Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“I sort of see [cannabis] as the pilot light of Gian consciousness.]
“The danger is [in using psychedelic drugs], just to put it out there, is madness.”
“LSD is different. LSD is like psychoanalytical Drano. It’s not a personality.”
“Matter is simply a concept. The world is made of language.”
“If you’re truly psychedelic the difference between living and dying is quite immaterial. No pun intended.”
The Union: The Business Behind Getting High
Directed by Brett Harvey
The Hasheesh Eater & The Poem of Hashish
By Fitz Hugh Ludlow, Charles Baudelaire
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Transcript
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Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic
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salon.
00:00:27 ►
Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon. So here we are in yet another year and although I hadn’t planned it this way at least well in advance we ended 2014 with a Terrence
00:00:33 ►
McKenna talk and we’ll begin 2015 with the last session of his workshop that we’ve been listening
00:00:39 ►
to for the past few weeks and beginning next, I’ve got some new voices for you.
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And I think that you’re really going to enjoy all that we have in store for the salon this year.
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And so that I don’t forget to mention this
00:00:52 ►
after we listen to Terrence’s talk,
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while I have often said that I didn’t have
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the exact same experiences as he did under DMT, for example,
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near the end of today’s talk,
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you’re going to hear Terrence categorize
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several psychedelic
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substances by their personalities. Well, for the record, I completely agree with everything that
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he says there. When I first got involved with these substances, I didn’t have anybody nearby
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that I could discuss my experiences with. And so I just figured that I was imagining different
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personalities coming through these various substances.
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And, of course, over time, I’ve exchanged these stories with a lot of people now.
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And for the most part, I think that you’re going to find close agreement to Terrence’s personality assessments.
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Now, in answer to the question that starts off today’s workshop session,
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Terrence begins with a description of his youth in a way that I hadn’t heard before.
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Today we would say that he was probably being bullied,
00:01:52 ►
but you’ll be amused at his solution to the bully problem.
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If the psychedelic community ever decides to create its own pantheon of gods and saints, then, well, maybe Terrence should be dubbed the patron saint of non-athletic geeks who are being bullied.
00:02:05 ►
But why am I telling you this?
00:02:07 ►
Let’s get it directly from the bard himself
00:02:09 ►
as he begins the Sunday morning wrap-up session from this workshop,
00:02:14 ►
which took place in May of 1993.
00:02:18 ►
I was wondering if you thought that,
00:02:20 ►
have you always been a knowledge junkie,
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up there. Have you always been a knowledge junkie or have psychedelics increased your enthusiasm for learning or a capacity for it?
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I’ve always been sort of a knowledge freak. I mean, I was a very weird kid. I knew I was weird when it was happening, but now that I have a 15-year-old
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son and watch how he does it, I realized how absolutely weird I was and how alarming I must
00:02:55 ►
have been to my parents. And I was not socially adaptable at all because I had bad eyes and poor coordination.
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And I was very easily intimidated.
00:03:11 ►
And like, you know, the story of my early schooling was in a town of only 1,200 people,
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I was able to find 1,700 different ways to get from school to my house in order to avoid
00:03:30 ►
being pounced upon by roving cannibal bands of my peers who had sworn to get me and they never got me it was astonishing and no no this was some cow town in western colorado and the
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other thing i discovered early on and maybe this is too psychotherapeutic to waste time on
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was but that i could hold them at bay with story and essentially i became like the the king’s jester you know i became and then i could hang out
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with these lumbering lumpen people because i i was always willing to verbally outrage and say
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crazy things i mean like one of my things that really got me a lot of points with the tough guys was I could stand up in class and very rapidly speak sentences into which I could occasionally drop obscenities, but you just couldn’t quite hear it.
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But the kids could hear it, but the teacher couldn’t.
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And it was this…
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could hear it but the teacher couldn’t and it was this so so that was my scene but in terms of the relationship to knowledge i just i love it’s what william blake said you know he said attend the
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minute particulars and and that’s what’s interesting i think is um the details of the distinctions
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among things i mean that’s why i was a butterfly collector an art historian a tibetan art hound
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a rainforest botany person because what it’s all about is the incredible variety of morphological expression in the world
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now I suppose a Buddhist would recognize this as a serious sangsaric hang-up you
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know that I love the texture of the apparent visible world it’s funny that
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you asked this question because in my morning meditation this morning,
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I had this image of a work of art which many of you know, I’m sure.
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It’s Durer’s Etching of Melancholia, and it shows an angel in the foreground,
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and she has the instruments of geometry, and there are zoological collections and maps spread out
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and an orrery of the solar system and she’s holding her head and this strange geometric
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form is beside her well i’ve put a lot of study into this geometric form and tracing its history
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and so forth but that wasn’t what caught my
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attention in the meditation this morning it was that I I realized or I recalled
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that someone had said that this might be a medically accurate portrayal of
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migraine and perhaps the earliest because jururer was interested in pathology.
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And then I got the thing for the first time,
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which was that the angel has a headache
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because of the proliferation of this technological artifractria
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of all sorts that is spread around.
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And it’s this amazing picture of historical exhaustion.
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I don’t know how I got off onto that.
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But anyway, this thing about complexity and appearances,
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I think the way to get into reality is by running the edges, as I’ve said.
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And for me, the entry drug was science fiction, definitely,
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because that permitted anything.
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I suddenly got the idea, ha, the imagination sets the parameters.
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If it will work in your head, that’s good enough.
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You don’t have to go further than that.
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You can build machines, societies, organisms, relationships in your head.
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And if when you run it, the gears turn and the wheels go and it works,
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then that’s it. It works.
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You don’t have to go further than that.
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And, well, it sort of is working here.
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I mean, I’m amazed at what I’m seeing happening.
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I mean, I have the feeling that we’re just calling it into existence,
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that it’s working.
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You know, just don’t drop the ball.
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Don’t jinx it.
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Nobody say too much. But it’s turning. You know, just don’t drop the ball. Don’t jinx it. Nobody say too much.
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But it’s turning.
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I can feel it.
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I mean, it’s like turning a battleship with a canoe.
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But it’s turning, you know, and it’s enormous.
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So it’s very hard to deflect its momentum.
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Nevertheless, by holding this point of view somehow it’s working I’ve never
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seen anything like it I mean I wouldn’t have believed it possible it’s it is
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that the world is made of language and it is that by a certain act of contained
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concentration if you are with the Tao it begins to shed its secret or it begins to open ahead of you.
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What’s that thing by W.H. Auden about a glacier rattles in the cupboard,
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the desert sighs in the bed, and the crack in the teacup opens a door to the land of the dead.
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It’s that, you know, it is a linguistic structure.
00:09:34 ►
You can decondition yourself sufficiently to actually step outside the cultural illusion.
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It’s a breathtaking possibility because nobody knows what’s outside the cultural illusion it’s a breathtaking possibility because nobody
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knows what’s outside the cultural illusion I mean you know Plato got it
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right we are chained in a cave watching the flickering shadows of something but
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life taken with sufficient seriousness and pushed hard enough at the edges,
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then this stuff will give itself up to you.
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And it isn’t about belief.
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It isn’t about commitment to guru or dogma or method.
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It’s about observational integrity.
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It’s about witnessing.
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And some kind of primacy of self.
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In other words, you have to believe
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that you can tell shit from Shinola.
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And when you say it’s shit and they tell you
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it’s Shinola you have to vote with your own side you know and it’s very
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interesting the the world is like a labyrinth or or as I said yesterday, it will be mastered by a feat of understanding somehow.
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It’s like a riddle. Yeah.
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Can you give some advice on how to avoid the pitfalls of mushrooms,
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the danger of mushrooms?
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The supply is irregular for those of us who don’t have our own botanical garden.
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From time to time, there are just physical problems.
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Is there anything practical that you’d like to share?
00:11:31 ►
Yeah, well, the very best thing is to grow them.
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And this is not as difficult as it’s been made out to be.
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And, you know, the dedication of half of a small closet
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will get you, your friends, and their friends absolutely smashed.
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And the other thing is, I mean, I really, I’m serious about urging it.
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It may sound exotic, but if you want to meet the alien and have a relationship with something very strange that loves you but that is very you know
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a lot different from a house cat you should grow this stuff first of all it’s white as the driven
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snow malvillian associations aside there’s something to be said for this and then it will take rye which you buy in a in a health food store for 17 dollars per
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hundred pound sack and it will take rye and it will convert it with a 12 efficiency to dried
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mushrooms 12 efficiency to dried mushrooms i mean this is like, it just wants to enslave itself to you.
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It will work like a dog.
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I’ve never seen anything like it.
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And it promotes virtues such as cleanliness, the primary virtue in Western civilization,
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virtue in western civilization attention to detail awareness of scheduling all these grounding qualities and then at the end it will deliver to you you know the alien body of the higher and
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hidden unspeakable and i suppose i should say that my brother and I wrote a book about how to do this
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which is around, it’s not under the name McKenna
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we did it pseudonymously, it’s called Psilocybin the Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide
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but literally if you want to turn your life into pure science fiction
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this is the way to do it because then you have it and and
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it’s not it’s not the dried stuff that’s rubbery that only works half the time that cost an arm
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and a leg it’s the living quintessence of the thing and my lord i mean from that point you know you are your own magellan and and need take
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lessons from nobody because the universe that it opens up to you is is so large that really
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you can be confident you’ll see things nobody’s ever seen before or will ever see again
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and technically it’s not that difficult. I mean,
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it’s at the level of a hobby. It’s a little trickier than canning jam. It’s up there with
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growing sprouts in little trays or culturing yogurt or something like that. Yeah.
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Can you maybe say a couple of words also about dmt and what sort of situation i haven’t had it
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before and i’m just as a first time how to set it up and maybe some ideas and where well dmt is
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you know regrettably very rare and hard to get i did notice that the last issue of a magazine
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called psychedelic illuminations that’s published in
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southern california that you can probably get at the phoenix or the bodhi tree
00:15:10 ►
published the recipe published four pages of chem abstract saying just in case you were wondering
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an interesting phenomenon is going on which is we haven’t talked about this much this weekend
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but briefly it goes like this as you many of you probably know there is a south american
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hallucinogen called ayahuasca that is orally activated dmt because and it’s orally active
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because it’s complexed with a monoamine oxidase
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inhibitor in this case haramine which
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comes from a large South American vine
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called Banisteriopsis capi well
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hardcore plant psychedelicos all over
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North America have begun to realize then
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that this formula, DMT-containing plant plus MAO-inhibiting
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plant, boiled together, concentrated, gives you some kind of pseudo-ayahuasca. And people are
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experimenting furiously and, you know, producing ghastly brews and amazing stories, and in some cases
00:16:30 ►
actually getting it right. What seems most promising is it was just discovered. Now,
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here’s an example of ethnobotanical progress. It was just discovered about two and a half years ago that a plant in the American Midwest called Desmanthus illinoyensis, the Illinois bundleweed, a plant that has no particular folk history or anything, it’s just a problem plant on the prairie, has more DMT in the root bark than any plant ever measured on this planet.
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And no history of human usage, although to me it’s suggestive that it’s called bundle weed
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because that suggests medicine bundle.
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But maybe that’s just a coincidence.
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Anyway, the Indians claim they don’t know from it.
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Well, you can take that plant and scrape the root bark,
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from it well you can take that plant and scrape the root bark and then there is another plant that grows widely in the american west and uh and the seeds of which are sold in iranian markets
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all over the country as a incense as a plant called pagaman harmon harmala, the giant Syrian rue,
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and it contains not harmeen but harmaline,
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which actually is a more hallucinogenic cogener than harmeen.
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So what people are doing is they’re taking Pagamon harmala
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and shredding it and boiling it with Desmanthus alanoensis root bark and they’re producing
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a north american analog to ayahuasca that works and this is a very interesting development on
00:18:19 ►
many levels because it means people are essentially concocting their own unique personalized brews.
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It also means that probably Pagamon Harmala,
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which I’m not kidding, in these Iranian markets they call it Hermal,
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and for $6 they’ll sell you a pound of it,
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which has enough Harmaline in it to flatten your entire apartment house.
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Pagamon Harmala, as a source of this MAO-inhibiting harmaline,
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can probably be used to activate all of the DMT-containing plants
00:18:55 ►
in the flora of North America, and there are many.
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There are, first of all, a whole family of grasses,
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the phalaris grasses, phalaris arundinaceae
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I can’t remember
00:19:09 ►
several others
00:19:11 ►
they cause staggers in sheep
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and are identifiable grasses
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there are a number of species of acacia
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acacia confusa contains DMT
00:19:23 ►
there’s a plant out in the central valley of California
00:19:29 ►
that clogs the locks, the canal system,
00:19:32 ►
that they spend millions of dollars dredging
00:19:35 ►
and piling up mountains of this stuff.
00:19:38 ►
The root bark of that, Arundo donex, it contains DMT.
00:19:43 ►
So people are out there scrambling,
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and, you know, if you were of a witchy turn of mind,
00:19:49 ►
this is something to fiddle around with.
00:19:52 ►
There’s nothing more satisfying than finding your way
00:19:57 ►
to that moment where in your head, you know,
00:20:00 ►
it begins to glitter, and you realize, you know,
00:20:04 ►
it’s here, it’s here it’s here it worked theory
00:20:08 ►
and practice in perfect concert has delivered outrage so that’s a possibility yes uh they’re
00:20:18 ►
they they’re saying that life on earth started a lot earlier than they thought they thought it
00:20:23 ►
started like six billion years after the. They thought it started like 6 billion
00:20:25 ►
years after the Earth stabilized, when it was only like 400 million years. And that
00:20:31 ►
it was very possibly, one of the ideas they had was that it was started by spores from
00:20:35 ►
outer space.
00:20:38 ►
Yes. Eventually, you see, this is what I said, that they will come to us. Because, I mean, that is such an, that’s almost like a freebie.
00:20:50 ►
Because it is, you know, all you have to do is like just wake up for a moment
00:20:55 ►
and realize that, of course, space is not an impermeable barrier to life. I mean, it’s a tough barrier,
00:21:07 ►
but I’ve been in the Seychelles and in the Hawaiian Islands.
00:21:10 ►
These are mid-ocean islands
00:21:12 ►
that have been populated by life that has drifted in there.
00:21:17 ►
And when you think about the fact
00:21:20 ►
that a single Stropharia cubensis mushroom
00:21:23 ►
in the sporulation phase,
00:21:25 ►
which can last up to three weeks,
00:21:29 ►
sheds three million spores per minute
00:21:32 ►
for three weeks.
00:21:33 ►
One mushroom.
00:21:35 ►
One mushroom.
00:21:37 ►
And then you have, you know,
00:21:38 ►
the dynamics of the atmosphere.
00:21:41 ►
They pick up off the Antarctic ice shelf chunks of Mars half the size of
00:21:49 ►
your head.
00:21:51 ►
This is now established that an asteroidal impact on Mars ejected material into Martian
00:21:59 ►
orbit that eventually percolated into Earth orbit. And you know now the way meteorites are prospected for is they eventually put it together
00:22:11 ►
that on the Antarctic ice shelf, where the wind is blowing 150 miles an hour most of the year
00:22:17 ►
and cutting the ice away, that you could fly.
00:22:21 ►
And there’s no land.
00:22:23 ►
What you eventually would get to is the antarctic sea
00:22:26 ►
that you can fly over those ice shelves in helicopters with high-powered binoculars and any
00:22:34 ►
black spot is a meteorite or an asteroid fragment because what the hell else could it be you know and and they’ve like tripled the world’s
00:22:46 ►
inventory of meteoric material in the last five years through this prospecting technique they
00:22:52 ►
have found a whole box full like 20 different specimens that they are confident are lunar
00:23:00 ►
material ejecta from from cometary impact on the moon but two strong
00:23:06 ►
candidates for Martian origin and we’re talking about fist-sized donies you know
00:23:12 ►
so the notion that the percolation of spores and biological material is not
00:23:20 ►
possible I think it will be concluded probably fairly shortly
00:23:25 ►
that life originated
00:23:27 ►
who knows where
00:23:29 ►
and has been percolating out through
00:23:31 ►
the universe for a long, long time.
00:23:35 ►
Where do you see
00:23:36 ►
the place of cannabis
00:23:37 ►
in consciousness evolution
00:23:39 ►
or whatever? I mean, on the one hand
00:23:41 ►
it’s obviously doing
00:23:44 ►
something like that, but on the other
00:23:45 ►
hand, kids do it before they do a drive-by shooting in L.A.
00:23:49 ►
And also address maybe the notorious effect of memory.
00:23:58 ►
You mentioned that you sometimes do cannabis when you do mushrooms, and my experience is
00:24:03 ►
that I don’t bring back as much information that I remember
00:24:05 ►
when I
00:24:06 ►
make the
00:24:07 ►
movie
00:24:07 ►
about it
00:24:07 ►
do you
00:24:08 ►
want to
00:24:08 ►
hear your
00:24:08 ►
comments
00:24:08 ►
about that
00:24:09 ►
yes well
00:24:10 ►
it’s worth
00:24:11 ►
talking about
00:24:12 ►
cannabis
00:24:12 ►
I certainly
00:24:16 ►
I don’t think
00:24:16 ►
I would be
00:24:17 ►
who I am
00:24:18 ►
if it weren’t
00:24:19 ►
for cannabis
00:24:20 ►
and it
00:24:20 ►
hasn’t
00:24:22 ►
particularly
00:24:22 ►
affected my
00:24:24 ►
memory
00:24:24 ►
I’m actually the most devout on a lifetime scale the person and it hasn’t particularly affected my memory.
00:24:28 ►
I’m actually the most devoted, on a lifetime scale,
00:24:33 ►
the person most devoted to cannabis that I’ve ever known is myself.
00:24:40 ►
I mean, when I lived in Asia, I used to set my alarm for 2 a.m. to smoke because I couldn’t go from midnight to 5.
00:24:43 ►
And, you know, people thought I was bananas.
00:24:48 ►
In terms of its deleterious effect, I mean, as I think it’s pretty,
00:24:55 ►
on a scale of the other major drugs of commerce,
00:24:58 ►
which would be alcohol, tobacco, and white sugar,
00:25:01 ►
I think it comes off as in the best position. I sort of think of it as,
00:25:10 ►
you know, going back to this partnership model about mushrooms in Africa, that when that all
00:25:19 ►
dried up and those people were moved into the Middle East and there had been previous waves of migration out of Africa
00:25:26 ►
that had established populations in Central Asia.
00:25:29 ►
This is why you have like Peking Man and Java Man.
00:25:33 ►
Those are earlier remnants of earlier migrations.
00:25:38 ►
Cannabis botanically originated north of the Himalayas
00:25:44 ►
on the plains of Central Asia.
00:25:47 ►
And I think it probably is the best substitute for mushrooms on the cultural level.
00:25:58 ►
It’s interesting.
00:25:59 ►
See, it’s one of the oldest domesticated plants.
00:26:02 ►
It was early on associated with cordage and fiber.
00:26:08 ►
And it’s strange that all the words that associate to narrative
00:26:12 ►
are also words about weaving.
00:26:16 ►
I mean, you weave a story.
00:26:18 ►
You unravel a yarn.
00:26:21 ►
You, you know, thread, unthread a situation you untangle a situation it’s the parallelism is
00:26:29 ►
very old in all European languages this association between narrative and fiber which means hemp so I
00:26:39 ►
sort of see it as the pilot light of Gaian consciousness that was kept going.
00:26:48 ►
Now, what people always say to shoot this down is they say,
00:26:53 ►
well, but Islam tolerates cannabis and Islam is hardly the pilot light of Gaian consciousness.
00:27:02 ►
Yeah, I mean, it isn’t actually that Islam tolerates
00:27:06 ►
cannabis it’s that the Quran
00:27:07 ►
expressly forbids alcohol
00:27:10 ►
and then that leaves you to
00:27:11 ►
sort it out from there
00:27:13 ►
I certainly think cannabis
00:27:17 ►
should be legalized and that
00:27:19 ►
if every serious alcoholic
00:27:22 ►
were encouraged to be a pothead
00:27:24 ►
and other drug abusers encouraged toward pot,
00:27:29 ►
the problem with pot from a societal point of view is that it is psychedelic enough that, like all psychedelics, it erodes loyalty to cultural values.
00:27:44 ►
Meaning this is the bullshit effect
00:27:46 ►
people say why don’t you get a job
00:27:49 ►
bullshit, why should I
00:27:51 ►
I don’t see it implicated in violence
00:27:58 ►
I think if anything
00:28:00 ►
probably cannabis in ghettos
00:28:03 ►
is holding down violence as a drug,
00:28:06 ►
but probably promoting violence as an item of commerce,
00:28:10 ►
and that is because of chuckle-headed laws.
00:28:14 ►
I mean, I’m absolutely convinced that the way to solve the drug problem
00:28:18 ►
is to remove the profit motive.
00:28:20 ►
That’s so obvious that I just, it’s baffling to me and society is so schizophrenic
00:28:29 ►
on this topic I mean the most dangerous drugs are alcohol and tobacco both fully established in the
00:28:38 ►
engines of commerce it’s a bizarre situation you know, largely driven by the agenda of Christian
00:28:48 ►
fundamentalism in collusion with criminal syndicalists who see this as an opportunity
00:28:56 ►
for enormous profit and, you know, cynicism all the way along. Yeah.
00:29:02 ►
Yeah, but I do find that, I mean, I can’t smoke a lot of pot
00:29:06 ►
because it just,
00:29:08 ►
unfortunately,
00:29:09 ►
I can never become addicted
00:29:10 ►
to any drug as much as I try.
00:29:11 ►
My body just doesn’t tolerate it,
00:29:13 ►
and I’ve tried them all more than once.
00:29:15 ►
But I do find that pot,
00:29:18 ►
I mean, I’ve had friends
00:29:19 ►
who became potheads
00:29:20 ►
who, it wasn’t that they
00:29:22 ►
betrayed commerce,
00:29:23 ►
they lost their ambition.
00:29:25 ►
And, you know, I mean, you’re very intelligent
00:29:28 ►
and you’ve got a vision and you’re dedicated to your vision,
00:29:32 ►
you can pursue it.
00:29:33 ►
You know, you’re a little bit above most average people,
00:29:36 ►
or different than most average people.
00:29:38 ►
Manic is what you’re trying to say, yes.
00:29:41 ►
I understand.
00:29:43 ►
But, I mean, these guys understand I would say
00:29:45 ►
really got lost because
00:29:47 ►
of their addiction to pot
00:29:49 ►
and so I think there’s more an issue
00:29:51 ►
around it’s not about drugs
00:29:54 ►
as much as it is about addiction
00:29:55 ►
and the issue of addiction
00:29:56 ►
and how addiction is
00:29:59 ►
individuals become addicted because
00:30:01 ►
they’re avoiding certain psychological
00:30:03 ►
issues that they’re struggling with.
00:30:07 ►
Rather than dealing with the issues, they turn on the TV.
00:30:12 ►
Well, this relates to this larger model we talked about of time,
00:30:16 ►
of the war between habit and novelty.
00:30:19 ►
The thing that offends people about drugs,
00:30:23 ►
and if it doesn’t offend you there’s i think something wrong
00:30:27 ►
with your value system is to observe unconscious repetitious self-destructive behavior i mean if
00:30:37 ►
that means betting on the ponies or chasing hookers or or shooting junk, or making bad investments,
00:30:46 ►
or always blowing your stack with your friends, whatever it is,
00:30:50 ►
repetitious self-destructive behavior triggers disgust in the rest of the gang.
00:30:58 ►
And drugs, you know, for instance, heroin and tobacco are interesting examples because both they are
00:31:08 ►
probably tied for their addictive ability and yet you know to shoot heroin i mean people just turn
00:31:15 ►
away aghast it’s like you’re the lowest of the low cigarette smoking until very recently was
00:31:21 ►
tolerated everywhere now what is the difference here?
00:31:25 ►
The person smoking the cigarette, we know that tobacco is tremendously destructive.
00:31:32 ►
That’s beyond argument. Heroin, on the other hand, if you shoot with clean needles and have
00:31:39 ►
a steady supply, in other words, if you’re not putting in social factors, my God, these junkies live
00:31:45 ►
forever. You know, they just pickle themselves and live forever and they don’t get sick. So,
00:31:51 ►
so then, but so then why is it that society is so abhorrent of heroin addiction and so accepting
00:31:58 ►
of tobacco addiction? The answer is the presentation of the intoxication. When you shoot heroin, first of all, you become very agitated and follow people around raving at them.
00:32:11 ►
And then, if you’re an addict, and then you nod.
00:32:18 ►
And so you drool and your face falls in your plate and your friends have to put you to bed.
00:32:25 ►
Tobacco, on the other hand, you know, you can maintain.
00:32:28 ►
There is no dramatic sequela of symptoms to betray that, you know,
00:32:36 ►
you’re completely jacked up and twisted around and self-poisoned with this.
00:32:41 ►
But there you are at your desk working efficiently making phone calls making
00:32:46 ►
money keeping it all together so uh it’s the presentation then the other thing to say about
00:32:53 ►
drugs is that like everything else about us but even more so drugs are subject to your genetic heritage of drug receptors.
00:33:07 ►
And so it’s not the same for everybody or even close to the same.
00:33:12 ►
I mean, the range of response to drugs can be over several orders of magnitude
00:33:19 ►
and can vary throughout your life.
00:33:22 ►
So, you know, the fact that I can smoke endless amounts of cannabis
00:33:27 ►
and still produce and function, it just means that I can.
00:33:33 ►
I see people, you know, alcoholics who drink.
00:33:37 ►
I mean, if I have more than a drink and a half,
00:33:41 ►
I have headaches and I pay my dues.
00:33:44 ►
And, you know know to watch somebody go
00:33:46 ►
down on a fifth of stolic Naya you just realize you know this person is a
00:33:51 ►
Martian metabolically speaking I mean it would just kill me to do that so this
00:33:58 ►
has to do with tolerances and the way the organism can accommodate itself to
00:34:02 ►
toxins but then below that at bed, it actually has to do with genetic proclivities.
00:34:10 ►
With regard to the fact that cannabis has a hallucinogen,
00:34:13 ►
is there a difference in your experience in smoking versus ingesting it, eating?
00:34:22 ►
Well, yeah, that’s a good point.
00:34:24 ►
See, hashish, or the way cannabis entered the west was as hashish
00:34:29 ►
which was eaten in the 19th century and if you read the accounts by 19th century savants who
00:34:37 ►
who ate large amounts of hashish uh it will convince you know, that it was the LSD of the 1870s.
00:34:46 ►
I mean, these are mad intoxications that they are describing.
00:34:51 ►
It’s not sitting around, you know, seeing the wallpaper move.
00:34:58 ►
Well, they were eating it.
00:35:01 ►
Why did cookies and brownies, LSD, topless and brownies why did that lose fashion
00:35:06 ►
is there a danger in it
00:35:07 ►
no I think when pot went from
00:35:09 ►
$15 a lid to
00:35:11 ►
$475 people stopped
00:35:14 ►
cooking with it
00:35:15 ►
but let me
00:35:18 ►
say this about
00:35:19 ►
about eating
00:35:21 ►
hashish if you’re going to do
00:35:24 ►
this I recommend that you eat
00:35:26 ►
a Lebanese hash
00:35:28 ►
if you can because you see
00:35:30 ►
Lebanese hash is made in a way
00:35:32 ►
that people don’t really touch it
00:35:34 ►
in the same way that
00:35:36 ►
charas is made
00:35:38 ►
in India by people
00:35:41 ►
whose
00:35:42 ►
hands may not be so clean
00:35:44 ►
and you know you’re going to take a hit, essentially,
00:35:48 ►
of the ambient bacterial population of the village of Hamarubitsar,
00:35:55 ►
and, you know, your guts will go completely berserk.
00:35:58 ►
This is one argument for baking it in a cookie,
00:36:01 ►
is to get the pathogens at least smacked down a bit but if you if you’ve
00:36:07 ►
never read Fitzhugh Ludlow’s book the hashish eater confessions of a hashish eater it’s hilarious I
00:36:15 ►
mean here it is it’s 1852 and he’s at Union College in Riverdale New York he’s been invited to the Dean’s Tea and he’s just taken this massive hit
00:36:28 ►
of cannabis jelly
00:36:30 ►
before arriving at the tea
00:36:32 ►
and he says something like
00:36:35 ►
when the umbrellas protruding
00:36:38 ►
from the oriental umbrella stand
00:36:41 ►
turned into gargoyles
00:36:42 ►
I knew that I must excuse myself,
00:36:45 ►
lest I run the risk of betraying my condition.
00:36:53 ►
Meaning, I’m too loaded, I’ve got to get out of here.
00:36:59 ►
Let me say one more thing about this.
00:37:02 ►
There’s a wonderful book called Shaman Woman, Mainline Lady
00:37:06 ►
that is writings by women about drugs.
00:37:10 ►
And if you want to read something that just will make you roll on the floor with laughter,
00:37:16 ►
it’s Louisa May Alcott’s account of a picnic she and her friends went on with a doctor,
00:37:24 ►
somebody or other. And it’s just the most insane thing.
00:37:28 ►
I mean, it’s these incredibly pretentious Victorian femmes with this doctor by this river in the English countryside. It’s Lil and Nell and Dolly. And Dolly says, oh, doctor, we’re so exhausted with canasta.
00:37:52 ►
Surely you have some new little divertissement that you can share with us.
00:38:12 ►
Well, Dolly, I do have this little case of the best Moroccan hashish bonbons from Paris.
00:38:16 ►
And they say, oh, and then it’s madness.
00:38:21 ►
It’s just the most extraordinary thing.
00:38:23 ►
Yes.
00:38:26 ►
Does cannabis work on the brain chemically?
00:38:28 ►
It’s not very well understood.
00:38:31 ►
There is a
00:38:32 ►
receptor, but
00:38:34 ►
cannabis is not an alkaloid.
00:38:36 ►
Cannabis is technically a
00:38:38 ►
polyhydric alcohol,
00:38:40 ►
which makes it a chemically
00:38:42 ►
unique type. It’s also
00:38:44 ►
botanically unique.
00:38:47 ►
Cannabis, it’s what’s called a monotypic genus.
00:38:50 ►
In other words, these three species,
00:38:55 ►
Ruderalis, Sativa, and Indica,
00:38:57 ►
which are all obviously speciated within historical time
00:39:01 ►
and can, by chromosomal studies,
00:39:04 ►
be shown to be all derivative of Rusula,
00:39:07 ►
the Central Asian wild type, it has no near relatives. And so it’s unique and it’s not
00:39:16 ►
well understood. As far as somebody asked about using it psychedelically i think that the real and i can’t say i do this because i
00:39:26 ►
need it for other reasons but in terms of the pure psychedelic issue the way to do cannabis
00:39:33 ►
is once a week in silent darkness alone with the best stuff you can get and then just you know do
00:39:43 ►
as much of it as you can possibly do in a shorter
00:39:46 ►
time and sit with it, you will every single time be absolutely torn to pieces by it, you know. I
00:39:53 ►
mean, it’s just astonishing. The problem is that people get into it, myself included, for other
00:39:59 ►
reasons than that hallucinogenic flash. But that would really be the ideal way.
00:40:06 ►
And also it would prove you were a person of great rectitude and self-control
00:40:11 ►
if you could do that.
00:40:13 ►
Yeah.
00:40:23 ►
In one of your books, you mention the idea of nostalgia for paradise as part of perhaps
00:40:33 ►
the unconscious, and maybe that was formed during the psilocybin paradise period. Do you see in 2012 us having to abandon that or will it be fulfilled by then?
00:40:53 ►
Well, this phrase, nostalgia for paradise, I don’t know who invented it.
00:40:59 ►
When I first encountered it in Merciliad’s book, Cosmos and History,
00:41:05 ►
which if you’ve never read this book, it’s a little book.
00:41:08 ►
It was one of the most influential books on my thinking
00:41:13 ►
because I saw there a whole different way of talking about spiritual reality.
00:41:33 ►
reality but I disagree with Iliad that it is simply a attitude in the human mind I really think there was a fall and that this is a diminished condition and that there was some
00:41:39 ►
kind of cohesion that we do have this nostalgia for that’s why I think our whole relationship to
00:41:49 ►
drugs is all about the fact that I mean look here here’s the metaphor we’re like the children of an
00:41:58 ►
abused relationship something was taken from us 15,000 years ago. It was the thing which kept us in
00:42:10 ►
balance with each other, with the earth. It kept us in our imaginations, in the poetic world of
00:42:17 ►
natural magic. And then it was taken from us. And it was a big downer and life turned into history and warfare and subjugation and
00:42:28 ►
classism and all of these things and uh and the thing that was taken from us was was this
00:42:36 ►
intoxication and so then we moved on to alcohol to money to opium because that was very big in the minoan phase i mean opium
00:42:50 ►
had a huge influence on minoan civilization and all of these things an effort to scratch an itch
00:42:58 ►
that you can never quite reach and but in the meantime all kinds of addictions, wars, criminal syndicates, horrible
00:43:06 ►
things go on. Now, in the 20th century, through the science of anthropology, a complete inventory
00:43:14 ►
essentially is taken of the world’s intoxicating possibilities. It’s part of a complete inventory
00:43:22 ►
of the world’s people, languages, technologies, belief systems that characterizes anthropology.
00:43:29 ►
But there it is.
00:43:30 ►
In 1953, Gordon Wasson returns from the village of Watla de Jimenez in the Sierra Mazateca,
00:43:37 ►
and he has the body of Eros, you know, pickled in a jar, lost since the fall of Minoan Crete
00:43:46 ►
but suddenly restored
00:43:48 ►
and then nobody knows what to make of it
00:43:51 ►
and the CIA looks at it and Hoffman looks at it
00:43:54 ►
and now it is found, I think
00:43:58 ►
and I don’t know if it comes too late
00:44:02 ►
or if the final irony is
00:44:04 ►
that we learn what it was all about
00:44:06 ►
but nevertheless have to succumb to the momentum of our own stupidity.
00:44:11 ►
In other words, it’s some kind of Greek drama
00:44:13 ►
where you have this horrible realization
00:44:15 ►
and fully understand the whole bit
00:44:18 ►
but you’re doomed anyway
00:44:20 ►
just because it makes for better theater.
00:44:23 ►
Or whether it is the happy ending of the Christian eschaton.
00:44:30 ►
Yeah.
00:44:32 ►
What the 9th century’s best tools were
00:44:36 ►
for cognizing these kinds of matters
00:44:40 ►
were scholastic theology.
00:44:44 ►
And I’ve been accused of that been accused of that so
00:44:50 ►
what scholastic theology says is that there is something called the nunc stans
00:44:56 ►
the the eternal now and that somehow well if this all goes back to this
00:45:02 ►
wonderful thing which Plato said.
00:45:08 ►
Plato said time is the moving image of eternity.
00:45:17 ►
And my notion of what this is all about is that the time wave we looked at last night is eternity.
00:45:24 ►
It’s the fractal structure of the temporal module viewed from a higher dimension.
00:45:28 ►
And then time is the traversing of that thing.
00:45:32 ►
The nature of the singularity is hard to anticipate. If you use the old fractal principle of ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny,
00:45:39 ►
do you all understand what that means?
00:45:41 ►
It’s the phenomenon of that a fetus, as it develops, ontogeny, recapitulates
00:45:50 ►
the evolutionary history of life on the earth. That’s phylogeny. In other words, the fetus
00:45:58 ►
is first a little kind of a thing, an amoeboid mass of of cells and then it becomes sort of like a salamander and then it
00:46:05 ►
becomes like a you know a primitive mammal and so forth and so on well using that principle
00:46:14 ►
to try and anticipate the end state seems legitimate in the fractal under the fractal
00:46:21 ►
dispensation however it leads to the conclusion
00:46:25 ►
that when you look at an organism,
00:46:26 ►
what happens to all organisms is that they die.
00:46:30 ►
So then that leaves you with the conclusion
00:46:33 ►
that what happens at the end date of the whole enchilada
00:46:40 ►
is the equivalent of some kind of mass dying.
00:46:44 ►
Well, then that really doesn’t tell you much
00:46:48 ►
because we don’t know what dying is, you know.
00:46:51 ►
We don’t know whether that means that
00:46:53 ►
how can the ultimate novelty be complete extinction.
00:46:58 ►
It must be then that we have to overcome as positivists
00:47:05 ►
our phobia against this area of speculation
00:47:10 ►
previously presided over by beady-eyed priests
00:47:14 ►
and actually take it back
00:47:16 ►
and say that in the mysteries of metabolism and morphology
00:47:21 ►
it is perhaps now necessary to entertain the idea that death is not a
00:47:28 ►
nihilistic release into non-entity, and that instead the shamanic model is correct, and
00:47:36 ►
that biological life is a sojourn into matter, and that at death, you you know you do go to some incomprehensible unfoldment only the first
00:47:48 ►
moments of which can be made sense of because i really think the dmt thing is like bungee cording
00:47:55 ►
into the bardo you know i mean there you go and then just as you’re… It jerks you back.
00:48:07 ►
And so you get that much of a look into the yawning grave.
00:48:14 ►
And I take it as…
00:48:16 ►
It’s strange, yes.
00:48:18 ►
But surely reason for hope and optimism,
00:48:22 ►
how much of oneself, whatever that means, is going to be carried over,
00:48:27 ►
I don’t know, but it looks to me like probably not much. But what lies ahead is, well, to quote
00:48:36 ►
Bilbo Baggins, the greatest adventure still lies ahead. I’m pretty convinced of that, which surprises me,
00:48:47 ►
because I’m a cynic, and I’m not easily swept into optimism.
00:48:59 ►
Well, you just had a great little pre-echo.
00:49:02 ►
Your analogy with scholastic theology lets us know
00:49:05 ►
what is going to be the defining event of 2012.
00:49:08 ►
The collected works of Terence McKenna
00:49:10 ►
are published under the title Summa Micrologica.
00:49:15 ►
I’ll take it.
00:49:18 ►
Yeah.
00:49:20 ►
What cautions and reservations do you advocate
00:49:23 ►
in this dance with Kali?
00:49:27 ►
We talk about the revival of the Kali,
00:49:30 ►
and sometimes I wonder if we remember what we’re talking about,
00:49:34 ►
that in this possible great ecstasy there lies some danger.
00:49:42 ►
Yeah, I guess I’m constantly asking that question
00:49:46 ►
as I’ve taken a four and a half year break from drugs
00:49:51 ►
and moving back in that direction
00:49:54 ►
and having consumed some mushrooms recently
00:49:57 ►
and wanting to, like in this revival
00:50:02 ►
of the use of these substances
00:50:07 ►
I feel like I need to be absolutely reverent
00:50:09 ►
and to be sensitive
00:50:12 ►
to what I’m doing
00:50:15 ►
well the danger
00:50:19 ►
as I see it
00:50:21 ►
and I feel it very strongly
00:50:24 ►
the danger is
00:50:27 ►
just to put it out there, is madness
00:50:31 ►
I mean we talk about stretching the envelope
00:50:34 ►
we talk about running the edge
00:50:36 ►
but you don’t want to rip the envelope
00:50:38 ►
you don’t want to island yourself
00:50:40 ►
in a situation where nobody can make sense
00:50:44 ►
out of what you’re saying and yet that’s
00:50:48 ►
the game we play is always pushing so what you said about reverence and absolute impeccability
00:50:57 ►
of attitude and also i think it’s very important to be physically together you know I mean I
00:51:05 ►
it’s important to be physically together anyway
00:51:09 ►
I go to a gym three days a week and I
00:51:12 ►
think of it as preparation for psychedelic
00:51:15 ►
voyaging because if your body is a
00:51:18 ►
clean instrument you can do it
00:51:21 ►
the other thing is
00:51:22 ►
technique I mean in the psychedelic state if there are problems you can do it. The other thing is technique.
00:51:28 ►
I mean, in the psychedelic state,
00:51:29 ►
if there are problems,
00:51:32 ►
there are techniques to deal with them.
00:51:33 ►
The best technique, and Western people don’t naturally gravitate toward this,
00:51:39 ►
but if you get into a place you don’t like on a psychedelic,
00:51:43 ►
sing.
00:51:49 ►
You must sing uh most people’s tendency is to clench this is very bad because it can just grind you to nothing what you have to do is you
00:51:56 ►
have to sit up and you have to sing and it doesn’t really matter what you sing you will find the song. I mean, start out with row, row, row your boat and go from there.
00:52:07 ►
And the other thing is, you know, the real issue I find in myself is surrender,
00:52:16 ►
that it’s all very fine to sit here getting paid dollars per minute extolling this stuff,
00:52:23 ►
but, boy, is it different to do it you know you can talk all you
00:52:28 ►
want but um the the thing is so i don’t know if scary is the word but it’s such a it’s so total
00:52:39 ►
what happens and you’re so vulnerable and you know that if there is any flaw,
00:52:47 ►
if there is any flaw in your approach or attitude,
00:52:50 ►
that that flaw will be magnified by the stress of the thing
00:52:54 ►
and become highly problematic.
00:52:57 ►
So it’s all about asking the question, you know, am I ready?
00:53:02 ►
Now, this is not how beginners approach it, nor should they. It’s incredibly forgiving of first, second, and third timers. a certain measure of for want of a better word let’s call it power and the
00:53:25 ►
payback on that existential validity would be another way of calling it
00:53:30 ►
rather than power the payback on that existential validity is that you have to
00:53:36 ►
be okay and you know maybe it’s my Catholic upbringing or something but one
00:53:43 ►
cannot do the examination of conscience carefully enough
00:53:48 ►
because there’s always flaw.
00:53:51 ►
So it’s about staying right with it.
00:53:54 ►
It teaches the right way to live and also surrender.
00:53:58 ►
That’s why I don’t ever have an agenda.
00:54:00 ►
I regard having an agenda as essentially aspiring to be a magician of some sort. And I
00:54:10 ►
don’t. I don’t. I want to witness it. I am perfectly content to be present at the miracle. I don’t want
00:54:18 ►
to do the miracle and I don’t want the miracle to be done to me. I just want to be there.
00:54:26 ►
miracle to be done to me I just wanted to be there Frank Herbert in his book Dune said something which over the years I found though it sounds flimsy to say
00:54:33 ►
it actually works you some of you may recall that in that book they had this
00:54:38 ►
drug called strewn and it did pull you out through time it was not just a drug
00:54:45 ►
it revealed like I’m saying
00:54:47 ►
psilocybin DMT do
00:54:49 ►
the real structure of reality
00:54:51 ►
and in there they discuss
00:54:54 ►
what do you do about the fear
00:54:56 ►
that comes with the
00:54:58 ►
gigantic awesome
00:54:59 ►
dimensions of this vision
00:55:01 ►
and he says
00:55:03 ►
or someone tells the main character, fear is like a wind,
00:55:10 ►
and it blows through the mind. And what you must do is you must wait. And it cannot sustain itself
00:55:19 ►
unless you give it an object. And this is actually true I found that fear whatever it is
00:55:28 ►
cognitively physiologically it’s a chemical wave of release of adrenaline
00:55:34 ►
and what you do is you just sit and watch it come like a bell curve and then
00:55:41 ►
recede and then you’re still on the surface of the ocean and the power of it has
00:55:46 ►
been defeated but if you
00:55:47 ►
give it any object to cling
00:55:50 ►
to it will break white
00:55:52 ►
water and then the chaos
00:55:53 ►
will overwhelm you
00:55:55 ►
yeah
00:55:58 ►
I was wondering if you could talk about the difference between
00:56:02 ►
psilocybin and
00:56:04 ►
ayahuasca experiences I’m particularly interested, I heard you could talk about the difference between psilocybin and ayahuasca experiences.
00:56:05 ►
I’m particularly interested.
00:56:07 ►
I heard you talk once about how the value of those,
00:56:10 ►
the value in psilocybin experiences is more technological
00:56:15 ►
and, you know, get ready to depart the planet kind of value,
00:56:19 ►
whereas ayahuasca is more save the planet.
00:56:23 ►
Feminine.
00:56:24 ►
Yeah.
00:56:24 ►
Yeah, I mean, somebody once said to me after they took a mushroom trip,
00:56:29 ►
they said, I don’t think I’ll do that anymore.
00:56:31 ►
And I said, why not?
00:56:32 ►
And they said, because I’m not interested in insects that drive spaceships.
00:56:41 ►
Which sums up psilocybin pretty well.
00:56:44 ►
which sums up psilocybin pretty well.
00:56:50 ►
Psilocybin is Apollonian and hortatory and grandiose.
00:56:53 ►
And it’s interesting that they have these personalities.
00:56:56 ►
I mean, psilocybin is kind of megalomaniac.
00:56:59 ►
I mean, it says history is ending.
00:57:01 ►
Prepare for the departure. The crisis of the species is upon us.
00:57:04 ►
Cosmic forces are intersecting, machines the size of Manitoba will be involved,
00:57:10 ►
and it’s all about, you know, mankind prepare to depart for the higher orders of the galactarian hegemony
00:57:18 ►
and this whole thing like that.
00:57:31 ►
thing like that and ayahuasca is all about how rivers flow and family lines intersect and what is in the river and what is in the mind of the woman and what is it’s like this very sensual
00:57:41 ►
telepathic gas which spreads out when you’re in the rainforest
00:57:46 ►
and brings you into connection with everything.
00:57:50 ►
It’s also, it doesn’t speak.
00:57:53 ►
It becomes like the eye of a camera.
00:57:57 ►
Its language is entirely a visual language.
00:58:00 ►
It never speaks.
00:58:01 ►
It just shows you, showing, showing, showing.
00:58:04 ►
After a good ayahuasca
00:58:06 ►
trip, you feel like your eyes are falling out. I mean, you have been looking, literally looking
00:58:13 ►
with full attention for hours at this stuff with this, you know, this sense of it being
00:58:21 ►
distanced from you somehow.
00:58:23 ►
Have you reconcil two with brain?
00:58:25 ►
No, it’s a little puzzling because DMT is…
00:58:30 ►
psilocybin in brain in the metabolic pathway
00:58:35 ►
doesn’t actually become DMT,
00:58:37 ►
but it’s about as close as it could possibly be.
00:58:41 ►
So the difference is quite startling.
00:58:44 ►
And then DMTT when smoked not when taken
00:58:51 ►
in the ayahuasca situation where you get what I just described but when smoked like it trumps
00:58:57 ►
the psilocybin it goes so far beyond it because it carries you into the part where you can’t understand.
00:59:08 ►
The other one, the psilocybin communicates at least in human terms.
00:59:09 ►
I mean, apocalyptically,
00:59:12 ►
megotechnically,
00:59:14 ►
through these science fiction metaphors and so forth.
00:59:17 ►
But the DMT flash goes beyond that
00:59:21 ►
and you say this is truly
00:59:22 ►
the presence of an alien mind.
00:59:25 ►
This is not being filtered for my consumption at all.
00:59:28 ►
This is absolutely just off the wall, whatever it is.
00:59:34 ►
That’s right.
00:59:35 ►
So it’s puzzling that the route of administration and the complexing with the MAO inhibitors
00:59:41 ►
gives it these different psychological tones,
00:59:44 ►
because I think almost everybody
00:59:46 ►
who’s experienced these things
00:59:47 ►
would agree with what I said
00:59:49 ►
about these aspects of the personalities
00:59:52 ►
of the substances.
00:59:54 ►
No, LSD is different.
00:59:59 ►
LSD is like psychoanalytical Drano.
01:00:02 ►
It’s not a personality.
01:00:02 ►
like psychoanalytical Drano.
01:00:04 ►
It’s not a personality.
01:00:06 ►
What about the unnatural rhythm?
01:00:08 ►
You mean the morning glory
01:00:09 ►
seeds?
01:00:11 ►
I’ve only taken those things
01:00:13 ►
five or six times in my
01:00:15 ►
life and all in my youth.
01:00:18 ►
I remember the visions.
01:00:20 ►
I remember the hallucinations.
01:00:23 ►
Once on
01:00:24 ►
Hawaiian Woodrose, on Argyria Nervosa,
01:00:27 ►
I entered into an entire world based on the theme of the sea urchin.
01:00:33 ►
And I was in these cathedral-like vaulted spaces,
01:00:37 ►
which were the insides of sea urchins.
01:00:39 ►
And then there was this coach that was pulled by,
01:00:43 ►
by these very strange-looking animals,
01:00:44 ►
and it had these
01:00:45 ►
nipple-like protuberances all over it and everything was done in mauve and purple and
01:00:52 ►
white and it was just sea urchin world for about 20 minutes and then that went away could you
01:00:59 ►
explain um and i know this gets back to a basic premise in what we’ve been talking about the last couple of days,
01:01:05 ►
but elaborate a little more on why you conclude that these hallucinations are in fact true hallucinations.
01:01:12 ►
In other words, why do you conclude that these alphalite entities really exist?
01:01:19 ►
Well, really exist.
01:01:24 ►
True enough.
01:01:25 ►
We talked about that, didn’t we,
01:01:27 ►
about the Wittgensteinian thing, did we?
01:01:31 ►
Yes.
01:01:32 ►
They’re true enough because they have efficacy.
01:01:35 ►
You see, we miss the point
01:01:38 ►
because we think the world is made of matter.
01:01:43 ►
Matter is simply a concept. The world is made of matter. Matter is simply a concept.
01:01:46 ►
The world is made of language.
01:01:48 ►
And since the hallucinations communicate in language,
01:01:53 ►
they are as real as anything else.
01:01:56 ►
They are helping make reality.
01:02:00 ►
It’s crazy to think that the universe is made of quarks
01:02:04 ►
and new mesons and neutrinos and stuff like that.
01:02:08 ►
I mean, who here has ever seen one
01:02:10 ►
or has even the most specious grasp
01:02:13 ►
of how you would go about looking for such a thing?
01:02:16 ►
But we get exposed to those words.
01:02:20 ►
The world is really made of language,
01:02:22 ►
of interlocking concepts.
01:02:25 ►
Well, so then that means that the hallucinations are real.
01:02:30 ►
That in that sense where Mia Farrow says in Rosemary’s Baby,
01:02:34 ►
my God, this is actually happening,
01:02:38 ►
that’s what needs to happen inside the psilocybin trip.
01:02:43 ►
What needs to happen inside the psilocybin trip,
01:02:50 ►
we have this category called hallucination or intoxication or trance. And then we say, oh, it’s only mental.
01:02:53 ►
Therefore, it’s not real.
01:02:56 ►
Well, I’ve got news for you.
01:02:57 ►
It’s all mental.
01:03:00 ►
And therefore, it is real.
01:03:03 ►
And the big news is that while we’ve been waiting for aliens to come in ships from the stars,
01:03:10 ►
we have totally overlooked the alien nature of reality around us.
01:03:16 ►
And that by pushing into these mental dimensions, we discover a bewildering fauna of angels, demons,
01:03:27 ►
helping spirits, ancestor spirits.
01:03:29 ►
I only speak from my own experience.
01:03:35 ►
So, for instance, I’m unable to pass judgment on something like voodoo
01:03:39 ►
or tantric invocation or something like that.
01:03:50 ►
But I, using reason, was able to confirm the existence of things
01:03:56 ►
that no reasonable person believes in.
01:04:00 ►
And this is impressive.
01:04:02 ►
And it’s repeatable.
01:04:04 ►
That’s the thing I want to stress. This is not some faith or something where you have to, you know, this is impressive. And it’s repeatable. That’s the thing I want to stress.
01:04:05 ►
This is not some faith or something where you have to, you know, I don’t know.
01:04:10 ►
It’s just that it’s a technology.
01:04:13 ►
It’s a technology of ethnopharmacology.
01:04:17 ►
Obviously the experience is repeatable, but what that experience means,
01:04:21 ►
whether it indicates some, for lack of a better phrase, objective
01:04:25 ►
reality separate and apart from your mind is not necessarily proven by having the experience
01:04:31 ►
itself.
01:04:32 ►
Yes, but see, it’s difficult to prove that there’s any objective reality apart from your
01:04:37 ►
mind anyway.
01:04:40 ►
Yeah, I mean, but it not only rests on Berkeley, which is an earlier version of it, but it also rests now on quantum physics’ need to include the observer into the equation.
01:04:53 ►
Somehow there is a something, the vectors of which are collapsed into the experience of the here and now by the observational act.
01:05:06 ►
And then the role of language in this.
01:05:08 ►
I mean, it’s not easy to sort this stuff out.
01:05:12 ►
If you want to read an interesting book,
01:05:14 ►
read Desponnet’s book,
01:05:17 ►
The Philosophical Foundations of Quantum Mechanics.
01:05:20 ►
This will give you something to chew on for sure.
01:05:25 ►
Somebody, yeah.
01:05:29 ►
Oh, that it has no character?
01:05:33 ►
And by character, I meant personality.
01:05:35 ►
I didn’t mean to diss it.
01:05:37 ►
I just meant it doesn’t organize itself around a personality the way psilocybin does I found LSD to be like a conceptual enhancer
01:05:50 ►
it was great for looking at things and for thinking about things and but I also and this
01:05:59 ►
may be my my and obviously is my personal thing i found it just physically incredibly hard on my body
01:06:07 ►
i mean my god the next day i would lay in warm baths and try and sort it all out and that seemed
01:06:14 ►
and i was taking good lsd i mean sandus lsd so uh for me when i got to Silesia, when I was just exultant,
01:06:25 ►
because, see, what I had done is I’d read Huxley,
01:06:27 ►
then I’d gone back to Havelock Ellis,
01:06:30 ►
The Dance of Life, and Henri Michaud,
01:06:33 ►
The Miserable Miracle, and people like that.
01:06:36 ►
And Havelock Ellis talks about
01:06:38 ►
ruined buildings of great antiquity
01:06:43 ►
drooping with opalescent
01:06:45 ►
jewels and protruding
01:06:47 ►
from Venusian forests
01:06:49 ►
and I said that’s
01:06:51 ►
what I’m after
01:06:52 ►
and LSD
01:06:54 ►
would never even approach that
01:06:56 ►
it was much more
01:06:58 ►
mechanical and elusive
01:07:01 ►
and fast moving
01:07:02 ►
well then when I took psilocybin
01:07:03 ►
lo and behold it was just like
01:07:05 ►
Havelock Ellis, produced and directed
01:07:08 ►
by Havelock Ellis.
01:07:10 ►
And that is what I love.
01:07:13 ►
It may just be a prejudice of mine,
01:07:15 ►
but to me, the transcendental part of it
01:07:23 ►
is the visions.
01:07:29 ►
Because thoughts, you can have and even insights you can have,
01:07:32 ►
but to have behind your darkened eyelids
01:07:35 ►
a huge Technicolor movie going on for minutes and minutes,
01:07:40 ►
stunning in its cohesion and beauty
01:07:43 ►
and architectonic, triumphal.
01:07:46 ►
I mean, you just say, wow, this is great.
01:07:48 ►
This is great.
01:07:50 ►
Who’s doing this?
01:07:52 ►
And the thing, if you appreciate it like that, it will say, oh, you think that’s something?
01:07:56 ►
Look at this.
01:07:57 ►
And then it starts trying to impress you.
01:08:01 ►
And you say, yes, do it.
01:08:02 ►
Just take me.
01:08:03 ►
I’m yours.
01:08:04 ►
Go, go, go, go.
01:08:08 ►
Yes.
01:08:09 ►
Could you say something about the information that’s revealed
01:08:13 ►
through the drug-induced state and dreaming?
01:08:17 ►
Good question.
01:08:19 ►
I think that perhaps dreaming is, you know, that perhaps every night we go as deep as these psychedelic drugs take us.
01:08:30 ►
But there’s something about, there’s apparently very little short-term or long-term memory trace laid down by these experiences.
01:08:40 ►
I think if we would just legalize these things and turn our creative science people loose on this, what we really need is a drug that allows you to remember your dreams. That’s it.
01:08:54 ►
Pardon me? Well, we have the concept and we have claims, but I mean one that will work for me.
01:09:09 ►
Yes, that’s a good point.
01:09:11 ►
The one argument that I feel the force of against cannabis
01:09:15 ►
is that it completely suppresses dreaming.
01:09:20 ►
You remember.
01:09:21 ►
You purporting that you don’t remember them.
01:09:24 ►
Well, it’s debatable. I think that because it’s debatable
01:09:25 ►
I think that because it’s a boundary dissolver
01:09:29 ►
that I have sort of a pressure theory of dreams
01:09:33 ►
and that somehow cannabis depressurizes
01:09:37 ►
the dream place
01:09:39 ►
because you deal with this material inactive fantasy
01:09:43 ►
but boy if you stop smoking if you fantasy. But boy, if you stop smoking,
01:09:45 ►
if you’re a regular cannabis user and you stop smoking,
01:09:49 ►
within 48 hours you will have dreams
01:09:51 ►
that will have you on the phone to mother.
01:09:54 ►
I mean…
01:09:54 ►
And it goes on and on.
01:09:58 ►
I stopped smoking cannabis about a year and a half ago
01:10:02 ►
for four months.
01:10:04 ►
And what finally sent me back to it
01:10:07 ►
is the dreams convinced me I was losing my marbles
01:10:10 ►
and enough of making a point, you know.
01:10:15 ►
And it was accessible to my rational mind.
01:10:19 ►
It was like my rational mind was in place
01:10:21 ►
enough to know that I hadn’t been threatened,
01:10:25 ►
and that I was re-dreaming and absolutely recollecting and reliving the dream state
01:10:31 ►
and the previous dreams that I had in the last month or so.
01:10:36 ►
And where were these amanitas from?
01:10:40 ►
Michigan.
01:10:44 ►
And what were the other symptoms? Michigan. Michigan.
01:10:47 ►
And what other, what were the other symptoms?
01:10:49 ►
Like, did you feel cold?
01:10:55 ►
Did you hallucinate?
01:11:05 ►
Uh-huh. I was just absolutely immersed. I was catatonic. I mean, I did not move first.
01:11:08 ►
Pretty cool.
01:11:09 ►
Well, that’s very interesting.
01:11:11 ►
I mean, we didn’t talk much about Amanita muscaria.
01:11:15 ►
Amanita muscaria is very mysterious
01:11:17 ►
because it is so variable over its range.
01:11:27 ►
It’s seasonally variable, genetically variable, geographically variable.
01:11:34 ►
And so you hear once in a while an amazing Amanita story.
01:11:40 ►
Most Amanita stories are that it’s toxic and horrible, but maybe one in 15 stories will be something just wonderful like this.
01:11:50 ►
And I’m convinced that it has to do with some very subtle chemical equilibrium that people find and lose. and probably when amanita shamanism was flourishing it was a case of where you
01:12:05 ►
really did have to go to a master to sort out so how to do it without wasting
01:12:12 ►
your time or poisoning yourself it was all right. I had willfully entered into it with the sense that I wanted a death.
01:12:26 ►
Not a physical death per se, but I wanted to experience the Bardot. And so it was like
01:12:32 ►
a willingness to be, you know, to feel poisoned. And so, you know what I mean? It wasn’t a
01:12:40 ►
negative thing. It was something that I had willfully sought. And was it muscarinic poisoning?
01:12:47 ►
Chills and salivation?
01:12:50 ►
Yeah.
01:12:50 ►
And uh-huh, uh-huh.
01:12:52 ►
But it was okay.
01:12:53 ►
I mean, it was just because it was as though I had accepted total responsibility
01:13:00 ►
that that was a willful act on my own part.
01:13:04 ►
And so it didn’t look as,
01:13:06 ►
you know, like, I would say, you know, what is death? I mean, to me, you can look at,
01:13:11 ►
is death birth, or is death death? And it was as though I was participating in a birthing.
01:13:19 ►
I mean, it was just, I focused on that aspect of it. And so I was not merely dying,
01:13:25 ►
I was birthing myself.
01:13:28 ►
And so it did have the negative…
01:13:30 ►
I didn’t get ill by it.
01:13:33 ►
I understand.
01:13:34 ►
When I’m falling out and I’m sick,
01:13:37 ►
I’m not…
01:13:38 ►
It’s as though another L.S. speaker
01:13:40 ►
if I had just previous,
01:13:42 ►
a few weeks before that,
01:13:44 ►
was I had all these energies
01:13:46 ►
you know just hitting me and
01:13:47 ►
the idea was this voice
01:13:49 ►
kept saying pick and choose anyone
01:13:51 ►
and so it became
01:13:53 ►
very apparent that you could
01:13:55 ►
get paranoid and just
01:13:57 ►
indulge in that aspect my god
01:13:59 ►
I’m dying and
01:14:01 ►
the ego this is what the ego
01:14:03 ►
tells you as its last desperate ploy
01:14:06 ►
let me say to the group
01:14:09 ►
as far as Amanita and Muscaria is concerned
01:14:11 ►
don’t try this at home folks
01:14:13 ►
I mean
01:14:15 ►
it’s you know
01:14:16 ►
out there on the edge of the bardo
01:14:19 ►
I think though
01:14:21 ►
I mean I hear what you’re saying
01:14:22 ►
if you’re truly psychedelic
01:14:24 ►
the difference between living and dying is quite immaterial.
01:14:29 ►
No pun intended.
01:14:33 ►
If we slowly can take the outcome almost,
01:14:36 ►
do you manifest it in your mind,
01:14:40 ►
or are you languishing the sense,
01:14:42 ►
this is death and dying, dying, dying?
01:14:44 ►
Or do you just transmitute it and you say,
01:14:47 ►
this is death, I’m being born, I’m being born, I’m being born,
01:14:50 ►
and you manifest the reality?
01:14:53 ►
I mean, that’s whether you are dying after you’re,
01:14:55 ►
whether you’re being born.
01:14:57 ►
I mean, it’s kind of all the same thing.
01:14:59 ►
Yeah, this is the issue of surrender
01:15:01 ►
because boundary dissolution is interpreted by the ego as death.
01:15:07 ►
And if the boundary dissolution is happening rapidly or for some reason in an alarming fashion to the ego,
01:15:15 ►
it will pull out this explanation.
01:15:18 ►
And then you really have to discipline the hind brain and say, you know, no, this is what we chose to do,
01:15:26 ►
this is the course we’re set on,
01:15:28 ►
and this is the course we’re sailing,
01:15:30 ►
because, you know,
01:15:32 ►
what are you going to do?
01:15:34 ►
How has taking
01:15:36 ►
the project taken over the years
01:15:37 ►
affected your familial relationships
01:15:40 ►
and your life generally
01:15:42 ►
in terms of your happiness?
01:15:45 ►
Absolutely. Well, it’s hard to say, you know,
01:15:47 ►
because you ask about a path not taken as well as a path taken.
01:15:55 ►
All the women I’ve ever been with were heads of some sort,
01:16:00 ►
of varying and lesser degrees.
01:16:04 ►
I was married for 15 years.
01:16:08 ►
We’re separated.
01:16:11 ►
I don’t see the drugs as a particular issue,
01:16:18 ►
although my wife used to complain
01:16:21 ►
that I spent a great deal of time
01:16:23 ►
sort of out of the flow of family life and loaded.
01:16:28 ►
But on the other hand, I remember when I was eight and nine years old, huge scenes with my father and my mother because they were always going off on picnics or something and I always wanted to stay home and read.
01:16:43 ►
So it was exactly the same pattern
01:16:45 ►
before drugs appeared in my life I’ve always been I like to do things by
01:16:51 ►
myself a lot I think I was I mean cannabis for me was really a turning point. I remember the first time I smoked cannabis,
01:17:06 ►
and I realized, aha, I can be a normal person with this stuff.
01:17:14 ►
I can self-medicate myself,
01:17:16 ►
and I can stop being this incredibly hyperactive, nervous,
01:17:23 ►
yammering,ing skinny bespectacled
01:17:27 ►
Ichabod-like
01:17:29 ►
creature
01:17:29 ►
that I was
01:17:31 ►
and then
01:17:32 ►
I don’t know
01:17:33 ►
I mean I leave it to you
01:17:34 ►
to judge the result
01:17:35 ►
but
01:17:36 ►
my impression was
01:17:39 ►
that it helped
01:17:40 ►
with that
01:17:41 ►
and it helped with my
01:17:43 ►
social relations
01:17:44 ►
because I was always so
01:17:46 ►
alienated and and peculiar but my life has been so totally about drugs that I
01:17:55 ►
can’t imagine it any other way one of the things that most horrified me when I
01:18:00 ►
stopped smoking cannabis and I thought I had always said it about cannabis, was you worry.
01:18:07 ►
You worry.
01:18:08 ►
People who don’t smoke cannabis worry.
01:18:10 ►
Now, they would say that they’re tending to business
01:18:14 ►
and that that’s part of being an adult.
01:18:17 ►
But most worry is superfluous and preposterous.
01:18:22 ►
And, you know, if I don’t smoke pot for a week,
01:18:27 ►
I become very attentive to stuff like balancing my checkbook receipts get deeply into receipts uh and just all this weird stuff
01:18:38 ►
you know and i start thinking you know gee is my medical insurance paid up? Or I should prepay my taxes and all this kind of thing.
01:18:51 ►
Now, I suppose to go too far in the other direction, you would just be a complete space case.
01:18:57 ►
But my life seems to function very well, and people say I have an abnormally neat apartment.
01:19:02 ►
So I don’t think I’m letting down too much.
01:19:07 ►
But anxiety is a very dubious thing, I think, and anything that assuages that,
01:19:14 ►
as long as it doesn’t sedate you, is probably a pretty good thing.
01:19:20 ►
Your presence makes me think it’s not as eccentric as it probably actually is.
01:19:25 ►
So I appreciate your contributing to my own delusional state.
01:19:31 ►
I hope you found this information interesting.
01:19:35 ►
You know, avoid gurus, follow plants.
01:19:39 ►
It’s like Van Morrison says, no guru, no method, no teacher, just you and me and Mother Nature in the garden,
01:19:48 ►
in the garden wet with rain.
01:19:50 ►
So thank you very much.
01:19:57 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:20:00 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:20:05 ►
At several points in this talk, Terrence said that he wouldn’t be who he had become
01:20:09 ►
had it not been for cannabis.
01:20:12 ►
And I find it amusing when he said that he would set his alarm for 2 o’clock in the morning
01:20:16 ►
to have a toke because he says he couldn’t make it until 5 a.m. without one.
01:20:21 ►
Now, here’s a place where you just know that he’s exaggerating. Think about this
01:20:27 ►
logically. Why would he have to set his alarm if he couldn’t make it without a toke until five
01:20:32 ►
o’clock? If he couldn’t make it all night without a toke, believe me, he would not have had to set
01:20:37 ►
his alarm. For a long time, I thought that I was the only old guy who would get up during the night
01:20:43 ►
and have a couple of tokes.
01:20:51 ►
But now I’ve discovered that quite a few people my age and older have a toke or two during the night to relieve some of the new waves of pain that old age brings with it.
01:20:55 ►
And a toke or two at three in the morning is all it takes to help me get in a full night’s rest.
01:21:00 ►
My guess is that in just a few more generations, people are going to be shocked to learn that
01:21:05 ►
a toke before bedtime hasn’t always been the secret to a happy old age.
01:21:10 ►
And for what it’s worth, at the time Terrence made the statement about never having encountered
01:21:15 ►
anyone more dedicated to cannabis than he was, well, at that time, he hadn’t yet met me.
01:21:23 ►
Enough said.
01:21:24 ►
But since I’m on one of my favorite topics,
01:21:27 ►
the importance and value of the cannabis plant, I want to pass along a few thoughts to our younger
01:21:32 ►
salonners who may be experiencing some resistance from their parents. And I must confess here that
01:21:39 ►
I was a terrible parent when it came to drugs. Like most parents in my age group, well, we weren’t afraid of the physical or mental damage that pot would bring,
01:21:48 ►
but we were totally afraid for their futures
01:21:51 ►
should they get busted for smoking pot.
01:21:53 ►
It really was a lot worse back in the 70s now that I think about it,
01:21:57 ►
but we were also hypocrites, or at least I was,
01:22:00 ►
because many years later my children would laugh
01:22:04 ►
and tell me about watching
01:22:05 ►
me sneak out to the garage to smoke pot I was the most uncool dad you can imagine
01:22:12 ►
so my mission is to see to it that no other parents make fools of themselves
01:22:17 ►
like I did in many cases the main problem is getting the conversation
01:22:21 ►
started in a positive direction. Had I seen the video
01:22:25 ►
that I’m about to recommend, I think that my kids might have had a much more enlightened
01:22:29 ►
parent and a better childhood. So if I was in my teens right now and still living at
01:22:35 ►
home and sneaking out to have a toke, well what I’d do first is watch this somewhat old
01:22:40 ►
video that’s called The Union, Business Behind Getting High. In my opinion,
01:22:46 ►
the title isn’t descriptive enough. Yes, the marijuana business in British Columbia has a
01:22:51 ►
prominent place in this documentary, but for me, overall, the documentary was one of the most
01:22:57 ►
comprehensive explanations that I’ve found about why marijuana is illegal and how and why it got
01:23:04 ►
and stays that way.
01:23:06 ►
Now, normally I wouldn’t have watched yet another cannabis documentary,
01:23:09 ►
but when Netflix recommended it, I noticed that the first two names mentioned in the credits
01:23:13 ►
were Tommy Chung and Joe Rogan.
01:23:16 ►
Naturally, I had to check it out, but I gulped when I saw that it was over an hour and three quarters long.
01:23:23 ►
However, after the first ten minutes I was hooked. I still think it’s too long, but most likely the parts
01:23:29 ►
that I’d cut out are the ones that you think most important. Anyway, this video
01:23:33 ►
has a very large amount of information from Jack Herrer’s important book, The
01:23:37 ►
Emperor Wears No Clothes. So watch it yourself and then tell your parents that
01:23:42 ►
you just saw a video about cannabis and you’d like to watch it yourself and then tell your parents that you just saw a video about cannabis and
01:23:45 ►
you’d like to watch it again with them so that you can ask them some questions about
01:23:49 ►
whether this video is telling the truth.
01:23:52 ►
It may not work for everyone but it’s worth a shot.
01:23:55 ►
Because if you watch that video, as imperfect as it may be, with a friend or a relative
01:24:00 ►
who is against marijuana, even medical marijuana, then you’ll have done something
01:24:05 ►
significant in the year 2015, even if they don’t change their mind. Remember what Gandhi said?
01:24:12 ►
What you do will be insignificant, but it is very important that you do it. And then recall the
01:24:18 ►
story about the guy who gave the man from Hollywood a sample of MDMA and how that became one of the threads in the rave scene.
01:24:26 ►
So you never can tell what might happen if you show this video to somebody who happens to have
01:24:31 ►
a father or a mother in a position to make some big gains towards cannabis legalization. And by
01:24:37 ►
the way, that video not only streams on Netflix, but you can buy it in DVD format for under five
01:24:42 ►
dollars. There’s actually another cannabis video series that I’ll mention one day,
01:24:47 ►
but for now I’m hoping that at least a few of our fellow salonners
01:24:50 ►
will show the union to their anti-pot friends and family members,
01:24:55 ►
followed by an open discussion about the facts that it presents.
01:24:59 ►
For someone here in the salon, I think this is going to be an important thing to do,
01:25:03 ►
and I wish you well.
01:25:06 ►
And just one more thing about my favorite plant, and that is, I’ll start with a question.
01:25:12 ►
In the U.S., which one of the states do you think has the highest percentage of pot smokers?
01:25:17 ►
The national average for people over 12 who reported smoking within the last month is 9%, or just less than 1 in 10. With the
01:25:27 ►
highest rates in the West, 11%, the Northeast, 9%, the Midwest and the South at 8% reported
01:25:34 ►
the lowest regional rates. So, what state do you think has the highest percentage of
01:25:39 ►
people over 12 who have smoked pot in the last month. Well, let’s hear it for Rhode Island, who beat the national average of 9% by coming in at a whopping 16%.
01:25:53 ►
And, of course, an honorable mention has to go to our nation’s capital, Washington, D.C.,
01:25:58 ►
which had a very respectable 14% of its population smoke pot last month.
01:26:03 ►
And if anyone needs a toke or two at night, it’s the good citizens of D.C.
01:26:09 ►
Now, getting back to the Terrence McKenna talk that we just listened to,
01:26:13 ►
at the time of this talk, the Mushroom Growers Guide that he and his brother Dennis published
01:26:18 ►
was still about the only source of how to grow magic mushrooms that I could find.
01:26:23 ►
But today there are over 75,000 YouTube videos demonstrating growing techniques.
01:26:30 ►
And from the word on the street, the hydrogen peroxide methods are by far the simplest and best, for what that’s worth.
01:26:38 ►
Also, in the discussion about Syrian Roux, Terence mentioned a long ago publication titled Psychedelic Illuminations. Thank you. But what I want to point out is that before you give any serious thoughts to using Syrian Roo,
01:27:06 ►
be sure to go to arrowid.org and read all that you can about it.
01:27:11 ►
This can be a seriously dangerous substance when not used precisely as directed.
01:27:16 ►
Well, I had some more to say about a few of the issues that I’ve been covering lately,
01:27:20 ►
but we’ve gone too long as it is.
01:27:23 ►
However, what I said about helping to spread the
01:27:25 ►
true facts about cannabis could be one of the most important contributions that you can make
01:27:30 ►
in this new year. So please give it some careful consideration. And for now, this is Lorenzo
01:27:37 ►
signing off from Cyberdelic Space. Be careful out there, my friends.