240 - Philosophical Gadfly Part 1

Program Notes

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

https://www.cdbaby.com/cd/NatureLovesCourage[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“There are several unexplained anomalies. Why is it that fully 80% of the world’s known plant hallucinogens are concentrated in the Amazon basin, even though the flora of the Old World jungles of Indonesia is equally rich?”

“The curing scenario of the ayahuascero is easily identified to the curing scenario of shamans world wide.”

“I think the word ‘psychedelic’ is maybe too broad, because it includes things which are very different from each other. It can include things as different as ketamine and mescaline.”

“The icaros, the magical songs, are actually technical tools for controlling the fabric of the hallucination.”

“It seems very clear that this [ayahuasca] healthcare delivery system is very effective, perhaps more effective than our own, especially in the treating of psychological disorders.”

“You must be aware that I have other wrinkles, the extraterrestrial angle, the end of history angle, several different things, but all of these things were inspired by our belief that these Amazon peoples have a technology for exploring the modalities of the unconscious that is centuries ahead of us.”

“But what I have become convinced of from using these hallucinogenic drugs is that the major portion of the unconscious has very little to do with human beings. It is simply a modality, an interior landscape, and large portions of it are not human.”

http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/0062506358“As techniques are developed for exploring consciousness, these trans-human, non-human dimensions slowly come into view. It appears to be a co-equal dimension of existential validity, which our cultural and linguistic programming has blinded us to rather severely.”

“[The mushroom] is not a drug of acceptance, you know. It want’s transformation of a very radical sort. The ayahuasca seems to integrate.”

“Ayahuasca is wonderfully suggestive and can be led in a way that these other things sometimes can’t be.”

“What does it mean that on a psychedelic drug one person can see more art in an hour than the species has produced in 10,000 years? What does that say about how effectively we are accessing our souls?”

“If you want a miracle, then language is the thing to look at.”

“I think literature occupies the same relationship to life that life that life occupies to death.”

“I imagine death to be a kind of release into the imagination.”

Transcript

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Greetings from cyberdelic space.

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This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.

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

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And today we have William See to thank for his donation to help pay some of the expenses here in the salon.

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So, hey, thank you very much, William. I really appreciate your support.

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Now, where are we?

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Well, after last week’s podcast, with what was for me a new Terrence McKenna talk,

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I just couldn’t resist the temptation to begin listening to one of the tapes in the box of McKenna material that my friend Diana Slattery sent to me a couple of months back.

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Now, Diana and I had reconnected at the Psychedelic Science Conference

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after having not seen one another for a while.

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Science Conference after having not seen one another for a while. And in fact, I can’t even remember if we were last together at Burning Man or at a salon or another conference. Seems like

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we’ve known each other for a long time. But anyway, after talking with Diana, she said she had all

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these tapes of Terrence McKenna she’d be happy to give to me. And so I got this big box filled with tapes from her,

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and some of them are talks that we’ve already heard,

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and there were a few professional recordings that were copyrighted

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that I didn’t want to use here.

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But there were also a lot of old cassette tapes

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that she’d obviously recorded herself over the years.

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And it’s one of those tapes that I’m going to begin the Diana Slattery phase of the McKenna material,

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for lack of a better description.

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So, hey, thanks again, Diana.

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Your years of recording and hauling these tapes around the country are finally going to pay off

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by you knowing that, quite literally literally thousands of others of us are now

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the beneficiaries of your labors.

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Now, the first set of tapes that I digitized and will be playing this week is a three-tape

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set that’s simply labeled Shamanology, Mill Valley, 1984.

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Now, considering that this was recorded on a personal cassette player back in 84,

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I think the sound quality cleaned up pretty well.

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Well enough to use here in the salon, and hopefully you’ll agree.

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Now, one of my favorite things about this particular recording, by the way,

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comes right at the beginning when Terrence actually had to introduce himself

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and said that he was a philosophical

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gadfly and a shamanologist. But as you’ll hear in just a moment, back in the early days of his

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workshops, and this is one of those times before, or it was right about the time he was becoming the

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persona that we now think of as Terence McKenna. But back in the 80s, when there was really no worldwide web,

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very little information on the net about psychedelics, well, he was probably the

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world’s main source of information about psychedelic substances in general and

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ayahuasca in particular. And so you’ll hear now how there were a lot of questions about the nuts

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and bolts of the psychedelic experience back then.

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But these are things, of course, you can find answers to now at arrowid.org.

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Anyway, now let’s join an intimate little group of early Terrence McKenna fans

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and hear the great bard for ourselves at a time when he was just beginning to become a well-known personality on the psychedelic scene.

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And keep in mind as we listen to this talk that there weren’t all that many people

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who were as experienced and knowledgeable about psychedelics back then as you are today.

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You know, back in 1984, all of a sudden I’m thinking of the George Orwell book too.

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It’s funny to say back in 1984, but in a way, doesn’t it feel like we are back in 1984?

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Anyhow, back then, Terrence’s workshops were probably the main source of information.

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Now compare that state of affairs to the spread of this information today,

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and I think you may agree that it was a combination

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of Terence McKenna and the Internet, maybe,

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that we have to thank

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for the resurgence of knowledge

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about the role of sacred medicines

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in the formation of human civilization.

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At least, that’s my take on it,

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but enough of me.

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Now, here’s Terence McKenna.

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My name is Terence McKenna and I’m a philosophical gadfly and shamanologist, writer and lecturer.

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Ruth assured me that you were so familiar with my work, but probably we could handle this meeting as a dialogue after a

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short introduction to some of the things that I’m interested in. So we’ll attempt that.

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I’ll talk for a few minutes and then we’ll see if we just can’t sustain our conversation

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about the aspects of these things that interest you.

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If any of you have read The Invisible Landscape, which I am the co-author

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of with my brother, you know that it ranges over fairly hardcore chemistry and neurophysiology

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through the phenomenology of shamanism and on into a fairly extensive discussion of principles of ordering in the I Ching.

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But what I seem to find myself publicly lecturing about

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is the relationship of hallucinogens,

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especially plant hallucinogens,

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to shamanic healing in the context

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where use of hallucinogens is associated with shamanism.

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If you look at the worldwide distribution of hallucinogens,

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you immediately notice that there are several unexplained anomalies.

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Why is it that fully 80% of the world’s known plant hallucinogens

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are concentrated in the Amazon basin,

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even though the flora of the old world jungles of Indonesia is equally rich.

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And Weston Labar and a number of people have written about this trying to say that perhaps it is because

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the people of the Amazon

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are closer to

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the hunting and gathering

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pre-agricultural mode

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than anywhere else in the world

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but for whatever reason

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the peoples of the Amazon

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have developed the

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use of hallucinogens and

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shamanism to a very high degree.

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And while a number of plant species are involved in the production of these various drugs,

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the chemistry of them is more simple than the botany.

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In other words, almost all of the halogenogens in use in the

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Amazon rely on a monoamine oxidase inhibition to potentiate dimethyltryptamine.

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Now, in other words, monoamine oxidase is the enzyme system in the body which degrades monoamines,

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which would be serotonin,

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but also any introduced monoamines,

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which would be all alkaloids and many drugs.

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When the monoamine oxidase is inhibited chemically,

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it can no longer do its job of deactivating these compounds,

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and consequently you get an accumulation of them at the synapse.

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And this is thought to be the mechanic by which the hallucinogenic experience is induced with these drugs.

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experience is induced with these drugs.

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Since so many people here seem interested in curing,

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I think this morning I will, in these brief remarks,

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concentrate on one ethnomedical system, and then if your questions range out beyond that, that’s fine.

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But I want to concentrate on this one ethnomedical system

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because part of what I am trying to do

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is to get researchers like yourselves

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to look more closely at this.

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There are a number of unanswered questions.

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In fact, I would say more is not known than known.

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The system that I refer to is the endemic use of ayahuasca

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throughout Bolivia, Peru, Southern Colombia,

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portions of Ecuador and Brazil.

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Very briefly, ayahuasca is a combinatory drug made out of the boiled leaves and stems

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of a Malthagaceous woody climber

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called Banisteriophthis capi,

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a huge woody vine

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that sometimes reaches 200 meters in length in the jungle.

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And it is boiled to make a hot water infusion. And then to this

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is added a small amount of the DMT-containing leaves of some other plant, either Diploteris

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cabarena or Socotria viridis. Now, my brother has just finished his work toward the PhD at the University

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of British Columbia, and much of what his thesis consisted of was looking at drug and plant samples

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that we collected in the Amazon in 1982 when we went down there. For over ten years, Schultes and Bo Homstedt of the Karolinska Institute

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had published theories of the activity of ayahuasca,

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which stated that they believed it worked

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through monoaminophthase inhibition,

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but this had never really been tested.

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Now it has been looked at in the laboratory

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and essentially confirmed that this is precisely

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what’s happening. And it’s a very interesting comment on ethnomedicine because unlike peyote

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or Amanita muscaria or the psilocybin mushrooms of Mexico, ayahuasca is a combinatory drug. It is prepared. It

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is not simply picked and eaten. So as a consequence of this, it can be made either well or badly.

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And as a consequence of that, the personality of the shaman becomes far more important in the ayahuasca cults than in the

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cults that revolve around the use of plant drugs where no preparation is involved.

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Now at the beginning of this I mentioned that all the hallucinogenic drugs of the Amazon

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are based on this tryptamine-beta-carboline interaction.

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What we were doing in 1982

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was looking at a much more endemic and restrictive drug complex,

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which is…

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For over 30 years, there have been persistent reports in the ethnographic literature

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that there was an orally active DMT drug,

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which was very interesting to pharmacologists

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because there’s large amounts of monoamine oxidase in the human gut

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monoamine oxidase in the human gut assumed by evolutionary biologists to be there to degrade potentially dangerous or toxic monoamines that might be taken in through the diet so it’s very

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interesting to pharmacologists to hear that there is an orally active DMT drug because it flies in the face of

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pharmacological theory. It should be impossible. And the pharmacologists said that if there was

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an orally active DMT drug, then it must be complexed with an MAO inhibitor to make it work.

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So what we were doing was going down there and visiting various shaman in various places,

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persuading them to make the paste for us,

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making voucher specimens of the plants that went into it,

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and then taking the voucher specimens, the pickled material,

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the air-dried material,

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all of this stuff back to Canada.

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And our assumption was that we would pretty much confirm Holmstedt and Schulte’s assertion that this drug also worked by monoamine oxidase inhibition.

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It now appears not to be so.

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It also appears to be…

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There are questions about the composition of the drug.

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The people who used this drug were disrupted in the 1930s.

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There was a dispute between Colombia and Peru,

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and when the new boundary was drawn

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these people felt they were in the wrong country they felt Peruvian but they

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ended up on the Colombian side of the line the Putumayo River was set as the

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new border and they undertook then a kind of exodus in which 10 to 15,000 of them moved about 100 miles across the Putumayo

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River to the present center where they’re located.

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And in that process, we believe that the knowledge of the drug was severely compromised.

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The reason for this is because samples of the drugs that we collected

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north of the Putumayo River in 1971 actually did show the presence of beta-carbolines in them,

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but samples prepared below the Putumayo River had no trace of beta-carbolines in them, and in fact in bioassay seemed, that means when we took it,

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seemed either inactive or toxic.

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And it’s well known that the trees from which this drug is prepared is also the source of

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an arrow poison.

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And in fact, among the Yanomamo if they are the men

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are on a hunting expedition and they run out of the supply of the drug they are

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persistently reported to scrape the arrow poison off their quill arrows and

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to sniff that so what exactly is going on is not clear. I think we took turns doing the bioassays with the drugs in Peru,

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and I think my brother got the most powerful and frightening sample,

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and it sounded, from his account, like a paralytic poison.

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He felt numbing, which began around the lips and proceeded down his throat.

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His breathing became very shallowed and labored.

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His mind was racing, but he couldn’t move.

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There was no eidetic or hypnagogic imagery.

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There was simply a massive sense of respiratory depression.

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And when he recovered from this

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and questioned the shaman

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who had made the drug, his only comment was that it does take getting used to.

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But I’m not sure that we’ll repeat the experiment. So I mention that because

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here is an unsolved problem. We took the best suggestion of the generation of researchers ahead of us

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and went to the Amazon and ran their suggestion to ground,

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and it appears not to, their conjecture was incorrect.

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These virolapase drugs don’t work through MAO inhibition. So here is the continuing

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unsolved pharmacological problem, which if any of you find yourselves doing field work in the Amazon,

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this is the one to bear in mind. The ayahuasca complex that I mentioned earlier is much more

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accessible and in fact is perhaps the most widely distributed psychedelic

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drug-taking complex in the world it involves millions and millions of people who on a regular

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basis approximately weekly gather together usually in windowless, corrugated-roofed sheds, and the local ayahuasquero, and in

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these areas ayahuasquero and shaman mean the same thing, he leads the group in the taking

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of this drug. And a number of people come to these sessions because they have medical or psychological problems.

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Either is, there is no distinction made.

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Many people come to these sessions out of curiosity.

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A certain percentage come with the attitude

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that they’re going to take a psychedelic drug.

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In other words, that this is a visionary experience.

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And this phenomenon of taking the drug

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is completely embedded in the people’s lives

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and very, very efficaciously so.

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They call it La Purga.

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And in fact, Harmin, the main monoamine oxidase-inhibiting constituent of ayahuasca

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actually is a strong anti-worm remedy.

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And this is important and definitely gives the people taking ayahuasca

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an adaptive leg up on everybody else

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because intestinal worms are an endemic problem in these areas

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and I believe there’s no question

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that if you’re taking ayahuasca every couple of weeks

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you’re probably staying fairly free of this.

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The curing scenario of the ayahuasquero

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is easily identified to the curing scenario of shamans worldwide.

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In other words, it consists of magical songs, the blowing of tobacco smoke over the body

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of the patient, the laying on of hands, the sucking on the afflicted part of the body to remove a magical object which may or may not be visible,

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the interpreting of visions, and this sort of thing.

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The ayahuasquero really functions as the hierophant for these groups of country people.

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And I might say a word about the context in which all this is happening.

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country people, and I might say a word about the context in which all this is happening. Though ayahuasca is used by deep forest Indians, and they have their own folk ways about it,

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it’s really a mass phenomenon of displaced Indian and mixed mestizo population.

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What you have in the Amazon are relatively new cities, new if we mean by new, built within this century.

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Iquitos in Peru arose first as a consequence of the rubber boom.

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Any of you who saw Herzog’s film Burden of Dreams, or not, Fitzcarraldo, got a good idea of what Iquitos is like.

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Pucallpa is a much newer city in the south of Peru

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and it’s essentially 50,000 Indians have come out of the jungle

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to work in the sawmills

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and to create a tremendous pocket of syncretic foment

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where folk beliefs, shamanistic practices,

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languages are all in a state of homogenation and very rich, very rich for those people

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to live in, very rich to do research in. and it was there that we found the ayahuasquero

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who came to us to have the most, as they say in Hebrew,

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he was mimash, he was real,

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he had a sense of existential authenticity about him

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and then in the laboratory we backed that up.

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His stuff was consistently stronger and better made than anyone

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else’s so kat and i spent six or seven weeks with these people we just moved in with them and we

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took ayahuasca as often as we could arrange to do which was at least once a week and sometimes twice a week and we can attest to its

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curative powers because the peaks of ayahuasca taking were interspersed with the trenches of

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salmonella infection and each time we got salmonella we we would ask the shaman to move up the next ayahuasca and that would give us about three days grace before the next bout of salmonella.

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It was a terrific problem.

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If you know what it is, you know what I mean.

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If you don’t, you’re lucky.

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So I can answer questions about this on many different levels.

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I guess before I open it for discussion, since so many of you seem to be interested in curing. I think the word psychedelic is maybe too broad

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because it includes things which are very different from each other.

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It can include things as different as ketamine and mescaline.

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And certainly the tryptamine intoxication,

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if we can use that word advisedly, is very distinct from the intoxication or the immersion in the phenomenology of LSD or mescaline, something like that.

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In our cultural context, DMT is almost never encountered,

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and when it is encountered, it is usually smoked,

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and it’s very, very breathing. It onsets in about 45 seconds. It lasts 100 to 300 seconds,

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and then it fades in a few minutes, and it’s this tremendously intense visual hallucinogen very difficult in fact to imagine

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anything more intense than that now psilocybin which is the active hallucinogen in mushrooms

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is 4-phosphoryloxynm-dimethyltryptamine it’s well understood that the phosphoral group is removed as it crosses the blood-brain barrier.

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This turns it into psilocin, 5-hydroxy-N-m-dimethyltryptamine,

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I mean 4-hydroxy-N-m-dimethyltryptamine, and this is very close to serotonin,

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so close that it’s reasonable to assume that these compounds are competing for

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the same sites of activity at the synapse now though psilocybin cannot be

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directly changed into DMT it’s a two-step process the structural

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affinities of them are very clear what seems to be happening in ayahuasca is a very small amount of DMT and a lot of MAO inhibitors being used to activate it.

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And I should talk about these MAO inhibitors in ayahuasca.

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They are harmin, harmaline, tetrahydroharmin, the family of compounds known as beta-carbolines.

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the Harman, the family of compounds known as beta-carbolines. Now, beta-carbolines are psychoactive in their own right, but not hallucinogenic. Some of you may know the work of Claudio Naranjo,

00:25:34 ►

who used Harmin and Harmaline in therapy. But if you study his work on the subject very carefully, it becomes clear that fully half of all the human

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descriptions of the psychoactivity of beta-carbolines come from one subject, and massive doses had

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to be given. They were giving 10 milligrams per kilogram in some cases to elusive even low ebetic activity behind

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closed eyelids so to call it a hallucinogen is perhaps a misnomer one of the things that my

00:26:18 ►

brother discovered that seems fascinating to me is that in in vitro system meaning in test tubes ayahuasca

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brews that we brought from the Amazon were found to be a million times

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stronger for MAO inhibition than they needed to be when he diluted these

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things to 1 million the strength that the people were taking them in the Amazon who’s

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still getting 80% the MAO inhibition so what seems to be happening if we can

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extrapolate from in vitro to in vivo is that they are way overdoing the amount

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of MAO inhibitor you need and just barely sidling up to enough tryptamine to potentiate the

00:27:08 ►

hallucinogenic activity.

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When you take ayahuasca, first after about 30 minutes you feel a kind of calmity effect,

00:27:19 ►

which if you’ve taken a large amount of it can actually become almost the beginnings of a light anesthesia.

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And then in darkness, under the influence of these itaros,

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these magical songs,

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the hypnagogia begins to weave itself,

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and it is not sharp-edged, bright, geometric kinds of hallucinations.

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It’s much more, as he says in his thesis,

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the colors of the forest floor,

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rich ochres, olive drabs, warm browns,

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dusty oranges,

00:27:56 ►

all very impressionistically put together

00:27:59 ►

and very much subject to audio control.

00:28:04 ►

The Icaros, the magical songs, and very much subject to audio control.

00:28:08 ►

The ikaros, the magical songs,

00:28:11 ►

are actually technical tools for controlling the fabric of the hallucination.

00:28:16 ►

And this is very interesting to me

00:28:18 ►

because, as some of you may know

00:28:19 ►

who have heard me lecture before,

00:28:21 ►

I’m interested in the effect of these things

00:28:24 ►

on the language centers and

00:28:26 ►

the relationship of visual modalities to spoken modalities.

00:28:30 ►

And definitely this is what’s happening in ayahuasca.

00:28:34 ►

The songs are being used to control the visions.

00:28:37 ►

Perhaps this is what’s happening in peyote circles as well.

00:28:42 ►

I don’t have great familiarity with that, but I do know that there’s great stress

00:28:46 ►

on attaining these magical songs,

00:28:49 ►

which are not produced from the ego.

00:28:52 ►

They are spontaneous outbursts

00:28:55 ►

of linguistic order

00:28:57 ►

that affect the visual cortex

00:29:00 ►

and control the fabric of the hallucinations.

00:29:03 ►

And the shaman can use this to in his own language

00:29:10 ►

to look into the body he can see into the body and i would say if i lost it’s the most

00:29:19 ►

i want to say health oriented but it’s definitely somatically oriented. You feel how you feel on it, and

00:29:28 ►

you see into yourself, and you can actually direct energy in a visual way that is way

00:29:36 ►

more intense than mere metaphor. And if a person such as myself can do this, you can

00:29:43 ►

imagine someone who’s given their

00:29:45 ►

life to manipulating these states, how intense it must be.

00:29:50 ►

And they see into the body and they direct sound into the body, and by this means energy

00:29:56 ►

blockages can be broken up, diseases diagnosed, psychological conditions addressed, all kinds

00:30:04 ►

of things go on.

00:30:07 ►

And our attitude in looking at this was not the attitude of representatives of a superior culture

00:30:18 ►

studying the quaint folkways of preliterate peoples.

00:30:23 ►

It seems very clear that this health care delivery

00:30:26 ►

system is very effective, perhaps more effective than our own, especially in the treating of

00:30:33 ►

psychological disorders, of which there are a number in Peru that only these populations

00:30:40 ►

are subject to. I am not an anthropologist or a sociologist

00:30:46 ►

and not particularly interested

00:30:48 ►

in phenomenological descriptions of these things.

00:30:52 ►

I really believe that there is a potential impact

00:30:59 ►

on our own society from all of this,

00:31:02 ►

that if we could understand what was happening, we would have

00:31:05 ►

a much better chance of being able to orient our own healthcare delivery systems to be

00:31:13 ►

more effective.

00:31:17 ►

A friend of ours, an anthropologist who lives in Finland, Louis Luna, who showed his film

00:31:23 ►

in Vancouver last year,

00:31:28 ►

he is completely convinced that the real mastery of ayahuasca lays in following a very rigorous diet,

00:31:33 ►

which the deep forest ayahuascaros use.

00:31:36 ►

And this may be true.

00:31:38 ►

I mean, definitely beta-carbolines are endogenously produced in human metabolism

00:31:45 ►

so are beta-carbolines

00:31:47 ►

and so are tryptamines

00:31:50 ►

and the peculiar diet in the Amazon anyway

00:31:54 ►

which is high starch, low protein, high sugar

00:32:00 ►

very few green vegetables kind of diet

00:32:03 ►

may predispose these people to accessing ayahuasca more easily.

00:32:10 ►

Kat had no trouble getting off when we were being dosed down there.

00:32:15 ►

I had more trouble, and I think it was simply a matter of the ratio of the compound to body weight.

00:32:23 ►

I was definitely the largest person in any of these sessions.

00:32:27 ►

And the same amount is doled out to each person.

00:32:32 ►

And you’re not in a context where you can say,

00:32:35 ►

I’d like to take more, please.

00:32:38 ►

You just have to go with what’s going on.

00:32:41 ►

But we also are informant,

00:32:44 ►

prepared several bottles of ayahuasca for us,

00:32:47 ►

and in a series of experiments in the United States, when we got back, we verified that it is

00:32:53 ►

not only a hallucinogen, but it can be a terrifyingly intense hallucinogen. If errors in dosage are made,

00:33:09 ►

it can be, well, I said after I made my error dosage, I never hope to be more stoned than that.

00:33:15 ►

So that’s what I offer to you.

00:33:19 ►

It’s interesting perhaps to you in your own field.

00:33:23 ►

You must be aware that I have other wrinkles,

00:33:26 ►

the extraterrestrial angle, the end of history angle, several different things. But all of

00:33:32 ►

these things were inspired by our belief that these Amazon peoples have a technology for

00:33:39 ►

exploring the modalities of the unconscious that is centuries ahead of us. I mean, we are at the

00:33:46 ►

very beginning of exploring the unconscious. The Freudian and Jungian models, which you

00:33:53 ►

can think of the Freudian model as embedded like a black dot in the center of the Jungian

00:33:59 ►

bullseye. Each theory of the unconscious claims more and more territory as its own.

00:34:06 ►

But what I have become convinced of from using these hallucinogenic drugs

00:34:11 ►

is that the major portion of the unconscious has very little to do with human beings.

00:34:18 ►

It is simply a modality, an interior landscape,

00:34:22 ►

and large portions of it are not human you could almost

00:34:28 ►

make the cybernetic metaphor of ROM portions of the unconscious ROM stands

00:34:36 ►

for read-only memory this means that if you have a computer with read-only

00:34:41 ►

memory you can read what is in that section of memory,

00:34:46 ►

but you cannot change it or input into it.

00:34:50 ►

And I believe there are read-only portions of memory

00:34:54 ►

that no human being has ever inputted into,

00:34:57 ►

so they bear no trace of humanness,

00:35:01 ►

but they can be contemplated.

00:35:04 ►

And this is the idea of the alien other,

00:35:07 ►

a tension that appears in modern society.

00:35:11 ►

It has appeared before, for instance, in Hellenistic society.

00:35:15 ►

As techniques are developed for exploring consciousness,

00:35:19 ►

these transhuman, non-human dimensions slowly come into view.

00:35:26 ►

It appears to be a co-equal dimension of existential validity,

00:35:32 ►

which our cultural and linguistic programming has blinded us to rather severely.

00:35:39 ►

Now, of course, we’re returning to look at it again in the larger context of the entire intellectual

00:35:49 ►

thrust of the 20th century being an effort to recapture and understand our caged forms

00:35:56 ►

of thought.

00:35:57 ►

This is why our fascination with the unconscious, with drugs, with shamanism, with the forms of art like cubism and this sort of thing,

00:36:08 ►

because we are trying to give ourselves cultural balance by harking back to a time in the Leo Tempore,

00:36:16 ►

a sacral time, a time before history, and these drugs are the means to do that properly understood. Our problems on this end are simply the baggage of cultural

00:36:28 ►

and legal and conventional assumptions about what these things are.

00:36:36 ►

I think there’s a great deal to be learned

00:36:38 ►

from these shamanic societies and conventions.

00:36:49 ►

However, I’m not a… I call myself a shamanologist to set myself aside from the people who claim to be shamans. I don’t… I think that there’s

00:37:01 ►

a great deal to be learned from shamanism, but that there is a great deal that can be extrapolated from it,

00:37:08 ►

that we need to create our own shamanism, and that we will.

00:37:11 ►

When you’re sitting in these cult huts in utter darkness

00:37:16 ►

with people vomiting and singing and undergoing these things,

00:37:20 ►

and you are still trying to perform the eidetic reduction,

00:37:24 ►

still thinking about Husserl and Heidegger and Heidegger,

00:37:28 ►

you realize that your mental insides are too different to ever stand in their shoes.

00:37:36 ►

You have to make your own shoes.

00:37:40 ►

So let’s talk about all this.

00:37:43 ►

But then you said that mushrooms are metabolized into tryptamine-type stuff,

00:37:48 ►

and so I wasn’t clear as to…

00:37:49 ►

No, well, either I wasn’t clear or you misunderstood me.

00:37:54 ►

Mescaline, which is the active constituent of peyote, is not a tryptamine.

00:38:00 ►

It’s a kind of amphetamine.

00:38:02 ►

Oh, no, I meant mushrooms.

00:38:03 ►

Mushrooms.

00:38:04 ►

Psilocybin is an interesting compound.

00:38:07 ►

It is the only four-substituted indolepilamine that occurs in nature.

00:38:16 ►

So it’s unique.

00:38:19 ►

And in another context,

00:38:21 ►

this is one of the reasons we were led to suggest

00:38:24 ►

that it might be an extraterrestrial gene inserted from the outside

00:38:29 ►

because you just don’t get single instances of a compound occurring in organic nature.

00:38:36 ►

Serotonin, for instance, which is very closely related to psilocybin,

00:38:40 ►

occurs in everything from planaria to man.

00:38:44 ►

It occurs virtually in all known living systems.

00:38:47 ►

Silysibin only is known to occur in a very limited number of fungi.

00:38:51 ►

It is a phosphorylated tryptamine.

00:38:55 ►

The tryptamines then that occur in the varolas in these trees used to make the paste

00:39:03 ►

or in the admixture plants of ayahuasca,

00:39:06 ►

these are not phosphorylated tryptamines.

00:39:09 ►

These are things like NM-dymethyltryptamine itself

00:39:13 ►

and 5-methoxy-MEO.

00:39:16 ►

The phosphoryl group is stripped off.

00:39:18 ►

No, it was never there in those cases.

00:39:20 ►

No, no, I mean in Russia it’s stripped off.

00:39:24 ►

So is the end result of subjective experience similar between psilocybin and

00:39:29 ►

ayahuasca? Yes, they’re very, very similar, with one exception, I think. Maybe more? The

00:39:38 ►

major difference is that unlike psilocybin, psilocybin has one very curious property,

00:39:46 ►

which is that it seems animate.

00:39:53 ►

You contact an organized intellect key of some sort very easily. It speaks to you.

00:39:55 ►

I’ve compared it to the logos of Hellenistic syncretism.

00:39:59 ►

It seems to be a psychic component not under the control of the ego. And this is very curious, frightening

00:40:10 ►

to some people. When I was with Albert Hoffman at that Entheogen conference in Santa Barbara,

00:40:17 ►

I asked him, you know, he discovered LSD and he characterized psilocybin and I asked him which he preferred to take and he

00:40:27 ►

said he preferred LSD and I said why and he said there’s something too animate about

00:40:35 ►

psilocybin and closer questioning showed that this was unsettling to him. It’s too much like the orthodox notion of madness.

00:40:46 ►

Having a dialogue with an independent voice in your head

00:40:50 ►

is quite unsettling to a certain sort of person, I think.

00:40:55 ►

And you don’t have the same experience with Ayahuasca?

00:40:58 ►

It teaches. Do you want to say something about it?

00:41:00 ►

I think that Ayahuasca has the feeling of some kind of energy in it as well, but it doesn’t particularize like the little creatures who can come at you or bombard you or whatever.

00:41:12 ►

And psilocybin is sort of more a mark that’s very large and very gentle.

00:41:17 ►

And so it might have experiences where, I think Dennis did as well, where I was led through the forest by someone so much bigger than me that I couldn’t see him or her, you know, but taught about the plants along the way and the jungle, what they were.

00:41:30 ►

Once I saw a huge hand dangling above my head that was all black with jewels in the crevices, you know, and that kind of entity.

00:41:39 ►

Not frightening, though. I didn’t ever find that frightening.

00:41:42 ►

The Russians, the coming of it at the beginning when people vomit, when you have a very strong seasickness, that’s what they call it, very

00:41:48 ►

strong seasickness at the beginning, that’s scary.

00:41:53 ►

And you quake. And they seem to encourage that. For instance, this shed where we would

00:42:03 ►

do it had a corrugated roof and no windows, but it was up on short stilts.

00:42:08 ►

The shaman would stand up and put his hands in front of him and tremble,

00:42:14 ►

and he would transmit this trembling into the floor and shake the entire building.

00:42:19 ►

And several times, the protocol is when you feel that you’re going to vomit, you just go outside and vomit.

00:42:25 ►

And people are coming and going all the time.

00:42:28 ►

We didn’t vomit that much, which was very puzzling to them.

00:42:32 ►

They really stress vomiting.

00:42:35 ►

And they identify the vomiting with the purgative effects of it.

00:42:40 ►

And when we would not vomit, they’d say,

00:42:42 ►

oh, you must live very cleanly you must be in very good shape

00:42:46 ►

but actually all that was happening

00:42:48 ►

I think was that we were following the rules

00:42:51 ►

they laid down

00:42:52 ►

and they were not

00:42:54 ►

like they would say, you know

00:42:55 ►

never eat pork before doing it

00:42:58 ►

don’t eat anything for six hours before doing it

00:43:01 ►

no salt, no alcohol

00:43:02 ►

and we would do this and be fine,

00:43:05 ►

and they would just be

00:43:06 ►

keegling out ten different ways

00:43:10 ►

and getting sick.

00:43:15 ►

But the entity in ayahuasca,

00:43:17 ►

it teaches by showing.

00:43:20 ►

The visions teach.

00:43:22 ►

The thing in psilocybin is much more puzzling

00:43:25 ►

I mean it’s a harangue

00:43:27 ►

you actually have

00:43:29 ►

you know psychic arm wrestling

00:43:32 ►

with somebody who wants to

00:43:34 ►

who loves

00:43:36 ►

controversy

00:43:37 ►

and rhetoric

00:43:38 ►

and is well able to express itself

00:43:42 ►

and present itself

00:43:43 ►

that’s a very puzzling thing that could lead one far afield

00:43:50 ►

if you sought a reasonable explanation.

00:43:55 ►

So those are the major differences.

00:43:57 ►

I think ayahuasca lends itself to be a better healing drug.

00:44:00 ►

Mm-hmm.

00:44:01 ►

Because it is gentler, because you can still communicate with the other people, it’s very

00:44:07 ►

close. It’s like this number of people in your smallest space, you know, and you can,

00:44:12 ►

it can flow back and forth where psilocybin, you’ve experienced it, you know, it just sort

00:44:17 ►

of blasts off, right? So maybe you can do personal healing on psilocybin, but collective

00:44:24 ►

healing, I think ayahuasca is really beautiful.

00:44:29 ►

It’s very earth-centered. I mean, even taking ayahuasca up where we live in Sonoma County, immediately as it comes on, it’s about sunlight on brown water, huge twining, in other words, it creates the jungle.

00:44:46 ►

It is the jungle in some strange way.

00:44:50 ►

The psilocybin entity is gnostic.

00:44:53 ►

It points to the center of the galaxy.

00:44:56 ►

It talks about ending history.

00:44:58 ►

It’s full of a sense of crisis and the need for activity and humor, but this intense desire for change, it is

00:45:10 ►

not a drug of acceptance, you know. It wants transformation of a very radical sort. The

00:45:16 ►

ayahuasca seems to create, to integrate, especially into that environment. You know, the major alkaloid fraction of ayahuasca is harming,

00:45:28 ►

which was a beta-carboline, which was first isolated from Syrian rue,

00:45:34 ►

the giant Syrian rue, Pergamon harmala, and that’s why it’s called harming.

00:45:39 ►

Before enough was known about the compound to realize,

00:45:42 ►

the compound in ayahuasca, to realize that it was the same as the compound in Pergamon harmala.

00:45:48 ►

It was called telepathy

00:45:49 ►

because the early explorers,

00:45:53 ►

the Vicencio and Koch-Rinberg in the early years of this century,

00:45:58 ►

reported that the people were inducing states of mass telepathy.

00:46:04 ►

And there is some reason to think that this might be true in some sense.

00:46:11 ►

In other words, these people live in a state of semi-telepathy anyway.

00:46:17 ►

If you can imagine a hunting-gathering tribe of 30 people moving through a vast rainforest with their children and their elders the notion of the

00:46:27 ►

super expressed individual that we take for granted is not really there there is more a

00:46:35 ►

sense of the unity of the group then when the elders get together and take ayahuasca, there is a kind of melding together to obtain consensus and

00:46:50 ►

also information impossible to obtain any other way. For instance, weather information.

00:46:59 ►

Shamanism is always related to weather prophecy, and it’s always been assumed that this was just a wing and a prayer,

00:47:08 ►

or that they were super-sensitized to environmental clues about weather change.

00:47:14 ►

But also things like game movement, this is very important to know.

00:47:18 ►

And for all of these things, ayahuasca was invoked and used.

00:47:24 ►

I want to go back to something you said about

00:47:26 ►

the personality of mushrooms.

00:47:28 ►

I think it’s an interesting political comment

00:47:30 ►

that mushrooms should be growing here

00:47:32 ►

in this country, which is so apathetic

00:47:34 ►

and we need to kick in the ass

00:47:36 ►

to do something

00:47:37 ►

that we don’t have a more gentle

00:47:39 ►

type of drug here

00:47:42 ►

in the country.

00:47:44 ►

And also we don’t have a collective format to use it in.

00:47:47 ►

People have to experiment individually and gradually

00:47:50 ►

to be as efficient as they can be.

00:47:55 ►

Two things.

00:47:56 ►

Let’s see.

00:47:56 ►

First is, you were describing your brother’s experience

00:48:00 ►

reminding us of Michael Harner’s description

00:48:03 ►

of his ayahuasca experience.

00:48:08 ►

And he said, after, I guess, going through a kind of death-like experience,

00:48:14 ►

that that’s why they called it the Little Death.

00:48:17 ►

And the other thing was that he said that in their preparation of ayahuasca,

00:48:21 ►

there was some tree doctrine.

00:48:23 ►

Did you find that?

00:48:24 ►

Tree detourists, arb some tree detour tree detour

00:48:25 ►

arboreal detour

00:48:27 ►

in the subfamily

00:48:28 ►

are used in certain

00:48:31 ►

areas

00:48:32 ►

rarely

00:48:35 ►

and not in these

00:48:36 ►

not in these public

00:48:39 ►

gatherings of people

00:48:41 ►

tropane alkaloids are notoriously

00:48:44 ►

difficult to control, and that

00:48:46 ►

would be more within a context of brujeria, of real sorcery and witchcraft, and generally

00:48:53 ►

tends to be more montane, a phenomenon of the mountains, especially around the valley

00:49:01 ►

of the Sibundoy and those places. We never, we grew bugmancias and have them,

00:49:09 ►

of course, but we never combined it with ayahuasca because knowing just what the tropanes

00:49:15 ►

are like on their own, it seemed very dangerous. You know, some tropanes make you sweat and

00:49:24 ►

your heart race. Other tropanes make you fall

00:49:27 ►

asleep and your body temperature drops and your respiration falls. And it just seemed like a

00:49:33 ►

dangerous area. There are a number. One of the interesting chemical frontiers of all this is

00:49:39 ►

these admixtures. In other words, you have the basic ayahuasca, the boiled stems of Banisteriopsis

00:49:46 ►

capi. Normally what’s added to that are the leaves of Cicotria viridis, a rubiaceous bush

00:49:54 ►

related to coffee, which has a great deal of DMT in the leaves. In the northern part of the range where this drug is being made, where it is called not ayahuasca but yahe, brunthelsias, which are also solanaceous plants with very high molecular weight tropanes that have defied characterization, They are sometimes used. But we knew Tim Plowman, and he’s the only non-Indian

00:50:28 ►

person ever to take Brynfelsia, and his description of it, it sounded like, you know, his life hung

00:50:35 ►

in the balance for 36 hours, and he didn’t know whether he would make it or not. So we didn’t go

00:50:42 ►

too deeply into that. What we did do was we always asked our

00:50:46 ►

informants what other plants are sometimes used in ayahuasca and they would usually name them

00:50:53 ►

and we would collect vouchers of nine unusual admixture plants that we collected only one a Menosperm, which is this very small family of plants a menosperm our buta grandifolia

00:51:10 ►

was definitely

00:51:12 ►

alkaloid positive and that’s there’s more work to be done there, but

00:51:20 ►

This technology of admixtures is very interesting and not well understood.

00:51:26 ►

And that kind of thing could be worked out up here in the laboratory

00:51:30 ►

if you could get and grow all these things.

00:51:33 ►

Also, there are vast areas where the question of admixtures hasn’t really been asked yet, right?

00:51:37 ►

That’s right.

00:51:38 ►

There are places where people could go and investigate.

00:51:43 ►

Andy Weil was saying that he felt the significance of the admixtures had to do with

00:51:47 ►

the synergistic effect of the multiple outwards, and it made an incredible amount of difference

00:51:58 ►

to the person who was running for the experience.

00:52:02 ►

Yes.

00:52:03 ►

Well, that’s a weaker way of saying what I said.

00:52:06 ►

I mean, ayahuasca is not effective without an admixture.

00:52:11 ►

It’s an odd experience,

00:52:13 ►

but it’s not an effective trance-inducing compound

00:52:18 ►

or visionary compound without an admixture.

00:52:22 ►

You have to have it.

00:52:26 ►

Could you contrast what you’ve been saying with the muscaria?

00:52:31 ►

Amanita muscaria? Well, that’s an entirely different situation. For those of you who

00:52:38 ►

aren’t familiar with it, I’ll review it briefly. Amanita muscaria is a mushroom that has a mycorrhizal relationship

00:52:46 ►

to birch trees

00:52:47 ►

that is distributed throughout

00:52:49 ►

the world at

00:52:51 ►

altitudes above

00:52:53 ►

5,000. Well, no, actually it occurs at sea level

00:52:56 ►

too. But anyway, it

00:52:57 ►

is highly variable

00:53:00 ►

both geographically and

00:53:01 ►

seasonally. And in Siberia

00:53:04 ►

in the Amur River Basin

00:53:06 ►

the Yakut shamans

00:53:09 ►

and a couple of other tribes

00:53:10 ►

have utilized this

00:53:12 ►

for a long long time

00:53:13 ►

Gordon Wasson wrote a book

00:53:16 ►

in which he tried to suggest

00:53:18 ►

that Amanita Muscaria

00:53:19 ►

may have been the basis

00:53:21 ►

of the Vedic hallucinogen Soma

00:53:24 ►

the problem with Amanita muscaria

00:53:26 ►

which he freely admitted

00:53:28 ►

is it is very hard to get

00:53:30 ►

satisfyingly loaded on it

00:53:31 ►

it is

00:53:34 ►

not consistent and we don’t know

00:53:36 ►

there have been various suggestions

00:53:38 ►

made that you must roast

00:53:40 ►

it over a fire to create

00:53:42 ►

a change in its chemistry

00:53:44 ►

that it must be pounded with milk curd.

00:53:49 ►

Apparently, readings of the Vedas seem to suggest that whatever soma was, it was pounded with milk

00:53:55 ►

curd. People have even come forth with chemical theories to show that the active agent in Amanita muscaria, which is muscimol,

00:54:06 ►

is very closely related to the active toxin in Amanita muscaria, muscarine.

00:54:12 ►

You can decarboxylate muscarine to muscimol using the enzymes in sour milk.

00:54:19 ►

So it might be possible to incubate Amanita muscaria in sour milk

00:54:24 ►

and turn

00:54:25 ►

the toxin into more

00:54:27 ►

of the active agent.

00:54:31 ►

Is that also toxic?

00:54:33 ►

Well,

00:54:34 ►

any, I mean, sure,

00:54:36 ►

you have with any

00:54:37 ►

alkaloid, or what’s called an LD50,

00:54:40 ►

which is the horrifying

00:54:41 ►

concept that

00:54:43 ►

I don’t need to go into.

00:54:46 ►

One thing on other mushrooms, often in the specific reaction of the person relates to

00:54:53 ►

their own biochemistry, and especially what they’ve eaten within the last 48 hours before

00:54:59 ►

you ingest it, you can get semi-toxic effects from certain mushrooms for example if you drink wine

00:55:06 ►

even very common ones like morels

00:55:09 ►

that varies from person to person

00:55:12 ►

so that could be an additional factor too

00:55:15 ►

that’s right there’s a lepiotis species

00:55:17 ►

which if you eat it it’s perfectly harmless

00:55:20 ►

but if you have very much alcohol in your system

00:55:22 ►

it’s fatal and irreversible

00:55:24 ►

another thing to bear in mind is that but if you have very much alcohol in your system, it’s fatal and irreversible.

00:55:34 ►

Another thing to bear in mind is that there are a number of monoamine oxidase inhibitors that occur in foods.

00:55:37 ►

Certain foods are high in these things.

00:55:45 ►

For instance, soft cheeses, brees, and camembert are just loaded with tyramine,

00:55:46 ►

which is a monoamine oxidase

00:55:47 ►

inhibitor.

00:55:48 ►

This is why

00:55:48 ►

certain

00:55:50 ►

antipsychotic

00:55:52 ►

drugs,

00:55:53 ►

this is an

00:55:54 ►

admonition

00:55:55 ►

that they must

00:55:55 ►

not be given

00:55:56 ►

and I think

00:55:58 ►

it would be

00:55:58 ►

murder to

00:55:59 ►

take ayahuasca

00:56:00 ►

on top of

00:56:01 ►

a typical

00:56:02 ►

diet of

00:56:03 ►

camembert

00:56:04 ►

and breeze.

00:56:05 ►

Fortunately, these things are unknown in the Amazon.

00:56:11 ►

Berkeley is a real hard time, huh?

00:56:13 ►

Yes, in Berkeley it would be tricky to keep track of yourself.

00:56:19 ►

But I definitely felt when we were in the Amazon,

00:56:23 ►

the diet is so strange and you cannot avoid it

00:56:27 ►

because everything you carry in goes on your back or on the back of an Indian who you are paying,

00:56:35 ►

and it may not seem like much, but over days and days.

00:56:38 ►

So there’s always an effort to eat off the land.

00:56:42 ►

Oh, my God.

00:56:44 ►

You know, if you’ve never been in a tropical jungle,

00:56:47 ►

people have the notion about a tropical jungle

00:56:49 ►

that it’s just full of food,

00:56:51 ►

wonderful things to eat,

00:56:53 ►

all these plants and things.

00:56:54 ►

But you see, the Amazon has been above water

00:56:58 ►

220 million years.

00:57:02 ►

That’s 220 million years of uninterrupted evolution of a tropical ecosystem

00:57:07 ►

with ample water supply. So that means every ecological niche is occupied. Protein is at

00:57:17 ►

such a premium that there is no protein. You could starve to death in the Amazon there is no protein chambers

00:57:27 ►

who’s the world’s expert on the tropical rainforest estimates that in the Amazon

00:57:33 ►

96% of all utilizable organic material at any one at any given moment is in the

00:57:42 ►

living system in other words only 4% of the organic material is not at any given moment is in a living system. In other words, only 4% of the organic material

00:57:47 ►

is not at any one given time

00:57:49 ►

in an organic system.

00:57:50 ►

What that means in practical terms

00:57:52 ►

is that a leaf falls.

00:57:56 ►

Ten minutes later, it’s gone.

00:57:58 ►

The leaf cutting ends.

00:58:01 ►

The this, the that.

00:58:02 ►

It just sucks it right up.

00:58:05 ►

And minerals in free suspension in rainwater, And the this, the that, it just sucks it right up, you know.

00:58:08 ►

And minerals in free suspension in rainwater, they estimate the average flow distance of an ion in rainwater

00:58:14 ►

is something like a centimeter before it’s uptaken into a living system.

00:58:19 ►

So there is no food in the Amazon.

00:58:22 ►

And this is one of the reasons why coca is so popular

00:58:26 ►

coca in the Amazon is not a drug it’s one a food and two an appetite depressant and this is what

00:58:34 ►

they’re they are you know and people no matter how deeply you go into the Amazon people are outraged

00:58:40 ►

at the notion that coca could be thought a drug a drug is something bad coca is wonderful

00:58:47 ►

you know so uh it’s a very tight ecosystem with very little elaboration of protein and that’s uh

00:58:57 ►

that’s why the search for food plants has been so intense and perhaps why the discover so many

00:59:04 ►

drug plants have been discovered because every single thing has been so intense and perhaps why so many drug plants have been discovered

00:59:06 ►

because every single thing has been tested again and again for its effect as a food,

00:59:11 ►

a poison, a hallucinogen, because everything is to be utilized.

00:59:15 ►

When you mentioned the use of the magic songs in the directing of the group experience in Alaska.

00:59:26 ►

You mentioned that you’re interested in the relationship between the visual experience and language studies.

00:59:31 ►

Do you think that it’s the linguistics, per se, or do you think it’s sound?

00:59:34 ►

I mean, I think frequency versus linguistics in terms of semantics that has the guiding power.

00:59:43 ►

Do you have a feeling for that distinction?

00:59:45 ►

that has the guiding power and deep feeling for that station?

00:59:50 ►

Well, is it possible for a human being to make sounds which do not reflect syntactical deep structure of language?

00:59:55 ►

I mean, in other words, we’re so hardwired for language

00:59:57 ►

that in any extended vocalizing,

01:00:01 ►

a Chomskyite would be able to come and find the linguistic structure of it.

01:00:08 ►

I’m not sure. I think this is a really interesting question because you have input through the senses.

01:00:17 ►

You have one sense perceptor which is geared to transduce audio input

01:00:25 ►

and one which is set to transduce audio input and one which is set to transduce visual input.

01:00:28 ►

But it’s probably something about the way these perceptual systems have evolved

01:00:34 ►

that they divide the incoming input.

01:00:38 ►

Actually, all that’s happening is that you’re moving through a multileveled wave system

01:00:42 ►

of various kinds of inputs, which you are transducing into tactility, vision, and sound.

01:00:51 ►

I think this is a very interesting area for research.

01:00:55 ►

Just recently someone sent me an article,

01:00:59 ►

which I thought was very, very suggestive.

01:01:02 ►

It occurred in no less respectable a place than

01:01:05 ►

Martin Gardner’s

01:01:06 ►

or the

01:01:07 ►

amateur scientist

01:01:08 ►

column in

01:01:10 ►

Scientific American

01:01:11 ►

but they were

01:01:12 ►

pointing out

01:01:12 ►

in there

01:01:13 ►

that if you

01:01:14 ►

can sustain

01:01:15 ►

a hundred

01:01:16 ►

hertz

01:01:16 ►

hum

01:01:17 ►

with your

01:01:19 ►

voice

01:01:19 ►

you can

01:01:20 ►

actually make

01:01:21 ►

an electric

01:01:22 ►

fan

01:01:23 ►

appear to

01:01:24 ►

slow down and stop you can also cause an electric fan appear to slow down and stop.

01:01:26 ►

You can also cause roll lines to appear on a TV set.

01:01:31 ►

Now, what exactly is happening here?

01:01:34 ►

It isn’t that the fan slows down or that the roll lines appear on the TV.

01:01:39 ►

The scientific explanation which they put forth was that a well-sustained 100 hertz hum actually vibrates your eyeballs

01:01:50 ►

so that they become like strobes and you can freeze motion

01:01:55 ►

and you can slow things down and start them up again.

01:02:00 ►

So other people aren’t able to perceive it?

01:02:02 ►

No, other people don’t perceive it, but you perceive it.

01:02:04 ►

There were anecdotes about airplane mechanics them up again. So other people aren’t able to perceive it? No, other people don’t perceive it, but you perceive it.

01:02:05 ►

There were anecdotes about airplane mechanics who can look at a spinning propeller and tell

01:02:11 ►

if it’s flawed by jerking their head back and forth very quickly.

01:02:16 ►

And this is very interesting, because here is a way to use your voice to control your

01:02:24 ►

visual input and to actually gain secret

01:02:27 ►

information if we had written a secret word on that propeller you could win bets in a bar

01:02:37 ►

so um i think this needs to be looked into what can we learn about the world by subjecting our bodies

01:02:45 ►

to different

01:02:46 ►

kinds of

01:02:46 ►

self-generated

01:02:47 ►

vibrations

01:02:48 ►

and you know

01:02:50 ►

without the

01:02:50 ►

backup of

01:02:51 ►

someone like

01:02:51 ►

Martin Gardner

01:02:52 ►

I’m sure people

01:02:53 ►

would dismiss

01:02:54 ►

a rap like

01:02:54 ►

that as

01:02:55 ►

pure

01:02:55 ►

fancy

01:02:57 ►

utterly

01:02:57 ►

preposterous

01:02:58 ►

the guy who

01:02:59 ►

wrote the

01:02:59 ►

article said

01:03:00 ►

it was very

01:03:00 ►

hard for him

01:03:01 ►

he didn’t

01:03:02 ►

have perfect

01:03:02 ►

pitch

01:03:03 ►

it was very

01:03:04 ►

hard for him

01:03:04 ►

to maintain this 100 Hz hum,

01:03:08 ►

so what he did was he got a wave generator which would perfectly generate the hum,

01:03:15 ►

and then he modified a football helmet so that he could strap it to his stereo speaker so he would rest his chin on his speaker and run this thing up to

01:03:26 ►

100 hertz and then pop the motion of the fan well this is just an example of peripheral human

01:03:36 ►

abilities that we have not explored i’m sure you all on lsd have experienced the time-smearing effect of motion where you move your hand and it just

01:03:47 ►

leaves it hanging there in all of its stages and people will say well your retinas are simply not

01:03:54 ►

quenching the previous image of some problem in the something or other but the effect is to smear the psyche in time,

01:04:05 ►

because the psyche is defined largely by the way the sensory inputs are interpreted.

01:04:14 ►

So I think these linguistic phenomena are very suggestive of special abilities.

01:04:24 ►

I’ve said many times,

01:04:26 ►

you’ve probably all heard me say it,

01:04:28 ►

Philo Judeus,

01:04:29 ►

who was an exact contemporary of Christ,

01:04:32 ►

born before, died after,

01:04:34 ►

was on a bug about what he called

01:04:37 ►

the more perfect logos.

01:04:39 ►

And he said the more perfect logos

01:04:41 ►

will be beheld rather than heard, but it will go from being

01:04:47 ►

heard to being seen without ever crossing over a quantized point of division. Now that

01:04:55 ►

suggests that hearing and seeing are just two ends of a continuum, and that your eyes

01:05:00 ►

slot you into part of that spectrum, your ears slot you into another, but that it’s really a continuing spectrum.

01:05:08 ►

And the evolution of this more perfect logos

01:05:11 ►

is my hope for psilocybin,

01:05:15 ►

that this can become an experience for people,

01:05:17 ►

a kind of ursprach.

01:05:20 ►

You may be aware of Robert Graves’ book,

01:05:24 ►

The White Goddess

01:05:25 ►

where he talks about

01:05:27 ►

a perfect poetic language

01:05:30 ►

that predates history

01:05:31 ►

a language of poetry

01:05:33 ►

so intense

01:05:34 ►

that to hear it

01:05:35 ►

was to understand it

01:05:37 ►

it required no conventionalizing

01:05:40 ►

of cultural context

01:05:42 ►

and dictionary

01:05:42 ►

it was so laden with existential validity

01:05:46 ►

that to hear it was to understand it.

01:05:49 ►

We have very few articulations like that left.

01:05:54 ►

Perhaps moans, screams, and howls are the only words.

01:05:58 ►

I think the Icaros.

01:05:59 ►

The Icaros.

01:06:00 ►

And they’re in varied Peruvian Indian dialects. And yet when you’re taking ayahuasca and they’re

01:06:08 ►

taking it and singing them, you can understand them even though you’ve never heard the language

01:06:12 ►

before.

01:06:13 ►

Did you get validation from the other people with it?

01:06:15 ►

Yes. All of us who couldn’t understand the language all felt very deeply that we were

01:06:20 ►

having images which jive with each other that we were getting.

01:06:24 ►

And did they then jive with the images of the people?

01:06:27 ►

That’s harder.

01:06:27 ►

It’s hard for them to talk about that, those people,

01:06:30 ►

because they are magical times.

01:06:31 ►

They don’t analyze them in non-magical time.

01:06:35 ►

Did you get any cross-reference?

01:06:37 ►

Yes.

01:06:37 ►

Yes, we did.

01:06:38 ►

We had, back to you talking about the telepathic aspects of the telepathic moments, it had to do with the songs moments that had to do with the songs

01:06:47 ►

and had to do with the visions. But we all recognized at one point we and the

01:06:52 ►

environment outside all recognized the encroaching presence of death. Some kind of

01:06:56 ►

death element. It was just outside the building. A baby cried, a dog howled, the clouds went over the moon,

01:07:01 ►

and everybody got a big chill. I just did.

01:07:11 ►

And the shaman jumped up and, like, commanded all of us in a way to go with him and then began hooting it away, you know, and it took some minutes.

01:07:16 ►

And then it was gone in one moment.

01:07:18 ►

Everyone just laid back and he sighed, really.

01:07:20 ►

That was a very telepathic moment that was not conducted in any language common to everyone there.

01:07:26 ►

What was your experience when you took it after having salmonella?

01:07:30 ►

And what experience that will connect to having had salmonella?

01:07:34 ►

Um, you mean just what did it feel like when you’d have salmonella and then take ayahuasca?

01:07:39 ►

Yeah. I’m wondering if there were things that you experienced during the ayahuasca trance

01:07:45 ►

that were definitely connected to having salmonella and resulting in the…

01:07:50 ►

Oh, yes. Traveling through your organs, traveling through your bloodstream,

01:07:53 ►

being in your stomach and in your guts, recognizing, like on a tiny level,

01:07:57 ►

being a molecule, traveling through, seeing the little yellow enemies or whatever,

01:08:04 ►

traveling through, you know, seeing the little yellow enemies or whatever,

01:08:08 ►

all of those things happen, you know, the healing on that level,

01:08:12 ►

you can do it to yourself very well.

01:08:14 ►

And it just felt like it just flushed it all out,

01:08:17 ►

like the awareness, the deep awareness that we got in ayahuasca made all the bad invaders go away.

01:08:20 ►

And then they would be gone until we ate the food.

01:08:23 ►

Yeah, right.

01:08:25 ►

It’s very much like what Palo Churro is doing at UC, in their behavioral medicine

01:08:29 ►

clinic. But they’re not using any drug-induced transverse medication.

01:08:34 ►

Yeah.

01:08:34 ►

Mm-hmm.

01:08:35 ►

Okay.

01:08:37 ►

Yeah.

01:08:38 ►

I wonder if you’d comment on the relationship of what you’re talking about to psychedelic synesthesia let’s say things

01:08:48 ►

like lsd you mean by psychedelic synesthesia you mean fusing of the sensorium under psychedelic

01:08:55 ►

drugs the initiation of visual phenomena by sound you mean do I think that happens on LSD?

01:09:06 ►

It’s analogous to what you’re talking about in that thing that I watched.

01:09:08 ►

Yes, pretty much, except that it’s controllable, you know.

01:09:13 ►

And in fact, that’s almost too restrictive a term.

01:09:20 ►

It isn’t that the sound controls the visions.

01:09:24 ►

It’s that the sound is the term. It isn’t that the sound controls the visions. It’s that the sound is the vision.

01:09:27 ►

And if you want to change the vision, you must change the sound. And so you actually

01:09:32 ►

can take control. Ayahuasca is wonderfully suggestive and can be led in a way that these

01:09:40 ►

other things sometimes can’t be. For instance, one of the most puzzling things that it can do

01:09:46 ►

is that you can suggest

01:09:48 ►

a motif

01:09:49 ►

for instance art deco

01:09:52 ►

and it will just go to that

01:09:54 ►

and flood you

01:09:56 ►

with millions and millions

01:09:58 ►

and millions of objects

01:10:01 ►

all perfectly exemplifying

01:10:03 ►

this very constrained

01:10:04 ►

artistic style

01:10:06 ►

and then you

01:10:07 ►

can say

01:10:08 ►

01:10:09 ►

attic vases

01:10:10 ►

let’s do

01:10:12 ►

attic vases

01:10:13 ►

thousands

01:10:14 ►

of them

01:10:15 ►

more than

01:10:15 ►

there must

01:10:16 ►

you know

01:10:17 ►

and then you

01:10:18 ►

can say

01:10:18 ►

okay now

01:10:19 ►

do one

01:10:20 ►

that now

01:10:20 ►

surprise me

01:10:21 ►

and it will

01:10:23 ►

produce an

01:10:23 ►

equally

01:10:24 ►

aesthetically coherent

01:10:26 ►

stream of images

01:10:26 ►

that are not referent

01:10:28 ►

to any historical period.

01:10:32 ►

So then this raises questions,

01:10:34 ►

you know,

01:10:34 ►

what is fashion?

01:10:36 ►

What is style?

01:10:37 ►

What are these

01:10:38 ►

collective image systems

01:10:41 ►

which come out of nowhere,

01:10:44 ►

gain great power

01:10:45 ►

and then fade away

01:10:47 ►

and how is it that a drug

01:10:50 ►

can command them

01:10:51 ►

out of the single human mind

01:10:54 ►

what does it mean

01:10:55 ►

that on a psychedelic drug

01:10:57 ►

one person can see more art

01:10:59 ►

in an hour than the species

01:11:01 ►

has produced in 10,000 years

01:11:04 ►

what does that say about how effectively

01:11:07 ►

we are accessing our souls? I mean, the potential then is so great. I mean, you prove it to

01:11:16 ►

yourself, you know? I mean, it’s very frustrating to imagine that that kind of beauty, those depths of ecstatic revelation are that accessible to the individual

01:11:28 ►

and so totally hidden from us as a group.

01:11:32 ►

How can the potential be tapped in our time?

01:11:36 ►

By evolving language,

01:11:39 ►

by recognizing that reality is created by language

01:11:42 ►

and no longer accepting the natural evolution of language

01:11:46 ►

but actually going to work

01:11:48 ►

to evolve language ever more rapidly

01:11:51 ►

so that we can communicate these modalities.

01:11:58 ►

I think that’s a lot of what’s happening here

01:12:00 ►

and the kind of meaning of trying to put together

01:12:03 ►

some sort of expressing these experiences

01:12:05 ►

that doesn’t totally violate them and rip them apart.

01:12:09 ►

It’s a very long process creating a new language.

01:12:14 ►

You mentioned at one point transcending the ego.

01:12:18 ►

It’s what so many people experience, whether in a specific healing event for each person or a collective event

01:12:29 ►

that happens when you get off. I ask this because I think it’s very intimately connected

01:12:39 ►

with what was just mentioned here, that’s the abrution the linguistic language and the tapping of our potential has to do with transcending the ego.

01:12:48 ►

Transcending the ego and its expectation and its linguistic set mainly.

01:12:54 ►

And its control over what we experience.

01:12:56 ►

Yes, language has not been examined enough, it seems to me all the argument over man’s place in nature and that sort of thing

01:13:07 ►

doesn’t take cognizance of the fact that if you want to if you want a miracle then language is

01:13:14 ►

the thing to look at because we know that our genetic component is only three percent or

01:13:22 ►

something removed from chimpanzees and this and that.

01:13:25 ►

But this thing that we do with sound and meaning is of an ontologically different order.

01:13:32 ►

And I am not sympathetic with the people who want to blur the distinctions and say that

01:13:38 ►

dolphins talk, ants talk, bees talk.

01:13:42 ►

They may communicate, but this is a very different thing what man is

01:13:47 ►

able to do because for 50,000 years or so man has the species has not been

01:13:55 ►

evolving in the soma type. Soma type is relatively steady what is evolving is culture, and what culture is, really, is language.

01:14:07 ►

Culture is merely the epiphenomenal accompaniment of language.

01:14:13 ►

So it is the evolution of language that is changing,

01:14:17 ►

and all our ontological, all our religious ontologies in the Western tradition,

01:14:24 ►

the insistence on the coming of the word into the world,

01:14:28 ►

the word becoming flesh.

01:14:31 ►

In a sense, man is the word become flesh.

01:14:35 ►

And what all this leads to, I’m not sure.

01:14:40 ►

I often like to think that our map of the world is so wrong

01:14:44 ►

that where we have centered physics,

01:14:48 ►

we should actually place literature as the central metaphor

01:14:54 ►

that we want to work out from.

01:14:56 ►

Because I think literature occupies the same relationship to life

01:15:02 ►

that life occupies to death. And I don’t think very many people

01:15:08 ►

have thought of it in those terms.

01:15:09 ►

You might be elaborating, please, on that one.

01:15:12 ►

True testimony of the word truth.

01:15:16 ►

Well, in the sense that a book is life with one dimension pulled out of it.

01:15:31 ►

And life is something which lacks a dimension which death will give it.

01:15:33 ►

I imagine death to be a kind of release into the imagination

01:15:37 ►

in the sense that for characters in a book,

01:15:43 ►

what we experience

01:15:45 ►

is an unimaginable dimension of freedom.

01:15:49 ►

And this is why people like James Joyce,

01:15:52 ►

though arcane and difficult to pierce,

01:15:55 ►

seem to me central to understanding this,

01:15:57 ►

because they’re saying something

01:15:59 ►

about the relationship of books, reality, and death,

01:16:04 ►

that this is a

01:16:05 ►

cycle of

01:16:06 ►

expansion and

01:16:07 ►

understanding that

01:16:07 ►

is happening

01:16:08 ►

through language.

01:16:09 ►

At one time

01:16:09 ►

there were no

01:16:10 ►

books.

01:16:12 ►

I think what

01:16:13 ►

you’re saying is

01:16:13 ►

extremely perceptive.

01:16:15 ►

At the same

01:16:15 ►

time, I think

01:16:16 ►

there’s a

01:16:16 ►

meta-problem

01:16:17 ►

with it, which

01:16:18 ►

is that if you

01:16:18 ►

take a metaphor

01:16:21 ►

of literature,

01:16:21 ►

what you’ve done

01:16:22 ►

is you do the

01:16:23 ►

same thing that

01:16:24 ►

we’re doing all

01:16:24 ►

the time, which is trying to abstract one thing that we’re doing all the time,

01:16:25 ►

which is trying to abstract one element that is the central metaphor.

01:16:29 ►

It seems to me the central problem we’re in is that it’s very difficult for us to give equal emphasis

01:16:35 ►

to all possible metaphors, all possible physical metaphors, biological metaphors, psychological, literary metaphor. The problem is we focus too much on one thing.

01:16:47 ►

We’re unable to express, well, not unable,

01:16:50 ►

but having great difficulty in expressing a totality.

01:16:53 ►

Well, see, what you want is a theory of being true to experience.

01:16:58 ►

And what we have by centering physics

01:17:01 ►

is a theory of being true to itself,

01:17:06 ►

meaning physics doesn’t contradict itself.

01:17:08 ►

They go to great pains to make sure that doesn’t happen.

01:17:12 ►

On the other hand, the models that it offers bear no relationship to anything.

01:17:17 ►

Anybody can see, experience, know, or understand.

01:17:21 ►

So somehow an explanatory vehicle was chosen,

01:17:29 ►

understand. So somehow an explanatory vehicle was chosen which explains something, but nothing with any immediacy.

01:17:31 ►

Right. Well, what I’m saying is to draw in other things, but not to push out the quantum

01:17:37 ►

physics model, but to integrate all of them so that you’ve got a more comprehensive view

01:17:43 ►

and not trying to select one overly.

01:17:46 ►

Yes, but you want it to be true to experience.

01:17:48 ►

Yeah.

01:17:49 ►

And the entire set of objects manipulated by physics are unseen, unknown.

01:17:55 ►

I mean, to take as simple an object in physics as the electron, it seems more remote than

01:18:03 ►

the resurrected Christ to me.

01:18:07 ►

And yet by invoking those notions we then created them.

01:18:10 ►

You know, to try and find further and further particles.

01:18:13 ►

We created them.

01:18:14 ►

More and more of them.

01:18:14 ►

That’s right.

01:18:15 ►

But do these new creations then reflect back on experience?

01:18:19 ►

Do we learn then to be better people or more at ease with ourselves? And it seems the answer is no.

01:18:27 ►

We just unlock more and more demonic levels of power.

01:18:33 ►

But that’s the contradiction that physics produces in itself,

01:18:36 ►

how they’re trying to find a unified field theory for it.

01:18:40 ►

What we need is a unified social field

01:18:42 ►

so that we don’t cause our extinction.

01:18:47 ►

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.

01:18:56 ►

A uniform social theory so that we don’t cause our extinction.

01:19:01 ►

Now, hey, that’s something that, as Terrence said, we should have our best people

01:19:07 ►

working on. And I guess that is exactly what you are doing right now. So press on. Just be sure

01:19:14 ►

that it includes having some fun, because sometimes these head trips can wear us out, don’t you think?

01:19:20 ►

Now, since you may not remember it from one of my earlier podcasts, but at least once before I’ve mentioned the story that Paul Stamets told about the Amanita muscaria mushrooms.

01:19:32 ►

I wish I had permission to tell the whole story of how he learned this fact, because it’s one of the funniest mushroom stories I’ve heard.

01:19:41 ►

But the bottom line is that apparently the active ingredient

01:19:45 ►

in the Amanita is not always equally distributed in the cap. As I remember the story, you could

01:19:51 ►

have three quarters of a mushroom cap be totally inactive, but the other one quarter could

01:19:57 ►

knock your socks off. And of course, you can find a lot more about this at arrowid.org, should you be interested.

01:20:07 ►

E-R-O-W-I-D dot org.

01:20:11 ►

Now, rather than add any more of my own comments right now,

01:20:14 ►

I’m going to first pass along a couple of announcements and then get on with the editing of the next tape in this series

01:20:17 ►

and see if I can get it out before another week passes.

01:20:21 ►

But here is part of an email I received from Brian Duffy,

01:20:24 ►

and I think it may be of interest to some of our fellow salonners, maybe even to you.

01:20:30 ►

Here’s part of what Brian had to say.

01:20:33 ►

I am an avid follower of the Psychedelic Salon podcast and a big fan of Terrence McKenna.

01:20:38 ►

After listening to dozens of hours of tapes and reading all of his books, I started to wonder why none of his fellow scholars

01:20:45 ►

had attempted any sort of big Terence McKenna biography.

01:20:49 ►

There’s plenty to piece together from his talks and books,

01:20:52 ►

but only small paragraphs of actual biographical material out there.

01:20:56 ►

Are you aware of anything more substantial?

01:20:59 ►

Well, as I told Brian,

01:21:01 ►

I’m not personally aware of any efforts like that at this time,

01:21:04 ►

but I’m passing this request along to see if maybe some of our fellow salonners

01:21:09 ►

or even you know something like that might be in the works.

01:21:14 ►

Now, my final announcement is one that I hope you take action on.

01:21:18 ►

This is my 240th podcast from here in the Psychedelic Salon,

01:21:22 ►

and on each and every one of them,

01:21:27 ►

there’s been another person whose voice you’ve heard in the background.

01:21:31 ►

And that’s my dear friend, Jock Oliver.

01:21:37 ►

And as you know, Jock is the man behind the musical group Chateau Hayuk, whose song El Alien is our theme song here in the salon.

01:21:41 ►

Now what you may not know is that Jock is also the caretaker gardener at Terrence

01:21:46 ►

McKenna’s old house on Hawaii, and along with Finn, they’re restoring the garden to its original

01:21:51 ►

condition. However, due to a stroke of bad luck, Jacques now needs to raise some money in a hurry

01:21:58 ►

and is trying to do so by selling his new CD titled Nature Loves Courage. And that’s all one word, by the

01:22:07 ►

way, Nature Loves Courage. And it’s available as an mp3 download at www.cdbaby.com, which is

01:22:19 ►

the musician’s site there. And I’ll put a link directly through to the CD with the program notes for this podcast.

01:22:27 ►

But over the years, I’ve had a lot of requests about Jacques’ music

01:22:30 ►

and his Chateau Hayouk CD that our theme music came from is out of print.

01:22:38 ►

But at last, now you have a chance to hear what he’s been up to these past few years.

01:22:42 ►

And by the way, there’s even a trance mix of our theme song

01:22:46 ►

on his new CD.

01:22:47 ►

So if you can, it would be really cool

01:22:50 ►

if you can give Jacques a helping hand

01:22:52 ►

and I’m also sure that

01:22:54 ►

you’re going to enjoy his new music.

01:22:56 ►

And as soon as I can get my own act

01:22:58 ►

together I hope to do an interview

01:23:00 ►

with Jacques from Terrence’s house and

01:23:01 ►

also get a preview of his music

01:23:04 ►

for you as well.

01:23:05 ►

Well, that’s going to have to do it for today. And so I’ll close today’s podcast by reminding

01:23:12 ►

you once again that this and most of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon are

01:23:16 ►

freely available for you to use in your own audio projects under the Creative Commons

01:23:21 ►

Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 3.0 License. And if you have any questions about that,

01:23:26 ►

just click the Creative Commons link at the bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage,

01:23:30 ►

which you can get to via psychedelicsalon.org.

01:23:34 ►

And if you’re interested in the philosophy behind the salon,

01:23:37 ►

you can hear a lot about it in my novel, The Genesis Generation,

01:23:41 ►

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

01:23:47 ►

And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic space.

01:23:52 ►

Be well, my friends.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

240 - Philosophical Gadfly Part 1

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Program Notes

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