We'll just start with a song that was inspired by some experiences that Terence speaks of.
Welcome everybody to the Ojai Foundation. It's lovely to see so many old and new faces.
When I was asked to introduce Terence, I wondered what on earth to say.
So I thought back to when we first met.
And that was at Esalen Institute in the spring of 19.
And I'd been living there for about nine months recovering from a nervous breakdown, which occurred here.
And I was certainly getting better at that point. I was walking again.
And Paul Herbert, who was the sound person at Esalen at that time, said,
Leon, you have to come and do this workshop.
I had done absolutely nothing at Esalen except sort of recuperate.
And he insisted that I come to your program.
So I did.
And the program itself is a sort of blur.
Laturera, flying saucers, mushrooms, chronic intelligences.
It's just a total blur.
He spoke, this man spoke for like, I don't know how many hours.
And I was, who is this person?
I'd never met anybody like this before.
The one part of the program that I remember clearly, it's interesting, was in the introductions.
You know, everybody goes around and says, why did you come and that sort of thing.
And Kat said something that just stuck with me.
And she said, I like his style.
And at the time, I thought she was talking about your shades and your socks, you know.
But afterwards, you know, I saw more of what she was referring to in a deeper way.
And after the program bag of presents in my hand, and that changed my life.
So he's one of those people, very few, a handful of people that I can say have really,
I've met at a crossroads of my life.
And for that, I've always been very grateful.
So, I like your style too.
And, and some tough ones.
Great introduction.
And a tough act to follow.
Before we get into this, what time is lunch, Lona?
1 o'clock.
1 o'clock? So we'll go till 1?
Or if you want to have time, if you want to walk around.
Go to 12.30 then?
Good.
Can everybody hear in the back, without amplification?
Yes.
Good.
Well, if I get tired and begin to mumble-wise, bring me back up.
Yeah.
Well, it's a pleasure to be here.
This is sort of a nostalgic return.
I can't even remember.
The last Ojai event was at Camp Shalom.
I can't remember.
It must have been three years since we were all together here under the teaching tree.
In some ways, a lot of water over the dam.
In other ways, five minutes ago.
I've just come from two days of speaking in Los Angeles to large audiences,
which demand a sort of formal intensity that you've thankfully relieved me of this morning.
I guess, well, how many people are familiar with my books or have been to workshops in the past?
Is there anybody who's just utterly unfamiliar?
Uh-huh.
Okay.
Well, so we'll work from that benchmark out.
I never imagined that I would end up sitting in this position and pontificating on the nature of life and history and global human destiny.
I started out simply with a love of nature.
I was persecuted as a child in my physical education classes.
So I spent a lot of time on my own.
And I grew up in western Colorado, where there is a lot of exposed sedimentary rock,
and some of it has dinosaurs pressed into it.
And I could always feel these dinosaurs.
The largest dinosaur ever found was found a few years ago near Delta, Colorado, about 30 miles from where I grew up.
And all the time I was growing up, I knew that sucker was out there.
But I could never walk to it.
If I could have, probably my career would have taken a different turn.
But my interest in fossils, I remember I had an uncle who gave me a book when I was about eight years old of fossils.
And it had one of those charts in the front of it where it shows five billion years,
and then the last half inch is expanded to the next column,
and then the last half inch is expanded to the next column.
And so I saw that human history was a hairline crack at the bottom of the column furthest to the right.
And I got the concept of how old, not the universe, but the earth is.
And it was a dizzying perspective.
The town I grew up in, if you've read Time magazine, you were persecuted as a left-wing intellectual.
The town I grew up in once made it into Ripley's, believe it or not,
as a place that had more Christian churches per capita than any town of its size in the United States.
This was a town of 1,600 people with 42 Christian churches thriving.
When I was a kid I thought street corners were for churches.
I didn't know you could have buildings on street corners that weren't churches.
And I would go up these dry arroyos with my rock pick looking for fossil shells and dinosaur bones and this sort of thing, brachiopods.
And in the solitude, because I would often not be able to con my little friends into attending me,
because they learned quickly that it was hotter out there than decent people could tolerate.
And also, I have to confess, whenever I invited someone to come along,
it was with the thought that they would carry back the specimens.
So they were essentially pack burrows for my fossil expeditions.
And then I had an uncle who was an old rockhound and he introduced me to the concept of not splitting apart strata to see ancient forms of life,
but slicing rocks up and polishing them to reveal the light and the color and sometimes the crystal cavities that were hidden inside them.
And so very early on I got this idea that the surface of things is not where attention should rest.
That you have to, as Ahab tells Starbuck in Moby Dick, you have to seek the little lower layer.
And under the surface of things is another reality, a reality that reaches, in some cases, back to the birth of the planet, practically.
Or in other cases, in other dimensions.
I had a fixation with meteorites at one time, and butterflies, and rocketry.
And all of these things were about a certain thrill, a certain iridescence that could be coaxed out of physical phenomena,
if you would not just simply dismiss them, and pass over them.
And as a little kid, I had very bad eyes.
I still do, but I wear contact lenses.
But at that time I wore very thick, bifocal lenses.
And my mother, bless her heart, who was cut from somehow different cloths than all the people around me,
read Aldous Huxley's book, The Art of Seeing, which was an occasion to look at it in the past year.
I was amazed how much of my own attitude toward life is contained in this fairly trivial book.
You know, Huxley had terrible eyes, too.
And he discovered the so-called Batesian method of eye exercises and eye health,
which at that time, we're talking 1954 or so, was completely sky-blue crackpot type stuff.
I mean, this was the Eisenhower era.
And the exercises that I learned when my mother took me were exercises in attention.
And then the other form of exercise was what the rest of American society wasn't going to encounter for 15 years,
and then would encounter as Buddhist visualization.
But for us, it was just close your eyes and the therapist would create castles in the air through narrative.
And it was an eye exercise.
And so it introduced me to the idea of sitting still and watching what's going on behind closed eyelids.
What fascinated me about the butterflies was the physical iridescence, which in the northern hemisphere is fairly rare in butterflies.
You only get it in these little blue lysoneas that you see fluttering around mud puddles in dry areas.
I've seen them here.
But of course, in the tropics, iridescence becomes a more generalized phenomenon, not only in butterflies, but in beetles as well.
And I had the ability to fixate, to spend hours with a single pyrite crystal or a single leaf turning it over and looking at it.
And then, at some point, again, Huxley decided that I would become a writer, not because I loved writing,
but because I admired all the attention that great writers seemed to have used upon them,
which was something that I, as a goggle-eyed weirdo, was not getting much of.
And I, so then, the name Huxley recurred again, and I started reading through all of those novels,
the social novels, you know.
Antique and Chrome Yellow, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, and all the rest of it, Ape in Essence.
And, finally, I came to a work of non-fiction by Huxley, The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell.
This was, by now, probably 1958. I was 14 years old.
And, in that book, Huxley, the quintessential English academic establishment intellectual,
describes his confrontations with mescaline and what it meant to him.
And, it was fascinating to me, because, previously, all I had ever known or heard about drugs
was what I had learned from reading Huxley's novel, Crave New World,
which is a pharmacological dystopia, if there ever was one,
and has lots to say to society today, I think.
If you haven't read it, I recommend it to you.
If you have read it, you recall that it was a society of people, perfect people,
grown in vats, who died early, but who never lost the bloom of their youth,
who were heard-minded, driven by advertising,
and entirely dependent for their happiness and psychic equilibrium on a drug called Soma.
And, they had little advertising slogans which they would repeat by rote
if anyone displayed inappropriate anger or emotion.
A gram is better than a dam, they would be displayed publicly.
A drug sound of this same author, writing of mescaline,
and reaching for metaphors drawn from Meister Eckhart, St. John of the Cross,
John Chrysostom, comparing the light falling into the folds of his trousers
to the light of Caravaggio and Duccio and Fra Angelico.
And, I was amazed, I had never heard such care names on.
Well, now, if you go back and look at the doors of perception,
you realize that this was not an extravagant telling of the nature of the psychedelic dimension.
It was, in fact, a fairly conservative rendering, a description of low-dose, eyes-open, thoughty, psychedelic voyaging.
I mean, it's been a long, long time since I've set a stack of Abram's art books by my left knee before I take a psychedelic.
But back then, that was how it was done.
And you looked at the visible world.
Well, so then, around this time there began to be alarmist articles in the press
about the abuse of Blue Morning Glory seeds by some of the more crazed and unassimilated members of American society.
And I immediately tore out and purchased a couple of packets of Blue Morning Glory seeds.
And then noticed that the leaves imprinted in the fabric of the drapes in the living room
all seemed to have little faces that were dancing.
This was, in fact, clearly the intent of the designer,
but something that in all the years of living around these ratty drapes I had never noticed.
And then I began to look at everything around me
and discovered that this affinity for looking into things
that my rock-hunting, butterfly-collecting habits had instilled in me
had become like turbo-charged.
And swimming in the depths of polished stones, ponds,
the ditch running down the back of the back yard,
were myriads of worlds.
And I went outside and I was looking around at everything
and then I just felt physically overcome.
My knees basically gave way underneath me
and I sat down under a tree and I closed my eyes.
And my life has never been the same since.
Because there, waiting behind closed eyelids,
were, you know, ruined cities
covered with creeping jeweled lichens
and inhabited by shining-eyed creatures that were,
I was not sure exactly what,
and much, much more.
And I just spent a half hour or so, literally entranced,
gazing into this unfolding reverie of deserts, jungles, machines,
archaeological artifactria, machines in orbit around alien worlds,
all of this stuff.
And I was stunned.
I still am stunned.
And that essentially set the compass for my,
the rest of my intellectual life.
I didn't understand, really, what had happened.
In other words, I didn't clearly get it that this was a trip
and that it was induced by the psychedelic.
I understood something of that,
that I thought also it must be unique.
It must be my mood, my expectation.
Or surely this cannot happen on demand
through the simple act of eating morning glory seeds
being sold at 35 cents a pack down at the hardware store.
And so then I began to ask questions.
And I quickly discovered it was a mistake.
So I went back to Huxley and read more carefully,
saw that he was working from the early of Pavlok Ellis,
Weir Mitchell, Fitzhugh Ludlow.
And so it turned out that this whole tradition,
albeit an underground tradition in Western intellectual
or aesthetic terms,
based around the perturbation of consciousness with substances.
Colerick, as an example.
And you may know this poem Kublai Khan.
Kublai Khan was written in a flash, basically,
based on an opium reverie.
Coleridge was an aficionado laudanum,
which was a tinctured form of opium
that had a great vogue in the 19th century.
Well, I knew nothing about opium or laudanum
or the style of the 19th century English intelligentsia.
But in the lines of Kublai Khan,
I could feel this same siren song iridescence
that had been in the pyrite crystal,
in the butterfly wings, in the beetle bodies.
Here, let's go out on a limb.
In Xanadu did Kublai Khan, a stature dome, decree,
where out the sacred river ran,
through caverns measureless to man,
down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground,
with walls and towers girdled round,
and there blossomed many an incense-bearing tree.
Tells meandering with a mazy motion
the sacred river ran.
And it goes on and on.
And then it says,
it was a miracle of rare device,
a sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice.
And that notion,
not the sunny pleasure dome itself,
but the notion of a sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice,
introduced me to the concept of what's called,
in alchemy, coincidencia positorum,
where two things which are mutually exclusive
are juxtaposed in a way which creates a shock in the mind,
a poetic shock that is then potentially memorable.
Years later, I used this effect to title my books.
So that's why you get the invisible landscape,
true hallucination.
See, this is all hideously contrived.
Well, eventually, and after many adventures
too painful to recall,
I ended up at Berkeley in the fall of 1965,
with the fall of 1965,
which was what an incredibly,
probably the most together thing
I've ever achieved with my life in terms of domain.
Because I was neither early nor late.
I was not ten miles off or a thousand miles off.
I was dead on.
I was right at the very center of the flowering
of what's now vilified and fondly recalled as the 1960s.
And I was living in a ratty room house in San Francisco
that summer before going over to Berkeley.
And there was a guy living across the hall from me
who replaced all the white light bulbs in his apartment
with red light bulbs and painted his windows black
and played the major chords of Freight Train on his slack guitar.
And there was a big band.
It definitely was a fight in the realm of
black guitar.
And this is a bad guy.
I'm looking at the center of the house.
And I'm working at the house with a black guitar for
many years ago.
So this is a big thing.
I'm looking at all of the color.
Now that the house is a great time.
Now that I think the door fences are available
to the house in the garage door,
we're trying to get much to the house for
a house for the house in the house.
But just sit down here and say,
and I'm looking at the house where
you are going at the house,
and I've got it at the house on the back the glass.
over and over again. And he went on to glory as Barry Melton, the lead guitarist of Country
Joe and the Fish. And I didn't know it, but at the time they were in the studio laying
down the tracks for electric music for the mind and the body, which was one of the defining
freak albums of that era. And he introduced me to the joys of cannabis and further to something
called Sandoz LSD, which was going around in these little tiny 00 capsules. And it was
as if the previous morning glory vision had now been lifted to a whole other level of
intensity. And everyone around me was undergoing these kinds of experiences. And there was a
sense of incredibly accelerated change. You could palpably feel the acceleration of change
seemed to be in the water, in the air. Once I moved to Berkeley, I noticed that the large
billboard that they changed for Telegraph Avenue every 30 days contained cryptic messages that
were inevitably addressed to me and my affinity group. In short, serious boundary, dissolution
and category and scramblement was creeping into my mental universe. And then, after about six
months of this, I had a very strange friend who lived in Palo Alto. He still is my friend.
He still is my great inspiration. I wish I could coax him into public display because he's the
real Terence McKenna. But if you're the real Terence McKenna, you have too much good taste
to ever do what I do. But he came to me. His style was to get there first, whatever it was, to do it, to reject
it, and to be absolutely contemptuous of it by the time anybody else even arrived at the scene of the crime. So in
early 1967, he came to my house in Berkeley one rainy February night. And he said,
something you might be interested in. And I said, what's that? And he said, this is a material that has been boosted from an army research project being run down at SRI. And someone managed to
get a fifty-gallon drum of this material out of the inventory without anybody knowing. And I said, what is it? And he said, it's called DMT. And I said, it's a psychedelic drug, right? And he said, right. And I said, how long does it last? And he said, three minutes. And I said, no problem, bring it on.
Because after all, I had been assaulted by Life magazine on the subject of LSD. And I had gotten that under my belt. And I was by now relatively sophisticated about cannabis. I figured there were probably no more frontiers to cross. And so we sat down then and there and did it.
And about 15 seconds after talking up on this stuff, I found myself plunged into an elf nest somewhere on the other side of the universe. In other words, there were, and thank God no one fills in for me because they know it so well,
well. Jewel self-dribbling basketballs. Did I get it right? Jewel self-dribbling basketballs that came bounding toward me from all corners of this domed underground space.
Well, I had been used to hallucinations, acceleration of thought, funny ideas, strange insights, hysterical waves of giggling, so forth and so on. I had never seen anything like what I was now face to face with.
And also, whatever this substance was, it didn't affect me. It didn't affect my perception of who I was. In other words, it seemed to me that the drug wasn't working.
It was simply that the world had disappeared and been replaced by something else. And I was still who I had been a few moments before, except now I was fairly alarmed by what had just happened to the architecture and geography of Southern Telegraph Avenue.
And these things, there was an overwhelming sense of affection, involvement, a sense that I hadn't experienced since being six years old and being released on Christmas morning to run out to the Christmas tree.
And there was a sense of reality. And there was a sense of childlike innocence under conditions of extraordinary alienness and emboldment.
And just, I was boggled, the mind boggled. I at last understood the real meaning of this new cliché at that time.
And these things were making objects with their voices. They were singing in this unearthly, crystalline, punning, elf chatter kind of language.
But it was not something simply heard. It was something which I could see. I could see syntax unfolding like ribbons being spewed out of machines, shooting across my visual field, rolling into balls, condensing as objects with rotating crystalline facets and machined interiors of gold
and ivory and crystal light. And these objects were themselves emitting strange singing language-like noises. And the whole thing was happening at an enormous speed, almost like a Bugs Bunny cartoon run backwards at about three times ordinary speed.
Well, I barely had time to take all of this scene, assure myself that I wasn't dying before it collapsed. The way a tent collapses, the way an ice cream cone melts, the way an erection disappears, the way an investment goes bad, it just was gone.
And my friend, I was sitting there, I opened my eyes and my friend said, so what do you think?
And I was, I was stunned. I've never actually seen it hit anybody quite as hard as it hit me. For about 15 minutes, all I could say was, I can't believe it. I can't believe it. I can't believe it. I can't believe it. I can't believe that. I can't believe that.
You call that a drug? You must be nuts. Drugs don't do that. I mean, drugs speed you up, slow you down, make you fall down, stuff like that. This is no drug. It's magic. It masquerades as a drug. It's a doorway into another world.
I kept having the image of Aladdin's land, my favorite fairy tale. And I felt like Aladdin. You know, you buy something in a junk shop, you take it home, you try to clean it up. The next thing you know, a flame a mile high pours out and demands to do your bidding.
That was the impression I have. And it's the impression I still have. That must have been early 1966, 66, 76, 86. What is it? 36 years ago? That's not possible.
26 years ago. Nothing has particularly changed. Nothing has ever surpassed it. And for me, that was the moment that set my auto compass for life.
I mean, I said, this I must understand. Not only did my mother not tell me and my father not tell me, but Aldous Huxley never told me.
And neither did John of the cross. And neither did Meister Eckhart. All those people were apparently flying at a lower altitude than I, 19-year-old brat in ratty rented room, have been able to achieve in the last 15 minutes.
And so then I began to look for this or for some trace of it in the history of human philosophy, in the history of art, in ethnography, everywhere.
And I really didn't find it. And I really still don't find it, except there are certain faint, faint footprints in the blowing sand of human experience that if you know, if you've seen the vision, you can follow these footprints back to something like this source.
First of all, I went to the library. None of the heads that I knew could make any sense out of this at all. For them, LSD defined the top of the ladder.
Well, with this stuff, LSD and being at the local PA meeting, Dathom seemed to be two states of mind which merged together on some horizon of straightness.
So I went to the library. So I went to the library and began reading more intensively in a more focused fashion.
And I learned there were who apparently utilized plants that had this . This was new information, information that had arrived in the domain of botanical scholarship.
Really, in the previous five to ten years, through the work of people like Richard Evans Schultes and William Safford and other people, had described this chemical being present in these aboriginal intoxicants.
So far as I could tell, no academic had ever done it, because no description matched what I had experienced.
And when I discussed this with my friend who had said that he felt that probably it was impossible to accentuate concentrations outside the laboratory.
And so that meant, if true, that these shamanic practitioners and societies that were utilizing this were utilizing it, but that they themselves had no real awareness of what it was potentially like when concentrated through modern analytical and laboratory techniques.
So it really wasn't a choice. I mean, I guess that's what it's like when you get your calling.
It's just a little hard for me to imagine that being a CTA or city planner or something like that could seize you by the years with the kind of intensity that this sees me.
I mean, I said, I've got to understand this stuff. This is the most amazing thing.
And the second most amazing thing. And the second most amazing thing was that nobody seemed to know about.
I mean, I couldn't understand why there weren't 11 inch high headlines on every newspaper on the platform saying, you know, doorway to hyperspace disturbed.
I mean, it wasn't the elf negotiations proceeding or something like that.
No, apparently it was a private mystery or known but to a very few.
And I immediately after coming down was seized by an absolutely messianic desire to expose other people to this and see what they said.
Because it just seemed so important to share it.
So that's basically what I've been doing ever since.
And trying to draw conclusions.
Trying to understand what is this, number one.
How is it that it can coexist with the world of George Bush and not be discussed or not be part of the mix of social concerns?
I mean, after all, we're a society where people jump out of airplanes on weekends because their lives are so boring and empty.
Well then, if you think jumping out of an airplane is a thrill to ride home about, you should try this stuff.
No one would jump out of an airplane if they had DMT on their menu.
But no, apparently it isn't about that.
Well then I came to feel that it is, and I still sometimes offhandedly refer to it like this, that it is secret.
It is not a secret.
It is the secret.
There is a secret, and this is it.
It is the secret that the world is not only not the way you think it is,
but the way the world is, is a way that you can't think it is, because you simply do not have the imaginative capacity to conceive of such overwhelming peculiarity.
And how this secret is able to coexist with the rest of mundane reality, maintain its integrity, and not become the object of pogrom, religion, hysteria, and repression, is part of the mystery of what the secret is.
You see, a secret is not something untold, it's something which can't be told.
And even as I sit here, I realize that I'm obliquely approaching it.
No matter how weird I say it is, no matter what scintillating metaphor I create to attempt to beguile you into imagining what you can't imagine,
I'm perfectly aware that I'm falling short of the goal.
I'm creating a symbol of what it is.
But frankly, words fail, and I'm a word kind of guy.
So then, the rest of my life can be basically poured into a nutshell.
It's just been a lot of wandering around in various fringy places, talking to a lot of fringy people,
and trying to figure out what is the real importance of this, for me personally, because that's where I'm living, obviously,
and for everybody else, because I assume that there is absolutely nothing extraordinary about me.
I didn't have these experiences because I'm in the lineage of Ramana Maharshi or some malarkey like that.
I had that experience because I'm a human being.
And every human being can have this experience.
The only analogy I can make to it is sexuality.
I notice that no one here seems to be having sex at the moment, but we all are shaped by it.
Probably, this is something so taboo, and not necessarily scripted into your biological functioning the way sex is,
so taboo, that you can go from birth to the grave and never encounter this.
Not only can you do that, but most people do.
And throughout history, most people have.
They never had an inkling.
You know, they may have set armies marching.
They may have launched empires.
They may have built fantastic inventions, painted amazing paintings, created phenomenal works of literature.
But they were wet behind the ears when it comes to the full spectrum of reality,
because without this in the picture, half the world is missing.
Well, so then, how to come to terms with this?
What is it?
The answer is, who knows?
We're not doing a very good job of coming to terms with this.
Governments invade against drugs of all sorts, but largely because these things are sources of difficult-to-tax revenue.
It's not the metaphysical concern for the health of your teleological structures that drives the government to repress these things.
It's simply the wish not to be chiseled on safely.
So, there it is, sideways to the rest of life.
Huxley once said, of the psychedelic experience generally, that it was what he called a gratuitous grace.
He said, it is neither necessary nor sufficient for salvation.
In other words, salvation can be attained without these things, whatever salvation is.
Discovering, using, and exploring these things does not guarantee you a place in heaven either, whatever a place in heaven means.
However, this is a part of this world.
A part of this world that you would think the restless, intellect of this world, that you would be restless, restless, intellectually...
Well, it's hard to put it into words exactly, especially when you try to do it for the first time.
Obviously, the difference between a living person and a dead person, there is a way of thinking about that where you would say the difference is a chemical one.
In one case, metabolism is going on. In the other case, not.
I am beginning to think that this narrowing of our conscious focus into three dimensions for survival purposes that I mentioned a few minutes ago may have actually cut us off not only from where the game will be next month or who stole the chicken,
but it also may have cut us off from contact with the after death world because it has no efficacy in the very nitty-gritty blood and muscle problem of day-to-day survival.
And that what we have discovered in DMT is literally a chemical doorway to the Barga.
And that this, I think, is an even more confounding notion than the notion that we are being pheromonally managed by zeta reticulums or something like that.
I mean, after all, if that were the case, it would probably just be one of many programs of social manipulation that are administered by some hideous bureaucracy somewhere beyond Agol.
And there's careerism and blunders and budget overruns and, in other words, it sort of comes back down into, that's what the problem I have with all extraterrestrial scenarios is the extraterrestrials seem so much like ourselves.
I think probably it's that we have found the pharmacological key to the Barga and that this is going to overturn civilization so completely that we might as well just call an end to it and recess the meeting.
And if you ask shamans about this, you say, you know, what is this all about, they will tell you, well, we do all our work through ancestor magic.
Well, ancestor is a very sanitized term because not too many people, when they hear the word ancestor, realize that we're talking dead people here.
So when a shaman tells you he works with the ancestors, he's saying he works with dead people.
Well, one of the questions that has driven us most buggy during, throughout history, which is, is there contra the body dissolved?
And I am the last person to ever carry this message into society. I was raised Catholic, rejected it. At age 14, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Genet, Friedrich Nietzsche, these were my gods.
And I felt, you know, that moral responsibility, existential honesty, demands that we put aside the cheerful fairytales of more naive levels of culture.
And that anybody who wants to talk to you about the dear departed and all that is, you know, in the grip of menopausal mysticism or something, or just hasn't carried out a rational analysis of what gives.
Now, I think, you know, these religions have all made hay out of, and hash, I might add, out of their imagined franchise of the after-death world.
Because they use it to beat you on the head with some moral laundry list of do's and don'ts that's very dear to them.
And it can be anything as nonsense that you shouldn't be bored to.
All sides of the world, and has only been thrown into question by the scientific high-tech democracies in the last 500 years or so,
and for them only among a secular educated elite, the premise that is that there is something that persists beyond life.
And I think that part of the profligate irresponsibility of modern life arises from the fact that we don't think we have dues to pay.
We don't think, we think there's an easy way out, and that you could be a jerk and then just become food for worms and nobody will ever get on your case about it.
And so, moral relativism has come into play.
But if in fact we are securing in some form the notion that the human personality or some portion of it persists after death, and that there is an ecology of souls, and that we must in some sense share this planet with them, because after all when you smoke BMT you don't go anywhere physically.
You simply see your nearby environment from a different dimension through different eyes, then it means that we represent a tiny minority of the human beings who care about this planet.
We, the living, are just a tiny slice of who cares and who is active in the situation.
And somehow, we are being, through champs, which I don't believe in, or through design, which seems everywhere around us, we are being brought up short and told that in order for the earth to survive, we must join everyone else in this other place.
and that it is not to be considered as a solution.
music
to be conceived of as disembodied.
This is the only thing I can figure out that is going on.
There is some kind of project underway
to transfer the lumpen living
into the realm of the grateful death.
And the anxiety that we feel about death
is an anxiety born essentially of ignorance.
And this ignorance is understandable
because we have suppressed, repressed and denied shamanism
the leadership role that it should have in metaphysics of all sorts.
And so now we are about to become extinct.
And you can like it or you cannot like it.
You can decry it as the greatest tragedy ever to befall us
or this planet, although I suspect the planet
will give an enormous sigh of relief.
But there is a perspective in which
it can actually be seen as progress
that we are all at once going to transit
into this bardo realm.
Now this may not be it.
It may not be a simple die-off.
It may be that somehow a dialogue can be set up
with these souls or their representatives
or whatever they are in this other place
and that a world can be established
which is neither quite theirs nor quite ours.
In other words, that the difference
between being alive and being dead
which seems to us fairly fundamental
could in fact turn out to be fairly minor
and erasable or the boundary could be moved
from where it is to somewhere else.
We, this stuff is hackle-raising in its weirdness
but if you're going to be true to the content of the experience
then I think you're pushed in these kinds of directions.
And the attractor at the end of history
that seems to be pulling the human world certainly
if not all of space and time
into its domain
is in the act of realizing itself
going to obliterate the kind of distinctions
that we have grown used to.
Even on such fundamental issues
as life and death
that's the grandest conception
that I've been able to come up with
and it doesn't require
friendly, altruistic, extraterrestrial
flying in from fatal Jews
and it doesn't involve
nanotechnological downloading of everybody
into a gold deterbium cube
buried on the backside of the moon
and it doesn't involve
the human enterprise
simply becoming a layer in shale
somewhere in the strata
of the paleontological record of life
on this planet.
It is, you know,
a fitting denouement
for the mess that we have wandered into.
It does require unlimbering of the imagination
to come to terms with this
because we are in great denial
over the possibility
that the world could really be transforming itself.
I mean, about as far as most of us can go
without getting metaphysically uncomfortable
is to embrace recycling and population control.
But I doubt that such cheerful diddling
with the machinery
will be able to swerve us from our path.
I think, like it or not,
we are going into a world
that we literally, as we sit here,
cannot conceive of.
A world so different
from ordinary reality
that to discuss
whether we will be alive or dead
in that world
is mere equivalent.
There is one point
I wanted to clarify real quick.
I didn't see this
launching of the alien psychedelic
explore templates
as a bureaucratic enterprise.
I almost always envisioned
it as a real provisional
underground thing
to be done by a small minority
of shamans
in a desperate hope
that some kind of propagate
their origins.
You mean alien shamans?
Yeah, yeah.
It could be that.
I sense a crisis
in the physics
of the matrix itself.
In other words,
I think that this
is not only happening
to human beings.
I'm serious when I say
there's only 20 years
of history left
and we still have
half of it to do.
We're going to have to do
some pretty fast stepping.
I mean, what we took
50,000 years to do,
we must now do
in 20 years.
I think that space
and time
and the physical body
and the planet
and that everything
is essentially
some kind of an illusion.
It's not real.
What is real,
what is truly bedrock
and I guess this comes
close to being
of the Buddhist position,
this is all provisional.
This is not
what the universe is.
The universe
is something else.
You know,
the Buddhists
have a doctrine
that if a single person
will attain enlightenment,
then the illusion
will collapse
instantly.
All beings
will be sucked
into the post-enlightenment
state
and the illusion
of space
and time
of becoming
and entity
will all be obviated
at the snap
of a finger.
Well,
we tend to disbelieve this
because no matter
how metaphysical
we are,
or we may even
call ourselves
Buddhists,
we really believe
that Andromeda
is 250,000 light-years away.
We can't conceive
of a light-year
but we actually believe
that what the scientists
tell us
and yet,
my God,
when you start,
when you start
carrying out
a critique
of modern science,
you cannot believe
what fluff
this stuff
is built on.
I heard an analogy
recently
which I thought
was very interesting.
Our entire picture
of the so-called
distant universe
is built up
by the science
of radiotelescopy,
the use of radio telescopes
to study deep space.
This science
has been in existence
since about 1950.
If you were to take
all the radio signals
that have been analyzed
by radio astronomy
since 1950
and characterize
them as energy,
it would be
the amount of energy
that is released
by a cigarette ash
falling a distance
of two feet.
So,
this is
the thinness
of the data
out of which
we have created
these incredibly
grandiose
conceptions
of what is happening.
science is just
whistling past
the graveyard.
Don't forget
that the telescope
is about
500 years old
this year.
So,
to believe,
you know,
that the story
science tells us
is true
when we can't
understand
the mathematics,
we cannot build
the instruments
ourselves,
we cannot analyze
the data.
I mean,
we are
under the thumb
of a priesthood
more domineering,
more removed
from the ordinary
concerns of ordinary
people than
any priesthood
of any religion
in the past
ever was.
I think we should
hold all that
in abeyance.
I'm not saying
it's not true,
I'm saying
it's not possible
to tell whether
it's true or not.
One thing
psychedelics will do
for you
for sure
is to convince
you that
what's real
is what I call
the felt
presence
of immediate
experience.
That's what's
real.
You know,
what you think,
what you feel,
what you see
now
is what's
real.
Even your own
memories
are so
shifting
and elusive
and subject
to psychological
transformation
based on
your own
inner
and unconscious
dynamics
and kinks
that
to believe
what somebody
else is telling
me
about the
temperature
of bagel
juice
or something
like that
or the charge
of the top
quark
means you're
just,
you've moved
off into
some kind
of private
Idaho.
Crazy people
rave about
stuff like
this.
But I think
people who are
rooted in
a good
philosophical
method
will not
give much
influence to
anything out
of reach
of their
good
right arm.
And the
psychedelic
experience
is an
experience.
You know,
I didn't
present you
with a set
of tensor
equations
or a
tape of
electromagnetic
data
interpreted
through the
fiat of
the fishy
formula.
We're talking
experience here.
and this
experience,
if made
commiserate
with ordinary
experience,
I think
leads to the
conclusion
that this
is, I
said this
the other
night,
this is as
dead as
you'll ever
be.
This is as
low as you
can go.
This is as
confined a
mode of
existence as
it's possible
to know
and it's
all up
from here
folks.
It's a kind
of Gnostic
vision.
It sees
our present
circumstance
as the
low run
of a
ladder
of
transformational
distillation.
and, you
know, we
come from
we know
not where.
I mean, we
have, yes, the
details on the
fertilization of
the egg by
the sperm and
so forth and
so on, but
where the
form comes
from, we
don't know.
This is the
mystery of
morphogenesis.
And then
where the
form goes
to, we
do not
know.
I mean, I
now think
that the
proper way
to think
about
biology
is
biological
objects.
Plants,
animals,
fungi,
bacteria,
amoebas,
and human
beings.
Biological
objects are
hyperdimensional
objects.
You can
tell that
that's true
because
whenever you
what is
the sine qua
non of
a biological
object,
meaning
what is
the thing
it must
have to
be
biological.
It must
metabolize.
That's the
essence of
life.
The form is
stable, but
the matter
and the
energy which
compose the
form are
in constant
cycling.
The form
stabilizes, but
the energy is
flowing through
it, which
stabilizes it.
when we use
phrases like
cycling through
it, flowing
through it, these
are words which
imply a
temporal
dimension.
If you have
a chair and
you cut into
it, it
doesn't bleed, it
doesn't squirm
away, it
doesn't begin
to rot and
fall over.
If you cut
into a living
object, it
undergoes all
kinds of
changes.
This is
because you
have destroyed
one of the
dimensions necessary
for its
manifestation, the
temporal
dimension.
The living
body has a
relationship to
time which the
chair doesn't
have.
The chair is
born along in
the stream of
time.
The biological
object is
made of
time itself as
much as it's
made of space
and matter.
And so
really what
birth is, is
the descent of
this mysterious
entity called
the form into
matter.
It clothes
itself with
matter and
energy through
a process of
gestation,
unfoldment,
separation from
the environment
of gestation and
unfoldment, which
is the mother's
body.
And then it
has an
autonomous
existence, but
what is generally
true of all
life in the
phylogenetic, in
the, I'm
sorry, in the
ontogenetic
expression, what's
true is that it
has finite
duration.
Everything
dies.
The individual
dinosaur, the
individual
elephant, the
individual human
being, they
die.
That means
that the form
eventually
withdraws itself
from the
domain of
matter and
energy, and
it then
presumably
exists as
it existed
before, having
added whatever
adumbrations,
three-dimensional
experience has
given to it.
So I've come to
see the body
as basically the
placenta of
the soul.
body, and
you know, that's
a way of
thinking about
it that makes
dying not
so terrifying.
I mean, it's
as terrifying as
smoking PMT, but
it's nothing to
claw the walls
about.
The body is the
placenta of the
soul for the
individual.
Well, then it's
just a short
step to realizing
that we are now
called upon as
a species to
abandon the
bodies.
The body is
the collective
body is the
collective
placenta of
the species, and
you don't do a
war dance around
the placenta.
Once it serves
its function, which
is to bring the
forming fetus to
the point where it
can exist and
sustain itself in
the dimension for
which it is
destined, in the
case of ordinary
birth, that's
three-dimensional
space and time.
In the case of
this metaphor, it's
the hyperspace
beyond space and
time.
Once we are
ready to exist in
that dimension, it's
time to undergo
the journey down
the birth canal
and bury the
placenta under
the old apple
tree and
forget it and
move on.
And, you
know, I grant
you the analogy
isn't perfect.
I mean, where
is the midwife?
Where is the
waving bassinet?
But perhaps the
answer to that is
the midwife is
waving in these
intimations of
the friendly
alien presence.
It may be an
aspect of
humanness that
awaits us just
over the great
divine.
And so we are
going to have
to, you
know, I think
you probably
now at every
talk I give, I
make the analogy
to birth, that
this is what we
in the 20th
century are
experiencing.
The 20th
century is
analogous to
the birth
canal of
human history.
And so, you
know, the
wonderful swim
in the
amniotic
ocean is
over.
The fool's
paradise of
of the fetal
life is
ending.
Now, the
walls are
literally closing
in.
We can't get
enough oxygen.
We're using up
our food.
The walls are
strangling us.
There's no room
on this planet
for all of us.
And for us,
it's a catastrophe.
But I imagine
when a woman
goes into
transition,
that the
fetus, if
it's not a
metaphysician,
must be fairly
alarmed by the
situation.
It must just
say, well, I
guess this is
it.
It's all over.
I'm going to
be strangled,
suffocated,
and simultaneously
choked to death
in this situation.
It would take a
far-seeing fetus
indeed to
embrace the
journey down the
birth canal as
the road toward
a split level
ranch house
if you play
your cards
right.
Surely that
gets the
idea,
Thron.
Yes.
Could you
say more about
your content
of your
text?
I was
really
fascinated,
and it
seemed like
there were
some qualities
to it that
I wanted to
know.
hear more
about.
Well,
sure.
DMT, if you
take it
orally, is
destroyed by
enzymes in
your gut, so
it has to be
smoked unless
you have a
chemical strategy
for inactivating
those enzymes.
So, assuming
you smoke it,
it comes on
in about 30
seconds, and
if you're a
leather lung
Tashashin, you
can maybe get
it in one
swell foot, but
it takes most
people about
three hits.
And the
first thing you
notice is
that it's
as though all
the air has
been drawn out
of the room
you're in.
Suddenly the
colors come
forward, the
edges sharpen.
This is really
happening.
It has an
extraordinary
effect at low
doses on
visual acuity.
So does
psilocybin.
And then you
close your eyes,
you feel very
peculiar, a
kind of
anesthesia
sweeps through
your body, a
kind of
numbing and
yet a sense
of a building
bubble of
energy.
You close
your eyes, and
after a few
seconds you
see forming
in front of
you what I
call the
chrysanthemum.
It's a
floral
mandala, usually
in yellow and
orange, most
people say.
And it's
slowly turning,
it's like a
wall, but
it's a
hallucination, but
it's right here,
right in front
of you.
And you
watch it for
about 15
seconds.
If it
stabilizes, you
need one
more hit.
But what
usually happens
is that after
about 15
seconds of
contemplating this
thing, it's
as though
suddenly whatever
was holding
you back, the
cable is cut,
and you
are just
propelled
through this
membrane, and
there is, you
hear a sound
like a bread
wrapper being
crumpled, a
cellophane bread
wrapper being
crumpled and
thrown away, or
the crackling of
flames.
This is, according
to a friend of
mine, your
radio intellect, he
exiting the
anterior fontanelle
at the top of
your head.
But he could be
wrong.
But whatever it
is, and then
you hear a
tone, which
is, it could
be reproduced
on a
synthesizer.
It's that
you know, but
it keeps
going, and
becomes
hypersonic,
supersonic,
subsonic, I
don't know.
And there
is a sense
of, literally
a membrane is
ruptured, and
now you're
there.
and what
happens to
me is, the
first thing I
hear is a
cheer, a
yell of
greeting.
It's, on
their second
album, the
Pink Floyd
have a song
in which they
sing, the
gnomes have a
new way to
say, hooray.
Well, you
break in to
this gnome
nest, and
it's a very
specifically
characterized
place.
It is
domed, it's
indirectly lit,
not brightly
lit, but
it's soffited
lighting of
some sort.
It's
comfortable,
and, but
all of
that is
hard to
focus on
and relatively
inconsequential
because the
main thing
that's happening
is these
things come
bounding
towards you
like greyhounds,
and there
are many
of them.
These
jeweled,
self-dribbling,
transforming
basketballs,
which look
like iridescent
electric
radiolaria or
something.
I mean, they
are diatomaceous
neon transforms
made of
syntax, or
some damn
thing like
that, and
they come
towards you,
and you
have to deal
with yourself
in this
situation,
because most
people, and
my reaction,
is absolute
amazement,
complete
hysterical
disbelief.
I mean, you
just say,
you know,
my God,
what is
happening?
It comes so
quickly that it
isn't like a
drug, where
you deep
breathe, and
you close your
eyes, and
you wait for
an hour, and
you slowly
summon it out
of its
crevice.
It's not like
that.
It's like you
were struck by
lightning.
In fact, some
people think they
have been struck
by lightning, that
they never got to
the drug, that
just as they
raised it to
their lips, they
were struck by
lightning, or a
jet fighter fell
out of the sky, or
something.
And then you
have to ask
yourself, is
this okay?
Because it's so
radical, and it
happens so
quickly, and your
eyes are wide
open, and you
don't see anything
recognizable.
Three-dimensional
space, the room
you were in,
everything, it's
gone.
Instead, this
place, and then
they tell you, they
try to reassure you,
although they're not
very reassuring.
What they say is,
don't give way to
amazement.
Don't abandon
yourself to wonder.
Basically, don't be a
jerk and a
rube, you know.
Pay attention.
Pay attention to
what is happening.
And then they
proceed to do a
very intense form
of teen teaching.
They, bounding
up, they present
themselves, they
also do this weird
thing where they
jump into your
chest, and then
they jump back
out.
So you're having
this sucking in
and out of your
body thing.
They jump in and
out of your chest,
and they are
singing and squeaking
and squealing in
some kind of elf
glossolalia, which
you can see.
This is very
important.
They speak a
language which you
look at, you
don't hear, and
they make
objects which
are like super
puns of some
sort, in that
the object is
not one
thing.
It is somehow
several things
simultaneously.
The way a
pun attains its
effect by being
simultaneously more
than one thing.
But these are not
verbal puns.
These are
objectified puns in
three-dimensional
space.
And they're
funny.
And the whole
thing is
pervaded by
the word
zany is what
I use.
It's a form of
humor.
It's a form of
merriment.
But you can't
entirely relax
around it because
you can't entirely
be sure that
you're getting
the joke.
So it's like
it's a humor
with an edge
to it.
And they
are showing
you these
jeweled, I've
compared them
to Fabergé
eggs.
And when they
show you these
things, you
can tell by
looking at
them that if
you could bring
a single one
of these
objects, no
larger than
an orange,
into this
world, it
would end
the debate.
I mean, all
you would have
to do is
show it to
somebody and
they would
say, that's
impossible, but
yet it's
happening, so
therefore my
reality is
dissolving.
I mean, it's
somehow to
gaze upon
these objects
is to be
forever
corrupted for
ordinary
consciousness.
Make them
with their
voices.
These objects
are quasi
alive.
The objects
themselves
can sing
and make
other objects.
So you're
just being,
you're like
in this
cross between
Santa's
workshop,
Tiffany's,
and the
basement of
the Metropolitan
Museum,
and they're
offering you
all this time.
I've somehow
stretched the
thread too
tightly, and
now I'm
never going
to make my
way back.
and they're
saying, no,
no, can
that, that's
not what's
happening, this
is what's
happening, pay
attention, look,
look, look,
and then it
just fades very
suddenly, and
they sense it
coming.
They have
urgency because
they know the
window is
tremendously
narrow, and
in the final
moments, in
some cases I
recall, they
literally, it
recedes away, or
you pull away
from it, and
they say,
deja vu,
deja vu.
And then
you open your
eyes, and
you're in the
room you
left, it's
like a
thousand mics
of LSD or
something, you
are more
loaded than
you have ever
been in your
life, and
you immediately
proclaim.
My God, I'm completely down.
And, you know, the walls are rubbery.
The Persian carpet is crawling around.
Your friends have faceted faces
and look like they just climbed out of one of Billy Meyer's starships.
But you're absolutely completely down.
You accept this as ordinary.
It's all you can do to keep from kissing the good earth.
Because where you were was so much removed from that
that there is no comparison.
Well, now, after doing this a number of times,
because the first time you do it,
the goal is pretty much to live through it.
I mean, it's like being shot out of a...
I read, I think it was Tim Leary's metaphor.
He said it's like being shot out of a cannon with Baroque barreling.
And afterwards, people want you to draw barreling
when what you were trying to do was live through the experience.
But after you do it many, many times,
and it depends on how bright you are
and how able to resist freaking out you are,
my impression became,
and this is astonishing to me
based on what I've said so far.
This is someone's...
Someone very strange.
It's someone's idea
of a reassuring environment for a human being.
This place you end up,
which is the weirdest place you could either conceive of or imagine,
has been specifically designed by someone
to be as mundane, ordinary,
and like this world as they could possibly make it.
Not only that,
the impression that I have is
the vibe of this place, if you will,
is it's a nursery.
It's a play can, in fact.
And these toys, these things, these elves,
are nothing more than the equivalent of stringing
a string of colored plastic objects over a bassinet.
They're to teach you spatial relationships
and hand-eye coordination.
You are briefly in a nursery
for receiving human beings
who have just crossed over from hyperspace.
Well, imagine if all you knew about this world
was a nursery and a maternity ward
or a home somewhere,
and you're trying to deduce the nature of the universe
from a 30-second visit to a human nursery.
That's the kind of position we're in.
And I think that is what gave me the notion
that this has to do with the after-death state.
Apparently, the soul is literally being born
into this other dimension,
and the soul is not...
It's exactly like this world.
When you're born into this world,
you're just a little worm of a thing, you know?
You have to be held by your mother,
you have to be swaddled,
you have to be kept away from bright lights,
breezes, men with cigars, and so forth.
And the soul, as it transits into that place,
you immediately meet the text,
extended existence of your soul
in an entirely new domain.
Yeah.
You mean stayed in that place?
No.
And it seems to me unlikely that anyone would,
because interesting about the MT
is that it occurs naturally in the human brain.
We all make it all the time.
And so, in a sense,
this is not a drug at all.
This is a human metabolite
that you're getting a tremendous overdose of.
But the fact that it occurs naturally
in the human brain
means that you have chemical pathways,
biosynthetic pathways,
that can deal with it.
That's why it lasts so short a time.
One way of talking about the toxicity of a drug
is to ask the question,
how long before you feel perfectly normal
after taking this drug?
If you have a drug
that 24 or 48 hours after you take it,
you still have lower back pain
and you're lying in warm baths
and avoiding ringing telephones
and don't want to talk to anybody,
that's a toxic drug.
I don't care whether it's coke,
methadone, or LSD.
You shouldn't.
That's not good.
DMT, if 10 minutes,
within 10 to 15 minutes after taking it,
you not only are down,
you can't tell you did it.
There's no residual,
no lingering headache,
no dryness of mouth,
no dilated pupils, nothing.
It's like you took an ice cube
and hurled it into a blast furnace
and then you went looking for it 15 minutes later.
It's not to be found.
It ain't there.
Well, this is amazing
because this is the strongest psychedelic there is.
You'd think that you'd have to put ice packs
on your head for a week after this,
and instead it's completely gone.
So Rupert and I,
in talking about this,
he developed the idea
of what he called a necrotic compound.
He thinks that DMT,
that at death,
you flood your system with DMT,
that this is what these pathways exist for,
and that it sets you up for dying.
And that if you can,
and I gave DMT once to a Tibetan llama
who, a very old one,
not one of these alcoholic fundraising llamas,
the real thing,
the real thing.
And Guy took it like a man.
He was probably 92.
and afterwards he said,
it's the lesser life.
He said,
you can't,
he said,
if you go further,
you can't return.
That's the limit.
Beyond that,
there is no fail-safe.
And he was perfectly matter-of-fact about it,
and I took him at his word.
I mean,
if anybody should have known,
this was the dude.
And,
um,
I think it's a tremendous argument for hope.
And,
you see,
it's not only an argument for hope.
It means that if we could get the,
well,
the infantile,
shit-brained,
drug-phobic,
yahoos,
sent back to wherever it is
that they are going to be sent
to practice their family values,
then,
we could actually do significant research
and find out what's going on here.
It's an object of legitimate research.
We don't have to genuflect in front of this
like it's a religious mystery,
and we'll always be unknowable.
In principle,
what we need to do is
you explore this dimension
the way you explore any unknown dimension.
You send people of great courage
and descriptive skill
in with their notebooks,
their telescopes,
their tape recorders,
or whatever is the equivalent for this job,
and then you find out what it is.
And,
uh,
I think that the,
you know,
the destiny of the species
may be,
um,
spun into this.
It may not be,
it may be
that this transition into hyperspace
is not as inevitable
as I previously assured you.
It may be
that we have to do something
on this side.
We have to meet them
halfway through the mountain.
They're boring toward us.
We have to alert ourselves
to the fact that a tunnel is possible
and then get cracking,
you know,
with dynamite,
which is an analogum for DMT.
Yeah?
Terrence,
I want to say something about,
um,
the distinction now
between what you have spoke about
for the last two minutes,
um,
the last two minutes,
um,
with,
uh,
distinction between,
uh,
the Fabergé eggs
and,
uh,
basketballs
and self-transforming machine elves,
and that,
that,
that one may occur
by going into the Amazon county
and experiencing
some type of preparation
prepared by the natives.
is that organically mixed,
um,
earthly-based,
uh,
high
that's similar to the
synthesized DMT.
Now,
I have taken DMT
many,
many years ago,
but it would seem that,
that,
the natives may
say,
describe it at least
in a much different fashion
than yourself.
Um,
what is the distinction,
and then,
and then also,
if you can hit on,
after that,
uh,
the distinction between that
and suicide?
Well,
the difference is not
as great
as maybe your question
implies.
First of all,
the,
the thing that is so
interesting about DMT
is if the only
requirement
is that you
be able to
hold the toke,
and if you cough
and lose it,
then it's murky
and mucked up.
Uh,
in the case of
ayahuasca,
which is what
you're asking about,
it's a,
well,
I'll explain
to the group.
Remember how I said
that DMT
is destroyed
in your gut,
so you have
to smoke it,
but then I added
the caveat
that unless
you,
uh,
somehow
inactivate
this enzyme
system in your gut,
which will destroy it,
the DMT,
well,
it turns out
there's a way
to do that.
The enzyme system
is called
monoamine oxidase,
and there are
compounds called
monoamine oxidase
inhibitors.
If you take
monoamine oxidase
or MAO inhibitor,
then,
and follow it
with oral DMT,
then the DMT
will not be destroyed
in your gut.
It will actually
be absorbed
into the lining
of the small intestine,
a large intestine,
and then passed
into the bloodstream,
and you will have,
uh,
psychedelic intoxication.
Well,
in the Amazon,
this has been
understood
by the shamans
for a long,
long time,
and so they
take two plants.
One,
Banisteriopsis copy,
a large,
woody vine,
a twining liana,
and it actually
contains
a powerful,
short-acting
monoamine oxidase
inhibitor,
and they take
this vine,
and they pulverize
it,
and they,
uh,
combine it
in a large pot
of water
with the leaves
of another plant
which contains
DMT.
It may be
one of several
plants.
It's usually
Socotria viridis.
Then,
they boil
these two things
together,
and then,
for hours,
and then they
pour the water
off
and save it
in a,
in a jug,
and put
fresh water
on this
mess
of two
different plants
and boil it
again for
hours,
and then they
pour the two
water fractions
together,
and they get
rid of all
the solid matter.
They throw it
away.
It's now been
cooked for
six to eight
hours,
and they take
this watery
fraction,
several gallons,
and they
drive it down
over a hot
fire until
they get
something,
a dark
brown
thick liquid
that is
truly
horrifying
to ingest
because the
taste is
so gasply
because all
the salts
and sugars
and God
knows what
else have
been concentrated
into this
stuff.
But this
is now
a beverage,
a liquid,
I love it
that in the
literature
they call
it a
psychoactive
beverage.
And when
you drink it,
the compound
from the
woody vine,
harmin,
inhibits
the MAO
and the
DMT
passes through
and enters
the bloodstream
and instead
of a
ten-minute
experience
that reaches
the apex
of intensity
in two
minutes,
you get
an experience
which is
drawn out,
stretched out
over about
four to six
hours.
Now,
usually,
this is
not,
it's a
psychedelic
experience,
it's similar
to mushrooms
in some
ways,
but if
you really
make it
stiff,
if you
really put
the pedal
to the
metal
on the
amount
of
psychotria
viridis
or DMT
containing
leaf
that you
put into
this stuff,
then,
after about
two hours,
you can
slowly,
by sitting
in darkness,
by practicing
breath
control,
you can
slowly
calculate it
into a
place
where you
then say,
you know,
by gosh
and be golly,
we've made
it to
the elf
nest,
here it
is.
So,
I think
that
great
shamans,
courageous
shamans,
have
always been
able to
make their
way into
the presence
of this
thing,
but I
put the
great
qualifier
in front
of the
word
shamans,
because in
my actual
field experience
in the
Amazon,
what I
discovered
was once
it got
you loaded
enough to
be comparable
to, say,
four grams
of mushrooms,
most of
these guys
would look at
you in
horror if
you suggested
that it
was only
twice as
strong as
it should be.
shamans
all over
the world
have an
ambivalent
attitude
toward these
dimensions
they go
into.
Very few
just hurl
themselves
delightedly
into complete
boundary
dissolution.
I had a
guy tell
me once,
he said,
you think
just because
we run
around wearing
penis sheaves
that this
stuff is
easy for
us to
do?
Well,
I've got
news for
you.
it's as
hard for
us as
it is
for
anybody.
It's hard
for human
beings to
surrender to
something so
strange.
I could
never get
ayahuasca to
carry me
into the
DMT
nest until
I made
it myself.
And then
with nobody
holding my
elbow and
keeping me
and telling
me how
much
poetry of
a ribbon
I could
put in,
I was
able to
jack it
up and
jack it
up until
finally it
was truly
horrifyingly
strong.
And that's
what you
want.
We're not
interested in
colored lights
and dancing
mice here.
So,
now let me
see.
Did I cover
the waterfront?
No.
Comparison to
DMT.
psilocybin.
So,
you explained
one time
in the past
lectures that
the earthy or
UFO type
image is a
more earthly
mother of
goddess connection.
But I think
if you push
the ayahuasca
hard, it all
begins to
migrate in
this direction.
Psilocybin, you
know, I
advocate five
dry grams in
silent darkness.
Eight dry
grams in
silent darkness
will give you
the indistinguishable
from a DMT
flash.
The problem
is, you
know, one
thing about
DMT that
is both
frustrating and
liberating is
that it's so
brief.
Basically, it's
like a
rollercoaster.
The great
consolation is
this is only
going to last
five minutes.
If you
climbed on a
rollercoaster
of super
intensity,
and as
they dropped
the bar
over your
lap, they
said, oh
yeah, this
is the
four-hour
trip.
Then you
would say,
you know,
roll, roll,
hand it.
It does
appear, though,
that by
IV, which
is mostly
how I did
it years ago,
that it
seemed that
it was
extended to
about 30
to 40
minutes.
IV DMT?
Yeah.
Do you
mean that
you shot it
intravenously?
You don't
mean that
it was
a perfusion
competition?
No.
Well, see,
I've talked
to people
who've done
research on
DMT, and
a surprising
conclusion that
comes out of
those discussions
is that
shooting it
is not as
intense as
smoking it.
Shooting it
is...
Well, yeah,
it sounds
fairly intense,
but people
who do both
say shooting
it can't
lay a candle
to...
And this
is a funny
thing, and I'll
just mention it
as an aside.
Drug researchers
love to
shoot drugs
into their
experimental
subjects.
They love
the syringe
as the route
of administration,
because you
get better
numerical data,
because you
can measure
the dose
absolutely,
and then
you hit them,
and you
know they
got it.
If you
smoke something,
you may,
you know,
obviously,
when you can
hold your breath
no longer,
and you exhale,
smoke comes
into the room.
That's not
part of your
dose.
And sometimes
there's a
residuum in the
bottom of the
pipe.
That's not
part of your
dose.
So in the
name of
precision,
people who've
done research
on DMT
have always
shot it,
even the
recent study
out at the
University of
New Mexico,
it was by
injection.
I tried to
persuade them
to do a
section with
smoking, but
this argument
for numerical
precision carried
the day.
But the
effect of
relying on
intravenous
injection like
that is that
no one in
the clinical
situation has
ever observed
or experienced
the flash that
I'm talking
think you
can attain
except by
smoking.
How about
the penis
snuffs of
the anomalous
of the
particles?
No, I've
done those.
And that
is, well,
tell the truth,
let the chips
fall where they
make.
Highly
overrated
for several
reasons.
first of
all, you
have to
snuff close
to a
tablespoon of
these toasted
and powdered
ifra-anadonanthra
peregrina
seeds, and
there's a lot
of cellulose
there, and
so you do
not absorb
it instantly.
The other
thing is, it's
so physically
unpleasant to
do it, that
there's a
tendency to
cut low
on the
dose, because
the standard
method of
administering
edema is
you have a
hollow reed,
like a
bamboo reed,
about this
long, you
fill it with
this powdered,
toasted
sawdust,
essentially,
that has been
reduced to
flour, and
you get up
on your
haunches, and
your friend
comes over, and
you put the
tube up your
nostril, and
he blows.
He takes a
huge lungful
of air, and
he just
blows as
hard as he
can.
Well, the
effect is
like being
hit in the
face with
a 2x4.
I mean, you
stagger
backwards, you
salivate, it's
intensely
painful, you
scream, you
squirm around
in the dirt, and
then you get
back up on your
haunches, and by
that time, he
has loaded the
tube for the
second nostril.
And then the
whole thing
happens all
over again,
except now you're
salivating, your
eye is swollen
up, your sinuses are
filled with this
gung, and you
do it again, same
thing, scream, squirm
in the dirt, so
forth and so on.
Then you stagger
over out of the
sun into the
show, and
through it with
this, with his
saliva just
pouring out of
your mouth, and
after about five
minutes, you
begin to drift
into a
psychedelic state
of some sort.
But there is
no sense of a
rush, of a
splitting of the
world into two
halves.
It's not an
effective route of
administration.
How about
what do they
call them?
Chorus
spirits?
Oh, well, once
they get, once
they get
intoxicated, then
they play this
strange game, which
is almost
characteristic of
this white
Yanomamo
cultural group.
Guys square
off.
They stand
about three
feet apart from
each other, and
by some means
equivalent of
tossing a
coin, it's been
decided who
will go first.
So the guy
who goes
first is
totally loaded
on the stuff,
and he has
mucus running
out of his
nose, saliva
running out
of his mouth,
his eyes are
swollen, practically
swollen shut.
He pulls
back his
hand, and
he hits the
other guy
right in the
center of the
chest as
hard as he
can.
So the
guy either
loses his
feet, or
does in
many ways, he
grunts like
a bull, and
stands there.
He also is
in the same
state.
Then he
pulls back, and
then he
does it.
And they
keep doing
this until
somebody is
knocked off
their spot.
And when
you interview
them later
about this,
what you're
told is,
your ability
to stand on
your spot
depends on
how many of
these Hikuli
spirits you
have inside
your chest.
And so
this is
some kind
of Yanomamo
psychology
meeting the
raw data
of the
DMT
experience.
I don't
know what
they're talking
about, but
it has
something to
do with
the DMT
things that
jump in
and out
of your
chest when
you smoke
it.
They
believe that
they say
the demon
from the
tree will
live in
your chest.
And the
more of
these tree
demons inside
your chest
you have,
the more
physically able
to resist
being knocked
off your
spot you
are, and
the more
shamanically
empowered you
are.
But this
goes to a
point I
often make
with my
groups, which
is, you
know, one
ethnic
group or
one
culture's
drug is
another
person's
pain in
the next.
You know, I
mean, I've
taken awful
drugs that
the people,
after it
was over
with, they
would, you
say, you
know, God,
you guys do
this all the
time, it's
really kind
of, uh,
and they
say, yeah,
well, it
takes getting
used to, and
we really
don't do
it all that
often, only
ceremonies,
and you're
right, most
people are
glad to get
it over with
and go
back to
the palm
beer.
So your
experience is
basically that
it's too
caveman-like, it's
very hard on
the system
biologically, and
it makes it so
that the time
that you could be
having and
exploring these
strange dimensions
is somehow
inhibited.
Yeah, I don't
think, I don't
think in the
bema-taking
situation that
you ever get
enough all
at once, to
the synapses
in sufficient
concentration to
deliver you
over into
what I'm
describing occurring
on this.
I heard you took
ayahuasca and
then do this
stuff right
after you
drank the
ayahuasca.
Strangely
enough, though,
those cultural
groups do not
overlap.
You know, where
there is
ayahuasca, there
is never
were some
people who
wanted to
or by bringing
in non-indigenous
sources of
ayahuasca into
the normal
area.
Well, people
are, you
know, traditional
people are
surprisingly
conservative.
I mean, I've
sat with
ayahuascaras and
done their
brew and
talked to
them about
DMT, and
then they
say, well,
describe it.
And so
then I will
describe it as
I described it
to you here.
And then my
best guy said,
well, I don't
know, it
sounds a little
intense, I
think I'll
take a pass on
it.
You know, and
he was my
mentor in the
domain of
ayahuasca.
It's pretty
stout stuff.
I think that,
you know,
shamans have
always, you
know, looked
over the
fence, looked
through the
keyhole, stepped
through the
doorway, but I
think DMT,
pure crystalline
DMT, or
ayahuasca
specifically
brewed to
reality
obliterating
doses, is
the only
way you
can approach
this place.
Yeah.
I'm
wondering, on
the experience
you talked
about, you're
being taught
that.
Yes.
And again,
the second
part would
be, how
have you
done it?
I've done
it maybe
thirty times.
I haven't
done it for
a couple
of years.
DMT?
No, DMT.
I'm, I'm,
uh, sometimes
I think it's
a young man's
game, or
sometimes I'm
just getting
chicken shit,
you know.
It's, this is
not a drug of
abuse, let me
tell you.
I know people
who say it's
their favorite
drug, and you
say, well, when
was the last
time you did it,
and they
say 1968, and
they're still
processing, to
feel no need
to go back and
have a second
look.
What was your,
the first part of
your question?
What kind of
knowledge?
Ah, the
knowledge.
The knowledge
is interesting.
The knowledge
is, they want
you, they want
me, to
to
know.
The knowledge
is, they want
to
know.
The knowledge
is, they want
to be
in the
knowledge
and
to
They make language that you can see.
They absolutely are convinced that this ability to make things visible with sound can be taught.
And that's what they want you to do.
They demonstrate it.
They say, see what we're doing?
See what we're doing?
Now do it!
And you say, no excuses.
We don't have a lot of time.
It's almost over.
Do it!
And then you attempt to do it, and you discover in that place you can do this.
But why this is so important?
Because when you come back to this world and listen to tape recordings of yourself doing
it, it's gibberish of some sort.
It's a kind of neurologically driven glossolalia.
It's like, you know, it's a language unhinged from the necessity of meaning.
And yet it is true that when you do it in that place, it's absolutely ecstatic.
It's like sex, but sex is sort of like a white light kind of thing.
This is like a colored spectrum.
If you could put the sexual experience through a prism and change the purity of orgasm into
a spectrum of stuff, then it would be like this language.
It's pure poetry.
It's poetry so thick you can literally cut it with a knife.
And they want you to do this.
And they are absolutely passionate about this is what we are here to teach you.
how to speak in a language that can be seen.
And, you know, a language which could be seen would be a kind of telepathy.
You know, if you could see what I mean, you would see my thoughts.
The way we communicate, small mouth noises and the assumption of shared dictionaries, an assumption
which is never borne out by careful questioning, is a miserable way to communicate.
If we could see our linguistic intentionality, it would be the equivalent of seeing our mind.
And so, this is what they want us to do.
Now, maybe if one were truly dead, they wouldn't be so urgent about it.
And they would be like a relative leaning over a bassinet and holding up objects and saying,
Look at this, baby. Look at this. This is a bell or something.
But, definitely, what they teach is in the domain of language.
And it's not a teaching which can be said, like, love one another or, you know, if it's juicy, eat it over the sink.
It's more an ability locked in your physiological structure that we're not using.
They want us to speak in colored lights.
And it's their agenda. It's not mine. I have the faintest idea why that is so compelling to them.
Well, that's a little unfair because I've given a lot of thought to it.
But initially, I couldn't figure it out.
We'll, I'm sure, get more into this this afternoon.
It is the little self-transforming elf machine informs me. Lunch time.
Perfect. Thank you for putting up with this.
So, I appreciate your, uh, silent scorn. Or whatever it is.
So, lunch will be over.
Venture, I'll be on the furthest bound.
I'll be searching for the spirit that can set me free.
Well, I've been caught in the clutter of the...
Some of them say, and that, and other times you, what you've said, you wonder why it isn't in headlines 11 inches tall.
There seems to be something about the experience that is, uh, I don't know if self-selecting is the right word, or evolutionary selecting.
Why isn't, why aren't there, why is there such a small percentage of people who actually end up,
although you say everyone can do it, they do have the genetic possibility.
But there's something more in a selective period that, um, where a shaman will come out.
Because it is, as you say, an awesome responsibility.
And yet, it's everyone's possible liberage.
And then one, one last thing, another coda to this.
You, you mentioned that you don't think that it's the, the Bush or Reagan, et cetera,
uh, feeling that they just want to keep an economic grip as far as the, uh, the sale of would-be hallucinogenics.
Don't you think that there is some degree of teleological repression going on as well?
I mean, you, you mentioned that, that, that you didn't feel that way.
But I, I, I, some other times I've heard you feel that there definitely is.
Well, I think that, yeah, I mean, it simplifies the issue to say that it's entirely a money issue.
Right.
Because the psychedelics are used by so small a percentage of people
that it doesn't rate the tremendous institutional fury that is brought against it.
And where you really see the contradiction in, uh, economic logic is, uh, with pot.
Um, I think that the subtext of the government's fear about psychedelics is that the, this quality
that they have of dissolving boundaries causes people to question basic assumptions about how
society is run.
And I think this is true of any society.
It isn't an American phenomenon.
It's that if you take psychedelics, whatever you are, you know, Eskimo, Hasidic Rabbi,
quantum physicist, you will question your first premises.
And you get millions of people questioning the first premises.
And, uh, then the powers that be become very nervous.
It's interesting that the, this whole phenomenon of the 1960s occurred because American commitment
to universal public education reached, brought its first generation of people to adulthood
in the middle of the 1960s because that universal commitment to public education began after
World War II, after the establishment took a look at what this filling, you know, actually funding
and building up great public universities and then filling them with inquisitive, uh, young
people, what the result of that was, that's when they decided to turn the universities back
into trade schools for CPAs, which they did do.
I mean, there is nothing like the level and the breadth of education and intellectual curiosity
that was encouraged when I was going to school.
Uh, that's all finished now.
Now you're expected to do your data entry job, watch a lot of TV and keep your mouth shut.
And that, this is what we expect of our college graduates.
So, really there was a crisis of faith in American institutions which was only exacerbated by
psychedelics.
It was a combination of educating people to the actual traditions of Western civilization
in large numbers for the first time and then giving them psychedelics.
I mean, or having them exposed to psychedelics and people began to ask questions for which
there were no answers and the response of the establishment was to suppress this.
Uh, I mentioned cannabis.
You know, you're all probably aware through the work of the, the hemp, uh, people that
cannabis holds many benefits, not necessarily related to its properties as an intoxicant, but
as a source of food, lubricant, plastics, fuels, etc.
The reason the establishment is so hysterical on the subject of cannabis is because it erodes
loyalty to the industrial state.
I mean, that's why, if you look at the pharmacological profile, let's contrast two familiar drugs.
One, caffeine.
We have the medical data which shows that it can contribute to fetal malformation.
We know that it damages the liver.
We know that it, uh, if abused, can cause, uh, severe stomach ulcers, so forth and so on.
Cannabis, vast amounts of money have been spent trying to find something wrong with it,
and they're still digging, folks.
I mean, they've decided it doesn't cause tits on statues.
It doesn't, you know, all the screwy things they've come up with over the years, uh, have
had to be abandoned.
Why is caffeine enshrined in every labor contract negotiated in the Western world as a sacred
right of all workers twice daily?
And why is cannabis, uh, you know, you can lose your house, your automobile, your bank account,
your art collection, simply because you had six plants in the back 40, and your children.
Why are the, why this disparity?
Well, what is the effect of caffeine?
It, uh, makes it possible for you to perform your duties during the last three hours of the work cycle
with efficiency equal to the first three hours of the work cycle.
It allows people to tolerate spinning widgets onto gombers until hell freezes over
without a thought ever rising in their mind that maybe this is a ridiculous way to spend your life.
Cannabis, on the other hand, people aren't so interested in going to work.
They'd rather lay around and make love.
They don't want to watch TV.
They'd rather smoke a doobie and have a conversation with a friend.
In other words, these things promote activities which don't make anybody any money
and cause people to question the institutions and the, and the, uh, social philosophies
that are being shoved down their throats.
If the playing field were level, uh, caffeine might well be a prescription drug.
Not that I think that's a good idea.
And, uh, cannabis I think would probably be freely available.
The most dangerous drugs in society in terms of detrimental social impact are alcohol and tobacco.
The two most freely available.
I mean, every street corner of every city, they're peddled, uh, in vast amounts.
We have a very crack-brained approach to the problem of drugs.
We're not the only society.
All societies seem to do this.
Out of a possible spectrum of twenty or thirty depressants and intoxicants,
most societies select three or four, which they hail as harmless, and then the rest are,
you know, the seed of Satan.
And this is, this attitude is persevered in against all scientific data, against all medical research.
This is just what people choose to think.
The problem is, we don't have the luxury of this kind of ignorance anymore.
The amount of revenue that could be accrued from, uh, cannabis economy.
The pressure that could be taken off petroleum extraction, if cannabis were part of the picture.
Um, all of these things, uh, make it incumbent upon us, I think, to think more creatively and more honestly
about which drugs really are posing, uh, problems for us.
What was the first part?
The other question really relates to this is, why are there, given the fact,
why are, why is the percentage of shamans so small relative to a population?
Because of the fact that, as you say, there's fear in going into, there's attraction and fear in going into these other realms.
And there's obviously maybe some self-limiting aspect of the, uh, of the hyper, uh, dimensional view,
which there's some dynamic going on, because everyone has an equal opportunity to go to this hyper-dimensional,
but very few of their own initiatives really push to that point where you are definitely within the hyper-dimensional realm.
Well, there are different things to be said about this.
I mean, first of all, um, one of, there are what are called, uh, biochemical differences in individuality.
Uh, and never more so than in the matter of drugs.
Uh, people are very different from each other.
Years ago, I took a course from Sasha Shogan, um, at Cal,
and, uh, at one point he brought in some substance, I don't know what it was,
and this was a class of 600 people,
and passed it around and asked everybody to take a sniff of this bottle.
Well, 598 people pronounced this stuff completely odorless.
Two people were almost violently ill from the overpowering odor of this thing.
They possessed a gene for the sensitivity to this compound that caused it to be, for them, overwhelming,
for everyone else, unnoticeable.
And we're surrounded by these kinds of individual biochemical differences.
In traditional societies, shamanism is often a family business.
And it may well be that this is because ability to handle these psychedelic substances,
uh, and to really get mileage out of them, is a genetic endowment of some sort.
I mean, cannabis, again, provides an interesting example.
One of the commonest things you hear people say about cannabis, who don't smoke it,
is they say, I used to, or I tried it, but it makes me paranoid.
Uh, well, uh, it, to the people who use it, this is inconceivable.
In fact, it's almost an antidote to paranoia,
uh, because it seems to make things appear more Taoistic, more integrated.
It all makes more sense.
These are biochemical differences that need to be studied.
You know, different racial groups have different relationships to intoxication.
I mean, I think it's probably, there is some truth to the idea that the North American Indians
had a susceptibility to distilled alcohol that the Europeans, who had been dealing with it
for a couple of centuries by the time they arrived here, didn't have.
Because the North American Indians represented a, uh, a closed gene pool,
never having been exposed to this, there was no selection for being able to handle it.
Uh, and then there's another issue in relation to your question, John,
which is, first of all, you know, some people say,
well, not all shamans take hallucinogens.
Well, true, and I've excited some people's ire by suggesting,
but all real shamans do.
And, uh, you know, saying that somebody is a shaman,
I mean, imagine if simply being able to rave and exhort on the subject of the four gospels
qualified you as a man of the Lord.
Uh, actually, you have to sort through dozens of so-called preachers
to find somebody you would be willing to leave alone with your chickens.
Well, similarly, uh, you have to sort through a lot of, uh, people who claim to be shamans
before you find somebody who really is one.
I mean, we tend to be naive.
Go to the Amazon with your heart on your sleeve seeking ayahuasca,
and I guarantee, unless you go well-connected, you'll drink a lot of swill
before you get to somebody honest enough, responsible enough, conscientious enough
to actually make it right and do it right.
And in, in the case of shamanism, usually this is going on in cultures without literacy,
without written languages, and, and so they don't hold conferences or publish proceedings
or have the university, uh, matriculation examinations in shamanism.
So, on the surface, a shaman is anyone who claims to be a shaman, or who cares to claim.
But, I, in terms of, uh, real shamanic ability, I think it only comes through either innate special abilities,
which probably means innate high sensitivity to neurological, um, to neurotransmitters, exotic neurotransmitters,
or it comes through an exposure to hallucinogens.
Uh, this is a big argument in anthropology.
Merci Eliade, who normally I am very deferent to, got this one completely wrong,
and decided on absolutely no evidence that what he called narcotic shamanism was decadent.
Well, first of all, the use of the word narcotic in that context shows that he didn't know what he was talking about.
Nobody uses narcotics to shamanize, you go to sleep if you take narcotics.
So, what he wanted to say was that he felt hallucinogenic shamanism was decadent,
but what is the alternative?
Reliance on ordeals, fasting, or pathological personalities?
Maybe epileptics, or borderline schizophrenics, or something like that.
I think the, that these kinds of shamanisms that are not hallucinogenically based are derivative shamanisms
that occur at a later stage of culture when the, the, uh, plant-based shamanism has been disrupted
by some, some, uh, like, migration, or the disappearance of the plants involved, or something like that.
Yeah.
From what I understand, uh, the Lakota aliens, in the genics, they, uh, accomplished all this through the drum beat and the song, and things like that, and to this day,
you can talk to the Lakota about the use of hallucinogenics, as far as shamanism is going to say,
it's not necessary.
And yet, in the southwest, in the southwest, you know, it's prominent.
Yeah, well, you, I think acoustical, uh, acoustical driving can carry you a certain distance.
There are substitutes for hallucinogens, but they're neither as effective, nor as, uh, pleasant.
I mean, ordeals are what many cultures get into.
Well, I was just thinking, you know, along the lines of, you know, someone like the crazy voice
that came out of the Lakota and seemed to possess these, you know, abilities and manifest them physically.
Well, there's also the exceptional personality.
The exceptional personality breaks all the rules, let's see.
But, um, something I wanted to say.
So would you say, would you say then, um, Terence, that there's a genetic proclivity,
maybe in some individuals, if there is access to, um, botanicals,
and if there is no, uh, historical evidence of shamanism prior to that,
for that individual to start engaging in explorations?
Yeah, I think so.
You know, Maria Sabina claimed that she was never initiated into shamanism.
She claimed that as a girl herding the cattle, she ate the mushrooms because she was hungry,
and that she was basically self-taught in shamanism in a society that actually had shamanic, uh, lineages and institutions.
Uh, in Madagascar, there are these highly evolved, uh, ordeal poisons.
And this is where you take a, you take a plant, you feel like you're dying, you beg to die, you want to die, and you don't die.
You come back from it a better person.
But it is only because you were slammed up against death itself.
Ordeals work, but they're not very pleasant.
And the idea of putting yourself through an ideal like that once a week or twice a month as part of your professional practice is, is, uh, is pretty outrageous.
The other thing that has to be said, and this is really important, and I think anthropologists have sold this one short.
Experiences are what we are least able to communicate to each other.
We can describe machine parts, agricultural procedures, but anything in the realm of feeling, our languages are woefully impoverished.
And I don't think that's specific to English.
I think it, it haunts all human experience.
That it's hard to communicate how we feel.
Well, so then there's a vast spectrum of experiences that come from plants.
Uh, and I dare say most of them.
pleasant. Let's start out with eating Diffenbachia or something, you know, which causes your throat
tissues to swell up and you feel like you're strangling. Or, you know, Amanita muscaria
is a very controversial shamanic plant because some people say it's garbage. And Gordon
Wasson in his last book called the supreme entheogen of all time. Well, clearly people
are, are they talking about different things or are they interpreting the same experience
differently? And so there are, for example, you know, people who are fond of peyote like,
if they haven't done their homework, like to imagine that they are taking this ancient
ancient, ancient hallucinogen that has informed the lives of the, of the Sonoran and, and
uh, the Indians of that area for thousands and thousands of years. Well, this is as far as
anybody can tell, complete bunk. Uh, there is no record of peyote use, uh, older than four
or five hundred years. Most of it is post-ghost dance. Before, when you go into the old Sonoran
graves, the old archaeology of the Sonoran, the Tarahumara Indians, you find Sikora Sifundi,
uh, yeah, Sikora Sifundifolia beans, the little, uh, black and red beans that you see in Mexico,
strung into jewelry, sold along the side of the roads. That's what those Indians took for
thousands and thousands of years. We have a continuous record over about four thousand years
of these seeds being buried in graves with, uh, ritual instruments indicating that they
were buried with shamans. You couldn't give it away today because it is such a horrible experience.
It's essentially sublethal strychnine poisoning. It can kill you effortlessly. It's clear that
at some point, fairly recently, somebody tried peyote and said, my God, this stuff we've been
taking for thousands and thousands of years is just horrible compared to this. This is
great. And immediately there was a transfer of loyalty. And Lord knows, eating fresh peyote
is no gourmet. So, the point there being, cultures tend to, um, define experiences differently.
And you can't tell what people are talking about until you really check in. Uh, traveling around
the world, you know, you all, you end up in certain cultures and they say, oh, we're so
happy to have you here. Uh, as our honored guest, we would like you to eat, uh, some of our national
food. Let's say you're in Scotland. And so they say, well, you must eat some haggis because, uh,
this is what we all eat. We all really love this. This is the best part of Scottish life.
Boy, are you going to love this? Well, when it's finally served, you know, your jaw drops
in disbelief, uh, because it's ghastly unless you're Scotch. And, uh, well, but if you're
Scotch, you dare not say so, you see, because a cultural myth has been built up around, I
mean, do Italians knock red wine? Do the French denounce truffles? Certainly not.
Well, you know, the origin is Scotch. Ah, true. Pate de foie gras is always my, uh, example.
So, what you have to realize is that these things are culturally defined and often what works
for the Nyanamamo or the Muinani or the Witoto won't work for you. Datura is a good example.
Datura is a shamanic plant used by many people throughout, uh, the world. All of them, I think,
pharmacologically deprived. Otherwise, they wouldn't put up with what you have to put up with to
take that stuff, you know. And, uh, my interest, and I, you know, it was practical, was to
find a hallucinogen that did what I wanted it to do and didn't do anything I didn't want
it to do. And what I was interested in was, first of all, hallucinations. Because some people
say I'm obsessed with it. Fine. My notion is that if you can see something that isn't there,
that's very much more convincing than just funny thoughts, racing ideas, strange physical sensations.
It's a powerful and boundary-dissolving confrontation when you confront what is not there. And so, I find,
and this is a heresy for sure, I'm not that fond of LSD. I think it's a very sloppy drug. I think, you know,
you feel terrible the next day. I always did. I had tight headaches, body aches. People always say,
well, it was not clean. It had speed in it. It had strychnine in it. Eh, maybe. But even the
good stuff is not, uh, and it wouldn't hallucinate for me the way I wanted it to. I could get
hallucinations if I would smoke hash with it. But on its own, it was what I have described in other
places as abrasively psychoanalytic, unpleasant, confrontational. And what I was interested in
were hallucinations. So when I got to psilocybin, I remember after my first mushroom trip, I said,
thank God we found this stuff. I'll never take LSD again. That wasn't quite true, but I'll bet I've
taken it less than half a dozen times since my first psilocybin trip. So, uh, and, and in terms of the
chemistry of these things, my conclusion from all this fiddling is that it's the indole hallucinogens
that are at the center of the mandala. They do what we want them to do with very little detrimental
side effect. LSD is one of them. Uh, ebogaine is one of them. Not one widely known. We've
got to save something for our old age, folks. Uh, harmin and harmaline, the beta-carbolines,
when complexed with DMT, and then psilocybin. And I think that's the basic list. Well, those
do, they, these are really the keys which open the lock very easily, very cleanly, very, uh, dependably.
And that's where I will put all of my attention. And, you know, even in that domain, you have to be
somewhat, uh, careful. My brother and I spent years tracking down a hallucinogen in the Amazon called
Ukuhe that, uh, was an orally active form of DMT, which we, remember I said that DMT is destroyed in the gut.
So we were fascinated to try and find this Ukuhe because we wanted to know how it was possible that it could work orally.
Uh, and also the ethnographic accounts claimed that, uh, the people who used it spoke with little men.
Uh, and we wanted to see these little men to see if they were the same little men we were talking to.
Well, we had three expeditions to the Amazon before we finally closed in on this stuff.
Uh, and when we finally got it, you know, with this tremendous sense of having attained the grail and having
finally this was going to do it, this was going to be the one, then we took this stuff and my God it turned us
every way but loose. Your heart feels like it's pounding its way out of the front of your chest.
Uh, you vomit, uh, you have tremoring of the limbs, on and on and on.
So, we go through this, live through it, wash off in the river and go looking for the shaman
to lodge a complaint.
And, uh, and he says, yeah, well, it's hard to get used to.
And, uh, so then when we get it back home to the lab and do the high pressure gas chromatography
and all the rest of it and see what's really there, you see that the genetic component of
the virola trees from which this resin is extracted is, it's a mess. It's too many tryptamines.
DMT, DET, 5-monomethyl tryptamine, 5-MAO DMT and several other cardio-active tryptamines.
It looked like they'd swept the floor of an endochemist's lab to put together the components of this plant.
You don't want this. You don't, because you're, it's like taking ten drugs at once.
You know, it's all running together. You can't tell whether you're Agnes or Angus.
What you want is a DMT source where when you put it in the grass, in the, uh, grass chromatograph,
no, in the, uh, gas chromatograph, you get one spike, that's NM dimethyl tryptamine,
and all the rest is cellulose, a little DNA, and that's all, some minerals and salt.
Uh, if, if you don't have a clean source, then, you know, it's contaminated.
So even that legendary shamanic hallucinogen, uh, when actually put to the, to the, uh, use test,
wasn't able to, to pass it. Yeah.
Yes, uh, going back to the DMT and, uh, mushroom psilocybin, um, you were talking about, uh,
taking psilocybin and, and then doing breath control is indistinguishable from a DMT trip.
If you do it correctly, you can coax it. Um, since this is a learning tree,
and you're sort of in front there, maybe you can give us an idea of what it's like to coax five grams into,
uh, I mean, I'm sure you won't be able to give us all the information,
but maybe you can sort of enlighten us a little bit, and we can sort of work in that direction.
At least I can work in that direction.
Oh, you mean, how do you get at the peak of a psilocybin trip to deliver you into DMT land?
Yes, because sometimes I get a little jealous hearing you talk about the DMT trip.
And I sit here and say, uh, you know, I want to find that stuff, and, you know, anyway, so...
Well, the thing is, psilocybin will take you there if you have the courage and the stamina
to tolerate the duration of the psilocybin revelation.
Thank you.
So, first of all, you take a heroic dose, five, six, seven grams.
Then, when you're peaking, uh, well, you smoke cannabis.
Then, you, you sit in silent darkness, alone, because I think the presence of other people
always pins you to the surface with this stuff.
Right.
I mean, you don't need somebody else.
No matter if they're talking or not, they can just be in the room and you're aware of them.
No, just sitting there, then this is a different thing.
Yeah.
Breathing, exhaling, breathing, exhaling.
And then, you form an intention for it to approach you.
I mean, you say...
I can feel it.
I mean, it's almost a, it's a neighborhood.
It's a pharmacological neighborhood.
And, and you know how you may go to Little Italy, but there are no Italians on the street.
But, if you start, uh, you know, you have to somehow shake them out of the nest.
And, you simply ask for them to appear.
I always hark back to that episode of I Love Lucy, where she and Ethel are discussing how
to contact the space people.
And, Lucy tells Ethel, she says, well, I just say, come in, little green men.
And, you know, yeah, it's a big laugh now, but try it on 25 milligrams of silver carbon.
Yeah.
Well, the they of the DMT thing is, uh, these entities which you contact, although they may
turn out to be toys created by someone unseen, who is in fact in charge of this hyper-dimensional
maternity ward.
But these toys, if that's what they are, are essentially teaching machines of some sort.
They're trying to get you to perform this linguistic activity.
As far as the UFO thing is concerned, I think it's, uh, well, it sort of requires some backgrounding.
I think that, uh, there's something fundamentally wrong with our understanding of the world.
Fundamentally wrong.
And what it is, is that we believe that the past creates the present.
That the present is the, is the sum total of actions and situations that exist in the past.
In other words, we believe that the horse pushes the cart.
The horse doesn't push the cart.
The cart is pulled.
There is an attractor in the future.
There is actually, uh, I think of history as a bowl.
Down these slopes, we are making our way.
Well, since we are, uh, in a, in a situation where conservation of energy is important,
where are we all going to end up?
The bottom of the bowl, obviously.
That, if you release a marble up on the rim, it's going to make its way down the bowl,
to the, what's called the dwell point.
The place where, uh, the energy requirements are such that the forward momentum of, of the falling ball,
is satisfied by meeting the resistance of the bottom of the bowl.
History is like this.
We are being pulled forward by an attractor.
It has somehow come into the human world and has pulled us out of animal organization.
If this attractor were not present, we would still probably be cheerfully slinging excrement around in the canopy of some jungle tree.
But because of the attractor, we have been pulled into social organization, technology, language, community, so forth and so on.
And, um, mystics and seers and visionaries are people who have a relationship to this attractor that is different from the rest of us.
They can, uh, glimpse, aspects of this thing.
And, when I think of it this way, I, I always think of those jewels, the, the mirrored ball that they hang over the bar in a disco.
And then they spin it and it throws reflections of light all over the room from the ambient lighting.
Well, history is like this.
Uh, the attractor at the end of time, which is below the event horizon of the present, and thus impossible to anticipate its true form.
Uh, sends back through time distorted reflections of itself.
Which, if you are struck by one of these distorted reflections, well then you begin to preach and cure.
And local conditions may damp your activity.
And then you're what's called a nut.
But if, in fact, local conditions support your activity, so that you become a mean spreader, then you're suddenly a messiah, a teacher, a Buddha, a Christ, a Mohammed.
That's what these people were.
They were people who were, for reasons mysterious to themselves, I'm sure, in a relationship of resonance with the transcendental object, such that they, in a sense, embodied it.
Well, um, in our own era, because of technology, and Jung was on to this, when he wrote his book in 1948, called Flying Saucers, a Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky.
He said, the Flying Saucer is an image of the Self that haunts the skies of Earth as a compensatory effect to our alienation.
Well, I think that that's exactly what's going on, except that he didn't realize how nuts and bolts that explanation was.
The UFO is a mirage being cast backward into time by the transcendental object at the end of time.
And that's why it has such a hair-raising aura of weirdness about it.
It isn't a ship from another star system.
I mean, how could anyone reasonably entertain that idea, given the distances in time and what you find when you get here?
I mean, who would make that trip who had any reasonable way to spend their time?
It's a compensatory image that haunts time, because time is a kind of hologram.
Time is a fractal.
And fractal means that the same pattern is embedded again and again in a relationship of self-similarity.
So, because the transcendental object exists somewhere ahead of us in history,
there must necessarily be a tiny part of it somewhere nearby.
And this is what the UFO is, I think.
And this is why nobody's ever going to show you a chunk of it,
and they're never going to put an extraterrestrial on network television,
because it isn't that kind of a creature.
It's a compensatory image from the end of time.
This leads me to an aspect of what I very briefly and obliquely indicated this morning,
which was when I was talking about how we're halfway through history,
but the rest of it has to happen in only 30 years.
I think that we're moving towards something called concrescence.
This isn't my word, it's Alfred North Whitehead's word.
I think you can tell what it means.
It means everything melts together into one thing.
I think that from the very birth of the universe,
this is bigger than the human species,
bigger than the life of the earth.
From the very first moments of the universe's existence,
it has been itself under the domain,
under the influence of an attractor.
And this attractor is pulling everything into tighter and tighter states of self-reflective resonance.
And that now we are very close to this concrescent event.
And that, in fact, human history, I called it the shock wave of eschatology.
But I didn't talk much about what eschatology is.
Because, well, first of all, it lies below the event horizon of the present historical epoch.
But it won't always.
It could rise above the horizon at any time.
You know, 2000, 1996, you name it.
But we have been too long under the spell of the idea that only the past creates the present.
The present is actually largely created by appetite for the future.
And this would seem to me a highly improbable idea
had I not taken psychedelics
and gotten this hyperdimensional view of the system that we're living in.
And then you can see that, yes, history is not a random walk.
It's not a series of undirected random fluctuations.
History is a process of fractal self-complexification
that builds on whatever it has achieved.
And so upon the complexity of animal organization
is laying the complexity of human language.
Upon the complexity of human language
is laid the complexity of symbolic signification of that language, i.e. writing.
Upon writing is laid electronic technology, and so forth and so on.
So we are, in a sense, in the act of giving birth to or creating the object of our theology,
which is a kind of god or goddess, depending on, you know, how you slide into it, how you feel about it.
And the UFO is simply an indicator that we are so close now to encountering the contrescent transcendental object
that it's able to haunt the skies of earth and the imaginations of people who live in trailer parks.
This is, you know, you have to remember that history itself is a violation of the laws of nature.
And history and its consequences are all around us.
We don't have to argue about whether is history happening.
I mean, if obviously it's happening, we're embedded, laid in it.
But it's caused by the fact that ordinary nature, the nature of glaciers, chipmunks, ant hills, termites,
termite nests and whale pods, has come, at least in the case of our species,
under the influence of something which is literally fastened onto us
and is now recreating us in its image.
You know, it's taking a monkey body and it's saying, you know,
stand it up, slide the eyes around to the front, oppose the thumb, shed the hair, enlarge the brain,
put ideas into the brain, so forth and so on.
I mean, we are being recast as something unimaginable to the rest of nature.
And we are now fairly close to figuring out what this is.
This is why we are able to talk about human-machine symbiosis, virtual reality,
downloading ourselves to the size of viruses in a nanotechnological domain,
stuff like that.
Could you say that the flap is taken with that to do with contact to you and the president of the nation,
or what's the name of Harvard, but I've had to contact you there in the football,
a number of people who work with who claim to have fertilization?
Yeah, I agree with your idea that it's an index of the depth of compressence,
though muddied by shrewd public relations types who are making a living off this stuff.
I think the crop circles are a more honest indication of how close we are to the transcendental body.
I interviewed the person you mentioned at Harvard for a film we did in Prague a few months ago,
and I...
His name was?
I'm avoiding it.
And I had to ask him halfway through the interview, I said,
well, do you detect anything in your own psychological makeup which makes you unfit to be doing this work?
That was after he told me that he'd interviewed 500 women who had had fetuses removed from their bodies by space people,
and he said, you know, the amazing thing about this is there are no physical scars at all.
And I said, well, what does this suggest to you?
And he said, advanced surgical techniques of which we have no knowledge.
And I'm just, my craft detector went AWOL on that answer.
The rules of evidence are not in suspension for the new age.
And, you know, people who recall their lifetime as the barber of Nefertiti or whatever have serious...
problem with what I call the rules of evidence
they don't seem to have ever heard
of Occam's Razor
which you study logic for 10 minutes
and they tell you about Occam's Razor
do you all know what this is?
it's a simple idea
keep it next to you
hypotheses should not be multiplied
without necessity
and there are a lot of unnecessary hypotheses
running around
especially in the new age domain
I would study the impregnation effect
more as an example of mass hysteria
because being in the position that I am in
supposedly a revered teacher
and a person of great insight
and all this hoopla and trapola
you occasionally get invited to dinner
with the movers and shakers
and then you hear what's said when not on stage
and I have to tell you
there's enough cynicism
to satisfy a renaissance pope
among these people
they are taking the rest of us
for a ride in many cases
and I have to tell you
well Danny and I last night
were discussing like what
this transcendental object
we were enumerating a list of things
that it could possibly be
and as you say
the casted reflection
and so forth
how is it that
say for example
the ayahuasqueros
in Pablo Amarengo's drawings
there's a UFO motif
in one of his drawings
what is that?
you mean do they see UFOs?
what are they
what is it that they see?
because they specifically
identify this motif
as separate from the rest of the drawings
in one of Shaman's drum magazines
well I'm giving the UFO
a slightly different status
than this stuff I'm dumping on
I think the UFO is real
or that there is a real phenomenon
the problem is
what is the phenomenon?
and it's why someone
who sees a spinning disc in the sky
assumes then an entire theology
about friendly extraterrestrials
coming to help us out
why do they assume that?
what they've seen is a spinning disc in the sky
for crying out loud
maybe what they saw was a spinning disc in the sky
not
there are two phenomenon here
which are entangled inextricably
and unfortunately for the intellectually honest
there's the UFO
who knows what that is
and then there's the UFO community
and the UFO community
is just fraught with the most crack-brained
peculiar
self-serving
unstable
mush-minded group of people
you would ever hope to get together
in one place
I mean it's like a magnet for screwballs
I mean people who like to wear diamond tiaras
and give themselves funny names
and it has absolutely nothing to do
with the tremendously fascinating
and ambiguous phenomenon
of strange things seen in the sky
I mean I went through this
I'm not talking as an outsider
I've seen
I had a UFO encounter
that was
a deeper encounter
than most of the people
who run around pontificating about UFOs
and I will
at the risk of boring you yet again
with this story
tell the story
I was in the Amazon
I was
having all these
revelations
about
time
and one thing
and another
and I noticed
a place
in the sky
where there was
a spectrogrammatic
diffraction
of some sort
it wasn't a rainbow
it was a colored smudge
in the sky
and
I was
lightly
but continually
intoxicated
on mushrooms
during this period
and
it said
watch there
it was in the southwest
and I really didn't need to be told
but it said
watch there
so I sat up one night
all night
on this rock
by a lake
watching the southwest
and
around 4.30 in the morning
with
essentially a perfectly clear sky
except that
off the Amazon jungle
local
mist
rises
and so about a mile and a half
away from me
on the horizon
was a line
of what looked to me
like a little fog bank
and
as light
broke over
this situation
I
noticed
I couldn't tell
whether it had
been doing this
or it began
doing it
as
things got lighter
but I noticed
that this fog bank
was
rolling
in place
like a pencil
rolled between your fingers
which I had never seen
a fog
do that
I thought
what a strange
thing
and as I watched it
stretched out
across the horizon
it gently broke
into four equal sized
pieces
so now I'm looking
at four
gray
lenticular
clouds
spaced out
along the horizon
about a mile and a half
away from me
across this lake
so I'm watching
and I'm getting
eager
and I'm
and I'm getting
excited
and as I watch
these four
lenticular clouds
two and two
merge
now I'm looking
at two
denser
grayer
dark gray
darker than
storm clouds
these two
things
on the horizon
and as I watch
the four
became two
the two
become one
and
at that point
faintly
I could hear
the
hui hui hui
sound of 1950s
science fiction
ufos
Allah
the day the earth
stood still
they came from
outer space
so forth and so on
and I see
my god
this thing is
starting toward me
and the sound
is getting louder
and at that point
there was like
a complete
conversion
in an instant
and my whole
body
went cold
and I
realized
they're coming
for me
this is it
you know
prepare to be
beamed up
Scotty
and I
everybody was
asleep
in a hut
about 70
miles
70 feet
up this
mud
embankment
I was down
by the river
and the lake
and I
said
and it
flashed in my
mind
I have to
get a witness
there must
be a witness
and I
looked
I looked
over my
shoulder
at the
mud
bank
the thing
was coming
at me
I half
stood up
my knees
were so
weak
I sat
back down
and I
just prepared
to depart
this planet
this dimension
and as it
came
I could see
it
and it was
getting closer
and closer
I could see
rivets on the
underside
I could see
the running
lights
and as it
got closer
and closer
I realized
that what I
was looking
at was
the end
cap of a
1932 Hoover
vacuum cleaner
the very
end cap
that George
Adamski
had suspended
on a piece
of nylon
thread in
his garage
and photographed
with his
brownie
instamatic
to produce
the famous
UFO photograph
of the UFO
with the three
balls on the
underside
and the ribbing
going around
right
that photograph
has been
utterly
debunked
computer analysis
of it by
modern techniques
it's
bullshit
and there
it was
40 feet
in diameter
coming after
me across
the Amazon
treetops
well
then
and I
just went
bananas
at that point
and then
it passed
over
not more than
200 feet
above my head
turning slowly
I could see
the three
balls
I could see
the everything
I could see
it
and I
understood
then
that what
it was
was
it was
more shocking
than a real
UFO
because it
had its
disconfirmation
built into
it
you know
we don't
print stories
like that
we're interested
in real UFOs
did it
depart information
to you
some sort
because apparently
you've been
knighted
the person
to speak
about mushrooms
in such a way
that you're
actually
and some people
do say that
that Terence McKinnon
may be an alien
being himself
incarnate
well only people
who are in
litigation
with me
I think
what it was
telling me
it was a
perfect
zen lesson
it was
saying
don't
believe in
UFOs
they're the
end caps
of 1932
Hoover
vacuum cleaners
expand to
40 feet in
diameter
and flying
through your
mind
so you have
to question
everything
yeah
it's saying
you know
you can't
replace
one
one stupid
hypothesis
there aren't
UFOs
with another
stupid
hypothesis
we're being
visited by
benevolent
creatures
from another
world
have to
get a little
more depth
here
if you want
to be the
alien
ambassador
well the crop
circles
I'm now
less sure
about the
crop circles
what I
liked about
them was
that each
that they
appeared at
a certain
point in
time and
then each
year there
were more
of them
and I
figured that
we could
take how
many there
are each
year and
draw a
curve and
reach a
conclusion about
how far
away in the
future the
source of
them was
because if
they are
it's almost
as though
the UFO
sea leaves
no trace
I mean the
burn marks
on the
ground but
already you're
into dubiousness
because who
has ever seen
these burn
marks
only the
editors of
these UFO
magazines and
their willing
psychophants
I mean you
and I have
not seen
these burn
marks we've
seen photographs
of funny
stuff on the
ground and
we're told
that's it
the crop
circle leaves
a trace that
is enduring
but the
problem there
the problem I
have with the
crop circles
and it's odd
how you never
hear this
discussed is
that nobody
has ever seen
one come
into existence
we get
before and
we get
after but
how come
we never
get during
do they
appear
instantly
if they
appear
instantly
that would
be pretty
convincing
just glance
it's not
there
glance
it's there
and we
figure
yeah
there's
a
I know he's
doing a lot
of the research
he's calling
Andrew
doing a lot
of research
on this
and I've
got a
recording
and this
is basically
how he
described it
they were
waiting
and setting
up to
in this
area to
you know
try and
record some
of this
going on
and it's
just opening
up
and all of a
sudden
you know
the recorders
were running
and all of a
sudden they
all stand up
into this
incredibly
strange
powerful
sounding
buzz
of some
kind
that comes
from far
away
just comes
zooming up
and comes
past them
over this
little rise
and it
takes them
all of maybe
you know
45 seconds
or a minute
to get to the
top of the
rise
and they're
on the other
side of the
rise
proper
but it
wasn't
there
when it
started
setting up
so apparently
you know
and Richard
Hochman talks
about this
too
don't get
me started
don't get
me started
bad works
of art
on a
scale
of miles
are not
what we
should expect
from
intelligent
visitors
from the
stars
here's
what I
let me
isn't it
a little
weird
let's
I mean
first of all
let me say
I'm open
minded
about
crop
circles
but let's
also
not
be
silly
isn't it
a little
peculiar
that this
phenomenon
appears
within
driving
distance
of the
apartments
of the
people
most likely
to
chronicle
and proclaim
it
as
a
manifestation
of
telluric
energy
from another
dimension
in other
words
what if
it had
been
happening
in Turkmenistan
then you
would have
something
but then
how would
John
Michelle
and Colin
Andrews
and all
these people
have been
able to
make a
living
off of
it
talking
southern
England
here
the place
is littered
with RAF
bases
nuclear
weapons
depots
intercontinental
missile delivery
systems
so forth
and so on
and we're asked
to believe
that the
ministry of
defense
is utterly
unconcerned
about the
fact that the
airspace of
Great Britain
is being
violated
night after
night by a
mysterious
agency that
if it can
snap the
stem of
a wheat
stock
could throw
the switch
on an
electrical
device
of some
sort
the British
establishment
is utterly
unconcerned
by the
crop
circles
well but
wherever it's
coming from
if you had a
nuclear weapons
depot I
think you
would be
Johnny at
the raffle
to find out
what's going
on
didn't you
read like
last year
the year
before
like these
two guys
came forward
and said
that they
perpetrated
a hoax
right and
all that did
was muddy
the waters
well it did
one good
thing
it finished
the it
can't be
done by
human
beings
position
we now
know
you know
Rupert
and all
these people
Rupert
believe it
or not
is the
plant
pathologist
who serves
on the
board
of the
seriologist
which is
the main
publication
that is
booming
this
they held
a contest
in July
where
you paid
50 pounds
you were
assigned
a five
acre plot
you had
from 10
at night
until 4
in the
morning
there were
I think
16 entries
everybody
was given
the same
design
and at
dawn
judges
helicoptered
over the
sites
and then
made the
ground
inspection
and
three
of the
contestants
produced crop
circles
that were
indistinguishable
from the real
thing
beautiful
crop circles
and I'm
getting this
from believers
you know
this is what
Rupert
reluctantly
informed me
I think
that
and you know
one theory
is that it's a
particle beam
weapon
being tested
from space
but tested
750 times
in the last
18 months
in the same
small part
of England
I don't
know
we tried
I came up
with two
theories
that do
not require
telluric
intervention
or friendly
extraterrestrials
first theory
a whole lot
of people
first of all
it's killed
the UFO
industry
in England
you can't
give away
UFO sightings
at this
point
so all
of these
people
you know
it all
is happening
near
Glastonbury
and down
where the
old
earthworks
are
it's occurring
in an area
where there is
the largest
concentration
of people
likely to
hail it
as a
paranormal
phenomenon
on the
surface
of the
earth
and
they have
done so
they have
made outrageous
statements
like
no human
being
could do
this
it's
impossible
to
explain
this
so forth
and so on
well
now imagine
that something
like MI5
you know
what that
is
the English
CIA
looks at
the rise
of paganism
in Britain
you know
earthworks
channeling
all of this
stuff
and says
this
threatens
church
and state
we need
to create
a disinformation
situation
let's
lure
these people
out
onto a
limb
way out
onto a
limb
and then
let's
cut the
limb off
so what you
do
is you
create
this
pseudo
paranormal
phenomenon
you get
John Mitchell
Colin Andrews
all these
people
to proclaim
its
weirdness
and then
you reveal
that it's
easily
duplicated
that's one
theory
in other words
the British
establishment
is undercutting
paganism
by luring
these people
into saying
too much
but that's not
my favorite
theory
that's a good
one
probably
what's your
favorite
oh my favorite
theory is
much better
because the
question is
how do you
make these
things
when you
actually go
to the
crop circles
what do
you see
this is a
Sherlock Holmes
type deal
you know
Sherlock Holmes
could handle
the crop
circles
with his arm
tied behind
his hand
I think
when you go
to the
crop circles
here it
is
the crop
circle
mysterious
unearthly
portending
who knows
what
and what else
is there
well the
press
and the
sightseers
and
yourself
and an
extraordinary
number
of Japanese
tourists
now
you're getting
close
these
the Japanese
press
has followed
the crop
circle
phenomenon
more avidly
than any
other press
in the world
outside of
England
every new
crop circle
appears
photographs
and discussion
it is
huge
in Japan
Japan
they're obsessed
with this
stuff
I think
that what
might be
going on
this is
certainly
MITI is
it's the
ministry of
trade and
industry
it's this
enormous
organization
in Japan
which coordinates
technological
development
and marketing
it's what
we're talking
about
when we say
Japan
incorporated
I think
that
this is a
MITI
research
project
and that
these
Japanese
tourists
which are
ever present
at these
sites
some of
them
are drawn
from a
centuries old
tradition
of ninja
stem
snappers
who
at a
given
signal
are able
to
hurl away
their
Nikons
rush into
the corn
and in the
matter of
a few minutes
create these
things
then put
their cameras
back on
and their
sunglasses
back on
and take
up their
deep cover
as Japanese
tourists
now why
would MITI
do such
a thing
what's in
it for
them
it's a
semiotics
project
they are
studying the
impact of
symbols
on the
western
mind
the
closest
thing to
these
crop
circles
if you
look at
a complete
encyclopedia
of them
are the
pottery
marks
made by
master
potters
in
medieval
Japan
on
their
ceramics
almost
all
of
the
crop
circles
except
the
frivolous
ones
like
for
instance
how
about
the
fact
that
the
symbol
of
the
seriologist
magazine
was
done
in
wrong
I
grappled
with
it
like
everybody
else
for
six
months
but
the
density
of
flakiness
around
it
is
incredible
and the
number
of
people
whose
private
agendas
are being
served
by this
thing
I
mean if it were
happening
north of
Hudson Bay
there'd be no
money in it
you have to be able to drive there from central London and for it in order for it to work
well then people always say well but it's happening all over the world my good man haven't you heard
show me
it's not happening all over the world
some clumsy attempts appeared in Kentucky
and you know there was something in Germany
and so forth and so on
but in the
it's really
hair raising to be among these people
and to see how uncommitted
to
finding out what it is
they are
and how totally committed they are to preserving it from rational inspection
they don't want to talk about
you know
any alternative other than whatever the pet theory of the week is
about how it's happening
now I see it as
part of the ingression into novelty
things are going to get weirder and weirder
there's no doubt about that
but it doesn't mean that there is a conscious extraterrestrial agency
I mean I find it pretty weird that there are 500 women who think they have
fetuses removed from their bodies by extraterrestrials
that's so weird
that suggesting that it's true
seems a little like overkill to me
I mean what is going on that would make a woman do that sort of thing
there's always
if you're a careful observer of one of these things
there's always
Jacques Vallée wrote about this
a residuum of absurdity
that is suppressed by the witness
because the witness knows that if they told the whole story
their story is not credible
this is called you know the built-in absurdity
of these paranormal things
and when somebody tells you a story about a UFO encounter
that does not have this element of self-contradicting absurdity in it
they're manipulating the evidence to make it seem more woo woo woo
I think
and I'm not
I'm not a rationalist
except
well
I've seen things that violated the laws of physics
I believe the laws of physics can be violated
I believe there may well be extraterrestrials somewhere in the universe
do you believe the Voynich manuscripts may have something to do with their
some type of alien intelligence
no I think the Voynich manuscript is a solved problem
and that this guy Leo Levertov's translation is correct
found was you know
it was a catharite manual for the dying
that's much more exciting
than trying to claim it as a book from another dimension
because now we gain an insight into what catharism was really about
I think there is a residuum of the irrational and the paranormal
but these things like flying saucers and Atlantis and the crop circles
they're like viruses upon the healthy body of language
you know
there's something wrong with language and communication
because it's never as you imagine it's going to be
and people are being sold a phenomenon that if they were to go
they would discover that aspects of it were suppressed or misrepresented
the people who are dealing with the crop circles are having a great time
it's the longest drinking party on record in that part of England
I guess I should say this
because I know it's a bummer to have your favorite weird thing dumped on
but my technique which I recommend to you
is
don't believe anything
if you believe in something
you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite
therefore you have given up a portion of your freedom
and freedom is the dearest thing we've got
you don't have to believe anything
you can just provisionally work your way through stuff
and then probe the edges
the edges will satisfy
I think that the proper way to contact the other
is with hard-headed rationalism exercised under weird conditions
I went to India
visited some of these yoga people and accomplished saints
I'm telling you, for my money, it was hokum
it was, there was an ulterior agenda
either having the wish to relieve you of your cash
or to violate some body cavity
that was the ulterior agenda
when I went to the Amazon
with the same
in the form
as
attitude of skepticism and talked to the shamans there. They delivered the goods. So you just investigate these things, and the key question is, what can you show me? If they've got it, they can show it.
There's no mumbo-jumbo around the real thing. But if they say, oh, well, you know, the tape recordings miraculously erased themselves last night, or we'll show you, but you have to sweep up around the ashram for a dozen years to prove you're worthy, or, you know, you are not worthy.
That's the one where you head for the door. You are not worthy. The real thing is the real thing, for crying out loud. It can be displayed. It doesn't require this weird, fuzzy relationship of worth and insight and so forth and so on.
And I, and that's how I got to psychedelics. Psychedelics work. If you think that I'm bullshitting you, go home and take five grams of mushrooms in silent darkness, and then we'll talk.
That's the sine qua non. But, and it'll work on demand. I'm not saying, and wait 40 years, or purify yourself, or fix, get your aura stitched up, or any of the rest of it. It'll work. It'll blow your mind to shreds. It's real.
This other stuff is just, you know, all these gurus. They need to find honest work. They need to join the rest of us in contemplating the mystery of reality. They don't know what they're talking about.
If they knew what they were talking about, they wouldn't have to shuffle the deck when you're out of the room. And that's what's going on.
Somebody must be outraged and insulted and terribly disappointed. Yeah.
Yeah. Getting back to the DMT.
Do you have the same experience each time you take it under similar conditions? Do other people report the same things, the same teaching machines, and how does it relate to near-death experience?
I'm happy. In order. Yes, I do have the same experience each time I take it.
Do they say, nice to see you again?
They say, you've sent so many, but you come so rarely.
And then, the more interesting question, do other people see it?
Do you get a connection?
Yeah, do I get a connection?
Do other people see it?
What I've thought about this question a lot, because it's a question of communication.
If they saw it, could they tell me?
If they told me in their language, would I understand what they were telling me?
And what I've decided is that the experience is an archetype.
It's the archetype of the circus.
Why?
Don't ask me why.
I don't know why.
But, for instance, I've listened to many, many people talk about their DMT experiences, and inevitably, this is the box into which it will fit.
I gave it to a woman once up in Washington, an anthropologist.
It was a sub-threshold dose, because she coughed.
I could tell she didn't get it.
And when she came down, she said, it was the saddest carnival I've ever been to.
She said, there were no, the rides weren't open.
The tents were shuttered, and there were little gum papers blowing between the things, the stands.
The circus is an interesting archetype, because it has a number of facets.
First of all, you have the three central ring under the big top, that's the dome.
And in the central ring, there's light, and color, and clowns.
Remember that Maria Sabina called the mushrooms the little clowns.
And these clowns, the circus is for children.
And when you take DMT, one of the things I didn't mention in my description of it,
is you have a peculiar impression of your own body geometry.
Your head seems to be very large in relationship to your torso.
You are, in fact, an infant, in some sense.
You become a child.
This leads to thinking about the 52nd fragment of Heraclysis, which says,
The Aeon is a child that play with colored balls.
Nobody knows what this saying means, but it's persisted for about 3,000 years.
So it must mean something.
But outside the three rings, there's another aspect to the circus.
It is spun into Eros, because above the center ring, and up near the top of the dome,
is the beautiful woman with long blonde hair, and the tiny skimpy spangled costume.
And when you look at that narrative-type dream, and the alarm rings,
and by the time your feet hit the floor and you stagger into the shower, it's gone.
It's not partially gone.
It's all gone.
And all you can say is, I was having this amazing dream.
I have no idea what it was.
The DMT thing can leave you just that quickly.
And also, and I think this has a bearing on this,
they have studied the production of DMT in normal metabolism,
and it peaks in normal human beings between 3 and 4 a.m.
This is when the deep dreaming is going on.
This is when the intense REM states are being experienced.
So I think that where the dead and the living get together is in the dream time.
Australian Aborigines have been trying to tell us this for as long as we would listen.
And also, a lot of people, it's possible to repress it very, very quickly.
I think, for instance, I've seen people,
one way you can tell if someone has really gotten a good DMT trip
is they lay down, they become very still,
but if you look closely at their face with their eyes closed,
you can see that their eyes are moving wildly underneath their closed eyelids.
This is because they're in REM state,
and they are watching whatever it is they're seeing.
They are looking at it.
I remember giving DMT to a person years and years ago,
a person who might have been a candidate for the description psychologically fragile.
And it was clear that she got it because she was a hash smoker
and she took three or four enormous hits,
laid down, her eyes were wildly rotating around in her head.
And when she came out of it, she said,
what was it?
She said, it was nothing.
I don't remember anything.
I don't remember anything at all.
And furthermore, I don't think I want to have anything more to do with it.
And didn't.
Well, I think that this is something that it only shows as much of it as you can stand.
And some of us cannot stand much at all.
This occurs with psilocybin as well.
I've had experiences with psilocybin where I've said to it after hours of hallucinations
of one sort and another, I finally say,
you know, what I'm really interested in is your true essence.
Can you show me what you are for yourself rather than for me?
What are you for yourself?
Well, then it's just like a cold wind blows through
and black velvet curtains begin to rise.
And after 30 seconds of this, you just say,
that's enough of what you are for yourself.
Because you can tell it's headed in a direction you can't tolerate at all.
You can't stand.
I have a friend who said of psilocybin, he said,
and he said, my goal every time I take it is to stand more of what it really is.
And this is why it's incredibly kind to beginners.
Beginners basically need have no fear if they will regulate the dose reasonably
because it wants to recruit you.
And so it says, you know, here it is, whatever you wanted,
aliens, outer space, elves, erotic imagery, here it is.
Doesn't this feel safe?
See, we're not so bad.
We're your friends.
We're not like all the others.
Come back soon.
It's after you gain familiarity with it, where it says,
you know, there are aspects to me that we've never really talked about.
Hell yeah?
Like what?
Like this.
No.
No, no.
Let's go back to the Disney loop.
How close is the DMT that you smoke compared to the brain DMT that we all have running through?
Is there a difference, like NN-dimethyltryptamine and what's in our brain?
No, no.
It's the same thing.
Exactly the same.
It's the same thing.
DMT occurs in two forms, the salt and the hydrochloride.
And both forms occur, well, no, I'm not sure that both forms occur in metabolism,
but the only difference is that one is water-soluble and the other isn't.
So, basically, then again, we are holding, then, I mean, if DMT is illegal,
then what we have in our brain running through us is considered illegal.
Yeah, we are potentially bustable.
You know, in light of what I said, one of the most interesting frontiers
that the New Age has brought forward that I think bears more serious study
than the channelings of Amenhotep's barber and all that,
is lucid dreaming.
Yeah.
Lucid dreaming, if it, I don't know whether those people,
I don't know those people personally, I don't know what their motivation is,
but if it's true that you can take control of the dream state,
then this would be something worth spending even a lot of time on,
because the dream state is more like the tryptamine geography than anything else.
One of the most fascinating things about DMT that should certainly be mentioned,
as long as we're exhausting ourselves on this subject,
is once you've had DMT, once you've smoked it and this experience has occurred,
you can have a dream, years later, in which you're with a bunch of people
and something's going on and you enter the atrium of the Hotel California
and you take a floor to the basement and then you're in a room with people
and someone whips out a little glass pipe and you smoke it and it happens.
It doesn't sort of happen. It happens. A hundred percent.
That means that's exciting data, because that means that we have the wherewithal
to trigger this experience in ourselves on the natch, at least while we're asleep.
And I presume that with sufficient patience and subtlety and biofeedback equipment,
and I don't know what you would take, but if you spend a million dollars,
you could probably deliver it on time, we can trigger this most intense
of all hallucinogenic ecstasies, most boundary dissolving
of all possible human experiences on the natch.
But we have to somehow find our way to the button.
And apparently, in normal waking consciousness, it isn't there.
I spent a lot of time, I mean, I didn't mean to be so flip about the UFOs.
I spent years trying to think about the UFOs and studied all the theories.
One that I still may be part of the truth is maybe it is so that we generate and sequester DMT somewhere in our brain,
and under unusual situations, this sequester DMT can suddenly be dumped into the brain fluid or into the bloodstream,
and then you have a DMT experience or some kind of quasi DMT-like experience.
Because I read an interesting paper a few years ago, I can't remember the name of the guy who wrote it,
was an anthropological paper, it was called The Felt Presence in Unusual Environments.
And it talked about how it is apparently a basic trait of human beings to, when in the wilderness,
especially unfamiliar wilderness, people sense something there.
The Felt Presence in Unusual Environments.
Well, it may be that, now, imagine if you're in the wilderness,
in a situation not entirely familiar to you, so that you're edging up toward this Felt Presence thing,
and suddenly DMT stored in your brain is for some reason, perhaps a pathological reason that it shouldn't happen,
but it's shunted into your brain.
Well, now, suddenly, you feel there's something here, there's someone here, there's someone with me,
the hair on the back of your neck stands up,
and then, you see, coming toward you, a disturbance in your perceptual field.
Now, you're supposed to be alone.
There isn't supposed to be a disturbance in your perceptual input.
But there is, you are alarmed.
It may be dangerous.
You must identify what this is.
Well, every one of us carries around inside us a cultural inventory of what weird events might possibly be.
If you're a medieval peasant farming the hills of Tuscany, and this happens,
you immediately conclude that it's the Virgin, or it's an angel.
And, lo and behold, as it comes closer, it clothes itself in heavenly raiment.
And it is the Virgin.
And so you are encountering the Virgin.
Well, now, what if you're a Southern California steeped in the religious faiths of Malibu,
and this happens to you?
You will conclude,
My God, it's a UFO!
I mean, haven't you been with people who every airplane that flies over,
they're willing to proclaim is an extraterrestrial intervention?
It's because this explanation lies very close to the surface.
When we don't know what something is, we want to know.
We want to English it.
We want to name it.
And we grasp the nearest thing at hand.
It's very important to avoid this reflex in order to see,
what is it really?
What is it really?
Let it be what it is.
Yeah?
Four small points.
On that one, I noticed, I did a book in 73 on the flat book.
And I interviewed perhaps 500 people.
And in a large number, they start with a traditional poetic,
it's called negative parallelism,
where you identify, negate, identify, negate.
It looked like a low-flying plane.
No, it was too low.
It looked like a semi with its out-of-order lights on.
And only as the third or fourth identification,
which is traditional to classic tropes of the 13th century,
would they identify as a goddess UFO.
Point one.
Another one, the strangest one,
was an old lady in Texas.
And I said, how did you know it was a UFO?
And she said, you're taking that UFO print on the undercast.
I like that.
The next one was a judge.
I went down to the fence to Google it,
the Hickson and Parker.
Famous case.
I've got to see them again,
because I want to see how they've done over there.
Very interesting.
And the judge and clerk of courts and two other people
were riding home during that period.
And two of them in the car saw a UFO
and the others couldn't see it.
So let's say one saw it because of a PMT drop at some point.
Another was his clerk and decided he had her see it.
And the other two were just strange.
Last point.
There's a guy called Orfeo Angolucci,
who was an early contactee,
who gave me a useful handle on kind of
talking about working the edges.
He was out and he met the captain of the ship
and the ship's captain said during the interview,
would you go and get me a bottle of soda pop?
And then they went on with their event.
So I began looking for what I called the soda pop factor.
You know, that's where there was an element
or more than one element,
absolutely unrelated to the story.
That was somehow a touch of human...
An intrusion.
Yes, an intrusion.
Well, let me say one thing about it.
You don't even have to be cynical
to the point of believing in the Pascadula situation
that the second guy saw the UFO because he was the clerk.
These drug molecules have resonant rings.
They are aromatics.
It may be that there's a pheromone thing happening here
and that a state of mind can be transferred
from one person to another through body odor.
This may be how the states of telepathy are achieved on psilocybin.
Correct.
Because you do smell funny.
And this smell may be more than funny.
It may be carrying information.
There's a very interesting phenomenon that is well documented called allophrenia.
Do you all know what allophrenia is?
Allophrenia is when a friend of yours gets put in the hospital for schizophrenia
and you being a good Samaritan decide to take them a box of candy
and during the visit to your friend you behave so bizarrely
that you don't get to leave the hospital.
Allophrenia.
Schizophrenic behavior on the part of non-schizophrenics
in the presence of schizophrenics.
I've experienced this.
I had a friend, I visited him in the hospital
and the way, here's how it works, it's really interesting.
I visited my friend in the hospital.
He was nutty as a fruitcake.
But he was my friend and he was talking 90 to nothing
so I wanted to communicate with him.
So instead of saying to every single statement he made
I don't understand you, you're nuts, that makes no sense whatsoever
I began trying to agree with him
trying to understand him
and then it sort of got the momentum of a game going
where he would say, you know, I'm really Sirhan Sirhan
and I would say, yes, but your teacup is on backwards
and a doctor walking into this situation
would have a hard time telling who's nuts and who's not.
Well was that because I decided to play along with him
or why did I decide?
There was an ambiance that gave permission
for erratic, irrational, peculiar behavior
and I suppose if you were borderline schizophrenic in that situation
that's all it would take to push you over the edge.
I know you're probably thinking about that Wiener's ECM stuff
and you told me about it yourself
but I finally just recently read all those papers again
and I think you're really right that there is some sub
it's what he calls the olfactory subconscious
that there is perception below what is olfactorily normally perceived
and this is profound information transformation
messages that are perceived and stuff
yeah, I think that there could be something too
Yeah, people who study human behavior have noted that
when a person enters a room full of people
unconsciously the first thing they do is they take a deep breath
what that's doing is giving you a whole bunch of information
and you can tell, you can say I walked into the room
and the vibes were terrible because Herbert had just slugged Alice
three minutes before and everybody was freaking out about it
or I just walked into the room
and I could tell something weird was happening
but I couldn't figure out what it was
and what it was was Alice and Fred heard me coming
so he took his hand out of her blouse as I opened the door
this kind of thing
in other words information that is coming in through the olfactory
the olfactory senses
there are psychiatrists who diagnose schizophrenia
by what they call the sniff test
you know, this is one of the most subtle and difficult
of all mental dysfunctions to diagnose
and some people just lean over your anterior fontanel
and take a hit and say
him to therapy, her to release
and him to medication
because they are confident enough that the smell will do it
there is even one theory of schizophrenia
that holds that what schizophrenia is
is a dysfunctional pheromone system
so that you who are the schizophrenic
your real problem is that you smell funny
not stink
people aren't aware of that
but it's that there's something about you
that causes people to treat you strangely
and you reacting to being treated strangely by people
get weirder
and they reacting to you getting weirder
treat you more and more strangely
so what you have here is a feedback cycle
that ends with nets being dropped over you
and you taken away
but the original cause was that there was
you were giving off a chemical
which made people treat you in a way
that caused you to react to them adversely
and that started the cycle going
or they say that you perceived olfactory hallucinations
not that you just smelled weirdly
but that you perceived
oh that you were misinterpreting incoming
that's right
there's a whole section in the weirder
that talks about olfactory hallucinations
the reason we're talking so much about this
is because if you look at these pheromone molecules
and lay them next to these drug molecules
it's all one family
these are all small planar molecules
there's even one area where it comes together
pretty spectacularly
that is
in the pineal gland of human beings
there's a great deal of
like something like
twelve percent of the brain's energy
is being channeled into the pineal gland
well if you know anything about evolutionary theory
you know that you don't waste energy
in unnecessary functions
you become extinct
so there's a reason why twelve percent of the brain's energy
is being channeled into the pineal gland
though we don't know what it is
well then when you look at what's going on in the pineal
a neuro compound called adenoroglomerotropane
is being transduced by light into melatonin
well this compound adenoroglomerotropane
in ordinary biochemical nomenclature
is 6-methoxy tetrahydroharnolam
it's a near relative of the compounds in the ayahuasca
well so then a reasonable question is to ask
well then what's happening to all this melatonin
that is being produced in the pineal
well then if you tag it
and follow its path through the metabolic system
you discover that the stuff is making its way
quite directly to the surface of the skin
and then
it's volatilizing away
what's happening here
a hallucinogenic molecule is being turned into a
and in the very center of the brain
and this pheromone is then hurrying on its way to the surface of the skin
where it volatilizes off
an effect of the ambient social environment in which you're living
this begins to look like a system of neurotransmitters and neuro regulators
that operate not only within the body but on the surface of the body
and in the ambient social environment
yes
I don't know if this relates to
I'm not a chemist or anything like that
there's this stuff on the market called tryptophan
I believe
right it's an amino acid
amino acid
and it was taken off the market not too long ago
yes
and um
supposedly it made you dream
your dreams more clear or more vivid
something like that
well it's the precursor for DMT
if you were to make
if you wanted to make trip DMT in the laboratory
tryptophan would be one of the pathways that you could start from
the reason tryptophan was taken off the market
there was a lot of confusion initially
but it was a poisoned batch
it turned out all of the world's tryptophan was coming from one enormous
stainless steel vat near Nagoya
and that it had been infected by a bacterium
and uh
so you know we're stuck with the fact that tryptophan will probably never again
be available in health food stores
but it wasn't tryptophan that was the coke
I knew someone whose life was completely messed up
from the tryptophan
from the poisoned tryptophan
so by taking the tryptophan then it caused DMT to be more
well no saying it that way is saying too much
we don't know that
all we can say is
tryptophan is an amino acid
it's used in the biosynthesis of many different compounds including DMT
DMT peaks when dream states are peaking
and tryptophan does seem to induce deep
dreaming it's a rational case you know we could sit here sometime we could have a weekend entirely
devoted to thinking of simple experiments that could be done in the laboratory with and without
human beings if only these things weren't illegal I mean there is so much to be learned and so little
work being done because it's not sanctioned I mean my brother is a pharmaceutical chemist
pharmacologist plant physiologist and his professional life is very touch and go because he's known to be a
hallucinogen man and they don't they don't hire you they don't publish you they don't fund you they
don't want to know you have to be a very dedicated person to stick with hallucinogenic chemistry when
you could get over into something else and make a lot of money so you don't see a conspiracy then
with the trip spent being taken off the market because it made dreams being more vivid you see
it was just a bad batch I mean I need a connection without just thinking about I'm not a conspiracist
but it seemed to me awfully funny that that was taken off and being made by one batch and that
it's got a hammered with or whatever well there may have been some form of hanky-panky but in all
fairness you know there are many approaches to the synthesis of DMT indole is probably what
a most chemists would probably prefer to start from indole and indole is an industrial precursor used in so
many hundreds of ways that you could never push indole off the market you'd have to reinvent
half the pharmaceutical industry but where I'm going with that is I'm talking about just being able to get
it from the health food store here it was tryptophan and it made your dreams more vivid I don't know if
that's what people are using it for I don't think so but here it was so maybe they felt that people were
dreaming too much or they were having too vivid dreams hey we can't have this anymore we've got to
sort of get it off the market maybe I think probably as long as you're asleep they're fine about it it's
when you wake up that they get nervous as long as you keep your eyes closed or you're glued to the
boot to they're quite happy to minimalize you marginalize you and make you larval yeah I wanted
I was thinking about this thing with the elves and so forth and I was also thinking about it in
relationship to you know let's say you smoke DMT you have the experience you can put the term elves on
them or speculate that what we have in various mythologies or thought systems elves refers to
that I was wondering what you think about you know other types of deities that people may encounter in
some sort of visionary experience either with hallucinogens or not I mean what do you make of
that you have more of an archetypal interpretation or do you think that they exist in some hyper-dimensional
uh reality uh in some form or I'm just curious what you make of that I guess I have an archetypal
interpretation I recall from some book of Robert Anton Wilson's where he he suggests he says you should
uh you should pray to the Blessed Virgin Mary every day and offer make offerings to her and put up her
picture until she appears then switch to Shiva and do it till Shiva appears then Mickey Mouse and just keep
doing this until you satisfy yourself that none of these things are more real than any other and that
whatever their ontological status they're all equal in ontological status apparently the human brain is far more
malleable than we can conceive of or imagine we become imprisoned within a language and an ideology
and it literally becomes our reality and yet it isn't our reality it's just something provisional
I've not had that experience I prayed for years as a kid but perhaps the agonbite of Inuit was already present in me and making it impossible for me to succeed
but in the case of the the elves there's uh there's sort of a cultural archetype of the elves but at the same time you seem to be saying that that there is a deeper reality that this is based on in other words
well and the DMT elves are a lot weirder than the Disney elves the Disney elves are really sanitized
these things are pretty frightening in a way I mean they are if you let yourself be frightened because
they're you can't they want well how can I put it they play too rough they are not
they're not they're not mean but they're not careful either it's like hanging out with a gang
you know as long as you're their friend you really feel aren't I cool look who I'm hanging out with but
then you realize if you said the wrong word or made the wrong move everybody would turn and look at you
and just the I recently wrote the introduction for a new edition of Evans Vence book The Fairy Faith in Celtic
Countries and if you're interested in elves this is the book to read you all know who Evans Vence was he
was the great Tibetologist who but as a student at Cambridge in 1913 before he went to Tibet he did his
doctoral thesis 1913 this was and he went around to Brittany and Wales and Ireland to the old old
people I don't think he talked to anybody under 80 and he said tell me stories about fairies and he
collected the most amazing stories about fairies and fairy encounters and I learned from rereading that book
that you know the note the christian notion of purgatory which is a place where you go that is
neither heaven or hell where you do time for minor infractions and then you get moved on to heaven
this idea was created I always assumed that it was dreamed up by some bishops of rome some synod or
something it was dreamed up by saint patrick to convert the pagan irish to convince them that fairyland
was part of the christian man and he was so successful in converting the pagan irish that when letters
went back to rome describing how he did it purgatory became a general doctrine of the church and then it
was used very successfully to convert the pagan slavs so purgatory is fairyland dressed up in christian
terminology and and what is the idea of fairyland it's the idea that the dead live all around us
linger among us as disincarnate souls and they can they and the fairies that evans vance was describing
were very ambiguous morally i mean sometimes they would only sour the milk but you know their favorite
concern of fairies is ufo freaks pay attention stealing babies that's what fairies like to do i don't know
about surgically ripping off fetuses that seems to be a modern touch but in ireland people in the
countryside do not leave babies small babies unattended in their cribs for fear of fairy theft and the fairies
substitute they don't just leave an empty crib they leave a withered strange little creature that is
supposed to fool the human beings and whenever there is a child born who is wasting and old looking and
undersized there's always the assumption that there was a healthy baby there but now there's been a fairy
switch uh fairies respond to riddlery this has to do with this thing about language and the strange
relationship of the irish to intoxication fairies and language suggests that here we might have a
restricted gene pool that is somehow indemnified itself in the direction of these peculiar uh concerns
present company accepted what was the name of that book the fairy faith in celtic countries by evan smith
um at least a couple of final points which is you know what is this all good for
i i think what it's good for i think the mystery that we're making our way toward
much more of which will be revealed later as we live into the next 20 years is
that we have lost connection to a very important part of reality
which i call the guy in mind but what which i think is more popularly understood as the goddess
goddess consciousness but the goddess is not as envisioned by at ephesus you know a woman studded with
breasts the goddess is the living earth it is not to be anthropomorphosed into uh some kind of human or
quasi-human form and when we were taking mushrooms on the plains of africa before the invention of
agriculture as nomads we were uh rocked in the cradle of the goddess and the you know differences between men and
women between parents and children between those who had much if anybody had much and those who had little
and between human beings and the animal and vegetable kingdom were minimal because everything operated in
the light of this reference experience boundary dissolution and a sense of the intelligence of the earth
now we are so alienated from the intelligence of the earth that when we encounter it we assume it came
from halfway across the galaxy to rescue us it isn't from across interstellar space it's something that is
partially in ourselves and partially in the world around us and if we could but clear the prejudices
of materialism of materialism from our uh approach to the world most especially from our language which by its
subject-object bias by its linear syntax and by god knows what else that's built into it hopelessly precludes us
from contacting this uh this reality if we could clear all that away we would discover you know a dimension of
immense support and affection for human beings and for our enterprises but as long as we pursue the
destruction of the earth and the elaboration of materialist ideology and the suppression of psychedelic
states and the suppression of the feminine uh we are going to be alienated feel abandoned
and operate in an ambience of rampant pathology so uh to my mind the the hallucinogens are a call
to return to the archaic style to recapture the tools techniques languages and attitudes that existed
and flourished on this planet uh you know before ad 10 000 and we must do this if we don't do this
uh then we are setting ourselves up for a very unhappy future we are living in a very unhappy world
maybe your world is not unhappy but you know tell that in bosnia tell it in somalia tell it to the aids
infected masses of africa uh the apocalypse is no longer a rumor it's arrived in many parts of the world
and we as the children the inheritors of the culture which created this catastrophe and as the people who
are still above high uh still living on high ground as the waters of poverty epidemic disease and misery rise
ever higher have a certain obligation to respond to this moral decency demands it and we can no longer
tolerate uh the evolution of consciousness the exploration of our relationships to each other
and the source of meaning itself to be regulated stigmatized and degraded by the most frightened the least
educated the least uh balanced and the least caring among us and this is what we've got at the present
moment the male dominator uh mentality is in the process of running us and all life on this planet into extinction
uh i don't have answers that must be clear by now i have questions and offered techniques
and there's nothing new about these techniques they have been around for a hundred thousand years
and for ninety thousand of those hundred thousand years they worked very well and we existed in harmony with
the rest of nature fully human fully able to philosophize argue love riddle perform theater make masks so
forth and so on but in the last ten thousand years we have fallen into a pathology and it's because
the umbilical connection to the mind in nature has been severed lost pissed away ignored degraded turned away from
it is a psychedelic relationship to these plants without that you are not yourself without that you are half human
and this is how we behave we behave as though you know we have a soul but it's stapled in yeats immensely
compelling phrase to the body of a dying animal this needs to be corrected reconstructed addressed
otherwise we are going to go into the books if there are books and into the cosmic record which there
surely is a cosmic record as jerks lame didn't get it couldn't put it together and this would be a terrible legacy
because we are not going into these crises with in a state of total anesthesia we have the answers we have the
political machinery to do something about this we have the sense of crisis we have the good will
and affection for each other but we are somehow unable to put all this together in a configuration that would
allow us to change our minds admit that history was a bad idea that science betrayed us that it's a tale told by
an idiot and uh to strike out in a new direction we're like the frog in the proverbial pot who never moves as
the temperature uh climbs toward the boiling point sooner or later you have to just get up on your hind legs
and say enough already now maybe this is beginning to happen and maybe it isn't but it's not for us to
judge as spectators at a hockey game it's for us to get in and roll up our sleeves and participate in do
what you think is right think about what you think is right and once you've thought about it then do it
and it doesn't have to fit in with my program or my agenda i have a deep and abiding face faith that
mother nature will sort out the options and from the offerings of all of us select those that will be
salvational and solitary for all the rest of us but if you don't act you didn't participate i mean this
is not a road show you know it's your life your planet your world and the tools to reclaim it are present
at hand you've heard this now now you have to ask yourself what are you going to do about it that's
really all i have to say and we're finished
I want to welcome everybody to the Ojai Foundation. It's lovely to see so many old and new faces. When I was asked to introduce Terence, I wondered what on earth to say. So, I thought back to when we first met.
And that was at Esalen Institute in the spring of 1983. And I'd been living there for about nine months, recovering from a nervous breakdown, which occurred here.
And I was certainly getting better at that point. I was walking again.
And Paul Herbert, who was the sound person at Esalen at that time, said, Leon, you have to come and do this workshop.
I had done absolutely nothing at Esalen except sort of recuperate. And he insisted that I come to your program. So, I did.
And the program itself is a sort of blur of natural era, flying sources, mushrooms, electronic intelligences.
It's just a total blur. He spoke, this man spoke for like, I don't know how many hours.
And I was, who is this person? I've never met anybody like this before.
The one part of the program that I remember clearly, it's interesting, was in the introductions.
You know, everybody goes around and says, why did you come and that sort of thing.
And Kat said something that just stuck with me. And she said, I like his style.
And at the time, I thought she was talking about your shades or your socks, you know.
But afterwards, you know, I saw more of what she was referring to in a deeper way.
And after the program bag of presents in my hand, and that changed my life.
So, he's one of those people, very few, a handful of people, that I can say have really, I've met at a crossroads of my life.
And for that, I've always been very grateful.
So, I like your style too.
And it's incredible.
Great introduction to you.
A tough act to follow on.
Before we get into this.
What time is lunch, Lola?
1 o'clock.
1 o'clock? So we'll go to 1?
Or if you want to have time, we'll go to walk around.
Go to 12.30 then?
Good.
Can everybody hear in the back, without amplification?
Yes.
Good.
Well, if I get tired and begin to mumble, why bring me back a...
Yeah.
Well, it's a pleasure to be here.
This is sort of a nostalgic return.
I can't even remember.
The last Ojai event was at Camp Shalom.
I can't remember.
It must have been three years since we were all together here under the teaching tree.
In some ways, a lot of water over the dam.
In other ways, five minutes ago.
I've just come from two days of speaking in Los Angeles to large audiences which demand a sort of formal intensity
that you thankfully relieved me of this morning.
I guess the...
Well, how many people are familiar with my books or have been to workshops in the past?
Is there anybody who's just utterly unfamiliar?
Uh-huh.
Okay.
Well, so we'll work from that benchmark out.
I never imagined that I would end up sitting in this position and pontificating on the nature of life and history and global human destiny.
I started out simply with a love of nature.
I was persecuted as a child in my physical education classes.
So I spent a lot of time on my own.
And I grew up in western Colorado where there is a lot of exposed sedimentary rock and some of it has dinosaurs pressed into it.
And I could always feel these dinosaurs.
The largest dinosaur ever found was found a few years ago near Delta, Colorado, about 30 miles from where I grew up.
And all the time I was growing up, I knew that sucker was out there.
But I could never walk to it.
If I could have, probably my career would have taken a different turn.
But my interest in fossils, I remember I had an uncle who gave me a book when I was about eight years old of fossils.
And it had one of those charts in the front of it where it shows five billion years.
And then the last half inch is expanded to the next column, and then the last half inch is expanded to the next column.
And so I saw that human history was a hairline crack at the bottom of the column furthest to the right.
And I got the concept of how old, not the universe, but the earth is.
And it was a dizzying perspective.
The town I grew up in, if you've read Time magazine, you were persecuted as a left-wing intellectual.
The town I grew up in once made it into Ripley's, believe it or not, as a place that had more Christian churches per capita than any town of its size in the United States.
This was a town of 1,600 people with 42 Christian churches thriving.
When I was a kid, I thought street corners were for churches.
I didn't know you could have buildings on street corners that weren't churches.
And I would go up these dry arroyos with my rock pick, looking for fossil shells and dinosaur bones and this sort of thing, brachiopods.
And in the solitude, because I would often not be able to con my little friends into attending me, because they learned quickly that it was hotter out there than decent people could tolerate.
And also, I have to confess, whenever I invited someone to come along, it was with the thought that they would carry back the specimen.
So they were essentially pack burrows for my fossil expeditions.
And then I had an uncle, who was an old rock hound, and he introduced me to the concept of not splitting apart strata to see ancient forms of life, but slicing rocks up and polishing them to reveal the light and the color and sometimes the color.
And sometimes the crystal cavities that were hidden inside them.
And so very early on, I got this idea that the surface of things is not where attention should rest.
That you have to, as Ahab tells Starbuck in Moby Dick, you have to seek the little lower layer, and under the surface of things is another reality.
A reality.
A reality that reaches, in some cases, back to the birth of the planet, practically, or in other cases, in other dimensions.
I had a fixation with meteorites at one time, and butterflies, and rocketry.
And all of these things were about a certain thrill, a certain iridescence that could be coaxed out of physical phenomena if you would not just simply dismiss them and pass over them.
And as a little kid, I had very bad eyes.
I still do, but I wear contact lenses, but at that time I wore very thick bifocal lenses.
And my mother, bless her heart, who was cut from somehow different cloth than all the people around me, read Aldous Huxley's book, The Art of Seeing.
Which, an occasion to look at it in the past year, and I was amazed how much of my own attitude toward life is contained in this fairly trivial book.
You know, Huxley had terrible eyes, too, and he discovered the so-called Batesian method of eye exercises and eye health, which at that time, we're talking 1954 or so, was completely sky blue crackpot type stuff.
I mean, this was the Eisenhower era.
And the exercises that I learned when my mother took me as a Batesian therapist, were exercises in attention, attention.
And then the other form of exercise was what the rest of American society wasn't going to encounter for 15 years, and then would encounter as Buddha.
But for us, it was just close your eyes, and the therapist would create capsules in the air through narrative.
And it was an eye exercise.
And so, it introduced me to the idea of sitting still and watching what's going on behind closed eyelids.
What fascinated me about the butterflies was the physical iridescence, which in the northern hemisphere is fairly rare in butterflies.
You only get it in these little blue lysineas that you see fluttering around mud puddles in dry areas.
I've seen them here.
But, of course, in the tropics, iridescence becomes a more generalized phenomenon, not only in butterflies, but in beetles as well.
And I had the ability to fixate, to spend hours with a single pyrite crystal or a single theme turning it over and looking at it.
And then, at some point, again, I decided that I would become a writer, not because I loved writing,
because I admired all the attention that great writers seem to have used upon them,
which was something that I, as a goggle-eyed weirdo, was not getting much of.
So then, the name Huxley recurred again, and I started reading through all of those novels, the social novels, you know.
Antique and Chrome Yellow, After Many a Summer Dies the Swan, and all the rest of it, Ape in Essence.
And, finally, I came to a work of non-fiction by Huxley, The Doors of Perception and Heaven and Hell.
This was, by now, probably 1958. I was 14 years old. And, in that book, Huxley, the quintessential English academic establishment intellectual,
describes his confrontations with mescaline and what it meant to him.
And, it was fascinating to me, because previously, all I had ever known or heard about drugs
was, was what I had learned from reading Huxley's novel, Brave New World, which is a pharmacological dystopia, if there ever was one,
and has lots to say to society today, I think. If you haven't read it, I recommend it to you.
If you, if you have read it, you recall that it was a society of people, perfect people, grown in vats, who died early,
but who never lost the bloom of their youth, who were heard-minded, driven by advertising,
and entirely dependent for their happiness and psychic equilibrium on a drug called Soma.
And, they had little advertising slogans, which they would repeat by rote, if anyone displayed inappropriate anger or emotion.
A gram is better than a dam, they would displayed publicly.
A drug sound proposition. There is this same author, writing of mescaline, and reaching for metaphors drawn from Meister Eckhart,
St. John of the Cross, John Chrysostom, comparing the light falling into the folds of his trousers
to the light of Caravaggio and Duccio and Fra Angelico, and I was amazed. I had never heard such carryings on.
Well, now, if you go back and look at The Doors of Perception, you realize that this was not an extravagant telling
of the nature of the psychedelic dimension. It was, in fact, a fairly conservative rendering.
A description of low-dose, eyes-open, thoughty, psychedelic voyaging.
I mean, it's been a long, long time since I've set a stack of Abram's art books by my left knee before I take a psychedelic.
But back then, that was how it was done. You looked at the visible world.
Well, so then, around this time, there began to be alarmist articles in the press about the abuse of blue morning glory seeds
by some of the more crazed and unassimilated members of American society.
And I immediately tore out and purchased a couple of packets of blue morning glory seeds.
And then noticed that the leaves imprinted in the fabric of the drapes in the living room all seemed to have little faces and were dancing.
This was, in fact, clearly the intent of the designer, but something that, in all the years of living around these ratty drapes, I had never noticed.
And then I began to look at everything around me and discovered that this affinity for looking into things that my rock-hunting, butterfly-collecting habits had instilled in me had become like turbocharged.
And swimming in the depths of polished stones, ponds, the ditch running down the back of the backyard, were myriads of worlds.
And then I went outside, and I was looking around at everything, and then I just felt physically overcome.
My knees basically gave way underneath me, and I sat down under a tree, and I closed my eyes.
And my life has never been the same since, because there, waiting behind closed eyelids, were, you know, ruined cities, covered with creeping jeweled lichens,
and inhabited by shining eyed creatures that were, I was not sure exactly what, and much, much more.
And I just spent a half hour or so, literally in trance, gazing into this unfolding reverie of deserts, jungles, machines, archaeological artifactria, machines in orbit around alien worlds, all of this stuff.
And I was stunned.
I still am stunned.
And that essentially set the compass for my, the rest of my intellectual life.
I didn't understand, really, what had happened.
In other words, I didn't clearly get it that this was a trip, and that it was induced by the psychedelic.
I understood something of that, that I thought also it must be unique.
It must be my mood, my expectation.
Or surely this cannot happen on demand through the simple act of eating morning glory seeds being sold at 35 cents a pack down at the hardware store.
And so then I began to ask questions, and I quickly discovered it was a mistake.
So I went back to Huxley, and read more carefully, saw that he was working from the early of Pavlok Ellis, Weir Mitchell, Fitzhugh Ludlow.
It turned out that this whole tradition, albeit an underground tradition in Western intellectual or aesthetic sense, based around the perturbation of consciousness with substance.
Coleridge.
Coleridge, as an example.
And you may know this poem Kublai Khan.
Kublai Khan was written in a flash, basically, based on an opium reverie.
Coleridge was an aficionado laudanum, which was a tinctured form of opium that had a great vogue in the 19th century.
Well, I knew nothing about opium or laudanum or the style of the 19th century English intelligentsia, but in the lines of Kublai Khan, I could feel this same siren song iridescence that had been in the pyrite crystals, in the butterfly wings, in the beetle bodies.
Here, let's go out on a limb.
In Xanadu did Kublai Khan, a state-fisher dome decree, where out the sacred river ran, through caverns measureless to man, down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground, with walls and towers girdled round, and there blossomed many an incense-bearing tree.
Meandering with a mazy motion, the sacred river ran.
And it goes on and on, and then it says,
It was a miracle of rare device, a sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice.
And that notion, not the sunny pleasure dome itself, but the notion of a sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice,
introduced me to the concept of what's called, in alchemy, coincidencia positorum, where two things which are mutually exclusive are juxtaposed in a way which creates a shock in the mind, a poetic shock that is then potentially memorable.
Years later, I used this effect to title my books.
So that's why you get The Invisible Landscape, True Hallucination.
See, this is all hideously contrived.
Well, eventually, and after many adventures too painful to recall, I ended up at Berkeley in the fall of 1965, which was an incredibly, probably the most together thing I've ever achieved with my life in terms of domain.
Because I was neither early nor late.
I was not ten miles off or a thousand miles off.
I was dead on.
I was right at the very center of the flowering of now vilified and fondly recalled as the 1960s.
And I was living in a ratty room house in San Francisco that summer before going over to Berkeley.
And there was a guy living across the hall from me who replaced all the white light bulbs in his apartment with red light bulbs,
and painted his windows black and played the major chords of Freight Train on his slack guitar over and over again.
And he went on to glory as Barry Melton, the lead guitarist of Country Joe and the Fish.
And I didn't know it, but at the time they were in the studio laying down the tracks for electric music for the mind and the body,
which was one of the defining freak albums of that era.
And he introduced me to the joys of cannabis and further to something called Sandoz LSD,
which was going around in these tiny 00 capsules.
And it was as if the previous morning glory vision had now been lifted to a whole other level of intensity.
And everyone around me was undergoing these kinds of things.
And there was a sense of incredibly accelerated change.
You could palpably feel the acceleration of change seem to be in the water, in the air.
Once I moved to Berkeley, I noticed that the large billboard that they changed for Telegraph Avenue every 30 days contained cryptic messages
that were inevitably addressed to me and my ability.
In short, serious boundary, dissolution and category and scramblement was creeping into my mental universe.
And then, after about six months of this, I had a very strange friend who lived in Palo Alto.
He still is my great inspiration.
I wish I could coax him into public display because he's the real Terence McKenna.
But if you're the real Terence McKenna, you have too much good taste to ever do what I do.
But he came to me. His style was to get there first, whatever it was, to do it, to reject it, and to be absolutely contemptuous of it
by the time anybody else even arrived at the scene of the crime.
So in early 1967, he came to my house in Berkeley one rainy February night, and he said,
something you might be interested in.
And I said, what's that?
And he said, this is a material that has been boosted from an army research project being run down at SRI,
and someone managed to give a...
...
50-gallon drum of this material out of the inventory without anybody knowing, and I said,
what is it? And he said, it's called DMT. And I said, it's a psychedelic drug, right? And
he said, right. And I said, how long does it last? And he said, three minutes. And I said,
no problem, bring it on. Because after all, I had been assaulted by Life Magazine on the
subject of LSD, and I had gotten that under my belt, and I was by now relatively sophisticated
about cannabis. I figured there were probably no more frontiers to cross. And so we sat down
then and there, and did it. And about 15 seconds after choking up on this stuff, I found myself
plunged into an elf nest somewhere on the other side of the universe. In other words, there
were, and thank God no one fills in for me because they know it so well, jewel self-dribbling
basketballs. Did I get it right? Jewel self-dribbling basketballs that came bounding toward me from
from all corners of this domed underground space? Well, I had been used to hallucinations,
acceleration of thought, funny ideas, strange insights, hysterical waves of giggling, so forth
and so on. I had never seen anything like what I was now face to face with. And also, whatever
this substance was, it didn't affect me. It didn't affect my perception of who I was.
In other words, it seemed to me that the drug wasn't working. It was simply that the world
had disappeared and been replaced by something else. And I was still who I had been a few
moments before, except now I was fairly alarmed by what had just happened to the architecture
and geography of Southern Telegraph Avenue. And these things, there was an overwhelming sense
of affection, involvement, a sense that I hadn't experienced since being six years old and being
released on Christmas morning to run out to the Christmas tree. And there was a sense of
childlike innocence under conditions of extraordinary alien-ness and engoldment. And just, I was boggled,
the mind boggled, the mind boggled. I at last understood the real meaning of this new cliché at that time. And these things were making objects with their voices. They were singing in this unearthly, crystalline, punning, elf chatter kind of language.
But it was not something simply heard. It was something which I could see. I could see syntax unfolding like ribbons being spewed out of machines, shooting across my visual field, rolling into balls, condensing as objects with rotating crystalline facets and machined interiors of gold and ivory.
And these objects were themselves emitting strange singing language-like noises. And the whole thing was happening at an enormous speed, almost like a Bugs Bunny cartoon run backwards at about three times ordinary speed.
Well, I barely had time to take all of this in, assure myself that I wasn't dying before it collapsed. The way a tent collapses, the way an ice cream cone melts, the way an erection disappears, the way an investment goes bad. It just was gone.
And my friend, I was sitting there, I opened my eyes and my friend said, so what do you think?
And I was, I was stunned. I've never actually seen it hit anybody quite as hard as it hit me. For about fifteen minutes, all I could say was, I can't believe it. I can't believe it. I can't believe it. I can't believe that. I can't believe that.
You call that a drug? You must be nuts. Drugs don't do that. Drugs speed you up, slow you down, make you fall down, stuff like that. This is no drug. It's magic. It masquerades as a drug. It's a doorway into another world.
I kept having the image of Aladdin's land, my favorite fairy tale. And I felt like Aladdin. You know, you buy something in a junk shop, you take it home, you try to clean it up. The next thing you know, a flame a mile high pours out and demands to do your bidding.
That was the impression I have. And it's the impression I still have. That must have been early 1966, 66, 76, 86, what is it? 36 years ago? That's not possible.
26 years ago. Nothing has particularly changed. Nothing has ever surpassed it. And for me, that was the moment that set my auto compass for life.
I mean, I said, this I must understand. Not only did my mother not tell me and my father not tell me, but Aldous Huxley never told me. And neither did John of the Cross. And neither did Meister Eckhart.
All those people were apparently flying at a lower altitude than I, 19-year-old brat in ratty rented room, have been able to achieve in the last 15 minutes.
And so then I began to look for this or for some trace of it in the history of human philosophy, in the history of art, in ethnography, everywhere.
Everywhere. And I really didn't find it. And I really still don't find it. Except there are certain faint, faint footprints in the blowing sand of human experience that if you know, if you've seen the vision, you can follow these footprints back to something like this source.
First of all, first of all, first of all, I went to the library. None of the heads that I knew could make any sense out of this at all. For them, LSD defined the top of the ladder.
Well, with this stuff, LSD and being at the local PA meeting, seem to be two states of mind which merge together on some horizon of straightness.
So I went to the library. So I went to the library and began reading more intensively in a more focused fashion. And I learned who apparently utilized plants that had this stuff in it.
Now, in 97, this was new information that had arrived botanical scholarship really in the previous five to 10 years through the work of people like Richard Evan Schultes and William Safford and other people described this chemical being present for original intoxicants.
So far as I could tell, no academic had ever done it because no description matched what I had experienced.
And when I discussed this with my friend who had brought me, he said that he felt that probably it was impossible to accentration.
And that meant, if true, that these shamanic practitioners and societies that were utilizing this were utilizing it, but that they themselves had no real awareness of what it was potentially like when concentrated through modern analytical and laboratory.
So I, it really wasn't a choice. I mean, I guess that's what it's like when you get your calling. It's just a little hard for me to imagine that, you know, being a CTA or city planner or something like that could seize you by the years with the kind of intensity that this sees me.
I mean, I said, I've got to understand this stuff. This is the most amazing thing. And the second most amazing thing was that nobody seemed to know about.
I mean, I mean, I couldn't understand why there weren't 11 inch high headlines on every newspaper on the platform saying, you know, doorway to hyperspace discussion, elf negotiations proceeding, something like that.
No, apparently it was a private mystery or known but to a very few. And I immediately after coming down was seized by an absolutely messianic desire to expose other people to this and see what they said, because it just seemed so important to share it.
So that's basically what I've been doing ever since and trying to draw conclusions, trying to understand what is this, number one, how is it that it can coexist with the world of George Bush and not be discussed or not be part of the mix.
Of social concerns. I mean, after all, we're a society where people jump out of airplanes on weekends because their lives are so boring and empty.
Well, then, if you think jumping out of an airplane is a thrill to ride home about, you should try this stuff. No one would jump out of an airplane if they had DMT on their menu.
But no, apparently it isn't about that. Well, then I came to feel that it was, and I still sometimes offhandedly refer to it like this, that it is secret. It is not a secret. It is the secret.
There is a secret. There is a secret. And this is it. It is the secret that the world is not only not the way you think it is, it's that the world, the way the world is, is a way that you can't think it is.
Because you simply do not have the imaginative capacity to conceive of such overwhelming peculiarity.
And how this secret is able to coexist with the rest of mundane reality, maintain its integrity, and not become the object of pogrom, religion, hysteria, and repression, is part of the mystery of what the secret is.
You see, a secret is not something untold. It's something which can't be told.
And even as I sit here, I realize that I'm obliquely approaching it. No matter how weird I say it is, no matter what scintillating metaphor I create to attempt to beguile you into imagining what you can't imagine, I'm perfectly aware that I'm falling short of the goal.
I'm creating a symbol. I'm creating a symbol of what it is. But frankly, words fail. And I'm a word kind of guy. So then, the rest of my life can be basically poured into a nutshell.
It's just been a lot of wandering around in various fringy places, talking to a lot of fringy people, and trying to figure out what is the real importance of this for me personally, because that's where I'm living, obviously,
and for everybody else, because I assume that there is absolutely nothing extraordinary about me. I didn't have these experiences because I'm in the lineage of Ramana Maharshi or some malarkey like that.
I had that experience because I had that experience because I'm a human being. And every human being can have this experience. The only analogy I can make to it is sexuality.
I noticed that no one here seems to be having sex at the moment. But we all are shaped by it. Probably this is something so taboo, and not necessarily scripted into your biological functioning the way sex is, so taboo that you can go from birth to the grave and never encounter this.
Not only can you do that. Not only can you do that, but most people do. And throughout history, most people have. They never had an inkling. You know, they may have set armies marching. They may have launched empires. They may have built fantastic inventions, painted amazing paintings, created phenomenal works of literature.
But they were wet behind the ears when it comes to the full spectrum of reality. Because without this in the picture, half the world is missing. Well, so then, how to come to terms with this? What is it?
The answer is, who knows? We're not doing a very good job of coming to terms with this. Governments invade against drugs of all sorts. But largely because these things are sources of difficult to tax revenue.
It's not the metaphysical. It's not the metaphysical concern for the health of your teleological structures that drives the government to repress these things. It's simply the wish not to be chiseled on safely.
So, there it is. Sideways to the rest of life. Huxley once said, of the psychedelic experience generally, that it was what he called a gratuitous grace. He said it is neither necessary nor sufficient for salvation.
In other words, salvation. In other words, salvation can be attained without these things, whatever salvation is.
Discovering, using, and exploring these things does not guarantee you a place in heaven either, whatever a place in heaven means.
However, this is a part of this world. A part of this world that you would think the restless, intellect of this world, that you would be restless, restless, intellectually...
Well, it's hard to put it into words exactly, especially when you try to do it for the first time.
Obviously, the difference between a living person and a dead person, there is a way of thinking about that where you would say the difference is a chemical one.
In one case, metabolism is going on. In the other case, not.
I am beginning to think that this narrowing of our conscious focus into three dimensions for survival purposes that I mentioned a few minutes ago may have actually cut us off not only from where the game will be next month or who stole the chicken,
but it also may have cut us off from contact with the after-death world because it has no efficacy in the very nitty-gritty blood and muscle problem of day-to-day survival.
And that what we have discovered in DMT is literally a chemical doorway to the bardo and that this, I think, is an even more confounding notion than the notion that we are being pheromonally managed by zeta reticulums or something like that.
I mean, after all, if that were the case, it would probably just be one of many programs of social manipulation that are administered by some hideous bureaucracy somewhere beyond Agol.
And there's careerism and blunders and budget overruns.
In other words, it sort of comes back down into, that's what the problem I have with all extraterrestrial scenarios is the extraterrestrials seem so much like ourselves.
I think probably it's that we are, we have found the pharmacological key to the bardo and that this is going to overturn civilization so completely that we might as well just call an end to it and recess the meeting.
I think that, and if you ask shamans about this, you say, you know, what is this all about, they will tell you, well, we do all our work through ancestor magic.
Well, ancestor is a very sanitized term because not too many people, when they hear the word ancestor, realize that we're talking dead people here.
So when a shaman tells you he works with the ancestors, he's saying he works with dead people, well, if that's the case that has driven us most buggy during, throughout history, which is, is there continuity of dissolve?
And I am the last person to ever carry this message into society.
I was raised Catholic, rejected it, at age 14, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Genet, Friedrich Nietzsche, these were my gods.
And I felt, you know, that moral responsibility, existential honesty, demands that we put aside the cheerful fairy tales of more naive levels of culture and that anybody who wants to talk to you about the dear departed and all that is, you know, in the grip of menopausal mysticism or something,
or just hasn't carried out a rational analysis of what gives, now, I think, you know, these religions have all made hay out of, and hash, I might add, out of their imagined franchise of the after-death world.
Because they use it to beat you on the head with a list of do's and don'ts that's very dear to them, and it can be anything as nuts as that you shouldn't be pork to who knows what.
All sides of the world, and has only been thrown into question by the scientific high-tech democracies in the last 500 years or so, and for them, only among a secular educated elite, the premise that is that there is something that persists beyond life.
And I think that part of the profligate irresponsibility of modern life arises from the fact that we don't think we have dues to pay.
We don't think, we think there's an easy way out, and that you can be a jerk and then just become food for worms and nobody will ever get on your case about it.
And so, moral relativism has come into play.
But if, in fact, we are securing, in some form, the notion that the human personality or some portion of it persists after death,
and that there is an ecology of souls, and that we must, in some sense, share this planet with them,
because, after all, when you smoke BMT, you don't go anywhere physically.
You simply see your nearby environment from a different dimension through different eyes,
then it means that we represent a tiny minority of the human beings who care about this planet.
We, the living, are just a tiny slice of who cares and who is active in the situation.
And somehow, we are being, through chance, which I don't believe in,
or through design, which seems everywhere around us,
we are being brought up short and told that,
in order for the Earth to survive,
we must join everyone else in this other place.
And that it is not to be conceived of as dissolution,
it is to be conceived of as disembodied.
This is the only thing I can figure out that is going on.
There is some kind of project underway to transfer the lumpen living
into the realm of the Grateful Dead.
And the anxiety that we feel about death
is the anxiety, is an anxiety born, essentially, of ignorance.
And this ignorance is understandable,
because we have suppressed, repressed, and denied shamanism
the leadership role that it should have in metaphysics of all sorts.
And so now, we are about to become extinct.
And you can like it, or you cannot like it.
You can decry it as the greatest tragedy ever to befall us,
or this planet, although I suspect the planet
will heave an enormous sigh of relief.
But there is a perspective in which
it can actually be seen as progress,
that we are all at once going to transit
into this bardo realm.
Now, this may not be it.
It may not be a simple die-off.
It may be that somehow a dialogue can be set up
with these souls or their representatives
or whatever they are in this other place,
and that a world can be established
which is neither quite theirs nor quite ours.
In other words, that the difference
between being alive and being dead,
which seems to us fairly fundamental,
could in fact turn out to be fairly minor
and erasable,
or the boundary could be moved
from where it is to somewhere else.
We, this stuff is hackle-raising in its weirdness,
but if you're going to be true
to the content of the experience,
then I think you're pushed
in these kinds of directions.
And the attractor at the end of history
that seems to be pulling the human world,
certainly, if not all of space and time,
into its domain,
is in the act of realising itself
going to obliterate the kind of distinctions
that we have grown used to,
excuse me,
even on such fundamental issues
as life and death.
That's the grandest conception
that I've been able to come up with,
and it doesn't require
friendly, altruistic, extraterrestrial
flying in from the base.
Jews, and it doesn't involve nanotechnological downloading of everybody into a gold
deterbium cube buried on the backside of the moon, and it doesn't involve the human
enterprise simply becoming a layer in shale somewhere in the strata of the paleontological
record of life on this planet. It is, you know, a fitting denouement for the mess that we have
wandered into. It does require unlimbering of the imagination to come to terms with this,
because we are in great denial over the possibility that the world could really be transforming
itself. I mean, about as far as most of us can go without getting metaphysically uncomfortable
is to embrace recycling and population control, but I doubt that such cheerful diddling with
the machinery will be able to swerve us from our path. I think, like it or not, we are going
into a world that we literally, as we sit here, cannot conceive of. A world so different
from ordinary reality that to discuss whether we will be alive or dead in that world is mere
quibbling.
There's one point I wanted to clarify real quick. I didn't see this launching of the alien
psychedelic explore templates as a bureaucratic enterprise. I almost always envisioned it as
a real provisional underground thing to be done by a small minority of shamans in a desperate
hope to somehow propagate their origins.
You mean alien shamans?
Yeah, yeah.
It could be that. I sense a crisis in the physics of the matrix itself. In other words, I think
that this is not only happening to human beings. I am serious when I say, you know, there is
only twenty years of history left and we still have half of it to do. We are going to have
to do some pretty fast stepping. I mean, what we took fifty thousand years to do, we must
now do in twenty years. I think that space and time and the physical body and the planet and
that everything is essentially some kind of an illusion. It's not real. What is real, what
is truly bedrock of, and I guess this comes close to being of a Buddhist position, this is all
provisional. This is not what the universe is. The universe is something else. You know, the
Buddhists have a doctrine that if a single person will attain enlightenment, then the illusion will
collapse instantly. All beings will be sucked into the post-enlightenment state. And the illusion of space and time of becoming an entity will all be obviated at the snap of a finger. Well, we tend to disbelieve this because no matter how metaphysical we are, or may even call ourselves Buddhists, we really believe that as
Andromeda is two hundred and fifty thousand light years away. We can't conceive of a light year, but we actually believe that what the scientists tell us. And yet, my God, when you start carrying out a critique of modern science, you cannot believe what flux this stuff is built on. I heard an analogy recently which I thought was very interesting.
Our entire picture of the so-called distant universe is built up by the science of radio telescope, the use of radio telescopes to study deep space. This science has been in existence since about 1950.
If you were to take all the radio signals that have been analyzed by radio astronomy since 1950 and characterize them as energy, it would be the amount of energy that is released by a cigarette ash falling a distance of two feet.
So, this is the thinness of the data out of which we have created these incredibly grandiose conceptions of what is happening. Science is just whistling past the graveyard. Don't forget that the telescope is about five hundred years old this year.
So, to believe, you know, that the story science tells us is true when we can't understand the mathematics, we cannot build the instruments ourselves, we cannot analyze the data. I mean, we are under the thumb of a priesthood more domineering, more removed from the ordinary concerns of ordinary people than any priesthood.
I think we should hold all that in advance. I think we should hold all that in advance. I'm not saying it's not true. I'm saying it's not possible to tell whether it's true or not.
One thing psychedelics will do for you for sure is to convince you that what's real is what I call the felt presence of immediate experience. That's what's real. You know, what you think, what you feel, what you see now is what's real.
Even your own memories are so shifting and elusive and subject to psychological transformation based on your own inner and unconscious dynamics and kinks that to believe what somebody else is telling you about the temperature of Betelgeuse or something like that or the charge of the top quark means you're just, you've moved off into some kind of private eye.
Crazy people rave about stuff like this. But I think people who are rooted in a good philosophical method will not give much credence to anything out of reach of their good right arm. And the psychedelic experience is an experience.
You know, I didn't present you with a set of tensor equations or a tape of electromagnetic data interpreted through the fiat of the fishy formula. We're talking experience here. And this experience, if made commiserate with ordinary experience, I think leads to the conclusion that
this is, this is, I said this the other night, this is as dead as you'll ever be. This is as low as you can go. This is as confined a mode of existence as it's possible to know.
And it's all up from here, folks. It's a kind of Gnostic vision. It sees our present circumstance as the low run of a ladder of transformational distillation.
And, you know, we come from we know not where. I mean, we have, yes, the details on the fertilization of the egg by the sperm and so forth and so on.
But where the form comes from, we don't know. This is the mystery of morphogenesis. And then where the form goes to, we do not know.
I mean, I now think that the proper way to think about biology is biological objects. Plants, animals, fungi, bacteria, amoebas, and human beings, biological objects are hyperdimensional objects.
You can tell that that's true. Because whenever you, what is the sine qua non of a biological object? Meaning, what is the thing it must have to be biological?
It must metabolize. That's the essence of life. The form is stable, but the matter and the energy which compose the form are in constant cycling.
The form stabilizes, but the energy is flowing through it, which stabilizes it.
Well, when we use phrases like cycling through it, flowing through it, these are words which imply a temporal dimension.
If you have a chair and you cut into it, it doesn't bleed, it doesn't squirm away, it doesn't begin to rot and fall over.
If you cut into a living object, it undergoes all kinds of changes.
This is because you have destroyed one of the dimensions necessary for its manifestation, the temporal dimension.
The living body has a relationship to time which the chair doesn't have.
The chair is born along in the stream of time.
The biological object is made of time itself as much as it's made of space and matter.
And so, really what birth is, is the descent of this mysterious entity called the form into matter.
It clothes itself with matter and energy through a process of gestation, unfoldment, separation from the environment of gestation and unfoldment, which is the mother's body.
And then it has an autonomous existence, but what is generally true of all life in the phylogenetic, in the, I'm sorry, in the ontogenetic expression, what's true is that it has finite duration.
Everything dies.
The individual dinosaur, the individual elephant, the individual human being, they die.
That means that the form eventually withdraws itself from the domain of matter and energy.
And it then, presumably, exists as it existed before, having added whatever adumbrations, three-dimensional experience has given to it.
So I've come to see the body as basically the placenta of the soul.
And, you know, that's a way of thinking about it that makes dying not so terrifying.
I mean, it's as terrifying as smoking DMT, but it's nothing to claw the walls about.
The body is the placenta of the soul for the individual.
Well, then it's just a short step to realizing that we are now called upon as a species to abandon the body.
The body is the, the collective body is the collective placenta of the species.
And you don't do a war dance around the placenta.
Once it serves its function, which is to bring the forming fetus to the point where it can exist and sustain itself in the dimension for which it is destined.
In the case of ordinary birth, that's three-dimensional space and time.
In the case of this metaphor, it's the hyperspace beyond space and time.
Once we are ready to exist in that dimension, it's time to undergo the journey down the birth canal and bury the placenta under the old apple tree and forget it and move on.
And, you know, I grant you the, the analogy isn't perfect.
I mean, where is the midwife?
Where is the waving bassinet?
But perhaps the answer to that is the midwife is waving in these intimations of the, of the friendly alien presence.
It may be an aspect of humanness that awaits us just over the great divide.
And so we are going to have to, you know, I think that probably now at every talk I give, I make the analogy to birth.
That this is what we in the 20th century are experiencing.
The 20th century is analogous to the birth canal of human history.
And so, you know, the wonderful swim in the amniotic ocean is over.
The, the fool's paradise of, of, of, uh, the fetal life is ending.
Now, the walls are literally closing in.
We can't get enough oxygen.
We're using up our food.
The walls are strangling us.
There's no room on this planet for all of us.
And for us, it's a catastrophe.
But I imagine when a woman goes into transition,
that the fetus, if it's not a metaphysician,
must be fairly alarmed by the situation.
You must just say, well, I guess this is it.
It's all over.
I'm going to be strangled, suffocated, and simultaneously choked to death in this situation.
It would take a far-seeing fetus indeed to embrace the journey down the birth canal
as the road toward, uh, you know, a split-level ranch house.
And here's the most hallelujah if you play your cards right.
Surely that gets the idea.
Could you say more about your content of your today?
I was really fascinated, um, and it seemed like there were some qualities to it
that I wanted to know, hear more about.
Well, sure.
Um, DMT, if you take it orally, is destroyed by enzymes in your gut.
So it has to be smoked unless you have a chemical strategy for inactivating those enzymes.
And so, assuming you smoke it, it comes on in about 30 seconds.
And if you're a leather-lunged ha-shashin, you can maybe get it in one swell foop.
But it takes most people about three hits.
And, uh, the first thing you notice is that, um, it's as though all the air has been drawn
out of the room you're in.
And suddenly the colors come forward, the edges sharpen.
This is really happening.
It has, uh, an extraordinary effect at low doses on visual acuity.
So does psilocybin.
And then you close your eyes.
You feel very peculiar.
A kind of anesthesia sweeps through your body.
A kind of numbing and yet a sense of a building bubble of energy.
Uh, you close your eyes.
And after a few seconds, you see forming in front of you what I call the chrysanthemum.
It's a floral mandala, usually in yellow and orange, most people say.
And it's, it's slowly turning.
It's like a wall.
But it's a hallucination.
But it's right here, right in front of you.
And you watch it for about 15 seconds.
And if it stabilizes, you need one more hit.
But what usually happens is that after about 15 seconds of contemplating this thing, it's
as though suddenly whatever was holding you back, the cable is cut.
And you are just propelled through this membrane.
And there is, you hear a sound like a bread wrapper being crumpled, a cellophane bread wrapper
being crumpled and thrown away, or the crackling of flames.
This is, according to a friend of mine, your radio intellect, he exiting the anterior fontanelle
at the top of your head.
But he could be wrong, but whatever it is.
And then you hear a tone, which is, it could be reproduced on a synthesizer.
It's that, you know, but it keeps going and becomes hypersonic, supersonic, subsonic, I
don't know.
And you, there is a sense of, literally a membrane is ruptured.
And now you're there.
And what happens to me is, the first thing I hear is a cheer, a yell of greeting.
It's, on their second album, the Pink Floyd have a song in which they sing, the gnomes have
a new way to say, Hooray.
Well, you break into this gnome mist.
And it's a very specifically characterized place.
It is domed.
It's indirectly lit.
Not brightly lit, but softeted lighting of some sort.
It's comfortable.
And, but the, but all of that is hard to focus on and relatively inconsequential, because
the main thing that's happening is these things come bounding towards you like greyhounds.
And there are many of them, these jeweled, self-dribbling, transforming basketballs, which
look like iridescent electric radiolaria or something.
I mean, they are diatomaceous neon transforms made of syntax or some damn thing like that.
And they come towards you and the, the, you have to deal with yourself in this situation
because most people, and my reaction is absolute amazement, complete hysterical disbelief.
I mean, you just say, you know, my God, what is happening?
It's, it comes so quickly that it isn't like a drug where, you know, you deep breathe and
you close your eyes and you wait for an hour and you slowly summon it out of its crevice.
It's not like that.
It's like you were struck by lightning.
In fact, some people think they have been struck by lightning, that they never got to the
drug, that just as they raised it to their lips, they were struck by lightning or a jet fighter
fell out of the sky or something.
And then you have to ask yourself, is this okay?
Because it's so radical and it happens so quickly and your eyes are wide open and you don't
see anything recognizable.
Three-dimensional space, the room you were in, everything, it's gone.
Instead, this place, and, and then they tell you, they try to reassure you, although they're
not very reassuring.
What they say is, don't give way to amazement.
Don't abandon yourself to wonder.
Basically, don't be a jerk and a rude, you know.
Pay attention.
Pay attention to what is happening.
And then they proceed to do a very intense form of teen teaching.
They come bounding up.
They present themselves.
They also do this weird thing where they jump into your chest and then they jump back out.
So you're having this sucking in and out of your body thing.
They jump in and out of your chest and they are singing and squeaking and squealing in some
kind of elf glossolalia, which you can see.
This is very important.
They speak a language, which you look at, you don't hear.
And they make objects, which are like super puns of some sort, in that the object is not one thing.
It is somehow several things simultaneously.
The way a pun attains its effect by being simultaneously more than one thing.
But these are not verbal puns.
These are objectified puns in three-dimensional space.
And they're funny.
And the whole thing is pervaded by the word zany is what I use.
It's a form of humor.
It's a form of merriment.
But you can't entirely relax around it because you can't entirely be sure that you're getting the joke.
So it's like it's a humor with an edge to it.
And they are showing you these jeweled, I've compared them to Fabergé eggs.
And when they show you these things, you can tell by looking at them that if you could bring a single one of these objects,
no larger than an orange, into this world, it would end the debate.
I mean, all you would have to do is show it to somebody.
And they would say, that's impossible, but yet it's happening, so therefore my reality is dissolving.
I mean, it's somehow to gaze upon these objects is to be forever corrupted for ordinary consciousness.
And you can't make them with their voices.
These objects are quasi-alive.
The objects themselves can sing and make other objects.
So you're just being, you're like in this, um, a cross between Santa's workshop, Tiffany's,
and the basement of the Metropolitan Museum, and they're offering you all this time.
There's, I've somehow stretched the thread too tightly, and now I'm never going to make my way back.
And they're saying, no, no, can that, that's not what's happening, this is what's happening, pay attention, look, look, look.
And then, it just fades very suddenly, and they sense it coming.
They have urgency because they know the window is tremendously narrow.
And in the final moments, in some cases, I recall, they literally, it recedes away, or you pull away from it,
and they say, deja vu, deja vu.
And then you open your eyes, and you're in the room you left.
It's like a thousand mics of LSD or something.
And you are more loaded than you have ever been in your life.
And you immediately proclaim, my God, I'm completely down.
And, you know, the walls are rubbery.
The Persian carpet is crawling around.
Your friends have faceted faces and look like they just climbed out of one of Billy Meyer's starships.
But you're absolutely, completely down.
You accept this as ordinary.
It's all you can do to keep from kissing the good earth.
Because where you were was so much removed from that that there is no comparison.
Well, now, after doing this a number of times, because the first time you do it,
the goal is pretty much to live through it.
I mean, it's like being shot out of a, I read, I think it was Tim Leary's metaphor.
He said it's like being shot out of a cannon with Baroque barreling.
And afterwards, people want you to draw the barreling when what you were trying to do was live through the experience.
But after you do it many, many times, and it depends on how bright you are and how able to resist freaking out you are,
And this is astonishing to me, based on what I've said so far.
This is someone's, someone's, someone's very strange.
It's someone's idea of a reassuring environment for a human being.
This place you end up, which is the weirdest place you could either conceive of or imagine,
has been specifically designed by someone to be as mundane, ordinary, and like this world as they could possibly make it.
Not only that, the impression that I have is, the vibe of this place, if you will, is, it's a nursery.
It's a play camp, in fact.
And these toys, these things, these elves, are nothing more than the equivalent of stringing a string of colored plastic objects over a bassinet.
They're to teach you spatial relationships, and hand-eye coordination.
You are briefly in a nursery for receiving human beings who have just crossed over from hyperspace.
Well, imagine if all you knew about this world was a nursery and a maternity ward or a home somewhere,
and you're trying to deduce the nature of the universe from a 30-second visit to a human nursery.
That's the kind of position we're in.
And I think that is what gave me the notion that this has to do with the after-death state.
Apparently, one, the soul is literally being born into this other dimension,
and the soul is not, it's exactly like this world.
When you're born into this world, when you're born into this world,
when you're born into this world, you're...
You're just a little worm of a thing, you know.
You have to be held by your mother.
You have to be swaddled.
You have to be kept away from bright lights, breezes, men with cigars, and so forth.
And the soul, as it transits into that place, you immediately meet the tenderly extended existence of your soul in an entirely new domain.
You mean stayed in that place?
No.
And it seems to me unlikely that anyone would, would, because interesting, interesting about DMT is that it has, it occurs naturally in the human brain.
We all make it all the time.
And so, in a sense, this is not a drug at all.
This is a human metabolite that you're getting a tremendous overdose of.
But the fact that it occurs naturally in the human brain means that you have chemical pathways, biosynthetic pathways, that can deal with it.
That's why it lasts so short a time.
One way of talking about the toxicity of a drug is to ask the question, how long before you feel perfectly normal after taking this drug?
If you have a drug that 24 or 48 hours after you take it, you still have lower back pain and you're lying in warm baths and avoiding ringing telephones and don't want to talk to anybody, that's a toxic drug.
I don't care whether it's coke, methadone, or LSD, you shouldn't, that's not good.
But DMT, within 10 minutes, within 10 to 15 minutes after taking it, you not only are down, you can't tell you did it.
There's no residual, no lingering headache, no dryness of mouth, no dilated pupil, nothing.
It's like you took an ice cube and hurled it into a blast furnace and then you went looking for it 15 minutes later.
It's not to be found.
It ain't there.
Well, this is amazing because this is the strongest psychedelic there is.
You'd think that you'd have to put ice packs on your head for a week after this experience and instead it's completely gone.
So, Rupert and I, in talking about this, he developed the idea of what he called a necrotic compound.
He thinks that DMT, that at death, you flood your system with DMT, that this is what these pathways exist for and that it sets you up for dying.
And that if you can, and I gave DMT once to a Tibetan Lama who, a very old one, not one of these alcoholic fundraising llamas, the real thing, the real thing.
And the guy took it like a man, he was probably 92, and afterwards he said, it's the lesser life.
He said, you can't, he said, if you go further, you can't return.
That's the limit.
Beyond that, there is no fail-safe.
And he was perfectly matter-of-fact about it, and I took him at his word.
I mean, if anybody should have known, this is the dude.
And I think it's a tremendous argument for hope.
And you see, it's not only an argument for hope.
It means that if we could get the, well, the infantile, shit-brained, drug-phobic yahoos
sent back to wherever it is that they are going to be sent to practice their family values,
then we could actually do significant research and find out what's going on here.
It's an object of legitimate research.
We don't have to genuflect in front of this like it's a religious mystery,
and we'll always be unknowable.
In principle, what we need to do is you explore this dimension the way you explore any unknown dimension.
You send people of great courage and descriptive skill in with their notebooks,
their telescopes, their tape recorders, or whatever is the equivalent for this job,
and then you find out what it is.
And I think that the, you know, the destiny of the species may be spun into this.
It may not be, it may be that this transition into hyperspace is not as inevitable as I previously assured you.
It may be that we have to do something on this side.
We have to meet them halfway through the mountain.
They're boring toward us.
We have to alert ourselves to the fact that a tunnel is possible,
and then get cracking, you know, with dynamite, which is an analogum for DMT.
Yeah, and Terrence, I wanted to say something about the distinction now between what you have spoke about
for the last kind of 10 minutes,
with the distinction between the Fabergé eggs and basketballs and self-transforming machine elves,
and that, that one may occur by going into the Amazon canopy
and experiencing some type of preparation prepared by the natives,
is that organically mixed, earthly-based hive similar to the synthesized DMT.
Now, I have taken DMT a minimum of years ago,
but it would seem that the natives may describe it,
at least in a much different fashion than yourself.
What is the distinction?
And then, and then also, if you can hit on after that,
the distinction between that and suicide.
Well, the difference is not as great as maybe your question implies.
First of all, the thing that is so interesting about DMT is,
if the only requirement is that you be able to hold the toque,
and if you cough and lose it, then it's murky and mucked up.
Now, in the case of ayahuasca, which is what you're asking about,
it's a, it's a, well, I'll explain to the group.
Remember how I said that DMT is destroyed in your gut, so you have to smoke it?
But then I added the caveat that unless you somehow inactivate this enzyme system in your gut,
which will destroy it, the DMT.
Well, it turns out there's a way to do that.
The enzyme system is called monoamine oxidase,
and there are compounds called monoamine oxidase inhibitors.
If you take a monoamine oxidase, or MAO inhibitor,
then, and follow it with oral DMT,
then the DMT will not be destroyed in your gut.
It will actually be absorbed into the lining of the small intestine,
a large intestine, and then passed into the bloodstream,
and you will have psychedelic intoxication.
Well, in the Amazon, this has been understood by the shamans for a long, long time,
and so they take two plants.
One, Banisteriopsis copy, a large, woody vine, a twining liana,
and it actually contains a powerful, short-acting monoamine oxidase inhibitor.
And they take this vine, and they pulverize it,
and they combine it in a large pot of water with the leaves of another plant,
which contains DMT.
It may be one of several plants.
It's usually Socotria viridis.
Then, they boil these two things together,
and then for hours,
and then they pour the water off,
and save it in a jug,
and put fresh water on this mess of two different plants,
and boil it again for hours.
And then they pour the two water fractions together,
and they get rid of all the solid matter.
They throw it away.
It's now been cooked for six to eight hours.
And they take this watery fraction,
several gallons,
and they drive it down over a hot fire
until they get something,
a dark brown, thick liquid
that is truly horrifying to ingest
because the taste is so ghastly
because all the salts and sugars
and God knows what else
have been concentrated into this stuff.
But this is now a beverage,
a liquid.
I love it.
In the literature,
they call it a cycle-active beverage.
And when you drink it,
the compound from the woody vine,
harmine,
inhibits the MAO,
and the DMT passes through
and enters the bloodstream.
And instead of a ten-minute experience
that reaches the apex of intensity
in two minutes,
you get an experience
which is drawn out,
stretched out,
over about four to six hours.
Now, usually,
this is not...
It's a psychedelic experience.
It's similar to mushrooms in some ways.
But if you really make it stiff,
if you really put the pedal to the metal
on the amount of
Secotria viridis
or DMT-containing leaf
that you put into this stuff,
then,
after about two hours,
you can slowly,
by sitting in darkness,
by practicing breath control,
you can slowly manipulate it
into a place
where you then say,
you know,
by gosh and be golly,
we've made it to the elf nest.
Here it is.
So,
I think that
great shamans,
courageous shamans,
have always been able
to make their way
into the presence of this thing.
But I put the great qualifier
in front of the word shaman
because in my actual field experience
in the Amazon,
what I discovered was
once it got you loaded enough
to be comparable
to, say,
four grams of mushrooms,
most of these guys
would look at you in horror
if you suggested
that it was only twice as strong
as it should be.
The shamans
all over the world
have an ambivalent attitude
toward these dimensions
they go into.
Very few
just hurl themselves
delightedly
into complete boundary
dissolution.
I had a guy tell me once,
he said,
you think just because
we run around
wearing penis sheaves
that this stuff
is easy for us to do?
Well,
I've got news for you.
It's as hard for us
as it is for anybody.
It's hard for human beings
to surrender
to something so strange.
I could never get ayahuasca
to carry me into the DMT nest
until I made it myself.
And then,
with nobody,
you know,
holding my elbow
and keeping me
and telling me
how much
poetry of a ribbon
I could put in,
I was able to jack it up
and jack it up
until finally
it was truly horrifyingly strong.
And that's what you want.
I mean,
we're not interested
in colored lights
and dancing mice here.
But I think if you push the ayahuasca hard,
it all begins to migrate
in this direction.
Psilocybin,
you know,
I advocate five dry grams
in silent darkness.
Eight dry grams
in silent darkness
will give you the indistinguishable
from a DMT flash.
The problem is,
you know,
one thing about DMT
that is both frustrating
and liberating
is that it's so brief.
Basically,
it's like a roller coaster.
The great consolation is
this is only going to last
five minutes.
If you climbed on a roller coaster
of super intensity
and as they dropped the bar
over your lap,
they said,
oh yeah,
this is the four hour trip.
Then you would say,
you know,
hold on,
it doesn't appear though
that by IV,
which is mostly
how I did it years ago,
that it seemed that
it was extended
to about 30 to 40 minutes.
IV DMT?
Yeah.
Do you mean
that you shot it intervenently?
You don't mean
that it was
a perfusion pump situation?
No.
Well, see,
I've talked to people
who've done research
on DMT
and a surprising conclusion
that comes out
of those discussions
is that
shooting it
is not as intense
as smoking it.
Shooting it
sounds fairly intense,
but people
who do both
say shooting it
can't lay a candle
to...
And this is
a funny thing,
and I'll just mention it
as an aside.
Drug researchers
love to shoot
drugs into their
experimental subjects.
They love the syringe
as the route
of administration
because you get
better numerical data
because you can
measure the dose
absolutely,
and then you hit them
and you know
they've got it.
If you smoke
something,
you may,
you know,
obviously,
when you can hold
your breath
no longer
and you exhale,
smoke comes
into the room.
That's not
part of your dose.
And sometimes
there's a residuum
in the bottom
of a pipe.
That's not
part of your dose.
So in the name
of precision,
people who've done
research on DMT
have always shot it.
Even the recent
study out
at the University
of New Mexico
was by injection.
I tried to persuade
them to do
a section
with smoking,
but this argument
for numerical
precision
carried the day.
But the effect
of relying
on intravenous
injection
like that
is that
no one
in the clinical
situation
has ever
observed
or experienced
the flash
that I'm
talking about.
I don't think
you can attain
except by
smoking.
How about
the penis
snubs
of the
anomalous
smoking?
No,
I've done
those.
And that
is,
you know,
well,
the truth,
let the chips
fall within me.
Highly
overrated
for several
reasons.
First of
all,
you have
to snuff
close to
a tablespoon
of these
toasted
and powdered
if
anademanthera
peregrinus
seeds,
and
there's a lot
of cellulose
there,
and so
you do not
absorb it
instantly.
The other
thing is
it's so
physically
unpleasant
to do
it
that there's
a tendency
to hit,
to cut low
on the
dose.
Because
the standard
method of
administering
a demon
is you have
a hollow
reed,
like a
bamboo
reed,
about this
long.
You fill
it with
this
powdered,
toasted
sawdust
essentially
that has
been reduced
to flour,
and
you get
up on
your
haunches
and your
friend
comes over
and you
put the
tube up
your
nostril
and he
blows.
He takes
a huge
lumpful
of air
and he
just blows
as hard
as he
can.
Well,
the effect
is like
being hit
in the
face
with a
two-by-four.
I mean,
you stagger
backwards,
you salivate,
it's
intensely
painful,
you scream,
you squirm
around in
the dirt
and then
you get
back up
on your
haunches
and by
that time
he has
loaded
the tube
for the
second
nostril
and then
the whole
thing
happens
all over
again
except
now
you're
salivating,
your eye
is swollen
up,
your sinuses
are filled
with this
gunk
and you
do it
again,
same thing,
scream,
squirm in
the dirt,
so forth
and so on,
then you
stagger
over out
of the
sun
into
the
shed
and
through it
with this
saliva just
pouring out
of your
mouth
and after
about five
minutes
you begin
to drift
into
a psychedelic
state
of some
sort
but there
is no
sense
of a rush
of a
splitting
of the
world
into two
halves
it's
not an
effective
route
of
administration
oh well
once they
get
intoxicated
then they
play this
strange
game
which is
almost
characteristic
of this
white
Yanomamo
cultural
group
guys
square off
they
stand
about
three feet
apart
from each
other
and
by some
means
equivalent
of tossing
a coin
it's been
decided
who will
go first
so the
guy who
goes
first
is totally
loaded
on this
stuff
and he
has
mucus
running out
of his
nose
saliva
running out
of his
mouth
his eyes
are swollen
practically
swollen
shut
he
pulls back
his hand
and he
hits
the other
guy
right in
the center
of the
chest
as hard
as he
can
so the
guy
either
loses
his feet
or doesn't
anyway
he grunts
like a
bull
and stands
there
he also
is in
the same
state
then he
pulls back
and then
he does
it
and they
keep doing
this
until
somebody
is
knocked
off
their
spot
and
when you
interview
what you
are told
is
your
ability
to
stand
on
your
spot
depends
on
how
many
of
these
hikuli
spirits
you have
inside
your chest
and so
this is
some kind
of
Yanomamo
psychology
meeting
the raw
data
of the
DMT
experience
I don't
know
what
they're
talking
about
but
it
has
something
to
do
with
the
DMT
things
that
jump
in
and
out
of
your
chest
when
you
smoke
it
they
believe
that
the
demon
from
the
tree
will
live
in
your
chest
and
the
more
of
these
tree
demons
inside
your
chest
you
have
the
more
physically
able
to
resist
being
knocked
off
your
spot
you
are
and
the
more
shamanically
empowered
you
are
but
this
goes
to a
point
I
often
make
with
my
groups
which
is
one
ethnic
group
or
one
culture's
drug
is
another
person's
pain
in the
neck
I've
taken
awful
drugs
that the
people
after it
was over
with
they
would
you
say
god
you
guys
do
this
all
the
time
it's
really
kind
of
ugh
and they
say
yeah
well
it takes
getting
used
to
and
we
really
don't
do
it
all
that
often
only
ceremonies
and
you're
right
most
people
are
glad
to
get
it
over
with
and
go
back
to
the
palm
beer
so your
experience
is basically
that it's
too caveman
like
it's very hard
on the
system
biologically
and
it makes
it so
that
the
time
that you
could be
having
exploring
these
strange
dimensions
is
somehow
inhibited
yeah
I don't
think
in the
bema
taking
situation
that you
ever
get
enough
all at
once
to the
synapses
in sufficient
concentration
to deliver
you over
into
what I'm
describing
occurring
on this
I heard
took
ayahuasca
and linked
in this
novel
right
after
trying
to
ayahuasca
strangely
enough
though
those
cultural
groups
do not
overlap
you know
where there
is
ayahuasca
there
people
people are
surprisingly
conservative
I mean
I've
sat
with
ayahuasca
and done
their brew
and talked
to them
about
DMT
and then
they say
well
describe it
so then
I will
describe it
as I
described it
to you
here
and then
my best
guy said
well
I don't
know it
sounds a
little
intense
I think
I'll
take a
pass
on it
and he
was my
mentor
in the
domain
of
ayahuasca
it's
pretty
stout
stuff
I think
that
you know
shamans
have always
you know
looked over
the fence
looked through
the keyhole
stepped
through the
doorway
but I
think
DMT
pure
crystalline
DMT
or
ayahuasca
specifically
brewed
to
reality
obliterating
doses
is the
only way
you can
approach
just like
yeah
I'm wondering
on the
experience
you talk
about
your
being
taught
yes
again
the second
part
would be
how
have you
done it
I've done
it
maybe
thirty
times
I haven't
done it
for a
couple
of
years
DMT
no
DMT
I'm
sometimes
I think
it's a
young
man's
game
or sometimes
I'm just
getting
chicken
shit
you know
this is
not a
drug
of
abuse
let me
tell you
I know
people
who say
it's their
favorite
drug
and you
say
well when
was the
last time
you did
it
and they
say
and they're
still
processing
to feel
no need
to go
back
and have
a second
look
what was
the first
part of
your question
what kind of
knowledge
ah the
knowledge
the knowledge
is interesting
the knowledge
is
they want
you
they want
me
to
make
language
that you
can see
they
absolutely
are
convinced
that this
ability
to make
things
visible
with sound
can be
taught
and that's
what they
want you
to do
they
demonstrate
it
they say
see what
we're doing
see what
we're doing
now
do it
and say
no excuses
we don't
have a lot
of time
it's almost
over
do it
and
then you
attempt
to do it
and
you discover
in that
place
you can
do this
but why
this is so
important
because when
you come
back to
this world
and
listen to
tape recordings
of yourself
doing it
it's
gibberish
of some
sort
mythologically
driven
glossolalia
it's like
you know
it's a language
unhinged
from the
necessity
of meaning
and yet
it is
true
that when
you do
it
in that
place
it's
absolutely
ecstatic
it's
like
sex
but
sex
is sort
of like
a white
light
kind of
thing
this is
like
a colored
spectrum
if you
could
put
the
sexual
experience
through
a prism
and change
the purity
of orgasm
into
a spectrum
of stuff
then it
would be
like
this
language
it's
pure
poetry
it's
poetry
so thick
you can
literally
cut it
with a knife
and they
want
you to
do
this
and they
are
absolutely
passionate
about
this
is
what
we
are
here
to
teach
you
how
to
speak
in a language
that can
be seen
and
you know
a language
which could
be seen
would be
a kind
of telepathy
you know
if you
could
see
what
I
mean
you
would
see
my
thoughts
the way
we
communicate
small
mouth
noises
and
the
assumption
of
shared
dictionaries
an
assumption
which is
never
borne out
by
careful
questioning
is
a miserable
way
to
communicate
if we
could
see
our
linguistic
intentionality
it would
be the
equivalent
of
seeing
our
mind
and
so
what
they
this is
what
they
want
us
to
do
now
maybe
if
one
were
truly
dead
they
wouldn't
be
so
urgent
about
it
and
they
would
be
like
a
relative
leaning
over
a
bassinet
and
holding
up
objects
and
saying
look
at
this
baby
look
at
this
is
a
bell
or
something
but
definitely
what
they
teach
is
in
the
domain
of
language
and
it's
not
a
teaching
which
can
be
said
like
love
one
another
or
you
know
if
it's
juicy
eat it
over
the
It's more an ability locked in your physiological structure that we're not using.
They want us to speak in colored lights.
And it's their agenda, it's not mine.
I haven't the faintest idea why that is so compelling to them.
Well, that's a little unfair because I've given a lot of thought to it.
But initially, I couldn't figure it out.
So, we'll, I'm sure, get more into this this afternoon.
It is the little self-transforming elf machine informs me.
Lunchtime.
Thank you for putting up with this.
I appreciate your silent scorn or whatever it is.
I've been caught in the clutter of the day today.
Some of them say, it scares me shit.
And that, and that, and other times you, what you said, you wonder why it isn't in headlines 11 inches tall.
There seems to be something about the experience that is, I don't know if self-selecting is the right word, or evolutionary selecting.
Why isn't, why aren't there, why is there such a small percentage of people who actually end up, although you say everyone can do it.
They do have the genetic possibility, but there's something more in a selective period that, where a shaman will come out, because it is, as you say, an awesome responsibility.
And yet, it's everyone's possible liberate.
And then one last thing, another coda to this, you mentioned that you don't think that it's the Bush or Reagan, et cetera, feeling that they just want to keep an economic grip as far as the sale of would-be hallucinogenics.
Don't you think that there is some degree of teleological repression going on as well?
I mean, you mentioned that you didn't feel that way, but I, I, I, some, other times I've heard you feel that there definitely is.
Well, I think that, yeah, I mean, it simplifies the issue to say that it's entirely a money issue.
Right.
Because the psychedelics are used by so small a percentage of people that it doesn't rate the tremendous institutional fury that is brought against it.
And where you really see the contradiction in economic logic is with pot.
I think that the subtext of the government's fear about psychedelics is that this quality that they have of dissolving boundaries causes people to question basic assumptions about how society is run.
And I think this is true.
And I think this is true of any society.
It isn't an American phenomenon.
It's that if you take psychedelics, whatever you are, you know, Eskimo, Hasidic rabbi, quantum physicist, you will question your first premises.
And you get millions of people questioning the first premises and then the powers that be become very nervous.
It's interesting that this whole phenomenon of the 1960s occurred because American commitment to universal public education reached, brought its first generation of people to adulthood in the middle of the 1960s.
Because that universal commitment to public education began after World War II, after the establishment took a look at what this filling, you know, actually funding and building up great public universities and then filling them with inquisitive young people.
What the result of that was, that's when they decided to turn the universities back into trade schools for CPAs, which they did do.
I mean, there is nothing like the level and the breadth of education and intellectual curiosity that was encouraged when I was going to school.
That's all finished now.
Now you're expected to do your data entry job, watch a lot of TV and keep your mouth shut.
And this is what we expect of our college graduates.
So, really, there was a crisis of faith in American institutions, which was only exacerbated by psychedelics.
It was a combination of educating people to the actual traditions of Western civilization in large numbers for the first time, and then giving them psychedelics.
I mean, or having them exposed to psychedelics.
And people began to ask questions for which there were no answers.
And the response of the establishment was to suppress this.
I mentioned cannabis.
You know, you're all probably aware, through the work of the hemp people, that cannabis holds many benefits, not necessarily related to its properties as an intoxicant, but as a source of food, lubricant, plastics, fuels, etc.
And the reason the establishment is so hysterical on the subject of cannabis is because it erodes loyalty to the industrial state.
I mean, that's why, if you look at the pharmacological profile, let's contrast two familiar drugs.
One, caffeine.
We have the medical data, which shows that it can contribute to fetal malformation.
We know that it damages the liver.
We know that it, if abused, can cause severe stomach ulcers, so forth and so on.
Cannabis, vast amounts of money have been spent trying to find something wrong with it.
And they're still digging, folks.
I mean, they've decided it doesn't cause tits on statues.
It doesn't.
You know, all the screwy things they've come up with over the years have had to be abandoned.
Why is caffeine enshrined in every labor contract negotiated in the Western world as a sacred right of all workers twice daily?
And why is cannabis that, you know, you can lose your house, your automobile, your bank account, your art collection,
simply because you had six plants in the back 40, and your children.
Why this disparity?
Well, what is the effect of caffeine?
It makes it possible for you to perform your duties during the last three hours of the work cycle
with efficiency equal to the first three hours of the work cycle.
It allows people to tolerate spinning widgets onto gombers until hell creates it over
without a thought ever rising in their mind that maybe this is a ridiculous way to spend your life.
Cannabis, on the other hand, people aren't so interested in going to work.
They'd rather lay around and make love.
They don't want to watch TV.
They'd rather smoke a doobie and have a conversation with a friend.
In other words, these things promote activities which don't make anybody any money
and cause people to question the institutions and the social philosophies that are being shoved down their throats.
If the playing field were level, caffeine might well be a prescription drug, not that I think that's a good idea,
and cannabis, I think, would probably be freely available.
The most dangerous drugs in society in terms of detrimental social impact are alcohol and tobacco,
the two most freely available.
I mean, every street corner of every city, they're peddled in vast amounts.
We have a very crack-brained approach to the problem of drugs.
We're not the only society.
All societies seem to do this.
Out of a possible spectrum of 20 or 30 depressants and intoxicants,
most societies select three or four which they hail as harmless,
and then the rest are, you know, the seed of Satan.
And this attitude is persevered against all scientific data, against all medical research.
This is just what people choose to think.
The problem is we don't have the luxury of this kind of ignorance anymore.
The amount of revenue that could be accrued from cannabis economy,
the pressure that could be taken off petroleum extraction if cannabis were part of the picture.
All of these things make it incumbent upon us, I think, to think more creatively and more honestly
about which drugs really are posing problems for us.
The other question really relates to this is why are there, given the fact, why is the percentage of shamans so small relative to a population?
Because of the fact that, as you say, there's fear in going into, there's attraction and fear in going into these other realms.
And there's obviously maybe some self-limiting aspect of the hyper-dimensional view,
which there's some dynamic going on because everyone has an equal opportunity to go to this hyper-dimensional,
but very few of their own initiatives really push to that point where you are definitely within the hyper-dimensional realm.
Well, there are different things to be said about this.
I mean, first of all, there are what are called biochemical differences in individuality,
and never more so than in the matter of drugs.
People are very different from each other.
Years ago, I took a course from Sasha Shogan at Cal,
and at one point he brought in some substance, I don't know what it was,
and this was a class of 600 people,
and passed it around and asked everybody to take a sniff of this bottle.
Well, 598 people pronounced this stuff completely odorless.
Two people were almost violently ill from the overpowering odor of this thing.
They possessed a gene for the sensitivity to this compound that caused it to be, for them, overwhelming,
for everyone else, unnoticeable.
And we're surrounded by these kinds of individual biochemical differences.
In traditional societies, shamanism is often a family business,
and it may well be that this is because ability to handle these psychedelic substances,
and to really get mileage out of them, is a genetic endowment of some sort.
I mean, cannabis, again, provides an interesting example.
One of the commonest things you hear people say about cannabis, who don't smoke it,
is they say, I used to, or I tried it, but it makes me paranoid.
Well, to the people who use it, this is inconceivable.
In fact, it's almost an antidote to paranoia, because it seems to make things appear more Taoistic,
more integrated, it all makes more sense.
These are biochemical differences that need to be studied.
You know, different racial groups have different relationships to intoxication.
I mean, I think it's probably there is some truth to the idea that the North American Indians had a susceptibility to distilled alcohol
that the Europeans, who had been dealing with it for a couple of centuries by the time they arrived here, didn't have,
because the North American Indians represented a closed gene pool, never having been exposed to this.
There was no selection for being able to handle it.
And then there's another issue in relation to your question, John, which is, first of all, you know, some people say,
well, not all shamans take hallucinogens.
Well, true, and I've excited some people's ire by suggesting, but all real shamans do.
And, you know, saying that somebody is a shaman, I mean, imagine if simply being able to rave and exhort on the subject of the four gospels
qualified you as a man of the Lord, actually you have to sort through dozens of so-called preachers to find somebody you would be willing to leave alone with your chickens.
Well, similarly, you have to sort through a lot of people who claim to be shamans before you find somebody who really is one.
I mean, we tend to be naive.
Go to the Amazon with your heart on your sleeve seeking ayahuasca.
And I guarantee, unless you go well-connected, you'll drink a lot of swill before you get to somebody honest enough,
responsible enough, conscientious enough to actually make it right and do it right.
And in the case of shamanism, usually this is going on in cultures without literacy, without written languages.
And so they don't hold conferences or publish proceedings or have the university matriculation examinations in shamanism.
So, on the surface, a shaman is anyone who claims to be a shaman or who cares to claim.
But in terms of real shamanic ability, I think it only comes through either innate special abilities,
which probably means innate high sensitivity to neurological, to neurotransmitters, exotic neurotransmitters,
or it comes through an exposure to hallucinogens.
This is a big argument in anthropology.
I mean, Mersel Iade, who normally I am very deferent to, got this one completely wrong
and decided on absolutely no evidence that what he called narcotic shamanism was decadent.
Well, first of all, the use of the word narcotic in that context shows that he didn't know what he was talking about.
Nobody uses narcotics to shamanize. You go to sleep if you take narcotics.
So, what he wanted to say was that he felt hallucinogenic shamanism was decadent.
But what is the alternative? Reliance on ordeals, fasting, or pathological personalities.
Maybe epileptics or borderline schizophrenics or something like that.
I think that these kinds of shamanisms that are not hallucinogenically based are derivative shamanisms,
but occur at a later stage of culture when the plant-based shamanism has been disrupted by some migration,
or the disappearance of the plants involved, or something like that.
From what I understand, the Lakota and genics, they accomplished all this through, you know, the drum beat and the song and things like that.
Right on.
I think acoustical driving can carry you a certain distance.
There are substitutes for how it works.
I think acoustical driving can carry you a certain distance.
There are substitutes for hallucinogens, but they're neither as effective nor as pleasant.
I mean, ordeals are what many cultures get into.
Well, I was just thinking, you know, along the lines of that, you know,
you know, in the south-west, you know, in the south-west.
You know, it's prominent.
Yeah, well, I think acoustical driving can carry you a certain distance.
There are substitutes for hallucinogens, but they're neither as effective nor as pleasant.
I mean, ordeals are what many cultures get into.
Well, I was just thinking, you know, along the lines of, you know, someone like Crazy Voice
that came out from the culture and seemed to possess these, you know, abilities and manifest them physically.
Well, there's also the exceptional personality.
The exceptional personality breaks all the rules, see.
So would you say then, Terence, that there is a genetic proclivity maybe in some individuals
if there is access to botanicals and if there is no historical evidence of shamanism prior to that,
for that individual to start engaging in explorations?
Yeah, I think so.
You know, Maria Sabina claimed that she was never initiated into shamanism.
She claimed that as a girl herding the cattle, she ate the mushrooms because she was hungry,
and that she was basically self-taught in shamanism in a society that actually had shamanic lineages and institutions.
In Madagascar, there are these highly evolved ordeal poisons, and this is where you take a plant, you feel like you're dying, you beg to die, you want to die, and you don't die.
You come back from it a better person, but it is only because you were slammed up against death itself.
Ordeals work, but they're not very pleasant.
And the idea of putting yourself through an ideal like that once a week or twice a month as part of your professional practice is pretty outrageous.
The other thing that has to be said, and this is really important, and I think anthropologists have sold this one short,
experiences are what we are least able to communicate to each other.
We can describe machine parts, agricultural procedures, but anything in the realm of feeling, our languages are woefully impoverished.
And I don't think that's specific to English.
I think it haunts all human experience, that it's hard to communicate how we feel.
Well, so then there's a vast spectrum of experiences that come from plants, and I dare say most of them unpleasant.
Let's start out with eating Diefenbachia or something, which causes your throat tissues to swell up and you feel like you're strangling.
Or, you know, Amanita muscaria is a very controversial shamanic plant because some people say it's garbage.
And Gordon Wasson in his last book called it the supreme entheogen of all time.
Well, clearly people are, are they talking about different things?
Or are they interpreting the same experience differently?
And so there are, for example, you know, people who are fond of peyote like, if they haven't done their homework,
like to imagine that they are taking this ancient, ancient hallucinogen that has informed the lives of the Sonoran and the Indians of that area for thousands and thousands of years.
Well, this is, as far as anybody can tell, complete bunk.
There is no record of peyote use older than four or five hundred years.
Most of it is post-ghost dance.
Before, when you go into the old Sonoran graves, the old archaeology of the Sonoran Batara Humara Indians, you find Sikora Sifundifolia beams, the little black and red beams that you see in Mexico strung into jewelry sold along the side of the roads.
That's what those Indians took for thousands and thousands of years.
We have a continuous record over about four thousand years of these seeds being buried in graves with ritual instruments indicating that they were buried with shamans.
You couldn't give it away today because it is such a horrible experience.
It's essentially sublethal strychnine poisoning.
It can kill you effortlessly.
It's clear that at some point, fairly recently, somebody tried peyote and said,
my God, this stuff we've been taking for thousands and thousands of years is just horrible compared to this.
This is great.
And immediately, there was a transfer of loyalty.
And Lord knows, eating fresh peyote is no gourmet.
So, the point there being, cultures tend to define experiences differently.
And you can't tell what people are talking about until you really check in.
Traveling around the world, you know, you end up in certain cultures and they say,
Oh, we're so happy to have you here.
As our honored guest, we would like you to eat some of our national...
National...
Let's say you're in Scotland, and so they say, well, you must eat some Huggies, because this is what we all eat. We all really love this. This is the best part of Scottish life. Boy, are you going to love this.
Well, when it's finally served, you know, your jaw drops in disbelief, because it's ghastly, unless you're Scotch. And, well, but if you're Scotch, you dare not say so, you see, because a cultural myth has been built up around, I mean, do Italians knock red wine? Do the French denounce truffles? Certainly not.
Oh, true. Pate de foie gras is always my example. So what you have to realize is that these things are culturally defined, and often what works for the Nyanamamo, or the Muinani, or the Witoto won't work for you.
Datura is a good example. Datura is a shamanic plant used by many people throughout the world. All of them, I think, pharmacologically deprived, otherwise they wouldn't put up with what you have to put up with to take that stuff, you know.
And my interest, and I know it was practical, was to find a hallucinogen that did what I wanted it to do, and didn't do anything I didn't want it to do.
What I was interested in was, first of all, hallucinations, because some people say I'm obsessed with it. Fine.
My notion is that if you can see something that isn't there, that's very much more convincing than just funny thoughts, racing ideas, strange physical sensations.
It's a powerful and boundary dissolving confrontation when you confront what is not there. And so I find, and this is a heresy for sure, I'm not that fond of LSD. I think it's a very sloppy drug.
I think, you know, you feel terrible the next day. I always did. I had tight headaches, body aches. People always say, well, it was not clean, it had speed in it, it had strychnine in it.
Eh, maybe. But even the good stuff is not, and it wouldn't hallucinate for me the way I wanted it to. I could get hallucinations if I would smoke hash with it.
But on its own, it was what I have described in other places as abrasively psychoanalytic, unpleasant, confrontational. And what I was interested in were hallucinations.
And so when I got to psilocybin, I remember after my first mushroom trip, I said, thank God we found this stuff. I'll never take LSD again. That wasn't quite true.
But I'll bet I've taken it less than half a dozen times since my first psilocybin trip.
So, and in terms of the chemistry of these things, my conclusion from all this fiddling is that it's the indole hallucinogens that are at the center of the mandala.
They do what we want them to do with very little detrimental side effects. LSD is one of them.
Ebogaine is one of them. Not one widely known. We've got to save something for our old age folks.
Harmine and Harmeline, the beta-carbolines, when complexed with DMT, and then psilocybin. And I think that's the basic lift.
Well, those do. These are really the keys which open the lock very easily, very cleanly, very dependably.
And that's where I would put all of my attention. And, you know, even in that domain, you have to be somewhat careful.
My brother and I spent years tracking down a hallucinogen in the Amazon called ukuhe that was an orally active form of DMT, which we remember I said that DMT is destroyed in the gut.
So we were fascinated to try and find this ukuhe because we wanted to know how it was possible that it could work orally.
And also the ethnographic accounts claimed that the people who used it spoke with little men.
And we wanted to see these little men to see if they were the same little men we were trying to...
Well, we had three expeditions to the Amazon before we finally closed in on this stuff.
And when we finally got it, you know, with this tremendous sense of having attained the grail and having finally this was going to do it, this was going to be the one...
Then we took this stuff and, my God, it turned us every way but loose.
Your heart feels like it's pounding its way out of the front of your chest.
You vomit.
You have tremoring of the limbs.
On and on and on.
So we go through this, live through it, wash off in the river and go looking for the shaman to lodge a complaint.
And he says, yeah, well, it's hard to get used to.
And so then when we get it back home to the lab and do the high-pressure gas chromatography and all the rest of it and see what's really there,
you see that the genetic component of the varrola trees from which this resin is extracted is a mess.
It's too many tryptamines.
DMT, DET, 5-monomethyl tryptamine, 5-MAO DMT, and several other cardioactive tryptamines.
It looked like they'd swept the floor of an endochemist's lab to put together the components of this plant.
You don't want this.
You don't, because it's like taking 10 drugs at once.
You know, it's all running together.
You can't tell whether you're Agnes or Angus.
What you want is a DMT source where when you put it in the grass chromatograph, no, in the gas chromatograph,
you get one spike, that's NM-dimethyl tryptamine, and all the rest is cellulose, a little DNA, and that's all, some minerals and salt.
But if you don't have a clean source, then, you know, it's contaminated.
So even that legendary shamanic hallucinogen, when actually put to the use test, wasn't able to pass it.
Yes, going back to the DMT and mushroom psilocybin, you were talking about taking psilocybin and then doing breath control
is indistinguishable from a DMT source.
If you do it correctly, you can coax it.
Since this is the learning tree, and you're sort of in front there, maybe you could give us an idea of what it's like to coax 5G into an...
I mean, I'm sure you won't be able to give us all the information, but maybe you can sort of enlighten us a little bit,
and we can sort of work in that direction.
At least I can work in that direction.
Well, you mean, how do you get at the peak of a psilocybin trip to deliver you into DMT land?
Yes, because sometimes I get a little jealous hearing you talk about DMT prayer.
And I sit here and say, you know, I want to find that stuff.
Anyway, so...
Well, the thing is, psilocybin will take you there if you have the courage and the stamina to tolerate the duration of the psilocybin revelation.
So first of all, you take a heroic dose, 5, 6, 7 grams.
Then, when you're peeking, well, you smoke cannabis.
Then, you sit in silent darkness, alone, because I think the presence of other people always pins you to the surface with this stuff.
You don't need somebody else.
No matter if they're talking or not, they can just be in the room and you're aware of it.
If you're sitting there, then this is a different thing.
Yes.
Breathing, exhaling, breathing, exhaling.
And then, you form an intention for it to approach you.
I mean, you say...
I can feel it.
I mean, it's almost a neighborhood.
It's a pharmacological neighborhood.
And you know how you may go to Little Italy, but there are no Italians on the street.
But if you start, you know, you have to somehow shake them out of the nest.
And you simply ask for them to appear.
I always hark back to that episode of I Love Lucy, where she and Ethel are discussing how to contact the space people.
And Lucy tells Ethel, she says, well, I just say, come in, little green men.
Come in, little green men.
And, you know, yeah, it's a big laugh now, but try it on 25 milligrams of silicide.
Well, the they of the DMT thing is these entities which you contact, although they may turn out to be toys created by someone unseen
who is, in fact, in charge of this hyper-dimensional maternity ward.
But these toys, if that's what they are, are essentially teaching machines of some sort.
They're trying to get you to perform this linguistic activity.
As far as the UFO thing is concerned, I think it's...
Well, it sort of requires some background.
I think that there's something fundamentally wrong with our understanding of the world.
Fundamentally wrong.
And what it is, is that we believe that the past creates the present.
That the present is the sum total of actions and situations that exist in the past.
In other words, we believe that the horse pushes the cart.
The horse doesn't push the cart.
The cart is pulled.
There is an attractor in the future.
There is actually, I think of history as a bowl.
Down these slopes, we are making our way.
Well, since we are in a situation where conservation of energy is important,
where are we all going to end up?
The bottom of the bowl, obviously.
That's, if you release a marble up on the rim,
it's going to make its way down the bowl to what's called the dwell point.
The place where the energy requirements are such
that the forward momentum of the falling ball
is satisfied by meeting the resistance of the bottom of the bowl.
History is like this.
We are being pulled forward by an attractor.
It has somehow come into the human world
and has pulled us out of animal organization.
If this attractor were not present,
we would still probably be cheerfully slinging excrement around
in the canopy of some jungle tree.
But because of the attractor,
we have been pulled into social organization,
technology, language, community, so forth and so on.
And mystics and seers and visionaries
are people who have a relationship to this attractor
that is different from the rest of us.
They can glimpse aspects of this thing.
And when I think of it this way,
I always think of those jewels,
the mirrored ball that they hang over the bar in a disco,
and then they spin it and it throws reflections of light
all over the room from the ambient lighting.
Well, history is like this.
The attractor at the end of time,
which is below the event horizon of the present
and thus impossible to anticipate its true form,
sends back through time distorted reflections of itself,
which if you are struck by one of these distorted reflections,
well, then you begin to preach and cure,
and local conditions may damp your activity,
and then you're what's called a nut.
But if, in fact, local conditions support your activity
so that you become a mean spreader,
then you're suddenly a messiah,
a teacher, a Buddha, a Christ, a Mohammed.
That's what these people were.
They were people who were, for reasons,
mysterious to themselves, I'm sure,
in a relationship of resonance with the transcendental object,
such that they, in a sense, embodied it.
Well, in our own era, because of technology,
and Jung was on to this when he wrote his book in 1948
called Flying Thorses,
A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky.
He said the flying saucer is an image of the self
that haunts the skies of Earth
as a compensatory effect to our alienation.
Well, I think that that's exactly what's going on,
except that he didn't realize
how nuts and bolts that explanation was.
The UFO is a mirage being cast backward into time
by the transcendental object at the end of time.
And that's why it has such a hair-raising aura of weirdness about it.
It isn't a ship from another star system.
I mean, how could anyone reasonably entertain that idea,
given the distances in time
and what you find when you get here?
I mean, who would make that trip
who had any reasonable way to spend their time?
It's a compensatory image that haunts time
because time is a kind of hologram.
Time is a fractal.
And fractal means that the same pattern is embedded
again and again in a relationship of self-similarity.
So, because the transcendental object exists
somewhere ahead of us in history,
there must necessarily be a tiny part of it
somewhere nearby.
And this is what the UFO is, I think.
And this is why nobody's ever going to show you a chunk of it
and they're never going to put an extraterrestrial
on network television
because it isn't that kind of a creature.
It's a compensatory image from the end of time.
This leads me to an aspect of what I wanted to talk about,
what I very briefly and obliquely indicated this morning,
which was when I was talking about
how we're halfway through history,
but the rest of it has to happen in only 30 years.
I think that we're moving towards something called concrescence.
This isn't my word.
It's Alfred North Whitehead's word.
I think you can tell what it means.
It means everything melts together into one thing.
I think that from the very birth of the universe,
this is bigger than the human species,
bigger than the life of the earth.
From the very first moments of the universe's existence,
it has been itself under the domain,
under the influence of an attractor.
And this attractor is pulling everything
into tighter and tighter states of self-reflective resonance.
And that now we are very close to this concrescent event.
And that, in fact, human history,
I called it the shockwave of eschatology.
But I didn't talk much about what eschatology is.
Because, well, first of all,
it lies below the event horizon
of the present historical epoch.
But it won't always.
It could rise above the horizon at any time.
You know, 2000, 1996, you name it.
But we have been too long under the spell of the idea
that only the past creates the present.
The present is actually largely created
by appetite for the future.
And this would seem to me a highly improbable idea
had I not taken psychedelics
and gotten this hyper-dimensional view
of the system that we're living in.
And then you can see that, yes,
history is not a random walk.
It's not a series of undirected random fluctuations.
History is a process of fractal self-complexification
that builds on whatever it has achieved.
And so, upon the complexity of animal organization
is laying the complexity of human language.
Upon the complexity of human language
is laid the complexity of symbolic signification
of that language, i.e. writing.
Upon writing is laid electronic technology,
and so forth and so on.
So, we are, in a sense,
in the act of giving birth to
or creating the object of our theologies,
which is a kind of god or goddess,
depending on, you know,
how you slice into it,
how you feel about it.
And the UFO is simply an indicator
that we are so close now
to encountering the contrescent transcendental object
that it's able to haunt the skies of Earth
and the imaginations of people
who live in trailer parks.
This is, you know,
you have to remember that history itself
is a violation of the laws of nature,
and history and its consequences are all around us.
We don't have to argue about whether
is history happening.
I mean, if obviously it's happening,
we're embedded late in it.
But it's caused by the fact that ordinary nature,
the nature of glaciers, chipmunks,
anthills, termites, termite nests,
and whale pods,
has come, at least in the case of our species,
under the influence of something
which is literally fastened onto us
and is now recreating us in its image.
You know, it's taking a monkey body
and it's saying, you know,
stand it up,
slide the eyes around to the front,
oppose the thumb,
shed the hair,
enlarge the brain,
put ideas into the brain,
so forth and so on.
I mean, we are being recast
as something unimaginable
to the rest of nature.
And we are now fairly close
to figuring out what this is.
This is why we are able to talk
about human-machine symbiosis,
virtual reality,
downloading ourselves to the size of viruses
in a nanotechnological domain,
stuff like that.
So, could you say that the index
of contrast
is taking what has to do
with contact
human-inspired mediation,
or what's the name of Harvard,
a psychiatrist,
a contractor,
and all the number of people
who's worked with these claims
that have had
fertilization?
Yeah, I agree with your idea
that it's an index
of the depth of compressence,
though muddied
by shrewd public relations types
who are making a living
off this stuff.
I think the crop circles
are a more honest indication
of how close we are
to the transcendental body.
I interviewed the person
you mentioned at Harvard
for a film we did in Prague
a few months ago,
and I...
His name was?
I'm a boy.
Wait, oh.
And I had to ask him
halfway through the interview,
I said,
well, do you detect anything
in your own psychological makeup
which makes you unfit
to be doing this work?
That was after he told me
that he'd interviewed
500 women
who had had fetuses
removed from their bodies
by space people,
and he said,
you know,
the amazing thing
about this is
there are no physical scars
at all,
and I said,
well,
what does this suggest to you?
And he said,
advanced surgical techniques
of which we have no knowledge,
and I'm just...
My craft detector
went AWOL
on that answer.
The rules of evidence
are not in suspension
for the new age,
and, you know,
people who recall
their lifetime
as the barber of Nefertiti
or whatever
have serious problem
with what I call
the rules of evidence.
They don't seem
to have ever heard
of Occam's Razor,
which you study logic
for ten minutes,
and they tell you
about Occam's Razor.
Do you all know
what this is?
It's a simple idea.
Keep it next to you.
Hypotheses should not
be multiplied
without necessity,
and there are a lot
of unnecessary hypotheses
running around,
especially in the new age domain.
I would study
the impregnation effect
more as an example
of mass hysteria,
because, you know,
being in the position
that I am in,
supposedly a revered teacher
and a person
of great insight
and all this
hoopla and crapola,
you occasionally
get invited to dinner
with the movers
and shakers,
and then you hear
what's said
when not on stage,
and I have to tell you,
there's enough cynicism
to satisfy
a renaissance pope
among these people.
They are taking
the rest of us
for a ride
in many cases.
Well, Danny and I
last night
were discussing
like what
this transcendental object,
we were enumerating
a list of things
that it could possibly be,
and as you say,
the cast of reflection
and so forth,
how is it that,
say, for example,
the Ayahuasqueros,
in Pablo Amarengo's drawings,
there's a UFO motif
in one of his drawings.
What is that?
You mean,
do they see UFOs?
What are they,
what is it that they see?
When is it,
because they specifically
identify this motif
as separate
from the rest
of the drawings,
in one of
Shaman's drama magazines?
Well, I'm,
I'm giving the UFO
a slightly different status
than this stuff
I'm dumping on.
I think the UFO
is real,
or that there is
a real phenomenon.
The problem is,
what is
the phenomenon?
And it's a,
why someone
who sees
a spinning disc
in the sky
assumes
then an entire
theology
about friendly
extraterrestrials
coming to help us out?
Why do they assume that?
What they've seen
is a spinning disc
in the sky,
for crying out loud.
Maybe what they saw
was a spinning disc
in the sky.
There are two
phenomenon here
which are
entangled
inextricably
and unfortunately
for the
intellectually honest.
There's the UFO.
Who knows
what that is?
And then there's
the UFO community.
And the UFO community is just fraught with the most crack-brained, peculiar, self-serving, unstable, mush-minded group of people you would ever hope to get together in one place.
I mean, it's like a magnet for screwballs. I mean, people who like to wear diamond tiaras and give themselves funny names, and it has absolutely nothing to do with the tremendously fascinating and ambiguous phenomenon of strange things seen in the sky.
I mean, I went through this, I'm not talking as an outsider. I've seen, I had a UFO encounter that was a deeper encounter than most of the people who run around pontificating about UFOs, and I will, at the risk of boring you yet again with this story, tell the story.
I was in the Amazon. I was having all these revelations about time and one thing and another, and I noticed a place in the sky where there was a spectrogrammatic diffraction of some sort.
It wasn't a rainbow, it was a colored smudge in the sky, and I was lightly but continually intoxicated on mushrooms during this period, and it said, watch there.
So I sat up one night, all night, all night, on this rock by a lake, watching the southwest, and around 4.30 in the morning, with essentially a perfectly clear sky, except that off the Amazon jungle, local mist rises.
And so about a mile and a half away from me on the horizon was a line of what looked to me like a little fog bank.
And as light broke over this situation, I noticed, I couldn't tell whether it had been doing this or it began doing it as things got lighter, but I noticed that this fog bank was rolling in place, like a pencil rolled between your fingers, which I had never seen a fog do that.
I thought, I thought, what a strange thing, and as I watched it, stretched out across the horizon, it gently broke into four equal-sized pieces.
So now I'm looking at four gray lenticular clouds spaced out along the horizon, about a mile and a half away from me, across this lake.
So I'm watching, and I'm getting eager, and I'm getting excited, and as I watched these four lenticular clouds, two and two merge, now I'm looking at two denser, grayer, dark gray, darker than storm clouds, these two things on the horizon.
And as I watched, the four became two, the two become one, and at that point, faintly, I could hear the hui hui hui sound of 1950s science fiction UFOs, a la the day the Earth stood still, they came from outer space, so forth and so on.
And I see, and I see, my God, this thing is starting toward me, and the sound is getting louder.
And at that point, there was like a complete conversion in an instant, and my whole body went cold, and I realized, uh, they're coming for me.
And I said, this is it, you know, prepare to be beamed up, Scotty.
And, uh, and I, I, everybody was asleep in a hut about 70 miles, 70 feet up this mud embankment.
I was down by the river and the lake, and I said, and it flashed in my mind, I have to get a witness.
There must be a witness.
And I looked, I looked over my shoulder at the mud bank, the thing was coming at me, I half stood up, my knees were so weak, I sat back down, and I just prepared to depart this planet, this dimension.
And as it came, I could see it, and it was getting closer and closer, I could see rivets on the underside, I could see the running lights, and as it got closer and closer,
I realized that what I was looking at was the end cap of a 1932 Hoover vacuum cleaner, the very end cap that George Adamski had suspended on a piece of nylon thread in his garage,
and photographed with his brownie instamatic to produce the famous UFO photograph of the UFO with the three balls on the underside and the, and the ribbing going around, right?
That photograph has been utterly debunked.
Computer analysis of it by modern techniques, it's bullshit.
And there it was, 40 feet in diameter, coming after me across the Amazon treetops.
Well, then, and I just went bananas at that point, and then it passed over not more than 200 feet above my head, turning slowly, I could see the three balls, I could see the, everything, I could see it.
And I understood then, that what it was, was it was more shocking than a real UFO, because it had its disconfirmation built into it.
I was having an experience which you couldn't tell anybody about.
What would the editor of We Love UFOs magazine say if you told him that story?
He'd say, get out of here, you know, we don't print stories like that, we're interested in real UFOs.
Did it depart information to you of some sort, because apparently you've been knighted the, the, um, person to speak about mushrooms in such a way that you're, you're actually,
and some people do say that that Terence McKinnon may be an alien being himself, incarnate.
Well, only people who are in litigation with me.
I think what it was telling me, it was a perfect Zen lesson.
It was saying, don't believe in UFOs, they're the end caps of 1932 Hoover vacuum cleaners, expand to 40 feet in diameter, and flying through your mind.
So you have to question everything.
Yeah, it's saying, you know, you can't replace one high, one stupid hypothesis, there aren't UFOs, with another stupid hypothesis,
we're being visited by benevolent creatures from another world, have to get a little more depth here, if you want to be the alien ambassador.
Well, the crop circles, I, I'm now less sure about the crop circles, um, what I liked about them was that each, that they appeared at a certain point in time,
and then each year there were more of them, and I figured that we could take how many there are each year and draw a curve and reach a conclusion about how far away in the future the source of them was.
Because if they are, uh, it's almost as though, um, the UFO, see, leaves no trace.
I mean, the burn marks on the ground, but already you're in to dubiousness, because who has ever seen these burn marks?
Only the editors of these UFO magazines and their willing psychophants.
I mean, you and I have not seen these burn marks, we've seen photographs of funny stuff on the ground, and we're told that's it.
The crop circle leaves a trace that is enduring.
But the problem there, the problem I have with the crop circles, and it's odd how you never hear this discussed,
is that nobody has ever seen one come into existence.
We get before, and we get after, but how come we never get during?
Do they appear instantly?
If they appear instantly, that would be pretty convincing.
Just glance, it's not there, glance, glance, it's there, and we figure, yeah.
Um, there's, uh, because he's doing a lot of the researches, Colin Andrews, he's doing a lot of research on this,
and I've got a recording, and this is basically how he described it.
They were waving and setting up to, in this area, to, you know, try and record some of what's going on.
And, uh, and all of a sudden, you know, recorders are running, and all of a sudden, they all stand up,
because there's this incredibly strange, powerful sounding buzz of some kind that comes from far away,
and just comes zooming up, and comes past them over this little ride, and it's next to them.
Okay, and it takes them all of maybe, you know, 45 seconds or a minute to get to the top of the rise,
and there on the other side of the rise is proper, but it wasn't there when they started setting up.
So, apparently, you know, and Richard Hoekwit talks about this, too.
Don't get me started.
Okay.
Don't get me started.
Bad works of art on a scale of miles are not what we should expect from, uh, intelligent visitors from the stars.
Um, here's what I, let me, isn't it a little weird?
Let's, I mean, first of all, let me say, I'm open-minded against, about crop circles.
But let's also not be, uh, silly.
Isn't it a little peculiar that this phenomenon, uh, appears within driving distance of the apartments,
of the people most likely to chronicle and proclaim it as, uh, a manifestation of telluric energy from another dimension?
In other words, what if it had been happening in, in Turkmenistan?
Then you would have something.
But then how would John Michel and Colin Andrews and all these people have been able to make a living off of it?
Uh, there are a number of things that are really weird about the crop circles.
First of all, we're talking southern England here.
The place is littered with RAF bases, nuclear weapons depots, intercontinental missile delivery systems, so forth and so on.
And we're asked to believe that the Ministry of Defense is utterly unconcerned about the fact that the airspace of Great Britain
is being violated night after night after night by a mysterious agency that, if it can snap the stem of a wheat stalk,
could throw the switch on, uh, an, an electrical device of some sort.
The British establishment is utterly unconcerned by the crop circles.
They're not necessarily said from above.
Well, but wherever it's coming from, if you had a nuclear weapons depot, I think you would be Johnny at the raffle to find out what's going on.
I, didn't, didn't you read, like, last year, the year before, like, these two guys came forward and said that they've perpetrated a hoax?
Right, and all that did was muddy the waters.
Well, it did one good thing.
It finished the, it can't be done by human beings position.
We now know, you know, Rupert and all these people, Rupert, believe it or not, is the plant pathologist who serves on the board of the seriologist,
which is the main publication that is booming this.
They held a contest in July where you paid 50 pounds, you were assigned a five-acre plot, you had from 10 at night until 4 in the morning.
Uh, there were, I think, 16 entries.
Everybody was given the same design.
And, uh, at dawn, judges helicoptered over the sites and then made the ground inspection.
And, uh, three of the contestants produced crop circles that were indistinguishable from the real thing.
Beautiful crop circles.
And I'm getting this from believers, you know.
This is what Rupert reluctantly informed me on.
And, uh, I think that, uh, and, you know, one theory is that it's a particle beam weapon being tested from space,
but tested 750 times in the last 18 months in the same small part of England.
And a couple of the tracks.
So, uh, I don't know, I, we tried, I came up with two theories that do not require telluric intervention or friendly extraterrestrials.
First theory.
A whole lot of people, first of all, it's killed the UFO industry in England.
You can't give away UFO sightings at this point.
So, all of these people, you know, it all is happening near Glastonbury and down where the old earthworks are.
It's occurring in an area where there is the largest concentration of people likely to hail it as a paranormal phenomenon on the surface of the earth.
And, uh, they have done so.
They have made outrageous statements.
Statements like, no human being could do this.
It's impossible to explain this.
So forth and so on.
Well, now imagine that something like MI5, you know what that is.
It's the English CIA.
It looks at the rise of paganism in Britain, uh, you know, earthworks, channeling, all of this stuff, and says, uh, this threatens church and state.
We need to create a disinformation situation.
Let's lure these people out onto a limb, way out onto a limb, and then let's cut the limb off.
So what you do is you create this pseudo-paranormal phenomenon.
You get John Mitchell, Colin Andrews, all these people to proclaim its weirdness, and then you reveal that it's easily duplicated.
That's one theory.
In other words, the British establishment is undercutting paganism by luring these people into saying too much.
But that's not my favorite theory.
That's a good one, though.
What's your favorite?
Oh, my favorite theory is much better.
Because the question is, how do you make these things?
When you actually go to the crop circles, what do you see?
This is a Sherlock Holmes type deal.
You know, Sherlock Holmes could handle the crop circles with his arm tied behind his head, I think.
When you go to the crop circles, here it is.
The crop circle.
Mysterious, unearthly, portending, who knows what.
And what else is there?
Well, the press, and the sightseers, and yourself, and an extraordinary number of Japanese tourists.
Now, you're getting close.
The Japanese press has followed the crop circle phenomenon more avidly than any other press in the world outside of England.
Every new crop circle appears, photographs, and discussion.
It is huge in Japan.
Japan, they're obsessed with this stuff.
I think that what might be going on, this is certainly a lot more likely than extraterrestrials or telluric forces.
Do you all know what MITI is?
It's the Ministry of Trade and Industry.
It's this enormous organization in Japan which coordinates technological development and marketing.
It's what we're talking about when we say Japan Incorporated.
I think that this is a MITI research project and that these Japanese tourists, which are ever-present at these sites,
some of them are drawn from a centuries-old tradition of ninja stem snappers
who, at a given signal, are able to hurl away their Nikons, rush into the corn,
and, in the matter of a few minutes, create these things,
then put their cameras back on and their sunglasses back on
and take up their deep cover as Japanese tourists.
Now, why would MITI do such a thing?
What's in it for them?
It's a semiotics project.
They are studying the impact of symbols on the Western mind.
The closest thing to these crop circles, if you look at a complete encyclopedia of them,
are the pottery marks made by master potters in medieval Japan on their ceramics.
Almost all of the crop circles, except the frivolous ones,
like, for instance, how about the fact that the symbol of the seriologist magazine was done
and was done in one of these things.
I was at that one, the proof.
Yeah.
These things, it's got humor behind it.
I mean, it's a grand silliness of some sort.
I'm willing to be proven wrong.
I grappled with it, like everybody else, for six months,
but the density of flakiness around it is incredible.
And the number of people whose private agendas are being served by this.
I mean, if it were happening north of Hudson Bay, there'd be no money in it.
You have to be able to drive there from central London in order for it to work.
Well, then people always say, well, but it's happening all over the world, my good man.
Haven't you heard?
Show me.
It's not happening all over the world.
Some clumsy attempts appeared in Kentucky.
And, you know, there was something in Germany.
And so forth and so on.
But it's really hair-raising to be among these people
and to see how uncommitted to finding out what it is they are
and how totally committed they are to preserving it from rational inspection.
They don't want to talk about, you know, any alternative
other than whatever the pet theory of the week is about how it's happening.
Now, I see it as part of the ingression into novelty.
Things are going to get weirder and weirder.
There's no doubt about that.
But it doesn't mean that there is a conscious extraterrestrial agency.
I mean, I find it pretty weird that there are 500 women who think they have fetuses
removed from their bodies by extraterrestrials.
That's so weird that suggesting that it's true seems a little like overkill to me.
I mean, what is going on that would make a woman do that sort of thing?
There's always, if you're a careful observer of one of these things,
there's always, Jacques Vallée wrote about this,
a residuum of absurdity that is suppressed by the witness
because the witness knows that if they told the whole story,
their story is not credible.
This is called, you know, the built-in absurdity of these paranormal things.
And when somebody tells you a story about a UFO encounter
that does not have this element of self-contradicting absurdity in it,
they're manipulating the evidence to make it seem more woo-woo-woo, I think.
And I'm not a rationalist except, well, I've seen things that violated the laws of physics.
I believe the laws of physics can be violated.
I believe there may well be extraterrestrials somewhere in the universe.
Do you believe the Vonage manuscripts may have something to do with
or some type of alien intelligence?
No, I think the Vonage manuscript is a solved problem
and that this guy Leo Levertoff's translation is correct.
What I found was, you know, it was a Catharite manual for the dying.
That's much more exciting than trying to claim it as a book from another dimension
because now we gain an insight into what Catharism was really about.
I think there is a residuum of the irrational and the paranormal,
but these things like flying saucers and Atlantis and the crop circles,
they're like viruses upon the healthy body of language.
You know, there's something wrong with language and communication
because it's never as you imagine it's going to be.
And people are being sold a phenomenon that if they were to go,
they would discover that aspects of it were suppressed or misrepresented.
The people who are dealing with the crop circles are having a great time.
It's the longest drinking party on record in that part of England.
I guess I should say this because I know it's a bummer
to have your favorite weird thing dumped on.
But my technique, which I recommend to you,
is don't believe anything.
If you believe in something,
you are automatically precluded from believing its opposite.
Therefore, you have given up a portion of your freedom
and freedom is the dearest thing we've got.
You don't have to believe anything.
You can just provisionally work your way through stuff.
And then probe the edges.
The edges will satisfy.
I think that the proper way to contact the other
is with hard-headed rationalism exercised under weird conditions.
I went to India,
visited some of these yoga people and accomplished saints.
I'm telling you,
for my money,
it was hokum.
It was,
there was an ulterior agenda,
either having the wish to relieve you of your cash
or to violate some body cavity.
That was the ulterior agenda.
When I went to the Amazon,
with the same attitude of skepticism,
and talked to the shamans there,
they delivered the goods.
If somebody,
so you just,
you just investigate these things.
And the key question is,
what can you show me?
If they've got it,
they can show it.
There's no mumbo-jumbo around the real thing.
But if they say,
oh, well, you know,
the tape recordings miraculously erased themselves last night.
Or,
we'll show you,
but you have to sweep up around the ashram for a dozen years
to prove you're worthy.
Or,
you know,
you are not worthy.
That's the one where you head for the door.
You are not worthy.
The real thing is the real thing,
for crying out loud.
It can be displayed.
It doesn't require this weird,
fuzzy relationship of worth and insight,
and so forth and so on.
And I,
and that's how I got to psychedelics.
Psychedelics work.
If you think that I'm bullshitting you,
go home and take five grams of mushrooms in silent darkness,
and then we'll talk.
That's the sine qua non.
But,
and it'll work,
on demand.
I'm not saying,
and wait 40 years,
or purify yourself,
or fix,
get your aura stitched up,
or any of the rest of it.
It'll work.
It'll blow your mind to shreds.
It's real.
This other stuff is just,
you know,
all these gurus,
they need to find honest work.
They need to join the rest of us
in contemplating the mystery of reality.
They don't know what they're talking about.
If they knew what they were talking about,
they wouldn't have to shuffle the deck
when you're out of the room.
And that's what's going on.
Somebody must be outraged,
insulted,
and terribly disappointed.
Getting back to the DMT,
do you have similar...
Yeah.
Well, no, no.
I got some shit.
Do you have the same experience
each time you take it
under similar conditions?
Do other people report the same things
to the same teaching machines,
and how does it relate
to near-death experiences?
Do you have a sign?
In order.
Yes,
I do have the same experience
each time I take it.
Do they say nice to see you again?
They say you've sent so many,
but you come so rarely.
And then,
the more interesting question,
do other people see it?
Do you get a connection?
Yeah, do I get a connection?
Do other people see it?
What I've thought about this question a lot,
because it's a question of communication.
If they saw it,
could they tell me?
If they told me in their language,
would I understand
what they were telling me?
And what I've decided
is that the experience is...
an archetype. It's the archetype of the circus. Why? Don't ask me why. I don't know why. But, for instance, I've listened to many, many people talk about their DMT experiences, and inevitably, this is the box into which it will fit.
I gave it to a woman once up in Washington, an anthropologist. It was a sub-threshold dose because she coughed. I could tell she didn't get it. And when she came down, she said, it was the saddest carnival I've ever been to.
She said, there were no... the rides weren't open. The tents were shuttered, and there were little gum papers blowing between the things, the stands.
The circus is an interesting archetype because it has a number of facets. First of all, you have the three central rings under the big top. That's the dome.
And in the central ring, there's light and color and clowns. Remember that Maria Sabina called the mushrooms the little clowns. And these clowns, the circus is for children.
And when you take DMT, one of the things I didn't mention in my description of it, is you have a peculiar impression of your own body geometry.
Your head seems to be very large in relationship to your torso. You are, in fact, an infant in some sense.
You become a child. This leads to thinking about the 52nd fragment of Heraclysis, which says,
the aeon is a child that play with colored balls. Nobody knows what this saying means, but it's persisted for about 3,000 years.
So it must mean something. But outside the three rings, there's another aspect to the circus.
It is spun into Eros because above the center ring and up near the top of the dome is the beautiful woman with long blonde hair
and the tiny, skimpy, spangled costume. And the narrative type dream. And the alarm rings. And by the time your feet hit the floor
and you stagger into the shower, it's gone. It's not partially gone. It's all gone.
And all you can say is, I was having this amazing dream. I have no idea what it was. The DMT thing can leave you just that quickly.
And also, and I think this has a bearing on this, they have studied the production of DMT in normal metabolism
and it peaks in normal human beings between 3 and 4 a.m. This is when the deep dreaming is going on.
This is when the intense REM states are being experienced. So I think that where the dead and the living get together is in the dream time.
Australian Aborigines have been trying to tell us this for as long as we would listen.
And also, a lot of people, it's possible to repress it very, very quickly. I think, for instance, I've seen people,
one way you can tell if someone has really gotten a good DMT trip is they lay down, they become very still,
but if you look closely at their face with their eyes closed, you can see that their eyes are moving wildly underneath their closed eyelids.
This is because they're in REM state and they are watching whatever it is they're seeing.
They are looking at it.
I remember giving DMT to a person years and years ago, a person who might have been a candidate for the description psychologically fragile.
And it was clear that she got it because she was a hash smoker and she took 3 or 4 enormous hits, laid down,
and her eyes were wildly rotating around in her head, when she came out of it, said,
what was it?
She said, it was nothing.
I don't remember anything.
I don't remember anything at all.
And furthermore, I don't think I want to have anything more to do with it.
And didn't.
Well, I think that this is something that it only shows as much of it as you can stand.
And some of us cannot stand much at all.
This occurs with psilocybin as well.
I've had experiences with psilocybin where I've said to it,
after hours of hallucinations of one sort and another,
I finally say, you know, what I'm really interested in is your true essence.
Can you show me what you are for yourself rather than for me?
What are you for yourself?
Well, then it's just like a cold wind blows through
and black velvet curtains begin to rise.
And after 30 seconds of this, you just say,
that's enough of what you are for yourself.
Because you can tell it's headed in a direction you can't tolerate at all.
You can't stand.
I have a friend who said of psilocybin, he said,
my goal every time I take it is to stand more of what it really is.
And this is why it's incredibly kind to beginners.
Beginners basically need to have no fear if they will regulate the dose reasonably.
Because it wants to recruit you.
And so it says, you know, here it is, whatever you wanted,
aliens, outer space, elves, erotic imagery, here it is.
Doesn't this feel safe?
See, we're not so bad.
We're your friends.
We're not like all the others.
Come back soon.
It's after you gain familiarity with it, where it says,
you know, there are aspects to me that we've never really talked about.
You say, oh, yeah?
Like what?
Well, like this.
No, no.
Let's go back to the Disney loop.
How close is the DMT that you smoke compared to the brain DMT that we all have running through?
Is there a difference, like, NN-dimethyltryptamine and what's in our brain?
No, no.
It's the same thing.
Exactly the same.
It's the same thing.
DMT occurs in two forms, the salt and the hydrochloride.
And both forms occur.
Well, no, I'm not sure that both forms occur in metabolism.
But the only difference is that one is water-soluble and the other isn't.
So, basically, then again, we are holding, then.
I mean, if DMT is illegal, then what we have in our brain running through us is considered illegal.
Yeah, we are potentially bust-able.
You know, in light of what I said, one of the most interesting frontiers that the New Age has brought forward
that I think bears more serious study than the channelings of Amenhotep's barber and all that
is lucid dreaming.
Lucid dreaming, if it, I don't know whether those people, I don't know those people personally,
I don't know what their motivation is, but if it's true that you can take control of the dream state,
then this would be something worth spending even a lot of time on.
Because the dream state is more like the tryptamine geography than anything else.
One of the most fascinating things about DMT that should certainly be mentioned,
as long as we're exhausting ourselves on this subject,
is once you've had DMT, once you've smoked it and this experience has occurred,
you can have a dream years later in which you're with a bunch of people
and something's going on and you enter the atrium of the Hotel California
and you take a floor to the basement or something,
and then you're in a room with people and someone whips out a little glass pipe
and you smoke it and it happens.
It doesn't sort of happen.
It happens 100%.
That means that's exciting data because that means that we have the wherewithal
to trigger this experience in ourselves on the natch, at least while we're asleep.
And I presume that with sufficient patience and subtlety and biofeedback equipment,
and I don't know what you would take, but if you spend a million dollars,
you could probably deliver it on time,
we can trigger this most intense of all hallucinogenic ecstasies,
most boundary dissolving of all possible human experiences on the natch.
But we have to somehow find our way to the button.
And apparently, in normal waking consciousness, it isn't there.
I spend a lot of time, I mean, I didn't mean to be so flip about the UFOs.
I've spent years trying to think about the UFOs and studied all the theories.
One that I still may be part of the truth is,
maybe it is so that we generate and sequester DMT somewhere in our brain,
and under unusual situations,
this sequester DMT can suddenly be dumped into the brain fluid,
or into the bloodstream,
and then you have a DMT experience,
or some kind of quasi-DMT-like experience.
Because I read an interesting paper a few years ago,
I can't remember the name of the guy who wrote it,
it was an anthropological paper.
It was called,
The Felt Presence in Unusual Environments.
And it talked about how it is apparently a basic trait of human beings
to, when in the wilderness,
especially unfamiliar wilderness,
people sense something there.
The Felt Presence in Unusual Environments.
Well, it may be that,
now, imagine if you're in the wilderness,
in a situation not entirely familiar to you,
so that you're edging up toward the Felt Presence thing,
and suddenly DMT stored in your brain is,
for some reason,
perhaps a pathological reason,
that it shouldn't happen,
but it's shunted into your brain.
Well, now, suddenly,
you feel there's something here,
there's someone here,
there's someone with me.
The hair on the back of your neck stands up.
And then,
you see,
coming toward you,
a disturbance in your perceptual field.
Now,
you're supposed to be alone.
There isn't supposed to be a disturbance in your perceptual input.
But there is,
you are alarmed.
It may be dangerous.
You must identify what this is.
Well,
every one of us carries around inside us
a cultural inventory
of what weird events might possibly be.
If you're a medieval peasant
farming the hills of Tuscany,
and this happens,
you immediately conclude that
it's the Virgin,
or it's an angel.
And lo and behold,
as it comes closer,
it clothes itself in heavenly raiment,
and it is the Virgin.
And so you are encountering the Virgin.
Well,
now,
what if you're a Southern California
steeped in the religious faiths of Malibu,
and this happens to you?
You will conclude,
my God,
it's a UFO.
I mean,
haven't you been with people
who every airplane that flies over,
they're willing to proclaim
is an extraterrestrial intervention?
It's because this explanation
lies very close to the surface.
When we don't know what something is,
we want to know.
We want to English it.
We want to name it.
And we grasp the nearest thing at hand.
It's very important to avoid this reflex
in order to see what is it really.
What is it really?
Let it be what it is.
Yeah.
Four small points.
On that one,
I noticed I did a book in 73
on the flatbook of the flatbook.
And I interviewed perhaps 500 people.
And in a large number,
they start with it.
It's a traditional poetic to a note.
It's called negative parallelism,
where you identify,
negate,
identify, negate.
So you start,
it looked like a low-flying plane.
No, it was too low.
It looked like a semi
with its out-of-order lights on.
And only as the third
or fourth identification,
which is traditional
to classic tropes
of the 13th century,
would they identify it
as the Odyssey UFO.
Point one.
Another one,
the strangest one,
was an old lady in Texas.
And I said,
how did you know it was a UFO?
And she said,
because it had UFO printed
on the undercast.
I like that.
The next one was a judge.
I went down to pass to Google.
It was the Hickson and Parker.
Famous case.
I've got to see them again
because I want to see
how they've done over there.
Very interesting case.
And the judge
and clerk of courts
and two other people
were riding home
during that period.
And two of them
in the car
saw a UFO
and the others couldn't see it.
So let's say one saw it
because of a PMT drop
at some point.
Another was his clerk
and decided he'd better see it.
And the other two
were just strange.
Last point.
There's a guy called
Orfeo Angolucci
who was an early contactee
who gave me a useful handle
on kind of
talking about working the edges.
He was out
and he met the captain of the ship
and the ship's captain
said during the interview,
would you go and get me
a bottle of soda pop?
And then they went on
with their event.
So I began looking
for what I called
the soda pop factor.
You know,
that's where there was
an element
or more than one element
absolutely unrelated
to the story.
There was somehow
a touch of human...
An intrusion.
Unnecessary intrusion.
Well, let me say
one thing about it.
You don't even have
to be cynical
to the point of believing
in the Pascadula situation
that the second guy
saw the UFO
because he was the clerk.
These drug molecules
have resonant rings.
They are aromatics.
It may be
that there's a pheromone thing
happening here
and that a state of mind
can be transferred
from one person to another
through body odor.
This may be
how the states
of telepathy
are achieved
on psilocybin
because you do smell funny
and this smell
may be more than funny.
It may be carrying
information.
There's a very interesting
phenomenon
that is well documented
called allophremia.
Do you all know
what allophremia is?
Allophremia is when
a friend of yours
gets put in the hospital
for schizophrenia
and you being
a good Samaritan
decide to take them
a box of candy
and during the visit
to your friend
you behave
so bizarrely
that you don't get
to leave the hospital.
Allophremia.
Schizophrenic behavior
on the part
of non-schizophrenics
in the presence
of schizophrenics.
I've experienced this.
I had a friend
I visited him
in the hospital
and the way
here's how it works
it's really interesting
I visited my friend
in the hospital
he was nutty
as a fruitcake
but he was my friend
and he was talking
ninety to nothing
so I wanted
to communicate
with him.
So instead of saying
to every single
statement he made
I don't understand you
you're nuts
that makes no sense
whatsoever
I began
trying
to
agree
with him
trying to
understand him
and then
it sort of got
the momentum
of a game
going
where
he would say
you know
I'm really
Sirhan Sirhan
and I would say
yes but your teacup
is on backwards
and a doctor
walking into
this situation
would have a hard
time telling
who's nuts
and who's not
well was that
because I decided
to play along
with him
or why did I decide
there was an
ambiance
that gave
permission
for
erratic
irrational
peculiar
behavior
and I suppose
if you were
borderline
schizophrenic
in that situation
that's all
it would take
to push you
over the edge
you think
I know you're
probably thinking
about that
Wiener's ECM stuff
you told me
about that yourself
but I finally
just recently
read all those
papers
again
and I think
you're really
right
that there
is some
sub
it's what he
calls the
olfactory
subconscious
that there
is perception
below
what is
olfactorily
normally perceived
and there's a
profound
information
transformation
messages
that are
perceived
and stuff
yeah I think
that could
be something
yeah people
who study
human behavior
have noted
that
when a person
enters a room
full of people
unconsciously
the first
thing they do
is they take
a deep breath
what that's
doing is
giving you
a whole bunch
of information
and you can
tell
you can say
I walked
into the room
and the vibes
were terrible
because
Herbert had
just slugged
Alice
three minutes
before and
everybody was
freaking out
about it
or I just
walked into
the room
and I could
tell something
weird was
happening
but I couldn't
figure out
what it was
and what it
was was
Alice and
Fred heard
me coming
so he took
his hand out
of her blouse
as I opened
the door
this kind
of thing
in other words
information
that is
coming in
through
the olfactory
senses
there are
psychiatrists
who diagnose
schizophrenia
by what they
call the
sniff test
you know
this is one
of the most
subtle and
difficult
of all
mental
dysfunctions
to diagnose
and some
people just
lean over
your anterior
fontanel
and take
a hit
and say
him to
therapy
her to
release
and him
to medication
because they
are confident
enough that
the smell
will do it
there's even
one theory
of schizophrenia
that holds
that what
schizophrenia
is
is a
dysfunctional
pheromone
system
so that
you
who are
the schizophrenic
your real
problem is
that you
smell funny
not stink
people aren't
aware of that
but it's
that there's
something about
you that
causes people
to treat you
strangely
and you
reacting to
being treated
strangely by
people get
weirder
and they
reacting to
you getting
weirder
treat you
more and
more strangely
so what you
have here is
a feedback
cycle that
ends with
nets being
dropped over
you and
you taken
away
but the
original cause
was that
there was
you were
giving off
a chemical
which made
people treat
you in a
way that
caused you
to react
to them
adversely
and that
started the
cycle going
or they say
that you
perceived
olfactory
hallucinations
not that
you just
smelled
literally
but that
you perceived
oh that
you were
misinterpreting
incoming
that's
the reason
we're talking
so much
about this
is because
if you
look at
these
pheromone
molecules
and lay
them next
to these
drug
molecules
it's all
one
family
these are
all
small
planar
molecules
there's even
one area
where it
comes
together
pretty
spectacularly
that is
in the
pineal gland
of human
beings
there's a
great deal
of
is being
channeled
into the
pineal
gland
well
if you
know
anything
about
evolutionary
theory
you know
that
you don't
waste
energy
in
unnecessary
functions
or you
become
extinct
so there's
a reason
why
12%
of the
brain's
energy
is being
channeled
into
the pineal
gland
though we
don't
know
what
it is
well
then
when you
look
at
what's
going
on
in
the
adenoroglomerotropane
is being
transduced
by light
into
melatonin
well
this compound
adenoroglomerotropane
in ordinary
biochemical
nomenclature
is
6-methoxy
tetrahydroharmiline
it's a
near relative
of the compounds
in the
ayahuasca
well
so then
a reasonable
question is
to ask
well
then
what's
happening
to all
this
melatonin
that is
being
well then
if you
tag
it
and
follow
its
path
through
the metabolic
system
you discover
that the
stuff
is making
its way
quite
directly
to the
surface
of the
skin
and
then
it's
volatilizing
away
what's
happening
here
a hallucinogenic
molecule
is being
turned
into
a
and
in the
very
center
of the
brain
and
this
pheromone
is then
hurrying
on its
way
to the
surface
of the
skin
where it
volatilizes
off
and
affects
the
ambient
social
environment
in which
you're
living
this
begins
to look
like
a
system
of
neurotransmitters
and
neuroregulators
that operate
not only
within
the
body
but
on
the
surface
of
the
body
and
in
the
ambient
social
environment
tryptophan
yeah
I don't
know if
this relates
to
I'm not
a chemist
or anything
like that
there was
this stuff
on the
market
called
tryptophan
right
it's an
amino acid
and it
was taken
off the
market
not too
long
ago
yes
and
supposedly
it made
you dream
your dreams
more clear
or more vivid
something like
that
well
it's the
precursor
for DMT
if you
were to
make
if you
wanted to
make
DMT
in the
laboratory
tryptophan
would be
one of
the
pathways
that you
could
start
from
the
reason
tryptophan
was taken
off the
market
there was
a lot
of
confusion
initially
but it
was a
poisoned
batch
it turned
out
all of
the world's
tryptophan
was
coming
from
one
enormous
stainless
steel
vat
near
Nagoya
and that
it had
been
infected
by a
bacterium
and
so
you know
we're stuck
with the fact
that tryptophan
will probably
never again
be available
in health
food stores
but it
wasn't
tryptophan
that was
the coke
I knew
someone
whose life
was completely
messed up
from the
poisoned
tryptophan
so
by taking
the
tryptophan
it caused
DMT
to be
more
well
no
saying
it
that
way
is
saying
too
much
we
don't
know
that
all
we
can
say
is
tryptophan
is an amino
acid
it's
used
in the
biosynthesis
of many
different
compounds
including
DMT
peaks
when
dream
states
are
peaking
and
tryptophan
does
seem
to induce
deeper
dreaming
it's a
rational
case
you know
we could
sit
here
sometime
we could
have a
weekend
entirely
devoted
thinking
of
simple
experiments
that could
be done
in the
laboratory
with and
without
human
beings
if only
these
things
weren't
illegal
I mean
there is
so much
to be
learned
and
so little
work
being done
because
it's not
sanctioned
I mean
my brother
is a
pharmaceutical
chemist
pharmacologist
physiologist
and his
professional
life
is very
touch
and go
because
he's
known
to be
a
hallucinogen
man
and
they
don't
hire
you
they
don't
publish
you
they
don't
fund
you
they
don't
want
to
know
you
have
to
be
a
very
dedicated
person
to
stick
with
hallucinogenic
chemistry
when you
could
be
taken
off
the
market
because
it
made
dreams
being
more
vivid
instead
of
just
a
bad
batch
I
mean
I
need
a
connection
without
just
thinking
that
I'm
not
a
conspiracist
but
it
seems
to me
awfully
funny
that
was
taken
off
and
made
by
one
batch
and that
got
hampered
with
or
whatever
Well
there
may
have
been
some
form
of
hanky
panky
but
in
all
fairness
you
know
there
are
many
approaches
to
the
synthesis
of
DMT
Indole
is
probably
what
most
chemists
would
probably
prefer
to
start
from
Indole
and
Indole
is
an
industrial
precursor
used
in
so
many
hundreds
of
ways
that
you
could
never
push
Indole
off
the
able
to
get
it
from
the
health
food
store
here
with
tryptophan
and
it
made
your
dreams
vivid
more
vividly
I don't
know
if
that's
what
people
are
using
it
for
I don't
think
it's
so
but
here
it
was
so
maybe
they
felt
that
people
were
dreaming
too much
or they
were having
too vivid
dreams
that
hey
we can't
have
this
anymore
we've
got to
sort
of get
it off
the
market
I
think
probably
as long
as
you're
asleep
they're
fine
about
it
it's
when
you
wake
up
that
they
get
nervous
as long
as you
keep
your
eyes
closed
or
you're
glued
to
the
boob
tube
they're
quite
happy
to
minimalize
you
marginalize
you
and
let's
say
you
smoke
teams
you
have
the
experience
you
can
put
the
term
elves
on
them
or
speculate
that
what
we
have
in
various
mythologies
or
thought
systems
elves
refers
to
that
I
was
wondering
what
you
think
about
other
types
of
deities
that
people
may
encounter
in
some
sort
of
visionary
experience
either
with
hallucinogens
or
not
what
What do you make of that? Do you have more of an archetypal interpretation, or do you think that they exist in some hyper-dimensional reality in some form?
I'm just curious what you make of that.
I guess I have an archetypal interpretation.
I recall from some book of Robert Anton Wilson's where he suggests, he says, you should pray to the Blessed Virgin Mary every day and make offerings to her and put up her picture until she appears.
Then switch to Shiva and do it until Shiva appears.
Then Mickey Mouse.
And just keep doing this until you satisfy yourself that none of these things are more real than any other, and that whatever their ontological status, they're all equal in ontological status.
Apparently the human brain is far more malleable than we can conceive of or imagine.
We become imprisoned within a language and an ideology, and it literally becomes our reality.
And yet it isn't our reality.
It's just something provisional.
I've not had that experience.
I prayed for years as a kid, but perhaps the agonvite of Inuit was already present in me and making it impossible for me to succeed.
But in the case of the elves, there's sort of a cultural archetype of the elves, but at the same time you seem to be saying that there is a deeper reality that this is based on.
In other words...
Well, and the DMT elves are a lot weirder than the Disney elves.
The Disney elves are really sanitized.
These things are pretty frightening in a way.
I mean, they are if you let yourself be frightened, because they're...you can't...they want...well, how can I put it...they play too rough.
They are not...they're not mean, but they're not careful either.
It's like hanging out with a gang, you know?
As long as you're their friend, you really feel, aren't I cool?
Look who I'm hanging out with.
But then you realize if you said the wrong word or made the wrong move, everybody would turn and look at you and just...
I recently wrote the introduction for a new edition of Evans Vence's book, The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries.
And if you're interested in elves, this is the book to read.
You all know who Evans Vence was.
He was the great Tibetologist who...
But as a student at Cambridge in 1913, before he went to Tibet, he did his doctoral thesis.
In 1913 this was.
And he went around to Brittany and Wales and Ireland, to the old, old people.
I don't think he talked to anybody under 80.
And he said, tell me stories about fairies.
And he collected the most amazing stories about fairies and fairy encounters.
And I learned from rereading that book that, you know, the Christian notion of purgatory,
which is a place where you go that isn't either heaven or hell, where you do time for minor infractions,
and then you get moved on to heaven.
This idea was created...
I always assumed that it was dreamed up by some bishops of Rome, some synod or something.
It was dreamed up by St. Patrick to convert the pagan Irish, to convince them that fairyland was part of the Christian man.
And he was so successful in converting the pagan Irish that when letters went back to Rome describing how he did it,
purgatory became a general doctrine of the church, and then it was used very successfully to convert the pagan Slavs.
So purgatory is fairyland dressed up in Christian terminology.
And what is the idea of fairyland?
It's the idea that the dead live all around us, linger among us as disincarnate souls.
And the fairies that Evans Vance was describing were very ambiguous morally.
I mean, sometimes they would only sour the milk.
But, you know, their favorite concern of fairies is, UFO freaks pay attention, stealing babies.
That's what fairies like to do.
I don't know about surgically ripping off fetuses.
That seems to be a modern touch.
But in Ireland, people in the countryside do not leave babies, small babies, unattended in their cribs for fear of fairy theft.
And the fairies substitute.
They don't just leave an empty crib.
They leave a withered, strange little creature that is supposed to fool the human beings.
And whenever there is a child born who is wasting and old-looking and undersized,
there's always the assumption that there was a healthy baby there.
But now there's been a fairy switch.
Now, fairies respond to riddlery.
This has to do with this thing about language and the strange relationship of the Irish to intoxication fairies and language
suggests that here we might have a restricted gene pool that has somehow indemnified itself in the direction of these peculiar concerns.
What was the name of that book again?
Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries by Evan Zvins.
I want to mention at least a couple of final points, which is, you know, what is this all good for?
I think what it's good for, I think the mystery that we're making our way toward, much more of which will be revealed later as we live into the next 20 years,
is that we have lost connection to a very important part of reality, which I call the Gaian mind,
but what which I think is more popularly understood as the goddess, goddess consciousness.
But the goddess is not as envisioned by, at Ephesus, you know, a woman studded with breasts.
The goddess is the living earth.
It is not to be anthropomorphosed into some kind of human or quasi-human form.
And when we were taking mushrooms on the plains of Africa, before the invention of agriculture, as nomads,
we were rocked in the cradle of the goddess.
And, you know, differences between men and women, between parents and children,
between those who had much, if anybody had much, and those who had little,
and between human beings and the animal and vegetable kingdom, were minimal,
because everything operated in the light of this reference experience.
There was boundary dissolution, boundary dissolution, and a sense of the intelligence of the earth.
Now, we are so alienated from the intelligence of the earth,
that when we encounter it, we assume it came from halfway across the galaxy to rescue us.
It isn't from across interstellar space.
It's something that is partially in ourselves and partially in the world around us.
And if we could but clear the prejudices of materialism from our approach to the world,
most especially from our language, which by its subject-object bias, by its linear syntax,
and by God knows what else that's built into it, hopelessly precludes us from contacting this reality,
if we could clear all that away, we would discover, you know,
a dimension of immense support and affection for human beings and for our enterprises.
But as long as we pursue the destruction of the earth and the elaboration of materialist ideology
and the suppression of psychedelic states and the suppression of the feminine,
we are going to be alienated, feel abandoned, and operate in an ambiance of rampant pathology.
So, to my mind, the hallucinogens are a call to return to the archaic style,
to recapture the tools, techniques, languages, and attitudes that existed and flourished on this planet,
you know, before AD 10,000.
And we must do this.
If we don't do this, then we are setting ourselves up for a very unhappy future.
We are living in a very unhappy world.
Maybe your world is not unhappy, but, you know, tell that in Bosnia.
Tell it in Somalia.
Tell it to the AIDS-infected masses of Africa.
Tell it to the apocalypse is no longer a rumor.
It's arrived in many parts of the world.
And we, as the children, the inheritors of the culture which created this catastrophe,
and as the people who are still above high, still living on high ground,
as the waters of poverty, epidemic disease, and misery rise ever higher,
have a certain obligation to respond to this.
Moral decency demands it.
And we can no longer tolerate the evolution of consciousness,
the exploration of our relationships to each other,
and the source of meaning itself to be regulated, stigmatized,
and degraded by the most frightened, the least educated,
the least balanced, and the least caring among us.
And this is what we've got at the present moment.
The male dominator mentality is in the process of running us and all life on this planet into extinction.
I don't have answers.
That must be clear by now.
I have questions and offered techniques.
And there's nothing new about these techniques.
They have been around for 100,000 years.
And for 90,000 of those 100,000 years, they worked very well.
And we existed in harmony with the rest of nature,
fully human, fully able to philosophize, argue, love, riddle, perform theater, make masks, so forth and so on.
But in the last 10,000 years, we have fallen into a pathology.
And it's because the umbilical connection to the mind and nature has been severed, lost, pissed away, ignored, degraded, turned away from.
It is a psychedelic relationship to these plants.
Without that, you are not yourself.
Without that, you are half human.
And this is how we behave.
We behave as though, you know, we have a soul, but it's stapled in Yeats' immensely compelling phrase,
to the body of a dying animal.
This needs to be corrected, reconstructed, addressed.
Otherwise, we are going to go into the books, if there are books,
and into the cosmic record, which there surely is a cosmic record, as jerks, lame, didn't get it, couldn't put it together.
And this would be a terrible legacy, because we are not going into these crises with, in a state of total anesthesia.
We have the answers, we have the political machinery to do something about this, we have the sense of crisis,
we have the goodwill and affection for each other.
But we are somehow unable to put all this together in a configuration that would allow us to change our minds,
admit that history was a bad idea, that science betrayed us, that it's a tale told by an idiot,
and to strike out in a new direction.
We're like the frog in the proverbial pot, who never moves as the temperature climbs toward the boiling point.
Sooner or later, you have to just get up on your hind legs and say,
enough already.
Now, maybe this is beginning to happen, and maybe it isn't.
But it's not for us to judge as spectators at a hockey game.
It's for us to get in and roll up our sleeves and participate in.
Do what you think is right.
Think about what you think is right.
And once you've thought about it, then do it.
And it doesn't have to fit in with my program or my agenda.
I have a deep and abiding faith that Mother Nature will sort out the options
and from the offerings of all of us, select those that will be salvational and salutary for all the rest of us.
But if you don't act, you didn't participate.
I mean, this is not a road show, you know.
It's your life, your planet, your world, and the tools to reclaim it are present at hand.
You've heard this now.
Now you have to ask yourself, what are you going to do about it?
That's really all I have to say.
And we're finished.
You're right.
So thank you, John.
Thank you for living in those voices.
Thank you.