469 - Philosophy With The Gloves Off

Program Notes §

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“We don’t produce enough seritonin for living above 20 degrees latitude.”

“I’m not a big advocate of mixing drugs, anyway. If you really want to get out into unknown territory, where there is the potential for danger, then start pouring these things together.”

“It’s a funny thing the way people relate to drugs. Many people take them in environments that couldn’t be better designed to suppress the effect of the drug. For instance, crowded singles bars, noisy social environments with everybody hitting on each other, and loud music, and lots of activity, and maybe lots of vigorous dancing. Well, this is an environment designed to suppress drug effects… . To really see what these things do, you need and atmosphere of quite, sensory deprived darkness.”

“My attitude is always if it’s legal it ain’t gonna work.”

“People have trouble saying a lot about many of these things. I think that’s a learned skill; narrative ability and to keep your wits about you in those places, and to try and bring back some kind of coherent metaphor.”

“The strange thing about opium is that it’s so endlessly fascinating while it’s happening, and there’s just nothing to be taken out of it. It apparently does not transcript into short term memories.”

“It’s as important to tell the trip as to have the trip.”

In answer to the question, “How do you regain yourself when having a difficult trip?” Terence answered, “I always have cannabis ready. It’s the rudder of the boat.”

“The key when you’re having a bad trip is to make your mind wander from the bummer.”
Legal status of Salvia divinorum

Previous Episode §

468 - Investigating Life – Part 2

Next Episode §

470 - Enter the Medicine Woman

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Transcript §

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Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic

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salon.

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And today I’m in the mood for a little more Terrence McKenna.

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So I’m going to pick up with a workshop that we heard the first part of in my podcast number 463 a little over a month ago.

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And just one word of caution here.

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Please keep in mind that this talk was given in February of 1996,

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Please keep in mind that this talk was given in February of 1996,

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which means that some of the information,

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particularly about Ibogaine and Salvia Dibonorum,

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the legality of Salvia in particular,

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well, that’s almost 20 years out of date now. So, while most of what Terrence says here is accurate,

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don’t take everything that you are about to hear

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as being the current state of affairs.

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…car somewhere and talking about all this.

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And I said, which do you prefer?

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And he said, oh, I definitely prefer LSD.

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And this is a Swiss chemist,

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very proper, very correct,

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Central European intellectual.

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And I said, why do you prefer LSD

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and he said

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the psilocybin is too animate

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and I said you mean there’s somebody in there

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and he said yes

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and apparently that challenged

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his category sufficiently

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that he found the LSD more psychoanalytic

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more reassuring

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more drug-like I would say

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I mean LSD does what you think a psychedelic would do

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if you’ve never taken one

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psilocybin on the other hand

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can surprise you

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yeah

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well he characterized

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he discovered the absolute structure of psilocybin

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he can reasonably claim to be the father

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of both

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psilocybin as an exercise

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it’s rarely it’s not an underground thing.

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It’s active in the 25 to 45 milligram range.

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To make tens of thousands of doses,

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you would have to have a very sophisticated,

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large-scale industrial pharmaceutical laboratory.

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See, the thing about LSD that makes it unique as a commodity sophisticated, large-scale industrial pharmaceutical laboratories.

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See, the thing about LSD that makes it unique as a commodity,

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not as a drug, but as a commodity,

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is that it takes so little to get you off. I mean, there are, what, 10,000 doses in a, no, one milligram.

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Yes, there’s 2,000 doses in a no, one milligram yes, there’s 2,000 doses

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in a gram

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no, very, very, very

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few drugs are active

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in that range

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okay

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so in terms of

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different kinds of properties

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of psilocybin

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being more animal

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and LSD being more animalistic,

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LSD being more psychoanalytic,

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are there any that are statistically associated with sort of harsh experiences,

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opening the heart?

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Well, it’s such a great sales pitch for any drug

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that nearly every drug has gone through a phase of being

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hailed as a love drug of some sort marijuana LSD MDMA LSD some people would

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say well some they all claim but some. That hasn’t been my experience.

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A great deal has to do with expectation, set, setting,

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and how you are led into it.

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Another really fascinating thing,

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I haven’t tried this with all of these,

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but with psilocybin, that is puzzling and worthy of comment,

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is that you can say to psilocybin,

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be MDMA.

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And it will.

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It will just switch.

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It will dismiss the dancing mice,

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the space people,

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and get you thinking about

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how much you love your mother,

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your brother, your sister,

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your landlord,

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your representative in Congress, whatever. So, you know, it’s good to have the scientific

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pharmacological reductionist approach, but you have to sort of hold it simultaneously with the understanding that in the realm of mind,

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you know, mind leads. And one of the things that I’ve grappled with is, you know, when

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you get out on one of these things and it’s very, very shaky or you’re having a hard time,

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you can always, if you’re well educated in these things, go back to the chemical data and say,

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well, I only took 25 milligrams of psilocybin.

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Nobody has ever died from this.

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It’s impossible to die from this, so forth and so on.

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But the deeper truth is,

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there’s this horrifying quote from Jung.

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I think it’s in The Structure of the Unconscious or something,

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where he says,

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the psyche has a thousand ways to terminate a life that has become meaningless.

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and so you realize it’s stepping off the curb

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in front of the bus

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you’re responsible if you do this

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this is happening because a decision is being made

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in your structure

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so it’s fine to have the pharmacological data

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but you also

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really have to respect these

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things and it is perfectly

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legitimate to pray

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for mercy and forgiveness

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in the tight spots

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in connection with the park

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question

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I just finished Food of the Gods

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and I was totally drawn to the Bwiti tribe in Africa.

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Oh, yeah.

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Their plant, which I can’t remember the Latin name.

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A tabernacle.

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Yes, and the reputation of it as an aphrodisiac,

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which was really kind of overshadowed in your literature

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by what they did for paravani,

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which is used in that culture to bond

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newlyweds and avoid

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divorce, which was easily attainable

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but very stressful because of the negotiations

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on the return of the wife’s dowry.

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And I was very impressed with that

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use of that psychedelic.

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Yeah, I mean, this isn’t

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worth talking about because you’ll be

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hearing more about all this.

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Since the middle of the last

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century, there has been this use in Gabon and Zaire of this plant called Tabernanthi boga.

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It contains a unique alkaloid, ibogaine, and several cogeners, isomers, and stereodantiumers, but the basic thing is Ibogaine,

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and it’s psychedelic, it has a reputation as an aphrodisiac, although this is a very complicated

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culture-based phenomenon. I mean, what is an aphrodisiac?

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Would you know it if you saw it?

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What does it mean?

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Does it mean prolonged erection?

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Does it mean heightened orgasm?

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Does it mean deeper empathy?

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Does it mean all of these?

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What would an aphrodisiac actually be like?

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Is cocaine an aphrodisiac?

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Is marijuana an aphrodisiac?

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The ibogaine, I’ve taken it a number of times.

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It is a very interesting and different from some of these other things. Several things

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about it that are different. First of all, it raises the concept of comfortable almost to a metaphysical absolute.

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I mean, this may relate to its aphrodisiac quality.

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You simply feel so comfortable

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that it’s astonishing.

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There is some kind…

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And if you’re in a situation where sexual carryings on are a possibility

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it is very supportive

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and it does extend

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erection and it does extend

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orgasm

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but more than that it seems

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to create

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and this is a kind of paradox

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when you think of it as an aphrodisiac

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it achieves this aphrodisiac quality through a strange kind of distancing

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so that you are very cool.

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You are very cool and hence you have enormous self-control

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and lovemaking becomes extremely unhurried.

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A thing I didn’t like about the Ebo game

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that has not been talked about much in the literature

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but every single person I’ve ever talked to who’s taken it

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has agreed that this is going on

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is it does something to your optical pathway

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that I don’t think is deep brain.

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It causes a shimmering,

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a kind of shuddering in the visual field

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that persists for 24, 36, 72 hours after you take it. And night driving becomes absolutely impossible

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because every light leaves a huge smear in your vision.

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And after a few minutes on the freeway,

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you just have to pull over and knock it off.

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Now, the people who’ve been using this for centuries

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don’t probably do a lot

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of freeway driving

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they do have

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ceremonies where they

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light

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and extinguish

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candles at various

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points

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but the way Iboga

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is taken

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among the fang

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is fairly terrifying

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because they have this notion that

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they say you must break your head open

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once in your life of taking it.

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And above, well, they teaspoon the raw ground root,

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and above 10 grams of that, you become semi-anesthetized,

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and then they force-feed it to you.

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And there have been a number of deaths recorded

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from massive forced feeding of iboga. I take four grams in a capsule and I have my hands

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full for the evening, definitely. So the thought of taking tablespoon after tablespoon of this

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is fairly daunting. And then the last thing to say about it and how you will probably hear about it is

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right now it’s having a huge vogue

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because a number of people who have come forward to say

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that it completely interrupts heroin addiction.

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And they have been convincingly enough

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able to make this case

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that NIDA, the National Institute of Drug Abuse

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is now running trials in Florida

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and there’s a clinic in Holland

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and there’s a clinic in Belize

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at this thing I just came from in Mexico, there was a guy

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there who had been a junkie his whole life and he had just spent two weeks in this Ibogaine clinic

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in Belize. I couldn’t tell whether it was working or not. When he arrived at the seminar in Mexico

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he looked like he was at death’s door

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I mean he the first morning fell off his chair

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in a meeting like this

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but by the end of the week

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he looked perfectly normal

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and was a very chatty active member of the group

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now I can’t tell whether he kicked or scored.

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But…

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Now, wasn’t there also, I believe in Thailand,

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a drug that was a plant,

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such as that inhibited…

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That’s right.

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That’s an interesting case

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that’s a plant

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native to Thailand and southern

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Burma amusingly

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enough because that’s the very

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center of the world heroin

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production

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called mitragyna

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speciosa

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that is a strange

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and not sufficiently researched situation.

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I mean, here you have Thailand, heroin everywhere, $5 a gram, addicts, social problem, this and that,

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and they have this plant which supposedly interrupts heroin addiction.

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which supposedly interrupts heroin addiction.

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The Thai government is furiously engaged in exterminating and persecuting this plant and claims that it’s highly addictive.

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The plant in Thai is called kratom, highly addictive,

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and has a peculiar presentation in that it blackens your face

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and so kratom addicts can be picked out on the street.

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And interesting that we were talking last night

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about the black face of the angel of melancholy.

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I don’t have a strong opinion about all this.

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It’s an interesting idea to fight drug addiction with drugs.

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Certainly from a chemist’s point of view,

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it’s a reasonable strategy

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because, I don’t know if you realize,

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but drugs to work

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have to go to places in your brain called receptor sites.

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And you can think of these receptor sites

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as rows and rows of locks.

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And you can think of the drugs as little keys

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floating in your bloodstream,

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and they fit into the lock,

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and when they turn it,

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then they are complexed to the receptor site,

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and no other key can get in there.

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And these receptor sites have different affinities

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for different kinds of compounds.

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So, for example, if the receptor site has a low affinity for heroin

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and a high affinity for substance X

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and you simultaneously inject heroin and substance X,

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no heroin will be activated.

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It will simply be cycled out of your bloodstream

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because the higher affinity compound will replace it.

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A more dramatic example would be the way DMT works.

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Most of these hallucinogens, the so-called indole

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hallucinogens, are what are called serotonin antagonists. That means that they are competing

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with this brain neurotransmitter 5-hydroxytryptamine serotonin for the serotonin bond site. But DMT has an order of magnitude

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greater affinity for the bond site

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than serotonin.

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So when you smoke DMT,

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the DMT just streaks to these receptors

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and fills all available slots

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for a few minutes

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until the brain can get organized to de-animate, de-alkalate,

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neutralize these compounds, shunt them to the urine, and get them out of there.

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So this whole new class of antidepressant medication, which is serotonin reuptake inhibitors,

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This whole new class of antidepressant medication,

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which is serotonin, VFK inhibitors,

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Prodexil, Zoloft, things like that,

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how would they interact if you took a psychedelic?

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They don’t interact very well.

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I mean, we’re understanding more and more about this. If you’re taking any of these,

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you probably should not take a psychedelic.

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In most cases, if you take a psychedelic,

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you will simply have a very diminished

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and unimpressive trip.

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But in some percentage of cases,

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it can bring on a hypertensive crisis.

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The way these serotonin reuptake inhibitors work

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is a little different.

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See, here’s what’s going on normally in the synapse.

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You all understand that the synapse is this place

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where one nerve clamps to another

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and there is a space between them called the synaptic cleft,

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which is a very complicated chemical environment. An electrical signal coming down the nerve,

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when it reaches the clamping portion, these vesicles, small, think of them as bubbles or membranes filled with various

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neurotransmitters, are released and the neurotransmitters flood into the synaptic cleft

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to allow the electrochemical signal to continue to the next nerve and in ordinary metabolism after a few milliseconds

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The serotonin which has allowed this signal to be transmitted is re-uptaken

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In other words it it flashes into the synaptic cleft

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The signal passes through and the serotonin is pulled back

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into this storage mode what Prozac and

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these other compounds do is they inhibit reuptake so what that means is that you

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have very serotonin juicy synaptic connections then. And this seems to feed back into our psychology

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as the feeling of well-being

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and so forth

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associated with Prozac.

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I have my own theory

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about these things

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and I can tell you in a moment.

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See, we have a funny way

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of thinking about ourselves. If it’s the mind, it involves psychologists, psychiatrists, shrinks of some sort. If it’s the body, then it’s allopathic physical medicine.

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I have taken Prozac at times and found it very interesting.

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And my analysis of it is that,

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and this ties in with a larger theory of mine about human evolution that we may get into,

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but basically we are tropical creatures.

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We evolved very close to the equator.

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And living in the temperate zone, as we do,

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there is this thing called seasonal light deficit disorder, which is nothing more than the extreme form

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of what we all experience every year called wintertime.

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And the feeling I had on Prozac was that it was summer.

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That was simply, in a nutshell, what the feeling was.

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And so I think that we have evolved.

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We are carrying a kind of recessive gene or something. We don’t produce enough

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serotonin to be living above 20 degrees latitude. So we all are subject to depression, but we

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culturally manage it. I mean, I know, you know, every Labor Day they say,

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well, now everybody’s going back to school, summer’s over, the party’s over.

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Well, if you’re in Hawaii, this seems very artificial. You say, you know, it’s summer

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forever. But in the media coming from the mainland, you can tell that the whole mass mind

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is being massaged toward the idea

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of the coming of winter.

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So, you know, I don’t know all there is to know

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about Prozac by a long shot,

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and it seems to affect different people differently,

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and Zoloft something else.

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But I think that’s a very fertile area for research

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and we need some kind of serotonin adjusting medication

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meditation, technique, therapy, dietary supplement or whatever

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and I don’t think people should diagnose or consider themselves neurotic

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or mentally ill

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or somehow diminished

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if you have to take Prozac.

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I think it’s a genetic thing

00:22:55 ► §

related to this light deficit syndrome.

00:23:00 ► §

It’s a complicated situation.

00:23:02 ► §

But no psychedelics?

00:23:04 ► §

No psychedelics

00:23:05 ► §

they’re also competing

00:23:07 ► §

for these same receptor sites

00:23:12 ► §

yeah I’m not a big advocate

00:23:15 ► §

of mixing drugs anyway

00:23:17 ► §

I mean if you really want to get out

00:23:19 ► §

into unknown territory

00:23:21 ► §

where there is the potential for danger

00:23:24 ► §

then start pouring these things together.

00:23:27 ► §

And maybe I just have a fragile constitution.

00:23:31 ► §

I mean, watching some of these people in Mexico,

00:23:35 ► §

as I said to somebody this morning,

00:23:38 ► §

the image I took away from one evening

00:23:40 ► §

was of this woman who channels angels

00:23:45 ► §

holding a syringe of ketamine in one hand

00:23:49 ► §

and a bottle of salsa tequila in the other

00:23:52 ► §

and saying, let’s party!

00:23:59 ► §

Excuse me?

00:24:02 ► §

Karen?

00:24:03 ► §

Uh-huh?

00:24:04 ► §

I wonder if you’ve heard anything about,

00:24:06 ► §

there’s an antipsychotic new class of agent called Risperdal,

00:24:12 ► §

and an interesting situation.

00:24:15 ► §

A woman I know has lupus

00:24:18 ► §

and was experiencing paranoid hallucinations,

00:24:23 ► §

visual hallucinations,

00:24:24 ► §

but also just thought process paranoia.

00:24:29 ► §

And the question was, was it entirely from the lupus, or did it have anything to do with the marijuana she smoked or the cocaine she snorted?

00:24:38 ► §

Now, she was prescribed Risperdal, which is fairly new.

00:24:44 ► §

She was prescribed Risperdal, which is fairly new.

00:24:46 ► §

And apparently after taking it,

00:24:50 ► §

it immediately stopped these paranoid hallucinations.

00:24:52 ► §

And she still gets high,

00:24:55 ► §

but she doesn’t have those negative effects.

00:24:57 ► §

Have you heard?

00:24:59 ► §

I don’t know what that drug is.

00:25:01 ► §

That’s very interesting. It’s been out about a year or two.

00:25:04 ► §

Cocaine, you know, the dark side of cocaine is very paranoid.

00:25:10 ► §

The reason people don’t always agree with that assessment

00:25:14 ► §

is because the style of taking cocaine is hyper-social.

00:25:20 ► §

But years ago, I used to play around with it,

00:25:24 ► §

and I had some friends in Berkeley,

00:25:25 ► §

and I would go down and we would score a gram and have a big evening.

00:25:31 ► §

But then I always had this two-hour drive home to Sonoma County,

00:25:36 ► §

and driving along the darkened freeway in the middle of the night,

00:25:40 ► §

carrying this load and watching it,

00:25:43 ► §

I couldn’t recognize myself. I could not believe how dark

00:25:48 ► §

and peculiar the fantasy and the expectation was. So, you know, it’s a funny thing the way people

00:25:58 ► §

relate to drugs. Many people take them in environments that couldn’t be better designed to suppress the effect of the drug.

00:26:10 ► §

For instance, crowded singles bars, noisy social environments with everybody hitting on each other,

00:26:21 ► §

and loud music, and lots of activity activity and maybe lots of vigorous dancing. Well,

00:26:27 ► §

this is an environment designed to suppress drug effects. I mean, you may get loaded to

00:26:35 ► §

some degree, but to really see what these things do, you need an atmosphere of quiet,

00:26:45 ► §

You need an atmosphere of quiet, sensory-deprived darkness.

00:26:49 ► §

And then, you know, you can actually tease the stuff out.

00:26:56 ► §

We in the West, probably coming down through Freud and before, have the idea that introspection of all types is considered morbid.

00:27:02 ► §

It’s considered narcissistic.

00:27:04 ► §

I mean, a person drinking with their friends somewhere,

00:27:08 ► §

that’s considered a pleasant picture.

00:27:11 ► §

But a person alone in a room taking a drug

00:27:15 ► §

is considered a picture of alienation

00:27:18 ► §

and severe dislocation from the social matrix and so forth

00:27:25 ► §

I’ve always done drugs that way

00:27:29 ► §

alone, high doses

00:27:32 ► §

low sensory input

00:27:35 ► §

and it’s not for everybody

00:27:38 ► §

but it certainly throws these things into high relief

00:27:42 ► §

oh, good point

00:27:44 ► §

yes, good point.

00:27:46 ► §

Yes, good point.

00:27:49 ► §

We haven’t mentioned this,

00:27:50 ► §

or I just mentioned it,

00:27:52 ► §

but this is something new and very interesting

00:27:53 ► §

and very challenging

00:27:55 ► §

to everybody’s categories,

00:27:57 ► §

which is,

00:27:58 ► §

in the last couple of years,

00:28:01 ► §

a new psychedelic

00:28:03 ► §

has been discovered

00:28:04 ► §

that has surprising implications

00:28:08 ► §

chemically, psychologically, botanically, and every other way. And here’s the story.

00:28:15 ► §

For 30, 40 years there has been a plant, and actually it’s on this list, it’s at the top

00:28:20 ► §

of the list, Salvia divinorum. And it was carried in all the ethnobotanical

00:28:26 ► §

descriptions of what’s going on in Mexico. It’s a powerful name for a nerd. Oh yeah.

00:28:34 ► §

Salvia divinorum, the diviner’s mint. Salvia is the mint family, always easily identified by the square stem.

00:28:45 ► §

If you’re a taxonomist, all mints have square stems.

00:28:50 ► §

This is a plant that grows in the mountains of Oaxaca,

00:28:54 ► §

south of Mexico City.

00:28:56 ► §

And for years and years, anthropologists reported

00:29:00 ► §

that in the absence of mushrooms,

00:29:03 ► §

certain Indian groups used this plant,

00:29:06 ► §

but no one could ever get off on it.

00:29:10 ► §

And when you do this little field test

00:29:13 ► §

called the Dragondorf reagent test for alkaloids,

00:29:18 ► §

it always came up alkaloid negative.

00:29:21 ► §

Well, all psychoactive drugs of this category that we’re talking about are alkaloids.

00:29:29 ► §

So in the field, when you test and get alkaloid negative, and the Indian is standing there

00:29:35 ► §

telling you this is a hallucinogen, the tendency is to revert to the white man’s superior attitude

00:29:43 ► §

and just say, well, these people are naive.

00:29:46 ► §

This really doesn’t have anything in it.

00:29:49 ► §

It’s somehow in their folk knowledge or their culture.

00:29:53 ► §

They’re just confused, basically.

00:29:56 ► §

It doesn’t do anything.

00:29:59 ► §

Well, then about six or seven years ago,

00:30:02 ► §

a friend of many of us here,

00:30:08 ► §

Brett Blosser, who was working in this area,

00:30:13 ► §

he finally got these Indians to cut loose with this stuff and show him how to do it.

00:30:16 ► §

And basically, as is often the case with these ethno-botanicals,

00:30:21 ► §

it’s that the route of administration is so horrendous

00:30:25 ► §

that unless somebody showed you

00:30:28 ► §

and insisted,

00:30:29 ► §

you would never put yourself

00:30:30 ► §

through such an ordeal

00:30:32 ► §

to get loaded.

00:30:34 ► §

And what they showed him

00:30:35 ► §

was they said,

00:30:36 ► §

here’s how we do it.

00:30:38 ► §

We take 13 pairs of leaves,

00:30:40 ► §

and these leaves can be

00:30:42 ► §

the size of my hand,

00:30:44 ► §

so imagine 26 of them, roll it up into a cigar

00:30:49 ► §

that’s about like that and about like that and then they said and then we eat it like rabbits

00:30:56 ► §

and meaning small bites chew chew chew hold in the mouth chew chew, chew, chew. Well, this stuff is bitter beyond belief.

00:31:05 ► §

I mean, it’s horrible.

00:31:07 ► §

Fresh?

00:31:08 ► §

Fresh, fresh.

00:31:11 ► §

But he came back saying that he had done this,

00:31:14 ► §

and he was a DMT test pilot.

00:31:18 ► §

He knew his way around the neighborhood,

00:31:22 ► §

and he came back and said,

00:31:24 ► §

I sank to my knees it was

00:31:27 ► §

incredibly powerful it was so forth and so on well so then people started playing with it and

00:31:35 ► §

what the literature had always said is kind of a covering their ass position was if there is something there it must be that it is so unstable that hours after

00:31:51 ► §

picking the plant it completely disappears and turns into something inactive well um

00:31:58 ► §

a fellow in los angeles who i don’t know if he wants his name used so I won’t mention it, but some of you know him, an amateur, one of us, somebody who’s been to many of these things, just decided the only way to get to the bottom of this is forget all that has been said.

00:32:19 ► §

Ignore all this stuff about how it’s unstable and it’s this and it’s that. Let’s just go for it with a standard

00:32:26 ► §

high molecular weight solvent extraction

00:32:30 ► §

and see what we come up with.

00:32:32 ► §

So he did that.

00:32:34 ► §

And he came up with a white crystalline material.

00:32:40 ► §

And, you know, there are old pharmacologists

00:32:44 ► §

and there are bold pharmacologists, but there are no old, bold pharmacologists.

00:32:52 ► §

So if you’re testing a new drug, what you do, a drug that you have just made, a drug that you’ve extracted or made that no human being has ever taken in the pure form,

00:33:02 ► §

you start orders of magnitude below where you think it’s effective.

00:33:08 ► §

Most drugs are effective in the milligram range.

00:33:12 ► §

A powerful drug is a drug that takes four or five milligrams.

00:33:17 ► §

Mescaline takes 700 milligrams.

00:33:21 ► §

That’s considered the effective dose in a 150-pound human being. So this fellow

00:33:26 ► §

decided he would start way, way, way down, that he would start with half a milligram.

00:33:34 ► §

That’s 500 micrograms. The only family of compounds known to be active in that range

00:33:41 ► §

are LSD. And that was thought impossible. Albert Hoffman once said

00:33:48 ► §

to me, he said, if you want to understand what getting a human being loaded on 500 grams

00:33:53 ► §

of LSD is, micrograms, if you want to understand what that’s like, think of an ant that can tear the Empire State Building apart in two hours.

00:34:08 ► §

That’s the relative size we’re talking about here.

00:34:12 ► §

So this fellow took half a milligram of this compound and vaporized it in a pipe and sank to the ground in a complete state of psychedelic discombobulation and was

00:34:31 ► §

astonished, as you can imagine. He didn’t know what he had on his hands. So then he went into

00:34:40 ► §

the literature and he discovered that some years before,

00:34:45 ► §

chemists had isolated a compound out of this plant called alpha-salvanorine.

00:34:52 ► §

So he wrote to Aldrich Chemical or Merck or somebody

00:34:57 ► §

and asked for a chromatography standard.

00:35:02 ► §

You all understand that chromatography is this technique

00:35:06 ► §

where you can take

00:35:08 ► §

a crude plant extract or a crude

00:35:10 ► §

drug, put it into a machine

00:35:12 ► §

and by comparing it

00:35:14 ► §

to known compounds

00:35:16 ► §

to their profiles

00:35:18 ► §

in this machine, you can

00:35:20 ► §

figure out what you’ve

00:35:22 ► §

got.

00:35:24 ► §

It can be. you can figure out what you’ve got. Is it a Scott-Cole test?

00:35:26 ► §

It can be.

00:35:27 ► §

Where you make a gas and then graph it?

00:35:28 ► §

Yeah, GCMS.

00:35:30 ► §

Yeah, gas, GCMS, gas chromatographic mass spectroscopy.

00:35:37 ► §

So he got the chromatography standard for alpha-salvinorine,

00:35:41 ► §

and they sent him only three milligrams of it

00:35:44 ► §

because these machines are incredibly sensitive.

00:35:47 ► §

You don’t need a lot.

00:35:48 ► §

So he took the three milligrams, and he took half a milligram of that,

00:35:53 ► §

and he smoked it.

00:35:54 ► §

And exactly the same thing happened again.

00:35:58 ► §

So then he knew that the compound was alpha-salvanorine.

00:36:03 ► §

It’s a sesquiterpene,

00:36:06 ► §

which may not mean much to anybody here,

00:36:09 ► §

but what it means is

00:36:10 ► §

it’s in a chemical family

00:36:13 ► §

never previously known

00:36:15 ► §

to contain any psychoactive drugs whatsoever.

00:36:19 ► §

So here, 35, 40 years after LSD,

00:36:24 ► §

coming from a plant

00:36:25 ► §

is a psychoactive drug

00:36:29 ► §

active in the microgram range.

00:36:32 ► §

And most people who’ve taken it

00:36:34 ► §

believe one milligram

00:36:36 ► §

is an enormous overdose.

00:36:41 ► §

I have taken the plant several times

00:36:45 ► §

and find it to be completely fascinating.

00:36:50 ► §

The way I do it,

00:36:52 ► §

the reason I haven’t done the pure compound

00:36:55 ► §

is because a friend of mine who’s an MD

00:36:59 ► §

and a clinical psychologist

00:37:02 ► §

and who does drug research,

00:37:05 ► §

but who probably doesn’t want his name mentioned here.

00:37:10 ► §

He’s as hard-boiled a character as there is,

00:37:14 ► §

and he took it, and it completely knocked him off his pins.

00:37:18 ► §

For a couple of weeks, there was great concern.

00:37:22 ► §

He could talk of nothing else.

00:37:28 ► §

weeks there was great concern. He could talk of nothing else. And during the experience, one of the somewhat disturbing aspects of this compound is you, unlike the psychedelics we’re

00:37:36 ► §

talking about here, you undergo a complete break with reality, but you don’t stay still.

00:37:48 ► §

with reality, but you don’t stay still. You move around, you curse, you open and slam drawers, you rush around in a strange and manic fashion which you don’t remember at all afterwards. So

00:38:00 ► §

we’ve created the protocol for doing it, which is the rope them to a tree protocol,

00:38:08 ► §

which is very effective,

00:38:12 ► §

and basically tie people down, restrain them,

00:38:18 ► §

and then see what happens.

00:38:21 ► §

The descriptions of the pure compound by DMT test pilots are that it is

00:38:30 ► §

at least as challenging and weirder in some ways and in a completely different direction.

00:38:37 ► §

And the more sophisticated people have come back talking about some kind of geometric,

00:38:47 ► §

some kind of extreme spatial distortion.

00:38:51 ► §

People talk about how the world unzips,

00:38:55 ► §

or the world rolls up,

00:38:57 ► §

or the world folds up,

00:39:01 ► §

and people in this manic state

00:39:05 ► §

sometimes appear to be trying to crawl into something.

00:39:10 ► §

I mean, people get into a,

00:39:12 ► §

if I could, I’m, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah,

00:39:18 ► §

this kind of thing.

00:39:23 ► §

Well, fun is not what we’re here for. This is philosophy with the gloves off. Yeah.

00:39:37 ► §

What are the physical effects?

00:39:39 ► §

Physical effects. Basically, you lose consciousness. You don’t lose continence, you don’t vomit,

00:39:48 ► §

but you lose muscle tone.

00:39:51 ► §

The descriptions of the trips are very, very anomalous and peculiar.

00:39:57 ► §

For example, one person I know, hardcore,

00:40:11 ► §

I know, hardcore, took it and said that they, it was some kind of, again, this spatial distortion,

00:40:18 ► §

some kind of cubist thing where they could simultaneously see the inside and the outside of their body, and not in x-ray vision, but somehow he said that his body was sliced.

00:40:29 ► §

He was in many pieces, and in the edges he could see into the meat,

00:40:35 ► §

and it was very confusing and visceral and so forth.

00:40:41 ► §

Well, that was this person’s first experience. Their second experience,

00:40:46 ► §

they were very concerned.

00:40:50 ► §

They wanted to have this experience again.

00:40:53 ► §

And I saw this trip.

00:40:57 ► §

They smoked it,

00:40:59 ► §

and they were sitting there,

00:41:02 ► §

and he flung his arm out,

00:41:05 ► §

and I could tell by the look on his face

00:41:09 ► §

that he was experiencing this inside-outside vision.

00:41:15 ► §

And then his description was,

00:41:18 ► §

while he’s trying to sort this out and stay calm

00:41:23 ► §

and look at this and analyze what is happening,

00:41:26 ► §

there’s a tap on the shoulder,

00:41:30 ► §

completely out of nowhere,

00:41:32 ► §

turns, and there’s a child

00:41:35 ► §

standing there in a little uniform of some sort,

00:41:40 ► §

like a cub scout, a beanie, some kind of uniform.

00:41:55 ► §

And this child says, Father, to this childless, unmarried, 35-year-old guy.

00:42:01 ► §

Says, Father, and he just, his jaw hangs.

00:42:05 ► §

And the child walked in front of him and then began walking away,

00:42:08 ► §

and he stood up to follow.

00:42:13 ► §

And at that moment,

00:42:18 ► §

and this will seem unlikely to you,

00:42:21 ► §

but the world is full of strangeness,

00:42:23 ► §

at that moment, in that place,

00:42:25 ► §

a large group of wild turkeys, who happened to be having a weekend nearby,

00:42:35 ► §

decided to take flight. And so there was this, suddenly the air was filled with this sound of wings.

00:42:50 ► §

And as he looked at this kid, out of the back of the kid’s shoulders,

00:42:54 ► §

wings just metamorphosed.

00:42:58 ► §

And the child rose into the air. And as he’s standing there looking at this,

00:43:03 ► §

he feels an enormous weight growing on his shoulders

00:43:08 ► §

and it pushes him down into the ground

00:43:11 ► §

and his face is in the dirt

00:43:13 ► §

and he can feel these wings sprouting out on him

00:43:16 ► §

and then he loses consciousness.

00:43:19 ► §

That’s a very anomalous…

00:43:22 ► §

It sounds like a dream.

00:43:24 ► §

It does sound like a dream.

00:43:26 ► §

Another person had a very interesting trip,

00:43:30 ► §

again the pure compound.

00:43:32 ► §

He said, the first thing that happened was

00:43:35 ► §

I found myself on the back porch

00:43:38 ► §

of my aunt’s house when I was a child.

00:43:44 ► §

And as I tried to coordinate this environment, I found myself on

00:43:51 ► §

the balcony of an apartment I had when I was at UCLA. And as I tried to come to terms with that,

00:43:59 ► §

I found myself on the porch of a hotel I stayed at in southern Thailand two years ago.

00:44:07 ► §

And so the conclusion was that

00:44:10 ► §

this was some kind of a memory thing

00:44:12 ► §

and that he had hit the porch file.

00:44:16 ► §

And there were just a bunch of porches

00:44:20 ► §

backed up here.

00:44:22 ► §

Porch A, Porch B, Porch C.

00:44:21 ► §

backed up here.

00:44:24 ► §

Porch A, Porch B, Porch C.

00:44:31 ► §

It does sound like time traveled to some degree.

00:44:34 ► §

Yes, he was on the porch course

00:44:36 ► §

going through all adumbrations

00:44:39 ► §

of porchness.

00:44:42 ► §

It was a porch-specific experience.

00:44:45 ► §

And how does the body metabolize?

00:44:48 ► §

How long is the condition metabolized?

00:44:50 ► §

It metabolizes it fairly quickly.

00:44:53 ► §

First of all, it’s such a small amount

00:44:55 ► §

and it goes away.

00:44:57 ► §

My experience, now speaking from my own experience,

00:45:01 ► §

is only with the plant,

00:45:06 ► §

which I find quite challenging enough.

00:45:09 ► §

And I really urge you to explore this.

00:45:11 ► §

Number one, it’s legal.

00:45:14 ► §

Number two, you can grow it in your apartment.

00:45:18 ► §

It’s a pretty plant.

00:45:20 ► §

You don’t have to kill it to use it.

00:45:23 ► §

In other words, it isn’t the roots

00:45:25 ► §

it’s the leaves and it’s very willing to produce these leaves

00:45:29 ► §

I’ve done it a number of times

00:45:32 ► §

at first it was elusive

00:45:35 ► §

and my attitude is always

00:45:38 ► §

if it’s legal it ain’t going to work

00:45:40 ► §

and that just being a cynic and knowing how life works. But I took it, the first time

00:45:53 ► §

it worked, it was interesting actually how it approached me. I had been hearing about

00:45:59 ► §

these horrendous pure compound trips. And somebody said, well, when are you going to do it?

00:46:05 ► §

You’ve got to do it.

00:46:06 ► §

How can you not do it?

00:46:07 ► §

You’re up there talking about all this.

00:46:09 ► §

You have to do it.

00:46:11 ► §

So I had a lot of confusion in my life

00:46:14 ► §

as usual at that time

00:46:16 ► §

and emotional upheaval and this and that.

00:46:18 ► §

I was not eager to expose myself to this drug.

00:46:24 ► §

But came the evening, and so I did,

00:46:29 ► §

and the way, here’s how I do it.

00:46:31 ► §

I weigh, and this is, I inject this incredibly technical concept

00:46:38 ► §

of weighing the dose.

00:46:41 ► §

I weighed 35 grams of it, and it was quite a pile of leaves, fresh leaves. And then I removed

00:46:51 ► §

the mid-vein from these leaves in order to lower the volume so I could get it in my mouth. And then

00:46:58 ► §

I rolled it up into this wad, which I could just barely get into my cheek, like, you know, shoving it in. And then I

00:47:08 ► §

lay down in darkness in a place where I can see a digital watch. And I wait 15 minutes.

00:47:20 ► §

And then I spit it out into a bowl right there without getting up, without moving much

00:47:26 ► §

I just roll over and spit it out

00:47:28 ► §

and about two to five minutes after that

00:47:32 ► §

you begin to get what’s called streaming

00:47:35 ► §

I see it after orgasm

00:47:38 ► §

I think a lot of people do

00:47:39 ► §

it’s some kind of low level hypnagogia

00:47:42 ► §

it has no content

00:47:44 ► §

but it’s a clue that you’re on the edge

00:47:47 ► §

of an altered state.

00:47:49 ► §

Streaming.

00:47:50 ► §

Well, so then after a couple of minutes of that,

00:47:52 ► §

this thing began to work.

00:47:55 ► §

But on this first trip,

00:47:57 ► §

it was absurd.

00:48:02 ► §

It was little blue kittens

00:48:04 ► §

and little pink bunnies, and they were doing kick step like the

00:48:10 ► §

Rockettes in lines and there were little blue birds pulling ribbons through the scene that said

00:48:19 ► §

don’t worry, don’t worry, don’t worry. and I was looking at this and thinking

00:48:25 ► §

a psychedelic drug for five-year-olds?

00:48:35 ► §

Which as I was experiencing it

00:48:38 ► §

you could have given it to any five-year-old

00:48:41 ► §

and they would have been absolutely delighted

00:48:43 ► §

it was Sesame Street

00:48:45 ► §

Saturday morning psychedelica

00:48:47 ► §

for sure.

00:48:49 ► §

Well, so after about 20 minutes

00:48:50 ► §

or 10 minutes of this,

00:48:52 ► §

I said, look,

00:48:53 ► §

so I’m chicken shit,

00:48:56 ► §

but not this chicken shit.

00:48:59 ► §

You know, is this it?

00:49:02 ► §

And basically that was it

00:49:04 ► §

for that trip.

00:49:06 ► §

And so the next time I took it

00:49:08 ► §

was under somewhat more dramatic conditions.

00:49:12 ► §

I was alone in a tent in a rainforest,

00:49:15 ► §

in a jungle,

00:49:16 ► §

and I zipped up my tent

00:49:22 ► §

so it was totally dark.

00:49:24 ► §

And there were two very interesting things about this trip.

00:49:27 ► §

The first thing was, incontrovertibly,

00:49:31 ► §

I could see in total darkness.

00:49:35 ► §

I mean, as I sat there waiting for this stuff to come on,

00:49:38 ► §

and it was an overcast night and it was dark,

00:49:43 ► §

but slowly, in this strange silvery blue light, I could see all the

00:49:48 ► §

ribbing of the tent and all the seams and everything. And then when the hallucinations began,

00:49:55 ► §

it was like invisible hands shuffling a deck of iridescent blue cards. And there was just

00:50:03 ► §

a deck of iridescent blue cards.

00:50:04 ► §

And there was just watching this.

00:50:08 ► §

And, you know,

00:50:09 ► §

ayahuasca is associated

00:50:10 ► §

with deep blue hallucinations,

00:50:13 ► §

cerulean hallucinations.

00:50:15 ► §

This was better.

00:50:16 ► §

This was an amazing journey

00:50:19 ► §

into blueness of some sort.

00:50:22 ► §

Then the next time I did it…

00:50:24 ► §

Yeah, I do it the same way every time.

00:50:31 ► §

I weigh it, yeah.

00:50:33 ► §

Pardon me?

00:50:34 ► §

I have smoked the leaves with no effect.

00:50:37 ► §

Some people get off quite stiffly that way.

00:50:41 ► §

I found fairly fresh dried leaves.

00:50:45 ► §

One standard

00:50:47 ► §

tobacco pipe full

00:50:49 ► §

which I guess was about a half

00:50:51 ► §

a gram of leaves.

00:50:53 ► §

Like

00:50:54 ► §

two or three large leaves

00:50:58 ► §

and

00:50:59 ► §

very intense

00:51:01 ► §

about a ten minute visual.

00:51:04 ► §

Did it work the first time?

00:51:07 ► §

Not as much as the second time.

00:51:09 ► §

Yeah, there seems to be some learning curve where you keep after it if it’s not working.

00:51:16 ► §

It surprised me how small of a dose seemed to be effective compared to what I had heard.

00:51:22 ► §

a dose seemed to be effective compared to what I had heard.

00:51:25 ► §

Yeah, I mean, my brother,

00:51:27 ► §

who is fairly hard to move off the dime,

00:51:30 ► §

he was at some conference

00:51:32 ► §

and stepped outside

00:51:33 ► §

and somebody offered him a hit

00:51:35 ► §

on the joint of this stuff

00:51:37 ► §

and the next thing he knew

00:51:38 ► §

he had sunk to his knees

00:51:40 ► §

and was just surrounded by…

00:51:43 ► §

The last time I did it was more…

00:51:49 ► §

It’s getting more and more dramatic.

00:51:52 ► §

The last time I did it,

00:51:53 ► §

I was alone in a room with a big skylight

00:51:57 ► §

and it was a full moon night.

00:52:00 ► §

And normally under those circumstances,

00:52:03 ► §

that’s the perfect situation in which to hallucinate.

00:52:08 ► §

Silvery moonlight, many dark edges and deep shadows.

00:52:12 ► §

With my eyes open, absolutely nothing was happening.

00:52:17 ► §

And when I would close my eyes,

00:52:19 ► §

it was like turning on a light in a dark room.

00:52:23 ► §

It was that fast.

00:52:25 ► §

There was no lag time.

00:52:27 ► §

When I closed my eyes, there was waiting

00:52:30 ► §

a three-dimensional, highly colored, very bright,

00:52:35 ► §

undulating environment.

00:52:38 ► §

Some of you may know the paintings of the surrealist painter Yves Tanguay,

00:52:43 ► §

the paintings of the surrealist painter Yves Tanguay,

00:52:47 ► §

these kind of melting, stretching things in these mauve landscapes.

00:52:52 ► §

And on that trip,

00:52:55 ► §

there was actually a kind of a voice.

00:52:59 ► §

And what it said was,

00:53:00 ► §

and this may explain what goes on

00:53:03 ► §

with these people who smoke the pure stuff, because what the voice was saying was, and this may explain what goes on with these people who smoke the pure stuff, because

00:53:06 ► §

what the voice was saying was, walk into it. Walk into it. And I said, no. If I walk into

00:53:16 ► §

it, I’ll stumble over furniture. I’ll fall down. It said, no, no, walk into it. And because there’s no lag time in producing these hallucinations,

00:53:30 ► §

closing your eyes is like opening your eyes. And then there’s this place, and it has an extremely

00:53:37 ► §

intense sense of place. It’s hard to tell yourself this is a drug. It doesn’t look like a drug. It

00:53:47 ► §

looks like somewhere. Now, the only other thing I can tell you about this, and this

00:53:54 ► §

is fascinating to botanists, is this plant is known only from this very small area in southern Mexico.

00:54:06 ► §

The people who use it are Mazatec Indians.

00:54:11 ► §

They call it Ojas de la Pastora,

00:54:15 ► §

the leaves of the shepherdess.

00:54:19 ► §

This is, first of all, an odd name,

00:54:24 ► §

Ojas de la Pastora.

00:54:26 ► §

At first, these people have been under the thumb

00:54:29 ► §

of the Catholic Church for several centuries.

00:54:32 ► §

There are no shepherdesses in the Christian tradition.

00:54:37 ► §

We got shepherds there at Christmas night.

00:54:41 ► §

There are no shepherdesses.

00:54:43 ► §

I mean, why is it the leaves of the

00:54:45 ► §

shepherdess? More startling,

00:54:48 ► §

these people

00:54:49 ► §

are Mazatec Indians.

00:54:52 ► §

They don’t speak Spanish

00:54:53 ► §

except as a remote

00:54:56 ► §

second language

00:54:57 ► §

of a conquering people.

00:55:00 ► §

So when you say to them,

00:55:01 ► §

what do you call it in Mazatec?

00:55:04 ► §

They say, we have no name for this in Mazatec.

00:55:09 ► §

Well, that’s a clue any anthropologist, any ethnographer would tell you.

00:55:14 ► §

That means that they cannot have had this plant for very long,

00:55:19 ► §

and it cannot be very deeply grounded in their culture.

00:55:24 ► §

And it cannot be very deeply grounded in their culture.

00:55:32 ► §

It would be like us referring to wine as Beaujolais or something.

00:55:34 ► §

I mean, it just does not happen.

00:55:39 ► §

And this plant is known from nowhere else on earth.

00:55:44 ► §

So here we have this endemic plant known by an Indian tribe,

00:55:49 ► §

but a tribe that has no name for it in their own language.

00:55:56 ► §

The suggestion is that it could have been brought from somewhere else, but where?

00:55:58 ► §

And could have been recently discovered, but how?

00:56:02 ► §

And why would it be named in Spanish anyway?

00:56:06 ► §

What if Volkos is really

00:56:08 ► §

Volkos? Volkos are eyes?

00:56:11 ► §

Then it’s eyes

00:56:12 ► §

of the shepherds.

00:56:13 ► §

Would that make more sense?

00:56:14 ► §

If there’s something lost

00:56:16 ► §

between the

00:56:18 ► §

tribes, dialect, and Spanish,

00:56:21 ► §

just one letter can change the meaning

00:56:22 ► §

that much.

00:56:23 ► §

Well, it is called the divining

00:56:26 ► §

mint.

00:56:28 ► §

Divination means

00:56:29 ► §

seeing, seeing into the

00:56:32 ► §

future. So it could be the eyes

00:56:34 ► §

of the shepherdess. But again,

00:56:36 ► §

who is the shepherdess?

00:56:37 ► §

Well, if you get it as the shepherdess, then that’s not

00:56:40 ► §

endemic in Western European.

00:56:42 ► §

It could be a slant.

00:56:43 ► §

It could just be a cover. It could just be covered. It could

00:56:45 ► §

be offended. So have we pressed by the Spaniards, they just sort of blanked it out, and it’s

00:56:51 ► §

like double-stating.

00:56:53 ► §

Yeah, I mean, it’s a complex ethnographic problem. We know that the Spanish suppressed

00:56:59 ► §

the mushrooms because we have their chronicles. We don’t have any Spanish mention of this plant.

00:57:08 ► §

And, you know, there is Zapotex, Mixtex, other tribal people in the same area, they don’t know

00:57:15 ► §

from it. You know, it’s a very indemnified local hallucinogen. Well, I don’t want to spend too

00:57:21 ► §

much time on that except that in practical terms

00:57:25 ► §

this is a plant you can obtain, you can grow

00:57:29 ► §

you can advocate, you can do therapy with it

00:57:33 ► §

you can do anything you want with it

00:57:34 ► §

because it is legal

00:57:35 ► §

but the pharmacological profile is unknown

00:57:40 ► §

the pharmacodynamics are unknown

00:57:42 ► §

and what will come out of this is not clear this plant is closely

00:57:48 ► §

related to coleus and coleus have for a long time had a reputation that there was something funny Well, now there is this new analytical technique called, I can’t remember the acronym, but it involves using liquid CO2 as the solvent rather than, say, petroleum ether or alcohol or chloroform or something like that. If you use liquid CO2 as a solvent,

00:58:29 ► §

you get out microgram quantities of things

00:58:33 ► §

which would otherwise be destroyed by the heat

00:58:36 ► §

of ordinary chemical extraction.

00:58:40 ► §

So they’ve gone into the salvia and into these coleuses, and there’s an entire family of these diterpenes, psychoactive compounds,

00:58:54 ► §

all microgram active, and none have their pharmacology yet characterized.

00:59:04 ► §

So if you are a research pharmacologist or a drug designer,

00:59:08 ► §

check the literature on this.

00:59:10 ► §

This is a really interesting area to work.

00:59:12 ► §

And who knows what treasures will be found

00:59:17 ► §

along these new chemical pathways.

00:59:21 ► §

Yeah?

00:59:21 ► §

You mentioned one experience in the lab

00:59:24 ► §

where it was hard

00:59:26 ► §

to remember that it was a drug.

00:59:28 ► §

You were talking about how it felt like a spray.

00:59:31 ► §

Do you ever forget it’s a drug?

00:59:34 ► §

The only time I’ve ever forgotten

00:59:36 ► §

it was a drug was on ketamine.

00:59:39 ► §

Ketamine

00:59:40 ► §

see

00:59:42 ► §

what I like about

00:59:43 ► §

DMT especially,

00:59:46 ► §

but all these alkaloids,

00:59:48 ► §

is in a certain very important sense,

00:59:51 ► §

they do not affect my mind.

00:59:56 ► §

They affect my visual pathway.

00:59:59 ► §

They affect my perception.

01:00:02 ► §

They affect my somatic self-image,

01:00:06 ► §

but the part of me that is watching,

01:00:11 ► §

the part of me that is saying,

01:00:13 ► §

pay attention, remember, analyze, understand,

01:00:18 ► §

is not ever interrupted.

01:00:22 ► §

On ketamine, I lost the concept drug. Well, once you lose the concept drug,

01:00:30 ► §

you don’t know where you are. You can’t remember that it was ever any different.

01:00:37 ► §

You wonder why this question is being asked. And then after a few minutes of this, suddenly you have this revelation.

01:00:48 ► §

I’m stoned. That’s what’s happening. And then it’s like it all comes rushing in at once.

01:00:55 ► §

That’s right. That’s it. I took a drug. I’m a human being who took a drug. I’m a human being

01:01:03 ► §

who took a drug, who’s lying on the floor of an apartment

01:01:06 ► §

in Santa Monica with friends and say, oh, got it. Now I know what to do with it. And then watch,

01:01:14 ► §

and then you have the trip. But before that, there’s just this vaguely posed question like, what?

01:01:30 ► §

And so I found that not so useful.

01:01:36 ► §

If it destroys the recording apparatus of the experience,

01:01:38 ► §

then you’re not taking a lot out of it.

01:01:42 ► §

And ketamine is known for that.

01:01:44 ► §

I mean, people cannot say very much

01:01:47 ► §

about it. People have a lot of trouble saying much about some of, many of these things.

01:01:53 ► §

I think that’s a learned skill, narrative ability, to keep your wits about you in those places and to try and bring back some kind of coherent metaphor.

01:02:09 ► §

It’s very difficult because you’re essentially trying to download

01:02:14 ► §

a higher dimension into not only three-dimensional space,

01:02:20 ► §

but three-dimensional space linguistically defined by American culture and historicity and

01:02:27 ► §

so forth and so on but to the degree that you can slowly move the benchmarks out that’s where

01:02:36 ► §

we learn something you know we need to build collective models you know The strange thing about opium

01:02:45 ► §

is that it’s so endlessly fascinating

01:02:48 ► §

while it’s happening

01:02:49 ► §

and there’s just nothing to be taken out of it.

01:02:53 ► §

It apparently does not transcript

01:02:57 ► §

into short-term memory.

01:03:00 ► §

And I’ve seen this with other drugs.

01:03:02 ► §

This is definitely a real issue.

01:03:04 ► §

Some drugs apparently do not And I’ve seen this with other drugs. This is definitely a real issue.

01:03:10 ► §

Some drugs apparently do not download themselves into RNA transcription for memory retention.

01:03:15 ► §

And so you have an extremely full experience in the moment,

01:03:20 ► §

but the moment it’s over with,

01:03:22 ► §

all you can say is,

01:03:24 ► §

boy, that was strange.

01:03:28 ► §

Yeah.

01:03:29 ► §

The idea that the observer alters what is observed just by the…

01:03:41 ► §

Act of observing, of observing.

01:03:42 ► §

act of observing of observing

01:03:43 ► §

it seems like if you’re trying to

01:03:46 ► §

chart

01:03:47 ► §

where you are and record it

01:03:50 ► §

so that you can remember it

01:03:51 ► §

and recollect it later

01:03:54 ► §

while it’s happening

01:03:55 ► §

that you’re imposing

01:03:58 ► §

a lot of limits

01:03:59 ► §

on what could happen if you didn’t do that

01:04:02 ► §

if you didn’t try to…

01:04:06 ► §

Download it into description.

01:04:09 ► §

Yeah, have you ever done that,

01:04:11 ► §

where you suspended that

01:04:12 ► §

and then saw what you could get from it afterwards?

01:04:16 ► §

Well, what happens is the state begins to come on

01:04:21 ► §

and I begin to describe it to myself. But in most trips there comes

01:04:29 ► §

a place where it outdistances description and then you go into a place where you deal

01:04:36 ► §

with it in real time, moment by moment, but you bring nothing out of that. DMT is particularly like this.

01:04:46 ► §

Well, can I just say,

01:04:47 ► §

it seems like you would maybe bring nothing out of it

01:04:50 ► §

for research purposes,

01:04:53 ► §

but just for personal revelations

01:04:59 ► §

or transcendent experience,

01:05:01 ► §

it seems like you could even go deeper into it,

01:05:03 ► §

but maybe lose the research value.

01:05:06 ► §

Well, how can you tell?

01:05:08 ► §

How it changes your life.

01:05:10 ► §

Oh, how it changes your life.

01:05:13 ► §

Sure.

01:05:14 ► §

Obviously, these things have effects which are not verbalizable, but I don’t think you

01:05:22 ► §

enhance those effects by ceasing to attempt to verbalize.

01:05:27 ► §

In other words, attempting to describe it doesn’t take anything away from it,

01:05:32 ► §

because description will always fail.

01:05:36 ► §

It’s very…

01:05:40 ► §

You know how you can have a very complex dream and then the alarm rings and by the time literally that your feet hit the floor, it’s gone.

01:05:56 ► §

And you can almost feel the pieces, the fragments flying out through space as you try to hold it, and then it’s gone.

01:06:11 ► §

What’s happening there is the dream is also being shunted around RNA transcription.

01:06:17 ► §

You can’t remember it because you have no memory of it.

01:06:22 ► §

And that’s what these high-dose drug states are. A friend of mine likes to say about psilocybin

01:06:25 ► §

that every time he takes it,

01:06:27 ► §

the goal is to stand more,

01:06:32 ► §

to tolerate more.

01:06:35 ► §

And as you build, it tests your metaphors.

01:06:40 ► §

Can you build a net that can hold this beast?

01:06:44 ► §

Or does it eventually rip free and dash into the jungle of your mind and disappear?

01:06:54 ► §

What I like to do is, I always use a voice-activated tape recorder, which is just lying there and when i come to certain spots where i can compress the experience

01:07:08 ► §

into the word or something that helps me later when i listen to it to get the full spectrum of

01:07:16 ► §

the experience that i only was having like shining a tiny little dawn on one aspect and later listen to it, I can see the whole picture.

01:07:29 ► §

Yeah, I’ve used voice-activated tape recorders

01:07:32 ► §

and it’s a good technique.

01:07:36 ► §

It’s a crude technique.

01:07:38 ► §

I mean, I have a number of tapes where I clear my throat 400 times, and that’s the recorded record of that trip. But

01:07:51 ► §

you’re right. At any moment, you could say, and I have, you know, little poetic aphorisms

01:07:59 ► §

or little reminders, and that’s a good, that’s an excellent technique. I know it can destroy the experience by trying to say it, but it has helped me very often

01:08:13 ► §

to get a full, meaningful picture and something that I can do something with it.

01:08:22 ► §

Well, I think that the ultimate impact of these things

01:08:26 ► §

is on community and society,

01:08:29 ► §

and so it’s very important to be able to share.

01:08:32 ► §

In all cultures where this is a big deal,

01:08:36 ► §

people talk.

01:08:37 ► §

It’s as important to tell your trip

01:08:40 ► §

as it is to have the trip.

01:08:44 ► §

Yeah.

01:08:45 ► §

I want to ask you something

01:08:47 ► §

you mentioned before when you were talking about

01:08:49 ► §

being cocaine

01:08:54 ► §

but being full of noise and doing

01:08:55 ► §

things that are putting yourself

01:08:57 ► §

in a setting that inhibits

01:08:59 ► §

the drug and instead of doing it by yourself

01:09:02 ► §

you know, a heroic

01:09:03 ► §

nose staring at the sky or whatever

01:09:05 ► §

and i agree with all that i understand a lot of what you say a lot of what you say

01:09:11 ► §

but when you’re talking about community i know that like sometimes when you smoke a joint

01:09:16 ► §

if you share it with people you get more people high than if you smoke the joint just by yourself

01:09:21 ► §

i also know i’ve been grateful to ted shows shows. I’ve been there like mushrooms on Soulcide

01:09:26 ► §

and when I know the community, there’s more going on than just that I would get by myself sitting

01:09:32 ► §

at the beach or being in my dark, you know, darkened room with that same dose that seems to be

01:09:39 ► §

brought out when you’re in a room with a bunch of people all on both sides and dancing to music, there seems to be, to me, a greater high, a greater community high, although there

01:09:50 ► §

are times when it’s good just to be by yourself and figure out your own trip, but there’s

01:09:55 ► §

sometimes it seems that the community is really important.

01:09:58 ► §

Yeah, I think this is a thing of preference and taste. I mean, I am basically hermetic, cool, withdrawn.

01:10:12 ► §

I’m not a party boy particularly. I can do it. But my natural inclination is to go the other way. The people who I am totally in awe of

01:10:26 ► §

are therapists whose idea of a good time

01:10:30 ► §

is to dose a dozen people

01:10:32 ► §

and then help them work through their trips.

01:10:37 ► §

I just go gray at the very thought of that.

01:10:43 ► §

To me, it’s like like a bunch of cocaine and alcohol

01:10:46 ► §

and going to a place and listening to loud music

01:10:48 ► §

as compared to, it’s more like a therapy

01:10:51 ► §

with a group of friends and share a bunch of shrooms

01:10:53 ► §

and go to the Grateful Dead or something

01:10:55 ► §

where there’s lights and music and people.

01:10:58 ► §

It seems to me that I’m pretty, on my own,

01:11:01 ► §

not into a party scene,

01:11:03 ► §

but there’s a difference there to me between cocaine, bright light, drug scene, and the kind of cosmic, you know,

01:11:11 ► §

when the open coliseum becomes a spaceship and everybody’s floating around.

01:11:15 ► §

But the people, I think, who enjoy those situations the most are the people who have taken a light dose.

01:11:28 ► §

people who have taken a light dose. In other words, I’ve had many people describe going to dead shows and doing too much and just having to find a dark place or get to the parking lot or to

01:11:37 ► §

deal with it because a little psychedelic makes everything fascinating and inviting and enfolding.

01:11:45 ► §

A lot brings on deeper issues and deeper insights for some people.

01:11:53 ► §

I mean, it’s very individual.

01:12:00 ► §

I close my eyes and feel alone, and that situation’s been resolved.

01:12:03 ► §

I close my eyes and I can be And that situation’s been resolved. And then I can close my eyes

01:12:05 ► §

and I can be in my test with this exhibit

01:12:07 ► §

even though I’m in work.

01:12:09 ► §

It’s not as I see it.

01:12:10 ► §

But also in a situation like that,

01:12:12 ► §

because that was my introduction to soul-saving,

01:12:14 ► §

to a great event show,

01:12:16 ► §

it seems like you can do a lower dose

01:12:19 ► §

because the music potentiates.

01:12:21 ► §

Sure.

01:12:23 ► §

And the energy,

01:12:26 ► §

because it’s very sacramental

01:12:29 ► §

for people who get into it at that level,

01:12:34 ► §

and it just seemed like you get high from the surroundings anyway

01:12:38 ► §

from the music,

01:12:39 ► §

and then with psilocybin or a cod or whatever,

01:12:42 ► §

it would really potentiate it.

01:12:49 ► §

Yeah, it’s that the morphogenetic field is very, very strong.

01:12:51 ► §

And it’s very positive.

01:12:57 ► §

Well, simply the sum total of all the Grateful Dead shows and of all the dead heads and of all the talk about the Grateful Dead show,

01:13:02 ► §

you come into an aura where expectations

01:13:06 ► §

of what is going to happen

01:13:07 ► §

are very strong and defined

01:13:10 ► §

where if you go

01:13:11 ► §

alone, you know

01:13:13 ► §

you basically have reduced

01:13:16 ► §

the environment to your own

01:13:18 ► §

body and past history

01:13:20 ► §

and also these

01:13:22 ► §

things are steerable

01:13:24 ► §

you know, you can keep it at the surface

01:13:27 ► §

if you want or you can

01:13:29 ► §

take it to depth

01:13:32 ► §

I mean I dialogue with it and I say

01:13:35 ► §

you know I’ve had conversations

01:13:39 ► §

with it where I say

01:13:40 ► §

after hours and hours

01:13:43 ► §

show me what you are for yourself.

01:13:48 ► §

And it’s like the temperature drops 20 degrees,

01:13:51 ► §

there’s an enormous organ tone

01:13:53 ► §

like the Bach B minor mass,

01:13:55 ► §

and black velvet curtains begin to rise

01:13:59 ► §

on something so mind-boggling and appalling

01:14:02 ► §

that after about 30 seconds of that

01:14:05 ► §

you just say, enough already.

01:14:08 ► §

Let’s go back to the dancing mice

01:14:11 ► §

and the rest of it.

01:14:13 ► §

Because it seems to know

01:14:17 ► §

what your limits are

01:14:19 ► §

and it’s willing to let you test those limits.

01:14:23 ► §

But there’s no doubt that there are things

01:14:26 ► §

not only that no one has ever looked upon,

01:14:29 ► §

but that no one can ever look upon,

01:14:32 ► §

because, because, because.

01:14:35 ► §

Do you think you’re exploring anything more than your own local genetic field?

01:14:43 ► §

Well, that’s the $64,000

01:14:45 ► §

question, isn’t it? Is there anything

01:14:48 ► §

here, is there anybody in here but

01:14:50 ► §

me?

01:14:51 ► §

And my fears and my hopes

01:14:54 ► §

and my projections and my

01:14:56 ► §

complexes and my

01:14:57 ► §

eventually I think maybe this question

01:15:02 ► §

just gives way to the realization

01:15:04 ► §

that it’s a pointless distinction.

01:15:08 ► §

You know, you have to deal with this world if you choose to.

01:15:15 ► §

People can go from birth to the grave and never have a psychedelic experience,

01:15:21 ► §

or maybe they have it at the brink of the grave, but we don’t hear about that.

01:15:26 ► §

But it is an avoidable dimension in life, and some people have one psychedelic experience,

01:15:33 ► §

and that is fine. They now know that the world has edges, and they stay far away from those edges, from thence forward. It’s a particular taste.

01:15:47 ► §

People say, you know, it’s not for everybody.

01:15:50 ► §

It certainly isn’t.

01:15:52 ► §

People who, you know, I consider it a kind of athletic undertaking,

01:16:00 ► §

roughly similar to rock climbing or windsurfing

01:16:06 ► §

or something like that.

01:16:08 ► §

It’s important to be in good physical shape.

01:16:11 ► §

It’s important to be in good mental shape. And it’s also important to take yourself lightly enough

01:16:15 ► §

that if it slams you, you can climb back on your board

01:16:20 ► §

without too much self-doubt and introspection.

01:16:24 ► §

Because it will. It’s like

01:16:26 ► §

surfing. But a curious thing about it is, and maybe this applies to surfing too, I don’t

01:16:33 ► §

know, but there is something like beginner’s luck. I have heard people say, you know, call it silly-sibin, or say they’ve never had a bad trip on mushrooms,

01:16:47 ► §

well, congratulations.

01:16:52 ► §

You know, just keep your fingers crossed,

01:16:54 ► §

because it’s a very, very tricky, delicate balance.

01:17:02 ► §

And you learn as much from the deep, hard trips, if not more, than you

01:17:11 ► §

learn from the…

01:17:12 ► §

…you just find something terrible. Some people just find what’s going on is something

01:17:17 ► §

terrible, and other people, sometimes you can just observe it like you said, and you

01:17:20 ► §

go, wow, what’s going on here? And it’s maybe terrible and frightening, but you you said, you go, wow, what’s going on here? It may be terrible and frightening, but you accept it.

01:17:28 ► §

And some people don’t want to accept whatever’s terrible and frightening

01:17:31 ► §

and back away from it or whatever.

01:17:33 ► §

Well, there are different kinds of terrible and frightening things.

01:17:37 ► §

There is discovery of something in your own past, traumatic, that you lost.

01:17:44 ► §

That’s rare, but devastating. There’s

01:17:49 ► §

also fear of madness. mind is a fragile construct.

01:18:08 ► §

And I have been in places where had I stayed there,

01:18:13 ► §

they just would have warehoused me in some back ward

01:18:17 ► §

and checked in once a week and cleaned me up.

01:18:20 ► §

And that’s where I would stay.

01:18:23 ► §

And I wonder if the people who are in that position,

01:18:26 ► §

what is going on for them? It’s horrifying to think that some of these places you pass

01:18:33 ► §

through for a few moments might persist for hours, days, weeks.

01:18:40 ► §

You cross your eyes and you keep doing it and stay like that.

01:19:08 ► §

Cross your eyes and keep doing it and stay like that. before they go into it. So, you know, it isn’t a case of everybody has to prove themselves.

01:19:10 ► §

It’s more like this is a calling.

01:19:14 ► §

It’s for edge runners.

01:19:20 ► §

And in human society, the way it’s worked is to deputize people,

01:19:32 ► §

call them shamans, seers, visionaries, DMT test pilots. And, you know, a test pilot is a good metaphor. I mean, a test pilot is cool. A test pilot can eject at three times the speed of sound

01:19:40 ► §

as part of a day’s work. If you don’t have those kinds of nerves,

01:19:45 ► §

and why should you, why should any of us

01:19:48 ► §

have that kind of terrible cool,

01:19:51 ► §

then some of these things are probably contraindicated.

01:19:56 ► §

Do you have any colleagues that have kind of

01:19:59 ► §

unraveled psychedelically and not reconstituted?

01:20:02 ► §

No.

01:20:03 ► §

No.

01:20:05 ► §

Some people say I’m the only known case.

01:20:13 ► §

But it’s not unusual to hear stories

01:20:16 ► §

of people being thrown for a loop

01:20:17 ► §

for a week or more.

01:20:19 ► §

And a week is a long, long time

01:20:22 ► §

to wander in the land of the shades.

01:20:27 ► §

There was a woman at this Mexico trip, I won’t use her name,

01:20:32 ► §

but the wife of a famous chemist and a psychoanalyst on her own,

01:20:38 ► §

a published author, and she described a ten-day wandering.

01:20:47 ► §

And in my book, True Hallucinations,

01:20:52 ► §

I describe a two-week episode that overcame my brother and I.

01:20:58 ► §

The wonderful thing about the human psyche and the human brain

01:21:03 ► §

is its thirst for equilibrium, you know, and it’s

01:21:08 ► §

many modes and methods for returning you to equilibrium. Nobody has ever nailed down what,

01:21:17 ► §

if any, the connection of this stuff is to severe mental illness. You the 50s it was all thought it was going to be pretty simple,

01:21:28 ► §

that there was something called a schizogen,

01:21:30 ► §

and that if we could just isolate it out of the blood of schizophrenics

01:21:34 ► §

that we would discover it to be an abnormal tryptamine metabolite

01:21:39 ► §

or something like that.

01:21:41 ► §

All that talk has died away.

01:21:43 ► §

The situation is much more complicated.

01:21:46 ► §

People thought, well, DMT is so weird, surely schizophrenics must have more of

01:21:53 ► §

it than normal people. They have less of it than normal people. Personally, when you’re in dark spaces like that, how do you write your stuff?

01:22:07 ► §

I always have cannabis ready.

01:22:18 ► §

It’s the rudder of the boat, basically.

01:22:22 ► §

The ballast, the rudder.

01:22:24 ► §

I always have cannabis ready and then deep breathing

01:22:29 ► §

and more importantly song it’s really usually these states which you think of as psychedelic

01:22:40 ► §

hells if you have sufficient presence of mind to analyze them, or if somebody’s

01:22:47 ► §

observing you, what’s happening is that your breath is failing, shallow breathing. And some

01:22:56 ► §

people don’t have presence of mind enough to deep breathe, even if you smack them around and tell them to deep breathe. So what you say to them is sing, sing.

01:23:09 ► §

And this establishes oxygen moving through the body

01:23:15 ► §

and it also establishes a task which focuses people.

01:23:21 ► §

And they quickly discover that it’s interesting that the song

01:23:26 ► §

is blue with violet speckling

01:23:29 ► §

and by undulating it you can bring in

01:23:32 ► §

yellow and the key when you’re having

01:23:35 ► §

a bad trip is to make your mind

01:23:38 ► §

wander from the bummer

01:23:40 ► §

you know and an interesting thing to know

01:23:44 ► §

about fear,

01:23:47 ► §

maybe the most important thing to know about fear,

01:23:51 ► §

is that it’s a reaction in your body

01:23:53 ► §

which has a very short-term chemical foundation.

01:23:58 ► §

No one can be petrified with terror

01:24:03 ► §

longer than five minutes.

01:24:07 ► §

It just gives way to something else,

01:24:11 ► §

reflection on petrification, if nothing else.

01:24:15 ► §

So, you know, I like to quote the guy who wrote Dune, Herbert.

01:24:22 ► §

What’s his first name? Frank Herbert.

01:24:24 ► §

There’s a drug in Dune, you may recall, called the water of life or strewn that allows you to blow through you so the way I deal

01:24:47 ► §

with fear is I don’t move and I sing and inevitably I can march my way out of the

01:24:56 ► §

most of most states of discomfort there are different kinds of bummers. There’s an extreme discomfort with

01:25:07 ► §

how the situation feels, and that can usually be handled with song. And then there’s a more

01:25:16 ► §

serious kind of bummer, which I call a cognitive hallucination. And what a cognitive hallucination is, is a hallucination, but

01:25:28 ► §

not one you see, but one that you discover and think. And it could be anything, it could

01:25:37 ► §

be, well, you could discover a tumor in your brain.

01:25:46 ► §

This would be a cognitive hallucination

01:25:49 ► §

until you are confirmed by a doctor that you have this thing.

01:25:54 ► §

Or you could discover a demon living within you.

01:26:00 ► §

Or, in playing back a recent conversation that seemed harmless,

01:26:05 ► §

you could discover that really it was filled with vicious, destructive innuendo

01:26:10 ► §

that you hadn’t noticed before.

01:26:13 ► §

This is the edge of paranoia.

01:26:16 ► §

And basically, you have to discipline yourself.

01:26:21 ► §

As I’m sure you know, the brain has what’s called a fight and flight response.

01:26:28 ► §

In many situations, the brain will just offer up these two choices. Fight, meaning raise blood

01:26:36 ► §

pressure, turn and face it, or flight, get away from it as fast as possible. Actually, neither of these is the correct

01:26:48 ► §

response. The correct response is to deep breathe, oxygenate your blood, and wait for the thing to

01:26:55 ► §

pass by. And whatever works for you, I mean, I pray, and I pray going into it, and I say to it,

01:27:02 ► §

and I pray going into it and I say to it

01:27:04 ► §

please be kind

01:27:09 ► §

I am completely at your mercy

01:27:12 ► §

and what I do is I take large enough doses

01:27:15 ► §

that I am at its mercy

01:27:17 ► §

you cannot cheat the house

01:27:21 ► §

so do not try to take,

01:27:25 ► §

like there is nothing worse

01:27:27 ► §

than a half dose of psilocybin.

01:27:29 ► §

Nothing worse.

01:27:31 ► §

Because it leaves you in a real wasteland.

01:27:35 ► §

So I say to it, you know,

01:27:37 ► §

I have taken enough

01:27:38 ► §

that I am your creature.

01:27:41 ► §

You can destroy me.

01:27:43 ► §

You can exalt me.

01:27:45 ► §

Please exalt me. If you can’t exalt me, please be brief.

01:27:53 ► §

And, you know, I’ve never not made it back.

01:27:59 ► §

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

01:28:07 ► §

I guess that I shouldn’t let this pass because, well, I’m sure that you also noticed that Terence’s example of what he called cognitive hallucinations was that of a tumor in the brain.

01:28:19 ► §

And as you know, less than five years after he made this comment, Terence died from a tumor in his brain.

01:28:26 ► §

And there have been other references like that that we’ve heard from him in the past.

01:28:31 ► §

It was almost as if his lectures were foreshadowing his death.

01:28:34 ► §

But then again, hey, who among us hasn’t at one time or another worried about having a tumor in our brain?

01:28:41 ► §

Or am I the only other person who has ever entertained that possibility?

01:28:46 ► §

Interestingly, at least to me, while I sometimes had that thought when I was much younger,

01:28:52 ► §

in my old age, the thought of a brain tumor no longer is something that comes through my mind.

01:28:57 ► §

My guess is that something other than a brain tumor will be what finally lays me low.

01:29:02 ► §

Hopefully not for a while, though.

01:29:09 ► §

Anyway, what did you think about Terrence’s salvia experience with the little kittens doing a kick step?

01:29:13 ► §

For what it’s worth, that’s actually one of the more pedestrian experiences on salvia that I’ve heard.

01:29:19 ► §

Of all the psychoactive substances that I’ve taken or heard about,

01:29:23 ► §

overall, salvia comes with more bizarre experience reports than almost all of the psychoactive substances that I’ve taken or heard about. Overall, salvia comes with more

01:29:25 ► §

bizarre experience reports than almost all of the others combined. It’s a truly unique experience

01:29:31 ► §

from what I’ve been told. As I’ve mentioned before, I happen to be, sadly for me, one of the 25% or so

01:29:40 ► §

of us humans who don’t seem to have the receptors required to experience a full-blown

01:29:45 ► §

salvia trip. I won’t go back into it again right now, but if you go to our program notes, which

01:29:51 ► §

you can get to via psychedelicsalon.us, click the link for categories and scroll down to the salvia

01:29:57 ► §

category. And there you’ll see that in addition to this program, there have been 10 others in which

01:30:03 ► §

we’ve discussed this amazing plant.

01:30:09 ► §

And my recommendation is for you to begin with my podcast number 81,

01:30:16 ► §

which is an interview with the man that Terrence called the guy from L.A., but he didn’t name him.

01:30:20 ► §

You see, back then, with the exception of Terrence and a few others,

01:30:24 ► §

we were all trying to keep a very low profile when it came to psychedelics,

01:30:31 ► §

and Terrence was very sensitive about that. However, today, that man from L.A., Daniel Siebert,

01:30:38 ► §

is quite well known, and I also want to add that he is a truly nice person. So, I’d suggest that you begin with my interview with Daniel if you want to look into this interesting little house

01:30:42 ► §

plant, and in case you are new to the salon,

01:30:45 ► §

you should also be aware that it is no longer legal everywhere.

01:30:49 ► §

It is legal in many places, but even here in the States,

01:30:52 ► §

its legality varies from state to state.

01:30:55 ► §

And just in case you don’t do your homework properly

01:30:58 ► §

and read everything that you can find about salvia before trying it,

01:31:02 ► §

here is one very important thing to know about the experience.

01:31:07 ► §

What Terrence said about the rope them to a tree protocol wasn’t all in jest. Salvia,

01:31:13 ► §

along with ayahuasca, is a substance that should never, as in never, be done alone. Always have

01:31:19 ► §

a sitter by your side. If you only learn one thing from these podcasts, I hope you learn this.

01:31:24 ► §

If you only learn one thing from these podcasts, I hope you learn this.

01:31:35 ► §

Salvia Divinorum can, and often does, cause people to physically act out their experience in ways that can be quite dangerous to themselves and to others as well.

01:31:38 ► §

This really isn’t something to do as an amateur psychonaut.

01:31:41 ► §

Get some experience with other things first.

01:31:44 ► §

Salvia most definitely is not for beginners.

01:31:50 ► §

Now, one of the other things that I’ve learned, not through doing it myself, but by seeing what happened to some people I was with, is that, in my opinion, if someone is using

01:31:56 ► §

prescription SSRIs of any kind, they should wean themselves off those substances for weeks

01:32:02 ► §

before ingesting any psychedelic substance.

01:32:05 ► §

I’ve seen and heard about more near-death situations involving SSRIs than I care to

01:32:11 ► §

think about.

01:32:13 ► §

And this isn’t just a casual, be careful out there comment.

01:32:17 ► §

SSRIs and synthetic psychoactive substances, like 2CT7 and its relatives, are most definitely not to be used by anyone

01:32:26 ► §

who hasn’t effectively gotten all SSRIs out of their system first.

01:32:31 ► §

Now, getting back to what Terence said in his description of people taking drugs in Mexico,

01:32:36 ► §

well, those are no doubt descriptions of the goings-on at the legendary and theobotany conferences

01:32:43 ► §

that were held in Palenque, Mexico.

01:32:45 ► §

In fact, his image of a woman with a syringe of ketamine in one hand and a bottle of tequila in the other

01:32:51 ► §

brings back some rather fond memories.

01:32:54 ► §

But since most of the people involved in these adventures are still alive, I need to be more discreet for now.

01:33:01 ► §

Actually, maybe I should do some podcasts that tell all, names and everything, and then

01:33:06 ► §

seal them away to be listened to a few decades after I die. And that little announcement may

01:33:11 ► §

send some shutters down a few spines. But for now, the only thing that I feel free to say is that

01:33:17 ► §

a good time was had by all. And for what it’s worth, I am also one of those people who,

01:33:24 ► §

with the exception of ayahuasca and salvia divinorum, have for the most part always used psychedelic drugs by myself, because I’ve found that if there’s even one other person involved, then my trip is subject to what is also going on with them.

01:33:45 ► §

psychedelic experiences can be great for a lot of things, but if you are basically an introspective person, like me for example, then there’s nothing wrong with you if you like doing psychedelics

01:33:50 ► §

alone. Now, I know that Terrence promotes doing them in silent darkness, and I’ve tried that, but

01:33:57 ► §

I prefer candlelight music when I do them. I don’t think a little candlelight and some well-selected

01:34:03 ► §

music makes much difference.

01:34:08 ► §

In a negative direction, I find it positive, actually.

01:34:13 ► §

I’ve done it both ways, but the silent darkness just isn’t something that works that well for me.

01:34:19 ► §

As I’ve said before, what Terence McKenna or anyone else experiences on a particular substance isn’t necessarily what you are going to experience.

01:34:23 ► §

For example, Terence said that on ketamine he lost the concept of having taken a drug.

01:34:28 ► §

Now, I’ve had a few high-dose IM ketamine experiences.

01:34:33 ► §

However, during them, I never lost sight of who I was or that I was doing a drug.

01:34:37 ► §

I was still me. I was having an extraordinary experience,

01:34:41 ► §

but I was still me and knew I was on a drug.

01:34:44 ► §

extraordinary experience, but I was still me and knew I was on a drug.

01:34:49 ► §

Actually, you should read about these substances and talk to people who have experience with them before ever trying them yourself, and then you’ll have the knowledge that you need

01:34:54 ► §

to navigate your own unique psychedelic experience.

01:34:58 ► §

My point is that you are your own person, and just because Terrence or myself or someone

01:35:04 ► §

else recommends something,

01:35:06 ► §

that doesn’t mean that it is the one and only best way to do things. Find your own path, or I guess

01:35:12 ► §

that I should say create the path for yourself that works best for you. Be your own person. Think for

01:35:17 ► §

yourself and question authority. All authority, as the good Dr. Leary often said. And to answer a question that I get quite a lot,

01:35:27 ► §

my music selections usually vary quite a bit,

01:35:30 ► §

depending on my mood and what I intend to get out of the experience.

01:35:34 ► §

However, whenever I take a mushroom trip,

01:35:37 ► §

I almost always begin with the same music

01:35:39 ► §

while I’m waiting for the psilocybin to begin taking effect.

01:35:43 ► §

And about 30 minutes after first ingesting them,

01:35:46 ► §

I put on what I’m sure that Terrence would consider to be about the worst thing

01:35:50 ► §

that I could be listening to at the time.

01:35:53 ► §

But for some reason, it really sets me up for a good trip.

01:35:57 ► §

I probably shouldn’t even tell you this,

01:35:59 ► §

but the first cut that I often listen to is track number 8 from the Shaman’s Boss drum album.

01:36:06 ► §

Here’s how it begins.

01:36:14 ► §

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

01:36:21 ► §

will be believed.

01:36:29 ► §

And now that I’ve put my own mind in a place that brings back such fond memories,

01:36:32 ► §

I think that I’ll sign off and re-listen to one of what I call my mushroom tapes,

01:36:37 ► §

which are the private recordings that I made

01:36:39 ► §

while under the influence of our wonderful mushroom friends.

01:36:43 ► §

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

01:36:48 ► §

Be careful out there, my friends.

01:36:51 ► §

If the truth can be told so as to be understood,

01:36:55 ► §

it will be believed.