404 - A Survey of Shamanic Options

Program Notes §

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

During the 1980’s, before the birth of the Web, Terence McKenna’s workshops were just about the only source of information about psychedelics that reached the streets. While there was some information about psychoactive plants available in professional journals and university libraries, it took Terence to pull out this information and repackage it for the rest of us. In this June 1989 workshop, he does what he did best back then, give us a detailed inventory, continent by continent, of the psychoactive plants native to each area, along with a brief history of how humans interacted with them in the distant past.

[The following quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“We can’t sell short the spiritual power of cannabis, especially when eaten.”

“In a way, this is a definition of shamanism. A shaman is a person who by some means has gotten out of their own culture.”

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403 - Sasha Shulgin_ In His Own Words

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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

00:00:22 ► §

Salon.

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And in case you’ve been wondering where I’ve been these past 10 days,

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I’ll tell you all about it after we first listened to this lecture by Terence McKenna.

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And in it, he’s going to give us a survey and a history of psychoactive plants around the world.

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You know, in past podcasts, I’m sure you’ve heard me mention the fact that during the 1980s,

00:00:42 ► §

Terence McKenna’s workshops were, well, they were just about the only source of information about psychedelics that actually reached the streets.

00:00:50 ► §

While there was some information about psychoactive plants, actually quite a bit available in

00:00:54 ► §

professional journals and university libraries, it took Terence to pull out this information and

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repackage it for the rest of us. Now the workshop that we’re about to join

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took place in June of 1989, which was 25 years ago in case you don’t want to do the math yourself.

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This talk begins with Terrence discussing the fact that, well at least back in 1989,

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there was very little effort being made to preserve information about the Amazon rainforest,

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information that had been

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discovered and compiled by the indigenous populations over several millennia. And as to

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whether that situation has improved, well, I’ll leave that up to you to decide. But should you

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decide that there is still not enough being done to gather this valuable information while we still

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can, well then, perhaps, just perhaps,

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maybe you should be figuring out how you can do something to improve the situation.

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And now, here once again is the Bard McKenna.

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I’m sure you’re all aware of the situation of peril

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in which the Amazon rainforest finds itself, and very large conservation organizations

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such as the World Wildlife Fund and that sort of organization are working very hard to preserve

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large tracts of the Amazon in situ and to essentially make large parks. And this is

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commendable and should certainly be done. But what is not being done is an effort to preserve

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human information about the rainforest. In other words, no effort is being made to conserve the heritage of the people who have lived in and

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adjacent to the rainforests over millennia and my estimate would be that this information which is

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extremely fragile will be lost by some time after the turn of the century. It’s not hard to understand why this is happening.

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It’s a consequence of the impact of market economies

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on primitive, so-called primitive,

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preliterate tribal people in the third world.

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In the case of the Amazon,

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the men are leaving the remote villages

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and going to work in sawmills

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and going to work as outboard motor captains and mechanics.

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And the kind of transformation that always accompanies urbanization

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and the arrival of a money economy is taking place.

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Yet these people have a body of medical data that has served them

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very well over thousands of years, and now, because they are impressed with the values of

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Western medicine and can buy all kinds of remedios at any drugstore in the city, why the importance of this knowledge

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is no longer apparent to them, and so it’s being lost. I might just digress for a minute

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on that subject because I have a passionate feeling about it. I have no reason to doubt the DEA statistics which say that 70%

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of the cocaine produced in South America is coming out of the Rio Huayaga basin.

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I know nothing about it. As a botanist, I can tell you that the Rio Huyaga is the richest floristically,

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the area richest in plant species in the entire Amazon basin.

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As near as we can tell looking at the geohistory of the basin,

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at times it’s been considerably drier.

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And during glaciations when water is

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concentrated at the poles

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the

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wet

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the high rainfall areas

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of the Amazon diminish

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in size. The Rio

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Huayjaga is one of those areas

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that is always wet

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and it has consequently

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produced a fantastic speciation of plants.

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One biogeographer, geologist, estimates that the Amazon basin has been above water continuously

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for 220 million years. This is as long as most places in the world,

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longer than most places.

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It’s estimated that the Madagascan plate,

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which is a relic plate that now comprises Seychelles,

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Mauritius, and the Malagasy Republic,

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has been above water.

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This is all, we’re talking Eastern Africa, Indian Ocean

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here. That land has been above water 350 million years and is the oldest above water sites on the

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planet. But the Amazon Basin, by virtue of heavy rainfall, continuous lack of inundation, and being tropical, has been

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like a laboratory for speciation, both of animals and plants, so that the Rio Huayjaga,

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which is the concentrated center of this process, is like the most intense concentration of variegated species and genetic

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material on the planet. Well, it should be made into a vast natural park. If that can’t be done,

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then it should be left alone. What the American government has decided is a better course

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is that it should be defoliated,

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that a chemical called spike

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should be aerosol sprayed into the air over this valley

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in order to kill coca bushes.

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Well, I don’t know who dreams this stuff up,

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but any one of you on the ground for 20 minutes in this scene

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would be convinced that nothing could be stupider,

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that this is essentially like burning down the forest to kill the ants,

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that coca, there may be a lot of it there, I don’t know,

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but there’s a lot of a lot of other stuff there, for sure.

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There are hundreds of distinct tribes,

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dozens of language groups,

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tens of thousands of unique species of plants and animals.

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It is floristically, faunistically,

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one of the five or six richest areas on the whole planet.

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And as if the inroads of capitalism and the inroads of Maoist politics and the inroads of

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capitalism were not enough, you’re also going to get a bunch of clowns from the DEA who want to

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defoliate it. So, you know, if any of you have political pull

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or are of the letter-writing type,

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you might put some pressure on anyone you know to halt this.

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This is really a kind of ecocidal atrocity,

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and if something isn’t done,

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like all the other ecocidal atrocities,

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it’ll be history before most people are even informed of what is going on.

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This is really one of the great, great policy wrong-turnings for many, many reasons.

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I mean, I don’t expect the State Department to be sympathetic to endangered plants,

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but what is happening is all of Peru is being pushed into the arms of Sindaro Luminoso,

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which is one of the most peculiar and radical political philosophies on the earth today. I mean,

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it rivals Pol Pot for having a no-holds-barred approach to dealing with its enemies. and economic policies and mismanaged American policies toward the campesinos,

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toward the poor people who grow the coca,

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because they are seeing Sandaro

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as their only protector,

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their only hope.

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So it’s a repeat performance

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of a sad story that has been seen

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in many parts of the world.

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Well, that’s enough political polemics.

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What I thought I would do today is just briefly survey the world,

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looking at the shamanic options in the plant area,

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trying to see just what is available, what are the history, chemistry,

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pharmacology, and botany of the relevant species. So I’ll go through this. It’s in the way of a

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survey. It’s not a rhetorical flight of fancy unless we lose control. Well, I’ve talked a lot about Africa in these meetings

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to set, talking about the emergence of culture and my belief that it was catalyzed into existence,

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language, and complex neural processing by exposure to psilocybin mushrooms in the veldt situation of ancient Africa.

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So I think I’ve said enough about that.

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What I would talk about today regarding Africa is the existing cults or patterns of hallucinogenic or shamanic plant usage in Africa.

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or shamanic plant usage in Africa.

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Africa is a special case because it is, of all the continents,

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the continent most heavily impacted

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by human presence

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because, of course, human beings evolved in Africa,

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fire was discovered and used in Africa

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before it was used anywhere else,

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and also the ecosystems of Africa had a particular fragility in relationship to the dryness that comes and goes with glaciations.

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So in spite of the fact that I propose Africa as the cradle of human emergence

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under the influence of psychedelic plant synergies.

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Today, Africa is noticeably poor in hallucinogenic plants.

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The most interesting hallucinogen in the African situation is Tabernanthae iboga.

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Tabernantha iboga Tabernantha iboga

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is a tree

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in the rubiesi

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or a small bush

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depending on edaphic factors

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that means soil factors

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can cause it to grow different ways

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Tabernantha iboga contains

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the alkaloid ibogaine

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ibogaine

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there’s a paradox about ibogaine,

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which is, of all the indole halocenogens,

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it was the one most earliest

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to come to the attention of Western researchers.

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In the 1870s and 80s,

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when Belgium was in control of the Congo

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and exporting huge amounts of ivory and gold out of Africa,

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entrepreneurs seized upon this plant, Tabernanthi Aboga,

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and created tonics that were compounded with it as the main ingredient.

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And it was sold as a tonic and an aphrodisiac,

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and in some cases it was understood to be an intoxicant.

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Much in the way that Vini di Mariani, the famous coca preparation, which was the rage in the 1880s in Europe, much in the same way that it was marketed, iboga tonics were marketed in the late 19th century.

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century. But the alkaloid was never very thoroughly studied after the turn of the century. And of all the indoles, we know less about this one. It has a complex molecular structure, placing it closer

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in structural affinity to LSD than to any other psychoactive indole. It is, yeah.

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Could you just say what an indole is?

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Oh, indoles are a class of hallucinogens

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that are based on a molecular structure

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that involves a benzene group,

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which is a six-sided structure,

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attached to what’s called a pentaxyl group, a five-sided structure attached to what’s called a pentaxal group,

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a five-sided structure,

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the six and the five,

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and then built off on them

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there may be another six,

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that gives you the beta-carboline family.

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There may be just a side chain,

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that gives you the tryptamine family.

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Or there may be more complex stereochemical attachments,

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and they give you the LSD-ebogaine type structure.

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So indole refers to a small family of psychoactive compounds,

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not necessarily all psychoactive compounds, not necessarily all psychoactive compounds,

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not opiates, not tropanes,

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which are the things in detour,

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not the polyhydric alcohols of cannabis,

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tetrahydrocannabinol,

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but this particular small group of plants

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united by this chemical structure

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that seems to, because of its affinities to serotonin,

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be the chemical structure that lays the basis

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for the most psychoactive of the hallucinogens.

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Iboga is used by the Fang people,

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most notably in Gabon

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and around the capital city in Ghana

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and in Nigeria and in Zaire.

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And it has an interesting and suggestive usage.

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First, let’s deal with this question of aphrodisiac.

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As you know, an aphrodisiac is a chemical substance

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thought to make one either capable of or susceptible to sexual activity.

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And over thousands of years, this has been a recurring theme of fascination for human beings for obvious

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reasons and the definition takes on different nuances in the hands of different people

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probably the best known so-called aphrodisiac among ordinary folks is the so-called Spanish fly, which is cantharidine.

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The carapaces of a small desert beetle can be ground down to yield cantharidine.

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And if you give someone cantharidine in a carefully calculated dose,

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in a carefully calculated dose,

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well, they have a generalized reaction to it where they can gain relief from this reaction by having sex,

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but it is not a true aphrodisiac.

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It’s more like an almost genital itching or something.

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It’s a strongly localized in the erogenous zone kind of itching.

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And so this is like a pseudo-aphrodisiac.

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All CNS stimulants, all central nervous system stimulants in low doses

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present themselves as what’s called arousal.

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I mentioned this yesterday.

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Attention to incoming detail,

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slightly elevated blood pressure, so forth and so on.

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This is a precondition for sexual activity,

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but it is not a true aphrodisiac.

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In fact, when you sort through the many candidates for aphrodisiacs, and I’m sure as you know they range from powdered rhinoceros horn to mangoes to oysters to what have you, interestingly enough, ibogaine is the only thing which actually seems to pass the test. Ibogaine is an aphrodisiac

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in the truest sense of the word,

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and I take that to mean this,

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that if you are interested in sexual activity,

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it promotes, facilitates, and enhances it.

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If you are not, it doesn’t.

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It doesn’t overwhelm the intentions of the user.

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This seems to be one pathway that the psychic energy that it releases can be shunted down, but that there are others.

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And paradoxically, the way it’s used in the Fang Society is it’s a major force holding couples together.

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Fang society

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is quite complex and it’s structured

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in such a way that there is a built-in high anxiety

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factor about women among men. The reason

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for this is an unusual set of customs which we don’t really

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find duplicated anywhere else in the world, and it goes like this. A man may have more than one wife.

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A wife is always accompanied by a dowry. The dowry is always quite large

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in the sense that it is always a strain

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on the girl’s family to get the dowry together.

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And when a woman marries,

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naturally she and her dowry

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go to the village of her husband.

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But what is a little unusual in this situation

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is that divorce is very easy for the woman to obtain, number one.

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And number two, if a woman leaves her husband,

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the dowry must be returned.

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So men are in a constant dither about hanging on to women

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because the dowry must be returned even if it has been spent.

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And these are family relationships.

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These aren’t relationships between a man and a girl’s parents.

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These are relationships between two filial structures.

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So it can become quite complicated.

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And in fact, Fang men between the ages of 25 and 45

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spend enormous amounts of their lives

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making journeys to the villages of their wives

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or former wives to negotiate dowry return because it isn’t the concept of used goods

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is recognized and so it isn’t simply that the guy has to pay back the dowry it’s that he has to meet

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with the girl’s family and argue with them about how much she was really worth. And this often ends in bloodshed.

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So into this social structure that is pre-structured for anxiety about women comes

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this psychedelic aphrodisiac that promotes not only pair bonding but community bonding.

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And in fact it does so.

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And often when people are…

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The cult of Iboga

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is not the generalized cult of the Fang.

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They have many cults

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and some are Baptists and Mormons.

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But when a couple gets into trouble,

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the old men of the village, the shamans,

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will often say to them,

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why don’t you join Bawiti, this cult?

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You’re having marital problems.

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Why don’t you join Bawiti?

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And perhaps you can avoid having to pay back your dowry.

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Perhaps your wife will reconsider and decide to stay with you.

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So it has actually become a very interesting force for social cohesion.

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And in fact, studies, sociological studies, have shown that members of the Bawiti cult

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have a divorce rate far below that of general Fang society.

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far below that of general fang society.

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So I spend so much time on this because this is an unusual role for a hallucinogen.

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We just don’t see them playing these secondary,

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socially catalytic roles.

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Iboga is a strong hallucinogen,

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and it’s usually given to a person in very massive doses at the initiatory exposure, which can come in late adolescence. are just almost beyond credibility or creditability

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because they talk in terms of tablespoons

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and people will go to the river and eat two tablespoons.

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Methods of preparing haoma and soma,

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which are very puzzling when you try to apply them to a mushroom

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because there’s all this talk about it’s squeezed, it’s filtered.

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A bunch of processes are described

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which if you tried to carry them out on a mushroom

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would just leave you with a mess.

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But if you carry these processes out

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on Pergamon harmala,

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it quite reliably produces a yellow fluid

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rich in harmaline.

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Harmaline is yellow that is probably an intoxicant.

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So this is an area where research needs to be done.

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Any of you who are interested in ayahuasca

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or interested in beta-carbolines in psychotherapy,

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I urge you to look at Flattery’s book.

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It’s brand new.

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1989, University of California Press,

00:24:49 ► §

Near Eastern Studies, publication number 21,

00:24:52 ► §

Haoma and Harmaline.

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Okay, moving on east then across the Iranian plateau

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into India,

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which is certainly the birthplace or a great cradle of esoteric spirituality,

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what we discover is a surprising poverty of true, i.e. indole, hallucinogens. There are interesting substitutes, aside from Pergamon Harmala,

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which I’ve mentioned, of which there is very little textual evidence for use in India.

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The two things which have to stand out in Indian psycho-phyto-shamanism

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would be, number one, the tourist species.

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And we might as well talk about them now,

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because we will meet them on every continent, and they’re including in Africa.

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I just read an article about a group in Tanzania, interesting group.

00:26:06 ► §

Datura fatuosa, taken by women only, in a women’s initiation right which I don’t know how often this goes on

00:26:09 ► §

but it involves a labial measuring right

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so everybody compares the size of their labia

00:26:18 ► §

at the height of this trip

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and what is culturally sanctioned

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and this is a funny concept which I’ll talk about a little bit, is blue hallucinations.

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The women strive for blue hallucinations, and if they don’t achieve them, it’s considered like it wasn’t really a successful initiation.

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And the anthropologist who wrote on this called this a culturally

00:26:46 ► §

sanctioned hallucination well now i’m not sure what is meant here do they mean that

00:26:52 ► §

or anthropologists white people don’t have blue hallucinations they just have hallucinations and

00:26:59 ► §

that somehow it’s expectation that directs this i I’m not sure. I don’t associate blue hallucinations with tropanes,

00:27:07 ► §

but it is certainly true that blue hallucinations attach themselves to ayahuasca.

00:27:14 ► §

And people have even called it the search for the blue flash.

00:27:18 ► §

And if you’ve ever taken ayahuasca,

00:27:21 ► §

you know that there is a moment when what appears to be the world’s entire supply of

00:27:29 ► §

magenta jello is unleashed upon you and just flows toward you past you and through you and it

00:27:37 ► §

invariably is this electric cerulean blue merging into magenta, a very typical presentation of that

00:27:49 ► §

okay, well, detour species, many types

00:27:53 ► §

occur throughout the world in the tropical

00:27:57 ► §

and the temperate zone, there are several species in India

00:28:00 ► §

and texts on yoga and on Indian spirituality never stress this. Use of Duttura

00:28:09 ► §

is quite strongly a part of religious, of Indian, well, sadhu-type spirituality. It’s too much for

00:28:18 ► §

ordinary people. But you do see when you hang out with sadhus, the little prickly pods of detour are as common to find cast around

00:28:29 ► §

about their dwelling places and gathering areas

00:28:32 ► §

as are the evidences of charas smoking.

00:28:37 ► §

And that brings me to the second major component

00:28:41 ► §

of the psychoactive flora of the subcontinent,

00:28:44 ► §

which is cannabis. Cannabis

00:28:48 ► §

is not an indole, but cannabis must be consideredabis is the source of fiber for weaving. And we find hemp and fibers in graves 8,000 to 9,000 years old at Çatalhöyük, for one place, a place I’ve talked a lot to you about.

00:29:24 ► §

Talhuyuk, for one place, a place I’ve talked a lot to you about.

00:29:30 ► §

It’s fascinating the way in which the metaphors of the weaver are the metaphors for human cognitive activity generally.

00:29:37 ► §

In the 50s, a famous book was published called Man is a Weaver

00:29:41 ► §

that pursued this theme but never made the connection to fibrous hemp.

00:29:46 ► §

But we weave a tale, we tell a yarn,

00:29:51 ► §

we have all these words, these fiber and weaving words

00:29:54 ► §

that we connect to poetic or narrative activity.

00:29:58 ► §

And most of us who are aficionados of cannabis in these latter days smoke it,

00:30:10 ► §

and don’t smoke charas, hashish, because it’s rare in this country,

00:30:15 ► §

but smoke bud, flowering tops of marijuana.

00:30:21 ► §

But if you actually eat hashish you know you can

00:30:26 ► §

convince yourself this was

00:30:28 ► §

the LSD of the

00:30:29 ► §

ancient world in the 19th century

00:30:32 ► §

you know Theodore

00:30:34 ► §

Gautier

00:30:34 ► §

and

00:30:36 ► §

Baudelaire

00:30:40 ► §

and Verlaine

00:30:42 ► §

Rimbaud that crowd

00:30:44 ► §

there was this thing called the Society of the Hashashin in Paris,

00:30:49 ► §

and they met at the old Hotel de Lyon on the left bank

00:30:55 ► §

and ate jellied cannabis that they were getting from Morocco

00:31:03 ► §

with little silver spoons

00:31:05 ► §

and the descriptions of these experiences make it clear

00:31:09 ► §

that this was operating

00:31:10 ► §

they’re not more florid or less florid

00:31:15 ► §

than the descriptions of LSD that we get

00:31:18 ► §

from Aldous Huxley and Tim Leary in the early 1960s

00:31:21 ► §

I mean this stuff was taking them away

00:31:24 ► §

I don’t advise you to eat in the early 1960s. I mean, this stuff was taking them away.

00:31:30 ► §

I don’t advise you to eat hashish or charas for a very practical reason,

00:31:32 ► §

which is it’s collected off people’s hands.

00:31:36 ► §

And, you know, your immune system

00:31:39 ► §

is just electrified by the presence

00:31:43 ► §

of all of this material

00:31:46 ► §

that’s been rubbed off of your hands.

00:31:50 ► §

I suppose we could put it through an x-ray machine

00:31:52 ► §

and then we could eat it with impunity.

00:31:57 ► §

But we can’t sell short the spiritual power of cannabis,

00:32:02 ► §

especially when eaten.

00:32:04 ► §

Some of you may know this book, The Oracles and Demons of Tibet, by Rene Dnibiski-Vojkovic. Vojkovic studied shamanism, was not interested in Tibetan Buddhism, but was interested in the pre-Buddhist strata and in that book there are pictures of Pungpo shamans intoxicated on

00:32:27 ► §

hashish experiencing actually fits and near convulsions in an oracular trance in a village

00:32:37 ► §

near Mustang. So it is not a minor psychedelic substance at all, it’s a very powerful psychedelic

00:32:46 ► §

it is not a minor psychedelic substance at all. It’s a very powerful psychedelic substance,

00:32:55 ► §

especially when eaten and when concentrated and then eaten. Opium is an Asian plant, but I’m not going to the absence, the surprising absence of hallucinogens

00:33:11 ► §

in the old world tropics. By the old world tropics we mean the Indonesian tropics.

00:33:21 ► §

This is an area that I’m very well familiar with from having spent a lot of time

00:33:27 ► §

out there as a professional insect collector in my pre-botany days. And there just are

00:33:38 ► §

no major hallucinogenic plants in the Indonesian or Philippine or Southeast Asian tropics.

00:33:45 ► §

There are certain suspect plants, but none of them do we encounter a living cult

00:33:54 ► §

that would be a clue to this thing as a major item of human spiritual or cultural usage.

00:34:02 ► §

Yeah, Marty.

00:34:03 ► §

What are the magic mushrooms we hear about from Indonesia now

00:34:06 ► §

that are available there supposedly openly now in omelets?

00:34:10 ► §

When I was in Bali, this practice was absolutely unknown,

00:34:16 ► §

the famous omelets of Denpasar and Kuta Beach and all that.

00:34:21 ► §

And I think that until somebody argues differently,

00:34:24 ► §

the most reasonable

00:34:25 ► §

thing to assume is that coprophytic mushrooms, meaning dung-loving mushrooms, have just followed

00:34:34 ► §

cattle around and around the world in the warm tropics. Now, the mushroom that is most commonly offered tourists in Bali

00:34:45 ► §

is not Stropharia cubensis.

00:34:48 ► §

It’s a coplandia.

00:34:50 ► §

And it’s a weaker mushroom.

00:34:53 ► §

There are a number of these dung-loving mushrooms

00:34:55 ► §

that contain psilocybin,

00:34:57 ► §

but almost all of them also contain an emetic.

00:35:02 ► §

Usually, well, no, I don’t want to say that.

00:35:04 ► §

They just usually contain an emetic. It, well no, I don’t want to say that, they just usually contain an emetic,

00:35:07 ► §

means makes you throw up. The Hawaiian mushrooms that people rave about are actually, from the

00:35:14 ► §

point of view of someone who knows psilocybin mushrooms, a very inferior choice. If you go to

00:35:21 ► §

Thailand, if you go to Koh Samui in the islands of the south

00:35:25 ► §

you will be offered mushrooms

00:35:28 ► §

and I quickly understood

00:35:29 ► §

that there was to a certain degree

00:35:32 ► §

a shell game going on

00:35:34 ► §

and what it is is this

00:35:35 ► §

the people selling the mushrooms

00:35:40 ► §

have learned from the school of hard knocks

00:35:44 ► §

that it’s a bad idea to wire up naive Westerners

00:35:48 ► §

with massive amounts of hallucinogenic drugs

00:35:50 ► §

because then you get in trouble with the local constable and so forth.

00:35:54 ► §

So unless you are on it in southern Thailand,

00:35:59 ► §

what they will sell you are mushrooms that have grown

00:36:02 ► §

in the dung of water buffalo and right there in the next

00:36:10 ► §

field over there is the dung of cebu cattle and that has stropharia cubensis in it but they try

00:36:18 ► §

to steer you away from that because it’s so much stronger they just want people to get a buzz on.

00:36:28 ► §

So if you’re buying mushrooms in southern Thailand, try to go with the guy and collect them

00:36:32 ► §

and see where they’re coming from.

00:36:34 ► §

Now, there’s an easy test to tell

00:36:36 ► §

these Paniolus and Coplandia species from Stropharia.

00:36:43 ► §

They will do what is called auto digest some mushrooms do this

00:36:48 ► §

and some don’t that means if you pick the mushroom and lay it on the in the sun on a stone if you

00:36:55 ► §

come back in an hour or two and it’s turned to slime it was not stropharia cubensis. It was a Coplandia or a Paniolus.

00:37:05 ► §

They literally dissolve themselves at death,

00:37:11 ► §

and this is not a quality of Stropharia.

00:37:16 ► §

There’s been a lot of wondering about this thing,

00:37:21 ► §

about why are there no hallucinogenic plants in the old world tropics

00:37:26 ► §

when in the new world tropics, the Amazon basin,

00:37:30 ► §

it is the most concentrated ecosystem for hallucinogenic plants.

00:37:38 ► §

Well, the thinking is the tropics are the tropics.

00:37:42 ► §

Who can imagine a set of evolutionary factors that would favor

00:37:46 ► §

the evolution of many species of hallucinogens in one hemisphere but not in the other hemisphere?

00:37:53 ► §

It’s very hard to picture a mechanism, a Darwinian or neo-Darwinian mechanism that would give you that result. So different suggestions have been made.

00:38:07 ► §

One is that actually there are as many hallucinogens in Indonesia

00:38:14 ► §

as in South America,

00:38:15 ► §

but because the Dutch have been there for 450 years,

00:38:21 ► §

the level of indigenous culture,

00:38:24 ► §

the primitiveness, so-called, of indigenous

00:38:27 ► §

culture has been mucked with, and consequently the people have forgotten these things.

00:38:34 ► §

Well, that’s a good theory, but when a botanist, who is not an ethnographer, goes over the species lists and looks at the suspect families of plants,

00:38:48 ► §

you also don’t find hallucinogens.

00:38:51 ► §

You see, certain families of plants are highly suspect for hallucinogens.

00:38:57 ► §

For instance, the leguminosii.

00:39:01 ► §

This is the family of flowering trees with finely divided leaves. This is a typical leguminous tree, this locust-like thing here. And they occur all over the world as trees and bushes. It always has a very exotic chemistry, not hallucinogens per se,

00:39:25 ► §

but flavonoids, saponins, terpenes, susquiterpenes,

00:39:30 ► §

all kinds of exotic tertiary byproducts.

00:39:33 ► §

A mimosa is a typical example.

00:39:38 ► §

Another family that is always suspect that you look at first is the Rubyaceae.

00:39:46 ► §

We know this as the family that contains tea.

00:39:50 ► §

And, of course, caffeine is an alkaloid that is sequestered

00:39:54 ► §

in the bean of this plant in surprising concentrations.

00:39:58 ► §

But some of the Rubyaceae contain DMT and other psychoactive compounds.

00:40:07 ► §

Another family that is always one of the first ones you check out are the euphorbs, the euphorbiaceae.

00:40:15 ► §

These are the fleshy old world succulents that bleed latex when cut.

00:40:21 ► §

They often have extremely poisonous or sometimes psychedelic principles in them.

00:40:30 ► §

Okay, so much then for the old world. As you know, when there is ice at the poles, there

00:40:40 ► §

are land bridges between Siberia and Alaska, and this is the route that most anthropologists believe the major migrations into the New World took.

00:40:51 ► §

Well, now an interesting consequence of this northern migration route to the New World, people didn’t just set out on a trip from Manchuria to San Diego. This happened over centuries, millennia,

00:41:07 ► §

that people would move a few miles and then have children and die.

00:41:13 ► §

And so what it means is that cultures crossing into the New World

00:41:18 ► §

had to go through a cold neck, the neck of cold land,

00:41:23 ► §

a floristically extremely restricted environment represented by

00:41:29 ► §

the Arctic tundra. And we can imagine that this would have stripped away many traditions of plant

00:41:36 ► §

usage as they moved north out of the areas where these plants occurred. So, well, the role of cannabis is not clear,

00:41:46 ► §

but for instance, no opium was carried to the New World

00:41:50 ► §

by these ancient peoples.

00:41:53 ► §

And in fact, very few plants at all.

00:41:56 ► §

Cannabis is the one slightly puzzling exception.

00:41:59 ► §

It may be that cannabis was carried to the New World

00:42:03 ► §

by people crossing the Siberian land bridge.

00:42:07 ► §

Cannabis does grow in Alaska under special conditions in short growing seasons, and it’s

00:42:14 ► §

possible that this happened. The closeness between cannabis sativa, the Mexican marijuana plant, and by closeness I mean the botanical closeness to cannabis ruderales,

00:42:28 ► §

the weed hemp of Central Asia, indicates that probably these things were separated not too long ago. in Asia you see is that obviously even without the narcotic dimension to the cannabis plant

00:42:50 ► §

we can see that very early on there was pressure on it selective pressure by human beings to produce

00:42:58 ► §

good fiber stock so what you get in India is a division into fiber tribes and drug tribes in cannabis.

00:43:07 ► §

And the resin tribes are extremely selected, heavily selected for the production of resin.

00:43:16 ► §

And they are the source of the narcotic charas.

00:43:20 ► §

Amanita muscaria the hypothesized mushroom

00:43:25 ► §

soma in Wasson’s view

00:43:28 ► §

and for sure a hallucinogen of use

00:43:31 ► §

in Siberia among the Ostiaks

00:43:34 ► §

Koryaks, Kamchatka tribes and Yakuts

00:43:37 ► §

this whole group of people

00:43:40 ► §

and by a coincidence of

00:43:43 ► §

scholarship

00:43:44 ► §

you know, when scholars study a worldwide

00:43:51 ► §

phenomenon of any sort, they like to have a baseline area to compare everything else

00:44:00 ► §

to. This is why, for instance, the volcanoes of Hawaii are the volcanoes of this planet.

00:44:10 ► §

All other volcanoes are compared to them. They are the baseline volcanoes. And the Hawaiian

00:44:19 ► §

words for various lava types and this sort of thing have been adopted by volcanologists worldwide.

00:44:26 ► §

So all rough lava is called pahoehoe.

00:44:31 ► §

All smooth lava is called a’a.

00:44:35 ► §

All smooth lava is called pahoehoe

00:44:37 ► §

because these Hawaiian terms have been adapted.

00:44:40 ► §

Well, a similar thing went on in the study of shamanism.

00:44:47 ► §

Merciliad and other people were looking for what they felt was the pure, the original, the real shamanism, and they focused on

00:44:56 ► §

Siberia. Now we see, for reasons apparently quite arbitrary, like mainly that they had a lot of ethnographic data on Siberia.

00:45:06 ► §

There’s no reason to hold the Hopi medicine man,

00:45:12 ► §

the Amazonian Iowa scarrow,

00:45:14 ► §

and the Solomon Island kapu man

00:45:17 ► §

up to comparison to a Siberian standard.

00:45:20 ► §

But nevertheless, the literature preserves this.

00:45:24 ► §

And so then, the model or

00:45:26 ► §

paradigmatic intoxicant of the paradigmatic shaman was Amanita muscaria. There are a lot

00:45:34 ► §

of problems with this. Amanita muscaria is not a reliable intoxicant. It is subject to geographic variation, seasonal variation, genetic variation.

00:45:48 ► §

There are toxins present in it that are also subject to variation.

00:45:52 ► §

You can end up with an NDE rather than a hallucinogenic experience

00:45:58 ► §

if you just miss the mark slightly with this one.

00:46:02 ► §

Nevertheless, it is circumarctic in its distribution. It occurs

00:46:08 ► §

in Denmark, across the northern reaches of the Soviet Union, into Alaska, and into Canada.

00:46:16 ► §

And it’s generalized in that range. As you move south, it retreats to higher and higher altitudes, with certain exceptions.

00:46:26 ► §

For instance, in California, it can be found at sea level in some ecosystems.

00:46:32 ► §

Some of you may know Baker’s Beach.

00:46:35 ► §

That’s a beach that lies outside the Golden Gate Bridge in this very ritzy district of old mansions.

00:46:43 ► §

this very ritzy district of old mansions.

00:46:48 ► §

Well, go on a rainy January day down to Baker’s Beach,

00:46:54 ► §

and there are a lot of birch trees and these kind of trees planted in old sea sand.

00:47:00 ► §

And my God, this is an Amanita ecosystem that you will not believe. I have seen not only Amanita muscaria by the bushel and Amanita pantherina but rare

00:47:08 ► §

rare Amanitas the chocolate brown one porphyria rumored to contain beta carbolines and and rugosa

00:47:19 ► §

and the the deadly one varusa the one they call the destroying angel.

00:47:26 ► §

All of these amanitas can be seen

00:47:28 ► §

within a half mile walk

00:47:30 ► §

of each other, specimens the size

00:47:32 ► §

of dinner plates.

00:47:33 ► §

So what this means, you see,

00:47:36 ► §

is that people then

00:47:38 ► §

moving south through

00:47:40 ► §

British Columbia and on into

00:47:42 ► §

the Great Plains and western

00:47:44 ► §

coast of North America had been

00:47:46 ► §

shorn of their phyto-shamanic knowledge because they had just come through centuries and centuries

00:47:55 ► §

of migration through hallucinogen-poor environments. And to my mind, this explains the curious absence of major hallucinogens in North American Indian spirituality.

00:48:10 ► §

And North American Indian spirituality relies largely on ordeals, the Sundance ordeal, and this sort of thing. minor psychoactives such as a chorus calamus,

00:48:27 ► §

sweet flag root,

00:48:29 ► §

and there are,

00:48:31 ► §

but really,

00:48:34 ► §

North American Indian shamanism

00:48:36 ► §

is not a shamanism of hallucinogenic ecstasy.

00:48:40 ► §

The use of peyote,

00:48:42 ► §

which might be offered as the counterexample,

00:48:46 ► §

it’s astonishingly difficult to document the use of peyote

00:48:51 ► §

before just a few hundred years ago.

00:48:54 ► §

I mean, we like to think, you know,

00:48:56 ► §

that people have been taking peyote in the New World for millennia.

00:49:00 ► §

But in fact, it seems to be something that came up out of Mexico, where the Tarahumara may have had it in a very localized culture complex.

00:49:12 ► §

But with the Indians in the western United States getting the shit kicked out of them by the U.S. Army, there was pressure for revitalization. And any of you who are anthropologists understand how this works.

00:49:26 ► §

You put pressure on a people,

00:49:28 ► §

they will launch revitalization movements.

00:49:31 ► §

The ghost dance religion of the Sioux

00:49:34 ► §

and Algonquin and Plains people

00:49:37 ► §

was largely a revitalization movement

00:49:40 ► §

based on peyote.

00:49:42 ► §

What appears to have been going on in the temperate Mesoamerican

00:49:47 ► §

zone anciently was the use of Sephora secundifolia. And Sephora secundifolia is a highly poisonous

00:50:00 ► §

plant. It is what anthropologists call an ordeal poison, not a hallucinogen. Now, ordeal poisons are a rougher way to end up at the same place. The place on earth for unknown reasons, or reasons not known to me anyway, where ordeal poisons have been perfected,

00:50:27 ► §

is on the island of Madagascar,

00:50:30 ► §

mentioned earlier in this lecture as one of those sites

00:50:33 ► §

where land has been above water longer than anywhere else on earth.

00:50:37 ► §

And on the island of Madagascar, the Malagasy Republic,

00:50:42 ► §

tribal people have located a number of plants that are extremely temporary

00:50:49 ► §

poisoners, so that you think you’re going to die. You beg for death, and you don’t die, you recover fully in 16, 10, 12 to 16 hours.

00:51:06 ► §

But it is so agonizing and you so completely wish for death in this experience

00:51:13 ► §

that when you finally realize that you’re going to live through it,

00:51:17 ► §

you have the equivalent of a psychedelic experience.

00:51:21 ► §

I mean, tears of joy well up, you embrace the earth, you give thanks to God and you come clean.

00:51:30 ► §

But this is a tougher way to do it than most of us might prefer.

00:51:35 ► §

Sometimes you have psychedelic trips like that where the fact that it is over is such cause for rejoicing that you hardly know who to thank.

00:51:42 ► §

is such cause for rejoicing that you hardly know who to thank

00:51:45 ► §

and apparently

00:51:49 ► §

North American Indian shamanism

00:51:54 ► §

tended in this direction

00:51:55 ► §

and only peyote arriving late mitigated that

00:52:00 ► §

and peyote still partakes of this

00:52:02 ► §

to some degree

00:52:04 ► §

I mean it is a minor ordeal especially if you eat enough peyote still partakes of this to some degree. I mean, it is a minor ordeal,

00:52:06 ► §

especially if you eat enough peyote

00:52:08 ► §

to trigger truly intense hallucinations.

00:52:11 ► §

What I’ve found sitting in peyote circles

00:52:14 ► §

is most people only take enough

00:52:16 ► §

to be able to sit in the circle without nodding out.

00:52:20 ► §

And at low doses, of course,

00:52:22 ► §

mescaline and amphetamine will wire you up.

00:52:26 ► §

But it takes a lot to put you into Don Juan country.

00:52:31 ► §

And it is not an indole.

00:52:33 ► §

It is a psychoactive amphetamine more closely related to the synthetic psychoactive amphetamines such as MDA and MDMA.

00:52:41 ► §

MDA and MDMA. But now we’re on the brink of moving down into Mesoamerica,

00:52:49 ► §

onto the Mexican Peninsula,

00:52:52 ► §

and we are approaching this puzzling concentration of psychoactive plants.

00:53:02 ► §

It begins, basically you could start your border

00:53:05 ► §

at the Rio Grande

00:53:06 ► §

and it goes south to Argentina

00:53:09 ► §

and in that zone

00:53:11 ► §

there is a tremendous

00:53:13 ► §

richness of psychoactive

00:53:15 ► §

plants of all types

00:53:17 ► §

in many plant families

00:53:18 ► §

I’ve mentioned peyote

00:53:21 ► §

I’ve mentioned datura

00:53:23 ► §

in another context

00:53:24 ► §

datura cults are very big and detour has to be viewed as an ordeal poison. It is a hallucinogen but it’s also a kind of deliriant and a kind of frenzy inducing thing. It’s very hard to take much out of it. You have intense experiences,

00:53:46 ► §

but the perceiving mind has been somehow interfered with.

00:53:51 ► §

Nevertheless, in Southern California,

00:53:53 ► §

Catalina Island, San Diego County,

00:53:56 ► §

in ancient times there was what was called the Tolaque religion

00:54:00 ► §

of the Luiseno people

00:54:02 ► §

and people speaking that language group.

00:54:06 ► §

And this was an adolescent initiation for males

00:54:09 ► §

that involved being taken into the desert

00:54:13 ► §

and given large amounts of detour over days.

00:54:17 ► §

This would be a completely boundary-dissolving,

00:54:21 ► §

consciousness-altering experience.

00:54:23 ► §

As we go deeper into Mexico

00:54:25 ► §

and leave the deserts behind

00:54:30 ► §

and begin to approach the mountain range

00:54:33 ► §

of the Sierra Mazateca and the central Mexican highland,

00:54:38 ► §

we come upon what, in some ways, to me,

00:54:42 ► §

is one of the most interesting hallucinogen and shamanic hallucinogen complexes,

00:54:49 ► §

which is, of course, the central Mexican mushroom complex discovered by Gordon and Valentina Wasson in the early 50s.

00:54:59 ► §

Now, these are not mushrooms that grow in the dung of cows or any other animal.

00:55:05 ► §

These are what mycologists call ephemeral, meaning small and diminutive and briefly present as fruiting bodies.

00:55:16 ► §

Ephemeral mushrooms that actually live in very restricted ecosystems. One of them lives in the waste from sugar cane, so

00:55:29 ► §

it can only grow in matted vegetable material. Some of them grow, the one called derumbes,

00:55:36 ► §

the earthquake mushroom, grows only in disturbed land where there’s like erosion or shifting.

00:55:48 ► §

land where there’s like erosion or shifting. And clearly all of these mushrooms must have speciated from a common ancestor. There are about, well it changes all the time, but there

00:55:53 ► §

are about 12 varieties. All have been utilized. Now interestingly enough, in terms of fungal speciation, the center of fungal speciation in North America is around Grants Pass, Oregon.

00:56:11 ► §

There are more mushroom species within 100 miles of Grants Pass, Oregon than almost anywhere on Earth.

00:56:18 ► §

And there are psilocybin-containing diminutive mushrooms, not coprophytic.

00:56:26 ► §

But nobody but the most inspired anthropologists

00:56:33 ► §

have ever been able to find any evidence

00:56:36 ► §

for use of these hallucinogenic psilocybin-containing mushrooms

00:56:40 ► §

in the Kwakutl, Shimsham, Tlingit complex of peoples. They knew about, well, no, we don’t

00:56:47 ► §

know that they knew about this. One would assume, because we give Indians a lot of credit, that they

00:56:54 ► §

knew a lot about their environment. And, of course, we have the evidence of their peculiar artistic

00:57:01 ► §

style, which is x-ray vision. These are the people who show you the insides

00:57:06 ► §

of things as well as the outsides. But in terms of usage or a claim of usage, it’s never been

00:57:14 ► §

substantiated. And this brings up an interesting point because the plants I’m talking to you about

00:57:20 ► §

today are plants with a history of shamanic usage but there are hallucinogenic plants

00:57:26 ► §

without a history of shamanic usage

00:57:29 ► §

plants that looked at pharmacologically

00:57:33 ► §

look like ideal candidates

00:57:37 ► §

why weren’t they used

00:57:39 ► §

a good example would be

00:57:41 ► §

in the convolvulaceae, the morning glory family, there is a group Argyria, 13 species of Argyria.

00:57:57 ► §

They occur naturally from northern India to the Solomon Islands. They are woody morning glories.

00:58:06 ► §

The one that you may know is the Hawaiian baby wood rose.

00:58:10 ► §

Well, now, the Hawaiian baby wood rose

00:58:13 ► §

is a very powerful hallucinogen, weight for weight.

00:58:19 ► §

I mean, it only takes eight seeds of this thing

00:58:22 ► §

to propel you into a fairly profound visionary state.

00:58:28 ► §

There are some cardioactive glycosides present,

00:58:34 ► §

but as we see, these ordeal poisons, that doesn’t turn people off in other situations.

00:58:41 ► §

Argyria is unknown to have a folk usage, and yet, you know, looking at the flora of earth, this is one of the first things you would think that people might have looked at. Certainly, hippies in the 1960s and people since have made very good use of argyria as a visionary vehicle.

00:59:06 ► §

a visionary vehicle. Rupert and I, Rupert Sheldrake and I have talked a lot about this,

00:59:12 ► §

about the morphogenetic field of a shamanic plant without a history of shamanic usage and how different that would be, say, to take Argyria nervosa and contrast it with

00:59:22 ► §

Strophara cubensis or something like that

00:59:25 ► §

that has a tremendous input

00:59:27 ► §

from past shamanic usage.

00:59:30 ► §

Well, here’s one that has none.

00:59:34 ► §

Do you experience this

00:59:36 ► §

very considerably along the line?

00:59:39 ► §

With Argyrian…

00:59:40 ► §

Yeah, yeah.

00:59:41 ► §

Has that been worn out

00:59:43 ► §

by the Syriac?

00:59:44 ► §

I don’t… I think it hasriac? I don’t really know.

00:59:47 ► §

We don’t have enough data on Argyria.

00:59:49 ► §

Nobody has done the Hawaiian Woodrow’s book

00:59:53 ► §

to give us 30 or 40 accounts so we can see.

00:59:58 ► §

When I took it, I had quite anomalous experience.

01:00:04 ► §

It was a standard psychedelic experience,

01:00:07 ► §

but the visionary episode was entirely,

01:00:14 ► §

and this was in a room in Berkeley,

01:00:16 ► §

no pre, you know, no suggestion.

01:00:22 ► §

And what the contents of the hallucinations

01:00:25 ► §

were is they were entirely

01:00:27 ► §

based on the motif

01:00:29 ► §

of the sea urchin

01:00:30 ► §

and I was in

01:00:33 ► §

huge dome rooms

01:00:35 ► §

that were pale purple

01:00:36 ► §

with these star like

01:00:38 ► §

things and these tit like

01:00:41 ► §

protuberances on everything

01:00:42 ► §

and then this

01:00:44 ► §

more floor and then this moor floor,

01:00:46 ► §

and then what looked to me like it was the pumpkin carriage from Cinderella,

01:00:52 ► §

but it wasn’t a pumpkin.

01:00:53 ► §

It was a sea urchin vehicle of some sort

01:00:58 ► §

that was being drawn by these bizarre-looking creatures.

01:01:03 ► §

They were like a cross between camels and giraffes

01:01:09 ► §

and they too were pale violet

01:01:11 ► §

and had these tit-like protuberances

01:01:14 ► §

all over their body.

01:01:16 ► §

The little knobs, you know, on the sea.

01:01:18 ► §

I don’t know.

01:01:20 ► §

Nobody had ever said to me

01:01:21 ► §

that Hawaiian wood rose had anything to do

01:01:23 ► §

with the sea urchin motif,

01:01:25 ► §

but it was pretty inescapable.

01:01:28 ► §

I would have done more with that, but I didn’t like this cardioactive glycoside thing.

01:01:39 ► §

In practical terms, what it meant was in the first wave,

01:01:43 ► §

you just had to sit down and tell yourself

01:01:45 ► §

that if you were having a heart attack,

01:01:48 ► §

you better get ready

01:01:49 ► §

because there was nothing you could do about it.

01:01:50 ► §

And it certainly was convincing.

01:01:53 ► §

I don’t know.

01:01:53 ► §

Maybe there are some medical people in the audience.

01:01:56 ► §

It’s always good to have a doctor around

01:01:58 ► §

because they’re so hard to alarm, you know.

01:02:03 ► §

I mean, I’ll be ready to bury somebody

01:02:05 ► §

and they will say, no.

01:02:08 ► §

They’ll snap out of it in an hour or two.

01:02:11 ► §

This person is absolutely rigid and unconscious

01:02:14 ► §

and you’re supposed to be calm about it

01:02:16 ► §

because their pulse tells you it’s all right.

01:02:20 ► §

Well, anyway, to say more about Mexico,

01:02:24 ► §

the coincidence with this Sierra Mazatecan cultural area where all these mushrooms are being utilized, there is an overlapping and completely unrelated complex also of great age and richness. And this is the hallucinogenic morning glory group, not the Argyrias that I’ve

01:02:48 ► §

just been talking about, but morning glories in two other families, in the family Ipomoia and in

01:02:56 ► §

the family Turbina. The Ipomoia is the one you might be most familiar with. This is the heavenly blue morning glory that is the ornamental morning glory, an annual,

01:03:10 ► §

and you can buy seeds in any decent seed store of this.

01:03:15 ► §

It’s been hybridized into three varietals,

01:03:19 ► §

and it’s amusing that they chose to name the original varietal, which was pure, pure blue.

01:03:26 ► §

I mean, it is a magical plant.

01:03:29 ► §

You don’t even have to take it.

01:03:30 ► §

I mean, just to look at this thing.

01:03:32 ► §

And some of you may know George O’Keefe’s paintings of these flowers.

01:03:39 ► §

It’s a pure, pure sky blue.

01:03:42 ► §

That one is called Heavenly Blue.

01:03:42 ► §

It’s a pure, pure sky blue.

01:03:44 ► §

That one is called heavenly blue.

01:03:48 ► §

Then it was hybridized into a blue and white one,

01:03:51 ► §

which is called flying saucer.

01:03:55 ► §

And then it was further hybridized into a pearly white,

01:03:58 ► §

which is called pearly gates.

01:04:02 ► §

So heavenly blue, pearly gates, and flying saucer. And this a a wonderful uh hallucinogen it has everything going

01:04:09 ► §

for it you can grow up a bunch of them in a summer a long summer and the plant really responds to

01:04:16 ► §

care and water i’ve grown them in a single summer 40 feet up a double garage wall and just filled it.

01:04:26 ► §

And then you let them make seed

01:04:28 ► §

and you cut down the mass of dried foliage

01:04:32 ► §

and seed capsules

01:04:34 ► §

and pound it over a sheet or a piece of plastic

01:04:37 ► §

and you can gather a thing like this

01:04:41 ► §

full of seed.

01:04:43 ► §

Well, it takes about 200 seeds

01:04:45 ► §

to provide an unambiguous psychedelic experience.

01:04:50 ► §

And one of the, you know,

01:04:53 ► §

you talk about morphogenetic fields,

01:04:55 ► §

one of the really fascinating things

01:04:57 ► §

about the Mexican morning glory seeds

01:05:00 ► §

is the number of people who report Toltec

01:05:04 ► §

and Mayan and Aztec imagery.

01:05:08 ► §

And I have experienced this myself.

01:05:10 ► §

It’s absolutely uncanny.

01:05:12 ► §

I mean, it’s like being at Teotihuacan,

01:05:16 ► §

at the height of that civilization,

01:05:20 ► §

and the motif of the feathered serpent,

01:05:22 ► §

and all of this stuff is there.

01:05:26 ► §

Now, I don’t know whether this is suggestion.

01:05:29 ► §

I mean, other plants, I mean, when I took iboga, I didn’t think that I was in Africa.

01:05:34 ► §

I didn’t see the motifs of the fang.

01:05:38 ► §

I don’t know. This is an interesting area.

01:05:40 ► §

I don’t know how you do research in it.

01:05:42 ► §

It’s not empirical, but it is an interesting area.

01:05:45 ► §

Why do the plants seem to have their own message?

01:05:49 ► §

The other Mexican morning glory is Turbina coriambosa, formerly Revea coriambosa.

01:05:57 ► §

And it is not an annual.

01:05:59 ► §

It’s a perennial.

01:06:01 ► §

It’s a little bush with small white morning glory-like flowers on it.

01:06:07 ► §

And it is quite powerful.

01:06:10 ► §

With the Ipomoea, you have to take 200 to 300 seeds.

01:06:14 ► §

With the Turbina, the ordinary dose is 13 seeds.

01:06:19 ► §

And 13 seeds would barely cover the bottom of a teaspoon.

01:06:23 ► §

So, you know, it’s interesting that in the convolvulaceae,

01:06:27 ► §

the concentration of the alkaloid is really quite

01:06:32 ► §

intense. And

01:06:35 ► §

turbina, both of these morning glories contain the

01:06:39 ► §

active constituents are LSD-like

01:06:43 ► §

compounds. Now LSD, LSD-25, the classic LSD that we all know,

01:06:51 ► §

is active in the nanogram range. In other words, 200 gamma of LSD is considered a good dose.

01:07:01 ► §

is considered a good dose.

01:07:03 ► §

These naturally occurring ergonamine and LSD-like compounds

01:07:07 ► §

have a more ordinary dose spectrum.

01:07:11 ► §

They are active in the range,

01:07:13 ► §

even purified,

01:07:14 ► §

of 10 to 30 milligrams.

01:07:17 ► §

This is more typical of a drug.

01:07:19 ► §

The activity of LSD

01:07:21 ► §

is still a pharmacological miracle.

01:07:25 ► §

I mean, you understand, do you not,

01:07:28 ► §

that one gamma is one millionth of a gram

01:07:32 ► §

and that one milligram is one one-thousandth of a gram.

01:07:39 ► §

A milligram, it takes a thousand gamma to make one milligram

01:07:45 ► §

so LSD is active in an unearthly

01:07:49 ► §

intensity, this is why

01:07:51 ► §

a guy could make six million hits in his garage

01:07:55 ► §

because the physical mass of it

01:07:58 ► §

the physical amount necessary for one human dose

01:08:01 ► §

is literally microscopic

01:08:04 ► §

so for one human dose is literally microscopic.

01:08:11 ► §

So perhaps the floristic coincidence of the two morning glories

01:08:13 ► §

and the many mushroom species

01:08:15 ► §

and then several minor psychedelics,

01:08:18 ► §

which I’m not going to talk about today,

01:08:20 ► §

in this Sierra Mazatecan situation

01:08:22 ► §

set the stage for the evolution

01:08:25 ► §

of such an intensely hallucinogenic

01:08:28 ► §

style of shamanism.

01:08:33 ► §

And of course those people then

01:08:35 ► §

and anthropologists differ

01:08:37 ► §

as to whether people entered South America

01:08:39 ► §

by going through the Caribbean islands

01:08:43 ► §

from the Yucatan

01:08:44 ► §

and entered in the Suriname area,

01:08:48 ► §

or whether people came down through the land bridge and across Panama and entered through Colombia.

01:08:54 ► §

Current thinking is that they came through the Caribbean islands, that this was an easier route. Now down through those Caribbean islands what we find is DMT cults using the seeds of

01:09:11 ► §

leguminous trees. In fact the major source of the snuffs of the Caribbean is a tree that

01:09:21 ► §

if you’re not a botanist, you couldn’t tell it from this.

01:09:27 ► §

The tree is called Anadenanthera paragrena,

01:09:31 ► §

and it looks like this in all particulars except the placement of the inflorescences

01:09:34 ► §

is just a little bit different.

01:09:37 ► §

It’s a matter of detail.

01:09:41 ► §

In the deserts of northern Chile,

01:09:44 ► §

in the Atacama Desert,

01:09:48 ► §

they actually have found 4,500-year-old samples of DMT-containing snuffs.

01:09:56 ► §

If any of you are interested in this, the anthropologist Manuel Torres and his wife

01:10:01 ► §

have made this their life’s work and have published on this, among others,

01:10:08 ► §

a wonderful book showing the snuff trays of these Atacama people. And they’re beautiful,

01:10:17 ► §

carved in wood, inlaid with shell and bone. They were the major high art that these people produced.

01:10:30 ► §

Well, whether people entered South America through the Caribbean or in through Colombia,

01:10:41 ► §

it’s very clear that the experiences in Mexico gave them a complete shamanic armamentarium of hallucinogenic substances. In the Amazon, what they encountered was the most floristically complex environment

01:10:49 ► §

on the planet. Thinking is that human beings arrived there somewhere between 20 and 30,000

01:10:56 ► §

years ago, depending on the faction in anthropology that you align yourself with. What they found there that they had not known before

01:11:09 ► §

was Banisteriopsis capi,

01:11:13 ► §

this Malfagaceous woody vine

01:11:17 ► §

that can attain up to 200 meters in length,

01:11:22 ► §

which is approaching 600 feet

01:11:25 ► §

I’ve seen specimens of this

01:11:28 ► §

thing as thick as

01:11:30 ► §

my thigh where it came out

01:11:32 ► §

of the ground and

01:11:33 ► §

clearly a tree the size of this

01:11:36 ► §

one completely

01:11:37 ► §

shrouded and hung with it

01:11:39 ► §

so that in estimating

01:11:42 ► §

how much biomass you were looking at

01:11:44 ► §

you would have to estimate it in metric tons of material.

01:11:51 ► §

And what these people discovered about ayahuasca,

01:11:54 ► §

about Banisteriopsis copy,

01:11:57 ► §

was that it was marginally psychoactive by itself.

01:12:02 ► §

It was, you know, an MAO inhibitor, but not an overt hallucinogen,

01:12:09 ► §

but that they could combine it with plants containing DMT and they would become activated.

01:12:16 ► §

Now, it’s interesting that this happened at the, that this technological breakthrough

01:12:23 ► §

involved in the combining of one plant with another to create an effective drug

01:12:29 ► §

happens at the end of this long process of cultural peregrinations and migrations.

01:12:37 ► §

In other words, up until that time, so far as we know, there were not drugs.

01:12:42 ► §

There were plants which get you high a drug is where is a combinatory

01:12:49 ► §

thing where the phenomenon that pharmacologists call synergy the causing of one thing to become

01:12:57 ► §

more active by being in the presence of another thing is being utilized and this must have been developed rather late

01:13:06 ► §

in the search for avenues to psychoactivity

01:13:09 ► §

in the Amazon

01:13:10 ► §

what’s going on there is that

01:13:14 ► §

DMT containing plants

01:13:16 ► §

either Socotria viridis

01:13:20 ► §

in the Rubiaceae

01:13:22 ► §

or Diplateris cabrarina in the Malfagaceae in Colombia

01:13:30 ► §

are being added into these banisteriopsis brews and are significantly changing the experience.

01:13:37 ► §

Now, above and beyond that, a very complex folk pharmacology has been put in place down there using what are

01:13:48 ► §

called tertiary admixtures. In other words, if Banisteriopsis is the primary ingredient,

01:13:54 ► §

if Socotria viridis is the secondary ingredient, then there are also tertiary admixtures.

01:14:01 ► §

And this is a very rich area for anthropological research because these tertiary admixtures are often highly localized, also very secret.

01:14:14 ► §

This is the personal part of a shaman’s repertoire, is his admixture plants and if you can get these people

01:14:26 ► §

to open up to you and share

01:14:28 ► §

the identity of these

01:14:30 ► §

admixture plants

01:14:31 ► §

almost invariably when you get them

01:14:34 ► §

back into the laboratory

01:14:36 ► §

and perform tests on them

01:14:38 ► §

with dragondorf’s reagent

01:14:40 ► §

and this kind of thing they are alkaloid

01:14:42 ► §

positive they are chemically

01:14:44 ► §

complex in other words these people this is not a bunch of shuck and agent and this kind of thing, they are alkaloid positive. They are chemically complex. In other

01:14:46 ► §

words, these people, this is not a bunch of shuck and jive. These people have an extreme sensitivity

01:14:51 ► §

to the presence of exotic chemicals in the environment and they know how to track them down.

01:14:58 ► §

And so it’s been very fruitful in our work to spend a lot of time on the tertiary admixtures,

01:15:06 ► §

and a lot of what we’re doing in Hawaii.

01:15:09 ► §

These are the things which are in danger of being lost.

01:15:12 ► §

Ayahuasca, millions of people take ayahuasca in the Amazon.

01:15:17 ► §

I venture to guess that it is the largest psychedelic religion on earth at this time.

01:15:24 ► §

Over a vast area this is going on.

01:15:27 ► §

But knowledge of these tertiary admixtures is fading fast

01:15:31 ► §

and so is the availability of some of the plants.

01:15:35 ► §

If some of you are interested in this,

01:15:38 ► §

write to my brother at the Stanford Department of Neurology.

01:15:42 ► §

He published two review papers

01:15:45 ► §

on admixtures to ayahuasca

01:15:47 ► §

in which the species names are given,

01:15:50 ► §

the taxonomic families,

01:15:52 ► §

and the identifiable chemical exotics

01:15:55 ► §

are tabled there.

01:15:56 ► §

And you can then see

01:15:58 ► §

what a rich selection

01:16:04 ► §

of psychoactive substances these people have to draw from.

01:16:08 ► §

And they claim, you know, that they say ayahuasca is not one thing.

01:16:13 ► §

Ayahuasca is many, many things because we change it.

01:16:17 ► §

We change it for the circumstance.

01:16:20 ► §

We change it for the personality.

01:16:22 ► §

We change it for the problem.

01:16:24 ► §

And I’ve come to think that this is quite true,

01:16:28 ► §

that there is an entire medical system there.

01:16:33 ► §

And so that’s what, at Botanical Dimensions,

01:16:37 ► §

though we preserve all kinds of plants

01:16:39 ► §

and have collectors in Thailand and West Africa and hither and yon,

01:16:44 ► §

we’ve really put our attention on this one medical system

01:16:48 ► §

because the evidence for its importance is the amazing balance, decency, dignity, and integrity of these people.

01:17:02 ► §

And, you know, I am a cynic from a

01:17:06 ► §

cynic’s point of view I do not

01:17:08 ► §

wax

01:17:09 ► §

eloquent over the

01:17:12 ► §

noble savage and some of you

01:17:14 ► §

have read my descriptions of my

01:17:16 ► §

life among the Witoto

01:17:17 ► §

and I found them

01:17:19 ► §

hard to put up with in some

01:17:22 ► §

cases

01:17:23 ► §

it’s not simply that if people are naked they’re beautiful. I mean

01:17:28 ► §

some naked people can be a real pain in the neck but this ayahuasca complex is an ennobling

01:17:35 ► §

folk way. These people have great heart and great sensitivity.

01:17:45 ► §

I mean, they could get along fine at Esalen,

01:17:47 ► §

these Iowa scaros.

01:17:49 ► §

They are aware.

01:17:50 ► §

You go into a village where this is happening

01:17:52 ► §

and the women may cluster around you,

01:17:56 ► §

giggling because you’re so funny looking,

01:17:59 ► §

all beet red and mosquito bitten

01:18:02 ► §

and tons of stuff on your back.

01:18:04 ► §

The shaman sees exactly who you are. all beet red and mosquito bitten and tons of stuff on your back.

01:18:09 ► §

The shaman sees exactly who you are.

01:18:13 ► §

He is not culture bound in the same way.

01:18:16 ► §

And in a way, this is a definition of shamanism.

01:18:24 ► §

Shamanism is a person who by some means has gotten themselves out of their own culture. So they can look back at it and manipulate its symbols,

01:18:28 ► §

its beliefs, its expectations, its rituals to an end.

01:18:34 ► §

And of course, if it’s a negative end,

01:18:36 ► §

then you have magic, brujeria, sorcery, witchcraft.

01:18:41 ► §

But if it’s an end which serves and maximizes reasonable social goals,

01:18:46 ► §

then you have true shamanism. In addition to the ayahuasca complex, about which I know a great

01:18:55 ► §

deal because I’ve concentrated on it, also in the Amazon, there is a sub-complex of the detour phenomenon.

01:19:08 ► §

Throughout the world, the detourers are bushes.

01:19:12 ► §

But as some of you may know, there are ornamental tree detourers

01:19:17 ► §

that are a favorite with landscapists

01:19:20 ► §

because they have these beautiful hanging flowers that shed scent in the evening.

01:19:26 ► §

Well, all tree detourers originated in Peru and southern Colombia

01:19:32 ► §

in the subfamily of the detourers called Brugmansia.

01:19:36 ► §

These are the arborescent detourers,

01:19:39 ► §

and they have an exotic chemistry even in comparison to the bush detours.

01:19:52 ► §

These are tropanes, hyalcyamine, L-hyalcyamine, scopolamine,

01:19:55 ► §

and these are not true psychedelics.

01:19:58 ► §

You may recognize the term scopolamine.

01:20:05 ► §

This was the truth serum of Nazis in interrogation situations.

01:20:09 ► §

And it really isn’t a truth serum.

01:20:12 ► §

It just causes you to dissolve your boundaries so thoroughly that you babble incessantly.

01:20:15 ► §

And if someone’s willing to listen

01:20:16 ► §

and they know what they’re listening for,

01:20:19 ► §

you might spill the beans.

01:20:21 ► §

But it isn’t that you suddenly have a compulsion to tell the truth if only such a thing

01:20:27 ► §

were possible who would need psychedelics if there were a truth serum the other complex that

01:20:35 ► §

has been quite highly evolved in the amazon probably brought in by the arawakan-speaking peoples who swept through the Caribbean

01:20:45 ► §

is the snuffing complex.

01:20:48 ► §

In the far east of the South American continent,

01:20:53 ► §

the snuffing complex concentrates on leguminous trees,

01:20:58 ► §

their seeds, Anadenanthra paragrena, Anadenanthra macrocarpa.

01:21:03 ► §

Anadenanthra paragrina, Anadenanthra macrocarpa.

01:21:10 ► §

Then those trees tend to, they’re not trees of the deep climaxed rainforest.

01:21:15 ► §

They’re trees more of the coastal and semi-arid regions. So as you go into the true climaxed lowland rainforest,

01:21:20 ► §

these snuff-using people had to find substitutes.

01:21:24 ► §

the snuff-using people had to find substitutes.

01:21:30 ► §

And they very cleverly found a very excellent substitute in the form of a family of Myristicaceous trees.

01:21:36 ► §

The Myristicaceae is a family that includes nutmeg.

01:21:40 ► §

Myristicaceous trees of the genus Varrola.

01:21:44 ► §

And they discovered that if you remove the bark of these trees before sunrise,

01:21:50 ► §

when the sap is still in them,

01:21:53 ► §

you can strip off these long, narrow pieces of bark,

01:21:56 ► §

and when you lay them on a low fire or a bed of coals,

01:22:02 ► §

the exudate, the sap, will rise up out of the inner cambium of the bark

01:22:09 ► §

and bead up on the interior surface as what looks like blood.

01:22:15 ► §

This is the resin of Varrola.

01:22:18 ► §

And this is a broad-spectrum source of psychoactive tryptamines.

01:22:23 ► §

DMT occurs in it. 5-methoxyamines DMT occurs in it 5-methoxy DMT occurs in it other

01:22:29 ► §

psychoactive and cardioactive and inactive tryptamines occur in it and it varies from

01:22:37 ► §

species to species and these varroa trees are outrageously difficult to identify.

01:22:45 ► §

Even a taxonomist who has made this group his special field of study

01:22:51 ► §

requires a handheld 50-power lens to make a species determination

01:22:58 ► §

because the species are determined by these little hairs

01:23:03 ► §

on the underside of the leaf called trichomes.

01:23:07 ► §

They’re little hairs which come up and then split in three ways.

01:23:12 ► §

And by the angle on the dangle, you determine which Varroa species you have in hand.

01:23:19 ► §

It was very interesting.

01:23:27 ► §

Very interesting, in 1980, my brother and I and a botanist from UBC and a fellow from Harvard all went down to the Rio Ampeyacu Yagos Yasu drainage, which is just over into Peru from Colombia,

01:23:36 ► §

specifically to study this Varrola complex because we felt that it was in real danger of being lost in a hurry,

01:23:47 ► §

that this was the fragile one.

01:23:50 ► §

Some of you may know about the huayca or the yanomamo or yanomami.

01:23:56 ► §

These are peoples who use these varrola snuffs,

01:24:02 ► §

and the way you do it is you pack a tube

01:24:05 ► §

a hollow tube with the ground up

01:24:08 ► §

seed dust or the

01:24:09 ► §

in the case of the varroa is the ground up

01:24:12 ► §

resin

01:24:12 ► §

and someone blows it into your

01:24:16 ► §

nostril with the full force

01:24:18 ► §

of their breath and it’s like

01:24:20 ► §

being hit in the side of the head

01:24:21 ► §

by a log I mean you

01:24:23 ► §

scream you fall over backwards, you salivate,

01:24:28 ► §

and by the time you’ve gotten back up on your haunches

01:24:31 ► §

and cleared the mucus out of your system,

01:24:35 ► §

the tube has been reloaded, and they do your other nostril then.

01:24:41 ► §

And then you have an unambiguous intoxication, but it doesn’t come anywhere near to being a dmt

01:24:48 ► §

flash uh the this approach to the to the grail of the psychedelic experience is difficult with

01:24:59 ► §

botanical materials you have to take a lot and you have to have the correct phyto pharmacological strategy

01:25:07 ► §

before you ever begin to my in my opinion you can’t approach the real center of the psychedelic

01:25:17 ► §

experience uh with psychobotanicals unless you’re doing a fair bit of psilocybin or a fair bit of ayahuasca committed

01:25:27 ► §

dose otherwise you’ll just slice low um now let’s see did i leave anything out here

01:25:35 ► §

well i left out ergot i’ll say a little bit about it ergot is not used as a psychedelic anywhere in the modern world.

01:25:47 ► §

Nevertheless, ergot is the source of LSD and it is grown in Pakistan, not only of LSD. The reason

01:25:54 ► §

it’s grown in Pakistan is that ergonamine tartrate, which can be made into LSD, has for many years,

01:26:03 ► §

and perhaps still is, there are now competitors, but for

01:26:07 ► §

many years was the preferred drug for migraine. And as a migraineur, I took a lot of it years

01:26:15 ► §

ago. Migraine is a condition that is not well understood, but operationally what it is is a sudden uncontrolled vasodilation

01:26:28 ► §

that allows too much blood pressure on the head and intense head pain.

01:26:33 ► §

Well, ergonamine tartrate is a vasoconstrictor and just will squeeze your veins down to very small,

01:26:43 ► §

and this is wonderful for migraine. You may have heard

01:26:46 ► §

horror stories in the 1960s about people who took too much LSD and developed gangrene in their

01:26:55 ► §

fingers and toes. This is possible. This is true. It’s the vasoconstricting aspect of LSD. It’s not related to its psychological effects.

01:27:08 ► §

It is physically a strong vasoconstrictor.

01:27:14 ► §

Ergot may have had a history of usage as a hallucinogen

01:27:18 ► §

because Gordon Wass and Carl Rook and Albert Hoffman

01:27:22 ► §

argued fairly persuasively that ergotized beer lay behind the Eleusinian mysteries.

01:27:48 ► §

great initiatory celebration was held in honor of Persephone’s return from the kingdom of the underworld and the restoration to her mother and it was clearly a rite of hallucinogenic

01:27:56 ► §

use of some sort and Wasson Rock Hoffman argued that it was ergotized beer. I question this because I think that there would have been more problems at Eleusis

01:28:11 ► §

if it had been ergotized beer.

01:28:13 ► §

Ergot is something not to mess around with.

01:28:16 ► §

I mean, you could kill yourself in a big hurry with this stuff.

01:28:20 ► §

And the notion that year after year year beer could be brewed reliably

01:28:26 ► §

that would intoxicate several thousand people at these ceremonies,

01:28:31 ► §

and there would not be any bad public relations about death or tremoring or convulsions,

01:28:39 ► §

causes me to wonder.

01:28:41 ► §

The proof of the pudding for the Wasson-Ruck theory would have been go

01:28:47 ► §

to the Eleusinian plain, gather ergot from the wild rye, and brew ergotized beer. I mean,

01:28:55 ► §

why not carry these experiments out? If we’re confident in our theory, the proof of the

01:29:00 ► §

pudding would be to do that. I wouldn’t touch ergotized beer.

01:29:06 ► §

I’d want to see a liquid gas chromatogram

01:29:09 ► §

and an infrared mass spectrophotometry data

01:29:13 ► §

before I knocked back a pint of ergotized beer.

01:29:20 ► §

A small voice in opposition to this theory

01:29:24 ► §

of Wasson, Hoffman, and Ruck

01:29:25 ► §

was the English poet and bon vivant Robert Graves.

01:29:32 ► §

He believed that it was simply mushrooms, that it was simply mushrooms.

01:29:38 ► §

And his argument for this was he took the list of ingredients that was used in the cult. It isn’t simply a list like you would do research and get the recipe. There was actually a published list of ingredients and the ingredients were always listed in a certain order and one of the ingredients was water and Graves argued that it’s crazy in a

01:30:08 ► §

recipe for beer to include water because you know that you’re going to add water. So he argued that

01:30:16 ► §

these words were to be interpreted as an ogum. Do you know what an augum is? An augum is when you have a list of words and

01:30:27 ► §

you’re supposed to take the first letter of each word in the list and it spells out a

01:30:32 ► §

secret message. And Graves showed that the six ingredients always stated to go into the

01:30:42 ► §

beer at Eleusis could be easily arranged so their first letter spelled out the Greek word for mushroom,

01:30:49 ► §

mikos.

01:30:51 ► §

And so he made that argument.

01:30:54 ► §

Well, it’s not clear either way.

01:30:57 ► §

In fact, the Eleusinian mystery is quite mysterious

01:31:00 ► §

because if they were mushrooms, all trace of them has died out,

01:31:05 ► §

and there’s not unambiguous iconographical representation of mushrooms.

01:31:10 ► §

We have a few Voss paintings where something small is being handed around,

01:31:17 ► §

but to say with certainty that it’s a mushroom isn’t really playing fair.

01:31:23 ► §

Well, I wanted to run over this today with you

01:31:26 ► §

and pretty much give it to you in one burst.

01:31:30 ► §

There wasn’t time for questions.

01:31:32 ► §

I’ll take questions on all of this data

01:31:35 ► §

at the beginning of the next session.

01:31:39 ► §

This is really just to bring you up to speed.

01:31:42 ► §

It’s the kind of information that you should have under your belt

01:31:45 ► §

if you’re trying to make informed and intelligent decisions

01:31:51 ► §

about your own spiritual growth in relationship to these things.

01:31:57 ► §

I mean, anybody who’s interested in taking a new or an old drug,

01:32:02 ► §

my advice would be the first stop is the library. You know, find

01:32:07 ► §

out as much as you possibly can. It’s going to mean a lot to you when you get out there

01:32:13 ► §

in the billows because, you know, I mean, I’ve had experiences where the shaman said take this but never shake the bottle so then i got you know

01:32:31 ► §

five years passed and i’m trying to remember did this guy say take this but never shake the bottle

01:32:38 ► §

or did he say take this but always shake the bottle well being a pharmacologist you know having a background in

01:32:46 ► §

pharmacology and ordinary scientific thinking i decided well he must have said always shake the

01:32:52 ► §

bottle because we want to agitate the stuff on the bottom and get it up into solution well i’m

01:32:58 ► §

telling you pay attention because mistakes like this if they don’t kill you they can scare the socks off you

01:33:07 ► §

it’s all in the details you know um i think we pretty much covered the waterfront uh one last

01:33:16 ► §

thought that i’ll leave you with i talked about the unclaimed nature of uh the argyria morning

01:33:23 ► §

glories and how fascinating this is,

01:33:26 ► §

how interesting it is to hypothesize

01:33:28 ► §

possible hallucinogens,

01:33:30 ► §

possible combinations

01:33:31 ► §

that have never been used by people.

01:33:34 ► §

An interesting one that was suggested just recently

01:33:38 ► §

that I want to do research on

01:33:41 ► §

and find out more about

01:33:42 ► §

because I am puzzled by the soma problem and not really

01:33:46 ► §

happy with any of the current answers. But reserpine occurs in Rawulfia serpentina,

01:33:57 ► §

an Indian tree. Reserpine is the first tranquilizer.

01:34:14 ► §

It’s possible that, well, no, it’s pretty clear that reserpine works by inhibiting serotonin, that reserpine somehow competes with serotonin for its uptake.

01:34:19 ► §

So if you were to combine reserpine with pergamon harmala or a psychoactive tryptamine,

01:34:27 ► §

and there are some on the Indian subcontinent,

01:34:30 ► §

one of the most interesting ones is arundodonax.

01:34:34 ► §

Now this is a plant that really has a suggestive aura about it.

01:34:39 ► §

We have no history of human usage for visionary purposes of arundodonax.

01:34:44 ► §

of human usage for visionary purposes of Arundo Donax.

01:34:50 ► §

Nevertheless, it is the giant river reed of the old world.

01:34:55 ► §

To this day, the reeds for reed instruments,

01:34:59 ► §

for clarinets and piccolos, comes from this plant.

01:35:08 ► §

The very best ones are made from the shafts of the Arundo Donax plant. Well, the roots of this plant contain large amounts of DMT. Well, think about the symbolism here. Orpheus was a god of music.

01:35:18 ► §

Orpheus was a flutist. And Orpheus made a descent into the underworld in search of his beloved, and the so- the Orphic religion may contain, may be

01:35:48 ► §

pointing us toward looking at Arundo Donax as a plant with a hallucinogenic

01:35:54 ► §

potential whose efficacy was lost before the rise of literate Greek

01:36:02 ► §

civilization. So I don’t want you to think that all mysteries have been solved

01:36:08 ► §

and all work has been done in this area.

01:36:11 ► §

It hasn’t at all.

01:36:13 ► §

The flora of Africa, the flora of eastern New Guinea,

01:36:17 ► §

the flora of the Amazon, of Mexico,

01:36:20 ► §

of what little forest remains in Africa,

01:36:22 ► §

all of these areas may yield astonishing tools

01:36:27 ► §

for spiritual and shamanic exploration

01:36:31 ► §

when the cataloguing and the phytochemical analysis is complete.

01:36:37 ► §

There’s a generation of work still to be done.

01:36:41 ► §

That’s it, folks.

01:36:42 ► §

Thank you.

01:36:42 ► §

to be done. That’s it, folks.

01:36:53 ► §

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

01:37:00 ► §

Talk about understatements. When Terence just now said that there is a generation of work yet to be done, he was being unusually conservative, I think. I would say that we have many, many

01:37:05 ► §

generations of work yet to be done. Just think of all the plants that Terrence mentioned in this

01:37:10 ► §

lecture. Each one of them, I think, needs to go through a whole series of studies, like the ones

01:37:15 ► §

that are now underway with psilocybin and MDMA, for example. Also, every one of Sasha’s tools should

01:37:22 ► §

go through similar testing. As Terrence said, while many of these substances will get you into a

01:37:28 ► §

psychedelic state, no two of these states are exactly alike.

01:37:32 ► §

Many aren’t even similar to anything else. And that,

01:37:35 ► §

at least to me, should be one of the most interesting and exciting areas of

01:37:40 ► §

potential research. It could be profoundly important to understand the

01:37:43 ► §

mechanisms that alter human consciousness in so many different directions. Let’s face it, we humans still haven’t

01:37:50 ► §

even been able to come up with an agreed-upon definition of what consciousness itself is.

01:37:56 ► §

Just think of what it could mean to our understanding of our situation here in these

01:38:00 ► §

bodies if we could find out exactly what places our consciousness in such radically

01:38:05 ► §

different states. So I hope that some of our younger slaunters will consider careers that

01:38:11 ► §

can help to solve some of these questions. Today it’s common knowledge that the brew known as

01:38:16 ► §

ayahuasca is actually a complex combination of more than one plant. Everyone that has even studied ayahuasca casually now knows that,

01:38:26 ► §

yet it took a young man who went to the Amazon with his brother, not knowing much at all about

01:38:31 ► §

what they were doing, but who became so curious about what made ayahuasca work that he came back

01:38:37 ► §

to the States, eventually earned a PhD, and then did the scientific research that explained what

01:38:43 ► §

we now know about ayahuasca.

01:38:45 ► §

And as you already know, that young man was Terrence’s brother, Dennis.

01:38:50 ► §

Are you the next Dennis McKenna?

01:38:52 ► §

As much as I enjoy listening to the words and wisdom of Terrence,

01:38:55 ► §

the ultimate McKenna legacy, I think, may turn out to be the scientific research of McKenna the Younger.

01:39:03 ► §

And as an aside to you, Dennis, I promise not to call you that again.

01:39:07 ► §

But, you know, it does have a really nice ring to it, don’t you think?

01:39:11 ► §

After all, ancient Rome had Pliny the Elder and Pliny the Younger.

01:39:16 ► §

A millennium or so from now, some writer, I think, is going to be talking about ancient

01:39:20 ► §

America and McKenna the Younger.

01:39:24 ► §

Okay, I’ll quit being so goofy.

01:39:26 ► §

I’m just trying to kill a little time to keep from having to once again update our

01:39:31 ► §

fun drive donors about the status of their thumb drives.

01:39:35 ► §

First of all, the good news.

01:39:37 ► §

All of the drives are not only here on my desk right now, but they have now all been

01:39:41 ► §

populated with 400 podcasts and 128 Mechanis soundbites.

01:39:46 ► §

And I have to say that when I hold one of those little devices in my hand

01:39:50 ► §

and see that it’s about the size of one of my fingers,

01:39:53 ► §

I find it hard to believe that it holds over 500 hours of audio

01:39:56 ► §

that also represents more than 7,000 hours of my work.

01:40:01 ► §

Well, it just seems that they should be a lot bigger.

01:40:07 ► §

So as soon as I post this podcast,

01:40:12 ► §

then my next step is to begin troubleshooting my printer so that I can print shipping labels for them. For what it’s worth, my printer hasn’t worked for many months, so I don’t anticipate

01:40:17 ► §

a simple job of fixing it. Which brings me to where I feel that I should explain why I’ve been

01:40:22 ► §

so slow in getting these drives shipped.

01:40:30 ► §

You see, the story of my life has been one of action without much prior thought.

01:40:37 ► §

At times, I’m like that man in the old Texas story who took off all his clothes and jumped into a big pile of cactus.

01:40:41 ► §

When asked why he did it, he said, well, it seemed like a good idea at the time.

01:40:45 ► §

And that’s how I kind of planned our pledge drive.

01:40:49 ► §

At first I was actually going to run a Kickstarter campaign,

01:40:55 ► §

but then I realized that 99% of the donors to such a campaign are probably already here in the salon.

01:40:59 ► §

So I thought, heck, I’d like to have a thumb drive with all those podcasts on it myself,

01:41:01 ► §

so I’ll make that a premium.

01:41:05 ► §

And that is the sum total of my thinking about it,

01:41:08 ► §

until the campaign was already underway.

01:41:10 ► §

Here’s what I hadn’t planned on.

01:41:16 ► §

First of all, I expected that maybe 30 or so people would donate $45 or more,

01:41:18 ► §

and they’d receive a thumb drive.

01:41:23 ► §

That was my first mistake, because, well, around 150 people took advantage of the offer.

01:41:27 ► §

And at first that seemed like a good thing, and it did turn out to be that way.

01:41:32 ► §

But I finally realized that PayPal doesn’t forward addresses of people who make donations.

01:41:37 ► §

So then I had 150 emails to send asking for addresses.

01:41:39 ► §

And you already know how I dislike email.

01:41:44 ► §

And in case you haven’t received one from me yet, you still will. I haven’t gotten them all out yet.

01:41:45 ► §

But I also discovered that Hotmail and the rest of the Microsoft email providers have blacklisted my Matrix Masters server.

01:41:54 ► §

And that means that tomorrow I have to get a Gmail account and resend a whole bunch of emails that came back to me so I can ask for your addresses.

01:42:03 ► §

But wait, there’s even more to my lack of foresight.

01:42:08 ► §

You see, I never bothered to estimate the size of the thumb drives that I’d need.

01:42:12 ► §

My guess was four, maybe five gigabytes. Guess what? The 400 podcasts take up almost 14 gigabytes

01:42:19 ► §

of storage. So my thought about a eight gigabyte thumb drive size just got doubled, along with the cost

01:42:26 ► §

of the drives. And then I discovered that to preload that much data would more than triple

01:42:31 ► §

the cost of the drives, which when combined with postage, and of course about a third of the drives

01:42:36 ► §

are being shipped out of the U.S., well all those costs together would just about get me to the

01:42:40 ► §

break even, with not much left over to support the salon. So, for the past 10

01:42:46 ► §

days, I’ve been pre-loading the files myself. No problem, I figured. Again, I hadn’t thought ahead,

01:42:52 ► §

but I then discovered that it takes over 35 minutes just to pre-load one drive. You can do

01:42:58 ► §

the math, but trust me, that was a lot of uploading. Now, all of this means two things. Number one,

01:43:04 ► §

the thumb drives, when you finally get

01:43:06 ► §

them, have all been handcrafted, so to speak, by me. They are one of a kind. And should I have another

01:43:13 ► §

fun drive next March, there most likely won’t be any premiums associated with it, but for sure

01:43:19 ► §

there won’t ever be any more thumb drives. This is it. And I’ve still got at least two full weeks of email, printer fixing, label printing, and post office lines before the last drives are shipped.

01:43:30 ► §

But eventually they’re going to get out to you, so don’t give up on me.

01:43:33 ► §

We did have a very successful pledge drive, and the salon is funded through February of 2015.

01:43:39 ► §

However, the administrative functions that followed after that fun drive are taking as much time as doing

01:43:45 ► §

a couple dozen podcasts would take. And please don’t feel sorry for me. This has been my own

01:43:51 ► §

fault for not planning properly, which is one of the main features of my life. And the reason I’m

01:43:57 ► §

telling you this is to embarrass myself so as to never do something like this again.

01:44:02 ► §

Live and learn. That’s what my mother always said. So, I guess

01:44:06 ► §

that’s why I’ve managed to live as long as

01:44:08 ► §

I have. I’m still learning.

01:44:10 ► §

And for those valuable lessons,

01:44:12 ► §

I want to thank all of our donors,

01:44:14 ► §

both for their patience in waiting for their thumb

01:44:15 ► §

drives, and for teaching me

01:44:18 ► §

another valuable life lesson.

01:44:19 ► §

Who would have thought that planning ahead could be so

01:44:22 ► §

important?

01:44:23 ► §

And that’s sarcasm for our fellow slaunughters for whom English isn’t their native language.

01:44:29 ► §

But the best part of this whole long tale, however,

01:44:33 ► §

is that with each drive that I plugged into my computer and began the upload process,

01:44:37 ► §

I was able to connect with the individual who will be receiving it,

01:44:41 ► §

from my hand to yours.

01:44:43 ► §

And that little warm fuzzy makes it all worthwhile

01:44:45 ► §

for me. Again, I thank all of our supporters over the past nine years for everything you’ve done to

01:44:51 ► §

publicize Aslan and keep us going. I just learned that Benjamin Franklin published Poor Richard’s

01:44:57 ► §

Almanac for 25 years. And that seems like a nice milestone to shoot for. It’ll be a stretch, because I’ll be 88 years old by then.

01:45:06 ► §

But it’s sure going to be fun to try.

01:45:09 ► §

And for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

01:45:13 ► §

Be well, my friends. Thank you.