Program Notes

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“The surface of things is not where attention should rest.”

“I’ve never actually seen it [smoked DMT] hit anybody quite as hard as it hit me. For about fifteen minutes all I could say was, ‘I can’t believe it!’ … This is no drug. It’s magic. It masquerades as a drug. It’s a doorway into another world.”

“We’re a society where people jump out of airplanes on weekends because their lives are so boring and empty. Well then, if you think jumping out of an airplane is a thrill to write home about you should try this stuff. No one would jump out of an airplane if they had DMT on their menu.”

“I came to feel, and I still sometimes offhandedly refer to it like this, that it [DMT] is secret. It is not a secret. It is THE secret. There is a secret, and this is it. It is the secret that the world is not only not the way you think it is. It’s that the way the world is, is a way that you can’t think it is, because you simply do not have the imaginative capacity to conceive of such overwhelming peculiarity.”

“You see, a secret is not something untold. It’s something which can’t be told.”

“Without this [the smoked DMT experience] in the picture, half the world is missing.”

“What we have discovered in DMT is, literally, a chemical doorway to the bardo.”

“One thing psychedelics will do for you, for sure, is to convince you that what’s real is what I call the felt presence of immediate experience. That’s what’s real.”

“The biological object is made of time itself as much as it’s made of space and matter.”

“I’ve come to see the body as basically the placenta of the soul.”

“The Twentieth Century is analogous to the birth canal of human history.”

“What’s interesting about DMT is that it occurs naturally in the human brain. We all make it all the time. And so, in a sense, this is not a drug at all. This is a human metabolite that you’re getting a tremendous of, but the fact that it occurs naturally in the human brain means that you have chemical pathways, bio synthetic pathways, that can deal with it.”

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Transcript

00:00:00

Greetings from cyberdelic space.

00:00:20

This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.

00:00:24

Psychedelic Space. This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.

00:00:30

And here we are with yet another talk by the one and only Terrence McKenna.

00:00:40

But before I play it, I would first like to thank James P., who was kind enough to send in a donation to help offset the expenses here in the salon.

00:00:43

And James, your help is very much appreciated.

00:00:46

And the other fellow salonner I’d like to thank will have to go nameless for the moment. And why is that, you may ask?

00:00:52

Okay, so here I am once again being forced to admit that all of my previous organizational

00:00:59

skills acquired in the corporate world are no longer a part of my repertoire. And so I can’t properly thank the fellow salonner who sent me this recording of Terrence McKenna

00:01:11

under the teaching tree at the Ojai Foundation.

00:01:14

And it was recorded in April of 85, by the way.

00:01:18

For a while it was available on YouTube, and so I didn’t put it at the top of my list.

00:01:24

But then I noticed that this series of videos was no longer available on YouTube, and so I didn’t put it at the top of my list, but then I noticed that this

00:01:26

series of videos was no longer available on YouTube, which tells me that somebody claimed

00:01:31

a copyright or something.

00:01:33

However, I checked again just a minute ago, and they reappeared.

00:01:36

So, hey, go figure, huh?

00:01:39

Anyway, some kind person sent me an audio recording of that event, and the first part is what I’m going to play for you today.

00:01:48

And by the way, if you happen to be that wonderful person who sent me this recording, please let me know,

00:01:54

and I’ll be sure to thank you personally in my next podcast, which will be a continuation of the talk we’re about to hear.

00:02:01

And I guess I should warn you that you shouldn’t delete your copy of this program if you

00:02:06

think you’ll ever want to hear it again, because I guess there’s a chance that some copyright holder

00:02:11

will raise his or her head and make me remove this talk too. Anyway, if you think back to my podcast

00:02:19

number 169, the talk by Krishnamurti, it was also given under the teaching tree at Ojai.

00:02:27

And I should add that Aldous and Maria Huxley also spent a lot of time up in Ojai with Krishnamurti.

00:02:33

They were good friends of his.

00:02:36

And I’ve got several of my more highly evolved friends who live there.

00:02:39

So, hello Ojai.

00:02:41

But enough of my chatter.

00:02:43

Let’s join Terrence McKenna under the teaching tree,

00:02:46

where we’ll hear a few stories that we’ve heard before,

00:02:49

but my advice is to listen closely,

00:02:52

and maybe we’ll hear a new gem or two that we haven’t heard before.

00:02:56

And I suspect we won’t be disappointed,

00:02:59

particularly when he begins to talk about death.

00:03:02

Particularly when he begins to talk about death.

00:03:10

Human, Gaian, artificial, and extraterrestrial.

00:03:14

Well, it’s a pleasure to be here.

00:03:17

This is sort of a nostalgic return.

00:03:19

I can’t even remember.

00:03:23

The last Ojai event was at Camp Shalom.

00:03:26

I can’t remember.

00:03:33

It must have been three years since we were all together here under the teaching tree.

00:03:37

In some ways, a lot of water over the dam.

00:03:39

In other ways, five minutes ago. I’ve just come from two days of speaking in Los Angeles

00:03:47

to large audiences which demand a sort of formal intensity

00:03:53

that you’ve thankfully relieved me of this morning

00:03:58

I guess the

00:04:03

well how many people have come in here with my books I guess the…

00:04:06

Well, how many people have familiarized with my books

00:04:09

or have been to workshops in the past?

00:04:12

Is there anybody who’s just utterly unfamiliar?

00:04:16

Uh-huh.

00:04:18

Okay.

00:04:19

Well, so we’ll work from that benchmark out.

00:04:22

work from that benchmark out

00:04:23

I never imagined that I would end up

00:04:29

sitting in this position

00:04:32

and pontificating on the nature of life

00:04:36

and history and global

00:04:38

human destiny

00:04:40

I started out

00:04:44

simply with a love of nature. I was persecuted as a child in my physical

00:04:54

education classes, so I spent a lot of time on my own. And I grew up in western Colorado where there is a lot of exposed sedimentary rock and some of

00:05:09

it has dinosaurs pressed into it and I could always feel these dinosaurs. The largest dinosaur

00:05:19

ever found was found a few years ago near Delta, Colorado, about 30 miles from where

00:05:27

I grew up. And all the time I was growing up, I knew that sucker was out there. But

00:05:35

I could never walk to it. If I could have, probably my career would have taken a different turn. But my interest in fossils, I remember I had an uncle

00:05:49

who gave me a book when I was about eight years old of fossils.

00:05:55

And it had one of those charts in the front of it

00:05:59

where it shows five billion years,

00:06:05

and then the last half inch is expanded to the next column,

00:06:10

and then the last half inch is expanded to the next column.

00:06:14

And so I saw that human history was a hairline crack

00:06:22

at the bottom of the column furthest to the right, and I got the concept

00:06:31

of how old, not the universe, but the earth is, and it was a dizzying perspective.

00:06:42

The town I grew up in, if you read Time magazine,

00:06:46

you were persecuted as a left-wing intellectual.

00:06:51

The town I grew up in

00:06:53

once made it into Ripley’s Believe It or Not

00:06:59

as a place that had more Christian churches

00:07:03

per capita than any town of its size in the United States.

00:07:08

This was a town of 1,600 people with 42 Christian churches thriving.

00:07:16

When I was a kid, I thought street corners were for churches.

00:07:22

No one could have buildings on street corners that weren’t churches. Now you could have buildings on street corners

00:07:26

that weren’t churches.

00:07:29

And

00:07:29

I would go up these dry

00:07:36

arroyos

00:07:37

with my rock pick

00:07:39

looking for fossil shells

00:07:42

and dinosaur bones and this sort of thing, brachiopods.

00:07:49

And in the solitude, because I would often not be able to con my little friends into attending me,

00:07:59

because they learned quickly that it was hotter out there than decent people could tolerate. And also,

00:08:06

I have to confess, whenever I invited someone to come along, it was with the thought that

00:08:13

they would carry back the specimen. So they were essentially pack burrows for my fossil expedition. And then I had an uncle who was an old rock hound,

00:08:30

and he introduced me to the concept of not splitting apart strata

00:08:37

to see ancient forms of life,

00:08:50

ancient forms of life, but slicing rocks up and polishing them to reveal the light and the color and sometimes the crystal cavities that were hidden inside them.

00:08:57

And so very early on I got this idea that the surface of things is not where attention should rest,

00:09:07

that you have to, as Ahab tells Starbuck in Moby Dick,

00:09:15

you have to seek the little lower layer,

00:09:19

and under the surface of things is another reality, a reality that reaches, in some cases, back to the birth

00:09:32

of the planet, practically, or in other cases, in other dimensions. I had a fixation with meteorites at one time,

00:09:45

and butterflies, and rocketry,

00:09:50

and all of these things were about a certain thrill,

00:09:57

a certain iridescence that could be coaxed out of physical phenomenon

00:10:05

if you would not just simply dismiss them and pass over them.

00:10:12

And as a little kid, I had very bad eyes.

00:10:16

I still do, but I wear contact lenses.

00:10:19

But at that time, I wore very thick bifocal lenses.

00:10:28

that time I wore very thick bifocal lenses, and my mother, bless her heart, who was cut from somehow different cloth than all the people around me, read Aldous Huxley’s book

00:10:38

The Art of Seeing, which I had an occasion to look at it in the past year,

00:10:46

and I was amazed how much of my own attitude toward life

00:10:51

is contained in this fairly trivial book.

00:10:55

You know, Huxley had terrible eyes, too,

00:10:58

and he discovered the so-called Batesian method of eye exercises and eye health,

00:11:10

which at that time, we’re talking 1954 or so,

00:11:17

was completely sky-blue crackpot type stuff.

00:11:23

I mean, this was the Eisenhower era.

00:11:27

And the exercises that I learned

00:11:32

when my mother took me to this,

00:11:35

I guess you would say,

00:11:36

Batisian therapist,

00:11:40

were exercises in attention,

00:11:43

in attention to the exterior world.

00:11:47

And then the other form of exercise was what the rest of American society wasn’t going to encounter for 15 years

00:11:59

and then would encounter as Buddhist visualization.

00:12:08

would encounter as Buddhist visualization. But for us it was just close your eyes and the therapist would create castles in the air through narrative and it was an eye exercise. And so it introduced

00:12:17

me to the idea of sitting still and watching what’s going on behind closed eyelids.

00:12:26

What fascinated me about the butterflies was the physical iridescence,

00:12:34

which in the northern hemisphere is fairly rare in butterflies.

00:12:39

You only get it in these little blue lysoneas that you see fluttering around mud puddles in dry areas.

00:12:49

I’ve seen them here.

00:12:51

But, of course, in the tropics, iridescence becomes a more generalized phenomenon,

00:12:57

not only in butterflies, but in beetles as well.

00:13:02

And I’ve had the ability

00:13:06

to fixate

00:13:08

on these things.

00:13:09

To spend hours with a

00:13:12

single pyrite crystal

00:13:14

or a single

00:13:15

beetle carpet.

00:13:17

Just turning it over and looking

00:13:19

at it.

00:13:21

And then

00:13:22

at some point, again, Huxley keeps coming back into this,

00:13:29

I decided that I would become a writer,

00:13:36

not because I loved writing particularly,

00:13:39

but because I admired all the attention that great writers seemed to have heaped upon them,

00:13:47

which was something that I, as a goggle-eyed weirdo, was not getting much of.

00:13:54

So then the name Huxley recurred again, and I started reading through all of those novels,

00:14:02

the social novels, you know, Antique and Prone Yellow, After Many

00:14:08

a Summer Dies the Swan, and all the rest of it, Ape and Essence. And finally, I came to

00:14:17

a work of non-fiction by Huxley, The Doors of Perception in Heaven and Hell. This was by now probably 1958.

00:14:29

I was 14 years old.

00:14:31

And in that book, Huxley,

00:14:36

the quintessential English academic establishment intellectual,

00:14:43

describes his confrontations with mescaline and what

00:14:50

it meant to him. And it was fascinating to me because previously all I had ever known

00:14:58

or heard about drugs was what I had learned from reading Huxley’s novel, Brave New World, which is

00:15:07

a pharmacological dystopia, if there ever was one, and has lots to say to society today,

00:15:18

I think. If you haven’t read it, I recommend it to you. If you have read it, you recall that it was a society of people,

00:15:28

perfect people, grown in baths,

00:15:31

who died early but who never lost the bloom of their youth,

00:15:36

who were herd-minded, driven by advertising,

00:15:41

and entirely dependent for their happiness and psychic equilibrium

00:15:46

on a drug called Soma and they had little advertising slogans which they

00:15:52

would repeat by rote if anyone displayed inappropriate anger or emotion a gram is

00:16:00

better than a damn they would display a drug sound proposition

00:16:06

there is this same author

00:16:08

writing of

00:16:10

mescaline and reaching

00:16:12

for metaphors

00:16:14

drawn from Meister Eckhart

00:16:16

St. John of the Cross

00:16:18

John Chrysostom

00:16:20

comparing the

00:16:22

light falling into the folds

00:16:24

of his trousers to the light falling into the folds of his trousers

00:16:25

to the light of Caravaggio and Duccio and Fra Angelico.

00:16:31

And I was amazed.

00:16:34

I had never heard such carryings on.

00:16:38

Well, now, if you go back and look at the doors of perception,

00:16:45

you realize that this was not an extravagant telling

00:16:50

of the nature of the psychedelic dimension.

00:16:54

It was, in fact, a fairly conservative rendering,

00:16:58

a description of low-dose, eyes-open, faulty psychedelic voyaging.

00:17:07

I mean, it’s been a long, long time

00:17:10

since I’ve set a stack of Abrams art books

00:17:13

by my left knee before I take a psychedelic.

00:17:18

But back then, that was how it was done.

00:17:21

And you looked at the visible world.

00:17:20

it was done.

00:17:24

You looked at the visible world.

00:17:28

Well, so then,

00:17:30

around this time, there began to be

00:17:32

alarmist articles

00:17:34

in the press about

00:17:36

the abuse of blue morning

00:17:38

glory seeds by

00:17:40

some of the more

00:17:41

crazed and

00:17:43

unassimilated members of American society.

00:17:48

And I immediately tore out and purchased a couple of packets of blue morning glory seed and then noticed that the leaves imprinted in the fabric of the drapes in the living room

00:18:10

all seemed to have little faces and were dancing.

00:18:15

This was, in fact, clearly the intent of the designer,

00:18:20

but something that in all the years of living around these ratty drapes,

00:18:26

I had never noticed.

00:18:31

And then I began to look at everything around me and discovered that this affinity for looking into things

00:18:37

that my rock-hunting, butterfly-collecting habits had instilled in me

00:18:44

had become like turbocharged.

00:18:48

And swimming in the depths of polished stones, ponds,

00:18:54

the ditch running down the back of the backyard were myriads of worlds.

00:19:02

And I went outside and I was looking around at everything and then I I just felt

00:19:08

physically overcome my knees basically gave way underneath me and I sat down under a tree

00:19:17

and I closed my eyes and my life has never been the same since because there, waiting behind closed eyelids

00:19:30

were, you know, ruined cities

00:19:37

covered with creeping jeweled lichens

00:19:41

and inhabited by shining-eyed creatures that were, I was not sure exactly what,

00:19:51

and much, much more.

00:19:53

And I just spent a half hour or so, literally entranced,

00:20:10

into this unfolding reverie of deserts, jungles, machines,

00:20:18

archaeological artifactria, machines in orbit around alien worlds,

00:20:20

all of this stuff.

00:20:24

And I was stunned.

00:20:26

I still am stunned and that essentially set the compass

00:20:29

for my

00:20:31

the rest of my intellectual life

00:20:35

I didn’t understand really

00:20:38

what had happened

00:20:39

in other words I didn’t clearly get it

00:20:42

that this was a trip and that it was induced by the psychedelic.

00:20:50

I understood something of that, but I thought also it must be unique.

00:20:55

It must be my mood, my expectation. happen on demand through the simple act of eating morning glory seeds being sold at 35 cents a pack

00:21:08

down at the hardware store. And so then I began to ask questions and I quickly discovered it was

00:21:20

a mistake. So I went to Huxley and read more carefully,

00:21:25

saw that he was working

00:21:27

from the early of Pavlov

00:21:29

Ellis, Weir Mitchell,

00:21:33

Fitzhugh Ludlow.

00:21:36

It turned out

00:21:37

that this whole

00:21:39

tradition,

00:21:41

albeit an underground

00:21:43

tradition in Western intellectual or aesthetic sense,

00:21:49

based around the perturbation of consciousness with substances.

00:21:56

Coleridge comes to mind as an example.

00:22:01

And you may know this poem, Kublai Khan.

00:22:07

Kublai Khan was written in a flash, basically,

00:22:13

based on an opium reverie.

00:22:16

Coleridge was an aficionado latinum,

00:22:22

which was a tinctured form of opium that had a great vogue in the 19th century.

00:22:29

Well, I knew nothing about opium or laudanum or the style of the 19th century English intelligentsia,

00:22:37

but in the lines of Kublai Khan, I could feel this same siren song iridescence

00:22:47

that had been in the pyrite crystals, in the butterfly wings, in the beetle bodies.

00:22:57

Here, let’s go out on a limb and really take a chance here. In the Sanadu did Kublai Khan a state of your dome decree

00:23:07

where out the sacred river ran

00:23:10

through caverns measureless to man

00:23:14

down to a sunless sea.

00:23:17

So twice five miles of fertile ground

00:23:21

with walls and towers girdled round

00:23:24

and there blossomed many an incense-bearing

00:23:29

tree. Five miles meandering with a mazy motion the sacred river ran and it goes on and on and then And then it says, it was a miracle of rare device, a sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice.

00:23:48

And that notion, not the sunny pleasure dome itself,

00:23:54

but the notion of a sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice,

00:23:58

introduced me to the concept of what’s called in alchemy coincidencia appositorum, where two things

00:24:09

which are mutually exclusive are juxtaposed in a way which creates a shock in the mind,

00:24:18

a poetic shock that is then potentially memorable.

00:24:24

that is then potentially memorable.

00:24:31

Years later, I used this effect to title my books.

00:24:38

So that’s why you get The Invisible Landscape, True Hallucination.

00:24:42

See, this is all hideously contrived.

00:24:45

Well. all hideously contrived. Well,

00:24:47

eventually,

00:24:51

and after many adventures

00:24:54

too painful to recall,

00:24:57

I ended up at Berkeley

00:24:59

in the fall of 1965,

00:25:03

which was an incredibly,

00:25:06

probably the most together thing

00:25:08

I’ve ever achieved with my life internally,

00:25:11

because I was neither early nor late.

00:25:14

I was not 10 miles off or 1,000 miles off.

00:25:19

I was dead on.

00:25:20

I was right at the very center

00:25:23

of the flowering of the cultural revolution that is now vilified and fondly recalled as the 1960s.

00:25:32

And I was living in a ratty room house in San Francisco that summer before going over to Berkeley.

00:25:41

going over to Berkeley.

00:25:45

And there was a guy living across the hall from me who replaced all the white light bulbs in his apartment

00:25:51

with red light bulbs

00:25:53

and painted his windows black

00:25:56

and played the main chords of Freight Train

00:26:00

on his slack guitar over and over again and he went on to glory as uh very melton

00:26:11

lead guitarist of country joe and the fish and i didn’t know it but at the time they were in the

00:26:20

studio laying down the tracks for uh electric music for the mind and the body,

00:26:27

which was one of the defining freak albums of that era.

00:26:33

And he introduced me to the joys of cannabis,

00:26:39

and further to something called Sandoz LSD,

00:26:44

which was going around in these tiny double-O capsules.

00:26:48

And it was as if the previous morning glory vision

00:26:58

had now been lifted to a whole other level of intensity.

00:27:06

And everyone around me was undergoing these kinds of experiences.

00:27:13

There was a sense of incredibly accelerated change.

00:27:19

You could palpably feel the acceleration of change seem to be in the water, in the air.

00:27:29

Once I moved to Berkeley, I noticed that the large billboard

00:27:34

that they changed for Telegraph Avenue every 30 days

00:27:38

contained cryptic messages that were inevitably addressed to me and my affinity.

00:27:48

In short, serious boundary dissolution and category and scramblement

00:27:54

was creeping into my mental universe.

00:28:00

And then, after about six months of this,

00:28:04

I had a very strange friend who lived in Palo Alto.

00:28:09

He still is my great inspiration.

00:28:14

I wish I could coax him into public display, because he’s the real Terrence McKenna.

00:28:22

But if you’re the real Terrence McKenna, you have too much

00:28:25

good taste to ever do

00:28:27

what I do.

00:28:31

But he came to me.

00:28:33

His style was

00:28:35

to get there first,

00:28:38

whatever it was,

00:28:40

to do it,

00:28:41

to reject it,

00:28:43

and to be absolutely contemptuous of it

00:28:46

by the time anybody else even arrived at the scene of the crime.

00:28:51

So in early 1967, he came to my house in Berkeley one rainy February night,

00:29:00

and he said, something you might be interested in.

00:29:06

And I said, what’s that?

00:29:08

And he said, this is a material that has been boosted from an army research project

00:29:17

being run down at SRI,

00:29:20

and someone managed to get a 50-gallon drum of this material

00:29:25

out of the inventory without anybody knowing.

00:29:29

And I said, what is it?

00:29:31

And he said, it’s called DMT.

00:29:34

And I said, it’s a psychedelic drug, right?

00:29:40

And he said, right.

00:29:41

And I said, how long does it last?

00:29:44

And he said, three minutes. And I said, how long does it last? And he said, three minutes.

00:29:46

And I said, no problem, bring it on.

00:29:49

Because after all, I had been assaulted by Life magazine on the subject of LSD,

00:29:57

and I had gotten that under my belt,

00:30:00

and I was by now relatively sophisticated about cannabis,

00:30:06

I figured there were probably no more frontiers to cross.

00:30:11

And so we sat down then and there and did it.

00:30:19

And about 15 seconds after toking up on this stuff,

00:30:24

I found myself plunged into an elf nest

00:30:29

somewhere on the other side of the universe.

00:30:34

In other words, there were…

00:30:39

And thank God no one fills in for me

00:30:42

because they know it so well.

00:30:47

Jewel self-dribbling basketballs.

00:30:49

Did I get it right?

00:30:52

Jewel self-dribbling basketballs that came bounding toward me

00:30:58

from all corners of this domed, underground space. Well, I had been used to hallucinations,

00:31:09

acceleration of thought, funny ideas,

00:31:13

strange insights, hysterical waves of giggling,

00:31:16

so forth and so on.

00:31:17

I had never seen anything like what I was now face-to-face with.

00:31:25

And also, whatever this substance was, it didn’t affect me.

00:31:32

It didn’t affect my perception of who I was.

00:31:35

In other words, it seemed to me that the drug wasn’t working.

00:31:39

It was simply that the world had disappeared and been replaced by something else.

00:31:45

And I was still who I had been a few moments before,

00:31:50

except now I was fairly alarmed by what had just happened to the architecture and geography of Southern Telegraph Avenue.

00:32:09

and these things, there was an overwhelming sense of affection, involvement,

00:32:16

a sense that I hadn’t experienced since being six years old and being released on Christmas morning to run out to the Christmas tree and there was a sense of childlike innocence

00:32:25

under conditions of

00:32:27

extraordinary alien

00:32:30

unfoldment

00:32:32

and just I was

00:32:34

boggled, the mind

00:32:36

boggled, I at last

00:32:38

understood the real meaning

00:32:39

of this

00:32:40

new cliche at that

00:32:43

time

00:32:44

and these things of this new cliché at that time.

00:32:55

And these things were making objects with their voices.

00:33:00

They were singing in this unearthly,

00:33:07

crystalline, punning, elf chatter kind of language. But it was not something simply heard.

00:33:10

It was something which I could see.

00:33:13

I could see syntax unfolding like ribbons being spewed out of machines,

00:33:21

shooting across my visual field, rolling into balls, condensing as objects

00:33:29

with rotating crystalline facets and machined interiors of gold and ivory and crystallite.

00:33:37

And these objects were themselves emitting strange singing, language-like noises.

00:33:47

And the whole thing was happening at an enormous speed,

00:33:52

almost like a Bugs Bunny cartoon run backwards at about three times ordinary speed.

00:34:00

Well, I barely had time to take all of this in and assure myself that I wasn’t dying before it collapsed.

00:34:15

The way a tent collapses, the way an ice cream cone melts, the way an erection disappears, the way an investment goes bad.

00:34:25

It just was gone.

00:34:28

And my friend, I was sitting there, I opened my eyes,

00:34:34

and my friend said, so what do you think?

00:34:38

And I was stunned.

00:34:46

I’ve never actually seen it hit anybody quite as hard as it hit me.

00:34:52

For about 15 minutes, all I could say was,

00:34:56

I can’t believe it.

00:34:58

I can’t believe it.

00:35:01

I can’t believe it.

00:35:02

I can’t believe that.

00:35:04

I can’t believe that. You call that

00:35:08

a drug? You must be nuts. Drugs don’t do that. I mean, drugs speed you up, slow you down,

00:35:16

make you fall down, stuff like that. This is no drug. It’s magic. It masquerades as a drug. It’s a doorway into another world. I kept

00:35:28

having the image of Aladdin’s land, my favorite fairy tale, and I felt like Aladdin. You know,

00:35:35

you buy something in a junk shop, you take it home, you try to clean it up. The next

00:35:39

thing you know, a flame a mile high pours out and demands to do your bidding. That was the impression

00:35:48

I had. And it’s the impression I still have. That must have been early 1966, 66, 76, 86, what is it, 36 years ago?

00:36:07

That’s not possible.

00:36:08

26 years ago, nothing has particularly changed.

00:36:14

Nothing has ever surpassed it.

00:36:17

And for me, that was the moment that set my auto-compass for life.

00:36:29

I mean, I said, this I must understand.

00:36:35

Not only did my mother not tell me and my father not tell me,

00:36:39

but Aldous Huxley never told me, and neither did John of the Cross, and neither did Meister Eckhart.

00:36:47

All those people were apparently flying at a lower altitude than I, 19-year-old brat in ratty rented room, have been able to achieve in the last 15 minutes.

00:37:13

the last 15 minutes. And so then I began to look for this, or for some trace of it, in the history of human philosophy, in the history of art, in ethnography, everywhere.

00:37:30

And I really didn’t find it.

00:37:32

And I really still don’t find it,

00:37:35

except there are certain faint, faint footprints

00:37:39

in the blowing sand of human experience

00:37:43

that if you know, if you’ve seen the vision,

00:37:48

you can follow these footprints back to something like this source.

00:37:53

First of all, I went to the library.

00:37:58

None of the heads that I knew could make any sense out of this at all.

00:38:03

For them, LSD defined the top of the ladder.

00:38:07

Well, with this stuff, LSD and being local PA meeting down

00:38:13

seemed to be two states of mind merged together

00:38:16

on some horizon of strengthening.

00:38:19

So I went to the library

00:38:22

and began reading more intensely in a more focused fashion.

00:38:27

And I learned that in South America, there were five people who apparently utilized plants that had this image.

00:38:40

Now, at that time, this was 67, this was new information, information that had arrived in the domain of botanical scholarship. and William Safford and other people have described this chemical being present in these aboriginal intoxicants.

00:39:14

So far as I could tell, no academic had ever done it, because no description matched what I had experienced. And when I discussed this with my friend who had brought me to this place,

00:39:28

he said that he felt that probably it was impossible to attain these kinds of concentrations outside the laboratory. if true, that these shamanic practitioners and societies that were utilizing this

00:39:50

were utilizing it, but that they themselves had no real awareness of what it was potentially like

00:39:58

when concentrated through modern analytical and laboratory techniques.

00:40:06

So I…

00:40:08

It really wasn’t a choice.

00:40:11

I mean, I guess that’s what it’s like when you get your calling.

00:40:16

It’s just a little hard for me to imagine that, you know,

00:40:20

being a CTA or a city planner or something like that

00:40:26

could seize you by the ears with the kind of intensity that this sees me.

00:40:32

I mean, I said, I’ve got to understand this stuff.

00:40:35

This is the most amazing thing.

00:40:38

And the second most amazing thing was that nobody seemed to know about it.

00:40:46

I mean, I couldn’t understand why there weren’t

00:40:47

11-inch high headlines

00:40:49

on every newspaper on the

00:40:51

platform saying, you know,

00:40:53

doorway to hyperspace

00:40:55

discouraged.

00:40:57

Elf negotiations

00:40:59

preceded

00:41:00

something like that. No,

00:41:03

apparently it was

00:41:04

a private mystery

00:41:07

or known but to a very few.

00:41:12

And I immediately, after coming down,

00:41:16

was seized by an absolutely messianic desire

00:41:20

to expose other people to this

00:41:23

and see what they said

00:41:25

because it just seems so important to share it.

00:41:30

So that’s basically what I’ve been doing ever since

00:41:36

and trying to draw conclusions,

00:41:41

trying to understand what is this, number one, how is it that it can coexist

00:41:48

with the world of George Bush, and not be discussed, or not be part of the mix of social

00:42:02

concerns. I mean, after all, we’re a society where people jump out of airplanes on weekends

00:42:09

because their lives are so boring and empty.

00:42:12

Well, then, if you think jumping out of an airplane is a thrill to write home about,

00:42:17

you should try this stuff.

00:42:19

No one would jump out of an airplane if they had DMT on their menu.

00:42:27

But no, apparently it isn’t about that. Well, then I came to feel that it was, and It is not a secret.

00:42:48

It is the secret.

00:42:50

There is a secret, and this is it.

00:42:55

It is the secret that the world is not only not the way you think it is,

00:43:04

is not only not the way you think it is,

00:43:11

it’s that the way the world is is a way that you can’t think it is, because you simply do not have the imaginative capacity

00:43:18

to conceive of such overwhelming peculiarity.

00:43:22

overwhelming peculiarity.

00:43:27

And how this secret is able to coexist

00:43:29

with the rest of mundane reality,

00:43:34

maintain its integrity,

00:43:36

and not become the object

00:43:38

of pogrom, religion, hysteria,

00:43:41

and repression,

00:43:43

is part of the mystery of what the secret is.

00:43:49

You see, a secret is not something untold.

00:43:52

It’s something which can’t be told.

00:43:56

And even as I sit here,

00:43:57

I realize that I’m obliquely approaching it.

00:44:03

No matter how weird I say it is,

00:44:06

no matter what scintillating metaphor I create

00:44:09

to attempt to beguile you into imagining what you can’t imagine,

00:44:15

I’m perfectly aware that I’m falling short of the goal.

00:44:18

I’m creating a symbol of what it is.

00:44:23

But frankly, words fail.

00:44:26

And I’m a word kind of guy.

00:44:30

So then, the rest of my life can be basically poured into a nutshell.

00:44:36

It’s just been a lot of wandering around in various fringy places,

00:44:46

talking to a lot of fringy people,

00:44:48

and trying to figure out what is the real importance of this for me personally,

00:44:56

because that’s where I’m living, obviously,

00:44:59

and for everybody else,

00:45:01

because I assume that there is absolutely nothing

00:45:06

extraordinary

00:45:07

about me

00:45:09

I didn’t have these experiences

00:45:11

because I’m in the lineage of Ramana Maharshi

00:45:14

or some malarkey like that

00:45:16

I had that experience

00:45:18

because I’m a human being

00:45:20

and every human being

00:45:22

can have this experience.

00:45:27

The only analogy I can make to it is sexuality.

00:45:34

I notice that no one here seems to be having sex at the moment,

00:45:40

but we all are shaped by it. Probably this is something so taboo

00:45:46

and not necessarily scripted into your biological functioning,

00:45:51

the way sex is,

00:45:53

so taboo that you can go from birth to the grave

00:45:57

and never encounter this.

00:46:01

Not only can you do that,

00:46:03

but most people do. And throughout history, most people have.

00:46:10

They never had an inkling. You know, they may have set armies marching, they may have

00:46:16

launched empires, they may have built fantastic inventions, painted amazing paintings,

00:46:27

created phenomenal works of literature,

00:46:29

but they were wet behind the ears

00:46:32

when it comes to the full spectrum of reality

00:46:36

because without this in the picture,

00:46:40

half the world is missing.

00:46:43

Well, so then, how to come to terms with this?

00:46:49

What is it?

00:46:51

The answer is, who knows?

00:46:54

We’re not doing a very good job of coming to terms with this.

00:46:59

Governments inveigh against drugs of all sorts,

00:47:04

in vain against drugs of all sorts, but largely because these things are sources of difficult-to-tax revenue.

00:47:14

It’s not the metaphysical concern for the health of your teleological structures

00:47:21

that drives the government to repress these things.

00:47:26

It’s simply the wish not to be chiseled on, essentially.

00:47:31

So, this, there it is, sideways to the rest of life.

00:47:39

Huxley once said of the psychedelic experience generally

00:47:43

that it was what he called a gratuitous grace.

00:47:48

He said it is neither necessary nor sufficient for salvation.

00:47:55

In other words, salvation can be attained without these things,

00:47:59

whatever salvation is.

00:48:03

Discovering, using, and exploring these things does not guarantee you a place

00:48:09

in heaven either, whatever a place in heaven means. However, this is a part of this world.

00:48:21

Well, it’s hard to put it into words exactly, especially when you try to do it for the first time.

00:48:27

Obviously, the difference between a living person and a dead person, there is a way of thinking

00:48:33

about that where you would say the difference is a chemical one. In one case, metabolism is going on, in the other case not. I am beginning to think that this narrowing of our conscious

00:48:50

focus into three dimensions for survival purposes that I mentioned a few minutes ago may have

00:48:57

actually cut us off not only from where the game will be next month or who stole the chicken,

00:49:09

but it also may have cut us off from contact with the after-death world

00:49:16

because it has no efficacy in the very nitty-gritty blood and muscle problem of day-to-day survival,

00:49:29

and that what we have discovered in DMT is literally a chemical doorway to the bardo,

00:49:37

and that this, I think, is an even more confounding notion than the notion that we are being pheromonally managed

00:49:48

by zeta reticulums or something like that i mean after all if that were the case it would probably

00:49:55

just be one of many programs of social manipulation that are administered by some hideous bureaucracy somewhere beyond Agal,

00:50:06

and there’s careerism and blunders and budget overruns.

00:50:12

In other words, it sort of comes back down into…

00:50:16

That’s the problem I have with all extraterrestrial scenarios

00:50:22

is the extraterrestrirestrial seems so much like ourselves

00:50:25

I think probably

00:50:28

it’s that

00:50:31

we have found

00:50:32

the pharmacological key

00:50:34

to the bargain

00:50:35

and that this is going to

00:50:39

overturn

00:50:40

civilization

00:50:42

so completely that we might

00:50:44

as well just call an end to it

00:50:47

and recess the meeting.

00:50:50

And if you ask shamans about this,

00:50:54

you say, you know, what is this all about?

00:50:56

They will tell you,

00:50:58

well, we do all our work through ancestor magic.

00:51:03

Well, ancestor is a very sanitized term

00:51:07

because not too many people,

00:51:10

when they hear the word ancestor,

00:51:12

realize that we’re talking dead people here.

00:51:16

So when a shaman tells you he works with the ancestors,

00:51:21

he’s saying he works with dead people.

00:51:29

Well, we don’t know. But if that’s the case, then we are close to meaning to secure, in a rational sense, the answer to

00:51:41

one of the questions that has driven us most buggy throughout history,

00:51:48

which is, is there continuity of something after the body dissolves?

00:51:57

And I am the last person to ever carry this message into society.

00:52:04

I was raised Catholic.

00:52:06

I rejected it.

00:52:10

At age 14, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Genet, Friedrich Nietzsche,

00:52:16

these were my gods.

00:52:18

And I felt, you know, that moral responsibility,

00:52:21

existential honesty demands that we put aside the cheerful fairy tales

00:52:28

of more naive levels of culture

00:52:31

and that anybody who wants to talk to you

00:52:33

about the dear departed and all that

00:52:36

is, you know, in the grip of menopausal mysticism or something

00:52:41

or just hasn’t carried out a rational analysis of what gives.

00:52:47

Now, I think, you know, these religions have all made hay out of, and hash, I might add,

00:52:55

out of their imagined franchise of the after-death world, because they use it to beat you on the head

00:53:08

with some moral laundry list of do’s and don’ts

00:53:12

that’s very dear to them.

00:53:14

And it can be anything as nuts as that you shouldn’t be

00:53:17

poured to who knows what, you know.

00:53:21

On all sides of the world,

00:53:23

and has only been thrown into question

00:53:25

by the scientific high-tech democracies in the last 500 years or so,

00:53:31

and for them only among a secular educated elite,

00:53:36

the premise is that there is something that persists beyond life.

00:53:43

is something that persists beyond life.

00:53:49

And I think that part of the profligate irresponsibility of modern life

00:53:54

arises from the fact that

00:53:56

we don’t think we have dues to pay.

00:53:59

We don’t think…

00:54:00

We think there’s an easy way out

00:54:03

and that you can be a jerk

00:54:04

and then just become food for worms and nobody will ever get on your case about it.

00:54:10

And so moral relativism has come into play.

00:54:24

in some form the notion that the human personality or some portion of it persists after death

00:54:27

and that there is an ecology of souls

00:54:31

and that we must in some sense share this planet with them

00:54:36

because after all, when you smoke DMT,

00:54:39

you don’t go anywhere physically.

00:54:42

You simply see your nearby environment

00:54:46

from a different dimension

00:54:48

through different eyes

00:54:50

then it means that

00:54:51

we represent

00:54:54

a tiny minority

00:54:55

of the human beings

00:54:58

who care about this planet

00:54:59

we the living

00:55:01

are just a tiny slice

00:55:04

of who cares

00:55:06

and who is active in the situation.

00:55:10

And somehow we are being, through chance, which I don’t believe in,

00:55:17

or through design, which seems everywhere around us,

00:55:21

we are being brought up short and told that in order for the earth to survive,

00:55:31

we must join everyone else in this other place.

00:55:36

And that it is not to be conceived of as dissolution, it is to be conceived of as disembodied.

00:55:43

This is the only thing I can figure out that is going on.

00:55:47

There is some kind of project underway to transfer the lump of living into the realm of the grateful dead.

00:56:07

and the anxiety that we feel about death is an anxiety born essentially of ignorance

00:56:14

and this ignorance is understandable

00:56:17

because we have suppressed, repressed

00:56:20

and denied shamanism

00:56:23

the leadership role that it should have

00:56:27

in metaphysics of all sorts.

00:56:30

And so now, we’re about to become extinct.

00:56:36

And you can like it or you cannot like it.

00:56:41

You can decry it as the greatest tragedy

00:56:44

ever to befall us or this planet,

00:56:50

although I suspect the planet will heave an enormous sigh of relief. But there is a perspective

00:56:57

in which it can actually be seen as progress, that we are all at once going to transfer into this bardo realm now this may not be it it

00:57:11

may not be a simple die-off it may be that somehow a dialogue can be set up with these souls or their representatives

00:57:26

or whatever they are in this other place

00:57:29

and that a world can be established

00:57:32

which is neither quite theirs

00:57:34

nor quite ours.

00:57:37

In other words,

00:57:38

that the difference between being alive

00:57:40

and being dead,

00:57:42

which seems to us fairly fundamental,

00:57:45

could in fact turn out to be fairly minor

00:57:48

and erasable,

00:57:51

or the boundary could be moved

00:57:52

from where it is to somewhere else.

00:57:56

We, this stuff is hackle-raising in its weirdness,

00:58:01

but if you’re going to be true

00:58:03

to the content of the experience,

00:58:06

then I think you’re pushed

00:58:07

in these kinds of directions.

00:58:12

And the attractor

00:58:15

at the end of history

00:58:17

that seems to be pulling

00:58:20

the human world, certainly,

00:58:23

if not all of space and time, into its domain is, in the act of realizing itself, going to obliterate the kind of distinctions that we have grown used to, excuse me, even on such fundamental issues as life and death.

00:58:47

That’s the grandest conception that I’ve been able to come up with.

00:58:52

And it doesn’t require friendly altruistic extraterrestrial flying in from fatal Jews.

00:59:01

And it doesn’t involve nanotechnological downloading of everybody into a gold deterbium

00:59:10

cube buried on the back side of the moon and it doesn’t involve the human enterprise simply

00:59:19

becoming a layer in shale somewhere in the strata of the paleontological record of life

00:59:27

on this planet.

00:59:30

It is, you know,

00:59:31

a fitting denouement

00:59:34

for the mess

00:59:36

that we have wandered into.

00:59:38

It does require unlimbering

00:59:41

of the imagination

00:59:42

to come to terms with this

00:59:44

because we are in great denial over the possibility

00:59:48

that the world could really be transforming itself.

00:59:54

I mean, about as far as most of us can go

00:59:56

without getting metaphysically uncomfortable

00:59:59

is to embrace recycling and population control, but I doubt that such cheerful diddling with the machinery

01:00:10

will be able to swerve us from our path.

01:00:13

I think, like it or not,

01:00:19

we are going into a world that we literally, as we sit here,

01:00:24

cannot conceive of.

01:00:26

A world so different from ordinary reality that to discuss whether we will be alive or

01:00:33

dead in that world is mere quibbling.

01:00:38

There’s one point I wanted to clarify real quick.

01:00:41

I didn’t see this launch of the alien psychedelic explore templates

01:00:45

as a bureaucratic enterprise.

01:00:47

I almost always envisioned it

01:00:48

as a real provisional underground thing

01:00:50

to be done by a small minority of shamans

01:00:53

in a desperate hope

01:00:55

to somehow propagate their origins.

01:01:01

You mean alien shamans?

01:01:02

Yeah, yeah.

01:01:04

It could be that.

01:01:06

I think, I sense a crisis in the physics of the matrix itself.

01:01:15

In other words, I think that this is not only happening to human beings.

01:01:20

I’m serious when I say, you know, there’s only 20 years of history left and we still have half of it to do.

01:01:29

We’re going to have to do some pretty fast stepping.

01:01:32

I mean, what we took 50,000 years to do, we must now do in 20 years. I think that space and time and the physical body and the planets

01:01:52

and that everything is essentially some kind of an illusion.

01:01:57

It’s not real.

01:01:59

What is real, what is truly bedrock,

01:02:02

and I guess this comes close to being a Buddhist position,

01:02:06

this is all provisional.

01:02:09

This is not what the universe is.

01:02:12

The universe is something else.

01:02:14

You know, the Buddhists have a doctrine

01:02:16

that if a single person will attain enlightenment,

01:02:23

then the illusion will collapse instantly.

01:02:28

All beings will be sucked

01:02:30

into the post-enlightenment state.

01:02:35

And the illusion of space and time,

01:02:39

of becoming an entity,

01:02:41

will all be obviated at the snap of a finger.

01:02:46

Well, we tend to disbelieve this

01:02:48

because no matter how metaphysical we are,

01:02:51

or we even call ourselves Buddhists,

01:02:54

we really believe that Andromeda is 250,000 light years away.

01:03:00

And we can’t conceive of a light year,

01:03:02

but we actually believe what the scientists tell us.

01:03:08

And yet, my God, when you start carrying out a critique of modern science,

01:03:16

you cannot believe what fluff this stuff is built on.

01:03:21

I heard an analogy recently which I thought was very interesting.

01:03:27

Our entire picture

01:03:28

of the so-called distant universe

01:03:32

is built up by the science

01:03:35

of radio telescopes,

01:03:37

the use of radio telescopes

01:03:39

to study deep space.

01:03:41

This science has been in existence

01:03:43

since about 1950

01:03:45

if you were

01:03:46

to take all

01:03:47

the radio

01:03:48

signals that

01:03:49

have been

01:03:50

analyzed by

01:03:51

radio astronomy

01:03:53

since 1950

01:03:54

and characterize

01:03:56

them as

01:03:57

energy

01:03:57

it would be

01:03:59

the amount

01:03:59

of energy

01:04:00

that is

01:04:00

released by

01:04:01

a cigarette

01:04:02

ash falling

01:04:03

a distance

01:04:04

of two feet.

01:04:06

So this is the thinness of the data out of which we have created these incredibly grandiose

01:04:17

conceptions of what is happening.

01:04:21

Science is just whistling past the graveyard.

01:04:24

Don’t forget that the telescope is

01:04:26

about 500 years old this year. So to believe, you know, that the story science tells us is true,

01:04:36

when we can’t understand the mathematics, we cannot build the instruments ourselves. We cannot analyze the data. I mean, we are under the

01:04:47

thumb of a priesthood more domineering, more removed from the ordinary concerns of ordinary

01:04:56

people than any priesthood of any religion in the past ever was. I think we should hold all that in abeyance.

01:05:07

I’m not saying it’s not true.

01:05:08

I’m saying it’s not possible to tell whether it’s true or not.

01:05:13

One thing psychedelics will do for you, for sure,

01:05:17

is to convince you that what’s real

01:05:20

is what I call the felt presence of immediate experience.

01:05:26

That’s what’s real.

01:05:27

You know, what you think, what you feel, what you see now is what’s real.

01:05:36

Even your own memories are so shifting and elusive

01:05:40

and subject to psychological transformation based on your own inner and unconscious dynamics and kinks

01:05:50

that to believe what somebody else is telling you

01:05:54

about the temperature of bagel juice or something like that

01:05:58

or the charge of the top quart

01:06:01

means you’ve moved off into some kind of private Idaho.

01:06:06

Crazy people rave about stuff like this.

01:06:09

But I think people who are rooted in a good philosophical method

01:06:17

will not give much credence to anything out of reach of their good right arm.

01:06:23

And the psychedelic experience is an experience.

01:06:28

You know, I didn’t present you with a set of tensor equations

01:06:32

or a tape of electromagnetic data

01:06:38

interpreted through the fiat fischi formula.

01:06:43

We’re talking experience here.

01:06:45

And this experience,

01:06:48

if made commiserate with ordinary experience,

01:06:51

I think leads to the conclusion that

01:06:54

this is, I said this the other night,

01:06:58

this is as dead as you’ll ever be.

01:07:02

This is as low as you can go.

01:07:04

This is as confined as you can go. This is as

01:07:06

confined a mode

01:07:08

of existence as it’s possible

01:07:10

to know.

01:07:11

And it’s all up

01:07:14

from here, folks.

01:07:16

It’s a kind of Gnostic

01:07:17

vision.

01:07:20

It sees

01:07:21

our present circumstance

01:07:23

as the low run of a ladder of transformational distillation.

01:07:34

And, you know, we come from we know not where.

01:07:39

I mean, we have, yes, the details on the fertilization of the egg by the sperm and so forth and so on,

01:07:47

but where the form comes from, we don’t know.

01:07:52

This is the mystery of morphogenesis.

01:07:55

And then where the form goes to, we do not know.

01:08:01

I mean, I now think that the proper way to think about biology is biological objects,

01:08:10

plants, animals, fungi, bacteria, amoebas, and human beings.

01:08:15

Biological objects are hyperdimensional objects.

01:08:20

You can tell that that’s true because whenever you, what is the sine qua non of a

01:08:27

biological object, meaning what is the thing it must have to be biological? It must metabolize.

01:08:38

That’s the essence of life. The form is stable, but the matter and the energy which compose the form are

01:08:48

in constant cycling. The form stabilizes, but the energy is flowing through it, which

01:08:57

stabilizes it. When we use phrases like cycling through it, blowing through it. These are words which imply a temporal dimension.

01:09:06

If you have a chair and you cut into it,

01:09:10

it doesn’t bleed, it doesn’t squirm away,

01:09:14

it doesn’t begin to rot and fall over.

01:09:17

If you cut into a living object,

01:09:21

it undergoes all kinds of changes.

01:09:24

This is because you have destroyed one of the

01:09:28

dimensions necessary for its manifestation, the temporal dimension. The living body has a

01:09:36

relationship to time which the chair doesn’t have. The chair is born along in the stream of time.

01:09:52

The biological object is made of time itself as much as it’s made of space and matter.

01:10:07

And so really what birth is, is the descent of this mysterious entity called the form, into matter. It clothes itself with matter and energy through a process of gestation, unfoldment,

01:10:11

separation from the environment of gestation and unfoldment,

01:10:15

which is the mother’s body.

01:10:17

And then it has an autonomous existence.

01:10:21

But what is generally true of all life in the ontogenetic expression,

01:10:31

what’s true is that it has finite duration.

01:10:35

Everything dies.

01:10:37

The individual dinosaur, the individual elephant, the individual human being, they die. That means that the form eventually withdraws itself

01:10:48

from the domain of matter and energy,

01:10:52

and it then presumably exists as it existed before,

01:10:58

having added whatever adumbrations

01:11:00

three-dimensional experience has given to it.

01:11:04

So I’ve come to see the body as basically the placenta of the soul.

01:11:12

And, you know, that’s a way of thinking about it

01:11:15

that makes dying not so terrifying.

01:11:19

I mean, it’s as terrifying as smoking DMT,

01:11:22

but it’s nothing to claw the walls about.

01:11:27

The body is the placenta of the soul for the individual. Well, then it’s just a short step to realizing that we

01:11:34

are now called upon as a species to abandon the body. The body is the collective body,

01:11:46

is the collective placenta of the species,

01:11:51

and you don’t do a war dance around the placenta

01:11:55

once it’s served its function,

01:11:59

which is to bring the forming fetus

01:12:03

to the point where it can exist and sustain itself

01:12:08

in the dimension for which it is destined.

01:12:12

In the case of ordinary birth, that’s three-dimensional space and time.

01:12:16

In the case of this metaphor, it’s the hyperspace beyond space and time.

01:12:23

Once we are ready to exist in that dimension,

01:12:27

it’s time to undergo the journey down the birth canal

01:12:32

and bury the placenta under the old apple tree

01:12:37

and forget it and move on.

01:12:40

And, you know, I grant you the analogy isn’t perfect

01:12:47

I mean where is the midwife

01:12:49

where is the waiting bassinet

01:12:51

but perhaps the answer to that is

01:12:54

the midwife is waiting in these intimations

01:12:57

of the friendly alien presence

01:13:00

it may be an aspect of humanness

01:13:04

that awaits

01:13:05

us just over

01:13:08

the great divine.

01:13:10

And so we are going to have

01:13:11

to

01:13:12

you know, I think

01:13:16

you probably now at every talk

01:13:18

I give, I make the analogy

01:13:20

to birth.

01:13:22

That this is what we

01:13:24

in the 20th century

01:13:25

are experiencing.

01:13:26

The 20th century is analogous

01:13:29

to the birth canal

01:13:31

of human history.

01:13:35

And so, you know,

01:13:37

the wonderful swim

01:13:40

in the amniotic ocean is over.

01:13:43

The fool’s paradise

01:13:46

of the people’s life is ending.

01:13:52

Now the walls are literally closing in.

01:13:56

We can’t get enough oxygen.

01:13:58

We’re using up our food.

01:14:01

The walls are strangling us.

01:14:04

There’s no room on this planet for all of us.

01:14:07

And for us, it’s a catastrophe.

01:14:10

But I imagine when a woman goes into transition,

01:14:13

that the fetus, if it’s not a metaphysician,

01:14:17

must be fairly aligned by the situation.

01:14:20

He must just say, well, I guess this is it.

01:14:23

It’s all over.

01:14:24

I’m going to be strangled,

01:14:26

suffocated, and simultaneously choked to death in this situation. It would take a far-seeing

01:14:33

fetus indeed to embrace the journey down the birth canal as the road toward, you know,

01:14:42

a split-level ranch house in the middle of Malibu if you play your cards right.

01:14:50

Surely that gets the idea across.

01:14:53

Yes.

01:14:55

Could you say more about your content of your character?

01:15:02

I was really fascinated

01:15:06

and it seemed like there were some qualities to it

01:15:13

that I wanted to know, hear more about.

01:15:17

Well, sure.

01:15:18

Sure.

01:15:31

DMT, if you take it orally, is destroyed by enzymes in your gut, so it has to be smoked unless you have a chemical strategy for inactivating those enzymes.

01:15:39

So assuming you smoke it, it comes on in about 30 seconds.

01:15:46

And if you’re a leather lung Tashashin, you can maybe get it in one swell poop.

01:15:55

But it takes most people about three hits.

01:16:11

the first thing you notice is that it’s as though all the air has been drawn out of the room you’re in.

01:16:16

Suddenly the colors come forward and the edges sharpen.

01:16:18

This is really happening. It has an extraordinary effect at low doses on visual acuity,

01:16:26

so does psilocybin.

01:16:29

And then you close your eyes.

01:16:31

You feel very peculiar.

01:16:34

A kind of anesthesia sweeps through your body,

01:16:38

a kind of numbing and yet a sense of a building bubble of energy.

01:16:45

You close your eyes, and after a sense of a building bubble of energy. You close your eyes and after a few seconds

01:16:48

you see forming in front of you what I call the chrysanthemum.

01:16:55

It’s a floral mandala, usually in yellow and orange, most people say.

01:17:02

And it’s slowly turning.

01:17:05

It’s like a wall, but it’s a hallucination.

01:17:08

But it’s right here, right in front of you.

01:17:11

And you watch it for about 15 seconds.

01:17:15

If it stabilizes, you need one more hit.

01:17:21

But what usually happens is that after about 15 seconds of contemplating this thing it’s as

01:17:28

though suddenly whatever was holding you back the cable is cut and you are just propelled through

01:17:36

this membrane and there is you hear a sound like a bread wrapper being crumpled,

01:17:48

a cellophane bread wrapper being crumpled and thrown away,

01:17:50

or the crackling of flames.

01:17:53

This is, according to a friend of mine,

01:17:59

your radio intellect exiting the anterior fontanelle at the top of your head.

01:18:03

He could be wrong, but whatever it is. And then you hear a tone, which is, it could be reproduced on a synthesizer.

01:18:09

It’s that…

01:18:12

You know, but it keeps going and becomes hypersonic, supersonic, subsonic, I don’t know.

01:18:21

subsonic, I don’t know and there is a sense of

01:18:25

literally a membrane is ruptured

01:18:30

and now you’re there

01:18:32

and what happens to me is

01:18:35

the first thing I hear is a cheer

01:18:38

a yell of greeting

01:18:41

it’s on their second album,

01:18:45

the Pink Floyd have a song

01:18:47

in which they sing,

01:18:49

the gnomes have a new way

01:18:52

to say hooray.

01:18:56

Well, you break into this gnomeness

01:19:00

and it’s a very specifically

01:19:04

characterized place.

01:19:06

It is domed.

01:19:10

It’s indirectly lit, not brightly lit,

01:19:14

but it’s softened lighting of some sort.

01:19:18

It’s comfortable.

01:19:20

But all of that is hard to focus on and relatively inconsequential

01:19:27

because the main thing that’s happening is these things come bounding towards you like greyhounds.

01:19:36

And there are many of them, these jeweled, self-dribbling, transforming basketballs

01:19:42

which look like iridescent electric radiolaria

01:19:46

or something. I mean, they are

01:19:48

diatomaceous neon

01:19:50

transforms made of

01:19:52

syntax or some damn

01:19:54

thing like that.

01:19:56

And they come towards you

01:19:58

and

01:19:59

you have to deal

01:20:02

with yourself in this

01:20:04

situation because most people, in my reaction, is absolute amazement, complete hysterical disbelief. It comes so quickly that it isn’t like a drug where, you know, you deep breathe and you close your eyes and you wait for an hour and you slowly summon it out of its crevice.

01:20:32

It’s not like that.

01:20:33

It’s like you were struck by lightning.

01:20:37

In fact, some people think they have been struck by lightning, that they never got to the drug, that just as they raised it to their lips, they were struck by lightning that they never got to the drug that just as they raised it to their lips they were

01:20:46

struck by lightning or a jet fighter fell out of the sky or something and then you have to ask

01:20:52

yourself is this okay because it’s so radical and it happens so quickly and your eyes are wide open

01:21:01

and you don’t see anything recognizable.

01:21:09

Three-dimensional space, the room you were in, everything, it’s gone. Instead, this place, and then they tell you, they try to reassure you, although they’re

01:21:19

not very reassuring.

01:21:21

What they say is, don’t give way to amazement.

01:21:26

Don’t abandon yourself

01:21:28

to wonder.

01:21:30

Basically, don’t be a jerk

01:21:32

and a rube.

01:21:35

Pay

01:21:36

attention. Pay

01:21:38

attention to what is happening.

01:21:40

And then they proceed

01:21:41

to

01:21:43

do a very intense form of teen teaching.

01:21:48

They are bounding up, they present themselves,

01:21:52

they also do this weird thing where they jump into your chest

01:21:56

and then they jump back out.

01:21:59

So you’re having this sucking in and out of your body thing.

01:22:03

They jump in and out of your body thing. They jump in and out of your chest,

01:22:06

and they are singing

01:22:08

and squeaking and squealing

01:22:12

in some kind of elf glossolalia,

01:22:15

which you can see.

01:22:18

This is very important.

01:22:20

They speak a language which you look at,

01:22:23

you don’t hear,

01:22:40

and they make objects which are like super puns of some sort, in that the object is not one thing. It is somehow several things simultaneously. The way a pun attains its effect by being

01:22:50

simultaneously more than one thing. But these are not verbal puns. These are objectified puns in

01:22:58

three-dimensional space. And they’re funny. And the whole thing is pervaded by

01:23:05

the word zany is what I use

01:23:09

it’s a form of humor

01:23:11

it’s a form of merriment

01:23:13

but you can’t entirely relax around it

01:23:17

because you can’t entirely be sure

01:23:20

that you’re getting the joke

01:23:22

so it’s like it’s a humor with an edge to it.

01:23:27

And they are showing you these jeweled,

01:23:32

I’ve compared them to Fabergé eggs,

01:23:35

and when they show you these things,

01:23:38

you can tell by looking at them

01:23:40

that if you could bring a single one of these objects,

01:23:44

no larger than an orange,

01:23:46

into this world, it would end the debate. I mean, all you would have to do is show it to somebody,

01:23:54

and they would say, that’s impossible, but yet it’s happening, so therefore my reality is

01:24:01

dissolving. I mean, it’s somehow to gaze upon these objects

01:24:06

is to be forever corrupted for ordinary consciousness.

01:24:12

Make them with their voices.

01:24:15

These objects are quasi-aligned.

01:24:19

The objects themselves can sing and make other objects.

01:24:28

themselves can sing and make other objects so you’re just being you’re like in this um a cross between santa’s workshop tiffany’s and the basement of the metropolitan museum

01:24:36

and they’re offering you all this time there’s i’ve somehow stretched the thread too tightly and now I’m never going to make my way back

01:24:47

and they’re saying

01:24:48

no, no, can that

01:24:50

that’s not what’s happening

01:24:51

this is what’s happening

01:24:52

pay attention

01:24:53

look, look, look

01:24:54

and then

01:24:56

it just fades very suddenly

01:24:59

and they sense it coming

01:25:01

they have urgency

01:25:03

because they know the window is tremendously narrow.

01:25:08

And in the final moments, in some cases, I recall,

01:25:12

they literally, it recedes away, or you pull away from it,

01:25:18

and they say, déjà vu, déjà vu.

01:25:22

Deja vu. Deja vu.

01:25:30

And then you open your eyes, and you’re in the room you left.

01:25:34

It’s like a thousand mics of LSD or something.

01:25:38

You are more loaded than you have ever been in your life, and you immediately proclaim, my God, I’m completely down.

01:25:42

my God, I’m completely down and you know

01:25:44

the walls are rubbery

01:25:47

the Persian carpet is crawling around

01:25:50

your friends have faceted faces

01:25:54

and look like they just climbed out of one of Billy Myers’ starships

01:25:58

but you’re absolutely completely down

01:26:01

you accept this is ordinary

01:26:03

it’s all you can do to keep from kissing the good earth.

01:26:07

Because where you were was so much removed from that

01:26:12

that there is no comparison.

01:26:14

Well, now after doing this a number of times,

01:26:18

because the first time you do it,

01:26:21

the goal is pretty much to live through it.

01:26:25

I mean, it’s like being shot out of a, I read, I think it was Tim Leary’s metaphor, he said

01:26:30

it’s like being shot out of a cannon with Baroque barreling, and afterwards people want

01:26:36

you to draw the barreling, when what you were trying to do was live through the experience.

01:26:46

you were trying to do was live through the experience. But after you do it many, many times, and 15 depends on how bright you are and how able to resist freaking out you are,

01:26:53

my impression became, and this is astonishing to me based on what I’ve said so far this is someone someone

01:27:05

very strange

01:27:07

it’s someone’s idea

01:27:10

of a reassuring

01:27:12

environment for a human

01:27:14

being

01:27:14

this place you end up

01:27:17

which is the weirdest place you could

01:27:20

either conceive of or imagine

01:27:22

has been specifically

01:27:23

designed by someone

01:27:25

to be as mundane, ordinary, and like this world

01:27:31

as they could possibly make it.

01:27:33

Not only that, the impression that I have is

01:27:37

the vibe of this place, if you will,

01:27:41

is it’s a nursery.

01:27:44

It’s a play can, in fact.

01:27:47

And these toys, these things, these elves,

01:27:51

are nothing more than the equivalent of stringing

01:27:54

a string of colored plastic objects over a bassinet.

01:27:59

They’re to teach you spatial relationships

01:28:03

and pandeye coordination.

01:28:06

You are briefly in a nursery for receiving human beings

01:28:13

who have just crossed over from hyperspace.

01:28:16

Well, imagine if all you knew about this world

01:28:20

was a nursery and a maternity ward or a home somewhere, and you’re trying to deduce

01:28:29

the nature of the universe from a 30-second visit to a human nursery.

01:28:34

That’s the kind of position we’re in.

01:28:36

And I think that is what gave me the notion that this has to do with the after-death state.

01:28:45

Apparently, the soul is literally being born into this other dimension,

01:28:54

and the soul is not…

01:28:56

It’s exactly like this world.

01:28:58

When you’re born into this world, you’re just a little worm of a thing.

01:29:02

You know?

01:29:03

You have to be held by your mother.

01:29:05

You have to be swaddled.

01:29:06

You have to be kept away from bright lights,

01:29:09

breezes, men with cigars, and so forth.

01:29:11

And the soul, as it transits into that place,

01:29:17

you immediately meet the extended existence of your soul

01:29:22

in an entirely new domain.

01:29:26

Am.

01:29:27

Am.

01:29:31

You mean stayed in that place?

01:29:36

No.

01:29:38

And it seems to me unlikely that anyone would

01:29:42

because interesting about DMT is that it has uh it occurs naturally

01:29:50

in the human brain we all make it all the time and so in a sense this is not a drug at all

01:30:00

this is a human metabolite that you’re getting a tremendous overdose of

01:30:05

but the fact that it occurs naturally in the human brain

01:30:09

means that you have chemical pathways

01:30:13

biosynthetic pathways

01:30:15

that can deal with it

01:30:18

that’s why it lasts so short a time

01:30:22

one way of talking about the toxicity of a drug

01:30:27

is to ask the question,

01:30:29

how long before you feel perfectly normal after taking this drug?

01:30:34

If you have a drug that 24 or 48 hours after you take it,

01:30:40

you still have lower back pain and you’re lying in warm baths

01:30:45

and avoiding ringing telephones and don’t want to talk to anybody.

01:30:50

That’s a toxic drug.

01:30:52

I don’t care whether it’s coke, methadine, or LSD.

01:30:55

You shouldn’t.

01:30:56

That’s not good.

01:30:58

DMT, 10 minutes, within 10 to 15 minutes

01:31:05

after taking it

01:31:07

you not only are down

01:31:08

you can’t tell you did it

01:31:11

there’s no residual

01:31:13

no lingering headache

01:31:15

no dryness of mouth

01:31:17

no dilated pupil

01:31:20

nothing

01:31:21

it’s like you took an ice cube

01:31:23

and hurled it into a blast furnace, and

01:31:26

then you went looking for it 15 minutes later. It’s not to be found. It ain’t there. Well,

01:31:32

this is amazing, because this is the strongest psychedelic there is. You’d think that you’d

01:31:39

have to put ice packs on your head for a week and instead it’s completely gone

01:31:45

so Rupert and I

01:31:47

in talking about this, he developed

01:31:49

the idea of what he called a

01:31:51

necrotic compound

01:31:53

he thinks that DMT

01:31:56

that at death

01:31:57

you flood your system

01:31:59

with DMT

01:32:01

that this is what these pathways

01:32:03

exist for

01:32:05

and that it sets you up for dying

01:32:10

and that if you can…

01:32:14

And I gave DMT once to a Tibetan Lama

01:32:19

who…

01:32:21

a very old one,

01:32:23

not one of these

01:32:24

alcoholic fundraising laws

01:32:28

but the real thing

01:32:30

the real thing

01:32:32

and

01:32:33

Guy took it like a man

01:32:35

he was probably 92

01:32:37

and afterwards he said

01:32:40

it’s the lesser life

01:32:43

he said you can’t he said if you go further, you can’t return.

01:32:50

That’s the limit.

01:32:52

Beyond that, there is no failsafe.

01:32:55

And he was perfectly matter-of-fact about it,

01:32:58

and I took him at his word.

01:32:59

I mean, if anybody should have known, this was the dude.

01:33:03

if anybody should have known, this was the dude.

01:33:12

And I think it’s a tremendous argument for hope.

01:33:15

And you see, it’s not only an argument for hope.

01:33:30

It means that if we could get the infantile, shit-brained,ined drug phobic yahoos sent back to wherever it is that they are going to be sent to practice their family values then we could actually do significant

01:33:37

research and find out what’s going on here it’s an object of legitimate research. We don’t have to genuflect in front of this

01:33:45

like it’s a religious mystery and will always be unknowable. In principle, what we need

01:33:52

to do is you explore this dimension the way you explore any unknown dimension. You send

01:33:59

people of great courage and descriptive skill,

01:34:05

in with their notebooks, their telescopes, their tape recorders,

01:34:10

or whatever is the equivalent for this job,

01:34:13

and then you find out what it is.

01:34:16

And I think that the destiny of the species may be spun into this.

01:34:24

It may be that this transition into hyperspace

01:34:29

is not as inevitable as I previously assured you.

01:34:34

It may be that we have to do something on this side.

01:34:38

We have to meet them halfway through the mountain.

01:34:42

They’re boring toward us.

01:34:44

We have to alert ourselves to the fact that a tunnel is possible

01:34:48

and then get cracking, you know, with dynamite,

01:34:53

which is an analogum for DMT.

01:34:58

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,

01:35:01

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

01:35:04

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

01:35:12

So here’s a little synchronicity that happened just after I finished listening to this talk for the first time. I decided to take a break and do some light reading before writing my notes to

01:35:18

introduce this program. And the book I picked up is the latest Dan Brown novel, The Lost Symbol.

01:35:26

And as I was opening it to the first page, I was still thinking about some of the interesting things

01:35:32

that Terrence had to say about what may lie beyond the grave for us.

01:35:36

And then I read the first two sentences of Brown’s book, which read,

01:35:41

The secret is how to die.

01:35:44

Since the beginning of time, the secret had always been how to die.

01:35:50

And you already know that Terrence and many others, including myself,

01:35:55

have long said that using psychedelic medicines helps one learn how to die.

01:36:01

Now, I realize this isn’t really a big deal, but it was a fun synchronicity for me, if you

01:36:05

want to call it that. And I also suppose that it’s worth mentioning once more that

01:36:11

from my own personal experience, and after talking with many, many other people who have

01:36:17

had a good number of psychedelic experiences, none of us seem to have had quite the level of

01:36:23

visual images that Terence seemed to have.

01:36:26

So if you do journey into Entheospace someday

01:36:29

and don’t find the fabulous cities and machines that he describes

01:36:33

well, don’t despair.

01:36:36

It isn’t all that common is what I’ve learned.

01:36:39

You know as I was listening with you just now

01:36:42

when Terence was talking about how similar he felt his childhood experiences of poor sight, poor eyesight, and being a bookworm paralleled those of Aldous Huxley,

01:36:53

I had to also marvel at the irony of other parts of their lives.

01:36:57

Not only did they both die from cancer, both of their archives were destroyed by fire.

01:37:03

both of their archives were destroyed by fire.

01:37:10

In Huxley’s case, he lost everything except for the then-unfinished manuscript of his last novel,

01:37:12

Island, along with three suits,

01:37:19

which meant that over 4,000 books with his personal annotations in the margins were all lost,

01:37:25

along with the manuscripts for what now fills six volumes of essays and a dozen novels.

01:37:36

And, as you know, all of Terence McKenna’s manuscripts and huge library and works in progress when he died were all lost to fire as well.

01:37:39

The parallels are quite amazing, actually.

01:37:43

You know, it’s like we’re all trapped in some kind of a game, but whomever created it got lazy and used some of the same storylines more than once with only a few variations here and there.

01:37:52

And if that’s the case, then what previous storyline is your life following these days?

01:37:58

And are you sure you like it, or might it be time to change your story?

01:38:04

Interesting questions, but I’m afraid

01:38:06

I don’t have any answers to them. Hey, that part’s up to you. Well, I think I already mentioned that

01:38:13

the entire recording of this lecture runs about four hours long, and I’ll play the next part of

01:38:19

it in my next podcast, which I hope to get out in a few days, because I’m looking forward to hearing the rest of it myself.

01:38:27

Now, I guess that’s about it for today, but before I go, I do want to give a shout-out

01:38:32

to Dustin Cantwell and his friends up in Nelson, Canada, where he can be heard every Sunday

01:38:38

night on Kootenai Co-op Radio.

01:38:41

And one of the reasons I’ve been thinking about those fellow saloners up there is that

01:38:45

they are also just about at ground zero for the current Winter Olympics. And while I haven’t had

01:38:52

a chance to watch many events, I did pay attention to one sport where we have a local hometown boy

01:38:59

who was favored to win a gold medal. And you know how local pride can get you involved in something,

01:39:05

even when you’ve never met the people involved.

01:39:08

And so I did watch a few hours of the programming

01:39:10

that was coming out of Vancouver this past week.

01:39:14

So now it’s time for my grumpy old man alert,

01:39:17

because I managed to have an attack of the grumpies

01:39:21

while watching one of the medal ceremonies that came on.

01:39:24

And here’s my complaint.

01:39:26

These young athletes spend more time training than I can even conceive of,

01:39:31

and all for the possibility of getting that gold medal.

01:39:35

But then what happens once it’s placed around their necks?

01:39:38

They have to stand through the playing of some nation’s national anthem.

01:39:42

What the fuck, you know?

01:39:44

It wasn’t a nation that skied down the

01:39:46

mountain the fastest or skated the best.

01:39:48

It was that individual athlete.

01:39:50

So, why all the nationalism?

01:39:52

Okay, I

01:39:53

know the standard answer and the history of the

01:39:56

Olympics and all that, but

01:39:57

for me, that still doesn’t justify bringing

01:40:00

nationalism into the games.

01:40:02

My suggestion is that

01:40:04

they should play the favorite song of whomever won the gold medal.

01:40:07

Hey, it’s their moment. Let them enjoy the music they like best. That’s what I say.

01:40:12

Then I’d probably try to watch every one of the medal ceremonies,

01:40:15

just to hear what kind of music these athletes like to listen to.

01:40:19

You know, it’d sure round out their images a little better, don’t you think?

01:40:23

Okay, that should end my grumpiness for a while.

01:40:27

And, oh yes, our hometown boy did quite well.

01:40:31

Got his gold for a second time.

01:40:33

And you’ve probably heard of him.

01:40:35

His name is Sean White.

01:40:37

And we’re as proud as punch that he won, whatever that means.

01:40:41

Well, that’ll do it for now.

01:40:43

And so I’ll close today’s podcast by reminding you that this and most of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon

01:40:50

are freely available for you to use in your own audio projects

01:40:54

under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 3.0 license.

01:40:59

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 at psychedelicsalon.org. And if you’re interested in

01:41:11

the philosophy behind the Psychedelic Salon, you can hear all about it in my novel, The Genesis

01:41:16

Generation, which is available as an audiobook that you can download at genesisgeneration.us.

01:41:28

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

01:41:30

Be well, my friends.