270 - Tryptamine Consciousness

Program Notes

This is Tape Number 003 of the Paul Herbert Collection.

This talk was given in December 1982
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“The search for a radio signal from an extraterrestrial source is probably as culture-bound an assumption as to search the galaxy for a good Italian restaurant.”

“It is no great accomplishment to hear a voice in the head. The accomplishment is to make sure it is telling you the truth.”

“The demons are of many kinds. Some are made of ions, some of mind. The ones of ketamine, you’ll find, stutter often and are blind.”

“There is no dignity in the universe unless you meet these things [psychedelics] on your feet. And that means that you have an I/thou relationship, and you say … ‘you’re long on talk, but what can you show me?”

“These things [psychedelic medicines] invoke the Logos, which means they work directly on the language centers. So that the important aspect of the experience is the dialogue.”

“I think if someone tells you they’ve every drug you know they’re confessing they’re a dilettante. It’s much better to lean hard on a few.”

“I think one of the interesting things about judging a drug is to see how eager people are to do it the second time. If they’re eager to do it the second time it’s probably not worth bothering about, because what is necessary to have validity in these experiences is the terror. The terror is a stamp of validity on the experience, because it means this is real.”

“Friends, right here and now, one quanta away, there is raging a universe of active intelligence that is trans human, hyper dimensional, and extremely alien.”

“The most alien thing in the cosmos is the human soul.”

“As nervous systems evolve to higher and higher levels, they become more and more to understand the true situation in which they are embedded.”

“As nervous systems evolve to higher and higher levels they become more and more to understand the true situation in which they are embedded. And the true situation in which we are embedded is an organism, an organization of active intelligence that is on a galactic scale.”

“In other words, shamanic experience, drug experience, this is ruled out of bounds. And it is because it is the source of novelty. The cutting edge of the ingression of the novel into the plenum of being is happening there. I mean, think about it for a moment. If the human mind does not loom large in the coming history of the human race, then what is to become of us?”

“So I am saying we are at the beginning of human thought. This is the birth crisis of intelligence. And intelligence is something which is moving through the higher primates now at greater and greater speed.”

“The fact is that the densest organizational material in the universe is the human cortex. And the richest experience in the universe is the experience you’re having right now.”

“The testimony that I want to give today is that magic is alive in hyperspace, and you don’t have to believe me or follow me or do anything to validate that except form a relationship with these plant drugs.”

“There is some surety that you are dealing with a creature of integrity if you deal with a plant, but the creatures born in the demonic artifice of laboratories have to be dealt with very, very carefully.”

“DMT is like an intellectual black hole in that once you know about it, it’s very hard for anyone to understand you when you’re talking about it.”

“The future is bound to be psychedelic because the future belon…

Transcript

00:00:00 ►

Greetings from cyberdelic space.

00:00:21 ►

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

00:00:25 ►

And I’m very happy to announce that today marks the sixth anniversary of these podcasts,

00:00:32 ►

which also nicely coincides with what would have been my mother’s 96th birthday if she were still alive.

00:00:38 ►

So, happy birthday, Mom, wherever and whomever you may now be.

00:00:43 ►

And before I introduce today’s program, I first would like to thank several people who

00:00:48 ►

either made a donation directly to the salon or who bought a copy of the audiobook version

00:00:53 ►

of my pay-what-you-can novel, The Genesis Generation.

00:00:57 ►

And after we listen to today’s program, I’ll tell you about the e-book version of it, which

00:01:02 ►

is now available.

00:01:03 ►

I’ll tell you about the e-book version of it, which is now available.

00:01:12 ►

But first, I would like to thank Vicente B., Anup S., Kim S., Christopher H.,

00:01:18 ►

longtime supporter and good friend of the salon, E-Rock X1, and Josh B.

00:01:21 ►

And by the way, thanks for your note also, Josh.

00:01:25 ►

I’ll look into the problem that you discovered and see if I can fix it.

00:01:27 ►

But thanks a lot for letting me know.

00:01:30 ►

I really appreciate that and your significant donation as well.

00:01:32 ►

Now for today’s program.

00:01:35 ►

And as I promised in my last podcast,

00:01:39 ►

I’m going to celebrate six years of salons with you by playing yet another Terrence McKenna talk,

00:01:42 ►

as he is obviously my favorite speaker in these podcasts.

00:01:46 ►

And again, I would like to thank our benefactor, Diana Slattery,

00:01:49 ►

for giving me this tape that we are about to hear,

00:01:52 ►

and for her long time and ongoing support of the salon.

00:01:57 ►

Now, as best as I can make out from the somewhat smeared handwriting on the cassette label,

00:02:01 ►

this talk was recorded in December 1982,

00:02:05 ►

and it seems to have been titled Tryptamine, Hallucinogens, and Consciousness,

00:02:10 ►

which I’ve just shortened to Tryptamine Consciousness for this podcast.

00:02:14 ►

As you’ll hear in just a moment, this talk must have been a part of a conference that Terrence

00:02:19 ►

was participating in at the time, but I don’t have any other information about it, so the best thing to

00:02:25 ►

do, I guess, is to just play it for you now, and we can both hear a little more from the mouth of

00:02:30 ►

the bard in the early days of his public speaking career.

00:02:37 ►

Well, perhaps this morning’s session will be a difficult act to top. I’m not sure.

00:02:44 ►

It was a little rough getting here.

00:02:48 ►

I want to call your attention this morning

00:02:52 ►

to a very circumscribed place

00:02:55 ►

in organic nature

00:02:57 ►

that has, I think, an implication

00:03:00 ►

for what’s been discussed here,

00:03:03 ►

not in the general sense of some of the theories that we’ve heard,

00:03:09 ►

but in the more particular and experiential sense.

00:03:13 ►

And that area is a family of hallucinogenic drugs

00:03:19 ►

that have not been mentioned particularly,

00:03:24 ►

which are the tryptophan-derived hallucinogens,

00:03:29 ►

dimethyltryptamine, psilocybin,

00:03:33 ►

and a hybrid drug, which is an aboriginal drug

00:03:38 ►

used in the rainforests of South America called ayahuasca,

00:03:42 ►

which is dimethyltryptamine but made orally active

00:03:47 ►

by being taken in the presence of a monoamine oxidase inhibitor.

00:03:52 ►

And the reason it seems to me appropriate to talk about these drugs in a conference

00:03:58 ►

devoted not only to consciousness, where its appropriateness is obvious, but devoted to quantum physics,

00:04:06 ►

is because it’s my interpretation

00:04:11 ►

that the major quantum mechanical phenomenon

00:04:16 ►

that we all experience, aside from life itself,

00:04:21 ►

is dream and hallucination.

00:04:30 ►

itself is dream and hallucination because these states, at least in the restricted sense that I’m using it, take place when the large amounts of radiation of various sorts that

00:04:38 ►

are conveyed into the body by the senses are restricted and instead we see interior images interior processes which are

00:04:50 ►

mental and these things definitely arise at the quantum mechanical level it’s been shown by John

00:05:01 ►

Smithies and others that there are quantum mechanical correlates

00:05:05 ►

to hallucinogenesis of one atom.

00:05:09 ►

In other words, a compound will be inactive

00:05:12 ►

and one atom is moved on the ring

00:05:16 ►

and then the compound becomes highly active.

00:05:20 ►

And to me, this is a perfect proof

00:05:24 ►

of the dynamic linkage at the formative level

00:05:28 ►

between matter, quantum mechanically described, and mind as experienced.

00:05:38 ►

So far what I’ve said is true generally of hallucinogens

00:05:43 ►

and of the anesthetics that John is interested in,

00:05:49 ►

and of other drugs and experiences as well. In other words, ordeals, dieting, this sort of thing

00:05:57 ►

can elicit hallucination. But what makes this tryptamine family of drugs interesting is the intensity of the hallucination and the concentration in the visual cortex of the activity so that there is an immense vividness to these interiorized landscapes it is as if information

00:06:25 ►

was being presented

00:06:27 ►

three dimensionally and fourth dimensionally

00:06:30 ►

deployed as

00:06:31 ►

light as surfaces

00:06:34 ►

which have information

00:06:35 ►

coded into them

00:06:37 ►

and when you confront

00:06:39 ►

these dimensions

00:06:41 ►

the

00:06:42 ►

dynamic relationship that is evolved

00:06:47 ►

is one of you relating to it,

00:06:50 ►

trying to decode what it is saying.

00:06:54 ►

And this phenomenon is not new.

00:07:00 ►

People have been talking to gods and demons

00:07:02 ►

for millennia.

00:07:04 ►

In fact, people have been talking to gods and demons for millennia. In fact, people have been talking to gods and demons

00:07:06 ►

for far more of human history than they have not.

00:07:11 ►

It is only the conceit of post-industrial societies,

00:07:16 ►

science and technology,

00:07:18 ►

that allows us to even propound some of the questions

00:07:23 ►

that we take to be so important.

00:07:26 ►

For instance, the question of contact with extraterrestrials is a complete red herring

00:07:36 ►

because it is hedged about with a number of assumptions

00:07:40 ►

which a moment’s reflection will tell you are completely false.

00:07:44 ►

which a moment’s reflection will tell you are completely false.

00:07:52 ►

In other words, the search for a radio signal from an extraterrestrial source is probably as culture-bound an assumption as to search the galaxy for a good Italian restaurant.

00:08:01 ►

That is just not going to happen.

00:08:05 ►

And yet this has been ruled as the means by which it is going to happen.

00:08:10 ►

Meanwhile, people all over the world,

00:08:13 ►

psychics, shamans, mystics, schizophrenics,

00:08:16 ►

their heads are filled with information.

00:08:20 ►

But it has been ruled a priori irrelevant, incoherent, or mad.

00:08:28 ►

Only that which is consensually validated through these certain instrumentalities will be accepted as a signal.

00:08:39 ►

The other problem is that we are actually so inundated by these signals from these other dimensions

00:08:46 ►

that there is a great deal of noise in the circuit.

00:08:50 ►

This is what I would say to John if he were here,

00:08:53 ►

that it is no great accomplishment to hear a voice in the head.

00:08:59 ►

The accomplishment is to make sure that it’s telling you the truth

00:09:03 ►

is to make sure that it’s telling you the truth because the demons are of many kinds.

00:09:10 ►

Some are made of ions, some of mind.

00:09:13 ►

The ones of ketamine, you’ll find, stutter often and are blind.

00:09:17 ►

And of all the others, I might say as well,

00:09:22 ►

it is not that you kneel in genuflection before a god because you will be like Dorothy before Oz. There is no dignity in the universe unless you meet these things on your feet.

00:09:44 ►

and you say, okay, well, you say you’re omniscient, omnipresent,

00:09:46 ►

or you say you’re from Zeta Reticuli,

00:09:50 ►

or you say you’re long on talk,

00:09:51 ►

but what can you show me?

00:09:58 ►

And magicians, people who invoke these things,

00:10:03 ►

have always understood that you go into it with your wits about you.

00:10:06 ►

Well, what does all this have to do with this family of drugs that I was talking about? Simply this, that this family of drugs has been overlooked

00:10:13 ►

whenever you, psilocybin is the one that most people have some experience with. Psilocybin

00:10:20 ►

legally and in people’s assumptions about it is lumped with LSD.

00:10:26 ►

They say psilocybin, LSD, mescaline, da-da-da-da.

00:10:29 ►

It is, each one of these things is a phenomenologically defined universe unto itself.

00:10:39 ►

And psilocybin and DMT, although DMT is more

00:10:45 ►

intense and briefer in its action,

00:10:49 ►

these things invoke the logos, which

00:10:53 ►

means they work directly on the language centers

00:10:57 ►

so that the important aspect of the

00:11:01 ►

experience is the dialogue. And as soon as you discover this about psilocybin,

00:11:08 ►

about tryptamines, you have to decide whether or not to enter into the dialogue to try and make

00:11:14 ►

sense of the incoming signal. And this is what I’ve done. I don’t call myself a scientist. I call myself an explorer

00:11:26 ►

because the area that I’m looking at,

00:11:29 ►

there is not enough data to dream of a science.

00:11:33 ►

We’re at the stage where people map one river

00:11:37 ►

and indicate other rivers flowed into it,

00:11:40 ►

but they didn’t ascend those rivers,

00:11:42 ►

and so nothing is known about that.

00:11:45 ►

And this Baconian collecting of data with no assumptions about what it has yielded, what it will yield,

00:11:53 ►

has pushed me to a number of conclusions that I didn’t anticipate. I, maybe by chronologically going through it I can explain to you what I mean and describing

00:12:09 ►

these trips raises all of the issues I first took DMT in 1965 and a friend of mine came to many of you have smoked EMT? By injection. Yeah. Well, it’s surprising so few have, because we

00:12:32 ►

live in a society that is absolutely obsessed with sensation. Every kind of thing you can imagine,

00:12:40 ►

every therapy, every drug, every sexual configuration, all forms of media overload,

00:12:46 ►

all of these things are adored in this society.

00:12:49 ►

And yet here is something that actually

00:12:53 ►

hedonists that we are,

00:12:57 ►

pursuers of the bizarre that we are,

00:13:00 ►

this thing is too much,

00:13:04 ►

or at least as they say in Spanish

00:13:05 ►

bastante, it’s enough

00:13:07 ►

so much enough that it’s too much

00:13:10 ►

you smoke it

00:13:13 ►

and it comes on in about 15 seconds

00:13:16 ►

you essentially fall back unconscious

00:13:20 ►

your eyes are closed

00:13:22 ►

and you hear a sound like ripping cellophane, like someone

00:13:26 ►

crumbling up a saran wrap or something like that and throwing it away. A friend of mine says this

00:13:31 ►

is your radio entelechy ripping out of the organic matrix. And you hear a tone, one of these ascending

00:13:39 ►

this kind of thing. And then there is the normal hallucinogenic drug modality which is a shifting

00:13:50 ►

geometric surface of migrating and changing colored forms and then you come up against this

00:14:00 ►

it’s like the well there must be some analogy some analogy at the site of activity. All the bond

00:14:07 ►

sites are being occupied, and you’re actually seeing the state begin to come into being

00:14:14 ►

over a period of about 30 seconds. And then you are in a place which is, well, I haven’t taken all drugs.

00:14:26 ►

I think if someone tells you they’ve taken every drug,

00:14:29 ►

you know they’re confessing they’re a dilettante.

00:14:32 ►

It’s much better to lean hard on a few.

00:14:36 ►

But I’ve taken most of the ones that would reflect

00:14:39 ►

or give a measure against this experience.

00:14:44 ►

And you find yourself in a space,

00:14:47 ►

it has a feeling of being underground,

00:14:50 ►

or somehow insulated and domed,

00:14:53 ►

it’s what in Finnegan’s Wake is called the Marigold Raum,

00:14:57 ►

from the German word Raum for space,

00:15:01 ►

and you actually, the room is going around,

00:15:04 ►

and in that space you feel, and Amit brushed this

00:15:08 ►

this morning, you feel like a child. You feel that you have come out somewhere in eternity and

00:15:15 ►

it always reminds me of the 53rd fragment of Heraclitus, which is the Aeon is a child at play with colored balls.

00:15:26 ►

And you not only become the Aeon at play with colored balls,

00:15:30 ►

but there are entities which are, in my book, The Invisible Landscape,

00:15:36 ►

I describe them as self-transforming machine elves.

00:15:42 ►

And this is sort of what they are. They’re dynamically contorting topological modules

00:15:50 ►

that are somehow distinct from the surrounding background,

00:15:55 ►

which is itself undergoing this continuous transformation.

00:16:00 ►

I always think of the scene in The Wizard of Oz

00:16:05 ►

after the house knocks the witch down

00:16:08 ►

and she’s in munchkin land

00:16:09 ►

and the head of the munchkins comes with a scroll

00:16:12 ►

and they all have very squeaky voices

00:16:14 ►

and they sing a little song about

00:16:17 ►

you are absolutely and completely dead

00:16:21 ►

and they’re marching around her.

00:16:28 ►

So the munchkins come these hyperdimensional machine elf entities and they bathe you in love which is spelled l-u-v it’s a kind of

00:16:41 ►

um well it’s not erotic and it’s not heartful, but it sure feels good.

00:16:50 ►

And what they are saying is, don’t be alarmed, remember, and do what we are doing.

00:16:59 ►

Now, another, and one of the interesting characteristics of DMT, and another reason that I would prefer it over something like ketamine,

00:17:08 ►

with ketamine you are not afraid. You go unafraid.

00:17:12 ►

I think one of the interesting things about judging a drug is to see how eager people are to do it the second time.

00:17:20 ►

If they’re eager to do it the second time, it’s probably not worth bothering about because what is real. We are in the balance,

00:17:45 ►

and in these states with these tryptamine drugs,

00:17:50 ►

we read the literature,

00:17:53 ►

we know what the maximum doses are,

00:17:55 ►

the LD50, this and that,

00:17:57 ►

but so great is one’s faith in mind

00:18:00 ►

that when you are out there,

00:18:02 ►

you know that the rules of pharmacology do not really apply

00:18:08 ►

and that control of existence on the plane is a matter of decision and luck and the roll of the

00:18:15 ►

dice with ketamine you don’t get this uh so they are reassuring you, these little entities, and saying, don’t worry, don’t worry, do this, look at this.

00:18:27 ►

Meanwhile, you are completely there.

00:18:33 ►

Your ego is intact.

00:18:34 ►

Your fear reflexes are intact.

00:18:37 ►

You are not fuzzed out at all.

00:18:39 ►

And consequently, your reaction is this.

00:18:50 ►

And it persists, and it persists and it persists and you breathe and it persists and they’re saying you know don’t don’t get some loop of wonder going that quenches

00:18:57 ►

your ability to understand just try not to be so amazed try to hang in and look at what we’re doing.

00:19:05 ►

And what they’re doing is emitting sounds

00:19:11 ►

like music, like language.

00:19:14 ►

And these sounds pass,

00:19:17 ►

as Philo-Judeus said that the Logos would

00:19:20 ►

when it became perfect,

00:19:22 ►

pass from being heard without ever going over a quantized

00:19:28 ►

moment of distinction into things beheld.

00:19:34 ►

And so what you hear and behold a language of alien meaning, which is taking place right

00:19:41 ►

in front of you, and it is conveying alien information

00:19:47 ►

which cannot be Englished.

00:19:50 ►

Now being a monkey,

00:19:52 ►

there is a kind of cognitive dissonance

00:19:56 ►

that is set up in your hind brain

00:19:59 ►

when you encounter an un-Englishable object

00:20:02 ►

because you try to pour mind over it and it just sheds it

00:20:08 ►

like water off a duck’s back. And then you try again and you are looking at it and this cognitive

00:20:14 ►

dissonance, this wow or flutter that is building off this object causes wonder or awe, awe at the brink of terror. So you have to keep controlling that.

00:20:27 ►

And the way to control it is to do what they’re telling you to do,

00:20:31 ►

which is do what we are doing.

00:20:34 ►

And then you begin to experiment with your voice.

00:20:40 ►

And a phenomenon is possible.

00:20:45 ►

And by the way, I give this lecture in this way

00:20:48 ►

to invite the attention of experimentalists,

00:20:53 ►

whether they be shaman or laboratory people

00:20:56 ►

or tank people or whatever,

00:20:58 ►

because I’m telling you,

00:20:59 ►

there’s something going on with these drugs

00:21:03 ►

that is not part of the normal spectrum of hallucinogenic drug experience as it’s known to be.

00:21:13 ►

So you begin this glossolalia-like phenomenon, although it isn’t classical glossolalia, which has been studied. In classical glossolalia, pools of saliva 18 inches across

00:21:27 ►

have been measured on the floors of these South American churches

00:21:31 ►

where people have been kneeling.

00:21:34 ►

And people always ask, after the glossolalia has happened,

00:21:39 ►

they turn to the people next to them and say,

00:21:41 ►

did I do it? Did I do it? Did I speak in tongues?

00:21:43 ►

This isn’t like that.

00:21:45 ►

This is simply a brain state

00:21:47 ►

which allows either the assembly language,

00:21:52 ►

which lies behind language,

00:21:54 ►

or a primal language of the sort

00:21:57 ►

that Robert Graves was talking about

00:21:59 ►

in The White Goddess,

00:22:01 ►

or a Kabbalistic language

00:22:03 ►

of the sort that is described in the Zohar, a primitive primal

00:22:08 ►

proto-Urshbrak that comes out of you and you discover you can make the extraterrestrial

00:22:16 ►

objects, the feeling-toned, meaning-toned, three-dimensional rotating complexes of light and color and transformation.

00:22:27 ►

And you feel like a child, and you are playing with colored balls.

00:22:33 ►

You have become the Aeon.

00:22:36 ►

So this happened to me 20 seconds after I did this drug on this day in 1965.

00:22:44 ►

And I was appalled.

00:22:49 ►

I mean, I thought that I had my ontological categories intact

00:22:53 ►

and I had taken LSD and it was all going forward.

00:22:57 ►

And this thing came upon me like a bolt from the blue

00:23:00 ►

and I came down and I said,

00:23:02 ►

and I said it many times while I was coming down,

00:23:05 ►

I cannot believe it.

00:23:07 ►

This is impossible.

00:23:10 ►

This is completely impossible.

00:23:14 ►

Because it was not, you know, that I was kneeling at the feet of some Rishi or Roshi or Geshe or one of those guys. It was not that there was a declension of gnosis.

00:23:30 ►

It was that, friends, right here and now,

00:23:34 ►

one quanta away, there is raging a universe

00:23:39 ►

of active intelligence that is transhuman,

00:23:44 ►

hyperdimensional,

00:23:46 ►

and extremely

00:23:48 ►

alien.

00:23:50 ►

The god that John Lilly talks

00:23:52 ►

to, that they play these

00:23:54 ►

games with about moral values

00:23:56 ►

and setting the

00:23:58 ►

constraints of the universe

00:23:59 ►

is not like this god at all.

00:24:02 ►

The chief thing about the

00:24:04 ►

god of tryptamine,

00:24:05 ►

if we can use that,

00:24:07 ►

I call it the Logos.

00:24:08 ►

That’s what I think it is.

00:24:10 ►

And I make no judgments about it.

00:24:12 ►

I constantly engage it in dialogue,

00:24:15 ►

saying, you know, well, what are you?

00:24:17 ►

Are you some kind of diffuse consciousness

00:24:20 ►

which is in the ecosystem of the earth?

00:24:24 ►

Are you… And the problem with it is that it

00:24:27 ►

is just full of answers to these questions you know it’s it’s the the true history of the galaxy

00:24:36 ►

over the last four and a half billion years is trivial to it and it can show you you can tune these images

00:24:46 ►

and of course the question always is

00:24:48 ►

independent validation

00:24:50 ►

or at least for a time

00:24:52 ►

for me the question was

00:24:54 ►

but as I

00:24:56 ►

attended more and more conferences like this

00:24:58 ►

and realized that the structure

00:25:00 ►

of the western intellectual

00:25:01 ►

enterprise is so flimsy

00:25:04 ►

at the center

00:25:05 ►

that apparently no one knows anything,

00:25:08 ►

I became less reluctant to talk about these experiences

00:25:14 ►

because they are experiences.

00:25:17 ►

They are primary datum for being.

00:25:22 ►

This is not remote, and yet it is so unspeakably bizarre that it casts into doubt

00:25:32 ►

all of man’s historical assumptions. And any of you who are familiar with the books I’ve written,

00:25:39 ►

I’ve entertained various ideas about it. When we first discovered the mushroom in South America,

00:25:46 ►

and it does these same things that DMT does,

00:25:50 ►

although it builds up over an hour

00:25:53 ►

and is sustained for a couple of hours

00:25:55 ►

and then comes down.

00:25:56 ►

But there is the same confrontation

00:25:58 ►

with an alien intelligence

00:26:00 ►

and these extremely bizarre,

00:26:08 ►

un-Englishable information complexes, and the hint, the hint that these drugs suggest that there is something that you can do with your body

00:26:16 ►

that you have never done, that no one has ever done, and that yet once it is done, it will be so obvious that it will fall right into the mainstream of cultural evolution. is a further extension of language. Perhaps, you know, I mean, perhaps,

00:26:47 ►

a language, a human language is possible

00:26:49 ►

where they’re actually,

00:26:51 ►

the intent of meaning is beheld

00:26:54 ►

in three-dimensional space.

00:26:57 ►

If this can happen on DMT,

00:26:59 ►

it means it is at least, under some circumstances,

00:27:02 ►

accessible to human beings.

00:27:05 ►

Well, given 10,000 years and a high-pressure technology looking at that,

00:27:10 ►

does anyone doubt for a moment that it could become just a cultural convenience

00:27:16 ►

in the same way that mathematics has become a cultural convenience

00:27:20 ►

or language has become a cultural convenience?

00:27:24 ►

But anyway, in confrontation with this organized intellect on the other side,

00:27:31 ►

many theories were elaborated.

00:27:35 ►

The theory that we wrote about in the book on psilocybin

00:27:38 ►

that teaches you how to grow it was that it was in fact an extraterrestrial,

00:27:46 ►

that in fact the physical body of the mushroom

00:27:50 ►

was the flesh of a species that did not evolve on Earth.

00:27:57 ►

And it said this, it had a whole rap.

00:28:01 ►

It said, yes, well, once a culture takes control of its, has complete understanding of its genetic information, it re-engineers itself for survival. work strategy when in contact with a planetary surface and a spore dispersion strategy in

00:28:28 ►

terms of as a means of radiating throughout the galaxy.

00:28:33 ►

And though I am troubled with how freely Bell’s non-locality theorem is thrown around, nevertheless

00:28:40 ►

my friends on the other side do seem to be in possession of a huge

00:28:48 ►

body of information drawn from the history of the galaxy.

00:28:53 ►

And they say that there is nothing unusual about this, that man’s conceptions of organized

00:29:02 ►

intelligence and the dispersion of life in the galaxy

00:29:05 ►

and this sort of thing

00:29:06 ►

are just hopelessly culture-bound

00:29:09 ►

and that the galaxy has been

00:29:11 ►

an organized system

00:29:17 ►

for billions of years

00:29:19 ►

and that life evolves

00:29:23 ►

under so many different regimens of temperature and pressure that searching for an extraterrestrial who will sit down and have a conversation with you is like searching for a good Italian restaurant out in the galaxy. is to recognize them, because time is so vast, and evolutionary strategies so varied,

00:29:47 ►

and environments so varied,

00:29:49 ►

that the trick is to know that contact is being made at all.

00:29:54 ►

The mushroom,

00:29:56 ►

if you can believe what it says in one of its moods,

00:30:01 ►

is a symbiote,

00:30:03 ►

and it desires symbiosis with the human species.

00:30:09 ►

It achieved it early by associating itself

00:30:13 ►

with the domesticated cattle that people keep.

00:30:17 ►

In other words, like the plants man grows

00:30:20 ►

and the animals he husbands,

00:30:24 ►

the mushroom sought to inculcate itself into that family

00:30:28 ►

because it’s very clear that where human genes go, those genes will be carried. It’s the old

00:30:35 ►

developed burrs so you can attach yourself to the fur of an animal and it will carry you with it

00:30:42 ►

wherever it goes. The the mushroom by being domesticated

00:30:45 ►

by human beings has become a part of the human family but this is all just beginning in terms

00:30:52 ►

speaking for a moment in terms of the classic mushroom cults in mexico they were destroyed by

00:30:59 ►

the coming of the conquest the the franciscans had an absolute monopoly on theophagia, which is eating God,

00:31:08 ►

and when they came upon these people calling a mushroom Tia Nonacatl, the flesh of the gods,

00:31:14 ►

they set to work with the Inquisition and were able to push this thing into the mountains of

00:31:22 ►

Oaxaca so that it only survived in a few villages

00:31:25 ►

until Valentina and Gordon Wasson

00:31:28 ►

went in the 1950s and found it there.

00:31:32 ►

And the metaphor I like for that,

00:31:35 ►

another metaphor,

00:31:37 ►

you see, balance these explanations.

00:31:39 ►

Now I’m going to sound like

00:31:40 ►

I don’t think it’s an extraterrestrial.

00:31:42 ►

It may be, it may not be.

00:31:44 ►

It may be what I’ve come recently to suspect

00:31:47 ►

is that the human soul is so alienated from us

00:31:51 ►

in our present culture

00:31:53 ►

that we treat it as an extraterrestrial.

00:31:58 ►

The most alien thing in the cosmos

00:32:00 ►

is the human soul.

00:32:05 ►

That’s why these movies like E.T. or even Alien,

00:32:09 ►

those guys could come tomorrow

00:32:12 ►

and the DMT trance is weirder

00:32:18 ►

and holds more promise for information

00:32:24 ►

for the human future.

00:32:27 ►

It is that intense a kind of thing.

00:32:32 ►

But what I was saying was they burned the mushroom cult.

00:32:38 ►

They forced it into repression.

00:32:40 ►

They burned the libraries of Greece at an earlier period.

00:32:44 ►

They dispersed the ancient knowledge.

00:32:47 ►

They shattered the stellar and astrological machinery that had been built.

00:32:53 ►

And by they, I mean the Greco-Hellenistic Christian Judaic tradition.

00:33:00 ►

And they built a triumph of mechanism. They realize the alchemical dreams

00:33:05 ►

of the 15th and 16th century

00:33:07 ►

and the 20th century

00:33:09 ►

with the transformation of elements,

00:33:11 ►

the discovery of gene transplant

00:33:15 ►

and this kind of thing.

00:33:17 ►

But then, having conquered the new world,

00:33:20 ►

having driven its people

00:33:22 ►

into cultural fragmentation and diaspora, in the mountains

00:33:26 ►

of Mexico, they came upon the body of Osiris, the condensed body of Eros, where it had retreated

00:33:35 ►

at the coming of the Christos. And this thing is now unleashed. If any of you read Phil K. Dick’s one of his last novels, Valus

00:33:45 ►

where he talks about the logos

00:33:49 ►

how it went into the ground

00:33:51 ►

it was a creature of pure information

00:33:53 ►

and it went into the ground at Nag Hammadi

00:33:56 ►

at the burying of the Chernobyl library in 270

00:33:59 ►

but it was information and it existed there until 1947

00:34:04 ►

and then the texts were translated, people read them,

00:34:08 ►

and as soon as people had the information in their minds,

00:34:12 ►

the symbiote came alive because it is a thing of pure information.

00:34:17 ►

And this is the same sort of thing.

00:34:20 ►

The mushroom consciousness is the consciousness of the other, both in hyperspace, which means in dream and in the separate parts, are seen to be part of a single continuum. flying saucer without ripping the envelope of the species so badly that the birth is aborted

00:35:09 ►

and fails and we remain in physis. And history essentially then is the shockwave of eschatology.

00:35:22 ►

Something is at the end of time and it is casting an enormous shadow over human

00:35:28 ►

becoming and it is drawing all human becoming toward it so that all the wars of history,

00:35:36 ►

the philosophies, the rapes, the pillaging, the migrations, the cities, the civilizations, all of this is occupying a microsecond of geological, planetary, and galactic time as the monkeys react to the symbiote which is in the environment, which is feeding the information from the true, about the historical situation in the galaxy.

00:36:04 ►

about the historical situation in the galaxy.

00:36:07 ►

And it is not… I don’t belong to the school of people who say,

00:36:10 ►

well, we couldn’t have done it if they hadn’t taught us writing

00:36:13 ►

and that sort of thing.

00:36:14 ►

They came from the stars and taught us to measure rep.

00:36:17 ►

What I’m saying is, I hope,

00:36:20 ►

something much more profound than that.

00:36:22 ►

It’s that as nervous systems evolve to higher and higher levels,

00:36:27 ►

they become more and more to understand the true situation in which they are embedded.

00:36:32 ►

And the true situation in which we are embedded is an organism,

00:36:38 ►

an organization of active intelligence that is on a galactic scale. And science may be culture bound,

00:36:51 ►

mathematics may be culture bound. People can argue about these things, but no one knows because we

00:36:57 ►

have never dealt with an alien mathematics or an alien culture, except in this limited area that is ruled out of bounds by the guardians

00:37:07 ►

of the truth. In other words, shamanic experience, drug experience, this is ruled out of bounds,

00:37:15 ►

and it is because it is the source of novelty. The cutting edge of the ingression of the novel into the plenum of being is happening there.

00:37:29 ►

I mean, think about it for a moment.

00:37:30 ►

If the human mind does not loom large in the history, in the coming history of the human race,

00:37:38 ►

then what is to become of us?

00:37:42 ►

The people who worry about getting the epistemological and ontological bases of these

00:37:47 ►

things nailed down say that the mathematics is in good order. What the problem is, is that the

00:37:56 ►

mathematics does not map well into English or any other natural language. And so people have

00:38:03 ►

violent disagreements in English when they are completely

00:38:07 ►

in agreement over the mathematical foundation of it. So I am saying we are at the beginning

00:38:15 ►

of human thought. This is the birth crisis of intelligence. And intelligence is something

00:38:25 ►

which is moving through the higher primates

00:38:28 ►

now at greater and greater speed.

00:38:30 ►

We know that there were primate species

00:38:33 ►

that were not human

00:38:34 ►

that chipped tools and made fire and drilled beads.

00:38:38 ►

So the question, are we unique,

00:38:42 ►

it has already been answered

00:38:44 ►

by the physical anthropologists.

00:38:46 ►

There have been other intelligent monkeys walking this planet.

00:38:51 ►

We exterminated them, and so now we are unique.

00:38:55 ►

But what is loose on this planet is language,

00:39:02 ►

self-replicating information systems.

00:39:06 ►

It may be a further rarification

00:39:10 ►

or a further hypostatization

00:39:13 ►

of what is happening in DNA.

00:39:16 ►

In other words, learning, coding,

00:39:18 ►

templating, recoding,

00:39:20 ►

testing, retesting, recoding.

00:39:23 ►

It may be,

00:39:24 ►

and the immune system does that too, it may be an extension of thatoding it may be and the immune system does that too

00:39:25 ►

it may be an extension of that

00:39:27 ►

or it may be a quality of an entirely different order

00:39:30 ►

but whatever it is

00:39:32 ►

it is in the monkeys now

00:39:34 ►

and moving through them

00:39:35 ►

and moving out their hands

00:39:37 ►

and into the technique

00:39:39 ►

with which we have surrounded ourselves

00:39:42 ►

the end state that this pushes toward

00:39:47 ►

and the tryptamine state

00:39:50 ►

seems to me to be, in that sense,

00:39:52 ►

trans-temporal.

00:39:53 ►

It is an anticipation of the future.

00:39:56 ►

It’s as though Plato’s metaphor were true.

00:40:02 ►

Plato said,

00:40:03 ►

time is the moving image of eternity. The tryptamine state is as though you step out of the moving image and into eternity, into the nunc stans, the standing now, the standing waveform of Thomas Aquinas and in the modern parlance of holographic transforms.

00:40:23 ►

the modern parlance of holographic transforms.

00:40:26 ►

And in that state, then,

00:40:29 ►

all of human history is seen to lead toward this culminating moment.

00:40:32 ►

And I take the acceleration that we see

00:40:35 ►

in the processes around us,

00:40:37 ►

the fact that fire 50,000 years ago,

00:40:41 ►

or whatever it was,

00:40:42 ►

language 35,000, whatever,

00:40:45 ►

then measurement 5,000 years ago or whatever it was, language, 35,000, whatever, then measurement, 5,000, then Galileo, 400, then Heisenberg.

00:40:52 ►

What is obviously happening is that everything is being drawn together.

00:40:57 ►

The description our physicists are giving us of the universe,

00:41:03 ►

which is that it lasted billions of years,

00:41:06 ►

will last billions of years, is a dualistic conception, an inductive projection that is

00:41:16 ►

very unsophisticated when it comes to the nature of consciousness and language. What Ahmet has gotten at in this conference, that consciousness collapses the state vector and causes the stuff to undergo what Whitehead called the formality of actually occurring, is the beginning of the understanding of the centrality of man. We have been on a decentralizing bender

00:41:47 ►

for 500 years,

00:41:49 ►

saying that the earth is not the center of the universe,

00:41:54 ►

man is not the beloved of God,

00:41:56 ►

moving ourselves out toward the edge of the galaxy.

00:41:59 ►

The fact is that the densest organizational material

00:42:04 ►

in the universe is the human cortex. And the

00:42:08 ►

densest and richest experience in the universe is the experience you’re having right now.

00:42:18 ►

Everything in the cosmos should be constellated outward from the perceiving self.

00:42:27 ►

That is the primary datum.

00:42:31 ►

And the perceiving self, under the influence of these drugs,

00:42:36 ►

gives information that is totally at variance with the models that we inherit in this society.

00:42:41 ►

So what I’m saying is, first of all, that this dimension exists. Second of all,

00:42:49 ►

on one level, it ain’t no big deal. People have been into this for millennia. It’s just that we

00:42:57 ►

are so grotesquely alienated and taken out of what life is about, that to us it comes as a revelation.

00:43:07 ►

Because the closest we can get to it

00:43:09 ►

is to try and feel in some dilettante-esque mode

00:43:13 ►

the power of myth or something, you know.

00:43:17 ►

And it’s this grasping after

00:43:19 ►

and it’s a very over-intellectualized sort of process.

00:43:25 ►

Well… in this very over-intellectualized sort of process. Well, I see it’s noon.

00:43:34 ►

They say if you don’t strike oil in half an hour,

00:43:38 ►

you should stop boring.

00:43:42 ►

Let me see if there’s anything to sum up about this.

00:43:46 ►

I think you struck it in half a minute.

00:43:47 ►

Whoa.

00:43:50 ►

The two things that I want to leave you with

00:43:53 ►

is, first of all,

00:43:55 ►

always in these kind of discussions

00:43:58 ►

where you present yourself as an explorer

00:44:00 ►

and not a scientist, yada, yada,

00:44:02 ►

it’s always that testimonials are what’s being given.

00:44:08 ►

I do not believe that I am unique,

00:44:12 ►

because if I believed that I were unique,

00:44:15 ►

none of my conclusions would have any meaning,

00:44:18 ►

because they would be of worth only to me.

00:44:22 ►

So everything I’ve described this morning has got to be more or less

00:44:27 ►

a part of the human condition, meaning, of course, maybe I have some facility for it,

00:44:33 ►

maybe somebody else. It’s very difficult to achieve, but it is part of the human condition.

00:45:06 ►

When I first smoked the DMT, I was an art history major, and I have a Jungian, very much into that,

00:45:07 ►

and there was no clue,

00:45:12 ►

no clue that these places exist.

00:45:15 ►

And I could not understand that.

00:45:16 ►

I said, well, you know, surely art is about carrying images

00:45:20 ►

out of the other,

00:45:22 ►

from the logos to the world,

00:45:28 ►

drawing ideas down into matter why is human art history so devoid of what i experienced so totally and i don’t really know the answer to

00:45:38 ►

that the alienness is very important and i, I haven’t spoken at all today

00:45:45 ►

about flying saucers or only by implication,

00:45:49 ►

but this is a favorite subject of mine

00:45:51 ►

because I think the flying saucer

00:45:53 ►

is the central motif to be understood

00:45:58 ►

in order to get a handle on reality here and now.

00:46:04 ►

We are alienated,

00:46:07 ►

so alienated that the self appears to,

00:46:12 ►

it must disguise itself as an extraterrestrial

00:46:16 ►

in order to not alarm us

00:46:18 ►

with the truly bizarre dimensions that it encompasses.

00:46:23 ►

And if any of you saw the movie E.T., the whole point of

00:46:27 ►

that movie was for to get the kid and the audience and everybody jacked around to the place where the

00:46:33 ►

kid with tears of joy streaming down his face could look out into the cool of the purple evening and say, E.T., I love you. And this is a great thing.

00:46:47 ►

It is a healing of the psychic discontinuity

00:46:52 ►

that we have been on since at least the 16th century,

00:46:56 ►

possibly earlier.

00:46:58 ►

The testimony that I want to give today

00:47:01 ►

is that magic is alive in hyperspace, and you

00:47:08 ►

don’t have to believe me or follow me or do anything to validate that except form a relationship

00:47:18 ►

with these plant drugs.

00:47:22 ►

And that’s the first time I think I’ve used the word plant but that

00:47:28 ►

for me is the defining characteristic remember my little ditty about the

00:47:33 ►

demons there of many kinds made of ions made of mind there is some surety that

00:47:41 ►

you are dealing with a creature of integrity if you deal with a plant.

00:47:48 ►

But the creatures born in the demonic artifice of laboratories

00:47:52 ►

have to be dealt with very, very carefully.

00:47:56 ►

And I think I’ll just leave it right there.

00:48:00 ►

You might want to mention that DMT is manufactured in the human brain,

00:48:05 ►

but in sub-threshold doses. I could have talked about all of that, that DMT is an endogenous

00:48:11 ►

hallucinogen, that psilocybin is 4-phosphoriloxy-NN-dimethyltryptamine, that serotonin,

00:48:18 ►

which is the major neurotransmitter running your brain, found in all life, found most in man, is 5-hydroxytryptamine.

00:48:26 ►

The very fact that you can smoke DMT, and I don’t know if I mentioned, but it takes

00:48:31 ►

five minutes.

00:48:32 ►

You do it, it comes on in 45 seconds, it lasts three minutes, you come down in two, that’s

00:48:37 ►

it.

00:48:37 ►

The very fact that that can happen means that your brain is absolutely at home with this compound.

00:48:46 ►

It just says, oh, I know what this is.

00:48:48 ►

I know how to de-alkalate, de-animate.

00:48:51 ►

And it does it.

00:48:53 ►

Where a drug like LSD, it clings, it hangs around.

00:49:00 ►

Ketamine as well. Ketamine as well.

00:49:04 ►

And if I could say one more thing, just a cautionary note,

00:49:09 ►

because I always feel odd telling people, you know,

00:49:12 ►

verify this thing, it’s out there, and the means is the drug.

00:49:18 ►

People should be very careful.

00:49:20 ►

I said earlier in this talk that I was addressing experimentalists, psychologists,

00:49:26 ►

psychiatrists. I don’t mean to scare anyone off, but you should build up to it. These are bizarre

00:49:32 ►

dimensions of extraordinary power and beauty, and I don’t believe there’s any set rule for acquiring

00:49:40 ►

power to not be overwhelmed. But I think moving carefully, reflecting a great deal,

00:49:49 ►

always trying to map it back on the history of the race

00:49:53 ►

and the philosophical and religious accomplishments of the species.

00:49:58 ►

This should always be done.

00:50:00 ►

If John were here, I would get a debate going with him.

00:50:05 ►

All drugs are dangerous.

00:50:08 ►

All drugs at sufficient doses or repeated over a sufficient amount of time,

00:50:15 ►

there are risks.

00:50:18 ►

The possibility of kindling epileptic effects is well known in ketamine.

00:50:22 ►

There’s a stack of literature on that.

00:50:24 ►

If anybody is intending to do ketamine. There’s a stack of literature on that.

00:50:27 ►

If anybody is intending to do ketamine who hasn’t done it,

00:50:31 ►

the first place you go when you’re going to take a new drug is the library.

00:50:33 ►

Read through all this stuff.

00:50:37 ►

Terence, can I ask you a couple of questions?

00:50:41 ►

Sure.

00:50:42 ►

Most intriguing to me.

00:50:44 ►

Well, one comment. There is in the

00:50:47 ►

Oriental art history, some, if not a tremendous amount of information of this demonic aspects,

00:50:56 ►

both from experimenting with drugs, which are very common in religious sects all over India,

00:51:03 ►

China, all of these ancient countries.

00:51:08 ►

Drugs were always used, plant drugs, of course.

00:51:09 ►

They didn’t have laboratory.

00:51:11 ►

They actually did, some, too.

00:51:15 ►

But in the Zen traditions, also there is the unmistakable evidence

00:51:22 ►

of encountering these demons.

00:51:26 ►

And they are talked about in various ways.

00:51:28 ►

In the enlightenment experience of the Buddha,

00:51:33 ►

it was confronting the Mara, the god of death,

00:51:39 ►

which sounds very similar to the terror experience that you talk about.

00:51:44 ►

In that perspective, we are beginning to

00:51:45 ►

understand that all of these experiences must occur because something similar happened in the

00:51:51 ►

religious experience and this drug experience. In fact, these drug experiences have been extremely

00:51:56 ►

valuable in telling us about many of the other experiences that we find in the esoteric literature.

00:52:02 ►

experiences that we find in the esoteric literature.

00:52:07 ►

The comment that interested me most is that you said that the terror in the drug experience is very essential,

00:52:11 ►

and it is better to use the aspect of terror as knowing that you are into the real thing

00:52:16 ►

than drugs which give into these pleasure trips where you are never sure.

00:52:24 ►

And what is your question?

00:52:25 ►

That is the question.

00:52:26 ►

Could you elucidate this a little bit?

00:52:28 ►

Talk about the terror?

00:52:29 ►

Talk about the terror and also why do you think that

00:52:32 ►

that switch to otherwise…

00:52:34 ►

I’m not saying that there is something intrinsically good about terror.

00:52:39 ►

I’m saying that granted the situation,

00:52:43 ►

if you are not terrified then you must be somewhat un in

00:52:52 ►

contact with the full dynamics of the situation to not be terrified means either you’re a fool

00:53:00 ►

or you have taken a drug which paralyzes the ability to be

00:53:07 ►

terrified I have nothing against you know hedonic experience and I certainly

00:53:13 ►

bring something out of it but the one you it must you know it must move your

00:53:19 ►

heart and it will not move your heart unless it deals with the issues of life and death.

00:53:29 ►

And if it deals with the issues of life and death,

00:53:33 ►

it will move you to fear.

00:53:34 ►

It will also move you to tears.

00:53:36 ►

It will also move you to laughter.

00:53:39 ►

But these places are profoundly strange and alien.

00:53:47 ►

And I agree with you and I disagree with you about the art thing.

00:53:54 ►

I mean, I’ve been to Cajurajo and I’ve been to Bubaneshwar

00:53:59 ►

and I’m fairly familiar with that art, collected tonkas, all these things.

00:54:04 ►

And I did see similarities in my LSD experiences.

00:54:08 ►

In fact, it was LSD experiences that drove me to collect Vajrayana art.

00:54:15 ►

But what amazed me was the total absence of the motifs of DMT.

00:54:23 ►

It is not there.

00:54:24 ►

It is not there in the funerary art of Egypt.

00:54:27 ►

It is, well, I mean, there are certain,

00:54:34 ►

there’s a story, a very interesting story,

00:54:37 ►

by Jorge Luis Borges called The Sect of the Phoenix.

00:54:43 ►

Do any of you know that story?

00:54:45 ►

It takes a page and a half.

00:54:48 ►

And he starts out and he says,

00:54:49 ►

there is a sect and it touches all mankind.

00:54:54 ►

Its practitioners have been the victims of persecution

00:54:57 ►

in every war in history.

00:55:00 ►

Its practitioners have held the red-hot poker

00:55:03 ►

at every inquisition in history.

00:55:06 ►

It touches the wealthy.

00:55:09 ►

It touches the poor.

00:55:11 ►

It respects no language barrier.

00:55:13 ►

It respects no age, no nothing.

00:55:17 ►

And it involves a right.

00:55:20 ►

And the practitioners of the sect view the right as trivial.

00:55:24 ►

It may be done in doorways.

00:55:26 ►

It is propitious to do it at the waxing of the moon.

00:55:30 ►

It involves something orange.

00:55:33 ►

It is old.

00:55:34 ►

The practitioners never speak of their cult,

00:55:38 ►

and when they do, they refer to it as the secret.

00:55:43 ►

And he goes on and he traces it to the gypsies,

00:55:47 ►

and he never explicitly says what it is,

00:55:52 ►

but I think if you know his other story, The Aleph,

00:55:55 ►

you put these two together,

00:55:57 ►

and The Aleph is the subject of the cult of the secret.

00:56:00 ►

And I don’t know, the mushrooms said, and I’m sure you’ll be horrified at this,

00:56:09 ►

the mushrooms said to me in the Amazon when they were revealing all this information and

00:56:15 ►

deputizing us to do all these things, that we said, why us? Why should we be you know the ambassador of an alien species into human culture and they said

00:56:29 ►

because you have never believed anybody because you have never uh given over uh your belief

00:56:38 ►

to anyone and this is somehow necessary so i uh the sect the phoenix, the cult of this experience,

00:56:50 ►

is perhaps millennia old,

00:56:53 ►

but it has not yet been brought to light where the threads may run.

00:56:59 ►

The history of drug taking on this planet is fairly well understood.

00:57:04 ►

Mushroom taking was confined to the central isthmus of Mexico, supposedly, the kind of mushrooms I’m talking about, not Amanita musensis, which is the mushroom we wrote our book

00:57:26 ►

about, is not known to be inculcated into a shamanic rite anywhere in the world.

00:57:34 ►

DMT is used in the Amazon and has been for millennia, but by cultures so primitive,

00:57:42 ►

not, I mean, the most primitive cultures use these DMT drugs.

00:57:46 ►

The Amazon is a world where you go nowhere

00:57:48 ►

except on water.

00:57:51 ►

Rivers are everything.

00:57:52 ►

Yet there are people who have not,

00:57:54 ►

who shun boats,

00:57:57 ►

don’t build them, don’t have them,

00:57:59 ►

think it’s a passing thing,

00:58:01 ►

not here to stay.

00:58:02 ►

And they are into these hallucinogens. I am baffled,

00:58:08 ►

and I am baffled by what I call the black hole effect, which seems to surround DMT. You know,

00:58:16 ►

a black hole is a curvature of space such that not only light can’t leave it, but no signal can leave it. Therefore, no information can leave it.

00:58:26 ►

And whether this is true in practice of spinning black holes and yada yada, but as a metaphor,

00:58:33 ►

think of it that way. DMT is like an intellectual black hole in that once you know about it,

00:58:40 ►

it’s very hard for anyone to understand you when you’re talking about it they don’t hear you

00:58:46 ►

and the more you are able to articulate what it is the less they are able to understand

00:58:53 ►

and this is why i think people who are enlightened if we may for a moment co-map these two things are silent they’re silent because you can’t understand them and

00:59:09 ►

why this thing has not been looked at by scientists by thrill-seekers by anybody

00:59:18 ►

I am not sure but I recommend it to your attention and I believe we didn’t even touch on the human

00:59:27 ►

future that the psychedelic state implies.

00:59:32 ►

But the future is bound to be psychedelic because the future belongs to the mind and

00:59:38 ►

we are just beginning to push the buttons on the mind. And once we take a serious

00:59:45 ►

engineering approach to this,

00:59:48 ►

we’re going to discover

00:59:49 ►

the plasticity, the mutability,

00:59:52 ►

the eternality of the mind,

00:59:55 ►

and I believe release it

00:59:57 ►

from the monkey.

00:59:58 ►

My vision of the final human future

01:00:01 ►

is that what history is about

01:00:04 ►

in engineering terms is an effort to

01:00:07 ►

exteriorize the soul and interiorize the body so that the exterior soul exists as a

01:00:16 ►

superconducting lens of translinguistic matter generated out of the forehead of each of us at a critical juncture,

01:00:26 ►

our psychedelic bar mitzvah, as it were. And then from that point on, you are eternal.

01:00:33 ►

And somewhere in the solid state matrix of the translinguistic lens that you have become,

01:00:40 ►

your body image exists as a holographic way of and you are at play in the fields of the Lord.

01:00:48 ►

You live in Elysium, Versailles in the morning.

01:00:56 ►

So that’s it.

01:00:58 ►

All right.

01:00:58 ►

That’s it.

01:01:03 ►

We have plenty of time for questions.

01:01:06 ►

We have not been stopping at 12.20 every day, so I’ll go on.

01:01:09 ►

I’d like to ask you a question, but I’d like to be dislocated from the experience.

01:01:16 ►

Well, I think you’re right.

01:01:18 ►

I think that the tragedy of our cultural situation

01:01:24 ►

is that we have no shamanic tradition.

01:01:29 ►

Shamanism is primarily techniques,

01:01:33 ►

not ritual.

01:01:35 ►

It is a set of techniques that work,

01:01:41 ►

that have been worked out over millennia,

01:01:44 ►

and that make it possible, perhaps not for everyone,

01:01:47 ►

to explore these areas, but for people of predilection.

01:01:52 ►

And there is also a method of noticing people of predilection

01:01:56 ►

and then taking them through it.

01:02:00 ►

But I agree with you.

01:02:01 ►

I feel very lucky because I’ve weathered some terrific storms

01:02:06 ►

and capsizings out there on the dark ocean of mind.

01:02:11 ►

But I always make the metaphor that how many of us,

01:02:15 ►

how many people, if they didn’t know how to sail,

01:02:18 ►

could learn to sail if they came upon a sailboat

01:02:22 ►

just drawn up on the sand?

01:02:25 ►

And that’s the challenge.

01:02:27 ►

And a great deal, obviously a great deal of the success of any person in that situation

01:02:33 ►

would depend on the weather.

01:02:36 ►

And the weather is something one must be able to intuit.

01:02:40 ►

If the sea is calm, you have a fair chance of mastering the rudiments of sailing

01:02:48 ►

before your metal is tested in any situation. If the weather is not calm, there’s great danger,

01:02:56 ►

and I feel very lucky, and if any of you who have read The Invisible Landscape know the invisible landscape know that we put in some fairly tough times in the Amazon.

01:03:07 ►

There was an instance of an irreversible monoamine oxidase inhibition episode which lasted 22 days.

01:03:16 ►

And had we not been in the Amazon basin, completely unreachable by modern health care delivery systems,

01:03:25 ►

it would have fared far different for us.

01:03:29 ►

Fortunately, we were able to go through the entire thing.

01:03:32 ►

And we are trepidatious.

01:03:34 ►

I mean, I am not an abuser of anything, let me tell you.

01:03:39 ►

I take these things as often as I can,

01:03:43 ►

but nevertheless fairly occasionally

01:03:46 ►

several times a year

01:03:47 ►

and I always approach it with

01:03:50 ►

fear and trembling

01:03:52 ►

and

01:03:53 ►

it’s been very good

01:03:55 ►

to us

01:03:57 ►

I have two amazing

01:04:00 ►

children and a lovely

01:04:02 ►

wife and

01:04:03 ►

my head is full of ideas my house is full of books it’s been

01:04:09 ►

very good to us and uh i’ve had something perhaps oblique to what you said but when i had the

01:04:20 ►

dialogue with it about uh why us and it said because you never followed any teachers.

01:04:27 ►

It also said something else, which I don’t, I’m not sure I can say this without sounding

01:04:34 ►

hubristic, but I don’t mean it that way. We also said why us, and it said, because you are good. And when we were flirting with the flying saucer

01:04:47 ►

and trying to, also the philosopher’s stone,

01:04:50 ►

trying to coax it out of the matrix,

01:04:53 ►

there would be these heated discussions

01:04:55 ►

between my brother and myself

01:04:56 ►

and the other people on the expedition.

01:04:59 ►

Why should we do this?

01:05:01 ►

Isn’t this going to be like atomic energy

01:05:04 ►

or anything else? Isn’t this going to be like atomic energy or anything else?

01:05:05 ►

Isn’t it going to be used by people

01:05:09 ►

to coerce other people

01:05:11 ►

and to gain control over them?

01:05:13 ►

And on this point,

01:05:14 ►

the Logos was very insistent

01:05:17 ►

and it said,

01:05:19 ►

you are not to worry about that.

01:05:23 ►

This belongs to the just and no one can lay a finger on it

01:05:30 ►

unless their heart is pure

01:05:41 ►

Yes. Yes.

01:05:42 ►

You said something about predilections.

01:05:49 ►

Do you recognize the predilection for being able to do this well?

01:05:55 ►

In classical, in societies where shamanism is a going institution, the predilections

01:06:01 ►

are fairly easy to state.

01:06:07 ►

Oddness, uniqueness in an individual.

01:06:14 ►

Epilepsy is often a signature in preliterate societies.

01:06:21 ►

Or surviving an unusual ordeal in an unexpected way. For instance, people who are

01:06:26 ►

struck by lightning and live are thought to make marvelous shaman. And people who often, people who

01:06:36 ►

nearly die of a disease and fight their way back after weeks and weeks in an indeterminate zone. They are thought to have, it’s about strength of soul, and so there must be some sign of

01:06:50 ►

strength of soul or of hypersensitivity to these places.

01:06:57 ►

In traveling around the world and dealing with shaman, what I find as the distinguishing characteristic is an extraordinary centeredness

01:07:09 ►

and also invariably the shaman is an intellectual. He is also invariably

01:07:16 ►

alienated from his own society. So when you go into these Amazon villages and you’re surrounded

01:07:24 ►

by tittering women with babes at each breast and all that, and into these Amazon villages and you’re surrounded by tittering women

01:07:25 ►

with babes at each breast and all that

01:07:27 ►

and all the people just think you’re very odd

01:07:30 ►

with all your gear

01:07:31 ►

huge, sweating,

01:07:33 ►

pouring pheromones into their

01:07:35 ►

living space. And

01:07:37 ►

they just think of you as people from

01:07:39 ►

outer space. The shaman

01:07:41 ►

sees exactly who you

01:07:43 ►

are. And he says, oh, here’s somebody to have a conversation

01:07:47 ►

with. These people are into the same thing. And whenever you gain the confidence of a shaman,

01:07:54 ►

the anthropological literature always presents them as embedded in a tradition and, you know,

01:08:01 ►

the whole sociological reductionist rap about shaman,

01:08:05 ►

but when you get to know them,

01:08:07 ►

they are always very sophisticated

01:08:09 ►

about what they are doing.

01:08:11 ►

They are the true phenomenologists of this world

01:08:15 ►

because they know that it’s a drug

01:08:19 ►

and they call these energy fields spirits.

01:08:23 ►

But we hear the word through a series of narrowing declensions of meaning

01:08:29 ►

that are worse almost than not understanding.

01:08:34 ►

They are speaking of spirit the way Amit might speak of charm.

01:08:41 ►

It’s a technical gloss for a very complicated concept

01:08:46 ►

and

01:08:47 ►

I’m sure in all of us

01:08:52 ►

there are varying

01:08:53 ►

greater and lesser degrees

01:08:56 ►

of shamanic predilection

01:08:58 ►

one of the ideas that my brother and I have tossed around

01:09:01 ►

there are families

01:09:04 ►

shamanic families and since by our analysis of what’s going

01:09:09 ►

on, we are, in other words, strictly speaking, hallucinogen shaman. I haven’t talked at all

01:09:15 ►

about shamanism without hallucinogens. The hallucinogenic shamanic family lines are obviously have a basis in the genome.

01:09:26 ►

In other words, it’s all about

01:09:28 ►

how many of these sites of activity,

01:09:30 ►

how well your serotonin,

01:09:32 ►

all how these things work together

01:09:35 ►

so that you may have these experiences.

01:09:37 ►

Some people claim to have these experiences

01:09:40 ►

on the natch.

01:09:41 ►

I am a very difficult person

01:09:43 ►

to move off the baseline of consciousness.

01:09:47 ►

And I scoured India

01:09:48 ►

and I have sat at a number of people’s feet,

01:09:53 ►

although perhaps my attitude was wrong,

01:09:56 ►

because what it comes down to for me

01:09:58 ►

is what can you show me?

01:10:02 ►

And I always ask that question.

01:10:04 ►

And finally, in the Amazon,

01:10:06 ►

the people said,

01:10:07 ►

well, let’s just get our machete

01:10:08 ►

and hike out here a half a mile.

01:10:10 ►

We’ll get some of this stuff

01:10:11 ►

and boil it up

01:10:12 ►

and I’ll show you what I can show you.

01:10:22 ►

Okay, I have a question.

01:10:24 ►

Aha.

01:10:25 ►

I’d like to know what happens to us if we have to, you know,

01:10:28 ►

it’s nice to be told we’re special, but what is it?

01:10:31 ►

Where is it in the brain that we can do something?

01:10:36 ►

You mean do something to manage it or do something to take advantage of it?

01:10:41 ►

It hurts so much, you know, it hurts so much when I have it.

01:10:43 ►

And sometimes it’s like it has such energy that people close to me hurts so much, you know. It hurts so much when I have it. Sometimes it’s like such energy

01:10:46 ►

that people close to me

01:10:47 ►

cannot stand it, you know.

01:10:51 ►

Well, there are many things

01:10:53 ►

to be said about this.

01:10:54 ►

First of all, you have to realize

01:10:56 ►

a person in these preliterate

01:10:58 ►

shamanic societies that I’m talking about

01:11:01 ►

who had serious epilepsy

01:11:03 ►

would probably not make it.

01:11:06 ►

In other words, drug intervention,

01:11:11 ►

I am assuming, I’m no expert on epilepsy,

01:11:15 ►

drug intervention is necessary in serious cases of grand mal epilepsy

01:11:20 ►

because nothing else is known to do for it.

01:11:28 ►

epilepsy because nothing else is known to do for it. People die in these societies that I’m talking about all the time for all kinds of reasons. Death is really much more among them than it is in our

01:11:39 ►

society. Those who have epilepsy who don’t die are brought to the attention of the shaman and trained in breathing and drugs and other things.

01:11:52 ►

And the fact is we don’t really know all of what goes on.

01:11:57 ►

These secret information systems have not been well studied.

01:12:03 ►

Then the person performs this function. But shamanism is not, in these

01:12:09 ►

traditional societies, a terribly pleasant office. You are not normally allowed to have any political

01:12:19 ►

power because you’re sacred. You always sit at the head man’s side

01:12:25 ►

in the council meetings.

01:12:27 ►

But after the council meeting,

01:12:30 ►

your hut is at the edge of the village.

01:12:32 ►

You are peripheral to society’s goings-on

01:12:35 ►

in every sense of the word.

01:12:37 ►

And you are only called on in crisis.

01:12:42 ►

And the crisis can be someone is dying or ill

01:12:47 ►

there’s a psychological difficulty a marital quarrel or someone has stolen something

01:12:53 ►

or weather must be predicted and

01:12:57 ►

You perform these functions the

01:13:02 ►

We are not that society. So when I explore these drugs

01:13:07 ►

and when I try to call their attention to,

01:13:10 ►

call people’s attention to them,

01:13:15 ►

it is as a phenomenon.

01:13:17 ►

I don’t know what we can do with it.

01:13:20 ►

I have a feeling that we can do a great deal with it.

01:13:24 ►

But the mindset that I always take to it

01:13:28 ►

is simply exploratory, Baconian, mapping and gathering facts. I have migraines.

01:13:39 ►

There’s one school of thought on migraines which holds that these are slow epileptic releases. There are

01:13:47 ►

similarities between epilepsy and migraine. And so speaking from migraine, there is what are called

01:13:58 ►

scatomata, which are traveling hallucinations of scintillating light that move across your field of vision.

01:14:06 ►

And intense physical pain accompanies these things.

01:14:10 ►

And people have extracted information from this state,

01:14:16 ►

used it.

01:14:17 ►

The 13th century mystic Hildegard von Bingen

01:14:20 ►

is known for a series of prayers and paintings,

01:14:27 ►

very odd paintings, that it now has been pretty conclusively shown she was a mystic, that’s obvious from what she said, but she must

01:14:33 ►

have been experiencing migraines scotomata to do these paintings in the way that she did.

01:14:39 ►

I don’t have any answer for you. All I can say is quote Herbert Gunther

01:14:46 ►

who talks about human uniqueness

01:14:48 ►

and says you must come to terms

01:14:51 ►

with your uniqueness.

01:14:53 ►

A lot of the talk that has gone on

01:14:55 ►

in this conference

01:14:56 ►

has been, as I said before,

01:14:58 ►

about general model building

01:15:00 ►

that seemed to me terrifically naive

01:15:03 ►

about the role of language and being

01:15:07 ►

as the primary fact of experience. In other words, what good is a theory of how the universe works

01:15:15 ►

if it’s a series of tensor equations that even when you understand them perfectly,

01:15:21 ►

nowhere come tangential to your experience. It’s like you’re creating

01:15:27 ►

an explanation for whom? For God, so that God can know how it works? It is the only intellectual or

01:15:38 ►

noetic or spiritual path worth following, seems to me, the one that builds on your own experience. And so you are

01:15:48 ►

given a unique situation, a challenge, epilepsy, an opportunity and a challenge.

01:15:55 ►

For someone else, it could be a high IQ or these very subtle and unstudied predilections for various drugs

01:16:05 ►

or susceptibility to pheromonal exchange

01:16:08 ►

by having very sensitive pheromonal receptors.

01:16:13 ►

There are psychiatrists who claim to be able to diagnose schizophrenia by smell,

01:16:18 ►

and that’s an extreme case.

01:16:20 ►

But what I’m saying is you must come to terms with your uniqueness,

01:16:29 ►

and that is all you can do really yes you have described all of these experiences as coming from the plants which are of the earth

01:16:35 ►

and you have described all of these experiences as extraterrestrial and I don’t know what you mean by extraterrestrial. Okay, here’s what I mean. The plants.

01:16:47 ►

A fungus is not a plant.

01:16:51 ►

Fungi are a third kingdom in nature.

01:16:56 ►

Fungi require oxygen just like we do

01:17:00 ►

and respire carbon dioxide.

01:17:03 ►

It is as though they are an amorphous animal and they’ve always

01:17:09 ►

been lumped in with the plants it was said it’s a primitive plant and but once the genetics was

01:17:15 ►

looked at closely and the metabolism was looked at closely it’s a third category the information

01:17:21 ►

that comes from ayahuasca which is made from the the vine, the Banisteriopsis capi, which is a higher plant, is earth-centered and healing, largely, and seems to be about the envelopes of information that surround the earth and our bodies and the jungle, that sort of thing. What the mushroom says about

01:17:46 ►

itself is that it is an extraterrestrial organism, that spores can survive the conditions of

01:17:56 ►

extraterrestrial space. They are black, deep, deep purple, the color that they would have to be to absorb in the deep UV end of the spectrum.

01:18:08 ►

The casing of a spore is one of the hardest substances, it is the hardest organic substance known.

01:18:17 ►

The density is similar to that of a metal, the density of electrons in the surface of that thing. Terry, are you saying that the mushrooms never evolved on Earth?

01:18:28 ►

What do you mean extraterrestrial in the material sense?

01:18:31 ►

That’s what the mushrooms said.

01:18:33 ►

I am not sure.

01:18:35 ►

And global currents form on the outside of the spore,

01:18:39 ►

and it is very light,

01:18:41 ►

and by Brownian motion,

01:18:44 ►

these things percolate to the edge of a planet’s atmosphere,

01:18:48 ►

and then through interaction with energetic particles coming in from space.

01:18:53 ►

You understand I’m talking now about an evolutionary strategy

01:18:56 ►

where only one in a ten high twelve spores

01:19:00 ►

actually makes the transition across the stars,

01:19:04 ►

actually makes the transition across the stars,

01:19:07 ►

but it’s a biological strategy for radiating throughout the galaxy

01:19:10 ►

without a technology.

01:19:12 ►

It just takes a billion or so years.

01:19:15 ►

But it’s the same principle

01:19:17 ►

by which a plant migrates into a desert.

01:19:20 ►

Your theory sounds very similar

01:19:21 ►

to Fred Hoyle and Chandra Bikram Singh.

01:19:23 ►

I was very happy that they came along with that theory.

01:19:30 ►

Their theory is that all of us came that way because they found, it’s very interesting,

01:19:34 ►

because there are, yeah, we are comets, but that’s only one vehicle.

01:19:40 ►

The interesting thing is that there are much more nebulae than there are life-supporting planets.

01:19:44 ►

The interesting thing is that they’re much more nebulous than their life-supporting planets.

01:19:50 ►

And nebulous had just the perfect environment, nourishment-wise,

01:19:55 ►

for not the macromolecules that Frank talks about, but the pre-macromolecules.

01:19:58 ►

That they too are compounds, but simple compounds,

01:20:03 ►

which can then go to a planet and start really, really doing their thing.

01:20:06 ►

And they think that this is what started all of us.

01:20:11 ►

And there is nothing, nobody can come up against this with anything except the inertia of their opinions.

01:20:14 ►

The facts are very nebulous.

01:20:16 ►

In other words, there are no fungi in the fossil record older than 60 million years.

01:20:23 ►

And the orthodox explanation of that is that they are

01:20:26 ►

soft-bodied and just didn’t occur. But on the other hand, we have soft-bodied worms and things

01:20:32 ►

from the bottom of oceans in the Flintstone Chirt that weigh in at just over a billion years old.

01:20:38 ►

So I don’t believe what the mushroom tells me. We have a dialogue. It is a very strange person

01:20:45 ►

and has many bizarre opinions

01:20:47 ►

and I entertain it the way I would rib this guy

01:20:51 ►

or somebody else and say,

01:20:52 ►

well, so that’s what you think, eh?

01:20:54 ►

And I often felt that I had the dilemma

01:21:01 ►

when the mushroom started saying

01:21:04 ►

it was an extraterrestrial, I felt that I was in the dilemma when the mushroom started saying it was an extraterrestrial,

01:21:05 ►

I felt that I was in the dilemma

01:21:07 ►

of a child who destroys a radio

01:21:09 ►

to see if there are little people inside.

01:21:12 ►

I couldn’t figure out

01:21:13 ►

whether the mushroom is the alien

01:21:16 ►

or the mushroom is some kind

01:21:18 ►

of technological artifact

01:21:20 ►

allowing me to hear the alien,

01:21:22 ►

and the alien is actually light years away, and

01:21:25 ►

some kind of bell non-locality system is allowing it to come through.

01:21:30 ►

Can I elaborate that a little bit? Would you agree with this statement? Mushroom is a conscious

01:21:36 ►

being. However, the consciousness is not released. It’s a latent virtual kind of consciousness.

01:21:43 ►

It’s not released until we become directly connected to it

01:21:47 ►

in a state of the brain where we are into the unit of consciousness.

01:21:50 ►

That’s what it says.

01:21:51 ►

It says, I require the nervous system of a mammal.

01:21:55 ►

Do you have one handy?

01:21:56 ►

Thank you.

01:22:09 ►

Should we go to lunch?

01:22:10 ►

Great.

01:22:12 ►

Thank you very much. Thank you.

01:22:21 ►

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,

01:22:23 ►

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

01:22:28 ►

I hope you caught that little jingle that Terrence recited about,

01:22:32 ►

oh, I guess about six minutes or so into his rap.

01:22:34 ►

You know, the one that went,

01:22:36 ►

The demons are of many kinds.

01:22:38 ►

Some are made of ions, some of mind.

01:22:41 ►

The ones of ketamine, you’ll find,

01:22:43 ►

stutter often and are blind. Now the reason I

01:22:47 ►

point this out is that in my podcast number 263, which was the second part of Eric Davis’s

01:22:53 ►

interview of Terrence shortly before his death, Terrence recited that jingle once again, but that

01:22:58 ►

time he mentioned DMT instead of ketamine. Not only am I impressed that 18 years after this talk, Terrence still

01:23:05 ►

remembered that little saying, but that Eric actually remembered that it was originally

01:23:10 ►

ketamine that Terrence used to make his point. Great memories on both sides, I’d say.

01:23:16 ►

One other thing that I’d like to comment on is when near the end of this talk, Terrence spoke

01:23:20 ►

about people who have a predilection to use psychedelic substances.

01:23:30 ►

And one of the things he pointed out was that people suffering from epilepsy often have this predilection.

01:23:33 ►

And while that isn’t the way it was in my own case,

01:23:38 ►

my brain may be inclined in that direction because my mother suffered from epilepsy.

01:23:42 ►

In fact, she suffered a grand mal seizure just as she was giving birth to me.

01:23:45 ►

But fortunately, I don’t remember much about that experience anymore. However, until the day before I was born, on her doctor’s orders, my

01:23:50 ►

mother had been taking very large doses of phenobarbital, which must have given baby me a

01:23:56 ►

nice little buzz during my first day or so on the planet. Ultimately, her use of that powerful

01:24:02 ►

substance doesn’t seem to have had any long-term disabilitating effect on me other than possibly to give me a predilection to explore my own

01:24:09 ►

consciousness with psychedelic tools.

01:24:12 ►

And so if you know someone who was a crack baby or something like that, my guess is that

01:24:17 ►

with luck they’ll grow up without having had too negative effect on their long-term health.

01:24:22 ►

I bring this up because there frequently is

01:24:25 ►

discussion about whether or not it’s safe for a pregnant woman to smoke

01:24:28 ►

cannabis. And while I’m not a scientist or a doctor and I have no qualifications

01:24:33 ►

whatsoever to make a statement about it, I do have a bibliography that lists over

01:24:38 ►

50 papers that have been written about studies conducted on cannabis and

01:24:41 ►

pregnancy. And their consensus seems to be that using cannabis during pregnancy has no negative

01:24:47 ►

effects on the fetus.

01:24:49 ►

And when I get a chance, I’ll scan that document and post it on the net for you to download

01:24:53 ►

should you be looking for information on that subject.

01:24:57 ►

Now, before I close, I would like to let you know that after two years as an audiobook

01:25:02 ►

only, I have now published a written version of my novel,

01:25:06 ►

The Genesis Generation, as a digital edition,

01:25:09 ►

an e-book that you can get through Amazon

01:25:11 ►

or many of the other digital bookstores.

01:25:14 ►

And I’ll put a couple of links at the bottom of the program notes

01:25:17 ►

for this podcast that will take you either to Amazon or to Smashwords,

01:25:21 ►

where you can get it in not only Kindle format,

01:25:24 ►

but also in a wide variety of other formats,

01:25:27 ►

including two that work with most word processors,

01:25:29 ►

so that you can download it and print it out for yourself

01:25:32 ►

in the event that you either don’t have an e-book reader

01:25:35 ►

or don’t like to read e-books on your computer, your tablet, or phone,

01:25:39 ►

all of which have free applications that make reading them pretty easy.

01:25:44 ►

And if you have a Kindle, you already know what a marvelous experience that is.

01:25:48 ►

I love it.

01:25:49 ►

And I should also point out that I’ve published the Genesis Generation

01:25:53 ►

under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No-Derivs 3.0 Unported License,

01:25:59 ►

which basically means that you can share the book

01:26:02 ►

and that you can copy, distribute, and transmit it

01:26:05 ►

as long as you give proper attribution.

01:26:08 ►

That means you have to admit that I wrote the book and not you.

01:26:12 ►

Non-commercial, you cannot sell it or use it for any type of commercial purposes.

01:26:17 ►

And no derivative works. You may not alter, transform, or build upon the work.

01:26:21 ►

In other words, it’s a book that you can lend to a friend.

01:26:25 ►

Basically, I think it would be great if you share a copy with your friends, so I have no problem if you want to buy

01:26:29 ►

a copy for yourself and then make copies to give to your friends for free. The bottom line is that

01:26:34 ►

I’m still a hacker at heart, and although my writing income is quite important to me, the

01:26:39 ►

mantra that information should be free is even more important to me. And since these are difficult

01:26:44 ►

times for all of us,

01:26:45 ►

I’ve got no problem with you sharing this book with your friends.

01:26:49 ►

I just ask that you don’t put it up on the Internet anywhere

01:26:52 ►

and that you don’t mass-produce it, even for free.

01:26:54 ►

What you could do if you’re giving away copies

01:26:57 ►

and you want to help in some other way

01:26:59 ►

is you could go to Amazon and write a review

01:27:01 ►

and or follow me on Amazon or Smashwords

01:27:04 ►

because more people

01:27:06 ►

who do that increases the visibility of the book and it’ll give it more visibility than

01:27:12 ►

it gets through my own efforts, which are mainly confined to talking about it here in

01:27:15 ►

the salon.

01:27:17 ►

And that way, hopefully, some of the others will find us too.

01:27:21 ►

And I promise to not do too much talking about the book after this here in the salon

01:27:25 ►

however just so you know a little bit more about it here’s the blurb about the book that you’ll

01:27:30 ►

find on Amazon the Genesis generation is a novel about a small band of friends who are part of a

01:27:37 ►

worldwide psychedelic community loosely calling itself the tribe like many other forward-thinking

01:27:43 ►

people today they are struggling

01:27:45 ►

to make the transition from cubicle-working consumers into beings who are more truly human.

01:27:51 ►

The story that Lorenzo weaves is the tale of a young man caught between two worlds,

01:27:56 ►

the world of corporate America and that of people with a more psychedelic or soul-manifesting point

01:28:01 ►

of view. As things unfold, we experience his transformation from being a

01:28:06 ►

29-year-old yuppie geek into a valuable member of the tribe. The story begins in Palenque, Mexico,

01:28:13 ►

and moves through Texas, Amsterdam, Vietnam, and even on to Burning Man before reaching a

01:28:18 ►

surprising climax. Eventually, the hero of the story must choose between living in the corporate

01:28:23 ►

world or living free.

01:28:25 ►

At least, that is what he thinks until events sweep him along in an unforeseen direction.

01:28:32 ►

And yes, it still is available as a pay-what-you-can audiobook that you can download at genesisgeneration.us,

01:28:39 ►

where you can hear it for free if you’re strapped for funds right now.

01:28:43 ►

Well, that’s going to do it for today,

01:28:45 ►

and so I’ll close this podcast by reminding you once again

01:28:48 ►

that this and most of the podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon

01:28:51 ►

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

01:28:55 ►

under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareLike 3.0 license.

01:28:59 ►

And if you have any questions about that,

01:29:00 ►

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

01:29:04 ►

which you can get to via psychedelicsalon.us. And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from

01:29:11 ►

Cyberdelic Space. Be well, my friends.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

270 - Tryptamine Consciousness

Program Notes §

Previous Episode §

Next Episode §

Similar Episodes §

Transcript §

00:00:00 ► §

00:00:21 ► §

00:00:25 ► §

00:00:32 ► §

00:00:38 ► §

00:00:43 ► §

00:00:48 ► §

00:00:53 ► §

00:00:57 ► §

00:01:02 ► §

00:01:03 ► §

00:01:12 ► §

00:01:18 ► §

00:01:21 ► §

00:01:25 ► §

00:01:27 ► §

00:01:30 ► §

00:01:32 ► §

00:01:35 ► §

00:01:39 ► §

00:01:42 ► §

00:01:46 ► §

00:01:49 ► §

00:01:52 ► §

00:01:57 ► §

00:02:01 ► §

00:02:05 ► §

00:02:10 ► §

00:02:14 ► §

00:02:19 ► §

00:02:25 ► §

00:02:30 ► §

00:02:37 ► §

00:02:44 ► §

00:02:48 ► §

00:02:52 ► §

00:02:55 ► §

00:02:57 ► §

00:03:00 ► §

00:03:03 ► §

00:03:09 ► §

00:03:13 ► §

00:03:19 ► §

00:03:24 ► §

00:03:29 ► §

00:03:33 ► §

00:03:38 ► §

00:03:42 ► §

00:03:47 ► §

00:03:52 ► §

00:03:58 ► §

00:04:06 ► §

00:04:11 ► §

00:04:16 ► §

00:04:21 ► §

00:04:30 ► §

00:04:38 ► §

00:04:50 ► §

00:05:01 ► §

00:05:05 ► §

00:05:09 ► §

00:05:12 ► §

00:05:16 ► §

00:05:20 ► §

00:05:24 ► §

00:05:28 ► §

00:05:38 ► §

00:05:43 ► §

00:05:49 ► §

00:05:57 ► §

00:06:25 ► §

00:06:27 ► §