Tree Of Knowledge

Sounds True presents In Search of the Original Tree of Knowledge, a weekend workshop with Terence

McKenna. Researcher, author, and philosopher, Terence McKenna has spent 25 years studying the

foundations of shamanism and the ethno-pharmacology of spiritual transformation. His books include

Food of the Gods and the Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide, and most recently, The Archaic Revival.

He is also the founder of Botanical Dimensions, a non-profit botanical research project.

In this weekend workshop, Terence McKenna examines time and its mysteries, the nature of language,

and the techniques of ecstasy that have developed in non-Western societies to navigate to and

from invisible worlds. And now, recorded live in Boulder, Colorado, in search of the original

tree of knowledge, a weekend workshop with Terence McKenna.

How to slice into this pie, I try to never do it the same way because I don't want to get

bored, but that lays a sort of obligation on me that I'm not always able to meet. Two things,

I think, are going on inside this wrap as currently packaged. First of all, I'm very interested in

talking about the impact of psilocybin on human evolution and values and institutions.

And then, so that you don't think we've just fallen into fringe anthropology 101, I'm interested

in taking the insights from that discussion and trying to apply it to the modern, or post-modern,

as the case may be, dilemma. Trying to draw some implication from looking at human prehistory and the set of factors

that were in place at the moment of human emergence. And since I feel pretty much among friends and fringes here,

it doesn't trouble me to confess that my book, Food of the Gods, I really conceived of as a kind of intellectual Trojan horse.

It's written as though it were a scientific study, footnotes, bibliography, citations of impossible-to-obtain books, and so forth and so on.

But this is simply to assuage and calm the academic anthropologists. The idea is to leave this thing on their doorstep,

rather like an abandoned baby or a Trojan horse, and they will open their doors to it and take it inside,

only to discover that out of this very staid rational discourse, pour the self-transforming elf machines from hyperspace

with their own agenda. I feel like I should say this, it's more for my ease than yours,

that I've reached the conclusions that I now espouse through skepticism, reason, rationalism, and tough argument.

So it may sound ditzy, flaky, and soft-headed, but that's just because you're hearing it wrong.

The guiding input was experience. And in a way, what we're gathered here to talk about tonight is an experience,

which is not only rare, transformative, challenging, but also, for reasons which we'll probably get around to, illegal.

So, it's a very peculiar situation. Very few experiences are illegal.

And our models of the world are built up based on our experience.

So, if you make an experience illegal, you're essentially saying it is off-limits for model-building.

You can't include that in your model, because it isn't really there, in some sense.

And this is the situation in Western society, vis-a-vis the psychedelic experience.

To my mind, the psychedelic experience is as much a part of being human as sexuality,

personal independence, child-rearing.

Meaning, these are the things which are scripted into us as opportunities for exercising our peculiar situation,

vis-a-vis the phenomenon of being.

And a society which would deny that is a society whose secret, or maybe not so secret, agenda,

is the infantilization of its citizens.

I mean, if we are not capable of dealing with these things, then who is?

And are the people who made the rules, did they carefully, conscientiously, and at depth,

explore these dimensions, and decide they were unfit for human consumption?

Or was it done more hastily, more mindlessly, and with more fear?

I would submit to you that it's the latter.

Well, first of all, I want to talk about the impact of psychedelics,

especially, in this case, psilocybin, on humanness.

And then, if there's time, maybe we can talk a little bit about what is so great about it.

I had a philosophy professor once, Paul Feyerabend, some of you may know his books.

And he opened his Epistemology 101 course by saying,

I'm going to teach you what truth is, and then I'm going to teach you what's so great about it.

Well, I won't claim to teach what the psychedelic experience is.

That you will have to find out on your own.

But I think it is legitimate to discuss what's so great about it.

You know, are we, by any measurable index, superior or inferior to people who do not have this experience?

Because if not, then really, the psychedelic position is no more than a kind of cult.

To be lined up along with Roman Catholicism and all the other cults out there.

Speaking as a former member, of course.

Well, my notion of the way to legitimate the importance of psychedelics is by showing,

and I think one can show in fairly short order, that these things are not alien to the human experience,

or ancillary, or the province of uneducated little brown people down in the rain forest, or anything like that.

I submit to you that the psychedelic experience and the impact of psychedelic plants on human beings

is central to understanding who we are and how we got this way.

And if we can explore this issue and convince ourselves that there's some merit in this point of view,

then it will simply, it will do more than rewrite the annals of a staid science like anthropology.

It will actually change how we relate to each other and to the planet that we're in the process of grinding into pollution.

So, that's the raison d'etre for the politics behind it.

Now, here's the spiel.

Sometime in the last three million years,

the proto, our remote ancestors, the proto-hominids,

were disrupted in their evolutionary climax in the canopies of the great rain forests of Africa.

You see, most animal species evolve into a niche, tighter and tighter and tighter.

We see this with termites and cockroaches and most life forms.

This is what happens to them.

Only if the niche is somehow disrupted or destroyed,

does the game veer away from its tendency toward closure.

And this is what happened to us.

Our remote ancestors would have lived happily in the climaxed rainforests of Africa,

in the same way that primates to this day live happily in the climaxed rainforests of Indonesia and South America.

But for the fact that the dynamics of the planet,

and this ultimately is, if we're looking for a cause, or some people would say a villain,

then it's the climatological dynamics of the planet which began to limit these rainforest habitats.

And a new kind of habitat began to form in Africa, which was grassland.

It's very recent.

And under nutritional pressure,

and under a pressure that was the result of this retreating environment,

our remote ancestors descended from the trees

and began to adapt themselves to the new world of the grassland.

And they did this over a period of probably a couple of million years.

Now, I maintain, and if any of you are evolutionary biologists or anthropologists,

this is the nub of my position.

Here's what's new scientifically.

What they teach you about evolution is that it's caused by mutation,

which is a random process, which then meets another random process, which is natural selection.

And out of these two random processes, lo and behold, you get sea urchins, birds of paradise, grey whales, and human beings.

Now, when you inquire as to what is the source of this mutation,

you will be told it's cosmic rays, incident, incoming hard radiation, which can disrupt chromosomes,

and then most of these mutations are lethal, some huge percentage of them.

But a vanishingly small number of them actually confer adaptive advantage,

and they are then preserved in the genome and passed on.

Now, what I want to suggest, and I've never seen it thoroughly treated by evolutionary thinkers,

is that food is the unexamined source of evolutionary pressure.

It can be.

If you know anything about animal species, you know that most animals tend to specialize their diet.

Insects are famous for this.

If you find a caterpillar and you want to raise it in a jar,

you must give it the food plant you found it on, because they don't just eat leaves.

It doesn't work like that.

They have species-specific adaptations.

Now, why is this?

It's because it's a strategy to limit exposure to toxic and mutagenic chemicals

that other life forms are sequestering in their tissue to discourage predation, essentially.

Well, so then what happens when an animal population, such as our remote ancestors,

comes under pressure from a dwindling habitat or a limited availability of food?

Well, what happens, if you have any sense, is you start experimenting.

You start digging up roots you never thought about before and chewing on them.

You start eating leaves.

You start eating insect protein.

You experiment with the slaughter of small animals and so forth and so on.

And this is precisely what our remote ancestors did.

This is the much lamented transition from fruititarian holiness to predatory carnivorous messiness.

But had we not been willing to lower our gourmet standards,

we would have entered the fossil record at that point.

So, here we have these proto-hominids foraging into this new grassland environment,

beginning to beat on prairie dogs and stuff like that.

And, simultaneously, as we all know, evolving in this African belt environment,

were great herds of ungulate animals, proto-cattle, bison, wildebeest, antelopes,

many, many different kinds of animals.

And one of the curiosities of nature is that many mushrooms preferred the dung of ungulate animals

to just going out and making a deal with the raw natural environment.

They like the leavening that goes on with vegetable material

when it passes through the double stomach of an ungulate animal.

As a headline, what this means is mushrooms grow in manure.

And so, our remote ancestors, testing for insects and eating small animals,

would certainly have encountered the so-called coprophilic or coprophilic,

the dung-loving mushrooms.

And they would have tested them for food.

Years ago, when I was in Kenya, I observed baboon troops in this very environment we're discussing,

and their habit was they were very interested in cow pies

because they had learned from experience that if you rush over to a relatively old cow pie

and flip it over, there's a high probability of beetles or beetle grubs under there,

and so these were vectors for food-getting.

Well, in the Amazon, I did not observe mushrooms in Africa, but I observed mushrooms in the Amazon,

and they can attain the size of a dinner plate.

I've never seen them in cultivation quite that large.

But, you know, you come out after a hard rain,

and these things are landed like little flying saucers or frisbees in the meadows.

They would certainly have been tested for their nutritional potential.

And psilocybin, different from all other chemicals in nature,

including, as far as I can tell, all other hallucinogenic chemicals in nature,

psilocybin has a unique set of characteristics which implicated, to my mind, very strongly

in the catalyzing of the emergence of humanness out of proto-hominid and hominid organization.

And it works like this.

It's very relatively easy to understand as major scientific breakthroughs go.

At least you're not going to be asked to do any partial differential equations this evening.

psilocybin in very low doses, doses so low that if you were to take a dose this low,

you could conceivably forget you had done it and just go out and shop and fiddle around.

But at doses so low that they do not register as a psychedelic experience,

psilocybin imparts measurable improvement in visual acuity.

Roland Fisher did this work in the late 50s and early 60s.

And they built an experimental device where a person who could not be seen,

by turning a crank, there were two parallel bars.

And by turning a crank, this person could rotate one of the parallel bars so that it was no longer parallel.

And lacking talking rats, they went to the next preferred experimental animal,

which is graduate students.

And they would sit a graduate student down in front of this device,

give them a very low dose of psilocybin,

and then put a buzzer in their hand and say,

when the two bars are no longer parallel, push the buzzer.

And Fisher collected large amounts of data which showed that the people who had taken the psilocybin,

and the other people were given placebo, of course,

could detect this deformation long before the unstoned subjects were able to do so.

And Fisher, who was a totally straight European scientist, in fact, of Vienneser,

when I talked to him about this stuff, he was very cagey, and he was funny.

In fact, he said, well, you see, it's very interesting.

Apparently, here we have data which argues significantly that we are perceiving reality better with the drug than without the drug.

Yes, yes.

For him, that was a joke.

I mean, he never did anything with it.

It was just a throwaway line.

But it stuck with me.

And I don't think you have to be a rocket scientist to see that if you are a hunting animal in a situation of nutritional pressure,

as our remote ancestors were, and there is a food in that environment which will give you better vision,

then, by God, the animals which accept that item into their diet are going to be more successful hunters than the ones that do not.

And consequently, they will out-breed those members of the population that have some aversion to this exotic food.

Either they don't like the look of it, or they don't like that it grows in manure, or they don't like the taste of it.

But those who accept it as a dietary item will be more successful at getting food,

and consequently more successful at raising their offspring to sexual maturity.

And that's the name of the game in Darwinian evolution.

You must raise your offspring to sexual maturity.

Then the genes flow forward.

If you fail in that, you get an F in the evolution game.

Well, okay, so visual acuity, that's all very fine.

But psilocybin has other properties which build on that initial pharmacological peculiarity.

If you take slightly larger doses of psilocybin, and this is typical of many indoles,

you get, many of which are hallucinogens, you get what is called CNS arousal, central nervous system arousal.

You all know this feeling. It's the feeling of two double cappuccinos in short order.

It's that you do not sleep. You are very restless. You are very alert.

Your attention is scanning, scanning, scanning.

And in highly sexed animals, like primates, arousal means exactly what it sounds like.

It means erection in the male animal.

And, now, isn't that interesting?

That is a second factor feeding back into this increased success with offspring business.

Not only are you a better hunter, but you are a more highly sexed creature.

And you are having more of what straight anthropologists refer to as successful copulations.

An amazing phrase, actually.

Meaning, of course, that impregnation is a consequence of this sexual activity.

Now, the other thing that psilocybin does, at or slightly above this arousal level,

and this is very important for the argument, is it creates, it causes what I call boundary dissolution.

Or, and boundary dissolution in human beings, like you and me, means ego loss.

And I believe that this would have promoted a social and sexual style based not on monogamous pairing, but on orgy.

The scenario is fairly easy to imagine.

It's that these remote ancestors of ours would take these mushrooms,

and they, probably at the new and full moon,

the thinking is that ritual was originally lunar-timed.

And then they would, and these are, we are talking about nomadic groups of people,

probably no more than 80 to 100 people.

And then there would be group sexual activity.

Now, an interesting social consequence of orgyastic social styles,

besides a whole lot of fun, of course,

is it's impossible to trace lines of male paternity in that kind of a situation.

You see, women know whose children are whose,

because they see the child come out of their body, and they nurse the child.

But men do not, in that situation, have their children, my children.

What they have are our children, the tribal group.

And this boundary dissolving thing, let's dwell on this for a moment,

because this is central to my argument, and it has political consequences for our own lives.

All primates, clear back down into squirrel monkeys and lemurs,

all primates have what are called male dominance hierarchies.

And what this means is that the most, the males with the longest claws, the hardest muscles,

and the meanest dispositions, take control of everybody else.

Women, children, weaker males, everybody comes under the thumb of the alpha males of the pack.

This is true, as I said, of squirrel monkeys, howler monkeys, so forth and so on.

It is also true of us, sitting here in this room.

This is a male-dominant society.

I mean, there's a lot of complaining and hair-pulling about it,

and there's a political alternative in the form of the women's movement and feminist sensitivities.

But for most people, male dominance is the rule.

Well, I would like to suggest that our peculiarly discomforted relationship to reality

is a consequence of the fact that for a long period of time,

perhaps as short as 20,000 years,

perhaps as long as a million years,

as a species, and not consciously,

we accepted into our diet a drug

that had the consequences of suppressing male dominance.

That this was the social consequence of accepting psilocybin into the diet.

The ego is a structure that forms in the psyche like a calcareous tumor or a growth

if you do not have regular recourse to the cure.

And the cure is psilocybin and the boundary dissolving sexual and social style

which it carried in its wake.

So, the reason that we, as a people, are haunted by the idea of a lost paradise,

a perfect world sometime in the misty past,

is not, you know, Merci Alliade called it the nostalgia for paradise,

and thought it was a kind of a longing that had no basis.

But I think that it's entirely a memory of a period when male dominance was chemically suppressed,

ego was chemically suppressed.

And by male dominance and ego, I don't mean to lay this entirely on men.

I mean, I would wager probably everyone in this room has more ego than they need,

certainly starting with me.

And that's part of the paradox that you're supposed to enjoy in this.

You know, the ambiguity of me preaching the loss of ego.

So, essentially, you know, what happened was a chemically driven leap in evolution

as a consequence of the suppression of these behaviors that favored male dominance.

As a species, we would have continued with male dominance forever

had it not been for psilocybin in the diet.

And it established a situation in which, in less than two million years, the human brain size doubled.

This is, without contest, the greatest mystery in the whole of evolutionary theory.

Lumsden, who is a brilliant evolutionary biologist, called the doubling of the human brain size in two million years

the most spectacular transformation of a major organ of a higher animal in the entire fossil record.

Well, now, it would be spectacular enough if it were the liver of an otter

or the pancreas of an elephant.

But notice that it is the organ which created the theory of evolution itself

and all other theories.

So that we're getting a little tautological here, folks.

There's something fishy going on.

What was it that caused this explosive doubling in human brain size?

Well, I maintain that it was the new behaviors that emerged with the suppression of ego

and their reinforcement in this situation of nomadic pastoralism.

And that there was a period, let's call it from the melting of the last glaciers in Tel Çatalhöyük, 6500 B.C.,

there was a period when men and women were in balance with each other,

children and adults were at peace with each other,

and human beings and the planet were at peace with each other.

So that they can feel the root of the human being.

Right?

Well, that you've got it?

Well, that you can stress.

Well, I've got it that it may be the same thing.

Well, that's an old man, but your weapon doesn't matter.

But, you know?

For those who are exactly astuaries in Tel Çatalhöyük,

then you can see it in?

And that's what the reality is that we'll find.

It's a really cool thing.

You can see it.

and then it was lost

and we fell into history

you know, the long slog toward Armageddon

is what was initiated in its place

well now, if it was so wonderful

why would anybody ever let go of it?

why was it lost?

well, we have to go back to the very forces

which created this situation

remember, I said it was the climatological dynamics of the planet

created the grasslands in place of the rainforest

continuation of those processes

turned those grasslands into desert

and where there once were water holes

running rivers, grasslands

and vast herds of animals

and their human symbiotes

suddenly there was encroaching desert

fewer water holes

the mushrooms began to be seasonal

began to be located only in the rain shadows of mountains

the great mushroom festivals

which had been at the new and full moon

became solsticeal

and then equinoctial

and then, you know, biennial or something

anyway, you get the picture

it was fading

and I don't think people took this lying down

no pun again

I think that

there was great anxiety

about the fading of the mushroom

and the loss of the sacrament

and so, these people

searched for a strategy for preservation

well, in a world without refrigeration

there is only one

well, no, there are two strategies for preservation

of a delicate food like that

one is air drying

which is not terribly satisfying

because as soon as a rain cloud comes along

your dry stuff absorbs moisture out of the air

and turns yuck

and so the real

the only real option

is preservation in honey

and this was done

I'm sure

it's still done in Mexico to this day

in remote mushroom using villages

people preserve it in honey

now, the problem here

and this is a lot

my book goes

into this kind of thing a lot

because

food of the gods

because what food of the gods is really about

are the hidden

factors

that drugs lay upon us

that we are not even aware of

and if you are attempting to preserve

a hallucinogenic mushroom in honey

what you have to be aware of

is that honey itself

is potentially a psychoactive drug

honey

will turn into mead

it will ferment

into a crude

kind of honeyed alcohol

well, if the mushroom brings

suppression of ego

group sexual activity

and the formation of group values

what does alcohol bring?

alcohol

has two effects

primarily

it lowers

sensitivity

to social cuing

at the same time

that it confers

an exaggerated sense

of verbal facility

in other words

people turn into jerks

behind it

I mean

you only have to go

to a busy singles bar

somewhere here in Boulder

and you will see

the alcohol

ambiance

being acted out

right in front of you

so

and

you know

it's perhaps not so true

of our generation

but

I think probably

for a thousand years

nobody got laid

in western civilization

unless they were juiced

because Christianity

was laying

such a heavy trip

on everybody

and you know

people barely took

their clothes

in other words

you had to become

blindly intoxicated

to do

what comes naturally

and I think

up until very recently

how many women

have their first

sexual imprinting

in an atmosphere

of alcohol abuse

I mean

some huge percentage

I imagine

so

that

is the story

basically

of the fall

into history

the loss

of this mushroom

cult

happened

right at the time

that we were inventing

agriculture

and

agriculture

and the

suppression

of orgy

have something

in relationship

to each other

on two

unrelated levels

first of all

you suppress

orgy

because once you

have agriculture

it's no more

about

psyching yourself up

for the great hunt

it's all about

getting up

before dawn

and going out

and hoeing

the weeds

out of the crops

so it doesn't

promote

a party

mentality

the other thing

is

that as

human

mental

capacity

was evolving

remember that

exploding

brain size

as human

mental capacity

was evolving

women

in these

nomadic

groups

began to notice

a curious

fact

which was

every year

they would return

roughly to the same

places they had been

the year before

and in the discards

from last year's

camp

in the midden

they would discover

food plants

growing

and some

brilliant

woman

or group of women

put it together

and said

aha

we buried

food here

last year

and now

there is

food here

must be something

about putting

food into the ground

gets you food

in other words

they were able to

cognize

cause and effect

relationships

that were separated

over many months

of time

at the same time

that women

were putting this

together

men

were noticing

that

the act

of sex

had certain

consequences

nine months

later

the same

perception

had different

impacts

on both sexes

but it was an ability

to coordinate

a temporally

separated

cause and effect

well once

men got onto

the notion of

male paternity

they realized

that

these aren't

our children

some are mine

some are

somebody else's

and from that

notion

you go to

my child

to

my woman

to

my

hunting area

to

my

weapons

to

my

sib group

you get it all

you see

the ego

is born

and it is born

in an atmosphere

of complete paranoia

the first consequence

of agriculture

well it has a number

of consequences

but one consequence

is

it is a tremendously

efficient way

of producing food

that is obviously

why people

got into it

what does efficiency

mean?

surplus

what does surplus

mean?

haves and have nots

the most spectacular

architectural

edifice

of 10,000 B.C.

on this planet

was the grain tower

at Jericho

it was

had thick walls

to hold the grain

and it had high walls

so you could climb up

on top of it

and drop rocks

on the people

who were trying

to get into it

the surplus

makes nomadism impossible

because you can't drag

this huge amount

of grain

with you

so you get

sedentary

populations

and then

since the people

who want the grain

are killing your people

in fury

when they can't

get the grain

you decide to put a wall

around the whole encampment

now you have a small town

now you have urbanism

now you have the division

between nature

and secular society

you have classes

you've got it all

and I maintain

that this is

the long march

into hell

and

our particular

obsession

with drugs

as a species

I maintain

can be traced back

to this transition

that

you know

yes

elephants love

fermented papayas

and so do

butterflies

and so forth and so on

but this kind of

intoxication

is not

what we're about

we

addict

severely

to several dozen

substances

less severely

to

probably a hundred

more

and

we

addict

to

everything

you know

what we call

romantic love

shows a lot

of similarities

to

hard drug addiction

when you

separate

the lovers

you know

sleeplessness

suicidal

tendencies

bursting

into tears

hysteria

loss

of weight

whether this person

is getting off

heroin

or

has separated

from

their partner

well

if you take

an individual

who is

alcoholic

or

has some kind

of serious drug problem

current thinking

is

this can be traced

to traumatic abuse

in childhood

this

is

what happened

to us

traumatic abuse

in childhood

we were literally

torn out

of a symbiotic

relationship

to the earth

by the forces

of male dominance

agriculture

sedentary living

so forth

and so on

and we've been trying

to

scratch

an itch

that we can't find

ever since

and it has

you know

money doesn't

do it

power

doesn't do it

nothing seems to do it

we cannot

we seem to be

the unhappy monkey

and we take

this unhappiness

out on each other

with a vengeance

and

you see

what happened

was

when the mushroom

faded

the million years

of pharmacologically

interrupted

patterns

of male dominance

reasserted

themselves

but

it was

no more

a foraging monkey

with this

style

it was a creature

with language

tools

music

social organization

and suddenly

it got very ugly

and people

began fighting

over the women

so we don't want to have

orgies anymore

this woman

is my woman

touch her

you die

and so forth

and so on

and we are living out

the legacy

of this

well before I talk

about the

the social consequences

of it

for us

i want to go back

to the question

what was so great

about it

i mean we've talked

about orgy

but you can have orgy

without psilocybin

what was

so wonderful

about that

proto-historical mode

well

this is where

it becomes

slightly more

woo woo

because what we have to talk about

is what is

the psychedelic experience

anyway

and i maintain

that if we're talking about

psilocybin

and we're talking about

taking it in nature

as these people did

that you know

yes

first come

the dancing mice

the little candies

the colored grids

and so forth

and so on

but what eventually happens

quickly

like

ten minutes later

is

there is an entity

in the trance

in the vision

there is a mind

there

waiting

that speaks good english

and invites you up into its room

and once there

you

realize

that this is what all the hoopla

about the Gaian mind

and the rebirth

of the goddess

and all that

is about

it's not a metaphor folks

it's a headline

in biology

we are not

the only intelligent

minded species

occupying

this planet

we may be the only bipedal hairless mammal

with intelligence

on this planet

but there is something

out there

spread

through

the grasses

the forests

the rivers

and the oceans

uh...

our own emergence

into intelligence

took less than two million years

life

has been on this planet

for a billion and a half years

and we don't know

how many

strange

pathways

beckon

but at some point

a kind of mind

came into existence

and it is real

it's what lies behind

the religious impulse

in our species

uh... there really is

somebody else

sharing

the local

mind space

and i don't believe

we're talking

theology

here

in other words

this is not

you know

in milton's wonderful phrase

the god who hung the stars

like lamps

in heaven

it's not about that

for me

that's a big question mark

but it is

the god

goddess

of this earth

it is the biological mind

it is

that all

boundaries

are illusions

and that life

is a thinking

feeling

entelechy

of some sort

and we are just like

a little droplet

that has somehow

escaped

from the river

of cognition

and now imagine

that we're the only

water in the cosmos

not

so

it turns out

what

the reason the psychedelic

experience

is so baffling

and transformative

even as we sit here

with your heads full of

Heidegger and Husserl

and

I don't know

Wilson Phillips

and all this stuff

is because

in the face

in contact with that

we have no more

sophistication

than our

orgiastic

mushroom-munching ancestors

civilization doesn't

give you a leg up

on this stuff

in fact

it makes it harder

to figure out

what's going on

because

we have defined

nature as

dead

you know

atoms

screaming

through empty space

ruled by

tensor equations

of the third degree

that's our picture

of what nature is

that isn't

what it is

it's

a mind

of some sort

ok

what is the implication

of all this

is this just

some kind of

fringe

anthropological

revisionism

no

it isn't

because

the

the fall into history

and its consequences

is

at this point

a loaded gun

held

to the head

of the entire planet

we are

about

to

pull over

the soup cauldron

and

if we do this

then

two and a half

billion years

of

evolutionary

advance

will be shot

nobody else

ever dropped

the ball

so you know

we appear to be

vying

for

this peculiar

honor

if we do not

awaken

to

the consequences

of ego

then

we are going to

run this

system

right over the edge

the whole

thing

which characterizes

our dilemma

as a

global society

is

our inability

to feel

feel

the consequences

of what

we are doing

you know

we've got

the data

the ozone hole

is disappearing

the planktonic life

in the sea

will die

if it does

that will disrupt

the food chain

the world food supply

will drop

by 60%

everybody who isn't

white as a sheet

in that case

and

so forth

and so on

we actually toy

not only with our own

extinction

but with the extinction

of all life

on the planet

and with the extinction

of the idea of dignity

and decency

itself

well

I'm not in this

psychedelic game

because I think

it's easy

or

because

I think it's going

to be a cinch

I'm in it

because I think

it's the only game

in town

you know

if hortatory preaching

could have done the trick

then the sermon

on the mount

would have turned

the corner

if

cautionary data

flowing back

to ruling institutions

could do the trick

then sometime

after Thomas Malthus

people would have begun

to hit the brakes

nothing

seems to work

we're sick

we need

pharmacological

intervention

the

ego

is

permitting us

to

slowly

not so slowly

commit suicide

and

you know

the fact that

we cannot act

collectively

that we are

suspicious

of all forms

of collectivism

that we

really

are

all for one

and one for all

is not

our style

instead

what we have

going is a catfight

and

you know

no less

straight person

than Arthur Kessler

in a book called

The Ghost in the Machine

said

humans are

so wired

for beating

the brains

out of

woolly mastodons

that's what

evolution

has equipped us

to do

not negotiate

weapons

treaties

and destroy

bacteriological

factories

we have

to force

our evolution

we have

to

chemically

restructure

the primate brain

so that

we do not

commit suicide

and the only way

to do it

in the time left

is for

the psychedelic

community

to stand up

on its hind legs

and roar

and you know

maybe they'll

build camps

for us

the point being

I think there's

a moral imperative

to try

what works

I mean you know

in the 60's

psychedelics were

called

consciousness expanding

drugs

a good old

phenomenological

description

well

if

consciousness

does not

loom large

in the future

history of our

species

then what the hell

kind of future

is it going to be

no future at all

I maintain

so

if

there is even

the slightest

iota

of possibility

that these things

do what I'm

saying they do

then we need

to get Johnny Quick

on it

and check it out

because

we may be

beyond the point

of no return

right now

nobody knows

how bad

this ozone hole

thing is

or what's locked up

at Rocky Flats

or behind the Iron Curtain

or dumped

in the Arctic Ocean

we may be

past the fail safe

point

right now folks

there is no time

to lose

it is time

to

engage

the powers

that be

in a little more

serious dialogue

than the

just say no

horseship

that's been peddled

recently

because we're talking

about the survival

of life

on the only planet

that we are

certain

has life

on it

this may be

the site

a cosmic

experiment

with

universal

implications

and it

rests in our

hands

everybody

here

tonight

is here

because

a whole bunch

of people

didn't drop

the ball

and you know

you think you've

got problems

nine times

in the last

million years

the ice

has moved

south

from the poles

miles

thick

no antibiotics

no electronic

communication

nothing

and I'm sure these people were miserable

and they dragged through it and they lived and they passed

it on

now we're

it

and we will be judged

the lamest

of the lame

if we cannot

come to terms

with this

and begin to talk

about what is going on

this is not

obscure

as I said

I view

the psychedelic experience

as

central to

humanness

as

our sexuality

we cannot allow

dominator

institutions

to

infantile

infantilize

that

and to tell you

where your mind

can and cannot go

we even have a piece of paper

locked up in a vault

in Washington D.C.

that guarantees

life

liberty

and the pursuit

of happiness

well now

what

could the pursuit

of happiness

possibly mean

if it doesn't mean

the freedom

to

practice your own

relationship

to nature

and its gifts

so I think

we have been

entirely

too casual

about the importance

of the psychedelic

experience

this is

for one reason

because

we cannot publicly

get together

and discuss it

in detail

and one of the things

that I think

is very important

about get togethers

like this

is if you will

look around

you'll notice

that we cannot

really be distinguished

from the rest

of society

some of us live

under bridges

some of us

clip coupons

you know

there is a wide

spectrum of people

here

but

this

is your

affinity group

this

is your community

someone in this room

actually has

what you need

and

you know

I have acted

as a filter

so

out of millions

living along

the front range

here

we've gotten it

down to 200

I can't go

any further

than that

folks

the rest

is up to you

well

I guess

the last thing

I want to say

and then

we'll take a little

intermission

together

and

and then come back

and do questions

afterwards

which is my

favorite part

but

I want to just

for a minute

invoke

the psychedelic

experience

without regard

to

the evolutionary

forces that

created it

or the political

institutions

that suppress it

and so forth

and just say

in case there's

some soul

in this room

who's never had

this experience

that

this is

extraordinary

news

we are not

talking about

something like

a dream

it is not

like meditation

no

you can't

get there

by yourself

and Babaji

is equally

useless

because you

and Babaji

are starting

from the same

place

in this game

it requires

pharmacological

perturbation

of ordinary

neurochemistry

in order

to see

this mystery

and it is

a mystery

it is not

going to be

reduced

to the firing

synapses

or repressed

sexual desires

or day

residues

or anything

like that

it is

the very thing

which all

these religions

are yammering

about

it's there

it's real

I mean if you think

the world is empty

of adventure

then you just

haven't been

hanging out

with the right

crowd

I mean

on a Saturday

night

within the confines

of your own

apartment

on five grams

of psilocybin

mushrooms

in silent darkness

I guarantee

you

you will believe

that Ferdinand

Magellan

should take

second place

you will see

things

which no human

being

has ever seen

before

and

that no human

being will

ever see again

that's how

big

that

universe

is

the incredibly

constricted

space-time

locus

of the here and now

that evolution

has forced upon us

for survival purposes

is simply one point

in an apparently

infinite hologram

of explorable data

that is

the human world

I mean

the

you know

the entire world

of

every science fiction

novel and story

ever written

is

minuscule

compared

to the universes

of strangeness

and peculiarity

that are accessible

to any one of us

if you will

but

apply the method

and if you are not

willing to apply the method

then you know

you are going to sweep up

around the ashram

until hell freezes over

and

not

understand

what

is going on

I mean

I think

you know

I'm sorry to be

so hard

on religion

I think

it has

its place

is

the inspiration

of ethical

behavior

you know

religion should

teach

ethical behavior

but

it has

very very little

to say

about the mystery

of being

other than

that it's there

and that's not

practicing religion

is dancing

with the mystery

losing

and finding

yourself

in the mystery

and people

often say to me

you know

well

how does this relate

to other forms

of spiritual work

the answer is

maybe not at all

I mean

I've certainly

taken a lot of

psychedelics

and I think

there's no sign

of spiritual

attainment

or ethical

perfection

or anything

so

la-di-da

as that

I don't know

what this is

all about

but I do know

it's ours

it belongs

to us

we are the

creatures

of mind

and

95%

of what mind

is

lies

on the other side

of the psychedelic

boundary

ordinary consciousness

is just

like

keeping

the accounts

of life

but there's more

to life

than the account

books

I mean

everything else

is out there

the color

the affection

the humor

the terror

the mystery

the incredible

strangeness

of it all

this

is the domain

that we want

to claim and explore

and if we can find

the collective

institutional courage

I think this

current planetary

crisis

will be seen

for what it really

is

and what it is

is

it's not a dying

these are not

the last rites

for intelligence

this is a birth

process

I mean

if you were to

come around

if you've never seen

somebody give birth

and you came around

the corner

and it was in progress

you would be

thoroughly

profoundly alarmed

I mean

it looks like

an enormous tumor

making its way

out of somebody

and they are being

split in two

and blood is being

shed

and there's pleading

and screaming

and thrashing

it would be a real

leap of understanding

for you to say

oh how wonderful

new light

is emerging

this is the way

we do it

well

this is the way

we do it

I mean

we are in the birth canal

right now

of a planetary civilization

literally

the amniotic oceans

of 500 years ago

that's all gone

there is no frontier

there is no going back

the peace

of the fetal environment

is gone

and now

in transition

literally

the walls

are closing in

you can't breathe

you can't eat

you can't find your way

it appears to be the end

but there is light

at the end

of the tunnel

the problem is

that tunnel

is in the back

of your mind

and if you don't go

to the back side

of your mind

you will never

see the light

at the end

of the tunnel

and once you see it

then the task becomes

to empower it

in yourself

and other people

spread it

as a reality

God did not

retire

to the seventh heaven

God is some kind

of lost continent

in the human mind

and if we will

but explore the human mind

we can reclaim

these relationships

with our own authenticity

and shed the childishness

of historical existence

and gender politics

and all the rest of it

and move on

to the real business

of establishing

a real civilization

thank you very much

Does anyone want to ask a question, or is it all just perfectly clear, utterly convincing, of psilocybin?

Bad effects.

Somebody once said, what's wrong with DMT?

And I said, well, nothing unless you fear death by astonishment.

But your question is a good one.

First of all, you know, I talked a lot about how what we have to do is destroy and ablate ego.

However, there is a very small percentage of us who have a hard time creating any ego whatsoever.

And for these people, boundary dissolution is no problem.

Their boundaries are dissolving all the time on them.

I would say that they are at the contraindicated end of the spectrum.

That if you're fearful already and fighting to keep from being overwhelmed by confusion at what's going on in your life at the paper box factory or something,

probably tossing in mega doses of hallucinogens is not the way for you to do it.

Or if you do, if you're just bent on doing that, then I would say do it in the presence of some kind of professional.

And how you find a professional in this legal climate, you'll have to discuss with me privately.

I don't want to make it sound, though, I mean, it's a tricky thing.

I don't want to make it sound like it's absolutely riskless.

Physically, I think it's pretty safe unless you are awed in some way.

But you need to know, you know, you don't want to find out you're awed an hour and a half into it.

But the problem comes with the mind, you know.

If you are delicately balanced, if your whole life has been about not looking at that or that or that,

then this is not your game, you know.

You should go back to watching Jeopardy and...

The kind of person who is called to this is a person who has an exploring soul.

I mean, I am not a courageous person in the sense that you won't find me shooting white water.

You don't see me, you know, rappelling down the faces of cliffs.

But from the time I was the tiniest little kid, I was into the weird.

What's weird? Weird is the compass heading.

And if you keep your compass always pointed toward the peculiar, the ultra, the bizarre, the unspeakably alien,

then, you know, you'll find these places.

The people who think life is all cut and dried and are perfectly happy to have Carl Sagan and George Bush explain all of reality,

have never left the broad, swift stream of mundane thinking.

But, you know, off in the byways and tributaries, there's a wonderful alchemical saying, which I generally mangle.

But I think it goes something like this.

The tallest mountains, the oldest books, the widest deserts, there you will find the stone.

And what it is, is it's a prescription for exploring weirdness.

That's all.

It's not going to be on MTV.

It's not going to be in, God forbid, Esquire.

It's going to come from, you know, doing your homework, visiting strange people in strange lands, and checking it out.

And what I can't give you, to return to your question, is I can't give you a guarantee that it will be fun.

You know, the Rolling Stones have that wonderful line, you don't get what you want, you get what you need.

This stuff is ruthless.

And if there's something that you're trying not to look at, it's going to get you, for sure.

But ask the veterans.

Most people will tell you, you learn more from the bad trips than you do from the good ones.

The good ones are ecstatic and connect you up to nature and other people.

The bad ones show you your kinks and your limitations and your thought errors and that sort of thing.

It's not an easy row to hoe.

That's why I think there's a little bit of social confusion about it.

One of the things I should make clear is, I really advocate high doses rarely.

I think the worst thing you can do is get into a style of psychedelic diddling.

Where you know, you take half a gram every day.

All this is doing is giving you a tolerance to psilocybin.

You're not having the psilocybin experience, you're having the tolerance to psilocybin experience.

Really, the way to do these things is to do them rarely so that your whole system can reassert itself and come to equilibrium.

And then just slam it.

And this is amazing.

I mean, I think that this works for all these psychedelics.

I'm an inveterate cannabis user and I wish in a way that I could get a slightly better grip on my cannabis use.

Because I think the real way to do cannabis is like once a week, by yourself, in silent darkness,

with the strongest stuff you can get and then immense amounts of it.

And, you know, people call it a recreational drug and a this and a that.

Hey, done that way, it will catapult you into places where it's...

I love it.

The great place to get to on cannabis, and some people never in their whole life touch it,

is the place where you say, my God, I've done too much.

It's not easy, folks, but it's worth shooting for.

Basically, what you should do is, you know, do some homework, read some books, talk to your friends, and then hang on Hannah.

It's like, you know, it's very much like riding an enormous roller coaster.

You know, once that baby rolls out of the station, do not stand up.

Do not try to climb out of your car.

Shut up and hang on with the faith that most people have lived through this.

Somebody else.

Yeah.

Purple.

Well, having just heard that I'm a pothead, please ask them one at a time.

What is your first literary question?

Well, I don't mean to imply that people first used it in low doses and then middle and then higher over time.

What I mean, what I meant to imply, I think they were using low, middle and high doses from the very get-go,

but they were using low doses to hunt, middle range doses for orgy and ceremony,

and truly high doses for this boundary dissolving tremendum.

Second literary question.

Uh-huh.

Well, I'm not wedded to that.

First of all, Choctal Jiyuk, for those of you who haven't read the book or know about Choctal,

was this immensely sophisticated civilization that existed in the seventh millennium BC.

We're talking 6,000 years before zero, this civilization existed and was destroyed.

And the characteristic of it is shrines dedicated to cattle.

And in my book I argue that this was probably the last outpost of this partnership society.

But it was still, I think the real golden age of mushroom use was probably from about 30,000 years ago to about 15,000 years ago.

And by the time Choctal Jiyuk comes along, it's a fading or yearly or seasonal thing.

The important one.

One of the assertions that you made earlier was that these indole-based plant solution agents actually changed people to use them.

And the unfortunate thing that I observed is I can't agree with that assertion.

It seems that as many people, it seems like only a really few people are changed by it.

Only those who are predisposed to change.

And I'd like, one of the questions you ask, does it make us better?

Does it make us different?

And I'm just not convinced at all.

When I see people taking mushrooms and going around doing change things,

and just being jerky as they're worth.

Does it make us better work?

I mean, if you're down and you're down and you're judging,

there's nothing for us.

And, you know, I don't see it happening.

Well, I, my argument would be that people don't take it enough,

and they don't take it frequently enough.

That there are a lot of people who really would rather not get loaded,

but who feel they must take some psychedelic drug in order to keep membership in their peer group.

So, what they do, you know, you can always spot these people,

because their first question at the get-go is,

will I be able to drive?

I love this question.

Because, you know, it indicates you've got a real tough nut on your hand.

In every sense of the word, no, you will not be able to drive.

So, you know, one of the things that inspires me to do this is,

I want to get to the people who've taken three grams of mushrooms,

and the people who've taken 150 mikes of LSD,

and I want to convince those people that they never got close to what I'm talking about,

even though they had a life-transforming experience and saw things totally differently,

they never got close to what I'm talking about.

And so, what you have to do is convince people to take high doses,

and then that's to break them through,

and then frequently enough that they don't forget what the deal is.

So I think if you take a psychedelic population and divide it into those who have done five grams and above,

then you will see an exceptional slice.

But not the dabblers.

The dabblers don't count.

And we all can be, or at times, guilty of this, I think.

And then, is that your last question?

Does that do it for you?

Or do you want to be thought psychotic?

You choose.

Well, I'd love competition.

I mean, I...

The competition is terrible.

That's the entire basis of my success.

Yeah.

You.

Because you were before.

If you still wish.

Right.

Why?

I guess you take your way to...

Why?

Because...

I mean, I don't know if it's preferable.

But here's the thing.

People are going to think you're a nut

if you come down and say

that Johann Sebastian Bach or Jerry Garcia is God.

And this is what you will have to say

if you listen to the dead or the B minor math.

So, what I'm interested in is...

I want to know the thing in itself.

Not what it does to Bach.

Not what it does to a river flowing through a forested valley.

I want to see what it can do with darkness and silence.

And I think most people think it'll be boring.

Probably because they've been hanging out with these BDI gurus

is meditating.

And God knows there's nothing more boring on Earth

than most meditations.

However, psychedelic, sitting in a darkened room

on five draggrams of psilocybin mushrooms

is nothing like meditating.

And that's where it can get at you.

My relationship to it is always one of...

I want to know what it is.

And so, I think this sensory deprivation method

is the only way to get at that.

Other people might not like that.

People say, well, you mean you put down the whole thing

of going into nature?

Isn't nature the great affirmation in all this?

And the answer is, yeah, but it works for me sort of without the drugs.

Plus, and this is just maybe my own weirdness, but I'll share it with you.

I have noticed that these things are incredibly disruptive

of the ordinary flow of Kazuistry.

Do you all know the concept of synchronicity?

Well, if you don't stay in your room with the lights out and the phone unplugged,

the damnedest things will happen to you.

I mean, you couldn't pay me to go into an American city even mildly loaded,

because adventures beckon.

Now, some people like that, you know.

Some people say, you know, let's take 500 mics and go meet weird people.

Uh-uh, not this cookie.

Yeah.

It's going to be a statement about it.

What I find happens there is that you create an experience

where you are taking in other people's dogma.

You know, you're bringing in something that's already done,

and I feel like the key of the experience is going to create something new,

and something you express yourself from the death,

which is why I don't have to pay the darkness on that.

But one thing that I did learn is that the high doses are very, very interesting.

It would take me way far beyond the small doses.

And I understand that you could go homeopathy and, um,

now from those in the works, that's intensive as my own medicine.

But in turn, it's psychedelic.

And if you take that into...

And my question is coming next, of course.

If you take that into a situation where you remove the homeopathic pattern

that you do in a homeopathy,

do you think that there could be a more potent experience through that solution?

Are you asking me do I think a homeopathic preparation of a psychedelic would be effective?

It would be homeopathically effective.

I wouldn't expect it to be experientially effective.

That, since what we view out here is a direct creation of what we are in form,

that's the current that I'm understanding.

Um, that if you do change it in the same manner that you change the homeopathic,

which is changing the experience,

so that you then create the world from the spirit of thought,

that it would be even more potent and even more immediate,

that you believe in something other well.

But don't you think that if that were true,

and since in a high dilution like that,

no molecular trace of the original compound remains,

that you have then just found the solution to the legalization conundrum?

One thing that I'm noticing in the field of civil medicine now,

is that we're getting a lot of political flack for having medicines out there,

but homeopathy is seemingly cruel and scade as it happens in years.

And so...

Because in a materialist world, it's assumed to be bogus.

Right. Yeah.

Well, this seems to me not an abstract proposition at all.

Let the best homeopaths succuss the strongest hallucinogens and set them out,

and let's give it a whirl.

Over on this side. Yeah.

This question may be embarrassing if you answer, but...

Oh, I can hardly wait.

Why are you in jail?

Ah, why am I not in jail?

Hmm.

Well, that's an interesting question.

Um...

And I...

Number one, I don't know.

Here's what I've come up with.

Uh...

Notice that I use big words.

I don't boil...

I don't try to boil it down to a shoutable slogan.

Like, turn on, tune in, drop out.

Uh-uh.

That, that...

Then they come.

They come.

Uh...

So that's one possibility.

That simply, if you are defined in their eyes as an intellectual,

then they automatically put you in the harmless category and send resources elsewhere.

That's one possibility.

Now, the other possibility is slightly more disturbing.

But in the interest of thoroughness, let me raise it.

Uh...

Perhaps I'm sanctioned.

Perhaps they decided,

We don't really understand what this stuff is.

And we can't have a mass movement.

Let one guy just kind of keep the pilot light on in case we ever change our minds about this.

He will have kept the pilot light on.

Uh...

And the other possibility, which is probably too naive, but in the interest, again, of exhaustive thoroughness,

maybe they just haven't noticed yet.

You know, Tim Leary, who's a friend of mine, would address 25,000 people at a throw.

My crowds are...

You know, a couple of times a year they creep over a thousand.

And I think the key is to keep it low-key.

And we don't want to, you know, dodge your stadium filled and...

Or anything like that.

Uh...

It's very good to atomize it and spread it through.

Now, the other thing is, uh...

You know, I advocate plant hallucinogens.

And people always say,

Well, why...

What about LSD?

I mean, didn't LSD change your life?

Didn't it change all our lives?

Why aren't you into LSD?

And the answer is certainly yes and yes.

The reason I'm not into LSD is a...

A...

Uh...

Not having to do with the effects of LSD, which I think are marvelous,

but with the fact that, uh...

A couple of enterprising second year biochemistry students

can produce six or seven million hits in a long weekend.

Six or seven million hits of an illegal drug?

Suddenly, this is the realm of governments and criminal syndicates

and revolutionary disruption of populations.

My brother and I wrote Psilocybin, the Magic Mushroom Growers Guide.

If you work like a dog for six months, maybe you can produce, uh...

two or three thousand hits.

So, that's the thing.

LSD had chemical qualities that made it terrifying to the government.

I mean, anybody with, uh...

fifty thousand dollars worth of backing and, uh...

uh...

two years of biochemistry could turn themselves into a major threat

to, uh... political stability in this country.

So they slammed that.

They're not going to put up with that.

The thing I love about the mushrooms is, you know,

if you're a dedicated mushroom grower,

you produce this piddling amount,

and if they come and drag you away because it is illegal,

all they get is you.

No syndicate collapses, no pyramid disappears.

So, it's invasive and low-key and slowly spreading.

The other thing is, mushrooms are, this is a cultural thing,

mushrooms are inherently non-threatening.

They're absurd.

You know, they're...

They're what we...

They're what we put decals of on serving trays,

and, uh... bath towels bear mushrooms on them.

It's a kind of silly thing.

And, uh...

And so, I think that they don't really understand

what a powerful, hallucinogen this is.

Well, that's enough on why I'm not in the can.

This woman.

Yeah.

The, uh...

The evolutionary process and how it was preserved by the absence of the mushrooms,

so do you think that it would be a more creative and beneficial process

if we worked on evolving our minds without using an external drug?

What happens if the government does come in and they decide to completely light it up?

Absolutely, if we could do it.

I mean, I'm not yet convinced.

See?

I mean, you've got your gurus.

But if you ever get close to any of these people in these guru scenes,

close enough where you can just say to them,

Look.

Level with me.

Is this stuff as good as five grams in silent darkness?

And they say, huh?

Are you serious?

Uh...

The other possibility is technology.

On two fronts.

Mind machines.

The problem with mind machines is, you know,

you have to smoke a bomber to put up with it more than ten minutes.

I mean, you quickly satisfy yourself that this can't possibly be it,

because it is light, but it is contentless.

While the psychedelic experience is all content.

The other possibility, and I've put in some time in this beat,

is virtual reality.

And I have more hope for virtual reality,

because virtual reality is a technology for showing,

that would allow us to show each other the inside of our heads,

our dreams, our visions.

And I think that sufficiently perfected,

it might have the consequences of these psychedelics.

The problem is, it carries a huge amount of negative freight.

You know that it's not going to be a tool for us to show each other the inside of our minds.

It's going to be a tool to sell us crap that we don't want.

It's going to be a tool for yet more realistic, vicarious and gratuitous violence.

It's going to be a tool for more pornographic degradation of women.

So, it seems to me, while it holds out the possibility of a technically driven psychedelic,

it has a lot of negative freight.

I agree with your premise, but I'm driven by a tremendous sense of urgency.

I mean, why try to create a technical alternative to psilocybin,

when you've got psilocybin?

Like, I think that people should use mushrooms as a step.

And once you get there, you try and you keep going without that tool.

I mean, because what we want, I mean, we want to transcend this plane.

We want to be on a higher plane, a higher state of awareness.

You're not going to get to that plane ultimately if you have to keep coming back into the plane

to get the stuff, to get out of the plane again.

Well, how about this?

Maybe there's something wrong with that metaphor,

because notice it has to do with planes and transitions.

It's an inherently dualist metaphor.

This concludes tape one.

Our program continues with tape two.

How about this?

Maybe there's something wrong with that metaphor,

because notice it has to do with planes and transitions.

It's an inherently dualist metaphor.

How about if we say there is no inside and outside.

There is no with or without.

You just use what you've got.

Whatever works should be used.

I spent time in India and visited all these people and so forth and so on.

And I just became convinced that unless you were predisposed to believe in this stuff,

that it would never carry you where you wanted it to.

And one thing about psychedelics, you don't have to be predisposed.

It doesn't work for those who believe it works.

It works for those who think it doesn't work.

Then one last point and then we'll go on.

There's a story, maybe some of you know this story,

of a man who lived by the side of a river.

And he wanted to cross the river.

So he practiced a siddhi of levitation so that he could walk across the water.

And it took him 40 years to perfect this siddhi.

And finally he could cross the river.

And Buddha was preaching in the neighborhood.

And the guy came to him and he said,

Master, look what I've achieved.

I can walk on the water to cross the river.

And Buddha said,

Yeah, but the ferry costs a nickel.

And that's the thing.

I think we're not going to be able to replace this tool

without wasting so much time in the act of it.

replacing it that armageddon will catch up with us i think we have to humble ourselves so thoroughly

that you have to admit that you can't get where you want to go unless you form a partnership with

somebody whose idea of a good time is growing in a cow pie and if you're willing to partner up with

this humble humble member of the ecosystem then you and it can fly to glory have added

yeah i wouldn't recommend especially in the late stages of pregnancy doing anything that is going to

wildly perturb you and you know lsd was discovered in the act of trying to produce better drugs to

induce labor so that's excellent advice honor the fetus uh yeah as a biologist yeah

well the true and honest answer is how the hell can you find out when they won't let you do research

it's totally insidious we don't know we don't know because they will not allow uh the the

research to be done this is one of the reasons why i say that you should stick with uh shamanically

sanctioned plants because we know for instance that people have been taking psilocybin in the

sierra mazateca of central mexico for millennia they don't show blindness tumors miscarriage madness

cataracts whatever that's your human data for that but you go to let's talk for a minute about something like ketamine

nobody knows nobody has any data mdma seems to be tremendously effective in facilitating interpersonal

stuff that's a psychological issue chemically what kind of data do we have you know six years worth of

data gathered under duress so uh to be safe stick with the things that are sanctioned by human use

and then uh in some more enlightened future we will explore these synthetics and find out just what

the parameters are yeah finish up

no i'm not saying that i'm saying take things which have been sanctioned by human usage i mean how about

a plant like strychnos nox vomica i mean you're dead in a minute and a half and it's a beautiful

wonderful plant why did it kill you well because it's jammed with strychnine no it's nothing about uh

it's being a plant it's about having a repeated history of human usage that's what sanctifies it

yeah the lady in magenta

this is what i love to try to see the woman sitting right here these are such a position that many

times in my own search of continents i've wanted to uh not have to depend on the external catalyst to

catalyze my broken consequence but i propose that you think about one thing that is um i've spent

a lot of plants for the last 23 years planting another thing and what i noticed is that there is a

particular um co-evalidation that happens between a plant and a human and so what i i sent

dinner for granted at one point that the mushrooms are going to tabloid the same kind of consciousness

that they always have but not only do the biological climatic situations determine what is going to happen

that mushroom but i think that all species are changing consciousness at the same time so what

the generations of mushrooms might have different needs years ago when i was 15 years old that whole

species and the whole might be prepared to teach an entirely different more evolved lesson at this

point and so i'm just trying to talk a little that's really an interesting point i mean i i it never

occurred to me but somebody brought it up to me they said have you noticed that the trips are changing

and once you do ask yourself this question it does seem to be so and i don't know whether that what

i mean that's a deep assertion i'm not sure exactly what's going on there for instance this goddess

thing i don't think people gave the goddess a thought in the early 1970s late 1960s now

people have you know some of the least likely people report intense encounters with the goddess so is it

amplifying the general mindset of the society and so there's more goddess stuff there or i don't

really know it's a very interesting question there are more questions than answers i mean this is

definitely wide open stuff yeah yeah

that's our sense of health but you suggest the use of psychedelics of suicide as an antidote to that but i

have trouble uh seeing a cognitive-sex relationship as far as what our youth or moral-wise repute might lead to in terms of

we're trying to restore the uh relationship of ego to the other components of the psyche that existed as

recently as 12 000 years ago the ego has become a deadly growth in the historical societies exacerbated by the

phonetic alphabet monotheism modern science this is like you're getting sicker and sicker and sicker as

you lay these things on and so the idea is that if we could restore the original uh diminished role

of the ego that it had for that period however long it was that we could begin to solve our problems

because the problems which face us put very simply are going to demand sacrifice

and sacrifice is what the ego doesn't want to hear about and when you go to somebody and say look to save

this planet we're going to have to redistribute income radically that means everybody in this room

is going to have less we're going to have to honor a whole bunch of uh cultural positions that we

previously just were going to bulldoze over and so forth and so on so it's uh it's the diminishing

of ego uh by any means necessary that lies to getting any grip on our problems i mean if we continue as we

are i think we have probably less than 30 years before life is irreconcilably screwed up you know nobody

believes that the future is uh rosy and wonderful i mean if you go to the people at the world bank and the imf

and these people who are straight you know suits all of them they have a set of curves which would stand

your hair on end when they propagate the curve of population the curve of toxification of the

environment the curve related to the ozone hole disappear you see you know it's finished in sometime

in the next 50 years they don't talk about this because they don't want to panic the vast numbers of

people who just go to work and raise their kids and pray somebody smarter is doing something about all

this but they don't believe there is any kind of normal future and i don't either i think we're going

to that it's business as usual is not on the menu folks we're either going to go into a era of immense

resource scarcity regimentation governmental interference in our lives tremendous propagandistic efforts to

make us do one thing or another or we're going to pull the plug on scientism and its stooges and the

institutions which feed us feed it in capitalism is an interesting problem more easily discussed now that

communism is out of the picture capitalism is as anti-human a philosophy as you can possibly conceive

because at this very moment we should be consuming less manufacturing less selling less transporting

less and what's the battle cry free trade everywhere what does free trade mean it means my right to come

to your country and sell the most outlandish junk you've ever seen and you will have no right to turn

it away because in the name of free trade crapola has to go everywhere uh it's it's really see they try to tell

you that that capitalism and democracy are not at variance actually the whole marxist leninist socialist thing

was a side dish the real life and death struggle is between capitalism and democracy democracy says

everybody has an innate worth that must be honored capitalism says those who die with the most

toys win you cannot reconcile these two things and nobody wants to talk about this we're still having

the party over the fall of communism but you know you go to the soviet union or the former areas of the

soviet union and you see that what it was was it was a deep freeze for traditional culture

in kyrgyzia and turkministan people are basically camel husbandry is what's going on

now with communism on the rocks mcdonald's will be there in five years and kmart will be

following close behind so i think we're coming to a great crisis of fundamental uh our relation to our

own fundamental institutions i'm not anti-capitalist i think capitalism needs to sever its uh connection to

materialism this is again why virtual reality is interesting you sell things made of light

not made of beryllium metal brass steel and wood but light we've got all the light

we need but we have to stop making things out of stuff or we're not going to be around to tell the

tail

i don't disagree with but your model has been that everybody in the culture participated in this and

were able to shift their values simultaneously to cooperate are you suggesting is that the necessary outcome

no i think that you know revolutions are made by percentages uh if 15 or 20 percent changed then the

example would spread you see we are not uh psilocybin is the easy way to awaken you know take a take a

psychedelic plant and have an experience and get your act together but the future is full of sledgehammers

it's not going we're not going to it's not going to end with the whimper it's going to end with a

series of thuds and bangs it could begin almost any time i mean we could get a hot muggy day in mexico

city this summer and a million people would die this thing in los angeles is a wake-up call it is going

to get uglier and more chaotic and more crazy there is going to be more starvation more fascism more

dictatorship it's unless we do something until we do something and it can how bad is it going to have to

get before people say you know we're doing something wrong you know people dance on the russians but you've got to admire

people who have the guts to say we did it entirely wrong 100 percent i mean can you imagine in this country

to being able to do say you know i mean it may be coming it may be coming this character from austin

is a peculiar item in the mix you know i mean i i for years had a fantasy speech which i always imagined

that i would somehow end up giving but but it's it's the speech where you say my fellow americans you have

been lied to screwed and abused by these two criminal parties for a hundred years and your only hope

is to overthrow the republicrats and create a decent world to live in well no republican can make that

speech no democrat can make that speech and be credible it has to be somebody who wasn't in bed with

either of those forces so i'm not at all pleased by who apparently will bear the mantle but on the other

hand if change is what we need then it's it's probably not going to be a candidate that you and i can

embrace it's going to be some oddball so you know we have to recognize it when we see it coming

yeah

no we don't know what it is

try to place it into a kind of spatial mode and it seems to me that it's uh it serves us better to

leave the question open and have the experience so that's the experience to tell us uh what it's

about and where we need to go yeah the great thing about it is it can talk i'd like to ask a question

about time waste zero good for you maybe i believe and um i was fascinated by it and i watched it

closely but as it got to the end of the tape when i started getting getting interested in what the

significance of a zero cropping was the tape stopped so i'd like to uh i mean it seems to be a

decreasing function of time which meant that a zero cropping had some singular significance but i i

really wonder what in real terms uh a zero cropping is kind of a zero well probably half at least in the

room haven't the faintest idea what this question is about i've stayed away from this because this is

the personalistic stuff where i've created a certain model of reality based on a new way of looking at

time and i don't want to go into it too much tonight but i want to suggest something to you tonight

which is that you know uh at the very beginning of this talk we talked about mutation and natural

selection and that's the darwin's insight was vast and deep and what he offered was an explanation for how

rainbow trout come to be monarch butterflies redwood trees herds of elephants so forth and so on what it

doesn't address is us we are the weird bird on the block i mean yes we're some kind of monkey but when you

stand us next to our nearest relative it's very very clear that it is not a very near relative it doesn't look

like us much certainly doesn't act like us what's the deal with human beings and i think that um you know

how all these religions these western religions have built in this idea of the end of the world and

they're always running around expecting the messiah or something and this to the scientific mind is just

the final proof of the pudding that these people have water between the ears uh because science just says

you know that's just ridiculous i mean uh but i wonder i wonder i mentioned just a minute ago these curves

that when you propagate them into the future everything leads to the unimaginable and it's all

within the next 50 years so uh i sort of think as human beings as uh analogous to iron filings on a piece of

paper and you shake these iron filings out of a salt shaker or something and there they lie randomly arranged

in heaps well then you come underneath the paper with a very powerful magnet and lo and behold these

little iron filings coherently arrange themselves into this beautiful double mustache pattern which i'm sure

you've all seen well i think that there is a an enormous punchline to the historical process that very very few

people suspect and that what history is it's what happens to an animal who falls under the influence

of a kind of strange attractor and that we are being pulled into a well of transformative intentionality

history history is not pushed by the kaazuistry of war migration uh imperial dynastic families and stuff like

that history is pulled toward an unimaginable something which is continuously trying to mirror itself in us

this is why these egyptians said you know i don't know what it is but i just think we should really build a big

simple building and say i i don't know why but i'm gonna enslave 50 000 people and do it and don't ask me why

and this is and you know this is the same force that reared chart cathedral this is the same force

that created the space shuttle we are in a relationship to an unseen something which we keep trying to image

with our mythologies our religions our technologies our epiphanies and i think that uh it's not so far away

that it does it isn't 10 000 years in the future it is sometime in the next 50 years and that this is what

history was for you see history is an incredibly peculiar and brief phenomenon i mean viewed from the

point of view of biology it's less time than it takes for a new species to emerge i mean let's call history

25 000 years you know in in frame one you're chipping flint in frame two you're hurling an instrument

toward alpha centura like that this happened well what's happening it's that mind itself is being

pulled out of this creature and it's being given hands and languages and post symbolic systems in order

to image the unspeakable the unspeakable i call it the transcendental object at the end of time

it casts and it's in another dimension it's in a kind of super space and what it casts into history

is the enormous shadow of its eminence this is what straight people call god this is what all these

visionaries are raving it's about it's that when you sink beneath the surface of ordinary causality and

mundane ho-hum-ism what you discover is this enormous transcendental object which you could call it you

know the sacred heart of jesus or the flying saucer or the philosopher's stone it's all of those things

and much much more it's not only stranger than you suppose it's stranger than you can suppose and it has

called us out of animal organization over a twenty five thousand year period we hang in the balance

and then we meet it and we're going to meet it that's the light at the end of that birth canal of

transcendence that i referred to and now i see that our song is sung our time is done thank you very very much

for turning in thank you

yeah we'll dig into this deep in the interim uh i think that it's worth taking the time for everybody to

just make a very brief uh very very brief statement about you don't have to say who you are if you don't

want to but you can say what you're hoping for or why you're here or what your agenda is just so that if

it turns out we're eighty percent shrinks or you know eighty percent ceramicists or something then we turn it

that way and those of you who are undercover please stay undercover so you don't alarm anybody uh especially

me right uh so why don't we just start uh and go across in some reasonably logical fashion which yeah

well that tells you what you're worth doesn't matter

oh true no let's not record it so people and also i had at one point

uh thought i would be an art historian that was one of my real obsessions so i had had enough art

history to be trained in you know recognizing the evolution of motifs how one artist passes on

techniques and conceits to his students or his imitators and all this art historical stuff and i also

had been very interested in jung and and none of this seemed to explain the content of the psychedelic

experience i would get in there and say well how come i'm not seeing a archetypes and b

things which somebody else you know i don't know dali ensor caravaggio bosch somebody should have seen

this stuff and gotten it down and there didn't seem to be uh a trail through the history of western art

of the presence of this dimension so then i thought wow is it that nobody knew about all this i mean bosh

would have given his right arm for a sheet of uh blotter i would think uh so so it became for me like a

mystery what where is this stuff coming from and what does it say about our humanness yeah

well there are there's a lot of ink been spilled over bosch because he is such a startlingly radical

painter in the context of his time many of his conceits were picked up after his life

peter bruegel the elder being the foremost exponent of it he may have been an alchemical guinea pig

who let's see uh fraser i think wrote a book called the millennium of hieronymus bosch in which he

wanted to suggest that maybe datura use that there was a cult called the brotherhood of the free spirit

which practiced ritual nudity which begins to sound something like the orgies we talked about last

night it was a cult of printers and it may be that the garden of earthly delights was actually painted

as an altarpiece for a congregation of the brotherhood of the free spirit but this is all pretty murky stuff

it's hard to get back to bosch uh uh he didn't leave any written records we have his birth is recorded in

the parish church where of the village where he was born we know he was born sometime around 1450 died in

1516 but the details are pretty murky well not to belabor bosch so what i thought we would be a reasonable way to do this this morning

is to take the most extreme psychedelic case and experience and describe it and talk about it a little

and then see what issues that raises because my experience with this stuff has led me to the conclusion that

in a way it's um to be thought of this other dimension is to be thought of like a mandala

and different psychedelic compounds and generously different kinds of yoga and different kinds of

techniques of techniques of all sorts land you in different parts of this mandala but that what

you're always trying to do is get to the center of the mandala and it's simply my bias my opinion but i think the

center of the mandala is probably the dmt experience for a number of reasons and so i thought it would be

interesting to talk about it this morning first let me talk about it physically dmt is an indole halucinogen a beta no no a

tryptamine and it's produced endogenously in the human brain this is very interesting very few psychedelic compounds

are produced in the human brain we don't know what dmt is doing there but it means essentially that we all are

subject to a rest on a technicality because we all are holding a schedule one drug it's sort of the ultimate

catch-22 where if all else fails they just say well you were holding anyway

the interesting thing about dm another interesting thing about it is that it's incredibly uh rapid in

the difference in its onset and in the offense

uh disappearance

uh...

the whole trip lasts about 15 minutes

this makes it a tremendous tool with which to challenge the critics of our position

because if somebody wants to rise up in righteous wrath and condemn psychedelics

then you say, well, you have tried them, haven't you?

and of course they never have, it's like scientific denunciations of astrology

I mean, scientists love to denounce astrology, but find one who can cast a natal horoscope

and I'll give you a hen's tooth, you know

so, DMT overcomes this objection

the entire experience lasts 15 minutes

so you say to the critic, you know, you're not going to experience it

and yet you're going to carry on a pogrom against it

you won't invest 15 minutes to checking out what this is about

you know, what kind of scientist are you?

so it has that social efficacy

now, the fact that it is the strongest of all hallucinogens

at least if there are ones stronger, please keep them away from me

I mean, I don't think anybody needs to get higher than that

I certainly don't

I mean, I've at times come out of those places and said

this stuff is illegal

you know, it breaks cosmic law

of course then Tim Leary told me that cosmic laws are only local ordinances anyway

so it didn't really matter

okay

well, good question

yes

it's the commonest of all hallucinogens in nature

it occurs in many grasses

Phalaris tuberosa, Phalaris arundinaceae

it occurs in a number of leguminous plants

probably the most spectacular being Anadonanthra peregrina

this huge tropical locust-like tree

from which the snuff called Neopa or Epina is made

that's a tough way to get your DMT, let me tell you

because there's so much cellulose and other crap and corruption in the mix

that you have to do like a tablespoon up each nostril

and the technique

the technique is you get a bamboo tube or a hollow tube about this long

and you pour in this tablespoon of this stuff

and then you squat down on your haunches

and you get a friend

and you put the tube up your nostril

and then the friend blows with the full force of his breath

blows this stuff into your head

well, you fall

it's like being hit in the face with a 2x4

I mean, it's like you think he kicked you

and you fall over backwards

you scream

you salivate

you get back up on your haunches

and by this time he has refilled the tube

for the other nostril

so, and then, after...

yopo, epina, nipa, it depends on the language group

and the waika, yanomami

it's also called vilka in the Karib language

and then, after 10 minutes or so

it slowly begins to form up in your head

but, you know, God, your sinuses are in stat for sure

and it's not very pleasant

and the other thing is

it never reaches the blinding transformative intensity

that you can achieve with the chemically pure compound

no, no

good point

if you orally ingest it

it will be destroyed in your guts

it won't work

the Amazon Indians have encountered this problem

and created a very sophisticated pharmacological strategy

for dealing with this

you've all heard of ayahuasca

ayahuasca is DMT from one plant

combined with another plant

which contains a chemical

which is called an MAO inhibitor

MAO is monoamine oxidase

and your gut is full of MAO

and its job is to take monoamines

small molecules

and oxidize them

into a harmless byproduct

usually indolecidic acid

which can be shunted to the bladder

well, when you take DMT orally

these monoamines just

I mean these monoamine oxidase compounds

just grab onto it and destroy it

but if you take an MAO inhibitor

with it

and harmine

which occurs in banisteriopsis copy

is an MAO inhibitor

then

lo and behold

it isn't destroyed in your gut

instead

it passes into the blood stream

it passes through the blood brain barrier

which is a very tight chemical filter

that keeps the brain from being exposed to toxic materials

but these drugs can cross that barrier

and then

what the ayahuasca experience really is

is a slow release DMT trip

that instead of taking five minutes

takes about two and a half hours

and if you really know your psychedelics

and your breath control techniques

on ayahuasca

over an hour or so

you can work yourself to a place

where you say

Lordy me

it looks just like a DMT flash

and it does

but you've had to do some hard climbing to get there

with DMT itself

once you push the start button

there's no stopping it

and

I think it's worth describing it

how many people have had this experience?

well so they can somewhat anchor it

it's very subjective obviously

but I will describe what happens to me

and then we can work out from there

one point that I want to make about these things

is that the great strength of the psychedelic possibility

is it's democratic

you know

it isn't that people of great spiritual advancement

attain these states

or

people who have studied under some lineage

it's truly available

to everyone

and when I had my DMT experiences

I realized

you know

either I am

incredibly special

which doesn't

there's no other evidence to support that

or

this is something which can happen to anyone

and that's the more interesting possibility

after all

if it can only happen to very very special people

then that lets

most people out

but if it's generally available

then it's

big

news

about the human condition

how did they find DMT in the human brain

hmm

interesting question

no I think he means how did they find that it was endogenously produced

well I think they were studying the group that did this was at the University of Louisiana

Christian and his group

and they were studying fast reactions in the brain

and for fast reactions you have to look at chemicals that can go through some kind of cycle of structural change and return to their zero point very very quickly

their original thought was that DMT mediated attention

I mean I'm talking to you right now

suppose there were a loud noise over here

we would all

immediately project our mind onto the source of the sound

they thought that that was a neurological function mediated by DMT

could be I'm not sure I suspect it has more to do with the chemistry of dreaming

once they discovered DMT and began to track it

they discovered that there was a circadian rhythm

means a daily rhythm

in its production in the human organism and that it reaches its greatest concentration in the brain

around 3.30 a.m. in most people

well this is when the deep dreaming and the high rem states are really chugging

and I suspect

I mean lucid dreamers may want to argue with this

but I suspect that every night

we go deeper places than we can ever speak of

that ordinary dreams are right on the surface of consciousness

big lucid dreams are an inch deeper

but I think we go a hundred feet down every night

into places where you cannot say anything about it

yeah

I wanted to ask you about

about Melatonia DMT

for people who can't get back in

I've heard you talk about

some of these creatures

let's make that perspiration

well it's

it's hard as hell to find DMT

and this is a puzzle

because if you look it up in a standard work on organic chemistry

it presents it as a trivial synthesis

much more simple than LSD

which it always presents as quite a difficult synthesis

but when you actually talk to workbench chemists

it's tricky to make DMT

it's especially tricky to carry out the final crystallization

so what you're usually offered in the underground is some kind of muck

which looks sort of like maple syrup half gone to sugar

I wouldn't get near that actually

it means they they botched their synthesis

what you're hoping for is a white powder

however in 30 years of chasing this all over the world

I've only seen it as a white powder a couple of times

usually the synthesis has fallen slightly below that standard

and what you get is a pale yellow powder

sometimes a pale rose

or pink powder

and then the real rough trade

is orange

and this is what you if you've seen it

this is probably what you've seen

it looks like orange moth balls

and it has the smell of indole

this very sharp smell

which if you're not a chemist

and you've never smelled indole

when you reach in your mind

for what is this like

you'll say

well it's sort of like moth balls

not quite

but it has that same sharp chemical

you know

and this is what you're gonna smoke

see

so a lot of people beef about that

and say

well you know

it's like smoking burning plastic

eh

masomenos

but it is a little bit like that

the other objection to DMT that has been around

since the sixties

is people say

it destroys brain cells

there's no evidence

for or against this

but I would submit to you

as the people who are neurophysiologists

can argue with this

if they disagree

but I think an excellent index

for the low toxicity of a drug

is how fast it clears your system

and DMT clears your system

in about fifteen minutes

if you take some compound drug or whatever

and forty-eight hours later

you're still taking hot baths

and you know wishing you could have a massage

and sitting staring at the wall

then this drug is really sticking to your ribs

it means that your metabolic pathways

have no way of dealing with it

they can't grab it here

they can't grab it there

and it takes a long time

to leave your system

an example of this

in the pseudo-psychedelic domain

would be ketamine

you know ketamine

the experience lasts about forty-five minutes

but forty-eight hours later

you can feel your knees suddenly go rubbery

or you can have

what are technically called fugue states

strange states of disconnectedness

from what's going on around you

this is not a very good advertisement

for a drug

here this woman and then you

how much would you take with that

in the same sort of experience

well less

because

if you smoke DMT

the dose is approximately fifty milligrams

which is like the size of a kitchen match head

if you combine it with an MAO inhibitor

and take it orally

you can probably get away with about thirty-five milligrams

of DMT

and

oh I don't know

a hundred milligrams of harmoline

now harmoline itself

is sometimes described as a psychedelic drug

I really think this is sort of misleading

you will have hallucinations if you take pure harmine

but only at doses approaching the toxic dose

many compounds will give you hallucinations

approaching the toxic dose

bee venom

rattlesnake venom

stuff like this

that doesn't mean it's a hallucinogenic drug

it means you're dying

and you should take steps to correct the situation

now

yes

you said that there was a short transit time

but how long does the memory of that experience last

because that would indicate to me that there is still a presence

and perhaps the homeopathic dose at that point

in the mind

in the brain

well

DMT

one of the things that has caused me to think

that it must

that it might have a role in the chemistry of dreaming

is that one of the frustrating things about it

is

you have this experience

without doubt

the most bizarre appalling peculiar experience you could possibly have

that's at minute two

at minute five

you're raving about it

at minute seven

you can't remember it

and so it's literally like gold running through your fingers

you say

this is the most amazing thing

this is

what am I talking about

and you know how you can have a very engaging complex dream

and the alarm goes off

and by the time your feet hit the floor

you're grasping for it

and it's just

it's literally melting before your eyes

that's a very DMT like presentation

the way a dream melts away

is the way a DMT trip

melts away

at the same speed

well

over time

and using tricks

you can drag a certain amount of data

out of it

and what I'll do is

I'll describe the DMT trip

and it's

it's a composite

of maybe forty

of these trips

and

then you can see what you make of it

so this is

I'll just describe it

I'll be the

the graduate student

you be the guy with the clipboard

you're saying to me

so what happened?

okay here's what happened

I took

one takes

most people can get off

in about three to four hits

now there's a trick to it

hash smokers are greatly favored in this endeavor

because you really need leather lungs for this

the great problem is that people will cough

or not be able to hold it in

you take two hits

in a situation where your clothes have been loosened

and you can just flop backward

when you need to

you take two hits

now many people miss the point

because after two hits

you feel completely peculiar

you feel as though your body is undergoing some strange kind of anesthesia

all the air has been pumped out of the room

this is the visual acuity thing I talked about last night

the colors jump up

the edges sharpen

it's

and at that point

people say

whoa

wow

it's really coming on strong

and then what you have to do

is you have to take one more enormous hit

and this separates the intrepid from the casual

believe me

because most people

and the facilitator doesn't want to lean on the person

you say

you know

damn it

take the third hit

and they say

no

I feel completely weird

I know you feel weird

but take the third hit

well if you can coax somebody into that

then what happens

is

you close your eyes

and you see the ordinary

warm brown

back

you know

closed eyelid scenario

and then

these colors begin racing

together

and it forms this

mandalic

floral

slowly

rotating

thing

which I call the chrysanthemum

this is a

place

in the trip

that you want to see

as you go by it

the chrysanthemum forms

and you watch it

for like

fifteen seconds

if it doesn't

give way

then you didn't do enough

you have to

do

more

one more hit

usually will do it

well then

what happens is

it like

physically propels you

through

this chrysanthemum

like thing

and you

there is a sound

like a

saran wrap

bread wrapper

being crumpled up

and thrown away

you know

that crackle

a friend of mine

says

this is your radio

infilecki

leaving through the

anterior fontanelle

at the top of your head

I don't know

what it is

but

it's

something is

being

yeah right

that's what it is

and

then

there's this

very

defined

sense

of bursting

through something

a membrane

and

on the other side

and

this is now

remember

my experience

on the other side

as

as you break through

there's a cheer

there's a

a

whole bunch

of

entities

waiting

on the other side

and they

you know that Pink Floyd song

the gnomes have learned a new way

a new way

to say

hooray

well

it's that place

it's those gnomes

and

you burst into this space

and

they're saying

how

wonderful

that you're here

you come

so rarely

we're so delighted

to see you

and

the

one of the things about the empty

that's really

puzzling

is

in a sense

it doesn't affect your mind

in other words

you don't

change

for instance

if you take ketamine

the first thing you notice

the very first thing you notice

before the trip hits

is

you notice that you no longer are anxious

about having taken ketamine

you

just sort of anxiety leaves you

that means it's affecting your mind

it's doing something to the judgmental machinery

DMT doesn't lay a hand

on the judgmental machinery

you

you break through into that space

exactly who you were before breaking through

and the usual reaction of most people

is something like

you know

you think

god

heart beat

normal

pulse

normal

everything's normal

yeah everything's normal

oh god

because these things

are there

and they're

hammering at you

and they come forward

they're like

jeweled

self-dribbling

basketballs

and there

there are many of them

and they come

pounding toward you

and they will stop in front of you

and vibrate

but then

they do a very disconcerting thing

which is they jump into your body

they jump into your body

and then they jump back out again

and

the whole thing is going on

in this very high speed

mode

where

you're being presented with thousands of details

per second

and you can't

get a hold

on

you say

you know

my god

what's happening

and these things are saying

don't

abandon yourself

to amazement

which is exactly

what you want to do

you just want to go nuts

with how crazy this is

they say

don't do that

pay attention

to what we're doing

well what are they doing

is they're making objects

with their voices

they're singing

structures

into existence

these things are

and what they will do

is they'll

come toward you

and then

and you have to understand

they don't have arms

so we're kind of downloading this

into a lower dimension

to even describe it

but what they do is

they offer things to you

say

look at this

and as your attention

goes toward

these objects

you realize

that what you're being shown

is

impossible

it's impossible

it's not simply

intricate

beautiful

and hard

to manufacture

it's impossible

to make these things

the nearest analogy

would be to

the

Fabergé

eggs

or something like that

but these things

are like

the toys

that are scattered

around the nursery

inside a UFO

or something

celestial toys

and

they are

the toys

themselves

appear to be

somehow alive

the toys

themselves

can

sing

other objects

into existence

so

what's happening

is there's just this

proliferation of

elf gifts

and the elf gifts

are moving around

singing

and the whole

thing

is directed toward

they're saying

do

what we are

doing

and they're very

insistent

they say

do it

and you feel

like a bubble

or

and now this is

subjective

I mean only

you know

five percent report this

but it happens to me

you feel like

some kind of

bubble

inside your

body

that's beginning to

move up

toward your mouth

and when it

comes out

it isn't

sound

it's vision

you begin

to discover

that you can

pump

stuff

out of your mouth

by singing

and they're urging

you to do this

they say

that's it

keep doing it

the whole thing

is like

you know

we're now at minute

four point five

with this stuff

and

you speak

in a kind of

glossolalia

there's a

spontaneous

outpouring

of syntax

unaccompanied

by what is

normally

called

meaning

it's sort of

you know

and

this is accompanied

by

a

modality

something

seen

and they're saying

yes

do it

and then

after a minute or so

of this

the whole thing

begins to collapse

in on itself

and they literally

begin to physically

the final shot

is

they actually

wave

goodbye

and they say

deja vu

which makes no sense

at all

if you analyze it

so then you come down

and

you're now at

minute

six to seven

and you come down

and it's like being

more loaded

than you've ever been

it's like about a

seven hundred mic

acid trip

but you embrace it

as

totally down

you say

I'm totally down

I mean

you look

you look like a termite

from our tourists

and the room

is

decorated in Amish

quilts

but I'm completely

back

and

then

over a minute

or a minute and a half

or so

the room

just comes right back

together

and

four minutes after that

that

some people can give no

account of it

whatsoever

they just say

you know

I don't know

it was the weirdest thing

that ever happened to me

and I

I can't remember it now

and

so

that's the basic run-through

now

a lot of stuff

is going on in there

first of all

you know

what are these things

things

and

why

do they want you to do

this strange

activity

and

what's so great about it

well

hmm

well first of all

who are these things

we can

like

you know

be good scientists

and make a list

of the possibilities

and then

see what seems more likely

they could be

a

disincarnate

race

of

hyper-dimensional

dwellers

who live

in some kind of

parallel

continuum

just over

some kind of

energy

barrier

and they're there

all the time

you do have

the feeling

that they're there

all the time

that it's ongoing

that you have just

cut into their

scene

so that's one possibility

another possibility

is

that behind all these

psychedelics

and especially DMT

that this is not a drug

at all

but it is

essentially

a

pay telephone

of some sort

to

aliens

good old

National Enquirer

type aliens

who

have

are using this

as a

communication

domain

say you know

we can't land

on the White House lawn

that would create

panic and hysteria

so let's

create a drug

which

inside the drug

we will be able

to deal

with people

and

I was hoping

that John Mack

who's an expert

on

UFO abductions

would be here

this weekend

I expected him

because I think

this whole

abduction thing

is not going to

be illuminated

until they start

giving abductees

DMT

and saying

so is this

what happened

to you

was it like this

or was it completely

different

well

so then there

those are the two

possibilities

that I sort of

dealt with

over the first

ten or fifteen years

of thinking about this

and then recently

just one second

so

possibly that

experience

that people are

interpreting

as an abduction

is just the height of

production of

endogenous DMT

within the brain

it could be

what puzzles me

is that the

abduction thing

is so non-psychedelic

it's so cut and dried

and all this

anal

examination

and stuff

with

There's nothing comparable to that, I'm happy to report to you, going on in the DMT thing.

But it may be, you see...

Well, I'd be interested in looking at the possibility that DMT, under normal or abnormal conditions,

could be sequestered in the human brain,

and then some unusual stimulus or stress could cause it to suddenly be dumped.

I want to share that there have been some migraines that I've had where,

you know, what you've just described about the colors coming in,

and the chastasm has happened, and it's been so fascinating.

I've completely forgotten about the pain about it.

I've just watched it for hours.

Well, until I guess I fell asleep, but it sort of struck a note.

And I was always under a lot of stress when I got the headache in the first place,

and there seemed to be a lot of brain things going on with the migraine in the first place.

So I'm wondering if that...

Yeah, that's an interesting possibility.

I also have migraines, or the kind called cluster headaches.

And, yes, a lot of the...

The nice thing about DMT is that it's painless,

but the sense of being split open,

and of the traveling scatomata, as they call these hallucinations that migraine people see,

it's related in some way.

Yeah, yeah.

May I bring science to those a little bit?

Sure.

It involves a principle that is characterized called phasing,

but its basis is sort of what happens on a subatomic level between matter and energy.

It turns out there's no fundamental particle.

At that level, you have this dance between matter and energy.

You know, energy coalesces into a bit of matter, which then becomes energy.

And you can look at this matter-energy relationship as having a wavelength of frequency associated with it.

Now, granted, this happens on a subatomic level,

but if there's something comparable going on on a level of which we seem to exist in the physical form,

and it seems to me that there has to be something akin to it,

that it may be that we as beings are sort of tuned to a frequency range,

you know, in this particular form,

and that somehow it's possible to shift that, or expand it,

so that what we're actually experiencing is a broader range of frequencies,

or sort of a shift in wavelength.

And I think some of these experiences can be at least explored, you know, in that context.

There's so much that we don't know.

Ain't that the truth.

The nature of this cosmos.

But we can take, and we can extrapolate some degree,

at least we can use this to take journeys and explore possibilities

from what we do know in science, for example,

what happens in a subatomic around a quantum level.

I mean, for God's sake, the language of these people is sounding more like sorcerers,

these days, than science.

And we do seem to at least believe, from the evidence that we see,

that there is this matter-energy interchange on a very fundamental level.

Now, if something akin to that is going on on a natural level,

there may be this principle of phasing in which we either shift our tuning,

or we expand it to include a larger spectrum.

Yeah, I think, no, I think that that's a very interesting avenue to pursue,

this thing about frequency.

Somebody told me, one of the great things about this job is you hear a lot of weird stories.

And somebody told me a story recently about, it didn't involve DMT, it involved LSD,

but this guy and a friend of his took a quite large dose of LSD, larger than they intended,

and they went to a party.

And they were so loaded by the time they got to the party that they realized they could not function as party-goers.

So they just moved into a corner and sat with their backs to the wall,

and watched this party rage in front of them.

And after about 20 minutes of sitting there, they both simultaneously noticed,

it was a dance party, noticed that the music was sounding really strange,

and everybody was moving very slowly.

And as they watched, the thing came to an absolute halt,

and people were just frozen, and there was absolute silence.

And at that point, the door at the other end of the room swung open,

and an elf entered the room and moved among all these frozen people,

and then left by the door he came in.

And they both saw this, and they said that they could tell that it was,

that the people in the room didn't know it happened,

because for them it occupied a microsecond.

But this thing that was, you know, in Carlos Castaneda,

who God knows is not the world's most reliable reporter on these things.

Nevertheless, there is this thing about stopping the world.

So, maybe it's something like that, that there is, as you suggest, a frequency phase.

Yeah.

This sort of leads into the third possibility having to do with the origin of these things.

And, in a sense, this is the hardest one to swallow.

But, in another sense, this is the most conservative, in some crazy notion of conservative,

the most conservative explanation.

Because, you know, because we have no evidence, other than the tabloids,

that this world is being visited by friendly visitors from Zenebulganubi, or Zeta Reticuli, or the Pleiades, or anywhere else.

I mean, to my mind, the evidence that this is happening is vanishingly small and totally underwhelming.

The other possibility, that there is some kind of parallel dimension in which these things exist, is also somewhat poorly supported.

If we're talking about something which thinks, something which can communicate, something which is intelligent,

then we should look to ourselves as the source of it.

Because we are the only intelligent, communicating things we know within a certain narrow definition of these things.

So that, it's occurred to me with greater and greater force, and largely prompted by giving DMT occasionally to Tibetans and Amazonian shamans,

and when you say to them, you know, to the shamans in the Amazon, when you say to them,

what is happening with this stuff, and what are those little things in there?

They say, oh, well, those are ancestor spirits. Didn't you know? Haven't you heard?

Shamanism is about doing healing through the intercession of ancestor spirits.

Say, hmm, ancestor spirits. Let's get this straight.

Dead people is what you're talking about, right? These are dead people.

And, you know, maybe because I was raised Catholic, I resisted this, like, grim death.

But I'm beginning to think that what you actually break into in that place is something that we might call an ecology of souls.

That, uh, is it possible to entertain the notion that at death you actually don't just become worm food,

but that something survives in some other dimension, and that it has this bizarre character to it,

and that this explains their peculiar affection for humanity, and their involvement somehow in our, uh, fate.

Well, this is, to me, fairly mind-bending as a possibility.

If what is awaiting us at the end of the 20th century is the erasure of the boundary between the living and the dead,

then we've all been too conservative in our projections of what is, uh, going on. Yeah?

Isn't that one of the aspects of the original?

Yes, that there will be some kind of erasure of, uh, the boundary between the two.

Well, once I had this idea, you know, uh, I mentioned my Jungian and art historical proclivities,

and so that means you always look back through tradition and folklore to try and find something analogous to this.

Well, there ain't much, but there is one area that seems suggestive to me,

and that is, as you all know, the Irish are a fairy-haunted race.

They're also an intoxication-obsessed race, at least in stereotype.

Well, it turns out that, uh, you probably all are familiar with the notion of purgatory.

Purgatory is the place where you have to spend a lot of time before you get to heaven,

if you're not bad enough to go to hell.

So you put in a few calculiocasms of eternity in purgatory, and then you get led into heaven.

Well, I had always assumed that this dogma, I don't know, I hadn't really thought about it,

I just sort of assumed it arose with early Christianity.

But when I began looking into this, I discovered that the idea of purgatory was invented by St. Patrick.

And it was invented specifically to convert the pagan Irish, because the pagan Irish believed in the land of Fae.

They believed there was this nearby dimension full of the souls of the dead surrounding us all the time,

and that certain people with the gift of second sight could see this.

So, Patrick just said to them,

No, no, that isn't it.

It's purgatory.

And was able to push that on them so successfully,

that a later church council adopted it as general dogma for the church to use in converting the pagan Slavs as well.

So, it's an idea of a nearby dimension, inhabited by disincarnate souls,

that is apparently very old, but very alien to our tradition.

Yes.

There is another notion that comes to gross over-signification, but it's kind of related,

and it has to do with the quantum wave function, which is really kind of a dual wave.

It has two parts to it.

One part, and they both have a temporal or time-related aspect to them.

One part, which is called the ordinary part of the wave,

can be seen as a wave propagating forward in time,

and the other half of the wave, which is called the complex conjugate,

can be seen as propagating backward in time from some past state,

from future state, emitting waves which at some point interact,

and produce what is perceived or experienced as the present state,

which is really a dynamic process in itself.

There is no absolute present, because as soon as you get out of your mouth, it's past.

But, the interesting thing is that what that implies is that what we experience in the present,

whatever they may be, is somehow related to some future state and some past state.

but it also means that neither future or past are fixed,

and that we can sort of align ourselves with different tracks or vectors.

You know, and a slightly different vector, a slightly askew,

may produce something totally different than what our ordinary perception is.

Well, yeah, this could be. I mean, I've always felt that what biology is,

is some weird kind of chemical strategy for amplifying quantum mechanical indeterminacy.

That, you know, macro-physical objects are not subject to quantum mechanical indeterminacy,

but organisms apparently are, especially thinking organisms.

We don't know. That's our perception. Our perception is that objects on a macro scale, large scale,

are not subject to quantum fluctuations.

But that's only because of this probability with it in some sense,

in that there's a most probable state.

And if we happen to exist in that, our perception is that it's more fixed,

that there is no indeterminacy. It obeys certain laws that are rather linear in nature.

But we really don't know.

What you're sort of saying is that natural laws only apply some of the time,

which gives them a curious status as laws in that case.

Well, that's sort of broadening the notion of relativity.

I mean, what happens in a black hole, for example? What is a singularity?

It simply means that the laws that normally apply in everyday experience no longer are relevant.

Well, one of the problems cosmology is meeting is that there are so many large black holes in the universe

that you come up with, you know, ten high six singularities.

That's a few more singularities than a good theory would tolerate, I would think.

I mean, what kind of theory is it that hands you back ten to the ninth singularities,

which are exceptions to the theory?

That's true, but a lot of that's based on assumptions that are stretches.

Ain't that the truth?

Again, it gets back to a psychedelic experience.

You know, it's this whole lower dimensional language slice thing that we seem to have to operate in

in order to describe an experience that just does not fit in that slice.

You know, we do our best to do it, you know, and sometimes it comes across being very crude and naive.

Sometimes we kind of get close to the mark, but it's difficult to know.

I mean, the whole notion of black hole singularities is just the present attempt at explaining some experience

that is beyond ordinary experience.

None of us have encountered a black hole directly.

That's true.

It seems to me one of the embarrassments of science is that the Big Bang begins with a singularity,

and so then you have this whole vast interlocking schema of rational explanation,

except that it begins with a hard swallow.

You're asked to believe that the entire cosmos of space and time sprang from a point

no larger than a cross-section of a gnat's eyelash.

Whatever, whatever else one could say about that theory,

I think you'd agree it's the limit case for credulity.

Absolutely.

I mean, if you believe that, try to think of something that you would throw up your hands and say,

well, I'm not buying that.

It absolutely, it's sort of like when you join the Catholic Church, you make a declaration of faith.

Well, when you join science, you sort of make this declaration of faith,

but I do believe that the universe sprang in a single instant from an incredibly tiny, hot, dense dot.

Unlikely, but who knows?

I think there's something else.

As you two were dialoguing a bit, I was getting this visualization.

You have to look at the pond of reality, so to speak, as not only being the visual of someone throwing a pebble

from the top of the pond and creating the ripple effect or the wave effect,

but also from the bubbles coming from below.

And to me, the deep space that you were talking about is the air inside the bubble coming from below.

And so the dimensional reality of that picture is not a linear time perspective.

It's something coming from all directions that is, again, a center of a mandala effect.

Well, this is why I say that the psychedelic experience is a boundary-dissolving experience,

because it takes away past, present, cause, effect.

All of these things disappear.

Now, remember, I said ayahuasca is a kind of slow-release DMT trip.

And one of the really interesting things going on with ayahuasca,

to my mind perhaps the most interesting thing,

is that the style in the Amazon of taking ayahuasca is people get together in a darkened hut at night,

and they take it and they sing.

But the songs, they're selling them at the table back there.

The songs, when there's a break in the singing and you hear the people discussing the songs,

they don't discuss them like music.

They discuss them like sculpture and painting.

And they say to the shaman,

I like the part with the grey bars and the blue speckling,

but when you brought in the pink in combination with the beige and white,

I thought it was too much.

You say, what kind of a discussion is this about a song?

You realize then, when you take ayahuasca, they see the songs.

And now this is really interesting to me,

because you remember in the DMT flash,

they wanted you to use your voice to make objects.

Well then, in the ayahuasca trance,

you use your voice to control these colored modalities.

And the whole thing is done that way.

Well, so then what it must mean is that the neurophysiology of ayahuasca

somehow allows for the ordinary signal processing,

which is being shunted into the audio pathway in the brain,

is instead being shunted into the optical pathway.

This is what's called a synesthesia.

These things have been fascinating for hundreds of years to people.

But the synesthesia means that, you know,

color sounds are seen.

Well, now, is this anything other than a neurophysiological curiosity?

Well, I maintain it is,

because I think that a language which could be seen

would be a kind of telepathic language.

If you've thought much about telepathy,

you might have naively assumed that telepathy is

you hearing me think.

That isn't what it is, I think.

Telepathy is you seeing what I mean.

And it's not something which happens dramatically.

It is a function of eloquence.

You know, first you have the speaker who is boring you to death.

Then you have the speaker who at least holds your attention.

Then you have the speaker of whom it is said,

she paints a picture.

It means we're moving toward poetry.

Well, it's possible to imagine a transformation of the neural processing of language.

It may be a behavioral possibility.

It may not even require a gene shift,

where then we would see what we each mean.

You know, there's this persistent idea,

promulgated by Robert Graves in The White Goddess among other people,

that there was once what he calls an ursprach,

a primal language,

so emotionally intense,

that to be in the presence of poetry declaimed in this language,

is to see the poetry.

And that this is what the lost poetics of the High Paleolithic were about.

And probably it was pharmacologically assisted,

that you could gather people in the presence of a great bard or singer,

and that person could then create telepathic modalities.

And that telepathic modality,

that richer, more unifying language,

was the thing which was suppressing the formation of ego.

The ego speaks and hears through sound.

The superego projects images and is perceived as images.

Now, it's very interesting, at least to me,

that in the pineal gland of ordinary human beings,

there is a compound called a deneroglomerotropine,

which, when analyzed in inorganic,

or just in the normal nomenclature of organic chemistry,

turns out to be a beta-carbolene,

closely related to harmoline.

Well, is it possible that we are as close as a one gene mutation away

from a shift that would switch our processing of audio input into the visual field,

and that then we would cross over into a realm of beheld understanding,

and that this is the evolutionary leap that we're trying to make,

that it's in the body, not in the technology.

In the body, there is actually going to be a minor, a one gene click to another channel,

and then we will be able to see what we mean.

And I maintain that if you can see what somebody means,

you are that person.

Contrast it to ordinary communication.

Ordinary communication is achieved through small mouth noises.

As primates, we have a throat and voice box arrangement

that allows us to produce small mouth noises for hours, if necessary.

I'm the living proof of it.

But it's not a very efficient mode of communication,

because what happens is I have a thought.

I look in a culturally sanctioned dictionary which I have copied into my head.

I translate the thought into an acoustical signal using my mouth,

which moves across space, which enters your ears.

You rush to your interior dictionary,

and you construct my meaning out of your dictionary.

Now, notice that this process rests on a very shaky assumption.

It rests on the assumption that your dictionary and my dictionary

were published by the same folks in the same year.

If your dictionary is different from mine,

you will not correctly reconstruct my meaning,

and we will have what we call misunderstanding.

Notice how among us, as a species, one of the most bring-down things you can say to somebody is,

would you please explain to me what I just said?

Because it means, oh boy, here comes trouble.

Now you're going to find out that, you know, people didn't understand you,

they horribly misunderstood, and the communication is very provisional.

The amount of noise in the circuit is huge.

Well, then contrast this to, I utter something,

and it condenses as a sculpture in the air,

and you and I then become its observers.

And we rotate this syntactical object, and we look at it,

we regard it from many points of view.

This is not ambiguous, or it's certainly considerably less ambiguous

than this reconstruction from interiorized dictionaries.

So perhaps what all this is about is evolutionary pressure on our languages

to become visual, and therefore to become more unified and less riddled with noise,

which creates misunderstanding, which creates horrible social realities.

Yeah?

I'm just in the middle of reading a book called The Colorado University.

Oh, Michael Talbot's book.

Uh-huh.

He was talking about visual experiences being about 50% based on meaning and addition internally

to, you know, what's going to be visual.

So it sounds like you still have a transmission problem in translation.

Yes, although what you could do with a visible language would be very challenging.

I mean, we could do many things with it.

It's not an outlandish, it's not a completely outlandish idea.

In nature it occurs.

There's a wonderful phenomenon in nature which is worth talking about

to sort of legitimate such a far out notion,

which is, as you all probably know, octopi can change color.

This is one of those things you learn on those science specials on TV.

This concludes tape two.

Our program continues with tape three.

Octopi can change color.

Well, most people, I think, assume that they do this for camouflage.

That would be a reasonable assumption.

They don't do it for camouflage.

Let's talk about octopi for just a moment.

First of all, they're mollusks.

They divided from our evolutionary lines 700 million years ago.

They're related to escargot.

They have no backbone, for crying out loud.

They're not even vertebrates.

But what is always said in biology classes about octopi

is that they're a wonderful example of parallel evolution

because their optical system is very much like a mammalian optical system.

Well, why is this?

Well, it's because they evolved in an environment, the reef environment,

that is an environment as dense with signals as a rain forest is.

And an octopus is soft-bodied.

It can not only change color, but it can also change its surface

from smooth and rubbery to bumpy, pimply, rugose, ribbed, so forth and so on.

And also, because it is soft-bodied and in an aqueous environment,

it can fold and unfold and reveal and conceal parts of its body very, very quickly.

Well, all of these behaviors and physiological characteristics go together

to make the octopus an excellent visual communicator.

And the color changes, the blushes, traveling dots and bars that these creatures manifest

and the squids do it too, are language.

And if you're interested in this, there's a wonderful book by a guy named Monaghan called

Communication and Non-Communication Among the Cephalopoidea.

And he goes as far as creating a grammar for this stuff.

Well, so then, in a way, you know, if you pull back from the mundane assumptions about this,

what's happening is the octopus wears its mind on its skin.

It is dressed in its mental state.

One octopus encountering another can tell its mood, how recently it's eaten,

how recently it's had sex, whether it's ovulating,

all by looking.

And so the only way an octopus can have a private thought

is by squirting ink into the water and then hiding inside it.

This is essentially, it's correction fluid for misspoken octopi, you see.

So, in a sense, this is what I think we are being beckoned toward,

that we want to clothe ourselves in language.

We do it in a, to a degree, in a funny way.

I mean, if you want to think about virtual reality, this is a virtual reality.

All this stuff, these fixtures, the architecture, the infrastructure, the road, these are ideas.

It was an idea.

And it has then been summoned into matter by the allotment of funds, the spending.

The

of money, the hiring of craftsmen, so forth and so on. Our whole civilization is an excreted

set of interlocking ideas, agreements. We're like coral animals and we somewhere, you know,

there's this naked pulpy creature but, you know, clothed in denim, clothed in a harder

shell produced by Mercedes or Chevrolet, moving around inside a larger environment produced

by the state of Colorado and so forth and so on. So I think octopi offer an excellent

metaphoric example of what naked-mindedness would be. And some of these octopi, as I said,

they evolved in the coastal reef domain, but that's a very competitive domain. Everybody

in the ocean wants to be there because that's where the sunlight and the food is. So if you're

smart, you'll try and evolve into a more hostile niche. And some of these octopi have become

what are called benthic or abyssal. It means they exist in the parts of the ocean where light

never reaches. Yes. And they have retained this communication ability by switching over to interiorly generated

phosphorescence. So there are species of octopi which actually are studded with organs that have the equivalent

of eyelids over them, but they're flasher lights. So when you descend into the benthic depths of the ocean, you enter a domain

where all one octopus ever sees of another octopus is its linguistic productivity, because that's interior generated light that can be seen.

And I think, you know, if you want to set the compass of virtual reality towards something worth writing home about, then producing an

octopus environment so that we could experience this kind of thing would be a kind of proto-telepathic playpen of some sort.

Yeah?

Uh-huh. So you think that subterfuge answers here, too.

Yeah, that was my real question. My real question is, last night when you were discussing the role of psychedelics in

human evolution, and you were drawn by a strictly Darwinian theory. Right.

I assume since you're searching for people shelter in various endeavors that you've entertained other theories.

And if so, have you considered the possibility that psychedelics may, uh,

the evolution of human kind is very direct, like, in other words, uh, direct, have a direct attack on DNA, so that, you know,

you know, disflexion, uh, .

Well...

You want me to...

It's a central dogma of biology, that information can get out of the internet, but can't get back in directly.

In other words, it can only be, uh, selected for over a period of generations.

Have you ever played around this period of time?

Yeah, well...

Have you ever made some curiosities from that evolution there?

Well, you raise a lot of issues.

First of all, since the discovery of retroviruses, of which the HIV virus is one,

we now know that it is not always information transcripted from DNA to RNA to protein.

The retroviruses transcript from RNA to DNA.

Uh, so the central dogma, which is that the genome is not being altered by, uh, by the environment, is, uh, is sort of shaky at this point.

Uh, you bring up a very interesting point, which has never, to my mind, been really thrashed out in orthodox science,

which is, if you had a bunch of these psychedelic molecules, and we could raise them up to the size of loaves of bread, or something like that,

what you would notice about them is they're all what are called by chemists planar, meaning they tend to be flat.

They're not lumpy, they're flat.

Well, if you look at DMT, or harmine, uh, harmine is built off, uh, a, uh, pentexel group, and with two, uh, benzene rings off of it.

It is the perfect size to slip in between two nucleotides in DNA.

It can actually bond into the DNA there.

Now, many drugs do this.

Uh, this is called, these drugs are called dimers.

The usual problem with a dimer that will intercalate, this is the other term, intercalate, means slide between the rungs of the DNA,

is it usually deforms the DNA.

It, like, passes, uh, a bulge along it.

And then, uh, transcription is difficult.

But these indole hallucinogens can dimer with DNA without disrupting its structural integrity.

This is why I believe that this is the source of the visions.

That, and, you know, orthodox biologists just roll their eyes at this idea and say,

well, now you've made a very common error here.

You've confused genetic information with information.

Don't you understand that genetic information is just a sequence of codons coding for protein?

And, uh, you know, that has no relationship to your memory of Aunt Minnie's face.

However, by being so, uh, unwielding on that point, they create a huge problem in, uh, in, uh, for their brothers and sisters across the hall who are trying to understand memory.

Because the, the molecular theory of memory is a nightmare.

Here's the problem.

Every molecule in your body is changed every five to seven years, depending on who you talk to.

Uh, except neurons.

The nerves are generally the nerves you're born with or the nerves you die with.

But it's an absolute, uh, it's an absolute, uh, no-no to suggest that memory is lodged in the neurons.

Well, but if Aunt Minnie died forty-five years ago, and you can still remember the dear woman's face when she used to walk you in the park,

then every molecule of your body has been swapped out five times since she quit the plane.

How can you have this memory of Aunt Minnie?

If, and then they say, well, um, well, they don't say, actually, they just throw up their hands.

Now, the, to the people who say DNA can't store any kind of information other than, uh, codon sequences for proteins,

they have to explain why then ninety percent of the genome seems devoted to junk sequencing

that does not produce protein, that does in fact not do anything that anybody knows about.

It seems to me that we might as well just take the path of least resistance and say,

if the neurons are the only part of the body that persists throughout life,

if the memories persist throughout life, then you've got two choices.

Either the memories are in the neurons, or the memories were never stored in the body in the first place.

And if you believe that, well then the obligation to explain just where they were stored is hard upon you,

and the mechanism for retrieving them.

So, I think molecular biology, by being so reductionist, has made certain problems in, in neurophysiology

and higher cortical functioning almost insoluble.

Uh, you know, for years and years it was held that the, this was another one of these central dogmas of biology,

it was held that, uh, information could move from the nucleus of the neuron to the synapse,

but that there was no transport mechanism for moving any molecular species from the synapse back to the nucleus.

So, consequently, they said learning cannot take place in the nucleus of the neuron

because the, the materials for learning, which would be present in the synapse,

modifications through experience, there's no transport system.

Oh, and this was dogma until ten years ago.

Well then, they discovered what's called axioplasmic transport,

and they, by putting labeled compounds in the synapse,

they were able to locate these labeled compounds later, uh, complexed with nuclear material in the neuron,

proving to the most die-hard materialist that synaptic material was, in fact, moving backward to the neuron.

So, I think that, uh, you know, there's much that isn't understood about how all this, uh, works.

Uh, something worth pointing out, you know, science seeks closure and explanation, explanatory closure.

My brother, one time, made a little aphorism, which I think says it all on this subject.

He said to me once, actually on a mushroom trip, he said,

Have you ever noticed how, as the sphere of understanding grows ever larger,

necessarily the surface area of ignorance gets ever bigger?

Seems perfectly clear.

You know, a simple-minded way of saying that is,

the bigger you build the bonfire, the more darkness you will reveal.

Yeah.

And also, any progress really comes from, um, outside the context of the paradigm

Yes, well, some of you have probably read Thomas Kuhn's book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,

where he shows, you know, that it's never the way they tell it afterwards.

The after-telling is always about the primary insight, the careful experiment, the gathering of data, the correlation.

Actually, it doesn't work like that at all.

It's entirely, uh, psychic, piecemeal, ruled by synchronicity.

One of the most interesting things, I'll tell this story and then we can go to lunch,

because I think, you know, science has great pretensions about itself.

I mean, it basically regards itself as a meta-theory.

It regards itself as capable of passing judgment on all other theories.

They are supposed to submit themselves to science to be told whether they're real or not.

A religion.

Yeah, like a religion.

Well, how many people know, uh, the, you know, modern science was founded by Rene Descartes

in, uh, in the, uh, early 17th century.

What were the circumstances under which Descartes founded modern science?

Rene Descartes was a 19-year-old, uh, basically ne'er-do-well.

And he decided that he would go wenching and soldiering across Europe,

which was a thing that young men of certain class did at that time.

And so he joined a Habsburg army that was laying siege to Prague in the, in the summer of 1619.

And after they had taken care of the problem there in Prague,

this Habsburg army began to retreat across southern Germany.

And in the, on the evening of, uh, now there's a lot of arm wrestling about this,

that let's just say the 17th of August, 1619,

this army made camp near the little town of Ulm in southern Germany,

which synchronicity freaks pay attention.

Ulm will later be the birthplace of Albert Einstein.

Worth noting.

But that night Descartes, in the barracks, uh, had a dream.

And an angel appeared to him.

And the angel said, uh, the conquest of nature is to be achieved through number and measurement.

And he was thunderstruck.

He took that angelic revelation and turned it into modern science.

Modern science was founded by an angel.

You know, they don't tell you this at MIT.

Uh, you know, it's, it's astonishing, uh, how, how, uh, things which claim roots in rationalism

are actually among some of the most irrational productions, uh, in the historical continuum.

It's, it appears that our development, our history, our histories,

have always been, uh, created at the promptings of invisible voices.

I mean, Socrates, who is at the very center of what's called thinking,

by Western civilization,

Socrates had a demon.

D-E-A-M-O-N.

It was a little voice.

It was his crap detector.

It told him the difference between profound philosophical thinking and bullpucky.

And, uh, so, you know, the edifice of Western thinking, built on Platonism,

owes its debt to an invisible agency speaking from hyperspace.

So does modern science a la Descartes.

How much more of this?

I mean, we don't care if artists talk to angels because we've,

our definition of them is that they're screwballs.

Uh, but to, uh, uh, uh, to believe that, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, uh, enterprise-like modern science

has to trace its way back to the same ecstatic roots

is, i think, uh, uh, very suggestive

that the world is stranger than we can suppose

and that we need to open these channels of communication

to these invisible worlds. Probably the next great paradigm shift will be

enunciated by a mushroom, an angel,

an elf, an alien, what have you.

Yeah?

Repetition, yeah.

The first few times I did it I couldn't get any grip at all on it,

and by talking a lot and trying to describe it,

you slowly, slowly build up a map.

So, about the Logos.

The Logos is this phenomenon that was sort of the centerpiece

of Greco-Hellenic spirituality.

What it is, is it's a voice in the head

that people strove to attain for a thousand years.

This was the sine qua non of intellectual accomplishment in the Greco-Roman world.

And the Logos told you the right way to live.

And this is sort of what you get with psilocybin.

You get a voice that can confound you with the depth and brilliance of its answers.

And one of the great, you know, one of the puzzles of trying to understand Greco-Hellenic spirituality

is what were they talking about?

And if this ever was a general phenomenon, then what happened to it?

Why do we not experience this?

This is not well understood.

I mean, the rational scholars who have created our vision of Greece

basically just don't even want to talk about this.

They would rather gloss over it.

You know, one of the things that sort of relates to all this is

I think human beings are a lot more malleable

than we tend to imagine.

In other words, we imagine that people in the distant past

or in Greece or somewhere were just like us

except they were living in a different time and place.

There's no way to find out, of course, because they're all dead.

But there are certain episodes in the evolution of Western culture

that suggest that people may be much more plastic than we ordinarily suppose.

First example would be,

how can it be that in the middle 1500s perspective was discovered?

I mean, how do you discover perspective?

This is very hard, I think, for modern people to understand

because it's a given for us.

I mean, we see in perspective.

We accept it as a quality of the world

rather than a cultural artifact put in place at a certain moment.

But in fact, during the Renaissance, only the most inspired people could paint in perspective on the natch.

Most people, they had complex devices called perspectographs

that would project over the scene a receding grid

and then people would essentially fill in the lines.

Now, another example of this kind of thing that's not so well known

but that is an example that Marshall McLuhan makes a lot of

is Saint Augustine, the great father of the Christian Church.

He had a reputation for being a very holy man.

And the accounts of his contemporaries say that the way people would satisfy themselves

that Saint Augustine had a pipeline to God

is they would bring him scripture, the Bible essentially

and open it in front of him and let him look at it

and then they would close the book and question him about what was there

and he could always tell them.

And they were amazed.

As far as we can tell, Saint Augustine was the only man in Europe

who could read silently.

Nobody else could do it.

It was regarded as a miracle.

Now, we all read silently

and there may be a few unfortunate individuals among us

who move their lips while they read

that's the only vestigital trace we have of this previous cultural mode

where everyone to read meant to read aloud.

No one could conceive of any other way of doing it.

The Logos seems to me a kind of similar thing.

It was a mental behavior function

which for reasons which are probably complex and unknowable

slipped out of reach.

That's why it seems to me these psychedelics are very close

to being able to modify our behaviors along these kinds of lines

because there are a number of behavioral and experiential possibilities

that we suppress.

I mean, I think it's just as an example of how little we know about what's going on.

Look at the Gaffen...

Don't look at it, but conceive of the Gaffenberg spot.

The G spot.

Now, we all know what this is.

Clearly, people were looking for it for a long, long time.

How come they only discovered it twelve years ago?

I mean, if something that major can be overlooked,

then it's hard to imagine what might have been overlooked.

I mean, that's pretty central into the project of being a human being.

And apparently it was unknown until very, very recently.

So, yes, the Logos was probably what I call the Gaian mind.

And that at a certain point in cultural development, people just became so chuckle-headed

that the Gaian mind just said, what the hell with this?

And then the voice fell silent.

It fell silent right at the... around the time of the birth of Christ.

Right at the time of the G... of the shift of the zodiacal aeon, you know.

How it works with psilocybin?

Well, I mean, I take... when I take psilocybin, I take it on an empty stomach.

I don't fast or anything like that.

I just don't eat for six hours.

I don't call that fasting.

And then I take it in silent darkness.

That's, number one, very important.

The next thing is, weigh the dose.

You must weigh the dose, because five grams is what you want.

And I've had over and over the experience of showing somebody what five grams is,

and they're appalled.

And they say, my God, you can't be serious.

I mean, I take a fifth that much, a fourth that much.

Yeah, well, that's the problem.

That's why you don't have elves in the attic and bats in the belfry like I do, you know.

And so then you take it, and I take it on an empty stomach, and a lot of people don't like the taste.

I don't really understand that.

I just chew them up.

I sit with them, and I chew them up.

And then, huh?

Dried.

None of this mixing in applesauce or any of that malarkey.

I mean, what's that about?

Oh, well, fresh, 60 grams, 60 grams, because there's more than a, you know, there's a huge water loss there.

And then it takes, people sometimes say it came on within five minutes, or it came on within ten minutes.

I don't know what that could possibly be about.

First of all, it defies pharmacodynamics, to imagine that it could come on that fast.

For me, it comes on almost always at the one hour and twenty minute mark.

I think it can come on sooner than that.

I think I'm fairly resistant to these things.

After I take it, I sit, I roll bombers, and I carry out what all good Catholics know as an examination of conscience.

This means you think about all the bombers that you're afraid are going to jump out at you as soon as you get loaded.

If you will carry out the examination of conscience, you'll be so bored with that by the time the compound actually hits,

that you usually don't have to pay any dues, because you've, you know, faced the fact that you're a jerk fifty times in the preceding hours.

So, and then, the way I do it is at about the hour and twenty minute mark.

And I should say, in the time preceding that, you may have to go to the bathroom once, you may...

It makes your nose run, which is a funny thing.

It also makes you yawn.

These are definitely qualities of suicide, but not related to its psychoactivity.

And I think that it's very good to decide, before it hits, that once it begins, you will not alter the plan.

In other words, you decide ahead of time, I'm going to sit here and do this,

because at about the hour and fifteen minute mark, it will begin hitting you with stuff like,

you'd really be more comfortable downstairs.

Or, you know, it's awfully hot in here, why don't you get up and adjust the thermostat, all this stuff.

You say, no, no, no, no, we're holding the space, and sit there.

And then it begins to come on, and it comes, the image I have is like a jellyfish, or a silk scarf, or something like that.

It just kind of drifts down and surrounds you.

And at that point, I guess I pray, I say to it, you know, I'm completely in your hands, please don't hurt me.

You know, I'm yours, I'm completely committed, I've held nothing back, so don't burn me, please.

And then there is a kind of, it's hard to describe, a kind of potential begins to build up.

And you say, hmm, the rush hasn't begun.

But it's, you can almost close your eyes and see millions of little psilocybin molecules,

elbowing serotonin molecules out of the way, and fitting themselves into the receptor site,

and the electron spin resonance dynamics is beginning to shift, and the whole thing is going to, is about to take off.

At that point, I smoke furiously, and that usually is all it takes.

And it comes on, and it, the first rush is really astonishing.

I mean, sometimes it's more mind-boggling than others, but I can remember situations where we just see it coming and say,

Oh my God, you know, it's a hundred miles wide and ten miles high.

Where are you going to run to? You know, it's just, you say, good grief.

You know, I guess I'm not going to meet this one sitting up.

I think I'd better lay down.

And in about the time it takes to make and execute that decision, then it just hits.

And it's like a tidal wave.

I mean, I have the feeling when I'm doing it in California that everybody from Vancouver to Tijuana has just crawled under their desk,

because you can't imagine this is happening between my ears.

You know, it's more like an asteroid must have fallen in the Pacific Ocean and raised some enormous incoming wave.

It's what it's sort of like, it's like watching a thermonuclear explosion through 50 feet of crystal clear glass.

So, you know, you're perfectly calm.

It's not getting at you.

But the energy that is being released in your presence is awesome.

And then it, and sometimes in that first pass, you actually, the linguistic machinery is burned out.

You've probably seen these scenes where they will test a hydrogen bomb and they set up cameras a quarter mile from ground zero,

a half mile, a mile, two miles.

And then when they actually detonate the bomb, they get the view from the first camera.

And then they switch to the second camera as the first camera is blown to bits and vaporized.

And they keep pulling back as each successive instrument is destroyed.

Well, this is sort of the feeling you have as this thing spreads out toward you.

And then it does what it wants to do.

It tells you what it wants to tell you.

And it's highly unpredictable.

I mean, you cannot, people always say you should ask it a question.

This seems absurd to me.

I mean, I don't know.

Why?

Once, when my life was in turmoil, I did ask a question, I said, I wrote it down ahead of time, and the question was,

am I doing the right thing with my life?

And then when I got in there and I posed the question and the answer came back instantly, it was a rip-off from Lyndon Johnson.

What kind of a chicken-shit question is that to ask me?

He said, oh, sorry, I didn't mean to presume, you know.

He said, get your act together and then we'll have a conversation, but if that's what you want to talk about, you should have taken MDMA.

And then, you know, paralleling what we talked about this morning, and again, I'm just giving you my subjective take on it.

It's like I come into a place, it's hard to describe, it's a feeling, and the content of the feeling is,

now the elves are near, but they won't appear unless I invoke them.

And, you know, I wish I could tell you that I chant in Mandayan or something like that, but I don't.

I stole a line from an old, old I Love Lucy program where Ethel is talking to Lucy about UFOs,

and Lucy says she talks to the UFOs, and Ethel says, well, how can you talk to UFOs?

And Lucy said, well, it's simple, I just say, come in little green men, come in little green men, and that's what I do.

I say, come in little green men, and then there is a, and women, if there are any out there.

And then there is a, it's like a, it's like, it's like a marching band, it's like a Nepalese marching band is what it's like.

And it comes from a distance, like there's a place in my vision that's small, a little dancing light, and a, and a little faint sound.

And the light comes closer, and the sound gets louder, until finally, you know, they pick me up on their shoulders,

and with tubas blaring, and sack butt, and rebeck, and all of this stuff.

And then they carry me around, and talk to me, and it's, the whole thing is shot through with such a weird sense of zaniness,

Irishness, Joyce-ishness, I mean, it's almost unbearable, it's so, I don't know, not exactly Disney-esque,

because their humor tends to be a little more savage than that.

And then that is part of the first wave, and then the rest of the trip unfolds pretty much as you,

there's a kind of a pushing and pulling that goes on, you can direct it.

Each one of these plants does have a character of its own.

Sure.

One of the most puzzling things about these plants is that they have characters that seem irreducible.

For instance, psilocybin, it is the science fiction drug.

In other words, it says, you know, we have been denizens of this planet for 400 million years,

our original home planet is in the M5-83C system.

We are connected via hyperspace to all intelligent life forms in the galaxy.

It shows you enormous machines in orbit around alien planets.

It talks about the end of history and the collectivizing of humanity,

and it's this enormous, hortatory, salvational, dramatic, science fiction-type scenario.

Well, then you take ayahuasca, which in molecular terms is just a few nitrogens are moved around,

I mean, it's basically the same thing, and you get a completely different message.

You feel the energy of the rainforest and the rivers, and it's very feminine.

You think about childbirth, you think about the continuity of generations,

you think about the mystery of the meat, you think about tantric sexuality.

It's all redirected back into the human and natural world in some way.

And then, of course, DMT, which I described this morning,

which the DMT elves are not from outer space, or they don't present themselves that way.

In fact, one of the odd things about the DMT thing is that you have the feeling that this space that you break into,

even though it's large, some people even refer to the dome of DMT.

That tells you they really were there.

But wherever this huge vaulted space is, you have the feeling,

although it's hard to explain how you know this,

but you have the feeling that you're way, way, way underground,

which fits with the elf motif.

You're in the hall of the mountain king.

You're under the hills with the, you know, the little people who retreated under the hills.

The character of these things is one of the most puzzling things about them.

And how do you relate all these different species of gremlins to the Logos that chose the part of this one?

Well, that's a real question.

The Logos seems more...

First of all, it doesn't crack jokes and do quadruple entendre puns and stuff like that.

It's more like a wise and loving teacher.

These DMT things are, you know, it's a troop of maddened elves,

and they are just doing their own thing.

And then with ayahuasca, though some people claim they contact an entity,

it hasn't been like that for me.

It seems to me that on ayahuasca you become like a camera.

You just fly through a visual world.

I mean, after a good ayahuasca trip,

you just feel like your eyes are bugging out of your head.

I mean, it's like buying prints on Madison Avenue, you know,

and you've just been looking and looking and looking and you literally have to give your eyes a rest after an ayahuasca trip.

And the ayahuasca visions are more...

They seem to cover a broader spectrum.

The psilocybin hallucinations tend toward this highly polished, machine-like, insect-like, outer space bit.

And the ayahuasca hallucinations are wonderful pastels, laces, layering of colors.

And then one of the most interesting things to me about ayahuasca,

and I just cannot understand how this works.

If I could, I'd be Erte or somebody.

And that is that you, in the middle of the ayahuasca trip,

you can suggest motifs.

You can lead it.

So that, for instance, you can say to it,

Art Deco.

And suddenly there will be thousands of candy dishes,

cigarette lighters, champagne buckets, automobiles,

stained glass windows, doorknobs, silverware,

all rolling in black space in front of you.

All the perfect exemplification of this aesthetic,

the Art Deco aesthetic.

And then you can say to it,

OK, Italian Baroque.

And it's just like that.

Suddenly, altarpieces, madonnas, martyred saints,

and fantastic scroll work, and fleur-de-lis.

And you can say, well, surprise me.

And then you will get a coherent style, like Art Deco, like Italian Baroque,

except that nobody's ever bothered to realize it on this planet.

But it's as coherent.

It's like, you know, 20 years ago there was no such thing as Southwest, as a style.

You know, this weird thing coming out of Santa Fe that I notice has planted its roots deep here as well.

The turquoise and beige endlessness of feathers and hammered titanium and all that.

Well, that's an aesthetic that has cohered in the last 20 years and come into being.

There seem to be an infinite number of these things.

As different as the bronzes of the Han Dynasty are to a Dali or a Pollock or a Bosch.

And then you can say to it, going beyond the surprise me challenges,

what I always say to it is,

I want to see more of what you are for yourself.

And then it's like there's this low organ tone and it begins to lift the veils

and the temperature in the room drops about 20 degrees.

And after about 20 seconds of that, you just say,

enough of how you are for yourself.

Because you can tell what's happening is, it's starting to reveal something so peculiar and so untailored for the human mind or eye that you become afraid.

You say, you know, can we go back to dancing mice, Art Deco cigarette lighters and Baroque altarpieces, please?

This is turning into deep water as far as I'm concerned.

So, yes?

What happens on higher than, if anything, higher than 5g?

Oh, that's a good question.

Good question.

It requires a small detour into pharmacology.

The concept, which all pharmacologists are familiar with, and which you should be too, if you're going to deal in this realm, called LD50.

This is not a pretty notion, but a necessary one.

It stands for lethal dose 50.

What does this mean?

It means if we have 100 mice, how much psilocybin do we have to give each mouse to kill half of them?

Do you see?

LD50.

Half the sample dies at the LD50 dose level, whether it's graduate students or rats.

Now, when you're designing a drug, or when you're thinking about a drug,

what you want is a drug with an extremely high LD50, opposed to its effective dose.

So, say the effective dose of psilocybin is probably about 0.5 mg per kg.

And the LD50 is probably 200 mg per kg.

The LD50 of psilocybin is 400 times the effective dose.

This is a pharmacologist's way of saying this is very, very safe.

A pound wouldn't kill you.

I don't think.

It might be getting close, but you'd have to eat in that range to die.

Now, some drugs have horrendous LD50 to effective dose profiles.

Unfortunately, and I hope I don't rain on anybody's parade here, MDMA has a terrible LD50 profile.

The effective dose is 125 mg.

You can kill yourself with 1,000 mg.

So, that's not good at all.

Because, sure as hell, some street person or some depressed person or some maniac is going to take 1,000 mg.

And then you've got a stiff on your hands.

So, yeah?

Tom, I recently read some info on MDMA indicating that serotonin, depressed serotonin levels on MDMA,

the serotonin stays low in your body for about 1,000 mg.

Whereas some of the related subjects called E, the serotonin levels are depressed for only 2 hours.

And the researcher indicated that his conclusion was that he may have some physiological toxicity that he did not have,

and therefore it might be wise to avoid it for that reason.

Well, in fact, I've read an article that was destroying the serotonin receptor sites.

There was a difference.

Well, I think MDMA is, I don't want to trash MDMA.

It's changed a lot of people's lives and saved relationships and so forth and so on.

But to me, it's a perfect example of why you're better off taking plants.

Because here was this drug.

Somebody invented it.

They gave it to a few friends.

It seemed to be wonderful for solving personal problems.

So without any collection of human data, this thing becomes an item in the underground.

Well, and so then thousands of people take it.

The psychological effects seem completely benign.

It's a wonderful thing.

The physiological effects, it's a very disturbing profile.

It isn't exactly as you said.

It's not that it destroys the serotonin receptor site.

It's that nerves, neurons, are covered by these very delicate structures called dendritic spines.

Now, nobody knows what dendritic spines do, but every neuron in your body has them.

And when you take MDMA, it mows them down.

They just, they go away.

Now, so then you get two schools of thought.

One says, well, my God, anything impacting the physical brain that dramatically should be stayed away from.

And the other camp says, well, do you see any behavioral changes in people who take MDMA a lot?

Do you see any physical destruction, seizures, blindness, anything?

And the answer is no.

So they say, well, here we have histological evidence that this thing is making major physiological changes in the dendrites,

and no behavioral sequela to back up that this is of any consequence.

Well, my position, being basically a very conservative person, is in that case, wait.

You know, they're doing work on this in a dozen labs around the country.

They'll figure it out.

In the meantime, take psilocybin or mescaline or something else that has been sanctioned,

because you just do not want to insult the physical brain.

You know, that's the whole name of the game.

You have to keep the brain in good shape.

Yeah.

Could we go back to his question?

Once you're past the trigger dose, is it worthwhile to start to step up?

Oh, yeah.

That's why we started talking about LD50,

because I wanted to explain to you that taking a compound like psilocybin,

if the effective dose is 20 milligrams for somebody who weighs 135 pounds,

well, then, looking at the pharmacological data,

they should be able to take 2,000 milligrams without any trouble at all.

That's a hundred times more.

But, in fact, what happens as you raise the dose is that the psychological presentation becomes unbearable.

It becomes so strange that you fear for your sanity, in a good old Edgar Allan Poe-ish phrase.

You know?

It gets stranger and stranger.

And, you know, I've talked to pretty naive people who have overdosed.

Usually the way these overdose situations occur is people are gathering mushrooms in the wild,

and they start eating them, and then they just keep eating them,

and then they realize they've eaten 4 times more than the effective dose.

And this is where you get into places where you don't know what to say,

because if you tell people, they'll throw a net over you.

But you want to say, because you're so personally disturbed.

This is where the flying saucers land, and the rectal examinations begin,

and you're told that you're the messiah, and they, you know, it becomes quirkier and quirkier.

So, I think you have to, you know, I'm very admiring of people who can take very high doses,

but I find it quite challenging enough in the five to seven gram range.

A friend of mine says of psilocybin that every time he takes it,

he tries to stand more, meaning more of the vision,

because it is filtering itself.

It's definitely filtering itself.

This is why beginners almost never have bad trips,

because somebody in there looks at your clipboard and says,

oh, this guy has never done this before, so lay off the rough stuff.

Just, you know, bring them through the standard number.

It's the people who consider themselves experienced,

you know, who've done it 20, 30, 40 times.

He says, you know, we can take the gloves off with this guy.

And, you know, it always amazes me, I sometimes meet people who say,

you know, I've taken mushrooms 50 times and I've never had a bad trip.

And I think, you know, lucky soul, because when it goes left, it's hard.

You know, it's hard.

You have to really then, you know, do not your mantras bungle,

is the best advice I can give you, because you need to steer back towards the mainstream.

Now, maybe at this point, this is a good point at which to talk about,

what do you do when the going gets rough?

There are two things, at least, that you can do that are very effective.

The first is, and it's a very simple thing,

but people in our culture seem to be resistant to this,

is you sing.

You force air into your lungs and body and you chant.

You sing anything you want.

And it will radically alter the parameters.

There's a certain place in psilocybin that is my Bette Noire, which I call the meat locker.

And I don't like this place, you know, and meat locker is a mild term for it.

It's more like, you know, the morgue for the homicide unit or something.

Whenever I start drifting that way, I sing.

And then you can navigate through it.

The other thing you can do, although this is sometimes trickier, is smoke cannabis.

This is what those bombers are for, that you rolled in the first hour,

while you were waiting for it to come on.

As soon as it begins to press in, in some really invasive or alarming way,

just take a couple of hits of the good and chant,

and then you can bring it back on track.

And also talk to it.

Don't be afraid to say, you know, I don't like this.

Take it off me.

It's too peculiar.

I'm not ready for this.

It says, oh, sorry, you know, back to dancing mice.

Yeah.

Do different facets of mushrooms have wildly varied concentrations for the flexible body?

Well, there hasn't been a lot of work on this.

Michael Buickley at Evergreen College, years ago,

grew stropharia cubensis by the method that's described in my book,

the book I wrote with my brother.

And what they discovered, see, psilocybin is 4-phosphoroxy-NN-dimethyltryptamine.

That phosphorus group is removed as soon as it crosses the blood-brain barrier.

So really, what's active is a simpler compound called psilocin.

And psilocin lacks the phosphorus attachment.

And what they discovered was that in the early flushes,

the psilocybin ratio is high and the psilocin ratio is low.

And you all know what a flush is, right?

And in the later flushes, the psilocin level rises and the psilocybin level drops.

So really, the two together stay remarkably stable throughout the life of the organism.

Something worth mentioning, I suppose it's worth mentioning,

is when I was into my extraterrestrial phase,

when I was assuming that the mushroom was an extraterrestrial,

either the extraterrestrial itself or something designed by some kind of an extraterrestrial,

it was very interesting to me that psilocybin is, as I said, 4-phosphoroxy-NN-dimethyltryptamine.

It is the only 4-substituted indole in nature.

The only one.

Well, if you were to search for evidence of extraterrestrial tampering with the biome of this planet,

what you would look for is a unique compound occurring in one life form and no other.

Here it is, folks.

This phosphorus group is unique.

And I've never read any description or discussion of what the evolutionary history of that,

why it would appear in an organism like that and not in any other.

That's just an aside,

because I'm always searching for the thumbprint of the alien.

There may not be an alien thumbprint,

but the phosphorus group attached to psilocybin is a good candidate for it.

Yeah?

Pushing the subject only slightly,

the descriptions that you've given of all of these experiences,

although you have said that it varies widely,

there is a remarkable internal consistency of your descriptions,

because you're entering a world that seems to have boundaries and entities

that you consistently encounter again and again.

I've spoken to many medicals over the years,

some of whom I've known you a long time.

And nobody I've ever spoken to,

people who've taken high doses or low doses,

have ever had similar experiences.

Now, clearly you've got people who can.

But I'm wondering...

Maybe they were just being polite.

I'm wondering if you've ever experimented with your own experiences,

like what Lily describes in programming and metaprogramming,

and to see...

I mean, you described ways of provoking this energy,

which certainly could be put into the context of introducing programs into your experience.

True.

Have you worked with different presuppositions going into this

to see what the limits are?

Well, my original presupposition was to try to have no presupposition at all.

And then out of that came all of these assumptions.

You're right that nobody has trips exactly like mine.

Although, if you question people carefully, you can begin to see how it works.

For example, you know, I described this thing this morning,

the elves, the presentational thing, the high speed motion, the gifts, all that.

Well, sometimes people will take DMT and they will come back

and you'll realize that it's as though there is an archetype there

which has different levels in it.

And if I had to say what the archetype of DMT is,

it's the archetype of the circus.

And one time I saw a woman come out of DMT.

She was an anthropologist.

She had fairly high body weight

and I could tell that she had not gotten a complete hit.

Came down and said, okay, what was it?

She said, it was the saddest carnival in the world.

She said, the carnival was closed.

All the tents had their flaps rolled down

and there were just paper cups and candy wrappers

blowing in the aisles in between them.

And the Ferris wheel was stopped.

Well, she was just at the edge of this thing.

And if you think about the archetype of the circus,

it is an interesting one.

First of all, you have the three center rings

where wild and zany activity is continuously being presented.

Tiny cars keep arriving with 14 clowns in each one

and they keep climbing out, falling all over each other.

But it isn't all fun and games.

It has a strange erotic content.

And as a child, I think my first awareness of what I would really call Eros

was watching this beautiful long-haired woman in a tiny spangled costume

hang by her teeth 120 feet above the center ring doing acrobatics.

So you've got...

So you've got the clown

and you've got the lady in the tiny spangled costume

and then off from the center ring

you have these dark alleyways where the sideshows are.

The Siamese twins and the goat boy and all the rest of it, you know.

And it has a very weird vibe about it.

So it can land you in any of these places.

But if you try and correlate people's experiences,

it seems to me that it's pretty clear that through their own life history

and their own programming, nevertheless something is trying to poke through.

Now, my DMT experience seems pretty radically different from other people's,

although other people don't give any account at all.

I mean, it's amazing how inarticulate people are.

They come down, you say, how was it?

And you say, it was far out.

You say, you know, you don't get out of here with that rap.

You know, how was it?

And you say, well, they can't give a good account.

On psilocybin, I think most people experience something very much like what I describe.

Huge machines, a sense of danger to the earth, apocalyptic visions,

the idea that someone will come and help.

And I'm pretty resistant to all the flotsam and jetsam of the new age.

I mean, I don't spend a moment worrying about the exact physical location of Atlantis,

or stuff like that.

And I think people, it inflates their personal mythologies and intellectual misconceptions,

but there is something trying to get through.

That's why this exercise,

show me what you are for yourself, is really a good one.

And maybe my trips are so weird because I have always worshipped weirdness.

So I can go further down that road without being alarmed while somebody else would pull back.

One of the problems is that we don't have complete maps of these places.

At this stage in exploring that new world,

what we have essentially are the scribbled diaries of frightened explorers.

And we don't know if Explorer A is talking about the same river system as Explorer B,

or whether they were on opposite sides of the planet or the universe.

Building a coherent picture of the psychedelic dimension would be the first challenge to a rational approach to understanding it.

Have you ever read Five Journeys by Robert Monroe?

Is that the first book?

No, I read the first book.

Well, it actually is a map.

It talks about weird, which is one of the weirdest things you would ever read.

But it has an amazing ring of truth in it.

And in it he presents a map of all of the realms of beings that exist that he's visited.

It's just normal consciousness.

It's almost an anti-psychedelic description.

But it's pretty consistent with some of the things you were discussing this morning.

It's because this is where you go when you die.

And it's also where you go when you sleep.

In fact, he talks about classes you attend in university.

And he describes these levels upon levels of entities co-existence.

And he describes it like...

Well, I read the first book and I was puzzled by how much of it didn't seem familiar to me.

Like, I remember in the first book he talks about a world that's just like this world, except the cars are nine feet wide.

That would be a very puzzling, psychedelic experience to go to that world.

I knew someone who was very close to him.

And I don't want to set off any lawsuits here.

But I once cornered this person and said,

So what about it?

And he said,

Don't worry. You don't have to worry.

This is not getting close to your bailiwick at all.

Buddhism of the Mahayanas.

It has, you know, a tremendously complex system of levels and entities.

Wrathful Buddhas and Dharmapalas and peaceful entities.

And I think that that's pretty interesting as a phenomenological description of mind.

I reject the philosophical premise of Buddhism because I think it's, you know, an unbelievably uncompromising kind of nihilism.

But Buddhism, as it's pitched in America, soft-pedals that a lot.

You know, they don't present it as a form of nihilism.

But I think ultimately it is, in the most positive sense.

But still, I'm of the school that follows Alfred North Whitehead who said,

Say what you may, there are certain stubborn facts.

And, you know, that's not a very Buddhist point of view.

Yeah.

Do you have visions on cannabis too?

If I can control myself and not do it too often.

The problem is, cannabis does so many other wonderful things.

And I tend to use it for those other wonderful things.

But if I were totally dedicated to vision, then I would only smoke once a week.

Because then you completely come to equilibrium.

And then, you know, again, I think people do it not wrong, but not the way you should do it if you want visions.

You should do it the way you do all these other things.

Alone in silent darkness and at high doses.

Bursts of hallucination on cannabis are hard to control and predict.

But sometimes they're as intense as anything can be.

If you read 19th century descriptions of cannabis use by people like Fitzhugh Ludlow and the Club du Hashashin and that crowd,

where they were eating the hashish, it's very clear that it was the LSD of the 19th century.

I mean, nobody can read those descriptions without realizing these people were loaded for sure.

They were thoroughly and completely smashed to be able to write those kinds of accounts.

Yeah, go ahead.

So I was interested, you said you spoke a lot at the start of the mushroom trip.

I mean, I spoke a lot at the start of the trip.

It's kind of a real confused entry and then...

It has an effect which...

I mean, I'm not sure that's a good effect in terms of getting the learning to say...

Well, you didn't exactly make clear to me what the effect was.

It fuzzes you out going into...

It depends on what you do.

I suppose if you have a very top grade sense of me, it will be one thing.

If you smoke, go out and get another.

It's something totally different.

Well, what it does to me is it just slightly cuts my anxiety.

You know, I'm able to let the thing unfold of its own.

I don't know.

I mean, I have a very lifelong, intense relationship to cannabis.

And I basically make my living out of being able to do feats of memory.

And, you know, cannabis is supposed to trash your memory.

So I don't...

You know, maybe I'm different.

But I resist any maybe I'm different argument because it's malarkey.

Nobody's different enough that they can, you know...

In terms of your articulness and memory recall,

when you're at the peak of an attempt experience,

does it still, you know, speak as clearly then?

I mean, I'll give you a little tongue tongue.

No, more so.

My great dream is that as my powers of locution fade with old age,

that cannabis will be legalized.

Then I can sit in front of you and smoke

and my career can be pushed 20 years further into the future.

The way I use cannabis is to think.

And I do a lot of thinking.

I do a lot...

And I...

At night, before I go to bed,

I smoke and then I play the tapes of the day.

And then I understand what happened.

If I didn't have cannabis,

I don't think I would be sort of at sea or a kind of a space case

because I never get what somebody really meant,

really intended,

really had in mind,

till I play the tapes stoned

and then I see,

Aha!

That's what the agenda was.

That's what was going on.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

And if I don't smoke, then I'm insomniac.

Yeah.

I don't know how far you want to go with all this,

but I'm really interested in how you can have

the best ones

and all of your experiences together

as you talk about.

How do you think that?

Okay.

Well, LSD...

Again, remember,

I'm only speaking for myself

because there is no other way to approach it.

I found LSD very interesting

but ultimately kind of frustrating

because I wanted visions.

And to me, what LSD by itself does

is it does a lot of slippery and hard to name stuff.

It accelerates and changes the quality of thought.

It...

Hmm...

Well, basically that's it.

It does something to the quality of thought.

But I had been reading Aldous Huxley

and Havelock Ellis and those people

and I kept saying, you know,

where are the ruins of alien civilizations?

Where are the jeweled tapestries?

And then, fiddling around with LSD,

I discovered that if I would take it with mescaline,

then it became the psychedelic experience

that I was seeking.

But in and of itself,

it's kind of psychoanalytic.

It's sort of like cleaning up your act.

It often focuses you on your own personal stuff.

And, you know, I have to confess to you,

I'm not that interested in my own personal stuff

probably because it's so horrendous.

But I don't like personalized trips.

I like cosmic vision information trips.

And then mescaline...

Mescaline is...

You have to take a lot to get it to really do

what you want it to do.

And it being an amphetamine

has not a very good LD50 profile.

It's not like MDMA

where 10 times the effective dose

you're in real trouble.

But probably 40 times the effective dose

and you'd be sweating bullets.

So...

And then just the nature of my life.

I've not had as much to do with mescaline

as these other things.

I'm really a vision freak.

And people say, you know,

well, there's feeling and there's insight

and there's this and that.

But the reason I'm so fixated on vision

or the excuse I give...

Somebody said it's because you're a double Scorpio.

To me it's the proof that it's not coming from me.

I can come up with insights.

I can come up with funny ideas.

But I can't come up with objects

never before seen by the human eye or mind.

And so when the visions start

then I feel this is the transpersonal part of the trip.

This isn't my unconscious,

my memories, my fears, my hopes.

This is something else.

Yeah.

Last time you were talking about

boundary dissolution and ego reduction.

And what you described this morning.

How do they relate?

How do boundary dissolution and...

How do your descriptions of the trip this morning

relate particularly to ego reduction?

Well, I think in very practical terms

they show you that everything you know is wrong.

You know?

I mean, how can the ego survive that piece of information?

It just puts in your lap incontrovertible evidence

that everything you ever thought or believed is hokum.

And that's extraordinarily humbling.

And that word, humbling, means the feeling you have when your ego is reduced.

You know?

Humble yourself enough and you'll begin to feel humiliated.

And, you know, that's a deeper ego reduction.

I think they, aside from any magical chemical effect they might have on ego,

they're just simply showing you the true size of the universe and your place in it.

And, you know, in our downed personal lives,

every man, every woman, a king or a queen.

I mean, we build castles in the air.

Our career, our children, our whatever.

Well, then you get into those places.

You just say, you know, how preposterous.

This is a dangerous kind of question.

Is there any gender difference in these things?

For men and women?

Well, that's an interesting question.

I'm interested in that also in terms of the history.

Yeah.

You mean what we talked about last night.

You live in the, perhaps, a male period.

Well, I think women, by virtue of the fact that they menstruate and give birth,

are just inherently more chemically driven creatures than men.

Men are Apollonian in intent.

The idea is always some kind of abstract purity, clarity kind of thing.

And women know from the get-go that that's an illusion.

That the reality is the floor of the rainforest, the interconnected tissue, the levels, the trade-offs, and so forth and so on.

And this is why I think generally men tend to be more interested in these things than women.

And to also be more impacted by them.

For women it seems to sort of fit in and affirm what they knew.

For men it seems to come as a tremendous surprise that this is the way things are put together.

I think that if everybody gave birth and experienced menstruation,

probably we never would have launched ourselves into history.

In a way, you know, without going too far with it, men are the ancillary sex.

I mean, the original blastula in the embryonic development is female.

And I was listening to somebody the other night talk about this, saying no wonder men have the problems they have.

What a man is, is a woman who has been under incredible chemical assault for nine months in the womb.

And you just have been hammered, sculpted, shaped, and recast again and again.

And then you're born male.

A female fetus doesn't experience anything like that.

It starts out with a smooth shot at its end phylogenetic expression and then achieves it.

I don't think of the ego as particularly male, because I think we all have it to excessive degrees.

But men are able to express it.

A woman with an ego is frustrated.

A man with an ego is a menace to all concerned, you know.

Yeah.

How do you think about taking a trip with another or other people?

Do you think the question of energy and personality changes your trip?

I think it's a very major decision to do that.

That if you're going to take a high dose of psychedelics with somebody else, then you better be prepared to get all entangled with them.

Which can be great.

It can also be fairly confusing.

I don't like taking psychedelics.

This is not an issue of entanglement.

That's sort of what goes on between lovers or close friends.

But I get a lot of requests to sit for people.

And I don't do it, because I don't know whether it's my personality or what it is, but I am unable to contain my anxiety in the presence of another stoned person.

Especially if I'm stoned.

If I'm stoned and they're stoned and we're in a dark room, I cannot get off.

I listen to them breathe.

I worry.

I wonder if I should ask them if they're all right.

Then I go off on long trips about not interrupting them.

And then that loops back into, but I haven't heard them breathe for 20 minutes.

And I'm always afraid.

I don't know.

So really, people say, doesn't it take courage to do it alone?

For me, it takes more courage to do it with people, because inevitably, then you get tangled up into some kind of craziness.

And, you know, you can think you're having a telepathic experience.

And they've decided that they want to have sex or something.

And meanwhile, I've just had a revelation about that entry Moliere made in his diary when he was talking to his niece Agnes about the nature of the French comic theater.

And so you say, boy, you know, we've got too much on the menu here.

But I'm weird.

Remember that.

Yeah.

Okay.

Now, I've heard about the common vision shared by people living in Ayahuasca.

So, can you comment on this kind of thing in contrast to what you're talking about, which is the human idea of what you don't want to have?

You mean the group mind on Ayahuasca?

Yes.

And is that possible with you?

Oh, yeah.

No, it's very possible.

It's very possible.

I mean, you can sit with someone and play a little game where you will describe the hallucinations for 30 seconds.

Then they get to describe the hallucinations for 30 seconds.

And you can absolutely convince yourself that people are seeing the same, you know, that you're seeing the same thing.

And, you know, when you toss sex into the mix, it just goes over the top.

I mean, I've had the impression, I don't want to trot it out as a position of mine or something that I assert as true,

but I have had the impression, stoned on mushrooms, making love, that it's like perspiration forms on the surface of the skin,

and there's some kind of electrolytic thing that goes on, and the boundaries dissolve between the people.

I don't mean metaphorically.

I mean that you become one organism, and that's pretty amazing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Now, after I just said I don't like taking psychedelics with people,

I guess what I should have said is I hate being responsible,

because I don't mind taking ayahuasca with 30 people, none of whom speak English, in a hut up some river.

But that's because I know that the old shamans are in charge, that I'm just a face in the crowd.

Nobody's going to turn to me for explanation or help.

I'll tell you an ayahuasca story just to give you an idea of the kind of stuff that goes on in these sessions.

Years ago, in 76, Kat and I, it was before we were married, were in Peru,

and we had found this shaman who was very good, and he had a following,

and we were, you know, apprenticing ourselves to him,

and he, the style of these Peruvian mestizo people is that, I mean, cultures handle this differently,

but they are never straight with each other.

It's an incredibly masked culture, almost like the Japanese, but without the formality.

In other words, if you think somebody's a jerk, you would never say that.

That's the last thing you would say, because that's your true opinion.

So, we got into a situation with these people where this elder shaman who was very respected,

beloved even, by these people.

He had a nephew, a sobrino, who was an absolute jerk.

I mean, this guy was into pimping a little on the side, and he was very ambitious to perfect his ayahuasca,

so he could go to Lima and charge yuppies a bunch of money for taking it, and so forth.

And he had this really awful habit, and I don't know what really had gone on before we got there,

but they would all get together to take ayahuasca, and these old, old guys, you know, 80, 85 years old,

the totally authentic dudes would sing these beautiful ayahuasca songs, and he would sing against them.

I mean, can you imagine a scene like this, where everybody's singing row, row, row your boat,

except one guy wants to sing five foot two, eyes of blue, and does.

And the level of social tension in these meetings would just rise and rise,

but nobody would ever say anything to this guy and tell him to bug out and can that crap.

So one night, this had happened two meetings in a row, it was the third meeting like this,

everybody hoped this guy wouldn't come, so then he showed up, so then we all dose, then we get loaded,

and the singing begins, and he begins his singing, and in the wave of hallucinations,

and Cat was sitting next to me, he was sitting up on his haunches, kind of rocking back and forth on his heels,

and I would look at him, and I could see he was going through these weird animal transformations.

First he would become like a jackal, then he would become like a monkey, and it was really intense,

and I mentioned it to Cat, and she could see it too.

Well, so then he kept, and we were also trying to tape these ayahuasca songs,

so it was a double irritation to us that this guy was so out of control.

So, after a particularly long song by the old guys, with him just hammering against them,

I could feel Cat, who has a real Irish temper, getting more and more pissed off at this guy.

And finally, at the end of this song, when the silence fell, she had been just staring at the floor,

and she looked across the room at Don Jose, and gave him a look of pure loathing.

And I saw these red things, these red triangular shaped things, come out of her eyes,

and go across the room, like...

And when it got to him, it knocked him off his feet.

He was thrown backwards from the impact of these things, literally.

And everything going on in the room stopped dead.

And the elder shaman said to the guy sitting next to him, he said,

Oh, the Gringus sends the ba-da-da-da-da-da.

And...

And, you know, then you realize, wow, we're in over our heads here.

You can't tell shit from Shinola in this scene.

This concludes tape three.

Our program continues with tape four.

So that's an example of, you know, magical power condensed onto the material plane.

Yeah.

Wait, wait, wait, wait.

We saw films, about two nights ago, of dolphins swimming,

and there were purple triangles coming from their heads.

It was a casual film.

Wow.

Clearly the same phenomenon.

Yeah.

First of all, I have to ask an inevitable question.

Did the man do the counter singing after that?

He actually didn't come back after that evening.

Then the other question, or actually a perspective is,

I've done extensive work with iridology to the point that I could understand

where the limitations in that science were blatantly obvious,

because it's not so much the physical characteristics of the iris of the eye.

It is what is transmitted from the mind through the pupil,

or the sensor of that filter that is really being accessed by someone who is discerning.

And that's what will give you the blueprint that you're looking for.

And so I feel that that power and that transmission of mind so many times

is carried from that energy that goes back and forth through the eye.

And I wondered if you had any more thoughts on that.

Well, it seems to imply that we are all potentially linked together

in many ways that civilization has suppressed.

We are no longer telepathic.

We are no longer able to reach out and tap somebody with a glance like that.

And, but somehow our perception of what's been going on is skewed.

We don't, you know, Rupert and I talked a lot about this.

He had the idea that, he said, you know, the search for a psychic,

the search for proof of psychic power has not been a very happy story

with card flipping and this sort of thing.

And Rupert had the genius to realize that what is the commonest psychic power

that we all believe exists and have experienced and so forth,

but which science is utterly unable to explain, that could be statistically studied.

Well, what it is, is the sense that someone is looking at you, you know.

And you could test this.

And in fact, we did tests where you would choose one person

and put them at the front of a room full of people.

And then you would tell people, either look at your lap

or look at the back of this person's head.

And they would be asked, are people looking at you?

Or are people looking at the back of, looking at their lap?

And certain people, you could quickly satisfy yourself,

were able to detect this a phenomenal amount of the time,

well beyond statistical, you know, the rules of probability.

So, I think we're surrounded by subliminal abilities that we can't really understand.

I mean, I, from years of traveling in Asia,

I have an amazing psychic power, which is,

I can tell when food shouldn't be eaten, you know.

And it will happen to me, you know, in very good restaurants.

And if I go against it, you know, I'll spend the evening over the toilet

because I couldn't believe that Shea so-and-so would serve poisoned food

because it was costing me so much money.

But then when I get back to the hotel room, sure enough,

by overriding my own instincts, I get into trouble.

I think psychic ability, well this is worth talking about,

that we cannot be, or how can I put it,

we cannot evolve beyond the confines of our language.

And if you have a language that makes telepathy impossible,

then telepathy will be impossible inside that culture.

You see, we all pay lip service to the idea that

that language and culture create each other.

But we actually act as though culture is real.

And it isn't.

I learned this, you know, in Peru very dramatically

because in the Peruvian Amazon there's a disease

which people are very, very concerned about called susto.

Have all of you heard of this?

Susto only affects Peruvians.

This is the first clue that something weird is going on.

And its major manifestation is bad luck.

But if you get it and you're a Peruvian, you prepare to cash in your chips.

You know, it's as horrible as melanoma.

You know, you're doomed if you have this stuff.

And you have to go to a shaman and get it taken care of or you're dead within six months.

But I can't get susto.

It's not, it's a linguistic disease of some sort.

It travels around inside the confines of Mestizo Spanish and nowhere else.

In the deep south of our country.

Well, people have these ideas, yeah.

And, you know, like people say, well, magic is accomplished

because the person the magic is being done to knows that it's happening

and therefore they unconsciously participate in their own demise.

But I've observed these shamans in the Amazon.

And they will go, if a shaman has decided to actually get somebody, then he will go to

incredible lengths to conceal what he's doing so that the person never knows and

never knows how to blame. So it isn't some kind of psychological co-option

that's happening. It's something a good deal more complex than that.

Yeah?

You know, a while back you were talking about a period of time where a man was walking inside out.

And that made me think about some of the things you've been saying.

For example, we have all these myths about fairies and elves and magic.

And perhaps at one time the world was like that, but it is not like that now.

Here you're talking about a social context that does not include telepathy,

generates a culture without people experiencing telepathy.

And yet we have all these myths. We have all the fairy tales.

And now that you're talking about self-transforming the machine elves, would you have a question?

Well, I'm not sure that you got it into a question that I can respond to. Try again.

Okay, so our culture then is very, like, science-oriented.

And the whole idea of magic, things like the existence of elves, thin corn,

people laugh at that unless they're on supposed princes.

Do you think that this kind of thing could come back?

Do you think that we will have, you know, like for our eyes, for example,

experiences with these kind of things?

Yes, sure, because what you have to do is you have to shift the locus.

I mean, it's kind of hard to explain, but every civilization has a locus.

And we have disempowered ourselves by shifting the locus to an imagined class of experts.

We have an incredibly peculiar version of how the universe is put together.

First of all, we rely a lot of the time on the notion of the insy-beinsy, genes, viruses, atoms, elementary particles.

These are the things which shape our world.

We tell each other.

And yet, who has ever seen any of these things?

I mean, a virus maybe a few people have seen.

A hydrogen atom is a pretty airy-fairy concept.

And when you start talking about the anti-New Mason and stuff like that,

where you can only approach it through an arcane mathematical language,

the reality, whatever that means, of these things becomes pretty questionable.

See, one of the things I think that psychedelics could do is give back to us what I call the immediacy of felt experience.

Since the rise of Cartesian analysis in the 17th century,

everything that we experience has been defined as what are called secondary characteristics.

Color, a secondary characteristic.

Feeling, and what's real is mass, momentum, charge, spin, stuff like this.

These are the primary qualities of the universe, whoever encounters or deals with them.

We need to model reality so that it is understandable to us.

I mean, that that statement should even have to be made shows how far off track we are.

Our current model of reality is excellent for describing the behavior of hydrogen at the center of stars or something like that.

Terrible for explaining to you how you're supposed to stay tuned to your girlfriend.

So, somehow, we have sold out to abstraction.

And this is something about science, you know, and the demonic power of numerical analysis and stuff like this.

I think that part of what the psychedelic revolution is and why it is so politically threatening

is because a psychedelic person does not believe anything they cannot confirm for themselves through thought, intuition, or feeling.

And a non-psychedelic person joins up with the quantum physicists or the Hasidic Jews

or some group of people who've already got it packaged and figured out.

I mean, the UFO thing is a good example.

Everybody's interested in UFOs and, you know, are there space people, are there not.

And I think most people think that the news will come, that the way you encounter a UFO,

the way most of us will encounter a UFO, is that the president will call a press conference

and say, you know, that the time has come to speak frankly about certain declassified material

and that, yes, in fact, it has been going on.

I mean, that's not how it's going to happen.

The way it's going to happen is on five grams in silent darkness in your living room.

And that's real.

You know, if flying saucers were to land on the south lawn of the White House tomorrow,

it would be minor news compared to what can happen to you a minute and a half after smoking DMT.

We don't realize that we are not real unless we are the center of our own private mandala.

And so we look to media, to experts.

You know, maybe the Dalai Lama can clarify it or Mother Teresa or Stephen Hawking.

Well, forget all that.

Those are just linguistic concepts as far as you're concerned.

The only thing that's real to you is yourself and your immediate surroundings.

And if we could empower that, you know, our political problems would disappear overnight.

We are infantile and we do love it.

We don't really try to claim our existential validity.

And those who do are called mad because they depart from the sanctioned paradigm.

Over here, somebody.

Yeah.

It just struck me that one of the things that you seem real good at is bringing that personal experience into the language and being able to communicate it,

which creates the same kind of reality that you appear to be in decline of a shared linguistic reality where we can discuss the experience that we've had.

Yes, well, it becomes real when we talk about it.

I mean, one of the most satisfying experiences that I have as a public speaker is sometimes after speaking to groups like last night,

somebody will come up afterward and say,

I thought I was crazy until I heard you speak.

Now I know there are at least two of us.

And the truth is, you know, there are more than two of us.

There are thousands.

If you, you know, it's a delusion if it happens to one person.

It's a cult if it happens to 20 people.

And it's true if it happens to 10,000 people.

Well, this is a strange way to have epistemological authenticity conferred upon something.

We vote on it, you know.

So I would like competition.

I mean, I feel pretty lonely out here.

I'm surprised nobody has followed me into this.

There must be other people who can articulate these things as well or better than I can.

But, boy, they don't seem to come forth.

And I really don't know why that is.

Because what I say is not all that exceptional.

It's just the sum total of it is kind of eerie.

But if we don't, that's why I was saying, you know,

we cannot evolve faster than we evolve our language.

Our language is like the collective skin of our culture.

So, you know, until you say the words,

self-transforming elf machines from hyperspace,

then there aren't such things.

Once you say it,

it has gained a certain kind of ontological currency.

So, weren't you arguing at the opposite point,

you know, when you talk about a quantum physicist or a spiritual view on the planet?

Well, see, people are buying other people's experience.

I mean, if you're not a quantum physicist,

why in the world should you take those people seriously?

They're talking gibberish.

What power does it have over you?

Except that it comes presented on the platter of science.

Say, you must believe this.

If you don't believe this,

you're not a well-educated, trendy, with it person.

We can just say, well, malarkey.

Didn't you people believe something completely different 15 years ago?

You say, yes, but now we've got it.

Say, well, am I supposed to take that assertion seriously?

You change your mind every six months.

But our experience during the psychedelic experience,

before we bring it to language,

is very frustrating once we lose it.

And, you know, we can't settle down until we bring it to language.

That's what they've done with their experience.

They brought it to language,

and they can kind of settle down and play with it.

So, we seem to be caught in this.

I mean, if we're having a true experience of pre-linguistic,

it's, you know, beyond time steps.

Once we conceptualize it,

it becomes not quite an experience,

but the experience really changes.

And it becomes something that we can then

self-manage and be asked to each other

and have a good social time with.

But, you know, we're missing it.

Well, every entity has a value-dark dimension.

I mean, surely only the most naive of quantum physicists

believe that the, you know,

the quantum electrodynamic description of the electron

is all there is to say about the electron,

because biology is made out of electrons.

And you can't reason from quantum electrodynamics

to the rainforest.

You know, obviously, other factors are present

which are escaping this particular linguistic model.

So, being able to talk about something

doesn't rob it of its mystery.

It merely is a sectioning through it

that gives you a kind of a lower-dimensional map of it.

But the mystery remains intact.

You know, Wittgenstein talks about what he called

the unspeakable.

And, you know, the unspeakable is the true domain of being.

And then, within that, there is a very small subset

of those things which can actually be captured in language.

But they're a vanishingly small set of the whole thing.

Mostly, it's all mystery.

I don't know why this is so surprising to people.

I mean, where is it writ large

that bipedal primates with binocular vision

are supposed to be carrying around in their heads

true models of the cosmos?

I mean, would you expect an apple tree

or a monarch butterfly

to have a true map of the cosmos inside them?

No more than that we should have.

So, I think all knowledge is provisional.

And I think the new science will honor this.

This is why the rise in the use of the word model,

they no longer believe

they're giving a complete explanation of phenomenon.

They just say, well, here's a model.

And next year, we'll get a better model.

And we'll keep modeling.

And our models will get better and better.

But they will never be more than crude approximations

to an unspeakable mystery.

No, I find it exhilarating.

I think part of the male

or part of the ego-dominator pathology

is to demand closure out of everything.

There is no closure.

You have to learn to sit with the messiness of the mystery.

You know, it's this thing we said this morning.

The bigger you build the bonfire of understanding,

the more darkness is revealed to your startled eye.

So, no, I think it's open-ended and exhilarating

and tremendously exciting

that that's the kind of universe we're living in.

Well, you know, this is not merely

the stoned ravings of the Psilocybin Brigade.

Do you all know or have you ever heard

of Gödel's incommensurability theorem?

This sounds daunting and disturbing.

Have you ever heard of this?

Does anybody have a clue what I'm talking about?

Okay, well, that in itself is a measure

of the kind of society we're living in

because to my mind,

more important than Einstein or Schrödinger

or any of those people

was Kurt Gödel, German mathematician.

He began by studying the calculus

and he had a very funny method.

What he did was he would number

every operation in a partial differential equation.

And these numbers are called Gödel numbers.

G-O-U-M-L-A-T-E-L.

Kurt Gödel.

And what he showed,

and I think this is maybe the most important

intellectual step taken in the 20th century,

he showed that any formal system

will produce true statements

which are not provable

within the confines of the formal system itself.

Now what this actually means is

that mathematics can fail.

It means that there is no closure.

He proved this logically,

showed that closure is impossible,

that everything,

he showed it for arithmetic,

the most secure of all intellectual edifices.

Essentially what he showed

was that 2 plus 2 equals 4

is a very strong tendency,

not a law.

And this incommensurability theorem

means that no program

of formal analysis

will ever completely exhaust its subject.

There will always be a residuum of mystery.

And we need to come to terms with this.

I mean it's taken us 80 years

to get Einstein under our belts.

And that's a simple notion

compared to what Gödel is saying.

Because what he's saying

is not about, you know,

the distortion of space-time

near massive objects,

but something which actually

affects our own lives

on a day-to-day basis.

And, you know,

if you live for closure,

you're beating your head

against a stone wall

and your head will wear out

long before the stone wall will.

There's a kind of an appreciation

for the mystery

needs to replace the attitude

that the mystery

is an unsolved problem.

Mysteries have no relationship

whatsoever to unsolved problems.

Yeah?

I'm just wondering

about the motivation

of the explorer

going into the dark continent

wanting to draw a map

of the river

so that he can eventually

go to the railroad,

et cetera, et cetera.

that you go through

a lot of pain,

a lot of difficulty

as a pioneer

to get the map back.

If your primary assumption

is that this map

will never be drawn,

where's the motivation?

What does it then do from?

You don't need

a complete map.

I mean,

I'm not such a fan

of Wittgenstein,

but he seems to have

raised his ugly head here.

Wittgenstein used to say,

we do not seek statements

which are true.

We seek statements

which are true enough.

That's this genuflection

to the incommensurability theorem.

That's as good as it gets, folks.

True enough.

Beyond that,

there's just, you know,

the airy realm of metaphysics

which will never be plumbed.

So what we're trying to do

is refine our model,

make it more responsive

to what we want

the model to tell us.

But you don't want

to confuse the model

with the phenomenon

being modeled

because it will always have

dimensions

which exceed the grasp

of the theory.

Yes, although I have

real problems

with probability theory

which we'll probably

get into tomorrow.

I think that in a sense

probability theory

has made it almost impossible

for us to think clearly

about anything

because it contains

certain insidious

built-in assumptions

that are purely assumptions.

For instance,

probability theory tells you

that when you flip a coin

the odds of it being

heads or tails

are 50-50.

If, in fact,

that were true

the coin would land

on its edge

every single time.

So what we need,

you see,

probability is not a theory

of what is possible.

That's science.

If you want to know

if something is possible,

you find a scientist

and they're always

perfectly happy

to fulfill this function

and tell you

whether this is possible

or not.

What we completely lack

as a civilization

is a theory

that explains to us

how it is

out of the vast class

of possible things

certain things

undergo

what Alfred North Whitehead

called

the formality

of actually occurring.

We have no theory.

I mean,

science can say

well,

it's probable

that it'll be this

but it's also

40% probable

that it'll be that.

Say,

well,

which will it be?

Say,

well,

I just told you

the probabilities.

Say,

I'm not,

that's not good enough.

I want to know.

Say,

we have no theory

of selecting

among the probabilities.

The other problem

that haunts

probability theory

is that it assumes

that time

is an absolute

flat plane.

It assumes

that

no physicist

tells you

in his lab notes,

please perform

my experiment

on Tuesdays,

Wednesdays,

and Saturdays

because it won't work

any other time.

In other words,

the assumption

is made

that the experiment

will produce

the data

predicted by theory

no matter when

the experiment

is performed.

In other words,

it's assumed

that the phenomena

is time independent.

But that's just

an assumption

that Newton

got into.

Proving

that phenomena

are time independent

is absolutely

beyond

our intellectual

reach.

It can't be done.

A curious thing

about probability

theory is

say you want

to know

how much current

is flowing

through a wire.

Here's how

probability theory

finds out.

It measures

the current

flowing

through the wire

with a meter.

it measures

it a thousand

times.

It takes

those values

and adds

them together.

Then it divides

by one thousand.

Then it tells

you this is

how much current

is flowing

through the wire.

You look

at the value

they've given

you and you

say but

we took a thousand

measurements

and we never

got this number.

Say well

that's because

you know

you didn't

average

the probability

and well

if we took

a thousand

measurements

and not

one

is the value

you're offering

why should

we believe

that this

is the amount

of current

flowing through

the wire.

Well then

there's a bunch

of hand

waving

and epistemic

foot stamping

and so forth.

Science is

an incredibly

fragile edifice

which if it

weren't for

its ability

to hand

its findings

on to

technologists

who make

pretty things

it would have

accupressure

something like

that.

In other words

it is not

a meta

theory

it has not

got truth

by the jugular

it has a bunch

of fishy

mathematical

formula

which it's

flailing you

with

but I don't

think

I think

that

serious

revision

of probability

theory

is going

to have

to take

place.

I think

you've given

probability

theory much

more than

it's already

there.

Inherently

what it's

all about

is simply

acknowledging

the fact

that there

are variables

in anything

that we

can't know

and we don't

know.

It's really

nothing more

than that.

Which brings

you back

to just

the access

of the moment.

Well

but for instance

if the odds

that the coin

comes up

heads or tails

are 50-50

why doesn't

it land

on its edge

every single

time.

I don't

see how

it's related

to the land

man's edge.

It's simply

what happens

with the coin

where it ends

up lying

basically

whether it's

faced up

or dying.

Right?

Well

you know

another thing

probability

theory says

is the chance

has no

memory.

And so

they always

in first

year statistics

they say

if you flip

a coin

and it

comes up

heads

49 times

what are

the odds

that will

come up

heads

the 50th

time

the answer

is

50-50

but any

gambler

would tell

you

that

you know

if it comes

up heads

five times

in a row

bet on

heads

for crying

out loud

so

there's

something

I'm not

an acolyte

of probability

or statistics

because I think

a lot

is done

or inferred

from them

it just

doesn't

exist

I agree

at the same

time

really

all it's

at the

basis

is the

notion

that there

are

things going

on here

that we

can't know

even though

that's not

acknowledged

by most

people who

are practicing

it

that's the

reality

but don't

you think

the other

assumption

is that

time

is a

non

inputting

it's not

variable

you know

that

you don't

say

the odds

of the

coin

coming up

heads

or tails

are

50-50

in Canada

but

48-52

in Bolivia

that's one

of the

variables

that's

sort of

smeared

out

simply

because

it

can't

be

characterized

the way

people

who are

doing that

like to

tend to

characterize

things

but

underline

the whole

thing

is still

the notion

that

you're

dealing

with

unknowables

and

I'm not

saying

that

those

who

are

deeply

immersed

in

practicing

probability

and statistics

hold this

view

but

the reality

is

underlying

the

sort of

underpinning

the whole

thing

is the

notion

that

there

are

things

going

on

here

with

such

a

vengeance

it's

because

you

know

thanks

to

William

of

Ockham

there

is

this

notion

called

Ockham's

Razor

which

is

this

idea

that

is

most

simply

stated

as

hypotheses

should

not

be

multiplied

without

necessity

so

since

the

idea

that

time

is

contained

that

you

know

science

has

in

certain

areas

been

very

slow

to

make

progress

in

the

social

domain

in

econometrics

in

the

you

know

multiple

body

problems

and

stuff

like

that

well

I

think

this

is

because

this

simple

assumption

that

time

is

an

invariant

has

to

be

re-examined

I

would

almost

read

I

science

is

that

field

of

human

endeavor

which

studies

phenomenons

so

crude

that

they

are

time

invariant

you

know

the

hydrogen

atom

cleaves

from

the

oxygen

atom

the

same

way

every

time

but

love

affairs

don't

come

apart

the

same

way

every

time

bankruptcies

don't

occur

the

same

way

every

time

these

are

complex

compound

phenomena

that

are

then

influenced

by

the

temporal

variables

and

the

variables

embedded

in

the

environment

around

them

now

the

problem

is

these

are

the

things

we're

interested

in

love

affairs

bankruptcies

and

the

establishment

of

empires

very

few

people

have

a

passionate

interest

in

the

dynamics

of

the

water

molecule

now

I

know

I

have you

on the

run

because

this

is

a

but

it

makes

pretty

things

arguments

but

not

the

arbiter

of

truth

there

are

no

arbiters

of

truth

the

truth

of

the

tarot

the

truth

of

quantum

physics

these

are

truths

in the

supermarket

of truth

but

there's

no

there's

no

top

end

to

that

process

there

may

not

even

be

one

truth

in

a

given

situation

if

you're

flipping

coins

probability

theory

is

probably

a

good

guide

you

wouldn't

want

to

run

your

love

affair

on

probability

theory

so

you

have

to

choose

the

domain

you

have

to

tools

for

whatever

domain

you're

looking

at

well

you're

allowed

to

be

a

heretic

you

just

don't

get

paid

well

that's

the

price

you

pay

for

that

still

yeah

kind of

time

what

you were

talking

about

last

night

about

how

messed

up

everything

is

since

our

ancestors

got

away

you

were

saying

that

we

are

tied

into

time

and

we're

being

pulled

towards

a

certain

something

like

this

dimension

being

destroyed

or

we're

not

really

being

able

to

live

and

I'm

wondering

is

that

it

seemed

like

you

looked

at

that

as

bad

and

then

on

different

perspectives

it's

good

because

we're

discovering

that

we're

being

pulled

towards

something

that

may

be

bigger

and

more

wonderful

how

does

that

tie

in

are

you

saying

that

this

is

bad

what

we're

discovering

so

we

need

to

hang

on

to

our

past

or

you

think

no

I

don't

think

it's

bad

I

I'm

entirely

in

support

of

whatever

the

universe

is

in

the

process

of

perturbation

of

the

system

and

that

we

can

anchor

ourselves

through

this

chaostrophy

or

whatever

it is

by

going

back

to

archaic

models

but

I

think

that

and

you

this is what we'll talk about tomorrow when we get the computer

because I don't merely talk about it, even though I've been flailing the mathematicians

ultimately I too come to rest with a fishy formula

I think that the universe is some kind...

I think that there's something that has been overlooked by science

called, and I'll name it, it's called novelty

the universe is a novelty conserving engine of some sort

from the very first nanoseconds after the Big Bang

novelty has been conserving itself

and building newer and deeper levels of novelty

on novelty already achieved

so that, you know, in the first few...

I mean, you have the Big Bang

you have this era called the pre-physical era

it's brief

it lasts the amount of time it takes light to cross a distance equivalent to the diameter of the proton

electron

something dinky for sure

that's called the era before physics

then physics begins, one jiffy after that

and the original universe was so hot

that it was a plasma of free electrons

so since it was a plasma

there was nothing that you could call atomic physics

because the ambient temperature was so high

that electrons could not settle down into stable orbitals around nuclei

as the temperature of the universe fell

atomic systems crystallized out of that plasmic environment

well then, further cooling of the universe leads to more complex kinds of bonds

and the cooking out of complex elements from stars

the original universe was made entirely of hydrogen

this hydrogen aggregated into masses so dense, so large

that at their centers there was actually

and if you think I'm not nervous doing this in front of you, you're crazy

these aggregates of hydrogen

at the center

it was so massive in temperature and pressure

that fusion could actually begin

and fusion cooked out heavier elements

iron, sulfur, and eventually carbon

well when you get four-valent carbon

this throws open the doorway to tremendous new novelty

you get now for the first time

not atomic systems, but molecular systems

these molecular systems lead into proto-biological systems

proto-biological systems lead into prokaryotes

then eukaryotes

then true higher multicellular animals

then mammals

then human beings

then electronic culture

then the big surprise

now the thing to notice about all this

is that novelty

keeps building on novelty

already achieved

it crosses biological lines

atomic lines

molecular lines

it is a law of the universe

I'm proposing

that novelty is conserved

and so then what we represent

is the kind of ultimate nexus of novelty

and I believe that, you know, we are being wound

tighter and tighter and tighter

into a confrontation with

the equivalent of the singularity at the center of a black hole

but it isn't a gravitational singularity that I'm talking about

it's a novelty singularity

and so, you know, the universe is growing toward some kind of ultimate state of boundaryless hyper-connectivity

and when that is achieved

the process will cease to be describable in the locus of ordinary space, time and energy

now science has no notion of this concept of novelty

in the East

there is such a concept

it's called Dao

and Dao builds things up and pulls them down according to its own mysterious laws

tomorrow I will argue

when we get the computer

that its laws are not in fact entirely mysterious

and that we can discover

the nature of the novelty constant

and instead of treating space-time as an absolutely featureless plane

we can take that zero value

which is how that shows up in the Newtonian mechanics

and substitute instead

a fractal dimension number

which will be some kind of decimal fraction between one and two

and then this will allow us to do things previously inconceivable

like predict the future

and stuff like that

see, one thing I guess I should say

since we sort of drifted into this fairly rappy place

is the idea that the universe is growing toward itself

it's not moving outward from its origin

it's moving toward its completion

and this is called teleology

it's very unwelcome in most scientific modeling

but that's a legacy from the 19th century

where they were so concerned to get God out of the picture

that they wanted everything to happen through one random process

colliding with another random process

and flipping out mule deer elephants and redwood trees

but in principle we don't have to believe in God

to believe in an attractor at the end of the process

we see many kinds of attractors in the natural world

one way that I think of the psychedelic experience

is, you know, you've heard me talk about hyperspace, superspace

this kind of thing

it really does seem to me

that reality is some kind of a very complex geometric object of some sort

and you know how they teach you in trigonometry

that all possible ellipses can be obtained by sectioning a cone

and that if you take the infinite set of ellipses and reconstruct them

you can reconstruct the cone

well, the way I think of psychedelics and psychedelic tripping

is you are sectioning a hyper-dimensional object

and what you're coming back with

is a lower dimensional map of this higher dimensional object

well, everybody has a different map

in the same way that there are an infinite number of elliptical sections of a cone

but they're all generated by the same object

and if it's a mystery to you

how a simple finite object like a cone

can generate an infinite number of elliptical sections

then it's going to be hard for you to understand

how everybody can have a different psychedelic trip

and yet be actually dealing with the same reality in hyperspace

yeah

talking about the universe being attracted towards

I'm not trying to trick up the semantics and things like that

but would it also be moving towards its own closure at that point?

you mean its completion closure?

yeah

well, what does closure mean to you?

well, I would relate you back to what we were talking before

about closure not really existing

well, maybe what we should say is

there's only one closure

and all others are false closure

closure isn't really the word I would use

I steal shamelessly from Alfred North Whitehead

and probably others as well

but I'm willing to cop to that

he has this notion called concrescence

which I think is a great idea

he says everything grows toward a nexus of concrescence

so complexification is at the service of concrescence

we can see how this planet is caught in a concrescent process

a hundred years ago

you know, it took three months to go around the world

now it takes a third of a second

a hundred years ago a newspaper carried local news

now local news means the news of this planet

we can telephone Prague or Shanghai by just going outside to the phone booth

we are being knitted more and more tightly together

now most people think this is a human world phenomenon

and it will stop at some point

with everybody connected to everybody else I guess

I don't think it is a process of the human world

I think we're embedded in a collapse of physical law

this is a fairly pathological notion from the point of view of most scientists

because they believe that the universe will exist for

you know, millennia or millions of years into the future

but I think our presence on this planet indicates

that we're deep into act three of the cosmic drama

yeah

well, if you were to have used as a session for souls

that the intelligence evolved back to the Godhead

when all this souls and intelligence evolved whatever they are

that must take

then would you have to consider

any need for a

yes, I mean in a way the problem is not the

you know, the problem is not the end of the universe

but why it existed in the first place

what happened to flaw the original nothingness

to contort itself into this fantastic cascade of interconnected complexity

it's very, very tricky this stuff

I mean, you know, well

without dragging that in, it's tricky enough

so let's leave it at that, yes

the philosophy in the top times is pretty interesting

because I really came here to learn more about

using the misogynics

oh, well, ask a question

seize the tiller

everything you described

you've taken a full dose all along

is that

is that the best way to do it

I mean, sometimes I've taken

four exams and start

and then three more later

oh, I see what you're asking

should you boost it?

I don't like doing that

simply because I like to get

I think the real action is in the flash

and the flash comes by getting as much of the material

to the synapses

in as coherent a wave front as possible

so I tend not to do that

but to take an initial large dose

of course, if you take an initial dose

and it doesn't do anything

then you could follow it up

you mean just to discuss it generally?

do you all know what Ibogaine is?

it's a psychedelic

it's an interesting one

one of the things interesting about it

is how little people are aware of its existence

it comes

it's the root scrapings of an African

small tree or bush

called Tabernanza Iboga

and interestingly enough

it's a true aphrodisiac

perhaps the only real aphrodisiac in the world

because what are called aphrodisiacs

are usually either just stimulants

or things which cause genital itching

but Ibogaine actually seems to be

works on the psychology of sexual drive in some way

it's a powerful hallucinogen

one of the puzzling things about Ibogaine

is that we can't confirm its use by human beings

before 1850

and you know the Portuguese were into the areas of Africa

where this is happening

they've been in there since the 1430s

so it probably is a new pattern of drug use

that has arisen

and it's a major force

among the Fang people of Zaire and Gabon

holding back Christianity and mission culture

and it's a visionary hallucinogen without doubt

I-B-O-G-A-I-N-E

probably in the future

eventually society will get around to exploiting

this particular one

just like it does

everything else

the drug is Ibogaine

the plant it comes from

is Tabernanza Iboga

yeah

you mentioned combining the DMT with homo

what is the experience

what is the change in this plant?

well that's what ayahuasca is

you see

the DMT is then not destroyed in your intestine

and so you have a slow release DMT trip by doing that

is that done with smoking DMT after adjusting hormones?

in theory

and probably in fact

that would be a tremendously successful way to get very loaded

the problem is it might be a too successful way

you want to be very careful with these MAO inhibitors

there are MAO inhibitors that drug companies have produced

where a single dose inhibits all the MAO in your body for up to a month

this would be murder if you got around some DMT on that

the nice thing about harmine is that it's fully reversible in four to six hours

so it's a gentle MAO inhibitor

but yes this is the strategy

this is why you could conceivably take the seeds of a plant like Pagamon harmola

which grows around here more or less

and contains harmine

and combine it with a plant like Desmantha solenoensis

which contains DMT

and come up with a North American pseudo ayahuasca of some sort

people are doing this

but you know

if you think it takes courage to just do these compounds naturally

imagine the kind of courage it takes to diddle with recipes

and to do your own bio-assay

which you must do

because the cook must taste the soup

Terence what was the first plant?

not the began but Pagamon?

Pagamon harmola

P-E-G-A-M-U-M

Pagamon harmola

in the Zygophilaceae

yeah

I was thinking it's really interesting

because I was wondering

if you and Dennis

ever tried the experiment again

it's not why

now and then it's going to be doing it

well we never tried the experiment again

because Dennis felt

that he'd really made the maximum contribution to the effort

there are many experiments though

which could be tried

which would put no human being in danger

you know

for instance

you could use square wave generators

which are acoustical generators

to try and drive these drug molecules into DNA

in vitro

in a test tube

you know

what you would do is

you would simply put the denatured DNA into solution

put some DMT into the solution

shake it furiously

ultracentrifuge the mix

to get the loose DMT out

and then weigh the DNA

and see if its weight had increased

by a number

which was magically divisible

by the molecular weight of the DMT molecule

these kinds of studies have been done

and show that DMT does intercalate

and locate itself into DNA

so yeah there are a lot of different things like that

things like that

that could be done

that wouldn't put anyone at risk

so Dennis really felt that he was at risk

in a very serious way

well

he doesn't remember it very clearly

he

his impression was that it lasted about five days

it actually lasted three weeks

so

the real stuff that would have alarmed him

he fortunately was too out of it to see or remember

but I was there throughout the whole thing and saw it

and

I think it would be nice to understand the parameters of the effect a little more clearly

before we charge off and try that particular trick again

yeah

well this is what's being referred to is

the

in true hallucinations

which is a tape set

which will be published as a book next year

it describes an expedition to the Amazon in 1971

which was really where we got the whammy

I mean it's still

I'm still running on what happened from

you know the 28th of February 1971

to the 21st of March

the rest of my life is pretty much throw away

but

what

he

I don't know

it was weirder than flying saucer

abduction

because that now

there's a whole form for it

it was hard to say

something was waiting for us

down in the Amazon

and as soon as we started taking these mushrooms

it began making suggestions about how you could use the mushroom

and your voice

and certain other materials present at hand in that environment

to essentially

well there aren't even words to say what it was

condense the soul into three-dimensional space

or create the philosopher's stone inside your body

and then give birth to it

or in other words

some

radical transformation

of the ontology of being human

was held out as a possibility

and it all came down to an experiment

that he wanted to perform

that seemed to me so unlikely

to have any effect whatsoever

that I felt it was perfectly alright

to let this experiment go forward

because I would have bet dollars to donuts

that nothing would happen

instead

all hell broke loose

at the conclusion of this experiment

and

you know

he claimed at the time

that what he had done

was bonded into my DNA

enough psilocybin

in a superconducting kind of bond

which if you know how superconductivity works

the superconductive bond is very hard to disrupt

it's not like an ordinary chemical bond

and he felt that you could do what he called bell the cat

that you could actually hang a transceiver around the neck of the logos itself

and from then on it would talk to you constantly in the confines of your own mind

and it just seemed so wildly improbable to me

that it went forward

but in fact at the conclusion of the experiment

something changed in me

and I essentially became who I now appear to be

but before that I wasn't

I was sort of a wastrel

and undirected person of some sort

and then tomorrow you will see

when we get the computer

what the bottom line of this is

because what was eventually revealed

was a kind of mathematical mandala

of space and time

that rested on it

for its veracity

on the fact that it allowed

that it made prediction of the future possible

and tomorrow afternoon I will display this thing for you

and you can judge for yourself

whether this is the product of a pathological incident

or in fact an intellectual leap comparable to Newton's laws of motion

or something like that

I think in principle all this is possible

I think transforming

part of what human history's conclusion will be

is what I call turning the human body inside out

we want the soul to become visible

we want the body to become an idea

freely commanded in the imagination

and then at that point as James Joyce said

man will be dirigible

that was as close as he could get in 1939

to saying you'll turn into a flying saucer

you know he knew it was an airship

he knew it was oblate

but he thought it was a dirigible

anyway enough about La Charrera

maybe we'll get into that tomorrow

yeah

I just have a matter of presentation about the ayahuasca

uh-huh

you said that it has the DMT

against the harminella

yes

the vine

the vine has that?

no

good point

the vine contains the harmin

another plant contains the DMT

this makes ayahuasca unique among these shamanic tools

because you see all the rest of them

peyote

mushrooms

san pedro

ibogaine

morning glories

and whatever else

cannabis

are simply plants

which you ingest

ayahuasca

is a drug

a product

something made by pharmacologists

I mean pharmacologists who wear penis sheaves

but pharmacologists nevertheless

you see

so suddenly

the human dimension enters into it

not all ayahuasca is alike

ayahuasca depends on the personality of the person who made it

so it's not about a relationship between you and a plant

when you take ayahuasca between you and the plants

there stands a human being

and you know if you're headed down there to seriously get into this

don't

don't give up in a hurry

you will drink a lot of swill

before you find someone who is conscientious enough

honest enough

and cares about you enough

to not short change you

in some way

how many do you speak of telepathine?

telepathine

yes

ayahuasca was discovered by Richard Spruce

in 1853

and then in the early years of the 20th century

the German ethnographer Theodor Koch-Grundberg

brought a lot of it back to Berlin

and Lewis Lewin and his group

characterized an alkaloid

which they named telepathine

but it was not realized then until I think 1957

by the chemists Hochstein and Paradis

that

harmine

or

that telepathine

was exactly the same compound as an earlier compound

isolated from the Syrian roux

named harmine

and since the rules of chemical nomenclature are that the first compound

the first name takes precedent

telepathine had to be dropped and harmine substituted

but it tells you how convinced these early ethnographers were

that this stuff was, you know, exciting paranormal mental abilities

Are they taking the PMT or are they taking it by celluline?

The harmine?

Oh, well, no, no.

See, what happened was

that what, what, what,

Grunberg took back to Berlin

was the liana, the vine,

the Banisteriopsis copy

the, the other active ingredient in ayahuasca

was not isolated chemically until 1956

But the guys who took the vine back

before the plant was the vine

The vine doesn't contain DMT

But the harmine and harmine itself

are both, well, yes, has an effect

at high doses it can cause hallucination by itself

the, the plant which contains the DMT

normally, there are a couple of possible substitutes

but normally what's used in the Amazon

is Socotria viridis

and this is a little coffee-like plant

that contains DMT, DMT in the roots

One of the great mysteries of ayahuasca

is how out of 475,000 species of plants in the Amazon

these people figured out that you pound the vine

and combine it with the leaves

and then go through this elaborate boiling

and concentrating

and then you get this fantastic visionary beverage

that, if you ask them how they figured it out

they say the plants told us

which is so far the best answer anybody has come up with

in 1962, Melvin Bristol

who was a graduate student of Richard Evans Schulte's at Harvard

was studying ayahuasca among the Sibundoy Indians

and he took ayahuasca

and during the trip

a plant was revealed to him

and he was told that it would be alkaloid positive

and it was alkaloid positive

well this is now anecdotally embedded in the literature

was it dumb luck

was it synchronicity

or was it that plants tell you about other plants

the way ayahuasca is used by research pharmacologists

in these Amazon tribes

is they brew a standard brew

and then if they have a plant

that they for some reason

suspect might have some medical usage

they will put a little bit of that plant into the ayahuasca

and then the ayahuasca will give them a readout on it

and explain what it is

I had one of the longest evenings I've ever put in

where I took half a dose of ayahuasca

and half a dose of mushrooms

and it was absolutely God awful

it was different than any bad trip I've ever had

it didn't seem to be about my personality

it seemed to be about core processes

there was a little Pac-Man thing

and I could see it moving through my memory

just chew chew chew chew chew

and I didn't know

you know that horrifying scene in 2001

where the guy is outside the spaceship

and he says

open the pod doors Hal

well that's how I felt

I felt

I could almost see the molecular machinery had jammed

and I said oh my God

it's not going to de-animate or de-alkylate

it's somehow caught in some kind of a loop

and I sweated bullets for an hour and a half with it

it was really horrible

and then it finally released

and let me go

but as I sat in that chair

I said you know if I can't pull out of this place

then there's a room in a back ward somewhere

and they will just sit me there

and look in on me every twelve or fourteen hours

and that will be my story

yeah

you said earlier

you were surprised that you had no competitors

right

and you understand that we have a political climate

that's not congenial for exploring

true

so why are you surprised?

because I don't feel particularly courageous

I don't feel that this is unusual what we're doing here

am I crazy?

could be

it seems to me perfect

it would seem to me

But me knowing what I know, which is no more than a thousand other people know,

I couldn't live with myself if I didn't talk about these things.

Because our problem is we're disempowered, unhappy, and disconnected from ourselves and each other.

Here's the solution.

It's a political obligation or it's a moral obligation to try and at least inform people.

They don't have to take it, but they should at least have the facts of the matter in front of them as they live their lives.

So I just do it because I couldn't do it any other way.

And I'm puzzled that nobody else feels this imperative because the people I talk to,

you know, a thousand people have told me psychedelics were the most important thing that ever happened to them.

But not one of those thousand people ever said,

and I've scheduled a speaking tour to do the same thing that you're doing.

So I don't know.

You know, there's fear and paranoia.

I hear there are people who are afraid to come to this for revealing their interests.

Wow.

Well, either I'm crazy or they are.

I don't know.

See, I think that, you know how if you confront certain, well, butterflies or deer,

there are certain kinds of animals that if you move slowly enough they can't tell you're there,

because they're set up for edge detection.

And if you move slowly enough they don't register the edge transiting.

So you can actually walk right up to them and grab them if you know how to do it.

Lizards are like this, cats.

So I think that by moving with stealth rather than going to Harvard or Berkeley

and inviting the freshman class to pour into the street and smash bank windows,

that we can actually slip this thing along.

I think that eventually such desperation is going to strike straight institutions

that they will come to us and ask.

They're going to try everything when the going gets rough.

And when they finally decide to drop all their pretension, we'll be perfectly willing to have a dialogue.

I'm sorry to hear that people felt that paranoid about it.

I don't think the political climate is that repressive.

I think people are doing the work of the man for the man by being that paranoid.

Well, counter-pressure, this book was banned in Florida, but for crying out loud, look at the Russians.

They were able to toss out the Communist Party.

Well, now that's a pretty scary thing to go up against.

We don't have anything comparable to that in terms of its depth of penetration into our lives.

And yet they were able to do that.

I think, you know, there's more to life than hiding out.

You've got to make the grand gesture at a certain point and then let the chips fall where they may.

Brave words, oh boy.

Do you have something for your audiences, an organization,

or something that they can support in raising consciousness and changing legislation?

Basically, I think people should see these kinds of meetings as a tremendous opportunity to form local alliances.

The last thing on earth we want here is a Terence McKenna cult.

That would just be the stupidest resolution of the whole thing.

The whole message is you don't need me or Tim or anybody else.

Just, you know, take a little metaphysical responsibility upon yourself.

Realize you are the microcosm of the macrocosm.

And then get with like-minded people and proceed.

I mean, this is how political revolutions are made is by people just ignoring as irrelevant, outmoded social forms and structures and insisting on their own authenticity.

So, mentioning maps or the Hoffman foundations would help?

Oh, it might help people.

I mean, how would it help?

Strength in numbers.

Well, I think people should support psychedelic communities, archival projects, legalization moves.

Yes, but mainly I think what we all need to do is get more loaded.

You know, deeper trips, higher doses.

You see, it's not that we want to convert the entire planet to taking mushrooms.

It's that we just want to be left alone to do what we want to do.

The mushroom, if it's as great as I say it is, then it doesn't need a mob clearing the way for it.

It's perfectly able to advance its own agenda.

The thing is just not to yield to fear.

Because, as I said, if you yield to fear, you do the man's work for the man.

And that makes you the man.

So, what you have to do is just say, well, you know, this is what we do and eventually it will change.

I mean, gay people is a good example.

I mean, in our own lifetimes we've seen this go from, you know, an unspeakable crime against nature,

which decent people took care to not even be informed of,

to, you know, a political subculture with its own agenda and its own press and its own political clout.

Well, we are not as under the thumb as gay people were, say, in the early 50s or something.

If they can do it, we can do it.

If black people can go from slavery to a legitimate claim on full social integration into the body politic,

then we can do it too.

In America, nobody gets nothing unless they demand it.

So, as long as we bow our heads and hide our stash and are looking over our shoulder,

well, then they've got us on the run.

But we just have to say, look, this is it.

This is who I am.

If this doesn't jive with your political agenda, adjust your political agenda.

Because this is who we are.

Well, now let's knock off and regroup for tomorrow on that point.

Thanks very much.

Well, before we get into this morning's rigid agenda,

where were we yesterday?

And is there, I recall there were hands up.

Do the people who belong to those hands still have the concerns that went with them?

Talk about forming local alliances in psychedelic communities?

Well, I think, you know, as I said, this is your affinity group.

You can't recognize psychedelic people walking around on the street

because our victory in the area of fashion has been so total that now even creeps look like freaks.

So, yeah, I've been in a number of places where people organized, I don't know what you would call them,

discussion groups, affinity groups in the wake of it.

It's something you sort of have to self-organize.

Maybe in the period after the close this afternoon, the people who are into that should exchange names and get something going.

I mean, obviously, it's a delicate thing, but on the other hand, mm-hmm.

Do you mention the words in what role that is played?

For me?

Well, a lot of people feel more secure doing journeys if they have some kind of ground control.

And in the most casual form, that can just be your best friend who doesn't do it, but you do.

Or if you suspect that fairly deep and charged issues are going to arise out of it,

why you want it to be someone with some psychotherapeutic experience.

But on the other hand, you know, you're in such a vulnerable state in that dimension that you really want to choose the facilitator carefully.

I mean, and have some kind of set of agreements worked out before.

I mean, the psychedelic trip doesn't always take the direction you want it to.

I mean, you write down before you take it that you want to deal with some episode of childhood trauma or abandonment.

Then you get loaded and it seems so preposterous that, you know, you can hardly contemplate the notion without laughing aloud.

And the facilitator has this, keeps trying to bring you back.

Say, well, you're not doing the work. We're here to do the work.

Well, then you say, well, you know, having a knock-down, drag-out fight while somebody's loaded isn't exactly the way to go either.

You sort of have to feel into that issue.

As I said yesterday, I can't get where I want to go in the presence of somebody else because they hold me to the surface.

If I were to have, my idea of the perfect facilitator's situation is that they're two rooms away and you have something equivalent of a beeper.

And then, you know, you can beep them and they'll come in and pat you on the head and tell you that it's all right if you need that.

But otherwise, they stay completely out of it.

It's really nice to follow your own thought, you know.

And I think we change in the presence of another person, you know.

We create a persona.

And it takes a lot of energy to maintain the persona.

And in that situation, there's no reason, so why do it?

Yeah.

I'm wondering...

I was going to be coming through as a psychedelic.

Have you been in a situation where you live without them?

I don't know if you're retired or maybe you're going to tell them.

Well, not exactly.

I mean, people always say, can you do it on the natch?

I sort of feel like if I could do it on the natch, I'd be alarmed enough to check myself in for some serious mental health care.

It's too radical.

You don't want to be able to do that on the natch.

It's a wonderful control on it to know that it won't happen unless you take the stuff.

You know, because it's not a mood shift or a subtle refocusing from foreground to background.

It's an absolutely ontology-appealing breakthrough.

You can't mentally change the body chemistry to actually go to that stage.

It's not like dogs.

In principle, I agree with that.

And I'm fascinated to try anything anybody has in mind.

But you have to be very demanding.

And I think too many people are not demanding at all.

I mean, you sit people down in a room and tell them we're going to repeat OM AH HUM 500 times.

And at the end of it, they come to you with tears of joy in their eyes and tell you it was the most profound thing that's ever happened to them.

I don't understand where those people could be coming from, you know?

I mean, I can sit down and like think about being stoned on DMT and I can give myself the butterflies with that exercise, but not much else.

That's as far as I get, you know?

Persistently, these various traditions claim that they can deliver the goods.

But when you look at the art, which is the paper trail that they leave, it doesn't look like what I'm talking about.

You know, I mean, I went through...

I once, for a while, I was a professional art buyer for Tibetan art, thongkas and that kind of thing.

And I interiorized all of that iconography.

But it isn't very much like what we're seeing.

And, you know, there are a number of highly idiosyncratic artists scattered through the history of art.

Gustave Moreau, James Ensor, we mentioned Hieronymus Bosch,

well, Mati Klarlein, but I'm trying to think of older ones.

But these seem to be unique visions, but not exactly the vision that seems to come out of this stuff.

Part of what's so interesting to me is how alien it is.

How if art is the... if the artist is supposed to be the antenna of society anticipating the visions which will later become the paradigms,

then they're not doing the job very well in this psychedelic domain.

Yeah?

Or you wanted... did you have a follow-up?

There's other ways, but it takes a lot of gifts.

And if you do get to that level, it's kind of like you sculpted your present moment,

but you're at that level, and you've stayed at us.

Whereas, I don't know, I see a way, sometimes, as you're going in and you come back,

you're going in and you come back, you're going in and you come back,

and that's where you started.

Well, but this is where the action is.

You know, it has to make sense in the world.

Now, I don't want to suggest... I mean, I think, like in the case of psilocybin,

I have no doubt whatsoever that if you take five grams of psilocybin every four days,

for, let's say, forty days,

then you will have nothing whatsoever to say to the rest of us.

You know, if what you see...

See, the thing is, in the spiritual quest, all these methods, yoga and mantra,

and then, you know, all the new versions of this,

the whole stance of the spiritual quester is accelerator to the floor all the time.

When you switch over to this method, it's the brake pads that are going to get the work out.

We don't... we, psychedelic people, do not strenuously exert ourselves to attain peculiar states of mind.

We strenuously exert ourselves to keep the states of mind from becoming too peculiar.

Why?

Because it can become so peculiar that... that... that... I don't know what...

Yes, that's it. It can become so peculiar that it is unspeakable.

And if it's unspeakable, it's just dropped out of the social contract, you know.

So, really, the reason to maintain it is so that you can get back into the sociological state and communicate.

But what I'm thinking is that I'm sure that there are people who have pursued it to the point that they just walked out of existence and didn't come back.

Yes, well, that's what I wanted to say. If you want to be the guy on Cold Mountain, who is covered with hair, who the village people occasionally see when the mist clears, when he descends to the lower levels to cut wood, you can become that Taoist immortal.

You know, what I like to say about psychedelics is once you get to this, it's no longer about seeking the answer.

It's now a tougher go. Now you have to face the answer.

And it's so easy to seek, you know, this Rishi, that Roshi, that Geshe, that Guru and all the wonderful people and the gossip and hijinks around the ashram

and all that malarkey. But once you get to this and it's just you and it, you know, it's a whole different ball game.

Well, we're talking there are two things, the experience and the wisdom and maturity that comes from the experience.

You don't have to keep dosing to do that, but to attain, maintain and work out the implications of that.

But you have to keep dosing to keep encountering the unspeakable thing that is the source of all that maturation and so forth.

My gosh, everybody's agitated here, yeah.

I wondered if in your experience in the Amazon or otherwise with Shimon, if you found that they were able to do this without drugs or whether they were using it?

No, largely not. In the Amazon, I mean, I discussed this with people and they said, no, you know, you must, the plant is the teacher.

I mentioned, or maybe I didn't, but there's an interesting book called Hauma and Harmeline by Flattery and Schwartz.

And it discusses the ambiance of the religious attitudes of early Zoroastrianism.

And they believed in what they called the Minang existence.

And we're talking, you know, 2000 B.C. here.

And they believed there was no possible way of accessing the spiritual dimension except drugs.

That was the entire way to do it.

And I think it's a kind of pharmacological and energy barrier.

It's good that these things are isolated from ordinary experience by the formality of having to take the compound.

If they weren't, it would be flooding in upon us all the time and we would have a hard time indeed.

Yeah.

Well, you just think about people taking the psychedelics from that.

And then there are these other people, like, for example, Ms. Jackson,

that tend to practice meditation.

I read somewhere recently that when the people in the Amazon, I watched it,

it was recommended that there was an initial effect to come on that they practiced mind control.

And what I haven't seen very much is the combination of, like, you know, mental practices

so as to end the combination of that, plus taking me to do it, like psychedelics or psilocybin.

And you talked a little bit about this, about what you do in preparation for the experience.

This concludes Tape 4. Our program continues with Tape 5.

Why is there no talk of the combining of the techniques with psychedelic?

Well, I don't know exactly. I mean, I would certainly agree.

See, I think that all religion is based on the experience of ecstasy.

And a religion like Hinduism represents, to my mind, an extreme case.

The roots of Hinduism are in the Soma rite.

For 3,000 years, this is what Hindu religiosity was about.

It was an intoxicant.

And without the intoxicant, there was no connection to the mystery.

Well, then, for some reason, it became tremendously hierarchically structured,

and constipated, and dogmatic, and, well, certainly dominator, if not outright fascism.

And so, I think all these religions have their roots in this irrational experience,

but they constantly want to turn it into a real estate operation.

And they do. And they do. And so, but in answer to your question,

all these techniques work with psychedelics.

You know, mantra, yantra, magical invocation, raising the Kundalini,

all of these things which seem so totally obscure from this level of consciousness.

It just becomes an, of course, of course it works.

So, it seems to me, the lost ingredient is the psychedelic.

I mean, you know, if you go to India, and you have any illusions about sadhus,

I mean, sadhus are hash heads with a line of patter, that's all.

I mean, the main concern in any community of sadhus is,

how many chillums can you make and smoke before you fall asleep?

And I've never seen a yoga text that came clean about this,

and said, you know, this is basically a how-to-use cannabis technique.

So, it's good to go to the actual place and see how it's being handled.

What's going on in the Amazon is the shamans cure, they chant,

they provide an exemplar for their society,

but when you get seriously loaded with them and talk to them,

their attitude is more like scientists.

They will agree that they can cure and find lost objects

and predict the weather and all that,

but they don't understand how this works.

They're very eager to admit that it's all a big mystery,

and that beyond the cheerful set of shamanic techniques

that they, the Witoto, the Warani, whoever they are,

beyond the cheerful power of the conjuration of these techniques

lies the absolute unknown, and they're aware of that.

There's no closure in shamanism, so it sort of keeps you humble.

Yeah?

The subject of, you know, from Friday night on into today,

the subject of naturally altered states,

you have things that keep coming up.

And I've come to the understanding that your question is for vision,

and not the feeling.

Right.

I mean, one of the most interesting things about psychedelic experience

for me, and my drug of preference of large LHP,

is the feeling part of the experience.

And it seems to tapping into a psychic level of information

that's not available for you normally.

My question is, what do you think about the phenomenon that I experienced,

and I don't know whether it's because of my programming

or because I'm a good receptor of a contact high?

Where, when you're around people who are tricking you,

you don't get the depth of their experience,

but you definitely feel like you're in an older experience.

Oh, I think contact highs are very real.

Not only contact highs, but there are also contact lows,

which are very noticeable.

You know, there's a phenomenon called allophrenia.

Do you know what allophrenia is?

Allophrenia is when your friend is put in the hospital for schizophrenia,

and you go to visit him,

and you begin acting so peculiar that they don't let you out.

This is a common phenomenon, misbehavior by people who have come to visit people

who have been hospitalized for schizophrenia or psychosis.

The best theory is that it's pheromonal.

You know, there's one theory of what schizophrenia is,

that schizophrenia is a pheromonal disorder,

and what happens is your pheromone system goes haywire.

So then you don't smell right.

So then the people around you begin frowning at you, avoiding you,

turning their back on you when you approach.

Then you begin thinking,

there's something wrong with me.

I'm weird.

Then you secrete more of this weird pheromone,

and people get more,

and a dissonance begins to happen

until finally you have to be plucked out of the situation.

There are psychiatrists who swear that they can diagnose schizophrenia by a sniff test.

You know, they just walk over and take a hit off the side of your neck,

and then say, you know, lock this one up, put this one on.

Yeah.

I assume that you've seen Huichol art,

and I'm wondering whether or not you see in any of that anything close to what schizophrenia is.

And I realize it's from a different point, but...

No, the problem is one of...

the question is, is there in Huichol art a trace of this psychedelic dimension?

I guess there's a trace.

The problem is twofold.

The problem is one of material,

that with wood and beads and pitch,

it's very hard to get the...

to contort that into the object scene.

And then the other thing is conceptually,

you know, that it's very hard to grab and hold these very weird images.

The other thing is, that's happening in most traditional societies,

is that you operate within a canon.

You know, if you're a Huichol,

you have a very limited vocabulary of expression

within the iconography of Huichol art.

If you're a Tibetan Tonka painter, similarly,

it's all laid out for you.

The walls of tradition are very high.

The channel is very narrow.

That's why it's so interesting when an artist can transcend

the momentum of their cultural position

to really produce something unique.

I don't see...

I mean, I think...

You know, the reason I like talking to artists

is because all the art of the past 20,000 years

is like a teacup dipped into the ocean.

And yet any one of us,

not particularly self-defined as artists,

most of us, can access the ocean,

can swim in the ocean.

And so you say, you know,

we all can touch the same source that these great artists must have touched.

Their skill was that they were able to bring out a thimble full of this material,

and the rest of us can only look at it in wonder,

and then it passes by.

Yeah?

I was wondering, yesterday I made a reference to when I was into the extraterrestrial reference to psychedelics.

I was wondering if you don't hold that position anymore?

No, I'm not sure exactly.

I mean, the funny thing about the extraterrestrial position is

that it depends on how long it's been since you've taken mushrooms,

how creditable it seems.

If it's recent, it seems the only possible explanation.

If you wait a few months,

then skepticism and reason begins to level the landscape,

and you say,

well, no, it couldn't possibly really be.

I can't believe it.

Yeah.

But it could really be.

I can't believe it,

but it's just to be a really big joke.

I've never been asked for it.

I can't believe it.

I can't believe it's just to be a greatạnher.

Oh, my God.

That's all.

So far it's just to be a big-serve.

but, I think, you know, I think that we hardly have an inkling as to the real nature of the world

and the real history of life on this planet

and, you know, we don't know how narrowly channeled the manifestation of organic intelligence is

does it always have to be in a body, does it always have to be in a body that stands upright with binocular vision

I think the real task with dealing with extraterrestrials is to know when you've got one

it's completely silly to search the galaxy with radio telescopes for a radio civilization

I mean, to my mind, that is as chuckle-headed as deciding you're going to search the galaxy for a decent Italian restaurant

I mean, it doesn't work like that

you know, if you think about the mushroom, try to think about it objectively

it looks to me very much like a good candidate for an extraterrestrial

first of all, you know, DNA has been known to us only since 1950

less than a century

and we're already involved in this thing called the Human Genome Project

well, what that means is we are taking control of the scripts that write human beings

it seems to me anything we would recognize as intelligence

would pass through a phase of self-analysis

where it would realize that it was made out of DNA

and would then sequence itself

we're about to do this ourselves

well, that means that most extraterrestrials

will be the product of their own reflexive design process

in other words, an extraterrestrial that can cross the gulf between the stars

must surely then be able to control its own form

well then, if you look at the mushroom

it's a curious combination of artifact and entity

it looks sort of manufactured

there's very little fat on that system

I mean, first of all

fungi are primary decomposers

this means that they are at the very bottom of the food chain

this makes the kind of vegetarianism espoused by Buddhists

look like an orgy of slaughter

you know

because if you're at the very bottom of the food chain

that is the only place that is absolutely karma-free

so there's the mushroom

and occupying the karma-free position in the food chain

well then, it's

you know, we've been reading about these huge mycelial clones

spread under acres of soil in Michigan and Wyoming

well, those things

what that is, is that's a cobweb-like network

and in the case of a psilocybin species

filled with neurotransmitter-like compounds

can you imagine how many synaptic clamps there must be

in a 1500-acre mushroom clone?

if brain size is any relationship to intelligence

then hang on, Hannah

because it means that this thing

spread through the forests of the Midwest

has, you know, a brain approximate in weight

to a couple of dozen grey whales

the other thing is then the spore

looks perfectly designed to sustain itself in outer space

if you want to store spores for longevity

you create conditions as close to the conditions in outer space

as you possibly can

high vacuum, very low temperature

the casing of a spore

is one of the most electron-dense organic materials in nature

so electron-dense that it approximates a metal

well, global currents can form on the quasi-metallic surface

of an airborne spore

and they act as a further repellent for hard radiation

so, and, you know, percolating through the galaxy

at an ordinary rate

typical of stellar material

a mushroom species could percolate

from one side of the galaxy to the other

in under 400,000 years

well, that's lightning speed

compared to the size and age of the universe

if we were to gain the power to design ourselves

I think after a whole bunch of, you know, Madonna and Robert Redford clones

we would probably move on

to becoming something very much like a mushroom

it's, you know, mild, it's non-invasive

it's at the bottom of the food chain

it's virtually immortal

it's laden with neurotransmitters

and it's living in the imagination

and this, you know, brings me to a favorite subject of mine

this is where we have to go

we have to enter into the Blakean divine imagination

that's where our future lies

at this point, our relationship to this planet

we have to be parted from the Mother

to save the Mother

and to save us

and there are not that many possibilities

where are we going to go?

the political geniuses who run this planet

have made migration to the stars virtually impossible

I mean, don't kid yourself

it isn't only a matter of announcing a program

our short stubby fingers couldn't assemble something like a Saturn V moon rocket

that was made by a generation of people now deceased

Americans in this era are, you know, rather dull-witted people

who have a good deal of trouble even running a third world economy

so we're not going to the stars

you can forget that

so then where are we going?

well, nanotech

is that a possibility?

can we download everybody into a super-cooled cube of gold

dyterbium alloy buried 500 feet deep in the center of Copernicus

and then we'll go there and leave the Earth

and dance forever in the hallways of the astral imagination

that's one possibility

another possibility is

is there a way to diffuse consciousness into the environment?

can we become dolphins, caterpillars, grey whales and mosquitoes

and just sort of defocus ourselves

I mean, all of these are of course wildly radical notions

but on the other hand, we're headed straight toward a brick wall

at about 5,000 miles an hour

we have to figure out something pretty astonishing in a hurry

yeah?

yes, another thing about the function of the grinding

unless you'll notice that it takes nice and blurry entry

into the atmosphere

the heat shield

yes, precisely

yes

can you have a jump start on evolution from your conception of the evolution?

that's a funny question

I...

I don't know

because it's so hard to tease apart genetics and environment

I mean, they certainly have had a jump start on evolution by virtue of hanging out

in the space that our lives have created

you know, I think children need lots of attention

lots of nurturing, physical and spiritual

I guess I would say so

certainly they haven't been programmed with the fear and misunderstanding

that is in the society

we just got through anti-dope week at our school

which is an incredibly painful experience at this particular school

because I don't think there's a person associated with it who believes it for a moment

but it's like we all have to study fascism

because we live in a fascist state

a teacher made a statement that LSD caused brain damage

and my son dared to challenge this

and the guy said

well who told you it doesn't cause brain damage?

my daddy

no, not my daddy

he said

well Albert Hoffman told me it doesn't cause brain damage

end of discussion

yeah

how do you feel like the presence of your child

sometimes going on your psychotropic experiences

because I've had that before

especially when you were really young

yes, well when children are very young

you know, all kinds of psychic phenomenon happen

and you know, I think mothers, nursing mothers

and their relationship to their children is intensely telepathic

I remember when my daughter was not very old

she must have been like about three and a half

and I had a dream

and it was a very unusual dream for me

and very highly realized

and I dreamed of an orrery

do you know what an orrery is?

it's a model of the solar system made of gears

and you crank it

and there's the sun in the center

and the planets go around it

but this was a huge orrery

I dreamed I walked down a hall

and I opened a door

and I walked into this room

and there was this orrery

and these planets were circling around the sun

inside this room

and then

and I was awakened by my daughter

crying

and I went downstairs

and she said

there were planets circling around

inside my bedroom

and you know, that's a very specific and rare image

for an adult or a child to have

so yes, I think that our chuckle-headedness

is the main barrier to our encountering

all kinds of special abilities

that move around us all the time

we are truly the prisoners

of our limited conceptions

yeah

well, that's sort of exciting

what you're saying

and also back to

some of the questions

about why you don't want to

take it every day

for forty days in a row

and it's more on a psychological level

that what causes

I've worked with someone

who has done drug therapies in Mexico

and also I have a little story about Jung

and many of the people who have gotten into a situation of psychosis

are people who have used drugs

and the general principle behind that

is that people have experienced something

that they cannot integrate back

into their psyche or whatever

even if it's the ability to say

well that was then

and this is now

and therefore you get psychosis

so

not to say these things to alarm people

but just for respect

that there has to be

this ability to come back

and not be far out there

and there are a lot of different parameters to this

one is your own ego strength

another one is the society you live in

if you're a shaman

and you can say these things

and have them be accepted

then you're fine

and it doesn't have to be drugs

Jung used to

when he was older

he used to sit in a chair

and just go inside

and when he came back

he would have this litany of things

that he would say

so that he could come back and function

he would say

you know

I'm Carl Gustav Jung

my wife is so-and-so

my children

I have this many children

this many grandchildren

meet you

yeah

he would just do all this

uh-huh

the reconnect affirmation

yeah

the re-entry

yeah well I think that's not a bad idea

could I just follow up on that

I wanted to ask you

how do you see the role of rituals

specifically in your life

if you want to see the study

in your traditions

well I don't have a very popular position on ritual

and I blame it on the mushroom

because I just quote the mushroom

and the mushroom

I said what about ritual

and it said that's fine

if you don't know what you're doing

and I think that that

you know

it's really not an anti-ritualist position

because that is what ritual is

that's what you do if you don't know what you're doing

none of us

but you know

the purpose

you can tell when ritual works

because it makes itself obsolete

that's the

it's

yeah

well you know even in the most ritualistic context

there's always a footnote made for the crazy wisdom

I mean every great teacher has said that what he's saying is malarkey

a teacher who doesn't tell you that what he or she is saying is malarkey

is not to be taken seriously

so

you know it's the

if you meet the Buddha on the road

kill him

style of thinking

or

I was just reading

this guru

who's coming on strong

uh

is his name

Poojaji

dogs

no no not dogs

but anyway

somebody

this guy said

don't do practice

practice is only distraction

he said

we have to keep thinking up

he said

you know running an ashram isn't easy

these students they expect so much of us

we have to continually keep inventing stuff to keep them happy

and

send them off on these crazy quests

and

and you know endless fasts

and all this stuff because they want that

but you know

the guru is

pretty much content to kick back with the latest rolling stone

yeah

um

well

are you all familiar with rupert sheldrake's work

sheldrake is a british biologist

uh... who's

written a number of books his first book was called a new science of life

and it

was catapulted to fame by virtue of a review in nature which

it should be burned

and then he wrote a book called the presence of the past

sheldrake has an extraordinarily simple

interesting

revolutionary idea that just drives scientists straight up a tree

his idea is

that

um

once something happens

it's easier for it to happen the next time

yes

simple

but it takes then forms which drive people crazy

because he asserts based on that

that

if you teach rats to run a new kind of maze in Australia

then rats in Massachusetts should be able to run this maze faster

than if the rats in Australia hadn't learned it

because once something has been has occurred

then it has a momentum in time

he calls this the theory of formative causation

or morphogenesis

and it explains a lot of things which are otherwise very difficult for biology to explain

but it raises also a bunch of issues that are pretty tricky

and so Rupert and I have been close friends for years

and

even longer

I've been tight

with a mathematician in Santa Cruz

named Ralph Abraham

who's a chaos dynamicist

and Ralph and Rupert and I

did a book together

called Trialogues at the Edge of the West

which will be out at the end of the summer from Bear

and we'll all get together at Esalen the end of August

and do a bunch more of these public three-way dialogues

which are pretty spirited

because we are very different people from each other

but all psychedelic

and all interested in paradigm recasting

so that's what it's about

and it'll be out in midsummer

end of August for that Esalen thing

anybody else?

yeah

what do you think?

when you see the plants in places you've gone

uh-huh

and how the people that live there experience and

and they really appreciate the impact

and your thing is

you're sort of indeed

that feminism is related to

but it's necessary for special people

well feminism is a necessary thing for a successful future

because the archaic world was so dominated by

well that's a bad choice of words isn't it

was so characterized by an awareness of

of the feminine and the boundary dissolving

and the organic

the whole problem with the world

uh-huh

is that we cannot feel

the consequences of what we are doing

you know I mean recently we had paraded in front of us

the figure of Jeffrey Dahmer

as who you don't want to be like

and yet Jeffrey Dahmer to me was an absolute paradigm

of global civilization

because his problem was that he didn't

he couldn't feel the consequences of his actions

and this is what we are doing

I mean we are lacerating ourselves

by cutting down the rainforests and poisoning the oceans

this is not some airy fairy

save the redwoods kind of mentality

that protests against this

this is our own atmosphere

our own environment that we are destroying

it's a slow suicide

not so slow at the rate that we are carrying it out

well somehow we have to reactivate

the maternal nurturing caring circuitry

that kept the tendencies that have evolved in this fatal direction

at bay for a long long time

and you know you can call it ego

you can call it male dominance

you can call it the phonetic alphabet

whatever it is it has to be stopped

because the planet is imperiled by it

and I my analysis of it is that the only way to do it

is to dissolve the boundaries that culture

and language and tradition

have allowed us to create

and they are largely boundaries that suppress women

not because men hate women

but because men hate the feminine

and they want to control and hold it back

it's threatening

it's devouring

I mean the fact that the French refer to orgasm

as the little death

tells you you know what a weird kind of ambivalence

haunts our relationship to anything which dissolves us

out of the knot that we have tied ourselves into

so I you know I'm a kind of non-feminist feminist

I mean I think most feminists are feminist

because they think women have gotten a raw deal

I'm a feminist because I think mankind is headed for suicide

if we don't return to a more intense expression of the feminine

so it's not a political agenda for me to liberate an oppressed group of people

it's a collectivist agenda necessary to save everybody and everything on the planet

yeah

one of the things that's implicit in your general work

is that there exists allies

allies in the form of the planet

and when we look at the drop from partnership to dominator society

in my mind one of the things that would become implicit with Eucasus

would be that they are not only allies but there are malevolent entities out there

the kind of demonator force becomes so powerful

and then when I get into that line of thought

I get into this whole deni-urge

clash of the titans

kind of notion

and

sometimes the allies notion is very attractive

but in my mind it always implies there's malevolent forces out there

just as there are benevolent ones

well

no I mean there are malevolent and benevolent forces in there

and out there

but the

I don't see the world really as a struggle between good and evil

in some kind of Manichaean situation

it seems to me

that

we confer value

that you know nature is neither good nor evil

and that must then include all these allies

it's just that we confer judgment

this is because

when you begin to get down toward the bottom line

we don't know what the bottom line is

for instance we're headed toward a great historical bifurcation

where we're going to have to make some really hard choices

and most of the time in the so-called new age

they try to fuzz all the distinctions

and make you think you're never going to be slammed to the wall

and have to make a choice

but the choice that's coming up for us

is fundamental

it is

are we

to become

the care givers

the nurturers

and the gardeners of the earth

or is the earth

you know

I put it this way to somebody the other night

the question was

is the earth our mother

therefore to be cared for into her old age

nurtured, revered, and loved

or is the earth our placenta

therefore to be examined for signs of toxin

and then buried under the apple tree

in other words

what is the true nature of human beings?

are we to be integrated into nature

to celebrate it

or is nature a demonic and titanic force

that is imprisoning spirit

and holding it back from its full unfolding

in worlds of alien light and higher dimension

so far from here

that it's a miracle that even rumor reached us

of the possibility of salvation

this is a tough choice

because one path leads to

radical renunciation of technology

radical pairing of population

and an attempt to come to terms

with this small liquid planet

on which we find ourselves

and the other direction

says you know

forget it

it's the husk of a seed

and it is utterly meaningless

in the cosmic drama

and the real destiny lies out there

half way to the Nebuchadnezzar

or Zeta Reticuli

or some other exotic port of...

I don't see how you can have that

both ways

Yes, and most stars

have lives shorter than the amount of time

that biology has been on this planet

we are fortunate enough

to be around a very slow burning stable star

there are a lot of mysteries

I haven't forgotten your second question Raven

there are a lot of mysteries

in our cosmic neighborhood

that we rarely hear addressed

for example

I mean just as an example

if our destiny lies out in the great universe

it's a hell of a technological barrier

to cross to the stars

I mean it may be insurmountable

however

isn't it interesting

that the most Earth-like star

within seventy light years

is the nearest star

not technically the nearest star

which is a glowing red clinker

called Alpha Centauri

right?

but Beta Centauri

is 1.1 solar masses

1.1 solar masses

no star within seventy light years

is as Earth-like

I mean as Sun-like

as that star

from the point of view of the galaxy

Beta Centauri and our Sun

almost look like lightly bounded binaries

if this is an accident

it's a tremendously fortuitous accident for us

because it may well mean

that there is an Earth-like planet

at an incredibly short distance away from us

in terms of the cosmic neighborhood

in fact

probably within the next ten years

telescopes of sufficient resolving power will be created

that if there is a water-heavy oxygen-rich world out there

it's going to show up

well then that is going to become a tremendous attractor

in the historical matrix

because it will be hailed as the answer

I mean can you imagine?

because there will then be two possibilities

that there is intelligence next door

not likely

or that there is

but likely

how do you assess it?

how many water-heavy oxygen-rich planets have we examined

for crying out loud?

and the other possibility is

that it's empty real estate

in either case

it will excite keen interest

throughout society

so, you know, that's a little oddness

in our cosmic neighborhood

that is rarely mentioned

or taken account of

yes?

yes, although I leave that

to the Jeremiah Sitchins of the world

to work out the details

there is, after all, a fossil record

that is pretty clear

in spite of the ravings and rantings

of these Christers

the fossil record is pretty clear

that we emerged out of

the proto-hominids

who emerged out of

the Pongid radiation

that emerged out of

and so forth and so on

I don't...

I think that...

but there may be mysteries

I mean, one question

that I'm surprised nobody ever seems to ask

in these weekends

when I tell the cheerful story

of the...

the descent from the trees, the ape encounter with the mushrooms, and so forth, and so on,

is nobody ever asks,

well, but who put the mushrooms in the path of these binocular, bipedal, evolving primates?

I mean, is this just the story of nature's happiest accident?

Or did someone say, you know, tweak the planet,

start the retraction of the rainforest,

move the spores into the grasslands, and watch what happens?

Because then we come down out of the trees, brainless as a wombat,

and begin testing food sources, and lo and behold,

here are these things which are obviously designed to be seen.

I mean, mushrooms are a form of display.

They're designed to be seen.

They demand to be eaten.

And the consequences of that, you know, are to lead a species to the brink of star flight.

Well, is that just a coincidence?

Or is there a mind behind all of this?

See, I think that mind, the problem I have with all the extraterrestrial scenarios,

and all the channeling, and all the abducting, and all the stuff that goes on,

is it's all too B-movie.

It's all too simple, too straightforward.

That's what troubles me about the Sitchin scenario,

is that it's perfectly understandable to us.

If it's understandable to us, you can bet your booties it's the wrong answer.

I mean, it's going to be weirder than that.

It's not about mineral extraction or even diplomatic goodwill.

I had a professor years ago.

His cosmology went like this.

You know how there are bacteria which you can introduce into gold slurry

in low-grade gold ore,

and the bacteria will concentrate the gold,

and then you just wash the gold out of the bacteria,

and it's a mining technique that's very efficient for poor-yielding gold ore.

So this guy's idea was that someday UFOs would appear over every major city on Earth,

and they would just load up all the plutonium and fissionable material,

and take it away, and say,

thank you very much.

This mining operation is now concluded.

You people can go back to hurling shit at each other in the treetops,

as far as we're concerned.

We have real application for this fissionable material.

You people were going to use it to blow each other up.

What a bunch of dummies.

And farewell and good luck.

So that's one possibility.

Yes, then I insist on getting to these plants.

You mentioned a book called Something in Harmony by Fletcher?

No, Haoma, H-A-O-M-A, Haoma and Harmony by Flattery and Schwartz,

and it's published by the University of California Press,

Near Eastern Studies Division, publication number 23.

Yeah, isn't that a grabber?

Well, what I thought we should talk about this morning,

since we seem to range wide and free,

is the practicum of all this,

which is, you know, how many of these vision plants are there,

and where are they, and how do you obtain them,

and how do you use them once you obtain them?

So I thought, how many of you have ever seen...

Can you all... Here, let me get with it.

This is a poster, which I don't even know if it's still available.

It may be out of print. It is still available.

And it's a very good ethnobotanical course in hallucinogens on one sheet of paper.

What it's divided into, basically, is this is the old world, and this is the new.

Immediately, you notice that there are a lot more hallucinogens in the new world than the old.

This is one of the great puzzles of evolutionary botany,

because nobody can offer a reasonable explanation

as to why there should be nearly three times as many hallucinogenic plants in the new world as in the old.

I mean, other than that's where the flying saucers planted them,

nobody has come up with a good explanation.

Major hallucinogenic plant complexes that I've had experience with and can address

are... Well, let's do a little quick geographical tour.

First of all, North America, for reasons not well understood,

is quite poor in native hallucinogens.

There are no major North American hallucinogens.

Peyote is... Well, yes, it's North American.

The funny thing about peyote... I mean, you can feed me questions as long as we stick to the subject.

The thing about peyote is, you know, we have this tremendous respect for it.

We imagine that it's tremendously ancient, and it apparently isn't.

There is no archaeological evidence of peyote use any earlier than 500 years ago.

It's almost a phenomenon of the conquest.

What you find in the old graves, in the peyote cultural area,

are the seeds of sephora secundifolia, which is an ordeal poison, strychnine.

And often, often, drug, human-plant symbiotic relationships evolve over time.

It may be that the use of hallucinogens is still in fairly dynamic evolution all over the planet.

Peyote is a major hallucinogen, should have been used for the past 50,000 years.

If it has only been used for the past 500 years, that's pretty peculiar, alright.

And yet, that appears to be the evidence.

Ibogaine, not only a visionary hallucinogen, but an aphrodisiac as well.

No evidence of any use before 1850.

And yet, in an area where the Portuguese had been trading for the past 500 years

and writing cultural descriptions and interviewing the people,

if it was there, it would have been mentioned.

So, this is a puzzle.

You know, ayahuasca use, we assume, is millennia old.

But, on the other hand, archaeology is a real miserable proposition in the Amazon

because the climate is so degradative.

So, we can't really know.

But, aside from peyote and whatever its history,

North America seems to have only minor hallucinogens that have been utilized shamanically.

A puzzle, another puzzle about culture and attitudes is,

as you all know, the Northwest Coast Indians,

the Kwakutal, Shimsham, and Tlingit language groups,

have an extraordinarily evolved shamanism.

And, were the people who developed that x-ray vision style of art,

well, their cultural area has the densest number of psilocybin mushrooms of any place in the world.

No cultural evidence of psilocybin use.

No evidence that these people even knew these things were there.

I mean, I know this challenges the tradition of the all-knowing Aboriginal.

But, you know, this is what the data seems to imply.

Now, in Southern California, and across portions of the Southwest,

there have been de Tura religions, which are very old, apparently.

The so-called Tulaach religion.

I don't recommend de Tura.

I don't know what astrological sign you have to be to make your peace with that stuff.

But I find it really peculiar and menacing.

It's about magic, which is about power and control,

and usually sexuality in some invasive and dominator application.

I've taken de Tura a number of times.

And it's been interesting, but it feels watery and dark and dangerous to me.

There was a period when I lived in Nepal,

when I became aware that these sadhus,

not content with their superior meditation techniques

and their endless smoking of hashish,

were also availing themselves of the seeds of de Tura metal,

which is conspecific to what we call Jimson weed in this country.

And so I thought, well, I should take this, too, and find out what it's about.

Well, it was a very odd trip.

It was, I sat in my room in Bodanath,

and I would sit and say, hmm, nothing is happening, nothing is happening.

Well, you can only think that so many times.

Then my mind would drift into a kind of twilight state,

and then these wraith-like entities.

I mean, they were like Victorian ghosts.

You know, they were like women in shredded damask gowns or something,

would fly into my window carrying newspaper sheets in their outstretched arms,

and they would let these sheets of newspaper flutter down onto my lap,

and I would, like, begin to read.

And I would begin, and I would be so astonished by what I was reading,

that it would jerk me out of it.

And I'd say, what's happening?

Nothing is happening, nothing is happening.

And then my attention would drift, and this would happen again.

Well, then after about a half an hour of that,

as the stuff began to build up, I began to, like I would undergo these very brief periods of unconsciousness,

and when I came out of them, I would discover that my leg had been thrown up around behind my head,

and my arm shot through, and I was, like, all knotted up.

Then I would very carefully unfold myself and lay back down.

And I remember thinking, I'm certainly glad there's nobody else here,

because this is the kind of thing just designed to drive a sitter into a conniption fit of alarm.

And, you know, about six times over the next hour and a half, I went into these convulsive spasms.

And, you know, then on another night, these English people shared a suite of rooms off of mine,

and I had to get to the bathroom, I had to go through this one guy's room.

So, this one night, I hadn't taken de Tura, but this fellow had taken de Tura,

and at one point, I had to go to the John's,

so I debated for a long time about how this was going to disturb his trip,

and maybe I should piss out the window, but no, that wouldn't seem,

although in India, it's perfectly all right.

And so, finally, I decided I would just walk through the room.

So then, as I was tiptoeing through the room, I saw that he was actually having sex with this girl

that we knew from Kathmandu, and it had a slight emotional tinge for me,

because I had actually had my eye on her, although I had never said anything about it to anybody.

So then, the next morning, I mentioned this, and he said that, yes, it had been his impression as well,

but that, in fact, she wasn't there.

And so, it was like, you know, I saw somebody else's hallucination,

and then what finally decided me that de Tura was too peculiar,

was I had another English friend who lived a couple of houses away,

and one day, I was in the market buying potatoes, and this guy came along, and we were just talking,

and in the course of this conversation, he was telling me how he'd been taking a lot of de Tura,

and in the course of this conversation, I became aware that he thought that I was visiting him in his apartment,

and I decided, that's too fucked up, you know, to not know whether you're entertaining someone

in the confines of your apartment, or buying vegetables in the market,

means that you have become too disengaged from the modalities of the real.

And, of course, it creates tremendous drying, and it's a deliriant, is what the literature calls it.

It's a deliriant, but these, you know, I think that people all over the world utilize plants for bizarre experiences.

Time and time again, I've run up against this.

One, you know, there's a very rare drug in South America called Ukuhei, Ukuhei.

It's made by the Witoto, and the Bora, and the Muinani, in this very circumscribed area.

And what fascinated us about it was that it was an orally active DMT drug,

and we couldn't, as pharmacologists, understand how an orally active DMT drug was possible,

because the DMT should be destroyed in your gut.

So we wanted to get a sample of this stuff.

And it's made from the resin of Varola trees.

The inner bark of the Varola sheds a red resin.

And we eventually, in 1981, my brother and I, and Wade Davis, the guy who wrote The Serpent and the Rainbow,

we all launched an expedition up the Rio Yaguas Yasu, and where there was this stuff.

And we would do what we called bioassays, which means somebody has to test this stuff,

because we would get samples from these shamans, and we would draw straws for who got to do the bioassay.

Well, taking this ukuhei was appalling.

I mean, your heart rate goes up to about three times normal.

You shed water by the gallon.

Your blood pressure shoots up.

I mean, it felt like a pre-coronary to me.

And then we come down and say to this shaman, you know, Lorenzia, what's the story?

And he said, yeah, it takes getting used to, doesn't it?

And so then I, and then when you look at it, when you look at this ukuhei chemically,

you see, well, yes, there's DMT in there, and there's 5-MAO DMT in there.

But then, when you do the gas chromatogram, you see that marching along behind those spots

are all these other spots of various tryptamine compounds, some of which are cardio-regulators,

some of which nobody knows what they do.

And so then you realize that it's a dirty drug.

There's too much junk in there.

What you want is something that has a very clean signature.

So ukuhei didn't exactly seem the way to go.

I think that this is the real situation with Amanita Muscaria,

probably the most discussed, uninteresting drug in the world,

because so many people have tried to hang so much on it.

And, you know, it's a horrible experience most of the time.

It's one that has a toxic level real close to this.

Yeah, yeah.

And occasionally you'll meet someone who says,

well, you're just wrong. It's wonderful.

I've taken it for years. I love it.

And I, you know, don't know.

First of all, it's genetically variable.

It's geographically variable.

It's seasonally variable.

And it fluctuates at various times in its process of maturation.

So what must be going on with Amanita Muscaria

is you have to learn how to take it in your area

from people who know where to collect it, when to collect it,

how much to collect and how to prepare it.

But if you just go out and find one and chow down,

I guarantee you it'll turn you every way but loose.

And then it'll turn you loose.

So...

But have you done it by drinking urine?

No, that's what they always say.

They say, have you drunk your urine recently?

I got a letter last week.

No, I understand.

But do you all understand the basis of the question?

Why does urine come into it?

Because in Siberia they have discovered,

which is where this Amanita thing originates,

that the active principle is not destroyed inside your body,

that it is excreted in the urine.

And the true aficionados of this stuff

believe that the so-called second pass

is better than the first pass.

And so you have to, you know, they drink the urine.

One of the great hazards of Siberian shamanism

is stepping outside of the yurt on a snowy night to take a leak

and being pitched head-first into the snow by frantic reindeer

who will butt you out of the way to try to get to the yellow snow

because they're so completely hooked on Amanita

that nothing stands in their way of this stuff.

I thought you were going to say it's your students.

Oh, your students pushing you out of them.

Well, I've never hung out with the Yakuts.

Maybe they are a pretty wild-eyed gang.

An example of how a very ancient folk way

can be incorporated into our culture

without us even realizing it

and is provided by discussing Amanita muscaria.

If you go to the Encyclopedia Britannica

and you look up Santa Claus,

they'll tell you that it has to do with Saint Nicholas

and it got started in the 11th century

but when you look at the Santa Claus story

it's a perfect mythologian

to analyze from this point of view

because look what's going on with Santa Claus.

First of all, Santa Claus's colors are red and white.

The colors of the Amanita muscaria, for sure.

Santa Claus lives at the North Pole.

What does this mean?

It means that Santa Claus lives at the Axis Mundi

where Yggdrasil, the magic world ash of Welch mythology

has taken root.

Santa Claus flies.

This is what shamans do.

Santa Claus is the master of the reindeer,

the animal most associated with the Amanita muscaria.

Santa Claus is aided in his work by troops of elves.

And what is the work of Santa Claus?

To build toys for children.

Remember the DMT thing saying,

look at this, look at this.

Well, those were off-duty elves, clearly.

And so here are all the motifs.

And I believe that for children in our culture,

that all the Christer stuff is not what Christmas is about.

Christmas is about standing in front of the tree on Christmas morning

with the gifts arrayed and the twinkling lights on.

Well, that tree is the tree that the Amanita muscaria forms its symbiotic relationship to.

It's always spruce or pine that it has a mycorrhizal relationship to.

So, the number of motifs relating Santa Claus to a cult of Amanita muscaria,

there's almost nothing but relational motifs there.

And yet, if you suggest this to people, they just back away in horror, you know.

Well, these hallucinogenic plants seem clustered in the New World in two areas.

The first area is the Sierra Mazateca of Central Mexico and related areas.

And there you have a number of things overlapping.

You have a mushroom area of multiple species

where, unlike the Coahuatl, Ximsham, Tlingit language area,

in this Central Mexican area, they absolutely did use and discover these mushrooms.

And we have these things called mushroom stones that go 2500 B.C.

So, the mushroom religion is truly archaic in Mexico.

In the same cultural area, you have the morning glory seeds

that come from Ipamea purpura and related hybrids.

Are you all familiar with these?

This is a psychedelic plant that you can grow yourself and take.

Don't buy the packages of seeds and take them

because a benevolent government has made sure that they are soaked in horrendous poison

so that you can't get loaded on them.

But you can grow a crop out of them that will be toxin-free.

And this is a tremendous visionary intoxicant.

It takes a couple of hundred of these seeds.

But in that same area, strangely enough, there is another morning glory, Turbina Coriombosa.

It used to be called Rivia Coriombosa.

That as few as thirteen seeds will flatten you.

Now, it's interesting, as long as we're talking about morning glory seeds,

to note that per unit volume, by weight,

probably the strongest plant hallucinogen in the world is Hawaiian Baby Woodrose.

And yet there is no record of any culture ever utilizing that.

There are thirteen species of Argyria.

It's called Hawaiian Baby Woodrose, but it has nothing to do with Hawaii.

It's native to India.

There are thirteen species of Argyria scattered from southern India out to Fiji.

And all contain ergot-like, LSD-like compounds, like Chinook Levine and so forth.

These, I got started on morning glory seeds because they were available.

But don't sell this stuff short, folks.

I mean, it'll give you a ride that you'll never forget.

And the Baby Woodrose, even more so, be very careful with the Hawaiian Baby Woodrose,

because it contains cardio-active glycosides.

And, you know, if you, you know, maybe six seeds will do you.

Twelve seeds might well plant you.

And twelve seeds will fit on a tablespoon.

So this is nothing to start choking down in large amounts, yeah.

Yes, and could be extracted in a fairly simple filtration system.

Yeah, good point.

Yeah.

Do you grind them up?

Well, they are dry.

They're little crescent-shaped dry things.

Yeah, grind them in a brawn grinder.

And applesauce is the favorite carrier for these disgusting things, or milkshakes.

But it would be good to look into doing a little chemistry.

The emetic in the morning glories is estercoumarone.

Not the cardio-active glycoside in Argyria nervosa, but in Ipomaea purpura, it's estercoumarone.

And you could devise a simple chemical system for removing that.

And I think LSD, you know, have you ever had what's called Woodrose LSD?

Well, it's wonderful.

It's unlike LSD, it's more like psilocybin, because it is highly visionary.

And one of the things about these morning glories is, you know,

I don't know whether we have to talk about Rupert's theory or what,

but it is just an archive of Mayan and Toltec imagery.

I mean, you take this stuff, and you're there, in the pyramidal complex,

on the day of Venus's heliacal rising, when they do their thing.

I mean, it's pretty amazing.

It's a close relative.

It's active, not in the microgram range, but in the milligram range.

And there are several active compounds.

You're right, and I think Chinoclavine is psychoactive, and Ergonovine,

all these occur there.

So do you grind them into a powder, and then just take, capsule them.

It's a lot of capsules.

It's like half a cup of this horrible, whitish meal with a strange smell.

But, yeah, basically, about 200 seeds.

You may want to go higher, but start with that.

Yeah.

Well, now, supposedly, in the Massatech area,

the Reveacaragosus seeds are ground up, and then they are put into a cold water

to make the cold water infusion.

And then the solids are removed, so that there's only a few water-soluble fractions in the water.

And then that is round.

Well, no, but if what you're saying is true, that's where the glycoside would reside.

That's not my understanding, actually, what...

I just remember a picture of a woman doing that, in a book like White Schultz or something like that.

Well, maybe the caption got mislabeled or something, because the way they do it, where I've seen it,

is they take the little seeds, and they grind them on a matate to powder.

Then they put it in water, as you said, and they shake it, and leave it, and come back an hour later, and shake it again,

and do that for a while, and then the stuff precipitates to the bottom, the matter,

and the liquid fraction is poured off and discarded, and they take the solid matter,

and they let it dry in the sun until it's no longer runny,

but it's a kind of like the consistency of oatmeal or Play-Doh or something like that,

and then they make a little tiny tortilla, which they then toast on a metal griddle,

and so you get this thing which looks slightly smaller than a Ritz cracker,

and is a toasted Morning Glory seed wafer, and you eat that, and that is the thing which is active.

That's how I've seen it done. Apparently not. They toast it lightly.

They don't, it's not blackened, it's just sort of golden.

No, it's one species of Morning Glory, Turbina, previously called Rivia coriombosa.

The other one, the Morning Glory that you have to take a couple of hundred seeds for,

is used in that area as a hallucinogen, but it's also used to induce labor,

and has a whole role in midwifery, and like that.

No, that's the Hawaiian Woodrose, and it has no history of human usage, so you're on your own.

It's worth talking about maybe for a minute that, you know, there are...

hallucinogens are like hotel rooms. Some are occupied and some are not.

And it's always interesting to fiddle with the unoccupied ones, because if you believe Sheldrake, then it's an empty field.

You know, one way of thinking of these things is when you take a plant, it takes you.

So, when you take mushrooms, for instance, what the trip is, is all the mushroom trips that anybody ever had.

And you leave, you know, you make a tiny contribution, too.

You leave a piece of your trip in the trip.

And so, the trip is slowly evolving over time, as those who take the plant each leaves a brick, or an offering, or a little architectural motif on this vast edifice.

Well, then, if you come, that was why, you know, a plant like Hawaiian Woodrose, or to some degree, Stroferia Cubensis,

because it is not the preferred mushroom among the Mexican traditionalists, then it's unoccupied.

You can make of it what you want. It can be sort of your vehicle.

This is why, you know, a drug like ketamine, which is a new drug, a drug without a thousand years of input,

my impression of where you go on ketamine is, it's like visiting a new office building, that nobody has rented offices yet.

I mean, all the water coolers work, and there are these recessional distances with fluorescent lighting,

but, you know, there are no hurrying secretaries in crowded offices and chatter around the water fountains.

It's just empty. It's empty because not enough people have left their initials on the walls, yeah.

What is the variety that's common, a mushroom that's common in the Yucatan, in the Mayan area?

Well, if you mean growing on manure, yeah, that's Stroferia Cubensis.

See, there are about 30 species of mushrooms that grow in that Mexican area,

and most of them are what are called, well, not most, some are ephemeral mushrooms,

meaning they're very small and they can be almost anywhere.

And then there are some larger ones, too, that can be almost anywhere.

Stroferia Cubensis is the only one of the good ones that locates on cow dung.

Now, there are other mushrooms which grow on cow dung that contain psilocybin,

but they also are more sickening.

There are species of Paneolus and species of Coprinus.

If you collect a mushroom off dung and you want to know whether it's a Paneolus or a Coprinus or a Stroferia,

just keep it around for a few hours.

If it's a Stroferia, it will just sort of be around.

If it's a Coprinus or a Paneolus, it will do what's called auto-digest.

It will turn into a slimy mess.

Can you tell from the sporeprin?

No, you can't tell from the sporeprin, but you can tell from the macromorphology of it if you know mushrooms.

They're easy to tell apart.

I think the sporeprin has to have mushrooms.

Yeah, well, that's tricky.

You need somebody who really knows their stuff.

Can you clarify one more question?

Mm-hmm.

Were you implying that there was a way to, like, a similar water process for the land?

Woodrows, seeds, remove and stuff?

It was more speculative, but I think it would be worth trying.

Yeah, yeah.

But I thought that the urge you now put in the water is fine.

Some are and some aren't.

But it's the one that is the water-soluble that are the Paneolus.

I'm not sure about that.

I've read some more about synthesizing honesty, and it's fairly hard to get to the starting points.

I heard if you get a bunch more in the water states, it's still kind of lighter fluid.

It's not hard.

I can't see a pathway there.

Yeah, that sounds right.

Pet ether is a good one.

So is chloroform.

Have any of you read The Road to Eleusis?

Yes.

Oh, yes.

That's about the Eleusinian Mysteries, and argues, it's by Wasson and Hoffman and Ruck,

and argues that the mystery at Eleusis was a kind of ergotized beer.

That they were gathering ergot off Paspalum, and making an ergotized beer.

And the only way they could have done that for 2,000 years, stoning thousands of people each September at this cult site,

without the thing getting a reputation for being toxic or causing convulsions,

is if they had some way that was very efficient of separating the dangerous alkaloids from the hallucinogenic ones.

So that may have been a water fractionation technique as well.

Or, you know, the whole theory may be wrong, and whatever was drunk at Eleusis may not have been ergotized beer.

It could have been a mushroom of some sort.

This is what Robert Graves thought, that it was a mushroom.

Do you think the second print here?

The road to Eleusis?

Probably not, because Wasson is now dead, and the estate is kind of funny about that kind of thing.

Yeah?

I have two questions.

One, could you talk more about the emetic in Morning Glory, and how to get rid of that?

The emetic is Esther Coumarone.

If you're not a chemist and used to dealing with high molecular weight solvents,

then you should do some kind of a water, you know, dissolve it in water,

and then try to separate out the fractions.

This would be, I mean, I think a lot of work needs to be done.

I think in the underground there are publications which have circulated that are, you know,

the wizard's workbook for mushroom rec... or for Morning Glory reclamation, and stuff like this.

It's a... you pay your dues with Morning Glories, but it's usually worth the price of admission.

It's just nausea, after all, for crying out loud.

Yeah?

The question had to do with what you were saying about different hallucinogens in hotel rooms.

I got the impression that the implication is that somehow consciousness creates the reality

that's put, you know, that's out there, depending on whether, how often consciousness has used

these different hallucinogens, is that...

Yeah, I think so.

I mean, that we leave our fingerprints upon the drugs we take,

and drugs that have been taken for thousands of years have a lot of fingerprints on them,

and you join up with that.

You enter into the field, you know.

One way of thinking, since somebody talked about Sheldrake earlier,

one way of thinking about psychedelics, in trying to define what do they do,

is that they are amplifiers of the morphogenetic field.

That, you know, the past of objects somehow becomes present.

This would fit in with my notion that when you take a psychedelic,

you are rising into some kind of super space that can be mathematically described,

because having the past be co-present with the present,

is a way of saying that you have shift your dimensional relationship to the data field,

and now it all appears to be one coherent thing.

Yeah?

What is the plant that grows in the southwest that has Harmelina?

Pagaman Harmelina, the giant Syrian rue.

Its original range is from Morocco to Manchuria,

but at some time in the 19th century it was brought into this country as a range fodder for goats.

I mean, it's a pretty rasty plant.

It has small yellow flowers, and it's a kind of...

It has succulent leaves, sort of water-holding leaves,

and it looks like a form of sagebrush.

And when you cut into it with a knife or a machete, it's brilliant yellow inside.

And that brilliant yellow is the harming.

Pound it up with a sledge hammer to separate the fibers,

and do a hot water wash on it,

and then, you know, do a second hot water wash,

then get rid of the physical stuff, combine the two mother liquors,

and drive it down to a reasonable volume,

and it'll do the trick.

Yeah?

You're probably familiar with a couple of different...

John Allegro and Andresa Puharic, yeah?

Yeah, I mean, what's your assessment?

Do you think there's any value that there is in you?

Well, not to rain on anybody's parade.

Andresa Puharic is a very mercurial person.

Is that what we want to say?

Recall that he was the guy who pushed Yuri Geller for a long time,

and they were forever tromping into the Negev

and coming out with blank cassettes that had held the wisdom of the galaxy,

but the aliens erased them before they let them return.

That could happen here.

So that's Andresa Puharic.

He's been around for a long time.

I mean, you have to...

These people are such eccentrics.

I mean, you have to just respect people's persistence and survival power.

But I think, you know, his scholarship and his notion of the rules of evidence

is fairly divergent even from my fairly loose canon.

So, Allegro is a little different case.

Do you all know the book, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross?

He managed to hypothesize one of the most radical theories ever to come down the pike.

I don't know how true it is, but his theory is that Jesus was a mushroom.

And, you know, this would not probably have cut too much mustard,

except that the guy was a Dead Sea Scroll scholar of world renown,

had a scholar's grasp of Aramaic and Akkadian,

and was fully licensed to be one of the people who tell us

what the primary documents of Christianity really mean.

The problem was, when Allegro got a hold of them, he said,

well, what they really mean is that a sacramental mushroom

was being grown in caves by Nabataeans down around Qumram,

and they called it Jesus in order to befuddle the Roman authorities

and created the cheerful theory of the friendly carpenter

who tells us to render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's.

And this was all a publicity stunt just to keep the Roman authorities guessing.

And he claims he has textual support for this.

The problem is you have to be an Aramaic philologist to follow the argument.

I mean, the argument is unbelievably tortured.

There is a lot of question.

There is a peculiar opaqueness about the early history of Christianity.

I mean, if we are to try and take it seriously and understand what happened there,

then it must be that, first of all, if we believe Christ was a real person,

then he must have been born in 6 B.C.

because there was a coniunctio maxima of Jupiter and Saturn at that time,

which is a good astrological event to hang the nativity on,

which means then that the crucifixion would have occurred in 27.

Well, why is it then that there are no mentions?

No mention of Christ can be pushed back later than earlier than A.D. 69.

What was going on between 27 and 69?

The Gospels are not contemporaneous.

And the mention in 69 is not even a sure thing.

It is in Suetonius.

And he says,

Jews have recently come to Rome agitating in the name of their leader Crespus.

And that is the reference.

And, you know, it's puzzling.

Because take a figure as minor as Mani.

Mani is the founder of Manicheanism.

He was born in Seleucia, Ctesiphon in the 700s.

Well, God, we have Mani's laundry bills.

I mean, we know how much he paid in taxes,

the nickname he had for his dog.

I mean, we have a lot of data on Mani.

And so why a figure like Christ should be so peculiarly swathed in ambiguity

if it was a real person with these people eager to chronicle it is a little hard to figure out.

Yeah, I mean, Mani got right with it.

I mean, he cultivated the court.

He knew how to get his thing going.

Yeah.

If any of you are interested in these kinds of questions and like your data in novel form,

read The Transmigration of Timothy Archer by Philip K. Dick,

which is a wonderful intellectual romp through all of these issues.

It's essentially the fictional telling of the story of James Pike,

who you may remember was the Episcopal Bishop of San Francisco and a great enthusiast for LSD.

And he died in the Negev under very mysterious conditions.

He parked his car and with a roadside map and a bottle of Coca-Cola in 115 degree heat,

started walking toward the Dead Sea and dehydrated and died.

And he was very close to John Allegro.

You know, I'm not given to conspiracy theory,

but you must have been following this whole hassle about the Dead Sea Scrolls.

Well, a lot of people think it's because what is written there is incommensurate with Christianity

as it has existed for 1700 years.

And nobody knows what to do with this stuff.

I mean, it's the equivalent of what do you do with the doctrine of the resurrection

if somebody comes up with the mummy of Christ.

Well, that's the kind of situation that these Dead Sea Scrolls may place Christian hermeneutics in.

John Allegro's book?

No, John Allegro died recently.

Sacred Mushroom?

Oh, no, the book by Philip K. Dick is called

The Transmigration of Timothy Archer.

Are you aware of Edmund Bordozeki's translation?

Oh, yes, he's another one.

His really tweaking volume is called How the Great Hand Died.

Right.

And it was an expose of Jesus Barabbas versus this,

as opposed to Jesus.

Yes, well, the empire never died, which is Philip K. Dick's motto.

The Gnostic temperament is alive and well.

In fact, there hasn't been a century as friendly to Gnosticism as the twentieth since the fourth.

So, there you have it.

I've heard a little bit of Revelations, and this sounds like a description of a burger poisoning.

Well, this has been suggested.

What you need to, you know, to put the Gospel of John in, or I mean, yes,

to put the Gospel of John in context, get to Charles' book,

The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the New Testament.

This concludes Tape 5.

Our program continues with Tape 6.

With Tape 6.

And then you see everything that the Church Fathers tossed out.

Because, you see, the canon, the New Testament, is a group of accounts

that were able to survive the sorting process of the Council of Nicaea.

And there was a huge literature which was just tossed out as being too weird.

I mean, read the Gospel of Philip, the Gospel of Thomas.

Have you all looked at the Nag Hammadi Library?

Do you know what this is?

The Nag Hammadi Library is forty-two texts

which were dug up in Upper Egypt in 1948

at a Coptic Monastery called Chenoboskion.

Forty-two texts that went into the ground A.D. 220.

means nobody has been able to put a finger on them since A.D. 220.

It's like a fossil of Christianity in the third century.

Well, my God!

You can barely map it on to the cheerful religion that we inherit as Christianity.

I mean, it is an exotic and complicated situation.

It's very well worth reading.

Can you go to research?

Oh, I'm sure the Metaphysical Bookstore in Berkeley, I mean in Boulder, will sell you.

James M. Robinson is the editor and it's called the Nag Hammadi Library.

Forty-two texts reflecting early Christianity, Gnosticism and so forth and so on.

Oh, Hans Jonas.

Hans Jonas is a brilliant, his book, Gnosticism, The Message of the Alien God to Infant Christianity.

If that's not a title to die for.

Huh?

Oh, The Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha of the New Testament by Charles.

And that weighs in at about 35 pounds.

But theological libraries will have it, but it's in the locked case.

You don't want seminarians mucking around with this kind of stuff.

And if I mention the Arantia Book too, which has about 2,000 pages on the Life of Christ,

and covers those years after 30 years after 20 years.

That's right.

The Arantia Book is a very spectacular and early example of channeling,

before it was even named, and very interesting.

Of all the channeled material, the Arantia Book, for pure grandiosity, puts everybody else to shame.

Right?

Can they talk about seeding the planet?

Yeah.

Well, these are persistent themes, you know.

I mean, all of Gnosticism is the perception that we don't belong here.

That we are creatures of another realm.

Beings of light, who because of some horrible cosmic mistake, have been trapped in the world of matter.

And the Gnostics take the Pentatech, the first five books of Moses, and turn it into a nightmare story.

And say that, you know, the God of this world, which in Jewish tradition is called Yahweh,

who is the creator of the world, for the Gnostics, he is not the real God at all.

He's the Demurge.

He's a kind of mad God, who has entrapped the light.

And the task of salvation is to gather the light and then release it back to its hidden higher source,

beyond the machinery of cosmic fate.

Well, that's good. It's sort of like, you know, the Manduki Upanishad?

It's my favorite Upanishad, because it's the shortest.

It's only a page and a half long, which, you know, others should have been so similarly inspired to brevity.

But it's the breath of Brahman.

It traces, it's the description of one exhalation-inhalation cycle.

Yeah.

Well, you're not even supposed to say it, if you're orthodox.

G-D.

Yeah.

I'm fascinated by the Rastafarian comfort,

in relation to Yahweh,

the abbreviation of Yahweh,

the same phrase, Hallelujah,

was supposed to be that.

What is your understanding of that connection?

Well, I don't know too much about Rastafarianism.

It was founded by Marcus Garvey and had this notion of return to Africa.

You know, syncretism is always with us.

Gnosticism was characterized by syncretism.

The whole late Hellenic religious efflorescence was largely syncretic.

And certainly, that's what we have now.

I mean, you know, the New Age, you go to these fairs,

and the people who are talking to the Pleiades,

have the booth next to the people who are talking to Zinebel Genubi,

and both have world plans from the Saucerian All Fathers,

and the two plans are different, and you just,

you know.

You know.

No, I agree.

There are two sentiments loose in the world,

and you're going to not get through this life without taking sides.

You know, do you believe that our destiny is in another dimension,

made of light on the other side of the universe?

Or do you believe that we should, you know,

clean up the rainforests and save the planet?

You want to be very careful with your political agenda.

One of my sub-interests,

which sort of has a relationship to this, but it's oblique,

is asteroidal impacts.

I think asteroidal impacts are one of the great undiscussed factors in evolution,

that every solid body in the solar system is heavily cratered with impacts by infalling bodies.

There's this thing down in Arizona that only happened 50,000 years ago.

It was a piss-ant sized object,

and everything within 800 miles of the impact point died instantly.

It dug a whole half a mile into the ground.

It was a nothing burger.

This thing which came down 65 million years ago,

they now think on the Yucatan,

that it killed everything on the earth larger than a chicken died.

You know?

I mean, you want to talk about ecotastrophe.

I mean, we have never...

You can't even conceive of what it's like when something like that happens to a planet.

They estimate that at the velocity this thing must have been traveling,

it was five miles into the planet in the first second and a half.

It raised a wall of rock 6,000 feet high that moved outward at Mach 7.

I mean, yeah.

And the planet rang for a million years, you know?

And it was...

But if it hadn't been for that,

there would be no flowering plants,

no triumph of the mammals,

no Whitney Houston, no...

But sperm entering egg.

Well, but suppose, you know,

there's all this tumult in our psyche

about the great change that's supposed to happen

and where are we supposed to put our political energies

and what are we supposed to be doing?

Well, it would be pretty ironic

if we, you know, beat ourselves over the head

and save the rain forest and all this malarkey,

and then this something came down

and just turned the whole thing into hash.

Then people would say,

My God!

How could we have been so stupid?

We should have been extracting and sequestering U-235 and plutonium.

We should have been building starships the size of Montana.

We should have been sparing no effort.

And what did we do?

We replanted rain forests?

And now look, the whole thing...

So you have to...

You know, good intentions are not sufficient.

You have to locate where the threat is coming from

and act accordingly.

There are no points for good intentions in the game of evolution.

So mind...

And we have to decide, you know, what does life want?

Is it that life at its most basic level senses the finite duration of the star's life?

And so it wants to use this moment of sunshine to build something that could carry us out into the mainstream of the galaxy,

to the denser star fields?

Or, you know, is that some kind of titanic, Apollonian, male-dominated, techno-fascist, materialist trip?

And what we need to do is cultivate gentleness and attention to the bugs and the grasses and the water.

I don't have an answer to that.

I think it's a real dilemma.

I think people who think they do have answers haven't really connected with how ambiguous the situation really is.

How can you do both?

What says the mushrooms?

Well, no, some people can do...

Well, what the mushroom says is it's a total apocalyptarian.

I mean, it says, rouse your camels, pack your tents, we're moving out.

This has been fine for a while, but ahead lie worlds of unimaginable challenge at great distance.

But, of course, the mushroom sounds like a techno-fascist, hortatory, male-dominator when it talks like that.

You take ayahuasca, and it says, clean up the rivers, care for the children, replant the forest.

Well...

But then you have to look at the mushroom, possibly being the universal traveler that it is.

It has that urge. It's got the wanderlust.

That's right. It has nomadic ethics, so it pushes nomadic solutions, where the ayahuasca, an enormous jungle plant, a flowering plant, a creature born out of the last catastrophe, just like we are, has a different agenda.

No, the demons are of many kinds. Some are made of ions, some of mind. The ones of DMT, you'll find, stutter often and are blind.

It means, you know, just because somebody once said of channeling, just because somebody's dead doesn't mean they're smart.

So, it could be, you know. Everybody has their own agenda.

Well, why don't we break... Yeah, question. Last question.

Speaking of pathological effects, are you aware of Fred Hoyle's work?

On the steady state or something?

On the virus system.

Oh, yeah. Mm-hmm. The panspermia theory.

And, again, that urge is strongly for high tech. Even the Asian men have come out of 40 years.

but it may actually have come out of space

and Coyle has an impressive array of statistics

that link commentary presence

in their orbit to viral disease.

Yeah, well I think that the next revolution in biology

is so obvious that you can be

totally radical and completely confident you're on safe ground

and say the next great revolution in biology is the realization

that space is not a barrier to life

and that technology is only one method

for traversing between the stars. If in fact

planets are regularly pulverized by cosmic catastrophes

then they must be like bursting seed pods

and everything is subjected to a tremendous

evolutionary hammering

but spores, viruses, stuff like that

particulate matter

it just drifts out between the stars

and then when it finds another suitable environment

it breaks out

we don't know what the constraints on life are

you know, the oceans of Europa

could harbor life

you know, these hot vent, sulfur vent organisms

that we find

in the deep oceans

here, they could survive

in the oceans of Europa

if there were hot sulfur vents

at the bottom of those oceans

those organisms wouldn't

bat an eye

Europa is covered with ice

but underneath the ice is water

and there are fractures

and

you know

the exotic chemistries

and pressures and temperatures

of the Jovian environment

could produce life

we don't know

what the constraints are

if cometary environments

are a better place for life to arise

than a warm pond

on a newly condensed planet

well then all bets are off

as to what, you know

planetary surfaces may be

unlikely places for life

to get going

it's hard to say

that's right

we don't know

you could have life

pressures

where we couldn't exist

for a microsecond

like at the bottom

of the Jovian atmosphere

something like that

no, there's more mystery

than anything else

it's

ok, the notion here is

I've always felt that

the psychedelic experience

should be good for something

in a very practical sense

and I always felt that

there was something

that wanted

that you should be able to learn

that was very hard

to bring out

and we talked a little bit yesterday

about this strange episode

that happened in the Amazon

where instead of an ordinary trip

it was locked in

for weeks and weeks

and then people differed

as to whether it was a transformative incident

or what exactly it was

but what happened was

or what I think

wants to happen

in every psychedelic experience

is that there is a totality symbol

you know, Jung

tried to get his patients

to make mandalas

because he said they were totality symbols

well, eventually the totality symbol

is more than a symbol

it actually becomes

a true map

of the totality

and I

what this boils down to

is a kind of very strange revelation

about the nature of the I Ching

that takes very seriously

the idea that the I Ching

is a tool

for studying time

but then takes the idea

much further

it's hard to give this lecture

it's hard to listen to this lecture

the learning curve is steep

and you just have to stick with it

for a while

and then there will be pay dirt

but it's

you have to

bear with me

and I had to bear with the entity

which was revealing

this stuff to me

because it took the form

of a

are you all familiar with the idea of a koan

this is something that your guru

a little saying

or something that your guru

gives you

that if you can figure it out

then you move on

to the next stage

well, so the koan

that I was presented with

had to do with the I Ching

which I was not that passionately fascinated by

and I was wildly interested in it

like a lot of other freaks

and I was not at all mathematically inclined

I mean

that I am the author of a theory

of pure mathematics

is as astonishing to me

as it is to anybody else, I'm sure

basically

as you know

but let me review it

the I Ching is a Chinese system

of divination

that uses 64 structures

called hexagrams

and hexagrams are made of

broken and unbroken lines

stacked one above another

and they are

the sum total

of the possible set

of such structures is 64

and it's been remarked

by a number of people

that the I Ching has peculiar structural affinities

with the DNA

but nobody has ever really known

what to make of that

well this dialogue

with this mushroom entity

began by posing

a very simple question

which is

as you know

most of you

the I Ching hexagrams occur

in a sequence

which is called the King Wen sequence

which is very old

in fact portions of the King Wen sequence

are scratched on shoulder scapula

that are 3500

years old

it's possible to argue

that the King Wen sequence

of the I Ching is the oldest abstract sequence

in the world

the question is

or what the koan was

was

is the King Wen sequence

a sequence

or is it simply a jumble of hexagrams

that over time

has become traditionally sanctioned

as the sequence

in other words

if it's a sequence

you should be able to write the rules

that generate

that sequence

and no other

so

let me dig into this here

the first hexagram

can you see this colored chalk

we have two other choices

we have the orange and blue

here we'll do the visual test

ooh

is this the stuff?

okay

why is this so

half-acid

as they say

uh

so here's the first hexagram

it's called the creative

and it's made of six lines

this is no news to anybody I hope

here's the second hexagram

it's called the receptive

the yellow

okay let me do these this way

and then I'll switch

so

when I started looking at this question

of

of the order in the I Ching

um

the first thing I saw

it only took me about ten minutes

of just looking at it

and I noticed

and I'm not the first person to have noticed this

that it isn't 64 hexagrams

it's 32 pairs of hexagrams

and the second member of each pair

is formed by turning the first member upside down

do you see?

so that only took ten minutes

that was no problem

now

there are eight cases in the I Ching

where inverting the first hexagram causes no change

because of the nature of its structure

you meet the first case here

obviously if you turn this thing upside down

it's still six unbroken lines

so in the eight cases where inverting a hexagram causes no change

a second rule is generated

the second rule is

if inverting the first hexagram causes no change

then all lines change

very straightforward

right?

but now

um

the problem

the koan has changed

and the question is

what are the ordering

what rules order the 32 pairs?

and this was much trickier

much trickier

and

after a while

the prompting voice said

look at the first order of difference

this is just a fancy way of saying

count how many lines change

as you go from one hexagram to another

if

if you go from this hexagram to this hexagram

how many lines change?

six

so the first order of difference is six

between these two hexagrams

similarly

we can go from two

to three

and there will be another first order of difference

now logic should tell you

that the values of the first order of difference

are going to be whole numbers one through six

right?

what I did was

I went through the I Ching

and actually checked on these

and I discovered it again

immediately

what jumped out at me

was there were no fives

so we wrote computer programs

to randomly arrange hexagrams

and check for fives

and we discovered fives are as common as any other number

the exclusion of fives in the King Wen sequence

was a human decision

someone didn't want fives

to show up in the first order of difference

ok

so then I

looked at these values

and what I discovered was

when you inside the pairs

when you invert one to get the other

the first order of difference

is always an even number

so within the pairs

you have no freedom

it's going to be an even number

between the pairs

you can arrange them

so that you get odd numbers

or even numbers

and what I discovered was

between the pairs

half are odd

and half are even

again human agency did this

we wrote computer programs

to randomly throw hexagram sequences

and test

for this quality

and we found that

only one in every 7,500 times

could you expect to get a sequence

which would be

25% odd

75% even

which is what this enforces

so I was very excited by this

because I said

wow there's all this hidden stuff

in the I Ching

that I've never

why is this thing

inching up on me?

this thing?

okay

so I thought

how weird

that all this structure

is in there

and I'd read all of

Wilhelm's commentaries

and

Lama Govinda

and these people

and

it didn't seem

that they had noticed

this kind of stuff

so I was very excited

I thought

that I was really on to something

and I made a graph

of the first order of difference

and it looks something like this

of course it has

one

two

three

four

five

six

on this axis

blue

and

one

two

three

four

to 64

this way

because there are 64 hexagrams

and then I drew the first order of difference

now notice

remember this was six

so

up here we put a point

and

the next one is something else

and

the next one is something else

and then we connect

the points

and

what you get

is the structure

which looks

like this

roughly

in other words

it looks stochastic

it looks random

it doesn't look like you're on the track of any kind of order here

except that

I noticed a really funny thing

about this

what I noticed was

that this section

and this section

are mirror images of each other

so imagine for a moment that you have a copy of this

right here

what you're then able to do

is rotate the copy

180 degrees within the plane

and

you'll discover that it fits perfectly in here

it dovetails at the beginning and at the end

but nowhere in between

this is

this is again a product of human decision

someone made it

so that it would do this

and the question is

why

why would anyone

want to do that

and when it works

you have hexagram one

across from

hexagram

sixty-three

and

hexagram two

across

from

sixty-two

in other words

these always

sum to sixty-four

when it's in the right position

so I just thought that I was uncovering

some kind of

like

you know

the equivalent of Chinese Kabbalism

some kind of lost intellectual system

and

but the voice said to me

it said

this is a picture of time

and I couldn't understand what exactly was meant by that

it seemed to me a fairly esoteric thing to assert

that it was a picture of time

now remember there are sixty-four hexagrams in the I Ching and they have six lines each

six times sixty-four is three eighty-four

when it told me that this was a picture of time

I began to entertain the idea that this was somehow could be used as a calendar

so then I said

well what it is

is it's the whole I Ching running one way

and the whole I Ching running backwards the other way

combined into this peculiar structure

which has three hundred and eighty-four data points in it

which are the lines or so called Yao of the I Ching

now three hundred and eighty-four is nineteen days longer than the solar year length

so if you had a calendar of three hundred and eighty-four days

it would precess

against

the equinoxes

nineteen days

every year

so it doesn't seem a good candidate

for a calendar if you're trying to keep solar dynamics central

but I discovered something weird about this number

three eighty-four days

now think of it as days

and that is that peculiar things happen when you multiply this number

by numbers that are inherent to the structure of the I Ching

when you multiply this number by sixty-four

you get a day number

which when you break it down into years

is sixty-seven years one oh four point two five days

now what's interesting about that number

is that it is six sunspot cycles of eleven plus years

there's also a major sunspot cycle of thirty-three years

so it meant each line in a super hexagram made by multiplying this number

will be associated with one sunspot cycle

and the trigrams inside the hexagram will be associated with the major sunspot cycle

well when you take sixty-seven years one oh four point two five days

again by sixty-four

you get four thousand three hundred and six years plus some days

this number

is very close to twice the amount of time

that it takes for a zodiacal era

such as the age of Pisces or the age of Aquarius

they last roughly this long

well if you take this number by six

six not sixty-four but six which is a legitimate number because it's built into the I Ching

you get twenty-five thousand years roughly

this is the procession of the great year or the equinoctial year as it's called

so I thought wow this is really far out

it's some kind of multi-leveled resonance calendar

oh and I forgot to say about three hundred and eighty-four days

this was central excuse me

that this is thirteen lunations

a lunation is twenty-five is twenty-nine point something days

and when you multiply that number by thirteen you get three eighty-three point eight nine

so I said aha what this thing is is it keeps track of the moon on this level

it keeps track of the sunspots on this level

and it keeps track of the great year of the zodiac on this level

all naked eye astronomical phenomenon

not hypothesizing any advanced technology

but hypothesizing an advanced intellectual point of view

well

so I thought I was finished

and that somehow it wanted to tell me about a Neolithic calendar in ancient China

for some reason

but there was more

Popeye had spinach

I have this

the prompting voice said

this structure which you have created

and by the way some of you who are scholars of the I Ching

remember in the second half of the Wilhelm Bains translation

there are a whole bunch of very ancient sayings

that nobody knows what they're talking about

they're so esoteric

and the most mysterious of these sayings

is the saying which says

the forward running numbers refer to the future

the backward running numbers refer to the past

well in the I Ching there are no forward or backward running numbers

unless you do something like this

and then look what you get

1, 2, 3, 63, 62, 61, 60, 59

you get forward and backward running numbers

so I said wow

you know we're digging this thing out

the I Ching is not an oracle as it's been done at country fairs for three millennia

the I Ching as we possess it is a piece of broken machinery

it's as though you had you know the main gear out of a machine

and you're trying by archaeological reconstruction

to rebuild that machine

so I was sort of stuck at this point

and the prompting voice turned on

and said this structure which you've made

which is the entire I Ching running forward and backward against itself

which would place it then at the top of a hierarchy

should be placed at the bottom of a hierarchy

treat this thing as a single line

it said

and I was calling this at that point the simple wave

it said treat the simple wave as a line in a hexagram

well when you do that

bear with me folks

remember I said the learning curve was steep

however it's not long

oh yeah

what color?

yellow

let me see

okay well so if we treat this module as the bottom of a hierarchy

then we want to treat it like a line

so what do you do with lines in I Ching land

you stack six of them on top of each other

so I'm going to symbolize this thing with an S

okay?

so here's what I did

I made

I took one of them

and another one

and I said did I do good?

and it said sort of

but a hexagram is more than six lines isn't it

and I said well what more is it than six lines

and said well it's two trigrams

I said oh okay

so then I went like this

do you see how I superimposed the thing over the six

two larger ones which were superimposed over three

so then I said

it's alright

it said yes except you forgot one thing

a hexagram has an identity as a whole

as a hexagram

said okay

good

it said yes good

now what are you going to do with it

and I'll show this to you

just so you can get the idea

I don't know how visible this will be

this is what you get if you do that

and what it looks like

is exactly what it looks like

which is a hodgepodge of crazy lines

running everywhere on three levels

and the thing said to me

it said this is a map of time

and I went

I made the mistake of saying to my friends and acquaintances

this is a map of time

and they said you know we're very concerned

apparently you didn't get better

even though you claimed you got better

and now you know you run around showing this thing to people

and notice it has everything is in closure up here

and then everything attains closure down here

and then there are sub closures

six on one level two on another

and the final one on this one

and finally my friend Ralph Abraham

took pity on me

and he said the problem with this thing is

that it's an occult dogma

nobody can understand this thing except you

you are necessary for its interpretation

and I said

so what am I what do I do

and he said you must learn how to change this

into a more orthodox mathematical object

that mathematicians can then discuss with you

and I was completely stuck

and I sat with it for two years

because it just seemed

I'm not a mathematician

I had no clue as to how to do that

and finally one afternoon

the pot was good enough

for the stars moved into position

or something

and in a single instant

I saw how to carry out

the mathematical reduction

of this wave

and I did it

on this?

well if you look at it closely

you'll see that because they are at different scales

it isn't that one side is exactly like the other side

yeah there are dissimilarities

so I finally figured out

how to mathematize

and conserve

all the qualities of that wave

and I put it into an ordinary Cartesian object

which I doubt you can see

but you don't really have to see it anyway

all this is

see what that is?

it's just a one level

it's an ordinary graph of some sort

huh?

it's the sum of certain qualities

there was skew

parallelism

angle of approach

crossover

there were about five things

that I felt were important

and I figured out

how to mathematize them all

so that this

which is an ordinary Cartesian graph

is in fact

a topological equivalent

of my occult diagram

and

yeah

right

uh huh

so

then

uh...

and then I started saying to people

this is a map of time

and they said

is it

haha

well where are we?

and I said well

um...

uh...

we uh...

hmm...

in order to know where we are

we would have to know where the end point is

if you have a wave you have a wavelength

so we have to find the end point

so

then I began

collecting historical data

and

fitting

curves

to it

trying to define the end point

now remember yesterday

at the close of the day

or in the afternoon

we got off on what appeared to some people to be

a tangent about

novelty

and science

and time

and whether

it was

uh...

whether

it should be viewed as a flat plane

or a fractal

or something like that

well

what the thing was telling me was

that novelty

is

uh...

something which can be charted in time

and that these waves

were actually pictures

of

uh...

of

um...

the ebb and flow of novelty

that this wasn't charting stock prices

or

population

rise

or

average temperatures

it was charting

the ebb and flow

of novelty

through time

and that

como

novelty

is

uh...

how about

density of connection

as opposed

you know

if complexity

can be

quantified

then you say

complexity

ebbs and flows

I mean if we had a device

which measured complexity

and we measured this point

right here

as opposed

to

this point

an inch

behind my finger

I'm hoping it would tell us

that an inch

behind my finger

is a more complex environment

than this point

right here

so space

and time

is

then

seen to be

a medium

with

uh...

density

uh...

com...

densification of complexity

embedded in it

like raisins

or something

yeah

well

until you scale it

against time

you don't have to

I mean

I think

well

I think

what your

I think if I understand

your question

right

that's both lines

they're running

that's both sides

of the graph

they're perfectly

superimposed over each other. At this point, they cease to be superimposed.

One goes that way and one goes that way, and then you start getting this kind of stuff,

and then when you come down to the end, they fall into closure again.

Yes, it's a thing of fate. Exactly. You got it. Okay.

So what would be the beginning of that? Is that some fall from the Garden of Eden where we...

Well, to this point, we haven't discussed this thing scaled against calendrical time.

We're just trying to look at it as a mathematical object.

Then what I realized was, if these are part...

If this thing has 384 points in it, and this has six,

then what the thing was telling me was, you have to map the wave back over itself.

So you take all 384 points, and you cram them into this space, wandering up this hill.

Then you go to this space, and you cram all 384 points in here,

and you create a fractal infinite regress. Do you understand?

Say you understand. You will understand.

Okay, so then that was the time. That was the time map.

It was saying novelty can be described by an infinite fractal regress that is contained in the I Ching.

Now, the main objection that I was meeting from people who wanted to lock me up

was they were saying, now, let's get this straight.

You want to revise modern physics based on a pattern which you found in an ancient Chinese book of divination.

Is that correct?

And I could feel the force of that criticism, because that's how I think, you know,

where somebody from some nut piece of data then wants to build castles in the air.

And so I created a metaphor, which is satisfying to me.

I hope it's satisfying to somebody else, trying to explain why we should seek a law of physics

inside the structure of the I Ching.

And here's the metaphor.

Think of sand dunes.

Picture them in your mind.

Since this is the New Age, you may even close your eyes if it helps.

Picture sand dunes.

Now, notice that sand dunes look like wind.

Sand dunes look like wind.

And sand dunes are made by wind.

So now let's analyze the situation.

Let's think of wind as input.

And let's think of sand grains as bits inside a computer.

So when the wind blows, the program runs.

And the bits rearrange themselves.

And they arrange themselves into a lower dimensional slice of wind.

Essentially, wind, which is a pressure variant phenomenon, variable in time,

turns into a pictorial phenomenon, variant across the pictorial surface.

Do you see how that works?

Well, now, sand dunes created by wind bear the impression of wind.

Lines of foam and beach detritus deposited by the incoming tide bear the form of waves.

So what it was telling me was, it was telling me that things formed in time bear the impression of the forces which created them.

And I said, well, then what is the equivalent of sand dunes or waves of beach detritus in the real world?

And it said, and it said, human beings.

Genes, not grains of sand.

Genes are moved by time.

And we, as hyperdimensional objects, we, human beings and other animals, we bear the impression of the forces that created us.

And if novelty truly does ebb and flow the way wind speed ebbs and flows over a landscape,

then the creatures that have arisen in time will bear the imprint of this ebb and flow.

And I believe that what was going on with the people who created the Ching was that they were practicing some kind of yoga or some kind of psychedelic plus yoga thing.

And they were stilling their macro-physical functions and they were descending deep into organism.

And there they were seeing the ebb and flow of variables of some sort.

And they watched, who knows how long, centuries maybe.

And they said, you know, in the organism there is the ebb and flow of variables.

And then they asked questions like, how many variables are there?

Are there an infinite number?

And they began to create notation systems for these variables.

And finally they came to the conclusion, no, there are not an infinite number.

There are 64 of these temporal variables.

And think of them as elements.

In the same way that the entire world of physical manifestation can be created out of 104 physical elements,

the entire world of temporal manifestation can be created out of 64 elements.

And so the way I think of reality, having survived this experience,

is you have hexagrams moving on many levels.

Let's say you have a hexagram which rules this 10,000 year period.

For 10,000 years this hexagram will rule.

And then on the next level, the hexagrams are changing every 100 years.

And then on the next level, every 10 minutes.

And on the next level, every 15 seconds.

Well, what any point in the matrix called now is,

is the perspective you have when you look through the moving film of these temporal elements,

moving on many, many levels, you see.

They create a unique juxtaposition with each other in every single moment.

And that is what the unique felt presence of immediate reality is all about.

Well, by this time, yeah, question?

No.

So you're saying that becomes a membrane of a huge,

the inside membrane of the reality.

What?

That position, where they all hung together.

And I go, that's the place where you can access both.

See, I look at that and always look at the symbol,

the teaching symbol, as the guiding symbol of this plane of reality,

bound by time.

So you're talking about the exact membrane that is between time and non-time.

Is that true?

Yeah, pretty much.

I mean, you know, Plato said,

time is the moving image of eternity.

It's a wave front.

And it's an interference pattern.

Yes, it's a kind of hologram

and a set of resonances and interference patterns

that are created when these waves,

moving at many levels of expression,

superimpose and collide with each other.

And through the use of small computers,

we can explore various places in the wave

and we can position it against time.

Because what it's saying is that novelty comes and goes.

You know, yesterday was wonderful,

tomorrow could be dog shit.

Same for last year and next year.

Time undergoes changes on many scales.

I mean, from moment to moment,

if you watch your mind,

you're going up, you're going down,

and then on the daily scale, up, down,

yearly scale, up, down,

and then on all scales,

there is ebb and flow of novelty.

And all these scales

can be mathematically collapsed into one wave.

And then with a computer,

you can not only predict the future,

which is fairly trivial,

because who can gainsay it,

but you can also predict the past,

which is very tricky,

because most people have a good deal more information

about the past

than they do about the future.

Yeah?

That's right.

Well, no,

you've got the whole concept correct,

except you don't need an infinite number,

because look what happens.

If you start with 384 days,

and you start multiplying upward by 64,

remember I said the first one was 67 years,

we only have to carry out about six of these

till you have 72 billion years,

more time than is necessary

for the universe to have birthed itself

and reached its present state.

Similarly,

if you start dividing,

you only have to divide 11 times

to reach the realm of Planck's constant,

6.55 times 10 to the minus 23rd erg seconds,

in technical parlance,

known as a jiffy.

Beyond the jiffy,

there is no need to continue the divisions,

because the jiffy defines the grain of the canvas

on which reality is projected.

So what we have are,

you know,

a cosmology of roughly 22 levels.

At the highest level,

it's 72 billion years.

At the lowest level,

it's in the realm of Planck's constant.

And we are somewhere suspended in between.

And these things are coming and going

on every level.

Yeah?

Well,

the way that you arrived at these conclusions

doesn't,

I don't follow it all,

to say the least.

However,

it seems to me

that you'd be able

to use this model.

You see some difference

in the wavefronts around

Planck's shadow highest

compared to the third right.

Absolutely.

Do you see differences like that?

Yes.

I'm hurrying us

toward the more fun part of this,

and I think that

we'll do it now.

What we're going to do now

is look at the wave

placed against history

with my end date,

December 22, 2012,

although

the machine will accept

any end date.

And the idea

that you should be asking yourself

is,

you know,

this clown claims

that this thing describes

the ebb and flow

of novelty,

but does it in fact

fit my intuition

of the ebb and flow

of novelty?

Now,

here's the good news.

The next part of the lecture

does not depend

on anything

that's been said

in the first part.

You don't have to understand

anything I've said

in the last half hour

to appreciate

the neatness

of the next level.

Lucky for us,

eh?

That's fine,

I think.

So now,

because, you know,

some people

aren't interested

in this,

you tell them

you can predict

the future

and they say,

well, predict it.

And then you predict

it correctly

and then they say,

great.

It never enters

their mind

to ask the question,

how did you predict it?

Which is what I,

out of obligation

to intellectual fairness,

feel that I should

expose you to.

Now, let's look

at the wave.

F.

Now, let me explain

the rules

of the game here.

There are six billion years

currently on screen.

Today

is over here

at 98.8%.

This is the last six billion years

and let me explain to you

how you interpret the wave

and if you want to take a moment

and rearrange yourselves,

the rest of it

is going to be fairly close focus

on this thing.

So don't be shy

and don't make yourself uncomfortable.

The end date.

I got it

by fitting historical data

to the wave

and seeing

I had certain intuitions.

I mean, for instance,

I said,

well, if I have a wave

which describes

historical novelty,

by God,

it better do well

on the Italian Renaissance.

It should do well

on the 20th century

and it should do well

on the golden age of Greece.

If a theory of novelty

incorrectly predicts

those episodes,

it's a pretty worthless

theory of novelty.

Once I had chosen

an end date

and I chose

December 22nd, 2012,

I got a lot of support

for that

by realizing

that the Mayan calendar

chose the same end date.

Now, the only thing

I had in common

with the ancient Maya

is that we both

take psychedelic mushrooms.

Now, is it conceivable

that there is a message

in the mushroom

as specific

as no matter where

in space and time

you are

and you take

these mushrooms

it says

December 22nd, 2012 A.D.

It appears so

because the Mayans,

their civilization

rose and fell

at a very uninteresting

part of their own

calendrical machinery.

They predicted

the end of the world

a thousand years

after their own eclipse

and they predicted

the birth of their

calendar,

they set the birth

of their calendar

a thousand years

preceding the emergence

of their civilization.

Yeah.

So, now this year 2012,

is this what the Mayan

has as a completion

of a large cycle

or is it what

they are believing

is the completion

of all their cycles?

It depends on

who you talk to.

The Mayan calendar

is built up

of nested cycles

some 20 years in length

some 240

and there are

13 baktuns

which I think

a baktun

is 396 years

in duration

and most Mayanists

believe

that a set

of 13 baktuns

is the complete

calendrical set.

there is a minority

of Mayanists

who want to argue

that there are

greater cycles

than that.

In any case

baktun 13

will come to an end

December 22nd, 2012

so, you know,

it was good enough

for me.

Could you say

just a little bit more

about the property

of novelty?

Is it synonymous

with complexity?

Well, you know,

since this is

a push-pull theory

and we have novelty

versus something

the opposite

of novelty

is habit.

Rupert insisted

on that.

I was calling it

entropy

and conservatism

and recidivism

and he said

no, no

it's a war

between habit

and novelty.

Habit means

a reversion

to a traditional

and already

established pattern.

Novelty means

a breaking out

into a previous

untested domain

of new connections

and new possibilities.

Serendipity

is affected

in it at all?

You mean as in

something dark

and surprising you?

Yes.

The unexpected

is built into it

because when you come

around some of these curves

there are unexpected

things going on.

What about the

chaos order

sounds like that

a little bit?

how novelty

should be defined

because if you know

anything about

information theory

you know that

they've had a hell

of a time

getting a definition

of complexity

together over there.

They also are interested

in mathematical

definitions of complexity

but they haven't

made too much progress.

This concludes

Tape 6.

Our program continues

with Tape 7.

Our program continues

with Tape 7.

Let me explain to you

how to read

the graph

because it's the exact

opposite psychologically

of a stock market graph.

I think when you look

at a stock market

most of us want it

to go up

not down.

In this game

we want it to go down.

The higher states

of novelty

occur as you approach

zero.

So this is the most

novel point

on the screen.

This is the most

habit

impacted

moment

on the screen

and what you see

is habit

and novelty

are at war

with each other.

Now here's how

I interpret

this particular

screen

and it is

a basis

for interpreting

all the rest.

This is a turning

point.

After a long

period of habit

consolidation

and recidivism

whatever that means

that 4.7 billion

years ago

something very novel

happened along

this descent.

I maintain

that it's actually

the stabilization

of the surface

of the earth

itself

that what we're

seeing here

is the earth

changing into a

stable planetary

body

and then

the earliest

forms of life

the proto-life

appears right here

and undergoes

a series

then

of fluctuations

then

there is

some kind

of a problem

some impediment

to what would

otherwise be

the rather

straight shot

toward novelty

by this

spike here

well

evolutionary

biologists

say that

in the early

history of the

earth

there was

a crisis

having to do

with the

production of

oxygen

as a waste

gas

life arose

in a

non-reducing

atmosphere

the first

pollution

crisis

in the history

of the earth

was pollution

by oxygen

and organisms

had to develop

complex

membranes

and mechanisms

for dealing

with this

and that's

what happened

along here

and

once that

was achieved

then

the pace

of novelty

quickened

and the

descent

continued

and we

our entire

civilization

in fact

you know

the last

million years

as a matter

of fact

is lost

down here

in this

stochastic

fluctuation

near the

zero point

in other words

relative to

these places

in the wave

we're so

near the

maximum

of novelty

that it's

practically

punching in

through the

walls

and in fact

human civilization

correctly mirrors

that

I mean

where you would

expect to find

the civilization

on this graph

is somewhere

down in here

well now

if everything

is working

right

you have to

98.8%

is the

target

date

of today

now

what I'm

going to do

is

there's a

zoom

function

here

and we're

going to start

flying toward

the present

and every time

a screen

changes

we're going

to see

half as much

time

on the screen

we have

six billion

years up

we'll go

to three

then one

and a half

then .75

and so forth

this seems

to be an

excellent

computer

with a fast

chip

so

we're going to

see

the right hand

yeah

and we're

going to

get greater

and greater

detail

and

your attitude

toward this

should be

I'm

asserting

that this

is true

you have

a notion

of where

the high

points

in evolutionary

and human

history

have occurred

you should

be asking

yourself

whether

this

fits

your

intuition

now

obviously

it's pretty

vague

stuff

when we're

looking at

six billion

years

but on the

other hand

we can

take this

thing down

to three

days

if necessary

and

we know

where the

great changes

have come

in the last

thousand years

it's not

that ambiguous

so let's

test the

zoom

function

zoom

it asks

me

yes

I reply

seek

minimum

it asks

me

no

I reply

approach

factor

it asks

me

and I'm

going to

tell it

two

in order

to have

the screen

each time

it would

accept

any number

but two

seems

rational

for demonstration

purposes

no

it's going

to slice

the time

it's going

to slice

it each

time

and rescale

I'm just

coming up

with minute

and hour

and day

instead of

year

so is the

origin of

time here

also like

the origin

of the universe

you would

presume so

the big bang

would be

no the big bang

would be

very high

because

there's no

life

there's no

atomic

systems

there's no

molecules

it's a very

low complexity

situation

at the birth

of the universe

yeah

no

yes

that's right

the big bang

is somewhere

up here

ok now

before I do

this

let me

locate

escape

ok

this is

such a

pleasure

to do

it

with

fast

machines

ok

there's

3 billion

see how

detail

is coming

up

as time

is lost

and

if anybody

wants me

to stop

it

there's

the history

of life

on earth

and in fact

of higher life

I'm sorry

you know

organisms

not

multicellular life

this is the history

of multicellular life

and what you see is

there was a steep descent

into novelty

until about

300 million years ago

and then there

are a series of oscillations

close to zero

until

about 65 million years ago

and then there's a sudden plunge

deeper

into novelty

immediately preceding

the concrescence

which occurs

at dawn

Greenwich Mean Time

December 22nd

one thing about this theory

it's not vague

and it

notice that it doesn't hedge on predictions either

it fills

every screen is full of prediction

two

approach factor

yeah

ok

we've got 750 million years

on the screen

375 million years

on the screen

now I want to talk about this

for a minute

now this

is a screen

full of dramatic predictions

these are tremendously

punctuated

and temporally defined

plunges

into novelty

and

we don't have

tremendous

paleontological

records

for what's going on

275 million years ago

but from

studying

these low points

and talking to

geochronologists

about them

I've decided

that these

are

planetesimal impacts

on the earth

now you know

that the last one

was 65 million years ago

that's this one

right there

but there were others

there was one

this one

220 million years ago

can you define

oh

asteroid strikes

on the earth

but I think you said

there was one

that caused it

65 million years ago

oh well there was a little

tiny one in Arizona

those happen

all the time

in cosmic terms

every

hundred thousand years

or so

but this thing that happened

65 million years ago

was a planet shatter

and

they're rare

okay

so

so I'm suggesting

that these

are

asteroid impacts

which then

evolution

has to restart

reclaim

its territory

and then

there is something

else happening

they may not all be

asteroid impacts

they could be

you know

enormous episodes

of volcanism

on the earth

such as the Deccan traps

in India

or something like that

now let's start

the thing again

and that was how many

million

what we're looking at now

seek minimum

no

approach factor

go for it

that's 187 million years

there's the impact

65 million years ago

now let's look at this

this is the last

93 million years

ah yes

it looks like the thing

we started out with

somebody's paying attention

right on

yes

see

what happens

is

a fractal

is a nested

data set

and

every time

you pass

through a whole

number

the pattern

repeats

this

sets up

a very interesting

um

uh

set of circumstances

inside the wave

which is

that we can talk

about temporal resonance

we can talk about

how the third Reich

is a resonance

of ancient Egypt

we can talk about

Saddam Hussein

as a resonance

of

Mohammed

because

when we look at the way

these things are lined up

historically

we see that

directly above

Saddam Hussein

and in a

relationship

of parallelism

is

the career

of the prophet

prophet

and so

what is being

suggested here

is that every day

every moment

is in fact

an interference

pattern

created by

other times

and places

this is not

this is a fairly

challenging

and peculiar

idea

not something

the linear western mind

would have ever

come up with

so for instance

if you should

find yourself

having lunch

in a place

called

Hadrian's Hamburger Stand

this has

something

to do

with the emperor

Hadrian

and his four-year

military campaign

in Scotland

is a direct

causal

influence

on your being

at Hadrian's Hamburger Stand

for lunch

I like to say

Rome

falls

nine times

an hour

and you have

to be

perceptive

you have to be paying attention

to the ebb and flow

of your own

inner

thoughts

but if you are

you feel

the fall of Rome

you also feel

the age of exploration

of the birth of Buddha

the

the fall of Carthage

it all happens

nine times an hour

it also happens

twice a day

and once a year

yeah

sometimes

yeah

it is very similar

that's right

yeah

there's

we've never tried

to do it

scientifically

you know

where you would

actually keep track

but

major astrological

conjunctions

are often

reflected in

major

ingressions

into novelty

Terence

interestingly

have

you or

anyone else

that's aware

of this

ever tried to

convolve

with

let's say

Einstein

you know

because I'm not

smart enough

to do that

I think it would

be a fascinating

thing to do

because what you're

doing is your input

using as one of the

variables

this entire system

that's right

and what it would

produce would be

fascinating

I think God has

chosen you

for this work

your father

about Saddam Hussein

just makes me ask

what

Remember the historical antecedents of Reagan and Bush?

Oh, well, Ronald Reagan, his historical antecedents were the last six Roman emperors

before the fall of Rome in 475.

And Bush's antecedent is...

No, I think Bush gets to be Justinian.

Remember somebody said history always occurs twice, first as tragedy, then as farce?

That person had a good intuitive...

So now, let's go into this a little more.

How much time do we have? Oh, 93 million years.

Okay, so here's the asteroid impact.

And dead on, I mean, 65 million years is right there to the degree that we can date these two events.

It's a bullseye.

And, you know, it was a huge setback for organic life.

As I said this morning, nothing larger than a chicken survived it.

The mammals began their radiation, and these are, you know, just different vicissitudes.

I'm not sure what to make of this spike here, but I haven't really spent a lot of time on that period

from 40 to 36 million years ago.

Somebody else may have a notion as to what this represents.

In fact, the recovery bill was fairly rapid.

Which it was.

Evolutionary biologists say, you know, that forms quickly reoccupied all the niches.

And remember, if this hadn't happened, we wouldn't be the planetary rulers that we are.

We'd still be little furry creatures trying to steal eggs out of the nests of the Saurian masters who ruled the planet.

Why?

Because all the dinosaurs were killed in this impact, and that allowed these little egg-stealing rodent-like furry creatures

to undergo an explosive evolutionary radiation leading directly to our own vast superiority over the rest of nature.

Yeah? Yeah? No? Yeah?

Oh, that's a whole different scale.

You see, the dinosaurs died off 65 million years ago.

The Ice Ages are a phenomenon of the last 5 million years.

And we'll see the Ice Ages, but not there.

Right now, those Ice Ages are down in here, somewhere lost in the detail.

Let's go back to our Zoom.

Oh, yeah, we'll get there.

I'm waiting for you to get to my writing slot.

Don't worry.

No, we don't want to seek the minimum.

The approach factor should be 2.

Okay, 93 million years on the screen.

46 million years on the screen.

23 million.

11 million.

5 million.

5 million years on the screen.

Now, here are your Ice Ages.

Here they are.

You see, when the ice is in place, species are bottled up and gene transfer is impeded.

This constitutes a non-novel situation.

Then when the ice melts, these gene pools re-encounter each other and you get proliferation of form.

We're getting excellent agreement here.

This is the melting of the last glacier.

Maybe.

The last glacier was about 15,000 years ago.

Yeah, I think it's actually over here.

Still lost in detail.

But these are...

You know how evolution is described as punctuated?

How it isn't that evolution proceeds smoothly, but there will be a climaxed stasis,

and then suddenly many new species.

Well, these are the punctuated evolution.

This is actually a picture of punctuated evolution,

and the high numbers of species are down in these troughs,

and the low numbers of species are on these ascents close to the changeover points.

So, again, the paleontological data isn't that clear,

but at this scale of resolution we're getting good agreement between data and theory.

Are these different nests identical in both amplitude and phase?

Do you know?

In other words, can you take the section that you're looking at,

superimpose it over the other nests,

and have it overlaid identically?

Well, they are topologically equivalent, but not numerically equivalent.

Amplitude is going to be different.

Yeah.

The whole wave is actually degenerated.

That's right.

It's a damped oscillation, is really what we're saying.

I just wondered if there's any other phase shifts,

because that's one of the things that an FFT could...

I mean, this is an ideal wave for an FFT,

and it's relatively easy to do.

Yeah, well, I hope you'll be on it by Monday afternoon.

Okay, let me restart the zoom.

No, I'm restarting the zoom.

Zoom, yeah.

I have a question about magnetic poles.

Yes, these could very well be magnetic reversals.

Yeah, they very well could be magnetic reversals.

And what we're looking at is I'm suggesting they're ice ages.

It was suggested that they're geomagnetic reversals.

Geomagnetic reversals in ice ages may even have links to each other.

Do we see anything that might indicate the increase of human constructs right?

Well, we see that over here a steep descent into novelty going deeper than we've ever gone before,

and that would probably indicate that an animal or an organ has appeared of a density of complexity greater than anything which preceded it.

So I would say yes.

Well, how is that?

Well, let me start the zoom and we'll get over in here on a big scale, and then you can see.

Okay, we're going to go from five million down to two million.

So now let's discuss this, because this is the domain in which we evolved.

Our story is on screen at this point.

It's said that a hundred thousand years ago at the Colossus Cave river mouth in South Africa,

where there were homo sapiens indistinguishable from the people sitting in this room.

The oldest homo sapiens skeletons are from there.

That's clear over here.

This is the pangida radiation, meaning the proliferation of these primate forms.

And that's about 900, a million years ago.

This is the whole period in which the primates were breaking away from the rest of nature.

And this is, I think, probably where the mushrooms begin to come into the picture.

And see how the whole system is propelled into lower levels of novelty than anything which preceded it.

Higher levels of novelty.

When the wave moves down, novelty is increasing.

That's one way of saying it, or increased density of connection,

or it means something happening which has never happened before,

which allows novelty to build upon itself.

We talked about this a little bit yesterday, about how the early universe was very simple,

and then came ordinary chemistry, and then organic chemistry,

and then life, and then complex life, and then higher animals,

and then primitive human beings, and then language, and culture,

and then computers, and particle accelerators,

and all of this representing steeper and steeper descents into novelty,

headed toward a confrontation with novelty at infinite density.

Not millennia or millennia in the future, but twenty years from now.

It's not only that something's being created that was never created before,

but it's being stored or entered into the entire system.

Conserved is the word I use, but yes, that's right.

And how does it relate to the fact that the last twenty years of the calendar ended in June 28th,

and that we're entering the supposedly last twenty years of the calendar?

Is that ever correct?

That's right.

Well, when we get to the present, you'll be able to see, you know,

the past few months, the next few months, the next few years.

We approach it this way because I want to convince you

that there's something sort of woo-woo about this thing.

It does seem to have an uncanny predictive ability.

Now, the most commonly met objection to this, and it may be forming in your mind,

is that this guy just doesn't understand patterns,

and that every pattern can be used to describe a different pattern.

But I resist this because notice that this whole set of correlations

is dependent upon this zero date which we inputted.

If we shift the zero date, then all the other predictions would be thrown off.

Well, now, naturally, if we shift the zero date fifty years,

it's not going to have a hell of an effect on an event 175 million years ago.

But if we move the date fifty years and we look at 1492, you know, it's all screwed up.

You have to be right on the money when you get into the historical data field

because the historical data field can vary over a 24-hour period.

I mean, John F. Kennedy dead, John F. Kennedy alive, the difference is ten minutes.

So it can be very, it can be very highly quantified, specific, yeah.

Okay, enter.

That's two million, roughly three million years on the screen.

One and a half million years on the screen.

Seven hundred thousand.

Let's look at this for a minute.

This is the last million years.

And the last hundred thousand years are right there.

This is the emergence of modern human types.

And it sets off the last cascade, at least at this scale.

So all of this is evolutionary advance and climatological flux and so forth.

And then from the time the modern human type emerges, it's a straight shot down in there.

Now, obviously, we all know more about time as we get closer to the present.

This is 366,000 years, it's 100,000 years up there.

There's the last 200,000 years.

There's the last 100,000 years.

This is the environment in which we were shaped.

These are climatological fluctuations here.

This is the last glaciation.

Oh, I forgot.

It's shipped to the computer.

Sorry.

Is it dying or is it having a good time?

It's an...

It's...

I forgot it does that.

Anyway.

It's a very happy computer.

Why didn't you have to wait?

What are you doing this evening?

When Harry met Sally, remember that orgasm in the restaurant?

Remember the orgasm in the restaurant when Harry met Sally?

Vaguely.

Okay, this is the last 91,000 years.

The glaciers melt here.

The glacial melt begins around 19,000 years ago.

And as you see, it's just a straight fall from there to the moon flight and to H. Ross Perot and to all the rest of it.

And these are, again, episodes probably of glaciation or flux in the incidents of incoming cosmic radiation.

It's hard to say what it is.

Have you spoken about in the last three or four days only?

Oh, yeah.

We can go down.

We can take it down to very small.

I mean, understand that the program does many wonderful things which we're not doing.

I'm just doing a simple demo.

But obviously all this stuff has got to be about something.

Now we're getting into the area where people have real data.

That's 45,000 years.

22,000 years on the screen.

Let's look at this for a minute.

This is worth talking about.

Now the pressure begins to come on.

It's all very well to predict interglacials that may or may not have occurred.

The predicting assassinations of dynastic families is a little trickier.

Here's the glacial melt begins.

And species, this is the descent.

This is where the mushroom paradise existed in its fullest expression.

From about 17,000 years ago to about 10,000 years ago.

Well, now what is this sudden interruption of the descent into novelty here?

I maintain, based on the archaeological record,

that it's what is called the Tanged Point Technocomplex.

Do you all know what that is?

Does anybody know what it is?

Tanged Point Technocomplex means that before this,

when an arrowhead is found,

you find one.

It means it was lost by somebody who was hunting.

Around 10,000 B.C.

you begin to find large numbers of arrowheads all in one place

without chipping fragments.

This was not an arrowhead factory.

This was the site of a battle between human populations.

War is invented here because agriculture is invented here.

You're looking at the end of the partnership paradise.

The era of orgy gives way to the era of anxious monogamy,

warfare, agriculture, you know, ego-hood is born.

Now, somebody asked about...

Who asked about chatalhyayuk?

Somebody.

Chatalhyayuk.

Bottom of this stab here.

The fire that burned through chatal level 5A occurred in 6500 B.C.

We know this from charcoal dating.

It's right there.

It's on the money.

See, somehow this whole Tang Point techno-complex bummer was overcome

and there was a steep descent into novelty.

And chatalhyayuk was the product of that.

But then it was destroyed and there was a rebound into chuckle-headedness for a while.

And then right down here in the bottom of this thing is where the Great Pyramid is sitting.

You know, the Great Pyramid was finished in September of 2970 B.C.

Why this should be so controversial, I do not understand.

Because there are grains of charcoal between the unmoved stones.

That charcoal has not been anywhere since the day that stone was set in place.

And it's 2790 B.C.

These people who want to push it back and say it's 10,000 years old.

Well, the obligation to prove is on them because the carbon radiological data argues.

You see, there's some tendency in the New Age, which I don't understand very well,

that wants to make everything older than it is.

You know, the pyramids are 50,000 years old.

Atlantis rose and fell 100,000 years old.

The miracle is how new everything is.

The pyramids were built day before yesterday.

Charlemagne was king of France early this morning.

It's all very, very recent.

I mean, the emergence of mind out of non-mind is an event practically on top of us.

Now, let's start it up and we'll get really down to the...

Well, yes, in a sense.

Because, you see, what happens is when you...

It's a built-in mathematical property of this wave that when you get to the end of a big wave,

there's...

When you get to the end on any scale, there's a sudden drop to the next scale.

And then it goes along to the end, and then there's a sudden drop.

So if what we're saying is that a universe is made like...

A universe that actually had this structure that I outlined for you,

of 26 levels where each level was 1 64th smaller than the level which preceded it,

a universe built on that kind of architectonics would only be halfway through its life an hour and 35 minutes before the end.

Do you see how that would work?

That in the last hour and 35 minutes it's going to go through as much development as it went through in the previous 72 billion years.

So, yes, time is accelerating, accelerating into...

You know, we've gone from barely moving to approaching a staggering speed.

And I maintain, you know, that in 2012, the last six days preceding the approach to concrescence will be the jackpot.

I mean, the laws of physics will break down.

Everything will be in a state of visible, motile transformation.

This isn't happening in the human world.

It isn't happening in our minds.

It's a crisis in the structure of physical law itself.

And that's why people...

That's why this theory will be hard to disprove or prove until so close to the end date

that you'll barely have time to make a telephone call to say whether it's true or not

before, if it is true, your telephone call becomes totally irrelevant, you know.

It's essentially saying that the fabric based on itself is being contorted, twisted and involved...

Yeah, that's right.

No, that's right.

And if that seems unlikely to you, let's always...

Let's never forget what the orthodox guys are peddling.

They're peddling the Big Bang Theory, which says the universe sprang from nothing in a single instant.

I would prefer what I call the big surprise cosmology.

Because it seems to me, if you have to have a singularity, the least likely place to find a singularity would be in a featureless high vacuum.

If you want to find a singularity, look in a corner of the universe where there are planets, stars, elements, organisms, alphabets, civilizations, minds.

In other words, look in a complex domain if you want to find a singularity.

That's where you might have some chance of finding it.

But finding it in an unflawed nothingness is a strange place to look, even.

One of the arguments maybe being proposed by those on the fringe is that, in fact, it's a very complex universe that's been pushed through a membrane into the singularity,

which then creates another entire...

Well, one possibility is that it's a wraparound, that we're just not whistling Dixie when we talk about the archaic revival.

What history is, is a finger reaching for the reset button.

And when you finally touch it, you find yourself at the moment of the Big Bang.

You know, you've actually sent it screaming back to the first moment.

So this is an exercise in holographics, in a sense.

That final six days is a very pertinent, potent holographic description of the whole day.

That's right.

And every cycle is a holographic description of the cycles that preceded it.

That we've just seen.

Right.

So in 1945, when the bomb flickers into existence over Hiroshima, this is the resonance of the Big Bang.

It's being caused by the Big Bang.

And the entire life of the universe is then somehow reenacted in the remaining 67 years.

In the same way, remember, there was a 4,306 year cycle.

We are reenacting that cycle in the present 67 year cycle.

We have reached AD 700 right now.

I mean, if you wonder why things are so benighted, it's because we're in the heart of the dark ages.

You wonder why you can't understand the nature of the collapse of the state vector.

Well, it's because you have an AD 700 intellectual machine looking at it.

My God, the calculus hasn't been invented.

Algebra hasn't been invented.

The new world hasn't been discovered.

These things will all happen ahead of us.

Right now, we are in the heart of the dark ages.

By the late 90s, we'll be closing distance with the Renaissance.

Clearly, we have to put up with a bunch of Christ or fundamentalism, epidemic diseases,

and general not-headedness until we get to that point.

But then, after the turn of the century, we can expect the equivalent of the Renaissance,

the Industrial Reformation, the rise of Napoleon, the Civil War, Adolf Hitler.

It'll just be coming quick, quick, quick, quick.

And finally, you know, it just pulls you in and everything happens at once.

One way of thinking of this is that the entire rest of the future history of the universe

is being compressed into the next 20 years.

Yeah.

But, in other words, the heat death of the universe is 20 years away, essentially,

is what is being suggested, because time is beginning to accelerate at such a rate

that this compression factor is enormous.

Okay, now, let me see, what have we got?

We've got 22,000 years on the screen, and we talked about it, so let me shift here.

Oh, no, zoom, yes.

Is that minimum? No.

Do you see the acceleration of time?

Yes, I think, you know, Jeremy Rifkin wrote a book.

Anybody read it? What was it called?

Nobody read it. It was called...

Anyway, the premise of the book was that time is accelerating,

but he thought of it as social time, cultural time.

I don't. I think it's embedded in the fabric of space-time itself.

Yes, I think in a few... You see, you can only react to crises that you understand.

So, if I tell you the ozone hole is disappearing, you're alarmed.

If I tell you an asteroid is going to strike the Earth, you're alarmed.

But if I tell you that the Earth is about to collide with a hyper-dimensional knot in the nexus of space-time,

you know, but that's what's happening.

Ahead of us is an enormous speed bump.

We are colliding...

We're about to collide with something that we can barely cognize.

So, it's hard to know what to think about it.

Yeah?

This may be a little la-la and a bit simplistic, but consider this...

You know, we all have experienced this sort of shifting of time and just the experience of one lifetime.

You know, as a two- or three-year-old, the moment as we experienced it seems to last a longer period of time.

I mean, by God, summer has lasted forever and whatnot.

We don't have that.

And it's sort of...

Well, that's what happens over the course of a lifetime.

What happens if consciousness shifts out to infinity?

What happens to the moment then?

It becomes vanishingly small.

Small.

Or, in terms of the frequency...

It stops.

Yeah, well, see...

Before it stops, it's speeding up.

In other words, the fan is becoming shorter and shorter.

Say, if you take a second, the seconds will become shorter.

That means, in effect, that the whole process is speeding up until it collapses.

Yes, it's possible that dying takes forever.

Right.

You see.

That's an extremist singularity.

And so, you know, you start to die and then you die and die and then you realize you're going to die forever and never approach it.

Because the seconds become stretched into millions of years.

It's something like that.

It's about...

And I think psychedelics are about the fabric of time.

When you strip away the hallucinations and the personal reference and the craziness, the bare bones of it are...

It's about time.

It illuminates what time is.

Yeah.

I mean, see, part of the problem with perceiving what's going on is...

that we're like mayflies or something.

I mean, we live so briefly that to us it looks like the world is standing still.

But, in fact, staggering amounts of change are going on.

I mean, the automobile is a hundred years old, for crying out loud.

We can't conceive of a reality without the automobile.

So, and just in my lifetime, you know, I've seen immense change.

So, and this is going to accelerate eventually to the point where I believe they'll hold conferences on the acceleration of time.

And people will... boards will be appointed to try and figure out if anything can be done about it.

And stuff like that.

I know you have a distaste for quantum physics.

But there was a conference, apparently, last spring in Spain.

Actually, it was a conference of astrophysics, I believe, because I heard some of the reports on it.

And a serious topic of discussion was the fact that...

trying to attempt to answer the question, does time exist?

I mean, this was being serious on the agenda at some astrophysics conference.

Yeah, time is the great misunderstood or un-understood quantity in our lives, for sure.

Terrence?

Yep?

You refer to the, those orthodox guys and their big bang theory.

Right.

So you reject the big bang theory.

I don't necessarily reject it.

I just think they shouldn't sneer at me when their theory is so cockamamie.

I mean, in other words, I haven't proposed anything weirder than the big bang.

Saying that a universe can condense itself faster and faster down into a super-novel object

sounds to me like a considerably more conservative statement

than to say that a universe can spring from nothing for no reason in a single instant.

They've cornered the market on the unlikely approach to cosmology.

Do you mean the book to refer to as an alternative to that?

To their theory? No, but I'm going to write one.

There's actually been a serious debate on the whole topic.

I mean, there was a book recently published in the last year.

Did the Big Bang happen? It was written by another cosmologist.

Well, the Big Bang looked like it was in real trouble as recently as six months ago,

but the new data from this, is it OGOS-3 or one of these satellites,

finally actually found irregularities in the microwave background.

And until they found some irregularities, they were in a real mess,

because they couldn't figure out how you get from the super smooth initial conditions

to the clumpy present situation.

Now this new data appears to have pulled their chestnuts out of the fire.

But I think the Big Bang may be in need of serious revision.

I mean, you have the inflationary, the super inflationary cosmology

as an attempt to fix some of those problems, but it gets, you know, there are problems.

Yeah.

Well, of course, if it's true that this derivation of the change of the fly,

then you would expect a small fluctuation to be backward radiation

because it's affecting the nature of what you're talking about.

That's right.

In the very beginning.

Also, in the style that you mentioned, in the Bible, Jesus said that things would be speeded up.

What did he say exactly?

I can't remember the exact quote, but he connected it or meant it would be speeded up.

Yeah, that's absolutely right.

If we get a little deeper into this, we can even discuss maybe why he would have said such a thing,

because I think we can illuminate it.

Here, let's do a little more.

We've got 22,000 years on the screen, 11,000 years on the screen, 5,000 and some.

This is, in a way, my favorite screen, because this book I want to write, I'm going to call History's Fractal Mountain.

And there it is, folks. History's Fractal Mountain.

Chatalyuk is over here in the bottom of this.

Along this descending gradient here, like pearls on a string, you get the great ancient civilizations.

Ur, Chaldea, Babylon, and Egypt.

And this actually, the graph actually confirms the intuition of the theosophical mentality

that Egypt did achieve some level of advance that was not surpassed until late Roman times.

That there was a tremendous breakthrough on the part of these civilizations.

This negative habitual or recidivist upward curve is studded with a whole bunch of warlike male dominator civilizations.

The Hittites, the Mitanni, the Assyrians, and up here at the top, Mycenaean pirates overwhelm the last outpost of the goddess culture on Minoan Crete.

This is Homer, right there. Homer sings his song.

And if that, that to me fits, because I had a professor who once said to me,

You want to know where it went wrong? I'll tell you where it went wrong.

When these Greeks pulled their boats up on the shore and stopped being fishermen and started talking philosophy, the shit hit the fan.

And that's precisely what happened. There it is. You see this steep, steep descent into novelty.

And then, after the fall of Rome, oscillation around a mean where it's sort of up, it's sort of down.

But there's no real progress until the Industrial Reformation, I mean, in the Industrial Revolution of the 1740s.

Well, that makes sense, because any kind of attempted descendant in the novelty or ascended in the novelty

would have been suppressed by the emerging church at the time.

That's right. Well, of course, this isn't Eurocentric. It's global.

Oh, you mean, where is the birth of Christ? Roughly, it's right here.

There's a little kind of a choke, and then a very steep fall right afterwards.

That's the birth of Christianity, of the Roman Empire versus the Republic, and so forth.

I read the dates here. I mean, these are all the BC numbers, 36 and BC.

You're right about in there.

Yeah, it's sort of...

Yeah, right about there.

Well, let's see. We may get it on the next pass.

I mean, this novelty has now gone to...

Yeah, yeah, it's bad, it's meanable.

And the model is falling apart.

Why does the biology of those verses, and why is it human?

Well, it wasn't... At first, it was physical.

It was that...

It was that atomic physics gave way to chemistry, which gave way to molecular biology,

which gave way to life.

It keeps moving, it keeps being active at the front of the wave, but it leaves a residuum behind it of these previously created structures.

Right now, the wave is clearly lodged in our species, while everything else is under the aegis of Darwinian mechanics.

We're apparently under the aegis of cultural mechanics.

Well, absolutely. It depends on the intensity of the prominent feature.

You know, if a meteor came in, in the middle of some of this, it would obliterate what you're seeing there,

and another feature would stand out more.

Yeah, that's right.

It's not really being dominant or dictated by human life, but it just so happens that it was more...

Well...

It's like the quantity being measured and changed here.

How so?

What?

The source.

It seems like, first we heard cosmological, now we're in traffic.

And you know, I'm really...

This is very speculative stuff.

It keeps condensing toward...

It keeps...

It builds on complexity.

Wherever there is complexity, you will get more complexity.

It doesn't build on simplicity.

It builds on the last, most complex achievement, see.

So intelligence rests on animal organization, which rests on cellular biology, which rests on molecular biology, which rests on...

You got it.

Okay.

Two.

Clarify that.

Now, pretty soon we're...

Now, there is the descent.

Here, let's stop and look.

The crucifixion is right there.

And it's interesting, you know, Christ was an absolute contemporary of Caesar Augustus.

So you get this great religious reformer at the same time that you get the great reformer of Roman polity.

So two of the most important personalities who ever lived are alive at that point.

That, strangely enough, does not win the prize.

See this deep little chip here?

If we were to blow that up and look at the bottom of that trough, there was a moment when you could have had a dinner party.

When Lao Tzu, Confucius, Mencius, Pythagoras, and Ezekiel could have all gotten drunk together had they been able to find each other.

Right back there in the immediately preceding the Greek Renaissance.

Now, the fall of Rome is in 475, right there.

And you see how the time after the fall of Rome is all of a certain general character clear up to 1700.

And then certain technologies and mathematical techniques propel to an even deeper level of novelty.

Now, the next screen is the one that I think is probably where we either win or lose you.

Look at the overall shape of that wave.

It's clear that there's an overlying principle at work here.

I mean, the birth and death of Christ is practically noise on that curve.

I mean, there's a deep, strong move into novelty, and those superpositions of those events are relatively mild.

That's true.

Maybe Christ was a what?

Well, it just points out that it's not being driven by what we would perceive as these great personalities.

No, it's not being driven by these great personalities.

They are being driven by it.

I'm sure that if you could have stepped into Christ's mind while he was undergoing the Passion,

the main question he was asking himself was,

what is going on?

You know, why do I say what I do?

Why do I do what I do?

I don't seem to be my own person.

You know, I seem to be a puppet of some cosmic force.

Because he was a puppet of some cosmic force.

You see, the transcendental object at the end of time is like one of those reflecto balls that hang in discos, you know?

And as it turns and spins, it sends off distorted reflections of itself which ricochet into the past.

And if you are correctly situated, it'll turn you into a Christ, or a Buddha, or a Lao Tzu.

If you are not quite correctly situated, it turns you into a modern Blavatsky, a Meister Eck, in other words, second stringers.

If you just get a little of it, well then you are a person with strange insights and great personal charisma,

and the people around you love you.

We all are very close to this thing.

Every night when you dream, you come into the presence of the transcendental object at the end of time.

We are all distorted reflections of the last thing.

And as we get closer and closer to the eschaton, the last thing, the distortion begins to leave.

And you say, my God, it's like watching a photograph from an SX-70 develop.

First it's just murk, and then you say, oh, there's a person there, and it's getting clearer and clearer.

You know, we are actually being pulled into the attractor.

The veils are being parted.

The truth is becoming more and more and more eminent.

And in the final confrontation with it, you know, it's the apotheosis.

It's the apocalypse, the apotheosis, the apocatastasis, a whole bunch of Greek words beginning with A.

No.

Well, that wasn't the things we were really worried about, it's Christmas.

Okay.

Did you enter a time span in it?

Well, no, it picked up the time span that we had.

See, it just accepted the correction.

Thank you very much.

Good thinking.

Now, is it all right?

Yes.

Okay, now, this is the screen upon which the theory will stand or fall.

Because this is the screen that is filled with the history that we know.

We're not talking fossil records or chatalyayuk or any of that.

We're talking very precise dates.

It's saying that there was a very steep descent into novelty around 948 A.D.

What is this?

What is it set to again?

1400 years.

And this first steep descent into novelty is the intellectual flowering of Islam within the confines of the Umayyid and Abbasid Caliphate

and the invention of algebra.

An intellectual tool that sets the stage for modern science.

Essentially, this is the birth of modern science.

And you see how steep, sudden, and precipitous it was.

Okay, then you go over to this next one.

And let me try something here since this is such a fast machine.

See, I'm moving the little pointer and it's telling me exactly what I'm pointing at.

I haven't done this for you before, but this is very good for checking these things.

Oh, to know exactly the date.

To know exactly.

Yes, we're pointing at the exact date.

And I want to get it over here to the bottom of this sucker.

1121, the first crusade, the collapse of fortress Europe.

This is the beginning of the globalization of the European mind.

We're dead on here.

Okay, now the next steep descent into novelty is this one, obviously.

Let's go over there and see what it is.

There it is.

1430...

Oh no, 1358.

I'm sorry, just a minute here.

Let me get my ducks in a row.

Okay.

Do we all agree it's pointing at the bottom of the thing?

Yes.

It's just the end of the novel, not the beginning of the novel.

No, that's the densest point of the novelty.

It's 1354.

What happened in 1354?

That's right.

One third of the population of Europe dies in an 18 month period beginning in late 1354.

The greatest demographic collapse that Europe has ever experienced.

It's an absolute hit.

Dead on.

Now let's go over here to this.

Now notice though that the recovery is quick.

There's a steep descent into novelty and an almost immediate reversion back up to the same level of habit, exactly, business as usual.

But this next one is different.

It's a steep descent into novelty and then it really stays down for a long time and explores this.

So let's go over to the turning point, which is up at the top.

It's global, but having said that, you have to notice that the world is now dominated by European values and culture.

So while we can chart the ebb and flow of the Han dynasty, at this point European culture is moving to the fore because European culture is beginning to put its imprint on all of world history.

This concludes tape 7.

Our program continues with tape 8.

...continues with tape 8.

But you also can't forget this is a superposition of many different factors.

That's right. This is a picture of a resonance pattern, an interference pattern of many times and places.

Now up here at the top of this thing, at the very top, it's 1455.

What happened in 1455? Does anyone know?

What? Columbus was born? Thanks for playing.

In 1455, Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turk, making European access to the Far East impossible.

Therefore, the age of exploration begins and you get Vasco da Gama and all those people.

This was a tremendously shattering event for European civilization to lose Constantinople to the Ottoman Turk.

Now let's go over to, or wait, back, I mean, to this place.

This is another very seminal event which combined with this Constantinople loss sets the stage for this descent into novelty.

Even though it's way up here in habit, there's a little chip out as there's a novel invention of some sort that happened in 1540.

1440, I'm sorry. The invention is the invention of printing in Mainz in 1440.

That did it, friends, as far as most people are concerned.

Enlarge it one seth now? Good idea.

Yeah, let's do one zoom.

I think I have to move it over clear all the way before we do that zoom or there'll be some kind of a screw up.

Right, let me...

Well, I'm glad you like it because it's my best trick.

Not bad.

I do, I do.

Oh, you do, you do?

It's just we haven't written the manual yet.

Oh.

How much are we going to do?

Oh, hard to say.

Okay, now it's pointing at today.

Now let's do our zoom.

Approach factor two.

Strange that it didn't ask for the seek minimum, isn't it?

Okay.

Now we're seeing the same thing again.

We're just seeing it in higher detail.

But what I'll fudge by telling you that up here, 1455, down here, 1492.

Along this screaming descent into novelty are all the painters of the Quattrocento.

This is the Italian Renaissance, this descent into novelty.

And this is the era of exploration, 1492.

Good, huh?

Good, good.

The absolute thing is in 1485.

And all the painters of the Italian Renaissance are along this thing.

Now, notice that in 1492, there isn't an instant rebound.

There's 1492.

But instead, because this lost half of the planet has been discovered,

this sets off the age of discovery.

And habit is unable to reassert itself because too much peculiar data is flowing in.

Too many new lands, peoples, materials, philosophies, alphabets, languages, sexual styles, cuisines.

And it's like they're overwhelmed.

However, after a while, they get their act together and manage to turn it into hell itself.

Right there, right what that is, what ends the era of discovery and optimism and psychedelic exotica is the Thirty Years' War.

The Thirty Years' War begins in 1619.

It ends in 1648.

It begins with Europe medieval.

It ends with Europe modern.

Parliaments have replaced popes and kings.

The whole name of the game has been changed.

Now, the Thirty Years' War lasts, as I said, until 1648.

Sorry.

1648.

At the bottom of this cut in here, which is in a situation of rising habit, there nevertheless is a strong tendency toward novelty, reaching a culmination in 1677.

Newton publishes the Principia.

The celestial mechanics are put on a firm basis.

The calculus has been invented.

The world of modern science is now completely in place.

And aside from the Thirty Years' War, what Europe is exporting to the rest of the world on this hellish upswing is slavery, the patron system, forced labor, brutal return to habitual methods of the past.

You may not know that slavery died with the fall of the Roman Empire.

If you owned a slave during the medieval period, you owned one slave.

It was a house slave.

And it proved your ownership of this person proved that you were a person of immense wealth.

It would be like owning a beach bonanza today.

It's beyond owning a Rolls Royce.

But the need for a drug, strangely enough, the drug being sugar, reversed this.

And in the 1440s, they began buying Africans and taking them to the Canary Islands to work sugar.

So, you know, the moral power of Western civilization could not stand in the way of the reestablishment of slavery and the sugar trade.

Now, up here at the top of this thing, there is a steep, there is a twist, a turn right there, in 1739.

This is the European Enlightenment.

The European Enlightenment was the great intellectual step that set the stage for secular civilization.

People like Voltaire.

And out of that came two revolutions.

Well, the Inquisition would have been, I presume, a fairly un-novel thing,

since what it was was a power group torturing the helpless,

which there's nothing new in that, for heaven's sake.

It went on for a long time, too.

It went on for a long time, but actually it was a Spanish phenomenon.

It was confined geographically to a number, to a very small number of places.

Right there, August 1st, 1776, the American Revolution takes place as a consequence of this steep descent into novelty

at the beginning of the European Enlightenment.

Well, as you know, the American Revolution is generally thought to have had a happy conclusion.

The French Revolution, not so happy.

And if you explode that area and look, you can see that they're happening on different slopes of this thing.

Then the restoration of Louis Napoleon in 1803 is there.

This bump is the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War,

which were the first modern wars and completely distorted the demographics of the United States and Europe.

And now I want to...

What year was that?

The Franco-Prussian War began in 1848, I think, and the Civil War was 1865.

Let's... I want to go over here to...

I think you're right. I didn't feel right about saying that.

And that would...

1848 was the year of revolution, but the Franco-Prussian War was at the same time as the American Civil War.

You're right.

Okay, there's today's date.

Now let's do the approach.

Approach factor 2.

Okay, that's 357 years on the screen.

You see the American and French Revolutions.

The Franco-Prussian War and the American Civil War, the 20th century.

Now let's look at the 20th century.

And this is...

Remember how I said that the Great Pyramids were at the bottom of this trough at a higher level?

And now we're seeing the same pattern again.

What we get at the bottom of this trough here is the Third Reich.

And to show you how the resonances work, think about the Third Reich in relationship to Ancient Egypt.

First of all, probably the word Führer can be traced to the word Pharaoh.

This is the same concept of a master leader.

In addition, the Third Reich and Ancient Egypt shared an obsession with large-scale tasteless architecture.

In addition, both civilizations had a real tendency to lean on the Jews.

So, you see, you get this strange kind of microscope on a historian.

I mean, most people, I think, would not associate Ancient Egypt to the Third Reich.

And yet, when you begin listing the similarities, you see, in a way, one is a reflection of the other.

Okay, within the 20th century, this is somewhere like 1903.

The invention, you know, Einstein was in 1905, the general theory, I think.

Which came first, the general or the special?

The special came first in 1905 and the general came slightly later.

Down here, in the bottom of this trough, let me show you, right there.

Hitler becomes Chancellor of Germany.

And then all of World War II is fought in the bottom of that trench.

Here's 39, here's August 39.

That's June, that's September.

So, that's when it begins.

And see how, even though it's a novel situation, because it's a war, it's a recursion to habit.

So, at the bottom of a trough of novelty, you get a little upward pimple of recursion to habit.

Then, let's look at, there it is.

That's Hiroshima, right there, and Nagasaki, right there.

The war ends, and novelty is left behind.

And remember that the psychology of the post-war mind was everybody wanted things to just get back to normal.

I mean, certainly the Europeans wanted things to get back to normal.

Their whole scene had been bombed into the Stone Age.

And in this country, people just wanted to get their place in the suburbs, and marry the girl next door, and have a slew of kids, and buy a Chevrolet, and forget about, you know, thousand year millennial plans, and all the rest of it.

And so, this is the post-war, Cold War era.

And it lasts, let's look, oh, there's 1952, here's the launching of Sputnik.

And now, we know that I'm Pris.

And we've got to know that Fleurlet made in the early hours of 10-14 days.

So we've got to see that.

So we'll be looking for some of the new ones as we're doing today.

And then we'll be looking for some of the new ones.

Let's see.

This is a new one.

No, no, October 1st, 1957.

A day graven on my mind till they lower my box.

The first American satellite was launched right around there, Explorer 1.

Give me the date.

Okay, there's the assassination of John Kennedy, as close as I can get it, at this resolution.

If I go back one, I'm before it.

So you see it's right at the bottom of that steep stab that takes place against this other thing.

What turned it around?

You mean what's the turning point?

I thought you'd never ask.

Oh, I'm about to get it for you.

There it is, August 1967.

It's the summer of love.

Not only does this thing illuminate history, it also fulfills my deepest inner delusion.

And remember I said when we were looking at history's fractal mountain that this was Homer up here?

So then you can see that the freak thing, the hippies, were like the pre-Hellenic Greeks.

I mean all those, you know, all that bra-lessness and loose fitting clothes and tambourines and ecstatic,

Bacchanalian, with a philosophical undertone, I mean it was a Greek mentality that broke out in 1967.

Well then here's the long descent into, you know, the dreary present moment.

And, um, uh, what can I show you here?

Richard Nixon getting the axe.

Yeah.

Now we're into the Reagan era, down here.

Yeah.

Yeah, I'm gonna cut it.

I'm just trying to get back to today.

There it is.

Uh, okay.

Cut it.

Zoom, yes.

Approach factor two.

Enter.

Uh, well it's gonna be...

There it is.

That's the hippie thing and then the descent.

Now that's in the, that's the eight, the seventies and the eighties.

That's the last eleven years.

Uh, I wanna stop it here.

Now, now, see how tight it has to be to work.

Remember that we've been looking at this thing from, we've descended from six billion years to eleven years.

We have predicted asteroid impacts, glaciations, speciations, the rise and fall of empires.

Now we're down to the short and curly, I would think.

Uh, let's take a look here at what we've got.

Who, who, I suppose, now we're all experts on this phase of things, cause we've all just lived through.

Uh, I don't see anyone here under eleven.

So, we've just lived through all of this.

So, let's take a look at what it is.

Uh, now let's see, when was George Bush elected president?

88.

So, it would have been November 88.

That's October.

That's November.

Now, what is the resonance to that moment?

I don't think of it so much as, as Bush being elected as Reagan leaving office.

The resonance here is the fall of Rome.

Rome falls right there.

Well then, then, see, we have a series of, of high and low points, which we should be able to correlate to, uh, recent catastrophic or world changing events.

So, let's play the game.

What's happening down here, for the thirty days preceding that day, is a million people are camping out in Tiananmen Square.

At the very bottom of the trough is the night that they had the most people in the square.

And then it turns upward, as you can see, because the constipated fascist oligarchs in charge of that society were preparing to do murder.

And there's nothing novel or new about murder.

It's the oldest game in the book.

So, that went on there.

Then, remember the Romanian, uh, no, no.

Let's go over here.

The next steep descent into novelty is right there.

Right?

That's too far.

No, no, no.

That's right.

Okay, right there.

Who knows what happened very close to 11-11-89?

The Berlin Wall fell down.

Germany is unified right there.

So, Tiananmen, Germany, then a bummer of some sort.

And what is that bummer?

It's the Romanian Revolution, which, as you'll recall, was handled in the messier style,

where you hurl, put people up against walls, and machine gun them, and so forth and so on.

There's a harmonic convergence, though, that's August 87.

August 87?

It's also sort of the building of the reaction of the Soviet Union to what Bob Chopper's doing as well.

Okay.

Along that line.

Well, then let's go over to here.

I want to see the harmonic convergence.

Oh, you want to see the harmonic convergence?

Give me the date.

August 87.

887?

In judging this, you have to ask yourself,

was the harmonic...

That's 88.

That's the first anniversary.

That's the Iran-Iraq war ending, right there.

Wait.

We'll go back to 87.

Don't you want to go back to 87?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Interesting payment of harmonic convergence is on the anniversary every year.

Something interesting happens in the sixth month.

Well, maybe it's not.

Oh, okay.

August what?

17th, 19th.

There it's as close as we can get.

What it shows is that a long descent into novelty that had previously been impeded,

but there isn't anything particularly special about that date,

but it does fall in the domain of going over this hump.

Over here, you'll recall the Gulf War and all that.

Here's how that looks.

Okay, now, look here.

August 3rd, 1990.

There's where Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait.

It's also where Muhammad is born, one level up.

I can get higher and lower resonances simply by touching eye here.

We haven't done that, but it's possible.

Now, remember how after he invaded, then there was a lot of breast beating

and armies being moved into position and so forth.

That goes on until there.

Now, there...

No, no.

There is where the 30-day ultimatum from the Security Council is issued.

The war begins, the air war, on the 17th of January, right there.

And the land war...

Well, you can see that there's a steep descent into novelty

which then is slightly moderated and at the kink is where the war begins.

Now, the next steep descent into novelty...

So, lining people up and machine gunning happens during periods

returning to...

To habit. That's the usual habit.

And I read war happens during novelty.

Well, wars can have... War is a kind of ambiguous thing.

War is a habitual activity.

But it does cause novelty, especially technological novelty.

So, you know, that's why it's nice that you can blow up these waves

and see the variations within the theme.

Now, this point...

The coup in the Soviet Union.

That's it.

There it is, the coup in the Soviet Union.

Right at the bottom of this one.

And now, the next one is really intriguing to me.

And I'll show you why.

There it is.

It's February 21st of this year.

And it's the lowest point of novelty for this year.

Now, I was really puzzled by this because I watched very carefully that week

and there didn't seem to be anything very novel going on.

My book did come out.

You're right.

But I was modest enough not to place that in a context of world history.

It's a little bit more important than the drug summit.

Well, you know what happened?

And this leads us to the slippery edge of prophecy.

There was an event which happened, not on the 21st of February, but on the 20th,

which may be trivial and forgettable and absolutely not worth talking about,

or may be one of the most important events in the history of the 20th century.

Do you know what it was?

No, no.

Ross Perot goes on Larry King and offers a suggestion about his availability for the presidency.

Now, if the guy fades and becomes a nothing burger, it doesn't count.

But he does have the wave blowing at his back.

That's for sure.

So that's basically it.

And if you want to see, let's see...

No, no, no, no.

No, well, let's look at the future.

Let me get the shmiggy somewhere roughly into the middle, and then we'll do it.

You really want to sell software and not show people in the future.

Oh, no, no, because we can play with it.

Okay, now let's see if I can figure out how to do this.

Let's specify target date, C.

Target date, month, let's do today.

Today is the fifth month, the 31st day of 1992.

We don't want to add days.

Okay, we want to move that over to 50%.

Yes, that's where the cursor pops up.

Now let's choose the time span, E.

Let's do ten years.

Plus months, zero.

Plus days, zero.

Now let's graph the wave.

Yes.

It's pointing at today.

What time span?

Ten years.

The last five, the next five.

And what it shows is that we are actually, as if you didn't know, exploring a very deep trough of novelty.

It will last until August of next year.

And then there will be some kind of return to habit with a vengeance.

Now, the November election is...

Now, wait a minute.

There's something wrong here.

Let me see.

No, I want to point at it today.

You can see what they are right there, right?

Yeah.

Okay, that's as close to today as we can get.

We're getting ready to go down into creative.

Yeah, we're definitely getting ready to go down into novelty.

Now, how long is that space of that next little novelty space?

You mean clear to here?

Yeah, yeah.

Okay, well, it's all going to last until...

August 93.

The thing to keep your eye on is this,

which is such a spectacular drop.

I mean, look how much weirdness we've been through,

but it's taken us this much time to do it.

This sucker is going to do it in a three-month period in early 96.

You know, this is where doing FFTs could really be a value,

because do you know what FFTs actually do?

I am the faintest.

They break down this waveform into a very large to infinite series of sine and cosine waves

at varying amplitudes and phases.

So if you could correlate a certain frequency of sine waves and phase shift

with a phenomenon, say medical phenomenon or political phenomenon,

you could really zero in on the nature of the changes that are likely to take place.

Well, I hope you'll do this.

I think it should be done.

Here, I'll show you a function you haven't seen.

Instead of zooming in, we'll zoom out.

Oh, so you're going to go back to its last Dr. Residence?

Well, no.

I'll just instead of ten years on the screen, we'll see 20.

Oh, I see.

Now, it's still pointing...

Well, no.

Wait a minute.

Okay.

There you see it.

Yeah, we're at this little peak.

Yeah, right.

Right.

And there's the whole thing.

So, that's the idea.

Now, the notion is that...

Remember how I kept talking about how a cone contains all possible ellipses and you section it?

What the psychedelic experience is, is a sectioning of eternity.

And you can build up a picture of the cone by sectioning eternity sufficiently that you get a map like this.

I mean, I'm convinced by this that time is fractal.

That instead of treating time as a zero quantity, as the Newtonian equations do,

or as a very gentle curvature, as the Einstein equations do,

that we have to sub in this fractal dimension.

And that this will make possible a science as more powerful relatively to present science

as present science is through the power of the calculus to Greek science.

Time, about which we previously knew next to nothing except that it seemed to keep happening,

can actually be described in the same way that energy and other factors in the universe can be described.

Now, the last thought I want to leave you with is,

I don't think anybody could make this up.

Certainly not me, a person with no training in mathematics, no interest in this kind of thing.

I was told this stuff.

And you know, most, God forbid, channeling is of the horrible variety which tells you to, you know,

eat brown rice and love your neighbor.

You don't need channels to tell you that.

You have channels in your own head which tell you that.

This is a mathematical equation.

I mean, it's embedded in a lot of rap.

But the real channel is an equation for the description of time which makes assertions,

makes predictions, is willing to be held to mathematical analysis.

All the things scientists are always screaming that occultists never will provide them with their theories,

this provides.

So I'm willing, since it's only one person, one person's life,

I'm willing to preach this a little bit,

because I'm not, maybe I can't believe, see the choice here is pretty stark,

either I'm nuts or I'm Newton.

There's no in-between.

There is no in-between.

Yeah, it's definitely, it's right.

I'm the greatest intellectual synthesizer in the history of man.

If I'm wrong, it's just horseshit.

So then the question is, which is it?

Now, what is the corollary?

Say you are the channel for the next step of our understanding of this reality in that sense.

What is your resonant corollary from this time?

You mean, who am I the resonance of?

Yeah.

A question I've never asked.

Well, okay.

When did this stop?

When did you first have...

I figured this out, there were many, it took a long time,

but from 1971 to 73 is when I figured it out.

Okay, so what was happening at that time?

Here.

About here.

Here, too.

Let's see.

Let's go back.

Let's go there and see.

Every 1973 had your...

The reason I said is because basically that's an inscription of the fabric of space-time.

You know, if doing that shows things like supernova and whatnot that we can document...

Then you would have it.

Okay, let's see.

You had finished developing this before your life-changing experience in 1971?

No, the life-changing experience was in 1971.

Well, let's point it at this little dip here giving me the benefit of the doubt

and say that it was January, February, March, April 26, 73.

I'm sure that had you visited me in April 26, 73, you would have found me hunched over graph paper and working furiously.

Now, let's see what the resonance of that is.

I is the resonance call.

It asks higher or lower.

We answer higher.

That means earlier.

Higher.

Major or trigrammatic resonance.

Forget that.

Major is the answer.

Which point?

1st, 2nd, 3rd, 99th?

I have no idea what that means.

Let's answer first.

526 B.C.

Oh, it's the Greek Renaissance.

It's Plato, Pythagoras, Ezekiel, Confucius, Lao Tzu.

Hey, I think it's time to knock off.

You should quit when you're ahead, you know?

Yes.

I'm just with redundancy.

I'm thinking of calculus.

I'm thinking of how it's done.

They're usually developed in parallel, several sites I've heard.

It's not just an observation.

There's no parallel, isn't there?

Well, in a sense there...

No, no, wait a minute.

In a sense there is.

This is a fractal.

It was invented or channeled by me

before fractals became the absolute obsession of frontier mathematics.

Now everybody wants to talk about fractals

and everybody says, you know, population growth, river mouths,

everything can be modeled by fractals,

but nobody has said time can be modeled by a fractal.

So I think probably the rise of fractal mathematics

is indicative of this.

The other thing is,

this could never have been brought to the public

without small personal computers.

I developed this, finished it in 75,

and in 77 they began selling small computers.

So it's a weirdness.

It's a hallucination.

That's what it is.

My dream has always been to bring something here from there.

And apparently the only things which travel well from there to here are ideas.

And I'm not an artist, so I couldn't paint.

So this is a psychedelic idea.

I think there are millions of these kinds of ideas swimming in the psychedelic ocean.

Yeah?

The second thing that strikes me about this,

what good doesn't do us, and if it's true, I don't want to know it.

I would like to hide from this if you're anywhere near correct.

Well, that's because we really haven't talked about the nature of the concrescence.

You know, this all argues for an impossible conclusion,

that the world is going to disappear up its own wazoo at dawn December 22nd, 2012.

Can we see it on the screen?

What?

2012.

Oh, you want to see the last day?

Well, here, let me...

Yeah, I'll show you, I'll show you the final thing.

We're running over here, but anybody who wants to leave has my blessing and my sympathy.

Well, we are going to let you leave.

Okay, let's change the date of interest.

Where is the date of interest?

Well, they don't get date specific.

Why don't I see...

Oh, there it is, see.

Target date, oh, let's look at January 1st, 2010.

On a time span...

Oh, wait a minute.

Do you wish to add a number of days?

No.

Well, rather, if you didn't have that calendar, there would be no place to...

That's right.

Time span.

Specify time span.

E.

Years.

Uh, 2010.

Years?

Uh, no.

Twelve.

Twelve years.

Plus months.

Zip.

Plus days.

Zip.

Okay, the pointer will be pointing at Jan 1, 2010.

But you see, there it is.

Uh, it runs down.

He don't go no more.

That's the end.

Now, I have created one way out that preserves the theory and the rational universe.

And it is simply this, that what happens on December 22nd, 2012, is that time travel is invented.

And because it is invented, it is no longer possible to portray historical data on a linear graph.

So that's all.

It's just, it was a thing about technology and eventually a technology was created which made the three-dimensional space-time matrix itself obsolete.

It's just a dimensional octave jump.

Yes.

Dimensional octave jump.

What is the transcendental object?

The transcendental object is the despair of description.

It cannot be known.

It can only be approximated.

It's the sacred heart of Jesus.

It's the flying saucer.

It's the philosopher's stone.

It's tantric union.

It's good LSD.

It's all of these things and more.

It cannot, it transcends language and understanding.

But the closer we get to it, the more it will be revealed.

And the reason the 20th century is so peculiar is because we're so close to the zero point.

We're so close to the transcendental object that, you know, take a hit.

There it is.

Close your eyes and daydream.

There it is.

Have an orgasm.

There it is.

It's trying to break through.

It's almost upon us.

We've been sailing toward this thing for 72 billion years and we are now 22 years from impact.

The walls are so steep.

The acceleration is so great.

We are there for all practical purposes.

And then what spiritual life and headdom and all that means is realize that we are there.

So that anxiety drains from your life, body and world view.

And then you just ride the wave.

And when people talk of catastrophe, revelation, salvation and destruction,

you just smile a small smile knowing that it will be all that and more and more and more.

It's something, I think it's to reassure us.

You see, I think the world is going to get hip to the fact that we are actually caught in a whirlpool in time that is sucking us into another dimension.

Without something like time wave zero, a notion like that could get fairly alarming and spread a lot of panic.

With time wave zero, you just say, look, we have a map of what's going on.

We'll check off the milestones.

As long as the wave keeps working, nobody should freak out.

Just settle in, hang on, and we'll navigate through this.

So it's a vital piece of knowledge necessary to face the eschaton without panic.

Because these crazy religions want to tell you that you're going to be judged and damned and fired and roasted.

No, no, that's not it. They got the story wrong.

We're just being sucked into hyperspace.

And hyperspace is the human imagination, the human heart, the human soul.

It's the domain of our dreams.

Our imagination is a flickering image of what it will be.

But what it really will be is the despair of prose.

What it will really be can only be approached in silent darkness on five grams.

And then you can't tell anybody about it.

Thank you very much.

This concludes In Search of the Original Tree of Knowledge, a weekend workshop with Terence McKenna.

If you would like additional copies of this recording, or a complete catalog of transformational audio tapes,

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