Program Notes

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

(Minutes : Seconds into program)

1:50 “Whether meditation and psychedelics are the same thing I think depends on your meditation and your psychedelics. Different meditations strive for different things. Much meditation is about emptying the mind of phenomena. This would certainly not be a description of the psychedelic state.”

4:14 “Ultimately, the meditation path and the psychedelic path must somehow lead to the same kinds of data if the claims of both are to be respected, which is that they give deeper knowledge about reality.”

6:03 “The chemistry of DMT suggests that, in deep REM sleep, it’s possible every single night you have a DMT flash, but it does not transcript into short term memory.”

6:20 “…or imagine a drug that allowed you to enhance long-term memory, so that you could slip into reveries of a summer day 30 years ago, and play it back, moment by moment by moment. Again, this is not shooting for the moon, pharmacologically…”

6:58 “It’s a false dichotomy, the idea that somehow you should be able to achieve these things ‘on the natch’, and they’re not authentic if you achieve them through psychedelics. This is just a con…”

7:55 Terrence tells the story of how his ‘gringa’ friend telepathically knocked a Peruvian shaman’s nephew off of his feet.

10:30 “Where the problem area lies–people think it lies in taking too much– [but] it lies in taking too little, because if you take too little, you can resist it, you can struggle with it…”

12:17 Terrence describes how he takes mushrooms.

14:00 “The most mind-boggling parts of it are just not possible to bring out of it, because language fails, because English–there are no words…”

14:30 Terrence talks about fear during a psychedelic experience, and how to deal with it.

15:39 “The thing to do is to sit up, and to sing.”

18:53 “…the ego feels threatened by the boundary-dissolution… and it can actually say to you, ‘You are dying, and here’s the evidence.’ And you have to say: ‘No, it’s unlikely,’ and sing your way through it.”

22:24 Terrence speculates that some psychedelic-seeming aspects of Tibetan/Mahayana Buddhism may have actually resulted from ancient experiences with psychedelics and/or cannabis.

26:39 “What always fascinated me was hallucination, because it was, to me, the proof that I was dealing with something outside myself. …a single image would have taken me hours to draw and figure out…”

28:49 “The impression you have when you smoke DMT is: This isn’t a drug… this is something else… this is a doorway into another modality that exists all the time, independent of my thoughts or feelings about it… It certainly doesn’t seem to be a place designed to fit human expectations.”

32:18 Terrence speculates about the future of the ‘free individual’ in the electronic/information age: “…[whether] each of us will become a kind of god… [or will we become] …a socialist gas… a hive-mind…”

36:28 “Part of the thing I found with hanging with shamans… is that, once you get past the language barrier… shamans… are simply curious people–intellectuals of a certain type.”

37:05 “…the shamans, who are the keepers of the cultural values, are also… keepers of the secrets of the theatrics of the cultural values, and so they live their lives in the light of the knowledge that it all rests on showbiz.”

37:41 Refering to Shamanism: The Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy and History, The Eternal Return, two books by Mircea Eliade: “…the shaman is socially marginal… and is feared by the people… [but] then the shaman comes forward in this critical role as… mediator between the cultural mind and the real world.”

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Transcript

00:00:00

3D transformational, musical, linguistic objects.

00:00:10

Help me change.

00:00:18

Greetings from cyberdelic space.

00:00:20

This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.

00:00:24

This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.

00:00:32

Well, first of all, let me thank those of you who sent me emails to let me know that you’re enjoying these podcasts.

00:00:38

I do read all of them, but you’ll have to forgive me for not being too good at responding.

00:00:43

I do the best I can, but as much as I’d like to answer each of you, I found that it was just taking too much of my time away from a new book I’m working on.

00:00:49

So until I get that project finished, I hope you don’t feel too bad that I haven’t answered each of you personally.

00:00:56

But as you can probably see, I am listening to your requests,

00:01:00

particularly the loud and clear request I just recently got to hear more of the Terrence McKenna workshop, where he was waxing eloquently about all things novel.

00:01:29

Well, we said, I think, that when you take psychedelics,

00:01:34

you go up a dimension.

00:01:37

And so this world of transience and flux

00:01:41

becomes an eternal world.

00:01:45

So in that sense, it’s the same thing.

00:01:49

Whether meditation and psychedelics are the same thing,

00:01:52

I think depends on your meditation and your psychedelics.

00:01:57

Different meditations strive for different things.

00:02:01

Much meditation is about emptying the mind of phenomena. This certainly

00:02:07

would not be a description of the psychedelic state.

00:02:10

Through my experience, the highest psychedelic states have been complete mergers and complete

00:02:16

ego loss and becoming a oneness. those have been both with the Russians and

00:02:26

with the LSD. Now through my highest meditation experiences, it has been very similar, where

00:02:32

there is no sense of self and otherness. It’s just a flash of everythingness and nothingness.

00:02:41

It’s non-dual. Itemingly, the center of singularity

00:02:46

where holes clash with each other

00:02:48

where we get to another dimension.

00:02:52

Well, in the interest of keeping

00:02:54

the number of singularities to a minimum,

00:02:57

the most elegant thing to do

00:02:59

is to wrap the theory around

00:03:02

and say that the starting point

00:03:04

and the ending point

00:03:05

are the same place.

00:03:08

Yeah, it’s the place where all is cotangent.

00:03:13

How we could get the universe back into the primal dot

00:03:19

in 12 years, I don’t know.

00:03:22

But there are some schemes to do that.

00:03:25

There’s always schemes to do it.

00:03:27

You know, if the universe were some kind of vacuum fluctuation

00:03:31

and it had an antimatter twin in a higher super space,

00:03:36

then there would be the potential, at least,

00:03:38

for them to collide across all points simultaneously.

00:03:44

And you would actually get the universe of matter disappearing instantly,

00:03:49

and you would then be left with a universe made only of photons

00:03:53

because they don’t have an antiparticle.

00:03:56

What a universe purely made of light,

00:03:59

what its physics would be like, is hard to say,

00:04:03

but it sounds peculiarly like certain Gnostic hierophanies

00:04:08

about gathering the light and returning the light.

00:04:14

Ultimately, the meditation path and the psychedelic path

00:04:18

must somehow lead to the same kinds of data

00:04:23

if the claims of both are to be respected, which

00:04:28

is that they give deeper knowledge about reality.

00:04:33

Yeah.

00:04:34

And I was wondering, as a kind of connection between that and the point that you were just

00:04:40

making previously about the expression of those interstates through art,

00:04:47

what your view might be on the use of some of the technologies today

00:04:54

that are aimed at providing access to those interstates

00:04:59

in and out of any more, I won’t say more,

00:05:03

but you’ve mentioned about the psychedelic one of the problems

00:05:06

is bringing back the information.

00:05:09

And so I’m thinking here about some of the machines

00:05:15

and particularly the technology of Robert Monroe

00:05:17

aimed at providing access consciously to those states

00:05:23

such that you can bring that information back more readily?

00:05:27

I’m all for it.

00:05:28

I just haven’t seen anything that convinced me

00:05:31

that anybody had achieved it

00:05:33

to any degree of significance.

00:05:38

Yeah, you know, imagine

00:05:40

a drug that did nothing more

00:05:44

than allow you to remember your dreams.

00:05:47

I mean, that’s not exactly shooting for the moon pharmacologically these days.

00:05:52

And yet, a drug which allowed you full recovery of your dreams might unleash God knows what,

00:06:00

because we don’t know what we dream.

00:06:01

because we don’t know what we dream.

00:06:08

The chemistry of DMT suggests that in deep REM sleep,

00:06:11

it’s possible every single night you have a DMT flash,

00:06:16

but it does not transcript into short-term memory.

00:06:26

Or imagine a drug which allowed you to enhance long-term memory so that you could slip into reveries of a summer day 30 years ago

00:06:32

and play it back moment by moment by moment.

00:06:36

Again, this is not shooting for the moon pharmacologically.

00:06:40

We’re not talking immortality here.

00:06:42

We’re just talking simple neurochemistry.

00:06:45

But all of these possibilities would change life beyond recognition.

00:06:52

And I think these things should be pursued by any means necessary.

00:06:58

It’s a false dichotomy,

00:07:00

the idea that somehow you should be able to achieve these things on the natch

00:07:05

and they’re not authentic if you achieve them through psychedelics.

00:07:11

This is just a con to keep lineages in business, I think,

00:07:17

because they don’t want you going off the ranch and charting your own course.

00:07:24

But where shamanism becomes priestcraft,

00:07:27

it’s already well on its way to senescence.

00:07:32

Terrence, when you’re collectively perceiving together

00:07:34

as a group taking mushrooms,

00:07:36

do you collectively perceive a similar phenomenon?

00:07:39

Without speaking…

00:07:39

In couple situations,

00:07:42

I’ve had telepathic things.

00:07:45

I’ve had in group situations

00:07:47

very quasi-telepathic social interactions.

00:07:55

And what I mean by that is I’m recalling an evening many years ago

00:07:58

taking ayahuasca with these people

00:08:01

and they had a weird scene going.

00:08:04

The shaman was

00:08:05

a good guy and a good shaman

00:08:08

but he had a nephew who was a jerk

00:08:10

and was sort of

00:08:12

a pimp and kind of a

00:08:14

hustler

00:08:15

and

00:08:16

the shaman was singing

00:08:20

with his three friends

00:08:21

these ancient ancient songs

00:08:23

and this guy was drunk on a guardiente

00:08:26

and he would sing against them.

00:08:29

He would sing against them.

00:08:31

And this was in Peru

00:08:32

and if you know the style of rural Peruvians,

00:08:35

people are so polite

00:08:37

and so not up front

00:08:40

that no social problem is ever dealt with directly.

00:08:47

People will tolerate incredible bad behavior without turning on the person and saying, listen, you’re completely out

00:08:53

of line, knock it off. So 30 people, 30 Peruvian campesinos were witnessing this sing against and the woman I was with at the time very much didn’t like what was going

00:09:09

on and at the end of this nephew, the Sobrino, at the end of his song of raucous interruption,

00:09:20

I looked up just as he ended. The room was almost complete darkness. I looked up just as he ended the room was almost complete darkness I looked up just as he ended

00:09:26

I saw her look up and look at him

00:09:29

with a look of utter disgust

00:09:32

and when these red dot

00:09:34

dart things got to him

00:09:36

it knocked him off his feet

00:09:38

and I heard the old shaman

00:09:40

was sitting right to my left

00:09:42

and I heard him turn to his friend

00:09:44

and he said,

00:09:45

ah, the gringa sends the…

00:09:48

And so it was like, wow.

00:09:58

But, you know, then ordinary reality immediately reasserts itself

00:10:02

and moves forward,

00:10:03

and there’s no time to say,

00:10:05

wait a minute, folks, something paranormal just happened here.

00:10:09

I want to interview everybody, get your impression.

00:10:12

It’s never, you know, when it’s real,

00:10:14

it’s always caught up in the on-moving flow of events.

00:10:17

To be resisting and fearful.

00:10:19

In other words, to resist what comes forward.

00:10:23

Well, if you’ve taken, what you don’t want to do is take…

00:10:26

This is reasonable advice, too, I think.

00:10:29

Where the problem area lies,

00:10:31

people think it lies in taking too much.

00:10:34

It lies in taking too little.

00:10:37

Because if you take too little,

00:10:39

you can resist it.

00:10:42

You can struggle with it.

00:10:44

And then it can turn into a real mess

00:10:47

because you’re afraid of it

00:10:49

and you actually have the power

00:10:51

to some degree to resist it.

00:10:54

What you want to do

00:10:55

is take sufficiently enough

00:10:59

that there’s no escape

00:11:02

and that the transition from ordinary reality to fully loaded is as quick as possible

00:11:08

because the going up is somewhat terrifying.

00:11:12

For example, let’s use psilocybin as the model.

00:11:15

Here’s how it works for me. This is not tea. This is eating raw mushrooms.

00:11:20

It comes on more slowly so after an hour or so and the way I do it is

00:11:26

I sit

00:11:27

as soon as the mushroom

00:11:30

enters my body

00:11:31

I sit and meditate

00:11:34

I noticed in South America

00:11:38

they don’t do it like this

00:11:39

they dose the ayahuasca

00:11:41

and then everybody just goes on

00:11:43

talking about their motorcycles and the jobs at

00:11:47

the sawmill and who’s conning who it’s like totally they toss it there’s a brief moment

00:11:54

they pour they toss it down then they all go back to raving at each other about mundane life and

00:12:01

then 30 minutes later on the dot the shaman blows his whistle or shakes his

00:12:07

shakipa his leaf uh dry leaf bouquet and everybody settles down it’s like it comes on within two

00:12:14

minutes as soon as the guy starts singing he just invokes it the way i do it is i uh I take the mushroom or the ayahuasca

00:12:25

and then I sit and I roll bombers

00:12:28

so I’ll have them ready if I need them

00:12:32

and I just sit as I’m going to sit

00:12:35

during the trip and I’ve unplugged the telephone

00:12:38

and I’ve gotten everything squared away

00:12:41

and it begins to come on

00:12:44

at about the 40 minuteminute or the 60-minute mark,

00:12:48

and there’s sometimes some nausea as it comes on.

00:12:54

And then I smoke a bomber or half a bomber,

00:12:58

and then it catapults it into the full deployment of the thing

00:13:04

where you just hang on.

00:13:06

There’s about a 25-minute period

00:13:08

where all your only job is to hang on.

00:13:12

It builds.

00:13:14

It’s like watching an atomic explosion

00:13:16

on the other side of 50 feet

00:13:19

of absolutely clear crystal glass.

00:13:21

I mean, you can’t believe this is happening,

00:13:24

quote-unquote, in my mind.

00:13:27

You have the feeling that everybody from Seattle to San Diego is just crawled under their desk as

00:13:33

this thing tore past, but it’s in your mind. And then there is the interaction with it, which moment to moment, you are pretty coherent, but you lose it.

00:13:48

A lot of it does not transcribe into short-term memory. And then after about an hour or 40

00:13:54

minutes of that, it becomes more manageable, more memorable. The most mind-boggling parts of it are just not possible to bring out of it

00:14:07

because language fails.

00:14:10

Because English, there are no words.

00:14:13

There are no words even close.

00:14:15

I mean, sometimes you’ll bring out an image or a metaphor,

00:14:19

but out of five hours of tripping, you bring know half a notebook page of metaphors and

00:14:25

yet you were entirely engaged during that time now this question about fear

00:14:30

which is a real question because when everything begins to slide if you are

00:14:37

not if it’s it’s it’s more than most people who haven’t done it expect they

00:14:43

have heard that they’ve read the books,

00:14:46

but they think it’s a metaphor.

00:14:48

They don’t understand it’s really going to happen

00:14:51

and it’s really going to happen to you.

00:14:54

And there’s a tendency to clutch or to try and resist it.

00:14:58

The thing to do in those situations, I think,

00:15:02

and it’s counterintuitive to how Western people think.

00:15:06

But the thing to do is to sing.

00:15:09

To sit up,

00:15:11

not to assume the fetal position.

00:15:13

See, what you might tend to do

00:15:15

is assume the fetal position

00:15:17

and tell yourself,

00:15:19

my God, this is the most appalling thing

00:15:21

that’s ever happened to me.

00:15:22

If I can just live through it, it’ll be all right.

00:15:25

I’ve taken this drug.

00:15:27

If I can just wait through.

00:15:29

How long did they say it will be?

00:15:31

Seven hours.

00:15:32

I see it started two minutes ago.

00:15:37

If I can just.

00:15:38

No, the thing to do is to sit up and to sing.

00:15:51

Why? to do is to sit up and to sing and why well being practical people to oxygenate your brain to move this the entire this thing that’s happened to you though it may have one claw in heaven

00:15:59

its roots are in your neurophysiology and in the chemistry of the drug.

00:16:07

You want to move your physiology around. So oxygenating your brain can’t fail to do this.

00:16:13

So you sing.

00:16:15

And this almost always is accompanied by a sense of power,

00:16:19

control, equilibrium, and so forth and so on.

00:16:24

Not always.

00:16:26

I mean, let’s face it.

00:16:27

You’re a product of a nutty society

00:16:30

and there are unexamined crevices

00:16:34

and uncleaned out drain traps in all of us

00:16:38

and you’re going to encounter that stuff.

00:16:42

The good news is the earlier psychedelic trips tend to deal with that.

00:16:48

You will quickly discover, taking psychedelics,

00:16:52

that either you can work through your personal issues

00:16:55

and become a psychedelic explorer,

00:16:58

or this is just stronger medicine than you are up for,

00:17:04

and you would be far better to go back to psychoanalysis

00:17:07

or whatever works for you.

00:17:11

Some people just can’t take it.

00:17:15

Why is that?

00:17:16

Well, because what it does is it dissolves boundaries,

00:17:19

and most of us are over boundary defined,

00:17:23

but some of us are having an uphill battle getting some boundaries in place

00:17:29

and realizing we are not the telephone or the tree or the person we live with.

00:17:37

And so for those people who are having trouble establishing and maintaining boundaries,

00:17:42

this is the last thing on earth they should get involved.

00:17:44

What’s in the box?

00:17:47

Cannabis.

00:17:48

Cannabis.

00:17:50

Cannabis.

00:17:53

Yeah.

00:17:53

When you’re in the state

00:17:57

that you’re experiencing

00:17:59

the total loss of ego or boundaries,

00:18:03

is it possible that your physical self

00:18:07

could just literally stop?

00:18:09

Because I have…

00:18:11

Where people often, yes, wonder.

00:18:14

Often people wonder.

00:18:16

You get into a place where it’s so unfamiliar

00:18:19

that the question comes up,

00:18:23

have I done it this time?

00:18:25

Am I dying or am I in danger?

00:18:29

The answer is the odds are incredibly against you being seriously in danger.

00:18:39

People don’t die from psychedelics unless they have heart conditions or some incredibly rare

00:18:48

medical condition the problem is that the ego feels threatened by the boundary

00:18:57

dissolution and its ace is your self identificationidentification with it. And it can actually say to you,

00:19:06

you are dying.

00:19:09

And here’s the evidence.

00:19:11

And you have to say no.

00:19:14

It’s unlikely.

00:19:16

And sing your way through it.

00:19:18

But this is really tough.

00:19:20

The Buddhists talk about slaying the ego.

00:19:24

This is slaying the ego for real.

00:19:26

You must slay it, otherwise it will spread panic

00:19:30

into your whole psychological system,

00:19:33

will give way to panic and hysteria.

00:19:36

So unless there is some real reason to think you’re dying,

00:19:41

and you should have done your homework,

00:19:43

you should know what to

00:19:45

expect for example if you take LSD and begin intense bouts of vomiting this is

00:19:54

not a proper reaction to LSD something is wrong either with the LSD or with

00:20:00

your relationship to it you should know what a tip,

00:20:05

because a typical trip will put you through changes,

00:20:10

but is not dangerous.

00:20:12

But if you suddenly begin exhibiting some symptom,

00:20:16

heart fibrillation or something like that,

00:20:19

then you want to have,

00:20:22

this is why then there’s always the issue of the buddy system.

00:20:25

Should there be somebody else there?

00:20:27

And what about all that?

00:20:29

My position is if you’re anxious,

00:20:33

then you should have a sitter.

00:20:35

If you’re going to do it alone,

00:20:38

you should certainly tell someone

00:20:40

so that they will check on you after a while.

00:20:43

I don’t like doing it in groups or with sitters

00:20:47

because inevitably I get spun into them.

00:20:54

What I want to do is go as deep as possible

00:20:57

and even if I’m alone with one other person,

00:21:01

culture is the third guest at the table.

00:21:05

You know, if you start,

00:21:07

I mean, I’ve often found myself

00:21:09

in the middle of psychedelic trips thinking,

00:21:12

I’m sure glad there’s nobody else here to see this

00:21:15

because I’m sure it would alarm an observer

00:21:18

because I have my leg thrown back up over my neck

00:21:21

and I’m screaming in Urdu or something. But it’s okay. After a few

00:21:27

minutes, it’s okay. But if there were an observer, they would feel the need to do something, you know.

00:21:34

And often, like I’ve seen people smoking DMT and people moan and they say, no no and they moan and well so then you know you get them back together and

00:21:49

constitute it and you say how was it and they say it was fantastic so you realize you know how they

00:21:56

present is not reliable well setting has a great deal to do with it and setting is a very complicated issue

00:22:06

setting means everything from

00:22:08

the astrological situation at the time that you do it

00:22:12

to the physical surrounding that you’re in

00:22:16

and it’s also a roll of the dice

00:22:19

you never know exactly what you’re going to get

00:22:23

as far as the question about Buddhism and all that,

00:22:28

when I started taking LSD,

00:22:32

I thought I saw in Tibetan Tonka painting and mandalas

00:22:38

the echoes of the same world

00:22:42

and pursued it,

00:22:45

went to Nepal,

00:22:47

studied Tibetan,

00:22:48

collected the art.

00:22:51

And it is similar.

00:22:53

I don’t know,

00:22:55

I don’t know to what degree

00:22:59

the Buddhists,

00:23:02

the Mahayanas,

00:23:04

realize those states without psychedelics.

00:23:07

I do know that with psychedelics,

00:23:11

those meditations, those techniques,

00:23:14

those insights are supercharged.

00:23:17

And I would suspect that Tibetan Buddhism,

00:23:21

as it has its roots in Vedic Hinduism,

00:23:24

there may be psychoactive plants in its past,

00:23:29

but it’s far in the past.

00:23:32

Buddhism was brought to Tibet in 741 by Padmasambhava.

00:23:37

There was an autothonous shamanism already present

00:23:42

throughout the Himalayas, the Punpo.

00:23:44

shamanism already present throughout the Himalayas, the PNPO.

00:23:51

And it was largely based on cannabis intoxication at that point in history, not so much in the present.

00:23:53

But I think that this is a fruitful area.

00:23:58

I just can’t believe that Mahayana Buddhism could have gotten as far as it did

00:24:03

without some reliance on psychedelics.

00:24:08

And of course, cannabis, we in the West,

00:24:11

our style is to smoke it.

00:24:13

And that’s a very mild way of dealing with it.

00:24:17

I mean, if you eat,

00:24:19

if you have unlimited amounts of high-grade cannabis

00:24:22

and you eat grams and grams of it, you will have experiences

00:24:27

as extreme as anything that psilocybin or ayahuasca can deliver to you. You only have

00:24:34

to read the descriptions of 19th century writers on cannabis. Fitzhugh Ludlow, S. Weir Mitchell,

00:24:45

Fitzhugh Ludlow, S. Weir Mitchell, these people,

00:24:51

their descriptions of their trips are as psychedelic and as out of control as any acid reportage or psilocybin reportage.

00:24:55

So the relationship of Indian and Buddhist spirituality to cannabis

00:25:00

and other psychedelics is not well understood.

00:25:03

We do know that the whole Rig Veda

00:25:06

is a hymn to a drug, Soma, but we don’t know what Soma is. Well, the fact that it could have

00:25:15

invited such attention to this Vedic civilization, the 95th mandala of the Rig Vedas says Soma is greater than Brahman

00:25:26

greater than Indra

00:25:28

well what is being talked about

00:25:31

how could such a great thing be forgotten and lost

00:25:34

what was it

00:25:36

and then

00:25:40

almost as puzzling as what was it

00:25:44

how could you lose such a thing?

00:25:47

I mean, it’s like us forgetting how to make automobiles or something.

00:25:51

It was something so basic to the culture that how could you possibly forget something so central?

00:25:58

Yet, apparently, they did.

00:26:00

And today, there’s scholarly fights.

00:26:03

Was it Amanita Muscaria?

00:26:04

Was it Silla Simon? Was it Vagaman Harmala? fights was it amanita muscaria was it sila simon was it pagamon

00:26:06

harmala or was it something else and why is this so hard to figure out the only thing i can imagine

00:26:15

is that it must have been eventually restricted to a priestly class of initiates and then there

00:26:22

must have been a social revolt from the bottom and all those

00:26:26

people were put to death and then nobody knew what it was yeah yeah i think you have to push

00:26:34

these psychedelics to reach these unitary states what it seemed what always fascinated me was

00:26:40

hallucination because it seemed it was to me the proof that I was

00:26:47

dealing with something outside myself

00:26:52

well and here was stuff that amazed me that I couldn’t make up on my own or

00:26:59

that would you know a single image would have taken me hours to draw and figure out.

00:27:05

And here I was getting 28 frames a second of this unpredictable stuff.

00:27:12

Pardon me?

00:27:13

Who was the meat in that experience?

00:27:15

The meat witnessing those hallucinations?

00:27:18

I guess that’s…

00:27:21

Well, one of the nice things about the tryptamines i think is they leave the sense of self pretty

00:27:30

much intact in other words it doesn’t distort who you are it it does something to your sensory input

00:27:38

dmt is very surprisingly like that you DMT, you are immediately plunged

00:27:46

into an alien universe.

00:27:48

But if you can keep your wits about you

00:27:51

and actually notice how you feel,

00:27:54

you don’t feel any different.

00:27:56

You’re not smarter,

00:27:58

stupider,

00:27:58

you’re not more excited.

00:28:01

Once you get the initial panic under control,

00:28:04

you realize, you know, know my god it didn’t lay

00:28:07

a finger on me i’m me i’m entirely intact what has happened is that the world has been completely

00:28:15

replaced by something completely unrecognizable an alien that i have no words for that’s blowing

00:28:23

my mind that’s ripping apart my philosophical machinery as I gaze upon it.

00:28:28

But when I bring my attention back into my body, I discover I’m fine. I’m okay.

00:28:35

It didn’t change my mind, you could almost say.

00:28:39

It changes 100% the reality around you.

00:28:45

That’s powerful because it appears objective.

00:28:49

I mean, the impression you have when you smoke DMT is,

00:28:52

this isn’t a drug, that’s ridiculous.

00:28:55

Drugs make you smarter, make you stupider,

00:28:59

make you fall down, make you stay awake.

00:29:02

We know what drugs are.

00:29:03

This is no drug.

00:29:04

This is something else hiding under the drugs are. This is no drug. This is something else

00:29:06

hiding under the label drug. This is a doorway into another modality that exists all the time,

00:29:14

independent of my thoughts or feelings about it. Is that true? Well, I don’t know. But it certainly

00:29:22

doesn’t seem to be a place constructed to fit human

00:29:26

expectations. Like one of the things that always troubled me about DMT being somewhat of a Jungian

00:29:33

bent was the question, how come there’s no hint of this in any mythology or religious tradition or alchemical text or fairy tale

00:29:46

or dream or anything else.

00:29:49

I mean, if this is so important a part

00:29:53

of what it is to be a human being,

00:29:55

how can it be so deeply buried,

00:29:59

so secret, so unknown,

00:30:01

and yet just one toke away?

00:30:05

It’s like, it’s like still that confounds me

00:30:08

because you can read all the Hindu scripture

00:30:11

or Sufi mysticism or all the stuff you want

00:30:14

occasionally sure you’ll find a phrase or two

00:30:18

that could be mapped onto a DMT state

00:30:21

but nobody has trumpeted it

00:30:24

nobody has said this is what

00:30:26

it is and and yet as I say it’s spread throughout nature it’s been known since

00:30:33

Aboriginal times it we used to years and years ago call it the secret and in a

00:30:39

way it it really is the secret Jorge Luis Borges has a story called The Cult of the Phoenix.

00:30:48

And he talks about a secret that seems profound and yet preposterous to the initiates.

00:30:55

And one child may initiate another.

00:30:59

And ruins are good places to do this.

00:31:03

And he just goes on like this for a page

00:31:05

and a half. Well, you realize

00:31:07

he must be talking about

00:31:09

DMT. Yeah?

00:31:11

Just to get back to what you were saying,

00:31:13

the sense that you brought up before

00:31:16

from talking about the ego

00:31:17

and the consciousness

00:31:19

and the camera line,

00:31:20

that if we’re looking at ego as a fairly

00:31:23

recent phenomenon,

00:31:26

and the ego, the way I’m sensing it, the ego is the sense of self. And it really is that

00:31:31

concept where you think, this is me, this is what I know. And the mystic traditions

00:31:37

say the true so-called enlightened state is the deconstruction of the sense of self.

00:31:43

So doesn’t it seem that the, this

00:31:45

is what I’m getting from the journey I’m taking, I’m getting intimation, not of the loss of

00:31:51

myself, but it is a sense of the loss of myself in fact. It’s like intimation of the future

00:31:57

where we’re functioning on such a different level that it’s beyond that ego construct.

00:32:02

such a different level that’s beyond that ego construct.

00:32:07

You know, we’re really telepathically in connection.

00:32:12

The whole sense of self as being just a limitation of this is me, this is what I am, my history is gone.

00:32:16

Yeah, the great cultural accomplishment of Western civilization

00:32:20

is this thing called the free individual.

00:32:23

is this thing called the free individual.

00:32:30

But now that we’re on the brink of the electronic dispensation,

00:32:33

exactly what we’re going to do with the free individual and how that’s going to look in an era

00:32:37

where consciousness flows through a thousand portals,

00:32:42

it’s not at all clear.

00:32:51

It’s not clear whether we can somehow now carry the idea of the free individual to an even higher level where each of us will become a kind of God,

00:32:56

Lord over our own creation as vast in time and space but virtual

00:33:02

as the cosmos in which we find ourselves embedded

00:33:06

or whether the free individual

00:33:08

is going to turn out to have been the problem all along

00:33:12

and we’re going to abandon it

00:33:14

and become some kind of socialist gas

00:33:17

or some collectivist swarm, a hive mind,

00:33:21

a world where intelligence flows where needed

00:33:24

and identity is provisional and fleeting

00:33:28

and unanchored to place or body. I mean, much of this goes on on the internet, you know.

00:33:35

You can be an 11-year-old girl. You can be whatever you want. You can build your avatar and present yourself in many guises.

00:33:46

It’s much more like a shifting fantasy land

00:33:51

than it is like the good old world of positivist rock and roll.

00:33:55

I was wondering what the connection is, I think,

00:34:01

between the singing of shamanism and shamanism

00:34:05

as a catalyst for visionary experience,

00:34:10

and if there’s any corollary between the bunch of them.

00:34:16

Well, yeah, I think that we see shamanism from the outside

00:34:22

with the values of western civilization unconsciously applied

00:34:28

in cultures that are taking psychedelics this thing which we call singing is a very complicated

00:34:37

activity indeed and if you’ve ever sung on psychedelics you know know that it’s an ecstatic and complicated and synesthetic

00:34:50

experience. I mean, to make of your body a vibrator for sound, to move out into the Pythagorean octaves with the human voice. And it’s extraordinary, actually,

00:35:09

I mean, how capable of sound human beings are.

00:35:13

No other animal has the range and control.

00:35:17

And of course they say,

00:35:18

well, this is because we’re adapted for spoken language.

00:35:22

But I think we had a lot of this range and control before.

00:35:28

So words that we use very knowledgeably,

00:35:35

like song, ancestor spirit, power place,

00:35:41

we’re not getting 90% of the nuance of these meanings

00:35:47

because they go so gracelessly into English.

00:35:52

When a shaman talks about spirit,

00:35:56

he’s using a term as technically complicated in his mind

00:36:01

as when a physicist uses the term beauty to describe a quark.

00:36:07

It’s very technically defined, and we tend to simplify

00:36:11

and then suppose that we understand.

00:36:16

Part of the thing I found with hanging with shamans in various places and times

00:36:22

is that once you get past the language barrier,

00:36:28

what shamans are are simply curious people, intellectuals of a certain type.

00:36:36

In Australian Aboriginal slang, a shaman is called a clever fella.

00:36:44

If someone says, I’m a clever fella, they mean, you know, I’m a shaman is called a clever fella. If someone says I’m a clever fella, they mean,

00:36:48

you know, I’m a shaman. Well, that’s all it is. You know, it’s somebody who pays attention

00:36:53

to how things actually work and sort of transcends the culture by that means. It’s a weird paradox.

00:37:06

It’s that the shamans who are the keepers of the cultural values

00:37:10

are also necessarily the keepers

00:37:13

of the secrets of the theatrics

00:37:16

of the cultural values.

00:37:19

And so they live their lives

00:37:21

in the light of the knowledge

00:37:22

that it all rests on showbiz.

00:37:26

Everybody else is a true believer, but these are the image makers,

00:37:31

the people who actually pull the strings and control the evolution of the mythologies.

00:37:38

And in a way, it’s a situation of alienation.

00:37:41

of alienation.

00:37:44

Mersiliad talks a lot about this in Shamanism,

00:37:45

the archaic techniques of ecstasy,

00:37:48

and in history,

00:37:50

the eternal return.

00:37:53

Talks about how the shaman

00:37:54

is socially marginal,

00:37:56

politically marginal,

00:37:58

lives at the edge of the village,

00:38:00

and so forth and so on,

00:38:01

and is feared by the people

00:38:04

because due dealings with the shaman

00:38:08

are always dealings about life and death.

00:38:12

But then the shaman comes forward in this critical role

00:38:16

as go-between, as mediator,

00:38:19

between the cultural mind and the real world,

00:38:24

which is this potent set of forces and planetary

00:38:29

cycles and meteorological events and diseases and, you know, fate.

00:38:35

And the shaman mediates.

00:38:37

In many languages, the word for shaman means go-between.

00:38:51

shaman means go between. So the cost of this or the price of this for the shaman himself or herself is a kind of alienation from the cultural values and a kind of understanding that it’s just a game

00:39:02

that’s kept in play.

00:39:07

And this is true in our culture as well.

00:39:11

You don’t think the people who market all this crap and produce all this bad art and so forth and so on

00:39:16

love it or watch it or consume it.

00:39:19

They market it.

00:39:22

Its basic purpose is to delude the

00:39:25

and distract the

00:39:28

masses so

00:39:30

psychedelics

00:39:31

what they bring into that shamanic

00:39:34

situation is sort of

00:39:35

rocket fuel for the

00:39:38

project of cultural

00:39:39

detoxification or

00:39:41

gnostic rocket fuel

00:39:43

into a realm of cultural alienation.

00:39:48

And from that point of view, then, these other dimensions of reality come into being

00:39:55

and deeper understanding comes into being.

00:40:00

I mean, one of the things I think after spending a while with all this is it

00:40:07

really helps to be educated. It really helps to cram a lot of information and experience

00:40:14

into your head because the logos, the alien AI, the higher and hidden God that is trying to reach down to you and deliver the message

00:40:26

is a collagist. It can’t really compose the message except out of bits and pieces of what

00:40:36

you already possess. And so, you know, this came home to me very forcefully when I developed the time wave out of the I Ching and its sequence.

00:40:49

Because at the times when I was most inflated in my thinking or most grandiose in my thinking,

00:40:57

one of the issues for me personally was, why me?

00:41:01

Why are you downloading this millenarian visionary revelation on me? Why are you downloading this millenarian,

00:41:05

visionary revelation on me?

00:41:09

And the answer from the mushroom

00:41:11

was fairly humbling.

00:41:17

It was, you are the first person

00:41:19

who has ever walked through this pasture

00:41:21

who had these 64 hexagrams in your head and that’s all we needed

00:41:28

we were just waiting for somebody with who could bring that much to the party and then we could

00:41:35

arrange the details and the mapping and the arranging but they had to arrive with that much, and you’re the first person. So it was like nothing about my fine genes or cosmic destiny,

00:41:50

but that just I was the first termite to happen

00:41:53

by carrying the right scrap of information in their head

00:41:58

that this thing could then manipulate.

00:42:04

Is that something that is clinically extracted?

00:42:10

Well, most DMT in the underground has been synthesized from indole.

00:42:16

It’s a fairly simple process, like third-year organic chemistry.

00:42:21

DMT does occur in nature in many plants

00:42:25

but usually

00:42:28

there is little of it

00:42:30

so you have to process a lot

00:42:32

or it occurs

00:42:34

complexed with other

00:42:36

tryptamines that have

00:42:38

various psycho and physiological

00:42:39

activities that you don’t want

00:42:41

and that’s very difficult to separate

00:42:44

them.

00:42:50

So most DMT in the underground is made by underground chemists.

00:43:00

And if any of them are listening, you might consider making a bit more, because it’s hideously hard to come by.

00:43:02

Can you buy a pharmacological?

00:43:01

hard to come by.

00:43:07

If you had an IND,

00:43:10

if you had a license to give it to human subjects,

00:43:13

but so few people have such paper that the practical answer is no.

00:43:17

So it’s like that.

00:43:20

Yeah. that yeah

00:43:41

shamanic ability to manifest these miracles on a rush hour hamburger stand level?

00:43:48

Well, aside from the story you mentioned… Or the whole put-on.

00:43:49

No, no.

00:43:51

The truthful answer is always complicated,

00:43:55

although the truth itself is always simple.

00:44:01

If you’re asking me to tell a story of a miracle that I still cherish as authentic,

00:44:09

I don’t think it’s told in True Hallucinations, the book, because it involves, well, you’ll soon see why.

00:44:20

But here’s an incident that happened at La Charrera that didn’t make it into the

00:44:25

invisible landscape, I don’t believe. Dennis had this notion of what he called the good

00:44:34

shit. This developed in the days after the ideas about hypercarbolation. And he claimed

00:44:41

it was like a fantasy, it was like a joke, it wasn’t clear exactly what it was,

00:44:45

but it was this idea that there was this hash somewhere that had been rolled into cow dung,

00:44:55

and cut with cow dung, and then infected with psilocybin mycelium,

00:45:01

so that the mycelium had completely replaced the cow shit in this ball of hash or this hypothesized kilos of hash somewhere in the world.

00:45:13

And so there was this psilocybinated, the good shit.

00:45:26

And at one point he envisioned us actually forming a rock and roll band which would play instruments that would condense this stuff out of the air

00:45:32

over large audiences.

00:45:35

And, you know, we would go on tour and at the end of the tour,

00:45:39

history would be, the whole thing would be in a shambles

00:45:43

because Uncle John’s band really did come out of the woodwork.

00:45:48

So at one point, he predicted, one night after he had been moved to the river and was sort of in semi-incarceration,

00:45:58

he predicted that the good shit would come that night.

00:46:04

that the good shit would come that night.

00:46:09

And by this time, he was very suspect.

00:46:10

I was highly suspect.

00:46:14

Everybody in the expedition was polarized against everybody else. It was a pretty uptight scene.

00:46:19

And so I left with my girlfriend of the time.

00:46:24

And it may have even been the same night as the Silver Key incident.

00:46:29

And it was pouring rain.

00:46:31

And we made our way like a quarter mile, half a mile back into the jungle to this other place where we were staying,

00:46:40

where the original experiment had been done.

00:46:43

And so then we get to the hut and it’s pouring rain.

00:46:46

And I had scored this kilo of Santa Marta gold for the expedition.

00:46:54

And we had smoked nothing but this, for Columbia,

00:46:58

relatively reg weed for weeks.

00:47:01

So I got it out to roll the evening’s joint and I was fumbling with it and I got

00:47:09

this thing lit and this little crumb, this little burning thing fell on the floor and smelled it and the transubstantiation

00:47:28

had occurred

00:47:29

it was you know

00:47:32

like Mazar-i-Sharif

00:47:34

triple A red lion

00:47:36

hashish

00:47:37

of some sort and I know

00:47:40

hashish

00:47:40

and here we were in the center of the Amazon

00:47:44

in this hut in this pouring rain.

00:47:47

And I could tell that it was the good. It was the good shit. It had actually manifest.

00:47:55

And I showed the woman who was with me, who was easily led one way or another, but anyway, she didn’t say it wasn’t.

00:48:05

And I stayed up late that night

00:48:08

smoking this incredible hash

00:48:11

and waiting for the rain to stop

00:48:14

so that at the first gray light of dawn

00:48:16

I could go down to the river

00:48:18

and confound my critics

00:48:20

with, you know, the stone itself,

00:48:24

the alchemical quintessence, the concrescence,

00:48:27

the excreta bonum, the good shit.

00:48:31

Here it was.

00:48:33

And so as dawn broke and the fog lifted,

00:48:37

I made my way across this rainy pasture

00:48:40

and sat down by the hammock of the sleeping form of my most vociferous critic

00:48:47

and sort of elbowed her awake.

00:48:51

And, you know, there were other instances where this was the principle at work.

00:48:56

It didn’t work.

00:48:59

Everything had returned to normal.

00:49:02

It was the Cinderella screw-up, you know.

00:49:06

It was just that I was a char-girl

00:49:08

who washed pots,

00:49:10

and there was no prince,

00:49:12

and there was no coach,

00:49:13

and there was no…

00:49:15

And plus, I was once again humiliated

00:49:18

in the presence of my critics

00:49:20

who had further reason to think

00:49:22

that a check-in to the local mental health care delivery system might not be a bad idea.

00:49:30

These things happen.

00:49:36

Ah, the story of the good shit.

00:49:40

Now, if that isn’t a perfect example of an Irish bard at the top of his form, then I don’t know what is.

00:49:46

That was really, really classic Terence McKenna.

00:49:50

You know, from meditation to the story of the good shit.

00:49:54

What a delightful morning that was.

00:49:57

I don’t know about you, but I thought Terence was correct in what he said about the authenticity of the psychedelic experience relative to achieving enlightenment on the natch, as he calls meditation.

00:50:11

If you missed that, you ought to maybe go back and replay it.

00:50:14

I think it’s around the seven-minute mark of this podcast.

00:50:18

I also thought it was pretty cool to hear Terrence admit that going up on a psychedelic journey can be quite terrifying.

00:50:25

On several other occasions I heard him say that if you weren’t somewhat scared before

00:50:30

a major psychedelic journey, then you really didn’t know what you were doing.

00:50:34

And I completely agree with that.

00:50:37

These sacred medicines are not just little 4th of July fireworks.

00:50:43

They’re atomic bombs and you darn sure better know what you’re doing before you start playing with them.

00:50:49

Those of you who are regulars here in the psychedelic salon, of course, probably know what I’m going to say next.

00:50:55

And that is, always begin every cosmic exploration involving plants or chemicals at Erowid.

00:51:02

That’s E-R-O-W-I-D dot org.

00:51:05

That’s the first stop on every journey

00:51:08

a professional psychonaut takes.

00:51:11

Start at Erowid.

00:51:12

Enough said.

00:51:13

Be very careful.

00:51:14

Always, as you know,

00:51:16

err on the side of caution.

00:51:19

But hey, you guys already know that.

00:51:21

Otherwise, you wouldn’t be hanging around here

00:51:23

in the psychedelic salon.

00:51:25

And I want to thank you again for being here.

00:51:27

Glad you stopped by.

00:51:30

And dear Terrence, wherever you may be,

00:51:32

thank you so much for everything that you’ve given to us all.

00:51:37

And I want you to know, by the way, that I really enjoyed your rap about virtual reality

00:51:41

and the possibility of a hive mind on the Internet.

00:51:41

rap about virtual reality and the possibility of a hive mind

00:51:44

on the internet

00:51:44

in case you guys missed that, that’s around

00:51:47

33 minutes into this podcast

00:51:50

so check it out

00:51:51

if you were thinking about something else

00:51:54

while he was on that little roll

00:51:55

and as most of you

00:51:58

already know, our music here

00:51:59

in the psychedelic salon is compliments

00:52:01

of Shatul Hayuk

00:52:03

so thanks again you guys.

00:52:05

Appreciate it.

00:52:07

And for now, this is Lorenzo,

00:52:09

signing off from cyberdelic space.

00:52:12

Be well, my friends. Thank you.