418 - Death By Astonishment

Program Notes §

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“Every drug problem can usually be traced to a previous drug problem.”

“I think drugs are much safer than gurus.”

“I’ve never been absolutely certain that psychedelics have anything whatsoever to do with the spiritual quest.”

“Academic culture runs very heavily on alcohol.”

“It’s hard to live a life where you don’t eventually get your mind altered.”

“Anything which changes your mind can be abused as a drug.”

“People who have taken 50 gamma of LSD, or 100 gamma of LSD, or two grams of mushrooms or something like that, they are not qualified to hold forth on the nature of the psychedelic experience, because those doses don’t deliver it to you.”

“DMT is the strongest hallucinogen there is. If it’s possible to get more loaded than that, I don’t want to know about it.”

“A ten minute DMT trip is worth of academic pharmacology, art history, psychology, and all this other malarkey.”

“Clearly we need to transform our language, because our culture is created by our language, and our culture is toxic, murderous, and on a downhill bummer.”

“A shaman is a person who knows the unspeakable secret. And once you know it, there’s no going back.”

“If flying saucers were to land on the south lawn of the White House tomorrow, it wouldn’t change the fact that DMT is the weirdest thing in the universe.”

Previous Episode §

417 - Earth Mind and Monkey Mind

Next Episode §

419 - A Conversation from the Margins

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Transcript §

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Greetings from Cyberdelic Space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic

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Salon.

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And if you’re one of our fellow salonners

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who listens to these new podcasts

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right away when I post them

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then what you may want to do right now

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is to check the time because

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beginning around 8.30pm

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Pacific Time today, October 13th

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if you surf on over

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to the Joe Rogan Experience

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via ustream.tv

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well then you can watch Joe interview our friend Bruce Dahmer,

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and that’s what I’ll be doing myself.

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Also, my friend Matt Palomary stopped by yesterday

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on his way back down to the Amazon jungle for a little more work with the vine,

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and he asked me to say hello to you,

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and depending on what happens during the rest of this month,

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he may be back here in the salon with some more new ayahuasca stories for us.

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And also, Matt has a couple of new novels out, Dreamland and Eye of the Predator,

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both of which I’ll link to in today’s program notes.

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Now, before I introduce today’s program, I also want to send a shout out to Dr. Neil Goldsmith and his team for

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producing another of their Successful Horizons psychedelic conferences. This is one of the

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longest running conferences in the psychedelic realm, and it’s often the place where we first

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learn who our new up-and-coming psychedelic researchers and thinkers are. And after the Saturday session, I received a call from Wild

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Bill, who you’ve heard from and both from and about, I should say, here in the salon on several

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occasions. And he’d just come from that day’s sessions and wanted to let me know that he met

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Lily Ross there. Lily, as you know, is also a featured speaker here in the salon. But here’s

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why I’m mentioning this

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encounter. Bill hasn’t been keeping up with these podcasts lately, and so he didn’t know about Lily.

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Yet here in downtown New York City, a 60-something former New York City parole officer and a 20-something

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graduate of Harvard Divinity School happened to meet, and despite their differences in age and backgrounds,

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well, they found some common ground, namely an interest in psychedelic medicines and the

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states of mind associated with them.

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Now, the next time somebody asks you what good psychedelics do, well, you can tell them

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about Wild Bill and Louie, and how a mutual understanding of this realm dissolved all

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the normal cultural boundaries

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that these two fine souls normally would have encountered.

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And a final shout out to Dr. T up there in the Northwoods who came to mind during one

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of the riffs that we are about to hear from the bard Terence McKenna as we continue listening

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to a workshop he led in February of 1992.

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Why did they, why did the English suddenly decide that they had to go into the opium

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business?

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Their stealth.

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That’s stealth.

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It goes, every drug problem can usually be traced to a previous drug problem.

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The British East India Company spent a huge amount of time building up a world tea trade.

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And the Chinese were very smart.

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They sold tea in the ports of China to the English. But for 250 years, they would never let the English see how the tea was grown

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or what it was exactly.

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What the English bought were bale tea.

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And all of Europe was addicted to a drug that nobody knew exactly where it came from

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or what it was.

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Well, then, eventually eventually the secret was lost

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stolen let’s be frank

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friends eventually the secret was stolen

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wrenched from the hands of the

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Chinese and the English began

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furiously growing tea

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in Ceylon

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although again what agriculture

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always does

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they produce too much tea

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and they blew the market the bottom out of the tea

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trade so here’s the british india east india company with this huge infrastructure coaling

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stations all around the world and a vast fleet of tea ships and nobody can sell tea and make any money so then they said well let’s put indians to work

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in goa and we’ll grow opium he said well but opium isn’t that a drug that’s not a good thing to do

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and he said well no no we’re not going to sell it in england that’s not the plan we’ll sell it in

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china you know there are more people in China and they’re not English

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so let’s let them have it

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so that’s why the tea traders

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became opium traders

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and that’s why the opium wars were fought

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was to protect English mercantile capitalism

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from the effects of

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the collapse of the tea trade.

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The Japanese, when they invaded Manchuria in the Second World War,

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they immediately began producing heroin and opium in vast amounts,

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not then as an economic strategy,

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but as a strategy to break the will of the Chinese population

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by encouraging addiction.

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And there was vast amounts of opium addiction.

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If any of you saw The Last Emperor of China,

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you recall that his mistress was severely addicted to opium

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and it depicted it in a number of scenes.

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So governments have very cynically manipulated drugs

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so that the drugs which make it possible for capitalism to function

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are cheap and freely available

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and the drugs which erode dominator values

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or cause people to question their situation

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are savagely suppressed.

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It seems like the dominator will always be in control

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because the psychedelic user will have a decreased ego.

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You mean how can we win if we’re taking psychedelics?

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I think you just put me out of business.

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That’s it folks I’m slightly

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caught

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out on that

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I think that what we have to say is

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that we must win

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by example

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you know the I Ching says

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you must never confront evil directly

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because then it learns

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how to defend itself.

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The hippies were certainly no threat

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to the government

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as a military force,

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but as an example,

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as a model for others to follow,

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I think they scared them to death.

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They were probably very happy to see them all turn into weathermen

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and begin hurling Molotov cocktails.

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That they understood.

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The existing apparatus of conflict.

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Right, they could relate to that.

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But flowers in the barrels of their guns spelled ruin and defeat,

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and they knew it.

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There was an article in Chronicle the other day

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about non-violent warfare.

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You know, the idea of

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drugs or gases or whatever

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that will just temporarily disable people

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to prevent physical aggression in war.

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And so I think that’s a step forward in a way.

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I think it’s a step forward

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although it was hatched

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by the military industrial complex in a desperate effort to keep the money flowing.

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They’re so frantic, they’re willing to cut a deal at this point.

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A kinder, gentler warfare is what we’re talking about here.

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out here.

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So back to basics,

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in terms of that it dissolves the ego and it

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shows you the true size of the world

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and it’s a humbling experience

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and it’s a religious

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experience, really, is no

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longer, I mean, just

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like he was saying, that’s not so.

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So isn’t the basic question

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how to get to that

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without using the machinery? You that without using the machinery?

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You mean without using the drugs?

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Yes.

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I mean, isn’t that the basic question?

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You know, you can tell them all to stick it up forever

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and you go on and you continue your religious, humbling, ego-dissolving experiences without…

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Well, the problem there is is it possible?

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Is it possible to attain these states

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any way other than with drugs?

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And this usually comes around

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at some point in these weekends

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as a bone of contention

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because we live in a society that

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offers an endless smorgasbord

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of non-pharmacological

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forms of

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spiritual advancement

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I mean there’s first of all all the

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orthodox forms of religiosity

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you know you can study the Torah

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you can study

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Christian theology

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or you can be a holotropic breather or you can study Christian theology or you can be a holotropic breather

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or you can, you know, it’s endless, this stuff.

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I am very lumpen

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and this is where I feel myself to be the most crude among us

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because none of this stuff works for me

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and in my darker moments i even say it

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doesn’t work for anybody uh but i always get a person there’s always somebody who assures me

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that it happens for them naturally and i just you know lucky for you you’re saving a pile of money. The rest of us are going to spend our whole lives trying to get to it.

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But basically, I’m very skeptical.

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And then the other problem is, if you don’t do it with drugs,

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it seems like there’s always some weird beard personality in the picture you know Babaji or Sri

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Muckaround Hamarubi

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or Lama

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so and so or sister

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somebody and these people

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are inevitably pathological

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I mean

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wouldn’t you be if you were

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sister somebody

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and I

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think drugs are much safer

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than gurus

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gurus are

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it’s part of this thing

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we don’t want to take responsibility for ourselves

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and I guess I’m loathed for saying this

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because I just blow the whistle

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on all these people who have very good livings

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and are surrounded by adoring fans.

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And people are perverse.

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And by people, I include myself in that.

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I mean, people are perverse.

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And one of the things they like to do,

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you see, is they like to surrender

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if it’s safe.

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And so here you have two choices.

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You can take this plant drug,

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which is in use among the witch doctors of the Amazon,

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and about which there are all these extravagant and horrifying stories,

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and maybe you’ll go mad, and maybe you’ll be enlightened,

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and maybe you’ll see God, or maybe you’ll be devoured by a giant snake.

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You can choose that path

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or you can just sweep up around the ashram

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for 10 or 15 years

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and make sure that Babaji

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always has a bowl of brown rice at his elbow

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and he will lift you up and do the thing

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and people say

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well I think I’ll go with Babaji

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I don’t want to

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and what it is is it’s a

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fear of surrender and i don’t i i hear you and i’m my concern is the original values are you know

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the values about um doing doing it you know as a people uh i don’t know you know it’s it’s again it’s very individualistic it’s

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it’s it’s i’m not sure that i can get to where i got to without the the drugs but i have felt

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certain experiences you know that are not exactly like that but they’re they were meaningful um

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and i’m not i’m not sure at this point i mean i’m talking to you and i’m not sure at this point I’m not sure that I’m willing

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to play the game

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because it’s become the game

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and not partake

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in it as a

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religious experience

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as a group

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as a kinder, gentler

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you know

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it’s hard

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because I certainly don’t want to follow Baba whatever,

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and that’s not my game either.

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But without judgment, absolutely, I’m just really trying to understand

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or find a way that the initial values and, you know, the humbling uh could be found and in terms of addiction i

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which i dealt with in terms of pot and uh you know a relatively powerful addiction for me it was

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i began to use it as a non-religious experience it was a deadening experience for me. It was a, you know, isolating experience.

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You know, this world feels like shit, you know.

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So, and it served me.

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That’s an accurate perception.

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Absolutely, that’s what I’m saying.

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Well, there are options other than the two that…

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Very much, and you can kill again, I’m sure, serve me.

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than the two that… I’m sure serve me.

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But I’m

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trying to find

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something.

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You know.

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One of the questions

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that’s worth talking about, because

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I’ve never made up my mind about

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this, is the psychedelics

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are always cast as

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an option

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in the spiritual quest.

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You can study yoga or meditation

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or you can take drugs

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or you can do good works

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like Mother Teresa

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or something like that.

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I’ve never been absolutely certain

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that psychedelics have anything

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whatsoever to do

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with the spiritual quest.

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If we define the spiritual quest

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as that which impels you to the moral life,

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then I don’t really see,

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I don’t understand.

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I certainly have taken a lot of psychedelics.

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I certainly am no moral exemplar,

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nor have I ever felt pressure to be one while on a psychedelic trip.

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The mushroom has never said to me, as a leader of the people, you should be a better person.

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I, inevitably these spiritual hierophanies tend toward a vocabulary of unity and light and completion.

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And that’s not the vocabulary that I would apply to the psychedelic experience.

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The psychedelic experience is weirder than that.

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It’s about self-transforming elf machines from hyperspace

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you know self transforming elf machines from hyperspace

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kicking down your front door

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and rotating all four tires

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on your after death vehicle

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and also checking the radiator

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is that a spiritual

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experience? Hell

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who knows what kind of an experience

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it is

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um

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in a very limited sense

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to refer to the triplenium psychedelics well I call those things psychoactive

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but you’re right

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see here’s the thing

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there’s a series of declensions here

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there’s psychedelic there’s psychoactive, and there’s altered states.

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There are hundreds and hundreds of altered states, most non-drug.

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And then there are altered states of consciousness which are drug-induced.

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I can feel an aspirin hit.

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I can feel an aspirin hit. I mean, I actually can feel the shift in my reality from two buffered aspirin. And then, of course, there’s caffeine stimulation and downers and all of these things. None of this is psychedelic in the ordinary sense. And the psychedelic experience for me is this very narrowly defined thing

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where you see visions.

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Hallucinations aren’t even sufficient

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because there are all kinds of hallucinations,

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you know, moving grids of color

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and little swimming things.

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And then you get the mice dancing in rows

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and the little candies floating by

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and this

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you can’t build a pyramid out of that kind of stuff

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but the real vision

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is a very mysterious

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thing

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impossible by rationalist standards.

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And we all are rationalist enough that even in confrontation with it,

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we know that it’s miraculous.

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So a thing worth thinking about and worth talking about this weekend

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is whether or not the psychedelics are in fact part of what is ordinarily thought of as the spiritual quest or the quest for religious understanding.

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There are people who take psychedelics

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who don’t have an iota of spirituality in them.

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If you’re interested, there’s a very interesting book

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called Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man by Michael Taussig. Michael Taussig,

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I dare say, would be very uncomfortable in this room. He would dismiss us all as fruits and flakes

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because he’s a Marxist labor organizer. There is no vertical gain in this guy’s worldview. And yet he’s taken more ayahuasca probably than anybody in this room

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and been loaded, thoroughly loaded.

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So it’s very interesting to read his book and garner his conclusions.

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He sees it in an entirely different way.

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I think it is a way to access insight,

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but it doesn’t seem to support the neoplatonic hierarchy

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of ascending light and space

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that is the assumption of Western religion.

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There’s no white light at the end of the tunnel in psilocybin.

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Instead, you know, there’s the alien edition

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of the Encyclopedia Britannica

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maybe that’s a spiritually

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enlightening thing to encounter or maybe not

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there is an LSD

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yeah LSD fits

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LSD is more classically

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psychoanalytic number one and number two

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supportive of the metaphors of Western religiosity.

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It does move you toward the dissolving whiteness, the oneness with the unspeakable of Meister Eckhart and that crowd.

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Except in the Harvard experiments, originally with Leary and Alport they used Silas Simon with these

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well but they put them in a

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they put them in a chapel on Good Friday

00:20:30 ► §

well so the set and setting

00:20:36 ► §

then highly determined the trip

00:20:38 ► §

yeah

00:20:40 ► §

good man

00:20:42 ► §

over here

00:20:43 ► §

a couple times during the morning and actually once last night,

00:20:47 ► §

the topic of addiction came up,

00:20:52 ► §

and I’ve heard a number of people say psychedelics can be addictive.

00:21:00 ► §

I believe that maybe that could possibly be true.

00:21:05 ► §

I don’t know it to be true, but it could be possibly true in lighter doses.

00:21:08 ► §

But in a strong psychedelic, full-blown experience, I don’t see how it possibly could be addictive.

00:21:15 ► §

And moving down that same line of thought, if that’s the case, then isn’t it?

00:21:22 ► §

I mean, aren’t we really kind of using the wrong word if we’re not making a distinction between drugs and psychedelics?

00:21:31 ► §

Well, you have to make a newspaper on time, and addiction to, well, the controversial one, I think, is cannabis.

00:21:54 ► §

Is it or is it not addicting?

00:21:56 ► §

And I’ve had occasion to fiddle with this in the course of my life, and I think the answer is fairly complicated I think the answer is yes sometimes

00:22:07 ► §

or no but sometimes yes a year or so ago I was in therapy and with a had a lot of problems

00:22:20 ► §

with my relationship and so forth and I was in therapy with this woman who I really respected a lot

00:22:28 ► §

and she seemed very bright.

00:22:30 ► §

But strangely enough, she knew almost nothing about drugs.

00:22:35 ► §

And it was a weird thing for me to have a therapist like that.

00:22:40 ► §

And she kept coming back to this thing about cannabis.

00:22:44 ► §

And she said, well, now, how many times a day do you get stung?

00:22:49 ► §

I said, well, 10 or a dozen.

00:22:52 ► §

She said, well, and how many years have you been doing this?

00:22:55 ► §

I said, 25.

00:22:57 ► §

She said, well, you know, you must be completely lost in this.

00:23:04 ► §

And it kept, it became an issue in the therapy.

00:23:07 ► §

So finally I said to her, I’ll quit.

00:23:11 ► §

I’ll just quit because I…

00:23:13 ► §

The therapy.

00:23:15 ► §

I quit.

00:23:18 ► §

I said, because I am convinced this isn’t a problem

00:23:23 ► §

and it will be useful for you to see that someone with this kind of a history of cannabis use doesn’t have a problem quitting.

00:23:33 ► §

And I did quit and I had absolutely no problem with it, which amazed me.

00:23:42 ► §

I had been whistling past the graveyard when I made these

00:23:46 ► §

brave statements it it was no problem whatsoever but at other times in my life when I’ve tried to

00:23:56 ► §

to quit it’s been a real tussle of some sort and I think that the setting

00:24:05 ► §

has a great deal to do

00:24:07 ► §

you know I think we’re now

00:24:09 ► §

fairly addicted to the concept

00:24:11 ► §

of addiction

00:24:12 ► §

as the evolution of drug

00:24:15 ► §

attitudes has progressed

00:24:17 ► §

well let’s

00:24:20 ► §

take heroin for example

00:24:21 ► §

in the 19th century

00:24:22 ► §

the user of opiates was called the drug fiend.

00:24:28 ► §

You were a fiend.

00:24:30 ► §

This means the concept that is being evoked here is of demonic possession.

00:24:36 ► §

You know, a junkie has a monkey on his back.

00:24:40 ► §

That’s another fiend image.

00:24:43 ► §

You’re possessed.

00:24:44 ► §

You can’t stop yourself

00:24:45 ► §

in the 20th century

00:24:47 ► §

addiction is viewed as a disease

00:24:51 ► §

and once you view addiction as a disease

00:24:55 ► §

you’ve totally released yourself

00:24:58 ► §

from responsibility to do anything about it

00:25:01 ► §

after all, if you have multiple sclerosis,

00:25:05 ► §

we don’t stigmatize you as morally lax

00:25:09 ► §

and unable to discipline yourself.

00:25:11 ► §

So if you have the disease of morphine addiction,

00:25:15 ► §

well, it’s not your fault.

00:25:17 ► §

It just sort of happened to you, you know,

00:25:19 ► §

like the flu or something.

00:25:21 ► §

Well, I think this makes it almost impossible

00:25:24 ► §

to begin any kind of

00:25:26 ► §

rational program of cure because you just say, doctor, fix me. There’s something wrong

00:25:32 ► §

with me.

00:25:35 ► §

I’m talking about those, it’s like five grams of mushrooms or 40 milligrams of DMT. I mean,

00:25:42 ► §

how often can you do that?

00:25:43 ► §

Oh, no, I think that’s a complete red herring.

00:25:46 ► §

Nobody can be addicted to psychedelics

00:25:48 ► §

only if they use them as though it were another drug.

00:25:53 ► §

In other words, it’s possible to take many doses of LSD

00:25:58 ► §

and what you are is you’re a speed head, you know.

00:26:03 ► §

This is not what LSD does.

00:26:06 ► §

This is what methamphetamine does.

00:26:09 ► §

All psychedelics in low doses appear to be the same drug.

00:26:15 ► §

You know, mescaline, LSD, psilocybin, harmine, not DMT

00:26:22 ► §

because there is no such thing as a little bit, it appears.

00:26:26 ► §

But it’s only when you take large doses, effective doses, I don’t mean heroic doses,

00:26:33 ► §

but when you take effective doses, then the differences immediately emerge.

00:26:40 ► §

I don’t know, I think addiction is a disempowering concept.

00:26:45 ► §

I notice there seems to be a backlash building.

00:26:48 ► §

It’s now okay to publicly ridicule 12-step programs

00:26:53 ► §

and you’re not just denounced as a mad dog of some sort

00:26:58 ► §

because people have seen through it.

00:27:00 ► §

People now announce their addiction to everything at the bat of an eye.

00:27:06 ► §

There seems to be

00:27:07 ► §

a movement amongst

00:27:09 ► §

AA, that particular 12-step

00:27:11 ► §

program that I’ve heard

00:27:13 ► §

and I know people are doing it,

00:27:15 ► §

are working with psychedelics.

00:27:17 ► §

They’re not drinking alcohol, but they’re working with psychedelics.

00:27:20 ► §

There seems to be

00:27:21 ► §

I wouldn’t say a lot of people,

00:27:24 ► §

but it’s fairly widespread.

00:27:26 ► §

Oh, well, I think that people who are very serious about AA

00:27:30 ► §

are usually pretty open about agreeing to the power of psychedelics.

00:27:37 ► §

I mean, I know that in the AA program you’re supposed to be totally clean and not do anything,

00:27:42 ► §

but I’ve had people who were major figures in a

00:27:46 ► §

tell me you know you’re exactly right on this is the right thing you know in in the in the

00:27:55 ► §

early 60s when lsd was first being explored by psychiatrists they began giving it to people, chronic alcoholics, and they were

00:28:07 ► §

getting close to 80% cure of chronic alcoholism with a single exposure to LSD.

00:28:19 ► §

Well, that doesn’t mean that LSD is the magic bullet for alcoholism. That would be hard to feature. What it means is

00:28:30 ► §

that if you take LSD, you are forced to examine the dynamics of your life. And if you notice that

00:28:38 ► §

you’re killing yourself, you will be inspired to stop doing whatever you’re doing I mean it can be alcohol

00:28:46 ► §

it can be hard drugs

00:28:47 ► §

it can be that you’re mean to your wife and children

00:28:51 ► §

it can be that you’re chiseling your business partner

00:28:54 ► §

and on the LSD you say

00:28:57 ► §

hey that’s not a smart thing to do

00:29:00 ► §

I shouldn’t do that

00:29:01 ► §

and then you can usually muster the energy to stop no the most

00:29:08 ► §

the paradox of our society and its cockamamie attitude toward drugs the most dangerous drugs

00:29:16 ► §

we legalize uh you know the drugs that do the most social harm, we create mega-industries out of them.

00:29:27 ► §

And then we demonize everybody else’s drugs.

00:29:32 ► §

And this is a situation that has been exacerbated since the middle of the 19th century.

00:29:39 ► §

You see, we forget that all of this information about drugs has arrived in Western civilization

00:29:49 ► §

only in the last 100 to 120 years.

00:29:53 ► §

In the same revolution in thinking that brings Darwin’s theory of evolution

00:30:01 ► §

and an awareness of

00:30:05 ► §

let’s call it the relativism of culture

00:30:08 ► §

suddenly we realize that there are Shinto

00:30:11 ► §

and Zen and Shamanism

00:30:14 ► §

and Hinduism and all of these things

00:30:16 ► §

also brought the arrival in western culture

00:30:20 ► §

of the information about extremely exotic

00:30:23 ► §

drug habits or drug usages

00:30:27 ► §

that were very localized until very recently.

00:30:32 ► §

I mean, ayahuasca is a good example.

00:30:34 ► §

In our lifetime, ayahuasca has gone from being the subject of William Burroughs

00:30:43 ► §

and Allen Ginsberg’s book, The Yahé Letters,

00:30:46 ► §

where they actually had to make the equivalent of a spiritual pilgrimage

00:30:50 ► §

to South America to sort through this.

00:30:54 ► §

It’s gone from that to Brazilian missionaries of these ayahuasca religions

00:31:00 ► §

setting up camp in Malibu and Boston and Berkeley

00:31:04 ► §

and turning people on.

00:31:08 ► §

Other drugs, well psilocybin, an even more dramatic example. In 1953 the use of psilocybin

00:31:17 ► §

was restricted to certain Mazatecan Indian tribes in central Mexico. Thanks to the promulgation of home methods of cultivation,

00:31:32 ► §

now it’s a standard item on the psychedelic menu

00:31:36 ► §

of most high-tech industrial cultures.

00:31:41 ► §

So we haven’t really had time to assimilate all this

00:31:45 ► §

and make sense of it

00:31:47 ► §

addiction is simply a

00:31:49 ► §

what’s the word?

00:31:50 ► §

a shibboleth

00:31:51 ► §

is that the word?

00:31:53 ► §

you know

00:31:53 ► §

it’s a false

00:31:54 ► §

it’s a false boogeyman

00:31:56 ► §

I mean our real addictions

00:31:58 ► §

are to status

00:32:00 ► §

property

00:32:02 ► §

money

00:32:03 ► §

and power over others.

00:32:05 ► §

I mean, if you got that under control,

00:32:07 ► §

I think people’s relationship to opiates

00:32:09 ► §

would be a minor part of the agenda.

00:32:13 ► §

But we love to demonize the exotic

00:32:17 ► §

and to pat ourselves on the back.

00:32:19 ► §

I mean, alcohol culture,

00:32:22 ► §

cultures that tolerate and encourage alcohol are just besotted with alcohol.

00:32:30 ► §

It touches every aspect of life.

00:32:33 ► §

I mean, for instance, you know, there are certain subcultures that I think are more besotted than others.

00:32:48 ► §

academe is just a nightmare of alcoholic abuse and misbehavior and carrying on of the most bestial and depressing sort.

00:32:54 ► §

And, you know, these are the carriers of the eggs.

00:33:01 ► §

They’re carrying the basket in which the eggs of culture have been hidden.

00:33:06 ► §

So, did that get it?

00:33:13 ► §

Did it get something?

00:33:14 ► §

Can you remind me one more time about academia?

00:33:18 ► §

That academic culture runs very heavily on alcohol.

00:33:22 ► §

Culture runs very heavily on alcohol.

00:33:25 ► §

If you’ve ever been to faculty parties,

00:33:31 ► §

or, you know, do you think you could advance to full professor in the English department at Cal and Stanford if you were a teetotaler?

00:33:35 ► §

I don’t think so.

00:33:36 ► §

I think you would be suspect as a pariah, not one of the boys,

00:33:42 ► §

not a team player, you know.

00:33:44 ► §

So a lot of hard drinking goes on in those situations.

00:33:48 ► §

That’s also true of politics, too.

00:33:51 ► §

Politics, incredible.

00:33:53 ► §

You know, Washington, if you want to go to a hard-drinking town,

00:33:57 ► §

you know, these guys that stumble across the front page of our newspaper

00:34:02 ► §

are just the ones who get caught i mean everybody

00:34:06 ► §

is juicing it real strong inside the beltway so uh yeah having a belt inside the beltway

00:34:16 ► §

a couple weeks ago the cbs reporter connie chung they were talking about uh when they brought up

00:34:24 ► §

about somebody’s mistress and all that,

00:34:26 ► §

you know, one of the presidential candidates,

00:34:28 ► §

and she said, if you had to eliminate everybody who had sexual problems

00:34:33 ► §

or drinking problems in Washington,

00:34:36 ► §

about 10% would qualify to run for anything.

00:34:39 ► §

That’s right. That’s right.

00:34:43 ► §

Yeah, I mean, we now are fixated on people’s sexual piccadillos in politics.

00:34:49 ► §

But imagine if getting sloppily drunk made you ineligible for high public office.

00:34:58 ► §

I mean, don’t forget, having one toke of marijuana 20 years in the past disqualifies you from the Supreme Court.

00:35:06 ► §

You can’t get near it.

00:35:07 ► §

I mean, you’re just a monster of vice.

00:35:10 ► §

And yet a clown like Clarence Thomas.

00:35:15 ► §

I hope you all read the Rolling Stone encounter between Clarence Thomas and Hunter S. Thompson.

00:35:24 ► §

Oh, it’s classic

00:35:26 ► §

it’s classic

00:35:28 ► §

the guy was such a beast

00:35:30 ► §

that he frightened Hunter Thompson

00:35:32 ► §

with his drug abuse

00:35:35 ► §

treatment of women

00:35:36 ► §

and antics

00:35:38 ► §

anyway

00:35:41 ► §

anything else left over from this morning?

00:35:45 ► §

you talked about institutions being rife with alcohol, almost alcohol cultures.

00:35:51 ► §

It seems that business is the one place that seems to be changing,

00:35:57 ► §

that it doesn’t really work as well,

00:36:02 ► §

and that the hierarchical structures do not fit against

00:36:05 ► §

what the real day-to-day

00:36:07 ► §

needs are. You don’t have an underlying

00:36:10 ► §

funded

00:36:11 ► §

environment like government

00:36:14 ► §

or universities

00:36:15 ► §

where you live or die and that

00:36:17 ► §

these new models

00:36:18 ► §

are taking hold and that

00:36:21 ► §

businesses are

00:36:23 ► §

trying to transform themselves

00:36:25 ► §

into learning organizations and keeping up with change

00:36:29 ► §

and are more open than I’ve ever remembered being before.

00:36:33 ► §

Well, probably because they’re very aware of the bottom line

00:36:37 ► §

and they’re actually seeing the cost of alcoholism in their workforce,

00:36:41 ► §

where, as you point out, government and academe,

00:36:45 ► §

these are places where you feed at the trough of public monies in their workforce, where, as you point out, government and academe,

00:36:51 ► §

these are places where you feed at the trough of public monies in some sense.

00:36:55 ► §

I mean, if you’re a tenured professor, I don’t know what kind of a drunk you would have to be turned into in order to get thrown out of a university.

00:36:59 ► §

I mean, short of serial murder, they don’t punish you for anything once you have tenure.

00:37:07 ► §

Somebody had something over here?

00:37:09 ► §

I just wondered,

00:37:10 ► §

segue completely,

00:37:11 ► §

if you’d seen a play in the fields of the Lord.

00:37:15 ► §

I actually had such an emotional stake

00:37:19 ► §

in that movie

00:37:20 ► §

that I listened to Lou Carlino,

00:37:24 ► §

who wanted to direct it, and I wanted to Lou Carlino who’s who wanted to direct it and I

00:37:28 ► §

wanted to be the expert the you know the consultant that I didn’t go see it

00:37:33 ► §

because he said they ruined it that it was just botched if you’ve read the book

00:37:40 ► §

have you read the book the book book is one of the most wonderful,

00:37:46 ► §

it is, I would say, the most wonderful piece of fiction

00:37:49 ► §

ever written about the Amazon.

00:37:51 ► §

And without naming names,

00:37:54 ► §

I understand these actors did a terrible job,

00:37:58 ► §

and Babenko, who directed it,

00:38:00 ► §

they thought they were so smart to get a guy,

00:38:03 ► §

a third world director,

00:38:04 ► §

but Victor Babenko had never

00:38:06 ► §

been to the jungle he’s a rio de janeiro boy just because he did kiss of the spider woman that

00:38:11 ► §

didn’t set him up for this at all what lou said to me was he said there was no sweat there were no

00:38:17 ► §

bugs there was no grime what kind of an amazon picture is this And their portrayal of his ayahuasca experience was just pathetic.

00:38:26 ► §

I heard it was wide at the mark.

00:38:31 ► §

I mean, I hope it wasn’t wonderful for you,

00:38:34 ► §

because here…

00:38:34 ► §

I enjoyed it tremendously.

00:38:35 ► §

Well, there you see,

00:38:37 ► §

that’s what makes horse racing.

00:38:38 ► §

I was stoned.

00:38:39 ► §

Ah!

00:38:42 ► §

I don’t know.

00:38:43 ► §

You probably ought to go see it

00:38:46 ► §

no I think I probably should go see it

00:38:49 ► §

now that my initial disappointment

00:38:52 ► §

you know it’s Hollywood

00:38:54 ► §

it’s not

00:38:55 ► §

maybe throw out the idea that there should be any realism or truth in it

00:38:59 ► §

but what it did do

00:39:01 ► §

I thought personally

00:39:03 ► §

was that at least it did give people, the audience, a somewhat more vivid and somewhat more accurate picture of this kind of tribal reality than anything I know of that’s ever been in a Hollywood movie.

00:39:18 ► §

Well, how about John Borman’s picture of the Emerald Forest?

00:39:21 ► §

Yeah.

00:39:26 ► §

It’s a better picture of this situation

00:39:27 ► §

more authentic

00:39:28 ► §

more authentic

00:39:29 ► §

I didn’t see

00:39:31 ► §

I didn’t see

00:39:32 ► §

at play

00:39:35 ► §

so I can’t say

00:39:36 ► §

but I thought

00:39:37 ► §

John did a good job

00:39:38 ► §

with that

00:39:39 ► §

considering

00:39:40 ► §

he had never had

00:39:41 ► §

a psychedelic experience

00:39:43 ► §

at that point

00:39:44 ► §

he was feeling by theory and he got pretty close to it.

00:39:51 ► §

There have been attempts in Hollywood to deal with this theme,

00:39:54 ► §

most of them quite unhappy.

00:39:57 ► §

What was that awful thing with Richard Chamberlain?

00:40:01 ► §

Altered states.

00:40:01 ► §

Altered states.

00:40:03 ► §

There’s one about peyote ceremonies coming out with Val Kilmer, Spirit Fire.

00:40:10 ► §

Oh, yeah, I saw the previous one.

00:40:12 ► §

Well, we want to encourage them.

00:40:15 ► §

I mean, keep trying, folks.

00:40:18 ► §

They may get it sooner or later,

00:40:20 ► §

but it’s hard for them to handle this kind of thing

00:40:24 ► §

because it’s very elusive, you know.

00:40:27 ► §

I mean, showing an internalized world,

00:40:30 ► §

and especially, you know, one that is different from person to person,

00:40:36 ► §

is very, very tricky.

00:40:39 ► §

Anything else?

00:40:40 ► §

One last comment about the alcoholism and LSD thing. I was at UCLA in the late 50s,

00:40:49 ► §

early 60s, when Sidney Cohen was doing that research. And I don’t think the statistics

00:40:55 ► §

were quite as high as you mentioned. But if they worked at all, they say that behind every alcoholic is a spiritual seeker, you know, gone awry.

00:41:08 ► §

And if LSD worked at all, it might be because of the numinous state that it produced, which

00:41:15 ► §

is what the alcoholic was really, you know, seeking or wanting to touch.

00:41:20 ► §

Well, also, you know, there’s a lot of contextualizing of drug experiences. For instance, the Chinese school of poetry surrounding Li Po, who was a Tang Dynasty poet, was alcohol.

00:41:41 ► §

of transcendence and these groups of poets

00:41:43 ► §

would get together and they would

00:41:45 ► §

drink heavily and then they would

00:41:47 ► §

declaim poetry

00:41:49 ► §

and scribes would

00:41:51 ► §

write it down and we

00:41:53 ► §

inherit this as a corpus

00:41:55 ► §

of sublime

00:41:56 ► §

artistic outpouring

00:41:59 ► §

and yet it happened, it was created in an

00:42:01 ► §

environment which we identify

00:42:03 ► §

with a very low consciousness state.

00:42:08 ► §

So, yeah, it is a contextualized thing, definitely.

00:42:13 ► §

So are we finished with that for the moment?

00:42:15 ► §

We can always go back.

00:42:19 ► §

Well, I thought…

00:42:21 ► §

I sort of tried to divide these things into different

00:42:25 ► §

domains of concern

00:42:27 ► §

and I think thought of the morning

00:42:29 ► §

as sort of the sociological

00:42:31 ► §

anthropological historical

00:42:34 ► §

shtick

00:42:35 ► §

and then I thought

00:42:38 ► §

maybe what we should do this afternoon

00:42:40 ► §

mainly because

00:42:42 ► §

it’s my favorite part

00:42:44 ► §

is to talk about the content

00:42:46 ► §

of these experiences

00:42:49 ► §

not only because it’s fun

00:42:52 ► §

but because one of the things I’ve discovered

00:42:56 ► §

in trying to wage this kind of career

00:42:59 ► §

is

00:43:00 ► §

because we are talking about something invisible

00:43:06 ► §

and an experience

00:43:08 ► §

and because we can’t all drop here in this room

00:43:13 ► §

and compare notes

00:43:14 ► §

it’s often hard to get everybody to the same starting gate

00:43:21 ► §

people have entirely different notions

00:43:24 ► §

of what you actually mean when you say

00:43:27 ► §

a psychedelic experience. Most people, even straight people, have had what they call a drug

00:43:36 ► §

experience. They either remember the time they drank a whole bottle of cough syrup or the time that they went in for minor surgery

00:43:49 ► §

and were given an anesthetic

00:43:52 ► §

or the time they had root canal work

00:43:55 ► §

and everybody eventually, it’s hard to live a life

00:43:58 ► §

where you don’t eventually get your mind altered.

00:44:02 ► §

This does not set you up for

00:44:06 ► §

the psychedelic experience

00:44:08 ► §

and because

00:44:09 ► §

there’s no consensus

00:44:11 ► §

about this it’s worthwhile

00:44:13 ► §

talking about the gradations

00:44:16 ► §

and what is

00:44:17 ► §

really possible

00:44:19 ► §

at the broadest level

00:44:23 ► §

you have what are called altered states.

00:44:28 ► §

And altered states are any state different from the state you were just in.

00:44:35 ► §

So if you have a double espresso, you enter an altered state.

00:44:39 ► §

If you climb a mountain in three minutes, you have an altered state.

00:44:44 ► §

If you dive into cold have an altered state.

00:44:49 ► §

If you dive into cold water, altered state.

00:44:55 ► §

And there are an infinitude of these altered states. I mean, if states didn’t alter, life would be pretty boring.

00:44:59 ► §

The moment-to-moment experience of being is an experience of altering states.

00:45:06 ► §

I’m horny, I’m sleepy, I’m pissed off.

00:45:10 ► §

These are all altered states.

00:45:12 ► §

Then as you close in through the concentric circle of this particular mandala,

00:45:19 ► §

you come to, well, psychoactive

00:45:25 ► §

the impact of psychoactive drugs

00:45:28 ► §

now we’ve eliminated jumping into cold water

00:45:31 ► §

climbing mountains

00:45:32 ► §

now we’re firmly in the domain of drugs

00:45:35 ► §

substances of some sort

00:45:38 ► §

and it includes foods

00:45:40 ► §

I mean, you all know what an MSG flush is like

00:45:44 ► §

well, or do you? does everybody know what an MSG flush is like.

00:45:46 ► §

Well, or do you?

00:45:49 ► §

Does everybody know what I’m talking about?

00:45:50 ► §

Chinese restaurant syndrome?

00:45:56 ► §

Okay, well, that’s a metabolite, a monosodium glutamate,

00:46:01 ► §

being taken in excess amount and causing an altered state.

00:46:04 ► §

It’s a kind of a, you could think of it as a drug anything which changes your mind

00:46:08 ► §

can be abused

00:46:10 ► §

as a drug

00:46:11 ► §

jalapeno peppers

00:46:12 ► §

are in many shamanic

00:46:15 ► §

societies

00:46:16 ► §

people eat huge amounts

00:46:19 ► §

of jalapeno peppers

00:46:20 ► §

and identify the feeling

00:46:23 ► §

as power

00:46:24 ► §

and they say I am building my inner heat so that I can cure jalapeno peppers and identify the feeling as power.

00:46:29 ► §

And they say, I am building my inner heat so that I can cure.

00:46:33 ► §

You know, it’s a very conscious kind of thing.

00:46:41 ► §

Well, then there are the more traditional psychoactive states, states of tranquility brought on by tranquilizers

00:46:46 ► §

halcyon, valium

00:46:48 ► §

you know there’s a

00:46:50 ► §

minion of these things and they come and go

00:46:53 ► §

Prozac

00:46:53 ► §

or states of agitation

00:46:56 ► §

methadrine, benzadrine

00:47:00 ► §

dexedrine, amphetamine

00:47:03 ► §

white sugar

00:47:04 ► §

caffeine theobromine, the active agent in cocoa and chocolate.

00:47:13 ► §

And each one of these things pushes you into a different state, which is largely emotive and rooted in the body but when you get

00:47:26 ► §

to the

00:47:28 ► §

psycho

00:47:28 ► §

well before we talk

00:47:32 ► §

about the psychedelics then there are

00:47:34 ► §

drugs which are mental drugs

00:47:36 ► §

which I don’t consider psychedelic

00:47:39 ► §

and I will

00:47:40 ► §

my definition of psychedelic is

00:47:42 ► §

tighter than most people’s

00:47:44 ► §

for instance you may know about detour My definition of psychedelic is tighter than most people’s.

00:47:47 ► §

For instance, you may know about Datura.

00:47:55 ► §

Datura is gypsum weed and these ornamental plants with the large white bell-like flowers.

00:48:01 ► §

Well, if you make a tea out of the leaves, root, flowers, or seed of that plant,

00:48:08 ► §

it will turn you every way but loose. I mean, it is a completely disorienting,

00:48:13 ► §

freaky kind of experience with loss of memory,

00:48:17 ► §

confusion of sequence, delusion of reference,

00:48:24 ► §

amnesia, projective imagining, so forth and so on.

00:48:28 ► §

To my mind, it is not a psychedelic state.

00:48:32 ► §

I call it a deliriant or a confusant.

00:48:36 ► §

I remember I always usually end up telling this story. What put me off Datora was years ago when I lived in Nepal,

00:48:40 ► §

I had this English friend,

00:48:44 ► §

and we experimented with all kinds of drugs. And one day I was in the

00:48:49 ► §

market buying potatoes and tomatoes, the only two things you could get in Bodna at that time. And I

00:48:58 ► §

encountered this guy, and we started just exchanging the news of the day. And in the course of the conversation,

00:49:05 ► §

I became aware that he thought I was visiting him in his apartment.

00:49:11 ► §

He was so lost in this stuff

00:49:15 ► §

that he didn’t know we were out in the street, in the market.

00:49:18 ► §

He thought I had come by his rooms.

00:49:22 ► §

Well, I just said said that’s too stoned

00:49:25 ► §

nobody needs to be that twisted around

00:49:28 ► §

I mean you literally

00:49:30 ► §

do not know what is happening

00:49:32 ► §

what the

00:49:34 ► §

this to my mind

00:49:36 ► §

the psychedelics

00:49:38 ► §

can be chemically defined

00:49:40 ► §

with very few exceptions

00:49:42 ► §

as

00:49:43 ► §

indles

00:49:44 ► §

now the only exception to this with very few exceptions as indoles.

00:49:46 ► §

Indoles.

00:49:51 ► §

Now the only exception to this is mescaline.

00:49:54 ► §

Mescaline is not an indole.

00:49:56 ► §

It’s a phenylethylamine,

00:49:59 ► §

or some people consider it a cyclicized amphetamine,

00:50:00 ► §

which is a phenylethylamine.

00:50:04 ► §

I am not fond of mescaline. It seems to me that to get to psychedelic levels

00:50:08 ► §

with it, you have to take so much that you’re fairly rattled. It’s hard on you, and it’s hard

00:50:16 ► §

on you the next day. And many people who are great devotees of peyote when you question them very closely it isn’t the quality of the

00:50:27 ► §

visions it’s some more murky thing it’s that they like hanging out with native americans they like

00:50:35 ► §

drumming all night they love ceremonies they like going to the southwest, but it’s not the quality of the visions.

00:50:46 ► §

Not that mescaline can’t do that, it certainly can.

00:50:49 ► §

If you read these early researchers like Heinrich Clouvert, S. Weir Mitchell, Havelock Ellis,

00:50:59 ► §

I mean, these are wonderful descriptions of full-on psychedelic states,

00:51:04 ► §

wonderful descriptions of full-on psychedelic states,

00:51:07 ► §

but they were using pure mescaline, you know,

00:51:12 ► §

and close to a gram a throw, which is a lot.

00:51:15 ► §

Most people, when they take pure mescaline,

00:51:19 ► §

if you actually measure the amount that they’re taking,

00:51:25 ► §

they’re taking well under what is clinically considered the effective dose.

00:51:28 ► §

If you look in the Merck manual or the PDR,

00:51:34 ► §

the clinically recommended dose of pure mescaline is 750 milligrams,

00:51:38 ► §

three quarters of a gram of alkaloid.

00:51:41 ► §

Very few people actually take that. And this brings us to one of the issues around psychedelics. There are a lot of wannabe

00:51:47 ► §

experts running around who didn’t take enough

00:51:52 ► §

because you have to take a lot

00:51:55 ► §

not a lot, but you have to take a frightening amount

00:51:59 ► §

to get into what it’s really about

00:52:03 ► §

people who have taken 50 gamma of LSD or 100 gamma of LSD

00:52:11 ► §

or 2 grams of mushrooms or something like that,

00:52:15 ► §

they are not qualified to hold forth on the nature of the psychedelic experience

00:52:21 ► §

because those doses don’t deliver it to you.

00:52:26 ► §

What they deliver is the periphery

00:52:30 ► §

of the psychedelic experience,

00:52:32 ► §

accelerated thought processes,

00:52:34 ► §

a kind of depth and richness to cognition

00:52:38 ► §

that is unfamiliar,

00:52:41 ► §

an ability to analyze situations

00:52:44 ► §

from unusual perspectives

00:52:46 ► §

or to reach unexpected conclusions

00:52:50 ► §

and I found this reluctance

00:52:54 ► §

to come to grips with the full

00:52:58 ► §

psychedelic experience even among

00:53:00 ► §

Amazonian shaman, I mean people are

00:53:03 ► §

reluctant to go the full distance.

00:53:06 ► §

We were with shamans

00:53:07 ► §

at one point in Peru,

00:53:09 ► §

Ayahuasca shamans,

00:53:11 ► §

and I was aware of

00:53:13 ► §

an admixture plant

00:53:17 ► §

that was stronger

00:53:18 ► §

than the admixture plant

00:53:19 ► §

that they were using.

00:53:21 ► §

And I kept asking this guy,

00:53:23 ► §

what about so-and-so?

00:53:25 ► §

Why don’t we do that?

00:53:28 ► §

And at first, all he would say was

00:53:31 ► §

that it’s not for Christians,

00:53:35 ► §

which was strange because he always knocked Christians.

00:53:39 ► §

But I kept pressing.

00:53:41 ► §

And finally, he said,

00:53:42 ► §

we just don’t do it that way and i said why not and he

00:53:47 ► §

said because it’s molly bizarro you know and i said isn’t that what we’re shooting for

00:53:54 ► §

apparently not a curing shaman wants to be empowered to cure he doesn’t conceive of himself as a magellan of the phenomenological realm

00:54:07 ► §

who’s setting out to circumnavigate the mental universe in an evening

00:54:12 ► §

and then of the psychedelics there they deliver differing levels of this. And then what you always have to bear in mind when you listen to me talk about this

00:54:27 ► §

is there are physiological differences among people.

00:54:32 ► §

You know, in the same way that person A

00:54:35 ► §

can detect a compound X at one part in 10,000,

00:54:41 ► §

but person B cannot detect the same compound

00:54:45 ► §

unless it’s there in, you know, a thousand parts in 10,000.

00:54:51 ► §

We are genetically different in this area of drug receptors.

00:54:59 ► §

And it’s even possible, although it is also permissive of a kind of crypto-fascism,

00:55:05 ► §

to believe that there are shamanic lines, families, races even,

00:55:12 ► §

that are more or less inclined to this.

00:55:16 ► §

The Irish are always singled out as special offenders in this area.

00:55:23 ► §

The stereotype of the Irish

00:55:26 ► §

is that they have a peculiarly intense relationship

00:55:29 ► §

to intoxication

00:55:31 ► §

and to little people in a nearby

00:55:34 ► §

but invisible world

00:55:36 ► §

I don’t put a lot of credence to this

00:55:41 ► §

but it’s very hard for me to tell because I can only

00:55:43 ► §

sample myself and I happen to be Irish

00:55:47 ► §

although leavened with Sicilian genes to keep it from getting out of hand so what you really have

00:55:56 ► §

to do when you start exploring psychedelics is to try and figure out you know what’s the center of the mandala. What are people talking about?

00:56:05 ► §

What is it when you arrive on the money?

00:56:11 ► §

And to my mind, the compound that is most interesting for doing that is DMT.

00:56:18 ► §

DMT is the most interesting in some ways of the psychedelics

00:56:27 ► §

because more issues are raised by it than any other.

00:56:34 ► §

Such issues as, I mean I’ll just run over some of them

00:56:37 ► §

so you get a feeling for it.

00:56:41 ► §

DMT is the strongest hallucinogen there is.

00:56:48 ► §

If it’s possible to get more loaded than that I don’t want to know about it

00:56:50 ► §

and I say so when I’m there

00:56:53 ► §

I say my god if you can get more loaded than this

00:56:57 ► §

keep it away from me

00:56:59 ► §

so that’s it, it’s the strongest

00:57:03 ► §

it’s also the shortest acting.

00:57:06 ► §

DMT when smoked in most people

00:57:09 ► §

is return you to normal in under 10 minutes.

00:57:13 ► §

Under 10 minutes.

00:57:15 ► §

Now this is interesting because people

00:57:18 ► §

who think there’s nothing to this

00:57:21 ► §

should actually invest the 10 minutes

00:57:25 ► §

to find out what’s

00:57:27 ► §

a 10 minute DMT

00:57:30 ► §

trip is worth

00:57:31 ► §

20 years of academic

00:57:33 ► §

pharmacology, art history

00:57:35 ► §

psychology and all

00:57:38 ► §

this other malarkey

00:57:39 ► §

because then you just say okay I got it

00:57:41 ► §

I got it

00:57:42 ► §

another very interesting thing about DMT is

00:57:46 ► §

it occurs naturally in the human brain.

00:57:50 ► §

Well, now what’s going on here?

00:57:52 ► §

He’s saying the strongest drug,

00:57:55 ► §

the fastest drug,

00:57:57 ► §

is the most natural drug.

00:58:00 ► §

It means that, you know,

00:58:01 ► §

you don’t have to sail off

00:58:03 ► §

into three hydroxy, four parietal, It means that you don’t have to sail off into 3-hydroxy-4-pyridyl-n-methyl-merubishtic or something like that to get into the exotic realms.

00:58:13 ► §

No, a human metabolite, which takes only 10 minutes to undergo its entire exfoliation and quenching, is the strongest of all.

00:58:26 ► §

Well then what is it?

00:58:28 ► §

What does strong mean?

00:58:31 ► §

What is a strong psychedelic?

00:58:40 ► §

You know, it’s highly personal.

00:58:43 ► §

Every psychedelic trip is.

00:58:48 ► §

But what happens on DMT for a large number of people,

00:58:50 ► §

I mean, we don’t have any statistics, but it is a completely confounding experience.

00:58:56 ► §

I mean, you may have had the expectation,

00:58:59 ► §

you might think if you had never had a psychedelic experience,

00:59:02 ► §

that it sort of begins like the Bach B minor fugue and goes from there as you rise into the realms of light and union with the deity or something like that.

00:59:16 ► §

That’s not what happens on DMT.

00:59:17 ► §

What happens on DMT I referred to this morning.

00:59:21 ► §

to this morning a troop of elves

00:59:23 ► §

smashes down your front door

00:59:26 ► §

and rotates and balances

00:59:28 ► §

the wheels on the after death

00:59:30 ► §

vehicle, present you with

00:59:32 ► §

the bill and then depart

00:59:33 ► §

and it’s

00:59:36 ► §

completely paradigm

00:59:38 ► §

shattering

00:59:39 ► §

union with the white

00:59:42 ► §

light you could handle

00:59:44 ► §

an invasion of your apartment by jeweled self-dribbling basketballs from hyperspace that are speaking in demotic Greek is not something that you anticipated and could handle.

00:59:59 ► §

Sometimes people say, is DMT dangerous?

01:00:05 ► §

It sounds so crazy. Is it dangerous?

01:00:08 ► §

The answer is only if you fear death by astonishment.

01:00:21 ► §

Remember how you laughed when this possibility was raised

01:00:27 ► §

and a moment will come

01:00:29 ► §

that will wipe the smile right off your face

01:00:32 ► §

and this death by astonishment thing

01:00:42 ► §

well one thing about it I mean let me say a little bit more about it.

01:00:47 ► §

One thing that endears DMT to me is I like to say it doesn’t affect your mind.

01:00:56 ► §

It doesn’t seem to affect your mind.

01:00:58 ► §

In other words, you don’t change under the influence of DMT

01:01:06 ► §

you don’t become a kinder, gentler person

01:01:10 ► §

you don’t sink into a line of drool

01:01:14 ► §

from one corner of your mouth

01:01:16 ► §

as you sit there twitching

01:01:17 ► §

you don’t change

01:01:20 ► §

what happens is

01:01:21 ► §

the world is completely replaced.

01:01:26 ► §

Instantly, 100%, it’s all gone.

01:01:30 ► §

And what is put in its place,

01:01:33 ► §

not one iota of what is put in its place

01:01:37 ► §

was taken from this world.

01:01:39 ► §

So it’s a 100% reality channel switch.

01:01:45 ► §

They don’t even retain three-dimensional space and linear time.

01:01:50 ► §

It’s not like you go to an exotic place, Morocco or New Guinea.

01:01:54 ► §

It’s like reality is swapped out for something else.

01:02:10 ► §

else and when you try to say what it is you realize that language has evolved in this world and it can serve no other in or it must it takes years of practice so what you’re looking at is

01:02:19 ► §

literally the unspeakable the indescribable falls into your lap

01:02:26 ► §

and when you try

01:02:28 ► §

you’re loaded right you’re there

01:02:30 ► §

and you’re trying to explain

01:02:32 ► §

to yourself what’s happening

01:02:33 ► §

and so this is like

01:02:36 ► §

you try to pour water over

01:02:38 ► §

the transdimensional objects

01:02:40 ► §

in front of you the water of language

01:02:42 ► §

and it just beads

01:02:44 ► §

up and flows off

01:02:45 ► §

like water off a duck’s back

01:02:47 ► §

you cannot say what’s there

01:02:50 ► §

and I’ve spent, I don’t know

01:02:55 ► §

25 years fiddling with this

01:02:57 ► §

it’s become the compass of my inspiration

01:03:00 ► §

trying to say what is on the other side

01:03:04 ► §

of that boundary.

01:03:05 ► §

Just two large tokes away at any given time

01:03:09 ► §

is this non-Euclidean, non-Newtonian, irrational, un-Englishable place.

01:03:19 ► §

But it’s not smooth and empty and clear.

01:03:24 ► §

That’s not what gives it its indescribability.

01:03:27 ► §

What gives it its indescribability is its utter weirdness,

01:03:32 ► §

its alienness, its power to astonish.

01:03:37 ► §

What happens to me when I smoke DMT

01:03:40 ► §

is there’s a kind of a going toward it.

01:03:46 ► §

There’s a sequela of events

01:03:49 ► §

which lead to the antechamber of the mystery.

01:03:52 ► §

I mean, you take a toke, you feel strange.

01:03:55 ► §

Your whole body feels odd.

01:03:58 ► §

You take a second toke,

01:04:01 ► §

all the oxygen seems to have been pumped out of the room.

01:04:04 ► §

Everything jumps

01:04:06 ► §

into clarity. It’s that

01:04:08 ► §

visual acuity thing.

01:04:10 ► §

You take a third toke

01:04:12 ► §

if you’re able, and then

01:04:14 ► §

you lay back, and

01:04:16 ► §

you see this thing which looks

01:04:18 ► §

like a rose or a chrysanthemum,

01:04:20 ► §

this orange spinning

01:04:22 ► §

flower-like thing. It

01:04:24 ► §

takes it about 15 seconds to form,

01:04:27 ► §

and it’s like a membrane.

01:04:29 ► §

And then you break through it.

01:04:32 ► §

You break through it, and then you’re in this place.

01:04:36 ► §

And there’s an enormous cheer

01:04:38 ► §

which goes up as you pass through this membrane.

01:04:43 ► §

Some of you may know the Pink Floyd song

01:04:46 ► §

about how the gnomes have learned a new way

01:04:49 ► §

to say hooray.

01:04:53 ► §

They’re waiting.

01:04:54 ► §

And you burst into this place

01:04:58 ► §

and you’re saying, you know,

01:05:00 ► §

geez, you know, this stuff is really speedy.

01:05:04 ► §

I mean, that’s like describing a space shuttle launching as noisy.

01:05:10 ► §

You know, you say, this stuff is, it’s, you know,

01:05:14 ► §

and you say, am I all right? Am I all right?

01:05:17 ► §

That’s the first question.

01:05:18 ► §

And so then you run your mind around the track

01:05:21 ► §

and you say, hmm, heartbeat normal, yeah, normal

01:05:25 ► §

heartbeat normal, pulse

01:05:28 ► §

normal, breathing, breathe, breathe

01:05:29 ► §

breathe, yes, but

01:05:31 ► §

what’s right here

01:05:33 ► §

and from here out is

01:05:36 ► §

this thing

01:05:37 ► §

which no matter how much science fiction

01:05:39 ► §

you’ve done, no matter how

01:05:41 ► §

much William Burroughs you’ve read

01:05:44 ► §

no matter how much time you’ve spent

01:05:46 ► §

in the company of the weird, the bizarre, the ultra and the peculiar, you weren’t ready.

01:05:52 ► §

And it’s completely real. It’s in a way more real than the contents of ordinary reality,

01:05:59 ► §

because see how the shadows here are muted and there’s a lot of transitional zones from one color to another and so forth.

01:06:09 ► §

This isn’t like that.

01:06:10 ► §

This is crystalline, clear, solid.

01:06:14 ► §

You can see the light reflected in the depths of these objects and everything is very brightly colored and everything is moving very, very rapidly.

01:06:25 ► §

And there are entities there.

01:06:29 ► §

It’s not about calling them up or the whisperings of them.

01:06:34 ► §

No, they’re in your face.

01:06:37 ► §

And they’re right here.

01:06:39 ► §

And they’re worse than in your face

01:06:41 ► §

because what they do is they jump into your chest and then they jump out.

01:06:48 ► §

And so you’re like this.

01:06:52 ► §

And you have to keep saying, keep breathing, keep breathing, don’t freak out, pay attention.

01:06:57 ► §

And the entities speak to you.

01:07:01 ► §

And they speak both in English and another way way which we’ll get to in a minute

01:07:07 ► §

but in english what they say is do not give way to wonder hang on don’t just go gaga with disbelief

01:07:18 ► §

pay attention pay attention and what they’re trying to do is they’re trying to show you something

01:07:25 ► §

they are very aware

01:07:28 ► §

of the fleeting nature

01:07:29 ► §

of this encounter

01:07:31 ► §

and they say you know

01:07:32 ► §

don’t just spiral off into amazement

01:07:35 ► §

and start raving about God

01:07:37 ► §

and all that

01:07:37 ► §

forget that

01:07:38 ► §

pay attention to what we’re doing

01:07:41 ► §

and then what they’re doing

01:07:43 ► §

is they’re dancing is they’re dancing around, they’re jumping around,

01:07:48 ► §

they’re emerging explicitly out of the background, bounding toward you,

01:07:52 ► §

jumping into your chest, bounding away, and they offer.

01:07:57 ► §

They make offerings.

01:07:59 ► §

And they love you.

01:08:00 ► §

That’s the other thing.

01:08:01 ► §

They say this.

01:08:02 ► §

They say, we love you.

01:08:04 ► §

You come so

01:08:06 ► §

rarely. And

01:08:07 ► §

you know, here you are.

01:08:10 ► §

Welcome. Welcome.

01:08:11 ► §

And then they

01:08:13 ► §

make these offerings. And

01:08:15 ► §

the offerings are

01:08:17 ► §

objects of some sort.

01:08:20 ► §

And the,

01:08:22 ► §

and now remember, you are not changed.

01:08:24 ► §

You’re exactly the person you were

01:08:26 ► §

a few minutes before

01:08:27 ► §

so you’re not exalted or depressed

01:08:30 ► §

you’re just trying to make sense of this

01:08:32 ► §

and the objects which they offer

01:08:34 ► §

are like

01:08:36 ► §

Fabergé

01:08:38 ► §

eggs

01:08:39 ► §

or exquisitely

01:08:42 ► §

tooled and enameled

01:08:44 ► §

pieces of machinery,

01:08:46 ► §

but they don’t have rigid outlines.

01:08:48 ► §

These objects are themselves somehow alive

01:08:53 ► §

and transforming and changing.

01:08:56 ► §

So when these creatures, I call them tykes,

01:09:00 ► §

when these tykes offer you these objects,

01:09:04 ► §

you grok it, you look at it,

01:09:07 ► §

and immediately, because you are yourself, you have this realization,

01:09:13 ► §

my God, if I could get this thing back into my world, history would never be the same.

01:09:23 ► §

A single one of these objects

01:09:25 ► §

is somehow you can tell by looking at it

01:09:28 ► §

this would confound my world

01:09:31 ► §

beyond hope of recovery

01:09:34 ► §

it cannot exist

01:09:35 ► §

what I’m being shown is a tiny area

01:09:39 ► §

where miracles are being transformed

01:09:43 ► §

and they then

01:09:45 ► §

and the creatures, the tykes

01:09:49 ► §

are singing, they are speaking

01:09:52 ► §

in a kind of translinguistic

01:09:55 ► §

glossolalia, they are actually

01:09:58 ► §

making these objects with their

01:10:01 ► §

voices, they are singing these

01:10:04 ► §

things into existence

01:10:06 ► §

and what the

01:10:08 ► §

message is

01:10:09 ► §

is do what

01:10:12 ► §

we’re doing you can do

01:10:14 ► §

what we’re doing do it

01:10:16 ► §

and they get

01:10:17 ► §

quite pushy about

01:10:20 ► §

this they say you know damn it

01:10:22 ► §

do it and you’re saying

01:10:23 ► §

but but but no it, do it, and you’re saying, but, but, but, but, and saying, no, do it, do it now, do it, and say, I can’t handle this, you know, and then this kind of reaction goes on for a while, well, then, I actually, I don’t, I don’t take credit for it, it was not willed, but like something comes up from inside of you something comes out of you

01:10:47 ► §

and you discover you can do it that you can use language to condense objects into existence in

01:10:57 ► §

this space it’s the dream of all magic but here it is folks happening in real time

01:11:05 ► §

and then they’re just delighted

01:11:08 ► §

they just go mad

01:11:09 ► §

with delight and turn somersaults

01:11:12 ► §

and turn themselves inside out

01:11:14 ► §

and they all jump into your chest

01:11:16 ► §

at once

01:11:17 ► §

and

01:11:17 ► §

after many many

01:11:21 ► §

encounters

01:11:24 ► §

of this sort when I first did DM, I couldn’t bring anything out of it.

01:11:29 ► §

I mean, I just said, you know, it’s the damnedest thing I’ve ever encountered, and I can’t say anything about it, and I don’t think I ever will be able to say anything about it.

01:11:38 ► §

But by going back repeatedly and working at it, I think I’ve gotten a pretty coherent

01:11:45 ► §

well let’s not go that far

01:11:47 ► §

I think I’ve got a pretty clear

01:11:50 ► §

metaphor anyway for what’s happening

01:11:55 ► §

in there and I think a lot of people

01:11:57 ► §

have this experience when you talk to shamans

01:12:00 ► §

they say oh well yes the helping spirits

01:12:04 ► §

those are the helping spirits They can help you cure,

01:12:08 ► §

find lost objects. You didn’t know about helping spirits?

01:12:11 ► §

Well, I knew, but I had no idea that it was

01:12:15 ► §

so literal. Say, oh, no, that’s the helping spirits.

01:12:20 ► §

But then the other thing they say, if you

01:12:23 ► §

press a shaman, if you say, well, what exactly is a helping spirit?

01:12:29 ► §

Say, well, a helping spirit is an ancestor.

01:12:33 ► §

Say, you mean to tell me that those are dead people in there?

01:12:39 ► §

Say, well, yes, ancestor, dead person.

01:12:42 ► §

You didn’t know about ancestors apparently

01:12:45 ► §

this is what happens to people who die

01:12:47 ► §

and you say, my god, is it possible

01:12:51 ► §

that what we’re breaking into here is an ecology

01:12:54 ► §

of souls, that these are not

01:12:58 ► §

extraterrestrials from Zenebel,

01:13:00 ► §

Ganubi or Zeta Reticula, Beta

01:13:03 ► §

these are the deer departed.

01:13:07 ► §

And they exist in a realm,

01:13:10 ► §

which for want of a better word, let’s call eternity.

01:13:14 ► §

And somehow this drug, or whatever it is,

01:13:18 ► §

is allowing me to see across the veil.

01:13:24 ► §

This is the lifting.

01:13:26 ► §

You want to talk about boundary dissolution.

01:13:29 ► §

It’s one thing to get tight to your partner.

01:13:31 ► §

It’s quite another to get tight

01:13:33 ► §

to the dear departed of centuries past.

01:13:35 ► §

That’s a serious boundary dissolution

01:13:38 ► §

when that happens.

01:13:40 ► §

What these creatures want,

01:13:43 ► §

according to them, is they want us to transform our language somehow. And I don’t know what this means. I mean, at this point in the weekend and in my life, we all are on the cutting edge and nobody is ahead of anybody else.

01:14:02 ► §

Nobody is ahead of anybody else.

01:14:07 ► §

Clearly we need to transform our language because our culture is created by our language

01:14:11 ► §

and our culture is toxic, murderous, and on a downhill bummer.

01:14:17 ► §

Somehow we need to transform our language.

01:14:19 ► §

But is this what they mean?

01:14:21 ► §

That we’re supposed to condense machines out of the air in front of us? How does

01:14:27 ► §

this relate to the persistent idea promulgated by Robert Graves and other people that there is a

01:14:35 ► §

primal language of poetry, that poetry as we know it is a pale, pale thing, and that at some time in the human past, people were in command of

01:14:47 ► §

languages which literally compel belief. They compel belief because they don’t make an appeal

01:14:58 ► §

through argument or metaphor. They compel belief because they’re able to present themselves as imagery.

01:15:08 ► §

You know, William Blake said,

01:15:09 ► §

if the truth can be told so as to be understood, it will be believed.

01:15:17 ► §

And so these things have, and it’s very confusing,

01:15:22 ► §

because you wonder, you say, well, have people been doing this for thousands of years? And if so, have they always encountered this tremendous urgency on the other side? If people have been doing it for thousands of years, why is there this urgency on the part of these entities? And who exactly and what exactly are they? It appalls me, you can probably tell, that I have no patience with channeling, you know, the lords of the many rays, the divas, and, you know, there’s this whole thing going around about disincarnate intelligence and it’s

01:16:25 ► §

mostly in under the control of fairly shall we say non-rigorous thinkers but i like to think that i

01:16:34 ► §

am a rigorous thinker and yet here i am telling you that you know elf legions await in hyperspace one toke away. The difference between my rap and, you know,

01:16:48 ► §

the Findhorn folks or somebody like that

01:16:51 ► §

is that we have an operational method

01:16:54 ► §

for testing my assertion.

01:16:57 ► §

We can all smoke DMT,

01:16:59 ► §

or you can make it your business

01:17:02 ► §

to now find out about this and see for yourself and not everybody

01:17:08 ► §

agrees with me i mean some people say you know it wasn’t anything like that but some people agree

01:17:14 ► §

and i think if you get two out of ten agreeing with a rap like this then you better pay attention

01:17:20 ► §

yeah somebody it was me um you said that no amount of meditation or anything else prepares you for it

01:17:28 ► §

i mean i’ve certainly smoked a fair amount of dmt and i’ve maybe not 50 times but probably

01:17:36 ► §

approaching that and i’m still not prepared for it each time it it seems like, I mean, all the times before haven’t prepared me for

01:17:45 ► §

what I get into. Is there a point where you found that you are prepared? No, you’re never prepared

01:17:51 ► §

because in fact, and I mentioned this last night, something goes on in the DMT flash

01:18:01 ► §

that I don’t think anyone can bring back

01:18:05 ► §

there is at the core

01:18:08 ► §

of the experience something

01:18:09 ► §

is revealed

01:18:11 ► §

that is so appalling

01:18:13 ► §

that nobody

01:18:16 ► §

can bring it back

01:18:17 ► §

into ordinary reality and that’s

01:18:20 ► §

why it’s hard to understand

01:18:22 ► §

because I’ve

01:18:24 ► §

done it a number of times.

01:18:26 ► §

And every time I approach it, it scares me shitless.

01:18:30 ► §

I cannot approach it any other way.

01:18:34 ► §

And it’s physical.

01:18:35 ► §

I mean, my palms sweat.

01:18:37 ► §

I can’t hold the pipe.

01:18:38 ► §

My hand shakes.

01:18:40 ► §

I wish I hadn’t gotten myself into this situation.

01:18:43 ► §

I fear it like death itself.

01:18:46 ► §

That’s the clue, folks.

01:18:49 ► §

I think that what happens,

01:18:51 ► §

and I’ve reached this opinion by reason and rationalization,

01:18:56 ► §

not by direct experience.

01:18:58 ► §

I think that what happens at the center of the mandala of that experience

01:19:02 ► §

is that you do understand

01:19:05 ► §

that these are souls

01:19:09 ► §

you have some kind of experience

01:19:12 ► §

which converts you to this view

01:19:16 ► §

beyond a shadow of a doubt

01:19:17 ► §

I’m not saying you meet your dead grandmother

01:19:20 ► §

but it’s something like that

01:19:23 ► §

and that experience is simultaneously

01:19:26 ► §

so

01:19:27 ► §

affirming and at the same time

01:19:32 ► §

so paradigm shattering that you

01:19:35 ► §

can’t retain it

01:19:37 ► §

you return to this world with a story

01:19:41 ► §

of Jules self-transforming basketballs

01:19:44 ► §

and Fabergé eggs and a lesson in hyper-language.

01:19:49 ► §

But there is a moment, I think,

01:19:51 ► §

where you find out something truly, truly paradigm-shattering

01:19:56 ► §

that you can’t even tell yourself.

01:19:58 ► §

It’s such an appalling revelation.

01:20:01 ► §

And the only thing I can think of that would fill that bill is something about the nature

01:20:07 ► §

of life and death that you actually go under the board you find out the thing which nobody is ever

01:20:14 ► §

supposed to find out in this world and I suspect it’s what shamans know that that a shaman is a person who knows the unspeakable secret. And once you know it,

01:20:28 ► §

you know, there’s no going back. I mean, you become fey, enchanted. You’re touched by the

01:20:36 ► §

other. You now are a part of fairyland. And this gives you, I don’t know what it gives you, charisma, magical power, healing, the possibility to heal.

01:20:48 ► §

But it also sets you apart from your fellows because they don’t know from it.

01:20:54 ► §

They don’t know.

01:20:56 ► §

I mean, science can’t survive in that environment for half a minute.

01:21:01 ► §

for half a minute.

01:21:05 ► §

The entire construct of Western reason disappears into that dimension

01:21:07 ► §

like hurling an ice cube into a blast furnace.

01:21:11 ► §

You know, it just can’t survive that encounter.

01:21:15 ► §

If flying saucers were to land

01:21:17 ► §

on the south lawn of the White House tomorrow,

01:21:20 ► §

it wouldn’t change the fact that DMT

01:21:23 ► §

is the weirdest thing in the universe.

01:21:28 ► §

Yeah?

01:21:30 ► §

I haven’t done DMT yet.

01:21:33 ► §

I’m very fascinated now.

01:21:37 ► §

So once you’re describing this experience in some way,

01:21:42 ► §

which somehow I think you’re communicating to us. But now

01:21:49 ► §

after this has happened, ten minutes of time, as we know it, passed, and you were saying

01:21:56 ► §

that physically your mind is working, your emotions are working, the drug goes out of your system you’re snapped back into

01:22:06 ► §

you know

01:22:07 ► §

boring old reality

01:22:09 ► §

then what happens?

01:22:12 ► §

Do you know what I mean?

01:22:13 ► §

Do you spend the next week sort of trying to integrate

01:22:15 ► §

what the hell this is about?

01:22:17 ► §

No.

01:22:18 ► §

No, you don’t do either in most cases.

01:22:21 ► §

What you do is

01:22:23 ► §

you immediately forget.

01:22:26 ► §

Immediately.

01:22:27 ► §

So if you talk to a person five minutes after they’ve smoked DMT,

01:22:32 ► §

they’re usually into saying,

01:22:35 ► §

it was incredible, it was amazing.

01:22:38 ► §

And then you talk to them a half hour later,

01:22:41 ► §

and they say, you know,

01:22:44 ► §

it was the most incredible thing that’s ever happened to me but i

01:22:47 ► §

can’t remember anything about it and the fact that it’s so brief we tend to value things based on how

01:22:54 ► §

long they last something which only lasts two minutes once it’s over how can you say that that

01:23:01 ► §

was the most important thing that ever happened to you? I mean, it is utterly irrelevant.

01:23:06 ► §

It made no statement

01:23:08 ► §

about your life, what you should do

01:23:10 ► §

with your future, who you are,

01:23:12 ► §

where you’re going, or anything like that.

01:23:14 ► §

It was just as though reality

01:23:16 ► §

was rent, and you

01:23:18 ► §

looked into an alien

01:23:20 ► §

dimension, and then the rent

01:23:22 ► §

was sealed, and everything

01:23:24 ► §

goes back to being fine and dandy.

01:23:26 ► §

Thank you.

01:23:27 ► §

It takes a lot of effort

01:23:30 ► §

to stay focused

01:23:31 ► §

on this dimension.

01:23:33 ► §

I’m sorry, so let’s say you do that

01:23:35 ► §

and then the amnesia happens

01:23:38 ► §

and you just cannot integrate

01:23:40 ► §

anything about that vision

01:23:41 ► §

into your personality or your mind.

01:23:44 ► §

It’s like it happens

01:23:46 ► §

and it stops happening

01:23:48 ► §

and you can’t absorb it.

01:23:51 ► §

But then up, what must happen

01:23:52 ► §

is that sometime in the future

01:23:55 ► §

your curiosity is up

01:23:57 ► §

and you want to go try to get it again.

01:24:00 ► §

Well, what it did for me

01:24:02 ► §

was its evidence against certain points of view is what it is.

01:24:11 ► §

It says, you know, rationalism is just vaporized, and that never returns for you.

01:24:22 ► §

Only if you can completely suppress the experience can you ever return to ordinary rationalism.

01:24:30 ► §

I mean, you’ve just been in a place that was crawling with elves.

01:24:34 ► §

Even if that never happens again, it did happen.

01:24:38 ► §

And you from now on must take account of that in your modeling of the universe.

01:24:43 ► §

You now know that elves really exist.

01:24:47 ► §

This will make you much more interesting to your children.

01:24:51 ► §

You know, you’ve been reconverted to a belief in Santa Claus,

01:24:55 ► §

is what’s happened.

01:24:56 ► §

And now Santa’s gone back up the chimney,

01:24:59 ► §

but you’re left saying, you know,

01:25:01 ► §

God, he was really here.

01:25:03 ► §

The milk’s gone.

01:25:04 ► §

Yeah, the milk’s gone. The cookie’s gone. Yeah, the milk’s gone.

01:25:05 ► §

The cookie’s eaten.

01:25:07 ► §

What the hell?

01:25:08 ► §

A couple of questions.

01:25:11 ► §

Can you bring volition to it?

01:25:13 ► §

Do something in that place?

01:25:15 ► §

Can you decide in advance

01:25:17 ► §

that since you’ve done this more than once,

01:25:20 ► §

that you know,

01:25:21 ► §

and you describe it as though it’s the same each time, is it?

01:25:24 ► §

It’s pretty much the same, yeah.

01:25:25 ► §

Well, the other side question to that is,

01:25:27 ► §

if three people were in the room doing it together,

01:25:29 ► §

would they have, if you caught them in a period,

01:25:33 ► §

or if you caught them immediately afterward,

01:25:35 ► §

would their impressions of it be very similar?

01:25:40 ► §

I’ve sat in situations where you would turn one person on,

01:25:44 ► §

then another person, maybe do six people in the course of an evening.

01:25:49 ► §

And reactions vary.

01:25:52 ► §

But also, there’s a skill to doing it.

01:25:56 ► §

And that’s a part of the problem.

01:26:00 ► §

It’s very harsh.

01:26:03 ► §

The smoke is very harsh. The smoke is very harsh.

01:26:05 ► §

And you have to hold on to these big tokes so that if a person can’t hang on to the toke, they’re pretty much out of luck.

01:26:15 ► §

I mean, it’s a pity that it comes down to such a mechanical matter.

01:26:20 ► §

This is why the best candidates for DMT, I think, are leather-lunged hash abusers.

01:26:27 ► §

They have the lungs for it.

01:26:30 ► §

My other question to that is, you have described it as an absolute phenomenon, but what benefit is there?

01:26:40 ► §

To me it seems like the beneficial aspects arise by extrapolation

01:26:47 ► §

it teaches you

01:26:48 ► §

and this is what it taught me

01:26:50 ► §

I will never forget my first DMT trip

01:26:53 ► §

because I was such a case going into it

01:26:57 ► §

if you had known me when I was 19 years old

01:27:01 ► §

I was into Jean-Paul Sartre

01:27:04 ► §

Alfred Camus

01:27:05 ► §

Marxism

01:27:07 ► §

Freud

01:27:08 ► §

I was a jerk

01:27:10 ► §

and I came

01:27:14 ► §

down from it

01:27:15 ► §

and I said

01:27:17 ► §

I can’t believe it

01:27:19 ► §

that was all I could say for about 20 minutes

01:27:22 ► §

I was like in shock

01:27:23 ► §

I said I can’t believe it I can’t believe it. I can’t

01:27:26 ► §

believe it. Jesus, I can’t believe it. You’re listening to the Psychedelic Salon,

01:27:34 ► §

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

01:27:38 ► §

I hope that you enjoyed Terrence’s DMT rap once again. It’s been quite a while since I’ve heard that death by

01:27:45 ► §

astonishment bit, and it brought me back to a room in upstate New York during the summer of 1999

01:27:52 ► §

when I first heard him go on with such enthusiasm about his experiences on DMT.

01:27:58 ► §

And the version of it that we just heard is for sure one of his most detailed and enthusiastic,

01:28:04 ► §

I believe. The first time that

01:28:05 ► §

I heard it live, I remember that we took a break shortly after the wrap and nobody left the room.

01:28:12 ► §

All 60 of us were trying to find the guy who was rumored to have some DMT for sale.

01:28:18 ► §

And looking back now, it seems quite funny, but at the time we were almost desperate to make a

01:28:23 ► §

connection before the weekend ended.

01:28:26 ► §

And a couple of those other attendees have become lifelong friends of mine now, I should add.

01:28:31 ► §

But before I forget it, for our newest members here in the salon, our new fellow salonners,

01:28:37 ► §

I should mention that you just listened to Terrence McKenna speaking about both DMT and ayahuasca.

01:28:43 ► §

Terrence McKenna speaking about both DMT and ayahuasca.

01:28:50 ► §

And I think it’s important to keep in mind that DMT is actually the primary active psychedelic ingredient in the ayahuasca brew.

01:28:52 ► §

The chemistry is similar, but a smoked DMT session lasts anywhere from two to ten minutes,

01:28:59 ► §

say, while an ayahuasca session can generally last from four to six hours.

01:29:07 ► §

an ayahuasca session can generally last from four to six hours. And one other thought about DMT that crossed my mind when Terrence was saying the elves he saw were creating machines out of language and

01:29:12 ► §

that they were telling him to do the same thing. Now, this is a bit of a stretch, okay, but what if

01:29:20 ► §

the language was a computer language? Well, then it’s possible to create machines out of language in a virtual reality environment.

01:29:28 ► §

I don’t actually think that that’s what Terrence was saying, or the elves were saying for that part,

01:29:32 ► §

but it’s an interesting thought.

01:29:34 ► §

Well, at least it is to me.

01:29:37 ► §

And following up on the comments that we just heard Terrence make about admixture plants in some ayahuasca brews, I suggest that should you ever go to the Amazon for an authentic ayahuasca experience yourself,

01:29:51 ► §

you want to be sure to ask your ayahuasquero whether any admixture plants are being used in the brew.

01:29:56 ► §

I’ve had several of these experiences with admixtures,

01:29:59 ► §

and for me they were all very informative.

01:30:02 ► §

However, there was one time when the ayahuasquero added Datura to the brew,

01:30:07 ► §

and while I had a very transformative experience,

01:30:11 ► §

one of our other members of the circle had one of the worst times I’ve ever seen.

01:30:15 ► §

In fact, it took months to sort the whole thing out,

01:30:18 ► §

but what happened was that one of the active chemicals in Datura

01:30:22 ► §

is also what was once used for childbirth.

01:30:25 ► §

It was called, I believe, Twilight Sleep.

01:30:28 ► §

And apparently this poor man had a horrible, terrible, horrible birth,

01:30:34 ► §

and his mother had been on that drug at the time.

01:30:37 ► §

And I’ve thought about this quite a bit,

01:30:39 ► §

since my own mother had been using large doses of phenobarbital

01:30:43 ► §

to hold her epilepsy at bay

01:30:45 ► §

during the entire time that she was pregnant with me.

01:30:48 ► §

It was in my system at birth.

01:30:51 ► §

And I’ll let you mull both of those things over for yourself.

01:30:54 ► §

How’s that?

01:30:56 ► §

For now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

01:31:00 ► §

Be well, my friends.