Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“One of the things that’s so striking about shamanism in the native context is the absence of mental illness.”
“Every step into freedom contains within it the potential for greater bondage.”
“This is what I talked about last night about the archaic revival as the notion of making a sharp left turn away from the momentum that the historical vehicle wants to follow.”
“We now have no choice in the matter of business as usual. There will not, apparently, be business as usual.”
“You either have a plan, or you are a part of somebody else’s plan.”
“The psychedelic sets you at the beginning of the path, and then people do all kinds of things with it.”
“We are reaping the fruits of ten thousand, fifty thousand years of sowing of the fields of mind. And it is being dropped into our laps for us to create human-machine interfacing, control of genetic material, redefinition of social reality, re engineering of languages, revisioning of the planetary ecology, all these things fall upon us.”
“I’m fascinated by hallucinations. I mean, to me that is the sina qua non that you’re getting somewhere.”
“If you actually look at the etymology of the word ‘hallucination’, what it’s come to mean in English is a delusion. But what it really means in the original language is to wander in the mind. That’s the meaning of ‘hallucination’, to wander in the mind.”
“For unknown reasons, there is a tremendous concentration of psychoactive plants on the South American continent. The South American continent has more known hallucinogens than the rest of the planet combined.”
“Patanjali specifically says that there are three paths to the goal of yoga. And they are, control of the breath, control of posture, and light-filled herbs. It says it right there. Stanza 6 of the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali.”
California Institute of Integral Studies
http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/0062502891
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187 - The Ethnobotany of Shamanism Part 1
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Transcript
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Greetings from cyberdelic space.
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This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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And I have to tell you that
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our fellow salonners just continue
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to blow me away by continuing
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to send in donations to
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help offset some of the expenses
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associated with the salon.
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And it looks like this year,
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thanks to all of our fellow donors
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and to you wonderful souls who have
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also bought a copy of my new book,
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well, it looks like I’ll be joining forces with Bruce Dahmer
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and a crew of multimedia artists to produce another big event at Burning Man this year.
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And I’ll tell you more about that after today’s talk.
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But first, I want to thank Andy W., Daniel P., Wilma V., Garth A.,
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and our old friend Adime Short,
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all of whom sent in donations this past week.
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And I might add, they not only are also all repeat donors,
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but they also bought a copy of my new audio book, The Genesis Generation.
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You know, it’s really difficult to tell you all how much I appreciate your support,
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and that also goes for all of our fellow Saloners
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who have now also begun to listen to my new novel.
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I truly appreciate your support and all of your kind words,
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but most of all, I appreciate the efforts of you
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and all of our fellow Saloners
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for spreading the word about the tribe
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and continuing your search for more of the others.
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Now, speaking of the tribe, Thank you. workshop was held on November 6, 1988, at the California Institute of Integral Studies in San
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Francisco. And by the way, if you aren’t familiar with CIIS, you ought to go to ciis.edu and look
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into some of their programs. And if you’re looking for an Institute of Higher Learning to attend,
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well, in my humble opinion, this is one of the finest schools in the land.
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As you can probably figure out from last week’s podcast, and from the continuation of it that I’m about to play,
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a school that sponsors workshops by people like Terrence McKenna has got to be a way cool place to study.
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Now, I’m going to pick up where the tapes left off last week, but there is a
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section of about 15 minutes that I cut out, and what it consists of is Terrence continuing with
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more book recommendations. And if you’re interested in his bibliography, well, you can download this
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complete workshop on the posting that Miguel made on the psychedelicsalon.org blog. But I felt that Thank you. Actually, it really wasn’t all that boring, but like most kids, I like to skip ahead to the fun stuff.
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So there’s a spot about 45 minutes into this where you’ll hear a jump from him talking about mind being a temporal style,
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and then it picks up with him saying how important it is to have this information.
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Of course, he’s speaking about the information in the books that I cut out.
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Of course, he’s speaking about the information in the books that I cut out.
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And actually, between those two sections, that was the 15-minute reading of his recommended reading list.
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So anyway, let’s go back in time to November of 1988,
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when Ronald Reagan was still the President of the United States,
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and when Salvia Dibinorum was still considered a very obscure plant.
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And let’s join the little group at CIIS for a little more fun stuff in the form of brain candy from Terrence McKenna.
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One of the things that’s so striking about shamanism in the native context is the absence of mental illness,
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the absence of serious neurotic patterns of behavior.
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This is because this trans-linguistic reality
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is allowed to work its will
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through shamanism,
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is allowed to regulate the society.
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In other words,
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our model of how society works is
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we are at war with nature,
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and we must push it back, seize a beachhead, fortify our position,
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dig in these kinds of metaphors, metaphors of capture and control,
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while the shamanic approach is we must communicate with nature in order that nature
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can communicate with us in order that we may know what should be done. And shamanism as classically
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practiced is hunting magic, weather magic, healing magic.
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In other words, ways of getting into the evolving of state-bound system patterns within nature.
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Weather, we would presume, can to some degree be predicted by looking at past weather states.
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be predicted by looking at past weather states. Hunting can to some degree be predicted by looking at the migration and movement of game in past situations. So shamanism then becomes a kind of
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mnemonic exercise where by keeping track of what has happened,
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you can build up a model of what will happen.
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And originally, this was done through great mnemonic feats of memory, you know, like the Yugoslavian folktale singers or the Homeric epics
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or the people who sang the Edith.
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These were, you know, works of hundreds of thousands of
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lines that were passed down virtually without change over millennia but in there’s a strange
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phenomenon in at least in the evolution of cultures and perhaps more generally,
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which is every step into freedom contains within it the potential for greater bondage.
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Now what I mean by that is, here’s an example of it.
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Women in charge of the gathering phase, in hunting, gathering cultures, developed grasses, small herbs, shrubs.
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They have roots, fruits, berries, seeds, inflorescences.
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Some of these things are poisonous.
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Some of these things are foods.
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Some grow in the spring, some in the fall, some along the river courses, some on the hilltops, so forth and so on.
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some along the river courses, some on the hilltops, so forth and so on.
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A great many descriptive dimensions come to bear on this.
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So consequently, I think women are to be held responsible for the evolution of language in order to discuss the extremely important matter of what is good to eat and what is not
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and where do you find it and how do you preserve it
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and what do you combine it with and so forth and so on.
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Men, on the other hand, who were in charge of the hunting
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because of the different body type and bladder capacity and so on,
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the premium there was placed on silence stoicism being able to stalk and for days make
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no noise possibly and to just you know sort of integrate into this silent kind of freedom which binds occurred in the shamanic effort to were overwhelmed by the amount of data,
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by the size of the epics,
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by the sheer length of these genealogies.
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So then symbolic notation is brought in
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and shamanism turns into scribe craft
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and signifying magical forces
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turns into writing down their names,
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and there is a tremendous binding,
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a compression, a limitation of freedom
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because the strategy of freedom became too successful.
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So this reaching beyond ourselves is a process that is continuous.
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We transcend a state.
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We then lock ourselves into the transcendent state.
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It becomes defined by its own set of limitations, and we move beyond it.
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And this kind of bootstrapping mechanism, I think, has been at work throughout the evolution of
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language, throughout the evolution of shamanism. Now we have come to a similar kind of bind,
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we have come to a similar kind of bind having to do with the bankruptcy
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of analytical analysis and rationalism,
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which has led us to a pretty complete mastery
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of inert matter.
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But when pushed into the quantum realm, suddenly contradictions begin to multiply
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and impossible conclusions force themselves upon the investigator. Well, what this means is that
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rationalism has simply reached its limit. There is no reason to think that it doesn’t have a limit.
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It was just the inflated fantasy of the 17th century
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that thought that God’s mind must work like the mind of a watchmaker.
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But in fact, what with chaos theory and catastrophism
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and numerous other non-equilibrium partial differential processes in nature,
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we now know that nature is extremely unpredictable, highly variable,
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not subject to analytical understanding,
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except in very limited domains.
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What this understanding that quantum physics has brought the physicists
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and that the psychedelic state has brought the people who pursue that,
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it has not fed back into the mainstream of society.
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We’re still living in a male-dominated, object-dominated, subject, other kind of world model, a world model, a world model inherited from the 18th century,
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really even more than from the 19th century.
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Well, is it going to kill us?
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Is it too late?
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What can we do about it?
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This is what I talked about last night,
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about the archaic revival as the notion of making a sharp left turn
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away from the momentum that the historical vehicle wants to follow,
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which is phanatoptic.
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Don’t kid yourself.
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You cannot have three religions stacked up on top of each other, stretching back 4,000 years, pursuing this monotheistic vision, which ends in an apocalypse, without building a tremendous morphogenetic predilection for the apocalypse, and our demonic investigations into matter
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have led us to create the machinery to produce the apocalypse. It’s interesting, somebody said
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of the Reagan administration, this is when James Watt was running around saying we didn’t have to save the trees
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because Jesus was coming anyway, so it didn’t matter. And someone said, the jerks want to be
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in the Bible. And that’s precisely the historical situation. The jerks want to be in the Bible. In other words, every petty potentate
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from Frederick Barbarossa to Ronald Reagan has secretly believed that they were living in the
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time of the Antichrist and would participate in the scenario of the book of Revelations.
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This is psychosis if you meet it in a person
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if you meet it in a culture
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it’s called religious piety
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and conviction
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and it has been going on so long
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that it has actually created
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a very narrow neck
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in the historical process
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that cannot be avoided. We now have no choice
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in the matter of business as usual. There will not apparently be business as usual.
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There will either be an apocalyptic destruction of the planet, a kind of Ragnarok, a Gotterdammerung, a complete
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storm of fire brought on by the eruption of the psychotic mythologies that have driven
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the matter-centered monotheistic male ego culture.
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Or there will be a plucking of victory from the jaws of that defeat, and not an apocalypse, but a kind of cultural’s work, The Chalice and the Blade.
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If you haven’t read this book, I recommend it to you.
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For psychedelic people, for feminists, for people concerned with the state of society, this is certainly an important book. And what she’s saying is partnership.
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an important book. And what she’s saying is partnership. It is not true that the
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story of the human race is the story of a pendulum swing
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between matriarchy and patriarchy, each with its own
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flaws. Rather, it is that human beings
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have always lived in an equilibrium
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style partnership society,
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except during the last 8,000 years,
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this pattern has been disrupted by the rise of the male ego,
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the suppression of the logos-like connection to nature,
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of the logos-like connection to nature and a certain evolutionary path
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taken in the epigenetic coding of information.
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In other words, the phonetic alphabet.
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The phonetic alphabet, which has no reference
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to the icon of the things expressed is utterly cool
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utterly unable then to give you any feeling of engagement which with what is being described. This gives permission for analytical science
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and the detachment of rationalism
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and the sorts of philosophies that have created
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the tremendous split between head and heart
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that characterizes the political systems
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of the last several hundred years.
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Well, this thing which the shamans are contacting,
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which we can call another dimension, hyperspace,
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the collective unconscious, whatever it is,
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it is the ground of our becoming.
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And the only way to sort of unhitch ourselves
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from the ego
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is to open pathways of communication
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to this invisible field of intentionality
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in which we are embedded.
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And this is a very difficult task
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because the culture in which we are embedded. And this is a very difficult task because the culture in which we live
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denies that this thing even exists.
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I mean, if you start saying
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that you feel the heartbeat of the planet
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or that you are in resonance
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with the local ecosystem
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or still worse,
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if you say that you hear the voices
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of elves and fairies
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this is psychopathy automatically you know you have to be observed sedated and
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cured because you’re participating in a model of reality that is not
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consensually validated nevertheless I think what we’re trying to do with meetings like this
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is empower this particular meme, empower this idea. I can’t remember who developed the idea of memes,
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but it’s basically the notion that ideas compete with each other the way animals and plants compete in an ecosystem,
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that ideas adapt and spread and occupy niches and defend territory and redefine environments.
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And so my mentioning last night of the woman who said to me,
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I thought I was crazy until I heard you speak,
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for me that is really the nugget of this work
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and the most satisfying kind of comment that anybody could make
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because what has happened since the 1960s
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because what has happened since the 1960s is the straight people all went off together.
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And by this I don’t refer to sexual preference.
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I use straight in the earlier sense.
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The straight people all went off and became very weird together you know with their golden mercedes and their picasso ceramics and all that uh the freaks all went off and became strange alone
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each apart in our own way because community was shattered, affinity groups were suppressed,
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people went all kinds of directions. Now, the people who went through the 60s,
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approaching or in their 40s, have had 20 years to see how they like that kind of
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years to see how they like that kind of uh alienated aloneness and so this morning as we went around i heard many people saying uh uh you know that they had done these things in the 60s
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but not for a long time and now they were returning to it i think this is because it finally dawns on you that, you know, this may be the only
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shot you’ve got at it. I mean, reincarnation is fine, past lives are fine, but we’re all getting
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daily older, and we don’t know where we came from, you know, what lies beyond the zygote. And we don’t know where we’re going,
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what lies beyond the pine box,
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who can say.
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So out of the incredible mystery
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of whatever the universe is,
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a microsecond of opportunity
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against impossible odds
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has sprung into being.
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We are embedded in that moment of opportunity so what are you going to do with it are you going to sweep up around the ashram for 30 years and
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then decide that that was a mistake or you know are you going to just give yourself over to the arms of holy mother church
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for a lifetime i mean people do this you cannot escape making some kind of commitment to something
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nobody gets through life without being asked to to sign up either in their own club or somebody else’s.
00:23:07 ►
The mushroom said to me once, in the way that it does when it delivers these aphorisms,
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it said, you must have a plan.
00:23:19 ►
If you have no plan, you will become part of somebody else’s plan.
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You either have a plan or you are part of somebody else’s plan.
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And so I think people are waking up to the fact that we must use what works.
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Because you see someone on this side of the room, when we went around,
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Because you see, someone on this side of the room, when we went around, talked about yoga and how the psychedelic gives the experience on demand, but are we ready and how do you gain skills and this sort of thing.
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To my mind, the goal is not the psychedelic experience.
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The beginning of the path is the psychedelic experience. The beginning of the path is the psychedelic experience.
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So if yoga promises that after 20 years
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it will deliver you to the beginning of the path,
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then there’s something seriously wrong here.
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The psychedelic sets you
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at the beginning of the path.
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And then people do all kinds of things with it.
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I mean, I am amazed.
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I feel there is more variation in how we deal with this
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than in almost any other phase of human activity.
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Because some people seem to have almost no self-reflection.
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And I’ve noticed it also touches sexuality
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because I don’t know how many of you have ever encountered
00:24:53 ►
the Penthouse Forum.
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But this is where people write into Penthouse
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and detail these astonishing sexual,
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unpredictable sexual exploits, threesomes, foursomes, and twelvesomes that just fell upon them.
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And whenever I have, for some reason, some occasion to read these things,
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what is amazing to me is that this appears to be descriptions of the behavior of an alien species
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because there is no self-reflection on what does this mean?
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You know, what does this mean that I get stuck in an elevator and end up copulating with 12 stockbrokers?
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It’s just accepted as how it is well you get this same thing with
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psychedelics where you say to someone and they say oh yeah and the night in the 60s i took psychedelics
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you know wow it was really strange all these colors and and voices and voices and apparently no self-reflection,
00:26:08 ►
no realization that this is actually happening to you.
00:26:14 ►
This is happening to you.
00:26:18 ►
Therefore, the implications must be fairly central.
00:26:24 ►
And then other people immediately get it.
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They say, you know, my gosh, this plant, this pill shows me that reality is at least a thousand times larger than I thought it was.
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Showed me that I don’t know who I am, where I am, what I am, or anything else.
00:26:47 ►
And I don’t know what it takes to instill that in people.
00:26:52 ►
Maybe intellectual self-reflection.
00:26:55 ►
One of the things that is so puzzling about shamans
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when you actually deal with them in the field
00:27:01 ►
is they are not like the other people in the tribe.
00:27:07 ►
The other people in the tribe are very tribal people. In other words, they have all the curious
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cultural limitations of people in every culture. They think you smell funny. They think you look funny. Everything you do is amusing.
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They stand around in small groups giggling and pointing and like that.
00:27:33 ►
The shamans, on the other hand, it’s nothing like that.
00:27:38 ►
They accept you totally as a person.
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They make no cultural judgments.
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You don’t look funny, smell funny, so forth and so on,
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because they are what I call extra-environmentalists.
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They are deconditioned from the assumptions of their own culture.
00:28:01 ►
So they may be the Witoto shaman,
00:28:04 ►
but the Witoto shaman, but the Witoto
00:28:05 ►
shaman is less Witoto than any other
00:28:08 ►
Witoto, because the Witoto shaman
00:28:11 ►
operates in the context of Witotoness
00:28:15 ►
embedded in the
00:28:17 ►
larger reality. And so
00:28:20 ►
I think what we need to do when we try to
00:28:23 ►
revivify shamanism in our own lives is recover the profound reality of what it’s doing.
00:28:36 ►
Sometimes I have flashes when I’m giving these talks of how different it is to be stoned than to talk about being stoned.
00:28:48 ►
I mean, here we sit, you know,
00:28:51 ►
in our cotton underwear,
00:28:54 ►
just with our, where we came from,
00:28:59 ►
our schedules in front of us.
00:29:02 ►
The mundaneness of it is so all-pervasive. And we could be discussing
00:29:09 ►
Gnosticism or a political action project, but we’re discussing instead something really appalling,
00:29:18 ►
I think. I mean, we’re calmly discussing the fact that there is another world overlapping our own,
00:29:28 ►
and very few people will even admit the fact.
00:29:32 ►
So I always think, and this is my symbol of myself, to myself,
00:29:39 ►
I always think of a wonderful B science fiction movie I saw when I was a kid,
00:29:49 ►
where there’s a dinosaur in the swamp,
00:29:53 ►
and it’s set somewhere in Mexico,
00:30:01 ►
and the typical campesino is sent by the patron of the ranch to gather firewood in the jungle. And he, of course, encounters this extremely large rubber reptile
00:30:09 ►
roaring around and then comes back to the ranch
00:30:13 ►
and is pointing back in the woods
00:30:16 ►
and is completely inarticulate trying to say,
00:30:20 ►
you know, a creature from the id, a beast from another dimension is rampaging around in the forest.
00:30:27 ►
Well, they just dismiss him as, you know, these peasants, they believe anything, you can’t trust them for a moment.
00:30:35 ►
This is the sort of situation we’re in.
00:30:58 ►
The extraterrestrial invasion that so many people anticipate or the extraterrestrial contact that so many people hope for and that sells so many cheap newspapers is well underway.
00:31:06 ►
It’s simply that the words we have to describe it are utterly inadequate. So words like extraterrestrial invasion, contact with an intelligent species,
00:31:13 ►
end of history, migration into hyperspace,
00:31:17 ►
these are pathetic signifiers of what is actually happening to us.
00:31:26 ►
signifiers of what is actually happening to us. What is actually happening to us is pretty darn hard to wrap your mind around. We are caught in a vortex of concrescence and
00:31:37 ►
compression that was set in motion at least as early as the melting of the last glaciation. We are reaping the fruits of 10,000, 50,000 years of sowing of the fields of mind,
00:31:56 ►
and it is being dropped into our laps for us to create human-machine interfacing,
00:32:04 ►
to create human-machine interfacing,
00:32:07 ►
control of genetic material,
00:32:12 ►
redefinition of social reality,
00:32:15 ►
re-engineering of languages,
00:32:19 ►
re-visioning of the planetary ecology.
00:32:22 ►
All these things fall upon us. And for us to be worthy of it, for us to make sense of it,
00:32:27 ►
for us to be anything other than victimized by the 20th century,
00:32:32 ►
we need, I think, to reach back into time and to anchor ourselves with the transcendent mystery,
00:32:44 ►
anchor ourselves with the transcendent mystery, which is somehow tied up with our own being,
00:32:49 ►
somehow present on the planet,
00:32:51 ►
but mostly a large list of unanswered questions.
00:32:57 ►
We don’t know what is going on on this planet.
00:33:01 ►
We don’t know why there is life here,
00:33:03 ►
whether it’s an accident, somebody’s plan. We don’t know why there is life here, whether it’s an accident, somebody’s plan.
00:33:06 ►
We don’t know why intelligence is here.
00:33:09 ►
Again, accident, plan,
00:33:11 ►
if plan, whose plan,
00:33:13 ►
if plan, for what,
00:33:16 ►
if plan, where are we in the plan?
00:33:19 ►
I mean, we all tend,
00:33:23 ►
when we abandon ourselves to cultural values,
00:33:26 ►
to focus in so tightly that we lose the big picture.
00:33:30 ►
And if psychedelics are anything, they are a zoom lens back to the broadest possible point of view.
00:33:50 ►
possible point of view. Well, why don’t we stop there and take a just a 10-minute break or something and then we’ll come back and do dialogue on this. So why
00:34:01 ►
don’t we use the rest of this morning to see if we’re getting oriented right
00:34:07 ►
and to just discuss any questions you have
00:34:11 ►
or anything that comes up for you out of this so far.
00:34:17 ►
Does anybody have anything?
00:34:20 ►
I was curious about what you were talking about with extraterrestrials
00:34:24 ►
and not having the appropriate language to really discuss it
00:34:28 ►
and your view of what’s going on.
00:34:34 ►
Can you put it in words so that we can hear it?
00:34:38 ►
Well, it changes for me all the time.
00:34:44 ►
I mean, I don’t have a point of view,
00:34:47 ►
and my primary job is not public speaking or writing, but exploring.
00:34:54 ►
When I first started taking mushrooms,
00:34:57 ►
and throughout the 70s when we wrote The Mushroom Grower’s Guide,
00:35:04 ►
I held several opinions but my most strongly held
00:35:08 ►
opinion was it actually is an extraterrestrial just no shit flat out it is an extraterrestrial
00:35:19 ►
and what’s surprising to me is that uh a single mushroom trip of a certain sort could probably put me right back there again.
00:35:55 ►
is a kind of process of coming down from the real assimilatable context of the experience.
00:35:59 ►
It’s like an extraterrestrial.
00:36:07 ►
I mean, I would certainly say this. If extraterrestrials appeared over Washington and Moscow tomorrow,
00:36:13 ►
it wouldn’t make this any less mysterious or puzzling.
00:36:18 ►
In fact, the extraterrestrials might turn out to be mundane.
00:36:20 ►
This is not.
00:36:26 ►
How it speaks, this is the most astonishing thing for me to get used to
00:36:30 ►
I mean the visual hallucinations
00:36:32 ►
somehow I can work it around
00:36:35 ►
that these are floods of imagery set off
00:36:38 ►
from deep structures of the brain
00:36:40 ►
and dumping of memory banks
00:36:42 ►
but that it can just address you in real time
00:36:48 ►
and say, Terrence, you know,
00:36:52 ►
and then proceed to blow my mind.
00:36:56 ►
The only, and now several things may be happening here,
00:37:02 ►
the only time when we have the experience
00:37:06 ►
of focusing on an incoming message,
00:37:10 ►
decoding it in real time,
00:37:12 ►
and responding to it immediately
00:37:15 ►
is when we have a conversation with someone.
00:37:20 ►
So if you find yourself responding to a message in real time, your brain automatically thinks you’re having a conversation.
00:37:32 ►
Saying, you know, if it looks like a duck, if it walks like a duck, it must be a duck.
00:37:37 ►
So here I am listening and responding to someone speaking to me in English, therefore this must be a conversation.
00:37:48 ►
There are physical arguments
00:37:51 ►
for viewing the mushroom as extraterrestrial.
00:37:55 ►
First of all, what is psilocybin?
00:37:59 ►
Psilocybin is 4-phosphoriloxy-NN-dimethyltryptamine.
00:38:04 ►
Of all the endo compounds in nature, of all the endo compounds in nature,
00:38:13 ►
only psilocybin is hydroxylated at the 4 position.
00:38:21 ►
Well, now, if you were to design a computer program to search Earth, to search the life forms of Earth for evidence of extraterrestrial origin, one of the things you would tell this program to do is look for unusual molecules that have no apparent cousins or relatives among other organisms.
00:38:45 ►
Well, here is psilocybin, phosphorylated in the four position.
00:38:50 ►
Nothing else on Earth is.
00:38:53 ►
A material argument for its origin outside of the terrestrial ecosystem.
00:39:02 ►
A slightly different argument that would see the mushroom as extraterrestrial is
00:39:09 ►
look at its style, for want of a better word. I mean, what is a mushroom? First of all,
00:39:19 ►
they reproduce by spores. Spores are the most economical biological unit imaginable.
00:39:28 ►
They can survive the radiation levels of interstellar space.
00:39:33 ►
They can survive for eons under conditions very close to those encountered in deep space.
00:39:42 ►
The mushroom spore falls into an ecosystem, immediately undergoes cell division.
00:39:52 ►
A fine thread-like network full of neurotransmitters begins to spread itself through the soil.
00:40:00 ►
It’s very closely analogous to the neural network of a higher animal, including a human being.
00:40:08 ►
Now, we’re accustomed to thinking that an extraterrestrial would bear the imprint of the evolutionary situation in which it came to be.
00:40:21 ►
In other words, if it evolved on a low gravity planet, it will be tall
00:40:28 ►
and thin. If it evolved in a methane atmosphere, it will have an exotic body chemistry and so forth.
00:40:34 ►
But that’s because we ourselves have possessed the knowledge of how DNA works for only about
00:40:41 ►
40 years. It’s reasonable to assume, I think, that if an intelligent species
00:40:47 ►
gets a thousand years of study of DNA, that they can design themselves to be however they
00:40:57 ►
care to be. And in fact, if you think of the mushroom from that point of view, I think that we might choose that kind of an adaptation
00:41:09 ►
if we could have any form we wanted, because it’s very non-invasive,
00:41:16 ►
very humbly insinuates itself into a situation and grows essentially on waste material in the soil, yet when it sporulates,
00:41:26 ►
it can actually cross the boundary of outer space.
00:41:32 ►
And, you know, great economy, great artistry, tremendous zen-like aesthetics seem expressed in the mushroom if you view it as a designed piece of work
00:41:47 ►
rather than an object in the environment.
00:41:50 ►
And then finally, of course,
00:41:52 ►
the major argument for the extraterrestrial origin of the mushroom,
00:41:57 ►
but it’s an insider argument,
00:42:00 ►
is the content of the experience.
00:42:03 ►
Number one, it says it’s an extraterrestrial organism,
00:42:08 ►
and it has the data to back up the claim.
00:42:13 ►
It can show you movies of desert worlds, jungle worlds,
00:42:20 ►
high-pressure, high-gravity methane worlds,
00:42:23 ►
planets whose cores are helium-4,
00:42:29 ►
and worlds where you don’t know whether you’re inside an organism
00:42:33 ►
or inside some kind of piece of machinery,
00:42:37 ►
whether you’re under the surface of a planet.
00:42:39 ►
I mean, literally things that our minds just stop in the presence of.
00:42:48 ►
So to me, that’s really the interesting thing about the mushroom,
00:42:52 ►
is that it can be as friendly as it needs to be
00:42:56 ►
and can even reassure you with a Disney-esque burlesque of dancing flowers
00:43:03 ►
and pirouetting pink elephants
00:43:06 ►
but once you are comfortable with it
00:43:10 ►
and enter the dialogue
00:43:11 ►
and begin to get to know it
00:43:14 ►
getting to know it is an appalling experience
00:43:18 ►
because you can say to it
00:43:21 ►
show me a little more
00:43:23 ►
of who you are for yourself and then you know a veil is lifted
00:43:30 ►
and your jaw just drops and then you say show me a little more of who you and that’s enough
00:43:36 ►
of who you are for yourself because and you wonder you know while this thing is talking to me, is it talking, is, how engaged is the
00:43:48 ►
mushroom by me? Is it, is all of its attention focused upon me when I’m talking to it the way
00:43:55 ►
all of my attention is focused back on it? Or is it like a multi-user computer system? Is it able
00:44:02 ►
to simultaneously deal with huge numbers of organisms? What is the
00:44:07 ►
relationship of psilocybin to the inner life of the mushroom? Is it stoned all the time?
00:44:15 ►
Why does it want, why is it so important that these indole compounds get lodged in the nervous system of mammals.
00:44:26 ►
It’s almost as though it’s a symbiotic relationship,
00:44:30 ►
that the mushroom does not truly live its life unless it is taken,
00:44:39 ►
unless its unique molecular component can find its way into the synapses
00:44:46 ►
of a self-reflecting higher animal.
00:44:50 ►
Well, then, what are we for for it?
00:44:55 ►
And, you know, you can ask these questions.
00:44:57 ►
Well, I think that it’s preserving.
00:44:59 ►
Like, they don’t, you know, they don’t impose themselves on us.
00:45:03 ►
You have to approach them.
00:45:06 ►
Yes, they usually, one reason I think people have had trouble confirming
00:45:10 ►
the animate and intelligent quality of the mushroom is you must ask.
00:45:18 ►
You know, you just don’t take psilocybin and sit there because it won’t do it.
00:45:22 ►
But if you take psilocybin and call it,
00:45:26 ►
in some sense, whatever that means,
00:45:29 ►
invoke, call, try to visualize,
00:45:35 ►
then it will begin to come towards you
00:45:38 ►
and lift these veils.
00:45:41 ►
And this world of zany, pun-like,
00:45:48 ►
hyper-dimensional intelligence that is revealed is as strange as an extraterrestrial would be this is i guess the final content of evidence
00:45:56 ►
for the extraterrestrial origin is the fact that it just seems so different from anything one could conceive of or imagine.
00:46:06 ►
I mean, you cannot, in one of these volleys of hallucination,
00:46:12 ►
convince yourself, this is only me.
00:46:16 ►
These are my memories, or these are distorted transforms of past experience because you know i was uh i was trained as an art historian
00:46:27 ►
to have an eye for stylistic difference and cohesion of of a set of aesthetic canons
00:46:37 ►
and it just blows my mind i mean there is more art locked up in these things to be viewed in a single hour than the human race has produced
00:46:47 ►
in 10,000 years. I mean, an art of a compelling, weird, breathtaking, awesome quality that just
00:46:59 ►
breathes in every pore of itself, you know, this is the other. This is not you.
00:47:05 ►
Don’t be deceived, my little primate friend.
00:47:12 ►
Yeah.
00:47:13 ►
It seems like our popular culture
00:47:14 ►
has had an inkling to that.
00:47:15 ►
Because if you look at the movies that came out
00:47:17 ►
between 1952 and 1962,
00:47:20 ►
so many of the sci-fi movies
00:47:21 ►
are about spores from outer space
00:47:23 ►
and plants coming down.
00:47:24 ►
And these are from very straight people who hadn’t taken psychedelics at all.
00:47:28 ►
They were like tuning in to what was about to come 10 or 15 years later.
00:47:32 ►
Well, I think, and I’m, so far as I know, pretty alone in this opinion,
00:47:38 ►
that information actually, a very small percentage of information
00:47:44 ►
is able to tunnel backward through time, that there is a very small counterflow to the forward movement of causal efficacy.
00:48:04 ►
is going into that hyper-dimensional place and picking up this thin, thin signal from the future
00:48:09 ►
and tuning it in.
00:48:11 ►
This is why prophecy and seership and all of that
00:48:16 ►
has to do with states of ecstasy and intoxication.
00:48:21 ►
One way of viewing all religion and all spiritual metaphor making is as an
00:48:33 ►
anticipation of the future. These Western religions have this apocalyptic transformation
00:48:41 ►
built into them almost as a self-fulfilling prophecy in other words they
00:48:48 ►
believe the world is going to end because the world is going to end and since the melting of
00:48:55 ►
the glaciers people of sufficient sensitivity have heard through a vast wall of stochastic noise coming from the future the thin, reedy broadcast
00:49:08 ►
station of the true vision of the future. And this seems to be one of the things that you can do
00:49:16 ►
with these psychedelics is tune this in. You know, it’s a cliche, and I’m sure you’ve heard it, that artists are society’s antenna for change,
00:49:28 ►
that artists are supposed to be somehow more sensitive than the rest of us, and they pick up
00:49:37 ►
the new design forms, the evolving aesthetic canons, and then translate it into society for the rest of us.
00:49:45 ►
Well, that gains a little more bite if you substitute shaman for artist
00:49:51 ►
and realize that this may not be a metaphor.
00:49:55 ►
It may not be simply because they pursue bohemian lifestyles
00:50:00 ►
and are willing to accept poverty for a life of free thinking and so forth,
00:50:05 ►
that isn’t what’s allowing an anticipation of the future.
00:50:09 ►
What’s happening is there truly is an anticipation of the future.
00:50:15 ►
And visionaries like William Blake or the author of Revelations, are actually people who,
00:50:25 ►
by virtue of some fortuitous confluence of circumstance,
00:50:30 ►
space, time, and genetic constitution,
00:50:34 ►
are able to draw these messages out.
00:50:37 ►
What is startling is that apparently
00:50:40 ►
this is fairly ordinary in psychedelic states.
00:50:46 ►
That, in fact, one way of thinking of psychedelics is
00:50:51 ►
you begin to move through time when you put them into your life.
00:50:58 ►
I don’t mean while the trip is happening.
00:51:02 ►
I mean ever after.
00:51:05 ►
I mean, if you’re living with a 1960s-style mind
00:51:09 ►
and you have a strong psychedelic experience,
00:51:12 ►
you will come down with a 1970s mind
00:51:15 ►
or perhaps a 2040-style mind.
00:51:19 ►
Mind is a temporal style.
00:51:25 ►
It’s important to have this information
00:51:28 ►
and to have it at your fingertips.
00:51:32 ►
People, the compartmentalization
00:51:35 ►
between areas of knowledge that impinge on this
00:51:39 ►
always amazes me.
00:51:41 ►
I mean, you get psychologists
00:51:44 ►
who don’t know what an MAO inhibitor is. You get people combining things without knowing how drug synergies work. You get people, you know, just not informing themselves on the importance of setting, dosage, psychic predisposition, so forth and so on,
00:52:11 ►
all vital matters that can impinge on how an experience develops.
00:52:21 ►
And if you will take the time to inform yourself you will feel
00:52:26 ►
much more sure of what you’re doing and that in itself can alleviate to
00:52:32 ►
confusion and negative reactions well so then I thought what I would do is sort
00:52:42 ►
of go around the world and talk about these things a little
00:52:47 ►
to give you an idea of what is available,
00:52:49 ►
what’s on the menu.
00:52:52 ►
And then we’ll take a little break,
00:52:54 ►
a very short break,
00:52:56 ►
and then come back and talk about it.
00:53:00 ►
Sure, absolutely.
00:53:01 ►
Did I hear you correctly
00:53:03 ►
that the liquid DMSO,
00:53:08 ►
drinking five to seven ounces a day for five days precipitates a psychedelic experience?
00:53:17 ►
No, did I say DMSO?
00:53:19 ►
That’s what I was wondering. Is it DMSO?
00:53:21 ►
No, it isn’t DMSO. If if i said that i didn’t mean to it’s di ethyl di
00:53:27 ►
dimethyl acetamide oh i thought you said sulfoxide i may have said sulfoxide dimethyl acetamide
00:53:37 ►
and i can show you the record here you just well i’m raving you just look it up in there
00:53:42 ►
find it and satisfy yourself.
00:53:45 ►
Sure.
00:53:46 ►
Yeah.
00:53:46 ►
Before you start, could you explain the difference between psychoactive, psychotropic, and psychedelic?
00:53:50 ►
Because I don’t understand what they mean.
00:53:52 ►
Yeah, if I can.
00:53:55 ►
Psychoactive means exactly what it implies,
00:53:59 ►
that you can detect this compound as a higher cortical experience.
00:54:05 ►
That’s all.
00:54:07 ►
I mean, to my mind, a higher cortical experience is a shift of mood,
00:54:14 ►
depression, elation, acute hearing, sensitivity to noises.
00:54:22 ►
All of these things could be classed as psychoactive reactions
00:54:27 ►
to a compound. Psychotropic is a word that I’ve never been very fond of, and it sort
00:54:35 ►
of came in late. Psychedelic, which is a fairly maligned word but was coined by the psychiatrist Humphrey Osmond
00:54:47 ►
means simply mind manifesting
00:54:53 ►
and I like that because it’s phenomenologically neutral
00:54:58 ►
now some people have tried to push the word entheogen
00:55:02 ►
for these things
00:55:04 ►
meaning literally God inducing to push the word entheogen for these things,
00:55:08 ►
meaning literally God-inducing.
00:55:10 ►
But to my mind,
00:55:12 ►
this carries a huge amount of ideological freight
00:55:14 ►
that we may not wish to buy into.
00:55:17 ►
I mean, maybe it’s God-inducing,
00:55:19 ►
maybe it isn’t.
00:55:20 ►
But psychedelic,
00:55:23 ►
meaning mind-manifesting, is pretty good.
00:55:27 ►
And then if all of these make you uncomfortable,
00:55:30 ►
you can just fall back on a completely phenomenological description
00:55:34 ►
and call them consciousness-expanding drugs.
00:55:38 ►
But there are drugs that I would not, for instance, I don’t consider,
00:55:43 ►
well, I certainly don’t consider alcohol a psychedelic, but clearly a psychoactive.
00:55:52 ►
Well, marijuana is one of these things that’s so widely variant, both in how people react to it and how strong it can be.
00:56:01 ►
I would call MDMA a psychoactive drug, not a psychedelic drug.
00:56:07 ►
And then I use the word hallucinogen a lot. And a lot of people don’t like that, even
00:56:15 ►
people in the field, and say, well, hallucinogen seems to imply that it’s an illusion, but not in my mind. I don’t hear that.
00:56:25 ►
I’m fascinated by hallucinations.
00:56:29 ►
I mean, to me,
00:56:30 ►
that is the sine qua non
00:56:32 ►
that you’re getting somewhere,
00:56:35 ►
I guess because it’s just
00:56:36 ►
my philosophical biases.
00:56:39 ►
But a hallucination,
00:56:41 ►
it’s such an extraordinary concept,
00:56:43 ►
isn’t it?
00:56:44 ►
To see something which isn’t there.
00:56:46 ►
And I don’t mean to misread a surface so that you think it sticks into the room,
00:56:53 ►
which in fact sticks out of the room or something.
00:56:56 ►
I mean seeing something that is not there.
00:56:59 ►
And then that divides into two classes.
00:57:03 ►
Seeing an ordinary object
00:57:05 ►
which is not there
00:57:07 ►
and I think this is what most people think a hallucination is
00:57:11 ►
here is a bicycle
00:57:12 ►
is it real or not
00:57:14 ►
the drug crazed victim cannot tell
00:57:18 ►
but most hallucinations are of things
00:57:22 ►
which can only be hallucinations, because that’s what they are, you know.
00:57:29 ►
And so they have this aura of the unexpected and the other and the intrusive alien-ness.
00:57:38 ►
People have claimed to me that they have seen objects which are not there, which are completely ordinary.
00:57:42 ►
that they have seen objects which are not there,
00:57:44 ►
which are completely ordinary.
00:57:49 ►
That is more typical of accounts of detour users,
00:57:54 ►
people who take high molecular weight tropanes,
00:57:57 ►
such as occur in gymson weed and those kind of things.
00:58:01 ►
But my brief experimentation with that is it is what I call a deliriant rather than a psychoactive.
00:58:08 ►
I mean, when you take the tour, you are so messed up that you can’t, you literally lose
00:58:14 ►
all discrimination.
00:58:16 ►
Yeah, belladonna.
00:58:17 ►
You can’t tell exactly where you are.
00:58:21 ►
You can’t tell thinking about being somewhere from being there. Well, you’re
00:58:27 ►
in no shape to undertake a spiritual quest if you’re that discombobulated. So what I
00:58:36 ►
like are the things which do not destroy what I call core functions. In other words, there is still an evidence-gathering, observing mind left intact,
00:58:50 ►
and the disruption of perceptual input, if you want to put it that way,
00:58:59 ►
is pretty much confined to the visual cortex,
00:59:03 ►
and then to the metaphor-forming capacity that is relating to the visual cortex and then to the metaphor
00:59:05 ►
forming capacity that is
00:59:07 ►
relating to the visual cortex
00:59:09 ►
but I don’t like
00:59:11 ►
things which confuse you
00:59:13 ►
which impair judgment
00:59:16 ►
what about
00:59:18 ►
sativa divinera
00:59:19 ►
salvia divinorum
00:59:21 ►
well that’s
00:59:24 ►
an obscure one
00:59:26 ►
about which not much is known
00:59:28 ►
although in the past year
00:59:30 ►
they’ve learned the absolute chemical
00:59:32 ►
characterization of the psychoactive
00:59:34 ►
compound which is called
00:59:36 ►
salvorine alpha
00:59:37 ►
more work has to be done
00:59:42 ►
anthropologists
00:59:44 ►
who have taken it with Indians in Oaxaca
00:59:48 ►
describe a very intense experience.
00:59:53 ►
When we grew it in Hawaii
00:59:54 ►
and took it exactly the way these people said to do it,
01:00:00 ►
it was an experience,
01:00:02 ►
but it was not clear whether it was psychedelic
01:00:07 ►
or merely so
01:00:08 ►
physiologically active
01:00:10 ►
in such a complex way
01:00:12 ►
that you couldn’t tell exactly what was going on
01:00:14 ►
the impression
01:00:15 ►
which was not mine
01:00:17 ►
but Kat’s
01:00:20 ►
and a beloved Dean
01:00:22 ►
they both experienced uh flow they described the experiences as though
01:00:32 ►
you were lying in a dirty ditch with this cold fluid flowing from the top of your head to the
01:00:40 ►
bottom of your feet and where this kind of cold clammy fluid encountered energy
01:00:47 ►
obstructions in your body it would wash them away but it was a kind of vertigo with nausea with
01:00:57 ►
i mean it was a complex uh experience but it was not largely mental.
01:01:06 ►
It was more a revisioning of the body image.
01:01:10 ►
And this is another one of these things where no research has been done.
01:01:16 ►
It isn’t illegal, salvia divinorum,
01:01:19 ►
but you’re not going to do your career any good to get tangled up with this.
01:01:24 ►
So consequently, it’s pretty much left alone.
01:01:27 ►
Salvorin alpha is extremely unstable and breaks down within 12 hours.
01:01:33 ►
So that indicates it’s probably a polyhydric alcohol or an isoquinone or something like that.
01:01:39 ►
It’s not an indole.
01:01:42 ►
Yeah.
01:01:43 ►
I’m curious.
01:01:44 ►
And Watson talks about
01:01:45 ►
entheans versus hallucinogens,
01:01:47 ►
and he’s really against the word
01:01:49 ►
hallucinogen.
01:01:51 ►
Yeah, he’s the one who proposed
01:01:52 ►
entheogen.
01:01:53 ►
Entheogen, right.
01:01:54 ►
And so,
01:01:56 ►
because his theory was, I guess,
01:01:57 ►
that he thought that
01:01:58 ►
a hallucination was something
01:01:59 ►
that wasn’t there completely,
01:02:01 ►
and he thought that the experience
01:02:02 ►
on the soma or the mushroom
01:02:03 ►
was something that you actually are experiencing, so it’s not a hallucination, it’s real.
01:02:09 ►
Yeah, that was what he said. But if you actually look at the etymology of the word hallucination,
01:02:17 ►
what it’s come to mean in English is a delusion. A delusion. But what it really means
01:02:25 ►
in the original language
01:02:27 ►
is to wander in the mind.
01:02:31 ►
That’s the meaning of hallucination,
01:02:33 ►
to wander in the mind.
01:02:35 ►
Well, that’s a pretty good
01:02:36 ►
operational description
01:02:38 ►
of what’s happening.
01:02:39 ►
And then when you add in
01:02:40 ►
the visual component,
01:02:43 ►
I don’t know.
01:02:45 ►
It’s hard for me to imagine
01:02:46 ►
how someone could undervalue hallucinations
01:02:49 ►
if they had had them.
01:02:51 ►
Yeah, it sounds like it was reacting to the 60s hoopla
01:02:54 ►
a lot, the hoopla over LSD
01:02:58 ►
and the misreading of what these experiences really were, too.
01:03:01 ►
Well, these guys were very frustrated
01:03:05 ►
with seeing this thing
01:03:08 ►
turned into a social hysteria.
01:03:11 ►
And Wasson, you know,
01:03:12 ►
at times expressed great
01:03:14 ►
unhappiness with Tim Leary’s
01:03:16 ►
approach and hated
01:03:18 ►
going to Mexico and seeing
01:03:19 ►
these mushroom villages invaded
01:03:22 ►
by graffiti-covered
01:03:24 ►
vans of filthy freaks from Southern California
01:03:28 ►
who were disrupting the local ecology.
01:03:31 ►
And it was a kind of proprietary approach.
01:03:35 ►
This thing belongs to anthropologists, to specialists.
01:03:41 ►
Watson was very reticent to assess his own work.
01:03:46 ►
Some of you may have seen Bob Forte’s interview with him
01:03:50 ►
in that psychedelic issue of revision,
01:03:53 ►
where Forte asks him,
01:03:55 ►
how do you assess the historical impact of your work?
01:03:59 ►
And he said, I’ll leave that to others to decide.
01:04:03 ►
He didn’t want to deal with the question
01:04:07 ►
of the potential impact on his own society.
01:04:11 ►
He really looked at it as this exotic, foreign kind of thing.
01:04:16 ►
These guys were cautious, this first generation.
01:04:20 ►
Hoffman, Wasson, Schultes.
01:04:23 ►
These guys are not stoners by any means.
01:04:28 ►
I mean, their approach is cautious
01:04:29 ►
and the psychedelic experiences can be counted
01:04:32 ►
on the fingers of one hand in a lifetime.
01:04:35 ►
So I’m not sure they ever realized the size of the tiger
01:04:39 ►
whose tail they had seized.
01:04:44 ►
Yeah.
01:04:45 ►
The DMT and the frog, whatever it is,
01:04:49 ►
how is that extracted?
01:04:50 ►
I mean, how, that frog slime or whatever it is?
01:04:54 ►
Toad.
01:04:55 ►
Yeah, right.
01:04:56 ►
Okay, now I want to know about that.
01:04:58 ►
Well, I haven’t had the good fortune to be present
01:05:02 ►
with the milking,
01:05:04 ►
so I really couldn’t say,
01:05:06 ►
but as I gather you put pressure on the back of the neck in two places
01:05:10 ►
and this exudate emerges exactly where, I’m not sure,
01:05:16 ►
and probably decency should safely, scarcely inquire.
01:05:23 ►
And then it’s dried on sheets of glass and scraped up and packaged and so forth well let me start
01:05:31 ►
through this and give you a notion of what is available whenever you talk about the the
01:05:36 ►
distribution and cultural usage of hallucinogens the first thing that you come up against is a curious, unsolved problem in botany,
01:05:46 ►
which is no one knows why this is,
01:05:51 ►
and we would be grateful if somebody could figure it out.
01:05:55 ►
But for unknown reasons,
01:05:57 ►
there is a tremendous concentration of psychoactive plants on the South American continent.
01:06:04 ►
of psychoactive plants on the South American continent. The South American continent has more known hallucinogens
01:06:08 ►
than the rest of the planet combined.
01:06:12 ►
Now, why is this?
01:06:13 ►
After all, the climax tropical rainforests of eastern Indonesia
01:06:17 ►
are at least as species-rich as the Amazon basin,
01:06:22 ►
and yet not a single powerful hallucinogen
01:06:26 ►
is known with certainty from the old world tropics.
01:06:31 ►
All kinds of suggestions have been made
01:06:34 ►
that actually there are psychedelic plants
01:06:38 ►
common throughout the tropics of the old world,
01:06:41 ►
but the cultures have lost contact with them
01:06:44 ►
and forgotten them,
01:06:46 ►
and hence our anthropologists have not discovered them.
01:06:50 ►
Or something in the soil of South America.
01:06:54 ►
Very improbable theory.
01:06:58 ►
I was talking about this once in a workshop
01:07:00 ►
and somebody raised their hand and said,
01:07:02 ►
well, no problem.
01:07:04 ►
Obviously that’s where the spaceship landed.
01:07:08 ►
Good. Well, we’ve solved that problem.
01:07:11 ►
Now we can move on.
01:07:12 ►
North America is extraordinarily poor in hallucinogens,
01:07:18 ►
perhaps the poorest of all continents,
01:07:20 ►
so that the psychedelic phobia that Europe created against paganism was completely reinforced, or at least not eroded, by the colonization of the New World or of North America, because there were no plants here to challenge that. The North American Indians tend to ordeal
01:07:46 ►
as a shamanic vehicle,
01:07:48 ►
the sun dance thing
01:07:50 ►
some of you may be familiar with,
01:07:52 ►
or sonic driving,
01:07:54 ►
which is worldwide
01:07:55 ►
in shamanically oriented cultures
01:07:58 ►
without drugs.
01:08:00 ►
You should know
01:08:01 ►
that not everyone agrees with me
01:08:04 ►
that psychedelics are the sine qua non of shamanism.
01:08:12 ►
That’s what Wasson thought, that you don’t have shamanism unless you have psychedelics.
01:08:18 ►
If you have people calling themselves shamans and not using psychedelics,
01:08:29 ►
shamans and not using psychedelics, then they are cut off from the older level of tradition and through ritual, drumming, ordeals, starvation, flagellation, they are creating near-psychedelic
01:08:38 ►
or pseudo-psychedelic states. Now, a brilliant and respected commentator on comparative religion like Mercier Léod, who I quote whenever it suits my purpose, totally disagreed with this and said no. What he called narcotic shamanism, which means psychedelic shamanism, the choice of the word tells you that the guy had a problem.
01:09:08 ►
Narcotic shamanism is decadent shamanism. And the flagellation, the starvation, the ordeals and the drumming, that’s the real shamanism.
01:09:16 ►
And it’s only when the tradition is abandoned and decadent that a culture will turn to drugs.
01:09:23 ►
and decadent that a culture will turn to drugs.
01:09:25 ►
I maintain this is nothing more than he was a Romanian who became an academic in Paris.
01:09:31 ►
I maintain that this is nothing more
01:09:32 ►
than his Western cultural bias operating.
01:09:36 ►
Also in his youth, he was pretty infatuated with yoga.
01:09:39 ►
They will insist to you
01:09:43 ►
that drugs are an inferior path.
01:09:46 ►
However, any of you who are scholars of yoga
01:09:50 ►
should know that all yoga is based on the yogic sutras of Patanjali,
01:09:56 ►
2nd century BC Hindu Vedic commentator.
01:10:03 ►
Hindu Vedic commentator. And Patanjali specifically says
01:10:06 ►
there are three paths to the goal of yoga.
01:10:10 ►
And they are control of the breath,
01:10:13 ►
control of posture,
01:10:15 ►
and light-filled herbs.
01:10:18 ►
Says it right there.
01:10:20 ►
Stanza 6 of the Yogic Sutra of Patanjali.
01:10:24 ►
It’s never discussed again
01:10:26 ►
basically in the entire exegesis of the yogic literature
01:10:30 ►
the third path is never mentioned
01:10:33 ►
well is that because it’s a secret tradition or what?
01:10:37 ►
I don’t know
01:10:37 ►
when you go to India
01:10:39 ►
seeking these yogans
01:10:42 ►
practicing these higher yogas
01:10:44 ►
what you find are a bunch of guys smoking as much charas as they possibly can.
01:10:51 ►
And the notion that you could do it without that,
01:10:54 ►
it just gets a long laugh from everybody down around the burning guts.
01:11:00 ►
I mean, they deal with it on a practical level.
01:11:03 ►
I mean, they deal with it on a practical level.
01:11:12 ►
Okay, moving out of drug-impoverished North America, or psychedelic-impoverished North America,
01:11:19 ►
where there are more than 20 species of indigenous psilocybin-containing mushrooms,
01:11:27 ►
but, and this is interesting, no evidence whatsoever for tribal or traditional usage.
01:11:34 ►
In other words, in this northwest coast Indian complex, the Shimsham, Klingit, Nutka group, no reason to believe, other than our own predilection for romantic fantasy,
01:11:42 ►
that these people were using mushrooms in pre-contact
01:11:47 ►
times, and yet the mushrooms were there.
01:11:51 ►
The complex that we’re most familiar with as a North American hallucinogen is in the
01:11:57 ►
southwest of the United States, peyote, Lophophora williamsi, the peyotal cactus.
01:12:05 ►
Now, the interesting thing here is we cannot find archaeological evidence of peyote use that is particularly ancient.
01:12:17 ►
Peyote use in the southwest appears to be less than 500 years old.
01:12:22 ►
to be less than 500 years old.
01:12:24 ►
Before that,
01:12:26 ►
what we find in Indian graves of the Tarahumara and so forth
01:12:28 ►
are the seeds of Sephora secundifolia.
01:12:32 ►
Sephora secundifolia
01:12:33 ►
is a highly poisonous legume
01:12:37 ►
that contains cysteine.
01:12:39 ►
This is an example of
01:12:43 ►
what we call not a psychedelic, but an ordeal poison.
01:12:48 ►
Now, in certain parts of the world, this approach to spiritual growth has been taken,
01:12:52 ►
most notably on the island of Madagascar off the coast of eastern Africa.
01:12:59 ►
What is an ordeal poison?
01:13:01 ►
This is a plant where you take it and you are so
01:13:06 ►
convinced that you’re dying that you have an experience of self abandonment
01:13:15 ►
getting straight surrender and then you live and you’re fine but you are absolutely convinced
01:13:26 ►
that you’re dying
01:13:27 ►
your heart pounds
01:13:29 ►
or fibrillates
01:13:31 ►
or you convulse
01:13:33 ►
or you fall into deep coma
01:13:35 ►
or you have tetanus in the limbs
01:13:39 ►
whatever it is
01:13:40 ►
and then you recover
01:13:42 ►
well anybody can tell you
01:13:43 ►
this is a kind of psychedelic experience
01:13:46 ►
because you’re so damn glad you lived that you see everything in a new light you can be kind to
01:13:54 ►
your children and love your wife and tolerate your relatives and people say well it made a new man
01:14:00 ►
out of him well yes because he came so close to dying that he shed neurotic
01:14:07 ►
behavior patterns but this is not a true psychedelic so what we’re assuming is
01:14:12 ►
that about 500 or a thousand years ago sometime in that span the Sephora cult
01:14:19 ►
was replaced by the peyote cult, which came from a much smaller usage area.
01:14:27 ►
Then also in Southern California,
01:14:30 ►
there were what were called the Tolaq religions,
01:14:33 ►
religions of detour, intoxication,
01:14:37 ►
initiation of young men by intoxicating them with detour
01:14:41 ►
and leaving them in the wilderness to fend for themselves.
01:14:45 ►
Again, this comes close to being an ordeal poison,
01:14:49 ►
although it also has psychoactive properties,
01:14:52 ►
but so confusing, such a deliriant,
01:14:56 ►
that it bears no relationship to the true hallucinogens,
01:15:01 ►
which, with the exception of mescaline,
01:15:04 ►
I believe all fall into the
01:15:06 ►
category of the indoles now mescaline is not an indole it’s an amphetamine
01:15:12 ►
closely related to MDA and MDMA but it is a true hallucinogen at fairly high
01:15:19 ►
doses the indoles which are this structurally related small family they seem to me to
01:15:27 ►
be the true visionary ecstatic ins and I will mention as I go through the list
01:15:34 ►
which ones are indoors and which ones are not well no the only one which is an
01:15:41 ►
amphetamine is masculine so we need so we need… So we have indole and non-indole.
01:15:46 ►
Indole and non-indole.
01:15:49 ►
A kind of parallel phenomenon to the peyote cult of the Southwest is in the deserts of northwestern Peru.
01:15:57 ►
There are very large columnar cacti in the genus Trichoceros that contain mescaline,
01:16:04 ►
and they have been used for a long time, a lot longer than peyote. in the genus Trichoceros that contain mescaline.
01:16:08 ►
And they have been used for a long time, a lot longer than peyote.
01:16:15 ►
We have mocha ceramic dated to before 1000 BC,
01:16:20 ►
which show, in fact, isn’t somebody wearing, yes, this gentleman has the T-shirt.
01:16:22 ►
This is a Peruvian design.
01:16:29 ►
Point out the, yes, that’s the chunk of San Pedro being held by this dwarf-like little demon.
01:16:35 ►
This is a fang demon, mocha design, 1,500 years old.
01:16:46 ►
Now, in central Mexico, we come upon the first of these large centers of hallucinogenic use in the cultural area in which the Olmec arose
01:16:51 ►
were subsequently succeeded by the Maya
01:16:54 ►
who were subsequently subjugated by the Toltecs.
01:16:58 ►
And the plants that were in use in those situations
01:17:02 ►
fall into two pretty well-defined categories.
01:17:06 ►
First of all, psilocybin-containing mushrooms
01:17:09 ►
of several species,
01:17:11 ►
and second of all, morning glories
01:17:15 ►
of at least two types, convolvulaceae,
01:17:19 ►
which contain LSD-like alkaloids
01:17:22 ►
active in the milligram range that are highly visionary.
01:17:28 ►
And there’s considerable evidence in the Codex Vindobonensis and in some of the Mayan ceramics
01:17:35 ►
that this was a culture that made a very important place for hallucinogens
01:17:42 ►
and that it was the privilege of the priestly class and that their obsession with calendrics and astronomy and this
01:17:52 ►
sort of thing was also somehow intimately connected to their interest
01:17:57 ►
in the psilocybin mushrooms and again one of these botanical puzzles. Here is a cluster of 10 or 15 species in central Mexico of mushrooms,
01:18:10 ►
and a culture builds itself around them.
01:18:14 ►
A similar cluster of species on the northwest coast,
01:18:19 ►
the culture seems to totally ignore it and have no use for it.
01:18:22 ►
And nowhere else on earth are there clusters of species of psilocybin mushrooms
01:18:29 ►
with a long history of use.
01:18:32 ►
Naturally, the export of cattle throughout the warm tropics
01:18:36 ►
has allowed the coprophytic mushrooms, the mushrooms which grow on manure,
01:18:41 ►
to be spread throughout the warm tropics.
01:18:43 ►
And then in places like England and France, you
01:18:46 ►
get the occurrence of the diminutive psilocybin mushrooms, lanceata. But again, only the most
01:18:54 ►
unconvincing evidence of traditional use. I mean, I am Irish Celtic. I would love to have somebody
01:19:01 ►
come up with a bunch of evidence that ancient Celtic and Druidic art and magic was somehow related to mushrooms.
01:19:10 ►
But to date, the efforts have been unconvincing to any skeptic.
01:19:15 ►
It may still be there.
01:19:16 ►
Perhaps in heraldic devices, someone should go back and study the escutcheon
01:19:22 ►
of the families of medieval Europe and you do
01:19:26 ►
find for instance the
01:19:27 ►
Morel family
01:19:29 ►
noble Italian family
01:19:32 ►
mushrooms
01:19:33 ►
on the family coat
01:19:36 ►
of arms and other
01:19:38 ►
families in France whose names
01:19:39 ►
escape me
01:19:40 ►
yeah
01:19:44 ►
although that is a coincidence.
01:19:46 ►
Well, I mean, not really.
01:19:47 ►
Yeah, but still.
01:19:48 ►
That name.
01:19:49 ►
Will the sergeant at arm.
01:19:53 ►
Okay, so,
01:19:54 ►
oh, well, let me say something
01:19:55 ►
a little bit more
01:19:56 ►
about the Morning Glory Complex
01:19:59 ►
because it’s very interesting.
01:20:03 ►
LSD, discovered by Albert Hoffman in 1937 and so forth,
01:20:08 ►
comes from ergot, comes from an organism called claviceps,
01:20:14 ►
or claviceps paspale, which is a smut which grows on ergot,
01:20:18 ►
a humbler organism.
01:20:20 ►
You could hardly imagine.
01:20:22 ►
I mean, this is basically yuck,
01:20:24 ►
is how you would describe this
01:20:26 ►
organism if you were to come upon it. It looks like a mistake because it’s just an amorphous,
01:20:33 ►
slimy, black mess growing on certain cereal grains. One of the fascinating questions to
01:20:39 ►
these chemists once they discover a new compound is to try and figure out, does it occur anywhere else in nature?
01:20:47 ►
Some plant, some fish, some something,
01:20:49 ►
and then you can form theories and judgments about evolutionary relationships.
01:20:58 ►
So Albert Hoffman, the discoverer of LSD,
01:21:01 ►
was amazed when carrying out analytical work for Gordon Wasson on magic
01:21:07 ►
morning glory seeds that had been sent to Wasson from Schultes
01:21:11 ►
he discovered the same compounds or very closely related
01:21:16 ►
compounds as he had synthesized to make LSD
01:21:20 ►
I’m going to slightly
01:21:23 ►
jump around here now
01:21:25 ►
and say that in India
01:21:28 ►
there are 13 species of morning glory
01:21:33 ►
you’re listening to the psychedelic salon
01:21:37 ►
where people are changing their lives
01:21:39 ►
one thought at a time
01:21:41 ►
as you guessed the tape cut off, right?
01:21:47 ►
As Terrence was saying that in India,
01:21:49 ►
there are 13 species of morning glory that are psychoactive.
01:21:54 ►
Now, if I was a good host,
01:21:55 ►
I would probably play a little of next week’s tape
01:21:58 ►
just to finish this current thought.
01:22:00 ►
But instead, I’m going to wait with you until next week
01:22:03 ►
to hear the rest of his world tour of psychedelic plants.
01:22:08 ►
However, I don’t want you to think that this is some kind of a cliffhanger or something
01:22:12 ►
because my hunch is that you probably already know almost everything he’s talking about right now.
01:22:18 ►
But back in 1988, this was all really big news
01:22:21 ►
because there weren’t many places you could go to learn this kind of information.
01:22:27 ►
Before I forget, did you notice where at one point Terrence said he was going to cover a particular topic
01:22:34 ►
but got interrupted by a question?
01:22:36 ►
And from there he spun off in a completely new lecture for 10 or 15 minutes before getting back on course.
01:22:43 ►
And his workshops were always like that.
01:22:46 ►
It didn’t seem to matter whether the question was about botany
01:22:50 ►
or chemistry or philosophy or any other topic.
01:22:53 ►
The Bard McKenna was kind of like a man who was hardwired to the Internet
01:22:57 ►
and knew quite a lot about a very wide range of topics.
01:23:01 ►
What a unique person he was.
01:23:04 ►
Okay, now for all of our fellow Saloners who are Greg Egan fans, geeks like me that is,
01:23:10 ►
I hope you picked up on that little bit about seven minutes into his talk where Terrence says that maybe we are bumping up against the limit of our reason.
01:23:20 ►
Now, doesn’t that sound just like the so-called people living inside the cyberspace construct that was also inside another database?
01:23:29 ►
And I’m sorry if you haven’t yet read Permutation City.
01:23:32 ►
It’s really an exceptional book.
01:23:34 ►
Well worth your time, I think.
01:23:36 ►
And our fellow salonners who have read it know exactly what I’m talking about here.
01:23:40 ►
Interesting thoughts, huh?
01:23:42 ►
On another topic, and I’m not sure where I read this, but
01:23:46 ►
I remember someone talking about some new evidence about mushroom spores that
01:23:51 ►
seriously calls Terrence’s theory about an extraterrestrial origin for them into question.
01:23:57 ►
Maybe one of our fellow salonners will post something about that on one of the growreport.com
01:24:03 ►
forums for us. And speaking of mushrooms,
01:24:06 ►
just this morning I was listening to the Dope Fiends’ latest podcast, and there was some
01:24:11 ►
discussion about the pros and cons of drinking mushroom tea versus eating them. However,
01:24:17 ►
there was one method that wasn’t mentioned that I thought should also be covered. And by the way,
01:24:22 ►
I’m only halfway through that podcast right now, so maybe this did get covered in the second part.
01:24:28 ►
If so, I’m sorry for covering it again.
01:24:30 ►
But in any event, if you aren’t listening to the weekly dopecast from dopefiend.co.uk,
01:24:37 ►
I think you’re missing out on being connected with a continually expanding cast of characters,
01:24:43 ►
some of whom even show up in my novel, by the way.
01:24:47 ►
But getting back to my point,
01:24:49 ►
here is something you might want to consider
01:24:52 ►
about the ingestion of mushrooms.
01:24:54 ►
If you eat them, no matter how well you chew them,
01:24:57 ►
there will be some chunks of fungus left in your stomach,
01:25:00 ►
and that can become uncomfortable.
01:25:03 ►
Diffusing the mushroom spirit in tea, it
01:25:06 ►
alleviates that problem, but it still tastes funky. However, reliable reports now indicate
01:25:12 ►
that by first carefully weighing the required amount of dried mushrooms, they can then be
01:25:19 ►
ground to a fine powder in a coffee mill. Then, if that powder is mixed in a mug of hot chocolate, well,
01:25:26 ►
the word on the street is that not only is there no bad taste and little stomach discomfort,
01:25:32 ►
but some people even believe that the chocolate actually enhances the shrooms.
01:25:37 ►
And I guess that’s about all I have to say about that.
01:25:41 ►
So let’s move on and hear what one of our fellow Saloners had to say about finding the others.
01:25:47 ►
And this email comes from Sasha Z., who says in part,
01:25:51 ►
Cheers for everything. Thanks to you, I have found the tribe.
01:25:55 ►
I contacted a few people from the Grow Report about a festival that we run over here in the UK,
01:26:00 ►
and ended up meeting a good two dozen members of the tribe at this year’s
01:26:05 ►
Goxtock.
01:26:06 ►
We also had four members play at the event.
01:26:09 ►
S.E.B., who’s on Bebe’s podcast now and again, DJ’d for us and blew the canopy off the forest.
01:26:16 ►
The man is a real talent, and we’ll be taking him to everything we do.
01:26:20 ►
Kaplick played a fantastic improvised set for the Saturday headliner slot,
01:26:26 ►
a rocking psychedelic chill mix.
01:26:30 ►
Well, that’s great news, Sasha,
01:26:33 ►
and please let me know in advance when your next event will take place,
01:26:36 ►
and I’ll pass the word along to our fellow salonners.
01:26:40 ►
Now, just two more things, and I’ll be out of here.
01:26:46 ►
The first is to tell you about a really interesting video collection of Terrence McKenna videos,
01:26:48 ►
many of which I hadn’t seen before.
01:26:55 ►
And they can be found on Zoopy, Z-O-O-P-Y, zoopy.com, slash maniac.
01:26:59 ►
And maniac is spelled M-A-N-E-Y-A-K.
01:27:04 ►
And I’ll also put a link in the program notes for the show to that site. It’s kind of an interesting place.
01:27:07 ►
My final comment has to do with Burning Man.
01:27:09 ►
And as you burners are already aware, everything we plan for the burn is subject to change right up to the last minute.
01:27:17 ►
But here are the current plans.
01:27:20 ►
And instead of holding several ply logs all in one place,
01:27:28 ►
Bruce Dahmer and I are going to take them on the road, so to speak.
01:27:33 ►
And so far we are thinking about doing at least two or three of them in the afternoons and then holding one big extravaganza at night.
01:27:37 ►
As our plans come into better focus,
01:27:40 ►
I’ll fill in the details about the multimedia show we are planning for the 10 jumbo screens in our soon-to-be-announced location.
01:27:48 ►
But for now, I’d like to read for you a little overview of our happening as conceived by Bruce Dahmer.
01:27:54 ►
And here’s what he wrote.
01:27:56 ►
Leary and McKenna come to Burning Man.
01:27:59 ►
Hear ye, hear ye.
01:28:00 ►
Y’all come on into the tent, for the main event is about to start.
01:28:04 ►
It’s Tim and Terrence. Leary and McKenna, that is,
01:28:08 ►
at Burning Man for their first time.
01:28:11 ►
It’s dialogues, trialogues, and, well, this year it’s going to be one big plyologue,
01:28:16 ►
where we bring back these ghosts from the past on the main stage at Entheon Village.
01:28:22 ►
But wait, what do we see here?
01:28:26 ►
A big magic bus is also pulling up, and yes,
01:28:28 ►
it’s Kesey on the poop deck with
01:28:29 ►
Cassidy behind the wheel.
01:28:31 ►
And what an interesting assortment of psychedelic
01:28:34 ►
explorers they have brought here to join us.
01:28:36 ►
Huxley, Hoffman,
01:28:37 ►
Ginsberg, and Lennon, to name just a few
01:28:40 ►
I see filing off further and into
01:28:42 ►
our big top here.
01:28:44 ►
So it’s going to be a wondrous, magical mystery tour
01:28:47 ►
as we bring together the Psychedelic Pantheon for the first time
01:28:50 ►
at the event and to a community that they helped spawn.
01:28:54 ►
However, it wasn’t before today that they have had the unique experience
01:28:58 ►
of being here with us on the playa.
01:29:00 ►
And we invite you to become a part of this experience.
01:29:04 ►
Meet us for a multi-course meal of histories revealed,
01:29:07 ►
weird theories posited, questions answered, answers questioned,
01:29:11 ►
rare and revealing photos brought to light,
01:29:14 ►
voices and video projected all around.
01:29:17 ►
And expect the greatest secrets of life, the universe,
01:29:19 ►
and all that is to come to light by dawn.
01:29:22 ►
All of this and more will be brought to you by
01:29:25 ►
cyber-technodelic shaman Damer and carnival barker Lorenzo.
01:29:30 ►
Come on the appointed day and at the appointed hour
01:29:32 ►
for a blend of spoken word performance, dance, audience participation.
01:29:37 ►
In fact, you can address your questions to one of the two Ts,
01:29:41 ►
or anyone else for that matter.
01:29:42 ►
And also, there’s going to be plenty of room for radical self-expression.
01:29:47 ►
It’s going to fill up fast, but an overflow video projection is going to be available,
01:29:51 ►
so don’t be tardy.
01:29:54 ►
So there you have it.
01:29:55 ►
It’s going to be great fun to see how this actually turns out,
01:29:58 ►
and by the way, we are going to do our best to capture as much of it as we can
01:30:03 ►
for you to listen to here in the salon this fall when I get back from the burn.
01:30:08 ►
Well, I guess that’s about all I have time for just now.
01:30:11 ►
So, once again, I’ll close today’s program by reminding you that this and all of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon are freely available for you to use in your own audio projects under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 3.0
01:30:26 ►
license. And if you have any questions
01:30:28 ►
about that, just click the
01:30:29 ►
Creative Commons link at the bottom of the
01:30:31 ►
Psychedelic Salon webpage, which you can
01:30:34 ►
find at psychedelicsalon.org.
01:30:36 ►
And that’s also where you’ll
01:30:37 ►
find the program notes for this podcast.
01:30:40 ►
And also, if you’d like to
01:30:42 ►
download a copy of my novel in
01:30:43 ►
audiobook format,
01:30:45 ►
just go to genesisgeneration.us.
01:30:49 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:30:53 ►
Be well, my friends.