Thank you for trying AudioCorder.
What I'll do today is I assume most of you are not familiar with my work,
but I also assume you're intelligent,
so I'm not going to give an introductory talk.
I'll just cut to the chase.
And if you don't understand what's said,
at least you have the satisfaction of knowing nobody talked down to you, right?
Okay.
It's very hard to know where exactly to slice into this pie.
I mean, I am an advocate of the psychedelic experience
for personal growth work, for shamanic exploration,
as an enzyme for the imagination,
as a force that forces us to grow up and to clean up.
However, what I want to talk to you today about,
because this is a pagan community
and because I think the argument,
if it's not understood here, won't be understood anywhere,
is I want to talk about the social impact
of psychedelic plants on human consciousness,
both in the present and in the remote past.
Because my approach to psychedelics is not to see it
as a religious freedom issue
or a personal self-exploration issue.
That's all there.
But I believe that we cannot really understand
what it is to be a human being
and how we came to be human beings
without factoring into our explanations
this most taboo of all subjects
for the Western dominator mind,
the subject of boundary-dissolving,
consciousness-expanding plants.
And so every point of view has a cosmology,
a myth of its meaning.
And as quickly as I can,
I want to tell you the myth
that to my mind unites paganism,
psilocybin, sexual freedom,
the peril to the earth,
and the hope for the future
all into one very nice, neat package.
And it requires a kind of an anthropology lesson.
First of all,
our fellow Voyagers along the way,
the scientists,
have created, as you all know,
the theory of evolution,
which has been the great crowning achievement
of biology over the past hundred years.
First, the Darwinian understanding
of natural selection and random mutation,
then Mendelian genetics,
the discovery of the particulate nature of the gene,
then, still later, molecular genetics,
the elucidation of DNA,
so forth and so on.
The theory of evolution
has been very successful
in explaining the state of nature
on this planet
with one tremendously embarrassing exception,
which is ourselves.
Biological evolution cannot account
for a phenomenon
like minded human beings
involved in the building and maintenance
of global, electronically sustained societies.
How do we do it?
Well, we do it because we have
a vastly superior cerebral architecture
to any other organism in nature.
And the interesting thing
about that architecture
is that it sprang into being
in the blink of an eye,
geologically speaking.
The human brain size doubled
in less than two million years.
This is the most dramatic expansion
in the size of a major organ
of a higher animal
in the entire fossil record.
It would be,
under any circumstances,
an embarrassment
to the theory of evolution.
But notice that the theory of evolution
was generated
by the very organ
we're discussing.
So it is doubly embarrassing.
Now, obviously,
we are the inheritors
of extraordinary circumstances.
Higher animals have existed
on this planet
for 200 million years
in all kinds of forms.
Reptilian life, amphibian life,
avian life, mammalian life.
And never,
so far as the geological history
of the planet can tell us,
never did machine-building,
language-using,
technology-producing societies arise.
Some extraordinary interaction
in our early history
is responsible
for our circumstance
as language-using,
technology-producing creatures.
Okay.
End of introduction.
Here's the scenario,
and I hope it has special resonance
for this community.
All animal species
tend to evolve
into an ecological niche
and stabilize themselves there.
Ants and termites
have been at equilibrium
for hundreds of millions of years.
Our remote ancestors
also were on a direct course
toward that kind of dynamic equilibrium.
We were evolving
toward being fruit-eating,
canopy-living,
insectivorous primates
with an advanced repertoire
of pack signals.
and this was apparently
to be our evolutionary destiny.
Were it not for the fact
that sometime in the last
five million years or so,
the African continent,
which was the site
of our environmental proto-system,
began to dry up.
And the forests
that had always been
our arboreal home
began to shrink.
And what this spelled
for our remote
proto-hominid ancestors
was nutritional pressure.
There wasn't enough food.
Our remote ancestors
began descending
from the canopy
and exploring
the new environment
that the aridity
was bringing into existence,
a grassland environment,
an environment
of limited numbers
of plant and animal species
relative to the climax
tropical rainforests
that were in retreat.
Now, the reason animals
specialize their food supply
is to avoid contact
with mutagens
in the environment.
If you begin experimenting
with foods
and begin eating everything,
you will produce
more children
with mutations.
Some of these mutations
will be positive.
Most will be lethal.
When our remote ancestors
came under nutritional pressure,
they began expanding their diet.
This was the moment
when we became
partially carnivorous,
when we became omnivores.
And had I more time,
I would lay out
many examples
of specific plants,
such as plants
that contain birth control,
alkaloids,
and things like that,
specific plants
that would have impacted
early human emergence.
But I want to concentrate here
on one plant,
and that is
the psilocybin-containing
mushrooms
that grow
in the dung
of cattle.
Because I think that
if we're looking
for a missing link,
it isn't a transitional skeleton,
it isn't meddling
by extraterrestrials,
at least not of the overt
thousand-ton
beryllium ship
variety.
It has to do with the fact
that we began to allow
into our diet
an exotic pseudo-neurotransmitter
that was part of the native flora
of the grassland.
And I believe that,
you know,
in the next ten minutes,
I can at least make it seem plausible
to you
that this mushroom
was the triggering factor
that moved us
from being an advanced hominid,
an advanced animal,
to being, in fact,
a conscious,
self-reflecting,
caring,
thinking,
dreaming,
striving human being.
And here is
my answer
to this riddle,
where did human consciousness
come from?
It begins like this.
In that foraging phase
where we were testing
all kinds of plants
on the grassland,
small amounts
of psilocybin mushrooms
would have naturally
been eaten
in the process
of eating corms
and things like that.
I personally
have seen baboons
in Kenya
investigating cow paddies
on the savannah
because they know
that bug pupa
will be under
the cow paddies.
So the cow paddies
are already set up
as vectors
for possible sources
of nutrition.
So there is no question
that these protohominids
would have eaten
psilocybin
in small amounts.
And by small amounts,
I mean amounts
so small
that if you were
to eat that much,
you wouldn't feel
nothing.
but this dose level
has been studied
and it causes
increased acuity
of vision.
You can actually
give people
small amounts
of psilocybin
and then give them
eye tests
and they do better
if they're slightly
intoxicated
than if they are not.
The guy who proved this,
the Viennese psychologist
Roland Fisher,
when he described
these experiments
to me,
he said,
and so you see,
my young friend,
here we have a case
where the use of drugs
actually introduces us
to a more true vision
of reality
than if we have
avoided the drug.
Scientific proof
that the drug
is telling you
more about reality
than if you had
refused it.
All right.
Now,
what kind of
visual acuity
is it
that is being improved?
Well,
it turns out
it's what's called
edge detection.
In the grassland environment
where the movement
of small animals
means dinner
and the movement
of large animals
means you become dinner,
a plant
which confers
increased visual acuity
is going to
immediately confer
an adaptive advantage
on those members
of the group
that let it in.
Those members
of the group
that refuse it
out of aesthetic
or gastronomic reasons
will tend
to be outbred
because the psilocybin
using members
of the species
will be more successful
at obtaining food
and at surviving
to raise their own children
to reproductive age,
which is the name
of the game
in evolution.
So,
that's step one
of a three-step process
that leads
to the explosion
of consciousness
in the hominid brain.
Step two,
which should have
special appeal
for this crowd,
is that when you take
slightly larger doses
of psilocybin,
not religiously
profound doses,
but doses
which you definitely feel,
psilocybin is what's called
a CNS stimulant,
a central nervous system
stimulant.
What it causes
in animals
is what
neurophysiologists
call arousal.
And in highly
sexed animals
like primates,
arousal
means
in the male
erection.
So,
what,
and an animal
then,
which is
allowing
what is essentially
a sexual stimulant
or an aphrodisiac
to enter
into the diet,
there will be
more instances
of what
anthropologists
call
successful
copulations.
And God knows
we need that.
So,
if you have
more successful
copulations,
you have
more pregnancies.
You have
another,
a second factor,
outbreeding
the non-psilocybin
using member
of the population.
Now,
something really
important
here
that is my,
well,
this whole thing
is my theory,
but here's the part
of it that I like
the best.
All primates,
all primates
have what are called
dominance hierarchies
or male dominance
hierarchies.
This goes right back
clear to lemurs
and the old world monkeys
which are much more,
I mean,
yes,
the new world monkeys
which are more primitive.
All primates
have this dominance hierarchy
and what it means is
the sharp-fanged,
hard-bodied young males.
They control
the women,
the children,
the elderly,
all sexual minorities.
Everybody is under the thumb
of the alpha males.
And as we sit here today,
though this community
may strive
to be an exception,
as a society,
male dominance
is an enormous dilemma
for us
and an enormous
distorting factor
in our politics
and in our lives.
So my notion is
that psilocybin,
by promoting
this polymorphic
sexual style,
actually acted
as an inoculation
against monogamous
sexual styles
of bonding,
you see.
And it isn't that
the monogamous style,
the dominator style,
disappeared.
It was simply
medicated out of existence
for perhaps
a hundred thousand years.
It was medicated
out of existence.
Now,
and what it promoted,
this arousal,
this psilocybin taking
around the African campfires
by these primitive
nomadic pastoralists,
what the social change
that came with it
was
was an orgiastic
sexual style,
a style where
everybody would get
loaded around
the campfire
and then hump
in an enormous
writhing heap.
Now,
yes,
now,
besides the fact
that this is
a great deal
of fun,
it has a very,
very profound
social effect,
which is
in societies
which allow
orgy,
men cannot trace
lines of male paternity.
Men cannot trace
lines of male paternity.
What does this mean?
It means that
men do not identify
with children
as property.
It means that
the men
of that kind
of a social group
can only think
in terms
of our children,
we,
the group,
our children,
and it creates
an immensely
cohesive social glue
that I believe
held these
societies together
for millennia.
And I believe
that during
this period
of pharmacological
suppression
of male dominance,
we became
human beings.
Theater,
poetry,
magic,
art,
altruism,
dance,
symbolic
and cognitive
activity
of every sort
was born
in that window
of opportunity
when there was
simultaneously
a chemical suppression
of male dominance
and consequently
an opening
to Gaian intentionality,
to the intent
of the larger
biological systems
in which the human
system
was embedded.
And a kind
of paradise
came into existence.
There were actually
two phases,
one from about
40,000 to 30,000
years ago
in the interglacial
and in that early phase
human beings,
cattle,
and mushrooms
were sort of
all swirling together
there on the
African grassland
in contact
but not yet
a coherent
triad.
The second
partnership
paradise
arose at the
last glaciation
at the melt
during the
last glacial melt
and lasted
from about
20,000 years ago
to perhaps
as much
as recently
as 10,000
years ago.
And it was
in that
later phase
that
the
Magdalenian
explosion
occurred
and the
social forms
were put
in place
that
Hellenistic
paganism
was looking
back at
with a
nostalgic
and barely
cognizable
memory.
There was
an old,
old memory
of a kind
of paganism
that was
old
5,000 years
before
Eleusis
laid its
cornerstone.
I wrote
a book
called
The Archaic
Revival
in which
I tried
to say
that the
entire
cultural
impulse
of the
20th century
beginning
with Freud
and Jung
discovering
the unconscious
beginning
with Picasso
dragging back
primitive
West African
masks
to Paris
and inserting
them into
his paintings.
Dada,
pataphysics,
jazz,
abstract
expressionism,
even phenomena
like national
socialism,
all of
these various
impulses
in the
20th century,
some positive,
some negative,
all have
a common
theme,
archaism,
a nostalgia
for a
state
before history.
And as
this
tendency,
this nostalgia
has been
sorted out
over the
last hundred
years by
generations of
scholars,
beginning with
Freud and
Jung and
Blavatsky and
Crowley and
then coming
up through
all the
folklorists
and
deconstructionists,
as this
thing has
been teased
apart,
it has become
clearer and
clearer that
the paradigmatic
figure in
any archetypal
revival is
the maker
of magic,
the shaman,
the wizard,
the seeress,
the person
who is in
control with
invisible
forces.
And as
I have
lived my
life and
explored these
things for a
long time,
I've come to
the conclusion
that the
shaman,
without the
hallucinogenic
plants,
is well on
the way to
becoming
priest or
priestess,
well on
the way to
being downloaded
into a
fixed canon,
a moral
vision,
a societal
religious
structure,
which is not
what shamanism
is about,
it's about
discordian
ecstasy,
it's about
the felt
presence of
immediate
experience in
the absence
of theory,
that's what
it's about.
so this,
well, and
then I want
to go back
to our
little process.
We've now
covered step
one, better
vision through
mushroom taking
leads to
better diets
and healthier
children.
Bigger doses
lead to an
end to
monogamy, a
dissolution of
pair bonding,
and a
replacement of
monogamous
anxiety with
polymorphic
amorousness or
whatever you
want to call
it, then
that's only
the second
step.
The third
step is
when you
double the
polyamorous
dose and
now hunting
is out of
the question
and even
fucking is
out of the
question
because you
are nailed
to the
ground
somewhere off
at the edge
of the
firelight
wrestling with
a mystery
so profound,
so bizarre,
that even as
we sit here
with Husserl
and Heidegger
and Heisenberg
and all these
clowns under
our belts,
it is still
absolutely
mysterious,
appalling,
challenging,
boundary-dissolving
and unavoidably
ecstatic.
It is
the living
mystery and
I don't know
how many of
them there
are in the
world but
for my money
there only
has to be
one to
rescue the
entire concept
from, you
know, the
dirty claws of
the reductionist,
the materialist,
the christers,
the nothing-butters,
the merely
this and the
simply-that-ers.
Yeah, I know
I'm preaching
to the converted
but if I
preached to the
unconverted
I'd be hung
from the
yardarm.
So, you
may say to
yourself, well
this is all
very interesting,
this guy has
some kind of
anthropologically
revisionist theory
and, you know,
that's all well
and good.
In other words,
so what?
What does it
have to do
with us?
Well, what it
has to do
with us
is we are
in a state
of enormous
dysfunctional
anxiety
as a result
of the fall
into history
which has
caused us
to have to
compromise
our sensuality,
our connection
to the
Gaian goddess,
our polymorphic
sexuality.
all of these
things have
been poured
into a new
set of social
institutions
that derive
essentially from
the invention
of agriculture
which is where
I think the
shit hit the
fan.
I mean, I'm
fairly radical
on that.
I think that
agriculture is
the end
because it's
incredibly
successful as a
strategy for food
production.
Well, what does
that mean?
It means you
can't be nomads
anymore.
Oh, no.
You have to
build a stone
tower to put
the grain in
and you have to
make sure you
can haul large
rocks up on
top of your
tower to drop
on people whose
grain crop
wasn't as big
as yours was.
We see this
at Jericho.
The most
advanced building
in the world
of 10,000 B.C.
was the grain
tower at
Jericho
and it was
defensive and
it bespeaks
the primal
paranoia.
Once people
stopped moving
across the
land, once
they violated
it with the
blade of the
plow, then
you get
sedentary
populations,
the division
between the
profane world
of the city
and the
wilderness
outside.
That's the
moment when
the division
between the
unconscious
and the
conscious mind
comes into
play and
an entire
set of
institutions
arise then.
Male
kingship,
standing
armies,
role
specialization,
slavery,
women as
chattel,
so forth
and so on.
I mean,
we are the
unhappy
inheritors of
this hideous
plunge into
dysfunctionality.
Now, why
is it such a
hideous plunge
into dysfunctionality
to live
without
psilocybin
or close
relatives
thereof?
The answer
is that
this thing
which to now
I've described
as male
dominance
and a tendency
to form
dominance
hierarchies,
we can
describe another
way and
bring much
closer to
home by
saying it
is the
interriving,
very tenuous,
highly
uncertain
of itself
social
structure
that has
taken root
in the
human psyche
like a
tumor,
like a
growth
of some
sort.
It is
the leftover
of this
primate
dominance
complex
and the
way it
manifests
itself
is by
the
establishment
of
boundaries.
First
of all,
this is
my
body,
do not
touch
it.
Second
of all,
these are
my
weapons
and
agricultural
tools,
do not
touch
them.
This
is
my
woman,
these
are
my
children,
I
hunt
there,
so
forth
and
so
on.
It's
this
division
of the
world
that
allows
the
illusion
of
the
ego
to
come
into
existence.
Now,
what do
psychedelics
do
and
why
are
they
such
social
dynamite?
The
answer
is,
it's
not a
health
issue,
it's
not an
addiction
issue,
it's
not,
I mean,
that's
preposterous,
it's
about
boundary
dissolution.
Every
society,
from
the
classic
Maya
to
Fujiwara
Japan
to
the
France
of the
Bourbons,
every
society
establishes
a set
of
boundaries,
which
it
then
calls
reality,
and
woe
betide
you
if
you
go
across
the
boundary,
because
then
you
are
outcast,
outclass,
outlandish,
and the
full
fury
of the
community
can be
turned
against
you,
and
we
invader,
and
that
it
will
continue
to
strengthen
and
perpetuate
itself
as
long
as
we
do
not
institute
either
as
groups
or
within
our
relationships
or
as
individuals
a
regular
ritual
encounter
with
the
forces
which
dissolve
these
boundaries.
And
the
only
force
I
know
that
works
are
these
plants.
And
as I
say,
I'm
not
interested
in
arguing
whether
there
are
other
methods
or
not.
God,
I
would
hope
so.
But
anything
I
ever
looked
into,
and I
shopped
the
spiritual
supermarket
from
stem
to
stern,
was
horseshit
as far
as I
could
see.
Now,
I am
not a
sensitive.
Let me
say that.
People
say,
well,
but what
about
Ramana
Maharshi
and what
about
Yacob
Burma?
And,
hey,
it's
great
for
those
folks.
I
applaud
arhats
and avatars
and so
forth and
so on.
But what
I'm
interested in
is
democratic
ecstasis.
this.
it should be for the most lumpen among us it is it is not to be attained by an
act of dietary control sexual abstinence or you know whatever it should be it is
a human birthright it is a human birthright to touch the incorporeal body
of the goddess it isn't something so you know well let's see where can we go
from here I I say all this if you're interested I say it better than I'm
saying it here in my book food of the gods which was not written for you
people it's an argument for people who do not know a great deal about drugs may
never have taken drugs but through some miracle have managed to maintain an open
mind all you know and and I don't know how much you know about my stick and I
can't get into it now but for me these things are more than tools for exploring
the Freudian their union unconscious I mean I journey to inhabited worlds that
are there are echoes in elf land and fey but you know as a rationalist as a as a
aspiring astronautical engineer at age 13 it's astonishing to me that I could
validate the mystery through doubt through doubt the truth does not require your
belief the truth is real you can beat it on the ground you can rip it apart you can
look inside it nobody needs to guard the truth from inspection nobody needs to tell
you that you know you can't look behind the stage and so my motivation is to try
to number one bring people to the realization that the spiritual path if you want to think
of it that way that is a real thing and it will carry you to the real thing all spiritual disciplines
that I know except for psychedelics put a great deal of emphasis on putting the pedal to the metal
push push push you know meditate make offerings do mantriana do pranayama do puja push push push with
psychedelics suddenly there's a very deep interest in and where are the brakes you see you're no longer
pushing once you get to the psychedelics seeking is an attitude which ill becomes
you you have found it you have found it now what in the hell are you going to do with it and and this
is a great dilemma for for anyone who goes into this I mean I am I am as I see myself I'm I'm a preacher
in the marketplace but I know and I'm sure most of you know that I could walk out of here you could walk out
of here and you could go as far as your courage would carry you there is no barrier there are no more
barriers you can go as far as your fucking courage will carry you and at that point you have to ask the
question you know do I want to be the mad monk of cold mountain do I want the villagers to down in the
valley to say oh yes we see him occasionally up in the mist naked flying with the eagles because you can be
be that person you know you don't have to go back to your job as ad exec stockbroker or or whatever it is and
so we stand on the edge of being able to leave history we can leave it you know we tend to forget
because our lives are so brief that what we call the psychedelic experience is very very new on the plate of
western occultism and science I mean hashish did not make great inroads into medieval Europe that all
came later in the 18th and 19th century chloroform ether these things don't cut it mescaline was
synthesized for the first time in 1888 these things had to compete with many other interesting areas of
scientific exploration in the 20th century we have not come to terms with what they mean and what they are
and it's a curious area because the counterculture whatever that may mean knows a great deal more about this
than science I mean science does not explore this area because it senses enormous danger for its ontological
machinery it probably couldn't survive the encounter and therefore it's just said well it's psychology
it's marginal it's fleeting it's non-irreproducible and so forth and so on this is all nonsense you can
by unplugging the telephone by fasting for six hours and by taking five dried grams of strophari cubensis in
silent darkness you can go up to the great simulacra of human explorers hypathea maria newton davinci you can
take that ride i have the feeling that when we go into those psychedelic spaces we not only see things no
one has ever seen before we see things no one will ever ever see again okay one one last thought i want to
put out and then i'll try for some questions i have a sort of a rational mind in that i like things to
make sense i don't mean experimental sense but i mean if you can build a verbal metaphor to get from one
thing to another then you understand it much better and so i the magical dimension is real it isn't
psychological it isn't based on the strength of will it's as real as mars in its orbit i mean there's
real estate out there folks it's that real and so then uh the question becomes uh how to
vivify it and the answer is by creating a consensus in language by having it made illegal it's like where
sex was with the victorians you know everybody was inventing the wheel over and over again what we have
to do is begin to build a consensus about this realm and uh you know this may be heresy in a community
as oriented toward tradition as this one seems to be but and the generally pleasant position
to take is that everybody has a piece of the action you know the hasids know something the buddhists know
something the book of mormon there's something there the mushroom was incredibly ungenerous on this point
it said nobody knows jack shit about what is going on so it is for you with your body as laboratory
and your mind as worker in that laboratory to find the way to reflux the alchemical gold the only experience
which counts which counts is your own experience everything else is somehow handed down through
social structures and political structures it's irrelevant if flying saucers were to land on the
south lawn of the white house tomorrow it would not matter to you as much as smoking dmt would if you did
that tonight because that's your experience your conviction you see and i believe that the rebirth of paganism the
rebirth of archaism the rebirth of psycho psychedelic shamanism is coming at this moment because we are going to be
be involved in a historical meltdown which will be the equivalent of a species deep shamanic crisis
in which as a collectivity we are going to have to make the journey to the well of worlds and recover and
cleanse the collective soul of humanity we have lost touch with our moral compass because we have lost
touch with the guy in mind and this is not a metaphor if you if if you take these neurotransmitters these exo
pheromones that connect you up with the natural environment the gaian intent becomes known it's an act of
feeling if we could feel what we are doing we would stop doing it but we live in a realm of abstraction
excuses incredible wealth incredible levels of pampering and softness lie between us the upper five
percent of the intellectual and material elite on the planet and the problems i mean how many of us have
been to bosnia or rwanda or somalia these things are only images on a dehumanizing screen if we could feel
what we are doing we would awaken to the mystery of each other and to the mystery of the historical
process of recovering what was lost we don't need this material civilization we don't need five billion
people on this planet we have to think very very radically about how we are going to change ourselves
or we are not going to make the cut and orthodoxy is utterly and completely bankrupt all it can do is
suppress they suppress they suppress they suppress but there's only one argument that will forgive suppression
deliverance and they can't give us deliverance all they can give us is the menendez trial
oj baby m the skaters klaus von bulow horseshit horseshit horseshit we are locked inside
uh a nightmare a nightmare a nightmare of contaminated and toxic imagery that is designed to disempower you
and make it impossible for you to think straight and the way out is straight back to the reality of the
vegetable gnosis it is there it has always been there the societies that never broke the connection
live in dynamic and loving balance with each other and the planet today were it not for the input of our
disruptive social and economic systems so i talk to all kinds of people who i see as part of my community
but it stretches from virtual reality to the radical gay movement to the house movement to the pagan movement
to the younger molecular pharmacologists to the radical art historians and psychotherapists all of these
communities are fragmented and suspicious of each other and this is precisely what orthodoxy
enjoys if all of these countercultural impulses could make common cause we would probably discover that
we're 65 to 70 percent of the population and so what is needed is a spirit of boundary dissolution
between individuals between classes sexual orientations rich and poor man and woman uh intellectual
and feeling toned types if this can happen then we will make a new world and if this doesn't happen nature is
fairly pitiless and has a place for us in the shale of this planet where so many have preceded us
well i think that's the basic rave it raises a lot of issues if somebody's burning to ask a question
uh yes burning to ask well i think that it's very hard to find pristine
quote pseudo paleolithic or pseudo neolithic culture even the amazon where i've spent a lot of time
tribes that were nomadic at the time of of contact are now agriculturalists simply because missionary
medicine has swollen aboriginal populations to the point where they can't be nomads as they used to be
so you're right there are some psychedelic using cultures that are pretty uh uh unappealing although
actually i can only think of one that i find politically very unappealing and i don't want to
knock them because i haven't lived with them so i may be misled but i think that uh it's not simply to
take psychedelics but it's also to decondition oneself to the notion of ego and all the concepts which
constellate around that such as place property ownership and stability you see the idea that we have
inherited from western religion and science is the idea that things should be stable this is a very male
dominant notion the wish for stability eternity when in fact the message life hands you over and over again
is nothing lasts nothing lasts not what you love not what you hate
not your enemies your friends not even your dear dear self nothing lasts and the ego goes mad
in the presence of that truth it it it can't swallow it and so we have anxiety of death need to dominate
people need to possess property uh terror of illness uh resentment of fate because we are not in the flow
and i think what these psychedelics do is they put you very much in the here and now and it's nothing more
than that i mean obviously i'm an egghead and an abstract thinker and i hope to make my reputation in
mathematics but feeling is the primary validator of existence i mean if you don't know that you you've got
to go back to square one and these things empower feeling they are catalysts for the imagination i mean
you may not like what psychedelics do to you they may terrify you but if it terrifies you then surely
it must have catalyzed your imagination or you wouldn't have known that terror so catalysis of the
imagination in a fairly loving and yet ruthless way is what the psychedelics deliver anybody who calls
this escapism is sitting on their thumb i mean they don't know what they're talking about reality is for
people who can't handle this stuff i do want to say one thing it almost slipped my mind and for those of
you have your hands up i apologize but i think this needs to be said and i don't know how many of you know
it but this comes under the uh this this is head this is a news flash folks we interrupt this program to
bring you a special announcement a new psychoactive substance has been discovered a very powerful
psychoactive substance the most powerful since the discovery of lsd a substance so powerful that 300
micrograms is the dose that means one gram will dose seven thousand people this compound comes from a plant
the plant is and i hope you're paying attention the plant is legal the compound is legal you can possess it
you can manufacture it you can transport it across borders you can give it away you can sell it and you
can do it on stage and it comes from a plant and the plant is also available and and i want to tell you
about this because okay no shoving no shoving all right the not to keep you in suspense any longer uh the plant
is salvia divinorum salvia divinorum which some of you who are real mavens of this stuff have know it it's
been in the books for 30 years the problem was nobody knew how to get off and so it was always carried
in these lists as suspect hallucinogen the thing is any scientist confronted with a plant where somebody
says it's a hallucinogen will test to see if it's an alkaloid all hallucinogens almost all are alkaloids
so salvia divinorum negative for alkaloids doesn't matter it has a new unknown compound in it now known
salvorine alpha and the interesting thing about salvorine alpha is we have in this country what's called
a structural near relatives or cogener law which says if a compound is a structural near relative
isomer and anti-amer or stereo isomer of an illegal compound then it too can be made illegal salvia divinorum
doesn't fit this description that means that in order to make this stuff illegal the government will have
to present medical data showing there is something wrong with it and at this stage nobody on earth knows
the real pharmacological parameters of this compound so here's the deal you can grow this plant in a window
box in your apartment in your backyard it looks like joe plant there is nothing particularly distinguishing
about this plant and if you have three or four cuttings in six or seven months you will have more
than you know what to do with the and and then i'll just describe how i do it i have not i'm slightly
chickenshit to do the pure compound which by the way you do 300 micrograms understand that what that looks
like is a grain of salt a small grain of salt is a human effective dose it comes on so fast that you have no
impression of it coming on at all you do it and then after a while you notice that for a long time you have
been staring at something incomprehensible well let me here's how i recommend that you do it while we get
the chemical things sorted out because the chemical it could be dangerous it would be very easy to overdose
by a factor of 10 20 30 and you would still just be doing a smidgen so i say let's honor the plants
let's not hand the government a bunch of casualties that it can cluck over and put on national tv you
know the bibble bibble bibble show let's use the plant and the way you do it is you grow up a batch of this
stuff and get between 15 and 20 leaves remove the mid vein with your fingernail just to lower the mass
fold it all into a little pile put it in your mouth and 20 leaves is a whopping mouthful so basically
as much as you can get in your mouth put it in your mouth lie down in silent darkness and squeeze this
stuff with your jaws taste like it's horrible it's not as bad as ayahuasca but it's horrible but you could
acquire a taste for it so lie down in darkness where you can see a digital watch of one of these red flashing
jobs like the k-mart deal and and then let it don't swallow it but just squeeze it and masticate it
at 15 minutes by the clock spit it out into a bowl or a kleenex or something and then just lie there lie
still in the darkness with your eyes closed and look and this is almost the key empowerment though it's
idiotic people fail to do it look at the back of your eyelids with the expectation of seeing something
and when you do that after just three or four minutes there will be what uh we professionals call
streaming which means amoeboid lights of after image colors the chartreuse and purple flowing by
and about three minutes after that it will deepen very very quickly into extraordinarily bizarre uh dare we
say it fairly dmt like hallucinations and it it it builds fast i mean so fast that you there is this
wonderful moment in it where you actually know real fear which shows you that it's working i mean i really
believe if if you're if if you take a psychedelic and you're not afraid you did too much you didn't do enough
the experience then will unfold over about 45 minutes and just lie there and look and it is beautiful it is
beautiful i mean i'm a a connoisseur of hallucination and the the beautiful these deep indigo blues these these
cerulean blues against blackness that are like neon and these amorphous eve tongue gay kind of shapes
that are moving and transforming themselves i mean i was amazed i couldn't believe it i was saying my god
this is legal this is legal and it's working it's working and i am i am the hardest of the hard heads i
mean i know people say you know here's target this lucidum this will get you off here's this smoke this
knick and nick this something no no no uh-uh no that it doesn't it's not like that these things are rare
but this one works and i commend it to your attention and your friends attention and anyone with shamanic
intent as i say it's perfectly legal to possess advocate the whole bit yes salvia it's in the genus salvia
that's the mint family sacred to pagans for millennia salvia salvia and then divinorum d-i-v-i-n-o-r-u-m the
diviner's mint it there's well yes let me say something about this that's very interesting
pardon me well that's what i was going to talk about it's native from mexico so it has no common name in
english in spanish it has a very interesting common name it's called ojos de la pastora now
the eyes of the shepherdess what a strange name think about it for a moment first of all notice that
in christian iconography there are no shepherdesses period not one we got shepherds you got your
shepherds there christmas night shepherdess no so it's called ojos de la pastora well then the
anthropologist who studied this brett blasser to whom we all owe a great debt hail brett
naturally these people are tzatzil and sotil they're in the mountains of oaxaca and so he said to them
well yes ojos de la pastora very interesting but what do you call it in your language what do you call it in
tzatzil and they said well well we we have no name for it in our language this is very very
interesting and if any of you have any thoughts or want to work on this it's
inconceivable if these people had used this for centuries that they would not have a local
tzatzil name for it so he said why don't you have a name for it and they said because
our grandfathers were the first to use it and this we do not know what to make of it because salvia
divinorum is known only from this very indemnified locality in the sierra mazateca where did it come
from has it always been there but these indians only discovered it 200 years ago did it come from
somewhere else and if so where because it's never been located anywhere else on the planet
so this is a great puzzlement and i think if we move fast enough we psychedelicos we pagans we
neuronauts we magicians if we move fast enough this will just be moot and this is a far more powerful
thing than can
Cannabis I mean not if you've never smoked cannabis, and then you sit down and smoke the best staff there is
But as we all know after a while cannabis loses its ability to really catapult you into the unspeakable
The the salvia divinorum every time I have taken it. It's gotten better and stronger and weirder
So I think it is sent from the goddess at this time eyes of the shepherdess
These are the eyes we should be looking through
Okay, I think several people at once asked where do you get it?
You must each have your own favorite rare plant dealer. I
Don't work for any rare plant dealer and every time I mention one
Thousands of dollars flow into their coffers, which leaves me feeling slightly weird
nevertheless of the jungle P.O. Box
Sebastopol, California
Somebody sitting next to you already knows this so I'm not going to repeat it. That's the one and a
Harvesting question
Well, we're learning we're learning and so far we've been
Fairly careful to eat it just as it's approaching flowering
Right, but you do know don't you that it's an it may look like an annual, but it's a perennial
You can clip it off above a node and it will grow more
Yeah, no seed is a pain is a pain try and do it with cuttings
That's about all I can say about it
All right, I'm gonna knock off. Thank you very much