486 - The Main Vein of the Peculiar

Program Notes

https://www.patreon.com/lorenzohagerty

http://freeross.orgToday’s podcast features the final section of a Terence McKenna workshop that took place in February 1991. In addition to more stories about the machine-elves and DMT, Terence covers evolution, the imagination, virtual reality, shamanism, and falling in love. The title of today’s podcast comes from my favorite quote by McKenna: “Apparently, if you pursue the weird, it won’t take you very long before you get to [psychedelics]. This is the main vein of the peculiar.”

Transcript

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Greetings from cyberdelic space.

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

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

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Well, today I’m going to play the final segment of the February 1991 Terrence McKenna Workshop that we’ve been listening to for the past three weeks.

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And for what it’s worth, this is going to be my last podcast of a McKenna Talk for a little while.

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Maybe for a few months at least, maybe till summer.

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You see, the other day I was

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at the gym and thought I’d go back and listen to some of the salon’s older podcasts. Now,

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on my phone, I use an app that’s simply called Podcasts, and it’s the one that comes up when I

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search on podcast app in the iTunes store. It’s the first one that comes up there. And if, like me, Thank you. Click the podcast link at the top menu, and that’s going to take you to a page that also lists every podcast line by line.

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And in the right sidebar, you’ll find a link to all of our RSS feeds.

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So anyway, I was scrolling through the podcast listing, and it seemed to me as if every other podcast featured Terrence McKenna.

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podcast featured Terrence McKenna. Well, in fact, today’s podcast marks the 230th time that Terrence has been featured here in the salon, which means that, well, he’s actually dominated almost half

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of the salon’s podcasts, and that seems like enough for a while. Now, I still do have a bunch of his

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talks on tapes that I haven’t checked out yet, but I’m going to let them rest in their box in my garage for a while

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so we can listen to a wider variety of speakers.

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In fact, tomorrow morning I’ll be visiting with Emmanuel Seferos,

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the founder of DanceSafe, which, as you know,

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is the non-profit organization that you’ve probably seen at various events around the world

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and who will test any little pills that you may have for their purity and actual content.

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And if all goes well, our conversation will be featured in next week’s podcast.

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But for today, at least, we will once again be listening to the Bard McKenna.

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Now, Terrence begins today by discussing his quandary over the DMT experience and his

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interactions with what he thinks of as machine elves. And then, wondering aloud about their

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origin, he asks the question, how can I tell that it’s not just coming from me? Now, if you have

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ever been in deep psychedelic space where you thought that maybe you were encountering entities from another dimension,

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well, then this is a question that you should be asking yourself as well.

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For my part, while I have had quite a few deep psychedelic experiences,

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I still can’t say with absolute certainty that it’s not all just happening in my own brain due to a major change in its chemistry.

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all just happening in my own brain due to a major change in its chemistry.

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Now, I know that this may upset some of our fellow salonners, most of them probably, but I want to be honest with you.

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While Terrence says that the test for him is whether he could have thought up these

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things without first ingesting a psychedelic substance, or doing it on the natch as he

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calls it, I may be giving my natch, as he calls it.

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I may be giving my imagination more credit than it’s due,

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but in all honesty, I haven’t ever encountered any thought in theospace that I couldn’t have come up with on my own.

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Of course, I probably have a much higher opinion of my own imagination than it deserves.

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In any event, this is something that I think any professional psychonaut

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should be giving some consideration to.

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But before you completely give up on me as a lost cause

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when it comes to entities from other dimensions,

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I must also let you know that after listening to what Terrence is about to say,

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I can return to questioning my own ideas along these lines

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and come to the conclusion that, well, maybe I’m just becoming a grumpy old man.

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So please don’t let me persuade you one way or the other.

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As the good Dr. Leary often said, you have to think for yourself.

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This is something that it’s up to you to decide for yourself

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and then adjust your life accordingly.

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Now, here once again is Terrence McKenna.

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Well, so this is our last opportunity to raise questions or get clarity.

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Does anybody want to have a go at it?

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Yeah.

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You mentioned a few times with mushrooms and DMT

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where you had

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it was kind of

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like an envelope

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come over you

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or a tent

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and where these

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elves would tell

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you to follow

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them and it

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was like they

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would show you

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knowledge

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could you

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explain

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well

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yeah the

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characteristic

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of the DMT

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flash is

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this encounter

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with these small, alive sentences,

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which are coming, approaching you and showing you stuff, telling you stuff.

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It seems to me, as a rationalist, that if you’re having a conversation with someone,

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there must be rules in communication theory.

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Someone must understand this.

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You know, in artificial intelligence,

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they have this rule that what is artificial intelligence?

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Well, if it’s a black box and you can’t tell whether there’s a machine or a person in there,

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it’s an artificial intelligence.

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You might set up a similar test with the alien in the head. I’ve tried to figure out how can I tell that it’s not me? How can I create a logically tight trap for it so that I can absolutely tell that it isn’t me.

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And I haven’t been able to figure out how to do that. This learning stuff from entities is not respectable in our present official intellectual world.

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But when you start asking questions, you’d be amazed where entities have

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acted and with what force for example i mean this is a to my mind one of the great suppressed

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stories of modern history uh in august of 1619 a retreating Habsburg army camped in Ulm in southern Germany for a few days.

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They were retreating from a campaign against Prague, where they had successfully deposed the Winter King and queen and in this group of troops of several thousand troops

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was a young French adventurer

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22 year old soldier of fortune

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and that night

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the night of August the 12th

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in Ulm

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he slept and had a dream

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and an angel appeared to this young man

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and said,

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the mastery of nature is achieved

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through measure and number.

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This was Rene Descartes.

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This was the founder of what is called materialism,

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rationalism.

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His marching orders were given to him in the same way that Mohammed got his marching orders.

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All of modern science was created at the behest of an angelic entity.

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Well, they’re not talking about this at Caltech and MIT, let me tell you.

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Well, they’re not talking about this at Caltech and MIT, let me tell you. So how many times in history have voices taken the wheel?

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Another example, one that’s dear to my heart is,

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because I kind of identify with it,

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is Alfred Russell Wallace, who was a poor surveyor from Devon

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who was out collecting surveyor from Devon,

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who was out collecting insects in Indonesia in the last century,

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and he got a fever on the island of Ternate, malaria.

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And in the midst of this fever,

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he understood the solution to the great problem of 19th century biology,

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which was called the problem of the species.

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He saw how random mutation and natural selective forces

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could produce biological diversity.

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And when he came down from this thing,

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and this was again an angelic deliverance in the height of this fever,

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he couldn’t figure out what to do with it

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so he wrote a letter to the greatest

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scientist of the age

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which was Charles Darwin

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in London

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and when Darwin opened this letter

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you know

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he said holy shit

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this guy has scooped me

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20 years I’ve been working on the origins

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here it is in four paragraphs who is this guy has scooped me 20 years I’ve been working on the origins here it is in four paragraphs

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who is this guy

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so then it became the Darwin-Wallace

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theory of evolution

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for its first 50 years

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and then Wallace dropped out of the picture

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because he disgraced himself

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by an interest in spiritualism

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but you can understand

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why

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if the guy got the original vision from an angel.

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Can I come in on spiritualism?

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Sure.

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Mackenzie King, who was Prime Minister of Canada

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for about 40 years all through the war,

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it was always kept secret

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that he was totally a spiritualist.

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And even if you read history since the war,

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when he died,

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suddenly everyone discovered this,

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and then there’s

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been a terrific

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clamp on it

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again.

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But I know

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Canada’s a small

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country, but the

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prime minister of

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a country very

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involved in

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decisions on war

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was getting most

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of his stuff

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from spiritualism.

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That’s right.

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This is part of

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what I was talking

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about last night

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with the time

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wave.

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The alchemical dreams of the 16th century, of the dream somewhat into the background.

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But after James Clerk Maxwell and Helmholtz and those people discovered the electromagnetic fields in the 1870s, I mean, we are totally intellectually at home

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with the idea of electromagnetic radiation.

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We don’t see what an occult thing it must have seemed to the 19th century

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where they had just risen to the place where they conceived everything mechanically,

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hard objects whizzing through space

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force, angular momentum, conservation of energy

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well then comes Helmholtz and Clerk Maxwell

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and these people and they say oh no

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there’s a diffuse invisible

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vibratory medium that extends

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throughout all space and just you know complete occult

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kind of vocabulary

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well that has now

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because it could be

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formalized

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through

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Maxwell’s

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equations for magnetic radiation

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somehow the occult side

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of it dropped away

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for us that’s how you take the magic out of something

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is you stride to the blackboard

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and write a tensor equation of the third degree

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and then somehow you have it

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so these fields became very mundane

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and could be used for radio and television and so forth

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it took someone like Marshall McLuhan

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to point out that the Christian

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program for the entry of God into history reaches the period of the intercession of the Holy Ghost

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once Marconi throws the switch, that the electrical web of noetic information,

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the instantaneous transformations of the global logos,

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this is the age of the Holy Spirit.

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And, you know, it’s a funny thing how effects in nature

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can be drawn forward and concentrated.

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For thousands and thousands of years,

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electricity was understood to be that thing that you see

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when you take a cat skin into a darkened room

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with an amber rod and rub it,

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rub the cat fur with the amber rod,

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and then as you stroke it in the darkness

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you see static electrical discharge through the cat fur.

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And this was known since Hellenistic times.

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It was a magic show demonstration.

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But it took the concrescence of novelty,

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the descent of the Holy Ghost into history

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to draw the crackle out of the cat fur and set it as an envelope around the planet,

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transducing the information that knits together the dominant species. present at hand, ready to be somehow reconfigured in some solitary or salvific way.

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One of the things, one of the insights that I had from all the fiddling with shamanism in the Amazon Amazon, was that everything can be simple. If things aren’t simple, we haven’t thought about it

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long enough. That’s why I like that population idea yesterday, because there may be a yet simpler

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idea than that, but that really gives me hope, because if you don’t have a simple idea

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you can be pretty sure

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you don’t have the solution

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the solution is going to have to be

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pretty simple and straightforward

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because it’s going to have to be executed

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by the combined

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commitment

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of millions and millions of people

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how Wallace did and millions of people. Basin, with Gregory Basin, you started out by how Russell had a slightly different version of evolution

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than Darwin did.

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How Wallace did.

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Yeah.

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Yes, it was an interesting intellectual episode,

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and it actually has something to do

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with what we’re talking about,

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because there have been many descriptions

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of what the controversy between Wallace and Darwin really was, what it came down to, and I don’t think most modern people realize this about evolution in the 19th century. were waging war against Christianity.

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They were the great warriors of atheism.

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And the way it worked,

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the way atheism was waged intellectually in the 19th century,

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was it took the form of a denial of purpose. This is called in theological language teleology.

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Purpose is telos.

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And a huge amount of the intellectual energy of science in the 19th century

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was put toward showing that there is no purpose,

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no end state.

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See, many people think of it, when they think of evolution,

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that, see, many people think of it, when they think of evolution,

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they think of higher and higher ascents towards some kind of ideal.

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No biologists curl their lip at this interpretation.

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A biologist believes that you have random mutation, random,

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colliding with selective pressures in the environment,

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and out of that you get a best fit,

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and that best fit is maintained and passed forward in time.

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But it was absolutely anathema to the 19th century scientists

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to suppose that there could be, you must never speak of purpose

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you must never speak of goal

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you must never speak of an arrow toward an end point

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they said no, no, it’s much more

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a random walk, you know

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in Hamlet where he says

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it’s a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

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That’s precisely the position of 19th century biology on what biology is about.

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Well, the problem there is that theory of evolution works very well when you’re looking at the evolution of species

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evolution of

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one ladybug, you know, the plain

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orange ladybug

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into the lady, the conspecific

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nearby species with black

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spots, this all works very well

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but what it doesn’t explain

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is the emergence

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of the phyla

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the great forces that pulled forward the phyla.

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The other thing it doesn’t explain

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are phenomena like metamorphosis,

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for instance, in insects.

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If evolution proceeds out of random mutation

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working against natural selection,

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well then a process like metamorphosis,

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where thousands of genes have to be coordinated perfectly with one another

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to take a worm and transform it into a winged flying creature with a sexual potential.

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I mean thousands of genes are coordinated to do this.

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Well how can you imagine any random evolutionary event that would give you a halfway point in metamorphosis?

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It’s either all or nothing.

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So Wallace, looking at the same data that Darwin was looking at, said there must be a telos in nature. And in that sense, he is the founder of the revolution in science

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that I tried to carry forward last night with the time wave,

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because this was entirely a theory of telos,

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of being drawn toward an omega point.

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Well, recently recently Wallace and

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my ideas

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have gotten good support

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from these

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frontier areas

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of mathematics called

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chaos theory and dynamical

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systems theory because

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they deal

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in a quite rigorous

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fashion and with no excitement or arm-waving with these things called attractors.

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And attractors are actually basins in the energy topology of a process such that all things in their

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vicinity are drawn to them

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just as if you imagine you had

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a flat floor but then there was

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a steep dip in it somewhere

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well when you swept this floor you would

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discover all the dirt in the bottom of the

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dip because that’s the

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minimum energy state for

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the system. I think

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that history is the great test

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for all of this new mathematics and holistic thinking

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and generalized metaphor making.

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It’s one thing to predict the course of a stock market

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or the fluctuation of an ecosystem

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but if our mathematical

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models are good for anything

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then they should be good for

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modeling the matrix

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in which we find ourselves

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so that what we looked at

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last night was just

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like our entry

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into the soapbox

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derby of historical modeling,

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which is now going on at quite a furious rate,

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because planning is very, very important.

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I mean, we have to make some very important moves in the next 30 years.

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The wrong move will checkmate us.

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I mean, this is a heart in your throat kind of situation.

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We need to study the board very carefully, you know, just one more wrong move and there could

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be a cascade of some sort in one of the many critically poised domains that threaten us

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that we would not then be able to reverse.

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Do you think we can make a wrong move?

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Oh, I think we could definitely make a wrong move.

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It’s easy to imagine wrong moves.

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I mean, here’s a wrong move.

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Use white phosphorus bombs to torch the oil sands in Saudi Arabia so that you get a nuclear

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winter without a nuclear war.

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That would be a wrong move.

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Cease to resist the spread of infectious disease.

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Nuclear proliferation.

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So far we’ve shown a remarkable ability

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to locate and make wrong moves.

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The banking system, the role between men and women,

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the stuff we were talking about yesterday,

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how much resources should be committed to space,

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how much to feeding the starving,

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how much…

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It’s an energy problem. We actually have a finite amount of energy and we are in a box

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and we need to calculate you know how many paths are there out of the box how much do they cost

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how long do they take and who eats it in each deal.

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Because it’s very hard to find a way out where somebody doesn’t eat it. I mean, that’s why I was so fascinated that the mushroom could offer,

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instantaneously offer what seemed to be a fairly humane, non-coercive, non-invasive,

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offer what seemed to be a fairly humane, non-coercive, non-invasive,

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and extremely cogent and bare-knuckles suggestion as to how we might solve our problems.

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I mean, you could commission three UN studies and not get that much plain talk.

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Yeah.

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For those who want to explore the mushroom experience do you have any insight or guidelines

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for them, books to read

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how to communicate

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how to communicate

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books to read

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well I always recommend

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because it’s easy to get

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and very good dense information

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that book called

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Hallucinogens and Shamanism,

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edited by Michael Harner

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from Oxford University Press.

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And then, you know,

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there’s a plethora of publishing.

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It’s so natural to me

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that I almost forget to say it,

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but if you’re interested

00:24:41 ►

in this kind of thing,

00:24:44 ►

your first stop has got to be the library.

00:24:47 ►

You have to educate yourself

00:24:49 ►

because this is the most lied-about area of human relations.

00:24:54 ►

I mean, it’s out there with transsexuality and stuff like that.

00:24:57 ►

When it’s an extremely misrepresented, misunderstood,

00:25:02 ►

hated, feared, loathed, and attacked place.

00:25:05 ►

So you have to learn the players and the positions and how to read this pharmaceutical literature.

00:25:13 ►

The real data is in journals.

00:25:17 ►

I mean, there are scientific guilds and brotherhoods where all this information moves around fairly freely. In fact, Esalen over the years has played host many times

00:25:27 ►

to the high priests, the chemists, and the psychotherapists,

00:25:34 ►

and people like that are making it happen.

00:25:38 ►

But it’s all in journals.

00:25:40 ►

Very little of it gets behind hardcover.

00:25:43 ►

In terms of recent publishing that you might find interesting anyway,

00:25:48 ►

there was a festrift published for Gordon Wasson

00:25:51 ►

called The Sacred Mushroom Seeker

00:25:54 ►

that has a bunch of interesting articles in it

00:25:58 ►

and a strange article by me

00:26:01 ►

that does not discuss the veldt of Africa either.

00:26:04 ►

Did you say on the first day that you weren’t taking mushrooms anymore article by me that does not discuss the belt of Africa either yeah well I meant fairly temporarily my

00:26:16 ►

my requirement is I mean because even

00:26:19 ►

when I get all kinds of weird stuff I

00:26:22 ►

mean I get spread out I, I see aircraft I can’t

00:26:26 ►

identify taking off from airfields in thorn bush country. And I can’t even tell the war

00:26:34 ►

I’m looking at, you know, is this South Africa? Is it Zimbabwe? Is it Libya? Where are we?

00:26:40 ►

What’s going on? That’s in the early stage, the swimming through it.

00:26:47 ►

Do you think that that actually,

00:26:49 ►

do you think it’s because of your knowledge about current events

00:26:54 ►

and the fact that you know this stuff is going on,

00:26:56 ►

or do you think that whatever the turmoil is,

00:27:00 ►

the mushroom knows about, or it exists independently of you?

00:27:03 ►

No, neither of those.

00:27:05 ►

I think that the way to think of these psychedelics is they amplify the morphogenetic field.

00:27:14 ►

And so it’s not because I follow current events.

00:27:18 ►

It’s not because the mushroom knows that.

00:27:21 ►

It’s because it’s all around us in the air.

00:27:27 ►

knows that it’s because it’s all around us in the air it’s like all the fm and short wave and long uvhf uh all this information it’s as though suddenly you’re transparent to it and you

00:27:33 ►

actually feel the planetary body heaving you know and now there’s a huge volume of

00:27:40 ►

information moving in arabic and Pashtun and all that,

00:27:45 ►

and you just, you know, it’s real.

00:27:48 ►

It is not a hallucination.

00:27:50 ►

You are entering, this is the unconscious of the human species,

00:27:55 ►

hardwired, it begins behind your eyes.

00:27:58 ►

And when you let down into it, you know,

00:28:00 ►

it’s like Gibson cyberspace,

00:28:03 ►

except that you don’t need the fancy board and all that.

00:28:07 ►

That’s just to give permission to realize that this is happening.

00:28:11 ►

No, it’s a penetration of the collectivity.

00:28:15 ►

You can really feel it. It’s really there.

00:28:18 ►

It’s the aura of the human and biological envelope of the planet.

00:28:26 ►

And I don’t know how deeply you can read it.

00:28:29 ►

I mean, obviously, like the time wave is, for me,

00:28:34 ►

it’s a kind of blueprint of the thing I see in hyperspace.

00:28:39 ►

It’s a CAD-CAM sketch of the philosopher’s stone

00:28:45 ►

or of the transcendental object.

00:28:47 ►

That’s the kind of shadow it throws.

00:28:50 ►

But it’s the whole collectivity.

00:28:52 ►

You know that, I can’t remember who wrote this poem,

00:28:55 ►

I think nobody very interesting,

00:28:57 ►

it’s kind of dismissed as doggerel,

00:28:59 ►

but do you know that poem,

00:29:00 ►

I saw eternity the other night, a golden ring?

00:29:09 ►

Well, the wave is eternity as a golden wave. It’s that all time is a standing wave in eternity. Plato said this. He said time

00:29:17 ►

is the moving image of eternity. It means that eternity is some kind of higher dimensional object and the present is like a wave moving through this,

00:29:30 ►

moving around the donut of eternity.

00:29:34 ►

And the time wave then shows the fine structure in this donut.

00:29:39 ►

If you could assimilate this idea and expand it

00:29:44 ►

and connect its vocabulary

00:29:46 ►

to the vocabulary of the perennial philosophy

00:29:49 ►

I think you would see that they’re saying

00:29:52 ►

the same thing. They’re saying

00:29:54 ►

you know

00:29:55 ►

everything already exists in some higher

00:30:00 ►

dimension yet there is

00:30:03 ►

free will

00:30:05 ►

within certain constraints

00:30:07 ►

and somehow the task of the,

00:30:15 ►

of, I don’t know,

00:30:16 ►

self-growth or spiritual understanding

00:30:19 ►

is to get a perspective on this,

00:30:22 ►

get an image,

00:30:23 ►

to become all space and all time.

00:30:25 ►

That’s what those guys and gals sitting there for 40 years in Zazen must be looking at.

00:30:33 ►

They have become everything, not in some metaphoric or pissant way,

00:30:39 ►

but they have become everything.

00:30:42 ►

And they’ve done it through an act of identification

00:30:46 ►

with the internal image of the totality.

00:30:52 ►

I mean, this sounds to me almost, it’s too airy-fairy,

00:30:56 ►

but it’s because we don’t have a control language for it.

00:30:59 ►

But it’s a real thing.

00:31:01 ►

We must learn to be able to command the image of the totality rather than

00:31:07 ►

think in terms of telepathy or something like that. I’ve had experiences like in the Amazon

00:31:13 ►

taking mushrooms and, well, basically taking mushrooms, where it would seem that I could see

00:31:20 ►

at all times, almost out of the corner of my eye I could see the whole planet

00:31:26 ►

like a whole earth decal

00:31:29 ►

I was just always aware of it

00:31:32 ►

I could see it in the upper right hand corner of my vision

00:31:36 ►

if I just glanced up it would be there

00:31:38 ►

well

00:31:39 ►

you know to have it not as an image

00:31:44 ►

but as a hypercard button into the thing,

00:31:48 ►

then all reality becomes, you know,

00:31:51 ►

the stack you’re moving through.

00:31:53 ►

And boundaries dissolve.

00:31:57 ►

That’s the thing.

00:31:58 ►

I mean, your boundaries are going to dissolve.

00:32:00 ►

You just might as well come to terms with that

00:32:03 ►

because they’re going to plant you.

00:32:07 ►

So why not experiment with it ahead of time

00:32:09 ►

so that you

00:32:11 ►

have some

00:32:12 ►

something that you can do

00:32:15 ►

with it, you know

00:32:16 ►

and when you dissolve your boundary into the living

00:32:19 ►

world, then you know, you become

00:32:22 ►

everybody

00:32:22 ►

a la Humphrey

00:32:24 ►

Chimpton Earwicker,

00:32:27 ►

the hero of Finnegan’s Wake. Here comes everybody, you know. You look here and he’s Chaucer.

00:32:35 ►

You look there and he’s Churchill. You just can’t tell who this is. Somebody, yes.

00:32:41 ►

When you think of the year 2012, do you envision a range of college-oriented

00:32:47 ►

as we’ve never looked before?

00:32:50 ►

I don’t know the details.

00:32:52 ►

I can’t quite yet see clearly how it’s going to work.

00:32:56 ►

But I think that we are preparing our own new world,

00:33:02 ►

and it’s a new world in the imagination the imagination is a is

00:33:08 ►

real estate you know this thing that my mother taught me if wishes were horses

00:33:16 ►

beggars would ride that’s the program of psychedelic cryptoanarchy. We want wishes to be horses. The beggars shall ride.

00:33:29 ►

And that’s why I gave a certain amount of energy to virtual reality. I’m trying to figure out where

00:33:34 ►

is this doorway into this other place? Because there is another place. I mean, that’s what DMT teaches you, incontrovertibly.

00:33:46 ►

I guess that’s the real shocker, hush my mouth and blow me away.

00:33:50 ►

There’s another, there’s a parallel world,

00:33:54 ►

not light years and centuries away, but right here.

00:33:59 ►

And it’s not, you know, the Pentagon isn’t investigating it.

00:34:02 ►

You’re investigating it.

00:34:02 ►

It’s not, you know, the Pentagon isn’t investigating it.

00:34:04 ►

You’re investigating it. And this parallel world, when you break into this elf-infested space,

00:34:15 ►

there is such love, such affection for humanity that, you know, it moves you to tears.

00:34:24 ►

I mean, why do these alien things care

00:34:27 ►

so much? Who are they? What are they? I mean, one of the ideas that I’ve been pushed toward recently,

00:34:36 ►

and I don’t know why it took me so long to get around to this, but my therapist could probably tell you if you were to go to shamans in the amazon or the

00:34:48 ►

hills of new guinea or somewhere and and say describe the dmt thing and ask what what’s going

00:34:54 ►

on here what’s this about without hesitation i think most shamans most shamans would just say, oh, well, those are the ancestors.

00:35:05 ►

That’s the bit with us shamans.

00:35:08 ►

We contact the ancestors and then we cure and find lost objects.

00:35:13 ►

Well, this is, in all the psychedelic voyaging I did,

00:35:18 ►

I never really entertained the possibility that with all this boundary dissolving we were going to do,

00:35:25 ►

that we were going to actually flirt with dissolving the boundary between life and death itself.

00:35:32 ►

Is it possible that there is some kind of ecology of souls over yonder?

00:35:41 ►

Is it possible that the hundred thousand year old claim of shamans that they can pass from here to there and back again is so?

00:35:51 ►

This, I mean, we feel so weird about death that we don’t know how exactly to look at this. are conservative in our hunt for the source of the alien voice and the steering mechanism of history,

00:36:08 ►

if we’re conservative in our search for the source of that, we shouldn’t reach to the conclusion that

00:36:15 ►

galactarians from, you know, Zenebel Ganubi are in charge of things, it’s far more likely that, you know, our dead ancestors

00:36:27 ►

are in charge of things. After all, after us, they are the only human thing we know.

00:36:34 ►

There’s nothing else. And so then when I go in there, I carry this thought with me am I in the bardo you know is this the way station to

00:36:48 ►

the lesser lights and I’m not sure I’m not sure they and sometimes I think that what happens at

00:36:58 ►

the very center of the DMT flash the thing that is so mind-boggling that no one has ever retained a memory

00:37:05 ►

of it that they could discuss with

00:37:07 ►

the gang, is

00:37:09 ►

you confront

00:37:12 ►

your soul

00:37:13 ►

you somehow meet the

00:37:16 ►

double, a la Carlos

00:37:17 ►

Castaneda, God forbid

00:37:19 ►

but you actually come up

00:37:22 ►

against a being

00:37:23 ►

which as you interact with this being, it dawns on you who it is.

00:37:29 ►

And it’s you.

00:37:31 ►

And then, you know, there’s some kind of an apotheosis, an apocatastasis, an outbreak of Greek of some sort for sure.

00:37:42 ►

of Greek of some sort for sure and

00:37:43 ►

yeah that’s a good question

00:37:51 ►

this

00:37:53 ►

reality obliterating flash

00:37:56 ►

that I’m describing

00:37:57 ►

as the sine qua non

00:37:59 ►

of psychedelic voyaging

00:38:01 ►

I have a real question

00:38:03 ►

in my mind as to whether or not the shamans in the Amazon

00:38:07 ►

encounter it very often

00:38:11 ►

because it’s very hard to concentrate the DMT

00:38:14 ►

sufficiently to deliver that much

00:38:18 ►

to the synaptic cleft all at once

00:38:20 ►

the brilliant strategy they’ve worked out

00:38:23 ►

is the slow release oral DMT

00:38:26 ►

in the ayahuasca mix

00:38:28 ►

if you make ayahuasca stiff

00:38:31 ►

you can after an hour and a half of pranayama

00:38:35 ►

and breath control and like that

00:38:36 ►

you can work yourself into a place where you say

00:38:40 ►

my god this does look like a DMT flash.

00:38:46 ►

I mean, it’s happening more slowly,

00:38:47 ►

and you’ve had more time to get used to it

00:38:50 ►

because it’s taken you a while to get there.

00:38:52 ►

But you can approach that thing.

00:38:56 ►

The thing is, people are universally the same, found and even among shamans

00:39:06 ►

there’s a lot of

00:39:08 ►

number one bluff and fear

00:39:12 ►

and it’s very rare that you meet

00:39:14 ►

a real exploring soul

00:39:17 ►

who is not afraid of it

00:39:20 ►

at ultra high doses

00:39:22 ►

so a lot of the shamanism in Peru is vitiated by the need to cure and make money and have a position in the community. And also the style in Peru is not to demand visions.

00:39:46 ►

meet a lot of people in Peru who have taken ayahuasca who don’t have the faintest idea of what is possible and if you should have occasion to show them or to be involved in seeing them

00:39:52 ►

encounter it then they say you know I had no idea it’s a very subtle kind of thing and the snuffs then

00:40:06 ►

are the other DMT

00:40:07 ►

approach

00:40:09 ►

and for me the snuffs are so

00:40:12 ►

complicated

00:40:13 ►

there’s a lot of problems with the snuff

00:40:16 ►

I think it’s an overrated thing

00:40:18 ►

number one there’s the physical

00:40:20 ►

problem of taking it

00:40:22 ►

you have a bamboo tube

00:40:24 ►

about this long

00:40:25 ►

and you load it up with a tablespoon and a half

00:40:29 ►

of ground, woody, toasted seed material.

00:40:34 ►

Well, then you sit and your friend sits in front of you.

00:40:37 ►

You put the tube up your nostril

00:40:40 ►

and your friend blows as hard as he can you don’t do it because you would restrain yourself

00:40:49 ►

too much and it wouldn’t work it has to be somebody else it’s like pulling a tooth out

00:40:54 ►

somebody else has to do it so he blasts this up your nostrils you know it’s like being hit in the face with a two by four i mean you you scream you fall over backwards

00:41:08 ►

you salivate you squirm around in the dirt a little bit and then you sit back up and by this

00:41:16 ►

time he has reloaded for the other nostril and then you know you go through the whole thing again

00:41:27 ►

and then it comes on

00:41:29 ►

and it is tryptamine like

00:41:31 ►

and it is, you know

00:41:33 ►

the vision clarifies

00:41:36 ►

and the energy rises

00:41:38 ►

and you’re loaded

00:41:40 ►

really loaded

00:41:42 ►

but when you do a chemical analysis

00:41:46 ►

on the Varrola resin

00:41:48 ►

the resin of these Amiris Dicasius trees

00:41:52 ►

that are the source of this

00:41:54 ►

it’s not a clean source of DMT

00:41:57 ►

there’s a lot of junk in there too

00:42:00 ►

there’s not only DMT and 5-MeO DMT,

00:42:05 ►

but there’s also alpha-methyltryptamine,

00:42:08 ►

monomethyltryptamine,

00:42:11 ►

and some beta-carbolines.

00:42:14 ►

And this is not what you want in a drug,

00:42:17 ►

a source drug plant.

00:42:18 ►

You want a clean signature.

00:42:20 ►

That’s why Socotria viridis is so preferred

00:42:23 ►

in the ayahuasca brew

00:42:25 ►

because there’s

00:42:26 ►

nothing in it

00:42:26 ►

but NN

00:42:27 ►

dimethyltryptamine

00:42:28 ►

it’s

00:42:29 ►

it’s

00:42:29 ►

very clean

00:42:31 ►

so those are

00:42:32 ►

the sources

00:42:32 ►

and then

00:42:33 ►

nowhere else

00:42:34 ►

in the world

00:42:34 ►

did these

00:42:35 ►

tryptamine cults

00:42:37 ►

arise

00:42:37 ►

we have no

00:42:39 ►

evidence of it

00:42:39 ►

ever existing

00:42:40 ►

except out

00:42:41 ►

through the

00:42:42 ►

Caribbean islands

00:42:43 ►

and down

00:42:43 ►

as far south

00:42:44 ►

as the Atacama Desert in Chile.

00:42:46 ►

But the DMT, the tryptamine complex, is an entirely new world.

00:42:53 ►

Yeah?

00:42:53 ►

The parallel world that you come to see exists, that you access through DMT,

00:42:59 ►

is there also a parallel world like that that you can access through the mushroom

00:43:04 ►

and out of the same world.

00:43:08 ►

Well, not exactly.

00:43:10 ►

You see, the mushroom behaves like you expect a drug to behave.

00:43:15 ►

You take it, you sit around for a while,

00:43:19 ►

you feel a little funny in the stomach,

00:43:21 ►

your nose runs, you go to the bathroom,

00:43:27 ►

and then you have this experience dmt isn’t like that dmt is you’re in a room people are talking to you about some they’re pushing some

00:43:36 ►

drug on you and there’s this little glass pipe and then you do it and and at that point, the building blows up.

00:43:53 ►

And, you know, I’ve seen people come out of the DMT flash,

00:43:55 ►

and what they say is, what happened?

00:43:57 ►

What happened?

00:44:02 ►

And they don’t even know, did we do it, or did the building blow up?

00:44:07 ►

Is that, you know, because it’s not like a drug.

00:44:09 ►

It’s like an experience.

00:44:11 ►

It happens to you.

00:44:12 ►

It falls upon you.

00:44:14 ►

It’s like an automobile accident.

00:44:17 ►

It has this… And I think that that has to do with the instantaneous transition.

00:44:22 ►

It happens so quickly that you say, this is not a drug, this is a place.

00:44:28 ►

The other thing about DMT that I think is really interesting is if you don’t panic or if you’re not a nervous or anxious type and you can be fairly objective, it doesn’t do anything to your body.

00:44:43 ►

it doesn’t do anything to your body it doesn’t do anything

00:44:45 ►

it affects only the visual cortex

00:44:50 ►

I think

00:44:51 ►

I mean there may be spillover

00:44:53 ►

but it’s incredibly selective

00:44:55 ►

it’s like surgical bombing

00:44:58 ►

it’s just coming in on this one thing

00:45:01 ►

and hitting it so hard

00:45:04 ►

that you can’t believe it.

00:45:06 ►

I mean, you reach through your body

00:45:08 ►

and you say,

00:45:09 ►

and the other thing is,

00:45:10 ►

it doesn’t affect your mind

00:45:12 ►

so that you don’t have

00:45:15 ►

illusions that you are now enlightened

00:45:18 ►

or you now understand something

00:45:21 ►

or you are,

00:45:23 ►

you stay the same. Your body is the same your mind is the

00:45:29 ►

same what has happened is that the world has just been replaced all this it’s all gone gone gone

00:45:37 ►

gone and there’s not even three-dimensional space left and you’re just looking out into this stuff saying hmm

00:45:45 ►

00:45:46 ►

you know

00:45:49 ►

and

00:45:49 ►

it’s very, it’s a great

00:45:53 ►

shock to

00:45:55 ►

the intellectually constipated

00:45:58 ►

and I think I led the list

00:46:00 ►

and it was just

00:46:01 ►

so shocking to me

00:46:03 ►

I can’t imagine anything more shocking

00:46:06 ►

if flying saucers were to land on the south lawn of the White House

00:46:09 ►

it’s page two news

00:46:12 ►

compared to this

00:46:16 ►

and

00:46:16 ►

I feel very fortunate

00:46:20 ►

I somehow started out

00:46:22 ►

it was the quest for the weird that brought me so far.

00:46:28 ►

I was always a strange kid, and I was always into what people weren’t into.

00:46:35 ►

So I missed out on a lot, because everybody was into it.

00:46:40 ►

But I also got into a lot of weird stuff.

00:46:44 ►

And my method is edge running.

00:46:49 ►

That’s what I do.

00:46:50 ►

I had a friend, I had many weird friends who were very good for me

00:46:55 ►

and gave me great advice along the way.

00:46:58 ►

And one of those people never read a book unless it was 200 years old

00:47:04 ►

and said, you know know you must be kidding it’s all

00:47:08 ►

vulgar after 1830 so uh you know i spent a lot of time in those places well apparently if you

00:47:17 ►

pursue the weird it won’t take you very long before you get to this. This is the main vein of the peculiar.

00:47:28 ►

I always talk about, and I might as well again, what the hell,

00:47:32 ►

that short story by Jorge Luis Borges in Labyrinths

00:47:37 ►

called The Sect of the Phoenix.

00:47:39 ►

Do you know that story?

00:47:41 ►

It’s a page and a half long, and it talks about how there is this sect,

00:47:47 ►

and it’s always existed as far as anybody can tell,

00:47:50 ►

and these sectarians have been persecuted in every pogrom in history,

00:47:56 ►

and these sectarians have prosecuted every pogrom in history.

00:48:04 ►

They are not associated with any race, any place, any religion.

00:48:10 ►

They are associated with an act, and the act is trivial.

00:48:15 ►

It involves something orange.

00:48:17 ►

It can be done in doorways.

00:48:19 ►

One child may initiate another.

00:48:22 ►

At first, the adept find it ridiculous and never speak of it. They refer to it among themselves as the secret. And he goes on and on talking about this thing. He’s talking about this. It’s true. Now I was not initiated. So I’ve taken no oath in blood to say nothing.

00:48:47 ►

I found out I’m a debunker, an exposer, and I’ve never met a sectarian.

00:48:56 ►

Everybody who knows anything about DMT, I told them, except for the one person who told me.

00:49:04 ►

I told them, except for the one person who told me.

00:49:09 ►

And, you know, this is a society where people jump out of airplanes for thrills.

00:49:12 ►

It’s a thrill-crazed society. And DMT is not a problem in this society.

00:49:16 ►

Nobody wants it.

00:49:17 ►

It’s too much, you know.

00:49:19 ►

It’s as though there was a design process that went beyond the expectation of its engineers.

00:49:27 ►

I mean, you know, you go Chevrolet, Mercedes, Porsche, Maserati, Lamborghini,

00:49:36 ►

and then they say, please, no more, we can’t stand it.

00:49:40 ►

Well, that’s what this is. It’s beyond expectation.

00:49:45 ►

So, you know, we don’t need stronger drugs.

00:49:49 ►

I never hope to have anything stronger than that.

00:49:52 ►

I mean, I think it carries you right to the threshold of the lesser lights.

00:49:56 ►

You see, you know, to go further than that is to snap the umbilicus

00:50:02 ►

that binds us to the biological matrix.

00:50:06 ►

Do you experience any continuity in your connection in the mushroom and in DMT

00:50:11 ►

with these intelligent entities, like from one trip to the next?

00:50:15 ►

And has anybody else met the same friends you’ve met?

00:50:19 ►

On mushrooms, a lot of people report elves and stuff like that.

00:50:24 ►

The thing that happens to me on DMT that is so specific,

00:50:29 ►

that elves offering the singing, language-making objects and all that,

00:50:35 ►

it’s hard to get people to report.

00:50:39 ►

I don’t know.

00:50:40 ►

Some people seem to have the same thing.

00:50:43 ►

People talk about a converging set of motifs.

00:50:49 ►

The motifs, there seem to be two ways to approach DMT. One is as the carnival, the archetype

00:50:58 ►

of the carnival. Because one thing about DMT is it’s furiously active. It’s like a Bugs Bunny cartoon run at double speed. I

00:51:08 ►

mean, there’s just all this zany stuff, this Marx Brothers kind of humor going on. And this is a

00:51:13 ►

thing about these elf creatures. They’re into a kind of humor that is right on the edge of

00:51:21 ►

terrifying. It’s sort of like hanging out with Hell’s Angels, except they’re your

00:51:25 ►

friends, you know?

00:51:27 ►

So as long as you keep everything

00:51:29 ►

cool, it’s going to be alright.

00:51:32 ►

They’re rough and tumble.

00:51:34 ►

And

00:51:34 ►

like the

00:51:37 ►

archetype of the circus,

00:51:40 ►

the central point of interest

00:51:41 ►

is the three rings

00:51:43 ►

and the clowns and the performing animals and the lady in the spangled costume.

00:51:49 ►

But then, away from the main action, it gets weird.

00:51:55 ►

It’s sideshows.

00:51:57 ►

It’s kinky.

00:51:58 ►

Hoochie-coochie dancers.

00:52:00 ►

Dark shadows.

00:52:02 ►

Pickpockets.

00:52:03 ►

Who knows what’s going on out there.

00:52:05 ►

And it has this same idea.

00:52:07 ►

It’s like an elf carnival.

00:52:09 ►

It’s a troupe.

00:52:10 ►

It’s a cosmic troupe.

00:52:13 ►

And then the other thing is it’s Christmas morning.

00:52:16 ►

That amazing childlike approach to the tree lit with lights

00:52:25 ►

and this expectation of gifts and all that.

00:52:29 ►

In fact, it’s interesting.

00:52:31 ►

If you want to look at a folk way

00:52:33 ►

that seems to have not been fully explicated,

00:52:37 ►

take a look for a minute at Santa Claus.

00:52:40 ►

Santa Claus is the master of the elves, and Santa Claus’ elves make toys.

00:52:49 ►

And Santa Claus is associated with the colors red and white, the colors of Amanita muscaria.

00:52:57 ►

And Santa Claus is associated with reindeer, and reindeer are part of the Amanita muscaria cult because you can

00:53:05 ►

drink the urine of the reindeer and it’s better than the first get-go of the

00:53:11 ►

mushroom and then if all that weren’t enough Santa Claus lives at the center

00:53:18 ►

of the world he lives at the North Pole where Yggdrasil, the magic world tree, is growing.

00:53:25 ►

And then he is active at the winter solstice

00:53:29 ►

with his elf-giving, gift-giving elves.

00:53:34 ►

So this is clearly a very old folkway

00:53:36 ►

that has all the motifs of DMT embedded in it.

00:53:41 ►

And it’s the major area where we give permission

00:53:44 ►

for the expression of these images in our own culture.

00:53:48 ►

I mean, this is where we get all of this stuff.

00:53:52 ►

And the magic toys of Santa’s workshop

00:53:55 ►

are the demon artifacts of the Elfin forges

00:53:59 ►

that are alchemical productions.

00:54:03 ►

There really is a Santa Claus.

00:54:04 ►

Hey. There is a Santa Claus. Hey.

00:54:07 ►

There is a Santa Claus.

00:54:11 ►

My belief in elves

00:54:13 ►

is very puzzling to my children.

00:54:19 ►

Yeah.

00:54:20 ►

We’ve never had mushrooms before.

00:54:22 ►

What we’d like to,

00:54:22 ►

is there a sort of good housekeeping seal you can get on?

00:54:26 ►

If you run into it, is it likely to be clean?

00:54:28 ►

Or are there things to watch out for?

00:54:31 ►

The best advice I can give you, it’s not what you want to hear,

00:54:35 ►

is you should grow it.

00:54:38 ►

Because growing it is an act of alchemical dedication.

00:54:41 ►

act of alchemical dedication

00:54:43 ►

and it will

00:54:45 ►

if you’re not able to take the mushroom

00:54:48 ►

because of personality flaws

00:54:50 ►

growing it will eliminate

00:54:52 ►

those flaws

00:54:53 ►

because growing it teaches you

00:54:56 ►

attention to detail

00:54:58 ►

cleanliness

00:55:00 ►

punctuality

00:55:01 ►

discretion

00:55:03 ►

all of these fine virtues

00:55:06 ►

which then will serve you very well

00:55:10 ►

when you take it

00:55:11 ►

and when you grow your own

00:55:14 ►

then it’s really alchemy

00:55:15 ►

the white stuff is the seed

00:55:20 ►

and you take rye

00:55:22 ►

a la Robert Flood

00:55:24 ►

you take rye and you inoculate

00:55:26 ►

it with this white stuff

00:55:28 ►

and then lo and behold

00:55:30 ►

over a period of days

00:55:32 ►

and with the helping

00:55:34 ►

hand of nature spirits

00:55:36 ►

why your friend

00:55:38 ►

comes to meet you

00:55:40 ►

I don’t know if it’s a neophyte

00:55:42 ►

or a neospore or a comedic

00:55:43 ►

how do you tell if you can get

00:55:46 ►

that source

00:55:47 ►

for the

00:55:48 ►

growing of

00:55:48 ►

mushrooms?

00:55:49 ►

Oh, you

00:55:49 ►

mean the

00:55:50 ►

spore?

00:55:50 ►

How do you

00:55:51 ►

get the

00:55:51 ►

spore?

00:55:52 ►

Well,

00:55:54 ►

fortunately,

00:55:54 ►

I wrote a

00:55:55 ►

book on

00:55:56 ►

this subject,

00:55:57 ►

which I

00:56:00 ►

think it’s

00:56:01 ►

in that

00:56:01 ►

catalog.

00:56:03 ►

And if

00:56:03 ►

you buy

00:56:04 ►

the book, in the back of the book is an ad for spores. So it’s in that catalog. And if you buy the book,

00:56:05 ►

in the back of the book is an ad for spores.

00:56:09 ►

So it’s all there, no problem.

00:56:11 ►

It’s on the shelf called addictions of all places.

00:56:15 ►

Addictions, is this where they put it now in the stores?

00:56:20 ►

Oh, yes, we published under the names

00:56:22 ►

Otios and Oniric. That’s because I’m Ot names Oteos and Oneric.

00:56:25 ►

That’s because I’m Oteos and my brother is Oneric.

00:56:30 ►

But, yeah.

00:56:32 ►

Terence, to return to the Velth for a moment,

00:56:35 ►

what other theories are there that even come close to explaining it?

00:56:41 ►

Come close?

00:56:42 ►

Come close to explain.

00:56:47 ►

The straight theory, the new straight theory,

00:56:50 ►

which is in a book by William Calvin,

00:56:54 ►

the name of which escapes me, but anyway,

00:57:00 ►

is that it was the coordination of the throwing arm that we were small and weak

00:57:04 ►

and we were predating upon these humongous beasts mastodons

00:57:10 ►

and like that and so we learned to throw things with incredible accuracy no animal can throw

00:57:18 ►

like a human being can so calvin’s theory is that in triangulating and coordinating the throwing arm, those cells began to replicate that were necessary for coordinating that complex data.

00:57:35 ►

And that set the cascade going.

00:57:37 ►

And that’s the best theory.

00:57:39 ►

It seems to me it’s very weak.

00:57:42 ►

There’s no good ideas on human emergence.

00:57:46 ►

It’s the speed of it, you see, that is so incredible.

00:57:52 ►

There are many interesting things about human beings

00:57:54 ►

when you contrast us to the other primates.

00:57:59 ►

You’ve probably heard discussions of how different sexuality is

00:58:04 ►

in human beings as opposed to other primates.

00:58:08 ►

That, for instance, there is in human females the suppressed estrus,

00:58:12 ►

so that it’s not possible by looking to tell whether a female is fertile or not,

00:58:19 ►

and it’s not seasonally confined.

00:58:21 ►

And yet those qualities of primate sexuality

00:58:25 ►

completely set it apart.

00:58:30 ►

The hard wiring for language,

00:58:33 ►

but then also important and not very well understood

00:58:37 ►

is the role of neoteny in human evolution.

00:58:40 ►

Do you all know what neoteny is?

00:58:42 ►

Neoteny is the preservation of juvenile characteristics

00:58:47 ►

into adulthood. And this often happens with animals. And for instance, if you were to look,

00:58:55 ►

compare the ratio of our head size to body size, compared to the ratio of a chimpanzee’s head to its body size, you would see that we are very fetal in our proportions.

00:59:09 ►

Even in adulthood, we retain many, many fetal characteristics.

00:59:14 ►

Our hairlessness is a fetal characteristic.

00:59:18 ►

The prolongation of adolescence in human beings is a neonatal trait.

00:59:26 ►

All this juvenileization

00:59:28 ►

seems to have occurred simultaneously

00:59:32 ►

with the expansion of the brain size.

00:59:35 ►

Well, to my mind,

00:59:36 ►

this supports the theory that I put to you

00:59:39 ►

because all this juvenileization

00:59:43 ►

is probably being caused by the same thing which I’m suggesting caused the expansion of brain size, i.e. exotic tertiary metabolites in food.

00:59:54 ►

And so we actually bear upon ourselves the stamp of an accelerated period of mutation that’s gone on in the last million years.

01:00:06 ►

That’s why we are actually really freaky.

01:00:10 ►

I mean, you can sense this, I think, about us,

01:00:13 ►

that you line up all the monkeys,

01:00:17 ►

and my God, the one on the end, the pink one,

01:00:21 ►

what’s that about and and you know they’ve done they’ve done gene sequencing studies of the

01:00:29 ►

pygmy chimpanzee which is apparently the closest living relative to human beings well 95 percent

01:00:37 ►

of the genome of the pygmy chimpanzee is identical to the human genome well that means that

01:00:45 ►

the 5% that is different is

01:00:48 ►

almost entirely taken up in the

01:00:50 ►

expression of superficial

01:00:51 ►

physical differences

01:00:53 ►

our height, our hairlessness

01:00:55 ►

our head to body ratio

01:00:58 ►

and all that

01:00:59 ►

so I really think we’re the creatures

01:01:01 ►

of an omnivorous diet

01:01:03 ►

our story really is you you-are-what-you-eat story.

01:01:08 ►

And you’re talking about the brief span of time,

01:01:11 ►

even pushing that.

01:01:13 ►

That’s right.

01:01:14 ►

As opposed to, say, whales,

01:01:17 ►

which I know is not your favorite topic,

01:01:19 ►

who had a much longer time,

01:01:22 ►

a large brain size.

01:01:24 ►

Yes, I mean, they evolved very leisurely

01:01:27 ►

and in an aqueous environment

01:01:30 ►

where the conquest of fire was not even a possibility.

01:01:34 ►

And it has to do not with brain size

01:01:38 ►

so much as with your appendages into the world.

01:01:46 ►

You have to be able to chip stone.

01:01:49 ►

You have to be able to throw things.

01:01:51 ►

Otherwise, your intelligence will be very Zen-like.

01:01:55 ►

And there may be such intelligence.

01:01:57 ►

I mean, I don’t say that the dolphins and the whales don’t think thoughts

01:02:01 ►

that we can’t even conceive of and that are very satisfying to them

01:02:06 ►

and fully expressive of their program of being.

01:02:11 ►

But they can’t communicate about it,

01:02:14 ►

they can’t build an image of it,

01:02:16 ►

they can’t leave any record of it.

01:02:19 ►

So it’s interfacing with matter is equally as important

01:02:24 ►

as the quality of the thoughts

01:02:27 ►

behind the eyes, you know.

01:02:29 ►

Just another whole doorway

01:02:31 ►

that’s so ignored and belittled

01:02:33 ►

is every night, you know,

01:02:34 ►

the launching pad when you hit the pillow.

01:02:38 ►

Dreams.

01:02:38 ►

As a culture.

01:02:40 ►

I mean, that’s immense.

01:02:41 ►

The helpers that come.

01:02:43 ►

I wonder what the relationship between that and the plants.

01:02:49 ►

It’s huge and boundary-dissolving and real.

01:02:55 ►

We fall asleep about it.

01:02:58 ►

Yes, I agree.

01:03:00 ►

If lucid dreaming can be made to function for everybody,

01:03:05 ►

if it’s actually real,

01:03:07 ►

then probably we can get rid of psychedelics.

01:03:12 ►

Well, this is a good place to mention a really interesting thing.

01:03:19 ►

I tell most of my groups this

01:03:21 ►

because someday some young researcher will hear me and follow this up

01:03:26 ►

but here’s an interesting

01:03:28 ►

piece of data

01:03:29 ►

if you have smoked DMT

01:03:32 ►

at some point in your life

01:03:34 ►

it’s possible to have

01:03:36 ►

a dream in which

01:03:38 ►

the theme of DMT will be introduced

01:03:40 ►

and you will smoke it

01:03:41 ►

and it will actually completely

01:03:44 ►

happen

01:03:44 ►

that is an important piece of evidence and you will smoke it, and it will actually completely happen.

01:03:48 ►

That is an important piece of evidence,

01:03:54 ►

because what it shows is the chemical material is there,

01:03:56 ►

the mechanism is there.

01:03:59 ►

I mean, that’s exciting.

01:04:07 ►

Imagine if you could just go into a brainwave pattern or something and begin to call it in.

01:04:12 ►

And it doesn’t seem so far away if it’s happening in the dream. They’ve done human sleep studies and they know that endogenous production of DMT in the brain peaks around 4 a.m. in most people.

01:04:23 ►

Well, this correlates well with the peak REM activity.

01:04:28 ►

It means probably that DMT is driving dreaming in some fairly profound way.

01:04:37 ►

Dissolving the boundary between waking and sleeping

01:04:40 ►

is a classical shamanic technique for entry into the invisible world,

01:04:46 ►

either by sleep deprivation or some other way.

01:04:49 ►

So yeah, this is a very good point.

01:04:53 ►

The world of sleep and the psychedelic world,

01:04:58 ►

the question is why are we constructed

01:05:01 ►

so that we can’t remember?

01:05:04 ►

It’s so frustrating.

01:05:06 ►

I mean, this is our main problem, is the mnemonic problem,

01:05:10 ►

both with the drugs and the dreams.

01:05:12 ►

Why do we go to worlds of incredible richness and complexity

01:05:17 ►

which we cannot remember anything about?

01:05:21 ►

It seems a strange statement on the economy of nature, if there is an economy of

01:05:27 ►

nature. I was amazed at the state of dream theory. I hadn’t paid much attention. About two months ago

01:05:35 ►

there was an article in Scientific American on dreaming. It was the most reductionist.

01:05:42 ►

They’ve gone back a hundred years

01:05:46 ►

basically they’re saying it’s mostly

01:05:48 ►

undigested pieces of potato

01:05:50 ►

it was incredibly

01:05:54 ►

they threw out all Freudian

01:05:56 ►

all Jungian, all interpretive

01:05:59 ►

what’s in vogue now

01:06:02 ►

is that it’s junk data

01:06:04 ►

it’s junk data.

01:06:08 ►

It’s the dumping ground, you know, meaningless.

01:06:13 ►

Any effort to understand dreams is like going through somebody else’s wastebasket.

01:06:15 ►

It doesn’t make any sense at all. So more denial of the power of the unconscious.

01:06:20 ►

Orthodox science more and more is simply talking to itself because the bodies of experiences that people are building up in their own lives do we can identify it in each other

01:06:46 ►

because we sort of share the same control language

01:06:50 ►

but what about all those people out there

01:06:52 ►

in the trailer courts of America

01:06:55 ►

who you know put your hand on the radio

01:06:59 ►

I mean this is not a scientific paradigm

01:07:02 ►

in action

01:07:03 ►

this is pure voodoo.

01:07:09 ►

It was William James who said,

01:07:13 ►

if we don’t read the books with which we line our apartments,

01:07:17 ►

we are no better than our cats and dogs.

01:07:21 ►

Terry, yesterday you said something about

01:07:23 ►

you don’t need to have the experience every day of a miracle or something extraordinary to know

01:07:30 ►

that it’s real well the the place where the miraculous is uh is most evident is uh in falling

01:07:38 ►

in love falling in love is a really interesting phenomenon. I mean, you can be the guy who marks the tires in the parking lot of the great corporation,

01:07:50 ►

and one day you see the daughter of the first, second, and fourth vice president go by,

01:07:58 ►

and you fall in love with her.

01:08:00 ►

And now watch what happens.

01:08:03 ►

Mountains are moved

01:08:05 ►

coincidences occur

01:08:07 ►

appointments cancelled

01:08:09 ►

deaths if necessary

01:08:11 ►

in order to bring you together

01:08:14 ►

and then you get married

01:08:16 ►

and unhappily spend the rest of your life

01:08:20 ►

with this woman

01:08:21 ►

but in the process of getting together almost everybody experiences

01:08:30 ►

magic it’s almost as though the universal zeitgeist what it’s really interested in is gene matching

01:08:36 ►

it’s really interested in who gets horizontal with who with consequence? Because that’s obviously how it steers and sculpts the historical animal.

01:08:49 ►

It understands that the pigments of this oil painting are genes

01:08:54 ►

and that the landscape is being painted in a genetic medium.

01:09:01 ►

So, yeah, it’s very interesting opium well the the civilization that built itself

01:09:16 ►

around opium was the late Minoan civilization I mean when they first did the translation, when Michael Ventris first translated

01:09:26 ►

Linear B, the tallies that they were translating, they thought this symbol was for wheat,

01:09:34 ►

because the tallies were so huge. Then they realized they were tallies for gum opium.

01:09:40 ►

It’s a complicated question, because the products of opium are fairly unsavory and virulent,

01:09:46 ►

although they do have their defenders.

01:09:49 ►

My analysis of opium and the way I’ve used it in my life was to escape pain of one sort or another.

01:10:01 ►

one sort or another.

01:10:08 ►

The opium reverie is not as interesting as the hashish reverie because it’s harder to retain.

01:10:11 ►

The way I look at late Minoan civilization is

01:10:14 ►

it was in great mourning for the passing of the goddess

01:10:20 ►

because Minoan Crete was the last bastion of the old old goddess religion that had come out

01:10:28 ►

of Africa at the time of Chattal Hyayuk but it all died in Asia Minor in the fifth millennium

01:10:36 ►

but it survived in Minoan Crete up until a thousand BC when so for three millennia Minoan civilization drifted

01:10:47 ►

in an unhistorical dream

01:10:49 ►

and slowly over time

01:10:51 ►

the accentuation of opium use increased

01:10:57 ►

it’s interesting

01:10:59 ►

opium, you say this

01:11:02 ►

and people’s eyes widen

01:11:03 ►

isn’t this a drug of degradation and addiction?

01:11:07 ►

Opium has been around for thousands and thousands of years.

01:11:11 ►

It wasn’t until 1624 that the English physician John Playfair noticed for the first time,

01:11:20 ►

so far as we can tell, that it was an addictive substance.

01:11:24 ►

Before 1624, no one knew opium was addicting.

01:11:28 ►

There is one mention in Dioscorides, but other than that.

01:11:33 ►

So the virulence of opium addiction is tremendously overrated.

01:11:38 ►

In fact, it’s silly to talk about it that way,

01:11:42 ►

unless you’re using it as an instrument of national policy.

01:11:46 ►

It’s funny, you know, we have drug wars.

01:11:49 ►

A hundred years ago, a little more than a hundred years ago,

01:11:52 ►

they had a drug war in the Far East.

01:11:55 ►

It was called the Opium War.

01:11:57 ►

What was the Opium War about?

01:12:00 ►

The British government’s wish to sell opium

01:12:04 ►

in the ports of China against the objections of the Chinese emperor.

01:12:11 ►

The Chinese emperor didn’t want opium in China, and the British, whose tea trade had undergone a collapse, had shifted their agricultural production to opium,

01:12:22 ►

and they were unloading it on the Chinese population

01:12:25 ►

while they tried to figure out what to do with all these tea ships.

01:12:29 ►

So in a hundred years we’ve gone from a war

01:12:31 ►

to force people to buy opium

01:12:34 ►

to the present state of manic schizophrenic attitudes about it.

01:12:41 ►

Pain in cultures?

01:12:43 ►

This is very possible.

01:12:45 ►

Pain is a very subjective thing,

01:12:47 ►

and I imagine much of antiquity was fairly unpleasant,

01:12:54 ►

and opium would be there,

01:12:57 ►

and it would certainly be there if you developed tumors,

01:13:01 ►

untreatable ulcers, any painful chronic condition,

01:13:06 ►

opium would be your obvious recourse.

01:13:09 ►

Addiction as a general concept, it’s probably in John Playfair.

01:13:13 ►

They began purifying and using alcohol extractions.

01:13:18 ►

You know, opium is, it’s interesting how these intoxicants,

01:13:23 ►

I mean, both opium and alcohol were made popular by alchemists who thought they had discovered the elixir of life.

01:13:33 ►

When Raymondus Lully discovered distilled alcohol, he got so jacked up behind it that he announced the end of the world.

01:13:44 ►

He said, you know, hey, this stuff is so good.

01:13:50 ►

And opium was popularized by Paracelsus.

01:13:55 ►

In fact, Paracelsus invented chemical medicine.

01:14:00 ►

If you want to look for a kind of a bad guy, or at least a black hat figure,

01:14:05 ►

it was Paracelsus who said we shouldn’t use herbs, we should use purified extractions,

01:14:12 ►

we should make pills, we should get rid of all this midwifery and all this nonsense

01:14:17 ►

and put medicine on a scientific basis.

01:14:20 ►

Of course, he was also a mad alchemist and popularized opium.

01:14:27 ►

In fact, von Helmut, a student of his, was so into popularizing opium

01:14:34 ►

that he signed his alchemical treatises, Dr. Opiatus.

01:14:42 ►

Well, it’s 11.30 yeah last

01:14:45 ►

shot

01:14:46 ►

with ayahuasca can someone take that alone

01:14:50 ►

or is it best to have

01:14:52 ►

sort of a guide

01:14:54 ►

well this issue of the guide

01:14:56 ►

it’s a good place to end

01:14:58 ►

it depends on the kind of personality

01:15:02 ►

you are

01:15:03 ►

I mean I have always taken things alone because other people are such complicated creatures and I can’t ever relax completely in the presence of another person.

01:15:22 ►

So they kind of hold me on the surface.

01:15:28 ►

But there certainly have been trips when I would have loved to have somebody to hug.

01:15:32 ►

If it doesn’t bother you to be around people,

01:15:35 ►

or you don’t feel that as a kind of impediment,

01:15:38 ►

then there should be a sitter.

01:15:42 ►

And always starting out or in uncertain situations, there should be a sitter.

01:15:44 ►

But the sitter should be very

01:15:46 ►

non-invasive and my style of psychedelic tripping is calm dark comfortable not no music no music

01:15:59 ►

because i want to see what it is in a situation of sensory deprivation, which is where it’s most beautiful.

01:16:06 ►

The best music is in silence. The best pictures is in darkness. Always I go in. Yeah. It’s possible

01:16:13 ►

to take psychedelics and entirely miss the point because you are so extroverted and so nervous and

01:16:21 ►

agitated. I mean, Roland Fisher, who did all this experimental work

01:16:26 ►

with psilocybin,

01:16:27 ►

gave it to 25,000 people,

01:16:30 ►

published all these important papers.

01:16:32 ►

And he and I were talking one day

01:16:34 ►

and I said,

01:16:35 ►

well, but Roland,

01:16:37 ►

aside from all this data

01:16:38 ►

and all this stuff,

01:16:40 ►

you know,

01:16:40 ►

what do you make

01:16:41 ►

of the hallucinations?

01:16:44 ►

Just the source of them, the complexity of them.

01:16:47 ►

He said, I never closed my eyes.

01:16:50 ►

I never closed my eyes.

01:16:52 ►

I mean, is this denial or what?

01:16:55 ►

I could hardly believe my ears.

01:16:59 ►

I mean, the psychedelic experience is not,

01:17:04 ►

it shouldn’t be projected.

01:17:05 ►

You don’t take it and then look for a good movie or go out to catch ACDC.

01:17:13 ►

It’s just silent darkness.

01:17:16 ►

And let this stuff come out of the organism and you will be amazed.

01:17:20 ►

I mean, this is your birthright, your real inner riches.

01:17:33 ►

I mean, this is your birthright, your real inner riches, and it’s more than you expect, more than you imagine, more than you suppose, more than you can suppose.

01:17:48 ►

I mean, it’s the center axis of what it is to be a minded, reflecting human being. We can go through life without knowing this, but is the game to go through life without knowing about as much as possible?

01:17:53 ►

That sounds like a fairly ass-backward approach to things.

01:17:57 ►

I think we want to assimilate life.

01:18:00 ►

We want to explore it.

01:18:01 ►

We want to find the path to the next level.

01:18:08 ►

I mean, I can’t believe that, I sort of believe the Catholic idea that there’s an obligation to do something and to behave correctly,

01:18:17 ►

but it has nothing to do with attending Mass on Sunday and keeping your language clean it has to do I think with an act of intellectual

01:18:25 ►

heroism

01:18:27 ►

of some sort

01:18:29 ►

a way

01:18:32 ►

of positioning yourself

01:18:34 ►

vis-a-vis the experience of

01:18:36 ►

the world that then can

01:18:38 ►

lift you to higher and

01:18:40 ►

higher levels and that’s what

01:18:42 ►

these things were put here

01:18:43 ►

for and if we use them i still have hope

01:18:47 ►

if we don’t use them then the momentum of the past will carry us into catastrophe so you know

01:18:56 ►

the choice is entirely uh ours ours and the societies that we live in, that we have a responsibility to reform.

01:19:07 ►

Well, that’s it, folks.

01:19:09 ►

Thank you very much.

01:19:13 ►

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,

01:19:15 ►

where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.

01:19:20 ►

Now, if you are new to the world of psychedelics,

01:19:23 ►

you may think that Terence’s descriptions of his DMT experiences are maybe a bit over the top.

01:19:30 ►

However, should you ever be fortunate enough to have the experience yourself,

01:19:35 ►

one of your first thoughts may be to wonder why Terence was so conservative when he spoke about it.

01:19:41 ►

I’ve experimented with a wide range of psychoactive substances for a long time,

01:19:47 ►

but nothing in my experience comes even close to what happens when you smoke NMDMT.

01:19:52 ►

It’s amazing beyond description, and the most interesting part, well, at least to me,

01:19:58 ►

is that right now, at this very moment, your brain is storing some DMT that it manufactured for you last night.

01:20:06 ►

And that really blows my mind.

01:20:09 ►

Now, just a quick note here to acknowledge something to our salonners of a more literary bent.

01:20:16 ►

As you most likely know already, that story by Jorge Luis Borges that Terrence mentioned isn’t universally acclaimed to be about DMT, at least according to Wikipedia.

01:20:28 ►

While the entry about the sect of the phoenix on Wikipedia does acknowledge Terrence’s idea,

01:20:34 ►

apparently many scholars believe that Borges was actually referring to homosexuality,

01:20:40 ►

which seems to make a lot of sense when you re-listen to Terrence’s description of that story.

01:20:46 ►

Terrence’s take on it, however, reminds me of the old saying that

01:20:49 ►

if your only tool is a hammer, well, then every problem looks like a nail.

01:20:55 ►

That said, what Terrence was talking about,

01:20:58 ►

the fact that you could think that you were in DMT space while during a dream,

01:21:03 ►

well, that’s more than conjecture.

01:21:06 ►

Not only have I spoken with several people that this has happened to, it’s happened to me as well, and more than

01:21:11 ►

once. The most satisfying time was when I dreamt that I was having an ayahuasca experience,

01:21:17 ►

and when I awoke, I could remember that dream in exactly the same way that I remembered my ayahuasca experiences the morning after.

01:21:26 ►

And believe me, if I could trigger those kinds of dreams at will,

01:21:31 ►

I would probably do it every night.

01:21:34 ►

I’m sure that in one of the earlier talks by Terrence, that podcast,

01:21:39 ►

he also mentioned something about the fact that today we are literally bathed

01:21:44 ►

in electromagnetic

01:21:45 ►

signals that are packed with significant amounts of information. But it’s something that I think

01:21:51 ►

may be worth our time to consider a little bit more. You see, when you live in a big city,

01:21:57 ►

one with numerous television and radio broadcasts, coupled with all of the wireless communications

01:22:02 ►

taking place on cell phones, it presents a, it presents an interesting picture of us humans swimming through a dense sea of information,

01:22:10 ►

and in many languages.

01:22:13 ►

And by using the proper device and tuning in to these signals,

01:22:17 ►

we can experience them one at a time.

01:22:19 ►

Now, we take for granted that this can be done with a cell phone, radio, television,

01:22:24 ►

or Wi-Fi device of some kind.

01:22:27 ►

But what about tuning in by using a plant, such as a mushroom?

01:22:31 ►

Do you think that perhaps a DMT flash or a mushroom experience

01:22:35 ►

simply turns our bodies into a receiving device that can pull some of these signals out of the air?

01:22:42 ►

Well, it’s certainly something to consider, don’t you think?

01:22:46 ►

Also, while I’m not going to go into it here in any detail,

01:22:51 ►

what Terence said about the Pentagon not investigating the possibility of there being a parallel world,

01:22:57 ►

well, it’s not actually correct.

01:22:59 ►

I have met with several high-level PhD types who do work for the U.S. Department of Defense

01:23:06 ►

and who study things such as remote viewing, ESP, and other so-called New Age concepts of spirituality.

01:23:14 ►

And while this is only a small portion of the goings-on of the Pentagon,

01:23:19 ►

they are, in fact, spending millions of dollars investigating these so-called occult concepts.

01:23:25 ►

While their work is highly classified, what these researchers are allowed to talk about

01:23:30 ►

has at times raised a hair on the back of my neck.

01:23:34 ►

And I’m talking about deep science here.

01:23:36 ►

It’s serious work for these people, and we may all eventually be surprised at what comes

01:23:41 ►

out of it.

01:23:42 ►

But I’m not counting on any of it being revealed in my own lifetime,

01:23:46 ►

and I guess that’s about all that I can say about these things right now.

01:23:51 ►

Now, just a quick note to any new listeners here.

01:23:54 ►

When Terrence mentioned that the first stop,

01:23:57 ►

if you are interested in investigating psychedelics,

01:24:00 ►

should be the library,

01:24:01 ►

well, as our long-time listeners already know,

01:24:05 ►

today that library is actually online

01:24:07 ►

and may be found at arrowid.org.

01:24:10 ►

E-R-O-W-I-D, arrowid.org.

01:24:14 ►

Without exception, Arrowid is by far the most significant

01:24:18 ►

and trustworthy source of information on these topics

01:24:21 ►

that you’re going to find.

01:24:22 ►

It was founded by and is still run by my friends Earth and Fire,

01:24:27 ►

and I’m willing to stake my own reputation on the accuracy of the information

01:24:31 ►

that you can find on their website.

01:24:33 ►

And if you’re thinking about trying some substance for the first time,

01:24:37 ►

be sure to first read all of the bad trip reports about that substance.

01:24:42 ►

Anyone can handle a good experience, but if you read about a bad experience on a particular substance and then determine that you’re not up to handling

01:24:49 ►

a trip like that, well, move on to something more easygoing. Enough said. Now there’s one last thing

01:24:57 ►

I’d like to bring up about the talk that we just listened to, and that is where Terrence mentioned

01:25:02 ►

the fact that many shamans speak about another dimension being a place where one can find what he called an ecology of souls.

01:25:10 ►

Now, this is a concept that I’ve subscribed to in the past, and it still holds great interest for me.

01:25:17 ►

However, I’ve come to a point where the concept of a soul has begun to bother me.

01:25:22 ►

I don’t have time to explain all that I’ve been thinking about this right now,

01:25:25 ►

but in a nutshell, here it is.

01:25:28 ►

I happen to accept the concept of biological evolution on this planet

01:25:33 ►

as being responsible for single-celled organisms

01:25:36 ►

to have eventually evolved into significantly more complex beings

01:25:41 ►

that one day became great apes

01:25:43 ►

that over many millions of years evolved

01:25:46 ►

into upright walking humans. So here’s my question. At what point in this evolutionary chain

01:25:53 ►

did the soul come into being? Did a non-material thing that we call a soul evolve along with us,

01:26:01 ►

or did it somehow get inserted into the great apes that we now think of as human?

01:26:07 ►

Was there a big ecology of souls in another dimension that, once these apes reached a certain point in evolution,

01:26:15 ►

these already formed souls started inserting themselves into those great apes, thus creating the human race?

01:26:22 ►

I haven’t answered any of these questions to my own satisfaction yet,

01:26:26 ►

but I do find them worth the time to think about and to discuss.

01:26:30 ►

In other words, for me, it’s kind of a chicken and egg situation.

01:26:35 ►

Did the soul come first and then come to Earth?

01:26:37 ►

And if so, when, how, and why did that first soul decide to inhabit a human body?

01:26:43 ►

and why did that first soul decide to inhabit a human body?

01:26:50 ►

Or is the planet Earth a kind of soul furnace in which they are forged anew?

01:26:55 ►

Well, maybe in your late-night dorm room discussions you can solve this problem for me,

01:26:59 ►

and if you do, I hope that you will share your ideas with us on our forums.

01:27:09 ►

And speaking of the forums, I hope that you will also go to psychedelicsalon.com and click on the forum links in the main menu at the top of the page.

01:27:18 ►

If you do, you’ll see that you have to register to use these forums, but please don’t think that you need to register as a paying subscriber.

01:27:26 ►

As of today, we now have 539 subscribers, the vast majority of whom are subscribed as student members.

01:27:31 ►

There’s no fee for a student member, and it’s the best way to try the forums for a year to see if they’ll actually be worth the while for you.

01:27:35 ►

In fact, right now there are only 30 fellow Saloners who are paid members of our forums,

01:27:40 ►

but so that you know, those 30 people are the ones who are supporting the continuation of these podcasts.

01:27:46 ►

In years past, I’ve accepted donations to cover the expenses associated with these programs,

01:27:52 ►

and thanks to the support of a small number of our fellow slaunters,

01:27:56 ►

these podcasts have now continued for almost 11 years.

01:27:59 ►

But instead of holding another pledge drive,

01:28:02 ►

I’m experimenting with using the funds from the forums to support our podcast.

01:28:07 ►

So there won’t be a pledge drive this year, and as long as there are enough paying members of the forums,

01:28:12 ►

these podcasts will be coming your way for many more years.

01:28:15 ►

So I want to thank all of our donors, both present and past.

01:28:19 ►

And if at any time during these past 11 years you’ve sent in a donation to the salon,

01:28:25 ►

just sign up as a free student member and then send me a private message from within the forums

01:28:31 ►

and let me know that you’re a previous donor.

01:28:34 ►

I’ll then change your status to lifetime member.

01:28:37 ►

And no, you don’t need a receipt.

01:28:40 ►

But we would love to have your input on our forums, which I’ll talk more about next week.

01:28:46 ►

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

01:28:50 ►

Be careful out there, my friends. Thank you.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

486 - The Main Vein of the Peculiar

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Program Notes

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