484 - This is the Mushroom’s Program

Program Notes

https://www.patreon.com/lorenzohagerty

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.”

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

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And to all of our fellow salonners who are using the same calendar as I am, well, Happy New Year.

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Of course, for many of us, it’s just good to have survived another end-of-the-year holiday season.

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Hopefully, you spiced up your family meals with a discussion about freeing the U.S. political prisoner Ross Ulbrich.

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Let’s not let that issue get buried in this new year, because ultimately

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his case is going to

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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.

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So please go to

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freeross.org and

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at least get on his mailing list to show your support.

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Now, I’ll have a few more announcements after we listen to today’s lecture,

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which is a continuation of the February 1991 Terrence McKenna workshop that we began last week.

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And just so you know, there are two more tapes in this series,

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and I’m going to play them in order

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before moving on to other speakers I know that in the past I’ve broken up some of Terrence’s

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workshops but that seems to seems to have upset many of our fellow salonners so I’ll play this

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entire workshop before playing some of the other talks that I’ve got lined up for this year

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for example there’s more from the 2015 Palenque Norte lectures,

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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.

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So, if you’re burned out listening to Terrence McKenna,

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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,

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including a fascinating and in-depth discussion about morning glory intoxication.

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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.

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For one thing, the so-called First Gulf War had recently begun.

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talk. For one thing, the so-called First Gulf War had recently begun, and on the East Coast,

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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

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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.

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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.

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So let’s listen.

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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.

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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

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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.

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Well, the question is, what about the way ayahuasca is being done in America without

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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

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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

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made well so the first issue is how is it made and the style of these more public ayahuasca circles

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is to make it mild they don’t want people swinging from the chandeliers. Ayahuasca can range over a spectrum from

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what’s all the excitement about to

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hang on Hannah.

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And so it takes a bit of fiddling

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to get it right.

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As far as DMT is concerned, ayahuasca is driven by DMT.

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What made me go to the Amazon was I first encountered DMT in the underground in Berkeley in 1967.

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And I was absolutely amazed.

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I mean, I had already taken lsd and and but for me and to this

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moment uh dmt is just the most amazing thing in the universe i mean it shouldn’t exist it it’s

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impossible and every time i do it i come down i is impossible. I mean, to call that a drug? What a joke.

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I mean, it just masquerades as a drug.

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It’s not a drug. That’s preposterous.

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The problem with DMT is its incredible power.

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That only the most intrepid can form any coherent impression whatsoever of what’s going on

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if it’s a strong trip i mean there are sub-threshold trips where you just graze the tummy of the beast

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and then people come down with various models of archetypal closure with the cosmic carnival.

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That’s the archetype of DMT, is the cosmic circus.

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But if you actually get a strong hit of it,

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which is in no way dangerous,

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but simply a true boundary-dissolving hit,

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it’s into some place it’s almost like

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well I once said

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there’s danger of death by astonishment

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and I think that’s true

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that’s the major danger

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is death by astonishment

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because you just get in there and you say

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my God

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I thought I had some expectation of what was possible.

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And instead, this is just so blown out.

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And it somewhat freaks me itself, so unrelated to our petty concerns on this planet.

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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,

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what does this say about the archetypes?

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There is no archetype for this.

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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.

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Human spiritual experience never got this deep,

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never tore open this doorway.

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And yet what?

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It’s a long toke away for an ordinary human being?

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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

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like the absolute quintessence of what all those things are are aiming for you know more stunning

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than the rise of atlantis from the atlantic seaboard is a toke of DMT.

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More appalling than the arrival of alien star fleets in the skies of our planet.

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And yet, it’s here.

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It’s here.

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And I don’t often invoke it.

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I mean, for me to talk about it is to invoke it.

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Because it’s weird to talk about it.

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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

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rages ignorant armies clash by night that whole thing but you know this extraordinarily powerful

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thing the depth of which the measure of which is so hard to take, lies very near.

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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

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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

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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?

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And largely, I would say, what we’ve learned from 20, 25 years of dealing with this is that our strategy was right.

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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

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there, folks. It’s like

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a little

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doorway

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into the previous universe

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or something.

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The whole, you know,

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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.

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The shiny, bright, active,

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exfoliating and bizarre part.

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Well then, we then are poised

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in this strange dimension

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of diminished possibility.

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Where are we?

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What is that?

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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

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understanding of the here and now

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how does it reflect on the quest for

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I don’t know

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immortality or enlightenment

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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.

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Hit the alarm clock with the hammer and you learn all about gears

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because they spring out and become visible. But, and this is how science works. This is

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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.

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Well, obviously, that’s not going to take us too far in this domain

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because it’s entirely made up of structure, of connection, of relationship, of thought.

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And because I’m concerned about the planet

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and the predicament we’re in

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and the way we spend our resources

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and cheat our children of a sane future and all that

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I keep trying to reconnect this back into the human world

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but I frankly don’t know whether that can be done

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another area I work in is I try to connect it up to the perennial philosophies of humanity,

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Zen and Buddhism and Shamanism.

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I don’t know whether that can be done.

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The shamans that I have gotten really close to have not been,

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I would not call, they were able to cure people,

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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,

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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

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very comfortable with these people because it it from the outside it looks like ritual and taboo and

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power and from the inside it’s just hey let’s all cook something up and try to figure it out

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it was totally familiar to me from my days in berkeley in the 60s it’s the head ethic

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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.

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The generous point of view,

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the ecumenical point of view,

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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

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it’s just preposterous you know the reason the world doesn’t make sense to you is because the

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world doesn’t make sense to you how could it it? I mean, look where you’re starting from.

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Where is it writ in Adamantine

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that troops of monkeys should comprehend

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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

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with some kind of provisional arrangement.

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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.

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They show us, number one, that there is a transcendent other, which I certainly didn’t

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believe there was till I took psychedelics. I mean, I was raised Roman Catholic. I spent

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a lot of time deconditioning myself from the transcendent other and embracing a kind of

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materialist agnosticism. Well, that lasted 15 seconds into the first DMT trip

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and then that had been vaporized

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for all time

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so I think we need to honor

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the religious impulse but I’m

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very skeptical

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of all hierarchical

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con games where the idea is

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somebody knows something and somebody

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else doesn’t and then they

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have to trade off their relationship.

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You know, the Rolling Stones have a song that says,

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you don’t get what you want, you get what you need.

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I don’t think you’re going to spend very long involved with these things

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at a deep level without scaring your socks off uh eventually

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i mean one of the great things about these psychedelic teachers is that they are so gentle

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with beginners and then the flip side of that coin is they are so unforgiving with veterans. And I don’t know.

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I mean, I have hard trips often.

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And the way I explain it to myself is, you know,

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I pretty much accept Rupert Sheldrake’s notion of the morphogenetic field

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and feel like the psychedelics amplify the morphogenetic field of the totality.

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And, you know, why shouldn’t I have difficult trips?

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The totality is in such a weird state of turmoil.

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I mean, you couldn’t pay me to take five grams of mushrooms in the present circumstances

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simply because I can feel the riptides

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in the historical dimension

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just churning everything into white water.

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I mean, I’d stay out of the water

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till it dies down a little.

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Fear is a problem

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because, well, there are different reasons,

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but here’s a reductionist reason these compounds

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are cns stimulants and that means they’re going to stimulate what’s called the fight or flight

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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

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position absolutely petrified with fear

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and not do anything about it except

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breathe and sing you know Paul Herbert

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Paul Herbert the other Herbert the

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Herbert who wrote Dean who is such a

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minor figure that I can’t remember remember his first name, Frank Herbert, he has a wonderful thing in there talking about fear.

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And he says fear comes like a wind out of the desert and it blows through you.

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And all you can do is let it blow itself out.

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And you really can do this you just wait fear is a kind of state

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of agitation of the organism that chemically cannot maintain itself very long so wait it

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through then in terms of practical suggestions, sing.

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You must sing.

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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.

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You have to oxygenate your body.

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You have to begin moving energy through your body.

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You can sing your way out of most situations.

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That’s the best advice.

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And you can breathe your way out

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of most situations.

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And it’s a set of techniques.

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No, you’re quite right.

00:25:19 ►

It’s a set of techniques.

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They’re very simple,

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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 ►

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 ►

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 ►

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.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

484 - This is the Mushroom’s Program

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Program Notes

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