190 - The Ethnobotany of Shamanism Part 4

Program Notes §

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna].
“Ayahuasca, in a way, is somehow more open to suggestion. These other things have their own agenda. Ayahuasca will work with you.”

“The possibility seems to be that what we call styles, or what we call motifs, are actually categories in the unconscious.” [Also see The Art of Steven Rooke.]

“Is there a necessary succession in style, or are these things pure chance?”

“Obviously, it’s some kind of freely commanded modality in the psyche with which we can have a relationship if we will but evolve a control language and a dialogue. And it remains mysterious.”

“The psychedelic experience is the beginning of the spiritual path. That’s why it’s not important that yogas’ claim that they can deliver you the psychedelic experience, because it begins with the psychedelic experience, and then you go from there.”

“Once you come face-to-face with these psychedelics, the trail ends. You have found the answer. … Now the question is, ‘What the hell do you do with it?’ ”

“Once you have the psychedelic tool in hand then some real choices have to be made.”

“It puts people who are into this psychedelic thing in an entirely different stance from all other spiritual seekers, because all other spiritual seekers are furiously seeking. Psychedelic people are holding it back with all their power, because they are IN the presence of the Mystery. And then the trick is to get a spigot on it so that it can be turned on and off rather than coming at you like a tidal wave a mile high and twenty miles wide.”

“What the churches are peddling is high abstraction, and you really have to work yourself up into a lather to be able to accept that as worthy of that kind of attention. The psychedelic subset of society is into an experience, and it’s accessible.”

“The race isn’t to the swift. It’s to the thoughtful.”

“There will be difficult moments in a five-gram [mushroom] trip, but on the other hand certain questions will be solved forever for you, because you will validate the existence of this dimension. You will see what your relationship to it is.”

“This is a general comment that you should take a committed dose of whatever it is you’re taking so that there is no ambiguity, because there’s nothing worse than a sub-threshold psychedelic experience.”

“On ketemine you can get so out there that it is a major intellectual breakthrough to realize that you’re on a drug.”

“At the interface of the sayable and the unsayable [in a psychedelic experience] is the novel, the new, the never before seen, said or done. And that’s what I think it’s important to try and bring out, ideas. Because I think we are the animals that bring back ideas.”

“Human populations that do not have contact with the psychedelic tremendum are neurotic because they are male ego dominated.”

“One way of assessing the toxicity of a drug is how do you feel the next day?”

“If you eat before you sleep after a trip, it won’t be nearly so hard a come-down.”

“DMT is the most powerful hallucinogen there is. If it gets stronger than that I don’t want to know about it.”

Eddy Lepp’s personal Web site

Previous Episode §

189 - The Ethnobotany of Shamanism Part 3

Next Episode §

191 - The Ethnobotany of Shamanism Part 5

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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 I hope you aren’t getting tired of Terrence McKenna yet,

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because today we’re going to hear the next-to-last section of the CIIS workshop

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that we’ve been auditing for the past couple of weeks.

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Three weeks now, I guess. This is the fourth in the series.

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But first, I would like to thank two nice salonners who very generously made donations to the salon.

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And they are Brian W. and Justin T.

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So, Brian and Justin, hey, thanks again for everything, you guys.

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And I also want to mention the fact that I really appreciate all of the offers to help around the salon in one way or another.

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I’m definitely thinking about ways to get our fellow salonners more involved in the discussions and activities here in the salon. Thank you. this summer and fall, plus I’m now in the beginning of my Burning Man prep,

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and you burners know what that means.

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But, hey, stay tuned, or I should say stay subscribed,

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and I’ll be letting you know about some of the plans for integrating some other activities into the salon that may be of interest to you.

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Now let’s get on with today’s program, which, as you already know,

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is the next installment of a workshop that Terrence McKenna gave at CIIS over the weekend

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of November 5th and 6th, way back over 20 years ago in 1988. So let’s pick up where

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we left off last week when Terrence McKenna was about to answer a question about ayahuasca visions.

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Yeah.

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I can play devil’s advocate if I can for a minute about this whole idea of certain plants or certain substances

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have certain attributes or certain places that they take people to.

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I’ve had the ideation that you’re talking about, the visualization of the snakes,

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the cats, the jungle, the pyramids, the whole Mayan aspect, jungle, shamanic routines,

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on LSD, on mushrooms, on Ibogaine, and on Yahe.

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And I’ve had clients that have had that same ideation

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doing breath work.

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Well, yeah, this raises a real question.

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One of the things…

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The black people.

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The black people were on Ib IPA, which I expected.

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But not the other people.

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Yeah, I don’t understand exactly how this works.

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I will join your side for a moment

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because there’s a phenomenon I’ve noticed,

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and some of you have heard me talk about it.

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It’s possible to do this on psilocybin. It’s really easy to do it on ayahuasca. Ayahuasca, in a way, is somehow more open to suggestion. These other things have their own agenda.

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bizarre things that you can do on ayahuasca is you can suggest a period,

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like let’s say Italian Baroque.

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You just say it in your mind.

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And paintings, altarpieces, architectural spaces,

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balustrades, vehicles, armament, saddlery,

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clothing,

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serving

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utensils, bowls,

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pewter, candelabra,

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all of this stuff will begin drifting

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toward, and it’s just, and it is

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high Baroque.

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In fact, it is

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more Baroque than the Baroque.

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It’s obviously what they were shooting for, you know?

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And then you just, a hawk-headed guy, and you just, and they say, Art Deco.

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And thousands of cigarette lighters, coffee tables, yes.

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And more intensely realized than you ever actually encounter these things in real life.

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Well, now what does that mean?

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I have no idea, first of all.

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The possibilities seem to be that what we call styles or what we call motifs

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are actually categories in the unconscious.

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But the amazing thing about it is

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having looked at the Italian Baroque,

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dynastic Egypt, and Art Deco,

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you can also say to it,

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so surprise me.

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And suddenly, it can surprise you 100%.

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It can show you objects

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that you cannot place to any set of motifs any

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historical period past present or future and then you can say to it surprise me again and it gives

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you surprise b which is completely different from surprise a and also not related to any known style

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so then you say well are styles categories in the unconscious?

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And how many of them are there?

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And what does it mean then for a group of people in 1680 or 1930

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to suddenly find one of these places and punch into it?

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And then another question is,

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places and punch into it. And then another question is, is there a necessary historical progression or is it by chance? In other words, could the world, could the political world of

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the 16th century have lived with the design motifs of Art Deco? Could we have had Columbus arriving in America in a ship consonant with the best canons of Bauhaus design?

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Strange questions, friends.

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Is there necessary succession in style, or are these things pure chance?

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So, I don’t know.

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Returning to and responding to your demonic advocacy,

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it may be that going to Tikal preconditions you,

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that that pushes the button,

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and then when you take the psychedelic,

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you discover that the high Mayan, the classic Mayan button had been set,

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and then you find all this stuff.

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It’s a little more bewildering to have it happen in your living room.

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My feeling about it is that those experiences are available to anybody

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in various states and there are various ways to get there.

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In my hand, I don’t feel that it’s mutually exclusive to say

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that some substances do seem to have a certain predilection

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for certain kinds of experiences.

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I’ve had both feelings about it,

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that that range of experiences,

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that band of experiences is available,

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and some things are more likely to put me there than others.

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Well, LSD is a relative of morning glories.

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So if you got Mexican imagery off LSD, that would be understandable.

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It may be that all the indoles resonate together.

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And, you know, Rupert’s fond of saying the morphogenetic or the thing which is most impinging on the present is the immediate and most closely related past.

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But also impinging is the related past moments and the related contingencies.

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Perhaps all of the indoles can access each other.

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One thing that I’ve done on psilocybin, and you might try this, this is an interesting

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experiment. Once you get it up and running smoothly, then you can say to it, be MDMA.

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And it will be it. And you can say to it, be LSD. And it loves to do imitations of other psychoactive drugs. Well,

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I don’t know, I don’t think you can say to MDMA, be DMT, and it will move. You hope not,

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don’t you? And it would move over into that space. But see see, obviously it’s some kind of freely commanded modality

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in the psyche

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with which we can have

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a relationship

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if we will but evolve

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a control language

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and a dialogue.

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And it remains mysterious.

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It is a point

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that I made yesterday

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that I think is worth repeating.

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The psychedelic experience is the beginning

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of the spiritual path

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that’s why it’s not important

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that yogans claim that

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they can deliver you the psychedelic

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experience because it

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begins with the psychedelic

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experience and then

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you go from there

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I said something like this a few weeks ago at the John Ford the psychedelic experience. And then you go from there.

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I said something like this a few weeks ago at the John Ford Theater in L.A.

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and this guy got up and said,

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so why don’t you take more?

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Which I think is a very interesting question.

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Very valid for me personally.

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And the answer is…

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personally and the answer is our whole lives we conceive of spiritual development as looking for the answer you know is it Taoism is it diet is it

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Tantra we look for the answer.

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And I think we have become so accustomed to looking for the answer

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that it’s never really entered our minds what it would be like to find it,

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to have it, yes.

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And once you come face-to-face with these psychedelics,

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Once you come face to face with these psychedelics, the trail ends that you have found the answer.

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Not because you are, I mean, perhaps because you’re smart, perhaps because you’re lucky,

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perhaps because you deserved it, perhaps because you hang out with the right people. You have found the answer.

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Now the question is, what the hell do you do with it?

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Because the answer is going to make hash out of your life, because your life is based on living

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without the answer. So suddenly it’s not, you know, I want to be an enlightened being, I want to be a shaman. I want to be a Taoist. I want to be a yogi. Be it.

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See how you like it.

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So the answer to the question,

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why don’t I take more,

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is because I don’t,

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I’m attached, basically.

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It is entirely my own attachments

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that now impede my spiritual growth.

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Nobody’s holding me back.

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Nothing is holding me back except my sense of the awesomeness of what is now possible.

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And this is true of everybody who reaches a certain point.

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of everybody who reaches a certain point.

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Think of the Taoist sage on Cold Mountain who has been up there in the fog and the mist

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and the rock escarpments for 30, 40, 50 years.

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And the people in the village

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occasionally mention him to each other

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and say, you know,

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is old Fu Si still alive? Has anyone seen him recently? And someone entirely possible, you know,

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to actually attain what we have previously thought of

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as unattainable spiritual accomplishments.

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But I don’t foresee, I don’t think it can happen

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without leaving everything, you know.

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Do you really want to be a Taoist hermit

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circulating the light for 200 years

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in a cave high up above Timberline?

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You can, you know.

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There’s nothing stopping you

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once you understand that this psychedelic vehicle

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is available.

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I’m appalled at that.

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I mean, it’s one thing to change your life to be nicer to your co-workers. It’s quite another to change your life to be incomprehensible to 99.9% of all humanity.

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So once you have the psychedelic tool in hand, then real choices have to be made. What is this

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to you? Is it simply something that you do once or twice a year to affirm to yourself

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that it’s possible? Or is it something that you can use in some way for your good and the world’s?

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That’s sort of where I have come to rest, and I hope it’s not a delusion.

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But I think that there are ideas out there, and that they don’t do any good out there,

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that they only have efficacy if brought into three dimensions.

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And there are all kinds of ideas.

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In fact, they are all ideas.

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So we’re talking about a more efficient internal combustion engine,

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how people can learn to love each other,

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how to save the planet,

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the most efficient way of packing crackers in a box

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for long shelf life and low destruction of their structural integrity.

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It doesn’t matter what the problem is.

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The answer can be found out there.

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Well, it puts people who are into this psychedelic thing

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in an entirely different stance from all other spiritual

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seekers because all other spiritual seekers are furiously seeking psychedelic people are holding

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it back with all their power because they are they are in the presence of the mystery and then

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the the trick is to get a spigot on it so that it can be turned on and off

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rather than just coming at you like a tidal wave a mile high and 20 miles wide.

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So it’s a different problem, an embarrassment of riches,

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an embarrassment of access to past, present, future, alien dimensions,

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to past, present, future, alien dimensions,

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mantra-hoarding elves and promise-bearing demons.

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And so, strangely enough,

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it creates a certain kind of conservatism. Now, I don’t think that everybody realizes this.

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Many people take psychedelics

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in order to prove to themselves that they can and then gain

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acceptance from their social group. It’s a way of fitting in. But those people, you can always evade

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the mystery. Not always, but if you’re trying to from the get-go, you can evade fully confronting the mystery.

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But if it’s what you want,

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you will quickly discover that, you know,

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you have hit the main vein,

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and that changes the rules of the game pretty entirely.

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How do people put terms in over a period of time? They’ll do it up to a point,

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and then it’s particularly sophisticated

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than psychologists and people like that

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that say, well, it’ll take you so far

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but then there’s something else

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and you have to quit doing this

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and give it up and do something else.

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And my experience is what that is.

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It’s not true that if you want to keep doing it

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it’ll take you as far as you want to go.

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That’s what I think.

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I think people who quit doing it see something, detect.

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Because what it is, is if you think of the self as a diamond,

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and then what the psychedelic is, is pressure on the diamond.

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Well, you can raise the pressure to a thousand pounds per square inch and there

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are no structural flaws.

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But if you raise the pressure to 10,000 pounds per square inch, micro flaws begin to show

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and sheer lines appear.

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And because everything will fly apart at a certain level, one cannot encompass this mystery.

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level. One cannot encompass this

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mystery. I mean, I think finally

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you have to avert your eyes

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and just

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you know,

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adore is a strange

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word, and worship is also

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a strange word, but

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certainly

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give credit to.

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It is not a program that you finish.

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And yes, people who say,

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I learned all I could from it

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probably learned mostly

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that they shouldn’t do more of it.

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It threatens to put them out of a job,

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especially for psychotherapists.

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Well, it threatens to put anybody out of a job

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because eventually the contradictions

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of living in this low-level slice

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of reality will just become unbearable and you’ll i mean this actually happened in the 60s i mean

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many people quit and dropped out for many reasons but the seed of all that talk about is you just You just say, you know, this is absurd. I am going to sit.

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That’s not absurd.

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But, you know, what about your stock brokerage?

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What about your portfolio?

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What about your divorce in progress?

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All of this, you know, you can’t…

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No, I think that the depth of this cannot be taken.

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And eventually the male ego in every single one of us, regardless of our gender, will feel threatened.

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Because it’s hardly different from death.

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Because you’re not going to recognize yourself.

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That’s the point that I wanted to make in talking about the guy up on Cold Mountain.

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You know, once he ran a gas station.

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Once he followed the Dodgers.

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But then it all began to slide in a certain direction

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and he is no longer recognizable to himself.

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Carlos Castaneda has Don Juan say,

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you must lose

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your personal history.

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Well, I don’t know

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whether Don Juan

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is a real person

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or whether he ever said that,

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but it’s interesting

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that notion.

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How many of us

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would be willing

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to become unrecognizable

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to ourselves?

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And yet, obviously,

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that’s the path

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that one is on.

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And so then you just decide,

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well, is there an obligation to go to the end?

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Do I have to become a genie?

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Do I have to become a Taoist sage, an immortal?

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And I think the answer is no.

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You know, one doesn’t have to do that.

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Buddhism creates the notion of the bodhisattva.

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That is, in a way, this same thing.

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It’s where you’re just about to go over the hill into incomprehensibility,

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and then you say, wait a minute.

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What about the people in the prisons, the naked, the hungry, the oppressed?

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prisons, the naked, the hungry, the oppressed, and you pull back and say, no, I forswear enlightenment until the last being attains enlightenment. Well, it’s a noble gesture,

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but I’ll bet these bodhisattvas make this vow with a tremendous sigh of relief.

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Now they know what they’re going to do with their lives. Oh, good, I’m going to

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work in prisons and counsel the dying and get into political action. Geez, for a minute

00:21:11 ► §

I thought I was going to go straight into the light and become unrecognizable to myself

00:21:19 ► §

and lose my definitions and so forth and so on.

00:21:22 ► §

and so forth and so on.

00:21:24 ► §

I will.

00:21:28 ► §

The comment, the two words that struck me was adore and worship.

00:21:32 ► §

I don’t know if I got it right.

00:21:34 ► §

Matthew Fox Friday night quoted

00:21:36 ► §

some theologian, I think it was Charles Desjardins.

00:21:41 ► §

And it struck me interesting

00:21:43 ► §

because he said that we have

00:21:45 ► §

come to

00:21:45 ► §

a point

00:21:46 ► §

in history

00:21:46 ► §

now where

00:21:48 ► §

we must

00:21:48 ► §

either find

00:21:49 ► §

some form

00:21:50 ► §

of meaningful

00:21:50 ► §

worship or

00:21:52 ► §

commit suicide.

00:21:55 ► §

And

00:21:55 ► §

somehow

00:21:56 ► §

that quote

00:21:58 ► §

came back

00:21:58 ► §

when you

00:21:59 ► §

mentioned

00:21:59 ► §

when one

00:22:02 ► §

may reach

00:22:03 ► §

that point

00:22:04 ► §

of the

00:22:04 ► §

penultimate truth

00:22:06 ► §

of the unspeakable or the formless form or the light

00:22:10 ► §

or whatever you want to call it

00:22:12 ► §

and the mushrooms are pointing the way

00:22:14 ► §

or whatever, breath therapy

00:22:16 ► §

that all these things are only

00:22:19 ► §

something that points you to the ultimate

00:22:23 ► §

and when you get there something that points you to the ultimate.

00:22:26 ► §

And when you get there,

00:22:31 ► §

it moves into the adoration and the worship level,

00:22:34 ► §

which, interestingly enough, as I say, coming from a mode of being a recovering Catholic,

00:22:39 ► §

I could never find in any kind of religious community

00:22:43 ► §

and didn’t want to join a monastery for that purpose.

00:22:48 ► §

And what I see is partially this neurosis or unhappiness

00:22:52 ► §

that exists in so many people in this country.

00:22:56 ► §

They have no contextual format for worship

00:23:00 ► §

because it doesn’t have that power for them to do it.

00:23:07 ► §

Yeah, so you have to have the personal experience of something to worship.

00:23:11 ► §

And this is what has been lacking.

00:23:14 ► §

I mean, what the churches are peddling is high abstraction

00:23:18 ► §

and you really have to work yourself up into a lather

00:23:20 ► §

to be able to accept that as worthy of that kind of attention.

00:23:27 ► §

The psychedelic subset of society is into an experience.

00:23:36 ► §

And it’s accessible.

00:23:37 ► §

In a way, we’re like Calvinists, not in our ethics or our restraint on behavior,

00:23:43 ► §

but in our insistence on a direct personal relationship with the mystery.

00:23:48 ► §

And this is something very new.

00:23:51 ► §

We have really accepted the idea that truth descends through hierarchies,

00:23:58 ► §

basically from Newsweek and Time and the Washington Post

00:24:01 ► §

down to us as consumers of these various images of what is going on.

00:24:09 ► §

The notion that you might know more about reality than the combined editorial board of Scientific American

00:24:18 ► §

and the Journal of Foreign Affairs is startling stuff.

00:24:23 ► §

We always give ourselves away.

00:24:26 ► §

We don’t realize it depends on you

00:24:30 ► §

to believe that at Cornell or down at SRI

00:24:36 ► §

people understand the universe is not helpful.

00:24:40 ► §

You must understand the universe.

00:24:43 ► §

And if you don’t know

00:24:46 ► §

partial differential calculus

00:24:49 ► §

then your model of how the universe works

00:24:52 ► §

must do it without partial differential calculus

00:24:56 ► §

in other words it’s not read anywhere

00:24:58 ► §

that only one model will work

00:25:00 ► §

and in fact I think all abstract models

00:25:03 ► §

should be highly suspect

00:25:04 ► §

it’s going to be,

00:25:07 ► §

it’s an opportunity. I mean, we have to view life as an opportunity. What are you doing with it?

00:25:16 ► §

Are you afraid of it? I mean, some people live their lives. Apparently, what they are doing is arranging their deathbed scene. They want it to

00:25:28 ► §

take place in a large baronial house with clipped green lawns, acres in surround. They want the room

00:25:38 ► §

in which they die to be filled with fine art. They want their loving heirs to be dutifully assembled

00:25:45 ► §

while they pass out

00:25:47 ► §

the final wisdom.

00:25:48 ► §

And they spend their entire life

00:25:49 ► §

creating the dramatic scenario

00:25:51 ► §

of their passage.

00:25:54 ► §

And of course,

00:25:54 ► §

you have to work hard

00:25:55 ► §

because you’ve got to make the money

00:25:56 ► §

to buy that house.

00:25:58 ► §

You have to sire all these children,

00:26:01 ► §

educate them into your values

00:26:03 ► §

so they won’t be stabbing you

00:26:04 ► §

in the back

00:26:05 ► §

and misbehaving in this situation.

00:26:08 ► §

You have to create loyalty, possession, power,

00:26:12 ► §

all of these things.

00:26:13 ► §

And then you won’t die in a ditch,

00:26:16 ► §

unknown and abandoned, you know.

00:26:18 ► §

But on the other hand, what was the quality of that life, you know?

00:26:25 ► §

Life is an opportunity.

00:26:27 ► §

How much pressure should you put on it?

00:26:31 ► §

How many places should you go?

00:26:32 ► §

How many drugs should you take?

00:26:34 ► §

How many sexual configurations should you experiment with?

00:26:37 ► §

How many professions should you…

00:26:41 ► §

And it depends, I think.

00:26:43 ► §

The question is, how seriously do you take it?

00:26:46 ► §

Do you just think life is a lark and it’s fine with you

00:26:49 ► §

that you’re going to go into a pine box and be forgotten for all eternity?

00:26:54 ► §

Or do you have some inner consolation that that won’t happen

00:26:57 ► §

and you’re going to go off and be with Lao Tzu and Mao

00:27:01 ► §

and everybody else who ever died?

00:27:03 ► §

Or, you know, just what is it?

00:27:05 ► §

And I think of it as a telephone booth being filled with water.

00:27:13 ► §

And you can see that when the water reaches the top of the telephone booth,

00:27:17 ► §

you’re going to be dead as a doornail.

00:27:20 ► §

And so you have 30 years to figure it out.

00:27:24 ► §

We are alive.

00:27:26 ► §

There’s no contest about that.

00:27:29 ► §

It’s extremely improbable that we should be alive,

00:27:33 ► §

that we should be here thinking, feeling, sharing.

00:27:36 ► §

The fact that we’re alive throws open the whole game,

00:27:41 ► §

means anything is probably possible.

00:27:44 ► §

But I doubt that it’s easy. I’ll bet you have to be very, very smart to figure out what’s going on and get it right. And so I guess I have a sort of private religion of intelligence. It isn’t how good you are. It’s how wily you are, which was the Greek virtue of Odysseus, you know, that was always his epitaph,

00:28:07 ► §

or his epithet was, he was wily Ulysses. Reality is some kind of maze. It isn’t to the swift that

00:28:15 ► §

the race goes. A maze, a puzzle garden that you walk through to try and find your way out.

00:28:29 ► §

find your way out. The race isn’t to the swift, it’s to the thoughtful, the careful, the one who can tease it all apart. Well, for puzzle solving, the psychedelic is this tremendously powerful tool

00:28:36 ► §

because it extends the domain of mind, and that’s what’s necessary to make it go.

00:28:43 ► §

and that’s what’s necessary to make it go.

00:28:48 ► §

Okay, moving through these things and discussing dosage,

00:28:53 ► §

probably in order of the likelihood of your encountering them.

00:29:00 ► §

Mushrooms, I feel that people who weigh around 140 pounds should take five dried grams.

00:29:03 ► §

This is a stiff hit. This is a committed hit.

00:29:08 ► §

There will be difficult moments in a five gram trip. But on the other hand,

00:29:15 ► §

certain questions will be solved forever for you because you will validate the existence

00:29:21 ► §

of this dimension. You will see what your relationship to it is.

00:29:26 ► §

I don’t believe in diddling with these things.

00:29:33 ► §

People tend to take tiny amounts, thinking that one-tenth of a dose is one-tenth of an experience.

00:29:41 ► §

Well, that doesn’t work like that.

00:29:43 ► §

I mean, half a dose can be no experience at all.

00:29:47 ► §

And a full dose can feel like 10 of these experiences. So trivializing it is really,

00:29:55 ► §

and I use this word advisedly, but sinful, because you’re trivializing the only mystery or one of the… It’s like trivializing sex.

00:30:06 ► §

I mean, the ordinary objections to pornography are not my objections,

00:30:12 ► §

but to my mind, a very strong objection to pornography is that it trivializes.

00:30:17 ► §

And anything which trivializes anything central to our self-definition

00:30:22 ► §

is bad mental hygiene, is about the only way I could put it.

00:30:29 ► §

And taking small doses of psychedelics tends to trivialize them. And there are people who

00:30:36 ► §

probably take LSD every weekend and go dancing and have done this for years and have no idea what LSD is capable of.

00:30:47 ► §

The main shift in the use pattern with LSD is from, I mean, it may have been childish,

00:30:55 ► §

but the style of the 60s was how many mics can you bolt down, you know?

00:31:01 ► §

Have you had the 500? Have you had the 1,000? Have you had the 500 have you had the thousand have you had the 2000 well

00:31:07 ► §

eventually it becomes moot because you just dissolve into shimmering atoms for longer and

00:31:13 ► §

longer periods of time on these trips but the modern approach which is how little can you get

00:31:19 ► §

away with taking and still be one of the gang is is even more insidious, you know,

00:31:25 ► §

because then people feel capable of talking about these things.

00:31:30 ► §

And, you know, there are people who feel

00:31:34 ► §

that their opinions on the psychedelic experience

00:31:36 ► §

should be weighed very carefully,

00:31:38 ► §

who have only taken MDMA.

00:31:41 ► §

Well, listen, I’ve got news for you.

00:31:44 ► §

I mean, that is to the domain we’re talking about,

00:31:48 ► §

like a broken tricycle to a Tesla Rosa Ferrari. So this is a general comment that you should take

00:32:02 ► §

a committed dose of whatever it is you’re taking so that

00:32:07 ► §

there is no ambiguity because there’s nothing worse than a sub-threshold psychedelic experience

00:32:15 ► §

because what it is is it’s all show and no go. You know, you feel the CNS activation,

00:32:48 ► §

You know, you feel the CNS activation, you feel the keyboards light up, everything comes on, you start down the runway, you pick up speed, you pick up speed, you pick up speed, and then you come to the end of the runway and taxi back to the hangar and you know well that was not a flight to boston that was just clogging the traffic pattern so committed doses and and then because you’re going to take a

00:32:57 ► §

committed dose inform yourself of the medical and pharmacological chit-chat on the matter so that you can feel reassured, you know?

00:33:07 ► §

And talk to a heart specialist.

00:33:09 ► §

Questions like, if my heart is pounding,

00:33:13 ► §

does that mean I’m having a heart attack?

00:33:17 ► §

What is a fibrillation and how will I recognize it?

00:33:22 ► §

Because you can have very odd feelings

00:33:24 ► §

and not be in any danger whatsoever, you know,

00:33:28 ► §

and your heart can pound.

00:33:30 ► §

It’s made to pound.

00:33:32 ► §

Look at all these aerobic exercise freaks.

00:33:35 ► §

Well, the fact that you’re sitting still

00:33:36 ► §

and this begins to happen

00:33:38 ► §

doesn’t mean that you’ve been shoved to death’s door.

00:33:41 ► §

It just means, you know,

00:33:43 ► §

that everything is equalizing and coming

00:33:46 ► §

to some kind of equilibrium, and you’re passing through a transition. These drugs do have a kind

00:33:53 ► §

of mock barrier. In other words, there is a barrier, somewhat like the speed of sound.

00:34:00 ► §

It’s a pharmacological and physiological barrier. So you take the compound, the plant, whatever it is,

00:34:07 ► §

nothing happens for 40 minutes or so except false starts and little things,

00:34:13 ► §

and you have to go pee, and then you come back and you sit down.

00:34:16 ► §

And then it begins to come on, and it’s like it can have many manifestations,

00:34:32 ► §

It can have many manifestations, but it can be chills, tremoring, knotted stomach, nausea, just restlessness, so forth and so on.

00:34:37 ► §

This is what I call, taking a page from the engineering book, Q.

00:34:47 ► §

Q in engineering circles is vibration in a physical system. And you may even, when they launch the space shuttle, if you listen to the radio chit-chat, they will say, approaching max Q, and then they’ll say

00:34:55 ► §

max Q mark, and then they’re through that. What that means is that as the system approaches a

00:35:03 ► §

transition, it begins to shake. It begins to shake

00:35:06 ► §

as though it’s going to shake to pieces. And the Q forces are building on all the air surfaces,

00:35:14 ► §

the airframe. Then you break through that, Q falls to zero, and you’re in the cool, you know, main engine cutoff. You are now in orbit.

00:35:25 ► §

All vibration has ceased.

00:35:28 ► §

Noise has ceased.

00:35:29 ► §

You are in orbit.

00:35:31 ► §

You are weightless.

00:35:33 ► §

You are there.

00:35:34 ► §

It’s different.

00:35:35 ► §

Now you shut down all these switches related to the launch procedure

00:35:39 ► §

and begin to set a course through a different kind of medium,

00:35:45 ► §

a medium characterized by smoothness, stillness, and that sort of thing.

00:35:52 ► §

LSD, I don’t see anything wrong with 300, 400 micrograms as an initial dose.

00:36:00 ► §

I don’t see any point in running up into the 1,500 to 2,000 gamma range, because in my

00:36:08 ► §

experience, what happens is, at higher doses, there’s simply an area where you can’t remember

00:36:14 ► §

what happened. And the higher the dose, the longer that period of time. But since you can’t remember

00:36:20 ► §

anything about it, why, you know, it should be shortened.

00:36:33 ► §

DMT, 70 milligrams, vaporized in a glass pipe, and 70 milligrams.

00:36:34 ► §

Yeah?

00:36:39 ► §

I’m just thinking that in LSD, I have done large doses of LSD at times,

00:36:43 ► §

and it’s always seemed to me that it’s very difficult to process all the stimuli coming in. The biocomputer just, at one point, for me at least,

00:36:46 ► §

one time I did about 4,000 once a month,

00:36:49 ► §

and the biocomputer shut down for a while.

00:36:51 ► §

I just, like you said, I forgot exactly.

00:36:54 ► §

Yeah, it’s overload, and it just shunts it past you.

00:37:02 ► §

What do we need to cover here?

00:37:07 ► §

DMT, psilocybin, LSD, MDMA, which I think probably you all know,

00:37:14 ► §

125, 150 milligrams.

00:37:19 ► §

And because I tell you these doses doesn’t necessarily mean I approve of all these things.

00:37:24 ► §

I’m just saying if you take them, these are the doses.

00:37:27 ► §

Ketamine, people take small amounts.

00:37:30 ► §

Again, usually after attaining some amount of proficiency with it,

00:37:35 ► §

I’ve only done it four or five times and always fairly large doses, 130, 150.

00:37:43 ► §

Interesting compound, but contraindicated because of physiological problems.

00:37:50 ► §

Depresses the immune system, possibility of epileptic kindling. Certainly, if you were

00:37:59 ► §

to vomit in that state, you might well strangle because you wouldn’t be able to clear your throat.

00:38:13 ► §

I don’t like, what I have against ketamine also is you have to shoot it, you know. As I was driving home last night, I was listening to some program and they were talking about

00:38:18 ► §

intravenous drugs. And I thought, how interesting, That’s a distinction you don’t hear made very often.

00:38:27 ► §

They were saying, we should legalize all drugs except intravenous drugs. Well, so that’s,

00:38:33 ► §

of course, morphine, cocaine, heroin, ketamine, steroids, I suppose, like that. That’s an

00:38:42 ► §

interesting distinction, operationally.

00:38:46 ► §

Yeah?

00:38:46 ► §

You can, but I’ve heard that it’s dangerous because…

00:38:55 ► §

Yeah, it’s IM.

00:38:58 ► §

When they give it as an anesthetic,

00:39:00 ► §

they give it 600 milligrams IV push,

00:39:04 ► §

which must be just like being struck from behind by a freight train.

00:39:09 ► §

I’m sure you never know what hit you.

00:39:12 ► §

I mean, imagine an exploratory dose is 100, let’s say, IM.

00:39:19 ► §

They’re talking about IV directly into the vein, 600, push.

00:39:25 ► §

That means pressure on the feeder,

00:39:28 ► §

so it’s just like a high-pressure filling of your gas tank.

00:39:33 ► §

You would never know what hit you.

00:39:35 ► §

The baby’s in geriatrics.

00:39:37 ► §

Yeah, although now they’ve pulled it from general surgery,

00:39:40 ► §

even veterinary surgery,

00:39:42 ► §

because it seems to depress the immune system

00:39:46 ► §

and the worst thing you could do is do surgery on somebody and then put them

00:39:49 ► §

into a surgical recovery ward with an immune depressed immune system so so

00:39:56 ► §

that is kind of out I must say about ketamine, it did something to me that nothing else has ever done,

00:40:07 ► §

which is it erodes the observer in a way that the indoles don’t.

00:40:16 ► §

On ketamine, you can get so out there that it is a major intellectual breakthrough

00:40:23 ► §

to realize that you’re on a drug.

00:40:28 ► §

In other words, there’s this situation,

00:40:31 ► §

and it seems like it’s always been there,

00:40:34 ► §

and it always will be there,

00:40:35 ► §

and you can’t remember who you are, or what you are, or where you are,

00:40:39 ► §

and this situation continues,

00:40:41 ► §

and there’s something about it, but you can’t quite put your finger on it and

00:40:45 ► §

there’s never been anything else there’ll never be anything else and then suddenly comes this tiny

00:40:52 ► §

thought you’re on a drug oh right i remember now you’re that’s it that’s it i’m a human being

00:41:04 ► §

i took a drug i’m a human being. I took a drug.

00:41:05 ► §

I’m a human being, and I took a drug, and that’s what this is.

00:41:08 ► §

This is a trip.

00:41:09 ► §

Right.

00:41:10 ► §

That’s it.

00:41:11 ► §

This is a trip.

00:41:12 ► §

I’m on a trip.

00:41:13 ► §

Now I’ve got it.

00:41:14 ► §

Now I am in.

00:41:16 ► §

Well, what this means is you’re now coming down.

00:41:18 ► §

The trip is now over with because you have, yeah.

00:41:22 ► §

the trip is now over with because you have, yeah.

00:41:24 ► §

I have this experience with

00:41:26 ► §

being so lost

00:41:28 ► §

that it was a victory to realize

00:41:30 ► §

No, not a victory, but I was just

00:41:32 ► §

in that state where there was only eternity.

00:41:34 ► §

There was no trace back to any

00:41:36 ► §

family member, to anything. I just knew

00:41:38 ► §

that this person which was sitting

00:41:40 ► §

was a familiar person.

00:41:42 ► §

From somewhere I knew this person.

00:41:44 ► §

And I said, come to that. And it was yourself. No, there was a familiar person. From somewhere I knew this person. And I said, come to that.

00:41:46 ► §

And it was yourself?

00:41:48 ► §

No, there was none of us.

00:41:49 ► §

My sitter was there.

00:41:51 ► §

Oh, I see.

00:41:52 ► §

Who was sitting in the next room.

00:41:54 ► §

But I was for hours just totally in, you know,

00:41:58 ► §

no connection to anything which was connected to my personality or to life.

00:42:03 ► §

Was that a five-gram disc?

00:42:05 ► §

Yes.

00:42:06 ► §

Uh-huh.

00:42:07 ► §

Well, I think probably, I would imagine that this is…

00:42:10 ► §

It was amazing.

00:42:11 ► §

It was wonderful to be there, you know,

00:42:13 ► §

to see that everything is just made up of our mind

00:42:15 ► §

and to see how this world is made up.

00:42:18 ► §

And, you know, why do we have architectures and colleagues and all this?

00:42:21 ► §

It’s just incredible to think about.

00:42:26 ► §

Yes. Maybe this is just incredible to think about yes maybe this is

00:42:27 ► §

the white light

00:42:28 ► §

maybe this is

00:42:29 ► §

what these early

00:42:29 ► §

LSD people

00:42:31 ► §

were so

00:42:31 ► §

enamored of

00:42:32 ► §

was getting

00:42:33 ► §

so far into it

00:42:34 ► §

that you don’t

00:42:35 ► §

even know you’re

00:42:36 ► §

into it

00:42:37 ► §

because you can’t

00:42:37 ► §

remember where

00:42:38 ► §

you started from

00:42:39 ► §

it sort of is

00:42:41 ► §

not what I’m

00:42:42 ► §

shooting for

00:42:42 ► §

because I always

00:42:43 ► §

want to bring

00:42:44 ► §

stuff back see my conviction is not what I’m shooting for, because I always want to bring stuff back.

00:42:45 ► §

See, my conviction is, oh no, I had my conviction reversed,

00:42:50 ► §

but my belief is that this stuff is important for all of us,

00:43:01 ► §

that we’re in some kind of lower dimensional slice

00:43:06 ► §

and what you see in the psychedelic experience

00:43:09 ► §

actually has historical implications.

00:43:13 ► §

And I find this sort of paradoxical

00:43:16 ► §

because I’m the person

00:43:19 ► §

who draws everybody’s attention

00:43:21 ► §

to the fact that people have been doing this

00:43:23 ► §

for 50,000 years.

00:43:25 ► §

So in a way, that sounds like I’m saying it’s not a big deal.

00:43:29 ► §

It’s part of the human heritage.

00:43:32 ► §

Certain people have always known about this.

00:43:35 ► §

Yeah?

00:43:35 ► §

Where does it start, though?

00:43:37 ► §

Like that point between where there’s nothing and then all of a sudden, you know,

00:43:40 ► §

coming back in, the observer kicks in.

00:43:43 ► §

That’s the big issue in my life is is like, where did the observer come from? Is it an evolutionary thing, like animals

00:43:49 ► §

never have it when they fade into the white light? You know, I mean, do you have anything

00:43:55 ► §

to say about that little place in between way in there?

00:43:58 ► §

Well, I think it begins with self-reflection. In other words, the question, what’s happening?

00:44:06 ► §

I don’t think animals ever ask that question.

00:44:09 ► §

For animals, what’s happening is what’s happening.

00:44:13 ► §

But we are capable of creating a state of distance

00:44:17 ► §

and posing the question,

00:44:20 ► §

what is happening?

00:44:22 ► §

And at that point in the trip,

00:44:24 ► §

it means you’re making your way back

00:44:26 ► §

to the modality that you left from.

00:44:29 ► §

You’re drawing away from the translinguistic place.

00:44:34 ► §

And it truly is translinguistic.

00:44:36 ► §

Nothing can be taken out of it.

00:44:38 ► §

But at the interface of the sayable and the unsayable

00:44:43 ► §

is the novel, the new,

00:44:46 ► §

the never-before-seen, said, or done.

00:44:50 ► §

And that’s what I think it’s important to try and bring out,

00:44:54 ► §

ideas, because I think we are the animals

00:44:58 ► §

that bring back ideas.

00:45:00 ► §

Somehow our hunting and gathering adaptation

00:45:03 ► §

then set us loose in our own minds

00:45:07 ► §

and you know somebody came back and said

00:45:10 ► §

let’s throw a chunk of this meat in the fire

00:45:15 ► §

and see what happens

00:45:17 ► §

it’s this see what happens attitude

00:45:19 ► §

so then suddenly they discovered

00:45:21 ► §

well meat burned in fires

00:45:24 ► §

is easier to digest and taste better.

00:45:28 ► §

And by this means, this let’s see what happens approach to things, the ideas come in the mental dimension.

00:45:36 ► §

The let’s see what happens translates those of them that can be translated into three-dimensional space. Let’s plant this plant.

00:45:46 ► §

Let’s slaughter this animal.

00:45:48 ► §

Let’s trisex this way.

00:45:51 ► §

Let’s go over that hill this year instead of that hill.

00:45:55 ► §

And what has come out of this is the entire legacy of our cultural heritage as a global civilization.

00:46:02 ► §

But all of these ideas began in the mind. And what are ideas?

00:46:08 ► §

Well, this is the central question of Platonic philosophy. And what are we that we seem to

00:46:16 ► §

separate the doable from the undoable in the realm of ideas. And then anything that can be done, we do.

00:46:27 ► §

It doesn’t matter how perverse, how painful, how destructive,

00:46:31 ► §

how grandiose, how wonderful, how sublime.

00:46:35 ► §

If it can be done, we do it.

00:46:38 ► §

And then in this three-dimensional domain of space and time,

00:46:43 ► §

these ideas compete with each other like organisms.

00:46:48 ► §

And an ecology of mind evolves. That’s really what culture is. It’s the ecology that mind has

00:46:57 ► §

created for itself in the same way that bees create a beehive, and then the beehive is the cultural context of be-ness.

00:47:07 ► §

We have created civilization through language,

00:47:11 ► §

and then civilization has become the context for humanness.

00:47:15 ► §

And yet we always seek to transcend it and go beyond it.

00:47:20 ► §

Now, I don’t know whether this is something innate in us,

00:47:33 ► §

Now, I don’t know whether this is something innate in us or whether it is somehow programmed in from the planet at different levels.

00:47:45 ► §

Because it’s very interesting, you know, I don’t know how many of you are aware of this, but there are leafcutter ants in the tropics. I mean, they’re a major part of life in the tropics. And they march in columns through the jungle

00:47:47 ► §

and they can swarm up a tree

00:47:49 ► §

and take all the leaf material off a large jungle tree

00:47:53 ► §

in a matter of hours.

00:47:55 ► §

And what they do with these leaves

00:47:57 ► §

is they return sometimes great distances

00:48:01 ► §

with each one carrying like a little banner,

00:48:04 ► §

a chunk of leaf, and they

00:48:06 ► §

go down into their nests, and they chew it up, and they stick it on the wall’s surface,

00:48:13 ► §

or some of them go back to the surface, and they gather spores on their antenna, and then they go back down into the anthill and they and they inject or

00:48:27 ► §

inoculate the chewed plant material with these spores well naturally this chewed

00:48:34 ► §

plant material is pretty organic and funky so it begins to grow all kinds of

00:48:41 ► §

things molds mildews bacteria so forth and so on.

00:48:46 ► §

And what the ants do is they farm this

00:48:50 ► §

and weed out all these bad bacteria and small micro fungi and organisms

00:48:57 ► §

and only cultivate this one fungus

00:49:01 ► §

which then converts the plant material into a usable sugar.

00:49:09 ► §

So what this is, is it’s a symbiotic relationship between the fungi and the ant.

00:49:20 ► §

And the ant is getting an enriched food out of this

00:49:25 ► §

and what the fungi is getting is a cultivated situation

00:49:30 ► §

where all its competitor organisms are carefully kept away and weeded out.

00:49:36 ► §

Well, this is precisely in my model

00:49:40 ► §

what is happening with the human species at a more complex level.

00:49:48 ► §

In other words, by domesticating cattle, we have set up an environment that is very favorable

00:49:58 ► §

to the growth and appearance of what would otherwise be a very rare deep forest mushroom.

00:50:06 ► §

But because we domesticate cattle and clear land so to do,

00:50:13 ► §

we have created a huge circumtropical global environment in which these mushrooms can reside.

00:50:21 ► §

What they make for us is not sugar, but ideas. You know, something we need the way

00:50:30 ► §

ants need sugar. And these ideas take all kinds of forms, and then we refine them. And you see,

00:50:40 ► §

I don’t, I’m not sure if I made the point strongly enough in the Friday night lecture.

00:50:46 ► §

I really believe that human populations that do not have contact with the psychedelic tremendum

00:50:58 ► §

are neurotic because they are male ego dominated.

00:51:05 ► §

Yeah, big ego.

00:51:07 ► §

The reason I call it male ego is because women,

00:51:12 ► §

by virtue of physiology, basically,

00:51:16 ► §

are pretty unavoidably welded to the nitty-gritty

00:51:22 ► §

because they give birth, they carry children to term, and those

00:51:30 ► §

two things which are biologically dictated, there is also the cultural dictate that women

00:51:37 ► §

are usually involved in preparing and burying the dead in traditional societies. So women know how weird it is.

00:51:48 ► §

I mean, surely to give birth must give you a perspective

00:51:52 ► §

that anybody who’s never done it just cannot hope to have.

00:51:56 ► §

So the male ego floats on this myth of separateness that no woman has the luxury of entertaining

00:52:11 ► §

because birth pregnancy menstruation care for the sick care for the dying uh these are boundary

00:52:22 ► §

dissolving activities that keep women close to the nitty-gritty.

00:52:29 ► §

The male organism can go off into its own private Idaho, pretty much.

00:52:39 ► §

Often what child-rearing means is the simple act of impregnation.

00:52:46 ► §

And then that’s the contribution in many cases in primitive and modern societies.

00:52:53 ► §

Death is something that women take care of.

00:52:56 ► §

Birth in primitive societies, men are never present.

00:53:00 ► §

And women do it alone or with other women.

00:53:04 ► §

So forth and so on.

00:53:06 ► §

So in these Neolithic and Paleolithic societies,

00:53:17 ► §

this tendency of the ego to tumorize and grow in individuals

00:53:26 ► §

was kept down by a chemical regulator,

00:53:30 ► §

which was the psychedelic experience.

00:53:34 ► §

It was part of the food chain,

00:53:37 ► §

and it suppressed ego,

00:53:40 ► §

much in the way that drugs are given in prisons

00:53:43 ► §

to suppress libido,

00:53:45 ► §

because it’s hard to manage highly libidinous people in an institutionalized situation,

00:53:53 ► §

especially when it’s only one sex is involved.

00:53:57 ► §

So this natural regulation of the human species by regulating this psychic function called ego was disrupted with the invention of agriculture. And ecstasy, and it was these weekly or biweekly psychedelic orgy ecstasy picnics that people used to have, that gave way, and Weston LaBar makes the point that ecstasy is not at a premium in agricultural societies because it’s disruptive.

00:54:46 ► §

What is at a premium in agricultural societies

00:54:49 ► §

is the ability to get up before dawn

00:54:52 ► §

and pick up your tools

00:54:54 ► §

and go to the fields

00:54:56 ► §

and work like a dog.

00:54:59 ► §

And if people have been up all night before

00:55:02 ► §

dancing and tripping,

00:55:04 ► §

they can’t do that.

00:55:06 ► §

And so the psychedelic gods are replaced by cereals, corn, wheat, rye.

00:55:19 ► §

And of course, you know, at a very early strata in the Neolithic, you do get the emergence.

00:55:31 ► §

I mean, Fraser is full of talk about the great corn god and Tammuz and all this. So we are living the legacy of millennia of cultural neurosis in Western civilization

00:55:42 ► §

by virtue of the fact of the untreated growth of the cancerous ego.

00:55:50 ► §

And we know this.

00:55:52 ► §

It’s simply that we assume there is no cure.

00:55:56 ► §

We assume that it’s natural to have ego and that it’s somehow unnatural to suppress it but wherever you have a

00:56:06 ► §

break an outbreak of psychedelic use in a high-tech society then you see

00:56:14 ► §

refeminized hang loose communal caring values well values come into prominence within the community.

00:56:28 ► §

You had, somebody had their hand.

00:56:29 ► §

Yeah.

00:56:29 ► §

I have a question.

00:56:31 ► §

One is, have you seen a difference in the way men and women react to psychedelics,

00:56:36 ► §

given the fact that maybe for us men embody a stronger male ego than women on balance?

00:56:42 ► §

And my other question is, it has to do with the role of the observer ego

00:56:47 ► §

when you’re doing drugs, whether it’s marijuana or alcohol

00:56:49 ► §

or especially psychedelics.

00:56:52 ► §

So I was just sitting here thinking that the reason that I don’t take anything

00:56:55 ► §

stronger than marijuana is that, as your experience,

00:56:58 ► §

I mean, I lose myself even in a strong hit of marijuana.

00:57:01 ► §

I lose my ego completely.

00:57:03 ► §

And I guess that’s just a different form of the experience

00:57:05 ► §

if I don’t get really fearful and paranoid.

00:57:08 ► §

But it’s easy to get scared

00:57:09 ► §

when that sense of observer ego just goes.

00:57:12 ► §

Because then I don’t remember that I’m on a drug trip.

00:57:14 ► §

And then it seems timeless and eternal.

00:57:16 ► §

And then I come down later, as you were saying,

00:57:18 ► §

at the backside of the high.

00:57:20 ► §

I go, oh yes, I just took some marijuana two hours ago.

00:57:23 ► §

Everything’s fine.

00:57:24 ► §

I’ll recover tomorrow.

00:57:26 ► §

And so, yeah, maybe talk a little bit about that

00:57:29 ► §

and what people can do who maybe don’t have a strong ecostructure,

00:57:34 ► §

whatever it takes to do these powerful drugs.

00:57:37 ► §

I don’t think I would be able to have, well…

00:57:39 ► §

If you don’t have a strong ecostructure,

00:57:41 ► §

chances are you’re not a heavy duty male dominator because they’re

00:57:46 ► §

sort of antithetical uh i i think probably um cannabis was a major ego dissolver and that all

00:57:56 ► §

these things have been used this way and if that works for you that’s. I didn’t take psychedelics to lose my ego, although people

00:58:07 ► §

said that that would happen. I never quite understood what was meant, but looking at

00:58:14 ► §

it as a mass phenomenon, where you’re not talking about an individual tripper, but tens

00:58:19 ► §

of thousands of people, inevitably this feminizing of values seems to take place.

00:58:28 ► §

What was your first thing?

00:58:29 ► §

Do men and women experience psychedelics differently?

00:58:32 ► §

I don’t know if they experience them differently.

00:58:35 ► §

I’ve never quantitatively looked into this,

00:58:41 ► §

but my impression is that it’s less of a surprise to women and that they feel less

00:58:51 ► §

of a need to do it. Particularly, I think this is true of cannabis. I think, I’ll bet that two-thirds

00:58:59 ► §

of cannabis use is male use. And why is this? I’m not sure.

00:59:06 ► §

Maybe women have too much work to do,

00:59:09 ► §

too many obligations.

00:59:11 ► §

I mean, the old man can sit and smoke dope,

00:59:15 ► §

but somebody has to do the shopping

00:59:18 ► §

and get the kids to school and pick them up

00:59:20 ► §

and keep the insurance paid and all that.

00:59:24 ► §

and pick them up and keep the insurance paid and all that.

00:59:31 ► §

But women, I think, have a different relationship to it.

00:59:34 ► §

Women are often shamans.

00:59:39 ► §

And in fact, the best shamans in many cultures,

00:59:41 ► §

if you ask the people in the culture,

00:59:44 ► §

are usually felt to be women. Women are connected up to all of this stuff.

00:59:48 ► §

Drug taking may not be a male enterprise, but history is a male enterprise.

00:59:57 ► §

I don’t think we would have ever gotten into it if it had been up to women.

01:00:01 ► §

if it had been up to women.

01:00:05 ► §

In a way, the women outsmarted themselves because they had the,

01:00:09 ► §

not control in the conscious sense,

01:00:13 ► §

but they were sitting in the front of the canoe

01:00:17 ► §

and then they invented agriculture.

01:00:22 ► §

And that undercut their own position because the vast repository of plant knowledge

01:00:29 ► §

that had been the secret knowledge of women it no longer really mattered as long as you knew how to

01:00:36 ► §

grow corn and a couple and a couple of other things the vast uh encyclopedic data on wild plants became less important.

01:00:49 ► §

And it becomes more labor-intensive.

01:00:52 ► §

And men, because they had evolved toward being efficient hunters,

01:00:58 ► §

probably did have a physical edge on women in terms of stamina

01:01:03 ► §

and the ability to work with a hoe for

01:01:08 ► §

eight or nine hours a day because what the women did when they were in there

01:01:13 ► §

you know in the prime cultural situation was they they gathered they looked at

01:01:21 ► §

stuff and talked about it with each other.

01:01:29 ► §

And this was this domain in which language then arose.

01:01:31 ► §

And gathering is not hard work.

01:01:33 ► §

It’s just steady work.

01:01:37 ► §

And it’s lots of fun if you do it with your friends.

01:01:47 ► §

And the cliched notion about Aboriginal peoples is the women chatter.

01:01:52 ► §

This phrase, the chattering of women in primitive situations.

01:02:04 ► §

It really is true, I think, that women avail themselves of language much more than men in these preliterate situations. The men are hunters, and they act like hunters.

01:02:08 ► §

They’re stoic.

01:02:09 ► §

They hold it all in, literally.

01:02:13 ► §

I mean, the larger bladder size of men

01:02:16 ► §

is thought to be related to the hunting adaptation and so forth.

01:02:22 ► §

So the men are stoic.

01:02:24 ► §

They’re holding it in.

01:02:25 ► §

The women are information freaks.

01:02:27 ► §

It all rides for them on information.

01:02:30 ► §

Where do you find it?

01:02:32 ► §

How do you cook it?

01:02:33 ► §

What does it look like?

01:02:35 ► §

Is it poisonous?

01:02:36 ► §

What time of year is best?

01:02:38 ► §

What soil is best?

01:02:39 ► §

What do you combine it with?

01:02:42 ► §

Is it good all year round?

01:02:44 ► §

What do the flowers look like around what are the flowers look like

01:02:45 ► §

what does the fruit look like so for data information how could you ever how

01:02:52 ► §

could you ever understand the use and location of 600 plants or more unless

01:02:59 ► §

you had a tremendously evolved vocabulary for this kind of thing.

01:03:07 ► §

Yes?

01:03:09 ► §

A couple of practical questions.

01:03:15 ► §

One, the physical weakness that follows substances like psilocybin,

01:03:17 ► §

is there any way to prevent that?

01:03:22 ► §

Well, the physical weakness, these things take energy. I mean, obviously during the trip, energy is being sucked into the moment.

01:03:29 ► §

I mean, a trip is hard work, even if you’re just sitting still.

01:03:33 ► §

So then there’s going to be an energy debt.

01:03:36 ► §

One way of assessing the toxicity of a drug,

01:03:42 ► §

in the course of this weekend,

01:03:46 ► §

I’ve named several ways and they all need to be used together.

01:03:50 ► §

But one way of assessing the toxicity of a drug

01:03:53 ► §

is how do you feel the next day.

01:03:58 ► §

Psilocybin, what I do when I take mushrooms,

01:04:02 ► §

is I usually take them about nine at night by one or

01:04:08 ► §

two in the morning it’s usually past and then I eat before I sleep so that I

01:04:16 ► §

don’t wake up in the morning with a protein debt and that’s very important

01:04:21 ► §

if you will eat before you sleep after a trip, it won’t be nearly so hard to come down.

01:04:31 ► §

MDMA, one of the things that’s really appalling to me about it is here it is, this pretty minor psychoactive,

01:04:40 ► §

and my God, the day after is tough sledding. I mean, for a hangover like that, you should at least have seen God.

01:04:52 ► §

Now, LSD, we said if you drink a lot of water, that cuts the thing.

01:05:04 ► §

Yeah, vitamins are never a bad idea at any point in

01:05:07 ► §

these things LSD which I said yesterday was so effective at low doses that on

01:05:16 ► §

that scale it appeared very non-invasive I feel terrible after taking LSD. I mean, it takes me 24 hours to put it back together.

01:05:27 ► §

The interesting exceptions to this, and it causes, you know,

01:05:33 ► §

it always seems to cut my way in terms of favoring the ones I think are most interesting.

01:05:41 ► §

DMT is, again, the anomaly here.

01:05:44 ► §

DMT is the most powerful here. DMT is the most powerful

01:05:46 ► §

hallucinogen there is.

01:05:49 ► §

If it gets stronger than that,

01:05:51 ► §

I don’t want to know about it.

01:05:53 ► §

And 15 minutes after you do it,

01:05:57 ► §

you feel as though

01:05:59 ► §

you have never done a drug.

01:06:02 ► §

You are down 100% mentally, physically, spiritually. It just returns you to the baseline.

01:06:13 ► §

Ayahuasca goes DMT1 better, and ayahuasca is the only one that I know of that does this.

01:06:20 ► §

And I maintain the reason these things behave this way is because they are so similar to brain chemistry,

01:06:27 ► §

ordinary brain chemistry.

01:06:30 ► §

Ayahuasca, you actually come out slightly higher than you went in,

01:06:37 ► §

and it isn’t lost, you know?

01:06:40 ► §

I mean, you feel great the day after an ayahuasca trip, usually.

01:06:45 ► §

I mean, it depends.

01:06:46 ► §

If it’s your first trip and you spent eight hours vomiting,

01:06:50 ► §

you’re probably not going to feel so good.

01:06:52 ► §

But if you were able, if it was an ordinary ayahuasca trip,

01:07:00 ► §

then you’re going to feel much better the day after than you did going in.

01:07:04 ► §

More connected, more more alert more energy well this must have something to do with

01:07:10 ► §

the fact that the constituents of ayahuasca har mean har Malene DMT all

01:07:16 ► §

occur in the human brain and DMT same thing now why this doesn’t happen with

01:07:22 ► §

psilocybin I don’t know psilocybin doesn’t occur in the brain, but it is a very, very close relative.

01:07:31 ► §

I think DMT is absolutely fascinating from every point of view.

01:07:38 ► §

Why is it so benign?

01:07:40 ► §

Why is it so powerful?

01:07:43 ► §

Why is it so short-acting? Why is it so powerful why is it so short acting

01:07:45 ► §

why is it so hard to get any

01:07:48 ► §

that’s the $64 question

01:07:56 ► §

believe me

01:07:56 ► §

every book on drugs

01:07:58 ► §

that you will pick up

01:07:59 ► §

will say it’s easily made

01:08:01 ► §

you know people are making

01:08:03 ► §

they ask you to believe

01:08:04 ► §

that people are making it

01:08:05 ► §

in their kitchens all around you.

01:08:08 ► §

Well, I don’t know.

01:08:09 ► §

A recipe?

01:08:13 ► §

You’re talking about the bottom of the box?

01:08:14 ► §

No, not bottom,

01:08:15 ► §

but DMT, N-N, DMT.

01:08:18 ► §

It,

01:08:19 ► §

I’ve seen it botched many times.

01:08:26 ► §

The literature doesn’t tell you that.

01:08:28 ► §

I mean, botched, ruined.

01:08:32 ► §

If somebody comes to you with a grainy, dark brown syrup, forget it.

01:08:39 ► §

That is not what it looks like.

01:08:41 ► §

That means they swept the floor after they dropped the retort or something.

01:08:47 ► §

What it looks like is it looks like orange mothballs.

01:08:53 ► §

It looks like a crystalline, waxy,

01:08:57 ► §

orange to pale rose to yellow kind of substance.

01:09:03 ► §

And it’s very aromatic.

01:09:06 ► §

And if someone shows you a liquid

01:09:07 ► §

or stuff which looks like brown sugar or, you know, some meth,

01:09:13 ► §

we were appalled.

01:09:14 ► §

We got samples of underground DMT

01:09:17 ► §

and ran high-pressure liquid gas chromatography on them.

01:09:23 ► §

It literally looked like the guy

01:09:26 ► §

swept the floor and these people had actually done it i mean i wouldn’t have given it to a rat

01:09:32 ► §

much less a human being the notion of someone actually taking that stuff was just hair raising What you should have is a very, very steep spike at 620 nanometers.

01:09:48 ► §

And what we got looked like the Himalayas, you know,

01:09:52 ► §

is running around all kinds of stuff.

01:09:56 ► §

What’s that gray powdery stuff?

01:09:59 ► §

There has been DMT around which was shootable DMT,

01:10:04 ► §

which is the hydrochloride.

01:10:07 ► §

And since I don’t shoot things, I didn’t pursue it.

01:10:12 ► §

Although what people tell me, and this is interesting and also something to bear in mind,

01:10:18 ► §

is shooting is not as effective as smoking.

01:10:23 ► §

is not as effective as smoking.

01:10:30 ► §

People think that shooting a drug is the most effective way because you see it all go into your body or something.

01:10:33 ► §

I don’t know.

01:10:34 ► §

But if you shoot DMT, it takes about five minutes to come on,

01:10:40 ► §

and it lasts about 45 minutes.

01:10:42 ► §

That’s why if you read in the literature how long does DMT last,

01:10:47 ► §

it will always say 45 minutes.

01:10:50 ► §

But if you smoke it, the peak experience lasts 400 seconds, something like that.

01:10:59 ► §

I mean, it’s extreme.

01:11:01 ► §

That’s why it’s so astonishing, because it is so intense, and the onset is so sudden, that it’s more like something has happened to you, rather than that you’ve taken a drug. And sometimes people come out of it saying, you know, what happened?

01:11:26 ► §

Have we done it yet?

01:11:28 ► §

Or was there an earthquake and the roof fell on me just as we were about to do it?

01:11:33 ► §

It has the quality of an event rather than an experience.

01:11:39 ► §

And also it has a quality of an event because it does not touch the core observer.

01:11:47 ► §

You are not changed.

01:11:50 ► §

What’s changed is the sensory input is changed.

01:11:54 ► §

You are still who you are.

01:11:56 ► §

You don’t think you’re God.

01:11:58 ► §

You don’t feel bad about yourself.

01:12:00 ► §

You are exactly who you were before you did it

01:12:03 ► §

with the same set of concerns but you have been whisked into an alien dimension one you never had

01:12:11 ► §

imagined existed or could have a moment before have conceived of and suddenly

01:12:18 ► §

it’s 100% in place 360 degrees around you. And then, you know, three minutes, four minutes, ten minutes later,

01:12:29 ► §

you’re raving to your friends,

01:12:31 ► §

and it’s as far away as that trip to Majorca four years ago, you know.

01:12:38 ► §

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,

01:12:41 ► §

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

01:12:47 ► §

I guess I should point this out, although I’m sure you probably already figured it out,

01:12:52 ► §

but when Terrence was talking about ecstasy near the end of this talk,

01:12:56 ► §

he was talking about the experience of ecstasy and wasn’t using the street name for MDMA,

01:13:03 ► §

which was just making its way into the street back then.

01:13:07 ► §

And like me, it may have taken you a sentence or two to grok the fact that it wasn’t a drug he was talking about.

01:13:14 ► §

Or, I guess more likely, I’m the only one who was confused at first.

01:13:19 ► §

Also, and I mentioned this a couple of weeks ago too,

01:13:23 ► §

but when Terrence went off on that long description of the ayahuasca visions he had when he voiced the word Baroque,

01:13:29 ► §

well, I’ve never experienced anything even close to what he was describing.

01:13:34 ► §

And I’m not the only one that I know of who doesn’t get these spectacular visions that Terrence speaks about.

01:13:40 ► §

So should you ever have the opportunity to experience the vine for yourself i don’t want

01:13:46 ► §

you to be disappointed if you don’t see castles in the sky but hey even without the visions it’s

01:13:52 ► §

very worthwhile and i should say a very spectacular experience you know over the past few years we’ve

01:14:00 ► §

heard terence go on over and over about the spectacular visions he seems to have on almost every substance.

01:14:07 ► §

And thinking of that brought back to mind some of the stories about Nikolai Tesla that were told,

01:14:13 ► §

where he was known to be able to actually see whatever it was that he was thinking about when he was working on a new invention.

01:14:20 ► §

Apparently his optic system and his brain were wired a little differently from most people.

01:14:26 ► §

Well, maybe Terrence was the Tesla of psychedelics.

01:14:31 ► §

And if so, hey, it’s not bad company for him to be in.

01:14:35 ► §

Well, I’ve got to get out of here a little early today

01:14:38 ► §

because, as I said, I’m beginning to get ready for Burning Man.

01:14:42 ► §

And that’s a bigger job than I remembered

01:14:45 ► §

it being before I committed to return to the playa again this year.

01:14:50 ► §

But that does remind me that Bruce Dahmer is looking for a couple of tickets.

01:14:54 ► §

So if you already have your Burning Man ticket, but circumstances have forced you to cancel

01:15:00 ► §

and you want to sell your ticket, well, please let me know.

01:15:03 ► §

And you can just send an email to lorenzo at matrixmasters.com.

01:15:09 ► §

And that’s how you can reach me anytime, in fact.

01:15:12 ► §

Hopefully it’ll get through the spam filters.

01:15:15 ► §

Now, before I go, I want to do something that you don’t hear very often here in the salon,

01:15:21 ► §

and that is to point out the plight of someone who is the victim of the U.S. government’s

01:15:26 ► §

war on people who are not satisfied with the status quo.

01:15:30 ► §

So today I want to mention the case of Eddie Lep, which many of our fellow saloners already

01:15:36 ► §

know about, I’m sure.

01:15:38 ► §

First of all, and this probably doesn’t mean much to anyone under 30, but Eddie is a fellow

01:15:44 ► §

Vietnam vet.

01:15:44 ► §

probably doesn’t mean much to anyone under 30, but Eddie is a fellow Vietnam vet.

01:15:51 ► §

And I’m here to tell you that it hasn’t always been easy on many of the women and men who returned from that war to a country that had disowned them.

01:15:55 ► §

I can still remember back in the 70s when I went to a vet support group meeting one night

01:16:00 ► §

and discovered that the people there no longer even thought of themselves as Americans.

01:16:05 ► §

Most of them said, I’m not an American, I’m a Vietnam vet.

01:16:09 ► §

As I said, unless you were there, this probably doesn’t mean much to you, but I’m mentioning

01:16:14 ► §

it here to give you a little idea of the mindset some of us have, and whether Eddie feels this

01:16:20 ► §

way, I don’t know, but that was the general vibe that was in the air when

01:16:25 ► §

we returned from our tour of duty.

01:16:28 ► §

And by the way, compared to the women and men in the armed forces today, I think we

01:16:33 ► §

probably had it easy because it was rare to have a second tour of duty in a war zone unless

01:16:38 ► §

you volunteered.

01:16:40 ► §

But today, those poor people are being sent back again and again.

01:16:44 ► §

Frankly, I don’t know how they do it without going completely bonkers.

01:16:49 ► §

But getting back to Eddie, I’d like to read a little from his website that tells his story in kind of a nutshell.

01:16:57 ► §

And it goes,

01:16:58 ► §

Reverend Charles Eddie Lepp of the Multidenominational Ministry of Cannabis and Rastafari was sentenced to 10 years in federal prison on May 18, 2009

01:17:09 ► §

for growing more than 1,000 marijuana plants.

01:17:13 ► §

Edie Lep had notified the governor, the attorney general,

01:17:16 ► §

the board of supervisors of Lake County,

01:17:19 ► §

the Lake County district attorney, and the local sheriff,

01:17:22 ► §

all by certified mail,

01:17:24 ► §

that he was growing the sacred herb for medicinal and spiritual use by the members of his ministry. Thank you. was the only one charged. Eddie Lepp was forbidden from entering any real sort of defense to the charges

01:17:45 ► §

since federal courts do not allow testimony regarding California’s medical use law.

01:17:53 ► §

After four years of litigation, his trial was reduced to two very short days of testimony

01:17:58 ► §

due to restrictions placed by the uncaring and insensitive Judge Marilyn Hall Patel.

01:18:05 ► §

The whole trial was over in less than one week.

01:18:08 ► §

By the way, I added the uncaring and insensitive part,

01:18:13 ► §

and that is only how I characterize this horrible judge and polite company.

01:18:18 ► §

I’ll let you imagine the language I use in my head when I think of this inhuman beast.

01:18:23 ► §

Anyway, the text on Eddie’s website goes on.

01:18:27 ► §

To know that this gentle man is going to prison for a decade at age 57

01:18:32 ► §

makes me physically ill.

01:18:35 ► §

This religious man who so bravely helps so many sick and dying

01:18:38 ► §

and since threatened Californians

01:18:40 ► §

find relief through the medicine grown on his land

01:18:44 ► §

is going to spend more time

01:18:45 ► §

in prison than the average rapist, manslaughterer, and child molester, because our country has

01:18:52 ► §

not yet overcome its prudish impulse to punish people for moral reasons.

01:18:58 ► §

And if you’d like to help Eddie, what I just read is part of a letter to Mr. Obama that’s on Eddie’s website, and you can send your copy of it to the White House in an attempt to obtain

01:19:10 ► §

a pardon for Eddie so that he doesn’t have to die in prison. Right now, he’s probably

01:19:15 ► §

thinking that it would have been more convenient for the United States of America if he’d been

01:19:19 ► §

killed in Vietnam while he was serving this ungrateful nation. Then at least they wouldn’t

01:19:24 ► §

have to pay the expense of keeping him in a cage for the rest

01:19:27 ► §

of his life.

01:19:29 ► §

Okay, I better get off my soapbox.

01:19:31 ► §

You can see why I don’t do this very often.

01:19:34 ► §

But what all this is leading up to is a nice, kind, gentle song that I’d like to play for

01:19:39 ► §

you as I end today’s podcast.

01:19:42 ► §

It was written and performed by fellow salonner

01:19:45 ► §

and fellow podcaster, Jesse Miller,

01:19:47 ► §

and I’ll put a link to Jesse’s podcast

01:19:49 ► §

along with the program notes with this podcast.

01:19:53 ► §

And also I want to say that

01:19:55 ► §

even if I didn’t know the story of Eddie Lapp,

01:19:57 ► §

I’d listen to this song some more

01:19:59 ► §

because, as you know, I was in college

01:20:02 ► §

from 1960 through 1964,

01:20:04 ► §

which was near the height of Bob Dylan’s folk career.

01:20:09 ► §

And protest songs were really coming in then, and this song by Jesse really takes me back to those exciting times in college.

01:20:17 ► §

Of course, that was before I did my Fuck You, I Quit dance.

01:20:22 ► §

I’m sorry about that. That was just a cheap way of putting in a

01:20:26 ► §

plug for my new novel, The

01:20:27 ► §

Genesis Generation, which you can

01:20:29 ► §

download in audiobook format

01:20:31 ► §

at www.genesisgeneration.us

01:20:36 ► §

or us.

01:20:38 ► §

Well, that should do it for now

01:20:40 ► §

and so I’ll close

01:20:41 ► §

today’s podcast again by reminding

01:20:44 ► §

you that this and most of the podcasts from The Psychedelic Salon are freely available for you to use in your own audio projects under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial ShareLite 3.0 license.

01:20:56 ► §

And if you have any questions about that, just click the Creative Commons link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage, which you can find through psychedelicsalon.org.

01:21:07 ► §

And for

01:21:08 ► §

now, this is Lorenzo signing

01:21:09 ► §

off from Cyberdelic Space.

01:21:12 ► §

Be well, my friends.

01:21:22 ► §

Free at you.

01:21:24 ► §

Free at me. Free at you. Free at you. Free Eddie, Free Eddie, Free Eddie Lamb

01:21:27 ► §

Free Eddie, Free Eddie Lamb

01:21:32 ► §

Free Eddie, Free Eddie, Free Eddie Lamb

01:21:39 ► §

Free Eddie, Free Eddie Lamb

01:21:43 ► §

Free Eddie, Free Eddie Lamb Eddie Lamb is a man up north

01:21:48 ► §

With a heart of gold and a thumb of green

01:21:51 ► §

He grew medical herb for the people

01:21:54 ► §

Till a runner with the feds made history

01:21:57 ► §

Protected under the law, still they raided his farm

01:22:00 ► §

Locked him up and took away the props

01:22:03 ► §

Looks like to me Prop 215 doesn’t mean a thing to the cops.

01:22:12 ► §

And he fought in Vietnam where he risked his life for his country.

01:22:18 ► §

Made it home alive in one piece, taking refuge in the smoke of the sacred weed.

01:22:24 ► §

Became a reverend of truth, can of blossom

01:22:26 ► §

And the Bible is the oil that Moses used

01:22:29 ► §

To heal the people around

01:22:31 ► §

And he turned to the ground

01:22:33 ► §

Planting seeds for me and you

01:22:35 ► §

Free Eddie, Free Eddie, Free Eddie Land

01:22:43 ► §

Free Eddie, free Eddie Lamb Free Eddie, free Eddie Lamb

01:22:48 ► §

Free Eddie, free Eddie, free Eddie Lamb

01:22:55 ► §

Free Eddie, free Eddie Lamb

01:23:01 ► §

Eddie took his case to court where he thought he’d won but it just begun

01:23:07 ► §

The judge intervened and told the jury not to listen to the truth spoken all along

01:23:13 ► §

The prosecution had rest at religious defense, no justice at Eddie’s expense

01:23:19 ► §

Ten years in jail, the system failed, fair trial, well, maybe in hell.

01:23:28 ► §

Free Eddie, Free Eddie, Free Eddie Land.

01:23:34 ► §

Free Eddie, Free Eddie Land.

01:23:40 ► §

Free Eddie, Free Eddie, Free Eddie Land. Free Eddie, Free Eddie, Free Eddie Lamb

01:23:45 ► §

Free Eddie, Free Eddie Lamb

01:23:50 ► §

He broke my heart when he told the tale

01:23:54 ► §

Of Linda dying, now he’s off to jail

01:23:59 ► §

Politicians in the pockets of corporate thieves

01:24:03 ► §

While patients are denied their needs

01:24:06 ► §

And sentence me, oh Eddie

01:24:10 ► §

Set him free Free Eddie, Free Eddie, Free Eddie Land

01:24:43 ► §

Free Eddie, Free Eddie Love Free Eddie, Free Eddie Love

01:24:50 ► §

Free Eddie, Free Eddie, Free Eddie Love

01:24:56 ► §

Free Eddie, Free Eddie Love

01:25:02 ► §

Free Eddie, Free Eddie, Free Eddie Love

01:25:07 ► §

Free Eddie, Free Eddie Love

01:25:12 ► §

Free Eddie, Free Eddie, Free Eddie Love

01:25:19 ► §

Free Eddie, Free Eddie Lamb

01:25:31 ► §

Free Eddie, Free Eddie, Free Eddie Lamb

01:25:36 ► §

Free Eddie, Free Eddie Lamb

01:25:42 ► §

Free Eddie, Free Eddie, Free Eddie Lamb

01:25:47 ► §

Free Eddie, Free Eddie Love Free Eddie, Free Eddie Love

01:25:52 ► §

Free Eddie, Free Eddie Free Eddie Love

01:25:55 ► §

Free Eddie, Free Eddie Love

01:26:01 ► §

Free Eddie, Free Eddie

01:26:04 ► §

Free Eddie, Free Eddie, Free Eddie Love

01:26:05 ► §

Free Eddie, Free Eddie Love

01:26:10 ► §

Free Eddie, Free Eddie, Free Eddie Love