless form or the light or whatever you want to call it.

And the mushrooms are pointing the way or whatever.

Breath therapy.

That all these things are only something that points you to the ultimate.

And when you get there, it moves into the adoration and the worship level.

Which, interestingly enough, as I say, coming from a mode of being a recovering Catholic,

I could never find any kind of religious community and didn't want to join a monastery for that

purpose.

And what I see is partially this neurosis or unhappiness that exists in so many people in

the country, they have no contextual format for worship.

Because it doesn't have that power for them to do it.

Yeah, so you have to have the personal experience of something to worship.

And this is what has been lacking.

I mean, what the churches are peddling is high abstraction.

And you really have to work yourself up into a lather to, you know, be able to accept that as worthy

of that kind of attention.

The psychedelic subset of society is into an experience.

And, you know, it's accessible.

In a way, we're like Calvinists, not in our ethics or our restraint on behavior,

but in our insistence on a direct personal relationship with the mystery.

And this is something very new.

We have really accepted the idea that truth descends through hierarchies.

Basically, from Newsweek and Time and the Washington Post down to us as consumers of these various images

of what is going on.

The notion that you might know more about reality than the combined editorial board of Scientific American

and the Journal of Foreign Affairs is startling stuff.

We always give ourselves away.

We don't realize, it only depends on you, you know, to believe that at Cornell or down at SRI,

people understand the universe, is not helpful.

You must understand the universe.

And if you don't know partial differential calculus,

then your model of how the universe works must do it without partial differential calculus.

In other words, it's not read anywhere that only one model will work.

And in fact, I think all abstract models should be highly suspect.

It's going to be...

It's an opportunity.

I mean, we have to view life as an opportunity.

What are you doing with it?

Are you afraid of it?

I mean, some people live their lives...

Apparently, what they are doing is arranging their deathbed scene.

They want it to take place in a large baronial house with clipped green lawns, acres in surround.

They want the room in which they die to be filled with fine art.

They want their loving heirs to be dutifully assembled while they pass out the final wisdom.

And they spend their entire life creating the dramatic scenario of their passage.

And, of course, you have to work hard because you've got to make the money to buy that house.

You have to sire all these children, educate them into your values so they won't be stabbing you in the back and misbehaving in this situation.

You have to create loyalty, possession, power, all of these things.

And then you won't die in a ditch, unknown and abandoned, you know?

But on the other hand, what was the quality of that life, you know?

Life is an opportunity.

Should we...

How much pressure should you put on it?

How many places should you go?

How many drugs should you take?

How many sexual configurations should you experiment with?

How many professions should you...

And it depends, I think, the question is how seriously do you take it?

Do you just think life is a lark and it's fine with you that you're going to go into a pine box and be forgotten for all eternity?

Or do you have some inner consolation that that won't happen and you're going to go off and be with Lao Tzu and Mao and everybody else who ever died?

Or, you know, just what is it?

And my, I think of it as a telephone booth being filled with water.

And you can see that when the water reaches the top of the telephone booth, you're going to be dead as a doornail.

And so you have 30 years to figure it out.

We are alive.

There's no contest about that.

It's extremely improbable that we should be alive, that we should be here thinking, feeling, sharing.

The fact that we're alive throws open the whole game, means anything is probably possible.

But I doubt that it's easy.

I'll bet you have to be very, very smart to figure out what's going on and get it right.

And so I guess I have a sort of private religion of intelligence.

It isn't how good you are, it's how wily you are, which was the Greek virtue of Odysseus, you know.

That was always his epitaph, or his epithet, was he was wily Ulysses.

Reality is some kind of maze.

It isn't to the swift that the race goes.

A maze, a puzzle garden that you walk through to try and find your way out.

The race isn't to the swift, it's to the thoughtful, the careful, the one who can tease it all apart.

Well, for puzzle solving, the psychedelic is this tremendously powerful tool,

because it extends the domain of mind.

And that's what's necessary to make it go.

Okay, moving through these things and discussing dosage,

probably in order of the likelihood of your encountering them.

Mushrooms, I feel that people who weigh around 140 pounds should take 5 dried grams.

This is a stiff hit. This is a committed hit.

There will be difficult moments in a 5 gram trip.

But on the other hand, certain questions will be solved forever for you.

Because you will validate the existence of this dimension,

you will see what your relationship to it is.

I don't believe in diddling with these things.

People tend to take tiny amounts, thinking that 1 tenth of a dose is 1 tenth of an experience.

Well, that doesn't work like that.

I mean, half a dose can be no experience at all.

And a full dose can feel like 10 of these experiences.

So, trivializing it is really, and I use this word advisedly, but sinful.

Because you're trivializing the only mystery or one of the...

It's like trivializing sex.

I mean, the ordinary objections to pornography are not my objections.

But, to my mind, a very strong objection to pornography is that it trivializes.

And anything which trivializes anything central to our self-definition is bad mental hygiene,

is about the only way I could put it.

And taking small doses of psychedelics tends to trivialize them.

And there are people who probably take LSD every weekend and go dancing,

and have done this for years,

and have no idea what LSD is capable of.

The main shift in the use pattern with LSD is from...

I mean, it may have been childish,

but the style of the 60s was,

how many mics can you bolt down?

You know?

Have you had the 500?

Have you had the 1,000?

Have you had the 2,000?

Well, eventually it becomes moot,

because you just dissolve into shimmering atoms

for longer and longer periods of time on these trips.

But the modern approach,

which is how little can you get away with taking and still be one of the gang,

is even more insidious, you know?

Because then people feel capable of talking about these things.

And, you know,

there are people who feel that their opinions on the psychedelic experience

should be weighed very carefully,

who have only taken MDMA.

Well, listen, I've got news for you.

I mean, that is to the domain we're talking about,

like a broken tricycle to a Tessa Rosa Ferrari.

So, this is a general comment that you should take a committed dose

of whatever it is you're taking,

so that there is no ambiguity,

because there's nothing worse than a sub-threshold psychedelic experience.

because what it is, is it's all show and no go.

You know?

You feel the CNS activation.

You feel the keyboards light up.

Everything comes on.

You start down the runway.

You know?

New tremendo controls on your screen.

OK?

You know?

You pick up speed, you pick up speed, you pick up speed,

and then you come to the end of the runway

and taxi back to the hangar.

Well, that was not a flight to Boston.

That was just clogging the traffic pattern.

So committed doses.

And then, because you're going to take a committed dose,

inform yourself of the medical and pharmacological chit-chat on the matter

so that you can feel reassured, you know.

And talk to a heart specialist.

Questions like, if my heart is pounding,

does that mean I'm having a heart attack?

What is a fibrillation and how will I recognize it?

Because you can have very odd feelings

and not be in any danger whatsoever, you know.

And your heart can pound.

It's made to pound.

Look at all these aerobic exercise freaks.

Well, the fact that you're sitting still and this begins to happen

doesn't mean that you've been shoved to death's door.

It just means, you know, that everything is equalizing

and coming to some kind of equilibrium.

And you're passing through a transition.

These drugs do have a kind of mock barrier.

In other words, there is a barrier somewhat like the speed of sound.

It's a pharmacological and physiological barrier.

So you take the compound, the plant, whatever it is.

Nothing happens for 40 minutes or so except false starts

and little things and you have to go pee

and then you come back and you sit down.

And then it begins to come on

and it's like it can have many manifestations

but it can be chills, tremoring, knotted stomach, nausea,

just restlessness, so forth and so on.

This is what I call taking a page from the engineering book, cue.

Cue in engineering circles is vibration in a physical system.

And you may even, when they launch the space shuttle,

if you listen to the radio chit-chat,

they will say, approaching max cue,

and then they'll say, max cue, mark,

and then they're through that.

What that means is that as the system approaches a transition,

it begins to shake.

It begins to shake as though it's going to shake to pieces.

And the cue forces are building on all the air surfaces,

the airframe.

Then you break through that,

cue falls to zero,

and you're in the cool, you know, main engine cutoff.

You are now in orbit.

All vibration has ceased.

Noise has ceased.

You are in orbit.

You are weightless.

You are there.

It's different.

Now you shut down all these switches related to the launch procedure

and begin to set a course through a different kind of medium,

a medium characterized by smoothness, stillness,

and that sort of thing.

LSD, I don't see anything wrong with 300, 400 micrograms as an initial dose.

I don't see any point in running up into the 1,500 to 2,000 gamma range

because in my experience, what happens is at higher doses,

there's simply an area where you can't remember what happened.

And the higher the dose, the longer that period of time.

But since you can't remember anything about it,

why, you know, it should be shortened.

DMT, 70 milligrams, vaporized in a glass pipe, and 70 milligrams.

Yeah?

I'm just thinking about LSD.

I have done large doses of LSD at times,

and it's always seemed to me that it's very difficult

to process all the staining that I'm coming in.

The biocomputer just, at one point, for me at least,

one time I did 4,000 micrograms,

and the biocomputer shut down for a while.

I just, like you said, I forgot exactly.

Yeah, it's the same overload,

and it just shunts it past you.

What do we need to cover here?

DMT, psilocybin, LSD, MDMA,

which, you know, I think probably you all know,

125, 150 milligrams.

And because I tell you these doses

doesn't necessarily mean I approve of all these things.

I'm just saying, if you take them, these are the doses.

Ketamine, people take small amounts.

Again, usually after attaining some amount of proficiency with it,

I haven't, I've only done it four or five times,

and always fairly large doses.

130, 150.

Interesting compound,

but contraindicated because of physiological problems.

Depresses the immune system.

Possibility of epileptic kindling.

Certainly, if you were to vomit in that state,

you might well strangle

because you wouldn't be able to clear your throat.

I don't like,

what I have against ketamine also is,

you have to shoot it, you know?

As I was driving home last night,

I was listening to some program,

and they were talking about intravenous drugs.

And I thought, how interesting.

That's a distinction you don't hear made very often.

They were saying, we should legalize all drugs except intravenous drugs.

Well, so that's, of course, morphine, cocaine, heroin, ketamine,

steroids, I suppose, like that.

But that's an interesting distinction, operationally.

Yeah?

You can, but I've heard that it's dangerous because...

Yeah, it's IM.

It's IM.

When they give it as an anesthetic,

they give it 600 milligrams IV push,

which must be just like being struck from behind by a freight train.

I'm sure you never know what hit you.

I mean, imagine an exploratory dose is 100, let's say, IM.

They're talking about IV directly into the vein, 600 push.

That means pressure on the feeder.

So it's just like a high pressure filling of your gas tank.

You would never know what hit you.

Yeah, although now they've pulled it from general surgery,

even veterinary surgery,

because it seems to depress the immune system.

And the worst thing you could do is do surgery on somebody

and then put them into a surgical recovery ward

with a depressed immune system.

So that is kind of out.

I must say about ketamine,

it did something to me that nothing else has ever done,

which is it erodes the observer

in a way that the indoles don't.

On ketamine, you can get so out there

that it is a major intellectual breakthrough

to realize that you're on a drug.

In other words, there's this situation,

and it seems like it's always been there,

and it always will be there,

and you can't remember who you are,

or what you are, or where you are,

and this situation continues,

and there's something about it,

but you can't quite put your finger on it,

and there's never been anything else.

There'll never be anything else.

And then suddenly comes this tiny thought.

You're on a drug.

Oh, right.

I remember now.

That's it.

I'm a human being.

I took a drug.

I'm a human being,

and I took a drug,

and that's what this is.

This is a trip.

Right.

That's it.

This is a trip.

I'm on a trip.

Now I've got it.

Now I'm in.

Well, what this means is

you're now coming down.

The trip is now over with,

because you have, yeah.

Being so lost

that it was a victory to realize.

No, not a victory,

but I was just in that state

where there was only eternity.

There was no trace back

to any family member,

to anything.

I just knew that this person

which was sitting

was a familiar person.

From somewhere,

I knew this person,

and if I had come with that.

And it was yourself.

No, there was none of them.

My sitter was there.

Oh, I see.

He was sitting in the next room.

But I was for hours

just totally in, you know,

no connection to anything

which was connected

to my personality or to life.

Was that a five-gram desk?

Yeah.

Uh-huh.

Well, I think probably,

I would imagine that this is...

It was wonderful to be there.

You know, to see that

everything is just made up

of our mind,

and to see how this world

is made up,

and, you know,

why do we have architectures

and colleagues and all this.

It's just incredible

to people.

Yes.

Maybe this is the white light.

Maybe this is what

these early LSD people

were so enamored of,

was getting so far into it

that you don't even know

you're into it,

because you can't remember

where you started from.

Uh, it sort of is not

what I'm shooting for,

because I always want

to bring stuff back.

See, my conviction is...

Oh, no, I had my conviction reversed.

But my belief is...

That...

Uh...

My belief is

that this stuff

is important

for all of us.

that we're in some kind

of lower dimensional

slice,

and what you see

in the psychedelic experience

actually has

historical implications.

And I find this

sort of paradoxical,

because I'm the person

who draws everybody's attention

to the fact

that people have been doing this

for 50,000 years.

So in a way,

that sounds like I'm saying

it's not a big deal.

It's part of the human heritage.

Certain people have always

known about this.

Yeah?

Where does it start, though?

Like, that point

between where there's nothing

and then all of a sudden,

you know,

coming back in,

the observer kicks in.

That's the big issue

in my life,

is like,

where did the observer

come from?

Is it an evolutionary thing?

Like, animals never have it

when they fade

into the white light?

You know,

I mean,

do you have anything

to say about that

little place

in between way in there?

Well,

I think it begins

with self-reflection.

In other words,

the question,

what's happening?

I don't think animals

ever ask that question.

For animals,

what's happening

is what's happening.

But we are capable

of creating a state

of distance

and posing the question,

what is happening?

And at that point

in the trip,

it means you're

making your way back

to the modality

that you left from.

You're drawing away

from the trans-linguistic

place.

And it truly is

trans-linguistic.

Nothing can be

taken out of it.

But at the interface

of the sayable

and the unsayable

is the novel,

the new,

the never-before-seen,

said, or done.

And that's what I think

it's important to

try and bring out

ideas.

Because I think

we are the animals

that bring back ideas.

Somehow our hunting

and gathering adaptation

then set us loose

in our own minds.

And, you know,

somebody came back

and said,

let's throw a chunk

of this meat

in the fire

and see what happens.

It's this

see-what-happens

attitude.

So then suddenly

they discovered,

well,

meat burned in fires

is easier to digest

and taste better.

And by this means,

this let's-see-what-happens

approach to things,

the ideas come

in the mental dimension.

The let's-see-what-happens

translates those of them

that can be translated

into three-dimensional space.

Let's plant this plant.

Let's slaughter this animal.

Let's try sex this way.

Let's go over that hill

this year

instead of that hill.

And what has come out of this

is the entire legacy

of our cultural heritage

as a global civilization.

But all of these ideas

began in the mind.

And what are ideas?

Well,

this is the central question

of Platonic philosophy.

And what are we

that we seem to

separate the doable

from the undoable

in the realm of ideas?

And then anything

that can be done,

we do.

It doesn't matter

how perverse,

how painful,

how destructive,

how grandiose,

how wonderful,

how sublime.

If it can be done,

we do it.

And then,

in this three-dimensional

domain of space and time,

these ideas

compete with each other

like organisms.

And an ecology

of mind evolves.

That's really

what culture is.

it's the ecology

that mind

has created

for itself

in the same way

that bees

create a beehive.

And then the beehive

is the cultural

context of beeness.

We have created

civilization

through language

and then civilization

has become

the context

for humanness.

And yet,

we always seek

to transcend it

and go beyond it.

Now,

I don't know

whether this is

something innate

in us

or whether it is

somehow programmed

in from the planet

at different levels.

Because it's

very interesting,

you know,

I don't know

how many of you

are aware of this,

but there are

leafcutter ants

in the tropics.

I mean,

they're a major part

of life

in the tropics.

And they march

in columns

through the jungle

and they can swarm

up a tree

and take all

the leaf material

off a large jungle

tree in a matter

of hours.

And what they do

with these leaves

is they return

sometimes great distances

with each one

carrying like

a little banner

a chunk of leaf

and they go down

into their nests

and they chew it up

and they stick it

on the walls.

...surface

or some of them

go back to the surface

and they gather spores

on their antenna

and then they go

back down

into the ant hill

and they inject

or inoculate

the chewed plant

material with

these spores.

Well,

naturally,

this chewed plant

material is pretty

organic and funky

so it begins to grow

all kinds of things

molds,

mildews,

bacteria,

so forth and so on.

And what the ants

do is they

farm this

and weed out

all these bad

bacteria

and small

micro fungi

and organisms

and only cultivate

this one fungus

which then converts

the plant material

into a usable

sugar.

so what this is

is it's a

symbiotic

relationship

between

the fungi

and

the ant

and the ant

is getting

an enriched

food

out of this

and what the

fungi

is getting

is a

cultivated

situation

where all

its competitor

organisms

are carefully

kept away

and weeded

out.

well

this is

precisely

in my

model

what is

happening

with the

human

species

at a

more

complex

level.

In other

words

by

domesticating

cattle

we have

set up

an environment

that is

very favorable

to the

growth

and appearance

of what

would otherwise

be a

very rare

deep

forest

mushroom

but because

we

domesticate

cattle

and clear

land

so to do

we have

created a

huge

circumtropical

global

environment

in which

these mushrooms

can reside.

What they

make for

us

is not

sugar

but

ideas

you know

something

we need

the way

ants need

sugar

and

these

ideas

take

all

kinds

of

forms

and

then

we

refine

them

and

you see

I don't

I'm not

sure if I

made the

point strongly

enough

in the

Friday

night

lecture

I really

believe

that

human

populations

that do

not have

contact

with the

psychedelic

tremendum

are neurotic

because they

are male

ego

dominated

yeah

big ego

the reason I

call it

male ego

is because

women

by

virtue of

physiology

basically

have

are

pretty

unavoidably

welded

to the

nitty

gritty

because

they

give

birth

they

carry

children

to term

and

those

two

things

which

are

biologically

dictated

there is

also

the

cultural

dictate

that

women

are

usually

involved

in

preparing

and

burying

the

dead

in

traditional

societies

so

women

know

how

weird

it is

I mean

surely

to give

birth

must give

you a

perspective

that

anybody

who's

never

done

it

just

cannot

hope

to

have

so

the

male

ego

is

floats

on

this

myth

of

separateness

that

no

woman

has

the

luxury

of

entertaining

because

birth

pregnancy

menstruation

care

for the

sick

care

for the

dying

these

are

boundary

dissolving

activities

that keep

women

close

to

the

nitty

gritty

the

male

organism

can

go

off

into

its

own

private

Idaho

pretty

much

often

what

child

rearing

means

is

the

simple

act

of

impregnation

and

then

that's

the

contribution

in

care

of

birth

in

primitive

societies

men

are

never

present

and

women

do

it

alone

or

with

other

women

so

forth

and

so

on

so

in

these

neolithic

and

paleolithic

societies

this

tendency

of

individuals

was

kept

down

by

a

chemical

regulator

which

was

the

psychedelic

experience

it

was

part

of

the

food

chain

and

it

suppressed

ego

much

in the

way

that

drugs

are

given

in

prisons

to

suppress

libido

because

it

makes

it's

hard

to

manage

highly

libidinous

people

in

an

institutionalized

situation

especially

when

it's

only

one

sex

is

involved

so

this

natural

regulation

of the

human

species

by

regulating

this

psychic

function

called

ego

was

disrupted

with

the

invention

of

agriculture

and

the

hunting

gathering

society

with

its

deep

involvement

in

ecstasy

which

and it

was

these

weekly

or

bi-weekly

psychedelic

orgy

ecstasy

picnics

that people

used to

have

that

gave

way

and

Weston

LaBar

makes

the point

that

ecstasy

is not

at a

premium

in

agricultural

societies

because

it's

disruptive

that

what is

at a

premium

in

agricultural

societies

is the

ability

to get

up

before

dawn

and

pick

up

your

tools

and

go

to

the

fields

and

work

like

a

dog

and

if

people

have

rye

and

of course

you know

at a

very early

strata

in the

neolithic

you do

get the

emergence

I mean

Frasier

is full

of talk

about the

great

corn

god

and

Tammuz

and all

this

so

we are

living

the

legacy

of

millennia

of

cultural

neurosis

in

western

civilization

by virtue

of the

fact

of the

untreated

growth

of the

cancerous

ego

and

we

know

this

it's

simply

that

we

assume

there

is

no

cure

we

assume

that

it's

natural

to

have

ego

and

that

it's

somehow

unnatural

to

suppress

it

but

wherever

you

have

a

break

an

outbreak

of

psychedelic

use

in a

high

tech

society

then

you

see

re-feminized

hang

loose

communal

caring

values

well

values

come

into

prominence

within

the

community

you

had

somebody

had

their

hand

yeah

one is

have you

seen a

difference

in the way

men and

women

react to

psychedelics

given the

fact that

maybe

perhaps

men

embody

a

stronger

male

ego

than

women

on

balance

and

my

other

question

has to

do

with

the

role

of

the

observer

ego

when

you're

doing

drugs

whether

it's

marijuana

or

alcohol

or

especially

psychedelics

so I

was just

sitting here

thinking

the reason

I don't

take

anything

stronger

than

marijuana

is

that

as

your

experience

I

mean

I

lose

myself

even

in

a

strong

hit

of

marijuana

I

lose

my

ego

completely

and

the

back

side

of

high

I

go

oh

yes

I

just

took

marijuana

two

hours

ago

everything

is

fine

I

will

recover

tomorrow

and

so

maybe

talk

a little

bit

about

that

and

what

people

can

do

who

maybe

don't

have a

strong

ego

structure

whatever

it

takes

to

do

these

powerful

drugs

because

I

don't

think

I

would

be

able

to

have

well

if

you

don't

have

a

strong

ego

structure

chances

are

you're

not

a

heavy

duty

male

dominator

because

they're

sort

of

antithetical

I

think

probably

cannabis

was

a

major

ego

dissolver

and

that

all

these

things

have

been

used

this

way

and

if

that

works

for

you

that's

fine

I

lose

my

ego

although

people

said

that

would

happen

I

never

quite

understood

what

was

meant

but

looking

at it

as a

mass

phenomenon

where

you're

not

talking

about

an

individual

tripper

but

tens

of

thousands

of

people

inevitably

this

feminizing

of

values

seems

to

take

place

what

was

your

first

thing

do

men

and

women

experience

psychedelics

differently

I

don't

know

if

they

experience

them

differently

I've

never

quantitatively

looked

into

this

but

my

impression

is

that

it's

less

of a

surprise

to

women

and

that

they

feel

less

of a

need

to

do

it

particularly

I think

this is

true

of

cannabis

I think

I'll

bet

that

two

thirds

of

cannabis

use

is

male

use

and

why

is

this

I'm

not

sure

maybe

women

have

too

much

work

to

do

too

many

obligations

I

mean

the

old

man

can

sit

and

smoke

dope

but

somebody

has

to

do

the

shopping

and

get

the

kids

to

school

and

pick

them

up

and

keep

the

women

are

often

shamans

and

in

fact

the

best

shamans

in

many

cultures

if

you

ask

the

people

in

the

culture

are

usually

felt

to

be

women

are

connected

up

to

all

of

this

stuff

drug

taking

may

way

the

women

out

smarted

themselves

because

they

had

the

not

control

in the

conscious

sense

but

they

were

sitting

in

the

front

of

the

canoe

when

they

and

then

they

invented

agriculture

and

that

undercut

their

own

position

because

the

vast

repository

of

plant

knowledge

that

had

been

the

secret

knowledge

of

women

it

no

longer

really

mattered

as

long

as

you

knew

how

to

grow

corn

and

a

couple

of

other

things

the

vast

encyclopedic

data

on

wild

plants

became

less

important

and

it

becomes

more

labor

intensive

and

men

because

they

had

evolved

toward

being

efficient

hunters

probably

did

have

a

physical

edge

on

women

in

terms

of

stamina

and

an

ability

to

work

with

a

hoe

for

eight

or

nine

hours

a

day

because

what

the

women

did

when

they

were

in

their

prime

cultural

situation

was

they

gathered

they

looked

at

stuff

and

talked

about

it

with

each

other

and

this

was

this

domain

in

which

language

then

work

it's

just

steady

work

and

it's

lots

of

fun

if

you

do

it

with

your

friends

and

you

know

the

cliched

notion

about

aboriginal

peoples

is

the

women

chatter

phrase, the chattering of women in primitive situations. It really is true, I

think, that women avail themselves of language much more than men in the in

these pre-literate situations. The men are hunters and they act like hunters.

They're stoic. They hold it all in, literally. I mean, the larger bladder size

of men is thought to be related to the hunting adaptation and so forth. So the

men are stoic. They're holding it in. The women are information freaks. It all rides

for them on information. Where do you find it? How do you cook it? What does it look

like? Is it poisonous? What time of year is best? What soil is best? What do you

combine it with? Is it good all year round? What do the flowers look like? What

does the fruit look like? Data, information. How could you ever understand the use and

location of 600 plants or more unless you had a tremendously evolved vocabulary for

this kind of thing? Yeah. I have a question. The physical weakness that follows substances

like psilocybin, is there any way to prevent that? Well, the physical weakness, these things

take energy. I mean, obviously, during the trip, energy is being sucked into the moment. I mean,

a trip is hard work, even if you're just sitting still. So then there's going to be an energy

debt. One way of assessing the toxicity of a drug, in the course of this weekend I've named

several ways, and they all need to be used together. But one way of assessing the toxicity

of a drug is how do you feel the next day. Psilocybin, what I do when I take mushrooms, is I

usually take them about nine at night. By one or two in the morning, it's usually past. And then I eat

before I sleep, so that I don't wake up in the morning with a protein debt. And that's very

important. If you will eat before you sleep after a trip, it won't be nearly so hard to come down.

MDMA, one of the things that's really appalling to me about it is here it is, this pretty minor

psychoactive, and my god, the day after is tough sledding. I mean, for a hangover like that, you should

at least have seen God, you know. Now, LSD, we said if you drink a lot of water that cuts the thing.

Yeah, vitamins are never a bad idea at any point in these things. LSD, which I said yesterday, was so effective

at low doses, that on that scale it appeared very non-invasive. I feel terrible after taking LSD. I mean,

it takes me 24 hours to put it back together. The interesting exceptions to this, and the causes, you know,

it always seems to cut my way in terms of favoring the ones I think are most interesting. DMT is again

the anomaly here. DMT is the most powerful hallucinogen there is. If it gets stronger than that, I don't want

to know about it. And 15 minutes after you do it, you feel as though you have never done a drug. You are down

100% mentally, physically, spiritually. It just returns you to the baseline. Ayahuasca goes DMT one better, and

ayahuasca is the only one that I know of that does this. And I maintain the reason these things behave this way

is because they are so similar to brain chemistry, ordinary brain chemistry. Ayahuasca, you actually come

out slightly higher than you went in, and it isn't lost, you know. I mean, you feel great the day after an

ayahuasca trip, usually. I mean, it depends. If it's your first trip, and you spent eight hours vomiting, you're

probably not going to feel so good. But if you had, if you were able, if it was a ordinary ayahuasca trip, then

you're going to feel much better the day after than you did going in. More connected, more alert, more energy.

Well, this must have something to do with the fact that the constituents of ayahuasca,

harmeen, harmaline, DMT, all occur in the human brain. And DMT, same thing. Now, why this doesn't

happen with psilocybin? I don't know. Psilocybin doesn't occur in the brain, but it is a very,

very, very close relative. I think DMT is absolutely fascinating from every point of view. Why is it so

benign? Why is it so powerful? Why is it so short-acting? Why is it so hard to get any?

That's the $64 question. Believe me, every, every book on drugs that you will pick up will

say it's easily made. You know, people are making, they ask you to believe that people

are making it in their kitchens all around you. Well, I don't know.

A recipe? Are you talking about bio-comboxy? No, not, but DMT, N-N-D-M-T.

It, I've seen it botched many times. The literature doesn't tell you that. I mean, botched, ruined.

If somebody comes to you with a grainy, dark brown syrup, forget it. You know, that is not what it looks like.

That means they swept the floor after they dropped the retort or something.

What it looks like is it looks like orange mothballs. It looks like a crystalline,

waxy, orange to pale rose to yellow kind of substance. And it's very aromatic. And if someone shows you a liquid

or stuff which looks like brown sugar or, you know, it's a mess, we were appalled. We got samples of underground

DMT and ran high pressure liquid gas chromatography on them. It looked like, it literally looked like the guy

swept the floor. And these people had actually done it. I mean, I wouldn't have given it to a rat,

much less a human being. The notion of someone actually taking that stuff was just hair-raising.

What you should have is a very, very steep spike at 620 nanometers. And what we got looked like the Himalayas,

you know, is running around all kinds of stuff. There has been DMT around which was shootable DMT,

which is the hydrochloride. And since I don't shoot things, I didn't pursue it. Although what people tell me,

and this is interesting and also something to bear in mind, is shooting is not as effective as smoking.

People think that shooting a drug is the most effective way because you see it all go into your body or something.

I don't know. But if you shoot DMT, it takes about five minutes to come on and it lasts about 45 minutes.

That's why if you read in the literature what, how long does DMT last, it will always say 45 minutes.

But if you smoke it, the peak experience lasts 400 seconds, something like that. I mean, it's extreme. That's why it's so astonishing.

Because it is so intense and the onset is so sudden that it's more like something has happened to you rather than that you've taken a drug.

And sometimes people come out of it saying, you know, what happened? Have we done it yet? Or was there an earthquake and the roof fell on me just as we were about to do it?

It has the quality of an event rather than an experience. And also it has a quality of an event because it does not touch the core observer.

You are not changed. What's changed is the sensory input is changed. You are still who you are. You don't think you're God. You don't feel bad about yourself.

You are exactly who you were before you did it with the same set of concerns. But you have been whisked into an alien dimension, one you never had imagined existed or could have a moment before have conceived of.

And suddenly it's 100% in place, 360 degrees around you. And then, you know, three minutes, four minutes, ten minutes later, you're raving to your friends and it's as far away as that trip to Majorca four years ago, you know.

So you make a major distinction between 5-athoxid EMT in terms of the quality of the experience?

Oh, yeah. They are day and night. I mean, 5-MEO DMT. Some people like it. It's a feeling is what it's been for me. It's this huge feeling that kind of sweeps through you and it's velvety and it's hard to describe actually.

But the main thing that I'm noticing when it's happening is I am not hallucinating. And, of course, the main thing that's happening with DMT is you're having hallucinations so intense, so three-dimensional, so highly colored, so sculpturally defined that it's more real than reality.

And by that I mean if you look at this room, notice how all edges are slightly feathered. There is, at all boundaries, a slight indeterminacy.

But on DMT, it's hard-edged. Everything is just defined. Sometimes people say it's as though all the air had been pumped out of the room.

You're seeing it with that lunar starkness and clarity, you know, and unimaginable objects, objects off the art scale and entities.

DMT is the only one of these. DMT is the only one of these psychedelics where I have seen the entities. On psilocybin it speaks and it's audio.

On DMT, you see these things. And I don't know whether it's my personal mythology. For me, DMT is the center of the mystery. I mean, I fear it. I love it. I thank God for it.

I wonder if I'll ever understand it. It takes a huge mustering of courage on my part to do it. Because it just is so... I mean, we talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, change, transformation, other dimensions.

This is not talk when you do that. I mean, you just do not know the parameters. I feel like I know more about what could happen to me if I'm in the Amazon jungle than I know what could happen to me when I'm in that place.

And after many, many DMT trips, I've finally been able to paint a picture for myself of what is happening in there and what happens for me. And I don't know anybody who's done it as much as I have.

I wish people did it more and talked more about it because, boy, if there is a landscape where we need some consensus, this is it. I have been present when people did it and they come back babbling about the same thing that I think I have encountered.

I mean, they come back and one woman said, it was a carnival. It was an extraterrestrial midway. And somebody else came back and said, there were gnomes, there were elves. And yeah, this is getting close to it.

I mean, what happens to me when I do it is, there's a period, an initial period of kind of hysteria and confusion. It's almost as though time speeds up, even before you take the first hit.

Many people say, just before you do DMT, there's this funny kind of impression in the room, almost as though there is backwash from the event about to happen.

You're caught in the psychic field of this event and everything is moving faster and faster. This is like the cue phenomenon. And then you take the hit and it's building up in your body and your heart is pounding and everything.

And then you break through to this place. And what it's like is, the first impression is of a loud, well, the first impression is of the sound of cellophane being crumpled, that crackling sound, as if someone had just taken a bread wrapper.

Yes. Crackle that cellophane for us. That's it. More of that.

Would that it were so easy. A friend of mine says, that's the sound of the radio intellecti of your soul tearing out of the organic envelope.

Which is what it sounds like. It sounds like your body has just been wadded up and thrown into a corner and now you're a radio signal, approximately four light seconds in diameter spreading out through an alien universe.

And the next impression is of a cheer. It's hurrah, welcome, welcome. And it's them and they're waiting and they just, they can hardly wait.

I mean, there's a moment when they're not on me. Just a moment. And then they say, you're here. We're glad to see you. Why did you stay away so long?

And then they come toward me. And the main thing for me and the DMT thing is to struggle not to go into shock of wonder, basically.

I mean, because there is a tendency, a strong tendency. And for the first few trips, I couldn't conquer it. I was just, I was a victim of it.

I mean, I just go into this. You know, and I would say, you know, heart, heart, okay. Breathing, breathing, okay.

But I'm looking and I can't believe my eyes. Because I'm in some kind of domed place.

And the impression, don't ask me why, but the impression is of being underground, even though it's a huge vaulted space and highly colored.

And then, but what is, of course, riveting my attention are these beings.

And they're small. And they're like, I've described them as machine elves.

They seem partially machine-like and partially elf-like.

Yeah. No, they are not so mundane as that. They don't have a fixed body outline.

And in fact, that's one of the things that's going on in this space that's so baffling.

They come toward you. They're singing in this alien language, which you somehow understand.

It cannot be translated into English, but you understand it in that moment.

And what they're doing is they are using their voices to produce objects.

And so song becomes thing.

And there are dozens of these things, and they're coming closer and closer, and the songs they sing condense into objects, and the objects themselves can sing.

And these things come and they're saying, look, look, and they're holding this stuff out to you.

And you look at it, and you're fighting wonder, because your entire being is caught up in this can't be happening.

And yet, they're saying, you know, just look.

And what these things are, are devices, toys, works of art, objects.

But whatever they are, they are amazing.

And you look into it, and they seem to be shifting, even though they're made of metal and glass and gems and pulsing, everything is migrating and shifting and changing.

And they say, look at this one.

It's the most astonishing thing you've ever seen.

And you just look at it, and they say, look at this one.

Look at this one.

And they're piling up.

And these things are coming towards you, and then they jump through you.

They can pass through your body.

And they're running around, chirping and singing and making these objects.

And what they're doing is they are saying, do what we are doing.

Do what we are doing.

And you say, you know, I just want to go back to New York.

Say, later for that.

And the implication is, and I'm still, this is the mystery of my life.

I'm teasing it out, trying to understand it.

But the implication is, and the promise is, that ahead of us in time, six months, 50,000 years,

is a visible linguistic channel of communication.

That the thin channel of audio communication composed of small mouth noises is just a provisional kind of communication.

And what is being proposed in this state is a true telepathy.

Now, we always thought, or I always thought, that telepathy means, you think, I hear what you're thinking.

What it actually turns out to be is, you speak, I see what you mean.

And I don't mean that metaphorically.

I mean, I see what you mean.

So that your linguistic intentionality condenses as a three-dimensional object in front of us.

A sculptural modality.

So then, we both see what you mean.

You made it, and I'm your conversational cohort, and we're both looking at your meaning.

And we can walk around it.

We can adjust it.

And notice that no common dictionary is necessary here.

If you're Witoto, and I'm Polish, I still see what you mean.

Because what you mean is an objectified three-dimensional modality, not a string of Witoto words.

So that, and it's saying, do this.

Do what we are doing.

Well, then, this took me about 15 trips to get this far.

And then I began to experiment with sounding in that state.

And I discovered that they were right.

That mmm is a three-and-a-half-foot-wide, eight-foot-long, magenta-curved surface with lime auras.

And that mmm shifts the lime auras into rose pink and adds gray-silver pinstriping along one edge.

And I thought, you know, like, God, what is this?

So then when you break out into actual chanting, actually linguistically modulated sound,

you discover you, too, can make these objects.

And what they apparently are, how this could be, don't ask me,

they are apparently a syntactical sculpture.

Sculpture made of syntax.

Syntax suddenly becomes not the rules that govern spoken languages,

but the rules that govern the assembly of three-dimensional thought objects.

And as the words were the shadows of hyper-dimensional intentions

that can actually be broken through to.

Well, my God, I just thought this is the weird, this takes the cake.

I mean, I've never heard of such a thing.

Nobody's ever suggested to me this is possible.

So forth and so on.

So then, as is the case with most things, if you look long enough, you discover precursors.

And what I discovered in a wonderful book, and any one of you would love this book, I'm sure,

it doesn't deal with the psychedelic experience by name, but it is a psychedelic book.

It's called The Phenomenon of Life by Hans Jonas, J-O-N-A-S.

And if you can find this book, what a read.

It's a group of essays.

And one of the essays, he is talking about the etymology of the word Israel.

And he says, following Talmudic thinkers,

that Israel means he who sees God, that this is the actual etymological basis of the word Israel.

So then, did I say that we're talking now about the writings of Philo-Judeus?

Yes, Philo-Judeus in discussing the etymology of the word Israel says it means he who sees God.

And then he says, what does this mean, he who sees God?

Well, as you probably know, in the Hellenistic world, there was this phenomenon called the Logos.

And the Logos was an informing internal voice that tells you the right way to live.

It's like a spirit ally that speaks to you and informs you.

So Philo-Judeus said, what would be the more perfect Logos?

And then he goes on to answer his own question.

He said, the more perfect Logos would go from being heard to being beheld

without ever crossing over a quantized moment of distinct transition.

This is precisely and in fact what is going on in these states.

Because now I have learned or have found out how to evoke this DMT phenomenon

in the more controllable environment of the psilocybin intoxication.

And it happens like this.

First of all, I form the wish for it to happen.

I usually follow a line I learned in an old I Love Lucy rerun

where she's explaining to Ethel how she contacts flying saucers.

And she says, I just say, come in, little green men, come in, little green men.

And so on mushrooms I do this.

I say, come in, little green men.

And what begins to happen is this sound like bells, like very distant bells.

And then it becomes louder and louder.

It's sort of like bells with wind.

And it becomes louder and louder and more complicated and more complex.

And at a certain very, very hard to precisely define moment,

it begins to spill over into the visual cortex.

And then I see the language and I can interact with it.

Well, it is apparently a more perfect Logos.

This is what I had in mind in the back of my mind yesterday.

Remember when I talked about how smoking was new to Europeans

and they couldn't understand what it was?

And then I made this offhand comment that it was a new use for the human body,

only 500 years old.

Well, it proves that there may be undiscovered uses for the human body.

I mean, we've only been around playing with our bodies for 50,000 years

and we've discovered most sexual configurations

and all these acrobatic things and amazing things that people can do,

like make pyramids of 10 individuals and so forth.

But smoking is pretty basic and yet only 500 years old.

Well, it seems to me that right under the surface of human neurological organization

is a mode shift of some sort that would make language beholdable

and that if we could somehow kick over into this alternative mode,

we would become unrecognizable to ourselves.

Now, I realize this sounds pretty far-fetched,

but you always have to have reference to context.

In a universe where there were no people,

that would be a pretty far-fetched idea.

But the fact that we already possess language

seems to argue that we are in the process continually

of evolving new applications for our bodies

and that when language, spoken language,

burst on the scene 35,000 years ago,

which is most estimates,

I mean, think of it,

35,000 years ago,

people invented language.

What must it have seemed like to them?

It must have seemed like a miracle.

Hardly anything sets you up for it.

I mean, the difference between a nine-hour recitation of oral poetry

and three chickadees on a line is quite elite.

and I'm suggesting that somehow there could be a leap forward in the

communication dimension and that this is in fact what shamanism is all about

what the end of history is all about what psychedelic drugs are all about we

are edge walking on an ontological transformation of what it means to be

human and the the mode that this transformation will come in it will not

be political or technological it is it isn't star flight it isn't socialism it's

a whole other way of making our minds known to each other by being able to show

each other our minds and in psychedelic states you can do this yeah

can you think there's any relationship to the Australian Aboriginal belief that the

world that the forefathers actually sung the world in to be that the song on that

whole that concept doesn't seem too far off that's right well yes as you say in

our own tradition in principio at verbum at verbo caro factum est in the

beginning was the word and the word was made flesh that's the whole story what we

need to do is pass through this transition and make the word flesh in other words

objectify the word somehow the work and I believe me I know I talk about these

things but the pictures are provisional I don't understand how it could be done I

mean I'm an engineering type on one level is it an acoustical hologram how in the

world could I make you see a concept in my mind as though it were hovering three

feet above the floor is there a way and I've noticed on psychedelics and again I

I don't know whether this is a false trail or whether this is part of the mystery but

I've noticed on psychedelics that if you get it a candle if you get a person between

yourself and a candle so that you have them in profile and they are raving and you

can see the candle past them there's something coming out of their mouth it's

like you know how when you agitate oil in water and you see the swirling oiliness

of water or when you're in a swimming pool with too much suntan lotion in it

there's this kind of roiling discontinuity in it that's fairly subtle well something like

that is happening for about eight inches in front of people's mouths when you look at them

under certain conditions maybe it doesn't need psychedelics I don't know and that's nothing

it's that air goes into your lungs and is heated and then is returned to the colder air of the room and

what you're seeing is the mixing of warm and cold air which have different refractive indices and so it shows

up as a kind of wave-like distortion could be I'm I'm a reductionist on one level if

it's not real I want to know that it's not real but I'm not sure that that's what it is because it seems

to me they are beginning on a very small level to do this thing and language seems to me to be a

continuous spectrum and you know because I'm a public speaker because I work with language I think

about these things a fair bit it seems to me language begins in total inarticulation I mean basically kind

of stuff and then it moves on to operational speech give me this bring me that change my diapers this kind

of thing and then we you introduce the notion of communication I mean at what age do children become

capable of saying I feel X Y and Z what this means is they are beginning to move invisible interior

modalities out into the linguistic domain say I feel sick at my stomach I feel too awake to go to bed so

over so on well then you get more complex ideas where people are conveying abstract ideas and then you get

eloquence a speaker who can make you listen and who can rivet your attention well then beyond

eloquence comes poetry and supposedly in the Irish tradition and in other traditions

great poetic feats were undertaken and poets were magicians the difference between a poet and a magician was practically nil but and that's where we're asked to believe that it ends in great poetic eloquence but it seems to me it's possible to just keep going and one of the curious things about the way we think about language is when we talk about clear language we always use visual

visual metaphors to understand someone if you understand someone you say I see what you mean I see what you mean

seeing is the sense that we trust and someone says you know he spoke clearly visual metaphor she painted a picture I see what you mean as though we unconsciously sense that language is an uncompleted project at this point moving toward a visual mode of expression and I think if we say the psychedelics are catalysts on imagination then what is it that they are

catalyzing they are catalyzing they are catalyzing the further concrescence of language and who knows how long this is it looking back at the invention of language you kind of have to suspect that it happened rather suddenly that people went from not speaking to speaking quite suddenly they had all the machinery the physical machinery the lungs the vocal cord the coordinating mind and the

the

And at a certain point, language has this capacity to become truly self-reflecting.

I can't imagine what a world would be like where this ability was mastered.

I suppose you would have to say it was a psychedelic world.

Yeah.

Earlier you were talking about this possibility,

and you started mentioning, I can't imagine how you could do this,

and you started talking about it.

And to me, it felt you were talking about something hovering.

And at that point, you could almost see that it would be possible to continue.

When you said hovering, I got hovering.

I could almost see something hovering.

And so it seems like there's really an evolutionary thing,

as you were mentioning, that once people get used to really hearing each other,

that it'll just begin to happen, that little by little, we'll get used to it.

We may not even know it.

And maybe it's happening now, that language is being used much more in different ways than it used to be.

Yeah, I think that's true.

I mean, my fantasy is of a workshop where someday we get it out.

I mean, that's really what I want to do, is I want to punch a hole into the other place

and have this linguistical, syntactical, intentionality-directed stuff pour into this universe and fill it to the brim.

It seems to me that this is a real possibility.

Whenever I'm stoned, I have this notion of, I call it the last conversation.

It's where you, it seems possible to sit down with somebody of goodwill and say,

we're going to have the last conversation.

We're going to start from here and we're going to work our way in.

And when it's over with, there will be no you, there will be no me, there will be no here, there will be no there,

because we will have carried out some kind of Derrida-type deconstruction project on the apparent reality,

and we'll be left with bedrock.

I think this, I don't know if that's the same program as the visible language.

What I do know is that on ayahuasca, in the Amazon Basin, this is what's going on.

They call it singing, but it's a visual art.

And, you know, some of you, our little company sells ayahuasca songs.

Well, they are audio recordings, but they are visual works of art.

How they sound doesn't matter.

It's how they look.

And when you're sitting in a blackened hut with these people,

you'll hear someone lay down a riff,

which manifests as a fluorescent pink line with gray undershading.

And then the shaman's sitting, and it's a wavy line,

and the shaman sitting next to the singer will then go back through

and place a mirrored green dot in the trough of each wave.

And the sound is lost in this.

The experience is entirely visual.

Well, is it only abstract colored patterns and moving fields of light?

Or could I sing you my grandfather?

And you would see him with his blue visor and his pegged pants and his crew cut.

It's this kind of thing, you know.

This is why I believe the psychedelic experience has some kind of historical role to play.

If we take seriously the idea that it's an enzyme for the imagination,

and if we take seriously the notion that language is the carrier wave of the imagination,

then probably what we're involved in here is an evolutionary,

a quantized evolutionary leap to a higher modality of language.

And it will come out of our biological organization, see?

It's not cultural, and it's still less technological.

It's in the bones and tongue and brain and lungs of human beings.

Yeah?

Parents, when you're in one of these circumstances and you speak to the little people,

if someone were in the room with you, would they hear you speak?

Oh, yeah.

So you actually acoustically verbalize this conversation from your side?

Yes.

It's a kind of glossolalia, or that's what we would have to call it.

Glossolalia, as you all probably know, is speaking in tongues.

But this has characteristics that glossolalia doesn't have.

For one thing, people who speak, who do glossolalia,

have a kind of disconnectedness from it.

In other words, in these Pentecostal churches,

when someone will go into glossolalia,

often when they come out,

they will turn to the people around them and say,

did I speak in tongues?

Did I really do it?

In other words, there seems to be a kind of occlusion of the observing mind.

The other thing is,

glossolalia of that sort

involves pretty radical physiological changes.

Some of you may know Felicitas Goodman,

who wrote a book on glossolalia.

She measured pools of saliva 18 inches across,

having originated from a single person

during a 20-minute burst of glossolalia.

Well, that's a pretty lathered up, hyped up state to be in.

And the glossolalia induced by DMT and psilocybin

is controlled and willed.

It's as though the language forming,

the English forming part of the mind steps away

and an ursprach,

a kind of primordial language,

steps in.

And it's highly modulated.

It doesn't have to be screamed, sung, or chanted.

It can simply be done at conversational levels.

Now, when you do this in the stoned state,

it's wonderful.

And when you make tape recordings of it

and listen to it in the un-stoned state,

it's either alarming or silly.

I mean, people have said to me,

soft-pedal this part of it

because it's too weird.

The place I was trying to get to is that

in order to form these sounds,

there is some sort of, presumably,

if you use today's electronic model,

some sort of electronic neurological,

something going on in the synapses

that cause the muscles to form the sounds.

Right.

Well, that's a radiation of electrical energy

that starts the mechanical acoustical coupling

to the vocal cords.

And in trying to figure out,

you know, you were discussing really the mechanism,

how would you make this work?

And would you actually see the sound

coming out of the throat?

It would seem to me more reasonable

to pick the electronic model

and the radiation of electromagnetic energy

rather than acoustical

to project this information.

True, although it is interesting

that sound can be used to form holograms,

which are three-dimensional objects.

In other words,

there are what are known as acoustical holograms,

not generated by lasers,

but generated by patterns of interference

that are acoustic waves.

So, it took me for years

in these psychedelic states,

I could hear this translinguistic stuff,

but never do it.

Then I became able to do it on the drugs,

and then after many more years,

I've become able to do it

pretty much on the natch,

or at least give a reasonable imitation of it.

But when I do it and I'm not stoned,

it doesn't transport me.

But it has syntax,

it has order.

I'll give you a short sample of this

so you can see,

and then we'll go to lunch.

If I can do it,

if I'm at all self-conscious or anxious,

something shuts down and I can't,

and I know I'm faking it,

and it's not real.

It's like that.

It's a beautiful song.

It sounds to me,

it's far removed from English.

It sounds to me like a very primitive language.

The image that comes to my mind

is of pygmies around a fire.

One guy raving,

he's telling a story.

There's something in there.

You know,

it feels like meaning,

but it doesn't compute to a dictionary.

But when you do it on your own,

you just can do it for hours in that state,

and it's very, very satisfying.

What you're hearing is the shadow thrown

by a hyper-dimensional object

that the person making the sound

is actually seeing.

They're rotating this thing,

looking at it,

going into it,

expanding it,

taking it apart,

melting it,

fusing it,

remaking it.

Strange stuff.

I've played this stuff for linguists,

this very straight linguist.

I played about a 30-minute burst of it,

and he smoked his pipe through it all.

And when it was over,

he said,

no woes.

Did you want to say something?

Did you just make that up?

Did I just make that up?

I mean,

that's not like something you memorized.

No, no,

I just made that up.

Yeah.

Did you have any images?

What was it not?

Can you describe what was going on inside

when you were doing that?

I was trying to stand aside.

I was trying to not do anything to it.

I was just trying to let it be.

Because, you know,

there'll be a part of it,

and I'll think as it goes by,

hmm,

sounds French.

Or,

hmm,

or,

the main effort is to just relax,

and let it be.

The way I discovered it was,

when I smoked DMT,

I can't stop myself.

And at first,

I would yell it.

And,

you know,

that got me,

my friends were concerned.

And so,

slowly,

I've been able to bring it down

into this conversational level.

But,

it just goes on and on,

you know,

and has a feeling,

has a tone,

very satisfying to do.

said on Friday night,

I had this in mind,

I think language existed for millennia

before meaning.

Meaning,

bowl,

bison,

reindeer,

meaning is just some kind of late thing

that was tacked onto language

to make it a more practical enterprise.

But,

I think people were taking drugs

and amusing each other

with artistic compositions

of the sort

I just did for you

for a long,

long time

before they did anything practical with it.

Terrence,

if you have...

I was just wondering

if you thought

that language may have changed

around the time

that agriculture came in

when things were,

all of the diversities

were narrowed down

to a few commodities.

And if that's any...

Well,

I think language

goes through tremendous periods

of impoverishment,

and that was one.

the origin point of language

is placed at about 35,000,

although on what basis

they do this,

I'm not sure.

There is a flute

in existence

that's 26,000 years old.

That's pretty interesting.

And that's not

the Museum of Atlantis artifacts either.

That's the real thing.

So, you know,

the Pythagorean faith,

that number,

musical tone,

language,

proportion,

you know,

it's still alive.

I mean,

there's still something

to be learned there.

A perfect,

a perfect science,

an appropriate science,

a science of harmony,

resonance,

proportion,

that is

and remains,

I think,

the shamanic ideal,

the Orphic ideal,

the Pythagorean ideal.

Well,

let's break for lunch,

and let's come back

around

to two

or a little after.

We have a couple

of opportunities

to ask some questions.

Yeah,

we'll do that.

Why don't we pull together here,

and

basically,

we seem to be going

pretty strong

at lunchtime,

so

why don't we

just pick up

where we left off,

if anybody still has

unresolved things

they want to say

or questions

that occurred to them

through lunch.

I don't know if you have

any kind of

male inhibitor

in the system

that's an interest

or something.

Well,

I'm not sure

what that

refers to.

you do not want

to take

certain

hallucinogens

if you're

taking an

MAO inhibitor

because it will

make it

prolong it

and cause it

to behave

in unpredictable

ways.

Now,

there are many

MAO inhibitors

commercially

prescribed,

some

quite

strong.

I think

even after

a single

dosage.

What are

those things

for?

The common

scenario

is Marplan,

which is a

monoamine oxidase

inhibitor.

And what that

means is

that's the enzyme,

monoamine oxidase,

is the enzyme

that destroys

monoamines.

So,

if you

are taking

that particular

drug,

and then you

take something

that builds up

in your system

like aged

cheeses,

or lentils,

lentils,

I think even

mushrooms may

be part of

it's aged

cheeses,

wines,

fermented

kinds of

things that

have lots

of amphetamine

type of

chemicals

in them,

there's an

overload at

the synapse

when this

happens

because it

can't break

it down

and your

brain

basically

deteriorates

and there

are a lot

well not a lot

but there

was at one

time before

they knew

this

where people

did this

and died.

So,

apparently

the hallucinogen

has some

of that

buildup

and it

can't be

destroyed

properly

so that's

why there's

the warning

not to

take it.

So the

hallucinogen

is a

monoamine

and then

if you

inhibit

the monoamine

oxidase

which is

the compound

which oxidizes

the monoamine

then the

monoamine

will accumulate

now

it's important

to know

this

because we

tend to

move in

a yuppie

environment

and a

typical

yuppie

buffet

of

good

burgundies

and good

brie

is just

going to

load

your system

with

tyramine

tyrosine

these

kinds of

things

and they

are monoamine

oxidase

inhibitors

well then

if you

12 hours

or 24

hours later

take a

hit of

ayahuasca

or something

well it's

just going

to send

you skittering

all over

the board

and you

won't

understand

why

unless you

are aware

that this

monoamine

thing is

working.

the idea

of the

precursors

of certain

neurochemicals

like I

heard the

ayahuasca

diet

specifically

Luna

they

talked

once in

New York

about it

and said

it was

like smoked

fish

and

plantain

and

possibly

this is

the precursors

of certain

neurotransmitters

yeah

this is a

more complicated

question

than simply

yes or

no

on

monoamine

oxidase

inhibitors

serotonin

which is

of course

the neurotransmitter

that runs

the nervous

systems

of all

higher

animals

and occurs

in all

animals

is

very strongly

present

in bananas

for example

so you can

load your

system with

serotonin

without realizing

it if you eat

a lot of

bananas

in fact

it was very

interesting

there was

a group

of people

in tribal

Africa

who had

actually

the gene

for the

production

of serotonin

or of serotonin

B

in any case

one

subspecies

of serotonin

and

they didn't

know

that that was

what was wrong

with them

all they knew

was that

whenever anybody

left the tribe

they would

become

psychologically

ill

and like

go mad

and then

when they would

return to the tribe

this situation

would immediately

normalize

well so then

they looked

into it

and they

discovered

that these

people

were eating

bananas

as a huge

component

of their

diet

consequently

even though

the serotonin

gene

was deficient

they were

always

had a

sufficient

amount

of serotonin

because they

were getting

it from a

dietary

source

but if

somebody

left the

tribe

and left

the forest

and went

to Kampala

or something

and got

a job

and stopped

eating so

many bananas

they immediately

became mentally

appeared to

become mentally

ill

this is because

they were then

finally forced

to confront

the fact

that on

the natch

they could

not produce

enough serotonin

to stay

balanced

so this is

an example

of how

foods

and neurotransmitters

and all

these things

work

it's really

astonishing

the fact

that

evolutionary

biologists

in talking

about how

human beings

have come

to be

have never

so far as

I know

talked about

the evolutionary

influence

of diet

you see

the fact

that under

pressure

from dwindling

rainforests

we ceased

being

fruititarian

canopy

living

creatures

and instead

became

omnivores

and meat

eaters

on the

plane

in going

through that

transition

we subjected

ourselves

to a huge

amount

of mutagenic

influence

there are

all kinds

of compounds

in plants

that will

break

chromosomes

interfere

with ovulation

interfere

with lactation

interfere

with fetal

formation

control

or accelerate

tooth decay

interfere

with acuity

of vision

digestive

enzymes

that may or may not

work in certain

situations

so that

if you start

just eating

things

randomly

or

testing things

to be foods

you're exposing

yourself

and your

progeny

to an immense

number

of mutagenic

influences

this may explain

why

the human

somotype

the human

body type

went through

this period

of rapid change

about 50,000

years ago

this is when

the brain size

doubled

and then

nothing much

has happened

since

physically

to human

beings

all evolution

has gone on

in the cultural

domain

but

this sudden

explosion

in the size

of the brain

case

is occurring

at the same

time

when there is

this dietary

shift

and one of the

things I mentioned

the other night

is

the preservation

of infantile

characteristics

as part

of our species

not necessarily

simply

infantile-ism

psychologically

but also

for instance

our hairlessness

Most primate babies are born hairless, but we're the ones who stay hairless the whole time.

The suppression of secondary sexual characteristics, for instance, our rumps don't redden when we're in estrus,

and all these things that we see happening in other primate species are suppressed in human beings.

So, and there's a lot of debate about why these things go on, why, for instance, there isn't a mating season in human beings,

or why it is that female human beings can keep pregnancy a secret for quite a long time before it becomes apparent.

How does this feed back in, then, to primate social organization?

What do males do if they think a female is pregnant or not pregnant, and how does this work into the evolutionary thing?

So there's a lot of thought that needs to be given to all of this, and MAO and how it works is one of the most easily influenced

of these internal enzyme systems, because there are enzyme, I mean, there are MAO inhibitors in so many things

that are human foods, pulses, all beans, fish, cheeses, dairy products, so forth and so on.

The very things that were probably fairly prominent in the primitive diet.

Does that affect fulcidins?

Yes, also, all monoamines will be more active in a human being who has taken a monoamine oxidase inhibitor.

Now, one of the strange things, and I mentioned this yesterday, is that in the Amazon, they have figured out how to make this work for them.

Certain DMT, for instance, cannot be taken orally.

It's destroyed in your gut, but if you inhibit the MAO, then it isn't destroyed in the gut, passes through to the bloodstream and through the blood-brain barrier.

They figured this out, it's only been since the mid-50s or something, that the monoamine oxidase system has been understood by Western medicine.

These people apparently intuitively figured it out thousands and thousands of years ago.

I have a chemical question, but I can't help but interject that a little promo for the rind of citrus and the pulp of citrus which contains the bioflavonoids with ascorbic acid.

Because that's exactly what happened to homo sapiens during its fruitarian era, when we ate so much naturally occurring vitamin C in the fruits,

that our enzyme systems just said, well, why synthesize ascorbic acid in the liver?

Remember, we have this so much abundance of ascorbic acid in the fruits, so we lost the enzyme to convert sugar, glucose, into ascorbic acid.

And Linus Pauling based his whole quote-unquote vitamin C theory on every animal that still is synthesizing, like goats synthesize 10 grams of ascorbic acid per day, pigs 5 grams.

And so that's how he worked it out, and we need about 2 to 3 grams of, not vitamin C ascorbic acid, but the vitamin C complex, which contains asperidin and rutin and bioflavonoids.

And when you put, since I've done that and put those together, I have never had a cold.

The misunderstanding in the culture is people go to Safeway and they buy 500 milligrams of ascorbic acid USP, and it doesn't work, because it doesn't have the other synergistic parts of the team,

just like in the mushrooms, all these little extra fairies or parts that make the thing work.

So that banana, yeah, that's a similar story, that's the story, that's why, you know, when they left the tribe, the body just said,

well, we don't need to make this kind of synthesize, this kind of serotonin, it's in the bananas, why waste that energy?

I had heard, like, the day before that you do medicine, if you take a lot of ripe bananas, it could make the chip a lot more gentle.

Well, it probably, you see, these things compete with serotonin for the bond site.

They are, in fact, inhibitors of serotonin, many of them.

And I don't know if it makes it gentler, or if maybe you have a huge amount of serotonin in your system, the serotonin can actually mitigate the trip.

It's a gentler trip, because it's not as strong a trip as it would be had you not loaded yourself with serotonin.

Some people do. I mean, that's the whole theory of why people get depressive.

Certain people have higher levels of serotonin, and certain people have lower, and if you've got higher levels, supposedly it correlates with how naturally high you are, and why some people get depressive.

Yeah, although it's been sort of hard to nail this down, when they first started doing psychedelic research, they thought that it was the so-called psychotomimetic theory of psychedelics,

that these things make you crazy, therefore being crazy must be a natural state of producing these things.

And so, for instance, they measure DMT in the blood of people who are diagnosed chronic schizophrenic.

The problem is there's no visible correlation. Some people have more, some people have less.

It isn't as simple as that mad people are people who are making their own psychedelic molecules.

There was great hope for this in the 50s, but it didn't quite pan out.

A thing to bear in mind, sort of related to what you were saying, is disease, which we accept as part of life, is actually something fairly unusual in nature.

The only places in nature where you see a lot of disease happening is in insects.

Insects are highly subject to viruses, and there's a huge family of insect viruses.

This is the basis of many pesticide design strategies, is to spray crops with viruses that attack insects.

The other area, in the animal world, where you see a lot of disease, is human beings and the animals they have domesticated,

so that cattle, pigs, poultry, and people are all fairly subject to disease.

But, for instance, birds of prey are not greatly subject to disease.

Many fewer diseases, fish, all animal groups have some susceptibility to diseases,

but really, human beings and insects seem to be the most set up for this.

And the reason that is advanced for this is that these are the social animals,

the insects and the human beings.

And wherever you have intense social activity, not, I mean, for instance, in some species,

a male and a female will encounter each other only once in the life of each individual,

then have sex, and that's it.

You know, there is no social life.

Well, so that's no, no disease can get a foothold there,

because diseases require transmission and contact.

The AIDS thing is a perfect example of this.

I mean, you know, the statistics are that a professional prostitute has perhaps five or six sexual contacts in an evening.

A person at high risk for AIDS with a very active homosexual lifestyle may have three or four times that number of sexual contacts.

Well, no virus is going to pass a chance like that up.

I mean, it's just like a super intense environment for transmission.

The diseases want to be able to move from one person to another.

The reason I mention this is because the rise of this susceptibility to disease

is something that apparently also was going on at the same time that we were acquiring language,

beginning to domesticate animals, switching our diet.

What we really are, are the evolutionary wreckage of a very chaotic and crazy series of pattern shifts

that went on between 50 and 100,000 years ago.

Now we are the inheritors of that.

Very interesting, as long as I'm on this subject,

very interesting relationship between disease and spirituality,

because pilgrimage sites are the great disease vectors of the ancient world.

I mean, you can imagine, here you have a temple,

everybody comes there to get cured,

and everybody comes there and leaves sick,

because all these infected people have been there.

There's a wonderful book, I can't remember the author,

but the title is Plagues and Peoples,

and it's a study of epidemiology and the history of disease

and its impact on human populations.

And very interesting, and has a lot to say, I think,

about psychedelic use as well, by implication,

because psychedelic use also brings people together

under very close and intimate circumstances many times.

Let me ask my question.

Sure.

This is a chemical question in terms of,

I have never done these substances that you're talking about,

specifically, I mean the NN-dimethyltryptamine

and the 5-MO-dimethyltryptamine,

and what you're talking about is ayahuasca,

which is a hybrid of an MAO inhibitor and DMT, correct?

Correct.

Now, those are the chemical names of these substances.

Are there generic names or so-called street names for these things

that you are aware of?

That's the first part of the question,

and secondly, since those are pure chemicals,

unlike mushrooms, which contain maybe three or four different synergistic psychedelics,

of the possibility of one chemical in mind was,

well, you know, 5-hydroxytryptamine is 5-hydroxytryptamine,

and what is the scenario for synthesizing it?

Well, I'm not sure I have at all.

First of all, 5-MO-DMT doesn't occur in ayahuasca.

The synergy, the way ayahuasca works,

the MAO inhibitor is a beta-carboline,

harmine, harmaline, tetrahydraharmane.

Now, these things are hallucinogens in their own right,

but only at uncomfortable doses.

I mean, if you took 600 milligrams of harmine,

you would have hallucinations,

but you would also have so much discomfort

and icky feeling that you couldn't call it a trip.

5-MAO occurs in anadonanthra peregrina,

and in the toad foam that I mentioned.

It's interesting that the toad foam

is the only animal-based hallucinogen

that we know anything about.

There are, DMT does occur in certain fish,

and these fish are eaten for psychedelic effect.

The DMT is psychedelic in its own right,

but not when taken orally.

But when taken with the harmine,

it becomes orally active.

You only have to take,

if you combine 200 milligrams of harmine,

which is a subthreshold dose of harmine,

with 50 milligrams of DMT,

which is a subthreshold dose of DMT,

you'll have a tremendous trip.

And that's called ayahuasca?

That's called ayahuasca.

But it comes from these plant sources.

And you...

Drink it.

It's a beverage.

It's a fluid.

Tastes terrible.

Yeah.

I wanted to ask you one question

about set and setting.

You were saying,

I think what you were saying,

what I heard you say,

I just want to see if this is what you were saying,

is that your sort of recommendation

would be to do a committed dose,

like, say, five milligrams.

Five grams of mushrooms.

Five grams, I mean.

Five grams of mushrooms

in a kind of silent space,

preferably at nighttime,

and also alone.

If that's your predilection,

if you're comfortable with that,

if you're uncomfortable with that,

get a friend.

Is that your question?

I guess that's my question

because it seems to me,

like, from reading Stan Groff's books,

the point that he makes

is that these substances

are basically physiologically very safe.

The danger is in psychological acting out.

And it's for that reason

that you have a sitter

in order to prevent a kind of confusion

of what he calls holotropic and hylotropic,

i.e. you decide you can fly

so you jump off your balcony

because you're confusing

your psychic reality,

which is that you can fly,

with the physical reality of your body,

which will fall off the balcony.

Well, if you had that delusion,

you would certainly want a sitter present.

In 99% of the cases,

what the sitter is there for

is not to restrain you,

but to tell you that it's okay.

You know, just to say

that it's okay.

This is immensely reassuring to people,

no matter how uncertain the sitter is,

that it is okay.

You know?

I mean, you could almost have a button

which you push,

which says,

you're okay.

Don't worry.

It won't last forever.

Something like that.

I guess I'm sort of in a funny position

on the sitter issue

because I find them so distracting.

But you do want it.

You know, the one time you need them,

you really need them.

The other thing is this issue of

should you do it indoors or outdoors?

Well, what I found is

that I really like keeping it mental.

I like keeping everything.

That's my way of controlling the situation.

And if you go out into the world,

we all know this phenomenon

called synchronicity,

which is where it's weird for no reason.

You know?

Well, if you go out into the world,

you will just, stoned,

you will just discover

that it is a maelstrom of synchronicity.

And I don't like being swept away

into strange and unexpected adventures.

I remember a...

Well, this is an example of how this works.

I was at Sarnath once,

outside of Benares.

Sarnath is the place

where Buddha preached his first sermon

after attaining enlightenment.

He was enlightened at Bodhgaya.

Then he walked south many, many miles

to the Deer Park at Sarnath

and gave his first sermon there.

And there's a stupa there,

an ancient stupa,

second century B.C.

And manicured green parks

and very nice place,

very nice place

to take a psychedelic, I thought.

So I took this psychedelic.

It happened to be mescaline

with these two women

who were friends of mine.

And we were...

Nobody could be seen.

Just nobody around.

It was very early in the morning.

We were sitting up

on this little knoll under a tree

and it began to come on

and come on strongly.

And I was looking out

over this green expanse

and almost at the edge

of discernible vision,

I suddenly see two people,

two dots,

two people

moving orthogonal to my position,

moving across my field of vision,

middle of my field of vision,

and I'm just watching them,

and they stop dead,

these two people.

They must be 500 yards away,

1,500 feet away

over these rolling green lawns.

They stop dead

and then they scan

and then they start toward me.

And I cannot believe my eyes

that these people

have changed course 90 degrees

and they're now headed right for me.

And I kept telling myself,

it's a hallucination,

it's an illusion.

They are not getting larger

in your field of vision.

You are not going to have

to confront these people, please.

God make it so.

No reprieve.

They're just getting larger

and larger and larger

until,

and so I said,

I'm going to make this go away

by not looking,

and I'm just going to sit like this.

And I sat like this,

not moving,

until the guy's feet

entered my field of vision.

And then I just,

and then I didn't move,

and I didn't say anything,

and then I just looked up.

And he said,

you're from which place?

You have been how long in India?

And it was the grilling,

which any Indian tourist knows.

Any citizen of the subcontinent

can approach you

any time of the day or night,

anywhere,

demand to know your name,

how long you've been in this country,

and then the kicker.

And what do you think of India?

And this question is asked

for the specific purpose

of observing your discomfiture,

because they know damn well

what you think of India.

And so,

I just,

I looked up,

and I gave this guy

my most penetrating gaze,

and I said,

I cannot be interrogated.

And then I just put my head down,

and waited,

I don't know,

an hour?

And when I looked up,

they were gone.

But only in that circumstance

of being so stoned

would I have ever behaved that way,

because the normal tourist reaction

is,

and they watch this happen to you,

you just go into a tailspin

of,

it's their country,

everybody's a person,

I'm a stranger,

I should be nice,

they're harmless,

what's so bad about this anyway?

And then,

you know,

and so then you pair it out,

you explain,

I'm from San Francisco, California,

I've been here three months,

so forth and so on.

A friend of mine

told me a funny story

about taking the Bombay,

Calcutta mail,

and arriving in Calcutta

on this train,

four o'clock in the morning,

and he gets off the train,

and there's a little Sadhu man

over there,

and the guy starts toward him,

and comes up to him,

and my friend said,

wait a minute,

before you say a word,

my name is Nathan Jones,

I'm from Brooklyn, New York,

I've been in India

three and a half months,

and I hate it.

And the guy said,

oh, you're a great Baba,

you're reading my mind,

you're reading my mind.

You've got to be fast,

that's all there is to it.

Yeah.

All right.

Over the last couple of days,

you've said that the mushroom

basically creates its own agenda.

You've also given examples

of how you've directed it.

So which of those is true,

and if you can direct it,

are there ways to direct it

to specific regions

by doing specific things?

What kind of a region?

Well, the first thing is,

do the mushrooms have their own agenda?

And second of all,

if you have some control over it,

how do you get to where you want to go?

Whether you want to deal with certain issues

like death or the body or whatever,

or get to certain regions of consciousness?

Well, it has its own agenda

in that it has this,

it has certain qualities,

this extraterrestrial outer space,

a planetary history is ending,

apocalypse, millennia kind of thing.

You can direct it

if it likes the way you're going.

It's sort of like a very,

a strong horse, you know?

If you're going the way it wants to go,

you're fully in control.

Otherwise, not.

I mean, I can remember situations

with mushrooms where

I hadn't taken it for a long time,

and I fall into confusion,

and it usually revolves around,

am I doing the right thing?

Whatever the right thing is.

So then I'll take mushrooms

and wait until properly,

and then put this question,

am I doing the right thing?

And it reminds me of a press conference

that Lyndon Johnson had once,

shortly after he became president.

Somebody asked a question

that he didn't care for,

and he said,

what kind of a chicken shit question

is that to ask the president

of the United States?

So, when I go to the mushroom

and say, you know,

am I doing the right thing?

It basically said,

what kind of a chicken shit question

is that to ask me?

And I think that was

a very good answer.

That was what I needed to hear,

you know.

I mean, are you kidding?

So, you know,

it can be, you know,

my father used to say,

you can drive a horse to water,

but a pencil must be led.

And I think that

that's sort of the situation

with the mushroom.

If the question pleases it,

it will answer.

If the question doesn't please it,

you'll hear about it.

And it is amazing

how it gives people

what they need.

You know that Rolling Stones song,

you don't always get what you want,

you get what you need.

I have a friend,

dear friend,

but arrogant.

No doubt about it.

This guy is arrogant.

He definitely thinks

he has the truth

by the throat

in most situations.

And he won't take mushrooms

because it gives him

such a hard time.

You know.

I mean, and it says,

you know,

you're arrogant.

You want to know

what we do to arrogant people?

For God's sake,

lift it off me.

So, a certain amount of,

a certain amount of humility,

it's a relationship.

Like to a crusty

Zen master

or something like that.

And it is really like

another entity

because you cannot predict

the answers.

I mean, I remember

a dialogue that I had

with the mushroom

early on

where I said,

what are you doing

on this planet?

And it said,

you're a mushroom,

you live cheap.

And so he said,

huh.

He said,

listen,

this neighborhood

was not so bad

until the monkeys

moved in.

To you,

it may look like a mess.

To me,

it was paradise.

To me,

it was paradise.

The mushroom

is very,

very weird.

I'll tell

one more story,

then I'll try

and get off stories.

And all these stories,

why am I doing

all these dialogue?

But why am I doing

all these ethnic

imitations?

I'm not sure.

There's one

in this story, too.

I was in Malibu

with all these

fancy film people.

And we went out

to dinner.

Ralph Abraham

was there, too.

And there was

this French woman

there,

a film producer.

And she was seated

next to me

at dinner.

And before dinner,

we had been

talking about

the mushroom,

or I had been

introduced to her

as the mushroom man

and this and that.

And she said to me,

and you'll see

why the story

I just told

relates to this,

the story about

you're a mushroom,

you live cheap.

And she said

to me at dinner,

she said,

you say that

the mushroom

speaks to you,

but I do not

understand exactly

how this works.

And I said,

well,

it's sort of like

it has many

faces that it

can show.

Like sometimes

it's like

the role that

Rod Steiger

played in

The Pawn Broker.

And at that

precise instant,

Steiger shows up

at the table

to shake hands

with everybody

and slap a few

backs and then

he just drifts off

into the recesses

of this restaurant.

And Ralph Abraham,

who was sitting

across the table

from me watching

this whole thing

and had heard

what I said

to this woman,

reached across

the table to me

and said,

you see,

the mushroom

is showing us

that it can

touch us

anywhere,

anytime.

reality.

Yeah.

How do you

remember to

bring back

what you've

learned?

Oh,

that's a good

question.

That's an

important question.

That's a key

question.

Roland Fisher,

who was a

great psychedelic

researcher with

psilocybin and

later retired to

Mallorca to be

Robert Graves'

next door neighbor,

coined the

phrase state

bounded.

This means you

can't bring it

back, and I'm

sure you all

have had the

experience of

dreaming, being

caught up in

some incredible

dream with

strange people,

foreign countries,

exotic costuming,

the alarm goes

off, and as

you stagger out

of bed, this is

just melting like

an ice cube in a

blast furnace, and

by the time you're

out of bed and

fully dressed, you

have nothing, not

a shred, not a

hint, not a

clue, it's

absolutely gone.

This is a

state-bounded

memory.

Chemically, what's

going on is

apparently short-term

memory transcription

is just not

occurring.

You're having the

immediate impression

of these things

happening, and

then it's not

going to

disk, so to

speak, it just

is lost.

Yeah?

My experience

is also with

dreaming is to

not to be

afraid that I'm

losing what I'm

dreaming.

In the moment I'm

afraid that I'm

not getting

hold of, I

know that's

gone.

And in

training myself

in knowing

everything, and

so I'm, how

do you say

that, I'm

tuning my body

to remember

everything what I'm

getting.

I mean, before

going to bed or

nothing.

Nothing.

I'm taking my dreams as learnings also, like learning during the night time.

And it's that I'm telling my body to take everything.

So even if I don't know it really consciously the next morning, it's there.

And I make the experience that it's really there.

Sometimes I have just a feeling, and I'm noting down the feeling.

I'm trying to just feel it again.

And I'm knowing something happened, and I shifted something to life, and it was like this and that.

And I know that I did my work, also if I don't know exactly what was going on.

But it helped me a lot in just knowing that my body has so many possibilities to memorize, that it will memorize.

So I'm not giving airs to fear that I'm not memorizing what I'm doing.

And the dream is not truly lost in that situation where you wake up and it melts away.

And the proof of this, and I'm sure you all have had this experience, is then you go off about your daily business.

And then there will be, and it's almost always by coincidence, an image, a chance phrase, a view of a street or something.

And it will cause you to remember the dream.

And once you get a hook into a portion of the dream, if you then work on it, you can probably bring a lot of it out.

How this works in psychedelics is, if I have an insight or something that I particularly want to remember,

first of all, I will say it aloud, this is strong imprinting, and then the real imprinting is to repeat it a few minutes later and then a few minutes later again.

And if you can carry it over a number of minutes to several different levels, it won't leave you.

A very useful shortcut for this is a tape recorder, where if you play the tape of the trip back after the trip,

you will certain, just a phrase spoken, will set off a chain of associative recall and you will retain it this way.

But to my mind, this is one of what shamanic training must really be, is mnemonic training.

If you want to bring the stuff back, you have to train yourself to bring it back.

Now, this state-bounded thing, it's important to notice.

We talk about how dreams are state-bounded, how psychedelic experiences are state-bounded,

but what we fail to notice, usually, is that ordinary reality is state-bounded.

I mean, if I were to ask any one of you,

what did you discuss with the person you had lunch with yesterday?

It's probably very touch-and-go to actually put this together.

I had lunch yesterday with Richard.

We discussed his television transmission system, but that was new to me, and therefore, easy to retain.

And also, Richard and I haven't had thousands of hours of conversation together.

But the person we are most familiar with is ourselves.

Well, I don't know if it works for you like this, but I am, let us say, cleaning my house, vacuuming,

doing dishes, making beds, and I'm thinking, all the time, thinking, and I understand why Rome fell.

I realize what I said wrong to somebody two weeks ago.

I recall a telephone obligation that I have to fulfill.

I think about things that happened years and years ago, and then the doorbell rings,

and I go to the door, and there's someone there, and they say, what are you doing?

And I say, nothing.

This is because the ordinary state of consciousness is highly state-bounded.

One thing these Buddhists have certainly gotten right is that attention to attention is the key to taking control of your mental life.

And for most of it, it's just like a river flowing by.

And every once in a while, we check to see if the river is still flowing by, but we don't attempt to retain it.

So, memory training is great psychedelic training, and of course, as I'm sure you know, there were arts of memory in the past.

We are very poor memorizers because we rely on technologies to do it for us, but people in the past had all kinds of technologies for allowing them to remember things.

For instance, the most common one in use in late antiquity and up through the Renaissance was the memory palace approach.

This is where you think of a place, a big place preferably, a place you know well, a school, a hospital, a cathedral, a university, but big.

And sit and think about it. Think about how it looks as you go through the main doors, and then what you see when you turn to the left, and what you see when you turn to the right.

Learn this building until you really can command it with reasonable vividness in most situations.

Then, if you want to remember something, imagine yourself walking through the front door of this building, turning to your left, and there near the water fountain, you will place an emblem of this thing you want to remember.

And then you will go down the hall and around the corner, and by the fire extinguishers, you will place another emblem of the next thing you want to remember.

Well, then, the act of remembering this long list of things is the act of mentally moving through this imaginary building that you know.

And when you come to the water fountain, the clue will be there.

When you pass the fire extinguishers in your mind, the emblem you place there will be there.

Now, I know this sounds highly unworkable and unwieldy, but it actually is extremely workable.

And people like Catalyst and Chichiro, the great late Roman orators, were able to speak for hours on end with lists of virtues and vices and interconnecting causes and this sort of thing,

because they were masters of this mnemonic memory palace technique.

Well, psychedelics are a vivid, this is another one of these things, like mantras, yantras, and so forth, that works on psychedelics.

You can do this.

And so, when you're on a psychedelic, and you have an experience that you want to remember, place it in your memory palace.

And the next time you come past that point in your memory palace, this thing will be there.

Now, the other trick is, any of you who are interested in this, the last word is The Art of Memory by Frances Yates,

which is a wonderful woman, great scholar of Renaissance magic.

And the final trick is to make the image extremely vivid, so that, for instance, if you're about to give a speech to your collegium on the seven deadly sins,

well, then one of these sins is lust.

I chose the easy one, because I can't remember what the other six are.

Shows you where my problem lies.

So, you don't just place the word lust in the memory keeping spot.

You place some vivid and shocking image.

Yates suggests the image of a nun lifting her skirts.

I think this was a classically suggested one that people were taught to use.

Well, then, when you come around the corner and meet the nun lifting her skirts, you think, aha, lust.

That's the first, and then you go on, and so forth.

And books, some of the most astonishing products of the medieval engraver's art,

are these books of what are called emblemata.

Emblemata are surreal juxtapositions of things and animal parts and bodies and machines

that are memory emblems made as grotesque, surreal, and bizarre as possible in order to make them unforgettable.

That was the technique.

And the surrealists use this very consciously.

There is something about the unexpected, the grotesque, and the surprising

that is, almost by definition, memorable.

And this will work very well in the psychedelic state as well.

If you ask, you know, just like that thing with your I Love Lucy,

when I did the mushroom experience, and there were certain issues,

certain things I went to that ceremony with on my agenda to be healed from.

And one of them was to be released from some of my early Catholic conditionings

that I felt were hanging me up.

And when I was in the experience, they talked about the Los Niños,

the little helpers that would come.

And I asked, just like Lucy, I said, I need some help.

What can you help me with it?

And I looked at my hand, and the, I mean, how could you forget something like this?

The fucking blood started to come out of my hand.

And right in the middle of my hand, this blood came right out of the palm.

It started dripping.

And I'm, you know, it's like, it doesn't hurt.

I was like, I'm bleeding to death here, and this isn't even.

Yeah, I mean, it was like the whole suffering stuff of what Catholics are conditioned with.

I mean, it came to my hand, there was a stigmata.

And I looked at my other hand, and the same thing was happening.

And I was going, my God, this is, I'm feeling this crucifixion, you know, thing.

And the St. Stephen, and my name was doing the martyr, and all.

And all this martyrdom shit I've subjected, you know, on and on.

I mean, I could talk for another 30 minutes about what that, how meaningful that was to me.

But talk about, you know, if you want an image, if you want a vision, ask the mushroom gods.

Give me a vision.

I'll give you one.

Oh, yeah.

Mask and you'll be seen.

I'm really interested in the legal aspect of this thing.

You know, you're talking about something about highly illegal.

As far as the lost, how do you handle it?

Anybody that drives around with a license plate that says NMDMT, you know, I wonder, are you paranoid about it?

Obviously not.

No, I'm not paranoid about it.

If they wanted me, they should have come a long time ago, because I was much more vulnerable then.

I've sort of covered my ass.

Naturally, if you speak about these things, you can't do anything particularly illegal.

And I am, perhaps I'm foolish in the sense that we're not, I shouldn't be worried about being arrested.

I should be worried about being shot.

If that's how they play the game, then I'm in big trouble, because they'll just come and shoot me, and you too, if you get into this.

But if we actually have a legal system that works, then this is called advocacy, and it's not a crime.

It's an exercise of the first, fourth, and, I don't know, a couple of other amendments to the Constitution.

Henry David Thoreau, you don't get more American than that, said that if you are right, you are a majority of one.

And we live by majority rule.

I don't feel heroic.

I mean, it's not false modesty or anything.

I don't feel heroic doing this.

This is really humdrum to me.

I just could not behave any other way because of what I've seen.

I mean, this transcends laws.

All that is, it's seen as preposterous.

I mean, there are, there are, I believe in universal laws.

You shouldn't kill people.

You shouldn't lie to people.

You shouldn't inject yourself between lovers.

Most cultures, I think, recognize a set of universal laws.

But, thou shalt not smoke marijuana?

Surely the god of Mount Sinai has better things to do than worry about that sort of thing.

We have to create a new option.

All social progress is made by people taking chances.

If I am an anomaly, some kind of dangerous sociopath, then my message will be swamped and lost in the noise of the tumult of the world because there are thousands of messages out there.

If, on the other hand, this is a great and important domain of truth, then they are crazy to try and repress it because it cannot be repressed.

They have tried to repress it.

Why have they tried to repress it?

The use of psychoactive drugs is so, you know, good for their psyche.

Why have they repressed it?

They sought to repress it because there's something in the Western mind that is very nervous, that gets very nervous when you try to talk about the bedrock of ontology.

McLuhan talked about this.

are so removed from the stuff of the world, as opposed to languages like Chinese or Mayan or something like that, where there is a retention of the image in the written language,

that the cultures descended from the phonetic alphabet are extremely paranoid about questions about the nature of reality.

And that's what this is really about.

The psychedelic issue does not relate to the drug issue at all.

I mean, in fact, it's important to make this point.

Drugs and psychedelics are not two members of a family.

They are antithetically opposed to each other.

The pro-psychedelic position is an anti-drug position.

Now, how can this be, since we are accustomed to thinking of psychedelics as drugs?

Well, it's like this.

What is it that we object to about drugs?

And I think everybody can agree, maybe not everybody, but most people can agree, we do have a drug problem.

I mean, if you live in the inner cities, you see people getting all twisted up behind this stuff.

We have a drug problem.

So, what is it about drugs that we find problematic?

Well, I think that what is objectionable about drugs is that they cause unconscious, obsessive, destructive self or other behavior.

Unconscious, obsessive behavior is intolerable because we are conscious people accustomed to injecting choice and meaning into our lives.

You cannot have meaning if you do not have choice.

This is why we don't have to spend any time at all talking about whether the world is predestined.

Because if the world is predestined, then I'm not saying what I'm saying because it's what I want to say.

I'm saying what I'm saying because I can't say anything else.

And you're sitting there because you can't not sit there.

So, it makes the world very dull and uninteresting.

Compulsive, unexamined, obsessive behavior is the quintessence of anti-human behavior.

It was Bertalanfi, the founder of General Systems Theory, who said people are not machines.

But in every situation where they're given an opportunity to behave like machines, they'll go for it.

Some of them are drugs which reinforce obsessive and unexamined and self-destructive behavior patterns.

Well, what do psychedelics do?

They destroy behavior patterns, destroy cultural assumptions, completely hold everything up for grabs,

completely throw open the possibility that reality could be any of a number of ways that are not culturally sanctioned.

So, in that sense, the psychedelics are almost the answer to the drug problem.

And the early use of psychedelics reported spectacular progress with alcoholism.

Well, now, see, the people who believe that alcoholism is a disease, and I don't follow this literature closely,

it seems to me this is a preposterous statement.

I mean, a disease? You mean like influenza and smallpox and AIDS?

Alcoholism is a disease. Can you get it if you don't practice safe sex, or do you have to wash your eating utensils?

It isn't a disease. What it is, is it's a failure of self-image.

And the reason LSD, in many cases, had a tremendous impact on alcoholic behavior,

was because it just showed people what they were doing.

Said, this is you. You're a drunk.

You're a burden to your family, a bore to your friends.

You smell bad, and you're useless.

How do you like it?

And so somebody said, I don't like it.

Said, well, then stop drinking.

That's what it is. That's how psychedelics cure addiction.

And nobody, when they talk about addiction, nobody ever talks about what is called self-restraint.

Terrence, there's a new book that came out about a month or two ago that's incredibly, I don't remember the name offhand,

incredibly controversial.

But alcoholism?

Yeah, about alcoholism.

How heavy drinking? Myth of alcoholism is a disease.

Right, yeah. And the man takes the position that the last 30 or 40 years where we've seen alcoholism as a disease

is just, you know, more bullshit from the medical model.

We need another alternative.

Of course, AA and everybody is just up in arms about the book.

Well, yeah. AA has a...

I don't remember that.

They're...

John, what's the book?

The name of the book is by Finnegade.

It's called Heavy Drinking, the Myth of Alcoholism as a Disease.

Basically, it discusses the fact that eventually it's a rationalization to say that it's a disease.

I mean, there are certain people, I think, that have certain chemical reactions to alcohol,

but they're in the minority in that.

This is very important to me as well because this is work that I'm interested in.

And alcoholism has also touched my family as it has a lot of the families.

Yeah, I think the disease model has no...

There's no responsibility involved, you know.

And AA, their position, their goal, is not to understand the nature of the universe.

They're not in the philosophy business.

They're trying to get people to stop drinking.

So to maximize that goal, I think that they go far overboard.

First of all, all substances, they say.

If you're an alcoholic, then you must forswear everything.

I don't know how they relate to tobacco.

But, see, what you've got to understand is

we are set up for addiction.

It's just like language and cognition and all of these other things.

We are the animal which addicts.

Other animals don't addict.

And addiction is a way of relating to the world.

We don't not only addict to drugs,

we addict to each other,

to chunks of territory,

to behavior patterns.

Isn't it like attaching ourselves to what we see?

Exactly, it's attachment.

It's attachment.

And we attach to everything.

And it's very real.

It's physiological.

I remember years and years ago,

a woman left me for a homunculus.

And I was appalled.

It became, I mean, I was like vomiting every four hours,

could not sleep,

would burst into tears in inappropriate situations,

of which there were many in my life.

And heroin withdrawal cannot be worse than that.

I mean, are you kidding?

Vomiting every four hours?

And then one night,

in the middle of the night,

I was just frantic.

Because I felt like I,

when I was awake,

I felt like I wanted to be asleep.

When I should have been sleeping,

I couldn't sleep.

And I was just dragging myself to classes.

I felt, you know, this is crazy.

I should turn myself in.

But they don't have crisis centers for broken hearts.

What are you going to do?

So then, in the middle of one of these bouts,

I went to the medicine cabinet.

And this woman who had left me

had left all these pills there.

And I sorted through all these pills

and came upon a small bottle of tranquilizers,

a very mild tranquilizer,

like Valium or something.

Well, I had never taken a Valium.

So I said,

I'll take half.

And I took it.

And the next morning,

or a few hours later,

I went out to breakfast

and somebody came up and sat at my table

and said,

well, how are you coping

since Hermione left you?

And I said,

who?

You know,

I just jerk.

And it really gave me respect for tranquilizers.

I mean,

I was appalled.

I was appalled

that something so real to me,

so,

so much me,

half the tab,

I didn't care,

you know,

let them go.

And then I realized

all the people around me,

this is how they deal

with emotional crisis.

Nobody wants to feel anything.

I mean,

the moment that an unpleasant emotion

rears its head,

people go take Valium

or something else

and cut themselves off

from feeling.

We addict to people.

That's the point of that story.

And when they leave us suddenly,

it's just like having your heroin taken away

and you become a mad thing

for months,

years sometimes.

I mean,

I still vibrate

from this event

and it was 15 years ago.

We addict to territory.

This is war,

our turf,

our land.

Now,

this arises,

again,

a consequence of agriculture.

Before agriculture,

nobody had land.

Land was something

you walked around on

as you migrated

behind your herds.

Once it was cognized

as an object

and fixed upon,

they were ready

to knock the other guy's brains out

for setting foot

on your territory.

We all do this.

I mean,

we are addicted

to caffeine,

outrageous caffeine addictions.

Money,

sugar,

praise,

television.

Now,

this is the favorite one

to talk about

because television

is a forerunner

of very insidious drugs

to come.

It's just the crudest

and the first.

But imagine if

after World War II,

a drug had been introduced

into this country

of right-thinking,

hard-working,

decent,

Christian people

such that

twenty years

after its induction,

the average American citizen

would be spending

six and a half hours

per day

involved in this drug.

That's the figure

for television consumption

in this country.

The average American

watches six and a half hours

a day of TV.

It is an electronic drug.

It is an obsessive

behavior pattern,

an unconscious

behavior pattern,

and a physically

destructive

behavior pattern.

I mean,

it's done more

for the rebirth

of hemorrhoid specialists

than any other

single force

in our society.

So,

but people say,

well,

that's not a drug,

that's entertainment.

Six and a half hours

a day

of entertainment?

You know,

before electronic media,

a person could regard

themselves

as a great patron

of,

let's say,

the musical community,

and maybe they would

hear twelve live

musical performances

a year

when they would go

to a theater.

I mean,

how many people

in Beethoven,

how many experts

on Beethoven

in his generation

or the generation

following

heard,

let's say,

the Ninth Symphony

more than several times

in their intellectual life?

Because,

you know,

you have to get

a lot of people

together

and cooperating

to perform

the Ninth Symphony.

We,

to us,

the Ninth Symphony

is an object.

Listen to it.

Listen again.

We are able

to turn experience,

we are able

to objectify experience

and then

addict ourselves

to it.

Well,

is this bad?

How can it be bad

if it is so

written into us?

I don't think

it is bad.

I think

what we have

to do

is choose

our addictions,

choose

our behavior

patterns.

One can choose

to be addicted

to punctuality.

I'm accused

of this.

Other people

are addicted

to always

being late.

One can be

addicted

to

meaningless

sexual

encounters.

You mean

because of

the physiological

angle?

Well,

I think

that's been

much overplayed.

I think,

I mean,

should we not

fall in love

because we

pheromone

lock together

with this person

and become

a single

unified set

of drives

and goals?

The physiological

aspects of

addiction

have been,

I think,

very strongly

overdrawn.

I smoke

cannabis

every day

at most

opportunities

and have,

for years and

years,

I mean,

since I was

18 years old,

every once in a

while,

I stop

just to see

what that's

like.

It's trivial.

It's utterly

easy.

All that

happens

is a shift

in behavior

patterns.

I read

more.

That's what

happens when I

stop smoking

cannabis.

And yet,

I'm supposed

to be breaking

out into

cold sweats,

wandering

aimlessly

through the

streets of

the city,

staring up

at lighted

windows.

Yeah, right. So, I think we give each other too much permission to be weak in this area. What is never talked about in talk about addiction is self-restraint. I mean, for heaven's sake, you know, just take hold of yourself.

Yeah, responsibility. And if you tell people addiction is a disease, addiction is it's because you're black, it's because you're poor, it's because you're this, it's because you're that, you have just given them a whole bunch of reasons not to take responsibility for their own situation.

And what is needed in these addictive situations, I think, is the shock of recognition. I believe, see, that if you don't take drugs, you're unbearable.

And there's no, I can't think of a society on earth where people don't take drugs that any of us would want to have anything to do with. I mean, let's take Calvinist Geneva, say.

I imagine that as an example of a fairly of an environment of moral rectitude. I mean, these people did not wear bright colors, didn't listen to music, never drank coffee, never smoked, forget about alcohol, sex for procreation, so forth and so on.

And they were, are paradigms of the male ego frozen in place, didactic, paternalistic, all-knowing, filled with hellfire and damnation, everything is seen in terms of a moral dimension that makes impossible demands on the human animal.

Rather, I think what we should realize is that somehow our evolution into a civilized, self-reflecting being is caught up in these synergistic relationships that our conscious mind has with various things in the environment.

So that we should choose our addictions. Now, notice that addictions to my mind, and you know, you can argue with this if you want by choosing extreme examples, but addictions to natural substances are harmless.

Let me name some natural substances that you might disagree with me on this point. I think probably the strongest one would be, people would say, well, what about opium? Surely this is the scourge of mankind.

Actually, opium was never a problem in human populations until it was conceived of as a problem by British colonial policy makers who decided that they could manipulate the opium trade to get an entree into China.

Alcohol was never a problem, particularly, until the discovery of distilled alcohol.

And, of course, heroin is distilled opium, morphine also. Sugar is a refined vegetable substance. In every case, it has required the intercession of science and technology to take harmless habits and turn them into dangerous addictions.

Addictions. So that, you know, everybody has a solution to the drug problem. I think what I would suggest is something called the Vegetable Drug Act, where you just say, if it's a vegetable, it's not a drug.

This was the position until very recently with British common law. In Canada, mushrooms were legal. Mushrooms aren't psilocybin. Psilocybin is a refined chemical.

It is technology which allows us then to create these super powerful addicting substances. And there will be more and more of them downstream, you may be sure.

So I think what we need to do is think of human beings as hardware, as the computer, if you will. And drugs are forms of software. And the software that you run determines the kind of functions that you can perform.

If you run distilled alcohol software, well, then you take on the persona of the alcoholic. I believe that cannabis is probably the most harmless and benign drug around.

It carries out this feminizing that I talked about. It lowers the profile of the male ego. Instead of wanting to duke it out, people just say, well, if that's your thing, you know, and that's what we need, you know, I mean, that practically boils down to what we call tolerance.

So I think that this disruption of our relationships to psychoactive plants is what set us on the long, hard, downward path into neurosis.

And it began with agriculture, with the narrowing of our spectrum of plant awareness from many, many plants down to the rye, the oats, the barley. And it's interesting that then out of this came the cultivation of, I mean, I think beer preceded wine.

Beer is an older thing than wine. Beer is an older thing than wine. That comes out of the fact of having created surpluses. Because the way, the way beer was discovered was through the fermentation of grain that was stored.

If you didn't have surpluses, you would never discover the psychoactive properties of fermented grain. It's very interesting. In Nepal, the Niwari people have an alcoholic beverage that when it's put in front of you, it looks like a bowl of granola.

It's dry. It's dry. They pour it out of a sack into your cup. And you say, you know, this is beer? And then they come along with boiling water and pour it over it. And then you get this foamy, lightly fermented, contaminated grain water.

And to my mind, that clearly is then how fermentation of grains and production of alcohol was established. Notice that it was also the accumulation of surplus from the agricultural adaptation that creates the need for defense.

Because now you have to guard your surplus from everybody who doesn't have any. The other thing that creation of surpluses caused was the invention of barter and money and this sort of thing.

Because now you have something that you can trade for something that you don't have. So all of these adaptations also, a nomadic people cannot move a grain surplus with them.

So if you're harvest one year, if you're a semi-nomadic people, that's a people who, like in the Amazon, they plant things and then they leave them and go away and they have like a yearly peregrination.

And when they come back to that place a year later, there's all this food ready for them.

Well, imagine a nomadic people who were doing that kind of quasi-agriculture with cereal. And then there's one year of great weather and great rainfall. And when they arrive at their little wheat patch, so much wheat has been produced that they can't move it.

They can't take it with them. So then they say, well, we, but we have food now, so we don't have to keep hunting. So let's spend the winter here. And this interruption of the cycle of nomadism to deal with unexpected surpluses obviously spawned the idea in people's minds.

Well, wouldn't it be great if we had surpluses every year? And then that says, well, that won't happen if we're as careless as we have been about our sowing and harvesting, but maybe if we're very careful and till the land and carefully plant and do careful weeding, we'll have to stay here and weed, but then we'll get this tremendous payback in the end.

So to my mind, the invention of agriculture broke our relationship to the wild plants and the lowered profile of the male ego and set us on a path of defending wealth, creating fortifications, supporting more specialization, larger populations, so forth and so on.

And then from there to the present predicament, it's only a moment.

Pardon me?

That's right. And also this idea of our land, because you want to hang on to this good cereal growing land. So it's yours, you say, and then you put a wall around it and then you defend it and so forth.

And so on. Well, I think that we're now, things are very far out of hand and we're caught up now in the end game of history and that we are going to have to create a way out of this impasse that is probably going to, you know,

mean a complete redefining of who we are and how we relate to each other and space and time and life and death. And it appears that technology is now the thing that is guiding us forward.

We are not being led into the future by politicians. Politicians are running frantically along behind the wagon of history, trying to jump onto it. What is leading us, what's pulling the cart is technology.

And I think technology is the program of realizing the practical concerns of the imagination. And that really where we are headed is the imagination. It's a place.

I don't know whether it's in solid state circuitry or in the bones of the planet or in artificial arcologies in deep space. The future will figure out the details, but we are close enough to it now that we can anticipate it.

It's what the shamans always said was possible. A world of value and meaning lived in the light of nature. And I think if we can get through this narrow neck that rationalism has imposed upon us and overcome these poisonous paternalistic philosophies, we will return.

Return. That's why I call it the archaic revival. It's the myth of the eternal return. History is something that you finish with as quickly as possible and then return to the archaic mode of eternity.

And I think that's the adventure that we're all caught up in. That's the agenda that the plants and the planet have always had in front of them. It's just that we wandered

away from an awareness of what was happening by deluding ourselves with our own inflated self-image. Man as master of woman and nature. And this distorted part of our self-image has now become so dangerous to us that we have to abandon it.

We have to draw back from it. And under that kind of pressure I think we will. So harking back to another question, the reason I do this and the reason I don't feel any great trepidation about it is because I believe that historical momentum is with us.

This is what is destined to come to be. We are going to take control of who we are by taking control of the physiological and psychological foundations upon which the self rests.

And that means the chemical re-engineering of ourselves into the state of Edenic innocence that was lost when we set out on the long trail of, you know, the sword and the hoe, basically.

That's it. End of weekend. Thank you very, very much. It's a political point of view, you see. And as a practical matter, there's no better way to succeed in politics than to champion the most out of it point of view.

And now we live in an era where beige fascism is apparently the rising rule of the day. Well, that means if you want to be on the cutting edge, you have to embrace something very akin to psychedelic anarchy, the absolute antithesis of the fascist state.

And then you will participate in the turning of the tide and the vindication of this point of view. And it will be vindicated. There's no doubt about it. All other points of view are bankrupt on the face of them. End of footnote.

End of footnote.

.