189 - The Ethnobotany of Shamanism Part 3

Program Notes §

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.>

“Think about this for a moment, we grow so inured to these religious forms, think about the notion of instituting at the center of your religion a rite where you eat your god. … [This] is probably a memory of a relationship to some kind of a psychedelic experience of some sort.”

“I think institutions will inevitably substitute a rite or a ritual for the authentic, for the real McCoy, because then priests can control the pipeline to god, and the parishioner can approach with offerings. But if everybody can have a pipeline to deity, why then the whole priest scam is put out of business.”

“Buddhism is a heresy on Hinduism.”

“The whole of the Amazonian narcotic complex, as it’s called in the old literature, is based on activation of DMT by one strategy or another.”

“I really think there is a very large distinction between synthetic and naturally occurring drugs. … I think that these plants ‘take people’ as much as people take the plants. … When you take one of these ancient, ancient hallucinogens you are locking in to the morphogenic fields of all the people who ever took it.”

“All psychedelic explorers should be aware of the concept of what is called a cognitive hallucination. The is a much more insidious phenomenon. This is, quite simply, an out-and-out delusion.”

“People are concrescences of ambiguity.”

“I think the sitter should be there only if there’s a three dimensional emergency.”

“I have never felt that the primary use of these things [psychedelic medicines] was to cure what is called in modern parlance neurosis, what I call unhappiness. It isn’t for that.”

Links mentioned in this podcast
Burning Man Poster Contest
Oracle Gathering in 2009
Symbiosis Gathering in 2009
Burning Man Guidelines for First Timers

What to and not-to bring to Burning Man

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188 - The Ethnobotany of Shamanism Part 2

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190 - The Ethnobotany of Shamanism Part 4

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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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And how are you doing today?

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I was just about to ask how your summertime is going, but then I remembered that there are a whole lot of salonners who happen to be living in the Southern Hemisphere and who are having winter thoughts right now.

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And as simple a concept as that is, it’s still kind of hard for me to get my head around.

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Simple a concept as that is, it’s still kind of hard for me to get my head around.

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I guess I should be telling the dope fiend and our European friends to stay cool,

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but that BB and hermit girl and the rest of our fellow salonners who are living south of the equator should stay warm.

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It kind of reminds me of that old joke about the guy with one foot in a bucket of boiling water and the other foot in a bucket of ice water.

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And when someone asked him how it felt, he said, well, on average, it’s quite comfortable.

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And so here in average Southern California, I want you to know that it’s quite comfortable here right now.

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Okay, that’ll be the last of the corny jokes today.

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And two wonderful folks who aren’t joking about helping to offset some of the expenses here in the salon are Kyle N. and John F.

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And if I’m not mistaken, they both have been hanging around with us here in the salon for quite a while now.

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So thanks for being here, Kyle and John, and thanks again for supporting these podcasts.

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Speaking of which, let’s get right into today’s program. And as you know,

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this will be the third program in which we’re hearing the recording of a workshop that Terrence

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McKenna gave sometime around the 5th, 6th, and 7th of November in 1988, way back when Ronald

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Reagan was still the U.S. President. And by the way, if you don’t want to wait for me

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to finish playing this entire set of tapes,

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you can download them from our psychedelicsalon.org website

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where fellow salonner Miguel Fernandez posted a link to a zip file

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that not only contains this workshop,

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but also the talk that Terrence gave in Palenque in 1999.

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But if you want to hear that talk, you can also find it as podcast number two in this series.

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So, thanks again to Miguel, we are going to hear what for me is a brand new McKenna workshop.

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And while we often hear some familiar themes in his presentations,

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I’ve found that each time I hear some of these concepts explained in

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a little different way that I wind up with a somewhat better grasp of his ideas.

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Now if you’ve been keeping up with which tapes in the series I’ve been playing, today’s

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podcast includes tape 3B and 4A.

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And yes, there’s a short gap in Terrence’s lecture between the two tapes,

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but it doesn’t seem to be a big one, and I don’t think we missed anything.

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But interestingly, not very far into tape 4A, he ends the workshop for that day.

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Yet all of the tapes up through and including 6B are labeled Saturday.

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So all we can say for sure is that this was recorded sometime during the weekend,

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just before the U.S. presidential election that Bush I won.

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In other words, the last November of the Reagan presidency.

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Now, if you remember, last week the tape cut off,

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right as Terrence was saying that in India there are 13 species of, and then Tape 3A stopped.

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So now here is where Tape 3B picks up with the one and only Terrence McKenna.

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I have morning glories which contain these ergonamine-like compounds, And this is the Hawaiian baby wood rose.

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Again, the interesting thing is there is no evidence

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that ancient India, with its obsession for altered states of consciousness,

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ever utilized any of these Asian morning glories.

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So this would be something somebody would want to look at.

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Did you want to say something?

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Just that probably you would never be able

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to give any hard coordinator

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on the use of mushrooms

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in Baccharian times,

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but I was delighted to know

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in the midst of Avalon

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when Morgan was supposedly banished,

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one of the little fairies from Avalon left her some mushrooms to accompany her on some of her journeys.

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I don’t know if you remember that part.

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I remember that.

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And I went, whoa.

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Well, Marion Zimmer Bradley lives in the hills of Berkeley.

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Well, Marion Zimmer Bradley lives in the hills of Berkeley.

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We can assume she’s fully installed and hooked in to the myths of the counterculture.

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But it would be great.

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Someone told me that they went to the island of Iona, I think it is, which is where the Book of Kells was supposedly composed.

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And they said there were mushrooms everywhere,

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that it was just to be there is to be inescapably confronted with mushrooms.

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And yet this doesn’t, no tradition, no mention.

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Yeah.

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Off the coast of England.

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It’s where St. Columba came.

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St. Columba came and reintroduced Christianity into England in the 900s. Christianity had died out in England. It was only in the advanced Celtic civilizations on the fringes of the British landmass that the Christian tradition was preserved. The other connection, I don’t know if this may fascinate you or not, but the misinterpretation

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and deterioration of the etymology of hallucinogen into its delusional semantic meaning, you

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know, kind of catalyzed in my brain how mythology has devolved into a lie.

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And if you look up the original meaning of mythology, it means the mutterings of eternity.

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That’s a great meaning.

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Yes.

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What a muttering of eternity.

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It’s the myths and the whole thing with Avalon being sort of that place between the world that one went to, the mystical part.

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And then Glastonbury, sort of the other place where all this Christianity existed. one time in a circle and said I was a recovering Catholic trying to evolve myself

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and find out what my mind was all about.

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And this one man,

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shaman student from down in the Amazon,

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he said, well, you know,

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if you eat these mushrooms,

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you’re going to be excommunicated

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because the Christians will tell you that once you eat the mushrooms you’re going to be excommunicated because the Christians

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will tell you that

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once you eat the mushrooms you’re doomed

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forever to

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hell and Satan and the devil

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and I said

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bullshit

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you gotta be kidding

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but I mean where would that come from

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maybe the Christian control

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well looked at these people and said,

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look, you know, you just like paganism and everything,

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and just like wipe out their connection with the other world.

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Well, it’s very interesting that when the Jesuits arrived in Mexico

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and talked to the Indians and found them eating these mushrooms,

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they said, you know, what do you call it?

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And they said, we call it Tia Nonacatl.

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Well, when they got their lexicons out and got that piece together,

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what Tia Nonacatl means is flesh of the gods.

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Well, the center of the Catholic mystery is the Eucharist,

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a sacrificial meal where a small Wheaton wafer

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is believed to be transubstantiated into the body and blood of the Son of God.

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So then to place the psychic experience,

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which follows upon a good Holy Communion,

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next to the psychic experience, which follows on a good dose of mushrooms,

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clearly these guys said, you know, this is competition we don’t need.

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We’re going to wipe this out.

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And it is interesting.

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I mean, think about this for a moment.

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We grow so inured to these religious forms.

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Think about the notion

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of instituting at the center

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of your religion a rite where you

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eat your God.

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And that is what is happening

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in Christianity. It suggests that

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this sacrificial meal

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idea, which can be

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traced back to

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pre-exilic traditions

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in Judaism is probably

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a memory of a relationship to some kind

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of psychedelic

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experience of some sort

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ok well let me continue my survey

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I have a wonderful modern day story

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about cultural experience.

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I lived in a state-owned community for a few years.

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And in the early 70s, I said mushrooms are not illegal in Scotland.

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I don’t think they are still, but they were in the early 70s.

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And in 1969, 1970, a lot of people started coming to Finhorn,

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and people regularly

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ate mushrooms. And between 1970 and 1973, it was arguably the most creative time at

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Finhorn. Books and music was being done, and the community was being built, and performing

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arts, everything. And by 1974, 1975, it was no longer acceptable. They were trying to

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just be a very proper state community,

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totally in line with the Christian Scottish environment around it,

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even though they still weren’t illegal in Scotland.

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Of course, nobody does mushrooms in Northern Scotland.

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And it’s interesting.

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When I arrived to Pinhorn in the early 80s,

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people had even forgotten that that tradition had existed.

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And one person, though, when I was looking at the old pictures,

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said, how come people are so much happier back then? They look like they’re smiling.

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And these old pictures, oh, everybody saw

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mushroom effect. This was a man who had lived during

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that time. But, you know, that gradually

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died out. But it’s interesting because he did

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them for years and years.

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And at the

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point that I’ve talked to him, he as well

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felt like it was just not

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proper spiritual growth and development

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to be using mushrooms.

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Yeah, well, I think institutions will inevitably substitute a rite or a ritual

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for the authentic, for the real McCoy,

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because then priests can control the pipeline to God

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and the parishioner can approach with offerings.

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But if everybody can have a pipeline to deity,

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well, then the whole priest scam is put out of business.

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Done what?

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Precisely what you’re describing.

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Suppressing?

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No, substituting

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essentially a

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ritual,

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i.e.

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meditation

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or some

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kind of

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trip for

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the experience

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and then

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empower the

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priest,

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i.e.

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the kind of

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Buddhist masters.

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In other words,

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is that process

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that you’re

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describing in

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Christianity

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was a thought?

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Happened in

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Buddhism.

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Yeah,

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in your opinion.

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Well,

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Buddhism

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is a heresy on Hinduism. In your opinion. tradition in India. But as I’m sure many of you know, the Rig Vedas, which are these tremendous

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outpourings of poetry that these Indo-Aryan people created as they came out of Central Asia and into

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India, the Rig Vedas are entirely devoted to the praise of a mysterious plant, Soma.

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The ninth mandala of the Rig Veda

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says Soma is greater than Indra.

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Soma is greater than Vishnu.

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And it just lifts the entire pantheon

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and says Soma is greater than all of these things.

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By the time Buddhism is getting rolling,

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Soma is a suppressed ancient tradition,

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and the Soma sacrifice, which is still being done,

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is being done with inert materials.

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If you want to read on this, why read Wasson’s book on Soma,

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and notice how it traces back to Haoma,

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Notice how it traces back to Haoma, which is a yet older strata of religious ritual practice

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that was Zoroastrian and Iranian in origin.

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And it’s very clear that what we’re talking about here

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is an intensely psychoactive plant,

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and there’s great argument about what what it was

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Buddhism because of the long historical record in the East arises entirely

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within the historical context so the the the suppression of the plant connection was in the earlier stratum of Hinduism.

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Okay, we discussed the central Mexican complex. It has minor components such as were mentioned here, salvia divinorum, and there are others not chemically well understood, but also not widely or regularly used.

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But then as you pass down across the Darien Gap and into South America proper,

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there is just an explosion of available psychoactives.

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Not only the tropane complex of the detourists,

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which now reemerge in the subgenus Brugmansia,

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the arboreal detourists, which we see around town as these ornamentals with the huge pendulous hanging white flowers,

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all of those tree detourists, some with yellow, some with orange, some with red, some with white, some with purple flowers,

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orange, some with red, some with white, some with purple flowers,

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originated in a very constrained area in the Andes and have been used for shamanic purposes for a long, long time.

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Also, coca is endemic to that part of South America.

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Coca occurs nowhere else in the world naturally.

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But more interesting from my point of view are the tremendous proliferation

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of DMT cults and options based around two pharmacological approaches. One, you orally

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ingest DMT at the same time as you orally ingest an MAO inhibitor.

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MAO is monoamine oxidase.

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This is the enzyme system that oxidizes monoamines.

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That means makes them harmless.

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Monoamines are this whole family of drugs we’re talking about

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and many other things as well.

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But if you don’t have any monoamine oxidase in your body then monoamines in your body just stick

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around because the machinery to degrade them is inoperable so there are what are

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called MAO inhibitors this means you take this compound and it causes the monoamine oxidase in your body to be bound.

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It can no longer do its work.

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DMT ordinarily would be destroyed in the gutO in the upper GI tract, it’s called Yahé.

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South of the Kaketá, it’s named in the

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Quechua language, Ayahuasca.

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Now this is a

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really fascinating thing

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for many reasons.

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First of all, this begins to look like

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the world’s first

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truly designer drug.

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Because notice what’s

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happening here

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all these other things I’ve been talking about

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peyote, mushrooms, detoura

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cannabis, what have you

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are single plants

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that require very little preparation

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basically find it, eat it

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that’s the way you prepare it

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ayahuasca is very different.

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It’s composed of two plants,

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neither of which is active

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except in combination with the other.

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So somebody figured this out.

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Well, this may not sound like such an accomplishment

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until you stand in the Amazon basin

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and look around you and realize

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we’re talking 50,000 species per square mile

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and, you know, 50 million square miles.

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So how did anybody ever figure out

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that you take the leaves of the little bush

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and the bark of the woody vine and combine them in these proportions

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and boil them and concentrate it,

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and then you have this fantastic psychedelic drug?

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The only way that I can imagine is somebody told them.

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And my experience is that these plants talk,

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that this does not make sense to the rational and discerning mind.

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But nevertheless, it is possible for one plant to lead you on to another.

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A perfect example of this is actually in the chemical literature.

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Melvin Bristol was a student of Schultes in the late 60s,

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and he specialized in the Brugmansias, the arboreal detours,

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and he went to the valley of the Sibundoi,

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and there they actually add the detour to the ayahuasca.

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And he took this ayahuasca,

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and while he was on it,

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the ayahuasca entity showed him a plant.

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He kept seeing this plant,

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and he couldn’t get it out of his mind.

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And the next day, after they came down from the

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trip he was collecting in the forest with indians and he came upon the plant the exact plant that

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he had seen in his vision well he thought that was pretty strange so he made extensive collections

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of this plant took it back to harvard analyzed it, and it was, in fact, psychoactive,

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did contain psychoactive alkaloids.

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So, see, it’s that we’re tiptoeing over the surface of some kind of mystery.

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We maybe can bring ourselves to accept that a voice could speak on mushrooms

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telling you that you should be kinder to your children or love your mother and not be so hard on yourself.

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But it’s a real leap for us to believe that a plant could tell you,

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you know that plant over there?

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Analyze that sucker.

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And, you know, in other words, real information,

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not information subject to personal interpretation.

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The whole of the Amazonian narcotic complex, as it’s called in the old literature,

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is based on activation of DMT by one strategy or another, either drinking this ghastly beverage, as the literature calls it, the psychedelic

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beverage, ayahuasca, drinking this beverage, or as you go east into the lowlands, the ayahuasca

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complex is replaced by what’s called the snuff complex, and it is based around a number of

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species of myristicaceous trees.

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and it is based around a number of species of Myristicaceous trees.

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The Myristicaceae is the same family as nutmeg occurs in,

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though nutmeg is an old world member of the genus. But several members of the Myristicaceae contain DMT in the inner bark exudate,

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in the inner bark exudate.

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And these Indians take the,

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you go out before dawn,

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before the first rays of sunlight strike the tree,

00:21:55 ► §

because when that happens, this resin retracts.

00:21:57 ► §

So before dawn,

00:22:00 ► §

and they then strip the bark from the cold side of the tree,

00:22:03 ► §

and they actually put their hands on both sides and determine the coolest side of the tree and they actually put their hands on both sides

00:22:05 ► §

and determined the coolest side of the tree.

00:22:08 ► §

Then they strip these long strips of bark back.

00:22:11 ► §

Then you take them back to the village,

00:22:13 ► §

build a fire and let it burn to coals

00:22:16 ► §

and then spread the coals out.

00:22:17 ► §

Lay these long strips of bark on the coals

00:22:21 ► §

with the wounded side up,

00:22:23 ► §

the clean inner side up,

00:22:25 ► §

and this orange resin will be forced out of the bark and onto the surface,

00:22:33 ► §

and then you can go along with a scraper of some sort, gather the stuff up,

00:22:39 ► §

put it in a pot, cook it down, grind that in a mortar and pestle,

00:22:45 ► §

and then you have a dandy paralytic arrow poison,

00:22:51 ► §

which can also be honked up as an outlandish hallucinogenic snuff.

00:22:59 ► §

And there are many stories of these Yanomamo and Huayca people going out on the hunt

00:23:07 ► §

and honking up their supply of drugs and just getting their poison arrows out

00:23:14 ► §

and scraping off the points so the guys can get a buzz on and won’t have to go back to the village.

00:23:21 ► §

Well, it’s a very interesting complex.

00:23:26 ► §

It hasn’t been very much researched by Westerners,

00:23:30 ► §

and the reason is easy to figure out why.

00:23:34 ► §

Here’s how you take this stuff.

00:23:36 ► §

You get with your buddy, and you have a bamboo tube.

00:23:40 ► §

Maybe some of you remember this from the Emerald Forest.

00:23:44 ► §

You have a bamboo tube about this long.

00:23:46 ► §

You pack about

00:23:48 ► §

this much of it with

00:23:50 ► §

this ground bark

00:23:52 ► §

exudate. And then you

00:23:54 ► §

hunker down in front of your

00:23:55 ► §

friend, put the thing

00:23:58 ► §

with the loaded end

00:23:59 ► §

into your nostril.

00:24:01 ► §

Your friend takes a huge

00:24:03 ► §

inhalation of air and then blasts on the end of this thing

00:24:07 ► §

and just drives this stuff up into your sinus cavities.

00:24:12 ► §

Well, everything goes violet.

00:24:15 ► §

You scream.

00:24:17 ► §

You salivate outlandishly.

00:24:20 ► §

You fall over backwards.

00:24:22 ► §

And by the time you’ve gotten yourself together

00:24:25 ► §

your friend has repacked the other side

00:24:28 ► §

and is ready to give you that

00:24:31 ► §

and then you do that

00:24:33 ► §

it goes purple again

00:24:35 ► §

you scream, you salivate, you fall over

00:24:38 ► §

and then people usually say something like

00:24:41 ► §

good

00:24:43 ► §

or far out say something like, good.

00:24:48 ► §

Or far out, right.

00:24:51 ► §

And then you see,

00:24:53 ► §

I’m sure you guys have seen Napoleon Chagnon did a film

00:24:56 ► §

and Juan Downey did a film.

00:24:58 ► §

This is great filmic material

00:25:00 ► §

because in these Wicca villages,

00:25:03 ► §

this has actually become

00:25:05 ► §

I wouldn’t want to say a drug of

00:25:08 ► §

abuse but it certainly is

00:25:10 ► §

a recreational drug not only

00:25:11 ► §

the shamans are doing this but people just

00:25:13 ► §

are doing it and you just see people

00:25:16 ► §

leaning against walls

00:25:17 ► §

with a line of saliva coming out

00:25:20 ► §

and people just think oh

00:25:21 ► §

he’s doing the Ipina

00:25:23 ► §

oh okay and you know people in various attitudes of consciousness and unconsciousness And people just think, oh, he’s doing the Ipina. Oh, okay.

00:25:25 ► §

And, you know, people in various attitudes of consciousness and unconsciousness.

00:25:31 ► §

And coca, of course, which there’s not a whole lot to say about coca.

00:25:37 ► §

It’s an interesting example of a psychoactive, non-psychedelic.

00:25:41 ► §

non-psychedelic the minute you hit

00:25:44 ► §

the Amazon forest

00:25:45 ► §

they are so concerned

00:25:47 ► §

that you’ve been misinformed about

00:25:49 ► §

coca

00:25:50 ► §

not a drug

00:25:53 ► §

this is not a drug

00:25:55 ► §

this is a food

00:25:56 ► §

this is a good food

00:25:58 ► §

this food makes us healthy

00:26:00 ► §

and there is some evidence that this is true

00:26:02 ► §

that cocaine bears very little resemblance

00:26:06 ► §

to coca coca is not a spectacular experience what i found was the way coca works is you’re just

00:26:14 ► §

about to you’ve been sitting with these people for hours and they’re talking in wikoto or some

00:26:20 ► §

language that you have no hope of understanding. You’re just about ready to excuse yourself and go to your hammock.

00:26:27 ► §

And they drag out the coca.

00:26:31 ► §

And the way you do it, and this is another thing people miss the point in South America

00:26:36 ► §

because they have no idea how much you’re supposed to do.

00:26:40 ► §

Imagine taking a tablespoon and going into a jar or a sack of flour

00:26:47 ► §

and getting as much flour as you possibly could on a tablespoon.

00:26:51 ► §

I mean a high-walled tablespoon.

00:26:55 ► §

So you get like that much coca.

00:26:58 ► §

You bring it to your mouth.

00:27:00 ► §

You put it in.

00:27:01 ► §

It’s dry as dust.

00:27:03 ► §

And the trick is to slime it over and get it into your cheek

00:27:08 ► §

and hold it there all without a break in your conversational flow and you know for a for a

00:27:16 ► §

honky the main effort is not to strangle and disgrace yourself in this scene

00:27:25 ► §

because it’s usually no women.

00:27:27 ► §

You’re in the longhouse

00:27:28 ► §

with the men

00:27:29 ► §

and these guys are,

00:27:30 ► §

you know,

00:27:31 ► §

the authentic,

00:27:32 ► §

bare-ass,

00:27:33 ► §

scarified folks

00:27:35 ► §

and you’re trying to fit in

00:27:38 ► §

and choking to death

00:27:40 ► §

on this wad of coca.

00:27:41 ► §

Well, then it dribbles down your throat

00:27:43 ► §

and suddenly

00:27:44 ► §

these people don’t seem so bad. on this wad of coca. Well, then it dribbles down your throat, and suddenly,

00:27:47 ► §

these people don’t seem so bad.

00:27:52 ► §

This place doesn’t seem so filthy,

00:27:54 ► §

and you don’t seem so tired.

00:27:56 ► §

Maybe you can make out what they’re saying. In fact, maybe you’ll just try out

00:27:58 ► §

a little of what you’ve picked up on,

00:28:01 ► §

and before you know it,

00:28:03 ► §

you’re the life of the party.

00:28:08 ► §

And then, about 20 minutes later you think well maybe now i’ll knock off and then like clockwork they reach for the tin can again

00:28:14 ► §

and send it around and they will do this until it’s uh it’s all gone uh now let’s see which way

00:28:21 ► §

should we go let’s jump across the water now to Africa I talked a little about Iboga fascinating cult very very similar to

00:28:31 ► §

ayahuasca in the social patterns that have arisen around it the way ayahuasca

00:28:38 ► §

is taken in the Amazon in the mestizo populations that Luna is talking about is people get together on

00:28:45 ► §

Saturday nights in

00:28:47 ► §

windowless sheds

00:28:49 ► §

to

00:28:50 ► §

about one third to have

00:28:53 ► §

the trip, about one

00:28:55 ► §

third because they have something physically

00:28:57 ► §

or psychologically wrong with them

00:28:59 ► §

that they want help from the shaman with

00:29:02 ► §

and about one third

00:29:03 ► §

who are wannabes

00:29:05 ► §

or just hanging in for the social occasion.

00:29:11 ► §

And in Zaire and Gabon,

00:29:16 ► §

where the Iboga cult is operating,

00:29:18 ► §

this same pattern exists.

00:29:21 ► §

And these things, Ayahuasca and Iboga in Africa,

00:29:22 ► §

exists. And these things,

00:29:24 ► §

ayahuasca and iboga in Africa,

00:29:27 ► §

are the major forces resisting conversion

00:29:29 ► §

to Christianity.

00:29:30 ► §

I mean, they really are

00:29:32 ► §

the native people’s answer

00:29:34 ► §

to the missionaries.

00:29:36 ► §

And as such, they act

00:29:38 ► §

as a tremendous force for

00:29:40 ► §

social cohesion.

00:29:43 ► §

Outside

00:29:44 ► §

of the iboga complex in Africa,

00:29:47 ► §

really, we only have rumors.

00:29:49 ► §

I mean, you will meet shamans from this place and that place.

00:29:53 ► §

They even come and have spoken in this school

00:29:56 ► §

who claim knowledge of extremely powerful plant hallucinogens.

00:30:02 ► §

But they won’t cough up the name or the species or a sample.

00:30:08 ► §

And until that’s done, you have to be very, very skeptical that these things are real.

00:30:17 ► §

One of the things that was so interesting to me, and I mentioned this this morning about

00:30:21 ► §

how the shamans are like scientists, we would take ayahuasca with these people and sing and cure

00:30:28 ► §

and go through all these trips and the hallucinations and everything.

00:30:32 ► §

And then a few six, seven hours later, as dawn was breaking

00:30:37 ► §

and all but the most hardcore people had gone back to their huts,

00:30:43 ► §

the assessing of the trip

00:30:46 ► §

would begin by everybody.

00:30:49 ► §

And inevitably, people would say,

00:30:51 ► §

well, this was pretty good,

00:30:53 ► §

but I remember a time in the Rio Y Jaga

00:30:56 ► §

when so-and-so made it

00:30:59 ► §

and it was like this and like this.

00:31:00 ► §

And in other words, amazing dovetails.

00:31:04 ► §

Amazing stories of other trips in other times and places

00:31:08 ► §

and what had been achieved.

00:31:10 ► §

So these shamans were consistently engaged in the search for the perfect high.

00:31:16 ► §

They were not set in a cultural pattern.

00:31:19 ► §

They were experimentalists, always on the outlook for rumors of new plants, untried combinations, so forth and so on.

00:31:31 ► §

Returning then to the African situation, there is a complex of plants and suspect hallucinogens in southern Africa

00:31:40 ► §

in use among the Hottentots, aboriginal peoples of South Africa.

00:31:47 ► §

And in the family of the Mesembrianthomaceae,

00:31:52 ► §

which includes the lithops, the Haworthias,

00:31:56 ► §

these little ground-growing things that look like stones,

00:31:59 ► §

you know, the so-called rock plants.

00:32:01 ► §

Well, some of those contain mesenbrine.

00:32:05 ► §

Mesenbrine is an alkaloid of some sort with unresearched psychoactivity,

00:32:12 ► §

but a persistent enough rumor of its use that it should probably be checked on.

00:32:20 ► §

Well, then when you turn to the Eurasian continent,

00:32:24 ► §

the largest landmass on the planet,

00:32:27 ► §

you discover what I referred to before, this surprising poverty of hallucinogenic plants.

00:32:34 ► §

You get the belladonna complex, the tropanes.

00:32:39 ► §

You get the opium complex.

00:32:43 ► §

Opium poppies are native to Southeast Asia,

00:32:45 ► §

have been used by people in Eurasia

00:32:48 ► §

at least as far back as the ancient Scythians.

00:32:51 ► §

We have accounts in Herodotus which make it clear.

00:32:55 ► §

And in fact, there’s a considerable amount

00:32:56 ► §

of Greek archaeological material

00:32:59 ► §

that shows opium diadems

00:33:02 ► §

and opium poppies being used as ornaments by various goddesses.

00:33:06 ► §

So it was understood that it was psychoactive, yeah.

00:33:11 ► §

Robert Graves makes mention in one of his books that he suggests that ambrosia,

00:33:18 ► §

the ambrosia of the Greek gods, were actually psilocybin mushrooms.

00:33:22 ► §

Have you ever come across another elusion of that?

00:33:26 ► §

Yes.

00:33:26 ► §

Well, it’s an interesting question.

00:33:28 ► §

It has to do with Eleusis.

00:33:31 ► §

And as you probably know,

00:33:33 ► §

Eleusis was a major prophetic mystery site

00:33:36 ► §

in classical and ancient Greece

00:33:38 ► §

where every September

00:33:40 ► §

a ceremony would be done. And the rule was you could only do it once in your life so you

00:33:49 ► §

never got a second shot and everybody in the Greek world would go at some point in their life

00:33:56 ► §

Plato, Aeschylus, Aristotle, the whole gang everybody had this experience. And at the center of it, something was drunk and something happened.

00:34:07 ► §

And there’s been great argument about what was it and what happened.

00:34:11 ► §

And Wasson and Hoffman and Ruck, who’s a classicist at Cornell,

00:34:17 ► §

all wanted to argue that it was an ergotized beer.

00:34:22 ► §

In other words, that on the Eleusinian plain, there

00:34:26 ► §

was a kind of rye

00:34:27 ► §

being grown, which was

00:34:29 ► §

infected with a strain of

00:34:31 ► §

claviseps that

00:34:33 ► §

was mild

00:34:36 ► §

enough

00:34:37 ► §

that it was hallucinogenic without

00:34:39 ► §

being convulsive or causing

00:34:42 ► §

miscarriages or something like that.

00:34:44 ► §

Because if you just go out and gather ergot smut, claviceps purpura, and you should be

00:34:52 ► §

very careful with it.

00:34:54 ► §

I mean, these ergot alkaloids can send you into convulsions, some of them, and they’re

00:35:00 ► §

fairly toxic.

00:35:02 ► §

But it’s conceivable that a strain grew on the Eleusinian plain

00:35:06 ► §

that was made into a kind of beer that was then this hallucinogenic intoxicant.

00:35:12 ► §

But Robert Graves, who didn’t have the kind of public relations machinery that Wasson had,

00:35:20 ► §

had a different notion.

00:35:32 ► §

had a different notion, and he claimed that the surviving recipes of the sacrament at Eleusis, and there were, I think, four examples of surviving recipes, all called for the same ingredients.

00:35:51 ► §

Don’t hold me to it, but I think the ingredients were barley, honey, water, and something else, hyssop maybe. And he pointed out that a recipe for beer in Greece would never specify water because you understand that water is part of beer.

00:36:03 ► §

So he said these words were code words

00:36:06 ► §

and that in Greek,

00:36:08 ► §

the first initial of these four words

00:36:11 ► §

could be arranged to spell

00:36:15 ► §

the word muco,

00:36:19 ► §

which is mushroom.

00:36:22 ► §

Mucus.

00:36:23 ► §

Part of the Indo-European language family believes mushrooms are slimy

00:36:29 ► §

this is why the word mucus can be traced back to the word micro mushroom my conno my sonia

00:36:38 ► §

in fact means the land of the mushrooms And so the role of mushrooms in generating the religions of early Greece

00:36:49 ► §

is a completely unexplored area.

00:36:52 ► §

It’s never been fully thought through.

00:36:55 ► §

And this is called an ogham, by the way,

00:36:57 ► §

where you take the first letter of a list,

00:37:02 ► §

and the first letter of the items of a list spells out a secret meaning

00:37:06 ► §

and it was a favorite trick

00:37:08 ► §

of Irish bardic poets

00:37:10 ► §

which Graves was very much

00:37:12 ► §

into that

00:37:13 ► §

but I

00:37:14 ► §

now here is a great project

00:37:17 ► §

for somebody

00:37:19 ► §

we need someone

00:37:20 ► §

to prove that you can brew

00:37:23 ► §

a hallucinogen out of claviceps on rye I

00:37:29 ► §

mean this ergotized beer wrap it’s just a phrase until somebody puts the stein

00:37:36 ► §

on the table in front of you I mean we they would be go a great distance toward

00:37:42 ► §

trying to prove their case someone should should go to the Ellicinian Plain

00:37:47 ► §

and see if they can still find any cereal grains growing there,

00:37:52 ► §

and if so, can they infect them with claviceps,

00:37:56 ► §

or is there claviceps in the area?

00:37:58 ► §

Now, there’s a problem here.

00:37:59 ► §

I understand there’s an oil refinery

00:38:02 ► §

where the Ellicinian mysteries used to be practiced.

00:38:07 ► §

But even in California, one could at least take a step toward understanding this

00:38:13 ► §

because we have in California a species of grasses called Spartina.

00:38:19 ► §

Spartina grows, there’s quite a population of it on the cliffs above the sea,

00:38:24 ► §

just north of Santa Cruz.

00:38:26 ► §

Well, Spartina could support Claviceps purpura as an organism.

00:38:32 ► §

So why not grow Spartina and attempt to infect it with a mild strain of ergot,

00:38:39 ► §

which you could get from the American Type Culture Collection or something like that?

00:38:43 ► §

See if an ergotized beer could be brewed.

00:38:47 ► §

The absence of mushrooms in these places does not disprove the theory

00:38:53 ► §

because all of the Mediterranean has been drying out throughout historical times.

00:39:01 ► §

And there are Greek vases and freezes,

00:39:14 ► §

And there are Greek vases and friezes which do show mushrooms in situations that are ambiguous as to whether or not they’re being venerated or exactly what is happening.

00:39:18 ► §

Now let me see if I’ve missed anything.

00:39:23 ► §

I mentioned the Argyria complex in India.

00:39:26 ► §

That’s the Hawaiian baby wood rose.

00:39:28 ► §

Now, that’s an interesting one,

00:39:32 ► §

and I’m always on the alert for these. I’m interested in unclaimed indole complexes.

00:39:38 ► §

In other words, why was Argyria nervosa never utilized by anybody?

00:39:44 ► §

It’s extremely powerful

00:39:46 ► §

you only have to take

00:39:47 ► §

eight or nine seeds

00:39:49 ► §

and you don’t have to prepare it at all

00:39:51 ► §

just chew it up and swallow it

00:39:54 ► §

how come

00:39:55 ► §

no cult, no impact

00:39:58 ► §

on the history of ideas

00:39:59 ► §

well we don’t know

00:40:00 ► §

those 13 species of Argyria

00:40:03 ► §

are spread from India down through Polynesia.

00:40:07 ► §

And it’s called Hawaiian baby wood rose, but it was introduced into Hawaii 100 years ago.

00:40:12 ► §

It has nothing to do with Hawaii.

00:40:15 ► §

The only major complex that I didn’t discuss is the cannabis complex.

00:40:22 ► §

Now, this is not an indole.

00:40:27 ► §

And there are many anomalous things about cannabis.

00:40:33 ► §

First of all, it’s what’s called a polyhydric alcohol,

00:40:38 ► §

the only psychedelic polyhydric alcohol known to science.

00:40:44 ► §

It’s an extremely old plant.

00:40:47 ► §

I mentioned last night the relationship of the metaphors

00:40:50 ► §

of storytelling and weaving and language.

00:40:53 ► §

And, of course, hemp is a fiber plant.

00:40:55 ► §

And we find hemp and math go back to as late as PPNB,

00:41:12 ► §

pre-pottery Neolithic bee, at Chattal-Huyuk, there are hemp mats. Well, it’s very unlikely with what with tossing waste from weaving into fires and the oiliness

00:41:20 ► §

of the seed and so forth that the psychoactive properties of this thing were not discovered.

00:41:26 ► §

Cannabis originates in Africa, the original, I mean, I’m sorry, originates in Central Asia.

00:41:32 ► §

The original species is ruteralis.

00:41:35 ► §

And then very early in prehistory, it divided into the resin race, indica, and fiber races and then it was carried across the land bridge

00:41:47 ► §

presumably into North America and that accounts for the the sativa variant and

00:41:53 ► §

so forth Herodotus describes interestingly enough hemp was used

00:42:01 ► §

marijuana was used for thousands and thousands of years before it was smoked.

00:42:07 ► §

One of the hardest things to wrap your mind around is the notion that until Columbus discovered

00:42:15 ► §

the New World 500 years ago, no one in Europe had ever smoked or conceived of smoking anything.

00:42:24 ► §

It was a New World cultural practice.

00:42:27 ► §

And if you read Columbus’s diary of when he landed in the New World, he was amazed.

00:42:35 ► §

He wrote, the natives drink smoke.

00:42:39 ► §

That was the only way he could imagine.

00:42:42 ► §

He said, you know, what are you doing?

00:42:42 ► §

That was the only way he could imagine.

00:42:44 ► §

He said, you know, what are you doing?

00:42:55 ► §

And then, of course, it was less than 100 years before it was a major vice of the sophisticated raconteurs of Europe. Within 100 years of the introduction of tobacco into Europe, tobacco was being buried in the graves of Lapland shamans above the Arctic Circle.

00:43:08 ► §

So the shamanic nature of tobacco was immediately recognized even in the European context.

00:43:17 ► §

Herodotus describes marijuana ingestion as a process somewhat like being in a sweat lodge and then pouring hemp seeds and hemp waste onto the hot rocks

00:43:31 ► §

and letting it mingle with the steam in this closed space and deep breathing.

00:43:37 ► §

But nobody ever had the notion of a pipe or anything like this.

00:43:42 ► §

pipe or anything like this.

00:43:45 ► §

And it’s very interesting for many different reasons.

00:43:50 ► §

One is that it’s a new use for the human body,

00:43:54 ► §

less than 500 years old in European culture.

00:44:03 ► §

At Non-Nak-Saw in Thailand they and in other Neolithic grave they have found long

00:44:13 ► §

bones arm and leg bones with burned out centers and they don’t know whether this was a marrow

00:44:21 ► §

extraction procedure or it was a chillum if you know what a chillum procedure, or it was a chilum.

00:44:26 ► §

If you know what a chilum is, a chilum is a ceramic tube narrow at one end and wide at the other,

00:44:33 ► §

and you pack it with hash and tobacco, and then you hold it and you do this to it.

00:44:41 ► §

Well, it may be that smoking was known in Asia in Neolithic times, but somehow

00:44:46 ► §

died out in the pre-classical period and had to be reintroduced from the New World.

00:44:53 ► §

Karen, do you want to comment about Amanita muscaria?

00:44:57 ► §

Yes.

00:44:57 ► §

Good. I’m glad you reminded me. Amanita muscaria is perhaps the old world hallucinogen par excellence,

00:45:06 ► §

at least in the opinion of Gordon Wasson and a lot of other scholars.

00:45:09 ► §

The problem with it is it’s extremely difficult to get a reliable, positive experience from it.

00:45:18 ► §

Now, the reasons for this are complex.

00:45:21 ► §

First of all, it’s geographically variant.

00:45:27 ► §

It’s seasonally variant,

00:45:30 ► §

and it’s genetically variant.

00:45:35 ► §

So only if you have lived in an ecosystem virtually your entire life and have inherited the accumulated knowledge

00:45:39 ► §

from the shamanic elders of your tribe are you going to know

00:45:43 ► §

whether you’ve got a good one or not?

00:45:46 ► §

Nevertheless, Gordon Wasson tried to argue

00:45:49 ► §

that it was the Ur-Halicenogen,

00:45:53 ► §

the prototypic Halicenogen of prehistory

00:45:56 ► §

that was being used by these Vedic peoples who invaded India.

00:46:02 ► §

In fact, he thought it was Soma.

00:46:04 ► §

I think, and I had

00:46:05 ► §

correspondence with him about it before

00:46:07 ► §

he died, I think the Soma

00:46:10 ► §

question isn’t settled, and it could

00:46:11 ► §

well have been a coprophytic

00:46:14 ► §

mushroom associated with the

00:46:15 ► §

dung of cows. After all, the

00:46:17 ► §

role of cattle in

00:46:20 ► §

Indian religion is

00:46:21 ► §

very central, and in fact, the role

00:46:23 ► §

of cattle in early religion

00:46:25 ► §

generally is extremely central

00:46:27 ► §

you do not get goddess religion in the ancient near east

00:46:32 ► §

without cattle worship

00:46:34 ► §

cattle and goddesses seem to go very much together

00:46:38 ► §

and on the other hand

00:46:39 ► §

the Dionysian Mithraic complex is a bull cult

00:46:44 ► §

and it too can be traced back into time

00:46:47 ► §

until it’s just lost in remote antiquity.

00:46:51 ► §

So yes, that’s the Arctic mushroom used by Siberian shamans,

00:46:57 ► §

and it’s been made the prototypic hallucinogen

00:47:00 ► §

because Siberian shamanism was made the prototype of all other shamanism,

00:47:06 ► §

only because some anthropologist somewhere decided that that would be a good idea.

00:47:15 ► §

Australia is, again, singularly poor in known hallucinogens.

00:47:20 ► §

I always say in known hallucinogens because somebody could go out into these places and come up with something brand new, something that we’ve overlooked.

00:47:31 ► §

This is a great challenge for field workers.

00:47:35 ► §

And then the other thing I want to say, and then I’ll stop for today, is just a bit about this issue about synthetics.

00:47:45 ► §

Are all psychedelics the same?

00:47:48 ► §

Are synthetics in any way inferior or superior

00:47:51 ► §

to naturally occurring hallucinogens?

00:47:54 ► §

And if so, why or why not?

00:48:00 ► §

This controversy began for me as like an aesthetic issue.

00:48:08 ► §

I just felt better about taking plants sanctioned by thousands of years of use,

00:48:15 ► §

but I didn’t particularly feel that it was a strong distinction.

00:48:22 ► §

But the more time I’ve spent with it,

00:48:24 ► §

and the more time I’ve spent with Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of morphogenetic fields,

00:48:29 ► §

the more I come to see that I really think there is a very large distinction

00:48:36 ► §

between synthetic and naturally occurring drugs.

00:48:40 ► §

Now, it’s not a distinction that you’re going to get a chemist to agree to or a materialist.

00:48:48 ► §

As far as they’re concerned, DMT from a plant and DMT synthesized in the laboratory are exactly the same thing.

00:48:58 ► §

And as far as they’re concerned, a synthetic hallucinogen such as, oh, I don’t know, ketamine.

00:49:05 ► §

Let’s give it the benefit of the doubt for a moment.

00:49:08 ► §

Ketamine.

00:49:09 ► §

And a natural hallucinogen such as psilocybin.

00:49:14 ► §

The differences do not reside in the fact that one is organic and one is synthetic.

00:49:20 ► §

But I think that these plants take people as much as people take the plants.

00:49:28 ► §

So that when you have a mushroom trip, you not only are having a mushroom trip,

00:49:35 ► §

you are contributing to the future mushroom trips of everybody in the future who will take this thing. In other words, you make a small offering on the altar

00:49:48 ► §

and that henceforth becomes part of the setting of the thing.

00:49:52 ► §

So that when you take one,

00:49:54 ► §

it’s like the notion of the Tao of the ancestors.

00:49:58 ► §

When you take one of these ancient, ancient hallucinogens,

00:50:31 ► §

you are locking into the morphogenetic fields of all the people who ever took it. of stair-step cities and hieroglyph balustrades and people dressed in gold and quetzal finery and all this.

00:50:36 ► §

Or that when you take ayahuasca, even in this culture,

00:50:43 ► §

there is a very strong impression of the jungle, of jaguars, of rivers. I mean, these things are coded into these compounds somehow.

00:50:49 ► §

So it seems to me it is, without talking about issues of toxicity

00:50:55 ► §

and pharmacological uncertainty,

00:50:58 ► §

it’s the content of the naturally occurring hallucinogens is much, much richer.

00:51:06 ► §

And then one last point that I want to make

00:51:08 ► §

to sum up this geographical survey

00:51:12 ► §

of what is available

00:51:14 ► §

is to say, again,

00:51:16 ► §

another research frontier is China.

00:51:20 ► §

There is very little evidence

00:51:23 ► §

of any use of hallucinogens in China, and yet there are clues. There are clues that mushrooms were understood, that other plants may have been used, the knowledge of which has been lost. And the Cultural Revolution did a pretty thorough job

00:51:47 ► §

on wiping out this kind of traditional Taoist shamanic data.

00:51:52 ► §

But a very simple way of focusing the problem is to say

00:51:58 ► §

there has never been reported from China a psilocybin-containing mushroom.

00:52:05 ► §

And yet I’ll bet if a reasonably informed investigator

00:52:08 ► §

were to go to southern China

00:52:10 ► §

and spend no more than two or three months

00:52:14 ► §

off the beaten path talking to country people,

00:52:17 ► §

I’ll bet you could come up with half a dozen

00:52:20 ► §

psychoactive mushrooms with a history of folk usage.

00:52:24 ► §

It’s simply the question has not been asked.

00:52:28 ► §

Well, we are going to not have a clear understanding

00:52:31 ► §

of the historical development of Chinese thought and institutions

00:52:35 ► §

unless we know what their relationship to the invisible world precisely was.

00:52:41 ► §

And I think the indigenous tradition of shamanism,

00:52:46 ► §

which became then Taoism,

00:52:48 ► §

which became the real substratum of Chinese religion

00:52:52 ► §

while it weathered various late grafted variants

00:52:59 ► §

and foreign imports like Buddhism,

00:53:01 ► §

but that native stratum of Taoistic shamanism

00:53:06 ► §

hints very, very strongly

00:53:08 ► §

that there were psychedelic usage

00:53:11 ► §

of these plants in ancient China.

00:53:16 ► §

Okay, that’s it for today,

00:53:19 ► §

and we’ll see you at 10 o’clock tomorrow morning.

00:53:22 ► §

Sorry to give you such a burst of information,

00:53:25 ► §

but this will lay the basis, I hope, for tomorrow’s discussion.

00:53:30 ► §

So think about what we didn’t cover,

00:53:32 ► §

what you hope to hear that you haven’t,

00:53:35 ► §

and then tomorrow we’ll try to tie up all the loose threads.

00:53:39 ► §

Thanks very much.

00:53:40 ► §

Sure.

00:53:40 ► §

very much.

00:53:41 ► §

Sure.

00:53:45 ► §

Okay.

00:53:47 ► §

It looks like almost everybody

00:53:49 ► §

is here.

00:53:50 ► §

There was a woman

00:53:51 ► §

yesterday

00:53:52 ► §

who isn’t here.

00:53:53 ► §

I wonder if she was

00:53:54 ► §

a one-dayer

00:53:55 ► §

or if she’ll show up.

00:53:57 ► §

Do you all remember

00:53:58 ► §

her?

00:54:00 ► §

No one saw her

00:54:01 ► §

but me.

00:54:03 ► §

Yes, she sat

00:54:04 ► §

sitting right here. Yes. She’ll be here. Yes, she sat…

00:54:05 ► §

Yes.

00:54:08 ► §

Oh, she will.

00:54:10 ► §

Okay, well…

00:54:12 ► §

It’s always somewhat late on Sunday morning, so we’ll…

00:54:31 ► §

a couple of people expressed interest in this week that I’m doing at Esalen so I might describe it a little bit

00:54:33 ► §

it’s quite different from this

00:54:36 ► §

it’s an in-depth involvement in the mathematics of the I Ching

00:54:42 ► §

and then a theory that I evolved out of my engagement with that

00:54:48 ► §

that has to do with the structure of time

00:54:53 ► §

and analysis of history as a predictable phenomenon.

00:54:58 ► §

It has no connection with psychedelics

00:55:01 ► §

other than that the entire thing was dreamed up under the influence of psychedelics other than that the entire thing was dreamed up

00:55:05 ► §

under the influence of psychedelics.

00:55:08 ► §

But it’s a stand-alone idea,

00:55:13 ► §

and if I’m able to control the group,

00:55:17 ► §

I will keep it quite far from psychedelics

00:55:20 ► §

except in moments of rhetorical desperation.

00:55:25 ► §

But if you’re interested in the I Ching,

00:55:28 ► §

don’t let the word mathematics put you off.

00:55:32 ► §

I am not a mathematician,

00:55:34 ► §

and the best mathematicians aren’t either.

00:55:37 ► §

You simply, it’s just a way of talking about it

00:55:43 ► §

and doing analysis that was very fruitful.

00:55:48 ► §

So that’s a five-day from the 28th of this month to the 2nd of December.

00:55:53 ► §

And Esalen has given us the big house.

00:55:56 ► §

And a lot of people will bring their computers.

00:55:59 ► §

There will be a lot of machine implementation people.

00:56:03 ► §

It will go from Taoist scholars to assembly

00:56:07 ► §

language programmers, and everybody will have more of a contribution to make than they suspect

00:56:14 ► §

at the time. Well, hopefully you turned some of this over in your mind in the time that we’ve been apart,

00:56:26 ► §

I certainly did,

00:56:27 ► §

in the sense of trying to figure out

00:56:29 ► §

what I had missed

00:56:30 ► §

and whose concerns had not been met.

00:56:36 ► §

And what I came up with was

00:56:38 ► §

your interest in the specifics

00:56:44 ► §

of time, place, and manner,

00:56:48 ► §

which should certainly be covered because it’s operational information.

00:56:57 ► §

Talking about the various plant, visionary plant complexes that we talked about yesterday,

00:57:06 ► §

each one of these things has a style and a set of demands

00:57:13 ► §

that it makes on its practitioners.

00:57:16 ► §

And if you look at the ethnographic literature,

00:57:20 ► §

you then see how the people who’ve used these things over millennia

00:57:25 ► §

have come to terms with them,

00:57:28 ► §

how they have accommodated themselves to these things.

00:57:33 ► §

For instance, in the Iboka cult of Gabon,

00:57:39 ► §

what is aimed for is early on in the involvement with the plant,

00:57:44 ► §

a massive dose is taken.

00:57:49 ► §

And they say it splits your head open.

00:57:53 ► §

And you never have to take very much again

00:57:57 ► §

because somehow a creode or a predilection has been created

00:58:03 ► §

and then you are initiated into this.

00:58:07 ► §

When you read the ethnographic literature,

00:58:11 ► §

it’s hard to believe how much they say they are taking.

00:58:15 ► §

I mean, there’s a saying in Gabon,

00:58:19 ► §

Bawiti, which is what they call Iboga,

00:58:22 ► §

Bawiti begins at 60,

00:58:27 ► §

and that means 60 grams.

00:58:33 ► §

Well, even allowing for the fact that they’re using fresh root

00:58:34 ► §

and you might get a collapse rate

00:58:38 ► §

of close to 50 or 75 percent,

00:58:41 ► §

that still means they’re saying

00:58:43 ► §

bowiti begins at 15 to 20 grams, which from my own

00:58:50 ► §

experience with this stuff, I can tell you, is not even a conceivable place to begin.

00:58:57 ► §

That’s not a strong hit.

00:58:59 ► §

That’s an impossible hit.

00:59:14 ► §

possible is. So the mushrooms, and you have to know, pharmacologically speaking, the window of effective activity. Every drug, every compound has a profile, which you can imagine as a profile, which you can imagine as a linear spectrum,

00:59:28 ► §

below a certain amount, it’s undetectable.

00:59:37 ► §

Above that amount, it becomes detectable first as this CNS arousal that I mentioned yesterday,

00:59:39 ► §

and then as a full-blown psychedelic experience,

00:59:44 ► §

And then as a full-blown psychedelic experience,

00:59:50 ► §

and then at higher doses, it begins to have toxic effects.

00:59:53 ► §

All drugs are toxins.

00:59:58 ► §

And people often make the mistake of thinking that if you have a toxic substance and you take half of it then it’s not toxic because there is

01:00:07 ► §

no register you don’t register its effects but of course everything is

01:00:12 ► §

incrementally toxic now some things have are very safe have a great range of effectiveness well below the range where any toxicity begins to set in.

01:00:30 ► §

Other compounds are active as psychedelics

01:00:36 ► §

at a level just slightly below

01:00:39 ► §

the level where you’re going to begin to have toxic effects. So you want to know what the profile is

01:00:49 ► §

of the particular substance that you’re thinking of taking.

01:00:52 ► §

In pharmacology, one of the parameters that they establish

01:00:57 ► §

is what’s called an LD50,

01:01:00 ► §

which is a fairly unpleasant concept,

01:01:03 ► §

which you should nevertheless be informed of.

01:01:06 ► §

LD50 means lethal dose 50.

01:01:11 ► §

This means we have 100 mice.

01:01:13 ► §

We give them an unknown drug at the point where half of them die.

01:01:20 ► §

That is the LD50 dose of that compound.

01:01:25 ► §

And there’s an LD100, an LD10, and so forth.

01:01:29 ► §

What you want is for the LD50 to be tremendously high

01:01:35 ► §

relative to the effective dose.

01:01:39 ► §

Now, the perfect or model compound in that case

01:01:44 ► §

is, of course course LSD. LSD is active at the 25

01:01:49 ► §

microgram range, 25 gamma. A microgram is a millionth of a gram. It’s well below a Now, the LD50 for lysergic acid has never been determined.

01:02:09 ► §

Do you agree?

01:02:10 ► §

It’s never been found how much it takes to kill half of the test animals.

01:02:16 ► §

So that makes it a tremendously safe drug if mortality is the only concern.

01:02:28 ► §

drug if mortality is the only concern. But of course, I think what most psychedelic trippers eventually realize is mortality is rarely at risk in psychedelic experiences. What’s

01:02:34 ► §

at risk is sanity. And, you know, being nuts is not as bad as being dead, but nevertheless, it can spoil your entire day.

01:02:46 ► §

So, and it’s very reassuring

01:02:52 ► §

having taken a compound like psilocybin

01:02:55 ► §

and to have become totally convinced that you are dying

01:02:59 ► §

to just remind yourself that the LD50

01:03:02 ► §

is 200 times more than you took,

01:03:05 ► §

and therefore it’s impossible,

01:03:07 ► §

and you merely have to discipline the hind brain and take control of your fear,

01:03:12 ► §

and then you will be all right.

01:03:15 ► §

I wish somebody would have told me that.

01:03:18 ► §

And you’re a pharmacologist.

01:03:22 ► §

But when you’re in it, you really think you’re dying.

01:03:25 ► §

When you’re in it and you think you’re dying, you weren’t able to say to yourself,

01:03:29 ► §

now see here, no one has ever died at this dose level.

01:03:36 ► §

Well, it is a question.

01:03:39 ► §

You start imagining that perhaps there was something in there that wasn’t just psilocybin.

01:03:45 ► §

Oh, yeah.

01:03:46 ► §

That’s a good point.

01:03:49 ► §

Or your heart can’t bear it.

01:03:50 ► §

I had tachycardia, and I thought my heart was going to explode.

01:03:53 ► §

Pound right out of your chest.

01:03:55 ► §

You make a point, which I want to elaborate on.

01:03:58 ► §

We’ve talked so much about hallucination here,

01:04:01 ► §

and always because of my particular bent which I have

01:04:06 ► §

unconsciously transferred to you it’s we’re talking about visual hallucinations

01:04:12 ► §

but all psychedelic explorers should be aware of the concept of what is called a

01:04:18 ► §

cognitive hallucination this is a much more insidious phenomenon.

01:04:29 ► §

This is quite simply an out-and-out delusion.

01:04:35 ► §

The commonest form of cognitive hallucination goes like this.

01:04:37 ► §

You take mushrooms.

01:04:43 ► §

An hour and 20 minutes into it, it’s getting mighty, mighty strange.

01:04:46 ► §

And this is especially a problem with first-timers.

01:04:55 ► §

And you realize with the force of revelation that you didn’t take psilocybin. You took a poisonous mushroom. And now you are going to die. This is an out-and-out cognitive hallucination,

01:05:03 ► §

This is an out-and-out cognitive hallucination,

01:05:06 ► §

which is as real as a belief,

01:05:09 ► §

but it’s not a disturbance in the visual field, it’s a disturbance in the cognitive machinery.

01:05:14 ► §

A story, a friend of mine had never taken mushrooms

01:05:22 ► §

and was very concerned about how to do it

01:05:25 ► §

and said and got the instructions from me,

01:05:28 ► §

silent darkness, quiet rooms, stay sitting,

01:05:33 ► §

and took them in his room in silent darkness

01:05:36 ► §

and at about the hour and a half point realized with a demonic chuckle

01:05:44 ► §

that I had been kidding.

01:05:48 ► §

I had been putting him on and actually had told him to stay in his room

01:05:54 ► §

because we were preparing a surprise party for him at the bar two blocks down the street.

01:06:02 ► §

And, you know, chuckling to himself with this realization he showered

01:06:10 ► §

dressed and went down to the bar two blocks down the street pushed open the door and said

01:06:17 ► §

I’m here and the guy behind the bar said,

01:06:25 ► §

oh, really?

01:06:28 ► §

Well, the trip got wilder from there

01:06:31 ► §

because in the wake of disconfirmation

01:06:33 ► §

of one of these cognitive hallucinations,

01:06:35 ► §

people tend to become confused, paranoid, and upset.

01:06:41 ► §

So you have to continuously track your mental processes. And it’s really good to

01:06:52 ► §

stick with whatever rules that you’ve laid down for yourself. I actually apply this technique

01:07:00 ► §

in my own life. If I get to the place where I cannot understand what is happening,

01:07:06 ► §

I try to think back to the last moment

01:07:09 ► §

when I did understand what was happening

01:07:12 ► §

and then do what I said I was going to do then,

01:07:17 ► §

having given up on understanding it in the moment.

01:07:21 ► §

The practical fallout from this

01:07:24 ► §

in terms of psychedelic research

01:07:25 ► §

is what we call the chain to a tree technique

01:07:29 ► §

which is where you just chain yourself to a tree

01:07:33 ► §

and providing you don’t hang yourself with the chain

01:07:36 ► §

this cuts down the possibility of doing something peculiar

01:07:42 ► §

psychedelics tend to be,

01:07:45 ► §

this doesn’t tend to be a problem,

01:07:48 ► §

but for instance with detour,

01:07:50 ► §

the best intended and most together people

01:07:55 ► §

lose it completely

01:07:58 ► §

and then come back into it 12 or 24 hours later

01:08:01 ► §

to just survey the swath of wreckage that they have cut through

01:08:07 ► §

their own and other people’s lives.

01:08:09 ► §

I had a friend years ago, a very diminutive, attractive woman who took detour with a couple

01:08:17 ► §

of boyfriends, waited hours and hours, nothing happened.

01:08:23 ► §

They finally decided to go to their homes.

01:08:27 ► §

She walked them down the stairs, said goodbye to them at the top of the stairs.

01:08:31 ► §

It actually happened in the hate.

01:08:34 ► §

And that was the last thing she remembered

01:08:36 ► §

until she came to on the sixth floor of the federal building

01:08:41 ► §

in the San Francisco County Jail.

01:08:43 ► §

And the charge was assault on the resting officer,

01:08:48 ► §

and the evidence was the officer’s thumb,

01:08:52 ► §

which had been bitten off.

01:08:55 ► §

So she was, you know, an Antioch PhD in medieval literature.

01:09:03 ► §

So it happens to the best of us. Ph.D. in medieval literature. No. It happens

01:09:05 ► §

to the best of us.

01:09:09 ► §

Yeah.

01:09:10 ► §

Can’t you eliminate

01:09:12 ► §

a lot of that

01:09:14 ► §

cognitive uncertainty by having

01:09:16 ► §

somebody with you when you do this?

01:09:18 ► §

Yeah, you can.

01:09:21 ► §

The ideal

01:09:22 ► §

situation, and always I’m

01:09:24 ► §

only speaking from my own experience,

01:09:26 ► §

and I may have an odd take on it because God knows I’m odd,

01:09:31 ► §

but to my mind the ideal situation is to have the sitter two rooms away

01:09:39 ► §

and you have a doorbell or the equivalent.

01:09:43 ► §

Because if the sitter is with you,

01:09:45 ► §

you start to analyze the sitter.

01:09:49 ► §

And as someone once said to me in India,

01:09:52 ► §

face is index of mind.

01:09:55 ► §

And the sitter can just become

01:09:57 ► §

an existential galaxy of possibilities

01:10:02 ► §

because you can read their history their intent

01:10:06 ► §

their most secret thoughts your belief in what is their most secret thoughts if people are

01:10:14 ► §

concrescences of ambiguity that you don’t want to

01:10:19 ► §

Get too tangled up with in that state unless you really

01:10:24 ► §

Are ready for the trip to take that

01:10:27 ► §

particular direction. I don’t know if it was in this workshop or the other night that I mentioned,

01:10:34 ► §

I recall a trip I took with this English guy, and it took me two weeks to get his voice out of my head.

01:10:45 ► §

It just became like this accompaniment to consciousness,

01:10:51 ► §

this stream of sort of understated English upper-class gibberish on all subjects.

01:10:58 ► §

And I finally, you know, it retracted.

01:11:02 ► §

That’s called becoming a victim of the transference

01:11:05 ► §

all psychotherapists are aware

01:11:08 ► §

of this

01:11:08 ► §

the

01:11:09 ► §

transference is when you get

01:11:14 ► §

dragged into the other person’s

01:11:16 ► §

system of values

01:11:18 ► §

or delusion

01:11:19 ► §

there’s even a name for this

01:11:21 ► §

in

01:11:22 ► §

clinical psychology.

01:11:26 ► §

It’s called allophrinia.

01:11:28 ► §

Allophrinia is schizophrenic behavior on the part of normal people

01:11:34 ► §

in the presence of schizophrenics.

01:11:38 ► §

And this is a real problem.

01:11:40 ► §

Your friend is put in the place.

01:11:43 ► §

You go to see your friend to cheer them up and your friend

01:11:48 ► §

is not violently insane but saying strange things behaving in strange ways and you in an effort to

01:11:57 ► §

relate to them begin saying strange things and behaving in strange ways and before you know it you know the resident

01:12:05 ► §

has to break in and escort you to the elevator because you’re causing a

01:12:10 ► §

problem in the ward the transference is this phenomenon happening among people

01:12:17 ► §

who are more or less psychologically healthy but still it can be very

01:12:23 ► §

disrupting I think the sitter should be there only if there’s

01:12:27 ► §

a three-dimensional emergency. And the sitter, the notion, I like the word sitter because it’s

01:12:40 ► §

operational. It tells what you should do. And guide is not such a pleasing word.

01:12:48 ► §

This implies control, prior knowledge, hierarchy, so forth and so on.

01:12:58 ► §

The best guide sitter I ever knew was a wonderful old guy.

01:13:08 ► §

He’s dead now, but I’m not yet ready to say his name in public. I’m sure some of you know him. But his style was he read these paperback trash novels,

01:13:16 ► §

you know, and he would just sit down with somebody, give them the stuff, and every once in a while they would fight their way out of this ocean of hallucination to deliver some insight.

01:13:31 ► §

And he would just put down his book and turn to them and say,

01:13:34 ► §

That’s nice. Now go back to the music.

01:13:38 ► §

Pick up his book and, you know, this guy could get 600 pages in a situation where he was nominally in charge of a dozen people who were tripping.

01:13:50 ► §

So non-intervention, I think.

01:13:52 ► §

And then there’s the question of doing it with another person.

01:13:58 ► §

And then the question is, meaning that the other person is going to be stoned too.

01:14:04 ► §

And then the question is, is it going, meaning that the other person is going to be stoned too.

01:14:10 ► §

And this has its own pitfalls and ambiguities.

01:14:20 ► §

If it’s your lover, your sexual partner, then in my opinion, that’s probably the best way to spend your time.

01:14:28 ► §

If it’s not, then, you know know the sky is the limit you’re going to learn more about this person than perhaps you were prepared to sometimes it’s easy it’s no problem everybody stays who they

01:14:35 ► §

appeared to be before you took off but sometimes you know the masks just start being hurled across

01:14:41 ► §

the room in all directions and and you don’t know where it’s going to leave you.

01:14:48 ► §

My approach, I guess, is one of two extremes.

01:14:55 ► §

I guess I sort of belong to the sensory deprivation school

01:15:00 ► §

that lie down, shut up, silent darkness,

01:15:05 ► §

music very judiciously, if at all,

01:15:10 ► §

and I always do it at night,

01:15:12 ► §

which some people find that strange,

01:15:14 ► §

but night is quiet.

01:15:16 ► §

The energy dies down.

01:15:18 ► §

There’s calm and still between midnight and 4 a.m.

01:15:22 ► §

The other end of the spectrum

01:15:24 ► §

is someone like Salvador Roquette

01:15:27 ► §

who, you know, gives you three drugs,

01:15:31 ► §

plays heavy metal rock and roll,

01:15:33 ► §

then you get to see the Auschwitz film.

01:15:37 ► §

No, I’m not kidding.

01:15:39 ► §

I’m not kidding.

01:15:40 ► §

I mean, it is an effort to,

01:15:43 ► §

so far as I can tell,

01:15:44 ► §

drive you absolutely starkers, you know,

01:15:48 ► §

and I would not submit myself to that. This same polarity exists in therapeutic theories.

01:15:57 ► §

Some schools of therapy want you to lose it, want you to weep, lament, rend your clothing,

01:16:06 ► §

throw yourself on the floor, kick your feet in the air,

01:16:08 ► §

and this is called getting out your stuff or working through your stuff.

01:16:16 ► §

What I find about this kind of thing is it resonates too long.

01:16:22 ► §

It doesn’t feel like you’ve gotten clear of it.

01:16:25 ► §

It feels like you have simply objectified it.

01:16:30 ► §

But, you know, life is an uncompleted puzzle.

01:16:33 ► §

I could certainly change my mind.

01:16:37 ► §

I have never felt that the primary use of these things

01:16:41 ► §

was to cure what is called in modern parlance neurosis what

01:16:47 ► §

I call unhappiness it isn’t for that it is and again this may be my the

01:16:56 ► §

influence of Jung in my background you know Jung felt that there was no such

01:17:01 ► §

thing as normality that life the task of life was what he called individuation.

01:17:08 ► §

And he felt it really doesn’t even begin until you approach middle life.

01:17:13 ► §

I mean, you must leave the 20s behind you

01:17:16 ► §

because they are so socially and hormonally turbulent

01:17:21 ► §

that you’re just basically trying to make sense of it on a day-to-day basis

01:17:26 ► §

but then you settle in and this unfolding takes place and I really assume that we are all beyond

01:17:34 ► §

neurosis not that we are not neurotic but that we all have our own strategies and our own take on our own quirks and peculiarities.

01:17:46 ► §

The psychedelic thing as tool

01:17:49 ► §

is more to go beyond the legacy of the normal

01:17:53 ► §

into the transpersonal or the suprapersonal

01:17:58 ► §

and really view life as an open-ended domain to be explored.

01:18:06 ► §

So I find myself talking to psychologists a lot

01:18:10 ► §

because this is where this has been seized upon

01:18:14 ► §

because it does perturb the dynamics of the psyche.

01:18:19 ► §

But for instance, I don’t think you should give people

01:18:21 ► §

hospitalized for psychotic behavior psychedelics,

01:18:26 ► §

they’re having enough trouble.

01:18:29 ► §

They are being overwhelmed by the contents of the unconscious 24 hours a day

01:18:35 ► §

and have no tool to make sense of it.

01:18:37 ► §

The rest of us can make sense of overwhelmment by the unconscious if it doesn’t go on too long

01:18:46 ► §

I mean I don’t think there’s any one of us who would wish to take mushrooms

01:18:50 ► §

arrive at the heights and just stay there because after 48 72 hours some

01:18:59 ► §

situation would arise which would cast cast us into an extreme state of disequilibrium.

01:19:06 ► §

It’s more like diving.

01:19:08 ► §

A friend of mine said many, many years ago,

01:19:12 ► §

the yogin and sub-in, shaman, psychedelic voyager,

01:19:16 ► §

the yogin and the schizophrenic dive in the same motion.

01:19:21 ► §

It’s just that the yogin remembers to take his tanks along, and that’s what it is,

01:19:27 ► §

you know. I mean, there is this possibility of inundation and overwhelmment. Well, let’s return

01:19:33 ► §

to the matter of dosage and set and setting. Yeah. I have a question. You mentioned yesterday how you

01:19:41 ► §

favored organic materials over synthetic. What about taking organic materials but then refining, narrowing them down,

01:19:48 ► §

getting rid of all the other ingredients in the plant?

01:19:50 ► §

That’s our Western tendency, to just take something, refine it down,

01:19:54 ► §

isolate the active ingredients and then take doses of that.

01:19:57 ► §

Do you see that the other natural ingredients that the mushrooms or ayahuasca

01:20:01 ► §

and whatever have provided kind of synergize the active ingredients and make the trip easier or smoother?

01:20:08 ► §

Yeah, I think so.

01:20:11 ► §

Rarely in a plant where you have a psychoactive compound will it occur all by itself.

01:20:18 ► §

For instance, in the peyote cactus, there is mescaline, there’s N-methylmescaline,

01:20:24 ► §

there’s anhalamine, anhaloene, methyl, well, there’s mescaline, there’s n-methyl mescaline, there’s anhalamine, anhaloween,

01:20:27 ► §

methyl, well, there’s a whole family, about a dozen of these things. Similarly, in the coca bush,

01:20:35 ► §

cocaine, and several other canes, and several other active compounds. So when you take a plant, you’re getting a broad spectrum of these active molecules that

01:20:52 ► §

have a familial relationship to each other.

01:20:55 ► §

And no chemist has ever exactly explained to me what’s happening, but I think all chemists and pharmacologists are aware of the fact that natural compounds,

01:21:10 ► §

even extracted and purified,

01:21:12 ► §

or let’s just say even extracted,

01:21:15 ► §

are smoother than their synthetic counterpart.

01:21:20 ► §

I recently had occasion to relearn this because there’s been some amount rush in the first 30 seconds.

01:21:52 ► §

I mean, you just feel like you’re in an up elevator that knows no limit.

01:21:57 ► §

And just about the time that you figure you’re going to go into some kind of emergency situation, it tends to back off.

01:22:07 ► §

So then recently there has been this material in the underground called toad foam, which

01:22:16 ► §

is actually 5-methoxy-DMT extracted from the glands of a large southwestern toad.

01:22:25 ► §

Well, when you smoke that, it too is 5-MAO-DMT,

01:22:30 ► §

but there is no heart rush, and it also doesn’t last as long.

01:22:35 ► §

It’s much more benign and easygoing.

01:22:39 ► §

Even in cases where there isn’t a detectably variant spectrum of compounds present,

01:22:46 ► §

for instance, in the psilocybin in Stropharia cubensis,

01:22:50 ► §

really there are only two active principles, psilocybin and psilocin,

01:22:56 ► §

and psilocin is the dephosphorylated ester of psilocybin,

01:23:02 ► §

so they are basically the same compound.

01:23:04 ► §

fibrin-correlated ester of psilocybin, so they are basically the same compound.

01:23:12 ► §

Nevertheless, if you talk to somebody who has only taken Sandoz psilocybin,

01:23:25 ► §

it’s much less animated and interesting than organic psilocybin. Now the counter example to this is when Hoffman synthesized psilocybin

01:23:28 ► §

for the first time

01:23:30 ► §

he gave some of it to

01:23:32 ► §

Wasson and Wasson took

01:23:34 ► §

it back to Huatla in the

01:23:36 ► §

Sierra Mazateca of Oaxaca

01:23:38 ► §

and gave it to Maria

01:23:40 ► §

Sabina and Maria Sabina

01:23:42 ► §

said the spirit

01:23:44 ► §

of the mushroom is in the little pill and this story

01:23:48 ► §

has been repeated over and over again well my assumption simply is you know Maria Sabina was

01:23:55 ► §

a wily old lady I mean it’s not writ anywhere that shamans have to always tell you the truth. And I very seriously doubt that the experience,

01:24:10 ► §

that I’ve never had the opportunity to take chemically pure psilocybin.

01:24:15 ► §

The difference between the morning glories and LSD is one of animation and color. The morning glories, you see, I’m talking now about Ipomoea and Turbina,

01:24:30 ► §

the Mexican species. When you take them, there is a flood of Aztec, Toltec, Mayan imagery.

01:24:39 ► §

It’s just, I mean, it’s uncanny. You can’t believe it while it’s happening, you know, that you would see this

01:24:45 ► §

much glyphs and carved obsidian and quetzal feathers and all of this stuff. Is it the

01:24:53 ► §

morphogenetic field? Is it the broader vegetable spectrum of the alkaloid rather than the synthetic?

01:25:01 ► §

rather than the synthetic?

01:25:03 ► §

Who knows?

01:25:06 ► §

These things remain to be looked at.

01:25:10 ► §

In terms of the theory of morphogenetic resonance,

01:25:13 ► §

it seems to me, you know,

01:25:17 ► §

some of you probably follow Rupert’s ideas and Rupert himself. The problem is that the morphogenetic field

01:25:21 ► §

is very difficult for instruments to detect.

01:25:25 ► §

And in fact, I think so far the only instrument that can detect it is the human mind.

01:25:31 ► §

And this probably means, you know, that it’s perturbing a field

01:25:36 ► §

that is very, very far removed from the fields associated with the four or five ordinary forces of nature.

01:25:44 ► §

associated with the four or five ordinary forces of nature.

01:25:50 ► §

But, for instance, when you go to Tikal in Guatemala or Borupadur in central Java

01:25:52 ► §

or Konarak on the Puri coast of India

01:25:56 ► §

and you take these psychedelics,

01:26:00 ► §

the past is present.

01:26:02 ► §

I mean, you see these places at their height,

01:26:06 ► §

and you can say, well, it’s just suggestion, you know.

01:26:10 ► §

But I don’t know.

01:26:12 ► §

When I take ayahuasca, wherever I take it,

01:26:15 ► §

I encounter the motifs typical of Amazonian shamanism,

01:26:19 ► §

the jaguar, the giant anaconda.

01:26:34 ► §

Jaguar, the giant anaconda, and to show you that sometimes the iconography of these compounds is not predictable, black people.

01:26:40 ► §

And everyone in the Amazon says this, that you see black people. Well, there are no black people in the Amazon, not really.

01:26:40 ► §

Black people.

01:26:43 ► §

Well, there are no black people in the Amazon.

01:26:44 ► §

Not really.

01:26:46 ► §

I mean, in the lower Amazon, there are a few.

01:26:50 ► §

But in the upper Amazon, a black person is as rare as a Kurd.

01:26:54 ► §

And yet, everybody insists on this. Well, I have had this experience on ayahuasca.

01:26:59 ► §

And to call it seeing black people is a very mild gloss on what it is.

01:27:04 ► §

seeing black people is a very mild gloss on what it is.

01:27:10 ► §

It’s like being at the Apollo Ballroom on a hot evening in 1960 and Aretha Franklin is on stage.

01:27:13 ► §

I mean, it is deep hit of blackness.

01:27:18 ► §

Yeah, uh-huh.

01:27:22 ► §

I don’t know quite what to make of it, you know.

01:27:24 ► §

I don’t know quite what to make of it, you know.

01:27:26 ► §

I don’t know why.

01:27:36 ► §

And Claudio Naranjo gave Harmaline to urban people in Santiago, Chile, stockbrokers and advertising executives, people who had no connection to the jungle,

01:27:42 ► §

and they reported jaguars, giant snakes, jungles, and black people.

01:27:49 ► §

So this, to me, is a tremendously fertile area for Jungians, for morphogenetic field people

01:27:57 ► §

to look into. Psychics have claimed since who knows how long that by holding an object in their hand,

01:28:06 ► §

they could penetrate its past states of being.

01:28:10 ► §

Well, it’s like all these other occult claims in my experience, mantra, yantra, yoga posturing, past life recovery.

01:28:22 ► §

past life recovery for me

01:28:24 ► §

none of these things are possible

01:28:26 ► §

unless I’m stoned

01:28:29 ► §

then they all become possible

01:28:31 ► §

it’s just like you just throw the switch

01:28:34 ► §

suddenly mantras work

01:28:36 ► §

I can chant mantras till hell freezes over

01:28:39 ► §

in an un-stoned state

01:28:40 ► §

the precondition for empowering occult idea systems seems to be a shift in brain

01:28:50 ► §

chemistry.

01:28:51 ► §

And it’s, you know, to be noted that in these cultures where a lot of magic, a lot of violation

01:28:59 ► §

of natural law is going on, there is a lot of psychedelic stuff going on. These ayahuasca shamans, say,

01:29:08 ► §

among the Aguaruna-Hivaro, for instance, which is a very no-nonsense tribe of head-hunting people

01:29:17 ► §

in the Amazon, the shamans live continuously in a state of altered consciousness.

01:29:25 ► §

I mean, they are taking this stuff all the time.

01:29:27 ► §

It is a food item.

01:29:29 ► §

And what it would be like

01:29:31 ► §

to be the shaman of the Aguaruna

01:29:34 ► §

in the jungle all the time,

01:29:36 ► §

taking all this stuff,

01:29:38 ► §

it’s hard to imagine,

01:29:39 ► §

because when you just do it once,

01:29:41 ► §

all plants have auras,

01:29:43 ► §

all plants have songs, which can be extracted out of

01:29:49 ► §

them i mean they are living literally in some kind of other dimension you’re listening to the

01:29:58 ► §

psychedelic salon where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.

01:30:09 ► §

And sometimes it feels to me like we are all living in some other dimension.

01:30:11 ► §

How about you?

01:30:15 ► §

Are you able to keep up with the fast pace of world news these days without thinking that you’re in some kind of a time warp?

01:30:19 ► §

I know that if I was an investor thinking about putting some money into a movie,

01:30:23 ► §

I sure wouldn’t buy any scripts that come directly from the current news stories,

01:30:27 ► §

because I don’t think anybody would believe their plots.

01:30:31 ► §

It’s really getting kind of freaky out there, don’t you think?

01:30:36 ► §

Chaos, the food of creation. Don’t you just love it?

01:30:41 ► §

And I have to admit that Terrence had me laughing a bit ago

01:30:44 ► §

when he told about those

01:30:46 ► §

South American Indians who would scrape off the poison from their arrows and get high on it rather

01:30:51 ► §

than engage their enemies. Now those guys are my kind of warriors. And speaking of warriors,

01:30:59 ► §

it’s time once again for a little talk about Burning Man. And I realize that for most of our fellow salonners,

01:31:06 ► §

this may hold little interest since you aren’t going to be able to make it this year.

01:31:10 ► §

But that doesn’t mean you can’t be there in spirit.

01:31:13 ► §

And in fact, that was how I participated last year, via the Internet.

01:31:18 ► §

In case you didn’t already know this,

01:31:20 ► §

my friend John Graham sets up a live video camera on a high tower at Center

01:31:25 ► §

Camp each year, and as the camera scans the playa, John uses a feed from one of the walkie-talkie

01:31:30 ► §

channels for sound.

01:31:32 ► §

While it’s not the same as being there, it is a lot less dusty and somewhat more comfortable

01:31:37 ► §

if you want to participate that way, and you can find that link once the festival starts

01:31:42 ► §

just on the BurningMan.com webpage.

01:31:44 ► §

You can find that link once the festival starts just on the BurningMan.com webpage.

01:31:53 ► §

Now, during the past several weeks, quite a few of my friends have had to cancel their trips to Burning Man for one reason or another.

01:31:57 ► §

And the reasons range from finances to love.

01:32:06 ► §

The bottom line here is that if you aren’t 100% sure that you absolutely must go to the burn, well, then you probably shouldn’t go. Knowing when not to go, I think, is a mark of a true burner. Since I’ve had

01:32:12 ► §

to do this myself, I know for a fact that it takes a lot of courage to back out of a

01:32:17 ► §

burn after you’ve told the whole world about your plans. But hey, I don’t know any burners

01:32:22 ► §

that haven’t had to do that once or twice so don’t worry about it.

01:32:25 ► §

Besides, there are ways to become involved without actually going there.

01:32:30 ► §

And one of those opportunities is now coming to all of our graphic artist friends

01:32:35 ► §

in the form of a poster contest.

01:32:38 ► §

That’s right, a poster contest.

01:32:41 ► §

Now, since we’ve never done anything like this before in the salon

01:32:44 ► §

I’ll have to take a page

01:32:46 ► §

out of the dopetheme.co.uk’s podcast series where he’s had several contests like this, not to mention

01:32:53 ► §

their annual joint rolling contest at Dope Stock each year. So here is our challenge to the artistic

01:32:59 ► §

community. As you know, Bruce Dahmer and I are preparing an evening extravaganza featuring audio and video clips of Terrence McKenna and Timothy Leary, some of which have never been shown in public before.

01:33:25 ► §

Now I would like to point you to the program notes for this podcast at thepsychedelicsalon.org,

01:33:31 ► §

where you’ll find a link to the concept poster that Bruce created to give you an idea of what we’re looking for.

01:33:40 ► §

Now, while I say this is a contest, I should also point out that there are no rules, no judges, and no prizes.

01:33:44 ► §

At least that’s the plan so far, if you want to call it a plan. And if you’re a burner,

01:33:46 ► §

you already know that this is probably one of the better thought out Burning Man projects that I’ve

01:33:51 ► §

been involved in. Which brings me to an email that has some questions that I think quite a few of our

01:33:57 ► §

fellow salonners who are going to the burn for the first time are also asking. This one comes from J.C., who writes in part,

01:34:07 ► §

What is your suggestion for a tent,

01:34:09 ► §

or any shelter for one?

01:34:11 ► §

I heard canvas works great out there against the dust.

01:34:13 ► §

Well, J.C., the first thing

01:34:16 ► §

to get out of the way is the dust.

01:34:18 ► §

And the story here is that

01:34:20 ► §

it doesn’t really matter what you do,

01:34:21 ► §

because everything,

01:34:23 ► §

and I mean everything,

01:34:24 ► §

that you bring to Burning Man will essentially be ruined for most other purposes.

01:34:30 ► §

And not only is the dust going to get into everything you bring, there’s no way to get it out afterwards.

01:34:37 ► §

So most any tent will do.

01:34:39 ► §

The one I use is just one of those lightweight ones, but I stake it down with rebar.

01:34:44 ► §

That’s something you

01:34:45 ► §

should know. The stakes that come with most tents are completely worthless on the playa.

01:34:51 ► §

The next question JC asks is, does the dust cause car problems a lot of the time,

01:34:57 ► §

and should I expect to be in an alkaline cloud on the drive-in with the windows closed?

01:35:07 ► §

cloud on the drive-in with the windows closed. Yeah, it’s a dusty drive into camp, JC, but the speed limit is five miles an hour, and so as long as the wind hasn’t picked up yet, your drive-in

01:35:13 ► §

should be okay. And as for car problems, I’ve always carried a spare air filter that I change

01:35:19 ► §

out just before leaving at the end of the event, but that’s probably overkill.

01:35:26 ► §

His next question is,

01:35:32 ► §

do you suggest using the standard evaporation pools suggested for beginners?

01:35:35 ► §

Is there a new method or a different one that you know of?

01:35:39 ► §

Again, only one person probably need a shower or two.

01:35:45 ► §

Well, here again, JC, you probably aren’t going to like my answer,

01:35:50 ► §

but I’ve found that it’s just not worth the trouble to haul in enough water for showers,

01:35:53 ► §

which also entails the evaporation ponds and a plan to carry out the gray water that doesn’t evaporate

01:35:57 ► §

because you just can’t pour it on the ground.

01:36:00 ► §

But if you’re feeling exceptionally grody,

01:36:02 ► §

then you can join a bunch of us who run behind the water truck that hoses down the streets every morning.

01:36:08 ► §

Just be prepared for a very powerful gush of very cold water, and then a muddy walk back to your camp.

01:36:17 ► §

Basically, personal hygiene isn’t a really high priority on the playa.

01:36:23 ► §

Now, JC goes on about his water and shower issue to say,

01:36:28 ► §

Alternatively, is it hard to find people who are willing to let you take a shower

01:36:32 ► §

or go to the bathroom in their RV, possibly for some sort of exchange of any sort?

01:36:37 ► §

Heard the bathrooms are pretty bad.

01:36:40 ► §

Well, I don’t think the porta-potties are all that bad.

01:36:43 ► §

They keep them pretty clean, and they clean them out every morning and afternoon.

01:36:48 ► §

And actually, I’d be surprised if you can find anyone who would be willing to share their precious water for a stranger to shower in.

01:36:55 ► §

But I’m sure that it probably happens all the time out there.

01:36:59 ► §

It just seems a little rude to me, because one of the things that the event is about is radical self-sufficiency.

01:37:07 ► §

And I think that you’ll find that you get a lot more out of the experience if you bring things to share and help those who are less prepared.

01:37:15 ► §

After all, it’s a gifting community, and I’ve found that the more you share, the more fun you have.

01:37:23 ► §

Now, the last question that he asks is, is Intheon Village

01:37:27 ► §

going to be there? And is it possible to set up there? Well, yes, Intheon Village will be back

01:37:34 ► §

again this year, but I’m not sure about their camping arrangements. However, just now I went

01:37:39 ► §

to IntheonVillage.com and discovered a notice that they’re going to be announcing their camp registration policy

01:37:46 ► §

any day now. So you might want

01:37:48 ► §

to check that out. In fact

01:37:50 ► §

in Theon Village is where Bruce Damer

01:37:52 ► §

and I will be holding our Terrence and

01:37:54 ► §

Timothy happening at 9pm on

01:37:56 ► §

Friday night. At least that’s

01:37:58 ► §

the plan right now.

01:38:00 ► §

And also Bruce and I will be

01:38:02 ► §

there one day during the week for a

01:38:04 ► §

daytime interactive pliologue of some kind. And we’ll also be there one day during the week for a daytime interactive

01:38:05 ► §

plyologue of some kind.

01:38:07 ► §

And we’ll also be doing one at shift camp.

01:38:10 ► §

But I’m not sure about the days and times for those talks.

01:38:14 ► §

So that’s the Burning Man plan so far.

01:38:16 ► §

But unfortunately, only a few of our fellow salonners are going to be at the burn this

01:38:21 ► §

year.

01:38:22 ► §

So hopefully we’ll have both video and audio of the talks

01:38:25 ► §

and happenings, etc., to pass along to you afterwards.

01:38:30 ► §

But there are two other events out this way

01:38:33 ► §

that you may also want to know about.

01:38:35 ► §

One is the Oracle Gathering that will take place

01:38:38 ► §

near Randall, Washington from July 31st through August 2nd.

01:38:42 ► §

I’ll be speaking at that gathering,

01:38:44 ► §

and you can find more about it on the web

01:38:46 ► §

at oraclegatherings.com.

01:38:54 ► §

I’ve already spoken with several salonners

01:38:56 ► §

who are going to be there,

01:38:57 ► §

and I’m looking forward to meeting quite a few of you.

01:39:02 ► §

Also, there is another festival

01:39:04 ► §

that’s going to take place in September

01:39:05 ► §

just shortly after Burning Man.

01:39:08 ► §

And that event is the

01:39:09 ► §

fourth Symbiosis Gathering

01:39:12 ► §

that will be held from September 17th

01:39:14 ► §

through the 21st.

01:39:16 ► §

Now, I’m not sure yet whether I’m going to

01:39:18 ► §

be able to make it there myself,

01:39:20 ► §

but I am hoping to, because

01:39:22 ► §

in addition to some terrific music

01:39:24 ► §

talent that will be creating some interesting soundscapes for us,

01:39:27 ► §

there are also going to be talks and workshops by quite a few interesting people,

01:39:32 ► §

including Allison and Alex Gray, Starhawk, Daniel Pinchbeck,

01:39:36 ► §

and the author of the Tao of Physics, Freehof Kopra.

01:39:40 ► §

So you might want to check that one out, too.

01:39:43 ► §

And I’ll put links to both of those events

01:39:46 ► §

along with the program notes for this podcast,

01:39:48 ► §

which you can find at psychedelicsalon.org.

01:39:52 ► §

And I’ll also try to remember to post a link there

01:39:55 ► §

to some more Burning Man information

01:39:57 ► §

that any first-timers should most definitely take a look at.

01:40:02 ► §

Well, that should do it for now,

01:40:05 ► §

and so I’ll close today’s podcast

01:40:06 ► §

by reminding you that this

01:40:08 ► §

and all of the podcasts

01:40:10 ► §

from the Psychedelic Salon

01:40:11 ► §

are freely available for you to use

01:40:13 ► §

in your own audio projects

01:40:15 ► §

under the Creative Commons Attribution

01:40:17 ► §

Non-Commercial Sharealike 3.0 license.

01:40:20 ► §

And if you have any questions about that,

01:40:22 ► §

just click the Creative Commons link

01:40:24 ► §

at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage,

01:40:26 ► §

which you can find at psychedelicsalon.org.

01:40:29 ► §

And should you want to download a copy of my new novel in audiobook format, just go to genesisgeneration.us.

01:40:38 ► §

And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

01:40:43 ► §

Be well well my friends