Program Notes
Guest speakers: Sasha Shulgin and Terence McKenna
(Minutes : Seconds into program)
10:09 Sasha Shulgin: “First, I am a very firm believer in the reality of balance in all aspects of the human theater.”
11:00 Sasha Shulgin: “One definition of the tools I seek is that they may allow words of a vocabulary, a vocabulary that might allow each human being to more consciously — and more clearly — communicate with the interior of his own mind and psyche. This may be called a vocabulary of awareness.”
17:47 Sasha Shulgin: [After a discussion of nuclear weapons.] “And to have such power leads to the threat to use such power, which – in time – will actually lead to its use. But, as I have said earlier, when one thing develops, there seems to spring forth a balancing, a compensatory counterpart. This balance can be realized with the psychedelic drugs. What had been simply tools for the study of psychosis (at best), or for escapist self-gratification (at worst), suddenly assumed the character of tools of enlightenment, and of some form of transcendental communication.”
19:24 Sasha Shulgin: “But I feel — along with many others — that the efforts being invested in the technology of destruction does not allow sufficient time. It is possibly only with the psychedelic drugs that words of vocabulary can be established, which might tunnel through the subconscious between the conflicting aspects of the mind and psyche. It is here that I feel my skill lies, and this is exactly why I do what I do.”
31:42 Sasha Shulgin: “My personal philosophy might well be lifted directly from Blake: ‘I must create a system, or be enslaved by another man’s.’ I may be wrong, but I must do what I can. And I will do what I can as fast as I can.”
38:44 Terence McKenna: “The shaman is a very peculiar figure. He is critical to the functioning of the psychological and social life of his community, but in a way he is always peripheral to it. He lives at the edge of the village. He is only called upon in matters of great social crisis. He is feared and respected. And this might be a description of these hallucinogenic substances.”
40:15 Terence McKenna: “Marcel Eliade took the position that hallucinogenic shamanism was decadent, and Gordon Wasson, very rightly I believe, contravened this view and held that actually it was very probably the presence of the hallucinogenic drug experience in the life of early man that lay the very basis for the idea of the spirit.” [NOTE: Graham Hancock’s book, Supernatural, provides a detailed investigation of this subject.]
41:46 Terence McKenna: “The traditional manner of taking psilocybin is to take a very healthy dose, in the vicinity of 15 mg. on an empty stomach in total darkness.”
44:45 Terence McKenna: “The Logos is a voice heard, in the head. And the Logos was the hand on the rudder of human civilization for centuries, up until, in fact, the collapse of the ancient mystery religions and the ascendancy of Christianity to the status of a world religion.”
47:36 Terence McKenna: “It’s my belief that one of the unconscious reasons which underlies the odd attitude of the establishment toward hallucinogens is the fact that they bring the mystery to the surface as an individual experience. In other words, you do not understand the psychedelic experience by getting a report from Time magazine or even the Economist. You only understand the psychedelic experience by having it.”
49:47 Terence McKenna: “And yet, WE are the culture that is in crisis.
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
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.
00:00:30 ►
And I want to welcome you to this, my 100th podcast from the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:36 ►
A few weeks back, in response to an email inquiry from one of our fellow salonners,
00:00:41 ►
I said that I didn’t have any plans to do anything special for my 100th program.
00:00:44 ►
And that was true.
00:00:48 ►
Three weeks ago, I had no idea what I was going to do for the program today.
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But then the magic began, and synchronicities, you might call them, or maybe this is all just a big coincidence, but here’s what happened.
00:01:00 ►
I received an email from a fellow salonner who told me about some cassette tapes he had from back in the 80s and 90s that were talks Terrence McKenna and others had given.
00:01:10 ►
Did I want to check any of them out for possible podcasting, he asked.
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And I’ll tell you more about our benefactor at the end of today’s program.
00:01:20 ►
So I said, sure, send me a few of them and I’ll see if they fit.
00:01:23 ►
So I said, sure, send me a few of them and I’ll see if they fit.
00:01:29 ►
Well, a week later, a box of seven well-used cassette tapes arrived.
00:01:40 ►
And on the top of the pile was one that was a talk that Terrence McKenna gave in 1983 at the Psychedelics and Spirituality Conference in Santa Barbara.
00:01:46 ►
And I’ll have much more to say about that conference and the particular talk that Terrence gave in just a little bit.
00:01:51 ►
But first, I want to play for you the talk that was on the other side of this tape.
00:01:58 ►
Now, I don’t expect this to have the same effect on you as it did and still does on me.
00:02:04 ►
In fact, it’s really hard to tell this story because the synchronicity involved in this particular talk,
00:02:09 ►
just magically appearing just in time for my 100th podcast,
00:02:13 ►
has impacted me in ways that I still don’t understand.
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I’ll try to keep this story as brief as possible.
00:02:23 ►
Back in 1984, about one year after the talk you’re about to hear was given,
00:02:27 ►
I had my very first experience with psychoactive substances.
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I was a true drug virgin, hadn’t even tried marijuana at that point.
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And I was almost 42 years old.
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The substance I first tried was MDMA. And before I even came down from that first experience, I knew with absolute certainty that these magic medicines held the keys to our future as a species.
00:02:49 ►
If we are to have one, that is.
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And in short, my first encounter produced in me a sort of spiritual epiphany.
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Not religious, but spiritual.
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And so I immediately began to search for anything I could find that supported my very naive view of psychedelic substances.
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And within days of that experience, what fell into my hands was a worn and tattered mimeograph copy of a talk given by someone called Sasha Shulgin.
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The title of the talk was Drugs of Perception.
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And the handwritten notation at the top of the first
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page simply read, Psychedelic Conference, Santa Barbara, California, 1983.
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You just really can’t imagine my excitement back then to learn that there even had been
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a psychedelic conference.
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I was sure it must have been held in some secret location with all kinds of security.
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Keep in mind that this was at the beginning of the Reagan years,
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and the drug war was just really getting up to speed.
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In Texas, where I was living at the time,
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people were getting 40-year sentences just for having a single joint in their possession.
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Back then in Dallas, Texas, in the Irish Catholic Republican lawyer circles I ran in,
00:04:07 ►
you never even mentioned the word drugs. And what I was about to learn is that another kind of world
00:04:13 ►
existed in parallel, and even in Dallas. And so to make a long story short, I became involved in
00:04:21 ►
helping to distribute MDMA to large numbers of people.
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However, I still had one foot firmly planted in the straight world,
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and I was firmly convinced that even the pillars of the community in Dallas
00:04:33 ►
would come around to our way of thinking once they tried MDMA,
00:04:37 ►
or ecstasy as we called it then.
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And to convince my straight friends to try it for the first time,
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I had them read that talk by Sasha.
00:04:47 ►
And I always called it his,
00:04:48 ►
Why Do I Do What I Do talk?
00:04:50 ►
And it was mandatory reading if you wanted to deal with me.
00:04:54 ►
I know that’s a little anal, but I’m only telling this long story
00:04:58 ►
just to give you some small sense of how important this talk has been in my life.
00:05:03 ►
Reading it the first time was definitely a major has been in my life. Reading it the first time was definitely a
00:05:06 ►
major turning point in my life. And so to have it show up on my doorstep just in time for my
00:05:11 ►
100th podcast, and by the way, this is the first time I’ve actually heard this talk myself,
00:05:18 ►
so hopefully you can understand what it means to me to be able to play this talk for you right now.
00:05:32 ►
And here it is, way back in 1983 at the Psychedelics and Spirituality Conference in Santa Barbara, California.
00:05:35 ►
The one and only, Sasha Shogun.
00:05:45 ►
There was a meeting last year when Dr. Hoffman came and his opening sentence was,
00:05:47 ►
you expected the shame and you’re going to get a chemist.
00:05:55 ►
Actually, when I was first asked by Dr. Robert Gordon McCutcheon to come here tonight and talk about whatever I wanted to do,
00:06:01 ►
my first impression, as long as I allowed my first impression, was to decline.
00:06:05 ►
After all, I am a student of chemistry and of pharmacology and not really a student of philosophy and religion, and I felt I had probably contributed
00:06:11 ►
as much as I could last year when I took chalk to blackboard and drew hexagons and
00:06:16 ►
tryptamine rings and gave my impression of what on a molecule caused it to do what. But
00:06:22 ►
my wife intervened. Why not tell them just why you do what you do?
00:06:27 ►
It got me launched into an interesting question.
00:06:29 ►
I never had actually spoken to myself and said,
00:06:32 ►
you know, why do you do what you do?
00:06:34 ►
The flippant answer is always at hand.
00:06:36 ►
Well, one does it because it’s there to be done.
00:06:38 ►
In the Mount Everest routine,
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I call them the mountain because it’s there to be climbed.
00:06:43 ►
But that is, of course, not the reason I do the research I do.
00:06:47 ►
Whenever this question would come up in a seminar or during a panel discussion, I’d
00:06:52 ►
place special emphasis on the word psychotomimetic. The word has been used quite a bit today.
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A term that is usually used by the scientific community
00:06:59 ►
when they wish to speak about the psychedelic drugs. The term psychedelic does not
00:07:04 ►
find a good audience in the psychiatric or in the chemical or in the medical literature.
00:07:09 ►
It carries a meta-message of drug use, drug encouragement, drug proselytizing.
00:07:16 ►
And as a result, the word is not often encountered.
00:07:20 ►
In its origin, as was pointed out, it comes comes from psychoto meaning in essence psychosis
00:07:26 ►
and mimesis meaning the imitation
00:07:28 ►
of and this indeed
00:07:30 ►
is a term that very early in the
00:07:32 ►
work in this area
00:07:34 ►
that had been given these materials
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because they had been cast
00:07:38 ►
in the role of causing
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syndrome causing symptoms that would
00:07:42 ►
reflect the character of
00:07:44 ►
mental illness and is felt by reflect the character of mental illness.
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And it’s felt by studying the effects of these materials in normal subjects,
00:07:50 ►
you might be able to glean some insight as to the mechanisms
00:07:53 ►
or at least the descriptions and definitions of this syndrome
00:07:57 ►
when seen in people who are spontaneously ill.
00:08:01 ►
This explanation, the search for new psychotomimetics for materials that would
00:08:06 ►
be more exacting the definition of psychosis, is completely logical in that all the hallucinogenics,
00:08:14 ►
the psychedelics that are known, can be classified into materials that are indoles, and there
00:08:19 ►
are many in this area, the tryptamines, the more convoluted carbolines, LSD as an ergot type indole.
00:08:28 ►
Or it can be classified as phenethylamines.
00:08:32 ►
And there are perhaps some three or four score that are in this classification.
00:08:36 ►
The analogs of mesclun compound has been mentioned several times.
00:08:40 ►
Or the substitution of variants of mesclun.
00:08:43 ►
Or the alpha-methyl compounds that have given rise
00:08:46 ►
to materials that are lumped chemically together as the amphetamines.
00:08:50 ►
And there are two principal neurotransmitters in the brain.
00:08:53 ►
One is an indole, and this is serotonin.
00:08:56 ►
One is a phenethylamine, namely dopamine.
00:08:59 ►
And it’s very desirable from the point of the neurochemist
00:09:02 ►
to find pigeonholes that can classify things.
00:09:04 ►
Here we have a group of
00:09:06 ►
psychedelics that are all indoles
00:09:08 ►
and we have a neurotransmitter
00:09:10 ►
that’s indolic, serotonin. Here’s a group
00:09:12 ►
that are all phenethylamines and we have
00:09:14 ►
a neurotransmitter that’s phenethylamine.
00:09:16 ►
All we have to do is understand why all of
00:09:18 ►
these work here and all of those work
00:09:19 ►
there and we shall now know how the neurotransmitters
00:09:22 ►
work in the brain. And once we know
00:09:24 ►
that, we’ll be able to cure
00:09:24 ►
mental illness.
00:09:27 ►
Well, it’s an appealing, and it has not been a particularly rewarding classification.
00:09:32 ►
And the explanation, beside being logical, is quite safe.
00:09:36 ►
Because it’s an unthreatening explanation.
00:09:39 ►
It’s easily accepted by the academic and administrative community.
00:09:42 ►
But the explanation is still not the explanation of why I do what I do.
00:09:46 ►
My work is indeed dedicated to the development of tools, but tools for quite a different
00:09:51 ►
purpose.
00:09:52 ►
And here is where I want to get quite away from chemistry and into some of my own personal
00:09:56 ►
thoughts.
00:09:58 ►
I’d like to lay a little background to establish a framework for these tools, and in part to
00:10:03 ►
define them, and in part to give emphasis
00:10:05 ►
to an urgency that I really feel associated with them.
00:10:09 ►
First, I am a very firm believer in the reality of a balance in all aspects of the human theater.
00:10:17 ►
When there seems to be a development of a move that-a-way, somehow, very shortly, or
00:10:22 ►
almost in concert, there is a move this way
00:10:25 ►
that keeps things in some delicate balance.
00:10:28 ►
If there must be a dichotomization
00:10:30 ►
of concepts into good and evil
00:10:32 ►
then all good seems to contain
00:10:34 ►
its unexpressed evil
00:10:36 ►
and all evil is unexpressed good.
00:10:39 ►
Within the human mind
00:10:41 ►
there coexists the eros
00:10:42 ►
the life-loving, the self-perpetrating force,
00:10:46 ►
with the thanatos, the self-destructive death wish.
00:10:50 ►
Both are present in each of us, but are usually separated by a very difficult wall,
00:10:57 ►
a very difficult-to-penetrate wall of the unconscious.
00:11:00 ►
One definition of the tools I seek is that they may allow words of a vocabulary, a vocabulary which might allow each human being to more consciously and more clearly communicate with the interior of his own mind and psyche.
00:11:16 ►
This may be called a vocabulary of awareness.
00:11:23 ►
a person who becomes increasingly aware of and so begins to acknowledge
00:11:24 ►
the existence of the two opposite contributors
00:11:27 ►
to his motives and decisions
00:11:29 ►
may begin to make choices
00:11:31 ►
which are knowledgeable
00:11:32 ►
and the learning process that follows such choices
00:11:36 ►
is the path that leads to wisdom
00:11:37 ►
but just as there is a balance within the mind
00:11:41 ►
that needs establishment
00:11:43 ►
there is an interesting record of balances of the same sort in
00:11:46 ►
society. Just look for a few minutes
00:11:48 ►
at some of the coincidences
00:11:49 ►
that have kept our human race in a rather
00:11:52 ►
precarious balance.
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Throughout the early centuries of the current millennium,
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there were carried out some of the
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most viciously inhuman wars that were known to
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man, all in the name of the forces
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of religion, and the horrors of the
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Inquisition, with its lethal intolerance
00:12:06 ►
of heresy. And yet,
00:12:08 ►
it was during these dark years that
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the structure of alchemy was established.
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Not to change base metals
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into noble ones, as is often thought,
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but to acquire knowledge through the study of matter.
00:12:19 ►
The work
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of the alchemists extended up to the
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age of enlightenment, with the urges of
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rationalism and skepticism.
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And it was always directed toward the learning process.
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The reward of alchemistic effort has been simply stated as the effort to achieve the transmutation of base metals into gold.
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But as Ralph pointed out just a bit ago, this is not the actual reward. The value was the doing and the redoing and the redoing of the process of distillation,
00:12:48 ►
of sublimation, of condensation, of precipitation.
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It was a continual, ever more exact effort to understand these processes
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that from the learning of the process,
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one would be able to find a unity between the physical and the spiritual world.
00:13:03 ►
It was the doing and the redoing itself
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that was the reward.
00:13:08 ►
In the last hundred years or so,
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this learning process has evolved
00:13:12 ►
into what we call science.
00:13:13 ►
However, there has been a subtle shift in the goal
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from the process itself
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to the results of the process.
00:13:21 ►
In this age of science,
00:13:23 ►
it is only the end result, the gold,
00:13:24 ►
that really matters. It is not this age of science, it is only the end result, the gold,
00:13:25 ►
that really matters.
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It is not the act of achieving,
00:13:29 ►
but the achievement itself that brings one the acknowledgement
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of his peers,
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that brings recognition
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from the outside world,
00:13:35 ►
that results in wealth
00:13:36 ►
and influence and in power.
00:13:39 ►
And these end achievements,
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these results,
00:13:41 ►
show the same dichotomy of directions
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which was so evident in the previous centuries.
00:13:47 ►
For years, there had been no separation of values.
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Neither direction had taken the colors of good or for evil.
00:13:54 ►
Still, there were incredible coincidences of timing.
00:13:57 ►
For example, in 1895, Wilhelm Conrad von Lenken observed that when electricity was applied to an evacuated tube
00:14:06 ►
containing certain gases
00:14:07 ►
a nearby plate covered with barium
00:14:10 ►
platino cyanide emitted a visible glow
00:14:12 ►
and the next year
00:14:14 ►
in 1896
00:14:15 ►
Antoine Henri Becquerel
00:14:17 ►
found that these same metal producing emanations
00:14:20 ►
were being emitted from uranium
00:14:21 ►
radioactivity had been discovered
00:14:24 ►
but it was just the following year at 11.45am were being emitted from uranium. Radioactivity had been discovered.
00:14:27 ►
But it was just in the following year,
00:14:31 ►
at 11.45 a.m. on the 23rd of November of 1897,
00:14:34 ►
that Arthur Hefter consumed an alkaloid that he had isolated from the peyote, dumpling cactus,
00:14:37 ►
brought to the Western world
00:14:38 ►
by the irrepressible pharmacologist Louis Levine.
00:14:41 ►
As Hefter wrote in his notes,
00:14:43 ►
and this is a quotation following 150 milligrams
00:14:46 ►
of mescaline,
00:14:47 ►
from time to time, dots with the
00:14:50 ►
most brilliant colors floated across the
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field of vision. Later on,
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landscapes, halls,
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architectural scenes also appeared.
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Mescaline had also been
00:15:00 ►
discovered.
00:15:02 ►
During the 1920s
00:15:03 ►
and 1930s, both worlds, that of the physical sciences involving radiation
00:15:07 ►
and that of the psychopharmacological sciences involving psychotropic materials,
00:15:12 ►
continued to develop without any clear sense of polarity,
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without the mine is good and yours is evil duality that was soon to come.
00:15:22 ►
Radioactivity and radiation were becoming the mainstays of medicine.
00:15:27 ►
X-ray photography was invaluable in diagnosis
00:15:29 ►
and radium therapy was broadly used in treatment.
00:15:33 ►
Controlled and localized radiation
00:15:35 ►
could destroy malignant tissue
00:15:36 ►
while sparing the host.
00:15:39 ►
And in the area of psychology,
00:15:41 ►
there were parallel developments.
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The theories of Freud and Jung
00:15:44 ►
were being developed into increasingly useful clinical
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tools and approaches to mental illness.
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And the basis of experimental psychology was laid in the pioneering studies of Pavlov.
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Another coincidence in timing, which in retrospect started a dividing of science on the separate
00:16:01 ►
paths occurred during World War II.
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on the separate paths occurred during World War II.
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In the late 1942, Enrico Fermi and several other scientists at the University of Chicago demonstrated for the first time ever
00:16:11 ►
that nuclear fission could be achieved and could be controlled by man.
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The age of unlimited power and freedom from dependency
00:16:19 ►
upon our dwindling fossil reserves had begun.
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Just the next year, at 4.20 p.m. on the 19th of April,
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Albert Hoffman consumed a measured amount of a compound
00:16:30 ►
which he had first synthesized some five years earlier.
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As Hoffman subsequently reported,
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as a quotation following 250 micrograms,
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after the crisis of confusion and despair,
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I began to enjoy the unprecedented colors and plays of shapes that persisted.
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Kaleidoscopic, fantastic
00:16:48 ►
images surged in on me,
00:16:50 ►
alternating, variegated,
00:16:52 ►
opening and closing themselves
00:16:53 ►
in circles and spirals.
00:16:56 ►
LSD had also been discovered.
00:16:59 ►
But then,
00:17:00 ►
still, and up until the last decade,
00:17:02 ►
it was the rich promise of the nuclear age,
00:17:05 ►
first with the power and potential of fission, and up until the last decade. It was the rich promise of the nuclear age, first with the power and potential of fission,
00:17:07 ►
and later with the virtually limitless potential of fusion energy
00:17:10 ►
that carried the banner and the hopes of man.
00:17:14 ►
And the area of the hallucinogenics was categorized as negative,
00:17:18 ►
psychosis-imitating, psychotomimetic.
00:17:23 ►
It was not until someone in the 1970s, sometime in the 1970s,
00:17:27 ►
that a strange and a fascinating and a rather frightening reversal of roles took place.
00:17:35 ►
The knowledge of nuclear fission and fusion took on a death-loving aspect,
00:17:40 ►
with country after country joining the fraternity of those skilled in the capacity for the eradication of the human experiment.
00:17:47 ►
And to have such power leads to the threat to use such power,
00:17:51 ►
which in time will actually lead to its use.
00:17:55 ►
But, as I said earlier, when one thing develops,
00:17:57 ►
there seems to spring forth a balancing, a compensatory counterpart.
00:18:01 ►
This balance can be realized with the psychedelic drugs.
00:18:05 ►
What had been simply tools for the study of psychosis at best, or for escapist self-gratification at
00:18:11 ►
worst, suddenly assumed the character of tools of enlightenment and of some form of transcendental
00:18:17 ►
communication. If man’s alter ego, his thanatos, have been entrusted with the imperpetual knowledge of how he can
00:18:26 ►
completely destroy himself, and
00:18:28 ►
this extraordinary experiment,
00:18:30 ►
then some development
00:18:31 ►
must occur at the
00:18:34 ►
eros side of his psyche, that
00:18:36 ►
will and must afford the learning
00:18:38 ►
of how to live with his professional
00:18:40 ►
knowledge.
00:18:41 ►
It is a communication between these two sides
00:18:44 ►
of the mind that requires
00:18:45 ►
an extraordinary vocabulary.
00:18:48 ►
Where do these words
00:18:49 ►
come from?
00:18:50 ►
The words of this vocabulary.
00:18:52 ►
All depend upon
00:18:53 ►
an intimate insight
00:18:54 ►
into the working
00:18:55 ►
of the human mind.
00:18:56 ►
But this can be approached
00:18:57 ►
in many ways.
00:18:59 ►
The study of religion,
00:19:01 ►
of meditation,
00:19:02 ►
of self-yielding
00:19:03 ►
provides a peace.
00:19:06 ►
But in my mind also tends toward a retreat and hence a capitulation.
00:19:11 ►
The efforts to amalgamate the two sides of the mind as seen in the Tao of physics and
00:19:15 ►
the rich findings of parallelisms between the Eastern and Western philosophies may eventually
00:19:20 ►
explain all and allow some unification for the human purpose. But I feel, along with many others,
00:19:26 ►
that the efforts being invested
00:19:28 ►
in the technology of destruction
00:19:30 ►
does not allow sufficient time.
00:19:32 ►
It is possibly only with the psychedelic drugs
00:19:35 ►
that words of vocabulary can be established
00:19:37 ►
which might tunnel through the subconscious
00:19:39 ►
between the conflicting aspects of the mind and psyche.
00:19:43 ►
It is here that I feel my skill lies.
00:19:46 ►
And this is exactly why I do what I do.
00:19:50 ►
Where do we stand as of today?
00:19:53 ►
In the last handful of years,
00:19:54 ►
the forces of government and nationalism
00:19:56 ►
have amassed an unprecedented arsenal of destructive power.
00:20:00 ►
The power is in the current arsenals of the world,
00:20:03 ►
if restructured into Hiroshima-strength weapons,
00:20:06 ►
to detonate one bomb every minute, on the minute, for the next two years.
00:20:12 ►
And the rationalized need to do so is becoming manifest at a frightening pace.
00:20:19 ►
But in the last handful of years, a number of tools of communication have increased at a like rate.
00:20:21 ►
in the last handful of years,
00:20:23 ►
a number of tools of communication have increased at a like rate.
00:20:25 ►
There are currently nearly 200 psychedelic drugs
00:20:28 ►
known and described,
00:20:30 ►
some touching at one, some at another,
00:20:32 ►
of the fibers that unify our minds.
00:20:34 ►
By learning each of their structures
00:20:36 ►
of sensory communication in turn,
00:20:38 ►
we might find a form of communication
00:20:40 ►
that would disarm our destructive compulsion.
00:20:44 ►
And indeed, what form of tools
00:20:45 ►
are now available to us?
00:20:48 ►
Some of the tools
00:20:49 ►
that are available
00:20:50 ►
or rather that have been available
00:20:51 ►
are the widely publicized drugs
00:20:53 ►
of psychopharmacology
00:20:54 ►
such as mesclit,
00:20:56 ►
psilocybin,
00:20:57 ►
DOM,
00:20:57 ►
LSD.
00:20:59 ►
These drugs played a role
00:21:00 ►
in defining the transition
00:21:01 ►
between drugs
00:21:02 ►
as entertainment,
00:21:04 ►
escape,
00:21:04 ►
turn on,
00:21:05 ►
and drugs as instructive vehicles for learning,
00:21:08 ►
enlightenment, and insight,
00:21:10 ►
but at quite a price.
00:21:12 ►
They had a high profile
00:21:14 ►
at the time that the scheduled drug laws were written,
00:21:16 ►
and thus were made illegal
00:21:18 ►
and are not available.
00:21:21 ►
However, in their place,
00:21:22 ►
there are now many, many other materials,
00:21:23 ►
some more limited in their instructive capacity, and some perhaps even richer.
00:21:28 ►
And for everyone today, there will be ten tomorrow.
00:21:31 ►
Let me describe a small sampling of the recently born materials a bit more in detail.
00:21:38 ►
These are examples, with some quotations in some instances, of experiments in which there
00:21:43 ►
have been actually definitions
00:21:45 ►
of some aspect
00:21:46 ►
of sensory teasing apart
00:21:47 ►
of the complex
00:21:49 ►
sensorium attack
00:21:50 ►
and effects
00:21:53 ►
that these materials can have.
00:21:56 ►
DIPT
00:21:57 ►
is an abbreviation
00:21:58 ►
of NN-diisopropylcryptamine,
00:22:01 ►
a drug unique
00:22:01 ►
among the psychedelics
00:22:02 ►
in that it expresses
00:22:03 ►
a distortion in
00:22:04 ►
or to
00:22:05 ►
an extent, a synthesis with the process of auditory integrity.
00:22:10 ►
It is perhaps one of the less available senses to be teased apart for special study.
00:22:14 ►
Many of the close relatives, as you well know, deal with the audit, with the visual process
00:22:19 ►
and in some way will change or synthesize or modify the visual integrity,
00:22:26 ►
but a rather interesting distinction between the drug-induced psychosis and endogenous schizophrenia
00:22:31 ►
is that very often in the latter, the primary sensory character that is affected is the auditory influence.
00:22:42 ►
A quotation following 20 milligrams of DIPT.
00:22:46 ►
The telephone sounds partly underwater.
00:22:49 ►
Here are signs of a pitch
00:22:50 ►
change on radio.
00:22:52 ►
The absolute pitch down a major third.
00:22:55 ►
Chord on the piano
00:22:56 ►
sounds out of tune, quite flat.
00:22:58 ►
Music terrible, unlistenable.
00:23:01 ►
The other senses seem to know
00:23:02 ►
I’m affected. If I were deaf,
00:23:04 ►
I would have thought this an inactive drug.
00:23:07 ►
Several hours after ingestion of the material, this note.
00:23:10 ►
Hearing normal, piano back in tune.
00:23:15 ►
MDMA or MDA is abbreviation for 3-4-methylendioxy-methamphetamine.
00:23:21 ►
It’s a tool of communication that has shown in recent years
00:23:24 ►
an extraordinary
00:23:25 ►
utility in opening communication between individuals. This has promoted its use in psychotherapy,
00:23:31 ►
but has given promise as well as a vehicle for intrapersonal communication. This particular
00:23:38 ►
drug has been used clinically in many applications, and these today probably number in the thousands,
00:23:41 ►
in many applications and these today
00:23:42 ►
probably number in the thousands
00:23:44 ►
and it has commanded
00:23:46 ►
a remarkably good record
00:23:47 ►
of positive results.
00:23:49 ►
A quotation following
00:23:50 ►
120 milligrams.
00:23:52 ►
We kept up a lively conversation
00:23:53 ►
covering many interesting aspects
00:23:55 ►
of our various family relationships.
00:23:58 ►
The conversation was
00:23:59 ►
unusually insightful
00:24:00 ►
and free of defensiveness.
00:24:02 ►
And following a 40 milligram supplement
00:24:04 ►
at the two hour point,
00:24:06 ►
gene glowed with energy, became very
00:24:08 ►
beautiful. We talked freely and openly.
00:24:10 ►
Every bush and plant looks
00:24:11 ►
utterly alive. I am entranced
00:24:13 ►
by a large rock.
00:24:15 ►
As I look at its surface, I see the surface
00:24:18 ►
of a planet with mountains and valleys.
00:24:20 ►
Little crystals of mica are like
00:24:22 ►
jewels.
00:24:24 ►
Another material, 2C-B, is the abbreviation for 2,5-dimethoxy-4-bromophenethylamine,
00:24:32 ►
a tool and a word of vocabulary which ties the mental process directly and constructively into the physical soma.
00:24:40 ►
The analgesic effects experienced with many, if not most, of the psychedelic drugs are not present with 2C-B.
00:24:46 ►
On the contrary, there is an increased body awareness of every kind,
00:24:50 ►
including skin sensitivity, heightened responsiveness to smells, tastes, to sexual stimulation.
00:24:56 ►
One experiences increased consciousness of physical health and energy,
00:25:00 ►
or, on the other hand, sharpened awareness of any body imbalance or discomfort.
00:25:04 ►
or, on the other hand, sharpened awareness of any body imbalance or discomfort.
00:25:09 ►
2C-B allows rich visual imagery and intense eyes-closed fantasy without cluttering up of the mental field with too many elaborations.
00:25:13 ►
A quotation following 20 milligrams.
00:25:16 ►
Along with the awareness of the body and the ability to deeply enjoy the fact
00:25:20 ►
that one is a physical as well as a spiritual being,
00:25:23 ►
the experience of 2C-B allows exploration as far as one needs to go.
00:25:28 ►
There is at all times full connection with all parts of oneself,
00:25:32 ►
the emotional and the intellectual, the intuitive and the instinctual.
00:25:38 ►
It is a superb tool for learning and for growth.
00:25:41 ►
And 2CV allows one to recover baseline within 6 to eight hours using a maximum dosage of 25 milligrams,
00:25:47 ►
usually lower in the area of 18 to 20.
00:25:51 ►
Another drug mentioned earlier, ketamine,
00:25:54 ►
is abbreviation for 2-orthochlorophenol-2-methylaminocyclohexanone,
00:26:00 ►
the antithesis of 2C-B,
00:26:02 ►
in that it effectively separates the mind and the body.
00:26:05 ►
This allows the mind a separate and constructive state, apart from the physical groundings of the body.
00:26:11 ►
Although the primary clinical application of ketamine is as a dissociative anesthetic,
00:26:16 ►
an increasingly important direction of study is now being directed to the psychological loosening that it allows.
00:26:24 ►
MEL and CPM
00:26:25 ►
are abbreviations of the compounds that are
00:26:28 ►
fascinating analogs of mescaline,
00:26:30 ►
namely 4-methyl-3,5-dimethoxyphenethylamine
00:26:32 ►
and 4-cyclopropylmethyl-3,5-dimethoxyphenethylamine.
00:26:36 ►
Two compounds that activate opposite sides of the sensorium.
00:26:41 ►
The former provokes an intense visual distortion
00:26:44 ►
at the retinal level with consequential bizarre interpretations.
00:26:49 ►
The latter displays its effectiveness in the fantasy counterpart, seen only with the eyes closed.
00:26:54 ►
Following 65 milligrams of MAL, a quotation,
00:26:58 ►
within two hours, intense effect, beautiful, diuretic, good connections between parts of myself,
00:27:05 ►
continual fantasy and imagery, lovely experience
00:27:08 ►
of the erotic with husband.
00:27:10 ►
Around 12 hours, excellent, solid
00:27:11 ►
sleep with clear, balanced dreams.
00:27:14 ►
Following 70 milligrams of
00:27:15 ►
CPM, a two-hour strong
00:27:18 ►
effect, but no visual.
00:27:19 ►
Wonderful locking into music,
00:27:21 ►
deep loving, erotic, very
00:27:23 ►
good, with eyes closed.
00:27:25 ►
Intense colorful fantasy.
00:27:27 ►
Much like LSD at times.
00:27:29 ►
No sleep before 18 hours.
00:27:32 ►
Thus anyone should have the impression by the way that research in this area leads always to God.
00:27:37 ►
And to insight and to deeper experiences in loving.
00:27:39 ►
Let me mention an example of a compound called 4-TASB.
00:27:43 ►
Which is 4-thioethyl-3-ethoxy-5-methoxyphenethylamine.
00:27:48 ►
Following a 100 milligram exposure.
00:27:51 ►
At about two hours, pleasant and positive,
00:27:53 ►
peaceful feelings, very good humored.
00:27:56 ►
Later, sleep impossible until early morning.
00:27:59 ►
And then only about two hours.
00:28:01 ►
All next day could not rest or sleep.
00:28:03 ►
Feeling of nerve endings raw and active.
00:28:06 ►
Anxiety over heartbeat.
00:28:08 ►
Frightening effects on nervous system.
00:28:10 ►
Depression.
00:28:11 ►
Back of neck sore from tension.
00:28:13 ►
My first experience of being able to detect
00:28:15 ►
what felt like continual electrical impulses
00:28:17 ►
between nerve endings.
00:28:19 ►
Had the impression that
00:28:21 ►
if I allowed the wrong sequence of images
00:28:22 ►
to flow in my mind,
00:28:24 ►
I might experience some sort of convulsion,
00:28:26 ►
or at least a kind of mental shock or shorting out.
00:28:31 ►
When I tried to sleep, eyes closed, fantasies became intensely negative and threatening.
00:28:36 ►
I could not smooth out the nervous system.
00:28:37 ►
Felt very vulnerable.
00:28:40 ►
Do not repeat.
00:28:44 ►
Alpha-O-DMS is an abbreviation of 5-methoxy-alpha-methyl-cryptamine,
00:28:48 ►
an analog of a neurotransmitter serotonin
00:28:51 ►
that has been tailored chemically to allow it to enter into the CNS, into the brain.
00:28:56 ►
It is a very potent endo-psychedelic
00:28:59 ►
that touches closely on those areas involved with primal energies.
00:29:02 ►
Several researchers experienced dreams of catastrophic events
00:29:05 ►
after exploring this material.
00:29:08 ►
One researcher, however, had a dream which involved
00:29:10 ►
as a complete science fiction
00:29:12 ►
scenario. He found it absolutely
00:29:13 ►
enjoyable and is still thinking of writing it up
00:29:15 ►
and sending it into a publisher.
00:29:18 ►
These are only about a half a dozen
00:29:20 ►
or so of many scores of fascinating compounds
00:29:22 ►
that are now available for the study
00:29:24 ►
of this developing vocabulary. This is where we are at the moment. Some materials show incredible promise, and
00:29:29 ►
some suggest caution. But what might we expect to emerge in the future? Let’s look at the
00:29:35 ►
past history of other areas of psychotropic chemistry. A few decades ago, it was marveled
00:29:41 ►
at that drugs such as the opiates, including morphine and heroin, and meparidine, could have such an exacting influence on the brain’s integrity. Then it
00:29:49 ►
became known that there were natural factors in the brain that had these actions, and that
00:29:54 ►
there were specific sites in the brain that were pre-designed to respond to them. There
00:29:59 ►
were the enkephalins and their fragmented portions known as the endorphins, which were
00:30:04 ►
derived from the cephalic process and related to morphine.
00:30:07 ►
These met a person’s need for the suppression of pain.
00:30:32 ►
communicative factors, which might be connected and eventually related to the natural receptor sites in the brain for transcendental communication.
00:30:36 ►
Their structures may someday be known. Their functions may someday be understood.
00:30:41 ►
There are a multitude of tenuous threads that tie together the fragile structure of the human spirit.
00:30:44 ►
The life-giving with the death-demanding side.
00:30:46 ►
The exalted voice with the mundane.
00:30:48 ►
The strongly centered self with the drive toward dispersion
00:30:50 ►
and loss of center.
00:30:52 ►
These all coexist in all of us,
00:30:54 ►
but there is an essential blockade
00:30:56 ►
between these inner worlds
00:30:57 ►
which I truly feel can be penetrated only
00:31:00 ►
with the words and the tools
00:31:01 ►
and the understanding
00:31:03 ►
that may be most easily obtained
00:31:04 ►
through the area of psychedelic experiences.
00:31:07 ►
William Blake said
00:31:08 ►
in the marriage of heaven and hell,
00:31:10 ►
man has no body distinct from his soul,
00:31:13 ►
for that called body
00:31:14 ►
is a portion of soul,
00:31:16 ►
discerned by the five senses.
00:31:18 ►
The chief inlets of soul in this age,
00:31:21 ►
energy is the only life
00:31:23 ►
and is from the body,
00:31:26 ►
and reason is the bound or outward circumference
00:31:27 ►
of energy
00:31:28 ►
energy is eternal delight
00:31:30 ►
these are responses
00:31:33 ►
to a heartfelt need
00:31:34 ►
for some vocabulary
00:31:35 ►
to allow the establishment
00:31:37 ►
of a dialogue
00:31:38 ►
that might diffuse
00:31:39 ►
the accelerating
00:31:40 ►
mad moves toward extinction
00:31:41 ►
my personal philosophy
00:31:44 ►
might well be lifted directly from Blake.
00:31:47 ►
I must create a system or be slaved by another man’s.
00:31:53 ►
I may be wrong, but I must do what I’m doing.
00:31:58 ►
And I will do what I can as fast as I can. It’s the best I can. Thank you.
00:32:13 ►
As you could tell, Sasha became a little emotional at the end.
00:32:17 ►
And on the copy of this talk that I received in 1984,
00:32:21 ►
over in the left margin on the last page was written,
00:32:24 ►
Here He Started to Cry.
00:32:25 ►
Well, back then in Dallas,
00:32:27 ►
the legend was that the copy of the talk that we had
00:32:29 ►
was actually Ann Shulgin’s copy
00:32:31 ►
and that she had written those words in the margin.
00:32:34 ►
But a few years ago, I showed my copy to Ann
00:32:36 ►
and she said that it wasn’t her handwriting.
00:32:39 ►
But anyway, it really was a thrill for me
00:32:41 ►
to hear the end of that talk right now,
00:32:44 ►
just particularly because he ad-libbed a bit at the end that didn’t follow his written text.
00:32:50 ►
And as I was listening to Sasha just now,
00:32:53 ►
I was obviously following along in my old copy of his talk,
00:32:57 ►
one that was first given to me in 1984.
00:33:00 ►
And it was interesting to see that Sasha actually delivered this talk
00:33:03 ►
in a more extemporaneous manner than I’d expected.
00:33:07 ►
It looks to me like he must have first written the essay and then used his outline of it to deliver the talk.
00:33:13 ►
And if you’d like to see a copy of the essay yourself, you can find it in the introductory information in Ann and Sasha’s book, To Call.
00:33:21 ►
And by the way, be sure to keep in mind that the talk you just heard was given in
00:33:26 ►
- At the time, there was no Arrowwood.org to go to. In fact, there wasn’t even a World Wide Web
00:33:33 ►
back then. Information like this just simply didn’t exist in ways that reached more than a handful of
00:33:40 ►
individuals. And also, since the governments of the world have copied the fascists in Washington,
00:33:47 ►
and now all of these compounds are prohibited that he talked about,
00:33:51 ►
including ones that haven’t even been invented yet,
00:33:55 ►
a lot of things have changed since then.
00:33:56 ►
But what a screwed-up political setup we humans have come up with, huh?
00:34:01 ►
Oh well, not much to do about that other than just to keep your head down and stay under the radar.
00:34:07 ►
I guess I should have mentioned that this tape has been played a lot,
00:34:11 ►
and so the sound quality of Sasha’s voice and Terrence’s voice in a minute
00:34:15 ►
isn’t as true as it most likely was when the tape was new,
00:34:19 ►
but thankfully we at least have the overall flavor of the moment.
00:34:24 ►
And before I forget it, did you notice that Sasha stated that Albert Hoffman consumed the first intentional dose of LSD on the 19th of April at 4.20 p.m.?
00:34:35 ►
Maybe that’s the origin of 4.20 in the wonderful world of cannabis lore.
00:34:50 ►
I know there are a number of explanations for the origin of 420, but now I’m going to vote for the reference to Dr. Hoffman’s famous bicycle ride as my choice.
00:35:02 ►
Now on the second part of today’s program, which originally was going to be the entire program before I discovered Sasha on the other side of the tape that you’re about to hear,
00:35:06 ►
the talk I’m going to play now is one that I had heard about for quite some time. Like many of our fellow slaughters, one of my favorite things to do
00:35:12 ►
is to sit around a fire with some friends, pass a pipe around, and talk about people we know and
00:35:17 ►
places we’ve been to. And quite often the name Terrence McKenna pops up along with the question,
00:35:23 ►
when did you first hear him speak?
00:35:26 ►
For some of you, including my wife Mary C.,
00:35:29 ►
that first exposure to the Bard McKenna came at the conference on psychedelics and spirituality
00:35:35 ►
that Robert Gordon McClutchin organized in Santa Barbara back in 1983.
00:35:41 ►
And what a conference that must have been.
00:35:43 ►
I haven’t been able to find out much about it on
00:35:46 ►
the web, and hopefully some of our fellow salonners who were there will write and fill in the details
00:35:51 ►
for us. But I do know that in addition to Sasha, the other speakers included Albert Hoffman,
00:35:58 ►
Richard Evans Schultes, Carl Ruck, Andrew Weil, Ralph Metzner, and many others. There was one speaker, however, who canceled at the last moment.
00:36:08 ►
And in his place, the conference organizers told the audience that they had replaced the
00:36:13 ►
absent speaker with this new guy, a guy named Terrence McKenna.
00:36:18 ►
And the rest, as they say, is history.
00:36:21 ►
It’s interesting to me that out of all the great luminaries on the program,
00:36:26 ►
the people who were actually the reason my wife and her friends went to the conference to see,
00:36:31 ►
well, all of those talks by all of those wonderful people have faded over time into only dim memories.
00:36:37 ►
But the talk by this new guy, McKenna, well, that’s the only talk that seems to have really stuck in the minds of many of the people who were there.
00:36:46 ►
Now, I think that Terrence had actually begun making public appearances a few years before this,
00:36:52 ►
but this seems to be the very first talk he gave at a major conference,
00:36:57 ►
and it was from here that his legend began to grow in earnest.
00:37:01 ►
The title of the talk on the tape is shown as,
00:37:04 ►
Hallucinogens Return to the in earnest. The title of the talk on the tape is shown as Hallucinogens Return to the Logos.
00:37:08 ►
But as you’re about to hear, Terrence also had two other titles for it.
00:37:20 ►
I was originally going to call this talk
00:37:23 ►
Monkeys Discover Hyperspace, but I decided that that was a little outrageous and I settled on hallucinogens before and after psychology.
00:37:35 ►
So before I dig into that subject, I’ll say a bit about how I come to have an interest in these substances and their very peculiar effects.
00:37:46 ►
Years and years ago, after an LSD trip,
00:37:49 ►
I imagined that I perceived a relationship between the LSD experience
00:37:55 ►
and the motifs of Tibetan religious art.
00:37:59 ►
And accordingly, I went to Nepal and took up residence
00:38:03 ►
in a village of Tibetan refugees.
00:38:06 ►
And I quickly learned that the shamanism that I wanted to study was inaccessible for reasons of language,
00:38:14 ►
for reasons such as that the Buddhists who were teaching me Tibetan looked askance at the shaman that I wanted to associate with and I realized
00:38:28 ►
then that the association between shamanism and hallucinogens is such that both in a way
00:38:36 ►
are taboo and when you deal with preliterate cultures you discover that the shaman is a very peculiar figure.
00:38:47 ►
He is critical to the functioning
00:38:51 ►
of the psychological and social life of his community,
00:38:54 ►
but in a way he’s always peripheral to it.
00:38:57 ►
He lives at the edge of the village.
00:39:00 ►
He is only called upon in matters of great social crisis.
00:39:06 ►
He is feared and respected.
00:39:10 ►
And this might be a description of these hallucinogenic substances.
00:39:15 ►
They are feared and respected.
00:39:19 ►
They are misunderstood.
00:39:22 ►
They are only called upon often in moments of great crisis and
00:39:28 ►
they are a persistent but always
00:39:30 ►
peripheral part of the community and I
00:39:35 ►
saw this in Nepal among Poonpo Tibetan
00:39:39 ►
shamanism which is a non hallucinogen
00:39:41 ►
based shamanism I saw it in Indonesia
00:39:44 ►
where techniques had been developed to induce trance
00:39:49 ►
that were non-chemical techniques, specifically dance,
00:39:54 ►
in the case of Bali and Lompoc.
00:39:56 ►
And I saw it finally in the Amazon, where I think I contacted the primal shamanism.
00:40:05 ►
As you know, there’s a division of opinion on the matter of whether narcotic
00:40:10 ►
or, as I call it, hallucinogenic shamanism is decadent or, in fact, primary.
00:40:15 ►
And Mursiliad took the position that hallucinogenic shamanism was decadent.
00:40:21 ►
And Gordon Wasson very rightly, rightly I believe contravened this view and held that
00:40:28 ►
actually it was very probably the presence of the hallucinogenic drug experience in the life
00:40:34 ►
of early man that lay the very basis for the idea of the spirit well as I made my way through these various cultures and various hallucinogenic substances
00:40:47 ►
it came to my attention
00:40:51 ►
that in my opinion
00:40:54 ►
and I believe in the opinion of Gordon Wasson
00:40:57 ►
and other scholars
00:40:59 ►
Henry Munn comes to mind
00:41:01 ►
he wrote a marvelous essay called
00:41:03 ►
The Mushrooms of Language
00:41:04 ►
that in the mushrooms of language that in
00:41:06 ►
the minds of those who associated themselves with the mushroom there were
00:41:11 ►
certain assumptions about psilocybin that were different from the mythos that
00:41:18 ►
was arising around some of the other hallucinogens. Psilocybin, I think, of the more commonly available hallucinogens is the most visual,
00:41:31 ►
and it is certainly visual if it is done in the traditional manner.
00:41:38 ►
And I’m always amazed at how little understood or practiced the traditional manner is,
00:41:44 ►
so I’ll sketch it for you.
00:41:46 ►
The traditional manner of taking psilocybin is to take
00:41:49 ►
a very healthy, effective dose in the vicinity of 15 milligrams
00:41:55 ►
on an empty stomach in total darkness.
00:42:02 ►
You’ve been there.
00:42:03 ►
you’ve been there and in that situation
00:42:08 ►
which is in a sense a situation of sensory deprivation
00:42:13 ►
the psilocybin is able to exfoliate itself to the fullest degree
00:42:18 ►
and to show you what it is
00:42:20 ►
not against a background of the reality that ordinarily surrounds us,
00:42:25 ►
but against a background of darkness,
00:42:27 ►
so that the pure essence of the thing can be shown.
00:42:32 ►
And it is extraordinarily bizarre,
00:42:36 ►
extraordinarily difficult, I believe, to assimilate into your worldview.
00:42:41 ►
And this is whether you’re a Bora youth undergoing initiation, or whether
00:42:46 ►
you’re a college student or a research chemist, these things do not lend themselves well to
00:42:54 ►
integration into language. If they did, they wouldn’t occupy this peripheral position after
00:43:01 ►
10,000 years of human culture. But above and beyond the visual intensity of psilocybin,
00:43:09 ►
the thing that sets it apart, I believe, is a phenomenon that might be described as an induction
00:43:19 ►
of audio hallucination. But in fact, to describe it that way is to fall back on a kind of medical jargon reductionism
00:43:30 ►
because what it really is is a voice in the head
00:43:34 ►
that is separate from the perceived ego function.
00:43:39 ►
In other words, a voice speaks.
00:43:41 ►
You hear it and it seems to be operating
00:43:45 ►
independent of the ego
00:43:47 ►
it operates in a psychopompic role
00:43:50 ►
as a teacher
00:43:51 ►
as the narrator of the vision
00:43:55 ►
which is revealed
00:43:56 ►
much in the same way
00:43:57 ►
that Virgil led Dante
00:43:59 ►
through the circles of hell
00:44:01 ►
and the modern intellectual equipage is not capable of assimilating this.
00:44:09 ►
This is the sort of thing that we associate with psychopathology.
00:44:13 ►
We can hardly imagine anything more alien to modern consciousness
00:44:18 ►
than a disembodied voice in the head.
00:44:22 ►
However, if you familiarize yourself
00:44:26 ►
with Western thought on the scale of millennia,
00:44:30 ►
you discover that not only is this not an alien phenomena,
00:44:34 ►
but for much of human history,
00:44:37 ►
it has been inimical to the human experience.
00:44:40 ►
And it is called, relying on the Greeks, the logos.
00:44:45 ►
The logos is a voice relying on the Greeks, the Logos.
00:44:48 ►
The Logos is a voice heard in the head and the Logos was the hand on the rudder of human civilization for centuries
00:44:54 ►
up until, in fact, the collapse of the ancient mystery religions
00:44:59 ►
and the ascendancy of Christianity to the status of a world religion.
00:45:04 ►
I’m sure many of you are familiar with the story in Plutarch
00:45:08 ►
of the fisherman who heard a great noise
00:45:13 ►
and saw something fall into the sea
00:45:16 ►
and heard a voice from the sky saying that great Pan was dead,
00:45:22 ►
that, in other words, the ancient gods had been eclipsed.
00:45:25 ►
And in fact, in Jungian terms, the ancient god, by falling into the sea, had been submerged
00:45:32 ►
in the phonic unconscious and disappeared from the experience of ordinary people.
00:45:41 ►
From that period on, it was 15 to 17 centuries while Christianity worked at the implications of its message,
00:45:49 ►
while science spun away from Christianity and created its own set of modes,
00:45:55 ►
the new world was discovered, reason was enthroned, scientific method was enthroned,
00:46:01 ►
and the civilization that we know arose around us.
00:46:07 ►
But then, in 1953, Valentina and Gordon Wasson went to Huatla de Jimenez in the Sierra Mazatec
00:46:15 ►
of Oaxaca, and they discovered this mushroom cult.
00:46:20 ►
And it’s my belief that to this day we do not know what exactly it was that they stumbled upon.
00:46:27 ►
Mushroom, drug, cult, all of these ideas about what it was
00:46:34 ►
rests on the assumption that we know what we’re talking about when we talk about mind.
00:46:42 ►
And in fact, everything that has been said at this conference has rested on the assumption
00:46:46 ►
that we know what we’re talking about when we invoke a concept like mind but the truth of the
00:46:52 ►
matter is ladies and gentlemen that after 2 000 years of grappling with the problem scientists
00:46:58 ►
cannot even tell you how you can form the conception that you will change your open hand into a closed fist
00:47:07 ►
and it will happen.
00:47:10 ►
This is an intervention of mind into the world of matter
00:47:13 ►
that no philosopher has been able to give a satisfactory account of.
00:47:21 ►
Now with the hallucinogens, this intervention of one realm into another of mind into matter or
00:47:29 ►
matter into mind is raised to a pitch of excruciating intensity and it’s my belief that
00:47:38 ►
one of the unconscious reasons which underlies the odd attitude of the establishment toward hallucinogens
00:47:47 ►
is the fact that they bring the mystery to the surface as an individual experience.
00:47:56 ►
In other words, you do not understand the psychedelic experience
00:47:59 ►
by getting a report from Time magazine or even The Economist.
00:48:04 ►
You only understand the psychedelic experience by having it.
00:48:09 ►
And therefore, to understand it is to embark on a course of action of self-education
00:48:16 ►
outside the context of your culture,
00:48:19 ►
because your culture has no answers about what this thing might be. Okay, so much for that. But psilocybin
00:48:30 ►
and DMT to a lesser extent, although it is so brief and so intense that it’s sometimes hard
00:48:35 ►
to sort these things out, invokes a logos or reintroduces the phenomenon of the logos into the experience of modern people.
00:48:47 ►
So what can we make of this?
00:48:52 ►
I think we have to take it very seriously.
00:48:55 ►
I think that the culture crisis that we are involved in has to do,
00:49:01 ►
and by that I mean the entire global cultural crisis leading possibly to the extinction of the species,
00:49:08 ►
has to do with the fact that our models,
00:49:11 ►
developed over the last 500 to 1,000 years,
00:49:14 ►
have played us false.
00:49:16 ►
They aren’t working.
00:49:17 ►
And the cultures that we have conquered with capitalism and technology,
00:49:29 ►
have conquered with capitalism and technology we have repressed their connection into these intuitive realms we have established one method for the arbitration of truth and everything which
00:49:36 ►
does not pass through that narrow gate is relegated to the realm of mythology or worse, cultural immaturity.
00:49:47 ►
And yet we are the culture that is in crisis.
00:49:51 ►
When you go to the rainforest, you don’t find cultures in crisis
00:49:55 ►
except to the degree that they are being impacted by us.
00:49:59 ►
So I believe that it is no coincidence that in this moment of maximum cultural crisis,
00:50:08 ►
which we call the 20th century, the hallucinogens, the entheogens, have emerged in Western culture.
00:50:16 ►
It is no accident that Wasson made his trip to central Mexico and contacted the mushrooms.
00:50:24 ►
What he discovered in the mountains of Mexico
00:50:26 ►
was nothing less than Eros
00:50:29 ►
sleeping but alive
00:50:31 ►
the body of Osiris
00:50:33 ►
preserved over an entire astrological age
00:50:38 ►
metaphorically speaking
00:50:39 ►
in other words
00:50:40 ►
that to take the mushroom
00:50:42 ►
was to transcend the cultural momentum of the past couple of millennia and return to a world where the Logos was a minor phenomenon. Over a period of 2,000 years, everyone who was anyone made the pilgrimage to Eleusis and had the experience.
00:51:13 ►
And it put the stamp on Greek drama, Greek philosophy, later Roman politics.
00:51:20 ►
All of these things were influenced by the hallucinogenic experience. So our culture, spiritually, has played the role of the prodigal son.
00:51:30 ►
We, for reasons of ideology, botanical geography, other factors,
00:51:37 ►
have not had visionary ecstatic hallucinogens installed in our culture,
00:51:49 ►
ecstatic hallucinogens installed in our culture as we perhaps should have over the last several hundred years. Now that is changing. And in order to understand what the change means,
00:51:56 ►
you have to look further back in time, in fact past history to prehistory again to the model of the shaman
00:52:06 ►
not the shaman as anthropologists describe him
00:52:10 ►
but the shaman as shaman dream him
00:52:13 ►
because every shaman looks back toward an archetypal first shaman
00:52:18 ►
who was superhuman
00:52:20 ►
who did go to the stars
00:52:22 ►
who could go to the bottom of the ocean,
00:52:25 ►
who could move through the gates of death and return with a lost soul.
00:52:34 ►
Now, it seems to me when you pull back to the perspective of several thousand years,
00:52:50 ►
years, all of history can be seen as an adumbration on this wish, expectation, hope for a superhuman condition, for a transcending of the laws of gravity, of the laws of life and death,
00:52:57 ►
into a superhuman condition that was solitary for mankind as a whole.
00:53:08 ►
In other words, the shaman as the archetypal perfected man.
00:53:14 ►
Now, this afternoon you heard Metzner refer to alchemy as one of the refractions of this concern with the perfection of the spirit.
00:53:21 ►
It is about the projecting of a perfect substance which is the self purified but it also
00:53:29 ►
led to the rise of modern science basically through a misunderstanding now it seems to me
00:53:36 ►
what’s happening now is that what marceli odd called the human desire for self-transcendence
00:53:45 ►
expressed through the motif of magical flight
00:53:48 ►
has been taken up by the technological society
00:53:52 ►
as the idea of space flight.
00:53:55 ►
And I’m sure if Tim Leary were here,
00:53:57 ►
he could speak to this more eloquently than I can.
00:54:00 ►
Space flight is nothing less than the exterior metaphor
00:54:04 ►
for the shamanic voyage.
00:54:07 ►
In other words, in our terms, for the hallucinogenic drug experience.
00:54:12 ►
This is the way that engineers get high.
00:54:16 ►
They go to the moon.
00:54:23 ►
What we need to do to transcend our cultural schizophrenia and to heal the rift between
00:54:32 ►
spirit and soul or world and self is to realize something which we all pay lip service to at
00:54:40 ►
least i’m sure all the people in this room pay lip service to, which is the idea that the inside and the outside are really the same thing.
00:54:49 ►
But I don’t think the cultural implications of that have been clearly drawn.
00:54:55 ►
What it means really is that all our dreams of transformation
00:55:01 ►
have to be realized at the same time and that we cannot go to
00:55:06 ►
space with our feet in the mud nor can we in fact turn ourselves into an
00:55:13 ►
echo-sensitive hallucinogenic based culture on earth unless we fuse this
00:55:20 ►
these dichotomous opposites it is only in a coincidencia appositorum, a union
00:55:26 ►
of opposites that does not
00:55:28 ►
strive for closure
00:55:30 ►
that we are going to find
00:55:32 ►
cultural
00:55:33 ►
sanity. And this is
00:55:36 ►
the thing that the
00:55:38 ►
entheogens, the hallucinogens
00:55:40 ►
deliver with such
00:55:42 ►
clarity and regularity.
00:55:50 ►
They raise paradox to a level of intensity that no one can evade. And in doing that, they set the stage for turning yourself into the kind of person
00:56:00 ►
who does not insist on having it either or black or white and a culture composed of those
00:56:08 ►
kinds of people will be a culture more civilized than any that we have seen so far if i can
00:56:15 ►
paraphrase telhard de chardin for a moment he said or i will paraphrase him this way when the human
00:56:23 ►
race understands the potential
00:56:25 ►
of the hallucinogenic drug experience
00:56:27 ►
it will have discovered fire for the second time
00:56:31 ►
and this is what we are waiting for
00:56:34 ►
we are waiting for the discovery of fire
00:56:38 ►
so that we can transcend the monkey business
00:56:43 ►
and get on with the great business of inhabiting our own imaginations.
00:56:50 ►
And it’s impossible to take that position
00:56:53 ►
without someone saying,
00:56:55 ►
Manichean, dualist, enemy of the body, perhaps.
00:57:01 ►
But since the very beginning of culture
00:57:05 ►
what we seem to be
00:57:07 ►
are animals
00:57:08 ►
which
00:57:09 ►
take in raw material
00:57:12 ►
and excrete it
00:57:13 ►
imprinted with ideas
00:57:15 ►
and we do this
00:57:17 ►
on a larger
00:57:18 ►
and larger scale
00:57:19 ►
looking toward the day
00:57:21 ►
when all physical constraints
00:57:22 ►
can be lifted off of us
00:57:24 ►
as they are in our imaginations,
00:57:27 ►
and we can erect the kind of civilization that we want to erect.
00:57:33 ►
And this vision was anticipated by no less a seer than James Joyce,
00:57:38 ►
who said, if you want to be phoenixed, come and be parked.
00:57:43 ►
if you want to be phoenixed, come and be parked.
00:57:47 ►
Up in the Yent, Prospector,
00:57:51 ►
here in Moycain, we flop on the Seamy side.
00:57:54 ►
Moycain is the red light district of Dublin.
00:57:57 ►
But up in the Yent, Prospector,
00:58:00 ►
you sprout all your worth and woof your wings.
00:58:04 ►
This was part of his program.
00:58:06 ►
He hoped that man would become dirigible as he put it and he didn’t live to see the revolution of the
00:58:11 ►
hallucinogens but I think had he he would have felt that that man was well
00:58:16 ►
on his way to becoming dirigible and it seems to me that we stand at an enormous threshold.
00:58:27 ►
The future of the human mind must loom large in the future of the human species.
00:58:37 ►
If it doesn’t loom large in the future of the human species, then we are in very big trouble.
00:58:42 ►
in the future of the human species,
00:58:44 ►
then we are in very big trouble.
00:58:47 ►
Now, a term that has been applied or was early on applied,
00:58:50 ►
though I haven’t heard it used at this conference,
00:58:52 ►
to hallucinogens was consciousness-expanding drug.
00:58:57 ►
And this may not be automatopoeic,
00:59:00 ►
but it’s certainly phenomenologically accurate and neutral.
00:59:05 ►
They are consciousness-expanding drugs.
00:59:08 ►
And the question, what is consciousness,
00:59:11 ►
cannot be divided away from the question, is man good?
00:59:17 ►
And this is a question that we have to answer for ourselves
00:59:20 ►
because I believe that we are not going to extinguish ourselves that we are going to evade
00:59:27 ►
the the many obstacles that are so obviously ahead of us in the next few years we are going to reach
00:59:37 ►
the threshold of the galaxy but in what form and in order for the form in which we reach the edge of the galaxy
00:59:47 ►
and present ourselves to the hegemony of organized intelligence that must exist there,
00:59:53 ►
in order for that form to be worthy,
00:59:56 ►
we are going to have to go with our minds fully illuminated in front of us.
01:00:02 ►
And that means that we can have no more truck
01:00:06 ►
with the idea of an unconscious of an inaccessible and dark part of the human
01:00:12 ►
psyche that cannot be controlled that is obviously a description of the childhood
01:00:19 ►
of an intelligent species and I believe that these hallucinogens signal the end of that childhood.
01:00:28 ►
There have always been individual shamans
01:00:30 ►
who have made that transition.
01:00:33 ►
And in that sense,
01:00:35 ►
the taking of hallucinogens
01:00:36 ►
is an unhistorical phenomenon.
01:00:39 ►
It has always been going on.
01:00:41 ►
But the idea of psychedelic societies
01:00:44 ►
is something new. and it doesn’t
01:00:47 ►
necessarily mean that everyone takes the drug it merely means that the complexity and the
01:00:55 ►
mysteriousness of mind are centered in the consciousness of the civilization as the mystery which it comes from
01:01:06 ►
and which it must relate to in order to be relevant.
01:01:12 ►
So I’ll take a couple of questions. Thank you. well you know
01:01:48 ►
a coincidence
01:01:49 ►
is what you
01:01:50 ►
have left over
01:01:51 ►
when you apply
01:01:52 ►
a bad theory
01:02:01 ►
any other
01:02:02 ►
questions Any other questions?
01:02:19 ►
About this idea that the mind is the central… Well, I guess the question is, is there any advice vis-a-vis utilization of materials
01:02:34 ►
that would allow you to hang on to whatever perceptions I may have triggered in you?
01:02:42 ►
I wouldn’t presume to answer that question, but I’ll answer another one that
01:02:46 ►
might relate to it, which is, I think that when you take hallucinogens, you should take an effective
01:02:51 ►
dose. And I can’t stress enough the importance of lying down and being still in darkness on an
01:03:01 ►
empty stomach. I mean, if you want an oral empowerment, that’s it.
01:03:06 ►
Nothing could be simpler.
01:03:07 ►
And yet you would be amazed at the number of people
01:03:10 ►
who, when you mention psilocybin,
01:03:12 ►
the first question that occurs to them is,
01:03:14 ►
will I be able to drive?
01:03:18 ►
This is…
01:03:28 ►
One more.
01:03:31 ►
Yeah.
01:03:34 ►
Which way would you categorize NDA?
01:03:37 ►
With regard to what?
01:03:41 ►
In the patient’s standing as the origin.
01:03:48 ►
Well, NDA, the word empathogen or empathogen seems to me very appropriate. It is not a powerful visual hallucinogen.
01:03:54 ►
I’m very interested in the visual hallucinogens
01:03:57 ►
because it seems to me they pose certain fundamental questions
01:04:01 ►
about information theory and that kind of thing.
01:04:04 ►
For instance, where do these hallucinations come from?
01:04:09 ►
These extremely intricate, far more intricate than any visual scene that your eye falls
01:04:16 ►
upon in ordinary reality, these intricate, ever-shifting information patterns, I don’t
01:04:22 ►
believe that they can be reduced to spirals, lines, and dots.
01:04:28 ►
What I see isn’t like that.
01:04:30 ►
It’s more as though you had a holographic hyperspatial radio,
01:04:34 ►
and you just tune down the dial,
01:04:37 ►
and here’s a desert world in a triple star system,
01:04:41 ►
and here is a city somewhere inhabited by insectile creatures with a machine symbiosis
01:04:48 ►
here is something else and it’s just flipping by I would prefer to believe that the human
01:04:56 ►
imagination is the holographic organ of the human body and that we don’t imagine anything we simply see things so far
01:05:05 ►
away that there is no possibility of validating or invalidating their
01:05:10 ►
existence
01:05:15 ►
one more psychotherapeutic potential for dimethylcyptamine being a short-acting tryptamine, is there enough time within that peak experience to benefit from any
01:05:30 ►
dead rebirth experience, or is it, in your opinion, too short-acting drugs have any
01:05:35 ►
profound lasting effect? No, I think it certainly has a profound and lasting
01:05:40 ►
effect. The very brevity of it serves to convince you that it isn’t a drug at all,
01:05:45 ►
but that it’s carried you into another dimension and back again.
01:05:49 ►
And that alone is something to ponder.
01:05:54 ►
Well, I thank you for your attention.
01:06:11 ►
Wow, what an experience that was for me just now.
01:06:18 ►
I think that what struck me most was hearing how very self-assured, self-confident Terrence was at what was one of his first major appearances.
01:06:23 ►
And think of the company that he found himself in that day.
01:06:26 ►
You know, Albert Hoffman, Sasha Shulgin, Richard Evans Schultes,
01:06:30 ►
and an audience that, for the most part, had no idea of who Terrence was.
01:06:35 ►
But as we now know, he soon became quite well known.
01:06:40 ►
So well known, in fact, that at the end of the last century, the Utney Reader selected Terence as one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century.
01:06:51 ►
And obviously, he continues to have an impact on the 21st century as well.
01:06:56 ►
And when you go back and listen to this talk again,
01:06:59 ►
which I’m pretty sure you’ll do at some point,
01:07:01 ►
try and put yourself in the position Terrence was in at
01:07:05 ►
the time he gave this talk.
01:07:06 ►
He was only in his mid-thirties, and I don’t know about you, but there’s no way I could
01:07:11 ►
have sounded that confident at that age and in front of so many psychedelic luminaries.
01:07:17 ►
What a heady experience that must have been for him.
01:07:21 ►
And what a thrill it has been for me to finally get to hear this talk.
01:07:25 ►
him. And what a thrill it has been for me to finally get to hear this talk. I want to give a huge thank you to John S. And I’m sure he wouldn’t mind my using his full name, but I didn’t think to
01:07:31 ►
ask in time for this podcast. But you’ll be hearing a lot more about John as he sent several more
01:07:36 ►
audio gems along with the ones we just heard. So thanks to John, you’ve got some surprises ahead.
01:07:43 ►
And John, I can’t thank you enough for bringing such a wonderful synchronicity into my life at this particular moment.
01:07:49 ►
Listening to these two talks just now has confirmed to me that I’m on the right path.
01:07:54 ►
And so, like you, I intend to press on.
01:07:58 ►
Well, I’ve got several emails I’d like to comment on right now, but they’ll have to wait until next week,
01:08:03 ►
as this podcast has already gone on a bit too long.
01:08:07 ►
But I do want to take just one more minute of your time
01:08:10 ►
and thank John H., Jill B., and William R.,
01:08:14 ►
all of whom made very generous donations to help offset some of the expenses of producing these podcasts.
01:08:21 ►
I know I’ve said it before, but without the encouragement and support
01:08:25 ►
I’ve received from so many of you,
01:08:28 ►
and in particular, the kind people
01:08:30 ►
who have sent money, equipment, advice, and time,
01:08:34 ►
including the time you’re taking right now
01:08:35 ►
to listen to these programs.
01:08:37 ►
You know, it’s taken me a long time
01:08:40 ►
to do what Joseph Campbell recommended,
01:08:42 ►
and that is to follow your bliss.
01:08:44 ►
Well, that’s just
01:08:45 ►
what I’m doing with these podcasts, following my bliss by sharing some interesting lectures and
01:08:50 ►
ideas with my friends. And one more thing, I know that in the past you’ve had to listen to me
01:08:57 ►
complain about how much time it takes to produce one of these podcasts, and I guess I must have
01:09:02 ►
even given the impression that I’m about to quit doing them.
01:09:05 ►
Well, thanks to all of the great comments I’ve received from so many people who have
01:09:10 ►
had such diverse backgrounds, I’m going to commit to doing at least 100 more programs
01:09:16 ►
in this series.
01:09:17 ►
So I hope that ends the speculation, at least until we get up to podcast 180 or so.
01:09:23 ►
And what’s more, sometime after I get back and recover from Burning Man,
01:09:27 ►
I’m going to start an additional podcast channel for monthly programs
01:09:32 ►
of some of the audio material that I have that doesn’t quite fit into the topics we normally cover here.
01:09:38 ►
But it’s interesting stuff, and I don’t want to let it just disappear in one of my storage boxes.
01:09:44 ►
Anyway, I’m not planning on fading out on you any time in the foreseeable future.
01:09:50 ►
So we still have many hours together that we can look forward to, you and me, here in the Psychedelic Salon.
01:09:57 ►
Before I go, I want to mention that this and all of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon
01:10:02 ►
are protected under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Like 2.5 License.
01:10:09 ►
If you have any questions about that, just click on the Creative Commons link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage, which you can find at www.psychedelicsalon.org.
01:10:20 ►
If you have any questions, comments, complaints, or suggestions, just send them to Lorenzo at MatrixMasters.com.
01:10:28 ►
And to our guest speakers, well, Terrence, thanks for waking us up.
01:10:33 ►
And Sasha, it just isn’t possible for me to put into words how much we all appreciate all the work, risk, and sacrifice that you and Ann have gone through on our behalf.
01:10:44 ►
And we all deeply appreciate everything that you’ve done have gone through on our behalf and we
01:10:45 ►
all deeply appreciate everything that you’ve done and we love you both very
01:10:49 ►
dearly and Jacques Cordell Wells better known as
01:10:54 ►
Chateau Hayuk who have been with us for all 100 programs here we thank you for
01:10:59 ►
your music for your wonderful energy guys thank. Thank you very much. And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:11:09 ►
Be well, my friends.