Program Notes
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
“If I didn’t have cannabis I wouldn’t take a psychedelic drug. It is indispensable.”
Terence McKenna
In this talk, Terence McKenna tells some stories about how Gordon Wasson was first led to investigating the mushrooms of Mexico, and of possible use of magic mushrooms by the Sufi’s. We also get to hear one of the rare instances where the bard McKenna gives us his opinion about 5MEO-DMT, as contrasted with his primary psychedelic substance of interest, NN-DMT. Going on, he speaks about drugs grown out of cultured amphibian skin, and about ways to enhance certain psychedelics. At one point Terence takes off on what can only be called an anti-Myan rant, something I haven’t heard him say before. This talk also contains the most detailed and specific accounting of what he thinks would happen on December 21, 2012 that I have ever heard Terence McKenna give.
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Transcript
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Greetings from Cyberdelic Space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic
00:00:22 ►
Salon.
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And in the interest of helping you find a
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few more of the others, well, this coming Memorial Day weekend, you may want to stroll through
00:00:31 ►
Forgotten City, because my hunch is that you will most definitely find some of the others there.
00:00:36 ►
And what is the Forgotten City, you ask? Well, it’s the Las Vegas Burning Man regional event,
00:00:43 ►
Well, it’s the Las Vegas Burning Man regional event,
00:00:47 ►
and at 2.30 on Sunday, May 24th at Center Camp,
00:00:49 ►
will be my friend, E-Rock X1,
00:00:53 ►
who’s going to be hosting a conversation in salon format that’s titled, In Theobotany and Shamanism.
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So, whether you’re a burner, a fellow salonner, or both,
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well, my recommendation is that you stop by and make a few new connections.
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Who knows where they’re going to lead?
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And one more announcement before I introduce today’s talk,
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which, by the way, is a continuation of the week-long workshop we’ve been listening to,
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the one that was conducted by Terrence McKenna in June of 1994.
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And this is something that I probably should have mentioned a long time ago,
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but, well, it keeps slipping my mind.
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In a few moments we’re going to be hearing Terrence speak about some books
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that he recommends for your library
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and like I’ve always done in the past
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I place links to those books in the featured book sections of my Amazon bookstore.
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Actually I do this every time a book is mentioned here in the salon.
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Well almost every time.
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But if you’re
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interested in any of the books that are talked about here, you can always go to my bookstore
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page and you’ll most likely find them featured there for you. Now, getting on with today’s
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program, we’re going to hear one of the main features of a Terrence McKenna workshop,
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information about psychedelic substances that wasn’t readily available anywhere else at the time.
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This talk is actually a really good example of how the information about psychedelics
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made its way around the country during the 80s and 90s.
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Terrence would travel to various places that he called New Age watering holes
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and answer questions, just like the ones we’re about to hear.
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Then the people from those workshops would pass their cassette tapes of these events around to their friends,
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who would then, of course, copy them and do the same.
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In a way, it was like a low-key version of what the Grateful Dead fans were doing at the same time.
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In fact, many Dead fans were also fans of Terrence.
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And while I’d like to riff on that a bit more, this is already kind of a long talk,
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so I’m going to get out of here and turn you over to Terrence McKenna and a few friends on a summer day in 1994.
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And by the way, in about an hour and four minutes from now,
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we’re going to hear the most detailed description yet of what Terrence thought would happen on December 21, 2012. Now, you may have heard this before, but for me it’s the most direct and fully detailed account
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of what he thought would happen on that day that I’ve ever heard him give.
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Okay.
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Well, we were going this morning,
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and we just were somewhat interrupted by noon,
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or whatever it was.
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And this morning we talked about
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DMT phenomenologically
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and to some degree
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pharmacologically
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it was good to run
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through all that because
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talking about one
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in detail and one
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that combines in its phenomenology
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so much of the others
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is sort of a general introduction to the phenomenology of the psychedelic experience.
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But then at the end of the morning we were saying,
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you know, each one of these compounds is different, each one of us is different,
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These compounds is different.
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Each one of us is different. And part of getting into this area of spiritual self-exploration or whatever
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is to learn what works for you.
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I mean, a substance as simple as cannabis makes some people so something
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that they’re very uncomfortable in social situations. They
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say it makes them paranoid. Other people, myself included, it quenches paranoia. So
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there’s one substance doing two things and that’s a fairly simple case. So you have to learn your way into
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it and there’s a rich
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lore about these
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things we haven’t
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really spent a lot of time on it but
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you should look
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at the literature
00:04:57 ►
of psychedelic substances
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shamanism
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chemistry so forth
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and so on certainly you should buy read and treasure
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every one of my books having once you’ve done that you know I notice up in the
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bookstore Jonathan Ott’s book Pharmacotheon this is not a book to curl up
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around the fire with
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but it is a compendious
00:05:32 ►
reference work
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and he proudly states
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and truly I believe
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that his bibliography is 30% longer
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than any bibliography on the subject ever published in English.
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And the man is an absolutely obsessive fact checker and footnote maker and scholar
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and holds everyone in the community to his level of scholarship and expertise.
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So if you need the equivalent of a physician’s desktop reference
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on psychedelics, psychedelic plants, chemistry, usage, personalities,
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so forth and so on, Pharmacotheon is a good one.
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Pharmacotheon is a good one.
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Richard Evans Schultes of Harvard,
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in collaboration with Albert Hoffman,
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who discovered LSD,
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together they wrote a number of books,
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the most scientific and the best of which is The Botany and Chemistry of Hallucinogens,
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which discusses every known
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hallucinogen on this planet
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some in great detail, some in not so much detail
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but again, extensive
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bibliographical citations
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in English and German in this case
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leading you wherever you need to go
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if you’re interested in mushrooms
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you’re going to have to come to terms with Gordon Wasson
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who was the great discoverer
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of the psilocybin mushroom complex
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and purveyor of the theory that
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Amanita muscaria was Soma
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so forth and so on
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if you’re interested in the more trippy aspects of it all,
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I suppose certainly you should read
00:07:34 ►
The White Goddess by Robert Graves,
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which is a very complex and challenging book.
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In fact, once you’ve read it,
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you can explain to me what it’s about.
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I can’t quite wrap my mind around it.
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The history of the discovery of the mushrooms
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is very interesting.
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If you like anecdotes about great men
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and the rivalries and so forth that pass between them.
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There’s certainly enough of that in the history of psychedelics.
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Just as an example, the reason Gordon Wasson and his wife Valentina went to Mexico
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was because Robert Graves told them that they should do that,
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that there was something in Mexico having to do with mushrooms
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that they would find very interesting.
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Many people know this part of the story,
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but very few people know that the person who told Robert Graves
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was, of all people, Idris Shaw.
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And why Idris Shaw knew this is not clear.
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But at Wasson’s death,
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all of his papers went to the Harvard Museum Botanical Library
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where a friend of mine happens to be the curator.
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And he recently sent me xeroxes
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of a correspondence between Idris Shaw and Gordon Wasson and the subject of the correspondence was
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Idris Shaw saying to Wasson please don’t publish the information that you obtained from my brother
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about the use of mushrooms in Sufi circles in Delhi.
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And this is interesting because nobody has ever said Sufis used mushrooms.
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It’s not a charge they need defend themselves against.
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And yet, if you are interested in this,
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take a look at Idris Shah’s book, The Sufis,
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and in the chapter on Ibn Attar,
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who was a great Arabic alchemist of the 10th century.
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Out of nowhere, there comes this passionate denial of Sufi involvement with hallucinogenic mushrooms.
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Just out of the blue.
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But what’s weird about it is the chapter before that, he talks about Sufi logic
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and explains to you that Sufis always deny the truth of what they’re doing. Then in the next chapter,
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this passionate denial of mushrooms makes you wonder. So that’s part of the literature
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of mushrooms. And every drug has a similar fascinating history
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you all know the story
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as
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Thomas Pynchon says in Gravity’s
00:10:51 ►
Rainbow, every school
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child knows the story
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of that
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bicycle ride through the streets
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of Basel that Albert Hoffman
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took that afternoon
00:11:04 ►
when he left work a little
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early with a case of the Blas
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and in the course of the
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afternoon realized that he had discovered a
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mega-halocenogen. One thing that’s not
00:11:18 ►
said about that story but which was
00:11:21 ►
very apparent when we celebrated the 50th
00:11:24 ►
anniversary of the event
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was that 600 miles away in Warsaw, at that very moment,
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the Jews of Warsaw were rising in revolt against the occupation of the Third Reich.
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The Warsaw Ghetto uprising and the discovery of LSD happened on the same
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weekend
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strange food for the
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novelty way
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and I can talk about the literature of other
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drugs if somebody has a particular
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interest in it it’s something I have
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an interest in just because I’m a
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bookish kind of guy.
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What about the poisonous frogs that were in the paper recently?
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By the paper, do you mean the New York Times?
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Oh, for the toad licking.
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Oh, well that’s a whole
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complex of vaguely related issues.
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I mean, here we can deal with this fairly briefly, I think.
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This morning I sang the praises of DMT.
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There is another tryptamine called 5-MeO-DMT or 5-Methoxy-DMT.
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And it occurs in some plants.
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It occurs in some of the plants that DMT occurs in.
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But it occurs in its purest and most available form in these large glands
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on the necks of certain
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new world toads
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especially Bufo alvarius
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and if any of you live around Santa Fe
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or throughout the southwest
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you know that in certain times of the year
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these toads go on the rut, as it were,
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and no one is safe from their nocturnal gallivantings.
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And these are fairly impressive creatures.
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I mean, a large specimen will hang its haunches off a dinner plate.
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So they’re hefty.
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And the preferred method of dealing with these toads by psychedelicos
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is you go to a dry arroyo at night where the toads are known to carry on
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with a big flashlight.
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And when you shine your flashlight on them, they stay still. are known to carry on with a big flashlight.
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And when you shine your flashlight on them,
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they stay still.
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They’re blinded. You then rush forward, seize your amphibian,
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and by a process I’ve never actually inquired too deeply into,
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you massage, milk, squeeze, pinch
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it depends on who’s describing it
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these glands
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and some people do it onto the windshield
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of their four wheel drive vehicle
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which has been parked facing east
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so that the rays of the rising sun
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will dry this
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let’s be frank folks
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slime
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this slime which you have squeezed out onto the windshield
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and then you can take your frosty scraper
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and scrape this stuff off,
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weigh it into gram bags
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and drive to Berkeley
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where it moves out
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at $80 a gram
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I understand. Maybe more.
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The number of people who’ve been
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asking me for it recently indicates
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a certain anxiety in the
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market about its accessibility.
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And I take a position which irritates a number of people, which is I’m not very keen on it.
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Comparing it to DMT, I would say it’s just like DMT, except that nothing very interesting happens.
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In other words, you don’t have visions.
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Some people dispute this.
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You have kind of visions.
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You have after images.
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You have fleeting things at the edge of your vision.
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But you don’t have a troop of elves
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kick down your front door and take you prisoner
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while they reveal the secrets of transformational linguistics.
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Nothing like that happens.
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What happens on 5-MeO is an enormous emotion,
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a huge wordless emotion overtakes you.
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And if you’re a DMT fan,
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you recognize this feeling as the feeling of tryptamine intoxication.
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But mental phenomena is almost completely absent with 5-MeO-DMT.
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Psychiatrists and psychotherapists like it. completely absent with 5-MeO-DMT.
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Psychiatrists and psychotherapists like it,
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and I’m not sure why.
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It must be that it creates an enormous contentless kind of catharsis in people.
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I have talked to people who have said
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it was the most profound experience of their life. And usually I try
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to wait like a day or two before asking, well, have you ever tried DMT? Because I don’t want
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to bring their burst to their bubble. But I think that it’s very hard for me to imagine that someone who had smoked DMT would prefer 5-MeO.
00:17:28 ►
Okay, so now that’s…
00:17:30 ►
Is that a terminal experience for the code?
00:17:34 ►
Not if you’re gentle.
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Not if you’re gentle.
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However, interesting you ask the question,
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if you take some of this 5-MeO
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in its purest form
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and inject a sheep with it
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it will drop dead on the spot
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which is a little
00:17:58 ►
raises questions
00:18:01 ►
as they like to say
00:18:03 ►
I mean I guess you find out whether you’re a sheep or not if you take it.
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But I think that’s weird,
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that a mammal, debatably a higher mammal,
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is so toxified by this stuff.
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And it’s a problem with sheep,
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because 5-MeO occurs in a number of members of the
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gramineae, the pasture grasses, and what is called staggers in sheep, which is a problem
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for ranchers, is nearly lethal 5-MeO intoxication and apparently a sheep doesn’t have to get much of this stuff to be dead.
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So that’s a little, maybe a red flag on this stuff.
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There may be people in this room who passionately disagree with what I’m saying
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and who think that 5-MeO is a wonderful, wonderful thing.
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It could be.
00:19:02 ►
that 5-MeO is a wonderful, wonderful thing. It could be.
00:19:04 ►
With a psychoanalyst known to us all
00:19:09 ►
who will remain nameless,
00:19:11 ►
but one of the greats who goes back 25 years.
00:19:15 ►
And he said that the DMT is not helpful
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for solving people’s problems,
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that in a sense it brings new data
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in that just confuses people
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I mean people are unhappy in their job
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and you introduce them to noetic elf hordes
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no, this is not helping
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they need something different in that circumstance
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and he likes the contentlessness of it and says that
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this emotional catharsis is
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real
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and
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therefore useful
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somebody here at
00:19:56 ►
Esalen told me a story
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recently
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about turning on
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a guru
00:20:04 ►
essentially who will also remain nameless about turning on a guru, essentially,
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who will also remain nameless,
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turning on a guru to this stuff.
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And the guy told me, he said,
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I thought that we’d lost him.
00:20:17 ►
He said it was the most terrifying thing
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I’ve ever been through.
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He said immediately lost consciousness
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and coherency
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and began to turn purple.
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This is not a good sign,
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turning purple.
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Began to turn purple.
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And through being heart massaged
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and thumped around
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and screamed at
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and physically pummeled,
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he came out of it
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and rose through it into some incredible ecstasy,
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some absolutely transformative thing
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which looked like a 20-minute orgasm or something,
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and then plunged back through it,
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back into this turning blue, shuddering, spasmodic thing.
00:21:07 ►
And finally, they were able to, through cold baths and heart massage,
00:21:14 ►
and they got through this physical crisis.
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But the guy is basically, you know, a haunted figure at this point.
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I mean, it’s been weeks,
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and he still has uncontrollable anxiety attacks and complete breakdowns in social situations
00:21:33 ►
and so forth and so on.
00:21:34 ►
This sounds to me like serious business.
00:21:39 ►
I mean, I assume gurus are at high risk for pathology,
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but this sounds a bit over the top.
00:21:48 ►
So I don’t really strongly recommend 5-MeO,
00:21:51 ►
but other people would and do use it
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and use it therapeutically.
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The other thing that’s happening is that,
00:22:03 ►
okay, so we’ve just dealt with toads.
00:22:05 ►
Now frogs.
00:22:07 ►
Frogs, as you probably know, are the source of a number of very exotic neurotoxins
00:22:13 ►
that Indians in South America use on their arrow points,
00:22:18 ►
paralytic neuroleptic poisons.
00:22:21 ►
And a whole industry is getting started in biotech, growing frog skins on petri dishes
00:22:32 ►
in exotic chemical mediums to force the frog skins not only to produce the exotic neurotoxins
00:22:41 ►
they produce in nature, but to produce all kinds of things that they wouldn’t
00:22:46 ►
ordinarily produce. This is a hot area in biotechnology right now. Amphibian drugs grown
00:22:56 ►
out of cultured amphibian skin. And these things are neurotoxins and consequently near relatives of hallucinogens.
00:23:08 ►
But no, the DMT toad or the DMT frog remains somewhat of an elusive creature. We’ve never
00:23:17 ►
actually found a frog that was DMT pure and clean, but very near chemical relatives of these things exist.
00:23:28 ►
What about ecstasy?
00:23:31 ►
Ecstasy is a synthetic related to MDMA,
00:23:35 ►
which is another synthetic.
00:23:38 ►
These things are cyclicized amphetamines
00:23:42 ►
and used widely,
00:23:47 ►
well MDMA, more MDMA being ecstasy,
00:23:50 ►
used more widely than MDA in therapy
00:23:53 ►
and for having a good time,
00:23:58 ►
dancing and this sort of thing in bars.
00:24:00 ►
But they, it seems most effective in use with psychotherapy. It also seems most effective the
00:24:11 ►
first few times you do it. It becomes more and more like amphetamine in my experience.
00:24:18 ►
And finally, you just have to admit, you know, basically you’re wiring yourself up with this stuff. It’s hard to get the amphetamine
00:24:27 ►
out of these cyclicized amphetamines. You know, mescaline is an amphetamine, and much of its
00:24:36 ►
presentation is amphetamine-like. The jaw clenching, the tooth grinding, that goes on with MDA, MDMA,
00:25:07 ►
the tooth grinding, that goes on with MDA, empathogens, all these words have been used.
00:25:11 ►
But they’re not true psychedelics. And there is no analog to them in nature.
00:25:15 ►
Yeah?
00:25:16 ►
I had a question on mushrooms.
00:25:18 ►
I’m sure you’re familiar with Timothy Leary’s work
00:25:21 ►
way back when and all that.
00:25:23 ►
And he used hydrated mushrooms coming from Mexico, I believe.
00:25:27 ►
And you were saying peyote, and is peyote the same thing like the cybans?
00:25:34 ►
No, no, they’re completely different things.
00:25:37 ►
Yes, here’s the distinction.
00:25:40 ►
Peyote is a cactus, Lophophora williamsi
00:25:45 ►
a small desert cactus
00:25:48 ►
that grows in the shadow of sagebrush
00:25:52 ►
and is a beautiful pale blue-green
00:25:56 ►
and it contains mescaline
00:25:59 ►
and up to 12 other psychoactive alkaloids closely related to mescaline.
00:26:07 ►
Anhalamine, anhalamine, n-methylmescaline, there’s a whole bunch of them.
00:26:13 ►
And it was used, it is used by a number of Indian tribes in Mexico.
00:26:20 ►
There is an argument about how long it’s been used.
00:26:25 ►
I don’t think it’s been used very long.
00:26:28 ►
I think it may be post-conquest.
00:26:30 ►
When you go into the old, old graves of Tarahumara graves and like that,
00:26:38 ►
you don’t find any remnants of peyote.
00:26:44 ►
What you find are the seeds of Sephora secundifolia,
00:26:50 ►
which is the mescal bean.
00:26:52 ►
It contains strychnine,
00:26:55 ►
but apparently was the basis of a shamanic rite
00:26:59 ►
of some sort over a wide area.
00:27:03 ►
Peyote, certainly from our point of view, would be immensely preferable,
00:27:08 ►
but yet the evidence for long use of peyote isn’t really there. This leads me to think I should say
00:27:18 ►
a little about something else, which is the way we perceive, well, culture dictates how we relate to experience.
00:27:29 ►
And this is why you can, you know, look at the Plains Indian hanging in the sun
00:27:35 ►
with the hooks under his pectoral muscles
00:27:38 ►
and see that, you know, this is a culturally validated undertaking
00:27:44 ►
and seems to work for those people,
00:27:48 ►
but you don’t get a lot of white people doing that.
00:27:52 ►
And in many parts of the world
00:27:54 ►
where there are poor flora for hallucinogens,
00:28:02 ►
you get another phenomenon,
00:28:04 ►
which is called ordeal poisons. And ordeal
00:28:10 ►
poisons are work like this. You are taken into the bush. You are given some plant to
00:28:20 ►
drink or eat. You go into convulsions.
00:28:27 ►
You think you’re going to die.
00:28:29 ►
You want to die.
00:28:32 ►
You beg to die.
00:28:34 ►
And you don’t die.
00:28:35 ►
You get better.
00:28:36 ►
You’re fine.
00:28:39 ►
12 hours, 15, 16 hours later, you’re fine.
00:28:41 ►
And you’re so damn glad to be alive
00:28:44 ►
that you are reborn
00:28:46 ►
it’s almost
00:28:48 ►
as good as a psychedelic
00:28:50 ►
trip because the very fact that you lived
00:28:52 ►
through this experience astonishes
00:28:54 ►
you so profoundly
00:28:55 ►
that you see your woman
00:28:58 ►
your children, your
00:28:59 ►
family, your tribe with new eyes
00:29:02 ►
and deep appreciation
00:29:04 ►
but this but so family, your tribe with new eyes and deep appreciation. And then there are a lot of drugs in the world that seem to fall somewhere in between the absolute gold-plated experience and an ordeal poison. For example, DMT in South America is used by this tribe called the
00:29:29 ►
Yanomamo. And what they do is they take the seeds of a certain tree, Anadenanthra paragrena.
00:29:39 ►
The seeds of this tree contain DMT. And they roast the seeds and then they grind them to as fine a powder as they can get.
00:29:49 ►
And then they load up a long tube with this powder.
00:29:54 ►
And you put the tube in your nostril
00:29:57 ►
and your friend sits across from you
00:30:00 ►
and blows this stuff up your nostril.
00:30:04 ►
Well, it’s like being hit in the face with
00:30:07 ►
a two by four. I mean, it’s just blindingly painful. You scream, you fall over backwards,
00:30:16 ►
you salivate, perhaps you vomit, and then you recompose yourself. And by this time, they filled it to do nostril number two.
00:30:28 ►
And then you go through the scream, the salivation, the whole thing all over again.
00:30:33 ►
And now your sinuses are completely packed with the equivalent of fine roasted sawdust.
00:30:43 ►
And your eyes are watering,
00:30:47 ►
your whole head feels like it’s just going…
00:30:49 ►
And in the middle of all this,
00:30:52 ►
in this absolutely filthy village
00:30:55 ►
with meningitis-infected dogs
00:30:58 ►
sitting around watching you,
00:31:00 ►
you begin to drift off
00:31:02 ►
into a very, very mild subthreshold DMT trip. Well, it’s our old
00:31:09 ►
favorite DMT, but administered in a form and under such circumstances that most white people’s desire
00:31:18 ►
in the middle of this is to say, boy, I hope this is over soon, you know, so I can clear my sinuses and get my act together.
00:31:28 ►
And, you know, perhaps we could even place ayahuasca in this category
00:31:33 ►
because ayahuasca, what goes with ayahuasca,
00:31:38 ►
is a physical purging.
00:31:41 ►
It’s a purgative.
00:31:43 ►
Most people vomit. Sometimes
00:31:46 ►
it clears you out from both ends.
00:31:49 ►
There is cultural
00:31:50 ►
validation of vomiting.
00:31:53 ►
In other words, they ask you if you
00:31:54 ►
vomited. They urge you to vomit.
00:31:57 ►
And you have this
00:31:58 ►
great hallucinogenic
00:32:00 ►
experience.
00:32:03 ►
Beautiful visions.
00:32:04 ►
Absolutely top notch
00:32:07 ►
well so that’s a kind of
00:32:09 ►
a mix of the
00:32:11 ►
ordeal and
00:32:12 ►
the thing
00:32:14 ►
people always ask the question
00:32:16 ►
is it possible to do it on the
00:32:18 ►
natch, it being
00:32:20 ►
have this kind of visionary
00:32:22 ►
transcendent experience
00:32:24 ►
and I think the answer for me has always been maybe.
00:32:29 ►
But what we want to do is to do it
00:32:32 ►
in the most comfortable way possible.
00:32:36 ►
I don’t think that’s such a bourgeois value
00:32:38 ►
that we need to dump it out of the canoe.
00:32:41 ►
What’s the matter with being comfortable
00:32:43 ►
while you do these things?
00:32:46 ►
And not risking your life
00:32:48 ►
and not risking hideous infections
00:32:52 ►
as you do when you flagellate yourself,
00:32:55 ►
scarify yourself,
00:32:58 ►
handle hot coals and stuff like that.
00:33:01 ►
I mean, you risk terrific infections,
00:33:03 ►
especially in the tropical
00:33:05 ►
rainforest. The hallucinogens just work. And so I think that, you know, in the present
00:33:13 ►
cultural phase we’re in, with all cultures communicating with all others, we just need
00:33:21 ►
to see that for many thousands of years people have been interested in altered states
00:33:26 ►
and some people have developed better technologies than others.
00:33:32 ►
And the best technologies are apparently the plant pharmaceutical approaches
00:33:41 ►
to be preferred over yoga breath control
00:33:46 ►
flagellation
00:33:48 ►
fasting
00:33:49 ►
all of these
00:33:55 ►
fairly strenuous
00:33:57 ►
and difficult things
00:33:59 ►
they don’t work as well
00:34:01 ►
as the hallucinogens
00:34:03 ►
this is a big argument in anthropology
00:34:06 ►
because there are a lot of anthropologists
00:34:09 ►
who say that when a culture uses hallucinogens,
00:34:13 ►
it’s entered a decadent phase of shamanism.
00:34:16 ►
This was Mircea Lillard’s notion.
00:34:19 ►
And I just put it down entirely to his upbringing.
00:34:22 ►
He was an upper-class cultured European
00:34:26 ►
with a fascination for Indian spirituality.
00:34:30 ►
Of course he was going to look at naked Aboriginal people
00:34:35 ►
intoxicating themselves with plants
00:34:37 ►
and see a more primitive stage of religion.
00:34:42 ►
But in fact, if you lay them side by side
00:34:45 ►
in terms of their effectiveness
00:34:47 ►
yoga
00:34:49 ►
which I take to be
00:34:51 ►
the most advanced system
00:34:54 ►
claiming to compete
00:34:55 ►
in the psychedelic domain
00:34:58 ►
it requires
00:35:00 ►
immense discipline
00:35:02 ►
years of dedication
00:35:04 ►
the right method because many It requires immense discipline, years of dedication,
00:35:10 ►
the right method, because many yogic methods are bunk.
00:35:12 ►
And so you have to have all that.
00:35:17 ►
And then if you do it right for years, you might get somewhere.
00:35:23 ►
We’ll contrast that to 40 seconds into a toke of DMT and you know it’s happening for you
00:35:26 ►
so I’ve never been interested
00:35:28 ►
in the details
00:35:32 ►
of the method
00:35:33 ►
and a lot of people have criticized me for that
00:35:37 ►
I mean the mushroom people say
00:35:39 ►
you know he really doesn’t care about mushrooms
00:35:43 ►
meaning that I don’t try to grow
00:35:46 ►
every diddly-squat psilocybin-containing mushroom
00:35:50 ►
on this planet in my basement in an aquarium.
00:35:54 ►
That’s how you gain points in the world of mycology.
00:35:58 ►
You say, I’ve cultivated, you know,
00:36:02 ►
Pleurotus strictopinus, I’ve done this, I’ve done that
00:36:05 ►
well yeah but how much time have you spent loaded
00:36:08 ►
that’s the important question
00:36:10 ►
so for me means was never
00:36:15 ►
what I was interested in
00:36:16 ►
the end was it
00:36:19 ►
and so I find the plant hallucinogens
00:36:23 ►
to be just what the doctor ordered.
00:36:27 ►
Yeah?
00:36:28 ►
I have two questions.
00:36:30 ►
One is, have you ever heard of something called nexus?
00:36:33 ►
That’s a root.
00:36:35 ►
Is it being sold in the plastic, in the little fold-out package
00:36:39 ►
with the Islamic pattern on it?
00:36:44 ►
I don’t know.
00:36:45 ►
I’ve seen it in capsules.
00:36:46 ►
It’s in capsules.
00:36:47 ►
Yeah.
00:36:48 ►
Yes.
00:36:49 ►
I don’t want to rain on your parade.
00:36:52 ►
Go ahead.
00:36:54 ►
It’s 2C-B.
00:36:57 ►
And it’s just a bunch of…
00:36:59 ►
It’s all marketing and lies
00:37:01 ►
and hype and delusion.
00:37:03 ►
It’s 2C-B, which is an illegal and interesting drug
00:37:09 ►
related to psilocybin.
00:37:11 ►
It’s an analog of psilocybin.
00:37:13 ►
But the people who want…
00:37:14 ►
First they said it was cathinone from Kat,
00:37:18 ►
and then they changed the story
00:37:20 ►
and said that it was something else.
00:37:26 ►
But Sasha Shulgin
00:37:29 ►
took some and analyzed it
00:37:32 ►
and he said it was the purest 2CB
00:37:34 ►
he’s ever seen outside of his own laboratory.
00:37:38 ►
So that was just
00:37:40 ►
points for entrepreneurial
00:37:42 ►
intent.
00:37:45 ►
I know those people were giving that stuff away.
00:37:48 ►
It was an interesting strategy
00:37:50 ►
to take an illegal drug,
00:37:52 ►
package it in a certain way,
00:37:55 ►
say it’s a legal substance,
00:37:58 ►
and distribute it.
00:38:01 ►
But it couldn’t go on for very long.
00:38:03 ►
Do you have a lot of it?
00:38:06 ►
No. I know some people who have it though.
00:38:09 ►
Well, tell them it’s probably worth more to CB
00:38:12 ►
than as the mysterious nexus.
00:38:17 ►
What was the other question?
00:38:18 ►
The other question is,
00:38:19 ►
are you familiar with flower essence at all?
00:38:22 ►
You mean like Bach flower essence?
00:38:26 ►
I was wondering, I mean they with flower essence at all? You mean like Bach flower essence? Yeah, just like the… I was wondering, I mean they have flower essence that enhance, supposedly, a trip without taking as much a dose of the mushrooms or whatever?
00:38:49 ►
It probably could.
00:38:51 ►
I mean, certainly odors are very, very…
00:38:58 ►
Isn’t that how you do it? You smell it?
00:39:01 ►
No, actually you take them.
00:39:02 ►
Oh, you physically take it.
00:39:03 ►
You physically take them.
00:39:05 ►
Well, I don’t know about that.
00:39:06 ►
I’d be more skeptical.
00:39:09 ►
There are two kinds of people, at least, in this world.
00:39:14 ►
And for purposes of this discussion,
00:39:16 ►
let’s call them the sensitives and the insensitives.
00:39:22 ►
And I number myself among the insensitives, and I number myself among the insensitives,
00:39:27 ►
it takes a great deal of anything
00:39:29 ►
to move me off the beam.
00:39:33 ►
And it’s people like myself
00:39:35 ►
that I’m trying to reach.
00:39:38 ►
The sensitives, I mean, I have people,
00:39:41 ►
after a discussion like this morning
00:39:43 ►
with the elf machines and all that
00:39:45 ►
come up to me occasionally and say
00:39:47 ►
well this is
00:39:49 ►
happening for me all the time
00:39:51 ►
I don’t
00:39:53 ►
I’ve never taken a psychedelic
00:39:55 ►
but I
00:39:56 ►
meditate
00:39:59 ►
and these things and all I
00:40:01 ►
can say is
00:40:03 ►
good luck
00:40:04 ►
what an amazing thing if true but what I say
00:40:09 ►
to myself is I don’t really believe you I can’t see how that could be I can’t why aren’t you more
00:40:18 ►
creative in that case if you can access this on the natch, why aren’t you different from the rest of us? If I
00:40:27 ►
could access it on the natch, if I could just at will move into the DMT state, I would be,
00:40:35 ►
I don’t know what I would be, but I would not be ordinary, I can tell you that. So I don’t know
00:40:42 ►
what to make of these, and I don’t diss it, like I don’t say
00:40:46 ►
it’s impossible, I just say it’s a tremendous gift and you should treasure it greatly, and I hope
00:40:54 ►
it’s true. I hope it’s not your way of evading psychedelics, you know, saying, well, I don’t need
00:41:02 ►
that. It’s happening for me all the time I’m there all the time
00:41:06 ►
really how extraordinary
00:41:08 ►
so basically my answer to the second part of your question
00:41:14 ►
is I don’t know anything about
00:41:16 ►
about flower essences really
00:41:19 ►
there are many things that can augment psychedelics
00:41:23 ►
that are very real.
00:41:26 ►
For example, monoamine oxidase inhibitors.
00:41:30 ►
Monoamine oxidase inhibitors are a chemical family of compounds that, well, they do exactly what it says.
00:41:41 ►
They inhibit monoamine oxidase.
00:41:44 ►
All these drugs are monoamines
00:41:46 ►
the way they leave your body
00:41:49 ►
and go through your urine
00:41:51 ►
and disappear and become harmless
00:41:53 ►
is by being oxidized
00:41:56 ►
but if you take
00:41:57 ►
so monoamine oxidase
00:42:00 ►
is the enzyme which oxidizes monoamines
00:42:04 ►
well if you take a monoamine oxidase inhibitor,
00:42:08 ►
the amines don’t disappear.
00:42:11 ►
If you load your system with monoamine oxidase inhibitors
00:42:16 ►
and then smoke DMT,
00:42:18 ►
what would have been a five-minute trip
00:42:21 ►
could turn into an hour and a half
00:42:24 ►
because your body is unable to chemically dealkalate,
00:42:30 ►
deanimate, decarboxylate the compound
00:42:33 ►
and get it out of the site of activity.
00:42:37 ►
So people use this as a strategy for enhancing drug trips.
00:42:42 ►
There is something you can get at Iranian markets
00:42:46 ►
called hormal.
00:42:49 ►
You ask for hormal and they will sell you
00:42:52 ►
a little paper bag full of what look like small black seeds.
00:42:58 ►
They are small black seeds.
00:43:00 ►
They’re the seeds of the Pergamon harmala plant
00:43:03 ►
and they contain a stiff amount of harmaline, a powerful monoamine oxidase inhibitor.
00:43:12 ►
If you take two grams of this harmal and grind it in a mortar and pestle or turn it, flour it in an osterizer, you can take half as much mushrooms with that.
00:43:29 ►
You can take half a dose of ayahuasca with that,
00:43:32 ►
and it will be a very strong full dose.
00:43:36 ►
So this is a strategy for strengthening drugs.
00:43:40 ►
What I do, and it’s just my preference,
00:43:43 ►
but it works at a level that I think is pharmacological, not psychological, is I smoke cannabis.
00:43:52 ►
I mean, if I didn’t have cannabis, I wouldn’t take a psychedelic drug.
00:43:57 ►
It’s indispensable.
00:43:59 ►
Why?
00:44:01 ►
Well, because it’s a navigational aid.
00:44:12 ►
If you get into a place you don’t like on a big hallucinogen,
00:44:20 ►
you can move out of that place by smoking or by chanting, singing.
00:44:23 ►
But smoking is the most effective.
00:44:27 ►
Actually, chanting will move you out of a place you don’t like,
00:44:32 ►
but smoking will move you into a place you do like if the thing is not cooperating.
00:44:35 ►
In other words, if you’ve taken five grams of mushrooms
00:44:38 ►
and it’s the hour and 20 minute mark
00:44:41 ►
and nothing is going on,
00:44:43 ►
you should smoke a bomber
00:44:45 ►
it will then just
00:44:47 ►
rupture through
00:44:49 ►
then there’s some kind of resistance
00:44:52 ►
there and it’s nothing to get all
00:44:54 ►
excited about just smoke a bomber
00:44:56 ►
and then it will happen
00:44:58 ►
yeah
00:45:01 ►
do you think that’s equally true if going back to
00:45:04 ►
your previous remark about some people are affected by pot
00:45:07 ►
one way some people another way
00:45:09 ►
yeah you have to know
00:45:11 ►
you have to know your tools
00:45:12 ►
you know you have to
00:45:14 ►
like I wouldn’t suggest that the first time you smoke
00:45:17 ►
pot it be when you’re
00:45:19 ►
circulating five dried grams
00:45:21 ►
of mushrooms
00:45:23 ►
you should know pot inside and out
00:45:26 ►
before you ever take it into that kind of a situation.
00:45:29 ►
What about interaction of these various things with alcohol?
00:45:33 ►
Oh, alcohol is…
00:45:35 ►
It’s just in another world.
00:45:38 ►
It’s irrelevant.
00:45:42 ►
You mean how does alcohol affect psilocybin?
00:45:45 ►
I don’t know that anybody has ever had the courage
00:45:49 ►
to admit that they did the two together.
00:45:51 ►
A lot of people who put the mushrooms in wine.
00:45:55 ►
Do they?
00:45:56 ►
Drink it, drink the whole bath.
00:45:58 ►
What an odd thing.
00:46:00 ►
I know people who put it in tea, hot water,
00:46:04 ►
but I’ve never heard of
00:46:06 ►
that. I took
00:46:07 ►
actually now that I think about it I
00:46:09 ►
took Amanita Muscaria
00:46:12 ►
once
00:46:12 ►
or one of the times I took it
00:46:15 ►
I was told to take hot
00:46:18 ►
sherry and
00:46:19 ►
pour it over the mushroom
00:46:21 ►
but I think it was
00:46:24 ►
just
00:46:24 ►
the sort of fin de siecle fantasies of pour it over the mushroom. But I think it was just, you know,
00:46:25 ►
the sort of fin de siècle fantasies
00:46:29 ►
of the person who was getting me to do this.
00:46:32 ►
Certainly, though, the alcohol will release the psilocybin,
00:46:35 ►
but the psilocybin is all there.
00:46:38 ►
I mean, the way I take mushrooms is I just eat them.
00:46:43 ►
I don’t take them with anything.
00:46:45 ►
I like the taste and I want them to be as dry as crackers,
00:46:50 ►
as the crispest saltine cracker you’ve ever had.
00:46:54 ►
If you have mushrooms in the back of your refrigerator
00:46:56 ►
and you get them out to take
00:46:59 ►
and they’re rubbery, bendable,
00:47:02 ►
then you’re probably better off to just get rid of them.
00:47:07 ►
They probably have gone off.
00:47:09 ►
You want that mushroom to be dry, as dry as a good saltine cracker, crumbly dry.
00:47:17 ►
And then that means it’s okay and has been properly stored.
00:47:22 ►
But I just eat them.
00:47:22 ►
and has been properly stored.
00:47:24 ►
But I just eat them.
00:47:30 ►
And I do have, close to the top of the five grams, my stomach does turn.
00:47:33 ►
My body or some part of me is saying,
00:47:37 ►
oh no, not this again.
00:47:40 ►
But I can get them down.
00:47:43 ►
but I can get them down.
00:47:50 ►
What is the shelf life for dried mushrooms?
00:47:54 ►
It depends on how carefully they’ve been stored. If you’ve stored them,
00:47:58 ►
if they were very dry when they went into their container
00:48:01 ►
and the container is absolutely airtight
00:48:04 ►
and you store them in a freezer in darkness
00:48:08 ►
they’ll last virtually forever
00:48:10 ►
but light degrades psilocybin
00:48:14 ►
and moisture degrades psilocybin
00:48:16 ►
and so you want to keep all that away from it
00:48:20 ►
one other question
00:48:22 ►
I asked this the last time I attended one of your seminars.
00:48:25 ►
The anecdotal insights
00:48:30 ►
and experiences
00:48:31 ►
of people who are on
00:48:33 ►
the serotonin reuptake inhibitors
00:48:35 ►
and taking psilocybin
00:48:40 ►
and a variety of psychedelics.
00:48:43 ►
What was said last time?
00:48:46 ►
No substantial effect.
00:48:48 ►
And I wondered about that.
00:48:50 ►
It just seemed to me there should be a pro-indication.
00:48:54 ►
It seems to me there should be as well,
00:48:57 ►
but apparently people aren’t reporting any dramatic effect.
00:49:02 ►
We’re talking here about what happens if you take mushrooms
00:49:05 ►
and you’re taking Prozac, for example. No dramatic effect, though you would expect there
00:49:13 ►
to be because Prozac is targeting the serotonin system, the serotonergic system, which is
00:49:19 ►
exactly the system that these hallucinogens are all working at psilocybin competes with
00:49:27 ►
serotonin for the bond
00:49:30 ►
site and has a greater
00:49:32 ►
affinity for the bond site
00:49:33 ►
than serotonin itself
00:49:35 ►
does
00:49:36 ►
and yet Prozac
00:49:39 ►
doesn’t seem to interrupt
00:49:41 ►
the effect
00:49:42 ►
and the other ones I don’t know about,
00:49:46 ►
what the other, the new…
00:49:48 ►
Zoloft.
00:49:49 ►
Zoloft, yeah.
00:49:51 ►
There’s a new one out there
00:49:52 ►
that affects both the serotonin and norepinephrine.
00:49:56 ►
Yeah.
00:49:57 ►
I don’t recall its name, but…
00:49:58 ►
Those are interesting drugs
00:50:00 ►
because they are the first effort by pharmacology to attack serious depression
00:50:10 ►
through the serotonin system, which always seemed to me the place to look at. They’re
00:50:20 ►
fascinating, the effect. What interests me about Prozac is that it stops working.
00:50:30 ►
That’s really interesting.
00:50:32 ►
Because imagine if we could design drugs that you take them ten times and then they stop working.
00:50:40 ►
And then there’s no reason to take them anymore.
00:50:43 ►
That’s really interesting.
00:50:46 ►
The other thing is, you know,
00:50:52 ►
Prozac has a very strong effect,
00:50:57 ►
and yet when you stop taking Prozac,
00:51:00 ►
it’s very much like taking it.
00:51:03 ►
And both are great.
00:51:06 ►
That’s the weird thing.
00:51:07 ►
My understanding about Prozac is that it has a lot of
00:51:09 ►
active metabolites and an extremely
00:51:11 ►
long half-life, like two, three
00:51:13 ►
weeks before it really fully leaves your system.
00:51:16 ►
Right. And in reference to the
00:51:17 ►
monoamine oxidase inhibitors, the two
00:51:20 ►
of them together can put you into
00:51:22 ►
a serious crisis
00:51:23 ►
with blood pressure skyrocketing.
00:51:26 ►
The Prozac and the monoamine oxidase
00:51:28 ►
inhibitors.
00:51:29 ►
That combination, and both of them
00:51:32 ►
are antidepressants, so they warn
00:51:33 ►
physicians. Not to mix them.
00:51:36 ►
Big, bold letters. If your patient
00:51:38 ►
is on a monoamine oxidase inhibitor,
00:51:39 ►
don’t put them on Prozac
00:51:42 ►
and vice versa.
00:51:43 ►
That would indicate then that ayahuasca is not a good idea for a person on Prozac and vice versa. Well, that would indicate then that ayahuasca is not a good idea
00:51:47 ►
for a person on Prozac,
00:51:48 ►
but maybe LSD and psilocybin are not so affected by that.
00:51:59 ►
I always imagined, being a fan of plants and shamanism and so forth that eventually a drug that eventually
00:52:08 ►
we would have a society where people would have psychedelic experiences and it would straighten
00:52:13 ►
them out prozac leads me to wonder if it might not be possible to design drugs where there is never a dramatic episode as there is with LSD or psilocybin, you know,
00:52:27 ►
the eight hour, oh my God, get your life together thing, but that you could just very slowly
00:52:34 ►
bring people to a different place. It’s very clear to me that what Prozac does is it teaches you
00:52:43 ►
that what Prozac does is it teaches you something about social interaction
00:52:46 ►
and that what it teaches you is pretty trivial
00:52:50 ►
and that you can fake Prozac once you know what it does.
00:52:54 ►
And it’s not a bad idea.
00:52:57 ►
I mean, we should all pretend we’re on Prozac.
00:53:00 ►
Life would be much better.
00:53:01 ►
And you don’t need Prozac to do that.
00:53:06 ►
All it does is it sets you slightly forward into social space.
00:53:12 ►
And you’re less self-reflective and more communicative.
00:53:20 ►
And after taking Prozac for three months, you know how to do this. Even after the Prozac for three months you know how to do this
00:53:25 ►
even after the Prozac leaves your system
00:53:28 ►
you just keep behaving that way
00:53:31 ►
so in a sense Prozac is a behavior modification drug
00:53:34 ►
and it doesn’t have to be taken very long
00:53:37 ►
before the behavior is in fact permanently modified
00:53:41 ►
I think
00:53:42 ►
I mean people have lots of opinions about it,
00:53:46 ►
but that’s what I’ve observed.
00:53:50 ►
Yeah?
00:53:51 ►
What do mushroom ceremonies constitute?
00:53:54 ►
In Mexico, which is the only place in the world
00:53:58 ►
where there is a living mushroom shamanism,
00:54:03 ►
like not even in the Amazon,
00:54:05 ►
there is living plant-based shamanism, but not mushroom shamanism, like not even in the Amazon. There is living plant-based shamanism,
00:54:08 ►
but not mushroom shamanism.
00:54:10 ►
So in the mountains of the Sierra Mazateca,
00:54:14 ►
behind Oaxaca,
00:54:16 ►
are the Tzaltzotl and a couple of other tribes of Indians.
00:54:23 ►
They’ve been there for a long, long time. And the mushroom
00:54:29 ►
taking ceremony is what’s called a velada, which is a rare word in Spanish. It basically is
00:54:37 ►
translated as an all-night singing session of the Lada.
00:54:49 ►
And usually the purpose is to cure.
00:54:54 ►
And people gather an hour or so after sundown in a hut.
00:54:57 ►
The shaman or shamaness,
00:55:01 ►
certainly the most famous mushroom shaman of all is the shamaness Maria Sabina,
00:55:04 ►
who died a few years ago,
00:55:06 ►
who was the person who turned Gordon Wasson on.
00:55:12 ►
And everyone, not everyone takes the mushroom,
00:55:15 ►
but everyone who wants to takes the mushroom.
00:55:19 ►
And the candles are extinguished,
00:55:23 ►
people sit in darkness, people chant.
00:55:27 ►
There aren’t musical instruments particularly, not drums or stringed instruments, just chanting.
00:55:35 ►
And then the shaman goes into trance and speaks. And if any of you know Maria Savina’s Mushroom Falada
00:55:46 ►
that Gordon Wasson published,
00:55:51 ►
she speaks in a kind of sing-song poetry.
00:55:56 ►
Woman of affairs am I.
00:56:00 ►
Medicine woman am I.
00:56:02 ►
Little bird am I.
00:56:05 ►
I in the forest am I? Little bird am I? I in the forest am I?
00:56:08 ►
And this goes on,
00:56:11 ►
and then tobacco smoke is blown over the patient,
00:56:14 ►
and copal is burned,
00:56:17 ►
and that’s about it.
00:56:18 ►
In the mushroom velada that Wasson recorded,
00:56:23 ►
Maria Sabina basically
00:56:26 ►
gives up
00:56:28 ►
on the
00:56:28 ►
patient
00:56:29 ►
she says
00:56:31 ►
it’s an
00:56:32 ►
11 year
00:56:32 ►
old boy
00:56:33 ►
and she
00:56:34 ►
says during
00:56:34 ►
the session
00:56:35 ►
that he’s
00:56:35 ►
not going
00:56:36 ►
to live
00:56:37 ►
and he
00:56:38 ►
doesn’t
00:56:38 ►
he died
00:56:40 ►
within three
00:56:40 ►
weeks of
00:56:41 ►
that session
00:56:42 ►
but there
00:56:44 ►
isn’t elaborate ceremony and there isn’t elaborate ceremony
00:56:46 ►
and there isn’t at this stage elaborate mythology.
00:56:50 ►
The Maya, we assume, used mushrooms
00:56:54 ►
but only because the mushrooms were there.
00:56:57 ►
We don’t have good evidence that they used mushrooms.
00:57:01 ►
We have these things called mushroom stones
00:57:04 ►
which are mushroom-shaped stones about this high that they used mushrooms. We have these things called mushroom stones,
00:57:09 ►
which are mushroom-shaped stones about this high with a face on them sometimes.
00:57:14 ►
And they’re found in the highland of Guatemala
00:57:16 ►
and across the Petan.
00:57:19 ►
But they’re not really associated with city sites.
00:57:25 ►
They’re just found.
00:57:27 ►
Sort of occasionally people find one.
00:57:30 ►
Nobody knows what that’s about.
00:57:33 ►
No Mayan book that is post-conquest,
00:57:37 ►
or no Mayan book is post-conquest.
00:57:40 ►
In the Codex Vindobonensis Mexicanus I,
00:57:46 ►
which is a mixtech codex
00:57:48 ►
there is a depiction
00:57:49 ►
of people doing something
00:57:51 ►
with mushrooms
00:57:53 ►
but the mixtech codexes
00:57:56 ►
have never been deciphered
00:57:58 ►
so we don’t know exactly
00:58:00 ►
what’s going on there
00:58:01 ►
I think they did use mushrooms
00:58:04 ►
I just can’t imagine that people building a civilization exactly what’s going on there. I think they did use mushrooms.
00:58:07 ►
I just can’t imagine that people building a civilization in the rainforest like that
00:58:10 ►
wouldn’t have utilized that resource.
00:58:13 ►
And certainly their art is hallucinogenic.
00:58:17 ►
I mean, if you know Mayan vases or friezes,
00:58:20 ►
it’s on a par with Tibetan Tantric Buddhism
00:58:25 ►
for a crazy set of images
00:58:28 ►
but
00:58:31 ►
the more we find out about the Maya
00:58:38 ►
the less interested I am in claiming them as mushroom takers
00:58:43 ►
because Mayan civilization begins to look like
00:58:47 ►
one of the tweakiest social organizations
00:58:50 ►
ever to come down the pike.
00:58:53 ►
I mean, these people,
00:58:54 ►
it was an incredibly steep social pyramid.
00:59:01 ►
Thousands of people were laboring
00:59:03 ►
to build these ceremonial cities
00:59:06 ►
these buildings which then 12 guys could walk around
00:59:10 ►
on top of and look down at everybody
00:59:13 ►
the public genital
00:59:16 ►
bloodlettings that were required of the royalty
00:59:19 ►
don’t sound like much fun
00:59:22 ►
and the obsession with warfare,
00:59:27 ►
not only warfare,
00:59:29 ►
but with the capture and torment of hostages
00:59:32 ►
doesn’t seem particularly appealing.
00:59:36 ►
As decipherment proceeds,
00:59:39 ►
the Maya, who we used to think of
00:59:42 ►
as these enlightened, stargazing people living in balance with their ecology, that’s pretty much over the brink now.
00:59:54 ►
I mean, even the noble skeletons of the classic climax show nutritional deficit. There was something was going wrong.
01:00:05 ►
And I think that the real message of the Maya
01:00:08 ►
may be not that they are spiritually to be emulated,
01:00:14 ►
but that they are in fact a cautionary example
01:00:17 ►
of what can happen to a civilization.
01:00:20 ►
I think they wrecked their environment.
01:00:24 ►
I mean, it’s incredible.
01:00:26 ►
Palenque, at the classic climax, had 220,000 people.
01:00:32 ►
Tikal, they believe, had 1.2 million people.
01:00:36 ►
It may have been the largest city in the world,
01:00:40 ►
A.D. 870.
01:00:44 ►
Well, good grief
01:00:46 ►
they were cutting the forest for charcoal
01:00:50 ►
they had this steep social pyramid
01:00:53 ►
very elaborate ceremonies
01:00:56 ►
and religious obligations
01:00:58 ►
being acted out by a tiny educated elite
01:01:03 ►
who could read this stuff
01:01:05 ►
and finally it
01:01:07 ►
flew to pieces
01:01:09 ►
and we know a lot now about
01:01:12 ►
how it flew to pieces
01:01:13 ►
we know that it took about
01:01:15 ►
120 years
01:01:17 ►
and we know that it radiated out
01:01:19 ►
from certain points, it radiated
01:01:21 ►
from Copan
01:01:22 ►
Copan fell because
01:01:25 ►
what would happen is when these cities
01:01:27 ►
were abandoned, they would
01:01:29 ►
sort of the act of turning
01:01:31 ►
out the light as you leave,
01:01:34 ►
they would push over
01:01:35 ►
the dated stela
01:01:37 ►
face down in the ground.
01:01:39 ►
These things weighed tons.
01:01:41 ►
They stayed face down
01:01:43 ►
until Sylvanus Morley
01:01:46 ►
and Eric J. Thompson
01:01:48 ►
and all those good folk
01:01:50 ►
came and with cranes
01:01:52 ►
and hoists set them back
01:01:54 ►
on their bases
01:01:55 ►
then they could read the dates
01:01:57 ►
so you can see that at Copan
01:01:59 ►
around 790
01:02:01 ►
it begins
01:02:02 ►
then goes Kirigoua
01:02:04 ►
then goes Kirigoua then goes
01:02:05 ►
you know
01:02:07 ►
the lowland Belize sites
01:02:10 ►
then
01:02:11 ►
Washaktun
01:02:15 ►
Tikal
01:02:16 ►
Miredor
01:02:17 ►
then
01:02:18 ►
and finally it reaches at the end
01:02:22 ►
Tonina
01:02:23 ►
at the uppermost.
01:02:25 ►
The last long-count date ever found was carved at Tonina.
01:02:32 ►
And strangely enough, this is the place where the revolt in Chiapas broke out last January.
01:02:41 ►
I mean, Ocosingo, this town made famous by the atrocities, is the town you go to if you
01:02:48 ►
want to hike up in the hills behind it and see Tanina. So I think it was a peasant revolt.
01:02:56 ►
It’s not very dramatic. It doesn’t rank with fleeing to the galactic center but on the other hand the glyphic evidence
01:03:06 ►
seems to support that
01:03:07 ►
people just got sick of all this
01:03:10 ►
pretense and religious
01:03:14 ►
display and so forth
01:03:16 ►
and so on and the intelligentsia
01:03:18 ►
were killed and the people
01:03:20 ►
went back into the forest
01:03:22 ►
you know people ask
01:03:24 ►
where did the Maya go?
01:03:26 ►
They didn’t go anywhere.
01:03:28 ►
15 million people speak a dialect of Maya as their first language.
01:03:35 ►
It’s the largest aboriginal language group in the Americas.
01:03:40 ►
They didn’t go anywhere.
01:03:42 ►
They’re there.
01:03:43 ►
They’re selling you Coca-Cola
01:03:45 ►
along the roads
01:03:46 ►
yeah
01:03:48 ►
you introduced a dimension
01:03:55 ►
I don’t know if you’d call it a dimension
01:03:56 ►
but it is to me
01:03:57 ►
in the beginning of your class
01:03:59 ►
you said that
01:04:00 ►
in about 30 years
01:04:03 ►
mankind could be like a holocaust or a horror.
01:04:07 ►
Oh, where I said the earth will be empty in 50 years?
01:04:10 ►
That rap?
01:04:11 ►
But here’s the question.
01:04:13 ►
That rap?
01:04:15 ►
30 years with this kind of knowledge?
01:04:20 ►
Well, I…
01:04:21 ►
How do you handle something like that?
01:04:23 ►
First of all, I’m not a pessimist. I think a great change is coming. Holocaust has a fairly ominous tone about it these days. Even apocalypse has been somewhat sullied. slipped deeper into Greek and called it an apokatastasis
01:04:45 ►
since that has no press at all
01:04:48 ►
nobody has strong feelings about apokatastasis
01:04:52 ►
but
01:04:54 ►
what’s going to happen
01:04:57 ►
is without precedent
01:04:59 ►
it’s so enormous
01:05:02 ►
that to call it good or bad is pointless.
01:05:07 ►
What is it that Stephen Vincent Benet says at the end of John Brown’s body?
01:05:14 ►
He says, some will worship and some adore, some will flee in horror.
01:05:19 ►
It is for you simply to say, it is here.
01:05:23 ►
It is here it is here
01:05:25 ►
and that’s what we’re
01:05:27 ►
talking about I mean I really think
01:05:29 ►
and I don’t know if I’ve conveyed it
01:05:31 ►
because there is in my personality
01:05:34 ►
a desire to be
01:05:35 ►
liked and it takes
01:05:37 ►
the form of
01:05:39 ►
slightly softening
01:05:42 ►
and evading
01:05:43 ►
the real implications of my position.
01:05:46 ►
Because everybody is writing books about how there’s going to be great change in the world.
01:05:52 ►
I mean, you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see that there’s going to be great change in the world.
01:05:57 ►
But what I’m saying is something much stranger than that.
01:06:30 ►
stranger than that. I’m saying that at the winter solstice of 2012 AD at 18 minutes after 11 a.m. Greenwich Mean Time, the state of physics in this part of the universe will undergo a dynamical collapse of some sort.
01:06:47 ►
Not the environment, not human society. The laws of physics will undergo a collapse and and the rest of the history of the universe will happen in about 20 minutes.
01:06:51 ►
It is as if you can imagine that we might be on a collision course with an asteroid.
01:06:57 ►
You might be able to imagine
01:06:59 ►
that we’re on a collision course with a black hole.
01:07:02 ►
But what I’m suggesting
01:07:04 ►
is that we’re on a collision course
01:07:06 ►
with something that we cannot
01:07:08 ►
model or imagine
01:07:10 ►
at this point
01:07:11 ►
and it’s possible to call it
01:07:14 ►
you know
01:07:16 ►
Christ triumphant
01:07:18 ►
if that’s what you want
01:07:20 ►
to call it or it’s possible
01:07:22 ►
to call it
01:07:23 ►
the end of the world or it’s possible to call it the end of the world or it’s possible to
01:07:28 ►
call it the dawn of hyperspace. Call it what you like. It isn’t simply the collapse of
01:07:36 ►
civilization. It isn’t simply the end of life as we know it. It’s the end of everything as we know it.
01:07:48 ►
And tonight, if we get the computer,
01:07:51 ►
I will argue toward this
01:07:53 ►
and attempt to convince you
01:07:55 ►
that this incredibly bizarre-sounding position
01:07:59 ►
is the only reasonable position
01:08:02 ►
an intelligent person should take that we are
01:08:06 ►
not thinking
01:08:08 ►
enough about the implications
01:08:10 ►
of what we see around us
01:08:12 ►
if I say to you time is
01:08:14 ►
speeding up everybody
01:08:16 ►
nods yes time is speeding up
01:08:18 ►
we have books about that we know
01:08:20 ►
about this but if I say to you
01:08:22 ►
I’m not kidding
01:08:24 ►
then you say well you mean metaphorically,
01:08:27 ►
you mean that things are busier. No, I mean that time is speeding up. And time has always been
01:08:36 ►
speeding up. Time is a phenomenon which does not move at a constant rate. It moves faster and faster and faster
01:08:46 ►
and faster and faster
01:08:48 ►
and so when you get
01:08:50 ►
an ape with
01:08:52 ►
enough intelligence
01:08:53 ►
to lift a stone
01:08:55 ►
and bring it down on another stone
01:08:58 ►
to shatter it, to get a cutting
01:09:00 ►
edge, at that
01:09:02 ►
point you’re 200,000
01:09:04 ►
years from concrescence
01:09:06 ►
this moment that I’m
01:09:08 ►
talking about, 200,000 years
01:09:10 ►
when you can get
01:09:12 ►
to the place where
01:09:13 ►
a bunch of Greek guys
01:09:16 ►
can sit around and talk
01:09:18 ►
about what is beauty
01:09:19 ►
you’re 2500
01:09:21 ►
years from the concrescence
01:09:24 ►
when you can get to the place where somebody can point out
01:09:32 ►
that space is curved in the vicinity of massive stars,
01:09:38 ►
then you’re 110 years from concrescence and when you light the atomic
01:09:47 ►
bomb over the city of your enemy
01:09:50 ►
you’re 67 years
01:09:52 ►
from concrescence and we are now
01:09:56 ►
18 years
01:09:58 ►
from concrescence
01:10:00 ►
and the proof of it
01:10:04 ►
is history itself
01:10:06 ►
history is what happens to biology
01:10:10 ►
when the singularity intrudes into the system
01:10:15 ►
think of biology as a bunch of random particles
01:10:21 ►
doing their thing, reproducing, preying upon each other, evolving, dying, migrating,
01:10:29 ►
and then from underneath the surface on which all this is happening, you move a very large magnet,
01:10:38 ►
and these particles are revealed to be magnetic particles, And what they do is they begin to arrange themselves
01:10:45 ►
in the beautiful fan-like pattern of the magnetic field.
01:10:50 ►
The particles don’t know why they’re doing this.
01:10:53 ►
To them, it’s not greatly different
01:10:55 ►
from the random game they were playing before.
01:10:59 ►
Well, this arranging of the pattern
01:11:04 ►
in a higher state of order is what we call history.
01:11:08 ►
And history is in fact headed somewhere.
01:11:13 ►
It can’t go on for thousands more years.
01:11:16 ►
It can’t even go on for decades more.
01:11:19 ►
History is a process like the birth of a child.
01:11:23 ►
When the child is finished in the womb,
01:11:27 ►
when gestation is completed,
01:11:30 ►
a whole set of new programs come in
01:11:33 ►
and the womb begins to knead and push the fetus
01:11:38 ►
into the birth canal,
01:11:40 ►
where then another set of muscles grab hold and squeeze and squeeze and expel the child into the world.
01:11:52 ►
We have been, since the fall of Rome at least,
01:11:56 ►
in this birth canal.
01:11:59 ►
And since the advent of atomic weapons,
01:12:02 ►
television, so forth, international airliners and so forth, we have been at the crisis of this birth transition.
01:12:12 ►
And now it’s upon us. There are people living today, millions of people, who will be alive at that moment.
01:12:24 ►
who will be alive at that moment.
01:12:30 ►
And it’s confounding to us because we are not religious people.
01:12:34 ►
I don’t believe.
01:12:35 ►
I mean, however much we may sage ourselves
01:12:38 ►
and visit with rishis and that sort of thing,
01:12:42 ►
we don’t even know what it means to be really religious.
01:12:46 ►
We are victims or the practitioners of scientism.
01:12:51 ►
And scientism teaches that history goes on forever
01:12:54 ►
and the grave is where you turn into compost.
01:12:58 ►
But what if these two statements are wrong?
01:13:04 ►
After all, science hasn’t proved that you turn into nothing but compost,
01:13:09 ►
and science hasn’t proved that history goes on forever.
01:13:13 ►
These are just statements that arise out of the scientific attitude toward the world.
01:13:20 ►
But what if it’s wrong?
01:13:22 ►
What if something does survive death? And what if history is a process leading toward some kind of tremendously unexpected conclusion?
01:13:47 ►
you, the only conclusion you can reach is a pessimistic one. You say, the earth is dying.
01:13:55 ►
There are too many of us. Technology is out of control. Pollution is out of control. Politics, out of control. Everything, out of control, out of control. Well, but what does the fetus think as it starts into the birth canal?
01:14:06 ►
Out of control.
01:14:08 ►
You know, every light on the dashboard turns red.
01:14:11 ►
No oxygen, no space, nowhere to go.
01:14:16 ►
Strangulation.
01:14:18 ►
And yet, hang on, hang on.
01:14:20 ►
One more push.
01:14:23 ►
One more push, push!
01:14:27 ►
And then, you know, everything is redefined.
01:14:30 ►
Everything is totally redefined.
01:14:32 ►
You’re now in a space thousands of times larger than the womb ever was,
01:14:38 ►
under the care of midwives, doctors, mother, father.
01:14:43 ►
A whole new world of possibilities opens up. And yet a moment ago,
01:14:48 ►
you were being crushed like a bug by some enormous muscle that was just squeezing the life out of you.
01:14:56 ►
And so I don’t fault history. History is not an aberration. History is the transition
01:15:05 ►
from those fun-loving, pastoral, agricultural,
01:15:11 ►
psychedelic, aboriginal, nomadic people
01:15:14 ►
from that to something else,
01:15:17 ►
which involves the necessary grotesqueness
01:15:21 ►
of the last 2,000 years of human history.
01:15:25 ►
Weird religions, toxic technologies,
01:15:29 ►
bunco political theories,
01:15:33 ►
all of that was a response of a panicked and maddened creature.
01:15:39 ►
The Bible got one thing right, at least,
01:15:44 ►
that we fell into history,
01:15:46 ►
that this is a fall,
01:15:47 ►
that this is not the full unfolding of the human condition.
01:15:51 ►
This is not what our father intended for us,
01:15:54 ►
is what I’m trying to say.
01:15:56 ►
And I am not different from Teilhard de Chardin
01:16:02 ►
or probably the guys on Sunday morning TV
01:16:06 ►
except that I’m willing to
01:16:10 ►
make a scientific argument for it
01:16:13 ►
and I’m willing to make a date
01:16:15 ►
I’m willing to be so crazy and reckless
01:16:19 ►
and to let my own reputation
01:16:22 ►
hang so far out there
01:16:24 ►
that I’m willing to take a stand
01:16:26 ►
and say, based on my calculations,
01:16:30 ►
based on my measurement of the rate of collapse,
01:16:34 ►
we’re not talking about 500 years or 100 years or 50 years.
01:16:40 ►
We’re talking about well under 7,000 days at this point.
01:16:45 ►
And I can feel it.
01:16:47 ►
All this stuff about the net, all these epidemic diseases,
01:16:53 ►
all this political upheaval and collapse,
01:16:57 ►
all this uncertainty on the part of the managers of the planet,
01:17:01 ►
it indicates that this is the final act.
01:17:05 ►
We’re going to find out who killed Miss Plum this act.
01:17:10 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:17:13 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:17:18 ►
And this, I think, is the main problem with Terence’s work.
01:17:22 ►
Ironically, it was also his bravest intellectual act,
01:17:25 ►
actually picking a date for his ultimate prediction. I can see a lot of reasons that he
01:17:31 ►
may have decided to be so specific about 2012, and looking back at my own life at a similar age,
01:17:37 ►
I can see how, well, how easy it is for one’s youthful naivety to cloud one’s judgment.
01:17:44 ►
I’m sure that I’m not the only one who wishes
01:17:46 ►
Terence had been more vague about his end date, but if you discard the 2012 issue and consider
01:17:52 ►
the rest of Terence’s work outside of that issue, I think that you’re going to find many of his
01:17:57 ►
ideas remain spot on yet today. Actually, I guess the first thing that I should be saying right now
01:18:03 ►
goes back to an early part of this talk,
01:18:06 ►
and that is, if you’re thinking about using psychedelics and are also using Prozac or some other SSRI,
01:18:13 ►
please be sure to go to arrowid.org, that’s E-R-O-W-I-D, arrowid.org, and do your research.
01:18:20 ►
A lot of new information has come out since this talk was recorded,
01:18:24 ►
and, well, you owe it to yourself to be very careful when combining prescription medicines and psychedelics.
01:18:30 ►
I say this because I’ve seen some really close calls with people who didn’t take that advice.
01:18:35 ►
You’ve got to be extremely careful when combining any drugs, but particularly prescription medicines and psychedelics.
01:18:44 ►
So, what did you think about Terence’s take on the Maya?
01:18:47 ►
I can’t remember hearing him go on at such length about his disregard for their culture.
01:18:53 ►
Taking a clue from his thought that perhaps the Mayan civilization collapsed because of a peasant revolt,
01:18:59 ►
well, if we had heard this before 2012, maybe we could have turned the 2012 event into what actually took
01:19:06 ►
place in 2011, the worldwide peasant revolt that we call the Occupy Movement. Check back for the
01:19:13 ►
original end date of Terence’s time wave, and well, you’re going to find that he originally set that
01:19:18 ►
date in November of 2011, which coincides nicely with Occupy Wall Street, a true peasant revolt if there ever
01:19:26 ►
was one.
01:19:27 ►
You know, I’m just saying, but I’ll leave the further speculations to you.
01:19:33 ►
Now, keeping in mind the fact that the talk we just listened to was recorded in June of
01:19:38 ►
1994, when information about psychedelic substances was still quite difficult to find,
01:19:50 ►
Terrence’s description of the differences between NN DMT and 5-MeO DMT were perhaps the beginning of the time when these two forms of DMT
01:19:54 ►
came to be known as the power and glory.
01:19:58 ►
And again, this isn’t meant to be taken in the form of criticism of Terrence.
01:20:02 ►
It’s just another way to point out how differently we all describe these experiences.
01:20:07 ►
So, when Terrence said that 5-MeO was just like NNDMT, but that nothing happens,
01:20:13 ►
well, I cracked up, as I suspect you did as well,
01:20:17 ►
assuming that you’ve experienced both of these substances.
01:20:20 ►
The only way that I could say they were alike is that they both shot me into a deep psychedelic state.
01:20:26 ►
But to say that nothing happened on 5-MeO, well, I’m almost at a loss for words.
01:20:32 ►
Let me just say that, at least to me, something happened.
01:20:37 ►
And I guess my reason for pointing this out is that far too often I hear people talk about
01:20:42 ►
what I would consider to be a really wonderful
01:20:45 ►
and fruitful experience on NMDMT.
01:20:48 ►
But they’re disappointed because they didn’t see any machine elves or self-dribbling basketballs
01:20:53 ►
or any of that stuff.
01:20:55 ►
You see, these experiences are unique to each of us, and for me that means that I really
01:20:59 ►
don’t pay much attention to descriptions of other people’s trips.
01:21:03 ►
They’re sort of like dreams, you
01:21:05 ►
know, you really have to be there to appreciate what seems to happen. Another thing that took
01:21:11 ►
place well after this talk was given is that an analog in nature for MDMA was discovered. And at
01:21:18 ►
one of the Planca conferences, Sasha Shulgin went into great detail about this plant, and within a
01:21:24 ►
month after the conference
01:21:25 ►
there wasn’t a single one of what before then was a common plant
01:21:29 ►
left in any California greenhouses
01:21:31 ►
it was really fascinating to watch
01:21:34 ►
and no, I’m not going to reveal what Sasha said about natural MDMA
01:21:39 ►
but I’m sure that with a deep enough search
01:21:41 ►
you’ll be able to figure it out
01:21:42 ►
now at one point in this talk when Terrence was speaking about wishing an experience would end,
01:21:49 ►
I realized that this may be something I haven’t mentioned to you before.
01:21:52 ►
And that is the fact that if you get serious about learning how to navigate through in theospace,
01:21:57 ►
then you’re probably going to need to accept the fact that there are going to be more times than you want to recall
01:22:02 ►
where a trip took a turn for the worst, and all you could think about was how much longer it was going to be more times than you want to recall where a trip took a turn for the worst,
01:22:05 ►
and all you could think about was how much longer it was going to last.
01:22:09 ►
So get ready for that to happen if being a psychonaut appeals to you.
01:22:13 ►
Believe it or not, even an exceptionally good trip
01:22:16 ►
can sometimes seem to last too long.
01:22:20 ►
Now, about an hour into this talk,
01:22:22 ►
when he was speaking about a potential 2012 event,
01:22:25 ►
Terrence said,
01:22:26 ►
What’s going to happen is without precedent.
01:22:28 ►
It is so enormous that to call it good or bad is pointless.
01:22:33 ►
And recall now that that was back in 1994,
01:22:36 ►
almost two decades before the so-called mysterious 2012 event,
01:22:41 ►
which is virtually what all of us focused on,
01:22:44 ►
some believing it would be
01:22:45 ►
an unprecedented event and others saying that nothing would happen.
01:22:49 ►
But what if something did happen that was and still is truly unprecedented and so enormous
01:22:55 ►
that to call it good or bad is pointless?
01:22:58 ►
Well, I think that something on that scale did and is happening, and that, like fish
01:23:04 ►
swimming through water without noticing the ocean,
01:23:07 ►
we’re swimming through an electronic ocean of information that over one half of all people
01:23:12 ►
alive today can instantly tap into for whatever their needs. In June of 1994, the World Wide Web
01:23:19 ►
was about two years old with only a handful of sites to visit. There was no mp3, no skype, no web-enabled
01:23:27 ►
phones, no texting, and no video cameras in the hands of billions. And by the way, these cameras
01:23:33 ►
are also connected to a global infrastructure that can be accessed by us common people.
01:23:39 ►
So let me ask you, what more do you need to see to understand that we have truly entered into unprecedented territories?
01:23:47 ►
Is it good? Is it bad?
01:23:49 ►
Well, that doesn’t really matter.
01:23:51 ►
It is what it is, and now the question is, what are we going to do with this enormous human interconnectivity?
01:23:58 ►
Something that has never in the history of our species even come close to existing before.
01:24:03 ►
This is really big news, my friend.
01:24:06 ►
Big news and good news at that.
01:24:09 ►
Our species has, perhaps,
01:24:12 ►
now actually entered the birth canal.
01:24:15 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off
01:24:18 ►
from cyberdelic space.
01:24:19 ►
Be careful out there, my friends.