Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“The psychedelic viewpoint is becoming more and more legitimate, but psychedelic drugs are not. That’s the odd paradox of it.”
“We are living in a state of constant scientific revolution. There is not a single area that you can name that is now seen as it was seen a hundred years ago. Nothing is left of the world view of one hundred years ago.”
“The mind is a far bigger domain than we ever imagined.”
“I think really what unites psychedelic people is the faith in the power of the imagination.”
“And science, when it examines psychedelics, as it will and must, is going to discover a revolution, I believe, that will put all the previous revolutions in perspective.”
“The psychedelics are this immense tool for the inspection of our own nature.”
“The entire drug phenomenon of the 1960s happened without the concept of shamanism to help it along.”
“I think that understanding man’s place in nature is going to require integration of the psychedelic experience.”
“Nobody should be allowed more than fifty years to get their act together.”
“Part of what being involved in the psychedelic experience is about is reclaiming your own experience.”
“You could almost describe psychedelics as enzymes for the activity of the imagination.”
“We do not birth our children into the world of nature. We birth our children into the world of culture.”
“What the psychedelic thing can be seen as, when it’s done with plants, as a return to Gaia, an immersion in the feminine.”
“The real nature of our predicament is completely opaque to us.”
“Ayahuasca, unlike mushrooms and all these other things is only as good as the person who made it… . The ayahuasca is a combinatory drug, and so it brings the human interaction and the lore of it into a much more central position.”
Palenque Norte Lecture Schedule
at the 2013 Burning Man Festival
Erowid Extracts (PDF)
Erowid Prospectus (PDF)
Previous Episode
364 - Communicating with the Mushroom
Next Episode
366 - Terence McKenna’s Suggested Reading List
Similar Episodes
- Podcast 699 – Kneading the Bread of Evolutionary Adaptation - score: 0.90853
- 221 - McKenna_ Evolving Times - score: 0.88885
- 594 - The Edge Runner Part 1 - score: 0.88378
- 382 - The Psychedelic Option - score: 0.87652
- 502 - Suspended Between Eternities - score: 0.87502
- 440 - The Tao of the Ancestors - score: 0.86431
- 439 - A Resolute Optimist of a Complicated Sort - score: 0.86237
- 241 - Philosophical Gadfly Part 2 - score: 0.86150
- 339 - A Necessary Chaos - score: 0.86118
- 188 - The Ethnobotany of Shamanism Part 2 - score: 0.86055
Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic
00:00:24 ►
salon.
00:00:24 ►
From Cyberdelic Space, this is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:30 ►
And I don’t know about you, but for some reason I’m feeling kind of restless today.
00:00:35 ►
I guess it may be because so many of my friends are getting ready for Burning Man right now,
00:00:41 ►
and I’m maybe just picking up on their hectic getting ready for the playa vibe.
00:00:46 ►
I spoke with Chris Pezza the other day, and he tells me that the first wave of the brave and hearty souls that will be building Camp Soft Landing will be leaving for the playa
00:00:52 ►
in just a day or so. And as you know, this is the camp that will be hosting this year’s Palenque
00:00:58 ►
Norte lectures. So if you go to palenquenorte.com, you can check out the really great speaker schedule that Pez and Annie Oak and their team have put together.
00:01:08 ►
It’s a truly wonderful lineup of over 40 speakers and includes more than a dozen women speakers this year.
00:01:16 ►
So if you’re going to be at the burn, be sure to stop by their camp and introduce yourself.
00:01:22 ►
You’re going to find them this year at 915 and B,
00:01:25 ►
which is about as good a location as you’re going to find on the playa.
00:01:29 ►
So I really wish that I could be there myself,
00:01:31 ►
but I’ll most certainly be with you all in spirit.
00:01:36 ►
And one of the reasons that I’m in a podcasting mood today
00:01:39 ►
is that there are some fellow salonners that I’d like to give a shout-out to,
00:01:43 ►
like Naomi and Joe, who just sent me a postcard from Paris,
00:01:47 ►
where they’re spending their honeymoon.
00:01:49 ►
And since I just finished reading Edward Rutherford’s brilliant historical novel,
00:01:53 ►
which is titled Paris,
00:01:55 ►
I now have a much better idea of the history of that interesting city,
00:01:59 ►
and I’m thinking of you two guys there right now.
00:02:03 ►
Also, I want to mention that we received donations during the past 10 days
00:02:07 ►
from Brian, Michael, Sean, Jeffrey, Stephen, Thomas,
00:02:12 ►
and once again from our friends at Stabila.
00:02:15 ►
You have all put us well on our way toward covering this month’s expenses once again,
00:02:21 ►
so I thank you all from the bottom of my heart.
00:02:24 ►
And so now let’s get back to listening
00:02:27 ►
to some more of the Terrence McKenna workshop that I began a few days ago. And I think that
00:02:32 ►
today’s talk is a really good example of what our longtime salon patron John Jay says about Terrence,
00:02:39 ►
and that is that we are attracted to his talks maybe not so much because he was such a big proponent of psychedelics,
00:02:47 ►
but because, well, in essence, he was one of the last great liberal thinkers of the 20th century.
00:02:54 ►
And, by the way, John, your year in one day ended on the day after my birthday this year,
00:03:00 ►
which means that it began on the day of my 70th birthday.
00:03:04 ►
Interesting coincidence, don’t you think?
00:03:07 ►
Now, although at times I’ve edited out a retelling of the stone date theory,
00:03:13 ►
this time I’ve left it in for a couple of reasons.
00:03:15 ►
First of all, since this recording was made in 1988,
00:03:19 ►
this is possibly one of his earliest tellings of the story,
00:03:23 ►
and so it seems a little more detailed and fresh.
00:03:26 ►
But the main reason I’ve left it in this time is the way that he led up to the telling of it
00:03:31 ►
by putting it in a larger context of the evolution of the planet as well.
00:03:36 ►
And hopefully you’ll be getting something new out of this in its larger context.
00:03:41 ►
But before Terence gets to the psychedelic apes,
00:03:44 ►
among other interesting topics he covers is his take on the drug culture of the 1960s and how the lack of a shamanism model for LSD caused some unforeseen consequences and why what he calls the first psychedelic revolution got into trouble.
00:04:05 ►
got into trouble. It’s an interesting look into that era from a perspective that I hadn’t thought of myself, and my guess is that you’re going to gain something new from these insights as well.
00:04:11 ►
So why wait? Let’s get on with the show and join the Bard McKenna on One Fine Day in 1988.
00:04:18 ►
What I sort of want to talk about this morning, and I can be led away from it if you have other considerations,
00:04:28 ►
is I want to…
00:04:30 ►
It’s pretty clear from how this group
00:04:33 ►
is relating and coming on
00:04:35 ►
that everybody has come to some resolution
00:04:40 ►
about this in their own lives.
00:04:43 ►
What’s become more and more interesting to me as I’ve talked to more people and also if you stay in a field like this you eventually get to meet everybody. and Sasha Shulgin and Leary and Lilly and all these people,
00:05:05 ►
and you begin to have a view of how all these people viewed it.
00:05:10 ►
So what I wanted to talk about this morning
00:05:13 ►
and lead it toward your concern with the alien intelligence
00:05:17 ►
is I wanted to talk about the effect that psychedelics are having
00:05:23 ►
and I believe will have, on society in general,
00:05:30 ►
and at deeper levels simply than drug laws
00:05:33 ►
and government campaigns of abstinence,
00:05:37 ►
but more on the level of how it’s impacting in philosophy and science
00:05:42 ►
and the social sciences.
00:05:47 ►
Because I think we are winning.
00:05:52 ►
The psychedelic viewpoint is becoming more and more legitimate.
00:05:56 ►
It isn’t, but psychedelic drugs are not.
00:05:59 ►
That’s the odd paradox of it.
00:06:08 ►
And this has a lot to do with the history of science over the past hundred years. of naturalists and the collated accounts of travelers, but big science where millions,
00:06:27 ►
hundreds of millions of dollars are spent on instruments and coordinated teams of people
00:06:33 ►
attack problems. This style of science that has grown up in the 20th century has had a
00:06:40 ►
very interesting consequence, which because it is spread out over more than a generation
00:06:47 ►
we all have grown up with it and haven’t really realized what an unusual situation
00:06:55 ►
we are living in we are living in a state of constant scientific revolution. There is not a single area
00:07:07 ►
that you can name
00:07:09 ►
that is now seen
00:07:11 ►
as it was seen,
00:07:14 ►
let’s pick a number,
00:07:16 ►
a hundred years ago.
00:07:19 ►
Nothing is left of the world view
00:07:22 ►
of one hundred years ago.
00:07:32 ►
One hundred years ago, atoms were billiard balls, the basic building block of the universe,
00:07:34 ►
indivisible.
00:07:47 ►
100 years ago, the position of biology was that Darwinian mechanics had just been enunciated in the 1850s and was making its way against an orthodoxy
00:07:51 ►
which held that the earth had been created in 4004 B.C.
00:07:58 ►
Less than 100 years ago,
00:08:01 ►
when the cave paintings at Lascaux and Altamira in southern France and Spain were first
00:08:08 ►
discovered and experts came from Paris to view them. After looking the caves over, the experts
00:08:15 ►
announced that these paintings were obviously done by soldiers in the army of Napoleon who had overwintered there in 1816 and 17.
00:08:26 ►
Continental drift was unknown.
00:08:30 ►
The fact that the continent of Africa had an edge
00:08:34 ►
which fit exactly against the continent of South America
00:08:37 ►
was mentioned in textbooks as an example of God’s sense of humor.
00:08:44 ►
It was not seen to signal anything. I can’t think
00:08:49 ►
of an area in science where we have retained the vision that we had then. The earth was thought to
00:08:57 ►
be ultimately stable, pretty much as it had been on the day of creation, even by the British geologists
00:09:05 ►
who were reacting against
00:09:07 ►
the story of biblical creation.
00:09:11 ►
But there’s one area
00:09:13 ►
where surprisingly little has happened.
00:09:19 ►
And it is, strangely enough,
00:09:21 ►
the area of the human mind.
00:09:26 ►
Strides were made in the early part of the 20th century
00:09:29 ►
by describing the unconscious.
00:09:32 ►
But it’s important to remember
00:09:34 ►
that some of the hottest therapies
00:09:36 ►
that passed through a place like Esalen,
00:09:40 ►
which would be things like hypnotherapy, mesmerism.
00:09:47 ►
Mesmerism had its great heyday in the 1890s of the last century.
00:09:53 ►
Colonic therapy brought to a peak in Germany in the 1870s.
00:10:01 ►
Reflexology, a 19th century theory.
00:10:05 ►
Homeopathy, a theory developed in the late 19th, early 20th century.
00:10:09 ►
So we’ve not had in place really new models of the mind.
00:10:17 ►
The body, because of Wilhelm Reich and the many, many schools
00:10:22 ►
that he spawned either as his progeny or in reaction to his thought
00:10:28 ►
have given us new handles on the relationship of psychology to the body.
00:10:33 ►
But in the area of the mind, it’s been pretty much left alone.
00:10:38 ►
Well now, to go back to the previous example of these other areas where scientific revolutions were made,
00:10:46 ►
they were true revolutions.
00:10:49 ►
They were not fine tunings or little additions of details,
00:10:55 ►
but complete overthrow of old paradigms and the establishment of new ones.
00:11:02 ►
The earth went from being a solid body with continents pretty
00:11:05 ►
much in the same places since creation to a complex system of convection flows where
00:11:12 ►
continents are brought together and broken apart. Man, instead of being seen as the highest
00:11:20 ►
product of creation, a descent slightly beneath the angels,
00:11:25 ►
is instead seen as a primate,
00:11:29 ►
a specialized monkey of a certain sort.
00:11:33 ►
The hard atoms, the indivisible atoms
00:11:36 ►
of 19th century physics give way to fields,
00:11:40 ►
first of all, fields which are characterized
00:11:43 ►
by action at a distance, which had always been excluded previously.
00:11:49 ►
I mean, reason dictated that action at a distance was a kind of superstition.
00:11:55 ►
Then James Clerk Maxwell demonstrated that these fields really exist.
00:12:02 ►
So in each of these areas, a total revolution took place. Now, the reason that
00:12:10 ►
psychology was immune to this, I think, was because we did not have the tools to advance it.
00:12:20 ►
They came to us out of ethnography and anthropology, out of the work of Wasson and Hoffman and earlier Havelock Ellis and Weir Mitchell, Henri Michaud, all the people who were interested in expanding their own sensation.
00:12:47 ►
But slowly it came to be realized
00:12:50 ►
that it was an insight into the mind,
00:12:53 ►
not into the nature of it so much,
00:12:57 ►
which I think still remains a mystery,
00:13:00 ►
but simply into its size,
00:13:03 ►
that the mind is a far bigger domain
00:13:06 ►
than we ever imagined.
00:13:09 ►
We have somehow the idea
00:13:11 ►
that the mind is in the head,
00:13:18 ►
it’s made by the brain,
00:13:20 ►
and therefore it must be a smaller
00:13:23 ►
and less inclusive domain
00:13:28 ►
than the domain in which it is embedded.
00:13:32 ►
But I brought along an example here.
00:13:35 ►
This is a box and this box has in it a box that is exactly the same size as it is.
00:13:46 ►
This demonstrates how even in three-dimensional reality,
00:13:51 ►
expectation can be confounded.
00:13:56 ►
This, which is inside the box,
00:13:59 ►
is itself a box, indistinguishable from this one.
00:14:04 ►
And then that one goes in there like that
00:14:08 ►
and can be closed into this
00:14:11 ►
now that’s what we’re here to talk about
00:14:16 ►
it’s just how to do that
00:14:22 ►
how to take a world with a world in it
00:14:25 ►
and put it into the world in it and put the world in it outside of it.
00:14:31 ►
Because what we’re talking about and what history is, I think,
00:14:35 ►
is an effort to exteriorize the soul and interiorize the body to make the fields of the Lord
00:14:48 ►
that we all sense inside us
00:14:50 ►
meadows that we can actually
00:14:53 ►
throw our clothes off and wander into.
00:14:56 ►
I think really what unites psychedelic people
00:14:59 ►
is the faith in the power of the imagination.
00:15:04 ►
And science, when it examines the psychedelics
00:15:10 ►
as it will and must,
00:15:14 ►
is going to discover a revolution, I believe,
00:15:19 ►
that will put all the previous revolutions in perspective
00:15:22 ►
and will show that they were merely anticipations
00:15:26 ►
of finding out this final unimaginable fact about nature. This weekend is called
00:15:36 ►
In the Light of Nature. Nature, whenever you scratch its surface, has aspects that are unanticipated.
00:15:46 ►
So when they looked at the shape of the continents, they discovered continental drift.
00:15:52 ►
When Wallace and Darwin looked at the distribution of butterflies over Indonesian islands,
00:15:58 ►
they suddenly had a vision of the origin of species and how that worked.
00:16:04 ►
of vision of the origin of species and how that worked.
00:16:13 ►
The psychedelics are this immense tool for the inspection of our own nature.
00:16:20 ►
And when we scratch it, when we bring that tool to apply, we are not going to recognize ourselves.
00:16:42 ►
ourselves. We talked a little bit last night about LSD. A kind of funny thing about LSD was that it was the right drug for the right time in that it fulfilled the psychological theories of the world into which it came. Now this may have something to do with the fact that it was psychologists who were keen to promote it.
00:16:48 ►
We’ll never know.
00:16:49 ►
The thing seems to be inextricably wedded together.
00:16:53 ►
But LSD made possible the recovery of traumatic material,
00:17:00 ►
lucid communication,
00:17:09 ►
re-visioning of self-image and the energy to break out of habit patterns
00:17:13 ►
and this sort of thing
00:17:15 ►
what was absent in LSD
00:17:18 ►
was any reference back
00:17:22 ►
into the natural world
00:17:24 ►
the entire drug phenomenon of the 1960s any reference back into the natural world.
00:17:29 ►
The entire drug phenomenon of the 1960s
00:17:33 ►
happened without the concept of shamanism to help it along.
00:17:35 ►
I mean, maybe Gary Snyder said something about it
00:17:39 ►
once in a seminar,
00:17:41 ►
but it was not heard by most people
00:17:43 ►
because what was being stressed about LSD
00:17:46 ►
was its utter newness.
00:17:48 ►
How this was, I remember people saying that it had been created to save us from the brink
00:17:54 ►
of atomic catastrophe.
00:17:56 ►
It had come into the world at the exact proper time to be there when we needed it.
00:18:02 ►
There was not a sense of history, you see.
00:18:06 ►
There was not a sense of 20, 30, 50,000 years
00:18:11 ►
of involvement with the psychedelic state.
00:18:17 ►
A society, a dominant culture,
00:18:20 ►
always assumes that it is the most sophisticated
00:18:22 ►
of a long line of precursors.
00:18:27 ►
But as a matter of fact, the childishness
00:18:31 ►
and the sort of fragile uninformedness
00:18:39 ►
that the hip people saw in the straight people in the 60s was a phenomenon that everyone shared
00:18:48 ►
everyone was naive everyone was more simplistic than they should have been and that’s why i think
00:18:57 ►
the the first psychedelic revolution got into trouble because there was no sense of history. There was no sense of have societies ever integrated something like this?
00:19:10 ►
And what then did they become?
00:19:12 ►
What kind of societies can live in the light of the psychedelic experience?
00:19:17 ►
There was no real discussion of that.
00:19:31 ►
of that. Now, because this dimension of earth crisis has been added in the intervening years,
00:19:41 ►
this was another aspect that was missing from the hippie thing to some degree. Yes? No? I’m sorry, I don’t think it was, because I recall the tremendous involvement
00:19:46 ►
with the hippies in the 60s at Millbrook, for instance.
00:19:50 ►
There was a lot of attention paid to organic growing of food
00:19:54 ►
and, you know, not abusing the fruits of this earth.
00:20:01 ►
There was tremendous involvement.
00:20:03 ►
It came out of the psychedelic, of the LSD consciousness. It was the beginning of the back to the earth, there was tremendous involvement. It came out of the psychedelic, of the LSD consciousness.
00:20:07 ►
It was the beginning of the back to the earth,
00:20:09 ►
what they used to call the back to the earth movement.
00:20:11 ►
But don’t you agree, Nina, that if you were to walk down
00:20:14 ►
Haight Street on a hot day in August of 1967,
00:20:18 ►
ecological sensitivity would not be highly visible on the surface?
00:20:24 ►
Well, true, that’s why Timothy Leary said, get visible on the surface.
00:20:28 ►
Timothy Leary said, get out of the city.
00:20:30 ►
Everybody should start their own,
00:20:33 ►
you know, grow their own food. And that consciousness was very much…
00:20:37 ►
Well, that was really the beginning of it.
00:20:39 ►
That it was the end of the summer of love
00:20:42 ►
when they realized that they’d just been mediated to death
00:20:45 ►
and political things
00:20:48 ►
they’d been overrun
00:20:50 ►
then they moved into the
00:20:52 ►
countryside
00:20:52 ►
communal living
00:20:56 ►
in the country which is tribalism
00:20:58 ►
which McLuhan was
00:21:00 ►
talking about in the 60s not from the point
00:21:02 ►
of drugs but electronics
00:21:04 ►
but I think that that was the beginning in the 60s, not from the point of drugs, but electronics.
00:21:14 ►
But I think that that was the beginning of the permission for Earth Day, ecological sensitivity. Now the great philosopher of the psychedelic community, to my mind, is Rupert Sheldrake.
00:21:23 ►
to my mind, is Rupert Sheldrake.
00:21:27 ►
And Rupert is a botanist, a natural scientist,
00:21:31 ►
a man in the tradition of Darwin and Wallace.
00:21:36 ►
We’re trying to say, and what is being realized, I think,
00:21:41 ►
is that the psychedelics have always been exerting
00:21:45 ►
a pressure on human beings that we, from about, oh, I don’t know,
00:21:50 ►
1600, something like that, pick a date,
00:21:52 ►
from 1600 to 1960, lost sight of that
00:21:58 ►
because we lived entirely in an industrial,
00:22:02 ►
mechanistic, materialistic, reductionist, capitalist kind of society.
00:22:09 ►
But all other societies have had some awareness, at least of nature,
00:22:15 ►
if not of psychedelics, of nature forming the aesthetic.
00:22:21 ►
And now we’re returning to this
00:22:25 ►
there is I think an awareness
00:22:29 ►
that understanding man’s place in nature
00:22:32 ►
is going to require psychedelic
00:22:36 ►
integration of the psychedelic experience
00:22:41 ►
when we go into nature
00:22:43 ►
and this gets to your question, when we look hard at these
00:22:47 ►
tryptamine psychedelics and the plants they come from and the content of the information and the
00:22:54 ►
fact that it seems to be very hard for people to bring it across, even having had 10 or 15,000 years to do so, well then the awareness begins to grow
00:23:06 ►
that there is a presence on this planet
00:23:10 ►
that we had previously missed,
00:23:13 ►
that we have been so busy about the anthill business
00:23:17 ►
of building human culture
00:23:19 ►
that we have paid lip service to the power of nature, to Gaia, to the goddess.
00:23:28 ►
But I don’t think anybody has realized how real it is.
00:23:33 ►
If you wanted to talk about Gaia, most people would place you in the category of spiritual or religious. But I think talking about Gaia belongs in the category
00:23:47 ►
natural science and natural history. Gaia is a regulating set of grids that are laid over this
00:24:00 ►
planet that keep it going in the right direction, that stabilize certain kinds
00:24:07 ►
of processes and damp others. And the expression of Gaia outside of culture is the botanical
00:24:19 ►
world, the world of plants. I mean, man, woman, animal woman animal plants the plants were the first ones to have
00:24:32 ►
a feminine approach if you want to put it that way I mean they invented the feminine approach
00:24:40 ►
before there was even femininity if you want to put it that way. In other words, nurturing, staying in one place,
00:24:49 ►
cooperation, integration, and regulation,
00:24:57 ►
rather than dominance, conquest, mobility,
00:25:03 ►
these sorts of things, which then are the animal solution to the same problem.
00:25:09 ►
And an orthodox evolutionary biologist tends to sneer at plants
00:25:15 ►
because we all have the built-in assumption
00:25:19 ►
that the brain is in the mind.
00:25:23 ►
I mean, that the mind is in the brain, and that if you don’t have a brain, you don’t in the mind. I mean that the mind is in the brain
00:25:25 ►
and that if you don’t have a brain,
00:25:27 ►
you don’t have a mind.
00:25:28 ►
Or if you do have a mind,
00:25:30 ►
it’s so low grade
00:25:32 ►
that it’s just kind of a shimmer
00:25:35 ►
of perceptual awareness.
00:25:38 ►
If you examine this proposition
00:25:40 ►
that the mind is in the brain,
00:25:42 ►
it doesn’t hold water at all.
00:25:47 ►
You know, all the miles and miles of electroencephalographic tracings that have been done nobody has ever correlated a thought
00:25:55 ►
with an electrical discharge in the brain the closest they’ve gotten is to correlate a kind of state of focused awareness
00:26:06 ►
with a blip in the electrical activity of the brain.
00:26:12 ►
When you’re told, prepare yourself for a question,
00:26:17 ►
then there is a measurable bit of activity in the brain
00:26:20 ►
as though you reorient, I’m about to get a question.
00:26:23 ►
In fact, couldn’t it be something that is so incredibly complex.
00:26:27 ►
We’re measuring billions of neurons operating at once.
00:26:31 ►
You mean to why this correlation hasn’t been?
00:26:34 ►
Yes, true, but
00:26:36 ►
they’ve had 50 years to make
00:26:43 ►
good on their promise that they were going to show us
00:26:46 ►
thought in the brain
00:26:48 ►
Sherrington and those people
00:26:50 ►
what was the famous
00:26:53 ►
Spanish
00:26:54 ►
neurophysiologist Ramon de Cajal
00:26:57 ►
and Sherrington
00:26:58 ►
and those people announced
00:27:00 ►
all of this in the early 1920s
00:27:03 ►
since then we’ve had supercomputers,
00:27:07 ►
super imaging systems,
00:27:10 ►
microprobes,
00:27:12 ►
vast advances in the technologies
00:27:14 ►
they said they needed
00:27:17 ►
in order to make this point.
00:27:19 ►
They have not made good.
00:27:22 ►
It’s interesting, there are a couple of areas.
00:27:24 ►
In 1952, DNA, the structure of DNA was
00:27:29 ►
elicited. Well, the scientific literature was full of predictions of the cure of all diseases within
00:27:37 ►
15 years, certainly the elimination of all genetic defects, a full understanding of what life is. Well then, as they began to elucidate
00:27:47 ►
the mechanisms of DNA, they turned out to be simply that, mechanisms. No more interesting
00:27:55 ►
than a water faucet or a torsion belt or a weighted governor. The life that molecular biology seems to be able to describe
00:28:09 ►
is a life of chains and pulleys,
00:28:14 ►
falling weights and tightening chains.
00:28:18 ►
There has not been a single step toward elucidating what it actually is.
00:28:24 ►
Its mechanisms are better understood,idating what it actually is its mechanisms are better understood but not
00:28:28 ►
what it is to the mind even more so to the point now where the people in the field to each other
00:28:36 ►
will admit that there’s a problem there’s a crisis this past week there was a conference here called the Holonomics Conference, Karl Prebram’s theory of brain functioning, which is certainly state of the art and out there, but it just recently had to be restructured and renamed, changed from the holographic theory to the holonomic theory because the experimental data was not supporting the model that they had. This happens over and over again. So I think we’re too patient with science. Nobody should be allowed more than 50 years to get their act together. If somebody claims that, I mean, think about it. We think of the 20th century as the most rapidly evolving century that there has ever been. A few years ago, Kat and I took the children to Mexico to wander around looking at the Mayan ruins.
00:29:41 ►
looking at the Mayan ruins.
00:29:44 ►
We were in San Cristobal de las Casas,
00:29:46 ►
which some of you may know.
00:29:48 ►
It’s high up in the mountains of Chiapas.
00:29:52 ►
And there’s an immense cathedral there. It was built in 1511.
00:29:57 ►
Built in 1511.
00:29:59 ►
Columbus discovered America in 1492.
00:30:03 ►
So that’s 92, 1502, 1512.
00:30:08 ►
Nineteen years after Columbus had discovered America
00:30:11 ►
in a world relying on galleons and horse flesh,
00:30:17 ►
the complete conquest of a culture
00:30:20 ►
was totally fait accompli
00:30:23 ►
and buildings 600 feet long
00:30:25 ►
with 300 foot ceilings
00:30:27 ►
were being put up
00:30:28 ►
all over Mexico.
00:30:30 ►
We went to the moon
00:30:32 ►
69, 79,
00:30:34 ►
19 years ago.
00:30:37 ►
Today,
00:30:37 ►
we couldn’t put
00:30:38 ►
a lawn chair
00:30:39 ►
on the moon.
00:30:42 ►
You would think
00:30:42 ►
that by now
00:30:43 ►
we would have buildings
00:30:44 ►
600 feet long
00:30:45 ►
with 300 foot ceilings,
00:30:47 ►
have the Indians
00:30:48 ►
all working for us,
00:30:50 ►
and be looting
00:30:51 ►
the place of minerals.
00:30:54 ►
So, see, there is,
00:30:58 ►
we tolerate too much foot-drying,
00:31:01 ►
and these scientists
00:31:02 ►
have been pontificating.
00:31:03 ►
A real sore point with me is the claims of quantum
00:31:08 ►
physics. I mean, my God, how many
00:31:12 ►
conferences are there going to be on
00:31:14 ►
the connection between quantum physics
00:31:16 ►
and consciousness before somebody comes
00:31:19 ►
up with something better than a rap? And
00:31:22 ►
the new position of the particle physics community
00:31:25 ►
is just give us
00:31:28 ►
six and a half billion dollars
00:31:30 ►
and a machine
00:31:32 ►
19 kilometers in diameter
00:31:35 ►
and we will show you something.
00:31:39 ►
Well, but five years ago
00:31:41 ►
we gave you four billion dollars
00:31:43 ►
and you built the machine
00:31:44 ►
four and a half kilometers in diameter.
00:31:47 ►
And what you concluded out of that was you need a bigger one.
00:31:51 ►
And we’re living in a world where people are starving, where people are dying of AIDS.
00:31:57 ►
I mean, I’m not saying you have to just give the money away to the poor.
00:32:02 ►
Certainly nothing as radical as that
00:32:05 ►
but if you
00:32:07 ►
want a scientific
00:32:09 ►
frontier that
00:32:11 ►
has positive feedback into the
00:32:13 ►
human experience then
00:32:15 ►
let’s take the six and a half
00:32:18 ►
billion dollars and have a
00:32:20 ►
full assault on the
00:32:21 ►
mechanism of viruses in the
00:32:23 ►
human cell
00:32:24 ►
so that we come out of it with an AIDS cure, of course, but we come out of it also with a much deeper us for the past 30 years.
00:32:45 ►
Where would psychedelic research be
00:32:48 ►
if it had been going on at full funding since 1960
00:32:54 ►
and hundreds of thousands of people, well and healthy, had taken it
00:33:00 ►
and the plants of the world had been fully surveyed,
00:33:05 ►
the cultures of the world, databases had been built of their folklore,
00:33:10 ►
and this sort of thing.
00:33:11 ►
So we, and even though I think we represent a fairly deconditioned subgroup,
00:33:20 ►
are still in thrall to the promises of a science
00:33:26 ►
whose promises begin to sound more and more hollow.
00:33:31 ►
Part of what being involved in the psychedelic experience is
00:33:34 ►
is reclaiming your own experience.
00:33:38 ►
We expect Carl Sagan to explain it to us,
00:33:43 ►
or the evening news.
00:33:45 ►
And we don’t realize all these people are just like we are.
00:33:50 ►
All of these people are utterly, utterly, utterly ordinary.
00:33:55 ►
Totally ordinary.
00:33:57 ►
I can’t impress upon you enough how ordinary everyone is.
00:34:02 ►
And we drift into the assumption you know that great
00:34:06 ►
men and women are at the helm and that deep thinkers are publishing all of
00:34:12 ►
these books and it’s just not so it’s a groping it’s a feeling toward it and
00:34:19 ►
any one of us is competent this whole cult of professionalism and elites
00:34:26 ►
is just a shell game.
00:34:28 ►
The thing to do is reclaim direct experience
00:34:31 ►
and then insist for other people
00:34:34 ►
that that be dealt with.
00:34:36 ►
I’ve tried to do that by talking about
00:34:40 ►
the part of the psychedelic experience
00:34:42 ►
which nobody seemed to want to talk about,
00:34:44 ►
which is, it seems to me
00:34:46 ►
that it’s not an exploration
00:34:49 ►
of our psychology,
00:34:51 ►
of our conscious or unconscious mind.
00:34:54 ►
It’s a place.
00:34:56 ►
There’s real estate in there.
00:34:58 ►
It is as profound a dimension
00:35:01 ►
as the new world was for Columbus.
00:35:04 ►
We are going to live in the world
00:35:07 ►
that the psychedelic experience is revealing to us because we primarily define ourselves
00:35:14 ►
culturally through language. And the psychedelic experiences, I think, primarily will be found to be a revisioning of language.
00:35:25 ►
Literally, castles in the air await us in our global future.
00:35:32 ►
We are going to, we are journeying deeper and deeper into the imagination.
00:35:40 ►
This conference that just finished this past week was called Living in the Imagination.
00:35:47 ►
And its focus was not strictly or at all particularly psychedelic.
00:35:52 ►
It was artists, writers, film people, performers talking about living in the imagination.
00:35:59 ►
I think you could almost describe psychedelics as enzymes for the activity of the imagination.
00:36:07 ►
And the imagination is a sense, like seeing, feeling, touching.
00:36:14 ►
It is more than simply an anticipation of the future.
00:36:18 ►
It’s an anticipation of those things which lie outside the forward thrust of the momentum of probability.
00:36:29 ►
The possession of the imagination is what characterizes us
00:36:33 ►
and distinguishes us from other creatures.
00:36:36 ►
I mean, you can talk all you want about porpoises and dolphins and all of these things,
00:36:42 ►
but, you know, they may have rich interior lives,
00:36:46 ►
but there is no trace of epigenetic coding.
00:36:52 ►
In other words, they don’t write books, paint paintings, build cathedrals.
00:36:57 ►
These are the things which we do,
00:37:00 ►
which have built up a tremendously rich environment for each succeeding generation
00:37:07 ►
so that we do not birth our children into the world of nature.
00:37:13 ►
We birth our children into the world of culture.
00:37:18 ►
And culture is some kind of collective engineering process
00:37:23 ►
that up to this point has been largely unconscious, entirely unconscious.
00:37:30 ►
I mean, people just thought what they thought and let the chips fall where they may,
00:37:35 ►
and every once in a while a Christ or a Mohammed or a Buddha would come along and reshuffle the deck,
00:37:41 ►
and then the game would play on. But we are coming to the place, a
00:37:49 ►
great turning place, I would think, a cusp almost in the evolution of human psychology.
00:37:55 ►
It’s the self-reflection cusp. We are beginning to become sophisticated enough with our language and our awareness to stand outside of ourselves.
00:38:09 ►
What is the human enterprise?
00:38:13 ►
You know, what is happening on this planet?
00:38:16 ►
What the hell is going on here?
00:38:18 ►
This planet has supported an endless succession of animal forms.
00:38:25 ►
They can be traced back into the gun-flit shirts of South Africa
00:38:30 ►
three and a half billion years.
00:38:33 ►
In the last million years,
00:38:38 ►
phenomena never before seen on this planet
00:38:42 ►
have begun to emerge.
00:38:44 ►
Not all of them having to do with the human species.
00:38:48 ►
For instance, glaciers.
00:38:50 ►
I believe and subscribe to the school in geology which says
00:38:55 ►
there were not glaciers a billion years ago or a hundred million years ago.
00:39:02 ►
Glaciers are a recent phenomenon
00:39:04 ►
having to do with the accumulation
00:39:06 ►
of instability in the planetary orbit.
00:39:10 ►
Ice moving southward miles high
00:39:13 ►
from the poles on a cycle
00:39:15 ►
of 20,000 to 50,000 years
00:39:17 ►
is something entirely unique
00:39:20 ►
for the biology of this planet
00:39:22 ►
to encounter.
00:39:23 ►
That process process which islands
00:39:26 ►
and then islands populations
00:39:30 ►
of primates and other animals
00:39:32 ►
and then recedes
00:39:34 ►
so that these intensified islanded genomes
00:39:37 ►
then flow back into a general gene pool
00:39:40 ►
and then islands them again.
00:39:43 ►
This is like kneading the bread of evolutionary adaptation
00:39:48 ►
and it’s out and it’s in that world of ice moving south and moving north that the human story
00:39:56 ►
begins to pick up because the human story is a story that everyone who studies the matter believes began in Africa.
00:40:08 ►
And it was the forming and the unforming of the glaciers
00:40:15 ►
that created the cycle of wetness and dryness in Africa
00:40:20 ►
that placed pressure on the evolving primates in the primary rainforests of the African tropics
00:40:28 ►
to begin to develop a dry grassland or limited resource adaptation
00:40:37 ►
in the background of the arboreal adaptation.
00:40:41 ►
Well then, as the ratios of selective intensity shifted in favor of the dry land situation, the previous mutation which had been there all along but had not been prominent because it was not conferring an adaptive advantage suddenly came into the fore.
00:41:07 ►
And you get binocular vision,
00:41:09 ►
bipedalism,
00:41:11 ►
pack signaling,
00:41:15 ►
all of these things which are the beginning of the repertoire of our heritage.
00:41:19 ►
Now up to this point in that story,
00:41:22 ►
almost all evolutionary biologists and primatologists
00:41:26 ►
agree what I’ve recently been trying to say and hope to write a book about is I think that it
00:41:34 ►
was the presence of psychedelic plants in that environment that provided the spark to begin to call forth conscious self-reflection
00:41:46 ►
out of this primate species.
00:41:49 ►
The case goes something like this.
00:41:53 ►
The primates evolved.
00:41:55 ►
They abandoned their vegetarian lifestyle
00:41:58 ►
as the great forests were reduced to grasslands.
00:42:02 ►
They adopted a more omnivorous lifestyle,
00:42:05 ►
which you see in most of the higher primates today.
00:42:09 ►
And they began to hunt the large ungulate mammals
00:42:14 ►
that were simultaneously evolving
00:42:17 ►
as the grasslands became a more dominant ecology.
00:42:22 ►
became a more dominant ecology.
00:42:31 ►
In the manure of these ungulate mammals, cattle,
00:42:36 ►
mushrooms find their idealized environment.
00:42:39 ►
Well, if you’ve ever watched a baboon,
00:42:42 ►
the strategy of baboons for hunting food is they go along and they pick stuff up and they smell and taste and they’re always turning things over looking for bugs.
00:42:53 ►
Well, carrion beetles and stuff like that always congregate under cow pies.
00:42:58 ►
Isn’t it wonderful that the evolution of the grandeur of the human mind begins with what’s going on with doodle bugs under cow
00:43:08 ►
pies it keeps your humility but this this the because searching for insect protein assume the
00:43:18 ►
mushroom is a very conspicuous part of that kind of environment i I mean, a child of three will run to it in the meadow because it’s neither fish nor fowl, you know. I mean, it is quite an anomalous and striking object.
00:43:42 ►
visual acuity in small doses.
00:43:44 ►
This is very solid research done by Roland Fisher
00:43:46 ►
in the 50s and the 60s.
00:43:47 ►
Some of the last research
00:43:49 ►
done with psychedelics,
00:43:51 ►
he showed that very small amounts
00:43:54 ►
of psilocybin increase visual acuity
00:43:57 ►
before there is any other effect.
00:44:00 ►
You don’t feel stoned
00:44:01 ►
or anything like that.
00:44:02 ►
The way they proved this
00:44:04 ►
is they built an apparatus
00:44:05 ►
where there were two parallel metal bars
00:44:08 ►
and someone unseen by the subject,
00:44:13 ►
by turning a crank,
00:44:15 ►
could impart torsion to one of the metal bars
00:44:19 ►
so that the two parallel bars would slowly,
00:44:22 ►
one would twist and they would cease to be parallel.
00:44:26 ►
So you’d get graduate students,
00:44:28 ►
the favorite experimental animal of the psychology,
00:44:32 ►
and you’d give them light doses of psilocybin
00:44:35 ►
and you’d sit them down in front of this apparatus
00:44:37 ►
and tell them to push the buzzer when the two bars are no longer parallel.
00:44:43 ►
Very consistently, the people who had been
00:44:46 ►
dosed with psilocybin scored
00:44:48 ►
higher on this test than the
00:44:50 ►
people who had not.
00:44:52 ►
Fisher,
00:44:53 ►
wishing to be facetious,
00:44:56 ►
said to me,
00:44:58 ►
you see, this
00:45:00 ►
is a case where we’ve experimentally
00:45:02 ►
proven that drugs give you
00:45:04 ►
a truer picture of reality
00:45:05 ►
than being straight.
00:45:09 ►
And for him it was a joke.
00:45:11 ►
See, it was just this cute thing
00:45:13 ►
that you say to your academic colleagues.
00:45:16 ►
But I was quite touched and struck by
00:45:20 ►
this is true what this man is saying.
00:45:23 ►
This is a simple experiment.
00:45:24 ►
It proves that sometimes a drug,
00:45:26 ►
it’s better to be stoned than not stoned
00:45:28 ►
and your life could be depending on it
00:45:30 ►
because hunting is an activity
00:45:33 ►
where visual acuity is 95% of the game, you know,
00:45:38 ►
and it doesn’t hurt to also have a CNS stimulant
00:45:41 ►
that can give you a running burst if you need it.
00:45:46 ►
So since psilocybin provides both of these things
00:45:48 ►
it just turns you into a real
00:45:50 ►
killing machine
00:45:51 ►
so
00:45:53 ►
and Fischer never
00:46:00 ►
considered the
00:46:01 ►
impacts of his findings
00:46:04 ►
in what this would mean in the natural environment.
00:46:07 ►
But I wanted to think about it, and it seemed to me that that meant that those primates,
00:46:15 ►
including the psilocybin in their food chain, would automatically have a leg up over those
00:46:22 ►
that did not. They would be able to move quicker in the hunting situation
00:46:26 ►
and more accurately.
00:46:28 ►
Well, you have to have studied evolution for 10 minutes
00:46:32 ►
to know that that means then
00:46:35 ►
that these forms are going to be preserved
00:46:38 ►
and selected in favor of over those individuals
00:46:41 ►
that do not have this in their food.
00:46:46 ►
At the same time, it could have made them a little bit more vulnerable.
00:46:49 ►
In what way?
00:46:50 ►
Well, you eat a bunch of mushrooms,
00:46:52 ►
and suddenly you’re just sitting there watching all these patterns,
00:46:54 ►
and suddenly you’re more vulnerable predators, per se, or something.
00:46:58 ►
Yes, well, that’s what I wanted to get to.
00:47:00 ►
I don’t mean full trips.
00:47:03 ►
I mean that in the process of eating bugs and roots and stuff,
00:47:08 ►
if they ate these mushrooms without even knowing they were psychoactive,
00:47:12 ►
they would have this visual acuity.
00:47:14 ►
Now, somebody at some point ate a lot of them,
00:47:19 ►
and they discovered that they were no good for hunting or bursts of speed or anything.
00:47:24 ►
They just wanted to lie on the ground and, you know, be with it.
00:47:29 ►
At that point, I think this becomes a mystery for the first human beings.
00:47:35 ►
The cow is the source of food, fuel, body covering, milk,
00:47:46 ►
and an image of nurturing that’s very important
00:47:50 ►
because the birthing of the cow,
00:47:53 ►
it probably was the birthing of cattle,
00:47:55 ►
and the observation of cattle probably taught people
00:47:58 ►
more about sex than their own sexuality did.
00:48:02 ►
I mean, the husbanding of animals
00:48:05 ►
is how farm children learn about life.
00:48:10 ►
I don’t know.
00:48:11 ►
This all relates to the theme of the light in nature
00:48:14 ►
because there is a great mystery on this planet.
00:48:18 ►
We are only one side of the coin of that mystery.
00:48:22 ►
Our existence here should be the clue to us
00:48:27 ►
that something really weird
00:48:28 ►
is going on.
00:48:30 ►
I don’t think most planets
00:48:32 ►
are like this planet.
00:48:34 ►
I can stretch out to the idea
00:48:36 ►
that there are many planets
00:48:37 ►
with life,
00:48:39 ►
but I think the level of complexity,
00:48:42 ►
the presence of a historical civilization,
00:48:44 ►
which is just going to exist for a geological microsecond.
00:48:49 ►
We are very, very close to the people we came out of 50,000 years ago.
00:48:56 ►
And yet look at how we have changed the world.
00:49:00 ►
Who is whispering to us in our dreams?
00:49:09 ►
the world. Who is whispering to us in our dreams? Whose hand is it that we feel guiding our destiny into the future? We’re so accustomed to being rational and reductionist, the there ain’t nothing
00:49:17 ►
really going on here at all school of thought, that we’re just deadened to the mysteriousness of our own presence. If we’re
00:49:27 ►
here, who knows what else could be here in the mountains, jungles, and deserts of this
00:49:33 ►
planet. I mean, we have not yet even carried out a complete cataloging of nature. We don’t
00:49:41 ►
really know what kind of a foundation we’re standing on.
00:49:46 ►
And then when you take the psychedelics, which come out of the natural world,
00:49:52 ►
the message that they are bearing in the broadest sweep
00:49:57 ►
is that our historically created symbolic model of reality is almost worthless.
00:50:06 ►
I mean, it’s okay for dealing bread and trading donkeys,
00:50:11 ►
but once you get into anything deeper than that,
00:50:16 ►
it’s just a story we tell ourselves,
00:50:20 ►
a magic charm that we rattle against the darkness.
00:50:24 ►
The real nature of our predicament is completely opaque to us, except when we put our mind into the socket of nature, and then we connect up to something so bizarre that we can barely recognize it. Something lying so far outside
00:50:45 ►
our previous symbolic structures
00:50:48 ►
that we don’t know whether it’s an alien invasion,
00:50:51 ►
the eminence of Christ’s immediate return,
00:50:55 ►
the rise of Atlantis,
00:50:57 ►
or just what it is.
00:50:59 ►
It is confounding.
00:51:00 ►
That’s the main thing about psychedelics.
00:51:03 ►
That’s why it seems to me it divides people. It’s for people who like the bizarre, the weird, the unthinkable, the unspeakable, the peculiar, the edge of meaning, beauty at its most Baroque and almost, you know, the world of Hieronymus Bosch and Peter Bruegel
00:51:26 ►
the Elder
00:51:27 ►
and some people don’t like that
00:51:30 ►
they like to be reassured
00:51:32 ►
they like closure
00:51:33 ►
they love
00:51:35 ►
being ensconced in
00:51:37 ►
concentric circles of
00:51:40 ►
expectation
00:51:41 ►
and tradition
00:51:43 ►
solidity
00:51:44 ►
that sort of thing
00:51:46 ►
and they I think
00:51:48 ►
this just gives them the
00:51:50 ►
heebie-jeebies this kind of stuff
00:51:53 ►
because we’re saying that the
00:51:54 ►
intellectual world has an edge
00:51:57 ►
you know
00:51:58 ►
and that if you go over that edge
00:52:01 ►
you will find the
00:52:03 ►
unanticipated tremendum.
00:52:07 ►
Maybe then it doesn’t matter if cats are teachers,
00:52:11 ►
and people are teachers too, how it got there.
00:52:15 ►
That’s a great question,
00:52:16 ►
but I see it more as a way into a doorway somewhere that’s real,
00:52:23 ►
and that’s the point.
00:52:26 ►
Well, maybe there’s a planetary regulating system
00:52:30 ►
and people are simply cells in a larger organism
00:52:36 ►
and when it comes time for something to happen,
00:52:42 ►
which maybe means all life leaves the planet or something, then
00:52:46 ►
the equivalent of hormones are produced in the environment to initiate this morphogenetic
00:52:55 ►
re-scripting of what is going on. And suddenly animals, which were perfectly happy hunting on the velts of Africa,
00:53:06 ►
begin making art, watching the stars,
00:53:10 ►
and moving into history for the purpose of saving the planet.
00:53:16 ►
I really like to think that we are biologically regulated
00:53:21 ►
and that history is a biological phenomenon under the control of the environment.
00:53:28 ►
It isn’t something that is going against the environment.
00:53:32 ►
Now, the objection to that is that it looks so bad.
00:53:37 ►
It looks cancerous.
00:53:40 ►
But the obvious counter to that is birth.
00:53:48 ►
I mean, birth is… There’s a lot of bloodshed.
00:53:50 ►
People make sounds as though they were in great pain.
00:53:53 ►
They are in great pain.
00:53:55 ►
It has all the attributes that we associate
00:54:00 ►
with the violent termination of the organism.
00:54:04 ►
And yet, it is the precise
00:54:07 ►
opposite it is the birthing of the new generation and it is unavoidable and it
00:54:15 ►
is perfectly natural well as a woman grows pregnant and she loses her sylph-like form
00:54:28 ►
and becomes heavier and clumped, all these things,
00:54:32 ►
the changes which go on in pregnancy,
00:54:34 ►
may be something like what has happened to the earth over the last 20,000 years.
00:54:39 ►
The earth is pregnant with humanity and perhaps much else. And obviously, you just look at the
00:54:48 ►
earth and humanity and say, these two can’t stay together much longer. They’re becoming
00:54:54 ►
a problem. The mother can’t function. The child is in danger. And like the birth situation, where if the child is not eventually birthed,
00:55:07 ►
toxemia will set in, then everything goes haywire.
00:55:12 ►
Then both parties are in danger and there has to be emergency intervention and so forth.
00:55:17 ►
I don’t really think we’ve reached that point, but I think we have come to term. And as you know, concerning birth,
00:55:26 ►
transition is the psychedelic compression of it all,
00:55:32 ►
where it all comes together.
00:55:34 ►
And it seems like it is impossible and overwhelming
00:55:38 ►
and is going on forever, and then it ends.
00:55:41 ►
And then the baby is born,
00:55:44 ►
and everything is seen to be all right.
00:55:47 ►
Well, I think the 20th century, it’s not a metaphor that we are birthing the new soul of humanity.
00:55:54 ►
It’s actually happening and it’s ripping our society and our planet to pieces.
00:56:00 ►
But what will come out of it is, you know, the meaning of our destiny, perhaps the meaning of the planetary destiny.
00:56:10 ►
And I hope that we are going to be privileged to be midwives of this process, to be there on that great day when it all makes sense and then you can turn and look back at the process the wars and
00:56:27 ►
revolutions and pogroms and migrations and the whole thing is saying now i understand what all
00:56:36 ►
that was about that’s i think the real promise of getting with nature through the psychedelics
00:56:46 ►
promise of getting with nature through the psychedelics, being in on that process. Because if you’re in on that process, anxiety will leave you. You will not define yourself as
00:56:53 ►
a victim. You will define yourself as a privileged spectator.
00:56:57 ►
Have you thought about this outside and inside dichotomy?
00:57:02 ►
But I wonder, Clive, I mean, thinking about the question
00:57:05 ►
is it inside or outside,
00:57:09 ►
it seems to me more is that
00:57:11 ►
what you have is a loosely coupled hierarchy
00:57:15 ►
where there are elements of freedom
00:57:19 ►
and self-will
00:57:21 ►
at every level of the hierarchy
00:57:24 ►
but always constrained and self-will at every level of the hierarchy,
00:57:32 ►
but always constrained by deterministic factors that are also at every level.
00:57:34 ►
So sort of the new model which I think is coming
00:57:38 ►
is that the earth is an organism, yes, that’s well established,
00:57:45 ►
but human history is a part of that organism.
00:57:50 ►
It is, and it’s as different from the rest of it as the brain is from the liver,
00:57:57 ►
but that human history is not somehow against the planet
00:58:00 ►
or unexpected or unwelcome,
00:58:04 ►
that it’s actually part of the control system and
00:58:09 ►
yet it is controlled. And this is where I think that we need to revision what drugs
00:58:17 ►
are. All of human history is the sculpting of human populations by their relationships to plants.
00:58:27 ►
I mean, think of the effect that sugar had on the rise of mercantilism and empire building,
00:58:36 ►
or opium policy in the Far East, or the spread of rye, the replacing of wheat by rye in the Middle East as you
00:58:46 ►
move north and how that
00:58:48 ►
made certain kinds of
00:58:49 ►
populations and migrations
00:58:51 ►
possible. You could write a
00:58:53 ►
book about human history in
00:58:55 ►
which you analyze the
00:58:57 ►
entire phenomenon as
00:58:59 ►
movements toward
00:59:03 ►
equilibrium in response to states of disequilibrium
00:59:09 ►
introduced by plants,
00:59:11 ►
by foods, by spices,
00:59:14 ►
by drugs, by psychedelics,
00:59:16 ►
by addicting drugs.
00:59:17 ►
So that’s how in our own bodies
00:59:20 ►
a given system is regulated
00:59:24 ►
through the release of hormones which
00:59:27 ►
turn on certain genes and turn off
00:59:31 ►
certain other genes and turn on certain
00:59:34 ►
secretions and turn off others. So I
00:59:39 ►
think we assume that human history has
00:59:42 ►
just been something dreamed up by egomaniacal males, mostly,
00:59:51 ►
each one building on the accomplishments of the other.
00:59:54 ►
But it may be that it’s actually always been regulated as a process by the planetary control system
01:00:06 ►
by regulating diet,
01:00:08 ►
that the diet of every species,
01:00:10 ►
and particularly this one,
01:00:12 ►
determines its energy levels,
01:00:14 ►
its intellectual preoccupations,
01:00:16 ►
its migratory patterns,
01:00:17 ►
its distribution of work and labor,
01:00:20 ►
and this sort of thing,
01:00:22 ►
which maybe this is over-answering your question,
01:00:26 ►
but it’s not a dualism.
01:00:29 ►
It’s not one or the other.
01:00:30 ►
Whether you see the control and the information from the drug
01:00:36 ►
coming from within you or without you
01:00:39 ►
is really a matter of perspective,
01:00:42 ►
where you choose to describe it from intrinsically it doesn’t seem
01:00:47 ►
to be possible to know that we’re we’re like cells moving at the will of a larger system
01:00:55 ►
somebody once said electrons blindly run and alfred north whitehead said yes but inside the body they blindly run according to the body’s
01:01:09 ►
plan and i think that’s what you might say about people people blindly run but without realizing
01:01:17 ►
it they run according to gaia’s plan yeah i personally have experimented with a whole number of psychedelics
01:01:26 ►
and I must say that I’ve never
01:01:28 ►
found that one psychedelic
01:01:30 ►
gives you a certain kind of vision
01:01:32 ►
and another, another. Never.
01:01:34 ►
No. I’ve always
01:01:36 ►
found that it had a lot to do with
01:01:37 ►
where I was at,
01:01:40 ►
a lot of
01:01:42 ►
other things, but the
01:01:44 ►
key, to me, all psychedelics are really keys.
01:01:47 ►
They open up that reducing valve that Huxley talks about, you know,
01:01:53 ►
and once that’s open, whatever comes in, comes in,
01:01:58 ►
but for me it has nothing to do with the psychedelic itself.
01:02:04 ►
has nothing to do with the psychedelic itself.
01:02:08 ►
I think we keep hearing you talk about words like expire or a sense like it felt like I might die.
01:02:11 ►
Possibly one of you would like to address
01:02:13 ►
the relative non-toxicity of mushrooms.
01:02:17 ►
Well, you see, it’s a funny thing.
01:02:19 ►
Now we’re talking about life and death,
01:02:22 ►
and when we need reassurance in that realm, we immediately turn to science and talk about the LD50.
01:02:32 ►
For those of you who don’t know, lethal dose 50.
01:02:36 ►
So pharmacologists are always asking of a given drug, what is its LD50?
01:02:42 ►
That means how much of it had to be given to 100 rats for 50 of
01:02:47 ►
them to die. Now, LD50s are considered a relative measure of the safety of a drug. The LD50 is huge. I mean, something like 200 milligrams
01:03:06 ►
per kilogram of body weight.
01:03:10 ►
So that means to kill yourself with mushrooms,
01:03:13 ►
you would have to eat a dried,
01:03:15 ►
four and a half dried pounds
01:03:18 ►
or something like that.
01:03:19 ►
That’s what I wanted to emphasize
01:03:21 ►
because people do,
01:03:24 ►
one of the basic fears that one may experience at a threshold dose
01:03:29 ►
is the fear of…
01:03:30 ►
Discorporation.
01:03:33 ►
And that is, if you can grasp the fact that you’re much worse off
01:03:38 ►
than drinking a couple of cups of coffee generally,
01:03:41 ►
that can alleviate some of that particular fear. You might say, well,
01:03:47 ►
it’s not going to poison me, all I have to do is keep breathing.
01:03:49 ►
Well, a funny thing about this thinking you’re going to die, if you tell a straight person
01:03:57 ►
this, they say, well, psychedelic drugs, isn’t that the bit? You take it and you think you’re
01:04:03 ►
going to die, and then you don’t, and you’re you’re going to die and then you don’t and you’re so
01:04:06 ►
damn glad you didn’t
01:04:07 ►
that it’s like you’re ecstatic.
01:04:11 ►
I’ve never taken ayahuasca.
01:04:14 ►
I’m wondering if
01:04:15 ►
since from what I understand
01:04:17 ►
DMT is the
01:04:19 ►
effective component.
01:04:22 ►
When you’ve taken that
01:04:24 ►
do you find that it’s
01:04:25 ►
characteristic of
01:04:27 ►
similarity to just
01:04:29 ►
pure DMT, or
01:04:32 ►
is it very different from that?
01:04:33 ►
No, it’s a lot like DMT
01:04:35 ►
in the center
01:04:38 ►
of the flash,
01:04:40 ►
but DMT unfolds
01:04:42 ►
over a minute or two,
01:04:43 ►
and lasts three or four minutes.
01:04:46 ►
Ayahuasca is more like mushrooms.
01:04:48 ►
It comes on at about the hour and 20-minute mark, and it comes in waves.
01:04:54 ►
And some of them, but when you really get it and you’re looking at it,
01:04:59 ►
you say, yes, this looks just exactly like DMT.
01:05:04 ►
You see, I suppose we should explain
01:05:06 ►
for people who aren’t familiar with it.
01:05:09 ►
DMT, if you were to eat it,
01:05:11 ►
would be destroyed in your gut
01:05:13 ►
by monoamines,
01:05:15 ►
or monoamine oxidase.
01:05:18 ►
So the strategy in the Amazon
01:05:20 ►
is to take a plant with DMT in it
01:05:23 ►
and a plant with a monoamine oxidase inhibitor in it
01:05:28 ►
and combine the two into a beverage that can then be drunk and then the DMT passes through to the
01:05:37 ►
brain. One of the great mysteries of ethnopharmacology in the Amazon is how they ever figured this out.
01:05:50 ►
Because we’re talking about, you know, hundreds of thousands of species of plants, and in this case it’s the leaves of one boiled with the pulpy main body of another
01:05:58 ►
placed together in a certain proportion, and then the thing works.
01:06:04 ►
in a certain proportion, and then the thing works.
01:06:06 ►
And when you ask them, how is this done,
01:06:10 ►
they say, the plants have told us.
01:06:14 ►
And this seems a more likely explanation than anything anybody has been able to come up with.
01:06:17 ►
Some of you may know this book called The Shaman…
01:06:21 ►
No, what was Bruce Lambva, or Bruce Lamb’s
01:06:25 ►
second book called?
01:06:27 ►
The Rio Tigre and Beyond
01:06:29 ►
where this guy who had learned
01:06:30 ►
how to make ayahuasca
01:06:32 ►
when he was kidnapped as a child
01:06:34 ►
by a deep forest
01:06:36 ►
tribe, when he then
01:06:38 ►
in later life becomes a
01:06:40 ►
rosewood and curare collector
01:06:43 ►
he meets people in the jungle
01:06:45 ►
who are extremely,
01:06:49 ►
what do I want to say,
01:06:53 ►
living in the natural state,
01:06:55 ►
very much uncontacted people.
01:06:58 ►
But when he takes their ayahuasca,
01:07:00 ►
he realizes that it’s garbage,
01:07:02 ►
that they don’t know how to make it.
01:07:04 ►
And then he makes it for them and shows them how to make it,
01:07:07 ►
and they’re just knocked off their feet and hail him as a cultural reformer.
01:07:12 ►
So it’s not always simply a matter of the uncontacted primitive,
01:07:18 ►
so-called primitive people have the skinny.
01:07:21 ►
It’s a technology.
01:07:22 ►
But something I want to say before we leave this is as you think
01:07:26 ►
about natural drug
01:07:27 ►
complexes around the world
01:07:30 ►
the interesting thing to notice
01:07:32 ►
about ayahuasca is that
01:07:34 ►
unlike peyote
01:07:35 ►
or mushrooms
01:07:37 ►
or the iboga cults
01:07:40 ►
of Africa or the morning
01:07:42 ►
glory cults of central Mexico
01:07:44 ►
or cannabis different from all of these
01:07:48 ►
is the fact that it’s a combinatory preparation. And in practical terms, what that suddenly means
01:07:56 ►
is a person is involved, the person who makes it. For the first time time we’re getting a chemist into the picture an
01:08:06 ►
alchemist a teacher if you want because ayahuasca unlike mushrooms and all these
01:08:13 ►
other things is only as good as the person who made it where mushrooms you
01:08:18 ►
don’t have to worry about that in quite the same way. A mushroom is ready to go when it comes out of the ground.
01:08:27 ►
The ayahuasca is a combinatory drug,
01:08:30 ►
and so it brings the human interaction and the lore of it
01:08:34 ►
into a much more central position.
01:08:38 ►
This is something to bear in mind
01:08:39 ►
if you’re thinking of going to the Amazon to take ayahuasca.
01:08:43 ►
You’re going to have a people experience
01:08:47 ►
because the only way to it is through people.
01:08:50 ►
You could have a mushroom experience in Mexico
01:08:54 ►
by simply finding the mushroom, you know.
01:08:58 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:09:01 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:09:05 ►
At times I’ve been chided about calling Terence McKenna a poet,
01:09:10 ►
but when he was talking about the cycles of ice ages during the past million years
01:09:15 ►
and likened them to Gaia kneading the bread of evolutionary adaptation,
01:09:20 ►
well, I rest my case.
01:09:22 ►
For me, that is really a beautiful poetic image.
01:09:26 ►
Old Mother Earth kneading her dough that perhaps is still rising,
01:09:31 ►
but will soon be baked into something delicious.
01:09:34 ►
Of course, the getting baked part is up to us cannabis tokers, don’t you know?
01:09:40 ►
And I’ll bet that when you heard Terrence say,
01:09:44 ►
nobody should be allowed more than 50 years to get their act together,
01:09:48 ►
well, you probably thought the same thing I did.
01:09:51 ►
That’s true with us humans, too, not just with our science.
01:09:55 ►
However, I must confess that at 50, I still didn’t have my act together,
01:09:59 ►
and my closest friends would say that it’s still true yet today.
01:10:04 ►
I’m still working on it.
01:10:06 ►
You know, sometimes I think that we confuse our science with our technology,
01:10:11 ►
which quite obviously has been growing by leaps and bounds for the past hundred years or so.
01:10:16 ►
But when you think about the fact that science still hasn’t figured out what 75% of the universe is composed of,
01:10:23 ►
you have to admit that his comparison of building 16th century churches in Mexico
01:10:28 ►
with not being able to do the same thing on the moon in the 20th century,
01:10:32 ►
well, it actually puts it into perspective a little bit better, I think.
01:10:37 ►
I hadn’t heard that rap before, and I obviously enjoyed it.
01:10:41 ►
Now, before I go today, I want to give you East Coasters a head up about one of the great annual conferences that will be held once again in New York City.
01:10:50 ►
And that is the Horizons Perspectives on Psychedelics Conference that will take place in October of this year.
01:10:57 ►
And that’s 2013 for you time travelers who are joining us in later years.
01:11:25 ►
Thank you. Memorial Church in New York City. And among many of the other presenters there are going to be my dear friends Earth and Fire from arrowid.org, which as you know is the web’s premier site for
01:11:31 ►
information about our sacred plants and medicines. In fact, if you haven’t already read the latest
01:11:38 ►
edition of Arrowwood Extracts, I highly recommend it, and I’ll put a link to it with the program
01:11:43 ►
notes for this podcast,
01:11:48 ►
which, as you know, you can get to via psychedelicsalon.us.
01:11:52 ►
There’s a really important article in the latest edition,
01:11:56 ►
and I hope that you’ll read it and pass the information along to your friends.
01:12:03 ►
What it concerns is a new group of substances called embomays, like 25I and 25C.
01:12:09 ►
And in case you’ve been puzzled by reports of people dying from something suspected to be LSD,
01:12:16 ►
well, these are the actual substances that are being passed as LSD right now. And as you know, there’s still never been a recorded instance of somebody dying from an overdose of LSD.
01:12:22 ►
But something’s going on right now, and that article provides some really good advice
01:12:27 ►
about how to tell the difference between LSD and the Enbo maze,
01:12:31 ►
which information may ultimately save you or your friends
01:12:34 ►
a trip to the emergency room.
01:12:36 ►
I think that it’s really important to try and keep up
01:12:40 ►
with what’s going on in the area of these new chemicals,
01:12:43 ►
and arrowid.org is the place to find the latest and most accurate information
01:12:48 ►
about psychedelic substances that I know of.
01:12:51 ►
And also on the program notes, I’ll include a link to the new Arrowid Prospectus,
01:12:56 ►
which is particularly worth reading for parents who want to keep up with the challenges
01:13:01 ►
that their children will be facing in regards to making decisions
01:13:05 ►
about all of the new substances that are now hitting the street. For example, from the Arrowwood
01:13:10 ►
prospectus, I learned that according to the European Monitoring Center for Drugs and Addiction,
01:13:17 ►
there were 73 new psychoactive drugs released in 2012 and 40 in the first half of 2013.
01:13:23 ►
You know, it looks to me like the future of drug education just got a whole lot more complex,
01:13:30 ►
and you aren’t going to be able to wait for the governments to sort things out.
01:13:34 ►
You’re going to have to take responsibility for teaching your children about these things
01:13:38 ►
yourself.
01:13:39 ►
But my guess is that you wouldn’t be here in the salon with us if you weren’t already
01:13:43 ►
doing just that.
01:13:44 ►
My guess is that you wouldn’t be here in the salon with us if you weren’t already doing just that.
01:13:50 ►
And by the way, just in case you aren’t already aware of the scope of Arrowwood’s work,
01:13:54 ►
and that, by the way, is E-R-O-W-I-D dot org.
01:14:00 ►
If you aren’t aware of the scope of their work, well, last year there were over 15 million people,
01:14:03 ►
unique visitors who visited the Arrowwood site.
01:14:05 ►
And they now average over 90,000 unique visitors each and every day 90,000 people a day every day are
01:14:12 ►
coming to that site you know it’s a really a very large tribe that you and I
01:14:17 ►
are a part of and our numbers are growing every day now to close on
01:14:23 ►
another personal note I just want to give a shout out to Kevin
01:14:26 ►
and the rest of the tribe up there
01:14:28 ►
in the San Juan Islands,
01:14:30 ►
better known as God’s Country.
01:14:32 ►
While I can’t be there in body,
01:14:34 ►
I’m always with you guys in spirit.
01:14:37 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo
01:14:39 ►
signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:14:41 ►
Be well, my friends.