It seems like an annual event now when Terence comes.
It's very challenging and inspiring for our community,
and we're very happy to welcome her back again.
Thanks.
It's good to be here.
Well, this is the culmination of a dream of mine
and sort of a departure from what you may be used to from me.
I think inevitably this weekend will be a little more personal
and maybe less cosmic than some have been
because I sort of have to open my private life to you
because what I'll be doing this weekend is basically sharing a friend.
Last year I was here with Rianne Eisler,
but that was a marriage of ideological convenience.
Not that it wasn't sincere,
but we were drawn together primarily because our ideas were in congruence.
Nicole and I, on the other hand,
were drawn together primarily because our patterns of intoxication
seemed to be in congruence.
We're going this weekend to talk inevitably a lot about the Amazon,
the crisis of conservation in the warm tropics,
vegetable medicine.
Nicole is a world expert.
She's spent over 40 years in the Amazon
after a very complex and fertile time spent in the Far East before that.
She's a storyteller, an ethnographer,
and a personality of great depth, warmth, and uniqueness.
And it's a pleasure to appear here with her.
I first met Nicole in 1980 when I was part of an expedition to the Amazon
and involved Wade Davis of Serpent and Rainbow fame
and my brother and Dennis and some other people
from the University of British Columbia.
And I had read Nicole's book,
The Witch Doctor's Apprentice.
This tells you something.
This lady got in on it so early
that shaman wasn't even a word,
let alone a buzzword,
when the first edition of her book came out.
And I quickly discovered in Iquitos in 1980
that all roads seemed to lead to Nicole.
If you wanted something done,
if you wanted to meet somebody,
if you wanted an obstacle cleared away
with the Peruvian government or the university,
Nicole was the person to see.
And one of my weaknesses is for characters.
And I've collected them in all times and places.
My charm bracelet has such peculiar specimens
as Ralph Abraham, Rupert Sheldrake,
Nina Wise, Joan Halifax.
Unique types.
I mean, they threw the mold away
before they made these people.
And Nicole fell in to that category.
So, in line with that picture
of our mutual love of hell-raising,
I have to tell you that we stayed up
much too late last night.
And so we're mere shells
that sit before you this evening.
Yes, and some of you I understand
are mere shells.
When I really feel like a mere shell,
I feel like an old wasp's nest.
So, what I thought we would do this evening
is we want to meet each of you.
This is Roy Tuchman is on vacation this month,
so we have an intimate group.
Otherwise, we would have had
a financially successful group.
So, we trade one breakthrough for another.
But what I would like to do this evening,
briefly, is go around the circle
and just hear who you are
and what your interests are
and maybe a statement of your expectation
or your hope for the thing.
Make it brief.
One cannot say often enough
in these situations
that lack of brevity
is proof of psychosis.
So, please bear that in mind.
Fifty people are looking at you
and wondering how balanced you are.
So, this is an opportunity
to lead them astray.
And I'll slyly organize it
so that we come around
and then it will come to Nicole
last before me
and then I will tie it all up if I can.
So, why don't we do that just briefly.
Before we start, let me say
we will have three meetings tomorrow.
One in the evening,
the other two in the obvious slots
and one meeting on Sunday.
And all of these meetings will either be
under the teaching tree,
which is immediately outside,
or right here if the weather turns bad on us.
Tomorrow night's meeting will be here.
So, why don't we just quickly go around the circle
and introduce ourselves.
Michael, why don't you start?
Okay, hi, I'm Michael.
I spend my time living here
at the Yo-Hai Foundation
and at Omega Institute in New York.
And Terence, his material
and influences that he's been influenced by
have been important to me as well.
I love science fiction.
And I love Tai Chi.
Glad to meet you.
My name's Leon.
I also work here.
Terence changed my life, to be honest.
I'd always been rather scared of the psychedelics.
And I met him at Esalen a number of years ago.
And he was the first person
who said something sane about me
that really changed my thinking.
And ever since,
I've been greatly stirred with him by his ideas.
And they've really impacted me a lot.
So I'm very thankful to be here with you again.
Glad you're here, man.
I'm Julie Wellings.
I live down in the valley here.
And I'm anxious to hear Nicole's story.
My name's Stephen.
I heard you one day on the radio
about six months ago.
And it was the first time I ever had any validation
on what was going on in the other world for me.
And you verbalize it when you talk about it.
And it's what I experienced.
So it's just,
it's really brought some light into my life.
And I really appreciate it.
That's why I'm here.
My name's Elaine.
And I'm here because I'm feeling a draw to children's
and getting reconnected with the earth
and make a contribution where I can give you help.
I'm here at the Ohio Foundation.
And I'm especially concerned about the threat to the...
My name's John Wymore.
I'm now the curtain.
I'm a temporary part-time staff member.
I'm anxious to find out who the hell you are.
Me too.
I'm Joe Lasosky.
And I'm a painter, fine arts.
I started doing psychedelics
with Wheat Show Indians maybe 20 years ago.
And I met Terrence.
It was like a meeting with Shaman
at Esalen and the Kenya ago.
My name's Christopher.
And I have an interest in the Amazon and psychedelics.
And very often haunted by Terrence.
I'm trying to do radio.
My name is Nina and I'm a performance artist
and old friend.
And I expect the unexpected.
Yes, Nina.
A man.
I didn't know.
Nina introduced me to my wife
and it's been unexpected ever since.
And I'm really delighted to meet Nicole.
What is it?
Yes, sir.
I'm Foster and Bray.
With Brian Morris,
we composed sound photosynthesis
and a band called Intuit.
We produced Terrence and Cat
and many other folks around the town
that you have come to know and love.
And it's great to see you here again.
We were here last year with Ralph Messner
and Terrence for our first time on our ride.
Brian.
Music.
And this kind of stuff.
I'm quite happy to be with these great characters.
My name is Elizabeth.
When I was 37,
on my birthday,
I heard a voice inside my head say,
from now on,
everything will be in reverse.
And to point it up,
while I was driving
about a half a mile from my house,
forward gear went out
and I drove home.
So I feel very comfortable
with the archaic revival things.
My name is Jane
and I also live in the valley
and I'm very grateful
to be in your presence
and looking very much forward
to hearing,
especially with Colas and me.
Thank you.
I'm Pat Danish,
a blue painter
and I work here.
I'm very curious
and interested
in the other parts
of reality
that I touch upon
and working with art
and the side of the world.
My name is Ingrid.
I'm a work student here.
I'm a colleague
from Vienna, Austria.
And I'm here
in your workshop
because I have heard
many interesting things
about Nicole and you,
little crazy things
and now I will find it out
for myself
what it's true about.
My name is Anne
and I'm an artist
and I live in Ojai
in Santa Monica
and I've heard enough
that I'm fascinated
with all this information
and I'm looking forward
to hearing more.
My name is Kevin
and I came
because I got the,
somehow I got on
the mailing list
and they sent me this out
and I looked through them
and this one looked really bad.
I have no expectations.
I heard parents speak once
down in Los Angeles
and that was a nice thing
so I'm looking forward.
If I'm looking forward to it
then that's an expectation
and I'm looking forward
to it in the end.
Welcome.
My name's Gary
and I work here
at the Ohio Foundation.
One of my interests
I guess would be
what the source
of hallucinations
got out of
or where they come from
or what sort of structures
in mind
and how they got there.
My name's Ken Simonton
and I live in Los Angeles
and I like plants
and I like to grow them
and deal with them
and see them grow
and I like to hear parents
talk about plants.
My name is Jordan Alex
and I've listened
to Ken's tapes.
I've got word
and loved all the people
for thought
and loved more.
My name's Carl.
I'm a physician
from Orange County
and I'm here
out of curiosity
looking for insight.
My name's Alan
and this place
is a spiritual home
for me
and my wife.
We come here a lot
and it's good
to be here
and Terrence
is always a great pleasure
to be with.
I like to think of him
as the Abraham Lincoln
of consciousness
among other things
and it's particularly
exciting to have an opportunity
to meet Nicole
and have a chance
to spend some time
with the two
together.
I'm Marion.
I'm an old friend
of Terrence's
and I'm happy
to meet Nicole
and I'm interested
in the stories
about the forest
and the other thing.
Good.
My name's Randy
and I'm not familiar
at all with Nicole
but I'm familiar
with Terrence's
and I think
we haven't heard yet
I guess.
I think we've heard
quite a bit
on it.
My name is Diane
and I'm an artist
and I've been having
this wonderful experience
since I've seen you
for the first time
this evening.
We've been listening
to true hallucinations
and a senior photograph
and something
well some very strange
phenomena's going on
to me because
hearing you speak
I mean I've heard
you speak about
going down the path
in my head
it's sort of full
of your words
but it was coming
from a speaker
and I don't know
if I'm explaining
this right
but it is a very
strange phenomena
a true hallucination
he lives
Hi I'm Max
August
I'm a therapist
and I'm interested
in consciousness
and what time
space
and reality
and all about
and it seems like
you've got some
things to say
about that.
My name is
Daniel Siebert
and I'm a
plant grower
and
partnership
with
golf pins
and sweater
business
and
I received
an itinerary
of Terrence's
a couple of
months ago
and there was
an asterisk
next to
the Nicole
Maxwell event
and down at the
bottom
it said
should be
very interesting
my name is
Ellen
and
I
design
sweaters
and
Daniel
left out
parties
while he does
which is
he has a
magical plant
business
and we're
very interested
in plants
from the
Amazon
and with
psychoactive
effects
yes Daniel
and Ellen
have a
business
which is
one of the
few places
in the
United States
where some
of these
psychoactive
and medicinal
Amazonian
plants actually
find a
commercial
outlet
I'm Laurel
and I'm
from New
Hampshire
and I'm
very much
of a child
through this
whole
consciousness
thing
I'm looking
for some
new answers
to old
problems
or old
answers
to new
problems
which are
the
women
in it
Hi
my name is
Bob
I work at
the Ohio
Foundation
and
I've gotten
a lot
of different
perspectives
on your
work
from the
staff
here
and
it's
rather
intrigued
there
I am
so
it seems
like something
I don't
like
a good
morning
my name
is June
and
I'm here
because I
like being
with people
of like
mind
and
I'm very
interested
to hear
what you
speak
I write
therapists
and do
artwork
and I'm
a very
good
company
I can
artist
and artist
is my
whole
sculptor
and I
was
interested
I heard
Terrence
on TPFK
the first
time
and wrote
the Ohio
Foundation
for tapes
and that's
how I
do this
whole
program
and
what Terrence
has to say
has fascinated
me
because of
where I
go
when I'm
doing
my
artwork
and
what
state of
mind
that I
get in
to do
my
artwork
seems
to have
a great
deal
of
camaraderie
with
what he
speaks
about
My name
is John
I live
here at
the Foundation
I'm interested
in the nature
of the mind
especially
the mind
before it
became so
overloaded
with symbols
and at this
time
I don't think
we have
the possibility
to look
at that
mind
without
looking
through
the veil
of symbols
and
I'd like
to see
through
shamanism
which
goes back
perhaps
40 or
50 thousand
years
where
time
in the
negative
mind
is
much
more
quiet
through
that
maybe
at
the
time
I'm
Joe
thanks to
me
I met
Terrence
about
years
ago
and
he
continues
increasing
number
of
insane
I'm
an
anthropologist
and
I've
had a
long
relationship
with
green
vegetables
and
I'm
very
interested
in
examining
in many
ways
personally
and in
other ways
the
relationship
between
indigenous
peoples
and
endangered
environments
I'm
Gigi
I'm
currently
an
emcee
and part
of
the
back-up
band
for
spirit
artists
at the
Ojai
Foundation
I am
interested
in
I would
say
events
and
people
ideas
experiences
that
help
deepen
our
sacred
relationship
to
class
to
all
life
and
I'm
particularly
happy to
see
Nicole
here
as a
welcome
coming back
from a
women's
retreat
to
see such
a
fine
distinguished
woman
here
and
us
homecoming
to
accompany
such
a
fine
distinguished
woman
as
Mary
What an
Irish
tongue
you've
got
my name is
Jim
I'm a
part of a
small company
that develops
socially
responsible
business
ventures
for many
years
we've been
doing business
with the
Soviet Union
and recently
become involved
in Brazil
because we
believe that
part of the
answer to
the preservation
and rainforests
is the
development of
commercially
viable
businesses
that support
the culture
and
the preservation
of the
Amazon basin
rather than
its destruction
so I'm
currently learning
all I can
about the
Amazon basin
to apply
our
business
acumen
to this
whole
past
government
my name is
Laura
Jensen
I'm a
contemporary
I've
worked for
this year
to 35
years
from South
America
also
I've been
on the past
and studying
communism
for the last
few years
looking forward
to your
new insights
and for being
here
last year
I went
to the
Amazon
for the
first time
I stayed
for a couple
of months
so I went
to Brazil
to the
forest
in Arizona
I was particularly
interested in
the preservation
of the rainforest
and preserving
the plants
that got involved
with a group
of people
who were working
to save the
forest
they do
the stuff
they do
very much
in the
planted
garden
and
so I've
been working
with them
for the
last year
and particularly
interested in
the medicinal
herbs
and that
that's been
the hardest
that you've
been living
in Africa
and so
different parts
of the world
and
particularly
interested
to as much
as I can get
of what I'm
looking for
and your name
has been
ringing in my
ears
for the last
year
so
I'm very
curious
my name is
Janet
I'm a character
at Ohi
foundation
and I'll
probably get
to see some
of your ears
and I came here
tonight to do
some slurps
my name is
Lynn Bradfoot
I've recently
come from the
east
to join the
staff at Ohi
doing program
work
and I'm a
peace and justice
activist
from a long
time
and that includes
justice for the
environment
and I'm glad
you're both
doing the
work for
and I'm always
glad to see
gutsy avant-garde
way out
ahead
women
so I'm
very glad
to see you
there
you're a good
role model
my name is
Pat
I live in
Malibu
and I live
in Mexico
and I love
the psychedelic
room
and I love
to be
used to
my name is
Tushanka
and I was
recently
introduced
to you
via our
take
at your
presentation
at Esalen
and I
thought it
very inspiring
and I'm
glad to hear
more
I'm Sarah
and I'm
glad to hear
parents talk
and I'm
glad to hear
you both talk
my name is
Lily
and I live
here in the
valley
and I have
pictures
near the
Amazon
and
hallucinogenic
drugs
from way
back
I do
production
with music
festivals
because I
believe music
is magic
and I have
also interest
in magic
and the
goddess
and I love
to hear
parents speak
because it
always makes
me laugh
and I always
learn something
and I thank
you for that
and I'm
looking forward
to Nicole
my name is
Lynx
and I'm
happy to be
here
haven't heard
either of you
speak before
I'm looking forward
to it
my name is
Bob
and I
recently heard
parents
up at
Essiline
give a
weekend series
of talks
and I sent
Dusanka
the tape
I'm Eric
I'm
semi-lucid
insomniac
I'd like
information
thank you
for sharing
my name is
Sean
I'm a
registered
nurse
working in
an emergency
room
in Ventura
been listening to
parents for a
couple years
and
I'd like to
be involved
in the
additional time
and I'm
Terry
I'm also
an emergency
room nurse
and
procrastinated
with
Terence
and
Nicole
can't
call me
I'm a
psychiatric
nurse
and we
don't even
know each
other
and
I study
different forms
of healing
and there's a
crew of the
Amazon
that's
very much
love the land
and very
interesting
in ancient
areas
were you
on the
map
though
or
where
were you
on the
Amazon
good
I'm
Tandra
in Ohio
I'm
the mother
of two
daughters
I've
wandered
around
a bit
around
the world
I'm
interested
in
good
ideas
in
consciousness
I love
plants
in the
forest
and
looking
forward
to
listening
tonight
I hope
we get
to you
My name
is Lola
and I live
here
and
I'm
completely
interested
in the
unlimited
expanse
of human
consciousness
and I
love
to
listen
to
Terence
as
one
of the
astral
travelers
in
all
those
realms
so
I'm
happy
to be
here
and
it's
a pleasure
to meet
Nicole
as well
So
Nicole
why don't
you just
take a few
minutes
and say
whatever's
on your
mind
Well the
first thing
I would
say
that I
ought to
is
I never
really
thought
too much
about
the
out of
the ordinary
experiences
that we all
have
because
it seems
so natural
and
I've
been
with
so
many
cultures
now
I
first
went
to
the
Amazon
region
in
19...
1948, that is, as an expedition. And that was not store for the purpose of getting medicinal
plants. I wanted some excitement. I got it. But the one thing about that was I got hooked
on jungle. It's the only thing I've ever been really addicted to. But I can't stay away
too much. I get restless. And it does that to some people, because, you see, it is an
entity. It is not just a bunch of trees and rivers and mud and bugs. To me, at least, and
to most of the people who live in it, I think of the primitive people, it is a very definite
personality. And it has power. And so that is why I have to keep going back. My first
trip did it. I got into a tribe who'd never seen a white skin before. They didn't think
much of it. No, they took my hand and went this way. And then they said something and
everybody broke up, just howling. And I kept saying to my guide, what did they say, Alfredo,
what did they say? And Alfredo was laughing so hard he couldn't say. But he finally dried
his eyes and said, he says, that isn't white paint, it won't come off. She's really got skin
like a fish and eyes like a fish belly since she's hideous. So that went my chance, my ideas
of being the white queen of the jungle. And after that, I learned that these people were
very different from other people I've known, in that you could really trust them anywhere.
I was with a group of heroes. They're the ones who cut off the heads of people that they kill
in battle and then shrink them. It's quite an easy matter. It's nothing particularly magical.
They boil the head a little bit and make a slit up the back and peel the skin off, delicate
cutting around the cartilage. And sew it up again and then fill it with hot rocks and smaller
and smaller hot rocks. And then finally sand and they sort of model it and you get a nice
little shrunken head called a sansa. And so some people suggested it might be rather good
for me. But this is my first encounter with primitive, except for a very brief one in Laos, Indochina,
as it was then. And they wanted everything I had, of course. Safety pins were the greatest,
the most popular. I had fortunately somehow got the idea of taking a lot of safety pins.
And since women wear a dress that goes with a piece of cloth wrapped around and brought over
the ones that were rather chic and fastened here usually with a thorn. Safety pins, combining the
elegance of jewelry with modern technology, were a great success. And they also rather sometimes
wear a lot of cloth. They weren't so sure. I'd taken a lot of gaudy stuff in. But mostly they wear brown,
stuff they weave out of the native cotton. Cotton goes all over the place. And then dye brown and
make it into their clothes. And, but I could leave everything I owned spread out because we got,
you're always getting wet in jungle. Getting rained on all your, your raft. I was on a raft for that one
because we'd gone through some rapids you can't take a canoe through. And everything out to dry. And I
could go away all day. They wouldn't touch a thing. They're very, very honorable. In fact,
honor is all they've got, you see. Because they have anything they, any possessions,
in a short time will get mildewed or they'll be eaten by bugs or they just plain rot. And so you can't
be anybody important by owning things. You have to be it. You have to be the best hunter or the best
warrior or whatever. And it works out rather well until our people come along and teach them a lot of
other things. But that was the first trip. And I learned to respect and admire these people very much.
And I had to keep going back. Only, and so I'd been hearing about medicinal plants all the time I'd been
in South America, which was by then three years, and that the Indians had wonderful remedies. And I
didn't believe a word of it. I'd had a year and a half of medical school. And these savages couldn't know
anything that my professors didn't know. That's what I thought. And it took me three years. I seemed to be a
slow learner. Before I could accept that, they did have some remarkable things. And only then, because I fell
on my machete and got a big gash in his arm. And I have a slight tendency to be a bleeder. And I was out in the
bush, not very far from the house, and put on the tourniquet of a vine and came back. And the interpreter, who was the
administrator, that this was a property owned by the widow of a Peruvian, who happened to be a gal from Brooklyn.
And it was way out of nowhere. It took five, the record for getting there by canoe was five days.
And the borders of the property were one range of mountains and a river over here and that way. And so,
but here I was bleeding all over the place. And they brought out a bottle with some tree sap in it and
put them on. But of course, when you're bleeding like that, nothing can take. It doesn't stay there.
And so they said, you have to drink some of this. And well, I didn't want to be rude.
So I drank it. It was the most horrible, acrid, major mouth pucker. And in three minutes, about three to four,
I would say, the bleeding had quite stopped. And that was kind of interesting. So I thought, I had plenty of penicillin,
and I didn't have to worry about infection. So they told me that putting this stuff on it would stop any infection.
So I thought, I'll see. And I put a couple of pieces of, a few pieces of adhesive across it,
holding it together, but I could see in between, because it got quite dry.
And there was never any infection. There was practically no inflammation. In the morning,
there was a neat scab, a very narrow one. And it healed in a little less than half the normal time,
leaving only a very slight scar. So then I had to do a little rethinking and decide that
my nice arrogant position of our superiority in medicine would do a little reviewing.
And from then on, I went after medicinal plants, and I found they have so much. And their psychedelics are just as important.
As a matter of fact, I think there are rather more of them than is generally recognized, even tobacco.
Chewing tobacco and swallowing it is very hard on the stomach, but we will hallucinate. I don't recommend it though,
because there are far pleasanter ways. And they use those hallucinations so very routinely.
They'll tell you, well, I didn't know what to do for my son, he was so sick, so I took ayahuasca. I mean, sometimes it was just one person alone in the jungle.
Or I took any one of a dozen, and I saw a ghost tigre attack my son, that's what happened to him, or something like that.
And it is so much a part of the life, that you stop thinking of those things, or the medicines, as particularly remarkable.
They're there, and you use them as you would use soap, or any ordinary thing. But with greater respect.
There is a very definite need that is manifested to respect the things you use, especially the psychedelics.
I remember the first time I took home a piece of ayahuasca to plant in my garden,
the shaman who gave it to me. It was a very nice friend of mine, who lived quite near Akita Zubunyak,
in Pikuruyako. You've been up there, haven't you? And they have a, it's a little village,
mostly of bestiezers who being, well most of them aren't too far from a tribe themselves,
and nouveau civilisé is very much like nouveau riche. They have great contempt for the poor,
poor, and the poor in what we consider culture. And so the Indians there, there are about eight of them,
Yalwa, and ritoto most, and Bora. And they stuck together, and they took their things to the market,
and all that. And I didn't realize when I first got acquainted with them, that the three of them were
shamans. And I didn't know that until one day, one of them came to my house, and it was Vicente,
who was quite old, and he was blind. It was very hard for him to get around. And he had to cross
a river, and then get on a bus or walk from Bella Vista, is about three, four miles. And he had a
little boy guiding him, it was raining. So he, I realized this was not just a dropping in to see a
friend. And he sat down and he said, you have to save me. I said, what, what do you mean? What can I do?
He said, they will arrest me for murder. And I said, whom did you kill?
And he said, I didn't kill anybody. It's Belisario. He said, you know, I'm a witch. I hadn't known it.
And he said, Belisario is a witch too. And he's off on the trip somewhere. He had gone up to the,
up the Maragnon River. And Belisario had died.
He got sick and died on his head. And he said, you know, I know that they will say that I put a spell
on him. And I put it, sent a dart at him. And the police will come and get me and arrest me for murder.
It is that matter of fact. And so I said, no, oh, no, they won't. And finally I had to say,
all right, I'll speak to the general about it. And I'll tell him you didn't do anything.
And then he was at ease. But it's that, it's that much a part of it, the ordinary texture of everyday
life, in a great part of the population. And so you get so, that you get a little used
and you sort of accept it as, well, that's part of it. And I think it would do us all rather a lot of
good to consider the possibilities. What do you think?
Sounds good, Nicole. I'm not going to let you off the hook so easily. I want to bring a little bit
of this out. Your name is really associated with, in the public mind, I think, with the contraceptives
that are very much a woman's secret. Yeah, I remember somebody told me, if I kept this up,
I'd be called Contraceptive Connie. Contraceptive Connie. It's not a title, I think.
Well, it wasn't that, it was Carstens, who was, I think, a Swedish or German anthropologist. In 1920,
he was studying the Canelos Indian in southern Ecuador. And he wrote an article saying that the
women took some plant, which is called piri piri, and they swallowed it so that they could
cohabit, as he put it in a, in a refined way, with men, and not to have children.
And at the time he was attacked violently, in 1920, everybody said, this is, this man's out of his mindy
sillies. It invalidated quite a lot of his very good work, because everybody knew that nothing you
took by mouth could stop a woman from having a child. It's nice to know how many of our present
beliefs didn't make about that much sense. The more you see of jungles, the more you wonder about those
things. And anyway, there are, they were the hardest of all things to get. You see, all medicines,
at the beginning at least, now that the acculturation process is proceeding at such a rate,
that the old taboos have worn kind of thin in some places. But when I first started doing this,
medicine is magic. And magic is secret. You don't tell anyone. One tribe would be using a totally
different set of medicinal plants from another tribe. Their pharmacopoeias will be quite different,
they'll, they'll overlap a bit. But, but the, the wittotos will know, know a plant that will heal
infected third degree burns, I've seen this, without any scarring. And the, the okinas who were,
even in the same language group, didn't know it. Because an okina girl told me how a wittoto woman
cured her, and they hadn't, her tribe hadn't known this. And they just keep it separate, it's secret.
Even when it's a friendly tribe, and if somewhat related tribe. So it was a lot of, it made it
rather a spoiling proposition to see how much you could work out of them. And being a woman and
traveling alone made it a lot easier because there's no threat to anybody. I'd have a boatman and his wife,
but that's all. And an interpreter that picked up at the edge, edge of the language area.
And also I'd traveled in very inconspicuous and not necessarily by choice, rather ordinary and
poverty-stricken way. And so that made it better too. You go in all with fancy equipment and a fine boat and
half a dozen people. You're not going to get very far. Because they're too used to being put down.
And that in itself is a put down to go in looking very elegant.
And so I managed to get quite, quite a lot of stuff. And it was, it was, it made it rather
more fun, you know, something of a game to, so you could feel you were pretty smart. And
uh, the one thing that I, even when I had formed a very strong friendship, I could not for years get
anyone to tell me about, because they're contraceptives. I knew they had them. I knew because some
missionaries, medical missionaries had told me of cases in which a woman with malformed pelvis
had had a terrible time giving birth. And they told her she couldn't have any more children. And she,
in this particular case, the woman said, oh, that's too bad. And said, are you going to leave your
husband? Why should I do that? The woman said, he's a, he's a nice man. Why would I leave him?
But you can't have any more children. And she said, well, I'll take some medicine. But she wouldn't
tell her what it was. And she never had another child. And they, over the time they were with them,
there were about four tribes, four, four women in the tribe who did, had that same experience.
And so they were convinced that oral contraceptives did exist and were effective. But at that time,
I think it's about, when I first heard about it, it was in the, it was about 1951 and before I'd even
really started going after medicinal plants. And there were, the contraceptives, oral contraceptives,
did not get published and get on the market until 1960. So I, I believed them. And I thought it'd be
kind of interesting to get them. But you just draw a blank when you mention them. In fact, you may ruin a
good, when you're building a relation with, you've gone into some tribes that are kind of far away and
not used to white people. And maybe it hasn't seen them very often. And then you're getting along fine.
You say something about a contraceptive. Once I just said, I smell piri piri, which is,
and you, and you know, there are, I've had 20 piri piri's for all different purposes, rheumatism,
contraceptives, and some you wash your husband's pants with and it'll be impotent with another woman.
And they use it for everything. They've got one for whatever it is.
So, but every time, I even got myself practically thrown out a couple of times just by mentioning them.
And so, finally, it took a long, long time. But you will eventually, if you keep going into different
tribes and meeting different people, get a sudden understanding. It's like the leap of an
of an arc between the two electric poles. And now and then it happens. And then you're in,
you're really lucky. And so I did find the evil old woman who got them for me.
And even then, I had a very difficult time getting away with them. Because... But we managed. And, uh...
Well, it was very funny, actually, how I managed. I had been thinking about this. I was going up
the Rio Corrientes. And there's a Hebrew... You've been up there?
Not the Corrientes. And there's a Hebrew colony, uh, up about halfway up the river, on the way to the Makosari.
And they were having a great fiesta and everybody was getting very drunk when we arrived. And you don't
want to hang around when... It's, uh, after... fights are apt to happen when Indians get drunk.
And so we went home with this one woman who was taking her husband home to clean him up. I think he'd been
a little sick. And it is not considered a bad manners at all for a man to get roaring drunk and throwing up.
And so, uh, she and I sat and talked. And with me, she spoke Spanish. Very bad Spanish. Very...
Sometimes pretty hard to understand. But she did know little. She didn't like my boatman and his wife.
Neither did I by that time. And, um, and so she wouldn't speak Spanish. In fact, I found there was
three people in the tribe who spoke Spanish excellently. Or at least intelligibly. That's
excellent in the jungle. And, uh, she didn't... When they had left, she said to me in Spanish,
first thing she said, Where's your husband? And I said, Oh! I... He... I didn't know that Indians had
divorces then. I said, Well, uh, he... We are not married anymore. He is in one place. I'm in another
place. He is no more my husband. Thinking I was giving a good shocker, she said, Oh, me too.
And so she had been married to a very brutal man, she told me. And he, uh, beat her and so forth.
And finally he abandoned her to a great delight. And her stepfather was the witch doctor of that tribe.
So he told her... It was a long time before she was willing to marry again. She's had a bad
time. And her little daughter... There's no question of custody that child stays with the mother
in divorce... in jungle divorces. And, uh, she... He told her she... that she ought to marry again.
And she finally did find a man she thought was... who was very good to her. And he was quite an
important guy in the tribe. He even had a pair of shoes. And they were bright yellow. And he was the
only person on the... only Indian on that river who had a pair of shoes. And he was an awfully nice man too.
And so she married him. But she would not give him a child. And I said, Well, how did you manage that?
She said, Well, of course. I took the person. And I thought, Oh, at last. And so she... she told me she'd
give it to me when I got... And I was going up the river. I said, I said, Give it to me when I get back.
I didn't want it. For one thing, I didn't want to carry it around because I knew by then that anything
that has to do with the giving or withholding of life, things that ease birth, ease labor. And they have
some very good...
and things that, and the contraceptives, and the fortifacians, they have very good things for abortion.
All of those are so secret that you have to be awfully careful and awfully sure you're really
and intimate before you mention them.
At least you did in those days.
It's easing up now as they're losing their taboos, they're losing their culture,
they're also losing their knowledge of the violence, so it doesn't help much.
And so she gave them to me when I came back down, but they were having another fiesta,
and the men were all sitting together at one end of the house.
It was an Indian house.
It has a trunk in front to climb up because they're built so-and-stilts because of the rough floods.
And then just a platform and a roof, and nice and airy.
And they were all sitting around there.
It was raining.
And the women got me the plants, because, and I was just about to get them down to the canoe,
when some of the old men who were sitting in a little row in the back came over and looked at the plants,
and looked at me.
Then they started talking, and my friend Tessa started explaining.
It didn't work.
And they said that she was looking very distressed,
and so it was Auntie.
Her Auntie of us had helped in this deal.
And I had been thinking about this.
I'd learned the trick from a man in Shanghai
who had a hard time getting the best of his Chinese servants sometimes.
And so, through the interpreter, I said,
Tell Tessa to tell them I already knew the names of all these plants.
I knew all about them.
So Tessa did, I suppose, and she spouted it to give her up.
And the men said,
Okay, that's the case.
What's the name of this one?
So the interpreter said,
Well, tell him, of course, I don't speak his language.
So I couldn't tell him what this bench is in him.
I don't know the word for bench.
I couldn't tell him what the rain is.
But I can tell him what it is in my language.
It is a...
This one, I think, is a logarithm.
And this one is an isosceles quadrangle.
It's a wild combination.
And, you know, they do sound magical.
And they are magic to me.
I don't understand with all.
And I got by with it.
Because Tessa said,
And the old witch dog,
whom I had bribed by giving him a glass eye,
with which he could,
I figured he could sort of
pull a few fashions
if he ever got in a problem with magic.
And so it worked beautifully.
And he left rather quickly
and got them in the canoe
and off we went.
But that's how secret they are.
And now...
Now I'll let you off the hook.
Thank you.
Yes, well...
I mean, I talk a lot about
how this plant knowledge
is being lost
even more quickly
than the rainforest itself.
And I think very few
modern ethnographers
have taken the time
to learn it
the way you have.
And very few
modern ethnographers
have been able to gain
the confidence of women
the way you have.
They haven't tried.
No, they haven't tried.
But I know horror stories
of clashes
between insensitive anthropologists
and tribal groups where...
You have to keep your antennae out
all the time.
And you have to take your time
and not be in a hurry.
Appleton, I have been sometimes.
I got myself thrown out.
By being in a hurry.
Yes, Nicole is the only
white person I have ever met
who has been able to convince me
that they actually enjoyed
being in the jungle.
And Nicole does enjoy
being in the jungle.
Oh, why not?
There are 10,000 reasons
why not?
It is the most exciting,
the most beautiful,
and also...
and the most
sort of sacred,
sort of...
it has a spirit,
a very strong spirit.
And also,
it has a great pleasure
to imagine me doing this
and feeling like
somebody important.
That's right.
For yourself.
That's right.
And you know,
I don't get that chance
very often.
But I traveled
years later
to many of the same places
that Nicole describes
in her book,
The Witch Doctor's Apprentice.
And the model,
let me tell you,
for exploratory writing
is you go nowhere
and then you exaggerate
when you write about it.
And all these
hairy-chested guys
who are running around
the Amazon
with machine guns
and helicopters
inevitably
exaggerate
the difficulty.
And if you read
Nicole's book,
it sounds as though
the Amazon basin
is just dotted
with wonderful,
clean,
friendly villages
filled with happy,
fascinating people.
Oh, nuts.
I don't...
My books aren't phony.
No, that's what I mean.
You don't exaggerate.
But Sebastian Snow
and some of these
other people...
Oh, well, I knew Sebastian.
He came to my door
and said,
in Lima many years ago,
somebody banged on the door.
He was this nice
little blonde boy.
And...
And he said,
I'm Sebastian Snow,
the Royal Geographical Society.
I said,
that's nice.
I'm a fellow, too.
I said,
well, I'm not yet,
but I'm going to be.
No, well, I think the acid test
for every Amazon explorer
is how hard you find it
to stay at a Rika.
And I became...
Well, that was not...
That was a hellhole.
Well, Alfred Russell,
Alfred Russell Wallace
in 1858
described it as
absolutely unbearable.
You had a terrible time there.
I had an awful time.
Not only that,
but I lived in a double boiler.
You lived in one of those
metal buildings
that they put up.
Yes, so did I.
Yes.
Why would people put up
with this kind of stuff
unless they felt
they were in touch
with a living world?
Because the people
they sent down,
they didn't know.
It was the Colombian police.
And they sent down people
who were from Bogota,
grew up in Bogota,
didn't know a thing
about the jungle.
And they sent them
for a year and a half
so they didn't have time
to learn anything.
Very lonely boys
from Boyacá.
And that,
the thing that's bad
about that place
is that they have
the most stinging gnats
I have ever seen.
three kinds
of stinging insects
that fly in clouds,
really in clouds.
And there are
the little black gnats
that make a blister.
There are the little black gnats
that make a bloody spot.
And there are the tabanos,
you know,
the triangular black flies.
This is the one
we were trying to remember
yesterday.
Tabano.
Tabano, yeah.
And they would eat
through the heaviest jeans
or anything else
and they make a very painful
burning bite.
Of course the mosquitoes
are all on duty too.
But they're never left by evil.
Now that is the most important.
It's an awful place.
Nicole,
Nicole visited La Charrera
long before I was there.
Even before John Sullivan
was there.
That's how out in front
of the patch you were.
I was there in 59.
You were there in 59.
I didn't get there
until 71.
You're a wonderful group
of nuns and priests there.
Yes,
I wonder how they're faring
in the middle
of the Koch wars.
But I haven't heard
they're killing any capital.
No,
I think that airfield
is very important
to the Kochianeros
and probably
they strive to keep
decent relations there.
But they're all Catholics too.
Oh yes,
absolutely.
The higher horror
of the whiteness
is certainly
a Catholic trait.
Well,
let's see here.
Let me,
I'm a little off balance
because I held
a weekend
at Esalen
two weeks ago
and you know
they allow
the people
who participate
in the workshops
to evaluate people
and I got dinged
and somebody
wrote an evaluation
and said
Terence McKenna
is the William Buckley
of the psychedelic left
and he needs
to learn
to listen.
So
you'll see me doing
or trying
to do a lot
of listening
this weekend.
I have a kind
of obsessive need
to create
a certain kind
of closure
so excuse me
for about five minutes
and I'll do it.
It's just to satisfy
an itch
of mine.
It's the need
to try and tie
this all together
and make some kind
of sense of it.
I mean what does
a plant
that heals
wounds
have to do
with hallucinogens
and what do
these things
have to do
with a global
planetary crisis
in the ecosystem
and what does
that have to do
with each of us?
Well to create
an overarching
metaphor
that can connect
all this together
I think what
we have to do
is think
in terms
of the exhaustion
of our own
cultural forms
I mean that's
what we're living
through
is a global
dying
created by the
exhaustion
of our cultural
forms
and the vitality
of the cultural
forms
that we see
in these
so-called
primitive
I call them
pre-literate
people
as Nicole
pointed out
they have
nothing
but what they
seem to have
that we cannot
seem to get
a grip on
is a kind
of dynamic
equilibrium
with their
environment
and peace
of mind
in the
felt experience
of the moment
these are the
two things
we don't have
as a society
we cannot
seem to
make peace
with nature
as human
beings
as individuals
it's very
hard for us
to be at
peace with
ourselves
I mean
I consider
my own life
the search
for peace
of mind
forget
enlightenment
forget
shunyata
all this
stuff
you know
just a little
peace of
mind
would be
a tremendous
boon
as far
as I can
see
so I
really think
that there's
a confluence
here
of themes
and possibilities
it has
this richly
plotted
texture
that always
lets you
know
that you're
in the
presence
of
a higher
order
of things
it's that
the shamans
whom we
admire
who we
idealize
are
seen to
be
at the
center
of
this
environment
the warm
jungle
the tropics
the warm
tropics
that we
find it
necessary
to destroy
so it's
a perfect
image
of us
being at
war
not only
with ourselves
but with
nature
itself
and
you know
for
you've heard
all about
how the
Amazon
and the
Congo
Basin
and Eastern
Indonesia
are all
being cleared
and lumbered
and
turned into
cattle ranches
this is a
tragedy
obviously
we understand
and can
perceive
the dynamics
of that
but how
to make
sense
of a
situation
where
as the
World Bank
and the
IMF
attempt
to halt
this kind
of destruction
on the
other side
of the
coin
the
United
States
State
Department
and the
DEA
and these
agencies
propose
and are
planning to
carry out
the
defoliation
of the
Waijaga
Basin
so
there's a
schizophrenia
here
that is
not
academic
I mean
are we
trying to
get the
patient
well
or are we
pulling the
plugs
one by
one
we seem
to be
acting
in both
dimensions
simultaneously
and I
think it's
because
we have
not in
this
culture
awakened
to the
depth
of the
crisis
that
surrounds
us
you know
there's a
lot of
kind of
self
congratulatory
back slapping
going around
these days
over the
fact that
communists
everywhere
are in
hot water
and have
to admit
that they
did it
wrong
and this
gives a
lot of
satisfaction
to
people
feel
that
means
we
did
it
right
we
didn't
do
it
right
they
did
it
wrong
and now
admit
they
did
it
wrong
we
do
it
wrong
and have
yet
to
even
raise
the
possibility
of
turning
away
from
propaganda
and
stereotyping
neither
do
people
respond
to
an
ethos
of
self
denial
or
a view
of human
beings
that denies
the fact
that we
have
certain
itches
which
must be
scratched
so
you
know
I
think
that
the
collapse
of
marxism
is
only
the
collapse
of
the
outer
edge
of
the
societal
and
civilizing
assumptions
that we
have made
after all
marxism
is nothing
more than
the
millenarian
retread
of
christian
millenarianism
and
so
is
modern
science
yet
another
secular
retread
of
christian
millenarianism
so
our
culture
is
in
trouble
not
trouble
we
are
at
a
terminal
crisis
a
bifurcation
that is
it can
only go
one of
two
ways
horror
beyond
your
wildest
imagination
or
breakthrough
to
dignity
decency
community
and
caring
beyond
your
wildest
imagination
now
where do
you look
for models
where do
you go
the answer
is so
obvious
you go
to
nature
has been
playing
this game
for three
billion years
on this
planet
we have
been playing
the game
we the
apostles
of
christian
scientism
for about
two thousand
years
nature
has an
economy
an
elegance
a style
that if we
could but
emulate it
we could
rise out
of the
rubble
that we
are making
of the
planet
you know
it was the
geographer
carl
sauer
who said
man
found
the planet
a climaxed
primeval
forest
he
and notice
the gender
here
he
will
leave
the
planet
a
weedy
lot
a weedy
lot
well
now this
is a
metaphor
where you
change
climaxed
rainforest
for weeds
but it's
also true
by clearing
land
we promote
the kind
of plant
evolution
that stresses
very rapid
seed production
and annular
cycles of
growth
in other words
weeds
and this
tendency
to find
perfection
and then to
leave rubble
in our wake
has haunted
us for the
past three or
four thousand
years of our
history
now
with the
ozone shield
disappearing
with acid
rain falling
on the earth
that can melt
blocks of
marble
with the
co2 levels
rising
with the
levels of
strontium
and
chlorofluorocarbons
and you know
the litany
we have
now
one last chance
to fish
or cut
bait
and
the place
where nature
has provided
the models
for how to
respond to
this situation
is the
climaxed
rainforest
only the
climaxed
tropical
rainforest
has the
kind of
complexity
of signal
transfer
movement of
nutritional
materials
movement of
electromagnetic
radiation
that we
find in
the modern
city
it is a
cliche of
modernity
the city
that the city
is a jungle
the problem
is it isn't
jungle enough
and I think
it's the task
of the new
shamans
to take the
metaphor of
the jungle
which is a
metaphor of
tremendous
wealth
tremendous
variety
a tremendous
outpouring of
form
and of
energy
and of
potential
fulfillment
of various
bifurcation
patterns of
flow
to take
that
and
enrich our
own lives
with it
and the way
this is done
is by
empowering
the
presence
of
experience
the main
thing that
you get
with these
so called
primitive
preliterate
people
and with
people like
Nicole
who have
spent time
in this
situation
is they
are in
the moment
they know
how to
have fun
they know
how to
work
they know
how to
live
and the
reason
they understand
this
is because
they are
focused
within the
confines
of the
felt
presence
of experience
they do
not live
by
abstraction
and
abstraction
is the
knife
poised
at our
hearts
we are
so much
the victims
of
abstraction
that with
the earth
in flames
we can
barely
rouse
ourselves
to wander
across the
room
and look
at the
thermostat
that's
the
level
of
disimpassioning
that
abstraction
has laid
upon us
well
hopefully
this weekend
there will
be
passion
there will
be
an effort
wherever
there is
abstraction
to drag
it down
into the
felt
presence
of the
moment
I think
basically
what we
are
a kind
of green
anarchy
an effort
to
revivify
social
forms
that have
been
atrophied
in the
west
at least
since the
destruction
of the
lucis
probably
in most
places
thousands
of years
before that
this is
our last
chance
I have
done
the best
I could
in terms
of trying
to sift
through
all these
options
and
as a
communicator
offer
the best
way out
and
you know
I could
only do
my best
and so
that's what
you get
I can't
preach
scientism
because I
don't believe
in it
I can't
preach
buddhism
because I
can't
understand
it
the only
thing I
can preach
is
the felt
presence
of immediate
experience
which
for me
came
through
the
psychedelics
which are
not drugs
but plants
it's a
perversion
of language
to try
and derail
this thing
into talk
of drugs
there are
spirits
in the
natural world
that come
to us
in this
way
and
so far
as I can
tell
this is the
only way
that they
come to
us
that is
rapid
enough
for it
to have
an impact
upon us
as a
global
population
this weekend
will be
different
because we
will be
hewing
close to
the source
Nicole
is a
priceless
repository
of information
more even
than she
knows
if I could
declare her
a national
treasure
I
would
and the
number
who knows
what this
woman knows
who knows
how much
human
suffering
the
alleviation
of how
much
anxiety
lies in
the hands
of perhaps
half a dozen
people
of Nicole's
caliber
who have
paid their
dues
in these
jungles
this information
is flowing
through our
fingers
and disappearing
in another
thirty years
it will be
all gone
every time
I go to
the Amazon
I can
feel
the way
in which
it's
slipping
away
when my
brother
and I
go off
looking
for these
unusual
hallucinogens
often we
have the
experience
where
when we
finally
find
the
person
who
claims
they
know
what
we're
after
the
line
goes
like
this
well
I've
never
taken
it
but
as
a
child
I
remember
seeing
my
grandfather
prepare
it
and
I
think
I
can
do
it
if
it
weren't
for
us
standing
there
asking
that
it
be
done
it
would
never
have
even
risen
into
the
gentleman's
mind
as
a
possibility
this
is
the
knife
edge
upon
which
this
knowledge
is
poised
if
it
can
be
saved
it
gives
me
hope
that
we
can
be
saved
if
we
can't
save
this
kind
of
knowledge
we
cannot
save
ourselves
because
this
kind
of
knowledge
is
ourselves
culture
is a
garment
which
you
put
on
medical
systems
are
pieces
of
jewelry
which
you
wrap
around
your
throat
or
neck
religious
ideals
are like
objects
which
you
push
through
pierced
nostrils
and
ear
lobes
if
we
cannot
come
to
terms
with
that
which
allows
us
to
give
birth
with
ease
to
die
with
dignity
and
to
live
in
health
then
what
kind
of
a
future
do
we
have
no
future
at
all
so
this
is
not
a
meeting
of
obscurantists
or
enthusiasts
for
some
private
vista
of
transcendence
this
is
a
meeting
of
political
activists
people
who
are
socially
committed
to
themselves
to
each
other
to
the
larger
idea
of
community
and
who
understand
that
when
you
talk
about
Gaia
it's
only
an
abstraction
unless
you
talk
about
plants
the
difference
between
men
and
women
it
is
fundamentally
a
division
between
plants
and
animals
plants
are
the
enveloping
feminine
matrix
of
control
and
refurbishment
animals
are something
invented by
plants
to move
seeds
around
an
extremely
yang
solution
to a
peculiar
problem
which
faced
so
the
archaic
revival
if it
means
anything
it
means
reconnecting
the
Gaian
mind
which
is a
vegetable
mind
a
feminine
enfolding
boundary
dissolving
planetary
mind
that is
not an
abstraction
not a
stereotype
not
something
used to
create
hortatory
propaganda
but a
living
breathing
reality
a reality
which
is the only
thing
which stands
between us
and Armageddon
we will pursue
this in detail
over the next
two days
thank you very much
spectrum
spectrum of
alkaloids
working on you
from ten
different directions
in the middle
of this
the wonderful
thing about
chacruna
the
cicotria
viridis
the admixture
the normal
admixture
to ayahuasca
is when you do
an HPLC
or a mass spec
on that
it's just
DMT
it's a pure
spike
of NN
dimethyltryptamine
nothing else
hanging on to
it
and I think
they are
such
subtle
folk
chemists
that they
have discerned
this
not only
located
every
possible
source
of DMT
in this
ecosystem
of several
hundred thousand
species
but then
discerningly
focused in
on those
that have
the cleanest
of these
signatures
so
it's a
very impressive
thing
and
to what
end
you may
ask
I mean
somebody
asked me
do they
just
take
these
things
for fun
and the
answer
is not
at all
they are
regulating
their
psychic
world
they are
this
you know
when ayahuasca
was first
described
by
people like
Richard Spruce
and Theodore
Koch-Grenberg
and these
early people
into the
Amazon
they spoke
in terms
of a
telepathic
drug
they felt
that these
small groups
of deep
forest Indians
were actually
entering into
group states
of mind
with this
stuff
Well, then, in the sort of hard reductionist era of pharmacology, this was, of course, completely poo-pooed and dismissed.
But now, with our planet in crisis, I think we need to go back and look at this.
I have had extraordinary experiences in ayahuasca sessions.
Cat isn't here, so she can't tell the story, but some of you may recall the story in Don Fidelmo Sanvite's circle, he had a nephew.
This guy was worthless.
He was a small-time weed dealer, part-time pimp, mostly ne'er-do-well.
But because he was the shaman's sobrino, the shaman's nephew, he couldn't just be tossed out.
And he would come to these ayahuasca sessions, and the shaman, Don Fidel, Don Jose, the old guys, would sing these beautiful songs in Quechua.
And he would sing against them.
He would sing while they were singing.
He would sing a different song.
And these people, I don't know how true it is generally in Peru, but these Loretanios, the people of Loreto, are such fine people, they will never directly confront a social outrage.
So everybody in the circle was uncomfortable with this guy, didn't want him back.
It was the main topic of conversation when we all weren't loaded.
But when we were loaded, there he would be, hassling the group.
So finally, after about the third time this came, there were about 30 of us in the shed, Don Jose, this older guy, had made the ayahuasca, and he was quite proud of it.
He was showing it off, and it was god-awful strong.
And Don Jose, the sobrino, was sitting across from me, and as these waves of hallucination would come, I would see him, and he would turn into like a monkey, a howler monkey, or a monkey with a dog's face.
And just these weird animal transformations, and everybody else was staying the same.
Well, Cat, who is a little less mealy-mouthed than I am, finally had had all she was going to take of this guy.
And we were all sitting there, and she just looked across the room.
She just gave him what in English parlance is called a look that would kill.
And he physically staggered backwards.
And what I saw was these red darts come out of her eyes and go across the room.
The singing stopped.
Yes, the singing stopped instantly, and Don Fidel turned to one of the old guys and said,
She sends the z-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m-m.
And the other guy said, Yes!
And it was just this, it was a telepathic group experience where someone had been able to zing somebody else,
and thirty people had seen it as a real thing.
Well, I think the potential for this kind of thing, for problem-solving, is immense.
The thing I used to would be in politics, as we have them today.
Do you want to say something?
No.
Well, and you see, what they'll tell you in the Amazon, these ayahuasqueros,
is the purpose of each journey when it is not to cure.
And the shaman I spent the most time with, he did public curing sessions on Saturday nights.
And everyone was welcome.
On Wednesday nights, he took double doses, and it was a very small, intimate group,
and he said, This is for knowing.
Now we don't cure.
This is to know and to see.
And what this consisted of was the recovery out of the hallucinogenic state of what are called Icaros.
Icaros are magical songs.
And the more of them you have, they are taught to you by the plant spirit.
And the more of them you have, the more powerful a shaman you are.
Well, these Icaros, when you listen to recordings of them, they're quite beautiful, quite extraordinary.
But when you're with the people, it's made very clear that an Icaro is not something you listen to.
An Icaro is something you look at.
You look at it.
It is to be seen, even though it is made out of sound, as a composition, as a work of art,
it is offered more in the vein of a painting than a song or a poem.
What is happening is that in this group state of mind,
the intentionality of the singer is beheld as a three-dimensional modality of light and of color.
Well, this is like an ontological transformation of language itself.
Language, you see, we have eyes, ears, and tactile sensory receptors.
They break the world of incoming perception, the electromagnetic radiation and the acoustical waveforms falling on our bodies are canalized by the senses into these narrow streams of input, the visual input, the audio input, the tactile input.
In the ayahuasca state, a synesthesia comes into being.
Well, synesthesia, in our context, is a rare medical word.
But if you know anything about Romanticism and the literary movements of the 19th century, the pursuit of synesthesia is what drove the French symbolists and the Romantics.
They saw this melding of the senses as a higher transformation of the ontos of art.
And I believe it so to be.
I think that what history is for is to give us a technology that will allow us to share our hallucinations.
And they, the people of the Amazon, these Los Tribus, the tribal groups, have perfected a shamanic technology that allows them to do the same thing.
It's this ability to display to your intimates the contents of your own head that creates a larger organism than simply the ego.
And there are so many problems here with translating these concepts from language to language.
The shamans of the Amazon may not even grok fully that it is this collective state of mind that is so empowering to them and that we don't have.
How do you know what it's like to be inside the clothing of another culture?
Well, you don't know, but the modality, the benchmark that the pharmacological fact of the chemistry of consciousness gives you allows you to work out from a given a kind of map of what must be going on.
That's why the shaman's remark that it's so hard to take Ukuhei was interesting.
It meant that, you know, he was making a statement about the human condition.
He was saying, it's hard for us to do this just the way it's hard for you to do this.
I've discussed this with the mushroom shamans in Mexico and ayahuasqueros in South America.
They say it is not easy to do this.
It is not easy to plunge into this hallucinogenic maelstrom.
No culture prepares you for the modalities of the psychedelic experience.
A culture can give you personal authenticity, self-control and courage.
These things will serve you well, but in terms of preparing you for what you will experience, it's virtually inconceivable.
I think that the great gift that is going to come out of ayahuasca is the ability to open our heads to each other, to truly de-individuate, to truly create for ourselves a group mind.
And now on a global scale, you see the masculine engineering mentality is just running along behind the feminist, shamanist parade, hardwiring all the changes into technology.
The engineering mentality doesn't believe it unless it turns on with a red light when you hit the button.
But all that the engineering mentality can dream of or ever accomplish, it's in place in this vegetable matrix, this other way of doing it that doesn't give you much to show.
No Amazonian shaman can point to an edifice like the World Trade Center or an atom smasher or a moon probe and say the genius of my worldview allowed me to create these things.
But the genius of their worldview allows them to create authentic caring, reasonable transmission of gnosis from one generation to another, an ability to walk lightly on the earth, an ability to intuit the needs and feelings of other people.
And this is what we lack is any sort of emotional sensitivity, any sort of ability to call on the racial mind at its roots to authenticate us personally in moments of stress and crisis.
The ego really is a poor substitute for authentic being and it's the poor substitute for authentic being that we have each and every one of us opted for, man, woman, oldster, child.
The neurotic programming is so deep that it is very difficult to transcend it.
You see, I think, and Nicole is certainly a part of this phenomenon, that what really has happened, let's say, well, let's just say in the 20th century,
it is that anthropologists, ethnographers, botanists, geographers, linguists, have gone out to the four corners of the globe,
the wastes of the Kalahari, the Amazon jungles, the storm-beaten shores of Kergulan, all of these places, and they have come back with information.
These people copulate in this position, these people intoxicate with this kind of thing, these people treat wealthy people this way, these people treat homosexuals this way,
these people who believe identical twins are this and that, all these ideas, ideas and technologies in the form of drugs, basically.
And every jungle has consciousness transforming potential within it, not all equally.
But no jungle, no ecosystem is so poor that you can't find a consciousness transforming element in it.
Well, as we now sort through this vast smorgasbord of options, you know, should we practice the oracular systems of the Azande?
Shall we all become Mahayanists?
Shall we take up Sufi practices?
What is our relationship to the shamanism of Tierra del Fuego?
As all of this is sorted out in a kind of evolutionary fury, certain things are going to come to the fore.
And I think it's the, it's not the form, not the ritual, but the way in which these things empower being, empower the physiology, the felt experience of being, and empower the cognitive processing, and the integrative processing that goes on between people.
And in the world of paradisical Taoistic integration that I hypothesize preceded history, still exists in the Amazon, in these, basically in the ayahuasca complex,
but then in all the other complexes that are the feathering out of the edges of that.
The archaic consciousness lives.
This is why I think we are so strongly drawn to involve ourselves with these archaic people,
because we recognize that they have answers to questions that we couldn't even ask until the 1960s.
Do you want to say anything about any of this, Nicole?
Or shall we ask people for questions?
I would like to be asked questions.
I like even to be interrupted when I'm talking and ask questions.
What do you mean by that?
What is your experience with ayahuasca for people?
Mine?
What is your experience with ayahuasca?
Well, it's about the usual, I would say.
Actually, they usually don't give me a strong enough dose,
because I think I'm, you know, an old lady indelicate or something.
And so I haven't had such vivid, such vivid experiences as,
so frequently, or such enduring experiences, you see.
I just get flashes on and off usually.
It's very hard for me to convince anybody that I am really a very couple baby.
And so they give me, I have, mine have been oddly disappointing usually.
For example, one night I couldn't see anything except the temples in Thailand.
And I'd seen those already, so I wanted to see something new.
Very elaborate, Indonesian architecture.
That wasn't what I wanted.
And I kept saying,
Senorita Ayahuasca, because that's the way you must address her.
Please, turn it off and get me something else.
But, incidentally, the respect for such plants must always be shown.
Not only in your mind, but verbally, and in the handling.
When a witch doctor, Fendim, he sang a song to it when he dug it up.
And he sang,
Dear Senorita Ayahuasca,
I am very sorry to have you leave me.
But you are going to Senorita Nicole.
She will be good to you.
She is a good person.
You will love her.
She will love you very much.
Please grow big and strong.
And active.
And that is the way you must transform that.
Did you do that with yours?
Oh yes, and I blow tobacco smoke and the whole bit.
But, uh, they are extremely well.
Plant sensitivity, of course,
must, must always respect it.
And the cuddles are these magical songs.
Are so much important.
I was sometimes told
that they didn't think the plant would work for me.
Especially when it was something they didn't want to give me.
It was taboo.
Uh, because I didn't know the song.
Or if I knew it,
I couldn't sing it properly.
Because nobody could.
It was not a result, though, for example.
Did you have that experience?
Oh yes.
And they're very proud of the difficulty of these languages.
These languages are, uh,
extremely difficult to learn.
Oh, it's something to hear.
Why do you know it's not?
Nicole's experience of finding it difficult to get, uh, thoroughly loaded
is somewhat typical.
There are a lot of problems.
I mean, I, it took me a long time to get stoned in a native situation
because they always gave me too little
because they're all little.
And they had a notion of the dose
and it just would barely rock my boat
when it was clearly, uh, very intense for them.
If you find yourself in South America
sometime pursuing these mysteries,
you, uh, you may have to resign yourself
to drinking a lot of swill
before you get to something swell.
I didn't, uh, I didn't really
understand ayahuasca
till I made it.
Till I was able to repeatedly make it
and each time add more
Socotria viridis
to intensify the visions.
And finally I got it
where I wanted it.
You see, one of the things that's,
there's so many things about ayahuasca
that are interesting.
It really is a unique thing.
Um, first of all,
it is technically a drug
in the sense that
it's not a plant,
it's not just one plant
with morning glory seeds,
with peyote,
with mushrooms,
with detura,
with cannabis.
This is one plant.
Uh, ayahuasca is a binary weapon.
You have two things
which have to be combined
for it to be effective.
Well, now that not only means
that it is a combinatory thing,
potentially different each time
because the ratios
are potentially different.
It also brings the human element
in very strongly
because it's going to be about
who made it
in the same way
that a souffle
is about who made it
while a glass of water
is not about who made it.
Uh, and so personalities
become involved here.
Well then,
because it's something made,
uh, it can be made strong or weak.
It can be diluted.
Now, if you're into it
for the money,
all you have to do
is cut it 50%
and you've got
twice as much money
and the stuff
is half as good.
This is familiar
to all of you,
I'm sure,
who've dealt street drugs,
this equation.
You know,
if you cut it by half,
you make more money
that the stuff is garbage,
even liquor,
the horror of cutting
fine liquor
and what that does to it.
So,
you really have to know
your guy
or gal
if it is the rare case
when the ayahuasquera
comes into the picture.
There are ayahuasqueras.
When Kat and I
were in the Amazon
in 76,
we tracked down
and spent time
with Manuel Cordova Rios,
who some of you may know
his book
The Wizard of the Upper Amazon
by Bruce Lamb
is about Manuel Cordova Rios.
Well,
when we met him in 76,
he was 93.
He looked 55,
but he did die
a couple of years later.
But he was still
curing people
and seeing people.
He was still curing death
and he was an awful liar.
Well,
that reflects on my story.
Nicole says
he was an awful liar.
We went to him,
he was in Iquitos
and we said
we want
real ayahuasca.
We want
the real thing.
He said
you have to leave Iquitos.
Everyone here
is a liar,
a mentorosa.
So,
he said
there is a woman,
Juana Gonzalez Opie.
Have you ever heard of her?
No.
His story was
that as a 17-year-old girl
many years before,
she had contracted leprosy
and there was no cure
available to her
except that he cured her
with ayahuasca,
but not before she lost
her hands and feet.
So,
she was clearly
a heavy-duty person
and had a great reputation.
And we pursued her
to Pucallpa,
to Yarina Cocha.
We finally actually
found her relatives,
but she had gone
to the Andes
for a few months
to cure.
But in the process
of trying to find
Juana Gonzalez Opie,
we met all these
other curanderos.
And this is often
the way of it
in the Amazon.
You look for one thing
only to have
a reason for being there
and what you really
are fated to find
is something
far different.
Serendipity is
Amazon travel.
Yes,
for sure.
Yeah,
it is.
Hello.
And you'd better
be good at it.
Isn't it time
for lunch or something?
It's getting close.
Maybe we should
break for lunch.
It's a few minutes.
Does anybody have
any questions?
Yeah,
we could take
a couple more questions.
Not brugmancy.
Did you ever
deal with brugmancy?
I've heard
it's being used
because I'm scared
of brugmancy.
I have known
personally
one case
in which it
killed so many
brain cells,
cortical cells,
that the man
was totally
incurable
and then it
was nobody
could help.
Yes.
Besides
the DMT,
which is
added to
the Ayahuasca
to make it
highly visionary,
then there are
what's called
tertiary admixtures,
a third component.
And this is what
Ken is asking about.
There are many,
many of these
tertiary admixtures.
I have 20 or 30
left.
And most of them,
when you get them
into the lab,
are chemically
complex.
They are
probably...
Some are quite useless.
Some are useless,
but some,
I'm sure,
push it all over
the map.
Yes.
And detoura is
certainly one.
Brugmansia is
one.
There are
Abuta species,
there are a number
of these.
But I'm still
trying to master
the two.
I have in Hawaii
many of these
tertiary admixtures,
but I'm a little...
That's real magic.
That you don't get.
Pardon me?
You have to test
those things
before you use them.
Yes,
because they could be
mutagenic.
And a lot of people,
really terrible things
go on in Peru.
I mean,
you have to be sure
of your ayahuasquero.
I had some friends
who went to Lamas
near Tarapoto,
and they documented
an ayahuasquero there
who,
when his ayahuasquero
was all done,
just to give it
the proper
zing,
he would hit it
with a tablespoon
of creosote.
Well,
creosote is not
only awful,
paint it on
a mouse's ears,
and two weeks later
the mouse will have
tumors on its ears.
It's about the worst
thing you could
possibly come up with.
There are all sorts
of things.
I knew of one
who would put
kerosene in it.
Yeah, kerosene.
Kerosene, of course,
is considered a great
cure for snakebite.
Right,
they always want to.
I remember writing
in a village
where
that gave
a lot of
good medicines
with me
in the early days
when I didn't
know so much
about blood.
Didn't believe
in blood medicines.
And
they said,
yes,
there was a man
there
who'd been bitten
by a snake,
a fedelage,
a few weeks
before,
and he still
wasn't well
that he'd had
two old bottles
of the other
singing.
Yeah.
I have a clue.
I remember
that John
Juan would
teach Carlos
about singing
songs.
Are there songs
for learning
with the magic
mushrooms?
Yes,
I think singing
is sound
and language
is what
this is all
about.
I mean,
we are not
given to this,
or I suppose
I shouldn't make
a generalized
statement,
but it's not
my general
tendency
to burst
into joyful
song.
But on
the mushroom,
voice,
the purity
of tone,
the control,
the almost
synthesizer-like
stability
of the tone
is shocking.
Plus,
you can see it.
You know,
you swipe
this way
and you leave
a chartreuse
treo.
You come down
through it this way
with a magenta
stripe.
You are sculpting
in this
audio dimension.
Yes,
all of the,
this small family
of hallucinogens
that I talk of
with such enthusiasm,
they're all related.
Psilocybin
is a
tryptamine.
Ayahuasca
is a
pharmaceutical
strategy,
pharmacological
strategy
for activating
DMT.
The snuffs
from the
cumola trees
are DMT
and 5-MeO-DMT.
The drugs,
the compounds
that interest me
are vanishingly
small compared
to the whole
cornucopia
of pharmaceutical
nature.
I'm not
into,
you know,
the whole
cyclicized
amphetamine
series,
including MDMA
and MDA.
I find that
not very compelling.
The
short-acting
anesthetics
ultimately seem
to me
to be
somewhat
uninteresting.
I'm just
a fanatic
for this
one thing
because I
want to
very strongly
make the point
that,
you know,
altered states,
there are just
thousands
of altered states.
Panic,
love,
despair,
hatred,
loathing,
anxiety,
and boredom,
and drug states,
you know,
two scotches,
two scotches
and an Irish coffee,
all of this stuff.
But what I'm
interested in
is this
very specific
thing
that is,
seems to me,
so transcendental
and peculiar.
It isn't a mirror
to self.
These tryptamines
ultimately
will be
superseded
in psychotherapy
by something else
because
they're not
the best instrument
for looking
at the cracked
personality.
What they are
is a tremendous
instrument
for looking
at the
invisible
dimensions
of the
larger
universe
of mind.
That's what
you should be
through
your stuff
before you
come to this.
It will
psycholytically
clean you out.
The first few trips
will then be
directed
toward your
stuff.
And many people
never push
beyond that.
They just say,
my God,
it was so horrible
dealing with my
fears and anxieties
and stupidities
and self-betrayals
that I'm never
going to go back.
But if you
will persist,
eventually
it no longer
becomes about
you.
You become
the
small figure
in the foreground
of a vast
and unfolding
cosmic drama,
not a personal
drama.
And that's
the shamanic
perspective.
And every shaman
must go through
this shedding
of personal
identity
to then
reach an
accomplishment.
accommodation with it. That's why when I encountered the mind
behind the plant, what I always say to it is, you know, show yourself,
reveal yourself. Let me see as much of you as I can stand.
Don't make it, don't tailor it for me.
Don't kowtow to my needs.
Push me to the limit. Let me see as much of your quintessence as I can imbibe
without overflowing.
Well, we'll talk more about this this afternoon. Thank you very much.
Do you know what you dealt with?
Yeah.
Yeah, you suggest that shamanism is like the way to get man into a harmony with nature sort of thing.
Are there other ways, and if there are, do they have any commonalities?
Well, I guess shamanism is what has been focused in on as the overarching metaphor
because all of these potential responses seem to lead somehow in that direction.
I mean, the concept of shamans spans the notion in the modern usage from manager to poet.
So it's a pretty broadly based concept.
It's exalting a superior form of planning, which we could use some of at this point here.
Okay, well, what we thought we would do this afternoon is I would talk for a little bit,
and then maybe Nicole would respond to that if she felt like it,
and then we would leave more time for questions than we left in the morning.
I think both Nicole and I feel that the fruitful thing, the most interesting thing, is the questions.
Because left unquestioned, I tend to fall into my own creodes of habit
and just repeat certain favorite numbers.
But if you want to jog it in some different direction or cast it in a different light,
then the question thing is good for that.
The subject matter of this weekend is Amazonian shamanism, specifically named in the title.
And I think this gives us permission to talk more about some of the details of shamanism in the Amazonian situation
than we might in a weekend that was devoted to the planetary crisis generally
or some of the broader cosmic themes that I sometimes deal with.
But I think one thing that is a common thread from the cosmic view to the particularized sensitivity
to what is happening in the Amazon is the content, as we can describe it,
of what these shamans are experiencing.
Can we build a common language about this other dimension?
And if we can, what does this common language begin to look like?
So I thought this afternoon I would just remind you of some of the old metaphors
for this alternative dimension, the beta matrix, the other realm,
and then some possible new wrinkles on it.
And I'm speaking now particularly of the intensified states that are associated
with this shamanic complex of plants based on tryptamine.
So it's a worldwide phenomenon.
DMT is rarely distributed in any plant in sufficient quantity
that it can trigger an unambiguous intoxication without somehow being concentrated.
Either you have to extract and concentrate the bark,
or you have to do a hot water extraction of the leaf,
or in some way it has to be concentrated.
Yet nevertheless, over the millennia,
people have located the sources of this phenomena
and spared no effort to make it available
in a religious and shamanic context.
Well, so what is it?
The experience can be very compressed and brief.
In a typical DMT experience where it has been smoked,
the onset of the experience is on the order of 30 seconds,
and the duration on the order of 5 to 7 minutes.
With ayahuasca, and sometimes the way the tribal people do it is they boost it.
They take a second hit some hours into the thing.
You can prolong these states of intense visionary synesthesia for hours.
But, yeah, no, I don't think so.
A typical dose of ayahuasca that would be highly visionary will have 85 wet weight grams of Socotria viridis in it.
I would estimate that to be close to maybe 15 dry weight of Socotria.
And that amount of DMT, if smoked by itself, not in the presence of an MAO inhibitor, would not be effective.
You see, the genius of the ayahuasca pharmacology is that beta-carbolene alkaloids, like harmene and harmaline,
are being used to lower the threshold of sensitivity to DMT so that a dose of DMT that would normally be not perceived
is, in fact, you know, absolutely flattens you because your sensitivity has been raised by the inhibition of these enzyme systems.
Well, what is this like experientially?
Well, it's as though, you know, in the first five seconds the room clears of air.
Everything, all colors, brighten.
It's as though the air has been sucked out of the room.
Everything brightens.
There's a generalized feeling of anesthesia, perhaps localized in the skin.
And then you close your eyes and there is a mandalic formation of undifferentiated red and orange.
This is some kind of, what you're actually seeing is the bow shock of this gradient of unusual neurochemistry
hitting the synaptic membrane.
One by one, the synapses are giving up their normal affinity for serotonin and instead converting over to the bioelectric dynamic molecule
that has been suddenly offered to them.
And as this occurs on the scale of millions and then tens of millions of synaptic locations,
a higher cortical experience comes into being.
There is a sound like the compression of a cellophane wrapper, a kind of crackling sound,
and then a penetration into this alternative reality, some kind of, a modality of light and distance and dimensionality
that is somehow inhabited, inhabited.
This is the real shocker for the modern positivist, reductionist mind,
that it is a world of spirit, of animate intelligence, of comprehending and relating
that suffuses every atom of existence.
And if you ask a shaman, what is this, he will answer without hesitation,
oh, well, it's the realm of the dead, it's the afterlife, these are our ancestors.
What he doesn't explain is why one's ancestors should look like they're made out of gold and brass
and be puttering around like jeweled basketballs, speaking in hyper-dimensional, syntactical languages
which condense on the floor in front of you.
Apparently, these are questions which are reserved for a deeper level of initiation.
But in any case, they say, oh, these are the ancestors.
Well, this is a, you know, I've been in this biz for 20 years, and at some time in the past,
I must have faced this and repressed it, but recently it has come to me what a stunning denouement
this would actually be if this is truly and in fact what shamanism is about,
and that we merely have to open ourselves to what these people are saying.
And what they are saying is there is a chemical technology for accessing the beyond,
this higher mathematical manifold where that which has been and that which will be is somehow kept,
you know, some Blakeian domain of potentiality that can be accessed.
This would explain this hair-raising sense of familiarity
that attends the contact with the utterly bizarre and unexpected,
so that when the the cognitive dissonance that accretes itself around this ecstasy
is composed of two parts.
It is that, my God, I can't believe this is happening or even that I could perceive it if it were.
And the second part is, this is totally familiar to me.
This is more familiar than any other part of my life.
This is my place.
And the cognitive dissonance that ricochets between those places
is approaches unbearable.
I was talking with a chemist a few weeks ago, an old friend of mine,
and he was saying, well, what do you think about DMT in terms of risk?
And I said, well, the risk is death by astonishment.
That's what you're really courting.
And, you know, if you don't think that's possible,
it's because you've never done this,
because you pass that close.
I mean, you just say, you know,
this is amazement on a spectrum which could kill you
if you let it run out of control
because it is so intense.
It is so improbable and yet so familiar.
Well, if it were somehow tied in to this afterworld domain,
this would all begin to make a certain weird kind of sense.
Rupert Sheldrake has suggested what he calls necrotic biochemistry,
but the dying process is actually the process
of release of tryptamines into deep brain structure.
Well, okay, so you've got this modality
and there's stuff going on there.
Well, what kind of stuff is it?
Well, chiefly it seems to be a kind of domain
where information is being passed around.
Information is being offered
and it's being traded.
And I've often tried
in reconstructing these experiences
to feel into where have I had this feeling before,
this feeling which I now have.
It's not a fear of being killed.
It's a fear of being sort of screwed.
In other words,
it's a fear of being taken to the cleaners,
being had,
having my purse slashed, essentially.
It's a feeling which I associate
with the Crawford Market in Bombay,
where in a dark period in my past,
I had to carry out intricate, semi-legal transactions
which left me sleepless for nights.
So then I had the idea,
why do I think that?
Why do I get this feeling from the ancestor souls
that they are trying to take me for a short ride?
And I realized it's because they are traders.
They are traders of memes.
This is what they love.
They collect and trade ideas.
So when you burst into this shamanic space
where Yggdrasil, the magic world ash,
is rooted on a plane of travertine
and there's flames before you,
when you break into this place,
what they offer are gifts.
You say,
look at this,
look at this.
And these things are like miracles,
toys,
bubbles,
Fabergé eggs,
Cellini gold work,
jewels,
and yet they sing,
they speak poetry,
they create their own objects
which they offer to you.
And in the midst of all of this,
cacophonous,
elfin,
confusion,
and opulence
and syntactical richness,
you're trying to perform
the eidetic reduction
and figure out
what the hell is going on here
and what's real
and what's not
and what you can tell your lover
and what you can tell your mother.
And it's a craziness.
After many years
of being completely
flabludgeoned
by this kind of thing,
I finally understood
through making a kind of
composite map
of these trips,
many of them
overlaid over each other,
that the place
that you break through to
and all the high-dose
tryptamine experiences
lead toward this
is,
it's like a receiving area
for a human being.
It's like a playpen.
It's someone very odd's idea
of a reassuring environment
for a human being.
You know,
sort of a cross between
French bordello
and early hyperspace.
I mean,
there's a lot of
cut plush velvet
and chrome
and warm
and domed
and mmm
and you're supposed
to like this.
You're supposed to say
how thoughtful
and then,
you know,
but somebody is looking in
from another dimension
and saying,
you know,
the human subject
seems to have accepted
the conditions
in the reception area,
something like that.
I don't know
what to make of this.
I mean,
I started out
a rationalist
and have ended up
the pathetic creature
you see before you.
I,
well,
and it was because
I poked into
the wrong places.
I discovered
and many of you
probably have too
or are soon about to
that reality
is a very
thinly spun
cultural fiction
and as long as
you stay on
Main Street
it all holds together
pretty well,
you know,
but my God,
just walk down
one of these alleys
off Main Street
and you discover,
you know,
channeling,
psychic healing,
the dreams of Atlantis,
the this,
the that,
and endless
cornicopal
fuzzy thinking.
And in that,
you know,
there is,
there are
nuggets of genius
because Main Street
is clearly
nowhere's ville.
I mean,
it's just male
dominator,
linear,
post-Cartesian,
high-tech,
materialist,
positivist,
so forth and so on,
the litany
you know so well.
So,
the great excitement
for me
in this
shamanic dimension
and why I speak
to it
and what excites me
is the fact
that
here is something
totally unexpected
beyond our
wildest,
wildest dreams.
I mean,
you may have believed
in flying saucers
but did you ever
believe that they
would land
in your bedroom?
I mean,
that's the promise
which this stuff
holds out.
Something is
curiously
awry
with our
cultural machinery
and apparently
we have
a huge
blind spot
to
a dimension
of
animate,
organized,
and non-human
intelligence.
You know,
is it God?
Is it the space people?
Is it the goddess?
The Gaian mind?
The vegetable matrix
of the planet?
The light pump
of the solar system?
Who knows
what it is?
The fact
is not to know
what it is
but to experience it,
to verify
that this is going on
and
that's the big news
that the cataloging
of cultural bric-a-brac
brings back
in the example
of shamanism
saying,
you know,
oh,
the this,
that turned out
to be phony
and this was done
with smoke and mirrors
and for this
they used pig guts
or something
but
these people
and that was
how I did it.
I mean,
I went to India
years ago
as an ingenue
and sat
at the feet
of these guys
and sought wisdom
and, you know,
it wasn't until
I got
to the jungle
that people
were
willing to
show me
into this
the dimension
that exceeded
my wildest dreams.
I mean,
that's it
and my dreams
are pretty wild
and they were then
and I'm sure
yours are
as well
and yet
even if we dream
together
we cannot dream
the frontiers
of what is possible
because
in our world
of entropy
and tawdryness
and betrayal
and stupidity
there is also
you know
the unspeakable
improbable
presence
of this thing
in these plans
and, you know,
I believe
it called us
forth out of
primate organization.
I believe
that history
is
an effort
to come to terms
with this
a kind of
hysterical love affair
with the unthinkable
where, you know,
you embrace it
for a thousand years
then you burn
all your cities
and books
and persecute it
for a thousand years
and then you go mad
and flip the coin
because
it's here with us
it is
with us
tangible
experienceable
and yet
not
rationally
apprehendable
it is the confounding
of rationalism
and rationalism
is the weapon
by which
the ego
segregates
the world
me and them
inside
outside
my tribe
their tribe
the good people
the bad people
this
segregation
of the ego
this
is the neurotic
response
that somehow
comes
out of the trauma
of our evolution
on the planet
our mother
has been turbulent
our childhood
was turbulent
I evoked this
this morning
when I talked about
how nine times
the glaciers
rolled south
from the poles
I mean
we were left
alone in the
apartment
a lot
is the practical
equivalent
of this
so now
finding our way
back
we can't get out
of this mess
without a miracle
I mean
it's like
the grateful dead
saying
you know
you need a miracle
every day
and the only
miracle
around
seems to lie
in this
strange
domain
of this
shamanic
dimension
that against
all odds
and probability
there is
help
or something
nearby
anyway
the strange
flickering light
of an unvisited
farmhouse
and we're broken
down on the road
with a double flat
and rain is pouring
so we are going
to have to make
our way
toward this
thing
which beckons
and which seems
to have shaped
our history
and
these amazonian
people
kept the faith
during the
prodigal
wanderings
of western
man
men
through history
the amazon
peoples
kept this
faith
which the memory
of which they
had carried
over the land
bridge
from the
Eurasian continent
the oldest
religion
in history
the doorway
out of
ordinary time
and into
the presence
of the elder
things
whatever
they may be
we don't even know
our history
is a fiction
spun so thin
that we are
like children
in the face
of this possibility
H.P. Lovecraft
where are you
now that we need you
well anyway
that's just sort
of a
way of evoking
the space
the depth
of the mystery
what we are
talking about
is not bright
colors or paisley
wallpaper
that is found
not to exist
in the morning
but
you know
the best kept
secret
in the whole
history of
the human race
the fact
that there is
this alien dimension
nearby
and accessible
through plants
at great risk
and with great
benefit
something to which
we have become
culturally
completely deadened
and hopefully
a gathering
like this
is a permission
now that we are
poised
with a knife
at the heart
of the world
to ask the question
you know
what is the world
what is this thing
we are about
to kill
out of our greed
for condominiums
and parking space
do we understand
what we are doing
can we understand
what we are doing
difficult questions
let's hope
that there are
easy answers
because
we have hardly time
for any other sort
because the momentum
of this thing
is so great
the answer
must be nearby
it must be
within us
because we haven't time
to go anywhere else
or meet anyone else
and understand them
and apply their solution
we don't have that kind of time
we have to dream it up
the submarine is sinking
now
what are you going to do about it
well
I think
that
I
I personally felt
that I searched
the surface of reality
like a blind person
probing
for
a chink
an opening
a possibility
in the seamless surface
of the high walls
that seem to
hem us in
the prison of
gnostic iron
that the Mandians
placed at the center
of the universe
and the chink
in the armor
is
this radiant
otherness
that is showing
through the plants
and what it is
who knows
what it's for
who knows
but that it loves us
that it too
is reaching up
toward us
is
self-evident
and how can we not
respond to that
we don't know
what reality is
we don't know
who we are
we don't know
where we are
we are lost
and this is
beckoning
light
warmth
affection
and understanding
for the plight
of humanity
shamans have always
healed their people
and predicted the weather
and predicted the movement
of game
and this sort of thing
out of resonance
with this greater mind
in nature
which has sheltered
the human family
over millennia
I mean it is the unseen partner
it is the goddess
it's a real thing
and now
it must
somehow
be invoked
operationally
again
because of
our predicament
as a result
of having turned
away from that
so the task
is to understand
all this
each in our own way
and then to communicate
it to others
to understand
each in their own way
and to build
a Guilanic consensus
for life
you know
for life
because it's the only
thing we know
that has given us
self-reflection
so
Nicole
do you have anything
to say about that
or
well
I believe
Terrence
that you have
have
been given
a much
wider
experience
in this
a much more
vivid
and
probably
valuable
experience
than most people
why is that
why do
for example
most of the
Indians
I know
have
perhaps
just not able
to explain it
or to talk
about it
but
most of them
say well
they saw
a Tigre
and
some snakes
or
they
went to a
beautiful city
and
much simpler
understanding
I think
it's language
you see
I think
that every
very well could be
that every single
one of these
Indians
has seen
things
no human soul
ever saw
before
that it's
a richness
of beauty
before which
one is
inarticulate
as to why
I can do it
well maybe
necessity
is the mother
of invention
I'm not a
stockbroker
and we can always
blame the Irish
but I don't like
to do that
because that
shuts everybody
else out
and I don't
believe for a
moment
and in fact
I might say
that
to me
the important
thing
about this
experience
is I really
believe
that everyone
can have it
that
this is something
almost
it's no
exaggeration
to compare it
to sexuality
this is a
potentiality
in the human
organism
that if you
go to the
grave
without
knowing about
this
it's rather
equivalent to
going to the
grave with your
virginity intact
this is an
enormous
area
of what it
is to be
alive
I mean
and it
blows my mind
to think
that the
last
generations
of people
in Europe
created all
that philosophy
and science
and diplomacy
and so forth
and so on
without a
single person
being stoned
for a single
moment
all the
centuries I mean it's pretty much gristle and beer isn't it folks when you
look at the accomplishments of European civilization so I think it takes
practice though to access these states and I'll respond your initial
experiences with anything like that my initial experiences were kind of funny
it always seemed to hit me very hard I was thinking the other day of for some
reason I hadn't thought of it for years I think I was remarking the anniversary
of it or something about the very very first time that I took LSD and I took it
in someone's apartment in San Francisco and for me the world divided into two
great polar opposites and perhaps it's still true in some strange way one side
of the thing was called the Iostex and they were like God they were everything
profound I mean to utter this word was to hurl yourself on the ground and press
your face into the dirt it was like invoking a Faustian flame miles in extent
that was the Iostex that the other polarity were these this something
called the pinkest stairs and they were hilarity and elfin dissolution into the
minute and I was just hurled between the antipodes of these two crazed
concrescent concepts for about 14 hours and very peculiar but it but by
techniques what I wanted to say was because it will be useful I assume to
people here you do it in darkness and in silence and in reverence on an empty
stomach free from distraction with attention to breath that's all what we're just now
what do we see what is this operationally look like it looks like a person sitting
alone in a dark room quietly breathing or meditating or something like that that's
all you see that's the exterior manifestation of the sadhana and what is going on is this
person is navigating an internal river system of great complexity syntactical Niagara's are pouring
over internal precipices of perception and remembrance and you know it's very intense I mean I
have had experiences where I swore that everybody from Seattle to San Diego must have just thrown
themselves under their desks to escape the blast and it was just happening between my ears you know I
mean it's like watching a thermonuclear explosion through 50 feet of absolutely clear crystal and
you know you're in violet but what's raging in the optical pathway is like the the collapse of a universe or
the birth of a universe the first time you took ayahuasca is it that intense no it took years of
fiddling with ayahuasca because they don't make it right I won't take anybody's but my own just because
they don't they're not heavy enough on the foot pedal of the cicotria I think they wanted that's it they
want to graze the surface of it and you know I want impact so I really push that because that's what
fascinates me the visions I mean some people say you're just a vision freak that these wonderful feelings and
thoughts and and it's true that that all is there but there is something so convincing to my mind about a
hallucination because it's so intricate and happening in real time and you just looking at
this thing jaw agape you could never draw it you could never have previously imagined it and yet it
must in some sense be said to be yours because it's happening in your mind and so then you wonder
well what is my relationship to this thing it's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen did I make
it does it come out of me or is it no more me than me standing looking at the evening star what is the
source of this transcendent beauty that resides within the human nervous system I confess I don't have the
answer I think that's what I mean I am basically a Platonist and then when you couldn't support
that anymore because of advances in modern philosophy I retooled as a phenomenologist but I'm still
basically a Platonist and I believe that the good the true and the beautiful are somehow facets of the
same notion and for me the pursuit of beauty has been the fastest way to get entangled with the true
and the good now for somebody else it might be it might be different but this beauty that we find
resident within ourselves is I think the strongest argument that I personally know of that we are more
than clay that we are you know caught up in a cosmic drama of salvation and redemption of some sort I
don't say what sort I'm very leery of that but that you know that we are caught up in a cosmic drama of
salvation and redemption and the covenant that she has made with human beings is symbolized by the
psychedelic experience in the same way that God's covenant with man was symbolized for Noah by the
rainbow you know the psychedelic experience is the magical iridescence that is thrown off ordinary matter
vouchsafing some kind of insight into a transcendent level of organization that is behind appearances
anybody want to say anything yeah well as I you know I wrote this book for Bantam and so trying to study the
relationship of drugs to culture over thousands of years in many places and what I came to feel was
that in a cultural situation where you have a strong plant hallucinogen one of these pipeline to the
goddess plants women will tend to be in the powerful positions in the society because I'm convinced that women
were the developers of language that the gathering part of the hunting gathering equation which was the
women's part had more evolutionary pressure on it to develop syntax in order to differentiate these hundreds
and hundreds of plants some toxic some food and I think that when the primal partnership society on the
Saharan grasslands of Africa began to break up it happened very slowly you see at the climax of the
African cattle goddess mushroom partnership equilibrium my supposition is that probably mushrooms were being
taken every two weeks or month in a group situation with group sexual practices because of the CNS arousal component of the
psilocybin being what was going on well okay so this is the experience that these people were
building their civilization around and it was an experience of boundary dissolution tribal mindedness group
sensuality and group values well as the African continent dried up and this pastoral lifestyle became more and
more difficult to support and the distance between water holes over centuries we're talking now grew greater it
became harder and harder to hold these mushroom ceremonies on time to have this experience regularly to keep it part of the society and eventually it died out and there was also another factor working here which was as the climate dried it became more and more important to find a way to preserve the mushrooms so that they could be used then at the regular ceremonies well the preferred agent
for preservation I discovered in the Neolithic was honey well the only problem with that is that honey
itself is a natural product subject to fermentation so as the mushrooms got scarcer and the climate drier and there were more and more preserved mushrooms in honey and then fewer and fewer
preserved mushrooms in more and more honey you got a slow switch over to a mead cult an alcohol cult and at that very early period in the Middle East then you get the emergence of the dominator model at 9500 BC from Scandinavia to Arabia you get what's called the tanked point techno complex means suddenly a lot of chipped flint
over to the river bottoms where the river bottoms where game was frequent but distributed on the wrong side of walls around former habitation sites in other words war has come to the world of 9500 BC this is because great agriculture over succeeded surpluses meant sedentary lifestyles and defense of inventories
in other words that you didn't have food and a whole economy of pillage and strife emerged so I'm really very unenamored of monotheism in all of its forms I understand its philosophical attraction one it's the attraction of simplicity let there be one God after all isn't that the simplest solution but
and taking a Jungian tack on that we image in our personalities the kinds of gods that we permit ourselves to worship and if you have an image of God as omnipotent omnipresent infallible all seeing you know this is a this is the dominator archetype incarnate and then everyone images it in their psyche and you get the birth of
the ego this thing it's like a tumor that forms in the personality in the absence of psilocybin in the absence of psilocybin these assumptions begin to get going about my territory my women my food and there's no end to it you know it's the death of everything so this long strain of dominator culture that comes out of the Middle East
gets unfortunately reinforced whether serendipitously or by design is not clear by the choice of a phonetic alphabet to put down these early Middle Eastern languages you see phonetic alphabet gives tremendous permission for abstraction
because what is symbolized is not a little picture not the thing but the sound of the name of the thing so your three steps removed it isn't enough that you communicate in in symbols here you don't communicate in symbols you you communicate in a still one stage further removed thing so yeah cultural styles are I believe drug based based based on
very old relationships with intoxicants and it basically divides along two lines the soporific
the soporific you know these things which loosen social strictures and give permission to express the dominator model and then these other more more nebulous visionary kinds of things
that's a suppression versus enhancement thing this might be a good point to make the point since there's so much talk about drugs in today's world that the pro-psychedelic position is an anti-
anti-drug position that should be clear because the way I think of drugs and what is objectionable about them is by analyzing cause and effect
well what is it that we don't like about drugs well we don't like that they cause unexamined repetitive self-destructive behavior in other words they make you stupid and self-destructive behavior
they make you stupid and self-destructive and habitual on those items well this is precisely the kind of behavior patterning that psychedelics break up and destroy they you cannot carry out unexamined self-destructive habitual behavior in the presence of psychedelics because they will show you too strong an image of the consequences
that were reported with curing alcoholism with LSD
before they made LSD illegal where they would give chronic alcoholics one 500 gamma LSD trip with a sitter and something like sixty percent of these people were going dry and sticking with it well people said
well people said my god LSD is a cure for alcoholism no no it's a cure for stupidity it's not a cure for alcoholism that's infantile it merely gives you a self an image of the consequences of your behavior and this image is so horrifying that you modify your behavior forthwith
yes others others yes yeah it was with a mixed group yes no no no they don't think about it that way people just go people yes somebody someone who has a problem perhaps is hoping to solve it
and uh by finding out what happened to his wallet or her string of pearls or something like that of course they don't very often wear pearls in that society but uh it was it's a totally heterogeneous group it's whoever happens to come who it with the permission
of the shaman of the shaman of the shaman of course i don't know when there seem to be far fewer women who have taken it no i don't know why the women in the women usually take it when they're in tribal situations in the culture the ones who are not too acculturated usually take it when they are ill and frequently it is a diagnostic tool for the shaman
or the shaman he takes it with the woman he takes it with the woman and then he knows where the evil dot is gone that is making her ill and how to remove it
in that when i choose to have a psychedelic experience i make a conscious choice to take ayahuasca or lsb or whatever and choose and control the time and place in the company i'm in but when it's over me in an uncontrollable way when i get an idea for a form or a painting or something like that
that um it's not something that i can control and it's a very it's a similar process
in that you you go into a different experiential mode and i found that we can sit here and talk about this
and we laugh about elves and things but in the real world people don't like it it's like main street we
were talking about main street uh if this happens to me and i feel like i really need to do my work
because the muse is there i can't say well the muse is here i have to go paint um somebody else up in the garbage
people get angry at me and say that's irresponsible there's no place for um an artist or a seer
unless you've got say you're terrence mckenna so therefore it's okay for you to come off the wall
because you're going to be funny and entertaining and but it's not okay for just you know
any old person like me to do that you're about to get what you came for yes it is
yes it is
well then you can do what i do the reason i do this is because i lost my job and
no i mean i see what you're saying i mean it is problematic uh you know if one person believes it
it's a psychosis if two people it's a folie adieu three a cult four a movement and so on
what we're trying to do here is empower the meme give permission and say you know you just got
comfortable with gays and black people well guess what you're now they have to elbow over one step
further because there are all us loadies out here and we're we're tired of being thought of as
stupid we're not stupid in fact we're smarter than you are and you know we're tired of being
still this is not the cheech and chong hour so uh and i and then the deeper answer to your question about
art is i think that these two things are basically spun together and are completely one in the same
process i mean on a historical scale the way i think of these psychedelics as they're catalysts for
ideas they are actually like enzymes you know an enzyme it well let me define a catalyst first a
catalyst is a chemical which makes a reaction go faster but it isn't itself consumed in the reaction
and an enzyme is an organic catalyst okay so psilocybin these things they're like organic enzymes for
creativity for the imagination we have this peculiar faculty called the imagination it's like an a
wonderful omni adaptable hand it's an internalized hand we use the imagination to grasp situations
and to remake models of reality and this is what's given us the one up on the taper the cheetah the gorilla
is you know the imagination now artists have always been you know the carriers of the banner of the
imagination but it becomes much more um cogent and pregnant with importance in the modern context
because the whole cultural enterprise is becoming um designed i mean i don't have to tell this to
people from la la is one of the most heavily designed cities in the world the entire cultural fabric the
coral reef of human accretions is becoming an expression of art and i think this is we might as
well talk about this now or at least brush by it this is where our future lies in the realm of the
imagination somehow i mean i can't quite put all the pieces together for you this afternoon but some
afternoon i will it's just not i don't know what to say yet it's too early but downstream and the
technology is already taking shape we are going to go in to the imagination we are going to live in a
world that touches the earth no more lightly no more heavily than a thought and this is a reasonable
cultural goal money can be made doing this this is not sky blue stuff we can retool the culture toward
this uh revivifying of archaic sensation and make money at it and back off a little from this other
thing which is so tremendously destructive and it basically has to do with turning it over to artists
people ask what can i do what can little me do in this on rushing planetary chaos trophy that has seized
everyone well i think the answer is um cognitive activity dance poetry painting writing computer graphics
code writing whatever your gig is but cognitive activity is our salvation it always has been and
it must be now there's no going back dream the dream yeah
time to express i mean i would i'm curious what your opinion about virtual reality will be yeah well i
yes do you all know what virtual reality i don't
virtual reality is a technology remember you heard it here first virtual reality is a technology which is
developing at lightning speed and it basically involves a helmet and a glove
and you put on the helmet and you put on the glove and you throw a switch and you're in another
reality a virtual reality and you can feel objects in this reality through your glove
because the glove has sensors embedded into it which react to a complex computer program which tells
the glove to bend as though it were gripping a ball and then you feel a doorknob in the virtual reality and
you open the door and walk through and so forth and the the people who are developing this have great
hopes for it uh clearly to make money which it obviously will but we here under this tree are
sophisticated macluanists and understand that media always has a feedback loop
into cultural self-image and that we cannot put on a dior gown without feeling like a party where that
would be appropriate and what virtual reality holds out the possibility of that these people have clearly
grasped is we are going to be able to show each other our fantasies of course yes all the trivial ones
first but then everything else you know and here is a tremendous dimension in which art can function
uh imagine if we each could show each other our dreams what an enriching thing that would be for
for design in other words for the topological manifold of visible culture because we see all these
things in our dreams but i think that this is only a trivial aspect of what virtual reality will make
possible because the people who are associated with it are no strangers i think to psychedelic perspectives
one of the strange things that happens in the dmt intoxication is this language which is seen not heard
these elf-like creatures in this other dimension have a syntactical way of communicating which is visible
they don't communicate with sound they communicate with light which condenses into these crystalline
toy-like semi-organic self-transforming highly colored things those are syntactical structures of some
sort they mean something well from you've heard me talk about the communication systems of octopi
that octopi have this very highly evolved nervous system and all over the surface of their skin there are
what are called chromatophores specialized cells which can change color and octopi when they wish to
communicate they have traveling bars blushes dots stripes all this stuff flowing over the surface of their skin
well notice that they become their syntactical intent that's what's actually happening here they are not
as we do our method of communication is to make small mouth noises which are transduced across space as
sound reconstructed in the brain of the hearer and then a dictionary is consulted and the commonest meaning
chosen for the incoming sound as ways of conveying information go this is what you call a very
low-grade signal it's a miserable way to transfer data but if you could see what we what i mean if i could
literally cause my uh concrescent intention to appear before us and rotate like an object in space we could take
step forward toward telepathy. Well, in the virtual reality, paint boxes and toolkits
are being created in the software realm that will allow people. Jared Lanier, the great
brain behind some of this, is interested in what he calls non-symbolic communication.
Non-symbolic communication and the more perfect logos of the DMT ecstasis are the same thing.
It's a moving, visible modality of intent that you see, you don't hear. So I think the
virtual reality opens up the possibility that, you know, my mother used to say, if wishes
were horses, beggars would ride, I actually look forward to that day. I believe that that's
within reach, you know. Anybody else?
Guy Lamick. It's a term that Rhianne Eisler introduced in her book, The Chalice and the
Blade, and it means related to Gaia, related to the goddess. Have you all read The Chalice
and the Blade? No. It does all this spade work for me. Rhianne
and I appeared right here a year ago. She's a brilliant woman. She's born in Vienna. An
archaeologist has given her life to understanding Middle Eastern prehistory, the archaeology of
it. And it is, when we talk of dominator versus partnership societies, we're using Rhianne Eisler's
words. You see, we want to get completely away from the gender polarity of talking about a matriarchy
versus a patriarchy. First of all, there is very little evidence for a true matriarchy. What seems to
have happened is that there was this thing called a partnership society, which gave way to male
dominance, dominator society. But in the original hunting-gathering thing, that equation was fairly
well balanced. The men hunted, the women gathered. There was pressure on the women to develop language.
This they did. This allowed them the notion of agriculture, and pastoralism, and the husbandry of cattle,
and a cycle of nomadism based on mushroom use, husbandry of cattle, and a mixed hunting and gathering
ecology, was what existed in Eden, really. And then the story I told you of the drying. You know,
if you look at the story of Genesis, it is very clearly the story of a drug bust. I mean, this woman
ate of the fruit of the tree of life, and she gave it to her husband, and then there was this problem. And
Jehovah, musing to himself, says, they must not do this, because if they do, they will become as we are.
Not it's bad, or it's poisonous, or they'll make themselves sick, but they will become as we are. Well,
how plain does it have to be, people? I mean, it's right there, embedded in the Ur-text of Western
civilization. The story of the woman's fascination with the dimension brought by the plant, and how
this had to be suppressed in order that everything could be a bring down for thousands of years.
But Terrence, there are two, I know of two tribes still in existence, which are matriarchal in Paraguay.
Yes, I think it happens. It's not a hard and fast rule. Because, but as a matter of fact,
they're in terrible trouble if they still exist, because the Amish went in and took them over.
The Amish. And they were so confused. The last I heard, they were in very bad shape psychologically.
Yes, well, wherever these dominator philosophies have gone. And, you know, I rap monotheism very
heavily. But I also think, you know, modern science is the bastard child of Christian theology. I mean,
all that rummaging around by Thomas Aquinas and Francis Bacon entirely set the stage for modern science.
I mean, here is Francis Bacon on nature. Nature must be put on the rack,
that we may torture from her, her secrets. This is Francis Bacon, the father of modern science. I mean,
is this a dominator, woman-hating, misogynist vision, or what? And this was done, you know,
and the secrets were tortured. And now we hold, you know, the power to light the fire of stars on the
cities of our enemies. But to what end? Here, this gentleman. You mentioned traitors. I always saw
that as kind of pirates. Pirates. Pirates, little pirates. That's absolutely right on. And
they're very much a competition for ideas. But they never let you kind of keep on them. You just kind
of get a taste of what this thing could be like. Well, see, the goal of my life was to escape from
the fairy mountain with fairy gold. And I think I did it. I mean, I may be deluded by the time spent in
fairy mountain. But this time wave thing that I am so concerned to communicate is like a piece of the
fairy action. And as to what they took from me for that, I don't know, probably the I Ching. Probably
they looked into my head and said, hmm, you know, crude, but the workmanship is interesting, a fascinating,
primitive piece and made the switcheroo. So did you feel at all that you were part of their play?
Oh, definitely. I thought that definitely too. Okay, let's leave me to my next question.
You mentioned the plant. You alluded to the plant bringing us to consciousness. And the question
to me is why. Why would the plant lead us to consciousness? Why would it? Yeah. Why would the
plant call us into consciousness? Well, it's, you know, or maybe you don't know, but in the in the
introduction to the book that Dennis and I wrote on how to grow mushrooms, the mushroom makes a little
speech there. It says, I am old, 50 times older than thought in your species. I come from the stars,
yet I've been on earth for ages, so forth and so on. And there it says, what you have that I want is
hands. You have hands. You can move matter. I am like a cobweb spread through the soil. I am so diaphanous,
I touch the earth so lightly. And then why? What are these hands for? Well, then you touch on this peculiar
theme in the mushroom, which is its apocalyptic tendencies, its millenarian tendencies.
It sees the solar life as circumscribed. It thinks in terms of a cosmic, a galactic radiation of its genes
through space and time. It doesn't want to be trapped on one mud ball when the star that it's orbiting goes up.
This question of the dynamics of the sun is very interesting. I don't know why,
you know, the alien thing that it is, why it would call us forth into organization. It,
there are some things that are hard to, that we can't comprehend. I mean, when you confront the other,
and you begin to dialogue with it about these things, and it begins to lift the veil on these
vistas, it becomes unbearable. Ultimately symbiotic. Ultimately symbiotic. And ultimately,
somehow, for purposes of departure, the theme of departure, whether it's to another continuum,
that a doorway will open, and we'll go, or down into the crystalline substructure of the planet,
or into the wind. It's, but the theme is that we are finished here. It's interesting that these plants
have these messages, because I don't get this from ayahuasca. To me, ayahuasca is maternal, and the river,
and I often see flow, flow, sediment, the rivers, the sediment, the overturning of minerals, life,
and death, and, but not this, let us go where no one has ever gone before, on your feet mankind,
the great adventure. And it begins to, you know, march out into this inflated, but perhaps true
vision of a destiny for us, that we have a destiny, that there is more, more for us than saving this
planet. That must be done. But maybe it's a test, you know, save your planet, and then we'll talk to you.
What do you suppose you have on your agenda, a debate with the drug czar?
Actually, within the last three hours, the very possibility was raised to showing that we all
resonate together. I suggested to Joan, and to Shishi, that the drug czar be invited here,
and that we, I'm a great, I believe you should meet with your enemies. I love this idea. If any of you
have read Encounters with the Arch Druid by John McPhee, it's about David Brower, the great
conservationist, who was such a radical conservationist, that the Sierra Club threw him out.
They just couldn't take this guy. And he went down the Grand Canyon with the head of the Bureau of
Reclamation, who built Glen Canyon Dam, and they hated each other. They had sworn death, practically,
on each other. And they went down the Grand Canyon together, and each night at the campfire, they would
set a bottle of scotch between them, and work on it, and rave. And it's fascinating. It's wonderful.
I would love to talk to these people, because you see, I'm as concerned as anyone else about the fact
that we're drugging ourselves to death, because we can't find what we're looking for. We are
dysfunctional. And like an alcoholic or a junkie, we take drugs to forget. We do everything to forget,
because had we been in balance over the last few centuries, we never would have gotten into this mess.
We're the generation that's having to pay the bills, but these bad habits have been in place for
centuries. And the answer to the drug problem lies in psychedelic, self-directed psychedelic therapy,
is the only way I can say it. I mean, if you ask, what can you do? Straighten yourself out, is one answer.
And how to do it, that's how to do it. Yes. Didn't you have a question? No. Sorry. Yes.
Friendship in shamanic healing. I asked Nicole, then she said, do you know that?
Partnership and friendship. I think it's shamanic healing. Well, shamans are fairly irascible people,
I've noticed. They, uh, Mercier Léod talks about this in his great study of shamanism. And I think the
phrase he finally settles on is essential but peripheral. In other words, the shaman lives in a
little house at the edge of the village or a short distance from the village into the forest. And
as the keeper of the doorway to these fairly terrifying dimensions that involve life and death,
he's a fairly remote character. The friends of shamans are usually shaman themselves. Uh,
the apprentice relationship is a whole other issue.
And in my estimation has been very perverted in the Eastern way of doing things. What I found in the
Amazon was that these people were very willing to share most of the secrets that I wanted to know.
Uh, you had to know a lot to ask the wrong question. Eventually we got to the wrong questions and they
were bewildering. I mean, like I was very interested, of course, in intensifying and intensifying and
intensifying this encounter with the DMT thing. And so I kept asking my shaman, uh, teacher, uh, about these
plants that he was reluctant to talk about that I knew were stronger. And finally he said, uh, it's
comida de perro. It's food for dogs. And I didn't know, since my Spanish is so terrible, whether this was an
idiom or literal. And, uh, he said it's molly bizarro, strange and evil, and, uh, not for Christians.
And what he was talking about was simply a more intensified state than what he was working with
and curing with, uh, in the ayahuasca sessions. So, uh, you know, it's a gradient. It's a thing. I saw a
shaman once who had been practicing shamanism for 25 years in the Amazon, um, have an ayahuasca trip
where he said after it was over with he'd never do it again. That was it. Uh, so, you know,
pride goeth before a fall. On the other hand, it's very, uh, kind and forgiving and user-friendly
to beginners. It's a relationship. It's not a thing. It's a somebody. And if you approach it as a
somebody rather than a thing, you will have a much, uh, a much richer time for it, I think.
Do you know that people can reach this dramatic knowingness that you've explained today any other
way than via the planet? Well, this question always comes up, and I'm famous for my answer,
so I might as well give it again. No.
Well, see, I mean, everybody always says, but surely yoga and the, the Sufis and this,
well, who knows? I haven't had time to check all this out. I did check out yoga. I'm, I feel fairly
confident in saying that 95% of yoga is absolute hokum. The other 5% is pure gold, but sorting it out
among these babas. And, you know, keeping your guts intact is just, you know, really a daunting task.
However, there is a concept in, in Hindu thought that I'm interested in. It's the concept of Tantra,
usually associated with sexual yoga. But for my purposes, I'm simply interested in the meaning
of Tantra. It means shortcut way. It means, it takes the notion that in a single lifetime,
you can attain some kind of tremendous reconstruction of your internal horizon of transcendence,
a way of saying enlightened without saying it, in a single lifetime. And I'm not enough convinced of any
of these theories of reincarnation and so forth to be willing to just write off this lifetime if I make
a botch of it. So I'm not interested, not only interested in ways that work, but ways which work
quickly, quickly. And nothing can come close to this psychedelic thing. I mean, this is it. Imagine
getting to a place with your spiritual quest where the problem is to hold it down. Well, everybody who
takes psychedelics reaches that place. I mean, you know, a way that I've gotten this into a formula for
myself is to say, once you come upon this psychedelic issue, you are no longer involved in the process of
seeking any spiritual answer. You are now confronted with facing the answer. You wanted a tool for
spiritual transcendence. Here is a spiritual of tool transcendence, the likes of which you can barely
wrap your mind around. If there are other ways to do this, I can't conceive of it. I mean, perhaps ordeals
and things that are tremendously stressful. Any time you make somebody think they're going to die and then they snatch life from the jaws of death,
that's a shedding of crap. But that's no, that's the, it's no fun, right? And yet, you know, in the privacy of your own home
with five grams of mushrooms, you join Magellan and Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart. I mean, you're out there. That's the real
frontier. That's not, there's no safety in that zone. You're, it's authentic exploration of reality.
Yeah.
I love it. Thank you.
You need to be able to be able to be brought to the LSD that is not there without it.
Thank you, Lola. Well, what LSD brought to the psychedelic experience was millions upon millions of
experiences. No other psychedelic has ever been produced in such volume. So surely even in today's
world, 90% of the people who've had a psychedelic experience, it must have been LSD as far as its
superiority or... In terms of, in terms of a teaching from a different perspective, like a, you know,
a piece of the, a piece of the lesson that may not be there with the plants, is there something that you
found with that? Nobody's ever asked me this question. A unique contribution of LSD. I don't know. I'm,
I'm not a great, I'm not the greatest of enthusiasts for it. I thank God for it. I mean,
it created me and my friends and my worldview. I don't, I can't really think of anything it does
that something else doesn't do. The way I ended up using LSD was as a magnifying glass to inspect
other psychedelics. You know, a hundred gamma of LSD and 60 milligrams of mescaline and, or a hundred
gamma of LSD and smoking DMT. A hundred gamma by itself is not much, but it seemed to work as a kind of
source of energy to inflate these other states. The original so-called psychedelic experience that the
people were working with at Harvard in the, in the famous experiments there, was this combo of
mescaline and LSD. That, that gave them the best results. And that is highly visionary. I mean,
that is just a kaleidoscope of three-dimensional vision. Tim Leary said a wonderful thing about LSD.
Actually, I asked him if he'd said it. He couldn't remember ever saying it, but it certainly described
my experience with LSD. He said, LSD is a psychoactive drug which causes, occasionally causes psychotic
behavior in people who haven't taken it. And I witnessed psychotic behavior all around me in people who
hadn't taken it. I never did that. Scratch my back and you'll discover a hard-bitten conservative.
Yeah, somebody else. I was wondering, um, in terms of the ayahuasca,
uh, do you have any, you mentioned some of the places, the conditions you might want to take it under,
but, uh, obtaining it and, uh, not, or any safeguards in terms of who you would obtain it from,
and, uh, you mentioned that it, it really varies in terms of the dosage, in terms of who makes it.
Yeah, it's a real problem. Uh, you're going to have to deal with
other people and their motives and motivations. Uh, the problem always with ayahuasca is to get it
good. And you never know, you know, till you're out there whether it's going to be good or not.
So all I can say to you is, you know, hone all the social skills you need anyway to get ahead in life,
and it will aid you in discerning shit from Shinola in the realm of ayahuasca as well.
By good you mean intense? Good ayahuasca? Yes, strong visions. You want it to be strong.
If it isn't visionary, I would be skeptical of everything being said around it and about it,
because that's what it must be. Uh, that's the quintessence. Yeah?
In the, um, in the Amazonian society, the shamans are, they're a minority within the culture.
How do you see that role in the context of, you know, if there's a new society where
hallucinogens are more widely than used, how do you see that role being in our culture and
children? Well, the obvious institution which is in place to do something with this is, uh, uh,
psychotherapy in some form. But I don't know, psychotherapy is so wrong-headed whether it can be
reclaimed or not. I spend a lot of time talking to psychotherapists because, uh, you know, they're
front-line workers in the realm of the mind. Uh, a professional class has to be created of people
who do it and who then provide guidance to other people. And people should self-select for this,
in the same way that some people want to be bartenders and some people air force generals. Uh, it's a
calling. And, uh, in the traditional societies that Nicole and I were involved with in South America,
there's always elder shamans who are able to pass this stuff down. Now our problem is we have to make
it up. We have to create or amalgamate or bring together from many sources a coherent shamanism. I
think we're doing this, but we're bootstrapping it. It's slow. It isn't easy. As far as the legality
of all this, I think people should be free to do what they want with their minds. It seems to me it's
already covered in the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness clause of, uh, the Bill of Rights. You
know, pursuit of happiness. If that does, I mean, Hamilton wanted it to say right to own property.
And they said, no, no, that'll make all kinds of problems. I said, well, how about the pursuit
of happiness? Okay. Well, that legitimizes this intent. I, I'm, my position on this psychedelic
thing, the reason I'm involved in it is because, uh, politically speaking, it seems to me it lies on a
direct line of development from the signing of the Magna Carta, the freeing of slaves, the emancipation of women,
the emancipation of gays. In other words, this deciding that people can take any drug they damn well
please is part of the task of creating a sane and rational society that places the values of the
individual first. Once we get through this drug war crap that we're having to put up with,
and all drugs are freely legal and very few people take them and it's, you know, all settled down,
people will look back and say of us, as we say of people who kept slaves on their plantations,
what a bunch of barbarians. Can you imagine in the 20th century, a president of the United States stood up
before his nation and advocated pissing in bottles by the citizenry in order to determine who was taking
what drugs? It's no weirder than, you know, they hung a pig for murder in Amsterdam in 1544. It'll be told
like that, anecdotes about the quaint medieval practices of the benighted past. Isn't that right, McCool?
Yes. But there's one aspect of shamanism we haven't touched and that is the ordeal preparation.
Why don't you mention a lot of that? Well, I think it's one thing that deters a lot of people
from becoming shamanism. I think you're right. Because it's pretty routine that they must go through
very severe ordeals of denial of, well, the average one goes into the jungle alone in some quite remote
area and lives for six months a year up to the longest one I've heard of was 19 months.
They almost starve to death. They allow themselves an extremely limited diet
and they have no contact with friends at all in most cases. Some will have certain foods brought to
them that they are allowed to eat yucca, which is the staple starchy food like potatoes. And others
really just go out there and stay there and that's it. And they eat what they can kill with their hands
and what they can catch in the rivers. And they come back in very bad shape. They don't wait till they're
incapacitated. But the ones who stay the longest come back in
and very emaciated, very weakened. But they have learned and they've
feel much, in some senses they seem to be much stronger than anyone else. And they
speak of it, many of them have had the experience of, they start at the foot of
a tree, a lupuna usually, and they are lifted up as time goes on and then when
they get to reach a certain level is when the plants begin to tell them, how
they come to them, the mother of the plant will come, that's the spirit of the plant,
and give them instruction on their use. Have you found that to you of most of the
shamans you've known? Yes, I think so, and you know in Madagascar they have ordeal
poisons, they're not psychoactive, but they make you think you're going to die, but
then you don't, but it's specifically so awful that it's used as an initiation.
Well they do this, and all the shamans I've known have gone through this. The diet,
it's called. The diet, well the diet but it's also the solitude. Have you talked to
Eduardo Luna about this? No. Because he feels that this, that the great secret of
ayahuasca that remains to be discovered is what it's like if you keep these
specialized diets and load your system with serotonin via plantains. There is a...
They live practically on plantains. Yes, and there is a specialized diet and often
shamanic power is judged by how long a man claims to have kept this diet. Now this
is an area none of us have explored. Rare enough here is the person who...
Well Eduardo went into it in a small way. He did it for about ten days or so, but they...
I saw, you see I haven't had a chance to talk to him much. I saw him only very briefly when I was in Peru in January.
So here's a frontier for self-experiment. What is it like to keep these high-start?
That's certainly accessible. Well the diet is plantains, which are these cookable bananas, and a very little bit of fish, and yucca.
And that's basically it. No greens, no sugar, no alcohol, an extremely minimal diet. I mean almost as spare as a Tibetan diet.
No fruit. No fruit. No fruit. No anything, except those things. And a lot of ayahuasca in isolation. I mean daily dosing. Yes.
And living in a little hut, being served by a child who's the only person you see. If they are served, no, some of them don't even have that contact.
Uh-huh. The plant, the mother.
They, they speak, no, it's not just that. They speak of the spirit of the plant, which, because there's a very strong animist belief, which you can find pretty easy to share when you get in there.
And, uh, they, they, they call it the mother of the plant. I don't know why, but la madre de la plant dice. The mother of the plant will tell you.
What's so much interest me is that in, uh, Western culture, you know, the idea that a young man has to, in the mythology, has to go out and, and get rid of, leave his mother in order to, uh, and leave all the feminine in order to become strong and be a man.
Well, they do that in the initiation period in a number of tribes in South America, I think. But it's a brief period.
Well, this experience of dissolution is experience of dissolution into the maternal matrix. I'm sure it's felt like that. It's a, it's a dying and a being reborn.
And surely these early people and people on that level of culture today must have experienced it that way as a death and a rebirth.
Can't.
How is the...
Boiled.
Isn't that a disappointing answer?
Occasionally roasted. Sometimes roasted, too.
Sometimes roasted, never fried.
They're really...
Oh, they never fry anything anyway because they haven't any fat.
Jungle...
One reason that, uh, Indian is sort of, one of the reasons I think is, have you ever seen a really fat Indian? I haven't.
At first they haven't, probably haven't got the genes for it.
But also they, their food is practically fat free because jungle animals are running.
They have, it's lean meat.
The fish they have, there are very few fat fishes.
And they have no source for fats.
They don't use the palm fats, except when they eat certain palm fruits.
And so, uh, they don't fry anything.
Yes, people have the wrong idea about the jungle in the sense that people think, well, it's so, so much vegetation, there must be a lot of food.
But you see...
You can starve.
The evolution has been so tight for so long that no excess protein is being produced.
And if it is produced, a bird, a monkey, an ant is gobbling it up long before you get near it.
And then you gobble up the bird, monkey, or ant.
That's right.
Especially those ants at the big behind.
Yes sir.
Were you, were you ever among, uh, we, uh, Muinani, they stick straws down into the ant hills and all the ants latch on and these Muinani children would pull these things out of the ant hills and put the ants in bowls of water and smash it up with a...
No, I haven't seen that.
Yeah, it was delicious.
I've seen them, but I've, the worst thing I had was having to eat live termites.
Live termites.
Yes.
When they, they're a great delicacy because it's orange tree termites.
And when they come out of the tree on their nuptial flight, they live only in orange trees.
The kids catch them with a gourd full of water.
And as they crawl out, they brush them into the water and of course they're stuck there.
And so it's a great treat to them.
So when they offered me some, I naturally thought I had to accept.
And I picked one up and the wings came off.
And that rather upset me because I, my idea of a good time is not pulling wings off flies.
And the, but the, but they, I learned later they just come off then anyway, because pretty soon they're going to stop flying.
And the kid said, well, the wings don't taste good anyway.
Go ahead, eat it.
So I did.
But though they, the taste wasn't too bad.
They were rather like weak orangeade.
Okay.
But it was the most, I can drink Masato and quantity love it.
Don't you?
I learned to like it.
Masato is this foaming yucca beer that after you've walked miles through the jungle and you arrive at some place.
The best thing now feels.
They meet you with a foaming gourd of this stuff.
And it's chewed by the elderly women in the village.
Let's cook yucca chewed.
And they spit it.
The, the mouth enzymes, the sugars work on it and then it's fermented.
And, and if you really want to gain their confidence, you knock back a huge gourd of this stuff and then call for more.
Yes.
And you have them.
Actually, if you can eat yogurt, it tastes quite good.
And you, you just have to hold to the thought.
I used to repeat as, as, as, as some people repeat their beads and Catholics.
The fermentation process destroys all pathogenic bacteria.
See, over and over and over.
I didn't know that.
So my mantra was, it is good to challenge the immune system.
It is good to challenge the immune system.
Did you ever see, Nicole, the people around La Charrera, the Witoto there, had this really unnerving habit.
There are these large metallic wood borers, buprested beetles, about this long, very brightly colored.
I don't know those beetles.
They make a very loud noise.
And you would be talking to one of these Witoto, and one of these things would fly into the scene and slap against the tree trunk.
And they would, without breaking stride, reach out, grab this thing, wrench the soft parts out of it.
Did you go to that village called Jarroka Mena?
No.
I was there.
I was tied down by this sick Indian who had been bitten by a snake.
Oh, that's right.
And I couldn't, I was, and then I was only there a few days because I had been waiting for weeks for a chance to get off that bloody Putumaya River.
And when I found I couldn't get to the, to the wild Witotos I wanted to get to from there, then I just wanted to get out.
I understand.
Because I was a little tired of the flowers.
Well, actually La Choeva is not bad.
No, it's on the month day.
And the nuns were gone.
You know, the mother superior had quite a history.
She was famous in Ecuador.
Tell me.
She had, well, there's a tribe, I can't think of that name.
There was a tribe, a quite powerful tribe, right on the highway to Ambato.
They had a big on, a big village.
And they wanted to put the highway through.
And the Ecuadorian government had to treat with the Minister of Public Affairs and Construction of the tribe
before he could put the highway through.
And those Indians, the Ecuadorian government has been very decent to its Indians.
And they were allowed to live there in their own way.
They didn't let white people in very much.
Very rarely let them in.
And, but they had, they were very orderly.
They did good weaving.
They were sort of like those of arrows in their character.
And they brought in their padiers.
They were good farmers.
They were good, a good community, orderly and decent.
And they were left alone.
They did not welcome visits.
Well, three nuns and a bishop decided to, the church decided to Christianize them.
So they went in.
And at first they were treated with great reserve.
They, they went in to stay three months only.
It was the Salisakas.
What's the tribe?
The tribe.
So they, the Salisakas did not, they were not a murderous tribe.
They were not a killer tribe.
But they were very reserved.
And very strong.
And they would, they had been, when people came in, they would simply pick them up and
throw them out.
Well, they couldn't, they didn't do that with the bishop and the nuns.
So, everyone, nothing was heard from them.
And then they came out and returned because they said they were going to stay three months
in the meantime.
The nuns had been taking care of the sick.
They made a sort of hospital.
They had, they made, they taught new ways of weaving and a lot of useful things.
And so, they went back to, they went back to Quito and stayed there, the capital.
And after a couple of weeks, a delegation of Salisakas came and they called on the Minister
of the Interior, who was the only one they'd ever heard about.
And they, like the Secretary of the Interior.
And they asked him, they said to him, we want to buy the nuns.
We will give you so much.
And he said, well, he couldn't sell them the nuns.
You couldn't buy a nun.
They thought he was trying to put up the prize.
So, they kept offering more and more.
And they were very prosperous people.
And finally, they, they finally got it explained to them.
Then they went to the President, who at that time was Gallo Plaza, who was very amiable about,
very interested in Indians and very decent guy.
And he finally explained to them that if they went to the people nunsio, whoever was the head
of the Catholic outfit there, I guess an archbishop, they would, they might be able to arrange.
They couldn't buy them, but they would come.
And so they did it.
And she was the one, she was the nun.
The mother superior at La Torreira was the one who led the nuns in first.
She was in charge of the first three.
I wonder if it was the same nun that was there when I was there, because she was very, a presence for sure.
I remember that.
A quiet, charming woman who had probably been quite beautiful in her youth.
Yes, if any of you are interested in the lower Putumayo, or the history of the rubber boom,
or the real deep psychology of this area that we talk about,
this book by Michael Taussig called Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man is absolutely...
I don't know that.
It's an eye-opener.
I mean, this guy is not particularly one of us, in the sense that he was a Marxist, a labor organizer.
His tack was not spiritual.
What was he doing there?
He went to Colombia as a labor organizer, and did that for years before he got interested in Yahé,
as they call Ayahuasca in Colombia.
And he went to the lower Putumayo, to the valley of the Sibundoy,
and reports on the history of it in horrific terms, and La Torreira figures in all of that.
It was dreadful.
And also talks about his own experiences with contemporary shamans,
many of whom I'm sure Nicole knew them.
I certainly knew them.
Did you know that guy, Don Apollinaire, who lived near Florencia, that was Eduardo's friend?
Yeah, I met him.
But I met him.
I think he was in Leticia, briefly.
And Don Francisco, who was his friend.
Anyway, legendary guys.
What's the name again?
The name of the book is Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man, by Michael Taussig.
Colonial.
It's University of Chicago Press, and just eye-opening book needs to be read,
will not be read by many people, but quite a masterpiece, I thought.
T-A-U-S-S-I-G.
T-A-U-S-I-G.
Other questions or issues?
Yeah.
Any of those tribes to speak for not being defoliated in the drum war?
I am sorry to say that most of the people, most of them have been absorbed into the drug
culture, into the drug bending.
They are now, they have been quite corrupted in the first place.
To them, coca has been something you grow.
They grow it for the cocaineros.
Well, why not?
Because they've always grown it.
And then, they get a lot of money, which is very bad for them.
And they lose all sense of responsibility.
They become drunk so easily.
It's a strange thing that the American Indian, too, takes the alcohol.
You see, in their native setting, in their original culture, one of the strange things about
South American indigenous people was that there were no alcoholists and no drug addicts,
at least in most of the tribes, most of South America.
It's simply unknown, and most anthropologists will tell you this.
And I was asked to attend a meeting of, what was it, the something or other, it was years ago,
some psychiatric organization to, they wanted to know, they called me and said,
we want you to tell us how the Indians handled alcoholism and drug abuse.
And I said, they don't handle it at all because I've got it.
And then they said, you've got to come now, you've got to come.
Well, the answer did not please them at all, because the answer is discipline.
And that was not particularly fashionable with the psychiatric outfit.
And you see, what happens is if a man, for drug abuse, you have too much respect for the ayahuasca,
or whatever they're using.
For the mother, the mother of the plant will get even if you're treated disrespectfully.
And anyway, it doesn't do any harm to use it.
And as for alcohol, they drink a certain amount of masata, which is alcoholic, mildly, every day,
first thing in the morning.
It's part of their food.
They drink about the same amount that the average French family would drink of wine,
and in much the same sense, much the same purpose.
And so, if a mayor, they're also, nobody is exempt from a great deal of hard physical labor.
The hunting is hard.
The house building, everybody must participate in.
It doesn't matter if you're the chiefs, the witch doctor, whatever.
You do it.
You work with the rest of them.
And if a man's loaded, well, he's not going to show up for work.
He's not, or if he does, he's going to be pretty sloppy at it.
And also, you may be at war with the tribe next door.
You can't afford to have drunks wandering around.
And so, if, on a very few rare occasions, someone has done too much drinking habitually,
the first thing they'll do is, the older men of the tribe,
because the political structure is very weak in the Peruvian tribes at least,
will get together, and they will call them on the carpet and say,
you don't do this anymore.
You're going to work.
You're not doing your work properly.
No more Masato.
Stop it.
And he will stop.
Or if he doesn't, then the next step is everybody laughs at him in points.
And that, what will people say, is terribly important.
When you have no possessions to make you proud, you have only what you are.
And the respect of your fellow men is perhaps the most valuable thing you can have.
So they don't, that hurts badly.
But if he really doesn't straighten himself out, then there's another meeting, and they say, get out.
And he is forced to leave the tribe under bane of death.
He has to go off and live alone in the jungle by himself, and he will certainly die.
Something will eat him, because one man alone cannot survive anywhere.
So they don't have alcohol.
And that is one of the very few things that people don't seem to know yet.
Still not have authenticity.
It is quite different now.
Now that, in the first place, they didn't have spirits.
They didn't have Aguardiente, which is a native rum of very horrible, usually pretty awful stuff.
Distilled.
Distilled cane juice.
And now, especially with the availability of more money, you are finding real drunks amongst the tribes.
Because the tribes are going to coca.
They get very big pay for it.
And they lose interest in the fact that they have become sort of outcasts to a lot of other tribes.
And a lot of them turn into drugs too bad.
What is it?
The same people that use psychedelics at one time are now...
Yes.
But, when you talk about the experiments with LSD, how it helped with people that were in...
Well, I don't think ayahuasca works quite like LSD.
It's not so easily available to them.
Right.
Although, there were amazing cures, you know, instant cures on ayahuasca.
I mean, sometimes they had to do with psychiatric insight.
I mean, I remember one night, this woman came to the meeting.
She was beautiful.
And she had this voice.
I mean, it was a supernatural voice.
It was just hard to believe.
Her name was Slinga.
And she had a stomach problem.
And we got out in there, into the trip.
And she was complaining about her stomach problem.
And Don Fidel listened to all this.
And finally he said, you're having an affair with a man.
And your husband doesn't know.
And this is the cause of your stomach problem.
And she broke down into tears and said, yes, it was so, and so forth and so on.
So, he was able somehow to discern, you know, where she was coming from.
It isn't always like that, but sometimes it is.
If you've taken a psychedelic, it doesn't prepare you.
I mean, you don't see what the evil elements are of something that's not related.
I mean, when alcohol gets into the culture.
Well, in the case of these experiments with alcoholics, they were already diagnosed severe alcoholics
and had voluntarily entered this experimental treatment program.
So, they had, to that degree, already made the commitment to sobriety.
They were in a treatment program.
I don't think it would work for everyone.
But I think, you know, in the hands of a skilled psychotherapist, you can make amazing strides
against habitual behavior of every sort.
Yes, and the ayahuasca thing, it's a totally different part of the culture, really.
And the drunks, well, I don't think they go in for it much.
No, and the surest sign you have a bad ayahuasca on your hand is if you have a drunk on your hands.
Yes.
I mean, a drunk, you shouldn't even bother.
There doesn't seem to be any overlap.
Yeah.
Could you comment on the Datura plant and its role in shaping the metaphysics of Hinduism?
Oh, of Hinduism.
Well, I'm not really qualified to talk to that.
I mean, Datura is used by sadhus to this day.
In Benares, you will see in the gutter, the broken open pods.
Years ago, I lived in Bodanath before there was pavement to it in the Nepal Valley.
And on full moon nights, the people would lock all the doors on the lower floors of the houses.
And these sadhus would come into town naked with their Shiva tridents in the middle of the night and attempt to break into the stores and stuff, intoxicated on Datura.
It's very difficult to keep control of that.
It's a kind of, I don't consider it a psychedelic.
The best description is deliriant.
It's a kind of delirious frenzy where your awareness of what's going on seems to extend no more than about five seconds into the past.
And you don't know where you are or how you got there, but you're going full tilt.
No, I've had a lot of, you know, my focus is fairly narrow.
I've tried a lot of things, but many of them only a couple of times because they weren't doing what I wanted them to do.
Datura is dangerous.
In that image of the dancing Shiva, the Shiva Nataraj, it's the Datura plant that's up there in the crown of his hand.
Is it?
I know the Shiva Nataraj very well.
Yeah.
That's one of the things up there in the crown.
The Datura magics that seem to me to work the best are not when you go for a full-on crazed intoxication by eating the root or eating the seeds or something,
but how about if you just take a flower and wad it up and squeeze one drop out of it onto the middle of your forehead before sleeping at night?
Yes.
Or put a flower.
Someone, a friend of mine, claimed that the way you take Datura is you plant it by your bedroom window and then you leave your bedroom window open at night.
I've also been told that if you put it under your pillow you will sleep beautifully.
It isn't true.
I tried it.
Well, let's see.
We're down here after five o'clock.
Why don't we take one more question, if there is one, and then, Alan, did you have something?
You changed your mind?
Anybody?
Yeah.
Of ayahuasca?
Of ayahuasca.
Well, you take it so rarely that I don't think you build a tolerance, no.
I mean, taking it once a week is taking it a lot.
You know, I mean, it really, it's...
Even the shamans tell them take it more than twice a week.
The one I knew who took it the most took it twice a week.
I don't think you build tolerance.
You see, maybe this is a good point to end on.
Another really interesting thing about ayahuasca that distinguishes it from all other psychedelics
is that the two things which it runs on, beta-carbolines as MAO inhibitors and DMT to fuel the visions,
are both human metabolites on the natch.
You have both in your brain all the time anyway.
Granted, not in such radical concentrations, but nevertheless, they're there.
So, consequently, the brain is very well able to deactivate and harmless, turn ayahuasca
in the brain into harmless by-products.
So, it's a very mild thing in that sense.
It's the only strong plant hallucinogen I know where you can actually...
say you feel better the day after you took it than if you hadn't taken it. You should know most of these things
there's an energy debt and a depletion
But this is not true with ayahuasca. It actually carries you up to a higher energy level and leaves you there
forever as far as anybody can figure out and this is quite amazing and if you
Ratchet yourself slowly you enter into I think this place that these dieters are probing
This place where you know self is perceived as world world is perceived as self all action is appropriate
Everything just unfolds with this kind of magnetic intensity
So I like to think of ayahuasca as merely a shift in the natural
chemistry of the brain rather than an actual encounter with an exogenous alkaloid
Okay, well, thank you very much. Your attention to these details is very gratifying. This is not easy stuff
We'll be back this evening. Hopefully with something a little lighter. Thank you
And thank you, Nicole. You're good. I thank the indulgence of the audience. The audience is intelligent
Good morning try to move this along and maybe get a kind of
Consensus there's no closure, but maybe consensus and
And then we'll talk together and and answer questions
We're sort of over the hump here this morning the general layout of the thing is now clear
The idea is that you should now begin to self-direct it so you get input on
On whatever issues are outstanding for you in all of this
I
Thought this morning. I would just talk a little bit about
my view of
of
time and the planetary crisis the historical crisis and
Relate all this back to the ecological crisis
Some people someone in fact this morning asked me about
What did I think about the large number of occult?
prophecies
About the approach of some great
phase transition in the life of humanity
Either we are about to experience the glory or be contacted by benevolent extraterrestrials or
Or the coming of the buddha matreya is hailed as just around the corner
Well, rationalism just rejects all this stuff as the fantasy of a
Paranoid streak in the collective imagination
But it's interesting how many
Psychedelic travelers
Return with maps that suggest that there is some immense
perturbation
Ahead of us in time and
Since my whole shtick is about
Stressing the primacy of experience the primacy of intuition
Intuition I think we have to at least
Take seriously and as
Phenomenologists this
Testimony this persistent intuition of an approaching transform
On one level it doesn't appear
Irrational at all
Because we can look around us in the world and see the acceleration of all kinds of tendencies
The density the rising density of population
The rising strain on the availability of
Minerals and petrochemical fuels and this sort of thing the increasing density of electromagnetic
Magnetic radiation from human-generated sources the increasing density of mutagens in the environment
The increasing availability of information of all sorts on all topics the factor that I indicated yesterday as being behind the psychedelic revolution
Well, what are we to make of this process of
intensification?
Coalescence
Concrescence knitting together that seems to characterize both
The natural and the human world it obviously cannot be propagated infinitely
Into the future before all these factors become asymptotic and
Can't can't be imaged anymore I mean at the rate at which we are releasing energy
And accelerating availability of information these things will become infinite sometime after the turn of the century
Well, what does that mean and why does the intuition of it so haunt?
the fantasy of Western religion and the psychedelic experience and to answer this question I have sort of had to I
don't know whether I
Underwent a conversion away from rationalism or a reconversion back to
Scholasticism but you know keep your eyes open on this one because I may be leading you down the primrose path
Nevertheless and nevertheless it seems to me what we need is a 12-gauge shotgun
No, I'm kidding
My friend Ralph Abraham is a proponent of this school of mathematics called
Chaotic attractors or dynamics and this is the notion that many
Many processes are not pushed from behind by the momentum of
Causuistry as in the Nord ordinary Newtonian model of process
But that there are what he calls attractors or
Basins of attraction and these are things which lead processes forward
For instance a
Somewhat trivial example would be if we had a large bowl and a marble and every time we release the marble up near the rim of the bowl
We would notice that it unfailingly
Rolled to the bottom of the bowl and located itself somewhere near the center of the bottom of the bowl
We could say that the bottom of the bowl acts as a basin of attraction
Attraction for the marble in other words the marble finds its most
That its energy state is most at equilibrium when it locates itself in the trough of the bowl
So there is a way of analyzing processes to see them as though they were led rather than pushed
And I think it's fruitful to see human history
History this way you see what we deny as a culture
as a culture of
Materialist positivist reductionists is the presence of spirit in the world in ourselves
Or in nature and so
Western science is very concerned to deny what is called telos
Telos telos is a greek term for purpose
purpose the same idea as the attractor that I was trying if you have a target if you're driving a car toward a goal
The goal is your telos it decides how you will steer the car
Well, it has been for the past hundred and fifty years extremely fashionable in sociology and biology
because of Darwin to deny telos in nature to say that you know any apparent order in nature is made up of
the disorder of random mutation
meeting the disorder of natural selective
Processes and these two streams of converging disorder create a kind of apparent or virtual order which is an illusion
This is the orthodox theory and when you take this darwinism and put it into historical
theory
Theory of human processes in time
You get the modern position in academic philosophy about history
Which is that it is and the official phrase is trendlessly fluctuating?
That's what we're asked to believe we are embedded in a
A ten-thousand-year-old process of trendless fluctuation in
Mathematics this is called a random walk
It means you just go over here a few steps and then you go this way and then you go about you're like a drunk
Lurching around in this face space and this is the highest vision of human purpose that the
reductionist vision can offer well what the intuition of religion is
especially Western religion and I wouldn't even bother to mention it except that it also is the strong intuition of a lot of
psychedelic experience that
There is some kind of a tractor in the historical face space
There is something which is drawing everything toward it
It's like a higher dimensional entity that casts an enormous shadow
Over the human landscape so that you know at sitting around
Campfires fifty thousand years ago people felt this vague
tug toward
Organization order cognitive activity epigenetic activity epigenetic activity means coding stuff not in your genes
But in dance gesture ritual and ultimately in clay and on paper and
in electronic
storage methods this
proliferation of complexity is a
A response to and an anticipation of this
Transcendental object at the end of historical process you see if it weren't for our presence on this planet
Even modern science at its present primitive state could give a fairly good accounting of what's going on
that out of
Out of complex polymers arose
Super complex polymers which were self-replicating and that was life and then you have an animal population
But the fly in the ointment of this rational model of reality is
Ourselves we are clearly
Imbued with a higher dimension
Dimension which we call spirit in a way that ordinary matter
When imbued with a higher dimension is called life in other words we represent a different ontological level in the career of
Organization because we hope we despair
We plan we remember and we misremember
You know we lie we fabricate we delude ourselves and other be all of these things are uniquely human functions
well, I I think that shamanism
Which is the focus of our concern here is a kind of anticipating of the whole pattern and
That this is really the way to think about shamanism when thinking of it as a force
That can steady and complete an individual human life the shamans are not in history in
The same way that we are by having access to this higher dimension
That they go to in their trance states and their states of intoxication
They gain a fractal overview on process on life
I mean after all isn't that what we mean by wisdom is
wisdom is
Understanding how things really work how they really work love affairs the raising of children the managing of corporations the prosecution of wars
How do these things really work?
Not the deluded and fumbling attempts of the proponents of this or that school
But a Taoistic insight into the actual appropriate dynamics of everything
Well, how do you gain that kind of an insight it make the
Answer is you must have a superior model
You must have a superior model now if you believe you know that the world is composed of three levels
And they are held up on the back of a woman who sits on a giant tortoise who floats in space
This is a model of the universe it can take you a certain distance
But what what model of the universe can actually offer?
Reassurance in all kinds of situations. Well strangely enough
I think that these models come from the frontiers of mathematics
That it is not mere coincidence that the
Storms of visionary hallucination
That the shaman encounters are very much like the storms of form and color
That are spewed out of a Cray 3 supercomputer
When it conducts a thousand iterations per second
Inside the Julius set or the Mantlebrot set or one of these other compound complex
Mathematical objects that we are beginning to see
You see mathematics up to this point has been a computational science
Because mathematicians used pencils and blackboards and chalk to describe their objects and
Consequently an excruciatingly
Difficult vocabulary
Kept most people from appreciating what mathematics was about
Now the computer is to modern mathematics
Like the telescope was to 16th century astronomy
The computer becomes a window into
Domains of hyper complex
Computability that previously could barely even be conceived
But that now at a rate of millions
Approaching billions of iterations per second
Ralph works on the MMPP machine the multiple parallel processing
Machine at Goddard space flight center
It does 800 mega flops per second
800 million floating point decimal calculations per second
Well, you can dream dreams with a machine like that and strangely enough
At the edge of the super technology of the dominator culture at Goddard space flight center with guys
High priests standing around in white coats when you get it up and running
What you see is what an ayahuasca shaman sees on a Saturday night in the Amazon
You see that you are navigating through a complex higher dimensional phase space
Where by varying the inputs of amplitude and frequency in one case using an electronic box in the other case using the human voice?
You sing your way through a mathematical domain
Which is a higher resonance of?
of reality and you learn how the world really works how things happen well
How the hell do they happen well on the simplest level they happen like this they have a beginning?
They have a middle and then they die away as an oscillation a damped oscillation now this
Simple truth to which we all nod dissent
is in fact the hardest thing the hardest swallow there is
For the dominator ego and the dominator personality
Because what this simple truth says things come into being they achieve their
inflorescence and they fade away is as Heraclitus put it
Pantithrae all flows
nothing lasts
Nothing is saved and this is you know our glory and our agony that you know
The people we love and the people we hate are swept away by time
Empires dynasties
Continents are swept away by time and yet our
Our search for security is cast in the dominator culture as a search for permanence
You know
I want to buy a house
I'd like to get my trust fund functioning a little better
I'd like to pay off x y and z you know a search for permanence
So what we what you do when you do that is you set yourself at war against the cosmos
Which is a heroic stance if you're if you're trying to produce Melvillian opera
Out of your life, you know ahab says in Moby Dick
He's talking to his first mate starbuck who signifies christian right reason and he says he's raving about
Going after the whale and he says
You know we'll chase it over both sides of earth and round perdition's flame
uh... and uh... and starbuck says to seek revenge on a dumb brute seems blasphemy and he says
blasphemy starbuck
Speak not to me of blasphemy. I would strike out the sun if it insulted me
For could it do that then could I do the other since there is ever a sort of fair play
Well, it you know this is locker room talk the notion that there is fair play
between a man and a nearby star is
The finest expression of the dominator ego I can imagine and of course
You know the story of Moby Dick can be read on many levels
But finally it is the story of the submerging of the male ego in the oceans of the unconscious
Born to its destruction and transformation by an encounter with the maternal matrix in the form of the vagina
Dentata of the of the sperm whale and everything that it's symbolized
So I don't think we want to go that way. I don't think we want to set ourselves
Up as the crusaders for permanence
But that means
Softening to the fact of the flow and of the impermanence
Nicole has made the point very eloquently that these people in the Amazon have nothing
The wonderful thing about the Amazon is that nothing lasts
Nothing is worth having. I mean a book forget it
Clothing houses everything is just swept away by the incessant
Recycling of material so all there all that is permanent are values
personality strength honesty decency dignity
These are things which can be erected against the flow and have some hope of permanence
So I think
You know shamanism is a is permission to transcend anxiety
by accepting the transience of all form and this is a
Truth of the universe that cannot be ignored so once it is
integrated
Then it's as though resistance in the electrical circuits that surround your integration into the world begins to fall
You accept that the present moment is the richest
Apex of being that on the downside back into the past
It shades off into memory and its vagaries in the future. It shades off into a
series of adumbrations and anticipations
But I think that the shamans gain this tremendous authenticity
That you feel in their presence the good ones because they have seen
The end they have a model of how process happens and so they don't push and they don't clutch and
then energy
flows through them and our our civilization has to learn this
You know, I think I need to deconstruct and yet every society
Society did it wrong. We all did it wrong
Capitalism it's wonderful that you can get a safety pin at 4 a.m.
Within a half mile of anywhere in the United States and I'm sure the Russians
Wish they had it so good, but is that the be-all and the end-all of cultural values
That you can walk the flora florescent lit to aisles of Kmart and
Congratulate yourself that whether it be gas can sanitary napkin or whatever
It's there waiting for you. I don't think so
I think that we have built in the termination of our world just as surely as the Marxist world
Built in a trip wire into its social mechanism. It's just that we're going to have to pay the piper short
More downstream in a while what's happening
Globally is that the contradictions of all of these social systems are
Rising into evidence when we have lethal ideas the world is haunted by a number of lethal ideas
The hot lethal idea at the moment is crack and you know, we're exhorted
It's terrible eleven-year-old children are apparently the sole source of support for a 14 billion dollar industry
Civilization is going over the edge as a former member of the high church of Rome
I
Feel it's incumbent upon me to point out to you that the the policies of the papacy on population
Are shoving more people into early death disease and degradation than any drug scourge you could imagine and I haven't heard any call for the extradition of the Pope
So, you know, it's just a matter of cultural style and blindness
Where you think the suffering is coming from and who you think is responsible for it?
If we descend into the dominator metaphor and play its game
We're probably going to be snookered because they've had a long long time to figure out all the angles
What I find myself more and more leaning to is
Sharing the meme of the irrelevance of
Conservative institutions
History is not a process for which you ask permission
History is just something you make and then other people pick up the pieces
Henry David Thoreau understood this very well when he wrote his
Famous treatise on civil disobedience
The growth of culture is something that comes out of
The animal body
Rousseau called it the general will
You know man proposes and God disposes
But in the realm of civil polity the people propose the people
Dispose and government is allowed to propose
But that's all and now what we are involved in really is a debate about human nature
Who are we? What are we?
The French cartoonist
Fortunist Mobius put it very well in his book where he asked the question is man good?
This is what we're going to find out and I my feeling is that it isn't decided
yet that it is
You know HG Wells called history a race between education and disaster
Well, you know they're in the home stretch neck and neck. It's clearly going to be
A photo finish, but there is say a responsibility on everyone who sees this
To communicate it to other people and to act upon it
I I think we forget
We all of us what a tiny
Percentage of the human race we represent and how many people are
are
Just so lost in propaganda and unexamined cultural values and you know people are worrying about how to get the next six hundred dollar end table
Or you know just trivia
And yet the world rolls inexorably toward a confrontation
With
Transformation or ruin
How can the the word be spread without just spreading panic?
Well, I think it has to do with empowering this notion of a
Of a planetary process a guy in birth that we are
Midwife to which is a functional role, but not a central role the process is going to happen our job is to ease it to
Reassure the mother reassure the spectators
Help the child bring everything to a calm fruition
But we are ultimately witnesses to the process not its cause and in the in the ethics of the position of witness
We can find I think a place to stand that will allow us to feel responsible and exercise moral responsibility without
without
feeling paralyzed by the magnitude of the task. Things are getting better and
better in every way. I mean, it's a complex process because the world lives
through death. I mean, you can see, if you're an embryologist, that when the
little paddle of the fish-human in the fetus begins to change into a hand, the
way in which the fetus develops is through the sculpting hand of death.
Death carves away tissue, cells are shed into the amniotic fluid, they die, and out
of this process of inward dying, the undifferentiated fish-like fetus turns
into a miniature anticipation of a human being. There is something totally
consuming about the way nature builds life out of death. The Amazon is a
wonderful example of this because the Amazon is the most living place you have
ever seen. And at any given moment, all organic material is bound in living
systems, 95% bound in living systems. You don't find forest floor detritus and
rotting logs and stuff like that in the Amazon. If the leaf falls within minutes
or hours at most, it has been found by leaf cutter ants or some other pathogen
things that begins to return it to the cycle of life. This kind of economy, this
kind of stability through utilization of flow, is the design principle that we have
ignored for several thousand years and that offers a way out. Dynamic equilibrium, an
abandonment of the possibility of closure. Closure is a neurotic and infantile demand to make
upon reality, other people, language. You just have to live in this state of dynamic
disequilibrium, which if sustained long enough and in sufficient taste, becomes a life well lived.
The shaman knows this because they plunge into this realm where everything is
transient flow and interlocking field, where the materiality of the ordinary reality is overcome
by the quantum mechanical, wave mechanical, maternal face behind appearances. And again,
you know, it must be Moby Dick morning. Ahab says, if you would strike, strike through the mask.
It is behind the mask. Reality is a mask because reality enforces this idea of permanence, but not if
carefully examined. Women know this because women see birth, bury the dead, raise the children. They
exist in this domain of flow. But the male dominant ego, because it is transient and has great anxiety
about that refuses this primary intuition. And when I say that the original partnership
society was stabilized through boundary dissolution, that's what I mean. The dissolution of the assumption
of permanence. Me, my existence, my women, my food, my children, my weapons, my land, my this, my that. You know, all of that is seen as a fiction. That's why primitive people are so amused by us and our concerns and our clutching, because they know easy come, easy go.
And if we could learn this one thing. This is what the plants are trying to teach, I think, that the border between life and death, between being and not being, between me being me and me being you, is so trivial and so arbitrary, that it can only be seen as the outer iridescence on the real reality.
within. This is the secret of a happy life, I think. I mean, I certainly don't claim to achieve it. I am fraught with the agonbite of in-wit and the torments of the 42 year old Irish male California heavily mortgaged soul.
But, but this, but I saw it. I saw it. I saw what it was. And what it is, is it's a coming to terms with impermanence. And that gives you authenticity that nothing can take away. And courage, and presence in the moment, and humor, and survivability.
survivability. And if you hold instead to the inviolate pearl of that which cannot be destroyed, everything becomes your enemy. Time becomes your enemy. Space becomes your enemy.
And you are doomed to that Ahab fate. Because, hey, it's bigger than any of us. You can't push the river.
Well, that's just by way of summation, trying to say, you know, what is it the pith essence of shamanism, aside from the colorful cultural forms, the dances, the feats of curing and leisure d'ermain.
Essentially, it all rides, I think, on this vision that all things are impermanent, nothing lasts. All things are in the process of coming to be and passing away, until the last syllable of recorded time.
Well, that was that. Nicole, do you want to try your own summation? This afternoon, I see basically as an opportunity for people to get their final questions answered. So, if you want to make any kind of statement this morning, that would be fine.
Well, I had planned. I rather wanted to, but it doesn't fall. It doesn't matter. To discuss some of the medicinal plants that are available in the jungle, that are disappearing as we cut and slash and burn, and that can do so much if only they are, people will go after them and bring them in, test them,
and put them, and discover how best to use them.
Well, I think you should do that. I think it's good to go from the general to the specific.
Indeed, too.
Hmm?
Yeah, go for it.
Well, there is, I've mentioned several of them, but I've had some peculiar experiences myself, because in the first place, it's very difficult when you have only anecdotal reports.
Or information on plants. You don't know quite what to believe. People exaggerate, and people get a little bit imaginative, because it makes themselves more important. And then, too, I'm peculiarly subject to that, because I haven't gone after things that have been medically tested, scientifically investigated.
I've gone after what isn't known, because, well, the others there let the technicians take over. But the other stuff, the stuff I've been after, is still in the minds and customs of people who are rapidly disappearing.
And who are losing that knowledge, and the knowledge that's kept them alive and remarkably healthy, through, we don't know how many millennia. So, I thought, that's what I want.
Now, to find out how much of it is a highly elaborated report, is about one of the two hardest things are to check diagnosis, which you just about can't do, and to check the truth of the reports of cures.
Because, because there are, we know, of course, that everything from aspirin to cocaine came originally from plants.
But, but, how many of them are just analogues of what we have? How many of the things that I learn about are merely analogues of things we already have, more conveniently available from pharmaceutical outfits?
And how many? And how many do not do the things they are supposed to claim to do? And how many are real? And they're there for us, and we need them badly.
And can do things that we can't do without, well, surgery, like the burn remedies, that, even with a ratio of plastic surgery, can't really be equaled in their efficiency.
So, the first thing I've done always is, if it's in a tribe, that's easier, because you can ask different people different questions that are really the same question, but asked in different ways.
About, did he have white stuff on it? Of course, you say it was infected. You have the remotest idea of what you're talking about. But, did it have a lot of white goo? I'm still on the subject of burns.
A lot like, like the sap with the capinuri on it. Well, that's pretty apt to be pus, and it's pretty apt to be, and pus means infection.
You go about it that way, it's a very long and tiresome process. And then you get it from one person, then you have to get it from another, and then another, and another, and another.
And some of them will say, well, it wasn't much, and some of them will say.
So you do, you do the best you can, and set it aside, something must be investigated.
Like, I've been particularly interested in burns, because it seems to me such a horrible thing, to be terribly disfigured.
And I noticed that you almost never see anything like that in the jungle, and yet they have a lot of fire problems.
I mean, they, in the first day, they clear their land by slash and burning, and somebody's kid's quite frequently falling into something that's on fire.
Or the fire, in many areas, are made, a stove is mud, held together by four logs.
And the fire is built on that, and the fire turns, it's very clay soil, almost everywhere in the Amazon.
And that turns to adobe, and makes a good hard surface to build a fire on.
And, well, we were, I was going up the Nappo, with Norman Farnsworth, who is our leading pharmacognosist,
and a bunch of other scientists, I was taking up to a witoto outfit, friends of mine, because they wanted a jungle expedition.
And we stopped to pick up a friend of mine, who is one of the most knowledgeable people I know in the area of medicinal plants.
And he's a Peruvian gentleman, who married, well, he had a wife in Lima, but he sort of went jungle, had a charming wife in the jungle.
And we got there when their six-month-old baby had just, the day before, crawled into the fire.
The stove on the earthen floor, the place they were living.
And the child's arms, the ventral surface, from wrist to elbow, both arms, was completely without skin.
It was raw red, neat red, neat.
And it's quite a pinkish red.
And the two doctors, the two MDs who were with this immediate said, oh, we'll take care of that.
And he said, no, you don't.
They said, well, we'll do something to stop the pain, let's at least put some, some local anesthetics on it.
He said, does the baby look as if it were in pain?
And the baby was, at that moment, in the arms, had been picked up by one of the scientists, a pharmacologist, who had a bright red beard.
And the baby was laughing himself, laughing and grabbing the beard with both hands.
And they said, well, no, maybe it doesn't hurt him.
And so the, my friend, Godoy his name was, said, well, he would, yes, he'd come along, but he'd just put a dressing on the baby first.
And his wife would keep the dressings going while he was gone.
And he got a good old piece of yucca.
You know, that is the staple food.
It is mania, it is cassava.
It has all sorts of names, but it is the staple food starch of the jungle, the entire Amazon region.
You find it everywhere from Colombia to, through Paraguay down to Argentina, everywhere.
And because it is a very suitable jungle crop, it, from the time it's planted, you have a harvest in six months.
And it's ideal climate and soil for it.
Well, he took a piece of that.
He peeled it and inside there is an, inside the brown peeling, it's a tuber, like potato.
There is a sort of slimy, the inner skin, you might call it.
It's a barstuff thing.
But, uh, so it, uh, he took that and put the, the inner part is gelatinous.
He put that on the baby's arms and bandaged it with good, clean, white bandages.
And we went on up the river.
We were gone eight days exactly.
When we came back, we dropped Godoy off of his house.
We went in to see, and the baby had grown perfect skin.
There was one area I measured, one by two centimeters, where the skin had not yet completely grown back.
The rest here was perfect.
You could not see at all where the, the burner had been.
It was new, it was clean, it was perfect.
No change in texture or color, no borders, no puckering, no anything.
Now that is the most available of all popular, possible medicines.
Of course, you've got to be careful not to get, I think it would be a bad idea to use the one that's full of cyanide.
Some, strangely enough, some yucca has to be cooked to get rid of the cyanide in it,
which is an integral part of it.
And then that's the yucca brava.
And it's the same species.
I've never figured this out.
I'm not a botanist.
They sort of claim they can figure out why.
But that, but it's well known which ones have the poisonous principle and which ones are totally without it.
And I was, I want to be very sure I was the one without, I think.
So that is one of two plants that I know that does exactly that same thing.
Of course, this was a very young baby, a six month old, very healthy baby.
But I assume, I haven't seen another case, that the method doesn't seem to be known, even to the tribes,
in any of the tribes I'm familiar with.
Now that sort of thing could be investigated cheaply.
Did you want to say something, doctor?
That could be investigated so cheaply, so easily.
Why doesn't somebody?
How is that spelled?
Y-U-C-A.
It is the staple food of the cities and the jungle, everywhere except the mountains.
It does not grow in cold climates.
I'm sure you could get it in the...
You can buy it in the Puerto Rican stores.
Oh yes, you can buy it in all the stores.
But you must get an image, a very young tuber.
I was told by my friend, Godoy, it has to be quite a young one.
But it's available anywhere.
Just make sure you don't get the one.
I don't think...
Yeah?
It indicates that sometimes these kind of remedies lose their efficacy
when you take them out of the social, cultural, and psychological environment
or milieu that they were used in.
No.
I haven't found that.
Because I've used several...
I did not believe on myself.
Because I...
Well, there wasn't anything else.
But...
You remember my knees?
Yeah, I do remember.
When the motorcycle hit me in Akita, Terence and Dennis were there at the time.
And...
I got out of it very well.
And...
The thing...
Except that...
All the scabs healed up.
But...
My knees didn't...
Never went back to normal size.
They stayed swollen.
And they got worse.
And worse.
And I just...
And of course they hurt.
But I...
You can ignore things.
I have a high pain threshold.
And...
Uh...
Kept going until...
The left knee began to keep...
Fold up every now and then.
I'd...
Go lurching along like an old drunk.
And...
That was embarrassing.
So...
I went over to see some...
Friends...
In...
An American doctor with them.
And he said...
They said...
Uh-uh.
I can't handle this.
It's got some bad tendon damage in there.
It needs surgery.
And...
Uh...
I'm not a surgeon.
You have to go to Lima.
Well...
I was not trusting any...
Peruvian...
Surgeons at that particular time.
I know one who's very fine...
But he's a neurosurgeon.
And...
The state of medicine...
In that country...
Is not the highest.
And anyway...
Knees are very tricky.
So...
I thought...
Well...
Why not try some of these...
Kooky...
Things that...
My...
Monteraces...
My...
Jungle men...
My...
The people who get plants for me...
Have suggested...
Because they kept saying...
Put...
Capinuri on it.
Capinuri.
So I did.
And...
That's very sticky sap of tree.
And...
The tree is...
It's a...
Rubiesi.
And...
I put it on...
And you're not supposed to get it wet.
You're supposed to let it dry.
Well...
I...
Don't know how you do that to your knees...
And still take a shower a couple of times a day.
As you must do in that climate.
And...
So...
I just...
Put it on fresh each time.
And pretty soon...
The pain stopped very quickly.
I'd put it on...
Put a...
Folded gauze...
Over it with adhesive tape.
And that was all.
And...
They healed up perfectly.
And they're still fine.
And I have no problem.
No pain.
No swelling.
No whatever.
And it doesn't make sense.
But I'm very glad it works.
And then...
That...
That to me...
Is fairly good proof.
That it works.
I was preparing to go to the states for surgery.
Because I was quite certain there was no use in doing this.
But...
Try it.
And so...
I've had several things that worked like that.
There is for example...
A thing that dissolves kidney stones.
I haven't had kidney stones.
But...
Kidney stones and gallstones.
Though they're not identical...
Chemically.
It works perfectly...
For both of them.
And...
My doctor...
In Iquitos...
When I was...
First there...
I had a doctor who was born in Iquitos.
He was a very good doctor.
And...
He'd been educated in Argentina, I believe.
Of course.
And...
I had a hot gallbladder.
I went to him.
And...
He...
After...
When he saw the x-rays he said...
Oh...
Gee...
It's a shame.
It's a pity you haven't got gallstones.
If you had gallstones...
We could just get rid of them like that.
With...
Such...
This plant.
Chanca piedra they call it.
Which means...
Incidentally...
Chanca...
Is Quechua.
That's the language of the...
Of the Inca.
For...
Smash...
Shatter.
And piedra of course is rock.
And...
Many times you find the names...
Of things are quite indicative of their...
Use.
But the use has been forgotten.
For example...
Amor Seiko.
Seiko means dry.
And I doubt that there's anyone who doesn't know what Amor means.
And...
That's a contraceptive.
But there's not...
It's only widely known by tribes.
About five tribes I know use it.
I know that the Yilk and the Kampa...
The Yawa and the Kampa...
And the Shipibo...
The Konebo...
And the Pirol use it.
So...
Well...
Anyway...
I managed to get the...
Well...
Actually I healed the...
Uh...
Gallbladder.
It was the first...
Medicine plant I'd ever had.
Which is Boldo.
Which has been...
Which is investigated...
I think it was about 1920 or 30...
No...
20...
By Johns Hopkins.
And was put on the market.
Officially.
But it doesn't come from the jungle.
It comes from Chile.
It goes only in Chile oddly enough.
Makes you perfectly delicious tea.
And it's great for...
All bladder infections.
But it doesn't dissolve stones.
And the other really does.
Because my doctor told me that he had had...
Some...
In the neighborhood of a hundred...
I think it was 93 cases...
That he had found...
Utterly successful in curing.
And...
Also...
A man came to visit me from Germany.
In Germany they have a far more...
Generous...
Attitude toward medicinal plants.
There is great interest that...
Germans are not known for being...
Bad scientists.
They're pretty good at their stuff.
Especially in pharmacology.
But...
They are you...
They allow the sale...
Of medicinal plants...
And the prescription of them...
Very freely.
And...
This man had a store...
For plant medicines.
And he had come to Peru...
To get another shipment...
A Chanka Pedra.
He told me...
That he had had...
It for sale for one year.
He'd used up all he had.
And that he had asked the people...
Who came to him and bought it...
To give him reports...
On progress.
And on...
On a...
Well a final result.
And...
He had had 94%...
Reports of perfect cures.
And the other six were people...
Who never came back...
To tell him.
Now that...
That is about...
Could be grown very easily...
In the United States.
I understand that laser...
Actually takes care of those things...
Very well.
But not...
At the present time...
It's still...
Quite...
Very expensive.
This stuff...
Is a weed that grows everywhere...
Very easily.
You know it.
And...
Just grow it...
In any sunny...
Warm place.
California would be perfect.
Where would you find...
Seedlings for that?
Could you buy those...
In Southern California?
Well you could...
No you can't buy...
Now...
But these things...
That's the point I'm making...
These things must be...
Brought in.
They really need to be brought in.
And...
Incidentally...
The Capinuri...
Does the same thing...
As in Syria...
You know the truth one?
Mm-hmm.
Well that...
That...
I first learned about...
From a policeman...
A jungle policeman...
The police of Peru...
Used to be...
Excellent...
Times have changed a bit...
I'm afraid...
But...
The...
That jungle police...
Was composed of...
Men who had grown up...
In that environment...
Who knew their way around...
Knew what to do...
Knew how to track...
Knew all that...
And what's more...
They usually took an Indian with them...
To...
To check their tracking...
Because nobody can do it like the Indians...
And they were going after...
An escaped murder...
When he developed...
A frightful toothache...
And he had a camper tracker with him...
And the camper said...
Oh that's alright...
I'll fix it...
And he went off...
And came back about...
Ten minutes later...
With a leaf...
On which he had a little...
Bit of...
Very sticky...
Gooey...
Yellow white substance...
Sap of a tree...
And he said...
Now...
And in his hand...
He had a piece of capoc...
Which grows in the jungle...
And he said...
You take a little piece of capoc...
Cotton is what...
Because they have no cotton there...
Didn't have any cotton there...
Cotton does grow wild in Peru...
But not there...
And...
He...
Dipped it in...
He said...
Now be very careful...
To put this in...
The cavity...
And don't let it touch...
Another tooth...
Because...
He said...
It will take the tooth out...
And it will...
Not...
If...
If it hits a tooth next to it...
Healthy one...
It will take that out too...
And so he put it in...
And it...
He said...
It just...
The pain stopped immediately...
It just felt very...
Very cold...
And in the next...
During the next 30 days...
The tooth gradually broke up...
And...
Came out in little bits...
He had no infection...
No bleeding...
No pain...
But the tooth is gone...
I had thought originally...
That this meant the roots went too...
They don't...
Because a dentist...
From Atlanta...
Dr. Hodges...
I've forgotten his first name...
Ben Hodges...
He was a really...
Very good...
dentist there came down and he was interested in this and he did a trip up
the rivers examining people who had removed because lots of the people the
mestizos and Indians know this and lots of people had teeth out that way and he
examined some many that had been done years before there was never an
infection he couldn't figure out why because the roots still there but he
found no trouble at all now that is a very handy way to get rid of a tooth I
much prefer it to root canal I tried it it didn't work but that was but we had
kept the stuff in the refrigerator for a week first it apparently has to be used
fresh and I should imagine your only way to get it up for testing in the States
would be by freezing by freezing that ought I should think to bring it up
without too much change that those are two of the more generally popular things but
there are others it is chlorophylla tinctoria c-h-l-o-r-o-p-h-o-r-i-a t-i-n-c-t-o-r-i-a and it is I think a euphorbia
c yeah I'm fairly sure it is but you can always find a family if you've got the genus
and then another of the things that urgently needs development now is the
treatment for hepatitis that Dr. Walter Lewis and his wife Dr. Memory Elvin Lewis
who is a very strong feminist and must be mentioned in all his work have found
that that the roots they have confirmed what is generally known in some
populations there that the roots of certain palm trees there are two that we
know about for sure will they can they make an infusion of them you know make a
tea of it actually they boil them a little while that's a decoction not an
infusion and drink the the the broth and that will very nicely do away with
hepatitis and Dr. Lewis found it very efficient for hepatitis B as well as the
more ordinary and easily treated types now that is the root of uterpia edulis which
is a palm tree and that is they have found that the Aishwara Indians who were
visited by Dr. Lewis had were using and getting the same results with because it's a
lot of hepatitis another palm tree it's an Iriartia that's called Pornatacea and
uh it it he suspects that most of the palms in that area at least the variety the species that grow there the genesis that grow there
genera that grow there will do the same thing that hasn't been tested but he has found them
he's a very good phytochemist and he found them chemically very similar now those
there's no reason why those things can't be broken down chemically and and tested
that because things like palm roots Chanka Piedra the one for gallstones is very
easy a very effective drive and so are the palm roots those are sold in the market in
Lima they're very popular there because they've got to be quite well known then
there let's see what are the diseases there for eyes I was going up Rio Tigre on my way far in
and a man a settler stood up standing on the bank jumped up and down kept waving and waving we pulled over to see it was the matter and he when we got close I have never seen a more hideous pair of eyes one of them was dripping pus and blood the other was just swollen and had some pus in it it wasn't running down his face
and they were in very bad shape he had been cutting clearing land and he got some sawdust sawdust sawgrass whipped across his eyes cutting the corneas which got very badly infected
jungle's a great place for infections well he I offered immediate I had got a pen both penicillin and tetracycline ointments and also even old faithful yellow oxide of mercury in the last you know if you couldn't get anything else and he'd had all of those he got them from a military base
there was just up the river and from a trader who came along who had the yellow oxide of mercury at the military base he got the antibiotics well they hadn't the antibiotics had rather helped the eye that looked not quite so bad the other one nothing had helped and so I didn't know what to do my boatman said but look amigo you're standing on the remedy
and he was standing on some it's a grass and goes about so high and he said you take this and you pull it apart at the node and then you run your fingernail down and out will come one crystalline drop of sap the juice of that grass you put it in put two drops of that in each eye
in each eye every morning and every night and we'll find you cured when we get back and so the man thanked him and he said he would do it and I you know I never heard of that and so sure enough when he came back two weeks later
it was exactly two weeks too he I know because I had to pay the boatman by the way
he was jumping up and down and waving and he was the happiest guy you ever saw he said my eye look look look
well one eye look I have seen more bloodshot eyes on people with a bad hangover and the other one it was still a little inflamed the one that had been so very bad but there was no pus no blood
it was obviously the treatment was a success and the infection was gone and the healing was progressing rapidly and well on its way at the on the right eye was no actually it was the left out from there
was perfect not quite perfect but I mean there was except for being a bloodshot and the other one
the sweaters and yucca and everything grew there gave us a very unhappy chicken which went all the way back to
Iquitos with us and but you know a chicken's a valuable gift in there because chickens are not native
so when we got got going I said you told me you didn't know anything about plant medicines how come
he said well I didn't know it would cure that but I thought it was because it cured me of carnosidad and if it'll cure carnosidad it'll cure anything
and carnosidad it's what they call pterygium which is very common in tropical countries it is actually technically I'm told it's a benign tumor that begins at the tear duct and gradually spreads
it makes a layer about a millimeter thick and until it covers the whole eye and you're blind
it is people who can afford it can have it removed by surgery which is expensive and in Peru very frequently means the loss of an eye
but if you don't have radiation afterwards it'll be back in a couple of years and you have to go through it all again
and so my boatman whose name is Natividad told me that he had had pterygium he'd had carnosidad so badly that he was beginning not to be able to see
and he went to know he was living in Brazil and an old woman there told him to use this treatment he said it took him two months
but look at him now well look at him now he didn't have a trace of anything wrong with his eyes
it had cleared it and cured it well that I think might just might in many cases
do away with the need for corneal transplants if it's the right kind of injury
what do you think doctor?
you found a cure for pterygia, a permanent cure for pterygia
oh I know two or three
well I know two or three
the Indians use them
there there there is a cypress a which is a sedge but it it's a scleria
that there is but it takes those things take a long time
they for pterygium that the treatment must be given every day it doesn't hurt
in fact the man on the shore told me that it had felt very cooling when he put it in
very soothing
and that takes two months for pterygium
six weeks to two months
everyday treatment
but in the case of infection it seems to work very much more rapidly
yes
please interrupt me anytime to ask a question I like it
the contraceptive herbology
yes
you had found out about different herbs that have very different kinds of effects
like I remember she was telling me one herb you could take it and a couple years later
it would keep the woman infertile for two years
yes
another one if they took it it would be irreversible for a long time
and I've never heard you talk about it I'm wondering if you could tell me a little bit about her
well there are a number of them
you see
although
the
these people have been using oral contraceptives
since time immemorial nobody knows how many centuries
we've got them into circulation in 1960
and
but before
earlier
when Carsten wrote an article about it
they called him a
crazy
or a liar or something
because
they said nothing taken by mouth
can
cause a woman to become sterile
well
if time has moved on
and
the Indians were right
so
there are a number of these cases
I think I told you the other day about the
Kampu
missionary
the missionary with the Kampus
this was before there were oral contraceptives on the market
or any publicity about them
that I'd heard of it at least
and
that's a Bauhenia
if I remember correctly it has to be taken
it's birth taken immediately after giving birth
that's what the
I met a woman
who was
whose husband was running a very large
cattle ranch in the jungle
a very large fundo
where they made cattle
they made
made cattle
they had cattle
they had
they raised
pigs
and they raised
sugar cane
and they had
a distillery for making a guadiente
they had
it was a big outfit
there was a lot of money behind it
and
she
she and her husband ran it
well she told me that when she was very very young
she got married
I think she was 14
it's not unusual
and she went to live with her husband on his property
in Kampu country
Kampu is a great tribe
they're great warriors
great trackers
very lively people
and smart
and
she was
she had a child
very shortly after marriage
I think nine months and two days or something
and
she had a very difficult birth
of course she'd never been in the jungle before for one thing
she was reacting rather badly to the climate
and
the Indian
midwife
who attended her
said
you can't have another child for three years
because you'll die if you do
the doctors of course
and
she said
but I can't leave my husband
I don't want to leave my husband
she said
what should you do
leave your husband
give you some medicine
so they did
and the medicine
that particular medicine
is one
to my mind
is
a magnificent example
of
freedom
for
freeing women
it
stops menstruation
for three years
without any evil effects at all
and
at the end of those three years
you just don't menstruate
it
brings about an artificial menopause
but no menopause symptoms
symptoms
and
so then
at the end of the three years
she got pregnant almost immediately
and then she had in rapid succession
I think it was
in
ten years
she had eleven children
so now with a total of around a dozen
she decided that was enough
and she took the same
herb again
and she said
she had been taking it
every
three years
since
in that she was at the time
I met her
forty-nine
she said she didn't think
she was going to have to take it again
because she thought she would probably have menopause
and
but she took it every three years
the children
every one of the twelve
was alive and healthy
and
they have
they were grown up by now
and
they had their own families
and her daughters
and daughter-in-laws
controlled their
their
fertility
in the same way
had children when they wanted them
the plant is a desmodium
now there are four
species I know of
there's desmodium canum
is the one I know best
there's
desmodium
is
I can't remember
the canum
is the one
oh yes ascendens
and axillary
and then there's one other
well I don't know which of the species
I'm not certain which
of the species it is
but because I've since learned
that the camper
beside the camper
the
yaguas
shipibos
konibos
and
kokama
all
say this is good stuff
and they use it
yes it is
but I
that's one of the sedges I had
that they
that
we have
finally decided
the active principle is cause
or is
the origin
the active principle is
a fungus
that grows in the plant
and
it's practically impossible to determine
unless you
are
a member of the tribe
and have grown that
they've handed it down from generation to generation
a plot of abortifacients
a plot
of
those which are supposed to enhance fertility
a plot which eases childhood
and believe me that was great
because I had a friend
who was a
school teacher
I met her in a little village
I stopped at
and she was teaching
a
Shipibo village
and she took
this is my
she was my first
link with the Shipibo tribe
they're the ones who make that beautiful
those beautiful textiles you showed last night
mm-hmm
and
she
the
I went to stay with her
at the tribe
and they got to be great chums
with the
all the Indians
I recorded their singing
which is beautiful
and
one of the songs I love best
it's the women's songs are very plaintive
and haunting
at
that very high pure voices
but beautifully flexible
and
very true
and very soft
and this one song was particularly moving
it was the kind of thing you kept going through your head
and
I
thought it's very hard to get them interpreted
because they're sung in an archaic language
and
I finally found somebody who had interpreted it
and what they were saying was
let's us gals have a few drinks
and
then that's smarter than it sounds
because
at fiestas
I learned
when they sing that song
pappy can't have a drink
the men have to stop drinking
when the women start
when the women drink
they never drink very much
they're too conscious of their children and taking care of them and
usually they're nursing one or two
and
so they
but when they
so when things are getting a little rough
very often they will sing this song and they'll have a bit of masato
and the men just have to sit there
well
she had gone
and
I went back to visit two years later
because I had become great chums with them
especially after they discovered
brassieres
I had done my washing and hung it on the line
and a boat came along
I didn't have my own boat then
and
I was
one came along
a pecky pecky would take
it was a collectivo
it takes people aboard
they sort of worked like
buses
on the river
and
I had to hurry to catch it
and
I had just got in
when
some of these beautiful little women came running
yelling
and they were running down
holding up
a brassiere that I'd left behind
and then they also held up some of their
they'd copied it
they had made them all
and the whole community
now all the chapibus look a lot better
laughter
they do
especially after they get to be about thirty
and
so I had
yes
question Pat
there don't seem to be any
according to my informants
there are none
zero
I haven't heard of any side effects
I tried very hard to find some
I'm told there are none
what
well yes
yes
I
she told me that her sister had been having a bad menopause
and she gave her this same thing
and
it
it took her through menopause
well I know one that's very good for menopause
it's not a contraceptive
but
there is one for
any
any dysmenorrhea
I have given it
I gave it to
the maid
a little girl who had very severe
cramps and hemorrhaging
I fixed her up in
in a day or so
and
then
I was
stay
the people I was staying with
Lillis had
was going through menopause and having a bad time
with the hot flashes and all that
and have
and hemorrhaging
and
I gave her
suggested she tried
I'd planted it in her garden a couple of years before when I was there
and
because they had pretty flowers
and
she took it
it's an iris
it's called
they call it
Yawar Piri Piri
Yawar means blood
and Piri Piri means Piri Piri
but
but this is not
a sedge
it's an iris
it's an iridesi
and
it is
what is this
I can't think of the
genus just at the moment
I'll think of it in about five minutes
drop the penny and I get the answer
do they use
yes
you take the bulb
and you can
just grind it up in water raw
but more often
you boil it a little while
and
that
that does the trick
it seems to regulate
menstruation
whether it's menopause or not
and they drink it just one time?
couple of times maybe
maybe
maybe two
maybe for two days
it doesn't seem to be toxic in any way
there haven't been any tests done on it
but I've never heard of anyone having any bad effect
Karen said
have you brought any of these plants over that change the set?
I think
that
the
Chanka Piedra
is it
oh yes
that
I think we have that
I think you can get that
and
what did you put on your knee?
Capinuri
we have that
and
I would have to have the full printout in front of me
but these are precisely the same plants that we're involved in
the Piri Piri's
and
Nicole has mentioned that there are
contraceptive ones
abortifuses
you can't tell which of which
there's also a hallucinogen
oh yes
Chicoro
Chicoro Piri Piri
and
I've made great effort to get that one
but
not wanting to induce an abortion
now that I have it
I'm not sure what to do with it
well it's a different
I think it's a
I don't think it's Corombosis
well I don't know
they look
I'll check it
I have it in my
files
I have three species of Piri Piri
and they basically
the only way in which they're different
is they're
little
middle-sized and big
before they stop growing
but
otherwise
I can't tell them apart
and
they're chemically
very complex
nobody can
I know
yeah
no
but the kinds of plants
that Paul is talking about
I gave up on those because of this
because of
because of the fact that is apparently not
there's no change
no difference in the genus
or the species
and there's not a
it's not a variety
it's
some external influence
such as
a fungus
well
so conceivably
because they are different chemically
someone could do a project
where you grew out
an
uninfected strain
and then
attempted to infect it
with these various strains
yes
you'd have to get the
you'd have to get the originals
from the Shipibos
though
you see throughout history
you will go to any village
and you will see little round plots
only about that big round usually
in a village
a
of
Piri Piri
and
they
one will be
oh they'll be for anyone
of the
uses
that I know of
and probably some more
running from broken bones
and I told you about the ones
you wash your husband's pants with
so they'll be impotent
with another woman
and
the ones for hunting
they'll make you a good hunter
you rub them on your blowgun
you'll never miss your shot
that sort of thing
which I don't really
think we have much
need for in our civilization
that's
Paspalum Conjugatum
P-A-S-P-A-L-U-M
C-O-N-J-U
G-A-T-U-M
it's a Gramineia
this family
the Gramineia
have many many
uh
indoles
and growth
hormones
and it seems to be a family
loaded with stuff
it's very interesting
very interesting
there is another glass
that the Shipibos
say has saved more lives
you see the Shipibos
have some other interesting customs
if a woman is caught with a man
who is not her husband
in a compromising situation
why
everybody drops everything
and there's a big fiesta
and
the woman is not punished
but the man
has to be
severely punished
because it's his fault
I am in favour of this civilization
and
and he is at the fiesta everybody gets very drunk and then the husband has a special knife for this
every Shipibo man wears one on a string it's called a russati and it's a knife with a little
handle that is this peculiar shape and a curved blade is cut out of an old machete and it's only
about so the blades only about so long and about as wide as my finger and the the culprit the seducer
gets a cut across the back of his neck and he bleeds profusely it's a deep cut
and of course some of them are proudly scarred from the back of his waist
and he would they say he would bleed to death but for this grass and I don't remember the
scientific name they call it canya canya negra it i have it have it in my notes i have it i took
i only got identified by sydney i had been trying for 12 years to get that one identified nobody knew
it it looks like sugarcane and it's purple but it isn't quite sugarcane and it's not sweet and it
would stop bleeding it's a hemostatic applied locally and it is it's wonderful stuff and he
says that's that all the men in the tribe would practically have bled to death if it hadn't been
for that grass because they always keep have it growing nearby and as i was saying the woman never gets
punished well she does it does only if the other wife decides to take a hand in it the betrayed wife
and then they have a hair pulling contest i was i was lucky enough to see one unfortunately i didn't
have my camera out at the time and it was back in the boat and these two women the women cut their hair
straight across here down here and then long in the back is straight and thick and very shiny and
beautifully kept and these two women had each other by the hair and their heads were down they looked
like fighting elk and their heads were down and they weren't going this way they just were pulling
steadily and they're walking around in a circle it seemed to be a sort of ritual and everybody was
standing around and they were all laughing and the women were furious and finally they broke it up but
for about five minutes while i was there they were pulling they didn't pull it out i don't quite understand
it but it was very interesting to see and extremely funny it's a whole plant it's a weed that grows about
so high that use root leaf stems and fruit and flowers it has it it has these little birds that stick to your that's why that's they
say why it's called amor seco it loves to stick to dry things but uh there is the contraceptive
and i think that's a rather nice name for one
there's a desmodium in india that contains dmt desmodium pucellum
it's a very big genus yeah it's a big genus the hitchhiker plant in hawaii is a weedy desmodium
you may have it there it may be one of them i know when i think how much time i've spent trying to
eradicate it there's a certain iron we'll have dentists go to work on it yes right
nicole what do you think about the future of the amazon well i think that
if we can only get the word around there's money to be made by
doing other things than cutting it down and burning it
then some of it may be saved so extractive foresting is the thing to
make people aware of i think it's essential because as it is a well you you know the statistics as well as
i do if not better and that one species is disappearing a day not necessarily a plant species
a species of something and these medicinals are disappearing did you you saw a buddy wiggles a hand
i think they mean me yes you can't get a patent on a plant they there's not in it well also
uh some of them are too efficient for example the ones for arthritis that rarely cure it who wants
arthritis cured certainly not the pharmaceutical houses
what was the name of that herb that cured the arthritis it's not a herb it's the bark of a tree
it's a unanopsis i've forgotten the species there aren't very many it's not a big genus but i have it
it's a rubiesi and that's the one that is also effective very effective for
controlling diabetes to everybody's surprise it's not touted for that and so now i know half a dozen
people who are using it for diabetes so uh i have an idea that this is like the uña de gato
and tabibuia which is the paudarko there are things that uh well they work entirely by
stimulating and restoring the immune system the autoimmune system they will there are two i found
them a tremendous help when i get any infection there are a number of infections that are not easily
treated with antibiotics and i found that taking that and the antibiotic need and uh they've
been now trying to get it trying to get somebody to try for aids because that is the obvious i think it's
the obvious remedy
well any of those tabibuia tabibuia tabibuia tabibuia tabibuia and that is also that's in
echelis it's known only as a cure for diabetes and the owner of the johnson motor franchise for all
of peru the outboard motors is was uh so helped by it that he keeps it in his desk in all stores
or in the manager's desk to be given to anybody because he feels he's so indebted to it for what it's done for him
you know a lot of the paudarko coming out of the amazon is now thought to be phony
i wouldn't be at all surprised since nobody up here knows what it looks like
and they're getting fancy prices for this powdered bark they can powder up anything so immediately once
something is discovered that's effective then fraud because oh yes look at the sangre de grado
even i was fooled by one it foams like the proper one they put detergent in it they get the sap of any
lots of trees have sap of the color of blood of sort of old blood dark red and so they put a little
detergent in it because if you do this with um with sangre de grado the marvelous healing and
hemostatic agent because it does definitely speed regeneration of healthy tissue and
uh then it will form if you do that okay take any old tree sap and put a little
a little bit of any kind of detergent in it and bingo you got it there's no substitute for growing
your own because then you know what you have your trees are about ready to be milked don't they yes we
have sangre de grado trees in hawaii and we're propagating it furiously it's a wonderful
fast-growing tree i know it's a croton lechlerii to yes when we can i mean our collections are small
but every plant that we have we're trying to get cuttings off of uh it's tricky for a 501 c3 to
make a lot of profit out of its business ventures
uh some of you may know daniel and ellen's business their catalogs have been around we are wholesalers
to them as are many other companies and we want to spread this stuff out get it to other botanical
gardens in the hawaiian islands and other places because what if the volcano were to blow up and
wipe out our scene then all this would be shot so it is important to spread the stuff uh around
most of the plants that we have have not been studied at all the way they should i mean we have plants for
impotence baldness kidney stones diabetes what's the one for baldness it's i don't know what the
indians call it the scientific name is scoparia it's a scope it's a scoparia i have some scoparias i
don't remember what for it i think it's scoparia dulces scoparia dulces yes that is also
i have it but it's not for i haven't got it for herry as a matter of fact i've
i've wondered about that the retortes maintain that bixor no uh pixelana not bixoriana but uh that's a
chote yes uh that's wito you know the black stuff that paints your skin they used to paint their skins black
oh yeah uh-huh will grow hair but uh i have never seen a bald indian bald indians and fat indians seem
not to be genetically possible so i have i'm a little dubious about the things that are supposed
to keep you slim and elegant or fine and hairy in fact i'm very dubious about most things and it takes
forever to establish a thing well enough for me to put it in my notes and a frightful lot of work
yes some of these things you try and you sort of realize that it lies in a domain of
language and expectation and that something you define as unpleasant they might define as pleasant
and worthwhile for instance they have a plant that after you've carried your backpack along the trail
all day long they say that your muscles are stiffening up so they have this plant that's like
a nettle yeah well they are nettles they're just ordinary nettles yes they pat all over and they use them
and they urge you to do this all the indians swear by it why should you do this what a terrible idea
i think so too and they all use it i've had my berries at the end of the day always just beat
themselves with nettles and they say it feels great and there are also you probably encountered this nicole
there is this concept of a culture specific disease and there are a lot of these in the amazon and a lot
are cured by ayahuasqueros uh i can't remember the term you probably know it nicole but when your luck goes
off oh yeah i rose and i really have ivory i thought it meant i smelled bad but it didn't it meant i'd been
having a lot of bad luck everything went wrong and that's mal-airi mal-airi and that's a disease
you have a problem oh susto this is interesting too susto is fear you get sick from us if you're badly
startled and babies especially are susceptible to this give a baby a bad scare and you'll get sick
sick well maybe do they do that now civilization not really you don't get a chill huh well get a chill some
people think that if you get a chill that you'll get sick from similar sort of shock i guess
uh-huh and uh but they recognize a lot of psychological states as being the cause of illness
depression or you don't see much of that in fact remarkably few neuroses are this notable
well this is this i think is the legacy of shamanism i do too that where shamanism is a healthy
institution neurosis is virtually unknown you do see an occasional psychosis but that could be a genetic
it can also be through injury true true yes serious psychosis seems to arise from a different
set of causes but neurotic activity is and people suppress it's very rare it is rare well so is psychosis
but the chulichaki is supposed to make you nuts is that the guy with the beard who comes no he's
one of his feet on backwards oh yeah they have all these demons that they fear one of
augustine says he had he knew a chulichaki saw him quite often and gathered rather friends i wouldn't
put it past augustino he's a sculptor a magnificent he's come to live in the states his work's superb it's
frightfully interesting augustine arrivo yeah yeah i'm sure there are people here who know him he has
quite a reputation pat about right well yeah they're getting colds in the head too
ayahuasca that's what it is the the reason psychosis and all this is increasing is simply that
stress is increasing worldwide and that's why they i mean just as they have got measles now and whooping
cough which are incidentally fatal there because they have don't have the immunities that we have developed
and uh they kill an awful lot of children unless they're vaccinated the missionaries now on most missions
no matter what kind vaccinate all the children every they can get too because they want to save them
i don't know any oh that sort of it because that's not what they're for that's not what pharmaceutical
companies are for they're out to make money they're not out for well you see it would be possible
you would think for like a feminist collective to create a non-profit pharmaceutical company concentrate
on these drugs that relate to women and reproduction this is the kind of political action that hasn't been
tried yet everything is done old style but i think there would be tremendous opportunities for i think
great support yeah no botanical dimensions which is far from that is the closest thing but you need you know
somebody who's really intensely committed to getting these contraceptives out and as a political thing with
no motivation or very little motivation to turn a profit then uh you could probably get somewhere this
abortion pill that's being developed in france which is the pharmaceutical equivalent of one of these
abortificents is obviously going to change the whole reproductive freedom argument much of the
the position of the right to life people just becomes irrelevant all it means is that we're going to have one
more illegal drug to worry about in this society but one addressed not to psychoactivity but bioactivity
well terence the main problem is getting the plants from over there over here no no the development testing and satisfying of the government
well who needs that if you just have a seed catalog and you're selling seeds to people who's going to go home
some of these things are very difficult and you have to be careful if you're going to interfere
with the reproductive system i mean this is delicate stuff here you want you want to know that you're not
going to have a negative fallout 20 or 30 years in the future but getting the plants is not a problem
a fifty thousand dollar investment would get all of these plants back to southern california in a greenhouse
catalog wouldn't keep the greenhouse longer no it would take five million dollars to go from there
to a product on the market freely available to women it's the development testing and certification that
is just fiendishly difficult because these chemical companies it's a big boys game well you know that
most of the fda people who are in big jobs with the important jobs go on to very highly paid jobs with
pharmaceutical houses so what i'm looking at is sort of a small industry where people are encouraged to
plant their own thoughts well uh i would be afraid of that you'd be afraid of that yes because how do you
know they get the right stuff you'd have to be very sure of that because some close relations are up to be toxic
we we had an idea that is still alive it was not clear it was for botanical dimensions to do but
someone could do it of what we called the botanical first aid kit and what you would do is you would
survey the entire world's known catalog of medicinal plants and out of that you would select a plant for
migraine a plant to cause abortion a contraceptive a hallucinogen an anti-diuretic an anti-discenter say
at 12 plants and then you would grow these in a huge greenhouse and build little care packages of
living plants that could be then sent to third world people and they would just grow these things in their
door yard most third world people have local but you know if the ayahuasca is prophylactic for malaria
you distribute it in the kit throughout but isn't it supposedly rather good for parasites too oh it's
proven for parasites the malarial thing is more speculative well that's a parasite but you see
you're giving people a self-renewing pharmacy in their own backyard right but even right here in the
united states there are all kinds of people who've given a few seeds or cuttings of something would
people and you've got to get people getting pushy
hear hear get pushy we've been polite too long i mean the the gentlemanliness of this debate about
saving the world is it gentlemanless or timidity timidity combined with laziness timidity gutlessness
cupidity ignorance momentum all those good values well why don't we break for lunch and come back to this
at uh 1 30. thank you very much thank you this is a wrap-up session uh i'm going to have to leave uh at its termination
uh i want to express my special deep thanks to nicole who has performed gallantly and above and
beyond the call of duty well i'm a warhorse at this my dear i feel like i led a virgin into a dance hall
but you dance very well thank you i i my i would like uh i would like my fantasy is to
see nicole become the mother teresa of rain forest salvation uh we'll keep her card playing and heavy
drinking off the front pages and to sell her as mother teresa in green um but this is this is serious
business that we're engaged in and it is on one level among ourselves it is communication and sharing and
opening and building consensus but when we turn away from our family and out toward the uncomprehending or
even hostile world outside then it becomes propaganda it becomes the struggle for the hearts
and minds of people everywhere and i think most people are with us it's simply that they haven't had
that explained to them in such a way that they were able to realize that in other words we're not out to
convert anybody to anything we're out to help people discover that they agreed with this point of view
all along it has to be so because after all we stand for something fairly simple and unambiguous life
survival continuity caring relationship feeling joy who's going to vote against this if it's properly
explained to them so i i view these things as consciousness raising sessions in the old style
and hope that you will see it as more than even privately inspiring entertainment but that you will go out
and uh get these points of view to people get these attitudes out not unto the greater glory of
terence mckenna or nicole maxwell or the ohi foundation but because uh this needs to be said it needs to be
empowered the first step towards solving any problem is an awareness that the problem exists now we're all
very tired of that because we've been suffering and agonizing over the problem of a dying earth some of
us for years nevertheless the astonishing news is some folks haven't heard or have only heard recently and
it's very important not to panic them or alarm them but to inspire them and motivate them and bring them into the
project of reclaiming the earth i mean this is our legacy this is our birthright it is the
legacy and birthright of our unborn children and you know there isn't even there maybe there is but i
don't know it rich as greek is there isn't a word for being so perverse that you devour your own children
the monades the women possessed of dionysic frenzy what was always put against them was that they devoured
their own children this is a propaganda image that to be smeared with this is to be tainted
very deeply well it is literally true that we are guilty of a crime which the ancients could barely
conceive we are looting the planet for our pleasure our condominiums speed boats and and electronic gadgetry
is literally part of the legacy of our children what kind of people comprise the larger society
in which we are embedded that they would do a thing like that it's a crime beyond war war you simply
slaughter all the fools who volunteer for it and all the fools who stand around and watch
but to destroy the potential of a future for our children is a crime that boggles the mind and this
is the final stage of the dominator metaphor when i picked up the new york times a year ago and read
that the united states state department was advocating the spraying of aerial herbicides over the wyjaga basin
to eradicate coca i i to me it felt like a turning point comparable to the assassination of john
kennedy or pearl harbor it was so clearly perverse so clearly directed against itself the contradictions
also it becomes so odious that at a certain point
so it becomes so odious that at a certain point
so ils
people of moral dignity feel they have no option left except to somehow throw themselves on the cogs of the machinery,
to try and halt it from carrying out the program of Moloch, the program of self-devourment that we have set in motion.
Now, if ever there was a moment to talk to your neighbors, clarify your own thinking, support organizations that are trying to make a difference,
now is the time and we can make a difference and I know you have heard that and it's a cliché and there's a tendency not to believe it.
I'd been hearing, we only, Botanical Dimensions was fairly narrowly focused until a couple of years ago on saving shamanic hallucinogens.
Then, really through Kat's process, the need was felt to encompass this whole problem of destruction of the warm tropics.
So, I began writing letters to the UN and the IMF and the World Bank and all of these people expecting to find a vast, well-funded edifice of typing pools and computer networks and people doing something.
I discovered that very little is going on. We have advanced a long, long way down this path on Yak alone.
There is not somewhere vast organizations toiling to contact every Brazilian politician and put the twist on him, toiling to contact every American corporation that is contributing to this atrocity and threatening them with stock sell-offs, boycotts and whatever.
All the obvious things that you may think are being done, you may then dismiss by saying,
well, I'm sure I shouldn't do that, surely somewhere a staff of 50 is working on that problem.
Well, when you look into it, you discover it is not happening.
If any one of you has moderate or great wealth and have decided not to pitch in with saving the rainforest,
because you think a lot of people are working in that field already, forget it.
The number of people waving their arms about it is legion.
The number of people who are actually attempting to halt it is countable on the fingers of two hands.
And every issue, I think, is like this.
The gas weapons, the fight against formula over breastfeeding.
All of these organizations piddle along on peanuts, absolute peanuts.
If someone were to give me or the Ojai Foundation a million dollars and say, do your good work,
word would get out of the phenomenal generosity of this person.
Imagine, a million dollars.
Did you know that the standard issue Air Force fighter plane costs a hundred and twenty million dollars?
One. One.
And they line these things up on the runways of various airfields a hundred and twenty deep.
We are completely paralyzed or unable to perceive the disparity in the way the money is spent.
If someone were to give or had even the power to give, because private wealth is not like governmental wealth.
If you are a private person and you control a fortune of five hundred million dollars, you are among the thousand richest people in the world.
If you are a government with a budget of five hundred million dollars, you have your hand in everybody's pocket around the world because you are a beggar.
If someone were to give to the New Age the price of one fighter plane, and half the governments in the world have dozens of these things,
that hundred and twenty million dollars would write a ticket to rebirth for every center in the state.
All the movies, films, pilgrimages, conferences, conscience raising, experimental programs of fringe scientific research.
All of that would be prosecuted to a glorious end.
The amazing thing is, we who have no money, have all the ideas.
If the cost of one fighter plane were spent on the promotion of ideas to save the world, the world would probably advance fifty percent closer to its own salvation.
So, what is the matter with us?
Why are we so perverse?
What is it that drives the inertia of these dominator systems?
Because we are not asking for half the military budget, not even close.
And yet, we are not being cut any slack at all.
And it doesn't make any sense.
You know, people love to talk about the new freedom in the Soviet Union and how exhilarating it must be.
My hope for the Soviet Union is that they shame us with the level of their freedom of discourse and their ability to look their past in the face and reassess where they are going.
So, this is not a plea for a million dollars.
This is a plea for consideration of the perverseness of the way we set our priorities.
You know, the world can be saved.
It's simply a matter of diverting, I would say, five percent of GNP to do it.
Well, only a terminally psychopathic person would refuse to divert five percent of their energy flow toward their own salvation.
If we can't get our act together to do that, I think the calm and cool judgment of Gaia Almighty is, who needed such clowns?
I'll hang out with the octopi, the dolphins, the butterflies, and the termite nests.
I don't need this headache.
You know, I don't need acid rain.
I don't need strontium in the environment.
I don't need extraction of petroleum products and tons of junk in orbit in order to foster what? Shakespeare?
There hasn't been a Shakespeare for five hundred years.
These clowns aren't producing anything.
H-bombs don't make it in the Gaian scale of values.
So, the point here is tremendously perverse misdirection of resources.
A tremendous patience with institutions that have proven that they are either ineffective or actually the enemy.
You know, institutions like the Brazilian government, large pharmaceutical companies, capitalism, so forth and so on.
Why are we so patient when our world, our children's world, the world of all future life on earth hangs in the balance?
I think that the time is really coming when people are going to have to stand up and be counted.
And I hope when you leave here this afternoon that you will feel that our group experience has given you permission to come out of the environmental closet, the psychedelic closet, the caring for the fate of the human family closet.
Because all of these things are either dismissed as perverse, dangerous, or air-headed.
And obviously, they are not.
This is the most serious business that we could be about.
This is what we were born to do.
It must be.
Because if this is not what we were born to do, then what we were born to do is witness the death of the only living world we know.
And I, for one, am not ready to stand mute witness to that kind of an atrocity.
Do you want to add anything, Nicole, and then we'll take more questions?
You said it.
Anybody out here?
We'll take questions now till around 3 o'clock.
Daniel.
What's happening?
Well, yes.
I mean, we're sort of in a bind, a time bind.
We now have many of these medically interesting or potentially medically interesting plants growing, but they're not yet large enough that we can make bulk biomass harvest for research.
In the next two or three years, we hope to be able to do this.
We are growing Castanosperma mostralis, which is a plant with a potential impact on inhibiting the AIDS virus, and we're beginning to supply a lab with that.
Hopefully, Sangre de Grado will come on.
The Tababuya?
Tababuya, we're growing that, and we're hoping to create a scheme.
We have that, the Incaria.
Those are terribly important.
I have seen them once.
I have seen a man who was sent to Lima with cancer in terminal, with just no prognosis at all.
I went over his medical records, and they were, he had 10% cancer cells in the bloodstream at the time.
They came to him in the hospital and said, you know, the doctor said, awfully sorry, but you've got to leave because you're going on strike tomorrow.
And so, it was the biggest break he ever had.
The friends, some friends came to take him home, and the doctors told him, he's got about nine days left, he's dying now.
They took him home, and they started him on this uña de gato, and a few other things.
The other things were for the, he had a cystitis, and generalized septicemia as well.
And in two weeks, he was walking around.
The strike lasted 31 days, and the doctors were absolutely floored.
They didn't believe he was the same person.
When I met him, he was back at his original job.
He was 54 years old, I think, or 58, which was teaching ballet and flamenco.
And flamenco, I have done a lot of dance, and flamenco is the most exhausting thing I have ever attempted.
And he, that was, I've known him now for 10 years or so, and he's still fine.
He, I took the director of the Cibagagi Cancer Ontology Investigation Laboratories.
He came over from Basel to visit his daughter, who's a friend of mine in Peru.
And I took him to see him.
He flipped.
He said, you've got to get me some of that stuff.
After he examined the man, said he had one small node, totally inactive, on a bone, on one rib bone.
He said, you've got to get me some of that. I did.
I knew where to buy it in Lima and bought him a good quantity.
And he took it with him for, he said, I've got to start a research on this immediately.
Then he had the nerve to write me and say, you must never tell anybody about this.
They hadn't even paid me for what I put out for the stuff I bought them.
And I didn't ask him to.
And I haven't heard from him since.
And that is, but that is what I consider one well established case with proper evidence.
It is one of many I have run into who have told me about it, but I have not personally read their medical records from the, a cancer institute.
And with things like that, are we going to let this all be destroyed?
Are we going to, to just say, well, you know, that was one case.
And of course it isn't one case, there are many.
Aren't we going to insist on some real investigation in a public way so that everybody knows what happened?
And that, and the results are not kept privately for one organization?
That's murdering people.
Because to keep the, just to keep that information secret, I think, would be a sort of mass murder.
Yes.
Question?
Yeah.
A lot of your stories, Nicole, have involved, part of the, players in the story have involved an encounter with the physicians that were to the one you just told.
Yes.
And many of the stories make the physicians look mud-handed.
Are they muddled headed?
No, no.
Not necessarily.
They are muddled headed.
What physicians?
It's not the physicians.
The question is, are there physicians in or around the jungle that are allies of your point of view?
There are a few.
There are more and more coming in to do research on it.
Not so much in this country.
Germany.
I have just been over there at the invitation of an institute that was founded by the wife of the president.
He was present until 1984.
And she is an MD.
They have now 44,000 members.
They are testing things like that.
In Germany, you can buy all these things, you see.
They are offered to the general public, and physicians supervise their use in many cases.
Why can't we?
Why do they have to be kept secret?
What's your notion?
What's the answer?
Why is it being...
The answer is to get people saying, that stuff's there.
We want to see it researched.
Why isn't somebody doing some clinical investigation?
And you say European...
In Rome.
Oh, I have his name written down somewhere.
I brought with me his name.
There is a man at the University of Rome who is working on this.
And he is doing some very interesting work.
I think it was he that established the low toxicity of Uña de Cato.
And which was, he found to achieve any semblance of a toxic effect, they had to give more than one gram per kilo body weight of concentrated extract.
That's kind of a high dose.
And, but this country, no.
A good example or a good case that shows how all this works is the AIDS problem.
Which, as soon as it was identified and they knew what they had on their hands, they took two directions.
Some of these big pharmaceutical companies, it's called rational drug design.
Where you know what you want this molecule to do and you design it.
What I understand by Jihad is he's saying people who don't agree with us can convert or go under the sword.
I haven't reached the end of my rope to that degree yet.
But I do think politics as usual, even revolutionary politics as usual, is not enough.
There has to be an almost religious intensity to this.
I think we'd have a religious intensity if we were personally struggling to save ourselves from drowning or to escape from a burning building.
And we are drowning and we are in a burning building.
So, I think we need to rise to that level of adrenal focus and single-minded intensity.
And, to my mind, what this means downstream, not now, but downstream, is a psychedelic religious option.
I mean, I hate the word church. It will not pass my lips in an affirmative mode.
But a psychedelic community, where the periphery is political interaction with the rest of society.
But the centerpiece has to be the boundary dissolving sense of communal collectivity and common caring that typified tribal peoples in the archaic time.
There's no other way out. Maybe this way won't work. It won't work unless we try it.
But I don't see anybody with an alternative plan. Most plans to solve some problem are directed at some fairly short-term problem.
But, you know, I think we need to think about the next 500 years and, in a slightly less intense mode, the next 1,000 years.
I mean, what are we to make of ourselves? Whither mankind? Are we to be ultimately viewed as a cosmic accident, the perils of unfocused intelligence?
Or can we reflect the inner dream, the inner image of wholeness that inspires us and makes us more than animals and raises us up as a simulacrum of the goddess?
That's what I would hope for. And thought, cognition, planning, caring, emotion, communication, intentionality, focus, and authenticity are the domains that we have to be in in order to carry this off.
You wanted challenge? Some of you have made fortunes. That was no challenge. You wanted a challenge? Save the planet. There's a challenge. That's what everybody who came before did.
They participated sufficiently at least to pass the buck to us. Can we participate sufficiently to pass the buck to our grandchildren? Or are we just going to go down as the lamest generation in the life of the planet?
I can't believe it. I know too many of these people. I love too many of these people. We just need to do our best, as the Grateful Dead say, you know, just a little bit harder, just a little bit more.
You can't go back and you can't stand still. If the thunder don't get you, then the lightning will. So forward into the future with a high heart and reasonable hope that we can make this planet into a living reflection of the inner dream.
Thank you all very, very much. Thank you all very, very much. Thank you, Nicole, very, very much.
In this sort of discussion, because I have not been in this country enough to know whom I want to shoot.
I'll point the gun. You pull the trigger.
I don't know the tactics nor the people to approach. That hasn't been my business. I'm a retriever.
Well, and you're a wonderful icon. God forbid that any of us should ever be nothing more than an icon, but it's a throwaway.
But that implies a totally motionless object. An icon. Well, you pose as an icon. It's just a part-time job.