So, I won't repeat, but we do EarthTrust Speakers Program seminars here once a month.
In addition to the Speakers Program that you guys are familiar with, this is one of the events,
we also work with projects around the world dealing with the environment and social justice.
And I wanted to tell you for just a couple minutes about some of those so you know that by coming here,
all the proceeds from the Speakers Program go to fund those projects.
So, by coming today, you're part of something global.
So, just two quick examples, and then you can see on our literature on the table that we have about nine other projects.
But just to let you know what we're part of here, one of the projects we fund is in Papua New Guinea,
where it's one of the largest remaining rainforests in the world.
It's estimated to be, at current rates of cutting, it will be the third largest rainforest by the end of the century.
It shouldn't be that way, it's a small island, but at current rates of cutting in Brazil.
So, what's happening is that the multinational companies are eyeing Papua New Guinea,
have already begun clear-cutting, but are really drooling over these pristine rainforests.
And there's been a, Papua is an unusual place.
It's one of the few places in the world where the indigenous people have land rights legally.
Basically, they have to say what's going to happen on the land.
And it's more or less followed, although manipulated by the government and the multinational lumber companies.
So, what we're working with, there's a man named Glenn Berry, who has worked with the Madang people,
and now is working with a number of other indigenous groups to organize efforts to educate their people about the dangers of clear-cutting.
They're offered bribes, you know, monetary bribes.
The companies come in and say, we'll build you a school, we'll build roads.
They do build a building and roads, and as soon as they take all the lumber out,
the roads are stopped being kept up, and they have an empty building.
So, that's what they get out of it.
So, what this project does, what was organized by the Madang people, is to do educational campaigns into the areas to warn them about the dangers of clear-cutting,
and then also to provide economic development.
They're very poor people, and their culture is being, is being rapidly disintegrated.
So, they need economic support, and so they've developed their own walkabout sawmills, which is a small cutting.
They can cut, you know, a few forests and still keep the lumber going,
because it's unrealistic to think that they should just stop their cutting and live, just live.
They're going to be bribed by the money.
So, this provides, they also are doing butterfly farming, which I don't know quite how that works.
Interesting concept of rounding up the butterflies, and cassowary and crocodile farming, all trying to get development.
So, it's a project that, one, is saving the environment.
Last year, they were able to save 255,000 hectares of rainforest from what would have been complete clear-cutting and immediate mulching into cardboard boxes.
They don't even use it as hardwood.
So, that's ongoing.
It's still urgent.
The companies are really moving in, and so we raise funds.
We've helped Glen Barry with his projects.
They're now doing propaganda posters to put up in the villages to help people understand the dangers.
So, that's one of the kind of projects we do, which tries to support the efforts, you know, multilevel,
try to support the efforts to keep the indigenous cultures alive, also support, say, the environment that they're living in.
Another quick one is we support village banking for women in Central America in a number of countries,
Belize, Guatemala, Honduras, and just starting now in El Salvador.
And that's a project to get marginalized women access to small loans, which are normally frozen out of loans,
so they can keep their, start income-generating businesses.
And these are ways to help organize the women, strengthen the community.
The profits go most quickly to the children and improve problems with malnutrition,
and, you know, strengthen the self-sufficiency efforts of those people.
So, if you want to know more about these kind of Earth Trust projects, and there's others, there's literature,
or talk to me, talk to Andrew, talk to Georgianne, Shiva, Elizabeth, and we can direct you.
And, you know, if you want to get involved and work with us, please do.
So, that's Earth Trust.
Again, thank you all for coming.
A couple of logistical details.
The bathroom is through, one bathroom is through that door and back in the back corner of the house.
Another one is at the front corner of the house.
You may have found outside.
I think that's it.
So, I'll introduce Georgianne, who's the director of the speakers program,
and is responsible for all the, getting all the speakers and all the publicity.
So, and you'll introduce Terence.
Well, first I want to welcome you all to this program.
And this is such a beautiful location to hold a spirit and nature program.
It couldn't be more perfect.
And I hope, actually, during lunch or during some of the breaks that you'll explore outside.
There's some paths leading down to some benches down there where you can sit and contemplate the ocean and whatever.
We've created this spirit and nature program, basically, to explore the intrinsic connection between spirituality and nature.
And with that awareness, basically, seeing how that then promotes the idea of stewardship of the Earth and sanctity towards the Earth.
We've gathered about eight speakers, and Terence is the second speaker of this program.
And I'd like to just tell you a little bit about who else will be here.
The next speaker will be Mark Gerzon, who will be here the end of October.
And he'll be presenting a talk on spirituality and nature in midlife and following a spiritual path in midlife.
And then after him, we have Brother David Standelrast, who's a Benedictine monk.
And I have to read just a little bit about what he'll do.
His presentation is Belonging to the Universe.
And then on December 4th, we have Australian environmental activist John Seed,
who will be presenting the Council of All Beings.
And he's developed this work along with Joanna Macy, if any of you know Joanna Macy.
And on February 5th, a wonderful woman, who I've been very inspired by, named Sister Miriam McGillis,
who many people don't know, but she has a wonderful tape out called The Fate of the Earth.
And it's just riveting, if you've ever heard it.
She gave this presentation in 1986.
And I just, it, what she has said applies sort of timelessly now and forever, I feel.
So she's something I really want to tell you about if you don't know about her.
And her presentation is Dreaming the Sacred Community.
So she'll be speaking in terms of the Earth community, and particularly our local community.
She was very aware of the LA riots when she came up with this theme.
And then on February 28th, we have Matthew Fox, who, as you may know,
was silenced by the Vatican for his controversial issues,
controversial views on feminism, sexuality, and the priesthood.
And I heard recently, I'm not sure of the full ramification of this rumor,
but he was, something happened where he was expelled from his order because of these views.
So this is a recent thing.
I think in the LA Times, if any of you know about it,
I'd be interested to hear what the rumor is and the truth is.
And his theme is Awakening the Cosmic Tree,
the tree being the symbol of regeneration and of life.
And the last person that we have is Charlene Spretnack,
who's an author, an eco-theologian, and feminist.
And her theme is States of Grace.
So any of these people that you're interested in, you can ask us about.
There's flyers over there on the table.
And we'd love to see you at these events.
Now, I'd like to just introduce Shiva Ray Bailey, who's our administrator.
And she'll just say a few things about today before I introduce Terrence.
This is just very short because I know you're probably restless to hear our great speaker here today.
We were very excited to have you here.
I wonder if you could just help us for a moment to help us find out how we got in contact with you.
So how many people came here through the Earth Trust brochure?
If you can just raise your hand.
That's great.
How many people came here through the Albert Hoffman Foundation mailing?
Yeah, the postcard, the green, acid green.
Yeah.
Great.
Okay.
What about the LA Weekly ad?
Did anyone see that?
Great.
And what about just word of mouth?
Great.
Okay.
Well, thank you.
So welcome.
And we hope to see you again.
Also, there are lunches for those that paid for lunches.
We'll have a lunch break.
And do we have any extra?
Yeah.
And there will be, if you need to get a lunch, there are some restaurants that we can tell
you about on PCH towards Topanga.
Is that right, Andrew?
Yeah.
Towards Topanga.
There's many restaurants along the way there.
Now to Terence McKenna.
Terence McKenna doesn't really need an introduction.
If you heard him last night, he certainly doesn't need an introduction.
But for those of you who don't know him, I will repeat a little bit of what I said last
night.
Terence is essentially an anarchist and an interdimensional explorer.
He's a shamanologist, and he is an author also.
He has many books out, three of which we have here today for sale.
The Archaic Revival is one of his most recent books, and Trilogues with Rupert Sheldrake and
Ralph Abraham co-authored.
And Food of the Gods, the Search for the Original Tree of Knowledge, also we have here, as well
as others.
And Terence, as I said, is an interdimensional adventurer with an understanding of nature from
the depths of the Amazon to the most current scientific breakthroughs.
He's a shamanologist who traverses the worlds of the psyche and the spirit, bringing back
startling visions of the nature of existence.
Simply put, he takes enormous chances, breaks all the rules, and comes back with pearls.
Terence McKenna.
In case we get into something really heavy, I'll have a pen ready.
How many people were at the event last night?
Oh, so practically a clean sweep.
Well, as you know, then, I'm an inveterate talker, and it doesn't take much to set me off,
and it takes quite a bit to turn me off.
So it seems to me these things are always more interesting if they're driven by the concerns
of the audience, and if the concerns of the audience aren't sufficient to fill the time,
well, then I have a whole laundry list of obsessions that we can work our way through
until the last syllable of recorded time, since that's not far away, in my opinion.
Very little of what I planned to say last night got said, because whenever I discover that
I'm going to have to stand at a podium rather than sit in a chair, I can't, because of my
contact lenses, glance down at my notes comfortably.
So instead, I just sort of rave.
So I appreciated the enthusiasm of the audience last night.
My personal assessment of the talk was that it was an even more than usual meandering diatribe.
And a critic who charged me with a basic incoherence would probably get my blushing acquiescence.
Maybe we can do better today.
Are there questions from last night?
At the time, I wasn't aware of any kind of discontinuity, but I was thinking about it later.
Me too.
Yeah.
And I wanted to know, what's the continuity between what you were saying at the beginning
about changing the way we are in relationship to the earth and consuming less resources,
and then what you were saying toward the end about the coming of the millennium and moving
out of the birth canal into a new reality.
Right.
No, I think that there is, if not a contradiction there, at least it's some kind of coincidence
of opposite, what I don't want to say is that there's nothing to be done, that there is no
moral or political imperative, and that we can just continue with this mindless potlatch
civilization until everything is ruined, because I don't believe that.
And I think it's socially irresponsible to say that.
On the other hand, what I don't want to fall too much in the other direction toward is saying
that it all depends on us and that we must raise enormous levels of anxiety in ourselves
and act as though the salvation of the planet depended on us, what more is happening is that
the most important political work that needs to be done is for each of us to raise our own consciousness
about these issues, and then to create a community based on the sum total of our personal acts of
reformation.
So, you know, it is very important to bring help to people in the third world who are struggling
to raise families and preserve their environments and this sort of thing.
But if I were a rationalist, I would be completely despairing.
So, we are more in the role of like midwives of this new order.
And I guess it's useful then to return to that birth metaphor.
The birth of the new humanity and the new earth is going to happen.
But in the same way that a midwife or an obstetrician can ease a birth, make it smoother, make it less painful
for all concerned, that's the role that political activism needs to take.
So, I think we should act as though the salvation of the earth is on our shoulders, but feel as though it is an automatic unfolding
that we need not have anxiety about.
You know, the Chinese philosopher Wipo Yang said, worry is preposterous.
And I think that's true.
We don't know enough to worry.
And to worry is in a sense a kind of act of hubris because you are claiming complete knowledge of the situation
and then you worry.
And so, what is much more empowering and what makes the process of historical ending easier, I think,
is to act from your heart and to individual acts of caring are more important than giving your energy to grandiose political schemes.
I mean, it almost comes back down to the gospel admonition to, you know, heal the sick, clothe the naked, visit the imprisoned, bury the dead.
But there's nothing there about grandiose political reform and all that sort of thing.
That, I think, arises out of the zeitgeist of the collectivity.
And I'm very hopeful.
People have a sort of hear my rap differently.
I mean, I've had people, after what I thought were inspiring panegyrics, come up to me and say,
but it's such a dark and horrifying vision.
It means that I failed as a communicator in that situation.
Because I'm the gonest and most irrational hope freak I've ever met.
I mean, I think everything is fine.
Everything is going toward the purpose for which it was intended.
But it's an act of conscious awareness on the part of each of us that carries us toward that.
So, you know, often in what I say, there is, if not the fact of contradiction, then the appearance of contradiction.
This is because, to my mind, life is complicated enough to admit of contradiction.
Was it Oscar Wilde, or who was it, who said, I contradict myself?
I contradict myself.
Logical consistency is one of the prejudices that we've inherited from the scientific attempt to describe the world.
But, in fact, even science, at its basic level, has now abandoned that as an ideal.
In quantum physics, the way it's done mathematically is you have an ordinary causal logic, an if-then logic.
But in order to handle what quantum physics is attempting to describe, you also have to have what are called islands of Boole,
or islands of Boolean logic, which is embedded in the standard logic, and which is a logic of both-and.
And you cannot reduce this to a non-contradictory description.
The great thing about the rational program of science is pushed far enough, it reveals the irrational foundations of nature.
And that's really what the crisis in science now is.
The cutting edges of physical science have contacted the Heisenberg uncertainty principle in the 20s,
the anthropocentric principle in the 80s and 70s, and we are realizing that somehow the notion of an observer outside the system
with a god-like objectivity and zero input into the situation,
that was a necessary fiction for the more naive program of description of nature.
But as we move into the more sophisticated description of nature, we have to place the observer in the picture,
and then there is going to be a reverberation of contradiction that probably can't be gotten rid of.
I mentioned a little, or I referred to this in the talk last night, where I said we shouldn't push for closure.
We should accept that it is in principle mysterious.
And so we are never explaining life or relationships or economies or whatever we're looking at.
We're describing them with ever more prescient accuracy.
But we cannot eliminate the unknown.
One of my teachers years ago, West Churchman, wrote a wonderful book called Planning on Uncertainty.
And I think, you know, we all need to plan on uncertainty, and it's the one thing that is left out of most models
because the model builder has such faith in the model that he would never build in a trapdoor into the realm of uncertainty.
And yet life is composed almost entirely of these kinds of trapdoors, you see.
Does that do it?
So do I understand, Ben, that in your vision, we really don't know anything about what it's going to look like once we're out of the birth canal.
But what we can do now is behave with integrity toward the world that we're in today.
Is that right?
That's right.
And it's not that in principle we can't know what it's like beyond the birth canal.
It's simply that it's too early.
I used the metaphor last night that the transcendental object is below the event horizon.
It is.
And so all we can see is the rosy glow of its promise at this point.
But give us ten years and the actual edge of the transcendental object will rise above the event horizon.
I mean, I don't think that we are marginalized or part of fad and fashion.
I think this is actually the rising modality necessary for the future if we're going to make it through.
In other words, I suspect that ten years from now, fifteen years from now, the things we are talking about today will be the general metaphors and concerns in society.
Because I just have a very strong intuition based on, you know, a lot of journeying into those hyperspatial modalities that this is the path.
And I'm sufficiently convinced of that to submit it to a kind of intellectual plebiscite.
I mean, I believe that ideas compete with each other the way animals compete in an environment and that the best ideas, the most fitting ideas for the human adventure will eliminate their competition.
And that's what we're experiencing now in in the political domain is the competition between ideological systems roughly comparable to dinosaurs and mammals.
And, you know, you can decide which is which, but the two are incommensurate and and one is in the act of eliminating the other.
And so it's a matter of observing this process, understanding it and being comfortable with it.
If you're right, I don't think you need to feel any urgency because that will quite naturally percolate out in the mix.
Many of you have heard me quote William Blake.
Like it's always worth repeating, he said, if the truth can be told so as to be understood, it will be believed.
In other words, understanding compels belief.
You don't have to hammer on somebody.
Your task is to refine your message into an understandable form and then let the dynamics of intellectual competition decide what is the best model to follow.
Yeah.
I had a question related to what you were just saying and then I had a chemistry question.
What keeps me optimistic is that information seems to be spreading more rapidly.
Some futurists have said that by the year 2011 that information will be doubling every second.
I was wondering if you could comment on that.
Well, yeah.
I mean, part of what I was going to talk about last night and didn't get to is I'm the purveyor of a very formal mathematical theory about how history unfolds itself and what time is.
And to your great good fortune, you're not going to be exposed to this today.
Had we two days, I would flay you with it on the second day.
But here's the thing that's going on.
Since the very first moments of the universe's existence, novelty, as I call it, or complexity, as someone else has called it,
or connectedness has been increasing so that the early universe was very simple.
It was a plasma free electrons.
There were no laws of molecular physics, still less laws of biology or gene segregation or something like that.
As the universe has aged, it has become more and more complex.
We represent the culmination to the present moment of that process.
Well, I don't think that's particularly big news.
It's sort of a stating of the obvious that the universe has grown more complex through time.
But what is interesting is that each advancement into complexity that has built on the previously established foundation of complexity
occurs more rapidly than the stages which preceded it.
So if you were to draw a diagram of that, it would be an involuting spiral so that after the Big Bang and things settled down
after the first few nanoseconds of the universe's existence, well, then for a long time, it was very boring.
And all that happened was the temperatures fell very gradually.
Eventually, they fell to the point where atoms could settle down into stable orbits around nuclei.
And then, as it fell, as the temperature fell still further, eventually these atoms could aggregate into molecular structures.
Again, each advancement into novelty proceeding more rapidly than the stage which preceded it.
Well, that's why, to my mind, human history is not a radical break with primate biology.
It simply represents an acceleration of primate biology.
behavior into a more compacted temporal domain and high technology electronic data transfer
the erection of global society which has built on the previous levels of cultural attainment
has happened even more quickly so that these eras or epochs you could almost think of them as
of complexity are now of such short duration that instead of taking millions of years or perhaps
billions of years to to transit through one of these we now are moving through them at the rate of
one or two a decade and beyond that one or two every two or three years and beyond that one or two
every few months and i see no elegant reason for assuming that this process will ever cease
its asymptotic acceleration well then if you picture what i'm describing it's a funnel of some sort
which begins with an extremely wide mouth but which has now narrowed to an extremely
small and fast moving kind of situation and this is why history is a self-limiting process
it isn't that we have broken away from the the uh slow-moving processes of ordinary nature
it's that we represent nature at a different time frame and i think this is why history is ending
because it's going so much faster than it used to go that it's going to finish very soon
there may be as much experience ahead of us as there is behind us but we're moving through it
so much faster than we used to that we may we are literally approaching the end of time at a faster and
faster speed and this is something built into the structure of the cosmos it's the answer to the
question where did we come from we were called forth out of biological organization by the continued
acceleration of the expression of novelty and and this is why i count myself as a proponent of what i call
the big surprise rather than the big bang the big surprise lies ahead of us not billions of years
or millions of years or thousands of years in the future but within our lifetimes potentially uh and it's
interesting the i think i said this last night the people who run the world now possess curves which when
they draw these curves and try to extrapolate them 50 years into the future it makes no sense at all you cannot
extrapolate uh the ozone hole the aids epidemic the spread of pluton you cannot extrapolate these things a hundred years into the future
the future because they all go asymptotic and reach infinity so it means the oceans boil the atmosphere blows off
everybody dies and that's the end of it but i don't think that's what's happening i think novelty is the saving grace and that we are the historical adventure is essentially coming into the finale of the third act and it is our great good fortune to be spectators and participants and
in the phenomena that for all preceding generations could only been anticipated uh and uh and prayed for
anticipated and and prayed for it's a screwy position I understand I mean
boiled down to a bumper sticker it's a bearded guy on the corner with a sign
which says repent for the end is nigh or maybe just the end is nigh but I think
all the evidence is that the soul is about to collectively leave the body the
human imagination married to technology has become a force too powerful to be
unleashed within the fragile ecosystem of this planet so we must either carry
ourselves elsewhere or the planets homeostatic drive to preserve ordinary
biology will eliminate us through epidemic disease or climatological
upheaval or you know that there are many possibilities so I think we are being
propelled somewhat reluctantly into a new human modality that is as radical a shift
as birth is to the individual or as the original entry into history was for our
species history cannot be conceived of as preceding another thousand or ten thousand
years I mean it just can't be so it must be that it's a self-limiting process and it
only lasts twenty five thousand years I mean if you go back twenty five thousand
years the earth was in ecodynamic balance human beings were fully established as
intelligent as caring as creative as you and I theater poetry dance love hope
tragedy religion all these things were in place but history represents Gaia hitting the fast forward by the
button on the evolution of the primates and it it seems of long duration to us because we at the level of the expression of the individual phenotype are as ephemeral as mayflies you know a person lives seventy years ninety years and then they're gone but on a scale of twenty five thousand years clearly what is happening on this planet is the emergence of the
the emergence of an entirely new kind of an entirely new kind of order within the natural order it is natural but it is new there is no contradiction in this once atoms were a new invention once molecules were a new invention once polymers were the cutting edge of what's happening now the cutting edge of what's happening is large scale primate machine integrated
the movement of the movement of the movement of the information
did that do it yeah yeah oh you want to follow on
oh yeah I'm sorry it's five methyl oxy NN di methyl tryptamine crystalline legal to possess
and would one if one was going to mix it with one mix it with harming harm mellow haraline or haraline or harmaline
that was some word salad
well I think you're asking about five MEO DMT five methoxy dimethyl tryptamine the toad foam of recent fame as far as I understand I think that it's legal however it would probably depend on the length of the fangs of the local DA
because there is what's called the cogenary law which says that structural near relatives of halicinogens can also be prosecuted as illegal compounds as far as the question about the harming alkaloids harming harm
harm align
aline harm aline tetra hydroharman harmelo I think is apocryphal
a species
that but the notion which must lie behind your question is
harm and alkaline alkaloids
I think is apocryphal
is apocryphal, specious.
But the notion which must lie behind your question
is harming alkaloids inhibit monoamine oxidase,
which is an enzyme system in the human gut
that tends to inactivate amines, monoamines,
of which these hallucinogens almost all fall into that category.
You could attempt to inhibit your MAO
with a dose of harming or harmaline
and then smoke 5-MeO-DMT.
But I don't recommend this unless you are a pharmacologist
with hours and hours of psychedelic flight time on your log.
And this is certainly nothing for the ingenue to attempt.
Once you get out into the realm of synergies,
that means what happens when you run
two metabolically active compounds at the same time,
and some people do three and four and five,
you know, you're definitely on your own
because pharmacology doesn't study drugs like that.
They study them in isolation, their activity.
And, you know, some people say of the smokable tryptomines,
they're so quick that wouldn't it be logical
to inhibit your MAO in order to freeze frame the experience
and instead of having it last three minutes,
have it last 30 minutes.
Yes, that's a fine idea, but what if it lasted 30 hours instead?
I mean, you don't, you know, a miss is as good as a mile in this game,
so you should be, have your mantras ready
if you push off into that.
Yeah.
Quick and easy question.
Okay.
I imagine psilocybin is probably, you know,
pretty common and pretty common use,
and I'm sure that the people around here are pretty aware
of the malathion spraying that's going on.
And I've always been curious, I'm not a chemistry student,
but since psilocybin does have a phosphorus in it,
and I know most of the malathion
and most of the other chemicals like it are organophosphates,
and they react synergistically,
is there a possibility of a synergistic toxicity
when you get, you know, a dose of malathion
and you're using psilocybin?
Well, every once in a while,
these kinds of questions come along,
and the answer is always,
since research with psilocybin is illegal,
or, and even in rats,
counterproductive to your career,
nobody knows.
You mentioned the phosphorus group in psilocybin.
Psilocybin is 4-phosphoryloxene and dimethyltryptamine.
This is very interesting to me because,
and we don't have to spend too much time on this,
but it's the only 4-substituted indole in nature on this planet.
The only 4-substituted indole in nature on this planet.
Well, this is suggestive to me
of a possible extraterrestrial origin for this molecule,
because the way evolution works
is from one structure,
you elaborate another structure,
and then near cousins of that appear,
and so forth and so on.
The phosphorus group in the 4-position on psilocybin
sticks out like a sore thumb
when you look at the structure of organic nature too much,
that melathion is a phosphorylated compound.
I was interesting, I noticed in Hoffer and Osmond's halucinogens,
melathion is occasionally,
there are known cases of human abuse of melathion.
And is there a bigger debt to pay at the dose where it does that?
I don't know,
not by the aerial spraying,
but accidentally working with it,
and fairly concentrated,
I've gotten it on my skin,
and for several days I had very disturbed dreams,
and broken sleep,
and I think that's pretty well reported
that that's not uncommon at all.
Well, that's very interesting.
Because it's a neurotoxin,
it also creates a neural disturbance.
You know, I'm willing to buy into the notion
that all drugs are poisons at certain doses.
All substances are poisons at certain doses.
I mean, you can kill yourself with common salt
if you eat three pounds of it,
that's all she wrote for you.
So, always what you're doing
is you're perturbing the dynamic of ordinary functioning,
and then you want to,
and then what you're watching
is the chemical cascade
that returns you to equilibrium.
After the beginning.
Mm-hmm.
We use many cultures,
but never really with much pleasure.
I don't think many cultures actually would posit
that Jimson Reed, for instance,
is an enjoyable hike.
So, it may give you psychedelic experiences,
it may give you vivid dreams,
but it's not something that many people would volunteer to take.
Drugs of that type.
Yeah, well, that's something worth talking about,
and certainly I found it true.
The notion of intoxication is an incredibly culture-bound idea,
and what one culture considers an acceptable intoxication,
another culture just regards as an incredibly unpleasant experience.
alcohol in high doses is not something most rational people would care to repeat, I think,
unless there were cultural conditioning pushing you toward that,
or tobacco.
I mean, essentially, that's an experience of toxicity,
and until you build up tolerance to the more toxic aspects of tobacco,
every time you smoke it, you turn green and become nauseated.
We had the experience in the Amazon,
there was, for years, my brother and I pursued a hallucinogen called Ukuhe,
that was in use in a very restricted area by three tribes of Indians,
and the reason we were interested in it is because the ethnographic literature said
that the shamans used it to talk to little men,
and because we had encountered in the DMT flash
these things that I've called self-transforming machine elves,
we were interested in an aboriginal hallucinogen
that would let you talk to little people of some sort,
and the chemistry of these things was known,
of the Ukuhe, gradually became known in the 70s,
and it was made from the resin of a certain tree
which elaborated not only DMT,
which is a clean, fast-acting, psychedelic tryptamine,
but also a number of other tryptamines,
and, you know, after immense expense and physical wear and tear,
we, on the upper Yaguas Yasu drainage in Peru,
we actually contacted people who knew how to make this hallucinogen,
and, you know, we thought it was going to hurl open the doorway to the golden realm,
and when we finally got to the bioassay of it,
which is a term which means getting loaded on it,
it was really tough to take this stuff,
and, you know, your heart felt like it was just going to hammer its way out of your chest,
and there were your sweats,
and there was hallucination,
but, my God, you were monitoring so many other physiological systems going into crisis
that, you know, it seemed almost ancillary,
so then, you know, live through it,
the next morning troop down to the shaman's hut and say,
you know, listen, Basilio, we have to talk,
and then him saying,
well, yeah, it takes getting used to,
and, you know, that's why our shamans don't live very long,
and so then you realize,
aha, what we're dealing with here is a culture
that has sanctioned this experience
and projected a lot of cultural baggage onto it,
but that if you're the unsold customer,
you say, you know, I think once is enough,
thank you for that,
a more familiar case that I think is similar,
although some people rise up in holy wrath,
and we get into great arguments about this,
but my personal opinion is that Amanita muscaria,
do you all know what that is?
It's the red mushroom of European folk mythology in German,
it's called the Fliegenpilz,
it's atropenic too.
Well, a lot of people who never got loaded on it
spewed a lot of scholarly argument
about how this was a wonderful shamanic intoxicant,
but I submit to you in most cases,
it comes closer to being an ordeal,
and it may be that because of genetic variation,
seasonal variation,
individual variations in the expression of its genome,
edathic factors, meaning the soil that it grows in,
the nature of its mycorrhizal relationship,
and in other words, we've staked out here
about an eight-variable equation relative to Amanita muscaria,
that sometimes it's wonderful,
but unless you have always been in that area,
and can draw on the shamanic lore of great tradition about it,
I think just going out into the woods
and faunching down on the first Amanita muscaria
that you come upon
is probably a ticket to the emergency room
if you're not very careful.
In Madagascar,
there are no hallucinogens,
as we would understand it,
but there are what are called
ordeal poisons.
This is an entire category
in Madagascarian aboriginal shamanism.
What's going on here,
there,
is there are these plants
which you take them
and you
at first assume you're going to die
because you feel so bad,
and then you feel so bad
that you beg to die,
and then you don't die,
and you recover completely
within 10 to 12 hours,
and you are so damn glad
to be alive
that this has all the characteristics
of a psychedelic experience.
I mean,
you come down
a kinder,
gentler,
more attentive,
more decent human being,
but it's only because
you've been hurled
into the jaws of death itself
and then brought back.
That will work, folks.
But,
so,
my interest
has always been
to squeeze
the definition
of psychedelic,
to narrow it,
to make it more precise.
I mean,
sometimes people say,
well,
you're,
it's about altered states.
Well,
there are all kinds
of altered states,
thousands of altered states,
without even talking
about drugs.
We can talk about
being in love,
being abandoned
in love,
being jealous,
being anxious
about your financial situation,
suddenly seeing
the,
your roots
in high Atlantis.
These are all
altered states.
None of them
are psychedelic.
Well,
then you move
into the realm
of drugs.
There are,
as you mentioned,
atropine states,
tropane-induced
deliriums,
the ketamine-type states,
states on the edge
of anesthesia,
states of extraordinary
agitation
brought on
by the whole
amphetamine family.
All of these things
and to my mind,
they are not
truly psychedelic.
What psychedelic
means to me
is,
in structural terms,
a very small
number of compounds
all based
on,
uh,
indole.
The indole
hallucinogens
are the true
psychedelics.
And,
let's see,
what are they?
There aren't
that many.
Uh,
there's LSD,
which is a,
a semi-synthetic,
made in the laboratory,
but from organic
precursors,
usually.
LSD,
uh,
Ibogaine,
about which
not much is
known,
because it has
never achieved
much currency
in the underground
in this country.
Psilocybin,
DMT,
um,
and the
beta-carbolines,
which are
monoamine oxidase
inhibitors,
but only
hallucinogens
at close
to the toxic
dose.
And that's
it.
How about
peyote?
Peyote is an
interesting,
uh,
is an interesting
edge situation,
because mescaline
is not an indole.
It's an
amphetamine.
And if you look
at the,
the chemical,
pharmacological
profile on
peyote,
it's, uh,
different from
all these others.
First of all,
an effective dose
of mescaline
is,
according to the,
to the literature,
700 milligrams.
That's a,
a pile of white
powder in the
palm of your
hand.
In other words,
it's,
it's a,
an inefficient
drug.
It puts a lot
of strain on
your system.
There are
different ways
to think
about toxicity.
One way
is to ask
how much
of this
compound
do you have
to take
to experience
an effect?
If you have
to take
700 milligrams,
then it's
a pretty
crude,
uh,
drug,
because that's
a lot.
On the other
hand,
you know,
LSD is at
the other
end of the
spectrum.
Uh,
you can feel
quite strongly
50 gamma,
50 micrograms
of LSD.
Uh,
help me
out here.
What is
that?
Five
ten
thousandths
of a
gram is
50 gamma.
That is,
to a
pharmacologist,
the fact
that a
human being
can feel
micrograms
of a
compound
is like
a miracle.
I mean,
to give you
an analogy
so you can
understand
that,
that's
like having
one red
ant tear
down the
Empire State
Building
in 30
minutes.
I mean,
that's,
that's what
it looks
like when
50 gamma
of LSD
enter your
body.
So,
so LSD
has an
incredibly
low toxicity
by that
measure,
you see.
Well,
then psilocybin
falls in the
mid-range.
Uh,
it,
it requires
about 15
to 25
milligrams,
and,
the situation.
The other
way of
talking about
psychedelics,
rather than
structurally,
or in
terms of
dose-dependent
profile,
is,
it's a
specific
altered
state.
It is,
first of all,
I like the
word
hallucinogen,
or hallucinogen.
See,
I grew up
in a cattle
town in
Colorado,
and I
haven't
shed
quite all
of it,
but
hallucinogens,
because I
was always
fascinated by
the idea
of
hallucination.
To me,
for some
reason,
the idea
of seeing
something
which is
not there
just became
the holy
grail for
me,
because that
was so
challenging
to my
notion
of what
is
possible.
And,
so then,
when we
lay these
indole
psychedelics
out in
front of
us,
and are
trying to
make
decisions,
many people
have a
great
enthusiasm
for
LSD
because
it
empowers
thought
and
stirs
the
engines
of
cognition,
but it
only
reluctantly,
compared to
these other
things,
is a
strong
visionary
hallucinogen.
You usually
have to
synergize it
with
cannabis
or
mescaline,
and then
those
combinations
are highly
visionary.
What I
love about
psilocybin
is that
it causes
you to
hallucinate
so effortlessly
at relatively
low doses
and without
a lot
of
accompanying
sweating
or
tremoring
or
physical
discomfort.
and
DMT
is
even
more
powerful
as
an
inducer
of
visionary
states.
Now,
people who
have never
had
a
hallucination,
and if
you read
the
literature,
think
that a
hallucination
means
little
traveling
lights
or
colored
lines
or the
kinds
of
things
you
see
when
you
press
hypnagogia.
Hypnagogia
also
includes
chorus
lines
of
dancing
mice,
little
round
candies,
falling
leaves,
snowflakes,
in other
words,
the
flotsam
and jetsam
of the
mental
ocean,
which
is
generally
no more
interesting
than the
flotsam
and jetsam
of
the
oceans
of
three
space.
What
I'm
interested
in
are
full
field
degree
visionary
scenarios
of
jungles,
deserts,
ice
fields,
ruined
cities,
machinescapes
and a
whole bunch
of other
stuff which
is not so
easily dropped
into any
category of
experience that
we're familiar
with but
highly
organized
three
dimensional
self
sustaining
transformed
modalities
that you
cannot pour
language
over.
I mean
when you
try to
say what
it is
all you
can say
is what
it isn't
and I
find that
tremendously
affirming
because to
me
and I
guess this
is important
to me
that is
the experience
which proves
that this
is not
self
generated
when I
take a
plant
and
it
shows me something I could previously not have imagined, then I know I am in the presence of the
other, because it couldn't have come out of me. I mean, if you insist that the volleys, that the
Niagara of hallucination caused by psilocybin is generated out of the dynamics of your own psyche,
if you insist that that's true, then you are unable to explain what your own psyche is.
In other words, you become unrecognizable to yourself in that case, and if you are unrecognizable
to yourself, you are not yourself in some sense. So I prefer to believe that it's coming from the
outside, that mind is a field into which we dip the dipstick of observation, but it's not being
generated in the neurons of the brain. Yeah, this guy's been waiting patiently, or perhaps impatiently.
I haven't heard much about since the late 60s, and I think the FDA took it out of the marketplace.
It was the Hawaiian wood rose. Do you know anything about that?
Sure, yes. Hawaiian wood rose. Argyria nervosa. The argyria refers to the silvery hairs on the
side of the leaves. It turns out that in the higher plants, you see LSD, or its near relatives, occur in
ergot and are made from ergot. It doesn't occur in ergot, but it's made from ergot. Ergot is a fungi,
an entirely different order of life than higher plants. But in the higher plants, in the convolvulaceae,
the morning glory family, there are a number of different genera that contain alkaloids that are
milligram effective cousins of LSD. And argyria nervosa is the best known of these. It's also probably,
I would estimate, gram for gram, probably the most concentrated natural halicinogen on this planet,
because half a teaspoon is an effective dose. Where people get in trouble with baby Hawaiian
wood rose is they think, oh well it's a plant, and plants are always weak, so let's do a half a cup,
or something like that. And then, you know, you're begging for mercy in a hurry. There are 13 species
of argyria, all natives of Asia, distributed from the base of the Himalayas to western Polynesia,
and argyria nervosa is simply the best known. Now, the problem with it is that, and this is something
you always have to be aware of with plant halicinogens, is that cardioactive compounds occur in argyria as
well. And so, if you miss dose even slightly, it will put your heart through changes that will stand
your hair on end. And I've never heard of anybody dying on it, but I've heard of people, you know,
laying down and making their peace with their maker, because they figured that they were probably
going to die. Now, an interesting thing about argyria nervosa is, so far as we know from the ethnographic
work that's been done, it is unclaimed by any aboriginal group, unless we count the surfers of
Maui as an aboriginal people. And this is fascinating to me, you know, certain plants have great antiquity
of use, and other plants, equally psychoactive, are ignored. And, you know, we tend to believe that
aboriginal people don't miss a trick, but occasionally it seems like they're as obtuse as we are.
I mean, a couple of examples will make the case clear. As you all probably know, there's quite a
complex of psilocybin-containing mushrooms in central Mexico, used by the Mazatecan and Mixtecan
people there, and they seem to have exploited these mushrooms for millennia. However,
on the northwest coast of North America, Washington and British Columbia, where you get the northwest
coast Indian groups, the Shimsham, Kwakutal and Tlingit language areas, this is the densest concentration of
psilocybin-containing species of mushrooms on this planet. And so far as we can tell,
they never used them. I mean, somebody will say, well, they used them, but they never told you in the
shamans. But listen, you know, a huge amount of ethnography has been done in that area. And there is not the
slightest indication that these people ever utilized these mushrooms, even though they had an advanced
shamanism, plant-based shamanism, they seem to have overlooked this. Another example that may have
practical implications for some of the more astute among you is, in the past two years, it's been
realized that a plant which grows as a weed in the Midwest of North America, called
Illinois Bundleweed, Desmanthus Illinoisensis, is in fact, the most concentrated source of natural DMT in
the world, on the root scraping of the root. And now this one is perhaps suspect, and maybe more ethnographic
work seems to be done. The straight story is that the Indians of the Great Plains never knew about this
and never utilized it. My question is, if that's so, then why is it called Bundleweed? Because that seems to
imply to me a medicine bundle. And so perhaps further ethnographic excavation will show that this was used,
but it could be the basis for a whole family of visionary hallucinogens that apparently were never utilized.
Yes. Yeah. You. Yeah.
So, we'll do that in a couple of conversations, too, in the focus of some of your, most of your work, which is
essentially this realm you talk about pushing through into this visionary world. It's a little bit, it feels to me
when you talk about it's a little bit like taking the glove and turning it inside out, that possibly your, your, your, your
premises is that the universe itself is the illusion. And that this visionary world is the reality that we may well be
going back into. That it's this material world and all the universe and all the material experience that we have is
are really the other side. Well, yes. I mean, I, I, I, I regard myself as basically an explorer and a researcher,
I have a lot more questions than answers. The thing that has made me be what I am and do what I do, is because, uh, the, the, the, what they're
telling you about these states of mind are is a whitewash in that they say oh it gives you and
these are the pros the people who are for hallucinogens say it's a form of instant
psychotherapy it's great for straightening out your relationship it's if you're an architect
you can visualize buildings in 3d they present it as a tool for understanding this world its
relationships and it's you know interconnection what I've observed is that at high doses and with
sufficient intentionality one seems to break through into what can only be honestly described
as a parallel universe of some sort that has such existential presence and immediacy that it's hard
to squeeze it down to being a mental construct generated temporarily in your mind through
pharmacological means because it seems much more like a place and this is incredibly challenging to
our way of thinking about reality because we deny the existence of these kinds of mental realms
uh it seems almost as though or or here's a model for how it might be it seems that reality is a
series of heavily compartmentalized universes of some sort and under extraordinary situations of mental
perturbation achieved by any means uh these membranes that keep these worlds mutually exclusive
and sequestered from contamination by each other just simply dissolve and you experience what
mercelia called the rupture of plane and the rupture of plane is just like poking a hole in nearby space
and then lo and behold you know the utterly unexpected is found to be alive and well right here right now
i mean it and i can't stress enough how real this is and how confounding it is i mean i may not be the brightest person around but i certainly have
assimilated you know the basic shtick of what western civilization is supposed to be about and there is no place in the western model of reality for the idea
the idea that just you know 20 heartbeats and 70 milligrams of dmt away is an elf infested uh mega space
of archaeology of of arcology sized dimensions in which non-material beings made not of matter but of
syntax are merrily pursuing uh their own goals and possibilities i don't know what to make of that
and i also almost equally puzzling as the existence of such a place is our lack of knowledge about it
when i and hundreds of other people in my experience and presumably millions of people throughout history
have known that you could use plant hallucinogens to break in to that world we're living in a fool's
paradise trapped inside the assumptions of linear materialism and rationalism that's the most seductive
and delicious aspect of your thesis is that my god there is a reality somewhere beyond that membrane
and then you compound it with with the exploration of logic or rationale where you present to us the
possibility that the big bang is the biggest is the most ludicrous thing to combine with rationality as
could possibly be imagined and then i've even heard people address well how is it possible that the
vanity of the individual human being could think that he's so important that the rest of the the galaxy
the universe out there that we should be at all significant whereas you say well hell that's all
mindscape it doesn't exist or it feels like you say well it's a mindscape you know it isn't it is it's
an invention well what i'm really saying is we know a lot less than we assume we know i mean if someone
tells you that we live around a typical star at the edge of a typical galaxy strewn through a mega space
trillions of times larger i mean they don't know what they're talking about that's just
the cheerful assurance of modern astronomy based on a bunch of fishy formulas that were cooked up
within the confines of the 20th century i mean the stars that shine down at night could be
painted dots on a scrim for all we know i mean i'm not saying that's the case but what i am saying is
uh i think that the greatest disservice that science has done to human kind is the marginalizing of our
own importance if we even let's take an objective measure uh of come and i think complexity if you look
around at nature at the fossil record at the human family uh complexity is clearly something very dear to
nature nature preserves it nature works through it nature builds upon it well uh we're told we're a
minor this in orbit around a minor that in a typical that and so forth and so on but if you will look at
the human cerebral cortex what you discover is the most densely complexified matter known to exist in the
universe the human cerebral cortex contains more connections per cubic centimeter than any form of
matter known to exist in this cosmos if that's true suddenly our marginality is completely obviated
and it's clear that no we are not marginal observers of a vast cosmic drama we are at the cutting edge of the
development and conservation of complexity and it is our mind which gives us these scenarios of our of our
position in space and time it may well be that the human mind is very very important the human mind
represents the culmination of biology which is another phenomenon that these astrophysicists always love
to marginalize and say oh well biology it's going on on one planet as far as we know it could be a fluke it
may have happened once and it'll never happen again but you know the life of most stars is on the order of 500
million years we happen to have the good fortune to be in orbit around a very slow-burning stable star and so
we have ignored the fact that most stars last less than half a billion years we can dig into the gun flint
church of south africa and bring up fossils of of soft-bodied creatures that are close to three billion years old
six times the life of most stars in the universe so when somebody's trying to tell you that what the universe is about is the life and
death of stars they're ignoring the fact that biology is a phenomenon as persistent as any phenomenon known to exist in the universe and
biology is not a static phenomenon it isn't an endless recycling of fissionable materials the way star life is
biological life has been steadily complexifying itself over the entire time span of its existence so
life is not marginal mind emerging out of life at its more complex levels of organization is not marginal and we
are not marginal we are i think tremendously important in the cosmic drama and that a rational analysis of
the situation will support that yeah you comment in that regard you comment on those that you mentioned
about lynn margot's theory that fact that all all of life all of plant life is a reorganization of bacteria
and all of animal life is a further reorganization of bacterial life just to get bacteria to move around
from place to place and the cerebral cortex is just a lot of that modified spirochetes that have organized
themselves in a certain way and that in that in in my reading of her the the way you put human beings in
this picture is that we're just an experiment in the way station of bacterial life which may or may not work
in other words our destiny is not really in our hands to think that we can control our fate is really hubris
or illusion well it's certainly illusion i mean it's pretty clear we don't control our fate yes you see
one way of looking at evolution i mean i just offer this as a heuristic insight is that life achieved
absolute perfection with the first organism and then this first organism underwent mutation
that's a kind of damage which it then repaired the mutation through a strategy of complexification
and then there was more mutation and more repair through complexification so what we represent is a
massive chunk of scar tissue uh the culmination of billions of years of repairing the perfect first
life form and all this complexity that has been added on since the first achievement is simply a response
to the damage done to it by incoming cosmic radiation i don't believe that you see that's a theory where you assume
everything is driven by the past i think that uh that what is really hanging up modern biology
is its absence its unwillingness to entertain the possibility that life is driven by purpose
this is an old chestnut in the philosophy of science it's called the issue
of teleology teleology is a fancy word meaning purpose and the what happened you see is it's just
simply a legacy of our intellectual history when darwin developed the theory of evolution in the 19th century
when darwin developed the theory of evolution in the 19th century english intellectual
society was under the sway of uh christianity and it was possible as recently as 150 years ago to claim
yourself to be an intellectual and to actually maintain in polite society that the earth was created by god
at 9 a.m on september the 4th uh 4004 bc 150 years ago in england people believed this with perfect
confidence that they were at the cutting edge of intellectual understanding well darwin wanted to overcome deism
which was this all-pervasive belief in in an interventionist creator who was literally guiding
the flight of every atom and the fall of every leaf and darwin said we don't need this kind of invasive
deistic uh plenum let's just take the process of mutation a random process driven by he knew not
what we now know largely driven by incidental cosmic radiation reaching the surface of the earth let's take
uh mutation and natural selection another random process and when we run these two random processes head
on lo and behold outcome flamingos cockroaches hummingbirds coral reefs palm trees and ourselves
but i think that and you know his the co-discoverer of evolution who if i believed in reincarnation i would
claim him as my own uh alfred russell wallace was unable to agree with darwin and he said no
that accounts for minor change in organisms natural selection but how can you use those processes to account for
something like for instance the metamorphosis of insects a caterpillar changing into a butterfly
involves the chemical coordination of hundreds if not thousands of genes doing a perfectly integrated and flawless
ballet of transformation how incrementally could you ever get a situation where a caterpillar undergoes mutation into a butterfly
unless unless there is some third factor at work in evolution and uh wallace thought that it was an appetition
an appetite a tendency toward an end state and that compass notion of evolution means that you're steering toward a goal now
now in common speech when we use the word evolution we usually mean this but orthodox biologists i remember when i was studying evolution i had a professor
who said do not use the word evolution unless you are talking about a process involving genes
in other words don't talk about the evolution of the novel
or of abstract expressionism or the evolution of society or the evolution of a political viewpoint
this is all bad thinking well people like ilia pregozine west churchman eric yaunch have have
reclaimed evolution as the notion of progressive motion movement toward uh higher and higher states of
development but 19th century evolutionists refused to talk about advanced and less advanced or higher and lower
when they talked about evolution they just saw it as a random process playing itself out i don't think so i think we are called that nature is
uh hyperdimensional in its architectonics and that we are flowing toward a culminating purpose probably
the shedding of matter as the vehicle of our becoming yeah yeah i just wanted to ask you a question about um
do you think the information that is contained in psilocybin dmt all the you know hallucinogenics
do you think that the information is self-contained or is it actually more of just a way of tuning
our brains into a more cosmic frequency that exists in the psilocybin or is the psilocybin just a mediator
to tune to a drastic way of tuning into a a more cosmic broadcast well it's hard for me to
imagine that it could be in the psilocybin because uh psilocybin is a very simple molecule i mean it's a small
molecule it's a planar molecule uh it seems to me what must be happening is that uh we are embedded in an
ocean of information and uh psilocybin somehow changes our channel slightly you know ordinary
consciousness is created by a neurotransmitter uh called serotonin uh five hydroxy tryptamine
suggestively a very close relative of psilocybin and dmt and it seems to me i think i mentioned this a
little bit in the talk last night that we have evolved a neurotransmitter which has a the effect
of narrowing the focus of consciousness to what is operationally defined by the body as the here and
now in other words the body is very fragile and sight dependent and must be protected from uh you know
high levels of radiation inundation by uh toxic or life-threatening chemicals like water i mean you
don't want to have the ocean wash over you or it's a problem uh but that these these pseudo neurotransmitters
which are hallucinogens are not have not been uh integrated into normal metabolism because they
don't serve the body's need to preserve itself but what they do serve is an expansion of mental function
and it may be you know that these neurotransmitters are in the act of evolving we no longer need to fear
the immediate environment well maybe that's a cheerful overstatement but uh one would like to think
that we no longer need to fear the immediate environment as much as we did when we were locked
in competition with other animal species now it's to me highly suggestive uh the fact that we contain
and metabolize dmt in the course of ordinary metabolism what does it mean that the most powerful of all
psychedelic hallucinogens is a part of normal human metabolism metabolism the pineal gland with whose
function is very mysterious uh is uh doing a lot of chemistry that looks like psychedelic chemistry it's
elaborating uh harming like beta-carbolines so it's possible that literally when we take
these tryptamine hallucinogens we are as it were dressing up in the mental furniture of the distant future
that we are experiencing a state of consciousness toward which we are naturally evolving and that over
time and through natural selection the the serotonergic neurotransmitters are making way for these more
more powerful psychedelic compounds and this and and the fact well something like imagination
looks to me like a self-generated internal involvement with uh compounds which some at some point in the
future might replace the compounds of ordinary metabolism and shift our mental life literally
into another dimension yeah uses organic psychedelics for a period of time as a daily dietary supplement
like every day for an extended period of time because nobody really talks about that and i'm just
how much do you use a grand a gram and a half yes well one can do that um i sort of i've i've sort of
thought that maybe this isn't such a good idea because i'm i'm interested more in spectacular
episodes of intoxication with the exception of
uh
there
you
cannabis, of course, rather than integrating it as a lifestyle.
Am I the only one that's doing this as a lifestyle? I feel really alone right now.
Well, is there anybody who wants to join this gentleman in his isolation?
At times I've done that, but I found it to be...
Well, here's the thing. You have to get the dose. The dose is very critical.
If you take, say, I would say a half a gram to a gram every day,
my experience of that was simply a kind of anxiety, a kind of being set forward, a speed type effect.
If you say, well, I don't want that, so I'm going to lift the dose slightly, and you go to, say, two and a half grams,
the problem I had with that is life quickly evolves into being so strange that I couldn't handle it.
In other words, it's very important for me to dip into these places and then to get out, towel off, and think about it.
However, you know, there is a streak of the chicken shit in me, I think.
If you really want to leave us all behind and, you know, bourgeois values and your job and Bill Clinton and the ozone hole and all of that behind,
then if you start taking psilocybin, let's say four grams every three days, I guarantee you within a month there will be very few people that you will have much in common with.
And you will be very happy. You will be very happy with your circumstance generally, I think.
But you will have evolved a point of view, a set of values, an expectation that most people will find a lot of difficulty relating to.
Like a shroom shape, let's say, fresh fruit, ice, a gram.
You're looking at, what, maybe three to five hours of time involved with it?
Uh-huh.
So that leaves 20 hours left in the day to do everything else you need to do.
No, but what is the dose again?
Say a gram.
Huh.
Well, I don't know.
See, it may be just a matter of personal styles.
When I take psilocybin, I give it 110% of my attention.
So I can't do it and work at the computer or make phone calls or shop or deliver my children to lessons and stuff like that.
And so my idea with it is to completely come down between doses and then, you know, you're virgin again.
Yeah, you don't keep hallucinating.
No, it becomes something else.
See, I don't want you to feel PA, but I think that what people do with drugs that is probably a bad idea is they take too little too often.
And that the best way to do drugs is to take very challenging doses, rarely.
I mean, I used to say to my groups, if you haven't taken enough that you think you may have done too much, then you did too little.
In other words, you really want to dissolve the boundary.
You don't want to integrate it into this world.
You want to have an experience which you can then integrate into this world after the trip.
You're the one who always talks about language and thought processes.
And I feel as though most of my best work is under that period of one to one and a half grams of dosage.
And I just don't understand how, you know, the recommended experience is much more than what I'm doing, obviously.
Well, have you taken large doses?
Well, isn't that much more interesting?
I guess it comes down to what it is you're looking to do while you're doing it.
It's not a matter of interesting, it's a matter of what your purpose is, what your intent is, what your trip is.
Right.
Well, at these higher doses, you can't do anything.
Of course, that's my point.
You know?
I mean, hanging on to the floor is a major program to be executed.
Yeah.
What kind of person exists in the parallel universe?
You mean for days and days?
Well, yeah.
I mean, could you live?
You can live, but you alarm your friends and quickly become an object of community concern because, you know, for ordinary people, you are what is called nuts.
Doesn't the experience just become a type of a, almost like a three-dimensional TV?
No, I think you underestimate how strange it is.
I don't think you could ever get used to these places.
You know, sometimes people ask me if DMT is dangerous, and the honest answer is only if you fear death by astonishment.
And death by astonishment is a real danger in these places.
I mean, these places are not simply strange or amazing or highly peculiar.
They are absolutely confounding.
I mean, that's what I'm trying to get across is this is not some, this is not going to require just some minor adjustment of our worldview.
These are the things they said were impossible.
The things they promised, assured were impossible, are possible.
The greatest secret that has been kept from us is that the world is a thousand times, a million times stranger than your wildest supposition.
And how they keep the lid on this stuff, I do not understand.
I mean, I don't understand why I'm the only person saying this, because I'm completely convinced of my own ordinariness.
I am, I am only a human being. I represent all of you.
What happens to me would happen to you.
It isn't, there's nothing special about me.
Well then, my God, how do they keep the lid on this stuff?
It's weird.
It's more, if, if, if, if a fleet of flying saucers were to land on the south lawn of the White House tomorrow, it would not, it would not change the fact that the weirdest thing in the universe is the DMT flash.
Flying saucers landing on the south lawn of the White House is a positively mundane possibility compared to this thing which is real.
It's here, it's now, you don't have to go to Babaji, you don't have to go to the Himalayas.
All, it's, it's, it's three tokes away.
And, and yet, you know, we argue, is it possible?
What does it mean?
Is it this?
Is it that?
It's amazing to me.
I mean, it is the new world.
The Europeans eventually discovered the new world, but they had to sail galleons three months through hell to get there.
This is three tokes and 30 seconds away.
And it is the absolute confounding exhibit of the whole structure of Western civilization.
How can they keep the lid on it?
I don't get it.
This person.
Where does individual spiritual development fit in without the use of hallucinogens in your world or into your scheme of thinking?
And two last night, you talked about the business of being, should be the cultivation of love.
And I'd like to hear more about that now or later.
And then third, I'd like to know what do you think you would be doing today in life if you had never used any psychedelics?
Well, first to the spiritual question, which is an interesting question to me.
Everyone casts the psychedelic experience in terms of being a subcategory of the spiritual quest.
I'm not exactly sure about that.
I've taken lots of psychedelics over nearly 30 years now.
And, you know, I have a marriage dissolving.
I have people who will tell you I'm a terrible person to negotiate a contract with.
I feel myself to be a moral paragon of nothing.
And I'm not sure it has anything to do with the spiritual quest.
It seems to me true spirituality is a very here and now matter.
One should visit the sick and imprisoned, clothe the naked, bury the dead, care for orphans, feed the hungry.
That's what the spiritual life is about.
It's very down to earth, straightforward.
I'm very puzzled, and I put more than psychedelics in this category.
What, like mantras, yantras, practices, do these things really ameliorate the suffering of the human condition?
They may be good for something.
The question is what?
Perhaps indirectly the psychedelics synergize the spiritual life
because they just show you that life is to be taken seriously,
and there is a great deal of it to be assimilated.
But in terms of suggesting that you are a more spiritually advanced person if you take psychedelics,
I don't really see any evidence for that.
I do think that you cannot take psychedelics without losing a portion of your ego
because it will... it's too hard for the egomaniac to take psychedelics.
The egoist will turn away from it, will have such bad trips that they will put it down, I think.
This is an interesting question, this question of...
You know, like the question I ask myself.
Here we are, we are psychedelic people, presumably by some high percentage.
Are we in any way morally superior to people who don't take psychedelics?
Maybe we are a little bit gentler and more open-minded, but probably in any mud-wrestling situation we can be just as down and dirty as the next person to some degree.
So I see it more... that's why I don't think of myself as a guru.
I think of myself as an explorer of a geography, the purposes of which are probably multiple.
In other words, I suppose we can use psychedelics to shape personalities and brainwash people and control them.
And I suppose we can use it to lead people to make peace with death, mortality, their own limitations.
It seems to me it's a morally neutral dimension and it can be used for good or ill and maybe slightly edging toward the good because it's very hard for egomaniacs to do anything with this stuff.
The CIA's involvement with LSD is an instructive situation.
The CIA got on to LSD well ahead of everybody else.
And the first notion was, and if you're interested in this you can read J. Steven, or not, no, the other one, Acid Dreams, that book, Martin Lee's book, and Schlain was the co-author.
The CIA's first assumption about LSD was that it was a kind of super truth serum.
And that they could kidnap KGB agents and give them LSD and they would spew out all their contacts and so forth and so on.
So a year of researching that possibility convinced them they were on the wrong track.
And so then they decided it isn't a truth serum, it's an anti-truth serum.
We will give our agents this drug and if they ever fall into enemy hands they will take it and then it will be impossible for the enemy to get any coherent account out of them of what is going on.
Well, so then a few months of that and they discovered no under some circumstances are people just to tell all under LSD.
So then they decided that they could program a Manchurian candidate type situation with it.
Well then that was abandoned and I think largely they have lost interest in this stuff.
I asked in the Amazon, I asked the mushroom at one point because I could see that we were going to carry it back to the world in some form.
I said, can't this be perverted? Can't it be misused?
And it said only the good can come near this.
Well, maybe good doesn't mean exactly what we think it means.
You know, it isn't a kind of piety worn on your cuff.
It's something else.
It's a sincere wish to understand.
That's the motivation that the psychedelics will turbo charge.
As to your question about what would I be doing if I hadn't taken psychedelics?
Well, I don't know what I was doing, what I assumed I would end up doing before I took psychedelics was hopefully end up teaching art history in a very exclusive Eastern girls school somewhere for a long, long time.
It was a kind of Nabokovian lechery with my life's plan.
And what was yours? Oh, and love, love.
Well, my analysis of what psychedelics do if you think not about my trip or your trip, but thousands, tens of thousands of these experiences,
what can we say that would be true of every psychedelic experience, every high dose psychedelic experience?
What can we say that would be a general truism?
What you could say is that psychedelics dissolve boundaries.
That's what they do.
The boundary between nature and society, between mind and body, between self and other, they dissolve boundaries.
And this is what love does when it is working right.
I mean, you are able to place yourself in the second position for a child, for a lover, for a cause, for whatever it is.
You know, you take second position.
And so I see them essentially as aphrodisiacs of a strange sort.
They empower not, you know, genital prowess, but real caring by showing that all differences are illusions.
That what is real is the unbroken, seamless plenum of being.
And this is what we need to learn because our whole social construct has been based on the establishment and maintenance of boundaries.
I mean, we are the most boundary-obsessed human society that has ever existed.
You know, when I go to the Amazon and spend time with the upriver people, the hardest thing for me to get used to is that I never have any privacy.
Ever.
You know, I hang my hammock in the longhouse and, you know, people are fighting and giving birth and having sex and arguing and doing all these things.
And even when you, even the act of defecation is not necessarily private.
So, boundary dissolution and boundary maintenance is what really, anxiety about these things is what characterizes our society.
I think, and I will mention it briefly here before the break, that some of you may have somehow escaped being exposed to my theory of human evolution, which is contained in Food of the Gods.
I think that we achieved a kind of perfection in human relations and in the relationship between human beings and nature sometime in the last million years.
And that we maintained that relationship till as recently as 15,000 years ago.
And we achieved this through a quasi-symbiotic or, let's put it this way, an incipiently symbiotic relationship to psilocybin.
You see, I'll give this to you in the short form because probably most of you have heard it.
All primates organize themselves using male dominance hierarchies.
You go clear back into lemurs and squirrel monkeys and it's the hard-muscled, sharp-fanged young males who set the agenda.
And everybody else, women, children, weak older males, have to dance to that tune.
This is a characteristic of primate organization.
It is also a characteristic of our society today as we sit here and we know that the suppression not only of women as individuals but of the feminine itself as an idea has made us tremendously, has blocked our potential and made us tremendously neurotic.
Well, I think that when we came down out of the trees, we were male dominators, hierarchically organized creatures, and then we encountered psilocybin as an item within our diet.
And without anybody realizing what was happening, it constituted a chemical intervention against hierarchical organization.
And an orgiastic, means sharing of sexual partners, style arose in the wake of accepting psilocybin into the diet.
Psilocybin promoted, in low doses, increased visual acuity.
This is an established fact.
And that allowed the psilocybin-using members of the species to outbreed the non-psilocybin-using members.
And human consciousness evolving, had been evolving, continued to evolve,
and through the augmentation of psilocybin, fell into a relationship of direct experience with this goddess-like Gaian totality, the mind of the earth.
And then there was a dynamic, satisfying balance between the expression of human advanced cognitive faculties,
and a human sense of our place in nature, and our roles vis-a-vis each other, and so forth and so on.
In short, paradise.
And it persisted for, who knows, let's say a million years.
And it only faded when the mushrooms became, through climatological change and migration, unavailable.
And when the mushroom became scarce and scarcer and unavailable,
after a million years of chemical suppression of the primate tendency to form dominance hierarchies,
the old behavior, which had never been genetically removed from the picture, reemerged.
12,000 years ago, no more.
And it must have been like hell itself.
People suddenly, no longer were caring for each other.
Suddenly, men wanted to control the sexual and reproductive activities of women.
The concept of territory emerged.
This is at the precise moment in time when agriculture was invented.
Agriculture put an end to the nomadic yearly wanderings of the human family.
It put an emphasis on sedentary lifestyles.
The problem with agriculture, especially in the early phase, was that it was so phenomenally successful,
you can imagine farming the alluvial detritus of these river valleys that had never been touched.
Surpluses were created.
Surplus, in the presence of a dominator or hierarchical attitude, must be defended.
And so suddenly you have haves and have-nots, us and them.
The most advanced structure on this planet, 11,000 years ago, was the grain tower at Jericho.
It was a storage area for grain and it was a tower so that you could beat back attacks by hungry neighbors
that you no longer identified with sufficiently to share your food.
And in the absence of psilocybin, this structure emerged in the psyche, which we call ego.
If you have psilocybin in your diet, the ego, it's like taking chemotherapy or something.
The calcareous tumor of ego is never able to form in a situation where psilocybin is being taken,
group sexual experiences in a religious context are being orchestrated at the new and full moon,
sharing of food, sharing of childcare, sharing of sexual partners.
All that is ended when the ego is born.
And the ego is the boundary establisher par excellence because it establishes me and mine as opposed to you and yours.
And with the invention of agriculture, the establishment of large sedentary populations, that means cities,
the establishment of specialized roles, that means kingship, the emergence of male dominance, the emergence of warfare.
These are the institutions that are fatal to our higher aspirations, to our hopes, even at this moment as they were ten to fifteen thousand years ago.
That's why I think, you know, we have to chemically intervene because we have fallen into a dysfunctional relationship toward the components of our own psyche.
And it's fine if monkeys want to dominate each other.
But when you have in the space in which we existed in the psilocybin maintained partnership mode,
we developed language, symbolic representation, dance, theater, so forth and so on.
And we acquired and empowered the tremendous imagination that has allowed us to build the cultures that we see around us.
That kind of power is only safe in the hands of collective community minded creatures.
And in the hands of ego driven creatures, it leads straight to Auschwitz and the hydrogen bomb, as it did.
So I think, you know, history is a state of chemical deprivation that allows animal, ancient animal patterns of behavior that degrade and confuse us to reemerge and stabilize themselves.
The response to each of that.
You mean in the present situation?
The assumption is that there is scarcity now, then what would that invoke?
Well, what it invokes is an ever greater distance between those at the top and those at the bottom of the social pyramid and an ever fiercer and an emergence of ever more brutal behavior patterns,
which is what we see happening.
I mean, our world is getting uglier and meaner and more mean spirited by the moment because those who have are so anxious about the fact that they might be asked to share it.
I mean, what we have gone through in the last twelve years in this country is a tremendous transfer of wealth to the upper two percent of society and become concomitantly a tremendous spread of anxiety, alienation and a dehumanizing of the entire social enterprise.
I mean, if we don't get hold of ourselves, the next century, most of the world is going to be a toxic desert.
And then here and there, there will be very well defended pleasure domes in which a very small number of incredibly wealthy people will live out lives of utterly self-indulgent hedonistic fantasy in denial of the moral catastrophe that they participated in.
In order to achieve that hedonic state of isolation.
I mean, that's clearly happening.
Metaphorically, that's what we have already.
I mean, not to freak you out, but that's where we're sitting right now.
You know, I mean, compared to Bosnia and Haiti and Somalia.
If they create defensiveness, then what is the alternative?
Well, neither create defensiveness except in the presence of the ego.
In other words, what we have to do is teach people to care for each other as a primary value, not something you do after, you know, you pay for your Mercedes and all that.
But as the primary value, we have to have community.
It's very simple.
We don't have community.
We have a free for all where the devil takes the hindmost, the most brutal and ruthless among us rise.
DEAN
to the top and everybody else has a foot on their neck.
We are now in a hell of a fix because we've waited so long to address these problems.
There is not now enough gold, aluminum, iron, so forth in the planet to raise everyone to
a middle class standard as it's enjoyed in Southern California.
And yet we have unleashed these expectations in everyone by flagellating people with images
of material wealth and comfort.
We must re-empower the individual and the quality of individual experience.
In other words, you have to convince somebody that you are a richer person on five grams of
psilocybin than you are if you live in a five million dollar house and are spending fifty
thousand dollars a year on psychotherapy because you're miserable, you see.
We have allowed ourselves to be tremendously disempowered by allowing our values to shift
toward the material domain.
You can't take it with you, folks.
But the soul is the vehicle that you do take with you into whatever dimensions of continuity
exist beyond this mortal coil.
So instead of balancing and replacing the tires on your Porsche, you should be balancing and
replacing the tires on your after death vehicle.
After all, that's the one that's going to have to serve you well in the clinches, you see.
Yeah.
How have you worked with the terror in dissolving, you know, on your journey, how have you worked
with the terror in dissolving the ego boundaries?
Well, you're right, there is a component of terror in this kind of work.
You know, the Rolling Stones song, you don't get what you want, you get what you need, is
never more true than with psychedelics.
But in terms of practical suggestions, fear is, has many aspects.
But one aspect of it is it has a chemistry.
And the chemistry of fear is fairly short term.
You've probably all experienced driving on the freeway and somebody cuts right in front
of you and there is a, it feels like your body temperature must rise about five degrees
in about a third of a second.
It's an incredibly fast chemistry that goes on there.
And then in about five seconds, you fall back down to within normal parameters.
The one way to deal with fear is sit still and wait.
In other words, the psychedelic terror is usually fairly unfocused.
It is simply raw terror.
Well just sit still and shut up and watch the chemicals in your mind tear those molecules
apart.
And rarely can the fear sustain itself more than five or ten minutes because it has to, it has
the force of a blow.
But then you can, you can sustain the blow and chemical equilibrium returns.
The other thing, and this is great, very good advice.
Don't forget it.
It's hard for Western people to keep it on their plate.
Sing.
The way we relate to terror is we crunch, clench, withdraw, and hunch over in some kind of fetal
position.
Like you're being beat on.
What you want to do is, is sit up straight, straighten your spinal column, open your air passages,
and begin to cycle oxygen through.
And if you sing in a very few minutes, the chemical foundations of the fear will be washed away.
So that's very practical.
So the mantra.
It doesn't matter, mantra, yantra, you know, everything becomes profound on psychedelics.
I mean, I tend toward row, row, row your boat gently down the stream.
Merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.
Well, I see it's lunch time.
Why don't we break?
Keep your, keep your questions.
We'll come back at about a quarter of two and then we'll push on to the summit.
Hopefully.
Thanks very much.
All right.
Okay.
So we're in business.
Oh, yes.
What a heart sinking assumption.
No, my assumption was that we could skate by on questions alone.
But what is your question?
Okay.
So an oblique request to override questions.
Basically what happens is I end up saying what I want to say anyhow,
because you may have noticed a certain logical gap between some of the questions and some of the answers.
That's not a failure of your own understanding.
That's what's going on as a matter of fact, you know.
But you had a question.
I just wanted to kind of introduce a new idea here.
I mean, it's probably an old idea, but also a new idea.
This was years ago that I played the Ouija board a lot.
And one strange evening I was playing and I asked the question,
who are we talking to when we speak to the Ouija board?
And the reply was, in your future, man will be able to speak with his ancestors,
contrary to popular belief that you were speaking to your ancestors,
which meant basically that in our future, we're going to discover ways to talk to the past
and deliver messages through the past.
And in connection with the UFO experience, I was wondering if quite possibly that the extraterrestrial was actually us in the future.
coming back, you know, discovered the technology of traveling through time, you know.
And I was just wondering if you had anything to say about that.
Now watch how this question is perverted into an episode of speechifying on my part.
I'm glad you asked that question.
Well, I mean, I've thought a lot about this.
I suppose in order to get into it, what I should do is just take a moment or two to actually describe for you my idea or my account of what it is that lies at the very center,
or at least as far into the center as I've been able to push of these experiences.
To my mind, I mean, I mentioned here this morning that DMT seems to me the most powerful of these things.
What powerful means in that context is that more of the motifs are present at greater energy than they are in some of these other compounds.
And, you know, at the risk of repeating myself, what happens to most people, I think, if they are able to remember it,
what an actual DMT flash is like is, you know, this stuff, it's vaporized in a glass pipe.
It's smoked.
It comes on in about half a minute or less and is immensely stronger than any amount of psilocybin or LSD could conceivably be, I think.
And what happens is, and I'll speak in the first person just to make it manageable.
What happens is I break into a space.
First of all, I am fully myself.
In other words, I am exactly who I was before.
That's why on one level I say DMT doesn't affect your mind.
You are not euphoric, ecstatic.
You are exactly who you were before.
But there is a sense of pushing through a membrane of some sort.
There's actually a sound as though someone had wadded up a cellophane bread wrapper.
That crackling sound, which some people assumed erroneously were brain cells frying in your cerebellum.
A friend of mine said, it's your soul as radio intellect-y leaving your body through the top of your head.
Well, whatever it is, you burst into a space.
I burst into a space that is inhabited.
That's the first shocker.
There is no ambiguity about it because there's an ear-splitting cheer as you break into this space.
It's an elf nest of some sort.
And there are hundreds of these self-dribbling jeweled basketballs, sort of.
I mean, that's a heavy download into English of what they are.
But they are autonomous, separate from the background.
And they bound forward, screaming hello, basically.
And for someone who expected insight into their relationship or their financial circumstances,
this is a fairly, you know, a fairly astonishing and rapid turn of development.
And they are intently focused upon you.
I mean, when it happens to me, they yell hooray, and then they are like long lost acquaintances.
They literally pour over you. They crawl over you.
You're being hugged by a troop of hyperspatial machine elves.
And they say, you know, you stay away so long.
You send so many, but you come so rarely.
And we're so happy to see you.
And there is a sense of being somehow, without being able to cognize the logic of it,
you're underground. You can tell that you're far underground.
And these things, the main thing going on in this place,
is that these things are creatures of language.
They are elves of syntactical intent.
They appear to be made of language, not matter.
And they are in a process of continuous semantic transformation.
Meaning is crawling across their surfaces in a state of continual metamorphosis.
And they are emitting sounds roughly analogous to some kind of music or language,
except that this is like no music or language you've ever heard.
Because what it is, is it is something capable of being visibly apprehended.
It's sound which you can see.
It's linguistic structure whose syntax is visible in three-dimensional space.
And they use their voices to make objects, which are, in some sense, the central focus of the experience.
Because out of the air, out of their bodies, out of your body,
they condense, create, and pluck these objects, which they offer for your inspection.
And as you lean forward to look at one of these things,
amidst this clamor of elf hysteria,
you, as I said, are fully yourself.
Your judgment is not impaired.
And in fact, they are saying to you,
fight excitement.
Do not abandon yourself to amazement.
In other words, they're telling you, stay down.
Don't just go off on some arm-waving rave about how this is impossible and outlandish and outrageous.
Try to stay focused on what we're doing.
And what they show you are objects that are intrinsically and inherently impossible.
So that these things made of tools, gold, ivory, cut stone, flesh, music, hope, odor...
I mean, it's hard to talk about.
But when you direct your attention towards these things,
you can tell by looking at it that if you could get it into three-dimensional space,
if I could suddenly whip one out of my briefcase and display it to you,
our world, our intellectual constructs would collapse upon themselves
because this is impossible.
Impossibly beautiful, impossibly constructed,
defying of the laws of physics and of chemistry.
So is there a...
Do you think there's a multi-dimensional life force that is the same for the entire dimension?
That is a...
That's a higher dimension, actually, maybe from the future, maybe...
I mean, as far as three-dimensional time is concerned, there is no such thing.
Well...
Besides what we've created.
So are they actually trying to tell you that,
okay, everything you see as impossible is not really impossible?
Introducing to you that nothing is impossible and that that is our future way of thinking,
is that nothing is impossible, and otherwise we're doomed.
Well, I have a sort of an...
I almost said rational, but let's say at least orderly kind of mind.
So I tried to understand, you know, what could this be?
So you make a list of hypotheses and then think about each hypothesis and test it against the evidence.
Okay.
Hypothesis one.
DMT is not a drug.
It is an extraterrestrial communication device.
These are creatures somewhere in the universe who are so different from us that they come to us not in starships the size of Manhattan,
but in drug molecules that are dinky.
So we are in contact here with some kind of extraterrestrial technology,
and these are true aliens of some sort.
And God knows the weirdness of the situation supports the hypothesis.
Okay.
Second hypothesis.
There is a parallel universe unsuspected by most human beings.
It's right here all the time.
It's inhabited.
These things have their own hopes, fears, problems, so forth.
And somehow this drug just erases this boundary and then you find yourself in the elf nest.
Okay.
Next hypothesis.
These things, because they have great affection for me, because they seem intent on the task of communicating,
perhaps they are human beings from the distant future.
Perhaps this is what we are fated to become.
You know, there's always, since we were kids, the cliché beings of pure energy.
Well, it's always been a little hard to wrap your mind around what that would look like,
but lo and behold, here appear to be creatures of pure energy.
But there are a lot of problems with hypothesizing a future human technological breakthrough,
which would allow them to actually manipulate the past.
Logical paradoxes and that sort of thing.
Well, so then here's another possibility.
They are human beings, but they are not in the future in the ordinary sense or in the past.
They are in the prenatal and post-life phase.
In other words, these are either the unborn waiting in some limbo-like dimension to descend into matter,
or they are in fact people who have had a sojourn in the domain of organic existence and now have moved on.
Let me not kid you.
We're talking about dead people here in that case.
Well, if you go to the shamans who access these places through Ayahuasca or the Varola Snuffs or something like that,
they will say, well, these are ancestors.
Didn't you read Marsiliad?
Don't you know that shamanism works through ancestor magic?
Well, ancestor is a tremendously sanitized term for dead people.
And if what is actually happening here is that the much argued about soul is actually made visible by this pharmacological strategy,
I mean, God knows why, but God knows why anything else is the way it is, then this is truly big news.
This is the confounding of rationalism.
If what is happening is that by pushing the frontiers of pharmacology, we discover a way to even momentarily and temporarily erase the boundary between the living and the dead,
then this is a 180 degree turn on the evolution of culture that not even the most technically infatuated among us are prepared to assimilate.
I mean, it's no, it's no challenge on that scale of things to expect visitors from Zenebul Ganubi or Zeta Reticuli or some other distant piece of real estate,
but to expect visitors from, you know, beyond the grave, that's a little confounding.
And over time, I've sort of come to incline to the idea that this is what is in fact going on.
And the reason it's so hard to bring anything out of the DMT flash is because at the center of the flash,
you find out something so unexpected, so appalling and so existentially convincing in the moment of confronting it,
that you simply immediately block it out and obliterate it.
And these things are very focused on getting you to do what they're doing.
I mean, they say you can do what we are doing.
Do it. Do it.
And what they want you to do is use your voice to make objects appear in visual space.
As though language, admittedly the phenomenon with which we are involved in a way that no other animal species on this planet is,
but that language as practiced by human beings is an incomplete enchantment.
And that pushed to its limits, language becomes not something heard with the ears, but something seen with the eyes.
On the brink, potentially, through pharmacological re-engineering of ourselves and through studying of these shamanic states of mind,
about to move into a domain where we see each other's thoughts.
Now, normally, when we conceive of telepathy, we think of it as, you hear what I think.
Telepathy is, you see what I mean.
You see, telepathy is a function which goes on in the domain of seeing, not of hearing.
And why this is important, rather than just some weird psychic ability, is because our boundaries are based on our relationship to our language.
If you could see what I mean in a fairly profound sense, you would be me.
In a much more profound sense than when you hear what I say.
Because, think about it for a minute, analyze what normal, ordinary communication is.
I want to communicate with you.
I consult my internal dictionary, and I carefully choose words out of my dictionary,
and I string them together according to the rules of English syntax.
I then activate, if I've done things in the right order,
I then activate my vocal apparatus.
I impart a vibration, an acoustical wave, unto the surrounding medium, which is air.
This vibration moves across space.
It enters through the holes on both sides of your head as a pressure wave.
You then, analyzing this incoming wave form, rush to your dictionary.
And you break up this incoming wave signature, and attempt to map it to words in your dictionary.
Now, if your dictionary and my dictionary are the same, then you will, lo and behold, reconstruct my thought in the confines of your brain-mind system.
But notice the caveat that was slipped in there.
If your dictionary and my dictionary are the same.
But they never are.
I mean, maybe they are if you ask, can you tell me what time it is, or would you please turn down the stereo.
But if you're talking about anything of interest, depth, ambiguity, or complexity, then chances are your dictionary and my dictionary only generally assimilate to congruency with each other.
So then, ambiguity creeps in.
You think you understand.
I think you understand.
And on that shaky foundation, we begin to build further semi-understandings.
And then we drift off in the general direction of misapprehension, eventually.
Well, if you could see what I mean, there would be no ambiguity in our communication.
Because we would, the intention of language would be established in visual space with an existential modality about it similar to sculpture.
I would make it, but having made it, you and I would both examine it, walk around it, and have the faith that we were looking at the same thing.
And this would tend to erase our boundaries.
So, it's very clear that communication of the ordinary sort, small mouth noises transduced across acoustical space, and symbolic notations thereof, have created the global civilization that we're living inside of.
But how much more collectivist, how much more community we would have if we could see what each other mean.
And so, I am beginning to assume that the proper way to think about these hallucinogens is as catalysts for language formation.
As catalysts for the project of communication, and that the end result of the project of communication is that we become what we behold.
In other words, there is not the sense of the observed and the observer.
These two polarities of an experience are merged in the act of pure perception.
And this is something emerging out of our biological organization.
It's not a cultural development the way a new invention or a new mathematical algorithm or something like that would be.
It's an evolution of our neural capacity.
And then let me just say one more thing about it, and then we can talk about it.
There is a model for this in nature that makes clear, I think, what I'm driving at.
As many of you know, octopi change colors.
We learn this from wonderful television programs about nature that keep us from being in nature,
but nevertheless inform us of the details of nature.
Octopi change color.
They have a very large repertoire of dots, blushes, spottings, ripples, and so forth.
It was for a long time thought that this was camouflage.
Now it's been understood by people who study animal communication that this is not camouflage, this is language.
The octopus does not make small mouth noises that move through space,
because in the aqueous medium there are certain physical problems that make that an improbable way to do business.
What the octopus does is it is its own syntax.
It doesn't generate syntax.
It becomes syntax.
So the mind of the octopus is worn on its surface.
Its thoughts ripple across its geometry as color changes.
It is in effect operationally a naked mind, not a naked brain, a naked mind.
So when one octopus encounters another, by the mere act of looking, it can tell how long it's been since the other one has eaten,
how long it's been since it's had sex, what its general attitude toward the world is at that moment, so forth and so on.
It is able to visually apprehend the mental universe of the other.
This is why octopi extrude ink into the water.
It's because it's the only way they can create a private dimension.
themselves because for an octopus to be beheld is to be understood so you can
think of octopus ink as correction fluid for misspoken cephalopods if you like
well in a sense this is what we I think are headed for in a way we can already
do this in a very crude way we have faces no other animal has a face other
animals have fronts to their heads but we have faces it's an area where a lot of
musculature is under the surface is under the control of the intent to
communicate so by scowling squinting rolling one's eyes looking away so forth
and so on we communicate imagine if that communicative ability rather than being
confined to a few square inches on the front of the skull were to spread out
over the entire body and of course for the octopus in an aqueous medium it can fold
and unfold itself it can reveal and hide parts of its body very quickly it can
in fact communicate faster than we can communicate with small mouth noises and
this ability to communicate is so important to the biological foundations of
octopus existence that when the octopi who all of whom for all of which I'm not
sure evolved in the shallow waters near coastlines whom or all of which I'm not
sure evolved in the shallow waters near coastlines when those environments became
evolutionarily crowded the octopi evolved into the benthic depths into the parts of
the ocean where no light ever reaches but in order to maintain lines of
communication over long periods of time they evolved phosphorescent organs on their
bodies and I live like membranes covering those phosphorescent organs so in the
benthic depths of the sea all that one octopus ever encounters of another is its
pure linguistic intent nothing else can be seen so I think that the DMT elves I mean
all I can figure is that they are trying to catalyze us to move up the scale in the
refining of the bandwidth of our communication skills yeah you mean do I
feel more able to do that yeah you feel any closer or is it otherwise just maybe an
entertainment instead of an enlightenment if we aren't able to actually reach it
well no I mean they they urge one toward a kind of glossolalia a kind of ecstatic verbal activity
that is devoid of attachment to the culturally contrived dictionary and for a long time I could
hear them do this I could hear this stuff this DMT gibberish flowing through my mind and then eventually I
became able to do it and it's immensely satisfying this relates back to what we
discussed this morning about how there's DMT in the human brain being produced for
some reason you see we do tend to connect successful linguistic activity with the
visual cortex in other words if somebody successfully communicates something to you you say I see what
you mean now it's clear to me you've painted a picture why is it that when we want to say that language is
succeeding we reach for visual metaphors it's because we trust our eyes we don't trust our ears the world is
defined for us as something seen and the ambiguity of ordinary communication which is
culturally defined and for each of us defined by basically where on the surface of the planet you
first saw the light of day you know the French speak French the Dutch speak Dutch why
can't the English learn how to speak or no that's something else but if but what I'm talking about
is an Ur language that you don't learn from a culture but that you learn in the same way that you know how
to breathe you know how to eat you know how to grasp it's in the organic structure rather than in the
cultural software yeah but is the communication with other can you communicate with others other human
beings on this level well you can if you're both loaded on DMT but that's such a chaotic environment
in which to sort this kind of stuff out that's what drove me to the Amazon in the first place was
the DMT flash is so maddeningly short I mean you're trying to sort all this out and assure yourself
you're not dead as a doornail in about two and a half minutes and I thought you know we need to slow it down
and stretch it out why does it have to be like a Bugs Bunny cartoon run backwards at five times normal speed
I mean you just cannot get a grasp on it and over the years judicious manipulation of these substances
and all kinds of special conditions eventually you see what it is and it's almost as though language
is trying to be born out of matter the pure energy thing of 50s science fiction may in fact be a fairly
accurate take on where we're headed we are headed toward becoming pure syntactical intentionality
just shedding the monkey shedding any umbilical cord into matter matter is becoming a fairly uncomfortable
dimension for us to be in and I dare say matter would probably be highly relieved to have us just move on
so that the rainforest chipmunks glaciers and schooling salmon could go back to doing what they do best
Nicole Lamentles got it different civilization have spoken about those and usually they always relate to them
as having a spirit which manifest itself in the shapes of elves and nymphs and usually the elves and the little dwarfs
are associated with elves and selva the forest the mother the earth and the water usually has more feminine nymphs
and so I was thinking since you took the mushroom which is you know very much of a forest of an earth element
you know maybe the mushroom open the door to you for that elemental of the earth
well this could be I mean all I've ever seen of that other universe is an area smaller than this room
and yet I assume that other universe is probably equal in size to our own
so I'm not exactly Ferdinand Magellan where it's concerned you know
well yeah but it's just you know a little glimpse at it and there is other other people have talked about it
like for instance the tribal men the shamans and not shamans you know had experiences where they did encounter beings
that talked to them and give a message and you know Castaneda talked about it
Lynn Andrews talked about the little nymphs of the water
and other Indians you know have basically even through their oral tradition
kind of passed on that kind of a message that there are the world has different layers of reality
and they are all accessible and available if one is you know if the boundaries can be broken enough
so that our flow of energy can really access these other layers
yeah I think our materialism has focused us so entirely away from these more rarefied layers
that we cannot see them at all that we in fact deny their existence
you know in a way what science has practiced over the past 500 years has come down to
is it has been a relentless de-spiritualizing of the world
until finally you know they tell you there is no soul
there are no spirits that what you see is what you get
we have risen to the surface
well a shaman looking at a person with that kind of a mental map of things
just pities them their simplistic stupidity
just says you know my god you're like a half-wit or something
because everything interesting and complex you say doesn't even exist
I agree but that doesn't mean that because we as a culture are now at a point where
we do need to go back to this forgotten land
we need that feminine energy or that sense of sacredness of life and of all things
and that sense of connectedness with the whole of the universe
well that's no reason to put down what we have learned you know
because I think every culture every civilization kind of drill in one direction for knowledge
and the far east for instance with all of their meditation and all of their time spent in caves and no eating
and this kind of ordeal that they go through that puts them facing death
even though they don't take psychedelic they get through that same experience
with the kind of excruciating pain and whatever they invent you know to get there
well they've drilled into that you know realm of the unconscious towards the source
towards the no being the no self
and they've done wonderful discoveries in that area
but then in order for them to go so far in that direction
they had to say forget the world this is all an illusion I'm not interested with
well we took the other side of the coin
we said forget religion forget philosophy forget even love and emotion
who wants to deal with it I want a microscope and I want to look at atoms
I want to look at viruses and look what we've discovered that way
I mean that's not to be all thrown into the water you know
no I agree
there is a big danger for the baby with the backwater
that's true but also eventually you get into a situation of diminishing returns
for instance you know it was a great step forward for von Leeuwenhoek to grind his lenses
and to see little animals cavorting in a drop of water
but for instance now ordinary science is going to Congress and saying
in order to take another step deeper into the understanding of matter
we want twenty billion dollars to create an instrument seventeen miles in diameter
that will take thirty years to build
and that will allow us to at last confront the bottom quark or something like that
I heard these guys on NPR probably some of you heard them being challenged particle physicists
being challenged by someone who said well you want America to commit
I think it was fifty billion dollars to building the super collider
is that can you name a single spin-off from particle physics that has trickled down into the lives of ordinary people
and they were absolutely stymied
well I kind of go with Peter Russell's theory that you know perhaps from our technological culture we did get something
you know first of all none of us would be here if it was not for technology
because today we have like close to five billion people on earth
that might be a curse but that also might be you know do you want to be the one who is not born
I mean a tricky question
so in in that fact of life explosion there is one thing that happened is that
we do not have a conscious of ourself as one planet as one whole being
I mean even with the technology of going to the moon through the physicality
we have a view of ourself from the outside
I mean to me I look at it like maybe in the evolution of humanity
it's like being seven years old you know all of a sudden you say but hey I am me
you know I am somebody and I can decide you know to say no or to say yes
but this is something there there is an entity
and as a planet maybe that's what we did when we went to the moon
and the Indians you know I go down to sweat lodge every week and I participate with the Indian community down in San Pedro
so I am trying to learn a bit the way they think
and a lot of things I enjoy very much you know but then other things you know I don't agree totally
for instance with the moon thing you know they say well we have been to the moon many many times before
and we go to the moon through the dream world
see like you went to the elves but a lot of people go to the stars
I mean there is a lot of other realities out there
and it's not the future and it's not the past
it's just life it's part of that dense rich
but do you think that it's simply that there are a lot of realities
for instance what puzzles me about these encounters with these elf things
is the urgency from their side
you know I could imagine just breaking into an elf ecology
and seeing them busy making shoes and you know putting the blush on strawberries or whatever elves do
but they seem intently focused on a project that has consequences in this world
and that puzzles me
I don't think history has been a waste of time
I think probably it's served its purpose
and that what we now have to do is take what we've learned
it's the prodigal son I mentioned that
and now return to the archaic family
with the ability to move to the moon
and to etch micro circuitry
and to define the protein coats of viruses
and these fancy things that we can do
all that is good knowledge
but it has to be linked to a coherency of self
that we somehow have gotten so strung out on this scientific descriptive binge
that we forgot why we're doing it
and what this is all for
the only thing I would say is that
for people to hear us into this kind of a you know rationality
I think it's good diplomacy
not to put down the culture
you know not to discard it
I mean I got a sense sometimes that you know
just kind of discard it as you know
a kind of a neurotic error of humanity or something
I think you know there is a acknowledging what it has done
acknowledging it as a step
and you know kind of a saying you know
there are good things that came out of it
but now we are reaching a kind of a crisis level
an apotheosis you know
and now we are into a dark corridor
where we have to make choice
we may have to change direction
we have to do you know something drastic
because if not it's going to be you know
a cataclysm for everybody
well the basis of my criticism of science is
not the science that it does
which it does very well
but the metaphysical pontificating
that it claims to be able to do
based on nothing more than its assumption
that all competitors are naive
I mean science should not be telling us
what we should think about astrology
because astrology is not a proper object
for scientific judgment
in other words science is simply one method
of understanding the world
but the people who practice science
think it's a meta method
think that it is somehow the arbiter of truth
and that we are supposed to take any proposition
and lay it at the feet of science
and it will tell us whether it's kosher or not
and that means that the scientists are completely out of their domain
and should be sent back to the work bench
and the test tube
and stay out of the domain of metaphysics and philosophy
which is not properly their area
that's part of the change
where we don't value strictly the material world
we have to bring back the value to the sacred
the mystery
the whole other aspect of life
and if as a culture we would change that
you know
so that everybody would have a more balanced view of the universe
then the scientists would be automatically put back in their spot
physics and metaphysics
thank you
everybody talks here like there is truth
there may be no truth
it may all be nonsense
when you go on and listen to the intergenic journey
I get the impression
sometimes you feel you're bringing truth back
how do you tell the difference between truth and nonsense
or shit and shinola
as we normally
I don't think
it worries me that it's entertaining
but I still don't feel there's necessarily any truth
well I don't know if you were at the lecture last night
but there was talk there about how
one must not get clutchy about closure
there is no closure
there is no truth
you're quite right
but I mean there isn't even a direction of truth
it may just all be nonsense
well if it's all nonsense
then we're in a hell of a fix
well that's where we may be
Wittgenstein had a slightly different notion
that I think is more serviceable here
he said
what we want to do
is we want to make statements that are true enough
now there is a monkey concept
that's what we want
we want to say things which are true enough
that means serviceable in the circumstance
in which they are being applied
and that is
yeah or whatever
you know
if you're solving tensor equations of the third degree
then in that domain
but the idea
you see
it's so crazy to think
that talking monkeys
could get anywhere near truth
I mean
do you think a sea urchin possesses the truth
or a macaw
well then why you
and especially when you realize
you know
we do all this business in English
and we're utterly naive
about the limitations of language
you can't even under
I mean
take someone like Derrida for instance
whatever the man's truth is
it can't even be exported into English
without becoming gibberish
because when you read them
you can't understand them
yeah
however it's also looked at
not only limitations of language
but the potency of
it's a reason to believe
and believe that consciousness itself
is being entered out of language
but when we take pharaoh or children
out of the jungles
that haven't had the adoption
of the abstraction
into their lives
that it's almost impossible
to bring them to humanness
to being human
so language is maybe incredibly potent
and as you suggest with these elves
you're talking about a medium of pure language
or purer language
purer
yes well language
you know
if you were to look at this planet
and seek the thumbprint of a higher intelligence
god or the goddess or whatever
language is the thing to look at
I mean this is the thing we do
that is an incredible symmetry break
with the rest of nature
do you think a dog can tell the difference
between those stairs and that floor
or the rug and that
or even the flowers and that
he sees it as a continuum
that simply is a texture
like we look at this rug
we don't identify that spot
from the rest of it
we just simply say it's a rug
well and animal intelligence
is suspended in the here and now
we have language seems to be
a strategy for binding time
and notice that the entirety of evidence
the entirety of evolutionary advance
is a series of time binding strategies
once you possess language
and especially once you possess writing
the past is not so past as it used to be
it hangs around
and we begin to create a database of experience
larger than any community of living people
could ever have
and the past stays with us
this is both a blessing and a curse
notice that we have industrial cultures
as a result of the accumulation of written language
that there's a simultaneousness
between written language and agriculture
etc. and industrial culture
oh yeah
I don't have any problem with that
you know somebody said language was created to lie
yes but it does it so elegantly and so well
that the half truths it tells
are all that we can communicate
the truth
cannot be said
it may even be possible to chart the evolution of a single individual
from you know from an infant all the way to his maturity
as one who takes the journey from the right side of his brain
into the left side of his brain
crossing a certain membrane there where he switches his dominance from right to left
and then going full circle
and then once again becoming quote unquote spiritual
by adopting and integrating the right once again
well yeah these are all metaphors and analogies for a process
which is essentially incomprehensible
there is no reason to expect reality to be rationally apprehendable
this is the basic fallacy
that we so confidently assume the world is for us
that we assume that we should also therefore be able to understand it
when in fact what we've done is just carved out a very limited domain
of repetitious algorithms that don't have fatal consequences for us
and then the rest of it lies in the realm of the great who knows
but you know since there's very little percentage to be made out of that
people prefer to keep their faces turned inward toward the campfire
not outward toward the immense darkness revealed by the campfire
and the bigger you build the campfire of metaphor
the more darkness you reveal outside of its domain
so if ever there was an argument for open-endedness
and a defocusing on closure
it would be the linguistic enterprise I think
well we could just this one
we could it may you know
language may be the carrier or the virus that in fact causes consciousness
there may not be any consciousness without the disinfection of language
yeah well I don't have any trouble with that
I mean William Burroughs said language is a virus from outer space
and well it may be
it does have you know it self-replicates itself
it spreads through a population
ideas mutate
they compete with each other
ideas become extinct
new ideological forms that are more adaptable squeeze out other forms
I mean the whole evolution of organic life may be simply a lower dimensional rehearsal
for a kind of syntactical evolution
that is going to go on in a domain that we can barely conceive of
yeah over
yeah for myself I'm not so concerned with what the truth is
but what in fact works in one's life
and how one uses the word or uses the ideas to manifest in the reality that we're swimming through
in light of that
I'm just wondering about the mushroom morphogenetic fields
the plant community in terms of allies
that one can become connected with as a collective community that we're all participating in
elaborate on that
well I've talked with Rupert a lot about this
and
sort of
different things can be said
I mean one way of thinking
about what the psychedelic experience is
is that
psychoactive compounds
amplify the morphogenetic field
to the point where it becomes a potential object for inspection by the conscious mind
in the same way that we know right now that this room is filled with radio VHF UHF signals
but we also know that we would have to have a radio or a television set in order to tap into them
the morphogenetic field is ordinarily damped by experience
but becomes overwhelmingly present
when we jack our neural physiological receptors up to the point where these previously invisible influences become visible
the other thing in terms of the morphogenetic field theory and how it relates to psychedelics
is
to realize that when you take a plant
the plant takes you
and so for instance
one of the reasons I prefer shamanic hallucinogens to synthetics
is that they are so much richer as databases
because they have inside them all the people who have ever taken them
I mean when you take psilocybin
you leave something behind in there
that every other
every subsequent user of psilocybin will encounter
so you know the way Tibetans leave little cairns of rock
when they cross high mountain passes
well this is what we are doing in the psychedelic experience
and really the character of psilocybin
is the cumulative super imposition
of the character of the thousands and thousands of people over the millennia
that have taken it plus something else
its own unique nature
when you take a drug which induces an altered state
like
ketamine for instance ketamine is a drug that has not been around very long
hasn't been taken by millions of people and is oddly empty it's the building is
there the architecture is there but where are the hurrying secretaries the
water coolers the executives the buzzing Ella nothing you know it's empty real
estate it's for rent and if you want to move in well then you can live there but
it's it's the difference between a modern office building and a 14th century
Italian Villa when you contrast a modern synthetic with a well-used shamanic
organic yeah it's it's in order to be a moving target yeah yeah I'd like to
a related experience well first of all I'd like to kind of get some input from if
anybody else has anything to say on this matter um a lot of times when I first
take like five grams or something I get this this is kind of a simple thing but
it's a yawn I'm wondering if does anybody else get that yawn no they the yawn is a
physiological response to psilocybin that is it's part of it and so is the runny
nose in the first hour this is you know every drug has a spectrum of effects and
some are dependable and some are not I mean for instance LSD almost you could
almost say 100% of the people who take LSD it dilates your eyes that is an
effect of LSD that it would be impossible to eliminate but I wouldn't say 100% of the
people who take LSD encounter the good Lord there's something like that that's
a more selective effect okay the second part is after I take five grams and after
I get the buzzing sounds in my ears and then I this last time I took it was in a
darkened room laid on the bed got naked and just laid there and for the first time
what happened usually I close my eyes and I'm able to get visions kind of a passing
vision almost like a film going through my head I'm wondering also does anybody
get it where it's coming from the right to the left or from the left to the right
sort of a film coming across
ah
here tell us yeah well I I think that that the number of ways these things can
present themselves is practically infinite I mean I've seen I've had really weird
experiences with information for instance you know these flashers on buildings
where the news goes by I've had hallucinations where it became a textual
hallucination in other words what I was seeing was an illuminated page of print and
then as I looked at it every 50th letter would invert and then suddenly every 20th and then every 10th and then
every fifth and I literally watch a page of text go from being readable to being gibberish and then watch the meaning come through again in a loop I mean I think anything you can conceive of it can do and many things you can't conceive of
I mean we're all individuals we all have the gift of bringing our own ideas but still you have to be able to make general statements about it or you would have to say that it's all and everything one of the one of the
one of the the same it would be boring well although how would you know since you would never have any trip but your own
one of the one of the things that happens on psilocybin and on ayahuasca that really puzzles me that I just go back to again and again is you can be having these volleys of hallucination and then you can say to it art deco and click and suddenly there will be thousands of cigarette lighters limousines
place in front of you thousands of these things perfectly exemplifying this very narrowly defined aesthetic domain italian baroque click altarpieces saints with their eyes rolled back dripping gold the whole thing and so you say boy that is really strange we click through aesthetic epochs like points on a dial
It you think people would never do them here with a different Valentine or whatever갔 fifty looking we could always find that interesting
It's interesting the use of it is how the摩
Yves Saint Laurent or Klimt or somebody like that.
And then, you know, the most puzzling one of all is you can say to the mushroom,
OK, enough of surprises, Art Deco, Italian Baroque.
Show me what you are for yourself.
And then it's almost like, you know, there's a roll of drums and black curtains begin to rise.
And there's a cold air that sweeps through the room.
And you realize, you know, OK, after about 45 seconds of that, you have to call a halt.
Because you realize, you know, this thing had clothed itself in so many levels of visual reassurance for you as a human being
that the request that it reveal its true nature sets off a cascade headed in a truly appalling direction.
And usually you say, OK, that's enough of your true nature.
Let's go back to dancing chipmunks and little candies rolling in the dark.
Yeah.
Do you foresee thought or discrete thought in particular being kind of locatable on the frequency spectrum of matter and energy
such that it could drive the input of virtual reality so that you could communicate with these kind of experiences with headspace?
You mean a machine that could be driven by the imagination?
It's pretty, it's, well, it raises a bunch of questions.
I mean, the first question is, where is thought generated?
The straight people believe that the brain makes thought, makes it.
I think that the evidence is overwhelmingly against that, that that's as naive an approach to thought as,
I remember when I was little, I once tore apart a radio looking for little people inside of it.
And, you know, there are no little people inside the radio.
The radio transduces vibrations that surround the planet and turns it into recognizable, a recognizable experience.
I don't believe thought can be located in the brain.
I think the brain is an amplifier and an antenna for something that is everywhere.
That the phrase, my thoughts, is a complete misnomer.
You don't own thoughts.
You don't generate them.
All you do is tune into an ocean of thought in which we're embedded.
This is the morphogenetic field about which so much shouting and arm-waving is going on.
To my mind, the proof of this position is the fact that the psychedelic experience unleashes visions in your head
which you could not possibly have conceived of or imagined.
It doesn't come from you.
If we say that the content of the psychedelic experience comes from the self,
then we have defined the self in such a way that it's unrecognizable to us.
And if your self is unrecognizable to you, then it isn't your self, you see.
So these things are proving that we participate in the world of mind,
but that we don't generate it done.
And they say, why come there are you a common experience?
What?
Why are we all tripping the same thing if it's a universal thought?
Well, that's like saying when we swim in the ocean,
why don't we all see the same fish?
Because the ocean is enormous.
Because we all enter it from different angles of attack.
But if we were swimming together, would we experience the same fish?
Yes, we would.
And on psilocybin, one of the most stunning experiences you can have
if you wanted to make a believer out of you
is to sit with somebody and describe what you're seeing
and agree that after three minutes you'll shut up and they'll start up
and you discover that you just hand the baton on.
They see what you see, you see what they see.
This is confounding.
You see, if we could do legal research with this stuff,
we could overturn the paradigms of normal science in a number of areas within 18 months.
I'm sure of it.
I've seen it happen.
I mean, I've seen states of group-mindedness that were so specific
that there was no possibility that what was not happening
was no shit, one-on-one, real-time telepathy.
Are there no countries in the world, maybe Amsterdam way?
Well, there are countries in the world where psychedelic research is tolerated,
is the only way to put it.
But it's in the hands of scientists.
And people of the imagination impaired
are largely in charge of these research programs.
They're asking the wrong questions, you know?
I mean, if you get a...
Well, that's enough.
They're asking the wrong questions.
It's just relevant to that,
the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies.
They've just released their new newsletter,
and what this newsletter says, basically,
is that at a recent convened meeting with the FDA
and a couple days after that with the National Institute for Drug Abuse,
they've worked out an arrangement now where MDMA, at least,
and they say in another article here
that possibly LSD testing will be undertaken very seriously in the near future.
And this is going through maps
and in conjoint working with the FDA
to get certain types of permits
for the more intensive research that should be done in this field.
There is, I think, the resistance to psychedelic research
is beginning to weaken
because an entire generation of people,
people who were, you know, three and four years old in the 1960s,
are now entering the medical research establishment
as post-docs and so forth.
And there is no good reason to be given
for not having a research program on psilocybin, for example.
I mean, it was never a social problem.
It is a valid object for scientific research.
It's amazing to me the gutlessness of the scientific establishment on this matter.
I mean, why, you know, we hear about the omnipotence of the AMA and so forth and so on.
Why has the scientific establishment lain down like a dog
and let politicians set the research agenda for human research on psychedelics?
The last time this happened was in the 14th century
when the Pope and his cronies tried to make it impossible for people to dissect corpses
because they didn't want people to understand human anatomy.
Well, in that situation, instead of swallowing it and putting up with it,
medical students would steal bodies off the gallows
and trail along behind armies to look at the freshly killed
in order to create a compendious understanding of human anatomy.
And they did.
In the 20th century, science, which would have you believe that it's absolutely unbiased
and it goes wherever curiosity seeks without prejudice or deference
to anybody's social values or anything,
is in fact a sycophantic slave to the agenda of these frightened politicians.
So it's a real disgrace because, you know,
I lived through the first psychedelic revolution
and the news about LSD swept over the psychoanalytic community
with the kind of force that the splitting of the atoms swept over the physics community
and people involved in treating mental illness
and studying brain function and mapping the brain
said, this is amazing.
A tool has been put into our hands
that will throw open doorways in the practice of psychology we couldn't dream of.
And instead, it was absolutely slammed shut.
Imagine if Galileo had smashed his telescope
after there was a little bit of whining from the Vatican.
Had that happened, you know, we would still be living in a universe
defined by the Aristotelian stellar shells.
A little courage on the part of these almighty scientists
would go a long way toward overwhelming the fearful strictures placed on
by politicians who are trying to maintain a social equilibrium
that is fairly odious anyway.
Yeah.
Yeah, I've got kind of support of one thing you said
and also a question which I hope will be organized enough for you to answer.
Your remarks about the telepathy,
after some extremely intense boundary dissolution experiences with my wife,
we have gotten to the point where,
using straight Michael Harner shamanic journeying techniques,
we routinely have each other's visions.
I think I'm wondering if it isn't as much a matter of a learned response as anything else.
No, I think it is a learned response.
I think, you know, it requires psychedelics usually to plow the channel.
But once you open the groove, then there are ways to reinforce it.
And one of the underrated tools in this game is the power of acoustical driving
and the power of sound to synergize subtle chemical reactions.
I mean, music is so compelling to us because it is essentially brain massage of some sort.
And the pleasure we derive from music is, at some level, a chemical pleasure.
And I think, you know, trying to get to these places with yoga and drumming and fasting and all that
is a pretty thankless task unless you clear the way with psychedelics
and then you can really get somewhere.
If you use psychedelics in combination with any of these traditional techniques
for working in these areas,
suddenly these traditional techniques previously found to be maddeningly ineffective
become very, very powerful tools.
So mantra with psychedelics works like magic.
Yoga, breath control, drumming, visualization, simple prayer.
It all works amazingly well in the presence of psychedelics.
And in the absence of psychedelics entirely, it's a pretty frustrating get-go.
And unfortunately, these non-psychedelic spiritual techniques
are very quickly co-opted by the beady-eyed priests among us
who then peddle it back to us with a menu of moral do's and don'ts
stapled to the front of it.
And that's entirely discouraging.
Yeah, my other question is, kind of ties together some things you've mentioned
during the course of the day.
You mentioned way back when about no one else having the experiences that you have.
And so my question is to the whole issue of community and lifestyle.
The issue that I'm wrestling with right now,
I think part of what I'm experiencing is my own drive for wholeness or insight or whatever.
Part of it is perhaps the transcendental object on the event horizon.
But what I'm wrestling with is how to follow my muse,
how to live the life that's drawing me,
and at the same time able to function and pay my child support and not live in the woods.
And if you could maybe give some guidance to me and some others of us
that are wrestling with that issue.
Well, this is the tension between the transcendental and the mundane.
What do you do about it?
I don't know.
I experience it as a real tension as well.
Because you see, all these other spiritual techniques,
yoga, breath control, diet, you name it,
the way you pursue those is with the pedal to the metal.
In other words, full-on, full-court press.
The way you relate to psychedelics is entirely the opposite,
with your foot on the brakes all the time.
The people who are using these non-psychedelic techniques
are endlessly frustrated by the fact that they're not able to get where they want to go, I think.
The people who use psychedelics spend a huge amount of time
trying to keep from overshooting the goal
and losing themselves in the incomprehensible who-knows-what.
I think that if you have a genuine desire to leave us all behind
and to go up on cold mountain
and to become a Taoist immortal
and to clothe yourself in a hair shirt
and eat roots and contemplate the one forever,
hey, there's nothing stopping you.
It's just that that's an easy goal to enunciate
when it's practically impossible.
But in the presence of psychedelics, it is quite realizable.
And then you have to think,
but wait a minute, what about child support?
What about, you know, my love of double cappuccino?
What about...
And then you say, well, I could leave this world.
I could become an ascended master.
But is that what I really wanted all along?
And I think this is a tension.
I mean, I feel it in myself.
Basically, I do what I do,
and it's a chicken-shit response to what I could be doing.
Because what I could be doing
is becoming utterly incomprehensible to everybody else on the planet
and living in a tree somewhere
and happily staring into space every waking minute.
But I am not ready to kiss off my library,
my children, my friends, my vices.
And so people in our position have to balance these things.
And I think the real spiritual frontier lies in the community.
That we must...
You know, it's sort of the bodhisattvic ideal.
We must somehow carry everyone with us.
It's not about bailing out of history.
It's about sticking with it until we can end it for everybody.
But I'm not saying that's the only point of view.
If you want to go...
If you want to become an Arhat,
I don't think there's anything stopping you.
You see, once you get to the place where you find out
by some set of peculiar circumstances
about these things,
psilocybin, DMT, and so forth,
you have crossed a real frontier.
This is not simply another spiritual technique
for, you know,
picayunish advancement,
one more small step down the path.
This is, in fact,
this works.
And maybe you never thought
you would find something that works.
Well, so the entire...
You see, the attitude...
It's a naive attitude to quest.
It's the attitude of the ingenue,
the fool,
the castaned figure,
seeks.
Once you reach the psychedelic plateau,
the tool has been placed in your hands now.
Now you have to figure out
whether you were really serious
about all this transcendental yearning
that you indulged in
when it seemed so far out of reach.
Because now, you know,
it's just a dose away.
And we all come to that
very differently.
It's a different dilemma
from the rest of the spiritual community.
They just need more and more power.
We need more and more insight and wisdom
in order to know what to do
with the fact that
we can now achieve
whatever we conceive of.
So now is a moment
to take a deep breath
and decide where we really
want to go with this stuff.
Can I...
Oh, sure.
I just wanted to go back
to you talking about the AMA.
I know I've heard
Dr. Ingle Wild
talk how they used LSD
in treating autism.
I knew a guy that was autistic
and regained his hearing
when his brother gave him LSD
when he was 12 years old.
I believe the AMA
does not want us to be healthy.
They do not want us
to have the tools.
There's a book called
Toxic Psychology
about how the psychopharmacology
is actually making people brain dead.
And I think...
I mean, if you go back in time,
the original healers
who used plants and herbs
were burned at the stake
of being witches
because of the medical schools
they had back then
and they were all men.
They wouldn't let women in it
even though they had
been the original healers.
And right now
the FDA is doing this.
They're trying to outlaw
plants and herbs
for healing,
for anything.
And this is vitamins,
food supplements,
everything.
And like I myself,
I don't take pharmaceutical drugs
because they make me sick.
And the only thing
I have to use
for my PMS
is hemp
and it's the only thing
that works.
And we all
have to be somewhat political
and make statements
to people
and enlighten them
and educate them
as to what's really going on
because there's a whole world
that could be opened up
if we started using
our plants and our herbs
for healing again.
Yeah, I agree.
There's a lot of holistic
centers opening up
all over.
I was just in one
in Leavenworth, Washington
and it was really
rewarding and wonderful
to see a physician
actually reaching out
and searching
other healers,
a shaman
and also herbalists,
everybody in her
private practice.
So it is coming
and it's very slow
but it's coming around.
And faster and faster.
I think that's why
the FDA right now
is trying to do away
with it
because it is growing.
If you knew
the legislation
that is going on right now
they are rating
health food stores
with guns
and taking things
out of there
like aloe vera products
and they are saying
they have never been tested
we haven't approved it
and they are taking
I guarantee you
this is happening right now
and that is why
you have to be aware
and you have to educate
people about it.
But you see
at the same time
they are granting
the first INDs
for psychedelic research
in 30 years.
So instead of
taking a paranoid view
that they are
against it
and us
I just think
that if you
dissect these
human institutions
what you find
always are
individuals
and
usually
these institutions
are fraught
with internal
conflicts
about what they are doing.
There is a lot
of fear
there is a lot
of mistrust
and very few people
go around
rubbing their hands
together
and cackling
over the fact
that they are
committing acts
of pure evil.
Most people
have some kind
of internal
story
that tells them
that they are doing
the very best
they can.
It is just
that there are also
a lot of
jug-headed
misconceptions
about what the best
we can
actually means.
dialogue
is so important.
Why free speech
is such a powerful
notion.
Let all ideas
compete
on a level
playing field
and
the correct
points of view
I think
will emerge
eventually.
Well that is why
we need people
like you out there
educated.
Just jump.
Backing up a little
bit to
the journeys
to Elfdom
and other places
most
semantic journeys
seem to be
almost
even when
they began
begun as a
group thing
end up being
the solitary
journey
of your own
whether you're
the octopus
with the colors
displaying yourself
and you're out there
it very rarely
do you hear
of people
journeying
with another
mind being
not the body being
but a mind being
so in these journeys
whether you're
in an elf realm
or another realm
is there
a reading
between these
other entities
and you
in your journey
to their world
or their space
is there a
communication
at all
and also
can you
go with
somebody
from this
realm
out there
but on a
mind plane
or as you
described
the octopus
type thing
where you're
communicating
not with words
or a dictionary
well it's hard
to say
you know
Plotinus
who was a
neo-Platonic
philosopher
he described
the mystical
experience
of as
the flight
of the alone
to the alone
and there certainly
is an element
in the psychedelic
thing
of it's being
so large
a dimension
that when you
go into it
you not only
see things
that you
have never
seen before
you
and not only
do you see
things that
no one else
has seen
before
but you
see things
which no
one else
will ever
see again
so I
tend to
and this is
just my
personal preference
and I'm a
double Scorpio
and a number
of different
things that
push me
in this
direction
but I
really like
to do
the deep
work
alone
and then
try to
bring it
back
and this
is the
proper
domain
for sharing
and community
we know
that the
psychedelic
you know
that behind
five grams
of psilocybin
lies a
psychedelic
world
but how
can we
create
a psychedelic
world
here and
now
on zip
and the
answer is
by becoming
ever more
psychedelic
ourselves
and so
it's a
tremendous
empowerment
for
eccentricity
and basically
my whole
career is
based on
eccentricity
one of the
most fearful
questions to
come my
way is
when I'm
riding on
airplanes
to some
situation
like this
and someone
sits down
beside me
and says
so what
do you
do
and I
usually
I try
to
escape i say and this is always a horribly weak thing i say i write books and then they say oh
well what do you write books about and then we move into the realm of pure lie i usually say
travel so you know i think if you have i mean to return to your question if you have an extraordinary
heart connection with someone you can voyage together a certain distance but this is a unique
kind of thing and probably many a relationship has experienced unnecessary strain because somebody
thought they had that kind of connection and then when they got out into the incoming psychic surf
they discovered one person forgot their tanks back on the beach you know behind five milligrams
of one thing or 500 of another there is a little green ale or something else is that a consistent
picture for you not that the experience would not be new in terms of the communication but is
is that consistent do you do you yourself find that same image or that same level of of uh
uh mushroom at that point but then secondly do in in terms of the people that that you communicate
with who do measured quantities and who do it similarly say uh rupert shelter is do does have
you have other people of other individuals communicated that they see those same type of
creatures for lack of better word you hear them saying about the urgency of your coming there and being
there and that's a big thing i feel that it's an important thing so once you're there i mean and you
have to have a community you're looking for a common denominator of communication there and the urgency of
finding something there i mean that's kind of you know also i'd like to well i mean the answer is
you know if you send 10 people to paris and then you interview them about their experience of paris
you know one of them stayed with the wife of the prime minister somebody else stayed in a bordello on
the wrong side of town their notions of paris are rather different however if you interview them closely
enough you can tell that this must have been the same place in some sense i mean for me the dmt experience
is remarkably consistent it always is this dome underground filled with these self-transforming elf
machine creatures and then when i talk to other people and interview them about it what i've come away
with is the notion that an archetype is like a series of concentric circles and to the degree that you
reach the center of the circle the accounts become more and more consistent for instance and in thinking
along those lines what i've come to see about for instance dmt is that it has an archetype and the
archetype is and god knows why the circus dmt is the archetype of the circus so you give it to someone
who is not psychedelically sophisticated and you give them a low dose then they come back then you say what
was it like this is a direct quote from a woman a couple of years ago she said it was the saddest
carnival i've ever been to she said all the rides were closed nobody was there there were just gum wrappers
blowing between boarded up tents i said interesting so then give it to someone else and they said it was full
of clowns and i said you mean elves they said no just clowns and as the dose rises
the familiarity of the image is stripped away and it migrates more and more toward this thing behind
the mask well now if you think of the circus it is an interesting archetype first of all three rings
in constant activity uh and it's a wonderful thing for children children love the circus because there's
light and color and music and animals and you know clowns but then there's also a side to it which
children don't see i mean you lift your eyes from the center ring and there is eros in the form of the
beautiful blonde woman in the tiny spangled costume who works without nets hanging by her teeth far above the
center ring and twisted into this erotic image is death because she works without nets the whole point
of her performance is the fact that she could uh fall and be killed well then there's yet another aspect
to this circus archetype which is away from the lady in the spangled costume and the clowns climbing out of
their little cars and the powdered elephants of many colors are the sideshows that snake off into the
darkness the two-headed lady the goat boy and the thing in the bottle they're all there too to be looked
at so it's this incredibly rich amalgam of light color humor childhood memories cotton candy joy eros death
the thing in the bottle the wild animals so forth and so on and as you make your way toward it it
it different layers fall away do you find the consistency with the uh do you find similar but
different consistencies with lsd and with uh psilocybin that you could make it clear as the consistency
that you find with dmt oh yeah i think that see one of the great confusions about psychedelics is that
they're all the same like in some textbooks if you look up psilocybin it will say a hallucinogen derived
from fungi which causes lsd type hallucinations this is nonsense this just simply means that lsd arrived
first on the workbench of western civilization so everything is referent back to it if you're going
to take these things you need to take enough that you can tell the difference and at low doses all
psychedelics are the same it's just the experience of agitation and psychic inner turmoil sort of like
speed you know but as the doses increase you begin to hit the bifurcation points and these things have
distinct personalities for instance uh dmt the elf playroom reception area that seems to define it
the amazing thing about psilocybin and its distinguishing characteristic is uh it speaks
speaks it speaks in english to you it conversationally approaches you and you talk to it in your mind i mean this
is an amazing thing if you've never experienced it there's something out there for you try it that's
that's what what was behind asking you that question because i don't have any dmt experience i've never
taken i've taken uh psilocybin just in the form of the mushrooms themselves in a botanical garden and i
don't have much other experience and what happened was quite transformational in the long term because
it put me in touch with the plant world but not in i didn't close my eyes i had no other realm it was
the realm that was there in the garden a communication well you said it last night with the mind of that
botanical area the mind of that plant world that was there it talked to me i wouldn't i guess like i
it got translated into english but it was kind of saying everybody should have very close to them
a realm like this to be in and people would be okay do everything you can to support that that's the
message and for instance you know the mushroom has a personality and like all personalities
it excludes some things and includes others the the mushroom personality is a radically eccentric
personality the mushroom talks about transforming the planet it says you know i i come from a distant
part of the galaxy i have 500 million years of galactic history in my data banks i have seen 50 000
worlds come into existence and pass out of existence i've seen ships the size of australia depart for
andromeda i've seen this i've seen that it's willing to show you the newsreels of it that kind of a and
it says your world is ending put your furry paw into my hand and together we will march out to the stars
it's this well so then you you take a compound or a or a a shamanic hallucinogen like ayahuasca
chemically this is very very similar to dmt experientially it could hardly be more different
ayahuasca does not show you images of enormous machines in orbit around alien planets and that sort
of thing ayahuasca first of all it doesn't speak it shows if you become like the eye of a camera flying
through a world and what it shows you it's much more feminine it shows you water flowing over the land
it shows you plant life growing and dying it shows you the movement of glaciers over the surface of the
land it shows you people burying their dead it shows you archaic civilizations it shows you women
nursing their children it shows you meat it shows you the stuff of this world on every level and and it moves
you to tears i mean it's emotive it's not about our cosmic destiny out there in the starry blackness
it's about coming to terms with the earth and our past and each other and you say you know these things
these are personalities these are visions and the idea is to fuse all of this into a single unitary
perception that does honor to all and uh limits none back here able to uh communicate with all types of
plant life and they see that each plant life has a beautiful message to bring and they did talk about
the mushrooms and saying that it does enhance the human immune system could you talk a little about
that well yes this is true uh you probably all know or may have heard of what's called rishi jen
or ganoderma lucidum this is a mushroom a chinese mushroom that definitely stimulates the immune
system and many fungi probably have uh have this quality because these higher fungi the basidiomycetes
have enough of a trace of their evolutionary depth to more uh primitive fungi the kind that cause candida
and and vaginal fungus and stuff like that the the undifferentiated fungi that the the immune system
recognizes this as a potential uh stimulant and and responds to it so this is definitely uh true
yeah i just got this notion uh that maybe the good old incompleteness there would explain the absence of
the self and we dive into it you know and i thought maybe you'd get a quick answer for a very long answer
about which is more real than the self and the other or is the self the other the one
the one no the self is the other that that's the that's what i've come away that the self is the other
and assimilating the implications of that takes a lifetime uh uh we have within us the very thing
that we're seeking you know it's like the jungian fairy tale of the guy who leaves home and searches the world
for enlightenment and has all these adventures and finally concludes that it is not to be found and returns
to his home and uh rebuilds the heart and discovers beneath the heart the thing that he had sought in all the wrong
places i mean it is uh it is within it is a recurso uh what we are looking for is within us it's our own
inner riches this is why psychedelics are such a powerful antidote to capitalism because they
teach you that you are not a wannabe you are where it's at and nobody should allow you or sell you
a different point of view to make you think you're going to be complete when you get a maserati
or a rembrandt or something like that all that is just the detritus of the physical world
would you say we're cycling at the same rate between self and other or is there such a thing
well i think that if we could really follow ourselves into dream every evening with full
consciousness that we would discover that we touch the philosopher's stone at least once every 24 hours
it's just that we return down the river of forgetting let's say you know and every morning we emerge from
spending time with the other as self and then we're inserted back into the fiction of our three
dimensional existence and our individuality i know that the tapers are getting antsy we need to break
for uh just a few minutes to have tea and stretch don't forget your question we'll come back and hammer
on this a little more why don't we pull together while we're doing that i wanted to call your attention
to uh a new publication on your newsstand which is psychedelic illuminations uh ron piper and a number of his
associates have gotten this together in this issue there happens to be an article or an interview with
yours truly i don't know if there's anything in it we didn't cover today but psychedelic publication
is rare enough anyway so uh it's called psychedelic illuminations this is issue three of volume one
it's still not too late to be the first on your block to uh subscribe to this publication so
watch for it this is ron if you want to talk to him i'm sure he can arrange for you to have more
involvement with it okay so we're into the uh final round here um is there anybody who's really oh there
they are the burning people yes i didn't quite get it and i just wondered if you would clarify because it
bothered me a lot and i thought i couldn't quite see i mean democracy is limited but um that doesn't
mean you throw it out i didn't you know it's always limited but it's still valuable for what it does
for them so i wonder if you'd explain better how you um well no i i wasn't advocating getting rid of
democracy what i was suggesting was that we don't really have democracy because we don't have an
ideologically level playing field because special interest groups are able to spend so much money to
influence opinion that what we really have is an oligarchy of special interest groups that is very
skillfully able to manipulate the general population into taking up positions that they would not naturally
incline themselves toward so if you're serious about having a democracy then you have to somehow
uh curtail the incredibly sophisticated efforts to skew the democratic dialogue to favor one or another
special interest groups that are buying their way into the dialogue i thought you were throwing the
concept out because you mentioned about oh there's one person one vote no didn't i uh i do i mean i agree
it's an ideal more than a reality you know no i think democracy i'm a thoroughgoing democrat i think
democracy is is almost a biologically obvious way of organizing ourselves i mean one person one vote
what i was knocking is that behind democracy lurks the idea of the citizen and that's the idea that we're all exactly alike
and that's preposterous and an unnecessary fiction to the practice of democracy we are not all alike in our abilities in the wealth we command
so forth and so on so for purposes of governing ourselves we give each person a say but we shouldn't then
extrapolate that uniformity into the idea that we are in fact uniform we are not you see democracy
democracy of that sort based on the modern concept of the citizen has arisen in the wake of the invention of printing
and uh printing a number of ideas spun off from printing that macluhan was the only person to really
correctly identify what they were and what their effects were one is the idea of interchangeable parts
because print is a system of interchangeable parts and once you establish a font every lowercase e looks
like every other lowercase e uh what we are is more like more analogous to what you deal with in
manuscript where every e is sort of like every other e but it contains individual variations imparted by the
fact that it was drawn by a human hand at a given moment we want to we want to express our political
wills through a system of equality but we don't want to do damage to our individual uniqueness and the
point i was trying to get at last night is the concept of the citizen it does erode the idea of our
uniqueness to some degree yeah you crafted an elegant response that basically said that the first molecule
was pure and every mutation after that became more complex i'd like your comments on the rift that they
found in western canada in recent scientific times but it's become a mother load of uh soft i don't know
what the word is of mammals not mammals but sea creatures that are incredibly more complex than
anything found on the planet today which is strongly suggest to the scientific community that we are
evolving rather than evolving well you're referring to the burgess shale and what's his name's book wonderful
life right yeah just to the scientific community that we are evolving rather than evolving well you're
referring to the burgess shale and what's his name's book wonderful life right yeah
uh i i sort of differ with your interpretation of it it wasn't that these things were more complex than
any life forms on the earth today it was that they represented a large number of phyla none of which exist
on the earth today so the point that was being made by the paleontologists is apparently we started out
with many different phyla and then it narrowed at some point into just a few phyla which then re-radiated
out into all the forms we possess today so i think um other people have brought this up and it's a troubling
example because it tends to throw a railroad tie against the onrushing of my rhetorical freight train
but that's the name of the game folks um it probably is true that at at an early point in the evolution
of life i mean it's obviously now established there were these many many different phyla and for unknown
reasons certain phyla became extinct and then the uh the what the phyla which were left radiated and
filled all the abandoned niches uh that had previously been occupied by these now extinct organisms
but nevertheless we have to look at this question of for reasons unknown they became extinct why did some
phyla survive and others not it would be inconsistent with the theory of evolution to suggest that this happened
entirely by chance there must have been some adaptive advantage possessed by the phyla that made it through
whatever these narrow evolutionary necks were and then the phyla which survived these climatological
crises or whatever they are radiated into an incredible number of complex forms that nevertheless could be
traced to a small number of earlier uh phyla a more in line with your the thrust of your argument
uh a more difficult to answer objection that i don't know why i'm telling you this because it erodes my own position
but i was preaching this the world complexifies through time rap at esalen one time and a guy was staying
with me there who was a professional russian translator he was a russian and a linguist and he said you know
there's a major exception to your rule that all phenomena complexify through time and and that is language
he said as we go back into the past languages become richer and i i am still puzzling over this i don't
think it's an inherent property of language i think it's because as we go back into the past languages become
more and more localized and local variations develop in small confined geographical areas
so that then when you pour all these languages together there tends to be a certain uh uh leveling and this probably
uh results in a uh in a general uh fall in the total number of words being used in a language in other words if in
canada they call a windshield a windscreen and in england they call it something else well then as long as
canada england and the u.s don't communicate we have three words for windshield but if these three
cultures communicate frequently and deeply probably a couple of these words will become obsolete or
colloquial and one term will dominate so language is not evolving uh uh in a vacuum you have to look at
the effects of modern transportation migrations of people and that sort of thing i agree that this is not
this complexification through time thing has the characteristic of a general tendency but it's not
an iron clad uh natural law we can see that now for instance uh communism in the soviet union acted as a deep
freeze for traditional cultures wonderful traditional cultures exist out on the steppes of central asia
in kyrgyzia turkmenistan uh nagorno badakshanskaya and these places well these wonderful traditional cultures are probably
now all trading in their colorful garb vocabularies and technologies for transistor radio subscriptions to time
magazine and der spiegel and generally lining up with the the global leveling of culture that we see in the 20th
century so these are complex issues and you're you're right it isn't entirely straightforward do you
mean the one to prog or the one to italy well well i went to prog to the ita conference international
transpersonal association conference in june and uh i had never realized till i went there it was my
second trip to czechoslovakia but you know as children we grew up with a wonderful story of an emerald green
country uh farmed by happy munchkins and ruled from a beautiful capital city built around a splendiferous
palace presided over by a wizard and i realized czechoslovakia is oz for grown-ups
and uh it the morphogenetic field of the place is such that it might be a place we should all consider
as a good venue for an archaic revival i think prague in the 90s could be what paris in the 20s was it is
after all the capital of old bohemia you may not know why we are called bohemians you don't have to
have a slavic gene in your entire family tree and can claim yourself as a bohemian it's because bohemia
stood for individual freedom eccentricity the magical arts the practice of the arts
uh the a a science which more gently approached the union of spirit and matter and this whole
out potential alchemical civilization based around prague was destroyed by the 30 years war if you're
interested in all this you should read francis yates book the rosicrucian enlightenment in which
she shows that at a certain point in western history there was the possibility of a protestant alchemical
revival in central europe that was uh bungled by a series of diplomatic and cultural misunderstandings
and led instead to the 30 years war which then if you know it before the 30 years war europe
was thoroughly medieval in its character really and at the end of the 30 years war modernity was
launched i mean the absolute power of kings had been replaced by parliaments and people
and prague when the people who won the 30 years war got down to redrawing the maps of europe
they made sure that prague fell on the wrong side of the language line and became a place that spoke
a language spoken nowhere else in europe czech instead of the language that had been spoken there
before the 30 years war by the court which was italian so it's a whole lost episode in western
history that uh not too many people know about but we could all return to our bohemian roots and create
a community under the gentle aegis of vaklov havel and similar uh uh philosophically right thinking
people that might be a window of opportunity we you know it's very important when you're trying to make
social change that you find a proper resting place for your your fulcrum or a proper fulcrum for your
lever and the best place is outside the system that you're trying to move and if we're serious about
carrying on a major critique of american society prague might be an excellent place from which to do it
especially if by some nightmarish fluke of fate the not as currently in power are able to hang on
um sorry for that brief foray into politics that that's what richard was trying to bait me into
yeah when you're several miles above where we are today in a place called decker canyon there's a lost
civilization walls that surround the city and artifacts carved into the mountains that could not
have possibly been from the indians the technology that they believe was a part of this lost civilization
was from another world could you comment on what your feelings are in terms of our planet being
colonized by extraterrestrials in terms of mantis and lemuria or the randomness yeah i can i'm not sure how
much comfort it will give you um it seems to me an underwhelming proposition in other words if this
happened where is the evidence uh you know there have been fabulous civilizations existing in the past
but their artifacts their buildings their earthworks are available to be visited and seen it seems to me
you know in trying to build models i try to follow occam's razor you all know what occam's razor is
hypotheses hypotheses should not be multiplied without necessity and i just find the the lost continent thing
um an unnecessary hypothesis i think there are lost civilizations but i think we do a grave injustice to
our dilemma and our accomplishment by thinking that anybody ever stood in this position before
to me you see there's an impulse that's very old in the western mind to um and strangely enough i trade
on it to some degree it's called the nostalgia for paradise and it's that we're always looking back to a lost
golden age and i think there was a lost golden age on the plains of africa 15 to 20 000 years ago i discussed
it this morning but i don't think high technology has ever existed before on this planet well there's
just no evidence of it and the atlantaian and people and the enthusiasts of mu and lemuria are always trying to
fiddle with the date and say you know the great pyramid is 25 000 years old and there's a ruin on the nazca plane
that's 50 000 years old this is first of all the evidence is absolutely unconvincing and second of all the miracle
is not how old the breakout into language and technology is but how recent it is i agree with
you i think that um you know if you were to go scuba diving off of bermuda and bimini islands you would
find what many people believe are artifacts from atlantis you can hike in decker canyon and most of what is to be
found is under water because of the shift in the continental place 10 000 years ago or more but
many people believe that the ufo involvement in that civilization um is still very active today i know
someone who i believe you met last night robert stanley from munichist magazine who takes people on
these expeditions and decker canyon he took somebody at the beginning of the summer and a raw film was shot
the person was from the east coast i believe in boston and he's based on the development of the film he
just forgot about it and he decided okay i might as well get this developed and sure enough hovering in
the distance over this part of the canyon were 12 saucers and it's a pretty obvious picture i saw it last
night for the first time and i'm just curious because i think that a lot of us don't really deal with
a lot of the information that's coming out right now because it's overwhelming you know it's almost like
wow well i i i am prepared to be convinced but i'm not willing to buy in without a fair amount of evidence
as far as ufos are concerned um i've thought a lot about it i've seen them far away up close and it's not
what people say it is and the the problem there are two phenomena the ufo who knows what that is and then
the ufo community and my god these people are much weirder than ufos i mean they the the whole slew of
them and the whole problem with the ufo community is apparently these people have never heard about
the rules of evidence i mean they're just full of revelation after revelation with absolutely zipped
to back it up there are so many i mean you look at these ufo magazines well do you want to believe
master chen's book of the nabungi system or do you want to go with the the billy myers crowd or what's
coming out of brazil uh i think jacques valet and one of his books estimated that if you don't believe
ufos only appear where there are witnesses and uh take the number of sightings seen by people and
extrapolate that by the area of the surface of the earth you have to conclude that ufos are coming
and going from this planet at a rate of 12 000 a month well my god what kind of extraterrestrial
contact is this that 12 000 a month for 50 years and never a definitive piece of evidence i was talking
to one of the researchers on the fetal abduction thing this guy was all excited he said to me you
know i've talked to 500 women who claim uh surgical removal of fetuses and he said and you know the
amazing thing there's not a single uh uh sign of physical invasion of these women's bodies and i said well
dr x doesn't this suggest something to you and he said yeah advanced surgical techniques of which we
have no knowledge i said well yeah but doesn't it i mean give me a break so i think they have to operate
in the light of the same evidence as everybody else and their problem is that they claim to know too much
they're just willing to tell you you know 125 000 years ago they arrived to grow sweet peas and then
a hundred thousand years ago the project changed and the 11th planet did something too much too much
data it's too jack armstrong-ish do you believe our government has the technology to travel and
ships to other stars do you think we're doing that today or do you think that's our future no i don't
think we're doing that today i mean this is a we have a government that can't uh knock off uh a loud mouth
in baghdad let alone travel to other stars pardon me program is limited to what massive health is the
reality of what's going on and that basically you don't think there's like an underground or a whole
network of societies and organizations within our government that are involved in research and
technology well obviously there is a black portion of the government where research goes on and probably
fairly kinky things are carried out but these people are no different from us i mean some of them
may be here today and i don't mean cops i mean you know there may be massive scientists here today that
we are not so different from the people we're talking about human beings cannot keep a secret you may
bank on it and so the idea that you know somebody possesses the technology thousands of years in advance
of us i mean then when you actually tear the lid off some of these government black operations you don't
find super scientists and brilliant minds you find people like gordon liddy and john dean and you know
half with clowns uh seem to lie behind most of this i i believe that no i am not a conspiracy
person i believe that nobody is in control and that the people who seek control are the most misguided
of all and that there's a great deal more than we don't know than we do know and uh
uh you know i would love to be convinced that something really far out were happening but it just always
seems to come apart in your hands these are i consider stuff like the ufo phenomenon as popularly um
commercially available ufo beliefs as basically viruses of language diseases of understanding if you could
teach people about the laws of evidence and how you build a case and stuff like that then people
wouldn't be troubled by this the same fuzzy thinking that permits people to believe in ufos
permits them to believe in the imminent expectation of the second coming or you know the face of christ
appearing on tortillas and all of this stuff terence may stop here for a second uh is there a lot of
people still with questions because they still have a lot of well at least till six o'clock supposedly
um can i have a show of hands okay there's a few more because we want to sort of limit the questions to
one question per person and and sort of one rebuttal from that so that everybody could get a fair share
before we uh make a final is this a gentle hint to stop raving about ufos oh i see well i'll i say to
the ufo people the same thing you know what can you show us drag it forth everything has to be judged on
the same field if you've got something spill it but to claim you know as i i don't want to use
names here but stories like well we met the ufos and they gave us a message for mankind but when we
got back to our car our tape recorder had miraculously erased itself well then be quiet don't tell anybody
this don't you understand how lame that sounds to the doubters it's it's not the believer you have to
convince they're a pushover what are you going to do about your skeptics that's the problem
well you want me to tell you a story i was in the amazon um i was in a state of considerable psychic
turmoil and i sat up all night this is told by the way in the book true hallucinations which will be
published next year and uh at dawn i looked across this lake and there was a thin line of clouds on the
horizon and uh i watched this line of clouds and they were and then suddenly i noticed that they were
turning in place like a pencil spinning on its axis in one place and then the clouds uh this line of
clouds broke apart into four perfectly identical lenticular clouds and then the lenticular the four
lenticular clouds merged into two lenticular clouds and then the two merged into one and as they merged
into one i i heard the the hui hui hui sound of hollywood science fiction flying saucers and i realized this
thing was coming toward me across the lake and it was absolutely convincing it was a flying saucer the real
thing and and i i i was absolutely convinced that it was going to take me at that moment and as it passed
over only about 200 feet above my head i could see it clearly enough that i could see rivets on its underside
i could see its running life i could see it but you know what i saw i saw the end cap of a 1932 model hoover vacuum cleaner
it was the very same flying saucer that george adamsky suspended from a piece of mylar fishing line in 1953
and photographed in his garage one of the most famous ufo hoaxes of all time i saw it a diameter of 40 feet
over the amazon basin and i knew what i was looking at it was uh more disturbing than if it had been a ship
from zeta reticuli because it had built-in cognitive dissonance uh what
it's a very short story
i saw it from my home in the sky there all the way the time i ever saw it
it's 12 000 and one generation okay i was looking down on another event
you're looking up and you're looking down and you see a plane with about i don't know
six feet in diameter and across the shape which means that anything that's inside of it was wrong
and you just sort of scan the hillside scan the bushes
you know you're not this room that's just below and it's sort of like you're up to the top of the hill
and there's no extra magnetic movement between two houses
at the window levels and the highway and i had two witnesses with me
and a friend of mine who lived there was driving a car
and a friend of mine who lived there was about 15 minutes
well see i i believe you completely i don't have any problem with that
it's simply an enormous leap to say that that was a craft from another star
it's much better to just say it's a who knows what it is the world is full of weird stuff
just briefly here's my best theory on flying saucers and a whole bunch of other stuff this
tries to solve all problems of this sort simultaneously the transcendental object at the
end of time let's drag it in here and let's imagine that it is like those mirrored
balls that they hang in discos above the bar and spin so then i think that definitely there is a
forward movement of causal necessity which propels us from the past into the present on into the future
but that there is also and necessary to account for precognitive visions and stuff like that which
happen all the time a flow of information from the future into the past and the transcendental object at the end
of time is casting reflections of itself backward into the past and if you are struck whatever that means
by one of these scintillas from the transcendental object at the end of time then you begin to cure
and teach and if you really got a good hit possibly raise the dead i mean i'm not sure how far it can go
now also these these images of the transcendental object at the end of time haunt the skies of this planet
in the form of spinning vortexes of contradiction this is what jung said he said you know the ufo
ufo is an image of the self and i don't mean the little self i mean the collective self of humanity
so a story like jim's story
is i have no problem with it i take it as true it's the people who say you know and they revealed
the nature of the fall of atlantis and the world plan then it's too much because it's coming through human
interpretation the horrible thing about the ufo people who claim contact is that the the aliens they
present to us are so incredibly mundane so much more mundane than what you would encounter on a dmt flash
that they're just like the neighbors next door uh i think that you know alien intelligence the trick
is not to find it but to recognize it when it's in front of you intel intelligence is a very slippery
concept sometimes we can't even identify it in the person sitting next to us on the bus
so how can you expect to identify the intelligence of an alien it just seems incredibly unlikely to
me i think the world is a lot stranger than we suppose without evoking benevolent aliens who prefer
vegetarian diets and who come from the stars i mean why do they so fit our preconception of what they
would be i mean silvery humanoids uh alien intelligence and alien life when and if you
meet it you'll know you're in the presence of the real thing because you'll be barely able to wrap your mind
around it yeah i'm basically in agreement with the idea of my earlier question about well if we perceive
these as being aliens that's one thing but what happens if in fact these humanoid creatures that
we're defining are up traveling back through time and and being able to materialize our through our
through the future technology then we're talking about something different i'm not saying that this is
true this is only you know part of my own you know speculation well it's an attractive idea it raises
problems as i'm sure you're aware the grandfather paradox and so forth and so on uh but it's a possibility
i think it's more likely that these are emissaries from the land of the dead than from the pleiades
and that it's since they speak english since they look humanoid since they seem to care about us and
our technologies and so forth they seem remarkably human well maybe they're concerned about their own
state of well-being maybe somehow it's related to to the the you know what's going on here now and what
the outcome is going to be maybe that's going to somehow affect the way they are you know i mean we've
seen it in in star trek you know i mean the ideas no the ideas of of you know people coming back from
the future to you know i mean there is a paradox obviously involved in this so it is it's a lot of
our imagination at work but the same time it's the same in the same ideas you know maybe there's a
certain sense of reality about it maybe there is maybe there is it could be a holographic projection
out of the guy in mind it could be uh you know a race of intelligent saurians that rose and fell before
the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaur it could be all and everything the trick is to try
and get some kind of evidentiary hold on it yeah parents uh this is a nut and both question
um but first i'd like to preface it by saying that i haven't used psychedelics in 20 years
and uh haven't used marijuana in seven and am have been considering uh return to the use of psychedelics
and um when i stopped the last experience which i had it wasn't a terrifying experience and it wasn't a
bad trip it was um similar it presented similar insights that i have heard you mention and speak of
but there were times in which my psychedelic use
left me rather shaken and terrified
um dealing with fear of death and crossing over the line so i have to say that my very first psychedelic
experience was one which contained the death and rebirth experience so i don't know why after that
but that's nature of fear i suppose um so the question is it's a nut and boat question it's uh how does one
proceed with the use of psychedelics after a long absence from it and uh not make the mistakes and not
run into the walls um that i occasionally ran into and or and or deal with them to get around them
so forth and so on well i think the best protection against unpleasant experiences on psychedelics is to do
it with care and attention in environments that are safe and low on sensory input in other words you
don't take it and go to a crowded singles bar or even a rock and roll concert i mean if you have to
combine psychedelics with rock and roll do it with low doses well this is the way to do it it isn't always
going to be ecstatic but it's all it's almost always guaranteed to be educational there's no way you
conceal yourself off from shock because shock may be what you need uh but you can
attention to it i mean fasting going into it cleaning yourself up creating a safe space
not going to it if you've just been highly agitated by some emotional upheaval in your life and then take a
long time to integrate it and think about it it's basically in the best sense of the word a religious
activity and it's incredible and the intellect or whatever it is that lies behind it is very sensitive
to your needs and your limits and unless you approach it with a cavalier attitude it will usually be very
gentle with you now this fear of death thing though it's a hard thing to come to terms with because um
you know it's we are going to die it's scripted into the human experience culturally there's a great deal
of anxiety around this and basically i think what one has to do is simply ride it out in terms of advice
as to what you do once you have are in the middle of an unpleasant revelation
um you can sing your way through that you can smoke cannabis to to shake up the pieces on the board
uh
or and you can just wait and put up with it it's the the real issue you see around fear on psychedelics is a surrender issue
the ego plays a trick on you because the ego begins to dissolve under the influence of the psychedelic
and uh the ego sends you the message you are dying this is its last most desperate ploy to halt what is
happening because the ego is dying and to the degree that you identify with the ego you'll be driven into a
state of panic a joke about the lone ranger and tonto are surrounded by indians and the lone ranger
says well it looks like the end of the trail partner and tonto says uh or it says it looks like the end of
the trail for us partner and tonto says what mean us pale face and wish it luck and it is in fact dissolved
and you can sing it will respond to being sung to i am always i am terrified of psychedelics i never take them
without a sense of sickening dread for vain because because i figure you know i stand up in front of
people and preach this stuff and if it wants to get me it will really get me good and what i say to it
when i take it i say i i am surrendering i am surrendering myself to you completely do what you will with me
please don't hurt me and if you must kill me please do it quickly and uh but i i
know people who have tried to order it around, heavy male dominator types who want to beat
information out of it, and my god, they have bad trips so terrifying that they never come
back to it again, because if it decides to turn on you, it has resources that would make
your hair stand on them, so he does it gently, reverently, and with a great deal of attention.
I have some lessons that are given to me, fresh, healed seven years ago, on my birthday. I still have them.
Would they still be any good? Did you keep them in a dark, cold place? For two years, and then I moved
onto a boat, but they're in a dark place. Well, the way to tell is, if they are still, if the seal
was so good that they are still cracker dry, as dry as a fresh, salting cracker, they're probably
all right, but what tends to happen with mushrooms under the best sealing conditions is they restore
water, and if it's rubbery at all, or even bendable, then it's probably degraded, and it's not any good
anymore. Another thing, let me say before I leave this, if you're really curious about taking this
into your life, and you really want insurance against unpleasant experiences, then learn to grow them.
This catapults you into a whole different category of relationship to it, because it gives special
privileges to growers. It's like premier class on United Airlines. You get to board first,
and you get a wiser seat, and a better meal, and a good movie. And if you can grow it, it will teach you
the qualities that you must have to take it, which are attention to detail, sensitivity to incremental
changes, scheduling, cleanliness, so forth and so on, and will reform your character sufficiently,
that you can then probably take it without fear. Yes, this lady over here. To my children about this,
I have an 11-year-old daughter and a 14-year-old son. I talk to them exactly the way I talk to you
about it. I say there are good drugs and bad drugs. There's no such thing as the drug problem or the drug
issue. Part of the way the establishment has muddied the water is by impoverishing our language about these
things. Name a drug, and I'll tell you what I think about it, and how you should relate to it.
I've seen people destroy themselves on cocaine, heroin, alcohol. I've seen people get nutty behind
tobacco, religion, fascist politics, fundamentalism. And I say, you know, if you're going to take a drug,
and if you want to take a drug, talk to me about it. If you want me to take it with you, and I think
it's a worthwhile drug, I will. If I don't think it's a worthwhile drug, I will tell you why. But it will
be a real reason, and you will find out that I'm not putting you on. And I haven't had any problem. I think
we are, we infantile, not only infantile lies, not only our children, but ourselves on this issue. Some drugs are bad,
some drugs are good, some drugs are trivial, and then there are styles of taking drugs. The way I think
psychedelics should be taken is, it's a kind of paradox, rarely and at high doses, so that you never are
comfortable. I'm not peddling comfort here, I'm peddling revelation. So you must take what are
called heroic doses. More than you want to take, that's the correct dose, and less frequently than you
want to take it, that's the correct timing. And then each time it will blow your mind to shreds, and positively
feed into the rest of your life. The people who think people who take psychedelics are into escape, don't know what they're
talking about. I mean, escape into what, for crying out loud? I mean, the heavy narcosis is going on in front of the
food tube, and imbibe them, you know, the daily newspaper, and that kind of thing. So, it's basically, you've got to level
with your kids, ever more so now, because lying has become official policy, you know? I mean, I can't believe the crap I see on
television in these anti-drug ads. Marijuana is the gateway drug to hard drugs. You know, tobacco and alcohol are the
gateway drugs to hard drugs, don't let anybody teach you, and so forth and so on. So, it's a matter of informing
ourselves, and then informing our children, and then teaching them how to do these things. It's a lot like
sexuality. When nobody mentioned it, you learned in the gutter, and that usually meant that you got your
girlfriend pregnant at age 19, and had a shotgun marriage, and lived a life of agony and repression
in the service of phony social values from that point on. We have to educate ourselves. Our sexuality,
our psychedelic psychology, and all the rest of it. We have, we, you and I, not our children, have been
tremendously infantilized by our government. I mean, think about the just say no slogan. What that means is
don't think about it, don't inform yourself, just say no. Behave, in other words, like an idiot.
This, this is not serviceable, and, pardon me? Yeah, why ask why? The empowering of institutional
ignorance. It's unconscionable. This is the kind of, these people make such a strong argument for the
legal regulation of advertising that they would do well to step back. They may find themselves in a
situation that they find very uncomfortable. Yeah, I mean, freedom of speech is not freedom to subvert
the human enterprise. Freedom of speech is freedom to advocate, and to argue, and to respond to arguments,
but not to stack the debt against truth and clear thinking, and relative truth. No, no. If, if nominated,
I will not run, if elected, I will not serve. Sobriety, psychedelics, several times, and being
human and not being able to keep it, I, I told this to my sponsor in a couple of weeks ago, and she's
going to fit. Um, let's see, I, I don't feel that it's a problem or that it's taken away anything from my
friend, if anything, but I'm having a hard time articulating to her why I don't see this as a
problem. I was wondering if you could, um, if you could address how to reconcile the use of psychedelics
within 12-step programs, and I've heard that there are, I heard at another workshop, I've heard
that there are people doing this, and I wonder if you... I don't want to name names, but the top
people in AA are entirely pro-psychedelic. They, they have told me this. Uh, addiction,
repetitious abuse of substances, has very little to do with this. Where I differ with AA, as it's
generally presented, is the idea that all things are to be looked at the same. Again, this Luddite
approach where you simplify no matter how much damage it does to the complexity of the issue.
A 12-step, a 12-step program is another form of infantilization. Uh, the whole idea of addiction
as disease is a way of lifting responsibility off people. After all, if heroin addiction is a disease,
then it's just sort of like the flu or gonorrhea. It's something that's happened to you and it's very
unfortunate, but you don't need to examine your own attitudes or psychology. This is, in fact,
what we need to do. We have to take responsibility for our action. And I think the whole, that the 12-step
thing is way out of control at this point because there's a 12-step program for everything. I think,
uh, you know, responsible activity, whether you're talking about drugs or managing your finances or your
sexuality, there's no substitute for it. And you can't have a set of rules that will be sufficiently
sophisticated to be a working substitute for intelligent decision making. I have a friend who's also been in
the program for five or six years and he's so convinced of the whole thing about the Bible and
the whole prophecy and everything that he's basically an alcoholic still. He hasn't come to terms with the
problems yet at all. I mean, he's the same, the same person with a, with, with only one substance less than
he had, than he had before. There's no substitute in politics, in psychedelics, in sexuality, in UFO hunting.
There's no substitute for clear thinking and unreasonable knowledge of the rules of evidence.
And if somebody's pushing some form of pipe past you, you need to have your craft detector out and
working because there's a lot of craft out there and some of it well-intentioned. It can be well-intentioned
and still lead you down the primrose path.
So what do you feel about this new discovery about, um, genetic, age controlling,
you mean life extension? Yes. I mean, it's inevitable. What do you feel is going to happen with that?
Well, so many things are happening at once. This is just part of the mix. Uh, I don't think we want to
live forever. I mean, somebody said death is nature's way of making room for next year's model. And there's
something to be said to that. I really think that death is what it's all about. And that, uh,
you know, the body is the placenta of the soul. And the purpose of life in three-dimensional space
is to build up this invisible organ called the soul so that it can make a, a clean slice back to its
point of origin once severed from biology. I, I don't think we should cling,
you know, to anything. Everything flows. This is here. Let me give you the one thing I've learned
out of life and drugs and everything else. It's a hard truth. It's an illuminating truth.
It brings a smile to your lips and a tear to your eyes. Nothing lasts. Nothing lasts. There are no exceptions
to this. Your relationship to your lover does not last. The hatred of your enemy does not last. The
wonderful home you worked so hard to create. It doesn't last. Your body doesn't last. Nothing lasts.
Everything is in the process of being transformed and replaced by something else. You have to
embrace that or life will disappoint you, embitter you, and tear you to pieces. I like to make an analogy to
the surface. The, the, the, the, the uninformed person thinks that when you enter the sea, you're safe
near the shore. You're not safe near the shore. That's where the waves are breaking and creating the
white water and the undertow. All surfers know that you have to swim out to where the waves are forming
cleanly in deep water. And then you can catch the waves and ride it into the beach. But if you, if you, if you,
if you hold to the shore, you'll just be beaten to death in the incoming surf. That could be the end of the
workshop as far as I'm concerned. How it works. Well, because, uh, science has so thoroughly convinced us
that the yawning grave is the end of the story. It's, it's presented as the absolute terminus of your
existence. When in fact, I believe, I think I said this last night, this is as dead as you can get.
This, you know, so the challenge is not how to face death. The challenge is how to come to terms
gracefully with the prospect of eternity.
The only thing that, the only exception that nothing ever lasts is maybe the spirit itself. Maybe that's the
only thing that is eternal. But it is constantly transforming. Right. But on the Jesus level of
the pure spirit, that is probably something that has reached through all of time, you know, beyond time.
Well, it's outside of time. Yes. You can exit time and then you exist in, in, in eternity. Yes.
Reincarnation. Um, again, the evidence is inconclusive. There is some evidence, you know,
stories, we all know them, but the idea that it happens to everyone seems an unnecessary hypothesis based
on the idea that it happened to some people. Uh, I would like to think that we move on. I would like
to think that, uh, there is a kind of a sense through existence. I'm open to the possibility of
reincarnation, but again, underwhelmed by the evidence. See, maybe I could say a little bit about my,
my own psychology because I always get into these wrangles with people. I'm sort of presented as a
person on the fringe of the new age or something like that. I don't consider myself a new rager at
all. I got where I am through doubt, skepticism, uh, lack of belief, hardheaded reason.
And I've gotten, I believe, further into weirdness than the channelers, the people who are talking to
the UFOs and all the rest of them. They're such pushovers. I mean, the first, uh, voice that comes
along from the invisible world and they're ready to sign on to whatever gibberish is being put. I think
you can be a rationalist. I think you can demand hard evidence. And, and still, this will not push
magic out of your world. Real magic doesn't demand dewy-eyed believers offering sacrifice that it's
altered. Real magic is real. It exists for skeptics, not believers. So, the, the technique is not to
believe, is to, not to stay in your comfortable cultural situation and believe the first word,
weird wrath that comes down the pipe or the second or the third. The way to do it is to be hardheaded,
rational, demanding, but explore edges.
Push the edges within, and also within the world. So, if you hear that someone in
India can raise the dead, fly to India. Put yourself in front of them and say,
would you please raise the dead? And if they say, oh, I only do it on Tuesday, or come back in April,
or you're not ready, then you just put them in the fraud column. And, and, and, and this has always
worked for me. I just say, you know, you say you've got the flammy, what can you show me? I went to India.
I mean, don't get me started. It is, it is a, a, a, a spiritual, uh, bargain basement of the sleaziest
source. I went to South America with the same question. What can you show me? And the guy said,
well, let's sharpen our machetes and we'll go out here a half a mile into the forest and we'll cut
some of this vine and we'll bring it back and brew it up and I'll show you what I can show you.
None of this, kiss my feet, sleep up around the ashram 10 years, memorize 50,000 lines of the
Avakatsampta Sutra or that kind of malarkey. If there's any assumption of hierarchy, head for the door.
If somebody's telling you that you're little and they're up, head for the door. It's the con of some
sort. It's just, it's a horrible, horrible con. The real, the real stuff is available to those who
ask for it. You don't have to prove yourself. Asking is sufficient. And none of these scams can
compete with psychedelics. That's why they inveigh against it so furiously and tell you that it'll
rend holes in your aura and all the rest of the malarkey that is brought against it. I mean,
give me a break. So the thing to do is explore edges, push hard, and then use your ordinary good
sense to tell shit from Shinola. And you will move much faster than the people who are worshiping at
the feet of this or that BB-eyed weasel who set himself up with a non-profit foundation and a line of
bunk that's being published by the devoted slaves and peddled in airports or whatever. I mean,
that's just horrible. All that stuff. Horrible.
In response to something that was said earlier, I've been fascinated with psychedelics since my first
experience when I was 17. And I, you know, have struggled with finding out about the mechanics of
cleaning and growing mushrooms. And over the last couple of years, I finally met with some,
uh, with relative success. And I'd just like to offer if there's anybody who's sincerely, you know,
has, I mean, it's a frustrating process when you first start. Is anybody that, you know,
is seriously interested, I'd be glad to give them a little help.
This is an incredibly generous offer. It's very hard to learn to grow mushrooms unless someone shows you
how. My book that I wrote with my brother is the best we could do, but it's like reading the
instructions for putting together an electric train or something, you know. If somebody will just show
you, it becomes transparent. So nobody has ever said this at any workshop I've ever been. If you're
interested, do not let this gentleman slip through your fingers.
That's the book that's available, uh, anything with Paul Seyman's book?
Yeah, the title of it's The Mushroom Cultivator.
By Paul Seyman. But even at that, there's no substitute for somebody at your elbow
showing you, uh, how to do it. Thank you for twisting me off the anti-guru tirade.
Yeah. Have you ever met any of these selves from your complement here from the...
Respect? Well, I make a differentiation. I'm not saying that the Hindu tradition or the
yogic tradition is, is phony. I'm saying that, uh, we misconstrue its intent. What these traditional
teachings deliver, if they are working right, is they deliver wisdom about how to live.
That's what a great guru can teach you. And I don't, and that's not what I'm trying to teach you.
We're talking here about using psychedelics to blow ourselves into another dimension.
Uh, we need... This goes to the question hours ago about the role of psychedelics in the spiritual
program of advancement. I don't claim that you will become a spiritually advanced person. I don't know
what a spiritually advanced person is. What I claim is that you will contact a dimension of experience
inaccessible by any other means if you will pursue this. And then you may decide that that's fine. You've
verified that everything I said is true or true enough. And now you don't ever want to do that again
and go on with your life. Or you may be able to make some good of it. Uh, it is not, it is no substitute for
ethical activity or moral sensitivity. It is no substitute for moral sensitivity. Moral sensitivity,
you don't cultivate in silent darkness in your bedroom with the telephone unplugged. Moral sensitivity is
visit the sick and imprisoned, heal the sick, bury the dead, instruct the ignorant. That's what moral
sensitivity is about. And people don't want to hear that. They want to go off and worship at the feet of
some guru. What could that possibly have to do with moral advancement? Moral advancement is care for
your fellow human beings, for crying out loud. It's far more Mother Teresa than Ramana Maharshi,
as far as I'm concerned. Not to knock Ramana Maharshi, but, you know, you know, in the whole, you get this in
the fascination with shamanism in the new age. Shamanism in the aboriginal context is primarily about
curing the sick. That's what it's about. Not these wild, grandiose, technicolor scenarios. My god, you can read
14,000 pages of Carlos Castaneda and nobody ever cures anybody of anything. It's all happening in this
other dimension. So it all comes down to pretty, pretty nitty-gritty, hands-on, here-and-now stuff. Yes?
I noticed that after a hallucinogenic activity, and you're by yourself, or you seem to be in nature,
a sort of empathetic consciousness happens to where you're more in pin with the surroundings,
the animals, and the plants, as though they could interspeak to your consciousness, and you can
sort of with them. I wonder if anyone else experiences that, or if it's deriving between mushrooms and not
the other one, it seems like a more organic, like a meshing of information that's coherent in
everything that exists, that's alive, that you tap into, that feeds into you also, and you affect the
surroundings somewhat. The animals and everything sort of are affected by your presence and being here.
Well, this is what I call this re-establishing of the relationship to the dying mind.
This is what the ego blocks us from, is this relationship to nature as though it were a kind
of partner and a companion. You know, the whole problem with the modern situation, I mean earlier
I defined it as ego, here's then a behavioral definition of it. Our problem is that we cannot
feel the consequences of what we're doing. We can talk about the spread of AIDS, the ozone hole,
the toxification of the ocean, but if we could emotionally connect with it and feel, we would have
the political reformation we're waiting for later this evening. And what you're talking about, I think,
is the feeling that comes when nature is suddenly perceived to be vibrant, alive, full of an intent
to communicate and caring of humanity. Women, I think, are closer to this than men, but in the context
of our civilization we're all so screwed up that comparing the differences between men and women in
regards to that hardly matters. We have to re-empower our emotions. We've gone way out of line in terms of of the
rational mind and have completely deadened our emotional receptors to the consequences of what we're doing.
Yes. There's one thing you mentioned earlier about conspiracy theories and not describing to that directly.
I'm sorry, I didn't hear the line. You had mentioned about conspiracy theory and not
describing to it directly as a theory, and I can appreciate that. But I think we have to look at it in more detail
and maybe from some other angles to get more out of that. Maybe the terminology doesn't fit. But in the 60s,
having lived through that era, we, I think, really touched on what democracy could be. It really was
a different relationship between people for a short period of time. And I remember how it evolved as the
60s went on and the 70s came, and what we've all experienced to the remainder of the 70s into the 80s and
now the 90s. I think it's been a very dramatic change. I think that to describe that its happenstance would be folly.
To say completely that the CIA, as an example, although I have no information and don't even want to have it,
did something and then let it go because it didn't fit their needs completely, may not be a whole story.
For example, we talked about drugs, natural especially, but drugs in general can be inhabited
as time goes on by those who experience it. And let's say, for example, as a theory that those who
experienced that democracy early in the 60s were inhibited from further experiencing, were
disassociated from it by safe houses, by whatever systems were developed, such that those drugs could
be inhabited in a different way over a period of time, rather than resulting in democracy, perhaps
they result in a new world or some system of control. It seems to me like there may be a
thing in peace that may have been manifested in a relatively certain way over a period of time.
So what does that mean by others.
Yes, let's say that there may be a strong fear, but it is not a good matter in a way for
any reason.
So what we're doing is taking action from the 20s and then we're still going to get
this on time and we're still looking at it.
We're still looking at values like we're still working on both of the 30s 500 and then we're
just going to be an update.
For some reason, let's say that there's a way they need to be a
rather than a democracy that's ruling, and that there may be a thought process that is guiding.
And one of the reasons we see these when we look inside of these institutions,
like the Center for Disease Control, the National Institutes of Health, the White House,
one of the reasons we see these Bundling people is because those are the only people who really can fill these roles,
not because there is nothing of intelligence behind that's guiding them.
And when I say intelligence, I don't mean positive intelligence.
So I feel like we have to, or it would be helpful for us to keep in touch with the idea of something going on,
something guiding and counter-guiding, that as you said about evolution earlier,
that evolution really is moving toward a goal.
I think that those who plan for 500 years in the future, and there are people that do that,
and those that may have a theocracy may see that goal and not want that.
They may not want the free use of materials on this planet to flow freely between all people.
Once that happens, you have whatever democracy truly is.
I mean, even that would transform to a new word, a new name.
So I feel there is something going on.
I feel that psychedelics do allow one to penetrate through the veils that are created.
I think that's why they are detrimental.
That's why they are a quote-unquote controlled substance.
You know, in the medical schools and in the research field,
the reason there is so much cowardice and fear is because people lose their jobs.
Literally, they don't even know why they lost them.
If you go to the UCLA Medical School Library and read in some of the more technical journals
on synthesis and other areas related to this, you will find in the corners of the book
people's notes about what their experiences were.
That's the source of information.
That's where it's being spread.
It's the only channel open.
There are people all across this nation and elsewhere trying to do things.
They have no avenue.
And if they step out, they're cut off.
Same way as in cancer therapy.
The same way as in other areas where this powerful dynamic life that we are should emerge.
I think it's a theocracy behind it.
Something that's known.
Well, I think there are a lot of groups, let's say, that aspire to control society.
I just don't think anybody is succeeding.
I don't think that the world we're living in is the result of anybody's conscious agenda.
To take LSD, for example, and again, I always go back to Occam's Razor.
The simplest explanation for what happened to the psychedelic revolution in the 60s is that
it self-corrupted itself.
It didn't require the CIA to ruin it.
When you have a situation where a graduate student in biochemistry and his roommate with a trust fund can get together and pool their money and intelligence and over a long weekend produce five or ten million hits of LSD in a small apartment, what you are going to get out of that is criminal syndicalism.
And that is clearly what destroyed LSD.
I mean, I lived through it.
The San Francisco Oracle and people like that were pleading, don't sell acid.
Give it away.
As long as you give it away, it will be pure.
And some people weren't interested in enlightenment.
Some people wanted, you know, houses in the hills and Maseratis.
So it is our own nature that conspires against us, not the dreams of the CIA.
I mean, don't forget George Bush once ran the CIA, for God's sake.
That's the level of competence that that agency can get together.
But why hypothesize that if there's no evidence for it?
Well, people decided they wanted to make money on it.
What was it primarily?
Control.
Control of what?
But these things were distributed in micro-cultures relative to the global situation.
I mean, I don't deny that there are people who seek to subvert the natural development of the social agenda.
I just think that it's an impossible proposition.
I mean, the real conspiracies are the Catholic Church, the World Bank, the IMS.
And they don't think of themselves as conspirators.
They think of themselves as thousand-year-old organizations.
Shepherds, not in the case of the IMS, but they what?
Those of us that listen to...
Well, wait, Richard has the talking.
Those that listen to KPFK in the middle of the night on Wednesday night
get the full, loath, conspiracy story from Dave Emery.
And I think, actually, there's a lot to be listened to very carefully
in terms of the evidence that he has gathered about this.
But don't you think, Richard, that even if...
We could almost say, even if all these conspiracies exist,
we're hearing about so many that they must be self-counseling.
Well, it's coming to Christ this moment in terms of the massive cover-up
versus the keep uncovering this and uncovering that,
and they just can't keep their fingers on every part of the dike.
No, I think running a world-controlling conspiracy
must be a fairly frustrating enterprise these days.
I'm getting the high signs from the papers, anyway.
Listen, I just want to speak to this lady's concern about LSD.
LSD was used in the 60s for alcoholic rehabilitation very successfully.
And only, you know, when the government put its hand,
its thumb on LSD research was this thought.
But they had tremendous success with LSD in recovering alcoholics
in straight psychiatric hospitals.
So, there is that evidence, John.
There has to be an overcoming of the institutionalized fear
that is exported into the society.
The news is, the psychedelic dimension represents a new world.
And, you know, we can go into it and enslave the Indians,
or we can go into it and save our souls.
And it's going to be guided and controlled, I think,
by the informed decisions of rational individuals.
And it's up to each and every one of us
to make sure that we fall into that category.
This is the best kept secret on this planet.
It is your birthright, as much your birthright as the sexual experience,
but more easily evaded, more easily distorted.
And so, there's a certain responsibility on each of us
to try and educate and inform ourselves
and then integrate it into our life.
We no more know what it's for
than we know what electricity or wind is for.
It can be used for all kinds of things.
It can be used to distort human nature
or to unfold it into some kind of incredible and amazing future.
These things used to be called consciousness-expanding drugs.
Well, now suppose for a moment that that were actually true,
that that's what they do.
If consciousness does not loom large as a part of the human future,
then what kind of future is it going to be?
If these things really empower consciousness, self-reflection,
boundary dissolution, and creative ideation,
then we must fully explore them
because we are on the brink of extinction
because of a failure of creativity,
a failure to creatively meet the challenges
that history, our own history, has created for ourselves.
We have to claim our birthright.
Nobody can take this away from you
any more than they can take away your right to have sex
or breathe air or drink water.
And anybody who tells you
that this is an item up for social manipulation and control
is somehow serving a dominator agenda
that diminishes and degrades every single member of the human family.
It is a true mystery.
It's a doorway out of the dead end of Western history.
It's the return path backward to the shamanic paradise
that existed before history.
If you don't believe what I'm saying,
do the rational thing.
Check it out.
Oh.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you, Karen.
Cape start.
Cape start available.