Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“I was able to jack it [the strength of the ayahuasca brew] up, and jack it up until finally it was truly horrifyingly strong, and that’s what you want. We’re not interested in colored lights and dancing mice here.”
“A language which could be seen would be a kind of telepathy. If you could see what I mean you would see my thought. The way we communicate, small mouth noises and the assumption of shared dictionary, an assumption that is never borne out by careful questioning, is a miserable way to communicate.”
“It’s more an ability locked in your physiological structure that we’re not using. They [the machine elves] want us to speak in colored lights.”
“I think that the subtext of the governments’ fear about psychedelics is that this quality that they have of dissolving boundaries causes people to question basic assumptions about how society is run. And I think this is true of any society. It isn’t an American phenomenon. It’s that if you take psychedelics, whatever you are, you know, Eskimo, Hassidic Rabbi, quantum physicist, you will question your first premises. And you get millions of people questioning the first premises, and then the powers that be become very nervous.”
“Cannabis holds many benefits, not necessarily related to its properties as an intoxicant, but as a source of food, lubricants, plastics, fuels, etc. The reason the establishment is so hysterical on the subject of cannabis is because it erodes loyalty to the industrial state.”
“This is a heresy for sure, I’m not that fond of LSD. I think it’s a very sloppy drug.”
“It’s the indole hallucinogens that are at the center of the mandala.”
“We have been too long under the spell of the idea that only the past creates the present. The present is actually largely created by appetite for the future.”
“History is not a random walk. It’s not a series of undirected, random fluctuations. History is a process of fractal self-complexification that builds on whatever it has achieved.”
“The rules of evidence are not in suspension for the New Age.”
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:21 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
00:00:25 ►
cyberdelic space. This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:30 ►
So, did you think I forgot about you because I didn’t get a podcast out last week?
00:00:37 ►
Well, for what it’s worth, I felt guilty all weekend about it and I don’t even have a good reason. The one thing I did accomplish last week, though, was to drive to L.A. and spend some time with Gary Fisher,
00:00:51 ►
who you can hear in my podcasts number 15, 97, 98, and 156, where Dr. Grobe and I spoke with Gary about his work many, many years ago
00:00:56 ►
in which he healed autistic and schizophrenic children using LSD and psilocybin.
00:01:02 ►
It was really groundbreaking work, and it’s a real tragedy that his research was shut
00:01:08 ►
down by the U.S. government, not yet to be restarted, I’m afraid.
00:01:13 ►
Although we didn’t have any kind of a formal conversation that would lend itself to a podcast,
00:01:18 ►
I did come away with a story he’s been promising to tell me for a long time, and I have to
00:01:24 ►
admit that it was kind of a letdown
00:01:26 ►
considering the unrealistic assumptions I had about it.
00:01:30 ►
The story is about Timothy Leary’s first LSD experience.
00:01:34 ►
And it took place right after Timothy returned
00:01:37 ►
from his first mushroom experience in Mexico.
00:01:40 ►
And at that time, Tim had a woman friend
00:01:44 ►
who was also a good friend of Gary Fisher’s,
00:01:46 ►
and she brought the good doctor over to Gary’s house to have the experience.
00:01:52 ►
And I don’t remember reading about this in flashbacks or anywhere else for that matter,
00:01:57 ►
probably because there isn’t all that much to report.
00:02:01 ►
Gary told me that, as he always did for somebody’s first LSD experience, he gave Timothy
00:02:07 ►
400 micrograms of Sandoz acid. And Gary was the sitter and didn’t take anything. But when I asked
00:02:15 ►
for more details, about the only thing he would say was that Timothy had a hard time. And if you’ve
00:02:22 ►
ever taken 400 mics of acid yourself, and particularly if it was your first acid trip
00:02:26 ►
well, you know exactly what he means by that
00:02:30 ►
but I guess I should save these stories
00:02:33 ►
for my next Timothy Leary podcast in a few weeks
00:02:36 ►
because today we’re going to hear the next part
00:02:39 ►
of the Terrence McKenna podcast that I played a week ago
00:02:42 ►
first however, I want to thank fellow salonners,
00:02:47 ►
Lynn R., Mark C., Nigel B., and Benjamin H.,
00:02:52 ►
all of whom sent us some of their hard-earned cash
00:02:55 ►
to help offset the expenses associated with these podcasts.
00:02:59 ►
And Lynn, Mark, Nigel, and Benjamin,
00:03:02 ►
thank you all ever so much for your support.
00:03:05 ►
And Benjamin, that was overly generous, and I hope you consider yourself all donated up for life now, because I sure do.
00:03:14 ►
And I’d be remiss if I didn’t also send my thanks along to those of you who have purchased a copy of my novel, The Genesis Generation.
00:03:22 ►
purchased a copy of my novel, The Genesis Generation.
00:03:26 ►
And since it’s only available through my own website,
00:03:28 ►
I actually get to see who’s bought a copy,
00:03:32 ►
which somehow makes the whole writing experience seem a little more intimate.
00:03:36 ►
So thank you, one and all. It’s great to know you’re there.
00:03:40 ►
Now, let’s get on with the program, as they say.
00:03:44 ►
And to be honest, I almost cut out the first part of what we’re about to hear, because, well, we’ve already heard the same information from a variety of sources.
00:03:49 ►
But since there were so many people who commented that this was one of their favorite McKenna Talks,
00:03:54 ►
I thought it better to just leave it unedited.
00:03:57 ►
That said, I have to admit that it did give me a warm, fuzzy feeling to hear him once again
00:04:03 ►
describe various psychedelic experiences in what I consider his best setting, and that is a relaxed outdoor setting.
00:04:12 ►
Now, I also have to admit that I thought this section of the talk begins kind of slowly, maybe because it’s part of his rap that we’ve heard so many times before.
00:04:21 ►
that we’ve heard so many times before.
00:04:27 ►
But if you’re like me, I think you’ll find that it builds up for more than one crescendo,
00:04:31 ►
including why governments are so fearful about psychedelics,
00:04:36 ►
and it extends on to a discussion of UFOs.
00:04:42 ►
So let’s once again join Terrence McKenna on an April day in 1985 under the teaching tree at the Ojai Foundation in Ojai, California.
00:04:49 ►
Yeah?
00:04:50 ►
Terrence, can you go into,
00:04:53 ►
could you please say something about the distinction now
00:04:57 ►
between what you have spoke about the last 10 minutes
00:05:00 ►
with the distinction between the Faberge eggs and basketballs and
00:05:12 ►
self-transforming machine elves and that that one may occur by going into the
00:05:19 ►
Amazon canopy and experiencing some type of preparation prepared by the natives,
00:05:36 ►
is that organically mixed, earthly-based high similar to the synthesized DMT? Now, I have taken DMT a few years ago,
00:05:40 ►
but it would seem that the natives may describe it
00:05:46 ►
at least in a much different fashion than yourself.
00:05:50 ►
What is the distinction?
00:05:51 ►
And then also, if you can hit on after that,
00:05:55 ►
the distinction between that and suicide.
00:05:58 ►
Well, the difference is not as great as maybe your question implies.
00:06:04 ►
First of all, the thing that is so interesting about DMT is
00:06:09 ►
if the only requirement is that you be able to hold the toke,
00:06:18 ►
and if you cough and lose it, then it’s murky and mucked up.
00:06:24 ►
In the case of ayahuasca, which is what you’re asking about,
00:06:30 ►
it’s a, well, I’ll explain to the group.
00:06:35 ►
Remember how I said that DMT is destroyed in your gut,
00:06:39 ►
so you have to smoke it?
00:06:40 ►
But then I added the caveat that unless you somehow inactivate this enzyme system in your gut, which will destroy it, the DMT, well, it turns out there’s a way to do that. and there are compounds called monoamine oxidase inhibitors.
00:07:05 ►
If you take a monoamine oxidase or MAO inhibitor
00:07:10 ►
and follow it with oral DMT,
00:07:15 ►
then the DMT will not be destroyed in your gut.
00:07:19 ►
It will actually be absorbed into the lining of the small intestine,
00:07:24 ►
a large intestine, and then
00:07:26 ►
passed into the bloodstream, and you will have psychedelic intoxication.
00:07:33 ►
Well, in the Amazon, this has been understood by the shamans for a long, long time.
00:07:40 ►
And so they take two plants.
00:07:50 ►
And so they take two plants, one, Banisteriopsis capi, a large woody vine, a twining liana,
00:07:57 ►
and it actually contains a powerful short-acting monoamine oxidase inhibitor.
00:08:02 ►
And they take this vine and they pulverize it, and they combine it in a large pot of water
00:08:06 ►
with the leaves of another plant
00:08:09 ►
which contains DMT.
00:08:13 ►
It may be one of several plants.
00:08:15 ►
It’s usually Socotria viridis.
00:08:18 ►
Then they boil these two things together
00:08:21 ►
for hours
00:08:23 ►
and then they pour the water off and save it in a in a jug
00:08:29 ►
and put fresh water on this come this mess of two different plants and boil it again for hours
00:08:39 ►
and then they pour the two water fractions together, and they get rid of all the solid matter.
00:08:47 ►
They throw it away.
00:08:49 ►
It’s now been cooked for six to eight hours.
00:08:51 ►
And they take this watery fraction, several gallons,
00:08:57 ►
and they drive it down over a hot fire
00:09:01 ►
until they get something, a dark brown thick liquid that is truly horrifying to ingest
00:09:13 ►
because the taste is so ghastly because all the salts and sugars and God knows what else
00:09:20 ►
have been concentrated into this stuff.
00:09:22 ►
But this is now a beverage, a liquid.
00:09:27 ►
I love it that in the literature they call it a psychoactive beverage.
00:09:33 ►
And when you drink it, the compound from the woody vine,
00:09:39 ►
harming, inhibits the MAO,
00:09:43 ►
and the DMT passes through and enters the bloodstream.
00:09:49 ►
And instead of a 10-minute experience that reaches the apex of intensity in two minutes,
00:09:59 ►
you get an experience which is drawn out, stretched out, over about four to six hours.
00:10:06 ►
Now, usually, this is not, it’s a psychedelic experience.
00:10:15 ►
It’s similar to mushrooms in some ways.
00:10:18 ►
But if you really make it stiff, if you really put the pedal to the metal on the
00:10:26 ►
amount of Socotria viridis
00:10:28 ►
or DMT containing
00:10:30 ►
leaf that you put into
00:10:32 ►
this stuff then
00:10:33 ►
after about two hours
00:10:36 ►
you can slowly
00:10:37 ►
by sitting in darkness
00:10:39 ►
by practicing breath control
00:10:41 ►
you can slowly manipulate
00:10:44 ►
it into a place
00:10:45 ►
where you then say, you know,
00:10:48 ►
by gosh and by golly,
00:10:50 ►
we’ve made it to the elf nest.
00:10:53 ►
Here it is.
00:10:54 ►
So I think that great shamans,
00:11:00 ►
courageous shamans,
00:11:02 ►
have always been able to make their way
00:11:05 ►
into the presence of this thing.
00:11:08 ►
But I put the great qualifier
00:11:11 ►
in front of the word shaman
00:11:13 ►
because in my actual field experience
00:11:16 ►
in the Amazon,
00:11:18 ►
what I discovered was
00:11:20 ►
once it got you loaded enough
00:11:23 ►
to be comparable to, say, four grams of mushrooms,
00:11:29 ►
most of these guys would look at you in horror
00:11:32 ►
if you suggested that it was only twice as strong as it should be.
00:11:37 ►
The shamans all over the world have an ambivalent attitude
00:11:44 ►
toward these dimensions they go into.
00:11:47 ►
Very few just hurl themselves delightedly
00:11:51 ►
into complete boundary dissolution.
00:11:54 ►
I had a guy tell me once,
00:11:56 ►
he said, you think just because we run around
00:11:58 ►
wearing penis sheaves
00:12:00 ►
that this stuff is easy for us to do?
00:12:03 ►
Well, I’ve got news for you.
00:12:05 ►
It’s as hard for us as it is for anybody.
00:12:08 ►
It’s hard for human beings to surrender to something so strange.
00:12:14 ►
I could never get ayahuasca to carry me into the DMT nest
00:12:20 ►
until I made it myself.
00:12:23 ►
And then, with nobody, you know,
00:12:27 ►
holding my elbow and keeping me
00:12:29 ►
and telling me how much poetry of the ribbons I should put in,
00:12:33 ►
I was able to jack it up and jack it up
00:12:37 ►
until finally it was truly horrifyingly strong.
00:12:41 ►
And that’s what you want.
00:12:42 ►
I mean, we’re not interested in colored lights and dancing lights
00:12:47 ►
here so now let me see did i cover the waterfront no comparison to dmt to that the earthly or UFO-type images that appear from the psilocybin
00:13:06 ►
is supposed to be more earthly,
00:13:08 ►
the Mother of God’s connection of the ayahuasca.
00:13:11 ►
But I think if you push the ayahuasca hard,
00:13:14 ►
it all begins to migrate in this direction.
00:13:19 ►
Psilocybin, you know, I advocate five dry grams in silent darkness.
00:13:24 ►
Eight dry grams in silent darkness. Eight dry grams in silent darkness will give you the indistinguishable from a DMT flash.
00:13:33 ►
The problem is, you know, one thing about DMT that is both frustrating and liberating is that it’s so brief.
00:13:43 ►
Basically, it’s like a roller coaster.
00:13:47 ►
The great consolation is, this is only going to last five minutes.
00:13:53 ►
If you climbed on a roller coaster of super intensity,
00:13:57 ►
and as they dropped the bar over your lap,
00:14:00 ►
they said, oh yeah, this is the four hour trip.
00:14:08 ►
Then you would say, know hold on it does appear though that by iv which is mostly how i did it years ago it seemed that it was
00:14:14 ►
extended to about 30 to 40 minutes iv dmc yeah do you mean that you you it? You don’t mean that it was a perfusion pump situation?
00:14:28 ►
No.
00:14:28 ►
No.
00:14:29 ►
Well, see, I’ve talked to people who’ve done research on DMT,
00:14:35 ►
and a surprising conclusion that comes out of those discussions
00:14:39 ►
is that shooting it is not as intense as smoking it.
00:14:45 ►
Shooting it…
00:14:46 ►
Well, yeah, it sounds fairly intense,
00:14:49 ►
but people who do both say shooting it can’t lay a candle to…
00:14:55 ►
And this is a funny thing,
00:14:58 ►
and I’ll just mention it as an aside.
00:15:01 ►
Drug researchers love to shoot drugs into their experimental subjects.
00:15:08 ►
They love the syringe as the route of administration because you get better numerical data because
00:15:17 ►
you can measure the dose absolutely and then you hit them and you know they got it.
00:15:20 ►
Absolutely.
00:15:24 ►
And then you hit them, and you know they got it.
00:15:30 ►
If you smoke something, you may, you know,
00:15:34 ►
obviously when you can hold your breath no longer and you exhale,
00:15:36 ►
smoke comes into the room.
00:15:38 ►
That’s not part of your dose.
00:15:42 ►
And sometimes there’s a residuum in the bottom of a pipe.
00:15:44 ►
That’s not part of your dose.
00:15:50 ►
So in the bottom of the pipe. That’s not part of your dose. So in the name of precision, people who’ve done research on DMT have always shot it.
00:15:54 ►
Even the recent study out at the University of New Mexico, it was by injection.
00:15:59 ►
I tried to persuade them to do a section with smoking,
00:16:04 ►
but this argument for numerical precision carried the day, but the effect of relying on intravenous injection like that
00:16:09 ►
is that no one in the clinical situation
00:16:13 ►
has ever observed or experienced the flash that I’m talking about.
00:16:19 ►
I don’t think you can attain it except by smoking.
00:16:24 ►
How about the penis snubs?
00:16:28 ►
No, I’ve done those.
00:16:32 ►
And that is, you know, well, tell the truth.
00:16:42 ►
Let the chips fall where they may.
00:16:44 ►
Highly overrated.
00:16:46 ►
For several reasons.
00:16:48 ►
First of all,
00:16:51 ►
you have to snuff close to a tablespoon
00:16:55 ►
of these toasted and powdered
00:16:58 ►
if anodinans are a pair of green seeds
00:17:02 ►
and there’s a lot of cellulose there,
00:17:08 ►
and so you do not absorb it instantly.
00:17:12 ►
The other thing is it’s so physically unpleasant to do it
00:17:16 ►
that there’s a tendency to cut low on the dose
00:17:20 ►
because the standard method of administering edema
00:17:25 ►
is you have
00:17:26 ►
a hollow
00:17:27 ►
reed
00:17:28 ►
like a bamboo
00:17:29 ►
reed
00:17:30 ►
about this
00:17:30 ►
long
00:17:31 ►
you fill it
00:17:33 ►
with this
00:17:34 ►
powdered
00:17:35 ►
toasted
00:17:36 ►
sawdust
00:17:38 ►
essentially
00:17:38 ►
that has been
00:17:39 ►
reduced to
00:17:40 ►
flour
00:17:40 ►
and
00:17:42 ►
you get up
00:17:43 ►
on your
00:17:44 ►
haunches and your friend comes over and you put the
00:17:48 ►
tube up your nostril and he blows. He takes a huge lump full of air and he just blows
00:17:57 ►
as hard as he can. Well, the effect is like being hit in the face with a two by four i mean you stagger backwards you salivate
00:18:08 ►
it’s intensely painful you scream you squirm around in the dirt and then you get back up on
00:18:17 ►
your haunches and by that time he has loaded the tube for the second nostril and then the whole thing happens all over
00:18:26 ►
again except now you’re
00:18:27 ►
salivating, your eye is
00:18:29 ►
swollen up, your sinuses
00:18:31 ►
are filled with this gunk
00:18:34 ►
and you do it
00:18:36 ►
again, same thing, screams
00:18:38 ►
squirm in the dirt and so forth and so on
00:18:39 ►
then you stagger over out of the sun
00:18:42 ►
into the show
00:18:43 ►
and sit
00:18:44 ►
with your saliva just pouring out of your mouth.
00:18:49 ►
And after about five minutes,
00:18:52 ►
you begin to drift into a psychedelic state of some sort.
00:18:59 ►
But there is no sense of a rush,
00:19:04 ►
of a splitting of the world into two halves.
00:19:08 ►
It’s not an effective route of administration.
00:19:12 ►
How about what they call the chorus spirits?
00:19:16 ►
Oh, well, once they get intoxicated, then they play this strange game,
00:19:30 ►
Then they play this strange game, which is almost characteristic of this Waika Yanomamo cultural group.
00:19:32 ►
Guys square off.
00:19:36 ►
They stand about three feet apart from each other,
00:19:43 ►
and by some means, the equivalent of tossing a coin, it’s been decided who will go first. So the guy who goes first is totally loaded on the stuff
00:19:48 ►
and he has mucus running out of his nose, saliva running out of his mouth,
00:19:52 ►
his eyes are swollen, practically swollen shut.
00:19:56 ►
He pulls back his hand and he hits the other guy right in the center of the chest
00:20:03 ►
as hard as he can.
00:20:05 ►
So the guy either loses his feet or doesn’t.
00:20:10 ►
And anyway, he grunts like a bull and stands there.
00:20:14 ►
He also is in the same state.
00:20:17 ►
Then he pulls back, and then he does it.
00:20:20 ►
And they keep doing this until somebody is knocked off their spot.
00:20:24 ►
And they keep doing this until somebody is knocked off their spot.
00:20:29 ►
And when you interview them later about this,
00:20:34 ►
what you’re told is your ability to stand on your spot depends on how many of these Hukuli spirits you have inside your chest.
00:20:42 ►
And so this is some kind of Yanomamo psychology
00:20:48 ►
meeting the raw data of the DMT experience.
00:20:52 ►
I don’t know what they’re talking about,
00:20:54 ►
but it has something to do with the DMT things
00:20:57 ►
that jump in and out of your chest when you smoke it.
00:21:02 ►
They believe that the…
00:21:04 ►
They say the demon from the tree will live in your chest when you smoke it. They believe that the demon from the tree will live in
00:21:08 ►
your chest. And the more of these tree demons inside your chest you have, the more physically
00:21:15 ►
able to resist being knocked off your spot you are, and the more shamanically empowered you are. But this goes to a point I often make with my groups,
00:21:28 ►
which is, you know, one ethnic group or one culture’s drug
00:21:34 ►
is another person’s pain in the neck.
00:21:38 ►
You know, I mean, I’ve taken awful drugs
00:21:41 ►
that the people, after it was over with,
00:21:47 ►
they would say, you know, God god you guys do this all the time it’s really kind of and they say yeah well it takes getting used to
00:21:54 ►
and we really don’t do it all that often only ceremonies and you’re right most people are glad
00:22:00 ►
to get it over with and go back to the palm beer. Your experience is basically that it’s too caveman-like.
00:22:08 ►
It’s very hard on the system biologically,
00:22:11 ►
and it makes it so that the time that you could be having
00:22:15 ►
in exploring these strange dimensions is somehow inhibited.
00:22:20 ►
Yeah, I don’t think in the abenotating situation
00:22:39 ►
Yeah, I don’t think in the abina-taking situation that you ever get enough all at once to the synapses in sufficient concentration to deliver you over into what I’m describing occurring on the… I took ayahuasca and went to the snuff right after I drank the ayahuasca.
00:22:43 ►
linked to the snuff right after you drank ayahuasca. Strangely enough though, those cultural groups do not overlap.
00:22:47 ►
You know, where there is ayahuasca, there is never ihina.
00:22:51 ►
Where there is ihina, if there is ayahuasca, there never is.
00:22:55 ►
There’s no ethnography done right now on that.
00:22:58 ►
That may be an area where someone might want to explore by bringing in non-indigenous
00:23:04 ►
sources of ayahuasca into the Yamamu area?
00:23:08 ►
Well, people are, you know, traditional people are surprisingly conservative.
00:23:12 ►
I mean, I’ve sat with ayahuascaros and done their brew and talked to them about DMT,
00:23:19 ►
and then they say, well, describe it.
00:23:22 ►
And so then I will describe it as I described it to you here.
00:23:26 ►
And then my best guy said, well, I don’t know, it sounds a little intense.
00:23:32 ►
I think I’ll take a pass on it.
00:23:35 ►
And he was my mentor in the domain of ayahuasca.
00:23:41 ►
It’s pretty stout stuff.
00:23:51 ►
ayahuasca, it’s pretty stout stuff. I think that, you know, shamans have always, you know,
00:23:57 ►
looked over the fence, looked through the keyholes, stepped through the doorway, but I think DMT, pure crystal DMT, or ayahuasca specifically brewed to reality obliterating doses, is the only
00:24:11 ►
way you can approach this place.
00:24:14 ►
Yeah.
00:24:15 ►
I’m wondering, on the experience you talk about, you’re being taught to mention that.
00:24:19 ►
Yes.
00:24:20 ►
Again, the second part would be, how have you done it?
00:24:26 ►
I’ve done it maybe 30 times.
00:24:29 ►
I haven’t done it for a couple of years.
00:24:32 ►
DMT or something like that?
00:24:34 ►
No, DMT.
00:24:36 ►
Sometimes I think it’s a young man’s game,
00:24:41 ►
or sometimes I’m just getting chicken shit, you know.
00:24:45 ►
This is not a drug of abuse, let me tell you.
00:24:49 ►
I know people who say it’s their favorite drug,
00:24:52 ►
and you say, well, when was the last time you did it?
00:24:54 ►
And they say 1968.
00:24:56 ►
And they’re still processing to feel no need to go back and have a second look.
00:25:03 ►
What was the first part of your question?
00:25:05 ►
What kind of knowledge?
00:25:06 ►
Ah, the knowledge.
00:25:08 ►
The knowledge is interesting.
00:25:10 ►
The knowledge is they want you, they want me,
00:25:16 ►
to make language that you can see.
00:25:24 ►
make language that you can see.
00:25:29 ►
They absolutely are convinced that this ability to make things visible with sound
00:25:33 ►
can be taught.
00:25:36 ►
And that’s what they want you to do.
00:25:38 ►
They demonstrate it.
00:25:40 ►
They say, see what we’re doing?
00:25:41 ►
See what we’re doing?
00:25:43 ►
Now do it!
00:25:45 ►
And you say, but… And they say, no excuses! We doing? See what we’re doing? Now do it! And you say, but, but, and say, no excuses.
00:25:48 ►
We don’t have a lot of time.
00:25:49 ►
It’s almost over.
00:25:50 ►
Do it.
00:25:51 ►
Do it.
00:25:52 ►
And then you attempt to do it,
00:25:56 ►
and you discover in that place you can do this.
00:26:00 ►
But why this is so important?
00:26:03 ►
Because when you come back to this world and listen
00:26:06 ►
to tape recordings of yourself doing it, it’s gibberish of some sort. It’s a kind of neurologically
00:26:15 ►
driven glossolalia. It’s like, you know, it’s a language unhinged from the necessity of meaning.
00:26:26 ►
And yet, it is true that when you do it in that place, it’s absolutely ecstatic.
00:26:33 ►
It’s like sex, but sex is sort of like a white light kind of thing.
00:26:41 ►
This is like a colored spectrum. If you could put the sexual experience
00:26:46 ►
through a prism
00:26:47 ►
and change the purity of orgasm
00:26:50 ►
into a spectrum of stuff,
00:26:54 ►
then it would be like this language.
00:26:56 ►
It’s pure poetry.
00:26:59 ►
It’s poetry so thick
00:27:00 ►
you can literally cut it with a knife.
00:27:03 ►
And they want you to do this.
00:27:06 ►
And they are absolutely passionate about
00:27:10 ►
this is what we are here to teach you.
00:27:13 ►
How to speak in a language that can be seen.
00:27:18 ►
And, you know, a language which could be seen
00:27:21 ►
would be a kind of telepathy.
00:27:24 ►
You know, if you could see what I mean, you would see my thoughts.
00:27:30 ►
The way we communicate, small mouth noises and the assumption of shared dictionaries,
00:27:39 ►
an assumption which is never borne out by careful questioning,
00:27:44 ►
is a miserable way to communicate.
00:27:48 ►
If we could see our linguistic intentionality,
00:27:52 ►
it would be the equivalent of seeing our minds.
00:27:56 ►
And so this is what they want us to do.
00:28:01 ►
Now, maybe if one were truly dead, they wouldn’t be so urgent about it and they would be like a
00:28:11 ►
relative leaning over a bassinet and and holding up objects and saying look at this. This is a bell or something.
00:28:30 ►
But definitely what they teach is in the domain of language.
00:28:41 ►
And it’s not a teaching which can be said, like love one another or, you know, if it’s juicy, eat it over the sink.
00:28:47 ►
It’s more an ability locked in your physiological structure that we’re not using.
00:28:48 ►
They want us to speak in colored lights.
00:28:52 ►
And it’s their agenda.
00:28:55 ►
It’s not mine.
00:28:56 ►
I have the faintest idea why that is so compelling to them.
00:29:00 ►
Well, that’s a little unfair,
00:29:02 ►
because I’ve given a lot of thought to it.
00:29:04 ►
But initially, I couldn’t figure it out
00:29:07 ►
we’ll I’m sure get more into this this afternoon
00:29:12 ►
it is the little self-transforming elf machine informs me
00:29:17 ►
lunchtime
00:29:19 ►
thank you for putting up with this
00:29:21 ►
I appreciate your silent scorn, or whatever it is.
00:29:33 ►
So we sort of had something going before lunch.
00:29:38 ►
Can anybody remember what it was?
00:29:39 ►
Oh, well, I had a question.
00:29:41 ►
It was based on hallucinogenic snuffs used by the Yanomami.
00:29:46 ►
Yeah, and hadn’t we done that?
00:29:48 ►
Hadn’t we done that?
00:29:51 ►
Let’s not do that again.
00:29:52 ►
Are you still doing questions?
00:29:54 ►
Sure, yeah.
00:29:55 ►
I’ve got one I’d like to toss around.
00:29:57 ►
The whole idea of the shaman as having this hyper-dimensional overview,
00:30:04 ►
and as you say, some of them say,
00:30:08 ►
it scares me shitless, even the top dogs.
00:30:11 ►
Okay?
00:30:11 ►
And other times you said you wonder why it isn’t in headlines 11 inches tall.
00:30:21 ►
There seems to be something about the experience that is, I don’t know if self-selecting
00:30:28 ►
is the right word or evolutionary selecting. Why is there such a small percentage of people
00:30:35 ►
who actually end up, although you say everyone can do it, they do have the genetic possibility,
00:30:42 ►
but there’s something more in the selective period where
00:30:47 ►
a shaman will come out, because it is, as you say, an awesome responsibility, and yet
00:30:53 ►
it’s everyone’s possible liberation. And then one last thing, another codicilist. You mentioned
00:31:01 ►
that you don’t think that it’s the Bush or Reagan, etc.,
00:31:06 ►
feeling that they just want to keep an economic grip
00:31:10 ►
as far as the sale of would-be hallucinogenics.
00:31:14 ►
Don’t you think that there is some degree of teleological repression going on as well?
00:31:21 ►
I mean, you mentioned that you didn’t feel that way, but
00:31:25 ►
other times I’ve heard you feel
00:31:27 ►
that there definitely is.
00:31:29 ►
Well, I think that, yeah,
00:31:31 ►
it simplifies the issue
00:31:34 ►
to say that it’s entirely
00:31:35 ►
a money issue, because
00:31:37 ►
the psychedelics are used
00:31:39 ►
by so small
00:31:41 ►
a percentage of people
00:31:43 ►
that it doesn’t rate
00:31:44 ►
the tremendous institutional fury that
00:31:49 ►
is brought against it.
00:31:50 ►
And where you really see the contradiction in economic logic is with pot.
00:31:58 ►
I think that the subtext of the government’s fear about psychedelics
00:32:06 ►
is that this quality that they have of dissolving boundaries
00:32:14 ►
causes people to question basic assumptions about how society is run.
00:32:23 ►
And I think this is true of any society.
00:32:26 ►
It isn’t an American phenomenon.
00:32:29 ►
It’s that if you take psychedelics,
00:32:33 ►
whatever you are, you know, Eskimo, Hasidic rabbi, quantum physicist,
00:32:40 ►
you will question your first premises.
00:32:44 ►
And you get millions of people questioning your first premises.
00:32:49 ►
And you get millions of people questioning the first premises.
00:32:55 ►
And then the powers that be become very nervous.
00:33:02 ►
It’s interesting that this whole phenomenon of the 1960s occurred because American commitment to universal public education
00:33:09 ►
reached, brought its first generation of people to adulthood in the middle of the 1960s, because
00:33:17 ►
that universal commitment to public education began after World War II. After the establishment took a look at what this filling,
00:33:30 ►
you know, actually funding and building up
00:33:33 ►
great public universities
00:33:34 ►
and then filling them with inquisitive young people,
00:33:39 ►
what the result of that was,
00:33:41 ►
that’s when they decided to turn the universities
00:33:43 ►
back into trade schools for
00:33:46 ►
CPAs, which they did do.
00:33:50 ►
I mean, there is nothing like the level and the breadth of education and intellectual
00:33:56 ►
curiosity that was encouraged when I was going to school.
00:34:01 ►
That’s all finished now. Now you’re expected to do your data entry job, watch
00:34:08 ►
a lot of TV, and keep your mouth shut. And this is what we expect of our college graduates.
00:34:14 ►
So really there was a crisis of faith in American institutions which was only exacerbated by psychedelics. It was a combination of educating people
00:34:27 ►
to the actual traditions of Western civilization
00:34:31 ►
in large numbers for the first time,
00:34:34 ►
and then giving them psychedelics,
00:34:37 ►
I mean, or having them exposed to psychedelics,
00:34:40 ►
and people began to ask questions for which there were no answers.
00:34:45 ►
And the response of the establishment was to suppress this.
00:34:50 ►
I mentioned cannabis.
00:34:53 ►
You know, you’re all probably aware through the work of the hemp people
00:34:58 ►
that cannabis holds many benefits,
00:35:03 ►
not necessarily related to its properties as an intoxicant,
00:35:08 ►
but as a source of food, lubricant, plastics, fuels, etc.
00:35:13 ►
The reason the establishment is so hysterical on the subject of cannabis
00:35:19 ►
is because it erodes loyalty to the industrial state.
00:35:25 ►
I mean, that’s why, if you look at the pharmacological profile,
00:35:29 ►
let’s contrast two familiar drugs.
00:35:33 ►
One, caffeine.
00:35:35 ►
We have the medical data,
00:35:37 ►
which shows that it can contribute to fetal malformation.
00:35:41 ►
We know that it damages the liver.
00:35:47 ►
malformation. We know that it damages the liver. We know that it’s abused, can cause severe stomach ulcers, so forth and so on. Cannabis and vast amounts of money have been
00:35:55 ►
spent trying to find something wrong with it, and they’re still digging, folks. I mean,
00:36:01 ►
they’ve decided it doesn’t cause tits on statues. You know, all the screwy
00:36:08 ►
things they’ve come up with over the years have had to be abandoned. Why is caffeine
00:36:15 ►
enshrined in every labor contract negotiated in the Western world as a sacred right of all workers twice daily?
00:36:27 ►
And why is cannabis, you know, you can lose your house, your automobile,
00:36:32 ►
your bank account, your art collection,
00:36:34 ►
simply because you had six plants in the back 40, and your children.
00:36:40 ►
Why this disparity?
00:36:43 ►
Well, what is the effect of caffeine?
00:36:46 ►
It makes it possible for you to perform your duties during the last three hours of the work cycle
00:36:54 ►
with efficiency equal to the first three hours of the work cycle.
00:36:58 ►
It allows people to tolerate spinning widgets onto gombers until
00:37:05 ►
without a thought
00:37:08 ►
ever rising in their mind
00:37:10 ►
that maybe this is a ridiculous
00:37:12 ►
way to spend your life.
00:37:14 ►
Cannabis, on the other
00:37:16 ►
hand, people aren’t so
00:37:18 ►
interested in going to work.
00:37:20 ►
They’d rather lay around and
00:37:22 ►
make love. They don’t want to
00:37:24 ►
watch TV. They’d rather smoke a do make love. They don’t want to watch TV.
00:37:29 ►
They’d rather smoke a doobie and have a conversation with a friend.
00:37:36 ►
In other words, these things promote activities which don’t make anybody any money and cause people to question the institutions and the social philosophies that are being shoved down their throats.
00:37:46 ►
If the playing field were level,
00:37:49 ►
caffeine might well be a prescription drug,
00:37:52 ►
not that I think that’s a good idea,
00:37:54 ►
and cannabis, I think, would probably be freely available.
00:37:59 ►
The most dangerous drugs in society,
00:38:03 ►
in terms of detrimental social impact are alcohol and tobacco, the
00:38:09 ►
two most freely available. I mean, every street corner of every city, they’re peddled in vast
00:38:18 ►
amounts. We have a very crack-brained approach to the problem of drugs.
00:38:26 ►
We’re not the only society. All societies seem to do this.
00:38:30 ►
Out of a possible spectrum of 20 or 30 depressants and intoxicants,
00:38:35 ►
most societies select three or four, which they hail as harmless,
00:38:41 ►
and then the rest are, you know, the seed of Satan.
00:38:50 ►
harmless and then the rest are you know the seed of satan and this is this attitude is persevered in against all scientific data against all medical research this is just what people
00:38:55 ►
choose to think the problem is we don’t have the luxury of this kind of ignorance anymore. The amount of revenue that could be accrued from cannabis economy,
00:39:09 ►
the pressure that could be taken off petroleum extraction
00:39:14 ►
if cannabis were part of the picture,
00:39:17 ►
all of these things make it incumbent upon us, I think,
00:39:22 ►
to think more creatively and more honestly
00:39:26 ►
about which drugs really are posing problems for us.
00:39:32 ►
What was the first part?
00:39:33 ►
The other question really relates to this.
00:39:37 ►
Why is the percentage of shamans so small relative to a population?
00:39:45 ►
Because of the fact that, as you say, there is fear in going into,
00:39:50 ►
there is attraction and fear in going into these other realms.
00:39:55 ►
And there’s obviously maybe some self-limiting aspect of the hyper-dimensional view,
00:40:01 ►
which there’s some dynamic going on because everyone has an equal opportunity to go to this hyperdimensional,
00:40:09 ►
but very few of their own initiatives really push to that point
00:40:15 ►
where you are definitely within the hyperdimensional realm.
00:40:20 ►
Well, there are different things to be said about this.
00:40:23 ►
Well, there are different things to be said about this. I mean, first of all, there are what are called biochemical differences in individuality,
00:40:39 ►
and never more so than in the matter of drugs.
00:40:48 ►
People are very different from each other.
00:40:53 ►
Years ago, I took a course from Sasha Shulgin at Cal,
00:40:59 ►
and at one point he brought in some substance.
00:41:00 ►
I don’t know what it was. And this was a class of 600 people,
00:41:08 ►
it was and this was a class of 600 people and passed it around and asked everybody to take a sniff of this bottle well 598 people pronounced this stuff completely odorless two people were
00:41:19 ►
almost violently ill from the overpowering odor of this thing.
00:41:26 ►
They possessed a gene for the sensitivity to this compound
00:41:31 ►
that caused it to be, for them, overwhelming,
00:41:35 ►
for everyone else, unnoticeable.
00:41:37 ►
And we’re surrounded by these kinds of individual biochemical differences.
00:41:43 ►
In traditional societies, shamanism is often a family business,
00:41:49 ►
and it may well be that this is because ability to handle these psychedelic substances
00:41:55 ►
and to really get mileage out of them is a genetic endowment of some sort.
00:42:06 ►
I mean, cannabis, again, provides an interesting example.
00:42:10 ►
One of the commonest things you hear people say about cannabis who don’t smoke it is they
00:42:16 ►
say, I used to or I tried it, but it makes me paranoid.
00:42:22 ►
Well, to the people who use it, this is inconceivable.
00:42:29 ►
In fact, it’s almost an antidote to paranoia
00:42:32 ►
because it seems to make things appear more Taoistic, more integrated.
00:42:39 ►
It all makes more sense.
00:42:42 ►
These are biochemical differences that need to be studied.
00:42:48 ►
You know, different racial groups
00:42:51 ►
have different relationships to intoxication.
00:42:55 ►
I mean, I think it’s probably,
00:42:57 ►
there is some truth to the idea
00:42:58 ►
that the North American Indians
00:43:00 ►
had a susceptibility to distilled alcohol
00:43:04 ►
that the Europeans, who had been dealing
00:43:07 ►
with it for a couple of centuries by the time they arrived here, didn’t have, because the
00:43:12 ►
North American Indians represented a closed gene pool, never having been exposed to this.
00:43:20 ►
There was no selection for being able to handle it.
00:43:23 ►
There was no selection for being able to handle it.
00:43:29 ►
And then there’s another issue in relation to your question, John,
00:43:33 ►
which is, first of all, you know, some people say,
00:43:37 ►
well, not all shamans take hallucinogens.
00:43:44 ►
Well, true, and I’ve excited some people’s ire by suggesting,
00:43:47 ►
but all real shamans do.
00:43:53 ►
And, you know, saying that somebody is a shaman, I mean, imagine if simply being able to rave and exhort on the subject of the four Gospels
00:44:03 ►
qualified you as a man of the Lord,
00:44:08 ►
actually you have to sort through
00:44:10 ►
dozens of so-called preachers
00:44:13 ►
to find somebody you would be willing
00:44:15 ►
to leave alone with your chickens.
00:44:18 ►
Similarly, you have to sort through
00:44:22 ►
a lot of people who claim to be shamans
00:44:26 ►
before you find somebody who really is one.
00:44:30 ►
I mean, we tend to be naive.
00:44:33 ►
Go to the Amazon with your heart on your sleeve seeking ayahuasca,
00:44:38 ►
and I guarantee unless you go well-connected,
00:44:42 ►
you’ll drink a lot of swill before you get to somebody honest
00:44:47 ►
enough, responsible enough, conscientious enough to actually make it right and do it
00:44:53 ►
right.
00:44:54 ►
And in the case of shamanism, usually this is going on in cultures without literacy, without written languages,
00:45:10 ►
and so they don’t hold conferences or publish proceedings or have the university matriculation examinations in shamanism.
00:45:16 ►
So on the surface, a shaman is anyone who claims to be a shaman
00:45:22 ►
or who cares to claim.
00:45:24 ►
But in terms of real shamanic ability,
00:45:29 ►
I think it only comes through either innate special abilities,
00:45:35 ►
which probably means innate high sensitivity to neurological,
00:45:41 ►
to neurotransmitters, exotic neurotransmitters,
00:45:46 ►
or it comes through an exposure to hallucinogens.
00:45:51 ►
This is a big argument in anthropology.
00:45:55 ►
Mercier Léod, who normally I am very deferent to,
00:46:01 ►
got this one completely wrong
00:46:04 ►
and decided on absolutely no evidence that what he
00:46:10 ►
called narcotic shamanism was decadent. Well, first of all, the use of the word narcotic in
00:46:17 ►
that context shows that he didn’t know what he was talking about. Nobody uses narcotics to shamanize.
00:46:26 ►
what he was talking about. Nobody uses narcotics to shamanize. You go to sleep if you take narcotics. So what he wanted to say was that he felt hallucinogenic shamanism was decadent.
00:46:34 ►
But what is the alternative? Reliance on ordeals, fasting, or pathological personalities, maybe
00:46:43 ►
or pathological personalities,
00:46:48 ►
maybe epileptics or borderline schizophrenics or something like that.
00:46:50 ►
I think that these kinds of shamanisms
00:46:54 ►
that are not hallucinogenically based
00:46:56 ►
are derivative shamanisms
00:46:58 ►
that occur at a later stage of culture
00:47:01 ►
when the plant-based shamanism
00:47:06 ►
has been disrupted
00:47:07 ►
by some
00:47:08 ►
factor like
00:47:13 ►
migration or the
00:47:15 ►
disappearance of the plants involved
00:47:18 ►
or something like that.
00:47:19 ►
From what I understand
00:47:21 ►
the Lakota
00:47:23 ►
Indians
00:47:24 ►
used to live in the From what I understand, the Lakota Indians, they’ve used hallucinogenics. far as their shaman’s going to say.
00:47:46 ►
It’s not necessary.
00:47:49 ►
And yet in the Southwest,
00:47:51 ►
in the Southwest,
00:47:52 ►
you know, it’s prominent.
00:47:55 ►
Yeah, well,
00:47:56 ►
I think acoustical driving
00:48:01 ►
can carry you a certain distance.
00:48:05 ►
There are substitutes for hallucinogens,
00:48:07 ►
but they’re neither as effective nor as pleasant.
00:48:14 ►
I mean, ordeals are what many cultures get into.
00:48:18 ►
Well, I was just thinking along the lines of someone like Crazy Horse who came out of the Makota who seemed to possess these abilities
00:48:30 ►
and manifest them physically.
00:48:34 ►
Well, there’s also the exceptional personality.
00:48:37 ►
The exceptional personality breaks all the rules.
00:48:40 ►
Let’s see.
00:48:41 ►
But something else.
00:48:50 ►
So would you say then, Terrence,
00:48:55 ►
that there is a genetic proclivity maybe in some individuals if there is access to botanicals
00:49:00 ►
and if there is no historical evidence of shamanism prior to that,
00:49:07 ►
were that individual to start engaging in explorations?
00:49:11 ►
Yeah, I think so.
00:49:13 ►
You know, Maria Sabina claimed that she was never initiated into shamanism.
00:49:18 ►
She claimed that as a girl herding the cattle,
00:49:22 ►
she ate the mushrooms because she was hungry, and that she was
00:49:27 ►
basically self-taught in shamanism in a society that actually had shamanic
00:49:32 ►
lineages and institutions. In Madagascar there are these highly evolved ordeal poisons. And this is where you take a plant, you feel like you’re dying,
00:49:52 ►
you beg to die, you want to die, and you don’t die. You come back from it a better person.
00:50:01 ►
But it is only because you were slammed up against death itself. Ordeals work, but
00:50:08 ►
they’re not very pleasant, and the idea of putting yourself through an ideal like that
00:50:12 ►
once a week or twice a month as part of your professional practice is pretty outrageous.
00:50:20 ►
The other thing that has to be said, and this is really important, and I think anthropologists have sold this one short.
00:50:32 ►
Experiences are what we are least able to communicate to each other. describe machine parts, agricultural procedures, but anything in the realm of feeling, our
00:50:49 ►
languages are woefully impoverished, and I don’t think that’s specific to English.
00:50:54 ►
I think it haunts all human experience, that it’s hard to communicate how we feel.
00:51:08 ►
how we feel. Well, so then there’s a vast spectrum of experiences that come from plants.
00:51:22 ►
And I dare say most of them unpleasant. Let’s start out with eating deep and bakia or something, you know, which causes your throat tissues to swell up and you
00:51:26 ►
feel like you’re strangling or uh uh you know amanita muscaria is a very controversial
00:51:35 ►
shamanic plant because some people say it’s garbage and gordon was, in his last book, called it the supreme entheogen of all time.
00:51:47 ►
Well, clearly people are, are they talking about different things?
00:51:51 ►
Or are they interpreting the same experience differently?
00:51:55 ►
And so there are, for example, you know, people who are fond of peyote,
00:52:03 ►
like, if they haven’t done their homework,
00:52:06 ►
like to imagine that they are taking this ancient, ancient hallucinogen
00:52:13 ►
that has informed the lives of the Sonoran and the Indians of that area
00:52:21 ►
for thousands and thousands of years.
00:52:24 ►
Well, this is, as far as anybody can tell, complete bunk.
00:52:28 ►
There is no record of peyote use older than 400 or 500 years.
00:52:36 ►
Most of it is post-Ghost Dance.
00:52:40 ►
Before, when you go into the old Sonoran graves,
00:53:03 ►
the old archaeology of the Sonoran, the Tarahumara Indians, you find Sikora’s fundifolia beans, the little black and red beans that you see in Mexico strung into jewelry sold along the side of the roads. That’s what those Indians took for thousands and thousands of years.
00:53:09 ►
We have a continuous record over about 4,000 years of these seeds being buried in graves
00:53:16 ►
with ritual instruments indicating that they were buried with shamans.
00:53:22 ►
You couldn’t give it away today
00:53:25 ►
because it is such a horrible experience.
00:53:28 ►
It’s essentially sublethal strychnine poisoning.
00:53:33 ►
It can kill you effortlessly.
00:53:37 ►
It’s clear that at some point, fairly recently,
00:53:41 ►
somebody tried peyote and said,
00:53:44 ►
my God, this stuff we’ve been taking for thousands and thousands of years
00:53:48 ►
is just horrible compared to this.
00:53:50 ►
This is great.
00:53:52 ►
And immediately there was a transfer of loyalty.
00:53:55 ►
And Lord knows eating fresh peyote is no gourmet.
00:53:59 ►
So the point there being cultures tend to define experiences differently,
00:54:11 ►
and you can’t tell what people are talking about until you really check in.
00:54:17 ►
Traveling around the world, you know, you end up in certain cultures,
00:54:22 ►
and they say, oh, we’re so happy to have you here.
00:54:26 ►
As our honored guest, we would like you to eat some of our national food.
00:54:34 ►
Let’s say you’re in Scotland.
00:54:36 ►
And so they say, well, you must eat some haggis
00:54:39 ►
because this is what we all eat.
00:54:42 ►
We all really love this.
00:54:43 ►
This is the best part of Scottish life.
00:54:47 ►
Boy, are you going to love this.
00:54:49 ►
Well, when it’s finally served, you know, your jaw drops in disbelief.
00:54:58 ►
Because it’s gaslit.
00:55:00 ►
Unless you’re Scotch.
00:55:03 ►
Well, but if you’re Scotch, you dare not say so, you see,
00:55:09 ►
because a cultural myth has been built up around…
00:55:13 ►
I mean, do Italians knock red wine?
00:55:15 ►
Do the French denounce truffles?
00:55:18 ►
Certainly not.
00:55:19 ►
I know you’re Scotch.
00:55:21 ►
Ah, true.
00:55:23 ►
Pate de foie gras is always my example.
00:55:27 ►
So what you have to realize is that these things are culturally defined
00:55:32 ►
and often what works for the Nyanomamo or the Muinani or the Witoto won’t work for you.
00:55:40 ►
Datura is a good example.
00:55:43 ►
Datura is a shamanic plant used by many people throughout the world. All of them, I think, pharmacologically deprived, otherwise they wouldn’t put up with what you have to put up with to take that stuff, you know, and my interest, and I know it was practical,
00:56:06 ►
was to find a hallucinogen that did what I wanted it to do
00:56:12 ►
and didn’t do anything I didn’t want it to do.
00:56:15 ►
What I was interested in was, first of all, hallucinations,
00:56:21 ►
because some people say I’m obsessed with it.
00:56:25 ►
Fine.
00:56:27 ►
My notion is that if you can see something that isn’t there,
00:56:33 ►
that’s very much more convincing than just funny thoughts,
00:56:39 ►
racing ideas, strange physical sensations. It’s a powerful and
00:56:45 ►
boundary-dissolving
00:56:47 ►
confrontation when you confront
00:56:50 ►
what is not there.
00:56:52 ►
And so I
00:56:53 ►
find, and this is a heresy
00:56:56 ►
for sure, I’m
00:56:58 ►
not that fond of LSD.
00:57:01 ►
I think it’s a very
00:57:02 ►
sloppy drug.
00:57:03 ►
I think, you know, you feel terrible the next day.
00:57:07 ►
I always did. I had tight headaches, body aches.
00:57:11 ►
People always say, well, it was not clean, it had speed in it, it had strychnine in it.
00:57:17 ►
Maybe. But even the good stuff is not…
00:57:23 ►
And it wouldn’t hallucinate for me the way I wanted it to.
00:57:28 ►
I could get hallucinations if I would smoke hash with it.
00:57:32 ►
But on its own, it was what I have described in other places as abrasively psychoanalytic, unpleasant, confrontational.
00:57:44 ►
And what I was interested in were hallucinations.
00:57:47 ►
So when I got to psilocybin, I remember after my first mushroom trip, I said, thank God
00:57:53 ►
we found this stuff.
00:57:54 ►
I’ll never take LSD again.
00:57:56 ►
That wasn’t quite true, but I’ll bet I’ve taken it less than half a dozen times since
00:58:02 ►
my first psilocybin trip.
00:58:04 ►
less than half a dozen times since my first psilocybin trip.
00:58:10 ►
So, and in terms of the chemistry of these things, my conclusion from all this fiddling
00:58:14 ►
is that it’s the indole hallucinogens
00:58:18 ►
that are at the center of the mandala.
00:58:22 ►
They do what we want them
00:58:25 ►
to do with
00:58:26 ►
very little
00:58:27 ►
detrimental
00:58:27 ►
side effect.
00:58:29 ►
LSD is one
00:58:30 ►
of them.
00:58:32 ►
Ibogaine is
00:58:33 ►
one of them.
00:58:34 ►
Not one
00:58:35 ►
widely known.
00:58:37 ►
We’ve got to
00:58:37 ►
save something
00:58:38 ►
for our old
00:58:39 ►
age, folks.
00:58:43 ►
Harming and
00:58:44 ►
Harmeline, the beta-carbolines,
00:58:47 ►
a wind complex with DMT,
00:58:49 ►
and then psilocybin, and I think that’s the basic list.
00:58:54 ►
Well, those do…
00:58:56 ►
These are really the keys which open the lock
00:58:59 ►
very easily, very cleanly, very dependably.
00:59:04 ►
And that’s where I would put all of my attention.
00:59:09 ►
And, you know, even in that domain,
00:59:12 ►
you have to be somewhat careful.
00:59:15 ►
My brother and I spent years tracking down
00:59:19 ►
a hallucinogen in the Amazon called Ukuhe
00:59:23 ►
that was an orally active form of DMT, which we
00:59:29 ►
remember I said that DMT is destroyed in the gut.
00:59:34 ►
So we were fascinated to try and find this Ukuhe because we wanted to know how it was
00:59:40 ►
possible that it could work orally. And also the ethnographic accounts claimed that the people who used it spoke with little
00:59:50 ►
men.
00:59:52 ►
And we wanted to see these little men, to see if they were the same little men we were
00:59:58 ►
talking to.
00:59:59 ►
Well, we had three expeditions to the Amazon before we finally closed in on this stuff.
01:00:08 ►
And when we finally got it, you know, with this tremendous sense of having attained the grail
01:00:14 ►
and having finally, this was going to do it, this was going to be the one.
01:00:18 ►
Then we took this stuff, and my God, it turned us every way but loose.
01:00:24 ►
Your heart feels like it’s pounding its way out of
01:00:27 ►
the front of your chest you vomit uh you have tremoring of the limbs on and on and on so we go
01:00:37 ►
through this live through it wash off in the river and go looking for the shaman to lodge a complaint.
01:00:48 ►
And he says, yeah, well, it’s hard to get used to.
01:00:54 ►
And so then when we get it back home to the lab and do the high-pressure gas chromatography and all the rest of it,
01:01:05 ►
and see what’s really there,
01:01:06 ►
you see that the genetic component of the varrola trees from which this resin is extracted
01:01:15 ►
is, it’s a mess.
01:01:19 ►
It’s too many tryptamines.
01:01:22 ►
DMT, DET, 5-monomethyltryptamine, 5-MAO-DMT,
01:01:32 ►
and several other cardioactive tryptamines.
01:01:35 ►
It looked like they’d swept the floor of an endochemist’s lab
01:01:39 ►
to put together the components of this plant.
01:01:42 ►
You don’t want this.
01:01:44 ►
You don’t, because it’s like taking ten drugs at once.
01:01:48 ►
It’s all running together.
01:01:50 ►
You can’t tell whether you’re agnus or angus.
01:01:52 ►
What you want is a DMT source where when you put it in the gas chromatograph,
01:02:09 ►
grass chromatograph, no, in the gas chromatograph, you get one spike, that’s NM dimethyltryptamine,
01:02:16 ►
and all the rest is cellulose, a little DNA, and that’s all, some minerals and salt.
01:02:26 ►
If you don’t have a clean source, then, you know, it’s contaminated. So even that legendary shamanic hallucinogen, when actually put to the use test, wasn’t able to pass it. Yeah.
01:02:37 ►
Yes, going back to the DMT and mushroom psilocybin, you were talking about taking psilocybin
01:02:46 ►
and then doing breath control
01:02:48 ►
is indistinguishable from a DMT trip.
01:02:51 ►
If you do it correctly, you can coax it.
01:02:53 ►
Since this is the learning tree
01:02:55 ►
and you’re sort of in front there,
01:02:57 ►
maybe you could give us an idea
01:02:58 ►
of what it’s like to coax 5-gram into…
01:03:02 ►
I mean, I’m sure you won’t be able to give us all the information,
01:03:05 ►
but maybe you can sort of enlighten us a little bit and we can sort of work in that direction.
01:03:08 ►
At least I can work in that direction.
01:03:10 ►
Oh, you mean how do you get at the peak of a psilocybin trip to deliver you into DMT land?
01:03:17 ►
Yes, because sometimes I get a little jealous hearing you talk about DMT trip.
01:03:22 ►
And I sit here and say, you know, I want to find that stuff.
01:03:27 ►
Anyway, so.
01:03:28 ►
Well, the thing is, psilocybin will take you there
01:03:32 ►
if you have the courage and the stamina to tolerate the duration
01:03:37 ►
of the psilocybin revelation.
01:03:40 ►
So first of all, you take a heroic dose, five, six, seven grams.
01:03:46 ►
Then, when you’re peaking,
01:03:53 ►
well, you smoke cannabis.
01:03:57 ►
Then, you sit in silent darkness alone,
01:04:03 ►
because I think the presence of other people always pins you to the surface with this stuff.
01:04:09 ►
You don’t need somebody else.
01:04:10 ►
And no matter if they’re talking or not, they can just be in the room and you’re aware of them.
01:04:14 ►
Just sitting there, then this is a different thing.
01:04:18 ►
Breathing, exhaling, breathing, exhaling.
01:04:23 ►
And then you form an intention for it to approach you.
01:04:28 ►
I mean, you say, I can feel it.
01:04:32 ►
I mean, it’s almost a neighborhood.
01:04:34 ►
It’s a pharmacological neighborhood.
01:04:37 ►
And you know how you may go to Little Italy,
01:04:39 ►
but there are no Italians on the street.
01:04:42 ►
But if you start, you know, you have to somehow shake them out of the nest.
01:04:50 ►
And you simply ask for them to appear.
01:04:54 ►
I always hark back to that episode of I Love Lucy
01:04:58 ►
where she and Ethel are discussing how to contact the space people.
01:05:04 ►
And Lucy tells Ethel are discussing how to contact the space people.
01:05:11 ►
And Lucy tells Ethel, she says, well, I just say, come in, little green men.
01:05:13 ►
Come in, little green men.
01:05:45 ►
And, yeah, it’s a big laugh now, but try it on 25 milligrams of silicon. I don’t know. I’d be great to know what your view at this point is of UFO and contact.
01:05:52 ►
I’m not sure which of those questions comes first.
01:06:08 ►
Well, the they of the DMT thing is these entities which you contact, although they may turn out to be toys created by someone unseen who is in fact in charge of this hyperdimensional maternity ward.
01:06:15 ►
But these toys, if that’s what they are, are essentially teaching machines of some
01:06:21 ►
sort.
01:06:22 ►
They’re trying to get you to perform
01:06:26 ►
this linguistic activity.
01:06:29 ►
As far as
01:06:30 ►
the UFO thing is concerned,
01:06:32 ►
I think it’s
01:06:33 ►
a…
01:06:38 ►
Well, it sort of
01:06:42 ►
requires some background.
01:06:43 ►
I think that there’s something fundamentally wrong with our understanding of the world.
01:06:56 ►
Fundamentally wrong.
01:06:58 ►
And what it is, is that we believe that the past creates the present.
01:07:06 ►
That the present is the sum total of actions and situations that exist in the past.
01:07:17 ►
In other words, we believe that the horse pushes the cart.
01:07:22 ►
The horse doesn’t push the cart.
01:07:25 ►
The cart is pulled.
01:07:27 ►
There is an attractor in the future.
01:07:31 ►
There is actually,
01:07:32 ►
I think of history as a bowl
01:07:36 ►
down the slope.
01:07:38 ►
We are making our way.
01:07:41 ►
Well, since we are in a situation
01:07:45 ►
where conservation of energy is important,
01:07:48 ►
where are we all going to end up?
01:07:51 ►
The bottom of the bowl, obviously.
01:07:54 ►
That’s if you release a marble up on the rim,
01:07:58 ►
it’s going to make its way down the bowl
01:08:00 ►
to what’s called the dwell point,
01:08:03 ►
the place where the energy requirements are
01:08:08 ►
such that the forward momentum of the falling ball is satisfied by meeting the resistance
01:08:15 ►
of the bottom of the bowl.
01:08:17 ►
History is like this.
01:08:19 ►
We are being pulled forward by an attractor. It has somehow come into the human world
01:08:30 ►
and has pulled us out of animal organization.
01:08:35 ►
If this attractor were not present,
01:08:37 ►
we would still probably be cheerfully slinging excrement around
01:08:42 ►
in the canopy of some jungle tree.
01:08:44 ►
But because of the attractor, slinging excrement around in the canopy of some jungle tree.
01:08:48 ►
But because of the attractor,
01:08:54 ►
we have been pulled into social organization,
01:09:01 ►
technology, language, community, so forth and so on. And mystics and seers and visionaries
01:09:09 ►
are people who have a relationship to this attractor
01:09:13 ►
that is different from the rest of us.
01:09:16 ►
They can glimpse aspects of this thing.
01:09:23 ►
And when I think of it this way,
01:09:26 ►
I always think of those jewels,
01:09:29 ►
the mirrored ball that they hang over the bar in a disco,
01:09:34 ►
and then they spin it,
01:09:35 ►
and it throws reflections of light all over the room
01:09:39 ►
from the ambient lighting.
01:09:41 ►
Well, history is like this.
01:09:46 ►
The
01:09:47 ►
attractor at the end
01:09:49 ►
of time, which is below
01:09:51 ►
the event horizon of the
01:09:53 ►
present and thus impossible
01:09:56 ►
to anticipate its true
01:09:58 ►
form,
01:09:59 ►
sends back through time
01:10:01 ►
distorted reflections
01:10:03 ►
of itself,
01:10:06 ►
which, if you are struck by one of these distorted reflections,
01:10:11 ►
well, then you begin to preach and cure,
01:10:17 ►
and local conditions may damp your activity,
01:10:22 ►
and then you’re what’s called a nut.
01:10:22 ►
your activity and then you’re what’s called a nut
01:10:24 ►
but if in fact
01:10:26 ►
local conditions support
01:10:28 ►
your activity so that you
01:10:30 ►
become a mean spreader
01:10:33 ►
then you’re
01:10:34 ►
suddenly a messiah
01:10:36 ►
a teacher
01:10:38 ►
a buddha, a christ
01:10:40 ►
a muhammad, that’s what these
01:10:42 ►
people were, they were people
01:10:44 ►
who were for reasons mysterious to themselves, I’m sure,
01:10:49 ►
in a relationship of resonance with the transcendental object
01:10:53 ►
such that they, in a sense, embodied it.
01:10:57 ►
Well, in our own era,
01:11:02 ►
because of technology, and Jung was on to this when he wrote his book in 1948 called Flying Saucers, a modern myth of things seen in the sky.
01:11:14 ►
He said the flying saucer is an image of the cell that haunts the skies of Earth as a compensatory effect to our alienation.
01:11:30 ►
Well, I think that that’s exactly what’s going on,
01:11:33 ►
except that he didn’t realize how nuts and bolts that explanation was.
01:11:39 ►
The UFO is a mirage
01:11:42 ►
being cast backward into time
01:11:47 ►
by the transcendental object at the end of time.
01:11:52 ►
And that’s why it has such a hair-raising aura of weirdness about it.
01:11:59 ►
It isn’t a ship from another star system.
01:12:02 ►
I mean, how could anyone reasonably entertain that idea, given
01:12:06 ►
the distances
01:12:07 ►
in time, and what you find
01:12:10 ►
when you get here? I mean,
01:12:12 ►
who would make that trip who had
01:12:14 ►
any reasonable
01:12:15 ►
way to spend their time?
01:12:18 ►
It’s
01:12:18 ►
a
01:12:21 ►
compensatory image
01:12:24 ►
that haunts time because time is a kind of hologram.
01:12:30 ►
Time is a fractal, and fractal means that the same pattern is embedded again and again in a relationship of self-similarity.
01:12:42 ►
relationship of self-similarity.
01:12:49 ►
So because the transcendental object exists somewhere ahead of us in history,
01:12:54 ►
there must necessarily be a tiny part of it somewhere nearby.
01:13:00 ►
And this is what the UFO is, I think.
01:13:14 ►
And this is why nobody’s ever going to show you a chunk of it, and they’re never going to put an extraterrestrial on network television, because it isn’t that kind of a creature.
01:13:27 ►
It’s a compensatory image from the end of time. This leads me to an aspect of what I wanted to talk about, what I very briefly and obliquely indicated this morning, which was when I was talking about how we’re halfway
01:13:38 ►
through history, but the rest of it has to happen in only 30 years. I think that we’re moving towards something called
01:13:47 ►
concrescence. This isn’t my word, it’s Alfred North Whitehead’s word. I think you can tell what it
01:13:54 ►
means. It means everything melts together into one thing. I think that from the very birth of the
01:14:01 ►
universe, this is bigger than the human species, bigger than the life of the earth. From the very first moments of the universe’s existence, it has been itself under the domain, under the influence of an attractor and this attractor is pulling everything into tighter and tighter states of self-reflective
01:14:30 ►
resonance and now we are very close to this congressive event and that in fact human history, I called it the shockwave of eschatology,
01:14:47 ►
but I didn’t talk much about what eschatology is,
01:14:51 ►
because, well, first of all, it lies below the event horizon of the present historical epoch,
01:14:59 ►
but it won’t always.
01:15:01 ►
It could rise above the horizon at any time.
01:15:06 ►
You know, 2000, 1996, you name it.
01:15:09 ►
But we have been too long under the spell of the idea that only the past creates the present.
01:15:18 ►
The present is actually largely created by appetite for the future.
01:15:23 ►
largely created by appetite for the future.
01:15:31 ►
And this would seem to me a highly improbable idea had I not taken psychedelics
01:15:34 ►
and gotten this hyperdimensional view of the system that we’re living in.
01:15:41 ►
And then you can see that, yes yes history is not a random walk it’s not a series of undirected
01:15:48 ►
random fluctuations history is a process of fractal self-complexification that builds on
01:15:59 ►
whatever it has achieved and so upon the complexity of animal organization is laying the complexity
01:16:08 ►
of human language. Upon the complexity of human language is laid the complexity of symbolic
01:16:17 ►
signification of that language, i.e. writing. Upon writing is laid electronic technology and so forth and so on. So we are, in a sense,
01:16:31 ►
in the act of giving birth to or creating the object of our theologies, which is a kind of god or goddess, depending on how you slice into it,
01:16:46 ►
how you feel about it.
01:16:48 ►
And the UFO is simply an indicator
01:16:53 ►
that we are so close now
01:16:56 ►
to encountering the contrescent transcendental object
01:17:02 ►
that it’s able to haunt the skies of earth and the imaginations
01:17:07 ►
of people who live in trailer parks this is uh you know you have to remember that history itself
01:17:16 ►
is a is a violation of the laws of nature and history and its consequences are all around us.
01:17:26 ►
We don’t have to argue about whether is history happening.
01:17:31 ►
I mean, obviously it’s happening.
01:17:33 ►
We’re embedded, laid in it.
01:17:35 ►
But it’s caused by the fact that ordinary nature,
01:17:41 ►
the nature of glaciers, chipmunks, anthills, termite nests, and whale pods has come, at least in the case of our species, under the influence of something which has literally fastened on to us and is now recreating us in its image, you know, it’s taking a monkey body and it’s saying, you know, stand it up,
01:18:09 ►
slide the eyes around to the front, oppose the thumb, shed the hair, enlarge the brain,
01:18:31 ►
the brain, put ideas into the brain, so forth and so on. I mean, we are being recast as something unimaginable to the rest of nature. And we are now fairly close to figuring out what this is.
01:18:39 ►
This is why we are able to talk about human-machine symbiosis, virtual reality, downloading ourselves to
01:18:47 ►
the size of viruses in a nanotechnological domain, stuff like that.
01:18:53 ►
So, you say that the index of Congress was to look at this current version of the lab is taking the test to the contact team and the presentation
01:19:05 ►
and what’s the name of the other
01:19:07 ►
psychiatrist who’s actually been
01:19:09 ►
a number of people
01:19:11 ►
who claim to have
01:19:13 ►
had
01:19:13 ►
yeah I would I’m more
01:19:19 ►
I agree with your
01:19:21 ►
idea that it’s an index
01:19:23 ►
of the depth of compressants,
01:19:26 ►
though muddied by shrewd public relations types who are making a living off this stuff.
01:19:34 ►
I think the crop circles are a more honest indication of how close we are to the transcendental body.
01:19:42 ►
to the transcendental body.
01:19:47 ►
I interviewed the person you mentioned at Harvard for a film we did in Prague a few months ago,
01:19:51 ►
and I…
01:19:53 ►
His name was…
01:19:59 ►
I’m a boy.
01:20:00 ►
And I had to ask him halfway through the interview,
01:20:04 ►
I said,
01:20:05 ►
well, do you detect anything in your own psychological makeup
01:20:09 ►
which makes you unfit to be doing this work?
01:20:14 ►
That was after he told me that he’d interviewed 500 women
01:20:18 ►
who had had fetuses removed from their bodies by space people.
01:20:23 ►
And he said, you know, the amazing thing about this is
01:20:26 ►
there are no physical scars at all.
01:20:29 ►
And I said, well, what does this suggest to you?
01:20:32 ►
And he said, advanced surgical techniques of which we have no knowledge.
01:20:38 ►
And I’m just, my craft detector went AWOL on that answer.
01:20:48 ►
The rules of evidence are not in suspension for the new age.
01:20:57 ►
And, you know, people who recall their lifetime as the barber of Nefertiti or whatever,
01:21:07 ►
have serious problem with what I call the rules of evidence.
01:21:16 ►
They don’t seem to have ever heard of Occam’s razor,
01:21:20 ►
which you study logic for ten minutes,
01:21:24 ►
and they tell you about Occam’s razor.
01:21:26 ►
Do you all know what this is?
01:21:28 ►
It’s a simple idea.
01:21:30 ►
Keep it next to you.
01:21:33 ►
Hypotheses should not be multiplied without necessity.
01:21:38 ►
And there are a lot of unnecessary hypotheses running around,
01:21:43 ►
especially in the new age domain. I would study the impregnation
01:21:52 ►
effect more as an example of mass hysteria because you know being in the position that I am in
01:22:10 ►
in, supposedly a revered teacher and a person of great insight and all this hoopla and crapola,
01:22:16 ►
you occasionally get invited to dinner with the movers and shakers, and then you hear what’s said when not on stage. And I have to tell you, there’s enough cynicism to satisfy a Renaissance Pope among these people.
01:22:31 ►
They are taking the rest of us for a ride in many cases.
01:22:39 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:22:48 ►
And so now you’ve heard Terence McKenna’s rap on the people who frequented what he called the New Age watering holes.
01:22:57 ►
And at which, I should add, he made his living one workshop at a time.
01:23:02 ►
And it’s also where I met him for the first time.
01:23:01 ►
is living one workshop at a time,
01:23:04 ►
and it’s also where I met him for the first time.
01:23:10 ►
Anyway, I hate to sound like a doubting Thomas here,
01:23:15 ►
but we’re now only two years away from this hypothesized concrescence that Terrence was talking about.
01:23:17 ►
And as much as I’d like to feel differently about it,
01:23:20 ►
I have to admit that I sure don’t feel like the Eschaton
01:23:23 ►
is any closer upon us than it
01:23:25 ►
was when he gave this talk. But I still don’t think that his razzle-dazzle about 2012 and the Eschaton
01:23:31 ►
is really what drew us all to him back then. Keep in mind that this talk was given almost 25 years
01:23:39 ►
ago, and in case you weren’t active in the psychedelic community back then, I’m here to
01:23:45 ►
tell you that the information Terrence was giving out here, particularly about DMT, was almost
01:23:51 ►
nowhere else to be found. There was no World Wide Web back in 1985, no arrowid.org, no podcast from
01:23:59 ►
thedopethean.co.uk. And while the war on consciousness still rages, we at least now have a lot more information available and significantly more people who think like you and I do.
01:24:11 ►
Just do the math.
01:24:13 ►
It’s been reported that since Nixon began this so-called war on drugs, that over 20 million people have been arrested in America for nonviolent drug offenses, overwhelmingly for simple possession of cannabis.
01:24:26 ►
So here are 20 million people, mainly young, overwhelmingly young men of color, who have
01:24:32 ►
now lost all of their access to a decent life.
01:24:35 ►
They can’t get student loans.
01:24:36 ►
They can’t participate in politics.
01:24:38 ►
They can’t get a decent job, even in a good economy.
01:24:41 ►
Basically, they’re screwed.
01:24:43 ►
And they’ve all got friends and family
01:24:46 ►
who most likely think that their friend or relative
01:24:48 ►
is a victim of the government gone mad.
01:24:52 ►
My guess is that this is a little time bomb
01:24:55 ►
of potential unintended consequences of the drug war
01:24:58 ►
that maybe should be paid more attention to.
01:25:02 ►
Well, this has gone on a little long,
01:25:04 ►
but there are a couple emails I want to read, and then I’ll be out of here.
01:25:08 ►
The first one comes from Matthew, who says,
01:25:12 ►
Hi, Lorenzo. I’ve listened to the entire archive of the Psychedelic Salon over the last six months or so and want to say thank you.
01:25:19 ►
And, Matthew, I’d better say thank you, too, and I hope you’re okay after doing all that.
01:25:24 ►
That’s pretty intense.
01:25:26 ►
He goes on,
01:25:27 ►
It is an incredible archive of great lectures filled with inspiration and thought-provoking ideas.
01:25:33 ►
It has opened my mind in many ways, along with the other podcasts I have recently discovered.
01:25:38 ►
I want to let you know about an archive of some McKenna talks.
01:25:42 ►
I don’t think you have podcasted all of them yet, so maybe you aren’t aware of this archive.
01:25:46 ►
Here’s the link.
01:25:47 ►
And it’s a long link at dmt-nexus.com,
01:25:51 ►
and I’ll put that along with the notes to this podcast.
01:25:54 ►
And he concludes,
01:25:55 ►
Thanks again, and keep up the greatest podcast on the net.
01:25:58 ►
Matthew.
01:25:59 ►
Well, thanks for the kind words, Matthew,
01:26:02 ►
and thanks for the link.
01:26:03 ►
As you say, there are a number of McKenna talks on that site that I haven’t heard or haven’t podcast yet,
01:26:10 ►
and I probably won’t get around to podcasting them for quite a while, if ever.
01:26:14 ►
So if you’re still hungry for some more McKenna recordings, this is a good place to look.
01:26:19 ►
And I also received another link to some McKenna podcasts from Eric, who says,
01:26:26 ►
I just wanted to let you know that I have uploaded my entire McKenna audio collection to the net.
01:26:31 ►
It totals three gigs and is missing a few of the talks that you have podcast, but I will add those in later.
01:26:37 ►
I have kept all of the original file names for these talks other than to add Terrence McKenna onto it.
01:26:42 ►
You’ve probably heard most of these.
01:26:43 ►
However, I think a few of them may interest you still.
01:26:46 ►
And that’s at nndmt.com, audio slash McKenna.
01:26:52 ►
And I’ll put that link up.
01:26:54 ►
And he goes on,
01:26:54 ►
Please feel free to download as much from here as you want
01:26:57 ►
and pass the link on as you please.
01:27:00 ►
I have a premium hosting plan with no bandwidth limitations,
01:27:03 ►
so no worries there.
01:27:05 ►
I also have many, many other things planned for upload.
01:27:08 ►
75 plus gigs.
01:27:10 ►
And it will be linked to by the main page eventually.
01:27:13 ►
Peace and love, Eric.
01:27:14 ►
And so thank you, Eric, as well.
01:27:17 ►
I guess I should put up a stand-alone page on our Notes from the Psychedelic Salon blog
01:27:23 ►
where I can keep a growing list of these McKenna download sites.
01:27:27 ►
In fact, I’ve just added that little tidbit to my work list.
01:27:31 ►
Unfortunately, it’s got quite a few things ahead of it at the moment, so I
01:27:35 ►
don’t know when I’ll get that done. Now, one more comes
01:27:39 ►
from Nigel Brooks, who says in part, Hi Lorenzo,
01:27:43 ►
I suspect you’re a busy fellow, but I was
01:27:45 ►
nonetheless inspired to write and invite
01:27:48 ►
you to an art show my partners and I
01:27:49 ►
are putting on for one night at the
01:27:52 ►
Oceanside Museum of Art
01:27:53 ►
that’s Oceanside, California
01:27:55 ►
on March 12th from 7pm
01:27:58 ►
to 10pm. I also
01:28:00 ►
just heard you interviewed on the Visionary Art
01:28:02 ►
podcast out of the UK.
01:28:04 ►
Although my art isn’t specifically visionary in an Alex Gray alternative landscape sort of way,
01:28:10 ►
I do consider it a vision of my surreal dreaming.
01:28:13 ►
And the work I create is definitely informed by, among other things,
01:28:18 ►
insights and stories I have experienced in your podcast.
01:28:21 ►
So thanks for letting us know about that, Nigel.
01:28:23 ►
And if you or any of our fellow salonners
01:28:26 ►
happen to live in San Diego or Orange Counties
01:28:29 ►
and can make it to Nigel’s show,
01:28:31 ►
well, it may be a chance for you
01:28:33 ►
to find a few more of the others.
01:28:35 ►
You just never know
01:28:37 ►
where you’re going to meet your new best friend.
01:28:39 ►
And an art show seems like a better place
01:28:42 ►
to look than a bar,
01:28:42 ►
but hey, that’s just my opinion.
01:28:46 ►
Well, that should do it for now.
01:28:48 ►
And so I’ll close today’s podcast by reminding 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 Share Alike 3.0 license.
01:29:26 ►
Transcription by CastingWords which is available as an audiobook that you can download at genesisgeneration.us.
01:29:31 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic space.
01:29:33 ►
Be well, my friends.