Under The Teaching Tree

We'll just start with a song that was inspired by some experiences that Terence speaks of.

Welcome everybody to the Ojai Foundation. It's lovely to see so many old and new faces.

When I was asked to introduce Terence, I wondered what on earth to say.

So I thought back to when we first met.

And that was at Esalen Institute in the spring of 19.

And I'd been living there for about nine months recovering from a nervous breakdown, which occurred here.

And I was certainly getting better at that point. I was walking again.

And Paul Herbert, who was the sound person at Esalen at that time, said,

Leon, you have to come and do this workshop.

I had done absolutely nothing at Esalen except sort of recuperate.

And he insisted that I come to your program.

So I did.

And the program itself is a sort of blur.

Laturera, flying saucers, mushrooms, chronic intelligences.

It's just a total blur.

He spoke, this man spoke for like, I don't know how many hours.

And I was, who is this person?

I'd never met anybody like this before.

The one part of the program that I remember clearly, it's interesting, was in the introductions.

You know, everybody goes around and says, why did you come and that sort of thing.

And Kat said something that just stuck with me.

And she said, I like his style.

And at the time, I thought she was talking about your shades and your socks, you know.

But afterwards, you know, I saw more of what she was referring to in a deeper way.

And after the program bag of presents in my hand, and that changed my life.

So he's one of those people, very few, a handful of people that I can say have really,

I've met at a crossroads of my life.

And for that, I've always been very grateful.

So, I like your style too.

And, and some tough ones.

Great introduction.

And a tough act to follow.

Before we get into this, what time is lunch, Lona?

1 o'clock.

1 o'clock? So we'll go till 1?

Or if you want to have time, if you want to walk around.

Go to 12.30 then?

Good.

Can everybody hear in the back, without amplification?

Yes.

Good.

Well, if I get tired and begin to mumble-wise, bring me back up.

Yeah.

Well, it's a pleasure to be here.

This is sort of a nostalgic return.

I can't even remember.

The last Ojai event was at Camp Shalom.

I can't remember.

It must have been three years since we were all together here under the teaching tree.

In some ways, a lot of water over the dam.

In other ways, five minutes ago.

I've just come from two days of speaking in Los Angeles to large audiences,

which demand a sort of formal intensity that you've thankfully relieved me of this morning.

I guess, well, how many people are familiar with my books or have been to workshops in the past?

Is there anybody who's just utterly unfamiliar?

Uh-huh.

Okay.

Well, so we'll work from that benchmark out.

I never imagined that I would end up sitting in this position and pontificating on the nature of life and history and global human destiny.

I started out simply with a love of nature.

I was persecuted as a child in my physical education classes.

So I spent a lot of time on my own.

And I grew up in western Colorado, where there is a lot of exposed sedimentary rock,

and some of it has dinosaurs pressed into it.

And I could always feel these dinosaurs.

The largest dinosaur ever found was found a few years ago near Delta, Colorado, about 30 miles from where I grew up.

And all the time I was growing up, I knew that sucker was out there.

But I could never walk to it.

If I could have, probably my career would have taken a different turn.

But my interest in fossils, I remember I had an uncle who gave me a book when I was about eight years old of fossils.

And it had one of those charts in the front of it where it shows five billion years,

and then the last half inch is expanded to the next column,

and then the last half inch is expanded to the next column.

And so I saw that human history was a hairline crack at the bottom of the column furthest to the right.

And I got the concept of how old, not the universe, but the earth is.

And it was a dizzying perspective.

The town I grew up in, if you've read Time magazine, you were persecuted as a left-wing intellectual.

The town I grew up in once made it into Ripley's, believe it or not,

as a place that had more Christian churches per capita than any town of its size in the United States.

This was a town of 1,600 people with 42 Christian churches thriving.

When I was a kid I thought street corners were for churches.

I didn't know you could have buildings on street corners that weren't churches.

And I would go up these dry arroyos with my rock pick looking for fossil shells and dinosaur bones and this sort of thing, brachiopods.

And in the solitude, because I would often not be able to con my little friends into attending me,

because they learned quickly that it was hotter out there than decent people could tolerate.

And also, I have to confess, whenever I invited someone to come along,

it was with the thought that they would carry back the specimens.

So they were essentially pack burrows for my fossil expeditions.

And then I had an uncle who was an old rockhound and he introduced me to the concept of not splitting apart strata to see ancient forms of life,

but slicing rocks up and polishing them to reveal the light and the color and sometimes the crystal cavities that were hidden inside them.

And so very early on I got this idea that the surface of things is not where attention should rest.

That you have to, as Ahab tells Starbuck in Moby Dick, you have to seek the little lower layer.

And under the surface of things is another reality, a reality that reaches, in some cases, back to the birth of the planet, practically.

Or in other cases, in other dimensions.

I had a fixation with meteorites at one time, and butterflies, and rocketry.

And all of these things were about a certain thrill, a certain iridescence that could be coaxed out of physical phenomena,

if you would not just simply dismiss them, and pass over them.

And as a little kid, I had very bad eyes.

I still do, but I wear contact lenses.

But at that time I wore very thick, bifocal lenses.

And my mother, bless her heart, who was cut from somehow different cloths than all the people around me,

read Aldous Huxley's book, The Art of Seeing, which was an occasion to look at it in the past year.

I was amazed how much of my own attitude toward life is contained in this fairly trivial book.

You know, Huxley had terrible eyes, too.

And he discovered the so-called Batesian method of eye exercises and eye health,

which at that time, we're talking 1954 or so, was completely sky-blue crackpot type stuff.

I mean, this was the Eisenhower era.

And the exercises that I learned when my mother took me were exercises in attention.

And then the other form of exercise was what the rest of American society wasn't going to encounter for 15 years,

and then would encounter as Buddhist visualization.

But for us, it was just close your eyes and the therapist would create castles in the air through narrative.

And it was an eye exercise.

And so it introduced me to the idea of sitting still and watching what's going on behind closed eyelids.

What fascinated me about the butterflies was the physical iridescence, which in the northern hemisphere is fairly rare in butterflies.

You only get it in these little blue lysoneas that you see fluttering around mud puddles in dry areas.

I've seen them here.

But of course, in the tropics, iridescence becomes a more generalized phenomenon, not only in butterflies, but in beetles as well.

And I had the ability to fixate, to spend hours with a single pyrite crystal or a single leaf turning it over and looking at it.

And then, at some point, again, Huxley decided that I would become a writer, not because I loved writing,

but because I admired all the attention that great writers seemed to have used upon them,

which was something that I, as a goggle-eyed weirdo, was not getting much of.

And I, so then, the name Huxley recurred again, and I started reading through all of those novels,

the social novels, you know.

Antique and Chrome Yellow, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, and all the rest of it, Ape in Essence.

And, finally, I came to a work of non-fiction by Huxley, The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell.

This was, by now, probably 1958. I was 14 years old.

And, in that book, Huxley, the quintessential English academic establishment intellectual,

describes his confrontations with mescaline and what it meant to him.

And, it was fascinating to me, because, previously, all I had ever known or heard about drugs

was what I had learned from reading Huxley's novel, Crave New World,

which is a pharmacological dystopia, if there ever was one,

and has lots to say to society today, I think.

If you haven't read it, I recommend it to you.

If you have read it, you recall that it was a society of people, perfect people,

grown in vats, who died early, but who never lost the bloom of their youth,

who were heard-minded, driven by advertising,

and entirely dependent for their happiness and psychic equilibrium on a drug called Soma.

And, they had little advertising slogans which they would repeat by rote

if anyone displayed inappropriate anger or emotion.

A gram is better than a dam, they would be displayed publicly.

A drug sound of this same author, writing of mescaline,

and reaching for metaphors drawn from Meister Eckhart, St. John of the Cross,

John Chrysostom, comparing the light falling into the folds of his trousers

to the light of Caravaggio and Duccio and Fra Angelico.

And, I was amazed, I had never heard such care names on.

Well, now, if you go back and look at the doors of perception,

you realize that this was not an extravagant telling of the nature of the psychedelic dimension.

It was, in fact, a fairly conservative rendering, a description of low-dose, eyes-open, thoughty, psychedelic voyaging.

I mean, it's been a long, long time since I've set a stack of Abram's art books by my left knee before I take a psychedelic.

But back then, that was how it was done.

And you looked at the visible world.

Well, so then, around this time there began to be alarmist articles in the press

about the abuse of Blue Morning Glory seeds by some of the more crazed and unassimilated members of American society.

And I immediately tore out and purchased a couple of packets of Blue Morning Glory seeds.

And then noticed that the leaves imprinted in the fabric of the drapes in the living room

all seemed to have little faces that were dancing.

This was, in fact, clearly the intent of the designer,

but something that in all the years of living around these ratty drapes I had never noticed.

And then I began to look at everything around me

and discovered that this affinity for looking into things

that my rock-hunting, butterfly-collecting habits had instilled in me

had become like turbo-charged.

And swimming in the depths of polished stones, ponds,

the ditch running down the back of the back yard,

were myriads of worlds.

And I went outside and I was looking around at everything

and then I just felt physically overcome.

My knees basically gave way underneath me

and I sat down under a tree and I closed my eyes.

And my life has never been the same since.

Because there, waiting behind closed eyelids,

were, you know, ruined cities

covered with creeping jeweled lichens

and inhabited by shining-eyed creatures that were,

I was not sure exactly what,

and much, much more.

And I just spent a half hour or so, literally entranced,

gazing into this unfolding reverie of deserts, jungles, machines,

archaeological artifactria, machines in orbit around alien worlds,

all of this stuff.

And I was stunned.

I still am stunned.

And that essentially set the compass for my,

the rest of my intellectual life.

I didn't understand, really, what had happened.

In other words, I didn't clearly get it that this was a trip

and that it was induced by the psychedelic.

I understood something of that,

that I thought also it must be unique.

It must be my mood, my expectation.

Or surely this cannot happen on demand

through the simple act of eating morning glory seeds

being sold at 35 cents a pack down at the hardware store.

And so then I began to ask questions.

And I quickly discovered it was a mistake.

So I went back to Huxley and read more carefully,

saw that he was working from the early of Pavlok Ellis,

Weir Mitchell, Fitzhugh Ludlow.

And so it turned out that this whole tradition,

albeit an underground tradition in Western intellectual

or aesthetic terms,

based around the perturbation of consciousness with substances.

Colerick, as an example.

And you may know this poem Kublai Khan.

Kublai Khan was written in a flash, basically,

based on an opium reverie.

Coleridge was an aficionado laudanum,

which was a tinctured form of opium

that had a great vogue in the 19th century.

Well, I knew nothing about opium or laudanum

or the style of the 19th century English intelligentsia.

But in the lines of Kublai Khan,

I could feel this same siren song iridescence

that had been in the pyrite crystal,

in the butterfly wings, in the beetle bodies.

Here, let's go out on a limb.

In Xanadu did Kublai Khan, a stature dome, decree,

where out the sacred river ran,

through caverns measureless to man,

down to a sunless sea.

So twice five miles of fertile ground,

with walls and towers girdled round,

and there blossomed many an incense-bearing tree.

Tells meandering with a mazy motion

the sacred river ran.

And it goes on and on.

And then it says,

it was a miracle of rare device,

a sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice.

And that notion,

not the sunny pleasure dome itself,

but the notion of a sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice,

introduced me to the concept of what's called,

in alchemy, coincidencia positorum,

where two things which are mutually exclusive

are juxtaposed in a way which creates a shock in the mind,

a poetic shock that is then potentially memorable.

Years later, I used this effect to title my books.

So that's why you get the invisible landscape,

true hallucination.

See, this is all hideously contrived.

Well, eventually, and after many adventures

too painful to recall,

I ended up at Berkeley in the fall of 1965,

with the fall of 1965,

which was what an incredibly,

probably the most together thing

I've ever achieved with my life in terms of domain.

Because I was neither early nor late.

I was not ten miles off or a thousand miles off.

I was dead on.

I was right at the very center of the flowering

of what's now vilified and fondly recalled as the 1960s.

And I was living in a ratty room house in San Francisco

that summer before going over to Berkeley.

And there was a guy living across the hall from me

who replaced all the white light bulbs in his apartment

with red light bulbs and painted his windows black

and played the major chords of Freight Train on his slack guitar.

And there was a big band.

It definitely was a fight in the realm of

black guitar.

And this is a bad guy.

I'm looking at the center of the house.

And I'm working at the house with a black guitar for

many years ago.

So this is a big thing.

I'm looking at all of the color.

Now that the house is a great time.

Now that I think the door fences are available

to the house in the garage door,

we're trying to get much to the house for

a house for the house in the house.

But just sit down here and say,

and I'm looking at the house where

you are going at the house,

and I've got it at the house on the back the glass.

over and over again. And he went on to glory as Barry Melton, the lead guitarist of Country

Joe and the Fish. And I didn't know it, but at the time they were in the studio laying

down the tracks for electric music for the mind and the body, which was one of the defining

freak albums of that era. And he introduced me to the joys of cannabis and further to something

called Sandoz LSD, which was going around in these little tiny 00 capsules. And it was

as if the previous morning glory vision had now been lifted to a whole other level of

intensity. And everyone around me was undergoing these kinds of experiences. And there was a

sense of incredibly accelerated change. You could palpably feel the acceleration of change

seemed to be in the water, in the air. Once I moved to Berkeley, I noticed that the large

billboard that they changed for Telegraph Avenue every 30 days contained cryptic messages that

were inevitably addressed to me and my affinity group. In short, serious boundary, dissolution

and category and scramblement was creeping into my mental universe. And then, after about six

months of this, I had a very strange friend who lived in Palo Alto. He still is my friend.

He still is my great inspiration. I wish I could coax him into public display because he's the

real Terence McKenna. But if you're the real Terence McKenna, you have too much good taste

to ever do what I do. But he came to me. His style was to get there first, whatever it was, to do it, to reject

it, and to be absolutely contemptuous of it by the time anybody else even arrived at the scene of the crime. So in

early 1967, he came to my house in Berkeley one rainy February night. And he said,

something you might be interested in. And I said, what's that? And he said, this is a material that has been boosted from an army research project being run down at SRI. And someone managed to

get a fifty-gallon drum of this material out of the inventory without anybody knowing. And I said, what is it? And he said, it's called DMT. And I said, it's a psychedelic drug, right? And he said, right. And I said, how long does it last? And he said, three minutes. And I said, no problem, bring it on.

Because after all, I had been assaulted by Life magazine on the subject of LSD. And I had gotten that under my belt. And I was by now relatively sophisticated about cannabis. I figured there were probably no more frontiers to cross. And so we sat down then and there and did it.

And about 15 seconds after talking up on this stuff, I found myself plunged into an elf nest somewhere on the other side of the universe. In other words, there were, and thank God no one fills in for me because they know it so well,

well. Jewel self-dribbling basketballs. Did I get it right? Jewel self-dribbling basketballs that came bounding toward me from all corners of this domed underground space.

Well, I had been used to hallucinations, acceleration of thought, funny ideas, strange insights, hysterical waves of giggling, so forth and so on. I had never seen anything like what I was now face to face with.

And also, whatever this substance was, it didn't affect me. It didn't affect my perception of who I was. In other words, it seemed to me that the drug wasn't working.

It was simply that the world had disappeared and been replaced by something else. And I was still who I had been a few moments before, except now I was fairly alarmed by what had just happened to the architecture and geography of Southern Telegraph Avenue.

And these things, there was an overwhelming sense of affection, involvement, a sense that I hadn't experienced since being six years old and being released on Christmas morning to run out to the Christmas tree.

And there was a sense of reality. And there was a sense of childlike innocence under conditions of extraordinary alienness and emboldment.

And just, I was boggled, the mind boggled. I at last understood the real meaning of this new cliché at that time.

And these things were making objects with their voices. They were singing in this unearthly, crystalline, punning, elf chatter kind of language.

But it was not something simply heard. It was something which I could see. I could see syntax unfolding like ribbons being spewed out of machines, shooting across my visual field, rolling into balls, condensing as objects with rotating crystalline facets and machined interiors of gold

and ivory and crystal light. And these objects were themselves emitting strange singing language-like noises. And the whole thing was happening at an enormous speed, almost like a Bugs Bunny cartoon run backwards at about three times ordinary speed.

Well, I barely had time to take all of this scene, assure myself that I wasn't dying before it collapsed. The way a tent collapses, the way an ice cream cone melts, the way an erection disappears, the way an investment goes bad, it just was gone.

And my friend, I was sitting there, I opened my eyes and my friend said, so what do you think?

And I was, I was stunned. I've never actually seen it hit anybody quite as hard as it hit me. For about 15 minutes, all I could say was, I can't believe it. I can't believe it. I can't believe it. I can't believe it. I can't believe that. I can't believe that.

You call that a drug? You must be nuts. Drugs don't do that. I mean, drugs speed you up, slow you down, make you fall down, stuff like that. This is no drug. It's magic. It masquerades as a drug. It's a doorway into another world.

I kept having the image of Aladdin's land, my favorite fairy tale. And I felt like Aladdin. You know, you buy something in a junk shop, you take it home, you try to clean it up. The next thing you know, a flame a mile high pours out and demands to do your bidding.

That was the impression I have. And it's the impression I still have. That must have been early 1966, 66, 76, 86. What is it? 36 years ago? That's not possible.

26 years ago. Nothing has particularly changed. Nothing has ever surpassed it. And for me, that was the moment that set my auto compass for life.

I mean, I said, this I must understand. Not only did my mother not tell me and my father not tell me, but Aldous Huxley never told me.

And neither did John of the cross. And neither did Meister Eckhart. All those people were apparently flying at a lower altitude than I, 19-year-old brat in ratty rented room, have been able to achieve in the last 15 minutes.

And so then I began to look for this or for some trace of it in the history of human philosophy, in the history of art, in ethnography, everywhere.

And I really didn't find it. And I really still don't find it, except there are certain faint, faint footprints in the blowing sand of human experience that if you know, if you've seen the vision, you can follow these footprints back to something like this source.

First of all, I went to the library. None of the heads that I knew could make any sense out of this at all. For them, LSD defined the top of the ladder.

Well, with this stuff, LSD and being at the local PA meeting, Dathom seemed to be two states of mind which merged together on some horizon of straightness.

So I went to the library. So I went to the library and began reading more intensively in a more focused fashion.

And I learned there were who apparently utilized plants that had this . This was new information, information that had arrived in the domain of botanical scholarship.

Really, in the previous five to ten years, through the work of people like Richard Evans Schultes and William Safford and other people, had described this chemical being present in these aboriginal intoxicants.

So far as I could tell, no academic had ever done it, because no description matched what I had experienced.

And when I discussed this with my friend who had said that he felt that probably it was impossible to accentuate concentrations outside the laboratory.

And so that meant, if true, that these shamanic practitioners and societies that were utilizing this were utilizing it, but that they themselves had no real awareness of what it was potentially like when concentrated through modern analytical and laboratory techniques.

So it really wasn't a choice. I mean, I guess that's what it's like when you get your calling.

It's just a little hard for me to imagine that being a CTA or city planner or something like that could seize you by the years with the kind of intensity that this sees me.

I mean, I said, I've got to understand this stuff. This is the most amazing thing.

And the second most amazing thing. And the second most amazing thing was that nobody seemed to know about.

I mean, I couldn't understand why there weren't 11 inch high headlines on every newspaper on the platform saying, you know, doorway to hyperspace disturbed.

I mean, it wasn't the elf negotiations proceeding or something like that.

No, apparently it was a private mystery or known but to a very few.

And I immediately after coming down was seized by an absolutely messianic desire to expose other people to this and see what they said.

Because it just seemed so important to share it.

So that's basically what I've been doing ever since.

And trying to draw conclusions.

Trying to understand what is this, number one.

How is it that it can coexist with the world of George Bush and not be discussed or not be part of the mix of social concerns?

I mean, after all, we're a society where people jump out of airplanes on weekends because their lives are so boring and empty.

Well then, if you think jumping out of an airplane is a thrill to ride home about, you should try this stuff.

No one would jump out of an airplane if they had DMT on their menu.

But no, apparently it isn't about that.

Well then I came to feel that it is, and I still sometimes offhandedly refer to it like this, that it is secret.

It is not a secret.

It is the secret.

There is a secret, and this is it.

It is the secret that the world is not only not the way you think it is,

but the way the world is, is a way that you can't think it is, because you simply do not have the imaginative capacity to conceive of such overwhelming peculiarity.

And how this secret is able to coexist with the rest of mundane reality, maintain its integrity, and not become the object of pogrom, religion, hysteria, and repression, is part of the mystery of what the secret is.

You see, a secret is not something untold, it's something which can't be told.

And even as I sit here, I realize that I'm obliquely approaching it.

No matter how weird I say it is, no matter what scintillating metaphor I create to attempt to beguile you into imagining what you can't imagine,

I'm perfectly aware that I'm falling short of the goal.

I'm creating a symbol of what it is.

But frankly, words fail, and I'm a word kind of guy.

So then, the rest of my life can be basically poured into a nutshell.

It's just been a lot of wandering around in various fringy places, talking to a lot of fringy people,

and trying to figure out what is the real importance of this, for me personally, because that's where I'm living, obviously,

and for everybody else, because I assume that there is absolutely nothing extraordinary about me.

I didn't have these experiences because I'm in the lineage of Ramana Maharshi or some malarkey like that.

I had that experience because I'm a human being.

And every human being can have this experience.

The only analogy I can make to it is sexuality.

I notice that no one here seems to be having sex at the moment, but we all are shaped by it.

Probably, this is something so taboo, and not necessarily scripted into your biological functioning the way sex is,

so taboo, that you can go from birth to the grave and never encounter this.

Not only can you do that, but most people do.

And throughout history, most people have.

They never had an inkling.

You know, they may have set armies marching.

They may have launched empires.

They may have built fantastic inventions, painted amazing paintings, created phenomenal works of literature.

But they were wet behind the ears when it comes to the full spectrum of reality,

because without this in the picture, half the world is missing.

Well, so then, how to come to terms with this?

What is it?

The answer is, who knows?

We're not doing a very good job of coming to terms with this.

Governments invade against drugs of all sorts, but largely because these things are sources of difficult-to-tax revenue.

It's not the metaphysical concern for the health of your teleological structures that drives the government to repress these things.

It's simply the wish not to be chiseled on safely.

So, there it is, sideways to the rest of life.

Huxley once said, of the psychedelic experience generally, that it was what he called a gratuitous grace.

He said, it is neither necessary nor sufficient for salvation.

In other words, salvation can be attained without these things, whatever salvation is.

Discovering, using, and exploring these things does not guarantee you a place in heaven either, whatever a place in heaven means.

However, this is a part of this world.

A part of this world that you would think the restless, intellect of this world, that you would be restless, restless, intellectually...

Well, it's hard to put it into words exactly, especially when you try to do it for the first time.

Obviously, the difference between a living person and a dead person, there is a way of thinking about that where you would say the difference is a chemical one.

In one case, metabolism is going on. In the other case, not.

I am beginning to think that this narrowing of our conscious focus into three dimensions for survival purposes that I mentioned a few minutes ago may have actually cut us off not only from where the game will be next month or who stole the chicken,

but it also may have cut us off from contact with the after death world because it has no efficacy in the very nitty-gritty blood and muscle problem of day-to-day survival.

And that what we have discovered in DMT is literally a chemical doorway to the Barga.

And that this, I think, is an even more confounding notion than the notion that we are being pheromonally managed by zeta reticulums or something like that.

I mean, after all, if that were the case, it would probably just be one of many programs of social manipulation that are administered by some hideous bureaucracy somewhere beyond Agol.

And there's careerism and blunders and budget overruns and, in other words, it sort of comes back down into, that's what the problem I have with all extraterrestrial scenarios is the extraterrestrials seem so much like ourselves.

I think probably it's that we have found the pharmacological key to the Barga and that this is going to overturn civilization so completely that we might as well just call an end to it and recess the meeting.

And if you ask shamans about this, you say, you know, what is this all about, they will tell you, well, we do all our work through ancestor magic.

Well, ancestor is a very sanitized term because not too many people, when they hear the word ancestor, realize that we're talking dead people here.

So when a shaman tells you he works with the ancestors, he's saying he works with dead people.

Well, one of the questions that has driven us most buggy during, throughout history, which is, is there contra the body dissolved?

And I am the last person to ever carry this message into society. I was raised Catholic, rejected it. At age 14, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Genet, Friedrich Nietzsche, these were my gods.

And I felt, you know, that moral responsibility, existential honesty, demands that we put aside the cheerful fairytales of more naive levels of culture.

And that anybody who wants to talk to you about the dear departed and all that is, you know, in the grip of menopausal mysticism or something, or just hasn't carried out a rational analysis of what gives.

Now, I think, you know, these religions have all made hay out of, and hash, I might add, out of their imagined franchise of the after-death world.

Because they use it to beat you on the head with some moral laundry list of do's and don'ts that's very dear to them.

And it can be anything as nonsense that you shouldn't be bored to.

All sides of the world, and has only been thrown into question by the scientific high-tech democracies in the last 500 years or so,

and for them only among a secular educated elite, the premise that is that there is something that persists beyond life.

And I think that part of the profligate irresponsibility of modern life arises from the fact that we don't think we have dues to pay.

We don't think, we think there's an easy way out, and that you could be a jerk and then just become food for worms and nobody will ever get on your case about it.

And so, moral relativism has come into play.

But if in fact we are securing in some form the notion that the human personality or some portion of it persists after death, and that there is an ecology of souls, and that we must in some sense share this planet with them, because after all when you smoke BMT you don't go anywhere physically.

You simply see your nearby environment from a different dimension through different eyes, then it means that we represent a tiny minority of the human beings who care about this planet.

We, the living, are just a tiny slice of who cares and who is active in the situation.

And somehow, we are being, through champs, which I don't believe in, or through design, which seems everywhere around us, we are being brought up short and told that in order for the earth to survive, we must join everyone else in this other place.

and that it is not to be considered as a solution.

music

to be conceived of as disembodied.

This is the only thing I can figure out that is going on.

There is some kind of project underway

to transfer the lumpen living

into the realm of the grateful death.

And the anxiety that we feel about death

is an anxiety born essentially of ignorance.

And this ignorance is understandable

because we have suppressed, repressed and denied shamanism

the leadership role that it should have in metaphysics of all sorts.

And so now we are about to become extinct.

And you can like it or you cannot like it.

You can decry it as the greatest tragedy ever to befall us

or this planet, although I suspect the planet

will give an enormous sigh of relief.

But there is a perspective in which

it can actually be seen as progress

that we are all at once going to transit

into this bardo realm.

Now this may not be it.

It may not be a simple die-off.

It may be that somehow a dialogue can be set up

with these souls or their representatives

or whatever they are in this other place

and that a world can be established

which is neither quite theirs nor quite ours.

In other words, that the difference

between being alive and being dead

which seems to us fairly fundamental

could in fact turn out to be fairly minor

and erasable or the boundary could be moved

from where it is to somewhere else.

We, this stuff is hackle-raising in its weirdness

but if you're going to be true to the content of the experience

then I think you're pushed in these kinds of directions.

And the attractor at the end of history

that seems to be pulling the human world certainly

if not all of space and time

into its domain

is in the act of realizing itself

going to obliterate the kind of distinctions

that we have grown used to.

Even on such fundamental issues

as life and death

that's the grandest conception

that I've been able to come up with

and it doesn't require

friendly, altruistic, extraterrestrial

flying in from fatal Jews

and it doesn't involve

nanotechnological downloading of everybody

into a gold deterbium cube

buried on the backside of the moon

and it doesn't involve

the human enterprise

simply becoming a layer in shale

somewhere in the strata

of the paleontological record of life

on this planet.

It is, you know,

a fitting denouement

for the mess that we have wandered into.

It does require unlimbering of the imagination

to come to terms with this

because we are in great denial

over the possibility

that the world could really be transforming itself.

I mean, about as far as most of us can go

without getting metaphysically uncomfortable

is to embrace recycling and population control.

But I doubt that such cheerful diddling

with the machinery

will be able to swerve us from our path.

I think, like it or not,

we are going into a world

that we literally, as we sit here,

cannot conceive of.

A world so different

from ordinary reality

that to discuss

whether we will be alive or dead

in that world

is mere equivalent.

There is one point

I wanted to clarify real quick.

I didn't see this

launching of the alien psychedelic

explore templates

as a bureaucratic enterprise.

I almost always envisioned

it as a real provisional

underground thing

to be done by a small minority

of shamans

in a desperate hope

that some kind of propagate

their origins.

You mean alien shamans?

Yeah, yeah.

It could be that.

I sense a crisis

in the physics

of the matrix itself.

In other words,

I think that this

is not only happening

to human beings.

I'm serious when I say

there's only 20 years

of history left

and we still have

half of it to do.

We're going to have to do

some pretty fast stepping.

I mean, what we took

50,000 years to do,

we must now do

in 20 years.

I think that space

and time

and the physical body

and the planet

and that everything

is essentially

some kind of an illusion.

It's not real.

What is real,

what is truly bedrock

and I guess this comes

close to being

of the Buddhist position,

this is all provisional.

This is not

what the universe is.

The universe

is something else.

You know,

the Buddhists

have a doctrine

that if a single person

will attain enlightenment,

then the illusion

will collapse

instantly.

All beings

will be sucked

into the post-enlightenment

state

and the illusion

of space

and time

of becoming

and entity

will all be obviated

at the snap

of a finger.

Well,

we tend to disbelieve this

because no matter

how metaphysical

we are,

or we may even

call ourselves

Buddhists,

we really believe

that Andromeda

is 250,000 light-years away.

We can't conceive

of a light-year

but we actually believe

that what the scientists

tell us

and yet,

my God,

when you start,

when you start

carrying out

a critique

of modern science,

you cannot believe

what fluff

this stuff

is built on.

I heard an analogy

recently

which I thought

was very interesting.

Our entire picture

of the so-called

distant universe

is built up

by the science

of radiotelescopy,

the use of radio telescopes

to study deep space.

This science

has been in existence

since about 1950.

If you were to take

all the radio signals

that have been analyzed

by radio astronomy

since 1950

and characterize

them as energy,

it would be

the amount of energy

that is released

by a cigarette ash

falling a distance

of two feet.

So,

this is

the thinness

of the data

out of which

we have created

these incredibly

grandiose

conceptions

of what is happening.

science is just

whistling past

the graveyard.

Don't forget

that the telescope

is about

500 years old

this year.

So,

to believe,

you know,

that the story

science tells us

is true

when we can't

understand

the mathematics,

we cannot build

the instruments

ourselves,

we cannot analyze

the data.

I mean,

we are

under the thumb

of a priesthood

more domineering,

more removed

from the ordinary

concerns of ordinary

people than

any priesthood

of any religion

in the past

ever was.

I think we should

hold all that

in abeyance.

I'm not saying

it's not true,

I'm saying

it's not possible

to tell whether

it's true or not.

One thing

psychedelics will do

for you

for sure

is to convince

you that

what's real

is what I call

the felt

presence

of immediate

experience.

That's what's

real.

You know,

what you think,

what you feel,

what you see

now

is what's

real.

Even your own

memories

are so

shifting

and elusive

and subject

to psychological

transformation

based on

your own

inner

and unconscious

dynamics

and kinks

that

to believe

what somebody

else is telling

me

about the

temperature

of bagel

juice

or something

like that

or the charge

of the top

quark

means you're

just,

you've moved

off into

some kind

of private

Idaho.

Crazy people

rave about

stuff like

this.

But I think

people who are

rooted in

a good

philosophical

method

will not

give much

influence to

anything out

of reach

of their

good

right arm.

And the

psychedelic

experience

is an

experience.

You know,

I didn't

present you

with a set

of tensor

equations

or a

tape of

electromagnetic

data

interpreted

through the

fiat of

the fishy

formula.

We're talking

experience here.

and this

experience,

if made

commiserate

with ordinary

experience,

I think

leads to the

conclusion

that this

is, I

said this

the other

night,

this is as

dead as

you'll ever

be.

This is as

low as you

can go.

This is as

confined a

mode of

existence as

it's possible

to know

and it's

all up

from here

folks.

It's a kind

of Gnostic

vision.

It sees

our present

circumstance

as the

low run

of a

ladder

of

transformational

distillation.

and, you

know, we

come from

we know

not where.

I mean, we

have, yes, the

details on the

fertilization of

the egg by

the sperm and

so forth and

so on, but

where the

form comes

from, we

don't know.

This is the

mystery of

morphogenesis.

And then

where the

form goes

to, we

do not

know.

I mean, I

now think

that the

proper way

to think

about

biology

is

biological

objects.

Plants,

animals,

fungi,

bacteria,

amoebas,

and human

beings.

Biological

objects are

hyperdimensional

objects.

You can

tell that

that's true

because

whenever you

what is

the sine qua

non of

a biological

object,

meaning

what is

the thing

it must

have to

be

biological.

It must

metabolize.

That's the

essence of

life.

The form is

stable, but

the matter

and the

energy which

compose the

form are

in constant

cycling.

The form

stabilizes, but

the energy is

flowing through

it, which

stabilizes it.

when we use

phrases like

cycling through

it, flowing

through it, these

are words which

imply a

temporal

dimension.

If you have

a chair and

you cut into

it, it

doesn't bleed, it

doesn't squirm

away, it

doesn't begin

to rot and

fall over.

If you cut

into a living

object, it

undergoes all

kinds of

changes.

This is

because you

have destroyed

one of the

dimensions necessary

for its

manifestation, the

temporal

dimension.

The living

body has a

relationship to

time which the

chair doesn't

have.

The chair is

born along in

the stream of

time.

The biological

object is

made of

time itself as

much as it's

made of space

and matter.

And so

really what

birth is, is

the descent of

this mysterious

entity called

the form into

matter.

It clothes

itself with

matter and

energy through

a process of

gestation,

unfoldment,

separation from

the environment

of gestation and

unfoldment, which

is the mother's

body.

And then it

has an

autonomous

existence, but

what is generally

true of all

life in the

phylogenetic, in

the, I'm

sorry, in the

ontogenetic

expression, what's

true is that it

has finite

duration.

Everything

dies.

The individual

dinosaur, the

individual

elephant, the

individual human

being, they

die.

That means

that the form

eventually

withdraws itself

from the

domain of

matter and

energy, and

it then

presumably

exists as

it existed

before, having

added whatever

adumbrations,

three-dimensional

experience has

given to it.

So I've come to

see the body

as basically the

placenta of

the soul.

body, and

you know, that's

a way of

thinking about

it that makes

dying not

so terrifying.

I mean, it's

as terrifying as

smoking PMT, but

it's nothing to

claw the walls

about.

The body is the

placenta of the

soul for the

individual.

Well, then it's

just a short

step to realizing

that we are now

called upon as

a species to

abandon the

bodies.

The body is

the collective

body is the

collective

placenta of

the species, and

you don't do a

war dance around

the placenta.

Once it serves

its function, which

is to bring the

forming fetus to

the point where it

can exist and

sustain itself in

the dimension for

which it is

destined, in the

case of ordinary

birth, that's

three-dimensional

space and time.

In the case of

this metaphor, it's

the hyperspace

beyond space and

time.

Once we are

ready to exist in

that dimension, it's

time to undergo

the journey down

the birth canal

and bury the

placenta under

the old apple

tree and

forget it and

move on.

And, you

know, I grant

you the analogy

isn't perfect.

I mean, where

is the midwife?

Where is the

waving bassinet?

But perhaps the

answer to that is

the midwife is

waving in these

intimations of

the friendly

alien presence.

It may be an

aspect of

humanness that

awaits us just

over the great

divine.

And so we are

going to have

to, you

know, I think

you probably

now at every

talk I give, I

make the analogy

to birth, that

this is what we

in the 20th

century are

experiencing.

The 20th

century is

analogous to

the birth

canal of

human history.

And so, you

know, the

wonderful swim

in the

amniotic

ocean is

over.

The fool's

paradise of

of the fetal

life is

ending.

Now, the

walls are

literally closing

in.

We can't get

enough oxygen.

We're using up

our food.

The walls are

strangling us.

There's no room

on this planet

for all of us.

And for us,

it's a catastrophe.

But I imagine

when a woman

goes into

transition,

that the

fetus, if

it's not a

metaphysician,

must be fairly

alarmed by the

situation.

It must just

say, well, I

guess this is

it.

It's all over.

I'm going to

be strangled,

suffocated,

and simultaneously

choked to death

in this situation.

It would take a

far-seeing fetus

indeed to

embrace the

journey down the

birth canal as

the road toward

a split level

ranch house

if you play

your cards

right.

Surely that

gets the

idea,

Thron.

Yes.

Could you

say more about

your content

of your

text?

I was

really

fascinated,

and it

seemed like

there were

some qualities

to it that

I wanted to

know.

hear more

about.

Well,

sure.

DMT, if you

take it

orally, is

destroyed by

enzymes in

your gut, so

it has to be

smoked unless

you have a

chemical strategy

for inactivating

those enzymes.

So, assuming

you smoke it,

it comes on

in about 30

seconds, and

if you're a

leather lung

Tashashin, you

can maybe get

it in one

swell foot, but

it takes most

people about

three hits.

And the

first thing you

notice is

that it's

as though all

the air has

been drawn out

of the room

you're in.

Suddenly the

colors come

forward, the

edges sharpen.

This is really

happening.

It has an

extraordinary

effect at low

doses on

visual acuity.

So does

psilocybin.

And then you

close your eyes,

you feel very

peculiar, a

kind of

anesthesia

sweeps through

your body, a

kind of

numbing and

yet a sense

of a building

bubble of

energy.

You close

your eyes, and

after a few

seconds you

see forming

in front of

you what I

call the

chrysanthemum.

It's a

floral

mandala, usually

in yellow and

orange, most

people say.

And it's

slowly turning,

it's like a

wall, but

it's a

hallucination, but

it's right here,

right in front

of you.

And you

watch it for

about 15

seconds.

If it

stabilizes, you

need one

more hit.

But what

usually happens

is that after

about 15

seconds of

contemplating this

thing, it's

as though

suddenly whatever

was holding

you back, the

cable is cut,

and you

are just

propelled

through this

membrane, and

there is, you

hear a sound

like a bread

wrapper being

crumpled, a

cellophane bread

wrapper being

crumpled and

thrown away, or

the crackling of

flames.

This is, according

to a friend of

mine, your

radio intellect, he

exiting the

anterior fontanelle

at the top of

your head.

But he could be

wrong.

But whatever it

is, and then

you hear a

tone, which

is, it could

be reproduced

on a

synthesizer.

It's that

you know, but

it keeps

going, and

becomes

hypersonic,

supersonic,

subsonic, I

don't know.

And there

is a sense

of, literally

a membrane is

ruptured, and

now you're

there.

and what

happens to

me is, the

first thing I

hear is a

cheer, a

yell of

greeting.

It's, on

their second

album, the

Pink Floyd

have a song

in which they

sing, the

gnomes have a

new way to

say, hooray.

Well, you

break in to

this gnome

nest, and

it's a very

specifically

characterized

place.

It is

domed, it's

indirectly lit,

not brightly

lit, but

it's soffited

lighting of

some sort.

It's

comfortable,

and, but

all of

that is

hard to

focus on

and relatively

inconsequential

because the

main thing

that's happening

is these

things come

bounding

towards you

like greyhounds,

and there

are many

of them.

These

jeweled,

self-dribbling,

transforming

basketballs,

which look

like iridescent

electric

radiolaria or

something.

I mean, they

are diatomaceous

neon transforms

made of

syntax, or

some damn

thing like

that, and

they come

towards you,

and you

have to deal

with yourself

in this

situation,

because most

people, and

my reaction,

is absolute

amazement,

complete

hysterical

disbelief.

I mean, you

just say,

you know,

my God,

what is

happening?

It comes so

quickly that it

isn't like a

drug, where

you deep

breathe, and

you close your

eyes, and

you wait for

an hour, and

you slowly

summon it out

of its

crevice.

It's not like

that.

It's like you

were struck by

lightning.

In fact, some

people think they

have been struck

by lightning, that

they never got to

the drug, that

just as they

raised it to

their lips, they

were struck by

lightning, or a

jet fighter fell

out of the sky, or

something.

And then you

have to ask

yourself, is

this okay?

Because it's so

radical, and it

happens so

quickly, and your

eyes are wide

open, and you

don't see anything

recognizable.

Three-dimensional

space, the room

you were in,

everything, it's

gone.

Instead, this

place, and then

they tell you, they

try to reassure you,

although they're not

very reassuring.

What they say is,

don't give way to

amazement.

Don't abandon

yourself to wonder.

Basically, don't be a

jerk and a

rube, you know.

Pay attention.

Pay attention to

what is happening.

And then they

proceed to do a

very intense form

of teen teaching.

They, bounding

up, they present

themselves, they

also do this weird

thing where they

jump into your

chest, and then

they jump back

out.

So you're having

this sucking in

and out of your

body thing.

They jump in and

out of your chest,

and they are

singing and squeaking

and squealing in

some kind of elf

glossolalia, which

you can see.

This is very

important.

They speak a

language which you

look at, you

don't hear, and

they make

objects which

are like super

puns of some

sort, in that

the object is

not one

thing.

It is somehow

several things

simultaneously.

The way a

pun attains its

effect by being

simultaneously more

than one thing.

But these are not

verbal puns.

These are

objectified puns in

three-dimensional

space.

And they're

funny.

And the whole

thing is

pervaded by

the word

zany is what

I use.

It's a form of

humor.

It's a form of

merriment.

But you can't

entirely relax

around it because

you can't entirely

be sure that

you're getting

the joke.

So it's like

it's a humor

with an edge

to it.

And they

are showing

you these

jeweled, I've

compared them

to Fabergé

eggs.

And when they

show you these

things, you

can tell by

looking at

them that if

you could bring

a single one

of these

objects, no

larger than

an orange,

into this

world, it

would end

the debate.

I mean, all

you would have

to do is

show it to

somebody and

they would

say, that's

impossible, but

yet it's

happening, so

therefore my

reality is

dissolving.

I mean, it's

somehow to

gaze upon

these objects

is to be

forever

corrupted for

ordinary

consciousness.

Make them

with their

voices.

These objects

are quasi

alive.

The objects

themselves

can sing

and make

other objects.

So you're

just being,

you're like

in this

cross between

Santa's

workshop,

Tiffany's,

and the

basement of

the Metropolitan

Museum,

and they're

offering you

all this time.

I've somehow

stretched the

thread too

tightly, and

now I'm

never going

to make my

way back.

and they're

saying, no,

no, can

that, that's

not what's

happening, this

is what's

happening, pay

attention, look,

look, look,

and then it

just fades very

suddenly, and

they sense it

coming.

They have

urgency because

they know the

window is

tremendously

narrow, and

in the final

moments, in

some cases I

recall, they

literally, it

recedes away, or

you pull away

from it, and

they say,

deja vu,

deja vu.

And then

you open your

eyes, and

you're in the

room you

left, it's

like a

thousand mics

of LSD or

something, you

are more

loaded than

you have ever

been in your

life, and

you immediately

proclaim.

My God, I'm completely down.

And, you know, the walls are rubbery.

The Persian carpet is crawling around.

Your friends have faceted faces

and look like they just climbed out of one of Billy Meyer's starships.

But you're absolutely completely down.

You accept this as ordinary.

It's all you can do to keep from kissing the good earth.

Because where you were was so much removed from that

that there is no comparison.

Well, now, after doing this a number of times,

because the first time you do it,

the goal is pretty much to live through it.

I mean, it's like being shot out of a...

I read, I think it was Tim Leary's metaphor.

He said it's like being shot out of a cannon with Baroque barreling.

And afterwards, people want you to draw barreling

when what you were trying to do was live through the experience.

But after you do it many, many times,

and it depends on how bright you are

and how able to resist freaking out you are,

my impression became,

and this is astonishing to me

based on what I've said so far.

This is someone's...

Someone very strange.

It's someone's idea

of a reassuring environment for a human being.

This place you end up,

which is the weirdest place you could either conceive of or imagine,

has been specifically designed by someone

to be as mundane, ordinary,

and like this world as they could possibly make it.

Not only that,

the impression that I have is

the vibe of this place, if you will,

is it's a nursery.

It's a play can, in fact.

And these toys, these things, these elves,

are nothing more than the equivalent of stringing

a string of colored plastic objects over a bassinet.

They're to teach you spatial relationships

and hand-eye coordination.

You are briefly in a nursery

for receiving human beings

who have just crossed over from hyperspace.

Well, imagine if all you knew about this world

was a nursery and a maternity ward

or a home somewhere,

and you're trying to deduce the nature of the universe

from a 30-second visit to a human nursery.

That's the kind of position we're in.

And I think that is what gave me the notion

that this has to do with the after-death state.

Apparently, the soul is literally being born

into this other dimension,

and the soul is not...

It's exactly like this world.

When you're born into this world,

you're just a little worm of a thing, you know?

You have to be held by your mother,

you have to be swaddled,

you have to be kept away from bright lights,

breezes, men with cigars, and so forth.

And the soul, as it transits into that place,

you immediately meet the text,

extended existence of your soul

in an entirely new domain.

Yeah.

You mean stayed in that place?

No.

And it seems to me unlikely that anyone would,

because interesting about the MT

is that it occurs naturally in the human brain.

We all make it all the time.

And so, in a sense,

this is not a drug at all.

This is a human metabolite

that you're getting a tremendous overdose of.

But the fact that it occurs naturally

in the human brain

means that you have chemical pathways,

biosynthetic pathways,

that can deal with it.

That's why it lasts so short a time.

One way of talking about the toxicity of a drug

is to ask the question,

how long before you feel perfectly normal

after taking this drug?

If you have a drug

that 24 or 48 hours after you take it,

you still have lower back pain

and you're lying in warm baths

and avoiding ringing telephones

and don't want to talk to anybody,

that's a toxic drug.

I don't care whether it's coke,

methadone, or LSD.

You shouldn't.

That's not good.

DMT, if 10 minutes,

within 10 to 15 minutes after taking it,

you not only are down,

you can't tell you did it.

There's no residual,

no lingering headache,

no dryness of mouth,

no dilated pupils, nothing.

It's like you took an ice cube

and hurled it into a blast furnace

and then you went looking for it 15 minutes later.

It's not to be found.

It ain't there.

Well, this is amazing

because this is the strongest psychedelic there is.

You'd think that you'd have to put ice packs

on your head for a week after this,

and instead it's completely gone.

So Rupert and I,

in talking about this,

he developed the idea

of what he called a necrotic compound.

He thinks that DMT,

that at death,

you flood your system with DMT,

that this is what these pathways exist for,

and that it sets you up for dying.

And that if you can,

and I gave DMT once to a Tibetan llama

who, a very old one,

not one of these alcoholic fundraising llamas,

the real thing,

the real thing.

And Guy took it like a man.

He was probably 92.

and afterwards he said,

it's the lesser life.

He said,

you can't,

he said,

if you go further,

you can't return.

That's the limit.

Beyond that,

there is no fail-safe.

And he was perfectly matter-of-fact about it,

and I took him at his word.

I mean,

if anybody should have known,

this was the dude.

And,

um,

I think it's a tremendous argument for hope.

And,

you see,

it's not only an argument for hope.

It means that if we could get the,

well,

the infantile,

shit-brained,

drug-phobic,

yahoos,

sent back to wherever it is

that they are going to be sent

to practice their family values,

then,

we could actually do significant research

and find out what's going on here.

It's an object of legitimate research.

We don't have to genuflect in front of this

like it's a religious mystery,

and we'll always be unknowable.

In principle,

what we need to do is

you explore this dimension

the way you explore any unknown dimension.

You send people of great courage

and descriptive skill

in with their notebooks,

their telescopes,

their tape recorders,

or whatever is the equivalent for this job,

and then you find out what it is.

And,

uh,

I think that the,

you know,

the destiny of the species

may be,

um,

spun into this.

It may not be,

it may be

that this transition into hyperspace

is not as inevitable

as I previously assured you.

It may be

that we have to do something

on this side.

We have to meet them

halfway through the mountain.

They're boring toward us.

We have to alert ourselves

to the fact that a tunnel is possible

and then get cracking,

you know,

with dynamite,

which is an analogum for DMT.

Yeah?

Terrence,

I want to say something about,

um,

the distinction now

between what you have spoke about

for the last two minutes,

um,

the last two minutes,

um,

with,

uh,

distinction between,

uh,

the Fabergé eggs

and,

uh,

basketballs

and self-transforming machine elves,

and that,

that,

that one may occur

by going into the Amazon county

and experiencing

some type of preparation

prepared by the natives.

is that organically mixed,

um,

earthly-based,

uh,

high

that's similar to the

synthesized DMT.

Now,

I have taken DMT

many,

many years ago,

but it would seem that,

that,

the natives may

say,

describe it at least

in a much different fashion

than yourself.

Um,

what is the distinction,

and then,

and then also,

if you can hit on,

after that,

uh,

the distinction between that

and suicide?

Well,

the difference is not

as great

as maybe your question

implies.

First of all,

the,

the thing that is so

interesting about DMT

is if the only

requirement

is that you

be able to

hold the toke,

and if you cough

and lose it,

then it's murky

and mucked up.

Uh,

in the case of

ayahuasca,

which is what

you're asking about,

it's a,

well,

I'll explain

to the group.

Remember how I said

that DMT

is destroyed

in your gut,

so you have

to smoke it,

but then I added

the caveat

that unless

you,

uh,

somehow

inactivate

this enzyme

system in your gut,

which will destroy it,

the DMT,

well,

it turns out

there's a way

to do that.

The enzyme system

is called

monoamine oxidase,

and there are

compounds called

monoamine oxidase

inhibitors.

If you take

monoamine oxidase

or MAO inhibitor,

then,

and follow it

with oral DMT,

then the DMT

will not be destroyed

in your gut.

It will actually

be absorbed

into the lining

of the small intestine,

a large intestine,

and then passed

into the bloodstream,

and you will have,

uh,

psychedelic intoxication.

Well,

in the Amazon,

this has been

understood

by the shamans

for a long,

long time,

and so they

take two plants.

One,

Banisteriopsis copy,

a large,

woody vine,

a twining liana,

and it actually

contains

a powerful,

short-acting

monoamine oxidase

inhibitor,

and they take

this vine,

and they pulverize

it,

and they,

uh,

combine it

in a large pot

of water

with the leaves

of another plant

which contains

DMT.

It may be

one of several

plants.

It's usually

Socotria viridis.

Then,

they boil

these two things

together,

and then,

for hours,

and then they

pour the water

off

and save it

in a,

in a jug,

and put

fresh water

on this

mess

of two

different plants

and boil it

again for

hours,

and then they

pour the two

water fractions

together,

and they get

rid of all

the solid matter.

They throw it

away.

It's now been

cooked for

six to eight

hours,

and they take

this watery

fraction,

several gallons,

and they

drive it down

over a hot

fire until

they get

something,

a dark

brown

thick liquid

that is

truly

horrifying

to ingest

because the

taste is

so gasply

because all

the salts

and sugars

and God

knows what

else have

been concentrated

into this

stuff.

But this

is now

a beverage,

a liquid,

I love it

that in the

literature

they call

it a

psychoactive

beverage.

And when

you drink it,

the compound

from the

woody vine,

harmin,

inhibits

the MAO

and the

DMT

passes through

and enters

the bloodstream

and instead

of a

ten-minute

experience

that reaches

the apex

of intensity

in two

minutes,

you get

an experience

which is

drawn out,

stretched out

over about

four to six

hours.

Now,

usually,

this is

not,

it's a

psychedelic

experience,

it's similar

to mushrooms

in some

ways,

but if

you really

make it

stiff,

if you

really put

the pedal

to the

metal

on the

amount

of

psychotria

viridis

or DMT

containing

leaf

that you

put into

this stuff,

then,

after about

two hours,

you can

slowly,

by sitting

in darkness,

by practicing

breath

control,

you can

slowly

calculate it

into a

place

where you

then say,

you know,

by gosh

and be golly,

we've made

it to

the elf

nest,

here it

is.

So,

I think

that

great

shamans,

courageous

shamans,

have

always been

able to

make their

way into

the presence

of this

thing,

but I

put the

great

qualifier

in front

of the

word

shamans,

because in

my actual

field experience

in the

Amazon,

what I

discovered

was once

it got

you loaded

enough to

be comparable

to, say,

four grams

of mushrooms,

most of

these guys

would look at

you in

horror if

you suggested

that it

was only

twice as

strong as

it should be.

shamans

all over

the world

have an

ambivalent

attitude

toward these

dimensions

they go

into.

Very few

just hurl

themselves

delightedly

into complete

boundary

dissolution.

I had a

guy tell

me once,

he said,

you think

just because

we run

around wearing

penis sheaves

that this

stuff is

easy for

us to

do?

Well,

I've got

news for

you.

it's as

hard for

us as

it is

for

anybody.

It's hard

for human

beings to

surrender to

something so

strange.

I could

never get

ayahuasca to

carry me

into the

DMT

nest until

I made

it myself.

And then

with nobody

holding my

elbow and

keeping me

and telling

me how

much

poetry of

a ribbon

I could

put in,

I was

able to

jack it

up and

jack it

up until

finally it

was truly

horrifyingly

strong.

And that's

what you

want.

We're not

interested in

colored lights

and dancing

mice here.

So,

now let me

see.

Did I cover

the waterfront?

No.

Comparison to

DMT.

psilocybin.

So,

you explained

one time

in the past

lectures that

the earthy or

UFO type

image is a

more earthly

mother of

goddess connection.

But I think

if you push

the ayahuasca

hard, it all

begins to

migrate in

this direction.

Psilocybin, you

know, I

advocate five

dry grams in

silent darkness.

Eight dry

grams in

silent darkness

will give you

the indistinguishable

from a DMT

flash.

The problem

is, you

know, one

thing about

DMT that

is both

frustrating and

liberating is

that it's so

brief.

Basically, it's

like a

rollercoaster.

The great

consolation is

this is only

going to last

five minutes.

If you

climbed on a

rollercoaster

of super

intensity,

and as

they dropped

the bar

over your

lap, they

said, oh

yeah, this

is the

four-hour

trip.

Then you

would say,

you know,

roll, roll,

hand it.

It does

appear, though,

that by

IV, which

is mostly

how I did

it years ago,

that it

seemed that

it was

extended to

about 30

to 40

minutes.

IV DMT?

Yeah.

Do you

mean that

you shot it

intravenously?

You don't

mean that

it was

a perfusion

competition?

No.

Well, see,

I've talked

to people

who've done

research on

DMT, and

a surprising

conclusion that

comes out of

those discussions

is that

shooting it

is not as

intense as

smoking it.

Shooting it

is...

Well, yeah,

it sounds

fairly intense,

but people

who do both

say shooting

it can't

lay a candle

to...

And this

is a funny

thing, and I'll

just mention it

as an aside.

Drug researchers

love to

shoot drugs

into their

experimental

subjects.

They love

the syringe

as the route

of administration,

because you

get better

numerical data,

because you

can measure

the dose

absolutely,

and then

you hit them,

and you

know they

got it.

If you

smoke something,

you may,

you know,

obviously,

when you can

hold your breath

no longer,

and you exhale,

smoke comes

into the room.

That's not

part of your

dose.

And sometimes

there's a

residuum in the

bottom of the

pipe.

That's not

part of your

dose.

So in the

name of

precision,

people who've

done research

on DMT

have always

shot it,

even the

recent study

out at the

University of

New Mexico,

it was by

injection.

I tried to

persuade them

to do a

section with

smoking, but

this argument

for numerical

precision carried

the day.

But the

effect of

relying on

intravenous

injection like

that is that

no one in

the clinical

situation has

ever observed

or experienced

the flash that

I'm talking

think you

can attain

except by

smoking.

How about

the penis

snuffs of

the anomalous

of the

particles?

No, I've

done those.

And that

is, well,

tell the truth,

let the chips

fall where they

make.

Highly

overrated

for several

reasons.

first of

all, you

have to

snuff close

to a

tablespoon of

these toasted

and powdered

ifra-anadonanthra

peregrina

seeds, and

there's a lot

of cellulose

there, and

so you do

not absorb

it instantly.

The other

thing is, it's

so physically

unpleasant to

do it, that

there's a

tendency to

cut low

on the

dose, because

the standard

method of

administering

edema is

you have a

hollow reed,

like a

bamboo reed,

about this

long, you

fill it with

this powdered,

toasted

sawdust,

essentially,

that has been

reduced to

flour, and

you get up

on your

haunches, and

your friend

comes over, and

you put the

tube up your

nostril, and

he blows.

He takes a

huge lungful

of air, and

he just

blows as

hard as he

can.

Well, the

effect is

like being

hit in the

face with

a 2x4.

I mean, you

stagger

backwards, you

salivate, it's

intensely

painful, you

scream, you

squirm around

in the dirt, and

then you get

back up on your

haunches, and by

that time, he

has loaded the

tube for the

second nostril.

And then the

whole thing

happens all

over again,

except now you're

salivating, your

eye is swollen

up, your sinuses are

filled with this

gung, and you

do it again, same

thing, scream, squirm

in the dirt, so

forth and so on.

Then you stagger

over out of the

sun into the

show, and

through it with

this, with his

saliva just

pouring out of

your mouth, and

after about five

minutes, you

begin to drift

into a

psychedelic state

of some sort.

But there is

no sense of a

rush, of a

splitting of the

world into two

halves.

It's not an

effective route of

administration.

How about

what do they

call them?

Chorus

spirits?

Oh, well, once

they get, once

they get

intoxicated, then

they play this

strange game, which

is almost

characteristic of

this white

Yanomamo

cultural group.

Guys square

off.

They stand

about three

feet apart from

each other, and

by some means

equivalent of

tossing a

coin, it's been

decided who

will go first.

So the guy

who goes

first is

totally loaded

on the stuff,

and he has

mucus running

out of his

nose, saliva

running out

of his mouth,

his eyes are

swollen, practically

swollen shut.

He pulls

back his

hand, and

he hits the

other guy

right in the

center of the

chest as

hard as he

can.

So the

guy either

loses his

feet, or

does in

many ways, he

grunts like

a bull, and

stands there.

He also is

in the same

state.

Then he

pulls back, and

then he

does it.

And they

keep doing

this until

somebody is

knocked off

their spot.

And when

you interview

them later

about this,

what you're

told is,

your ability

to stand on

your spot

depends on

how many of

these Hikuli

spirits you

have inside

your chest.

And so

this is

some kind

of Yanomamo

psychology

meeting the

raw data

of the

DMT

experience.

I don't

know what

they're talking

about, but

it has

something to

do with

the DMT

things that

jump in

and out

of your

chest when

you smoke

it.

They

believe that

they say

the demon

from the

tree will

live in

your chest.

And the

more of

these tree

demons inside

your chest

you have,

the more

physically able

to resist

being knocked

off your

spot you

are, and

the more

shamanically

empowered you

are.

But this

goes to a

point I

often make

with my

groups, which

is, you

know, one

ethnic

group or

one

culture's

drug is

another

person's

pain in

the next.

You know, I

mean, I've

taken awful

drugs that

the people,

after it

was over

with, they

would, you

say, you

know, God,

you guys do

this all the

time, it's

really kind

of, uh,

and they

say, yeah,

well, it

takes getting

used to, and

we really

don't do

it all that

often, only

ceremonies,

and you're

right, most

people are

glad to get

it over with

and go

back to

the palm

beer.

So your

experience is

basically that

it's too

caveman-like, it's

very hard on

the system

biologically, and

it makes it so

that the time

that you could be

having and

exploring these

strange dimensions

is somehow

inhibited.

Yeah, I don't

think, I don't

think in the

bema-taking

situation that

you ever get

enough all

at once, to

the synapses

in sufficient

concentration to

deliver you

over into

what I'm

describing occurring

on this.

I heard you took

ayahuasca and

then do this

stuff right

after you

drank the

ayahuasca.

Strangely

enough, though,

those cultural

groups do not

overlap.

You know, where

there is

ayahuasca, there

is never

were some

people who

wanted to

or by bringing

in non-indigenous

sources of

ayahuasca into

the normal

area.

Well, people

are, you

know, traditional

people are

surprisingly

conservative.

I mean, I've

sat with

ayahuascaras and

done their

brew and

talked to

them about

DMT, and

then they

say, well,

describe it.

And so

then I will

describe it as

I described it

to you here.

And then my

best guy said,

well, I don't

know, it

sounds a little

intense, I

think I'll

take a pass on

it.

You know, and

he was my

mentor in the

domain of

ayahuasca.

It's pretty

stout stuff.

I think that,

you know,

shamans have

always, you

know, looked

over the

fence, looked

through the

keyhole, stepped

through the

doorway, but I

think DMT,

pure crystalline

DMT, or

ayahuasca

specifically

brewed to

reality

obliterating

doses, is

the only

way you

can approach

this place.

Yeah.

I'm

wondering, on

the experience

you talked

about, you're

being taught

that.

Yes.

And again,

the second

part would

be, how

have you

done it?

I've done

it maybe

thirty times.

I haven't

done it for

a couple

of years.

DMT?

No, DMT.

I'm, I'm,

uh, sometimes

I think it's

a young man's

game, or

sometimes I'm

just getting

chicken shit,

you know.

It's, this is

not a drug of

abuse, let me

tell you.

I know people

who say it's

their favorite

drug, and you

say, well, when

was the last

time you did it,

and they

say 1968, and

they're still

processing, to

feel no need

to go back and

have a second

look.

What was your,

the first part of

your question?

What kind of

knowledge?

Ah, the

knowledge.

The knowledge

is interesting.

The knowledge

is, they want

you, they want

me, to

to

know.

The knowledge

is, they want

to

know.

The knowledge

is, they want

to be

in the

knowledge

and

to

They make language that you can see.

They absolutely are convinced that this ability to make things visible with sound can be taught.

And that's what they want you to do.

They demonstrate it.

They say, see what we're doing?

See what we're doing?

Now do it!

And you say, no excuses.

We don't have a lot of time.

It's almost over.

Do it!

And then you attempt to do it, and you discover in that place you can do this.

But why this is so important?

Because when you come back to this world and listen to tape recordings of yourself doing

it, it's gibberish of some sort.

It's a kind of neurologically driven glossolalia.

It's like, you know, it's a language unhinged from the necessity of meaning.

And yet it is true that when you do it in that place, it's absolutely ecstatic.

It's like sex, but sex is sort of like a white light kind of thing.

This is like a colored spectrum.

If you could put the sexual experience through a prism and change the purity of orgasm into

a spectrum of stuff, then it would be like this language.

It's pure poetry.

It's poetry so thick you can literally cut it with a knife.

And they want you to do this.

And they are absolutely passionate about this is what we are here to teach you.

how to speak in a language that can be seen.

And, you know, a language which could be seen would be a kind of telepathy.

You know, if you could see what I mean, you would see my thoughts.

The way we communicate, small mouth noises and the assumption of shared dictionaries, an assumption

which is never borne out by careful questioning, is a miserable way to communicate.

If we could see our linguistic intentionality, it would be the equivalent of seeing our mind.

And so, this is what they want us to do.

Now, maybe if one were truly dead, they wouldn't be so urgent about it.

And they would be like a relative leaning over a bassinet and holding up objects and saying,

Look at this, baby. Look at this. This is a bell or something.

But, definitely, what they teach is in the domain of language.

And it's not a teaching which can be said, like, love one another or, you know, if it's juicy, eat it over the sink.

It's more an ability locked in your physiological structure that we're not using.

They want us to speak in colored lights.

And it's their agenda. It's not mine. I have the faintest idea why that is so compelling to them.

Well, that's a little unfair because I've given a lot of thought to it.

But initially, I couldn't figure it out.

We'll, I'm sure, get more into this this afternoon.

It is the little self-transforming elf machine informs me. Lunch time.

Perfect. Thank you for putting up with this.

So, I appreciate your, uh, silent scorn. Or whatever it is.

So, lunch will be over.

Venture, I'll be on the furthest bound.

I'll be searching for the spirit that can set me free.

Well, I've been caught in the clutter of the...

Some of them say, and that, and other times you, what you've said, you wonder why it isn't in headlines 11 inches tall.

There seems to be something about the experience that is, uh, I don't know if self-selecting is the right word, or evolutionary selecting.

Why isn't, why aren't there, why is there such a small percentage of people who actually end up,

although you say everyone can do it, they do have the genetic possibility.

But there's something more in a selective period that, um, where a shaman will come out.

Because it is, as you say, an awesome responsibility.

And yet, it's everyone's possible liberage.

And then one, one last thing, another coda to this.

You, you mentioned that you don't think that it's the, the Bush or Reagan, et cetera,

uh, feeling that they just want to keep an economic grip as far as the, uh, the sale of would-be hallucinogenics.

Don't you think that there is some degree of teleological repression going on as well?

I mean, you, you mentioned that, that, that you didn't feel that way.

But I, I, I, some other times I've heard you feel that there definitely is.

Well, I think that, yeah, I mean, it simplifies the issue to say that it's entirely a money issue.

Right.

Because the psychedelics are used by so small a percentage of people

that it doesn't rate the tremendous institutional fury that is brought against it.

And where you really see the contradiction in, uh, economic logic is, uh, with pot.

Um, I think that the subtext of the government's fear about psychedelics is that the, this quality

that they have of dissolving boundaries causes people to question basic assumptions about how

society is run.

And I think this is true of any society.

It isn't an American phenomenon.

It's that if you take psychedelics, whatever you are, you know, Eskimo, Hasidic Rabbi,

quantum physicist, you will question your first premises.

And you get millions of people questioning the first premises.

And, uh, then the powers that be become very nervous.

It's interesting that the, this whole phenomenon of the 1960s occurred because American commitment

to universal public education reached, brought its first generation of people to adulthood

in the middle of the 1960s because that universal commitment to public education began after

World War II, after the establishment took a look at what this filling, you know, actually funding

and building up great public universities and then filling them with inquisitive, uh, young

people, what the result of that was, that's when they decided to turn the universities back

into trade schools for CPAs, which they did do.

I mean, there is nothing like the level and the breadth of education and intellectual curiosity

that was encouraged when I was going to school.

Uh, that's all finished now.

Now you're expected to do your data entry job, watch a lot of TV and keep your mouth shut.

And that, this is what we expect of our college graduates.

So, really there was a crisis of faith in American institutions which was only exacerbated by

psychedelics.

It was a combination of educating people to the actual traditions of Western civilization

in large numbers for the first time and then giving them psychedelics.

I mean, or having them exposed to psychedelics and people began to ask questions for which

there were no answers and the response of the establishment was to suppress this.

Uh, I mentioned cannabis.

You know, you're all probably aware through the work of the, the hemp, uh, people that

cannabis holds many benefits, not necessarily related to its properties as an intoxicant, but

as a source of food, lubricant, plastics, fuels, etc.

The reason the establishment is so hysterical on the subject of cannabis is because it erodes

loyalty to the industrial state.

I mean, that's why, if you look at the pharmacological profile, let's contrast two familiar drugs.

One, caffeine.

We have the medical data which shows that it can contribute to fetal malformation.

We know that it damages the liver.

We know that it, uh, if abused, can cause, uh, severe stomach ulcers, so forth and so on.

Cannabis, vast amounts of money have been spent trying to find something wrong with it,

and they're still digging, folks.

I mean, they've decided it doesn't cause tits on statues.

It doesn't, you know, all the screwy things they've come up with over the years, uh, have

had to be abandoned.

Why is caffeine enshrined in every labor contract negotiated in the Western world as a sacred

right of all workers twice daily?

And why is cannabis, uh, you know, you can lose your house, your automobile, your bank account,

your art collection, simply because you had six plants in the back 40, and your children.

Why are the, why this disparity?

Well, what is the effect of caffeine?

It, uh, makes it possible for you to perform your duties during the last three hours of the work cycle

with efficiency equal to the first three hours of the work cycle.

It allows people to tolerate spinning widgets onto gombers until hell freezes over

without a thought ever rising in their mind that maybe this is a ridiculous way to spend your life.

Cannabis, on the other hand, people aren't so interested in going to work.

They'd rather lay around and make love.

They don't want to watch TV.

They'd rather smoke a doobie and have a conversation with a friend.

In other words, these things promote activities which don't make anybody any money

and cause people to question the institutions and the, and the, uh, social philosophies

that are being shoved down their throats.

If the playing field were level, uh, caffeine might well be a prescription drug.

Not that I think that's a good idea.

And, uh, cannabis I think would probably be freely available.

The most dangerous drugs in society in terms of detrimental social impact are alcohol and tobacco.

The two most freely available.

I mean, every street corner of every city, they're peddled, uh, in vast amounts.

We have a very crack-brained approach to the problem of drugs.

We're not the only society.

All societies seem to do this.

Out of a possible spectrum of twenty or thirty depressants and intoxicants,

most societies select three or four, which they hail as harmless, and then the rest are,

you know, the seed of Satan.

And this is, this attitude is persevered in against all scientific data, against all medical research.

This is just what people choose to think.

The problem is, we don't have the luxury of this kind of ignorance anymore.

The amount of revenue that could be accrued from, uh, cannabis economy.

The pressure that could be taken off petroleum extraction, if cannabis were part of the picture.

Um, all of these things, uh, make it incumbent upon us, I think, to think more creatively and more honestly

about which drugs really are posing, uh, problems for us.

What was the first part?

The other question really relates to this is, why are there, given the fact,

why are, why is the percentage of shamans so small relative to a population?

Because of the fact that, as you say, there's fear in going into, there's attraction and fear in going into these other realms.

And there's obviously maybe some self-limiting aspect of the, uh, of the hyper, uh, dimensional view,

which there's some dynamic going on, because everyone has an equal opportunity to go to this hyper-dimensional,

but very few of their own initiatives really push to that point where you are definitely within the hyper-dimensional realm.

Well, there are different things to be said about this.

I mean, first of all, um, one of, there are what are called, uh, biochemical differences in individuality.

Uh, and never more so than in the matter of drugs.

Uh, people are very different from each other.

Years ago, I took a course from Sasha Shogan, um, at Cal,

and, uh, at one point he brought in some substance, I don't know what it was,

and this was a class of 600 people,

and passed it around and asked everybody to take a sniff of this bottle.

Well, 598 people pronounced this stuff completely odorless.

Two people were almost violently ill from the overpowering odor of this thing.

They possessed a gene for the sensitivity to this compound that caused it to be, for them, overwhelming,

for everyone else, unnoticeable.

And we're surrounded by these kinds of individual biochemical differences.

In traditional societies, shamanism is often a family business.

And it may well be that this is because ability to handle these psychedelic substances,

uh, and to really get mileage out of them, is a genetic endowment of some sort.

I mean, cannabis, again, provides an interesting example.

One of the commonest things you hear people say about cannabis, who don't smoke it,

is they say, I used to, or I tried it, but it makes me paranoid.

Uh, well, uh, it, to the people who use it, this is inconceivable.

In fact, it's almost an antidote to paranoia,

uh, because it seems to make things appear more Taoistic, more integrated.

It all makes more sense.

These are biochemical differences that need to be studied.

You know, different racial groups have different relationships to intoxication.

I mean, I think it's probably, there is some truth to the idea that the North American Indians

had a susceptibility to distilled alcohol that the Europeans, who had been dealing with it

for a couple of centuries by the time they arrived here, didn't have.

Because the North American Indians represented a, uh, a closed gene pool,

never having been exposed to this, there was no selection for being able to handle it.

Uh, and then there's another issue in relation to your question, John,

which is, first of all, you know, some people say,

well, not all shamans take hallucinogens.

Well, true, and I've excited some people's ire by suggesting,

but all real shamans do.

And, uh, you know, saying that somebody is a shaman,

I mean, imagine if simply being able to rave and exhort on the subject of the four gospels

qualified you as a man of the Lord.

Uh, actually, you have to sort through dozens of so-called preachers

to find somebody you would be willing to leave alone with your chickens.

Well, similarly, uh, you have to sort through a lot of, uh, people who claim to be shamans

before you find somebody who really is one.

I mean, we tend to be naive.

Go to the Amazon with your heart on your sleeve seeking ayahuasca,

and I guarantee, unless you go well-connected, you'll drink a lot of swill

before you get to somebody honest enough, responsible enough, conscientious enough

to actually make it right and do it right.

And in, in the case of shamanism, usually this is going on in cultures without literacy,

without written languages, and, and so they don't hold conferences or publish proceedings

or have the university, uh, matriculation examinations in shamanism.

So, on the surface, a shaman is anyone who claims to be a shaman, or who cares to claim.

But, I, in terms of, uh, real shamanic ability, I think it only comes through either innate special abilities,

which probably means innate high sensitivity to neurological, um, to neurotransmitters, exotic neurotransmitters,

or it comes through an exposure to hallucinogens.

Uh, this is a big argument in anthropology.

Merci Eliade, who normally I am very deferent to, got this one completely wrong,

and decided on absolutely no evidence that what he called narcotic shamanism was decadent.

Well, first of all, the use of the word narcotic in that context shows that he didn't know what he was talking about.

Nobody uses narcotics to shamanize, you go to sleep if you take narcotics.

So, what he wanted to say was that he felt hallucinogenic shamanism was decadent,

but what is the alternative?

Reliance on ordeals, fasting, or pathological personalities?

Maybe epileptics, or borderline schizophrenics, or something like that.

I think the, that these kinds of shamanisms that are not hallucinogenically based are derivative shamanisms

that occur at a later stage of culture when the, the, uh, plant-based shamanism has been disrupted

by some, some, uh, like, migration, or the disappearance of the plants involved, or something like that.

Yeah.

From what I understand, uh, the Lakota aliens, in the genics, they, uh, accomplished all this through the drum beat and the song, and things like that, and to this day,

you can talk to the Lakota about the use of hallucinogenics, as far as shamanism is going to say,

it's not necessary.

And yet, in the southwest, in the southwest, you know, it's prominent.

Yeah, well, you, I think acoustical, uh, acoustical driving can carry you a certain distance.

There are substitutes for hallucinogens, but they're neither as effective, nor as, uh, pleasant.

I mean, ordeals are what many cultures get into.

Well, I was just thinking, you know, along the lines of, you know, someone like the crazy voice

that came out of the Lakota and seemed to possess these, you know, abilities and manifest them physically.

Well, there's also the exceptional personality.

The exceptional personality breaks all the rules, let's see.

But, um, something I wanted to say.

So would you say, would you say then, um, Terence, that there's a genetic proclivity,

maybe in some individuals, if there is access to, um, botanicals,

and if there is no, uh, historical evidence of shamanism prior to that,

for that individual to start engaging in explorations?

Yeah, I think so.

You know, Maria Sabina claimed that she was never initiated into shamanism.

She claimed that as a girl herding the cattle, she ate the mushrooms because she was hungry,

and that she was basically self-taught in shamanism in a society that actually had shamanic, uh, lineages and institutions.

Uh, in Madagascar, there are these highly evolved, uh, ordeal poisons.

And this is where you take a, you take a plant, you feel like you're dying, you beg to die, you want to die, and you don't die.

You come back from it a better person.

But it is only because you were slammed up against death itself.

Ordeals work, but they're not very pleasant.

And the idea of putting yourself through an ideal like that once a week or twice a month as part of your professional practice is, is, uh, is pretty outrageous.

The other thing that has to be said, and this is really important, and I think anthropologists have sold this one short.

Experiences are what we are least able to communicate to each other.

We can describe machine parts, agricultural procedures, but anything in the realm of feeling, our languages are woefully impoverished.

And I don't think that's specific to English.

I think it, it haunts all human experience.

That it's hard to communicate how we feel.

Well, so then there's a vast spectrum of experiences that come from plants.

Uh, and I dare say most of them.

pleasant. Let's start out with eating Diffenbachia or something, you know, which causes your throat

tissues to swell up and you feel like you're strangling. Or, you know, Amanita muscaria

is a very controversial shamanic plant because some people say it's garbage. And Gordon

Wasson in his last book called the supreme entheogen of all time. Well, clearly people

are, are they talking about different things or are they interpreting the same experience

differently? And so there are, for example, you know, people who are fond of peyote like,

if they haven't done their homework, like to imagine that they are taking this ancient

ancient, ancient hallucinogen that has informed the lives of the, of the Sonoran and, and

uh, the Indians of that area for thousands and thousands of years. Well, this is as far as

anybody can tell, complete bunk. Uh, there is no record of peyote use, uh, older than four

or five hundred years. Most of it is post-ghost dance. Before, when you go into the old Sonoran

graves, the old archaeology of the Sonoran, the Tarahumara Indians, you find Sikora Sifundi,

uh, yeah, Sikora Sifundifolia beans, the little, uh, black and red beans that you see in Mexico,

strung into jewelry, sold along the side of the roads. That's what those Indians took for

thousands and thousands of years. We have a continuous record over about four thousand years

of these seeds being buried in graves with, uh, ritual instruments indicating that they

were buried with shamans. You couldn't give it away today because it is such a horrible experience.

It's essentially sublethal strychnine poisoning. It can kill you effortlessly. It's clear that

at some point, fairly recently, somebody tried peyote and said, my God, this stuff we've been

taking for thousands and thousands of years is just horrible compared to this. This is

great. And immediately there was a transfer of loyalty. And Lord knows, eating fresh peyote

is no gourmet. So, the point there being, cultures tend to, um, define experiences differently.

And you can't tell what people are talking about until you really check in. Uh, traveling around

the world, you know, you all, you end up in certain cultures and they say, oh, we're so

happy to have you here. Uh, as our honored guest, we would like you to eat, uh, some of our national

food. Let's say you're in Scotland. And so they say, well, you must eat some haggis because, uh,

this is what we all eat. We all really love this. This is the best part of Scottish life.

Boy, are you going to love this? Well, when it's finally served, you know, your jaw drops

in disbelief, uh, because it's ghastly unless you're Scotch. And, uh, well, but if you're

Scotch, you dare not say so, you see, because a cultural myth has been built up around, I

mean, do Italians knock red wine? Do the French denounce truffles? Certainly not.

Well, you know, the origin is Scotch. Ah, true. Pate de foie gras is always my, uh, example.

So, what you have to realize is that these things are culturally defined and often what works

for the Nyanamamo or the Muinani or the Witoto won't work for you. Datura is a good example.

Datura is a shamanic plant used by many people throughout, uh, the world. All of them, I think,

pharmacologically deprived. Otherwise, they wouldn't put up with what you have to put up with to

take that stuff, you know. And, uh, my interest, and I, you know, it was practical, was to

find a hallucinogen that did what I wanted it to do and didn't do anything I didn't want

it to do. And what I was interested in was, first of all, hallucinations. Because some people

say I'm obsessed with it. Fine. My notion is that if you can see something that isn't there,

that's very much more convincing than just funny thoughts, racing ideas, strange physical sensations.

It's a powerful and boundary-dissolving confrontation when you confront what is not there. And so, I find,

and this is a heresy for sure, I'm not that fond of LSD. I think it's a very sloppy drug. I think, you know,

you feel terrible the next day. I always did. I had tight headaches, body aches. People always say,

well, it was not clean. It had speed in it. It had strychnine in it. Eh, maybe. But even the

good stuff is not, uh, and it wouldn't hallucinate for me the way I wanted it to. I could get

hallucinations if I would smoke hash with it. But on its own, it was what I have described in other

places as abrasively psychoanalytic, unpleasant, confrontational. And what I was interested in

were hallucinations. So when I got to psilocybin, I remember after my first mushroom trip, I said,

thank God we found this stuff. I'll never take LSD again. That wasn't quite true, but I'll bet I've

taken it less than half a dozen times since my first psilocybin trip. So, uh, and, and in terms of the

chemistry of these things, my conclusion from all this fiddling is that it's the indole hallucinogens

that are at the center of the mandala. They do what we want them to do with very little detrimental

side effect. LSD is one of them. Uh, ebogaine is one of them. Not one widely known. We've

got to save something for our old age, folks. Uh, harmin and harmaline, the beta-carbolines,

when complexed with DMT, and then psilocybin. And I think that's the basic list. Well, those

do, they, these are really the keys which open the lock very easily, very cleanly, very, uh, dependably.

And that's where I will put all of my attention. And, you know, even in that domain, you have to be

somewhat, uh, careful. My brother and I spent years tracking down a hallucinogen in the Amazon called

Ukuhe that, uh, was an orally active form of DMT, which we, remember I said that DMT is destroyed in the gut.

So we were fascinated to try and find this Ukuhe because we wanted to know how it was possible that it could work orally.

Uh, and also the ethnographic accounts claimed that, uh, the people who used it spoke with little men.

Uh, and we wanted to see these little men to see if they were the same little men we were talking to.

Well, we had three expeditions to the Amazon before we finally closed in on this stuff.

Uh, and when we finally got it, you know, with this tremendous sense of having attained the grail and having

finally this was going to do it, this was going to be the one, then we took this stuff and my God it turned us

every way but loose. Your heart feels like it's pounding its way out of the front of your chest.

Uh, you vomit, uh, you have tremoring of the limbs, on and on and on.

So, we go through this, live through it, wash off in the river and go looking for the shaman

to lodge a complaint.

And, uh, and he says, yeah, well, it's hard to get used to.

And, uh, so then when we get it back home to the lab and do the high pressure gas chromatography

and all the rest of it and see what's really there, you see that the genetic component of

the virola trees from which this resin is extracted is, it's a mess. It's too many tryptamines.

DMT, DET, 5-monomethyl tryptamine, 5-MAO DMT and several other cardio-active tryptamines.

It looked like they'd swept the floor of an endochemist's lab to put together the components of this plant.

You don't want this. You don't, because you're, it's like taking ten drugs at once.

You know, it's all running together. You can't tell whether you're Agnes or Angus.

What you want is a DMT source where when you put it in the grass, in the, uh, grass chromatograph,

no, in the, uh, gas chromatograph, you get one spike, that's NM dimethyl tryptamine,

and all the rest is cellulose, a little DNA, and that's all, some minerals and salt.

Uh, if, if you don't have a clean source, then, you know, it's contaminated.

So even that legendary shamanic hallucinogen, uh, when actually put to the, to the, uh, use test,

wasn't able to, to pass it. Yeah.

Yes, uh, going back to the DMT and, uh, mushroom psilocybin, um, you were talking about, uh,

taking psilocybin and, and then doing breath control is indistinguishable from a DMT trip.

If you do it correctly, you can coax it. Um, since this is a learning tree,

and you're sort of in front there, maybe you can give us an idea of what it's like to coax five grams into,

uh, I mean, I'm sure you won't be able to give us all the information,

but maybe you can sort of enlighten us a little bit, and we can sort of work in that direction.

At least I can work in that direction.

Oh, you mean, how do you get at the peak of a psilocybin trip to deliver you into DMT land?

Yes, because sometimes I get a little jealous hearing you talk about the DMT trip.

And I sit here and say, uh, you know, I want to find that stuff, and, you know, anyway, so...

Well, the thing is, psilocybin will take you there if you have the courage and the stamina

to tolerate the duration of the psilocybin revelation.

Thank you.

So, first of all, you take a heroic dose, five, six, seven grams.

Then, when you're peaking, uh, well, you smoke cannabis.

Then, you, you sit in silent darkness, alone, because I think the presence of other people

always pins you to the surface with this stuff.

Right.

I mean, you don't need somebody else.

No matter if they're talking or not, they can just be in the room and you're aware of them.

No, just sitting there, then this is a different thing.

Yeah.

Breathing, exhaling, breathing, exhaling.

And then, you form an intention for it to approach you.

I mean, you say...

I can feel it.

I mean, it's almost a, it's a neighborhood.

It's a pharmacological neighborhood.

And, and you know how you may go to Little Italy, but there are no Italians on the street.

But, if you start, uh, you know, you have to somehow shake them out of the nest.

And, you simply ask for them to appear.

I always hark back to that episode of I Love Lucy, where she and Ethel are discussing how

to contact the space people.

And, Lucy tells Ethel, she says, well, I just say, come in, little green men.

And, you know, yeah, it's a big laugh now, but try it on 25 milligrams of silver carbon.

Yeah.

Well, the they of the DMT thing is, uh, these entities which you contact, although they may

turn out to be toys created by someone unseen, who is in fact in charge of this hyper-dimensional

maternity ward.

But these toys, if that's what they are, are essentially teaching machines of some sort.

They're trying to get you to perform this linguistic activity.

As far as the UFO thing is concerned, I think it's, uh, well, it sort of requires some backgrounding.

I think that, uh, there's something fundamentally wrong with our understanding of the world.

Fundamentally wrong.

And what it is, is that we believe that the past creates the present.

That the present is the, is the sum total of actions and situations that exist in the past.

In other words, we believe that the horse pushes the cart.

The horse doesn't push the cart.

The cart is pulled.

There is an attractor in the future.

There is actually, uh, I think of history as a bowl.

Down these slopes, we are making our way.

Well, since we are, uh, in a, in a situation where conservation of energy is important,

where are we all going to end up?

The bottom of the bowl, obviously.

That, if you release a marble up on the rim, it's going to make its way down the bowl,

to the, what's called the dwell point.

The place where, uh, the energy requirements are such that the forward momentum of, of the falling ball,

is satisfied by meeting the resistance of the bottom of the bowl.

History is like this.

We are being pulled forward by an attractor.

It has somehow come into the human world and has pulled us out of animal organization.

If this attractor were not present, we would still probably be cheerfully slinging excrement around in the canopy of some jungle tree.

But because of the attractor, we have been pulled into social organization, technology, language, community, so forth and so on.

And, um, mystics and seers and visionaries are people who have a relationship to this attractor that is different from the rest of us.

They can, uh, glimpse, aspects of this thing.

And, when I think of it this way, I, I always think of those jewels, the, the mirrored ball that they hang over the bar in a disco.

And then they spin it and it throws reflections of light all over the room from the ambient lighting.

Well, history is like this.

Uh, the attractor at the end of time, which is below the event horizon of the present, and thus impossible to anticipate its true form.

Uh, sends back through time distorted reflections of itself.

Which, if you are struck by one of these distorted reflections, well then you begin to preach and cure.

And local conditions may damp your activity.

And then you're what's called a nut.

But if, in fact, local conditions support your activity, so that you become a mean spreader, then you're suddenly a messiah, a teacher, a Buddha, a Christ, a Mohammed.

That's what these people were.

They were people who were, for reasons mysterious to themselves, I'm sure, in a relationship of resonance with the transcendental object, such that they, in a sense, embodied it.

Well, um, in our own era, because of technology, and Jung was on to this, when he wrote his book in 1948, called Flying Saucers, a Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky.

He said, the Flying Saucer is an image of the Self that haunts the skies of Earth as a compensatory effect to our alienation.

Well, I think that that's exactly what's going on, except that he didn't realize how nuts and bolts that explanation was.

The UFO is a mirage being cast backward into time by the transcendental object at the end of time.

And that's why it has such a hair-raising aura of weirdness about it.

It isn't a ship from another star system.

I mean, how could anyone reasonably entertain that idea, given the distances in time and what you find when you get here?

I mean, who would make that trip who had any reasonable way to spend their time?

It's a compensatory image that haunts time, because time is a kind of hologram.

Time is a fractal.

And fractal means that the same pattern is embedded again and again in a relationship of self-similarity.

So, because the transcendental object exists somewhere ahead of us in history,

there must necessarily be a tiny part of it somewhere nearby.

And this is what the UFO is, I think.

And this is why nobody's ever going to show you a chunk of it,

and they're never going to put an extraterrestrial on network television,

because it isn't that kind of a creature.

It's a compensatory image from the end of time.

This leads me to an aspect of what I very briefly and obliquely indicated this morning,

which was when I was talking about how we're halfway through history,

but the rest of it has to happen in only 30 years.

I think that we're moving towards something called concrescence.

This isn't my word, it's Alfred North Whitehead's word.

I think you can tell what it means.

It means everything melts together into one thing.

I think that from the very birth of the universe,

this is bigger than the human species,

bigger than the life of the earth.

From the very first moments of the universe's existence,

it has been itself under the domain,

under the influence of an attractor.

And this attractor is pulling everything into tighter and tighter states of self-reflective resonance.

And that now we are very close to this concrescent event.

And that, in fact, human history, I called it the shock wave of eschatology.

But I didn't talk much about what eschatology is.

Because, well, first of all, it lies below the event horizon of the present historical epoch.

But it won't always.

It could rise above the horizon at any time.

You know, 2000, 1996, you name it.

But we have been too long under the spell of the idea that only the past creates the present.

The present is actually largely created by appetite for the future.

And this would seem to me a highly improbable idea

had I not taken psychedelics

and gotten this hyperdimensional view of the system that we're living in.

And then you can see that, yes, history is not a random walk.

It's not a series of undirected random fluctuations.

History is a process of fractal self-complexification

that builds on whatever it has achieved.

And so upon the complexity of animal organization

is laying the complexity of human language.

Upon the complexity of human language

is laid the complexity of symbolic signification of that language, i.e. writing.

Upon writing is laid electronic technology, and so forth and so on.

So we are, in a sense, in the act of giving birth to or creating the object of our theology,

which is a kind of god or goddess, depending on, you know, how you slide into it, how you feel about it.

And the UFO is simply an indicator that we are so close now to encountering the contrescent transcendental object

that it's able to haunt the skies of earth and the imaginations of people who live in trailer parks.

This is, you know, you have to remember that history itself is a violation of the laws of nature.

And history and its consequences are all around us.

We don't have to argue about whether is history happening.

I mean, if obviously it's happening, we're embedded, laid in it.

But it's caused by the fact that ordinary nature, the nature of glaciers, chipmunks, ant hills, termites,

termite nests and whale pods, has come, at least in the case of our species,

under the influence of something which is literally fastened onto us

and is now recreating us in its image.

You know, it's taking a monkey body and it's saying, you know,

stand it up, slide the eyes around to the front, oppose the thumb, shed the hair, enlarge the brain,

put ideas into the brain, so forth and so on.

I mean, we are being recast as something unimaginable to the rest of nature.

And we are now fairly close to figuring out what this is.

This is why we are able to talk about human-machine symbiosis, virtual reality,

downloading ourselves to the size of viruses in a nanotechnological domain,

stuff like that.

Could you say that the flap is taken with that to do with contact to you and the president of the nation,

or what's the name of Harvard, but I've had to contact you there in the football,

a number of people who work with who claim to have fertilization?

Yeah, I agree with your idea that it's an index of the depth of compressence,

though muddied by shrewd public relations types who are making a living off this stuff.

I think the crop circles are a more honest indication of how close we are to the transcendental body.

I interviewed the person you mentioned at Harvard for a film we did in Prague a few months ago,

and I...

His name was?

I'm avoiding it.

And I had to ask him halfway through the interview, I said,

well, do you detect anything in your own psychological makeup which makes you unfit to be doing this work?

That was after he told me that he'd interviewed 500 women who had had fetuses removed from their bodies by space people,

and he said, you know, the amazing thing about this is there are no physical scars at all.

And I said, well, what does this suggest to you?

And he said, advanced surgical techniques of which we have no knowledge.

And I'm just, my craft detector went AWOL on that answer.

The rules of evidence are not in suspension for the new age.

And, you know, people who recall their lifetime as the barber of Nefertiti or whatever have serious...

problem with what I call the rules of evidence

they don't seem to have ever heard

of Occam's Razor

which you study logic for 10 minutes

and they tell you about Occam's Razor

do you all know what this is?

it's a simple idea

keep it next to you

hypotheses should not be multiplied

without necessity

and there are a lot of unnecessary hypotheses

running around

especially in the new age domain

I would study the impregnation effect

more as an example of mass hysteria

because being in the position that I am in

supposedly a revered teacher

and a person of great insight

and all this hoopla and trapola

you occasionally get invited to dinner

with the movers and shakers

and then you hear what's said when not on stage

and I have to tell you

there's enough cynicism

to satisfy a renaissance pope

among these people

they are taking the rest of us

for a ride in many cases

and I have to tell you

well Danny and I last night

were discussing like what

this transcendental object

we were enumerating a list of things

that it could possibly be

and as you say

the casted reflection

and so forth

how is it that

say for example

the ayahuasqueros

in Pablo Amarengo's drawings

there's a UFO motif

in one of his drawings

what is that?

you mean do they see UFOs?

what are they

what is it that they see?

because they specifically

identify this motif

as separate from the rest of the drawings

in one of Shaman's drum magazines

well I'm giving the UFO

a slightly different status

than this stuff I'm dumping on

I think the UFO is real

or that there is a real phenomenon

the problem is

what is the phenomenon?

and it's why someone

who sees a spinning disc in the sky

assumes then an entire theology

about friendly extraterrestrials

coming to help us out

why do they assume that?

what they've seen is a spinning disc in the sky

for crying out loud

maybe what they saw was a spinning disc in the sky

not

there are two phenomenon here

which are entangled inextricably

and unfortunately for the intellectually honest

there's the UFO

who knows what that is

and then there's the UFO community

and the UFO community

is just fraught with the most crack-brained

peculiar

self-serving

unstable

mush-minded group of people

you would ever hope to get together

in one place

I mean it's like a magnet for screwballs

I mean people who like to wear diamond tiaras

and give themselves funny names

and it has absolutely nothing to do

with the tremendously fascinating

and ambiguous phenomenon

of strange things seen in the sky

I mean I went through this

I'm not talking as an outsider

I've seen

I had a UFO encounter

that was

a deeper encounter

than most of the people

who run around pontificating about UFOs

and I will

at the risk of boring you yet again

with this story

tell the story

I was in the Amazon

I was

having all these

revelations

about

time

and one thing

and another

and I noticed

a place

in the sky

where there was

a spectrogrammatic

diffraction

of some sort

it wasn't a rainbow

it was a colored smudge

in the sky

and

I was

lightly

but continually

intoxicated

on mushrooms

during this period

and

it said

watch there

it was in the southwest

and I really didn't need to be told

but it said

watch there

so I sat up one night

all night

on this rock

by a lake

watching the southwest

and

around 4.30 in the morning

with

essentially a perfectly clear sky

except that

off the Amazon jungle

local

mist

rises

and so about a mile and a half

away from me

on the horizon

was a line

of what looked to me

like a little fog bank

and

as light

broke over

this situation

I

noticed

I couldn't tell

whether it had

been doing this

or it began

doing it

as

things got lighter

but I noticed

that this fog bank

was

rolling

in place

like a pencil

rolled between your fingers

which I had never seen

a fog

do that

I thought

what a strange

thing

and as I watched it

stretched out

across the horizon

it gently broke

into four equal sized

pieces

so now I'm looking

at four

gray

lenticular

clouds

spaced out

along the horizon

about a mile and a half

away from me

across this lake

so I'm watching

and I'm getting

eager

and I'm

and I'm getting

excited

and as I watch

these four

lenticular clouds

two and two

merge

now I'm looking

at two

denser

grayer

dark gray

darker than

storm clouds

these two

things

on the horizon

and as I watch

the four

became two

the two

become one

and

at that point

faintly

I could hear

the

hui hui hui

sound of 1950s

science fiction

ufos

Allah

the day the earth

stood still

they came from

outer space

so forth and so on

and I see

my god

this thing is

starting toward me

and the sound

is getting louder

and at that point

there was like

a complete

conversion

in an instant

and my whole

body

went cold

and I

realized

they're coming

for me

this is it

you know

prepare to be

beamed up

Scotty

and I

everybody was

asleep

in a hut

about 70

miles

70 feet

up this

mud

embankment

I was down

by the river

and the lake

and I

said

and it

flashed in my

mind

I have to

get a witness

there must

be a witness

and I

looked

I looked

over my

shoulder

at the

mud

bank

the thing

was coming

at me

I half

stood up

my knees

were so

weak

I sat

back down

and I

just prepared

to depart

this planet

this dimension

and as it

came

I could see

it

and it was

getting closer

and closer

I could see

rivets on the

underside

I could see

the running

lights

and as it

got closer

and closer

I realized

that what I

was looking

at was

the end

cap of a

1932 Hoover

vacuum cleaner

the very

end cap

that George

Adamski

had suspended

on a piece

of nylon

thread in

his garage

and photographed

with his

brownie

instamatic

to produce

the famous

UFO photograph

of the UFO

with the three

balls on the

underside

and the ribbing

going around

right

that photograph

has been

utterly

debunked

computer analysis

of it by

modern techniques

it's

bullshit

and there

it was

40 feet

in diameter

coming after

me across

the Amazon

treetops

well

then

and I

just went

bananas

at that point

and then

it passed

over

not more than

200 feet

above my head

turning slowly

I could see

the three

balls

I could see

the everything

I could see

it

and I

understood

then

that what

it was

was

it was

more shocking

than a real

UFO

because it

had its

disconfirmation

built into

it

you know

we don't

print stories

like that

we're interested

in real UFOs

did it

depart information

to you

some sort

because apparently

you've been

knighted

the person

to speak

about mushrooms

in such a way

that you're

actually

and some people

do say that

that Terence McKinnon

may be an alien

being himself

incarnate

well only people

who are in

litigation

with me

I think

what it was

telling me

it was a

perfect

zen lesson

it was

saying

don't

believe in

UFOs

they're the

end caps

of 1932

Hoover

vacuum cleaners

expand to

40 feet in

diameter

and flying

through your

mind

so you have

to question

everything

yeah

it's saying

you know

you can't

replace

one

one stupid

hypothesis

there aren't

UFOs

with another

stupid

hypothesis

we're being

visited by

benevolent

creatures

from another

world

have to

get a little

more depth

here

if you want

to be the

alien

ambassador

well the crop

circles

I'm now

less sure

about the

crop circles

what I

liked about

them was

that each

that they

appeared at

a certain

point in

time and

then each

year there

were more

of them

and I

figured that

we could

take how

many there

are each

year and

draw a

curve and

reach a

conclusion about

how far

away in the

future the

source of

them was

because if

they are

it's almost

as though

the UFO

sea leaves

no trace

I mean the

burn marks

on the

ground but

already you're

into dubiousness

because who

has ever seen

these burn

marks

only the

editors of

these UFO

magazines and

their willing

psychophants

I mean you

and I have

not seen

these burn

marks we've

seen photographs

of funny

stuff on the

ground and

we're told

that's it

the crop

circle leaves

a trace that

is enduring

but the

problem there

the problem I

have with the

crop circles

and it's odd

how you never

hear this

discussed is

that nobody

has ever seen

one come

into existence

we get

before and

we get

after but

how come

we never

get during

do they

appear

instantly

if they

appear

instantly

that would

be pretty

convincing

just glance

it's not

there

glance

it's there

and we

figure

yeah

there's

a

I know he's

doing a lot

of the research

he's calling

Andrew

doing a lot

of research

on this

and I've

got a

recording

and this

is basically

how he

described it

they were

waiting

and setting

up to

in this

area to

you know

try and

record some

of this

going on

and it's

just opening

up

and all of a

sudden

you know

the recorders

were running

and all of a

sudden they

all stand up

into this

incredibly

strange

powerful

sounding

buzz

of some

kind

that comes

from far

away

just comes

zooming up

and comes

past them

over this

little rise

and it

takes them

all of maybe

you know

45 seconds

or a minute

to get to the

top of the

rise

and they're

on the other

side of the

rise

proper

but it

wasn't

there

when it

started

setting up

so apparently

you know

and Richard

Hochman talks

about this

too

don't get

me started

don't get

me started

bad works

of art

on a

scale

of miles

are not

what we

should expect

from

intelligent

visitors

from the

stars

here's

what I

let me

isn't it

a little

weird

let's

I mean

first of all

let me say

I'm open

minded

about

crop

circles

but let's

also

not

be

silly

isn't it

a little

peculiar

that this

phenomenon

appears

within

driving

distance

of the

apartments

of the

people

most likely

to

chronicle

and proclaim

it

as

a

manifestation

of

telluric

energy

from another

dimension

in other

words

what if

it had

been

happening

in Turkmenistan

then you

would have

something

but then

how would

John

Michelle

and Colin

Andrews

and all

these people

have been

able to

make a

living

off of

it

talking

southern

England

here

the place

is littered

with RAF

bases

nuclear

weapons

depots

intercontinental

missile delivery

systems

so forth

and so on

and we're asked

to believe

that the

ministry of

defense

is utterly

unconcerned

about the

fact that the

airspace of

Great Britain

is being

violated

night after

night by a

mysterious

agency that

if it can

snap the

stem of

a wheat

stock

could throw

the switch

on an

electrical

device

of some

sort

the British

establishment

is utterly

unconcerned

by the

crop

circles

well but

wherever it's

coming from

if you had a

nuclear weapons

depot I

think you

would be

Johnny at

the raffle

to find out

what's going

on

didn't you

read like

last year

the year

before

like these

two guys

came forward

and said

that they

perpetrated

a hoax

right and

all that did

was muddy

the waters

well it did

one good

thing

it finished

the it

can't be

done by

human

beings

position

we now

know

you know

Rupert

and all

these people

Rupert

believe it

or not

is the

plant

pathologist

who serves

on the

board

of the

seriologist

which is

the main

publication

that is

booming

this

they held

a contest

in July

where

you paid

50 pounds

you were

assigned

a five

acre plot

you had

from 10

at night

until 4

in the

morning

there were

I think

16 entries

everybody

was given

the same

design

and at

dawn

judges

helicoptered

over the

sites

and then

made the

ground

inspection

and

three

of the

contestants

produced crop

circles

that were

indistinguishable

from the real

thing

beautiful

crop circles

and I'm

getting this

from believers

you know

this is what

Rupert

reluctantly

informed me

I think

that

and you know

one theory

is that it's a

particle beam

weapon

being tested

from space

but tested

750 times

in the last

18 months

in the same

small part

of England

I don't

know

we tried

I came up

with two

theories

that do

not require

telluric

intervention

or friendly

extraterrestrials

first theory

a whole lot

of people

first of all

it's killed

the UFO

industry

in England

you can't

give away

UFO sightings

at this

point

so all

of these

people

you know

it all

is happening

near

Glastonbury

and down

where the

old

earthworks

are

it's occurring

in an area

where there is

the largest

concentration

of people

likely to

hail it

as a

paranormal

phenomenon

on the

surface

of the

earth

and

they have

done so

they have

made outrageous

statements

like

no human

being

could do

this

it's

impossible

to

explain

this

so forth

and so on

well

now imagine

that something

like MI5

you know

what that

is

the English

CIA

looks at

the rise

of paganism

in Britain

you know

earthworks

channeling

all of this

stuff

and says

this

threatens

church

and state

we need

to create

a disinformation

situation

let's

lure

these people

out

onto a

limb

way out

onto a

limb

and then

let's

cut the

limb off

so what you

do

is you

create

this

pseudo

paranormal

phenomenon

you get

John Mitchell

Colin Andrews

all these

people

to proclaim

its

weirdness

and then

you reveal

that it's

easily

duplicated

that's one

theory

in other words

the British

establishment

is undercutting

paganism

by luring

these people

into saying

too much

but that's not

my favorite

theory

that's a good

one

probably

what's your

favorite

oh my favorite

theory is

much better

because the

question is

how do you

make these

things

when you

actually go

to the

crop circles

what do

you see

this is a

Sherlock Holmes

type deal

you know

Sherlock Holmes

could handle

the crop

circles

with his arm

tied behind

his hand

I think

when you go

to the

crop circles

here it

is

the crop

circle

mysterious

unearthly

portending

who knows

what

and what else

is there

well the

press

and the

sightseers

and

yourself

and an

extraordinary

number

of Japanese

tourists

now

you're getting

close

these

the Japanese

press

has followed

the crop

circle

phenomenon

more avidly

than any

other press

in the world

outside of

England

every new

crop circle

appears

photographs

and discussion

it is

huge

in Japan

Japan

they're obsessed

with this

stuff

I think

that what

might be

going on

this is

certainly

MITI is

it's the

ministry of

trade and

industry

it's this

enormous

organization

in Japan

which coordinates

technological

development

and marketing

it's what

we're talking

about

when we say

Japan

incorporated

I think

that

this is a

MITI

research

project

and that

these

Japanese

tourists

which are

ever present

at these

sites

some of

them

are drawn

from a

centuries old

tradition

of ninja

stem

snappers

who

at a

given

signal

are able

to

hurl away

their

Nikons

rush into

the corn

and in the

matter of

a few minutes

create these

things

then put

their cameras

back on

and their

sunglasses

back on

and take

up their

deep cover

as Japanese

tourists

now why

would MITI

do such

a thing

what's in

it for

them

it's a

semiotics

project

they are

studying the

impact of

symbols

on the

western

mind

the

closest

thing to

these

crop

circles

if you

look at

a complete

encyclopedia

of them

are the

pottery

marks

made by

master

potters

in

medieval

Japan

on

their

ceramics

almost

all

of

the

crop

circles

except

the

frivolous

ones

like

for

instance

how

about

the

fact

that

the

symbol

of

the

seriologist

magazine

was

done

in

wrong

I

grappled

with

it

like

everybody

else

for

six

months

but

the

density

of

flakiness

around

it

is

incredible

and the

number

of

people

whose

private

agendas

are being

served

by this

thing

I

mean if it were

happening

north of

Hudson Bay

there'd be no

money in it

you have to be able to drive there from central London and for it in order for it to work

well then people always say well but it's happening all over the world my good man haven't you heard

show me

it's not happening all over the world

some clumsy attempts appeared in Kentucky

and you know there was something in Germany

and so forth and so on

but in the

it's really

hair raising to be among these people

and to see how uncommitted

to

finding out what it is

they are

and how totally committed they are to preserving it from rational inspection

they don't want to talk about

you know

any alternative other than whatever the pet theory of the week is

about how it's happening

now I see it as

part of the ingression into novelty

things are going to get weirder and weirder

there's no doubt about that

but it doesn't mean that there is a conscious extraterrestrial agency

I mean I find it pretty weird that there are 500 women who think they have

fetuses removed from their bodies by extraterrestrials

that's so weird

that suggesting that it's true

seems a little like overkill to me

I mean what is going on that would make a woman do that sort of thing

there's always

if you're a careful observer of one of these things

there's always

Jacques Vallée wrote about this

a residuum of absurdity

that is suppressed by the witness

because the witness knows that if they told the whole story

their story is not credible

this is called you know the built-in absurdity

of these paranormal things

and when somebody tells you a story about a UFO encounter

that does not have this element of self-contradicting absurdity in it

they're manipulating the evidence to make it seem more woo woo woo

I think

and I'm not

I'm not a rationalist

except

well

I've seen things that violated the laws of physics

I believe the laws of physics can be violated

I believe there may well be extraterrestrials somewhere in the universe

do you believe the Voynich manuscripts may have something to do with their

some type of alien intelligence

no I think the Voynich manuscript is a solved problem

and that this guy Leo Levertov's translation is correct

found was you know

it was a catharite manual for the dying

that's much more exciting

than trying to claim it as a book from another dimension

because now we gain an insight into what catharism was really about

I think there is a residuum of the irrational and the paranormal

but these things like flying saucers and Atlantis and the crop circles

they're like viruses upon the healthy body of language

you know

there's something wrong with language and communication

because it's never as you imagine it's going to be

and people are being sold a phenomenon that if they were to go

they would discover that aspects of it were suppressed or misrepresented

the people who are dealing with the crop circles are having a great time

it's the longest drinking party on record in that part of England

I guess I should say this

because I know it's a bummer to have your favorite weird thing dumped on

but my technique which I recommend to you

is

don't believe anything

if you believe in something

you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite

therefore you have given up a portion of your freedom

and freedom is the dearest thing we've got

you don't have to believe anything

you can just provisionally work your way through stuff

and then probe the edges

the edges will satisfy

I think that the proper way to contact the other

is with hard-headed rationalism exercised under weird conditions

I went to India

visited some of these yoga people and accomplished saints

I'm telling you, for my money, it was hokum

it was, there was an ulterior agenda

either having the wish to relieve you of your cash

or to violate some body cavity

that was the ulterior agenda

when I went to the Amazon

with the same

in the form

as

attitude of skepticism and talked to the shamans there. They delivered the goods. So you just investigate these things, and the key question is, what can you show me? If they've got it, they can show it.

There's no mumbo-jumbo around the real thing. But if they say, oh, well, you know, the tape recordings miraculously erased themselves last night, or we'll show you, but you have to sweep up around the ashram for a dozen years to prove you're worthy, or, you know, you are not worthy.

That's the one where you head for the door. You are not worthy. The real thing is the real thing, for crying out loud. It can be displayed. It doesn't require this weird, fuzzy relationship of worth and insight and so forth and so on.

And I, and that's how I got to psychedelics. Psychedelics work. If you think that I'm bullshitting you, go home and take five grams of mushrooms in silent darkness, and then we'll talk.

That's the sine qua non. But, and it'll work on demand. I'm not saying, and wait 40 years, or purify yourself, or fix, get your aura stitched up, or any of the rest of it. It'll work. It'll blow your mind to shreds. It's real.

This other stuff is just, you know, all these gurus. They need to find honest work. They need to join the rest of us in contemplating the mystery of reality. They don't know what they're talking about.

If they knew what they were talking about, they wouldn't have to shuffle the deck when you're out of the room. And that's what's going on.

Somebody must be outraged and insulted and terribly disappointed. Yeah.

Yeah. Getting back to the DMT.

Do you have the same experience each time you take it under similar conditions? Do other people report the same things, the same teaching machines, and how does it relate to near-death experience?

I'm happy. In order. Yes, I do have the same experience each time I take it.

Do they say, nice to see you again?

They say, you've sent so many, but you come so rarely.

And then, the more interesting question, do other people see it?

Do you get a connection?

Yeah, do I get a connection?

Do other people see it?

What I've thought about this question a lot, because it's a question of communication.

If they saw it, could they tell me?

If they told me in their language, would I understand what they were telling me?

And what I've decided is that the experience is an archetype.

It's the archetype of the circus.

Why?

Don't ask me why.

I don't know why.

But, for instance, I've listened to many, many people talk about their DMT experiences, and inevitably, this is the box into which it will fit.

I gave it to a woman once up in Washington, an anthropologist.

It was a sub-threshold dose, because she coughed.

I could tell she didn't get it.

And when she came down, she said, it was the saddest carnival I've ever been to.

She said, there were no, the rides weren't open.

The tents were shuttered, and there were little gum papers blowing between the things, the stands.

The circus is an interesting archetype, because it has a number of facets.

First of all, you have the three central ring under the big top, that's the dome.

And in the central ring, there's light, and color, and clowns.

Remember that Maria Sabina called the mushrooms the little clowns.

And these clowns, the circus is for children.

And when you take DMT, one of the things I didn't mention in my description of it,

is you have a peculiar impression of your own body geometry.

Your head seems to be very large in relationship to your torso.

You are, in fact, an infant, in some sense.

You become a child.

This leads to thinking about the 52nd fragment of Heraclysis, which says,

The Aeon is a child that play with colored balls.

Nobody knows what this saying means, but it's persisted for about 3,000 years.

So it must mean something.

But outside the three rings, there's another aspect to the circus.

It is spun into Eros, because above the center ring, and up near the top of the dome,

is the beautiful woman with long blonde hair, and the tiny skimpy spangled costume.

And when you look at that narrative-type dream, and the alarm rings,

and by the time your feet hit the floor and you stagger into the shower, it's gone.

It's not partially gone.

It's all gone.

And all you can say is, I was having this amazing dream.

I have no idea what it was.

The DMT thing can leave you just that quickly.

And also, and I think this has a bearing on this,

they have studied the production of DMT in normal metabolism,

and it peaks in normal human beings between 3 and 4 a.m.

This is when the deep dreaming is going on.

This is when the intense REM states are being experienced.

So I think that where the dead and the living get together is in the dream time.

Australian Aborigines have been trying to tell us this for as long as we would listen.

And also, a lot of people, it's possible to repress it very, very quickly.

I think, for instance, I've seen people,

one way you can tell if someone has really gotten a good DMT trip

is they lay down, they become very still,

but if you look closely at their face with their eyes closed,

you can see that their eyes are moving wildly underneath their closed eyelids.

This is because they're in REM state,

and they are watching whatever it is they're seeing.

They are looking at it.

I remember giving DMT to a person years and years ago,

a person who might have been a candidate for the description psychologically fragile.

And it was clear that she got it because she was a hash smoker

and she took three or four enormous hits,

laid down, her eyes were wildly rotating around in her head.

And when she came out of it, she said,

what was it?

She said, it was nothing.

I don't remember anything.

I don't remember anything at all.

And furthermore, I don't think I want to have anything more to do with it.

And didn't.

Well, I think that this is something that it only shows as much of it as you can stand.

And some of us cannot stand much at all.

This occurs with psilocybin as well.

I've had experiences with psilocybin where I've said to it after hours of hallucinations

of one sort and another, I finally say,

you know, what I'm really interested in is your true essence.

Can you show me what you are for yourself rather than for me?

What are you for yourself?

Well, then it's just like a cold wind blows through

and black velvet curtains begin to rise.

And after 30 seconds of this, you just say,

that's enough of what you are for yourself.

Because you can tell it's headed in a direction you can't tolerate at all.

You can't stand.

I have a friend who said of psilocybin, he said,

and he said, my goal every time I take it is to stand more of what it really is.

And this is why it's incredibly kind to beginners.

Beginners basically need have no fear if they will regulate the dose reasonably

because it wants to recruit you.

And so it says, you know, here it is, whatever you wanted,

aliens, outer space, elves, erotic imagery, here it is.

Doesn't this feel safe?

See, we're not so bad.

We're your friends.

We're not like all the others.

Come back soon.

It's after you gain familiarity with it, where it says,

you know, there are aspects to me that we've never really talked about.

Hell yeah?

Like what?

Like this.

No.

No, no.

Let's go back to the Disney loop.

How close is the DMT that you smoke compared to the brain DMT that we all have running through?

Is there a difference, like NN-dimethyltryptamine and what's in our brain?

No, no.

It's the same thing.

Exactly the same.

It's the same thing.

DMT occurs in two forms, the salt and the hydrochloride.

And both forms occur, well, no, I'm not sure that both forms occur in metabolism,

but the only difference is that one is water-soluble and the other isn't.

So, basically, then again, we are holding, then, I mean, if DMT is illegal,

then what we have in our brain running through us is considered illegal.

Yeah, we are potentially bustable.

You know, in light of what I said, one of the most interesting frontiers

that the New Age has brought forward that I think bears more serious study

than the channelings of Amenhotep's barber and all that,

is lucid dreaming.

Yeah.

Lucid dreaming, if it, I don't know whether those people,

I don't know those people personally, I don't know what their motivation is,

but if it's true that you can take control of the dream state,

then this would be something worth spending even a lot of time on,

because the dream state is more like the tryptamine geography than anything else.

One of the most fascinating things about DMT that should certainly be mentioned,

as long as we're exhausting ourselves on this subject,

is once you've had DMT, once you've smoked it and this experience has occurred,

you can have a dream, years later, in which you're with a bunch of people

and something's going on and you enter the atrium of the Hotel California

and you take a floor to the basement and then you're in a room with people

and someone whips out a little glass pipe and you smoke it and it happens.

It doesn't sort of happen. It happens. A hundred percent.

That means that's exciting data, because that means that we have the wherewithal

to trigger this experience in ourselves on the natch, at least while we're asleep.

And I presume that with sufficient patience and subtlety and biofeedback equipment,

and I don't know what you would take, but if you spend a million dollars,

you could probably deliver it on time, we can trigger this most intense

of all hallucinogenic ecstasies, most boundary dissolving

of all possible human experiences on the natch.

But we have to somehow find our way to the button.

And apparently, in normal waking consciousness, it isn't there.

I spent a lot of time, I mean, I didn't mean to be so flip about the UFOs.

I spent years trying to think about the UFOs and studied all the theories.

One that I still may be part of the truth is maybe it is so that we generate and sequester DMT somewhere in our brain,

and under unusual situations, this sequester DMT can suddenly be dumped into the brain fluid or into the bloodstream,

and then you have a DMT experience or some kind of quasi DMT-like experience.

Because I read an interesting paper a few years ago, I can't remember the name of the guy who wrote it,

was an anthropological paper, it was called The Felt Presence in Unusual Environments.

And it talked about how it is apparently a basic trait of human beings to, when in the wilderness,

especially unfamiliar wilderness, people sense something there.

The Felt Presence in Unusual Environments.

Well, it may be that, now, imagine if you're in the wilderness,

in a situation not entirely familiar to you, so that you're edging up toward this Felt Presence thing,

and suddenly DMT stored in your brain is for some reason, perhaps a pathological reason that it shouldn't happen,

but it's shunted into your brain.

Well, now, suddenly, you feel there's something here, there's someone here, there's someone with me,

the hair on the back of your neck stands up,

and then, you see, coming toward you, a disturbance in your perceptual field.

Now, you're supposed to be alone.

There isn't supposed to be a disturbance in your perceptual input.

But there is, you are alarmed.

It may be dangerous.

You must identify what this is.

Well, every one of us carries around inside us a cultural inventory of what weird events might possibly be.

If you're a medieval peasant farming the hills of Tuscany, and this happens,

you immediately conclude that it's the Virgin, or it's an angel.

And, lo and behold, as it comes closer, it clothes itself in heavenly raiment.

And it is the Virgin.

And so you are encountering the Virgin.

Well, now, what if you're a Southern California steeped in the religious faiths of Malibu,

and this happens to you?

You will conclude,

My God, it's a UFO!

I mean, haven't you been with people who every airplane that flies over,

they're willing to proclaim is an extraterrestrial intervention?

It's because this explanation lies very close to the surface.

When we don't know what something is, we want to know.

We want to English it.

We want to name it.

And we grasp the nearest thing at hand.

It's very important to avoid this reflex in order to see,

what is it really?

What is it really?

Let it be what it is.

Yeah?

Four small points.

On that one, I noticed, I did a book in 73 on the flat book.

And I interviewed perhaps 500 people.

And in a large number, they start with a traditional poetic,

it's called negative parallelism,

where you identify, negate, identify, negate.

It looked like a low-flying plane.

No, it was too low.

It looked like a semi with its out-of-order lights on.

And only as the third or fourth identification,

which is traditional to classic tropes of the 13th century,

would they identify as a goddess UFO.

Point one.

Another one, the strangest one,

was an old lady in Texas.

And I said, how did you know it was a UFO?

And she said, you're taking that UFO print on the undercast.

I like that.

The next one was a judge.

I went down to the fence to Google it,

the Hickson and Parker.

Famous case.

I've got to see them again,

because I want to see how they've done over there.

Very interesting.

And the judge and clerk of courts and two other people

were riding home during that period.

And two of them in the car saw a UFO

and the others couldn't see it.

So let's say one saw it because of a PMT drop at some point.

Another was his clerk and decided he had her see it.

And the other two were just strange.

Last point.

There's a guy called Orfeo Angolucci,

who was an early contactee,

who gave me a useful handle on kind of

talking about working the edges.

He was out and he met the captain of the ship

and the ship's captain said during the interview,

would you go and get me a bottle of soda pop?

And then they went on with their event.

So I began looking for what I called the soda pop factor.

You know, that's where there was an element

or more than one element,

absolutely unrelated to the story.

That was somehow a touch of human...

An intrusion.

Yes, an intrusion.

Well, let me say one thing about it.

You don't even have to be cynical

to the point of believing in the Pascadula situation

that the second guy saw the UFO because he was the clerk.

These drug molecules have resonant rings.

They are aromatics.

It may be that there's a pheromone thing happening here

and that a state of mind can be transferred

from one person to another through body odor.

This may be how the states of telepathy are achieved on psilocybin.

Correct.

Because you do smell funny.

And this smell may be more than funny.

It may be carrying information.

There's a very interesting phenomenon that is well documented called allophrenia.

Do you all know what allophrenia is?

Allophrenia is when a friend of yours gets put in the hospital for schizophrenia

and you being a good Samaritan decide to take them a box of candy

and during the visit to your friend you behave so bizarrely

that you don't get to leave the hospital.

Allophrenia.

Schizophrenic behavior on the part of non-schizophrenics

in the presence of schizophrenics.

I've experienced this.

I had a friend, I visited him in the hospital

and the way, here's how it works, it's really interesting.

I visited my friend in the hospital.

He was nutty as a fruitcake.

But he was my friend and he was talking 90 to nothing

so I wanted to communicate with him.

So instead of saying to every single statement he made

I don't understand you, you're nuts, that makes no sense whatsoever

I began trying to agree with him

trying to understand him

and then it sort of got the momentum of a game going

where he would say, you know, I'm really Sirhan Sirhan

and I would say, yes, but your teacup is on backwards

and a doctor walking into this situation

would have a hard time telling who's nuts and who's not.

Well was that because I decided to play along with him

or why did I decide?

There was an ambiance that gave permission

for erratic, irrational, peculiar behavior

and I suppose if you were borderline schizophrenic in that situation

that's all it would take to push you over the edge.

I know you're probably thinking about that Wiener's ECM stuff

and you told me about it yourself

but I finally just recently read all those papers again

and I think you're really right that there is some sub

it's what he calls the olfactory subconscious

that there is perception below what is olfactorily normally perceived

and this is profound information transformation

messages that are perceived and stuff

yeah, I think that there could be something too

Yeah, people who study human behavior have noted that

when a person enters a room full of people

unconsciously the first thing they do is they take a deep breath

what that's doing is giving you a whole bunch of information

and you can tell, you can say I walked into the room

and the vibes were terrible because Herbert had just slugged Alice

three minutes before and everybody was freaking out about it

or I just walked into the room

and I could tell something weird was happening

but I couldn't figure out what it was

and what it was was Alice and Fred heard me coming

so he took his hand out of her blouse as I opened the door

this kind of thing

in other words information that is coming in through the olfactory

the olfactory senses

there are psychiatrists who diagnose schizophrenia

by what they call the sniff test

you know, this is one of the most subtle and difficult

of all mental dysfunctions to diagnose

and some people just lean over your anterior fontanel

and take a hit and say

him to therapy, her to release

and him to medication

because they are confident enough that the smell will do it

there is even one theory of schizophrenia

that holds that what schizophrenia is

is a dysfunctional pheromone system

so that you who are the schizophrenic

your real problem is that you smell funny

not stink

people aren't aware of that

but it's that there's something about you

that causes people to treat you strangely

and you reacting to being treated strangely by people

get weirder

and they reacting to you getting weirder

treat you more and more strangely

so what you have here is a feedback cycle

that ends with nets being dropped over you

and you taken away

but the original cause was that there was

you were giving off a chemical

which made people treat you in a way

that caused you to react to them adversely

and that started the cycle going

or they say that you perceived olfactory hallucinations

not that you just smelled weirdly

but that you perceived

oh that you were misinterpreting incoming

that's right

there's a whole section in the weirder

that talks about olfactory hallucinations

the reason we're talking so much about this

is because if you look at these pheromone molecules

and lay them next to these drug molecules

it's all one family

these are all small planar molecules

there's even one area where it comes together

pretty spectacularly

that is

in the pineal gland of human beings

there's a great deal of

like something like

twelve percent of the brain's energy

is being channeled into the pineal gland

well if you know anything about evolutionary theory

you know that you don't waste energy

in unnecessary functions

you become extinct

so there's a reason why twelve percent of the brain's energy

is being channeled into the pineal gland

though we don't know what it is

well then when you look at what's going on in the pineal

a neuro compound called adenoroglomerotropane

is being transduced by light into melatonin

well this compound adenoroglomerotropane

in ordinary biochemical nomenclature

is 6-methoxy tetrahydroharnolam

it's a near relative of the compounds in the ayahuasca

well so then a reasonable question is to ask

well then what's happening to all this melatonin

that is being produced in the pineal

well then if you tag it

and follow its path through the metabolic system

you discover that the stuff is making its way

quite directly to the surface of the skin

and then

it's volatilizing away

what's happening here

a hallucinogenic molecule is being turned into a

and in the very center of the brain

and this pheromone is then hurrying on its way to the surface of the skin

where it volatilizes off

an effect of the ambient social environment in which you're living

this begins to look like a system of neurotransmitters and neuro regulators

that operate not only within the body but on the surface of the body

and in the ambient social environment

yes

I don't know if this relates to

I'm not a chemist or anything like that

there's this stuff on the market called tryptophan

I believe

right it's an amino acid

amino acid

and it was taken off the market not too long ago

yes

and um

supposedly it made you dream

your dreams more clear or more vivid

something like that

well it's the precursor for DMT

if you were to make

if you wanted to make trip DMT in the laboratory

tryptophan would be one of the pathways that you could start from

the reason tryptophan was taken off the market

there was a lot of confusion initially

but it was a poisoned batch

it turned out all of the world's tryptophan was coming from one enormous

stainless steel vat near Nagoya

and that it had been infected by a bacterium

and uh

so you know we're stuck with the fact that tryptophan will probably never again

be available in health food stores

but it wasn't tryptophan that was the coke

I knew someone whose life was completely messed up

from the tryptophan

from the poisoned tryptophan

so by taking the tryptophan then it caused DMT to be more

well no saying it that way is saying too much

we don't know that

all we can say is

tryptophan is an amino acid

it's used in the biosynthesis of many different compounds including DMT

DMT peaks when dream states are peaking

and tryptophan does seem to induce deep

dreaming it's a rational case you know we could sit here sometime we could have a weekend entirely

devoted to thinking of simple experiments that could be done in the laboratory with and without

human beings if only these things weren't illegal I mean there is so much to be learned and so little

work being done because it's not sanctioned I mean my brother is a pharmaceutical chemist

pharmacologist plant physiologist and his professional life is very touch and go because he's known to be a

hallucinogen man and they don't they don't hire you they don't publish you they don't fund you they

don't want to know you have to be a very dedicated person to stick with hallucinogenic chemistry when

you could get over into something else and make a lot of money so you don't see a conspiracy then

with the trip spent being taken off the market because it made dreams being more vivid you see

it was just a bad batch I mean I need a connection without just thinking about I'm not a conspiracist

but it seemed to me awfully funny that that was taken off and being made by one batch and that

it's got a hammered with or whatever well there may have been some form of hanky-panky but in all

fairness you know there are many approaches to the synthesis of DMT indole is probably what

a most chemists would probably prefer to start from indole and indole is an industrial precursor used in so

many hundreds of ways that you could never push indole off the market you'd have to reinvent

half the pharmaceutical industry but where I'm going with that is I'm talking about just being able to get

it from the health food store here it was tryptophan and it made your dreams more vivid I don't know if

that's what people are using it for I don't think so but here it was so maybe they felt that people were

dreaming too much or they were having too vivid dreams hey we can't have this anymore we've got to

sort of get it off the market maybe I think probably as long as you're asleep they're fine about it it's

when you wake up that they get nervous as long as you keep your eyes closed or you're glued to the

boot to they're quite happy to minimalize you marginalize you and make you larval yeah I wanted

I was thinking about this thing with the elves and so forth and I was also thinking about it in

relationship to you know let's say you smoke DMT you have the experience you can put the term elves on

them or speculate that what we have in various mythologies or thought systems elves refers to

that I was wondering what you think about you know other types of deities that people may encounter in

some sort of visionary experience either with hallucinogens or not I mean what do you make of

that you have more of an archetypal interpretation or do you think that they exist in some hyper-dimensional

uh reality uh in some form or I'm just curious what you make of that I guess I have an archetypal

interpretation I recall from some book of Robert Anton Wilson's where he he suggests he says you should

uh you should pray to the Blessed Virgin Mary every day and offer make offerings to her and put up her

picture until she appears then switch to Shiva and do it till Shiva appears then Mickey Mouse and just keep

doing this until you satisfy yourself that none of these things are more real than any other and that

whatever their ontological status they're all equal in ontological status apparently the human brain is far more

malleable than we can conceive of or imagine we become imprisoned within a language and an ideology

and it literally becomes our reality and yet it isn't our reality it's just something provisional

I've not had that experience I prayed for years as a kid but perhaps the agonbite of Inuit was already present in me and making it impossible for me to succeed

but in the case of the the elves there's uh there's sort of a cultural archetype of the elves but at the same time you seem to be saying that that there is a deeper reality that this is based on in other words

well and the DMT elves are a lot weirder than the Disney elves the Disney elves are really sanitized

these things are pretty frightening in a way I mean they are if you let yourself be frightened because

they're you can't they want well how can I put it they play too rough they are not

they're not they're not mean but they're not careful either it's like hanging out with a gang

you know as long as you're their friend you really feel aren't I cool look who I'm hanging out with but

then you realize if you said the wrong word or made the wrong move everybody would turn and look at you

and just the I recently wrote the introduction for a new edition of Evans Vence book The Fairy Faith in Celtic

Countries and if you're interested in elves this is the book to read you all know who Evans Vence was he

was the great Tibetologist who but as a student at Cambridge in 1913 before he went to Tibet he did his

doctoral thesis 1913 this was and he went around to Brittany and Wales and Ireland to the old old

people I don't think he talked to anybody under 80 and he said tell me stories about fairies and he

collected the most amazing stories about fairies and fairy encounters and I learned from rereading that book

that you know the note the christian notion of purgatory which is a place where you go that is

neither heaven or hell where you do time for minor infractions and then you get moved on to heaven

this idea was created I always assumed that it was dreamed up by some bishops of rome some synod or

something it was dreamed up by saint patrick to convert the pagan irish to convince them that fairyland

was part of the christian man and he was so successful in converting the pagan irish that when letters

went back to rome describing how he did it purgatory became a general doctrine of the church and then it

was used very successfully to convert the pagan slavs so purgatory is fairyland dressed up in christian

terminology and and what is the idea of fairyland it's the idea that the dead live all around us

linger among us as disincarnate souls and they can they and the fairies that evans vance was describing

were very ambiguous morally i mean sometimes they would only sour the milk but you know their favorite

concern of fairies is ufo freaks pay attention stealing babies that's what fairies like to do i don't know

about surgically ripping off fetuses that seems to be a modern touch but in ireland people in the

countryside do not leave babies small babies unattended in their cribs for fear of fairy theft and the fairies

substitute they don't just leave an empty crib they leave a withered strange little creature that is

supposed to fool the human beings and whenever there is a child born who is wasting and old looking and

undersized there's always the assumption that there was a healthy baby there but now there's been a fairy

switch uh fairies respond to riddlery this has to do with this thing about language and the strange

relationship of the irish to intoxication fairies and language suggests that here we might have a

restricted gene pool that is somehow indemnified itself in the direction of these peculiar uh concerns

present company accepted what was the name of that book the fairy faith in celtic countries by evan smith

um at least a couple of final points which is you know what is this all good for

i i think what it's good for i think the mystery that we're making our way toward

much more of which will be revealed later as we live into the next 20 years is

that we have lost connection to a very important part of reality

which i call the guy in mind but what which i think is more popularly understood as the goddess

goddess consciousness but the goddess is not as envisioned by at ephesus you know a woman studded with

breasts the goddess is the living earth it is not to be anthropomorphosed into uh some kind of human or

quasi-human form and when we were taking mushrooms on the plains of africa before the invention of

agriculture as nomads we were uh rocked in the cradle of the goddess and the you know differences between men and

women between parents and children between those who had much if anybody had much and those who had little

and between human beings and the animal and vegetable kingdom were minimal because everything operated in

the light of this reference experience boundary dissolution and a sense of the intelligence of the earth

now we are so alienated from the intelligence of the earth that when we encounter it we assume it came

from halfway across the galaxy to rescue us it isn't from across interstellar space it's something that is

partially in ourselves and partially in the world around us and if we could but clear the prejudices

of materialism of materialism from our uh approach to the world most especially from our language which by its

subject-object bias by its linear syntax and by god knows what else that's built into it hopelessly precludes us

from contacting this uh this reality if we could clear all that away we would discover you know a dimension of

immense support and affection for human beings and for our enterprises but as long as we pursue the

destruction of the earth and the elaboration of materialist ideology and the suppression of psychedelic

states and the suppression of the feminine uh we are going to be alienated feel abandoned

and operate in an ambience of rampant pathology so uh to my mind the the hallucinogens are a call

to return to the archaic style to recapture the tools techniques languages and attitudes that existed

and flourished on this planet uh you know before ad 10 000 and we must do this if we don't do this

uh then we are setting ourselves up for a very unhappy future we are living in a very unhappy world

maybe your world is not unhappy but you know tell that in bosnia tell it in somalia tell it to the aids

infected masses of africa uh the apocalypse is no longer a rumor it's arrived in many parts of the world

and we as the children the inheritors of the culture which created this catastrophe and as the people who

are still above high uh still living on high ground as the waters of poverty epidemic disease and misery rise

ever higher have a certain obligation to respond to this moral decency demands it and we can no longer

tolerate uh the evolution of consciousness the exploration of our relationships to each other

and the source of meaning itself to be regulated stigmatized and degraded by the most frightened the least

educated the least uh balanced and the least caring among us and this is what we've got at the present

moment the male dominator uh mentality is in the process of running us and all life on this planet into extinction

uh i don't have answers that must be clear by now i have questions and offered techniques

and there's nothing new about these techniques they have been around for a hundred thousand years

and for ninety thousand of those hundred thousand years they worked very well and we existed in harmony with

the rest of nature fully human fully able to philosophize argue love riddle perform theater make masks so

forth and so on but in the last ten thousand years we have fallen into a pathology and it's because

the umbilical connection to the mind in nature has been severed lost pissed away ignored degraded turned away from

it is a psychedelic relationship to these plants without that you are not yourself without that you are half human

and this is how we behave we behave as though you know we have a soul but it's stapled in yeats immensely

compelling phrase to the body of a dying animal this needs to be corrected reconstructed addressed

otherwise we are going to go into the books if there are books and into the cosmic record which there

surely is a cosmic record as jerks lame didn't get it couldn't put it together and this would be a terrible legacy

because we are not going into these crises with in a state of total anesthesia we have the answers we have the

political machinery to do something about this we have the sense of crisis we have the good will

and affection for each other but we are somehow unable to put all this together in a configuration that would

allow us to change our minds admit that history was a bad idea that science betrayed us that it's a tale told by

an idiot and uh to strike out in a new direction we're like the frog in the proverbial pot who never moves as

the temperature uh climbs toward the boiling point sooner or later you have to just get up on your hind legs

and say enough already now maybe this is beginning to happen and maybe it isn't but it's not for us to

judge as spectators at a hockey game it's for us to get in and roll up our sleeves and participate in do

what you think is right think about what you think is right and once you've thought about it then do it

and it doesn't have to fit in with my program or my agenda i have a deep and abiding face faith that

mother nature will sort out the options and from the offerings of all of us select those that will be

salvational and solitary for all the rest of us but if you don't act you didn't participate i mean this

is not a road show you know it's your life your planet your world and the tools to reclaim it are present

at hand you've heard this now now you have to ask yourself what are you going to do about it that's

really all i have to say and we're finished

I want to welcome everybody to the Ojai Foundation. It's lovely to see so many old and new faces. When I was asked to introduce Terence, I wondered what on earth to say. So, I thought back to when we first met.

And that was at Esalen Institute in the spring of 1983. And I'd been living there for about nine months, recovering from a nervous breakdown, which occurred here.

And I was certainly getting better at that point. I was walking again.

And Paul Herbert, who was the sound person at Esalen at that time, said, Leon, you have to come and do this workshop.

I had done absolutely nothing at Esalen except sort of recuperate. And he insisted that I come to your program. So, I did.

And the program itself is a sort of blur of natural era, flying sources, mushrooms, electronic intelligences.

It's just a total blur. He spoke, this man spoke for like, I don't know how many hours.

And I was, who is this person? I've never met anybody like this before.

The one part of the program that I remember clearly, it's interesting, was in the introductions.

You know, everybody goes around and says, why did you come and that sort of thing.

And Kat said something that just stuck with me. And she said, I like his style.

And at the time, I thought she was talking about your shades or your socks, you know.

But afterwards, you know, I saw more of what she was referring to in a deeper way.

And after the program bag of presents in my hand, and that changed my life.

So, he's one of those people, very few, a handful of people, that I can say have really, I've met at a crossroads of my life.

And for that, I've always been very grateful.

So, I like your style too.

And it's incredible.

Great introduction to you.

A tough act to follow on.

Before we get into this.

What time is lunch, Lola?

1 o'clock.

1 o'clock? So we'll go to 1?

Or if you want to have time, we'll go to walk around.

Go to 12.30 then?

Good.

Can everybody hear in the back, without amplification?

Yes.

Good.

Well, if I get tired and begin to mumble, why bring me back a...

Yeah.

Well, it's a pleasure to be here.

This is sort of a nostalgic return.

I can't even remember.

The last Ojai event was at Camp Shalom.

I can't remember.

It must have been three years since we were all together here under the teaching tree.

In some ways, a lot of water over the dam.

In other ways, five minutes ago.

I've just come from two days of speaking in Los Angeles to large audiences which demand a sort of formal intensity

that you thankfully relieved me of this morning.

I guess the...

Well, how many people are familiar with my books or have been to workshops in the past?

Is there anybody who's just utterly unfamiliar?

Uh-huh.

Okay.

Well, so we'll work from that benchmark out.

I never imagined that I would end up sitting in this position and pontificating on the nature of life and history and global human destiny.

I started out simply with a love of nature.

I was persecuted as a child in my physical education classes.

So I spent a lot of time on my own.

And I grew up in western Colorado where there is a lot of exposed sedimentary rock and some of it has dinosaurs pressed into it.

And I could always feel these dinosaurs.

The largest dinosaur ever found was found a few years ago near Delta, Colorado, about 30 miles from where I grew up.

And all the time I was growing up, I knew that sucker was out there.

But I could never walk to it.

If I could have, probably my career would have taken a different turn.

But my interest in fossils, I remember I had an uncle who gave me a book when I was about eight years old of fossils.

And it had one of those charts in the front of it where it shows five billion years.

And then the last half inch is expanded to the next column, and then the last half inch is expanded to the next column.

And so I saw that human history was a hairline crack at the bottom of the column furthest to the right.

And I got the concept of how old, not the universe, but the earth is.

And it was a dizzying perspective.

The town I grew up in, if you've read Time magazine, you were persecuted as a left-wing intellectual.

The town I grew up in once made it into Ripley's, believe it or not, as a place that had more Christian churches per capita than any town of its size in the United States.

This was a town of 1,600 people with 42 Christian churches thriving.

When I was a kid, I thought street corners were for churches.

I didn't know you could have buildings on street corners that weren't churches.

And I would go up these dry arroyos with my rock pick, looking for fossil shells and dinosaur bones and this sort of thing, brachiopods.

And in the solitude, because I would often not be able to con my little friends into attending me, because they learned quickly that it was hotter out there than decent people could tolerate.

And also, I have to confess, whenever I invited someone to come along, it was with the thought that they would carry back the specimen.

So they were essentially pack burrows for my fossil expeditions.

And then I had an uncle, who was an old rock hound, and he introduced me to the concept of not splitting apart strata to see ancient forms of life, but slicing rocks up and polishing them to reveal the light and the color and sometimes the color.

And sometimes the crystal cavities that were hidden inside them.

And so very early on, I got this idea that the surface of things is not where attention should rest.

That you have to, as Ahab tells Starbuck in Moby Dick, you have to seek the little lower layer, and under the surface of things is another reality.

A reality.

A reality that reaches, in some cases, back to the birth of the planet, practically, or in other cases, in other dimensions.

I had a fixation with meteorites at one time, and butterflies, and rocketry.

And all of these things were about a certain thrill, a certain iridescence that could be coaxed out of physical phenomena if you would not just simply dismiss them and pass over them.

And as a little kid, I had very bad eyes.

I still do, but I wear contact lenses, but at that time I wore very thick bifocal lenses.

And my mother, bless her heart, who was cut from somehow different cloth than all the people around me, read Aldous Huxley's book, The Art of Seeing.

Which, an occasion to look at it in the past year, and I was amazed how much of my own attitude toward life is contained in this fairly trivial book.

You know, Huxley had terrible eyes, too, and he discovered the so-called Batesian method of eye exercises and eye health, which at that time, we're talking 1954 or so, was completely sky blue crackpot type stuff.

I mean, this was the Eisenhower era.

And the exercises that I learned when my mother took me as a Batesian therapist, were exercises in attention, attention.

And then the other form of exercise was what the rest of American society wasn't going to encounter for 15 years, and then would encounter as Buddha.

But for us, it was just close your eyes, and the therapist would create capsules in the air through narrative.

And it was an eye exercise.

And so, it introduced me to the idea of sitting still and watching what's going on behind closed eyelids.

What fascinated me about the butterflies was the physical iridescence, which in the northern hemisphere is fairly rare in butterflies.

You only get it in these little blue lysineas that you see fluttering around mud puddles in dry areas.

I've seen them here.

But, of course, in the tropics, iridescence becomes a more generalized phenomenon, not only in butterflies, but in beetles as well.

And I had the ability to fixate, to spend hours with a single pyrite crystal or a single theme turning it over and looking at it.

And then, at some point, again, I decided that I would become a writer, not because I loved writing,

because I admired all the attention that great writers seem to have used upon them,

which was something that I, as a goggle-eyed weirdo, was not getting much of.

So then, the name Huxley recurred again, and I started reading through all of those novels, the social novels, you know.

Antique and Chrome Yellow, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, and all the rest of it, Ape in Essence.

And, finally, I came to a work of non-fiction by Huxley, The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell.

This was, by now, probably 1958. I was 14 years old. And, in that book, Huxley, the quintessential English academic establishment intellectual,

describes his confrontations with mescaline and what it meant to him.

And, it was fascinating to me, because previously, all I had ever known or heard about drugs

was, was what I had learned from reading Huxley's novel, Brave New World, which is a pharmacological dystopia, if there ever was one,

and has lots to say to society today, I think. If you haven't read it, I recommend it to you.

If you, if you have read it, you recall that it was a society of people, perfect people, grown in vats, who died early,

but who never lost the bloom of their youth, who were heard-minded, driven by advertising,

and entirely dependent for their happiness and psychic equilibrium on a drug called Soma.

And, they had little advertising slogans, which they would repeat by rote, if anyone displayed inappropriate anger or emotion.

A gram is better than a dam, they would displayed publicly.

A drug sound proposition. There is this same author, writing of mescaline, and reaching for metaphors drawn from Meister Eckhart,

St. John of the Cross, John Chrysostom, comparing the light falling into the folds of his trousers

to the light of Caravaggio and Duccio and Fra Angelico, and I was amazed. I had never heard such carryings on.

Well, now, if you go back and look at The Doors of Perception, you realize that this was not an extravagant telling

of the nature of the psychedelic dimension. It was, in fact, a fairly conservative rendering.

A description of low-dose, eyes-open, thoughty, psychedelic voyaging.

I mean, it's been a long, long time since I've set a stack of Abram's art books by my left knee before I take a psychedelic.

But back then, that was how it was done. You looked at the visible world.

Well, so then, around this time, there began to be alarmist articles in the press about the abuse of blue morning glory seeds

by some of the more crazed and unassimilated members of American society.

And I immediately tore out and purchased a couple of packets of blue morning glory seeds.

And then noticed that the leaves imprinted in the fabric of the drapes in the living room all seemed to have little faces and were dancing.

This was, in fact, clearly the intent of the designer, but something that, in all the years of living around these ratty drapes, I had never noticed.

And then I began to look at everything around me and discovered that this affinity for looking into things that my rock-hunting, butterfly-collecting habits had instilled in me had become like turbocharged.

And swimming in the depths of polished stones, ponds, the ditch running down the back of the backyard, were myriads of worlds.

And then I went outside, and I was looking around at everything, and then I just felt physically overcome.

My knees basically gave way underneath me, and I sat down under a tree, and I closed my eyes.

And my life has never been the same since, because there, waiting behind closed eyelids, were, you know, ruined cities, covered with creeping jeweled lichens,

and inhabited by shining eyed creatures that were, I was not sure exactly what, and much, much more.

And I just spent a half hour or so, literally in trance, gazing into this unfolding reverie of deserts, jungles, machines, archaeological artifactria, machines in orbit around alien worlds, all of this stuff.

And I was stunned.

I still am stunned.

And that essentially set the compass for my, the rest of my intellectual life.

I didn't understand, really, what had happened.

In other words, I didn't clearly get it that this was a trip, and that it was induced by the psychedelic.

I understood something of that, that I thought also it must be unique.

It must be my mood, my expectation.

Or surely this cannot happen on demand through the simple act of eating morning glory seeds being sold at 35 cents a pack down at the hardware store.

And so then I began to ask questions, and I quickly discovered it was a mistake.

So I went back to Huxley, and read more carefully, saw that he was working from the early of Pavlok Ellis, Weir Mitchell, Fitzhugh Ludlow.

It turned out that this whole tradition, albeit an underground tradition in Western intellectual or aesthetic sense, based around the perturbation of consciousness with substance.

Coleridge.

Coleridge, as an example.

And you may know this poem Kublai Khan.

Kublai Khan was written in a flash, basically, based on an opium reverie.

Coleridge was an aficionado laudanum, which was a tinctured form of opium that had a great vogue in the 19th century.

Well, I knew nothing about opium or laudanum or the style of the 19th century English intelligentsia, but in the lines of Kublai Khan, I could feel this same siren song iridescence that had been in the pyrite crystals, in the butterfly wings, in the beetle bodies.

Here, let's go out on a limb.

In Xanadu did Kublai Khan, a state-fisher dome decree, where out the sacred river ran, through caverns measureless to man, down to a sunless sea.

So twice five miles of fertile ground, with walls and towers girdled round, and there blossomed many an incense-bearing tree.

Meandering with a mazy motion, the sacred river ran.

And it goes on and on, and then it says,

It was a miracle of rare device, a sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice.

And that notion, not the sunny pleasure dome itself, but the notion of a sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice,

introduced me to the concept of what's called, in alchemy, coincidencia positorum, where two things which are mutually exclusive are juxtaposed in a way which creates a shock in the mind, a poetic shock that is then potentially memorable.

Years later, I used this effect to title my books.

So that's why you get The Invisible Landscape, True Hallucination.

See, this is all hideously contrived.

Well, eventually, and after many adventures too painful to recall, I ended up at Berkeley in the fall of 1965, which was an incredibly, probably the most together thing I've ever achieved with my life in terms of domain.

Because I was neither early nor late.

I was not ten miles off or a thousand miles off.

I was dead on.

I was right at the very center of the flowering of now vilified and fondly recalled as the 1960s.

And I was living in a ratty room house in San Francisco that summer before going over to Berkeley.

And there was a guy living across the hall from me who replaced all the white light bulbs in his apartment with red light bulbs,

and painted his windows black and played the major chords of Freight Train on his slack guitar over and over again.

And he went on to glory as Barry Melton, the lead guitarist of Country Joe and the Fish.

And I didn't know it, but at the time they were in the studio laying down the tracks for electric music for the mind and the body,

which was one of the defining freak albums of that era.

And he introduced me to the joys of cannabis and further to something called Sandoz LSD,

which was going around in these tiny 00 capsules.

And it was as if the previous morning glory vision had now been lifted to a whole other level of intensity.

And everyone around me was undergoing these kinds of things.

And there was a sense of incredibly accelerated change.

You could palpably feel the acceleration of change seem to be in the water, in the air.

Once I moved to Berkeley, I noticed that the large billboard that they changed for Telegraph Avenue every 30 days contained cryptic messages

that were inevitably addressed to me and my ability.

In short, serious boundary, dissolution and category and scramblement was creeping into my mental universe.

And then, after about six months of this, I had a very strange friend who lived in Palo Alto.

He still is my great inspiration.

I wish I could coax him into public display because he's the real Terence McKenna.

But if you're the real Terence McKenna, you have too much good taste to ever do what I do.

But he came to me. His style was to get there first, whatever it was, to do it, to reject it, and to be absolutely contemptuous of it

by the time anybody else even arrived at the scene of the crime.

So in early 1967, he came to my house in Berkeley one rainy February night, and he said,

something you might be interested in.

And I said, what's that?

And he said, this is a material that has been boosted from an army research project being run down at SRI,

and someone managed to give a...

...

50-gallon drum of this material out of the inventory without anybody knowing, and I said,

what is it? And he said, it's called DMT. And I said, it's a psychedelic drug, right? And

he said, right. And I said, how long does it last? And he said, three minutes. And I said,

no problem, bring it on. Because after all, I had been assaulted by Life Magazine on the

subject of LSD, and I had gotten that under my belt, and I was by now relatively sophisticated

about cannabis. I figured there were probably no more frontiers to cross. And so we sat down

then and there, and did it. And about 15 seconds after choking up on this stuff, I found myself

plunged into an elf nest somewhere on the other side of the universe. In other words, there

were, and thank God no one fills in for me because they know it so well, jewel self-dribbling

basketballs. Did I get it right? Jewel self-dribbling basketballs that came bounding toward me from

from all corners of this domed underground space? Well, I had been used to hallucinations,

acceleration of thought, funny ideas, strange insights, hysterical waves of giggling, so forth

and so on. I had never seen anything like what I was now face to face with. And also, whatever

this substance was, it didn't affect me. It didn't affect my perception of who I was.

In other words, it seemed to me that the drug wasn't working. It was simply that the world

had disappeared and been replaced by something else. And I was still who I had been a few

moments before, except now I was fairly alarmed by what had just happened to the architecture

and geography of Southern Telegraph Avenue. And these things, there was an overwhelming sense

of affection, involvement, a sense that I hadn't experienced since being six years old and being

released on Christmas morning to run out to the Christmas tree. And there was a sense of

childlike innocence under conditions of extraordinary alien-ness and engoldment. And just, I was boggled,

the mind boggled, the mind boggled. I at last understood the real meaning of this new cliché at that time. And these things were making objects with their voices. They were singing in this unearthly, crystalline, punning, elf chatter kind of language.

But it was not something simply heard. It was something which I could see. I could see syntax unfolding like ribbons being spewed out of machines, shooting across my visual field, rolling into balls, condensing as objects with rotating crystalline facets and machined interiors of gold and ivory.

And these objects were themselves emitting strange singing language-like noises. And the whole thing was happening at an enormous speed, almost like a Bugs Bunny cartoon run backwards at about three times ordinary speed.

Well, I barely had time to take all of this in, assure myself that I wasn't dying before it collapsed. The way a tent collapses, the way an ice cream cone melts, the way an erection disappears, the way an investment goes bad. It just was gone.

And my friend, I was sitting there, I opened my eyes and my friend said, so what do you think?

And I was, I was stunned. I've never actually seen it hit anybody quite as hard as it hit me. For about fifteen minutes, all I could say was, I can't believe it. I can't believe it. I can't believe it. I can't believe that. I can't believe that.

You call that a drug? You must be nuts. Drugs don't do that. Drugs speed you up, slow you down, make you fall down, stuff like that. This is no drug. It's magic. It masquerades as a drug. It's a doorway into another world.

I kept having the image of Aladdin's land, my favorite fairy tale. And I felt like Aladdin. You know, you buy something in a junk shop, you take it home, you try to clean it up. The next thing you know, a flame a mile high pours out and demands to do your bidding.

That was the impression I have. And it's the impression I still have. That must have been early 1966, 66, 76, 86, what is it? 36 years ago? That's not possible.

26 years ago. Nothing has particularly changed. Nothing has ever surpassed it. And for me, that was the moment that set my auto compass for life.

I mean, I said, this I must understand. Not only did my mother not tell me and my father not tell me, but Aldous Huxley never told me. And neither did John of the Cross. And neither did Meister Eckhart.

All those people were apparently flying at a lower altitude than I, 19-year-old brat in ratty rented room, have been able to achieve in the last 15 minutes.

And so then I began to look for this or for some trace of it in the history of human philosophy, in the history of art, in ethnography, everywhere.

Everywhere. And I really didn't find it. And I really still don't find it. Except there are certain faint, faint footprints in the blowing sand of human experience that if you know, if you've seen the vision, you can follow these footprints back to something like this source.

First of all, first of all, first of all, I went to the library. None of the heads that I knew could make any sense out of this at all. For them, LSD defined the top of the ladder.

Well, with this stuff, LSD and being at the local PA meeting, seem to be two states of mind which merge together on some horizon of straightness.

So I went to the library. So I went to the library and began reading more intensively in a more focused fashion. And I learned who apparently utilized plants that had this stuff in it.

Now, in 97, this was new information that had arrived botanical scholarship really in the previous five to 10 years through the work of people like Richard Evan Schultes and William Safford and other people described this chemical being present for original intoxicants.

So far as I could tell, no academic had ever done it because no description matched what I had experienced.

And when I discussed this with my friend who had brought me, he said that he felt that probably it was impossible to accentration.

And that meant, if true, that these shamanic practitioners and societies that were utilizing this were utilizing it, but that they themselves had no real awareness of what it was potentially like when concentrated through modern analytical and laboratory.

So I, it really wasn't a choice. I mean, I guess that's what it's like when you get your calling. It's just a little hard for me to imagine that, you know, being a CTA or city planner or something like that could seize you by the years with the kind of intensity that this sees me.

I mean, I said, I've got to understand this stuff. This is the most amazing thing. And the second most amazing thing was that nobody seemed to know about.

I mean, I mean, I couldn't understand why there weren't 11 inch high headlines on every newspaper on the platform saying, you know, doorway to hyperspace discussion, elf negotiations proceeding, something like that.

No, apparently it was a private mystery or known but to a very few. And I immediately after coming down was seized by an absolutely messianic desire to expose other people to this and see what they said, because it just seemed so important to share it.

So that's basically what I've been doing ever since and trying to draw conclusions, trying to understand what is this, number one, how is it that it can coexist with the world of George Bush and not be discussed or not be part of the mix.

Of social concerns. I mean, after all, we're a society where people jump out of airplanes on weekends because their lives are so boring and empty.

Well, then, if you think jumping out of an airplane is a thrill to ride home about, you should try this stuff. No one would jump out of an airplane if they had DMT on their menu.

But no, apparently it isn't about that. Well, then I came to feel that it was, and I still sometimes offhandedly refer to it like this, that it is secret. It is not a secret. It is the secret.

There is a secret. There is a secret. And this is it. It is the secret that the world is not only not the way you think it is, it's that the world, the way the world is, is a way that you can't think it is.

Because you simply do not have the imaginative capacity to conceive of such overwhelming peculiarity.

And how this secret is able to coexist with the rest of mundane reality, maintain its integrity, and not become the object of pogrom, religion, hysteria, and repression, is part of the mystery of what the secret is.

You see, a secret is not something untold. It's something which can't be told.

And even as I sit here, I realize that I'm obliquely approaching it. No matter how weird I say it is, no matter what scintillating metaphor I create to attempt to beguile you into imagining what you can't imagine, I'm perfectly aware that I'm falling short of the goal.

I'm creating a symbol. I'm creating a symbol of what it is. But frankly, words fail. And I'm a word kind of guy. So then, the rest of my life can be basically poured into a nutshell.

It's just been a lot of wandering around in various fringy places, talking to a lot of fringy people, and trying to figure out what is the real importance of this for me personally, because that's where I'm living, obviously,

and for everybody else, because I assume that there is absolutely nothing extraordinary about me. I didn't have these experiences because I'm in the lineage of Ramana Maharshi or some malarkey like that.

I had that experience because I had that experience because I'm a human being. And every human being can have this experience. The only analogy I can make to it is sexuality.

I noticed that no one here seems to be having sex at the moment. But we all are shaped by it. Probably this is something so taboo, and not necessarily scripted into your biological functioning the way sex is, so taboo that you can go from birth to the grave and never encounter this.

Not only can you do that. Not only can you do that, but most people do. And throughout history, most people have. They never had an inkling. You know, they may have set armies marching. They may have launched empires. They may have built fantastic inventions, painted amazing paintings, created phenomenal works of literature.

But they were wet behind the ears when it comes to the full spectrum of reality. Because without this in the picture, half the world is missing. Well, so then, how to come to terms with this? What is it?

The answer is, who knows? We're not doing a very good job of coming to terms with this. Governments invade against drugs of all sorts. But largely because these things are sources of difficult to tax revenue.

It's not the metaphysical. It's not the metaphysical concern for the health of your teleological structures that drives the government to repress these things. It's simply the wish not to be chiseled on safely.

So, there it is. Sideways to the rest of life. Huxley once said, of the psychedelic experience generally, that it was what he called a gratuitous grace. He said it is neither necessary nor sufficient for salvation.

In other words, salvation. In other words, salvation can be attained without these things, whatever salvation is.

Discovering, using, and exploring these things does not guarantee you a place in heaven either, whatever a place in heaven means.

However, this is a part of this world. A part of this world that you would think the restless, intellect of this world, that you would be restless, restless, intellectually...

Well, it's hard to put it into words exactly, especially when you try to do it for the first time.

Obviously, the difference between a living person and a dead person, there is a way of thinking about that where you would say the difference is a chemical one.

In one case, metabolism is going on. In the other case, not.

I am beginning to think that this narrowing of our conscious focus into three dimensions for survival purposes that I mentioned a few minutes ago may have actually cut us off not only from where the game will be next month or who stole the chicken,

but it also may have cut us off from contact with the after-death world because it has no efficacy in the very nitty-gritty blood and muscle problem of day-to-day survival.

And that what we have discovered in DMT is literally a chemical doorway to the bardo and that this, I think, is an even more confounding notion than the notion that we are being pheromonally managed by zeta reticulums or something like that.

I mean, after all, if that were the case, it would probably just be one of many programs of social manipulation that are administered by some hideous bureaucracy somewhere beyond Agol.

And there's careerism and blunders and budget overruns.

In other words, it sort of comes back down into, that's what the problem I have with all extraterrestrial scenarios is the extraterrestrials seem so much like ourselves.

I think probably it's that we are, we have found the pharmacological key to the bardo and that this is going to overturn civilization so completely that we might as well just call an end to it and recess the meeting.

I think that, and if you ask shamans about this, you say, you know, what is this all about, they will tell you, well, we do all our work through ancestor magic.

Well, ancestor is a very sanitized term because not too many people, when they hear the word ancestor, realize that we're talking dead people here.

So when a shaman tells you he works with the ancestors, he's saying he works with dead people, well, if that's the case that has driven us most buggy during, throughout history, which is, is there continuity of dissolve?

And I am the last person to ever carry this message into society.

I was raised Catholic, rejected it, at age 14, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Genet, Friedrich Nietzsche, these were my gods.

And I felt, you know, that moral responsibility, existential honesty, demands that we put aside the cheerful fairy tales of more naive levels of culture and that anybody who wants to talk to you about the dear departed and all that is, you know, in the grip of menopausal mysticism or something,

or just hasn't carried out a rational analysis of what gives, now, I think, you know, these religions have all made hay out of, and hash, I might add, out of their imagined franchise of the after-death world.

Because they use it to beat you on the head with a list of do's and don'ts that's very dear to them, and it can be anything as nuts as that you shouldn't be pork to who knows what.

All sides of the world, and has only been thrown into question by the scientific high-tech democracies in the last 500 years or so, and for them, only among a secular educated elite, the premise that is that there is something that persists beyond life.

And I think that part of the profligate irresponsibility of modern life arises from the fact that we don't think we have dues to pay.

We don't think, we think there's an easy way out, and that you can be a jerk and then just become food for worms and nobody will ever get on your case about it.

And so, moral relativism has come into play.

But if, in fact, we are securing, in some form, the notion that the human personality or some portion of it persists after death,

and that there is an ecology of souls, and that we must, in some sense, share this planet with them,

because, after all, when you smoke BMT, you don't go anywhere physically.

You simply see your nearby environment from a different dimension through different eyes,

then it means that we represent a tiny minority of the human beings who care about this planet.

We, the living, are just a tiny slice of who cares and who is active in the situation.

And somehow, we are being, through chance, which I don't believe in,

or through design, which seems everywhere around us,

we are being brought up short and told that,

in order for the Earth to survive,

we must join everyone else in this other place.

And that it is not to be conceived of as dissolution,

it is to be conceived of as disembodied.

This is the only thing I can figure out that is going on.

There is some kind of project underway to transfer the lumpen living

into the realm of the Grateful Dead.

And the anxiety that we feel about death

is the anxiety, is an anxiety born, essentially, of ignorance.

And this ignorance is understandable,

because we have suppressed, repressed, and denied shamanism

the leadership role that it should have in metaphysics of all sorts.

And so now, we are about to become extinct.

And you can like it, or you cannot like it.

You can decry it as the greatest tragedy ever to befall us,

or this planet, although I suspect the planet

will heave an enormous sigh of relief.

But there is a perspective in which

it can actually be seen as progress,

that we are all at once going to transit

into this bardo realm.

Now, this may not be it.

It may not be a simple die-off.

It may be that somehow a dialogue can be set up

with these souls or their representatives

or whatever they are in this other place,

and that a world can be established

which is neither quite theirs nor quite ours.

In other words, that the difference

between being alive and being dead,

which seems to us fairly fundamental,

could in fact turn out to be fairly minor

and erasable,

or the boundary could be moved

from where it is to somewhere else.

We, this stuff is hackle-raising in its weirdness,

but if you're going to be true

to the content of the experience,

then I think you're pushed

in these kinds of directions.

And the attractor at the end of history

that seems to be pulling the human world,

certainly, if not all of space and time,

into its domain,

is in the act of realising itself

going to obliterate the kind of distinctions

that we have grown used to,

excuse me,

even on such fundamental issues

as life and death.

That's the grandest conception

that I've been able to come up with,

and it doesn't require

friendly, altruistic, extraterrestrial

flying in from the base.

Jews, and it doesn't involve nanotechnological downloading of everybody into a gold

deterbium cube buried on the backside of the moon, and it doesn't involve the human

enterprise simply becoming a layer in shale somewhere in the strata of the paleontological

record of life on this planet. It is, you know, a fitting denouement for the mess that we have

wandered into. It does require unlimbering of the imagination to come to terms with this,

because we are in great denial over the possibility that the world could really be transforming

itself. I mean, about as far as most of us can go without getting metaphysically uncomfortable

is to embrace recycling and population control, but I doubt that such cheerful diddling with

the machinery will be able to swerve us from our path. I think, like it or not, we are going

into a world that we literally, as we sit here, cannot conceive of. A world so different

from ordinary reality that to discuss whether we will be alive or dead in that world is mere

quibbling.

There's one point I wanted to clarify real quick. I didn't see this launching of the alien

psychedelic explore templates as a bureaucratic enterprise. I almost always envisioned it as

a real provisional underground thing to be done by a small minority of shamans in a desperate

hope to somehow propagate their origins.

You mean alien shamans?

Yeah, yeah.

It could be that. I sense a crisis in the physics of the matrix itself. In other words, I think

that this is not only happening to human beings. I am serious when I say, you know, there is

only twenty years of history left and we still have half of it to do. We are going to have

to do some pretty fast stepping. I mean, what we took fifty thousand years to do, we must

now do in twenty years. I think that space and time and the physical body and the planet and

that everything is essentially some kind of an illusion. It's not real. What is real, what

is truly bedrock of, and I guess this comes close to being of a Buddhist position, this is all

provisional. This is not what the universe is. The universe is something else. You know, the

Buddhists have a doctrine that if a single person will attain enlightenment, then the illusion will

collapse instantly. All beings will be sucked into the post-enlightenment state. And the illusion of space and time of becoming an entity will all be obviated at the snap of a finger. Well, we tend to disbelieve this because no matter how metaphysical we are, or may even call ourselves Buddhists, we really believe that as

Andromeda is two hundred and fifty thousand light years away. We can't conceive of a light year, but we actually believe that what the scientists tell us. And yet, my God, when you start carrying out a critique of modern science, you cannot believe what flux this stuff is built on. I heard an analogy recently which I thought was very interesting.

Our entire picture of the so-called distant universe is built up by the science of radio telescope, the use of radio telescopes to study deep space. This science has been in existence since about 1950.

If you were to take all the radio signals that have been analyzed by radio astronomy since 1950 and characterize them as energy, it would be the amount of energy that is released by a cigarette ash falling a distance of two feet.

So, this is the thinness of the data out of which we have created these incredibly grandiose conceptions of what is happening. Science is just whistling past the graveyard. Don't forget that the telescope is about five hundred years old this year.

So, to believe, you know, that the story science tells us is true when we can't understand the mathematics, we cannot build the instruments ourselves, we cannot analyze the data. I mean, we are under the thumb of a priesthood more domineering, more removed from the ordinary concerns of ordinary people than any priesthood.

I think we should hold all that in advance. I think we should hold all that in advance. I'm not saying it's not true. I'm saying it's not possible to tell whether it's true or not.

One thing psychedelics will do for you for sure is to convince you that what's real is what I call the felt presence of immediate experience. That's what's real. You know, what you think, what you feel, what you see now is what's real.

Even your own memories are so shifting and elusive and subject to psychological transformation based on your own inner and unconscious dynamics and kinks that to believe what somebody else is telling you about the temperature of Betelgeuse or something like that or the charge of the top quark means you're just, you've moved off into some kind of private eye.

Crazy people rave about stuff like this. But I think people who are rooted in a good philosophical method will not give much credence to anything out of reach of their good right arm. And the psychedelic experience is an experience.

You know, I didn't present you with a set of tensor equations or a tape of electromagnetic data interpreted through the fiat of the fishy formula. We're talking experience here. And this experience, if made commiserate with ordinary experience, I think leads to the conclusion that

this is, this is, I said this the other night, this is as dead as you'll ever be. This is as low as you can go. This is as confined a mode of existence as it's possible to know.

And it's all up from here, folks. It's a kind of Gnostic vision. It sees our present circumstance as the low run of a ladder of transformational distillation.

And, you know, we come from we know not where. I mean, we have, yes, the details on the fertilization of the egg by the sperm and so forth and so on.

But where the form comes from, we don't know. This is the mystery of morphogenesis. And then where the form goes to, we do not know.

I mean, I now think that the proper way to think about biology is biological objects. Plants, animals, fungi, bacteria, amoebas, and human beings, biological objects are hyperdimensional objects.

You can tell that that's true. Because whenever you, what is the sine qua non of a biological object? Meaning, what is the thing it must have to be biological?

It must metabolize. That's the essence of life. The form is stable, but the matter and the energy which compose the form are in constant cycling.

The form stabilizes, but the energy is flowing through it, which stabilizes it.

Well, when we use phrases like cycling through it, flowing through it, these are words which imply a temporal dimension.

If you have a chair and you cut into it, it doesn't bleed, it doesn't squirm away, it doesn't begin to rot and fall over.

If you cut into a living object, it undergoes all kinds of changes.

This is because you have destroyed one of the dimensions necessary for its manifestation, the temporal dimension.

The living body has a relationship to time which the chair doesn't have.

The chair is born along in the stream of time.

The biological object is made of time itself as much as it's made of space and matter.

And so, really what birth is, is the descent of this mysterious entity called the form into matter.

It clothes itself with matter and energy through a process of gestation, unfoldment, separation from the environment of gestation and unfoldment, which is the mother's body.

And then it has an autonomous existence, but what is generally true of all life in the phylogenetic, in the, I'm sorry, in the ontogenetic expression, what's true is that it has finite duration.

Everything dies.

The individual dinosaur, the individual elephant, the individual human being, they die.

That means that the form eventually withdraws itself from the domain of matter and energy.

And it then, presumably, exists as it existed before, having added whatever adumbrations, three-dimensional experience has given to it.

So I've come to see the body as basically the placenta of the soul.

And, you know, that's a way of thinking about it that makes dying not so terrifying.

I mean, it's as terrifying as smoking DMT, but it's nothing to claw the walls about.

The body is the placenta of the soul for the individual.

Well, then it's just a short step to realizing that we are now called upon as a species to abandon the body.

The body is the, the collective body is the collective placenta of the species.

And you don't do a war dance around the placenta.

Once it serves its function, which is to bring the forming fetus to the point where it can exist and sustain itself in the dimension for which it is destined.

In the case of ordinary birth, that's three-dimensional space and time.

In the case of this metaphor, it's the hyperspace beyond space and time.

Once we are ready to exist in that dimension, it's time to undergo the journey down the birth canal and bury the placenta under the old apple tree and forget it and move on.

And, you know, I grant you the, the analogy isn't perfect.

I mean, where is the midwife?

Where is the waving bassinet?

But perhaps the answer to that is the midwife is waving in these intimations of the, of the friendly alien presence.

It may be an aspect of humanness that awaits us just over the great divide.

And so we are going to have to, you know, I think that probably now at every talk I give, I make the analogy to birth.

That this is what we in the 20th century are experiencing.

The 20th century is analogous to the birth canal of human history.

And so, you know, the wonderful swim in the amniotic ocean is over.

The, the fool's paradise of, of, of, uh, the fetal life is ending.

Now, the walls are literally closing in.

We can't get enough oxygen.

We're using up our food.

The walls are strangling us.

There's no room on this planet for all of us.

And for us, it's a catastrophe.

But I imagine when a woman goes into transition,

that the fetus, if it's not a metaphysician,

must be fairly alarmed by the situation.

You must just say, well, I guess this is it.

It's all over.

I'm going to be strangled, suffocated, and simultaneously choked to death in this situation.

It would take a far-seeing fetus indeed to embrace the journey down the birth canal

as the road toward, uh, you know, a split-level ranch house.

And here's the most hallelujah if you play your cards right.

Surely that gets the idea.

Could you say more about your content of your today?

I was really fascinated, um, and it seemed like there were some qualities to it

that I wanted to know, hear more about.

Well, sure.

Um, DMT, if you take it orally, is destroyed by enzymes in your gut.

So it has to be smoked unless you have a chemical strategy for inactivating those enzymes.

And so, assuming you smoke it, it comes on in about 30 seconds.

And if you're a leather-lunged ha-shashin, you can maybe get it in one swell foop.

But it takes most people about three hits.

And, uh, the first thing you notice is that, um, it's as though all the air has been drawn

out of the room you're in.

And suddenly the colors come forward, the edges sharpen.

This is really happening.

It has, uh, an extraordinary effect at low doses on visual acuity.

So does psilocybin.

And then you close your eyes.

You feel very peculiar.

A kind of anesthesia sweeps through your body.

A kind of numbing and yet a sense of a building bubble of energy.

Uh, you close your eyes.

And after a few seconds, you see forming in front of you what I call the chrysanthemum.

It's a floral mandala, usually in yellow and orange, most people say.

And it's, it's slowly turning.

It's like a wall.

But it's a hallucination.

But it's right here, right in front of you.

And you watch it for about 15 seconds.

And if it stabilizes, you need one more hit.

But what usually happens is that after about 15 seconds of contemplating this thing, it's

as though suddenly whatever was holding you back, the cable is cut.

And you are just propelled through this membrane.

And there is, you hear a sound like a bread wrapper being crumpled, a cellophane bread wrapper

being crumpled and thrown away, or the crackling of flames.

This is, according to a friend of mine, your radio intellect, he exiting the anterior fontanelle

at the top of your head.

But he could be wrong, but whatever it is.

And then you hear a tone, which is, it could be reproduced on a synthesizer.

It's that, you know, but it keeps going and becomes hypersonic, supersonic, subsonic, I

don't know.

And you, there is a sense of, literally a membrane is ruptured.

And now you're there.

And what happens to me is, the first thing I hear is a cheer, a yell of greeting.

It's, on their second album, the Pink Floyd have a song in which they sing, the gnomes have

a new way to say, Hooray.

Well, you break into this gnome mist.

And it's a very specifically characterized place.

It is domed.

It's indirectly lit.

Not brightly lit, but softeted lighting of some sort.

It's comfortable.

And, but the, but all of that is hard to focus on and relatively inconsequential, because

the main thing that's happening is these things come bounding towards you like greyhounds.

And there are many of them, these jeweled, self-dribbling, transforming basketballs, which

look like iridescent electric radiolaria or something.

I mean, they are diatomaceous neon transforms made of syntax or some damn thing like that.

And they come towards you and the, the, you have to deal with yourself in this situation

because most people, and my reaction is absolute amazement, complete hysterical disbelief.

I mean, you just say, you know, my God, what is happening?

It's, it comes so quickly that it isn't like a drug where, you know, you deep breathe and

you close your eyes and you wait for an hour and you slowly summon it out of its crevice.

It's not like that.

It's like you were struck by lightning.

In fact, some people think they have been struck by lightning, that they never got to the

drug, that just as they raised it to their lips, they were struck by lightning or a jet fighter

fell out of the sky or something.

And then you have to ask yourself, is this okay?

Because it's so radical and it happens so quickly and your eyes are wide open and you don't

see anything recognizable.

Three-dimensional space, the room you were in, everything, it's gone.

Instead, this place, and, and then they tell you, they try to reassure you, although they're

not very reassuring.

What they say is, don't give way to amazement.

Don't abandon yourself to wonder.

Basically, don't be a jerk and a rude, you know.

Pay attention.

Pay attention to what is happening.

And then they proceed to do a very intense form of teen teaching.

They come bounding up.

They present themselves.

They also do this weird thing where they jump into your chest and then they jump back out.

So you're having this sucking in and out of your body thing.

They jump in and out of your chest and they are singing and squeaking and squealing in some

kind of elf glossolalia, which you can see.

This is very important.

They speak a language, which you look at, you don't hear.

And they make objects, which are like super puns of some sort, in that the object is not one thing.

It is somehow several things simultaneously.

The way a pun attains its effect by being simultaneously more than one thing.

But these are not verbal puns.

These are objectified puns in three-dimensional space.

And they're funny.

And the whole thing is pervaded by the word zany is what I use.

It's a form of humor.

It's a form of merriment.

But you can't entirely relax around it because you can't entirely be sure that you're getting the joke.

So it's like it's a humor with an edge to it.

And they are showing you these jeweled, I've compared them to Fabergé eggs.

And when they show you these things, you can tell by looking at them that if you could bring a single one of these objects,

no larger than an orange, into this world, it would end the debate.

I mean, all you would have to do is show it to somebody.

And they would say, that's impossible, but yet it's happening, so therefore my reality is dissolving.

I mean, it's somehow to gaze upon these objects is to be forever corrupted for ordinary consciousness.

And you can't make them with their voices.

These objects are quasi-alive.

The objects themselves can sing and make other objects.

So you're just being, you're like in this, um, a cross between Santa's workshop, Tiffany's,

and the basement of the Metropolitan Museum, and they're offering you all this time.

There's, I've somehow stretched the thread too tightly, and now I'm never going to make my way back.

And they're saying, no, no, can that, that's not what's happening, this is what's happening, pay attention, look, look, look.

And then, it just fades very suddenly, and they sense it coming.

They have urgency because they know the window is tremendously narrow.

And in the final moments, in some cases, I recall, they literally, it recedes away, or you pull away from it,

and they say, deja vu, deja vu.

And then you open your eyes, and you're in the room you left.

It's like a thousand mics of LSD or something.

And you are more loaded than you have ever been in your life.

And you immediately proclaim, my God, I'm completely down.

And, you know, the walls are rubbery.

The Persian carpet is crawling around.

Your friends have faceted faces and look like they just climbed out of one of Billy Meyer's starships.

But you're absolutely, completely down.

You accept this as ordinary.

It's all you can do to keep from kissing the good earth.

Because where you were was so much removed from that that there is no comparison.

Well, now, after doing this a number of times, because the first time you do it,

the goal is pretty much to live through it.

I mean, it's like being shot out of a, I read, I think it was Tim Leary's metaphor.

He said it's like being shot out of a cannon with Baroque barreling.

And afterwards, people want you to draw the barreling when what you were trying to do was live through the experience.

But after you do it many, many times, and it depends on how bright you are and how able to resist freaking out you are,

And this is astonishing to me, based on what I've said so far.

This is someone's, someone's, someone's very strange.

It's someone's idea of a reassuring environment for a human being.

This place you end up, which is the weirdest place you could either conceive of or imagine,

has been specifically designed by someone to be as mundane, ordinary, and like this world as they could possibly make it.

Not only that, the impression that I have is, the vibe of this place, if you will, is, it's a nursery.

It's a play camp, in fact.

And these toys, these things, these elves, are nothing more than the equivalent of stringing a string of colored plastic objects over a bassinet.

They're to teach you spatial relationships, and hand-eye coordination.

You are briefly in a nursery for receiving human beings who have just crossed over from hyperspace.

Well, imagine if all you knew about this world was a nursery and a maternity ward or a home somewhere,

and you're trying to deduce the nature of the universe from a 30-second visit to a human nursery.

That's the kind of position we're in.

And I think that is what gave me the notion that this has to do with the after-death state.

Apparently, one, the soul is literally being born into this other dimension,

and the soul is not, it's exactly like this world.

When you're born into this world, when you're born into this world,

when you're born into this world, you're...

You're just a little worm of a thing, you know.

You have to be held by your mother.

You have to be swaddled.

You have to be kept away from bright lights, breezes, men with cigars, and so forth.

And the soul, as it transits into that place, you immediately meet the tenderly extended existence of your soul in an entirely new domain.

You mean stayed in that place?

No.

And it seems to me unlikely that anyone would, would, because interesting, interesting about DMT is that it has, it occurs naturally in the human brain.

We all make it all the time.

And so, in a sense, this is not a drug at all.

This is a human metabolite that you're getting a tremendous overdose of.

But the fact that it occurs naturally in the human brain means that you have chemical pathways, biosynthetic pathways, that can deal with it.

That's why it lasts so short a time.

One way of talking about the toxicity of a drug is to ask the question, how long before you feel perfectly normal after taking this drug?

If you have a drug that 24 or 48 hours after you take it, you still have lower back pain and you're lying in warm baths and avoiding ringing telephones and don't want to talk to anybody, that's a toxic drug.

I don't care whether it's coke, methadone, or LSD, you shouldn't, that's not good.

But DMT, within 10 minutes, within 10 to 15 minutes after taking it, you not only are down, you can't tell you did it.

There's no residual, no lingering headache, no dryness of mouth, no dilated pupil, nothing.

It's like you took an ice cube and hurled it into a blast furnace and then you went looking for it 15 minutes later.

It's not to be found.

It ain't there.

Well, this is amazing because this is the strongest psychedelic there is.

You'd think that you'd have to put ice packs on your head for a week after this experience and instead it's completely gone.

So, Rupert and I, in talking about this, he developed the idea of what he called a necrotic compound.

He thinks that DMT, that at death, you flood your system with DMT, that this is what these pathways exist for and that it sets you up for dying.

And that if you can, and I gave DMT once to a Tibetan Lama who, a very old one, not one of these alcoholic fundraising llamas, the real thing, the real thing.

And the guy took it like a man, he was probably 92, and afterwards he said, it's the lesser life.

He said, you can't, he said, if you go further, you can't return.

That's the limit.

Beyond that, there is no fail-safe.

And he was perfectly matter-of-fact about it, and I took him at his word.

I mean, if anybody should have known, this is the dude.

And I think it's a tremendous argument for hope.

And you see, it's not only an argument for hope.

It means that if we could get the, well, the infantile, shit-brained, drug-phobic yahoos

sent back to wherever it is that they are going to be sent to practice their family values,

then we could actually do significant research and find out what's going on here.

It's an object of legitimate research.

We don't have to genuflect in front of this like it's a religious mystery,

and we'll always be unknowable.

In principle, what we need to do is you explore this dimension the way you explore any unknown dimension.

You send people of great courage and descriptive skill in with their notebooks,

their telescopes, their tape recorders, or whatever is the equivalent for this job,

and then you find out what it is.

And I think that the, you know, the destiny of the species may be spun into this.

It may not be, it may be that this transition into hyperspace is not as inevitable as I previously assured you.

It may be that we have to do something on this side.

We have to meet them halfway through the mountain.

They're boring toward us.

We have to alert ourselves to the fact that a tunnel is possible,

and then get cracking, you know, with dynamite, which is an analogum for DMT.

Yeah, and Terrence, I wanted to say something about the distinction now between what you have spoke about

for the last kind of 10 minutes,

with the distinction between the Fabergé eggs and basketballs and self-transforming machine elves,

and that, that one may occur by going into the Amazon canopy

and experiencing some type of preparation prepared by the natives,

is that organically mixed, earthly-based hive similar to the synthesized DMT.

Now, I have taken DMT a minimum of years ago,

but it would seem that the natives may describe it,

at least in a much different fashion than yourself.

What is the distinction?

And then, and then also, if you can hit on after that,

the distinction between that and suicide.

Well, the difference is not as great as maybe your question implies.

First of all, the thing that is so interesting about DMT is,

if the only requirement is that you be able to hold the toque,

and if you cough and lose it, then it's murky and mucked up.

Now, in the case of ayahuasca, which is what you're asking about,

it's a, it's a, well, I'll explain to the group.

Remember how I said that DMT is destroyed in your gut, so you have to smoke it?

But then I added the caveat that unless you somehow inactivate this enzyme system in your gut,

which will destroy it, the DMT.

Well, it turns out there's a way to do that.

The enzyme system is called monoamine oxidase,

and there are compounds called monoamine oxidase inhibitors.

If you take a monoamine oxidase, or MAO inhibitor,

then, and follow it with oral DMT,

then the DMT will not be destroyed in your gut.

It will actually be absorbed into the lining of the small intestine,

a large intestine, and then passed into the bloodstream,

and you will have psychedelic intoxication.

Well, in the Amazon, this has been understood by the shamans for a long, long time,

and so they take two plants.

One, Banisteriopsis copy, a large, woody vine, a twining liana,

and it actually contains a powerful, short-acting monoamine oxidase inhibitor.

And they take this vine, and they pulverize it,

and they combine it in a large pot of water with the leaves of another plant,

which contains DMT.

It may be one of several plants.

It's usually Socotria viridis.

Then, they boil these two things together,

and then for hours,

and then they pour the water off,

and save it in a jug,

and put fresh water on this mess of two different plants,

and boil it again for hours.

And then they pour the two water fractions together,

and they get rid of all the solid matter.

They throw it away.

It's now been cooked for six to eight hours.

And they take this watery fraction,

several gallons,

and they drive it down over a hot fire

until they get something,

a dark brown, thick liquid

that is truly horrifying to ingest

because the taste is so ghastly

because all the salts and sugars

and God knows what else

have been concentrated into this stuff.

But this is now a beverage,

a liquid.

I love it.

In the literature,

they call it a cycle-active beverage.

And when you drink it,

the compound from the woody vine,

harmine,

inhibits the MAO,

and the DMT passes through

and enters the bloodstream.

And instead of a ten-minute experience

that reaches the apex of intensity

in two minutes,

you get an experience

which is drawn out,

stretched out,

over about four to six hours.

Now, usually,

this is not...

It's a psychedelic experience.

It's similar to mushrooms in some ways.

But if you really make it stiff,

if you really put the pedal to the metal

on the amount of

Secotria viridis

or DMT-containing leaf

that you put into this stuff,

then,

after about two hours,

you can slowly,

by sitting in darkness,

by practicing breath control,

you can slowly manipulate it

into a place

where you then say,

you know,

by gosh and be golly,

we've made it to the elf nest.

Here it is.

So,

I think that

great shamans,

courageous shamans,

have always been able

to make their way

into the presence of this thing.

But I put the great qualifier

in front of the word shaman

because in my actual field experience

in the Amazon,

what I discovered was

once it got you loaded enough

to be comparable

to, say,

four grams of mushrooms,

most of these guys

would look at you in horror

if you suggested

that it was only twice as strong

as it should be.

The shamans

all over the world

have an ambivalent attitude

toward these dimensions

they go into.

Very few

just hurl themselves

delightedly

into complete boundary

dissolution.

I had a guy tell me once,

he said,

you think just because

we run around

wearing penis sheaves

that this stuff

is easy for us to do?

Well,

I've got news for you.

It's as hard for us

as it is for anybody.

It's hard for human beings

to surrender

to something so strange.

I could never get ayahuasca

to carry me into the DMT nest

until I made it myself.

And then,

with nobody,

you know,

holding my elbow

and keeping me

and telling me

how much

poetry of a ribbon

I could put in,

I was able to jack it up

and jack it up

until finally

it was truly horrifyingly strong.

And that's what you want.

I mean,

we're not interested

in colored lights

and dancing mice here.

But I think if you push the ayahuasca hard,

it all begins to migrate

in this direction.

Psilocybin,

you know,

I advocate five dry grams

in silent darkness.

Eight dry grams

in silent darkness

will give you the indistinguishable

from a DMT flash.

The problem is,

you know,

one thing about DMT

that is both frustrating

and liberating

is that it's so brief.

Basically,

it's like a roller coaster.

The great consolation is

this is only going to last

five minutes.

If you climbed on a roller coaster

of super intensity

and as they dropped the bar

over your lap,

they said,

oh yeah,

this is the four hour trip.

Then you would say,

you know,

hold on,

it doesn't appear though

that by IV,

which is mostly

how I did it years ago,

that it seemed that

it was extended

to about 30 to 40 minutes.

IV DMT?

Yeah.

Do you mean

that you shot it intervenently?

You don't mean

that it was

a perfusion pump situation?

No.

Well, see,

I've talked to people

who've done research

on DMT

and a surprising conclusion

that comes out

of those discussions

is that

shooting it

is not as intense

as smoking it.

Shooting it

sounds fairly intense,

but people

who do both

say shooting it

can't lay a candle

to...

And this is

a funny thing,

and I'll just mention it

as an aside.

Drug researchers

love to shoot

drugs into their

experimental subjects.

They love the syringe

as the route

of administration

because you get

better numerical data

because you can

measure the dose

absolutely,

and then you hit them

and you know

they've got it.

If you smoke

something,

you may,

you know,

obviously,

when you can hold

your breath

no longer

and you exhale,

smoke comes

into the room.

That's not

part of your dose.

And sometimes

there's a residuum

in the bottom

of a pipe.

That's not

part of your dose.

So in the name

of precision,

people who've done

research on DMT

have always shot it.

Even the recent

study out

at the University

of New Mexico

was by injection.

I tried to persuade

them to do

a section

with smoking,

but this argument

for numerical

precision

carried the day.

But the effect

of relying

on intravenous

injection

like that

is that

no one

in the clinical

situation

has ever

observed

or experienced

the flash

that I'm

talking about.

I don't think

you can attain

except by

smoking.

How about

the penis

snubs

of the

anomalous

smoking?

No,

I've done

those.

And that

is,

you know,

well,

the truth,

let the chips

fall within me.

Highly

overrated

for several

reasons.

First of

all,

you have

to snuff

close to

a tablespoon

of these

toasted

and powdered

if

anademanthera

peregrinus

seeds,

and

there's a lot

of cellulose

there,

and so

you do not

absorb it

instantly.

The other

thing is

it's so

physically

unpleasant

to do

it

that there's

a tendency

to hit,

to cut low

on the

dose.

Because

the standard

method of

administering

a demon

is you have

a hollow

reed,

like a

bamboo

reed,

about this

long.

You fill

it with

this

powdered,

toasted

sawdust

essentially

that has

been reduced

to flour,

and

you get

up on

your

haunches

and your

friend

comes over

and you

put the

tube up

your

nostril

and he

blows.

He takes

a huge

lumpful

of air

and he

just blows

as hard

as he

can.

Well,

the effect

is like

being hit

in the

face

with a

two-by-four.

I mean,

you stagger

backwards,

you salivate,

it's

intensely

painful,

you scream,

you squirm

around in

the dirt

and then

you get

back up

on your

haunches

and by

that time

he has

loaded

the tube

for the

second

nostril

and then

the whole

thing

happens

all over

again

except

now

you're

salivating,

your eye

is swollen

up,

your sinuses

are filled

with this

gunk

and you

do it

again,

same thing,

scream,

squirm in

the dirt,

so forth

and so on,

then you

stagger

over out

of the

sun

into

the

shed

and

through it

with this

saliva just

pouring out

of your

mouth

and after

about five

minutes

you begin

to drift

into

a psychedelic

state

of some

sort

but there

is no

sense

of a rush

of a

splitting

of the

world

into two

halves

it's

not an

effective

route

of

administration

oh well

once they

get

intoxicated

then they

play this

strange

game

which is

almost

characteristic

of this

white

Yanomamo

cultural

group

guys

square off

they

stand

about

three feet

apart

from each

other

and

by some

means

equivalent

of tossing

a coin

it's been

decided

who will

go first

so the

guy who

goes

first

is totally

loaded

on this

stuff

and he

has

mucus

running out

of his

nose

saliva

running out

of his

mouth

his eyes

are swollen

practically

swollen

shut

he

pulls back

his hand

and he

hits

the other

guy

right in

the center

of the

chest

as hard

as he

can

so the

guy

either

loses

his feet

or doesn't

anyway

he grunts

like a

bull

and stands

there

he also

is in

the same

state

then he

pulls back

and then

he does

it

and they

keep doing

this

until

somebody

is

knocked

off

their

spot

and

when you

interview

what you

are told

is

your

ability

to

stand

on

your

spot

depends

on

how

many

of

these

hikuli

spirits

you have

inside

your chest

and so

this is

some kind

of

Yanomamo

psychology

meeting

the raw

data

of the

DMT

experience

I don't

know

what

they're

talking

about

but

it

has

something

to

do

with

the

DMT

things

that

jump

in

and

out

of

your

chest

when

you

smoke

it

they

believe

that

the

demon

from

the

tree

will

live

in

your

chest

and

the

more

of

these

tree

demons

inside

your

chest

you

have

the

more

physically

able

to

resist

being

knocked

off

your

spot

you

are

and

the

more

shamanically

empowered

you

are

but

this

goes

to a

point

I

often

make

with

my

groups

which

is

one

ethnic

group

or

one

culture's

drug

is

another

person's

pain

in the

neck

I've

taken

awful

drugs

that the

people

after it

was over

with

they

would

you

say

god

you

guys

do

this

all

the

time

it's

really

kind

of

ugh

and they

say

yeah

well

it takes

getting

used

to

and

we

really

don't

do

it

all

that

often

only

ceremonies

and

you're

right

most

people

are

glad

to

get

it

over

with

and

go

back

to

the

palm

beer

so your

experience

is basically

that it's

too caveman

like

it's very hard

on the

system

biologically

and

it makes

it so

that

the

time

that you

could be

having

exploring

these

strange

dimensions

is

somehow

inhibited

yeah

I don't

think

in the

bema

taking

situation

that you

ever

get

enough

all at

once

to the

synapses

in sufficient

concentration

to deliver

you over

into

what I'm

describing

occurring

on this

I heard

took

ayahuasca

and linked

in this

novel

right

after

trying

to

ayahuasca

strangely

enough

though

those

cultural

groups

do not

overlap

you know

where there

is

ayahuasca

there

people

people are

surprisingly

conservative

I mean

I've

sat

with

ayahuasca

and done

their brew

and talked

to them

about

DMT

and then

they say

well

describe it

so then

I will

describe it

as I

described it

to you

here

and then

my best

guy said

well

I don't

know it

sounds a

little

intense

I think

I'll

take a

pass

on it

and he

was my

mentor

in the

domain

of

ayahuasca

it's

pretty

stout

stuff

I think

that

you know

shamans

have always

you know

looked over

the fence

looked through

the keyhole

stepped

through the

doorway

but I

think

DMT

pure

crystalline

DMT

or

ayahuasca

specifically

brewed

to

reality

obliterating

doses

is the

only way

you can

approach

just like

yeah

I'm wondering

on the

experience

you talk

about

your

being

taught

yes

again

the second

part

would be

how

have you

done it

I've done

it

maybe

thirty

times

I haven't

done it

for a

couple

of

years

DMT

no

DMT

I'm

sometimes

I think

it's a

young

man's

game

or sometimes

I'm just

getting

chicken

shit

you know

this is

not a

drug

of

abuse

let me

tell you

I know

people

who say

it's their

favorite

drug

and you

say

well when

was the

last time

you did

it

and they

say

and they're

still

processing

to feel

no need

to go

back

and have

a second

look

what was

the first

part of

your question

what kind of

knowledge

ah the

knowledge

the knowledge

is interesting

the knowledge

is

they want

you

they want

me

to

make

language

that you

can see

they

absolutely

are

convinced

that this

ability

to make

things

visible

with sound

can be

taught

and that's

what they

want you

to do

they

demonstrate

it

they say

see what

we're doing

see what

we're doing

now

do it

and say

no excuses

we don't

have a lot

of time

it's almost

over

do it

and

then you

attempt

to do it

and

you discover

in that

place

you can

do this

but why

this is so

important

because when

you come

back to

this world

and

listen to

tape recordings

of yourself

doing it

it's

gibberish

of some

sort

mythologically

driven

glossolalia

it's like

you know

it's a language

unhinged

from the

necessity

of meaning

and yet

it is

true

that when

you do

it

in that

place

it's

absolutely

ecstatic

it's

like

sex

but

sex

is sort

of like

a white

light

kind of

thing

this is

like

a colored

spectrum

if you

could

put

the

sexual

experience

through

a prism

and change

the purity

of orgasm

into

a spectrum

of stuff

then it

would be

like

this

language

it's

pure

poetry

it's

poetry

so thick

you can

literally

cut it

with a knife

and they

want

you to

do

this

and they

are

absolutely

passionate

about

this

is

what

we

are

here

to

teach

you

how

to

speak

in a language

that can

be seen

and

you know

a language

which could

be seen

would be

a kind

of telepathy

you know

if you

could

see

what

I

mean

you

would

see

my

thoughts

the way

we

communicate

small

mouth

noises

and

the

assumption

of

shared

dictionaries

an

assumption

which is

never

borne out

by

careful

questioning

is

a miserable

way

to

communicate

if we

could

see

our

linguistic

intentionality

it would

be the

equivalent

of

seeing

our

mind

and

so

what

they

this is

what

they

want

us

to

do

now

maybe

if

one

were

truly

dead

they

wouldn't

be

so

urgent

about

it

and

they

would

be

like

a

relative

leaning

over

a

bassinet

and

holding

up

objects

and

saying

look

at

this

baby

look

at

this

is

a

bell

or

something

but

definitely

what

they

teach

is

in

the

domain

of

language

and

it's

not

a

teaching

which

can

be

said

like

love

one

another

or

you

know

if

it's

juicy

eat it

over

the

It's more an ability locked in your physiological structure that we're not using.

They want us to speak in colored lights.

And it's their agenda, it's not mine.

I haven't the faintest idea why that is so compelling to them.

Well, that's a little unfair because I've given a lot of thought to it.

But initially, I couldn't figure it out.

So, we'll, I'm sure, get more into this this afternoon.

It is the little self-transforming elf machine informs me.

Lunchtime.

Thank you for putting up with this.

I appreciate your silent scorn or whatever it is.

I've been caught in the clutter of the day today.

Some of them say, it scares me shit.

And that, and that, and other times you, what you said, you wonder why it isn't in headlines 11 inches tall.

There seems to be something about the experience that is, I don't know if self-selecting is the right word, or evolutionary selecting.

Why isn't, why aren't there, why is there such a small percentage of people who actually end up, although you say everyone can do it.

They do have the genetic possibility, but there's something more in a selective period that, where a shaman will come out, because it is, as you say, an awesome responsibility.

And yet, it's everyone's possible liberate.

And then one last thing, another coda to this, you mentioned that you don't think that it's the Bush or Reagan, et cetera, feeling that they just want to keep an economic grip as far as the sale of would-be hallucinogenics.

Don't you think that there is some degree of teleological repression going on as well?

I mean, you mentioned that you didn't feel that way, but I, I, I, some, other times I've heard you feel that there definitely is.

Well, I think that, yeah, I mean, it simplifies the issue to say that it's entirely a money issue.

Right.

Because the psychedelics are used by so small a percentage of people that it doesn't rate the tremendous institutional fury that is brought against it.

And where you really see the contradiction in economic logic is with pot.

I think that the subtext of the government's fear about psychedelics is that this quality that they have of dissolving boundaries causes people to question basic assumptions about how society is run.

And I think this is true.

And I think this is true of any society.

It isn't an American phenomenon.

It's that if you take psychedelics, whatever you are, you know, Eskimo, Hasidic rabbi, quantum physicist, you will question your first premises.

And you get millions of people questioning the first premises and then the powers that be become very nervous.

It's interesting that this whole phenomenon of the 1960s occurred because American commitment to universal public education reached, brought its first generation of people to adulthood in the middle of the 1960s.

Because that universal commitment to public education began after World War II, after the establishment took a look at what this filling, you know, actually funding and building up great public universities and then filling them with inquisitive young people.

What the result of that was, that's when they decided to turn the universities back into trade schools for CPAs, which they did do.

I mean, there is nothing like the level and the breadth of education and intellectual curiosity that was encouraged when I was going to school.

That's all finished now.

Now you're expected to do your data entry job, watch a lot of TV and keep your mouth shut.

And this is what we expect of our college graduates.

So, really, there was a crisis of faith in American institutions, which was only exacerbated by psychedelics.

It was a combination of educating people to the actual traditions of Western civilization in large numbers for the first time, and then giving them psychedelics.

I mean, or having them exposed to psychedelics.

And people began to ask questions for which there were no answers.

And the response of the establishment was to suppress this.

I mentioned cannabis.

You know, you're all probably aware, through the work of the hemp people, that cannabis holds many benefits, not necessarily related to its properties as an intoxicant, but as a source of food, lubricant, plastics, fuels, etc.

And the reason the establishment is so hysterical on the subject of cannabis is because it erodes loyalty to the industrial state.

I mean, that's why, if you look at the pharmacological profile, let's contrast two familiar drugs.

One, caffeine.

We have the medical data, which shows that it can contribute to fetal malformation.

We know that it damages the liver.

We know that it, if abused, can cause severe stomach ulcers, so forth and so on.

Cannabis, vast amounts of money have been spent trying to find something wrong with it.

And they're still digging, folks.

I mean, they've decided it doesn't cause tits on statues.

It doesn't.

You know, all the screwy things they've come up with over the years have had to be abandoned.

Why is caffeine enshrined in every labor contract negotiated in the Western world as a sacred right of all workers twice daily?

And why is cannabis that, you know, you can lose your house, your automobile, your bank account, your art collection,

simply because you had six plants in the back 40, and your children.

Why this disparity?

Well, what is the effect of caffeine?

It makes it possible for you to perform your duties during the last three hours of the work cycle

with efficiency equal to the first three hours of the work cycle.

It allows people to tolerate spinning widgets onto gombers until hell creates it over

without a thought ever rising in their mind that maybe this is a ridiculous way to spend your life.

Cannabis, on the other hand, people aren't so interested in going to work.

They'd rather lay around and make love.

They don't want to watch TV.

They'd rather smoke a doobie and have a conversation with a friend.

In other words, these things promote activities which don't make anybody any money

and cause people to question the institutions and the social philosophies that are being shoved down their throats.

If the playing field were level, caffeine might well be a prescription drug, not that I think that's a good idea,

and cannabis, I think, would probably be freely available.

The most dangerous drugs in society in terms of detrimental social impact are alcohol and tobacco,

the two most freely available.

I mean, every street corner of every city, they're peddled in vast amounts.

We have a very crack-brained approach to the problem of drugs.

We're not the only society.

All societies seem to do this.

Out of a possible spectrum of 20 or 30 depressants and intoxicants,

most societies select three or four which they hail as harmless,

and then the rest are, you know, the seed of Satan.

And this attitude is persevered against all scientific data, against all medical research.

This is just what people choose to think.

The problem is we don't have the luxury of this kind of ignorance anymore.

The amount of revenue that could be accrued from cannabis economy,

the pressure that could be taken off petroleum extraction if cannabis were part of the picture.

All of these things make it incumbent upon us, I think, to think more creatively and more honestly

about which drugs really are posing problems for us.

The other question really relates to this is why are there, given the fact, why is the percentage of shamans so small relative to a population?

Because of the fact that, as you say, there's fear in going into, there's attraction and fear in going into these other realms.

And there's obviously maybe some self-limiting aspect of the hyper-dimensional view,

which there's some dynamic going on because everyone has an equal opportunity to go to this hyper-dimensional,

but very few of their own initiatives really push to that point where you are definitely within the hyper-dimensional realm.

Well, there are different things to be said about this.

I mean, first of all, there are what are called biochemical differences in individuality,

and never more so than in the matter of drugs.

People are very different from each other.

Years ago, I took a course from Sasha Shogan at Cal,

and at one point he brought in some substance, I don't know what it was,

and this was a class of 600 people,

and passed it around and asked everybody to take a sniff of this bottle.

Well, 598 people pronounced this stuff completely odorless.

Two people were almost violently ill from the overpowering odor of this thing.

They possessed a gene for the sensitivity to this compound that caused it to be, for them, overwhelming,

for everyone else, unnoticeable.

And we're surrounded by these kinds of individual biochemical differences.

In traditional societies, shamanism is often a family business,

and it may well be that this is because ability to handle these psychedelic substances,

and to really get mileage out of them, is a genetic endowment of some sort.

I mean, cannabis, again, provides an interesting example.

One of the commonest things you hear people say about cannabis, who don't smoke it,

is they say, I used to, or I tried it, but it makes me paranoid.

Well, to the people who use it, this is inconceivable.

In fact, it's almost an antidote to paranoia, because it seems to make things appear more Taoistic,

more integrated, it all makes more sense.

These are biochemical differences that need to be studied.

You know, different racial groups have different relationships to intoxication.

I mean, I think it's probably there is some truth to the idea that the North American Indians had a susceptibility to distilled alcohol

that the Europeans, who had been dealing with it for a couple of centuries by the time they arrived here, didn't have,

because the North American Indians represented a closed gene pool, never having been exposed to this.

There was no selection for being able to handle it.

And then there's another issue in relation to your question, John, which is, first of all, you know, some people say,

well, not all shamans take hallucinogens.

Well, true, and I've excited some people's ire by suggesting, but all real shamans do.

And, you know, saying that somebody is a shaman, I mean, imagine if simply being able to rave and exhort on the subject of the four gospels

qualified you as a man of the Lord, actually you have to sort through dozens of so-called preachers to find somebody you would be willing to leave alone with your chickens.

Well, similarly, you have to sort through a lot of people who claim to be shamans before you find somebody who really is one.

I mean, we tend to be naive.

Go to the Amazon with your heart on your sleeve seeking ayahuasca.

And I guarantee, unless you go well-connected, you'll drink a lot of swill before you get to somebody honest enough,

responsible enough, conscientious enough to actually make it right and do it right.

And in the case of shamanism, usually this is going on in cultures without literacy, without written languages.

And so they don't hold conferences or publish proceedings or have the university matriculation examinations in shamanism.

So, on the surface, a shaman is anyone who claims to be a shaman or who cares to claim.

But in terms of real shamanic ability, I think it only comes through either innate special abilities,

which probably means innate high sensitivity to neurological, to neurotransmitters, exotic neurotransmitters,

or it comes through an exposure to hallucinogens.

This is a big argument in anthropology.

I mean, Mersel Iade, who normally I am very deferent to, got this one completely wrong

and decided on absolutely no evidence that what he called narcotic shamanism was decadent.

Well, first of all, the use of the word narcotic in that context shows that he didn't know what he was talking about.

Nobody uses narcotics to shamanize. You go to sleep if you take narcotics.

So, what he wanted to say was that he felt hallucinogenic shamanism was decadent.

But what is the alternative? Reliance on ordeals, fasting, or pathological personalities.

Maybe epileptics or borderline schizophrenics or something like that.

I think that these kinds of shamanisms that are not hallucinogenically based are derivative shamanisms,

but occur at a later stage of culture when the plant-based shamanism has been disrupted by some migration,

or the disappearance of the plants involved, or something like that.

From what I understand, the Lakota and genics, they accomplished all this through, you know, the drum beat and the song and things like that.

Right on.

I think acoustical driving can carry you a certain distance.

There are substitutes for how it works.

I think acoustical driving can carry you a certain distance.

There are substitutes for hallucinogens, but they're neither as effective nor as pleasant.

I mean, ordeals are what many cultures get into.

Well, I was just thinking, you know, along the lines of that, you know,

you know, in the south-west, you know, in the south-west.

You know, it's prominent.

Yeah, well, I think acoustical driving can carry you a certain distance.

There are substitutes for hallucinogens, but they're neither as effective nor as pleasant.

I mean, ordeals are what many cultures get into.

Well, I was just thinking, you know, along the lines of, you know, someone like Crazy Voice

that came out from the culture and seemed to possess these, you know, abilities and manifest them physically.

Well, there's also the exceptional personality.

The exceptional personality breaks all the rules, see.

So would you say then, Terence, that there is a genetic proclivity maybe in some individuals

if there is access to botanicals and if there is no historical evidence of shamanism prior to that,

for that individual to start engaging in explorations?

Yeah, I think so.

You know, Maria Sabina claimed that she was never initiated into shamanism.

She claimed that as a girl herding the cattle, she ate the mushrooms because she was hungry,

and that she was basically self-taught in shamanism in a society that actually had shamanic lineages and institutions.

In Madagascar, there are these highly evolved ordeal poisons, and this is where you take a plant, you feel like you're dying, you beg to die, you want to die, and you don't die.

You come back from it a better person, but it is only because you were slammed up against death itself.

Ordeals work, but they're not very pleasant.

And the idea of putting yourself through an ideal like that once a week or twice a month as part of your professional practice is pretty outrageous.

The other thing that has to be said, and this is really important, and I think anthropologists have sold this one short,

experiences are what we are least able to communicate to each other.

We can describe machine parts, agricultural procedures, but anything in the realm of feeling, our languages are woefully impoverished.

And I don't think that's specific to English.

I think it haunts all human experience, that it's hard to communicate how we feel.

Well, so then there's a vast spectrum of experiences that come from plants, and I dare say most of them unpleasant.

Let's start out with eating Diefenbachia or something, which causes your throat tissues to swell up and you feel like you're strangling.

Or, you know, Amanita muscaria is a very controversial shamanic plant because some people say it's garbage.

And Gordon Wasson in his last book called it the supreme entheogen of all time.

Well, clearly people are, are they talking about different things?

Or are they interpreting the same experience differently?

And so there are, for example, you know, people who are fond of peyote like, if they haven't done their homework,

like to imagine that they are taking this ancient, ancient hallucinogen that has informed the lives of the Sonoran and the Indians of that area for thousands and thousands of years.

Well, this is, as far as anybody can tell, complete bunk.

There is no record of peyote use older than four or five hundred years.

Most of it is post-ghost dance.

Before, when you go into the old Sonoran graves, the old archaeology of the Sonoran Batara Humara Indians, you find Sikora Sifundifolia beams, the little black and red beams that you see in Mexico strung into jewelry sold along the side of the roads.

That's what those Indians took for thousands and thousands of years.

We have a continuous record over about four thousand years of these seeds being buried in graves with ritual instruments indicating that they were buried with shamans.

You couldn't give it away today because it is such a horrible experience.

It's essentially sublethal strychnine poisoning.

It can kill you effortlessly.

It's clear that at some point, fairly recently, somebody tried peyote and said,

my God, this stuff we've been taking for thousands and thousands of years is just horrible compared to this.

This is great.

And immediately, there was a transfer of loyalty.

And Lord knows, eating fresh peyote is no gourmet.

So, the point there being, cultures tend to define experiences differently.

And you can't tell what people are talking about until you really check in.

Traveling around the world, you know, you end up in certain cultures and they say,

Oh, we're so happy to have you here.

As our honored guest, we would like you to eat some of our national...

National...

Let's say you're in Scotland, and so they say, well, you must eat some Huggies, because this is what we all eat. We all really love this. This is the best part of Scottish life. Boy, are you going to love this.

Well, when it's finally served, you know, your jaw drops in disbelief, because it's ghastly, unless you're Scotch. And, well, but if you're Scotch, you dare not say so, you see, because a cultural myth has been built up around, I mean, do Italians knock red wine? Do the French denounce truffles? Certainly not.

Oh, true. Pate de foie gras is always my example. So what you have to realize is that these things are culturally defined, and often what works for the Nyanamamo, or the Muinani, or the Witoto won't work for you.

Datura is a good example. Datura is a shamanic plant used by many people throughout the world. All of them, I think, pharmacologically deprived, otherwise they wouldn't put up with what you have to put up with to take that stuff, you know.

And my interest, and I know it was practical, was to find a hallucinogen that did what I wanted it to do, and didn't do anything I didn't want it to do.

What I was interested in was, first of all, hallucinations, because some people say I'm obsessed with it. Fine.

My notion is that if you can see something that isn't there, that's very much more convincing than just funny thoughts, racing ideas, strange physical sensations.

It's a powerful and boundary dissolving confrontation when you confront what is not there. And so I find, and this is a heresy for sure, I'm not that fond of LSD. I think it's a very sloppy drug.

I think, you know, you feel terrible the next day. I always did. I had tight headaches, body aches. People always say, well, it was not clean, it had speed in it, it had strychnine in it.

Eh, maybe. But even the good stuff is not, and it wouldn't hallucinate for me the way I wanted it to. I could get hallucinations if I would smoke hash with it.

But on its own, it was what I have described in other places as abrasively psychoanalytic, unpleasant, confrontational. And what I was interested in were hallucinations.

And so when I got to psilocybin, I remember after my first mushroom trip, I said, thank God we found this stuff. I'll never take LSD again. That wasn't quite true.

But I'll bet I've taken it less than half a dozen times since my first psilocybin trip.

So, and in terms of the chemistry of these things, my conclusion from all this fiddling is that it's the indole hallucinogens that are at the center of the mandala.

They do what we want them to do with very little detrimental side effects. LSD is one of them.

Ebogaine is one of them. Not one widely known. We've got to save something for our old age folks.

Harmine and Harmeline, the beta-carbolines, when complexed with DMT, and then psilocybin. And I think that's the basic lift.

Well, those do. These are really the keys which open the lock very easily, very cleanly, very dependably.

And that's where I would put all of my attention. And, you know, even in that domain, you have to be somewhat careful.

My brother and I spent years tracking down a hallucinogen in the Amazon called ukuhe that was an orally active form of DMT, which we remember I said that DMT is destroyed in the gut.

So we were fascinated to try and find this ukuhe because we wanted to know how it was possible that it could work orally.

And also the ethnographic accounts claimed that the people who used it spoke with little men.

And we wanted to see these little men to see if they were the same little men we were trying to...

Well, we had three expeditions to the Amazon before we finally closed in on this stuff.

And when we finally got it, you know, with this tremendous sense of having attained the grail and having finally this was going to do it, this was going to be the one...

Then we took this stuff and, my God, it turned us every way but loose.

Your heart feels like it's pounding its way out of the front of your chest.

You vomit.

You have tremoring of the limbs.

On and on and on.

So we go through this, live through it, wash off in the river and go looking for the shaman to lodge a complaint.

And he says, yeah, well, it's hard to get used to.

And so then when we get it back home to the lab and do the high-pressure gas chromatography and all the rest of it and see what's really there,

you see that the genetic component of the varrola trees from which this resin is extracted is a mess.

It's too many tryptamines.

DMT, DET, 5-monomethyl tryptamine, 5-MAO DMT, and several other cardioactive tryptamines.

It looked like they'd swept the floor of an endochemist's lab to put together the components of this plant.

You don't want this.

You don't, because it's like taking 10 drugs at once.

You know, it's all running together.

You can't tell whether you're Agnes or Angus.

What you want is a DMT source where when you put it in the grass chromatograph, no, in the gas chromatograph,

you get one spike, that's NM-dimethyl tryptamine, and all the rest is cellulose, a little DNA, and that's all, some minerals and salt.

But if you don't have a clean source, then, you know, it's contaminated.

So even that legendary shamanic hallucinogen, when actually put to the use test, wasn't able to pass it.

Yes, going back to the DMT and mushroom psilocybin, you were talking about taking psilocybin and then doing breath control

is indistinguishable from a DMT source.

If you do it correctly, you can coax it.

Since this is the learning tree, and you're sort of in front there, maybe you could give us an idea of what it's like to coax 5G into an...

I mean, I'm sure you won't be able to give us all the information, but maybe you can sort of enlighten us a little bit,

and we can sort of work in that direction.

At least I can work in that direction.

Well, you mean, how do you get at the peak of a psilocybin trip to deliver you into DMT land?

Yes, because sometimes I get a little jealous hearing you talk about DMT prayer.

And I sit here and say, you know, I want to find that stuff.

Anyway, so...

Well, the thing is, psilocybin will take you there if you have the courage and the stamina to tolerate the duration of the psilocybin revelation.

So first of all, you take a heroic dose, 5, 6, 7 grams.

Then, when you're peeking, well, you smoke cannabis.

Then, you sit in silent darkness, alone, because I think the presence of other people always pins you to the surface with this stuff.

You don't need somebody else.

No matter if they're talking or not, they can just be in the room and you're aware of it.

If you're sitting there, then this is a different thing.

Yes.

Breathing, exhaling, breathing, exhaling.

And then, you form an intention for it to approach you.

I mean, you say...

I can feel it.

I mean, it's almost a neighborhood.

It's a pharmacological neighborhood.

And you know how you may go to Little Italy, but there are no Italians on the street.

But if you start, you know, you have to somehow shake them out of the nest.

And you simply ask for them to appear.

I always hark back to that episode of I Love Lucy, where she and Ethel are discussing how to contact the space people.

And Lucy tells Ethel, she says, well, I just say, come in, little green men.

Come in, little green men.

And, you know, yeah, it's a big laugh now, but try it on 25 milligrams of silicide.

Well, the they of the DMT thing is these entities which you contact, although they may turn out to be toys created by someone unseen

who is, in fact, in charge of this hyper-dimensional maternity ward.

But these toys, if that's what they are, are essentially teaching machines of some sort.

They're trying to get you to perform this linguistic activity.

As far as the UFO thing is concerned, I think it's...

Well, it sort of requires some background.

I think that there's something fundamentally wrong with our understanding of the world.

Fundamentally wrong.

And what it is, is that we believe that the past creates the present.

That the present is the sum total of actions and situations that exist in the past.

In other words, we believe that the horse pushes the cart.

The horse doesn't push the cart.

The cart is pulled.

There is an attractor in the future.

There is actually, I think of history as a bowl.

Down these slopes, we are making our way.

Well, since we are in a situation where conservation of energy is important,

where are we all going to end up?

The bottom of the bowl, obviously.

That's, if you release a marble up on the rim,

it's going to make its way down the bowl to what's called the dwell point.

The place where the energy requirements are such

that the forward momentum of the falling ball

is satisfied by meeting the resistance of the bottom of the bowl.

History is like this.

We are being pulled forward by an attractor.

It has somehow come into the human world

and has pulled us out of animal organization.

If this attractor were not present,

we would still probably be cheerfully slinging excrement around

in the canopy of some jungle tree.

But because of the attractor,

we have been pulled into social organization,

technology, language, community, so forth and so on.

And mystics and seers and visionaries

are people who have a relationship to this attractor

that is different from the rest of us.

They can glimpse aspects of this thing.

And when I think of it this way,

I always think of those jewels,

the mirrored ball that they hang over the bar in a disco,

and then they spin it and it throws reflections of light

all over the room from the ambient lighting.

Well, history is like this.

The attractor at the end of time,

which is below the event horizon of the present

and thus impossible to anticipate its true form,

sends back through time distorted reflections of itself,

which if you are struck by one of these distorted reflections,

well, then you begin to preach and cure,

and local conditions may damp your activity,

and then you're what's called a nut.

But if, in fact, local conditions support your activity

so that you become a mean spreader,

then you're suddenly a messiah,

a teacher, a Buddha, a Christ, a Mohammed.

That's what these people were.

They were people who were, for reasons,

mysterious to themselves, I'm sure,

in a relationship of resonance with the transcendental object,

such that they, in a sense, embodied it.

Well, in our own era, because of technology,

and Jung was on to this when he wrote his book in 1948

called Flying Thorses,

A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky.

He said the flying saucer is an image of the self

that haunts the skies of Earth

as a compensatory effect to our alienation.

Well, I think that that's exactly what's going on,

except that he didn't realize

how nuts and bolts that explanation was.

The UFO is a mirage being cast backward into time

by the transcendental object at the end of time.

And that's why it has such a hair-raising aura of weirdness about it.

It isn't a ship from another star system.

I mean, how could anyone reasonably entertain that idea,

given the distances in time

and what you find when you get here?

I mean, who would make that trip

who had any reasonable way to spend their time?

It's a compensatory image that haunts time

because time is a kind of hologram.

Time is a fractal.

And fractal means that the same pattern is embedded

again and again in a relationship of self-similarity.

So, because the transcendental object exists

somewhere ahead of us in history,

there must necessarily be a tiny part of it

somewhere nearby.

And this is what the UFO is, I think.

And this is why nobody's ever going to show you a chunk of it

and they're never going to put an extraterrestrial

on network television

because it isn't that kind of a creature.

It's a compensatory image from the end of time.

This leads me to an aspect of what I wanted to talk about,

what I very briefly and obliquely indicated this morning,

which was when I was talking about

how we're halfway through history,

but the rest of it has to happen in only 30 years.

I think that we're moving towards something called concrescence.

This isn't my word.

It's Alfred North Whitehead's word.

I think you can tell what it means.

It means everything melts together into one thing.

I think that from the very birth of the universe,

this is bigger than the human species,

bigger than the life of the earth.

From the very first moments of the universe's existence,

it has been itself under the domain,

under the influence of an attractor.

And this attractor is pulling everything

into tighter and tighter states of self-reflective resonance.

And that now we are very close to this concrescent event.

And that, in fact, human history,

I called it the shockwave of eschatology.

But I didn't talk much about what eschatology is.

Because, well, first of all,

it lies below the event horizon

of the present historical epoch.

But it won't always.

It could rise above the horizon at any time.

You know, 2000, 1996, you name it.

But we have been too long under the spell of the idea

that only the past creates the present.

The present is actually largely created

by appetite for the future.

And this would seem to me a highly improbable idea

had I not taken psychedelics

and gotten this hyper-dimensional view

of the system that we're living in.

And then you can see that, yes,

history is not a random walk.

It's not a series of undirected random fluctuations.

History is a process of fractal self-complexification

that builds on whatever it has achieved.

And so, upon the complexity of animal organization

is laying the complexity of human language.

Upon the complexity of human language

is laid the complexity of symbolic signification

of that language, i.e. writing.

Upon writing is laid electronic technology,

and so forth and so on.

So, we are, in a sense,

in the act of giving birth to

or creating the object of our theologies,

which is a kind of god or goddess,

depending on, you know,

how you slice into it,

how you feel about it.

And the UFO is simply an indicator

that we are so close now

to encountering the contrescent transcendental object

that it's able to haunt the skies of Earth

and the imaginations of people

who live in trailer parks.

This is, you know,

you have to remember that history itself

is a violation of the laws of nature,

and history and its consequences are all around us.

We don't have to argue about whether

is history happening.

I mean, if obviously it's happening,

we're embedded late in it.

But it's caused by the fact that ordinary nature,

the nature of glaciers, chipmunks,

anthills, termites, termite nests,

and whale pods,

has come, at least in the case of our species,

under the influence of something

which is literally fastened onto us

and is now recreating us in its image.

You know, it's taking a monkey body

and it's saying, you know,

stand it up,

slide the eyes around to the front,

oppose the thumb,

shed the hair,

enlarge the brain,

put ideas into the brain,

so forth and so on.

I mean, we are being recast

as something unimaginable

to the rest of nature.

And we are now fairly close

to figuring out what this is.

This is why we are able to talk

about human-machine symbiosis,

virtual reality,

downloading ourselves to the size of viruses

in a nanotechnological domain,

stuff like that.

So, could you say that the index

of contrast

is taking what has to do

with contact

human-inspired mediation,

or what's the name of Harvard,

a psychiatrist,

a contractor,

and all the number of people

who's worked with these claims

that have had

fertilization?

Yeah, I agree with your idea

that it's an index

of the depth of compressence,

though muddied

by shrewd public relations types

who are making a living

off this stuff.

I think the crop circles

are a more honest indication

of how close we are

to the transcendental body.

I interviewed the person

you mentioned at Harvard

for a film we did in Prague

a few months ago,

and I...

His name was?

I'm a boy.

Wait, oh.

And I had to ask him

halfway through the interview,

I said,

well, do you detect anything

in your own psychological makeup

which makes you unfit

to be doing this work?

That was after he told me

that he'd interviewed

500 women

who had had fetuses

removed from their bodies

by space people,

and he said,

you know,

the amazing thing

about this is

there are no physical scars

at all,

and I said,

well,

what does this suggest to you?

And he said,

advanced surgical techniques

of which we have no knowledge,

and I'm just...

My craft detector

went AWOL

on that answer.

The rules of evidence

are not in suspension

for the new age,

and, you know,

people who recall

their lifetime

as the barber of Nefertiti

or whatever

have serious problem

with what I call

the rules of evidence.

They don't seem

to have ever heard

of Occam's Razor,

which you study logic

for ten minutes,

and they tell you

about Occam's Razor.

Do you all know

what this is?

It's a simple idea.

Keep it next to you.

Hypotheses should not

be multiplied

without necessity,

and there are a lot

of unnecessary hypotheses

running around,

especially in the new age domain.

I would study

the impregnation effect

more as an example

of mass hysteria,

because, you know,

being in the position

that I am in,

supposedly a revered teacher

and a person

of great insight

and all this

hoopla and crapola,

you occasionally

get invited to dinner

with the movers

and shakers,

and then you hear

what's said

when not on stage,

and I have to tell you,

there's enough cynicism

to satisfy

a renaissance pope

among these people.

They are taking

the rest of us

for a ride

in many cases.

Well, Danny and I

last night

were discussing

like what

this transcendental object,

we were enumerating

a list of things

that it could possibly be,

and as you say,

the cast of reflection

and so forth,

how is it that,

say, for example,

the Ayahuasqueros,

in Pablo Amarengo's drawings,

there's a UFO motif

in one of his drawings.

What is that?

You mean,

do they see UFOs?

What are they,

what is it that they see?

When is it,

because they specifically

identify this motif

as separate

from the rest

of the drawings,

in one of

Shaman's drama magazines?

Well, I'm,

I'm giving the UFO

a slightly different status

than this stuff

I'm dumping on.

I think the UFO

is real,

or that there is

a real phenomenon.

The problem is,

what is

the phenomenon?

And it's a,

why someone

who sees

a spinning disc

in the sky

assumes

then an entire

theology

about friendly

extraterrestrials

coming to help us out?

Why do they assume that?

What they've seen

is a spinning disc

in the sky,

for crying out loud.

Maybe what they saw

was a spinning disc

in the sky.

There are two

phenomenon here

which are

entangled

inextricably

and unfortunately

for the

intellectually honest.

There's the UFO.

Who knows

what that is?

And then there's

the UFO community.

And the UFO community is just fraught with the most crack-brained, peculiar, self-serving, unstable, mush-minded group of people you would ever hope to get together in one place.

I mean, it's like a magnet for screwballs. I mean, people who like to wear diamond tiaras and give themselves funny names, and it has absolutely nothing to do with the tremendously fascinating and ambiguous phenomenon of strange things seen in the sky.

I mean, I went through this, I'm not talking as an outsider. I've seen, I had a UFO encounter that was a deeper encounter than most of the people who run around pontificating about UFOs, and I will, at the risk of boring you yet again with this story, tell the story.

I was in the Amazon. I was having all these revelations about time and one thing and another, and I noticed a place in the sky where there was a spectrogrammatic diffraction of some sort.

It wasn't a rainbow, it was a colored smudge in the sky, and I was lightly but continually intoxicated on mushrooms during this period, and it said, watch there.

So I sat up one night, all night, all night, on this rock by a lake, watching the southwest, and around 4.30 in the morning, with essentially a perfectly clear sky, except that off the Amazon jungle, local mist rises.

And so about a mile and a half away from me on the horizon was a line of what looked to me like a little fog bank.

And as light broke over this situation, I noticed, I couldn't tell whether it had been doing this or it began doing it as things got lighter, but I noticed that this fog bank was rolling in place, like a pencil rolled between your fingers, which I had never seen a fog do that.

I thought, I thought, what a strange thing, and as I watched it, stretched out across the horizon, it gently broke into four equal-sized pieces.

So now I'm looking at four gray lenticular clouds spaced out along the horizon, about a mile and a half away from me, across this lake.

So I'm watching, and I'm getting eager, and I'm getting excited, and as I watched these four lenticular clouds, two and two merge, now I'm looking at two denser, grayer, dark gray, darker than storm clouds, these two things on the horizon.

And as I watched, the four became two, the two become one, and at that point, faintly, I could hear the hui hui hui sound of 1950s science fiction UFOs, a la the day the Earth stood still, they came from outer space, so forth and so on.

And I see, and I see, my God, this thing is starting toward me, and the sound is getting louder.

And at that point, there was like a complete conversion in an instant, and my whole body went cold, and I realized, uh, they're coming for me.

And I said, this is it, you know, prepare to be beamed up, Scotty.

And, uh, and I, I, everybody was asleep in a hut about 70 miles, 70 feet up this mud embankment.

I was down by the river and the lake, and I said, and it flashed in my mind, I have to get a witness.

There must be a witness.

And I looked, I looked over my shoulder at the mud bank, the thing was coming at me, I half stood up, my knees were so weak, I sat back down, and I just prepared to depart this planet, this dimension.

And as it came, I could see it, and it was getting closer and closer, I could see rivets on the underside, I could see the running lights, and as it got closer and closer,

I realized that what I was looking at was the end cap of a 1932 Hoover vacuum cleaner, the very end cap that George Adamski had suspended on a piece of nylon thread in his garage,

and photographed with his brownie instamatic to produce the famous UFO photograph of the UFO with the three balls on the underside and the, and the ribbing going around, right?

That photograph has been utterly debunked.

Computer analysis of it by modern techniques, it's bullshit.

And there it was, 40 feet in diameter, coming after me across the Amazon treetops.

Well, then, and I just went bananas at that point, and then it passed over not more than 200 feet above my head, turning slowly, I could see the three balls, I could see the, everything, I could see it.

And I understood then, that what it was, was it was more shocking than a real UFO, because it had its disconfirmation built into it.

I was having an experience which you couldn't tell anybody about.

What would the editor of We Love UFOs magazine say if you told him that story?

He'd say, get out of here, you know, we don't print stories like that, we're interested in real UFOs.

Did it depart information to you of some sort, because apparently you've been knighted the, the, um, person to speak about mushrooms in such a way that you're, you're actually,

and some people do say that that Terence McKinnon may be an alien being himself, incarnate.

Well, only people who are in litigation with me.

I think what it was telling me, it was a perfect Zen lesson.

It was saying, don't believe in UFOs, they're the end caps of 1932 Hoover vacuum cleaners, expand to 40 feet in diameter, and flying through your mind.

So you have to question everything.

Yeah, it's saying, you know, you can't replace one high, one stupid hypothesis, there aren't UFOs, with another stupid hypothesis,

we're being visited by benevolent creatures from another world, have to get a little more depth here, if you want to be the alien ambassador.

Well, the crop circles, I, I'm now less sure about the crop circles, um, what I liked about them was that each, that they appeared at a certain point in time,

and then each year there were more of them, and I figured that we could take how many there are each year and draw a curve and reach a conclusion about how far away in the future the source of them was.

Because if they are, uh, it's almost as though, um, the UFO, see, leaves no trace.

I mean, the burn marks on the ground, but already you're in to dubiousness, because who has ever seen these burn marks?

Only the editors of these UFO magazines and their willing psychophants.

I mean, you and I have not seen these burn marks, we've seen photographs of funny stuff on the ground, and we're told that's it.

The crop circle leaves a trace that is enduring.

But the problem there, the problem I have with the crop circles, and it's odd how you never hear this discussed,

is that nobody has ever seen one come into existence.

We get before, and we get after, but how come we never get during?

Do they appear instantly?

If they appear instantly, that would be pretty convincing.

Just glance, it's not there, glance, glance, it's there, and we figure, yeah.

Um, there's, uh, because he's doing a lot of the researches, Colin Andrews, he's doing a lot of research on this,

and I've got a recording, and this is basically how he described it.

They were waving and setting up to, in this area, to, you know, try and record some of what's going on.

And, uh, and all of a sudden, you know, recorders are running, and all of a sudden, they all stand up,

because there's this incredibly strange, powerful sounding buzz of some kind that comes from far away,

and just comes zooming up, and comes past them over this little ride, and it's next to them.

Okay, and it takes them all of maybe, you know, 45 seconds or a minute to get to the top of the rise,

and there on the other side of the rise is proper, but it wasn't there when they started setting up.

So, apparently, you know, and Richard Hoekwit talks about this, too.

Don't get me started.

Okay.

Don't get me started.

Bad works of art on a scale of miles are not what we should expect from, uh, intelligent visitors from the stars.

Um, here's what I, let me, isn't it a little weird?

Let's, I mean, first of all, let me say, I'm open-minded against, about crop circles.

But let's also not be, uh, silly.

Isn't it a little peculiar that this phenomenon, uh, appears within driving distance of the apartments,

of the people most likely to chronicle and proclaim it as, uh, a manifestation of telluric energy from another dimension?

In other words, what if it had been happening in, in Turkmenistan?

Then you would have something.

But then how would John Michel and Colin Andrews and all these people have been able to make a living off of it?

Uh, there are a number of things that are really weird about the crop circles.

First of all, we're talking southern England here.

The place is littered with RAF bases, nuclear weapons depots, intercontinental missile delivery systems, so forth and so on.

And we're asked to believe that the Ministry of Defense is utterly unconcerned about the fact that the airspace of Great Britain

is being violated night after night after night by a mysterious agency that, if it can snap the stem of a wheat stalk,

could throw the switch on, uh, an, an electrical device of some sort.

The British establishment is utterly unconcerned by the crop circles.

They're not necessarily said from above.

Well, but wherever it's coming from, if you had a nuclear weapons depot, I think you would be Johnny at the raffle to find out what's going on.

I, didn't, didn't you read, like, last year, the year before, like, these two guys came forward and said that they've perpetrated a hoax?

Right, and all that did was muddy the waters.

Well, it did one good thing.

It finished the, it can't be done by human beings position.

We now know, you know, Rupert and all these people, Rupert, believe it or not, is the plant pathologist who serves on the board of the seriologist,

which is the main publication that is booming this.

They held a contest in July where you paid 50 pounds, you were assigned a five-acre plot, you had from 10 at night until 4 in the morning.

Uh, there were, I think, 16 entries.

Everybody was given the same design.

And, uh, at dawn, judges helicoptered over the sites and then made the ground inspection.

And, uh, three of the contestants produced crop circles that were indistinguishable from the real thing.

Beautiful crop circles.

And I'm getting this from believers, you know.

This is what Rupert reluctantly informed me on.

And, uh, I think that, uh, and, you know, one theory is that it's a particle beam weapon being tested from space,

but tested 750 times in the last 18 months in the same small part of England.

And a couple of the tracks.

So, uh, I don't know, I, we tried, I came up with two theories that do not require telluric intervention or friendly extraterrestrials.

First theory.

A whole lot of people, first of all, it's killed the UFO industry in England.

You can't give away UFO sightings at this point.

So, all of these people, you know, it all is happening near Glastonbury and down where the old earthworks are.

It's occurring in an area where there is the largest concentration of people likely to hail it as a paranormal phenomenon on the surface of the earth.

And, uh, they have done so.

They have made outrageous statements.

Statements like, no human being could do this.

It's impossible to explain this.

So forth and so on.

Well, now imagine that something like MI5, you know what that is.

It's the English CIA.

It looks at the rise of paganism in Britain, uh, you know, earthworks, channeling, all of this stuff, and says, uh, this threatens church and state.

We need to create a disinformation situation.

Let's lure these people out onto a limb, way out onto a limb, and then let's cut the limb off.

So what you do is you create this pseudo-paranormal phenomenon.

You get John Mitchell, Colin Andrews, all these people to proclaim its weirdness, and then you reveal that it's easily duplicated.

That's one theory.

In other words, the British establishment is undercutting paganism by luring these people into saying too much.

But that's not my favorite theory.

That's a good one, though.

What's your favorite?

Oh, my favorite theory is much better.

Because the question is, how do you make these things?

When you actually go to the crop circles, what do you see?

This is a Sherlock Holmes type deal.

You know, Sherlock Holmes could handle the crop circles with his arm tied behind his head, I think.

When you go to the crop circles, here it is.

The crop circle.

Mysterious, unearthly, portending, who knows what.

And what else is there?

Well, the press, and the sightseers, and yourself, and an extraordinary number of Japanese tourists.

Now, you're getting close.

The Japanese press has followed the crop circle phenomenon more avidly than any other press in the world outside of England.

Every new crop circle appears, photographs, and discussion.

It is huge in Japan.

Japan, they're obsessed with this stuff.

I think that what might be going on, this is certainly a lot more likely than extraterrestrials or telluric forces.

Do you all know what MITI is?

It's the Ministry of Trade and Industry.

It's this enormous organization in Japan which coordinates technological development and marketing.

It's what we're talking about when we say Japan Incorporated.

I think that this is a MITI research project and that these Japanese tourists, which are ever-present at these sites,

some of them are drawn from a centuries-old tradition of ninja stem snappers

who, at a given signal, are able to hurl away their Nikons, rush into the corn,

and, in the matter of a few minutes, create these things,

then put their cameras back on and their sunglasses back on

and take up their deep cover as Japanese tourists.

Now, why would MITI do such a thing?

What's in it for them?

It's a semiotics project.

They are studying the impact of symbols on the Western mind.

The closest thing to these crop circles, if you look at a complete encyclopedia of them,

are the pottery marks made by master potters in medieval Japan on their ceramics.

Almost all of the crop circles, except the frivolous ones,

like, for instance, how about the fact that the symbol of the seriologist magazine was done

and was done in one of these things.

I was at that one, the proof.

Yeah.

These things, it's got humor behind it.

I mean, it's a grand silliness of some sort.

I'm willing to be proven wrong.

I grappled with it, like everybody else, for six months,

but the density of flakiness around it is incredible.

And the number of people whose private agendas are being served by this.

I mean, if it were happening north of Hudson Bay, there'd be no money in it.

You have to be able to drive there from central London in order for it to work.

Well, then people always say, well, but it's happening all over the world, my good man.

Haven't you heard?

Show me.

It's not happening all over the world.

Some clumsy attempts appeared in Kentucky.

And, you know, there was something in Germany.

And so forth and so on.

But it's really hair-raising to be among these people

and to see how uncommitted to finding out what it is they are

and how totally committed they are to preserving it from rational inspection.

They don't want to talk about, you know, any alternative

other than whatever the pet theory of the week is about how it's happening.

Now, I see it as part of the ingression into novelty.

Things are going to get weirder and weirder.

There's no doubt about that.

But it doesn't mean that there is a conscious extraterrestrial agency.

I mean, I find it pretty weird that there are 500 women who think they have fetuses

removed from their bodies by extraterrestrials.

That's so weird that suggesting that it's true seems a little like overkill to me.

I mean, what is going on that would make a woman do that sort of thing?

There's always, if you're a careful observer of one of these things,

there's always, Jacques Vallée wrote about this,

a residuum of absurdity that is suppressed by the witness

because the witness knows that if they told the whole story,

their story is not credible.

This is called, you know, the built-in absurdity of these paranormal things.

And when somebody tells you a story about a UFO encounter

that does not have this element of self-contradicting absurdity in it,

they're manipulating the evidence to make it seem more woo-woo-woo, I think.

And I'm not a rationalist except, well, I've seen things that violated the laws of physics.

I believe the laws of physics can be violated.

I believe there may well be extraterrestrials somewhere in the universe.

Do you believe the Vonage manuscripts may have something to do with

or some type of alien intelligence?

No, I think the Vonage manuscript is a solved problem

and that this guy Leo Levertoff's translation is correct.

What I found was, you know, it was a Catharite manual for the dying.

That's much more exciting than trying to claim it as a book from another dimension

because now we gain an insight into what Catharism was really about.

I think there is a residuum of the irrational and the paranormal,

but these things like flying saucers and Atlantis and the crop circles,

they're like viruses upon the healthy body of language.

You know, there's something wrong with language and communication

because it's never as you imagine it's going to be.

And people are being sold a phenomenon that if they were to go,

they would discover that aspects of it were suppressed or misrepresented.

The people who are dealing with the crop circles are having a great time.

It's the longest drinking party on record in that part of England.

I guess I should say this because I know it's a bummer

to have your favorite weird thing dumped on.

But my technique, which I recommend to you,

is don't believe anything.

If you believe in something,

you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite.

Therefore, you have given up a portion of your freedom

and freedom is the dearest thing we've got.

You don't have to believe anything.

You can just provisionally work your way through stuff.

And then probe the edges.

The edges will satisfy.

I think that the proper way to contact the other

is with hard-headed rationalism exercised under weird conditions.

I went to India,

visited some of these yoga people and accomplished saints.

I'm telling you,

for my money,

it was hokum.

It was,

there was an ulterior agenda,

either having the wish to relieve you of your cash

or to violate some body cavity.

That was the ulterior agenda.

When I went to the Amazon,

with the same attitude of skepticism,

and talked to the shamans there,

they delivered the goods.

If somebody,

so you just,

you just investigate these things.

And the key question is,

what can you show me?

If they've got it,

they can show it.

There's no mumbo-jumbo around the real thing.

But if they say,

oh, well, you know,

the tape recordings miraculously erased themselves last night.

Or,

we'll show you,

but you have to sweep up around the ashram for a dozen years

to prove you're worthy.

Or,

you know,

you are not worthy.

That's the one where you head for the door.

You are not worthy.

The real thing is the real thing,

for crying out loud.

It can be displayed.

It doesn't require this weird,

fuzzy relationship of worth and insight,

and so forth and so on.

And I,

and that's how I got to psychedelics.

Psychedelics work.

If you think that I'm bullshitting you,

go home and take five grams of mushrooms in silent darkness,

and then we'll talk.

That's the sine qua non.

But,

and it'll work,

on demand.

I'm not saying,

and wait 40 years,

or purify yourself,

or fix,

get your aura stitched up,

or any of the rest of it.

It'll work.

It'll blow your mind to shreds.

It's real.

This other stuff is just,

you know,

all these gurus,

they need to find honest work.

They need to join the rest of us

in contemplating the mystery of reality.

They don't know what they're talking about.

If they knew what they were talking about,

they wouldn't have to shuffle the deck

when you're out of the room.

And that's what's going on.

Somebody must be outraged,

insulted,

and terribly disappointed.

Getting back to the DMT,

do you have similar...

Yeah.

Well, no, no.

I got some shit.

Do you have the same experience

each time you take it

under similar conditions?

Do other people report the same things

to the same teaching machines,

and how does it relate

to near-death experiences?

Do you have a sign?

In order.

Yes,

I do have the same experience

each time I take it.

Do they say nice to see you again?

They say you've sent so many,

but you come so rarely.

And then,

the more interesting question,

do other people see it?

Do you get a connection?

Yeah, do I get a connection?

Do other people see it?

What I've thought about this question a lot,

because it's a question of communication.

If they saw it,

could they tell me?

If they told me in their language,

would I understand

what they were telling me?

And what I've decided

is that the experience is...

an archetype. It's the archetype of the circus. Why? Don't ask me why. I don't know why. But, for instance, I've listened to many, many people talk about their DMT experiences, and inevitably, this is the box into which it will fit.

I gave it to a woman once up in Washington, an anthropologist. It was a sub-threshold dose because she coughed. I could tell she didn't get it. And when she came down, she said, it was the saddest carnival I've ever been to.

She said, there were no... the rides weren't open. The tents were shuttered, and there were little gum papers blowing between the things, the stands.

The circus is an interesting archetype because it has a number of facets. First of all, you have the three central rings under the big top. That's the dome.

And in the central ring, there's light and color and clowns. Remember that Maria Sabina called the mushrooms the little clowns. And these clowns, the circus is for children.

And when you take DMT, one of the things I didn't mention in my description of it, is you have a peculiar impression of your own body geometry.

Your head seems to be very large in relationship to your torso. You are, in fact, an infant in some sense.

You become a child. This leads to thinking about the 52nd fragment of Heraclysis, which says,

the aeon is a child that play with colored balls. Nobody knows what this saying means, but it's persisted for about 3,000 years.

So it must mean something. But outside the three rings, there's another aspect to the circus.

It is spun into Eros because above the center ring and up near the top of the dome is the beautiful woman with long blonde hair

and the tiny, skimpy, spangled costume. And the narrative type dream. And the alarm rings. And by the time your feet hit the floor

and you stagger into the shower, it's gone. It's not partially gone. It's all gone.

And all you can say is, I was having this amazing dream. I have no idea what it was. The DMT thing can leave you just that quickly.

And also, and I think this has a bearing on this, they have studied the production of DMT in normal metabolism

and it peaks in normal human beings between 3 and 4 a.m. This is when the deep dreaming is going on.

This is when the intense REM states are being experienced. So I think that where the dead and the living get together is in the dream time.

Australian Aborigines have been trying to tell us this for as long as we would listen.

And also, a lot of people, it's possible to repress it very, very quickly. I think, for instance, I've seen people,

one way you can tell if someone has really gotten a good DMT trip is they lay down, they become very still,

but if you look closely at their face with their eyes closed, you can see that their eyes are moving wildly underneath their closed eyelids.

This is because they're in REM state and they are watching whatever it is they're seeing.

They are looking at it.

I remember giving DMT to a person years and years ago, a person who might have been a candidate for the description psychologically fragile.

And it was clear that she got it because she was a hash smoker and she took 3 or 4 enormous hits, laid down,

and her eyes were wildly rotating around in her head, when she came out of it, said,

what was it?

She said, it was nothing.

I don't remember anything.

I don't remember anything at all.

And furthermore, I don't think I want to have anything more to do with it.

And didn't.

Well, I think that this is something that it only shows as much of it as you can stand.

And some of us cannot stand much at all.

This occurs with psilocybin as well.

I've had experiences with psilocybin where I've said to it,

after hours of hallucinations of one sort and another,

I finally say, you know, what I'm really interested in is your true essence.

Can you show me what you are for yourself rather than for me?

What are you for yourself?

Well, then it's just like a cold wind blows through

and black velvet curtains begin to rise.

And after 30 seconds of this, you just say,

that's enough of what you are for yourself.

Because you can tell it's headed in a direction you can't tolerate at all.

You can't stand.

I have a friend who said of psilocybin, he said,

my goal every time I take it is to stand more of what it really is.

And this is why it's incredibly kind to beginners.

Beginners basically need to have no fear if they will regulate the dose reasonably.

Because it wants to recruit you.

And so it says, you know, here it is, whatever you wanted,

aliens, outer space, elves, erotic imagery, here it is.

Doesn't this feel safe?

See, we're not so bad.

We're your friends.

We're not like all the others.

Come back soon.

It's after you gain familiarity with it, where it says,

you know, there are aspects to me that we've never really talked about.

You say, oh, yeah?

Like what?

Well, like this.

No, no.

Let's go back to the Disney loop.

How close is the DMT that you smoke compared to the brain DMT that we all have running through?

Is there a difference, like, NN-dimethyltryptamine and what's in our brain?

No, no.

It's the same thing.

Exactly the same.

It's the same thing.

DMT occurs in two forms, the salt and the hydrochloride.

And both forms occur.

Well, no, I'm not sure that both forms occur in metabolism.

But the only difference is that one is water-soluble and the other isn't.

So, basically, then again, we are holding, then.

I mean, if DMT is illegal, then what we have in our brain running through us is considered illegal.

Yeah, we are potentially bust-able.

You know, in light of what I said, one of the most interesting frontiers that the New Age has brought forward

that I think bears more serious study than the channelings of Amenhotep's barber and all that

is lucid dreaming.

Lucid dreaming, if it, I don't know whether those people, I don't know those people personally,

I don't know what their motivation is, but if it's true that you can take control of the dream state,

then this would be something worth spending even a lot of time on.

Because the dream state is more like the tryptamine geography than anything else.

One of the most fascinating things about DMT that should certainly be mentioned,

as long as we're exhausting ourselves on this subject,

is once you've had DMT, once you've smoked it and this experience has occurred,

you can have a dream years later in which you're with a bunch of people

and something's going on and you enter the atrium of the Hotel California

and you take a floor to the basement or something,

and then you're in a room with people and someone whips out a little glass pipe

and you smoke it and it happens.

It doesn't sort of happen.

It happens 100%.

That means that's exciting data because that means that we have the wherewithal

to trigger this experience in ourselves on the natch, at least while we're asleep.

And I presume that with sufficient patience and subtlety and biofeedback equipment,

and I don't know what you would take, but if you spend a million dollars,

you could probably deliver it on time,

we can trigger this most intense of all hallucinogenic ecstasies,

most boundary dissolving of all possible human experiences on the natch.

But we have to somehow find our way to the button.

And apparently, in normal waking consciousness, it isn't there.

I spend a lot of time, I mean, I didn't mean to be so flip about the UFOs.

I've spent years trying to think about the UFOs and studied all the theories.

One that I still may be part of the truth is,

maybe it is so that we generate and sequester DMT somewhere in our brain,

and under unusual situations,

this sequester DMT can suddenly be dumped into the brain fluid,

or into the bloodstream,

and then you have a DMT experience,

or some kind of quasi-DMT-like experience.

Because I read an interesting paper a few years ago,

I can't remember the name of the guy who wrote it,

it was an anthropological paper.

It was called,

The Felt Presence in Unusual Environments.

And it talked about how it is apparently a basic trait of human beings

to, when in the wilderness,

especially unfamiliar wilderness,

people sense something there.

The Felt Presence in Unusual Environments.

Well, it may be that,

now, imagine if you're in the wilderness,

in a situation not entirely familiar to you,

so that you're edging up toward the Felt Presence thing,

and suddenly DMT stored in your brain is,

for some reason,

perhaps a pathological reason,

that it shouldn't happen,

but it's shunted into your brain.

Well, now, suddenly,

you feel there's something here,

there's someone here,

there's someone with me.

The hair on the back of your neck stands up.

And then,

you see,

coming toward you,

a disturbance in your perceptual field.

Now,

you're supposed to be alone.

There isn't supposed to be a disturbance in your perceptual input.

But there is,

you are alarmed.

It may be dangerous.

You must identify what this is.

Well,

every one of us carries around inside us

a cultural inventory

of what weird events might possibly be.

If you're a medieval peasant

farming the hills of Tuscany,

and this happens,

you immediately conclude that

it's the Virgin,

or it's an angel.

And lo and behold,

as it comes closer,

it clothes itself in heavenly raiment,

and it is the Virgin.

And so you are encountering the Virgin.

Well,

now,

what if you're a Southern California

steeped in the religious faiths of Malibu,

and this happens to you?

You will conclude,

my God,

it's a UFO.

I mean,

haven't you been with people

who every airplane that flies over,

they're willing to proclaim

is an extraterrestrial intervention?

It's because this explanation

lies very close to the surface.

When we don't know what something is,

we want to know.

We want to English it.

We want to name it.

And we grasp the nearest thing at hand.

It's very important to avoid this reflex

in order to see what is it really.

What is it really?

Let it be what it is.

Yeah.

Four small points.

On that one,

I noticed I did a book in 73

on the flatbook of the flatbook.

And I interviewed perhaps 500 people.

And in a large number,

they start with it.

It's a traditional poetic to a note.

It's called negative parallelism,

where you identify,

negate,

identify, negate.

So you start,

it looked like a low-flying plane.

No, it was too low.

It looked like a semi

with its out-of-order lights on.

And only as the third

or fourth identification,

which is traditional

to classic tropes

of the 13th century,

would they identify it

as the Odyssey UFO.

Point one.

Another one,

the strangest one,

was an old lady in Texas.

And I said,

how did you know it was a UFO?

And she said,

because it had UFO printed

on the undercast.

I like that.

The next one was a judge.

I went down to pass to Google.

It was the Hickson and Parker.

Famous case.

I've got to see them again

because I want to see

how they've done over there.

Very interesting case.

And the judge

and clerk of courts

and two other people

were riding home

during that period.

And two of them

in the car

saw a UFO

and the others couldn't see it.

So let's say one saw it

because of a PMT drop

at some point.

Another was his clerk

and decided he'd better see it.

And the other two

were just strange.

Last point.

There's a guy called

Orfeo Angolucci

who was an early contactee

who gave me a useful handle

on kind of

talking about working the edges.

He was out

and he met the captain of the ship

and the ship's captain

said during the interview,

would you go and get me

a bottle of soda pop?

And then they went on

with their event.

So I began looking

for what I called

the soda pop factor.

You know,

that's where there was

an element

or more than one element

absolutely unrelated

to the story.

There was somehow

a touch of human...

An intrusion.

Unnecessary intrusion.

Well, let me say

one thing about it.

You don't even have

to be cynical

to the point of believing

in the Pascadula situation

that the second guy

saw the UFO

because he was the clerk.

These drug molecules

have resonant rings.

They are aromatics.

It may be

that there's a pheromone thing

happening here

and that a state of mind

can be transferred

from one person to another

through body odor.

This may be

how the states

of telepathy

are achieved

on psilocybin

because you do smell funny

and this smell

may be more than funny.

It may be carrying

information.

There's a very interesting

phenomenon

that is well documented

called allophremia.

Do you all know

what allophremia is?

Allophremia is when

a friend of yours

gets put in the hospital

for schizophrenia

and you being

a good Samaritan

decide to take them

a box of candy

and during the visit

to your friend

you behave

so bizarrely

that you don't get

to leave the hospital.

Allophremia.

Schizophrenic behavior

on the part

of non-schizophrenics

in the presence

of schizophrenics.

I've experienced this.

I had a friend

I visited him

in the hospital

and the way

here's how it works

it's really interesting

I visited my friend

in the hospital

he was nutty

as a fruitcake

but he was my friend

and he was talking

ninety to nothing

so I wanted

to communicate

with him.

So instead of saying

to every single

statement he made

I don't understand you

you're nuts

that makes no sense

whatsoever

I began

trying

to

agree

with him

trying to

understand him

and then

it sort of got

the momentum

of a game

going

where

he would say

you know

I'm really

Sirhan Sirhan

and I would say

yes but your teacup

is on backwards

and a doctor

walking into

this situation

would have a hard

time telling

who's nuts

and who's not

well was that

because I decided

to play along

with him

or why did I decide

there was an

ambiance

that gave

permission

for

erratic

irrational

peculiar

behavior

and I suppose

if you were

borderline

schizophrenic

in that situation

that's all

it would take

to push you

over the edge

you think

I know you're

probably thinking

about that

Wiener's ECM stuff

you told me

about that yourself

but I finally

just recently

read all those

papers

again

and I think

you're really

right

that there

is some

sub

it's what he

calls the

olfactory

subconscious

that there

is perception

below

what is

olfactorily

normally perceived

and there's a

profound

information

transformation

messages

that are

perceived

and stuff

yeah I think

that could

be something

yeah people

who study

human behavior

have noted

that

when a person

enters a room

full of people

unconsciously

the first

thing they do

is they take

a deep breath

what that's

doing is

giving you

a whole bunch

of information

and you can

tell

you can say

I walked

into the room

and the vibes

were terrible

because

Herbert had

just slugged

Alice

three minutes

before and

everybody was

freaking out

about it

or I just

walked into

the room

and I could

tell something

weird was

happening

but I couldn't

figure out

what it was

and what it

was was

Alice and

Fred heard

me coming

so he took

his hand out

of her blouse

as I opened

the door

this kind

of thing

in other words

information

that is

coming in

through

the olfactory

senses

there are

psychiatrists

who diagnose

schizophrenia

by what they

call the

sniff test

you know

this is one

of the most

subtle and

difficult

of all

mental

dysfunctions

to diagnose

and some

people just

lean over

your anterior

fontanel

and take

a hit

and say

him to

therapy

her to

release

and him

to medication

because they

are confident

enough that

the smell

will do it

there's even

one theory

of schizophrenia

that holds

that what

schizophrenia

is

is a

dysfunctional

pheromone

system

so that

you

who are

the schizophrenic

your real

problem is

that you

smell funny

not stink

people aren't

aware of that

but it's

that there's

something about

you that

causes people

to treat you

strangely

and you

reacting to

being treated

strangely by

people get

weirder

and they

reacting to

you getting

weirder

treat you

more and

more strangely

so what you

have here is

a feedback

cycle that

ends with

nets being

dropped over

you and

you taken

away

but the

original cause

was that

there was

you were

giving off

a chemical

which made

people treat

you in a

way that

caused you

to react

to them

adversely

and that

started the

cycle going

or they say

that you

perceived

olfactory

hallucinations

not that

you just

smelled

literally

but that

you perceived

oh that

you were

misinterpreting

incoming

that's

the reason

we're talking

so much

about this

is because

if you

look at

these

pheromone

molecules

and lay

them next

to these

drug

molecules

it's all

one

family

these are

all

small

planar

molecules

there's even

one area

where it

comes

together

pretty

spectacularly

that is

in the

pineal gland

of human

beings

there's a

great deal

of

is being

channeled

into the

pineal

gland

well

if you

know

anything

about

evolutionary

theory

you know

that

you don't

waste

energy

in

unnecessary

functions

or you

become

extinct

so there's

a reason

why

12%

of the

brain's

energy

is being

channeled

into

the pineal

gland

though we

don't

know

what

it is

well

then

when you

look

at

what's

going

on

in

the

adenoroglomerotropane

is being

transduced

by light

into

melatonin

well

this compound

adenoroglomerotropane

in ordinary

biochemical

nomenclature

is

6-methoxy

tetrahydroharmiline

it's a

near relative

of the compounds

in the

ayahuasca

well

so then

a reasonable

question is

to ask

well

then

what's

happening

to all

this

melatonin

that is

being

well then

if you

tag

it

and

follow

its

path

through

the metabolic

system

you discover

that the

stuff

is making

its way

quite

directly

to the

surface

of the

skin

and

then

it's

volatilizing

away

what's

happening

here

a hallucinogenic

molecule

is being

turned

into

a

and

in the

very

center

of the

brain

and

this

pheromone

is then

hurrying

on its

way

to the

surface

of the

skin

where it

volatilizes

off

and

affects

the

ambient

social

environment

in which

you're

living

this

begins

to look

like

a

system

of

neurotransmitters

and

neuroregulators

that operate

not only

within

the

body

but

on

the

surface

of

the

body

and

in

the

ambient

social

environment

tryptophan

yeah

I don't

know if

this relates

to

I'm not

a chemist

or anything

like that

there was

this stuff

on the

market

called

tryptophan

right

it's an

amino acid

and it

was taken

off the

market

not too

long

ago

yes

and

supposedly

it made

you dream

your dreams

more clear

or more vivid

something like

that

well

it's the

precursor

for DMT

if you

were to

make

if you

wanted to

make

DMT

in the

laboratory

tryptophan

would be

one of

the

pathways

that you

could

start

from

the

reason

tryptophan

was taken

off the

market

there was

a lot

of

confusion

initially

but it

was a

poisoned

batch

it turned

out

all of

the world's

tryptophan

was

coming

from

one

enormous

stainless

steel

vat

near

Nagoya

and that

it had

been

infected

by a

bacterium

and

so

you know

we're stuck

with the fact

that tryptophan

will probably

never again

be available

in health

food stores

but it

wasn't

tryptophan

that was

the coke

I knew

someone

whose life

was completely

messed up

from the

poisoned

tryptophan

so

by taking

the

tryptophan

it caused

DMT

to be

more

well

no

saying

it

that

way

is

saying

too

much

we

don't

know

that

all

we

can

say

is

tryptophan

is an amino

acid

it's

used

in the

biosynthesis

of many

different

compounds

including

DMT

peaks

when

dream

states

are

peaking

and

tryptophan

does

seem

to induce

deeper

dreaming

it's a

rational

case

you know

we could

sit

here

sometime

we could

have a

weekend

entirely

devoted

thinking

of

simple

experiments

that could

be done

in the

laboratory

with and

without

human

beings

if only

these

things

weren't

illegal

I mean

there is

so much

to be

learned

and

so little

work

being done

because

it's not

sanctioned

I mean

my brother

is a

pharmaceutical

chemist

pharmacologist

physiologist

and his

professional

life

is very

touch

and go

because

he's

known

to be

a

hallucinogen

man

and

they

don't

hire

you

they

don't

publish

you

they

don't

fund

you

they

don't

want

to

know

you

have

to

be

a

very

dedicated

person

to

stick

with

hallucinogenic

chemistry

when you

could

be

taken

off

the

market

because

it

made

dreams

being

more

vivid

instead

of

just

a

bad

batch

I

mean

I

need

a

connection

without

just

thinking

that

I'm

not

a

conspiracist

but

it

seems

to me

awfully

funny

that

was

taken

off

and

made

by

one

batch

and that

got

hampered

with

or

whatever

Well

there

may

have

been

some

form

of

hanky

panky

but

in

all

fairness

you

know

there

are

many

approaches

to

the

synthesis

of

DMT

Indole

is

probably

what

most

chemists

would

probably

prefer

to

start

from

Indole

and

Indole

is

an

industrial

precursor

used

in

so

many

hundreds

of

ways

that

you

could

never

push

Indole

off

the

able

to

get

it

from

the

health

food

store

here

with

tryptophan

and

it

made

your

dreams

vivid

more

vividly

I don't

know

if

that's

what

people

are

using

it

for

I don't

think

it's

so

but

here

it

was

so

maybe

they

felt

that

people

were

dreaming

too much

or they

were having

too vivid

dreams

that

hey

we can't

have

this

anymore

we've

got to

sort

of get

it off

the

market

I

think

probably

as long

as

you're

asleep

they're

fine

about

it

it's

when

you

wake

up

that

they

get

nervous

as long

as you

keep

your

eyes

closed

or

you're

glued

to

the

boob

tube

they're

quite

happy

to

minimalize

you

marginalize

you

and

let's

say

you

smoke

teams

you

have

the

experience

you

can

put

the

term

elves

on

them

or

speculate

that

what

we

have

in

various

mythologies

or

thought

systems

elves

refers

to

that

I

was

wondering

what

you

think

about

other

types

of

deities

that

people

may

encounter

in

some

sort

of

visionary

experience

either

with

hallucinogens

or

not

what

What do you make of that? Do you have more of an archetypal interpretation, or do you think that they exist in some hyper-dimensional reality in some form?

I'm just curious what you make of that.

I guess I have an archetypal interpretation.

I recall from some book of Robert Anton Wilson's where he suggests, he says, you should pray to the Blessed Virgin Mary every day and make offerings to her and put up her picture until she appears.

Then switch to Shiva and do it until Shiva appears.

Then Mickey Mouse.

And just keep doing this until you satisfy yourself that none of these things are more real than any other, and that whatever their ontological status, they're all equal in ontological status.

Apparently the human brain is far more malleable than we can conceive of or imagine.

We become imprisoned within a language and an ideology, and it literally becomes our reality.

And yet it isn't our reality.

It's just something provisional.

I've not had that experience.

I prayed for years as a kid, but perhaps the agonvite of Inuit was already present in me and making it impossible for me to succeed.

But in the case of the elves, there's sort of a cultural archetype of the elves, but at the same time you seem to be saying that there is a deeper reality that this is based on.

In other words...

Well, and the DMT elves are a lot weirder than the Disney elves.

The Disney elves are really sanitized.

These things are pretty frightening in a way.

I mean, they are if you let yourself be frightened, because they're...you can't...they want...well, how can I put it...they play too rough.

They are not...they're not mean, but they're not careful either.

It's like hanging out with a gang, you know?

As long as you're their friend, you really feel, aren't I cool?

Look who I'm hanging out with.

But then you realize if you said the wrong word or made the wrong move, everybody would turn and look at you and just...

I recently wrote the introduction for a new edition of Evans Vence's book, The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries.

And if you're interested in elves, this is the book to read.

You all know who Evans Vence was.

He was the great Tibetologist who...

But as a student at Cambridge in 1913, before he went to Tibet, he did his doctoral thesis.

In 1913 this was.

And he went around to Brittany and Wales and Ireland, to the old, old people.

I don't think he talked to anybody under 80.

And he said, tell me stories about fairies.

And he collected the most amazing stories about fairies and fairy encounters.

And I learned from rereading that book that, you know, the Christian notion of purgatory,

which is a place where you go that isn't either heaven or hell, where you do time for minor infractions,

and then you get moved on to heaven.

This idea was created...

I always assumed that it was dreamed up by some bishops of Rome, some synod or something.

It was dreamed up by St. Patrick to convert the pagan Irish, to convince them that fairyland was part of the Christian man.

And he was so successful in converting the pagan Irish that when letters went back to Rome describing how he did it,

purgatory became a general doctrine of the church, and then it was used very successfully to convert the pagan Slavs.

So purgatory is fairyland dressed up in Christian terminology.

And what is the idea of fairyland?

It's the idea that the dead live all around us, linger among us as disincarnate souls.

And the fairies that Evans Vance was describing were very ambiguous morally.

I mean, sometimes they would only sour the milk.

But, you know, their favorite concern of fairies is, UFO freaks pay attention, stealing babies.

That's what fairies like to do.

I don't know about surgically ripping off fetuses.

That seems to be a modern touch.

But in Ireland, people in the countryside do not leave babies, small babies, unattended in their cribs for fear of fairy theft.

And the fairies substitute.

They don't just leave an empty crib.

They leave a withered, strange little creature that is supposed to fool the human beings.

And whenever there is a child born who is wasting and old-looking and undersized,

there's always the assumption that there was a healthy baby there.

But now there's been a fairy switch.

Now, fairies respond to riddlery.

This has to do with this thing about language and the strange relationship of the Irish to intoxication fairies and language

suggests that here we might have a restricted gene pool that has somehow indemnified itself in the direction of these peculiar concerns.

What was the name of that book again?

Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries by Evan Zvins.

I want to mention at least a couple of final points, which is, you know, what is this all good for?

I think what it's good for, I think the mystery that we're making our way toward, much more of which will be revealed later as we live into the next 20 years,

is that we have lost connection to a very important part of reality, which I call the Gaian mind,

but what which I think is more popularly understood as the goddess, goddess consciousness.

But the goddess is not as envisioned by, at Ephesus, you know, a woman studded with breasts.

The goddess is the living earth.

It is not to be anthropomorphosed into some kind of human or quasi-human form.

And when we were taking mushrooms on the plains of Africa, before the invention of agriculture, as nomads,

we were rocked in the cradle of the goddess.

And, you know, differences between men and women, between parents and children,

between those who had much, if anybody had much, and those who had little,

and between human beings and the animal and vegetable kingdom, were minimal,

because everything operated in the light of this reference experience.

There was boundary dissolution, boundary dissolution, and a sense of the intelligence of the earth.

Now, we are so alienated from the intelligence of the earth,

that when we encounter it, we assume it came from halfway across the galaxy to rescue us.

It isn't from across interstellar space.

It's something that is partially in ourselves and partially in the world around us.

And if we could but clear the prejudices of materialism from our approach to the world,

most especially from our language, which by its subject-object bias, by its linear syntax,

and by God knows what else that's built into it, hopelessly precludes us from contacting this reality,

if we could clear all that away, we would discover, you know,

a dimension of immense support and affection for human beings and for our enterprises.

But as long as we pursue the destruction of the earth and the elaboration of materialist ideology

and the suppression of psychedelic states and the suppression of the feminine,

we are going to be alienated, feel abandoned, and operate in an ambiance of rampant pathology.

So, to my mind, the hallucinogens are a call to return to the archaic style,

to recapture the tools, techniques, languages, and attitudes that existed and flourished on this planet,

you know, before AD 10,000.

And we must do this.

If we don't do this, then we are setting ourselves up for a very unhappy future.

We are living in a very unhappy world.

Maybe your world is not unhappy, but, you know, tell that in Bosnia.

Tell it in Somalia.

Tell it to the AIDS-infected masses of Africa.

Tell it to the apocalypse is no longer a rumor.

It's arrived in many parts of the world.

And we, as the children, the inheritors of the culture which created this catastrophe,

and as the people who are still above high, still living on high ground,

as the waters of poverty, epidemic disease, and misery rise ever higher,

have a certain obligation to respond to this.

Moral decency demands it.

And we can no longer tolerate the evolution of consciousness,

the exploration of our relationships to each other,

and the source of meaning itself to be regulated, stigmatized,

and degraded by the most frightened, the least educated,

the least balanced, and the least caring among us.

And this is what we've got at the present moment.

The male dominator mentality is in the process of running us and all life on this planet into extinction.

I don't have answers.

That must be clear by now.

I have questions and offered techniques.

And there's nothing new about these techniques.

They have been around for 100,000 years.

And for 90,000 of those 100,000 years, they worked very well.

And we existed in harmony with the rest of nature,

fully human, fully able to philosophize, argue, love, riddle, perform theater, make masks, so forth and so on.

But in the last 10,000 years, we have fallen into a pathology.

And it's because the umbilical connection to the mind and nature has been severed, lost, pissed away, ignored, degraded, turned away from.

It is a psychedelic relationship to these plants.

Without that, you are not yourself.

Without that, you are half human.

And this is how we behave.

We behave as though, you know, we have a soul, but it's stapled in Yeats' immensely compelling phrase,

to the body of a dying animal.

This needs to be corrected, reconstructed, addressed.

Otherwise, we are going to go into the books, if there are books,

and into the cosmic record, which there surely is a cosmic record, as jerks, lame, didn't get it, couldn't put it together.

And this would be a terrible legacy, because we are not going into these crises with, in a state of total anesthesia.

We have the answers, we have the political machinery to do something about this, we have the sense of crisis,

we have the goodwill and affection for each other.

But we are somehow unable to put all this together in a configuration that would allow us to change our minds,

admit that history was a bad idea, that science betrayed us, that it's a tale told by an idiot,

and to strike out in a new direction.

We're like the frog in the proverbial pot, who never moves as the temperature climbs toward the boiling point.

Sooner or later, you have to just get up on your hind legs and say,

enough already.

Now, maybe this is beginning to happen, and maybe it isn't.

But it's not for us to judge as spectators at a hockey game.

It's for us to get in and roll up our sleeves and participate in.

Do what you think is right.

Think about what you think is right.

And once you've thought about it, then do it.

And it doesn't have to fit in with my program or my agenda.

I have a deep and abiding faith that Mother Nature will sort out the options

and from the offerings of all of us, select those that will be salvational and salutary for all the rest of us.

But if you don't act, you didn't participate.

I mean, this is not a road show, you know.

It's your life, your planet, your world, and the tools to reclaim it are present at hand.

You've heard this now.

Now you have to ask yourself, what are you going to do about it?

That's really all I have to say.

And we're finished.

You're right.

So thank you, John.

Thank you for living in those voices.

Thank you.