Okay, well welcome to plants consciousness and transformation
I'm Terence McKenna. I know many of you
We will meet here today and tomorrow 10 to noon 1 30 to 5 and
Basically, this is a workshop to discuss the interaction between plants and human beings
specifically the psychological and mental
Interpenetration of these two very different kinds of life forms and
Those of you who are writing who are concerned about a paper that you may write relative to this class
I'll say a few words about that before the afternoon session
So don't fret about it. It will all come clear
in time
I think of this
course as plants and mind and
The way I like to teach is to just begin to lay out the basic pieces of what is a very complex
interdisciplinary puzzle
and hopefully at some point
your
Specialties your passions your
Interests will ignite the whole thing and it will have then a dynamic of its own
We could discuss these matters for two days five days ten days or as I've done for about 40 years 35 years
There is no end to it and very few
areas of human endeavor
Of human endeavor
Dissolve the disciplinary boundaries of Western academia as
thoroughly as
The study of human and psychoactive plant interactions do
There are important issues here
There are important issues here in biology and botany
in
biogeography in
ethnography and ethnology in
psychology and
neurophysiology in
the study of
symbols
The
The number of disciplines that have to be brought to bear on this subject
is I think a central clue to how important
it is
to
understanding
our
humanness
and
I
represent
a
radical
point of view
on these matters
and I
don't imagine I was invited here to dumb it down
so
you know if you had Darwin you'd get natural selection
if you had Freud you'd get sexual repression
so you've got McKenna so you're going to get
a
psychoactive
catalysis
of consciousness
because that's basically
why I think these ideas are so important
but before we get to that let me just lay out
some of the
the field
Human beings began
their career well
we can trace it back to the primordial slime I suppose
but
our
our animal career
be
was a career of
insectivorous
vegetarian
and
fruititarianism
lived out
in the arboreal canopies
of tropical
rainforests
and
all
all animal species
indeed all life
tends to
uh
occupy an evolutionary
niche
and
then
stabilize itself
in that niche
uh
termites
cockroaches
these sorts of organisms
found their niche
hundreds of millions of years ago
and
filled it
to perfection
and have occupied it ever since
generally
nature
is not progressive
in its particulars
overall
nature
is progressive
but its particulars
uh
seek
equilibrium
and so
it would have been
in the case
of our
primate
ancestors
they
achieved
uh
dynamical balance
as i said
a diet of insects
and fruit
a canopy
habitat
uh
language of pack
signaling
designed to convey
danger
and information
about food sources
and so forth
and so on
and there they would
have remained
uh
had it not been
for the larger
ecodynamics
of the planet
ecodynamics
which are still
shaping
uh
human
habitat
in Africa
because what
has been
going on
in Africa
for at least five
million years
is a slow
drying
of
the continent
and
it disrupted
this
uh
rainforest
ecology
so that about
two to four
million years ago
I mean these are vast
spans of time
we're talking about
the rainforest
began to island
itself
and to be restricted
to the wetter
areas
of Africa
and into the new
environment
the more
xerophitic
or arid environment
that was coming
into being
uh
a very diminished
plant community
took hold
a community
of
uh
opportunistic
grasses
uh
annuals
heavy cedars
this sort of thing
now we know
that the
rainforest
was primary
because the
rainforest
just to give you
a broad notion
might
consist of
uh
over a hundred thousand
plant species
the grassland ecosystem
might well consist
of under
five hundred
species
and all
five hundred
grassland species
can be found
as rare
members
of the flora
of the rainforest
so clearly
what we have
are the survivors
of a process
of clearing
and there is
argument
among botanists
about this
but Carl Sauer
who was a great
geographer
and thinker
on these matters
held
that there is no
such thing
as a natural
grassland
that grasslands
are the
earliest
artifacts
of human
impact
on the planet
grasslands
are created
by burning
uh
they promote
the growth
of cereals
uh
and so
play
feed in
to the human
uh
food chain
so
our
uh
primate
ancestors
ecological adaptation
to arboreal
life
was interrupted
by this
process
uh
and
key to my
thinking
about
all this
and
those of you who are
going to have careers
in all this
I hope some of you will
take it up
contemplate it
I think the great
overlooked
factor
in any model
of human evolution
and indeed in
uh
evolutionary models
of many other species
is
we have not given
enough
uh
emphasis
to diet
when we talk about
natural selection
of an animal species
we tend to
think
that
uh
the genome
expresses
uh
physical type
and the phenotype
is then
subject
to selection
by natural
environment
some biologists
have
seen
the
thinness
of this
understanding
L.L. White
wrote a book
called
Internal Factors
in which he pointed out
that
the womb
is itself
an
environment
that makes
a very heavy
selection
before
an organism
is ever born
into the theater
of Darwinian
selection
so it isn't
a tabla rasa
that you're born
into the theater
of natural selection
you have been
subject to natural selection
from the very
earliest moments
of the existence
of the
zygote
uh
so that's one
factor
uh
but what I have
emphasized
is diet
diet
is
uh
an input
of
potentially
mutagenic
factors
into the body
that can have
enormous consequences
uh
on the health
of an individual
or the general
evolution
uh
of a population
and
I've
used
the
toolbox
of ideas
that I'm going to put
forward here
today and tomorrow
to try and address
what seems to me
to be
one of the most
centrally interesting
questions
uh
to be asked
of this world
and that is
what is
human consciousness
where did it come from
and why does it exist
at all
uh
and I believe
that we can
by thinking
about psychoactive
plants
diet
and the early
human evolutionary
situation
we can
make a lot of progress
uh
on this question
and
we can illuminate
some of our
political dilemmas
that persist
to this day
the
gender
friction
uh
that typifies
human society
the hierarchy
structures
and the tensions
they create
so forth
and so on
so let me
run through
this
and get it off
my chest
and then
we can
talk about
the larger
uh
materia
medica
of
uh
psychoactive
change
relative
to
plants
as the
rainforest
retreated
our
remote
primate
ancestors
came under
nutritional pressure
obviously
because their
area for gathering
food
was being
physically
diminished
now
when a
uh
as you probably know
or have observed
most animal species
are very particular
about their
food
intake
and if you've ever
tried to
tried to raise
butterflies
or something
for your children
uh
you know that if you
capture a caterpillar
in the wild
but don't
pay close attention
to the plant
you find it on
you can't just
put grass
in a peanut butter
jar
with a caterpillar
and expect great
success
animals
are highly
specialized
in their
choice of
foods
why is this
well
as near as we can
tell
uh
eating all kinds of foods
from an evolutionary
point of view
is a very
reckless
move
indeed
because
plants represent
um
uh
chemical smorgasbords
of various types
that have
accumulated over
time
in the genome
of a particular
organism
if you
have a very
broad based
diet
you are exposing
yourself
to many different
kinds
of mutagenic
influences
as a strategy
for survival
of a species
this is not good
uh
much better
to specialize
to evolve
special enzymatic
pathways
to deal
with toxins
so for instance
we know certain animals
can eat
things that other animals
would become ill from
or even die
uh
and this is the way
it's done
and all animal species
tend to evolve
toward these
very
bland
uh
mono diets
now
what happens
when
uh
there is an upheaval
in an environment
uh
geomagnetic reversal
a volcanic eruption
a drought
something like that
and ordinary sources of
nutrition
become restricted
then
an organism
has basically
two choices
it
can
uh
go extinct
starve itself
out of existence
or
if it has more
flexible behaviors
it can begin
to experiment
with
previously
rejected
potential foods
in the environment
rejected
probably
because
of
uh
strong taste
or something like that
which are clues
to the presence
of
marginally
acceptable
chemical compounds
of
some sort
our remote
canopy living ancestors
as I mentioned
were fruititarian
insectivores
they
under
nutritional
pressure
began to
expand
their repertoire
of foods
they also
began to
explore the grassland
environment
and
I mentioned
that the grassland
environment
is much poorer
in
total number of plant
species
than the rain forest
thus
and logically
the potential number
of
food sources
is also
limited
baboons
and
chimpanzees
will dig
with sticks
for the corms
the swollen roots
of
grasses
uh
so as
our
remote ancestors
began to explore
this new
environment
of the grasslands
they also began
to explore
new
dietary
items
uh
and
one of the items
that they would
surely
have
uh
observed
are
coprophytic
mushrooms
which prefer
dung
as their environment
coprophilic
or coprophytic
is the word
for this
many of these
species of coprophytic
mushrooms
elaborate psilocybin
which as I
assume you know
is
uh
one of the major
psychoactive
alkaloids
uh
psilocybin
occurs in
many species of
mushroom
it's unknown
outside
of
the
fungi
uh
and
but I maintain
that in a sense
psilocybin
is the
uh
best model
for human interaction
with the
psychedelic
or that all
other
psychoactive
plant usages
are an
effort to
duplicate
return
to
or somehow
evoke
the original
human
relationship
uh
to psilocybin
and here
is
uh
it is not
simply
it's psychoactive
properties
that make
psilocybin
a potential
catalyst
for human
consciousness
it is
it's psychoactive
properties
in combination
with certain
other properties
that make it
uh
uniquely suited
to carry out
the role
of
catalysis
of consciousness
in a higher
animal
what are
these unique
characteristics
well
first of all
uh
in very low
doses
psilocybin
uh
increases
visual acuity
if you want
to go back
into the literature
Roland Fisher
uh
in the middle
sixties
uh
took graduate
students
and
gave them small
amounts of
psilocybin
or placebo
and he built
an apparatus
where two
parallel strips
of metal
could be
deformed
uh
by winding
a crank
and he asked
people to
uh
push a button
when the two
strips seem
to them
to cease
to be parallel
and he demonstrated
that
edge
detection
is enhanced
by small amounts
of psilocybin
well
you don't have to be
a rocket scientist
to realize
that edge
detection
is at a very high
premium
in any grassland
situation
where predation
is taking place
the
the lion moving
in the grass
300 yards away
as it creeps
upon your
camp
or
the gazelle
trying to
slip away
through the tall grass
from your hunting party
edge detection
is the key to success
or failure
in hunting
in that kind
of a situation
and
uh
it's extraordinary
uh
that
uh
we can
statistically demonstrate
this improved
visual acuity
occurring
uh
in the presence
of psilocybin
what it would have done
you see
is
these proto-hominids
who would accept
the psilocybin
into their diet
would have a
slightly
enhanced
success
in hunting
that
slightly
enhanced
hunting success
would mean more
nutritional resources
available
for them
and their
offspring
presumably
inculcated into
the habit of also
eating the mushrooms
so what we have here
is a slight
favoring
then
of those
animals
in the population
that would accept
psilocybin
into the diet
uh
at
slightly
higher levels
psilocybin
is
uh
like all
cns
stimulants
uh
causes
arousal
and arousal
is simply a
unfocused
restlessness
you know
it's that
too
espresso
feeling
uh
sleep
is
impossible
hands
are
busy
at
small tasks
one is aware
of
one's
sphere of awareness
extends out
somewhat further
uh
and in highly
sexed animals
like primates
arousal means
erection
as we not only have to account for human consciousness
but we have to account for the peculiar dislocation
that human consciousness seems to carry with it
that we are both of nature
yet not of nature
somehow creatures with one foot in nature and one foot in heaven
and how does this
uh
come about
uh
i believe
and i'm
you know willing to argue it against all comers
that a key
element to understanding our
social our sociology and our sexual politics and all that
is
to realize
that
psilocybin had two
effects in the early human populations that were using it
one
we are very familiar with
if we're psychedelic
sophisticates
ourselves
it's the psychedelic
experience
the boundary
dissolving
hallucinatory
shamanic
uh
apotheosis
that occurs
with psilocybin
but the other effect
is
to
uh
medicate
the tendency
to form
dominance
hierarchies
and this is very
controversial
in other words
what i'm saying
is
that all primates
form
dominance hierarchies
and what that means
just to remind you
is that the hard-bodied
long-fanged
young males
take control
of the group
they control the children
the women
they order the old
the homosexual
and the young
among
everybody
is under their
thumb
and
uh
part of our
dilemma
as a
global
society
is that though we
claim great
sophistication
we still live
under male
dominance hierarchies
corporations
universities
family structures
you know
long-fanged males
are still ordering
around the elderly
the weak
and the female
among us
and it is
and as we are
conscious beings
and reflect
upon this
it creates great
social dislocation
and political
unhappiness
and tension
in relationships
and so forth
and so on
I believe
that our unique
position
in the animal
world
arose
as a consequence
of a chemical
suppression
of a natural
behavior pattern
the pattern
of male
dominance
of forming
dominance
hierarchies
was interrupted
by an item
in the diet
psilocybin
and into this
chaos
this egalitarian
chaos
which resulted
was
a situation
in which
everything
about us
that we
treasure
and hold up
as human
was put in
place
in other words
theater
language
dance
story
altruism
ethics
metaphysics
did I say
poetry
everything
that makes us
human
came into being
roughly
a hundred thousand
in the last
well from a hundred thousand
to about fifteen thousand
years ago
people lived
in balance
with the earth
with the larger
biome
in which they
were embedded
there was not
product fetishism
ushering into
enormous
toxic
processes
involving
the smelting
of metals
or the
extraction
of rare
elements
from the earth
now you could
object and say
well but they just
simply weren't
sophisticated enough
to do those
things
I maintain that
our technical
sophistication
is a very
specialized form
of cultural adaptation
and that
comparing us
and finding us
favorably
compared
to the
civilization
of Homer
or
Altamira
is
is simply a form
of cultural
chauvinism
okay
but
psilocybin
had other
effects
besides
this suppression
of male dominance
that I mentioned
and this increased
sexual
thing which I did
mention but I didn't
draw the correct
conclusion there
if you have
something in your
food
which is
to put it crudely
acting as an
aphrodisiac
then it is
reasonable to expect
that you will have
more pregnancies
and reasonable to expect
that you will therefore
have
again
a tendency to
outbreed
the non-psilocybin
using
members
of the population
so we have
two factors
here
increased visual acuity
which gives
greater
food gathering
capacity
increased sexual activity
which tends to
outbreed
the non-psilocybin
imbibing
members
of the group
and then
on top
of all this
you have
this
ecstatic
internal
state
for which
we
with all
our cultural
and epistemic
sophistication
are still
unable
to come
to terms
the mystery
of the psychedelic
experience
now
these things
taken together
with other factors
working in parallel
created
I think
the dilemma
and the glory
and the opportunity
of
humanness
once
we began
under nutritional
pressure
to
expand
our diet
we
were
delicately
poised
on the edge
of
omnivorous
because recall
in the canopy
situation
we were
insectivores
our remote ancestors
we were not
simply vegetarians
we were insectivores
in the grassland
environment
we began
probably
to
originally
to
follow along
behind lion
kills
and that sort
of thing
and eat
carrion
one evolutionary
theory says
that our
suppressed
olfactory
apparatus
the fact that we have
a very limited
sense of smell
is because
there was a period
in our evolution
when we did a lot of
rooting around
in carcasses
this is not
the noble
image
we might have
wished
but
there it is
if you need a
countervailing theory
because you don't like
that one
the other theory is
no
we lost our sense of smell
we stood upright
we got our faces
up off the ground
and that's where the smells
are anyway
so it all sort of became
useless equipment
and we dropped it
a point that I've become convinced of
in the last couple of years
that is definitely not PC
is that I've noticed
this
and my attention was called to it
by
Philippe de Vauchelet
who's a friend of mine
carnivores
are the most conscious
of animals
cows
have very little interest
in the habits
of chipmunks
or birds
or anything else
all they do
is munch grass
carnivores
on the other hand
have an acute interest
in the behavior
of other animals
and in fact
I'm on the brink
of willing to argue
that the earliest consciousness
was not self consciousness
it was consciousness
of how dinner thought
because if you can think
like your dinner
you can go out
and plant yourself
in its path
of behavior
and have dinner
you see
and if you will
if you will look
at the difference
between
oh I don't know
a gerbil
and a house cat
the intelligence level
is striking
and I think
that
this attention
to the behavior
of other animals
on the part
of an emerging habit
of carnivorous behavior
is going to have to be
taken
into consideration
it's interesting
that shamanism
which is
in a sense
the earliest
intellectual pursuit
emerges
in its early phase
as a technique
for identifying
with animals
hunting magic
is what we're talking
about here
and so
I think
that there is
was a very interesting
mix
of
factors
and
players
in the early
human
evolutionary situation
first of all
a canopy
dwelling primate
with a
pack
signaling repertoire
is forced
into a grassland
environment
where psilocybin mushrooms
occur
where small
and large
animals
are predating
upon each other
and where
nutritional options
are highly
restricted
and as the
as this animal
makes its
adaptive
choices
it moves deeper
and deeper
into the realm
of mind
first
the modeling
of the behaviors
of other animals
and the behaviors
of plants
because in a hunting
gathering situation
when plants produce fruit
what environments
they prefer
what other plants
they grow in association
with
what soil types
they prefer
all of these
things
are cofactors
feeding in
to an image
with the two
and the image
.
of the world and this image of the world by its accuracy or falsity decrees life
or death upon those who carry it the omnivorousness forced us into an
awareness of other animals that made us that put us on the level of intelligence
of a hunting cat or something like that but the psilocybin experience at higher
doses and obviously by this time inculcated for sexual and ritual and
hunting purposes into the society also impels you into a non-local invisible
magical world that is to use a Jungian term highly numinous highly charged
with the energy of the archetype of the archetypal world and as I said to this
day we are not able to come to terms with this no matter how much Derrida or
Husserl or Wittgenstein you've imbibed it still is a very challenging thing to
dissolve your ordinary state of consciousness and abandon yourself to
the dynamic of the larger mind that we find ourselves embedded in for a long
time therefore up let's say I mean numbers are numbers but let's say from 50,000
years ago to 12,000 years ago there was a kind of paradise on this planet poetry
coexisted with a balanced ecosystem observational sciences astronomy botany biology taxonomy the
observational sciences co-existed with the natural world and then the same factors
which created this Edenic situation which remember what they were it was the drying of
the African continent that caused the rainforest retreat that same process had been
going on slowly inevitably endlessly and about between well after the last glacial melt which began 20 to
17,000 years ago Africa went dramatically dry and the Sahara Desert began to form where there had been a vast
grassland dotted by sandstone pinnacles cut by rushing streams and crowded with vast
herds of game and that was the theater of human emergence but when it began to go dry it went dry rather
dramatically these ice cores coming out of Iceland make this clear nevertheless as late as Roman times the Roman historian Pliny
referred to North Africa as the bread basket of Rome because they were growing wheat in vast amounts in North Africa as
recently as 2,000 years ago in areas now where there is nothing well that this paradisiacal African
psilocybin matriarchal partnership psychedelic shamanic archaic whatever you want to call it society
was then pushed into crisis and a number of things happened first of all migrations of people out of Africa
this happens every time there's a glacial melt human populations were trapped or proto hominid populations get trapped during the glacial
because the last glacial period the glaciers came as far south as northern Israel
so human populations get trapped and then in the inter glacial during the melt they radiate outward
people began leaving the Sahara settling in the Nile Valley and the use this shamanic use of psilocybin was disrupted
because the environment which made it possible was disrupted and when that happened and this I'm closing the loop here for you
few of my wraps are so sustained
when that happened the pattern of male dominance the pattern that was genetically never removed but which had been
pharmacologically suppressed for over a hundred thousand years perhaps reasserted itself with a vengeance
it was always there it had never been bred out and it must have been an era of enormous brutality
when people's sense of things was that people were turning bad
suddenly we get a whole bunch of things come at once an end to nomadism the beginnings of sedentary agriculture
agriculture
city building
standing armies
slavery
male kingship
dominance
all of these things appear just almost
overnight they spring up
and I maintain they are what
a monkey
would build as a
civilization if suddenly
all of its worst behavioral
tendencies
came to the forefront
with a vengeance
and that's precisely what happened
in the period when we were self-medicating ourselves with psilocybin
we passed from being an animal
into being the peculiarly spiritual entity that we are
we elaborated
observational techniques
theories of magic
language
but when the psilocybin
was withdrawn
these tools which had been
our glory
became instead our curse
because instead of using them to produce
theater and dance
and ecstatic social interaction
we began to use them
to support
the new
and older
the new
agenda
of male dominance
and it's a frightening thing you know
to think people following their cattle across the African plain
eating the mushrooms
seeing the mushrooms as part
of the output of the cattle
in the same way that
meat and milk
and manure were output
of the cattle
a mother goddess
religion
a religion of the land
that moves lightly over the soil
no evidence of
intergroup conflict
so forth and so on
and somehow
then this process
which took a long time of domesticating
cattle
what I'm sure you see
you can see how it all worked
how these factors were disparate
and then they flowed together
human beings followed cattle
because they were following
uh
kills of lions
uh
you follow the cattle
in the same way that the jackals
follow the cattle
to deal with the lion kills
made by large predators
in the course of this
you encounter
uh
weakened animals
or abandoned
uh infant animals
and you care for them
and over 20,000 years
this turns into
domestication of animals
husbandry of cattle
and I think this is a frightening
thing to contemplate
the earliest cities
I will argue
were pens
for human beings
that's what a city is
it's a pen for human beings
some of these dominant males
if we don't control cattle
why shouldn't we
control human beings
in the same way
why shouldn't a king
order his people
with the same impunity
that he orders the slaughter
and the movement
of herds of goats
and cattle
and all of the institutions
were under
came into being
at this moment of transition
from the late Neolithic
or from the Paleolithic
to the Neolithic
to the agricultural situation
the reason for this
I believe
can be traced to
consciousness
I mean consciousness is a double-edged sword
at the very
one of the factors
I think that contributed
to the re-emergence of male dominance
was that at some point
human intellectual capacity
reached the point
where a distant cause
could be connected
to an effect
and the effect and cause
that were being observed
was the sex act
at some point
men and women presumably
but men must have understood
that an act of copulation
if carried out successfully
and in the right
rhythm to the moon
will result in a child
nine months later
if you don't have that understanding
you have no sense of male paternity
so you have a very tight social bond
because for men
the children are our children
the children of the group
once you have a sense of male paternity
then you have ownership
and this then
becomes very problematic
at the very moment that men
were figuring this out
women were noticing
that in the yearly round
of following the cattle
when they would return
to the kitchen middens
and fire pits
abandoned a year previously
that there would be food
in those areas
an abundance of food plants
from cast off kernels of cereals
and so forth and so on
so then there is this awareness
if we bury food
if we bury food sources
then food will come
out of the ground
the problem with agriculture
in the early phase
is that it is hideously efficient
and what it does
is it immediately creates
such a surplus
that you have to stop moving
nomadism has to be abandoned
you till fields
and you overproduce
and then you must store
and defend your overproduction
against less fortunate human groups
in the area
the most advanced building
on this planet
in 10,000
8,000 B.C.
was the grain tower
at Jericho
and what was it?
the grain tower
and it had a staircase
so that you could carry large rocks
up onto the parapet
so that you could drop them
onto the heads of enemies
who were trying to batter their way
into your grain tower
so I've spent some time on this
because this could be taught
this course
without any reference
to our contemporary dilemma
which is the
and by that dilemma
I mean the dilemma
of gender difference
male dominance
underutilization
of females
in society
underutilization
of feminine points of view
in society
but obviously there is a lot of tension
in our society
around the issue of
though there is a growing awareness
among sophisticated people
that the case
is almost entirely emotional
in other words
we tolerate outlandish
toxic drugs
alcohol
tobacco
we're willing to make a trade-off
of 70,000 deaths
a year in this country
of driving the automobile
so forth and so on
we tolerate
very toxic practices
if they are seen to be
somehow supportive
of the agenda being handed down
from the top
psychedelics are not
tremendously disruptive
and yet
as the ethnographic
and pharmacological data
comes in
they are among the most benign
substances in the world
and
their history of human usage
is almost universal
and then the question is
do these intoxications
limit
the spectrum of consciousness
and allow hierarchical models
to be handed down
and brainwashed
into the doubters
or do these states of consciousness
dissolve cultural assumptions
and cast
the individual
into an ocean
of existential perplexity
out of which they have to build
their own model
of how the world works
well
I believe the reason
for this tension
in our society
and anxiety
and suppression
furious suppression
of these things
is because
we sense
that this addresses
origins
in the same way
that it took a long time
to overcome
our
queasiness
about discussing
sexuality
there's something about
the origin
subjects
that make us
very very
nervous
ok
so that's a very linear
discussion
of the role of one
psychoactive plant
in human history
psilocybin
and as I say
I think it was uniquely
chemically
botanically
uh
positioned
to play
that
role
in human consciousness
uh
now
the contemporary
situation
worldwide
is
that we find
uh
many forms
of shamanism
from the arctic
to the rainforest
tropics
and
shamanism
always
depends
for its
uh
efficacy
on a
dislocation
or a
transformation
of ordinary
consciousness
and
we see this
achieved
in many different
ways
uh
through fasting
through
ordeal
meaning abandonment
in the wilderness
or
flagellation
uh
through
uh
elaborate
theatrical
effects
special effects
uh
through
the use of
of
substances
in plants
and
there has been
a
controversy
in anthropology
never resolved
uh
over the past
forty years
uh
what is the
authentic
shamanism
and
those of you
who are
anthropologists
know that
uh
who was one of the
great
uh
experts in this
field
claimed
he called
use of plants
in a shamanic context
decadent
he called
the use
of such
plants
narcotic
well first of all
the use of the word
narcotic
in that context
shows you don't know
what you're talking about
in terms of
pharmacology
that's a totally
obsolete
and silly
category
and
not true
to boot
psychedelics are
in no sense
narcotic
uh
Gordon
Wasson
on the other hand
who was a
brilliant amateur
and the discoverer
of the psilocybin cults
in Mexico
along with his
partner
and wife
Valentina Wasson
took just the opposite
position
and said no
use of plants
to transform consciousness
is the primary
method
where there are
is resort
to
ordeal
fasting
wilderness
abandonment
uh
so forth
and so on
this
is the derivative
late arriving
decadent
shamanism
in fact
this is shamanism
on its way
to turning
into religion
of the ordinary
sort
and in fact
if we look at
religion of the ordinary
sort
we see that it does
have a place
for fasting
it does have a place
for self-flagellation
uh
it does
it does have
it does admit
those techniques
but no
organized religion
of any size
tolerates
the use of
psychedelics
in consciousness
transforming
amounts
and that little
parenthetical phrase
is there
because one of the things
that you should know
and remember
and keep always
in front of you
is that
that if you wish to
control
someone
or if you want
to brainwash
somebody
the way you do it
is with
small amounts
of drugs
and large amounts
of your message
whatever it is
so
uh
you know
but if you give people
large amounts
of a psychedelic
your message
will take
its place
in the
parade
of ideas
and find
its relative
importance
uh
so
so using drugs
does not mean
if you come upon
a cult
or a group
or an individual
using psychedelic
substance
it doesn't necessarily
mean
that they are
on a path
of spiritual
and shamanic
transformation
it may be
self enforcing
some private
Idaho
of illusion
in which they
choose to live
but if
large doses
are being
taken
and by large
I simply mean
effective
full spectrum
doses
one of the wonderful
things about
these substances
is that the
effective dose
is a long ways
away from
a dangerous
dose
the LD50
in other words
is very
favorable
the boundary
well
so then let me
talk for a minute
about the character
of this experience
generally
what is
the plant
hallucinogen
experience
in all times
and all places
for all people
I mean
I don't know
if you can be that general
but it's important
to try
what it is
is it's an experience
of boundary
dissolution
it's an experience
of having
categories
obliterated
of having
previously
defined
boundaries
and differences
eliminated
the enterprise
of being
and the enterprise
of language
is basically
an enterprise
of defining
boundaries
I am myself
you are you
this is now
that was then
we are here
they are there
these are provisional
distinctions
about reality
that make it necessary
that are necessary
for us to keep track
of and manipulate
our animal body
as a machine
in Newtonian space
but when a shaman
takes a psychoactive plant
at an effective dose
he or she
falls
into trance
becomes
immobile
and then
the
geometry of consciousness
if you wish
is
melted
and
recast
in a different
geometry
and
I use these
mathematical terms
because I really
sincerely believe
that
at some hypothetical
future date
when this is all
sorted out
what we are going to
realize about the
psychedelic experience
is
that it is
the
experience
of
the fact
of
the higher geometry
of the universe
in which we live
in other words
it is very easy
to see
that ordinary
consciousness
evolved
to
well
let me put it this way
it is a wonderful aphorism
consciousness
takes the contours
of the vessel
into which it is poured
it is like
water
it always takes
the shape of the vessel
into which it is poured
and so
what are we?
we are
on
the
large scale
we are animals
in
three-dimensional
space
given to
hunting and given
to being
hunted
so what has
consciousness
done?
it has evolved
into a kind of
threat
anticipation
detection
and
avoidance
machine
the purpose of
consciousness
the purpose of
your eyes
the coordination
of your
sense
is to
navigate you
through the world
without dying
without being
ripped apart by
predators
or being caught
in landslides
or rushing rivers
so forth
and so on
and consciousness
fills that need
ordinary consciousness
very well
but
because
the body
has
a locus
in three-dimensional
space
consciousness
of the
ordinary sort
tends
to
surround
the body
as an
object of
concern
in other words
if
you're worried about
being hit
by traffic
you're not
worried about being
hit by traffic
in Berkeley
you're worried about being
hit in traffic
in San Francisco
because that's where you happen to be
so consciousness
of the ordinary sort
tends to cluster
around
the physical body
but when consciousness
is
dissolved
of that concern
and dissolved
of the programming
in language
that that concern
has
built up
over
ages
it
recrystallizes
in
a higher
dimension
literally
a kind
of
hyperspace
and if you will think
for a moment
about shamanism
I think you'll see
how literally
we can take
this mathematical
metaphor
of the psychedelic
experience
what is a
classic
shaman
expected
to do
and be
well
shamans
predict
hunting
they
see
where the game
will be
shamans
predict
weather
they
can
tell
what the weather
will be
shamans
are
brought in
to mediate
complex
social
hassles
of the
who is sleeping
with my woman
who stole
the chicken
you know
who shat in the stream
kind of
social hassles
shamans are brought in for this
these kinds of purposes
and then finally
and most importantly
shamans cure
they cure
sometimes
well
now
these things
predicting the weather
seeing where the game went
curing
and
having a deep
insight
into social
interaction
these are things
which become
completely
non-mysterious
if we
hypothesize
that the shaman
has a
hyperspatial
point of view
you know
if you went into
a mathematical
hype
if we had a
safe
here
and we could go
into hyperspace
we would discover
that the safe
is open
that there is
a
words are difficult
here but there is
a side
of the safe
or let's say
a dimension
to the safe
which isn't locked
in the same way
that if a
hyperspatial
entity
were
looking down
on San Francisco
it could reach
into this room
without coming
through the door
and rearrange
things
in other words
everything that we call
magic
seeing the future
seeing into
locked boxes
knowing what is going
to happen
becomes
utterly
non-mysterious
if you
hypothesize
that consciousness
can unfold itself
under
this peculiar
pharmacodynamic
situation
into a higher
dimensional
space
and that becomes
important
in the modern
context
more than
in the archaic
context
because
the collective
future
has become
for us
a focus
of major
anxiety
we need to know
where we're going
you know
Marshall McLuhan
said
the way we run
our societies
is like driving
an automobile
using only the rear
view mirror
well
in shamanically
guided societies
they actually
turn on
the headlights
running
by the rear view
mirror means
you only
have past
experience
to guide you
running
with the headlights
on
means you actually
have an insight
into the forward
dimension
into what
into which
you're moving
ok
so
that is
sort of
a broad
sketch
of
how one
plant
psilocybin
may have
catalyzed
shaped
impacted
human consciousness
how the abandonment
of that
archaic
shamanic
style
through
climatic
change
created the
fall into
history
how the fall
into history
is the absence
of this hyper
dimensional
point of
view
and then
what we'll
talk about
when we come back
after the break
is
how can we
utilize
the botanical
and ethnographic
and pharmacological
data
that we have
garnered
in the last hundred
years
to
recapture
revivify
and
explore
this dimension
of human potential
in such a way
that we can
actually
inject
some hope
into our
political
circumstances
I don't believe
if we remain
as we are
half
hierarchies
ruled by the most
ruthless
among us
that we have
much of a future
on the evolutionary
stage
but I think
that if we can
recapture
the lost
symbiosis
with these
psychoactive
plants
that we will
in fact
be
recovering
a lost portion
of ourselves
that history
is a progressive
dehumanizing
of the human
experience
and we have
now in the
twentieth century
reached the level
of dehumanizing
where you've got
the holocaust
the thermal
potential thermal
nuclear war
Bosnia
Rwanda
you name it
I mean the scale
of brutality
brutal
brutalness
bruteness
in the twentieth century
indicates to me
that the struggle
for the soul
of humanity
is reaching an incredibly intense crescendo.
And I really believe that the path forward is backward,
that we need an archaic revival,
and that central to that revival
will be the personality and the technology of shamanism.
And when we analyze that technology for its effectiveness,
we will discover that the most interesting things
in the shamanic toolbox are the plants
which directly intervene in the functioning of human consciousness.
So let's just take a stand-up five-minute break
so you can stretch.
And then I've talked without questions this session.
I'm perfectly happy to entertain questions.
If you want to control the agenda,
you're going to have to make some noise.
So are there questions to this point?
Or shall I just keep plodding?
Yes.
The idea of the thinking towards male dominance
that suppressed chemically
which allows for a matriculatural sort of existence
only under a chemical sort of suppression
that we weren't able to read out over thousands of years.
What is that?
I mean, do we have to mainline man for the rest
throughout the journey?
Well, I think the implication is yes.
In other words, had we remained monkeys,
we never would have gotten into this crazy situation.
We became human by forming a relationship,
a symbiotic relationship with a psychoactive plant.
And then we became semi-human when we abandoned it.
And that's what we are now, semi-human.
You know, we're capable of enormous acts of kindness
and appalling acts of brutality.
I think conscious self-reflection can help here.
I mean, if you know this story and believe it,
and if evidence, God knows what evidence would look like,
but if evidence could be found to support it,
then it makes it easier to understand our dilemma.
I mean, men don't want to dominate,
and it's not a man-woman issue either.
The ego is a sort of genderless way of attacking this thing.
The ego was suppressed by psilocybin.
And in the absence of psilocybin,
men and women became much more egocentric.
And that egocentricity created all kinds of institutions
which are very unflattering to us.
So we need, I think, to...
If this idea were accepted that this is what happened,
this is why we're conscious,
this is why we're so uncomfortable with consciousness,
and this is where we are,
and somehow this dialogue could go on
outside the distorting effects of Christianity,
male anxiety, and so forth and so on,
then I think the conclusion would be
we need some very radical social reforms,
not simply, obviously,
the legalization of spiritual transformation
through substances,
but all of our institutions have been built up
on the assumption of ego and dominance hierarchy.
And deconstructing that is really what the future is all about,
I think, and it's a challenge.
Does that go to it sufficiently?
Don't be shy.
It does, except for, I feel like,
well, I also feel like, just in general,
in this theory of the evolution of consciousness
is female, is left out.
I mean, here we have a theory of
erection and arousal
and male dominance
sort of tendency.
I guess it's just that if a matrifocal culture
can exist only under chemicals,
what is the implication of that?
I guess transformation is necessary.
Well, I don't call it matrifocal.
I call it partnership.
I don't think there's a pendulum swing
between patriarchy and matriarchy.
I think there is partnership,
which is appropriate role expression.
Everybody does what is appropriate
to their position.
And then there is the assigned role
of the hierarchical situation.
I think it was in science last week.
Here is a frontier that is breaking right now,
which is, it's just being realized
that men and women
are incredibly different anatomically.
And at the micro-anatomical level,
I think there was a list
of 40 physical differences
between the brains of men and women.
And in a sense,
and this is pure speculation,
but I believe that,
especially in the archaic situation,
well, we don't even have to talk
about the archaic situation.
In 1800,
the average American woman
gave birth 13 times.
The average American woman in 1800.
So, you put a statistic like that
against the phenomenon of menstruation,
and what you have then
when you look at women
is a life absolutely rooted
in the rhythms
and the fact of nature.
Men are sort of,
it's more like a closed system.
It's sealed off.
And there isn't this connection
into the biological world.
So, men are potentially more capable
of getting off the track,
if you want to put it that way,
meaning leaving this Gaian creode
of symbiotic self-reinforcement.
It's very obvious
in the years I've been doing this,
this looks to me
like a fairly balanced group.
But my groups tend to be
heavily male.
And women,
in my own experience,
tend to be far more casual,
psychedelic users
than men.
If you just look at cannabis use,
usually women are very casual.
A woman who is truly a smoker
is a rare, rare thing.
Well, that would go along
with menstruation
and birth
and breastfeeding.
Women are involved
in biology
in a way
that men
need not be.
They can choose,
you know,
and that's why abstraction
is the great realm
of male activity
and so forth.
I guess I want to
pick up
your example
of women in the 1800s
giving birth
so many times
and point out
that that also
was an aberration
that came from
what I consider
to be
the learned behavior
of males
into domination.
That when women
were in control
of their own
reproductive cycle,
there was not
that many births.
they were appropriately
spaced
because the sexual
activity
was not dominant
and the women
determined
when sexual activity
would take place
based on what
was best
for the community
and the offspring.
No, you're right.
I probably
yield on that.
I guess then,
but I try to save
the point
by saying this.
You're right.
Probably in this
archaic situation,
women had knowledge
of plant contraceptives
and they were
well in control
of...
were not forced
into sexual activity
which was an
important piece
of the domination
cycle.
That women
controlled the
reproductive cycle
and the sexual cycle
and so children
were saved.
It was when
the concept
of domination
began
that they lost
power over
when they could,
when they would
have sex
and then also
how often
they would have
babies.
And that was
a real turning
point in that
reproductive aspect.
But don't you
imagine that
in a world
without anesthetic,
even if you
gave birth
only three
or four times
in your life,
these would be
immense boundary
dissolving
psychedelic
extravaganzas.
I don't have
any problem
with the
conclusion,
it's just
sort of
the pathway
there
and what
the constructs
were before
that.
I think you're
right that such
a large number
of pregnancies
and births
indicates a
pattern of
subjugation.
There was something
else I wanted to
say about that.
Well, it'll come
back.
Yeah?
I'd just like to
add something
about gender.
I think we need
to be really
aware of how
biochemically
mediated it is.
I have a friend
who went to
a hormonal
change, became
a woman over
a five-month
period hormonally
and he'd feel
his aggressions
drop away
and then five
months later
he'd change
his mind
back.
He hates
being generous
and loving.
That's
it's off of
me.
You can feel
the aggression
coming back
and now he's
in a really
actually quite
beautiful
entourage
in his face.
Well, now I'm
seeing him
from both
senses.
I really
understand
how
you can feel.
I don't want
to spend too
much time on
it but you
should be
aware of
this.
It's
interesting.
It's always
fun to talk
about sexuality
and so
forth and
so on.
But you're
probably aware
of these
things called
bonubos,
these so-called
pygmy
chimpanzees.
They're
actually not
noticeably
smaller than
ordinary
chimpanzees
but they
are a
distinct
species.
First of
all, we
differ from
chimpanzees
by 2%
of our
genome.
98% of
us is
chimpanzee.
We differ
from the
bonubos in
about the
same amount.
Chimpanzees
are male
dominant,
highly
monogamous,
very
territorial,
so forth
and so
on.
The
bonubos,
which are
to a
non-zoologist
indistinguishable
from the
chimpanzees,
all aggression
is mediated
through sex.
Incredible.
I don't
even, I'm
surprised such
animals can
exist because I
would have
thought a
virus would
have jumped
into this
situation.
But the
bonubos are
incredibly
highly
sexed
animals.
All
forms of
sexual
activity are
going on
almost
constantly.
And all
aggression and
all social
difference and
everything is
ameliorated by
sexual activity,
usually initiated
by the
females.
Well, if you
look at these
two animals,
chimpanzee and
bonubo, you
can't tell them
apart.
I think what
it means is
that this
matter of
our sexual
expression and
dominance and
so forth and
so on is
riding on a
cusp of some
sort.
We can go
either way.
That's why we're
the only animal
species where
there is no
defined style
of pairing.
In other
words, we
have monogamy
in some
societies,
polygamy,
polyandry,
a whole smorgasbord
of social and
sexual arrangements
that we will
tolerate.
No other
creature is
like that.
And I think it
indicates that
we are in a
zone of
ambiguity on
this matter.
And that
means we
have a lot
of leeway.
We can
send ourselves
one way or
the other.
We can build
a nightmarish,
male-dominated,
crypto-fascist
kind of
situation.
Or we can
go the
other way.
Bonubo or
chimpanzee,
we're looking
down both
those roads.
Are you
saying that
basically as
species we
have not
been stabilized
such as
the
dog
or the
school?
Well, we've
been destabilized.
I think we
were stabilized
in the
chimpanzee
dominator mode
and then
100,000 years
of psilocybin
use put us
closer to the
bonubos.
Now, the
bonubos are
almost extinct.
There's only a
few thousand
of them left.
They need to
be studied.
There was a
paper recently,
I can't give
you the
citation,
but if you
write me,
I can't,
studying
chimpanzees
in Africa.
They would
only leave
the nest,
they would
only leave
the trees
and descend
down onto
the ground
to forage,
but the
only thing
they would
do this
for were
mushrooms.
The pygmy
chimps are
really the
only animal
where any
success has
been gleaned
in the
sign language
communications
and the
more modern
versions of
that.
But the
pygmy chimps
are the
ones which
can use the
message board
to actually
have some
effectiveness.
The only
ones that
have language
ability,
you know
the hopes
for dolphins,
whales,
and regular
chimps,
it's still a
blank.
But the pygmy
chimps,
they're doing
it.
So here
we have
the language
thing on
the cusp
for them.
So it
would be
very
interesting
to know
if
psilocybin,
I mean
they might
be an
image of
us half
a million
years ago.
In other
words,
were we
to go
extinct and
the
bonubos
to flourish,
there might
be another
anthropoid
species
take the
stage in
a million
or two
years.
Yeah?
This is
for the
question
to
mainline
psilocybin.
In my
experience,
I've seen
many men,
especially
a lot of
heavy hitters
in the
psychedelic
movement,
take high
doses and
don't care
about gender
issues or
justice or
equality.
So I'm
not sure
that that
has,
I think
the psychedelic
experience
can mean
in force,
all the
oppressions
that
psilocybin
itself
can't
necessarily
open you
up,
melt down
and have
to seek
out
justice.
Well,
I guess
I'm more
of a
believer
than you
are.
I just
say they
didn't
take
enough.
And the
other thing
is,
you mentioned
these were
heavy hitters
in the
male heavy
hitters in
the psychedelic
movement.
It may
just be
that some
people
can't
be saved,
that Christ
himself
couldn't
lift some
people out
of chaos.
I haven't
had that
experience.
I mean,
I think
that...
Well,
I think
it was
interesting
to ask
the women
in the
psychedelic
movement
about their
experience,
because,
I mean,
you come
from the
perspective
of male
dominators,
and you
check it
out.
What
specifically
should I
ask them
about their
experience?
if they
feel that
the men
in their
lives
change
through
strictly
high doses
of
psilocybin
or other
psychedelic
youth,
that there's
more justice...
I mean,
my thing
is that
family is
the most
interesting
political
stage there
is.
Is there
justice
in their
family?
Is there
a partnership
model happening
in the
family?
Is the
father actively
taking care
of the
children
in the
family?
Well,
that's
sort of a
different
question.
I liked
your first
in their
lives
a tendency
toward a
softening
or justice.
But the
stage of
that is
really
a relationship
and it's
a family.
Yeah,
the problem
I have
with that
is I
think the
modern
family is
first of
all a
very
modern
invention
and
basically
a
cauldron
for the
production
of
neuroses.
But that's
what we
have to
work with.
Well,
let's ask
these
this
proposition
that
psychedelics
make
men
smoother,
evener,
more.
Does
anyone
want
to
that
has
been
effective?
Not
on that
scale.
I've
read
through
books
like
the
archaic
revival
with
the
Timothy
Larry
pastor
of
saving
all
the
children
to
reach
everybody
and
as
opposed
to
that
maybe
reaching
the
people
that
want
to
be
out of
the
same
story
teaching.
You have
to
not
dominating
teaching
on
either
side
of
male
or
female
but
some
people
who
now
comprehend
the
kind
of
oneness
basically.
You mean there
has to be a
supportive
of the
story.
Yeah,
there has to be
some
sort of
part of
what
complicates
it is
notice that
the male
dominator
society
we're
living in
is just
fanatically
concerned
to
suppress
this
and to
me
that's
a sign
that it
must
threaten
it
at a
very
basic
level
and yet
it
seems
silly
I mean
they're
more
grinding
everybody
else
down
particularly
as
women
there
are
men
out
there
who
have
worked
out
relationships
with
women
and
with
other
men
that
are
cooperative
partnerships
well
a lot
of them
never
took
suicide
well
you
live
in a
society
you
take
upon
yourself
the
tone
of
the
time
I
getting
it
into
a
gender
thing
I
really
think
ego
here's
the
way
I
put
it
ego
is
like
a
cyst
which
will
begin
to
grow
in
you
whether
you
are
male
or
female
unless
you
take
a
psychedelic
the
psychedelic
is
that
it
will
dissolve
this
cyst
the
cyst
is
in
your
personality
it's
a
tumor
it
shouldn't
be
there
I
mean
we
do
need
to
have
egos
little
egos
so
that
when
I
take
you
out
to
dinner
I
put
the
food
I
order
in
my
mouth
you
put
the
food
you
order
in
your
mouth
that's
what
an
ego
is
for
but
if
are
hard
driving
egomaniacal
ambitious
it's
a
bad
style
and
men
may
be
born
into
it
and
women
may
be
infected
by
it
but
there's
plenty
of
it
and
the
person
who's
willing
to
do
that
is
the
solution
of
the
ego
and
it
has
reverberations
for people
who
won't
or aren't
in a
position
to do
that
or
they're
so
involved
in
protecting
your
ego
that
they're
not
in
that
place
yet
but
that
both
men
and
women
benefit
from
that
and
it
goes
beyond
that
for
people
who
will
not
use
that
yeah
that's
a
good
should
take
psychedelic
plants
well
then
the
question
automatically
follows
well
who
shouldn't
well
in
practical
terms
we
all
know
people
who
are
likely
here
who
have
diminished
self-esteem
so
forth
and
so
on
they
are
for
them
ego
dissolution
is not
the
goal
they
have
been
so
victimized
by
egomaniacs
that
they
have
no
sense
of
self
so
for
them
they
should
be
encouraged
to
build
up
an
internal
structure
in
their
personality
and
a
coherent
reference
point
in
the
self
but
that
is
a
state
of
dis-ease
that
most
of us
are not
like
that
most
of us
are
ordinary
or
more
toward
the
spectrum
of
profit
from
the
psychedelic
experience
women
I
think
are
less
excited
by
psychedelics
because
they
experience
by
and
large
it
has
less
of
an
I
stayed
with
a
group
for
about
three
months
and
I
found
it
to be
a
very
male
dominated
aggressive
culture
and
yet
they
were
using
shamanic
and
psychedelic
plans
for
ritual
and
ceremony
well
here's
what I
think
once
this
African
paradisical
partnership
thing
was
disrupted
and
people
were
scattered
to the
four
corners
of the
earth
the
memory
never
was
lost
and
there
is
even
what's
called
a
nostalgia
for
paradise
today
throughout
time
the
belief
that
in the
past
it
was
better
and
since
the
renaissance
it's
been
fashionable
to
dismiss
this
as
a
kind
of
naivete
you know
the grass
is
greener
kind
of
thing
but
I
think
probably
things
were
better
and
that
our
nostalgia
for
paradise
is
what
has
caused
us
to
be
so
subject
to
abuse
and
use
of
drugs
you
know
no
other
animal
shares
this
pattern
of
behavior
sometimes
elephants
will push
down
fences
to
get
to
rotting
fruit
and
birds
get
drunk
and
fall
down
on
their
little
feeders
and
this
sort
of
thing
but
human
beings
addict
to
a
startling
spectrum
not only
of
substances
but
of
behaviors
we
addict
to
each
other
I
mean
heroin
withdrawal
and a
broken
heart
look
and
feel
exactly
the
man
bursting
into
tears
insomnia
inability
to
eat
I
mean
does
this
person
have
a
broken
heart
or
are
they
getting
off
junk
you
can't
tell
and
we
tend
to
addict
and
I
think
this
is
a
kind
of
we
feel
in
ourselves
a
certain
incompleteness
since
the
breakup
of the
African
partnership
society
and
you
know
alcohol
doesn't
quite
do
it
cannabis
is
good
but
doesn't
quite
go
far
enough
we've
tried
all
kinds
of
things
and
interestingly
in the
last
hundred
years
the
science
of
ethnography
and
anthropology
has
scoured
the world
and brought
back
to us
data
which we
didn't
have
a hundred
hundred
and twenty
years
ago
data
about
peyote
ayahuasca
datura
psilocybin
morning glory
so forth
and so
on
the
materia
medica
of the
remote
human
cultures
of the
planet
is
now
available
and
I
think
it
comes
not a
moment
too
late
that's
why I
called
my
book
the
archaic
revival
I
really
see
the
whole
cultural
impulse
of the
20th
century
as
an
impulse
toward
the
archaic
in
other
words
if
impressionism
except
LSD
30 minutes
in
other
words
the
sharpness
goes
the
colors
brighten
everything
begins
to
blur
the
boundaries
are
beginning
to
dissolve
it's
contentless
it's
I mean
it's
ideologically
empty
it's
just
how
things
look
they
look
this
certain
way
well
then
minutes
later
ideas
are
beginning
to
accompany
this
melting
and
flowing
of
perception
we've
now
reached
surrealism
and
Freud
and
Jung
the
discovery
of
the
unconscious
well
then
it
keeps
going
it
gets
more
and
more
intense
now
we
don't
see
dreamscapes
distorted
gargoyle
like
figures
melting
watches
and
burning
giraffes
that
has
all
been
now
replaced
by
just
a
blur
an
energy
storm
now
we're
in
energy
is
flinging
itself
around
and
at the
same
time
things
like
jazz
which
carried
with it
a heavy
content
of
sexual
looseness
the
flapper
era
that
whole
thing
people
weren't
Victorian
ladies
and
gentlemen
that
they
had
the
cannibalistic
drive
the
edible
drive
the
this
drive
the
Hitler
proved
that
you know
years
of
western
ethics
have
you
shoving
people
into
ovens
as a
political
course
of
action
the
whole
of
the
20th
century
has
been
an
exploration
of
the
archaic
and
then
in
the
60s
LSD
appeared
but
without
the
rhetoric
of
shamanism
LSD
for those
of us
who
lived
through
it
was
presented
as
the
latest
thing
after
penicillin
and
birth
control
it
was
better
living
through
chemistry
it
was
now
we
have
penicillin
and
now
we
have
orthonovum
and
now
we
have
LSD
was
better
living
through
chemistry
you've
all
seen
the
poster
of
the
kids
in
the
hate
holding
the
banner
in
the
70s
it
was
realized
that
the
psychedelic
experience
need
not
be
confined
to
LSD
it
was
generally
realized
and
that
there
were
all
these
ethnographic
usages
ayahuasca
peyote
detoura
morning
glories
so forth
and so
on
and
then
late
in the
70s
the
shaman
became
the
paradigmatic
figure
for cultural
emulation
and that's
basically
where we
are now
the
nation
state
is
dissolving
it's
a
creation
of
renaissance
rationalism
electronic
media
is
re-tribalizing
the
world
pharmacology
is
throwing
open a
vast
cornucopia
of
psychoactive
substances
and
the
legacy
of
psychoanalysis
modern art
quantum
physics
and
phenomenology
have propelled
us to the
brink
of
a
neo-archaic
understanding
of our
world
and now
it has to
become more
explicit
I mean I don't think
there's much chance
of survival
without
a
major
effort
to
re-establish
archaic
styles
and
institutions
and it's not
an easy
thing to do
I mean if
you're
idealizing
naked
people
with no
physical
culture
who are
following
along
behind
their
cattle
on the
plains
of
Africa
and
you
want
to
take
their
social
institution
psychology
philosophy
and
aesthetic
and lay
it
on
to
a
global
level
electronic culture of seven billion you're going to have to there's going to be some creative
twisting and turning in all of that nevertheless i believe it can be done now there's one more
aspect of this that i want to touch on that's sort of philosophical in general and that is
we've talked about the psychedelic experience we've talked about how it dissolves boundaries
and changes cultural values and so forth but what we haven't talked about is what is it exactly i
mean what's so great about it if you read a description of a psychedelic experience it sounds
sort of like uh well everything dissolves you see a lot of bright colors you have funny ideas and
then you have to rest for a day well what is so great about that i mean why should that be a
cultural culturally transforming issue well i i believe that that we misperceive the psychedelic
substances if we simply think of them as an inert substance in a plant which when taken by a human
being dissolves programming and shows you the basement of your mind essentially that isn't
what's going on i believe here is much closer to what's going on psychedelics convey information
the other kind of chemicals in nature that we're familiar with that convey information aside from dna
are pheromones pheromones are aromatic compounds released by plants and animals usually to carry a
message within the species so ants as you know lay down chemical trails that other ants sense and can
follow well uh in a sense hallucinogens are are intraspecies pheromones of some sort they carry
information across species lines and uh the kind of information that they carry the message
is one of harmony balance and uh integration and so a human population with a with a psychedelic
institution or sacrament will in its pristine form tend to be nomadic have very little physical cultural
expression uh tend to have a very loose family structure an extended family structure and child rearing
uh arrangement and i believe that this is where we can introduce the concept of the guy in mind
the reason the psychedelic experience is so paradigm shattering is because we believe that we are alone
in intelligence on this planet and what the psychedelics show is no there is a much larger field of mind
than we ever could suspect in our ordinary state of consciousness nature herself is a minded
entity and information is flowing between species between biosystems across biota gradients of light
chemical release water so forth and so on all of nature is a vast communicating mind of some sort
and the only portion of that vast system that is out of alignment is the human world because we we closed the channel
we closed the channel by abandoning the shamanic institutions in many many human languages the word shaman means go
go between go between go between we'll go between what and what is the question well the answer is go between the safe pedestrian
assumptions of an organized society and the vast churning ocean of mystery that is real being and every society is an illusion
reared against the mystery of real being and pursued in ignorance of it so the psyche the the shaman mediates
between these two worlds the ordinary world people have to live in in order to catch fish and have children and form relationships
and bury the dead and bury the dead and another unseen dynamic world of energy of process of
strange attractors of the great unknown but it isn't an abstraction its nature and history is the consequence of an animal species
creating its connection to the guy in mind and instead of then a guy in the agenda
integration unity cooperation
you get an ego
agenda
dominance
resource extraction
territorial acquisition
control of other human beings
and resources
so when shamanism died when hallucinogens became stigmatized when the climate changed
we literally fell
into history we became a different kind of animal
and the consequences of
untrammeled historicity being practiced for 12,000 years is to bring us to our present
situation
where we have immense intellectual understanding of some aspects of nature
we have an immense ability to coordinate group activity in certain areas like building a bridge but not disarming
for example
uh... but we have no ability whatsoever to control this darker self
that sort of drew itself up to the campfire 12,000 years
and said you know you have you banished me into the darkness
for a million years
while you lived in the psilocybin driven paradise
but here i am again and the piper must be paid
now
all the cards are on the table
and it's up to us
we who live on this planet at the end of the
of the 20th century
to try and do something
with these facts
if we go extinct
if we wreck the planet and toxify the environment
it will be a tremendous tragedy
because there are ways out
there are answers
but how much of the baggage we've accumulated over the past 4,000 years
are we going to be able to take with us into that new world
bloody little
i maintain
our music
our mathematics
our dance
our theater
through serious downsizing and detoxification
so really
the discovery in the 19th and 20th century of these ancient ways of relating to plants
it's not just a curiosity of anthropology
or an exciting subfield of botany
it is in fact
very central to the human drama of our salvation
i don't think we can fix ourselves
through rhetoric
if we could fix ourselves through rhetoric
then buddha and christ would have done the job
uh... we can only fix ourselves by consciously analyzing our dilemma
and then intervening
and i believe these
uh... cultures that have existed in a kind of suspended animation
forests of the world
while western european civilization charged
through its merry adventure
the uh...
raison d'etre
for the existence of those aboriginal civilizations
is that they carry
the archaic gnosis
it's all still intact
for maybe 30 or 40 more years
if we act quickly
the material is there
the techniques are there
uh...
it can be saved
but it has to be brought
into modern civilization
and so
you know
classes like this
yeah
if it is
um...
if it is that Gaia
kind of gets to the equilibrium
and there's some
certain type of consciousness
that humans need to have
in order to
bring about that equilibrium
why is it then
that Gaia
uh...
has made
these passages
taste so bad
it's a great question
hmmm
well
i have
here
here's an answer
and then
the essential thing we all need
is courage
and most of us don't have it
under every circumstance
that's a good answer
really
that's very deep
and i will say
i'm going to do this
because my life is depending on it
where my future is
whether it is an existential future
whatever
i don't want to go to hell
i want to
uplift myself
and i'm going to do this
because i know there's love in the world
and i'm going to prove it
i'm going to be it
and i will now offer a tremendously down interpretation
of the same thing
it
these things are all alkaloids
it may just be
that in this universe
alkaloids
they're always bitter
so that Gaia herself
you know
it's like
can God make an object
God can't lift
can Gaia make an alkaloid
that isn't bitter
i don't know
it's a challenge
i don't know
i know that alkaloids
it's bad
my question is
that
are these alkaloids
something that we really should
think
i'm trying to figure out the role
of these physicians
in our consciousness
i see
you know
i don't doubt
that when we were pre-humanoids
and we were running through the fields
and we were like
okay
i can see it
it literally looks like something i can eat
it doesn't have the spine
it's not running away
i don't doubt it
it probably even tastes it good
now
we see fruit
and it's colorful
it's sweet
and maybe
the consciousness that it has
when we eat fruit
is just a different consciousness
than we would have
if we eat mushrooms
but i know
the mushrooms take that
the aliens take that
that twerp
practically kills everyone
that doesn't die from it
and
there's a recommendation
and
you know
every reason
well i think we have
tremendous
i think we have tremendous
resistance
i think
the private issue
certainly for me
and for
probably most of you
it's easy to take psychedelics
the first time
because you don't know what you're getting into
ever after
that
you have to
really have a little chat
with yourself
and
the
there are barriers
to overcome
i have to think about this question
of sweetness
yeah
i think
you made a point there
you know
we see fruit
and its color
and all that
i think we're very conditioned
in our
eating habits
and everything
like we said
we're almost over civilized
to
specifically
you know
teeth
touch
smell
oriented
realm of foods
basically
and i think that probably
our ancestors
were not that
you know
they ate insects
they went from insects
to mushrooms
to meat
it was more
sensual
and a lot less
with all of the
language
build up there
you know
i mean
you mean
that good and bad
is an aesthetic judgment
when you're a hungry
primate
it either
kills you or
it doesn't
there's another issue
around
the taste of our thoughts
the bitter taste
has a very
therapeutic role
quite apart from
psychotic
there's
six or seven
physiological
responses
when you taste
something bitter
all of which
are vital to
immune response
in general
and from
holistic medicine
you can really
say that
some of the
causes of the
explosion of
autoimmune diseases
and degenerative diseases
that we don't
let the bitter taste
of people
there's a
cultural bias
as well
well
sometimes it's good
hearing it
because you
say it
louder
um
when
you taste something
bitter on the back
of a tunnel
there's
a series of reflexes
that are triggered off
by the brain
one of which is
the stimulation of all
the digestive enzymes
being released
there's one of the
exocrine glands
the liver is stimulated
to work a little bit
more efficiently
there are certain
balls of depression
which are lifted
the whole range
of things like that
so
just because they
taste bad
to our culturally
conditioned
sense of what is
good and bad
taste
doesn't mean that
their biologically
is increasingly
becoming
things that taste like
that
are actually very very
important to
humeous status
and holiness
in general
yeah I just wanted to
elaborate on that
this is a cultural
condition
I know in Chinese
medicine
there's the different
tastes
sweet and salty
bitter
these are all essential
you know to do this
for balance
it's a book I think
by Timothy Johns
has to do with
it's a whole book
on bitterness
and the kind of biases
that are against that
are called
yeah I mean because
think about the taste
of scotch
or anchovies
or something like that
and clearly we can
train ourselves
into these things
and cultural values
have a great deal to do
with it
you'd be amazed
what you can eat
if everybody else
is eating it
and in the case of
the psilocybin mushroom
which is the
ur halicinogen
or at least I'm arguing
it is here
when I first encountered it
it took years for me
to build up a gag reflex
I really liked it
in nature
it didn't taste bad
I used to say
it tastes like cold water
that's what it tasted
like to me
now I do have a gag reflex
but I think that
has to do with
you know
accumulated association
to it
yeah
the most
or one of the most
benign substances
chemicals
that you could do
in the brain
or the body
as a whole
it was very rewarding
but after waiting
for the first 90 pages
of the invisible landscape
I think the stuff
that I can understand
some of that was mentioned
in there
and you can elaborate on it
well I guess it's important
to talk about toxicity
this is an issue
and drugs
what you have to understand
is all substances
are potentially toxic
you can kill yourself
with water
if you will
drink enough of it
in the case of drugs
the toxicity
usually lies
much closer
to the effective dose
than it does with water
pharmacologists
have a concept
called LD50
which is a horrifying idea
but you should know it
LD50 is if you have a hundred rats
and you give them a drug
the LD50 dose
is the dose
at which half the rats die
and what you want
in a drug
whether it's a psychoactive drug
or a cancer drug
or anything
what you want
is a drug
where the effective dose
is many many times lower
than the LD50
the LD50
now by that standard
LSD is the safest drug
there is
because you can feel
50 micrograms
of LSD
and 200 micrograms
of LSD
is quite a full menu
but to kill yourself
with LSD
nobody knows
how much it would take
the LD50 for LSD
has never been determined
it's so high
that's good news
now
psilocybin is a mid-range
in this way of classification
the effective dose of psilocybin
is 15 to 30 milligrams
a fatal dose
of psilocybin
is around 150 milligrams
per kilogram
of body weight
so you can figure out
what that is
that's thousands of times
or several thousand times
the effective dose
well then something like mescaline
the LD50 is only about
40 times the effective dose
but so and by that measurement
then you would have to say
mescaline is a rather toxic compound
and it is in fact
you have to take 700 milligrams
this is the other
another way of talking about toxicity
how much do you have to take
if you have mescaline
you have to take 700 milligrams
that's damn near a triple zero cap
filled with pure alkaloid
LSD
to a hundred micrograms
you can lose it on the head of a pin
easily
so that's
that's another way
of thinking about the toxicity and effectiveness
just and then there's one other parameter
how long
does the drug last
if you
if you take a substance
and 48 hours later
you still have your phone turned off
and you're lying around in warm baths
and wishing for a massage
then you took a toxic substance
it's not supposed to do that to you
it's not supposed to leave you with back aches
and insomnia
and a wreck
well by that
criteria
then
DMT must be
one of the safest drugs there are
because it carries you to a titanically psychedelic
state of mind
and returns you in under 10 minutes
to the baseline
of consciousness
uh...
now it takes 70 milligrams
of DMT
to do that
uh...
so then that's
you know it takes a lot more than it does LSD
now
interestingly
and then I'll let you go to lunch
we ran a little over
so we'll go to 1230
here's some new data
that you may not have
uh...
a new psychoactive plant
has come onto the scene
with a new psychoactive substance in it
previously unknown to science
in a chemical family
previously unknown to contain
psychoactive compounds
and this new compound
can justly claim
though very little is known about it
at the moment
and the experience itself
is absolutely
white knuckle terrifying
uh...
can claim to be
the safest
psychedelic
in the world
because
it only takes
um...
a thousand micrograms
one milligram
of this substance
now remember
it took
seventy milligrams
of LSD
one
or fifty
to seventy
one milligram
of
salvanorine
alpha
smoked
will deliver
you into
a freakishly
alien
reality
for about
fifteen minutes
and then
you will return
and
we know almost
nothing about
this drug
at this point
we don't know
it's LD50
but it's the
only the second compound
ever discovered
that is active
in the microgram range
it is an isoquinoline
it is in a chemical family
unknown
to contain psychoactive drugs
they've all been
alkaloids
or
tropanes
or something like that
suddenly
late
in the game
here is
a plant
you can get
high on the plant
although you have to work at it
and it's not dramatic
it's like
the first half hour of ayahuasca
or something
but if you isolate this compound
and smoke it
it'll turn you every way but loose
and this is new data
that has just come out
it should inspire those of you who are field botanists or ethnographers
there is a vast number of plants in the literature
that are listed as suspect hallucinogens
what that means is somebody said
or some Indian told some botanist
we take this and we see things at night
or something
salvia divinorum was known for 20 years
but nobody could find the compound
and nobody could get off on it
well
now
people are getting off
and the compound has been discovered
and they're looking at near relatives of salvia divinorum
including a Ukrainian mint
and some coleus species
and we're finding in microgram
and smaller amounts
a whole family
of these new psychedelic isoquinolines
and what they will mean for us
it's hard to say
I mean
previously DMT
held all honors
for
you know
weirdness
the depth of the
of the call
as Heidegger likes to say
now
Salvinari Nalpha
is
is on stage
and there's lots of work to be done
yeah
I mean I think it's fairly logic
it seems reasonable to say that
first of all you don't want to insult the physical brain
in any time
any how
because you only have one or two
so
you have to keep care of your brain
the
it's very interesting
that the most dramatic
hallucinogen
and now I'm talking about DMT
let's leave Salvinari Nalpha out of this
because not enough is known about it
but the most powerful hallucinogen
actually occurs in human metabolism
every single one of us as we sit here is elaborating DMT
in tiny amounts
we're also elaborating 5-hydroxytryptamine or serotonin
in quite extensive amounts
so I believe that ayahuasca from this standard of judgment
is probably among the safest of the hallucinogens
because it's essentially brain soup
there's nothing in it that you don't already have in your brain
it's just got more of it and in a different proportion
oh yes
they occur in the
in the pineal gland
6-adenaroglomerotropane
is actually
5-hydroxytryptamine
6-hydroxytryptamine
so a lot of these compounds are elaborated in the brain
LSD is not
Salvinari Nalpha is not
ketamine is not
mescaline
close
but not
I mean there are amphetamine like compounds in normal metabolism
but that isn't one of them
yeah
just to give you a question
that you might want to do after
or when we come back
but I have two bold questions
one is
what is your opinion
as to how these different substances
open up different aspects
you know each has their own little niche
and more specifically
if you could give me any point of view
as to the differences in three
what opens up between the mushrooms
and the mushroom experience
and the ayahuasca experience
how do they differ
and do you have any point of view
as to the different windows
or the different dimensions
that different drugs open
sure
I mean it seems to me
and somebody with equal experience
might differ
but it seems to me
it seems to me
that the best model
is like a target
or a bullseye
the various substances
exhibit more and more of their unique character
the more you take
in other words
if you take a low dose
of something
that's psychedelic
it will clarify your vision
stimulate you
and then
and you can't really tell
whether you've taken psilocybin
LSD
mescaline
or what have you
as the dose increases
the specific characteristics
of these substances
begin to emerge
and often
they're contraintuitive
to a chemical way of thinking
for example
ayahuasca
and mushrooms
psilocybin is
4-phosphoroloxy
and then
dimethyltryptamine
when you remove
the phosphorus group
which happens
as it crosses the blood-brain barrier
you get something
very much like DMT
however
when you take psilocybin
you don't get something
like a DMT trip
you
you get
in the case of psilocybin
the most
startling
um
quality of it
is that it speaks
it speaks
it speaks in English
it
it tells you things
I mean this sounds preposterous
unless you've had the experience
it sounded preposterous
to me for years
I just could not imagine
what my friends meant
when they said
these plants talk to you
until I
had a conversation
with it
uh
so psilocybin speaks
and it's a kind of a
it's a kind of a
Spockian
kind of message
it's about
enormous machines
in orbit
around alien planets
it's about
galactarian destiny
and the history
of the local cluster
over the last
half billion years
and it
it's an enormous scale
and it's about
races
worlds
technologies
civilizations
on
and on
switch over to ayahuasca
which is chemically
almost
the same animal
and it's
about
the waters
it's about
birth
death
femininity
uh
health and disease
uh
relationships
energy flows
between people
it's very human
it's very
feminine
it's very
organic
and
uh
enclosing
well
these are
quite different
messages
I mean if you had one
in the absence of the other
you would have an
unbalanced view
I think
of what is going on
however
then
if you take these things
and push them all
do double doses
or triple doses
you
I'm not recommending this, but I'm just saying it has been done and we have the data.
What begins to happen is everything migrates toward the DMT flash.
The DMT flash seems to be sort of like the center of the bullseye.
Now, I haven't personally had enough guts to smoke Salvinorine Alpha.
I've watched people do it, and if you're going to do it,
I suggest you don't watch people do it.
Because I was gung-ho till then.
But assuming it lies somewhere on this spectrum,
what seems to be happening is all of these things propel you
toward deeper and deeper states of boundary dissolution.
At the first level, you simply dissolve the boundary between yourself
and the part of yourself you don't want to look at.
That's called dealing with your stuff.
At the next level, you dissolve the boundary between yourself and other people.
And this is the bonding situations and that sort of thing.
At the next level, boundary between yourself and your memories of the past.
All of your experience is returned to you.
And beyond that, you dissolve then into what Jung called the collective unconscious or something like that.
And then beyond that, Gaian mind, cosmic mind.
I mean, I'm no fan of these hierarchies of named, hypostatized spiritual entities.
But that's the basic idea.
And finally, and astonishingly, you know,
I think the elf workshop of the DMT flash lies very close to the center
of the experience, of what is possible.
It is not simply, as you might have gotten the idea from reading the literature.
You see, in the 60s, they wanted to map it over Buddhism or Eastern religion.
And they wanted to say that as the dose increases, somehow Satori or Shunyata or Nirvana
or the white light or the great void or something like that.
I never had that experience.
As I raised the dose, the complexity of the state complexified.
It never simplified.
It never became neoplatonic.
It always, it just, it became Borgesian and, you know,
the universe is full of a number of things.
So, I don't think we can, you know, some, this is maybe time to stop,
but I'm reluctant to connect this entire enterprise to what is popularly called spiritual growth.
I just think it's more like about growth.
And spirit implies some weird anti-materialist bias or something like that.
These, you know, I was raised Catholic.
So, to me, spirituality means, do you visit the sick and imprisoned?
Do you clothe the naked?
Do you feed the hungry?
Do you bury the dead?
Do you comfort the afflicted?
This is what's, that, when I see somebody doing those things,
I say, this is a spiritually evolving person.
When I see somebody taking psilocybin, I say, there is an explorer.
But I don't try to lay on some moral judgment about good and evil.
I think that's, that's inappropriate.
Spiritual accomplishment is manifested by moral action.
And the role these psychedelics play is they may make moral action easier
because they show you your memories and your depths and your mistakes.
But intrinsically, they are not tools for spiritual development.
They are tools for the exploration of mind.
And we don't know what that is.
And we probably won't figure it out this afternoon.
But anyhow, we'll come back here.
And since it's now 12.30, let's come back at 2 o'clock.
We'll place two announcements, actually.
The first one is the constraints and the rules on the paper.
Those of you who are taking this for credit,
we will meet at break tomorrow morning and discuss that.
So don't worry about it until then.
But it will be discussed.
This is for those of you who are writing a paper.
And the other announcement is Sound Photosynthesis,
which distributes my tapes and videos and a lot of other people's tapes and videos,
are taping this event.
And we'll provide those of you who want it with a tape of this event when it's finished,
for a fee, of course.
And they also have many books, videos, and recordings back there
that deal with this subject or are my books.
And sometimes these things are hard to find.
So if you're looking for something and you see it,
buy it because you can't always be sure that it'll come back around.
And they've gone to the effort of bringing all these things in for you.
Okay, we'll go to 5.
So at 3.30 or roughly, we'll do a little break.
Well, you all went off to lunch somewhere.
Not where I was, so I don't know where you went.
You found the restaurant I couldn't find.
But are there issues outstanding from this morning
or a direction you want to send us off in?
Well, I was just talking to this reporter.
From the Sacramento Bee about this very thing.
I think if you're stupid, there's just no hope.
You have been afflicted with a terrible circumstance
and you have to struggle with that.
A lot of people took LSD in the 60s
and it seemed to have no effect whatsoever on them.
I mean, a lot of pretty colors and this and that.
And then they went out to be war planners
and corporate executives and so forth.
I think it's very important to talk about and analyze your experience.
There is no communication even within the confines of your own mind
if you can't describe what's going on.
And so, you know, the idea here is not that you should take psilocybin day in and day out
or week in and week out,
but that when you do it,
you should do it with dedication and attention and pre-planning
and while it's happening you must pay attention
and after it's over you must analyze it.
You must understand it.
You must try.
It's a tool for thought.
It's a tool for understanding.
And as far as education is concerned,
you know, I think one of the reasons I keep coming back to CIIS
is because unspoken in what's going on here
is the idea that modern psychotherapy of the transpersonal sort
is an embryonic kind of neo-archaic shamanism.
And there is something to be said for judicious use of the concept of the guide.
I think that the guide should first of all be very psychedelically experienced.
A therapist who has never taken these substances can't guide you
because they've never been there.
But in the presence of a skilled therapist,
all kinds of progress in dealing with personal issues and complexes can be made.
People say this stuff is escapist,
but nobody who's ever taken it will line up behind that.
It's too difficult.
I mean, I've had people say to me,
I've heard people refer to psilocybin as psilocybin
and said, I've never had a bad trip on psilocybin.
And I think to myself, gee, I wish I were you
because I don't think the goal with this stuff
is to get through it without ever having a bad moment
sort of unscathed with the parental seal of approval
stamped across your chest.
The goal is to learn.
And learning is often painful.
And the most important lessons are often the most painful.
And if you're going to have to drop an attitude
or a way of relating to somebody
or an opinion about yourself or something,
these things are painful.
And often you don't just say at the height of the psychedelic,
oh, I see, I should change my mind.
And no, often there's tears and soul-searching
and then a sense of dawning light
and then the conversion.
This is not easy work to do.
It's not easy for anybody to do.
I had a guy tell me once in the Amazon,
he said, don't think because we wear penis sheaves
and live in the rainforest
that this is easier for us than it is for you.
It's not.
It's as challenging to your humanness.
It challenges your humanness
no matter where you start out from.
So you have to bring something to it.
But if you bring something to it,
it will work for you.
And I'm of the opinion,
and I get a lot of flack from this,
and you're perfectly free to pile on,
that many other spiritual techniques of advancement
don't work.
Even if you are intelligent,
dedicated,
attentive,
they just don't work.
Or they didn't work for me,
that's all I can say.
This will work.
And if you bring sincerity and integrity to it,
it will respond beyond your wildest dreams.
Yes, did you want to say?
Along these lines,
I was thinking,
there was a thought that came to my mind
while I was at lunch.
I'm going to call it
embodying the love.
And I'm not sure that phrasing is correct.
I'm not even sure I know exactly
what I'm talking about.
But it connected it with something
that you said earlier,
about,
it takes a little bit of burden.
and connects us with the idea
that you and less means
that the strength of the ego.
So,
I'm not used to talking in front of you,
so I get all nervous about it.
I think that there's a certain quality
of you saying
it has to be brought to your experience
in order for what you think of any value.
I mean,
now I can get really bloated
and see all kinds of things you said
and come back
and not be substantially different
unless I'm willing
and in some way or other
it begins to embody
what it is,
the gnosis that I saw.
And that,
at that point,
begins to change
the direction of the core of the body.
And it's really the question,
I think,
that's reported
that what we're dealing with
is how are we,
as a species,
I mean,
it's non-sexual.
And the question is
how do we embody this?
What I see in our culture
is that we have managed
to totally undo
any kind of
historical connection
which would give us
this tradition
within which we could offer
to a kind of
long study from scratch
and borrowing bits and pieces
from our case.
At this point
that you just brought up
about
kind of first
it's a complex.
I agree with you.
This is the direction
of the moving axis.
It's not really so much
of discovering something new
but recovering something
which is from the law.
Right?
Yes, absolutely.
Yes.
Well,
I don't really hear a question.
I agree with what you're saying.
It is a...
What do you have to offer
in terms of
your experience
about how do you get
to the body?
Well,
it's a complicated question.
I'm an alienated intellectual.
Probably most of you
are as well.
I may have been that
before I ever reached
psychedelics.
Basically,
I think that
it almost comes down
to practicing
a noisy form
of aesthetic criticism
of the society.
If something is stupid,
you should say so.
And if something is tasteless
or brutal
or insulting
or demeaning,
we just have to say so.
Now,
the problem is
there is so much
that is tasteless,
insulting,
and demeaning
that you would spend
your entire time
doing that.
Well,
isn't that
what the counter-cultural
milieu is?
I think
it's a group of people
who to greater
or lesser degrees
are entirely
uncomfortable
with the
official culture
and then
try to embody
an alternative culture.
And it's a culture
of tolerance,
of
broad-mindedness,
of
immediate experience.
It's not
a work ethic culture.
It's not
a pile-up
wealth
kind of culture.
It's a culture
that lives
in the moment.
I mean,
and to my mind,
what we can do
is be more
adamantly
counter-cultural
and creative.
That's why
I'm so happy
to see
something like
rave
and house
and ambient music
come along
because,
you know,
rock and roll,
which was
previously
the sustaining
thing of the
counter-culture
was totally
co-opted.
And
the official
culture
turns all
criticism
into a fashion
statement.
That seems to be
how it operates.
So,
in terms of
embodiment,
I think what we have to do
is be creative.
At lunch,
I was saying,
you know,
the culture,
the crisis
that we're in
as a planetary society
is a culture
of consciousness.
There ain't
enough of it.
That's what happens
when women
are raped
in Bosnia.
That's a failure
of consciousness.
That's what happens
when rivers
are polluted
with DDT.
It's a failure
of consciousness,
a failure
to correctly
appreciate
cause and effect.
And
if there is
anything
which increases
our consciousness,
I don't care
if it's a religion,
a food,
a drug,
a sexual product,
a magazine,
if there is
anything
which increases
our consciousness,
we should find out
what it is
and get with it.
And once you've
increased your
consciousness,
a little,
a lot,
some,
it's not doing
any good then
unless it is
embodied.
And the way
it's embodied,
I think,
is by pushing
the art pedal
to the floor.
It's the only
pedal which we
have been allowed
to touch
we don't get
to touch the
international investment
profile pedal
or the international
diplomacy pedal.
Those are all
reserved for
the masters.
But art has been
ceded
to us.
And art
can either be
fawning
and sycophantic
or it can be
radical
and challenging
or it can be
transcendental
and inspiring.
And I think
what we've accepted
in the arts
in the last
20 years
is the idea
of immense
fragmentation
and personal
expression.
This is
exactly the
wrong thing
because what that
is is ego.
We don't care
what Jeff Koons
thinks about
the person
he's sleeping
with and all
this other stuff.
This is just
self-indulgent
nonsense.
The idea
that art
should save
humanity
is very
out of fashion
in the cynical
90s.
But I believe
it.
And I believe
that the
technologists
who are working
at our elbows
are giving us
tools more
powerful
than we
or our
critics
ever imagined
could exist.
And if we
use those
tools
for the
explicit
purpose
of creating
a new
cultural
agenda
it will
be done.
You know
we're all
a little
confused
about this
but those
folks over
on the
extreme
right wing
the Pat
Buchanons
of this
world
they know
exactly
what's going
on
and they
call it
cultural war
and while
they're moving
up their
tanks
and digging
foxholes
what are
we doing
you know
wandering
around
asking
what's
happening
cultural
war
is
very
real
and
the
people
who
are
you know
I realized
sometime
in the last
48 hours
that when
fascism
comes to
America
it will
be called
traditionalism
that seems
to be
how it's
going to
present
itself
so
I think
art
is our
great
our great
ace
in this
game
right now
the most
yeah
well one
more thing
I was going
to say
right now
the most
exciting
cultural
frontier
to my
mind
on this
planet
is the
internet
and the
world wide
web
and
that is
a beast
which escaped
from the
control
of the
dominator
institutions
it was built
to wage
thermal nuclear
war and
to be
indestructible
well when
thermal nuclear
war ceased
to be a
hot option
the
indestructibility
of it remained
and now it
can't be turned
off
it can't be
controlled
it can't be
regulated
and look who's
on there
I mean guys with
long hair and
girls with short
hair and this
drives the
masters crazy
so I
look at the
internet
as
a
vast
canvas
and
to which
we are
each
invited
to make
our own
contribution
and
if
we
seed
3D
to the
orthodox
culture
then we
should make
cyberspace
our own
one of the
things that
I didn't
stress enough
this morning
was
the visual
acuity
empowered
by
psilocybin
leads to
hunting
success
but the
higher doses
of psilocybin
propel you
past
observation
of animal
habits
and environments
and into
the imagination
and I
think you
know that
the cultural
compass
of this
species
points
toward the
imagination
that's where
we're going
to live
in the
future
that's
what we
were born
for
that's
where
we
are
at
our
best
in
3D
well as
James Joyce
says in
Finnegan's
Wake
here in
Moikane
we flop
on the
seamy
side
Moikane
being the
red light
district
of Dublin
but
up
nient
prospector
you
sprout
all your
worth
and you
woof
your wings
well
up
nient
is
spelled
these
days
HTTP
colon
double
back
slash
WWW
yak
right
in other
words
the
imagination
is being
turned into
a piece
of real
estate
and
the
faster
we can
occupy it
and give
it
yeah
specifically
around
psychological
substance
I wanted
to ask
about
intention
I
noticed
in
journeys
that I
had
that
intentions
were
important
and they
shaded
the experience
and
filtered
the experience
and sometimes
very strongly
and sometimes
hardly
at all
but
that's not
what I
noticed
I
am curious
in
comments
you have
an issue
about
intention
and also
intention
as it relates
to different
substances
you get
the same result
you get the same
influence
with the various
substances
with intention
well I
would sort
of agree
with you
and sort
of differ
I
remember
once
I was
at some
impasse
in my
personal
life
and I
decided
I should
take a
psychedelic
and pose
a question
you know
and they
sometimes
say
you should
pose
a question
and I
had
never
done
that
so
the
question
was
am I
doing
the
to ask
a
galactarian
intelligence
well I
suppose
that was
the answer
I needed
to hear
it put
my
problems
in perspective
I realized
you know
you don't
ask
Freud
to clip
your fingernails
for God's
sake
so
in that
sense
I'm not
sure
about
intention
but
the
way
I
understand
intention
is
that
you
should
very
conscientiously
control
set
and
setting
going
into
it
don't
take
these
things
in
crowded
noisy
socially
complex
environments
on an
empty
stomach
with people
you don't
know
that
this is
definitely
a bad
strategy
to follow
and
it's
you know
going
dancing
your ass
off
in a
noisy
environment
is a
perfect
strategy
for clearing
your system
of a drug
I mean
if you take
a drug
you don't
like
what do
you do
you go
outside
and chop
a wood
for three
hours
and then
you feel
much
going to
stronger
to stronger
doses
not
recklessly
high
doses
but what
I call
effective
doses
alone
and this
last thing
just seems
to throw
people
this alone
it tells
me what a
triple
Scorpio
I must
be
that so many
people are
absolutely
horrified of
the idea
of taking
a psychedelic
alone
when
you'd have
to twist
my arm
to get
me
to take
it
with
someone
because
if I
take
it
with
someone
it's
inevitably
going to
be
about
them
and I
may not
want
that
much
of
them
in
I
can't
hear
them
breathing
but
now
so maybe
they're
dead
but
maybe
they
maybe
I
just
can't
hear
them
so
if
I
disturb
them
that's
not
cool
on the
other hand
if they're
dying
and
as a
courtesy
and then
my mind
just
you know
it just
goes
into
a tizzy
well
maybe
you're
not
as
neurotic
as
I
and
I
used
to
adhere
to
a
similar
model
in terms
of
phytosis
use
on my
own
and
then
became
involved
in
the
roquette
type
group
which
for a
variety
of reasons
I've
left
including
I guess
there's
another
part
of
that
which
is
that
there
was
a
tremendous
demand
of
undercurrent
deception
and
guru
abuse
in the
group
which
do you
all
understand
what
he's
referring
to
by
the
roquette
type
model
he's
referring
to
a
person
a
psychiatrist
Salvador
Roquette
who
operated
in
Mexico
for
years
I've
never
met
him
so
correct
me
if
I'm
not
doing
it
justice
but
as
I
understand
it
this
is
basically
the
assault
theory
of
psychedelics
where
you
give
people
first
of
all
you
give
them
multiple
substances
it
Jewish
housewives
from
long
island
and
showed
them
holocaust
footage
well
that
well
it
depends
on
what
you're
after
here
I
mean
if
you're
trying
to
break
people
down
this
sounds
like
it would
break
me
down
I
would
not
know
how
I
could
even
survive
something
like
that
but
I
think
my
theory
is
almost
exactly
the
opposite
I
say
there
should
be
very
little
input
I
don't
think
you
need
to
go
out
and
buy
a
lily
tank
for
your
basement
but
as
close
to
that
as
you
something
it
took
me
years
to
be
able
to
articulate
this
because
I
thought
everybody
did
this
but
apparently
not
I
once
talked
to
Roland
Fisher
the guy
I
mentioned
this
morning
he'd
given
psilocybin
to
2,500
grad
students
he'd
taken
it
times
himself
and
I
said
I
said
well
Roland
what
do
you
make
of
these
hallucinations
of
these
volleys
of
visual
hallucination
and
he
said
I
never
closed
I
was
floored
I
mean
that
is
so
antithetical
to
my
instinct
with
the
stuff
that
I
couldn't
even
imagine
it
then
your
question
about
guru
abuse
I
don't
know
what
it
is
in
me
I
guess
it
just
deep
cynicism
I
discussed
this
once
with
the
mushroom
and
what
I
was
told
was
simply
this
for
one
human
being
to
assume
that
they
could
attain
enlightenment
from
another
human
being
is
like
a
grain
of
sand
on
the
beach
assuming
that
it
can
attain
enlightenment
from
another
grain
of
sand
on
the
beach
in
other
words
all
grains
of
sand
are
alike
didn't
you
know
that
and
all
people
in
this
particular
area
are
alike
how
many
gurus
have
to
be
caught
with
their
hand
in
the
cookie
jar
or
the
nook
of
the
jar or whatever it is before you get the message they are just like us and that may be granting
them a level of moral sophistication they lack as a class what i truly believe is nobody knows
anything the more generous position is you know well the buddhists have a piece of the action and
the mormons know something and everybody has a piece of the action the mushroom says nobody has a piece of
the action that no one knows anything and that's tremendously liberating and it carries a
responsibility for you to take yourself seriously you have no other source everything else is going to
be hearsay secondhand rumor thrice told your self is your instrument for the exploration of these
dimensions there is spread through the world a lot of what i call and i hate the gender bias in calling
it this but it would be dishonest to change it i i call it wise old man woman wise old man knowledge
it could be wise old woman knowledge there's a lot of this all over the world if you go to asia you
will see men sitting in doorways at evening smoking their pipes and watching the sunset as their
grandchildren play at their feet it's a safe bet this person never took lsd or psilocybin and yet
they've attained a certain kind of existential validity wisdom comfort with the phenomenon
of their own being and that can be taught and handed down and talked about and inculcated and cultivated but this psychedelic
thing is something very different i don't i don't think anyone can lead because i don't think anyone is in a position to
lead if you counter by saying what am i doing i'm pointing toward an open door that's all the the method and the material
is what you need to take away from this weekend the opinions of terence mckenna are simply that and worth
just that much but if you take the techniques and the materials you can create your own world of of meaning and
and and coherence yeah
for thoseiah
five if you weigh a hundred and forty five pounds five dried grams weigh it
this is the other thing people
uh don't weigh their doses they eyeball it
Well, the ego, in a frantic effort to save itself, has an amazing ability to under, to overestimate the weight of mushrooms.
When you actually show somebody five dried grams lying on a plate, they usually pale visibly at the very thought that that's what you're talking about.
Yeah?
I just wanted to add that there are species that are quite a bit stronger than that.
Yes, good point.
When I say five dried grams, I mean stropharia cubensis, which is the commercially cultivated one, the large, silvery, stipe, golden-capped mushroom.
Some of the Pacific Northwestern species are twice as strong, or three times as strong.
But if you were to have just applied this literally across the board, you'd probably get further faster than if you are careful.
What about taking out some yields around in the area?
Well, you know what they say, there are old mycologists and bold mycologists.
But there are no old, bold mycologists.
If you're going to do that, learn your taxonomy or join the San Francisco Mycological Society or something.
Many of these things are hard to confuse with anything else.
But Psilocybe semilanciata is, in fact, easily confused with a species of gallerina that you don't even know there's a problem until 12 hours after you've eaten them.
And at that point, you're dead on arrival. There's nothing science can do for you. Your liver has just turned to mush.
So, what I believe people should do is cultivate mushrooms.
I mean, you want to take the alchemical path.
The cultivation of mushrooms is an incredible spiritual and physical discipline.
It will teach you all those good Lutheran values, cleanliness, punctuality, attention to detail, how to keep a clean workspace, for God's sake.
And then you are absolutely confident.
And you have also obtained karma-free mushrooms outside of the cycle of inevitable criminal syndicalism and the karma that carries with it.
And I've participated in it plenty myself, so I'm not knocking it.
But it would be nice if people would produce their own mushrooms because inevitably you produce more than you can use
and then, you know, can help people out down in 5B or something. Yeah.
And how long does it take to grow mushrooms?
Oh, start to finish six to seven weeks.
It's not like growing any plant you've ever grown. Mushrooms are not a plant.
It requires, you know, the sophistication normally reserved for an eighth grade science project.
You have to be able to cook petri dishes and this sort of thing.
And then?
How long does it take fresh?
Fresh.
If you will dehydrate the mushrooms, you'll discover they're 90% water.
So five dried grams becomes 50 wet grams.
And again, this is a plateful.
So figure ten times more than if it's dried.
Or if you're a little conservative, eight times more than if it's dried.
Yeah.
Is there any books that you can recommend in that whole season?
Current growth?
Or really?
Well, two books I would recommend.
The book I wrote with my brother called Psilocybin Magic Mushroom Growers Guide is still in print from Quick Press.
They have an 800 number here in the city.
Quick Trade.
I'm sorry.
Not Quick Press.
Quick Trade.
And then Paul Stamath's book, The Mushroom Cultivators Encyclopedia, is a very good book.
If you are serious about this, try and find someone who's done it and get them to teach you.
Because it's very easy to do, but doing it without being shown by someone is a little like trying to assemble a complex toy on Christmas Eve.
You know, flap F into slot P, that kind of thing.
It's much easier to just be taught by someone.
Yeah.
I had a dream that I slept in the early part of the evening to wake up at midnight to do mushrooms at one.
It was like, I had a dream about that.
I'm wondering about doing it in the same thing of the night.
I always do it at night.
Yeah, that's the best part.
And the reason is a practical one.
And that is, and this gets into another realm, but I'm a hallucination sharpener.
I really like hallucination.
To me, the hallucination is the proof that I am connected to the other.
And so, if I take a low dose and don't hallucinate, even though I may have insights and write paid cover pages with ideas and so forth,
I consider the trip to be somewhat of a failure.
Hallucination is what's important.
Now, what was the other part of your question?
Night time or day time.
The hallucinations are reluctant to form in light, I've found.
That's not true of everything.
For instance, DMT.
I prefer to, my ideal site for smoking DMT would be a grassy sloping hillside somewhere in Marin County or something.
Perfect in bright sun.
But all other hallucinogens seem to prefer darkness and can organize themselves in darkness much better.
It's quieter, although, boy, there are some weird sounds in the middle of the night.
It sounds like the entire house has been surrounded by a motorized platoon or something.
Yeah.
I don't know if I can go on to the religious level.
I'm trying to think about where Christians fit into a religious spiritual pathway.
And I was reading about, and I know there's a lot of controversy about, but he talks about an idea of an eagle and an eagle ship.
Ideas that I've read in Eastern traditions about immortality and certain, you know,
certain hallucinogens lead people to a certain way that they can be so that they can, you know, get by the eagle.
I know that, you know, I was thinking just some of the stuff that, you know,
that that tour that you do since your body seems to get into it out loud,
and I think different, you know, different plants fit in a different way.
Or with your own ideas of not simply just using it as a healing tool for a society,
as a healing tool for a person, and not only using it as just expanding and connecting up your mind
and other people's mind or the world mind or guiding the consciousness,
but also in relation to, you know, more out there, stuff like a religious power.
Well, I think the sincerest form of religious worship is an act of understanding.
That the universe wants to be understood by its creation.
There is a need for dialogue.
So, when you take psychedelics, the way I think of it is once you get past the personal stuff,
then the model for the psychedelic voyager that I use is the fisherman for ideas.
Ideas are the proof of the pudding.
And so you put your little boat out on the sea of mind and let down your nets.
And what you're hoping for is that minnows don't swim through the net.
Minnows are ideas that have a certain striking peculiarity but are utterly, ultimately unsatisfying.
An example would be to spend much time meditating on why your little finger just fits your nostril.
You know, it's an interesting insight, but you can't build on that much, I think.
And if an idea is too large, it'll rend your nets and you won't be able to wrestle it into the boat.
And in fact, you and your nets and your boat will be dragged into the ocean
and we'll just put you in a corner somewhere and look in on you once a week.
So, what you want is middle-sized ideas.
And they can be, any idea counts.
It can be an idea for how to reorganize an investment plan
or what quantum physics is really trying to say
or, you know, the structure of cytochrome C.
It's a specific problem with an answer.
And I really believe that salvation is an act of understanding.
That the moral life is a precondition for salvation.
But that the final step is an act of understanding.
So, I take seriously the idea that these things are consciousness expanding
and that we should use them to add to the storehouse of culturally validated ideas.
Yeah?
I've been wrestling with an issue since lunch and I'm just trying to think how to articulate it to you.
I'm wondering about how age and intention come into the use of psychedelics.
And I know when I was a lot younger and I was using LSD and mushrooms,
I didn't have the intention to really use them for personal growth or for understanding.
I did just to kind of have a good time.
And as I got older and my own awareness increased, my use of them changed.
And I'm wondering what your views are or if you have any insight on
is there a certain age when you think it's appropriate to use these as part of the process for personal growth
as opposed to abuse which a lot of children...
I think it's more about the culture in which you're embedded.
In other words, I'm obviously considerably older than you.
In the 60s, we actually did it with fairly high purpose and did it at fairly high doses.
I mean, you weren't even getting into the game if you didn't take 500 micrograms.
Now people take 70 micrograms and feel that they can hold forth on the subject of what is LSD.
I think what happened was in the 70s and then in the 80s, the dose was dialed down
and it permitted people to take it less seriously.
And so you didn't take it as a fun thing because you were young.
You took it as a fun thing because you were young in the 80s.
And that was how the 80s dealt with it.
You can dismiss LSD as just kind of a fun thing if you keep the dose down under 100.
But once it starts climbing, it begins to be more and more profound.
I have noticed as I age and my peers age that we seem to get more sensitive to it,
which is not to say that we don't need to take it,
but that when we do take it, we don't need to take quite such flattening amounts as in the old days.
But I think once you are conscious of your identity and of the world you're in, sometime around 16 or so,
then I think it becomes just a matter of circumstance and predilection and intelligence.
I don't think, you know, psychedelics work with intelligence, but they can't increase it beyond a certain point.
And some people are just, I almost said shallow, and then I decided simple.
And some people just are beyond the reach of these things somehow.
It just doesn't address their agenda.
What this seems mostly to have an appeal for is slightly culturally alienated members of a ruling elite.
Where are the black people who should be at this thing?
Where are the Latino people who should be here?
These things are inevitably incredibly white and male.
Why is that? Well, I'm not sure. Yeah?
What about in nature?
That's a good one.
What I would say is just make sure you are really in nature.
Because the reason I stopped taking LSD outside, or psychedelics outside,
was because every time I would take it, something so weird would happen that I just could not stand it.
Usually having to do with another person, usually a stranger.
I mean, you can go up to the top of Mount Whitney, look around, make sure nobody is there, drop,
and within 15 minutes, the ranger wants to see the camping permit, the army is doing helicopter maneuvers,
30 cup scouts show up.
I mean, it's uncanny.
So I, I, and some people like to do that.
I mean, some people's idea of a good time is to take 500 mics of LSD
and wander around lower Manhattan meeting people.
Listen.
On people that take psychoactive drugs around a lot of people,
to absorb, like, a learning experience from interaction with other people,
say like mine, a similar mind.
Well, these have to be small doses, because that effective doses, you're lying on the floor as dead.
So, yeah, I mean, and you learn what you can handle.
You know, I mean, some people can take vast amounts of LSD,
and it would never enter your mind that they're loaded at all.
And other people, you look over at them, and they're bursting into laughter and can't behave themselves.
Well, I think DMT is, if DMT didn't exist, we would have to invent it.
It's sort of, there has to be something in the world.
There has to be a weirdest thing.
Once we have the concept weird, there has to be a weirdest thing.
And DMT is simply it.
DMT is that thing which, above all other things, you have convinced yourself doesn't exist.
It's the one thing you are certain is impossible.
That's how it seemed to me.
It completely deconstructs reality in a completely unexpected way.
In other words, reality can come apart many different ways.
And if it begins to come apart, you hope it will begin to move along some traditionally sanctioned spiritual arc, you know,
toward Jesus or heaven or hell or something identifiable.
What happens with DMT is there is an eruption of the unexpected.
It seems to be in its nature to be unexpected.
And it seems to carry the message with incredible intensity that everything you know about reality is wrong.
It isn't what you think it is.
When you smoke DMT, when I smoke DMT, and according to Rick Strassman's research out at New Mexico, when most people are exposed to DMT,
very quickly, like within 30 seconds to a minute, you are conveyed into an inconceivably alien and dramatic environment of 100% hallucination.
Nothing you have ever seen before is there.
There is nothing there that the English language can describe.
Because there is nothing there that any English speaking person ever has encountered before.
Or German or French or Swahili.
You are conveyed into not a unitary world, not the white light, the one, or any of that, but a complex, multiplistic world of motion, light, color, depth, interaction.
And none of it makes very much sense at all.
It is a metaphor for what I am talking about.
Imagine that you were a Paleolithic person getting loaded around a campfire somewhere on the grasslands of Africa.
And imagine that for a minute and a half you suddenly found yourself standing in Times Square at rush hour.
Well, you could sort of make sense of it.
When you came back you would say, well, there were people, sort of, there were sort of people,
and then there was a lot of motion, and then there was a lot of verticality,
but basically you are just thrashing and clawing the air in front of your companions.
They are not getting a picture of Times Square at rush hour from this description.
DMT is like that.
It seems to punch through to an impossible world, a parallel dimension.
And it would be shocking enough if it were purely incomprehensible.
The problem is, it is not quite purely incomprehensible.
There is a 2% residuum that you seem to be able to relate to.
These self-dribbling basketball-like entities that I call Tykes that come bounding up and leap into your body and crawl all over you and jump in and out of your chest cavity.
They are singing in some kind of language that you don't hear but see.
And so they are singing objects into existence.
Some kind of musical grammar is condensing small pieces of furniture around you.
And you have to remember, 30 seconds before you were in some shabby apartment, you and your strange friends fiddling with some drug,
and now that is all gone and you are not sleepy, you are not dazed, you are absolutely who you were.
That is the strange thing.
DMT does not affect the part that we call ourselves.
Say, I am who I was, I am exactly who I was.
But what the hell has happened to reality?
And it has been entirely replaced by something that I never saw in any science fiction film,
never heard about in any fairy tale, never dreamed of, never hinted of.
And now I am fully there.
And these little entities are dancing around your attention and then they want you to do something.
They want you to sing objects into existence with your voice.
And they are doing it.
They are showing you how it is done.
They somehow, grammar is seen in that world.
It is as though a switch has been thrown in your neurophysiological machinery.
And language, which you used to hear, you now see.
And these things are putting a lot of pressure on you.
Saying, do it, do it, don't question, don't think, don't reflect, just do it.
And I sort of feel something cross between heartburn and satori begin to move its way up my chest.
And when it comes, when it reaches my mouth, my mouth flies open.
And this glossolalia-like linguistic stuff begins to happen, which is like language, like liquid, like silk, I can see it.
And it's colored and it's complicated.
And now I do not understand what this is for.
I can join you in speculating.
It looks to me like, first of all, language itself is a mysterious activity.
A behavior, which we participate on the body of nature.
Human language is the place to look.
It is not anticipated in other forms of animal organization.
And in us, it reaches this excruciating level of expression.
And with it, we have created culture, which is a virtual reality that we surround ourselves with,
not only of ideologies, Marxism, democracy, monarchy, but buildings, highways, infrastructure.
So it's almost as though language is an alien artifact of some sort.
You remember Bill Burroughs said it's a virus from outer space.
Well, this is sort of like that idea.
But language is obviously not something that is a finished enterprise.
And I think that we are approaching, either through our own, the natural evolution of the soma, of the body,
or through technology, or through some combination of the two.
We are approaching a place where we are going to switch channels
and switch the language channel into a more broad bandwidth mode.
And we are going to see what we mean instead of hear what we mean.
That the convention of using small mouth noises to symbolically indicate objects in the world
so that those who share the same set of linguistic assumptions can download this acoustical babble
and reconstruct the thought out of it is going to be traded in for something more like a direct acoustical hologram,
where then ambiguity is much less prevalent.
You know, if I read you a paragraph from Proust, we can spend the rest of the afternoon discussing what did the author mean.
You've all been in those situations.
What did the author mean?
But if I show you a sculpture by Brancusi, we just walk around and look at it.
It self-evidently is what it is.
It does not have the ambiguity that adheres to written and spoken language.
And I think this ambiguity has allowed misunderstanding and misunderstanding has allowed pain and agony.
So, it may be that we are on the brink of a higher form of language, the descent of the Logos.
This would be it, the manifestation of the Logos and the psychedelics,
by allowing a look through the hyperspatial window at future states of human organization,
as I argued this morning, is actually giving us a taste of a human future that may be far in the future,
in the same way that if you had smoked DMT 20,000 years ago, you might have landed in Times Square circa 1960.
It's an insight into a future development in the physiology and mind of man,
and makes it very suggestive then that DMT is being elaborated in our brains as part of normal metabolism.
We have genes that produce DMT.
Well, what if those genes were to be switched on in a more dramatic way?
Then what would the quality of culture be?
If culture is the serotonin trip,
then what kind of culture would we live in if the serotonin were backed out in favor of a DMT-maintained neural substrate?
I don't know, lots of hands up.
You've been patient.
It speaks to you in your own language.
Let me tell you a story which seems to me really a strange story, but it happened to me, so I'll tell it.
When I...
When I first started growing mushrooms, I was testing all these batches and taking it quite a bit of the time.
And one evening, I got locked into this voice thing, and it was singing a little song.
And the song was something like this.
Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-saes.
Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-saes.
It ended each line with the word says.
So I thought, interesting.
Then I went back and listened to Maria Sabina's Mushroom Vallada, where she's singing in Tzatzil, which is a mountain Indian language of central Mexico.
She's singing in Tzatzil, and the interlinear translation is right there on the page.
this word means says
so I thought
this thing can do it
in any language
it is apparently
omnilingual
yes
I said DMT naturally occurs
in the human brain
well there's a lot of anecdotal
talk about this but I don't think
there's ever been a statistically
coherent study
coming out of the 60s of course
there was a rash of LSD
babies and some of those
LSD babies are now
19, 25 years old
and they are perhaps in this room
and can speak for themselves
but it's never been studied
it would be an interesting thing to look at
if you could follow up
the idea that LSD breaks chromosomes
was simply a government lie
a smear
that to this day survives
in certain portions of the literature
it is not true
it is not even a little true
it is 100%
horseshit
it just doesn't do that
aspirin and caffeine
break chromosomes
with an order of magnitude
more alacrity
than LSD
that's right
my brother did a study
actually
Lawrence Rockefeller
paid for much of it
a study of these
maestres
in Brazil
these Santo Daime people
who've taken
Unial
Unial du Vegetal
these people who had taken
ayahuasca
weekly
for 40 years
and they did blood studies
and tissue studies
and they're fine
in fact
they are slightly
above normal
in certain indices
it just has
hasn't been studied
many of these LSD babies
were also born
into very loving
communal
neo-archaic
kind of settings
and they had lots
of unconventional
nurturing
and raising
too
so it's very hard
to separate
all these
to tease
these factors
apart
yeah
uh-huh
how did you bring about
true shamanism
within our modern culture
without it
falling into
that kind of thing
like people start
to idolize
an individual
and yet
still bring
someone
like a shaman
into a community
and
in business
tribe shamanism
they're often
not necessarily
idealized
like they are
in a groovy situation
but
they're respected
and they thought
of as being
more learning
and
they often have
the
archive of knowledge
well you know
Merseliad
in his
great book
on shamanism
he subtitled it
the archaic
techniques
of ecstasy
what
a shaman
is in command
of
are techniques
and they're not
based on
his personality
that's where
it's different
from the guru
if once
the shaman
has told you
his techniques
he's told you
all he can tell you
and
you then
have to apply
the techniques
that
ideology
is fairly
absent
in shamanism
at a practical
level
it's
it's basically
about
experience
not about
an ideological
preconception
of things
the way
I handle
gurus
is just
to simply
say
what can
you show
me
and then
if you're
told
well you
have to
sweep up
around the
ashram
here
12 years
or so
and do
daily
prostrations
and then
we'll cut
you in
on the
good
you just
can pick
up your
knapsack
and keep
going
because
real
the real
stuff is
not hidden
like that
when I
went to
South
America
and people
said
I said
what can
you show
me
and they
said
well let's
just sharpen
our machetes
and go
out here
into the
woods
a half
a mile
and cut
some vine
and bring
it back
and boil
it up
and I'll
show you
what I'll
show you
I'm very
suspicious
of lineages
and secret
knowledge
and situations
where somebody
decides
where somebody
else is
worthy
to ascend
to the
next level
because
you know
man for
man and
woman for
woman
there doesn't
seem to
be a more
scheming
tawdry
and venal
subclass
on this
planet
than
gurus
I mean
there may
be some
good ones
but my
god
they keep
bad
company
yeah
I heard
Brad
I was
speaking up
about
I heard
what I
am saying
in my
mind
kinesthesia
sort of
characteristics
when you
were describing
the DMT
the hearing
of colors
or speaking
words
words that
became
colors
clearly it is
a sense
so
okay so
can that
and you might
want to go
into that
for other
people
but I'm
really into
this whole
can that
happen
and occur
with other
with the
mushrooms
say
or another
hallucinogen
than
the DMT
well
no I
think
you know
if you
take
enough
psilocybin
it begins
to look
like
DMT
if you
take
an 8
or 9
gram
dose
of
psilocybin
at about
the 2
hour mark
it'll be
indistinguishable
from
DMT
to address
this question
of synesthesia
obviously
the world
is a
unity
and it
arrives at
the surface
of your
body
as a
unity
of
electromagnetic
vibrations
and light
and so
forth
but your
senses
break it
up at
that point
your eyes
tell you
about light
that's a
certain
range of
electromagnetic
radiation
your ears
measure
pressure waves
in the air
the acoustical
range
your
hands
inform you
about the
tactility
of the world
but the world
is one thing
so
it's almost
as though
the senses
are reunified
in
synesthesia
in a way
that may have
been originally
intended
and has
for some
reason
fallen out
of our
physiological
repertoire
or perhaps
exist
as a
future
state
but yes
tasting
shapes
seeing
colors
feeling
music
there are
people who
have
unusual
neurological
conditions
who live
in these
kinds of
spaces
and it's
very hard
to
some of
you may
know
the guy
who wrote
Oliver Sacks
book
The Man
Who Mistook
His Wife
for a
Hat
it's a
wonderful
book
and the
man who
tasted
shapes
that's
right
yes I'm
a little
embarrassed
by it
because it
it breaks
my
proletarian
mold
there were
only 70
copies of
that book
and it
costs
about
$1500
and what
it is
it's a
showcase
for an
artist
named
Tim
Eli
who is
very famous
in the
world
of
made
books
and he's
at the
top of
the
made
books
thing
so I
contributed
a text
he made
the paper
and the
binding
and set
the print
and painted
on each
page of
each book
in a
special
unique
way
and
it's
an
art
marked
object
yeah
your book
on cultivating
psilocybin
mushrooms
has a
very strong
impact
in terms
of the
accessibility
of mushrooms
and DMT
is much
harder
to obtain
than mushrooms
and I
know
people
have
explored
Jonathan
on
analog
and
you
did
review
which
is
very
mixed
success
and I'm
wondering
if you
have any
thoughts
about
similarly
accessible
ways
of
making
it
become
magnificent
yeah
well
I don't
advocate
if you're
not
at least
a third
or fourth
year
biochemist
you shouldn't
attempt
it
because it
involves
in the
laboratory
because it
involves
the use
of
LIAH
here's a
book
called
psychedelic
shamanism
that has
recipes
but
LIAH
is
lithium
aluminum
hydride
is
very
explosive
and
don't
make
a fuel
of
yourself
the
other
approach
is to
try to
find
a
weak
source
in
nature
and
concentrate
it
and
phalaris
grasses
phalaris
tuberosa
and
arundinacee
you can
grow
them
and
do
a
low
tech
water
extraction
I'm
not
sure
nobody
has
ever
handed
me
a
gram
of
DMT
created
by
these
techniques
this is
all
sort
of
backyard
theory
but in
theory
it should
be able
to do
this
there's
also
a
plant
called
Desmantha
solenoensis
that grows
in the
Midwest
that has
a very
high
concentration
of
DMT
in the
root
bark
it's
interesting
to talk
about
that
plant
for
a
moment
because
it's
only
been
known
that
it
contained
DMT
in the
root
bark
for
about
five
years
but
it
could
have
been
used
by
the
North
American
Plains
Indians
to
produce
some
kind
of
a
shamanic
hallucinogen
but
never
was
as far
as
we
can
tell
and
this
is
an
interesting
question
those
of
you
and
not
others
it
simply
isn't
a
matter
of
availability
for
example
second
only
to
the
Mexican
concentration
of
species
in
Oaxaca
and
the
Sierra
Mazateca
is
the
concentration
of
over
known
species
in
the
Pacific
Northwest
yet
evidence
of
use
of
those
mushrooms
by
the
Tlingit
Chimsham
and
the
Northwest
Coast
Indians
is
very
hard
to
come
by
ranging
from
maybe
none
to
maybe
a
little
tiny
bit
but
by
no
means
is
it
established
that
they
did
this
desmanthus
thing
is another
thing
why
was
it
never
utilized
this
new
chemical
and
plant
that
I
talked
about
this
morning
has
an
interesting
relationship
to all
this
salvia
divinorum
this
Mexican
mint
that
contains
salva
norine
alpha
it's
used
only
by
two
fairly
small
language
groups
the
tzotzil
and
the
tzotol
and
they
call
it
ojas
de la
pastora
the
leaves
of
the
shepherdess
but
when
you
ask
them
well
what
do
you
call
it
in
sotsil
what
do
you
call
it
in
your
language
they
say
we
have
no
name
for
this
plant
in
our
language
well
that's
impossible
if
they've
been
using
it
for
any
length
of
time
so
is
it
that
these
people
discovered
this
plant
as
recently
maybe
as
or
years
ago
and
having
a
tradition
of
plant
use
they
inculcated
this
one
into
it
there's
a
similar
case
in
Africa
you
probably
all
know
about
Iboga
Tabernanza
Iboga
which
is
the
only
religion
in
Gabon
and
Zaire
called
Bawiti
and
interesting
on this
gender
issue
just
as
an
aside
this
stuff
is
used
to
hold
relationships
together
it's
well
understood
that
that's
what
it's
for
is
to
bond
people
but
and
these
people
who
use
it
the
fang
people
they
say
they
got
it
from
the
pygmies
but
what's
strange
about
Iboga
is
there
is
no
record
of
anybody
using
it
before
anywhere
this
is
very
puzzling
because
the
Portuguese
had
been
into
West
Africa
since
the
1440s
and
trading
and
buying
slaves
and
bringing
back
artifacts
and
this
sort
of
thing
no
record
of
Iboga
use
before
so
we
can't
assume
always
that
these
things
are
ancient
there's
a lot
of
controversy
about
peyote
if you're
not
looked
into
the
matter
you
might
assume
this
is
this
ancient
hallucinogen
but
in fact
the
most
of
the
evidence
argues
that
until
the
1880s
Sephora
secundifolia
beans
were the
preferred
shamanic
intoxicant
of the
Rio Grande
drainage
well
now
today
Sephora
secundifolia
is
considered
a
poison
it
has
cytosine
in it
it's
a
terrible
thing
to
take
this
is
another
thing
I mean
as long
as I'm
just
riffing
on
these
things
you
have
to
realize
that
intoxication
is
a
culturally
defined
situation
for
example
in
Madagascar
the
Malagasy
Republic
the
large
island
off
eastern
Africa
there
are
no
major
psychedelics
but
there
are
what
are
called
ordeal
poisons
these
are
plants
where
you
take
it
you
think
you're
going
to
die
you
beg
to
die
and
then
you
get
better
and
are
fine
well
people
come
out
of
that
reborn
rededicated
to
their
families
and
their
professions
and
their
position
in
society
why
not
because
it
was
psychedelic
but
because
a
near
death
experience
is
intrinsically
an
experience
which
a
couple
years
ago
that
popular
underground
designer
drug in
Japan
or
something
that
invoked
a
certain
kind
of
near
death
experience
with
something
that
was
described
as being
a
kind
of
neurological
state
that
the
body
doesn't
go
and
takes
a
very
catastrophic
end
basically
gives you
a certain
kind
experience
of a
violent
kind
of
demise
and
that
has
some
kind
of
popular
use
it's
not
true
it
probably
will
be
in
time
some
people
have
nominated
DMT
for that
role
my
friend
Rupert
Sheldrake
he
calls
it
a
thanatoptogen
he
says
when
you
really
die
when
you
are
beyond
any
returning
DMT
floods
the
dying
brain
and
the
only
way
you
can
have
that
experience
without
dying
is to
artificially
induce
it
this
may
be
so
I
mean
one
of
the
most
challenging
things
about
DMT
and we
might as
well
you know
it's
the
afternoon
of
hallucination
we
whose
lives
are
built
on
hallucination
or
what
is
to be
made
of that
what
kind
of
an
entity
can
have
a
mind
but
not
a
body
and be
loose
inside
your
mind
I
think
that
possibly
I
mean
this
is
sort
of
the
most
woo
place
we'll
pass
through
unless
you
bait
me
but
if
you
ask
shamans
worldwide
how do
you do
what
you
do
they
will
say
well
we
use
ancestor
spirits
the
ancestor
spirits
help
us
well
you
know
you
may
think
you're
counter
cultural
but
most
people
hearing
about
ancestor
spirits
are
able
to
dumb
that
down
into
oh
these
naive
charming
Indians
you
know
that
sort
of
thing
but
what
if
there
is
actually
something
which
survives
bodily
death
that
is
actually
continues
to
exist
in a
dimension
which
we
would
have
to
call
mental
or
trans
real
and
what
if
you
can
come
and
go
from
that
dimension
using
shamanic
techniques
well
that
is
in
fact
what
shamanism
has
always
claimed
to
anyone
who
would
listen
they
say
you
know
the
shaman
passes
back
and
forth
through
the
same
doorway
through
which
the
dead
pass
but
they
do
not
return
the
superhuman
condition
of the
shaman
his or
her
ability
to
cure
to
handle
fire
to
drive
metal
objects
through
flesh
all of
this
is
to show
that they
are of
both worlds
that they
partake in the
antos of
normal being
but they
also partake
in the
antos of
transcendental
being
and I think
it would be
the most
astonishing
cultural
development
of the
last
years
if we
were to
actually
learn
something
about
the
after
death
that
would
strip
away
our
materialist
and
cheerful
assumptions
that when
you go
into the
ground
you're
nothing
but
compost
in a
way
that
belief
has
been
the
permission
for
all
of
our
dumbing
down
and
devaluing
of
ourselves
our
society
each
other
and
the
planet
the
belief
that
well
ultimately
it
doesn't
amount
to
anything
anyway
well
what
if
ultimately
you
don't
know
what
is
it
now
there
isn't
any
bug
taken
there
but
we
have
had
and
I
witnessed
the
verdict
on
experiences
of the
ancestors
saying
people
were
all
saying
they
were
kept it
and
one
afterwards
we were
going around
the room
the
experiences
were
all
remarkable
and
I
don't
know
if that's
true
it's a
professional
calling
I mean
I think
everybody
should have
a psychedelic
experience
but to
professionally
dedicate
yourself
to a
lifetime
you
experience
if you
can
concur
with
that
and
I
want
to
get to
a
question
about
the
book
earlier
that
you
mentioned
well
first let me
deal with
the
timelessness
this
metaphor
that I
tried to
put out
this
morning
about
how
the
shaman
goes
to
hyperspace
and
therefore
can
see
next week's
weather
next week's
hunting
who's
going to
recover
from
illness
and
who
isn't
what
going
into
the
fourth
dimension
means
is
all
time
becomes
co-present
you know
there's
that piece
of
doggerel
poetry
I
dreamed
I
saw
eternity
the
other
night
an
endless
golden
ring
in other
words
eternity
is
all
time
in a
completed
form
and
I
think
timelessness
stopping
the
world
as
Castaneda
said
this
is
an
indication
that
you
have
truly
crossed
the
boundary
out
of
three
dimensional
Newtonian
space
and
into
this
hyperspatial
dimension
I
really
I
can't
say
enough
about
this
because
I
think
this
is
the
key
that
life
is
a
process
that
conquers
dimensionality
it
always
has
been
the
earliest
forms
of
life
were
fixed
slimes
they
had
no
motility
they
had
an
existence
as
points
later
they
acquired
motility
the
ability
to
swim
around
and
were
aware
then
of the
concept
here
and
there
and
then
really
the
entire
evolution
of life
on
this
planet
is
simply
to
develop
better
organs
for
moving
around
in
three
dimensional
space
stronger
legs
stronger
arms
better
binocular
vision
so forth
and so
on
until
you get
to
human
beings
and
we
invent
language
and
what
is
language
it's
a
strategy
for
escaping
from
the
narrowness
of
the
present
moment
because
if
you
have
language
you
can
say
I
remember
the
time
or
you
can
say
why
don't
we
plan
on
doing
so
and
so
in
other
words
you
ask
and
when
you
get
written
language
then
you
get
history
then
there
is
in a
way
the
past
never
goes
away
the
past
changes
into
history
and
in
that
form
or
the
present
changes
into
history
and
in
that
form
it
stays
with
us
and
now
culture
electronic
culture
we dream
of an
information
lossless
society
where
no
information
is
lost
and
then
that
means
in
a
sense
where
no
time
passes
away
you
know
we'll
have
Marilyn
with
us
and
JFK
everybody
a
kind
of
eternity
so
and
so
language
is
then
seen
as
a
strategy
for
the
further
overcoming
of
dimensional
limitation
and
now
with
the
internet
about
to go
visual
and
all
that
it
seems
like
we're
again
about
to
take
another
step
deeper
into
the
conquest
of
dimensionality
but
there's
nothing
new
in
all
this
is
the
business
that
biology
has
been
about
since
day
one
and
then
the
glossolalia
there's
a
feeling
it's
you know
not to be
crude
but it's
somewhat
like a
belch
or
something
it's
like a
bubble
something
moving
up
and
then
when
it
actually
gets
to your
mouth
it
manifests
as
a
deep
air
passing
from
my
awareness
what
do I
do
with
vibration
of
energy
which is
somehow
and I don't
know how
it's done
but
somehow
through some
sort of
activity
that's actually
taking place
in me
something
changes
and this
becomes
what
you're
describing
as
language
to see
that's
sound
from your
ears
are you
and I'm
looking at
frequencies of
vibration
that's one
what one
kind of energy
and there's another
kind of energy
that's behind that
that could be
what we call
the ancient
meaning
okay
well
there's
sound
and
meaning
and they
are
not
necessarily
related
yes
I mean
I've had
I always
my technique
or my
intellectual
style
though it
may not
seem like
it
is to
always
seek
for a
rational
explanation
first
and then
from there
more and
more
exotic
explanations
so
I was
really
floored
by
this tyke thing,
because that seemed to me unambiguously
not something which was supposed to happen
in the universe as I was told it,
that there were supposed to be
small non-human intelligences
leaping in and out of my chest.
And one idea that's occurred to me,
and since some of you are interested in psychology,
it's maybe worth talking about,
plus we get to inject a buzzword here,
which is, as you know,
it is now understood that
we are really not one person.
We have many personalities.
Multiple personality disorder
is simply when you manifest this
on a level that irritates other people.
Multiple personality order
is when you have them all lined up in a row
and the right ones always talk to the same people
and so the illusion is maintained.
Well, in the same way that,
you know, if you had a big mirror,
you look in the mirror
and you see a reflection of yourself.
But now if you lift the mirror up
and bring it down on the ground
and shatter it,
what you see now
is not a shattered reflection of yourself,
but hundreds of little reflections of yourself,
each one whole.
Well, may it not be then
that what DMT does
is it shatters the illusion of the self
and says,
you're not a self,
you're a tribe of selves.
And here they are,
dancing,
performing,
singing.
They are the fractal adumbrations
of the personality.
That was the buzzword
that I wanted to get in.
They are the fractal adumbrations
of personality.
That's one possibility.
The other possibility,
souls.
Like I said,
an ecology of souls.
That is the conservative explanation.
Why is it the conservative explanation?
Well, because we are here
and so if we think of them
as human beings of some sort,
they just happen to be dead human beings.
Nevertheless,
we see that there are human beings
so perhaps there is a residuum
that survives death
and that is what these things are.
Other possibilities
must range more further afield.
A parallel continuum
actually inhabited by these things.
That they are not human beings
in any form.
That they are autonomous entities
with their own universe.
That's one possibility.
Another possibility is
that these are the long-sought extraterrestrials.
That they don't come in beryllium ships
the size of Manhattan
to take control of our gross industrial output.
That that's a crazy way of thinking
about extraterrestrials.
That they come through
a technology of mind.
That they come
by collapsing space
across mega parsecs
and appearing in the mind
as a hallucinogenic experience.
But then, of course,
the question is
why?
And why this sense of familiarity?
And why this deep affection
and concern for suffering humanity?
I don't have answers.
But I know that these questions
need to be answered.
The domain is real.
Yeah, we'll do a question
and then it's break time.
I just wonder
if there's really
that much of a difference.
I mean, you're presenting
these alternatives
maybe for clarity
as completely separate.
But the idea
of autonomous entities
living in some hyper-eventual space
versus the idea
of our separate personalities
versus the idea
of other beings
that maybe have a more
traditional existence
but just very far away.
Are they really all that separate?
It seems to me
that if the mind
actually makes its home
at least in large part
in hyper-space
in the everyday world
of the mind
and if that's where
our thoughts live
then
if we take these drugs
they transport us
to a place
where we see that
through another filter.
In this hyper-space
that's where
the other minds live
presumably
there may not be
that much of a difference
between those three alternatives
you actually compose.
It may be
the ego
that you talked about earlier
that is
causing the confusion here.
We think of ourselves
wrapped in this skin
living at this point
and then all this stuff
is very confusing.
But if we expand
our definition of mind
to be
what you've earlier
said it to be
then perhaps
these entities
I mean,
they're fascinating
but they're not so mysterious
outside the domain
of where they should be.
well, yeah,
I mean,
you're right
although
well, let's take
two of the possibilities.
If it's an ecology
of souls
we're dealing with
then
there should be
they should have
complete knowledge
of the history
of the planet
and everything
that's ever gone on
and so forth
but they won't have
a complete
encyclopedia
of galactic history
or something like that
I think that
well, frankly
I don't know
what I think
it depends on
how recently
I've smoked DMT
the overwhelming impression
is of
cognitive dissonance
occasioned by
the simultaneous
perception
of alienness
and familiarity
these are the most
alien things
you've ever seen
and you know
you've been here before
and you know
it's very important
and you know
it's basic
to who you are
but if it's
the self
then what have we done
to the definition
of the self
the self is supposed
to mean
that which is most
familiar to me
if the concept self
can also include
the notion
that which is least
familiar to me
then it's almost
too broad
a concept
to use
I think
what we need
is scientists
meaning you don't
have to wear
a white coat
but you do have
to have the
scientific attitude
rolling up their
sleeves
and going in there
with the same
attitude that
Wallace went
to the Amazon
and that Darwin
went to the Galapagos
and let's figure out
let's map
the flora
and fauna
let's get a taxonomy
of these tykes
let's try and figure out
where they're coming from
and what their purpose is
shamanism
I believe
is the study
of this
dimension
and
it's not reached
any conclusions
at this point
it is
a phenomenology
not a science
and so
the Amazon shaman
he has a language
of control
and description
which is satisfying
in his context
and to his people
but it may not
be satisfying
in your context
and to your people
even if you
assimilate it perfectly
now it's like
physicists
talk about
charm
and strangeness
of quarks
but this has nothing
to do with
strangeness
or charm
in ordinary speech
these are very
very complicated
concepts
where the technical
gloss
has been
to call it
strangeness
and when a shaman
tells you
he deals
with ancestor
spirits
you
for whom
Caspar the
friendly ghost
is the image
of an ancestor
spirit
definitely get
a cockamamie
notion
then
when you try
and map
Caspar the
friendly ghost
onto the Amazon
shaman's notion
of an ancestor
spirit
these concepts
require a lifetime
of manipulation
and familiarity
before you
understand
where the
boundaries
will lie
well
why don't we
take a
five minute
ten minute
break here
and then
we'll come back
kinds of
details
there's the
details
of shamanic
usage
descriptions
of ethnographic
material
how
ayahuasca
is used
how
there's a whole
neurophysiological
world
of discussion
what happens
to these
molecules
once they get
inside your
body
where do they
go
in the body
and in the
brain
and
why
are they
able to
do
what they
do
what
molecular
species
are they
competitive
with
so forth
and so on
issues
of botany
taxonomy
biogeography
so forth
and so on
so I
want you
to direct
it where
you want
it to go
in some
of these
areas
I'm more
competent
than in
others
but if I'm
incompetent
I can
usually
bring myself
to say so
and name
a book
that will
help you
out
with this
stuff
so don't
be shy
about
jerking
us
one way
and then
another
yeah
well let me
background
the question
relates
to
an incident
told
about
in both
my book
with Dennis
Invisible
Landscape
and in
True
Hallucination
creatively
agitated
under the
influence
of mushrooms
announced
that he
could
do
something
which is
very hard
to describe
what it
was
it was
sort of
like
turn
himself
inside
out
trigger
the
end
of
the
world
open
a
doorway
into
hyperspace
something
like that
anyway
some
highly
touted
dramatic
thing
he
organized
an
experiment
to test
the
theory
and
the
result
of the
experiment
was
not
nothing
which
was
what
I
was
betting
on
not
what
he
said
would
happen
which
what
he
was
but
a
very
peculiar
incident
then
was
generated
where
he
seemed
to
lose
his
mind
to put
it
simply
for
about
three
weeks
but
in
a
very
specialized
and
orderly
way
and
I
seemed
to
also
undergo
a
parallel
but
different
kind
of
transformation
and
the
theory
that
was
being
manipulated
was
a
theory
that
involved
using
vocally
produced
tones
to
acoustically
cancel
metabolizing
psychedelic
molecules
in the
body
so that
they
would
bond
as
dimers
into
DNA
in
other
words
so that
they
would
intercalate
into
DNA
the
hypothesis
which
lie
behind
all
this
was
that
DNA
must
be
the
storage
the
physical
storage
site
for
memory
this
is
not
a
popular
idea
this
is
a
sneered
at
idea
but
memory
is a
great
problem
for
modern
science
you
know
we've
decoded
DNA
we've
got
the
top
quark
we've
measured
the
core
temperature
of
betel
juice
we
have
no
idea
how
memory
works
it's
absolutely
confounding
because
a woman
a man
of 90
years
old
can
remember
the
way
their
great
grandmother
skirts
smelled
when they
used to
crawl up
into her
lap
when they
were
four
years
old
it was
years
ago
during
that
time
every
molecule
in the
body
has been
cycled
out
every
five
to
seven
years
so
it's
ten
bodies
away
is the
body
that
crawled up
into
that
woman's
lap
and
could
smell
the
here
where
are
the
memories
and
as
you
know
experiments
have been
done
with
ablating
large
parts
of
the
brain
or
studying
people
who are
the
unfortunate
victims
of very
traumatic
head
injuries
and
there
are
cases
in
the
medical
literature
of
people
who
have
fully
80%
of
their
physical
brain
destroyed
and
no
memory
impairment
whatsoever
so
where
are
the
memories
well
there
are
a
number
of
theories
but
there
is
nothing
more
than
theory
at
this
point
Dennis
said
let's
assume
nature
is
conservative
for a
moment
we know
that
nature
stores
protein
code
in
DNA
and
we
know
that
DNA
has
large
silent
portions
and
in fact
some
of
you
may
have
seen
the
data
which
came
out
just
recently
that
those
large
silent
portions
of
the
DNA
exhibit
the
same
mathematical
properties
as
language
did
you
all
read
this
oh
this
is
hot
as
you
know
DNA
codes
for
protein
that
code
is
only
about
6%
of
the
DNA
chain
the
rest
of the
DNA
the
other
94%
is
called
silent
DNA
or
by
some
people
junk
DNA
because
it
doesn't
code
for
protein
so
what
does
it
do
well
recently
they've
been
sequencing
this
junk
DNA
and
then
studying
it
with
algorithms
used
by
the
CIA
to
detect
code
in
noise
and
they
discover
that
these
silent
portions
of
the
DNA
fit
all
the
necessary
criterion
of
language
they have
syntactical
structure
this
seems to
support
Dennis'
contention
which
was
and
it's
very
would
be
very
controversial
you see
because
it's
a
Lamarckian
mechanism
it's
saying
that
experience
can
modify
nuclear
DNA
which
is
denied
by
anti
Lamarckian
evolution
that's
not
the way
it's
supposed
to
work
according
to
Darwin
and
the
neo
Darwinians
nevertheless
if we
don't
believe
that
the only
part
of
the
body
which
is
not
traded
out
many
times
over
the
only
part
of
the
body
which
you
are
born
with
and
die
with
is
neural
DNA
neural
DNA
what
you're
born
with
you
keep
therefore
it's
reasonable
following
good
scientific
method
to
hypothesize
that the
neural
DNA
must be
where
the
memories
are
well
then
Dennis'
idea
was
that
ordinary
experience
has
to
do
with
serotonin
dropping
into
a
relationship
of
bonding
with
DNA
and
giving
off
a
signal
like
a
radio
transmitter
of
the
structural
hyperfine
ESR
of the
DNA
and
that
then
constitutes
the
electro
biochemical
foundation
of the
experience
of thought
and
so
what
he
was
saying
was
then
what
these
psychedelics
are
is
they're
like
different
kinds
of
transmitters
stronger
or
transmitting
in
different
wavelengths
or
transmitting
with a
higher
bandwidth
and
it
is
known
in
fact
that
these
psychedelic
molecules
do
compete
with
serotonin
they are
serotonergic
competitors
so
visualize
the
DNA
in
the
course
of
metabolism
unfolding
and
folding
itself
to
expose
various
runs
of
nucleotides
to
ribosomal
coding
into
RNA
and
in
this
molecular
environment
these
drug
molecules
are
whirling
around
and
by
Brownian
motion
or
by
enzymatic
delivery
the
details
don't
matter
these
molecules
intercalate
meaning
they
slip
neatly
between
the
nucleotides
many
drugs
do
this
is
known
but
most
drugs
or
compounds
when
they
intercalate
into
DNA
they
distort
the
twisting
of it
and
it's
dysfunctional
it messes
up
the
thing
can't
transcript
anymore
these
drug
molecules
if
you
look
at
them
they're
usually
a
pentexel
five-sided
central
group
with
two
benzene
rings
or a
benzene
ring
and a
partial
benzene
ring
hanging
off
of
this
thing
and
they're
flat
they're
planar
it
means
if
you
could
blow
up
a
psilocybin
molecule
to
the
size
of
a
cutting
board
it
would
be
about
as
thin
as
a
cutting
board
and
as
wide
and
as
long
those
flat
molecules
fit
right
in
and
as
in
and
you
can
measure
the
hyper
fin
ESR
signature
of
DNA
in
an
in
vitro
laboratory
situation
this is
not
mysterious
so
the
idea
then
is
that
we
have
a
family
of
molecules
endogenous
neurotransmitters
like
serotonin
acetylcholine
and so
forth
and so on
and
exogenous
neurotransmitters
like
psilocybin
DNA
I'm
sorry
psilocybin
mescaline
and then
exogenous
endogenous
like
DMT
found inside
and outside
the body
and it
may be
that
what
the
evolution
of
consciousness
is
the
slow
trading
in
of
low
gain
molecular
transceivers
like
serotonin
for
much
more
broad
band
high
gain
molecular
transceivers
like
DMT
so
Dennis's
idea
was
to
take
all
this
theory
that
I
just
laid
out
and
then
use
acoustically
produced
vocal
sound
to
cancel
the
charge
of
these
molecules
and
as
you
probably
know
or
maybe
you
don't
know
when
they
when
the
when
a
molecule
becomes
superconducting
it will
bond
into
anything
it
becomes
a
hyperbonding
molecule
it will
bond
anywhere
so
theoretically
if you
could
cause
psychedelic
molecules
during
their
act
of
being
intercalated
into
your
genetic
material
to
become
superconducting
even
for a
moment
they
would
lock
in
permanently
and
you
would
begin
to
have
a
very
deep
a
much
deeper
experience
of
consciousness
it would
be much
broader
much
deeper
he
claimed
he
could
do
this
but
he
also
went
further
and
claimed
and
this
is
where
I
am
not
good
at
explaining
it
because
I
didn't
understand
it
then
and
I
don't
understand
it
now
but
he
claimed
that
in
the
act
of
becoming
superconducting
and
intercalating
this
thing
would
cause
the
molecule
to
undergo
something
which
he
simply
that
it
would
turn
inside
out
and
he
said
then
that
you
would
produce
something
and
you
know
I'm
embarrassed
at the
strangeness
of the
concept
but
that
you
could
in
some
sense
give
birth
to
your
own
soul
that
something
could
yourself
it
would
be
he
made
analogies
to
the
philosopher's
stone
to
the
flying
saucer
to
the
birth
of
an
idea
it's
the
idea
that
you
could
create
what
he
called
translinguistic
matter
that
means
a
form
of
an
ontological
form
of
being
which
looks
like
matter
but
which
behaves
like
mind
and
that
somehow
this
would
trigger
the
collapse
of
the
illusion
of
history
and
everything
would
be
swept
into
the
presence
of
almighty
god
upon
her
throne
or
something
like
that
anyway
that
was
the
notion
and
in
proceeding
to
carry
out
this
experiment
which
I
just
thought
was
madness
and
would
result
in
nothing
and
then
we
could
go
back
to
botanizing
instead
it
in a
sense
it
seemed
to
work
the
condensation
of the
philosopher's
stone
and the
collapse
of the
historical
state
vector
is
slightly
delayed
but
the
rest
of it
seems
right
on
track
in
that
when
he
began
when
he
threw
the
switch
as
he
said
the
harming
switch
he
went
bonkers
basically
for about
21 days
in a
very
complicated
way
which
he
had
anticipated
he
said
there
is
a
small
chance
that
I
will
be
turned
inside
out
not
my
body
but
my
mind
and
it
seemed
as
though
that
was
precisely
what
had
happened
he
could
recite
the
alphabet
backwards
he
spoke
in a
language
which
if
you
got
him
to
spell
it
you
could
turn
it
around
and
you
could
see
these
were
full
sentences
but
spoken
backwards
in
other
words
he
truly
seemed
to
be
running
backwards
while
we
were
all
the
rest
of
us
were
running
forward
well
after
about
days
that
faded
and
he
got
his
act
together
and
went
back
to
get
multiple
PhDs
in
molecular
biology
pharmacognosy
and
what
have
you
coincident
with
the
throwing
of
the
switch
I
who
had
been
the
skeptic
noticed
that
it was
as though
a switch
had been
thrown
in me
and
I
began
to
understand
it
was not
like
any
drug
I'd
ever
taken
it
was
not
like
psilocybin
or
ayahuasca
there
were
no
hallucinations
but
what
began
to
happen
was
I
simply
began
to
understand
faster
and
faster
and
faster
and
faster
so
fast
that
I
was
just
walking
around
on
these
jungle
trails
holding
my
landing
settled
down
into
the
theory
of
the
time
wave
which
I
will
not
slay
you
with
because
this
is a
course
in
psychobotany
not
a
course
in
megalomania
revealed
but
what I
finally
came to
rest
with
was
a
complete
model
of
space
and
time
as
which
is
what
you
would
end
up
with
if
space
and
end
history
and
everyone
would
leave
their
factories
and
offices
and
discard
their
clothes
and
with
tears
of
joy
streaming
down
their
faces
begin
to
that
offered
me
a
complete
model
of
space
and
time
and
the
future
and
the
past
and
has
continued
to be
the
touchstone
of
my
intellectual
life
so
I
think
that
we
can
argue
for
hours
although
it's
probably
not
worth
doing
about
whether
anything
at
all
happened
at
La
Chirera
I
was
there
I
should
mention
I
didn't
sleep
for
days
and
it
was
the
most
amazing
days
I
have
ever
had
I
was
absolutely
ecstatic
I
barely
ate
and
I
was
full
of
compassion
and
understanding
for
everyone
and their
limitations
in this
terrible
dilemma
because
we
were
a
thousand
miles
up
the
Rio
baboon
asshole
with
no
airplanes
and
no
radios
and
here
my
brother
proceeds
to
go
nuts
and
I
saying
it's
okay
but
the
world
may
end
in
a
few
days
and
on
and
on
it
took
me
about
five
years
to
get
myself
publicly
presentable
in
that
time
my
I
was
a
burden
to
my
friends
and
stretch
with
a
wrap
so
alarming
and
appalling
that
people
would
just
back
to
the
wall
to
wait
to
see
if
I
was
going
to
explode
it
was
simply
it
takes
a
long
time
you
have
to
leaven it
with
humor
and
self
criticism
and
convince
people
that
you
don't
take
yourself
seriously
and
all
these
things
to
make
it
palatable
yeah
that
is
true
hallucinations
and
I
think
that
you
know
if
you
want
to
read
an
eye
opening
book
if
you
haven't
read
it
read
Thomas
Kuhn's
book
The
Structure
of
Scientific
Revolution
because
what
you'll
learn
there
to
your
amazement
is
that
these
great
intellectual
breakthroughs
like
Newton
and
Einstein
and
Planck
and
so
forth
they
don't
come
out
of
careful
examination
of
the
evidence
and
conservative
adumbration
of
theories
and
all
no
they
don't
come
like
that
they
come
like
revelation
you know
completely
and then
you
argue
backward
to
convince
your
colleagues
you
go
out
and
you
get
the
evidence
and
you
argue
backward
and
you
convince
everybody
and
then
everybody
says
well
it
was
obvious
all
the
time
and
anyway
they
knew
it
years
earlier
and
on
and
on
and
on
to
do
so
I
have
stuck
with
this
my
devotion
to
psychedelics
because
it
gave
me
really
my
greatest
wish, which was, I want to have a complete understanding of how things work. That doesn't
mean there is no more surprises, but it means you at least have a structure that you can
pour it into. And I think this is what shamans do. They create a personal ideology sufficient
to their needs. And my needs are complex because I live in a society where I'm going to be
talking to quantum physicists, mathematicians, historians of science, epistemologists, so
forth and so on. So it had to perform at top speed. If you're in the rainforest situation
in a culture, in a monoculture, then it is perhaps not so challenging. But the point
of all this is catalysis of ideas. Culture can evolve no faster than its language. It
can evolve no faster than the models that it can set up for itself to achieve. And that
requires language. So I take the psychedelics to be catalysts of language. They probably
caused it to come into existence in the first place. And then they continue to push it forward
into new domains. And this great period of creativity that we're living through now in the sciences,
in the arts, in the implementation of exotic technologies, I think this is the real legacy of the 60s.
The people who run these fancy computer companies and the World Wide Web and the Net and CERN and all
that, they're all freaks. They're all people who came up through the 60s and have somehow fitted
themselves into straight society. But the great bulk of creative work in the society in those areas is
being done by people who took psychedelics. And in fact, arguably, the scientists of today, the
technological implementers of today, are in fact shamans. And we are creating a kind of culturally
validated shamanic super space, except we call it cyberspace. But all we're doing with the creation of
cyberspace is hardwiring in a male way, what has always been there in a female way. I mean, the
the web of invisible hidden associations that make us the cosmos instead of the chaos. Well, that seems to
be an over-long answer to a question that I've forgotten. Yeah.
Well, first let me talk about morphogenetic fields. For those of you who don't recognize the term,
this is an idea which has been developed by Rupert Sheldrake, who's a theoretical biologist in England.
It's a very simple idea with very revolutionary implications. The idea can be simply stated like
this. Things happen the way they happen, because that's how they happened before.
That may not sound terribly challenging, but here then is an example of the consequences if you believe
that. If you believe that, then it should be possible to teach rats to run a maze in Cambridge,
we'll say. And once they know how to run that maze, it should take rats in Australia less time to learn to
run the same maze, because it's been done before. In other words, this is a theory which says it's very
hard for something to happen the first time, and slightly easier the second, and more easy the third,
and inevitable by the 10 trillionth time it happens. Science doesn't recognize this. This is madness
from the point of view of science, and yet there are many phenomena which can only be explained in this
way. Well, the way this relates to psychedelics, I think, is that on psychedelics essentially you feel,
or you see, the morphogenetic fields that surround objects. You see not the ordinary, see the ordinary
experience is, time is sliced as a moment, a moving moment of infinite thinness that is moving through
time. On psychedelics, the past seems somehow present in the present. And one of Sheldrake's books is
called The Presence of the Past. So in a way, the idea that I developed, the time wave, is an attempt to
mathematicize his conversational model of a morphogenetic field. The universe, to me, is self-evidently
moving between narrower and narrower walls. That's not orthodox. Orthodoxy says the universe is a random walk.
There are no constraints. There is no telos, is the way a scientist would put this. Telos is the Greek word for
purpose. The universe does not have a purpose. We are not evolving toward some idealized future state.
I think we are. I think that self-evidently, nature conserves complexity.
And if you define complexity as the number of points cotangent in a system, then obviously
ultimate complexity is achieved when all points are cotangent with all other points.
And that is a state of hyperdimensionality. And I think that's what we're migrating toward.
That's why boundary dissolution is so important. Because ultimately, all boundaries will be dissolved.
I mean, we quibble about a boundary like the difference between men and women. That's a
political boundary. The differences in which we treat men and women, that's a political boundary.
But eventually, all boundaries are destined to be dissolved. The boundaries between men and women,
the boundaries between young and old, but then the boundaries between people and nature,
the boundaries between plant and animal, and then even more ultimate boundaries. The boundary between
life and death, the boundary between earth and space. All boundaries will be dissolved in the universal
process of complexification that is leading toward all points being cotangent. And the psychedelics,
because they give you a little bit of hyper-dimensional vision, show you this cohering
process, which I call concrescence, using the terminology that Alfred North Whitehead popularized. The universe
is growing toward concrescence. This is an interesting idea, because it's very counter to what we've been taught.
We've been taught that the universe is basically incomprehensible, unimaginable in its size. We are
somewhere in it very typical. Everything about us is typical. Our star is typical, our planet is typical,
we are typical, and therefore no value should be conferred on our existence. But this is just simply
somebody's idea. Measurements have only been carried out on this planet and in this solar system and for one
century. So upon what basis do we generalize from these measurements to a statement about the character
of the kiliochasm? It seems ridiculous. I think that the presence of evolution, traceable in the
paleontological record of this planet, and then the presence of ourselves emerging out of animal
organization and moving rapidly toward a disincarnate, electronic, global civilization,
must mean that we are being channeled into deeper and deeper complexity at a faster and faster rate.
And when you penetrate hyperspace, this is the landscape you see. You see the funnel that is
channeling us towards a kind of hyper-dimensional nexus point beyond which we can't project because our
intellectual equipment can't be pushed past that point. Yeah. Can you envision this as what's
happening until 2012? And what do you think, what your idea was going to happen in 2012?
All points will become cotangent in a super-space. Can't say. Not that we don't know. Can't say. Language is not
capable of describing a cotangent hyperspace. Well, that's not always all the dimensions or? Yeah, basically
you will be everybody. Everybody will be you. You will be everywhere. You will be every when. You will be
every which. And every when, which, and where will be you. All assumptions of distinctness will be
illusory. And so we can see this happening. I mean, people are fond of saying the earth has shrunk to a
point under the influence of electronic technology. It's a nice way of putting it, but it's just beginning. The
world wide web further shrinks it. And when the world wide web is virtual and an implant behind your eyelids
and, and, and, I mean, you can carry out these fantasies for yourself.
A little bit. Crazy. Coming a little bit more sooner than Tipperer sees.
Yeah. Mine's the earliest of all of the non-completely insane people. Or the latest of the
completely insane people. Yeah. Well, there are shamans from the, they, um, in the 17,000 seats,
they, according to their prophecy, which they're in the direct community of the Inca, they said that
in 1995, they are coming out of the mountains because it's part of their prophecy, that they
come and teach the earth how to shift into planetary consciousness, which is evolving at the beginning
this year. And then we'll shift into the next millennium. And then the body of it will come
out of North America because we have done so much destruction. And also because we know how to
manifest in the body, that the intellect will come from Europe and then the heart and soul will come
from South America. And then they're coming down to teach how to begin to move into these other
consciousness. Well, there is, you know, there is a lot of this kind of anticipation of a great
shift. And I think there's more to it than simply the, the pressure, the millennial turn of the calendar
puts on us. This garden party is over. You know, there's nothing but crumpled plates and stabbed out
cigarette butts in Aspic. Now it's over. The party's over. And where we're headed now is not clear,
but we have finished our sojourn in three dimensional space and historical time. And
our technology and our dreams are about to carry us further. What this means for the rest of the earth
is hard to say. Life once left the ocean. Life once elaborated oxygen to the point where it
threatened its own survival on the planet. Dan Joy once said to me, once you strip away the hype,
it's just another concrescence. Quite true. But the hype is major because, you know,
we haven't seen a turning point like this since before the bust up of Pangea. And that was 275 million
years ago. This is bigger than that. And it's mind shedding matter. Matter was the vehicle that could
carry mind a certain distance in its self-revelation. But now clearly we have become a toxic drag on the
rest of nature. And it means it's time to move on. The womb would like to expel this puppy into whatever
hyperspace awaits us. But clearly, if we remain in the womb of three-dimensional space and time,
we're just going to mess the joint up, toxify it, wreck the oceans, and ultimately pollute ourselves and
everything else to death. So the time has come to move on. And hey, we're moving on. Yeah.
What responsibilities do we personally have? I spoke earlier, it's not necessarily being so optimistic that we'll be able to make it into the space.
I think the responsibility that we have is to spread reasonable hope. In other words,
a lot of people are becoming frightened and a lot of people will be more frightened. We haven't hit
the white water yet. It's coming. But this is the long garden party before the white water. And
there are going to be a lot of doomsayers. There's going to be a lot of ugliness like Rwanda, Bosnia,
this sort of thing. Much reason for despair unless you have the broad picture. But I think that our
purpose is to educate ourselves about the situation. And that when that task is completed, you will be
filled with hope and then to spread that hope. There is no other ideology of hope on this planet.
Christianity is so dramatically on the ascendant because it offers otherworldly hope. It denies this
world. It consigns it to the flames and asks you to seek salvation in some other world. Secular
humanism and its various forms. Capitalism and so forth and so on offers nothing but more stuff.
You know, they are willing to hasten the end in order to keep people playing deck tennis while the
Titanic goes down. There is no sanctionable position of hope except the belief that history is ending.
And that the acceleration of novelty which we see happening back and back, the further back in time you go,
the less novel things are and the slower time moves. Now we have come to the place where time is moving
very quickly. So that by a moment in the future as near as 2012, we may traverse as much distance as we've
traversed from the big bang to this afternoon in terms of how quickly things are going to unfold.
James Joyce said, man will be dirigible. It's a wonderful thing to hope for.
One thing that, I mean, I've been fascinated with the time wave since I first heard about it, but do you
have, one that's really bothered me is, uh, is there some objective way to quantify this novelty?
I mean, um, other than by asking Terence or someone else looking at the wave to say, whoa,
well, here's a big fall and obviously there was novelty at this time. If we just look back here,
we'd find, aha, that's when Poland fell to the Germans, you know? I mean, can we somehow work the
other way and, and look at a historical record, plot out the novelty without reference to the time wave,
and then look back at the time wave and see if we were right? The problem is, you see, that history is
not a quantifiable entity. There's no theory that agrees on how we quantify history. I mean,
do we give the War of the Roses a 10 and the Thirty Years' War a 42? How do we do that? Uh, I maintain
that we can't scientifically prove it, but we can make a very strong case because the ebb and flow of
novelty, uh, continues. And we can look back in the past and see that where there were
vast descents into novelty, novelty certainly occurred. I'm willing to go out on a limb because
next year is a very dramatic descent into novelty on the time wave. I'm willing to go out on a limb and
say if next year doesn't deliver, I'll be willing to seriously talk about cashing it in. Uh, because
next year is predicted by the time wave to be an enormously dramatic year. And in a sense, we can
already see the prophecy fulfilling itself. We know there will be a presidential election next year. We
know that society will go mad and rip itself apart for months over that. We also know that there will be a
presidential election in Russia next year. They will probably put our act in the shade when they begin to rip
their society apart. Uh, revolution in China, that would affect a third of mankind. That's scheduled,
that's on the menu. Uh, it's possible that next year is the year when even doubters realize that global
warming is upon us. In other words, worldwide climate upheaval. So we're going to have
some, if not all, of those things next year. And I maintain it could even be the unexpected.
As I said to somebody today, you know, if the Kobe earthquake had been Tokyo, the capital
retraction from the rest of the world by Japanese banks would have sent us into the Stone Age.
And, you know, uh, there are, uh, this gas attack. It was designed to kill millions. It just happened
to be botched. The attack on the World Trade Center was designed to kill hundreds of thousands of people.
It happened to be botched. But they're not all going to be botched. The nuts are out there. And, uh, so I,
I, I think that what we are seeing is a recapitulation of much of the past several thousand years of
history in a very compressed form as we get closer and closer to the transcendental object at the end of
time. And shamanism has always been the technique for anticipating and mapping this transcendental object.
In a pre-scientific world, you get a vocabulary that is religious. That, you know, there is a force
in the universe, not a sparrow falls, but that this force doesn't take note of it. This force is love.
This force created everything. This force cares for us. We are its children. It is calling us to return to its
essence. I mean, this is a religious vocabulary. But in the 20th century, we, we've gone beyond
that. We're no longer moving in a, in a coinage of emotional terms. We can say, you know, God is physics.
God is the universe trying to birth itself into a higher dimension. God is the, is the universe's
appetite for self-reflective complexity coming into its fullest flower. And then the different,
the distinctions between science and religion are seen to be small potatoes. Indeed, I mean,
we can calculate our way towards the second coming, I maintain. Well, this is somewhat far afield of
most people's ideas of what constitutes botanical shamanism, but not mine, because I think
that we could have lived in the light of this gnosis and never made the descent into history that we made
with the abandonment of partnership, society, psychedelic religion, pastoralism, and so forth. We were
designed to live in paradise until the coming of the kingdom, but instead we fell into history,
which is a kind of hell where the animal nature was able to reassert its power over the human dream. And
we have lived in that, with that paradox now for some 12,000 years, and it's left us fairly frazzled and
sketched out, I think. Well, if this is what is on a macro scale happening to the human race,
and this goes back to the question some time ago of what should be done, if this is what's happening on a
fractal macrocosm, then what you can do to aid this process is just accelerate your own arrival at the
omega point. And what that means is psychedelicize yourself, begin to deconstruct the hold over your
freedom that culture, history, biology has on you, and begin to experiment with the concept of yourself
as a being trembling on the edge of true liberation, because I think that's probably what you really are.
Yeah?
What do you see as you travel around the world, the dynamics between the mainstream dominator and what could be
looked at as an emerging psychedelic culture? What kind of connection do you see among this emerging culture?
the dynamics that happen? It's kind of a large question there.
Well, there are a lot of things going on. The collapse of Marxism was really the collapse of everything,
because Marxism and capitalism were balanced against each other like a house of cards. In the absence of any
intellectual critique of capitalism, capitalism has asserted itself with a vengeance. And what we see
happening in the world, what the new world order is, is a new corporate order. Some things about it are good and some
things are bad. For instance, when the world was ruled by nation states driven by ideologies, and remember that was as
recently as seven years ago, when the world was ruled by nation states driven by ideologies, war was a frequent
instrument of national policy. Racism was tolerated as a reflection of national identity. Nuclear arsenals and a mutual
standoff in that area was tolerated. Suddenly, now, a new gang is in charge. Marxism is gone. Racism in the
institutionalized form known as apartheid is gone. Trade barriers are being lowered all over the world. And if you look at
governments in the United States, in England, in France, Germany and Japan, they are universally, and Italy, they are
universally characterized by being staffed and run by jackasses. In other words, high caliber talent isn't going into
government. Government is a place where the Jesse Helms of this world hang out. And when was the last time an
official of the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund felt the need to threaten the life of an
American president? It won't happen. Those people are heavy hitters. Only a hysterical powerless yahoo would
behave that way. All right, why don't we sort of slowly roll into this? I'm always amazed that so many people can get their
act together on a Sunday morning. I know. What happened to the complacencies of the
Penoir and all that? Okay, I have a couple of announcements. First of all, I think you found on your chair when you came in a
sound photosynthesis order blank. That's if you're just dying to have more tapes of lectures. They have a huge selection, more than anybody else. And you can deal with that. And there's a sticker on those things that begins with the words HTTP. Those who know, know that this is a website address. Those who don't know soon will.
So if you want to check out sound photosynthesis website address, that's the URL, the universal resource locator, which I wish I had one now. Okay. In case I forget, remind me at the break, and David will be here to help, that we'll go over the paper requirements for the folks who are going to do a paper for this.
If we're going to do a paper for this class. And I think that's that. Oh, there you are on time as promised. I was just saying that at the break, we'll go over the paper constraints.
Well, I don't want to spend the whole time this morning in Q&A, but we'll do it for a few minutes to let stragglers find their way in. And then I'll flail you with my agenda for a while.
If there are, oh, yes. Oh, that's a good question. There are a number. First of all, the alt.drugs conference. Most people know about this. There are thousands, a couple of thousand people participating in that.
And it's now fragmented into alt.psilocybin, alt.psychedelic, alt.mescaline. You know, there's a whole subset of those. If you don't like news groups, there is an email conference. Anybody here in that email conference?
Hmm. Well, I can't remember. I was in it. But the problem with these email conferences is, you know, you think, oh, great, I'll meet some people interested in what I'm interested in.
You join, and the next day, there are 80 messages in your email, and you spend hours a day pouring through the email. I just joined a conference where I get dispatches from the front in Chiapas, including all the latest statements from subcommandante Marcos.
I just picked up the mail. There were 130 messages, half in a language I barely read. So, you know, but there's a lot of action on the net. I have a website, too, but I'm not going to give out the public number yet because it's not cool enough yet.
It's more like a construction zone with yellow ribbon strung around and a sign which says, someday something really cool will be here. That's how a lot of the internet is. It's a vast, vast construction zone, but that's probably enough on that.
If you're using the internet, you should use it more.
not using it you should really put that at the top of your agenda because it's
going to become increasingly indispensable as a part of your cultural
toolbox if I have to pay 35 cents a minute to reach the internet because I'm
on a cellular modem from US Cellular at 7200 baud and I still spend far more
time and money than I should there yeah well this question always comes up and
my answer is the answer of a fanatic and a purist not really I mean the best
substitute for psychedelics which takes a lot more time energy and dedication is
penniless travel in Asian countries but it's not nearly as pleasant and the risk
to your gastrointestinal tract is orders of magnitude greater it's an
interesting question I mean and I may be a special case more lumpen than others I
mean naturally in this business all the time I meet people who say I hallucinate
hallucinate all the time I I don't understand what the excitement is about
well it's a very hard thing because you're can you either have to say you
don't know what I'm talking about or you have to define yourself ever after as an
impoverished individual with the genetic constitution that places this out of your
reach if I had psychedelic experiences not in the presence of psychedelic
substances I would be alarmed I'm not shooting for being high on the natch why
when the substances work perfectly well and being high on the natch indicates a
physiological situation that may be problematic or or could be problematic I
I practiced yoga and silent sitting and I find all these things very very
interesting but pretty non competitive with psychoactive one of the things that
was so astonishing to me when I first got into all this my original impulse at
university was toward art history well art history you study the evolution of style and
motif over space and time that's basically what it's about and a good art historian has a fairly come
complete inventory of world style which I felt I did well then I took DMT and it was
absolutely unfamiliar you know I could make no comparisons it wasn't like Tibetan
tantric painting it wasn't like Amazonian bark cloth painting it wasn't like Jan van Eyck it wasn't
like Hieronymus Bosch or Jackson Pollock or anybody else and I thought how extraordinary if you take the
Jungian view that art is the function of artist is to explore and communicate the
unconscious to the rest of us then how bizarre that three thousand years of eastern and western art and
nobody passed very close at all to the DMT space that's why and yet it is without contest I think a Niagara of
orgasmic beauty I mean if I had to say one thing that DMT is it's it's alien beauty well if the purpose of art and those who follow
Aristotelian and platonic aesthetics believe that art the purpose of art is the communication of the beautiful well why is it then that so little of this has been communicated I mean I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that at the peak of a
psychedelic experience you see more art in a half an hour than the human race has produced in the last thousand years you little you will the relationship then of the individual to genius is very puzzling any one of us is the
yes if we could just get the door jammed open would then become a Duchamp a Da Vinci in other words a major formative force on their contemporaries I'm hoping we'll be able to do that with virtual reality I mean I see virtual reality as a technology that will allow one person to show another the contents of their mind and that when we get the cross fertilization and creativity
that will flow from that will create art that will make everything done to this point look like scratchings in the dirt I mean at least that's my my hope
yeah
so you get points for that I mean they put it many ways but not like that I don't think the last word has been said on this subject in science news last week or the week before there are a hundred and twenty anatomical differences between the brains of men and women that are not genital related
yeah
I don't I think that we're on the brink of a whole frontier of discovering who and what women are
they were just thought to be soft boys up until fairly recently and the most enthusiastic proponents of feminism I think don't understand how deep a subject they've grabbed onto
in a way I would sort of plead guilty to your metaphor that I do sort of see women as out of history they are an historical creatures and men invented history lost themselves in it and femininity if you want to call it that guy unconsciousness if you want to call it that
psychedelic spirituality if you want to call it that is beckoning does sort of hold the high ground and is drawing history back toward a feminizing archaic mode but you know you race is a phenomenon of groups of people in a sense so is femininity as an individual you
you have to deal with the cards you have to deal with the cards you're dealt and we all have a feminine a masculine and androgynous and so forth and so on component in our psyche but in a sense I guess I'm a conservative because I don't see history doing anything other than recapturing what once was and which once was definitely under the aegis of the feminine like for instance the world
the world wide web this vast technological artifact that's being put in place all it is is a hard wiring of female intuition you know it's the engineering mentality is catching up with the feminine outlook
but your question disquiets me I'm not sure again it's important as an individual not to identify with the characteristics of a group this is and it's very tricky because you're constantly dinned into thinking of yourself as black gay white poor you know but those are those are not really qualities of individuals individuals are more complex than that I mean you may
you may have a gay component you may have a black portion of your genetic heritage but don't define yourself as a group that's a trick that was launched by print in the act of creating this peculiar entity called the public the public is a fiction of the print created galaxy you are not a citizen and you are not part of the public unless you seriously
do damage to your humanness in order to fit yourself into such a narrow definition yeah
the chemical act on the brain those females have this huge hormonal swing way I find that I have certain experiences during certain times in the mind that I would consider losing again it and it's a mystery to me about women and men there is a difference just in the
well you know we can talk about this but since this is a room full of aspiring professionals this is obviously an area where incredibly good work could be done using ordinary scientific sampling techniques you probably know it's a scandal how much medicine can be done using ordinary scientific sampling techniques you probably know it's a scandal how much medicine can be done by
medical research is done on male human subjects and then extrapolated to all human subjects I would be willing to bet you just sitting here that in thirty years of research on psychedelics there has never been a study which attempted to differentiate the difference in the response of men and women to the substance it's like step one but it's never been done
how does menstruation affect this how does menstruation affect this how does menopause affect this how does the chemo the postpartum chemistry affect these are easily answered scientific questions that have never been looked at because of gender bias in the scientific establishment
that's the way of putting that driving that
oh
well that's an interesting so that's a very straightforward theory if psychedelics inhibit and compete with testosterone obviously their impact on men is going to be much more profound than their impact on women right there you have a hypothesis you could
well my question was is there have been any research on that or has anyone looked at the
the
no
the amount of research you know the first psilocybin project was is underway now
the first one in thirty years and they're just trying to define the basic pharmacodynamics of the substance they haven't looked at this stuff i should say to you you know you know the
I'm urging you aspiring young professionals into these fields.
Let me caution.
That's because I'm an enthusiast
and I want to know the answers to these questions.
Professionally, it's a life of hell.
You will not be promoted.
Your colleagues will look upon you as a freak.
You will find yourself...
My brother can talk to this point.
It's not a pleasant thing to associate yourself
with psychedelics professionally.
Yeah.
I guess something that I feel like
you need to take responsibility for
is the use of words like profound and transformative
because what is profound and transformative for a male,
if it's more profound for a male,
it might be just a different profound and transformative
that's not on the male scale
of what is profound and transformative
and I think that it's irresponsible to say
that it's more profound for a male,
especially when no research has been done
on the way in which these drugs affect...
Well, I guess what I meant by more profound
is that I think the average male
is set down further from where he started
than the average female is
at the conclusion of a psychedelic experience.
One of the things...
Let me mention this as long as we're on this subject.
This is just throwing this out.
But one of the things that's always fascinated me
is the difference between male and female orgasm
and how male orgasm...
Here's a place where it seems to be reversed.
Male orgasm seems to lie fairly close to the surface
and be a fairly unspectacular event most of the time
where why is the female sexual response
so much more dramatic
and why is there an orgasmic response at all?
In other words, many animals don't have such a response.
You can build an urge,
you can build a sexual urge into an organism
without this payoff of immediate experiential fireworks.
There are species of fish where the female lays the eggs
and the male swims over them and releases the sperm
and that's sex in that species.
I sense, and I've never been able to articulate it,
that the DMT flash is very orgasmic in some sense.
It's somewhat like a full-body orgasm,
but it has components in it
which are only encountered otherwise in orgasm.
And I wonder what this orgasmic response is for,
what evolutionary role it fulfills.
It seems to emerge late in animal organization.
This is not something you trace back to flatworms or something.
Sexual orgasm, it seems most intensified in the primate.
And, you know, again, I have no answers,
but I would bet when this is all teased apart,
the chemistry of orgasm
and the neurochemistry of orgasm
and the chemistry of the DMT flash
are going to be found to be at least cousins of each other
in some sense.
Yeah.
I wanted to make a comment about the gender issue
that's been coming up.
And I think that in my experience with psilocybin
is that it has had an effect of healing
and bringing back to wholeness, of balancing.
So if you have too much testosterone that you brought up
or if you have, you know, too much one thing,
it will bring you back and direct you and center you.
And since males usually do all the talking,
that's why we said psilocybin has had a feminizing effect.
Well, it has a feminizing effect
on most of the people who have been doing the talking
who take, you know, take psilocybin.
I've also had experiences where I've been very,
you know, at times when I've been depressed and weak
where psilocybin has not made me very feminine.
It's actually given me, you know, power.
I felt very, like, I don't remember one time
I went out and really liked the sound of bottles breaking.
And I would break the bottle and go, yeah!
It would make me feel really good.
Build up, almost the building up of an ego
when my ego was down.
And when my ego was too big, it would fall back down again.
So that would then, you know, what Katie was saying,
that would then fit in, you know,
that everyone who takes it will be balanced,
will be kind of redirected and, you know,
led further along.
So it's a kind of regulator, is what you're saying.
Yeah, it's getting back in tune with what's real.
And, you know, extreme feminism and extreme axonism
are far neither of them are real.
They're both extremes.
And it'll bring you back into a more integral fullness
of the way the world is.
Well, I would certainly agree with that
as a description of ayahuasca.
There's a lot of work being done right now.
I mean, I'm sure you all have heard of Prozac,
which is the most widely prescribed antidepressant
in the world now.
And six or seven years ago, it didn't even exist.
Well, what's interesting about Prozac is
that it is a serotonergic competitor.
This is the same system that the psychedelics are working on.
And I think probably we're converging on some kind of a breakthrough
where sexual dysfunction, depression, psychedelic states
are all going to be seen to be various twiddlings
of the serotonergic system.
And probably whole new families of drugs will come out of this.
I have never taken any antidepressant.
And my brother's urging, I took Prozac.
And I've always been contemptuous of all of the Valium,
that whole thing.
That's not our church, for sure.
But I was very, very impressed with what Prozac was doing.
And in a way, it was a strangely painless kind of psychedelic.
What Prozac seems to do is put you where ayahuasca puts you
four days after the trip.
In other words, there's no dramatic episode of intoxication.
There's just a slow kind of getting real,
which means dropping your illusions,
which are usually what is depressing you.
I think Prozac is being misprescribed
in the sense that it's thought of as an antidepressant.
I don't think that's quite correct.
I think it's the cure for seasonal light deficit syndrome.
I think that as tropical primates,
we paid a terrible price for conquering the temperate
and subarctic zones of the world.
And that is six months of kind of downness out of the year.
And that can be chemically corrected.
Our genetics are designed for the arboreal tropics,
and yet we insist in living in places like Boston and Hamburg,
which are so far north, you know,
that you're physiologically dysfunctional
seven months out of the year,
and you don't know it because so is everybody else there.
In conjunction with MDMA,
sort of offset some of the,
you know, MDMA get real speedy.
Prozac helps to tell them that they don't
do you work with that at all?
There may be a confusion here.
The way I'm familiar with Prozac
being mentioned in connection with MDMA
is that MDMA has a toxic effect
on the dendritic spines of the nerves.
This is part of what you buy into with MDMA.
But strangely enough,
if you pre-dose yourself with Prozac,
not as Prozac is supposed to be taken for depression,
where you take it for 30 days and then like that,
but if you just take a 20 milligram capsule of Prozac
six hours before you take MDMA,
it absolutely blocks this toxic effect.
I have mixed feelings about mixing drugs
and handing this information on,
but on the other hand,
this is a group of professionals.
You should know this.
It's a fact.
It was published in Brain,
in the Journal of Neurophysiology
and so forth and so on.
MDMA by itself
has a physiological profile
that causes me to stay away from it.
I have no quarrel with the effect,
the experience,
but when you can see histological damage
to macro structures in the nerve,
you want to slow down a little
and send a few tens of thousands ahead of you.
Is that just doing it once
that you'll have that sort of damage?
Well, every time you take it,
it has this effect.
Oh, well, but let me say something
about this damage that MDMA does.
It does damage.
You can see it.
However, there is no behavioral sequela.
What does this mean?
It means you don't act funny.
You don't fall down twitching
or your eyes go out of focus
or become manic.
So you can have two opinions about this.
Well, if it destroys a structure
that then there's no behavioral consequence,
you must not have needed that structure.
However, when we start tossing out
chunks of our brain
based on our own judgment,
you have to wonder about that,
you can always take psilocybin
and say to it
in the middle of the second hour,
B-M-D-M-A.
And that's how I do my MDMA.
I'm sure it works with healing plants
and his method is to communicate
with a plant,
he says the plants are bursting
to tell us what their purpose is,
how they can help us.
We just have to learn how to listen.
So in the same way that you're saying
that he sees a communication
and information.
But what he does,
once the shaman has made contact
with the plant,
he doesn't have to give that plant
to the person,
he can use a messenger plant, and they use Moxa in a homeopathic picture.
And because he knows the information of the plant,
he can send the messenger for the information
without actually having to give the plant itself.
And I'm wondering whether anybody's done that with psychedelics
or whether you see that that's feasible to do with psychedelics.
I assume, being a practical person,
that it must not be feasible,
because, as you know, in the highly succussed homeopathic preparations,
no physical trace of the original material can be found.
If there were such a thing as homeopathic psychedelics,
they would be impossible to prosecute under the drug laws.
What are you asking?
I'm asking, seeing it as information,
that you can actually have a messenger plant.
Like you were saying, the shaman is the messenger between the worlds.
What he's doing is using a fairly inoculant plant
as a messenger between the information of the huge array of pharmacokers
for what plants can do,
and using just a draw of that messenger
to be able to give an experience.
Well, in a sense, there's a parallel idea in the Amazon,
which is shamans take ayahuasca,
and then they take very, very minuscule amounts of other plants
that they want to learn about,
and they say that the ayahuasca then informs them
of the properties of the other plant.
This whole business of information
and how it moves around in nature
is an area where we are uniquely ill-fitted to understand it
because we are objective materialists.
And it's very hard for us to understand
and operate on the assumption that the world is made of language.
We may say it so,
but we don't know how to operationally operate with that perception.
As we learn how to do that,
I agree with you,
not only plants,
everything seeks to communicate.
Everything is somehow completed
in an act of mutual recognition and understanding.
Nature is alive,
not only biological nature,
but the atoms and the continents
and everything seeks to communicate.
I think what psychedelics are
is a kind of opening of our portals
to this constant stream of communication
that evolutionary necessity
has shut us away from.
Yeah.
Plants.
Why does it speak in such galactic terms?
Because when I'm dosed really high,
I've had visions of UFOs
and things that are not of this earth.
Very similar to the DMT flash,
like you said.
Oh, yeah.
I actually would have had
precisely the same hallucinations at times.
That's the way I see heavy doses of psilocybin
speaking to me,
not really about things here on this planet.
Well, I agree with you.
That's my experience.
And in trying to account for it,
you know,
you have to look at fungi.
Fungi are primary decomposers.
That means they can only live on decaying life.
That suggests to me
that they are late evolving
or at least not early evolving.
Mushrooms are very soft-bodied
and so are all fungi.
There is no record,
no fossil record of a mushroom
older than 40 million years.
Well, that's a tiny fraction
of the time life has been on the earth.
Now, when I asked a paleontologist about this,
he said,
well, they're soft-bodied
and they don't fossilize easily.
But, hey, we have flatworms
from the Gunflint Church of South Africa
that are 4.3 billion years old.
If they left a trace in the fossil record,
you'd think there would be more
of a trace of mushrooms.
If you decondition your presuppositions
and just look at the mushroom,
it looks to me, number one,
as though it is capable of...
surviving an extraterrestrial environment in other words if you have mushroom spores and you want to
store them for long-term longevity you seek an environment as much like outer space as you can
find you store them in liquid nitrogen at minus 200 degrees and they will last virtually forever
if you look at the color of stropharia cubensis spores that's in the brown gild mushroom family
the spores are deep purple almost black that's the color you would paint a spacecraft if you wanted to
absorb long long wave radiation if you look at the spore you know what is it it's a packet of
crystallized dna a single mature stropharia cubensis mushroom when it's sporulating will shed up to
three million spores a minute for up to two weeks three million spores a minute for two weeks
and these things are microscopic so small that the perturbations and agitation of air molecules which
are called brownian motion can actually percolate these things into the outer atmosphere where then
energetic cosmic events can actually detach them from the terrestrial medium and they slowly like
planetary dandruff or something drift off into space well I always it seems so obvious to me maybe it's because
that the most predictable major revolution in biology that you can imagine is of course
within a few years it will be realized that the earth is an island that's all that the biota that is present here
much of it probably drifted in in cosmic debris when stars go supernova planets are destroyed it's a cliche of
cosmic consciousness to say you know the atoms in your body were once in the hearts of distant stars
well if that's true then some of the atoms in your body were once in the uh a part of distant planets and
some vanishingly small fraction may have been part of the biota of extraterrestrial ecosystems the other
the other thing about the mushroom that's very suggestive to me is it appears to be or or there is a place a
perspective from which you can look at it that it appears to be not an organism but an artifact
it is incredibly well designed uh at a very high level of design criteria for example on this planet
uh one of the most advanced ethical systems we've been able to evolve is buddhism which teaches
vegetarianism uh if a buddhist could design their own genome they would become a fungus
because a fungus is a primary decomposer it's the only carmelous place in the entire food chain
there is no karma for the fungi they don't destroy any life whatsoever so and so here you have this thing
designed to traverse extraterrestrial space occupying a carmelous niche in the ecosystem
and when complex with a mammalian nervous system a galactarian archive of historical data becomes accessible
we have only known about dna since 1950 less than 50 years and we're already confidently talking about
completely redesigning the human genome and so forth and so on well if we pursue along these
lines for 500 years we will look the way we want to look and you know you trivially we may all want to be
keanu reeves or something but once the cultural agenda cuts in uh if say buddhism took over in the presence of an
advanced molecular genetics then we could design ourselves into a carmelous niche in the universe
i i wish that we could bring i don't know who it is but the content of the mushroom experience which was
what launched your question is so evidently alien and non-human and self-referential to a world we don't know
that to me uh it would require a commission and several years of study to decide that this thing is not
an extraterrestrial our notions of extraterrestrials to this point have been incredibly self-reflexive
uh i the once you have fully in grasp the size of the universe and the amount of time
that is available then the idea that someone would come in a mental in a metal ship with an interest in your
gross industrial output and a desire to cure cancer is absolutely preposterous that's such a culture
bound notion it's like expecting them to arrive with a load of pizzas ready for delivery
uh the trick uh the trick is going to be to recognize the extraterrestrial the very notion alien means unfamiliar so it's it's it's not going to
be like we think it is the real task will be to recognize it and uh we have discovered after only a thousand years
that uh toxic metal based technologies are fatal and we have pushed our entire planet into planetary crisis
by coming to this realization rather late in the game if if long-term survival is the name of the game for
intelligent life in the universe then the way we're doing it is not the way to do it it's going to have to
be non-polluting biologically based molecularly based so forth and so on and as you run down the list
the mushroom begins to look more and more like the real thing and then of course the content
of the of the experience is so different from other psychedelics and so it's so
other oriented that i i am puzzled that we've been at this now nearly 30 years and we still don't have a
consensus i don't think i don't know what it is is it that when you take the mushroom you lose all ability
to then operate in the world of straight judgments and understanding uh it's very puzzling but i think
probably the biota of the earth is riddled with extraterrestrial genes if not organisms and possibly
intelligences but they're not interested in your fetal tissue or uh putting implants in you or taking
you up and slicing you up on in very large scale surgical wards i find all that paranoid and
pathological i can talk about that if you want but it's not really our subject yes um there are
different ways to look for extraterrestrials one way is to build a vast radio telescope and search for a
signal the way i would do it if i were in charge of things is i would search the terrestrial
ecosystem for anomalous molecules molecules that have no near relatives or history of evolutionary
development in terrestrial organisms well it turns out you don't have to look far it's psilocybin
psilocybin is four phosphoryloxy nn dimethyltryptamine it's the only four phosphorylated indole in nature
the only one okay well here you have a pentaxel group it's a five-sided thing and then you have a
benzene molecule off it and these molecules have numbered positions one through six and then you have a
phosphorus group it can attach at any one of those six positions attached in the four position this is
unheard of it only occurs in this one case well that's very odd i mean if we believe nature is a
continuum of evolutionary adumbration then have suddenly out of nowhere a completely anomalous
molecule sticking up suggest it may have come in from somewhere else yeah it's similar i mean serotonin is
five hydroxy tryptamine uh serotonin is ubiquitous in life on this planet from flat worms to man it's in
every organism there is well the one that yoga comes on your brain yeah the structure yes i mean
here's the thing serotonin is five hydroxy tryptamine psilocybin is four phosphoryloxy nn
dimethyltryptamine you've got then is uh uh uh uh uh four and then dimethyltryptamine as opposed to five
hydroxy tryptamine yeah these these things are uh a chemical family yeah
about this alien ufo people's experience with the psilocybin having that sort of galactic experience
and since we're talking about purchases and transformation what role do you think that
either the psilocybin bringing these images in or this sort of cultural mythology around you know
close encounters what what role do you think that's playing why is that coming up in terms of the
consciousness shift that we're trying to make what's that about well if you want i mean if you're
interested in ufos one of the first books ever written is i think one of the best it's called modern
it's called flying saucers a modern myth of things seen in the sky by jung and what he says is that
i hope i don't have to do too much backgrounding for an audience like this but as you know jung analyzed
alchemy and said that in the presence of a psyche epistemologically naive about the real nature of
matter the contents of the unconscious will be projected upon chemical processes well our level of naivete
about the cosmic environment is approximately at the same level of sophistication as the 16th century's
grasp of matter was and so jung said that he talked about what in alchemy what's called the rotundum
that which spins and he said the spinning rotundum is a symbol of the psyche uh the the flying saucer i
believe is a symbol of the eschatological object at the end of time that we are being pulled into a
confrontation with call it the other call it the ancestors call it jesus call it galactarian civilization
it's all and more than any of these things and i believe and i'm fairly alone in this i think
that uh the the pressure and the chaos that we're experiencing at the end of the 20th century
is because we are drawing near to a bifurcation point in the in the there's not even words for it in the
dimensionality of our cosmos i mean we're very close to some kind of cusp some kind of breakthrough point
history is in fact the enunciation that an animal is standing too close to the transcendental object and
is in fact beginning to be transformed into a partial simulacrum of the transcendental object
that's what we are half beast half angel you know one foot in the slime one foot in the platonic super
spaces uh as far i mean i suppose we have to talk at least briefly about the abduction thing i i think
that this isn't much ado about nothing uh it's very clear to me that every abduction case around except
for a vanishingly small number that we can put in the classical category of stigmata can be explained by one
simple fact people are losing the ability to distinguish dreams from memories that's all that's all
if you lose the ability to distinguish dreams from memories you'll have a very strange history to
recite to people uh and i think this is a a cause by television it's caused by a number of things i grew up
during the 50s when movies like the day the earth stood still invasion of the body snatchers and so
forth were coming out and i distinctly remember a fever that i had when i was about 12 in which i had a
horrifyingly real dream of gray-faced cat-eyed aliens who were doing something to me that i didn't care for
and so forth and so on well if i were to be placed into the hands of an obsessive hypnotherapist
i guarantee you in two weeks we'd come out with the realization that it wasn't a dream that it actually
happened but that that's uh that's uh and also the content if you analyze the content of the abduction
scenario it's pure paranoia and i can get off on this but i i don't really want to the normal rules of
evidence are not being applied here's let me go off on this just a little bit to say you know how do
you live your life uh in the light of a universe that is strange and vast well you can just believe
anything anybody tells you in which case you know fetal removal by extraterrestrials vies with your
attention as you seek elvis in the aisles of the local supermarket as you worry about the fall of
atlantis and so forth and so on but over time there has been something evolved called the rules of
evidence colloquially known as how to tell shift from shinola and uh the first thing is there should be
an economy an economy of explanation this is called occam's razor in other words hypotheses should be no more
complex than is necessary to explain whatever it is you're trying to explain so if inability to tell
dreams from memories explains abduction why do we have to reach for the idea that uh uh geneticists from
zinebel ganubi are moving secretly among us with a surgical agenda and also carry out unscheduled proctological
examinations in the middle of the night i mean really now uh and what i want to say about that
is i got where i am whether it is enviable or not but i got where i am by being tough not by being
gullible and so i've rejected vast amounts of things uh not only dubious things but i've probably tossed a few
babies out with the bath water as well but uh ask tough questions make it make sense uh and be as they say in
hawaii be akamai be smart uh understand the subtleties and the potential degradation of language and then trust
trust only yourself trust only yourself uh photographs are useless anecdotes are useless what happened to
your best friend last weekend when you weren't there is useless you can entertain all that information
but what you have to given the slipperiness of language given uh the limitations of the human organism
you have to stay with primary experience and extrapolate out from there and if you
have had fetal tissue removed then you have to deal with it but the testimony of 700 people you don't know
doesn't have to bother you at all yeah in light of your dialogue with the measuring how do you see
sort of the big picture of the agenda if this is an extraterrestrial force that catalyzes consciousness on
the planet what's what do you think you mean what's happening i i think that nature
nature well i mentioned this yesterday that that biology let's leave nature out of this for a minute
biology is some kind of chemical strategy for the conquest of dimensionality
i said this yesterday but i'm not sure i was understood and what i mean by that is the entire
history of biology from the first uh naked dna to this moment is a history of progressively taking more
and more control of more and more dimension first primitive life moved it had no eyes it simply felt its way
that means it was like uh one uh one two-dimensional life it just feels its way down a linear
creode of sensation defecating eating undergoing mitosis and so forth and so on but it's a it's a two-dimensional
thing well then life acquired light sensitive chemistry which it's sequestered on the surface of itself
driven by serotonin interestingly enough and this light sensitive chemistry gave the idea of a gradient
the organism had however dimly the notion here and there and to have the notion of going from here to there
you have to add in the notion now and then and what these notions being added in are dimensional vectors
into the reality space well then the entire history of life from let's say the crossocterigian fishes to
homo habilis is simply the history of developing more efficient organs of motion
motion in the three-dimensional world better eyes better arms better legs uh mobility motility
so forth and so on then with the appearance of true human beings and language an entirely new dimension
let's call it the fourth dimension of time begins to be invaded in a very subtle way it's that monkeys
human beings can't tell stories to each other about past experiences or hoped for uh denouements
human beings can that act of linguistic recollection is a small conquest of dimensionality
well once you invent writing then all of the past can in a sense be kept in the present the present is
not a narrow slice of experience fading off into the past and the future it becomes instead like a train
moving into the future the future is unknowable but the past can be recollected and uh analyzed and
if the analysis is sophisticated enough one can begin to triangulate outward toward the future
uh the history of science is uh the history of uh the history of prediction well what is prediction it's
that taking control of a previously uncontrolled dimension the future and uh i think that the rise of
electronic technology the rise of extremely complex language using societies means that we're about to
uh go wholly in to the fourth dimension the temporal dimension and we see ourselves as distinct from our
technologies you see we like when you are in a car you think i am a human being driving a human invention but
there is a point of view from which no you are just a human being who has put on another level of
humanness which happens to have wheels under it and is rolling along in other words genetics that
changes the stuff of our bodies epigenetics which we call ideology and technology changes the environment
in which our bodies operate and i think we're getting set basically to decamp into the imagination
that the imagination is as real a place as across the river is if you've just acquired eyes it's something
you're seeing for the first time and then generating an appetite to go into and this has been kicking
around for 15 or 20 000 years a shaman is a seer is a prophet is a higher dimensional mathematician
and they may not you know use tensor equations to express what they're doing but mathematics before symbols is
experience and so uh i i i really believe history is ending very soon i cannot conceive of a hundred years
in the future at the present accelerated rate of development uh we have unleashed such novelty that i think
we're in the terminal phase of decamping from three-dimensional space we are leaving the womb of newtonian
being for something else the imagination and the birth is tumultuous an entire planet is at risk and
eventually you know toxemia seems to be setting in we've used up all the nutritional resources in the
womb the walls are closing in we're suffocating our political systems don't work our social systems are
breaking down if you're a realist a pessimist then you just say well this is it folks this is the smash
up the party lasted 20 000 years and here comes the bill but you might think that if you were a fetus
trapped in a collapsing womb at transition you could not conceive of the stock broker fashion designer or
whatever that you are going to be in another dimension in another reality that you're being born into
and i think we our aspiration is the conquest of death our religions promise it and if our gods can't
deliver we'll elbow them aside and do it ourselves thank you uh and you know these things aren't decisions
made by a single person or even a group of people they come from the bone it's it's who we are we aspire to be
magic and we probably uh given our track record will achieve it as i said yesterday james joyce said man
will be dirigible a humorous thing to say but yes you mean by that like even for the birth of imagination
you mean like a star trek episode where they have no bodies and the guy like makes himself a big cat
well one of the nice things about my position is i don't have to entirely understand myself
because i'm self-defined as a primitive uh i it when we talk about decamping from newtonian space and
you're asking me what would it look like uh i'm as puzzled as you are i don't know is it nanotech are we
going to become anti and all live in one acre of the rain forest are we going to uh
uh find a way to completely transpose ourselves into the net and just shed our bodies the way we
once shed the placenta that connected us i i once said the body is the placenta of the soul
but is that a religious statement or a technological goal what do we mean the body is the placenta of the
soul and then people get really agitated because a lot of people and i include myself among them rather
like the body and you can imagine a debate in the archaeozoic ocean when people said when people of a
very scaly and lantern jawed type said listen we're leaving for the land you cannot live on the land
there's no water on the land the land is our whole being we're defined by the water the joy of swimming
the great you know on and on and on well some organisms turned their back on that and so then we had the
conquest of the land it's a big thing it's a big thing because what we're being asked is what is
humanness what can you discard and still be human can you can we discard our bodies and still be human
can we discard our ethics and still be human i'd rather keep my ethics and get rid of the body
but you know we are sexual creatures what is life what is sex without a body for crying out loud
uh how does that work and look uh but it is really not ours to decide we have grabbed hold of a tiger
several billion years ago nature is a bootstrapping process and it seems fairly unsentimental you know
there's no tears shed for for for the great sauropods that once stalked the planet they there they were
wiped out in an asteroid impact that allowed the the arise of the angiosperms and the mammals we are the
children and the inheritors of a planetary
catastrophe if this planet hadn't been wrecked 65 million years ago we'd still
be here we wouldn't be here well then what is our position on planetary
catastrophe we're in the process of making one is it so that 65 million years
in the future an organism filled with love and justice and intelligence will
look back at our skeletons in the shale and say well they had a good thing going
but if it hadn't been for their extinction we wouldn't be here the very large scale
is very large indeed one of the things that's so interesting about the
visionary plants is that they give you a large large picture I think the
vegetable mind views death in a different way it is vegetables are eternal in a
sense through vegetative propagation they can live virtually forever life lies
very close to the surface in us and if it's crushed out we're we're very
alarmed we our sense of uniqueness is so highly evolved that our own death becomes
for us the most universal tragedy we can conceive of that's a serious ego
so dislocation I maintain yes
one of the discussions that I know it takes place in the western
um becoming um kind of culture um zero state culture what about these other cultures that never embraces this
this way of life is to you and not like people who love you they don't have access to these technologies maybe it's what they would probably have to know to be finding a lot of pain in them
well nature has two impulses
uh in the particular case the impulse is always toward equilibrium
uh animal species seek to establish niches for themselves in ecosystems that can then be maintained indefinitely just the way you seek a job
where you'll then get money and without working too hard or eating too much excrement you'll be able to maintain yourself
uh indefinitely if you look at all of nature right now the only uh the human species is where the evolutionary cutting edge has become concentrated
and then if you look at the human species the place where the changing novelty has been concentrated is in uh high-tech industrial democratic civilization
i don't call it western anymore because its leading exponent is japan
but high-tech industrial democracies are the only social systems that are still evolving and changing
so uh i think
they also serve who only stand and wait
uh these traditional societies perform the role very much
of a of an animal species at equilibrium in an ecosystem they preserve values related to stability and homeostasis
meanwhile uh in these places where these creative uh creodes have begun to cascade novelty is what's being explored but the novelty feeds back
and changes the context in which these equilibrium seeking systems operate
uh the universe i believe is an engine for the production and conservation of novelty
the universe will
will sacrifice everything achieved to achieve something new
you can see that in looking at this asteroid impact 65 million years ago
i mean this this was a climaxed planetary ecosystem of tropical forests from pole to pole
filled with complex animals and ecosystems and many phyla represented but it was all thrown away
to make way to make way for the mammals and the angiosperms i mean speaking teleologically
so i i think novelty is what nature values above all else and that interestingly leads on to the notion
of an ethic for us because that confers immediate central importance on the human enterprise
the orthodox view is that we're a chance anomaly an eccentricity in the cosmic game
but if the conservation of novelty is what the universe is about then we are it's pride and joy
it's crown jewel the firstborn son and heir apparent uh and the other thing is this this
this ingression or this movement into novelty it has been going on since the beginning of the universe
but always ever faster ever faster so in the in the early universe once things settled down after the big
bang it was dull for a long long time i mean there wasn't much happening there weren't even stars there was
just hydrogen aggregating and then eventually there were aggregates of hydrogen so large that the
pressures at the centers of those aggregates of hydrogen caused a new property to emerge fusion
and fusion cooks out uh heavy elements like iron and sulfur and carbon and when carbon cooks out new
emergent properties become possible molecular chemistry rather than simple atomic systems comes into play well
then elaborate that for a few billion years and you get long chain polymers they're like super molecules
and they have the quality or the ability to template and reproduce themselves well so suddenly you get a whole new
uh emergent uh domain uh domain in nature the the domain of the self-copying self-replicating molecules
and then they begin to embed themselves in membranes and so forth and then you get uh nucleated cells and then
colonies of nucleated cells and from there to advanced mammals it's just a matter of time and and then
uh the uh the the organs of locomotion seem to have been perfected uh you know the fastest animal in
the world can run 70 miles an hour something like that and so then the development seems to concentrate in the in the nervous system
the the coordination no longer of of space but of information information becomes the new coinage
advanced binocular vision systems evolve pack signaling systems evolve in social animals and then at some
point the level of complexity is sufficient to cross a boundary into true language true representation of
the past in the present through symbolic activity uh in each case these stages are happening faster and faster and
faster language may is probably less than 100 000 years old it may be half that age well good grief
that's less than five that's less than three thousand generations in the past language that's yesterday
and and yet since the inception of language look at what has happened you know urbanism global
conquest of the environment uh mathematical conquest of nature we can call down the fires
that burn in the hearts of stars to the deserts of this planet or if necessary necessary down upon the heads
of our enemies that's an extraordinary feat for protoplasm to be able to uh undertake
extraordinary uh and and and and and so i i think this accelerating novelty indicates that we are on the brink
of just going down the novelty well and becoming as unrecognizable to ourselves as we would be to
tyrannosaurus rex if it were introduced to us as the heirs to its struggle and dreams yeah
uh it was one of the most interesting things to me the landscape at the end and the other correct
devices that was incorrect um and among all we'll talk about what it might look like i think there was
one line that said is it was december 21st 2012 and the 22nd may look there for the 21st if there may be
no change on the circle it may look the same and i'm sure it's how that fits all the questions
well you know are are we going to be walking around a small yard or are we going to be self-driven
things that you talked about yesterday or is it going to is that day going to pass by and i don't
know there's one percent see it and 99 percent doesn't or is it going to be that 100 percent doesn't
see it or is there probably well one way it could happen is that as we get closer and closer to it
our ability to accept these strange things becomes broader and broader so when the moment finally comes
yes you are a self-dribbling jeweled basketball but hey it ain't no big deal and you saw it coming years
ago so what uh i i i don't know i i vacillate on all of this because as a rationalist i'm very puzzled by
my intellectual burden of a completely irrational revelation i would never have wished this upon
myself i'm much more comfortable as a as a fairly hard-nosed skeptical thinker yet i've spent so much
time with this idea that i guess i have become infected with it it now seems to me as reasonable as anything
else there is unremarked by science a universal tendency toward complexity through time it's a law
as as real as the law of the speed of light of the segregation of genes but science has never said that
because science is as practiced out of the 19th century is militantly anti-teleological in other
words it denies any end goal any goal any purpose any predefined end state it it science just thinks the
universe is a random walk but i i can't i i think it's becoming harder and harder to maintain that idea
in the face of the evidence there are too many choices if you have a protein of several thousand
atoms it has 10 high 16 folding configurations it can choose from if it if it worked through those things
by trial and error it would take the life of the universe for that molecule to figure out its minimum
energy configuration and assume it so there is a kind of logic or there are constraints that we
aren't aware of that push processes toward completion and i think you know the new sciences of of chaos
theory dynamics complexity fractals strange attractors are going to deliver this into our
uh understanding it's a very exciting time i mean we're taking the first intellectual steps toward the
real re-understanding of nature since at least the invention of the calculus and probably the
invention of greek mathematics yeah
this model that you're talking about sounds a little bit to me um like a phase transition that
that's in consciousness when it reaches the point of complexity and then there's a transition
but it seems completely we're all connected on some level with the morphic field and all but that
may just you know you will start and then it's just like popular all of a sudden everyone
like a chain reaction yeah well you put your finger on it the key word is connectedness uh i i'm very
interested in the philosophical if you want to put it that way implications of the world wide web
and the internet i mean the internet is a fascinating thing you can't see it therefore if you're not into
it the world appears to have remained the same nothing has changed uh and yet actually the largest human
human artifact ever created has sprung into being in the last five years it's as big as this planet
and uh nobody controls it it has no central control no one can decide that it shall be this
or shall be that there are certain areas under limited control well but what does the internet
do well it connects us together it it uh uh broadens and deepens and makes more immediate the cultural
database that we're all swimming in and uh i i i think that probably it is a model for or not a model
but it is an anticipation of this transcendental object at the end of time i mean i have said in these
lectures you know my idea of the future perfect state is a world of 500 million human beings of all races
genders sexual persuasion so forth and so on 500 million well-fed healthy people living mostly in warm
climate largely naked very little physical cultural manifestation but if you could project yourself into
one of these people's minds or bodies you would see that when they close their eyes there are menus
hanging in space those menus are there because at age three there was a surgical implant behind the eyelids
of something like a very small contact lens and that is the philosopher's stone that is the culmination of
10 000 years of technical evolution and engineering dreams and what it boils down to is a little black
disc that's surgically implanted behind your eyelid and that's your interface to the culture and you can
move into the net which is of course virtually implemented it's not text it's not even hypertext
it's a three-dimensional non-material world ruled by the laws not of physics but the imagination
and i call this turning the body inside out this is what the cultural enterprise is for
we want we want we want to live in the imagination with the body as a freely commandable object in the
imagination in other words replace the laws of physics with the laws of of uh dream or imagination this is
culturally within our reach right now i mean if it were as important as piling up nuclear stockpiles or
screwing people over in a hundred different ways we'd have it in five years not 17 as it is we'll probably
have to wait 17 years but that that the fact that we can make a model like that that's a bridge from where
we're sitting to a spiritually transcendental realm that's within reach is i think very positive now all we
have to do is fill in the blanks keep taking psychedelics so that our engineering standards stay
high so that we stay focused on the goals that we're trying to maximize and then try to
promote the idea that anxiety is inappropriate anxiety poisons the will to action and i really think that
this is going to be the the task of the high-tech um alternative culture is to provide an optimistic vision
because you see the people who run the world are becoming more and more panic-stricken because a world is
ending their world is ending the world of the shell game and the international corporation and the
propagandized passive electorate and all these things that have been that game is ending and there there is
no substitute vision being discussed at the upper echelons of the control mechanism of this society it's
it's coming from the grassroots the people at the top are too paralyzed with the poisons they've imbibed by
feeding at the trough of the old order they can't think their way out of their dilemma in fact they have to
pay guys with ponytails just to turn on the machines in the morning they're so distanced from the things
they rule you see yeah i'm wondering that like in my experience and other people talking to me about
taking hallucinogens you talk about dissolving the boundaries another way to look at it is um you talk
about anxiety it's anxiety or fear eventually goes away of the other which if we have a boundary there is
another and um in terms of like men and women if women are more other for men than vice versa that on a
hallucinogen a man can um get to a place where he observes and goes beyond the boundaries to know that it's not the
other and if a woman is in that place what i for my own personal experience and from other people
talking to me and so women kind of find their voice in the way of the world to say well it's okay
not to have always experience with the other and um and at some hope of things accelerating my mother was born in 1921 and
very conservative kind of comes to the point where she's only three years old or whatever and has a 77
year old boyfriend and at dinner in the third town and laughing and says well i'm living do you think your
mother would say that and i don't know i i kind of like to hear what you would say about in terms of
otherness and how psychedelics can what the dissolving the boundaries does and how we carry that to other
people yeah well first of all uh it's important in all these discussions to remember there is nothing
on earth as much like a woman as a man uh the the next species over whatever it is the difference is enormous
the other thing to remember is if if you believe in evolutionary theory then this has always amazed me
women are the creation of choices made by men men are the creation of choices made by women
the aesthetic difference is striking i mean apparently men prefer smooth gentle uh nurturing curvaceous forms and
apparently women their aesthetic is fulfilled by a rougher cut uh we are reflections of the desires of the
opposite gender because we've been subject to selection in the sexual process that way uh as far as everybody
is struggling to keep up with the evolution of the culture i experienced this same thing i mean my father
is a very conservative character and uh uh he's now 80 and he seems to go out of his way to be outrageous
and uh i i it's maybe the one good thing television is doing is that straight people and by that i don't mean
non-gay i mean in the sense of non-psychedelic straight people can't escape from the weirdness of the
culture you know no matter who you are you have to look at this stuff it's in your face and eventually
you bend uh so approaching the other is a process of redefining yourself to be more acceptable
to it you know there's a coming to meet it becomes more familiar as you become more familiar with it
but the truly other what rudolph auto called the the totally other is other in principle it's like
the archetype of the other and it can't be assimilated but wherever the other is particularized in a
person a work of art a place uh it can be approached through a process of templating yourself to it you
know we become what we behold no matter how bizarre what we behold may be well uh it's a little past time
to take a break let's take a break those of you who are doing uh a paper why don't you gather up here
and david and i will lay out the guidelines the rest of you why don't you give us just a little bit of
space so we can work this academic thing out let's see i have uh some guidelines and david has this
civilization lose a piece of knowledge that's central to its functioning well the only scenario i can come
up with is uh an increasingly autocratic elite ordering everybody around until finally there is a populist
revolt and those people and their books and their buildings are all put to death and burned this may
be a similar thing may have happened to the maya you know the mayan civilization looking at the archaeological
evidence was an incredibly steep social pyramid so steep that it's conceivable the execution of a a few
thousand people would essentially disembowel uh the accomplishments of the civilization kill the
architects the scientists the astronomers the scribes and the artisans and what you've got left are
rainforest swidden farmers and then they go and do what they've always known how to do i i i don't believe
in the case of soma that it could have been a matter of it being available and then slowly uh disappearing i
mean the the rick veda speaks of intoxicating hundreds of people a day it speaks of the of the soma
gushing from the soma presses in these enormous amounts well clearly it was something easily available
obtained and processed and yet it died out completely and was not really replaced with anything else
so why i think cultural institutions are more fragile uh than we imagine in the scenario and and this
brings up the issue of substitutes uh in the scenario i told you yesterday about psilocybin in the sahara
and how it created a partnership paradise which then faded as the mushroom faded i am my as i try to imagine how
that would have felt i think probably what happened was
was at some point in the african past the mushroom was everywhere on the grasslands uh whenever it
rained it appeared it rained frequently the cattle the dung of the cattle was everywhere the mushroom was
everywhere well then it began to uh dry up and the first thing that would happen and we're talking
millennia in each step the first thing that would happen is the mushroom would become seasonal so then
you would have great mushroom festivals once a year rather than continuous mushroom taking
seasonal the next thing is as the drying continues it would retreat into the rain shadows of mountains
seasons seasonally now you have to make pilgrimages long distances seasonally to the mushroom place well
in parallel with this diminishing supply of mushrooms would logically be a rising anxiety about that
so what would you do well you would create strategies for the preservation of it in times of scarcity
smoking meat burying eggs the primitive you know aboriginal peoples know how to do these things
the obvious method of preserving mushrooms still used to this day in in the sierra mazateka in a world without
refrigeration is to put them into honey honey is a an antiseptic medium and the sugar in honey will draw
water out of a fragile thing like a mushroom and tend to preserve it the problem is if you've ever dealt
with aboriginal honeys you know they're not like the stuff we get in the little plastic bears
aboriginal honey is very watery and what what the consequences of this are is that the preserving
medium honey itself has the capacity to transmute into a psychoactive substance alcohol
so suddenly you see people of good intention
trying to preserve their mushrooms but unbeknownst to themselves they're turning into an alcohol cult
because fewer mushrooms more and more honey then uh uh and as the as the supply continues to shrink
finally you give up on intoxicating everybody and you just say we're going to establish a professional
class of people shamans and they will take the mushroom since we can't all take it so then you have
knowledge of it retreating into a professional class and these in aboriginal society these professional
classes are always hedged about with secrecy so then you actually have a situation where there is a body
of cultural knowledge which not everybody possesses in fact which very few people possess well at that point
through war epidemic schism or natural catastrophe you could lose that core of experts and then you you
would simply be uh adrift so it's it's a very it's a very complicated issue and the history of each one of these
things is fought with the these kinds of episodes the other thing is you know just to keep the complexity ever
before you um styles of usage change
I mentioned that that the 19th century eight hashish
we smoke it and
It has very different impacts on our
Psychologies and our art and so forth and so on
Another example is a good example close to home
LSD in the 60s
You couldn't play the game unless you took 500 mikes
These days you split a half a blotter
It's probably 70 mikes and that is what people call an LSD trip
It's half an order of magnitude smaller than what was being done 30 years ago
Well, so naturally people say entirely different things about LSD now than they did
then
the other thing that makes this very complicated I mean nature is not cutting you any slack here if you can have a
species of a plant
Genetically fairly defined and taxonomically fairly defined and it can have a horrific number of variables
bearing upon it the favorite example here would be
amanita muscaria
More ink has been spilled over amanita muscaria than almost any other plant I can think of it
Wasson identified it as soma the subject matter of these ecstatic
hymns of praise that filled the Rick Vedas
But when you actually take
Amanita muscaria if you only get a bellyache you're lucky
This is not at all a reliable
Intoxicant well, what's going on here? Well, here's what's going on
Amanita muscaria because of its genetic makeup is
Is subject to geographical variance that means the siberian amanita the new mexico amanita and the andean amanita are
experientially different creatures, so
geographical variation
then there is a
Edathically induced variation depending on the soil and the mycorrhizal host the chemistry of the mushroom will be different
Well, then there's brood
Differentiation the first flush
Will have a different chemistry than the third fourth or fifth flush of the same organism again
This is where shaman where the guru may have a role to play
You shouldn't take amanita muscaria
Unless you are with someone who says I have taken these
Mushrooms from this place at this time of year in this fashion and attain success
But if you just go out and eat the first dominina muscaria you find your experience could range from
Nothing to a medical emergency and very few people who have just gone out and eaten
Amanita muscaria have any kind of experience that could be mapped over an ecstatic
hallucinogenic experience, but a
Occasionally you will hear a story so wild
That you can tell under certain very narrowly defined conditions. This thing must be tremendously
Effective, but what those conditions are
We don't know
I think it was Watson that wrote about, I guess it's the regmaid, the regmaid, talking about drinking the piss of shiva and soma and this whole thing and his interpretation, maybe it was more than interpretation, the evidence showed that they would drink the urine of the animals that ate the mushrooms, like the antelope or the reindeer or the cows, because that way it was purified of the animals that ate the mushrooms, like the antelope or the reindeer or the cows, because that way it was purified of these
Toxins through the animals' systems, and they would drink a potion that was
Well
Yes, I mean
I really respect Gordon Wasson, but in this particular area, I think he spread more confusion than light
It is certainly true that Amanita muscaria is a shamanic
Intoxicant of great age used among the Arctic peoples of Siberia in the Tunguska and Amur River Basin
but
And it is true that
One of the great hazards of Amanita taking in that area is that when you go out on a snowy night to take a whiz
It is
These reindeer come and knock you over head first in order to get to the yellow snow because they're
So into it
But reindeer are not cattle and there are no reindeer in India
And
Cattle don't seek out mushrooms to eat them
The thing that to my mind breaks down Wasson's theory is
First of all, the inadequate intoxication
But second of all, you can tell from the Rig Veda that hundreds of people were being intoxicated with this stuff
That basically people were just lining up and passing through a line and it was being labeled out
Well Amanita muscaria has a mycorrhizal relationship to birch and spruce
That means it grows only in association with the roots of those plants
To this day no mycologist has ever successfully cultivated it on the natch
So when you find it, it's a rare thing
To find one or two is cause for rejoicing
To find half a dozen is a miracle
I've never heard of anybody finding more than that
I've seen other Amanitas in great abundance
If you're an Amanita fan
Check out Baker's Beach
In January
Do you all know where it is?
It's at the bottom of 25th Avenue
The number of Amanita pantherinas that come up in that sandy soil down there
You can literally gather a couple of grocery bags of it
But even at that, how far will a couple of grocery bags go
If you have several hundred people to intoxicate
So I don't see how it could possibly have been Amanita muscaria
I think a whole bunch of mistakes were made by Wasson and the people who followed him
In arguing so strenuously for that
Wasson himself admitted that he never obtained a satisfactory intoxication from Amanita
So again, you have to be aware of all of these variables
And I think it's fine to respect those who have preceded us into this
Lots of hard work has been done
But on the other hand
They're just fallible, career-mongering human beings
Like all the rest of us
And it never hurts
To double-check
I mean, what you haven't confirmed for yourself
You should view as simply informed speculation
But you do need to check for yourself
Yeah
I mean, the pure compound?
Frankly, in 30 years there has been very, very little chemically purified psilocybin
I
Once took a small white capsule that was said to be pure psilocybin
It may have been
It was it was like a very warm and friendly flavor of LSD
But it didn't have the voice
Now there's a famous story that when Hoffman isolated psilocybin
He then to prove the isolation
He manufactured some
And then he and Wasson took it back with them to Watla
And they gave it to Maria Sabina
And she said the spirit of the mushroom is in the little pill
But let's face it
Maria Sabina was a sly old woman
Who really knew how to play on the gringo's harp
And I don't think it's the last word that she said that
I mean, the implication may have been
And so why don't you go back to Basel and leave us alone
For crying out loud
Haven't you done enough good here?
Um, yeah
The synchronicity surrounding the use of mushrooms
And her like story about the
Are you pulling his restaurant?
Oh, yeah
The Rod Steiger story
Well, yes
I mean, I don't know quite what to make of this
Again, there are more questions than answers
But one of the things that you will quickly experience
If you get into this
And most of you probably already know
Is that rational
And by that I mean statistically extrapolatable expectations
Seem to be superseded on these trips
By a kind of magical connectedness
All kinds of strange things happen on trips
That really happen
It's not hallucination
These things really happen
It's almost as though the ordinary laws of causality
Are obviated
And you become a magnet for the strange
The peculiar
And sometimes these synchronicities are trivial
Sometimes they're the difference between life and death
As an example of the latter
I've told this story before
But one time years ago
Dennis and a girlfriend of his
Went up into the mountains behind a boulder
And they took
Argyria nervosa
Hawaiian baby woodrose
And it was much stronger than they expected
And it lasted much longer than they expected
And so night fell
And behind boulder up around Nederland
It's 12,000 feet
I mean when night falls
The temperature plummets
You're immediately in a situation of crisis
Night fell
They were completely lost
They had no clue where they were
Or how to get back to the car
And it looked grim
And so they're looking out over these valleys
And mountains and so forth
Trying to spot something
And finally across the valley
They see what my brother assumes is a car
Come around the corner
Because they see the headlights
And so they descend down into this canyon
It takes them an hour
It's pitch dark
To climb up the other side
And they arrive
To arrive in a parking lot
To find their car
Not only to find their car
But to find that the lights are on
Well they had left the car some 12 hours before
The battery would have been run down
If the lights had been on all that time
It means the lights
They saw the lights
Come on
When they looked out across the valley
Full of fear
Wondering where they were
So you know, it's just a story
Unless you're the person
Whose life was saved
By this incident
So, and you can see then
Why aboriginal people
Would have this faith
In the primacy of mind
Probably because mind is in fact
Primary
And it's only because we've locked ourselves down
Into a set of reductionist expectations
That we live in a world
So brutally
Under the aegis
Of laws like entropy
And seriality
And so forth and so on
Yeah
Something that Sasha said in book cycle
That you and him have a disagreement about
Synthesizing masculine
Saying that
Similar to her question about
Synthesizing
Do you still hold that?
Yeah, and that that plant spirit
Doesn't really speak to you
Unless you use the plant itself
Rather than the compound
I don't know
Much has been made about
This difference we had
I don't recall the conversation
And haven't read the account of it
If Rupert's theory holds any water
It's the same thing
And we can both still believe
Whatever we like to believe
And I think that without argument though
Generally the plant experiences are richer
And it's not difficult to see why
If you take mescaline
You have a mescaline trip
If you take peyote
You have a mescaline
Plus thirteen other
Mescaline-like alkaloids
Anhalamine, Anhaloene
Peyote
Loafel-4
And there's a whole spectrum
Of these things in there
And I think that gives
A more
A richer experience
I don't
It's not an absolute ontological difference
Between Sasha and I on that issue
Where I might argue
That there is a real difference
Is between
Drugs created yesterday
In the laboratory
And drugs that have a huge
History behind them
Because I believe that in some sense
I mean this is not rationally defendable
But it's an intuition
In some sense when you take a plant
It takes you
And you
Make a contribution
To the high
A tiny
You know it's like you add one brick
To the wall
So that then when
Essentially when you take psilocybin
You are experiencing
All the previous psilocybin trips
That ever were
That's what the psilocybin trip is
So I remember once when I
Years ago the first time I did ketamine
Ketamine
My impression was
It's an empty vessel
It's an unfurnished hotel
It's a blank canvas
It's a psychedelic experience
But it's incredibly impoverished
In that not enough people have done it
To fill the space with stuff
For the rest of us
Now in a thousand years
Ketamine may be a very rich
Experience
Because so many people
Will have carved their initials
On that tree
But I think you know
As we learn from the plants
The plants learn from us
And they adjust
The content
So I'm not
I don't
I'm not of this school
That says what we need
Is a drug we don't have
You know
Somebody wrote an essay called
What we need is a new drug
Quoting the lyrics of the song
I think that we have
The substances we need
What we don't have
Are the techniques and the intelligence
To know what to do with them
Because that is the act of the breathing
And they do seem to give
Completely different parts
Well not if you take enough ayahuasca
If you take really a lot
And sit and breathe
And work with it for an hour or so
You can eventually get to a place
Where you just say
This looks like a DMT flash to me
But that's a lip numbing dose of ayahuasca
You know
Harmine has a slightly anesthetic effect
So if you take a dose of ayahuasca
And your lips go numb
You are definitely topping out
That's an effective dose
Many people have never felt that
But it's a sign that you're approaching
The effective limit
Yeah
Are you familiar with the alleged
CIA testing daily on people in a mental hospital
Hospital in Menlo Park in the 60's
That can keep you to part in?
The Langley-Porter experiments
Yes
I was very frustrated
What happened with those studies
What the government found
From those in relation
You were saying that
These studies in the University of New Mexico
Were going to be
The new studies
What came out of those
I can't really answer in detail
Those were not
Pharmacodynamical studies
They were more like psychotherapeutic studies
They were giving mescaline to people
And working with states of dysfunction
But they weren't trying to understand
The physiological parameters of it
Joe Adam
And the guy who became the regent
Willis Harmon
All of those people were associated with those experiments
Mescaline was well studied during the 20's
I mean if you've not read Heinrich Kluver's book
On Hallucination
It's a very nice piece of work
And done very early
And he actually tried to create a vocabulary of hallucination
I mean it's kind of silly
But you know
He taught his subjects to identify colors
By their place in the spectrum
So people would say
You know
Spiked basketball
Moving at 4 o'clock
700 nanometers
Shifting toward 800 nanometers
And
This sort of thing
Which it just
It doesn't quite give you the flavor
I'm afraid
Yeah
We were in the
Dave's
The definition of hallucination came up
And Ralph Messner's
He was saying
For him the distinction between
A hallucination
Which means something which isn't there
And the experience that you have on psychedelics
Where you're having what you were talking about
Or did I imagine that
No
I wanted to figure it out
Yeah, no, that's worth talking about
Because I use the vocabulary in a specific sense
And if I don't explain it
I'm not really understood
There is a definite distinction
I mean most people who've never taken these things
Think
Well don't you see colors
And isn't it like that
There are three
At least three
Discussable stages here
First of all there's what's technically called hypnagogia
Hypnagogia is when you close your eyes
And you see little lights and stars
And drifting debris
And that sort of thing
That's hypnagogia
Then there's what I would call
I guess
Hallucination
And there's a spectrum
And it's very interesting
When they simulate or talk about hallucinations
They only talk about the onset of hallucination
When you take a psychedelic
Here's the timeline
Let's say it's psilocybin
At one hour
You begin to feel the state of arousal
Give or take a few minutes
Well then when you close your eyes
There's this black background
That is typical of the baseline of consciousness
Well then after a few minutes
There are these sort of amoeboid
After image colored lights
That come toward you and stream past you
And this is actually called streaming
This is how it's referred to
And these things are either
That after image violet
Or that after image chartreuse
That we all know
And these things sort of come
But and if you don't take a sufficient dose
That's it with theme and variation
And now we're in the land of the famous geometric grids
Floating shapes
This sort of thing
But that is not the payoff of psychedelics
The real payoff is vision
And visions are not dancing mice
And rows of little candies doing calisthenics
And all that detritus
Vision is something which has emotional content
That's why light shows
And fancy computer graphics and all that
They stop short at this point
Because no matter how visually complicated something is
Going on a screen
If it doesn't somehow touch your heart and your soul
Then it's just a complicated pattern of some sort
But if it also contains information
Specific to your circumstance
Then it's completely engaging
And that's what I shoot for
And consider the visionary trip
It's coherent
It's not like a dream
It's not that coherent
It's not a little story
In which you appear in a strange circumstance
With odd people
It's not like that
But it is not
Simply a visual experience
The content is multidimensional
And deeply mental
And largely informational
And that's the proof of the pudding
And there is no way to achieve it
Any other way that I've ever noticed
Relative to my remarks this morning
About orgasm
And this is part of the clue
I've noticed
That in the post-coital
Aura
If you want to put it that way
There are these blue and green lights
Streaming past
Usually not for very long
Maybe a minute's worth
After a completely satisfying
Sexual release
But it doesn't go to the next level
Which it always does do
With the psychedelic
But the fact that they share that phenomenon
For a moment
Suggests something
Suggests that it's both
And I used to think not
I used to think it was entirely dose
But I've realized from talking to people
That what seems natural and obvious to me
Seems odd to some people
What you have to do
Is you have to look at the back of your eyelids
With the expectation that you will see something
And it's a plane in the field
Now if you're in front of the plane
That means you're thinking
Oh, I'm getting high
I feel weird
My agenda is this
I need to think about that
Do I need to go to the bathroom
Where is the water?
Your attention is here
If your attention is beyond it
You also won't see it
Like I've noticed
You can't talk and see it
At the same time
The act of verbalizing
Requires so much mental focus
That you can't see this stuff
So what you have to do
Is look at the back of your eyelids
As though it were a flat surface
And just keep looking at it
And keep looking at it
And if there's any flicker
Of color or light or movement
Concentrate and keep looking
And it usually doesn't take more than a minute or two
Of that for it to completely open up
In front of you
The other thing is
I plead with it
I address it
And I say
Do what you will
I'm entirely yours
Please don't hurt me
But do with me what you will
And if that invoking
That announcing
That you are ready
Is very important
In this matter of the speech
Of the mushrooms
The reason a lot of people
Don't have that experience
Is because you have to initiate
The conversation
You can be loaded for hours
On mushrooms
And if you will never say
In the silence of your mind
It doesn't have to be spoken
If you say
Hello
It will never directly address you
It's shy
But if you will say hello
It's there
It says yes
And you're off
And you know another thing
We're so defensive
And locked down
Another thing that's very important
And all Aboriginal people know this
Is the importance of chant and song
If you get into a hard place
The western reflex
Seems to be
To assume the fetal position
And wait
With the belief
That in some hours
If you don't go mad
This hell
Whatever it is
Will be lifted off of you
Well this is the worst thing
You could possibly do
In that situation
If you get into a place
That is difficult
Sit up
Gulp air
And sing
And the reasons for this
Are obvious
On different levels
First of all
It's an assertion
Of your existential right to be
You don't just whimper and fold
You sit up
You sing
Second of all
You
It oxygenates your brain
And mental though these places may be
They have some root
In matter and physiology
Flood your brain
With oxygen
And the demon
Whatever it is
Will be washed away
Or at least transformed
And so
By techniques
Of invocation
Of chant
Of song
Of concentration
Self-discipline
And I don't mean rigorous self-discipline
Nothing like what yoga demands
I just mean
Pull yourself together
For God's sake
And pay attention
To what's going on
You can make it your vehicle
And then the other thing
Which I always do
But I
It's controversial
I suppose to say it
Is cannabis
Cannabis is the rudder
On your ship
If you come into a place
That you don't care for
Just take a hit of cannabis
And then do your chanting
And you will move through it
But don't clench
Realize that you are an energetic system
And the addition of cannabis
Or oxygen
Or water
Is going to change the situation
So take responsibility
And then finally
You know
You have to discipline your hindbrain
In the presence of the strange
And the overwhelming
The primate locks into a fight or flight
Syndrome
But it's an adrenal
It's an adrenaline release
And adrenaline is a very short act
It's a very short act
compound
all you have to do is wait
and the fear will come
and it will
spike and if you don't
go mad and start screaming
or tear your clothes off and run
into the street but if you just sit
it can't sustain
the spike, it chemically
is impossible to remain
petrified
for very long
eventually you just say
well, alright, so I'm terrified
so what about it
and then you begin to drift down
so it's not an easy
thing but it
can be mastered and it's mainly
practical
attention
the more exotic techniques
mantra, yantra
physiologically
unlikely positions and so forth
that all works as well
but I think just breath
and sound
and cannabis
and intent
will carry you through
through most difficulties
yeah
I had a question about
about cannabis
when I was younger
I could smoke
very easily
readily
at any time
whether I was
sitting in class
or playing soccer
any time
and it would feel
very good
calming
and I'd just kind of be
stoned
and after a while
and now I can barely
smoke anymore
because I get really
just kind of sketched out
and not really paranoid
but a little bit like that
I'm just wondering
would
you mean you feel
uncomfortable with yourself
in social situations
you don't know what to do
yeah
sometimes when I'm alone
funny more
but even when I'm alone
like I have to be
I can't just sit
I usually like end up
I don't know
wanting to go mountain
but I can't just run up a hill
well
I mean I think
our responses
change
over life
not only to drugs
but to other things
I think also
you have to find
what works
for you
I know people
who
take LSD
in small amounts
very often
because they say
they can work
better on it
I tried it
I tried to
I felt
I wasn't getting
enough work done
and they said
oh well you'll be able
to do 12 hours
of work a day
if you just take
50 mics
after breakfast
I couldn't do it
I mean it
sketched me out
I found myself
pacing the floor
and you know
just it was madness
I on the other hand
can before breakfast
smoke enough cannabis
that most people
would simply
go back to bed
and that sets me up
for hours and hours
of work
so you sort of
have to learn
yourself
these people
who are these
enthusiasts for
Datura
they've got to be
some different
kind of person
than I am
and because they
genuinely take
pleasure in something
which would just
drive me
right up
my tree
so
one of the things
that you have to
honor in this
domain
more than in most
human endeavors
is our human
uniqueness
I remember
years ago
I took a course
it was a funny
course too
it was called
forensic pathology
if you can imagine
and it was taught
by
if you can imagine
Sasha
Shulgin
forensic pathology
right
so one of the
things he did
in this class
is he brought
in a little
vial of
some substance
and there were
500 people
in this class
it was at
Cal
so we
passed it
around
no big deal
you sniff it
a kind of
a nondescript
odor
pass it on
to the next
person
out of the
500 people
three
had an
incredibly
violent
reaction
to this
stuff
and then
Sasha
explained
there is a
known gene
for reacting
to this
thing
people who
have this
gene
are 50,000
times more
sensitive
to this
substance
than people
without it
well just
extrapolate
that range
to every
substance
in nature
and
and you
will see
why
in a
sense
learning
what
drugs
you
should
and
shouldn't
take
is as
big a
task
as
deciding
what
kind
and
you
honor
your
individuality
the shamans
say
you know
if the
plant
wants
you
it
will
take
you
will
know
if
there
is
a lock
and key
fit
and
and I
think
part
of
late
adolescence
is
drug
experimentation
for this
purpose
I think
if you
go through
life
taking
vast amounts
of drugs
of all
sorts
then
you
didn't
quite
get it
right
the
idea
is
to
find
what
works
for
you
and
then
put
the
pedal
to
the
metal
you know
and if
it's
LSD
you know
and if
it
or
whatever
it is
because
the
things
have
personalities
it's
like
making
a
friendship
and
some
people
are
going
to
want
to
be
your
friend
and
some
people
are
going
to
think
you're
a
jerk
and
you
don't
want
to
hang
out
with
those
people
because
they
make
you
feel
bad
all
these
other
subjective
things
would
you
come
into
it
against
an
argument
like
that
right
forgive me
I can't
remember
the book
no
I'll
reconstitute
it
for you
yes
in one
of my
books
I said
if you're
thinking
of taking
a
substance
you should
ask
yourself
three
questions
first
of all
does
it
is
not
toxic
to
organic
systems
does
it
occur
in
a
plant
second
question
does
it
occur
in
a
plant
with
a
history
of
human
usage
if
the
answer
is
yes
then
you
have
your
human
data
sample
if
people
somewhere
have
been
taking
this
plant
for
millennia
then
you
know
that
it
doesn't
cause
blindness
miscarriages
madness
tumors
so
forth
and
narrowest
gate
is
does
it
have
an
affinity
a
relationship
to
ordinary
brain
chemistry
cause
you
don't
want
to
insult
the
physical
brain
you
don't
want
to
damage
yourself
in
this
enterprise
psilocybin
will
pass
this
test
stretching
the rules
a bit
LSD
will
pass
this
test
in
compounds
that
have
been
used
for
a
long
time
whether
or
not
it's
a
constituent
of
brain
chemistry
is
debatable
but
now
the
interesting
thing
about
applying
this
test
you
might
say
oh
well
what
a
downer
everything
is
getting
tossed
out
no
the
strongest
stuff
remains
DMT
passes
this
test
with
flying
colors
it's
already
in
your
brain
just
as
you
sit
here
it
has
a
long
history
of
human
usage
in
many
parts
of
the
world
and
it
occurs
in
many
species
of
plants
and
it
is
the
strongest
hallucinogen
known
so
this is a
reasonable
test
to
first
of
all
does
it
occur
in
a
plant
because
that
tells
you
that
at
least
it
is
not
toxic
to
organic
system
does
it
occur
in
a
plant
second
question
does
it
occur
in
a
plant
with
a
history
of
human
usage
if
the
answer
is
yes
then
you
have
your
human
data
sample
if
people
somewhere
have been
taking
this
miscarriages
madness
tumors
so
forth
and so
on
and
the
third
and
narrowest
gate
is
does
it
have
a
an
affinity
a
relationship
to
ordinary
brain
chemistry
because
you
don't
want
to
insult
the
physical
brain
you
don't
want
to
stretching
the
rules
a
bit
LSD
will
pass
this
test
in
other
words
LSD
is
a
relative
of
compounds
that
have
been
used
for
a
long
time
whether
or
not
it's
a
constituent
of
brain
chemistry
is
debatable
but
now
the
interesting
thing
about
applying
this
test
you
might
say
oh
well
what
a
downer
everything
is
getting
tossed
out
no
the
strongest
stuff
remains
DMT
passes
this
test
with
flying
colors
it's
already
in
your
brain
just
as
you
sit
here
it
has
a
long
history
of
human
usage
in
many
parts
of
the
world
and
it
occurs
in
many
species
of
plants
and
it
is
the
strongest
hallucinogen
known
so
this
is
a
reasonable
test
to
apply
that
to
avoid
basically
danger
and
damage
then
once
you've
done
that
you
have
your
friend
who
you
have
an
affinity
for
all
right
why don't
we break
now
and
you're
going to
final
here
as
old
pilots
like to
say
so
you
should
now
be
in
the
last
crack
mood
meaning
that
you're
getting
your
last
crack
at
me
what
turns
have
been
left
on
stones
and
what
stones
left
unturned
yes
i don't
really
know
anything
about
it
i
do
think
i
it's
puzzling
when
you
feel
that
the
initial
conditions
have
been
recreated
but
the
results
you
get
are
completely
different
and
astrology
then
offers
itself
as
an
explanation
well
the
last
time
you
did
it
the
moon
was
in
Taurus
now
it's
in
something
else
again
this
is
something
that
could
be
looked
at
is
there
a
time
i
i don't
believe
everything
the mushroom
tells me
i just
treat it
like
everybody
else
you know
you can't
trust anybody
a hundred
percent
but but the
mushroom does
seem to have the
idea that
it's good
when the moon
is in
scorpio
i've just
experientially
noticed that
that
things
seem
to go
better
in the
psychedelic
realm
when the
moon
is in
scorpio
i'm a
triple
scorpio
hey
yes
hey
wait a
minute
here
yeah
well
they're
probably
smoking
canick
and
aboriginal
tobaccos
and
various
things
you know
it's a
very odd
thing
i mean
you talk
about
cultural
evolution
and that
sort
of
thing
did
you
know
that
smoking
was
unknown
in
europe
and
asia
until
it was
brought
from
the
new
world
at
the
time
of
the
spanish
conquest
rome
never
smoked
its
opium
it
put it
in
wine
opium
was
never
smoked
in
china
until
after
tobacco
was
introduced
in
fact
the
smoking
of
opium
in
china
arose
largely
as a
result
of
trying
to
drive
out
tobacco
smoking
as
a
habit
this
method
of
drug
delivery
which
you
would
assume
was
paleolithic
was
unknown
to
the
civilization
that
we
evolved
in
the
new
world
seems
particularly
expertise
in
these
dimensions
for
example
enemas
are
one
of
the
very
few
things
that
we
can
that
have
entered
our
culture
as
a
cultural
contribution
unique
to
the
amazon
basin
enemas
are
they
had
rubber
they
had
natural
rubber
and
they
discovered
that
some
substances
were
so
toxic
that
you
didn't
want
to
put
them
into
your
stomach
but
that
they
would
be
active
if
you
would
directly
insert
them
and
so
the
enema
was
invented
millennia
ago
in
South
America
but
was
a
mad
idea
from the
point of
view
of
European
medicine
until
it
was
tried
and
then
of course
it
became
the
rage
and
there
are
then
successive
rages
of
upper
colon
focus
that
sweep
through
our
society
every
once
in a
while
yeah
that
was
an
essay
that
originally
appeared
in
Whole
Earth
Review
I
think
called
Plant
Plan
Planet
and
what
I
was
trying
to
say
there
was
there
is
a
great
deal
to
be
learned
from
emulating
plants
especially
in the
culture
of
crisis
that
we're
in
first
of
all
plants
they
have
to
deal
with
their
toxic
byproducts
because
they
can't
move
away
from
them
the
way
we
do
and
move
into
new
niches
plants
are
homeostatically
self
regulating
plants
are
degrees
notice
that
we
do
our
technologies
operate
at
degrees
and
up
and
then
produce
all
kinds
of
heavy metal
toxins
and
poisons
and this
sort of
thing
also
in a
sense
the
dowel
like
passivity
of
plants
the
way
in
which
they
accept
their
circumstances
essentially
an
animal
is
an
organism
that
can
move
away
from
the
circumstances
of
its
own
being
and
so
for
all
of
these
reasons
plants
seem
like
an
excellent
model
for
the
kind
of
future
that
we
should
be
building
we
organic
starting
and
ending
materials
in
industrial
processes
we
want
to
create
a
kind
of
integrated
homeostatic
cohesion
in our
societies
in all
these
cases
and
a
solar
based
society
in all
these
cases
the
plants
provide
the
model
they've
been
showing
how
to
do
these
things
very
time
yeah
are you
familiar
with
Rick
Tarnas
and
Roth
when they
get
together
on
the
whole
archetypal
archology
that
is
specific
related
to
the
planets
and
how
doing
people's
transits
or
charts
seems
to be
the
only
predictor
to be
very
heard
that
from
Rick
it's
very
interesting
I
haven't
actually
looked
at
the
data
the
only
reason
astrology
is
not
scientifically
respectable
is because
no one
can
hypothesize
how
the
coupling
takes
place
in
other
words
how
can
the
transit
of
mercury
be
coupled
to
an
event
system
on
this
planet
but
don't
despair
we
know
that
the
sun
radically
affects
the
weather
on
the
earth
but
no
coupling
system
has
ever
been
proven
for
that
either
it's
just
the
statistical
correlations
are so
overwhelming
that
it's
impossible
to
ignore
I
astrology
to
understand
it
to
something
like
fractal
resonance
the
reason
the
pattern
in
the
stars
is
repeated
in
the
pattern
of
your
life
is
because
there's
only
one
pattern
to
begin
with
it
isn't
that
the
stars
cause
you
to
be
the
way
you
are
any
more
than
that
you
cause
the
stars
to
be
the
way
they
are
there
is
not
a
causal
relationship
here
what
there
is
a
series
of
adumbrations
and
reflections
that
are
this
is
you
know
a
great
discovery
that
has
been
made
in
the
past
ten
years
one
of
the
greatest
intellectual
steps
ever
taken
by
human
beings
a
new
law
of
nature
is
now
discernible
and
I
across
scales
do you
understand
what
that
means
it
explains
why
an
atom
looks
like
a
solar
system
and
why
they
both
look
like
a
galaxy
because
nature
is
self
similar
across
scales
it
means
that
you
know
if
a
certain
architectural
conceit
works
on
one
level
nature
will
use
it
on
any
other
level
where
it
seems
appropriate
and
so
on
many
levels
the
same
patterns
repeat
and
so
it
wouldn't
surprise
me
at
all
if
in
the
next
while
we
got
the
equivalent
of
astrology
but
quantum
ology
quantum
ology
where
instead
of
calculating
downward
from
the
stars
to
the
context
of
human
fate
you
calculate
upward
from
the
atom
to
the
context
of
human
fate
and
if
you
keep
calculating
you
can
go
from
quantum
ology
to
astrology
and
leave
out
sociology
and
show
you know
that
these
things
are
reciprocal
reflections
of
each
other
then
the
mystery
and
the
woo
of
astrology
I
think
would
just
simply
disappear
and
be
replaced
by
an
of
course
how
could it
be
otherwise
kind
of
understanding
yeah
well
you know
somebody
said
the thing
that has
changed
least
in
western
civilization
in the
last
years
is the
classroom
I mean
this could
be
you know
I mean
everything else
has changed
but what
do we
do
we come
with
sharpened
pencils
and sit
and listen
to
elderly
lecherous
professionals
and
to
try
and
stay
out
of
their
clutches
long
enough
to
get
a
degree
and
then
we
go
out
and
play
the
game
I
think
that
this
is
somewhat
a
field
but
something
very
profound
is
happening
in
the
way
in
which
we
modern
people
process
information
I
don't
know
how
many
of
you
are
familiar
with
Marshall
McLuhan
but
McLuhan
argued
that
an
equally
profound
transition
occurred
with
the
introduction
of
print
is
not
simply
writing
that's
easy
to
read
and
reproduce
print
is
an
entirely
different
creature
than
anything
that
had
been
produced
before
it
has
qualities
that
no
other
medium
has
specifically
it's
linearity
it's
uniformity
it's
interchangeability
and what
I mean
by that
is
that
every
A
every
capital
A
looks
like
every
other
capital
A
they
are
interchangeable
when
you
when
a
friend
of
yours
writes
you
a
note
you
look
at
it
that's
the
precondition
to
reading
it
when
you
open
a
book
you
immediately
read
it
you
don't
look
at
it
at
all
very
age
with
that
white
back
no
we
just
read
and
the
difference
between
looking
and
reading
is
very
great
he
McLuhan
called it
the
contrast
between
a
manuscript
culture
which
is
ear
oriented
and
an
eye
oriented
visual
culture
well
now
what's
happening
to
us
and
I
was
talking
to
somebody
about
this
at
the
break
is
the
rise
of
the
image
the
image
is
in
the
ascendant
ever
since
the
invention
of
photography
let's
say
in the
middle
19th
century
followed
by
color
photography
followed
by
color
lithography
followed
by
moving
pictures
followed
by
television
followed
by
the
internet
VR
stereograms
and all
the rest
of it
something
is
happening
we
are
our
culture
is
forcing
our
visual
education
and
I
think
one
of
the
problems
with
education
is
that
we
are
trying
to
use
a
print
created
institution
to
educate
electronically
biased
human
beings
and
it's
created
a
kind
of
a
speed
bump
of
illiteracy
one
of
the
things
that
is
put
against
your
generation
you
generation
xers
here
is
that
you're
not
literary
you're
not
a
literary
culture
but
I
and
it's
true
don't
deny it
none
of
you
can
quote
Milton
but
but I
also think
it's a
temporary
thing
your
children
will
not
be
like
you
your
children
will
be
fully
visually
literate
they
will
have
assimilated
this
new
medium
and
operate
under
its
aegis
while
you
are
in
a
transition
phase
and
so
the
kind
of
dumbing
down
of
culture
that
has
had
to
occur
as we
go
from
a
fully
literate
culture
to a
fully
electronic
culture
is
I
think
transitional
I
mean
everybody
says
you
know
people
learn
everything
from
TV
kids
know
every
star
every
show
every
plot
and
say
why
do
they
know
that
junk
when
they
can't
memorize
the
sequence
of
US
presidents
well
make
a
good
enough
TV
show
about
it
and
they
probably
will
not
that
I'm
a
fan
of
TV
but
I
am
a
fan
of
the
visual
image
and
I
think
TV
betrays
it
to
some
degree
HDTV
may
correct
that
but
it
gives
psychedelics
an
interesting
role
because
they
are
such
stimulants
to
the
visual
imagination
it's
almost
like
they
lead us
deeper
in
this
cultural
direction
that
we
have
great
appetite
for
and
now
you
know
with
CD-ROMs
and
multimedia
and
websites
and all
that
we
just
show
each
other
stuff
everybody
is
building
a
website
everybody
wants
to
invite
you
over
to
see
their
latest
visual
creation
and
I
think
that
language
itself
is
headed
in
this
direction
that
our
language
is
literally
becoming
more
colorful
more
sparkling
more
engaging
and
it's
because
it's
becoming
more
visual
and
eventually
it may
be an
entirely
visual
exercise
the rise
of
icons
is an
interesting
example
of this
but now
wherever you
go in
the world
if you
will push
yourself
just a
little bit
you can
understand
what's
going on
because
signage
is so
iconographic
it doesn't
matter
whether you're
in Germany
or France
or Argentina
or where
you are
the signage
is in an
international
language
of visible
symbols
that unite
us all
you see
the thing
is
the word
is ambiguous
to a far
greater degree
than the
image
and so
when we
communicate
in words
we communicate
incompletely
if we communicate
in images
it's much
closer
to
fulfilling
the intent
of communication
which is
to erase
the boundaries
between
the messenger
and those
the messages
being sent
to
yeah
what you're
saying
it's like
I feel
it's a return
to the archaic
because there was
a time
when people
didn't read
and they had
to get
their information
by one image
whether it was
going to the church
and seeing a
thing about
it's not gonna
work
but if it was
fulfilled
then like
a picture
worth a thousand
words
you know
looking at
if each
one could just
be a visual
image
then you could
have done
that quickly
well that's why
I called my book
one of my books
the archaic revival
because you see
I really think
the thing that
McLuhan was
trying to say
was
that every
medium
be it
print
even treated
the electric
light
as a medium
every medium
has
a hidden
agenda
which
you're not
the users
of the medium
are not
aware of
until it's
too late
for instance
in his
discussion
of the automobile
it was
invented
to convey
people
from place
to place
in practical
terms
what it
was
was a
bedroom
away
from home
and
a whole
generation
of people
discovered
sexuality
much earlier
than they
would have
because of
the automobile
that wasn't
its intent
but that
was
its effect
similarly
McLuhan
says
you could
need
have the concept of the citizen if you were if it was not preceded by the invention of movable type
because the citizen is an
interchangeable social unit the way a letter is an interchangeable unit in
topography also
the linearity of Western thought is a product of the fact that when we communicate in print we arrange our thoughts in
lines that isn't done in some in some languages but in ours it is well then we impute that quality of our
communication method to
reality itself
My hope is that through holography and virtual reality and
HDTV and a deep awareness of McLuhan that we could create what I would call a
bias-less media in other words it would be a media that would do to you exactly what reality does to you
instead of pushing you in some other direction and it would be then a return to the archaic and it might be
technically very
sophisticated but the final impression must be I am NOT looking at a screen
I am NOT turning the pages of a book I am NOT listening to earphones I am really
having this experience and it is really real I've never heard the VR
profits talk about it as a bias-less form of media but I think that's what we're headed for well when media becomes
bias-less
media becomes reality and
we you know this is this is within reach now
I don't know about HDTV it seems slow coming I
saw it in Frankfurt and I was shocked have you seen it
it it it's not at all what I expected I expected you know they the hype is it's just like a movie it's that clear
high-definition television it's an entirely different way of doing TV well it's much weirder than film it's a window it's
freakishly
three-dimensional I mean you can't tear your eyes off of it you can't believe how
intensely real it is in fact it's sort of hyper real in some way it's to the issue of virtual reality
I don't know I was a speaker at Seagrath
last August and at one point I turned to Brenda Laurel and I said I think we can stop hyping virtual reality
it appears to have attained lift off speed because you know soft image
the
Disney micro they were all there with mega million dollar outlays and they haven't yet figured out
how to deliver it but it may not it it it may be cheap it may come over the wire it may cost you a quarter
it may not be the fantasy of the virtual reality
reality salon
in your house it may just simply come over the wire I don't I think the economics of it may delay or
accelerate it but that the appetite for it is so great that it is for sure on its way
what's holding it back is is the technology
technology because the demands that we make of our hardware when we move to VR are incredible
I mean look at these eucalyptus trees blowing in the wind out here look at how each leaf has a unique
reflective index of its own which is changing in time think of the computational
energy that would have to be brought to bear to convincingly reproduce that in a VR environment
I mean it's orders of magnitude more computationally demanding than anything
currently being done however
you know it's said of the computer well it's said of the automobile if it had evolved at the same rate as the computer
they would now a car would now go three hundred and seventy five thousand miles an hour on a nickel's worth of gas and cost you two hundred bucks
so
we shouldn't assume at all that we're reaching the limits of the put the potential limits of the computer
I'd say we're probably about halfway there
there is right now a fiber optic
experimental line between the university of michigan and the university of minnesota
that is able to transfer
630 gigabytes per second
that's the encyclopedia britannica in under a 30th of a second
that's bandwidth
that can handle anything
we just have to run that experimental cable into every city and home on the planet and
and and then we'll have it you know mcleughan had an interesting idea mcleughan's a weird character because a very advanced thinker
but a convert to catholicism
so forth and so on he finally concluded that electricity
is
the physical descent of the holy ghost into history
uh that as that as the planet
as our cities turn to light and everything is linked together informationally
that this is uh this is the enfolding presence of the third person of the trinity
and you know since electricity is a fairly mysterious item anyway
uh who is to say not in practical terms it may lead to something very very much like that a gathering
of us all together uh in cyber hyper shimano space
yeah
sure i'll describe it briefly i've tried to stay off it because i tried to keep this botanically focused
for those of you who don't know it i'm
i'm i have other burdens to bear other than my psychedelic advocacy and one of them is
is that uh
uh
i
am the purveyor of a theory
of history
which has many different aspects
about it and i've used some of the terms like novelty and aggression of novelty
concrescence
but i i i believe that i uh have discovered or was told a mathematical algorithm that allows us to
replace probability theory with a with a wave form that predicts where in time novelty will cluster
and where in time uh very probable events should be assumed to to concentrate it's a very neat mathematical
theory it's all very solid and so forth and so on but it has as all theories do what i call a hard swallow built in
to illustrate what i mean the hard swallow in normal cosmology is called the big bang
you know if you can believe that you'll believe anything this is the idea that the universe sprang from
nothing in a single moment for no reason notice that whether that's true or not it's the limit case for credulity
i mean if you can believe that it's a little hard to know what you would dig your heels in on
uh the hard swallow in my theory is that it seems to all calculate out to prove that uh we're less than 18 years away
from an event as dramatic as the big bang but sort of the big bang in reverse what i call the big surprise
that this process of boundary dissolution that we are have been experiencing in our historical and
cultural adventure is accelerating by a factor such that uh half of the history of the universe is going to
unfold in the next 17 years as much will happen in other words in the next 17 years has happened in the
previous 17 or 20 billion years that in fact history is the phenomenon which immediately precedes
this event sort of in the way that the dilation of the cervix is the phenomenon which immediately
precedes the birth of an infant history is the indicator event that says the transcendental object
hidden in the protean depths of nature is about to shed all its foils and emerge in its hyperdimensional
nakedness at the end of time and the it would be a mad thing to hypothesize except that the mathematical
algorithm allows very accurate predictions of the past now at first that may sound silly but notice
it's easy to predict the future who the hell can may say it it's very difficult to predict the past because
it's already happened so whether you were right or wrong or not is going to be immediately
determinable and i believe based on this theory's ability to describe the past that we should take very
seriously the idea that we are in fact the carriers of a process of universal metamorphosis that is reaching its culmination
you may find that impossible to imagine that in 18 years the world will turn itself inside out
but i think if you sit with it a while try to imagine that not happening
try to imagine this world 500 years from now if we continue with business as usual and no vertical gain
it's inconceivable we have painted ourselves into some kind of a corner i grant you my schedule is a little
breathtaking breathtaking only 18 years but i'll bet you if my schedule were a hundred years you'd feel that it was uncomfortably long viewed
sometime in the next little while it's going to be apparent to everybody that the human adventure is building towards some kind of quantized
transition point uh we are not going to wander in the miasma of of techno worship male dominance resource exploitation and
ever burgeoning human population forever it's impossible it's a self-limiting exercise and to the degree that we can
educate ourselves and communicate with each other we can we can hasten
this process or at least uh make it easier uh for the planetary culture to go through
yeah so given that metaphor of preparing for another bird would it be presumptuous to look at
the plants coming into this north american culture and sort of like like when i when i was getting ready
to birth for about four hours before i started getting flooded with visions and hallucinations and going
into the other world and i'm seeing that the plans in this culture and their reawakening in the last 30 years
could be sort of that momentum to help move us into this new birth process oh i think so because i think what
we're we're we're going to history is ending but time will continue well what is time without history for
human beings well it's the archaion we're going back into the archaic and apparently as central to the
archaic as uh nuclear physics and economics is to our world with shamanism and hallucinogenic plants so i think we're
we're preparing to to make a return nothing happens without a reason and nothing is unannounced this is
something the mushroom told me i i it's a very interesting idea nothing is unannounced if you
are sensitive enough you can never be taken by surprise because there is always the the wave which
precedes the actual arrival of the event and a lot of people talk about the end of the world
but it's almost entirely couched negatively i feel that i am without a doubt the most optimistic person
i have ever met or heard of and yet after i give some of my lectures people come up to me and say
it was frightening it was an appalling vision of what he said you missed the point i'm telling you
you know god's kingdom is 18 years away how could you possibly interpret that as negative and say well
but aren't you saying that everything will be changed and transformed and swept away well yes but
you know that's the way of it you want a psychedelic truth you know 30 years of psychedelic
voyaging i can distill it for you this is not a psychedelic truth this is truth here it is yes
and you can learn this from drugs you can learn it from life you can learn it from death you can learn
it any way you like but by god you will learn it nothing lasts nothing lasts not your enemies
not your friends not your youth not your dreams not your fears not your hopes not even yourself
nothing lasts nothing lasts i mean this has been said often but felt rarely you know heraclitus said
all flows and and the lie of western psychology is that something is stable god's nature
the equinoctial points uh something lasts and and because of this lie we are perpetually in a state of
anxiety because the truth of our experience is nothing lasts and yet the truth that our culture tells us
is you know save your immortal soul make a contribution preserve protect conserve
stabilize retain it it's pointless and and so the central truth of being is the felt presence of
immediate reality that's all you will ever have and so the quality of the felt presence of immediate
experience is uh what you want to impact and determine and everything else is rumor hearsay hope
dream memory projection but the felt presence of immediate experience if that is not
satisfying to you you have to change your life you have to do something and uh
uh the fact that western western psychology and civilization is a vast exercise in delayed gratification
and the consequences of that are endless unhappiness and neurosis and fetish substitution
and so forth and so on for reality it it should be liberating to know that nothing lasts but instead it paralyzes with a sense of uh
ephemerality when what it should do is empower an enormous sense of freedom and i think this ability to accept
the inevitable passing and coming to be of phenomena is what psychedelic wisdom is really about
anybody anything hit me yeah
you mean my views on the web where did i learn my views from well ralph abraham you should visit his website
um it's um it's uh http colon double backslash hypathea at u c s c dot edu dot org well it's hi it's basically it's just a url
it's a it's a it's a funny question i'm puzzled because i never thought of these as my views on the net aren't these the views of the net i mean is anybody saying anything different
i mean i assume this is what unites the faithful in the religion of net worship
but maybe i'm wrong well that's more alarming the the businessmen
will wherever you know wherever there is a frontier i mean first come the explorers then come the
missionaries then come the hookers and the businessmen uh and we've got plenty of hookers and plenty of
businessmen on the internet now i it's the content i'm i'm McLuhan enough to not so much be obsessed with
the content it's not what is on the net that's important it's the net itself it's what it is it's
the fact that if you want to find something out you now can it's the greatest democratization
of information that's ever occurred i mean the head of the cia under jimmy carter didn't have
intelligence as good as i do because i can go on to the net and and access uh these various uh you know
databases so uh the thing that is so empowering about the net i think is you know tim leary had a
slogan back in the 60s he used to tell his audiences find the others find the others
well how do you find the others in the 60s you put a flower in your hair and headed for san francisco
today you just you go on to the net and go to the well and you can find the others it doesn't matter how
obscure peculiar or bizarre your interest is i guarantee you you can find 10 or 15 people who
passionately share this thing and and that empowers you and it builds communities and community
is the enemy of authoritarian organization because community springs from the heart authority springs
from theory keeping us in a decommunal state is a major part of the agenda of anybody controlling us
that's why the internet is so terrifying to people because obviously it strengthens dissidents
it uh and uh you know just last week this stupid thing happened in congress the the digital decency act
ask yourself how many times have you been told that child pornography bestiality so forth and so on
is being purveyed to thousands of people on the net uh then if you have any experience of the net you realize that that's like thinking of san francisco
as that one corner at broadway and columbus where they peddle girly mags that's just a part of san francisco
it's a complex civilization we have all kinds of people everybody should be able to do what they want
but to define san francisco that way would then lead you to the conclusion well maybe we better seal off
san francisco and clean up this hideous evil that's breaking loose this is what's being done on the web
the public is being manipulated by major media to think that the web is just swarming with pederous fetish
but please restrict the web and to get regulation and put cops on every node and so forth and so on
and this this is very bad it should be resisted it probably will succeed i don't think it will destroy
the web i think it'll be a speed bump but please know that a war is going on for your uh loyalty
in this issue and don't allow uh you know uh pornograph uh uh pornograph uh uh phobes and people like
that to stampede you into the idea that the web is a tremendous social evil poised at the souls of our
children i mean my god you have to have ten thousand dollars of equipment and an engineering degree to
make your way into these places i don't think there are too many eight-year-olds uh wandering
around traumatized by what they're finding at adult alt dot pix dot erotic seems idiotic to me
yeah
in terms of the dea there are a lot of discussions going on because the government seems to condition a
lot of our lives around usage of the sick black clients there are different discussions going on
in the bay area about just how to deal with some people advocating going public coming out and which
uh i like to not agree with other people around the beginning uh the first amendment challenge and
having a number of cases coming up which was certainly constructed and i'm wondering if you have any thoughts about uh
any sort of general uh social way about how to deal with these governmental or on track issues
it's a complicated thing because there are two levels there is there is first of all the drug problem we
are told we have which is too many people are taking too many bad drugs and committing crimes in order
to obtain money to buy drugs or committing crimes in order to transport manufacture and deal drugs and this
has dehumanized our society and it's a terrible scourge and we have to do something about it that's level
one of the drug problem what you are not told is that governments are the chief offenders
most drugs in the world are either produced by governments or produced with the connivance of
governments and the our our little bailiwick the psychedelics don't even figure in this issue because
not enough money is being made the only psychedelic that ever made anybody any money was lsd
and on a scale where we're talking about methamphetamine cocaine and heroin the fortunes made off of lsd
were minuscule the drug thing is a con governments need vast amounts of untraceable cash they believe
because they turn it over to their secret police agencies who then pursue secret agendas
where they try to control events by illicit and non-sanctioned means and by that i mean rigging elections
murdering labor leaders hounding liberal editors into retirement smearing people so forth and so on
uh the the major the hard drug markets of this world are entirely in the hands of governments
you know somebody pulls a stunt in kuwait and we're there in a moment we send troops to haiti but these
mysterious uh um jungle warlords in burma seem untouchable nothing can be done
they're beyond the reach of any army any aerial bombing campaign it's just mysteriously uh uh indestructible
these warlords in burma well it's because they are the producing end of an illicit world girdling
organization whose purpose is to deliver drugs to the market and i i believe that the cia got into this
game because for you could almost say for good reasons from their point of view the cia in the middle 60s as
long as well as the rest of the american establishment was confronted with the spectacle of uh black people
determined to burn down the core of every city in america until they got social justice
the decision was made to bring uh hundreds of tons of chemically pharmaceutically pure china white number
three heroin into those ghettos and just basically dump it on the ground and see what happens and it totally broke the back
of black radicalism and turned everybody into a junkie or a gangster somewhere uh in that system well then when
we lost the vietnam war um the way the geopolitical thing came down was khomeini got the heroin industry
and china white was traded in for for iranian brown a lower grade of heroin well since khomeini is not a nice
man in our pantheon uh heroin suddenly became you know uh highly repressed but at the same time as the vietnam war
and wound down uh these insurgencies in south america
were being started up, and cocaine was brought on to the scene.
And I can remember in like 72, 73, 74,
a particular cover of Time magazine,
cocaine, the new drug of choice.
And it was just this far short of an endorsement.
It was all about movie stars were doing it,
and everybody was doing it.
The huge picture of lines on the cover,
that's a decision to sell.
That's an ad campaign, a very high-profile ad campaign.
Well, I think I said to you yesterday,
in the international drug trade,
the real cost of these drugs is in transporting them.
Because you have to pay somebody
to bring 10 kilos of heroin into the United States,
unless you know fools,
you're going to have to pay them $40,000 or $50,000,
a fraction of the worth of that heroin.
But nevertheless, if you haven't sold it yet,
it may be tricky to get that kind of scratch together.
Well, that's for 10 kilos of junk.
You have to pay $50,000 to transport it.
But if you have a C-130,
you can bring 50,000 pounds of heroin,
and it will cost you far less per unit volume.
So the CIA had all these airplanes,
and they simply diverted them to the drug trade.
You probably have been following this recent scandal
involving the U.S. Forest Service.
Has this been in the papers here?
It's been well rehearsed in Hawaii.
Well, as you know,
the U.S. Forest Service uses C-130s
to drop fire-retardant chemicals on forest fires.
When the Air Force was downsizing three years ago,
the Forest Service requisitioned 15 C-130s.
By manipulating paperwork and painting out serial numbers
and painting on other serial numbers,
only three of those C-130s ever reached the Forest Service.
The other 12 mysteriously disappeared.
Do you know what a C-130 looks like?
Do you know how hard it is to lose one of those puppies?
Twelve of them disappeared without a trace.
Well, guess where?
And guess what they're lugging back and forth.
Now, the CIA itself is addicted to the money.
The original impulse,
break the back of black radicalism,
has been replaced by a more obvious impulse,
make a lot of money.
Where do you get a quick billion dollars
if you need it in a hurry?
It's called, you take a floater on drugs.
That's what you do.
And the amount of money is so great
that anyone can be corrupted.
These boats that come up from Columbia
that lie off the coast of Florida,
the so-called motherships,
a guy with a fast cigarette boat
can make three trips to and from
one of those motherships on a cloudy night.
The standard pay for one of those trips,
which takes about 40 minutes,
is $125,000.
You can make $375,000 a night doing this,
and you're not a player,
you're not a kingpin,
you're not a major figure,
you're a totally disposable peon.
So imagine how much money
there is to be made at the top.
Who can refuse a $10 million bribe?
People come in and say,
listen, we'd like to give you $10 million,
and we've bought a house for you
in the highlands of Malaysia
and a Ferrari,
and we'd just like you to go and live there
and do whatever you want.
And the choice is a bullet in the head.
So which would you prefer?
We're perfectly at ease either way,
so you figure it out and call us back.
Nobody can resist that kind of thing.
So we're in a situation
where we are being radically manipulated
by governments
because they are addicted
to a style of piratical rogue capitalism
that is just simply
the greatest windfall ever imagined.
I mean, there has never been anything
like the modern drug,
illicit drug trade
in the history of the world.
Ten years ago,
the drug trade
and the international arms trade
were on a par
with each other.
Today,
the international drug trade
makes ten times as much money
as the international arms trade,
and there's no end in sight.
There's a case
that you're in a process
of becoming
psychologists, clinicians
who want to work with psychedelics
and yet feel that
their careers would be destroyed
if they were to do so
or if they were to do something in court.
And the general social times
or the governmental pressures on that.
Here are some thoughts
about
in the 60s,
one group was tried
and the commuceration
goes now
because when are you getting
blood fed
how people could approach
the psychedelic situation now?
Well,
some of you may know
Bobby Faust
in New York.
He's an interesting guy.
He has an idea.
He says
that
he advocates something
which he calls
civil obedience.
He says
not civil disobedience
but civil obedience.
He says
everybody
who smokes pot
should take their pot
on a certain day
and march down
to the cop shop
and demand
that justice be done.
And that
if everybody
who smoked pot
did that
the courts
would be so clogged
the entire
madness
of the whole thing
would be exposed
for everyone
to see
and it would just
be impossible
to enforce.
That's a strategic idea.
It might work.
From observing
American society
as long as I have
it's very clear to me
they don't hand out
rights
around here.
The only people
who have any rights
are people
who demand them.
And you can look
at how black people
broke free
in the 60s.
You can look
at how the gay
community
got itself
together
in the 70s
and 80s
and apparently
unless you're
willing to
stand up
for what you are
you're going
to be forever
stigmatized.
It was
you know
black people
they couldn't
escape it.
The reflectivity
of their skin
marked them.
But it was
very very
courageous
for gay people
many of whom
were way
in the closet
and doing well
in straight society
to risk
all that
and say
no look
this is what's
going on
this is who I am.
Now if there's a problem
it's your problem
not my problem.
And homosexuality
was a crime
in many states
in most states
just as drugs are.
So I think
really
if we're serious
we're going to
have to risk
something.
We're going to
have to risk
our jobs
our reputations
perhaps some
of our friendships
and just say
look
this is what
it is.
Now
if you don't
like it
don't do it
but don't
legislate
for the rest
of us.
Society
is a very
complex
enterprise
and what's
good for you
may not be
good for me.
And if it's
to be done
in mass action
that's better.
We all feel
better if we
march in a group
than if we
march alone.
But we
drug people
are incredibly
we fold
too easily
I think.
I think we
feel great
shame
on some
level
about what
we've done.
I mean it's
very hard to
stand up to
a really
straight
person
and say
yeah
no no
I didn't
try it
I just
did it
ten minutes
ago.
We're not
talking about
my wild
college days
we're talking
about 35
seconds
before I
stood in
your presence
and see
I'm not
falling down
I'm not
about to
commit murder
I'm just
like you
are
except I
have this
different
preference
and force
that
and
it's the
task of
a generation
you know
the right
wing
they understand
far better
than we do
I mean
when Pat
Buchanan
says it's
cultural war
he's talking
about us
we're the
counterculture
we're the
enemy
and
the
response
of a
desperate
foe
is an
ever more
desperate
lashing out
and
Christianity
is not
going to
go quietly
into that
good night
it's going
to get
nuttier
as it
approaches
its terminal
delirium
the killing
of abortion
doctors
is a good
example
what does
that do
for the
right to
life movement
it totally
discredits
them
to just
nuts
we no
longer
have to
make
any kind
of effort
to sway
those people
or come
to terms
with them
they're
crazy
people
and you
would no
more try
to convert
them to
your point
of view
than you
would try
to convert
somebody
who pulled
a gun
on you
in an
alley
yeah
obviously
it's probably
not much
of trade
right now
because
it seems
to be
a very
elusive
substance
and outfit
though
one would
probably argue
that more
people should
use it
and see it
and this
experience
you mean
do I think
there will be
more of it
and how that
will progress
will it become
something
you know
like mushroom
mushroom industry
is fairly well
developed
because it's a
very profitable
type of thing
and it
seems to be
a
to a large
extent
a
money driven
type of
occupation
that people
go into
going into
money
and about
money
well yes
I mean
the mushroom
thing is a
little different
in the sense
that a
dedicated
mushroom grower
who works
day and
night
can produce
maybe
10,000
hits of
mushrooms
in a
year
a chemist
working with
sufficient
material
can produce
millions
of doses
of a
pure
compound
I think
the reason
mushrooms
have
flourished
in such
and have
you noticed
how
mushrooms
have been
around
since
have you
noticed
how the
press
never
writes
about it
never
interviews
with
underground
mushroom
growers
never
exposes
it
never
talks
about
it
that's
I believe
because
to expose
it is to
inspire ever
more people
to do it
it's very
easy to do
you don't have
to have a lot
of capital
backing
you don't have
to have a degree
in biochemistry
you don't have
to be able
to handle
explosive
materials
it's a very
quiet
calm
cottage
industry
kind of
thing
I think
DMT
well
first of all
I know
there's more
DMT
around
in the last
year and a half
than in the
previous
20 years
I don't know
who's making it
or where it's
coming from
but I'm
certainly
more and more
one thing
about DMT
that holds
it back
as a
commercial
commodity
is
if you sell
somebody
a gram
you may not
see them
for a year
if you sell
somebody a gram
of cocaine
they'll be back
8 hours
later
the speed
at which people
consume
their DMT
once
I mean
I know
somebody who has
2 grams
of DMT
and I said
you're not
using it
very fast
and he said
yes
well I'm
saving it
for my
grandchildren
I said
you're not
even married
for God's
sake
so
it's
more an
act of
love
and dedication
but I think
there are
enough
people
out there
who care
more for
hell raising
and outrage
than money
that we can
depend on them
to produce
some of this
stuff
and some
people make
it simply
in order to
have it
for themselves
and then of
course
they overproduced
by a factor
of a thousand
so they might
as well dump
the rest
of that
stuff
but I
would love
to see
a national
it's always
puzzled me
why
there aren't
four inch
headlines
on every
newspaper
on the
planet
saying
you know
drug
discovered
which
opens
doorway
to hyperspace
how can
they keep
it secret
how can
it be
a secret
I mean
we live
in a culture
where people
regularly
jump out
of airplanes
for recreational
pleasure
that's the kind
of culture
we live in
and yet
DMT
has not
made its way
very deeply
into that culture
I mean
if what people
want is
thrills
my god
are there
thrills
still untapped
however
I've noticed
the surrender
issue
works here
I've talked
to people
who
sailed
solo
around the
world
climbed
the north
face
of Everest
shot
the rapids
on the
Mekong
and so forth
say
oh well
you're a real
hairy chested
guy
would you like
to smoke
some DMT
and you know
absolutely
ashen
no
absolutely
not
are you
crazy
that stuff
is dangerous
I said
well
what about
the time
you parachuted
into
Kilimanjaro
at the
22,000
foot level
I said
well
I knew
what I was
doing
I was
so
I don't
know
different
thrills
for
different
folks
yeah
oh yeah
no
that's
a very
serious
thing
see
when
here's
the legal
history
of how
this
all
went
down
in
the
middle
60s
it must
have been
around
somebody
somewhere
jumped
out of
a window
on
LSD
and managed
to kill
themselves
every
newspaper
in the
country
if not
the
planet
did
in-depth
detailed
background
you know
maps
how he
walked
to the
balcony
the
arrow
the whole
thing
and
LSD
was legal
at that
time
so then
there was
a huge
hue and
cry
about how
it had
to be
made
illegal
and
this was
in
California
and the
California
state
legislature
with
almost
no
debate
with
no
professional
witnesses
with no
scientific
evidence
placed
before
them
not only
made
LSD
illegal
they
made
psilocybin
DMT
ebogain
and
figure this
one out
bufotinin
was made
schedule
one
now
guess
this
bufotinin
is inactive
in human
beings
why was
it made
schedule
one
because
two weeks
before this
debate
took place
a paper
was published
suggesting that
it might
cause
hallucinations
in human
beings
in other
words
they just
went through
the scientific
literature
and anything
described as
a hallucination
hallucinogen
was poured
in to
this
California
drug
bill
well
and so
then it
was
passed
well then
six weeks
later
somebody
jumps out
of a window
somewhere else
this time
it's not even
clear drugs
are involved
but the mere
suggestion
that they might
have been
involved
is enough
to create
a national
debate
and the
congress
rather than
hold hearings
and adduce
scientific evidence
says
just take
the California
statute
and federalize
it
and so
that was
done
so
what the
consequences
of this
are
is
in the
case
of
a drug
substance
like
psilocybin
no
scientific
evidence
has ever
been offered
to any
legislative
body
saying
there was
anything
wrong
with it
it
was
specifically
made
illegal
simply
because
it
causes
hallucinations
no
health
risk
is
involved
nothing
was
known
about
psilocybin
at that
time
so
that's
the
first
attack
on
these
laws
they
were
not
properly
formulated
in the
first
place
they
were
not
based
on
reality
or
social
need
second
of
all
DMT
it
is
now
subsequently
become
known
is an
ordinary
constituent
of human
metabolism
how
can
you
make
possession
of this
substance
illegal
when
every
man
woman
and
child
on
earth
is
holding
it's
like
the
ultimate
catch
we
are
all
criminals
all
the
time
they
don't
have
to
throw
pot
around
your
apartment
they
can
just
draw
blood
from
your
good
right
arm
and
there's
the
damning
evidence
right
there
so
in the
light
of
all
this
silliness
it
would
seem
logical
I
think
to go
back
and have
a scientific
review
and a
complete
revision
of the
scheduling
of these
drugs
look at the
scheduling
anyway
schedule
one
what is
it
compounds
with
absolutely
no
medical
use
whatsoever
cannabis
is in
there
even
though
it's
the
preferred
treatment
for
glaucoma
and
for
chemotherapy
to
suppress
nausea
in
chemotherapy
heroin
is in
there
and
then
all
psychedelics
you
move
to
schedule
two
and
the
first
thing
that
jumps
out
of you
is
cocaine
is
schedule
two
marijuana
is
considered
to be
a more
dangerous
and
devastating
drug
than
cocaine
why
because
by the
rules
of the
game
cocaine
is
used
in
certain
medical
procedures
to
anesthetize
the
optic
nerves
sometimes
and to
anesthetize
nerves
in the
throat
for
certain
forms
of
surgery
so
because
it
has
this
obscure
medical
use
it's
scheduled
two
and
this
doesn't
make
any
sense
at
all
these
drug
laws
have
never
been
rationally
put in
place
the
original
stigmatization
of
cannabis
was
carried
on
by
the
Hearst
newspapers
because
they
spent a
huge amount
of money
buying
Canadian
forest
for
newsprint
just
as
the
hemp
industry
was
beginning
to
develop
as
a
supplier
for
paper
and
when
they
realized
that
they
had
badly
invested
in
Canadian
timber
they
decided
that
they
out
of
business
and
so
they
discovered
that
it's
marijuana
among
those
wily
dark
skinned
folks
south
of
the
border
who
are
so
unclean
and
peculiar
and
they
began
to
attach
it
to
a
stigmatized
racial
group
and
managed
to
hound
it
out
of
existence
this
game
has
never
been
played
fairly
it
has
always
been
played
to
benefit
markets
capitalists
and
producers
it
has
never
been
handled
in a
rational
and
scientific
manner
and
it
should
be
because
there's
very
little
doubt
that
the
future
holds
an
endless
cornucopia
of
psychoactive
drugs
this
thing
I
told
you
about
yesterday
salvorine
alpha
what's
to
become
of
this
I
have
some
friends
who
have
a
church
and
a
bunch
of
pagan
folk
and
I
told
them
about
this
and
they
immediately
filed
it
as
a
sacrament
of
their
church
now
they
couldn't
have
done
this
if
it
were
illegal
but
it's
at
the
moment
legal
and
so
they
proclaimed
it
a
sacrament
of
their
church
and
are
using
it
ritually
and
hope
that
when
it
inevitably
becomes
illegal
they
will
be
in a
position
to
argue
that
it
was
legal
and
they
drugs
of
all
types
and
we
just
simply
need
a
rational
process
that
serves
who
that
serves
the
user
not
the
producer
the
purveyor
but
these
are
medicines
they
should
be
subject
to
the
same
standards
of purity
and so
forth
that the
pharmaceutical
industry
what's
always
put
against
drugs
is
that
they're
unclean
and
dirty
but
that's
because
they're
made
in
illicit
clandestine
labs
that have
been
forced
underground
by
witless
government
policies
and
now
it's
not
even
a
matter
of
debate
we've
got
the
Dutch
data
we've
got
we
know
that
when
you
legalize
drugs
people
don't
immediately
start
smoking
reefer
hours
a
day
and
committing
acts
of
that
hasn't
happened
anywhere
that's
a
fantasy
of
the
Christian
right
wing
no
all
that
happens
when
you
legalize
drugs
is
that
people
continue
to
do
what
they've
been
doing
whether
they
use
drugs
or
not
so
it's
a
shell
game
and
if
any
of
and
rationalize
it
because
it's
one
of
the
great
unregulated
scams
on the
planet
and
millions
and millions
of people
are being
victimized
third world
poverty
is being
exacerbated
criminal
syndicalism
is
flourishing
ordinary
law abiding
people
are being
criminalized
people
are being
made
to feel
guilty
about
simply
trying
to
understand
their
own
spiritual
yearnings
and their
own
place
in the
cosmos
it's
a
tragic
situation
and it's
retarding
cultural
transformation
yeah
oh
yeah
oh
absolutely
I mean
Germany
for
example
I've been
coming and
going from
Germany
for seven
or eight
years
it's always
been
loose
I mean
you could
always
sit
in a
reasonably
sleazy
restaurant
after dinner
and make
a spliff
and hand
it around
and nobody
would say
anything
but
and
now
the
hemp laws
have been
declared
unconstitutional
they're more
liberal than I
would be
in Germany
in other words
they say
that you can
possess
a gram
of heroin
every 24
hours
without legal
consequences
that seems
to me
a little
loose
I mean
maybe
I've known
more junkies
than the head
of the German
Supreme Court
but
it seems
a little
loose
you can
possess up
to 40
grams
of hashish
for your own
personal use
and
you can
grow up
to 12
plants
without
stigma
and
it's
interesting
I was
in Germany
in May
of this
year
and this
law
had just
been passed
six weeks
before
and I
was staying
in Berlin
and Berlin
like San
Francisco
has many
residential
districts
that are
high
narrow
three story
houses
you could
look down
these
streets
and there
are all
these balconies
and just
peeking
above
every
balcony
were the
heads
of the
allowed
cannabis
plants
per person
and you
could see
that the
entire
city
of Berlin
was just
slowly
turning
green
and
while I
was there
I saw
an interview
with the
chief of
police
and he
said
yeah
we love
this new
cannabis
law
I've been
able to
assign
real crime
problems
and look
at our
statistics
on how
few
stolen
car
deals
there have
been
you know
the police
are now
freed to
do what
they should
be doing
which is
maintain
public
order
not
messing
around
with what
people are
doing
in the
confines
of their
own
minds
if it
weren't
for
Europe
I
you
know
we
are
we
I
had
always
traveled
all over
the world
but I
never
really
been
to
Europe
until
about
eight
years
ago
and
when
you
go
there
you
discover
what
some
people
say
it
was
de
Tocqueville
and
some
people
say
Charles
de Gaulle
but
someone
said
America
it's
a footnote
on
European
civilization
and
you
go
there
and
you
discover
oh
this
is
where
it
all
came
from
this
is
where
they
invented
all
of
this
stuff
what
peculiarly
complicates
our
situation
is
Europe
is a
genuinely
secular
society
and
the
concept
of
a
Christian
right
wing
being
able
to
dominate
the
political
agendas
it's
inconceivable
to
them
I
of
course
but
it's
a
curiosity
a
testament
to
their
tolerance
not
a
knife
poised
at
the
heart
of
political
dialogue
the
way
it
is
in
this
country
we
have
allowed
ourselves
to
become
too
rigidified
in
this
meddling
sort
of
neo
Lutheran
attitude
toward
each
other
don't
people
understand
that
the
essence
of
sophistication
is
tolerance
that's
all
Robert
Frost
once
said
the
secret
of
happiness
is
learning
to
enjoy
people
you
don't
approve
of
and
I
would
add
and
the
second
secret
is
learning
the
only
place
where
it's
illegal
it's
not
just
psychoactive
plans
which
is
suppressed
it's
the
use
of
any
by
an
ordinary
person
someone
who
hasn't been
given
authority
and
I
think
Americans
are
paranoid
of
nature
our
history
is
one
of
conquest
and
we
though
we
slaughtered
a lot
of
Indians
we
never
tell
it
that
way
we
say
we
tamed
the
frontier
and
so
nature herself is set up as the enemy of American destiny.
And that's why, you know, the incredible artificiality of our culture
and our incredible anxiety in the face of chaos.
We're order freaks.
That's why it's so disturbing to people to imagine that people around them might be stoned
because they don't know what stoned is.
So that terra incognito becomes frightening to them.
We're a very infantile society.
I had some German friends visit me in Hawaii and they wanted to go to the beach.
And so we all went down to the beach and we're laying out the towels and everything.
And my friend whipped her top off.
I said, you can't do that here.
And she said, you're not serious.
And I said, well, didn't you know that you can't go topless on American beaches?
And she said, well, I'd heard that, but I just didn't believe it.
I thought they meant some American.
I said, no, this is over the top.
Well, I can't imagine that that will change before the end of the world.
This society is so rigid that, you know, the sight of a tit shakes the entire social edifice from foundation to top.
That's how paranoid, how clenched, how fragilely balanced the American enterprise is.
But it's a craziness.
It's a cultural craziness to people who come from outside of it.
They can't believe it.
And so she put her top on, but just shaking her head, you know, oh.
Because up to that point, she thought it was just sort of like Europe, but exotic and interesting.
But suddenly she realized, oh, no, these people are cannibals.
And best watch what you say and do.
I'm not a vegetarian, and it shocks many people.
And my riposte is simply, the most intelligent beings I've ever met are plants.
So why shouldn't I eat meat?
You know, you want me to chow down on a turnip in good conscience?
You can't be serious.
What was the other part?
Oh, the toad foam.
I have been vegetarian for long periods in my life.
Now I sort of follow the hippie philosophy that your body knows what it wants,
even if it's a snicker.
The deeper wisdom of the body.
As far as toad foam, it isn't toad skin.
So we don't have to worry about the fate of this.
The toad is not sacrificed in this process, unless your milking technique is excessively vigorous.
The substance is 5-methoxy-DMT, and many people like it.
I don't prefer it, simply because it's just like DMT, except there's no vision.
And that's a little like saying, it's just like the Philadelphia Philharmonic, only there's no orchestra.
But it is a huge tryptamine-like feeling.
Because it's not been studied, the toxicology of it is not well understood.
And I've seen people get pretty uncomfortable with it.
I've never seen anybody vomit on DMT.
I have seen it repeatedly on 5-MeO.
One piece of information about 5-MeO, which don't draw any conclusions, but it's worth knowing,
it's fatal to sheep.
I mean, if you inject a sheep with 5-methoxy-DMT,
they fall down and their little legs shake in the air, and that's all she wrote.
Well, we're not sheep, but if you think you might be one,
I would suggest that you don't try this stuff.
Well, I think we're at the end of the road here.
I feel a little guilty that there wasn't more hard botany,
but I feel confident that David and Ralph and the other people participating in this course
will get this to you.
There's a great deal to be learned.
There's a great deal of camaraderie among the people who do this work.
I think most people who work in this field feel that we're struggling
at the frontier of the envelope of human potential,
and that great good is potentially here,
and that part of the saving of the planet
and the saving of human-ness
involves saving these plants
and the shamanic dimensions that they throw open to us.
Gaia wishes to communicate,
and these are the channels of communication
by which she reaches us
through and around our own fears and silliness.
And to the degree that we can rescue this tradition,
save these species,
legitimize this research,
and carry ourselves deeper
into the endless riches of the world of the spirit,
to the degree that we do these things,
I feel we've advanced the universal project
of bringing the good to manifestation.
So I wish you all luck in your professions.
I hope that you take your chosen field by storm.
If any of you need to reach me,
come through a friend or through the CIIS front office.
David usually knows where I am.
If you think I can help you
by introducing you to someone
or pointing you toward a reference
or in any other way,
feel free.
This is very important work.
Whether we succeed or fail,
it would be tragic not to make the effort
because I think we really align ourselves
with the Gaian intent
when we bring these things to the community
and share them.
Thank you very much.
Thank you.