Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“Most software, I think, is written by freaks.”
“What it [investigating psychedelics] really requires is a love of the peculiar, of the weird, the bizarre, the étrange, the freaky and unimaginable.”
“Nature and the imagination seem to be the precursors to involvement in the psychedelic experience.”
“DMT seems to argue, convincingly I might add, that the world is made entirely of something, for want of a better word, we would have to call magic.”
“By manipulating queuing, by manipulating expectation, you can lead people to a fundamental confrontation, not only with themselves, but with the Other.”
“What I’m talking about is actually is the Mystery of Being as existential fact. That there is something that haunts this world that can take apart and reduce every single one of us to a mixture of terror and ecstasy, fear and trembling. It is not an idea, that’s the primary thing to bear in mind. It’s an experience.”
“Our theories are the weakest part of what we say. What we’re working from is the fact of an experience which we need to make sense of.”
“What we call three dimensional space, and what we call the imagination actually have a contiguous and continuous transformation from one into the other, … and THIS is big news!”
“If you play the cultural game, it’s like playing only with clubs or something, or playing only with the red marked cards. You have to play with a full deck, and that includes this pre-linguistic surround in which we are embedded.”
“Ultimately, I think, what the psychedelic experience may be is a higher topological manifold of temporality.”
“The mind is the cutting edge of the evolving event system.”
“I think the cybernetic matrix is a tremendous tool for feminizing, and radicalizing, and psychedelicizing the social matrix. I see computers as entirely feminine.”
“The ‘person’ is not an interchangeable part. The ‘citizen’ is. … The person is harking back to a pre-print model. It’s what the hippies were.”
“What people notice about [when they are on] LSD is either what’s right or wrong with themselves or how freaky the world is.”
“It’s as important to be well informed in this area, if you’re going to do it, as it is to be well informed about procedures in skin diving and that sort of thing if you’re going to do that.”
The Oracle Gatherings, July 31-August 2, 2009
SCIENCE AND NONDUALITY CONFERENCE
October 21-25, 2009
Embassy Suites/Marin Civic Center
San Rafael, California
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:19 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:23 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:33 ►
And before I go any farther, I would like to send my sincere thanks to Daniel P., James C., Justin K.,
00:00:39 ►
and you aren’t going to believe it, but we also received a contribution from another Daniel P., not to mention the fact that there was also a donation from another James, but it was James M.
00:00:45 ►
I think I would have really freaked out if there were also two Jameses with the same last initial.
00:00:50 ►
Anyway, all of these kind souls made donations to the salon over the past week,
00:00:55 ►
and their contributions will go directly to pay off some of the expenses associated with producing these podcasts.
00:01:03 ►
So James and James, Justin and both Daniels,
00:01:06 ►
I want to thank you all on behalf of myself
00:01:09 ►
and on behalf of all of our fellow Saloners.
00:01:12 ►
These podcasts wouldn’t still be going on without you.
00:01:16 ►
I also want to thank our fellow Saloners
00:01:19 ►
who downloaded a copy of my new novel,
00:01:21 ►
The Genesis Generation.
00:01:23 ►
And after we hear today’s talk, I’ll give you a little update about that. But first, let’s get on with the show Genesis Generation And if you’ve visited our psychedelicsalon.org blog lately, you will have seen the posting where Miguel gave us a link to download this entire workshop.
00:01:50 ►
And while I know that a few of our die-hard McKenna fans have already done so, my guess is that you may not have had time to do so yourself.
00:01:59 ►
So for the next couple of weeks, I’ll be podcasting what for me are completely new McKenna recordings.
00:02:04 ►
So for the next couple of weeks, I’ll be podcasting what for me are completely new McKenna recordings.
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And while I’m sure we will be hearing some things that we’ve heard before,
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my experience has been that in each of these workshops, due primarily to the mix of people in the audience,
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he usually comes up with a few ideas that I didn’t remember hearing before.
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And so today this is a joint podcast by myself and Miguel.
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So thanks again for collecting this material for us, Miguel,
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and I know that the rest of our fellow salonners send their thanks as well.
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Now while I have sometimes edited out the introduction to Terrence’s workshops,
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I thought that this time it might be interesting to leave it in here, just to give you a little idea of how he organized his weekend workshops.
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And in the interest of the privacy of the students who attended this workshop,
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I’ve edited out all of their personal stories.
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However, there were a few interchanges that they had with Terrence that I left in,
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and one is for my DJ friends who want a sample of Terrence saying,
00:03:06 ►
most software, I think, is written by freaks.
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I love that.
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I thought that it was really priceless, and so while the first ten minutes or so of this talk
00:03:16 ►
might seem a little disjointed because of my edits,
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I think that it’s better than just cutting out some of the Bard’s more interesting remarks.
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But I did leave in most of the
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questions that were asked, as no
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personally identifying information was being
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revealed then.
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So let’s travel back in time to
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November 5th, 1988,
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over 20 years ago.
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And we’ll join a
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little group of CIIS
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students in San Francisco and
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get a feel for the relaxed atmosphere in which his
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workshops took place. And as we listen, it may be well to keep in mind the fact that this talk was
00:03:53 ►
given in the year before Tim Berners-Lee actually invented the World Wide Web. And so when Terrence
00:03:59 ►
talks about cybernetics, it’s with a pre-internet state of mind, something akin to not knowing yet that the world isn’t flat. He was a true prophet, or at least he was very good at predicting future trends. And now, here is Terrence McKenna.
00:04:27 ►
Well, because this is a small group and probably self-selected for high interest in these subjects,
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why, as much as possible,
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you should direct me toward whatever your special concerns are
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so that for each person, whatever their slant,
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there’s a reasonable payback in information.
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And there may be areas where I’m disappointing or unhelpful,
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but usually then I can point you toward somebody else or some source.
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The first thing this afternoon, I’ll bring in some books
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to show you 10 or 15 source books
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that would help you in researching any aspect of this,
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whether you were interested in it academically
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or for personal spiritual growth or whatever,
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it’s very important to be informed.
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And this is an area where it’s very hard to bluff it
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because, you know, on one level,
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it’s a branch of medical science I mean what
00:05:47 ►
we’re talking about is folk pharmacology and you really should understand certain
00:05:55 ►
things about pharmacology certain things about physiology because your life may come to depend on it in some situation.
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I mean, it’s not casual.
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You want to be able to assess risk and to make intelligent choices.
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So what I usually do in these kinds of situations is go around the circle
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and try to get a feeling for the backgrounds,
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the interests, and the concerns of whoever is here, and then tailor what is said afterwards
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to the needs of the group.
00:06:38 ►
So why don’t we just do that, and you can tell me, you can tell us your name and then uh your particular concern or what
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you hope to get out of this just something which will give me a basis then for uh uh structuring
00:06:58 ►
what comes afterwards so why don’t we uh go around uh, pun-po, shamanic fashion, counterclockwise?
00:07:09 ►
Well, that’s very interesting.
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I mean, we’ll talk a fair bit about computers.
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Most software, I think, is written by freaks.
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I mean, if you hang around these scenes where it’s going on,
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everybody has hair down to their waist.
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But the relationship of psychedelics to computers
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and of psychedelic people to computer people and all that is very interesting.
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Recently I had to review Marshall McLuhan’s letters,
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so I read all these letters that McLuhan wrote and
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one of the things he wrote about was how nervous people got when he tried to
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discuss the effects of media the unconscious effects of media and he said
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that people who were raised in the tradition of phonetic alphabet were tremendously
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nervous about having the
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machinery of reality
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examined and I think the
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drug thing is even more
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intensely this kind of issue
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when I was
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in the 60s when I went home
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thinking I would convert my
00:08:22 ►
family to taking LSD
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it was very clear with me to me as I argued with them about it,
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that the reason they didn’t want to take it
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was because they knew damn good and well that they were crazy.
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And they didn’t want to mess with it.
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You know, the last thing on earth they wanted to do
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was probe and explore the mind.
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They had that all nailed down just fine, thank you.
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So we will talk about this.
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Good, well, I’m glad you’re here.
00:08:54 ►
Okay.
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Now, did we miss anybody?
00:08:57 ►
Well, I’ll say just a little bit about my own interest in all this
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or how I got into it.
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I don’t know.
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I mean, one creates a false history
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when you look back into time
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to try and explain how you got to where you are,
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or at least I do.
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Trying now to understand
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how I came to be involved in the psychedelic experience,
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it seems to me that what it really requires
00:09:31 ►
is a love of the peculiar,
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of the weird, the bizarre, the outre,
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the freaky and unimaginable.
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And I don’t give great credence to astrology,
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but I am a double Scorpio.
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So I’m told that this kind of thing predisposes one for 12th house activity.
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predisposes one for 12th house activity.
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Several times in my life,
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I’ve gone through these kinds of revelations where everything seemed to change so profoundly
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that I could hardly recognize who I had been before.
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And I noticed this around the time I was seven or eight,
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happening the first time.
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Nature and the imagination
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seemed to be the precursors to involvement in the psychedelic experience.
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So I was a rock hound, a butterfly collector, a rocket builder,
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a connoisseur of explosives, and all of this sort of thing.
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While my peers were off playing Little League Baseball, I was back in the hills digging out trilobites and tracking down moths and stuff like that.
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And then science fiction was a tremendous stimulus to my imagination
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because it seemed to say, you know, anything you can imagine is fair game.
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Anything that you can conceive of can be treated as a reality.
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And, but I was also very, you know, I was raised in a Catholic household,
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so my whole thing was to build cynical resistance to the spirit.
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So I was an atheist, a Marxist, an existentialist, a rational material, you know, a pain in the neck, basically.
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basically.
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And in all of that,
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somehow I began reading Aldous Huxley.
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The social novels,
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Antique Hay, Chrome Yellow,
00:12:18 ►
these comedies of manners of British academic society.
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I was like 12 or something,
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but I always drove myself to read really beyond my level.
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Well, this led me to The Doors of Perception, which I had read Brave New World. Brave New World
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is an anti-drug dystopia, you know, a nightmarish world of plastic,
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never-grow-old people who take tranquilizers
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every time there’s a hint of any deep emotion
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or any kind of anxiety.
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They just, you know, the motto was
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a gram is better than a damn.
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And you can just for a quarter anywhere
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get one of these pills
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that just puts you right back into being happy and cooperative.
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And so Huxley, who was, you know, a very concerned person,
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very interested in the fate of 20th century society,
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went from this dystopic vision of drugs to the doors of perception and heaven and hell,
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in which he describes experiments with mescaline that essentially totally turned him around
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and convinced him that these medieval mystics that he was so fond of,
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Meister Eckhart and San Juan de la Cruz and so forth,
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were actually describing the same reality that he was, and William Blake, that he was getting into.
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So I wanted to pursue this, and this was like 1962 or something, and I was about 14 years old.
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And then a few months later, there were stories in the newspaper that morning glories were being abused for their psychedelic effect.
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Well, there was a bindweed that grew locally where I lived.
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So I went tearing out and gathered
00:14:30 ►
half a peanut butter jar
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of this wild morning glory
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and took it home
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and ground it up and took it.
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And of course, nothing happened.
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But the hour before it came,
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before it failed to come on,
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I sat quietly and fearfully and examined my mind from that point of view for the first time in my life.
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In other words, examined my mind from the point of view of watching it to see if it was changing in some unpredictable way.
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And actually, though the morning glories were totally inactive,
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in that hour of watching, I did observe some interesting false positives
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that would come and go for a few minutes.
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And then a few months later, I got my data a little more
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together and learned that it was a certain species of morning glory and
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that you had to buy the seeds from a seed company and and and then I
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discovered what it was,
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not the full-blown psychedelic experience,
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but by this time I was in Southern California going to school,
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and a friend of mine and I would go out into the Mojave Desert
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and grind up low doses of these morning glory seeds,
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because we didn’t know what a dose was, really,
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or what actually was supposed to
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happen because if you read huxley it’s pretty high-flown language it’s all about radiance and
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significance and existential validity flooding into the rose well once you’re looking at a rose
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and posing the question is existential validity flooding into it? You know, you don’t have anything to measure it about.
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But we would go out into the Mojave and take these morning glory seeds
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and observe shifts in the apparent significance of things.
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Everything would appear somehow more pregnant with potential meaning.
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And then, in fact, if you would close your eyes in that situation,
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there would be the beginnings of hypnagogia
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and drifting lights and undulating colored patterns
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and grids and laceworks and all these things
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which are the precondition for the psychedelic experience.
00:17:08 ►
Well, it wasn’t long after that that I went to Berkeley in the fall of 1965,
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and LSD was available.
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A few months later, DMT was available. available and I was just stunned and have never lost that sense of profound astonishment
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that such things could exist, just that they could exist.
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I mean, DMT seems to argue convincingly, I might add, that the world is made entirely of something
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that, for want of a better word,
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we would have to call magic,
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that, you know, things are not what they appear,
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not at all what they appear,
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and that what we call reality
00:17:57 ►
is just some kind of utterly provisional construct
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that, if leaned upon too hard,
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can just fly to pieces before your startled eyes.
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Well, then the question is,
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what are the implications of this?
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What lies behind it?
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So forth and so on.
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So I, as most people do, or would, I think,
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looked to tradition for some kind of guidance
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about what this was
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and read Jung
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and read Mercier Léod
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and saw
00:18:33 ►
parallels but not a clear
00:18:35 ►
congruency
00:18:36 ►
and saw in the
00:18:39 ►
iconography of Tibetan Buddhism
00:18:41 ►
seemed to me
00:18:43 ►
to bear certain kinds of parallels to the hallucinations that I had by that time
00:18:49 ►
glimpsed in LSD states. And so studied the Tibetan language, went to Asia, learned that the iconography of Tibetan Buddhism is a rip from the pre-Buddhist shamanism of Tibet,
00:19:09 ►
which has been there since the Stone Age.
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Buddhism only entered Tibet in the 7th century with Padmasambhava,
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and all the iconography was taken from the autonomous indigenous shamanism that was there.
00:19:26 ►
But I didn’t find in these yogans and lamas and geishas what I was looking for, which was direct experience of these realities.
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I mean, Tibetan Mahayana seemed tremendously sophisticated
00:19:45 ►
in its analysis of states of mind,
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but operationally it was not coming anywhere close
00:19:56 ►
to what these psychedelics were able to deliver.
00:20:00 ►
Well, because I was fortunate enough to have wise and well-read friends, I knew that this tradition was alive in the Amazon. Nepal to India, throughout Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia,
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ostensibly making my living as a professional butterfly collector,
00:20:33 ►
but also using that as an excuse to go to these extremely rural and tribal situations
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and observe what was going on. And I concluded that it was far in the past or far removed,
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that it was something that had retreated to the status of a myth in most cultures.
00:21:02 ►
And then in late 1970, I went to the Amazon and very quickly, through using
00:21:13 ►
mushrooms, through using ayahuasca, learned that there it is accessed and the traditions are alive and
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the attitudes were
00:21:28 ►
simpatico with my own
00:21:32 ►
that there were not lineages
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you didn’t have to pledge eternal fealty
00:21:38 ►
to some character that they were
00:21:41 ►
exploratory in their approach
00:21:44 ►
they were open minded in their approach. They were open-minded.
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Everybody admitted that nobody knew what was going on with it,
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that yes, they could cure, yes, they could balance their societies
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and act as paradigms of behavior to other members of their tribe.
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But what they really liked to do, these shamans, was get together and puzzle over what the
00:22:09 ►
hell it is and how can it be, you know?
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I mean, they were like scientists.
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They were like explorers.
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They didn’t have a myth that encompassed it.
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have a myth that encompassed it they had they were technicians of myth which they presented back to their societies and this is something that it’s very
00:22:33 ►
important to realize about shamanism as a theatrical entertainer, but they’re not putting on the show
00:22:52 ►
for themselves. But in this society, people actually become actors on their own stage.
00:23:01 ►
The shamans do not believe, I maintain from spending time with them, shamans do not believe I maintain from spending time with them
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shamans do not believe
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in the powers of magic words
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crystals, healing darts
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and so forth and so on
00:23:16 ►
they manipulate these things
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the way a stage magician
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manipulates rabbits, hats, saws, and boxes with women inside them.
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They understand what it’s for and how it works,
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and these things are manipulated to create an effect on other people.
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But the shamans understand that the real magic is the magic of sign, symbol, and language,
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and that by manipulating cueing, by manipulating expectation,
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you can lead people to a fundamental confrontation,
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not only with themselves, but with the other.
00:24:00 ►
And as I said last night in my talk,
00:24:05 ►
it is no easier for an Amazonian Indian
00:24:08 ►
to come to terms with these things
00:24:10 ►
than it is for a native of Manhattan.
00:24:14 ►
Ultimately, this coming to confront the other
00:24:18 ►
is coming to confront the mystery of being,
00:24:23 ►
not as a phrase, mystery of being not as a phrase mystery of being i mean we all give lip service
00:24:30 ►
to that the mystery of being it’s everywhere it’s in the trees the stones the elevators the life of
00:24:35 ►
the city the life of the country everything is radiant with the mystery of being this is some
00:24:41 ►
kind of gloss what i’m talking about is actually the mystery of being as existential fact,
00:24:49 ►
that there is something that haunts this world that can take apart and reduce every single one of us
00:24:59 ►
to a mixture of terror and ecstasy, fear and trembling.
00:25:07 ►
It is not an idea.
00:25:09 ►
That’s the primary thing to bear in mind.
00:25:12 ►
It is an experience.
00:25:14 ►
And as we went around this morning,
00:25:16 ►
a surprising number of people spoke to it as an experience.
00:25:21 ►
And I think this is what makes the great distinction between the shamanic
00:25:27 ►
pragmatic approach and what I called last night the political ideologue approach, that
00:25:36 ►
we are not working here from theory. We really, our theories are the weakest part of what we say.
00:25:46 ►
What we’re working from is the fact of an experience
00:25:50 ►
which we need to make sense of.
00:25:53 ►
Now, most of these other-oriented experiences
00:25:58 ►
which are hard to keep track of or make sense of
00:26:01 ►
cannot be commanded freely they’re more in the realm of you
00:26:09 ►
know you’re traveling in a foreign country and you contract a terrific
00:26:13 ►
fever and you fall into a vision and you have deep awareness and realization
00:26:19 ►
about the nature of life this is not an experience that can ever be repeated. Or you’re alone in a wilderness and you
00:26:29 ►
confront a flying object in the sky which seems to trigger strange bursts of thought in yourself.
00:26:38 ►
This cannot be repeated and triggered on command. So only in the context of the psychedelic experience
00:26:48 ►
and the willed decision to act
00:26:52 ►
can you enter this arena of repeatedly
00:26:56 ►
going to meet the experience of the other.
00:27:04 ►
And it is a very, very bizarre enterprise. It is not that if we do it enough times, we will understand it or become comfortable with it, because it is not in its nature to be understood. And it is not in its nature to be understood and it is not in its nature to accommodate itself to us.
00:27:29 ►
Rather, it’s that we’ve discovered another dimension
00:27:33 ►
almost in the same way that Europeans discovered another world
00:27:40 ►
only 500 years ago. In 1992, we will celebrate the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s
00:27:50 ►
discovery of America. Now, notice that when Columbus set out from Spain, there was a large
00:27:59 ►
body of intelligent opinion which believed that he was sailing over the edge of the world literally that he was
00:28:06 ►
sailing out of mind
00:28:08 ►
and instead
00:28:09 ►
what lay at the end of that voyage
00:28:13 ►
was real estate
00:28:15 ►
immense amounts of real estate
00:28:19 ►
and we have come to terms with that
00:28:22 ►
and in fact now inhabit
00:28:24 ►
what 500 years ago was not even on the maps.
00:28:28 ►
It was in the unconscious.
00:28:31 ►
Now it is the center of the global economy.
00:28:35 ►
In the same way that these European navigators began to have this intimation that the world was a wraparound.
00:28:46 ►
That’s what it means to say that the world is round.
00:28:49 ►
It means you can get back to where you started from by going away continuously.
00:28:54 ►
In the same way that the European navigators discovered that the world was a wraparound,
00:29:00 ►
I think we are on the brink of discovering that you can start in three-dimensional space and time,
00:29:08 ►
move off in a linguistic vehicle, and find your way back to the place you left from.
00:29:17 ►
This means that what we call three-dimensional space and what we call the imagination actually have a contiguous and
00:29:28 ►
continuous transformation from one into the other. And this is big news. This entirely goes against
00:29:37 ►
our Cartesian expectation that thoughts inside, world outside, objects outside, perceptions inside. And this is
00:29:52 ►
actually nothing more, this inside-outside thing, than an artifact of European languages. And yet, we take it to be, you know, how God made the world, basically,
00:30:08 ►
because we are so embedded in our language that we cannot, literally, we cannot cognize reality without it.
00:30:20 ►
We cannot cognize reality without our language.
00:30:24 ►
But then, in the psychedelic state, somehow this happens.
00:30:29 ►
Somehow syntax is replaced by hypersyntax.
00:30:35 ►
Linguistically moderated and modulated perception is replaced by perception in the raw,
00:30:43 ►
replaced by perception in the raw, not coded and sculpted and sifted
00:30:48 ►
for culturally validated meaning,
00:30:51 ►
but rather just the full hit.
00:30:55 ►
Well, this is tremendously disorienting,
00:30:58 ►
but it’s also tremendously liberating
00:31:01 ►
because that’s the full deck.
00:31:05 ►
That’s when you have full command of the options available within the matrix.
00:31:12 ►
If you play the cultural game, it’s like playing only with clubs or something,
00:31:19 ►
or playing only with the red marked cards.
00:31:23 ►
You have to play with a full deck.
00:31:25 ►
And that includes this pre-linguistic surround
00:31:32 ►
in which we are embedded.
00:31:36 ►
Now, why is it so emotionally charged for us?
00:31:42 ►
In other words, why can the shamans
00:31:44 ►
go into this dimension and heal or divine,
00:31:53 ►
see into the future, or in a sense see into the past by discovering who stole whose cow or who’s
00:32:01 ►
sleeping with who or all these things that shamans are concerned with.
00:32:05 ►
What is this ground of being that we discover
00:32:10 ►
by dissolving the cultural machinery of cognition?
00:32:17 ►
Well, I think what it is is simply reality unpackaged for a historical epoch.
00:32:26 ►
In other words, reality
00:32:29 ►
uncompromised
00:32:32 ►
by the need to be culturally
00:32:36 ►
efficacious and useful.
00:32:38 ►
And this is precisely what we need
00:32:41 ►
to throw light on our culture crisis
00:32:44 ►
because the models that we have used to sanction information
00:32:50 ►
that is culturally useful have given us information which is toxic.
00:32:57 ►
I mean, we have actually created a toxic relationship
00:33:02 ►
between ourselves and nature.
00:33:04 ►
We have pursued avenues of questioning the feedback from which have given us an overpopulated,
00:33:13 ►
polluted, ideology-obsessed, unresponsive planet that we’re living in. We, as a culture, must conventionalize and believe that today is
00:33:31 ►
whatever it is, November 5th or 6th, 1988. But some of us are living in the 21st century,
00:33:39 ►
and some of us are living in the 18th century. And the goal, you know, is to try and move all this forward.
00:33:46 ►
This is why it’s funny.
00:33:49 ►
Certain themes that have emerged
00:33:51 ►
in the Western mind
00:33:53 ►
are, in fact, very psychedelic.
00:33:56 ►
And one of them is
00:33:58 ►
the notion of progressivism,
00:34:01 ►
which is a pretty Western idea
00:34:03 ►
and quite psychedelic.
00:34:05 ►
It’s the idea that things are getting better or that things can get better.
00:34:12 ►
Most societies look backward toward a paradigm of a past paradise,
00:34:19 ►
and all effort is toward recovering this paradise.
00:34:23 ►
We’re the only people who have this faith in progress.
00:34:29 ►
And it’s quite strong enough, so strong that we barely question it. I remember the first time I
00:34:35 ►
was in Karachi, Pakistan, I was being hauled around the city in a rickshaw drawn by a guy with bare feet. I mean, it was a human-powered machine.
00:34:47 ►
And he spoke English, and we were scoring hash and this and that. So we got to know each other.
00:34:53 ►
And he said, in Pakistan, we understand what is wrong with the world. And I said,
00:35:01 ►
so what’s wrong with the world? he said progress that’s what it is
00:35:06 ►
we have to stop progress which for me was a quite a revelatory idea this thing about time though
00:35:15 ►
is very interesting and operates on many different levels
00:35:19 ►
ultimately I think what the psychedelic experience may be is a higher topological manifold of temporality.
00:35:35 ►
That the reason it is so puzzling and so familiar, so alien and so exalting, is that it is in fact mundane.
00:35:45 ►
It is in fact just us,
00:35:49 ►
but us sectioned through some higher spatial dimension.
00:35:56 ►
And if, for instance, you think about magic for a moment,
00:36:00 ►
let’s think about the major identifiers of the magical act, such as psychic surgery, where your hand is plunged through the wall of the body cavity of a human being and a tumorous organ is taken out and no wound is visible.
00:36:26 ►
Typical form of folk magic, much discussed.
00:36:31 ►
I’m sure you’re all familiar with it.
00:36:33 ►
Or another form of magic, stage magic in this case.
00:36:41 ►
A word is written on an envelope and the envelope is locked in a box and the blindfolded
00:36:48 ►
magician is able to tell the audience what the word is in the envelope in the box.
00:36:54 ►
And these things are miraculous.
00:36:58 ►
We cannot conceive of how they could be done.
00:37:02 ►
of how they could be done.
00:37:08 ►
But if you allow the possibility of a higher spatial dimension,
00:37:11 ►
then these things become trivial
00:37:14 ►
because it means the body is open.
00:37:19 ►
There is a way that from the point of view
00:37:23 ►
of this higher spatial dimension,
00:37:25 ►
the inside and the outside of the body are on the same side,
00:37:29 ►
so no problem is posed by removing this organ.
00:37:33 ►
Likewise, from the point of view of a higher spatial dimension,
00:37:37 ►
the locked box is open on one end, the end that is intersecting that dimension.
00:37:44 ►
So the way you read the message is you just go over and look.
00:37:46 ►
It’s completely trivial.
00:37:48 ►
A way to make this cogent for people who are now thoroughly confused
00:37:53 ►
is to recall Edwin Abbott’s fantasy Flatland,
00:37:58 ►
where he imagined a world of two dimensions,
00:38:01 ►
where a house was what in our world is what’s called a blueprint and that was
00:38:07 ►
all you needed was the blueprint you could live in the blueprint because you walked in and once
00:38:13 ►
you had closed the door no one in flatland could come through that blue line and get at you but of
00:38:20 ►
course to those of us in three dimensions we just lean over and look at the blueprint and put your thumb in the inside of the flatlander’s living room.
00:38:29 ►
And from his point of view, from out of nowhere, an enormous thumb has magically appeared in his living room.
00:38:36 ►
Well, this shows how perfectly mundane situations on one level appear to be absolute violations of natural law on another level.
00:38:48 ►
And this is happening very much in the psychedelic experience
00:38:51 ►
because the mind is the cutting edge of the evolving event system.
00:38:58 ►
Yeah.
00:38:59 ►
Can you talk a little bit about the idea of this race that we’re in between apocalypse and some kind of transformational event. experience in altered states has led you to believe or
00:39:25 ►
feel that
00:39:26 ►
there’s some
00:39:27 ►
hope for
00:39:27 ►
changing that
00:39:28 ►
and why?
00:39:31 ►
Well, I
00:39:32 ►
think it’s
00:39:32 ►
clear that
00:39:34 ►
we’re in a
00:39:35 ►
race between
00:39:35 ►
apocalypse and
00:39:37 ►
breakthrough.
00:39:40 ►
And I
00:39:41 ►
suppose
00:39:42 ►
breakthrough is
00:39:43 ►
the dark
00:39:44 ►
horse.
00:39:45 ►
Everything seems to be set up to favor apocalypse.
00:39:48 ►
It has the inside track.
00:39:51 ►
Except, of course, very few people would own up to saying
00:39:55 ►
that they personally want to die.
00:39:59 ►
So why is it, if none of us really want to die,
00:40:02 ►
why is the overwhelming global cultural image one of
00:40:08 ►
inevitable catastrophe I’m very optimistic I really think history was for a purpose I would
00:40:18 ►
not have not had it I think it was useful and that we must have learned something very
00:40:25 ►
important what we learned that was so important I’m not sure but probably when
00:40:31 ►
we need it we’ll have it I mean maybe we need atomic weapons because a large
00:40:38 ►
object will be detected hurtling toward Earth And if nature had not split off the monkeys 100,000 years ago and
00:40:48 ►
evolved intercontinental missile thermonuclear weapon delivery systems that we could use to
00:40:55 ►
destroy that asteroid, then all life on Earth would die. So what appears to us madness,
00:41:03 ►
so what appears to us madness our own dedication to the release of larger and larger amounts of energy
00:41:09 ►
for no purpose other than to destroy ourselves
00:41:12 ►
is suddenly rescued from pathology
00:41:15 ►
and shown to be this tremendously foresightful thing
00:41:20 ►
and saying God we did this because otherwise we’d all be dead
00:41:24 ►
and everything else all be dead and everything
00:41:25 ►
else would be dead. I don’t seriously believe that. But I do think that we must have learned
00:41:33 ►
something very, very important. Perhaps cybernetics come in here. Perhaps this exoskeleton of mnemonic material that allows us essentially to freeze and record our entire culture.
00:41:57 ►
Everything is going into the data banks.
00:42:01 ►
One way of thinking about what’s going on is compression of information.
00:42:10 ►
And history represents a compression of information magnitudes more accelerated than the evolution
00:42:18 ►
of life.
00:42:19 ►
And then 20th century history represents an even greater information compression.
00:42:28 ►
Information finally compressed to such a degree that it’s like the singularity inside a black hole.
00:42:34 ►
You know, a black hole has at its center a place where the equations don’t sum.
00:42:41 ►
In other words, where it doesn’t make any sense. And the only conclusion you can reach is that at that point of so-called infinite compression or singularity,
00:42:53 ►
another universe bursts into being somewhere else in a greater and vaster cosmology.
00:43:02 ►
And then the energy equations balance.
00:43:05 ►
Well, it’s as though mind is undergoing this kind of gravitational collapse
00:43:12 ►
and information is being compressed to such a degree
00:43:16 ►
that eventually it will not all fit in the present.
00:43:21 ►
And then the information begins to move off
00:43:25 ►
into the only dimensions available to it,
00:43:28 ►
which are the past and the future.
00:43:31 ►
Exactly as if you fill a glass
00:43:34 ►
with more water than it can hold.
00:43:36 ►
Once it has more water in it than it can hold,
00:43:39 ►
the water begins to flow down the sides
00:43:42 ►
and out into the larger domain.
00:43:45 ►
And so I think that people who try to use history,
00:43:49 ►
which is usually male egos and male-dominated institutions,
00:43:55 ►
are actually tremendously frustrated.
00:43:59 ►
We don’t see it that way because to us it looks like they win every battle
00:44:04 ►
because they win every election.
00:44:07 ►
But because they win every election, it is their job to manage the situation.
00:44:15 ►
It’s a case of you want it? Here it is.
00:44:18 ►
And they have not a clue as to how to manage it.
00:44:23 ►
So their thing is all about the headaches of ownership,
00:44:27 ►
while our political point of view is pretty much about the headaches of disenfranchisement.
00:44:34 ►
But I think that there is some kind of event ahead of us in time, not far, on the order of 20 to 40 years, that is casting an enormous shadow
00:44:51 ►
back through the lower dimensional slice of being, which we call history, so that religions and mystical visions and the visions of revolutionary leaders
00:45:08 ►
are a response to flickering intimations
00:45:15 ►
of this transcendental object
00:45:17 ►
that is pulling intelligence
00:45:21 ►
out of the organic matrix of life on this planet in a process that is occupying
00:45:28 ►
50 to 100,000 years. It’s extremely unusual what’s happening. And a process that
00:45:36 ►
creates a series of self-transforming bootstrap steps in a period of 100,000 years
00:45:47 ►
means it’s a unique kind of phenomenon.
00:45:50 ►
There’s never been anything like it on the planet.
00:45:53 ►
What it is leading toward is hard to say,
00:45:56 ►
but I know that its values are the values of life,
00:46:02 ►
connectedness, primacy of experience, and caring.
00:46:08 ►
And it is using the historical process to wire us all together in some way.
00:46:17 ►
Control mechanisms are spreading through the society at an enormous rate.
00:46:23 ►
You know, it’s interesting, one of the horror fantasies of the 1950s,
00:46:28 ►
which was when, you know,
00:46:31 ►
this conservative straight crew cut point of view
00:46:36 ►
was really at its height.
00:46:38 ►
One of the fears of the future
00:46:40 ►
that people would just toss off offhandedly was,
00:46:44 ►
well, in the future
00:46:47 ►
machines will take over and run
00:46:51 ►
everything and this notion of the
00:46:55 ►
control of the planet rested from the
00:46:57 ►
sure hands of noble human beings and
00:47:00 ►
instead betrayed into the power of
00:47:03 ►
calculating automatons
00:47:05 ►
was a great science fiction theme of the 50s.
00:47:09 ►
But it’s interesting how impartial computers are.
00:47:15 ►
They are not ideologues.
00:47:18 ►
They are not…
00:47:20 ►
They’re managers.
00:47:23 ►
And remember I said the struggle was between the shaman manager
00:47:28 ►
and the ideologue politician.
00:47:31 ►
And so I think the cybernetic matrix is a tremendous tool
00:47:36 ►
for feminizing and radicalizing and psychedelicizing the social matrix.
00:47:43 ►
I see computers as entirely feminine.
00:47:47 ►
I mean, people have a reaction to this
00:47:50 ►
because they think that
00:47:51 ►
because men spend a lot of time around them
00:47:54 ►
and seem obsessed with them
00:47:56 ►
that somehow it isn’t feminine.
00:47:59 ►
But men have always been obsessed with the feminine.
00:48:02 ►
I mean, I think it was D.H. Lawrence who said,
00:48:06 ►
what life is really about is men keeping women from ever suspecting
00:48:13 ►
how truly obsessed we are by them.
00:48:18 ►
So I think, you know, that this linking together,
00:48:24 ►
I think that this linking together,
00:48:28 ►
feminizing, cybernetic thing is part of the anticipation of this object
00:48:31 ►
at the end of time.
00:48:32 ►
What seems to be happening is we’re all flowing together.
00:48:36 ►
We keep talking about unity,
00:48:39 ►
globalism, completion.
00:48:42 ►
Well, you’re going to get what you ordered.
00:48:47 ►
And I think what it means is probably the dear individual, which, don’t be fooled,
00:48:54 ►
is a soft description of the male ego run rampant. The democratic individual, the citizen, this notion is in fair peril to be
00:49:09 ►
replaced by the person, which is a much more nubbly kind of concept. The person is not an interchangeable part.
00:49:26 ►
The citizen is.
00:49:28 ►
The citizen is a model of society
00:49:30 ►
based on the industrial revolution
00:49:36 ►
of the 18th century.
00:49:38 ►
But the person is a harking back
00:49:42 ►
to a pre-print model,
00:49:46 ►
and this is being set loose.
00:49:53 ►
It’s what the hippies were, essentially.
00:49:55 ►
What they were trying to evoke was this do-your-own-thing idea.
00:50:02 ►
But there’s a paradox here. The do your own thing idea is somehow leading
00:50:06 ►
to this vectoring toward a unified cultural state where everybody is involved in everybody
00:50:14 ►
else. It’s all right that it’s paradoxical because there’s no reason that it should be
00:50:21 ►
reasonable. Yeah. I was wondering if you could address the difference
00:50:27 ►
between the LSD experience and mushroom experience,
00:50:30 ►
if there is a difference,
00:50:31 ►
and also your views about marijuana as an other state.
00:50:34 ►
Well, the LSD experience is…
00:50:37 ►
I mean, I speak only from my own experience, of course.
00:50:42 ►
But to me, it seemed more psychoanalytical than psychedelic. I mean, I was
00:50:50 ►
in my early 20s when I encountered LSD. Maybe I had more stuff, as they say, to deal with.
00:50:58 ►
But it was not a reliable visionary drug for me. It caused me to have funny ideas.
00:51:07 ►
It seemed mostly to be a thought thing,
00:51:11 ►
but not a visual thing.
00:51:15 ►
And somehow in my education,
00:51:17 ►
somewhere along the way,
00:51:19 ►
I had picked up this bias
00:51:21 ►
in favor of the visual channel.
00:51:24 ►
I wasn’t satisfied with LSD. I
00:51:26 ►
wanted those things that Havelock Ellis describes where he talks about, you know,
00:51:32 ►
jeweled ruins and phosphorescent maidens in diaphanous gowns howling demon songs beneath a violet moon, and that was what I wanted. Not funny ideas.
00:51:47 ►
And what I found, and I worked pretty diligently at it with LSD,
00:51:54 ►
I found that my most satisfying LSD experiences were while smoking hash,
00:52:01 ►
and that then that really did do something interesting,
00:52:07 ►
hash and that then that really did do something interesting sent it skittering off in these wonderful visionary directions but uh uh these things do have characters and this is something
00:52:17 ►
probably worth talking about in this group that at low doses everything seems like everything else.
00:52:26 ►
In other words, a little mescaline, a tiny amount of LSD,
00:52:30 ►
a little bit of MDMA, a tiny tad of psilocybin.
00:52:35 ►
All of these things simply register as wired arousal,
00:52:41 ►
eager to hear what’s being said and follow the thread of the argument
00:52:47 ►
and just absolutely fascinated by what’s going on, no matter what’s going on.
00:52:52 ►
But as you raise the dose, the character of these things begins to appear.
00:53:01 ►
And, for instance, psilocybin is to my mind in many ways the most anomalous
00:53:10 ►
because number one this thing about how it speaks it does speak and none of the
00:53:18 ►
others do I mean the others you may, in years of fiddling, get a sentence or two.
00:53:27 ►
But the mushroom just is voluble.
00:53:30 ►
It just comes on and raves, you know.
00:53:33 ►
And sometimes you even, and people have said to me, it really does rave.
00:53:37 ►
I mean, it’s not a calm.
00:53:39 ►
It’s not a go-with-the-flow rap. It’s a rap about planetary destiny and the next 10 million years and the last 10 million years.
00:53:51 ►
It’s this trumpet blast, Cecil B. DeMille, hyper, you know, real like that.
00:53:59 ►
Well, then something like ayahuasca, which is this thing these shamans use in the Amazon basin
00:54:05 ►
that’s based on DMT and monoamine oxidase inhibitors,
00:54:09 ►
you take that and it’s about the rivers and the jungle
00:54:16 ►
and these people and their humility and dignity
00:54:22 ►
and your humility and dignity, and the earth, and plants, and life, and water, and sunlight,
00:54:31 ►
and it’s this totally earthbound, terrestrial, life-affirming thing.
00:54:37 ►
And it does not speak, but it’s an eye, and its language is visual,
00:54:44 ►
But it’s an eye, and its language is visual.
00:54:52 ►
And after an ayahuasca trip, you just feel like your eyes are literally bulging out of your head. I mean, you’ve spent six hours looking, looking, looking, looking,
00:54:58 ►
just not really doing anything else but looking.
00:55:02 ►
really doing anything else but looking.
00:55:04 ►
Well, then something like Datura
00:55:09 ►
has this watery, magical,
00:55:12 ►
forgetful, kind of witchy
00:55:15 ►
occult quality.
00:55:18 ►
It’s, you know, shadows,
00:55:21 ►
shadows, and a peculiar
00:55:23 ►
quality of erosion of your own attention,
00:55:27 ►
so that, you know, no matter who you are,
00:55:30 ►
you find yourself wandering through empty colonnades
00:55:34 ►
and under a sky pregnant with the possibility of rain.
00:55:40 ►
I mean, it’s this strange, Chirico-esque kind of landscape.
00:55:46 ►
DMT has another quality.
00:55:49 ►
It seems to convey you into just a world of utter outrage
00:55:55 ►
where all linguistic sensory and analytical machinery
00:56:00 ►
is just brought to a screeching halt. So it’s important to learn what you like
00:56:10 ►
and to learn what you can put up with. Someone at a recent weekend who takes mushrooms quite
00:56:19 ►
religiously and quite regularly, and I said, you know, does it ever get easier? And he said, no,
00:56:26 ►
it never gets easier. Each time what I pray as I go into it is, please let me be able to stand
00:56:35 ►
a little bit more. Because, you know, finally you just, it is the real mystery. So the only way your relationship to it can end
00:56:47 ►
is by you averting your gaze.
00:56:50 ►
Because no human being can gaze into it endlessly.
00:56:55 ►
Because it is what it says it is.
00:57:04 ►
It is the other.
00:57:08 ►
I was groping for the Hebrew, but not finding it.
00:57:13 ►
Yes. Yeah.
00:57:15 ►
I just want to follow up on that question a little bit.
00:57:18 ►
Stan Grof describes LSD as a nonspecific amplifier.
00:57:23 ►
And by that he means it amplifies what’s already existing in the psyche.
00:57:27 ►
And he uses this metaphor that LSD serves
00:57:30 ►
as a kind of telescope or microscope,
00:57:34 ►
in that it does not itself produce the experience,
00:57:37 ►
but rather it enables you to have an experience
00:57:39 ►
that’s already there in potentia, latent in your psyche.
00:57:43 ►
And I just wonder if you could comment on that,
00:57:45 ►
since you just now described the various psychologics
00:57:48 ►
as having a character.
00:57:50 ►
So in his framework, would you disagree with it?
00:57:52 ►
Or would you say that the various telescopes
00:57:54 ►
are tinted with a certain lens?
00:57:57 ►
Or how would you sort of reconcile?
00:57:59 ►
Well, at the beginning of your question,
00:58:03 ►
you characterized LSD
00:58:05 ►
it’s that it
00:58:09 ►
it is a non-specific
00:58:11 ►
amplifier
00:58:12 ►
but of the contents of the personal
00:58:15 ►
unconscious and the sensorium
00:58:17 ►
what people notice about LSD
00:58:22 ►
is either what’s right or wrong
00:58:24 ►
with themselves or how freaky the world is.
00:58:29 ►
You know, a bug, a drop of water, it can be anything.
00:58:33 ►
But you discover the strangest things on LSD.
00:58:37 ►
And they’re real things.
00:58:39 ►
I mean, relationships of reflections and windows. It basically seems to be a tremendous amplifier of attention
00:58:46 ►
and analysis of the input of attention
00:58:50 ►
when directed into the outer world.
00:58:53 ►
And when directed into the inner world,
00:58:55 ►
it’s an analytical tool for looking at past history of the individual,
00:59:02 ►
which is what I call the personal unconscious.
00:59:06 ►
The thing that always puzzled me about enthusiasts of LSD was that they claimed that beyond this lie
00:59:15 ►
what they called the white light, which they put great store by and made all kinds of Buddhist associations to it.
00:59:29 ►
I don’t know if I’ve ever had the white light experience. As I go deeper into strong psychedelics,
00:59:34 ►
what happens is multiplicity proliferates.
00:59:38 ►
There is not a simplifying.
00:59:41 ►
There is a further and further and further complexifying. And I was talking to
00:59:49 ►
someone at Ojai Foundation about this, and they said, but surely beyond all this, there is some
00:59:55 ►
kind of simplification and unity. And I said, well, that I wasn’t sure that maybe it’s just,
01:00:02 ►
you know, an infinite samsaric ocean in all directions,
01:00:07 ►
in all dimensions forever.
01:00:10 ►
Ketamine comes closer to providing a no-observer,
01:00:17 ►
nothing-observed kind of state,
01:00:21 ►
but you can’t do much with that.
01:00:24 ►
You can have it, but you can’t do much with that. You can have it, but I, and
01:00:27 ►
there is, of course, with the dropping of all boundaries,
01:00:31 ►
a feeling of release, but what I’m
01:00:35 ►
interested in are bringing back
01:00:39 ►
artifacts to share with the tribe,
01:00:44 ►
and I’ve accepted that they will come in the
01:00:46 ►
form of either things that can be painted or things that can be said and
01:00:52 ►
and since I’m better at the saying than the painting I work like that Stan is a
01:01:00 ►
good friend of mine we’ve talked about this over the years.
01:01:11 ►
I just can’t confirm his maps of the psyche.
01:01:18 ►
I don’t see those states occurring along a continuum the way that he says they do. I think it’s much more chaotic and that if his categories work to facilitate psychotherapy, then that’s
01:01:29 ►
good because that’s what he’s interested in.
01:01:31 ►
In other words, I see his maps as very, very provisional and useful for navigating, but
01:01:41 ►
I doubt that when we get the final maps, if we ever do,
01:01:45 ►
that they will bear
01:01:46 ►
terrifically much resemblance to that.
01:01:49 ►
And I think he would agree with that.
01:01:51 ►
I mean, we’re not at loggerheads about this.
01:01:54 ►
Anybody who works with psychedelics,
01:01:57 ►
their ultimate position is
01:02:00 ►
that hell, they don’t know.
01:02:04 ►
And on that note, why don’t we go to lunch
01:02:08 ►
and we will reassemble at 2 o’clock.
01:02:12 ►
If you’re new to the neighborhood,
01:02:14 ►
Haight Street is two blocks down Ashbury
01:02:17 ►
and there’s a plethora of restaurants
01:02:21 ►
to choose from down there.
01:02:23 ►
of restaurants to choose from down there.
01:02:27 ►
Okay.
01:02:31 ►
I think we’re all here.
01:02:33 ►
People are pulling together.
01:02:42 ►
So we’ll talk for an hour or so and then we’ll break
01:02:43 ►
and then we’ll go to four. Well, this
01:02:50 ►
afternoon I thought we would do some operational homework and academic
01:03:01 ►
referencing. One of the most important things about all of this that we’ve been discussing
01:03:09 ►
is to get the information straight,
01:03:12 ►
to be as well-informed as possible.
01:03:15 ►
I mean, it’s as important to be well-informed in this area
01:03:19 ►
if you’re going to do it as it is to be well-informed
01:03:22 ►
about procedures in skin diving and that sort of thing if you’re going to do it as it is to be well informed about procedures in skin diving and that sort of
01:03:26 ►
thing if you’re going to do that.
01:03:30 ►
Okay, well what I thought I’d do at the beginning of this afternoon today, apropos of this idea
01:03:37 ►
that people should inform themselves about what’s going on, because though you can’t
01:03:43 ►
find out everything,
01:03:48 ►
you can find out a lot more than most people know.
01:03:52 ►
And it’s amazing to me the number of people who would pay a couple of hundred bucks
01:03:55 ►
to come to a weekend with a person like myself
01:04:00 ►
to learn about psychedelics
01:04:03 ►
when a couple of hundred books would get you quite far in a bookstore
01:04:08 ►
and the public library is a marvelous resource for this stuff.
01:04:17 ►
So I hauled some titles off my own bookshelf and I’ll go through them.
01:04:26 ►
This is by no means all.
01:04:29 ►
I just simply chose books that I thought were either important to the field
01:04:32 ►
or I felt would be fairly easy
01:04:35 ►
for someone to obtain
01:04:37 ►
if they wanted to look into these matters.
01:04:42 ►
This one, some of you may know,
01:04:45 ►
this is probably the easiest to obtain
01:04:48 ►
and the most compendious
01:04:50 ►
it’s Plants of the Gods by Richard Evans Schultes
01:04:53 ►
who is Professor Emeritus of Botany at Harvard
01:04:56 ►
and this is basically the distillation
01:05:00 ►
of his life’s work
01:05:01 ►
it’s filled with pictures
01:05:04 ►
it has all kinds of information
01:05:10 ►
arranged in this kind of table form
01:05:13 ►
where you can look up a plant,
01:05:15 ►
get a notion of what it looks like,
01:05:18 ►
what family it belongs to,
01:05:19 ►
what its chemical constituents are,
01:05:22 ►
and so forth.
01:05:23 ►
And it has a very good bibliography and a chemical appendix.
01:05:29 ►
So this is a round and highly recommended.
01:05:35 ►
If you want to go slightly deeper than that book goes, this is the academic version of
01:05:42 ►
the same book.
01:05:44 ►
This is the botany and chemistry of hallucinogens.
01:05:47 ►
This is the Bible of this field because it lists, well, virtually the state of the art circa 1980
01:05:58 ►
and compendious bibliography and Unopened Mail.
01:06:10 ►
This book, though, is an expensive academic press, but highly recommended.
01:06:16 ►
If you had to have just one book on hallucinogens, this would probably be the one to go for.
01:06:23 ►
This would probably be the one to go for.
01:06:28 ►
It’s also by Richard Evans Schultes and Albert Hoffman,
01:06:32 ►
who some of you may know as the discoverer of LSD and the man who first characterized and synthesized psilocybin.
01:06:43 ►
From a slightly more countercultural point of view,
01:06:48 ►
the revised edition of the Psychedelics Encyclopedia
01:06:52 ►
by Peter Stafford, who some of you may know.
01:06:58 ►
And again, this is an effort to be compendious.
01:07:02 ►
No one of these books should be taken as gospel.
01:07:06 ►
I mean, you want to get it from several different sources
01:07:09 ►
before you conclude any given fact is true.
01:07:13 ►
But this book is published by Tarture in L.A.
01:07:17 ►
I think this is a fairly easily obtained book.
01:07:20 ►
Is that a new issue?
01:07:22 ►
I did talk to him at the Trans-Christian Conference second edition and he’s going to do a
01:07:32 ►
third edition yeah and he’s very good about keeping up on on the literature
01:07:39 ►
and and following it through this is an interesting book, Peter Stafford.
01:07:46 ►
Then, for those of you who are more inclined to pharmacology
01:07:54 ►
and neurophysiology and that sort of thing,
01:07:58 ►
this is a fairly hard book to obtain,
01:08:01 ►
but in a way it’s never been surpassed.
01:08:04 ►
This book is called The Hallucinogens
01:08:06 ►
by Hoffer and Osmond. And there was never a revised edition after 1965, discusses a lot about LSD and
01:08:19 ►
psychotherapy, and also has all kinds of strange information
01:08:25 ►
that was never again mentioned in the literature,
01:08:29 ►
that was just sort of dropped out.
01:08:32 ►
So you can read here about, for instance,
01:08:35 ►
the hallucinogen dimethyl sulfoxide,
01:08:40 ►
where you drink eight fluid ounces a day for five successive days
01:08:46 ►
and then the onset of hallucinations begin that are supposedly quite spectacular.
01:08:54 ►
It’s just that the notion of drinking eight fluid ounces of this bizarre chemical compound
01:08:59 ►
is not too appetizing.
01:09:04 ►
Is that still available in the book?
01:09:07 ►
I doubt it.
01:09:08 ►
I think you probably have to have a scientific book searcher
01:09:12 ►
hunt this one down for you.
01:09:14 ►
Hoffer and Osmond, the hallucinogens.
01:09:19 ►
And then for sort of the state of the art,
01:09:23 ►
in a simple one between,
01:09:26 ►
you know, in one book
01:09:28 ►
is Solomon H. Snyder’s book
01:09:30 ►
Drugs and the Brain.
01:09:33 ►
And it doesn’t simply address
01:09:35 ►
hallucinogens.
01:09:36 ►
It talks about all kinds of drugs,
01:09:40 ►
but explains the mechanism
01:09:42 ►
of drug activity,
01:09:44 ►
the notion of the lock and key activity of the drug molecule to the synaptic cleft,
01:09:53 ►
and it gives you a short basic course in neurology.
01:09:59 ►
And Saul Snyder is one of the giants of psychopharmacology,
01:10:03 ►
Nobel Prize winner, so forth and so on.
01:10:07 ►
So, Drugs in the Brain by Solomon Snyder.
01:10:12 ►
Let’s see here.
01:10:17 ►
Here’s another book somewhat on the line of Snyder’s book.
01:10:22 ►
This is one of the most recent books
01:10:25 ►
written on hallucinogens.
01:10:28 ►
The editor is Barry Jacobs.
01:10:31 ►
Hallucinogens, neurochemical, behavioral,
01:10:35 ►
and clinical perspectives.
01:10:38 ►
And as my brother said,
01:10:40 ►
all of the uninteresting perspectives
01:10:43 ►
are covered here very thoroughly and in detail.
01:10:49 ►
And what these books are good for, besides whatever they say,
01:10:54 ►
is that they contain excellent bibliographies.
01:10:58 ►
So tracing a particular problem, you go to these books,
01:11:03 ►
and then they direct you to the journal articles
01:11:07 ►
that give you what you want to know most of the literature of psychopharmacology
01:11:13 ►
is in journals which you will never as a layman encounter unless you go to
01:11:19 ►
medical libraries and attempt to see these things, things like Lloydea and, oh, I don’t know,
01:11:28 ►
Acta Neurologica and all of this, the Journal of Psychopharmacology and this sort of thing.
01:11:37 ►
But you can be directed to the, I mean, some of these journals cost as much as 300 a year to subscribe to.
01:11:47 ►
So if you don’t want to do that,
01:11:49 ►
the bibliography directs you to the articles you need,
01:11:52 ►
and you just go to the med library and Xerox them out.
01:12:02 ►
It’s edited by Barry Jacobs.
01:12:08 ►
I’m trying to do this in some kind of reasonable order.
01:12:11 ►
Let’s see.
01:12:14 ►
Well, then this sort of bridges the gap
01:12:18 ►
between pharmacology, sociology, and anthropology.
01:12:24 ►
This is Brian
01:12:25 ►
Dutoy
01:12:27 ►
I guess
01:12:28 ►
D-U
01:12:29 ►
space
01:12:29 ►
T-O-I-T
01:12:30 ►
drugs
01:12:32 ►
trois
01:12:32 ►
deux trois
01:12:33 ►
Brian Dutoy
01:12:34 ►
drugs
01:12:36 ►
rituals
01:12:36 ►
and altered states
01:12:38 ►
of consciousness
01:12:39 ►
and
01:12:40 ►
some of the altered states
01:12:42 ►
of consciousness
01:12:43 ►
hmm
01:12:43 ►
let me see if I can make and some of the altered states of consciousness. Hmm.
01:12:50 ►
Let me see if I can make a quick identification here.
01:12:55 ►
I think this is actually Banisteriopsis rusbiana,
01:12:59 ►
which is a rare admixture plant,
01:13:00 ►
contains DMT,
01:13:04 ►
but has the lanceolate leaf end that distinguishes it from Banisteriopsis copy.
01:13:10 ►
Hmm, probably could do 10 years for the book.
01:13:17 ►
The publisher on this one is a weird one.
01:13:20 ►
It’s B-A-L-K-E-M-A, Balkema of Rotterdam. So it’s a Dutch publisher. The
01:13:32 ►
author’s name is Dutoit, D-U-T-O-I-T. Yeah, this is a good one. So then sort of moving out of the realm of pharmacology and psychology
01:13:49 ►
and into the specifically anthropological stuff,
01:13:55 ►
this is one that a number of various contributors,
01:14:01 ►
alternate states of consciousness,
01:14:04 ►
multiple perspectives on the Study of Consciousness,
01:14:07 ►
edited by Norman Zinberg of Harvard.
01:14:10 ►
And this deals not only with shamanic drug usage,
01:14:15 ►
but the heroin subculture and a number of different things.
01:14:23 ►
Urban drug cultures are discussed as well.
01:14:27 ►
Mostly a sociological perspective here.
01:14:30 ►
Zinberg.
01:14:31 ►
Zinberg.
01:14:33 ►
And then moving into the more specifically anthropological stuff.
01:14:41 ►
In what order? Let’s see.
01:14:44 ►
Well, here’s my favorite one. Before he got into drumming,
01:14:49 ►
Michael Harner edited this book, Hallucinogens and Shamanism, Oxford University Press, available
01:14:58 ►
in print, in paper. And a number of writers contributed to this. There are about three articles on
01:15:06 ►
ayahuasca that you just will not find anywhere else. Four articles. Articles on peyote. A
01:15:15 ►
wonderful article by Henry Munn called The Mushrooms of Language. Just a classic article
01:15:23 ►
on mushrooms.
01:15:27 ►
So this I highly recommend.
01:15:33 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:15:36 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:15:42 ►
And I’ll add a second to that recommendation.
01:15:48 ►
Of course, that Michael Harner book is the only one of those that he mentioned that I actually own.
01:15:51 ►
But nonetheless, it really is a great book, and I just checked and found that there are still a few copies available at an affordable price
01:15:56 ►
through Amazon and other places like that.
01:16:00 ►
Now, there is just one thing I would like to add about what Terrence was saying
01:16:03 ►
about ayahuasca being such a visual experience.
01:16:07 ►
Well, I don’t think that’s the case for everyone.
01:16:10 ►
While I have on occasion had some spectacular visions,
01:16:14 ►
they didn’t even begin to happen for me until I had been working with that substance for quite a few years.
01:16:20 ►
Unlike MDMA, there is a steep learning curve in learning how to work with the vine.
01:16:24 ►
Unlike MDMA, there is a steep learning curve in learning how to work with the vine.
01:16:32 ►
And the other thing is that my most profound experiences on ayahuasca didn’t even involve visions at all,
01:16:39 ►
but were things I was able to access deep within the recesses of my mind and then bring them into the light of my everyday life.
01:16:48 ►
So if you’ve had a few experiences with ayahuasca and they didn’t meet with your expectations after listening to Terrence, well, don’t despair.
01:16:56 ►
In fact, I’ve never been able to reproduce what I thought he was saying about any of the substances he talks about.
01:17:02 ►
Which causes me to recall that, first and foremost, at least in my opinion, Terrence was a poet. And so I don’t get discouraged when the self-transforming machine elves
01:17:07 ►
never show up to play jeweled basketball with me in some jewel-encrusted palace.
01:17:12 ►
But even without all of those fireworks, I still come back for more.
01:17:16 ►
So go figure.
01:17:19 ►
And were you thinking what I was thinking about 30 minutes or so into this talk
01:17:23 ►
when he was talking about our unthinking faith in progress,
01:17:28 ►
that we were always moving onward and upward?
01:17:31 ►
With all that has been taking place in the past 10 years since Terrence died,
01:17:36 ►
and all that is happening right now,
01:17:39 ►
it still doesn’t seem to me that my concept of progress will be halted.
01:17:43 ►
However, my concept of it has changed
01:17:46 ►
quite a bit over the past 50 years. Now I see progress as getting off the grid and growing
01:17:51 ►
some of my own food. But I’m definitely not wanting to go back to any so-called good old
01:17:56 ►
days because I don’t think that any age before now was all that much better. No, what I’m
01:18:02 ►
working toward is a more simple life, one that doesn’t include commuting to a job that I don’t enjoy
01:18:07 ►
and where I don’t consume as much stuff.
01:18:10 ►
But I still want a high-speed connection to the net
01:18:13 ►
and all that brings with it in the way of connecting with you and my other friends.
01:18:18 ►
And I certainly expect a lot of progress in this area
01:18:21 ►
to where before long we can all be meeting in some kind of a holodeck
01:18:25 ►
version of the salon. Now that’s the kind of progress I can get behind. And speaking of
01:18:31 ►
progress, right now the only progress I’ve been making in building an interactive website to
01:18:37 ►
support my new book has mainly been done in my head. But a recent email I received has reminded
01:18:44 ►
me that I should probably
01:18:45 ►
pass along some of the ideas that I’m working on. This came to me through Facebook the other day,
01:18:51 ►
just before I somehow got cut off from access to my account. Hopefully that will magically clear
01:18:57 ►
up soon, but if you don’t hear back from me on Facebook, it’s because I now seem to be locked out. Anyway, here is part of the message that I received from JC.
01:19:07 ►
I am so glad to finally be able to say hello to you.
01:19:11 ►
Podcasts are not two-way, as you know.
01:19:14 ►
And that’s the first thing that I’d like to address,
01:19:16 ►
which are my plans for making these podcasts a little more interactive.
01:19:22 ►
Before this year ends, I hope to have a Skype record account set up
01:19:25 ►
where our fellow salonners who want to
01:19:28 ►
can add their voices to the discussion.
01:19:31 ►
I still have a lot of work to do on this,
01:19:33 ►
but I do want you to know that over time
01:19:35 ►
I hope to evolve these programs
01:19:37 ►
into a much more interactive format.
01:19:40 ►
Now, getting back to JC’s email,
01:19:44 ►
I am looking to become more involved in the psychedelic community in a broad sense. Now, getting back to JC’s email… I guess. I’m also looking to learn a lot and use my academics to dip my foot deeper into the realm
01:20:06 ►
of our subculture. I’ve just finished my first year of college but have stalled in order to
01:20:11 ►
gather the right energy. Well, JC, one thing that I can pass along is the fact that you certainly
01:20:19 ►
aren’t alone. A lot of people are asking the same kinds of questions these days, and if I were you, the first place I would go is over to the forums at thegrowreport.com.
01:20:29 ►
And not just the Psychedelic Salons forum, but spend a little time lurking through all of the other ones as well.
01:20:35 ►
And in time, I think you’ll begin to feel a part of a community as you get to know the frequent posters.
01:20:41 ►
And on those forums, you will also find postings about various festivals and other events where
01:20:46 ►
maybe you can find some of the others.
01:20:49 ►
The one event this summer that I am most familiar with, of course, is the Oracle Gathering,
01:20:54 ►
which is being held from July 31st through August 2nd.
01:20:58 ►
And I’ll be one of the speakers there, but there’ll be a whole lot more going on.
01:21:02 ►
And if you’re near the Seattle to Portland area, this may be something to look into.
01:21:07 ►
So just go to Oracle Gatherings, O-R-A-C-L-E-G-A-T-H-E-R-I-N-G-S,
01:21:14 ►
oraclegatherings.com for the details.
01:21:18 ►
And besides myself and, oh, a hundred or so artists and musicians who will also be there,
01:21:23 ►
you will be able to find Andre and Missy Nobles, who I think you can also find on Facebook, by the way.
01:21:30 ►
Another suggestion is the Science and Duality Conference that will be held from October 21st through the 25th of this year,
01:21:37 ►
which is 2009 for those who will be joining us a little later in these podcasts.
01:21:43 ►
for those who will be joining us a little later in these podcasts.
01:21:48 ►
And one of the presenters at that conference is someone you may want to meet because he has combined academics with an interest in the psychedelic community
01:21:53 ►
and who may be able to give you some more guidance on this topic.
01:21:57 ►
I’m speaking here of Dr. Thomas Ray, who is a professor at the University of Oklahoma.
01:22:02 ►
And I’ll put a link to his presentation topic along with the program notes for this program.
01:22:07 ►
And by the way, two of the other speakers at that conference are people that you’ve
01:22:11 ►
heard from here in the salon on a couple of different occasions.
01:22:14 ►
And they are Daniel Pinchbeck and Alex Gray.
01:22:18 ►
So my guess is that that conference should be an excellent place to find a few of the
01:22:22 ►
others.
01:22:23 ►
And I guess I should mention that it’s going to be held in San Rafael, California. Now, while I had planned
01:22:30 ►
on announcing my shiny new interactive website today to support my new novel, well, it looks
01:22:37 ►
like that’s going to take a little longer to build than I first thought. Mainly because
01:22:41 ►
I’m not pushing myself very hard. Hey, it’s summertime, remember?
01:22:45 ►
And besides that, I’m supposed to be retired.
01:22:49 ►
Anyway, I want to thank those of you who forged ahead
01:22:52 ►
and downloaded a copy of the Genesis Generation.
01:22:56 ►
And as you have already discovered,
01:22:58 ►
it is actually more of a how-to manual
01:23:00 ►
embedded in a long lecture that is wrapped in a story
01:23:03 ►
to help pull you through.
01:23:05 ►
And in the weeks ahead, I’ll have more to say about the response to the book and how
01:23:09 ►
you can become involved in shaping what goes into the next volume in this series.
01:23:14 ►
Oh, and in case you haven’t yet been to my GenesisGeneration.us temporary website, you
01:23:21 ►
probably don’t even know what it’s all about, even if you did listen to the first
01:23:25 ►
chapter in last week’s podcast.
01:23:27 ►
But basically, it’s the story of a group of young friends who are struggling to make the
01:23:32 ►
transition from cubicle-working consumers into beings who are truly human.
01:23:37 ►
As one character says, people living a thousand years from now will remember you, not by name,
01:23:43 ►
but as having been a part of a new generation of humans.
01:23:47 ►
They will remember you as one of the people who helped to build a civilization that should last for yet another thousand years.
01:23:55 ►
And let me just say one last thing here, and that has to do with the fact that I know how strapped for cash a lot of our fellow salonners are right now.
01:24:03 ►
I know how strapped for cash a lot of our fellow salonners are right now,
01:24:08 ►
and if it wasn’t my only source of income outside of my Social Security check,
01:24:10 ►
I’d be happy giving my book away.
01:24:13 ►
But the truth is, I’m in the same cash-poor boat myself,
01:24:16 ►
so here’s an idea that might be a good compromise.
01:24:21 ►
Now, I’m assuming that everyone who downloads a copy is already impeccable, and so I’m not at all concerned that anyone would make copies and give them away.
01:24:26 ►
But the thing that bothers me is that if you bought a paperback book, you could loan it
01:24:30 ►
to a friend after you’d read it.
01:24:32 ►
So how about this?
01:24:34 ►
If you are testing the waters in your search to find the others, why don’t you loan them
01:24:39 ►
your MP3 player overnight and let them listen to my book?
01:24:43 ►
I think that our fellow salonners who have already heard it will agree that anyone who
01:24:48 ►
listens to 11 hours of me going on about the wonder, the glory, and the importance of our
01:24:53 ►
sacred medicines and still isn’t interested is probably not one of the others.
01:24:58 ►
But the idea is that if you just copy the files, they may never get around to listening
01:25:02 ►
to them.
01:25:03 ►
But if you loan them your own player overnight, it should get the ball rolling much sooner.
01:25:08 ►
Anyway, if you’re sharing a copy with a friend without actually making another copy of it, well, I think that’s great.
01:25:16 ►
Well, that’s it for today.
01:25:18 ►
And so I’ll again close by reminding you that this and almost all of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon are freely available for you to use in your own audio projects
01:25:27 ►
under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 3.0 license.
01:25:32 ►
And if you have any questions about that,
01:25:33 ►
just click the Creative Commons link at the bottom of our psychedelicsalon.org webpage,
01:25:40 ►
and that’s also where you’ll find the program notes for these podcasts.
01:25:43 ►
And, of course, if you’d like to download a copy of my new book, just go to genesisgeneration.us.
01:25:50 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic space.
01:25:55 ►
Be well, my friends.