I'd like you all to welcome Timothy Leary.
Terrence McKenna means a great deal to me.
I would say he's one of the five or six most important people on the planet.
I can't even think of any others.
Short-term memory loss.
By the way, the role that Terrence is playing right now is one that takes not only vision, but it also takes fucking courage.
The child of the 60s, born in 1946, went to Berkeley as a freshman in 1965, did the India circuit, did the LSD circuit, went to South America.
I've written a number of books about shamanism and hallucinogens and psychoactive plants.
And I share an idea, which is that the world is moving at an ever-greater acceleration towards some kind of complete redefining of all aspects of reality.
...to be, but it's not like anybody's supposed to be.
Well, good morning to you.
Wherever you might be, this is Mike Hagan.
You're listening to Radio Orbit.
It's Monday night, the 3rd of April, 2006.
And I'm glad to be with you guys here tonight.
It's a special day.
It's a special show.
And we'll get right to it here.
All right?
Okay.
Listen, a big thank you, first of all, to John Lash.
A wonderful program last week.
John, of course, amazing, intelligent, very well-spoken, and a wonderful program.
So a big thank you to John, and thanks to Martin Lind as well for providing the music for the show last week.
Tonight, as I said, it's April 3rd, and it is a special day in my world.
It is the six-year anniversary of the passing over to the other side of my friend and mentor and teacher, Terrence McKenna,
one of the most remarkable individuals I've ever experienced.
And tonight, his brother, his younger brother, as a matter of fact, a remarkable individual in his own right, Dr. Dennis McKenna,
will be on the program, a much-anticipated appearance, which myself and many listeners have been looking forward to for a long time.
And if that weren't enough, we've also got Stephen Herod Buhner, and Stephen's been on the program before as well.
He's the author of a number of amazing books, The Lost Language of Plants, of course, one that is my favorite, but he's written a number of things.
So, Dennis McKenna and Stephen Herod Buhner tonight together, and we'll have that for you in about an hour or so.
Stephen is also an herbalist, an amazing herbalist.
He's an ecologist.
As I said, he's the author of The Lost Language of Plants, this amazing book.
Most of you are familiar with Dennis and what he's done over the years.
So, you're in for a treat tonight.
All right?
And it is a special day.
And let me tell you something else, all right?
Last night was a special night.
More about that another time.
But suffice to say this, all right?
And I hope you're listening.
And this is to everybody out there within the sound of my voice.
Last night something was born.
And last night something was planted.
And it was good.
And I'm tired.
We're going to have a wonderful show tonight.
All right?
It is springtime.
And that's become quite apparent lately.
It was a nice weekend.
Some nice weather.
Amazing storm last night.
And I was doing some yard work.
Got leaves and bonfires going all over the place.
New buds appearing on the trees.
Flowers starting to peak up.
Wonderful, wonderful, life-affirming stuff everywhere.
So, with that in mind, I think that I will read a poem, do something a little bit different for the beginning of the program tonight.
It's a poem that's sort of been with me for the last few days.
And it's called Flower Chorus.
It was written by the magnificent Ralph Waldo Emerson sometime in the mid-19th century.
Not sure exactly when.
But it goes like this.
Flower Chorus.
Such a commotion under the ground.
When March called, ho there, ho.
Such spreading of rootlets far and wide.
Such whisperings to and fro.
Are you ready?
The snowdrop asked.
Tis time to start, you know.
Almost, my dear, the scylla replied.
I'll follow as soon as you go.
Then, ha, ha, ha, chorus came.
Of laughter sweet and low.
From millions of flowers under the ground.
Yes, millions beginning to grow.
I'll promise my blossoms, the crocus said.
When I hear the blackbird sing.
And straight thereafter, Narcissus cried.
My silver and gold I'll bring.
And ere they are dulled, another spoke.
The hyacinth bells shall ring.
But the violet only murmured.
I'm here.
And sweet grew, the air of spring.
Oh, the pretty brave things.
Through the coldest days.
Imprisoned in walls of brown.
They never lost heart.
Though the blast shrieked loud.
And the sleet and the hail came down.
But patiently each wrought her wonderful dress.
Of fashioned her beautiful crown.
And now they are coming to lighten the world.
Still shadowed by winter's frown.
And well may they cheerily laugh.
Ha, ha.
In laughter sweet and low.
The millions of flowers under the ground.
Yes, millions beginning to grow.
All right.
That was Flower Chorus.
A poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson.
And this is Mike.
And you're listening to Radio Orbit.
Okay, so let's see here.
Thank you, first of all, to Debbie Johnson.
Wonderful stuff.
I love listening to The Hobbit.
It's been on for two weeks now.
And we get to hear the next version.
Or the next segment, I guess I should say.
Next week.
On Free Range Radio Theater.
10 p.m. every Monday night.
Just an hour before this program.
All right.
Okay, thanks for the nice emails.
Hello.
To all of you listening over the web.
Thank you to Larry, of course.
The changes with the website.
We talked about them a little bit over the last couple weeks.
But we're sort of getting it tweaked out.
And Larry has done an amazing job, as usual.
And he is just this, he's the web wizard.
That's what he is.
He's the web wizard.
And he's doing some fantastic stuff.
Really cool stuff, as a matter of fact.
And live chat.
There's a great forum now on the site where people can post stories
and have correspondence and communication and debate and discussion.
About whatever it is they decide to talk about.
Like I said, live chat on the front page there.
Music archives are getting built.
We'll start to pretty soon have the music that's being featured on the program
available on the website as well.
And as a matter of fact, the music for the program tonight
is from a project that was entitled Journey Through the Spheres.
A tribute to Terrence McKenna.
And it's brought to you by the good people, past and present, of the novelty group.
You know who you are.
And I send my greetings to all of you who are listening.
And we'll be playing a number of tracks from Journey Through the Spheres tonight.
And as a matter of fact, I think I'll give away a copy of that CD as well.
So not right now.
I think we'll do it during the interview with Dennis and Stephen.
Which is a taped interview, by the way.
I recorded it just about 13 days ago.
And airing it tonight, we weren't able to get our schedules all jived
where we could do a live show with all three of us.
So we settled for this recorded interview.
But it's wonderful.
And I think you guys will enjoy it.
So I hope you stick around and listen to that.
Like I said, coming up in about, I don't know, a little less than an hour,
Dr. Dennis McKenna and Stephen Herod-Buhner.
Okay?
All right.
As I said, thanks to everybody listening over the web.
Everybody that's subscribed to the podcast, if you're using it, thank you.
And thanks for letting me know that it's working.
I think we've got all the bugs worked out of that for the most part.
For the people who are subscribing to the podcast,
of course, Larry's got some cool free stuff there on the website for you as well.
You can get a radio orbit journey into space screensaver,
this thing that Larry put together with some wonderful imagery from space-type scenarios
and space-type photographs.
And there's also a free music download on the site right now.
If you go over to MikeHagan.com,
you can get a copy of the entire CD,
Sweet Mother Mercy, by my friends Yachai.
And it's a great CD.
I think there's 10 or 12 songs on it.
And it's wonderful music inspired by Amazonian shamanism.
And Jeff and William, those guys, really pushing the edge
and creating some really interesting sounds with just two guys in the band.
So anyway, if you're interested in that,
I've played Yachai a couple times on the program,
actually a number of times on the program.
And you can get some of their music for free
if you hop on the web and go over to MikeHagan.com.
And you'll see a link there somewhere that says free music, Yachai,
or something like that.
Okay?
All right.
Of course, thanks to everybody who's already subscribed
and taken advantage of that stuff.
Tell your friends about it.
Okay?
We're trying to create a mailing list
and build a community there at the website now.
Okay?
All right.
Speaking of that,
if you want to get in touch with me,
I'm always available.
My email address is OrbitRadio, O-R-B-I-T-R-A-D-I-O,
OrbitRadio, at AOL.com.
And the website, of course, www.MikeHagan.com.
That's M-I-K-E-H-A-G-A-N.com.
And the number here in the studio,
when I decide to give away that CD in a little while here,
is area code 573-874-5676 or 1-800-895-5676.
All right.
Let's talk a little bit about what's coming up on the show
in the next few weeks here.
And then we'll get on with things.
As a matter of fact,
I'm going to have Kent Stedman on with me in a few minutes, too.
I think I'm going to call Kent in about 15 minutes.
And we'll talk with him a little bit about what's happening in his world.
And instead of doing space weather myself,
we'll talk with Kent a little bit about what's happening up there
in the stars and in the skies above our heads.
Okay?
So, as I said tonight, Dr. Dennis McKenna,
the wonderful brother of Terrence McKenna,
an outrageous neurochemist, brilliant biochemist,
plant biologist, ethnopharmacologist,
and somebody who's just talking about pushing the edge.
Dennis has done a remarkable job over the last four decades.
And I'm proud to have him on the program.
So, Dennis and Stephen Herod-Buhner tonight.
Next week, Dr. Michael Heysen.
Anybody who's been listening to the program for any length of time
will be familiar with Dr. Heysen,
a wonderful marine biologist from the Sirius Institute in Hawaii.
We'll talk to Dr. Heysen next week.
The following week, James Kent,
an amazing author and psychonaut
and the proprietor of TripZene magazine on the web,
TripZene.com,
and involved in lots of interesting projects.
We'll have James Kent on the air in two weeks.
Let's see.
What else?
I'm not sure.
The 24th is open for now.
We'll have to see what we come up with for the 24th of April.
And into May, we've got Dr. Alan Goldstein,
Professor of Biomaterials
and the Chair of Molecular Cell Biology at Alfred University.
We'll be talking about nanotechnology and nanobiotechnology.
A few other irons in the fire.
But on the 22nd of May, Rianne Eisler,
the remarkable author of The Chalice and the Blade.
I can't wait to have Rianne on the program.
She's just wonderful.
And that will be a privilege and a pleasure.
So all that stuff coming up over the next few weeks and months.
So keep coming back and join us, all right?
Okay, as I said tonight,
I'll give away a copy of Journey Through the Spheres
in just a little while.
And we'll hear another song from that.
We'll do that right now, I think.
And then we'll get Kent on the horn here.
Come back and talk to him for a few minutes, okay?
All right, this is Mike.
You're listening to Radio Orbit.
We'll be back in just a few minutes.
Where we really want to be is naked,
singing in the rainforest,
stoned and exalted,
one with the souls of the ancestors,
one with the Gaian spirit of the planet.
Here's a tribute to Terrence McKenna,
brought to you by the Novelty Group.
All right, this is Mike Hagen,
and you're listening to Radio Orbit.
As I said, we'd come back and do space weather,
but we'll do a little bit of a special version tonight
because we're going to be joined by my good friend,
Kent Steadman,
the wizard behind cyberspaceorbit.com.
We'll see what's happening in the Bards world here in just a moment.
And jump over to Seattle.
Hello, Kent.
What's happening?
Oh, a lot of things happening.
How are you?
Good.
Hey, that sound, Cliff, Terrence.
Yes.
That reminds me of something that hasn't been mentioned very often lately.
Do you remember the Taos hum?
I do remember the Taos hum.
A lot of people were reporting from all across the country, as a matter of fact,
were reporting sort of a low, dieseling,
almost mechanical-sounding hum,
modulated hum from what they thought deep within the earth.
They call it the Taos hum, named after the Pueblo of Taos.
Yeah, in Taos, New Mexico, T-A-O-S,
the spelling for people out there who are wondering what we're talking about.
But, yeah, the Taos hum.
And you're right, Kent,
there were reports from lots of different areas, actually,
about some, and it was like an oscillating hum or something like that.
Yeah.
Have you ever been to Taos?
I have, yeah.
I've been there before.
I went skiing there a number of years ago.
When I was living in Colorado,
we used to go down to New Mexico once in a while.
Did you go to the Pueblo?
No, I didn't get a chance to.
I was not in a space at that time in my life
where I was interested in that sort of thing.
Yeah, it was really magical up there.
And then west of there is the Apache Res.
It's very bizarre, strange, eerie.
And some say that under the Apache Res,
the NSA has worked a deal to do a lot of tunneling.
So maybe this or the Taos hum was coming in.
Interesting, yeah.
And what else was there, Kent?
There was something else that was going on underground there.
Oh, you know, the Anasazi were there.
That's the same area that the Anasazi were living in.
Is that correct?
Yeah, that's correct.
A really amazing place.
I guess the Anasazi around Chaco and Chaco Canyon,
Pueblo Bonito,
really developed quite an amazing culture.
You know, with Pueblo Bonito, for instance,
has roads that can be seen by satellite
that fan out like the spokes of a wheel
going for hundreds of miles,
centering on Pueblo Bonito
and connecting to the other Anasazi city-states.
Yeah, yeah.
And they were city-states, you know.
It was quite a vast complex.
There were lots and lots of people in it.
And there are all kinds of rumors
of ancient underground caverns around there, too.
Mm-hmm.
It interests me, these underground tunnelways.
Yeah, you know, we had Richard Sauter on the program
just a few weeks ago.
Yeah.
And he talks at length about that sort of stuff,
although nothing really revealing,
but just verifies more than anything
that even in the public record,
even in the stuff that we do know about,
you know, that there's a huge amount of this work
that's been done and is probably ongoing.
And who knows what's going on
that we're, you know, that we're not privy to.
Well, they've been running on the Discovery Channel
or National Geographic, I can't remember which one,
but I've been watching about these underground caverns
that are scuba diving
because they're filled with seawater.
Yeah.
And down in the Mayan kingdoms.
And the interesting part is here,
these guys suit up and go diving
at the great risk to their life
because the tunnels are complex
and then they'll go back, you know,
many, many kilometers.
And so to explore them is risky,
but the thing is they'll get back in these tunnels
with no air bubbles or anything,
just seawater mixed with groundwater,
you know, different types of water.
And they'll get back in there like nine kilometers.
I was watching this the other night
and there's a pile of boulders like an altar
with skulls and things,
human skulls and remains, you know,
underwater.
Oh, my gosh.
Nine kilometers away from the entrance.
So go figure.
Yeah, it's outrageous.
There have been some still images,
photos of some of that stuff
that have been posted on the web
over the last week or so.
And I've been looking at that stuff too.
And in fact, I sent some of that stuff
to John Jenkins.
I want to see what he thought about it.
But yeah, it's remarkable what they find
in these, not just the underwater ones,
but all of these caverns.
I mean, it's just amazing
the stuff that's being found.
And one of these days, you know,
we've got to wake up to the incredible
ancient history of North America.
You know, we talk about pre-Columbian civilization.
We talk about the pyramids
all over the planet, Egypt.
Mexico.
Mexico and so on.
But you know, one of the most
wondrous civilizations
is right where you live.
It's Missouri.
Yeah, the mound city, man.
There are hundreds of thousands
of incredible negalithic structures,
mounds, cairns, or whatever they were.
Right.
Including entire cities designed
around pyramidal type mounds.
And so one of these days, you know,
I don't know why we sort of avoid
the topic here in North America
specifically in regards
to our own antiquities,
but we do, you know.
Well, there's a mental block for sure
because we went on a genocidal rage
and wiped them out.
We dug a lot of them up,
plowed them over.
Yeah, you know,
and built Walmarts on top of them.
So there's definitely a problem
with dealing with that.
But it's something that eventually
will have to be dealt with
as a nation, you know,
and as a people.
We will eventually have to deal with that
and come to terms with,
you know, our own history.
So we talk about the mounds
in Ireland and England.
Oh, my God.
They're spectacular.
But by far the most spectacular array of ancient mounds is along the east coast, from Florida up into Canada.
Hundreds of thousands of mega-huge mounds.
Well, varying size, but some of them represent the biggest earth-filled pyramids probably in the west.
Yeah, and I know in Wisconsin, I was reading something on your site recently,
Wisconsin alone had something like 20,000 identified mounds or cairns.
Yeah, in that state alone.
Yeah, just in Wisconsin alone.
And the more we learn about them, the more we're learning how they're oftentimes not laid out in a random fashion.
They're organized on the ground, oftentimes representing astronomical configurations or star charts or this sort of thing.
It's absolutely fascinating.
Yeah, the huge array of mounds in the east coast there, they fall under, what was it, Orion.
Hmm, yeah.
I mean, you plot them all out, the many thousands of them, and it's the constellation of Orion.
It's amazing.
Anyway, so much for under the earth.
Yeah, under the earth.
What's happening above our heads?
The sun's acting up.
You've got to go see, folks.
So go over to cyberspaceorbit.com and just take a looky.
That's right.
Because when we talk about what's going on with space weather, it's really staggering.
The visuals are staggering.
We have a telescope about a million miles out, actually, in earth orbit, but trained upon the sun.
It's called the Soho spacecraft, and for some peculiar, obsessive reason, I have, over the years, been glued to this camp.
Yeah, and you dragged me into the whole deal, too.
Yeah, sorry, sorry.
But what's happened is my whole understanding of astronomy, especially solar astronomy, has totally been nuked.
Because what I learned in my astronomy classes in college has nothing to do with what I'm seeing around the sun.
There's an incredible amount of mysterious anomalous activity.
And if you go over and take a look now, you'll see a couple of big red details of the solar camera called the C-2 aboard the Soho spacecraft, the Lasko C-2.
And there's stuff there.
There's this huge spark emanating from the northwest, about one o'clock position, of our sun.
I mean, a huge swath.
It's amazing.
And then it looks like it connects to another spheroid-type ghostly object up in the right-hand corner.
Now, people are notifying me of this by email and also asking me, what is it?
Well, I don't know.
But why do I think of the electrical universe theory when I see something like this brilliant arc-like presence, you know, that's leaping out of the top of the sun?
And then apparently intersecting some dark, serious object north of it.
Yeah, it's amazing.
As Kent says, get on the web and either go to my site and just click on Kent's link that's right there on my front page or go directly to cyberspaceorbit.com.
And Kent is very image-oriented.
And you'll find right there at the top of his page, you'll see this image, a recent still photograph from the Soho C2 camera.
And, yeah, it'll be apparent what we're talking about as soon as you look at it.
But Kent will have this up for a few days, too, I'm sure.
So, people, if you're listening to this from the archives over the web, go over there as well.
Because we've seen a lot of this stuff over the years, Kent, strange things like this.
This one in particular is...
It's right up there with the top ten.
Yeah, yeah.
Then just a few days prior to that, there was this other, you'll see it, a sort of rainbow band.
It looks like the band of a spectrum hanging to the northeast of the sun.
It's there.
Nobody knows what it is.
What to...
You know, we've had a number of occasions, too, in the past where we've approached NASA scientists and these types of people and said,
Hey, what's this?
What's going on here?
They've emailed me.
Yeah, I know.
You have correspondence with them pretty frequently.
And it's usually the same story, though.
What do we usually get from them?
Well, in fact, early on in the Soho mission, say, 97 and 98, they were really busily collecting these images, too.
Some are kind of fuzzy around the edges.
Some are sharp and distinct.
And they say the sharp, distinct ones, because of the way the camera works, it's a depth of focus is set at infinity.
So the sharp, distinct images would be way out there, away from the spacecraft, whereas the more fuzzy ones, you'll see an example of each kind on my site right now.
Well, the fuzzy ones might be closer to the spacecraft and thus out of focus, because the focal length is set on infinity.
Right, right, right.
But they listed them under the category of debris.
They're not making any bones about it.
They don't call it necessarily a particle strike, although we've seen lots of particle strikes.
Right.
Well, this thing that we're looking at right now, that's completely outside of the realm of that explanation.
They're calling it debris.
This, what we're looking at?
The one that we're talking about with this giant extension out from the top of the sun?
Yeah.
Okay, whatever.
Anyway, take a look at it yourself, people.
Now, also, while you're there, there are other, I've posted some of the movies in relationship to these images,
and so you can see them as they appear, usually a single frame, so they're transient, just transient.
They just appear over, happen to be caught over a frame, which is like about 15 minutes apart.
Right, right, every 15 minutes they shoot them, yeah.
And, but also, while you're there, there's a link nearby that goes to the SWAN imaging camera,
which is a deep space, wide swath of picture of the sun,
and there's just an incredible amount of debris, dust, molecular dust, as well as atomic material,
hydrogens that's glowing in and around the vicinity of the sun,
and it's more intensified than I've ever yet seen,
and Spacecom and other more formal astronomical sites have been alerting us now for, you know,
a couple of years that, indeed, a lot of galactic dust.
Yeah, yeah.
Actually, the sun and its planets are moving through an arm, apparently,
that includes, of the galaxy, that includes a denser, dustier environment.
And, in fact, you know, this concept has led some scholars, especially, what's the name of the Russian guy?
I can't, Planito physical status.
Ah, yeah, Dimitriev.
Yeah.
It led them to speculate rather soundly that it's going to change the space weather,
which is what we're going to talk about in the first place.
Right.
Well, here, I'll tell you, here's my take on it, on the thing I'm looking at on your website, right?
Uh-huh.
This is my scientific take, by the way.
The date on that frame is April 3rd, 2006, 0230 hours.
That's 2.30 a.m. universal time, Greenwich Mean Time.
I think that's the time stamp that they put on those.
So now I access my long-term memory, and I will tell you that on April 3rd of 2000,
of course that's part of what's happening on the program tonight,
at 2.15 a.m. Pacific time, Terrence McKenna joined the Ancestors.
When was that?
2.15 a.m.
2.15 a.m. on April 3rd, six years ago.
Now, I had a remarkable night last night, too, and we're not going to talk about it much right now.
I can't wait to hear about that.
Well, I'm telling you, Kent, something happened last night, and I'm telling the world that, too.
I'm not afraid to talk about it, but I'll tell you, something happened last night,
and it was a frickin' miracle, and we're going to find out how it pans out,
but last night was a very special night for me and for, hopefully, a lot of other people.
So, anyway, Terrence, my man, and who knows what's happening with the sun right now, Kent?
Oh, I might quickly mention that on 3.30, March 30th, we had another object,
you can call it what you want, a comet, a crux comet, or a sun grazer, barreling in.
I call it incoming, which means it's incoming in the direction of the sun,
so another distinct object entity moving in toward the sun.
I call them solar torpedoes because I don't accept some of the mainstream theory on this.
It's just puzzling to me why these objects always move in from the south of the sun
in the 5 o'clock or 7 o'clock position.
The model, the Krutz model, which, we won't go into it,
but it's about a comet exploding sometime during the time of ancient Greece
and leaving a debris field hanging somewhere south of the sun,
which I don't understand because I don't understand how it orbits,
such that we see these amazing events taking place,
objects, sometimes one of them, sometimes two of them,
line at stern, flying in the direction of the sun,
as perceived within the rather limited range of the Soho spacecraft.
That's an amazing thing to me.
And also there's a paper that I'll quickly mention
about a massive knot of comets or a massive comet called CR-105
that has been presented by a group rather academically and amazingly
with sophisticated astronomical calculations.
Right, right.
There's a Japanese woman, I think, that's involved with that.
I forget the other guy, but I know there's a Sonia Kawamoto
or something like that is her name.
Mm-hmm.
Anyway, Comet Vulcan or the Comet of Vulcan they're calling it, right?
Well, they're thinking that there have been a lot of different people
over the years speculating that our sun is not solitary.
In fact, it's more like our solar system is more like the others
in that our sun has a binary twin, which is the rule rather than the exception.
Right.
We've talked with Walter Crutton, the guy that wrote Lost Star of Myth and Time
about deals with that exact idea that possibly we're part of a binary system.
And this binary companion has been called various names.
It's been called Nemesis.
Mm-hmm.
Also tagged as, quote-unquote, Vulcan, B-U-L-C-A-N.
But, you know, when you see a binary star system through the Hubble telescope,
for instance, you very often see a plasma tether that passes between the sun
and the big sun and the smaller sun, usually a large red,
a large sun similar to our own, and then like a brown dwarf.
Right, right.
Red dwarf, neutral orbit around it, and you'll see this passage of plasma
going back and forth like an umbilical cord between the two entities.
Now, if we live in a binary system, it might explain some of this stuff we're seeing
on Soho in the fact that there's a plasma interchange going back and forth
between our sun and its binary.
Companion, right.
And now they're talking about this comet Wasserman, which is a destroyed comet.
It'll be starting to appear in our area in May.
Yeah.
Kent, let me read the first paragraph of this abstract, okay?
Yeah.
And this is really interesting.
It is definitely a professional paper.
And it's titled CR-105, Comet of Vulcan, Astronomical Verification of Vulcan's Period
by Dr. Herbert Kuhn and Barry Wormkessel and Sonia M. Kawamoto, Jane Yin.
Listen to this.
We're pretty short here.
Others, including mainline astronomical investigators,
have contended that our sun has a companion brown dwarf companion star.
We do likewise based on multi-source data, and we call it Vulcan.
Until now, only circumstantial evidence ranging from newspaper articles
to ancient artifacts and even to postulated communications with extraterrestrial aliens
have cited support for this thesis.
Our investigations have even led to Vulcan's orbital parameters
and modeled comet swarms forming a 3-to-2 resonant period.
Now, the computation of giant comet CR-105's average orbital period
has made it statistically certain that it is in just such a resonance with Vulcan.
This is tantamount to the discovery of Vulcan itself.
That's the way it starts.
Astounding.
Amazing.
And it goes on for 100 pages or something.
Yeah, it's very sound astronomical material with precise calculations,
but it also does what you really hope the scientific community
will allow itself to do more often,
and that's to expand out into mythology and so on.
Well, you know, there's quite a bit of interest in that area.
It seems to be coming back, but, boy, it's a tough sell in many cases.
But this particular paper,
I'd like to see what some of the orthodox people have to say about this
because it is presented in a fashion that's very professional.
Amazing.
Okay, that's another one.
Get on the web.
Again, cyberspaceorbit.com,
and it's just a hair down on the front page
and right below the links that say solar torpedoes
that we've been talking about for the last few minutes.
There's a link that says CR-105, Comet of Vulcan.
That's the link that you want if you want to read this.
And I'll put a link up on my site, too, Kent, to that one.
That's a really interesting one.
So, anyway, all right, well, look, what else?
Well, that's what's happened cosmically.
Now, when I, you know, I'm crazy old coot.
And with my background in the creative arts,
I like to expand a lot into a lot of different areas.
And we have a lot of really weird political things happening right now.
And speaking of crazy old coot,
there's this biologist.
Oh, yeah.
I know what you're going to say.
A population reduction biologist.
Yeah, that's nice.
Eric Pionka, out of the University of Texas,
who's, you know, he's saying things like
he's giving formal academic lectures to his peers,
saying that we'd be better off with 90% of the human population dead.
He's talking about saving the earth with the Ebola virus and so on.
And he's getting standing ovation amongst his peers.
And, you know, I now regard myself as totally conservative and sane
in the presence of this guy.
Yeah, I hear this right here.
Population reduction, Texas style.
A University of Texas professor, Eric Pionka,
says the earth would be better off with 90% of the human population dead.
Meeting Dr. Doom, there's an article here.
Yeah, and he mentions that saving the world with Ebola, this is great.
They want to infect 90% of the population with Ebola
and kill 5 billion human beings.
And, you know, if they want to kill 5 billion people,
why don't we at least give me just to OD a heroin or something?
You know what I mean?
Why do I have to bleed to death internally and externally, you know,
and just melt away from the Ebola virus?
Why can't I just have some morphine or something, these assholes?
Unbelievable.
Anyway, brilliant, brilliant doctor.
So that's, you know.
Thanks a lot, Dr. Pionka.
A ray for politics.
I didn't really get involved in politics.
I was more interested in, like, this solar stuff
and the sort of amazing thing of our cosmic environment.
And 9-11, this guy called me up and said,
oh, hell's breaking loose back in New York City,
and I've got a live connection to the news,
which is hard to get because a lot of the towers were on top of the WTC.
And so from that point on, you know, I became really political
in the fact that I began to watch.
We said, remember, we set up a command center
and began to watch all the bolts formally over about a year,
and it's still going on.
You know, that's something that's about to break open, too, I have a feeling, Kent.
Well, just today, you know,
there are more and more sophisticated type of people
coming out and feeling safe.
We're free to say something.
Now, the former head of the Star Wars program says
Teenie was the main, is the main 9-11 suspect.
Well, him and Rumsfeld in my book are certainly people
that I would like to have a discussion with.
Let's leave it at that.
And, you know, may the truth be told,
and may the light of day shine on these clowns,
because mama's home, Kent.
That was one of the messages that came through last night,
I'll tell you that.
Mother is home.
Oh, and here's an interesting thing.
Yeah, no kidding.
And here's an interesting thing.
I put a link to a website that says how to stop time.
How to stop time.
It's got a little clock on the website that tells you what to do.
And I've tried it with my mechanical pocket watches, too.
It tells you what to do to stop the second hand.
I have a movie with your mind, you know.
And, well, I've known for quite a long time
that the TikTok time is one thing,
and the psychological time is something quite else.
How to stop time.
Here it is, right?
Yeah.
Now, you ought to go try that.
It's a trip.
It works.
It's grasshopper.com, mind games, how to stop time.
You watch the second hand go round and round and round,
and then you kind of look ahead 15 minutes, or 15 seconds ahead,
and you'd rather relax and put yourself in a mellow frame of mind.
And as we all know, time seems to go much,
the more, your psychological state and your state of focus
has a lot to do with the warping of time.
Well, in this case, you can see it having a second hand stops,
unless it's some sort of cheap trick.
Amazing.
Yeah.
But, you know, I've had people contact me.
Look at a link I got here called the Worldwide Periodical Time Shift.
This is a guy, a German, that collects watches in traditional German fashion.
He collects hundreds and hundreds of watches,
and he was reporting several years ago
that his watches were all changing their period of time.
Yeah, I remember that, too.
That was back in 2002.
And I'm actually looking at it now.
I'm there on the website again,
and I love you've got that Dada, or it's a dolly painting, actually,
a Salvador dolly painting of that stopwatch
that sort of melted over the edge of that cube.
I love it.
You know I've been obsessively collecting stopwatches.
I have no idea what.
Well, maybe there's a story in there somewhere.
I don't know.
All right, Bartle, look, we've got,
I'm getting toward the top of the hour here.
I've got a few things I've got to take care of.
Well, it's great, as usual.
Yeah, thanks for everything.
I can't wait to talk to you about your experience the other night.
Yeah, I'll talk to you about it,
and I'll decide, we'll have to see what the future brings,
you know, how we present that to the audience,
because it's something that should probably be shared at some point,
but I need to sort of reconcile a few things.
What was the weather like during the,
I won't ask you about the experience, but real quickly.
Well, I mean, it was an outrageous storm.
I mean, it was a storm like, and it's very strange.
You know, where I live, I live in a town called Roachport,
and we're about 10 miles west of Columbia,
and for the last two weeks, the big storms have been out there.
They haven't been here in Columbia.
They've been right over my house.
They've been right over where we live in this particular area,
and there have been hail storms and wild storms.
Well, last night at about 10 o'clock is when this whole thing began,
and it was sort of simultaneous with the thing that I went through,
or synchronistic or something.
But anyway, it got absolutely wild,
where the wind was blowing and, you know, rain and lightning and thunder
and just the whole deal, but it was an outrageous storm,
but it was beautiful, you know.
It wasn't, I mean, it was awesome.
Well, we'll have to talk about that.
It sounds incredible.
Yeah, man, yeah, it was a whole deal.
So, all right, well, look, thanks, as always.
I love you, buddy, and everybody take a look at Kent's work
and his website at www.cyberspaceorbit.com.
He's been doing amazing work for many, many years,
and it's been a great.
Ten years, Nick.
Yeah, ten years, and it's been a great friend and mentor to me,
and I love you, Kent, and I love your family,
and I hope that everyone's doing well.
How's your grandson?
He's just great, a little tikey, six months old.
You know, all my kids are left for college,
and I was having this terrible empty nest,
and this boy here comes along,
a little baby Quentin, and he's my pal now.
He's six months old, and we see eye to eye
in a lot of things already.
That's awesome.
Well, that's what it's about.
It's about these children
and about straightening things out for the children,
so I appreciate everything that you do toward that, bud.
All right, everybody.
That's it.
Kent, I'll talk to you soon.
Later.
Love you.
Bye.
All right, everybody.
Kent Stedman, www.cyberspaceorbit.com.
This is Mike.
You're listening to Radio Orbit.
It's KOPN Columbia.
We'll take a quick break here
and pretend it's the top of the hour, close enough,
and come back in just a few minutes.
I've got a few news stories to read to you,
and then we will say hello to Dennis McKenna
and Stephen Herod Buehner.
All right, this is another song
from Journey Through the Spheres.
This one is called Earth Spirit.
Check this out.
It's not, as Milton said,
the God who hung the stars like lamps in heaven,
but it's the God of the oceans and the jungles
and the ice caps and the rivers and the glaciers
and the great schools of fish and the deserts.
It's the goddess of the earth.
It's the mind of organic life on this planet.
All shamanism can attest is the news
that there is a sentient, minded, caring entity
that surrounds and holds the planet in its hands, in its heart.
Call it Gaia, call it God, call it the spirit of nature.
It doesn't matter what you call it.
It transcends the rational apprehension of higher priming.
We're from Journey Through the Spheres,
and this is Mike, you're listening to Radio Orbit.
All right, let's do a few news stories here,
and then we'll get to our interview
with Dr. Dennis McKenna and Stephen Herod Buehner.
All right, check this out.
Brain cells fused with computer chip.
The line between living organisms and machines
has just become a whole lot blurrier.
Actually, the correct English should be more blurry.
European researchers have developed neurochips
in which living brain cells and silicon circuits
are coupled together.
The achievement could one day enable the creation
of sophisticated neural prostheses
to treat neurological disorders
or the development of organic computers
that crunch numbers using living neurons.
To create the neurochip,
researchers squeezed more than 16,000 electronic transistors
and hundreds of capacitors
onto a silicon chip just one millimeter square in size.
They used special proteins found in the brain
to glue the brain cells called neurons onto the chip.
However, the proteins acted as more than just a simple adhesive.
They also provided the link between...
...and the link between...
ionic channels of the neurons and semiconductor material in a way that
neural electrical signals could be passed to the silicon chip, the study team
member Stefan Vassanelli from the University of Padua in Italy said. Okay,
so now we're fusing brain cells with chips, with computer chips, and not only
are they fusing them, they've actually got it to the point where
there's a situation of interaction between the two. Fascinating. I wonder
what that means. Hmm. You know, I'm fascinated by the technological revolution
that's, you know, been happening for the last 200 years, but for the last, you
know, 50 years has gone vertical, and now we're just in this absolute ascent of the
curve if you look at these things mathematically. And I've actually had a
revelation recently regarding technology, and thanks to my iPod, believe it or not,
and to Steve Jobs and the people over there at Apple, so thanks. You know, it is a,
this iPod, it's a remarkable device, even though at the same time it's just a
simple extension of an earlier idea, you know, the Walkman, of course. So what's the
big deal? Well, there's no big deal if you use your iPod in the manner which is most popular,
you know, in the traditional method of using it. In other words, you use it to play Britney
Spears or Kanye West or whatever, and you basically use it to prop up and reinforce
the cultural stereotypes that already exist. It's just an extension of that. So if you
utilize it in that matter, no, it's no big deal. But if you decide to get creative with
your iPod, then it becomes a very big deal, because you can turn it from a glorified Walkman
into a trans-dimensional communication device. You know, I mean, how so? Well, you, along with
your entire music collection, what else can you listen to? Hmm, how about old Terrence McKenna
talks? How about Eisenhower's farewell address? Maybe Jesus Christ Superstar? Maybe Radio Orbit
Archives? Maybe Macbeth? Maybe Sweeney Todd? Maybe Studs Terkel? Anything. You can have anything
else that, anything you can find on audio, including books, etc. And now video as well,
with these new little devices. And they can hold 40, 60, 80 gigabytes of data. I mean, it's
everything that you have on your computer, most likely, including all of your music. So the
iPod, and technology in general, if it's not trivialized, if it's not trivialized, if it's
recognized for the powerful tool that it is, well, then it can be a great benefit. I mean,
everybody talks about how they don't have any time. Most of the arguments for people, including
family members and friends of mine who don't listen to my radio program, and I say, why don't
you listen to my show? Well, the number one answer is usually, I just don't have the time.
Well, you know, this is a solution to that for many people. You can use these new musical
angels on the train, in the car, at work in many cases, as long as your boss isn't a control
freak or jerk. You know, so you can listen to whatever you like. You can put them on when
you go to bed, and listen all night if you like. But anyway, wonderful stuff, and the
technology always walks down a two-way street. You know, it's easy to demonize it, but it's
part of the world that we live in. Technology is nothing more than an expression of humanity,
of human nature. We are nature. You know, even though the vast majority of the people walking
around this planet don't think they are. We are nature. We are from the earth, and we are
made of the same stuff of the earth. And technology is something that we did with our hands. And so
technology itself is by definition an extension of the natural world. All of technology comes
from the earth, too. All of it. All of the metals, all the glasses, all the ceramics, all
the minerals, all the funky little strange elements that are required to make your cell phone work,
they all come from the earth. And this is something that's going to be made self-evident.
Very soon, I have a feeling. Anyway, I love my iPod. All right, check this other one out
here. The Inuit sees signs in Arctic thaw. A string of warm winters alarms sentries for
the rest of the world. This is from Canada. 30 miles from the Arctic Circle, hunter Noah
Matuk feels the Arctic changing. Its frozen grip is loosening. The people and animals who depend
on its icy rain are experiencing a historic reshaping of their world. Fish and wildlife are following
the retreating ice caps northward. Polar bears are losing the flows they need for hunting.
Seals, unable to find stable ice, are hauling up on the islands to give birth. Robins and barn
owls and hornets, previously unknown so far north, are arriving in Arctic villages. The global warming
felt by wildlife and increasingly documented by scientists is hitting first and hardest here
in the Arctic, where Inuit people make their home. The hardy Inuit, described by one of their leaders as
centuries for the rest of the world, say this winter was the worst in a series of warm winters,
replete with alarms of quickening transformation that many scientists expect will spread from the
north to the rest of the globe. These are things that all of our old oral history has never
mentioned, said Imelsik Nashalik, 87, the eldest of the male elders in this Inuit village. We cannot pass on
our traditional knowledge because it is no longer reliable. Before I could look at the cloud patterns
or the wind or even what the stars were doing and how they were twinkling and I could predict the
weather. Now everything has changed. So more signs of change in the Arctic and global warming,
as I've said many times, is a misstatement, a misrepresentation. Global climate change,
maybe that's a better representation because there are parts of the planet that are cooling off
and there are parts of the planet that are warming up. The thing is that the thing is in flux.
It's a dynamic situation that is really in flux right now and there's just a lot of change going
on and it's impossible to try to come up with some single cause for what's happening. Nobody knows
what's happening. Maybe it's the sun. Maybe it's the internal energy generated from the earth.
Maybe human endeavors are involved in it. Who knows? But people that think that they've got the
silver bullet with their fancy ideas of, well, if we all stop driving our cars all of a sudden,
that it's just going to solve all the problems. This is just silliness. I mean, it's an amazingly dynamic
and complex situation and nobody knows what's going on. So the idea that anybody has any concept
of how to solve it is absolute lunacy. It's preposterous. It's just another one of these ego
trips of modelers, scientists and their models, their precious models. Their models aren't worth
the air that just left my lungs. Anyway, who knows what's happening, but things are getting
interesting. All right, one more for you here. Wonderful story. It's called Art Transplant.
This is from the Daily Mail in the UK. William Sheridan's drawing skills were stuck at nursery
level. His thick figures were the sort you would expect of a child. But as he convalesced after a
heart transplant operation, he experienced an astonishing revelation. Suddenly he was blessed
with an artistic talent he simply did not recognize, producing beautiful drawings of wildlife and
landscapes. He was even more amazed when he discovered that he now believes what he now believes to be the
explanation. The man who donated his heart was a keen artist. Last night, Mr. Sheridan, 63, was being
hailed as the latest example of a phenomenon which sounds like science fiction, but which is intriguing to a
growing number of medical experts. That is, that it's possible during an organ transplant to inherit character
traits from the donor. Again, a real, a lot more to that story as well. And you can read that on the web. All these
stories that I've been talking about tonight, you can get on the web, go over to mikehagan.com and click on the
news tab and you can see the stories and the links to the original source articles and then you can read them in their
entirety. Okay. All right. So, uh, let's, uh, play one more short piece of music here. This is called
The Call of the Jungle Brew. And, uh, then we will come back and get things going with our interview
with Dr. Dennis McKenna and Stephen Herod-Biener. This is Mike, you're listening to Radio Orbit, back in just a few minutes.
So here we are, once again, gathered to contemplate, uh, the forward rush toward the unspeakable, the historical
ascent from the unknowable and this very delicate moment of equilibrium, which is called the here and now.
How are we doing? How are we doing in the here and now? What we all share, I think, is this belief that
spirit is in ascent, that spirit is manifesting and moving toward completion. Don't like the word spirit.
They think you have to have a philosophical and theological disputation going if you talk about
spirit. Let's just define it here for practical purposes as consciousness. The feeling of being
conscious is the feeling of the indwelling of spirit.
Radio Orbit with Mike Hagan on KOPN 89.5.
Alright, this is Mike and you're listening to Radio Orbit. My first guest is an author, a deep ecologist, he's a poet, a
master brewer of beer, he's a gentleman who is as comfortable discussing the works of Goethe as he is discussing
Lyme disease, he's a brilliant herbalist, he's an artist, and his name is Stephen Herod-Biener. He's been on the program
once before, and we welcome him back. My second guest, also returning to the program, is a world-renowned
ethnopharmacologist. He's a brilliant biochemist and neurochemist. He's the author of amazing books and
innumerable professional publications, and he is, in my opinion, a shaman of the highest order. He is just
back from Peru. His name is Dr. Dennis McKenna. It is the day after St. Patrick's Day, and I would consider
myself extremely fortunate to have the opportunity to talk to either of these gentlemen alone, but the
luck of the Irish is with us today, and we are fortunate enough to have them both together to
share their thoughts and experiences with us, and it is a true privilege and a gift. So, from my heart,
both of you guys, Dennis and Stephen, thanks so much for being back on the program, and welcome.
No, you're welcome. Thanks for having me.
Thanks, Mike. It's good to be here again.
Wonderful. All right. Well, these three-way conversations are a little bit tricky sometimes,
so at least as we get going here to begin with, I'm just going to ask both of you right off the bat,
what's been up lately? Stephen, we haven't spoken for about a year. Dennis, same with you. I know
you've both been very busy in the meantime. So, Stephen, maybe you first. Why don't you give us
a little update about what's going on in your world?
Well, a couple of things that, in just terms of my own research and stuff I've been working on,
that's been fun for me. I've been really interested in emerging diseases for a long time,
because, you know, they're kind of freaky, and I think they're really interesting. And I like really
watching how emerging diseases move through human populations and how plant populations begin to
follow those along. So, that's one of the things I've been working on. And the second one is I've
become really intrigued by how different ego states, like in the developmental stages that human beings
have, like the nine-month-old infant or the two-year-old or the four-year-old, that each of
those developmental stages, there's a particular ego state that goes along with them. And then learning
how to connect or put energy into one of those ego states and let it kind of come forward so that
you see the world through that part, each one of those developmental stages has particular gifts
and strengths, which, and the certain perceptual strengths and uniquenesses to it. And so I'm
working a lot with correlating that to a lot of work in other mystical traditions and indigenous
cultures and just the way perception of plant communications, for instance, is facilitated by
particular ego states more than others. Wow. Fascinating. I'm living it in real time. I have
a two-year-old son. No, that's a great way to learn about that stuff. Yeah, I'm learning about the ego
development and all that. Trust me, it's very interesting and very enlightening, as a matter
of fact. So, Dennis, how about you? What's the latest? I know you're recently just back from Peru.
Yes. Well, yes, I've been away in Peru for five weeks and I just got back about a week ago.
And what I'm doing down there, I actually don't know if we discussed it previously on the program,
but I have a grant from a private foundation to investigate Amazonian traditional medicines,
potentially for new compounds to treat schizophrenia. And so, you know, this is really
classic ethno-pharmacology in the sense that it combines, you know, looking at literature,
looking at what's known about some of these plants with interviews with traditional healers,
and trying to tie together a number of threads to identify plants that, you know, are not so well
known in terms of their chemistry, but have a pretty good folk record of being used to treat these kinds
of things. And through that process, we've identified about 200 that we're trying to get our hands on.
And so far, we've gotten about half that number. So we'll be, I mean, we're not really expecting to
get all of them. So I was down there basically on the second phase of this project and did some more
collecting. Interestingly, when you go down to South America to do this type of fieldwork,
you find that you spend as much time as in government offices trying to get permits and
get the bureaucracy under control as you do in the jungle. And so, you know, we've had,
we've been trying to be very sort of straightforward and honest about all these intellectual property
issues and, you know, trying to export these things. And that's a process that's been going on for the
last couple of years. Finally, this time, they seem to have, we seem to have worn them down,
basically. So they finally decided to release all the specimens that we've had in storage for a
couple of years. So I'm very happy. We've got two big boxes of collections on the way. If they're not
intercepted in some way, we'll have a lot to sort out in the lab in about a week or so when they get
here. So that's what I've been doing, hanging out in the jungle a lot. Big news, though. That's great
news that they release your samples, your specimens. Yeah, it is. All right. Well, good.
I'm very frustrated. I imagine. But it sounds like you've had, I mean, 125, even though maybe it was
half of what you were looking to collect. It seems, at least to me, it seems like a lot. It seems
wonderful because knowing the power of some of these things, if you have 125 of them, maybe there's
125 miracles there or something. Well, I doubt that, but we've settled for one. That's right.
Out of the pool, if we come up with just one new compound that looks interesting, I think we'll
be happy. All right. Well, Stephen, you know, this relates directly to your work, of course,
as well, because, you know, Stephen comes from a long line of healers and, of course, his interest
in emerging diseases and the things that he brings up originally certainly must be related
to this work. What do you guys think about the connections between Dennis' work and, Stephen,
your work in emerging diseases and trying to come up with solutions for some of these things?
Well, it's interesting. You know, Dennis, actually, his first book that he wrote with Terrence,
The Invisible Landscape. I got a copy of that back in 1979 when I was working on my degree
in transcultural epistemology and basically looking at the shaman as an archetype for human
contact with the sacred and I wrote him a letter and he was really nice. He wrote me back this
long letter and so it's kind of neat to be able to talk to him today. That was at the era
when we had time to write long letters. Exactly. You know, we were both just babies back then.
Right. Well, it's funny, you guys, because I told Dennis off the air that it's sort of
a closing of a circle because I was familiar with Dennis' material as well and had read Invisible
Landscape and lots of other things that he had done and things that Terrence had done.
But not until I had spoken to Dennis last year was I familiar with you, Stephen. He introduced
me to you and told me that he thought that you were doing wonderful work and that's when
I went out and got The Lost Language of Plants, which was a stunner to me, and then went on
to read The Secret Teachings of Plants and then got in touch with you and then we talked.
So it's wonderful to have you guys together. That's great. That's really fun. Yes, the work
of Stephen's that I'm familiar with mostly is The Lost Language of Plants, which I think
is a wonderful book. In a way, it's the book that I've wanted to write for a long time. He very
beautifully explains the way that these ecological systems involving plants and everything else
in the ecosystem are so carefully regulated by plant chemistry. That's a message that people
sort of overlook or are not really aware of. The question in classes I teach come up, why
do plants make all of this chemistry? Why do you find this chemical diversity in nature?
The answer is that they don't just spin these things off for the fun of it. They have important
roles in regulating the ecosystem. Stephen explains that very beautifully and very poetically, and
I really appreciate his contribution in that book. It's required reading in all my classes.
Stephen, maybe you can riff on that for a minute because I think it's
something that does deserve more discussion and clarification, and we can always make it
more clear of this deep connection. Dennis, you once told me, I think, that plants substitute,
I think you called it biosynthesis for behavior. Right. Plants substitute biosynthesis for behavior.
Stephen, what do you make of that sort of a statement? Well, I mean, plants are really intriguing,
and I suppose, you know, one of the things that strikes me the most as I age, I'm 53 now, and
what, Dennis, you're 55, I guess, is how incredibly stupid I've been so much of my life, or ignorant
might be a better word. You know, I mean, it's just like I still get caught up in realizing
how anthropocentric I am. I mean, you know, it's like I remember walking along and then
the first time I was shocked at the realization that plants have been making these kind of
chemicals for millions of years, and we've, you know, for like 170 million years, some of
them, and we're, you know, I'm like, gee, I wonder what those, they did, those medicines did
before we showed up. Isn't that amazing, you know? Right, that's the question. You know, and then, you
know, one of the things that is just really fascinating to me, for instance, like pine pollen is
extremely high in testosterone. Really? It's the exact same chemical that's in our bodies, and then pines
have been around for, you know, hundreds of millions of years, for a long time, and, but we've got this
whole thing about human men and testosterone, but, you know, that's been out there for a long
time, and that plants make neurochemicals, and they've been making them a lot longer than
we've been using them in our brains, and slowly what I have started to understand very deeply
as I re-inhabit my inner being with the world, as John Seed calls it, is that we're only a
specific instance of a macrocosmic kind of phenomenon, that everything has intelligence.
I mean, you think about it, every organism has to identify things that are coming into
its system that touch it, and they have to identify what it is, and how to use it, and
how to respond to it, and so, you know, just like Tophagoras said all those years ago, he
said, everything's intelligent, and so we kind of come out of this ecological environmental
soup, we are expressed for an ecological reason, and of course, all of these things that have
been going on all along have impacts on us, I mean, we're made up of the same substance,
so as I become more and more immersed in the world, and I start to see myself as just a
localized expression of a general phenomenon, that kind of anthropocentrism disappears, and
also at the same time, I can see, you know, I mean, Dennis has got a long-standing interest
in schizophrenia, and I do as well, and I worked at it more as a psychotherapist from that angle
of it, and then working with deep relationship with people with the earth, and helping resolve
schizophrenic structures through that, but seeing how all of this stuff is interrelated,
I mean, it's really interesting to me, I look at schizophrenia as an ecological expression
more than anything else.
Interesting.
Yeah, well, that's right, there are many things that Stephen brought up that, you know, that spark
comment, and it could be talked about, but I think, you know, the point that he makes that,
you know, we're all made of the same stuff, you know, plants, animals, everything in the
environment, you know, on the chemical level, we're all made of the same stuff, and the fact
that plants have neurochemicals in them is, in some ways, remarkable, but in other ways,
is to be expected, but, you know, plants, I mean, this notion that plants mediate their
relationships to the environment through biosynthesis rather than behavior, you know,
is an expression of that.
Plants, these molecules, this chemical diversity that you find in the plant kingdom is really
these things are messengers, this is how they communicate.
You know, I think this is one reason why, in graduate school, you get a disproportionate
number of people study zoology, and relatively few people study botany, because, you know,
there's a widespread perception that plants don't do anything.
Yeah, there is.
You know, they just sort of sit there.
They sit there.
And, you know, Larry Niven's favorite statement, you know, how much intelligence does it take
to sneak up on a carrot?
Yeah, right.
Vegetarians are really dumb.
You know, carnivores have to be really smart.
Oh, right.
Yeah.
And animals mediate their, you know, animals behave, and plants biosynthesize, but, you know,
on the surface, they don't seem to be doing that much, but inside, there's a lot going
on on a chemical level.
Yes.
And because of photosynthesis, you know, which is the trick that plants have mastered, that
nothing else has, you know, they're able to do that.
You know, as Steven points out so well in his chapter on this, in his book, All Plants Are
Chemists.
You know, it's a great chapter.
And, you know, as I, another point I like to make to my ethno-pharmacology class is this
notion that, you know, the very neurotransmitters that, you know, are in our brain that mediate
what we think of as the higher functions, you know, cognition, and the symbol forming capacity,
and this kind of thing.
I mean, they're basically the, the monoamine neurotransmitters.
things like serotonin, dopamine, norepinephrine, and so on.
Those things come from what we call the essential amino acids.
And the reason they're called essential amino acids is you have to get them from your diet.
So in other words, you have to consume plants.
We cannot synthesize these essential amino acids, which are the precursors for these neurotransmitters.
We have to get them from dietary sources, and that's either from eating animals which have them or directly from plants.
But ultimately, those neurotransmitter chemicals come from plants.
So in a sense, you know, we're made of the, you know, the compounds that mediate consciousness are plant products.
You know, I mean, we're made of these compounds, which if we encountered them in the ecology, we'd identify them as drugs.
And in fact, they are drugs.
You know, we are made of drugs.
So, you know, we can just abandon the notion of the drug-free America because, you know, organisms themselves are made out of drugs.
Right, and some which are really interesting, as a matter of fact, too.
I mean, certainly the DMT dimethyltryptamine compound comes directly to mind, and, you know, we've spoken about it before, but it's in human metabolism.
It exists within our system, and yet it's a Schedule I drug, at least classified that way.
That's a political classification that has nothing to do with, you know, its actual place in nature.
Right.
You know, the example of DMT is interesting because it's interesting that it's, you know, so widely distributed in nature.
But on the one hand, that's, you know, in a way it's not surprising.
What's interesting to me about something like DMT is it's two steps from tryptophan, two trivial enzymatic steps.
So, in other words, you know, tryptophan is one of these essential amino acids.
It's one of the 20 amino acids that goes up to make a protein.
So, tryptophan is in all organisms.
We haven't found one yet that doesn't have it, and if we did, it would be very unusual.
By two very simple modifications, tryptophan can be converted to DMT in two steps.
You know, I don't know what that says about nature, maybe nothing, but maybe it does, maybe you can read into that fact something about the intelligence that's inherent in nature.
I mean, is there a message here?
I don't know.
You know, Stephen, let me ask you a question about something that's a little more esoteric and not as scientific.
I had this experience years ago when I was living in Colorado, and we had this vine that grew on our deck.
And it had these big leaves, and in the morning, when the sun came up, the leaves would look toward the sun.
And then as the sun moved, it did this all day, and it turned out I learned about it.
It's called heliotropism, they call it.
Right.
And it's this turning toward the sun.
But I was, you know, I didn't know anything about any of this stuff back then, but my initial intuition was that plant knows where the sun is.
I mean, it's obvious.
There was an intelligence of sorts there.
It's not of sorts.
There was an extremely keen intelligence in plants.
And, you know, I mean, some of the things, you know, Goethe would say stuff, it's like, we discover so much only because we've forgotten so much, you know.
And I look back at, like, Jakadus Bose's research from the early 1900s, late 1800s, and in his examination of the nervous system of plants,
he found that plant nervous systems are, in some instances, as sophisticated and rapid as ours, and in many instances, approach ours.
And so, to me, you know, he found ways to measure that and look at it.
And the plants have a lot more movement than they're credited with having, and a lot more sophisticated nervous response.
It's just it's not in a form that we're used to seeing.
And so, of course, it makes perfect sense to me that they make neurotransmitters, not just for all of the other reasons neurotransmitters can be used for in the plant kingdom,
but also for their particular nervous system functions.
And then I start looking at, of course, these more entheogenic substances that are present in the plant kingdom
and move throughout plant ecosystems at various rates.
You know, we tend to think of ourselves as so incredibly unique with our intelligence, our mobility, our cognition.
But the older I get and the more I've removed myself from that kind of bias,
the more I see that we're only a specific example of something that's been present there for a long time.
So, you know, it's taken me a long time and a lot of experience to get to the place where I perceive plants as equal kindred and of equal intelligence.
They just do a different thing with it than other people do.
Right.
Remarkable.
Well, let me ask you guys both a question then that's sort of related.
There's a question that came in from the listening audience,
and they're asking about these ideas of entheogens,
and certainly they're talking about the mushroom and perhaps some of these commentatory things that involve DMT, Dennis, or whatever.
But there was an overwhelming thread that came through email that I received before I spoke with you.
And it was sort of like this.
How can the listening audience help to integrate these types of ideas of intelligence in nature,
symbiosis, gnosis, entheogenic investigation?
And how can we help to get people to accept that these ideas are more approachable and not this whole, you know,
this is your child on crack image?
Oh, boy.
And I guess maybe that's a question that we've been struggling with for 40 years, Dennis.
I don't know.
Yeah, I mean, I'm not sure.
You know, I think in this culture, it's difficult, you know,
because we are, for one thing, we're estranged from nature.
And we're, you know, most people don't live in a situation that they're exposed to nature.
And, you know, we're sort of trapped within this culture of, you know, of civilization in a way.
You know, as a result, we experience nature at one step removed.
I think if you, and so when it comes to, you know, in a sense,
all of these conundrums about drugs and drug regulation
and what should our relationship to it be,
in a sense, these are all sort of meta aspects of the, you know,
ongoing process of human-plant interactions
or human interactions with plant secondary compounds.
I mean, our, you know, policies with respect to drug regulation, tobacco control,
all of these things are, you know, an expression of human behavior
in response to interactions with plant secondary compounds.
But, you know, it sort of diffuses out into the area of law, jurisprudence,
all of these things.
If you go to a more indigenous-type society that sort of lacks these overstructures
that, you know, come with civilization,
you can see it in a much more raw form.
You know, in a lot of the societies in the Amazon, for example,
you know, even though those traditions are threatened, they still persist.
You know, and in indigenous villages, I mean, they don't have drug laws, you know.
They don't have this type of regulation.
They have, you know, the people and nature,
and then the role of people like shamans becomes very important, you know.
What they have is wise people, you know,
who are the mediators of this relationship.
I think we need more of that in our society,
but I'm not sure how you implement that.
Hey, Stephen, this sort of makes me think about some of the work that you're doing
on ego development and this sort of thing,
because this is obviously a function of ego,
some of the cultural phenomenon that we're in the middle of
that Dennis describes as so difficult to get over.
Yeah, it's, you know, I mean,
I've been active as a lobbyist at various parts for many years,
and so seeing it from that kind of perspective about herbal practice,
our healing, looking at it as a psychotherapist,
looking at it as an herbalist,
looking at it as somebody who works with these different mind states.
You know, the thing I've been most curious about really my whole life,
which has informed everything,
has been, you know,
what are those states of mind that human beings routinely engaged in
that allowed this kind of communication between nature,
and not just the mental dynamics of it,
but there is this flow of sharing of spirit
between the human being and the rest of nature.
Right, you've written about that.
To really do that kind of work,
you know,
I've always been fascinated by experiential anthropology.
Theoretical anthropology is ridiculous to me.
And so, you know,
and I love Thor Heyerdahl because they said,
well, you know,
no, the Egyptians couldn't have sailed there.
And he goes, let's find out.
Yeah, get in the boat and do it.
And so,
Joan Halifax to me was an experiential anthropologist,
and there's many people like that.
And I want to know,
what is it like inside that world,
and how does it shift my paradigms I was raised with?
And so I'm constantly confronted with the American cultural paradigm
and then what happens when you move out of that
and the impacts it makes on the psychological self and the structure.
And, you know,
and the subtleties of ego state expression become very paramount.
I mean,
one of the things I've noticed with the few indigenous peoples I've met
in other cultures is that,
and also from reading what people who met them hundreds of years ago said,
is that they tend to have a kind of a childlike approach to seeing the world.
And, you know,
and then you see that kind of concept in Christianity
and several other places of being childlike.
And so,
in starting to work with that,
to see what happens when you begin to let go of the self-definition
as a single-point ego
and begin to have that kind of flexibility of structure.
And having worked with schizophrenics over many, many years,
you know,
to find out truly all human beings are multiple personalities.
I mean,
Goethe was really cool about that
in that he said that the abnormal,
if you assume the abnormal is normal,
then you start to understand what normal really is.
And so a multiple personality like in Psycho or the movie or something like that
is an extreme expression of a normal state.
And everybody's had that experience of
they go home to see their family
and all of a sudden they're acting like they're four years old again.
Or they get in a certain situation
and then they're feeling very two or whatever.
And so the thing that I see in our culture
is that there's a tremendous terror
in the overall cultural paradigm
of moving out of that extremely contained definition of self
as a single ego point of view.
And that that flexibility of personality,
which is normal and inherent in human beings,
of course,
is extremely facilitated by entheogenic substances.
And, you know,
people that move farther away from that kind of paradigm
become more fringe-like on the culture.
So for me,
you know,
I went through many years being very upset with our culture
because of the repressions
that are inherent in it.
And finally,
just because of my age,
I guess,
began to take a much longer term perspective.
You can't get rid of the human tendency
for perception of multiple reality structures
by putting a psychological sidewalk over.
Everything doesn't work.
Like they put sidewalks down
and dandelions still break through them.
And so the capacity of the human being
has to have expression.
And it continues to have expression
because it's there for a reason.
So that's why I look at schizophrenia
as an ecological expression,
not a biochemical breakdown necessarily
or a disease process.
It's a, you know,
it's more of a cultural ecological expression to me.
And so I like preaching to the choir
because there's more and more people
that feel inside themselves
that something isn't quite right
and that as those,
as we talk to those parts of people,
those of us who know about
these other ways of being,
it encourages them
to allow their full humanness
to express itself.
And that's where the real truth is.
What do you make of that, Dennis?
Well,
he's covered a lot of territory,
but basically I agree with what he's saying.
I think there is, you know,
in Western culture,
there is this dynamic tension always
between sort of the impulses of the individual
and the, you know,
the motivation toward direct experience
and direct experience that is
not necessarily mediated
through cultural filters
like the entheogens,
for example,
or other types of mind states
where, you know,
the verbal scaffolding,
the verbal filters
and the cognitive filters
that we usually apply,
you know,
are temporarily disabled
to allow direct experience
of, you know,
this energy web,
this chemical web,
all of the energetic influences
that, you know,
tie us to the world.
The idea that, you know,
the West is very invested
in the notion that,
you know,
the self and nature
are separate.
It's kind of the ultimate
Woody Allen comment,
you know,
nature and I are two.
Yeah,
but that somehow
the skin is a barrier,
you know,
that somehow
it defines the boundaries
between the self and nature,
but that's an illusion.
You know,
we are semi-permeable membranes
and there are things moving out
and things moving in
all the time.
We're immersed
in this chemical ecology,
you know,
and responding to it
and inputting into it
all of the time.
This is what Stephen
so beautifully illustrates
with the plants,
but it's true
of any organism
that this is going on
and, you know,
recognition of this
is somehow threatening.
I don't know.
This perspective
is somehow threatening
to Western power structures
which are much more invested
in the notion of control
and, you know,
people going out
and having these
spontaneous experiences,
you know,
I mean,
it doesn't
subserve
the control
corporate agenda
very well,
you know,
because they may not
be content
to go back
to their cubicle
after things like that,
you know,
and so I think
in a sense
the effort
to control
substances
and humans'
relationship
to substances
and I,
you know,
I deliberately
make that
a very sort
of broad topic
that's not just
about drugs,
you know,
it's about nutrients,
it's about herbal medicines,
it's, you know,
the whole issue
of, you know,
who should own nature,
who should patent
these plant substances,
it's really
an expression
of the sort
of the paranoia
of the Western worldview
that nature
is something
to be controlled
and, you know,
people's relationships
with nature
should be
regulated
and controlled
and if they're not,
it's very dangerous,
you know,
it's perceived
as dangerous
by the power structure
because people
may have
thoughts
that are,
you know,
that are inherently
dangerous
and actually
they're right,
you know,
that's the thing,
they have it right.
Right,
they understand
what it means
to their
particular
endeavor.
I kind of
have wondered
too about this,
that that
whole kind
of approach,
it seems to me
in looking back
at it historically
that it really
emerged from,
in part,
and I think
fairly strongly
from the
kind of unique
dynamics
that were going
on between
early Christianity
and Roman
pagan approaches
and that,
you know,
the Christians
were very
oppressed
and any group
that is
oppressed
like that,
that when they
kind of get
on top,
they tend to
oppress others
that they viewed
as their oppressors
and so,
that kind of
movement away
from nature
is a living
force that was
more clear in
Roman and Greek
tradition,
you know,
and moving way
away from that
to that there's
nothing in nature
which,
and if you start
looking at how
the whole scientific
paradigm began
to emerge
out of Christianity
itself,
and they were
kind of curtailed
in what they
could say
and how they
could say it
to get along
with Christian
perspectives,
and Christianity
has really influenced
scientific work
a lot more
than I think
most people realize
and we kind of
get to this place
where,
you know,
there's no living
intelligence or soul
in nature
and that actually
reconnecting with
that thing
is considered
very dangerous
as Dennis was
saying,
and so I tend
to look at it
as not so much
just civilization
but this particular
kind of heavily
Christian influenced
civilization structure
that we have,
you know,
that there's a lot
of sense to it
and that there's
some things
in it from that
and so,
yeah,
it is dangerous
to that.
Well,
yeah,
I think
that's interesting
that you should
bring that up
because
definitely
sort of
the Christian
perspective
has definitely
very much
influenced
the evolution
of Western
civilization
and what's
interesting
about
the influence
that Christianity
has had,
it's essentially
devalues nature
and it devalues
or even
actively
suppresses
biology.
You know,
it's sort of
based on the notion
that,
you know,
nature is,
you know,
part of this world
and the Christian
focus is always
on the next world.
So nothing
in this world
has,
you know,
intrinsic value.
So,
you know,
you can get,
you know,
on the further
fringes of
Christianity,
for example,
that perspective
leads to
some of the
revelation,
some of the
left-behind
perspective
that,
you know,
the world's
going to go
down the tubes
and won't we be
happy when that
happens because
we'll all be saved
and all the bad
people will get
their just desserts.
but,
you know,
it doesn't
create a
motivation
to respect
nature and
nature becomes
something to
be,
in a sense,
feared because,
you know,
it's sort of the
ultimate expression
of this world
and,
in another sense,
actively suppressed
or opposed,
you know,
I mean,
this phenomenon
of sort of
the,
what I've
sometimes called
or what I
sometimes think
of as
biological
totalitarianism,
you know,
what are the
three things
that Christians
fear most?
Sex,
drugs,
and rock
and roll,
right?
Isn't that
what it is?
It is,
in a nutshell.
Yeah,
in a nutshell.
And what are
the three things
that are the
expression of
biology in all
of its flowering
the most?
Sex,
obviously,
that's how
we got here.
Drugs,
if you go back
to the notion
that we were
talking about
a while ago
that,
you know,
we are drugs.
Essentially,
organisms are
bags of
enzymes,
neurotransmitters,
proteins,
hormones,
all this stuff.
They're drugs,
right?
I love it.
And rock and roll,
what is rock and roll
if not rhythm?
And isn't rhythm
what characterizes
the living state?
I mean,
in other words,
we're not simply
bags of
these different
biochemicals.
The bags of
biochemicals
are very
elegantly
orchestrated
in space
and time
so that
everything
happens
according to
a rhythm.
And in terms
of,
you know,
the basic
human impulse
to expression,
you know,
it's rhythm.
Rhythm is
what gets you
going,
right?
Rhythm is
what gets
your feet
tapping
or gets
you up
dancing,
that sort
of thing.
It's biology.
It's biology
that these
sort of,
you know,
that this
sort of
authoritarian
version of
Christianity
most fears.
And, you know,
Dennis,
certainly the
rhythm idea
is really
taken to the
place where
you can see
it in the
indigenous
drumming
ceremonies
and this sort
of thing.
Well,
they're sort
of the
opposite of
this.
I mean,
they celebrate
all of these
things,
you know,
they're pretty
loose on the
sexual side
of it and,
you know,
in constant
relationship with
their natural
environment,
the plants that
surround them.
I mean,
it's just a
constant thing
with them
and the
rhythm as
well.
So, you
know,
what does that
say?
I mean,
Christianity
likes to,
you know,
posit itself
as the
culture of
life,
but it
looks to
me like
it's more
like the
culture of
death in
a sense
that it
tends to,
you know,
I mean,
its agenda
is to
deny
biology.
Remarkable.
All right,
Stephen,
Dennis,
that's a good
place to take
a break here,
so let's
do that.
We'll come
back in just
a minute and
talk some
more.
All right,
this is Mike,
you're listening
to Radio
Orbit.
My guests
are Stephen
Herod-Buhner
and Dr.
Dennis
McKenna.
You can find
information about
Stephen at
www.gainstudies.org
That's G-A-I-A-N
studies.org
And you can
also find out
information about
Dennis at
www.hefter,
H-E-F-F-T-E-R
.O-R-G
hefter.org
And with both
Stephen and
Dennis,
just put either
of their names
in a search
engine and
you'll find
much information
as well.
All right,
this is Mike,
you're listening
to Radio
Orbit,
back in just
a few minutes
with Stephen
and Dennis
and right now
a little more
music from
the spheres.
We call
these substances
consciousness
expanding
agents.
Well now,
if consciousness
does not
play a
major part
in the
future
history
of our
species,
then what
kind of
a future
history
are we
talking about?
Are we
going to
become
stupider,
duller,
more animal-like?
I don't
think so.
Consciousness
is our
defining
quality
and it
must be
nourished,
encouraged,
catalyzed,
never more
so than
now because
we have
a planet
in peril.
People who
say adventure
has fled,
it's all
humdrum.
I just
know,
you know,
that they
have forgotten
the five
grams of
psilocybin
sitting in
their
refrigerator.
All right
everybody,
this is
Mike,
you're
listening to
Radio Orbit.
We'll get
back to that
interview with
Dennis and
Stephen
Herod-Buhner
in just a
moment.
I've got a
couple things
I'd like to
mention here
real fast,
okay?
First of all,
Dennis mentioned
early in the
interview that he
was awaiting
the delivery
of his
plant samples
from Peru
and they
did arrive
safely.
He received
them just
a few days
ago as a
matter of
fact.
So anyone who's wondering, that's the update.
Everything's cool.
Dennis got the plants, and the work continues.
The websites, www.gayonstudies.org for Stephen, www.hefter.org for Dennis.
As soon as we go back to the interview, the first person who calls me,
I'll give you a copy of the CD that you've been hearing tracks from tonight
called Journey Through the Spheres.
It's a tribute to Terrence McKenna, and we're talking with Terrence's brother Dennis tonight.
And so call me at 573-874-5676 when we get back to that interview,
and you can get a copy of that, all right?
And I'll give you a copy of the program, too, if you want.
Let's see, one last thing here.
Anybody out there who is into astrology or planetary alignments or this sort of thing,
I'm interested in what was happening last night, special alignments,
anything particularly special that was happening in the sky last night about midnight central time.
So that would be midnight on the 2nd of April, yeah, just rolling over to the 3rd of April, all right?
So about 24 hours ago, 25 hours ago, as a matter of fact, from now.
If there was anything special going on last night in the sky,
I'd like to know about it if anybody has that sort of knowledge or information.
Okay.
One last thing here.
I'm going to read a poem that Stephen wrote because I think it's appropriate,
and he's a wonderful poet as well.
And I want to try to introduce more people to Stephen Herod Buhner
because he comes from a wonderful tradition,
and he's an amazing guy who's doing outrageously cool work.
And he has a lot of different gifts.
And this is one gift that he's given to us.
This is called Flowers by Stephen Herod Buhner.
Semen is Latin for a dormant fertilized plant ovum, a seed.
Men's ejaculate is chemically more akin to plant pollen.
See, it is really more accurate to call it mammal pollen.
To call it semen is to thrust an insanity deep inside our culture
that men plow women and plant their seed
when, in fact, what they are doing is pollinating flowers.
Now, doesn't that change everything between us?
Let me ask you guys both another question
that sort of is related to this whole cultural idea.
Dennis, there was a word that I learned from your brother years ago.
It's a word that's used in biology, and it's called neoteny.
Neoteny.
Neoteny, yeah.
And neoteny means the retention of adolescent characteristics into adulthood.
And I just thought that was such a fascinating description and word
because it seems to me to be a reasonably good definition
of the state of many human beings, certainly many human males in our culture.
Maybe I thought you guys could give your ideas on this idea
that we're pretty much adult boys or something like that.
Well, I think that notion of neoteny, as Terence used it,
actually it wasn't his idea.
It was, I think it was Gregory Bateson who came up with this idea.
The notion is that evolutionarily, you know, we have a prolonged childhood, right,
in the sense that, you know, we're born essentially in a larval state,
and evolutionarily we have to be because the head has got to be able to, you know,
emerge from the womb.
So most of the brain development that goes on is postnatal, and it's very prolonged.
I mean, they now pretty much know that the human brain doesn't really reach maturity
until about age 30, so there are lots of things going on up until that.
And because we have to, you know, there is so much involved with the maturing of the brain
and this sort of overlay of civilization, you have to acquire these cognitive structures,
language, ability to write, all of these things.
It takes time, and so in a way, you know, it's an evolutionary both advantage and disadvantage
for a newborn because a newborn is helpless, right?
Without the parents, it wouldn't survive.
On the other hand, with the protection of the parents, you know,
it has the luxury of, you know, being able to go through this process
of essentially brain evolution that goes on throughout childhood and young adulthood.
You know, it doesn't have to get up on its feet and be ready to run immediately.
Right, right.
Like other animals do.
So in that sense, you know, neoteny, I think, is a thing.
As far as the population, you know, as a race, we are sort of neotenous,
you know, or immature, certainly.
Right.
And I think that's what you're referring to.
Yeah, sort of culture as a neotenizing effect almost.
Right, right.
I guess the next question related to that, which maybe, Stephen, you could jump in on,
is male initiation.
I've always thought that that was a fundamental thing that seems to be missing culturally in the West
is some sort of an initiatory experience for men to bring them out of boyhood
and into the tribe, so to speak.
Well, you know, it's like my thinking's been changing a lot on these particular issues
that you're bringing up in the last few years considerably.
And, you know, I worked for years as a carpenter remodeling mansions and stuff like that.
You know, when I first went to work, I was, how old was I?
I was like 23.
I tried to avoid work as long as possible and finally caught up with me.
You know, I had to learn to trade.
And so I start working with these guys and these old boys, they knew that I was as green as grass.
And so they began this process of initiation.
And there's an instinctive thing I've seen amongst men who work together.
You know, there's this kind of thing that happens.
They work together in silence, but there's this energy that flows between their bodies
that they all know about, but they never talk about it.
And if any male comes into that circle who doesn't understand what it is to be male
in that kind of a circumstance, they have a biologically driven, it seems,
need to initiate that male into the group.
And so I think amongst tradesmen, people that work with their hands,
I see that initiation across disciplines, whether it's electricians or carpenters or whatever.
Where I tend to not see it very much is amongst more white-collar people.
And as a matter of fact, the way the jobs tend to be structured,
they're structured in such a way that the initiation process just doesn't occur.
And I see a lot of great sadness in those men because of it.
You know, and then there's that tendency for the American culture to be fairly youth-oriented,
very adolescent, which as soon as I started moving into middle age,
you know, the first time, you know, because guys, we learn to say with our eyes
when we see a woman that's, you know, attractive.
And we say it with our eyes, oh, you're attractive.
And the woman will say back, oh, thank you, and you're attractive too.
And we're not going to do anything with it.
It's just this very minor social flirting.
Right.
But when I moved into middle age and I saw a woman and I did that,
and what her eyes said back was, you're old enough to be my father.
You know?
And that's the moment I became middle age.
And then all of a sudden I started seeing there's this other state of being that we move into,
that middle age is truly an archetype of its own that has its own kind of identity
and quality and perceptions and character to it that we're biologically intended to move into.
And Bly used to say things like, he said, you know,
you can't understand what I'm talking about until you're at least 40.
You know, it really pissed me off.
I was like, hey, wait a second, you know.
But then now I go, well, yeah, he was actually right.
And I think that's part of the reason why.
And so as I've gotten older and I start to have less of a black and white kind of a view of things,
I start to see how people are, not only the big broad brush thing,
but there's a lot of variations.
And there are a lot of men that go through initiatory processes.
It's just we're not used to thinking of them as such.
And because the men don't talk about it very much, most people aren't aware of it.
And, of course, those kind of trades are of less and less importance each year
as we go more into a kind of an information society.
So, yeah, I feel like I was initiated,
but how many men percentage-wise are, I don't know anymore.
Dennis, what do you think about an initiation?
And maybe both of you, what do you think about an initiation with regard to entheogenic plants?
I mean, do you think that that's something that should be on the table for both men and women
as a sort of an initiatory experience?
Well, I think, I mean, yes, obviously.
You know, that's one of the forms of initiation that you find, you know, in indigenous cultures.
And that also usually goes along with the figure of a wise man or woman,
someone, you know, that holds the gnosis,
that can sort of be the figure that can help, you know, guide the initiation.
I, you know, in indigenous cultures, you know, you have fewer options in a sense.
I mean, the cultures tend to be small.
There are, you know, more, you know, there are only so many options for initiation,
you know, in an indigenous culture, I guess.
In our culture, you have so many more options on so many other levels.
Some of these activities, you know, like extreme sports or like, you know, hunting,
like the kinds of things, as Stephen said, you might experience in the company of other men,
you know, although women also, you know, have initiatory, you know, context and experiences,
you know, but we don't think of them formally.
We don't have that clarity, I guess, to realize that these are really forms of initiation.
I mean, you know, when it's going on, you know, I mean, Stephen makes the point that,
you know, he worked with carpenters, and it was only later that he realized,
you know, that he had undergone this initiation.
So it was not a formal thing.
It wasn't that they said, you know, now we're going to initiate you.
It's just something that took place as a result of hanging out and working with these people.
I think that dynamic goes on in our culture a lot.
I think, and I think basically it is a good thing.
I think that people are reaching out.
People are reaching out for essentially a form of spiritual expression that has meaning for them,
you know, and for young people particularly, when they're on the cusp of adulthood,
they want a meaningful experience, you know,
and they may not consciously even, in most cases, they probably don't say, you know,
I really need an initiation.
Right, right.
You know, they don't think that clearly about it.
It's just that they feel that something is lacking.
They reach out for an experience.
And so, you know, those that are lucky, you know, find either a wise mentor or a situation,
maybe they go to South America to, you know, try ayahuasca and that sort of thing.
Others don't really have that option, and so they seek other forms of initiation.
You know, whatever you have to do to become a member of the gang or whatever.
Right, right.
These are forms of initiation.
Yeah, we have, you know, there's certainly gang-related rights of initiation.
These are tribal institutions, basically.
Amazing.
They're a tribal species.
Nothing's ever going to change.
Yeah, yeah.
An interesting comment for sure, yeah.
And the thing about, you know, entheogens, it's been my belief and experience with myself anyway for a very long time
that those kind of teenage years, there's a tremendous drive in human beings for some sort of a visionary experience
that, as Dennis was putting it, that will sort of set the tone for their, or the direction for their lives.
And I think there's a tremendous hunger for that.
And to me, you know, psychotropic substances, they belong in that category.
I mean, that's one of the, was one of the major influences for me back in the 60s.
And it really helped set the structure and tone and direction for my life and all of my subsequent research.
And, you know, you know, I mean, I've known a lot of people that did LSD back in the 60s.
You know, lots of them.
And, you know, not that many of them that I know really had significant visionary experiences.
For a lot of people, it was just, it was like, you know, drinking but more fun, you know.
Right.
And a lot of laughter, and it was great.
And so.
No real intent.
I mean, I think with psychotropics, like in theogens, you know, context is everything.
I mean, Leary and Metzner and people like that said it, and they got it basically right when they said it's all about set and setting.
And intention.
And, well, intention.
Yeah, it's part of set, you know, it's part of what you bring to it.
In other words, your experiences, what you know, and your intention and what you anticipate it's going to be about.
I mean, it's perfectly possible to pop LSD and go to parties or, you know, and basically do it in a way that's purely recreational and not associated with any intent or any desire to have insights or uncover anything.
I don't say that's even illegitimate necessarily.
I mean, that's, you know, recreation has its place, but, you know, I think that it's also possible to use it in a very different context where there is an intent and there is sort of an expectation that you're going to learn something.
You're going to discover something about yourself, perhaps.
You know, our culture, I mean, in indigenous cultures, this is pretty much the context in which these substances are approached.
In our culture, that isn't even permitted.
I mean, that is part of the answer to the so-called drug problem, you know, with young people.
I think if you could, you know, if you could create context in which people could have these experiences, you know, many would have them and they would benefit from them.
And it would be, you know, a much less of a problem than it is now.
But our culture doesn't even admit, you know, of the value of this type of thing.
Well, we don't have any really living mystical tradition within the body of our culture.
Right, exactly.
And that's a real problem.
The mystical traditions, even in Christianity, have been suppressed.
Very much so.
And, you know, I mean, that's a natural expression of the human being and everybody benefits from it to a certain extent.
And so, but people that have that kind of movement inside them toward that direction, they have very few cultural expressions or cultural outlets that they can find that will allow that dynamic to emerge.
And, you know, even, you know, and again, this goes back to this notion of control.
I mean, a lot of what ecclesiastical, hierarchical, religious institutions are about are control.
And, you know, they're basically authoritarian institutions.
And they frown on people having their own experiences.
You know, that's not politically correct.
That's outside the bounds of, you know, what should be permitted.
The experience needs to be, you know, received by the priest and interpreted and massaged and filtered and then trickled down to the masses.
You know, we can't have people going off and having these, you know, spontaneous experiences on their own.
That's very threatening.
And they're right.
Again, they're right.
These are threatening to the institutions.
All right.
Let's let me switch gears here real fast for a moment.
And I want to talk about something that gets back to this idea of intelligence in nature.
And Dennis and Stephen, you both mentioned that there seems to be a tendency in education, for example, of students to gravitate towards things like zoology rather than botany.
And even energetics.
I think of things like engineering and the sciences and this sort of thing.
And I was reading an article just a couple days ago about this giant, what they call the large hadron collider.
It's a big, giant, super collider, particle accelerator type thing.
And there was a comment that I recalled from years ago that Dennis made.
And I'm paraphrasing Dennis.
But you made a comment about this idea that science looks toward these huge, high energetic experiments to try to solve the ultimate questions of nature and the universe and all this thing.
But in nature, however, some of the most interesting processes occur at really low energy levels.
And it seems that maybe all of this scientific, you know, their quest for the ultimate particle and all this sort of thing may be just chasing ghosts, it seems like, because of these other ideas that are at much lower energy levels.
Well, you know, I mean, I'm all for, you know, high energy experiments.
I think it's great, you know, that we have the technology that we can look at these processes.
I think that, you know, in a sense, it's, you know, it's the ultimate expression of the arrogance of science in a way, you know, to be able to say we can, you know, we can do these things.
We can initiate these processes where literally we can tear space and time apart, you know.
And it's a sort of an expression of the arrogance of science that not only can we do this, but we will do it no matter what.
I mean, I have read certain experiments that they've designed that say, well, there's a, you know, not zero probability that we may collapse space-time.
Right, create a black hole.
But we're going to do it anyway.
You know, because we are scientists and that's what we do, you know.
But, you know, so I think it's good in a way that we, you know, it's an expression of human creativity and we can learn things about it.
But to address your question, you know, I think by far the more interesting processes are going on at much lower energy levels.
It's not so much about, you know, scale and energy levels.
It's what's going on, you know, at the synapse, for example, or in the brain, you know, these sorts of things,
especially in biological processes, which are, you know, low energy, low temperature processes.
They all take place, you know, well below the boiling point of water.
They take place in aqueous mediums.
And, you know, I mean, from the biochemical energetics point of view, they're fairly boring, you know.
But from the point of view of the intricacy of the processes, what is really going on, you know, that's really where the rubber meets the road.
That's where the action is.
You know, quantum processes, for example, in the operation of the brain, you know, we know that they take place.
Things like electron tunneling, superconductivity, and this kind of stuff.
I mean, when we wrote The Invisible Landscape, this was all, you know, wild speculation.
And now it's pretty much, oh, yeah, you know, everybody knows this is going on, you know.
So I, you know, I mean, I don't know what the answer is.
I think we have to look at it at all levels.
But I think that, you know, it's not going to be found by the Hadron supercollider.
It's going to be found in somebody's test tube.
All right.
Well, the purpose for my question was really for people who are listening to get a feel for the fact that there are other things that are out there that are very interesting that may not have the, you know, the flash, no pun intended, of the large Hadron collider.
But there are very interesting things happening in botany and at the microscopic levels as well.
Absolutely.
And I think as you, I think that that will come around.
I mean, I think that, you know, as we begin to focus on these extremely small scale phenomena, which, you know, come up in the area of nanotechnology and this kind of thing.
You know, these are now getting a lot of attention and they are very sexy.
But what they do is, you know, they refocus attention from sort of the macro or the meta macro to the extremely small scales, you know, extremely small scale processes.
And at some point, you know, these things come together.
I mean, what happens on the quantum scale that you can measure, you know, at the, you know, radii of the order of the atom and that sort of thing also influence macro cosmic processes.
But they're much harder to observe that way.
So I think you're going to see a refocusing on the extremely small.
I once wanted to start a nanotechnology company, which I would call IBM, which would stand for Itty Bitty Machines.
I love it.
That's wonderful.
I remember an old transcript of a shamanic journey that I heard years ago that was documented by Joseph Campbell, as a matter of fact.
And he said, as the shaman was going into trance, when he came out of it, he spoke and he said, when you go into God's place, you make yourself small.
And I was always struck by that from a number of different levels, you know, but I just thought it was great.
So, Stephen, if I could, I want to ask a little bit about Lyme disease.
Oh, that's the, the, one of the emerging diseases that I've been interested in for a long time.
It's a really intriguing disease.
And, you know, I think there's nothing sexier than a good emerging disease like that.
We've got plenty of those these days, it seems.
Yeah, plenty of those.
And, you know, I mean, people consistently forget one primary fact that human beings are designed to be biodegradable, you know.
And we're trying to escape that destiny, you know.
So, you know, these kind of large-scale systems are really intriguing to me because it kind of brings us back down to our inescapable destiny.
But the other thing that's fascinating to me, too, are the plant populations that move with them.
And, for instance, Lyme disease has been moving up to host and in that pattern kind of through there.
The one primary plant that's been accompanying it, there's several, but one of them that is really intriguing is Japanese knotweed,
which is considered to be an invasive botanical and should be exterminated, you know.
But what's fascinating when you look at what Japanese knotweed does when it goes into the system of a human being that takes it,
it actually shuts down every inflammatory pathway that the Lyme disease, Spirocat, initiates.
And, I mean, it's, like, very sophisticated.
It must have found 30 points of meeting where it specifically deactivated the Spirocat's impacts on the human body.
And, you know, this is kind of a thing that herbalists have known for a long time,
which is that if they start to treat somebody or if they get ill or a friend gets ill,
that the plant that they need to treat it will spontaneously start growing either in their yard or around there.
And this phenomenon has been reported on for, you know, hundreds and hundreds of years by herbalists.
And so I love seeing that kind of dynamic.
And it's, you know, one of the things I talked about in Lost Language of Plants, too,
how these plant populations tend to move in response to needs that they pick up of the other ecosystem members.
And, anyway, so Lyme disease just happens to be one of the newest ones that I'm looking at
because it's such a kind of a freaky, interesting disease.
Oh, it's fascinating.
That's very interesting.
Yeah.
So, Stephen, what is your perspective on bird flu?
On bird flu, it's just like Robert Heinlein summed it up best years ago.
He said human population problems have a horrible way of solving themselves.
So is that what you, I mean, do you think inevitably there'll be this mutation in the flu virus
than they'll then allow human-to-human transmission?
Is that pretty much?
Well, it's inevitable that something like that's going to emerge.
I mean, flu is one of the best candidates for it because, well, for a zillion reasons.
If anybody's been reading the paper, they kind of, the experts kind of go over the reasons for it being a much more important disease
than malaria or something like that, for instance, because of its person-to-person transfer
and it just can spread around the world pretty quickly.
But the thing is that...
Once it crosses that threshold, but so far it hasn't done so.
No, well, it has.
It's kind of playing around the edges of it.
And, you know, there's maybe 15 diseases that are all kind of becoming sort of candidates for emerging like that.
And, I mean, part of the problem is that it's environmental.
You know, we've already exceeded the carrying capacity of the Earth, and you can't...
There's a point of no return that we're hitting.
So, for instance, like, one of the major things about peak oil, which is kind of, you know, the herb of the day topic these days,
is, you know, what most people aren't looking at is what that's going to do to the health care system
because almost all the pharmaceuticals we have are made from oil.
So we've basically erected a barrier around the human species using technological medicine.
And each year we have to put more and more energy into the technological medicine we use to keep that barrier in place.
And sooner or later, it's just the way ecosystems work.
Sooner or later, we're not going to be able to have the energy.
We just aren't going to be able to do it to keep that barrier in place.
And when it goes down, the gyrations that are going to occur from disease influx from this kind of temporary period
that we've created since 1946, you know, before the system equalizes, there's just going to be a lot of devastation.
And that's, you know, just because we have an opposable thumb and can print books
doesn't mean we're immune from, you know, these kind of systematic processes.
And when that happens, probably cultures that, you know, indigenous cultures that do have a reliance on plant medicines,
they'll probably do all right.
They'll do a lot better.
But, you know, see, one of the things that are really interesting to me is that...
Thank you.
Over the last 40 years, there's somewhere between 200,000 and 500,000 herbalists
that have trained in the United States.
And see, I speak at a lot of conferences, and for years I'd ask this question.
I'd say, well, why did you all decide to train to be an herbalist?
I mean, it's a profession you can't legally practice.
Right.
And yet all these classes are filled.
And 90% of the people would say something like, I don't know, I just felt like I had to.
Wow.
And to me, that's an ecological expression, I mean, of the human species knowing there's
this skill they're going to need before too long.
Right, right.
So in a sense, this is a collective expression of anticipation of this crisis.
Yeah, I think so.
People will turn to their local herbalists.
Right.
And 90% of them are women disguised as housewives and suburban.
Uh-huh, uh-huh.
And then all of a sudden, at that point of need, that knowledge base is going to still
be there.
Uh-huh, uh-huh.
Very interesting.
Ultimately, that's a good thing.
You know, but there will be a huge wrench.
A huge wrench.
Yeah.
Of course, when the disease comes in like that, they've run simulations of this, and it always
is the same because of how the system is set up, is that the first people that die are the
EMTs, the ambulance drivers, the nurses, and the doctors, right?
Uh-huh.
And then because that's the people where they concentrate the disease, and that's just it.
It shuts down the whole system after that.
Yeah, yeah.
As well, I mean, another worry I have about those things, you know, inevitably I think
that these mutations, you know, will take place, and how virulent they are, and how quickly
they spread remains to be determined.
But in the meantime, you know, all of this concern about it does serve the totalitarian
control agenda very well.
No, that's true.
There's nothing like fear to keep that stuff going.
Yeah, I mean, you can get away with a lot in terms of quarantining people, you know, moving
large segments of populations to places they don't necessarily want to be.
People will tolerate that if they think, oh, you know, it's an epidemic, right?
We have to do this for public health reasons.
They'll put up with a lot more than if, you know, it's being done for some political
agenda.
Yeah, that's right.
And Dennis, you guys, that's one of the reasons why I'm glad we got Stephen's opinion, because
I've always had this little skeptical thing in the back of my mind that says, I wonder,
you know, how serious these pandemic quote-unquote things are, or are they just being used as
another manipulatory device, you know, as a control mechanism?
I think the answer is both.
Well, Dennis, we haven't spoken much about mutations, but this idea that there are all
these hidden herbalists and things like that, and people that are learning to understand
these things.
It seems to me almost like an intelligence test, and you have to be able to pass go,
otherwise you don't make it to the next phase of the game or something.
And then I begin to think again about the endogenous tryptamines, and if they play a role
in some future advancement of the species or something like that.
And I know that's a question that's unanswerable, maybe, but I know you've thought a lot about
it.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, yeah.
I mean, they do and they don't, you know, I think.
I mean, as, I don't know if you read my essay about ayahuasca and human destiny.
I did, I did.
I didn't pick the title, by the way, but, you know, I mean, what I expressed there, you
know, I used to be sort of all gung-ho about the notion that ayahuasca could be used to
treat alcoholism or drug addiction, you know, we should develop a standardized extract, we
should do clinical trials, et cetera, et cetera, and basically we should develop it into, you
know, a pharmaceutical or a quasi-pharmaceutical.
And I've sort of gotten away from that notion in the last few years, partly because I have
come up against the regulatory wall and it's just impossible to breach in this country.
You know, it's hard to, it's hard enough to get an IND approved for, you know, a common
herbal medicine like St. John's wort or Kava Kava or something like that.
They never anticipated that you were going to be wanting to do clinical trials with, you
know, plants that contain controlled substances.
I mean, this just wasn't on their radar, you know.
But in a sense, I've stepped back from it and I've come to think that, you know, maybe that's
not the way to go.
Maybe, you know, with respect to these plants, and ayahuasca's a good example, you know, and
it sort of touches on this notion of plant intelligence that we've been talking about.
Maybe ayahuasca doesn't really need, you know, people like me to come along and make pharmaceuticals
out of it.
Maybe it has its own way of finding the right people.
You know, if people need to...