Hello, and welcome to Sea Realm Podcast number 39, part 2.
This is the conclusion of a talk by Dennis McKenna,
given at the first International Amazonian Shamanism Conference
held in Iquitos, Peru, back in 2005.
That conference was organized by Alan Shoemaker and his wife, Mariela,
and they have done a marvelous job, and I will be attending the conference this year.
It will be the third annual International Shamanism Conference.
As I say, this is the continuation and conclusion of a talk
that I podcast in episode number 39, part 1 of the Sea Realm Podcast.
If you haven't heard part 1 yet, then you might want to stop this recording
and go hunt down part 1.
You can find it on my website, that's www.searrealm.com,
and Sea Realm is the letter C, and then a hyphen, and then R-E-A-L-M.com.
And if you don't find it there, then you can just send me email,
and I will direct you to it.
My email address is, not surprisingly,
K-M-O at searealm.com.
At the conclusion of Dennis McKenna's talk,
I'm going to play just about 5 minutes
that I've snipped out of a recent Psychedelic Salon podcast,
in which Lorenzo is talking to the organizer of the Mind States Conferences,
John Hanna,
and they're talking specifically about reasons to attend the Mind States Conference,
but I think they make it pretty clear that attending conferences,
particularly those conferences held outside the United States,
conferences that are focused on issues of consciousness and entheogenic experience,
will put you in contact with an amazing community of people.
I think John Hanna calls the type of people that you will meet
at these international consciousness conferences,
the entheogenic cognoscenti of the world,
and I think he's right.
I have met some amazing people in my travels,
and in particularly traveling to exotic locales,
places that are not so easy to get to,
and not as comfortable as, say,
a conference held in Los Angeles, or Seattle, or Manhattan.
Well, I know that you tuned in here to part two of this podcast
to hear Dennis McKenna and not to hear me rambling,
so I will exit the stage now and give the floor back to Dennis McKenna.
We pointed out before, consciousness itself is a simulation of reality.
It's a simulation that we happen to experience as conscious.
Here's another interesting investigator,
another Canadian, the Canadians seem to be on the forefront of this kind of stuff.
I don't know why.
But Dr. Michael Persinger is the director
of the behavioral neuroscience program at Laurentian University in Ontario,
and he has not contend simply to image mystical states.
He has built what he calls the God Machine,
and this is a device which he claims can induce a sensed presence,
a sense of an other that is outside the cell,
and he claims that maybe this sensation,
that through the stimulation of specific areas of the brain,
can lead to phenomena such as encounters with angels,
encounters with supernatural entities, including even alien abductions,
and that sort of thing.
He claims to be able to induce alien abductions with this contraction,
and it's called the octopus,
and what it basically does is it applies a low-level transcranial magnetic field
to the subject in an isolation chamber,
and he hypothesizes that this induces a transient sense of the right hemisphere.
That's the hemisphere that's normally more suppressed in normal consciousness.
It sort of brings that to the forefront,
and it generates a sense of being extended in space,
slow in time, and very intense emotions,
which tend to be functions that we normally push into the background in consciousness.
So much as the left hemisphere is involved in focus
and helping us maintain a sense of where we are in space and time.
The right hemisphere is more extended over space and time,
and he claims that this device can bring that to the forefront.
I have talked to people that have used it.
Some are very impressed,
and others were like,
ah, didn't do much.
So again, there's the individual variability.
Ah, Persinger's work grew out of his earlier studies of temporal lobe epilepsy,
and temporal lobe epilepsy, or TLE,
ah, is quite interesting.
Ah, temporal lobe epilepsy is a special kind of epilepsy,
where the lesion, if you will,
that leads to the epilepsy is located in the temporal lobe,
and, ah, epilepsy as you know is a sort of spontaneous discharge of electrical activity
in a particular area of the brain.
And we normally think of it as, you know, having seizures,
and having muscular seizures, and flopping all over and that sort of thing,
but temporal lobe epilepsy is quite different.
You don't have muscular response to it.
Ah, it's a discharge in the limbic system,
and it can, when it occurs, it can generate an intense emotional state
that can range from terror to rage to or sometimes ecstasy.
And there are a lot of us in the ecstatic form of temporal lobe epilepsy,
there are some striking similarities to what we call mystical states of mind.
Many TLE patients have temporal lobe personality.
They tend to have feelings of a divine presence or of being in direct communication with God.
They often see cosmic significance in everything, even in trivial events.
They may be obsessively preoccupied with theological and philosophical issues.
They have an inflated sense of self-importance, are egocentric and argumentative.
They may often practice typography, that is, they keep elaborate diaries or write long screeds on mystical topics.
They have transient amnesia, or conversely, they may recall minute details of events, experience, or books read decades previously.
That's a kind of an interesting profile.
Are we beginning to get the picture here?
I would venture to say perhaps 70% of the people in this room probably have temporal lobe epilepsy,
given our preoccupation with these issues of mysticism and consciousness.
Typical statements of the transcendent type of temporal lobe epilepsy patients are things like this.
Suddenly, it was all crystal clear to me.
There is no longer any doubt anymore.
This is the moment I have been waiting for all my life.
Finally, I have true insight into the nature of the cosmos.
Well, that's kind of interesting, because post-psychedelic or in-psychedelic states and other types of mystical states,
you have a tendency to make similar statements.
You know, I mean, if you have a truly profound mystical experience on ayahuasca, or another psychedelic,
you're very likely to, if you want to English it, if you want to articulate it, you're likely to come up with statements like that.
So, this activation of temporal lobe processes, and as we'll see, psychedelics are also involved in this.
You know, maybe we're onto something here.
We can focus more closely on the temporal lobe.
These are some famous figures from history.
You'll recognize St. Paul, Dostoevsky, Moses, and Muhammad.
Probably all of them had temporal lobe epilepsy.
They were subject to fits of spontaneous rage, and they were also subject to spontaneous mystical experiences.
Another of these ancient altered state technologies, of course, is shamanism, and what Michael Winkerman has called neurotheology.
Shamanism is one of the most archaic techniques of ecstasy, or set of techniques for inducing altered states of consciousness.
I don't have to belabor that among this group.
And in a way, it's a kind of a neurotheology, as Michael Winkerman has talked about.
Shamanism the world over has common elements, and it's really a set of techniques for inducing altered states of consciousness,
and some of the common elements found pretty much in all shamanic traditions include soul travel, contact with the spirit world,
the notion of undergoing a death and rebirth, or a dissolution of the ego and rebirth,
and also healing is a part of virtually all shamanic traditions.
So, Michael Winkerman, who has been mentioned before in Frank's talk, claims that these universals of shamanic experience are related to basic brain functions.
He claims that these shamanic practices can be related back to the fundamental similarities that all humans have in brain architecture and brain neurochemistry.
In other words, the hardware, if you will, that mediates consciousness, and that shamanic experiences involve the activation of similar neural pathways in the brain,
no matter where, what the cultural context, the activation of the serotonin and opioid neurotransmitter systems, primarily.
Okay, well, serotonin. We've talked about serotonin a little bit. Serotonin is a neurotransmitter. As you know, chemically, it's 5-hydroxytryptamine.
And serotonin receptors are arborized throughout the brain. They originate primarily in the brainstem, but then they arborize from the brainstem throughout the frontal cortex and the midbrain, and they're pretty much all over the place.
So, serotonin receptors, in some ways, can be thought of as the master neurotransmitter of the brain. Serotonin is the neurotransmitter, but there are many types of serotonin receptors, what are called sub-receptor sub-times, and they mediate different functions.
Some mediate, for example, eating behaviors. Some mediate headaches, that sort of thing. Migrating headaches have been linked to certain sub-types of serotonin receptors.
They also mediate perceptions. This is just a diagram of the serotonin synapse. Just to remind you, the brain is both an electrochemical system.
And a lot of information in the brain is transmitted electrically through the propagation of nerve signals down these long dendritic, they're called dendritic spines or dendritic extensions, through the depolarization, the change in electrical charge of the cell membrane.
But when the nerve signal reaches the synapse, which is the junction between neurons, then chemical transmission takes over.
And in the case of really virtually all neurotransmitters, but serotonin is a good example.
Serotonin comes from dietary tryptophan and is synthesized by several steps and stored in this nerve terminal here called the presynaptic terminal.
It's stored in little membrane-bound bubbles, essentially called vesicles. When an electrical impulse reaches this point, it actually causes these bubbles, these vesicles, to migrate to the end of the nerve and fuse with the outer membrane and release the chemical, the serotonin, into this space here called the synaptic flap.
I'm sorry, I know I'm boring neurophysiologists among you, maybe I'm boring everybody, but kind of interesting.
You're listening to the C-ROM podcast. C stands for consciousness.
Another serotonin subtype called the serotonin 2A, or the 5-HT 2A. 5-HT stands for 5-Hydroxytryptamine, which is the chemical name for serotonin.
And again, this just shows the LSD molecule docking into their receptors.
So, you know, we can sort of, if we look at these various chemical structures of the true psychedelics, we can say, well, what do they all have in common?
Well, what they all have in common is that they are more or less potent and selective for the 5-HT 2 receptors, 2-A receptors.
They're, you know, they're all 5, what a pharmacologist would call a 5-HT 2-A agonist.
And that really is, pharmacologically, that's kind of by definition what a psychedelic is.
There are many other kinds of psychoactive drugs, but only the psychedelics interact with these 5-HT 2A receptors in this very selective way.
And we can use, again, techniques like PET and radio-labeled psychedelics to, well, actually, the psychedelic in this case is not labeled.
We're using glucose here, which is this labeled form of glucose that shows where metabolic activity is going on in the brain of a subject who has been administered psilocybin.
This work is done by Franz Wolleweiter in Switzerland, very beautiful work.
And he's shown, basically, that the areas of the brain that are activated where the most metabolic activity is going on are those same areas that are activated in mystical states, in meditating states, and so on.
In other words, the temporal lobe, certain parts of the frontal cortex, and so on.
So, if you want to look at the neural imaging maps of these things, you can see a correlation.
There's a very strong overlap between the areas of the brain that psychedelics activate in the brain,
and the areas that meditative practices or shamanic practices also activate.
So, the temporal lobe emerges as fairly important.
Another important contributor to all this, some of you have heard about, or undoubtedly have heard about, Dr. Alexander Shogun, or Sasha Shogun, as he's known to the psychedelic community.
He is really a pioneer in this field of what you might call psychedelic neurochemistry.
Really a pioneer in the notion that these psychedelics are molecular probes for studying consciousness.
Over the course of many years, he has studied what are called structure-activity relationships.
This is the relationship between the structure of a molecule, its three-dimensional configuration, and its activity.
And this is a common practice in all of pharmacology.
If you're a medicinal chemist and you synthesize a drug, the usual practice is to synthesize a whole bunch of analogs, slightly different from each other,
and then see how they work, how they absorb, what receptors they're interacting with, and so on.
This is very commonly done in things like cancer, drugs, any kind of drug, really.
But he was the first to apply this structure-activity type work to psychedelics.
And over the course of about 30 years, he invented, oh, maybe 260 or so analogs of mescaline,
and maybe about the same number, maybe half that number, analogs of DMT.
And he tested them on himself, the good old scientific method, and a small group of trusted colleagues
who were experienced with psychedelics who were mostly neuroscientists or psychotherapists and that sort of thing.
People that could, you know, be interested in this and people who were experienced.
And they kept very careful notes and they noted the differences between them and between these different structures.
And one of his, I mean, it's hard to summarize a life's work in one slide, but one of his main discoveries,
he worked initially with the mescaline molecule, which is shown here.
It has a very simple structure, and he noted that by making what amount to essentially trivial changes in the mescaline molecule,
for example, taking this group here, this methoxy group here, and moving it up to this position.
And I apologize to the, if you've taken organic chemistry, these diagrams make sense.
And if you haven't, don't worry about it. Just kind of think of them as schematics. Schematic representations of molecules.
Molecules don't really look like this any more than an electrical circuit looks like.
The actual electrical circuit schematic looks like the real circuit.
But this is just a shorthand way the chemists have of representing molecules.
Let's draw it out. And they can show that if you take this group of atoms here, this crumb of atoms,
called the methoxy group, and you move it here, essentially without making any change at all,
you suddenly, mescaline has a potency, it takes about 400 milligrams of mescaline as a dose to really get anywhere.
If you move it up here and leave everything the same, it takes about 4 milligrams.
So you've suddenly increased its potency by a factor of 100, by that trivial change.
And then you can start mucking around with this position here, which is called the 4 position.
And you can start putting various things on it. For example, halogen molecules.
Things like iodine and bromine in that area where the X is there.
And again, suddenly you change its activity. Again, you raise its potency by another factor of 4.
And you make it very, very selective for the serotonin 2A receptors.
Most hallucinogens are quite selective for them, but not completely selective.
If you look at something like LSD, for example, it's what pharmacologists call a dirty drug.
And that's not necessarily a bad thing. A dirty drug is a drug that binds to many different types of receptors.
I mean, many types of serotonin receptors, as well as dopamine and norepinephrine and all kinds of receptors.
The LSD is a very dirty drug, which may have to do with why it's so potent and may have to do with why it's so interesting in some ways.
Well, these mescaline analogues that Shulkin came up with is a very clean drug, in a sense.
Something like DOI or DOB bind basically to the serotonin 2A receptors at very little else.
Yet they're still psychedelics, although they lack maybe some of the color of some of the dirtier psychedelics,
like LSD or DMT, which are not that selective.
These compounds are very useful to neurophysiology because you can actually use them to map the distribution of these serotonin receptors in the brain.
When I was a post-doc at NIH, I was able to persuade Sasha Shogan to make me a radioactive firm of this DOI.
I spent about two years mapping the distribution of serotonin 2A receptors in the brain, trying to get a handle.
Unfortunately, it was the rat's brain, not the human brain.
But we learned a little bit.
So, structure-activity relationship.
By making trivial changes in molecules, you can make something that you can make a hallucinogen into a mega-hallucinogen.
You can take the same molecule and tweak it another way and have a totally inactive compound.
So, that's a pretty powerful set of techniques.
Now we can talk about the other main class of true psychedelics, DMT.
DMT is, of course, short for enidimethyltryptamine.
And in many ways, it's more intriguing than the mescaline analogs.
It's one of the simplest hallucinogens, natural hallucinogens.
It's derived enzymatically from tryptophan.
Tryptophan, of course, is an amino acid.
We have to get it from our diet.
And it's also an essential amino acid.
The nutritionists among you will know that an essential amino acid is an amino acid that we can't make.
We have to get it from food.
And that food is primarily plants or secondarily from animals.
And DMT, tryptophan, is actually one of about, I don't know, half a dozen essential amino acids.
As it turns out, all of the amino acids that are precursors for neurotransmitters,
phenylalanine, tryptophan, and tyrosine, are all essential amino acids.
So, that's always kind of interested me.
The fact that, you know, the very neurotransmitters in our brain that are mediating our consciousness
come from plants, ultimately.
We have plant consciousness inborn into us.
So, DMT can be synthesized in two steps.
Two very trivial enzymatic steps from tryptophan, which is found everywhere.
Well, DMT is not found everywhere, presumably, although it's found a lot of places.
It's found in hundreds of plants that we know about.
And it's probably found in thousands of plants that we don't know about.
We only find it where we've looked.
Which means that there are many species of plants that we haven't looked at that undoubtedly have DMT in them.
Interestingly, DMT is also found in animals, including us.
It's found in the brain, it's found in the pineal gland, it's found in the cerebral spinal fluid,
and the adrenal glands.
And also, reptiles, like frogs, and mammals, it's all over the place.
Well, what's it doing there?
This is a powerful, DMT is a very powerful hallucinogen.
And when you take DMT by smoking, by smoking a free base, as some of you know, or by injecting it,
when you take it by a route called the parenteral route, in other words, other than by mouth,
other than by going through the stomach,
if you smoke it as a free base, you have a very transient but very intense psychedelic experience.
Very overwhelming, and so overwhelming that it has been compared to the near-death experience.
It's really a very transient experience that lasts maybe 10-15 minutes at most,
and it's about as close as you can get to the near-death experience without actually dying, or so they tell me.
I haven't talked to people who have died, so I'm not sure.
But there are many analogies to the near-death experience.
Okay, you can also take DMT another way.
When you take DMT orally, nothing happens,
because orally DMT is degraded in the gut, in the liver, by an enzyme called monoamine oxidase.
That same enzyme that in the brain degrades serotonin and other types of neurotransmitters.
Well, MAO, monoamine oxidase as it's called, is all over the body, and it's particularly present in the gut and in the liver,
so that when you eat a plant by itself that contains DMT,
nada is going to happen.
Because you've got this in-built protective mechanism, MAO, that will prevent it,
that will essentially degrade it before it can ever cross the blood-brainer.
But when you take it in the presence of a monoamine oxidase inhibitor,
another molecule that blocks the action of MAO, then the DMT is protected,
and then it becomes orally active.
And so the effect of that, and this is the basis of the pharmacology of ayahuasca,
as you all know probably, much less intense, although sometimes not that much less intense,
but usually much longer.
Usually instead of ten minutes, more in the order of four hours.
But a little less intense usually than when DMT is smoked,
which can be a good thing because it's easier to kind of integrate that information and make sense out of it,
and then smoked DMT can be very sort of overwhelming.
And as it turns out, this other class of alkaloids, of plant compounds called beta-carbillanes,
which are closely related to DMT in terms of their structure and closely related to serotonin,
they also occur in many plants, and very often they occur even in the same plants that DMT occurs in,
or in close relatives, which is not so surprising because they all really sort of evolve or originate from the same biosynthetic pathways,
the same pathways, the same enzymatic pathways in the brain.
Well, here's the whole family of them.
Dinecyltryptamine found in, for example, chacruma used in ayahuasca.
These are the three major alkaloids, beta-carbillane alkaloids, found in ayahuasca.
This is serotonin, the neurotransmitter. Just for reference, you can see how it resembles DMT, and to some degree these.
And so this is the DMT beta-carbillane family of natural alkaloids that form the basis for the pharmacology of ayahuasca.
Ayahuasca, as you know, is made from the bark of Banisteriopsis coffee, also called yahe, and many other names,
and most commonly the leaves of this other plant called chacruna in the tradition,
and known to botanists as Psychotria viridis, a member of the coffee family,
and you can see how much it resembles coffee by the leaf structure.
And Psychotria viridis contains the DMT, and the vine, Banisteriopsis, contains the beta-carbillanes.
So when these two plants are combined and mixed together, you get an orally active groove.
The beta-carbillanes protect the DMT and enable it to become active,
and the UDB has a notion, I like their concept of the force and the light.
They understand these two plants as comprising force and light.
The DMT and the Psychotria and the Chacruna is the light, and the...
The banisteriopsis supplies the force, the MAO inhibition that drives the reaction.
And experientially, that makes a lot of sense to me.
Another question is, what in the world are these things doing in animals?
What is their function in the unaltered state?
Because we know that both DMT and beta-carbolanes are found in macros.
And my colleague, Jason Halloway, whose name is familiar to many, I mean because he's done marvelous work on the pharmacology of ayahuasca,
came up a few years ago with a very interesting theory about what these endogenous visionary chemicals might be doing in the brain under normal circumstances.
And he has an idea that they're involved with the mediation of the visions of sleep and dreams through these various cycles.
He came up with this cartoon here, which he kindly let me use.
In waking life, when you're awake and your eyes are open, light is coming into the eye and what is called the serotonin pathway is activated.
You got your tryptophan up here coming in from dietary sources and most of it is being shunted into the serotonin pathway.
A little bit of it is being shunted toward tryptamine, but not very much, right, a little bit.
But most of it is going toward serotonin. So this is the serotonin pathway that's active when you're awake.
Some of this other minor pathway here is being transformed into DMT.
But it's all falling through the hole and into the toilet that is represented by MAO.
So, you know, the serotonin falls into the toilet and the DMT falls into the toilet.
MAO shunts it away and not much is happening.
This other alternative pathway is quiescence. It's not activated when you're awake.
When you're asleep, through the activation of what is called the melatonin pathway, the melatonin being another tryptamine in the pineal gland,
then in the dark, the melatonin pathway is activated.
You still have tryptophan being shunted along here.
You've got some of it going into DMT, but now the serotonin is going into several different pathways.
Some of it continues to go through the serotonin, but a lot of it gets shunted along the melatonin pathway.
And one of the byproducts, one of the biosynthetic products of melatonin, is a beta-carboline called pinoline,
which happens to be a mono-aminoxidase inhibitor.
So, also originating from this melatonin pathway is another hallucinogen, similar to DMT, called 5-methoxy-DMT.
So, when you have, when it's stumped over in this direction, you're getting melatonin churning out, pinoline and 5-methoxy-DMT,
and you're still getting DMT through this alternative pathway.
It's falling through the hole, but it's falling into the toilet, but the toilet is plugged up.
So, all of the toilet overflows, and you've got all this DMT and 5-methoxy-DMT floating around,
and as you go through various stages of sleep, this builds up in the system, so that in your state of deepest sleep,
the visionary effects are activated.
Nobody has ever proven this idea, but it would be very easy to test, actually, if you had, well,
if you had access to a research budget, it would certainly be possible to test this idea.
It makes a lot of sense, and it does explain, maybe, what some of these molecules are doing, being endogenously originated in the human brain.
Another interesting thing that Richard Grossman talked about, I think is also interesting, is this notion of synesthesia.
Synesthesia is where one sensory modality is translated into another.
This is very commonly experienced on psychedelics. You can see music, you can hear colors, that sort of thing.
And some people are genetically able to experience synesthesia. It's not always associated with brain disruptions.
There are some people who just experience it commonly. Other people do have brain injuries and, you know,
disruption of the sort of sensory compartmentalization in the brain, and they also experience it.
But what looks like is going on is that it disrupts this usual compartmentalization, and it results from cross-talk between different areas of the brain involved in processing this kind of visual and sensory information.
And, you know, it's also related in some way to language functions. I'm completely convinced that somebody should look into this more, because if you think of language, language is a synesthetic function.
I'm standing here making meaningless noises, essentially. I mean, maybe they really are meaningless, but hopefully not. But you understand it, because you can represent meaningless sound and associate the sound with meaningful images.
If I say table, you can visualize a table. And we have come, you know, an essential function of human language is that we associate sound and image. This happens in the background. We don't even think about it. It's a universal human ability.
And yet, if you think about it, it's a synesthetic function. This is synesthetic. And so maybe it's possible that in the widely corriging primate, you know, out there on the serengetic plane, looking for something to eat, ingests a few mushrooms, has the synesthetic experience spontaneously, and suddenly language is born.
I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. But, you know, that is speculation. Another interesting area that is related to all this is what they call OBEs and NBEs, out-of-body experiences and near-death experiences.
Kind of some of the work that Persinger, Michael Persinger is working with. You know, and this is another place where it's very hard to separate the spiritual or the paranormal from brain processes.
Do these things really take place? It happens too often that people do experience states of being outside of the body, able to view themselves, you know, from an external perspective or in the near-death experience, very often moving towards some light down some tunnel, you know, surrounded by angels or whatever.
This is very common in the near-death experience. It also has similarities to the so-called alien abduction experience, which has a lot in common with temporal epilepsy, the sense of a perceived other that's outside the self that you can't really put a finger on, but you have a definite sense of another presence that's not another part of the self.
Well, we don't know. And actually, Rick Strassman, who wrote a very interesting book called DMT, the spirit molecule, he is a neuroscientist who worked with high doses of DMT in various patients.
And at the highest doses, he found that they very often reported experiences that were almost indistinguishable from people's experiences and stories of alien abductions retrieved through hypnosis and other types of techniques.
And so sort of upset was he by this. I mean, he took to his work a very strict scientific paradigm. He had it all figured out before he started. And at the end of his research, he basically gave it up.
Because he said, it's so bizarre. I can't make sense of it within any of my models. I'm just, I'm giving up science. I'm going to join a monastery. And that's what he did.
You know, because he just put in the lake. Again, in UFO literature, in UFO experience, we see, again, this recurrence of the notion of a bright light, a tunnel, a circular object of some sort that you approach.
You know, where do these tunnels lead to? You know, nobody knows what is going on for sure. What we can say is, there are certainly striking similarities between temporal lobe epilepsies, near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, psychedelic states, mystical states, prayer, shamanic ecstasy, alien abductions, and reduced brain states.
We can at least say enough to be able to say that this is all the same territory. You know, in some sense. The territory may be unexplored, but it all seems to be part and parcel of the same territory.
All of these types of experiences seem to involve very strongly, very actively, the limbic system, the heart of the brain that mediates our sense of self, our sense of place and space and time, the heart of the brain that creates this fiction of the self, this movie that we live in that we call reality.
And this hallucination, this notion that we are bounded in space and time is part of this, part of our movie. And in order to move through the world and survive, we almost have to maintain this fiction.
You know, we have to have this sense of boundedness and locality and that we're in one place so that, you know, we can do normal things like, you know, open a can of tuna fish or whatever we might need to do to survive.
But that really is a, that's not how it really is. You know, it's, it's different. If we could make this go away, if we could disrupt it or alter it in certain ways through psychedelics, for example, we can get in a transient way to get a glimpse of the way that we are.
And if we really are, it's infinite, unbounded, and immortal. So that is, that's my talk. Thank you for listening.
Yeah, I understand.
Uh, Dennis will be taking some questions for the people that are staying in the Moloka. We need to go now. Jorge's waiting over here to take you down to the Moloka.
Okay, I'm sorry it went so late. So I am, you know, I'm, I talk a lot. I'm sorry it went so late.
Can I make a comment?
I'll take a couple of questions. If I can make this time for you. Yes.
You can make a comment.
It's late, so just one minor thing on synesthesia.
Uh-huh.
Something I work on. And there's lots of work now being done by communist psychologists on the relation between synesthesia and metaphor, linguistic metaphor,
and clearly they are associated.
Uh-huh.
Now when you mentioned this synesthesia in, uh, psychedelics, I know only about various stuff, so you said, and it's very, very, very common, say, like, people, uh, see music.
It's very, it's very true. It's very common. And then you have to always say, and they, uh, hear. Now, that does not happen.
That's exactly where the, uh, uh, systematic chronological studies pick up statistics.
There is synesthesia from sound to color, but not from color to sound.
Yeah, yeah. I, again, you know, I, I don't know. I can't explain it, but I think, I think it's interesting that, I guess I shouldn't talk in this.
I think it's interesting that ayahuasca and these other things can induce a form of synesthesia.
Uh, and, the, there's a relationship to language, definitely. I mean, this, this is what's interesting.
What I've read about people, they've been doing studies, for example, uh, with people who have synesthesia genetically.
In other words, they have an inborn synesthesia that's always with them.
And some of the statements that they make are just bizarre. I mean, you can't, like, like, when they see, they'll say, you know, the letter G is green and spiky.
You know? Or, you know, it's definitely related to language somehow. I mean, I, I, this is clear.
Or, you know, they'll, they'll, they'll make statements that, you know, they, they can, you know, I mean, they can look at words.
And, and the words, for them, have colors. They have textures. And, and they're consistent. And, what is that about? You know?
I mean, I think, if we really want to understand the, the, the neural substrate of language, and how it might have originated evolutionarily,
we've got to understand synesthesia, but I don't, you know, I, you, I'm sure, know much more about this than I do,
but I think it's a fascinating thing that the human brain is capable of it, and that, you know, by sort of breaking down these compartmentalizations
in the sensory processing, you need to, you know, uh, uh, like a whole new cognitive process.
I.e. Lightworks, the ability to associate the meaningless sounds with meaningful images. Yes, sir.
Yes. First of all, on behalf of everyone here, I, I'm not scientific, but I'm interested in all these questions.
I have never heard such a clear explanation of all the different points. It's masterly, besides the great scientists,
the great scientists, the great scientists.
Wait a minute. First of all, Jimmy, put the mic up to your mouth, because I can't hear what you're saying.
Okay. I congratulate you on the best thought I have ever heard such a good thought.
Again, of course, the ladies, like me, self. I've experienced these things, I've read about these things,
I've written about these things, but I've never had such a fear in the next, next vision,
next vision I did before, for a non-scientific person, like myself.
So, I, I think, on behalf of all of us, before we all share that, it's been tough, we're tired,
I haven't slept, I did the ayahuasca last night. Alright. Dennis says a million things, I'll try to keep concentrating.
The first, in talking about mal-inhibited theory, I've already had a fight with Christian Lutz about this,
you know, it's not a fight, just making my point. The first rigorous description of the visions of ayahuasca,
not hard science, social science, also in school, right you're going for it.
You know, visions, you know, kaleidoscopes, holy water, Persian tapestries, all these things,
which I think a lot of us have seen. It was the vine, the balestrian, it's chopped up, left in water,
no cipotria, no cabrera. So, I have drawn, draw ready, approval, that's it, with only the vine, you know, and I've seen visions,
and so, I mean, I humbly offer that up as a question of the Mao theory.
Benet, I cited Benet in my book, I mean, Schultes was a mortal, a great scientist, but it doesn't mean that he saw much in the way of visions, right,
but the visions, he saw a palace, he saw a shape, but, I mean, he didn't see specific images, and he said the visions were brighter with the, with the capopanga.
Right. But, he didn't say they were qualitative, and also, it's not visions, you're not seeing the visions,
you're seeing the visions, you're seeing them, you're hearing them, all at the same time, it's a multiple perception. Anyway.
Well, yeah, I mean, that's, that's interesting, and I know, I've heard, I've heard this notion, I mean, I've heard this,
that sometimes banisteriopsis, on its own, can be, if not visionary, at least, at least have some of the effect without the DMT admixtures.
And, it's, you know, again, one of the things about ayahuasca that we don't completely understand,
we know that some of the beta-carbolines in ayahuasca, particularly tetrahydroharmin, is actually very close to DMT.
And, it's possible that tetrahydroharmin, itself, may have some of this 5-HT 2A agonist-type activity.
It's also possible that, in the process of preparing ayahuasca, this beta-carboline, if you actually open the ring,
you can form DMT from tetrahydroharmin.
So, I'm not really to dismiss the notion that DMT is not necessary for the ayahuasca experience.
I mean, you can certainly make ayahuasca without the admixtures, and you can have acuity.
Although, there's also little doubt that by using the admixtures, you sort of amp that up,
you amp up the visionary components of it.
But, you know, I don't know what the explanation is.
It may be, I would suspect it's tetrahydroharmin may be the culprit here.
Because, that is, after harmin, that's the second most abundant alkaloid in mastereopsis.
And if you treat it not very rough, you can fairly easily transform it into DMT.
And there's also pretty good evidence that it's psychoactive in itself.
You know, it's a weak MAO inhibitor.
It's a more or less strong 5-HT uptake inhibitor.
And it may be a 5-HT2 agonist as well, you know.
So, we don't know.
I mean, I think what that proves is there's a lot to learn about ayahuasca.
We still don't completely understand its chemistry.
...out of the country, with one coming up.
So, just tell us a little bit about these conferences.
Because, as I've mentioned in several podcasts,
that this is how I've met everybody in the tribe, is coming to these conferences.
And that's, to me, even though the speakers are a big draw,
it's the audience that's the biggest draw for me.
So, let me step out of the way and see what you think about your own conferences here.
Sure.
I book speakers because I'm interested in them.
That's what makes me book them.
And I'm lucky because a lot of other people seem to be interested
in the same sort of thing that I'm interested in.
That's very convenient.
So, we hold them about once a year,
and they kind of rotate back and forth between somewhere in the Bay Area
or some foreign location.
I did one in Jamaica and then one in Oaxaca, Mexico.
And so, this year, we're going to Costa Rica.
So, but you mentioned that, you know, that the speakers are great,
but it's kind of the reason it goes for the community.
And I think that, you know, this kind of leads to a complaint and a comment.
And the complaint that I hear frequently is that the conferences are expensive.
And this is particularly true with the foreign events.
Although, like I said, it's not like I'm getting rich and sometimes they lose money or just break even.
But what I encourage people to do is to ask around.
Ask anyone who's attended one of the events whether or not they feel like they got their money's worth.
Let me just jump in here, John, and say that, you know, as I said, that between my wife and I, we've been to all of them in this country.
And no question about what we've gotten our money's worth.
And for the, while I haven't been wanting to one of the foreign mind states conference,
I've, you know, as you know, been to the Planque and several of the other foreign conferences.
And there's something magical about those.
I know they're expensive and that's why I can't go all the time myself either.
But I do want to point out to anybody that's just joining us for the first time here
and hasn't been in the psychedelic salon with us regularly,
that many of the lectures that we played here are from the mind states conferences
that you've so generously allowed us to podcast and get out.
And so thousands of others get to hear these talks eventually.
And so, you know, I think that's really just another instance of how you, you know, do this to help the community.
And it's not, this isn't a big money making deal for you by any stretch of the imagination.
Yeah.
And I think, you know, the, I think the key word in all of it is, is this idea of community.
I mean, the way that I like to frame it is, is like, if you would think of whoever the person is,
who's currently your best friend in the world, right?
The person that you think of as like, this is the, the, the guy or the woman who's got my back in any situation
who I love spending time with and, you know, that, that person.
And then knowing how great that person is to think if you had never met him or her, right?
But I told you that I was going to introduce you to them, right?
And at the same time, you'd be able to hear talks from a variety of, you know, interesting individuals
and, and relax for a week's vacation where, you know, everyone at a resort kind of shared your most passionate interests.
You know, um, is it worth two grand?
You know, if I, if I introduce you to your new best friend, I mean, I, I have met the people who are my current best friends at these events.
And, and the folks that come to them are, they're the most intelligent, you know, creative, heart oriented, fun people that I've ever met.
It's, it's just consistency.
There's the people who are interested in consciousness studies, um, and how the mind works are, are the most vital people that you're going to come across.
Um, and I, you know, I like to consider that the mind states conferences attract what, uh, I, I call the MPO cognoscenti, right?
Which are kind of the self-made cutting edge, you know, folks that are on the cutting edge of their field.
Um, and, and like you said, the attendees are as interesting as the presenters.
There's, you know, there's a, maybe a raw food enthusiast or computer programmers and, or visionary artists,
um, medical doctors working with psychedelics, um, you know, so many people in different fields that all come together.
Uh, around this, this constellated around this shared interest, uh, in consciousness.
So, um, and then if you, if you keep coming, like, like you've been doing, you know, year after year, you can reconnect with all these people.
And it's just like going on vacation with a bunch of your friends.
So, uh, yeah, definitely community is the reason that, uh, keeps me, uh, do, help.
Like you said, at the start of our conversation, we met at a conference in, in, uh, in Hawaii, right?
It wasn't one of my conferences, but it was an incredible conference, you know?
And I met, uh, a number of good friends there.
Yeah.
That's where I first met Robert Venosa.
Well, you know, that's, that's where I met, uh, Robert, uh, Robert Venosa.
And that's where I met Bruce Dahmer, who's one of my closest friends.
Right, right.
Yeah, that's where I met Bruce.
And Mark Pesci.
That's where I met Mark Pesci.
That's where I met him too.
And, and, uh, in fact, I would say of all the close friends I have who I'm in touch with
on a regular basis throughout the year, uh, almost all of them have come from conferences,
including my wife.
So, uh.
Right.
Actually, that's, that's something that I've, a number of people have told me that they
met their life partner at my conference, you know, and then later got married or they've
been together since then.
And so, you know, that's always nice to hear as well.
Daniel Sievert met his wife at the conference too.
He and I both met our wives at Palenque.
So, you know, if you're single and looking around, there's another reason to go to the
conference.
It's true.
Yeah.
I hate to bring this to an end, but.
And I hate to bring this podcast to an end.
Actually, that's not entirely true.
I'm podcasting this from the Bentonville Public Library.
I've been here all day and it's very cold in here and maybe you can hear from my voice.
It's not the crystal clear voice you're used to.
I'm very cold and I'm looking forward to getting out of here.
But, I would very much encourage you to join me in the tropical heat of the Iquitos Peru
jungle this July to drink ayahuasca in the jungle with an ayahuascaro the way that it
was meant to be enjoyed with a group of like-minded people who value the experience and who have
gone to great lengths to seek it out.
I hope that you will join me.
And for those of you who can't know that I will be podcasting the talks presented at the
conference over the coming months and I will be recording interviews with many of the presenters
and other conference attendees while I'm there.
And those are things that I will also be sharing with you both here and over on the Psychonautica
program on the dopefiend.co.uk podcast network.
On Wednesday of this coming week, Sea Realm podcast number 40, I don't have a guest lined
up yet.
I have several guests who are maybes up in the air.
Sure, I'll come on the show sometime but we don't have anything scheduled yet.
So, what you'll hear might be some outtakes from things that didn't make it into previous
podcasts or really that's a lot of work.
More likely I'll just call up one of my regular guests and chat for a bit.
But in any event, I will be sharing some things with you that I have encountered in my cyber
travels recently and things that Sea Realm listeners have sent to me, things of great interest.
And it will be a show much like every other show you've heard here on the Sea Realm podcast.
You pretty much know what to expect from week to week.
And if it's something that you like, something that you look forward to each week, then I hope
you'll join me here in the Sea Realm for episode number 40.
Before I go, I think I should mention that this podcast and all the podcasts in the Sea Realm
are protected under a Creative Commons Attribution non-commercial share-alike license,
sometimes called 2.5, sometimes called 3.0.
But in any event, you are welcome to excerpt from it, share it, pass it around, make something
new out of it.
And if you do, I hope that you would let me know.
I'd be interested in what you've done with it.
Well, as you can hear the music's coming up, I'll be going out.
Take care all.
Bye.