Sounds True presents In Search of the Original Tree of Knowledge, a weekend workshop with Terence McKenna.
Researcher, author, and philosopher, Terence McKenna has spent 25 years studying the foundations of shamanism and the ethno-pharmacology of spiritual transformation.
His books include Food of the Gods and The Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide, and most recently, The Archaic Revival.
He is also the founder of Botanical Dimensions, a non-profit botanical research project.
In this weekend workshop, Terence McKenna examines time and its mysteries, the nature of language, and the techniques of ecstasy that have developed in non-Western societies to navigate to and from invisible worlds.
And now, recorded live in Boulder, Colorado, In Search of the Original Tree of Knowledge, a weekend workshop with Terence McKenna.
How to slice into this pie, I try to never do it the same way because I don't want to get bored, but that lays a sort of obligation on me that I'm not always able to meet.
And two things, I think, are going on inside this wrap as currently packaged.
First of all, I'm very interested in talking about the impact of psilocybin on human evolution and values and institutions.
And then, so that you don't think we've just fallen into fringe anthropology 101, I'm interested in taking the insights from that discussion and trying to apply it to the modern or postmodern, as the case may be, dilemma.
Trying to draw some implication from looking at human prehistory and the set of factors that were in place at the moment of human emergence.
And since I feel pretty much among friends and fringies here, it doesn't trouble me to confess that my book, Food of the Gods, I really conceived of as a kind of intellectual Trojan horse.
It's written as though it were a scientific study, footnotes, bibliography, citations of impossible to obtain books and so forth and so on.
But this is simply to assuage and calm the academic anthropologists.
The idea is to leave this thing on their doorstep, rather like an abandoned baby or a Trojan horse.
And they will open their doors to it and take it inside, only to discover that out of this very staid rational discourse, pour the self-transforming elf machines from hyperspace with their own agenda.
I feel like I should say this, it's more for my ease than yours, that I've reached the conclusions that I now espouse through skepticism, reason, rationalism and tough argument.
So it may sound ditzy, flaky and soft-headed, but that's just because you're hearing it wrong.
The guiding input was experience.
And in a way, what we're gathered here to talk about tonight is an experience, which is not only rare, transformative, challenging, but also for reasons which we'll probably get around to, illegal.
So, uh, it's, uh, it's, uh, it's a very peculiar situation.
Very few experiences are illegal and our, uh, models of the world are built up based on our experience.
So, if you make an experience illegal, you're essentially saying it is off limits for model building.
You can't include that in your model because it isn't really there in some sense.
And, and this is the situation in Western society vis-a-vis the psychedelic experience.
To my mind, the psychedelic experience is as much a part of being human as sexuality, in personal independence, uh, child rearing.
These are the things which are scripted into us as opportunities for exercising our peculiar situation vis-a-vis the phenomenon of being.
And a society which would deny that is a society whose secret, or maybe not so secret, agenda is the infantilization of its citizens.
I mean, if we are not capable of dealing with these things, then who is?
And are the people who made the rules, did they carefully, conscientiously, and at depth explore these dimensions?
And decide they were unfit for human consumption?
Or, uh, was it done more hastily, more mindlessly, and with more fear?
I would submit to you that, uh, it's the latter.
Well, first of all, I want to talk about the impact of psychedelics, especially in this case, psilocybin, on humanness.
And then, if there's time, maybe we can talk a little bit about what is so great about it.
I had a philosophy professor once, Paul Feyerabend, some of you may know his books.
And he opened his Epistemology 101 course by saying,
I'm going to teach you what truth is, and then I'm going to teach you what's so great about it.
Well, I won't claim to teach what the psychedelic experience is.
That you will have to find out on your own.
But I think it is legitimate to discuss what's so great about it.
You know, are we, by any measurable index, superior or inferior to people who do not have this experience?
Because if not, then really the psychedelic position is no more than a kind of cult
to be lined up along with Roman Catholicism and all the other cults out there.
Speaking as a former member, of course.
Well, my notion of the way to legitimate the importance of psychedelics is by showing,
and I think one can show in fairly short order,
that these things are not alien to the human experience,
or ancillary or the province of uneducated little brown people down in the rainforest or anything like that.
I submit to you that the psychedelic experience and the impact of psychedelic plants on human beings
is central to understanding who we are and how we got this way.
And if we can explore this issue and convince ourselves that there's some merit in this point of view,
then it will simply, it will do more than rewrite the annals of a staid science like anthropology.
It will actually change how we relate to each other and to the planet that we're in the process of grinding into pollution.
So that's the raison d'etre for the politics behind it.
Now, here's the spiel.
Sometime in the last three million years,
our remote ancestors, the proto-hominids,
were disrupted in their evolutionary climax
in the canopies of the great rainforests of Africa.
You see, most animal species evolve into a niche,
tighter and tighter and tighter.
We see this with termites and cockroaches and most life forms.
This is what happens to them.
Only if the niche is somehow disrupted or destroyed
does the game veer away from its tendency toward closure.
And this is what happened to us.
Our remote ancestors would have lived happily
in the climaxed rainforests of Africa
in the same way that primates to this day live happily
in the climaxed rainforests of Indonesia and South America.
But for the fact that the dynamics of the planet,
and this ultimately is, if we're looking for a cause,
or some people would say a villain,
then it's the climatological dynamics of the planet
which began to limit these rainforest habitats.
And a new kind of habitat began to form in Africa,
which was grassland.
It's very recent.
And under nutritional pressure and under a pressure
that was the result of this retreating environment,
our remote ancestors descended from the trees
and began to adapt themselves to the new world of the grassland.
And they did this over a period of probably a couple of million years.
Now, I maintain, and if any of you are evolutionary biologists or anthropologists,
this is the nub of my position.
Here's what's new scientifically.
What they teach you about evolution is that it's caused by mutation,
which is a random process,
which then meets another random process,
which is natural selection.
And out of these two random processes,
lo and behold, you get sea urchins,
birds of paradise, gray whales, and human beings.
Now, when you inquire as to what is the source of this mutation,
you will be told it's cosmic rays,
incident, incoming hard radiation,
which can disrupt chromosomes.
And then most of these mutations are lethal,
some huge percentage of them.
But a vanishingly small number of them
actually confer adaptive advantage,
and they are then preserved in the genome
and passed on.
Now, what I want to suggest,
and I've never seen it thoroughly treated
by evolutionary thinkers,
is that food is the unexamined source
of evolutionary pressure.
It can be.
If you know anything about animal species,
you know that most animals tend to specialize their diet.
Insects are famous for this.
If you find a caterpillar and you want to raise it in a jar,
you must give it the food plant you found it on
because they don't just eat leaves.
It doesn't work like that.
They have species-specific adaptations.
Now, why is this?
It's because it's a strategy
to limit exposure to toxic and mutagenic chemicals
that other life forms are sequestering in their tissue
to discourage predation, essentially.
Well, so then what happens when an animal population
such as our remote ancestors
comes under pressure from a dwindling habitat
or a limited availability of food?
Well, what happens, if you have any sense,
is you start experimenting.
You start digging up roots you never thought about before
and chewing on them.
You start eating leaves.
You start eating insect protein.
You experiment with the slaughter of small animals
and so forth and so on.
And this is precisely what our remote ancestors did.
This is the much-lamented transition
from fruititarian holiness
to predatory carnivorous messiness.
But had we not been willing to lower our gourmet standards,
we would have entered the fossil record at that point.
So, here we have these proto-hominids
foraging into this new grassland environment,
beginning to beat on prairie dogs
and stuff like that.
And, simultaneously, as we all know,
evolving in this African veld environment,
were great herds of ungulate animals,
proto-cattle, bison, wildebeest, antelopes,
many, many different kinds of animals.
And one of the curiosities of nature
is that many mushrooms prefer the dung of ungulate animals
to just going out and making a deal
with the raw, natural environment.
They like the leavening that goes on
with vegetable material
when it passes through the double stomach
of an ungulate animal.
As a headline, what this means is
mushrooms grow in manure.
And so, our remote ancestors,
testing for insects and eating small animals,
would certainly have encountered
the so-called coprophytic or coprophilic,
the dung-loving mushrooms.
And they would have tested them for food.
Years ago, when I was in Kenya,
I observed baboon troops
in this very environment we're discussing,
and their habit was
they were very interested in cow pies
because they had learned from experience
that if you rush over to a relatively old cow pie
and flip it over,
there's a high probability of beetles
or beetle grubs under there.
And so, these were vectors for food getting.
Well, in the M,
I did not observe mushrooms in Africa,
but I observed mushrooms in the Amazon,
and they can attain the size of a dinner plate.
I've never seen them in cultivation quite that large.
But, you know, you come out after a hard rain,
and these things are landed
like little flying saucers or frisbees
in the meadows.
They would certainly have been tested
for their nutritional potential.
And psilocybin,
different from all other chemicals in nature,
including, as far as I can tell,
all other hallucinogenic chemicals in nature,
psilocybin has a unique set of characteristics
which implicated, to my mind,
very strongly in the catalyzing
of the emergence of humanness
out of proto-hominid and hominid organization.
And it works like this.
It's very relatively easy to understand
as major scientific breakthroughs go.
At least you're not going to be asked
to do any partial differential equations this evening.
I mean, psilocybin, in very low doses,
doses so low that if you were to take a dose this low,
you could conceivably forget you had done it
and just go out and shop and fiddle around.
But at doses so low that they do not register
as a psychedelic experience,
psilocybin imparts measurable improvement
in visual acuity.
Roland Fisher did this work
in the late 50s and early 60s.
And they built an experimental device
where a person who could not be seen
by turning a crank,
there were two parallel bars.
And by turning a crank,
this person could rotate one of the parallel bars
so that it was no longer parallel.
And lacking talking rats,
they went to the next preferred experimental animal,
which is graduate students.
And they would sit a graduate student
down in front of this device,
give them a very low dose of psilocybin,
and then put a buzzer in their hand
and say,
when the two bars are no longer parallel,
push the buzzer.
And Fisher collected large amounts of data
which showed that the people
who had taken the psilocybin
and the other people were given placebo,
of course,
could detect this deformation
long before the unstoned subjects
were able to do so.
And Fisher,
who was a totally straight European scientist,
in fact,
a Vienniser,
when I talked to him about this stuff,
he was very cagey.
And he was funny,
in fact.
He said,
well, you see,
it's very interesting.
Apparently,
here we have data
which argues significantly
that we are perceiving reality
better with the drug
than without the drug.
Yes.
For him,
that was a joke.
I mean,
he never did anything with it.
It was just a throwaway line.
But it stuck with me.
And I don't think you have to be
a rocket scientist
to see
that if you are a hunting animal
in a situation
of nutritional pressure,
as our remote ancestors were,
and there is a food
in that environment
which will give you
better vision
than, by God,
the animals
which accept that item
into their diet
are going to
be more successful hunters
than the ones
that do not.
And consequently,
they will outbreed
those members
of the population
that have some aversion
to this exotic food.
Either they don't like
the look of it
or they don't like
that it grows in manure
or they don't like
the taste of it.
But those who accept it
as a dietary item
will be more successful
at getting food
and consequently
more successful
at raising their offspring
to sexual maturity.
And that's the name
of the game
in Darwinian evolution.
You must raise
your offspring
to sexual maturity.
then the genes
flow forward.
If you fail
in that
you get
an F
in the evolution
game.
Well, okay,
so visual acuity
that's all very fine
but psilocybin
has other properties
which build
on that initial
pharmacological
peculiarity.
If you take
slightly larger doses
of psilocybin
and this is typical
of many indoles
you get
with many of which
are hallucinogens
you get
what is called
CNS arousal
central nervous system
arousal.
You all know
this feeling.
It's the feeling
of two double cappuccinos
in short order.
It's that you
do not sleep.
You are very restless.
You are very alert.
Your attention
is scanning,
scanning,
scanning
and
in highly
sexed animals
like primates
arousal means
exactly what it
sounds like.
It means
erection
in the male
animal
and
now
isn't that
interesting?
That is
a second
factor
feeding back
into this
increased
success
with offspring
business.
not only are you
a better hunter
but you're a more
highly sexed creature
and you're having
more of what
straight anthropologists
refer to as
successful copulations.
An amazing phrase
actually.
Meaning of course
that impregnation
is a consequence
of this sexual activity.
Now the other thing
that psilocybin
does
at or slightly
above this
arousal level
and this is very
important for the
argument
is it creates
it causes
what I call
boundary
dissolution
or
and boundary
dissolution
in human beings
like you
and me
means
ego loss
and I believe
that this
would have
promoted
a social
and sexual
style
based
not on
monogamous
pairing
but on
orgy
the scenario
is fairly easy
to imagine
it's
that
these
remote
ancestors
of ours
would take
these mushrooms
and they
probably
at the new
and full moon
the thinking
is that
ritual
was originally
lunar
timed
and then
they would
and these
are
we're talking
about
nomadic
groups of
people
probably
no more
than 80
to 100
people
and then
there would
be
group
sexual
activity
now
an interesting
social
consequence
of
orgyastic
social
styles
besides
a whole
lot of fun
of course
is
it's impossible
to trace
lines of male
paternity
in that
kind of a
situation
you see
women know
whose children
are whose
because they
see the child
come out of their
body
and they nurse
the child
but men
do not
in that
situation
have
their children
my children
what they
have
are
our children
the tribal
group
and
this
boundary
dissolving
thing
let's dwell
on this
for a moment
because this
is central
to my
argument
and it
has
political
consequences
for our
own
lives
all
primates
clear back
down
into squirrel
monkeys
and lemurs
all primates
have
what are called
male
dominance
hierarchies
and what this
means is
that the
most
the males
with the
longest claws
the hardest
muscles
and the
meanest
dispositions
take control
of everybody
else
women
children
weaker
males
everybody
comes under
the thumb
of the alpha
males
of the pack
this is true
as I said
of squirrel
monkeys
howler monkeys
so forth
and so on
it is also
true of us
sitting here
in this room
this is a male
dominant society
I mean there's a lot
of complaining
and hair pulling
about it
and there's a
political alternative
in the form
of the women's
movement
and feminist
sensitivities
but for most people
male dominance
is the rule
well I
would like
to suggest
that our
peculiarly
discomfort
relationship
to reality
is a consequence
of the fact
that
for a
long period
of time
perhaps as short
as 20,000 years
perhaps as long
as a million years
as a species
and not
consciously
we accepted
into our
diet
a drug
that had
the consequences
of suppressing
male dominance
that this
was
the social
consequence
of accepting
psilocybin
into the diet
the ego
is
a
structure
that
forms
in the
psyche
like a
calcareous
tumor
or a
growth
if you
do not
have
regular
recourse
to the
cure
and the
cure
is
psilocybin
and the
boundary
dissolving
sexual
and social
style
which it
carried
in its
wake
so the
reason
that we
as a
people
are
haunted
by the
idea
of a
lost
paradise
a
perfect
world
sometime
in the
misty
past
is not
you know
Mercier
called it
the
nostalgia
for
paradise
and thought
it was
a kind
of a
longing
that had
no basis
but I
think
that it's
entirely
a memory
of a
period
when
male
dominance
was
chemically
suppressed
ego
was
chemically
suppressed
and by
male
dominance
and ego
I don't
mean to
lay this
entirely
on men
I mean
I would
wager
probably
everyone
in this
room
has more
ego
than they
need
certainly
starting
with me
and that's
part of the
paradox
that you're
supposed to
enjoy
in this
you know
the ambiguity
of me
preaching
the loss
of ego
so
essentially
you know
what happened
was
a chemically
driven
leap
in evolution
as a
consequence
of the
suppression
of these
behaviors
that favored
male
dominance
as a
species
we would
have continued
with male
dominance
forever
had it
not been
for
psilocybin
in the
diet
and it
established
a situation
in which
in less
than
two
million
years
the human
brain
size
doubled
this is
without
contest
the
greatest
mystery
in the
whole
of
evolutionary
theory
Lumsden
who is a
brilliant
evolutionary
biologist
called the
doubling of
the human
brain size
in two
million years
the most
spectacular
transformation
of a major
organ
of a higher
animal
in the
entire
fossil
record
well
now
it would
be
spectacular
enough
if it
were the
liver
of an
otter
or the
pancreas
of an
elephant
but
notice
that
it is
the
organ
which
created
the
theory
of
evolution
itself
and
all
other
theories
so that
we're
getting a
little
tautological
here
folks
there's
something
fishy
going on
what
was it
that
caused
this
explosive
doubling
in
human
brain
size
well
I
maintain
that
it
was
the
new
behaviors
that
emerged
with
the
suppression
of
ego
and
their
reinforcement
in
this
situation
of
nomadic
pastoralism
and
that
there
was
a
period
let's
call
it
from
the
melting
of
the
last
glaciers
in
BC
there
was
a
period
when
men
and
women
were
in
balance
with
each
other
children
and
adults
were
at
peace
with
each
other and then it was lost and we fell into history you know the long slog
toward Armageddon is what was initiated in its place well now if it was so
wonderful why would anybody ever let go of it why was it lost well we have to go
back to the very forces which created this situation remember I said it was
called the climatological dynamics of the planet created the grasslands in place
of the rainforest continuation of those processes turned those grasslands into
desert and where there once were water holes running rivers grasslands and vast
herds of animals and their human symbiotes suddenly there was encroaching
desert fewer water holes the mushrooms began to be seasonal began to be
located only in the rain shadows of mountains the great mushroom festivals
which had been at the new and full moon became solstice seal and then equinoctial
and then you know biennial or something anyway you get the picture it was fading
and I don't think people took this lying down no pun again I think that there was
great anxiety about the fading of the mushroom and the loss of the sacrament and
so these people searched for a strategy for preservation well in a world without
refrigeration there is only one well no there are two strategies for preservation of
a delicate food like that one is air drying which is not terribly satisfying because as soon as a
rain cloud comes along your dry stuff absorbs moisture out of the air and turns yuck and so
the real the only real option is preservation in honey and this was done I'm sure it's still done in
Mexico to this day in remote mushroom using villages people preserve it in honey now the problem here and this is a
a lot of my book goes into this kind of thing a lot because food of the gods because what food of the gods is
really about are the hidden factors that drugs lay upon us that we are not even aware of and if you are
attempting to preserve a hallucinogenic mushroom in honey what you have to be aware of is that honey itself is
potentially a psychoactive drug honey will turn into mead it will ferment into a crude kind of honeyed alcohol
well if the mushroom brings suppression of ego group sexual activity and the formation of group values what does alcohol bring
alcohol has two effects primarily it lowers sensitivity to social cuing at the same time that it confers an exaggerated sense of verbal
facility in other words people turn into jerks behind this I mean you only have to go to a busy singles bar somewhere here in Boulder and you will see the alcohol ambiance being acted out
right in front of you so and and you know it's perhaps not so true of our generation but I think probably for a thousand years nobody got laid in western civilization unless they were juiced
because Christianity was laying such a heavy trip on everybody and you know people barely took their clothes in other words you had to become blindly intoxicated to do what comes naturally
and I think up until very recently how many women have their first sexual imprinting in an atmosphere of alcohol abuse I mean I would some huge percentage I imagine
so that is the story basically of the fall into history the loss of this mushroom cult happened right at the time that we were inventing agriculture and
agriculture and the suppression of orgy have something in relationship to each other on two unrelated levels
first of all you suppress orgy because once you have agriculture it's no more about psyching yourself up for the great hunt it's all about getting up before dawn and going out and hoeing the weeds out of the crops
so it doesn't promote a party mentality
the other thing is that as human mental capacity was evolving remember that exploding brain size as human mental capacity was evolving women in these nomadic groups
began to notice a curious fact which was every year they would return roughly to the same place as they had been the year before and in the discourse
from last year's camp in the midden they would discover food plants growing
and some brilliant woman or group of women put it together and said aha we buried food here last year and now there is food here
must be something about putting food into the ground gets you food in other words they were able to cognize a cause and effect relationship
that were separated over many months of time at the same time that women were putting this together men were noticing that the act of sex had certain consequences nine months later
the same perception had different impacts on both sexes but it was an ability to coordinate a temporally separated cause and effect
well once men got onto the notion of male paternity
they realized that these aren't our children
some are mine
some are somebody else's
and from that notion
you go to
my child
to my woman
to my hunting area
to my weapons
to my
my
sib group
you get it all
you see
the ego is born
and it is born in an atmosphere of complete paranoia
the first consequence of agriculture
well it has a number of consequences
but one consequence
is
it's a tremendously efficient way of producing food
that's obviously why people got into it
what does efficiency mean?
surplus
what does surplus mean?
haves and have-nots
the most spectacular architectural edifice of 10,000 BC on this planet
was the grain tower at Jericho
it was
had thick walls to hold the grain
and it had high walls so you could climb up on top of it and drop rocks on the people who were trying to get into it
surplus makes nomadism impossible
because you can't drag this huge amount of grain with you
so you get sedentary populations
and then
since the people who want the grain are killing your people in fury when they can't get the grain
you decide to put a wall around the whole encampment
now you have a small town
now you have urbanism
now you have the division between nature and secular society
you have classes
you've got it all
and I maintain that this is the long march into hell
and
our particular
obsession with drugs
as a species
I maintain can be traced back
to this transition
that
you know
yes elephants love fermented papayas
and so do butterflies
and so forth and so on
but this kind of
intoxication
is not
what we're about
we
addict
severely
to several dozen substances
less severely to
probably a hundred more
and
we addict to everything
that
you know
what we call romantic love
shows a lot of similarities to hard drug addiction
when you separate the lovers
you know
sleeplessness
suicidal tendencies
burning into tears
hysteria
loss of weight
you can't tell whether this person is getting off heroin
or has separated from their partner
well if you take an individual
who is alcoholic
or
has some kind of serious drug problem
current thinking is
this can be traced to traumatic abuse in childhood
this is what happened to us
traumatic abuse in childhood
we were literally
torn out
of a symbiotic relationship
to the earth
by the forces of male dominance
agriculture
sedentary living
so forth and so on
and we've been trying to
scratch an itch
that we can't find
ever since
and it has
you know
money doesn't do it
power doesn't do it
nothing seems to do it
we cannot
we seem to be the unhappy monkey
and we take this unhappiness out on each other
with a vengeance
and
you see what happened was
when the mushroom faded
the million years of
pharmacologically interrupted
patterns of male dominance
reasserted themselves
but it was no more a foraging monkey
with this style
it was a creature with language
tools
music
social organization
and suddenly it got very ugly
and people weren't interested
people began fighting over the women
so we don't want to have orgies anymore
this woman
is my woman
touch her you die
and so forth and so on
and we are living out
the legacy
of this
well before I talk about the
the social consequences of it
for us
I want to go back to the question
what was so great
about it
I mean we've talked about orgy
but you can have orgy without psilocybin
what was so wonderful about that
proto-historical mode
well this is where it becomes slightly more woo-woo
because what we have to talk about is what is the psychedelic experience anyway
and I maintain
that if we're talking about psilocybin
and we're talking about taking it in nature
as these people did
that you know
yes
first come the dancing mice
the little candies
the colored grids
and so forth and so on
but what eventually happens
quickly
like ten minutes later
is
there is an entity
in the trance
in the vision
there is a mind
there
waiting
that speaks good English
and invites you up into its room
and once there
you
realize that this is what all the hoopla
about the Gaian mind
and the rebirth of the goddess
and all that
is about
it's not a metaphor folks
it's a headline
in biology
we are not
the only intelligent
minded species
occupying
this planet
we may be the only
bipedal hairless mammal
with intelligence
on this planet
but there is something
out there
spread through
the grasses
the forests
the rivers
and the oceans
our own emergence
emergence into intelligence
took less than two million years
life
has been on this planet
for a billion and a half years
and we don't know
how many strange pathways
beckon
but at some point
a kind of mind
came into existence
and it is real
it's what lies behind
the religious impulse
in our species
there really is
somebody else
sharing
the local
mind space
and I don't believe
we're talking
theology
here
in other words
this is not
you know
in Milton's wonderful
phrase
the God who hung the stars
like lamps
in heaven
it's not about that
for me
that's a big question mark
but it is
it is
the God
goddess
of this earth
it is the biological mind
it is
that all
boundaries
are illusions
and that life
is a thinking
feeling
entelechy
of some sort
and we are just like a little
droplet
that has somehow
escaped
from the river
of cognition
and now imagine
that we're the only water
in the cosmos
not so
it turns out
what
the reason the psychedelic experience
is so baffling
and transformative
even as we sit here
with your heads
full of Heidegger
and Husserl
and
I don't know
Wilson Phillips
and all this stuff
is because
in the faith
in contact with that
we have no more
sophistication
than our
orgiastic
mushroom
munching ancestors
civilization doesn't give you
a leg up
on this stuff
in fact
it makes it harder
to figure out
what's going on
because we have defined
nature
as dead
you know
atoms
screaming
through empty space
ruled by
tensor equations
of the third degree
that's our picture
of what nature is
that isn't what it is
it's
a mind
of some sort
okay
what is the implication
of all this
is this just some kind of
fringe
anthropological revisionism
no
it isn't
because
the fall into history
and its consequences
is
at this point
a loaded gun
held
to the head
of the entire planet
we are about
to
pull over
the soup cauldron
and if we do this
then
two and a half billion years
of evolutionary advance
will be shot
nobody else ever dropped
the ball
so you know
we appear to be
vying for
this peculiar
honor
if we do not
awaken
to the consequences
of ego
then
we are going to run
this system
right over the edge
the whole
thing
which characterizes
our dilemma
as a global society
is
our inability
to feel
feel
the consequences
of what we are doing
you know
we've got the data
the ozone hole is
disappearing
life in the sea
will die
if it does
that will disrupt
the food chain
the world food supply
will drop
by 60%
everybody who isn't
white as a sheet
will have to starve
in that case
and so forth
and so on
I mean
we actually toy
not only
with our own extinction
but with the extinction
of all life
on the planet
and with the extinction
of the idea
of dignity
and decency itself
well
I'm not in this
psychedelic game
because I think
it's not easy
or because
I think it's going
to be a cinch
I'm in it
because I think
it's the only game
in town
you know
if hortatory preaching
could have done
the trick
then the sermon
on the mount
would have turned
the corner
if
cautionary data
flowing back
to ruling institutions
could do the trick
then sometime
after Thomas Malthus
people would have begun
to hit the brakes
nothing
seems to work
we're sick
we need
pharmacological
intervention
the
ego
is
permitting us
to
slowly
not so slowly
commit suicide
and
you know
the fact that we
cannot act
collectively
that we are suspicious
of all forms of
collectivism
that we
really are
all for one
and one for all
is not
our style
instead
what we have going
is a cat fight
and
you know
no less
straight person
than Arthur Kessler
in a book called
The Ghost in the Machine
said
humans are so wired
for beating the brains
out of woolly mastodons
that's what evolution
has equipped us to do
not
negotiate
weapons
treaties
and destroy
bacteriological
factories
we
have to
force
our evolution
we
have to
chemically
restructure
the primate
brain
so that we
do not
commit suicide
and the only way
to do it
is for the psychedelic
community
to stand up on
its hind legs
and roar
and
you know
maybe they'll build
camps for us
but
the point being
I think
there's a moral
imperative
to try
what works
I mean
you know
in the 60's
psychedelics were called
consciousness expanding drugs
a good old
phenomenological
description
well
if
consciousness
does not
loom large
in the future
history of our species
then what the hell
kind of future
is it
going to be
no future at all
I maintain
so
if
there is even the
slightest
iota
of possibility
that these things
do
what I'm saying
they do
we need to get
johnny quick on it
and check it out
because
that we may be
beyond the point of
no return
right now
nobody knows how bad
this ozone hole
thing is
or what's locked up
at rocky flats
or behind the iron
curtain
or dumped in the arctic
ocean
we may be past
the fail safe point
right now
folks
there is no time
to lose
it is time to engage
the powers that be
in a little more
serious dialogue
than the
just say no
horseship
that's been peddled
recently
because we're talking
about the survival
of life
on the only planet
that we are
certain
has life
on it
this may be
the site
of a cosmic
experiment
with
universal
implications
and it rests
in our hands
everybody
here
tonight
is here
because
a whole
bunch of people
didn't drop
the ball
and
you know
you think you've got problems
nine times
in the last
million years
the ice
has moved south
from the poles
miles
thick
no antibiotics
no electronic
communication
nothing
and I'm sure
these people
were miserable
and they dragged
through it
and they lived
and they passed
it on
now we're
it
and we will be judged
the lamest
of the lame
if we cannot
come to terms
with this
and begin to talk
about what is going
on
this is not
obscure
as I said
I view
the psychedelic
experience
as central to
humanness
as our sexuality
we cannot
allow
dominator
institutions
to infantile
infantilize
us
and to tell you
where your mind
can and cannot
go
we even have a piece
of paper
locked up in a vault
in Washington DC
that guarantees
life
liberty
and the pursuit
of happiness
well now
what could
the pursuit
of happiness
possibly mean
if it doesn't mean
the freedom
to practice
your own
relationship
to nature
and its gifts
so I think
we have been
entirely
too casual
about the importance
of the psychedelic
experience
this is for one reason
because
we cannot
publicly get together
and discuss it
in detail
and one of the things
that I think
is very important
about get-togethers
like this
is if you will
look around
you'll notice
that we cannot
really be distinguished
from the rest
of society
some of us
live under bridges
some of us
clip coupons
you know
there's a wide
spectrum
of people here
but
this is your
affinity group
this is your
community
someone in this room
actually has
what you need
and
you know
I have
acted as a
filter
so out of
millions
living along
the front range
here we've
gotten it down to
I can't go any further
than that folks
the rest
is
up to you
well
I guess
the last thing
I want to say
and then we'll take
a little intermission
and
and then come back
and do questions
afterwards
which is my favorite
part
but I want to
just for a minute
invoke
the psychedelic
experience
without regard
to
the evolutionary forces
that created it
or the political
institutions
that suppress it
and so forth
and just say
in case there's
some soul
in this room
who's never had
experience
that
this is
extraordinary
news
we're not talking
about something
like a dream
it is not
like
meditation
no
you can't
get there
by yourself
and
Babaji is
equally useless
because you
and Babaji
are starting
from the same place
in this game
it requires
pharmacological
perturbation
of ordinary
neurochemistry
in order
to see
this mystery
and it is
a mystery
it is
not going to be
reduced
to the firing
of synapses
or repressed
sexual desires
or day
residues
or anything
like that
it is
the very thing
which all
these religions
are yammering
about
it's there
it's real
I mean if you think
that the world
is empty
of adventure
then you just
haven't been hanging
out with the right
crowd
I mean
on a Saturday
night
within the confines
of your own
apartment
on five grams
of psilocybin
mushrooms
in silent darkness
I guarantee
you
you will believe
that Ferdinand
Magellan
should take second
place to you
you will see
things
which no human being
has ever seen
before
and
that no human being
will ever see
again
that's how big
that universe
is
that can
the incredibly
constricted
space-time
locus
of the here and now
that evolution
has forced upon us
for survival purposes
is simply
one point
in an apparently
infinite hologram
of explorable
data
that is
the human world
I mean
the
you know
the entire world
of every science fiction
novel
and story
ever written
is
minuscule
compared
to the universes
of strangeness
and peculiarity
that are
accessible to
any one of us
if you will
but
apply the method
and if you're not
willing to apply the method
then you know
you're going to sweep up
around the ashram
till hell freezes over
and
not
understand
what
is going on
I mean
I think
you know
I'm sorry to be so hard
on religion
I think it has
its place
is
the inspiration
of ethical behavior
you know
religion should
teach
ethical behavior
but
it has
very very little
to say
about the mystery
of being
other than
that it's there
and that's not
practicing religion
is dancing
with the mystery
losing
and finding
yourself
in the mystery
and people often
say to me
you know
well
how does this relate
to other forms
of spiritual work
the answer is
maybe
not at all
I mean
I've certainly taken
a lot of psychedelics
and I think
I see no sign
of
spiritual attainment
or
ethical
perfection
or anything
so
la-di-da
as that
I don't know
what this is
all about
but I do know
it's ours
it belongs
to us
we are the creatures
of mind
and
95%
of what
mind is
lies
on the other
side
of the psychedelic
boundary
ordinary
consciousness
is just
like
keeping the
accounts
of life
but there's more
to life
than the account
books
I mean
everything else
is out there
the color
the affection
the humor
the terror
the mystery
the strangeness
of it all
this
is the domain
that we want to claim
and explore
and if we can find
the collective
institutional courage
to do it
I think this
current
planetary crisis
will be seen
for what it really is
and what it is
is
it's not a dying
these are not
the last rights
for intelligence
this is a birth
process
I mean
if you were to
come around
if you've never seen
somebody give birth
around the corner
and it was in progress
you would be
thoroughly
profoundly
alarmed
I mean
it looks like an
enormous tumor
is making its way
out of somebody
and they are being
split in two
and blood
is being shed
and there's
pleading
and screaming
and thrashing
it would be a real
leap of understanding
for you to say
oh how wonderful
new light
is emerging
this is the way
we do it
well
this is the way
we do it
I mean
we are in the birth
canal right now
of a planetary
civilization
literally
the amniotic oceans
of 500 years ago
that's all gone
there is no frontier
there is no going back
the piece of the fetal environment
is gone
and now
in transition
literally
the walls
are closing in
you can't breathe
you can't eat
you can't find your way
it appears to be the end
but there's light
at the end of the tunnel
the problem is
that tunnel
is in the back of your mind
and if you don't go
to the back side of your mind
you will never see
the light at the end of the tunnel
and once you see it
then the task becomes
to empower it
in yourself
and other people
spread it as a reality
God did not retire
to the seventh heaven
God is some kind of lost continent
in the human mind
and if we will but explore the human mind
we can reclaim these relationships
with our own authenticity
and shed the childishness of his mind
of historical existence
and gender politics
and all the rest of it
and move on to the real business
of establishing a real civilization
thank you very much
Does anyone want to ask a question or is it all just perfectly clear utterly convincing and
Yeah, of psilocybin bad effects
Somebody once said what's wrong with DMT and I said well nothing unless you fear death by astonishment
But but your question is a good one first of all
You know, I talked a lot about how what we have to do is destroy and ablate ego
However, there is a very small percentage of us who have a hard time creating any ego
whatsoever and the for these people boundary dissolution is no problem their boundaries are dissolving all the time on them
I would say that they are at the
Contraindicated end of the spectrum that if you're
fearful already and
Fighting to keep from being overwhelmed by confusion at what's going on in your life at the paper box factory or something
then probably
Tossing in mega doses of how the sentence is not the way
for you to do it or if you do if you're just bent on doing that then I would say
Do it in the presence of some kind of professional and
How you find a professional in this legal climate you'll have to discuss with me privately?
I don't want to make it sound though. I mean it's a tricky thing
I don't want to make it sound like it's absolutely riskless
Physically, I think it's pretty safe
Unless you have are odd in some way, but you need to know you know
You don't want to find out you're odd an hour and a half into it, but that
the the problem comes
with the mind
You know if if you are delicately balanced
If your whole life has been about not looking at that or that or that
Then this is not your game, you know you should go back to
watching Jeopardy and
But the kind of person
The kind of person who is called to this is a person who has an exploring
soul I mean my I am not a
Courageous person in the sense that you won't find me shooting white water you would do don't see me
You know rappelling down the faces of cliffs, but from the time I was at the tiniest little kid
I was into the weird
What's weird weird is the compass heading and if you keep your compass always
Pointed toward the peculiar the ultra the bizarre the unspeakably alien then you know you'll find these places
The people the people who think life is all cut and dried and are perfectly happy to have Carl Sagan and George Bush explain all of reality
Have never left the broad swift stream of mundane
thinking but you know off in the byways and tributaries
There's a wonderful alchemical saying
Which I generally mangle, but I think it goes something like this the tallest mountains the oldest books the widest deserts
There you will find the stone and what it is is it's a prescription for exploring weirdness
That's all it's not going to be on mtv. It's not going to be in God forbid Esquire
It's going to come
From you know doing your homework visiting strange people in strange lands
and checking it out the
What I can't give you to return to your question is I can't give you a guarantee that it will be fun
You know the rolling stones have that wonderful line you don't get what you want you get what you need
This stuff is ruthless and if there's something that you're trying not to look at it's going to get you for sure
But ask the veterans most people will tell you you learn more from the bad trips
Than you do from the good ones the good ones are ecstatic and connect you up to nature and other people the bad ones show you
Your your kinks and your limitations and your thought
Errors and that sort of thing. It's not an easy row to hoe. That's why I think
There's a little bit of social confusion about it one of the things I should make clear is I really advocate
high doses
Rarely I think the worst thing you can do is get into a style of psychedelic diddling
Where you know you take half a gram every day
all this is doing is
Giving you a tolerance to psilocybin
You're not having the psilocybin experience. You're having the tolerance to psilocybin
experience the really the way to do these things is to
Do them rarely so that your whole system can reassert itself and come to equilibrium and then just slam it
and
This is amazing. I mean, I think I think that this works for all these psychedelics
I'm
I'm an inveterate cannabis user and I wish in a way that I could get a slightly
Better grip on my cannabis use because the I think the real way to do cannabis is like
once a week
by yourself in
Silent darkness with the strongest stuff you can get and then immense amounts of it
And you know people call it a recreational drug and of this and of that hate done that way it will
catapult you into places where it's the it's I love it the great place to get to on cannabis and some people never in their whole life
Touch it is the place where you say my god. I've done too much
It's not easy folks, but it's worth shooting for
Basically what what you should do is is you know do some homework read some books
Talk to your friends and then hang on Hannah. It's like
You know, it's very much like riding an enormous roller coaster
You know once that baby rolls out of the station
Do not stand up do not try to climb out of your car
Shut up and hang on with the faith that most people have lived through this
Somebody else yeah the purple
Well having just heard that I'm a pothead please ask them one at a time
What is your first literary question?
Well, I don't mean to imply that people first used it in low doses and then middle and then higher over time
What I mean what I meant to imply I think they were using low middle and high doses from the very get-go
But they were using low doses to hunt middle range doses for orgy and ceremony and truly high doses for this boundary dissolving
tremendum
literary question uh-huh
Well, I'm I'm not wedded to that first of all chatal hyaluk for those of you haven't read the book
Or know about chatal was this immensely sophisticated
civilization that existed in the seventh millennium
B.C.
We're talking three thousand we're talking six thousand years before
Zero this civilization existed and was destroyed and the
The characteristic of it is shrines dedicated to cattle and in my book
I argue that this was probably the last outpost of this partnership
Society
But it was still I think the real golden age of mushroom use was probably from about
30,000 years ago to about
15,000 years ago and by the time chatal hyaluk comes along it's it's a fading or yearly or seasonal thing
The important one. The assertions that you made earlier
The assertions that you made earlier was that these endo-based plant solution agents actually change people that use them. And the unfortunate thing that I observed is, I can't agree with that assertion. It seems that as many people, it seems like only a really few people are changed by it. Only those who are predisposed to change. And I'd like, in one of the questions you asked, that's one of the important ones that you made earlier.
Does it make us better...does it make us different. And I'm just not convinced at all. When I see people taking mushrooms and going around, no. And I mean, it's, it's an amazing show, I mean, my friends are you all through me too.
And that's because I tell my brothers, you know, it's one of the things, right? And I'm very interested in sharing that there's what you're going to do. This is so hard to learn.
So you're a real person that you're doing. That's why you're going to be the ones that are worthy of the most.
I think one of the questions you ask that doesn't make it better, doesn't make it different.
different. And I'm just not convinced
at all. But when I see people
taking mushrooms and going around
doing chinkish-minkish things,
and just being as jerky
as they ever were, I mean,
you know, I'm going to
and you know, I don't see it happening.
Well, I...
My argument
would be that people
don't take it enough and they don't take
it frequently enough.
That there are a lot of people
who really would rather
not get loaded
but who feel they must
take some psychedelic
drug in order to keep membership
in their peer group. So what they
do, you know, you can always spot these people
because their first question
at the get-go is, will I be able
to drive? I love this
question.
Because, you know, it indicates
you've got a real tough nut
on your hand. In every
sense of the word, no.
No, you will not be able to drive.
So, you know, I...
One of the things that inspires
me to do this is
I want to get to the people
who've taken
three grams of mushrooms
and the people who've taken
150 mikes of LSD.
And I want to convince those people
that they never got close
to what I'm talking about. Even though
they had a life-transforming experience
and saw things totally differently,
they never got close to what I'm
talking about. And so
what you have to do is convince people to take
high doses
and then that's to
break them through and then
frequently enough that they don't
forget what the deal
is. So I think if you take a
psychedelic population and divide
it into those who have done
five grams and above,
then you will see
an exceptional
slice.
But not the dabblers.
The dabblers don't count.
And we all can
be, or at times,
guilty of this, I think.
And then...
Is that your last question?
Does that do it for you?
Or do you want to be thought psychotic?
You choose.
Well, I'd love competition.
I mean, I...
The competition is terrible.
That's the entire basis
of my success.
Yeah.
You, because you were
before.
If you still wish.
I don't know if it's preferable.
But here's the thing.
People are going to think
you're a nut
if you come down
and say
that Johan Sebastian Bach
or Jerry Garcia
is God.
And this is what
you will have to say
if you listen to the dead
or the B minor math.
So,
what I'm interested in
is
I want to know
the thing in itself.
Not what it does
to Bach.
not what it does
to a river
flowing through
a forested valley.
I want to see
what it can do
with darkness
and silence.
And I think
most people think
it'll be boring.
Probably because
they've been hanging out
with these BDI gurus
meditating
and God knows
there's nothing
more boring on earth
than most meditations.
However,
psychedelic,
sitting in a darkened room
on five dry grams
of psilocybin mushrooms
is nothing
like meditating.
And that's where
it can get at you.
My relationship
to it
is always one
of
I want to know
what it is.
And so,
I think this
sensory deprivation method
is the only way
to get at that.
Other people might not like that.
People say,
well, you mean
you put down
the whole thing
of going into nature?
Isn't nature
the great affirmation
in all this?
And the answer is,
yeah,
but it works for me
sort of
without the drugs.
Plus,
and this is just
maybe my own weirdness,
but I'll share it with you.
I have noticed
that these things
are incredibly disruptive
of the ordinary flow
of Kazuistry.
Do you all know
the concept of synchronicity?
Well,
if you don't stay
in your room
with the lights out
and the phone unplugged,
the damnedest things
will happen to you.
I mean,
you couldn't pay me
to go into
an American city
even mildly loaded
because
adventures beckon.
Now,
some people like that.
You know,
some people say,
you know,
let's take 500 mics
and go meet
weird people.
Uh-uh.
Not this cookie.
Uh-uh.
Yeah.
According to your statement,
what I find happens there
is that you
create an experience
where you are
taking in other people's dogma.
You know,
you're bringing in
something that's already done.
And I feel like
the people experience
can create something new
and something new
expresses itself
from the death.
Which is why
I also say
the darkness sometimes.
But one thing
that I did learn
is that
the high doses
are very,
very interesting.
It would take me
way far
beyond
the small doses.
And I've experimented
with both
homeopathy
and
now from the
mineral extracts
in terms of
making my own medicine.
But in turn,
it's psychedelic.
But if you take that
into
and my question
is coming back,
of course,
that if you take that
into a situation
where you remove
the whole
elective habit
that you do
in a homeopathy,
do you think
that there could be
a more potent experience
through that solution?
Are you asking me
do I think
a homeopathic
preparation
of a psychedelic
would be effective?
It would be
homeopathically
effective.
I wouldn't expect
it to be
experientially effective.
See,
I would say
that
there's
what we view
out here
is a direct
creation
of what we are
inside
that's the current
present.
That if you do
change it
in the same manner
that you change
your homeopathy,
which is changing
the asterisk
so that you then
create the world
of a certain time,
that it would be
even more potent
and even more
immediate
effective
really
just in our reality.
But don't you
think that
if that were true
and since
in a high dilution
like that
no molecular trace
of the original
compound remains
that you have
then just
found the solution
to the
legalization
conundrum.
because in a
materialist world
it's assumed
to be bogus.
right
yeah
well
this seems
to me
not an abstract
proposition
at all
let the best
homeopaths
succuss
the strongest
hallucinogens
and set them
out
and
let's give
it a whirl
over on
this side
yeah
oh I can
hardly
wait
why are you
in jail
ah
why am I
not in jail
hmm
well that's
an interesting
question
and I
number one
I don't know
here's what
I've come up
with
notice
that I
use
big words
I don't
boil
I don't try
to boil it
down to
a shoutable
slogan
like
turn on
tune in
drop out
uh uh
that
then they
come
they come
so that's
one possibility
that simply
if you are
defined in
their eyes
as an
intellectual
then they
automatically
put you
in the
harmless
category
and send
resources
elsewhere
that's one
possibility
now the other
possibility is
slightly more
disturbing
but in the
interest of
thoroughness
let me
raise it
perhaps I'm
sanctioned
perhaps
they decided
we don't
really understand
what this
stuff is
and we
can't have
a mass
movement
but let
one guy
just kind
of keep
the pilot
light
on
in case
we ever
change
our minds
about
this
he will
have kept
the pilot
light on
and the
other possibility
which is
probably
too naive
but in the
interest
again of
exhaustive
thoroughness
maybe they
just haven't
noticed
yet
you know
Tim
Leary
who's
a friend
of mine
would
address
25,000
people
at a
throw
my
crowds
are
you know
a couple
of times
a year
they creep
over a
thousand
and I
think the
key is
to keep
it
low-key
and we
don't want
to
you know
dodge
your
stadium
filled
or anything
like that
it's
very good
to
atomize
it
and spread
it through
now the
other thing
is
you know
I advocate
plant
hallucinogens
and people
always say
well
what about
LSD
I mean
didn't LSD
change your
life
didn't it
change all
our lives
why aren't
you into LSD
and the
answer is
certainly
yes
and yes
the reason
I'm not
into LSD
is a
a
not having
to do with
the effects
of LSD
which I think
are marvelous
but with the
fact that
a
couple of
enterprising
second year
biochemistry
students
can produce
six or seven
million hits
in a long
weekend
six or seven
million hits
of an illegal
drug
suddenly
this is the
realm of
governments
and criminal
syndicates
and revolutionary
disruption
of populations
my brother
and I wrote
psilocybin
the magic
mushroom
growers guide
if you work
like a
dog
for six
months
maybe you
can produce
two or
three thousand
hits
so
that's the
thing
medical qualities
that made it
terrifying
to the government
I mean
anybody
with
fifty thousand
dollars worth
of backing
and
two years
of biochemistry
could turn
themselves
into a major
threat
to
political
stability
in this country
so they
slammed that
they're not going
to put up
with that
the thing
I love
about the
mushrooms
is
you know
if you're
a dedicated
mushroom grower
you produce
this piddling
amount
and if they
come and drag
you away
because it is
illegal
all they get
is you
no
syndicate
collapses
no pyramid
disappears
so
it's invasive
and
low-key
and slowly
spreading
the other
thing is
mushrooms
are
this is a
cultural
thing
mushrooms
are
inherently
non-threatening
they're
absurd
you know
they're
they're what
we
they're what
we put
decals
of on
serving trays
and
bath
towels
bear
mushrooms
on them
it's a
kind of
silly
thing
and
and so
I think
that they
don't really
understand
what a
powerful
hallucinogen
this is
well that's
enough on
why I'm not
in the can
this woman
yeah
more creative
and beneficial
process
if we work
on evolving
our minds
without using
an external
drug
what happens
if the government
does come in
and decide
to completely
wipe it out
or
we can't
access
that thing
of consciousness
anymore
and then
things
you know
they just
step backwards
again
when they do
so much more productive
to teach people
how to get
themselves out
the road
absolutely
if we could
do it
I mean
I'm not yet
convinced
see
I mean
you've got
your gurus
but if
you ever get
close to
any of these
people
in these
guru scenes
close enough
where you can
just say to them
look level
with me
is this stuff
as good
as five grams
in silent darkness
and they say
are you serious
the other possibility
is technology
on two fronts
mind machines
the problem
with mind machines
is you know
you have to smoke
a bomber
to put up with it
more than ten minutes
I mean
you quickly
satisfy yourself
that
this can't
possibly be it
because it's
it is lights
but it is
contentless
while the
psychedelic
experience
is all
content
the other
possibility
and I've
put in
some time
in this
beat
is
virtual reality
and I have
more hope
for virtual reality
because virtual reality
is a technology
for showing
for
that would allow us
to show each other
the inside of our heads
our dreams
our visions
and I think
that
sufficiently perfected
it might have
the consequences
of
these psychedelics
the problem is
it carries a huge
amount of negative
freight
you know
that it's not going to be
a tool for us
to show each other
the inside of our minds
it's going to be a tool
to sell us crap
that we don't want
it's going to be a tool
for yet more realistic
vicarious and gratuitous
violence
it's going to be a tool
for more
pornographic
degradation
of women
so it seems to me
while it holds out
the possibility
of a technically
driven psychedelic
it has a lot
of negative freight
I agree
with your premise
but I
I'm driven
by a tremendous
sense of urgency
I mean
why try to create
a technical alternative
to psilocybin
when you've got
psilocybin
like
I think
that people
should use mushrooms
as a step
and once
you get there
you try
and you keep going
without
without that tool
I mean
because what we
what we want
I mean
we want to
transcend
this plane
we want to be
on a higher plane
a higher
state of awareness
that you're not
you're not going to
get to that plane
ultimately
if you have to
keep coming back
into the plane
to get the stuff
to get out
of the plane
again
well how about
how about this
maybe there's
something wrong
with that metaphor
because notice
it has to do
with planes
and transitions
it's an inherently
dualist metaphor
this concludes
tape 1
our program
continues
with tape 2
our program
continues
with tape 2
how about this
maybe there's
something wrong
with that metaphor
because notice
it has to do
with planes
and transitions
it's an inherently
dualist metaphor
how about if we say
there is no inside
and outside
there is no with
or without
you just use
what you've got
whatever works
should be used
I spent time
in India
and visited
all these people
and so forth
and so on
I just became
convinced
that unless
you were
predisposed
to believe
in this stuff
that it would
never carry you
where you wanted
it to
and one thing
about psychedelics
you don't have
to be predisposed
it doesn't work
for those who
believe it works
it works
for those who
think it doesn't work
then one last
point
and then we'll
go on
there's a story
maybe some of you
know this story
of a man
who lived
by the side
of a river
and he wanted
to cross
the river
so he
practiced
a city
of levitation
so that he could
walk across
the water
and it took
him 40 years
to perfect
this city
and finally
he could cross
the river
and
Buddha
was preaching
in the neighborhood
and the guy
came to him
and he said
Master
look what I've
achieved
I can walk
on the water
to cross
the river
and Buddha
said
yeah but the ferry
costs a nickel
and that's
the thing
I think
we're not going
to be able
to replace
this tool
without wasting
so much
time in the
act of
reporting
It that Armageddon will catch up with us. I think we have to humble ourselves
So thoroughly that you have to admit that you can't get where you want to go unless you form a partnership
with somebody whose idea of a good time is growing in a cow pie and
If you're willing to partner up with this humble humble
Member of the ecosystem then you and it can fly to glory
Have at it
Yeah, I wouldn't recommend especially in the late stages of pregnancy doing anything that is going to wildly
Perturb you and you know LSD was discovered in the act of trying to produce better drugs to induce labor
So that's excellent advice honor the fetus. Yeah
Yeah
Well the true and honest answer is how the hell can you find out when they won't let you do research?
It's totally insidious. We don't know
We don't know because they will not allow
The the research to be done. This is one of the reasons why I say that you should stick with
shamanically
Sanctioned plants because we know for instance that people have been taking psilocybin in the Sierra Mazateca of Central Mexico
Mexico for millennia they don't show blindness
tumors
miscarriage
Madness cataracts whatever that's your human data for that
But you go to let's talk for a minute about something like ketamine
Nobody knows nobody has any data
MDMA seems to be tremendously effective in facilitating
Interpersonal stuff that's a psychological issue chemically
What kind of data do we have you know six years worth of data gathered under duress so?
To be safe stick with the things that are sanctioned by human use and then
In some more enlightened future
We will explore these synthetics and find out just what the parameters are. Yeah finish up
No, I'm not saying that I'm saying take things which have been sanctioned by human usage
I mean, how about a plant like Strychnos Nox Vamica? I mean, you're dead in a minute and a half
And it's a beautiful wonderful plant. Why did it kill you? Well, because it's jammed with strychnine
No, it's nothing about it's being a plant
It's about having a repeated history of human usage. That's what sanctifies it
Yeah, the lady in magenta
First of all, I'd like to point to the woman who's sitting right here
I deeply respect your position there because many times in my own search of consciousness
I've wanted to not have to depend on the external catalyst to catalyze my broken consciousness
But I propose that you think about one thing
And that is, I've studied plants for the last 23 years
Plants and medicine
And what I've noticed is that there is a particular co-evolution that happens between the plant and the human
And so what I've studied here for granted at one point that the mushrooms are going to catalyze the same kind of consciousness that they always have
But not only do the biological climatic situations determine what is going to happen to that mushroom
But I think that all species are changing consciousness at the same time
So what the generations of mushrooms might have taken me years ago when I was 18 years old
That whole species and the whole might be prepared to teach an entirely different, more evolved lesson at this point
And so I'm just trying to talk a little bit
That's really an interesting point
I mean, it never occurred to me, but somebody brought it up to me
They said, have you noticed that the trips are changing?
And once you do ask yourself this question, it does seem to be so
And I don't know whether that what, I mean, that's a deep assertion
I'm not sure exactly what's going on there
For instance, this goddess thing
I don't think people gave the goddess a thought in the early 1970s, late 1960s
Now people have, you know, some of the least likely people report intense encounters with the goddess
So is it amplifying the general mindset of the society?
And so there's more goddess stuff there?
Or I don't really know
It's a very interesting question
There are more questions than answers
I mean, this is definitely wide open stuff
Yeah
You discussed our sense into health
Which certainly makes sense
You suggest the use of psychedelics of suicide as an antidote to sex
But I have trouble seeing a cause and sex relationship
As far as what our youth or moral-wise threat youth might lead to in terms of bearing the path
We're trying to restore the relationship of ego to the other components of the psyche that existed as recently as 12,000 years ago
The ego has become a deadly growth in the historical societies
Exacerbated by the phonetic alphabet, monotheism, modern science
This is like you're getting sicker and sicker and sicker as you lay these things on
And so the idea is that if we could restore the original diminished role of the ego that it had for that period
However long it was, that we could begin to solve our problems
Because the problems which face us, put very simply, are going to demand sacrifice
And sacrifice is what the ego doesn't want to hear about
I mean when you go to somebody and say look to save this planet
We're going to have to redistribute income radically
That means everybody in this room is going to have less
We're going to have to honor a whole bunch of cultural positions
That we previously just were going to bulldoze over and so forth and so on
So it's the diminishing of ego by any means necessary that lies to getting any grip on our problems
I mean if we continue as we are
I think we have probably less than 30 years before life is irreconcilably screwed up
You know nobody believes
That the future is rosy and wonderful
I mean if you go to the people at the World Bank and the IMF
And these people who are straight, you know suits all of them
They have a set of curves which would stand your hair on end
When they propagate the curve of population
The curve of toxification of the environment
The curve related to the ozone hole disappearing
You see, you know, it's finished sometime in the next 50 years
They don't talk about this because they don't want to panic
The vast numbers of people who just go to work and raise their kids
And pray somebody smarter is doing something about all this
But they don't believe there is any kind of normal future
And I don't either
I think we're going to that it's business as usual is not on the menu folks
We're either going to go into a era of immense resource scarcity
Regimentation, governmental interference in our lives
Tremendous propagandistic efforts to make us do one thing or another
Or we're going to pull the plug on scientism
And its stooges and the institutions which feed us feed it
Capitalism is an interesting problem
More easily discussed now that communism is out of the picture
Capitalism is as anti-human a philosophy as you can possibly conceive
Because at this very moment
We should be consuming less
Manufacturing less
Selling less
Transporting less
And what's the battle cry?
Free trade everywhere!
What does free trade mean?
It means my right to come to your country and sell the most outlandish junk you've ever seen
And you will have no right to turn it away
Because in the name of free trade
Crapola has to go everywhere
It's really
See they try to tell you that capitalism and democracy are not at variance
Actually the whole Marxist Leninist Socialist thing was a side dish
The real life and death struggle is between capitalism and democracy
Democracy says everybody has an innate worth that must be honored
Capitalism says those who die with the most toys win
You cannot reconcile these two things
And nobody wants to talk about this
We're still having the party over the fall of communism
But you know
You go to the Soviet Union or the former areas of the Soviet Union
And you see that what it was was it was a deep freeze for traditional culture
In Kyrgyzia and Turkmenistan
People are basically camel husbandry is what's going on
Now with communism on the rocks
McDonald's will be there in five years
And Kmart will be following close behind
So I think we're coming to a great crisis
Of fundamental
Our relation to our own fundamental institutions
I'm not anti-capitalist
I think capitalism needs to sever
Its connection to materialism
This is again why virtual reality is interesting
You sell things made of light
Not made of beryllium, metal, brass, steel and wood
But light
We've got all the light we need
But we have to stop making things out of stuff
Or we're not going to be around to tell the tale
In order to get anywhere we have a major shift of values
Yeah
You're suggesting that a way to shift our values
Is to take a lot of psilocybin
Which I don't disagree with
But your model has been that everybody in the culture
Participated in this
And were able to shift their values simultaneously
So to cooperate
Are you suggesting
Is that the necessary outcome in this case?
No, I think that you know
Revolutions are made by percentages
If fifteen or twenty percent changed
Then the example would spread
You see, we are not
Psilocybin is the easy way to awaken
Take a psychedelic plant
And have an experience
And get your act together
But the future is full of sledgehammers
It's not going to end with a whimper
It's going to end with a series of thuds and bangs
It could begin almost any time
I mean we could get a hot muggy day in Mexico City this summer
And a million people would die
This thing in Los Angeles is a wake up call
It is going to get uglier
And more chaotic
And more crazy
There is going to be more starvation
More fascism
More dictatorship
It's unless
We do something
Until we do something
And it can
How bad is it going to have to get
Before people say
You know
We're doing something wrong
You know
People dance on the Russians
But you've got to admire people
Who have the guts to say
We did it entirely wrong
100%
I mean
Can you imagine in this country
To being able to do
Say
You know
I mean
It may be coming
This character from Austin
Is a peculiar item in the mix
You know
I mean
I for years
Had a fantasy speech
Which I always imagined
That I would somehow end up giving
But
It's
The speech where you say
My fellow Americans
You have been lied to
Screwed
And abused
By these two criminal parties
For
A hundred years
And your only hope
Is to
Overthrow
The republicrats
And create a decent world
To live in
Well no republican
Can make that speech
Speech
No democrat
Can make that speech
And be credible
It has to be
Somebody who wasn't
In bed
With either of those forces
So I'm not at all pleased
By who
Apparently will bear the mantle
But on the other hand
If change is what we need
Then it's
It's probably not going to be
A candidate
That you and I can embrace
It's going to be
Some oddball
So you know
We have to recognize it
When we see it coming
Yeah
A couple of things
First of all
It seems to me
In an attempt to place the
Spatial and temporal context
Which you put in
Experience
You have to realize
What the functions are
That go into that
We don't even know
What it is
No we don't know
What it is
We try to place it
Into a temporal
Spatial mode
And it seems to me
That it's
It serves us better
To leave the flesh open
And have the experience
To let the experience
To tell us
What it's about
And what we need to build
Yeah
The great thing about it
Is it can talk
Secondly
I'd like to ask a question
About time away to zero
Good for you
When I first saw it
You talk about that
It was not a thing
That was
Made in Sansei
I believe
And
I was fascinated by it
And I watched it closely
But as it got
To the end of the tape
When I started
Getting interested
In what the significance
Of a zero crossing
Was
The tape stopped
So I'd like to
I mean it seems to be
A decreasing function
Of time
Which meant that
A zero crossing
Had some singular significance
But I
I really wonder
What
In real terms
A zero crossing
Is time away zero
Well
Probably half
At least
In the room
Haven't the faintest idea
What this question
Is about
I've stayed away
From this
Because this is
The personalistic
Stuff
Where I've created
A certain model
Of reality
Based on
A new way
Of looking at time
And I don't want
To go into it
Too much tonight
But I want to
Suggest something
To you tonight
Which is
That
You know
At the very beginning
Of this talk
We talked about
Mutation
And natural selection
And that's
The Darwin's
Insight
Was vast
And deep
And what he
Offered was
An explanation
For how
Rainbow trout
Come to be
Monarch butterflies
Redwood trees
Herds of elephants
So forth
And so on
What it doesn't
Address
Is us
We are
The weird
Bird
On the block
I mean
Yes
We're some kind
Of monkey
But when you
Stand us next
To our nearest relative
It's very very clear
That it is not
A very near relative
It doesn't
Look like us
Much
Certainly
Doesn't act
Like us
What's the deal
With human beings
And I think
That
You know
How all
These religions
These western religions
Have built in
This idea
Of the end of the world
And they're always
Running around
Expecting the Messiah
Or something
And this
To the scientific
To the scientific mind
Is just the final proof
Of the pudding
That these people
Have water
Between the ears
Because science
Just says
You know
That's just ridiculous
I mean
But I wonder
I wonder
I mentioned
Just a minute ago
These curves
That when you
Propagate them
Into the future
Everything leads
To the unimaginable
And it's all
Within the next
50 years
So
I sort of
Think
As human beings
As analogous
To iron filings
On a piece of paper
And you shake
These iron filings
Out of a salt shaker
Or something
And there they lie
Randomly arranged
In heaps
Well then
You come underneath
The paper
With a very powerful magnet
And lo and behold
These little iron filings
Coherently arrange themselves
Into this beautiful
Double mustache pattern
Which I'm sure
You've all seen
Well I think
That
There is
A
An enormous
Punchline
To the historical
Process
That
Very very few
People
Suspect
And that
What history
Is
It's
It's what happens
To an animal
Who falls
Under the influence
Of a kind
Of strange
Attractor
And that
We are being
Pulled
Into a well
Of transformative
Intentionality
History
Is not
Pushed
By the
Causuistry
Of war
Migration
Imperial
Dynastic families
And stuff like that
History
Is pulled
Toward
An unimaginable
Something
Which is
Continuously
Trying to
Mirror
Itself
In us
This is why
These Egyptians
Said
You know
I don't know
What it is
But I just think
We should really
Build a big
Simple building
And say
I don't know why
But I'm gonna
Enslave 50,000 people
And do it
And don't ask me
And this is
And you know
This is the same force
That reared
Chartres Cathedral
This is the same force
That created
The space shuttle
We are
In a relationship
To an unseen
Something
Which we keep trying
To image
With our mythology
Our religions
Our technologies
Our epiphanies
And I think
That
It's not so far away
That it
It isn't
10,000 years
In the future
It is
Sometime
In the next
50 years
And that
This is what
History was for
You see
History is an
Incredibly
Peculiar
And brief
Phenomenon
I mean viewed
From the point of view
Of biology
It's less time
Than it takes
For a new species
To emerge
Let's call history
25,000 years
You know
In frame
One
You're chipping flint
In frame
Two
You're hurling
An instrument
toward Alpha Centura
Like that
This happened
Well
What's happening
It's that
Mind itself
Is being
Pulled out
Of this creature
And it's being
Given hands
And languages
And
Post symbolic
Systems
In order to image
The unspeakable
I call it
The transcendental object
At the end of time
It casts
And it's in another dimension
It's in a kind of
Superspace
And what it casts
Into history
Is the enormous
Shadow
Of its eminence
This is what
Straight people
Call God
This is what
All these visionaries
Are raving
It's about
It's that
When you sink
Belief
The surface
Of ordinary causality
And mundane
Hohumism
What you discover
Is
This enormous
Transcendental
Object
Which you could call it
You know
The sacred heart
Of Jesus
Or the
Flying saucer
Or the
Philosopher's stone
It's all of
Those things
And much
Much more
It's not only
Stranger than you
Suppose
It's stranger
Than you can
Suppose
And it has
Called us
Out of animal
Organization
Over a 25,000 year
Period
We hang in the balance
And then we meet it
And we're going
To meet it
That's the light
At the end
Of that birth canal
Of transcendence
That I referred to
And now I see
That our
Song is sung
Our time is done
Thank you
Very very much
For turning in
Thank you
To show up at 10 AM
To play
Saturday or
Sunday
And then
We'll dig into this
Deep and deep
In the interim
I think
That
It's
Worth
Taking the
Time for
Everybody
To
Just make a
Very
Brief
Very, very
Brief
Statement
You don't have to say
Who you are
If you don't want to
But you can say
What you're hoping for
Or why you're here
Or what your
Agenda is
Just so that
If it turns out
We're 80%
Shrinks
Or you know
80%
Ceramicists
Or something
Then we turn it
That way
And
Those of you
Who are
Undercover
Please stay
Undercover
So you don't
Alarm
Anybody
Especially
Me
Right
So why don't we
Just start
And
Go
Across
In some
Reasonably
Logical fashion
Which
Yeah
Well
That
Tells you
What you're
Worth
Doesn't
Oh
True
No
Let's not record it
So people
And
Also I had
At one point
Thought I would be
An art historian
That was one of my
Real
Obsessions
So I had
Had enough art history
To be trained
In
You know
Recognizing the evolution
Of motifs
How one artist
Passes on
Techniques
And conceits
To his
Students
Or his
And all this
Art historical stuff
And I also
Had been
Very interested
In Jung
And
And none of this
Seemed to explain
The content of the
Psychedelic experience
I would get in there
And say
Well
How come
I'm not
Seeing
A archetypes
And B
Things
Which
Somebody
Else
You know
And so
Caravaggio
Bosch
Somebody
Should have seen
This stuff
And gotten it down
And there didn't seem
To be
A trail
Through the history
Of western art
Of the presence
Of this
Dimension
So then I thought
Wow
Is it that nobody
Knew
About all this
I mean Bosch
Would have given
His right arm
For a sheet
Of blotter
I would think
So
So it became
For me
Like a mystery
What
Where is this stuff
Coming from
And what does it say
About our humanness
Yeah
I've read
Bosch
Is somewhat
Of an ink pig
By the optimist
Of his time
They were experimenting
With him
Well there's a lot
Of ink
Spilled over Bosch
Because he is such
A startlingly
Radical painter
In the context
Of his time
Many of his conceits
Were picked up
After his life
Peter Bruegel
The elder
Being the foremost
Exponent of it
He may have been
An alchemical
Guinea pig
Who
Let's see
Frasier
I think
Wrote a book
Called The Millennium
Of Hieronymus Bosch
In which he wanted
To suggest
That maybe
Detura use
That there was
A cult
Called
The Brotherhood
Of the
Free Spirit
Which practiced
Ritual
Nudity
Which
Begins to sound
Something like
As we talked about
Last night
It was a cult
Of printers
And
It may be
That the garden
Of earthly delights
Was actually painted
As an altarpiece
For a congregation
Of the Brotherhood
Of the free spirit
But this is all
Pretty murky stuff
It's hard to get back
To Bosch
He didn't leave
Any written records
We have his birth
Is recorded
In the parish church
Where
Of the village
Where he was born
We know he was born
Sometime around 1450
Died in 1516
But the details
Are pretty murky
Well
Not to belabor Bosch
So what I thought
Would be a reasonable way
To do this
This morning
Is to take
The most extreme
Psychedelic
Case
And experience
And describe it
And talk about it
A little
And then see
What issues
That raises
Because my
Experience
With this stuff
Has led me
To the conclusion
That
In a way
It's
To be thought
Of
This other dimension
Is to be thought
Of
Like a mandala
And different
Psychedelic compounds
And generously
Different kinds
Of yoga
And different kinds
Of techniques
Of all sorts
Land you
In different parts
Of this mandala
But that
What you're always
Trying to do
Is get to the center
Of the mandala
And it's
Simply my bias
My opinion
But I think
The center
Of the mandala
Is probably
The DMT
Experience
For a number
Of reasons
And so I thought
It would be interesting
To talk about it
This morning
First
Let me talk
About it
Physically
DMT
Is
An
Indole
Halucinogen
A beta
No, no
A tryptamine
And
It's
Produced
Endogenously
In the human
Brain
This is
Very interesting
Very few
Psychedelic
Compounds
Are produced
In the human
Brain
We don't know
What DMT
Is doing
There
But
It means
Essentially
That we all
Are subject
To a rest
On a technicality
Because we all
Are holding
A Schedule
One drug
It's sort
Of the ultimate
Catch-22
Where if all
Else fails
They just say
Well you were holding
Anyway
The interesting thing
About DMT
Another interesting
Thing about it
Is that
It's incredibly
Rapid
In it's
Onset
And
In it's
Disappearance
The whole
trip lasts about 15 minutes
This makes it a tremendous tool with which to challenge the critics of our position
Because if somebody wants to rise up in righteous wrath and condemn
psychedelics
Then you say well you have tried them haven't you and of course they never have it's like scientific
denunciations of astrology I mean scientists love to denounce astrology
But find one who can cast a natal horoscope, and I'll give you a hen's tooth
You know so
the
DMT overcomes this objection the entire experience lasts 15 minutes, so you say to the critic
You know you're not going to experience it and yet you're going to carry on a pogrom against it
You won't invest 15 minutes to checking out what this is about. You know, what kind of scientist are you?
So it has that social efficacy
Now the fact that it is the strongest of all
Hallucinogens at least if there are ones stronger, please keep them away from me
I mean, I don't think anybody needs to get higher than that. I certainly don't
I mean, I've at times come out of those places and said this stuff is illegal
You know it breaks cosmic law
Of course then Tim Leary told me that cosmic laws are only local ordinances anyway, so it didn't really matter
Uh, okay. Oh, good question. Yes, it's the commonest of all hallucinogens in nature
It occurs in many grasses
Phalaris tuberosa, Phalaris arundinaceae. It occurs in a number of leguminous plants
Probably the most spectacular being Anadonanthra peregrina this huge
Tropical locust-like tree from which the snuff called neopa or epina is made
That's a tough way to get your DMT. Let me tell you
Because there's so much cellulose and other crap and corruption in the mix that you have to do like a tablespoon
Up each nostril and the technique
The technique the technique is you get a bamboo tube or a hollow tube about this long and you
Pour in this tablespoon of this stuff and then you squat down on your haunches
And you get a friend and you put the tube up your nostril
And then the friend blows with the full force of his breath blows this stuff into your head
Well, you fall. It's like being hit in the face with a two-by-four. I mean you that it's like you think he kicked you and
You fall over backwards. You scream you salivate
You get back up on your haunches and by this time he has refilled the tube for the other nostril
So and then after
Mm-hmm
Yopo, epina, nipa, it depends on the language group and the waika, yanomami
It's also called vilka in the carib language and then after
For ten minutes or so it slowly begins to form up in your head
But you know God your sinuses are in stat for sure and
It's not very pleasant and the other thing is it never reaches the blinding
transformative intensity that you can achieve with the the chemically pure
compound
No, no that good point if you orally ingest it
It will be destroyed in your guts. It won't work
the Amazon Indians have
Encountered this problem and created a very sophisticated
Pharmacological strategy for dealing with this you've all heard of ayahuasca
Ayahuasca is DMT from one plant
Combined with another plant which contains a chemical which is called an MAO inhibitor
MAO is mono amine oxidase and your gut is full of MAO and
Its job is to take mono amines
small molecules and
Oxidize them into a harmless byproduct usually indolecetic acid which can be shunted to the bladder
Well, when you take DMT orally these mono amines just I mean these mono amine oxidase compounds
Just grab on to it and destroy it
But if you take an MAO inhibitor with it and harming which occurs in banisteriopsis copy is an MAO inhibitor
Then lo and behold it isn't destroyed in your gut instead
It passes into the bloodstream it passes through the blood-brain barrier
Which is a very tight chemical filter that keeps the brain from being exposed to toxic materials?
But these drugs can cross that barrier and then what the ayahuasca
experience really is is a slow-release DMT trip that instead of taking five minutes
Takes about two and a half hours and if you really know your
Psychedelics and your breath control techniques on
Ayahuasca over an hour or so you can work yourself to a place where you say
Lordy me it looks just like a DMT flash and it does
But you've had to do some hard climbing to get there with DMT itself
Once you push the start button, there's no stopping it and
I
Think it's worth describing it. How many people have had this experience?
Uh-huh. Well, so they can somewhat anchor it
Uh-huh. It's very subjective
Obviously, but I will describe what happens to me and then we can work out from there
One point that I want to make about these things is that the the great strength of the psychedelic possibility is
It's democratic
You know, it isn't that people of great spiritual advancement attain these states or
People who have studied under some lineage. It's truly available to everyone and when I had my DMT
Experiences I realized you know either I am
Incredibly special
Which doesn't there's no other evidence to support that or
This is something which can happen to anyone and that's the more interesting possibility
After all if it can only happen to very very special people then that lets most people out
But if it's generally available, then it's big big news about the human condition. Yeah
Yeah
How did they find DMT in the human brain?
Hmm interesting question
No, I think he means how did they find that it was endogenously produced?
Well, I think they were studying the group that did this was at the University of Louisiana
Christian and his group and I they were studying fast reactions in the brain and
For fast reactions you have to look at chemicals that can go through some kind of cycle of
Structural change and return to their zero point very very quickly
Their original thought was that DMT mediated attention. I mean I'm talking to you right now
Suppose there were a loud noise over here. We would all
Immediately project our mind onto the source of the sound
They thought that that was a
neurological function mediated by DMT
Could be I'm not sure I suspect it has more to do with the chemistry of dreaming
Once they discovered DMT and began to track it they discovered that there was a circadian rhythm
It means that daily rhythm in its production in the human organism and that it reaches its greatest
concentration in the brain around
3 30 a.m. in most people well, this is when the deep dreaming and the high REM states are really chugging and I
suspect I
Mean lucid dreamers may want to argue with this, but I suspect that every night
We go deeper places than we can ever speak of
That ordinary dreams are right on the surface of consciousness
Big lucid dreams are an inch deeper, but I think we go a hundred feet down
Every night into places where you cannot say anything about it. Yeah
I wanted to ask you about
Let's make that perspiration
Well, it's
It's hard as hell to find DMT and this is a puzzle
Because if you look it up in a standard work on organic chemistry, it presents it as a trivial
synthesis
much
More simple than LSD which it always presents as quite a difficult synthesis
But when you actually talk to workbench chemists, it's tricky to make DMT
It's especially tricky to carry out the final crystallization
So what you're usually offered in the underground is some kind of muck which looks sort of like
maple
Syrup half gone to sugar
I wouldn't get near that
Actually, it means they they botched their synthesis what you're hoping for is a white
powder
However in 30 years of chasing this all over the world
I've only seen it as a white powder a couple of times usually the synthesis has fallen slightly below that
Standard and what you get is a pale yellow powder
Sometimes a pale rose or pink powder and then the real rough trade is
orange and this is what you if you've seen it this is probably what you've seen it looks like orange mothballs and
It has the smell of indole
This very sharp smell which if you're not a chemist and you've never smelled indole
When you reach in your mind for what is this like you'll say well, it's sort of like mothballs
Not quite but it has that same sharp chemical
You know, and this is what you're gonna smoke see so a lot of people beef about that and say well, you know
It's like smoking burning plastic
Musso may not but it is a little bit like that
The other objection to DMT that has been around since the 60s is people say it destroys brain cells
There's no evidence for or against
this but I would submit to you as
spend the people who are neurophysiologists can
Argue with this if they disagree, but I think an excellent index
For the low toxicity of a drug is how fast it clears your system and DMT clears your system in about 15 minutes
If you take some compound drug or whatever and 48 hours later
You're still taking hot baths and you know wishing you could have a massage and sitting staring at the wall
Then this drug is really sticking to your ribs
It means that your metabolic pathways have no way of dealing with it
They can't grab it here. They can't grab it there, and it takes a long time to leave your system an example of this in the pseudo
psychedelic domain would be ketamine you know ketamine the experience lasts about 45 minutes, but
48 hours later you can feel your knees suddenly go rubbery or you can have
What are technically called fugue states strange states of?
Disconnectedness from what's going on around you. This is not a very good
Advertisement for a drug here this woman and then
Well less because if you smoke DMT the dose is approximately 50 milligrams
Which is like the size of a kitchen match head
the
If you combine it with an MAO inhibitor and take it orally, you can probably get away with about 35 milligrams of DMT and
Oh, I don't know a hundred and a hundred milligrams of harmaline
Now harmaline itself is sometimes described as a psychedelic drug. I really think this is sort of misleading
You will have hallucinations if you take pure harmin
But only at doses approaching the toxic dose
Many compounds will give you hallucinations
Approaching the toxic dose
Bee venom
Rattlesnake venom
Stuff like this that doesn't mean it's a hallucinogenic drug. It means you're dying
And you should take steps to correct the situation
Now yes
You said that there was a short transit time
But how long does the memory of that experience last because that would indicate to me that there is still a presence and perhaps a homeopathic dose at that point in the in the mind in the brain
Well at DMT and one of the things that has caused me to think that it must that it might have a role in the chemistry of dreaming
is that one of the frustrating things about it is you have this experience without doubt the most bizarre appalling peculiar experience you could possibly have
that's at minute 2 at minute 5 you're raving about it at minute 5 you're raving about it at minute 7 you can't remember it and so if you're raving about it
One of the things that has caused me to think that it might have a role in the chemistry of dreaming is that one of the frustrating things about it is you have this experience without doubt the most bizarre appalling peculiar experience you could possibly have
That's at minute 2 at minute 5 you're raving about it at minute 7 you can't remember it and so it's literally like gold running through your fingers you say you know this is the most amazing thing this is the most amazing thing this is the most amazing thing this is what am I talking about
and you know how you can have a very engaging complex dream and the alarm goes off and by the time your feet hit the floor you're grasping for it and it's just it's literally melting before your eyes that's a very DMT like presentation the way a dream melts away is the way a DMT trip melts away at the same speed
Well over time and using tricks you can drag a certain amount of data out of it and what I'll do is
I'll describe a DMT trip and it's a composite of maybe 40 of these trips and then you can see what you make of it
So this is I'll just describe it I'll be the the graduate student you be the guy with the clipboard
You're saying to me so what happened?
Okay, here's what happened
You I took you one takes
Most people can get off in about three to four hits
Now there's a trick to it
Hash smokers are greatly favored in this endeavor because you really need leather lungs
For this
The great problem is that people will cough or not be able to hold it in
You take two hits
In a situation where your clothes have been loosened and you can just flop backward
When you need to you take two hits now many people miss the point
Because after two hits you feel completely peculiar you feel as though your body is undergoing some strange kind of anesthesia
All the air has been pumped out of the room this is the visual acuity thing I talked about last night
The colors jump up the edges sharpen
It's and at that point people say whoa wow it's really coming on strong
And then what you have to do is you have to take one more enormous hit
And this separates the intrepid from the casual believe me
Because most people and and the facilitator doesn't want to lean on the person you say you know dammit take the third hit
And saying no I feel completely weird say I know you feel weird but take the third hit
Well if you can coax somebody into that then what happens is you close your eyes
And you see the ordinary warm brown
Back you know closed eyelid scenario
And then these colors begin racing together
And it forms this mandalic
mandalic
Floral slowly rotating
thing
Which I call the chrysanthemum
This is a place in the trip that you want to see as you go by it
The chrysanthemum forms and you watch it for like
15 seconds
If it doesn't give way
Then you didn't do enough
You have to do more
One more hit usually will do it
Well then what happens is it like physically propels you through
This chrysanthemum like thing
And you there's a sound like a
Saran wrap bread wrapper
Being crumpled up and thrown away you know that crackle
A friend of mine says this is your radio interlecky leaving through the anterior fontanelle at the top of your head
I don't know what it is
But it's something is being
Yeah, right, that's what it is
And then there's this very
Very defined sense of bursting through something
A membrane
And on the other side
And this is now remember my experience
On the other side
As you break through
There's a cheer
There's a
Whole bunch of entities
Waiting on the other side
And they you know that Pink Floyd song
The gnomes have learned a new way to say
Hooray
Well, it's that place
It's those gnomes
And you burst into this space
And
And they're saying
How wonderful that you're here
You come so rarely
We're so delighted to see you
And
One of the things about DMT that's really puzzling
Is in a sense
It doesn't affect your mind
In other words
You don't change
For instance if you take ketamine
The first thing you notice
The very first thing you notice
Before the trip hits
Is you notice that you no longer are anxious
About having taken ketamine
You just sort of anxiety leaves you
That means it's affecting your mind
It's doing something to the judgmental machinery
DMT doesn't lay a hand on the judgmental machinery
You break through into that space
Exactly who you were before breaking through
And the usual reaction of most people
Is something like
You know when you think
You think
God
Heartbeat
Normal
Pulse
Normal
Everything's normal
Yeah everything's normal
Oh God
Because these things are there
And they're hammering at you
And they come forward
They're like jewel self-dribbling basketballs
And there are many of them
And they come pounding toward you
And they will stop in front of you
And vibrate
But then they do a very disconcerting thing
Which is they jump into your body
They jump into your body
And then they jump back out again
And the whole thing is going on
In this very high speed mode
Where you're being presented with thousands of details
Per second
And you can't get a hold
You say you know my God
What's happening
And these things are saying
Don't abandon yourself to amazement
Which is exactly what you want to do
You just want to go nuts with how crazy this is
They say don't do that
Don't do that
Pay attention
To what we're doing
Well what are they doing
Well what they're doing
Is they're making objects
With their voices
They're singing
Structures into existence
These things are
And what they will do is
They'll come toward you
And then
And you have to understand
They don't have arms
So we're kind of downloading this
Into a lower dimension
To describe it
But what they do is
They offer things to you
Say look at this
Look at this
And as your attention
Goes toward these objects
You realize
That what you're being shown
Is impossible
It's impossible
It's not simply intricate
Beautiful
And hard to manufacture
It's impossible to make these things
The nearest analogy would be to
The Fabergé eggs
Or something like that
But these things are like the toys
That are scattered around the nursery
Inside a UFO
Or something
Celestial toys
They are
The toys themselves
Appeared to be somehow alive
The toys themselves
Can sing other objects
into existence
So what's happening is
There's just this proliferation of elf gifts
And the elf gifts are moving around
Singing
The whole thing
Is directed toward
They're saying
Do what we are doing
And they're very insistent
They say
Do it
And you feel
Like a bubble
And now this is subjective
I mean only
You know 5% report this
But it happens to me
You feel like some kind of bubble
Inside your body
That's beginning to move up
Toward your mouth
And when it comes out
It isn't sound
It's vision
You discover that you can
Pump
Stuff
By singing
And they're urging you to do this
They say
That's it
Keep doing it
And the whole thing
Is like
You know we're now at
Minute 4.5
With this stuff
And you speak in a kind of glossolalia
There's a spontaneous outpouring of syntax
Unaccompanied by what is normally called meaning
It's sort of
You know
And this is accompanied by a modality
Something seen
And they're saying
Yes, do it
Do it
And then after a minute or so of this
The whole thing begins to collapse in on itself
And they literally begin to physically move away from you
And usually their final shot is
They actually wave goodbye
And they say
Deja vu
Which makes no sense at all
If you analyze it
So then you come down
And you're now at minute 6 to 7
And you come down
And it's like being more loaded than you've ever been
It's like about a 700 mic acid trip
But you embrace it as
Totally down
You say
I'm totally down
I mean
You look
You look like a termite from Arturis
And the room is decorated in Amish quilts
But I'm completely back
And then over a minute or a minute and a half or so
The room just comes right back together
And four minutes after that
Some people can give no account of it whatsoever
They just say
You know
I don't know
It was the weirdest thing that ever happened to me
And I can't remember it now
And
So
That's the basic run through
Now
A lot of stuff is going on in there
First of all
You know
What are these things?
And
Why do they want you to do this strange activity?
And what's so great about it?
Well
Hmm
Well first of all
Who are these things?
We can like
You know
Be good scientists
And make a list of the possibilities
And then see which seems more likely
They could be
A
Disincarnate race
Of
Hyperdimensional dwellers
Who live in some kind of parallel continuum
Just over some kind of energy barrier
And they're there all the time
You do have the feeling that they're there all the time
That it's ongoing
That you have just cut into their scene
So that's one possibility
Another possibility is that behind all these psychedelics
And especially DMT
That this is not a drug at all
That it is
Essentially
A pay telephone
Of some sort
To aliens
Good old National Enquirer type aliens
Of
Who
Have
Are using this as a
As a
Communication domain
Say you know
We can't land on the white house lawn
That would create panic and hysteria
So let's create a drug
Which inside the drug
We will be able to deal with people
And
I was hoping that John Mack
Who's an expert on
UFO abductions
Would be here this weekend
I expected him
Because I think this whole abduction thing
Is not going to be illuminated
Until they start giving abductees DMT
And saying so is this what happened to you?
Was it like this?
Or was it completely different?
Well, so then there
Those are the two possibilities
That I sort of dealt with
Over the first 10 or 15 years
Of thinking about this
And then recently
Just one second
So
That people are interpreting
As an abduction
Is just a high production
Of endogenous DMT
Within the brain
It could be
What puzzles me
Is that the
Abduction thing
Is so non-psychedelic
It's so cut and dried
And all this anal
Examination stuff
With strange
Machinery, there's nothing comparable to that. I'm happy to report to you
Going on in the DMT thing, but it may be you see it
Well, I'd be interested in looking at the possibility that DMT under normal or abnormal conditions
could be sequestered in the human brain and then some
unusual stimulus or stress could cause it to suddenly be dumped and
Yeah
Yeah, that's an interesting possibility. I also
have migraines or the kind called cluster headaches and
Yes, a lot of the simply the nice thing about DMT is that it's painless
But the sense of being split open and of the traveling scatomata as they call these
Hallucinations that migraine people see it's related in some way. Yeah, yeah
Sure
It involves this principle that is characterizing called phasing
But it's basis
This is sort of what happens on the subatomic level between matter and energy
Turns out there's no fundamental particle at that level. You have this dance between matter and energy, you know energy
Coalesces into a bit of matter which then becomes energy
And you can look at this matter and energy relationship as having a wavelength of frequency associated with it
Now granted this happens on a subatomic level, but if there's something
comparable going on on a level at which we
We seem to exist in the physical form and it seems to me that there has to be something akin to it
That it may be that we as beings are sort of tuned to a frequency range, you know in this particular form and that
Somehow it's possible to shift that or expand it to so that what we're actually experiencing is a broader range of frequencies
So a sort of shift in wavelength and I think some of these experience can be at least explored you know in that context
You know there's so much that we don't know ain't that the trail of
this cosmos that
But but we can take and we can extrapolate some degree at least we can we can use this to
To take journeys and explore possibilities from what we do know in science for example
subatomic around it fundamentally
uh, I mean for god's sake the language of these people is something more like sorcerers
these days than than science
and
And we do seem to at least believe from the evidence that we see that there is this matter energy interchange on a very fundamental level
Now if something akin to that is going on in macro level there may be this this
principle of phasing of which we either shift
Uh our tuning or we expand it to include a
larger spectrum
Yeah, I think no I think that that's a very interesting avenue to pursue this thing about frequency
Somebody told me one of the great things about this job is you hear a lot of weird stories and somebody told me a story recently
About it didn't involve DMT it involved LSD
But this guy and a friend of his took a quite large dose of LSD larger than they intended and they went to a party
And they were so loaded by the time they got to the party that they realized they could not function as party goers
So they just moved into a corner and sat with their backs to the wall and watched this party rage in front of them
And after about 20 minutes of sitting there
They both simultaneously
Noticed it was a dance party
Noticed that the music was sounding really strange
And everybody was moving very slowly
And as they watched
The thing came to an absolute
Halt and people were just frozen and there was absolute silence and at that point
the door at the other end of the room swung open and
an elf
entered the room and
moved among all these frozen people and
And then left by the door he came in and they both saw this and they said that they could tell that it was
that
The people in the room didn't know it happened because for them it occupied a microsecond
But this thing that was you know in Carlos Castaneda who God knows is not the world's most reliable
Reporter on these things nevertheless there is this thing about stopping the world
So maybe it's something like that that there is as you suggest a frequency phase
Yeah, this sort of leads into the third possibility having to do with the origin of these things and
In a sense this is the hardest one to swallow
But in another sense this is the most conservative
In some crazy notion of conservative the most conservative explanation
Because
We have no evidence other than the tabloids that this world is being visited by friendly visitors from Zenebul
Ganubi or Zeta Reticuli or the Pleiades or anywhere else
I mean to my mind the evidence that this is happening is vanishingly small and totally underwhelming
The other possibility
That there's some kind of parallel dimension
In which these things exist is also somewhat poorly supported
If we're talking about something which thinks
Something which can communicate
Something which is intelligent
Then we should look to ourselves
As the source of it because we are the only intelligent
Communicating things we know within a certain narrow definition of these things
So that it's occurred to me with greater and greater force and largely prompted by giving DMT
Occasionally to Tibetans and Amazonian shamans
And when you say to them you know to the shamans in the Amazon when you say to them
What is happening with this stuff and what are those little things in there?
They say oh well those are ancestor spirits didn't you know haven't you heard?
Shamanism is about doing healing through the intercession of ancestor spirits
Say hmm ancestor spirits let's get this straight
Dead people is what you're talking about right?
These are dead people
And you know maybe because I was raised Catholic I resisted this like grim death
But I'm beginning to think that what you actually break into in that place
Is something that we might call an ecology of souls
That is it possible to entertain the notion that at death you actually don't just become worm food
But that something survives in some other dimension
And that it has this bizarre character to it
And that this explains their peculiar affection for humanity
And their involvement
Somehow in our fate
Well this is to me fairly mind bending as a possibility
If what is awaiting us at the end of the 20th century
Is the erasure of the boundary between the living and the dead
Then we've all been too conservative in our projections of what is going on
Yeah
Yes that there will be some kind of erasure of the boundary between the two
Well once I had this idea you know
I mentioned my Jungian and art historical proclivities
And so that means you always look back through tradition and folklore to try and find something analogous to this
Well there ain't much but there is one
One area that seems suggestive to me and that is as you all know the Irish are a a fairy haunted race
They're also an intoxication obsessed race at least in stereotype
Well it turns out that
You probably all are familiar with the notion of purgatory
Purgatory is the place where you have to spend a lot of time before you get to heaven
If you're not bad enough to go to hell
So you put in a few
Calculio chasms of eternity in
Purgatory and then you get led into heaven
Well, I had always assumed that this dogma
I don't know I hadn't really thought about it
I just sort of assumed it arose with early Christianity
But when I began looking into this I discovered that the idea of purgatory
Was invented by Saint Patrick
And it was invented specifically to convert the pagan Irish
Because the pagan Irish believed in the in the land of fae
They believed there was this nearby dimension full of the souls of the dead surrounding us all the time
And the certain people with the gift of second sight could see this
So Patrick just said to them no no that isn't it
It's purgatory and was able to push that on them so successfully that a later church council
Adopted it as general dogma for the church to use in converting the pagan slavs as well
So it's an idea of a nearby dimension
inhabited by disincarnate souls that is apparently very old but very alien to our tradition
Yeah
There's another notion
It's going to be a gross over simplification but it's kind of related
And it has to do with the quantum wave function which is really kind of a dual wave
has two parts to it uh one part and they both have a temporal or time related aspect to them
one part which is called the ordinary part of the wave can be seen as a wave
propagating forward in time and the other half of the wave which is called a complex conjugate
can be seen as propagating backwards from some future state
some past state some future state emitting waves which at some point
interact and produce what is perceived or experienced as as the present state which is really a dynamic
process in itself there is no absolute present because as soon as you get out of your mouth it's past
but the interesting thing is that what that implies is that what we experience in the present
whatever they may be is somehow related to some future state and some past state
but it also means that neither future or past are fixed and that we could sort of align ourselves with different tracks or vectors
you know and and a slightly
different vector
slightly askew may produce something totally
different than what our ordinary perception is
this is speeding well yeah this could be i mean i've always felt that what biology is
is some weird kind of chemical strategy for amplifying quantum mechanical indeterminacy
that you know macro physical objects are not subject to quantum mechanical indeterminacy but organisms
apparently are especially thinking organisms we don't know that's our perception our perception is that
that objects on a macro scale large scale are not subject to quantum
fluctuations fluctuations but that's only because
of this probability with in some sense and that it there's a most probable state and if we happen to
exist in that that our perception is that it's more fixed that there is no indeterminacy it obeys certain laws that
are rather linear in nature
but we really don't know
what you're sort of saying is that natural laws only apply some of the time
which gives them a curious status as laws in that case
well that's sort of broadening the notion of relativity
i mean
what happens in a black hole for example what is a singularity it simply means that the laws that
normally apply in everyday experience no longer are relevant well one of the problems cosmology is
meeting is that there are so many large black holes in the universe that you come up with you know 10 high six singularities
that's a few more singularities than a good theory would tolerate i would think i mean
what kind of theory is it that hands you back 10 to the 9th singularities which are exceptions to the theory
that's true but we you know a lot of that's based on uh assumptions that uh are stretches
ain't that the truth again it gets back to a psyche with a psychedelic experience you know
it's this whole lower dimensional language slice thing that we seem to have to operate in in order
to describe an experience that just does not fit into that slice you know we do our best to do it you
know and sometimes it comes across being very crude and and nice sometimes we kind of get close to the
mark but it's it's difficult to know uh i mean the whole notion of black hole singularities is just
that's the present uh attempt at explaining some experience that uh is is beyond ordinary experience
none that we've encountered a black hole directly that we know of that's true
it seems to me one of the embarrassments of science is that the big bang begins with a singularity
and so then you have this whole vast interlocking schema of rational explanation except that it begins
with a hard swallow you're asked to believe that the entire cosmos of space and time sprang from a point
no larger than a cross section of a gnat's eyelash whatever whatever else one could say about
that theory i think you'd agree it's the limit case for credulity absolutely i mean if you believe
that try to think of something that you would throw up your hands and say well i'm not buying that
it it it absolutely it's sort of like when you join the catholic church you make a declaration of faith
well when you join science you sort of make this declaration of faith that i do believe that the
universe sprang in a single instant from an incredibly tiny hot dense dot unlikely but who knows
there's something else as you two were dialoguing a bit i was getting this visualization of you have to
look at the pond of reality so to speak as not only being the um the visual of someone throwing a pebble
from the top of the pond and creating the ripple effect of the wave effect but also from the bubbles
coming from below and to me the deep space that you were talking about is the air inside the bubble coming
from below and so the dimensional reality of that picture is not a linear time perspective it's
something coming from all directions it is again the center of a mandala effect well this is why i say the
the psychedelic experience is a boundary dissolving experience because it takes away past present
cause effect all of these things disappear now remember i said ayahuasca is a kind of slow release
dmt trip and one of the really interesting things going on with ayahuasca to my mind perhaps the most
interesting thing is that the style in the amazon of taking ayahuasca is people get together in a darkened hut
at night and they take it and they sing but the songs they're selling them at the table back there
the songs when there's a break in the singing and you hear the people discussing the songs
they don't discuss them like music they discuss them like sculpture and painting and they say to the
shaman i like the part with the gray bars and the blue speckling but when you brought in the pink in
combination with the beige and white i thought it was too much say what kind of a discussion is this about
a song you realize then when you take ayahuasca they see the songs uh and now this is really interesting
to me because you remember in the dmt flash they wanted you to use your voice to make objects well then
in the ayahuasca trance you use your voice to control these colored modalities and uh the whole thing
is done that way well so then what it must mean is that the neurophysiology of ayahuasca somehow allows
for the ordinary signal processing which is being shunted into the audio pathway in the brain is instead
being shunted into the optical pathway this is what's called a synesthesia these things have been
fascinating for hundreds of years to people but the synesthesia means that you know color sounds are seen
well now what was this anything other than a neurophysiological curiosity well i maintain it is
because i think that a language which could be seen would be a kind of telepathic language if you've thought
much about telepathy you might have naively assumed that telepathy is you hearing me think that isn't what it
is i think telepathy is you seeing what i mean and it's not something which happens dramatically
it is a function of eloquence you know first you have the speaker who is boring you to death then you have
the speaker who at least holds your attention then you have the speaker of whom it is said she paints a picture
it means we're moving toward poetry well it's possible to imagine a transformation of the neural
processing of language it may be a behavioral possibility it may not even require a gene shift
where then we would see what we each mean you know there's this persistent idea
promulgated by robert graves in the white goddess among other people
that there was once what he calls an ursprach a primal language so emotionally intense
that to be in the presence of poetry declaimed in this language is to see the poetry and that this is
what the lost poetics of the high paleolithic were about and probably it was pharmacologically assisted
that you could gather people in the presence of a great bard or singer and that person
could then create telepathic modalities and that telepathic modality that richer more unifying language
was the thing which was suppressing the formation of ego
the ego speaks and hears through sound the super ego projects images and is perceived as images now it's very interesting
at least to me that in the pineal gland of ordinary human beings there is a compound called a deneroglomerotropine
which when analyzed in inorganic or just in the normal nomenclature of organic chemistry turns out to be
a beta-carbolene closely related to harmoline well is it possible that we are as close as a one gene
mutation away from a shift that would switch our processing of audio input into the visual field and that then we would cross over into a realm of
beheld
understanding and that this is the evolutionary leap that we're trying to make that it's in the body
not in the technology in the body there is actually going to be a minor a one gene
click to another channel and then we will be able to see what we mean and i maintain that if you can see what
somebody means
you are that person
contrast it contrast it to ordinary
communication
ordinary communication is achieved through small mouth noises
as primates
we have a throat and voice
arrange a voice box arrangement that allows us to produce small mouth noises
for hours if necessary i'm the living proof of it
but it's not a very efficient mode of communication because what happens is i
have a thought
i look in a culturally sanctioned dictionary which i have copied into my head
i translate the thought into an acoustical signal
using my mouth which moves across space
which enters your ears
you rush to your interior dictionary
and you construct my meaning out of your dictionary
now notice that this process rests on a very shaky assumption
it rests on the assumption that your dictionary and my dictionary were published by the same folks in the same year
if your dictionary is different from mine
you will not correctly reconstruct my meaning
and we will have what we call misunderstanding
notice how among us as a species one of the
most bring down things you can say to somebody
is would you please explain to me what i just said
because it means oh boy here comes trouble
now you're going to find out that you know
people didn't understand you they horribly misunderstood
and and the communication is very provisional
the amount of noise in the circuit is huge
well then contrast this to i utter something
and it condenses as a sculpture in the air
and you and i then become its observers
and we rotate this syntactical object
and we look at it we regard it from many points of view
this is not ambiguous
or it's certainly considerably less ambiguous than this reconstruction from interiorized dictionaries
so perhaps what all this is about is evolutionary pressure on our languages
to become visual and therefore to become more
unified and less riddled with noise
which creates misunderstanding which creates horrible social realities
yeah
i'm not just in the middle of reading a book called
oh michael talbot's book uh-huh
he was talking about uh visual experiences being about 50 percent based on meaning
and additions internally to you know what's coming through originally
so it sounds like you still have a transmission problem translation
yes although what you could do with a visible language would be very challenging i mean we could do
many things with it it's not an outlandish it's not a completely outlandish idea
in nature it occurs there's a there's a wonderful phenomenon in nature which is worth talking about to
sort of legitimate such a far out notion which is as you all probably know um octopi
can change color this is one of those things you learn on those science specials on tv
this concludes tape two our program continues with tape three our program continues with tape three
octopi can change color well most people i think assume that they do this
for camouflage that would be a reasonable assumption they don't do it for camouflage
let's talk about octopi for just a moment first of all they're mollusks they divided from our
evolutionary lines 700 million years ago they're related to escargot they have no backbone for crying out
loud they're not even vertebrates but what is always said in biology classes about octopi is that
they're a wonderful example of parallel evolution because their optical system is very much
like a mammalian optical system well why is this well it's because they evolved in a in an environment
the reef environment that is an environment all as dense with signals as a rainforest is
and um an octopus is soft bodied it can not only change color but it can also change its surface
from smooth and rubbery to bumpy pimply rugos ribbed so forth and so on and also because it is soft
bodied and in an aqueous environment it can fold and unfold and reveal and conceal parts of its body very very quickly
well all of these behaviors and physiological characteristics go together to make the octopus
an excellent visual communicator and the color changes the blushes traveling dots and bars that
these creatures manifest and the squids do it too uh our language and if you're interested in this there's a
wonderful book by a guy named monahan called communication and non-communication among the cephalopoidea
and he goes as far as creating a grammar for this stuff well so then in a way you know if you pull back from the
mundane assumptions about this what's happening is the octopus wears its mind on its skin
it is dressed in its mental state
one octopus encountering another can tell its mood how recently it's eaten how recently it's had sex
whether it's ovulating all by looking and so they the only way an octopus can have a private thought
is by squirting ink into the water and then hiding inside it this is essentially its correction fluid for
misspoken octopi you see so in a sense this is what i think we are are being beckoned toward that we want to
clothe ourselves in language we do it in a to a degree in a funny way i mean if you want to think about
virtual reality this is a virtual reality all this stuff these fixtures the architecture the
infrastructure the road these are ideas it was an idea and it has then been summoned into matter by the
the allotment of funds the spending of money
you
the hiring of craftsmen, so forth and so on.
Our whole civilization is an excreted set of interlocking ideas, agreements.
We're like coral animals.
And we, somewhere, you know, there's this naked, pulpy creature,
but, you know, clothed in denim, clothed in a harder shell produced by Mercedes or Chevrolet,
moving around inside a larger environment produced by the state of Colorado, and so forth and so on.
So I think octopi offer an excellent metaphoric example of what naked-mindedness would be.
And some of these octopi, as I said, they evolved in the coastal reef domain,
but that's a very competitive domain.
Everybody in the ocean wants to be there, because that's where the sunlight and the food is.
So if you're smart, you'll try and evolve into a more hostile niche.
And some of these octopi have become what are called benthic, or abyssal.
It means they exist in the parts of the ocean where light never reaches.
Yes, and they have retained this communication ability by switching over to interiorly generated phosphorescence.
So there are species of octopi which actually are studded with organs that have the equivalent of eyelids over them,
but they're flasher lights.
So when you descend into the benthic depths of the ocean,
you enter a domain where all one octopus ever sees of another octopus is its linguistic productivity,
because that's interior-generated light that can be seen.
And I think, you know, if you want to set the compass of virtual reality towards something worth writing home about,
then producing an octopus environment so that we could experience this kind of thing
would be a kind of proto-telepathic playpen of some sort.
Yeah?
I guess I'm skeptical enough, but octopi, I don't want to introduce colors that are not really
because of what they're thinking of, but it's still worth a lot of it, as we need it.
Aha, so you think that subterfuge enters here, too.
Yeah, that was my real question.
My real question is, last night when you were discussing the role of psychedelics in human evolution,
and you were going by a strictly Darwinian theory.
Right.
I assume since your researcher that you were sheltered in various endeavors,
that you entertained other theories.
And if so, have you considered a possibility that psychedelics may influence evolution,
the evolution of human kind in very direct light?
In other words, have a direct effect upon DNA, so that the selection of...
Well, you want me to...
It's a central dogma of biology, that information we can get out of DNA,
but can't get back in directly.
In other words, it can only be selected for over a period of generations.
Have you ever played around this period of...
Yeah, well...
Well, you raise a lot of issues.
First of all, since the discovery of retroviruses, of which the HIV virus is one,
we now know that it is not always information transcripted from DNA to RNA to protein.
The retroviruses transcript from RNA to DNA.
So, the central dogma, which is that the genome is not being altered by the environment,
is sort of shaky at this point.
You bring up a very interesting point, which has never, to my mind, been really thrashed out in orthodox science,
which is, if you had a bunch of these psychedelic molecules,
and we could raise them up to the size of loaves of bread, or something like that,
what you would notice about them is they're all what are called, by chemists, planar,
meaning they tend to be flat.
They're not lumpy.
They're flat.
Well, if you look at DMT or harmine,
harmine is built off a pentexel group,
and with two benzene rings off of it.
It is the perfect size to slip in between two nucleotides in DNA.
It can actually bond into the DNA there.
Now, many drugs do this.
These drugs are called dimers.
The usual problem with a dimer that will intercalate,
this is the other term, intercalate,
means slide between the rungs of the DNA,
is it usually deforms the DNA.
It, like, passes a bulge along it,
and then transcription is difficult.
But these indole hallucinogens can dimer with DNA
without disrupting its structural integrity.
This is why I believe that this is the source of the vision.
That, and, you know, orthodox biologists just roll their eyes at this idea
and say, well, now you've made a very common error here.
You've confused genetic information with information.
Don't you understand that genetic information is just a sequence of codons
coding for protein?
And, you know, that has no relationship to your memory of Aunt Minnie's face.
However, by being so unwielding on that point,
they create a huge problem for their brothers and sisters across the hall
who are trying to understand memory
because the molecular theory of memory is a nightmare.
Here's the problem.
Every molecule in your body is changed every five to seven years
depending on who you talk to,
except neurons.
The nerves are generally the nerves you're born with
or the nerves you die with.
But it's an absolute no-no to suggest that memory is lodged in the neurons.
Well, but if Aunt Minnie died 45 years ago
and you can still remember the dear woman's face
when she used to walk you in the park,
then every molecule of your body has been swapped out five times
since she quit the plane.
How can you have this memory of Aunt Minnie?
And then they say,
well, they don't say, actually.
They just throw up their hands.
Now, to the people who say
DNA can't store any kind of information
other than codon sequences for proteins,
they have to explain why then 90% of the genome
seems devoted to junk sequencing
that does not produce protein,
that does, in fact, not do anything that anybody knows about.
It seems to me that we might as well
just take the path of least resistance
and say if the neurons are the only part of the body
that persists throughout life,
if the memories persist throughout life,
then you've got two choices.
Either the memories are in the neurons
or the memories were never stored in the body in the first place.
And if you believe that,
well, then the obligation to explain
just where they were stored is hard upon you
and the mechanism for retrieving them.
So, I think molecular biology,
by being so reductionist,
has made certain problems in neurophysiology
and higher cortical functioning
almost insoluble.
You know, for years and years,
it was held that the...
this was another one of these central dogmas of biology.
It was held that information could move
from the nucleus of the neuron to the synapse,
but that there was no transport mechanism
for moving any molecular species
from the synapse back to the nucleus.
So, consequently, they said learning cannot take place
in the nucleus of the neuron
because the materials for learning,
which would be present in the synapse,
modifications through experience,
there's no transport system.
And this was dogma until 10 years ago.
Well, then, they discovered
what's called axioplasmic transport,
and they, by putting labeled compounds in the synapse,
they were able to locate
these labeled compounds later,
complexed with nuclear material in the neuron,
proving to the most diehard materialist
that synaptic material
was, in fact, moving backward to the neuron.
So, I think that, you know,
there's much that isn't understood
about how all this works.
Something worth pointing out,
you know, science seeks closure
and explanation, explanatory closure.
My brother one time made a little aphorism,
which I think says it all on this subject.
He said to me once, actually on a mushroom trip,
he said, have you ever noticed
how, as the sphere of understanding
grows ever larger,
necessarily the surface area of ignorance
gets ever bigger?
Seems perfectly clear.
You know, a simple-minded way of saying that is
the bigger you build the bonfire,
the more darkness you will reveal.
Yeah.
And also, any progress
really comes from outside the context
of the paradigm that's having the experience.
I mean, it really, to my knowledge,
almost everything that's really been advanced
in any, you know, in science or philosophy,
it's really something that's come from
outside the context of the paradigm.
Yes, well, some of you have probably read
Thomas Kuhn's book,
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions,
where he shows, you know,
that it's never the way they tell it
afterwards.
The aftertelling is always about
the primary insight,
the careful experiment,
the gathering of data,
the correlation.
Actually, it doesn't work like that at all.
It's entirely
psychic, piecemeal,
ruled by synchronicity.
One of the most interesting things,
I'll tell this story
and then we can go to lunch
because I think, you know,
science has great pretensions
about itself.
I mean, it basically regards itself
as a meta-theory.
It regards itself
as capable of passing judgment
on all other theories.
They are supposed to submit themselves
to science
to be told
whether they're real or not.
Yeah, like a religion.
Well, how many people know
that, you know,
modern science was founded
by René Descartes
in the early 17th century.
What were the circumstances
under which Descartes
founded modern science?
René Descartes
was a 19-year-old
basically ne'er-do-well
and he decided
that he would go wenching
and soldiering
across Europe
which was a thing
that young men
of certain class
did at that time.
And so he joined
a Habsburg army
that was laying siege
to Prague
in the summer of 1619
and after they had taken care
of the problem
there in Prague
this Habsburg army
began to retreat
across southern Germany
and on the evening of
now there's a lot of arm wrestling
about this
but let's just say
the 17th of August
this army made camp
near the little town
of Ulm
in southern Germany
which
synchronicity freaks
pay attention.
Ulm will later be
the birthplace
of Albert Einstein.
worth noting
but that night
Descartes
in the barracks
had a dream
and an angel
appeared to him
and the angel said
the conquest of nature
is to be achieved
through number
and measurement
and he was
thunderstruck.
he took that
angelic revelation
and turned it
into modern science.
Modern science
was founded
by an angel.
You know
they don't tell you
this at MIT.
You know
it's astonishing
how
things which claim
roots in rationalism
are actually
among some of the
most irrational
productions
in the
historical
continuum.
It appears
that
our development
our history
our histories
have always been
created
at the promptings
of invisible
voices.
I mean
Socrates
who is at the
very center
of what's called
thinking
by western
civilization
Socrates
had a demon
D-E-A
M-O-N
it was a little
voice
it told
it was his
crap detector
it told him
the difference
between profound
philosophical
thinking
and
bullpucky
and
so
you know
the edifice
of western
thinking
built on
Platonism
owes its debt
to an invisible
agency
speaking from
hyperspace
so does
modern science
a la Descartes
how much more
of this
I mean
we don't care
if artists
talk to angels
because we've
our definition
of them
is that
they're screwballs
but to
believe that
an enterprise
like modern
science
has to trace
its way
back to the
same ecstatic
roots
is I think
very suggestive
that the world
is stranger
than we can
suppose
and that
we need to
open
these channels
of communication
to these
invisible worlds
probably the
next great
paradigm shift
will be
enunciated
by a mushroom
an angel
an elf
an alien
what have you
yeah
repetition
yeah
the first few
times I did it
I couldn't get
any grip
at all on it
and by talking
a lot
and trying to
describe it
you slowly
slowly build up
a map
so about the
logos
the logos
is this
phenomenon
that was sort of
the centerpiece
of greco
hellenic
spirituality
what it is
is it's a voice
in the head
that people
strove
to attain
for a thousand
years
this was the
sine qua non
of intellectual
accomplishment
in the greco
roman world
and the logos
told you
the right way
to live
and this is
sort of what
you get
with psilocybin
you get a voice
that can
confound you
with the depth
and brilliance
of its answers
and one of the
great
you know
one of the
puzzles
of trying to
understand
greco
hellenic
spirituality
is
what were they
talking about
and if this
ever was
a general
phenomenon
then what
happened to it
why do we
not
experience
this
this is
not well
understood
I mean
the rational
scholars
who have
created our
vision of
Greece
basically
just don't
even want
to talk
about this
they would
rather
gloss
over it
you know
one of the
things that
sort of relates
to all this
is
I think
human beings
are a lot
more malleable
than we tend
to imagine
in other words
we imagine
that people
in the distant
past
or in
Greece
or somewhere
were just
like us
except they
were living
in a different
time and
place
there's no
way to
find out
of course
because they're
all dead
but there are
certain
episodes
in the
evolution
of western
culture
that suggest
that people
may be
much more
plastic
than we
ordinarily
suppose
first example
would be
how can
it be
that in
the middle
1500s
perspective
was
discovered
I mean
how do
you discover
perspective
this is
very hard
I think
for modern
people to
understand
because
it's a
given
for us
I mean
we see
in perspective
we accept
it as
a quality
of the
world
rather than
a cultural
artifact
put in
place
at a
certain
moment
but in
fact
during
the
renaissance
only the
most
inspired
people
could
paint
in
perspective
on the
natch
most
people
they had
complex
devices
called
perspectographs
that would
project
over the
scene
a receding
grid
and then
people would
essentially
fill in
the lines
now another
example of
this kind
of thing
that's not
so well
known
but that
is an
example
that
Marshall
McLuhan
makes a
lot of
is
St.
Augustine
the great
father of
the Christian
church
he had
a reputation
for being
a very
holy
man
and the
accounts
of his
contemporaries
say that
the way
people would
satisfy
themselves
that
St.
Augustine
had a
pipeline
to
God
is
they
would
bring
him
scripture
the Bible
essentially
and
open it
in front
of him
and let
him look
at it
and then
they would
close the
book
and question
him about
what was
there
and he
could always
tell them
and they
were
amazed
as far
as we
can tell
St.
Augustine
was the
only man
in Europe
who could
read
silently
nobody
else
could
do
it
was
regarded
as
a
miracle
now
we
all
read
silently
and there
may be
a few
unfortunate
individuals
among us
who move
their lips
while they
read
but that's
the only
vestigial
trace
we have
of this
previous
cultural
mode
where
everyone
to read
meant
to read
aloud
no one
could conceive
of any
other way
of doing
it
the
logo
seems
to me
a kind
of
similar
thing
it
was a
mental
behavior
function
which
for reasons
which are
probably
complex
and unknowable
slipped out
of reach
that's why
it seems
to me
these
psychedelics
are very
close
to
being able
to modify
our behaviors
along these
kinds of
lines
because
there are
a number
of behavioral
and experiential
possibilities
that we
suppress
I mean
I think
it's
just
as an
example
of how
little
we know
about
what's
going
on
look
at the
Gaffin
don't look
at it
but conceive
of
the Gaffinburg
spot
the G spot
now we all
know what
this is
clearly
people were
looking for
it for a
long
time
how come
they only
discovered
it 12
years
ago
I mean
if
something
that
major
can be
overlooked
then it's
hard to
imagine
what might
have been
overlooked
I mean
that's
pretty
central
into
the
project
of being
a
human
being
and
apparently
it was
unknown
until
very
recently
so
yes
the
logos
was
probably
what I
call
the
Gaian
mind
and
that
at a
certain
point
in
cultural
development
people
just
became
so
chuckle
headed
that
the
Gaian
mind
just
said
the
hell
with
how it
works
with
psilocybin
yeah
well
I mean
I take
when I
take
psilocybin
I take
it on
an empty
stomach
I don't
fast
or anything
like that
I just
don't
eat
for
six
hours
I
don't
call
that
fasting
and
then
I
take
it
in
silent
darkness
that's
number
one
very
important
the
next
thing
is
weigh
the
dose
you
must
weigh
the
dose
because
five
grams
is what
you want
and
I've
had
over
and
over
the
experience
of
showing
somebody
what
five
grams
is
much
a
fourth
that
much
yeah
well
that's
the
problem
that's
why
you
don't
have
elves
in
the
attic
and
bats
in
the
belfry
like
I
do
you know
and so
then you
take it
and I
take it
on an
empty
stomach
and a
lot
of
people
don't
like
the
taste
I
don't
really
understand
that
I
just
chew
them
up
I
sit
with
them
and
I
chew
them
up
and
then
huh
dried
none
of
this
mixing
in
applesauce
or
any
of
that
malarkey
I
mean
what's
that
about
oh
well
fresh
grams
because
there's
more
than
a
you
know
there's
a
huge
water
loss
there
and
then
it
takes
people
sometimes
say
it
came
on
within
five
minutes
or
it
came
dynamics
to
imagine
that
it
could
come
on
that
fast
for
me
it
comes
on
almost
always
at
the
one
hour
and
twenty
minute
mark
I
think
it
can
come
on
sooner
than
that
I
think
I'm
fairly
resistant
to
these
things
in
the
hour
after
I
the
bummers
that
you're
afraid
are
going
to
jump
out
at
you
as
soon
as
you
get
loaded
if
you
will
carry
out
the
examination
of
conscience
you'll
be
so
bored
with
that
by
the
time
the
compound
actually
hits
that
you
usually
don't
have
to
pay
any
dues
because
you
face
the
fact
that
you're
a
jerk
fifty
times
in
and
I
should
say
in
the
time
preceding
that
you
may
have
to
go
to
the
bathroom
once
you
may
it
makes
your
nose
run
which
is
a
funny
thing
it
also
makes
you
yawn
these
are
definitely
qualities
of
psilocybin
not
related
to
its
psychoactivity
and
I
in
other
words
you
decide
ahead
of
time
I
am
going
to
sit
here
and
do
this
because
at
about
the
hour
and
fifteen
minute
mark
it
will
begin
hitting
you
with
stuff
like
you
would
really
be
more
comfortable
downstairs
or
you
know
it
is
awfully
hot
in
here
why
don't
you
get
up
and
adjust
the
thermostat
all
this
stuff
you
say
no
we
holding
the
space
and
sit
there
and
then
it
begins
to
come
on
and
it
comes
the
image
I
have
is
like
a
jellyfish
or
a
silk
scarf
or
something
like
that
it
just
kind
of
drifts
down
and
surrounds
you
and
at
that
point
I
guess
I
pray
I
say
to
it
you
know
I'm
completely
in
your
hands
please
don't
hurt
me
you
know
I'm
yours
I'm
completely
committed
I've
held
nothing
back
so
don't
burn
me
please
and
then
there
is
a
kind
of
it's
hard
to
describe
a
kind
of
potential
begins
to
build
up
and
you
say
hmm
the
rush
hasn't
begun
but
it's
you
can
almost
close
your
eyes
and
see
millions
of
little
psilocybin
molecules
elbowing
serotonin
molecules
out of
the way
and
fitting
themselves
into
the
receptor
site
and
the
electron
spin
resonance
dynamics
is beginning
to shift
and the
whole thing
is
about
to
take
off
at that
point
I
smoke
furiously
and
that
usually
is
all
it
takes
and
it
comes
on
and
it
the
first
rush
is
really
astonishing
sometimes
it's
more
mind
boggling
than
others
but
I
can
remember
situations
where
we
just
see
it
coming
and
say
oh
my
god
you
know
it's
miles
wide
and
miles
high
where
are you
going
to
run
to
you
know
it's
just
good
grief
you
know
I guess
I'm not
going to
execute
that
decision
then
it
just
hits
and
it's
like
a
tidal
wave
I
mean
I
have
the
feeling
when
I'm
doing
it
in
California
that
everybody
from
Vancouver
to
Tijuana
has
just
crawled
under
their
desk
because
you
can't
imagine
this
is
happening
between
my
ears
you
know
it's
more
like
an
asteroid
must
have
fallen
in the
Pacific
Ocean
and
raised
some
enormous
incoming
wave
it's
what
it's
sort
of
like
it's
like
watching
a
thermonuclear
explosion
through
50 feet
of
crystal
clear
glass
so
you
know
you're
perfectly
calm
it's
not
getting
at
you
but
the
energy
that
is
being
released
in
your
presence
is
awesome
and
then
it
and
sometimes
in that
first
pass
you
actually
the
linguistic
machinery
is
burned
out
that
you've
probably
seen
these
scenes
where
they
will
test
a
hydrogen
bomb
and
they
set
up
cameras
a
quarter
mile
from
ground
zero
a
half
mile
a
mile
two
miles
and
then
when
they
actually
detonate
the
bomb
they
get
the
view
from
the
first
camera
and
then
they
switch
to
the
second
camera
as
the
first
camera
is
have
as
this
thing
spreads
out
toward
you
and
then
it
does
what
it
wants
to
do
it
tells
you
what
it
wants
to
tell
you
and
it's
highly
unpredictable
I
mean
you
cannot
people
always
say
you
should
ask
it
a
question
this
seems
absurd
to
me
I
my life was in turmoil, I did ask a question. I wrote it down ahead of time
and the question was, am I doing the right thing with my life? And then when I
got in there and I posed the question and the answer came back instantly. It
was a ripoff from Lyndon Johnson. It said, what kind of a chicken shit question
is that to ask me? I said, oh sorry, didn't mean to presume, you know. I said, get your
act together and then we'll have a conversation, but if that's what you want
to talk about, you should have taken MDMA. And then, you know, paralleling
what we talked about this morning, and again I'm just giving you my subjective
take on it. It's like I come into a place, it's hard to describe, it's a
feeling, and the content of the feeling is, now the elves are near, but they
won't appear unless I invoke them. And, you know, I wish I could tell you that I
chant in Mundayan or something like that, but I don't. Well, I stole a line from an
old, old I Love Lucy program, where Ethel is talking to Lucy about UFOs, and
Lucy says she talks to the UFOs, and Ethel says, well, how can you talk to UFOs? And
Lucy said, well, it's simple. I just say, come in little green men, come in little green
men, and that's what I do. I say, come in little green men, and then there is a, and
women if there are any out there, and then there is a, it's like a, it's like, it's like a
marching band, it's like a Nepalese marching band is what it's like, and it
comes from a distance, like there's a place in my vision that's small, a little
dancing light, and a, and a little faint sound, and the light comes closer, and the
sound gets louder, until finally, you know, they pick me up on their shoulders, and
with tubas blaring, and sackbut, and rebeck, and all of this stuff, and then they carry
me around, and talk to me, and it's, the whole thing is shot through with such a
weird sense of zaniness, Irishness, Joyce-ishness, I mean, it's almost unbearable, it's so,
I don't know, not exactly Disney-esque, because their humor tends to be a little more savage
than that, and then that is part of the first wave, and then the rest of the trip unfolds
pretty much as you, there's a kind of a pushing and pulling that goes on, you can direct it, each
one of these plants does have a character of its own, and, sure, one of the most puzzling
things about these, these plants, is that they have characters that seem irreducible, for
instance, psilocybin, it is the science fiction drug, in other words, it says, you know, we
have been denizens of this planet for 400 million years, our original home planet is
in the M5-83C system, we are connected via hyperspace to all intelligent life forms in
the galaxy, it shows you enormous machines in orbit around alien planets, it talks about
the end of history, and the collectivizing of humanity, and it's this enormous
hortatory, salvational, dramatic, science fiction type scenario, well, then you take
ayahuasca, which in molecular terms is just a few nitrogens are moved around, I mean, it's
basically the same thing, and you get a completely different message, you, you, you, you feel
the energy of the rainforest, and the rivers, and you, it's very feminine, you think
about childbirth, you think about the continuity of generations, you think about the, the, uh,
mystery of the meat, you think about tantric sexuality, it's all redirected back into the human and natural world in some way, and then, of course,
DMT, which I described this morning, which the DMT elves are not from outer space, or they
don't present themselves that way, in fact, one of the odd things about the DMT thing is that you have
the feeling that this space that you break into, even though it's large, some people even refer
to the dome of DMT, that tells you they really were there, but wherever this huge vaulted space
is, you have the feeling, although it's hard to explain how you know this, but you have the feeling
that you're way, way, way underground, which fits with the elf motif, you're in the hall of the mountain king, you're
under the hills, with the, you know, the little people who retreated under the hills, uh, the character
of these things is, uh, one of the most puzzling things, uh, about them.
And how do you relate all these different species of, uh, gremlins to the, uh, the logos that shows the part of this one?
Well, that's a real question. The logos seems more, it, first of all, it isn't, it doesn't crack jokes,
and, and do quadruple entendre puns, and stuff like that. It's more like a wise and loving teacher.
Uh, these DMT things are, you know, it's a troop of maddened elves, and they are just doing their own thing.
And then, with ayahuasca, though some people claim they contact an entity, it hasn't been like that for me.
It seems to me that on ayahuasca, you, you become like a, a camera. You just fly through a visual world.
I mean, after a good ayahuasca trip, you just feel like your eyes are bugging out of your head.
I mean, it's like buying prints on Madison Avenue, you know, and, and you've just been looking, and looking, and looking, and looking,
and you, you literally have to give your eyes a rest after an ayahuasca trip.
And the ayahuasca visions are more, they seem to cover a broader spectrum.
The psilocybin hallucinations tend toward this highly polished, machine-like, insect-like, outer space bit.
And the ayahuasca hallucinations are wonderful pastels, laces, layering of colors.
And then, one of the most interesting things to me about ayahuasca, and I just cannot understand how this works.
If I could, I'd, I'd be Erte or somebody.
And that is that you, in the middle of the ayahuasca trip, you can suggest motifs.
You can lead it, so that, for instance, you can say to it, uh, Art Deco.
And suddenly there will be thousands of candy dishes, cigarette lighters, champagne buckets, automobiles, stained glass windows, doorknobs, silverware,
all rolling in black space in front of you, all the perfect exemplification of this aesthetic, the Art Deco aesthetic.
And then you can say to it, okay, uh, Italian Baroque.
And it just, like that, suddenly, altar pieces, Madonnas, uh, martyred saints, uh, and fantastic scroll work, and fleur-de-lis.
And you can say, well, surprise me.
And then you will get a coherent style, like Art Deco, like Italian Baroque, except that it's, nobody's ever bothered to realize it on this planet.
But it's as coherent.
Uh, it's like, you know, 20 years ago, there was no such thing as Southwest, as a style.
You know, this weird thing coming out of Santa Fe that I notice has planted its roots deep here as well.
The turquoise and beige endlessness of feathers and hammered titanium and all that.
Well, that's an aesthetic that has cohered in the last 20 years and come into being.
There seem to be an infinite number of these things.
As different as the bronzes of the Han Dynasty are to a Dali or a Pollock or a Bosch.
And, uh, and then you can say to it, going beyond the surprise me challenges, what I always say to it is, uh,
I want to see more of what you are for yourself.
And then it's like there's this low organ tone and it begins to lift the veils and the temperature in the room drops about 20 degrees.
And after about 20 seconds of that, you just say, enough of how you are for yourself.
Because you can tell what's happening is, it's starting to reveal something so peculiar and so untailored for the human mind or eye that you become afraid.
You say, you know, can we go back to dancing mice, Art Deco cigarette lighters and Baroque altarpieces, please?
This is turning into deep water as far as I'm concerned.
So, uh, yes?
What happens on, uh, higher than, uh, if anything, higher than five grams per hour?
Oh, that's a good question. Good question.
It requires a small detour into pharmacology.
The concept, which all pharmacologists are familiar with and which you should be too if you're going to deal in this realm,
called LD50.
This is not a pretty notion, but a necessary one.
It stands for lethal dose 50.
What does this mean?
It means if we have a hundred mice,
how much psilocybin do we have to give each mouse to kill half of them?
Do you see?
LD50.
Half the sample dies at the LD50 dose level, whether it's graduate students or rats.
Now, when you're designing a drug or when you're thinking about a drug,
what you want is a drug with an extremely high LD50 opposed to its effective dose.
So, say the effective dose of psilocybin is probably about .5 milligrams per kilogram.
And the LD50 is probably, uh, 200 milligrams per kilogram.
The LD50 of psilocybin is 400 times the effective dose.
This is a pharmacologist's way of saying this is very, very safe.
A pound wouldn't kill you.
I don't think.
It might be getting close, but you'd have to eat in that range to die.
Now, some drugs have horrendous LD50 to effective dose profiles.
Unfortunately, and I hope I don't rain on anybody's parade here,
MDMA has a terrible LD50 profile.
The effective dose is 125 milligrams.
You can kill yourself with a thousand milligrams.
So, that's not good at all.
Because, sure as hell, some street person or some depressed person or some maniac
is going to take a thousand milligrams.
And then you've got a stiff on your hands.
So, yeah.
I recently read some info on MDMA indicating that
uh, uh, uh, serotonin, depressed serotonin levels on MDMA, uh,
uh, uh, uh, well, the serotonin stays low in your body for biology at the kidney.
Where it's going to related substance called E.
Uh, the serotonin levels are depressed for only two hours
and the researcher indicated that his conclusion was
that MDMA had some physiological toxicity
that he did not have
and therefore it might be wise to avoid it for that reason.
So, in fact, I've read an article that
it's destroying the serotonin receptor sites.
I've heard about a liver test before and after,
about 3,500 milligrams.
Was there a difference?
There was a difference.
Well, I think MDMA is,
I don't want to trash MDMA.
It's changed a lot of people's lives
and saved relationships and so forth and so on.
But to me, it's a perfect example
of why you're better off taking plants.
Because here was this drug.
Somebody invented it.
They gave it to a few friends.
It seemed to be wonderful for solving personal problems.
So, without any collection of human data,
this thing becomes an item in the underground.
Well, and so then thousands of people take it.
The psychological effects seem completely benign.
It's a wonderful thing.
The physiological effects,
it's a very disturbing profile.
It isn't exactly as you said.
It's not that it destroys the serotonin receptor site.
It's that nerves, neurons,
are covered by these very delicate structures called dendritic spines.
Now, nobody knows what dendritic spines do,
but every neuron in your body has them.
And when you take MDMA,
it mows them down.
They just, they go away.
Now, so then you get two schools of thought.
One says,
well, my God, anything impacting the physical brain that dramatically
should be stayed away from.
And the other camp says,
well, do you see any behavioral changes
in people who take MDMA a lot?
Do you see any physical destruction,
seizures, blindness, anything?
And the answer is no.
So they say,
well, here we have histological evidence
that this thing is making major physiological changes
in the dendrites,
and no behavioral sequela to back up that this is of any consequence.
Well, my position being basically a very conservative person
is in that case, wait.
You know, they're doing work on this
in a dozen labs around the country.
They'll figure it out.
In the meantime,
take psilocybin or mescaline
or something else that has been sanctioned
because you just do not want to insult the physical brain.
You know, that's the whole name of the game.
You have to keep the brain in good shape.
Yeah.
Could we go back to his question?
Once you're past the Traeger dose,
is it worthwhile to start to step up?
Oh, yeah.
That's where we were talking.
That's why we started talking about LD50
because I wanted to explain to you
that taking a drug like a compound like psilocybin,
if the effective dose is 20 milligrams,
20 milligrams for somebody who weighs 135 pounds,
well, then looking at the pharmacological data,
they should be able to take 2,000 milligrams
without any trouble at all.
That's a thousand times,
that's a hundred times more.
But in fact,
what happens is as you raise the dose
is that the psychological presentation becomes unbearable.
It becomes so strange
that you fear for your sanity
in a good old Edgar Allan Poe-ish phrase, you know.
It gets stranger and stranger.
And you know,
I've talked to pretty naive people
who have overdosed.
Usually the way these overdose situations occur
is people are gathering mushrooms in the wild
and they start eating them
and then they just keep eating them
and then they realize
they've eaten 4 times more than the effective dose.
And this is where you get into places
where you don't know what to say
because if you tell people,
they'll throw a net over you.
But you want to say
because you're so personally disturbed.
This is where the flying saucers land
and the rectal examinations begin
and you're told that you're the Messiah
and they, you know,
it becomes quirkier and quirkier.
So I think you have to,
you know,
I'm very admiring of people
who can take very high doses
but I find it quite challenging enough
in the 5 to 7 gram range.
A friend of mine says of psilocybin
that every time he takes it
he tries to stand more,
meaning more of the vision
because it is filtering itself.
It's definitely filtering itself.
This is why beginners
almost never have bad trips
because somebody in there
looks at your clipboard
and says,
oh, this guy has never done this before
so lay off the rough stuff.
Just, you know,
bring them through the standard number.
It's the people who consider themselves experienced,
you know,
who've done it 20, 30, 40 times.
He says, you know,
we can take the gloves off with this guy
and, you know,
it always amazes me.
I sometimes meet people who say,
you know,
I've taken mushrooms 50 times
and I've never had a bad trip
and I think, you know,
lucky soul
because when it goes left,
it's hard, you know,
it's hard.
You have to really then,
you know,
do not your mantras bungle
is the best advice I can give you
because you need to steer back
towards the mainstream.
Now, maybe at this point
this is a good point
at which to talk about
what do you do
when the going gets rough?
There are two things, at least,
that you can do
that are very effective.
The first is,
and it's a very simple thing,
but people in our culture
seem to be resistant to this,
is you sing,
you force air into your lungs
and body
and you chant,
you sing,
anything you want
and it will radically alter the parameters.
There's a certain place in psilocybin
that is my
uh,
which I call the meat locker
and then I don't like this place,
you know,
and meat locker is a mild term for it.
It's more like,
uh, you know,
the morgue for the homicide unit
or something.
Whenever I start drifting that way,
I sing.
And then you can navigate through it.
The other thing you can do,
although this is sometimes trickier,
is, uh,
smoke cannabis.
This is what those bombers are for
that you rolled in the first hour
while you were waiting for it to come on
is as soon as it begins to press in
in some really invasive or alarming way,
just take a couple of hits of the good
and chant
and then you can bring it back on track.
And also talk to it.
Don't be afraid to say,
you know,
I don't like this.
Take it off me.
It's too peculiar.
I'm not ready for this.
It says,
oh, sorry,
uh, you know,
back to dancing mice.
Uh, yeah.
Do, uh,
different batches of mushrooms have
wildly during concentrations of psilocybin?
Well,
there hasn't been a lot of work on this.
Uh,
Michael Buickley at Evergreen College
years ago,
grew stropharia cubensis
by the method that's described in my book,
the book I wrote with my brother.
And what they discovered,
see,
psilocybin is 4-phosphoroxy-NN-dimethyltryptamine.
That phosphorus group
is removed as soon as it crosses,
uh,
the blood-brain barrier.
So really,
uh,
what's active is,
uh,
a,
organism
Something worth mentioning. I suppose. It's worth mentioning is
when I was into my
Extraterrestrial phase when I was assuming that the mushroom was an extraterrestrial
Either the extraterrestrial itself or something designed by some kind of an extraterrestrial
It was very interesting to me that psilocybin is as I said for
Phosphoroxy NN dimethyltryptamine. It is the only force substituted indole in nature
the only one
Well, if you were to search for evidence of extraterrestrial
Tampering with the biome of this planet what you would look for is a unique compound occurring in one life form and no other
Here it is folks this phosphorus group is unique
And I've never read any description or discussion of what the evolutionary history of that why it would appear in an organism like that
And not in any other
That's just an aside because I'm always searching for the thumbprint of the alien
It there may not be an alien thumbprint
But the phosphorus group attached to psilocybin is a good candidate for it. Yeah
Um
Switching the subject only slightly the
Descriptions that you've given of all of these experiences
Although you uh have said that it varies widely
There is a remarkable internal consistency
Of your description that you're entering a world that seems to have
Boundaries and entities that you've consistently encountered
Again and again
I've um spoken to
Many other people over the years
Some of whom
I've known you a long time
And nobody I've ever spoken to
People who've taken high doses or
Low doses have ever had
Similar experiences
Now clearly you've talked to people who have
Maybe they were just being polite
I'm wondering if you've ever experimented
With your own experiences
Like what Lily describes in programming and metaprogramming
And to see
You describe ways of evoking
the energy
Which certainly could be put into the context of
Introducing programs into your experience
True
Have you worked with
Different presuppositions going into this
To see what the limits are
Well my original presupposition was to try to have no presupposition at all
And then out of that came all of these assumptions
You're right that nobody has trips exactly like mine
Although
If you question people carefully
You can begin to see what how it works
For example
You know I described this thing this morning the elves the presentational thing
The high speed motion the gifts all that
Well sometimes people will take dmt and they will come back and you'll realize that
It's as though there is an archetype there
Which has different levels in it
And if I had to say what the archetype of dmt is
It's the archetype of the circus
And one time I saw a woman come out of dmt
She was an anthropologist
She had fairly high body weight
And I could tell that she had not gotten a complete hit
Came down we said okay, what was it?
She said it was the saddest carnival in the world
She said the carnival was closed
All the tents had their flaps rolled down
And there were just paper cups and candy wrappers blowing in the aisles in between them
And the the ferris wheel was stopped
Well, she was just at the edge of this thing
And if you think about the archetype of the circus
It is an interesting one
First of all
You have the three center rings
Where wild and zany activity is continuously being presented
Tiny cars keep arriving with 14 clowns in each one
And they keep climbing out falling all over each other
But it isn't all fun and games
It has a strange erotic content
And as a child I think my first awareness of what I would really call eros
Was watching this beautiful long-haired woman in a tiny spangled costume
Hanged by her teeth 120 feet above the center ring doing acrobatics
So you've got so you've got the clown
And you've got the lady in the tiny spangled costume
And then off from the center ring
You have these dark alleyways where the side shows are
The Siamese twins and the goat boy and all the rest of it
You know, and it has a very weird vibe about it
So it can land you in any of these places
But if you if you try and correlate people's experiences
It seems to me that it's pretty clear that through
Through their own life history and their own programming
Nevertheless something is trying to poke through
Now my dmt experience seems pretty radically different from other people's
Although other people don't give any account at all
I mean it's amazing how inarticulate people are
You they come down you say how was it and they say was far out
You say you know you don't get out of here with that rap
You know how was it and you say well
Well
They can't give a good account on psilocybin
I think most people experience something very much like what I describe
Huge machines a sense of danger to the earth
Apocalyptic visions
The idea that someone will come and help
I'm pretty resistant to all the flotsam and jetsam of the new age
I mean, I don't spend a moment worrying about the exact physical location of Atlantis or
Stuff like that and I think people it inflates their personal
Mythologies and intellectual misconceptions, but there there is something trying to get through that's why this exercise
Show me what you are for yourself is
Is really a good one and maybe my trips are so weird because I have always worshipped weirdness
So I can go further down that road without being alarmed while somebody else
You know would pull back
One of the problems is that we haven't we don't have complete maps of these places at this stage in exploring that new world
What we have essentially are the scribbled diaries of frightened explorers
And we don't know if Explorer A is talking about the same river system as Explorer B
Or whether they were on opposite sides of the planet or the universe
Building a coherent picture of the psychedelic dimension would be the first challenge to us to a rational approach to understanding
Is that the first book? No, I read that I read the first book
Well, it actually is a map. Talk about weird. This is one of the weirdest things you would ever read
But it has an amazing ring of truth in it and in it he presents a map of all of the realms of beings that exist that he's visited
Visited is just normal consciousness. It's almost an anti-psychedelic description
But it's pretty consistent with some of the things you were discussing this morning
Because this is where you go when you die
And it's also where you go when you sleep
In fact, he talks about classes you attend in your sleep
And he describes these levels upon levels of entities coexistence
Well, I read the first book and I was puzzled by how much of it didn't seem familiar to me
Like I remember in the first book he talks about a world that's just like this world except the cars are nine feet wide
That would be a very puzzling psychedelic experience to go to that world
I knew someone who was very close to him and I don't want to set off any lawsuits here
But I once cornered this person and said so what about it?
And he said don't worry. You don't have to worry. This is not getting close to your bailiwick at all
Buddhism of the Mahayanas
has you know a tremendously complex system of levels and entities
wrathful Buddhas and Dharmapalas and peaceful entities
And I think that that's pretty interesting as a phenomenological description of mind
I reject the philosophical premise of Buddhism because I think it's
You know an unbelievably uncompromising kind of nihilism
But Buddhism as it's pitched in America soft pedals that a lot
You know they don't they don't present it as a form of nihilism
But I think ultimately it is in the most positive sense
But still I'm of the school that follows Alfred North Whitehead who said say what you may
There are certain stubborn facts
And you know that's not a very Buddhist point of view
Yeah
If I can control myself and not do it too often
The problem is cannabis does so many other wonderful things
And I tend to use it for those other wonderful things
But if I were totally dedicated to vision
Then I would only smoke once a week
Because then you completely come to equilibrium
And then you know I again I think people do it
Not wrong but not the way you should do it if you want visions
You should do it the way you do all these other things
Alone in silent darkness and at high doses
Bursts of hallucination on cannabis are hard to control and predict
But sometimes they're as intense as anything can be
If you read 19th century descriptions of cannabis use by people like Fitzhugh Ludlow
And the Club de Hashashin and that crowd
Where they were eating the hashish
It's very clear that it was the LSD of the 19th century
I mean nobody can read those descriptions without realizing
These people were loaded for sure
They were thoroughly and completely smashed
To be able to write those kinds of accounts
Yeah, go ahead
So I was interested you said you spoke a lot at the start of the mushroom trip
And when I spoke a lot at the start of the trip
Which tends to really confuse Henry
And then just like realize
It has an effect which
And I'm not sure that's a good effect
In terms of getting the learning
Shall we say
From both our accounts
Well you didn't exactly make clear to me what the effect was
It fuzzes you out going into
Well it depends on the scope
I suppose if you have a very top grade sense of me
It will be one thing
It will be something totally different
What it does to me is it just slightly cuts my anxiety
You know
I'm able to let the thing unfold of its own
I'm not I don't know
I mean I have a very
A lifelong
Intense relationship to cannabis
And I basically make my living
Out of being able to do feats of memory
And you know cannabis is supposed to trash your memory
So I don't you know maybe I'm different
But I resist any maybe I'm different argument
Because it's malarkey
Nobody's different enough
That they can
You know
In terms of your articulateness
And memory recall
When you're at the peak of a time of experience
Is it that you still
You know
Speak as clearly then
I mean I'll give it a little tongue-tap
No more so
My great dream is
That as my powers of locution fade with old age
That cannabis will be legalized
Then I can sit in front of you and smoke
And my career can be pushed 20 years further into the future
The way I use cannabis is to think
And I do a lot of thinking
I do a lot
And I
At night before I go to bed
I smoke
And then I play the tapes of the day
And then I understand what happened
If I didn't have cannabis
I don't think I would be
Sort of
At sea
Or a kind of a space case
Because I never get what somebody really meant
Really intended
Really had in mind
Till I play the tapes stoned
And then I see
Aha!
That's what the agenda was
That's what was going on
You didn't go to sleep afterwards?
Oh yeah
Yeah
And if I don't smoke
Then I'm insomniac
Yeah
I don't know how far you want to go about this
But I'm really interested in how you can hear it
And that's one
And all of the experiences together
What we talked about
Kind of complete that
Okay
Well
LSD
Again
You remember
I'm only speaking for myself
Because there is no other way to approach it
I found LSD very interesting
But ultimately kind of frustrating
Because I wanted visions
And to me what LSD by itself does
It does a lot of slippery and hard to name stuff
It accelerates and changes the quality of thought
It
Hmm
Well basically that's it
It does something to the quality of thought
But I had been reading Aldous Huxley
And Havelock Ellis
And those people
And I kept saying
Where are the ruins of alien civilizations?
Where are the jeweled tapestries?
And then fiddling around with LSD
I discovered that if I would
Take it with mescaline
Then it became the psychedelic experience
That I was seeking
But in and of itself
It's kind of psychoanalytic
It's sort of like cleaning up your act
It often focuses you on your own personal stuff
And you know I have to confess to you
I'm I don't I'm not that interested in my own personal stuff
Probably because it's so horrendous
But I I don't like personalized trips
I like cosmic vision information trips
And and then mescaline
Mescaline is you have to take a lot to get it to really do what you want it to do
And it being an amphetamine has a not a very good LD50 profile
It's not like MDMA
Where 10 times the effective dose you're in real trouble
But probably 40 times the effective dose
And you'd be sweating bullets
So and then just the nature of my life
I've not had as much to do with mescaline as these other things
I'm really a vision freak
And people say you know well there's feeling
And there's insight
And there's this and that
But the reason I'm so fixated on vision
Or the excuse I give
Somebody said it's because you're a double Scorpio
But to me it's the
To me it's the proof
That it's not coming from me
I can come up with insights
I can come up with funny ideas
But I can't come up with objects
Never before seen by the human eye or mind
And so when the vision start
Then I feel this is the transpersonal part of the trip
This isn't my unconscious
My memories my fears my hopes
This is something else
Yeah
Last night you were talking about
Boundary dissolution and ego reduction
In what you described this morning
How do they relate?
How do boundary dissolution and
How do your descriptions of the trip this morning
Relate particularly to ego
Well I think in very practical terms
They show you that everything you know is wrong
You know?
I mean how can the ego survive that piece of information
It just puts in your lap
Incontrovertible evidence
That everything you ever thought or believed is hokum
And that's extraordinarily humbling
And that word humbling
Means the feeling you have when your ego is reduced
You know?
Humble yourself enough and you'll begin to feel humiliated
And you know that's a deeper ego reduction
I think they
Aside from any magical chemical effect
They might have on ego
They're just simply showing you
The true size of the universe
And your place in it
And you know in our down personal lives
Every man, every woman, a king or a queen
I mean we build castles in the air
Our career, our children, our whatever
Well then you get into those places
You just say you know
How preposterous
This is a dangerous kind of question
Is there any gender difference in these things?
For men and women?
Male and ego being?
Well that's an interesting question
I'm interested in that also in terms of the history
Yeah
You mean what we talked about last night
Yeah
You live in the, perhaps a male created
Well I think women by virtue of the fact that they
Menstruate and give birth
Are just inherently
More, more chemically driven creatures than men
Men are Apollonian in intent
The idea is always some kind of abstract
Purity, clarity kind of thing
And women know from the get-go
That that's an illusion
That the reality is the floor of the rainforest
The interconnected tissue
The levels, the trade-offs
And so forth and so on
This is why I think
Generally men tend to be more interested
In these things than women
And to also be more impacted by them
For women it seems to sort of fit in
And affirm what they knew
For men it seems to come as a tremendous surprise
That this is the way things are put together
I think that if we, if everybody gave birth
And experienced menstruation
Probably we never would have launched ourselves into history
In a way, you know, without going too far with it
Men are the ancillary sex
I mean the the original
Blastula in the embryonic development
Is female
And I was listening to somebody the other night
Talk about this
Saying no wonder men have the problems they have
What a man is, is a woman
Who has been under incredible chemical assault
For nine months in the womb
And you just have been hammered
Sculpted, shaped
And recast
Again and again
And then you're born male
A female fetus
Doesn't experience anything like that
It starts out with a smooth shot
And phylogenetic expression
And then achieves it
I don't think of the ego
As particularly male
Because I think we all have it
To excessive degrees
But men are able to express it
A woman with an ego
Is frustrated
A man with an ego
Is a menace to all concerned
You know
Yeah
How do you feel about taking a trip
With another
Or other people
Do you think
Reflection of energy
And personalities
Changes your trip?
I think it's very
It's a very major decision
To do that
That if you're going to take a
High dose of psychedelics
With somebody else
Then you better be prepared
To get all entangled
With them
Which can be great
It can also be
Fairly confusing
I don't like taking psychedelics
This is not an issue
Of entanglement
That's sort of what goes on
Between lovers
Or close friends
But I get a lot of requests
To sit for people
And I don't do it
Because I
I don't know whether it's my
Personality
Or what it is
But I am unable
To contain my anxiety
In the presence of
Another stoned person
Especially if I'm stoned
If I'm stoned
And they're stoned
And we're in a dark room
I cannot get off
I listen to them breathe
I worry
I wonder if I should ask them
If they're alright
Then I go off on long trips
About not interrupting them
And then that loops back into
But I haven't heard them breathe
For 20 minutes
And I'm always afraid
I don't know
So really people say
Doesn't it take courage
To do it alone?
For me it takes more courage
To do it with people
Because inevitably
Then you get tangled up
Into some kind of craziness
And you know
You can think
You're having a telepathic experience
And they've decided
That they want to have sex
Or something
And meanwhile
I've just had a revelation
About that entry
Moliere made
In his diary
When he was talking
To his niece Agnes
About the nature
Of the French comic theatre
And so you say
Boy you know
We've got too much
On the menu here
But I'm weird
Remember that
Yeah
Okay
Now
And we
Have heard about
The common vision
Shared by people
In Ayahuasca
So
Can you comment
On this kind of thing
In contrast
To what you're talking
About
You mean the group mind
On Ayahuasca?
Yes
Is that possible?
Oh yeah
No
It's very possible
I mean you can sit
With someone
And play a little game
Where you will
Describe the hallucinations
For 30 seconds
Then they get to
Describe the hallucinations
For 30 seconds
And you can absolutely
Convince yourself
That people are
Seeing the same
You know
That you're seeing
The same thing
And you know
When you toss
Sex
Into the mix
It just goes
Over the top
I mean I've had
The impression
I don't want
To trot it out
As a position
Of mine
Or something
That I assert
As true
But I have had
The impression
Stoned on mushrooms
Making love
That
It's like
Perspiration forms
On the surface
Of the skin
And there's
Some kind of
Electrolytic
Thing
That goes on
And the boundaries
Dissolve
Between the people
I don't mean
Metaphorically
I mean
That you
Become
One
Organism
And that's
That's
Pretty
Amazing
Yeah
Now
After I just said
I don't like
Taking
Psychedelics
With people
I guess
What I should have said
Is I hate
Being responsible
Because I don't mind
Taking ayahuasca
With 30 people
None of whom
Speak English
In a hut
Up some river
But that's
Because I know
That the old
Shamans
Are in charge
That I'm just
A face in the crowd
Nobody's going to
Turn to me
For explanation
Or help
I'll tell you
An ayahuasca story
Just to give you
An idea of the
Kind of stuff
That goes on
In these sessions
Years ago
In 76
Cat and I
It was before
We were married
Were in Peru
And we
Had found
This shaman
Who was very good
And he had a following
And we were
You know
Apprenticing ourselves
To him
And he
The style
Of these
Peruvian mestizo
People
Is that
I mean
Cultures handle
This differently
But they are
Never straight
With each other
It's
An incredibly
Masked
Culture
Almost like the
Japanese
But without the formality
In other words
If you think
Somebody's a jerk
You would never
Say that
That's the last thing
You would say
Because that's your
True opinion
So we got into
A situation
With these people
Where this
Elder shaman
Who was very respected
Beloved
Even
By these people
He had a nephew
A sobrino
Who
Who was an absolute
Jerk
I mean this guy
Was into
Pimping a little
On the side
And he was very
Ambitious to perfect
His ayahuasca
So he could
Go to Lima
And charge yuppies
A bunch of money
For taking it
And so forth
And he had this
Really awful
Habit
And I don't know
What was really
Had gone on
Before we got there
But they would all
Get together
To take ayahuasca
And these old
Old guys
You know
85 years old
The totally
Authentic dudes
Would sing
These beautiful
Ayahuasca songs
And he would sing
Against them
I mean can you imagine
A scene like this
Where everybody
Singing row row row
Your boat
Except one guy
Wants to sing
Five foot two
Eyes of blue
Does
And and the level
Of social tension
In these meetings
Would just rise
And rise
But nobody
Would ever
Say anything
To this guy
And tell him
To bug out
And can that crap
So one night
This had happened
Two meetings
In a row
It was the third
Meeting like this
Everybody hoped
This guy wouldn't come
So then he showed up
So then we all
Dose
Then we get loaded
And the singing
Begins
And he begins
And in the wave
Of hallucinations
And cat was
Sitting next to me
He was sitting up
On his haunches
Kind of rocking
Back and forth
On his heels
And I would look at him
And I could see
He was going through
These weird
Animal transformations
First he would become
Like a jackal
Then he would become
Like a monkey
And it was really intense
And I mentioned it
To cat
And she could see it too
Well
So then he kept
And we were also
Trying to tape
These ayahuasca songs
So it was a double
Irritation to us
That this guy
Was so out of control
So after a
Particularly long song
By the old guys
With him
Just hammering
Against them
I could feel cat
Who has a real
Irish temper
Getting more
And more
Pissed off
At this guy
And finally
At the end
Of this song
When the silence
Fell
She had been
Just staring
At the floor
And she looked
Across the room
At Don Jose
And gave him
A look
Of pure
Loathing
And I saw
These red things
These red
Triangular shaped things
Come out of her eyes
And go across the room
Like
And when it got to him
It knocked him
Off his feet
He was thrown
Backwards
From the impact
Of these things
Literally
And the
Everything going on
In the room
Stopped dead
And the elder shaman
Said to the guy
Sitting next to him
He said
Oh
The gringa
Sends
The ba da da da da
And
You know
Then you realize
Wow
We're in over our heads
Here
You can't tell shit
From Shinola
In this scene
This concludes
Tape 3
Our program continues
With tape 4
Our program continues
With tape 4
So that's an example
Of you know
Magical power
Condensed onto
The material plane
Yeah
There's a film
About two nights ago
Of dolphins
Swimming
And there were
Purple triangles
Coming from their heads
As Capuletans
Wow
Clearly
The same
The same phenomenon
Yeah
First of all
I have to ask
Inesitable question
Due to the counter singing
After that
He actually
Didn't come back
After that evening
Then the other question
Or actually
A perspective
Is
I've done extensive work
With iridology
To the point
That I could understand
Where the limitations
In that science
Were blatantly obvious
Because it's not so much
The physical characteristics
Of the iris of the eye
It is what is transmitted
From the mind
Through the pupil
Or the sensor
Of that filter
That is really being accessed
By someone
Who is discerning
And that's what will give you
The blueprint
That you're looking for
And so
I feel that
That power
And that transmission
Of mind
So many times
Is carried
From that energy
That goes back and forth
Through the eye
And I wondered
If you had any more thoughts
On that
Well it seems to imply
That we are all
Potentially linked together
In many ways
That civilization
Has suppressed
We are no longer telepathic
We are no longer able
To reach out
And tap somebody
With a glance
Like that
And
But somehow
Our perception
Of what's been going on
Is skewed
We don't
You know
Rupert and I talked a lot
About this
He had the idea
That
He said
You know
The search for a psychic
The search for proof
Of psychic power
Has not been a very happy story
With card flipping
And this sort of thing
And Rupert
Had the genius
To realize
That
What is the commonest
Psychic power
That we all
Believe exists
And have experienced
And so forth
But which science
Is utterly unable
To explain
That could be
Statistically studied
Well what it is
Is
The sense
That someone
Is looking at you
You know
And you could
Test this
And in fact
We did tests
Where you would
Choose one person
And put them
At the front
Of a room full of people
And then you would
Tell people
Either look at your lap
Or look at the back
Of this person's head
And they would be asked
Are people looking at you?
Or are people looking
At the back
Of looking at their lap
And certain people
You could quickly
Satisfy yourself
Were able to detect
This a phenomenal amount
Of the time
Well beyond statistical
You know
The rules of probability
So I think
We're surrounded
By subliminal abilities
That we can't
Really understand
I mean
I from years
Of traveling
In Asia
I have an amazing
Psychic power
Which is
I can tell
When food
Shouldn't be eaten
You know
And it will
It will happen
To me
You know
In very good restaurants
And if I go
Against it
You know
I'll spend the evening
Over the toilet
Because I
Couldn't believe
That
Shea
So-and-so
Would serve
Poisoned food
Because it was costing me
So much money
But then when I get back
To the hotel room
Sure enough
By overriding
My own instincts
I get into trouble
I think
Psychic ability
Well this is worth
Talking about
That we cannot be
Or
How can I put it
We cannot
Evolve
Beyond the confines
Of our language
And
If you have a language
That makes telepathy
Impossible
Then telepathy
Will be
Impossible
Inside
That culture
You see
We all pay lip service
To the idea
That
That language
And culture
Create each other
But we actually act
As though
Culture
Is real
And it isn't
I learned this
You know
In Peru
Very dramatically
Because in the
Peruvian Amazon
There's a
Disease
Which people
Are very
Very
Concerned
About
Susto
Have all of you heard of this
Susto
Only affects
Peruvians
This is the first clue
That something weird
Is going on
And it's major
Manifestation
Is bad luck
And
But if you get it
And you're a Peruvian
You prepare to cash in your chips
You know
It's as horrible as melanoma
You know
You're doomed
If you have this stuff
And you have to go to a shaman
And get it taken care of
Or you're dead
Within six months
But I can't get Susto
It's not
It's a linguistic disease
Of some sort
It travels around
Inside the confines
Of mestizo
Spanish
And nowhere else
Well
Yeah
People have these ideas
Yeah
And you know
Like people say
Well magic is accomplished
Because the person
The magic
Is being done to
Knows
That it's happening
And therefore
They unconsciously
Participate
In their own demise
But I've observed
These shamans
In the Amazon
And they will go
If a shaman
Has decided to
Actually get
Somebody
Then he will go
To incredible
Lengths to conceal what he's doing so that the person never knows and never knows how to blame
So it isn't some kind of psychological
Co-option that's happening. It's something a good deal more complex than that
Yeah
For example we have all these myths about fairies and elves and magic and perhaps at one time the world was like that but it is not like that now
Here you're talking about a social context that does not include telepathy
Generates a culture without people experiencing telepathy
And yet we have all these myths, we have all the fairy tales
Now you're talking about self-transplanting the machine elves
Do you have any question about this?
Well, I'm not sure that you got it into a question that I can respond to try again
Okay, so our culture then is very like science oriented
And the whole idea of the magic
Things like the existence of elves, thin corn
People laugh at that unless they're on supposed trenches
Do you think that this kind of thing could come back?
Do you think that we will have
You know, like with our eyes for example, experiences with these kind of things
Yes, sure, because what you have to do is you have to shift the locus
I mean it's kind of hard to explain but every civilization has a locus
And and we have disempowered ourselves by shifting the locus to an imagined class of experts
We have an incredibly peculiar version of how the universe is put together
First of all, we rely a lot of the time on the notion of the eensy-beensy
Genes, viruses, atoms, elementary particles
These are the things which shape our world
We tell each other
And yet who has ever seen any of these things?
I mean a virus maybe a few people have seen
A hydrogen atom?
It's a pretty airy-fairy concept
And when you start talking about the anti-mu-maison and stuff like that
Where you can only approach it through an arcane mathematical language
The reality, whatever that means, of these things becomes pretty questionable
See, one of the things I think that psychedelics could do
Is give back to us what I call the immediacy of felt experience
Since the rise of Cartesian analysis in the 17th century
Everything that we experience has been defined as what are called secondary characteristics
Color, a secondary characteristic
Feeling, and what's real is
Mass, momentum, charge, spin
Stuff like this
Which, you know, these are the primary qualities of the universe
Whoever encounters or deals with them
We need to model reality so that it is understandable to us
I mean that that statement should even have to be made
Shows how far off track we are
Our current model of reality is excellent for describing
The behavior of hydrogen at the center of stars
Or something like that
Terrible for explaining to you how you're supposed to stay tuned to your girlfriend
So, somehow we have sold out to abstraction
And this is something about science, you know
And the demonic power of numerical analysis and stuff like this
I think that part of what the psychedelic revolution is
And why it is so politically threatening
Is because a psychedelic person does not believe anything they cannot confirm for themselves
Through thought, intuition, or feeling
And a non-psychedelic person
Joins up
With the quantum physicists
Or the
Hasidic Jews
Or some group of people
Who've already got it packaged and figured out
I mean the UFO thing is a good example
Everybody's interested in UFOs
And, you know, are there space people
Are there not?
And I think most people think that the news will come
That the way you encounter a UFO
The way most of us will encounter a UFO
Is that the president will call a press conference
And say, you know, that the time has come to speak frankly
About certain declassified material
And that yes, in fact, it has been going
I mean, that's not how it's going to happen
The way it's going to happen is on 5 grams
In silent darkness in your living room
And that's real
You know, if flying saucers were to land
On the south lawn of the White House tomorrow
It would be minor news
Compared to what can happen to you
A minute and a half after smoking DMT
We don't realize that we are not real
Unless we are the center of our own private mandala
And so we look to media
To experts
You know, maybe the Dalai Lama can clarify it
Or Mother Teresa
Or Stephen Hawking
We'll forget all that
Those are just linguistic concepts
As far as you're concerned
The only thing that's real to you
Is yourself and your immediate surroundings
And if we could empower that
You know, our political problems
Would disappear overnight
We are infantile
And we do love it
We don't really try to claim
Our existential validity
And those who do
Are called mad
Because they depart
From the sanctioned paradigm
Over here somebody
Yeah
It just struck me
That one of the things
That you seem real good at
Is bringing that personal experience
Into language
And being able to communicate it
Which creates the same kind of reality
That you appear to be
Declined
Of a shared
Linguistic reality
Where we can discuss
The experience that we've had
It's value
It becomes elevated
When we talk about it
Yes, well it becomes real
When we talk about it
I mean, one of the most satisfying experiences
That I have
As a public speaker
Is sometimes
After speaking to groups
Like last night
Somebody will come up afterward
And say
I thought I was crazy
Until I heard you speak
Now I know there are at least two of us
And the truth is
You know, there are more than two of us
There are thousands
If you
You know
It's a delusion
If it happens
To one person
It's a cult
If it happens
To twenty people
And it's true
If it happens
To ten thousand people
Well this is a strange way
To have
Epistemological authenticity
Conferred upon something
We vote on it
You know
So I
I
Would like
Competition
I mean
I feel pretty lonely
Out here
I'm surprised
Nobody has followed me
Into this
There must be other people
Who can articulate
These things
As well
Or better
Than I can
But boy
They don't seem
To come forth
And I really don't know
Why that is
Because what I say
Is not all that
Exceptional
It's just
The sum total
Of it
Is kind of eerie
But if we don't
That's why
I was saying
You know
We cannot evolve
Faster
Than we evolve
Our language
Is like the
Collective skin
Of our culture
So you know
Until you say
The words
Self transforming
Elf machines
From hyperspace
Then there aren't
Such things
Once you say it
It has gained
A certain kind
Of ontological currency
So why aren't you arguing
The opposite point
You know
When you talk about
A quantum physicist
Or
A spiritual
Or
You know
That
Learning a language
System
See people are buying
Other people's experience
I mean
If you're not
A quantum physicist
Why in the world
Should you take
Those people seriously
They're talking
Gibberish
What power does it have over you
Except that it comes
Presented on the platter of science
Say you must believe this
If you don't believe this
You're not
A well educated
Trendy
With it person
We can just say
Well malarkey
Didn't you people believe
Something completely different
Fifteen years ago
You say
Yes
But now we've got it
Say well
Am I supposed to take
That assertion seriously
You change your mind
Every six months
But our experience
During the psychedelic experience
Before we bring it to language
Is
You know
Ungraspable
Very frustrating
Once
We lose it
And
You know
We can't settle down
Until we bring it to language
That's what they've done
With
Their experience
They brought it to language
And they can kind of
Settle down
And play with it
So
We
We seem to be caught
In the thing
If we're having a
True experience
It's pre-linguistic
It's
You know
Beyond concept
It
Once
Once we conceptualize
It
It becomes
Not quite an experience
But the experience
Really changes
And
It
It becomes something
That we can then
tokenize
To each other
And have a good social time
With
But
You know
We're missing it
Well
Every entity
Has
A value dark
Dimension
I mean
Surely
Only the most naive
Of quantum physicists
Believe
That
The
You know
The quantum electrodynamic
Description
Is
All
There is
To say
About
The electron
Because
Biology
Is made
Out of electrons
And you can't reason
From
Quantum electrodynamics
To
The rainforest
You know
Obviously
Other factors
Are present
Which are
Escaping
This particular
Linguistic model
So
Being able
To talk
About
A mystery
It merely is
A sectioning
Through it
That
Gives you a kind
Of a lower dimensional
Map
Of it
But the mystery
Remains intact
You know
Wittgenstein
Talks about
What he called
The unspeakable
And
You know
The unspeakable
Is the true domain
Of being
And then
Within that
There is a very
Small subset
Of those things
Which can actually
Be captured
In language
But
There are
Vanishingly
Small
Set
Of the whole
Thing
Mostly
It's all
Mystery
I don't know
Why this is so surprising
To people
I mean
Where is it writ large
That bipedal primates
With binocular vision
Are supposed to be
Carrying around
In their heads
True models
Of the cosmos
I mean
Would you expect
An apple tree
Or a monarch butterfly
To have
A true map
Of the cosmos
Inside them
No more
Than that we
Should have
So I think
All
All knowledge
Is provisional
And I think
The new science
Will
Honor this
This is why
The rise
In the use
Of the word
Model
They no longer
Believe
They're giving
A complete explanation
Of phenomenon
They just say
Well here's a model
A better model
And we'll keep
Modeling
And our models
Will get better
And better
But they will never
Be more than crude
Approximations
To an unspeakable
Mystery
No I find it exhilarating
I think
Part of the male
Or part of the ego
Dominator
Pathology
Is to demand closure
Out of everything
There is no closure
You have to learn
To sit
With the messiness
Of the mystery
You know
It's this thing
We said this morning
The bigger you build
The bonfire
Of understanding
The more darkness
Is revealed
To your startled eye
So
No I think
It's open-ended
And exhilarating
And tremendously
Exciting
That that's the kind
Of universe
That's the kind
Of universe
We're living in
Terence I think
The thing about mystery
Is
I find it fascinating
I think
Up until
Just a few months ago
When May thing
Was trying to understand
Trying to understand
I read something
Somewhere
Some little sentence
That said
I'm not trying to understand
The mystery anymore
I'm just trying to have
A relationship
That's right
Because it clicked me
Into a whole
Different place
Well you know
This is not merely
The stoned ravings
Of the psilocybin brigade
Do you all know
Or have you ever heard
Of Gödel's
Incommensurability theorem
This sounds daunting
And disturbing
Have you ever heard of this?
Does anybody have a clue
What I'm talking about?
Okay, well that
In itself
Is a measure
Of the kind of society
We're living in
Because to my mind
More important
Than Einstein
Or Schrodinger
Or any of those people
Was Kurt Gödel
German mathematician
And he began
By studying
The calculus
And he had a very
Funny method
What he did
Was he would
Number
Every operation
In a partial differential equation
And these numbers
Are called
Gödel numbers
G-O-U-M-L-A-T-D-E-L
Kurt Gödel
And what he showed
And I think this is
Maybe the
Most important
Intellectual step
Taken
In the 20th century
He showed
That
Any formal system
Will produce
True
Statements
Which are not
Provable
Within the confines
Of the formal system
Itself
Now what this actually means
Is that
Mathematics
Can fail
It means
That
There is no closure
Closure
You can
He proved this
Logically
Showed
That closure
Is
Impossible
That everything
He showed it
For arithmetic
The most secure
Of all
Intellectual edifices
Essentially
What he showed
Was that
2 plus 2 equals
Is a very
Strong tendency
Not a law
And
This
Incommensurability
Theorem
Means that
No program
Of
Formal
Analysis
Will ever
Completely exhaust
Its subject
There will always be
A residuum
Of mystery
And
We need to come to terms
With this
I mean it's taken us
80 years
To get Einstein
Under our belts
And that's a simple notion
Compared to what
Gödel is saying
Because what he's saying
Is not about
You know the distortion
Of space-time
Near massive objects
But something
Which actually
Affects our own lives
On a day-to-day basis
And you know
If you live
For closure
You're beating your head
Against a stone wall
And your head
Will wear out
Long before
The stone wall
Will
There's a kind
Of an appreciation
For the mystery
Needs to replace
The attitude
That the mystery
Is an unsolved problem
Mysteries have no relationship
Whatsoever
To unsolved problems
Yeah
I'm just wondering
About the motivation
Of the explorer
Going into the dark continent
Wanting to
Draw a map
Of the river
So that you can eventually
Go the railroad
Et cetera
That
You go through
A lot of pain
A lot of difficulty
To pioneer
To get the map back
If your primary assumption
Is that this map
Will never be
Drawn
Where's the motivation
What
You don't need
A complete map
I mean
I'm not such a fan
Of Wittgenstein
But he seems to have
Raised his ugly head
Here
Wittgenstein
Used to say
We do not
Seek statements
Which are true
We seek statements
Which are true enough
That's this genuflection
To the incommensurability theorem
That's as good as it gets
Folks
True enough
Beyond that
There's just
You know
The airy realm
Of metaphysics
Which will never be plumbed
So what we're trying to do
Is refine our model
Make it more responsive
To what we want
The model to tell us
But you don't want to confuse
The model
With the phenomenon
Being modeled
Because it will always have
Dimensions
Which
Exceed
The grasp
Of the theory
That's what the probability
Says that there's a tendency
For
A particular state to exist
That's as good as it can
Yes
Although I have
Real problems
With probability theory
Which we'll probably
Get into
Tomorrow
I think
That in a sense
Probability theory
Has made it almost impossible
For us
To think clearly
About anything
Because it
It contains certain
Insidious
Built-in
Assumptions
That are
Purely
Assumptions
For instance
Probability theory
Tells you
That when you flip a coin
The odds of it being
Heads or tails
Are 50-50
If in fact
That were true
The coin
Would land on its edge
Every single time
So
What we need
You see
Is
Not a theory
Of
What is possible
That's science
If you want to know
If something is possible
You find a scientist
And they're always perfectly happy
To fulfill this function
And tell you
Whether this is possible
Or not
What we
Completely lack
As a civilization
Is
A theory
That explains to us
How it is
Out of the
Vast
Class
Of
Possible
Things
Certain things
Undergo
What Alfred North Whitehead
Called
The formality
Of
Actually
Occurring
We have no theory
I mean
Science can say
Well it's probable
That it'll be this
But it's also
40% probable
That it'll be that
Say well which will it be
Say well
I just told you
The probabilities
Say I'm not
That's not good enough
I want to know
Say we have no theory
Of selecting
Among the probabilities
The other
Problem that haunts
Probability theory
Is that it assumes
That time
Is an absolute
Flat plane
It assumes
That
No physicist
Tells you
In his lab notes
Please perform
My experiment
On Tuesdays
Wednesdays
And Saturdays
Because it won't
Work
Any other time
In other words
The assumption
Is made
That the experiment
Will produce
The data
Predicted by theory
No matter when
The experiment
Is performed
In other words
It's assumed
That the phenomena
Is time independent
But that's just
An assumption
That Newton
Got into
Proving
That phenomena
Are time independent
Is absolutely
Beyond
Our intellectual
Reach
It can't be done
A curious thing
About probability theory
Probability theory
Is say
You want to know
How much current
Is flowing through
A wire
Here's how probability
Theory
Finds out
It measures
The current flowing
Through the wire
With a meter
It measures it
A thousand times
It takes those values
And adds them
Together
Then it divides
By one thousand
Then it tells you
This is how much current
Is flowing through
The wire
You look at the value
They've given you
And you say
But we took a thousand
Measurements
And we never got
This number
Say well
That's because
You know
You didn't average
The probability
And
Well
If we took a thousand
Measurements
And not one
Is that value
You're offering
Why should we believe
That this is the amount
Of current flowing
Through the wire
Well then there's a bunch
Of hand waving
And epistemic
Foot stamping
And so forth
Science is an
Incredibly
Fragile
Edifice
Which if it weren't
For its ability
To hand its findings
On to
Technologists
Who make pretty
Things
Would have to take
Its place
Somewhere to the left
Of
I don't know
Homeopathy
Acupressure
Something like that
In other words
It is not a meta-theory
It has not got
Truth by the jugular
It has a bunch of
Fishy mathematical formula
Which it's
Flailing you with
But I don't think
I think that
Serious revision
Of probability theory
Is going to
Have to take place
I think you've given
Probability theory
Much more than it's
Really there
Inherently what it's
All about is simply
Acknowledging the fact
That there are variables
In anything that we
Can't know
And we don't know
It's really nothing
More than that
Which brings you back
It has a moment
Well
But for instance
If the odds
That the coin
Comes up heads or tails
Are 50-50
Why doesn't it land
On it's edge
Every single time
I don't see how it's
Related to the
Lanning insight
Just simply
What happens
With a coin
Where it ends up lying
Basically
Whether it's face
Up or down
Right
Well
You know
Another thing
Probability theory
Says
Is the chance
Has no memory
And so
They always
In first year
Statistics
They say
If you flip a coin
And it comes up heads
49 times
What are the odds
That will come up heads
The 50th time
The answer is
50-50
But any gambler
Would tell you
That
You know
If it comes up heads
Five times in a row
Bet on heads
For crying out loud
So
There's
Something
I'm not an acolyte
Of probability
Or statistics
Because I think a lot
Is done
Or inferred from them
That just doesn't exist
I agree
At the same time
Really
Is the notion
That there are
Things going on here
That we can't know
Even though
That's not acknowledged
By most people
Who are practicing it
That's the reality
Probably
But don't you think
The other assumption
Is that
Time
Is a
Non
Inputting
It's not variable
You know
That
You don't say
The odds of the coin
Coming up heads or tails
Are 50-50
In Canada
But
48-52
In Bolivia
The variables
That sort of
Smear it out
Simply because
It can't be characterized
The way
People
People who are doing that
Like to tend to characterize
them
Well
But underlying the whole thing
Is still the notion
That you're dealing with
Unknowable
And
And I'm not saying
That those who are
Deeply immersed
In practicing
Probability and statistics
Hold this view
But
The reality is
Underlying
Sort of
Underpinning the whole thing
Is the notion
That
There are things going on here
That we can't know
Oh well I don't have any trouble
With that
I understand
Why science
Latched on to probability
With such a vengeance
It's because
You know
Thanks to
William of Ockham
There is this notion
Called
Ockham's Razor
Which is this idea
That is most simply
Stated as
Hypotheses
Should not be
Multiplied
Without necessity
So
Since the idea
That time
Is a flat
Invariant
Is the simplest
Assumption
Try it first
And
See if it works
But
I maintain
That you know
Science has
In certain areas
Been
Very slow
To make progress
In
The social
Domain
In
Econometrics
In
The
You know
Multiple body
Problems
And stuff like that
Well I think
This is because
This simple assumption
That time is an invariant
Has to be
Reexamined
I would almost
Read
I would offer
A new definition
Science
Is that
Field of human
Endeavor
Which studies
Phenomenon
So crude
That they are
Time invariant
You know
The
Hydrogen atom
Cleaves
From the oxygen atom
The same way
Every time
But
Love affairs
Don't come apart
The same way
Every time
Bankruptcies
Don't occur
The same way
Every time
These are
Complex
Compound
Phenomena
That are then
Influenced
Temporal variables
And the variables
Embedded
In the environment
Around them
Now the problem is
These are the things
We're interested in
Love affairs
Bankruptcies
And the establishment
Of empires
Very few people
Have a passionate interest
In the dynamics
Of the water molecule
Except that those
That equipment over there
Was produced by those
Notions
These noble computers
The software that you're running
Oh, now I know
I have you on the run
Because this is a
But it makes pretty things
Argument
I'm just saying
I'm not commenting
On the value of it
Or not
Each person
Has to assess that
From the software
Well, see, I think
Science is a great
Enterprise
And noble
But not
The arbiter of truth
There are no arbiters
Of truth
The truth of the tarot
The truth of quantum physics
These are truths
In the supermarket of truth
But there's no
There's no
Top
End
To that process
There may not even be
One truth
In a given situation
If you're flipping coins
Probability theory
Is probably
A good guide
You wouldn't want to run
Your love affair
On probability theory
So you have to choose
The domain
You have to recognize
The applicable models
The applicable tools
For whatever domain
You're looking at
You're not allowed to do that
In this culture
The size of the overarching truth
Or
Well, you're allowed
To be a heretic
You just don't get paid well
That's the price
You pay for that
Still, yeah
Kind of tying this into
What you were talking about
Last night
About how
Messed up everything is
Since
Our ancestors got away
From the mushroom celebrations
And all that
It seems like
You were saying
That
We are tied into time
And we're being pulled towards
A certain something
Like
This dimension being destroyed
Or
We're not really being able to live
And I'm wondering
Is that
It seemed like
You looked at that
As bad
And then
On a different perspective
It's good
Because we're discovering
That we're being pulled
Towards something
That's maybe
Bigger
And more wonderful
How does that tie in?
Are you saying
That this is bad
What we're discovering
So we need to hang on
To our past
Or do you think
No, no
No, I don't think
It's bad
I think
I'm entirely
In support
Of whatever the universe
Is in the process
Of trying to do here
I think
That
I think that
History is ending
And that it was
A temporary
Perturbation
Of the system
And that we can
Anchor ourselves
Through this
Chaostrophy
Or whatever it is
By going back
To archaic models
But I
I think that
And you know
This is what
We'll talk
about tomorrow when we get the computer because I don't merely talk about it even though I've been flailing the
Mathematicians ultimately I too come to rest with a fishy formula
I think that the universe is some kind I think that there's something that has been overlooked by science
Called and I'll name it. It's called novelty
The universe is a novelty conserving engine of some sort from the very first
nanoseconds after the Big Bang
novelty has been
conserving itself and
Building newer and deeper levels of novelty on novelty already achieved so that
You know in the first few I mean you have the Big Bang then you have this era
Called the pre-physical era
It's brief. It lasts the amount of time it takes light to cross a distance
equivalent to the diameter of the proton electron
Something being dinky for sure. That's called the era before physics
Then physics begins one jiffy after that and and the original universe
was so hot that there would that it was a plasma of free electrons
So since it was a plasma there was nothing that you could call atomic physics because that the ambient temperature was so high
That electrons could not settle down into stable orbitals around nuclei as the temperature of the universe fell
Atomic systems crystallized out of that plasmic environment well, then
Further cooling of the universe leads to more complex
kinds of bonds and
The cooking out of complex elements from stars the original universe was made entirely of hydrogen this hydrogen
Aggregated into masses so
Dan so large that at their centers there was actually and if you think I'm not nervous doing this in front of you you're crazy
These aggregates of hydrogen
At the center it was so massive in temperature and pressure that fusion could actually begin and
And fusion cooked out heavier elements iron sulfur and eventually carbon well when you get four valent carbon
This throws open the doorway to tremendous new novelty you get now for the first time not atomic systems
But molecular systems these molecular systems lead into proto biological systems
proto biological systems lead into
Prokaryotes then eukaryotes then true higher
Multicellular animals then mammals then human beings then electronic culture then the big surprise now the thing to notice about all this is that
novelty keeps building on
Novelty already achieved it crosses biological lines
Atomic lines molecular line it is a law of the universe
universe I'm proposing that novelty is
Conserved and so then what we represent is
the kind of ultimate nexus of
novelty and I believe that you know we are being wound tighter and tighter and tighter into a confrontation with
the equivalent of a the singularity at the center of a black hole, but it isn't a
Gravitational singularity that I'm talking about it's a novelty
Singularity and so you know the universe is
Growing toward some kind of ultimate state of boundaryless
Hyperconnectivity and when that is achieved
The process will be cease to be
Describable in the locus of ordinary space time and energy
and energy now science has no notion of this concept of
Novelty in the East there is such a concept it's called Tao and
Tao builds things up and pulls them down according to its own mysterious laws
Tomorrow I will argue when we get the computer that its laws are not in fact entirely mysterious
and that we can discover
the nature of
the novelty
constant and
Instead of treating space-time as an absolutely featureless plane
We can take that zero value which is how that shows up in the Newtonian mechanics and
substitute instead of a
fractal dimension number which will be some kind of decimal fraction between one and two and
Then this will allow us to do things previously
Inconceivable like predict the future and stuff like that
See one thing I guess I should say since we've sort of drifted into this fairly rappy place is
the idea that
the universe is
The universe is growing toward itself
It's not moving outward from its origin. It's moving toward its completion and this is called teleology
It's very unwelcome in most scientific modeling
But that's a legacy from the 19th century where they were so concerned to get God out of the picture
But they wanted everything to happen through one random process
Colliding with another random process and flipping out
Mule deer elephants and redwood trees
But in principle we don't have to believe in God to believe in an attractor at the end of the process
We see many kinds of attractors in in the natural world one way that I think of the psychedelic experience is
You know you've heard me talk about hyperspace super space this kind of thing
It really does seem to me that
that reality is some kind of a very complex geometric object of some sort and you know how
they teach you in trigonometry that all possible ellipses can be obtained by sectioning a cone and
that if you take the infinite set of ellipses and
Reconstruct them you can reconstruct the cone
Well the way I think of psychedelics and psychedelic tripping is you are
sectioning a hyperdimensional object and what you're coming back with is a lower dimensional map of this higher dimensional object
Well everybody has a different map in the same way that there are an infinite number of elliptical sections of a cone
but they're all generated by the same object and if it's a mystery to you how a
simple finite object like a cone can generate an infinite number of
elliptical sections
Then it's going to be hard for you to understand how everybody can have a different
Psychedelic trip and yet be actually dealing with the same
Reality in hyperspace
Yeah
And I'm not trying to trick you up the semantics or anything like that, but would it also be moving towards its own closure, if that's what I mean?
You mean is completion closure?
Yes
Well, what does closure mean to you?
Well, I would relate the event to where we were talking before about
Closure not really existing
Well, maybe what we should say is there's there's only one closure and all others are
Our false closure closure isn't really the word I would use I I steal
Shamelessly from Alfred North Whitehead and probably others as well, but I'm willing to cop to that
He has this notion called
Concrescence
Which I think is a great idea. He says everything grows toward a nexus of concrescence
So complexification is at the service of concrescence
We can see how this planet is is caught in a concrescent
process a hundred years ago
You know it took three months to go around the world now it takes a third of a second a hundred years ago a newspaper
Carried local news now local news means the news of this planet
We can telephone Prague or Shanghai by just going outside to the phone booth
We are being knitted more and more tightly together now most people think this is a human world
Phenomenon and it will stop at some point with everybody connected to everybody else
I guess I don't think it is a process of the human world
I think we're embedded in a collapse of physical law
This is a fairly
Pathological notion from the point of view of most scientists because they believe that the universe will exist for you know
Millennia or millions of years into the future, but I think our presence on this planet indicates that we're deep into act three of the cosmic drama
Yeah
I
Yes, I mean in a way the problem is not the you know the problem is not the end of the universe
But why it existed in the first place what happened to flaw the original nothingness?
To contort itself into this fantastic cascade of interconnected complexity
It's very very tricky this stuff. I mean
You know there well without dragging that in it's tricky enough, so let's leave it at that. Yes
Yeah, the philosophy and the crop science is pretty interesting. I really came here to learn more about using that
Oh, I'll ask a question seize the tiller
Everything you describe you take the full dose all the time is that you have the best way to do your thing
I mean sometimes I take them
for them and start and then three more later. Oh, I see what you're asking. Should you boost it?
I
I don't like doing that simply because I like to get I think the the real action is in the flash and
the flash comes by getting as much of the material to the synapses in as coherent a wave front as
possible so I tend not to do that
But to take an initial large dose of course if you take an initial dose, and it doesn't do anything then you could follow it up
Pardon?
You mean just to discuss it generally?
Do you all know what ebogaine is?
It's a it's a psychedelic it's an interesting one one of the things interesting about it is how little people are aware of its existence
It comes it's the root scrapings of an African
small tree or bush called tabernacea iboga and
Interestingly enough, it's it's a true aphrodisiac
Perhaps the only real aphrodisiac in the world because what are called aphrodisiac are usually either just
stimulants or things which cause genital itching
But ebogaine actually seems to be a works on the psychology of sexual drive in some way
It's a powerful halicinogen
One of the puzzling things about ebogaine is that we can't confirm its use by human beings before
1850 and
You know the portuguese were in to the areas of africa where this is happening
They've been in there since the 1430s
so it probably is a new a new
pattern of drug use
That has arisen and it's a major force among the fang people of Zaire and Gabon
holding back
Christianity and mission culture and
It's a visionary halicinogen without doubt
I-b-o-g-a-i-n-e
Probably in the future eventually society will get around to exploiting
This particular one just like it does everything else
The drug is ebogaine the plant it comes from is Tabernansa eboga
Yeah
Well that's what ayahuasca is
You see the DMT is then not destroyed in in your intestine and so you have a slow-release DMT trip by doing that
In theory and probably in fact that would be a tremendously successful way to get very loaded the problem is it might be a too successful way
You want to be very careful with these mao inhibitors
There there are mao inhibitors that drug companies have produced where a single dose
Inhibits all the mao in your body for up to a month
This would be murder if you got around some DMT on that
The nice thing about harming is that it's fully reversible in four to six hours
So it's a it's a gentle mao inhibitor
But yes, this is the strategy
This is why you could conceivably take the seeds of a plant like pergammon harmola which grows around here more or less
and contains harming and combine it with a plant like desmantha selenoensis which contains DMT
and come up with a North American
Pseudo ayahuasca of some sort
People are doing this
But you know if you think if you think it takes courage to just do these
These compounds naturally
Imagine the kind of courage it takes to diddle with recipes
And to do your own bio assay
Which you must do because the cook must taste the soup
Terence, what was the first one?
Not the difference, but the bad one
Pegammon harmola
P-E-G-A-M-U-M
Pegammon harmola
In the Zygophilaceae
Yeah
I was talking to you two of these nations at the time
I was wondering if you and Dennis ever tried the experiment again
If not why not and then I didn't even do that
Well we never tried the experiment again because Dennis felt that he'd really made the maximum contribution
To the effort
There are many experiments though which could be tried which would put no human being in danger
For you know for instance you could use square wave generators which are acoustical generators to try and drive these drug molecules into DNA in vitro in a test tube
You know you would what you would do is you would simply put the denatured DNA into solution
Put some DMT into the solution
Shake it furiously
Ultra centrifuge the mix to get the loose DMT out
And then weigh the DNA and see if its weight had increased by a number which was magically divisible by the molecular weight of the DMT molecule
These kinds of studies have been done and show that DNA DMT does intercalate and locate itself into DNA
So yeah there are a lot of different things like that that could be done that wouldn't put anyone at risk
So Dennis really felt that he was at risk in a very serious way
Well he doesn't remember it very clearly
He his impression was that it lasted about five days
It actually lasted three weeks
So the real stuff that would have alarmed him
He fortunately was too out of it to see or remember
But I was there throughout the whole thing and saw it
And I think it would be nice to understand the parameters of the effect a little more clearly
Before we charge off and try that particular trick again, yeah
Well, this is what's being referred to is the
In True Hallucinations, which is a tape set which will be published as a book next year
It describes an expedition to the Amazon in 1971
Which was really where we got the whammy
I mean it's still I'm still running on what happened from you know the 28th of February 1971 to the 21st of March
The rest of my life is pretty much throw away
But what he I don't know it was weirder than flying saucer abduction
Because that now there's a whole form for it
It was hard to say something was waiting for us down in the Amazon
And as soon as we started taking these mushrooms
It began making suggestions about how you could use the mushroom and your voice
And certain other materials present at hand in that environment
To essentially, well there aren't even words to say what it was
Condense the soul into three-dimensional space
Or create the philosopher's stone inside your body and then give birth to it
Or in other words some radical transformation of the ontology of being human
Was held out as a possibility
And it all came down to an experiment that he wanted to perform
That seemed to me so unlikely to have any effect whatsoever
That I felt it was perfectly alright to let this experiment go forward
Because I would have bet dollars to donuts that nothing would happen
Instead all hell broke loose at the conclusion of this experiment
And you know he claimed at the time
That what he had done was bonded into my DNA
Enough psilocybin in a superconducting kind of bond
Which if you know how superconductivity works
A superconductive bond is very hard to disrupt
It's not like an ordinary chemical bond
And he felt that you could do what he called bell the cat
That you could actually hang a transceiver around the neck of the logos itself
And from then on it would talk to you constantly in the confines of your own mind
And it just seemed so wildly improbable to me that it went forward
But in fact at the conclusion of the experiment
Something changed in me
And I essentially became who I now appear to be
But before that I wasn't
I was sort of a wastrel and undirected person of some sort
And then tomorrow you will see when we get the computer
What the bottom line of this is
Because what was eventually revealed was a kind of mathematical mandala
Of space and time that rested for its veracity
On the fact that it allowed that it made prediction of the future possible
And tomorrow afternoon I will display this thing for you
And you can judge for yourself
Whether this is the product of a pathological incident
Or in fact an intellectual leap comparable to Newton's laws of motion
Or something like that
I think in principle all this is possible
I think transforming part of what human history's conclusion will be
Is what I call turning the human body inside out
We want the soul to become visible
We want the body to become an idea freely commanded in the imagination
And then at that point as James Joyce said
Man will be dirigible
That was as close as he could get in 1939 to saying
You'll turn into a flying saucer
You know, he knew it was an airship
He knew it was oblate
But he thought it was a dirigible
Anyway, enough about La Cerrera
Maybe we'll get into that tomorrow
Yeah
I've said a matter of clarification about the ayahuasca
Uh-huh
You said that it hits the DMT
Gains the harminas
Yes
The vine?
No
Good point
The vine contains the harmin
Another plant contains the DMT
This makes ayahuasca unique among these shamanic tools
Because you see all the rest of them
Peyote
Mushrooms
San Pedro
Ibogaine
Morning Glories
And whatever else
Cannabis
Are simply plants
Which you ingest
Ayahuasca is a drug
A product
Something made by pharmacologists
I mean pharmacologists who wear penis sheaves
But pharmacologists nevertheless
You see
So suddenly
The human dimension enters into it
Not all ayahuasca is alike
Ayahuasca depends on the personality of the person who made it
So it's not about a relationship between you and a plant
When you take ayahuasca between you and the plants
There stands a human being
And you know if you're headed down there to seriously get into this
Don't
Don't give up in a hurry
You will drink a lot of swill
Before you find someone who is conscientious enough
Honest enough
And cares about you enough
To not short change you
In some way
How do you speak of telepathine?
Telepathine, yes
Ayahuasca was discovered by Richard Spruce
In 1853
And then in the early years of the 20th century
The German ethnographer
Theodore Koch-Grundberg
Brought a lot of it back to Berlin
And Lewis Lewin and his group
Characterized an alkaloid
Which they named telepathine
But it was not realized then
Until I think 1957
By the chemists Hochstein and Paradis
That harmine
Or that telepathine
Was exactly the same compound
As an earlier compound
Isolated from the Syrian roux
Named harmine
And since the rules of chemical nomenclature
Are that the first compound
The first name takes precedent
Telepathine had to be dropped
And harmine substituted
But it tells you
How convinced
These early ethnographers were
That this stuff was
You know
Exciting paranormal mental abilities
Were they taking the PMT
Or were they taking it by someone?
The harmoline?
Yes
Oh, well
No, no
See, what happened was
That what
What Koch-Grundberg
Took back to Berlin
Was the liana
The vine
Banisteriopsis copy
The
The other
Active ingredient
In ayahuasca
Was not
Isolated
Chemically
Until 1956
But the guys
Who took the vine back
Before playing with the vine
The vine
Doesn't contain DMT
But the harmine
And harmoline itself
Are both
Well
Yes
Has an effect
At high doses
It can cause
Hallucination
By itself
The plant
Which contains
The DMT
Normally
There are a couple
Of possible substitutes
But normally
What's used
In the Amazon
Is Socotria viridis
And this is a little
Coffee-like plant
That contains DMT
In the roots
One of the great mysteries
Of ayahuasca
Is how
Out of
475,000 species of plants
In the Amazon
These people figured out
That you pound the vine
And combine it
With the leaves
And then go through
This elaborate boiling
And concentrating
And then you get
This fantastic visionary beverage
If you ask them
How they figured it out
They say
The plants told us
Which is so far
The best answer
Anybody has come up with
In 1962
Melvin Bristol
Who was
A graduate student
Of Richard Evans Schulte's
At Harvard
Was studying ayahuasca
Among the Subundoy Indians
And he took ayahuasca
And during the trip
A plant was revealed
To him
And he was told
That it would be
Alkaloid positive
And it was
Alkaloid positive
And it was
Alkaloid positive
Well this is now
Anecdotally
Embedded
In the literature
Was it dumb luck?
Was it synchronicity?
Or was it
That plants
Tell you about
Other plants
The way ayahuasca
Is used
By research
Pharmacologists
In these Amazon tribes
Is they brew
A standard brew
And then
If they have a plant
That they
For some reason
Suspect
Might have
Some medical usage
They will put
A little bit
Of that plant
Into the ayahuasca
And then
The ayahuasca
Will give them
A readout
On it
And explain
What it is
I had one
Of the longest evenings
I've ever put in
Where I took
Half a dose
Of ayahuasca
And half a dose
Of mushrooms
And it was
Absolutely
God awful
It was
Different
Than any bad trip
I've ever had
It didn't seem
To be about
My personality
It seemed to be
About core
Processes
There was a little
Pacman thing
And I could see it
Moving through
My memory
Just chew chew
Chew chew chew
Chew
And I didn't know
You know that horrifying
Scene in 2001
Where the guy is
Outside the spaceship
And he says
Open the pod doors
Hal
Open the pod doors
Hal
Well that's how I felt
I felt
I could almost see
The molecular machinery
Had jammed
And I said
Oh my god
It's not going
To de-animate
Or de-alkylate
It's somehow caught
In some kind
Of a loop
And I sweated bullets
For an hour
And a half
With it
It was really horrible
And then it finally
Released
And let me go
But as I sat
In that chair
I said you know
If I can't pull out
Of this place
Then there's a room
In a back ward
Somewhere
And they will just
Sit me there
And look in on me
Every twelve
Or fourteen hours
And that'll be
My story
Yeah
You said earlier
You were surprised
That you had
No competitors
Right
And you understand
That we have
A political climate
That's not congenial
They're exploring
True
So why are you surprised
Because I don't feel
Particularly courageous
I don't feel
That this is unusual
What we're doing here
Am I crazy?
Could be
It seems to me
Perfect
It would seem to me
Knowing what
I know which is no more than a thousand other people know I couldn't live with myself if I didn't talk about these things because our
problem is we're disempowered unhappy and
Disconnected from ourselves and each other
Here's the solution
How can you it's a political obligation or it's a moral obligation to try and at least inform people
They don't have to take it, but they should at least have the facts of the matter in front of them as they as they live their lives
So I just do it because I couldn't do it any other way, and I'm puzzled that nobody else feels
This imperative because the people I talked to
You know a thousand people have told me psychedelics were the most important thing that ever happened to them
But not one of those thousand people ever said and I've scheduled a speaking tour to do the same thing that you're doing
So I don't know
Wow
Well either I'm crazy or they are I don't know see I think that
that the that is you know how
If you confront certain well butterflies or deer there are certain kinds of animals that if you move slowly enough
They can't tell you're there
Because they're set up for edge detection and if you move slowly enough they don't register the edge
Transiting so you can actually walk right up to them and grab them if you know how to do it lizards are like this cats
So so so I think that by moving with stealth
Rather than going to harvard or berkeley and inviting the freshman class to pour into the street and smash bank windows
That we can actually slip this thing along I think that eventually
Such desperation is going to strike straight
Institutions that they will come to us and ask
They're going to try everything when the going gets rough and when they finally decide to drop all their pretension
We'll be perfectly willing to have a dialogue
I'm sorry to hear that people felt that paranoid about it. I don't think the political climate
Is that repressive? I think people are doing the work of the man for the man by being that paranoid
Well counter pressures his book was banned in florida, but for crying out loud look at the russians
They were able to toss out the communist party. Well now that's a pretty scary thing to go up against
We don't have anything comparable to that
In terms of its depth of penetration into our lives and yet they were able to do that
I think you know, there's more to life than hiding out
You've got to make the grand gesture at a certain point and then let the chips fall where they may
Brave words oh boy
I agree, but do you have something for your audiences and organization or something that they can support in raising consciousness and changing legislation?
Basically, I think people should see these kinds of meetings as a tremendous opportunity to form local
Alliances the last thing on earth we want here is the Terence McKenna cult that would just be the stupidest
Resolution of the whole thing the whole message is you don't need me or Tim or anybody else
Just you know take a little metaphysical responsibility
Upon yourself realize you are the microcosm of the macrocosm and then get with like-minded people and proceed
I mean this is how political revolutions are made is by people just ignoring as
Irrelevant outmoded social forms and structures and insisting on their own
authenticity
Oh
It might help
People I mean, how would it help?
Strength in numbers well, I think people should support psychedelic communities
archival projects
Legalization moves
Yes
But mainly I think what we all need to do is get more loaded
You know
Deeper trips higher doses you see it's not that we want to convert the entire planet to taking mushrooms
It's that we just want to be left alone to do what we want to do the mushroom if it's as great as I say it is
Then it doesn't need a mob
Clearing the way for it. It's perfectly able to advance its own agenda
The thing is just not to yield to fear because it as I said if you yield to fear you do the man's work
For the man and that makes you the man so what you have to do is just say well, you know, this is what we do and
Eventually it will change. I mean gay people is a good example. I mean that in our own lifetimes
We've seen this go from you know an unspeakable crime against nature
Which decent people took care to not even be informed of?
to you know a political subculture with its own agenda and its own
press and its own
political clout well
We are not as under the thumb as gay people were say in the early 50s or something if they can do it
We can do it if black people can go from slavery to a legitimate claim on full social
Integration into the body politic then we can do it too, but not if we know in American nobody gets nothing unless they demand it
So as long as we bow our heads and hide our stash and they're looking over our shoulder
Well, then they've got us on the run, but we just have to say look
This is it. This is who I am if this doesn't jive with your political agenda
Adjust your political agenda because this is who we are
Well now let's knock off and regroup for tomorrow on that point. Thanks very much
Well before we get into this morning's
rigid agenda
Where were we yesterday and is there I recall there were hands up do the people who belong to those hands still have the concerns
that went with them
Talk about forming local alliances and psychedelic communities
Well, I think you know
As I said this is your affinity group. You can't recognize
Psychedelic people walking around on the street because our victory in the area of fashion has been so total that now even creeps
Look like
Freaks, so
Yeah, I've been in a number of places where people
Organized I don't know what you would call them discussion groups affinity groups in the wake of it
It's something you sort of have to self-organize
Maybe in the period after the close this afternoon the people who are into that should be exchange names and and get something going
I mean obviously it's a delicate thing, but on the other hand
Mm-hmm
For me well a lot of people feel more secure
Doing journeys if they have
Some kind of ground control and in the most casual form that can just be your best friend who doesn't do it
But you do or if you're
suspect that fairly deep and
Charged issues are going to rise arise out of it why you want it to be someone with some
psychotherapeutic experience
But on the other hand, you know
You're in such a vulnerable state in that dimension that you really want to choose
Use the facilitator carefully I mean and have some kind of set of agreements worked out
Before I mean the psychedelic trip doesn't always take the direction
You want it to I mean you want you write down before you take it that you want to deal with some
Episode of childhood trauma or abandonment
Abandonment then you get loaded and it seems so preposterous that you know, you can hardly contemplate the notion without laughing aloud and the
Facilitator has this is keeps trying to bring you back say well. You're not doing the work
We're we're here to do the work. Well, then you say well
You know having a knockdown drag out fight while somebody's loaded isn't exactly the way to go either
you sort of have to feel into that issue as I said yesterday I I
Can't get where I want to go in the presence of somebody else because they hold me to the surface if I were to have my idea of the perfect
facilitator
situation is that they're two rooms away and you have something equivalent of a beeper and
Then you know you can beat them and they'll come in and pat you on the
Head and tell you that it's all right if you need that, but otherwise they stay completely out of it
It's really nice to follow your own
Thought you know, and I think we're we we change in the presence of another person
you know we create a persona and
It takes a lot of energy to maintain the persona and in that situation. There's no reason so why do it?
Yeah
Well, not exactly I mean people always say can you do it on the natch and I sort of feel like if I could do it on the natch
I'd be alarmed enough to check myself in for some serious mental health care
It's too radical. You don't want to be able to do that on the natch
It's a wonderful control on it to know that it won't happen unless you take the stuff
You know because it's not a mood shift or a subtle
Refocusing from foreground to background. It's an absolutely ontology peeling breakthrough
In principle I
Agree with that and I'm fascinated to try anything anybody has in mind, but
you have to be very
Demanding and I think too many people are not demanding at all
I mean you sit people down in a room and tell them we're going to
repeat om ah hum
500 times and at the end of it they come to you with tears of joy in their eyes and tell you it was the most profound thing that's ever happened to them
I don't understand where those people could be coming from you know, I mean, it's um
I can sit down and like think about being stoned on DMT and
And and I can get I can give myself the butterflies with that exercise, but but not much else
That's as far as I get you know
Persistently these various traditions claim that they can deliver the goods
But when you look at the art, which is the paper trail that they leave it doesn't look like what I'm talking about
You know, I mean I went through I
Once for a while I was a professional art buyer for Tibetan art
Tonkas and that kind of thing and I interiorized all of that iconography and the but it isn't very much like
what we're seeing and
You know, there are a number of highly idiosyncratic artists scattered through the history of art
Gustav Moreau
James Ensor we mentioned Hieronymus Bosch
Well, Mati Klarlein, but I'm trying to think of older ones
But but not these seem to be unique visions, but not exactly the vision
that
Seems to come out of this stuff part of what's so interesting to me is how alien it is
How if art is the if the artist is supposed to be the antenna of society
Anticipating the visions, which will later become the paradigms
Then they're not doing the job very well in this psychedelic
domain
Yeah, or you want it. Did you have a follow-up?
No way, but take a lot of distance and if you do get to that level
It's kind of like you sculpted your present moment
You're at that level, you can stay there
Whereas I don't know I see a way sometimes as you're going in and come back
You're going in and come back, you're going in and come back, you're going back to where you started
Well, but this is where the action is
You know it has to it has to make sense in the world now. I don't want to suggest
I mean, I think like in the case of psilocybin, I have no doubt
whatsoever
That if you take five grams of psilocybin
every four days
For let's say 40 days
Then you will have nothing whatsoever to say to the rest of us
You know if what you see the thing is in the spiritual quest all these methods
yoga and mantra and then you know all the
New versions of this the whole the whole stance of the spiritual quester is
Accelerator to the floor all the time
When you switch over to this method, it's the brake pads that are going to get the workout
We don't we psychedelic people do not strenuously exert ourselves to attain peculiar states of mind
We strenuously exert ourselves to keep the states of mind from becoming too peculiar
Why?
Because it can become
so peculiar
that
That I don't know what
Yes, that's it. It can become so peculiar that it is unspeakable, and if it's unspeakable
It's just dropped out of the social contract, you know
So really the reason to maintain it is so that you can get back into the sociological state and communicate
But what I'm thinking is that I'm sure that there are people who have pursued it to the point that they just walked out of existence and didn't come back
Yes, well, that's what I wanted to say if you want to be the guy on cold mountain
who is
Covered with hair who the village people
Occasionally see when the mist clears when he descends to the lower levels to cut wood you can become that Taoist immortal
You know what I like to say about
Psychedelics is once you get to this it's no longer about seeking the answer
It's now a tougher go now you have to face the answer and it's so easy to seek
You know this Rishi that Roshi that Geshe that guru and all the wonderful people and the
Gossip and hijinks around the ashram and all that malarkey, but once you get to this and it's just you and it
you know, it's
It's a whole different ballgame
Well, just keeps we're talking there are two things the
experience and the
Wisdom and maturity that comes from the experience you don't have to keep dosing to do that
But to attain maintain and work out the implications of that
But you have to keep dosing to keep encountering the unspeakable thing that is the source of all that
maturation and and so forth my gosh everybody's agitated here. Yeah
I wondered if in your experience in the Amazon or otherwise with shamanic culture
if you found that they were able to
To do this without the drugs or whether they were even interested
No, largely not
In the Amazon, I mean I discussed this with people and they
They they said no, you know you must the plant is the teacher I
Mentioned or maybe I didn't but there's an interesting book called hauma and harmaline by flattery and schwartz
And it discusses the real ambiance of the religious attitudes of early
Zoroastrianism and they believed in what they called the menang
Long existence and we're talking you know twenty two thousand B.C. Here and
they
Believe there was no possible way of accessing the spiritual dimension except drugs
That was the entire way to do it and I think it's a it's a kind of pharmacological and energy barrier
It's good that these things are isolated from ordinary
Experience by the formality of having to take
The compound if they weren't it would be flooding in upon us all the time and we would have a hard time indeed
Yeah, well
You speak about people
Psychedelics repeatedly and gaining experience from that and then there are these other people like for example mistakes and that can do
And so forth who practice meditations
I
Read somewhere recently that one of the people in the Amazon I watched it is recommended they
they
They
There is an initial effects come on today by the practice mind and control
And what I haven't seen very much is the combination of like you know mental practices
So as to
And the combination of that plus taking into the like psychedelics or suicides
And you talked a little bit about this, about what we do in preparation for the experiment.
But what is this?
This concludes Tape 4. Our program continues with Tape 5.
News with Tape 5.
Why is there no talk of the combining of the techniques with psychedelic?
Well, I don't know exactly. I mean, I would certainly agree.
See, I think that all religion is based on the experience of ecstasy.
And a religion like Hinduism represents, to my mind, an extreme case.
The roots of Hinduism are in the Soma rite.
For 3,000 years, this is what Hindu religiosity was about.
It was an intoxicant.
And without the intoxicant, there was no connection to the mystery.
Well, then, for some reason, it became tremendously hierarchically structured.
And constipated.
And dogmatic.
And, well, certainly dominator, if not outright fascism.
And so, I think all these religions have their roots in this irrational experience.
But they constantly want to turn it into a real estate operation.
And they do.
And so, but in answer to your question, all these techniques work with psychedelics.
You know, mantra, yantra, magical invocation, raising the Kundalini.
All of these things which seem so totally obscure from this level of consciousness.
It just becomes an, of course, of course it works.
So, it seems to me the lost ingredient is the psychedelic.
I mean, you know, if you go to India and you have any illusions about sadhus.
I mean, sadhus are hash heads with a line of patter.
That's all.
I mean, the main concern in any community of sadhus is how many chillums can you make and smoke before you fall asleep.
And I've never seen a yoga text that came clean about this.
And said, you know, this is basically a how to use cannabis technique.
So, it's good to go to the actual place and see how it's being handled.
What's going on in the Amazon is the shamans cure.
They chant.
They provide an exemplar for their society.
But when you get seriously loaded with them and talk to them, their attitude is more like scientists.
They will agree that they can cure and find lost objects and predict the weather and all that.
But they don't understand how this works.
They're very eager to admit that it's all a big mystery.
And that beyond the cheerful set of shamanic techniques that they, the Witoto, the Warani, whoever they are,
beyond the cheerful power of the conjuration of these techniques lies the absolute unknown.
And they're aware of that.
There's no closure in shamanism.
So it sort of keeps you humble.
Yeah.
The subject of, you know, from Friday night on into today, the subject of naturally altered
states, without chemicals that keep coming up.
And I've come to the understanding that your question is for vision.
Right.
And not for feeling.
And one of the most interesting things about psychedelic experience to me and my drug of
preference so far as LSD is the feeling part of the experience.
And it seems to tap me into a psychic level of information that's not available to me normally.
My question is, what do you think about the phenomenon that I experienced?
And I don't know whether it's because of my programming or because I'm a good receptor of a contact high,
where when you're around people who are tripping, you don't get the depth of their experience,
but you definitely feel like you're in an altered state.
Oh, I think contact highs are very real.
Not only contact highs, but there are also contact lows, which are very noticeable.
You know, there's a phenomenon called allophrenia.
Do you know what allophrenia is?
Allophrenia is when your friend is put in the hospital for schizophrenia and you go to visit him
and you become, you begin acting so peculiar that they don't let you out.
This is a common phenomenon.
Misbehavior by people who have come to visit people who have been hospitalized for schizophrenia or psychosis.
The best theory is that it's pheromonal.
You know, there's one theory of what schizophrenia is, that schizophrenia is a pheromonal disorder.
And you, what happens is your pheromone system goes haywire.
So then you don't smell right.
So then the people around you begin frowning at you, avoiding you, turning their back on you when you approach.
Then you begin thinking, there's something wrong with me. I'm weird.
Then you secrete more of this weird pheromone and people get more.
And a dissonance begins to happen until finally you have to be plucked out of the situation.
There are psychiatrists who swear that they can diagnose schizophrenia by a sniff test.
You know, they just walk over and take a hit off the side of your neck and then say, you know, lock this one up, put this one on.
Yeah.
I assume that you've seen Huichol art.
I'm wondering whether or not you see in any of that anything close to what schizophrenia is.
And I realize this from a different point, but...
Now the problem is one of...
The question is, is there in Huichol art a trace of this psychedelic dimension?
I guess there's a trace.
The problem is twofold.
The problem is one of material.
That with wood and beads and pitch, it's very hard to get the...
to contort that into the object scene.
And then the other thing is conceptually.
You know, that it's very hard to grab and hold these very weird images.
The other thing is that's happening in most traditional societies is that you operate within a canon.
You know, if you're a Huichol, you have a very limited vocabulary of expression within the iconography of Huichol art.
If you're a Tibetan Tonka painter, similarly, it's all laid out for you.
The walls of tradition are very high.
The channel is very narrow.
That's why it's so interesting when an artist can transcend the momentum of their cultural position and really produce something unique.
I don't see...
I mean, I think, you know, the reason I like talking to artists is because all the art of the past 20,000 years is like a teacup dipped into the ocean.
And yet any one of us, not particularly self-defined as artists, most of us, can access the ocean, can swim in the ocean.
And so you say, you know, we all can touch the same source that these great artists must have touched.
Their skill was that they were able to bring out a thimble full of this material and the rest of us can only look at it in wonder and then it passes by.
Yeah.
Yesterday I made a reference to when I was into the extraterrestrial reference to psychedelic use.
I was wondering if you don't hold that position anymore.
No, I'm not sure exactly.
I mean, the funny thing about the extraterrestrial position is that it depends on how long it's been since you've taken mushrooms, how creditable it seems.
If it's recent, it seems the only possible explanation.
If you wait a few months, then skepticism and reason begins to level the landscape and you say, well, no, it couldn't possibly really be that.
But I think, you know, no, I think that we hardly have an inkling as to the real nature of the world and the real history of life on this planet.
And, you know, we don't know how narrowly channeled the manifestation of organic intelligence is.
Does it always have to be in a body? Does it always have to be in a body that stands upright with binocular vision?
I think the real task with dealing with extraterrestrials is to know when you've got one.
It's completely silly to search the galaxy with radio telescopes for a radio civilization.
I mean, to my mind, that is as chuckle-headed as deciding you're going to search the galaxy for a decent Italian restaurant.
I mean, it doesn't work like that.
So, you know, if you think about the mushroom, try to think about it objectively, it looks to me very much like a good candidate for an extraterrestrial.
First of all, you know, DNA has been known to us only since 1950, less than a century, and we're already involved in this thing called the Human Genome Project.
Well, what that means is we are taking control of the scripts that write human beings.
It seems to me anything we would recognize as intelligence would pass through a phase of self-analysis where it would realize that it was made out of DNA and would then sequence itself.
We're about to do this ourselves.
Well, that means that most extraterrestrials will be the product of their own reflexive design process.
In other words, an extraterrestrial that can cross the gulf between the stars must surely then be able to control its own form.
Well then, if you look at the mushroom, it's a curious combination of artifact and entity.
It looks sort of manufactured.
There's very little fat on that system.
I mean, first of all, fungi are primary decomposers.
This means that they are at the very bottom of the food chain.
This makes the kind of vegetarianism espoused by Buddhists look like an orgy of slaughter.
You know?
Because if you're at the very bottom of the food chain, that is the only place that is absolutely karma-free.
So there's the mushroom in the occupying the karma-free position in the food chain.
Well then, it's...
You know, we've been reading about these huge mycelial clones spread under acres of soil in Michigan and Wyoming.
Well those things, what that is, is that's a cobweb-like network.
And in the case of a psilocybin species, filled with neurotransmitter-like compounds.
Can you imagine how many synaptic clamps there must be in a 1500-acre mushroom clone?
If brain size is any relationship to intelligence, then hang on, Hannah.
Because it means that this thing, spread through the forests of the Midwest, has, you know, a brain approximate in weight to a couple of dozen grey whales.
The other thing is, then, the spore looks perfectly designed to sustain itself in outer space.
If you want to store spores for longevity, you create conditions as close to the conditions in outer space as you possibly can.
High vacuum, very low temperature.
The casing of a spore is one of the most electron-dense organic materials in nature.
So electron-dense that it approximates a metal.
Well, global currents can form on the quasi-metallic surface of an airborne spore.
And they act as a further repellent for hard radiation.
So, and, you know, percolating through the galaxy at an ordinary rate, typical of stellar material,
a mushroom species could percolate from one side of the galaxy to the other in under 400,000 years.
Well, that's lightning speed compared to the size and age of the universe.
If we were to gain the power to design ourselves, I think after a whole bunch of, you know, Madonna and Robert Redford clones,
we would probably move on to becoming something very much like a mushroom.
It's, you know, mild, it's non-invasive, it's at the bottom of the food chain, it's virtually immortal, it's laden with neurotransmitters,
and it's living in the imagination.
And this, you know, brings me to a favorite subject of mine.
This is where we have to go.
We have to enter into the Blakean divine imagination.
That's where our future lies.
At this point, our relationship to this planet as infant to child is a relationship of impending toxemia.
We have to be parted from the mother to save the mother and to save us.
And there are not that many possibilities.
Where are we going to go?
The political geniuses who run this planet have made migration to the stars virtually impossible.
I mean, don't kid yourself.
It isn't only a matter of announcing a program.
Our short, stubby fingers couldn't assemble something like a Saturn V moon rocket.
That was made by a generation of people now deceased.
Americans in this era are, you know, rather dull-witted people who have a good deal of trouble even running a third world economy.
So we're not going to the stars.
You can forget that.
So then where are we going?
Well, nanotech, is that a possibility?
Could, can we download everybody into a super-cooled cube of gold deterbium alloy buried 500 feet deep in the center of Copernicus?
And then we'll go there and leave the earth and dance forever in the hallways of the astral imagination.
That's one possibility.
Another possibility is, is there a way to diffuse consciousness into the environment?
Can we become dolphins, caterpillars, grey whales and mosquitoes and just sort of defocus ourselves?
I mean, all of these are, of course, wildly radical notions.
But on the other hand, we're headed straight toward a brick wall at about 5,000 miles an hour.
We have to figure out something pretty astonishing in a hurry.
Yeah.
Yes.
Another thing about the functional design in the country.
You'll notice that it's shaped nice before re-entry into the atmosphere.
The heat shield.
Yes.
Precisely.
Yeah.
Can you kind of jump start an evolution from your conception of creation?
That's a funny question.
I don't know because it's so hard to tease apart genetics and environment.
I mean, they certainly have had a jump start on evolution by virtue of hanging out in the space that our lives have created.
You know, I think children need lots of attention, lots of nurturing, physical and spiritual.
I guess I would say so.
Certainly they haven't been programmed with the fear and misunderstanding that is in the society.
We just got through anti-dope week at our school, which is an incredibly painful experience at this particular school,
because I don't think there's a person associated with it who believes it for a moment.
But it's like we all have to study fascism because we live in a fascist state.
A teacher made a statement that LSD caused brain damage and my son dared to challenge this.
And the guy said, well, who told you it doesn't cause brain damage?
My daddy.
No, not my daddy.
He said, well, Albert Hoffman told me it doesn't cause brain damage.
End of discussion.
Yeah.
I know that children are very interconnected with their parents, so when you're doing substances, do you feel like the presence of your child sometimes going on your psychotropic experiences?
Because I've had that before, especially when they were really young.
Yes.
Well, when children are very young, you know, all kinds of psychic phenomenon happen.
And, you know, I think mothers, nursing mothers, and their relationship to their children is intensely telepathic.
I remember when my daughter was not very old.
She must have been like about three and a half.
And I had a dream, and it was a very unusual dream for me, and very highly realized.
And I dreamed of an orrery.
Do you know what an orrery is?
It's a model of the solar system made of gears.
And you crank it, and there's the sun in the center, and the planets go around it.
But this was a huge orrery.
I dreamed I walked down a hall, and I opened a door, and I walked into this room, and there was this orrery.
And these planets were circling around the sun inside this room.
And then, and I was awakened by my daughter crying.
And I went downstairs, and she said, there were planets circling around inside my bedroom.
And, you know, that's a very specific and rare image for an adult or a child to have.
So, yes, I think that our chuckle-headedness is the main barrier to our encountering all kinds of special abilities that move around us all the time.
We are truly the prisoners of our limited conceptions.
Yeah?
Well, sort of cycling with what you were saying, and also back to some of the questions about why you don't want to take it every day for 40 days in a row.
And it's more on a psychological level that what causes—I've worked with someone who has done drug therapies in Mexico, and also I have a little story about Jung.
And many of the people who have gotten into a situation of psychosis are people who have used drugs, and the general principle behind that is that people have experienced something that they cannot integrate back into their psyche or whatever,
even if it's the ability to say, well, that was then, and this is now, and therefore you get psychosis.
So, not to say these things to alarm people, but just for respect that there has to be this ability to come back and not be far out there.
And there are a lot of different parameters to this.
One is your own ego strength.
Another one is the society you live in.
If you're a shaman and you can say these things and have them be accepted, then you're fine.
And it doesn't have to be drugs.
Jung used to, when he was older, he used to sit in a chair and just go inside.
And when he came back, he would have this litany of things that he would say so that he could come back and function.
He would say, you know, I'm Carl Gustav Jung, my wife is so-and-so, my children, I have this many children, this many grandchildren.
I hate you.
Yeah.
He would just do all this.
Uh-huh.
The reconnect affirmation.
Yeah, re-entry.
Yeah, well, I think that's not a bad idea.
Yeah.
Can I just follow up on that?
I wanted to ask you, how do you see the role of rituals, specifically in your relationship to what students are playing in the traditional society?
Well, I don't have a very popular position on ritual, and I blame it on the mushroom, because I just quote the mushroom.
And the mushroom, I said, what about ritual?
And it said, that's fine if you don't know what you're doing.
And I think that, you know, it's really not an anti-ritualist position, because that is what ritual is.
That's what you do if you don't know what you're doing.
None of us.
But, you know, the purpose, you can tell when ritual works, because it makes itself obsolete.
That's the, it's, it's, yeah.
I think there's things that we do, and I think, I think, I think as we, as we continue to explore these things, we find all the choice.
There's certain things that, yeah.
I do this particular thing in your head.
We can do it in a certain ways that we can do it.
And it has changed.
It doesn't stay the same.
They are, in a way, to be able to find a ritual.
Well, you know, even in the most ritualistic context, there's always a footnote made for the crazy wisdom.
I mean, every great teacher has said that what he's saying is malarkey.
A teacher who doesn't tell you that what he or she is saying is malarkey is not to be taken seriously.
So, you know, it's the, if you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him style of thinking.
Or, I was just reading this guru who's coming on strong, is his name, Poojaji?
Poojaji?
Dobbs.
No, no, not Dobbs.
But anyway, somebody, this guy said, don't, don't do practice.
Don't do practice.
Practice is only distraction.
He said, we have to keep thinking up.
He said, you know, running an ashram isn't easy.
These students, they expect so much of us.
We have to continually keep inventing stuff to keep them happy and send them off on these crazy quests and, you know, endless fasts
and all this stuff because they want that.
But, you know, the guru is pretty much content to kick back with the latest Rolling Stone.
Yeah.
Remember, it serves me correctly.
Right.
Could you comment on that?
I'd like to know a little bit about it.
Well, are you all familiar with Rupert Sheldrake's work?
Sheldrake is a British biologist who's written a number of books.
His first book was called A New Science of Life and it was catapulted to fame by virtue of a review in nature
which said that it should be burned.
And then he wrote a book called The Presence of the Past.
Sheldrake has an extraordinarily simple, interesting, revolutionary idea that just drives scientists straight up a tree.
His idea is that once something happens, it's easier for it to happen the next time.
Yes, simple.
But it takes then forms which drive people crazy because he asserts based on that, that if you teach rats to run a new kind of maze in Australia,
then rats in Massachusetts should be able to run this maze faster than if the rats in Australia hadn't learned it.
Because once something has occurred, then it has a momentum in time.
He calls this the theory of formative causation or morphogenesis.
And it explains a lot of things which are otherwise very difficult for biology to explain.
But it raises also a bunch of issues that are pretty tricky.
And so Rupert and I have been close friends for years and even longer, I've been tight with a mathematician in Santa Cruz named Ralph Abraham,
who's a chaos dynamicist.
And Ralph and Rupert and I did a book together called Trilogues at the Edge of the West,
which will be out at the end of the summer from Bear.
And we'll all get together at Esalen the end of August and do a bunch more of these public three-way dialogues,
which are pretty spirited because we are very different people from each other,
but all psychedelic and all interested in paradigm recasting.
So that's what it's about.
And it'll be out in mid-summer.
End of August for that Esalen thing.
Anybody else?
Yeah.
What do you think?
The plants and places you've gone.
Uh-huh.
And how do people that live there experience them?
And you're thinking that feminism is a necessary thing for a successful future because the archaic world was so dominated by, well that's a bad choice of words isn't it?
Was so characterized by an awareness of the feminine and the boundary dissolving and the organic.
The whole problem with the world is that we cannot feel the consequences of what we are doing.
You know, I mean recently we had paraded in front of us the figure of Jeffrey Dahmer as who you don't want to be like.
And yet Jeffrey Dahmer to me was an absolute paradigm of global civilization.
Because his problem was that he couldn't feel the consequences of his actions.
And this is what we are doing.
I mean, we are lacerating ourselves by cutting down the rainforest and poisoning the oceans.
This is not some airy, fairy, save the redwoods kind of mentality that protests against this.
This is our own atmosphere, our own environment that we're destroying.
It's a slow suicide, not so slow at the rate that we're carrying it out.
Well, somehow we have to reactivate the maternal, nurturing, caring circuitry that kept the tendencies that have evolved in this fatal direction at bay for a long, long time.
And, you know, you can call it ego, you can call it male dominance, you can call it the phonetic alphabet.
Whatever it is, it has to be stopped because the planet is imperiled by it.
And I, my analysis of it is that the only way to do it is to dissolve the boundaries that culture and language and tradition have allowed us to create.
And they are largely boundaries that suppress women, not because men hate women, but because men hate the feminine.
And they want to control and hold it back.
It's threatening.
It's devouring.
I mean, the fact that the French refer to orgasm as the little death tells you, you know, what a weird kind of ambivalence haunts our relationship to anything which dissolves us out of the knot that we have tied ourselves into.
So, I, you know, I'm a kind of non-feminist feminist.
I mean, I think most feminists are feminists because they think women have gotten a raw deal.
I'm a feminist because I think mankind is headed for suicide if we don't return to a more intense expression of the feminine.
So, it's not a political agenda for me to liberate an oppressed group of people.
It's a collectivist agenda necessary to save everybody and everything on the planet.
Yeah.
One of the things that's implicit in your general work is that there exists allies, allies in the form of the planet.
And when we look at the drought from partnership to dominator society, in my mind, one of the things that would become implicit with your thesis would be that there are not only allies, but there are malevolent entities out there and the dominator force becomes so powerful.
And then when I get into that line of thought, I get into this whole demi-urge, clash of the titans kind of notion.
And sometimes the allies notion is very attractive, but in my mind, it always implies there's malevolent forces out there just as there are benevolent ones.
Well, no, I mean, there are malevolent and benevolent forces in there and out there.
But I don't see the world really as a struggle between good and evil in some kind of Manichean situation.
It seems to me that we confer value.
That, you know, nature is neither good nor evil, and that must then include all these allies.
It's just that we confer judgment.
This is because when you begin to get down toward the bottom line, we don't know what the bottom line is.
For instance, we're headed toward a great historical bifurcation where we're going to have to make some really hard choices.
And most of the time in the so-called New Age, they try to fuzz all the distinctions and make you think you're never going to be slammed to the wall and have to make a choice.
But the choice that's coming up for us is fundamental.
It is, are we to become the caregivers, the nurturers, and the gardeners of the earth?
Or is the earth, you know, I put it this way to somebody the other night.
The question was, is the earth our mother, therefore to be cared for into her old age, nurtured, revered, and loved?
Or is the earth our placenta, therefore to be examined for signs of toxin and then buried under the apple tree?
In other words, what is the true nature of human beings?
Are we to be integrated into nature and to celebrate it?
Or is nature a demonic and titanic force that is imprisoning spirit and holding it back from its full unfolding in worlds of alien light and higher dimension?
So far from here that it's a miracle that even rumor reached us of the possibility of salvation.
This is a tough choice because one path leads to radical renunciation of technology, radical pairing of population,
and an attempt to come to terms with this small liquid planet on which we find ourselves.
And the other direction says, you know, forget it.
It's the husk of a seed.
And it is utterly meaningless in the cosmic drama.
And the real destiny lies out there, halfway to the Nebul Gnubi or Zeta Reticuli or some other exotic port of...
I don't see how you can have that both ways.
But the star does have a lifetime.
Yes, and most stars have lives shorter than the amount of time that biology has been on this planet.
We are fortunate enough to be around a very slow-burning stable star.
There are a lot of mysteries...
I haven't forgotten your second question, Raven.
There are a lot of mysteries in our cosmic neighborhood that we rarely hear addressed.
For example, I mean just as an example,
if our destiny lies out in the great universe,
it's a hell of a technological barrier to cross to the stars.
I mean it may be insurmountable.
However, isn't it interesting that the most Earth-like star within 70 light-years is the nearest star?
Not technically the nearest star, which is a glowing red clinker called Alpha Centauri.
Right?
But Beta Centauri is 1.1 solar masses.
1.1 solar masses.
No star within 70 light-years is as Earth-like, I mean as Sun-like as that star.
From the point of view of the galaxy, Beta Centauri and our Sun almost look like lightly bounded binaries.
If this is an accident, it's a tremendously fortuitous accident for us because it may well mean that there is an Earth-like planet
at an incredibly short distance away from us in terms of the cosmic neighborhood.
In fact, probably within the next ten years, telescopes of sufficient resolving power will be created
that if there is a water-heavy, oxygen-rich world out there, it's going to show up.
Well then that is going to become a tremendous attractor in the historical matrix
because it will be hailed as the answer.
I mean can you imagine?
Because there will then be two possibilities.
That there is intelligence next door, not likely, or that there is, but likely, how do you assess it?
How many water-heavy, oxygen-rich planets have we examined, for crying out loud?
And the other possibility is that it's empty real estate.
In either case, it will excite keen interest throughout society.
So, you know, that's a little oddness in our cosmic neighborhood that is rarely mentioned or taken account of.
Yeah?
Yes, although I leave that to the Jeremiah Sitchens of the world to work out the details.
There is, after all, a fossil record that is pretty clear in spite of the ravings and rantings of these Christers.
The fossil record is pretty clear that we emerged out of the proto-hominids,
who emerged out of the pungid radiation that emerged out of and so forth and so on.
I don't, I think that, but there may be mysteries.
I mean, one question that I'm surprised nobody ever seems to ask in these weekends,
when I tell the cheerful story of the descent from the...
from the tree.
Right?
Exactly.
Right?
Right.
the ape encounter with the mushrooms and so forth and so on, is nobody ever asks,
well, but who put the mushrooms in the path of these binocular, bipedal, evolving primates?
I mean, is this just the story of nature's happiest accident?
Or did someone say, you know, tweak the planet, start the retraction of the rainforests,
seed the spores into the grasslands, and watch what happens?
Because then we come down out of the trees, brainless as a wombat,
and begin testing food sources, and lo and behold, here are these things which are obviously designed to be seen.
I mean, mushrooms are a form of display. They're designed to be seen.
They demand to be eaten. And the consequences of that, you know, are to lead a species to the brink of star flight.
Well, is that just a coincidence? Or is there a mind behind all of this?
See, I think that mind, the problem I have with all the extraterrestrial scenarios, and all the channeling, and all the abducting, and all the stuff that goes on,
is it's all too B-movie. It's all too simple, too straightforward.
That's what troubles me about the Sitchin scenario, is that it's perfectly understandable to us.
If it's understandable to us, you can bet your booties it's the wrong answer.
I mean, it's going to be weirder than that. It's not about mineral extraction or even diplomatic goodwill.
I had a professor years ago, his cosmology went like this.
You know how there are bacteria which you can introduce into gold slurry in low-grade gold ore,
and the bacteria will concentrate the gold, and then you just wash the gold out of the bacteria,
and it's a mining technique that's very efficient for poor-yielding gold ore.
So this guy's idea was that someday, UFOs would appear over every major city on Earth,
and they would just load up all the plutonium and fissionable material, and take it away, and say,
thank you very much. This mining operation is now concluded.
You people can go back to hurling shit at each other in the treetops, as far as we're concerned.
We have real application for this fissionable material.
You people were going to use it to blow each other up. What a bunch of dummies!
And farewell and good luck! So that's one possibility.
Can I ask what you think?
Yes, then I insist on getting to these plants.
You mentioned a book called Something in Harmony by Fletcher.
By Fletcher?
No, Haoma, H-A-O-M-A, Haoma and Harmony by...
No, by Flattery and Schwartz.
And it's published by the University of California Press,
Near Eastern Studies Division, publication number 23.
Yeah, isn't that a grabber?
Well, what I thought we should talk about this morning, since we seem to range wide and free,
is the practicum of all this.
Which is, you know, how many of these vision plants are there, and where are they,
and how do you obtain them, and how do you use them once you obtain them?
So, I thought, how many of you have ever seen...
Can you all... Here, let me get with it.
This is a poster, which I don't even know if it's still available.
It may be out of print. It is still available.
And it's a very good ethnobotanical course in hallucinogens on one sheet of paper.
What it's divided into, basically, is this is the old world, and this is the new.
Immediately, you notice that there are a lot more hallucinogens in the new world than the old.
This is one of the great puzzles of evolutionary botany,
because nobody can offer a reasonable explanation as to why
there should be nearly three times as many hallucinogenic plants in the new world as in the old.
I mean, other than that's where the flying saucers planted them,
nobody has come up with a good explanation.
Major hallucinogenic plant complexes that I've had experience with and can address are...
Well, let's do a little quick geographical tour.
First of all, North America, for reasons not well understood, is quite poor in native hallucinogens.
There are no major North American hallucinogens.
Peiote is, well, yes, it's North American.
The funny thing about peiote, I mean, you can feed me questions as long as we stick to the subject.
The thing about peiote is, you know, we have this tremendous respect for it.
We imagine that it's tremendously ancient, and it apparently isn't.
There is no archaeological evidence of peiote use any earlier than 500 years ago.
It's almost a phenomenon of the conquest.
What you find in the old graves, in the peiote cultural area,
are the seeds of sephora secundifolia, which is an ordeal poison.
Strychnine.
And often, often drug, human plant symbiotic relationships evolve over time.
It may be that the use of hallucinogens is still in fairly dynamic evolution all over the planet.
Peyote is a major hallucinogen, should have been used for the past 50,000 years.
If it has only been used for the past 500 years, that's pretty peculiar, all right.
And yet, that appears to be the evidence.
Ibogaine, not only a visionary hallucinogen, but an aphrodisiac as well,
no evidence of any use before 1850.
And yet, in an area where the Portuguese had been trading for the past 500 years
and writing cultural descriptions and interviewing the people,
I mean, if it was there, it would have been mentioned.
So, this is a puzzle.
You know, ayahuasca use, we assume, is millennia old.
But on the other hand, archaeology is a real miserable proposition in the Amazon
because the climate is so degradative, so we can't really know.
But aside from peyote and whatever its history, North America seems to have only minor hallucinogens
that have been utilized shamanically.
A puzzle, another puzzle about culture and attitudes is, as you all know, the Northwest Coast Indians,
the Kwakutal, Shimsham, and Tlingit language groups, have an extraordinarily evolved shamanism.
And were the people who developed that X-ray vision style of art?
Well, their cultural area has the densest number of psilocybin mushrooms of any place in the world.
No cultural evidence of psilocybin use.
No evidence that these people even knew these things were there.
I mean, I know this challenges the tradition of the all-knowing Aboriginal.
But, you know, that this is what the data seems to imply.
Now, in Southern California, and across portions of the Southwest,
there have been Datura religions, which are very old, apparently.
The so-called Tulaach religion.
I don't recommend Datura.
I don't know what astrological sign you have to be to make your peace with that stuff.
But I find it really peculiar and menacing.
It's about magic, which is about power and control and usually sexuality in some invasive and dominator application.
I've taken Datura a number of times.
And it's been interesting, but it feels watery and dark and dangerous to me.
There was a period when I lived in Nepal when I became aware that these sadhus,
not content with their superior meditation techniques and their endless smoking of hashish,
were also availing themselves of the seeds of Datura metal,
which is conspecific to what we call Jimson weed in this country.
And so I thought, well, I should take this too and find out what it's about.
Well, it was a very odd trip.
It was, I sat in my room in Bodanath and I would sit and say,
Hmm, nothing is happening, nothing is happening.
Well, you can only think that so many times.
Then my mind would drift into a kind of twilight state.
And then these wraith-like entities, I mean, they were like Victorian ghosts.
You know, they were like women in shredded damask gowns or something,
would fly into my window carrying newspaper sheets in their outstretched arms.
And they would let these sheets of newspaper flutter down onto my lap
and I would like begin to read.
And I would begin, and I would be so astonished by what I was reading that it would jerk me out of it.
And I would say, What's happening?
Nothing's happening. Nothing's happening.
Nothing's happening.
And then my attention would drift and this would happen again.
Well, then after about a half an hour of that, as the stuff began to build up,
I began to, like I would undergo these very brief periods of unconsciousness.
And when I came out of them, I would discover that my leg had been thrown up around behind my head
and my arm shot through.
And I was like all knotted up.
And then I would very carefully unfold myself and lay back down.
And I remember thinking, I'm certainly glad there's nobody else here.
Because this is the kind of thing just designed to drive a sitter into a connection fit of alarm.
And, you know, about six times over the next hour and a half, I went into these convulsive spasms.
And, you know, then on another night, these English people shared a suite of rooms off of mine.
And I had to get to the bathroom.
I had to go through this one guy's room.
So, this one night, I hadn't taken de Tura.
But this fellow had taken de Tura.
And at one point, I had to go to the John's.
So, I debated for a long time about how this was going to disturb his trip.
And maybe I should piss out the window.
But no, that didn't seem, although in India, it's perfectly all right.
And so, finally, I decided I would just walk through the room.
So, then as I was tiptoeing through the room, I saw that he was actually having sex with this girl that we knew from Kathmandu.
And it had a slight emotional tinge for me because I had actually had my eye on her,
although I had never said anything about it to anybody.
So, then, the next morning, I mentioned this.
And he said that, yes, it had been his impression as well, but that, in fact, she wasn't there.
And so, it was like, you know, I saw somebody else's hallucination.
And then what finally decided me that de Tura was too peculiar was I had another English friend who lived a couple of houses away.
And one day, I was in the market buying potatoes.
And this guy came along and we were just talking.
And in the course of this conversation, he was telling me how he'd been taking a lot of de Tura.
And in the course of this conversation, I became aware that he thought that I was visiting him in his apartment.
And I decided that's too fucked up, you know.
To not know whether you're entertaining someone in the confines of your apartment or buying vegetables in the market
means that you have become too disengaged from the modalities of the real.
And, of course, it creates tremendous drying and it's a deliriant is what the literature calls it.
It's a deliriant.
But these, you know, I think that people all over the world utilize plants for bizarre experiences.
Time and time again, I've run up against this.
There's one, you know, there's a very rare drug in South America called Ukuhei.
Ukuhei.
It's made by the Witoto and the Bora and the Muinani in this very circumscribed area.
And what fascinated us about it was that it was an orally active DMT drug.
And we couldn't, as pharmacologists, understand how an orally active DMT drug was possible.
Because the DMT should be destroyed in your gut.
So we wanted to get a sample of this stuff.
And it's made from the resin of varola trees.
The inner bark of the varola sheds of red resin.
And we eventually, in 1981, my brother and I and Wade Davis, the guy who wrote The Serpent and the Rainbow,
we all launched an expedition up the Rio Yaguas Yasu.
And where there was this stuff.
And we would do what we called bioassays, which means somebody has to test this stuff.
Because we would get samples from these shamans.
And we would draw straws for who got to do the bioassay.
Well, taking this Ukuhei was appalling.
I mean, your heart rate goes up to about three times normal.
You shed water by the gallon.
Your blood pressure shoots up.
I mean, it felt like a pre-coronary to me.
And then we come down and say to this shaman, you know,
Lorenzio, what's the story?
And he said, yeah, it takes getting used to, doesn't it?
And so then I, and then when you look at it,
when you look at this Ukuhei chemically,
you see, well, yes, there's DMT in there.
And there's 5-MAO DMT in there.
But then when you do the gas chromatogram,
you see that marching along behind those spots
are all these other spots of various tryptamine compounds,
some of which are cardio regulators,
some of which nobody knows what they do.
And so then you realize that it's a dirty drug.
There's too much junk in there.
What you want is something that has a very clean signature.
So Ukuhei didn't exactly seem the way to go.
I think that this is the real situation with Amanita muscaria,
probably the most discussed, uninteresting drug in the world
because so many people have tried to hang so much on it.
And you know, it's a horrible experience most of the time.
I mean...
Yeah, yeah.
And occasionally you'll meet someone who says,
well, you're just wrong.
It's wonderful.
I've taken it for years.
I love it.
And I, you know, don't know.
First of all, it's genetically variable.
It's geographically variable.
It's seasonally variable.
And it fluctuates at various times in its process of maturation.
So what must be going on with Amanita muscaria
is you have to learn how to take it in your area
from people who know where to collect it,
when to collect it,
how much to collect and how to prepare it.
But if you just go out and find one and chow down,
I guarantee you it'll turn you every way but loose.
And then it'll turn you loose.
So...
But have you done it by drinking urine?
No, that's what they always say.
They say, have you drunk your urine recently?
I got a letter last week.
No, I understand that it...
Do you all understand the basis of the question?
Why does urine come into it?
Because in Siberia they have discovered,
which is where this Amanita thing originates,
that the active principle is not destroyed inside your body,
that it is excreted in the urine.
And the true aficionados of this stuff believe that the so-called second pass
is better than the first pass.
And so you have to...
You know, they drink the urine.
One of the great hazards of Siberian shamanism
is stepping outside of the yurt on a snowy night to take a leak
and being pitched head first into the snow by frantic reindeer
who'll butt you out of the way to try to get to the yellow snow
because they're so completely hooked on Amanita
that nothing stands in their way of this stuff.
I thought you were going to say that it's your students.
Oh, your students pushing you out of them.
Well, I've never hung out with the Yakuts.
Maybe they are a pretty wild-eyed gang.
An example of how a very ancient folkway
can be incorporated into our culture
without us even realizing it
and is provided by discussing Amanita muscaria.
If you go to the Encyclopedia Britannica
and you look up Santa Claus
they'll tell you that it has to do with Saint Nicholas
and it got started in the 11th century
but when you look at the Santa Claus story
it's a perfect mythologian to analyze from this point of view
because look what's going on with Santa Claus.
First of all, Santa Claus's colors are red and white.
The colors of the Amanita muscaria for sure.
Santa Claus lives at the North Pole.
What does this mean?
It means that Santa Claus lives at the Axis Mundi
where Yggdrasil, the magic world ash of Welch mythology
has taken root.
Santa Claus flies.
This is what shamans do.
Santa Claus is the master of the reindeer.
The animal most associated with the Amanita muscaria.
Santa Claus is aided in his work by troops of elves.
And what is the work of Santa Claus?
To build toys for children.
Remember the DMT thing?
Saying, look at this!
Look at this!
Well, those were off-duty elves, clearly.
And so here are all the motifs.
And I believe that for children in our culture
that all the Christer stuff is not what Christmas is about.
Christmas is about standing in front of the tree on Christmas morning
with the gifts arrayed and the twinkling lights on.
Well, that tree is the tree that the Amanita muscaria forms its symbiotic relationship to.
It's always spruce or pine that it has a mycorrhizal relationship to.
So the number of motifs relating Santa Claus to a cult of Amanita muscaria,
there's almost nothing but relational motifs there.
And yet if you suggest this to people they just back away in horror, you know.
Well, these hallucinogenic plants seem clustered in the New World in two areas.
The first area is the Sierra Mazateca of Central Mexico and related areas.
And there you have a number of things overlapping.
You have a mushroom area of multiple species where,
unlike the Kwakutal, Shimsham, Tlingit language area,
in this Central Mexican area they absolutely did use and discover these mushrooms.
And we have these things called mushroom stones that go 2500 BC.
So the mushroom religion is truly archaic in Mexico.
In the same cultural area you have the morning glory seeds that come from Ipomia purpura and related hybrids.
Are you all familiar with these?
This is a psychedelic plant that you can grow yourself and take.
Don't buy the packages of seeds and take them because a benevolent government has made sure that they are soaked in horrendous poison so that you can't get loaded on them.
But you can grow a crop out of them that will be toxin free.
And this is a tremendous visionary intoxicant.
It takes a couple of hundred of these seeds.
But in that same area, strangely enough, there's another morning glory, Turbina coriombosa.
It used to be called Rivia coriombosa.
That as few as 13 seeds will flatten you.
Now, it's interesting, as long as we're talking about morning glory seeds,
to note that per unit volume, by weight, probably the strongest plant hallucinogen in the world is Hawaiian baby wood rose.
And yet there is no record of any culture ever utilizing that.
There are 13 species of Argyria.
It's called Hawaiian baby wood rose, but it has nothing to do with Hawaii.
It's native to India.
There are 13 species of Argyria scattered from southern India out to Fiji.
And all contain ergot-like, LSD-like compounds like Chinook Levine and so forth.
These, I got started on morning glory seeds because they were available.
But don't sell this stuff short, folks.
I mean, it'll give you a ride that you'll never forget.
And the baby wood rose, even more so, be very careful with the Hawaiian baby wood rose.
Because it contains cardio-active glycosides.
And, you know, if you, you know, maybe six seeds will do you.
Twelve seeds might well plant you.
And twelve seeds will fit on a tablespoon.
So this is nothing to start choking down in large amounts.
Yeah.
Yes.
And could be extracted in a fairly simple filtration system.
Yeah.
Good point.
Yeah.
Do you grind them up?
Well, they are dry.
They're little crescent-shaped dry things.
Yeah.
Grind them in a brawn grinder.
And applesauce is the favorite carrier for these disgusting things or milkshakes.
But it would be good to look into doing a little chemistry.
The emetic in the morning glories is estercoumarone.
Not the cardio-active glycoside in Argyria nervosa.
But in Ipomaea purpura, it's estercoumarone.
And you could devise a simple chemical system for removing that.
And I think LSD, you know, have you ever had what's called Woodrow's LSD?
Well, it's wonderful.
It's unlike LSD.
It's more like psilocybin because it is highly visionary.
And one of the things about these morning glories is, you know, I don't know whether we have to talk about Rupert's theory or what,
but it is just an archive of Mayan and Toltec imagery.
I mean, you take this stuff and you're there in the pyramidal complex on the day of Venus's heliacal rising when they do their thing.
I mean, it's pretty amazing.
Is the active ingredient like psilocybin?
It's a close relative. It's active, not in the microgram range, but in the milligram range.
And there are several active compounds.
You're right.
And I think Chinoclavine is psychoactive and Ergonovine.
All these occur there.
So do you grind those and swallow them all or make them infusion?
No, you grind them to a powder and then just take it, capsule them.
It's a lot of capsules.
It's like half a cup of this horrible whitish meal with a strange smell.
But yeah, basically about 200 seeds.
You may want to go higher, but start with that.
Yeah.
Okay.
Now, supposedly in the mass attack area, the merveocarbosis seeds are ground up and then they are like put into a cold water to make a cold water infusion.
And then the solids are refused so that there's only like a water soluble fraction in the water.
And then that is wrong.
Well, no.
But if what you're saying is true, that's where the glycoside would reside.
That's not my understanding actually.
Well, maybe the caption got mislabeled or something because the way they do it where I've seen it is they take the little seeds and they grind them on a matate to powder.
Then they put it in water, as you said, and then and they shake it and leave it and come back an hour later and shake it again and do that for a while.
And then the stuff precipitates to the bottom, the matter, and the liquid fraction is poured off and discarded and they take the solid matter and they let it dry in the sun until it's no longer runny.
But it's a kind of like the consistency of oatmeal or play dough or something like that.
And then they make a little tiny tortilla which they then toast on a metal griddle.
And so you get this thing which looks slightly smaller than a Ritz cracker and is a toasted morning glory seed wafer and you eat that and that is the thing which is active.
That's how I've seen it done.
Apparently not.
They toast it lightly.
They don't, it's not blackened.
It's just sort of golden.
No, it's the, it's one species of morning glory, Turbina, previously called Rivia coriumbosa.
The other one, the morning glory that you have to take a couple of hundred seeds for is used in that area as a halicinogen,
but it's also used to induce labor and has a whole role in midwifery and like that.
Okay, good.
Thank you.
No, that's the Hawaiian Woodrose and it has no history of human usage, so you're on your own
This is it's worth talking about maybe for a minute that you know there
Halicinogens are like hotel rooms
Some are occupied and some are not and it's always interesting
to fiddle with the unoccupied ones because if you're if you believe Sheldrake, then it's an empty field
You know one way of thinking of these things is when you take a plant it takes you
So when you take mushrooms for instance
what the trip is is
all the mushroom trips that anybody ever had and
you leave you know you make a tiny contribution to it's you leave a piece of your trip in the trip and
so the the trip is slowly evolving over time as
Those who take the plant each leaves a brick or an offering or a little
Architectural motif on this vast edifice. Well, then if you come that was why
You know a plant like Hawaiian Woodrose or to some degree stropharia cubensis because it is not the preferred mushroom among the Mexican
Traditionalists then it's unoccupied
You can make of it what you want. It can be sort of your
Vehicle and this is why you know a drug like ketamine
Which is a new drug a drug without a thousand years of input my impression of where you go on ketamine is it's like visiting a new office building
That nobody has rented offices yet. I mean all the water coolers work and there are these
recessional distances with fluorescent lighting
But you know there are no hurrying secretaries and crowded offices and chatter around the water fountains
It's just empty. It's empty because not enough people have left their initials on the walls. Yeah
What is the variety that's common mushroom that's common in the Yucatan and the Mayan?
Well, if you mean growing on manure, yeah, that's stropharia cubensis
See there are about 30 species of mushrooms that grow in
in that Mexican area and most of them are
are
What are called? Well not most some are ephemeral mushrooms meaning they're very small and they can be almost anywhere and
Then there are some larger ones too that can be almost anywhere
stropharia cubensis is the only one of the good ones that locates on cow dung
Now there are other mushrooms which grow on cow dung that contain psilocybin
But they also are more sickening there are species of paneolus and species of coprinus
if you collect a mushroom off dung and you want to know whether it's a
paneolus or a coprinus or a stropharia
Just keep it around for a few hours if it's a stropharia
it will just sort of be around. If it's a coprinus or a paneolus it will do what's called autodigest
it will turn into a slimy mess and
Can you tell from sporeprin?
No you can't tell from the sporeprin but you can tell from the macromorphology of it if you know mushrooms
They're easy to tell apart
I think I had sporeprin and I don't have much
Yeah well that's tricky you need somebody who really knows their stuff
It was more speculative but I think it would be worth trying
Yeah, yeah
Some are and some aren't
But it's the one that is the water-soluble but I don't think I'm not sure about that
I've read some more about synthesizing LSD and it's apparently hard to get to the starting points
I heard if you get a bunch more in the lower states it's still kind of lighter flutes
and I heard that gets you halfway there
Yeah, that sounds right
Pet ether is a good one. So is chloroform
Have any of you read The Road to Eleusis?
Oh yes
That's about the Eleusinian Mysteries and argues
It's by Wasson and Hoffman and Ruck
and argues that the mystery at Eleusis was a kind of ergotized beer
that they were gathering ergot off paspalum
and making an ergotized beer
and the only way they could have done that for 2,000 years
stoning thousands of people each September at this cult site
without the thing getting a reputation for being toxic or causing convulsions
is if they had some way that was very efficient
of separating the dangerous alkaloids from the hallucinogenic ones
so that may have been a water fractionation technique as well
or you know the whole theory may be wrong
and whatever was drunk at Eleusis may not have been ergotized beer
it could have been a mushroom of some sort
this is what Robert Graves thought that it was a mushroom
Is that put back in print yet?
The Road to Eleusis?
Probably not because Wasson is now dead
and the estate is kind of funny about that kind of thing
yeah
I have two questions
one of them
could you talk more about the emetic
and how to get rid of that?
The emetic is ester coumarone
if you're not a chemist
and used to dealing with high molecular weight solvents
then you should do some kind of a water
you know dissolve it in water
and then try to separate out the fractions
this would be
I mean I think
a lot of work needs to be done
I think in the underground
there are publications which have circulated
that are you know
the wizard's workbook for mushroom rec
or for morning glory reclamation
and stuff like this
it's a
you pay your dues with morning glories
but it's usually worth the price of admission
it's just nausea after all for crying out loud
yeah
the question had to do with what you were saying about
different hallucinogens in hotel rooms
I got the impression that the implication is that
somehow consciousness creates the reality
that's put you know that's out there
depending on whether how often consciousness has used
these different hallucinogens
is that
yeah I think so
I mean that we leave our fingerprints upon the drugs we take
and drugs that have been taken for thousands of years
have a lot of fingerprints on them
and you join up with that
you enter into the field
you know
one way of thinking
since somebody talked about Sheldrake earlier
one way of thinking about psychedelics
in trying to define what do they do
is that they are amplifiers of the morphogenetic field
that you know
that the past of objects
somehow becomes present
this would fit in with my notion
that when you take a psychedelic
you are rising into some kind of super space
that can be mathematically described
because having the past be co-present with the present
is a way of saying
that you have shift your dimensional relationship to the data field
and now it all appears to be one coherent thing
yeah
what is the plant that grows in the southwest that has Harmelina?
Pegaman Harmelina
the giant Syrian rue
its original range is from Morocco to Manchuria
but at some time in the 19th century
it was brought into this country as a range fodder for goats
I mean it's pretty rasty plant
it has small yellow flowers
and it's a kind of
it has succulent leaves
sort of water holding leaves
and it looks like a form of sage brush
and when you cut into it with a knife or a machete
it's brilliant yellow inside
and that brilliant yellow is the harming
pound it up with a sledge hammer
to separate the fibers
and do a hot water wash on it
and then you know do a second hot water wash
then get rid of the physical stuff
combine the two mother liquors
and drive it down to a reasonable volume
and it'll do the trick
yeah
you're probably familiar with a couple of different books
by Allegro and Pujaric
John Allegro and Andreja Pujaric
yeah
what's your assessment
do you think there's any value that there is in you
well
not to rain on anybody's parade
Andreja Pujaric is a very mercurial person
is that what we want to say
recall that he was the guy who pushed Uri Geller for a long time
and they were forever tromping into the Negev
and coming out with blank cassettes
that had held the wisdom of the galaxy
but the aliens erased them before they let them return
that could happen here
so that's Andreja Pujaric
he's been around for a long time
I mean you have to
these people are such eccentrics
I mean you have to just respect people's persistence and survival power
but I think you know his scholarship and his notion of the rules of evidence
is fairly divergent even from my fairly loose canon
so Allegro is a little different case
do you all know the book The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross
he managed to hypothesize one of the most radical theories ever to come down the pike
I don't know how true it is
but his theory is that Jesus was a mushroom
and you know this would not probably have cut too much mustard
except that the guy was a Dead Sea Scrolls scholar of world renown
had a scholars grasp of Aramaic and Akkadian
and was fully licensed to be one of the people who tell us
what the primary documents of Christianity really mean
the problem was when Allegro got a hold of them
he said well what they really mean is
that a sacramental mushroom was being grown in caves by Nabataeans down around Qumram
and they called it Jesus in order to befuddle the Roman authorities
and created the cheerful theory of the friendly carpenter
who tells us to render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's
and this was all a publicity stunt just to keep the Roman authorities guessing
and he has textual he claims he has textual support for this
the problem is you have to be an Aramaic philologist to follow the argument
I mean the argument is unbelievably tortured
there is a lot of question
there is a peculiar opaqueness about the early history of Christianity
I mean if we are to try and take it seriously and understand what happened there
then it must be that first of all if we believe Christ was a real person
then he must have been born in 6 BC
because there was a conunctio maxima of Jupiter and Saturn at that time
which is a good astrological event to hang the nativity on
which means then that the crucifixion would have occurred in 27
well why is it then that there are no mentions
no mention of Christ can be pushed back later than earlier than AD 69
what was going on between 27 and 69
the Gospels are not contemporaneous
and the mention in 69 is not even a sure thing
it's in Suetonius
and he says Jews have recently come to Rome
agitating in the name of their leader Crespus
and that's the reference
and you know it's puzzling
because take a figure as minor as Mani
Mani is the founder of Manicheanism
he was born in Seleucia Ctesiphon in the 700s
well God we have Mani's laundry bills
I mean we know how much he paid in taxes
the nickname he had for his dog
I mean we have a lot of data on Mani
and so why a figure like Christ
should be so peculiarly swathed in ambiguity
if it was a real person with these people eager to chronicle
it is a little hard to figure out
didn't Mani have a figure of religion
going in his own lifetime
to have a figure organization
of course Christ has had 12 guys
yeah I mean Mani got right with it
I mean he cultivated the court
he knew how to get his thing going
yeah
if any of you are interested in these kinds of questions
and like your data in novel form
read the Transmigration of Timothy Archer
by Philip K. Dick
which is a wonderful intellectual romp
through all of these issues
it's essentially the fictional telling of the story of James Pike
who you may remember was the Episcopal Bishop of San Francisco
and a great enthusiast for LSD
and he died in the Negev under very mysterious conditions
he parked his car
and with a roadside map
and a bottle of Coca-Cola
in 115 degree heat
started walking toward the Dead Sea
and dehydrated and died
and he was very close to John Allegro
you know I'm not given to conspiracy theory
but you must have been following this whole hassle
about the Dead Sea Scrolls
well a lot of people think
it's because what is written there
is incommensurate with Christianity
as it has existed for 1700 years
and nobody knows what to do with this stuff
I mean it's the equivalent of
what do you do with the doctrine of the resurrection
if somebody comes up with the mummy of Christ
well that's the kind of situation
that these Dead Sea Scrolls
may place Christian hermeneutics in
John Allegro's book
no, John Allegro died recently
sacred mushroom
oh no
the book by Philip K. Dick
is called
The Transmigration of Timothy Archer
yeah
are you aware of
Edmund Bordeaux Zeki's translations?
oh yes
he's another one
his really tweaking volume
was called
How the Great Pan Died
Right
and it was an expose
of Jesus Barabbas
versus this
suppose of Jesus
and so
yes
yes well
the Empire never died
which is Philip K. Dick's motto
the Gnostic temperament is alive and well
in fact there hasn't been a century
as friendly to Gnosticism
as the 20th
since the 4th
so
there you have it
I've heard a little bit of revelations
and it sounds like a description of
of
well this has been suggested
what you need to
you know
to put the
to put the Gospel of John
in
or I mean
yes
to put the Gospel of John in context
get
Charles' book
the Apocrypha and Pseudepigrapha
of the New Testament
this concludes
Tape 5
our program continues
with Tape 6
and then you see
everything that the Church Fathers
tossed out
because you see
the
canon
the New Testament
is a group of accounts
that were able to survive the
sorting process
of the Council of Nicaea
and
there was a huge literature
which was just tossed out
as being too weird
I mean
read the Gospel of Philip
the Gospel of Thomas
had you all
have you all
looked at
the Nag Hammadi Library
the Nag
and you know what this is
the Nag Hammadi Library
is
42 texts
which were dug up
in Upper Egypt
in 1948
at a
Coptic Monastery
called
Chenabaschion
42 texts
that went
into the ground
A.D. 220
means
nobody has been able
to put a finger
on them
since A.D. 220
it's like a
fossil
of Christianity
in the third century
well my god
you can barely
map it on
to the cheerful
religion
that we inherit
as Christianity
I mean it is
an exotic
and complicated
situation
it's very well
worth reading
James
oh
any
I'm sure
the metaphysical bookstore
in Berkeley
I mean in Boulder
will sell you
James M. Robinson
is the editor
and it's called
the Nag Hammadi Library
42 texts
reflecting
early
Christianity
Gnosticism
and so forth
and so on
Hans Jonas
is a brilliant
his book
Gnosticism
the message
of the alien god
to infant Christianity
if that's not a title
to die for
huh
oh
the Apocrypha
and Pseudepigrapha
of the New Testament
by Charles
and that's a
that weighs in
at about 35 pounds
but
theological libraries
will have it
but it's in the
locked case
you don't want
seminarians mucking around
with this kind of stuff
that's right
the Arantia book
is a very spectacular
and early example
of channeling
before it was even named
and very interesting
of all the channeled material
the Arantia book
for pure grandiosity
puts everybody else
to shame
right
they talk about
seeding the planet
yeah well
these are persistent themes
you know
I mean all of Gnosticism
is
the perception
that we don't belong here
that we are creatures of another realm
beings of light
who because of some horrible cosmic mistake
have been trapped
in the world of matter
and the Gnostics take
the Pentatech
the first five books of Moses
and turn it into a nightmare story
and say that you know
the God of this world
which in Jewish tradition
is called Yahweh
who is the creator of the world
for the Gnostics
he is not the real God at all
he's the Demerge
he's a kind of mad God
who has entrapped the light
and the task of salvation
is to gather the light
and then release it back
to its hidden higher source
beyond the machinery of cosmic fate
well that's good
that it's sort of like
you know the Manduki Upanishad
it's my favorite Upanishad
because it's the shortest
it's only a page and a half long
which you know
others should have been
so similarly inspired to brevity
but it's the breath of Brahman
it traces
it's the description of one
exhalation inhalation cycle
cycle
yeah
I know people call it
and say
Yahweh
well you're not even supposed to say it
if you're orthodox
G-D
yeah
I'm fascinated by
the Rasa Farni
the installation of
Yahweh
the abbreviation of
Yahweh
in the same phrase
hallelujah
is supposed to be that
what is your understanding of that connection
does it find that first
well I don't know too much about Rastafarianism
it was founded by
Marcus Garvey
and had this notion of return to Africa
you know syncretism
is always with us
Gnosticism was characterized by syncretism
the whole late Hellenic religious efflorescence
was largely syncretic
and certainly that's what we have now
I mean
you know the new age
you go to these fairs
and the people who are talking to the Pleiades
have the booth next to the people who are talking to Zinebel Genubi
and both have world plans from the Sausserian All Fathers
and the two plans are different
and you just
you know
Gnosticism is alive and well
in the halls of academia
I mean
you've got guys like Marvin Minsky
and Hasmore
which you want to download
human brain
into a computer
to you know
kind of come pure information
so if that's not released from people matter
good information
I don't know what it is
No I agree
there are two sentiments loose in the world
and you're going to not get through this life
without taking sides
you know
do you believe that our destiny is in another dimension
made of light
on the other side of the universe
or do you believe that we should
you know
clean up the rainforests
and save the planet
you want to be very careful
with your political agenda
one of my
sub-interests
which sort of has a relationship to this
but it's oblique
is
Asteroidal impacts
I think
Asteroidal impacts
are one of the great
undiscussed
factors
in evolution
that
every
solid body
in the solar system
is heavily
cratered
with impacts
by infalling bodies
there's this thing
down in Arizona
that only happened
50,000 years ago
it was a piss-ant sized object
and everything
within 800 miles
of the impact point
died instantly
it dug a whole
half a mile
into the ground
it was a nothing burger
this thing which came down
65 million years ago
they now think
on the Yucatan
it killed
everything on the earth
larger than a chicken
died
you know
I mean you want to talk about
ecotastrophe
I mean we have never
you can't even conceive
of what it's like
when something like that
happens to a planet
they estimate that
at the velocity
this thing must have been
traveling
it was 5 miles
into the planet
in the first
second and a half
it raised a wall
of rocks
6,000 feet high
that moved outward
at Mach 7
I mean
yeah
and the planet
rang for a million years
you know
and it was
but if it hadn't been
for that
there would be
no flowering plants
no triumph
of the mammals
no Whitney Houston
no
sperm entering egg
well
but suppose
you know
there's all this
tumult in our psyche
about
the great change
that's supposed to happen
and where are we supposed
to put our political energies
and what are we supposed
to be doing
well it would be
pretty ironic
if we
you know
beat ourselves over the head
and save the rain forest
and all this malarkey
and then
this something
came down
and just turned
the whole thing
into hash
then people would say
my god
how could we have been
so stupid
we should have been
extracting
and sequestering
U-235
and plutonium
we should have been
building starships
the size of Montana
we should have been
sparing no effort
and what did we do
we replanted rainforests
and now look
the whole thing
so you have to
you know
good intentions
are not sufficient
you have to locate
where the threat
is coming from
and act accordingly
there are no points
for good intentions
in the game of evolution
so mind
and we have to decide
you know
what does life want
is it
that life
at its most basic level
senses
the finite
duration
of the stars life
and so
it wants
to use
this moment
of sunshine
to build
something
that could carry us
out into the
mainstream
of the galaxy
to the denser
star fields
or
you know
is that some kind
of titanic
Apollonian
male dominated
techno-fascist
materialist trip
and what we need
to do
is cultivate
gentleness
and attention
to the bugs
and the grasses
and the water
I don't
have an answer to that
I think it's a real dilemma
I think people who think
they do have answers
haven't
really
connected with
how ambiguous
the situation
really is
how can you do both
what says the mushroom
well
no
some people can do
well what the mushroom says
is it's it's a total
apocalyptarian
I mean it says
rouse your camels
pack your tents
we're moving out
this has been fine for a while
but ahead lie worlds
of unimaginable challenge
at great distance
but of course the
the mushroom sounds like
a techno-fascist
hortatory
male dominator
when it talks like that
you take ayahuasca
and it says
clean up the rivers
care for the children
replant the forest
well
but then you have to look
at the mushroom
possibly being the
universal traveler
that it is
it has that urge
it's got the wanderlust
so it's of course
it's going to be accomplished
that's right it has
nomadic ethics
so it pushes
nomadic solutions
where the ayahuasca
an enormous jungle plant
a flowering plant
a creature born out of
the last catastrophe
just like we are
has a different
uh
agenda
no
the demons are of many
kinds
some are made of ions
some of mind
the ones of DMT
you'll find
stutter often
and are blind
means you know
just because
somebody
uh
just because
somebody once said
of channeling
just because somebody's
dead doesn't mean
they're smart
so
it could be
you know
everybody has their own
uh
agenda
well why don't we break
yeah
question
last question
speaking of
physiological threats
are you aware of
Fred Miles
work
on the steady state
or something
oh yeah
mm-hmm
the panspermia theory
yeah
and
and again
they argue strongly
for high tech
even the age
might have come out
of court
detract
yeah
and again
they argue strongly
but it may actually have come out of space.
And Hoyle has an impressive array of statistics
that link planetary presence in near orbit to viral disease.
Yeah, well I think that the next revolution in biology
is so obvious that you can be totally radical
and completely confident you're on safe ground
and say the next great revolution in biology is the realization that space is not a barrier to life
and that technology is only one method for traversing between the stars.
If in fact planets are regularly pulverized by cosmic catastrophes
then they must be like bursting seed pods
and everything is subjected to a tremendous evolutionary hammering
but spores, viruses, stuff like that, particulate matter
it just drifts out between the stars
and then when it finds another suitable environment it breaks out.
We don't know what the constraints on life are.
You know the oceans of Europa could harbor life.
You know these hot vent, sulfur vent organisms that we find in the deep oceans here
they could survive in the oceans of Europa
if there were hot sulfur vents at the bottom of those oceans
those organisms wouldn't bat an eye.
You know ice covered?
Europa is covered with ice
but underneath the ice is water
and there are fractures
and you know the exotic chemistries
and pressures and temperatures of the Jovian environment
could produce life.
We don't know what the constraints are
if cometary environments are a better place for life to arise
than a warm pond on a newly condensed planet
then all bets are off as to what, you know
planetary surfaces may be unlikely places for life to get going.
It's hard to say.
Who's to say there are gaseous creatures on gaseous planets?
That's right.
We don't know.
You could have life at temperatures and pressures
where we couldn't exist for a microsecond
like at the bottom of the Jovian atmosphere
something like that.
No, there's more mystery than anything else.
Okay, the notion here is
I've always felt that the psychedelic experience should be good for something
in a very practical sense
and I always felt that there was something
that wanted, that you should be able to learn
that was very hard to bring out
and we talked a little bit yesterday
about this strange episode that happened in the Amazon
where instead of an ordinary trip
it was locked in for weeks and weeks
and then people differed as to whether it was a transformative incident
or a psychosis or what exactly it was
and but what happened was
or what I think wants to happen in every psychedelic experience
is that there is a totality symbol
you know, Jung tried to get his patients to make mandalas
because he said they were totality symbols
well eventually the totality symbol is more than a symbol
it actually becomes a true map of the totality
and what this boils down to is a kind of very strange revelation
about the nature of the I Ching
that takes very seriously the idea that the I Ching is a tool for studying time
but then takes the idea much further
it's hard to give this lecture
it's hard to listen to this lecture
because the learning curve is steep
and you just have to stick with it for a while
and then there will be pay dirt
but it's you have to bear with me
and I had to bear with the entity
which was revealing this stuff to me
because it took the form of a
are you all familiar with the idea of a koan?
this is something that your guru
a little saying or something that your guru gives you
that if you can figure it out
then you move on to the next stage
well, so the koan that I was presented with
had to do with the I Ching
which I was not that passionately fascinated by
I was just sort of mildly interested in it
like a lot of other freaks
and I was not at all mathematically inclined
I mean that I am the author of a theory of pure mathematics
is as astonishing to me as it is to anybody else I'm sure
basically as you know but let me review it
the I Ching is a Chinese system of divination
that uses 64 structures called hexagrams
and hexagrams are made of broken and unbroken lines
stacked one above another
and they are the sum set
sum total of the possible set of such structures is 64
and it's been remarked by a number of people
that the I Ching has peculiar structural affinities with the DNA
but nobody has ever really known what to make of that
well this dialogue with this mushroom entity
began by posing a very simple question
which is as you know most of you
the I Ching hexagrams occur in a sequence
which is called the King Wen sequence
which is very old
in fact portions of the King Wen sequence
are scratched on shoulder scapula
that are 3500 years old
it's possible to argue that the King Wen sequence of the I Ching
is the oldest abstract sequence in the world
the world the question is or what the koan was
was is the King Wen sequence a sequence
or is it simply a jumble of hexagrams that over time
has become traditionally sanctioned as the sequence
in other words if it's a sequence you should be able to write the rules
that generate that hex that sequence and no other
so let me dig into this here
the first hexagram
can you see this colored chalk we have two other choices
we have an orange and blue
here we'll do a visual test
oh
is this the stuff
ok
why is this so half acid as they say
so here's the first hexagram
it's called the creative
and it's made of six lines
this is no news to anybody I hope
here's the second hexagram
it's called the receptive
the yellow
ok let me do these this way and then I'll switch
so when I started looking at this question of the order in the I Ching
the first thing I saw it only took me about ten minutes
of just looking at it
and I noticed and I'm not the first person to have noticed this
that it isn't 64 hexagrams
it's 32 pairs of hexagrams
and the second member of each pair is formed by turning the first hexagrams
by turning the first member upside down
do you see
so that only took ten minutes
that was no problem
now
there are eight cases in the I Ching where inverting the first hexagram causes no change
because of the nature of its structure
you meet the first case here
obviously if you turn this thing upside down
it's still six unbroken lines
so in the eight cases where inverting a hexagram causes no change
a second rule is generated
the second rule is
if inverting the first hexagram causes no change
then all lines change
very straightforward right
but now
the problem
the koan has changed
and the question is what are the ordering what rules order the 32 pairs
and this was much trickier
much trickier
and
after a while the prompting voice said
look at the first order of difference
this is just a fancy way of saying
count how many lines change as you go from one hexagram to another
if you go from this hexagram to this hexagram how many lines change
six
so the first order of difference is six between these two hexagrams
similarly we can go from two to three
and there will be another first order of difference
now logic should tell you that the values of the first order of difference
are going to be whole numbers one through six right
what I did was I went through the I Ching and actually checked on these
and I discovered it again immediately what jumped out at me was there were no fives
so we wrote computer programs to randomly arrange hexagrams and check for fives
and we discovered fives are as common as any other number
the exclusion of fives in the King Wen sequence was a human decision
someone didn't want fives to show up in the first order of difference
ok
so then I
looked at these values and what I discovered was
when you inside the pairs
when you invert one to get the other
the first order of difference is always an even number
so within the pairs you have no freedom
it's going to be an even number
between the pairs
you can arrange them so that you get odd numbers or even numbers
and what I discovered was between the pairs
half are odd and half are even
again human agency did this
we wrote computer programs to randomly throw hexagram sequences and test
for this quality and we found that only one in every 7,500 times
could you expect to get a sequence which would be 25% odd 75% even
which is what this enforces
so I was very excited by this because I said wow there's all this hidden stuff
in the I Ching that I've never
why is this thing inching up on me
this thing?
ok
so I thought how weird that all this structure is in there
and I'd read all of Wilhelm's commentaries and
Lama Govinda and these people
and it didn't seem that they had noticed this kind of stuff
so I was very excited I thought that I was really on to something
and I made a graph of the first order of difference
and it looks something like this
of course it has 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 on this axis
blue
and 1, 2, 3, 4 to 64 this way
because there are 64 hexagrams
and then I drew the first order of difference
now notice remember this was 6
so up here we put a point
and the next one is something else
and then we connect the points
and what you get is the structure
which looks like this roughly
in other words it looks stochastic
it looks random
it doesn't look like you're on the track of any kind of order here
except that I noticed a really funny thing about this
what I noticed was that this section
and this section are mirror images of each other
so imagine for a moment that you have a copy of this right here
what you're then able to do is rotate the copy 180 degrees within the plane
and you'll discover that it fits perfectly in here
it dovetails at the beginning and at the end
but nowhere in between
this is again a product of human decision
someone made it so that it would do this
and the question is why
why would anyone want to do that
and when it works you have hexagram 1
across from hexagram 63
and hexagram 2 across from 62
in other words these always sum to 64
when it's in the right position
so I just thought that I was uncovering some kind of
like
you know the equivalent of Chinese Kabbalism
some kind of lost intellectual system
and
but the voice said to me
it said this is a picture of time
and I couldn't understand what exactly was meant by that
it seemed to me a fairly esoteric thing to assert
that it was a picture of time
now remember there are 64 hexagrams in the I Ching
and they have six lines each
six times 64 is 384
when it told me that this was a picture of time
I began to entertain the idea that this was somehow could be used as a calendar
so then I said well what it is is it's the whole I Ching running one way
and the whole I Ching running backwards the other way
combined into this peculiar structure
which has 384 data points in it
which are the lines or so called Yao of the I Ching
now 384 is 19 days longer than the solar year length
so if you had a calendar of 384 days it would precess against the equinoxes 19 days every year
so it doesn't seem a good candidate for a calendar if you're trying to keep solar dynamics central
but I discovered something weird about this number 384 days
now think of it as days
and that is that peculiar things happen when you multiply this number by numbers that are inherent to the structure of the I Ching
when you multiply this number by 64 you get a day number which when you break it down into years is 67 years 104.25 days
now what's interesting about that number is that it is six sunspot cycles of 11 plus years
there's also a major sunspot cycle of 33 years
so it meant each line in a super hexagram made by multiplying this number
will be associated with one sunspot cycle
and the trigrams inside the hexagram will be associated with the major sunspot cycle
well when you take 67 years 104.25 days
again by 64 you get 4306 years plus some days
this number is very close to twice the amount of time that it takes for a zodiacal era
such as the age of Pisces or the age of Aquarius
they last roughly this long
well if you take this number by 6 not 64 but 6 which is a legitimate number because it's built into the I Ching
you get 25,000 years roughly
this is the procession of the great year or the equinoctial year as it's called
so I thought wow this is really far out
it's some kind of multi-leveled resonance calendar
oh and I forgot to say about 384 days
this was central excuse me
that this is 13 lunations
a lunation is 25 is 29 point something days
and when you multiply that number by 13 you get 383.89
so I said aha what this thing is is it keeps track of the moon on this level
it keeps track of the sunspots on this level
and it keeps track of the great year of the zodiac on this level
all naked eye astronomical phenomenon
not hypothesizing any advanced technology
but hypothesizing an advanced intellectual point of view
well so I thought I was finished
and that somehow it wanted to tell me about a Neolithic calendar in ancient China for some reason
but there was more
Popeye had spinach
I have this
the prompting voice said
this structure which you have created
and by the way some of you who are scholars of the I Ching
remember in the second half of the Wilhelm Bains translation
there are a whole bunch of very ancient sayings
that nobody knows what they're talking about
they're so esoteric
and the most mysterious of these sayings
is the saying which says
the forward running numbers refer to the future
the backward running numbers refer to the past
well in the I Ching there are no forward or backward running numbers
unless you do something like this
and then look what you get
1, 2, 3, 63, 62, 61, 60, 59
you get forward and backward running numbers
so I said wow
you know we're digging this thing out
the I Ching is not an oracle
as it's been done at country fairs
for three millennia
the I Ching as we possess it
is a piece of broken machinery
it's as though you had you know
the main gear out of a machine
and you're trying by archaeological reconstruction
to rebuild that machine
so I was sort of stuck at this point
and the prompting voice turned on
and said this structure which you've made
which is the entire I Ching
running forward and backward against itself
which would place it then at the top
of a hierarchy
should be placed at the bottom
of a hierarchy
treat this thing as a single line
it said
and I was calling this at that point
the simple wave
it said treat the simple wave
as a line in a hexagram
well when you do that
bear with me folks
remember I said the learning curve
was steep
however it's not long
oh yeah
what color
yellow
let me see
okay
well so if we treat this module
as the bottom of a hierarchy
then we want to treat it
treat it like a line
so what do you do with lines in I Ching land
you stack six of them on top of each other
so I'm going to symbolize this thing
with an S
okay
so here's what I did
I took one of them
and another one
and I said
did I do good
and it said sort of
but a hexagram is more than six lines isn't it
and I said well what more is it than six lines
and said well it's two trigrams
said oh okay
so then I went like this
do you see how I superimposed the thing over the six
two larger ones which were superimposed over three
so then I said
it's alright
it said yes except you forgot one thing
a hexagram has an identity as a whole
as a hexagram
said okay
good
it said yes good
what are you going to do with it
and I'll show this to you
just so you can get
the idea
I don't know how visible this will be
this is what
you get if you do that
and what it looks like
is exactly what it looks like
which is a hodgepodge
of crazy lines running everywhere
on three levels
and the
the thing said to me
it said this is a map of time
and I
when I made the mistake
of saying to my friends and acquaintances
this is a map of time
and they said
you know we're very concerned
apparently
you didn't get better
even though you claimed you got better
and now you know you run around
showing this thing to people
and notice it
everything is in closure up here
and then everything attains closure
down here
and then there are sub closures
six on one level
two on another
and the final one on this one
and finally my friend
Ralph Abraham
took pity on me
and he said the problem with this thing
is that it's an occult dogma
nobody can understand this thing
except you
you are necessary for its interpretation
and I said
so what am I
what do I do
and he said you must learn
how to change this
into a more orthodox mathematical object
that
mathematicians can then discuss with you
and I was completely stuck
and I sat with it
for two years
because it just seemed
I'm not a mathematician
I had no clue
as to how to do that
and finally one afternoon
the pot was good enough
or the stars moved into position
or something
and in a single instant
I saw how to carry out
the mathematical reduction
of this wave
and I did it
on this
well if you look at it closely
you'll see that
because they are at different scales
it isn't that
one side is exactly like
the other side
there are dissimilarities
so I finally figured out
how to
mathematize
and conserve
all the qualities of that wave
and I put it into
an ordinary Cartesian object
which I doubt you can see
but you don't really have to see it anyway
all this is
see what that is
it's just a one level
it's an ordinary graph of some sort
huh
it's the sum of certain qualities
there was skew
parallelism
angle of approach
crossover
there were about five things
that I felt were important
and I figured out how to
mathematize them all
so that this
which is an ordinary Cartesian graph
is in fact
a topological equivalent
of my occult diagram
and
yeah
right
uh huh
so then
uh
and then I started saying to people
this is a map of time
and they said
is it
haha
well where are we
haha
and I said
well
um
we
uh
hmm
in order to know where we are
we would have to know where the end point is
if you have a wave you have a wavelength
so we have to find the end point
so then I began
collecting historical data
and
fitting
curves
to it
trying to define the end point
now remember yesterday
at the close of the day or in the afternoon
we got off on what appeared to some people to be
a tangent about
novelty and science
and time
and whether
it was
uh
whether
it should be viewed as a flat plane
or a fractal
or something like that
well
what the thing was telling me was
that novelty
is
uh
something which can be charted in time
and that these waves
were actually pictures
of
uh
of
um
the ebb and flow of novelty
that this wasn't charting stock prices
or population rise
or
average temperatures
it was charting
the ebb and flow of novelty
through time
and that
como
novelty
is
uh
how about density of connection
as opposed
you know if complexity can be
quantified then you say
complexity ebbs and flows
i mean if we had a device
which measured complexity
and we measured this point right here
as opposed to this point an inch behind my finger
i'm hoping it would tell us that an inch behind my finger is a more complex environment than this point right here
so space and time
is
then
seen to be
a medium
with
uh
density
uh
densification of complexity
embedded in it like raisins
or something
yeah
where are the under-established origin things
well
until you scale it against time
you don't have to
i mean i think
you did scale it on this graph
i don't have to
well i think what you're
i think if i understand your question right
remember how i said that over here it was at closure
it goes like this
and that's both lines
they're running
that's both sides of the graph
they're perfectly superimposed over each other
At this point they cease to be superimposed
One goes that way and one goes that way and then you start getting this kind of stuff
And then when you come down to the end they fall into closure again
Yes, it's a thing of fate exactly you got it, okay
Well to this point we haven't discussed this thing scaled against calendrical time
We're just trying to look at it as a mathematical object
then what I realized was
If these are part if this thing has 384 points in it and this has
six
Then the what the thing was telling me was you have to map the you have to map the wave back over itself
So you take all 384 points and you cram them into this space
wandering up this hill
Then you go to this space and you cram all 384 points in here and you create a fractal infinite regress
Do you understand?
Say you understand
You will understand
Okay, so then that was the time that was the time map it was saying novelty can be described
By an infinite fractal regress that is contained in the I Ching
Now the main objection that I was meeting from people who wanted to lock me up was they were saying now let's get this straight
You want to revise you want to revise modern physics based on a pattern which you found in an ancient Chinese book of divination is that correct and I could feel the force of that criticism because that's how I think
You know where somebody from some nut piece of data then wants to build castles in the air
And so I created a metaphor which is satisfying to me
I hope it's satisfying to somebody else
Trying to explain why we should seek a law of physics inside the structure of the I Ching
And here's the metaphor
Think of sand dunes
Picture them in your mind
Since this is the new age you may even close your eyes if it helps
Picture sand dunes
Now notice that sand dunes look like wind
Sand dunes look like wind
And sand dunes are made by wind
So now let's analyze the situation
Let's think of wind as input
And let's think of sand grains as bits inside a computer
So when the wind blows the program runs and the bits rearrange themselves
And they arrange themselves into a lower dimensional slice of wind
Essentially wind which is a pressure variant phenomenon variable in time
turns into a pictorial phenomenon variant across the pictorial surface
Do you see how that works?
Well, now, sand dunes created by wind
Deposited by wind bear the impression of wind
Lines of foam and beach detritus
Deposited by the incoming tide
Bear the form of waves
So what it was telling me was
It was telling me that
Things formed in time
Bear the impression of the forces which created them
And I said well then what is the equivalent of sand dunes
Or waves of beach detritus in the real world
And it said human beings
Genes
Not grains of sand
Genes are moved by time
And we as hyperdimensional objects
We human beings and other animals
We bear the impression of the forces that created us
And if novelty truly does ebb and flow
The way wind speed ebbs and flows over a landscape
Then the creatures that have arisen in time
And the creatures that have arisen in time
Will bear the imprint of this ebb and flow
And I believe that what was going on
With the people who created the I Ching
Was that they were practicing some kind of yoga
Or some kind of psychedelic plus yoga thing
And they were stilling their macro physical functions
And they were descending deep into organism
And there they were seeing the ebb and flow of variables
Of some sort
And they watched
Who knows how long?
Centuries maybe
And they said you know
In the organism there is the ebb and flow of variables
And then they asked questions like
How many variables are there?
Are there an infinite number?
And they began to create notation systems
For these variables
And finally they came to the conclusion
No, there are not an infinite number
There are 64 of these temporal variables
And think of them as elements
In the same way that the entire world
Of physical manifestation
Can be created out of 104 physical elements
The entire world of temporal manifestation
Can be created out of 64 elements
And so the way I think of reality
Having survived this experience
Is you have hexagrams moving on many levels
Let's say you have a hexagram
Which rules this 10,000 year period
For 10,000 years this hexagram will rule
And then on the next level
The hexagrams are changing every 100 years
And then on the next level every 10 minutes
And on the next level every 15 seconds
Well what any point in the matrix called now
Is is the perspective you have
When you look through the moving film
Of these temporal elements moving on many many levels
You see
They create a unique juxtaposition
With each other in every single moment
And that is what the unique felt presence
Of immediate reality is all about
Well I by this time
Yeah question
No
So you are saying that
That becomes a membrane
Of a huge
The wide membrane
Between the two realities
What?
That position
Where they all come together
Like that's the place
Where you can access both
See I look at that
And always look at the symbol
The teaching symbol
As the guiding symbol
Of this plane of reality
Found by God
So you are talking about
The exact membrane
That is between
Time and yon time
Is that true?
Yeah pretty much
I mean you know
Plato said
Time is the moving image of eternity
It's a wave front
And it's an interference pattern
Yes it's a
It's a
Kind of hologram
And a set of resonances
And interference patterns
That are created
When these waves
Moving at many levels
Of expression
Superimpose
And collide
With each other
And through
The use of small computers
We can explore
Various places
In the wave
And we can position it
Against time
Because what it's saying
Is that novelty
Comes and goes
You know
Yesterday was wonderful
Tomorrow could be dog shit
Same for last year
And next year
Time
Undergoes changes
On many scales
I mean
From moment to moment
If you watch your mind
You're
You're going up
You're going down
And then on the daily scale
Up
Down
Yearly scale
And then on all scales
There is ebb and flow
Of novelty
And all these scales
Can be mathematically
Collapsed into one wave
And then with the computer
You can
Not only predict the future
Which is fairly trivial
Because who can gainsay it
But you can also predict the past
Which is very tricky
Because most people have a good deal more information
About the past
Than they do about the future
Yeah
Is there an infinite level
One year you may have
A larger scale
Going up
But
That's right
Well no
You've got the whole concept correct
Except you don't need an infinite number
Because
Look what happens
If you start with 384 days
And you start multiplying upward
By 64
Remember I said the first one was 67 years
Well you only have to carry out about 6 of these
Till you have 72 billion years
More time than is necessary
For the universe to have birthed itself
And reached its present state
Similarly
If you start dividing
You only have to divide 11 times
To reach the realm of Planck's constant
6.55 times 10 to the minus 23rd erg seconds
In technical parlance known as a jiffy
Beyond the jiffy
There is no need to continue the divisions
Because the jiffy defines the grain of the canvas
On which reality is projected
So what we have are
You know
A cosmology of roughly 22 levels
At the highest level it's 72 billion years
At the lowest level
It's in the realm of Planck's constant
And we are somewhere suspended in between
And these things are coming and going
On every level
Yeah
Well the way that you
Arrogate these conclusions
Doesn't
I don't follow it all
To say the least
However
It seems to me
That you'd be able to
Use this model
Do you see some difference in the waveforms
Around the time of
Shadow Hyatt
Compared to the Third Reich
Absolutely
Do you see differences like that?
Yes
I'm hurrying us toward the more fun part of this
And I think that
We'll do it now
What we're going to do now
Is look at the wave
Placed against history
With my end date
December 22nd, 2012
Although
The machine will accept any end date
And the idea that you should be
Asking yourself
Is
You know
This clown claims
That this thing
Describes the ebb and flow of novelty
But does it in fact
Fit
My intuition
Of the ebb and flow of novelty
Now
Here's the good news
The next part of the lecture
Does not depend on anything
That's been said in the first part
You don't have to understand
Anything I've said in the last half hour
To appreciate the neatness
Of the next level
Lucky for us
Eh?
Is there any way to answer that?
Hmm
That's fine I think
So now
Because you know
Some people aren't interested in this
You tell them you can predict the future
And they say
Well predict it
And then you predict it correctly
And then they say
Great
It never enters their mind
To ask the question
How did you predict it?
Which is what I
Out of
Out of obligation
To intellectual fairness
Feel that I should expose you to
Now
Let's look at
The wave
F
Now
Let me explain
The rules of the game
Here
There are
Six billion years
Currently
On screen
Today
Is over here
At 98.8%
This is the last
Six billion years
And
And let me explain to you
How you interpret the wave
And if you want to take a moment
And rearrange yourselves
The rest of it
Is going to be fairly close focus
On this thing
So
Don't be shy
And don't make yourself uncomfortable
How did the history
Ah
The end date
Ah
It
I got it
By fitting historical data
To the wave
And seeing
I had certain intuitions
I mean
For instance
I said
Well if I have a wave
Which describes historical novelty
By God
It better do well
On the Italian Renaissance
It should do well
On the 20th century
And it should do well
On the golden age of Greece
If a theory of novelty
Incorrectly predicts
Those episodes
It's a pretty worthless
Theory of novelty
Once I had chosen
An end date
And I chose
December 22nd
I got a lot of support
For that
By realizing
That the Mayan calendar
Chose the same end date
Now the only thing
I had in common
With the ancient Maya
Is that we both
Take psychedelic mushrooms
Now is it conceivable
That there is a message
In the mushroom
As specific
As no matter where
In space and time
You are
And you take these mushrooms
It says
December 22nd
2012 AD
It appears so
Because the Mayans
Their civilization
Rose and fell
At a very uninteresting part
Of their own
Calendrical machinery
They predicted
The end of the world
A thousand years
After their own eclipse
And they predicted
The birth of their
Calendary
They set the birth
Of their calendar
A thousand years
Preceding the emergence
Of their civilization
Yeah
So
Now this year
Is this
What the Mayan
Has as a
Completion
Of a large cycle
Or is this
What they are
Believing is
The completion
Of all
Their cycles
It depends
On who you talk
To
The Mayan calendar
Is built up
Of nested cycles
Some
20 years
In length
Some 240
And there are
13 Baktuns
Which I think
A Baktun
Is 396 years
In duration
And most Mayanists
Believe
That
A set
Of 13 Baktuns
Is the complete
Calendrical set
There's a minority
Of Mayanists
Who want to argue
That there are
Greater cycles
Than that
In any case
Baktun 13
Will come to an end
December 22nd
So
You know
It was good enough
For me
Now
Could you say
Just a little bit more
About the property
Of novelty
Is it synonymous
With complexity
Well
You know
If
Since this is a
Push-pull theory
And we have
Novelty versus
Something
The opposite
Of novelty
Is habit
Rupert
Insisted on that
I was calling it
Entropy
And
Conservatism
And
Recidivism
And he said
No, no
It's a war
Between habit
And novelty
Habit means
A reversion
To a traditional
And already established
Pattern
Novelty means
A breaking out
Into a previous
Domain
Untested domain
Of new
Connections
And
And new
Possibilities
As in
You mean
As in
Yes
The unexpected
Is built
Into it
Because when you
Come around
Some of these curves
There are unexpected
Things going on
What about the chaos
Order
Sounds like that
Yeah, well you could think
Of it that way
I haven't completely
Resolved
How novelty
Should be
Defined
Because if you know
Anything about information
Theory
You know that they've had
A hell of a time
Getting a definition
Of complexity
Together over there
They also are interested
In mathematical
Definitions of complexity
But they haven't
Made too much progress
This concludes
Tape 6
Our program
Continues
With Tape 7
Our program
Continues
With Tape 7
Let me
Explain to you
How to read
The graph
Because it's
The exact opposite
Psychologically
Of a
Stock market graph
I think
When you look
At a stock market
Most of us
Want it to go up
Not down
In this game
We want it
To go down
The
Higher
Novelty
Occur as you
Approach 0
So
This is the most
Novel point
On the screen
This is the most
Habit
Impacted
Moment
On the screen
And what you see
Is habit and novelty
Are at war
With each other
Now
Here's how
I interpret
This particular screen
And it
Is a basis
For interpreting
All the rest
This is a turning point
After a long period
Of habit
Consolidation
And recidivism
Whatever that means
At 4.7 billion years ago
Something very novel
Happened
Along this descent
I maintain
That it's actually
The stabilization
Of the surface
Of the earth
Itself
That what we're seeing
Here
Is the earth
Changing into
A stable planetary body
And then
The earliest forms
Of life
The proto-life
Appears
Right here
And
Undergoes
A series
Then
Of fluctuations
Then
There is
Some kind of
A problem
Some impediment
To
What would otherwise
Be the rather
Straight shot
Toward novelty
By this
Spike
Here
Well
Evolutionary biologists
Say
That in the early
History of the earth
There was a crisis
Having to do
With the production
Of oxygen
As a waste gas
Life arose
In a non-reducing
Atmosphere
The first
Pollution crisis
In the history
Complex membranes
And mechanisms
For dealing
With this
And that's
What happened
Along here
And
Once that
Was achieved
Then
The pace
Of novelty
Quickened
And the descent
Continued
And we
Our entire
Civilization
In fact
You know
The last
Billion years
As a matter of fact
Is lost
Down here
In this stochastic
Fluctuation
Near the zero point
Of course
Relative
To these places
In the wave
We're so near
The maximum
Of novelty
That it's practically
Punching in
Through the walls
And in fact
Human civilization
Correctly mirrors
That
I mean
Where you would expect
To find a civilization
On this graph
Is somewhere
Down in here
Well now
If everything
Is working right
Are you at the 98.8%?
Ninety
That's
Yeah
98.8%
The target
Date of today
The target
Date of today
Now
What I'm going to do
Is
There's a zoom
Function here
And we're going to start
Flying toward the present
And every time a screen
Changes
We're going to see
Half as much time
On the screen
We have six billion years up
We'll go to three
Then one and a half
Then point seven five
And so forth
This seems to be
An excellent computer
With a fast chip
So
Let me see
The right hand
Yeah
And we're going to
And we're going to get
Greater and greater detail
And
Your attitude toward this
Should be
I'm asserting
That this is true
You have a notion
Of where the high points
In evolutionary
And human history
Have occurred
You should be asking yourself
Whether this fits
Your intuition
Now obviously
It's pretty vague stuff
When we're looking
At six billion years
But on the other hand
We can take this thing
Down to three days
If necessary
And
We know
Where the great changes
Have come
In the last thousand years
It's not that ambiguous
So let's
Test the zoom function
Zoom
It asks me
Yes
I reply
Seek minimum
It asks me
No
I reply
Approach factor
It asks me
And I'm going to tell it
Two
In order to have
The screen each time
It would accept
Any number
But two
Seems rational
For demonstration purposes
No
It's going to slice
The time
It's going to slice it
Each time
And rescale
I'm just coming up
With minute and hour and day
So is the origin of time here
Also like the origin of the universe
You would presume so
So the big bang
Would kind of
The big bang would be
No
The big bang would be
Very high
Because
There's no life
There's no atomic systems
No
There's no molecules
It's a very low complexity
Situation
At the birth of the universe
That's not the graph
Yeah
No
Yes
That's right
Here
Up here
Okay
Now before I do this
Let me locate escape
Okay
This is such a pleasure
To do it
With fast machines
Okay
There's three billion
See how detail
Is coming up
As time is lost
And if anybody wants me to stop it
At any point
I will
Just read off what it is
Stop it here
Here's 750 million years
This is virtually the entire history
Of life on earth
And in fact
Of higher life
I'm sorry
You know
Organisms
Not
Multicellular life
This is the history
Of multicellular life
And what you see
Is there was a steep descent
Into novelty
Until about
300 million years ago
And then there
Are a series of oscillations
Close to zero
Until
About 65 million years ago
And then there's a sudden plunge
Deeper
Into novelty
Immediately preceding
The concrescence
Which occurs
At dawn
Greenwich mean time
December 22nd
One thing about
This theory
It's not vague
And notice
That it doesn't hedge
On predictions
Either
It fills
Every screen
Full of predictions
Two
Approach factor
Yeah
Okay
We've got
750 million years
On the screen
375 million years
On the screen
Now I want to talk
About this
For a minute
Now this
Is a screen
Full of dramatic predictions
These are
Tremendously
Punctuated
And temporally
Defined
Plunges
Into novelty
And
We don't have
Tremendous
Paleontological
Records
For what's going on
275 million years ago
But from
Studying
These low points
And
Talking to
Geochronologists
About them
I've decided
That
These are
Planetesimal
Impacts
On the earth
Now you know
That the last one
Was 65 million years ago
That's this one
Right there
But there were others
There was one
This one
220 million years ago
Can you define
Oh
Asteroid strikes
On the earth
Oh
Well there was
A little tiny one
In Arizona
Those happen
All the time
In cosmic terms
Every
Hundred thousand years
Or so
But this thing
That happened 65 million years ago
Was a planet shatterer
And
They're rare
Okay
So
So I'm suggesting
That these
Are asteroid impacts
Which then
Evolution
Has to restart
Reclaim its territory
And then
There is something else
Happening
That could not all be
Asteroid impact
They could be
You know
Enormous episodes
Of volcanism
On the earth
Such as the Deccan traps
In India
Or something like that
Now let's start
The thing again
And that was how many
What we're looking at now
Seek minimum
No
Approach factor
Two
Go for it
That's 187 million years
There's the impact
65 million years ago
Now let's look at this
This is the last 93 million years
Ah yes
It looks like the thing
We started out with
Somebody's paying attention
Right on
Yes
See what happens is
A fractal is a nested data set
And every time you pass through
A whole number
The pattern repeats
This sets up a very interesting
Um
Set of circumstances
Inside the wave
Which is that
We can talk about
Temporal resonance
We can talk about
How the Third Reich
Is a resonance
Of ancient Egypt
We can talk about
Saddam Hussein
As a resonance
Of Muhammad
Because
When we look at the way
These things are lined up
Historically
We see that
Directly above
Saddam Hussein
And in a
Relationship of
Parallelism
Is the career
Of the Prophet
And so
What is being suggested here
Is that
Every day
Every moment
Is in fact
An interference pattern
Created by
Other times
And places
This is not
This is a fairly challenging
And peculiar idea
Not
Something the linear
Western mind
Would have ever come up with
So for instance
If you should find yourself
Having lunch
In a place called
Hadrian's Hamburger Stand
This has something
To do
With the Emperor Hadrian
And his four year military campaign
In Scotland
Is a direct causal influence
On your being
At Hadrian's Hamburger Stand
For lunch
I like to say
Rome falls
Nine times an hour
And you have to be
Perceptive
You have to be paying attention
To the ebb and flow
Of your own inner thoughts
But if you are
You feel
The fall of Rome
You also feel
The age of exploration
Of the birth of Buddha
The fall of Carthage
It all happens
Nine times an hour
It also happens
Twice a day
And once a year
Yeah
Sometimes
Yeah
It is very similar
That's right
With astrologers
Where the
scientific positions
were
Yeah
There's
We've never tried
To do it
Scientifically
You know
Where you would actually
Keep track
But
Major
Astrological
Conjunctions
Are often
Interacted
In major
Ingressions
Into novelty
Terence
Interestingly
Have you
Or anyone
Else
That's
Aware of this
Ever tried to
Convolve
With the
Einstein
Spiel equation
No
Because
I'm not smart
Enough
To do that
And what it would
Produce
Would be
Fascinating
I think God
Has chosen you
For this work
Your father
About Saddam Hussein
Just makes me ask
What are the
historical
Hennesses
Oh, well Ronald Reagan, his historical antecedents were the last six Roman emperors before the
fall of Rome in 475. And Bush's antecedent is... No, I think Bush gets to be Justinian.
You remember somebody said history always occurs twice, first as tragedy, then as farce. That person had a good intuitive...
So now, let's go into this a little more. How much time do we have? Oh, 93 million years. Okay, so here's the...
Here's the asteroid impact and dead on, I mean 65 million years is right there to the degree that we can date these two events.
It's a winner. It's a bullseye. And you know, it was a huge setback for organic life.
As I said this morning, nothing larger than a chicken survived it. The mammals began their radiation.
And these are, you know, just different vicissitudes. I'm not sure what to make of this spike here,
but I haven't really spent a lot of time on that period from 40 to 36 million years ago.
Somebody else may have a notion as to what this represents.
Which it was. Evolutionary biologists say, you know, that forms quickly reoccupied all the niches.
And remember, if this hadn't happened, we wouldn't be the planetary rulers that we are.
We'd still be little furry creatures trying to steal eggs out of the nests of the saurian masters who ruled the planet.
Why? Because all the dinosaurs were killed in this impact.
And that allowed these little egg-stealing rodent-like furry creatures to undergo an explosive evolutionary radiation
leading directly to our own vast superiority over the rest of nature.
Yeah? Yeah? No? Yeah?
Oh, that's a whole different scale. You see, the dinosaurs died off 65 million years ago.
The ice ages are a phenomenon of the last 5 million years.
And we'll see the ice ages, but not there. Right now, those ice ages are down in here.
Somewhere lost in the detail. Let's go back to our Zoom.
We'll get there, won't we? Oh yeah, we'll get there.
I'm waiting for you to get to my writing slot.
Don't worry. No, we don't want to seek the minimum. The approach factor should be 2.
Okay, 93 million years on the screen. 46 million years on the screen.
23 million, 11 million, 5 million. 5 million years on the screen.
Now, here are your ice ages. Here they are. You see, when the ice is in place, species are bottled up and gene transfer is impeded.
This constitutes a non-novel situation. Then when the ice melts, these gene pools re-encounter each other and you get proliferation of form.
We're getting excellent agreement here. This is the melting of the last glacier. Maybe.
The last glacier was about 13,000 years ago. Yeah, I think it's actually over here. Still lost in detail.
But these are, you know how evolution is described as punctuated. How it isn't that evolution proceeds smoothly,
but there will be a climaxed stasis and then suddenly many new species.
Well, these are the punctuated evolution. This is actually a picture of punctuated evolution.
And the high numbers of species are down in these troughs and the low numbers of species are on these ascents,
close to the changeover points. So, again, the paleontological data isn't that clear.
But at this scale of resolution, we're getting good agreement between data and theory.
Are these different nests identical in both amplitude and phase? Do you know, Prince?
I mean, maybe it does. In other words, can you take the section that you're looking at,
superimpose it over this other nest and you can have it overlay identically or the phase shifts?
Well, they are topologically equivalent, but not numerically equivalent.
Right, amplitude is going to be different. The whole wave is actually regenerated.
That's right. It's a damped oscillation is really what we're seeing.
I just wondered if there's any other phase shifts because that's one of the things that an FFT could...
I mean, this is an ideal wave for an FFT and it's relatively easy to do.
Yeah, well, I hope you'll be on it by Monday afternoon.
Okay, let me restart the zoom. No, I'm restarting the zoom. Zoom, yeah.
I have a question. Okay.
About magnetic k?
Yes, these could very well be magnetic reversals.
Yeah, they very well could be magnetic reversals.
And...
Well, what we're looking at is I'm suggesting they're ice ages.
It was suggested that they're geomagnetic reversals.
Geomagnetic reversals and ice ages may even have links to each other.
Do we see anything there that might indicate the increase of the human construct range?
Well, we see that over here a steep descent into novelty going deeper than we've ever gone before.
And that would probably indicate that an animal or an organ has appeared of a density of complexity greater than anything which preceded it.
So I would say yes.
How low is that?
Well, let me start the zoom and we'll get over in here on a big scale and then you can see.
Okay, we're going to go from five million down to two million.
Now let's discuss this.
Because this is the domain in which we evolved.
Our story is on screen at this point.
It's said that a hundred thousand years ago at the Colossus Cave river mouth in South Africa there were homo sapiens indistinguishable from the people sitting in this room.
The oldest homo sapiens skeletons are from there.
That's clear over here.
This is the panjida radiation, meaning the proliferation of these primate forms.
And that's about 900 million years ago.
This is the whole period in which the primates were breaking away from the rest of nature.
And this is I think probably where the mushrooms begin to come into the picture.
And see how the whole system is propelled into lower levels of novelty than anything which preceded it.
Higher levels of novelty.
When the wave moves down, novelty is increasing.
Zoom.
Yes.
Minimum.
That's one way of saying it.
Or increased density of connection.
Or it means something happening which has never happened before which allows novelty to build upon itself.
We talked about this a little bit yesterday about how the early universe was very simple and then came ordinary chemistry and then organic chemistry and then life and then complex life and then higher animals and then primitive human beings and then language and culture and then computers and particle accelerators.
And all of this representing steeper and steeper descents into novelty headed toward a confrontation with novelty at infinite density.
Not millennia or millennia in the future, but twenty years from now.
It's not only that something's being created that was never created before, but it's being stored or incarnate in the entire system.
Conserved is the word I use.
But yes, that's right.
And how does this relate to the fact that the last twenty years cycle of the mind calendar ended in June 28th and that we're entering the supposedly last twenty years of the calendar?
Am I correct?
That's right.
Well, when we get to the present, you'll be able to see, you know, the past few months, the next few months, the next few years.
We approach it this way because I want to convince you that there's something sort of woo-woo about this thing.
It does seem to have an uncanny predictive ability.
Now, the most commonly met objection to this, and it may be forming in your mind, is that this guy just doesn't understand patterns and that every pattern can be used to describe a different pattern.
But I resist this because notice that this whole set of correlations is dependent upon this zero date which we inputted.
If we shift the zero date, then all the other predictions would be thrown off.
Well, now, naturally, if we shift the zero date fifty years, it's not going to have a hell of an effect on an event 175 million years ago.
But if we move the date fifty years and we look at 1492, you know, it's all screwed up.
You have to be right on the money when you get into the historical data field because the historical data field can vary over a 24-hour period.
I mean, John F. Kennedy dead, John F. Kennedy alive, the difference is ten minutes.
So it can be very, it can be very highly quantified, specific, yeah.
Okay, enter.
That's two million, roughly three million years on the screen.
One and a half million years on the screen.
Seven hundred thousand.
Let's look at this for a minute.
This is the last million years.
And the last hundred thousand years are right there.
This is the emergence of modern human types.
And it sets off the last cascade, at least at this scale.
So all of this is evolutionary advance and climatological flux and so forth.
And then from the time the modern human type emerges, it's a straight shot down in there.
Now, obviously we all know more about time as we get closer to the present.
This is 366,000 years.
It's a hundred thousand years up there.
There's the last two hundred thousand years.
There's the last hundred thousand years.
This is the environment in which we were shaped.
These are very, these are climatological fluctuations here.
The last, this is the last glaciation.
Oh, I forgot.
It's shipped to the computer.
Sorry.
Is it dying or is it having a good time?
It's an, it's a, it's a, I forgot it does that.
Anyway, it's a very happy computer.
What are you doing this evening?
You can't, when Harry met Sally, remember that orgasm in the restaurant?
Remember the orgasm in the restaurant when Harry met Sally?
Vaguely.
Okay.
This is the last 91,000 years.
The glaciers melt here.
The glacial melt begins around 19,000 years ago.
And as you see, it's just a straight fall from there to the moon flight and to H. Ross Perot and to all the rest of it.
And these are, again, episodes probably of glaciation or flux in the incidents of incoming cosmic radiation.
It's hard to say what it is.
Have you spoken about it in the last three or four days only?
Oh, yeah.
We can go down.
We can take it down to very small.
I mean, understand that the program does many wonderful things which we're not doing.
I'm just doing a simple demo, but obviously all this stuff has got to be about something.
Now we're getting into the area where people have real data.
That's 45,000 years.
22,000 years on the screen.
Let's look at this for a minute.
This is worth talking about.
Now we, now the pressure begins to come on.
It's all very well to predict interglacials that may or may not have occurred.
Predicting assassinations of dynastic families is a little trickier.
Here's the glacial melt begins.
And species, this is the descent, this is where the mushroom paradise existed in its fullest expression.
From about 17,000 years ago to about 10,000 years ago.
Well, now what is this sudden interruption of the descent into novelty here?
I maintain based on the archeological record that it's what is called the Tanged Point Technocomplex.
Do you all know what that is?
Does anybody know what it is?
Tanged Point Technocomplex means that before this point, when an arrowhead is found, you find one.
It means it was lost by somebody who was hunting.
Around 10,000 B.C. you begin to find large numbers of arrowheads all in one place
without chipping fragments.
This was not an arrowhead factory.
This was the site of a battle between human populations.
War is invented here because agriculture is invented here.
You're looking at the end of the partnership paradise.
The era of orgy gives way to the era of anxious monogamy, warfare, agriculture,
you know, ego-hood is born.
Now, somebody asked about, who asked about chatalhyayuk?
Somebody.
Chatalhyayuk, bottom of this stab here.
The fire that burned through chatal level 5A occurred in 6500 B.C.
We know this from charcoal dating.
It's right there.
It's on the money.
See, somehow this whole Tang Point techno-complex bummer was overcome.
And there was a steep descent into novelty.
And chatalhyayuk was the product of that.
But then it was destroyed and there was a rebound into chuckle-headedness for a while.
And then right down here in the bottom of this thing is where the Great Pyramid is sitting.
You know, the Great Pyramid was finished in September of 2970 B.C.
Why this should be so controversial, I do not understand.
Because there are grains of charcoal between the unmoved stones.
That charcoal has not been anywhere since the day that stone was set in place.
And it's 2790 B.C.
These people who want to push it back and say it's 10,000 years old.
Well, the obligation to prove is on them because the carbon radiological data argues.
You see, there's some tendency in the New Age, which I don't understand very well,
that wants to make everything older than it is.
You know, the pyramids are 50,000 years old.
Atlantis rose and fell 100,000 years ago.
The miracle is how new everything is.
The pyramids were built day before yesterday.
Charlemagne was king of France early this morning.
It's all very, very recent.
I mean, the emergence of mind out of non-mind is an event practically on top of us.
Now let's start it up and we'll get really down to the...
Well, yes, in a sense, because you see what happens is when you...
It's a built-in mathematical property of this wave that when you get to the end of a big wave,
there's... when you get to the end on any scale, there's a sudden drop to the next scale.
And then it goes along to the end and then there's a sudden drop.
So if what we're saying is that a universe is made like...
A universe that actually had this structure that I outlined for you of 26 levels where each level was 164th smaller than the level which preceded it...
A universe built on that kind of architectonics would only be halfway through its life an hour and 35 minutes before the end.
Do you see how that would work?
That in the last hour and 35 minutes, it's going to go through as much development as it went through in the previous 72 billion years.
So yes, time is accelerating, accelerating into...
You know, we've gone from barely moving to approaching a staggering speed.
And I maintain, you know, that in 2012, the last six days preceding the approach to concrescence will be the jackpot.
I mean, the laws of physics will break down.
Everything will be in a state of visible, motile transformation.
This isn't happening in the human world.
It isn't happening in our minds.
It's a crisis in the structure of physical law itself.
And that's why people...
That's why this theory will be hard to disprove or prove until so close to the end date
that you'll barely have time to make a telephone call to say whether it's true or not
before, if it is true, your telephone call becomes totally irrelevant, you know.
What you're essentially saying is the fabric based on itself as being contorted, twisted, and involved...
Yeah, that's right.
You won't use that particular...
No, that's right.
And if that seems unlikely to you, let's always...
Let's never forget what the Orthodox guys are peddling.
They're peddling the Big Bang Theory, which says the universe sprang from nothing in a single instance.
I would prefer what I call the big surprise cosmology.
Because it seems to me if you have to have a singularity, the least likely place to find a singularity would be in a featureless high vacuum.
If you want to find a singularity, look in a corner of the universe where there are planets, stars, elements, organisms, alphabets, civilizations, minds.
In other words, look in a complex domain if you want to find a singularity.
That's where you might have some chance of finding it.
But finding it in an unflawed nothingness is a strange place to look, even.
One of the arguments maybe being proposed by those on the fringe is that, in fact, it's a very complex universe that's been pushed through a membrane into the singularity, which then creates another entire...
Well, one possibility is that it's a wrap-around, that we're just not whistling Dixie when we talk about the archaic revival.
What history is, is a finger reaching for the reset button, and when you finally touch it, you find yourself at the moment of the Big Bang.
You know, you've actually sent it screaming back to the first moment.
So this is an exercise in holographics, in a sense.
That final six days is a very pertinent, potent holographic description of the whole baby.
That's right.
And every cycle is a holographic description of the cycles that preceded it.
That we've just seen.
Right.
So in 1945, when the bomb flickers into existence over Hiroshima, this is the resonance of the Big Bang.
It's being caused by the Big Bang.
And the entire life of the universe is then somehow reenacted in the remaining 67 years.
In the same way, remember, there was a 4,306-year cycle.
We are reenacting that cycle in the present 67-year cycle.
We have reached AD 700 right now.
I mean, if you wonder why things are so benighted, it's because we're in the heart of the dark ages.
You wonder why you can't understand the nature of the collapse of the state vector.
Well, it's because you have an AD 700 intellectual machine looking at it.
My God, the calculus hasn't been invented.
Algebra hasn't been invented.
The new world hasn't been discovered.
These things will all happen ahead of us.
Right now, we are in the heart of the dark ages.
By the late 90s, we'll be closing distance with the Renaissance.
Clearly, we have to put up with a bunch of Christ or fundamentalism, epidemic diseases,
and general not-headedness until we get to that point.
But then, after the turn of the century, we can expect the equivalent of the Renaissance, the Industrial Reformation, the rise of Napoleon, the Civil War, Adolf Hitler.
It'll just be coming quick, quick, quick, quick, and finally, you know, it just pulls you in, and everything happens at once.
One way of thinking of this is that the entire rest of the future history of the universe is being compressed into the next 20 years.
But in other words, the heat death of the universe is 20 years away, essentially, is what is being suggested, because time is beginning to accelerate at such a rate that this compression factor is enormous.
Okay, now, let me see, what have we got? We've got 22,000 years on the screen, and we talked about it, so let me shift here.
Oh, no, zoom, yes. Is that minimum? No.
Yes, I think, you know, Jeremy Rifkin wrote a book. Anybody read it? What was it called? Nobody read it. It was called...
Anyway, the premise of the book was that time is accelerating, but he thought of it as social time, cultural time.
I don't. I think it's embedded in the fabric of space-time itself.
Yes, I think in a few... You see, you can only react to crises that you understand.
So if I tell you the ozone hole is disappearing, you're alarmed.
If I tell you an asteroid is going to strike the Earth, you're alarmed.
But if I tell you that the Earth is about to collide with a hyper-dimensional knot in the nexus of space-time...
You know? But that's what's happening. Ahead of us is an enormous speed bump.
We are colliding... We're about to collide with something that we can barely cognize.
So it's hard to know what to think about it. Yeah?
This may be a little la-la and a bit simplistic, but consider this...
You know, we all have experience of this sort of shifting of time and just the experience of one lifetime.
You know, as a two- or three-year-old, the moment as we experienced it seemed to last a longer period of time.
I mean, my God, summer has lasted forever and whatnot. We don't have that.
And it's sort of... Well, that's what happens over the course of a lifetime.
What happens if consciousness shifts out to infinity?
What happens to the moment then? It becomes vanishingly small, or in terms of the frequency...
It stops. It stops. Yeah, well see...
Before it stops, it's speeding up. In other words, the span is becoming shorter and shorter.
Say if you take a second, the seconds will become shorter.
That means, in effect, that the whole process is speeding up until it collapses.
Yes, it's possible that dying takes forever.
Right. You see.
That's what...
And so, you know, you start to die, and then you die, and die, and then you realize you're going to die forever,
and never approach it, because the seconds become stretched into millions of years.
It's something like that. It's about...
And I think psychedelics are about the fabric of time.
When you strip away the hallucinations, and the personal reference, and the craziness,
the bare bones of it are...
It's about time. It illuminates what time is.
Yeah.
Something I have to add to is that you're moving to Highlander,
and they have a term called the quickening.
And I've noticed a lot of people in ecstasy circles on x,
feel this sense of quickening time, of something approaching,
when time is quickening towards that end point.
And people seem, more or less, on ecstasy to be a lot more epicent and eugenic towards that.
Yeah. I mean, see, part of the problem with perceiving what's going on
is that we're like mayflies or something.
I mean, we live so briefly that to us it looks like the world is standing still.
But, in fact, staggering amounts of change are going on.
I mean, the automobile is a hundred years old, for crying out loud.
We can't conceive of a reality without the automobile.
So, and just in my lifetime, you know, I've seen immense change.
So, and this is going to accelerate eventually to the point
where I believe they'll hold conferences on the acceleration of time,
and people will, boards will be appointed to try and figure out
if anything can be done about it, and stuff like that.
I know you have a distaste for quantum physics,
but there was a conference, apparently, last spring in Spain.
Actually, it was a conference of astrophysics, I believe,
because I heard some of the reports on it.
And a serious topic of discussion was the fact that,
trying to attempt to answer the question, does time exist?
I mean, this was being serious on the agenda at some astrophysics conference.
Yeah, time is the great misunderstood or un-understood quantity in our lives, for sure.
Terence?
Yep?
You refer to those Orthodox guys and their Big Bang theory.
Right.
So you reject the Big Bang theory.
I don't necessarily reject it.
I just think they shouldn't sneer at me when their theory is so cockamamie.
I mean, in other words, I haven't proposed anything weirder than the Big Bang.
Saying that a universe can condense itself faster and faster down into a super-novel object,
sounds to me like a considerably more conservative statement
than to say that a universe can spring from nothing for no reason in a single instant.
They've cornered the market on the unlikely approach to cosmology.
If you have any book to read.
Thank you.
Do they refer to as an alternative to that?
To their theory? No, but I'm going to write one.
There's actually been a serious debate on the whole topic.
I mean, there was a book recently published in the last year.
Did the Big Bang happen? It was written by another cosmologist.
Well, the Big Bang looked like it was in real trouble as recently as six months ago,
but the new data from this, is it OGOS-3 or one of these satellites,
they finally actually found irregularities in the microwave background.
And until they found some irregularities, they were in a real mess
because they couldn't figure out how you get from the super smooth initial conditions
to the clumpy present situation.
Now this new data appears to have pulled their chestnuts out of the fire.
But I think the Big Bang may be in need of serious revision.
I mean, you have the inflationary, the super-inflationary cosmology
as an attempt to fix some of those problems.
But it gets, you know, there are problems, yeah.
Well, of course, if it's true that this derivation of the change of the fly,
then you would expect small fluctuations in the background radiation
because of the practical nature of what it talks about.
That's right.
What did he say exactly?
I can't remember the exact quote, but he, in fact, said that events would be speeded up in the time of events.
Yeah, that's absolutely right.
If we get a little deeper into this, we can even discuss maybe why he would have said such a thing
because I think we can illuminate it.
Here, let's do a little more.
We've got 22,000 years on the screen, 11,000 years on the screen, 5,000 and some.
This is, in a way, my favorite screen because this book I want to write I'm going to call History's Fractal Mountain.
And there it is, folks. History's Fractal Mountain.
Chatalyayuk is over here in the bottom of this.
Along this descending gradient here, like pearls on a string, you get the great ancient civilizations.
Ur, Chaldea, Babylon, and Egypt.
And this actually, the graph actually confirms the intuition of the theosophical mentality
that Egypt did achieve some level of advance that was not surpassed until late Roman times.
That there was a tremendous breakthrough on the part of these civilizations.
This negative habitual or recidivist upward curve is studded with a whole bunch of warlike male dominator civilizations.
The Hittites, the Mitanni, the Assyrians, and up here at the top, Mycenaean pirates overwhelm the last outpost of the goddess culture on Minoan Crete.
This is Homer, right there. Homer sings his song.
And if that, that to me fits, because I had a professor who once said to me, you want to know where it went wrong?
I'll tell you where it went wrong.
When these Greeks pulled their boats up on the shore and stopped being fishermen and started talking philosophy, the shit hit the fan.
And that's precisely what happened. There it is. You see this steep, steep descent into novelty.
And then, after the fall of Rome, oscillation around the mean where it's sort of up, it's sort of down.
But there's no real progress until the Industrial Reformation. I mean, in the Industrial Revolution of the 1740s.
Well, that makes sense, because any kind of attempt at descend into novelty or ascend into novelty would have been suppressed by an emerging church at the time.
That's right. Well, of course, this isn't Eurocentric. It's global.
Oh, you mean where is the birth of Christ?
Roughly, it's right here. There's a little kind of a choke and then a very steep fall right afterwards.
That's the birth of Christianity, of the Roman Empire versus the Republic, and so forth.
Because I read the tapes here. I mean, these are all the BC numbers, 36 BC.
Yeah.
But you're right about in there, then.
Yeah, it's sort of...
Straight up at that minimum.
Yeah, right about there.
Well, let's see, and we may get it on the next pass.
The thing that novelty has now gone to...
...and it around the human civilization.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's bad, it's mutual.
You mean as opposed to general speech or whatever?
Yeah.
Well, it wasn't... at first it was physical.
It was that... it was that atomic physics gave way to chemistry, which gave way to molecular biology,
which gave way to life.
It keeps moving, it keeps being active at the front of the wave, but it leaves a residuum behind it of these previously created structures.
Right now, the wave is clearly lodged in our species, while everything else is under the aegis of Darwinian mechanics.
We're apparently under the aegis of cultural mechanics.
Well, absolutely.
It depends on the intensity of the prominent feature.
You know, if a meteor came in, in the middle of some of this, it would obliterate what you're seeing there, and another feature would stand out in the way of it.
Yeah, that's right.
It's not really being dominant or dictated by human life, but it just so happens that it's more...
It seems like the thing that you're measuring change.
Well...
It seems like the quantity being measured changed here.
How so?
It seems like the first we are cosmological, now we're in traffic.
I mean, I'm really...
This is very speculative stuff.
It keeps condensing toward...
It keeps...
It builds on complexity.
Wherever there is complexity, you will get more complexity.
It doesn't build on simplicity.
It builds on the last, most complex achievement, see.
So, intelligence rests on animal organization, which rests on cellular biology, which rests on molecular biology, which rests on physio...
I found one.
You got it.
Okay.
Uh...
Two.
That could be clarified by a transform of the way.
Now, pretty soon we're...
Now, there is the descent.
Here, let's stop and look.
Uh...
The...
Crucifixion is right there.
And, it's interesting.
You know, Christ was an absolute contemporary of Caesar Augustus.
So, you get this great religious reformer, at the same time that you get the great reformer of Roman polity.
So, two of the most important personalities who ever lived are alive at that point.
That, strangely enough, does not win the prize.
See this deep little chip here?
If we were to blow that up and look at the bottom of that trough, there was a moment when you could have had a dinner party.
When Lao Tzu, Confucius, Mencius, Pythagoras, and Ezekiel could have all gotten drunk together.
Uh...
Had they been able to find each other.
Right back there in the...
Immediately preceding the Greek Renaissance.
Now, the fall of Rome is in 475, right there.
And, you see how the time after the fall of Rome is all of a certain general character clear up to 1700.
And, then, certain technologies and mathematical techniques propel to an even deeper level of novelty.
Now, the next screen is the one that I think is probably where we either win or lose you.
Look at the overall shape of that wave.
It's clear that there's an overlying principle at work here.
I mean, the birth and death of Christ is practically noise on that curve.
Uh...
I mean...
There's a deep, strong move into novelty and those superpositions of those events are relatively...
That's true.
He was arguing that maybe Christ was a...
What?
Well, it just points out that it's not being driven by what we would perceive as...
No, it's not being driven by these great personalities.
They are being driven by it.
I'm sure that if you could have stepped into Christ's mind while he was undergoing the passion...
The main question he was asking himself was...
What is going on?
You know, why do I say what I do?
Why do I do what I do?
I don't seem to be my own person.
You know, I seem to be a puppet of some cosmic force.
Because he was a puppet of some cosmic force.
You see, the transcendental object at the end of time...
Is like one of those reflecto balls that hang in discos, you know?
And as it turns and spins...
It sends off distorted reflections of itself which ricochet into the past.
And if you are correctly situated...
It will turn you into a Christ.
Or a Buddha.
Or a Lao Tzu.
If you are not quite correctly situated...
It turns you into a modern Blavatsky.
A Meister Echo.
In other words, second stringers.
If it's...
You know, if you just get a little of it...
Well, then you're a person with strange insights and great personal charisma.
And the people around you love you.
We all are very close to this thing.
Every night when you dream...
You come into the presence of the transcendental object at the end of time.
We are all distorted reflections of the last thing.
And as we get closer and closer to the eschaton, the last thing...
The distortion begins to leave.
And you say, my God, it's like watching a photograph from an SX-70 develop.
First it's just Merck and then you say...
And then you say, oh, there's a person there and it's getting clearer and clearer.
You know, we are actually being pulled into the attractor...
The veils are being parted.
The truth is becoming more and more and more eminent.
And in the final confrontation with it...
You know, it's the apotheosis.
It's the apocalypse, the apotheosis, the apocatastasis.
A whole bunch of Greek words beginning with A.
No.
Well, that would mean the things we're going to really carry about is Christmas.
Okay.
Did you enter a time span in there too?
Well, no, it picked up the time span that we had.
See, it just accepted the correction.
Thank you very much.
Good thinking.
Now, is it all right?
Yes.
Okay.
Now, this is the screen upon which the theory will stand or fall.
Because this is the screen that is filled with the history that we know.
We're not talking fossil records or chatalyayuk or any of that.
We're talking very precise dates.
It's saying that there was a very steep descent into novelty around 948 A.D.
What is this?
What is it set to again?
1400 years.
And this first steep descent into novelty is the intellectual flowering of Islam within the confines of the Umayyid and Abbasid caliphate and the invention of algebra.
An intellectual tool that sets the stage for modern science.
Essentially, this is the birth of modern science.
And you see how steep, sudden and precipitous it was.
Okay.
Then you go over to this next one.
And let me try something here since this is such a fast machine.
See, I'm moving the little pointer and it's telling me exactly what I'm pointing at.
I haven't done this for you before.
But this is very good for checking these things.
Oh, to know exactly the date.
To know exactly.
Yes, we're pointing at the exact date.
And I want to get it over here to the bottom of this sucker.
1121, the first crusade, the collapse of fortress Europe.
This is the beginning of the globalization of the European mind.
We're dead on here.
Okay.
Now the next steep descent into novelty is this one, obviously.
Let's go over there and see what it is.
There it is.
1430.
Oh, no.
1358.
I'm sorry.
Just a minute here.
Let me get my ducks in a row.
Okay.
Do we all agree it's pointing at the bottom of the thing?
Yes.
It's at the end of the novel, not the beginning of the novel.
No, that's the densest point of the novelty.
And it's 1354.
What happened in 1354?
That's right.
One third of the population of Europe dies in an 18 month period beginning in late 1354.
The greatest demographic collapse that Europe has ever experienced.
It's an absolute hit, dead on.
Now let's go over here to this.
Now notice though that the recovery is quick.
There's a steep descent into novelty and an almost immediate reversion back up to the same level of habit.
Exactly.
Business as usual.
But this next one is different.
It's a steep descent into novelty.
And then it really stays down for a long time and explores this.
So let's go over to the turning point, which is up at the top.
Karen, do you cross-reference this with Indian culture and Chinese culture?
It's global.
It's global, but having said that, you have to notice that the world is now dominated by European values and culture.
So while we can chart the ebb and flow of the Han Dynasty, at this point European culture is moving to the fore
because European culture is beginning to put its imprint on all of world history.
This concludes tape seven.
Our program continues with tape eight.
Continues with tape eight.
But you also can't forget this is a superposition of many factors.
That's right.
This is a picture of a resonance pattern, an interference pattern of many times and places.
Now up here at the top of this thing, at the very top, it's 1455.
What happened in 1455?
Does anyone know?
Columbus was born.
What?
Columbus was born?
Thanks for playing.
In 1455, Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Turk, making European access to the Far East impossible.
Therefore, the age of exploration begins and you get Vasco da Gama and all those people.
This was a tremendously shattering event for European civilization to lose Constantinople to the Ottoman Turk.
Now let's go over to, or wait, back, I mean, to this place.
This is another very seminal event which combined with this Constantinople loss sets the stage for this descent into novelty.
Even though it's way up here in habit, there's a little chip out as there's a novel invention of some sort that happened in 1540.
1440, I'm sorry.
The invention is the invention of printing in Mainz in 1440.
That did it, friends, as far as most people are concerned.
Enlarge it one set now?
Good idea.
One more.
Yeah, let's do one zoom.
I think I have to move it over clear all the way before we do that zoom or there'll be some kind of a screw-up.
Yeah, we'll focus on that one.
Right.
Let me...
Well, I'm glad you like it because it's my best trick.
Not that.
You only have one for Macintosh.
I do, I do.
Oh, you do?
You do?
It's just we haven't written the manual yet.
Oh.
How much are we going to do?
Do you know?
Oh, hard to say.
Oh, you're bad, yeah.
Okay, now it's pointing at today.
Now let's do our zoom.
Approach factor two.
Strange that it didn't ask for the seek minimum, isn't it?
Okay.
Now we're seeing the same thing again.
We're just seeing it in higher detail.
But what I'll fudge by telling you that up here 1455, down here 1492.
Along this screaming descent into novelty are all the painters of the Quattrocento.
This is the Italian Renaissance, this descent into novelty.
And this is the era of exploration, 1492.
Good, huh?
Good, good.
The absolute thing is in 1485.
And all the painters of the Italian Renaissance are along this thing.
Now notice that in 1492, there isn't an instant rebound.
There's 1492.
But instead, because this lost half of the planet has been discovered, this sets off the age of discovery.
And habit is unable to reassert itself.
Because too much peculiar data is flowing in.
Too many new lands, peoples, materials, philosophies, alphabets, languages, sexual styles, cuisines.
And it's like they're overwhelmed.
However, after a while, they get their act together and manage to turn it into hell itself.
Right there.
Right.
Figurant.
What that is, what ends the era of discovery and optimism and psychedelic exotica is the Thirty Years' War.
The Thirty Years' War begins in 1619.
It ends in 1648.
It begins with Europe medieval.
It ends with Europe modern.
Parliaments have replaced popes and kings.
The whole name of the game has been changed.
Now, the Thirty Years' War lasts, as I said, until 1648.
Sorry.
1648.
At the bottom of this cut in here, which is in a situation of rising habit,
there nevertheless is a strong tendency toward novelty reaching a culmination in 1677.
Newton publishes the Principia.
The celestial mechanics are put on a firm basis.
The calculus has been invented.
The modern, the world of modern science is now completely in place.
Then, and, and what, aside from the Thirty Years' War, what Europe is exporting to the rest of the world,
on this hellish upswing, is slavery, the patron system, forced labor, brutal return to habitual methods of the past.
You may not know that slavery died with the fall of the Roman Empire.
If you owned a slave during the medieval period, you owned one slave.
It was a house slave.
And it proved, your ownership of this person proved that you were a person of immense wealth.
It would be like owning a beach bonanza today.
It's beyond owning a Rolls Royce.
And, but, the need for a drug, strangely enough, the drug being sugar, reversed this.
And in the 1440s, they began buying Africans and taking them to the Canary Islands to work sugar.
So, you know, the whole, the moral power of Western civilization could not stand in the way of the reestablishment of slavery and the sugar trade.
Now, up here at the top of this thing, there is a steep, there's a twist, a turn right there.
In 1739, this is the European Enlightenment.
The European Enlightenment was the great intellectual step that set the stage for secular civilization.
People like Voltaire.
People like this, this is a rule.
That's immediate.
That is a brutalist.
In 17ありがとう mood growth.
Yes.
We kind of know how those people care and out of that came two revolutions.
Well, the Inquisition would have been, I presume, a fairly un-novel thing since what it was was a power group torturing the helpless, which there's nothing new in that, for heaven' sake.
It went on for a long time in a note.
It was a Spanish phenomenon. It was confined geographically to a number to a very small number of places
right there
August 1st
The American Revolution takes place as a consequence of this steep descent into novelty at the beginning of the European
Enlightenment well as you know the American Revolution is generally thought to have had a happy
conclusion
the French Revolution
not so happy and
If you explode that area and look you can see that they're happening on different slopes of this thing then the restoration of Louis-Napoleon
In 1803 is there. This bump is the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War
which were the first modern wars and completely distorted the demographics of the United States and Europe and
now I want to
The Franco-Prussian War began in 18
I think and the Civil War was 1865
let's uh
I want to go over here to
I think you're right. I didn't feel right about saying that and that would
1848 was the year of revolution, but the Franco-Prussian War was at the same time as the American Civil War. You're right
Okay, there's today's date. Now let's do the approach
Approach factor
Okay, that's 357 years on the screen. You see the American and French Revolutions
The Franco-Prussian War and the American Civil War, the 20th century
Now let's look at the 20th century
And this is, remember how I said that the Great Pyramids were at the bottom of this trough
Uh, at a higher level and now we're seeing the same pattern again. What we get at the bottom of this trough here is, um
The Third Reich
And to show you how the resonances work
Think about the Third Reich in relationship to ancient Egypt
First of all, probably the word Fuhrer can be traced to the word Pharaoh
These, if this is the same concept of a master leader
In addition, the Third Reich and ancient Egypt
Shared an obsession with large-scale tasteless architecture
In addition, both civilizations had a real tendency to lean on the Jews
So, you see, you get this strange kind of microscope on a historical
I mean, most people, I think, would not associate ancient Egypt to the Third Reich
And yet, when you begin listing the similarities
You see, in a way, one is a reflection of the other
Okay, within the 20th century
This is somewhere like 1903
You know, Einstein was in 1905
The general theory, I think
Which came first, the general or the special?
Special came first in 1905
And the general came slightly later
Down here, in the bottom of this trough
Let me show you
Right there
Hitler becomes Chancellor of Germany
And then all of World War II
Is fought in the bottom of that trench
Here's 39
Here's August 39
That's June
That's September
So that's when it begins
And see how
Even though it's a novel situation
Because it's a war
It's a recursion to habit
So at the bottom of a trough of novelty
You get a little upward pimple of recursion to habit
Then
Let's look at
There it is
That's Hiroshima
Right there
And Nagasaki
Right there
The war ends
And
Novelty is left behind
And remember that the psychology of the post-war mind was
Everybody wanted things to just get back to normal
I mean, certainly the Europeans wanted things to get back to normal
Their whole scene had been bombed into the stone age
And in this country people just wanted to get their place in the suburbs
And marry the girl next door
And have a slew of kids
And buy a Chevrolet
And forget about, you know, thousand year millennial plans
And all the rest of it
And so this is the post-war, cold war era
And it lasts
Let's look
Oh, there's 1952
Here's
The launching of Sputnik is there
Sputnik is there
Three
Sputnik is there
And
Sputnik is there
Could
have a
院
No, no. October 1st, 1957. A day graven on my mind till they lower my box. The first
American satellite was launched right around there, Explorer 1. Give me the date. Okay,
there's the assassination of John Kennedy, as close as I can get it at this resolution.
If I go back one, I'm before it. So you see it's right at the bottom of that steep stab that takes place against this other thing.
What turned it around? You mean what's the turning point? I thought you'd never ask.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And what is it?
Oh, I'm about to get it for you. There it is. August 1967. It's the summer of love.
Not only does this thing illuminate history, it also, you know, fulfills my deepest inner delusion.
So, and remember I said when we were looking at history's fractal mountain that this was Homer up here.
So, then you can see that the freak thing, the hippies were like the pre-Hellenic Greeks.
I mean, all those, you know, all that bra-lessness and loose-fitting clothes and tambourines and ecstatic,
Bacchanalian with a philosophical undertone. I mean, it was a Greek mentality that broke out in 1967.
Well, then here's the long descent into, you know, the dreary present moment.
And what can I show you here? Richard Nixon getting the axe. Yeah.
Now we're into the Reagan era down here. Yeah. Yeah, I'm going to cut it.
I'm just trying to get back to today. There it is. Okay. Cut it. Zoom. Yes. Approach Factor 2. Enter.
Well, it's going to be... There it is. That's the hippie thing and then the descent.
Now that's in the, that's the eight, the seventies and the eighties. That's the last 11 years.
I want to stop it here. Now, now, see how tight it has to be to work.
Remember that we've been looking at this thing from, we've descended from six billion years to 11 years.
We have predicted asteroid impacts, glaciations, speciations, the rise and fall of empires.
Now we're down to the short and curly, I would think. Let's take a look here at what we've got.
Who, I suppose, now we're all experts on this phase of things because we've all just lived through.
I don't see anyone here under 11. So we've just lived through all of this.
So let's take a look at what it is. Now let's see, when was George Bush elected president?
88. So it would have been November 88. That's October. That's November.
Now, what is the resonance to that moment? I don't think of it so much as, as Bush being elected as Reagan leaving office.
The resonance here is the fall of Rome. Rome falls right there.
Well then, see, we have a series of high and low points which we should be able to correlate to recent catastrophic or world-changing events.
So let's play the game.
What's happening down here, for the 30 days preceding that day, is a million people are camping out in Tiananmen Square.
At the very bottom of the trough is the night that they had the most people in the square.
And then it turns upward, as you can see, because the constipated fascist oligarchs in charge of that society were preparing to do murder.
And there's nothing novel or new about murder. It's the oldest game in the book.
So that went on there.
Then, remember the Romanian... No, no. Let's go over here.
The next steep descent into novelty is right there.
Right? That's too far. No, no, no. That's right.
Okay, right there. Who knows what happened very close to 11-11-89.
The Berlin Wall fell down. Germany is unified right there.
So, Tiananmen, Germany, then a bummer of some sort.
And what is that bummer?
It's the Romanian Revolution, which, as you'll recall, was handled in the messier style,
where you hurl, put people up against walls and machine gun them and so forth and so on.
There's a lot of convergence that was August 87.
August 87?
It was also sort of the building of the reaction of the Soviet Union to what Gorbachev was doing as well.
Along that line.
Well, then let's go over to here.
I want to see the harmonic convergence.
Oh, you want to see the harmonic convergence?
Give me the date.
887.
887?
In judging this, you have to ask yourself, was the harmonic...
It's actually 88.
It's the first anniversary.
It's the Iran-Iraq war ending right there.
Wait.
We'll go back to 87.
Don't you want to go back to 87?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
There's an anniversary every year.
Something interesting happens.
In the six month hour.
Well, maybe it's not.
Oh, okay.
August what?
17th, 18th, I think.
There is as close as we can get.
What it shows that is that a long descent into novelty that had previously been impeded,
but there isn't anything particularly special about that date,
but it does fall in the domain of going over this hump.
Over here, you'll recall the Gulf War and all that.
Here's how that looks.
Okay.
Now, look here.
August 3rd, 1990.
There's where Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait.
It's also where Mohammed is born, one level up.
I can get higher and lower resonances simply by touching I here.
We haven't done that, but it's possible.
Now, remember how after he invaded, then there was a lot of breast beating
and armies being moved into position and so forth.
That goes on until there.
Now, there, no, no.
There is where the 30-day ultimatum from the Security Council is issued.
The war begins, the air war, on the 17th of January, right there.
And the land war, well, you can see that there's a steep descent into novelty,
which then is slightly moderated and at the kink is where the war begins.
Now, the next steep descent into novelty...
So, lining people up and machine gunning happens during periods, returning to...
To habit. That's the usual habit.
And I write war happens during novelty.
Well, wars can have... War is a kind of ambiguous thing.
War is a habitual activity, but it does cause novelty, especially technological novelty.
So, you know, that's why it's nice that you can blow up these waves and see the variations within the theme.
Now, this point...
The coup in the Soviet Union.
That's it.
There it is, the coup in the Soviet Union, right at the bottom of this one.
And now, the next one is really intriguing to me, and I'll show you why.
There it is.
It's February 21st of this year, and it's the lowest point of novelty for this year.
Now, I was really puzzled by this, because I watched very carefully that week, and there didn't seem to be anything very novel going on.
My book did come out, you're right.
But I was modest enough not to place that in a context of world history.
Well, you know what happened, and this leads us to the slippery edge of prophecy.
There was an event which happened, not on the 21st of February, but on the 20th, which may be trivial and forgettable and absolutely not worth talking about,
or may be one of the most important events in the history of the 20th century.
Do you know what it was?
No, no.
Ross Perot goes on Larry King and offers a suggestion about his availability for the presidency.
Now, if the guy fades and becomes a nothing burger, it doesn't count.
But he does have the wave blowing at his back, that's for sure.
So that's basically it.
If you want to see, let's see.
No, well, let's look at the future.
Yeah.
Let me get the shmiggy somewhere roughly into the middle, and then we'll do it.
Do you really want to sell software?
I don't show people in the future.
Oh, no, no, because we can play with it.
Okay, now let's see if I can figure out how to do this.
Specify target date C.
Target date month.
Let's do today.
Today is the fifth month, the 31st day of 1992.
We don't want to add days.
Okay, we want to move that over to 50%.
Yes, that's where the cursor pops up.
Now let's choose the time span, E.
Let's do 10 years, plus months, 0, plus days, 0.
Now let's graph the wave, F, F.
So it's pointing at today.
What time span?
10 years.
The last five, the next five.
And what it shows is that we are actually, as if you didn't know,
exploring a very deep trough of novelty.
It will last until August of next year.
And then there will be some kind of return to habit with a vengeance.
Now the November election is...
Now wait a minute.
There's something wrong here.
Let me see.
No, I want to point at it today.
You can see what they are right there, right?
Yeah.
Okay, that's as close to today as we can get.
We're getting ready to go down into creative.
Yeah, we're definitely getting ready to go down into novelty.
How long is that space of that next little novelty space?
You mean clear to here?
Yeah, yeah.
Okay, well, it's all going to last until...
August 93.
The thing to keep your eye on is this, which is such a spectacular drop.
I mean, look how much weirdness we've been through, but it's taken us this much time to do it.
This sucker is going to do it in a three-month period in early 96.
You know, this is what we're doing.
FFTs could really be a value, because do you know what FFTs actually do?
I am a scientist.
They break down this waveform into a very large to infinite series of sine and cosine waves
at varying amplitudes and phases.
So if you could correlate a certain frequency of sine waves and phase shift with a phenomenon,
say, a medical phenomenon or a political phenomenon,
you could really serve in on the nature of the changes that are likely to take place.
Well, I hope you'll do this.
I think it should be done.
Here, I'll show you a function you haven't seen.
Instead of zooming in, we'll zoom out.
Oh, so you're going to go back to its last octave resonance?
Well, no.
I'll just, instead of 10 years on the screen, we'll see 20.
Oh, I see.
Now, it's still pointing, well, no, wait a minute.
Okay, there you see it.
Ah, the water.
Yeah, we're at this little peak.
Yeah, right.
Right.
And there's the whole thing.
So, that's the idea.
Now, the notion is that, remember how I kept talking about how a cone contains all possible ellipses and you section it?
What the psychedelic experience is, is a sectioning of eternity and you can build up a picture of the cone by sectioning eternity sufficiently that you get a map like this.
I mean, I'm convinced by this that time is fractal, that instead of treating time as a zero quantity as the Newtonian equations do or as a very gentle curvature as the Einstein equations do, that we have to sub in this fractal dimension.
And that this will make possible a science as more powerful relatively to present science as present science is through the power of the calculus to Greek science.
Time, about which we previously knew next to nothing except that it seemed to keep happening, can actually be described in the same way that energy and other factors in the universe can be described.
Now, the last thought I want to leave you with is I don't think anybody could make this up.
Certainly not me, a person with no training in mathematics, no interest in this kind of thing.
I was told this stuff.
And, you know, most, God forbid, channeling is of the horrible variety which tells you to, you know, eat brown rice and love your neighbor.
You don't need channels to tell you that.
You have channels in your own head which tell you that.
This is a mathematical equation.
I mean, it's embedded in a lot of rap.
But the real channel is an equation for the description of time which makes assertions, makes predictions, is willing to be held to mathematical analysis.
All the things scientists are always screaming that occultists never will provide them with their theories, this provides.
So I'm willing, since it's only one person, one person's life, I'm willing to preach this a little bit because I'm not, maybe I can't believe, see the choice here is pretty stark.
Either I'm nuts or I'm Newton.
There's no in between.
There is no in between.
Yeah, it's right.
I'm the greatest intellectual synthesizer in the history of man.
If I'm wrong, it's just horseshit.
So then the question is, which is it?
Now, what is the corollary?
Say you are the channel for the next step of our understanding of this reality in that sense.
What is your resonant corollary from this time?
You mean, who am I the resonance of?
Yeah.
A question I've never asked.
When did this stop?
When did you first publish?
I figured this out.
There were many.
It took a long time.
But from 1971 to 73 is when I figured it out.
Okay, so what was happening at that time?
Here.
Up here.
Let's see.
Let's go back.
Let's go there and see.
In 1973 you had your...
I really think this needs to go into...
The reason I said it is because basically it's a description of the fabric of space-time.
You know, if doing that shows things like supernova and whatnot that we can document...
Then you would have it.
Absolutely.
Then you would have it.
So you had...
Okay, let's see.
You had finished developing this before your life-changing experience in 1971?
No, the life-changing experience was in 1971.
Well, let's point it at this little dip here giving me the benefit of the doubt and say
that it was January, February, March, April 26, 73.
I'm sure that had you visited me in April 26, 73, you would have found me hunched over graph paper
and working furiously.
Now let's see what the resonance of that is.
I is the resonance call.
It asks higher or lower.
We answer higher.
That means earlier.
Higher.
Major or trigrammatic resonance.
Forget that.
Major is the answer.
Which point?
First, second, third, 99th?
I have no idea what that means.
Let's answer first.
526 BC.
Oh, it's the Greek Renaissance.
It's Plato, Pythagoras, Ezekiel, Confucius, Lao Tzu.
Hey, I think it's time to knock off.
You should quit when you're ahead, you know?
Yes.
It provides us with redundancy.
I'm thinking of calculus.
I'm thinking of atomic bombs.
They're usually developed in parallel, several sites on Earth.
Just an observation.
There's no parallelism here.
Well, in a sense there...
No, no.
Wait a minute.
In a sense there is.
This is a fractal.
It was invented or channeled by me before fractals became the absolute obsession of frontier mathematics.
Now everybody wants to talk about fractals.
And everybody says, you know, population growth, river mouths, everything can be modeled by fractals.
But nobody has said time can be modeled by a fractal.
So I think probably the rise of fractal mathematics is indicative of this.
The other thing is, this could never have been brought to the public without small personal computers.
I developed this, finished it in 75, and in 77 they began selling small computers.
So it's a weirdness.
It's a hallucination.
That's what it is.
My dream has always been to bring something here from there.
And apparently the only things which travel well from there to here are ideas.
And I'm not an artist, so I couldn't paint.
So this is a psychedelic idea.
I think there are millions of these kinds of ideas swimming in the psychedelic ocean.
Yeah?
The second thing that strikes me about this is what good doesn't do us, and if it's true, I don't want to know it.
I would like to hide from this if you're anywhere near correct.
Well, that's because we really haven't talked about the nature of the concrescence.
What is happening?
This all argues for an impossible conclusion.
That the world is going to disappear up its own wazoo at dawn, December 22, 2012.
Can we see it on the screen?
What?
It's 2012.
Oh, you want to see the last day?
The last day.
Right there.
The last week.
Well, here, let me...
The day after, sir.
The last day we're not here.
Yeah, I'll show you.
I'll show you the final thing.
We're running over here, but anybody who wants to leave has my blessing and my sympathy.
Well, we'll let you leave.
Okay, let's change the date of interest.
Where is the date of interest?
Well, they don't get date specific.
Why don't I see...
Oh, there it is.
See.
Target date.
Oh, let's look at January 1, 2012.
August 2010.
On a time span...
Oh, wait a minute.
Do you wish to add a number of days?
No.
We're rather fortuitous that we have 2012.
I mean, if we didn't have that calendar, there would be no place to index it.
That's right.
Time span.
Specify time span.
E.
Years.
2010.
No.
Twelve years.
Plus months.
Zip.
Plus days.
Zip.
F.
Okay, the pointer will be pointing at Jan 1, 2010.
But you see, there it is.
It runs down.
He don't go no more.
That's the end.
Now, I have created one way out that preserves the theory and a rational universe.
And it is simply this, that what happens on December 22, 2012, is that time travel is invented.
And because it is invented, it is no longer possible to portray historical data on a linear graph.
So that's all.
It's just, it was a thing about technology and eventually a technology was created which made the three-dimensional space-time matrix itself obsolete.
It's just a dimensional octave jump.
Yes, dimensional octave jump.
What is the transcendental object?
The transcendental object is the despair of description.
It cannot be known.
It can only be approximated.
It's the sacred heart of Jesus.
It's the flying saucer.
It's the philosopher's stone.
It's tantric union.
It's good LSD.
It's all of these things and more.
It cannot, it transcends language and understanding.
But the closer we get to it, the more it will be revealed.
And the reason the 20th century is so peculiar is because we're so close to the zero point.
We're so close to the transcendental object that, you know, take a hit.
There it is.
Close your eyes and daydream.
There it is.
Have an orgasm.
There it is.
It's trying to break through.
It's almost upon us.
We've been sailing toward this thing for 72 billion years.
And we are now 22 years from impact.
The walls are so steep.
The acceleration is so great.
We are there for all practical purposes.
And then what spiritual life and headdom and all that means is realize that we are there
so that anxiety drains from your life, body, and world view, and then you just ride the wave.
And when people talk of catastrophe, revelation, salvation, and destruction, you just smile a small smile knowing that it will be all that and more and more and more.
It's something, I think it's to reassure us.
You see, I think the world is going to get hip to the fact that we are actually caught in a whirlpool in time that is sucking us into another dimension.
Without something like time wave zero, a notion like that could get fairly alarming and spread a lot of panic.
With time wave zero, you just say, look, we have a map of what's going on.
We'll check off the milestones.
As long as the wave keeps working, nobody should freak out.
Just settle in, hang on, and we'll navigate through this.
So it's a vital piece of knowledge necessary to face the eschaton without panic.
Because these crazy religions want to tell you that you're going to be judged and damned and fired and roasted.
No, no, that's not it. They got the story wrong.
We're just being sucked into hyperspace.
And hyperspace is the human imagination, the human heart, the human soul.
It's the domain of our dreams.
Our imagination is a flickering image of what it will be.
But what it really will be is the despair of prose.
What it will really be can only be approached in silent darkness on five grams.
And then you can't tell anybody about it.
Thank you very much.
This concludes In Search of the Original Tree of Knowledge, a weekend workshop with Terence McKenna.
If you would like additional copies of this recording or a complete catalog of transformational audio tapes,
please call Sounds True, 1-800-333-9185, or write Sounds True, 735 Walnut Street, Boulder, Colorado, 80302.