Program Notes
Guest speakers: Dennis McKenna and David Ellenbogen
Please Support Dennis McKenna’s Kickstarter Project:
The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss!
[NOTE: All quotations are by Dennis McKenna.]
“The brain is essentially a communications network … all this complex network of neurons that cross-talk to each other through these neurotransmitters.”
“We think of ourselves as separate from the environment. We’re kind of here, and our skin separates us from the environment, but we’re not like that at all. We’re semi-permeable membranes. Things are coming in all the time in the form of food, drugs, smoke, other things that we absorb, and we’re putting out things all the time at the same time. So we’re part of this chemical communication system.”
“If it weren’t for the linkage to symbols, or significance, which are abstractions, we wouldn’t be conscious. That is the sine qua non of consciousness, is that we’re immersed in this world of ideas and abstractions, and dreams. And this kind of experience is as real as the external world for us. And not really separated from us. That’s what sets us apart from animals.”
“Consciousness is something you detect, like tuning a television set to different channels, as much as it is something that the brain generates. I think the brain modulates signals that come from outside, but consciousness is probably more primal than matter.”
“It’s not only up to us. Life probably permeates the universe, and that means intelligence permeates the universe. And that’s good. So if we blow it, and it looks like we’re probably going to, others will carry on. And if we wake up in time maybe we can be part of that. Our challenge is to propagate these understandings through enough people that people do wake up and they realize that we’ve got to get cracking.”
“Ayahuasca is now a global phenomenon, and this is part of the plants’ reaching out, trying to reach out to larger groups of people and basically hit us upside the head with a two by four and say, “Hey you monkeys wake up! You’re fucking it up! You have to wake up.”
“I think humility is essential for doing this [working with psychedelic plants]. This is the other thing that to me personally, and I think to a lot of people I think this is the message of the plant teachers, not only ‘You monkeys need to wake up,’ but ‘You monkeys need to get over yourselves. You monkeys only think you’re running the show. You’re not running the show.’ If anything, the plants are running the show.”
“Religions, established religions tend to want you to take a lot of things on faith for which there’s not a shred of evidence. And so the doctrines and the dogmas become essentially political institutions, they become instruments for keeping people in line, don’t ask too many questions, just accept it.”
“One of the maybe adverse side effects of psychedelics is that they’ll make you think you’re the messiah, or you somehow have to play a role in this.”
“I think ayahuasca is perfectly capable of finding the people it needs, and the people who need to find ayahuasca will find it. And there’s no need for cults or movements or very much human intervention, although a lot of people will be convinced that we must do this.”
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
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 before I introduce today’s program, I’d first like to thank a few of our fellow salonners who either made a donation to the salon or who bought a copy of my novel,
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the pay-what-you-can audiobook, The Genesis Generation.
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And those fine people are… And, hey, I really want to thank you all so much for your continuing support.
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I know a lot of you have been with us for a long time here, and it really means a lot to me.
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Now, for today’s program, as promised, we are about to listen
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to an interview that Dennis McKenna gave to David Ellenbogen, in which David played last night,
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no, it was the night before, on WKCR 89.9 FM radio in New York City. And David very kindly
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has allowed me to replay that interview for you
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here in the salon. And by the way, after we hear this interview, I’ll be telling you about a new
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podcast that David’s also started. But first, let’s tune in as he asks a few questions of
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one of our elders who is deeply rooted in both the academic world and the world of the shaman.
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In past podcasts with Dennis’s brother Terrence, there have been many occasions where we heard The Shaman Now we are at long last getting the chance to hear some of these interesting thoughts directly from Dennis himself.
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So let’s join them now. Good evening. You are tuned to WKCR 89.9 FM New York.
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This is Studio A.
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My name is David Ellenbogen.
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So glad to have you.
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It’s going to be a really interesting show.
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And that is because we have Dennis McKenna as our guest.
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Dennis McKenna is an author and an ethnopharmacologist,
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a well-respected scientist who’s dedicated his life to exploring plants and their potential.
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If you find his ideas compelling, and I expect that you will,
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Google Dennis McKenna Kickstarter,
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and you will learn about his campaign to write a book about his experiences with his brother, Terence McKenna,
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one of the most radical philosophers of our time.
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So yes, if you get three things out of this program,
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one would be that you have a chance to be a part of what will be an incredible book.
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And it’s going to be called The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss.
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Written by Dennis McKenna about the wild adventures that he’s had with his brother.
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Internal and external adventures.
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his brother internal and external adventures.
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And number two would be to inspire you to research the ideas of Terence McKenna further.
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And number three would be that you might totally change the way you think about plants.
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So yeah, we’re going to dive in.
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This was pre-recorded at Dennis’ friend’s Alexandra’s house a couple months ago before Dennis gave a talk about plants and creativity.
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So let’s dive in.
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And stay tuned.
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Thanks for listening.
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Maybe I’ll start with a quote from Michael Potlin that exists in my iPhone. Basically, he states that a lima bean, when attacked by a spider mite,
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can release a volatile chemical that summons the species of another mite
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to attack that first mite.
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He mentions that, and he also mentions in the same quote to attack that first mite.
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He mentions that, and he also mentions in the same quote that when they did research, when they did the Human Genome Project,
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they found that the human beings only had 25,000 genes,
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while a grain of rice had 35,000.
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So I wondered what does this say to you as a scientist?
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Well, the part about communication with the lima bean,
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or that example, you know, is a good example of what I’ll be talking about tonight,
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which is basically that plants, that chemistry is the language of plants in a certain sense.
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And plants are able to make all of this enormous biodiversity
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of what they call secondary compounds.
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They’re not really secondary,
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but they’re compounds that are not universally distributed among all living things.
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They’re things that certain species or certain families make,
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or certain families make,
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and they’re obviously not required to maintain life because not everybody makes all of these things,
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but what they are is basically a system of chemical communication
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that the plants use.
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These are messenger molecules,
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and the plants substitute chemistry or biosynthesis as you could call it
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for behavior that’s how they interact animals interact with their world through behavior
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you know through the fight or flight or or fuck reaction you know we’re always responding to stimuli from the environment in that way and
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we respond through behavior and we can move around and all that and so this makes sense
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well plants don’t move around in the same way they have ways to distribute their seeds and so on but
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they just kind of sit there.
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But it’s not that they’re not doing anything.
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They are chemical factories that are communicating and maintaining
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and balancing this chemical ecosystem with everything else in their environment,
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which includes other plants of the same species, other species of plants,
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fungi and microorganisms in the soil, herbivores, which includes us, that might want to nibble
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on these plants, and sometimes they want to be nibbled. You know, that helps their reproductive cycle.
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Sometimes they want you to stay away,
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and so a lot of these things are toxins or repellents.
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Others are signaling molecules,
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and others are more symbiotic.
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You know, they help establish and maintain symbiosis
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with other organisms.
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And that’s what they do.
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That’s how they communicate.
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And so it gets interesting.
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I mean, it’s interesting in itself, but it gets interesting when we focus on the relationships between plants and higher organisms like us,
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organisms with complex nervous systems,
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because plants have these neurotransmitter-like molecules too, right?
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In fact, that’s where they came from, ultimately.
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These things are signaling molecules that are uniquely suited to communication.
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And, you know, in evolution, these molecules, these neurotransmitter-like molecules have
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become, you know, they originally may have had an external communication type function,
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but then they have become internalized and so the brain is essentially
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a communications network it’s you know all this complex network of neurons with you know that
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cross talk to each other through these neurotransmitters and it’s it’s kind of interesting to me that the neurotransmitters that are involved in the functions of consciousness, as far as we understand that, we know that serotonin, dopamine, epinephrine, norepinephrine are the so-called biogenic amines.
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And these are the main neurotransmitters that function in the brain
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in the areas that we know regulate consciousness.
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And these neurotransmitters come from amino acids.
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They come from amino acids,
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and they come from what they call essential amino acids.
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They’re essential because we don’t make them.
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We have to get them from our diet.
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Other things make them.
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We don’t make those things,
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so we have to get them from our diet.
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So these messenger molecules, essentially these plant molecules,
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we are plants in a certain sense.
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We get from our diet these neurotransmitter precursors
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that then our body can convert into these neurotransmitters. So,
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you know, were it not for the plants on that level, there would be, you know,
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we wouldn’t have these functions. Now, this business about the genes and the apparent paucity
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or, you know, the puzzle, we’re so complex, why do we have fewer genes than a grain of rice?
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You know, I don’t know if anybody really has the answer to that.
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But, you know, the paradigm that seems to be emerging, it used to be thought,
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one gene, one enzyme, one gene, one protein.
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one gene, one enzyme, one gene, one protein.
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And that may be true, but a lot of what goes on,
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a lot of what’s important in making these systems,
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our systems so complex is post-translational,
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after the protein has been made.
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Then it’s modified by various factors, you know, internal and external.
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It’s cleaved in different ways. It, you know, the proteins are made and come off the ribosome, and then they’re usually modified in some ways. They may be methylated in certain places or
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chopped up into smaller fragments that then go off and do their functions.
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So this whole realm of, this is not genomics, this is proteomics.
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And the one gene may make one protein, but that protein may feed into multiple functions.
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but that protein may feed into multiple functions.
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And a single gene, it’s not as simple a picture as it used to be.
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A single gene can make proteins that have multiple functions.
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And it’s at that level that the complexity arises.
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So the fact that we have fewer genes than a grain of rice,
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I mean, I don’t know if it still explains that,
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but it seems like on the proteomic level,
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the degree of modification that goes on following the synthesis of these proteins is much more complex.
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It must be, because obviously we think we’re more complex than a turnip, say,
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but maybe not so much, maybe not as much as we thought.
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So I think that’s kind of the current view,
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and it’s a model, like everything in science is a model
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um and right now that’s the best explanation for it but it’s still it’s still remarkable
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you know i mean it’s not so much about genetics it’s more about epigenetics. And that’s interesting because that opens the door to other evolutionary mechanisms.
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It’s not simply the simple Darwinian picture of natural selection.
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It becomes much more elaborated because
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it opens the door to environmental
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modification.
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For example,
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there’s a very interesting
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theory.
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There’s a book
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called Left in the Dark,
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which is a theory about neural evolution
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that talks about the environment
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that early hominids evolved in
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was originally an arboreal environment
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in which their diet was mainly fruits,
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very little meat, but mainly fruits and other plants.
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And the net effect, the constituents in that kind of diet
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was very high in neurotransmitter precursors,
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neurotransmitter-like substances, monoamine oxidase inhibitors,
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essentially the chemistry that you find in pineal functions.
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And his theory is that this environment, influenced by the essentially chemical ecology that these hominids were evolving in, potentiated pineal functions.
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Those folks had a much more integrated kind of organization of their brains,
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where in our brains
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our left brain is dominant
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in most people
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and the right brain is the intuitive
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creative brain
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but it’s usually the so called
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inferior hemisphere
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there’s nothing inferior about it
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but it’s less accessible
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right and so
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most people at least conditioned by western civilization
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are you know analytical and uh uh you know
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more the the the uh left brain functions are are more structured than the right brain functions. But the right brain is where the creativity is
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and to a certain extent musical and mathematical abilities.
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You know, this is all left brain stuff.
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And his theory was that, you know, these hominids in this environment
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had access to this and that it wasn’t a genetic effect.
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It was an epigenetic effect because it modified the uterine environment of the female.
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So the fetus grows up in this environment that’s essentially modeled
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or in some sense influenced from the outside
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from the dietary
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the diet of the mother
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and the mothers are living in this environment
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and so that has this epigenetic effect
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on the development of the fetus
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and the brain development of the fetus
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as long as that environment continues,
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then it goes on from generation to generation.
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And you don’t need thousands of generations for this to manifest.
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You need a few generations.
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But then, so this fellow’s theory goes,
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the environment changed, the climate changed,
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these groups moved from the forest into the savannah, and their diet changed.
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They started eating a lot of grains, they started hunting animals and eating a lot more meat,
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they invented cooking, they didn’t consume so many of these fruits.
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And they had, you know, the pineal potentiation was suppressed.
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And the steroids from their animal diet has the opposite effect.
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It suppresses pineal potentiation so gradually the what what we think of
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the neural evolution he’s he’s claiming is neural devolution in a sense that we
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lost this connection between the hemispheres gradually and the hem and
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the and the right hemisphere came to be thought of as the inferior hemisphere, but it wasn’t inferior, but we lost access to it in a certain sense. For example, maybe things like telepathy, you know, or just more intuitive integration with our environment.
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And as this continued, and it’s only continued in our time as our diet has gotten worse and worse,
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In our time, as our diet has gotten worse and worse,
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now our diet, the typical modern diet,
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has almost no relationship to nature.
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It’s all processed foods and all that.
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So this is what, since this connection was lost, these somewhat less desirable traits
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having to do with our left brain fixations have become dominant.
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But the brain of modern humans is actually only about three quarters the size of Neanderthals, for example.
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Our brain is shrunk.
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Our brain is shrunk, yeah.
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Now, you have to take into account body mass and all that,
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because talking about brain size without talking about body mass is,
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you know, it doesn’t make any sense, right,
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because an elephant’s brain is a lot bigger than ours and so on.
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But they are not particularly intelligent they’re not intelligent enough to do what we do
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which is create culture and language and all that but that this relationship you know over time has
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has accelerated and we become more and more estranged from the kind of functions that the right brain
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it’s not that it’s not going on it’s just it’s more in the background and we’re not always
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accessible to it so a lot of these spiritual practices psychedelics meditation various kinds
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of integrative things are techniques to try to re-establish this connection
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to try to re-establish this
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and potentially, I mean the implications of his theory
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is that you could also over time
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if you were to change the environment
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you could re-establish this
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and perhaps recover from this
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neurodegenerative disease that we
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have which is known as
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civilization
00:22:10 ►
right
00:22:13 ►
so
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right so this
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summarizes what this last
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piece that you’re saying basically
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our as our diet
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changed, we devolved
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from having a
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more integrated left-right
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hemisphere existence
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and that led to a
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dominance of our left brain, which
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leads to male dominance,
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anal
00:22:42 ►
thinking. Exactly.
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All of those things.
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And a more or less suppression of the right brain by the left brain.
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I mean, the left brain kind of took over the executive functions
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and the right brain, being the right brain,
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wasn’t particularly interested in that anyway.
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So, okay, you know, you guys go run things
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and I’ll just be here as the
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source of you know all creativity and insight and all that i i don’t know if it’s uh if it’s uh
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true true i mean it it’s a reasonable theory um and it explains a few things. One of the things about evolutionary theory or evolutionary biology that’s always puzzled me,
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and this is kind of my main wrap for tonight’s talk and my main wrap in general,
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is that because of this plant communication system that works throughout the ecosystem,
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and it works on everything in it that interacts with plants,
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it just makes sense that secondary products, which work often at the genomic level and various levels,
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at the genomic level and various levels, had an influence on evolution, you know, in terms of the way that we adapted to this chemical environment.
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Some of the adaptations were behavioral and some of them were genetic, right?
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Like, for example, behavioral adaptations have to do with things like, well, purging,
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Adaptations have to do with things like, well, purging, for example, or methods of cooking or methods of detoxifying plants to make them edible.
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You know, these are all simple folk technologies,
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but they enable the hominids to have a wider diet to be essentially omnivores
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because we’ve evolved those adaptations.
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But then over on the genomic side,
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there’s also biochemical adaptations that are going on.
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The liver is essentially the body’s toxin filter in some ways.
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It’s loaded with enzyme systems
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that have evolved over time
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to deal with these chemicals
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that come in from the environment,
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what we think of as drugs,
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which may be synthetic,
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but also natural chemicals.
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And everybody is a biochemical individual, right?
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And we know this now.
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There’s a whole area of pharmacology that’s a hot new area called pharmacogenetics.
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Everybody metabolizes drugs and toxins in a slightly different way,
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and that depends on the complement of enzymes that they have,
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whether monoamine oxidases or there’s another big set of enzymes called the mixed function oxidases,
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the so-called cytochrome P450 complex of enzymes, and these are inducible.
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You have the genetic blueprint to make them, but they’re not made until you get
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exposed to a particular complex of toxins or a particular toxin in the environment. And then
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these things are induced by that environmental stimulus. It goes back to gene expression.
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The trivial and obvious example is an alcoholic or a person who drinks a lot of
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alcohol has much higher levels of alcohol dehydrogenase, which is the enzyme, the primary
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enzyme in the pathway that breaks down alcohol eventually into, you know, CO2 and water, but it inactivates the alcohol.
00:26:50 ►
A person who drinks a lot of alcohol develops tolerance because they’re much less sensitive to it,
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whereas you or me, if we don’t drink a lot of alcohol,
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that’s why somebody can drink you under the table, right?
00:27:01 ►
Even though you’re not consuming more than they are, they’re consuming a
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lot more, but they’re adapted to it. And for just about every class of toxins, there’s a family of
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enzymes that is inducible, and those come online when you’re exposed to the toxins. But a person
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living in the Amazon, say, that chemical environment is going to have a particular
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enzyme profile. If you isolated those enzymes and did HPLC or whatever, you’d see they have a unique
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profile that is a function of or a consequence of the environment that they’re living in.
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So you get the individual variations, but you also get the group variations.
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So a person in the Amazon is going to have quite a different profile
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based on their chemical environment
00:27:53 ►
than a person in Siberia or a person in L.A.,
00:27:57 ►
and they’ll have a unique signature as well.
00:28:03 ►
So I think that, you know, this is just a function of the fact that, you know, we think of
00:28:13 ►
ourselves as separate from the environment. You know, we’re kind of here and our skin separates
00:28:19 ►
us from the environment, but we’re not like that at all. We’re semi-permeable membranes, you know.
00:28:27 ►
Things are coming in all the time in the form of food, drugs, smoke,
00:28:33 ►
other things that we absorb, and we’re putting out things all the time at the same time.
00:28:40 ►
So we’re part of this chemical communication system, you know,
00:28:56 ►
So we’re part of this chemical communication system, you know, even though we experience this as being, you know, this all happens at a fairly subtle level and we’re not necessarily aware of it, you know, until you eat too many mushrooms or some poisonous plant and all that.
00:29:05 ►
And all of a sudden, no, you know, didn’t have the enzymatic machinery to take care of that one.
00:29:11 ►
So now we get to die.
00:29:15 ►
Or whatever.
00:29:17 ►
Right.
00:29:19 ►
So us being these semi-permeable beings,
00:29:33 ►
So us being these semi-permeable beings, and I guess I’ve heard that a large percentage of our body weight is actually kind of microorganisms and stuff like that.
00:29:35 ►
That too. So as you’re describing, we’re basically this soup.
00:29:39 ►
Yes.
00:29:40 ►
But there’s also the part of us that is speaking to each other,
00:29:47 ►
which is something else, or is it?
00:29:51 ►
Is that semi-permeable as well?
00:29:52 ►
I mean…
00:29:54 ►
Well…
00:29:57 ►
I guess we’re talking about consciousness.
00:29:59 ►
We’re talking about consciousness,
00:30:04 ►
and so that’s like a whole other level of interaction,
00:30:07 ►
mostly between us as individuals.
00:30:27 ►
I mean, there are chemical interactions as well, but we’ve sort of gone, because our brain has evolved to enable us to generate language, and language has all sorts of consequences that most animals don’t really have to deal with.
00:30:32 ►
I mean, animals have primitive languages, but not languages that can carry signification. I mean, this is the main thing that they lack, is the ability to attach significance to symbols.
00:30:43 ►
to attach significance to symbols.
00:30:49 ►
In primates, language is a path in a way,
00:30:55 ►
if it weren’t for the linkage to symbols or significance,
00:30:57 ►
which are abstractions, right?
00:30:59 ►
We wouldn’t be conscious.
00:31:03 ►
I mean, that is the sine qua non of consciousness, is that we’re immersed in this world of ideas and abstractions and dreams.
00:31:10 ►
And, you know, this kind of experience is as real as the external world for us and not really separated from us.
00:31:21 ►
So, you know, that’s what sets us apart from animals.
00:31:29 ►
I don’t think animals, I mean, you have to be careful to make these blanket statements,
00:31:36 ►
but, you know, I don’t think animals are as modulated,
00:31:42 ►
their behavior is not as modulated by symbols
00:31:45 ►
and things that are not external environmental cues,
00:31:49 ►
but internal constellations of ideas and emotions and so on.
00:31:59 ►
Now I know that prairie dogs can say such things as,
00:32:02 ►
there’s a guy coming and he’s wearing a red shirt
00:32:05 ►
and he’s tall or something like that.
00:32:08 ►
They’ve discovered this pretty recently.
00:32:09 ►
They can…
00:32:11 ►
So what…
00:32:12 ►
Is that symbolic speaking
00:32:17 ►
or is what we’re doing now…
00:32:20 ►
What makes what we’re doing now
00:32:22 ►
on another plane than that?
00:32:24 ►
Or is it not?
00:32:25 ►
I think what makes it different is that what we can do
00:32:30 ►
is not necessarily linked to immediate survival concerns.
00:32:38 ►
I mean, a prairie dog sees the hunter coming,
00:32:41 ►
and it’s important to get that signal out, and they do that.
00:32:44 ►
And that goes on. That’s what most animals communicate. is the hunter coming and it’s important to get that signal out and and they do that right and
00:32:45 ►
that that goes on that’s what most no i think therefore i am amongst none of that none of this
00:32:52 ►
philosophical stuff or these internal things uh you know that go on that you then integrate into
00:33:00 ►
abstract abstractions and symbol structures which we’re immersed in all the time we can’t get
00:33:08 ►
away from it i mean the only way we can get away from it is by well i’m not even sure we can certain
00:33:15 ►
meditative techniques where the object is to have no mind to just obviate all that and just be i mean it’s hard to get to that
00:33:29 ►
place you know because our brain is always chattering at us it’s always yammering you know
00:33:36 ►
and the raw material of consciousness is kind of a mix of environmental cues and internal cues.
00:33:47 ►
And, you know, if you think about it, once I had a DMT experience where I got what I
00:33:56 ►
thought was kind of an insight into this, where, you know, as powerful DMT experiences
00:34:03 ►
they tend to be,
00:34:09 ►
and with experiences like that, the interpretation always comes later.
00:34:14 ►
You know, when you’re experiencing that, you don’t really have time to analyze it.
00:34:16 ►
You’re just, oh, wow, you know.
00:34:20 ►
But when you think about it, and the thing that,
00:34:24 ►
a model that makes a certain amount of sense to me is that consciousness the brain is a an organ
00:34:28 ►
that likes to organize information right that’s what it does it takes in information and it routes
00:34:35 ►
it to certain parts of the brain and their internal processes that desperately try to have it make sense on some level to our cognitive apprehension.
00:34:49 ►
And so you take something like a drug that disrupts these neural processes
00:34:55 ►
and completely kind of fries the wiring in a certain way,
00:35:00 ►
and yet what you experience from that seems to make sense.
00:35:05 ►
Because even this kind of random neural noise is going to be structured in a way that, you know, patterns emerge out of it that have meaning or significance for us. floods the whole serotonin system with this alien molecule with this non-natural neurotransmitter
00:35:27 ►
completely disrupts the system and yet what we experience is patterns and ideas and
00:35:34 ►
you know geometric structures and all that that’s what a lot of the brain does is help to
00:35:42 ►
you know filter raw data of information.
00:35:46 ►
And that was the insight from the trip.
00:35:49 ►
It was like the DMT allows you to rip the curtain back on this
00:35:55 ►
for a few minutes or turn the circuit board over
00:35:59 ►
and see what the thing is wired like.
00:36:03 ►
It’s like you’ve got all this information pouring into this big blender.
00:36:08 ►
And it’s spinning around and all this information.
00:36:11 ►
And it’s something you read last week.
00:36:15 ►
It’s a fragment of a song you heard 20 years ago.
00:36:18 ►
It’s the first time you kissed a girl.
00:36:21 ►
It’s something you read, something you heard.
00:36:26 ►
All of this stuff is spinning around and the function of the brain is to mash that all together and come up with a
00:36:35 ►
coherent story you know which is sort of the story of your movie your personal movie that you’re living in, your own hallucination, if you will,
00:36:45 ►
your reality hallucination.
00:36:48 ►
But the DMT lets you tear that filter function away.
00:36:53 ►
You get to see the blender from the top.
00:36:55 ►
Normally it’s separated from you by these curtains
00:36:58 ►
that are, you know, the stuff is flowing through the blender
00:37:01 ►
and it’s all being shunted into the right place.
00:37:04 ►
Hopefully, unless you’re completely, you know, completely disrupted,
00:37:09 ►
and we equate that to pathology often, you know, but you get to see it from the,
00:37:17 ►
you get to go behind the curtain and see the raw material of experience for a few minutes.
00:37:29 ►
And how it’s all coming together in this very chaotic way that then the brain’s ability to synthesize things takes over.
00:37:35 ►
And what comes out, it’s like making pasta or something.
00:37:38 ►
You put a big gamish of pasta in the top,
00:37:42 ►
but these nice strings come out the bottom.
00:37:46 ►
And it’s kind of like that, I think.
00:37:49 ►
If you’re just tuning in,
00:37:52 ►
this is WKCR 89.9 FM New York.
00:37:54 ►
My name is David Ellenbogen, and we are playing an interview
00:37:57 ►
I recorded with Dennis McKenna a few months ago.
00:38:01 ►
He’s an author and a scientist,
00:38:04 ►
and if you’d like to take part in his newest creation,
00:38:11 ►
he’s right now raising funds on Kickstarter to tell the story of his adventures with his
00:38:19 ►
famous brother, Terrence McKenna. All right, back to the interview.
00:38:25 ►
Now, to tie all this together,
00:38:29 ►
at the beginning you kind of said that
00:38:32 ►
consciousness itself comes from plants
00:38:35 ►
because it’s the essential things.
00:38:38 ►
And then you’re later having experiences
00:38:41 ►
through DMT, which is from a plant,
00:38:44 ►
which is giving you a new angle on reality.
00:38:48 ►
And we also spoke of the spider mites that think that they’re doing what they want to do, but in fact are being controlled by a chemical from a plant.
00:38:59 ►
As someone who’s planting a rose thinks it’s because they think it’s beautiful, but maybe it’s because the rose is also trying to survive.
00:39:06 ►
Yeah, exactly.
00:39:07 ►
And this is the great insight that Michael Pollan has in this.
00:39:12 ►
And you’ve read some of his books.
00:39:15 ►
You’ve read The Omnivore’s Dilemma, perhaps.
00:39:18 ►
And that’s the point that he makes.
00:39:20 ►
We only think we’re domesticating plants and growing plants,
00:39:24 ►
things like corn and that sort of thing.
00:39:27 ►
Actually, you can turn it around.
00:39:29 ►
Corn is growing us.
00:39:31 ►
Corn has turned us into its slaves.
00:39:35 ►
He talks about it as being the quintessential capitalist plant.
00:39:47 ►
quintessential capitalist plant you know it’s adopted us and it’s forced us to change global agriculture right you know not in a good way and a lot of times because but as a dominant
00:39:56 ►
species it’s great for corn you know there’s corn is more important in the Western diet, in the industrial food chain, than probably any other thing.
00:40:09 ►
It’s not simply that we eat it.
00:40:11 ►
We get thousands of products from it.
00:40:13 ►
We get biofuels from it.
00:40:15 ►
We get all these things.
00:40:17 ►
And we’re totally addicted to and dependent on corn.
00:40:21 ►
Well, corn is like, hey, I got an easy ride here.
00:40:24 ►
I’m not going extinct because
00:40:27 ►
I have this protector.
00:40:29 ►
And they have four senators now from Iowa and Nebraska.
00:40:33 ►
Exactly.
00:40:33 ►
Family senators.
00:40:33 ►
Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. And so it’s a very successful plan.
00:40:41 ►
Right. But what I was kind of getting at as well is that is it possible that these insights that you had
00:40:48 ►
in these DMT experiences were insights that a
00:40:52 ►
plant wanted you to have?
00:40:57 ►
Well,
00:40:59 ►
yeah, it’s tricky.
00:41:04 ►
Yes, in some sense. in the sense that I think plants, it’s to their advantage to establish these symbiotic relationships, you know, like corn, like it’s to its advantage to have us value it and grow it and use it, you know.
00:41:23 ►
and grow it, and use it, you know.
00:41:26 ►
Does the plant want that?
00:41:32 ►
I mean, that attributes a different kind of intellect.
00:41:36 ►
That attributes a human-like intellect to the plant.
00:41:37 ►
I don’t think it has that.
00:41:39 ►
I don’t think it exactly has that. It deals more on the evolutionary level.
00:41:43 ►
It deals more on the evolutionary level.
00:41:50 ►
You know, all organisms, to the degree that they can control their environment, they want to optimize their environment for comfort, for security, for reproductive reasons,
00:41:58 ►
maximize their chances to transmit those genes into the future.
00:42:03 ►
to transmit those genes into the future.
00:42:06 ►
And by forming symbioses,
00:42:10 ►
I think that the process of plant domestication
00:42:12 ►
is essentially a symbiosis.
00:42:16 ►
So in the sense that the plant wants to be,
00:42:19 ►
to have this evolutionary advantage,
00:42:21 ►
and here’s this primate, you know,
00:42:24 ►
that has the ability to domesticate it,
00:42:26 ►
to grow it, to take it out of nature.
00:42:33 ►
So it doesn’t have to compete out there with all the other plants in the wild jungle that can grow in someone’s garden.
00:42:41 ►
And its evolutionary, you know, fitness in some ways has just gone up several notches because it can be,
00:42:47 ►
I mean, I’m not saying it thinks about these things,
00:42:50 ►
but if it did, it would say, hey, I’m in great shape.
00:42:53 ►
Until these knotheads destroy the planet completely,
00:42:57 ►
I’m good, you know, I’m on easy street.
00:43:06 ►
And so I don’t know that the plants want it as an individual,
00:43:09 ►
but it may be that as a community of species,
00:43:11 ►
I think as a community of species, what the community of sentience shared among living things in the biosphere
00:43:19 ►
understands on some level is that the whole global ecosystem is in peril you know and it’s always
00:43:33 ►
been in peril i mean if you think about it it’s it’s i mean we’re facing ecological crises right
00:43:40 ►
now like we’ve never faced but there were always ecological crises and just the very fact
00:43:47 ►
that you know we’re this rock tumbling through space that’s covered with slime and we may be the
00:43:53 ►
only slime covered rock in the whole in theasis life you know wants to cleave stored towards
00:44:10 ►
stability but not too much stability because that’s death but stability it’s homeostasis is
00:44:18 ►
the way life perceives it it’s an energetic state that is some distance from thermodynamic entropy.
00:44:29 ►
I mean, that’s what life is.
00:44:31 ►
They’re negentropic systems.
00:44:33 ►
They’re systems with a high degree of order.
00:44:38 ►
And in the physical universe, in the universe at large, those systems usually don’t last that long
00:44:45 ►
and there are so many influences trying to disrupt that order
00:44:49 ►
and essentially reduce it to chaos.
00:44:53 ►
And life pushes back against that, you know,
00:44:57 ►
because they’re not closed systems, right?
00:44:59 ►
They’re these semi-permeable open systems
00:45:02 ►
where you take in nutrients and you transform them
00:45:04 ►
and you make the food part of your body and that you can run them you know the machinery of the brain the
00:45:12 ►
machinery of the body on that eventually you always lose because you die right and that’s true of
00:45:19 ►
of species of ecosystems of planets you know i. I mean, it’s a losing game so far as we know.
00:45:29 ►
But that’s only if you define you as you, right?
00:45:33 ►
I mean, if you are just, as your brother kind of put it,
00:45:40 ►
there’s a quote that I found very stimulating where he said,
00:45:42 ►
you know, language is code, body language is code
00:45:46 ►
and, you know,
00:45:48 ►
he went on to say
00:45:50 ►
that everything is code and what will
00:45:52 ►
reunite humans and machines is code.
00:45:55 ►
So if everything is code
00:45:56 ►
then the code
00:45:58 ►
will go on. I mean, I guess
00:46:00 ►
maybe with the extinguishing of the Earth
00:46:03 ►
I mean, still
00:46:04 ►
solar the sun will still be changing hydrogen
00:46:09 ►
into different states and stuff like that.
00:46:12 ►
Well, these things will be going on,
00:46:14 ►
but code, the notion of code goes back to the notion of message
00:46:20 ►
and the notion of significance.
00:46:23 ►
I mean, is there a code if there’s no mind to apprehend it?
00:46:30 ►
You know, the notion of code requires a receiver, an interpreter,
00:46:36 ►
someone who is going to look at that information
00:46:38 ►
and out of that draw meaning or significance.
00:46:42 ►
If there’s no apprehender, then it’s not code.
00:46:46 ►
It’s just what goes on.
00:46:48 ►
And what makes life different is that it takes in these messages
00:46:57 ►
and they do have meaning, they do have significance.
00:47:01 ►
And so it’s code in a certain sense and we but you know the code is almost something that we
00:47:11 ►
put on that well in some cases it clearly is but you know do these processes go on if there’s no
00:47:18 ►
receiver of these molecular messages but the other thing about your idea that life is kind of a losing game
00:47:26 ►
because it always ends, I mean
00:47:28 ►
that also assumes
00:47:30 ►
kind of a linear concept of time, right?
00:47:32 ►
Yeah. So if
00:47:33 ►
that is not the case, then
00:47:35 ►
maybe something else is going on.
00:47:38 ►
If that’s not the case,
00:47:39 ►
maybe something else is going on.
00:47:41 ►
And so far as we know, it’s
00:47:43 ►
a losing game. You know, in we know, it’s a losing game.
00:47:46 ►
But it’s kind of like, well, there’s life, there’s hope.
00:47:51 ►
As long as there are living systems, intelligent systems maintaining this distance from entropy,
00:48:01 ►
there’s always a chance that you’ll figure out a way to game the system and escape,
00:48:09 ►
you know, into some other state of being where entropy does not rule. I mean, that’s what I’m
00:48:16 ►
always, I’m kind of amused by the cosmologists, you know, who theorize about the ultimate death of the universe
00:48:26 ►
because that’s ultimately what we’re talking.
00:48:30 ►
The heat death of the universe.
00:48:32 ►
And now the current model is that it doesn’t collapse.
00:48:35 ►
It just expands forever.
00:48:37 ►
Freezes.
00:48:37 ►
And eventually all the stars burn out
00:48:40 ►
and eventually there’s not enough energy to even keep atoms together and
00:48:46 ►
just all kinds of peers out yeah right right so that’s pretty depressing right but the key thing
00:48:52 ►
that they leave out of these models inevitably is mind is intelligence right i mean if intelligence
00:49:01 ►
exists in the universe now and we’re furiously trying to understand how things are structured
00:49:08 ►
and how it all works,
00:49:10 ►
isn’t it reasonable to assume that in a few trillion years,
00:49:14 ►
if we persist, we’re going to figure out how to get around this?
00:49:19 ►
We’re going to move the whole system to some other state of being.
00:49:24 ►
We’ve got a long time to work on it, and there’s no particular hurry.
00:49:29 ►
I mean, there’s a hurry for our planet because we’ve been very stupid.
00:49:35 ►
We haven’t been good stewards of the planet.
00:49:37 ►
But you have to take some comfort, I think.
00:49:41 ►
I mean, it looks like we may not do it.
00:49:44 ►
We intelligent monkeys are really very stupid monkeys,
00:49:48 ►
and we’re following our own nest, really.
00:49:53 ►
And we may destroy the planet, but there are lots of planets out there,
00:49:57 ►
and there’s lots of life, you know,
00:49:59 ►
and I think we’re all part of this process of intelligence,
00:50:04 ►
you know, trying to come to terms intelligence you know trying to come
00:50:05 ►
to terms with being trying
00:50:07 ►
to wake up to itself
00:50:09 ►
in a certain sense I mean I think
00:50:11 ►
that you know this gets back to
00:50:13 ►
you know what we’ve been talking about
00:50:15 ►
is consciousness primary
00:50:17 ►
is consciousness something that
00:50:19 ►
you know it’s not something the brain
00:50:21 ►
generates it’s something that
00:50:23 ►
forms the
00:50:24 ►
the ground of being.
00:50:27 ►
And what we have are these elaborate detection machines.
00:50:34 ►
Consciousness is something you detect, like tuning a television set to different channels,
00:50:40 ►
as much as it is something the brain generates.
00:50:42 ►
I think the brain modulates signals that come from outside,
00:50:48 ►
but consciousness is probably more primal than matter.
00:50:54 ►
In the beginning was the Word, right?
00:50:56 ►
And the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
00:51:00 ►
Now you’ll have to explain that more deeply,
00:51:03 ►
because I’ve heard people state this state this but I never
00:51:06 ►
could really feel it on the visceral level
00:51:08 ►
that consciousness could be
00:51:11 ►
have primacy over matter
00:51:13 ►
I don’t know
00:51:16 ►
I don’t even know where to start with that
00:51:18 ►
I mean
00:51:19 ►
well is consciousness
00:51:22 ►
generated by matter
00:51:24 ►
or is matter generated by matter?
00:51:27 ►
Or is matter generated by consciousness? And I think that’s what in the beginning was the word.
00:51:32 ►
That’s the idea was that, you know, I mean, I’m not saying I buy into this,
00:51:36 ►
but there’s the idea of, you know, a primal and primary intelligence
00:51:42 ►
that puts meaning,
00:51:46 ►
puts the word goes, the word went forth.
00:51:49 ►
In other words, the act of signification,
00:51:54 ►
which is what words are,
00:51:57 ►
went forth in this primary way,
00:51:59 ►
and by uttering what some philosophers have called the Logos, you know, pure meaning,
00:52:07 ►
it triggered the eruption of this material efflorescence that we call the Big Bang or that we call the origin of the universe.
00:52:18 ►
Now, you know, it begs the question, in a sense, okay, so there’s a being out there that sent the word out
00:52:30 ►
and started the whole thing going, started the clock ticking.
00:52:35 ►
No, it’s not that it’s separate.
00:52:37 ►
It’s inherent in it.
00:52:39 ►
You know, it’s not that God is out there and God made the universe.
00:52:45 ►
The universe is God.
00:52:47 ►
It’s trying to come awake to itself.
00:52:52 ►
And it exists in the current view of it is there’s this quantum foam, you know, these, what is the term, these vacuum fluctuations, which
00:53:09 ►
you’ve heard of, right? Vacuum fluctuations.
00:53:12 ►
I haven’t heard a lot about it. I mean, and certainly anything quantum I don’t understand.
00:53:16 ►
Well, vacuum fluctuations, they’re not that difficult to understand, but there’s something,
00:53:20 ►
it’s an observed phenomenon that in particle physics,
00:53:27 ►
you can look at this stuff in cloud chambers and that kind of thing
00:53:30 ►
where there’s nothing happening.
00:53:32 ►
It’s a perfect vacuum as far as you know.
00:53:35 ►
But all of a sudden, an electron and a positron and a proton appear out of nowhere.
00:53:41 ►
And they exist for a tiny fraction,
00:53:45 ►
fraction of a second,
00:53:47 ►
I mean, on the order of Planck’s constant.
00:53:50 ►
And then they come back together
00:53:52 ►
and annihilate each other.
00:53:54 ►
And everything’s back to, you know,
00:53:57 ►
this kind of quantum foam,
00:53:59 ►
this sea of potentiality.
00:54:01 ►
And usually these quantum fluctuations
00:54:04 ►
that we can study in the lab
00:54:06 ►
are a few particles,
00:54:08 ►
a few dozen particles.
00:54:10 ►
But there is no upper limit,
00:54:13 ►
there’s no theoretical limit
00:54:15 ►
on the size of a vacuum fluctuation.
00:54:19 ►
And a vacuum fluctuation
00:54:21 ►
could be as big as the universe.
00:54:24 ►
And that’s kind of
00:54:25 ►
the current idea. That’s essentially
00:54:27 ►
how things came into being.
00:54:29 ►
There’s just this quantum foam of
00:54:32 ►
particles appearing and
00:54:33 ►
disappearing and somehow
00:54:35 ►
for some reason a bubble forms
00:54:37 ►
and this one
00:54:39 ►
doesn’t disappear
00:54:41 ►
in a microsecond.
00:54:43 ►
It lasts trillions of years. Or it’s all relative, right? It disappear in a microsecond. It lasts trillions of years.
00:54:45 ►
Or it’s all relative, right?
00:54:47 ►
I mean, it could be a microsecond compared to another.
00:54:51 ►
Yeah, absolutely.
00:54:51 ►
Someone else’s sense of it.
00:54:52 ►
Yeah, absolutely.
00:54:53 ►
And this is going on all over this sort of quantum ground of being,
00:54:58 ►
this foamy substrate.
00:55:01 ►
And so there are multiple universes you know and uh some are very short-lived and
00:55:08 ►
some are medium lived and some are quite long-lived you know and it is all relative and that’s much
00:55:15 ►
more hopeful than the heat death model well absolutely it’s hopeful and and and it’s hopeful
00:55:21 ►
and yeah i don’t like the idea of the heat death i mean that’s that’s pretty depressing it’s hopeful, and yeah, I don’t like the idea of the heat death. I mean, that’s pretty depressing.
00:55:26 ►
It’s all just going to…
00:55:27 ►
But it is more hopeful because within some of these bubbles,
00:55:34 ►
some of these quantum fluctuations that have a long lifespan,
00:55:38 ►
it’s long enough for life to evolve, intelligence to evolve.
00:55:43 ►
And once you’ve got that evolve and once you’ve got that and once you’ve got
00:55:46 ►
intelligence with an ability to manipulate
00:55:49 ►
the environment
00:55:50 ►
then all bets are off as to
00:55:55 ►
the fate of that particular system but chances
00:55:58 ►
are life and
00:56:01 ►
intelligence because it wants to
00:56:03 ►
persist will get busy and figure out a way to and intelligence, because it wants to persist,
00:56:11 ►
will get busy and figure out a way to escape from this constraint that everything must return to entropy.
00:56:16 ►
And you seem to be the only guy getting grant money towards this.
00:56:21 ►
Well, I’m not getting any grant money for this.
00:56:24 ►
I didn’t said so.
00:56:27 ►
No, I’m not getting any grant money for this.
00:56:30 ►
You’ve got grant money to
00:56:32 ►
go down and study what the
00:56:34 ►
shaman have to say.
00:56:36 ►
Yeah, but
00:56:36 ►
I mean, I do
00:56:40 ►
but the grants
00:56:42 ►
come
00:56:43 ►
because we don’t talk about any of this. we don’t talk about
00:56:45 ►
any of this
00:56:45 ►
we don’t talk about the wider
00:56:49 ►
implications you have to focus your
00:56:51 ►
you have to focus your science
00:56:53 ►
you know very specifically
00:56:55 ►
on something and you can’t let
00:56:57 ►
people know that you know you’re really
00:56:59 ►
a wild eyed screwball you know
00:57:01 ►
you have to play the role of well you know
00:57:03 ►
I’m a serious scientist I’m a reductionist I just want to look at you know you have to play the role of well you know i’m a serious scientist i’m a
00:57:05 ►
reductionist i’m just i just want to look at you know the chemicals and plants and see how they
00:57:10 ►
work you know in biological systems but you you can’t no you you can’t get grant money for this
00:57:18 ►
kind of thing i mean you can get a fast ticket to an insane asylum if you talk about the wrong people you know you have to be very
00:57:28 ►
careful but we all
00:57:30 ►
I mean and we all
00:57:33 ►
we all have these intuitions
00:57:36 ►
there’s nothing that’s unique to
00:57:38 ►
me about this I mean I think anyone
00:57:40 ►
any thoughtful person
00:57:41 ►
has got to be
00:57:44 ►
you know in some ways astonished, you know, that we’re even here.
00:57:53 ►
I mean, the whole shooting match is so bloody unlikely, given that, you know, the universe is entropic in most of its parts that we know.
00:58:01 ►
The fact that we’re here is a marvelous thing,
00:58:05 ►
on the order of a miracle.
00:58:07 ►
Thank Gaia, thank God,
00:58:11 ►
thank whoever you want to thank
00:58:12 ►
that we are here.
00:58:14 ►
And, you know,
00:58:18 ►
when you really think about
00:58:20 ►
how unlikely this is,
00:58:23 ►
given what we know about the way things are organized.
00:58:27 ►
I mean, some incredibly unique event took place here, and hopefully it’s not unique.
00:58:35 ►
Hopefully it’s the norm. I mean, this is a big question. How prevalent is life in the universe?
00:58:45 ►
And, I mean, I’m reasonably confident that if you have complex life forms,
00:58:50 ►
sooner or later you’re going to have intelligence.
00:58:52 ►
It’s this property, it’s this emergent property notion.
00:58:57 ►
You know, if you have an environment that’s prebiotic before life,
00:59:04 ►
but if the chemistry is complex enough you’ve got
00:59:08 ►
complex chemical systems a lot of these organic compounds including amino acids and nucleotides
00:59:14 ►
and all the building blocks of life can spontaneously form in abiotic or prebiotic systems i mean this has all been worked out years ago you know
00:59:28 ►
simulate the the atmosphere primitive earth and shoot lightning bolts through it or whatever
00:59:36 ►
and uh you know amino acids will rain down out of that medium so this is a property of matter. This is just what carbon chemistry does.
00:59:47 ►
But at a certain point,
00:59:49 ►
the complexity will go over from,
00:59:51 ►
you know, organic chemistry to biochemistry
00:59:54 ►
as these systems begin to
00:59:58 ►
surround themselves with membranes,
01:00:01 ►
for example,
01:00:02 ►
and sequester certain molecules
01:00:04 ►
in certain compartments,
01:00:05 ►
and then they’re closer together and they can interact, and you get enzymatic systems going on.
01:00:13 ►
Enzymes are usually simply a way of accelerating a chemical reaction that would take place over time anyway,
01:00:21 ►
but slowly, you know, and not fast enough to really have much consequence.
01:00:28 ►
So, you know, you get out of complex organic chemistry, you get primitive life emerging
01:00:35 ►
as an emergent property at a certain level of organization, and then you have more complex
01:00:41 ►
multicellular systems emerging, and then they become complex enough that you can get
01:00:48 ►
compartmentalization you know specialization into organ systems you know multicellularity in a sense
01:00:56 ►
and so you can get specialized systems that you know are adapted to particular functions.
01:01:05 ►
And of course, for us, the most fascinating one is the neural systems,
01:01:10 ►
these evolved systems of chemical communication.
01:01:14 ►
And knowing what we know about the way that matter works and chemistry works and so on,
01:01:31 ►
way that matter works and chemistry works and so on we can be reasonably sure that you know other places in the universe other places in the galaxy that simulate the environment that was on the
01:01:38 ►
primitive earth those systems will also evolve life it’s just an inevitability. It’s a property of matter.
01:01:46 ►
So that’s reassuring because, you know…
01:01:49 ►
It takes a lot of the pressure off.
01:01:50 ►
It takes a lot of the pressure.
01:01:51 ►
Yeah, it’s not only up to us.
01:01:53 ►
It’s not only up to us.
01:01:56 ►
You know, life probably permeates the universe.
01:02:00 ►
And that means intelligence permeates the universe.
01:02:07 ►
You know, and that means intelligence permeates the universe you know and that’s good that’s so you know if we blow it and looks like we’re probably going to but others will carry on
01:02:14 ►
you know and if we wake up in time maybe we can be part of that i mean that seems to be our
01:02:20 ►
our challenge is to you know propagate these understandings
01:02:25 ►
through enough people that people do wake up
01:02:30 ►
and they realize we’ve got to get cracking.
01:02:34 ►
And what are the methods that people do
01:02:38 ►
that you see as ways that people could open their eyes
01:02:43 ►
or wake up to these larger issues.
01:02:48 ►
Well, I think that’s where the psychedelic plants come in
01:02:54 ►
to play a big role.
01:02:57 ►
I mean, I think that these intelligent plants,
01:03:01 ►
the plant teachers, if you will,
01:03:03 ►
the ones that the shamans have had this symbiotic relationship with
01:03:08 ►
for millennia, you know, since long before history began,
01:03:14 ►
they’re part of that message.
01:03:17 ►
I mean, they’re trying desperately.
01:03:19 ►
It’s almost like they’re emissaries from the rest of the biosphere
01:03:23 ►
who have come forward, who have always been there
01:03:27 ►
and have always been recognized by some,
01:03:30 ►
but now they’re exploding on a global scale, you know,
01:03:35 ►
with the Internet, with the widespread interest.
01:03:37 ►
I mean, ayahuasca is now a global phenomenon, you know,
01:03:41 ►
and this is part of, you know plants reaching out trying to reach out to
01:03:47 ►
larger groups of people and basically you know hit us upside the head with a two by four and say hey
01:03:52 ►
you monkeys you know wake up you’re fucking it up you know you have to wake up and i think that’s what they do. So I think that that’s a big part of why we’re in some ways returning to, you know, I mean, we never really left it.
01:04:14 ►
But this archaic fascination with these plant teachers is certainly a whole lot more out there than it was a few years ago.
01:04:23 ►
And I think because people are making these discoveries,
01:04:26 ►
but people being people,
01:04:28 ►
there’s all sorts of things you can do with that knowledge.
01:04:36 ►
And people being people, some of it’s not necessarily good.
01:04:42 ►
People receive the message and then the next thing
01:04:48 ►
you know you know they’re the messiah they have to save the world it falls on their shoulders to be
01:04:55 ►
the one and they’re going to lead humanity into this post-historical age and what’s lost there a lot of what’s lost there is humility and i think humility
01:05:07 ►
is essential for doing this i mean this is the other thing that to me personally and i think to
01:05:14 ►
a lot of people i think this is the message of the plant teachers not only you know you monkeys need
01:05:21 ►
to wake up but you monkeys need to get over yourselves.
01:05:26 ►
You monkeys only think you’re running the show.
01:05:29 ►
You’re not running the show.
01:05:31 ►
If anything, the plants are running the show.
01:05:34 ►
And this we know because plants are, through photosynthesis,
01:05:42 ►
they’re the basis of life on Earth.
01:05:44 ►
They’re the mechanism that life on earth they’re the mechanism that
01:05:45 ►
life has evolved to grab solar energy out of the cosmos and use it you know convert it into
01:05:53 ►
chemical energy and use it to run this biosphere much in the same way that we use nutrients or food
01:06:01 ►
to run our little ecosystem this biochemical engine that we are.
01:06:07 ►
And that’s really what the biosphere is.
01:06:09 ►
I mean, you can think of it as a cell as much as anything.
01:06:15 ►
So I think that the plant teachers are important
01:06:22 ►
in helping people to make these discoveries.
01:06:26 ►
And then the natural impulse is to propagate that message, you know,
01:06:33 ►
to spread the good news or to spread the news in a sense.
01:06:37 ►
But it’s also we tend to think that we’re important, individuals are important,
01:06:42 ►
we tend to think that we’re important individuals are important so
01:06:44 ►
there’s a real tendency to
01:06:45 ►
on our part to place
01:06:48 ►
yourself right in the center of that
01:06:50 ►
and say it’s all about
01:06:52 ►
me you know
01:06:53 ►
I’m the messiah I’m the
01:06:56 ►
person who’s going to propagate the message
01:06:58 ►
and it’s not
01:07:00 ►
a it’s not an unhealthy
01:07:02 ►
impulse to want to let people know
01:07:04 ►
but there’s a temptation to
01:07:06 ►
say well you know i’m gonna found a religion or i’m gonna found a cult or i’m gonna you know
01:07:12 ►
and then the sort of the the purpose of the whole thing gets lost the purpose being to wake people
01:07:20 ►
up but suddenly or not suddenly but over time that purpose becomes obscured
01:07:26 ►
and the purpose becomes to perpetuate the institution you know or the individual or
01:07:34 ►
the structure of the thing and so the central mystery which may have come from a plant teacher
01:07:41 ►
or other sort of one-on-one direct revelation reception of a message from the
01:07:47 ►
cosmos or a learning a teaching from the cosmos becomes obscured and it was like you know because
01:07:54 ►
real mysteries are inherently threatening to institutions and you know even if they had their
01:08:03 ►
origin in the in a revelation,
01:08:06 ►
the institutions become rigidified,
01:08:08 ►
and it’s like, oh my God, we’ve got to suppress this.
01:08:11 ►
Only the priests get to know that this all came from, you know,
01:08:17 ►
eating mushrooms or whatever it came from, you know.
01:08:20 ►
We can’t tell the rabble this, because then they won’t obey us.
01:08:24 ►
They won’t look up to us
01:08:25 ►
so that’s
01:08:27 ►
also sort of
01:08:29 ►
my shtick when I talk about this stuff
01:08:32 ►
is
01:08:32 ►
don’t follow
01:08:35 ►
or
01:08:37 ►
preserve your
01:08:39 ►
inherent
01:08:41 ►
right to think for yourself
01:08:44 ►
and question everything you know religions
01:08:47 ►
talk a lot about faith um and i guess we all have faith in a certain in certain things like i have
01:08:57 ►
i have faith that life is common in the universe And there’s evidence for that belief
01:09:05 ►
in what we were talking about,
01:09:08 ►
the nature of physics and chemistry and all that.
01:09:10 ►
I have no hard evidence that there’s life anywhere else in the universe,
01:09:14 ►
but I take it on faith with a certain amount of evidence
01:09:18 ►
that there probably is, there’s likely to be.
01:09:22 ►
Religions, established religions,
01:09:21 ►
likely to be.
01:09:24 ►
Religions, established religions,
01:09:26 ►
tend to want you to take a lot of things on faith
01:09:30 ►
for which there is not a shred of evidence.
01:09:33 ►
And so the doctrines and the dogmas
01:09:36 ►
become essentially their political institutions.
01:09:40 ►
They become instruments for keeping people in line.
01:09:46 ►
Don’t ask too many questions.
01:09:51 ►
Just accept it, you know, because we’re smarter than you and we’re running things, so you must have faith, my son.
01:09:54 ►
Right.
01:09:55 ►
You know, why in hell should I have faith?
01:09:59 ►
Give me a reason.
01:10:01 ►
I prefer evidence, you know,
01:10:03 ►
and I mean even just a little evidence would help.
01:10:06 ►
So I think that’s one of the dangers of getting these revelations,
01:10:12 ►
and it just seems part of the natural evolution of these things,
01:10:16 ►
that that’s how people react.
01:10:18 ►
With psychedelics, it’s almost a side effect of psychedelics.
01:10:23 ►
One of the maybe adverse side effects of psychedelics
01:10:27 ►
is it’ll make you think that you’re the messiah
01:10:30 ►
or you have to somehow play a role in this.
01:10:34 ►
And I don’t think so in a way.
01:10:37 ►
I mean, I think ayahuasca,
01:10:40 ►
you’ve got to look at it from an evolutionary perspective.
01:10:43 ►
And what’s playing out here is plant-human co-evolution.
01:10:48 ►
It’s been going on for tens of thousands of years and possibly longer than that.
01:10:56 ►
Now it seems to have gone to a new stage.
01:10:59 ►
But I think ayahuasca is perfectly capable of finding the people it needs,
01:11:06 ►
and the people that need to find ayahuasca will find it.
01:11:10 ►
There’s no need for cults or movements or very much human intervention,
01:11:16 ►
although a lot of people will be convinced that we must do this.
01:11:23 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a
01:11:28 ►
time well now you know why terence was always so generous in his praise of his brother dennis
01:11:38 ►
together they made quite a team and now it’s up to Dennis to continue not only the scientific research work that the
01:11:45 ►
two brothers began so long ago at La Charrera but as you know Dennis is also right now working on
01:11:53 ►
writing the definitive biography of his famous brother and there are many exciting adventures
01:11:58 ►
together. Now I’ve talked about this project in recent podcasts, but as of now, with only 20 days to go and only 585 backers for Dennis’ Kickstarter project,
01:12:11 ►
I want to mention it one more time in the hopes that he’ll get enough pledges of support so that he can proceed with this important project.
01:12:18 ►
And for what it’s worth, I’ve pledged part of the donations that we’ve been receiving here in the salon this year towards the project.
01:12:25 ►
So thank you again to all of the salonners out there who have made contributions,
01:12:30 ►
not only to the salon, but to Dennis’ project, to the Shulgens,
01:12:34 ►
and to all of the other worthwhile causes that seem to be calling for our help these days.
01:12:41 ►
And another way we can help, all help one another, I think,
01:12:44 ►
is to support each other’s projects
01:12:46 ►
in ways that don’t involve money
01:12:48 ►
and I’m talking of course about
01:12:50 ►
spreading the word about what other people
01:12:52 ►
are doing for example
01:12:54 ►
today I’d personally like to thank
01:12:56 ►
Dennis McKenna, David Allenbogen
01:12:59 ►
and WKCR
01:13:01 ►
89.9 FM radio
01:13:03 ►
in New York City for providing the informative interview that we just heard.
01:13:07 ►
And I also want to mention that David has also begun podcasting.
01:13:12 ►
And his program can be found online and in iTunes if you go to NYCRadioLive.
01:13:19 ►
That’s online at NYCRadioLive.org.
01:13:24 ►
That’s online at nycradiolive.org.
01:13:30 ►
Or search in the iTunes store for NYC Space Radio Space Live.
01:13:32 ►
Not all one word there.
01:13:38 ►
And while I’ve had a long-standing self-imposed rule to only plug podcasts after they’ve had, oh, say, ten or more programs,
01:13:42 ►
but after listening to David here in the salon
01:13:45 ►
and after listening to his first podcast,
01:13:47 ►
I think that this program is one that’s going to be around for quite a while.
01:13:51 ►
So if you’re interested in jazz and world music,
01:13:55 ►
maybe you want to check it out.
01:13:57 ►
Not only will you hear some new music,
01:13:59 ►
but you’ll also be treated to in-depth interviews
01:14:01 ►
with the musicians that are being featured.
01:14:04 ►
I really enjoyed that
01:14:05 ►
first podcast, David, so thanks again for all you’re doing to make this world a nicer place.
01:14:11 ►
And I should also mention that on David’s website you can hear some of his own music, which
01:14:15 ►
I find quite enjoyable and will probably be featuring in some future podcast.
01:14:22 ►
Well, that’s going to have to do it for today, and so I’ll close again by
01:14:26 ►
reminding you that this and most of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon are freely available
01:14:31 ►
for you to use in your own audio projects under the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial
01:14:36 ►
3.0 license. And if you have any questions about that, just click the Creative Commons link at the
01:14:42 ►
bottom of the Psychedelic Salon webpage, which you can get to via psychedelicsalon.us. And if you are interested in the philosophy behind
01:14:51 ►
the salon, you can hear a little bit about it in my novel, The Genesis Generation, which is
01:14:56 ►
available as a pay-what-you-can audiobook that you can download at genesisgeneration.us.
01:15:03 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:15:08 ►
Be well, my friends. I’m an alien Thank you. into the light of a naked moon Thank you. Thank you.