421 - Personal Implications of a DMT Flash

Program Notes §

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“The world is magic, not a little bit, one hundred percent. Every atom from one end of this cosmos to the other is magic, magic, magic.”

“Fate has chosen you to hear about [DMT]… . If you now go ahead and live in your mundane, stock portfolio, BMW existence, it’s because you’re making a choice.”

“To go from birth to the grave without ever encountering DMT is to my mind like going from birth to the grave without ever having a sexual experience. It means you skated through life. You never got it!”

“We’re accepting a kind of society where millions and millions of people have very simple thoughts and spend all their time in a larval state imbibing manufactured data streams that come to them over the boob tube. This is not a pretty picture, actually. I mean these people are not entirely human beings.”

[A shaman] “is a creature of the Interzone. And this is the power of shaman, that they can come and go from the Interzone.”

“I think that culture is the program within the monkey species that is an attempt to make language visible.”

“At the operational level, what virtual reality is is it’s a way of showing somebody the inside of your mind.”

“People didn’t know what an ego trip was until they took LSD [in the Sixties]. There was no word in the language for that.”

“Psychedelics are like the quintessential essence of this aesthetic of the weird. Once you get to psychedelics it’s like you’ve hit the main vein of weird.”

Chemical Warfare Secrets Almost Forgotten by MD James S. Ketchum

Previous Episode §

420 - Grover Norquist at Burning Man

Next Episode §

422 - Visualizing the Psychedelic Experience

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Transcript §

00:00:00 ► §

Greetings from Cyberdelic Space.

00:00:19 ► §

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

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And since we’ve got kind of a long program

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again today, I’ll just get right to it and save my personal remarks for after we first listen to

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another part of a workshop that Terrence McKenna led in February of 1992. And we’ll pick up with

00:00:40 ► §

Terrence telling the story of what took place in his mind immediately after his first

00:00:46 ► §

DMT experience. And I said, you know, I’ve got to go back to square one. All these people I dismissed,

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all these people who say the universe is made of levels, who say there are disincarnate

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intelligences, who say that the, you know, death is not simply the yawning grave.

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I had dismissed all those people as crybabies and subsisters,

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and they said, no, the point of view that I previously dismissed

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is apparently what’s actually happening.

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So in a single experience, I was converted from naive rationalism realism reductionism to my present position

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whatever it is really all I’ve done is worked out the implications of the personal implications for

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me of the DMT flash and I’ve also tried to create linguistic models of it.

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So the worth of it

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is that it shows you

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beyond a shadow of a doubt

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that the world is made of magic.

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That’s what the world is made of.

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Not natural law,

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not interlocking cause and effect,

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not any of these things that are normally…

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The world is magic, not a little bit.

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100% every atom from one end of this cosmos to the other

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is magic, magic, magic.

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Certain concerns just die in the first 30 seconds of the DMT flash and can never be brought back to my mind.

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I’ve seen people who I considered what I call fragile.

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Some people are not good candidates for the psychedelic experience because they’ve been damaged by life in some way.

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because they’ve been damaged by life in some way.

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And so for them, boundaries shouldn’t be dissolved because their whole challenge is to keep boundaries in place.

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And I remember one case particularly,

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a woman who was a friend of mine, I really liked her,

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but I thought of her as fragile and to not somebody

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you wanted to lean on in a crisis. She smoked EMT, thrashed, moaned, rolled her eyes back,

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gave all the exterior symptoms of really having grabbed on. After about ten minutes, she sat up and said,

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it didn’t work.

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Nothing happened.

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I said, nothing happened.

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Well, you want to try again?

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No way.

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Never, ever again.

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So it did work,

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but the personality was somehow

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able to seal itself off from the implications

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because the implications quite literally would have destroyed that person.

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It was a truth they weren’t ready for.

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And I suppose it’s wonderful that DMT saves you from that.

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I felt in danger of dying from astonishment when I did it

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and I do every time I do it

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I don’t know how they keep the lid on this stuff

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I think that this is the secret that wants to be told

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I think that we are in a sense

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here involved in some kind of…

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I mean, I don’t want to lay this trip on too heavy,

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but in a sense we’re involved in a little cosmic drama here.

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Fate has chosen you to hear about this.

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If you’ve never heard of it before, you’re hearing about it now.

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Now, you don’t have to do anything with the fact that you’re hearing about it now now you don’t have to do anything with the fact

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that you’re hearing about it but you have been told at this point if you now go forward and live

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in your you know mundane stock portfolio bmw existence it’s because you’re making a choice

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because you heard from terence mckenna that there was an entirely other possibility

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you don’t have to avail yourself of it

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but I think it’s a moment

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of great import in a person’s life

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when they are told about DMT

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because it’s what everyone thinks

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is impossible

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that’s actually what it is.

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I have a question.

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Is that because the mind gives away to the inner self

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that you are seeing these things with your soul,

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or that you become your soul in a new thing?

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Well, what I don’t understand is

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why are the things you see so alien?

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I mean, you would think that

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we have 15,000 years of poetry,

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painting, song, story.

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How come there’s no tradition of this?

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How come our folk ways

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and our art and our drama

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are so utterly empty

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of an awareness of this.

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I mean, this is, to my mind, actually probably the central fact of being,

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or at least it’s as important as sexuality.

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To go from birth to the grave without ever encountering DMT is to my mind like going from birth to the grave without ever

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having a sexual experience. It means you skated through life. You never got it. You never figured

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out what it was for. And that unnerves me because I think what life is for is to figure it out.

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You know, life is some kind of an opportunity.

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Yeah.

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Okay, Terrence.

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How and from whom do you buy this stuff?

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Well, they haven’t made it easy for you.

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They’ve made it illegal.

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So that’s really the question is where do you get it

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I can’t solve all your problems

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for you

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but that’s what you need to know

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is there any place that it is legal

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in the country

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oh it’s legal in most countries

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see there isn’t enough of it around

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it’s never been a social problem

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they just made it illegal

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in the 1960s because they made everything illegal. I mean, if somebody is proposing to the DEA that a drug be made illegal, how do you decide if a drug should be made illegal if you’re of their mindset? set well the first thing you do is you um you look at emergency room admissions over the past

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10 years you say well how many people have been dragged into emergency rooms either raving or

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dying on this drug the numbers for dmt how many people in the past 15 years have been brought to emergency rooms

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zero

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nobody

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because it doesn’t last long enough

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with our health care delivery system

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it could last an hour

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and there would still be no

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you’d have to take it

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in the emergency room

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and then they’d have to run

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to keep the emergency alive

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long enough for anybody to look at it

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is there any difference between whether you get one or three

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as far as dosage

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yes there’s something you have to learn how much you need

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because some people are very sensitive

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and some people are incredibly insensitive

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and that’s why I took the time

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to describe this feeling of the air

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being pumped out of the room

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and then the appearance of this flower-like mandala

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if the flower-like mandala persists

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for longer than 30 seconds or a minute

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you’re not going to

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break through you need to sit up and ask for another toke and I tell people that

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when I turn people on to it whenever I’m in some country where it’s legal I always

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say to them at the 30 second mark I will say do you want

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another hit if you don’t

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don’t say anything you don’t have to

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do anything if you do

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you must sit up

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on your own power if you

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can’t sit up it’s my judgment

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that you’re too loaded to

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take another hit so

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it’s tricky to lead

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people into that.

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What’s the history? How long has it been around?

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Well, that’s an interesting question because as a plant, hallucinogen, DMT has been around a long

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time, but in the Amazon as a snuff and it’s what gives the visions to ayahuasca you see ayahuasca is a combinatory drug

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it’s two plants mixed together one inhibits a an enzyme system in the body called the monoamine

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oxidase system whose job is to deactivate monoamines, of which all these drugs we’re talking about are.

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And the other chemical in ayahuasca is DMT.

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So what these shaman in the Amazon are really doing

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is they are inhibiting the monoamine oxidase system,

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and that allows the DMT to be orally active.

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You see, if you were to just have some DMT

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and decide that rather than smoke it,

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you’re going to take it orally,

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nothing will happen.

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It will be destroyed in your gut

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by this system called the MAO inhibitor,

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the monoamine oxidase system.

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But if you inhibit that system,

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you can make it become orally active

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but when it’s orally active it’s much more diminished and stretched out but a very stiff

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dose of ayahuasca you can after about at the hour and 25 minute mark, on a very strong dose of ayahuasca,

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if you’re familiar with the territory,

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you can look around and say,

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my God, it’s building toward being like a DMT flash.

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It is like a DMT flash,

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except that it goes on for a lot longer, 20, 30 minutes.

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except that it goes on for a lot longer, 20, 30 minutes.

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I question whether in traditional societies anybody ever really reaches these reality obliterating levels.

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Among the Yanomamo, they make a snuff

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out of the seeds of Anadenanthra paragrena.

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And I’ve done that snuff, and it’s very painful to do

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because you have to blow a couple of tablespoons of ground toasted material up into your nostrils.

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You can’t self-administer it.

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You have to have a friend blow the blower and then you

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scream fall back salivate and by the time you’ve gotten your act together he’s got it loaded again

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for the other nostril and then if you do that after about 10 minutes of sitting and shaking your head and saying, geez, what have I done? A psychedelic state will creep over you

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a trip,

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but not the DMT flash.

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So I think it’s an interesting question.

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DMT was characterized and purified

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only in 1956

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by a Czech chemist named Sara.

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And it may be then that only since 1956 have people been able to access that tremendous flash.

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given DMT to

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well in one case

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a very well known

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Tibetan spiritual

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teacher who shall

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remain nameless

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but what he said after doing it

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was he said

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they’re the lesser lights

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what he

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meant was when you enter the

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bardo you see on the first stage of the bardo you see

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these so-called lesser lights if you go beyond the lesser lights you cut the thread that binds

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you to the physical body and you then cannot return you must head deeper into the death realm. So he said, they’re the lesser lights.

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I’ve seen it many times.

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Unusual that it should be caused by a plant,

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but there you have it.

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Yeah, Kathleen.

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When we were foragers and the DMT was in plants,

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did that affect our nervous system

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or did it have to have the MAO inhibitors

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it has to have the MAO inhibitors

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to be orally active

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although it’s a question

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why did we invent smoking in the first place

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I was thinking of it not so much as

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a hallucinogen

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but as a formative

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thing for the nervous system

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well definitely

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these things must have acted.

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You see, all these indoles, which we’ve been talking about, are drugs,

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but there are other indoles, which are growth hormones,

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sexual hormones, all kinds of stuff,

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and a lot of our physical expression

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has probably been altered by exposure to plants.

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I mean, our hairlessness.

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There are many aspects about us

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that are what is called neoteny.

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Do you all know what neoteny is?

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It’s retention of infantile characteristics

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into adulthood

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and if you look at the ratio for instance

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of our skull size to our body size

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and compare it to other monkeys

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we’re like juvenile monkeys

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even in the adult form

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we appear juvenile in our proportions our hairlessness other monkeys

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are born hairless but then they quickly grow body hair we don’t we remain we retain the juvenile

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characteristics and this is probably uh when you encounter it in other animal life it’s always assumed to be a response

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to mutational pressure

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and there may be progressive juvenileization

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going on in the human species

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if sex gets any more dangerous

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I think probably it will be eliminated

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as a method of reproduction

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and will go to vats.

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And, you know, this will further exacerbate this tendency toward neoteny,

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the way in which we permit and encourage a larval relationship to television.

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And the fact that

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the content of television is so idiotic

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they say it’s now down to being geared for the average

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11 year old, my 11 year old

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is bored to death with TV

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so this is a neotenization that is

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culturally sanctioned, we’re accepting

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a kind of society

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where millions and millions of people

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have very simple thoughts

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and spend all their time in a larval state

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imbibing manufactured data streams

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that come to them over the boob tube.

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This is not a pretty picture, actually.

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I mean, these people are not entirely human beings

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uh i mean they would i’m sure rise in holy wrath if they heard that but they never will hear it

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because it’s not going to be broadcast on any channel they watch yeah i’m confused about the

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tibetan spiritual leaders uh thing that he said was that dT? is it your understanding he saw the

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DMT elves?

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I don’t know if he saw

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the elves he was of such

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a stature that I couldn’t really

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hammer at him he pronounced

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it the lesser lights

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and I bowed my way

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out of the room

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oh because these

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yogas that these Tibetans

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are into are all designed to

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familiarize themselves with

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the after death

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state in one

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way in one possibility

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you know like the notion of

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Tibetan religion is that what life

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is for is to get ready for

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dying and that this getting ready

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for dying has to do with this metaphor of a vehicle that you’re supposed to build an after

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death vehicle so that when you die and put the key in the ignition it’s not going to chug chug chug

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and then turn over and not go because then you’re in real

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trouble you want your after-death vehicle to be well serviced and fully fueled when you need it

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because then you’re going to drive off into the unknown does that mean that those guys experience

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the same thing as others experience on dmt well what is persistently claimed for shamanism,

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and certainly Tibetan religion has roots deep in Central Asian shamanism,

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what’s claimed for shamanism is that the shaman can travel to the realms of the dead,

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that the shaman is a superhuman in a superhuman condition,

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a shaman is a superhuman in a superhuman condition,

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not entirely alive, not dead,

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but has physically transformed himself or herself into something, a creature of the interzone.

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And this is the power of shaman,

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that they can come and go from the interzone

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and how seriously we should take this

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very seriously

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because we have no technology for accessing

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these places

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there’s a lot of cultural hubris involved in all this

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we can’t imagine that any other culture

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is in possession of any information

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that we don’t have a pre-prepared file on and i think that when you spend time with these shamans

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and really get into it you finally realize western civilization is completely infantile it’s completely hung up on the surface

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it is not grounded in the dynamics

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of nature we are childish

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you know I

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have heard it said I knew

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had an Indian friend

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and he told me once he was going to return to live

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in India I said my god you’re

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going back to India it’s such a nightmare why and he said I know it’s a nightmare I hate everything

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about it except one thing and I said what’s that and he said people in the west are so simple I

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can’t stand it and this is true I mean if if you don don’t think so, go buy hash in the markets of Bombay and you will discover you are such a child. You don’t know what’s going on. You’re so easily manipulated and led, so eager to be friendly. You take everyone at face value. Someone smiles at you. You think they’re your friend.

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one at face value someone smiles at you

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you think they’re your friend

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the line I love

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which you hear occasionally in India

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and in other third world countries

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is I am your friend

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I am not like all the others

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yes special price

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welcome

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I was able to

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ask

00:21:49 ► §

formulate questions

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in this situation

00:21:52 ► §

it sounds like you

00:21:54 ► §

deduced that they may be

00:21:57 ► §

souls

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no I deduced that

00:22:00 ► §

no you can’t really

00:22:03 ► §

ask questions because

00:22:04 ► §

you can on ps ask questions because you can

00:22:06 ► §

on psilocybin

00:22:07 ► §

with other psychedelics

00:22:09 ► §

but you cannot

00:22:10 ► §

do that with

00:22:13 ► §

DMT because they know what they want

00:22:16 ► §

to talk about they only want to talk

00:22:18 ► §

about this one thing

00:22:19 ► §

about this language transformation

00:22:22 ► §

possibility they want you to do about this language transformation possibility.

00:22:26 ► §

That they want you to do.

00:22:27 ► §

They want you to do.

00:22:29 ► §

That happens for others as well?

00:22:32 ► §

Yeah, a number of people have reported it.

00:22:35 ► §

At the risk of repeating myself,

00:22:39 ► §

there is a metaphor in the natural world

00:22:43 ► §

which sheds some light on this which is um you all know that

00:22:50 ► §

octopi change color this is well understood most people think it’s because they can camouflage

00:22:57 ► §

themselves and so when they move across the reef they go orange red red, blue, green, depending on what’s behind them. This is not

00:23:06 ► §

what is happening with octopi color changes. What is happening is that they communicate with each

00:23:16 ► §

other by changing not only their colors, which they can have a very large repertoire of color changes, traveling dots, blushes, so forth. There are

00:23:28 ► §

technical terms for all of these, but also because an octopus is a mollusk, it’s a very soft-bodied

00:23:36 ► §

creature, they can fold and unfold various parts of their bodies very rapidly so they can modulate what you see so that, for instance,

00:23:46 ► §

if there’s a red spot in the equivalent of their armpit, by raising and lowering an arm very

00:23:53 ► §

rapidly, they can flash you this red spot. Well, at first pass, you just think, well,

00:24:00 ► §

isn’t that interesting? Octopi communicate by changing their shape

00:24:05 ► §

and color. But if you go back

00:24:07 ► §

and analyze it a little more closely,

00:24:10 ► §

something very profound

00:24:12 ► §

is happening here.

00:24:15 ► §

You get to it by

00:24:17 ► §

analyzing the nature of how

00:24:19 ► §

we communicate.

00:24:21 ► §

We communicate with small

00:24:23 ► §

mouth noises.

00:24:30 ► §

And we are physiologically set up to produce small mouth noises the average human being can talk for a couple of hours without showing much sign of

00:24:37 ► §

fatigue those of us who train hard can do it endlessly and what’s

00:24:46 ► §

happening with small mouth noise

00:24:47 ► §

communication is

00:24:50 ► §

an acoustical wave

00:24:52 ► §

is moving through

00:24:53 ► §

space, it’s been

00:24:55 ► §

formed by the sender

00:24:58 ► §

based on consulting

00:24:59 ► §

of an internal dictionary

00:25:01 ► §

and then I see the

00:25:03 ► §

word for

00:25:04 ► §

could you please help me, the word for could you please help me

00:25:07 ► §

the words are could you please help me

00:25:09 ► §

so they say could you please help me

00:25:11 ► §

and then the other way the acoustical wave goes across space

00:25:15 ► §

enters the ear of the intended object

00:25:19 ► §

of the communication

00:25:20 ► §

they look in their dictionary

00:25:22 ► §

and they say oh he’s asking for assistance

00:25:26 ► §

could you please help me means can I be

00:25:29 ► §

can I have assistance but now

00:25:32 ► §

what if the utterance is extremely complex

00:25:34 ► §

then the object

00:25:38 ► §

of this intended communication looks in their

00:25:41 ► §

dictionary and they say well he either

00:25:44 ► §

means that he would like to have an affair looks in their dictionary and they say well he either means

00:25:45 ► §

that he would like to have an affair with me

00:25:48 ► §

or he means he would like the name of my tailor

00:25:51 ► §

or he means that his clothes

00:25:54 ► §

cost more and you know

00:25:57 ► §

there’s ambiguity in all of this

00:25:59 ► §

and one thing we avoid doing

00:26:03 ► §

very much in ordinary speech

00:26:05 ► §

is saying to somebody,

00:26:07 ► §

what do you exactly mean?

00:26:11 ► §

Because we fake it.

00:26:14 ► §

I mean, a lot of communication is,

00:26:17 ► §

uh-huh, uh-huh,

00:26:19 ► §

and you say, well, I don’t know exactly.

00:26:20 ► §

He said, I think, I don’t know, something.

00:26:22 ► §

He wants something.

00:26:24 ► §

What’s happening with the cephalopods, the squids and the octopi,

00:26:30 ► §

is there is no ambiguity.

00:26:33 ► §

The surface of the octopus’s body is the surface of the octopus’s mind.

00:26:42 ► §

The mind changes and controls the appearance of the body. There’s no culturally sanctioned

00:26:50 ► §

dictionary. One octopus can tell what another means by looking. And the meaning is biologically

00:26:58 ► §

and genetically scripted, not culturally scripted. An octopus from thousands of miles away from where another octopus originated,

00:27:07 ► §

if they are the same species, can understand instantly what is intended.

00:27:14 ► §

So in a way, the octopus has involved a very complex linguistic system where the surface of the creature is its mind.

00:27:24 ► §

Yeah?

00:27:25 ► §

You know the book by John Steinbeck, Sweet Thursday?

00:27:27 ► §

Mm-mm.

00:27:28 ► §

You should read that book.

00:27:29 ► §

The main character, Doc, has a laboratory where he studies octopus, and he studies them

00:27:35 ► §

in order to see if he can induce apoplexy.

00:27:39 ► §

Apoplexy encephalopoidia.

00:27:41 ► §

Sounds good.

00:27:41 ► §

Encephalopoidea.

00:27:42 ► §

Sounds good.

00:27:45 ► §

You know, there are kind… To show you how important this kind of communication is to octopi,

00:27:50 ► §

the octopi evolved in the intertidal or in the circolateral zone,

00:27:56 ► §

meaning in shallow waters off of continents in reef environments.

00:28:01 ► §

But, you know, there’s a lot of life in reef environments.

00:28:06 ► §

It’s as intense as a rainforest so there’s a lot of evolutionary pressure on a on a reef environment and one strategy if you’re

00:28:14 ► §

under a lot of evolutionary pressure is to just go somewhere else go where there isn’t pressure

00:28:20 ► §

and where there isn’t pressure uh competition for food and stuff like that in the oceans is in what’s called the benthic depths, the abysses of the oceans. environments and they have retained their ability

00:28:46 ► §

to communicate with each other in these

00:28:49 ► §

zones of utter darkness

00:28:52 ► §

by evolving phosphorescent organs

00:28:55 ► §

that stud their bodies

00:28:57 ► §

so there are even octopi which have eyelid

00:29:01 ► §

like membranes over little

00:29:04 ► §

lights that they can turn on and off at will,

00:29:07 ► §

and then they can flutter these eyelid-like membranes.

00:29:10 ► §

And if you can ever see film of this

00:29:14 ► §

taken through the windows of bathyscaphes

00:29:18 ► §

and other deep ocean exploration vessels,

00:29:22 ► §

it’s pure idea.

00:29:24 ► §

The animal has disappeared idea the animal has

00:29:25 ► §

disappeared, the animal has become

00:29:27 ► §

its language, they never see anything

00:29:30 ► §

of each other but their language

00:29:32 ► §

the body and the language

00:29:34 ► §

have become the same thing

00:29:36 ► §

and I think that

00:29:38 ► §

this is

00:29:40 ► §

what

00:29:42 ► §

we are being pointed toward

00:29:43 ► §

this is what those elves in hyperspace are trying to push us

00:29:49 ► §

toward. Remember how I said they sing objects into existence and the objects themselves then become

00:29:57 ► §

kind of autonomous entities capable of singing other objects into existence. It’s that in order to get the ambiguity out of language,

00:30:08 ► §

we are going to have to go to a wider bandwidth,

00:30:13 ► §

and the wider bandwidth is visual.

00:30:16 ► §

It’s incredible that this world of nuclear powers

00:30:22 ► §

and integrated global economies and so forth and so on,

00:30:25 ► §

is held together by small mouth noises,

00:30:29 ► §

is held together by a method of communication,

00:30:32 ► §

90% of which is lost in noise and ambiguity.

00:30:36 ► §

We barely can communicate with each other,

00:30:39 ► §

and yet we have seized the tiller of planetary existence

00:30:43 ► §

and proposed to set

00:30:45 ► §

the agenda for every life form on this

00:30:48 ► §

planet from virus to grizzly bear part of

00:30:52 ► §

our I think our problem with managing

00:30:55 ► §

our situation is that we don’t have a

00:30:59 ► §

way of getting ambiguity out of our

00:31:02 ► §

languages because you can misuse ambiguity.

00:31:07 ► §

George Bush can tell us

00:31:09 ► §

that he is the environmental president,

00:31:13 ► §

that he wants a kinder, gentler America,

00:31:17 ► §

that he feels the pain.

00:31:19 ► §

I mean, you know, you would call this horseshit

00:31:21 ► §

if it weren’t so pathetic.

00:31:23 ► §

It’s, it’s, we, you know, You would call this horseshit if it weren’t so pathetic.

00:31:31 ► §

Somebody once said language was invented to lie.

00:31:36 ► §

Small mouth noise language was certainly invented to lie because it doesn’t existentially map back onto the surface of appearances.

00:31:42 ► §

onto the surface of appearances.

00:31:52 ► §

This whole, you know, fantasy or hope of telepathy lies behind a lot of psychedelic imagery.

00:31:56 ► §

Well, telepathy, when most people think about telepathy,

00:32:00 ► §

they think that they will be able to hear what you think if they could hear what

00:32:07 ► §

you think then there wouldn’t be ambiguity but in fact there would be as much ambiguity as there is

00:32:13 ► §

in spoken language because people speak as much crap to themselves as they do to other people

00:32:19 ► §

the only way you can transcend the ambiguity of language is if you turn it into something beheld.

00:32:27 ► §

And I think

00:32:28 ► §

that culture is

00:32:30 ► §

the program

00:32:31 ► §

within the monkey species

00:32:33 ► §

that is an attempt to

00:32:36 ► §

make language visible.

00:32:38 ► §

And that’s why virtual reality,

00:32:40 ► §

which we haven’t talked about too much, but which

00:32:42 ► §

somebody mentioned as we went around last

00:32:44 ► §

night, virtual reality holds great promise.

00:32:47 ► §

Because at the operational level, what virtual reality is,

00:32:53 ► §

is it’s a way of showing somebody the inside of your mind.

00:32:58 ► §

Showing somebody.

00:33:00 ► §

And notice that when we talk about language, our notions of clarity, there it is, our notions of clear speaking are all visual metaphors.

00:33:13 ► §

If you think you really understand somebody, then you say, I see what you mean.

00:33:20 ► §

Or you say, you’re completely transparent to me.

00:33:24 ► §

If somebody is eloquent, you say,‘re completely transparent to me if somebody is eloquent

00:33:26 ► §

you say he spoke clearly

00:33:27 ► §

she painted a picture

00:33:30 ► §

what this means is that we have an unconscious bias

00:33:34 ► §

in favor of the visual sense

00:33:36 ► §

it’s what our eyes tell us

00:33:38 ► §

that we believe

00:33:40 ► §

if your DMT experiences have revealed to you that the surface, the naive realism of our world, which you referred to on the first talk, is not the whole picture, right?

00:34:01 ► §

Right.

00:34:01 ► §

And it does not, in fact, communicate to us the important meaningfulness of life,

00:34:09 ► §

it does not take from us

00:34:13 ► §

the pain of existence and the fear of death

00:34:16 ► §

and all these problems

00:34:17 ► §

that all human beings have had as far as we know,

00:34:22 ► §

then why is visual communication

00:34:24 ► §

the answer to these things? Why is it impossible

00:34:27 ► §

to be deceptive communicating in a visual way? And once you have the technical problems,

00:34:33 ► §

it’s just like, you know, I personally am an artist in many different media, and I’m

00:34:39 ► §

sure a lot of people here are creative, and the great challenge of creativity is trying to make physical what it is that’s inside

00:34:49 ► §

and and the technology to do it even with computer virtual the problem with virtual reality is it’s

00:34:54 ► §

boring and it’s clumsy and it’s not very interesting place to be well it’s very young

00:35:00 ► §

it’s very young but how does how does well I think the key to the answer to your objection lies in the word naive.

00:35:10 ► §

Naive realism won’t do.

00:35:13 ► §

What we need is sophisticated realism.

00:35:16 ► §

The world is very complicated.

00:35:18 ► §

I don’t think naive anything is going to take us very far.

00:35:23 ► §

What we need is a very sophisticated analysis

00:35:26 ► §

of our situation.

00:35:29 ► §

Every artist…

00:35:31 ► §

Well, no, that’s not true,

00:35:32 ► §

because there’s music,

00:35:34 ► §

and some people say all art aspires

00:35:36 ► §

to the condition of music.

00:35:38 ► §

But to my mind, the visual arts

00:35:41 ► §

all aspire to this elimination of ambiguity

00:35:45 ► §

from communication. This is is why I suppose if we were to

00:35:49 ► §

try to create a theory of aesthetic

00:35:52 ► §

here I would argue that

00:35:55 ► §

sculpture is a superior

00:35:57 ► §

mode of communication to

00:36:01 ► §

painting let’s say because

00:36:04 ► §

sculpture has an infinite number of points of view built into it,

00:36:10 ► §

while the pictorial representation assumes a single or a very limited number of points of view.

00:36:21 ► §

What we have to do is both contact our inner reality and then clarify our tools for

00:36:30 ► §

communicating it we the culture cannot evolve faster than the language evolves because remember

00:36:39 ► §

we said last night the culture is made out of language and you know what we are doing here at esalen or what

00:36:47 ► §

you’re doing when you try to persuade people to recycle or what you’re doing when you’re trying

00:36:53 ► §

to persuade people to re-examine their attitudes towards the feminine is we’re trying to get them

00:37:00 ► §

to change their language the bad people have always understood this very clearly.

00:37:07 ► §

It’s called propaganda.

00:37:10 ► §

You know, Lenin said,

00:37:12 ► §

give me the child at age seven and I will return you the man

00:37:17 ► §

because this seems to be how it works.

00:37:21 ► §

What we need to do is clean up our language. There are terrible problems in English.

00:37:29 ► §

I mean, the subject-object relationship. At least English is gender neutral. Languages which aren’t

00:37:38 ► §

are just, you know, have carry heavy freight in that department that would be very difficult to overcome.

00:37:46 ► §

Notice that our most powerful descriptions of reality

00:37:51 ► §

are mathematical.

00:37:54 ► §

Mathematics is an artificial language

00:37:58 ► §

specifically created with the intent of eliminating ambiguity.

00:38:03 ► §

Now, the problem is we can’t all follow these mathematical languages,

00:38:08 ► §

but we probably could if we gave it more effort.

00:38:12 ► §

Yeah.

00:38:12 ► §

Terrence, vocalization and telegraphy are so miserable as tools for this all-important job of communicating thought,

00:38:30 ► §

you know, real communication.

00:38:32 ► §

I’ve often fantasized in my mind that it’s some dim, dark past.

00:38:39 ► §

This species had a power of direct communication that somehow was lost.

00:38:46 ► §

It’s sort of a babble concept.

00:38:50 ► §

It was somehow lost.

00:38:54 ► §

Probably because of the overloading of the networks,

00:38:57 ► §

that would be one hypothesis.

00:38:59 ► §

In other words, when you have too many circuits going,

00:39:03 ► §

then people have to dream up other ways of talking with each other.

00:39:08 ► §

But it’s so inefficient to talk.

00:39:10 ► §

I mean, our speech and our language is so horrible

00:39:13 ► §

that I can’t believe that this species started out with that.

00:39:18 ► §

No, I think that language was evolved in an ambiance

00:39:23 ► §

of nearly continuous psilocybin intoxication

00:39:26 ► §

and that what we call poetry

00:39:29 ► §

is in fact clear speech

00:39:32 ► §

Ursprach

00:39:34 ► §

a language so powerful

00:39:36 ► §

that its linguistic intent is directly beheld

00:39:41 ► §

if you hear it

00:39:43 ► §

and the Babel myth is a good one.

00:39:45 ► §

We have fallen into a realm of corrupted language.

00:39:49 ► §

And somehow recovering this primal language

00:39:52 ► §

is the task of saving the human world.

00:39:57 ► §

And it sounds airy-fairy.

00:40:00 ► §

It’s saying that poetry can save the planet.

00:40:03 ► §

But very powerful bardic poetry

00:40:07 ► §

of a sort that we haven’t seen for several millennia

00:40:11 ► §

well some

00:40:12 ► §

cats, dogs, etc

00:40:15 ► §

evidence the capability

00:40:19 ► §

of direct communication

00:40:20 ► §

there’s non-verbal communication

00:40:23 ► §

which is much more direct.

00:40:25 ► §

In fact, schizophrenic children believe more non-verbal communication than verbal communication.

00:40:32 ► §

A mother who says, I love you, you know, is definitely schizophrenic and double-blind

00:40:40 ► §

message.

00:40:41 ► §

And that child will believe this versus whatever comes out of the mouth.

00:40:46 ► §

So, it’s not complete.

00:40:48 ► §

It’s not

00:40:49 ► §

detailed, but we believe

00:40:52 ► §

more what’s in front of our eyes,

00:40:54 ► §

just like you were saying, but

00:40:55 ► §

and we do have it. It exists.

00:40:58 ► §

The problem is that we have

00:41:02 ► §

a drive to communicate all kinds

00:41:04 ► §

of things which can’t be done that way.

00:41:07 ► §

They’re more complex.

00:41:10 ► §

And so then we’ve created provisional languages.

00:41:13 ► §

But I agree.

00:41:14 ► §

I think that originally language was to communicate emotion.

00:41:23 ► §

This glossolalia that I did this morning

00:41:27 ► §

or whenever I did it,

00:41:28 ► §

let me do it a little bit

00:41:30 ► §

and then talk about it to make the point.

00:41:32 ► §

Yi dong huay huak si kipi pin

00:41:35 ► §

e mun di ki vi mung di de ek ang glokat.

00:41:40 ► §

Now, when you analyze that

00:41:42 ► §

and make recordings and really analyze it

00:41:45 ► §

there is syntax

00:41:46 ► §

there is syntax

00:41:48 ► §

but there’s no meaning

00:41:51 ► §

but I just did it

00:41:53 ► §

and I just did it at the speed of an ordinary conversation

00:41:56 ► §

what was happening in my brain

00:42:00 ► §

when I did it

00:42:01 ► §

if there was no meaning

00:42:03 ► §

in other words what I did is I said to myself,

00:42:06 ► §

take the meaning maker out of the loop,

00:42:10 ► §

but let the language flow.

00:42:12 ► §

Well, then from where comes the modulation,

00:42:17 ► §

the tonality, the differences?

00:42:20 ► §

Well, the only place it could possibly have come from

00:42:23 ► §

is my internal state.

00:42:26 ► §

What you just heard from me was the most honest thing I’ve said today.

00:42:32 ► §

Situation reflected in a verbal exercise that was not designed to convince you or impress you or drag you into my vision of things.

00:42:44 ► §

It was simply that’s who I was at that moment.

00:42:48 ► §

Ralph Metzner and I once had a notion

00:42:50 ► §

of giving a workshop or a weekend

00:42:54 ► §

in which half of all utterance

00:42:58 ► §

would have to be in glossolalia.

00:43:01 ► §

So that, you know, you said,

00:43:03 ► §

well, I’m a committed Marxist-Leninist

00:43:06 ► §

myself, however

00:43:08 ► §

istach sie mich

00:43:09 ► §

heuer mein

00:43:10 ► §

daftig mitinkt

00:43:12 ► §

so he’s a Marxist but he’s also this other thing

00:43:16 ► §

that’s who he is emotionally

00:43:18 ► §

then you could balance

00:43:20 ► §

it and you see

00:43:21 ► §

we suppress these

00:43:23 ► §

internal states. We create meaning as a kind of community venture, but there’s not much of us in it when we do that behavior.

00:43:52 ► §

Emotions in our language is a clue to the fact that we have put too much emphasis on nuts and bolts stuff and not enough emphasis on conveying the essence of who we are.

00:44:08 ► §

And so now we empower a special class of people called artists and their job is to convey this essence. But what we need to do is make life into art and take upon ourselves an awareness of the responsibilities that language puts upon us. We’re not going to save the world

00:44:15 ► §

or honor the feminine or do anything worthwhile until we change the way we talk about these

00:44:22 ► §

things. That’s the first step. And, you know, in any political

00:44:27 ► §

agenda, the first thing they want to do is control definitions. I mean, if you define, this is what

00:44:35 ► §

the Nazis did brilliantly. If you define someone who is Jewish as not a human being, which is what the Nazis did. They called them untermensch, the underman, subhuman.

00:44:50 ► §

So you’ve changed the reality of what this person is in your mind.

00:44:57 ► §

Now you can build ovens, deport them, put them in slave labor camps

00:45:02 ► §

because you’ve changed their essential nature by changing

00:45:06 ► §

how you speak about them. And most of what we, most of the changes we’ve allowed in language

00:45:12 ► §

have been of this negative, destructive, disempowering sort. The curse of simplification,

00:45:21 ► §

the easy answer, the glib reply. This is what our politicians, you know, they say,

00:45:26 ► §

well, you just cut the capital gains tax and it’ll be fine. Everybody knows this is malarkey. It

00:45:33 ► §

won’t be fine. But language metaphors are being misused to delude and to keep some people on top

00:45:41 ► §

and some people on the bottom. I think the reason we’re spending so much time on this

00:45:47 ► §

is because I think that what psychedelics do

00:45:50 ► §

is they catalyze new forms of language.

00:45:54 ► §

People are still…

00:45:56 ► §

The greatest leap forward in language evolution

00:45:59 ► §

that happened in my lifetime

00:46:00 ► §

was under the influence of LSD in the 1960s.

00:46:04 ► §

And people now make fun of all of that.

00:46:07 ► §

The concept of the vibes, the concept of grokking,

00:46:13 ► §

the concept of an ego trip, the concept of a put-down.

00:46:18 ► §

These are all, people didn’t know what an ego trip was until they took LSD.

00:46:24 ► §

There was no word in the language for that.

00:46:29 ► §

And notice how much energy the establishment has put into denigrating

00:46:35 ► §

the kinds of languages that evolved in the 1960s.

00:46:41 ► §

It’s penetrated everywhere.

00:46:43 ► §

It’s penetrated everywhere.

00:46:44 ► §

Well, that addresses a different issue

00:46:46 ► §

which is the meme wars

00:46:48 ► §

you all know

00:46:50 ► §

I suppose that a meme

00:46:52 ► §

is the smallest unit

00:46:54 ► §

of an idea

00:46:56 ► §

in the same way that genes

00:46:58 ► §

are the smallest units of

00:47:00 ► §

heredity, ideas are made

00:47:02 ► §

out of memes

00:47:03 ► §

any coherent notion is a meme.

00:47:09 ► §

Women should be respected.

00:47:12 ► §

That’s a meme.

00:47:13 ► §

It’s competing against the meme that women are worthless.

00:47:18 ► §

That’s another meme.

00:47:20 ► §

These two memes compete in this society.

00:47:24 ► §

These two memes compete in this society.

00:47:30 ► §

One leads to a certain, believing one of those memes leads to a certain set of consequences.

00:47:35 ► §

Believing the other meme leads to a different set of consequences.

00:47:41 ► §

Memes evolve in exactly the same way that organisms evolve.

00:47:47 ► §

Large ideological structures can be made up of thousands of memes.

00:47:51 ► §

The meme of democracy is a very complicated meme. It makes certain assumptions about literacy and voting and responsibility and so forth and so on.

00:47:59 ► §

I believe that what we’re involved in here is a meme war

00:48:02 ► §

and that the best memes will win

00:48:06 ► §

if the playing field is level.

00:48:09 ► §

That’s why we’re talking about the psychedelic experience.

00:48:12 ► §

If we don’t talk about it, it isn’t a meme.

00:48:15 ► §

It’s a private obsession.

00:48:17 ► §

It’s something underground.

00:48:20 ► §

But we bring it into competition

00:48:22 ► §

in the environment of natural selection

00:48:25 ► §

for applicable meaning when we utter it.

00:48:32 ► §

And that’s why the beginning of any social change is discussion.

00:48:37 ► §

I sort of wanted to share an experience,

00:48:40 ► §

only because it’s remarkably like what you were talking about.

00:48:45 ► §

experience, only because it’s remarkably like what you were talking about. And that is,

00:48:58 ► §

once on a suicide, I met an entity that was right on the picture plane. It was almost annoying. It was like an eel made out of some beautiful chiffon with a dog’s head, you know, kind of looking at me.

00:49:07 ► §

It’s right there on the picture plane.

00:49:10 ► §

Oh, well, that’s the dog-headed chiffon.

00:49:13 ► §

Yeah.

00:49:16 ► §

It was the fact that it was close to my face.

00:49:22 ► §

Uh-huh.

00:49:22 ► §

And the other instance was walking down a spiral staircase

00:49:28 ► §

with what looked like plants shoving things at me, you know,

00:49:33 ► §

and I thought they were rude.

00:49:35 ► §

That was my take on it, and it resonated with what you said.

00:49:39 ► §

These were psilocybin visions?

00:49:41 ► §

Ayahuasca.

00:49:42 ► §

Oh, ayahuasca.

00:49:44 ► §

Yeah, one of the things we didn’t talk about this afternoon

00:49:48 ► §

is sort of the ambiance of that DMT state.

00:49:53 ► §

What is the attitude of these tykes toward you?

00:49:58 ► §

And it’s a curious attitude.

00:50:03 ► §

They are not entirely friendly, or they are not entirely to be trusted.

00:50:10 ► §

And if you’re a graduate of Irish fairy tale literature, you know that fairies are very, very tricky.

00:50:19 ► §

That’s essentially their major characteristic.

00:50:22 ► §

And their sense of humor and their sense of comedy

00:50:26 ► §

doesn’t always dovetail very smoothly

00:50:29 ► §

with our own

00:50:31 ► §

I’ve sort of described the tykes as

00:50:34 ► §

piratical

00:50:35 ► §

when I try to remember where I’ve had

00:50:41 ► §

that feeling that I have in the DMT

00:50:44 ► §

space,

00:50:49 ► §

where in my life I ran across that feeling before. It was in Indian markets as a child,

00:50:53 ► §

buying hashish for purposes of smuggling

00:50:58 ► §

and being conducted into these situations where everyone was your friend

00:51:05 ► §

but they had led you through such a labyrinth of streets

00:51:09 ► §

and relieved you of all your gold

00:51:12 ► §

and had given you a Coca-Cola

00:51:15 ► §

and put you in a room and told you to wait

00:51:18 ► §

and said, you know, we’re your friends

00:51:21 ► §

not to worry

00:51:22 ► §

all is going to be all right and it always was and this is sort of the

00:51:30 ► §

feeling you have with these things and it came to me because at the end of this afternoon we were

00:51:36 ► §

talking about memes and i had said how these things offer you these objects I think what they are is meme

00:51:45 ► §

traders

00:51:46 ► §

in another dimension

00:51:49 ► §

and what they want

00:51:51 ► §

is ideas

00:51:53 ► §

and they sort of use the

00:51:55 ► §

technique that we would use

00:51:57 ► §

in trading with magpies

00:51:59 ► §

you know how a magpie

00:52:01 ► §

will take a piece of

00:52:03 ► §

colored glass

00:52:04 ► §

or let’s shift the metaphor, pack rats.

00:52:09 ► §

Are you all familiar with pack rats?

00:52:11 ► §

I grew up in the high mountains of Colorado where pack rats exist.

00:52:17 ► §

And pack rats are traders.

00:52:20 ► §

They will always leave something for what they take.

00:52:24 ► §

They will always leave something for what they take.

00:52:31 ► §

And so the trick is to get them to leave something more valuable than what they take. And there are numerous anecdotal stories in Colorado about leaving a 7-up cap out and getting back a diamond wedding ring in trade.

00:52:43 ► §

getting back a diamond wedding ring in trade.

00:52:47 ► §

Because the pack rats, like one way,

00:52:49 ► §

a way when I was a kid,

00:52:52 ► §

we used to hunt treasure in old ghost towns.

00:52:54 ► §

And the way we would do it is we would look for huge abandoned

00:52:57 ► §

or not abandoned pack rat nests.

00:53:00 ► §

And there in the pack rat nest,

00:53:02 ► §

you would discover watches, coins, jewelry, rings, and broken glass, bobby pins, bottle caps, you know, all the detritus.

00:53:15 ► §

So the DMT creatures are meme traders of some sort.

00:53:20 ► §

And what they’re offering, these things they’re offering are the equivalent of glass beads

00:53:26 ► §

they’re saying, this is the sort of thing

00:53:30 ► §

a quasi-intelligent primate ought to be able to respond to

00:53:35 ► §

say, how would you like this?

00:53:38 ► §

oh, wow, let me have that

00:53:40 ► §

well, just a moment

00:53:42 ► §

can’t you give us a piece of your folklore or a chunk of religious ontology

00:53:50 ► §

or a little bit of political philosophy, and then we’ll give you the Bible.

00:53:55 ► §

And so there is a trading.

00:53:58 ► §

And what I intend to talk about tonight in utter indulgence of my own ego,

00:54:06 ► §

having spent the day denouncing the ego, is an idea.

00:54:11 ► §

This is what they trade in, is ideas.

00:54:14 ► §

And they handed me a very interesting idea in trade for something which I didn’t value all that much,

00:54:26 ► §

but which I think they really got a bang out of,

00:54:30 ► §

which was I traded them the I Ching in its Wilhelm Bain’s translation,

00:54:40 ► §

and they gave me a complete hyper-dimensional map of time.

00:54:46 ► §

And they took the I Ching and twisted it around and wired it back upon itself.

00:54:52 ► §

And then handed it back to me as a gesture so that I could relate to this primitive artifact of my own culture in a new way.

00:55:04 ► §

And I don’t

00:55:05 ► §

know how much of this we can convey in

00:55:07 ► §

the absence of a computer but I’m

00:55:09 ► §

willing to give it a whirl and in the

00:55:12 ► §

in the spirit of the lady who just spoke

00:55:16 ► §

I will I will make it try to make it

00:55:21 ► §

anecdotal because Saturday night people have had enough of this stuff anyway.

00:55:29 ► §

So here’s my story.

00:55:35 ► §

In 1971, well, actually I realized after talking last night that I never introduced myself or did anything formal at all.

00:55:48 ► §

I just, the engineer was at my elbow and I began pummeling him and then that just led out into the gray wastes of heaving rhetoric and never got back to anything approaching an introduction.

00:56:06 ► §

And I’ve made allusions to my rationalism and so forth.

00:56:09 ► §

But my story is sort of like the unsinkable Molly Brown.

00:56:16 ► §

I grew up in a coal mining town in Colorado,

00:56:19 ► §

and I was always a weird kid.

00:56:25 ► §

While everybody else was playing little league baseball,

00:56:28 ► §

I was off in the dry arroyos near my home

00:56:32 ► §

digging up fossils and being maladaptive

00:56:38 ► §

in many different ways.

00:56:41 ► §

And the thing that I was always tracing or looking for

00:56:47 ► §

was a kind of iridescence

00:56:50 ► §

that adheres to certain kinds of matter

00:56:54 ► §

certain situations and even certain kinds of people

00:56:59 ► §

so it started out with a fascination with minerals, a rock hound,

00:57:09 ► §

and then that led into fossils, and that led to butterflies,

00:57:14 ► §

which was a lifelong obsession until so much pummeling with Buddhist ethics

00:57:21 ► §

made me give it up a few years ago.

00:57:23 ► §

Buddhist ethics made me give it up a few years ago. But resentfully, I must say, you know, Buddhism is fine,

00:57:30 ► §

but no one knows the pleasure of the capture of a birdwing ornithopterid in the jungles of Saram.

00:57:39 ► §

You want to talk about hard wiring in the human organism?

00:57:42 ► §

We’ve been insectivores for nine million years.

00:57:47 ► §

And there’s a thrill there in the capture of a large butterfly that,

00:57:54 ► §

well, sorry to drift off into.

00:57:59 ► §

Forgive me.

00:58:01 ► §

Iridescence.

00:58:03 ► §

Iridescence, yes.

00:58:04 ► §

And so then the butterflies sort of carried me along for a while. And then

00:58:09 ► §

when puberty hit, pineal symbolism overwhelmed everything else and I got into rocketry.

00:58:18 ► §

And, you know, the compounding of fuels and the launching of these things from the local baseball diamond and airport at incredible peril to myself and the people around me. science chauvinist. And then at a certain point, I discovered art, literature, poetry, music,

00:58:48 ► §

dance, theater, the whole of the humanities came flooding in. But the guiding aesthetic

00:58:55 ► §

was always an aesthetic of the weird. I guess I should mention that I’m a double Scorpio. But the aesthetic of the weird drove me, and nothing was

00:59:10 ► §

strange enough. I loved the science fiction films of the 1950s, and I was into the music of John

00:59:17 ► §

Cage early, early on. And of course, all of these things funneled me toward psychedelics.

00:59:26 ► §

I mean, psychedelics are like the quintessential essence of this aesthetic of the weird.

00:59:33 ► §

Once you get to psychedelics, it’s like you’ve hit the main vein of weird, you know.

00:59:39 ► §

No more do you have to closet yourself in the attic with your copy of Hieronymus Bosch.

00:59:46 ► §

You can now, you know, move out into the real thing.

00:59:51 ► §

So that propelled me to a lot of traveling.

00:59:56 ► §

And traveling, I think, is second or third in importance in the human experience.

01:00:03 ► §

I mean, I would say sexuality

01:00:06 ► §

psychedelic drugs and travel

01:00:09 ► §

this is my prescription

01:00:12 ► §

for I don’t know destroying your digestive tract

01:00:16 ► §

or something

01:00:17 ► §

and I

01:00:20 ► §

I went first to Africa

01:00:24 ► §

and then to the Seychelles Islands and then to India and lived in Japan for a while and then eventually went back to Asia.

01:00:35 ► §

And I had encountered LSD in Berkeley where I went as an undergraduate in the fall of 1965.

01:00:48 ► §

That was the other thing about me.

01:00:50 ► §

I was incredibly lucky in that a kid from a cow town in Colorado,

01:00:56 ► §

I was able to find my way to ground zero of the cultural scene.

01:01:02 ► §

I was able to put myself at the corner of Shattuck and Bancroft

01:01:06 ► §

in the fall of

01:01:08 ► §

1965

01:01:09 ► §

so the whole thing was just being

01:01:12 ► §

staged for my benefit

01:01:14 ► §

I thought

01:01:15 ► §

so then I became very interested

01:01:18 ► §

in psychedelics

01:01:20 ► §

and I actually smoked DMT

01:01:21 ► §

early in 1967

01:01:23 ► §

tremendously fortuitous moment in the history of the development of my thinking. called BZ which was an aerosol delivered tryptamine that would

01:01:46 ► §

hallucinogenic tryptamine that would be

01:01:48 ► §

delivered by an artillery shell

01:01:50 ► §

into a Vietnamese

01:01:52 ► §

village and while everybody

01:01:54 ► §

was stoned on DMT

01:01:56 ► §

our boys would come in

01:01:58 ► §

and kick butt or do whatever

01:02:00 ► §

they do and

01:02:01 ► §

a 55 gallon drum

01:02:04 ► §

of solid DMmt had been boosted off the back of a truck

01:02:10 ► §

by some uh stanford graduate students and um i’m telling you it was incredible i mean it was it’s never been that good

01:02:26 ► §

I don’t know what this stuff was

01:02:28 ► §

exactly

01:02:29 ► §

a 55 gallon drum

01:02:31 ► §

there might be

01:02:36 ► §

actually the search for the

01:02:38 ► §

treasure of the Sierra Madre

01:02:40 ► §

so I had this benchmark

01:02:47 ► §

you know aha DMT

01:02:49 ► §

and I took a fair bit of LSD

01:02:52 ► §

in those undergraduate years at Berkeley

01:02:54 ► §

but I have to confess

01:02:55 ► §

it was never easy for me

01:02:59 ► §

it always seemed like psychoanalytic Drano

01:03:03 ► §

kind of

01:03:04 ► §

and after each AS acid trip I would say my god

01:03:08 ► §

I’m not going to do that again well of course then two weeks later I would be

01:03:13 ► §

back to it but and but I had was my style has always been to be a reader and

01:03:21 ► §

to get to inform myself so I read the doors of perception and havelock ellis and

01:03:28 ► §

weir mitchell all these people i mentioned this afternoon and i what fascinated me was how they

01:03:36 ► §

insisted on visions particularly havelock ellis’s descriptions of his mescaline experiences where he says

01:03:45 ► §

architectural ruins dripping

01:03:49 ► §

with globular jewels, strange

01:03:52 ► §

statuary leering from darkened doorways

01:03:55 ► §

and I said hey I want it

01:03:57 ► §

where do we, how do I get that

01:04:01 ► §

and LSD didn’t really do it

01:04:04 ► §

for me although my most satisfying LSD trips, and this is

01:04:08 ► §

just maybe a practical suggestion, were in the presence of good hashish. Hashish seems to be able

01:04:17 ► §

to pull the pure translucency of LSD toward a much crazier, more psychedelic, more mushroom-like place, at least for me.

01:04:30 ► §

So then I went to India and I knocked around for a while and I quickly became incredibly disillusioned with all of that.

01:04:40 ► §

I mean, I don’t know, folks.

01:04:43 ► §

Everybody has different experiences and you can only judge your own path. But I just thought it was the most outrageous con that has ever come down the pike. going on but it has been so enfolded by priestcraft and dogma and class consciousness and

01:05:08 ► §

and everybody’s out to con everybody else and there you are what do you know i mean these people

01:05:16 ► §

have been at this for a thousand years and you fly in from malibu sugar and money heavy into their

01:05:26 ► §

midst well they know just exactly

01:05:28 ► §

how to turn you every way but loose

01:05:30 ► §

and eventually all you

01:05:32 ► §

ask is that they turn you loose

01:05:34 ► §

you know

01:05:35 ► §

now I know there are people

01:05:38 ► §

for whom this message is

01:05:40 ► §

unwelcome who are

01:05:41 ► §

within this room this evening

01:05:44 ► §

but I’m not knocking

01:05:45 ► §

Indian spirituality I think that there

01:05:49 ► §

is a great wisdom

01:05:51 ► §

about how to live

01:05:54 ► §

that these world religions have accumulated

01:05:58 ► §

the problem was I was 23

01:06:00 ► §

years old and I wasn’t interested in wisdom

01:06:04 ► §

on how to live I was interested in how do you wasn’t interested in wisdom on how to live.

01:06:05 ► §

I was interested in how do you get as loaded as possible

01:06:08 ► §

and then be able to talk about it.

01:06:12 ► §

So I went through all these experiences

01:06:17 ► §

and was abandoned by the love of my life

01:06:22 ► §

and all kinds of things happened.

01:06:24 ► §

And eventually I decided that the answer lay in the Amazon

01:06:28 ► §

and so in late 1970

01:06:33 ► §

I had been living in Vancouver, British Columbia

01:06:37 ► §

I couldn’t enter the States

01:06:39 ► §

because I had a price on my head

01:06:41 ► §

not much of one

01:06:43 ► §

but an uncomfortable situation to be in so then I

01:06:48 ► §

went to the Amazon for the first time with my brother and a couple of friends who came with

01:06:56 ► §

me from the states and then we quickly made common cause with a woman down there, and she came with us.

01:07:05 ► §

So it was two women and three guys,

01:07:09 ► §

and we were considering that I was the oldest

01:07:16 ► §

and I was 25 years old.

01:07:18 ► §

As I look back on it,

01:07:20 ► §

we were an incredibly serious and well-informed group

01:07:24 ► §

of 22 through 25-year-olds.

01:07:29 ► §

And our intent, we had all graduated from the school of DMT.

01:07:35 ► §

We were all post-revolutionary Berkeley communard types. and we had collectively decided that the only hope lay in somehow getting into the DMT flash

01:07:50 ► §

for longer than a minute to a minute and a half

01:07:53 ► §

and that the strategy for doing this must be then to go to the Amazon

01:07:58 ► §

and explore these psychoactive drugs and the one that we were interested in

01:08:05 ► §

is one that even

01:08:08 ► §

today has yet to become

01:08:10 ► §

an item on the Malibu

01:08:11 ► §

consciousness circuit

01:08:14 ► §

a drug called

01:08:15 ► §

Ukuhe

01:08:16 ► §

it’s used only by

01:08:20 ► §

the Witoto, Bora

01:08:21 ► §

and Muinani tribes

01:08:23 ► §

of the lower Putumayo of

01:08:25 ► §

Camasari Amazonas in

01:08:27 ► §

Colombia. Very

01:08:29 ► §

limited

01:08:30 ► §

geographic area in a

01:08:33 ► §

completely remote

01:08:35 ► §

part of the Amazon.

01:08:37 ► §

And what was interesting to us

01:08:39 ► §

was the anthropological

01:08:41 ► §

reports were that

01:08:43 ► §

they rolled it up, it was the resin of a tree, and that they rolled it up,

01:08:46 ► §

it was the resin of a tree,

01:08:49 ► §

and that they rolled it up into little pills,

01:08:51 ► §

and that they took the little pills,

01:08:53 ► §

and then they would lie in their hammocks,

01:08:56 ► §

and they would speak to the little men.

01:08:59 ► §

And so we said, this has got to be it.

01:09:03 ► §

And Dick Schultes, Richard Evans Schultes of Harvard, had already published on the chemistry of Ukuhe, and it was definitely contained DMT.

01:09:08 ► §

So we said, okay, these people have found the way into what we then called the beta level, just for shorthand.

01:09:19 ► §

So the way into the beta level was to be achieved by Ukuhe.

01:09:23 ► §

into the beta level was to be achieved by Ukuhe.

01:09:26 ► §

So we put together this expedition and we descended the Putumayo River,

01:09:31 ► §

which is the border between Colombia

01:09:33 ► §

and Ecuador and Peru,

01:09:37 ► §

to a place called San Jose del Encanto

01:09:40 ► §

on the Rio Higara Paranal,

01:09:42 ► §

which flows into the Putumayo there.

01:09:45 ► §

And at that point, it’s a 120-kilometer overland five-day walk

01:09:51 ► §

to a remote mission called La Chorrera.

01:09:56 ► §

And most places in the Amazon are history-less,

01:10:02 ► §

but La Chorrera had a very dark history behind it, which I didn’t really

01:10:09 ► §

know at the time, and probably very few people in this room have ever heard of or know anything

01:10:16 ► §

about what’s called the Putumayo rubber horror. What this was, was a rehearsal for some of the for Hiroshima Auschwitz you name it it went on

01:10:31 ► §

from 1912 to 15 in the Amazon when in a frantic effort to get natural rubber to fight the First World War, British banks bankrolled an episode of genocidal brutality

01:10:50 ► §

that is remarkable both for the depth of the horror

01:10:55 ► §

and for how thoroughly it’s been completely forgotten.

01:10:59 ► §

And what they did, these British banks,

01:11:01 ► §

is they financed this Peruvian mafia called the House of Arana

01:11:06 ► §

to basically enslave Indians over a vast area of the Amazon and force them to extract the natural

01:11:16 ► §

rubber under pain of death. And there are endless stories of the atrocities people had the soles of their feet

01:11:26 ► §

removed by machete if they didn’t

01:11:29 ► §

meet the rubber quotas

01:11:32 ► §

and just nightmare after nightmare

01:11:35 ► §

if you want to read about it there’s

01:11:37 ► §

the British Royal High Commission under

01:11:40 ► §

Roger Casement

01:11:42 ► §

and that was another story you see Roger Casement and that was another story

01:11:45 ► §

you see Roger Casement was the last man hung

01:11:48 ► §

for homosexuality by the British Crown

01:11:50 ► §

he had been the British Council General in Rio de Janeiro

01:11:54 ► §

and had exposed this rubber

01:11:58 ► §

atrocity and all the collusion

01:12:01 ► §

of British banks and stuff like that

01:12:03 ► §

but a few years later, he expressed Irish sympathies,

01:12:08 ► §

sympathies with the Easter Rising of 1919,

01:12:11 ► §

and immediately the Foreign Office came forward with love letters

01:12:16 ► §

between him and Parnell, the Irish revolutionary,

01:12:21 ► §

and he was hung for being a homosexual.

01:12:23 ► §

revolutionary and he was hung for being a homosexual but anyway

01:12:26 ► §

La Charrera had this very dark history

01:12:29 ► §

of these rubber atrocities

01:12:31 ► §

well we rolled in there

01:12:34 ► §

and immediately

01:12:37 ► §

there began the unfolding

01:12:40 ► §

over just about a three week period

01:12:43 ► §

a very short length of time,

01:12:46 ► §

from the 27th of February 1971 until the 22nd of March,

01:12:53 ► §

so a period of just under four weeks.

01:12:57 ► §

It was like the doorway was standing open.

01:13:02 ► §

All rational expectation had to be put behind

01:13:06 ► §

it was as though our whole lives

01:13:08 ► §

had built to this

01:13:10 ► §

moment and what was

01:13:12 ► §

what we

01:13:14 ► §

thought was a quest for an

01:13:16 ► §

obscure orally active

01:13:18 ► §

tryptamine drug

01:13:19 ► §

it turned out it was more as though

01:13:22 ► §

something, something which had

01:13:24 ► §

been with us from the cradle,

01:13:27 ► §

actually lured us to this extremely remote place where there was no way out, no radio, no communication of any sort,

01:13:36 ► §

lured us to this place to then begin this series of unfolding ideas.

01:13:46 ► §

And these ideas that were released in that three-week period

01:13:50 ► §

are basically all I’ve ever worked with.

01:13:54 ► §

I haven’t had an original thought since March of 1971, essentially.

01:13:59 ► §

It’s just been endless recension and reworking of what happened there.

01:14:05 ► §

Well, what happened was taking a lot of mushrooms and being in this incredibly natural, beautiful, low-toxin environment.

01:14:19 ► §

I mean, there was barely even radio waves in this place.

01:14:23 ► §

It was so remote.

01:14:31 ► §

It was like our minds began to dissolve back into the order of nature.

01:14:37 ► §

And we began to discover what the order of nature actually is.

01:14:49 ► §

And it took the form of an idea, which my brother, Dennis, who’s the pharmacologist of the gang although he wasn’t at the time he has gone on to become the person he most was before he studied the subject now he

01:14:57 ► §

is a molecular biologist research pharmacologist and drug designer then he was a 21 year old kid with a rave

01:15:05 ► §

but he proposed

01:15:07 ► §

that there was a way to take

01:15:10 ► §

these psychedelic drugs

01:15:12 ► §

and to use sound

01:15:14 ► §

to cause

01:15:16 ► §

a small number of these

01:15:18 ► §

drug molecules to

01:15:20 ► §

permanently bond

01:15:22 ► §

into the DNA

01:15:23 ► §

the term for this is intercalate.

01:15:27 ► §

And it’s known now, although it wasn’t known then,

01:15:31 ► §

that many drugs do this.

01:15:34 ► §

Many drugs do intercalate.

01:15:36 ► §

You all know how DNA is a double helix

01:15:40 ► §

with nucleotide rungs on the ladder.

01:15:45 ► §

Well, certain molecules, especially certain drug molecules,

01:15:49 ► §

can slide right in between the rungs of that ladder,

01:15:53 ► §

and without imparting any physical deformation to the molecule,

01:15:58 ► §

they can change its properties.

01:16:02 ► §

In fact, this may be how psychedelic drugs

01:16:05 ► §

work

01:16:06 ► §

now we’re at the edge of known

01:16:10 ► §

physiology and neurophysiology

01:16:13 ► §

when we talk like this

01:16:15 ► §

one of the great puzzles of

01:16:18 ► §

biology or human biology

01:16:21 ► §

is the persistence of memory

01:16:24 ► §

in other words

01:16:26 ► §

it’s said that every molecule in your body

01:16:30 ► §

is cycled within a five year period

01:16:35 ► §

that six years ago

01:16:38 ► §

there wasn’t a single atom in your body

01:16:41 ► §

that is now in your body

01:16:43 ► §

the form persists

01:16:44 ► §

but the matter is traded in and out

01:16:47 ► §

except in one case which is the neurons do not trade out the neurons that you’re born with are

01:16:59 ► §

the neurons that you die with so then the problem here is memory

01:17:05 ► §

you can be 70 years old

01:17:10 ► §

and have an absolutely crystal clear memory

01:17:14 ► §

of your first day of attending school

01:17:18 ► §

in that red brick schoolhouse

01:17:20 ► §

65 years ago

01:17:23 ► §

okay

01:17:24 ► §

conservatively seven times every molecule in your body has been swapped out

01:17:34 ► §

so where has this memory been all this time that you can pull it up with perfect clarity. This is a great mystery of metabolism, unsolved to this day. There are

01:17:47 ► §

several possibilities. One possibility is that memories are not located in the body at all,

01:17:55 ► §

although suggesting this is no magic bullet. It raises a number of questions, probably as

01:18:03 ► §

difficult to solve as the original question

01:18:06 ► §

for which this was proposed as a

01:18:08 ► §

solution. Okay, what

01:18:09 ► §

are the other possibilities?

01:18:11 ► §

The memories must be

01:18:13 ► §

stored then in the

01:18:15 ► §

non-degrading part of the

01:18:17 ► §

body. The non-degrading

01:18:20 ► §

part of the body is the neural

01:18:22 ► §

DNA. The cell

01:18:24 ► §

nuclei of neurons

01:18:25 ► §

don’t change within your

01:18:28 ► §

lifetime. Well,

01:18:29 ► §

so then you take this idea

01:18:32 ► §

to an orthodox

01:18:34 ► §

molecular biologist or

01:18:37 ► §

neurophysiologist or geneticist

01:18:40 ► §

and they say, well, this is just bunk.

01:18:42 ► §

I mean, in the first place, you don’t

01:18:43 ► §

understand the concept information.

01:18:46 ► §

The kind of information which is stored in DNA

01:18:50 ► §

is sequences of nucleotides which code for protein.

01:18:55 ► §

To confuse that with an image of your great-grandmother’s face

01:19:00 ► §

is to just, you know, have such a mush of categories

01:19:05 ► §

that it’s hopeless to even talk to you.

01:19:08 ► §

Okay, so that destroyed the supposition,

01:19:11 ► §

but it didn’t solve the problem of memory, yeah.

01:19:15 ► §

What about the possibility that what happens

01:19:17 ► §

when you remember that schoolhouse 65 years ago,

01:19:22 ► §

that you aren’t remembering it,

01:19:23 ► §

you are remembering the last time you

01:19:25 ► §

remembered it. That you only actually remembered that schoolhouse once, and then every time

01:19:30 ► §

after that all you remember is the last time you remembered it.

01:19:32 ► §

But what if you haven’t remembered it for 50 years? I mean, this happens.

01:19:38 ► §

But I’m suggesting that you’re not remembering it each time, you’re only remembering

01:19:44 ► §

a snapshot of it.

01:19:45 ► §

You remember the last time you remembered it.

01:19:48 ► §

But what if that was more than

01:19:49 ► §

that length of time ago?

01:19:51 ► §

Yeah, that doesn’t solve this problem

01:19:54 ► §

of how is the memory

01:19:55 ► §

trace able to persist.

01:19:58 ► §

Well, so

01:19:59 ► §

Dennis’ notion

01:20:01 ► §

was, he said

01:20:04 ► §

that some form of superconductivity must be involved.

01:20:09 ► §

Now, this was 1971.

01:20:11 ► §

Superconductivity was not known to occur more than three-tenths of a degree above zero absolute.

01:20:18 ► §

He said, no, there must be room temperature superconductivity going on in the DNA.

01:20:25 ► §

This must be how the DNA preserves information.

01:20:30 ► §

Now, if you know anything about superconductivity,

01:20:33 ► §

it is the perfect physical phenomenon to use for preserving information

01:20:42 ► §

because no information degrades

01:20:45 ► §

in a superconducting circuit

01:20:47 ► §

say you have a ring of supercooled gold

01:20:51 ► §

and you impart an electric current

01:20:54 ► §

to this ring

01:20:55 ► §

that current, barring interruption

01:20:59 ► §

of the superconducting state

01:21:01 ► §

will circle that gold ring with zero resistance for eternity.

01:21:08 ► §

Now, the only thing which can cause the superconducting phenomenon to cease

01:21:13 ► §

is if a high energy source overwhelms the superconductivity,

01:21:20 ► §

comes in from the outside and disrupts it. Now think about the problem that nature faces

01:21:27 ► §

with the genetic machinery.

01:21:30 ► §

The key to life is error-free copying.

01:21:36 ► §

Wherever there’s error, then there becomes mutation

01:21:40 ► §

or problem or incompatibility.

01:21:43 ► §

So all of the strategies of genetic preservation of information

01:21:48 ► §

seek to maximize the absence of error.

01:21:52 ► §

So the perfect mechanism for doing this

01:21:55 ► §

would be a superconducting mechanism.

01:21:59 ► §

Now you see the major cause of mutation in the natural environment

01:22:04 ► §

is cosmic radiation,

01:22:06 ► §

ambient cosmic rays, high-energy particles that smash into the genome,

01:22:13 ► §

physically collide with the DNA and break the bonds

01:22:18 ► §

and disrupt the message so that it can’t be copied.

01:22:23 ► §

the message so that it can’t be copied.

01:22:30 ► §

Superconductivity would be the natural medium to retard this process.

01:22:39 ► §

So Dennis’s notion was that the DNA was a kind of superconducting storage device and that in fact what we call the Jungian unconscious or the racial memory

01:22:44 ► §

or the genetic memory

01:22:46 ► §

could be tapped into

01:22:48 ► §

and that what a drug trip is

01:22:52 ► §

is a neurotransmitter

01:22:55 ► §

that competes with serotonin

01:22:57 ► §

that then broadcasts

01:23:01 ► §

off this genetic memory bank

01:23:03 ► §

a slightly different slice of the catalog.

01:23:08 ► §

Serotonin broadcasts are the equivalent of traffic and weather reports,

01:23:14 ► §

where it tells you how to get around in the world and where not to go and how to avoid problems.

01:23:20 ► §

If you swap out the serotonin channel for the psilocybin channel,

01:23:25 ► §

suddenly it’s the equivalent of Pacifica radio.

01:23:29 ► §

It’s running philosophy discussions and classical music from another planet, you see,

01:23:35 ► §

because the efficiency and the emphasis of these neurotransmitters is different.

01:23:41 ► §

neurotransmitters is different well so

01:23:43 ► §

we went through

01:23:46 ► §

a series of startling

01:23:48 ► §

revelations

01:23:50 ► §

and experiences

01:23:52 ► §

using this idea

01:23:54 ► §

because he was dead serious about

01:23:56 ► §

doing this and decided

01:23:58 ► §

that I would be the likely candidate

01:24:00 ► §

for what he called

01:24:01 ► §

hypercarbolation

01:24:03 ► §

and that you know we would

01:24:06 ► §

saturate me with drug molecules and then

01:24:09 ► §

he would he knew how to

01:24:12 ► §

do the thing to make an ordinary

01:24:14 ► §

trip turn into the forever

01:24:17 ► §

trip by locking these molecules

01:24:21 ► §

into their bond sites oh and that’s

01:24:24 ► §

the piece of the puzzle that I didn’t explain

01:24:26 ► §

that you might not realize

01:24:27 ► §

when a molecule is superconducting

01:24:31 ► §

I’m sorry, when a molecule is at 0 degrees

01:24:35 ► §

absolute, it becomes superconducting

01:24:39 ► §

so if you can cool a molecule

01:24:42 ► §

to that level, it will immediately bond permanently to whatever is physically nearby.

01:24:50 ► §

So Dennis said what you do is you saturate your body with these drug molecules

01:24:57 ► §

and then using a complex theory of harmonic canceling,

01:25:03 ► §

which I won’t regale you with this evening

01:25:05 ► §

he thought there was a way to

01:25:07 ► §

generate sound

01:25:09 ► §

that would affect a

01:25:11 ► §

very small number of these

01:25:13 ► §

drug molecules and cause

01:25:15 ► §

them actually to super

01:25:17 ► §

conductively bond into

01:25:19 ► §

the DNA and then

01:25:21 ► §

the trip would be

01:25:23 ► §

permanent, the trip would be scripted into the genome or at least for

01:25:29 ► §

the life of the organism and he suggested that if you make the DNA superconducting in this way that

01:25:35 ► §

eventually death is no problem it’s just sort of like a shedding and you go into the rivers and

01:25:42 ► §

the water and the air and you become very tiny.

01:25:46 ► §

You become the size of your DNA nucleus.

01:25:51 ► §

Well, I thought that this was a very highly unlikely notion.

01:25:56 ► §

So unlikely that since he was so gung-ho to try it, the best thing to do would be to just let it rip.

01:26:03 ► §

to try it, the best thing to do would be to just let it rip.

01:26:08 ► §

And if there was something there, that would be interesting,

01:26:12 ► §

but that I was willing to bet dollars to donuts against it.

01:26:17 ► §

Well, he set up the experiment, he did the experiment,

01:26:24 ► §

and he had made very extravagant and inflated predictions about what would happen.

01:26:26 ► §

He thought that you would literally give birth to your mind as a physical substance.

01:26:34 ► §

I don’t know whether it would flow out of your nose or where it would come from,

01:26:38 ► §

but he thought that there was a kind of superconducting, hyper, translinguistic matter, he called it.

01:26:51 ► §

He thought there was a way to dissolve the boundaries between matter and spirit

01:26:56 ► §

and create an obsidian fluid that would be obedient to your own imagination,

01:27:04 ► §

that would in fact be you

01:27:06 ► §

you would just preserve your body

01:27:09 ► §

as a convenient reference point

01:27:11 ► §

but you would actually become this stuff

01:27:15 ► §

I’m telling you

01:27:18 ► §

so I thought

01:27:21 ► §

sure, so try it.

01:27:26 ► §

What’s to lose?

01:27:27 ► §

Yeah, what’s to lose?

01:27:29 ► §

We didn’t come all this way for nothing.

01:27:32 ► §

You say you know what you’re doing.

01:27:34 ► §

Nobody else has a clue, so go for it.

01:27:39 ► §

Well, what happened was not what he predicted but not nothing

01:27:46 ► §

and that was

01:27:48 ► §

the great puzzlement

01:27:49 ► §

of this experience because

01:27:51 ► §

what happened was

01:27:54 ► §

immediately

01:27:56 ► §

after this

01:27:58 ► §

procedure was carried out

01:28:00 ► §

I could tell that something

01:28:03 ► §

had changed in me

01:28:06 ► §

and it was very hard

01:28:08 ► §

it took me a few hours to figure out what it was

01:28:10 ► §

and what it was was it was though a switch

01:28:14 ► §

had been thrown

01:28:15 ► §

and I began to understand

01:28:19 ► §

that’s all it was

01:28:21 ► §

Whitehead defines understanding as the apperception of pattern as such.

01:28:30 ► §

And suddenly I began seeing things very differently.

01:28:36 ► §

I began to see the relationships between things on one level and among levels.

01:28:44 ► §

And I stopped sleeping

01:28:47 ► §

I didn’t sleep for 11 days

01:28:51 ► §

effortlessly

01:28:53 ► §

and every night during this 11 days

01:28:57 ► §

in the late evening I would just become

01:28:59 ► §

very very impatient for all these people

01:29:02 ► §

to go to bed, my companions, because the chatter of the

01:29:08 ► §

camp would interrupt my thoughts. And what I just wanted to do was I would just go in the jungle and

01:29:15 ► §

I would just put my hand on a tree and I would just stand and think and think and think and think

01:29:22 ► §

and think. And it was this endless cascade

01:29:25 ► §

it was not like a psychedelic trip

01:29:27 ► §

there was no hallucination

01:29:28 ► §

there was simply this unfoldment

01:29:32 ► §

and it was like as though I was just filled to overflowing

01:29:37 ► §

with gnosis

01:29:38 ► §

I would sit down on the ground

01:29:41 ► §

and begin thinking

01:29:43 ► §

and I would lose myself in my thoughts and when I would come

01:29:48 ► §

back to my situation I would look down in front of myself and see that while I had been thinking

01:29:55 ► §

my hands had built a fire out of small sticks it was as though everything was cognitive activity.

01:30:06 ► §

Dennis went what would be conventionally called a psychotic episode,

01:30:14 ► §

but it wasn’t a typical psychotic episode.

01:30:18 ► §

It was a kind of turning inside out so that he became

01:30:25 ► §

he in a single moment

01:30:30 ► §

after the hypercarbolation

01:30:31 ► §

it was like he ended up at the other end of the universe

01:30:34 ► §

turned inside out and headed backwards

01:30:38 ► §

and over the next 14 days

01:30:41 ► §

he came through a progressive narrowing of his um the what he was identifying

01:30:51 ► §

with so that first it was the whole universe then it was the galaxy then the solar system then each

01:30:59 ► §

of the planets moving in then all life on earth then all mammals

01:31:05 ► §

then all human beings

01:31:06 ► §

then all Irish

01:31:08 ► §

then finally all the McKenna’s there ever were

01:31:11 ► §

and then finally the question was

01:31:13 ► §

was he him or me

01:31:14 ► §

and then he got that sorted out

01:31:17 ► §

finally and then he was fine

01:31:19 ► §

shaken but fine

01:31:21 ► §

we’ve now

01:31:23 ► §

reached the 22nd of March, 1971.

01:31:26 ► §

And I was just, I couldn’t talk to anybody.

01:31:32 ► §

I was in a very, very, very, very strange place.

01:31:38 ► §

I mean, things went on, well, just as an example,

01:31:43 ► §

because there wasn’t much of this 3d stuff that you could you could

01:31:47 ► §

wrap your mind around but everything was teaching me everything had a message for me

01:31:56 ► §

and i would go out into the jungle and i would uh i would raise my arms above my head and I would call the butterflies into me out of the jungle.

01:32:09 ► §

And they would come, first by dozens and then by hundreds.

01:32:16 ► §

And I would stand there and here’s how the thought progression would go.

01:32:20 ► §

would go I would call the butterflies in

01:32:24 ► §

and then I would

01:32:26 ► §

it would move me

01:32:29 ► §

to tears

01:32:31 ► §

and so there I am standing

01:32:33 ► §

covered with butterflies

01:32:35 ► §

tears of joy streaming down my face

01:32:39 ► §

and streaming down my face

01:32:41 ► §

and streaming down my face

01:32:43 ► §

and finally I begin thinking, so now what?

01:32:49 ► §

And then I think, ah, the people back at the camp who doubt me,

01:32:56 ► §

those bastards, wait till they see this.

01:33:00 ► §

So then I would go to the camp,

01:33:02 ► §

and I was smiling the tiny smile that only Buddhas can manage.

01:33:07 ► §

And I would invite them into the jungle to see something unannounced.

01:33:12 ► §

And so they would say, well, I don’t know, you’re just, all right, we’ll go.

01:33:18 ► §

So then we would go into the jungle and I would raise my hands above my head

01:33:22 ► §

and I would call the butterflies in, and none would come.

01:33:28 ► §

And these people would just say,

01:33:30 ► §

Oh, God.

01:33:32 ► §

It’s just, it’s getting worse and worse and worse.

01:33:37 ► §

Your brother is nuts.

01:33:39 ► §

You have delusions of grand…

01:33:42 ► §

This is pathetic.

01:33:43 ► §

I mean, this is a mind in wreckage this is the green hell

01:33:48 ► §

this is the thing we feared the most you know and so eventually and any of you who are self-diagnosed

01:33:57 ► §

as schizophrenic will agree with me on this i’m sure the key to surviving schizophrenia in one piece and avoiding massive intervention

01:34:07 ► §

by the mental health care authorities

01:34:09 ► §

is shut up

01:34:11 ► §

shut up about it

01:34:14 ► §

do not talk about it

01:34:16 ► §

of course you can raise the dead and heal the sick

01:34:21 ► §

and divine distant events

01:34:23 ► §

but just shut up about it or you’re not

01:34:26 ► §

going to make it through well eventually everybody else sort of re-negotiated themselves back to some

01:34:36 ► §

kind of reality my brother flew back to the states and i was uh in a sense, left in the Amazon to mull all this.

01:34:48 ► §

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,

01:34:51 ► §

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

01:34:56 ► §

Well, Terrence, now you have left a great many of us to mull over all of this,

01:35:02 ► §

and along with mulling over all of the strange and difficult trips we’ve had ourselves. Thank you. questions that I think about every once in a while, but to tell the truth, it always freaks

01:35:25 ► §

me out a bit when I think about it. If you’ve ever had a DMT experience and are somewhat familiar

01:35:31 ► §

with the place that you seem to be in when you smoke it, not to mention the entities that you

01:35:36 ► §

encounter there, well, if you’ve been there then, you know that it’s an experience unlike any other you’ve probably had. Now, think about this for a moment.

01:35:46 ► §

Where is that place?

01:35:49 ► §

It’s right here.

01:35:50 ► §

It has to be.

01:35:51 ► §

I mean, your body doesn’t go anywhere,

01:35:53 ► §

and yet you smoke a little DMT and you’re immersed in that world,

01:35:57 ► §

surrounded by it.

01:35:59 ► §

Maybe we are now.

01:36:00 ► §

Or not.

01:36:01 ► §

I really don’t know.

01:36:03 ► §

But it kind of freaks me out when I think that perhaps those tricky little elves could be sitting right here on my desk and laughing at me right now.

01:36:12 ► §

Well, getting on with the program, I also realize that you already knew Terrence’s story of his youth and the adventures at La Charrera,

01:36:21 ► §

but each time he tells it, there are slight variations that I find fascinating, Thank you. There’s been a significant amount of work done in the field of psychedelic chemistry and molecular biology since then,

01:36:46 ► §

so be careful about repeating some of the scientific things that Terrence was talking about,

01:36:51 ► §

because, well, there’s a good chance that not everything he believed to be so at the time is still considered true.

01:36:57 ► §

Maybe some of our fellow slauners can add a few thoughts about this in the program notes,

01:37:02 ► §

which, as you know, you can get to via psychedelicsalon.us. As I was listening with you to Terrence speaking in the early part of this talk,

01:37:11 ► §

it finally struck me what it is about him that has always been so compelling to me.

01:37:16 ► §

It was during his octopus rap just now that it struck me. You see, Terrence never spoke from

01:37:21 ► §

notes, and his talks were led by the questions from the audience.

01:37:32 ► §

So going into this talk, he had no previous notion that he’d be speaking about the technical terms for the ocean’s various depths,

01:37:35 ► §

along with a bunch of scientific terms about octopi.

01:37:43 ► §

In a way, I’m now thinking of Terence’s mind as what big data has now become with the aid of a web phone,

01:37:45 ► §

but Terence did it on the natch.

01:37:50 ► §

Also, that was the part of this talk where Terence was stressing the fact that we need to get away from communicating with just using small mouth noises

01:37:55 ► §

and evolve a visual language instead.

01:37:58 ► §

And he went on to say that, and I quote,

01:38:01 ► §

I think that culture is the program within the monkey species

01:38:05 ► §

that is an attempt to make language visible.

01:38:08 ► §

Well, it may be a small step in that direction,

01:38:12 ► §

but remember the old saying about a picture being worth a thousand words?

01:38:16 ► §

How many pictures on average do you think are conveyed

01:38:19 ► §

in, say, an hour of YouTube videos?

01:38:22 ► §

Did you know that a 100 hours of new video

01:38:25 ► §

was being uploaded to YouTube every minute?

01:38:29 ► §

And that last year there were over 6 billion hours

01:38:32 ► §

of video watched on YouTube?

01:38:35 ► §

I’ll let that sink in for just a moment.

01:38:38 ► §

I’d also like to mention just a little something

01:38:41 ► §

about Terrence’s reference to the U.S. Army’s work

01:38:44 ► §

with the drug

01:38:45 ► §

BZ. If you’ve been with us here in the salon for a while, you may remember me speaking of my friend

01:38:51 ► §

Jim Ketchum. I say friend, although we’ve exchanged a number of emails since then, but the only face-to-face

01:38:57 ► §

time that we ever spent together was at Burning Man, where Sasha Shulgin introduced us, and someday

01:39:03 ► §

I’ll have to tell you the story about those Burning Man conversations, but not today.

01:39:08 ► §

Anyway, it was Jim Ketchum who was in a major research position

01:39:12 ► §

during the work that the U.S. Army did with a drug called BZ.

01:39:16 ► §

In Jim’s monumental book, Chemical Warfare, Secrets Almost Forgotten,

01:39:21 ► §

Jim spends a lot of time writing about the BZ experiments.

01:39:25 ► §

And this is not a drug to be taken lightly, as the saying goes.

01:39:29 ► §

Depending on the dose, it could take as long as 48 hours to get back to baseline.

01:39:35 ► §

And according to Jim, and I quote here,

01:39:38 ► §

Systematic testing of BZ began in July 1960.

01:39:42 ► §

BZ began in July 1960.

01:39:50 ► §

By March 1963, we were ready to submit a summary of 22 different BZ studies,

01:39:54 ► §

each designed to explore a particular aspect of its pharmacology.

01:40:01 ► §

More than 300 enlisted volunteers had helped to develop the details of BZ’s remarkable profile.

01:40:16 ► §

It took almost three years and an estimated 100,000 hours of professional effort End quote.

01:40:21 ► §

I’m tempted to go on, but this one story covers dozens of pages in Jim’s book. My point is that while groups like the Hefter Research Institute and MAPS

01:40:26 ► §

are desperately short of funds for research into psychedelic medicines,

01:40:31 ► §

as far back as 1960, the U.S. government was spending

01:40:34 ► §

vast sums of money for research in this area.

01:40:37 ► §

All of that data still has to exist somewhere,

01:40:40 ► §

and maybe some of our fellow slaughters can dig around

01:40:43 ► §

and find out more about where those old records are now lying fallow.

01:40:48 ► §

Now, as I say this next bit, you should picture me with an elfish grin on my face and pretend that I’m speaking directly to Terrence here.

01:40:57 ► §

So, Terrence, you tell us that you think you got the best of the DMT meme traders because you didn’t value what it was that you gave them

01:41:06 ► §

in exchange for them giving you the idea for the time wave. Well, now that all of the time wave

01:41:13 ► §

furor is over and we see its current value, I have to say that my mother maybe was right.

01:41:19 ► §

You get what you pay for. Terrence, I think that maybe the elves were just kind of fucking with you about the time

01:41:26 ► §

wave because you tried to cheat them. Now, I know that’s not fair since Terrence can’t respond,

01:41:32 ► §

but even though I only knew him slightly, I’m quite sure that this thought would at least bring and for now this is lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic space be well my friends