Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“Safety is really a concern of mine, and what I’ve been telling people recently is that until there’s animal and human data on a drug it should probably be looked at very carefully.”
“In the absence of good scientific data about the effects of artificial hallucinogens it’s good to stick to the natural ones.”
“I think that what these psychedelics do, is they actually do connect you to the whole circle. You stand outside of the moment from which you embarked on your psychedelic experience, and you see eternity like a vast landscape deployed in front of you. So what I think psychedelics are is they’re about time, and they somehow make all time co-present.”
“The apocalypse is the millennium, and the psychedelics move you into the future.”
“I think that the whole thing, the crux of the whole psychedelic issue, is that it accentuates personal responsibility by making people take their own experiences seriously.”
Links mentioned in Jon Hanna’s comments:
The bio synthesis of dimethyltryptamine in vivo.
Comments by Sasha about DMT & Tryptophan
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Transcript
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Greetings from Cyberdelic Space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic
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Salon.
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And before I go any further, I’d like to again thank those who have purchased a copy of one Psychedelic Space. This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
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And before I go any further, I’d like to again thank those who have purchased a copy of one of my books or who made a direct donation to the salon to help with our expenses.
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I think that I’ve emailed a thank you to those who made direct donations
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or made a donation for my pay-what-you-can version of the Genesis Generation.
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But since I know that there are three people out there who purchased
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Kindle versions of my book,
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I’ll have to thank you this way because Amazon
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doesn’t let me know who you are.
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And also I want to send
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a thank you to the two people who
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sent in a donation via snail mail,
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including one very
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generous donation all the way from Germany.
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Well, I simply
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can’t thank all of you enough for helping
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me to keep the fires burning here in the
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salon.
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And speaking of fire,
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it is tonight that the
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man burns at the Burning Man Festival.
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I actually tried
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to Skype in for the Palenque Norte
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lectures there last Thursday,
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but apparently the bandwidth
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is now at a serious premium on the playa.
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Even Bruce wasn’t able to squeak an email out to me that night. But in any event, I’ll be joining
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thousands of others online who couldn’t make the burn in person, and by the time this podcast is
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posted on the net, I’ll be watching the live video feed from the playa, and we’ll be dancing at home
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watching the man burn. And maybe you’ll be dancing at home like me tonight, as we watch the festivities
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from afar. Anyway, I hope you’re enjoying your night tonight. Now, the talk that I’m going to
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play for you today was sent to me by my friend Nur, who was also one of the participants in the
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Esalen workshop that we’ve been listening to these past few weeks.
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And hey, thank you very much for your time and trouble in getting this recording to us here in the salon, Nur.
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We really appreciate your efforts.
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The recording itself is an interview that Elizabeth Gipps did with Terrence McKenna at his home in mid-1985.
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And as far as I know, it hasn’t been posted on the net
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before, but of course I could be wrong about that. In any event, we are all very fortunate in that
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Elizabeth gave a copy of this recording to NERR, who in turn passed it along to the salon.
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As you’re going to hear in just a moment, along with Elizabeth and Terrence is a man
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who Elizabeth
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introduces right at the beginning of the recording, but I couldn’t clearly make out his name.
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Maybe some of the fans of her radio program of years ago, the one that Elizabeth hosted
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for many years in Santa Cruz, will recognize who he is and post some information about
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him in the comments section for this podcast, which, as you know, you can get to via psychedelicsalon.us.
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Now, the reason I’m pointing him out right off the bat is that
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he starts out by asking Terrence a question that quite literally blew my mind.
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It was about something known as cauldron chemistry.
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Have you ever heard about that before?
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Well, I hadn’t. So after
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previewing this recording, right away I wrote to my friend and colleague John Hanna, who
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to my mind is one of the very few people around who might know about this topic. John is my
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go-to guy to kind of help me sort the shit from the Shinola, so to speak. And on more than one occasion, he has corrected some false impressions that I’ve formed
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about several of the more esoteric topics that we come into contact with here in the salon.
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And right after we listen to this interview, I’ll read John’s response to my query.
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And it’s a real classic reply.
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So how’s that for getting you interested in what’s to come
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but i won’t tease you any longer i’ll just play the recording and let you join me in a
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great big smile as the first question is asked
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in his house uh we being lou de bourbon and eliz, me, and we’re sitting in this incredible collection of books
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in a very beautiful home in a wonderful, magical spot near…
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Is this Marin County?
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No, it’s Sonoma.
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This is Sonoma County.
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Let’s do Sonoma County. Far from Sonoma.
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Talking.
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So I will take the conversation
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and if Terrence has special information
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that he’d like you all,
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you aware people of the United States to have,
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he’ll let us have it.
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And we will mention the fact
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that he has a new book which is on cassette
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and he’ll talk some about that too too, and where it can be ordered.
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That’s all.
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That feel like a good introduction to everybody?
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Yeah, that sounds fine.
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Okay, here we go.
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Okay.
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Maybe I’ll just start out by asking a couple of questions that have been on my mind.
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Fascination with the combination of DMT and Harmeen and things
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of this nature.
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And what I’m interested in is those places or plants or animals or ways in which people
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can come close to or have historically come close to or had access to DMT.
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And I remember you briefly mentioned a process whereby by combining rabbit lungs, say, and pig intestines,
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you could actually in some way create or obtain DMT.
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And I was wondering if you could go into a little more detail on how that could be done.
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I’m not sure pig intestines is the second ingredient, but what you need is a source
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of tryptophan, which is a common amino acid, and then rabbit lung, which is replete with
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an omethylation enzyme, omethyltransferase, and it will omethylate the tryptamine into a psychoactive, which is just an
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example of what’s called cauldron chemistry, where you use animal enzymes to do chemical
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transformations. Another one that has been discussed in the literature is using the decarboxylation activity of enzymes in raw milk
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to decarboxylate the poison in Amanita muscaria,
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which is muscarine,
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to the hallucinogen, which is muscimol.
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And in Wasson’s book on soma,
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he discusses the fact that the soma, whatever it was,
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was whipped together with milk curd and
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allowed to stand and this was one of the major
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arguments for identifying it as Amanita muscaria because that would make it much more palatable and less toxic.
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But who knows how many of these things
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exist, you know, because we have lost the lore of special uses for animal organs and that sort of thing.
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And that really is shamanic lore that we’ve lost touch with.
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Are you familiar with the newt, the California newt,
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or the importance of the tetrodotoxin and the fugu?
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Perhaps maybe you can go a little bit into the fish, if you want,
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and, of course, the nude in that sense.
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Before we get into that much of a technical thing,
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I wonder if it’s possible to tell people why we think this is important.
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Can we just discuss that for a minute?
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Why is it important to track down these natural sources of the psychedelic
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experience
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well
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it’s important because the psychedelic
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experience is important
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in and of itself
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but it’s important to involve ourselves
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with these biological materials
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because the things which come out of the laboratory of
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which there’s a potentially unlimited number uh are not receiving the kind of animal and human
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testing that they would if they were above ground drugs so safety is really a concern of mine. And what I’ve been telling people
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recently is that until there is animal and human data on a drug, it should probably be
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looked at very carefully. If you look at naturally occurring hallucinogens with a tradition of human use, you don’t have to worry about that because you, for instance, the mushrooms, we know that they were used in the mountains of Mexico for at least two millennia.
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Ditto the morning glories in Mexico.
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So in the absence of good scientific data about the effects of artificial hallucinogens
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it’s good to stick to the natural ones
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and it also
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a more interesting and kind of more
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um
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philosophical
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case can be made
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if you accept the theory of
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Rupert Sheldrake of morphogenetic
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fields because you
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have to realize then that the morphogenetic fields because you have to realize then
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that the morphogenetic field of a drug like psilocybin,
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which has been in living systems perhaps 120 million years,
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been used by human beings perhaps 20,000 years,
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what is its morphogenetic field going to be like
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contrasted to a drug made six weeks ago in the laboratory?
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It’s the depth of these things.
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You see, the new drugs are empty.
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They haven’t taken enough people yet to fill up.
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But what you see with something like psilocybin
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or morning glory seeds or something like that is the accumulation of the experience of all the people who ever took these things.
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I mean, that’s why you’re reaching back into a human family spread out over millennia and actually being those shaman.
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You are those shaman or you are participating in the personality of the over-shaman, if you wish.
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So that is the basis for an ontological distinction between artificial and naturally occurring drugs of all types,
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but especially hallucinogens, which have this intellectual content.
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Gee, that’s the best explanation of a case for organic psychedelics
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that I’ve heard.
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Stephen said a long time ago,
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when we were on the caravan,
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12 years ago, I guess,
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that we should stop using LSD
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because so many people had used it
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in such paranoid circumstances
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that the vibrational rate
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was no longer such that you could know that you were going to have an ecstatic trip anymore.
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Well, that is an intuitive understanding of exactly what Shell Drake was saying.
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The reason I’ve been thinking about this recently
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was because I was at a conference recently on psychedelics,
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a closed conference mostly for health care professionals.
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And there was a lot of talk about ADAM, MDMA.
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And then someone asked the question,
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what is the LD50 of it?
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LD50 is a fairly unpleasant concept,
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which is necessary to understand in pharmacology.
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The LD50 is the dose
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at which half the mice die
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or half the dogs die.
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And all drugs are tested this way.
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And what you want with a drug
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is a drug where the LD50
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is hundreds or thousands of times more than the effective dose.
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For instance, the effective dose of psilocybin is about 20 milligrams.
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The LD50 for psilocybin is 375 milligrams per kilogram.
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So we’re talking 30,000 milligrams
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for a 145-pound human being.
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The problem that emerged with ADAM
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was that the LD50 is very close to the effective dose
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and that no human trials have ever been done.
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The effective dose of ADAM is considered to be
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somewhere between 75 and 150 milligrams. The LD50 is considered to be 500
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milligrams based on studies of dogs. Now let me explain this so it doesn’t sound
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too alarmist. Dogs are not good creatures to extrapolate to human beings.
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Practice has shown that mice are much better,
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that the LD50 in mice will be more generally close to the LD50 in primates,
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including man, than data on dogs or cats.
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including man, than data on dogs or cats.
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Nevertheless, in the absence of any human data whatsoever about Adam,
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it’s very unnerving that the LD50 is so close to the effective dose.
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So immediately, the institution which was holding this conference,
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which probably would prefer to be anonymous,
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pledged $1, dollars to study the problem. Someone at the conference pledged a thousand dollars. And
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tests will begin with sophisticated human volunteers who will clear their systems and and then take it and then have massive blood work done.
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This is the short-term human data will come out of that.
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The long-term human data is beyond the financial capability of the underground.
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But you see, this is interesting, so let me take a moment
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because it’s important for people.
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There’s only one drug in the world which is safe, strangely enough.
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In other words, there’s only one drug in the world that no one knows how much it takes to kill you,
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and that drug is LSD-25.
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And that drug is LSD-25.
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And this is a very fortunate thing because people in the 1960s got into the habit,
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I remember Tim Leary said,
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when in doubt, double the dose.
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Completely reasonable advice for LSD.
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The problem is LSD is the only drug
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with such a benign profile so that we can’t carry the dose estimation habits that we formed on LSD into these new amphetamines like MDA, MDMA, ADAM, ecstasy, because they are, it’s well known among chemists that the cyclicized amphetamines are toxic.
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Mescaline is the most toxic of all natural hallucinogens.
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MDMA is four times as toxic as mescaline.
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So at this conference, a great deal of thought was put into,
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there were people there who were so enthusiastic
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about the effects of Adam,
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the psychological effects,
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that they felt that this was the greatest chance
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the underground had ever had
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to actually obtain a quasi-legal or legal status for a hallucinogen.
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The problem is this toxicological data
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makes it clear that it could never be legalized.
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And in fact, if Adam cured the common cold,
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it would not be legalized if it has a LD50 profile only four times the effective dose.
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but I had not formulated what is the real difference, you know.
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And when you would argue with people that synthetics and organic drugs were different,
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they could eventually argue you to the point where you just couldn’t defend it because they seemed to be the same.
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But with Sheldrake, the notion of Sheldrake,
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that the morphogenetic field attends the compound,
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and the absence mainly of human data.
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I mean, we went through a ketamine phase
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with moderate amounts of human data,
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although now I see in science news last week
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there’s fear that it depresses the immune system.
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In fact, it does depress the immune system.
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While leaving aside its use in the underground,
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the worst thing an anesthetic can do is depress your immune system
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because you’re going to have surgery and come out of surgery
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and be in a surgical recovery ward.
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You want your immune system to just be fully revved up.
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Now we have this problem apparently with Adam.
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And in fact, there has been one reported death at a dose of 390 milligrams.
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Thanks for that information.
00:18:16 ►
It’s really important to get out because there’s so much enthusiasm about Adam.
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Well, I told Tom these things and he was floored.
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I’m sure he was.
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And we had a long talk about it.
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We have to take responsibility, you know, the underground,
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because we can’t have another drug scandal
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would finish psychedelic research above and underground
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for the rest of this century.
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above and underground for the rest of this century.
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So it’s a problem with people’s courage.
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I mean, let’s contrast two drugs for a minute.
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Here we have psilocybin, effective at the 20 milligram dose,
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and you would have to take, as I said,
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probably close to two and a half dried pounds of the mushrooms that are on sale in the Bay Area
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to approach the fatal dose.
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Nevertheless, if you take 40 milligrams of psilocybin,
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you will swear that you are at death’s door.
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You will swear that you are looking at the path to the bardo.
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But with Adam, it’s totally the feeling, the aura is that it’s completely benign even as you approach a fantastically dangerous dose.
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It is amazing because Adam puts you in this state of love even for itself.
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That’s what happens.
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And, you know, and I discussed this with Lou coming down.
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It seems to me that my experience with Adam is that I’m so much in love,
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in a state of love that it’s dangerous in other ways because I accept.
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Too much.
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I accept things
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that I shouldn’t really accept
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that aren’t the best for me.
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That’s right.
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So it’s some…
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Boy, it’s fascinating.
00:20:12 ►
So I’ve heard of people
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who essentially to become courageous enough
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to get really stoned,
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take Adam ahead of it.
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In other words, people say,
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well, I take Adam
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and then I take LSD an hour and a half later,
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or I take psilocybin an hour and a half later.
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Well, I think that these are, you know,
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in the absence of human data,
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this is all very chancy stuff.
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We have to realize that LSD was a God-sent,
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special, miraculous case.
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I mean, it was amazing to pharmacologists
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that it was so non-toxic.
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The CIA gave an elephant six grams
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and, you know, it laid down for three days
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and then it got up and shook its head
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and wandered off to look for something to eat.
00:21:00 ►
So, but we must be more responsible.
00:21:05 ►
So I’ve actually formulated it down to a little test,
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which is if you are interested in the spiritual path utilizing hallucinogens,
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then the hallucinogen you use should be able to answer yes
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to two of the following three questions. Does it
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have a history of shamanic usage? Does it occur in the tissue of a plant or animal?
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And then let me think.
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I can’t think of a third one.
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And now let me think.
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You can’t think of it.
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Does it bear a similarity to compounds that occur in our own brains?
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We’re just discovering a lot of those compounds,
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so we don’t know them all yet.
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Well, but as I said, you have to be able to answer yes to two of three.
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So LSD would actually pass two of those. That’s right.
00:22:04 ►
The hallucinian mysteries where it was utilized for thousands of years and it occurs in the brain.
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Well, and also it occurs in morning glories and ergotized rye.
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So.
00:22:17 ►
Yes.
00:22:20 ►
And if we do that, I don’t think we’ll get into trouble. And I also want to make this clear.
00:22:26 ►
We will not be denying ourselves any dimension of importance.
00:22:32 ►
In other words, I notice people have the attitude that you have to take out far more about what’s going on if you take a few drugs at progressively more and more heroic doses.
00:22:52 ►
Also, and I invite experimenters to try this,
00:22:57 ►
at the moment there is so much attention directed toward Adam
00:23:01 ►
that the morphogenetic field of Adam is so strong
00:23:04 ►
that if you will
00:23:05 ►
take psilocybin, you can request it to masquerade as Adam, and it will immediately turn over
00:23:12 ►
and be Adam for you.
00:23:16 ►
And I don’t think Adam can do the same trick going the other way.
00:23:23 ►
Well, do you mind if I talk?
00:23:25 ►
Go ahead. Please do join the conversation.
00:23:27 ►
I know you want to get more technical, but I want to save it a little bit.
00:23:30 ►
Sure.
00:23:31 ►
Well, that’s all I want to say.
00:23:32 ►
Well, I’ve got some questions.
00:23:33 ►
Oh, God.
00:23:34 ►
What did you just say about psilocybin?
00:23:35 ►
Oh, that it would turn over.
00:23:39 ►
I want you, could you run down for people, if I understand you correctly, Terrence, I understand that you believe the reality that the spore of suicide mushrooms are alien intelligence
00:23:54 ►
or intelligence from other areas of the galaxy or universe.
00:24:00 ►
Would you tell us a little about that?
00:24:03 ►
Well, it’s not a belief of mine.
00:24:05 ►
It’s just a case, a case I make
00:24:09 ►
because I want to stretch the imaginations of evolutionary biologists
00:24:13 ►
and everybody else who’s looking at the living kingdom.
00:24:17 ►
And it is certainly true that spores appear to be
00:24:21 ►
genetically engineered for space flight.
00:24:25 ►
They are a color, deep purple.
00:24:28 ►
I’m now talking about the spores of Staphylocubensis.
00:24:31 ►
They’re a deep purple color which absorbs UV.
00:24:34 ►
That’s the color you would paint a spaceship.
00:24:39 ►
They survive best in conditions most like those of space.
00:24:44 ►
In other words, high vacuum, low temperature.
00:24:47 ►
They are small enough that they could, through Brownian motion
00:24:53 ►
and then the formation of global electrical currents
00:24:57 ►
forming on their surfaces high up in the atmosphere,
00:25:01 ►
actually percolate out into outer space,
00:25:04 ►
much the way, instance that the atmosphere
00:25:06 ►
much of the atmosphere of mars has drifted away over millions of years and i think that the
00:25:14 ►
experience well that’s basically a case for that they are a biological entity able to migrate
00:25:20 ►
between the stars by through utilizing convective flow and light pressure and that sort of thing.
00:25:28 ►
A more radical proposition based on the experience of psilocybin is that that organism is intelligent or that it is able to transfer information,
00:25:45 ►
able to transfer information, that it is somehow a form of life which is able to communicate with us when it is locating in our nervous systems, that it comes to its fullest flower
00:25:54 ►
in the organism of a higher animal, and that in that state there is the potential for an
00:26:00 ►
I-Thou exchange.
00:26:04 ►
And phenomenologically, there’s no question about this, that there is this I-Thou exchange. And phenomenologically, there’s no question about this,
00:26:07 ►
that there is this I-Thou exchange with psilocybin.
00:26:11 ►
But people can say, you know, a psychologist can say,
00:26:15 ►
well, it’s an autonomous psychic component
00:26:18 ►
that has slipped out of the control of the ego
00:26:20 ►
and you’re dialoguing with that or whatever.
00:26:24 ►
But I think when you’ve had
00:26:26 ►
the experience
00:26:27 ►
the overwhelming impression
00:26:30 ►
is that you are having a conversation
00:26:32 ►
with a very
00:26:33 ►
strange, very
00:26:36 ►
old, very different
00:26:38 ►
kind of organism
00:26:39 ►
and based
00:26:42 ►
on that and as I say these physical
00:26:44 ►
arguments about the survivability of the spore
00:26:46 ►
and its adaptability to the outer space environment
00:26:49 ►
I want to suggest
00:26:52 ►
that space may be no barrier
00:26:55 ►
to the migration of forms of
00:26:58 ►
many forms of life
00:27:00 ►
not just forms of life possessing spaceships
00:27:03 ►
and that probably many times in the Earth’s
00:27:06 ►
history, spores
00:27:08 ►
have drifted down and become
00:27:10 ►
part of things. And this is not a
00:27:12 ►
radical theory at all.
00:27:15 ►
Crick, of Crick and Watson,
00:27:18 ►
holds the same view
00:27:20 ►
and believes that probably
00:27:21 ►
the galaxy is a biome.
00:27:24 ►
The galaxy is a biome, the galaxy is a biological unit,
00:27:27 ►
and we are just coming to the level of scientific and cultural
00:27:31 ►
and awareness to recognize these things.
00:27:35 ►
And, of course, I think this argument seems preposterous
00:27:39 ►
unless you have had the experience on fairly high doses of psilocybin
00:27:44 ►
of actually meeting this alien
00:27:46 ►
entity, which is an experience very different from the classical psychedelic experience
00:27:54 ►
established through the use of LSD and mescaline. Those seem to be largely explorations of human
00:28:01 ►
dimensions, psychoanalytic and the collective unconscious of Jung,
00:28:07 ►
dimensions of historical resonance and that sort of thing.
00:28:12 ►
But there was not the prevalence of the extraterrestrial theme
00:28:16 ►
that you get with the tryptamines,
00:28:19 ►
psilocybin and DMT especially.
00:28:21 ►
These seem to be ways of communicating
00:28:24 ►
with a nearby world of alien
00:28:27 ►
intelligence, which may or may not be space-based. It may be hyper-dimensional, or it may be
00:28:34 ►
earth-based. These may be the elves and fairies of folklore. The human experience is so bounded
00:28:41 ►
by language, we don’t realize how our scientific and linear
00:28:47 ►
expectations of the world hide from us the real complexity of what’s going on.
00:28:54 ►
Well, do you have something you would like to say or ask or comment on?
00:29:07 ►
How are we doing, Tom?
00:29:09 ►
No, go ahead.
00:29:10 ►
Okay.
00:29:12 ►
Didn’t mean to stop the trail over there. That’s all right.
00:29:14 ►
It was a great little…
00:29:16 ►
I have a question then.
00:29:18 ►
In the experience of actual extraterrestrial intelligence embodied in form,
00:29:25 ►
which I’ve read and heard you describe before.
00:29:31 ►
Is there a place where you go…
00:29:33 ►
I’m asking a question.
00:29:35 ►
In the psychedelic experience,
00:29:37 ►
with psilocybin at any rate and DMT forms,
00:29:40 ►
where you go into the molecular form
00:29:43 ►
and then out another side that forms itself
00:29:48 ►
into forms that we’re not familiar with here in our 3d land you actually go through the mandala
00:29:53 ►
the molecular mandala well i had never cognized it that way but that’s an interesting way to think
00:30:00 ►
of it it’s as though the molecule turns your mind through another dimension,
00:30:06 ►
and you see something which is co-present with reality, as it were, but between the spaces,
00:30:15 ►
sort of, and suddenly the phase shift occurs. I remember when I was a child, I had this toy,
00:30:22 ►
which was a flat piece of paper with a circus cage printed on it.
00:30:28 ►
And when you moved the bars one way, there was a zebra in the cage. When you slid the
00:30:34 ►
bars the other way and covered all the parts of the zebra, a tiger was revealed. And this
00:30:40 ►
is something about the nature of reality, that there seems to be at least one other continuum co-present.
00:30:48 ►
And this is why our folklore is haunted by elves, genies,
00:30:56 ►
jinns, afrites, demons, all these curious creatures of folklore,
00:31:02 ►
which wouldn’t be there if there was not some
00:31:06 ►
experiential basis for them. It’s just that we have crowded into cities and then crowded into
00:31:11 ►
condominiums, and we don’t experience what goes on with the single person in vast wilderness,
00:31:19 ►
in a life lived based on experience of the present at hand rather than vast abstract systems of explanation
00:31:27 ►
dictated by science and government and that sort of thing.
00:31:31 ►
Would you like to comment at all on what you think the psychedelic experience is
00:31:37 ►
with your knowledge of the chemistry of the plants and so forth
00:31:42 ►
and of the physiology of the body and the kind of experiences you’ve had?
00:31:46 ►
Do you have any idea what it is?
00:31:47 ►
What is it?
00:31:48 ►
Well, I’ll tell you what I think it is,
00:31:50 ►
but it’s not really based on physiology or pharmacology.
00:31:54 ►
It’s based on carefully looking at the experience.
00:31:58 ►
Plato said time is the moving image of eternity.
00:32:03 ►
And I think that what these psychedelics do is they actually do connect you to the whole
00:32:12 ►
circle.
00:32:13 ►
You stand outside of the moment from which you embarked on your psychedelic experience
00:32:19 ►
and you see eternity like a vast landscape deployed in front of you. So what I think psychedelics are is they’re
00:32:29 ►
about time and they somehow make all time co-present and how this is possible and why it’s
00:32:38 ►
possible, I don’t know. But I think perhaps this is what the myth of the fall is about, that what man’s
00:32:46 ►
fall is, is really the fall into time, the time of a fading past, an unknown future,
00:32:58 ►
and a very intense but very small area where things are going on called the present,
00:33:09 ►
there is some way in which that can be stepped out of. And it’s not an either-or situation.
00:33:14 ►
We are all to some degree in time,
00:33:17 ►
and we are all to some degree in eternity.
00:33:20 ►
And to the degree that we are in eternity,
00:33:23 ►
we behave correctly and have right activity and right perception. And these psychedelics enhance this involvement with the totality of everything. like the nuclear gridlock and all these other terminal problems that we have
00:33:47 ►
could be overcome if people would by any means try to come into attunement with
00:33:55 ►
the notion of unity in time and space of the species and the planet and the solar system. And I think this is the evolving core idea
00:34:08 ►
which will either save us
00:34:11 ►
or the absence of its evolution will be our ruin,
00:34:15 ►
the idea of unity and interrelatedness.
00:34:19 ►
I would like to suggest that it’s possible
00:34:21 ►
that both things are happening,
00:34:22 ►
that there is a universe where it’s unraveling
00:34:25 ►
and one where it’s already won.
00:34:29 ►
And wasn’t it you, Robert Anton Wilson,
00:34:34 ►
I know has talked about it some,
00:34:36 ►
suggested the future is already, it’s pulling us towards it.
00:34:39 ►
And I like that.
00:34:41 ►
And you talked about 12-12 as a step-over point.
00:34:43 ►
00:34:44 ►
2012, yeah, and I told like that. And you talked about 12-12 as a step over point. 2012. 2012, yeah.
00:34:45 ►
And I told everybody that.
00:34:46 ►
And a few days ago somebody told me that the Mayan fifth wheel, which we’re on now, ends in 2011, which I didn’t know.
00:34:56 ►
It actually ends in 2012.
00:34:57 ►
It ends on the 21st of December, 2012, just 30 days after the date that I picked from all the work we did with the I Ching.
00:35:07 ►
Yes, somehow…
00:35:07 ►
What did you do?
00:35:08 ►
How did you do that?
00:35:09 ►
Do you mind running it down really…
00:35:11 ►
It’s very complex.
00:35:11 ►
I can’t understand your book.
00:35:13 ►
I just can’t understand it.
00:35:15 ►
And I’m telling you the I Ching, you know.
00:35:18 ►
But, yeah, the apocalypse is the millennium, and the psychedelics move you into the future.
00:35:30 ►
We are all occupying different places in historical time.
00:35:34 ►
I mean, some of us are completely uncivilized Neanderthals. I mean, and some of us are very uptight 18th century sort of people interested in the social contract and the obligations of class and party
00:35:47 ►
and and some of us are future people and this is the whole you don’t have to wait for society to
00:35:56 ►
move into the future you can just make it happen around you and if everyone did that we could leap
00:36:02 ►
a thousand years into the future.
00:36:05 ►
I try to tell people that. That’s one of the things that I say when people come on,
00:36:09 ►
oh, well, are we going to make it through the nuclear thing and stuff?
00:36:12 ►
And I say, listen, man, I’ve visited the future. I know there’s a future.
00:36:16 ►
I don’t know whether there’s one for you, but I’m sure there’s one for me because I’ve seen myself in it, right?
00:36:21 ►
And I keep coming back and you keep coming back we all keep coming back is because we’ve got all this great thing we want everybody to share it but
00:36:30 ►
we have a few little things we work out ourselves on the way yes well by
00:36:34 ►
everybody by example I think that the whole thing the crux of the whole
00:36:39 ►
psychedelic issue is that it it accentuates personal responsibility
00:36:47 ►
by making people take their own experiences seriously.
00:36:52 ►
People completely undervalue themselves.
00:36:55 ►
They think that they are spectators to life.
00:36:59 ►
They think that the great scientific breakthroughs,
00:37:02 ►
the great works of art, the great political upheavals,
00:37:06 ►
will all be brought to them on the tube and explained by Newsweek.
00:37:10 ►
They don’t realize that all of that is illusion
00:37:14 ►
and that what is central is the immediacy of personal experience
00:37:19 ►
and that if you work with that,
00:37:21 ►
you can just leave history and move off sideways from it and become your own Magellan.
00:37:28 ►
This is what people are doing in their living rooms, taking psilocybin in darkness late at night.
00:37:33 ►
They are the Columbuses of the new world of the human spirit.
00:37:50 ►
it and by taking responsibility by abandoning the myth of that science government the military and the churches are the forces which make culture and just realizing culture is what we’re doing
00:37:56 ►
at this very moment the evolution of historical thought is what we’re doing at this very moment. Maybe before, I have one more thing, and then I think that you ought to get a little technical
00:38:09 ►
before you have to go, but I always like to ask people if there’s something I haven’t
00:38:16 ►
asked that they feel people ought to hear right now at this place in the infinity sign.
00:38:25 ►
No, I’m very tricky.
00:38:27 ►
I unburdened myself early on of what I wanted to say,
00:38:31 ►
what I thought should be gotten out.
00:38:32 ►
Let’s talk about, just for a few minutes,
00:38:34 ►
about your book, your cassette book,
00:38:37 ►
and that and where people can order.
00:38:38 ►
What’s in it? What’s it about?
00:38:40 ►
Okay, well, it’s a book called,
00:38:43 ►
I wrote a book called True Hallucinations, which was the story behind the invisible landscape, the story of an amazing expedition to the Amazon in the early 70s, in which we met the saucers, or at least I never wanted to meet them more closely than that, and discovered the the mushroom which we brought back,
00:39:05 ►
which we wrote our book about
00:39:07 ►
and basically it’s just the wildest experience
00:39:10 ►
I’ve ever had or ever heard of
00:39:13 ►
read onto eight cassettes
00:39:17 ►
as a nine and a half hour talking book
00:39:20 ►
with wonderful special effects
00:39:24 ►
and musical backgrounding and that sort of thing.
00:39:28 ►
Well, that gave us a concise thing here
00:39:31 ►
before they started making too much noise,
00:39:33 ►
which was really great.
00:39:35 ►
So, Lou, I know has a lot of questions,
00:39:37 ►
and before we break, I thought it would be neat to hear you all.
00:39:39 ►
I can tape or not tape.
00:39:41 ►
I think you’d probably like to…
00:39:42 ►
Well, let me thank you, first of all, Liz.
00:39:44 ►
I think people like you are really the shock troops of the new order
00:39:48 ►
because the whole thing that we’re all doing is information,
00:39:52 ►
and the radio is very, very important.
00:39:57 ►
I know.
00:39:57 ►
That’s why I’ve got to get together to package this program
00:40:00 ►
and send it out around.
00:40:01 ►
I want to send it to those spots in the United States
00:40:06 ►
that have enough aware population to enjoy it.
00:40:10 ►
I think there are probably 30 to 50 of them anyway.
00:40:13 ►
Well, you may get better, but you’re just fine the way you are.
00:40:17 ►
Oh, yeah, well, I know.
00:40:19 ►
It’s an all-win situation.
00:40:22 ►
So do you want to go back to where you were talking about,
00:40:26 ►
because that led us into why organic stuff.
00:40:29 ►
We were talking about…
00:40:31 ►
Oh, we were talking about cauldron chemistry.
00:40:32 ►
The shaman and alchemy of it, yeah.
00:40:35 ►
Well, there are many.
00:40:38 ►
An interesting thing to think about in regard to shamanism and all that
00:40:42 ►
is that there may be many situations where natural
00:40:47 ►
products can be combined to make a powerful hallucinogen where the components themselves
00:40:53 ►
are not the most obvious known example of that is ayahuasca in the amazon where dT in Socotria viridis is potentiated
00:41:05 ►
by taking MAO-inhibiting haramine from Banisteriopsis capi.
00:41:10 ►
But there may be many potentials for these kinds of things.
00:41:15 ►
For instance, why were the Druids so interested in mistletoe?
00:41:21 ►
Let’s look at the chemistry of mistletoe
00:41:23 ►
and try to imagine ways in which mistletoe might be’s look at the chemistry of mistletoe and try to imagine ways in which
00:41:25 ►
mistletoe might be brought in that direction.
00:41:28 ►
The Arundodonax case is another one.
00:41:30 ►
The Chinese, many of the mushrooms in the Chinese pharmacopoeia could be looked at as
00:41:36 ►
well.
00:41:38 ►
Ayurvedic medicine, there are traces of combinatory hallucinogens.
00:41:43 ►
So this is actually an area where not a lot of work
00:41:46 ►
has been done, and in fact generally
00:41:47 ►
synergies have
00:41:50 ►
not been studied. Synergies are a
00:41:52 ►
situation where two compounds are put
00:41:54 ►
together to get an effect, and
00:41:55 ►
even
00:41:56 ►
pharmaceutically and medically
00:41:59 ►
the synergies that occur with various
00:42:02 ►
drugs have not been
00:42:03 ►
well studied.
00:42:06 ►
There were a few areas that I spend some time thinking about.
00:42:10 ►
One of the most is what I call lower life form biochemical conversion processes
00:42:17 ►
or ways in which things are transmitted, perhaps from termites through termidomyces, through
00:42:27 ►
tool-making behavior in chimpanzees, through that this transfer of information occurs and
00:42:36 ►
continues to occur, and so that each organism, perhaps, in its combination, the flies which
00:42:42 ►
are stupefied by muscaria as it discaze,
00:42:48 ►
are eaten by the frogs whose legs in turn are,
00:42:54 ►
and so there’s a lore or a processing that goes on in that way as one form. The other is a chromopuncture, an area selectively,
00:42:57 ►
that the body is selectively sensitive to certain colors,
00:43:03 ►
to certain chemicals in certain areas,
00:43:06 ►
and that this is another area that isn’t really understood
00:43:10 ►
or hasn’t been looked into.
00:43:12 ►
No, you make a very good point.
00:43:14 ►
The other would be olfactory intoxicants.
00:43:16 ►
There’s a critical timing and involvement, I think,
00:43:22 ►
that has to go on in order to optimize an experience and I think the
00:43:26 ►
olfactory component is another one that needs to be
00:43:30 ►
considered. Pheromones are aromatic compounds which are message-bearing chemicals that
00:43:41 ►
insects give off but plants also give off pheromones. And in fact, the
00:43:48 ►
more it’s looked into, the more it appears that everything is giving off pheromones.
00:43:54 ►
And the plainer nature of hallucinogens suggests that they may be, in some sense, natural
00:44:01 ►
hallucinogens, super pheromones. They are actually message-bearing compounds
00:44:07 ►
whose purpose is to communicate between one species and another
00:44:13 ►
or within a species.
00:44:14 ►
For instance, the language of insects is not a language of sound,
00:44:19 ►
but a language of chemical excretion.
00:44:22 ►
And how complex this language is, we don’t know because we can’t
00:44:26 ►
pierce into it.
00:44:28 ►
But I studied for a while
00:44:30 ►
under Dr. Ralph Foddy,
00:44:32 ►
who was a great geographer
00:44:34 ►
and medical epidemiologist.
00:44:36 ►
And he suggested that
00:44:38 ►
hallucinogens should be looked upon
00:44:41 ►
as a subset of pheromones.
00:44:44 ►
And I know when you’re in the Amazon, you
00:44:47 ►
just breathe this air which is laden with thousands of chemical messengers of all sorts
00:44:55 ►
that are setting the ambiance of the whole biosphere. And this has not been looked at.
00:45:04 ►
It’s not well understood.
00:45:05 ►
There was an amazing article written a few years ago
00:45:08 ►
by a man named Harry Wiener
00:45:10 ►
who wrote an article called
00:45:11 ►
External Chemical Messengers, ECM he called them,
00:45:16 ►
in the New York Journal of Medicine
00:45:19 ►
and he outlined a whole theory
00:45:21 ►
of how this regulated species and interspecies relations.
00:45:25 ►
He talked about how when you walk into a room full of people,
00:45:29 ►
you get an immediate gestalt impression,
00:45:33 ►
which he felt was olfactory,
00:45:35 ►
that you were sensing the psychic conditions of everyone
00:45:39 ►
by taking a lungful of the message-laden chemicals
00:45:43 ►
that everybody was exuding.
00:45:45 ►
He talked about psychiatrists who would diagnose schizophrenia by smell.
00:45:51 ►
They would just walk over to the person and take a hit of their body odor
00:45:55 ►
and felt, you know, that…
00:45:59 ►
And he even suggested that what perhaps some forms of schizophrenia are is miscuing socially because your pheromone system is haywire.
00:46:10 ►
So you’re giving off what can only be described as a weird vibe,
00:46:16 ►
and so people relate to you weirdly,
00:46:18 ►
and that makes you weirder, and it makes them weirder,
00:46:21 ►
and you get this feedback lock,
00:46:23 ►
and it’s essentially because your invisible
00:46:27 ►
exochemical messenger computer is broken down.
00:46:34 ►
What I was thinking was,
00:46:36 ►
if we could get back a little bit to the combination of the,
00:46:39 ►
let’s say the tryptamine and the DMT
00:46:42 ►
and the haramine or those combinations, the DMT, and the haramine, or those combinations,
00:46:46 ►
and also to get to the fugu.
00:46:48 ►
I know very little about it,
00:46:51 ►
and it would be nice if you have some thoughts on the chemistry of the fugu and the newt.
00:46:56 ►
What is the fugu?
00:46:58 ►
It’s the fish that’s eaten in Japan.
00:47:01 ►
Yes, I don’t know actually anything about that particular fish.
00:47:06 ►
I know that there are fish eaten off Norfolk Island,
00:47:10 ►
which is an island off the west coast of Australia.
00:47:12 ►
In fact, there’s an amazing description of a trip
00:47:15 ►
in Hoffer and Osmond’s book, Hallucinogens.
00:47:20 ►
This person, this happened in the early 60s,
00:47:30 ►
they saw a monument to the first landing on the moon and had all these super science fiction visions of the future
00:47:34 ►
that they had not expected to get high.
00:47:37 ►
It was an accidental.
00:47:38 ►
They had caught this fish, roasted it on the beach and ate it.
00:47:42 ►
And in Hawaii, there are similar fish.
00:47:46 ►
And about six species are implicated,
00:47:48 ►
and I think in all cases DMT is the compound.
00:47:52 ►
But not a lot of animal tissue contains
00:47:55 ►
utilizable amounts of hallucinogens.
00:47:58 ►
For instance, I don’t think it’s ever,
00:48:00 ►
no hallucinogenic insect has ever been confirmed,
00:48:10 ►
although there are persistent reports of a grub, a palm grub,
00:48:14 ►
an immature beetle form in Brazil, which is hallucinogenic,
00:48:19 ►
and occasionally butterflies are mentioned as hallucinogenic,
00:48:21 ►
but it’s never been confirmed.
00:48:25 ►
So this is an area where research needs to be done.
00:48:34 ►
If one were to be able to make, say, DMT from rabbit lungs and were able to obtain the hamin from the Russian thistle or the other plants,
00:48:42 ►
how would one proceed in terms of combining these in the most effective way?
00:48:49 ►
Well, you want MAO inhibition, so you have to take an effective dose of the MAO inhibitor,
00:48:57 ►
and then the DMT is usually potentiated at a dose lower than the effective dose without the MAO inhibitor.
00:49:06 ►
And probably since these things are degraded substantially in the gut, the most effective
00:49:13 ►
way of doing it would be to smoke it. Or sublingual absorption is also a direct route that avoids
00:49:20 ►
the degradation in the digestive system.
00:49:24 ►
avoids the degradation in the digestive system.
00:49:28 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
00:49:32 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
00:49:39 ►
So, are we ready to start boiling up rabbit lungs and pig guts?
00:49:42 ►
Or do you think that we should stick to mushrooms?
00:49:48 ►
Personally, since I don’t like the thought of killing anything, any animal for sure,
00:49:52 ►
I’ll stick to the plants myself, mainly cannabis I should add.
00:49:57 ►
Now as I mentioned earlier, when I first previewed this recording and it started with that question about cauldron chemistry,
00:50:01 ►
I immediately copied that section of the recording and sent it to John Hanna
00:50:04 ►
for a more professional opinion about the topic.
00:50:07 ►
And I received a really wonderful reply, which I’ll read to you in just a moment.
00:50:12 ►
But in fairness to John, after I told him that I’d be reading it in a podcast, he suggested
00:50:17 ►
that maybe he should do a little more professional write-up after first consulting our mutual
00:50:22 ►
friend and psychedelic scholar par excellence, Kay Trout.
00:50:26 ►
However, I think that John may have gone to Burning Man, which is underway at this very moment,
00:50:32 ►
and so he wasn’t able to get his response back to me before leaving for the playa,
00:50:36 ►
probably because I may have misled him by saying it would be several more weeks before I podcast
00:50:42 ►
this interview. However, as it works out, I think his initial response was great.
00:50:47 ►
And here’s what he said.
00:50:50 ►
Lorenzo, I literally burst out laughing when I heard Terrence say,
00:50:54 ►
I’m not sure pig intestines is a second ingredient.
00:50:58 ►
Thanks for that.
00:51:00 ►
I have no chemistry background,
00:51:01 ►
so anything I say on this topic should be considered within that framework.
00:51:06 ►
And he added a few little chuckles there.
00:51:09 ►
Terrence’s presentation of the DMT produced using rabbit lung is, I suspect, a little off.
00:51:16 ►
He first says that you need the amino acid tryptophan.
00:51:20 ►
Later, he says that the rabbit lung will omethylate the tryptamine.
00:51:28 ►
Well, tryptophan is not the same thing as tryptamine. Also, I suspect that omethylation would indicate that there is some oxygen present.
00:51:34 ►
So while Terence talks about omethyltransferase, perhaps what he wanted to say was
00:51:40 ►
n-methyltransferase, with the N meaning that the substituent is connected to the nitrogen.
00:51:48 ►
I suspected that the experiment that he is attempting to refer to is this one.
00:51:53 ►
And there John gave me a link to a study that was titled, The Biosynthesis of Dimethyltryptamine in Vivo.
00:52:01 ►
And I’ll put that link on the program notes.
00:52:04 ►
He goes on,
00:52:06 ►
tryptamine in vivo, and I’ll put that link on the program notes. He goes on, the other issue is that there are two types of NMT, one that methylates tryptamine into methyl tryptamine, known as PIMT,
00:52:14 ►
and one that methylates methyl tryptamine into dimethyltryptamine, known as SIMT.
00:52:22 ►
Terence makes the whole thing a bit worse via his comments about decarboxylating
00:52:26 ►
muscarine into muscimol. Not only because it is actually ibotenic acid that decarbolates
00:52:33 ►
into muscimol, but because if one were to extrapolate backwards from his comments about
00:52:38 ►
mixing the aminomidamascaria mushroom with milk to accomplish this, then one might think
00:52:44 ►
his earlier statements suggest
00:52:46 ►
that one simply stirs up a bunch of tryptophan or tryptamine
00:52:49 ►
with some lungs cut out of a rabbit and viola DMT.
00:52:54 ►
Considering that the original experiments,
00:52:56 ►
done with different chemicals and Terence mentions,
00:52:59 ►
were carried out by IV injection into living rabbits,
00:53:03 ►
I am not sure that it is correct to leave one with the impression
00:53:06 ►
that rabbit lung can be physically mixed with some other chemical
00:53:10 ►
to produce anything other than a messy blend of rabbit lung and some other chemical.
00:53:15 ►
But I could be wrong.
00:53:17 ►
Maybe the enzymatic action can be done in vitro.
00:53:20 ►
I honestly have no idea.
00:53:22 ►
Furthermore, I tend to interpret the comments by the guy speaking with Terrence
00:53:26 ►
as being those made by a dude who is having trouble scoring DMT
00:53:30 ►
and who is looking for some way to mix together eye of newt and tongue of lizard
00:53:35 ►
and then stick that in his pipe and smoke it.
00:53:38 ►
Now, even if one used the correct materials in Living Rabbits,
00:53:42 ►
the abstract of the article mentions that the peak DMT level
00:53:46 ►
was reached a minute after
00:53:48 ►
injecting the precursor.
00:53:49 ►
I’ve not read the article. I’ll see if I can get a copy
00:53:52 ►
of it pulled and forward it to you if I do.
00:53:55 ►
Anyway, my guess
00:53:56 ►
would be that MAO in rabbits
00:53:58 ►
is going to break down any DMT
00:53:59 ►
pretty quickly. So what?
00:54:02 ►
You wait a minute, drain the animal
00:54:04 ►
of its blood, and then quickly extract
00:54:06 ►
how much DMT?
00:54:08 ►
I suppose that one could
00:54:10 ►
dose the rabbit with an MAOI,
00:54:12 ►
wait until that took effect,
00:54:14 ►
then inject the N-methyltryptamine,
00:54:16 ►
wait 60 seconds, then kill
00:54:18 ►
the rabbit, and make a
00:54:20 ►
tasty Hassan Peferaska.
00:54:22 ►
These comments by
00:54:24 ►
Sasha, and again he sends a link,
00:54:26 ►
it’s from Ask Dr. Shulgin
00:54:28 ►
on the Cognitive Liberty site,
00:54:30 ►
so I’ll put that link
00:54:32 ►
in the program notes too,
00:54:33 ►
but John goes on,
00:54:35 ►
these comments by Sasha
00:54:36 ►
might lead one to believe
00:54:38 ►
that if rabbits were injected
00:54:39 ►
with methyl tryptophan,
00:54:41 ►
that they could produce
00:54:42 ►
dimethyl tryptophan.
00:54:44 ►
But, of course, Sasha points out that we have no idea of whether or not that chemical is active.
00:54:50 ►
So, you know, this is a typical Terrence.
00:54:52 ►
A grain of truth, a dash of horseshit, and a nice portion of laughter as the appetizer.
00:54:58 ►
I’ve forwarded this message to Trout, since I hate to be providing any sketchy information here myself,
00:55:03 ►
and I appreciate that Trout has a much better grasp on all this stuff than I do,
00:55:08 ►
so hopefully he’ll correct any errors that I have put forth.
00:55:11 ►
John.
00:55:13 ►
Now, after that we had a few other exchanges,
00:55:16 ►
including several with our friend Kay Trout,
00:55:19 ►
who added a whole bunch of highly technical information
00:55:21 ►
along with references to several scholarly papers,
00:55:25 ►
but I’ll just add this one little snippet here. And by the way, my pronunciation of all these
00:55:30 ►
chemical names is probably way off the mark, so don’t try to translate them into any real facts,
00:55:39 ►
okay? Trout starts, Hi, methylated tryptophanes are fairly rare in nature, mainly in a few legumes, suggesting a different set of enzymes is involved to methylate tryptophan than tryptamine.
00:55:53 ►
I believe we have just discussed much the same thing, me and what I just sent you below. I’ll send a copy of that other email to Lorenzo as well.
00:56:01 ►
Yes, N-methylation is what Terrence was trying to talk about. O-methylation
00:56:06 ►
is what makes 5-MeO from bufotamine. Terence was really sloppy in this talk. Later, KT.
00:56:14 ►
So, now you know as much and probably even more than I do about cauldron chemistry. I don’t really
00:56:21 ►
know how relevant the topic actually is, but I truly love the phrase, cauldron chemistry.
00:56:27 ►
For me, it brings up an image of Terrence wearing a monk’s robe and a tall pointy hat while bent over a steaming cauldron of some weird and smelly gook.
00:56:37 ►
And he has his certain silly grin on his face, of course.
00:56:45 ►
grin on his face, of course. And in fact, since there are so many Joe Rogan fans who are also fellow swanners, maybe a few of you could ask Joe to do a show on cauldron chemistry for us,
00:56:51 ►
maybe on Halloween. You know, while it’s obviously a serious topic from one point of view,
00:56:56 ►
it most certainly does lend itself to comedy as well. And I’d really love to hear what Joe and
00:57:02 ►
his crew could come up with on the topic. Although I guess it would be kind of hard to top Terrence’s straight-faced comment
00:57:08 ►
that he didn’t think pig intestines were part of the recipe.
00:57:13 ►
Wouldn’t it have been great to hear Terrence and Sasha talk about this subject?
00:57:17 ►
Because I’m sure that Sasha, with his truly wonderful sense of humor,
00:57:21 ►
would have had us in stitches before Terrence could even finish the serious part of his rap. But I digress. Now another thing that I also think needs to be
00:57:32 ►
clarified and followed up on is what Terrence was saying about the LD50 for MDMA or ecstasy.
00:57:39 ►
From what little I’ve been able to discover, The LD50 for humans is still unknown,
00:57:47 ►
but for mice, rats, and guinea pigs,
00:57:51 ►
I’ve found ranges from 49 to 98 milligrams per kilogram,
00:57:56 ►
which seems to indicate that the standard 120 milligram dose of MDMA that humans take should be well within reasonable safety limits.
00:58:01 ►
But as scientists often tell us, results can vary,
00:58:04 ►
so be careful out there. These are
00:58:07 ►
really powerful substances and can have long-term and serious consequences if they’re abused.
00:58:13 ►
However, Terrence’s statement that MDMA has an LD50 of only four times the effective dose
00:58:18 ►
seems to me quite far off the mark. For a 150-pound human using the data from dead mice and erring on the safe side,
00:58:27 ►
well, it’s still over 25 times the effective dose. But only a complete idiot would want to test that
00:58:33 ►
limit, don’t you think? However, it still was fun for me to hear Terrence pointing out the
00:58:39 ►
difference between synthetic substances and naturally occurring ones, coming down, of course,
00:58:44 ►
on the side of the natural ones. And I know that there are quite a few of our fellow slaunters, Thank you. Two of them went on about it, each staunchly defending their positions. Oh, they went on for a couple of hours, I guess, until they kind of ran out of steam and called it a draw
00:59:08 ►
and then ended in a fit of laughter at how intense they’d both been.
00:59:14 ►
Also, I guess that I don’t have to point this out to you,
00:59:17 ►
but when Terrence said that LSD-25 was the only drug with such a benign profile that its LD-50 wasn’t known,
00:59:24 ►
was the only drug with such a benign profile that its LD50 wasn’t known,
00:59:28 ►
he was talking about the category of hallucinogens,
00:59:33 ►
which by definition doesn’t include the safest of all known psychoactive substances, cannabis.
00:59:39 ►
It can’t be repeated often enough that never in the entire course of human history has anyone ever died from an overdose of cannabis.
00:59:43 ►
And yet, of course, the U.S. government still claims that it is right up there with crack and heroin as a dangerous substance.
00:59:51 ►
Obviously, there is something much more to their prohibition of this plant than meets the eye,
00:59:56 ►
for safety isn’t even a factor.
01:00:00 ►
I really should also give you some more information about the amazing Elizabeth Gipps,
01:00:05 ►
who was responsible for creating this interview.
01:00:08 ►
But since I’m still recovering from a rather bad cold,
01:00:11 ►
and my energy level isn’t high enough yet to do that,
01:00:14 ►
and to cover a couple of other topics that I want to touch on before we close today,
01:00:19 ►
I’m just going to have to move on.
01:00:21 ►
But I do want to mention that a couple of years ago,
01:00:24 ►
a young man came up to me at a conference that we were both attending
01:00:27 ►
and told me that he had a whole box full of recordings of the interviews
01:00:31 ►
that Elizabeth did for her Santa Cruz radio program.
01:00:35 ►
And he was going to send them to me to use here in the salon.
01:00:38 ►
Unfortunately, we seem to have lost touch with one another.
01:00:41 ►
So, hey, if you’re out there somewhere and remember our conversation,
01:00:45 ►
I would very greatly appreciate the opportunity
01:00:47 ►
to play more of her work here in the salon
01:00:50 ►
should you be able to get it to me.
01:00:53 ►
Well, I’m going to have to sign off for now
01:00:55 ►
as it’s once again getting really warm here in the salon
01:00:58 ►
and I’m just not very productive in warm weather.
01:01:01 ►
Plus, I’m getting a little more lazy every day.
01:01:06 ►
But I need to let you know that it will be several weeks, maybe even a month before my next podcast. So I don’t want
01:01:12 ►
you to get worried about things. I already have our next program planned and I think you’ll enjoy
01:01:17 ►
it as it’s another talk by Krishnamurti, who we haven’t heard here in the salon for quite a long
01:01:22 ►
time and who is already a big favorite of many of our fellow salonners. You too, hopefully. Also, until sometime after the 20th of September,
01:01:32 ►
I won’t be having any access to my email or Facebook mail either. From time to time,
01:01:38 ►
I may be able to get online and approve a few comments that you make to our salon website,
01:01:43 ►
but that will be intermittent at best.
01:01:45 ►
So don’t give up on me if you haven’t heard from me or had your comments approved.
01:01:50 ►
I’ll eventually catch up, with the possible exception of email, of course.
01:01:55 ►
And if you and I have been in the middle of an email exchange,
01:01:58 ►
you’ll have to remind me of where we are by sending something later this month,
01:02:02 ►
because right now there are over 300 unread
01:02:06 ►
emails in my inbox and that number will certainly grow before I return. So what I’ll probably have
01:02:13 ►
to do is to just put all of my unread email to the side when I return and then start fresh,
01:02:19 ►
which means that you should probably hold off until the end of September if you want to contact me because otherwise it could get lost in the shuffle.
01:02:28 ►
Now I’ve got to get packing and so for now this is Lorenzo
01:02:32 ►
signing off from Cyberdelic Space. Be well my friends.