Program Notes
https://www.patreon.com/lorenzohagerty
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/0932551068[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“I don’t think you are going to spend very long involved with these things at a deep level without scaring your socks off eventually. One of the great things about these psychedelic teachers is that they are so gentle with beginners. And then the flip side of that coin is they are so unforgiving with veterans.”
“You see, I just don’t feel the force of this argument that you should be able to do it on your own. Why should you be able to do it on your own? How about that you can’t do it yourself unless humble yourself to cut a deal with a plant? That seems more logical to me.”
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from Cyberdelic Space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic
00:00:22 ►
Salon.
00:00:23 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:30 ►
And to all of our fellow salonners who are using the same calendar as I am, well, Happy New Year.
00:00:37 ►
Of course, for many of us, it’s just good to have survived another end-of-the-year holiday season.
00:00:45 ►
Hopefully, you spiced up your family meals with a discussion about freeing the U.S. political prisoner Ross Ulbrich.
00:00:47 ►
Let’s not let that issue get buried in this new year, because ultimately
00:00:50 ►
his case is going to
00:00:52 ►
have a significant impact on you and me
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unless we decide to
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quit using the internet, which
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doesn’t seem very likely.
00:00:59 ►
So please go to
00:01:01 ►
freeross.org and
00:01:03 ►
at least get on his mailing list to show your support.
00:01:07 ►
Now, I’ll have a few more announcements after we listen to today’s lecture,
00:01:13 ►
which is a continuation of the February 1991 Terrence McKenna workshop that we began last week.
00:01:20 ►
And just so you know, there are two more tapes in this series,
00:01:24 ►
and I’m going to play them in order
00:01:26 ►
before moving on to other speakers I know that in the past I’ve broken up some of Terrence’s
00:01:31 ►
workshops but that seems to seems to have upset many of our fellow salonners so I’ll play this
00:01:38 ►
entire workshop before playing some of the other talks that I’ve got lined up for this year
00:01:42 ►
for example there’s more from the 2015 Palenque Norte lectures,
00:01:48 ►
and I’ve received several other talks from our fellow Saloners,
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and speakers from those talks include Sasha Shulgin and Jonathan Ott, among others.
00:01:57 ►
So, if you’re burned out listening to Terrence McKenna,
00:02:00 ►
just hold on for a couple more weeks, and I’ll begin to mix it up a bit once again.
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Now, last week when we listened to Terrence introduce this workshop, we heard him say
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that he was getting tired of just talking about the nuts and bolts of psychedelics,
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and then he began his archaic revival phase.
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But as you’ll hear in just a moment, it didn’t take long before questions from those in the audience led back to some nuts and bolts questions,
00:02:28 ►
including a fascinating and in-depth discussion about morning glory intoxication.
00:02:34 ►
And I guess that I should say a little something about what was going on in the country and the world at the time of this talk.
00:02:41 ►
For one thing, the so-called First Gulf War had recently begun.
00:02:46 ►
talk. For one thing, the so-called First Gulf War had recently begun, and on the East Coast,
00:02:52 ►
where I was living in a psychedelic blackout zone of some sort, I’d not even yet heard about a drug called DMT. Yet, at that very same moment in time, this talk about DMT that we’re about to listen to
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was taking place on the West Coast. Now, contrast that situation with where we are today.
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Thanks to the Internet, there isn’t a nook or cranny on the planet
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where people aren’t hearing about DMT,
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if they’re interested in these things, that is.
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At least that’s somewhat of an improvement, I think.
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So, now let’s join Terence McKenna and a few of his friends
00:03:22 ►
on a February day in 1991,
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which actually was about six months before Tim Berners-Lee published his summary of the Worldwide Web
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Project at alt.hypertext, and the first website had yet to be built.
00:03:38 ►
So back in 1991, these talks, especially these talks by Terence McKenna, were our best and in some cases our only source of esoteric knowledge about such things as DMT.
00:03:51 ►
So let’s listen.
00:03:53 ►
I suppose this is the point in this discussion to point out that this visible language that I’m talking about, there is a precedent for it in nature.
00:04:06 ►
There’s a very interesting book, which if you’re into animal communication, it’s well worth reading.
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It’s called Communication and Non-Communication Among the Cephalopods. And it points out that octopi have this ability to change their color and their shape and their surface texture.
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And it was at first assumed that this had to do with camouflage against complex backgrounds.
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But it turns out that it has nothing to do with that, or very little to do with that,
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that octopi communicate visually.
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And so, in a sense, the octopus is the model for the kind of future evolution of human communications
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that I’m suggesting we need.
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The octopus is, from the point of view of another octopus, a naked mind,
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an entirely naked mind, because it does not transduce its thoughts into acoustical waves
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which move across space and are then reconstructed in a culturally sanctioned dictionary, it actually becomes its meaning.
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It translates syntax into three dimensions,
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and it dances its intent.
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And the soft body of these creatures
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allows them to fold and unfold and reveal and hide
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parts of themselves very rapidly,
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as fast as we can make speech, they do this.
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And so this is a potential model for how human beings might communicate.
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After all, if we were simply naked minds,
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I imagine us as existing as somewhat filamentous creatures
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in a semi-aqueous cybernetic medium I imagine us as existing as somewhat filamentatious creatures
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in a semi-aqueous cybernetic medium
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with us displaying our syntactical intent on our surface.
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You would become what you mean in that case.
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And the octopus does that.
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The reason octopi extrude ink into the water
00:06:24 ►
is so that they can form a private thought.
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It’s the only way that they’re able to disconnect from the telepathic net.
00:06:37 ►
Well, the question is, what about the way ayahuasca is being done in America without
00:06:41 ►
ikaros and ritual? I’ve never sat in on an American ayahuasca session.
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I know they occur in several different styles.
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The thing about ayahuasca that you have to be aware of
00:06:54 ►
that is both a strength and a weakness of it
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is that unlike mushrooms or peyote or iboga
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or morning glory seeds, or datura.
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It is a drug in the sense that it’s combined of two ingredients and made by somebody.
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Nobody makes peyote.
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Nobody makes mushrooms.
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But somebody makes ayahuasca.
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And it’s like flan or something it can be made badly or it can be
00:07:29 ►
made well so the first issue is how is it made and the style of these more public ayahuasca circles
00:07:36 ►
is to make it mild they don’t want people swinging from the chandeliers. Ayahuasca can range over a spectrum from
00:07:47 ►
what’s all the excitement about to
00:07:51 ►
hang on Hannah.
00:07:58 ►
And so it takes a bit of fiddling
00:08:02 ►
to get it right.
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As far as DMT is concerned, ayahuasca is driven by DMT.
00:08:12 ►
What made me go to the Amazon was I first encountered DMT in the underground in Berkeley in 1967.
00:08:21 ►
And I was absolutely amazed.
00:08:23 ►
I mean, I had already taken lsd and and but for me and to this
00:08:28 ►
moment uh dmt is just the most amazing thing in the universe i mean it shouldn’t exist it it’s
00:08:38 ►
impossible and every time i do it i come down i is impossible. I mean, to call that a drug? What a joke.
00:08:48 ►
I mean, it just masquerades as a drug.
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It’s not a drug. That’s preposterous.
00:08:54 ►
The problem with DMT is its incredible power.
00:09:01 ►
That only the most intrepid can form any coherent impression whatsoever of what’s going on
00:09:09 ►
if it’s a strong trip i mean there are sub-threshold trips where you just graze the tummy of the beast
00:09:15 ►
and then people come down with various models of archetypal closure with the cosmic carnival.
00:09:30 ►
That’s the archetype of DMT, is the cosmic circus.
00:09:35 ►
But if you actually get a strong hit of it,
00:09:37 ►
which is in no way dangerous,
00:09:40 ►
but simply a true boundary-dissolving hit,
00:09:44 ►
it’s into some place it’s almost like
00:09:45 ►
well I once said
00:09:47 ►
there’s danger of death by astonishment
00:09:51 ►
and I think that’s true
00:09:55 ►
that’s the major danger
00:09:56 ►
is death by astonishment
00:09:58 ►
because you just get in there and you say
00:10:01 ►
my God
00:10:03 ►
I thought I had some expectation of what was possible.
00:10:10 ►
And instead, this is just so blown out.
00:10:13 ►
And it somewhat freaks me itself, so unrelated to our petty concerns on this planet.
00:10:30 ►
I mean, I went to it first as an art historian,
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and I was a Jungian.
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I mean, I had Jungian proclivities,
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and I thought, you know,
00:10:39 ►
what does this say about the archetypes?
00:10:42 ►
There is no archetype for this.
00:10:45 ►
Not in the painting of the Bushmen,
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not in the ecstasies of Hildegard von Bingen,
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not in the ravings of Mandaean ecstatics.
00:10:53 ►
Human spiritual experience never got this deep,
00:10:57 ►
never tore open this doorway.
00:11:00 ►
And yet what?
00:11:01 ►
It’s a long toke away for an ordinary human being?
00:11:04 ►
How could something that titanic and beautiful and cosmic and alien be kept secret when what we do is we seek in all corners, in all times and places for the bizarre, the utre, the unthinkable we’re always turning over rocks secret teachings
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you know ancient cities buried ruins lost tribes you name it well then here is this thing which is
00:11:34 ►
like the absolute quintessence of what all those things are are aiming for you know more stunning
00:11:40 ►
than the rise of atlantis from the atlantic seaboard is a toke of DMT.
00:11:46 ►
More appalling than the arrival of alien star fleets in the skies of our planet.
00:11:53 ►
And yet, it’s here.
00:11:55 ►
It’s here.
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And I don’t often invoke it.
00:11:58 ►
I mean, for me to talk about it is to invoke it.
00:12:01 ►
Because it’s weird to talk about it.
00:12:03 ►
Because it reminds me that we don’t know what we’re doing at all that we sit in rooms discussing all this stuff and and you know a war
00:12:12 ►
rages ignorant armies clash by night that whole thing but you know this extraordinarily powerful
00:12:20 ►
thing the depth of which the measure of which is so hard to take, lies very near.
00:12:27 ►
What I had hoped from, what I had hoped for from ayahuasca was, my brother and I, when we got into
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this DMT stuff, we said, we’ve got to slow down this movie. I mean, you get in there for about 70 seconds, the first 35 of
00:12:46 ►
which is taken up with you
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checking all your meters to make
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sure you’re not dead.
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Because that’s
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what you
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assume. You know, you
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say, I did it, I’m dead, fuck it,
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I’m dead.
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And then you
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say, but, you you know chest rising and falling
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thoughts continuing in linear
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apparently I’m not dead
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apparently I’m something else
00:13:14 ►
well then by the time you sort it out
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you’re usually coming down
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and people come down babbling, raving
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I mean I’ve seen people who’ve headed mega corporations,
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people who are accustomed to
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ordering hundreds of people
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just completely come apart
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because it is so unexpected.
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So our notion was,
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slow the movie down, get in there.
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And ayahuasca looks like a strategy for doing that and we couldn’t imagine
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you know can you picture people wearing penis sheaths and painting themselves with red ochre
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and they have this and this is what they’re doing and and then it makes the whole notion of history
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seem crazy i mean i, we’re primitives
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because we diddle around with atom smashers
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and stealth bombers and stuff like that.
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I mean, you know,
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and these people have this other thing,
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so of course they don’t wear clothes, Bill.
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Would you?
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You know?
00:14:22 ►
And largely, I would say, what we’ve learned from 20, 25 years of dealing with this is that our strategy was right.
00:14:32 ►
Ayahuasca will let you in to these places, and so will psilocybin. based on experience, is that what I’m interested in is a very tiny subset of all the smorgasbord of possible altered states and experiences that life and nature offer up. ketamine, MDMA, endlessly, and then states brought on by ordeal
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and fasting and meditation.
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I am only interested as a phenomenologist,
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definitely more with the attitude of the scientist
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than some kind of conclusion drawer.
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I’m interested in this very circumscribed
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area in organic nature
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because it’s not supposed to be
00:15:29 ►
there, folks. It’s like
00:15:32 ►
a little
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doorway
00:15:35 ►
into the previous universe
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or something.
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The whole, you know,
00:15:41 ►
at the height of Islam in the
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10th century, the poets of the Mughal dynasty said of the city of Isfahan in Iran, because of its mosques and architecture, that it was half the world.
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Isfahan is half the world.
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DMT is half the world.
00:16:02 ►
The shiny, bright, active,
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exfoliating and bizarre part.
00:16:09 ►
Well then, we then are poised
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in this strange dimension
00:16:13 ►
of diminished possibility.
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Where are we?
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What is that?
00:16:19 ►
What is it to possess a body
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such that you can use it
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as an instrument
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to turn on and off these places
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how does it reflect on the quest for
00:16:32 ►
understanding of the here and now
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how does it reflect on the quest for
00:16:37 ►
I don’t know
00:16:41 ►
immortality or enlightenment
00:16:43 ►
or a sense of fitting in to the cosmic purpose.
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I don’t know. I mean, one can play a reductionist game and say that the human brain mind system is an alarm clock.
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DMT is a hammer.
00:17:03 ►
Hit the alarm clock with the hammer and you learn all about gears
00:17:07 ►
because they spring out and become visible. But, and this is how science works. This is
00:17:14 ►
the scientific method. Smash it, then count the pieces. Find the bigger pieces, find the
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littlest pieces, smash them. Count the pieces, find the little pieces, smash them.
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That’s how it proceeds.
00:17:29 ►
Well, obviously, that’s not going to take us too far in this domain
00:17:32 ►
because it’s entirely made up of structure, of connection, of relationship, of thought.
00:17:41 ►
And because I’m concerned about the planet
00:17:46 ►
and the predicament we’re in
00:17:48 ►
and the way we spend our resources
00:17:50 ►
and cheat our children of a sane future and all that
00:17:53 ►
I keep trying to reconnect this back into the human world
00:17:58 ►
but I frankly don’t know whether that can be done
00:18:02 ►
another area I work in is I try to connect it up to the perennial philosophies of humanity,
00:18:10 ►
Zen and Buddhism and Shamanism.
00:18:12 ►
I don’t know whether that can be done.
00:18:14 ►
The shamans that I have gotten really close to have not been,
00:18:21 ►
I would not call, they were able to cure people,
00:18:24 ►
but they had no pretension of spiritual accomplishment.
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They weren’t even interested in that.
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They were interested in what they would call understanding.
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The same thing which drives a scientist.
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They say…
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I mean, Don Fidel, who I took most of my ayahuasca with,
00:18:42 ►
we would take it on Saturday nights
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with a group of about 40 people and cure, and with we would take it on saturday nights with a group of about 40 people
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and cure and then we would take it on wednesday nights just he and i or a couple of other people
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and that was for learning he always said and he said you can’t cure unless you learn and i felt
00:18:59 ►
very comfortable with these people because it it from the outside it looks like ritual and taboo and
00:19:06 ►
power and from the inside it’s just hey let’s all cook something up and try to figure it out
00:19:14 ►
it was totally familiar to me from my days in berkeley in the 60s it’s the head ethic
00:19:20 ►
it’s cook it up try it out try and make sense of it with your friends. And if we,
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you see, I think it’s very disempowering to believe that somebody else has the answer
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and that your life consists of sorting out a bunch of options to try and find this person who has the answer.
00:19:48 ►
The generous point of view,
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the ecumenical point of view,
00:19:52 ►
when looking at the world’s religions and spiritual traditions
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is to say everybody has a piece of the answer.
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You know, the Buddhists have a piece,
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the Kabbalists have a peace somebody
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everybody has a peace the mushroom on this subject is extremely ungenerous it says nobody has a peace
00:20:14 ►
it’s just preposterous you know the reason the world doesn’t make sense to you is because the
00:20:20 ►
world doesn’t make sense to you how could it it? I mean, look where you’re starting from.
00:20:25 ►
Where is it writ in Adamantine
00:20:27 ►
that troops of monkeys should comprehend
00:20:30 ►
the architectonics of the cosmos?
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You know, it’s just not part of the deal.
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So then you have to rest
00:20:41 ►
with some kind of provisional arrangement.
00:20:46 ►
But I somehow think that the forced evolution of language
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is how we’re going to work our way back into taking care of our planet,
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and that psychedelics are the catalyst for this.
00:21:00 ►
They show us, number one, that there is a transcendent other, which I certainly didn’t
00:21:07 ►
believe there was till I took psychedelics. I mean, I was raised Roman Catholic. I spent
00:21:12 ►
a lot of time deconditioning myself from the transcendent other and embracing a kind of
00:21:19 ►
materialist agnosticism. Well, that lasted 15 seconds into the first DMT trip
00:21:26 ►
and then that had been vaporized
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for all time
00:21:30 ►
so I think we need to honor
00:21:32 ►
the religious impulse but I’m
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very skeptical
00:21:35 ►
of all hierarchical
00:21:37 ►
con games where the idea is
00:21:40 ►
somebody knows something and somebody
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else doesn’t and then they
00:21:44 ►
have to trade off their relationship.
00:21:49 ►
You know, the Rolling Stones have a song that says,
00:21:52 ►
you don’t get what you want, you get what you need.
00:21:56 ►
I don’t think you’re going to spend very long involved with these things
00:22:02 ►
at a deep level without scaring your socks off uh eventually
00:22:08 ►
i mean one of the great things about these psychedelic teachers is that they are so gentle
00:22:15 ►
with beginners and then the flip side of that coin is they are so unforgiving with veterans. And I don’t know.
00:22:28 ►
I mean, I have hard trips often.
00:22:31 ►
And the way I explain it to myself is, you know,
00:22:34 ►
I pretty much accept Rupert Sheldrake’s notion of the morphogenetic field
00:22:39 ►
and feel like the psychedelics amplify the morphogenetic field of the totality.
00:22:48 ►
And, you know, why shouldn’t I have difficult trips?
00:22:52 ►
The totality is in such a weird state of turmoil.
00:22:56 ►
I mean, you couldn’t pay me to take five grams of mushrooms in the present circumstances
00:23:02 ►
simply because I can feel the riptides
00:23:05 ►
in the historical dimension
00:23:07 ►
just churning everything into white water.
00:23:11 ►
I mean, I’d stay out of the water
00:23:13 ►
till it dies down a little.
00:23:18 ►
Fear is a problem
00:23:20 ►
because, well, there are different reasons,
00:23:23 ►
but here’s a reductionist reason these compounds
00:23:27 ►
are cns stimulants and that means they’re going to stimulate what’s called the fight or flight
00:23:34 ►
reflex in the hind brain one of the hardest things i think you have to learn to do is to discipline the hind brain you know to sit in a full lotus
00:23:46 ►
position absolutely petrified with fear
00:23:50 ►
and not do anything about it except
00:23:53 ►
breathe and sing you know Paul Herbert
00:23:57 ►
Paul Herbert the other Herbert the
00:24:01 ►
Herbert who wrote Dean who is such a
00:24:04 ►
minor figure that I can’t remember remember his first name, Frank Herbert, he has a wonderful thing in there talking about fear.
00:24:12 ►
And he says fear comes like a wind out of the desert and it blows through you.
00:24:19 ►
And all you can do is let it blow itself out.
00:24:24 ►
And you really can do this you just wait fear is a kind of state
00:24:30 ►
of agitation of the organism that chemically cannot maintain itself very long so wait it
00:24:39 ►
through then in terms of practical suggestions, sing.
00:24:46 ►
You must sing.
00:24:50 ►
I mean, it’s terrible to have it sit heavily on you and to try and deal with it like this, you know, just crumple.
00:24:56 ►
You have to oxygenate your body.
00:24:58 ►
You have to begin moving energy through your body.
00:25:01 ►
You can sing your way out of most situations.
00:25:06 ►
That’s the best advice.
00:25:08 ►
And you can breathe your way out
00:25:10 ►
of most situations.
00:25:14 ►
And it’s a set of techniques.
00:25:17 ►
No, you’re quite right.
00:25:19 ►
It’s a set of techniques.
00:25:20 ►
They’re very simple,
00:25:21 ►
but if you don’t know them,
00:25:23 ►
you’re in deep, deep water.
00:25:26 ►
And breath control, and not being afraid to articulate.
00:25:30 ►
We have some kind of taboo against sounding.
00:25:34 ►
But, you know, I’ve sung, I’ve started in the depths of hell singing to save my soul,
00:25:41 ►
and managed to sing my way right through normality and right on into heaven you
00:25:47 ►
know it takes courage and courage is not something that is demanded of us very much in the modern
00:25:56 ►
world i mean we occasionally deal with large amounts of fear like when some jackass cuts in
00:26:03 ►
front of you and on the freeway,
00:26:05 ►
and, you know, you soak your clothes with sweat in under a third of a second,
00:26:10 ►
those kinds of things.
00:26:12 ►
But courage, where we actually determine to do something that feels dangerous or challenging to us,
00:26:19 ►
and then doing it, we don’t do.
00:26:22 ►
And especially boundary-dissolving challenges.
00:26:26 ►
I mean, the macho type will, you know,
00:26:30 ►
climb El Capitan, jump out of airplanes,
00:26:34 ►
and that sort of thing.
00:26:38 ►
But strangely enough, those macho types
00:26:41 ►
are sometimes the most reluctant
00:26:43 ►
to just sit quietly in their living room on five dried grams
00:26:47 ►
because it’s a different kind of surrender.
00:26:51 ►
It’s a surrender to something feminine and penetrating
00:26:55 ►
and you don’t have to.
00:27:00 ►
It’s the opposite reflex.
00:27:02 ►
Surrender is the opposite reflex to conquest.
00:27:06 ►
Did you want to say something? No? Yeah?
00:27:08 ►
Could you contrast this experience
00:27:10 ►
with experience like the trance dance or the bushman
00:27:14 ►
or Kundalini type of experiences?
00:27:17 ►
Well, it’s very hard to get inside somebody else’s experience,
00:27:21 ►
especially when it’s culture-bound.
00:27:24 ►
For purposes of operational efficiency
00:27:28 ►
I just have long ago decided
00:27:31 ►
nothing works but drugs
00:27:34 ►
and it causes a lot of friction
00:27:38 ►
I mean that’s the hard way of putting it
00:27:41 ►
it’s really nothing works but plants
00:27:43 ►
but I put in a lot of time trying, you know, breath control and pranayama and all these things and reading the literature. And I just, I’m just not convinced that they’re getting it. The literature doesn’t reflect it. The mystical literature in all times and places
00:28:07 ►
tends toward unitary effulgence or something.
00:28:15 ►
The white light.
00:28:16 ►
In other words, everything is supposed to be,
00:28:19 ►
all contradictions are dissolved.
00:28:22 ►
Everything becomes love and light and the hierophany.
00:28:27 ►
This is the archetypal hierophany.
00:28:30 ►
This is not what they’re talking about in the Amazon.
00:28:33 ►
They enter into a world of jeweled multiplicity.
00:28:38 ►
There is no effort to push it towards some kind of neoplatonic end state.
00:28:43 ►
towards some kind of neoplatonic end state.
00:28:45 ►
It’s that what is revealed is a dimension of incredible complexity.
00:28:50 ►
And some people have said of me, to me,
00:28:53 ►
that I’m lost in samsara.
00:28:57 ►
I can accept that.
00:28:59 ►
That sounds right.
00:29:01 ►
I love multiplicity.
00:29:03 ►
I mean, I love nature, which to me means multiplicity I mean I love nature
00:29:07 ►
which to me means multiplicity
00:29:09 ►
I’m an insect collector for God’s sake
00:29:11 ►
an art historian, a heresy hunter
00:29:15 ►
it’s for me all in the details
00:29:18 ►
that’s what I love, the richness, the texture of it
00:29:21 ►
and it’s a troubling question for people
00:29:26 ►
because people want to be told
00:29:28 ►
that there’s another way to get to it.
00:29:30 ►
And there may be,
00:29:32 ►
but it’s unbelievably difficult,
00:29:35 ►
unbelievably uncertain,
00:29:38 ►
and very hard to recognize.
00:29:42 ►
Schizophrenia, it doesn’t convince me entirely that that’s
00:29:47 ►
the same thing. Many schizophrenics are obviously very, very unhappy people. And
00:29:54 ►
you see, I just don’t feel the force of this argument that you should be able to do it on
00:30:01 ►
your own. Why should you be able to do it on your own. Why should you be able to do it on your own?
00:30:05 ►
How about that you can’t do it
00:30:08 ►
unless you humble yourself to cut a deal with a plant?
00:30:12 ►
That seems more logical to me.
00:30:16 ►
You know, that it begins with an act of humility
00:30:18 ►
instead of an act of, you know,
00:30:21 ►
no women, no dope, no this.
00:30:23 ►
I’m going to seal myself into the alchemical vessel.
00:30:27 ►
Yeah.
00:30:31 ►
Are you, is that statement reflecting a position
00:30:35 ►
that there’s a potentiation in the pharmacokinetics?
00:30:38 ►
I mean, are you, or is this really based upon
00:30:41 ►
the activity of chemicals and the interaction of chemicals
00:30:44 ►
in the brain.
00:30:45 ►
And then to go along with that,
00:30:47 ►
in your own pushing to try to understand this,
00:30:51 ►
how do you value the philosophical versus the actual, again,
00:30:55 ►
that model of, well, can we talk about any cerebral cortical uptake
00:30:59 ►
or biochemistry again?
00:31:01 ►
How do you value those two?
00:31:04 ►
Well, I’m not sure
00:31:05 ►
I understand your question. I mean, I’m very
00:31:08 ►
interested in the nuts and bolts
00:31:10 ►
details of how this
00:31:12 ►
happens. And my brother
00:31:14 ►
is a pharmaceutical
00:31:16 ►
chemist, drug designer,
00:31:18 ►
so we work on
00:31:20 ►
the nuts and bolts issue.
00:31:23 ►
I want to know
00:31:24 ►
where these visions are coming from. I want to know where these visions are
00:31:26 ►
coming from. I would like
00:31:28 ►
a complete understanding of the
00:31:30 ►
psychedelic experience.
00:31:32 ►
I would like to turn the light of
00:31:34 ►
the psychedelic experience upon
00:31:36 ►
the psychedelic experience
00:31:38 ►
and try to
00:31:40 ►
understand
00:31:41 ►
what’s happening.
00:31:43 ►
The best theory so far I think my brother and I put together in a book we wrote called The Invisible Landscape,
00:31:52 ►
there are certain clues.
00:31:56 ►
Obviously, memories persist in human beings throughout a lifetime.
00:32:04 ►
in human beings throughout a lifetime.
00:32:11 ►
But we know that no physical part of the organism persists through a lifetime except the neural DNA.
00:32:14 ►
That means that we either have to hypothesize that memories are copied perfectly
00:32:21 ►
and handed along in some system so that you can have them
00:32:26 ►
even though every atom in your body has changed
00:32:28 ►
except the neural DNA
00:32:30 ►
or we have to hypothesize
00:32:32 ►
that they exist in the neural
00:32:34 ►
DNA
00:32:35 ►
that memories are actually stored
00:32:38 ►
in the DNA
00:32:39 ►
well no notion
00:32:41 ►
evokes
00:32:42 ►
such scorn from molecular biologists as this one.
00:32:49 ►
And they just rush in to set you straight in a hurry.
00:32:53 ►
And the first thing they tell you is, well, you’ve completely misunderstood the notion of information.
00:33:00 ►
You see, DNA stores genetic information.
00:33:04 ►
It stores codons. It stores these three amino acid sequences. To think that it could go from that to storing experience is just a complete misunderstanding of what is being suggested. You say, oh, well, then, so what’s your explanation for the persistence of
00:33:25 ►
memory? Well, we don’t actually have one. We’re working on that. Well, I think that the persistence
00:33:35 ►
of memory argues that the 90% of the DNA, which is not known to code for any protein or to have any of the so-called silent portions of the genome,
00:33:49 ►
which are about 85% of it is silent,
00:33:51 ►
somehow information experience is being stored there.
00:33:57 ►
I mean, this is the Lamarckian heresy
00:33:59 ►
because they said it fed back into the genetic part of the DNA.
00:34:04 ►
But there may be in this one molecule both genetic storage and epigenetic storage.
00:34:11 ►
Well, then when you look at these drug molecules that we’ve been talking about, the psychedelics,
00:34:17 ►
what you see structurally that they all have in common is they all have very reactive rings, benzene rings, usually built up on a pentexyl
00:34:29 ►
group, a five-sided group in the middle. They’re extremely reactive molecules. Okay,
00:34:38 ►
it was discovered in the 1960s that there’s a phenomenon that nobody knows why it happens called intercalation.
00:34:47 ►
These drug molecules, if we could blow one up to this big, it would be thin. It would be flat. It’s
00:34:55 ►
what they call planar. And lo and behold, when you look at the dimensions of this molecule against the dimensions of the bond site that lies between the nucleotides of DNA,
00:35:10 ►
you discover that this drug molecule can just slip right in there like toast into a toaster.
00:35:16 ►
And they sit down on this very large molecule, the neural DNA,
00:35:23 ►
very large molecule, the neural DNA, and they begin to broadcast its electron spin resonance
00:35:29 ►
at a higher frequency or at a higher amplitude
00:35:33 ►
than is happening in normal metabolism.
00:35:37 ►
And that this amplifying of the electron spin resonance of DNA
00:35:42 ►
is what we experience subjectively
00:35:46 ►
as the onset of a psychedelic experience.
00:35:50 ►
Well, now you see this gives cogency
00:35:54 ►
to what we’re talking about here
00:35:56 ►
because it shows that there is a real material mechanism
00:36:01 ►
in the core of ourselves
00:36:04 ►
which is relating to this molecule
00:36:07 ►
and then all this information
00:36:08 ►
is flowing out.
00:36:10 ►
So we’re beginning to create
00:36:11 ►
a coherent map
00:36:13 ►
appealing to the material mind
00:36:15 ►
of how these things may work
00:36:19 ►
to transduce higher cortical experiences.
00:36:23 ►
Obviously, the mind,
00:36:24 ►
the mind-brain system can be thought of
00:36:27 ►
like an automobile in the sense that
00:36:31 ►
there are always fuel efficiency modifications
00:36:36 ►
and design modifications that are possible to imagine,
00:36:41 ►
which would make the whole system work better.
00:36:44 ►
that are possible to imagine, which would make the whole system work better.
00:36:54 ►
Serotonin is the molecule that is being competed with by these drug molecules. Well, may it not then be that what these drug molecules represent
00:36:58 ►
is the same thing that serotonin represents,
00:37:02 ►
but in a slightly more efficient packaging
00:37:06 ►
that somehow from the point
00:37:08 ►
of view of cellular
00:37:09 ►
metabolic dynamics
00:37:12 ►
the drug molecule
00:37:13 ►
is more efficient. It obviously is.
00:37:16 ►
That’s why it has a greater affinity
00:37:18 ►
for the bond site than the
00:37:19 ►
endogenously produced
00:37:21 ►
neurotransmitter. Well,
00:37:23 ►
it’s as though,
00:37:26 ►
and I think Aldous Huxley was the first person to suggest this,
00:37:30 ►
that the mundane demands of day-to-day life and evolution,
00:37:36 ►
the need to be ever on the alert for attack and so forth,
00:37:41 ►
has led us to evolve a neurological style of chemical flavor of human brain soup
00:38:07 ►
could be changed for a different flavor
00:38:11 ►
in which we walked around
00:38:13 ►
with a much larger awareness
00:38:15 ►
and much less immediate focus
00:38:18 ►
on being prepared to fall into a fighting stance
00:38:22 ►
and fend off immediate attack
00:38:26 ►
on ourselves
00:38:27 ►
I think that what I see as characteristic
00:38:30 ►
of
00:38:31 ►
psychedelic people
00:38:33 ►
and psychedelic communities
00:38:35 ►
is a kind of tendency to go for the big picture
00:38:38 ►
psychedelic people
00:38:40 ►
always are aware
00:38:41 ►
that whatever they’re talking about
00:38:43 ►
is nested in a still larger set
00:38:47 ►
of relationships nested in a still larger set of relationships that awareness of the big picture
00:38:54 ►
could probably be mapped onto what is ordinarily called an awareness of dao it’s that you don’t get down into the little stuff because you know
00:39:06 ►
what the I Ching calls
00:39:08 ►
the pre-potent systems of
00:39:10 ►
relationship in which
00:39:12 ►
the event is embedded
00:39:13 ►
and that feeds
00:39:16 ►
back into the personality
00:39:17 ►
that knowing of that
00:39:20 ►
as permission
00:39:22 ►
to relax
00:39:23 ►
you’re neither pushing the river nor pulling the river
00:39:27 ►
it goes in its good time and you always seem to be comfortable and there uh with it see this logos
00:39:37 ►
this vegetable mind that i keep referring back to it may be nothing more than the voice of our own DNA
00:39:45 ►
but whatever it is
00:39:47 ►
when we do not have it
00:39:49 ►
guiding us and
00:39:51 ►
cultivated within our personality
00:39:54 ►
then it becomes
00:39:56 ►
all up to the ego to figure
00:39:58 ►
out and the ego is a
00:40:00 ►
frightened, pathetic, grasping
00:40:02 ►
creature and will make a mess
00:40:04 ►
of it, you may be sure.
00:40:08 ►
Yeah.
00:40:09 ►
In these cultures, in these South American cultures,
00:40:13 ►
when are children introduced into the process?
00:40:19 ►
Well, this varies.
00:40:20 ►
Among the Aguaruna-Hivero,
00:40:22 ►
a male child gets his first taste of ayahuasca at three days.
00:40:28 ►
But it’s just a taste.
00:40:30 ►
The mother just wets her nipple.
00:40:32 ►
But it’s to introduce him.
00:40:36 ►
And I’m sure the taste, I mean, the immune system is locking on to all that stuff and scripting it in immediately.
00:40:42 ►
And for the rest of his life, his immune system will be reacting to that.
00:40:47 ►
It varies from tribe to tribe, but it’s just part of the ambience.
00:40:57 ►
It’s part of the air they breathe.
00:40:59 ►
The surface of the forest gives way to the invisible forest.
00:41:04 ►
Behind the visible forest behind the visible forest
00:41:05 ►
is the invisible forest I mean they say
00:41:08 ►
this to you and
00:41:09 ►
you know it’s
00:41:12 ►
a real question to which
00:41:13 ►
I suppose there’s no answer
00:41:15 ►
but I would maybe
00:41:17 ►
virtual reality will someday let us know
00:41:20 ►
this I would love to
00:41:21 ►
have the hallucinations
00:41:23 ►
of a deep forest shaman because it would tell me
00:41:28 ►
how much of a much the content of the hallucination is genetically based and how much is culturally
00:41:35 ►
based because for instance like so often on psilocybin the hallucinations are mechanistic, highly polished surfaces,
00:41:48 ►
consoles almost, glass, crystal, instrumentality of some sort.
00:41:54 ►
Well, is that me?
00:41:56 ►
Or, because then I, if I take morning glory seeds, you know,
00:41:59 ►
then I get Mayan temples and rainforests.
00:42:04 ►
But the character of these compounds is very interesting Then I get Mayan temples and rainforests.
00:42:09 ►
But the character of these compounds is very interesting because it’s not slightly one way or another.
00:42:14 ►
I mean, when you get into these places,
00:42:15 ►
it’s like the absolute distillation of it.
00:42:21 ►
My question really related to where could you see this process being introduced into our culture
00:42:28 ►
as far as children, several mentioned a couple of other things,
00:42:34 ►
the process of deconditioning is a big part of this experience,
00:42:38 ►
and I’m presuming it’s helpful to condition by the technologies we’ve surrounded ourselves with.
00:42:46 ►
So how far down for that condition do you see introducing this element?
00:42:55 ►
It’s a preventative way of developing a supposed cure of this.
00:42:59 ►
Well, that’s an interesting question.
00:43:01 ►
I’ve thought about the issue of psychedelics in children, but mostly from the point of view of initiation into the full spectrum of possibility that comes at puberty. That’s where you are inducted into the sexual universe. You might as well also be given the full set of options.
00:43:22 ►
be given the full set of options.
00:43:27 ►
I don’t, see, I don’t think,
00:43:31 ►
I think that if the society is psychedelic,
00:43:36 ►
you don’t need to particularly radically restructure it.
00:43:38 ►
It will restructure itself.
00:43:42 ►
So what’s important for me in these Amazonian societies is that everybody gets together and frequently does it,
00:43:47 ►
and the children are there as well. At the Bridge Conference at Stanford two weeks ago,
00:43:53 ►
there was a women’s panel about women and psychedelics, but my God, this is such edge
00:44:00 ►
stuff. I mean, psychedelics are edgy enough. And then you add in the issue of giving them
00:44:07 ►
to children. Anyone willing to stand up and say they think children should be given psychedelics
00:44:13 ►
is in real danger of having their children taken away from them. And that’s the kind
00:44:17 ►
of society we’re living in if push came to shove. So it’s touchy.
00:44:23 ►
You mentioned a little while ago about the timing
00:44:27 ►
of taking something like mushrooms. What kind of circumstances
00:44:31 ►
or things you lay out to determine
00:44:35 ►
when you would like to go into an experience?
00:44:40 ►
The basic rule is I think that
00:44:42 ►
I think of it as diving.
00:44:46 ►
So the surface of the water should be calm before you undertake diving.
00:44:52 ►
And that means just a certain amount of psychic turmoil has to be pushed to the walls.
00:45:01 ►
This is maybe hard advice to hear because many people maybe take psychedelics
00:45:06 ►
at the height of psychic turmoil
00:45:08 ►
as a way of finding their way out of it.
00:45:11 ►
I’ve done that too, but I’m too old for that malarkey now.
00:45:15 ►
If I’ve got psychic turmoil, I’ll just sit with it.
00:45:20 ►
Yeah.
00:45:21 ►
Is ayahuasca just a better delivery system for DMT than smoking?
00:45:26 ►
Is that why it’s used?
00:45:28 ►
Because when you try to smoke a V-mecap, it’s harder to tell how much you’re getting?
00:45:32 ►
No, it’s not that it’s a…
00:45:34 ►
Well, it is a better delivery.
00:45:35 ►
It’s slower.
00:45:37 ►
Ayahuasca, you can actually make sense of it.
00:45:40 ►
Ayahuasca and mushrooms are very interesting in their contrast because they uh
00:45:45 ►
the the amazing thing about the mushrooms the unique thing about them is that they speak
00:45:54 ►
they speak english they talk to you they will answer questions they will carry on conversations
00:46:00 ►
so forth and so on no other thing in my experience speaks not like that i mean there
00:46:08 ►
may be in some at the height of some crazed trip some brief something or other but psilocybin just
00:46:15 ►
pulls up a chair on the porch and puts its feet up you know and uh and ayahuasca does not do that, at least in my experience.
00:46:27 ►
The language of ayahuasca is visual.
00:46:31 ►
The front of your head becomes like a cinemascopic camera.
00:46:37 ►
After a good five-hour ayahuasca trip, you just feel like your eyes must be bugging out of your head.
00:46:44 ►
I mean, it’s like going to Madison Avenue with money.
00:46:47 ►
You have done so much looking.
00:46:50 ►
Just look, look, look, look at this, look at this.
00:46:54 ►
I mean, your eyes hurt from so much looking
00:46:56 ►
because it speaks to you in this visual language
00:47:00 ►
and it barely ever makes a sound
00:47:02 ►
and certainly no linguistic linguistic sound so why these
00:47:06 ►
things have this different presentation and then of course the thing about dmt that i should have
00:47:11 ►
mentioned that is the most astonishing appalling and the definitive characteristic is that for a
00:47:21 ►
lot of people myself included you burst into a place that is absolutely swarming
00:47:27 ►
with some kind of intelligent life.
00:47:30 ►
I mean, I call them self-transforming elf machines.
00:47:35 ►
It’s definitely an elf place.
00:47:38 ►
And, you know, you thought you were going to get the white light
00:47:42 ►
or you thought you were going to get a Huxley-esque aphorism on form and void.
00:47:48 ►
And no, you got 16 elves trying to climb inside your clothes
00:47:54 ►
in this broom closet in hyperspace that you’ve broken into.
00:47:59 ►
Very odd.
00:48:01 ►
And they…
00:48:07 ►
My personal model of all this is that it’s a series of concentric shells
00:48:10 ►
and I really think that the DMT flash
00:48:14 ►
is the deeper level
00:48:17 ►
that all psychedelic experiences
00:48:19 ►
lead into this elf infested
00:48:22 ►
dome like backlit space.
00:48:26 ►
But most psychedelics can’t quite carry you there,
00:48:31 ►
or they carry you there in such a state of discombobulation
00:48:34 ►
that when you come down, you have no memory of that part of the trip.
00:48:38 ►
A lot of people, I think, go to that place on DMT
00:48:41 ►
and come down with no memory of that part of the trip
00:48:45 ►
because at that moment
00:48:48 ►
when you encounter this tribe of elves
00:48:51 ►
your choices are pretty stark
00:48:53 ►
you have to either immediately jettison
00:48:56 ►
everything you’ve ever believed about reality
00:49:00 ►
or you have to immediately embrace the idea
00:49:03 ►
that you are now absolutely crackers.
00:49:08 ►
And for me it was an easy choice to make.
00:49:14 ►
But it causes anxiety in some people.
00:49:18 ►
And I want to learn from these things.
00:49:22 ►
I mean, they are not simply there observing you.
00:49:21 ►
want to learn from these things I mean they are not simply there observing
00:49:24 ►
you they’re waiting almost
00:49:25 ►
holding a net like
00:49:27 ►
firefighting personnel
00:49:29 ►
at the site of a disaster
00:49:31 ►
they’re waiting for you to come
00:49:33 ►
to and then they start
00:49:35 ►
speaking in this language
00:49:38 ►
of the visibly
00:49:39 ►
beheld logos
00:49:41 ►
this is where it is most concretely
00:49:44 ►
beheld that these elves things which look like
00:49:48 ►
jeweled self-dribbling basketballs or something are all around you and they sing they make sound
00:49:57 ►
in these crystalline high-pitched warbling voices and that condenses into the air as objects and words and other little beings and so they’re
00:50:10 ►
these things they offer you these objects a single one of them if it could be brought into this room
00:50:17 ►
and set here would change the course of the world forever it’s like the sort of thing that they keep in the nurseries of flying
00:50:25 ►
saucers you know uh and and they’re offering these things to you at a ripping pace i mean they just
00:50:33 ►
say look at this you say oh my god it’s so no forget that look at this oh my god and and these
00:50:41 ►
things are like fabergé eggs of jewels and ivory and stone.
00:50:46 ►
But they’re not made of jewels and ivory and stone.
00:50:49 ►
They’re made of light and meaning and intentional humor and triple entendre.
00:50:55 ►
And, you know, it’s a linguistic object, material.
00:50:59 ►
And they’re saying, do this.
00:51:01 ►
We do this.
00:51:02 ►
You can do this.
00:51:03 ►
Make these things. And some of these little objects themselves begin to sing
00:51:08 ►
and make other objects.
00:51:10 ►
And this is all, what has happened is you have burst into the hall of the mountain king.
00:51:15 ►
These are the demon artificers.
00:51:18 ►
These are the elves making their transdimensional toys.
00:51:24 ►
Why? Hell, who knows why?
00:51:27 ►
Just to have arrived there is accomplishment enough.
00:51:30 ►
You can spend a lifetime sorting out why.
00:51:33 ►
But they seem to be the vector at the end of time.
00:51:39 ►
They are an anticipation of who is waiting.
00:51:42 ►
And if you know the pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus, the 52nd
00:51:47 ►
fragment of Heraclitus says, the aeon is a child at play with colored balls. This is it, folks.
00:51:57 ►
Heraclitus saw the aeon. The aeon is a child at play with colored balls, and it’s the pu-erh at the end of time.
00:52:05 ►
It’s this thing.
00:52:06 ►
It’s so radiant that you can hardly look at it.
00:52:09 ►
I mean, it has intimations of death, eternity, transformation,
00:52:13 ►
and yet it’s all going on in this weird dimension of humor.
00:52:18 ►
It’s like a Bugs Bunny cartoon running at triple speed,
00:52:22 ►
and all of this action is taking place this is a real place and science
00:52:30 ►
denies its existence i mean if it weren’t for the fact that you pay to hear me the only category
00:52:37 ►
society has for what i have just told you is serious delusion this This man has a pathologic,
00:52:46 ►
chronic pathological delusion.
00:52:49 ►
It appears harmless in the social context
00:52:53 ►
because it nowhere comes tangential
00:52:55 ►
to functioning in this society.
00:52:57 ►
But don’t put a lot of pressure on him.
00:53:00 ►
Obviously, the guy could snap at any moment.
00:53:08 ►
Yes? obviously the guy could snap at any moment yes are morning glories just morning glories?
00:53:12 ►
seeds?
00:53:14 ►
is this a test?
00:53:20 ►
oh you mean is that the psychedelic one?
00:53:23 ►
I see what you’re asking
00:53:24 ►
there are many many there many, many morning glories, and only a few are psychoactive.
00:53:32 ►
But the good news is that one of the few psychoactive ones is this heavenly blue morning glory that’s grown as an ornamental.
00:53:40 ►
And that was one of the great sacraments of the Mayan civilization and the Aztecs.
00:53:47 ►
And it contains, or got alkaloids that will definitely give you a very intense experience.
00:53:55 ►
And it’s just filled, at least in my experience, with the motifs of those civilizations.
00:54:02 ►
Mayan hieroglyphs and that style of that Pua kills style of carving.
00:54:10 ►
There’s also a morning glory called Argyria nervosa, the Hawaiian baby wood rose. It isn’t
00:54:17 ►
really Hawaiian, it’s native of India, but it’s a very powerful hallucinogen and interestingly it has no history
00:54:26 ►
of human usage
00:54:27 ►
no aboriginal group claims it
00:54:30 ►
this is one of the things I’m kind of
00:54:32 ►
interested in is
00:54:33 ►
why one psychedelic plant will have
00:54:36 ►
thousands of years of devoted
00:54:38 ►
use and another
00:54:39 ►
nobody will have ever had anything
00:54:42 ►
to do with. Hawaiian wood rose is really
00:54:44 ►
quite a puzzle
00:54:45 ►
because per unit volume,
00:54:49 ►
it’s probably the strongest psychedelic there is.
00:54:52 ►
You only have to eat about six seeds of that.
00:54:57 ►
And it does have a cardioactive glycoside
00:55:01 ►
that will put your heart through its paces.
00:55:04 ►
So be aware of that i i took
00:55:08 ►
that one one time and i had this long extended hallucination based entirely on the theme of
00:55:17 ►
sea urchins i was in this vaulted space that was clearly the interior of a vast sea urchin and these purple
00:55:26 ►
tit-like protuberances
00:55:28 ►
were on all the walls and on the
00:55:30 ►
floor and a
00:55:31 ►
coach with
00:55:33 ►
six white horses was being hauled
00:55:36 ►
through the space, a coach shaped
00:55:37 ►
like a purple
00:55:39 ►
sea, it just didn’t make any sense at all
00:55:41 ►
you know
00:55:42 ►
the seeds that come in the package you have to be careful with those See, it just didn’t make any sense at all. So do you…
00:55:45 ►
The seeds that come in the package?
00:55:47 ►
You have to be careful with those
00:55:49 ►
because they’ve dipped them in a fungicide
00:55:52 ►
to make it impossible for you to get loaded on them.
00:55:55 ►
So what you have to do is grow them out.
00:55:58 ►
You have to devote yourself.
00:56:00 ►
This is a good shamanic homework.
00:56:02 ►
A summer of growing…
00:56:04 ►
I was just about to grow them
00:56:05 ►
just because I always loved them
00:56:06 ►
I’ve grown them before
00:56:10 ►
but I’ve never found a seed from a flower
00:56:12 ►
oh no
00:56:13 ►
they’ll set seed capsules in the autumn
00:56:15 ►
and then what you do is
00:56:17 ►
you let them dry out
00:56:19 ►
string runners for them
00:56:20 ►
and let them dry out on their runners
00:56:23 ►
and the seed cap is a little round swollen thing
00:56:26 ►
that has four seeds in it and then gather all this string and dried morning glory and stuff like that
00:56:32 ►
and put it in a big paper bag and close the bag and beat on it and all the seeds will detach from
00:56:39 ►
the thing and then you can just pour out a bunch of these seeds it is sickening it contains ester
00:56:46 ►
coumarone a sickening agent but it’s quite spectacular and if you overdo it you know
00:56:53 ►
it’s a big one it’s a big one there’s no question about it many of these things are sealed away from
00:57:00 ►
abuse i guess you’d say by the fact that they’re somewhat of an ordeal to take.
00:57:08 ►
I mean, they’re sickening or in the onset,
00:57:12 ►
there’s vertigo or, you know.
00:57:16 ►
But this is all right.
00:57:17 ►
This keeps them sealed away, yeah.
00:57:20 ►
Either from smoking DMT or drinking ayahuasca,
00:57:22 ►
is there much of a toxic feeling in your body after it’s over?
00:57:27 ►
No. See, the interesting thing about DMT and ayahuasca is that they’re composed entirely of neurotransmitters.
00:57:34 ►
The thing that’s amazing about DMT is you smoke it.
00:57:38 ►
It comes on in one minute.
00:57:40 ►
It lasts two minutes.
00:57:42 ►
It’s without a doubt orders of magnitude stronger
00:57:45 ►
than any trip you’ve ever had
00:57:48 ►
it lasts two minutes
00:57:50 ►
you come down
00:57:52 ►
over the next five minutes
00:57:54 ►
and twenty minutes after that
00:57:56 ►
you can’t
00:57:57 ►
there is no trace of it
00:57:59 ►
not only in your body
00:58:01 ►
but almost as miraculous
00:58:03 ►
there’s very little trace of it in your mind
00:58:05 ►
it’s almost like it happens so fast that short-term memory can’t grok it so people come down
00:58:13 ►
raving and then five minutes later they don’t know what they were raving about and finally they’re
00:58:19 ►
just they have to rest with it was the damnedest thing that ever happened to me and don’t ask me any more
00:58:26 ►
about it because i can’t i don’t know it was very impressive while it was happening then if you do
00:58:32 ►
it over years occasionally if you can keep your courage up because i find it takes a lot of
00:58:37 ►
courage to do it maybe this is because i have a surrender problem but the very thought of doing it brings sweat to my palms i mean it’s just so
00:58:47 ►
unambiguously profound but you can by doing it repeatedly slowly slowly build up an image
00:58:55 ►
of what’s happening in there and then this little story i told you about the self-transforming elf
00:59:01 ►
machines that’s my composite image of what’s happening inside the dmt flash
00:59:06 ►
the the surprise is that there’s somebody in there and that they are really interested in you
00:59:13 ►
and the whole thing then begins to take on dimensions that the mere search for psychic
00:59:19 ►
health may not have envisioned even the combination of ayahuasca, you don’t feel the… No, ayahuasca, I think you can fairly say
00:59:27 ►
that in most cases people feel better the day after
00:59:31 ►
than they did before they did it.
00:59:33 ►
It’s the only one I know like that
00:59:36 ►
where there seems to be a net energy gain
00:59:39 ►
that is never lost.
00:59:41 ►
Or if it’s lost, it’s over a long, long period of time.
00:59:44 ►
But no, you don’t feel thrashed after ayahuasca.
00:59:49 ►
Yeah?
00:59:49 ►
So what’s the deal then if you can’t remember where you were?
00:59:53 ►
What does transform you?
00:59:56 ►
You come down, you may not be able to say where you were,
01:00:00 ►
but you come down absolutely convinced that you’ve passed through some kind of cleansing
01:00:07 ►
fire there’s no doubt that the dross of some aspect of you has been burned away and it isn’t
01:00:15 ►
you see you come down in a series of declensions 20 minutes after it you may not be able to say
01:00:21 ►
very much but five minutes after it you’ll be thrashing pretty hard to try and say something.
01:00:27 ►
It’s just that it becomes more and more absurd, almost literally before your eyes.
01:00:33 ►
It goes from the sublime to the ridiculous.
01:00:36 ►
I mean, you go from having the message, which if you could but deliver it, would lead all mankind to glory to forget it
01:00:46 ►
over here
01:00:50 ►
the primitive cultures in the Amazon you were with
01:00:53 ►
did they ever take ayahuasca
01:00:56 ►
as a group and you mentioned
01:00:57 ►
before that a person when they do it solely
01:01:00 ►
has a song did they ever do it
01:01:02 ►
in a group where a group had a song
01:01:03 ►
and I’m wondering what that might be.
01:01:05 ►
Yes, they did.
01:01:06 ►
There were songs
01:01:08 ►
that are culturally
01:01:10 ►
sanctioned Icaros as well
01:01:12 ►
that everybody knows.
01:01:14 ►
And then people develop
01:01:16 ►
their own Icaros
01:01:17 ►
off of that.
01:01:19 ►
So, yeah,
01:01:20 ►
the people we were with,
01:01:22 ►
we would get together
01:01:23 ►
in groups of about 30. And I would say a third of the people we were with we would get together in groups of about 30
01:01:25 ►
and I would say
01:01:26 ►
a third of the people would be there
01:01:30 ►
with a physical complaint of some sort
01:01:32 ►
in other words to be cured
01:01:33 ►
a third would be there to learn
01:01:37 ►
meaning to trip for tripping’s sake
01:01:40 ►
and a third would be there
01:01:42 ►
because it was the most interesting thing going on in the neighborhood
01:01:44 ►
and they would just hang out.
01:01:46 ►
Would there be quite an experience of kind of like undeniable unity you all would experience at that time?
01:01:54 ►
We took it pretty much for granted, but considering how much trepidation I would have
01:01:59 ►
if I were to take ayahuasca with 30 of you chosen at random,
01:02:04 ►
we thought nothing of it, you know.
01:02:07 ►
And we were a pretty tight group.
01:02:10 ►
The shaman insisted that Kat and I move in with the village,
01:02:16 ►
that we were not to come and go from the little town nearby.
01:02:20 ►
And so we were part of things 24 hours a day for five weeks.
01:02:28 ►
And I love ayahuasca people I think ayahuasqueros are unique people
01:02:33 ►
they have a quality
01:02:35 ►
you can hear it in their voice actually
01:02:38 ►
that they have attained some kind of authentic status of being
01:02:44 ►
that the rest of us are striving toward.
01:02:48 ►
Yeah, yeah.
01:02:49 ►
I’m just wondering about
01:02:51 ►
if you identify a difference
01:02:54 ►
between curing and healing.
01:02:56 ►
The people who were coming for cure
01:02:58 ►
were coming for physical cure, presumably.
01:03:02 ►
And healing you may have even while you’re physically dying.
01:03:08 ►
True.
01:03:09 ►
I’m just trying to sort of see what you meant by cure.
01:03:12 ►
Well, these categories are not so rigid in the Amazon.
01:03:15 ►
For instance, a lot of what they think of as physical problems
01:03:21 ►
we would think of as psychological problems.
01:03:24 ►
For instance, a big problem that a lot
01:03:28 ►
of Peruvians have is a disease called susto, but only Peruvians get susto. And what it is,
01:03:37 ►
is it’s basically bad luck. You know, it’s when things go wrong and won’t go right.
01:03:47 ►
And people will say, oh, you have susto.
01:03:50 ►
You better do something about this.
01:03:54 ►
And so there’s a lot of curing of that kind of a condition.
01:04:03 ►
And then there’s a lot of, like, what I would call fairly insightful minor psychotherapeutic intervention.
01:04:06 ►
I mean, I remember one woman fascinating woman this woman was beautiful
01:04:08 ►
and she was from way in the woods
01:04:10 ►
and she had this amazing voice
01:04:14 ►
and her complaint was an ulcer
01:04:19 ►
and she told the story of this ulcer
01:04:25 ►
in the meeting
01:04:27 ►
in this amazing liquid voice in the darkness
01:04:30 ►
and after she was finished
01:04:33 ►
Don Fidel just sat
01:04:35 ►
and then he said
01:04:36 ►
you’re having an affair
01:04:40 ►
and you’re concerned what will happen
01:04:44 ►
when your husband finds out about this and this is the
01:04:48 ►
cause of this pain in your stomach and she agreed instantly that this was the cause of the pain in
01:04:55 ►
her stomach and that she had known and well now i i don’t claim that as an instance of telepathy i
01:05:02 ►
don’t think that’s what it was. I think it was a very skilled practitioner
01:05:05 ►
with a sense of
01:05:07 ►
this woman’s sexual
01:05:09 ►
intensity, the nature
01:05:12 ►
of the society. He just
01:05:14 ►
put it together and figured it out,
01:05:15 ►
you know, in a stroke of
01:05:17 ►
brilliance. But then she
01:05:20 ►
abreacted and
01:05:22 ►
went the next
01:05:24 ►
several days later. She was obviously in much better shape
01:05:28 ►
it’s you know behind disease lies
01:05:31 ►
language if you have a material
01:05:34 ►
model of disease then language will not appear to be
01:05:40 ►
part of the issue to you but spending time with these people
01:05:44 ►
in the Amazon everything is about
01:05:47 ►
language in a society where magic rules because magic is the is the uh domain of human concern
01:05:58 ►
in which language is empowered in which will becomes a force that can strike you dead you know so in
01:06:08 ►
in these societies where magic is happening language becomes everything and you can cure
01:06:15 ►
somebody by simply telling them that you’re going to and then acting as though you had and the fabric will admit
01:06:26 ►
of that sort of thing
01:06:28 ►
can you elaborate on the idea of
01:06:29 ►
song or singing
01:06:31 ►
well if you listen to the styles
01:06:34 ►
of ayahuasca singing
01:06:35 ►
it can range over a pretty broad
01:06:38 ►
range, it can range
01:06:40 ►
from something which sounds pretty much
01:06:42 ►
like a take off of the
01:06:44 ►
guelzo monks you know, that very
01:06:47 ►
deep diaphragmatic vibration
01:06:51 ►
to a fairly lyrical
01:06:55 ►
thing, you can’t quite dance
01:06:59 ►
to it, but I think it’s basically that you surrender
01:07:03 ►
and then the song comes through and the quality of the song resides in the moment.
01:07:11 ►
What’s always puzzled me is how these people retain these songs.
01:07:15 ►
Because once one comes through, they never seem to be lost.
01:07:20 ►
There may be meter in the song that I’m not aware of that makes it mnemonically easy to keep track of.
01:07:28 ►
But I’ve heard incredible singing.
01:07:33 ►
And sometimes the singing is acknowledged to be incredible.
01:07:37 ►
I was in an ayahuasca circle once and songs were sung.
01:07:43 ►
And this guy was there who nobody really knew
01:07:46 ►
and he sang a song
01:07:48 ►
so amazing
01:07:50 ►
that the curing stopped
01:07:52 ►
everything stopped
01:07:54 ►
and the shaman just sat down
01:07:56 ►
across from this guy
01:07:58 ►
and said
01:07:59 ►
teach me this song
01:08:01 ►
we’re not leaving
01:08:02 ►
till I learn this song
01:08:03 ►
and they sat there till 630 in the morning
01:08:06 ►
And he did learn the song and it was incredible. I mean even down it seemed psychedelic
01:08:12 ►
It seemed impossible the liquid gliding the strange language with these glottal stops
01:08:19 ►
And then these liquid glissando’s it was impossible to imitate imitate that’s why it took even the shaman
01:08:25 ►
hours to commit it
01:08:28 ►
it depends on the area
01:08:34 ►
of the Amazon but it
01:08:35 ►
is usually either
01:08:37 ►
Socotria viridis
01:08:38 ►
which is a small bush
01:08:41 ►
in the Rubiaceae related
01:08:43 ►
to coffee or it’s a near relative of Banisteriopsis
01:08:49 ►
copy in the nearby genus Diploteris, Diploteris cabrarana. For some reason, all the genes
01:09:01 ►
that produce harming in the other Bamisteriopsis leonis
01:09:05 ►
produce DMT in that one.
01:09:08 ►
So it’s the interplay between these two that controls the visions.
01:09:17 ►
Other questions? Yeah.
01:09:18 ►
You mentioned vitreo a couple times this morning.
01:09:20 ►
I was wondering if you thought of the effects of that
01:09:24 ►
and if you had any
01:09:25 ►
things about
01:09:26 ►
administration
01:09:27 ►
or preparation
01:09:28 ►
or experimentation.
01:09:30 ►
Well, remember,
01:09:31 ►
I said this morning
01:09:31 ►
my interests are pretty
01:09:33 ►
tightly focused
01:09:34 ►
on this tryptamine thing.
01:09:37 ►
There are many,
01:09:38 ►
many altered states
01:09:39 ►
that are possible
01:09:40 ►
and the detour
01:09:41 ►
is one of them
01:09:43 ►
that’s plant-based
01:09:44 ►
that’s been traditionally
01:09:46 ►
utilized for magical purposes, but that doesn’t seem to me very psychedelic. I also think you
01:09:54 ►
have to have a certain kind of personality to handle it. My experiments with it were not very
01:10:02 ►
happy, and the people around me who were experimenting with it were not very happy. And the people around me who were experimenting with it
01:10:06 ►
were really getting out there.
01:10:09 ►
When I finally decided to put it behind me
01:10:12 ►
was when all this was going on in Nepal many years ago.
01:10:17 ►
And one day I was down in the market buying potatoes
01:10:20 ►
and I met a friend of mine who also lived in the village.
01:10:24 ►
And he had been experimenting with datura for many days and in the course of our
01:10:28 ►
conversation it came out that he thought we were in his apartment and then I knew
01:10:35 ►
that you know he had had a serious breach with reality I took detoura metal, Himalayan detoura seeds
01:10:45 ►
in my upper
01:10:48 ►
rooms at Bodanath
01:10:49 ►
in the Kathmandu Valley
01:10:51 ►
and I
01:10:54 ►
found it very
01:10:55 ►
hard to
01:10:58 ►
engage with in the way
01:11:02 ►
I like to engage with these things.
01:11:04 ►
You would sit there and nothing seemed to be happening,
01:11:08 ►
nothing seemed to be happening,
01:11:09 ►
and then your mind would drift off into a kind of twilight.
01:11:13 ►
And then there were these strange wraith-like beings,
01:11:18 ►
almost like cartoon ghosts is what they were like.
01:11:21 ►
And they were coming in through my window,
01:11:24 ►
each one bearing an open sheet of newsprint.
01:11:28 ►
And these ghostly pages of newsprint would settle in my lap
01:11:33 ►
and I would be sort of bent forward like this
01:11:35 ►
and I would begin reading these stories in this ectoplasmic media
01:11:41 ►
and then I would snap out of it
01:11:45 ►
and say, you know, what was that?
01:11:48 ►
Nothing’s happening.
01:11:49 ►
It’s not working.
01:11:50 ►
Nothing’s happening.
01:11:51 ►
And it was very elusive and mercurial.
01:11:54 ►
And then later there were
01:11:55 ►
very complicated muscle contortions
01:11:58 ►
and I would find myself with my leg
01:12:01 ►
thrown up over my neck
01:12:03 ►
and this sort of thing
01:12:04 ►
and I would very carefully
01:12:05 ►
untangle myself and lay back down and then it would happen again and and i was thinking you
01:12:12 ►
know i’m glad this is happening to me and i’m glad nobody is here because i’m sure this must
01:12:17 ►
look pretty alarming and it probably is it’s a strange ghostly thing where minds and realities seem to get all mixed up.
01:12:29 ►
I remember I had a New Zealander
01:12:32 ►
living down the hall from me
01:12:34 ►
in this Nepali rooming house.
01:12:37 ►
And at one point I had to go from my room
01:12:39 ►
through his room to get to the john
01:12:42 ►
in the middle of the night.
01:12:44 ►
And I glanced at his bed as
01:12:47 ►
i went through and he was very clearly in the act of making love with a woman a woman that i
01:12:55 ►
vaguely knew just from seeing in the marketplace and the next morning i mentioned it to him, and he said, yes, he thought she was there too, but she wasn’t there.
01:13:09 ►
Not for him and not for me.
01:13:11 ►
So, you know, it was like it was inside somebody else’s hallucination.
01:13:16 ►
Epistemic murk is a good phrase for those kinds of states of mind,
01:13:20 ►
and I don’t like them because I can’t sort it out.
01:13:24 ►
You know, I don’t like these watery, entangling…
01:13:27 ►
Well, see, it wasn’t my Catholicism that it took from me.
01:13:37 ►
I’d abandoned my Catholicism over
01:13:39 ►
five or six years, jettisoning each piece slowly
01:13:44 ►
and managed to transform myself into
01:13:47 ►
jean genet worshiping existential dark anarcho type character an atheist yes and that’s what
01:14:00 ►
it took from me in the 15 secondsecond interval. That’s what I mean.
01:14:06 ►
Yeah.
01:14:06 ►
You came back to deity.
01:14:07 ►
I came back to deity, but I don’t think I came back to the Trinity.
01:14:13 ►
The Trinity and all other hypostatizations of deity that we inherit in major religions
01:14:20 ►
are such friendly, cheerful, cartoonish stuff compared to
01:14:26 ►
the abyss
01:14:27 ►
of DMT.
01:14:29 ►
I’m not sure. I didn’t exactly come back
01:14:32 ►
to deity. I came back
01:14:33 ►
to mystery.
01:14:35 ►
I immediately understood
01:14:37 ►
the relativity of the program
01:14:39 ►
of science, which had been
01:14:41 ►
my hope, you know.
01:14:43 ►
It’s not a somebody out there
01:14:44 ►
necessarily. It’s not a somebody out there, necessarily?
01:14:48 ►
It’s more of a something, or a what?
01:14:51 ►
You can’t tell because we
01:14:54 ►
cast such a large shadow on what we’re looking at.
01:15:00 ►
In other words,
01:15:02 ►
if information begins to unfold in your head suddenly, new stuff that you’ve never thought, so quickly that you have to go, uh-huh, uh-huh, uh-huh.
01:15:18 ►
If I were to ask you then, what’s happening?
01:15:22 ►
You would have to say, I’m having a conversation. That’s because the only
01:15:27 ►
thing you know to call a situation where you’re being given new information that fast is a
01:15:34 ►
conversation. But maybe this isn’t a conversation. Maybe this is accelerated learning that appears to be happening so fast that it’s like a conversation. I tend to,
01:15:47 ►
I also notice in myself a weird thing, which is the longer it’s been since I’ve taken something,
01:15:55 ►
the more conservative my position will be. I mean, if you catch me nine hours after I’ve been there I will take
01:16:05 ►
the positions that I’ve mostly abandoned
01:16:08 ►
the most radical and crazed
01:16:10 ►
positions, the extraterrestrial
01:16:12 ►
intervention position
01:16:13 ►
all of that, I keep trying
01:16:16 ►
to humanize it
01:16:17 ►
and to shrink its dimensions
01:16:19 ►
but the fact of the matter is
01:16:21 ►
up against it
01:16:23 ►
it’s weirder than I say it is
01:16:26 ►
so
01:16:27 ►
you know I don’t
01:16:29 ►
know exactly what to do with that
01:16:32 ►
the mind cannot
01:16:33 ►
encompass this thing
01:16:35 ►
I’m convinced it’s like
01:16:37 ►
you pour the water of description
01:16:40 ►
over it and it beads up
01:16:41 ►
and runs off
01:16:43 ►
and so sometimes we’re emphasizing one part, sometimes
01:16:47 ►
another. It seems to me it’s just the limit case of understanding and that maybe that’s what it
01:16:54 ►
exists for, to demonstrate to human beings that there is a limit case for understanding.
01:17:01 ►
For me as a language person and an analytical rationalist and so forth and so on,
01:17:08 ►
it’s just such an amazing experience to stand in the presence of the unspeakable and to say,
01:17:16 ►
to see it and to say, you know, you are unspeakable. You are not the white light. You’re
01:17:22 ►
not the unitary anything. You are the unspeakable.
01:17:25 ►
And I can only encounter you in silence. But in silence, I encounter you a hundred percent.
01:17:34 ►
And I just didn’t think this kind of stuff was psychically lawful. I mean,
01:17:39 ►
I guess it isn’t psychically lawful. That’s the crux of the matter, isn’t it?
01:17:41 ►
isn’t psychically lawful.
01:17:43 ►
That’s the crux of the matter, isn’t it?
01:17:47 ►
But then how do you encounter that further with the experience you get then,
01:17:49 ►
like in your real life and out there in the world?
01:17:53 ►
Well, you create metaphors.
01:17:55 ►
You tell yourself little stories.
01:17:57 ►
You create a new paradigm, is what it is.
01:18:00 ►
You replace scientific rationalism
01:18:03 ►
with psychedelic Zen synchronicity
01:18:06 ►
or some other way of describing it.
01:18:09 ►
But there is a way to make bridges out of it,
01:18:15 ►
remembering the relativity of everything.
01:18:18 ►
I mean, it really seems to be a relativistic kind of perception.
01:18:23 ►
The mystery, which isn’t necessarily good or bad
01:18:26 ►
or benevolent or evil, but it’s…
01:18:29 ►
It has a lot to do with the angle of regarding
01:18:32 ►
of what is shown to you.
01:18:35 ►
A lot of people who take mushrooms
01:18:38 ►
report some version of an end-of-the-world revelation.
01:18:49 ►
Either we’re all going to be lifted off in ships the size of Manitoba or the Matreya is just around the corner. But this unraveling apocalyptic scenario
01:18:57 ►
and then the clinical view of that is that it’s paranoia. But really it’s the archetype of our civilization. We have built into
01:19:08 ►
our civilization this dream of the end. And every war that comes along is hailed as the war of
01:19:16 ►
Armageddon. Every tin horn dictator is hailed as the Antichrist. This has been going on for 500 years.
01:19:27 ►
If it’s more specific than that,
01:19:30 ►
where you actually begin to pull apart,
01:19:35 ►
if it’s really personalistically paranoid,
01:19:37 ►
then you’re in my league,
01:19:40 ►
and I don’t think there’s any hope for you.
01:19:49 ►
I mean, you just have to really learn. I mean, the way I’ve fought it is by disbelieving anything, you know, because my life is fairly science fiction-y and carries over it this
01:19:58 ►
question, which I grapple with all the time, which is, who do you work for? What is going on here? Do you understand what you’re
01:20:06 ►
doing? And if you don’t, who does? And why did they set you marching? Because I can tell what’s
01:20:14 ►
happening here. We’re trying to tinker with something. It’s a groping in the dark for a
01:20:20 ►
button. We’re trying to make something happen by saying words, by setting examples, by empowering
01:20:27 ►
people to do certain things. This is the mushrooms program, not mine. I mean, left to myself,
01:20:35 ►
I would probably be a hermit, and I’m much too cynical for crusades, but the mushroom isn’t the mushroom is a gung-ho kind of guy and uh you know has this
01:20:48 ►
whole vision of man and fungus hand in hand to the stars and i just say you know you just meet
01:20:57 ►
the damnedest people out in the fields you know and and this is one of them
01:21:03 ►
you’re listening to the psychedelic salon where people are changing their lives you know, and this is one of them.
01:21:07 ►
You’re listening to the Psychedelic Salon,
01:21:10 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:21:17 ►
You, me, and the mushroom, hand in hand and on to the stars.
01:21:23 ►
Now, if that isn’t poetry worthy of an Irish bard, I don’t know what is.
01:21:26 ►
Actually, until the last minute of this talk,
01:21:29 ►
I wasn’t sure what title I would give to today’s podcast.
01:21:32 ►
As you already know, I decided to call it This is the Mushrooms Program.
01:21:35 ►
But some of my other ideas included
01:21:38 ►
searching for the source of the psychedelic experience,
01:21:42 ►
awareness of the big picture,
01:21:44 ►
at play with colored balls,
01:21:46 ►
and groping in the dark for a button.
01:21:51 ►
Actually, I guess that I could have just called it
01:21:54 ►
more McKenna, and left it at that.
01:21:58 ►
Now, unless I’m completely mistaken,
01:22:01 ►
my guess is that there are some fellow salonners
01:22:03 ►
who are of a more scientific bent than
01:22:06 ►
was dear Terrence, and so when he got into his rap about DNA and electron spin resonance, well,
01:22:14 ►
it may have sounded like fingernails on a blackboard to you. However, full disclosure here,
01:22:20 ►
coming from my background of physics, which basically ends sometime around 1964 when I graduated from university,
01:22:30 ►
I have to admit that from such a limited understanding of physics and biology as I have,
01:22:36 ►
well, he did seem to be on to something there.
01:22:39 ►
But in other words, as our scientific friends will most likely say,
01:22:44 ►
I actually have no idea what I’m talking about here.
01:22:49 ►
Anyway, back when Terence was talking about how our consciousness has been narrowed down
01:22:55 ►
to give our fight or flight circuits the highest priority,
01:22:59 ►
I got to thinking that perhaps that is why,
01:23:02 ►
when a psychedelic experience is properly arranged and you’re
01:23:06 ►
in the proper mindset, then the setting becomes an extremely important feature in determining
01:23:12 ►
the outcome of your experience.
01:23:15 ►
You see, in a small group assisted by sober sitters, you can significantly reduce your
01:23:22 ►
fight or flight responses and let the experience take over.
01:23:26 ►
I’m not sure that I said that quite the way I mean it, but I think you get the idea.
01:23:32 ►
Remember when Terrence was talking about courage being a requirement for a psychonaut?
01:23:38 ►
Well, I’m here to tell you that it has been my experience that whenever I’ve participated
01:23:42 ►
in various psychedelic circles,
01:23:51 ►
that the more experienced a person is, the more fear they seem to have to face in order to participate yet again.
01:23:58 ►
In fact, I can remember the night when I had planned to smoke 5-MeO-DMT for the first time.
01:24:02 ►
And the person who was my experienced sitter said,
01:24:07 ►
you’d better be prepared to spend the next six months processing this before you take it.
01:24:12 ►
Well, I backed down that night and went out to Arrowwood the next day to learn more about it before my first experience,
01:24:16 ►
which actually took place several months later and was an extremely pleasant one, I should add.
01:24:21 ►
So please don’t let peer pressure force you to have a psychedelic
01:24:25 ►
experience before you are fully ready. This is a really big deal, in case you haven’t already
01:24:31 ►
figured that out. A psychedelic experience can often be a life-changing one, so don’t treat it
01:24:36 ►
casually. We don’t want any more casualties. Now, before I go, I want to pass along some news that now seems to be a regular feature of my first podcast each year.
01:24:49 ►
It comes from my good friend, Ido Hardikson, who has been a part of the salon for as long as I can remember.
01:24:56 ►
When we heard from Ido last year, he was still living in Spain, but recently he has moved back home to Israel, where he’ll be spending the next few years.
01:25:05 ►
However, in addition to some personal stuff, he had this to say.
01:25:09 ►
As in every year’s end, I’m writing to let you know about the daily psychedelic videos,
01:25:15 ►
end-of-the-year collection of the best psychedelic videos of 2015,
01:25:19 ►
which includes 25 stunning and very psychedelic videos.
01:25:24 ►
Over the past years, I’ve arranged a number of psychedelic screenings of videos from the
01:25:29 ►
website, and came to understand that psychedelic videos are to a large extent a mind-state
01:25:36 ►
dependent form of art.
01:25:38 ►
You need to watch them in the right set and setting to really appreciate what they have
01:25:42 ►
to offer.
01:25:43 ►
So our recommendation is to watch them on a large screen
01:25:46 ►
with good speakers or headphones
01:25:48 ►
and in the right state of mind, if you know what I mean.
01:25:53 ►
Ah yes, Ido, I do know what you mean.
01:25:56 ►
In fact, I went out to the DPV website,
01:25:59 ►
which you will find at dailypsychedelicvideo.com
01:26:03 ►
and that’s a URL that i think you may want to remember
01:26:06 ►
and when i went out there to give the videos a quick look i wound up spending a whole lot more
01:26:12 ►
time there than i’d planned on in fact i had to break away to finish this podcast just now but
01:26:18 ►
as soon as i sign off do the post-production and publish this podcast on the net, I’m heading right back out there to watch a few more.
01:26:26 ►
Only this time I plan on first getting myself in a special state of mind
01:26:31 ►
in which I can better enjoy this excellent psychedelic art
01:26:35 ►
that Ido has gathered for us.
01:26:38 ►
So, for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic space.
01:26:42 ►
Be careful out there, my friends.