526 - History Ends In Green

Program Notes

https://www.patreon.com/lorenzohagerty

http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/1564147088Date this lecture was recorded: September 1990

In today’s talk from a September 1990 workshop, Terence McKenna explains that when speaking about the DMT state he says that what he calls self-dribbling basketballs “are like crystalline, jeweled, semi-see-through, opaque, movemented things, which look like sculptures, but you can tell while you’re looking at them they’re actually sentences. And the sentences are saying themselves in some weird way.” That should give you something to think about the next time you come out of a DMT reverie. He also goes on a little riff about why drugs have specific “identities” in the way they present themselves, as well as giving some advice about how best to choose your drugs.

[The following quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“This crisis in the Soviet Union and in the East Bloc countries, which was presented as a crisis of Marxism, is actually a crisis of centralized institutional control everywhere, and a lot of America’s assumptions will be swept away.”

“The thing about Czechoslovakia is that if you scratch a Czech you get a Celt.”

“Shamans of the Global Village”

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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And I’d like to begin once again by thanking several of our fellow salonners

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whose recent donations are going to be used to offset some of the expenses associated with these podcasts.

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And these wonderful people are

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Philip H., Marcus R., Kate M., and Arnold B.

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Marcus R., Kate M., and Arnold B.

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And I want to thank you one and all for your support of these podcasts from the Psychedelic Salon.

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You most certainly will not be forgotten.

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And so today we pick up with Part 3 of Terrence McKenna’s September 1990 workshop that he titled, History Ends in Green.

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So, do you remember where we left off two weeks ago?

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Well, neither do I, to tell you the truth.

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But since Terrence’s workshops were largely shaped by the questions that came from those in attendance,

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there isn’t necessarily a theme or a plot that we need to keep up with.

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So, let’s just jump right back in and listen again to a few of the ideas of the Bard McKenna.

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Into the light, into the light of the naked truth.

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So there were questions outstanding when we parted this morning.

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So why don’t we just take that up then.

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Mr. John, at Esalen in the

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60s, I wrote for

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Big Sur that there were thousands of hippies who lived

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in the woods in various states of grace.

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It seemed that they were actualizing

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the new paradigm with which we spoke.

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So true well, yesterday

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there was no hippies, not one.

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I don’t think anybody’s living in the

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woods here anymore.

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Where have they gone?

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What have we done wrong?

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The door seems to have slammed shut in that paradigm.

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Is it our fault?

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Well, I mean, as somebody who lived through all that,

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I guess it was the hardest lesson that we had to learn

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was how big a revolution you can have and how quickly they can toss water on it

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and have business as usual eric yonch introduced me to the term metastable and it certainly is

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true that many many things are metastable you think it looks easy to push it over but when you start pushing you discover

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that the leaning tower of Pisa

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goes 800 feet underground or something

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and it’s not moving anywhere

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I don’t know

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I think that there’s a real constipation

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in the historical process

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we talk about how the 20th century

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is this century of

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tremendous change and

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innovation but actually

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they’ve been

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remarkably successful in

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forestalling any true outbreak

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of the future

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I mean the most science fiction moment

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in the 20th century or one, the most science fiction moment in the 20th century, or one of the most

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science fiction moments to date, is probably 1939. I mean, if you think about 1939, if you think

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about the V2 rockets raining down on London and Germany in the grip of a leader with a genetic

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race theory that he plans to establish for a thousand years.

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This is science fiction style talk.

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Rocket bombs and master races

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and robot armies and all that stuff.

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Well, so then it was quenched.

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Fascism was sort of quenched.

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Actually, it infected everybody who got near it

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to the point that everybody was a fascist

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but also everybody went back to work

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realizing very self-centered ideals

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in the United States

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what had happened was that paradise

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had been promised

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the generation that would defeat fascism

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but because it isn’t easy to deliver paradise,

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it had to be tacky.

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So then you get Levittown and the suburbs

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and modular building and Bauhaus styles of design.

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This is an effort to create a proletarian paradise.

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The Marxists topped proletarian paradise,

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but the American middle class actually created it during the 50s.

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Then in the 60s, what happened was,

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well, the precondition for social upheaval

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seemed to be an extremely unpopular war

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being prosecuted thousands and thousands of miles from home.

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And then LSD, which was a unique phenomenon because so much could be made so easily.

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I mean, there are few weapons on earth, even gas.

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It’s hard to create enough poison gas to kill a million people

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a guy with a small bathroom can create enough LSD

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to stone a million people

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but I think that what

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the lesson I drew from the 60s

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is that history can’t be rushed

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and that history is not made by individuals

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even righteous individuals.

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You know what Shakespeare said,

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all the world’s a stage and its people merely players.

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They have their entrances and their exits

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and each man in his time plays many parts.

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It is a work of literature somehow.

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And the 60s, for all of what it was it must be that it was

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only prelude and uh and they managed to get the lid back on but i think at great detriment to

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themselves because what’s the change is like a gas.

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If you plug the keyhole, it comes in under the door.

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If you plug under the door, it comes in over the transom.

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There’s no end to it. And forestalling it makes it more violent.

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What I would like to see would be a conscious engineering of change

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where you actually

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anticipate social

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change and try and make it

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easier. As a perfect example

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is the stupid situation

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now in the Middle East.

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It’s been known since the early

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Carter administration

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that we should

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put policies in place

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which de-emphasize our need for Middle East oil.

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So for 20 years they looked at that situation and never did anything.

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Now they say they have to fight a world war because of that.

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Well, it’s just bad management is what it is.

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is what it is. But I think that this crisis in the Soviet Union

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and in the East Bloc countries,

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which was presented as a crisis of Marxism,

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is actually a crisis of centralized institutional control everywhere,

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and that a lot of America’s assumptions will be swept away.

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It came first to places like Czechoslovakia and Poland,

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but do you think that the United Arab Emirates and Qatar

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and places like this can be far behind?

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I mean, these are oligarchic states ruled by single families, dynastic lines.

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It’s the most reactionary form of government you can have.

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So what I see happening in the world is fragmentation on a vast scale to be applauded in all cases.

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This is not a bad thing.

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This is what McLuhan said would happen.

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It isn’t going to be a world federalist state ruled from Geneva

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with a spaceport in Antarctica and all that malarkey.

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It’s just going to be thousands and thousands of local

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and somewhat integrated

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like the European model is interesting

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because there it’s simultaneously falling to pieces

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and integrating itself at the same time

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integration of currency and economics

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but preservation of cultural diversity

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and that sort of thing seems to me

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to be what’s happening.

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But nobody has to shout and nobody has to go into the streets.

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It’s much bigger than that.

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And as far as the thing in the Middle East is concerned,

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I think probably, well, I’ll talk more about it this afternoon,

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but it has an inevitability to it that is huge.

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The United States is in the process of, you know,

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playing a fairly desperate hand.

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They could just stand so much of all that disarmament

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and troop reduction stuff

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and then they just finally couldn’t stand it anymore.

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But I think it’s good news

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that nobody is in charge of the historical process

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because even the best motivated people

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have the wrong idea.

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You know, more faith in the unconscious.

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It’s gotten us this far, God knows.

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Yeah.

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You were talking about syntax and language

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and being able to go back on the other side and look at it, you know,

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and Chomsky, I think, wrote some books about what that

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syntax all looks like. I was just wondering what you saw when you went on the other side,

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you know.

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Well, Chomsky’s idea, which he called transformational grammar, was he eventually, he dreamed of

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being able to write the rules not only for all, not only for English, but for all rationally apprehendable languages.

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And he felt there were 15 rules of deep structure.

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I never could really understand the fine print on Chomsky.

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It seemed pretty tormented to me.

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What I discover most spectacularly in the DMT state

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is there are these entities there which I call

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self-transforming machine elves and they look sort of like self-dribbling jeweled basketballs

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and they have a linguistic intentionality. They want to communicate.

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The songs that they sing condense as objects in three-dimensional space.

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I’ve compared them to the eggs of Fabergé,

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but that does them… They’re much more interesting than that.

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They are like crystalline, jeweled,

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semi-see-through, opaque,

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movemented things

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which look like sculptures,

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but you can tell while you’re looking at them

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they’re actually sentences.

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And the sentences are saying themselves

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in some weird way.

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And in the way that a good sentence, a good long sentence,

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has all its clauses operating and its articles rotating smoothly

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and its gerunds running up and down their tracks and everything,

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in the same way that a good sentence does that,

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these little objects have this same kind of linguistic coherency.

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Well, then what the entities in this space are doing

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is they’re urging me, the percipient,

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to explore this and to do it,

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to sing these songs,

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to make these objects condense.

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And I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out

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what this could possibly be about

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in terms of new ideas about it.

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The only new idea I’ve had about it

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is it’s occurred to me with some force

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over the past year and a half or so

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that the conclusion that I never looked at carefully

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because my mind tried to shy away from it

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was that maybe these things have something to do with the dead.

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That if you were to ask a shaman what these entities were,

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he would just say without hesitation,

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oh, well, these are the ancestors.

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These are the spirits of the ancestors.

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There’s a hair-raising quality to contacting these things.

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They are both very familiar and yet somehow freakishly bizarre.

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And the presence of the familiarity with the bizarre

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creates a kind of cognitive dissonance that’s very…

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Well, there’s just nothing else that feels quite like that.

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I wrote an introduction recently for a reprint of Evans Vence’s book,

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The Fairy Faith in Celtic Countries.

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And I discovered when I reread that book that the doctrine of purgatory,

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which is good church doctrine,

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it’s a realm where souls go to be cleansed for a few millennia

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they’re not so sinful that they go to hell

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but they go to purgatory for a few thousand years

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before they enter heaven

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well I always assumed that this idea

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came out of the Roman

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contact with Gnostic ideas,

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but I discovered in writing the introduction

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for the fairy faith

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that St. Patrick invented the idea of purgatory,

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and he invented it when he was converting the Irish

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to Christianity.

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He did it as a way to Christianize the notion of fae, of fairyland. And the Celtic

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pure belief is that the dead go to a realm that is co-present all around us. We can’t see them, but all around us is just jammed with souls

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in wild states of activity.

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And that if you have the eye,

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you know, a certain talent,

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you can see these things.

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Well, Patrick, in order to have an appeal

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to these Celtic peasants,

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made purgatory part of the Christian cosmogonic scheme.

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But when you actually smoke DMT,

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you burst into a space

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which seems very much to fit

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the description of this elfin inhabited space.

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Because if you think about what is the gnosis of elves

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elves are

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artificers

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they make things in metal

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and jewels and glass

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this is the archetype of the elves

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that they are underground

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craftsmen and they are

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humorous

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but their humor is highly

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unpredictable and sort of not necessarily running in your favor They are humorous, but their humor is highly unpredictable

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and sort of not necessarily running in your favor.

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They’re somewhat cruel and boisterous and like that.

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Well, when you break into this space,

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you discover, you know, that you’re in fairyland.

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You’re in fairyland as much as darby o’gill or

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any of the rest of these people who ever made it across and the secret of the elves what they

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really fabricate is language this is why in in irish mythology if you can get elves on your side you can make great poetry because they are the keepers

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of linguistic artifice and and getting elves on your side makes you into a master poet well it’s

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interesting then that in the amazon where there’s a tradition of taking dmt there are these things called Heruke and they’re actually described as

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bouncing demons

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and the Heruke

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you’re supposed to get

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they come into being when you’re stoned

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and you’re supposed to get them into your chest

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you’re supposed to invite

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them into your chest somehow

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well then the number of these things

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you have inside of you

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determines what kind of a real man you are.

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And this is generally a male practice.

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Well, I noticed that these DMT tykes, as I call them,

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they jump in and out of your body too.

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They seem to be trying to teach you something about the body image

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or their relationship

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to your self-identity. And all the time they’re saying, you know, make these objects, do what

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we’re doing. Well, then you go down to the Amazon, to the Icaro singing Ayahuasqueros, and they are using voice to make objects.

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So what we’re on the track of here is a physiological ability

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or a pharmacologically driven physiological ability

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to transduce language as something seen.

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Well, now you see, if you could see what I mean it

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would be as though we were the same person seeing what I mean is a much more

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intimate relationship to my intent than hearing what I mean you can hear what I

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mean and go and look it up in your little dictionary and

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get it all wrong if your dictionary and

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mine are different but if you see what I

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mean we will be in agreement because I

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see what I mean too so if meaning were

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something that one could sculpturally

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command in three-dimensional space and

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we would walk around and look at it.

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Well, part of what I was doing in Linz in Austria

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was trying to get these virtual reality people

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hooked into this as a concept.

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Because you see, with the present virtual reality,

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do you all know what virtual reality is?

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Everybody knows what it is.

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Virtual reality is a technology where you put on a helmet

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and you have a little, and then you think you’re in this place,

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some other place under engineering control.

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Well, what you could do is you could slave the parts of English speech

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to geometric objects so that, for instance,

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every time you use the word and,

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a rotating turquoise dodecahedron appeared over your left shoulder.

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Similarly, all the parts of the dictionary could be slaved to physically

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or to visually beholdable objects.

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Well, then, as I would speak, this thing would be happening over my left shoulder,

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a kind of self-constructing grammatical tinker toy.

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Well, I maintain that very quickly people would stop listening

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and start looking, and that they would be getting it.

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In fact, they would be getting more than if they were listening,

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because the way in which these syntactically visible parts of speech

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can be connected and shaded and presented and emphasized

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and italicized and underlined and brightly colored

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and set in different fonts and so forth and so on.

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In other words, many more dimensions to the intent to communicate

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can be brought into play.

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And I think this is what technology

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is probably driving for and what the psychedelic experience will inspire is

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this kind of sculptural linguistic modality where meaning is something that that we behold. Yeah, Nima. Is that a visual type?

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And is it responding to auditory messages?

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Well, we have to find out whether there are visual types

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and audio types

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or whether there are generalized human biases

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embedded in cultural conventions.

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You know, McLuhan talked about how

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at the inventing of printing

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there was a shift from the eye culture,

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as he called it, to the ear culture,

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that before printing,

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if somebody gave you a piece of manuscript,

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it was in cannabula.

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It was written, it was in cannabula it was written

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it was manuscript

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and therefore you had to look at it

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after printing was invented

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every E

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looked like every other E

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and so print

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acquired uniformity

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and uniformity

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you don’t, when we read

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we do not look

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you don’t look at the page

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you read it

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and your eye rips through it

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you don’t linger over each letter

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and try to piece out how it’s different

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from the other F’s on that line

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and stuff like that

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but in manuscript culture you do

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similarly print created

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an expectation then of uniformity in the way that the eye expected

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the letters to always present a uniform appearance. There began to be the idea of uniformity of social

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appearances. And previously the largest social class had been the guild, but suddenly you get people talking about the ruling class, the middle class, the lower class, white collar, blue collar.

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These are linear uniform terms for describing lots of non-linear, non-uniform phenomena. And then finally, of course,

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with the machine age,

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you get the idea of interchangeability of parts.

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This is an idea that would never emerge in a…

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could only emerge in a print culture

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because in a print culture,

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the interchangeability of the parts of print

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becomes an established convention.

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So you say, well, we want to make tractors or hay mowers,

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so let’s not just make one hay mower,

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let’s make 50 of them and let’s make them all at once

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and let’s lay out the pieces

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and then let’s assemble them in teams.

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And this kind of thinking arises out of the bias of a technology.

00:24:06 ►

McLuhan talked a lot about technological biases.

00:24:10 ►

Isn’t this going back to the Chinese ideogram,

00:24:15 ►

where they had 50,000 symbols at one time,

00:24:22 ►

and now only about 5,000 newspapers, and the average person only knows

00:24:28 ►

that much.

00:24:29 ►

Well, yeah, I mean, language is becoming more glyphic.

00:24:33 ►

Reality is becoming more iconic.

00:24:36 ►

When you travel in Europe, you’re aware that you’re skating along on a thin surface of

00:24:42 ►

icons that, if you’re careful, will never break through and let you down.

00:24:47 ►

You know, you can read all this international jargon

00:24:51 ►

about where the dog can poop and not to smoke

00:24:55 ►

and not to open the window and so forth and so on.

00:24:59 ►

Yeah, we need an iconic language,

00:25:03 ►

and we’re tending back toward it.

00:25:06 ►

Now, an iconic language like Chinese has also undergone huge amounts of local conventionalization.

00:25:13 ►

So I don’t think we’re all going to end up learning Chinese unless it’s going to return more to its ancient form.

00:25:30 ►

its ancient form. Mayan is an interesting case because Mayan is a rebus language where you use icons not to symbolize things but sounds. Do you see the difference? So for instance,

00:25:39 ►

if we want to, in rebus language you would put a picture of an eye, a saw going through wood,

00:25:48 ►

an ant running across the ground,

00:25:51 ►

and a rose.

00:25:53 ►

And that would be a sign which said,

00:25:55 ►

I saw ant rose.

00:25:58 ►

The icons symbolize sounds.

00:26:01 ►

They don’t symbolize meaning.

00:26:03 ►

This makes it hellishly difficult to reconstruct

00:26:06 ►

a lost language that is

00:26:08 ►

written this way because

00:26:10 ►

the language, what you have are

00:26:12 ►

the symbols of sounds

00:26:14 ►

and you don’t have the sounds

00:26:16 ►

anymore. So how can you reconstruct

00:26:18 ►

the language? This is the problem

00:26:20 ►

Mayan decipherment

00:26:22 ►

has had to grapple with.

00:26:25 ►

Yeah.

00:26:26 ►

When you’re talking about visual language,

00:26:27 ►

I keep thinking of pre-emptive deaf people.

00:26:30 ►

They process language in the right hemisphere.

00:26:33 ►

Their language is visual-spatial,

00:26:35 ►

and they interpret language in a visual-spatial way.

00:26:38 ►

And when they try to teach you sign language,

00:26:41 ►

they keep saying,

00:26:42 ►

think in pictures, stop thinking in words,

00:26:44 ►

think in pictures. Have you ever had any contact with deaf people or deaf community?

00:26:49 ►

Not with the community. I’ve known deaf people. And yes, you’re right. This thinking in pictures,

00:26:57 ►

this is something that happens at a certain point in most psychedelic experiences, you realize that the quality of our ordinary thought,

00:27:07 ►

or at least in my case,

00:27:10 ►

it is language.

00:27:12 ►

It’s a stream of words.

00:27:14 ►

And then it can become this much richer,

00:27:19 ►

fuller, imagistic type thinking.

00:27:23 ►

This is very elusive.

00:27:24 ►

I mean, it’s so close to the level

00:27:26 ►

of human organization that probably

00:27:28 ►

there are some people in this room who are

00:27:30 ►

doing it right now

00:27:31 ►

there are art movements

00:27:33 ►

00:27:34 ►

the pre-Raphaelites or the

00:27:38 ►

romantics that put great

00:27:40 ►

stress on this kind of thing

00:27:42 ►

even had exercises to

00:27:44 ►

elicit this kind of thinking.

00:27:46 ►

I mean, I think that we’re,

00:27:48 ►

and McLuhan is trying to get at this

00:27:50 ►

by talking about the effects of technology.

00:27:53 ►

It’s that we haven’t realized

00:27:55 ►

just how fluid the mental modality is.

00:28:01 ►

You know, Thomas Aquinas in the middle ages

00:28:05 ►

was thought to be a great saint

00:28:08 ►

and he would prove his sainthood

00:28:12 ►

by they would come to him with a Bible

00:28:15 ►

or a work of theology

00:28:19 ►

and they would open it in front of him

00:28:22 ►

and let him look at it for a few minutes

00:28:24 ►

and then close it and

00:28:26 ►

question him about it and he could answer questions and they thought this was a proof

00:28:33 ►

of his sanctity and all he was doing was silently reading he was the only man in Europe who could silently read, and everybody else had to sound the words.

00:28:47 ►

Well, we can’t quite wrap our mind around that,

00:28:51 ►

because for us this is just something you do.

00:28:55 ►

It’s not even as hard as riding a bicycle.

00:28:58 ►

Well, how many of these things are there

00:29:01 ►

where we are down between narrow walls of expectation, and just a little

00:29:07 ►

tweak of our programming would make a real difference. One of the things that fascinates

00:29:12 ►

me about the psychedelics that we haven’t talked about at all this morning, because it’s kind of

00:29:17 ►

on a technical bend, is how close the most interesting ones are to ordinary brain chemistry.

00:29:24 ►

how close the most interesting ones are to ordinary brain chemistry. It isn’t that the strangest, weirdest drugs

00:29:29 ►

give the strangest, weirdest experiences.

00:29:34 ►

No, the drugs that are most like what you have in your brain at this moment

00:29:40 ►

give the strangest, weirdest experiences.

00:29:44 ►

The ones that are just one tweaked atom away

00:29:47 ►

from ordinary consciousness are the ones that give the profound world-dissolving experiences.

00:29:55 ►

So this suggests to me that what we deal with when we deal with psychedelics is future chemical states of mind, future ratios of

00:30:08 ►

neurotransmitters in the human brain. Is it that the 5-HT2 and A receptors for serotonin

00:30:16 ►

are slowly over time, centuries, being swapped out for a receptor that will accept a more energetic molecule like DMT.

00:30:32 ►

We know that DMT occurs in ordinary human metabolism, but we don’t know why.

00:30:39 ►

Is it increasing over time? We don’t know because we’ve only been measuring it 20 or 30 years.

00:30:45 ►

I mean, the place where evolution is going to be visible is in consciousness

00:30:52 ►

because this is where the chemistry is most delicately poised

00:30:58 ►

to augment or suppress function.

00:31:02 ►

augment or suppress function.

00:31:05 ►

So we’re very well set up to observe evolution and shift

00:31:08 ►

in conscious modalities.

00:31:10 ►

And this is no neutral,

00:31:12 ►

cooled-out scientific endeavor.

00:31:15 ►

The rate at which we can do this

00:31:17 ►

probably determines the rate

00:31:19 ►

at which we can save ourselves

00:31:21 ►

and the planet from ruin.

00:31:25 ►

Music. You haven’t mentioned the function of music

00:31:28 ►

in your non-linear communication group.

00:31:33 ►

It’s very verbose.

00:31:35 ►

Well, music is, you know,

00:31:39 ►

this very old form of art

00:31:42 ►

which appeals to this thing I’m talking about,

00:31:46 ►

not quite with the kind of linguistic specificity

00:31:50 ►

that maybe we would desire ultimately,

00:31:54 ►

but music is a language of emotion

00:31:59 ►

that hovers between the seen and the heard

00:32:03 ►

pretty ambiguously.

00:32:07 ►

I mean, for the romantics, you know,

00:32:10 ►

they were one of these groups of people who talked about synesthesia.

00:32:15 ►

This is this technical term for the senses moving from one modality to another,

00:32:22 ►

tasting colors, feeling feeling music hearing light and a lot of the

00:32:30 ►

a lot of the talk in the 19th century among symbolists and pre-raphaelites and romantics

00:32:40 ►

was about these synesthesiaias and how to trigger them.

00:32:45 ►

Strangely enough, this led to the first bout of psychedelic,

00:32:50 ►

quote-unquote, psychedelic drug experimentation.

00:32:53 ►

It was the romantic pursuit of synesthesia through opium

00:32:58 ►

that created the first wave of opium addiction in literate English society

00:33:06 ►

I mean Coleridge

00:33:08 ►

and

00:33:08 ►

De Quincey and these people

00:33:12 ►

were quite consciously

00:33:14 ►

trying to use drugs

00:33:16 ►

to create and push

00:33:18 ►

the definitions of art

00:33:20 ►

out further

00:33:22 ►

somebody said

00:33:23 ►

architecture is frozen music

00:33:28 ►

from which it must follow then

00:33:31 ►

that music is unfrozen architecture.

00:33:40 ►

The architectonic quality

00:33:42 ►

of hallucinations

00:33:44 ►

when they’re driven by music is very striking

00:33:48 ►

and the way in which all these things come together

00:33:52 ►

has almost a kind of gothic elegance.

00:33:57 ►

The way tone can be used to create impressions

00:34:01 ►

of large vaulted space and this sort of thing

00:34:05 ►

I mean it’s really an unexplored

00:34:08 ►

thing and I think technology

00:34:10 ►

is going to

00:34:12 ►

teach us a lot about

00:34:14 ►

making that kind of

00:34:16 ►

art in particular

00:34:18 ►

yeah

00:34:20 ►

you talked about being a

00:34:22 ►

textile artist, did you have an opportunity

00:34:24 ►

to talk with or study in that teaching sort of part of that Václav Havel couldn’t see me

00:34:33 ►

because he had Margaret Thatcher

00:34:35 ►

it’s true

00:34:39 ►

a frozen architecture

00:34:44 ►

no I mean Czechoslovakia

00:34:46 ►

is an interesting case

00:34:48 ►

because you can see

00:34:50 ►

you know Prague’s reputation

00:34:52 ►

before the revolution was

00:34:54 ►

that it was the gloomiest city in Europe

00:34:57 ►

and you can certainly

00:34:58 ►

see that it would have been

00:35:00 ►

a gloomy city

00:35:02 ►

if people had been marching around

00:35:04 ►

in uniforms and there had been bread lines

00:35:07 ►

and fear and loathing with communism gone people stay up all night and dance in the streets and

00:35:16 ►

and suddenly it just looks charming and unwashed and we just need to get the soot and industrial grime off all this jugenstiele and

00:35:27 ►

art deco architecture and it will be just fine the thing about czechoslovakia is you know if

00:35:37 ►

you scratch a czech you find a celt because the celts were there a long, long time ago building fortresses on all the hills.

00:35:48 ►

And when you look at the people in large crowds,

00:35:53 ►

of which, my God, do they know how to get crowds together.

00:35:57 ►

There are crowds of them everywhere.

00:35:59 ►

They have that same Celtic cast that you get

00:36:03 ►

at a West Coast Grateful Dead concert.

00:36:06 ►

I mean, everybody has brown hair.

00:36:13 ►

Czechoslovakia was exciting because all these places have an opportunity to redefine freedom,

00:36:21 ►

to be even more free you know to push it further and what i was doing there to

00:36:29 ►

have a mission to have a reason to be there was visiting the national museum department of

00:36:35 ►

mycology and leaving off spore prints and growers guides with people in the department who I thought might like to grow psilocybin mushrooms.

00:36:47 ►

And being good Slavs, they were very open to this

00:36:52 ►

and very excited by the idea of growing mushrooms.

00:36:56 ►

You know, cultures can be divided into mycophilic and mycophobic.

00:37:03 ►

And mycophobic cultures are like the English

00:37:06 ►

for whom all mushrooms are toadstools

00:37:09 ►

and you should put it down

00:37:11 ►

because you don’t know where it’s been

00:37:13 ►

this is the basic English attitude

00:37:16 ►

well then Slavs and Celts

00:37:20 ►

there are hundreds of words in these languages

00:37:23 ►

for mushrooms and mushroom outings and people go out on Saturdays on mushroom forays.

00:37:31 ►

In Czechoslovakia, a national bestseller is a guide to the mushrooms of Czechoslovakia.

00:37:38 ►

No home can be without it.

00:37:40 ►

So you can imagine that it’s a different a different attitude Prague is

00:37:48 ►

further west than Vienna it’s the real

00:37:52 ►

center of old Europe and of course

00:37:55 ►

because of the court of Rudolf the

00:37:58 ►

second it was the court of all this

00:38:01 ►

alchemical Protestant alchemical, Protestant alchemical political plotting

00:38:06 ►

and lots of intrigue.

00:38:11 ►

That’s why we’re called Bohemians,

00:38:14 ►

is because that radical style of free thought

00:38:18 ►

began in the principalities of Bohemia,

00:38:22 ►

with people deciding nobody should wear clothes

00:38:25 ►

or we should get rid of money

00:38:28 ►

and then everybody would do this

00:38:31 ►

until the local bishop would get an army together

00:38:35 ►

and come and kick some sense into everybody

00:38:38 ►

but over and over in Bohemia

00:38:40 ►

this kind of outbreak of radical free thought was typical.

00:38:47 ►

Yeah.

00:38:48 ►

A year ago, I was fortunate enough to sample some ayahuasca

00:38:52 ►

in the company of a medicine circle.

00:38:54 ►

The first part of it was enraptured by these glorious visions.

00:38:58 ►

Then there was a sudden shift of perspective,

00:39:00 ►

and I realized suddenly that the visions were all taking place

00:39:03 ►

on the side of the snake.

00:39:07 ►

A large, giant snake.

00:39:10 ►

The visions were actually being projected on its skin.

00:39:12 ►

The snake’s been riding and moving.

00:39:16 ►

Later, I found that most of the other people in the circle were having visions of snakes, too.

00:39:20 ►

And then recently in Shaman’s Drama, the later Shaman’s Drama,

00:39:23 ►

there’s a series of wonderful ayahuasca paintings,

00:39:25 ►

and almost all of them have snakes in them. What do you make of that, Terence? Is that a common thing wonderful ayahuasca paintings and almost all of them have snakes in them.

00:39:26 ►

What do you make of that?

00:39:28 ►

Is that a common thing with ayahuasca? Well, it’s an interesting

00:39:30 ►

question.

00:39:33 ►

Why do drugs have identities

00:39:35 ►

like this and do

00:39:38 ►

they have them?

00:39:40 ►

Well, the answer is yes, they certainly

00:39:42 ►

do.

00:39:43 ►

It’s one of the puzzling pieces of information

00:39:46 ►

that I always keep in front of myself

00:39:49 ►

when trying to understand these things,

00:39:52 ►

that it’s irrational that, for instance,

00:39:56 ►

no matter who you are,

00:39:59 ►

you know, Viennese Jew, Icelandic ski instructor,

00:40:04 ►

Irish pub owner,

00:40:06 ►

if you take ayahuasca, you will see large snakes, large cats,

00:40:12 ►

and dancing black people in this order of statistical frequency

00:40:17 ►

with black people being not as common as cats and snakes,

00:40:21 ►

cats being not as common as snakes, snakes being the most common.

00:40:25 ►

What’s going on here?

00:40:27 ►

How can it be that a chemical compound

00:40:31 ►

that can be defined down to the quantum mechanical positions of the atoms

00:40:36 ►

nevertheless seems to carry informational content of some sort?

00:40:42 ►

Well, I don’t know know but here is one possibility

00:40:48 ►

and maybe there are others

00:40:49 ►

maybe this is support for Sheldrake’s

00:40:55 ►

hypothesis of formative causation

00:40:59 ►

that actually

00:41:00 ►

around the drug

00:41:03 ►

a complex of ideas has accreted itself in some kind of psychological hyperspace.

00:41:11 ►

A pattern has been worn in hyperspace which is the pattern of how this drug works

00:41:19 ►

and it’s really in some sense a composite of all the trips, of all the people who ever took it.

00:41:28 ►

Well, since for the first 20,000 years

00:41:31 ►

all the people who ever took ayahuasca

00:41:34 ►

had snake and jaguar fear as a major source of anxiety.

00:41:40 ►

We discover that up front.

00:41:43 ►

But of course now why the dancing black people?

00:41:46 ►

This becomes less easy to understand.

00:41:50 ►

Wouldn’t it be the consciousness of the plant?

00:41:53 ►

Well, this is the other possibility, see,

00:41:56 ►

that the reason these things are so message specific

00:42:00 ►

is that this is the plant.

00:42:03 ►

This is its presentation. Like with ayahuasca particularly

00:42:09 ►

its language is visual i mean after a strong ayahuasca session your eyes are bugging out of

00:42:19 ►

your head it’s like a visit to madison avenue to buy prints I mean you’ve just looked

00:42:25 ►

at so many prints and looked and looked and compared the Bruegel to the Bosch

00:42:30 ►

and the Bosch to the Buffon all this stuff you know look look look and but

00:42:38 ►

then for instance with mushrooms it’s actually verbal. It speaks. It tells you things in plain English, in a

00:42:48 ►

conversational mode. I don’t understand. The more I live, the longer I see of all this

00:43:01 ►

stuff, the less I feel that I understand of what is going on.

00:43:06 ►

Don’t you think there’s a consciousness

00:43:07 ►

in the plant?

00:43:10 ►

You mean a psychedelic plant

00:43:12 ►

like that?

00:43:13 ►

Well, maybe all sorts of plants.

00:43:15 ►

It depends on…

00:43:16 ►

Yeah, but why would it have one

00:43:19 ►

presentational mode over another?

00:43:23 ►

Because it’s

00:43:24 ►

a particular chemical composite

00:43:26 ►

that becomes its own unique life force

00:43:30 ►

or composite of biology or whatever,

00:43:33 ►

but that in that it has its own consciousness.

00:43:36 ►

Well, I guess this is what we’re left with,

00:43:39 ►

that these are the masks

00:43:40 ►

by which we understand these things.

00:43:44 ►

What happens with the mushroom is it always

00:43:47 ►

has a presentational personality, but then when you inquire, you discover that this presentational

00:43:54 ►

personality is created for your convenience, and that behind it lurks God knows what. And

00:44:02 ►

then when you begin to talk to it about that that’s when the

00:44:05 ►

trip turns off to the left and begins to get peculiar because you’re inquiring

00:44:12 ►

into its inner nature I mean with the mushroom you can actually say show me

00:44:18 ►

more of what you really are and immediately the trip will take a turn away from the dancing mice and all that

00:44:28 ►

cheerful hypnagogic riffraff and towards something you know say okay that’s enough

00:44:37 ►

of who you really are you know reassure me now so, these things are like personalities, minds.

00:44:47 ►

But the question for me is,

00:44:50 ►

it’s such a strange way to communicate

00:44:53 ►

that here is a life form

00:44:55 ►

that it can’t communicate unless you eat it,

00:44:59 ►

unless it’s inside you.

00:45:00 ►

And then somehow the more of its being and your being mesh together and then

00:45:09 ►

these images spring into being. But it is in the very act of passing away, being consumed

00:45:18 ►

in your metabolism. It’s like some kind of act of love or something. Do you ever ask it what it’s like having eaten you or being

00:45:28 ►

digested?

00:45:31 ►

What is it like to take a person?

00:45:36 ►

Well, I asked it once what it wanted to be called

00:45:40 ►

and it said, call me Dorothy.

00:45:46 ►

Dorothy. And I said, call me Dorothy. And I, Dorothy.

00:45:48 ►

And I said, why?

00:45:53 ►

And it said, because this seems like Oz to me.

00:45:58 ►

I just report these things.

00:46:01 ►

I don’t know why it wanted to be called Dorothy. When you say it turns left,

00:46:03 ►

when you take that point of inquiry,

00:46:06 ►

the trip goes in that direction,

00:46:09 ►

and then you’ve had enough,

00:46:11 ►

or you say, all right, all right, I want comfort.

00:46:13 ►

Could you say a little more about that?

00:46:15 ►

You mean how to steer it through these places?

00:46:18 ►

Or why do you want to turn back,

00:46:20 ►

or what is that experience?

00:46:22 ►

Well, you have the feeling,

00:46:24 ►

it’s a very complex

00:46:25 ►

feeling when you deal with the other it’s your friend sort of and it’s predictable sort of

00:46:37 ►

but everything has this vibe about it where you don’t want to push too much i mean i’ve given a lot of thought to trying to think

00:46:46 ►

about where have i had this feeling that i have when i meet the dmt elves and it’s a feeling of

00:46:53 ►

exhilaration but caution accomplishment but doubt and i decided that where I knew this feeling from was years ago in my dissolute youth

00:47:06 ►

as a hash trader in the back streets of Bombay.

00:47:11 ►

We would enter into these labyrinths where these guys with shining eyes and deformed limbs

00:47:19 ►

would take us back into these warrens of streets.

00:47:23 ►

take us back into these warrens of streets.

00:47:27 ►

And they would know that we had enough money on our body to ransom them all for five years’ income.

00:47:31 ►

And we would know that they knew.

00:47:34 ►

And yet we would be there to conclude a business deal

00:47:37 ►

over a psychedelic substance.

00:47:40 ►

And this feeling of meeting the mean traders,

00:47:46 ►

and they would always say, they had this wonderful line calculated

00:47:48 ►

to put you completely at your ease

00:47:51 ►

they would say I am your friend

00:47:53 ►

I am not like all the others

00:47:56 ►

oh great

00:48:01 ►

wonderful

00:48:03 ►

I feel so much better now.

00:48:09 ►

And that’s what these elves are saying.

00:48:12 ►

They’re saying, you know,

00:48:13 ►

don’t listen to him or her.

00:48:14 ►

I’m your friend.

00:48:16 ►

I’m not like all the others.

00:48:18 ►

And, you know, you’re clearly the new kid in town.

00:48:22 ►

I mean, you can barely sit up

00:48:23 ►

and they’re able to pick your pocket from ten dimensions you don’t even know exist.

00:48:29 ►

So you’re trying to sort this out in good order.

00:48:36 ►

Terrence, I wanted to go back to the idea of assimilation,

00:48:40 ►

that in order to have this experience and so forth,

00:48:43 ►

that it’s a process of digestion and assimilation.

00:48:47 ►

And that really is true

00:48:48 ►

of giving yourself to that consciousness,

00:48:51 ►

whatever you want to call it.

00:48:53 ►

And that’s actually true

00:48:54 ►

of all the experiences one has.

00:48:56 ►

I mean, if you’re reading a book,

00:48:57 ►

if you really want to get into it,

00:48:59 ►

you have to totally digest it.

00:49:00 ►

I mean, it’s not literal, honestly.

00:49:01 ►

You don’t read the pages necessarily

00:49:03 ►

because you’re starving or something. But anyway, it is everything that you do that has many

00:49:10 ►

real influence has to be digested.

00:49:13 ►

Well, maybe this has to do with the notion of boundary dissolution, that to be digested by something is to actually become it.

00:49:25 ►

It becomes you.

00:49:27 ►

And, you know, Yeats said,

00:49:30 ►

we become what we behold.

00:49:33 ►

And, yeah, I mean, it’s fairly profound when you think about it.

00:49:37 ►

I didn’t really lean on this thing this morning.

00:49:40 ►

Well, I mentioned it about the diet and the copulation

00:49:43 ►

and the religion and the psilocybin

00:49:46 ►

but the notion here

00:49:48 ►

that feminism

00:49:51 ►

is actually a state

00:49:54 ►

of dietary

00:49:56 ►

neuro-regulation

00:49:57 ►

in the species if you want

00:50:00 ►

and that

00:50:01 ►

because

00:50:03 ►

the feminine I associate with this state of boundary dissolution or potential state of boundary dissolution, because feminine sexuality is based on the acceptance of penetration and the experience of giving birth is the experience of heavy boundary reorganization and so forth. So the earth actually talked to the human beings through the diet.

00:50:33 ►

I mean, it’s crude and awful to say it that way,

00:50:37 ►

but you see, because the psilocybin was in the diet,

00:50:41 ►

because the people were tribal,

00:50:43 ►

because there was pressure on hunting success

00:50:46 ►

and sexual success and all this.

00:50:50 ►

The people were in a state of maximum attention

00:50:53 ►

directed toward the environment.

00:50:56 ►

And coming at them out of the environment was a mind,

00:51:00 ►

not an abstract mind, not as we imagine God, an old man with a beard, an abstract principle, all of this, but actually, you know, a friend and a comfort, a feminine thing, not remote at all, not the creature of theology, but a creature of experience. And these feminine values

00:51:27 ►

were the values of the human group

00:51:30 ►

and they were a kind of objectification,

00:51:35 ►

realization of the values in nature itself.

00:51:40 ►

And getting away from that

00:51:42 ►

broke this bond that was very real.

00:51:50 ►

And this breaking of this bond traumatized us.

00:51:53 ►

I mean, you can even use the language of dysfunctional relationships,

00:52:00 ►

childhood trauma, abuse, that sort of thing, that in the infancy of the human species,

00:52:09 ►

there is a tremendous traumatic event,

00:52:13 ►

the tearing away of the human tribal family

00:52:19 ►

from this embeddedness in larger vegetable nature.

00:52:23 ►

And then once that happened,

00:52:25 ►

we had to make it up by ourselves.

00:52:28 ►

And we, you know, did a botched job of it.

00:52:32 ►

I mean, religion just became a way of berating people.

00:52:36 ►

Ethics became control.

00:52:39 ►

Government became coercion.

00:52:41 ►

Education became the inculcation of past mistakes, so forth and so on.

00:52:48 ►

Understandably, because we were, you could almost think of us as an ant society whose queen had been killed,

00:52:57 ►

but we don’t notice it because it’s not part of our species.

00:53:00 ►

We actually were an incipient symbiote to this invisible thing and it still exists

00:53:07 ►

it still exists in whatever dimensions are its own i mean is it the mushroom is it the sum total

00:53:17 ►

of organic life on the planet is it an extraterrestrial mind somehow here so long that it’s as old as the continents?

00:53:27 ►

Whatever it is, it’s still there.

00:53:30 ►

Well, then what human history and outbreaks of messianic hysteria

00:53:35 ►

and the prompting of visionary dreams

00:53:38 ►

and all of the stuff that sets us sitting bolt upright

00:53:41 ►

in the middle of the night is,

00:53:43 ►

is, you know, this thing can reach into the human world

00:53:48 ►

haltingly, hesitatingly, but plaintively, probingly,

00:53:54 ►

trying to bring us back,

00:54:00 ►

calling us to some kind of return,

00:54:04 ►

trying to reconnect the broken circuit of history.

00:54:08 ►

And this is what is the cause of all the nostalgia for paradise,

00:54:14 ►

you know, the belief in a vanished Eden, a lost Atlantis, so forth and so on,

00:54:19 ►

and all the utopian yearning,

00:54:22 ►

the belief that, you know, the extraterrestrials will come

00:54:25 ►

and kiss it and make it well,

00:54:27 ►

that we will somehow be rescued

00:54:29 ►

from our own folly,

00:54:31 ►

that dead Galilean politicians

00:54:34 ►

will walk again among us.

00:54:36 ►

All of these ideas

00:54:38 ►

that are overthrow of natural law

00:54:42 ►

for the purpose of saving us

00:54:45 ►

in a drama of cosmic redemption.

00:54:49 ►

Well, it’s like a psychological process.

00:54:56 ►

It’s like somebody digging into their stuff.

00:55:00 ►

And, you know, we all start out with the assumption

00:55:02 ►

that our childhood was perfectly normal and our parents were fine people.

00:55:07 ►

And then you start digging and separating and working and looking, and then the picture becomes much more complicated.

00:55:15 ►

And I think the human attitude toward drugs, the fact that we can addict to 40 or 50 substances and do.

00:55:29 ►

I mean, yes, other animals form addictions of various sorts,

00:55:30 ►

but nothing like this.

00:55:33 ►

I mean, clearly we are in a state of permanent chemical disequilibrium.

00:55:36 ►

I mean, we will gnaw door handles,

00:55:39 ►

sniff paint thinner, tobacco, heroin, you name it,

00:55:44 ►

thousands of alkaloids, dig up stuff the pig wouldn’t

00:55:49 ►

eat and then pickle that and then eat that.

00:55:53 ►

I mean, all this anxiety and disease around the problem of food is that we’re looking.

00:56:00 ►

We’re looking for something. Well, then every time somebody finds it,

00:56:06 ►

then a huge shriek goes up from the body politic

00:56:11 ►

that it’s illegal what you found.

00:56:15 ►

It’s unacceptable.

00:56:17 ►

This behavior cannot be tolerated.

00:56:20 ►

People who smoke joints of marijuana,

00:56:24 ►

the chief of police in Los Angeles

00:56:26 ►

wants them shot like dogs

00:56:29 ►

in public places

00:56:31 ►

in order to keep public order

00:56:34 ►

well what we’ve got here folks

00:56:36 ►

is a lot of serious anxiety

00:56:38 ►

around states of mind

00:56:40 ►

clearly

00:56:41 ►

it’s a rupture from the synthetic I mean it’s a rupture from the synthetic.

00:56:46 ►

I mean, it’s a rupture from the

00:56:48 ►

organic, creating totally

00:56:49 ►

synthetic realities in every level.

00:56:52 ►

That’s part of what happens

00:56:54 ►

when you’re separated from the organic.

00:56:56 ►

You mean a rupture into history

00:56:58 ►

of this material? Well, I mean, because

00:57:00 ►

they have been separated from

00:57:02 ►

psychedelics and from

00:57:04 ►

the organic, it’s like being separated from an

00:57:06 ►

organic life and the same thing is being separated from nature from themselves and then they’re open

00:57:13 ►

to synthetic realities well it’s an extreme uh an extreme case of alienation over like a thousand

00:57:23 ►

years i mean yes we’re so alienated we don’t

00:57:26 ►

even know how alienated we are I mean things built into our language like the

00:57:31 ►

subject-object dualism the assumption of science you know that spirit doesn’t

00:57:38 ►

exist this is what they’ve been busy at for the last 400 years is exercising spirit in the from the

00:57:46 ►

late medieval cosmology we inherit a

00:57:49 ►

world entirely animate with spirit and

00:57:53 ►

angelic beings running up ladders and

00:57:56 ►

performing all kinds of miraculous tasks

00:57:59 ►

and then with Descartes you know you get

00:58:02 ►

this grudging admission that well maybe the

00:58:07 ►

soul touches matter at just one place in

00:58:11 ►

the pineal gland of each one of us

00:58:14 ►

there’s this magic trip hammer and

00:58:16 ►

there the little angel performs the

00:58:19 ►

forbidden transduction and so and then

00:58:23 ►

50 years after Descartes then they they say, well, no, no,

00:58:25 ►

that was the naive part of his thinking.

00:58:28 ►

We’re going to get rid of that.

00:58:30 ►

And now we understand that spirit was an illusion

00:58:33 ►

of the ontologically naive mind

00:58:36 ►

and there’s only force and momentum.

00:58:38 ►

And then you have permission to commit

00:58:43 ►

all kinds of atrocities against nature.

00:58:46 ►

Although the permission to commit these atrocities

00:58:48 ►

has been present in the Western tradition for a very, very long time.

00:58:54 ►

I mean, you go back to Gilgamesh

00:58:56 ►

and you discover that what’s going on in Gilgamesh

00:59:00 ►

is that Gilgamesh rejects the goddess,

00:59:06 ►

and the goddess sends the bull as her emissary to Gilgamesh,

00:59:11 ►

which I take to be a symbol of the mushroom, obviously.

00:59:15 ►

And Gilgamesh rejects the cosmic bull, rejects the goddess,

00:59:19 ►

and then he gets his shaman friend, Enkidu,

00:59:23 ►

who’s very reluctant about this enterprise,

00:59:26 ►

and he says, you know what we need to do?

00:59:28 ►

I have a great idea.

00:59:29 ►

Let’s go into the wilderness, and you’ll help me,

00:59:32 ►

and we’ll cut down the tree of life.

00:59:35 ►

And this is what they do.

00:59:37 ►

This is on cuneiform tablets

00:59:40 ►

that are dug out of the Ur level of our civilization.

00:59:44 ►

And what they’re plotting and scheming is two clowns want to cut down the tree of life. that are dug out of the ur-level of our civilization.

00:59:49 ►

And what they’re plotting and scheming is two clowns want to cut down the tree of life.

00:59:53 ►

So this alienation goes very deep.

01:00:07 ►

That’s why the psychedelic experience is illegal and repressed and suspect. suspect it’s because nothing less than the whole kitten caboodle of this civilization hangs in the balance

01:00:09 ►

against it it is forbidden to know that

01:00:14 ►

the dynamics of the mind have such depth

01:00:17 ►

and breadth we are supposed to live in a

01:00:21 ►

narrow canyon of consciousness walled in between awake and asleep and anything

01:00:29 ►

else is considered pathological and we make a little place for artists as long as they don’t

01:00:35 ►

get too uppity or obscene and otherwise it’s all closed off well know, breaking into this is, breaking through this is this recapturing

01:00:48 ►

of the birthright that I’ve been talking about. Other comments? Yeah.

01:00:56 ►

Every time I eat mushrooms, I look for, there’s three things that happen to me that invariably

01:01:01 ►

happen, physical things. And I wonder what you make of that, or if you have one.

01:01:05 ►

I know you have a couple.

01:01:07 ►

One is the tearing.

01:01:09 ►

I always tear,

01:01:10 ►

and then I always go through a phase

01:01:12 ►

where I start to yawn.

01:01:13 ►

And the yawning,

01:01:16 ►

then I start making a sound.

01:01:19 ►

It’s like my head becomes an echo chamber.

01:01:21 ►

And it always happens to me.

01:01:24 ►

And I play with that sound a lot.

01:01:26 ►

And then I heard the Kyoto monks.

01:01:29 ►

And I go, that’s the sound.

01:01:31 ►

Same sound.

01:01:32 ►

And I’ve heard you discuss the sound before.

01:01:36 ►

Well, even in the pharmacology textbooks,

01:01:39 ►

the yawning gets in for psilocybin.

01:01:43 ►

It makes you yawn, they say,

01:01:46 ►

and it certainly does make you yawn.

01:01:48 ►

The tearing, it also makes you tear.

01:01:52 ►

It makes your nose run a little bit about at the 40-minute mark.

01:01:56 ►

The tearing I associate with the actual moments

01:02:00 ►

when the visions are occurring.

01:02:02 ►

It seems as though your eyes produce a lot of water

01:02:06 ►

and the tone is

01:02:08 ►

yeah, pretty basic

01:02:11 ►

to the presentation of these things

01:02:14 ►

the way it works for me usually is

01:02:17 ►

I take it on an empty stomach

01:02:21 ►

in silent darkness

01:02:22 ►

and at about the hour and ten minute mark, there’s visual streaming.

01:02:29 ►

Nothing much before.

01:02:31 ►

I mean, runny nose, restlessness, need to go to the bathroom.

01:02:35 ►

One of the things you don’t want to do is once it begins,

01:02:39 ►

I think it’s very important to stay still.

01:02:43 ►

And you will get into loops where it would be better to be downstairs

01:02:48 ►

it would be better to be on the other side of the room it would be better this is the small

01:02:55 ►

tinny voice of true madness trying to push you off your point and you just say no no it wouldn’t

01:03:04 ►

be better downstairs and it wouldn’t be better downstairs

01:03:05 ►

and it wouldn’t be better across the room

01:03:07 ►

and it’s better right here and then

01:03:09 ►

at an hour and 20 minutes you get visual

01:03:11 ►

streaming which are these

01:03:13 ►

I’ve also noticed they occur

01:03:15 ►

after orgasm

01:03:17 ►

they’re like purple after image

01:03:19 ►

kind of amorphous jelly bean

01:03:21 ►

shaped lights that are

01:03:23 ►

passing by not Not very interesting.

01:03:26 ►

But they indicate the onset of something is happening.

01:03:31 ►

The synapse is coming to the potential for the thing.

01:03:35 ►

And then I usually smoke cannabis to sort of push it over the edge.

01:03:42 ►

And at a certain point I know that if I now will take a huge hit of cannabis,

01:03:47 ►

the whole thing will just come apart over moments.

01:03:52 ►

And then it does,

01:03:54 ►

and it usually is,

01:03:56 ►

you sort of see it coming,

01:03:59 ►

you know, like a sandstorm or something.

01:04:02 ►

I mean, it’s 10 miles high and 100 miles wide,

01:04:06 ►

and it just rolls toward you,

01:04:08 ►

and there’s nowhere to run.

01:04:10 ►

And I usually just have a few moments to lie down,

01:04:15 ►

is what I basically do.

01:04:17 ►

That seems a good strategy at that point.

01:04:20 ►

Lie down.

01:04:23 ►

Ah, a plan.

01:04:27 ►

I lie down a plan lie down so then I do that

01:04:31 ►

and that sort of helps a little

01:04:34 ►

and it just hits

01:04:36 ►

and you would swear that everybody from Vancouver to San Diego

01:04:41 ►

just hurled themselves underneath their desk

01:04:44 ►

because it’s like

01:04:45 ►

an asteroid striking the earth or something

01:04:48 ►

everything gives way, you have these images

01:04:51 ►

first there’s light, then there’s heat

01:04:53 ►

then the instruments which record light and heat

01:04:56 ►

themselves disintegrate and vaporize and begin to move outward

01:05:00 ►

and there’s just a linguistic

01:05:03 ►

zero zone where language will not operate, it’s just, you know, a linguistic zero zone

01:05:05 ►

where, you know, language will not operate.

01:05:08 ►

It’s like ground zero.

01:05:10 ►

And then this goes on for a long, long time,

01:05:13 ►

and the viewpoint keeps telescoping back

01:05:16 ►

until finally the viewpoint is outside the blast zone.

01:05:21 ►

And then you can begin an inward description of it.

01:05:24 ►

Say, you know, oh, it say you know oh it’s like this

01:05:26 ►

it’s like that it’s telling me this it’s telling me that other times it’s this irish elfin band

01:05:33 ►

thing where they come literally tiptoeing through the tulips you know and you hear it far off like

01:05:40 ►

the tinkling of bells and then it just gets louder and louder and nearer and nearer and

01:05:46 ►

then you see it and then it’s around you and it’s you know like that’s like well it’s like a Bugs

01:05:55 ►

Bunny cartoon directed by Tristan Zara or something like that I, it’s quite zany, unpredictable.

01:06:07 ►

The thing that always impressed me about psychedelics

01:06:10 ►

was the way in which it could convince you

01:06:12 ►

that you could never think of this.

01:06:15 ►

And that was the stamp of authenticity,

01:06:18 ►

the fact that it was moving faster than your own imagination,

01:06:22 ►

astonishing you, making you laugh

01:06:25 ►

frightening you, leading you on

01:06:27 ►

teasing you

01:06:28 ►

it’s very strange

01:06:32 ►

I mean there’s nothing else like it

01:06:33 ►

it’s like you know the Arabs used to say

01:06:36 ►

of the city

01:06:38 ►

of Isfahan

01:06:39 ►

in Iran in the 10th century

01:06:42 ►

that it was half the world

01:06:44 ►

because of its vaulted

01:06:47 ►

domes and minarets

01:06:48 ►

that if you hadn’t seen Isfahan

01:06:51 ►

half the world

01:06:52 ►

lay before you

01:06:53 ►

well it’s literally true of

01:06:56 ►

psychedelics

01:06:57 ►

I mean half at least of the world

01:07:00 ►

lies over yonder

01:07:03 ►

in these strange dimensions

01:07:06 ►

and they’re not

01:07:07 ►

inaccessible

01:07:09 ►

they’re very accessible

01:07:11 ►

you don’t have to spend 20 years

01:07:14 ►

around the ashram

01:07:15 ►

and yet my goodness

01:07:17 ►

we maintain decorum

01:07:19 ►

around them

01:07:21 ►

and don’t break protocol

01:07:23 ►

and behave ourselves in the presence of it.

01:07:27 ►

I mean, even those of us who are supposed experts

01:07:30 ►

or accounted great explorers of it

01:07:33 ►

spend nine times as much time talking about it as doing it,

01:07:39 ►

you may be sure.

01:07:41 ►

So, you know, it’s just a kind of a cultural

01:07:45 ►

blind spot

01:07:46 ►

seeming to a person like myself

01:07:49 ►

very important to someone else

01:07:50 ►

extraordinarily trivial

01:07:52 ►

I mean there was even a book published

01:07:54 ►

on the drug problem recently

01:07:56 ►

called America’s Great Drug War

01:07:59 ►

by Tread

01:08:00 ►

Locke, Treadwell

01:08:02 ►

who’s a good guy

01:08:04 ►

he wants legalization, he’s a good guy he wants legalization

01:08:06 ►

he’s a good guy

01:08:07 ►

but there’s no entry for psychedelic drugs

01:08:11 ►

no entry for LSD

01:08:12 ►

no entry for mescaline

01:08:14 ►

it’s not what they’re talking about

01:08:17 ►

not what they’re worrying about

01:08:19 ►

even the people who want drugs legalized

01:08:23 ►

do it with this kind of

01:08:26 ►

okay

01:08:28 ►

you know this attitude

01:08:31 ►

we’re defeated we’ll legalize drugs

01:08:33 ►

screw it that’s it

01:08:35 ►

go ruin yourselves now

01:08:38 ►

there’s no notion of hope

01:08:41 ►

no notion of a pharmacological engineering of consciousness

01:08:45 ►

to any reasonable end.

01:08:48 ►

It’s just, you know, if you’re not willing to go it alone with God’s grace,

01:08:52 ►

well, then you’re just consigned to the road to hell.

01:08:56 ►

Yeah.

01:08:57 ►

I have some friends that have used MDMA with ketamine and 2C-B,

01:09:03 ►

and I was wondering if anyone had used that.

01:09:06 ►

I’m sure someone has used it with mushrooms,

01:09:08 ►

but I was curious if you’d heard of it.

01:09:10 ►

MDMA with mushrooms?

01:09:14 ►

Let me see if I can remember.

01:09:16 ►

I can’t really remember anybody specifically doing that.

01:09:21 ►

All these things get done.

01:09:24 ►

I sort of try to warn people off of these

01:09:27 ►

things and I’m a terrible party pooper because I’m just such an obsessed person that all I really

01:09:35 ►

care about is this very narrow psychedelic effect there are a lot of weird altered states of

01:09:42 ►

consciousness around many of them of them drug-induced

01:09:47 ►

and a whole spectrum of them alcohol-induced.

01:09:54 ►

Yeah.

01:09:57 ►

How was that?

01:09:58 ►

Well, I felt that right away that the mushroom was just…

01:10:03 ►

I felt sullied. Sullied, it felt sullied.

01:10:06 ►

Sullied.

01:10:07 ►

It was sullied, but I felt I violated this relationship.

01:10:10 ►

So I cultivated this relationship with the mushroom.

01:10:13 ►

It says, what is this doing here?

01:10:16 ►

Who is this cheap trollop that you’ve dragged in?

01:10:23 ►

It wasn’t pleasant because they both were at odds. And it was just an empty block. Yeah, synergies are a sort of unexplored area

01:10:33 ►

because there are so many of them.

01:10:35 ►

You all understand synergies are what happens

01:10:37 ►

when you rub two drugs or more together.

01:10:41 ►

And very weird things happen,

01:10:43 ►

but they’re not very controllable or repeatable

01:10:46 ►

my what i always say to people about choosing drugs and strategies for bringing drugs into

01:10:54 ►

your life and your program of spiritual development or self-exploration or whatever

01:10:59 ►

is the most interesting drugs are the ones that occur in plants.

01:11:08 ►

That the occurrence of a drug in a plant

01:11:10 ►

shows that it has a certain affinity to organic life.

01:11:15 ►

But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t hellacious toxins in some plants.

01:11:21 ►

I mean, there’s curare, there’s strychnine, there’s cyanide. These are plant

01:11:25 ►

byproducts as well. But nevertheless, as a first pass, it’s important that a compound occur in a

01:11:32 ►

plant. Well, then the next thing is, millennia. Other parts of the world it’s

01:11:50 ►

probably for a very long time, although the evidence is less clear.

01:11:56 ►

Mesopiote has a long history of usage in the American Southwest. Cannabis goes back millennia so does

01:12:05 ►

opiate

01:12:06 ►

use

01:12:06 ►

so then

01:12:07 ►

do these

01:12:07 ►

things have

01:12:08 ►

a history

01:12:08 ►

of human

01:12:09 ►

usage

01:12:10 ►

and even

01:12:10 ►

specifically

01:12:11 ►

shamanic

01:12:12 ►

usage

01:12:12 ►

and then

01:12:13 ►

to my

01:12:13 ►

mind

01:12:14 ►

the really

01:12:15 ►

interesting

01:12:15 ►

question

01:12:16 ►

do they

01:12:17 ►

have an

01:12:17 ►

affinity

01:12:18 ►

to ordinary

01:12:19 ►

brain

01:12:19 ►

chemistry

01:12:20 ►

do they

01:12:21 ►

because

01:12:23 ►

and I

01:12:24 ►

mentioned this

01:12:24 ►

this morning the strongest drugs are the ones most like ordinary brain chemistry. The most extreme case being DMT. DMT only lasts 7 to 10 minutes and yet it’s the most profound dislocation of reality that you can undergo.

01:12:46 ►

Well, why is it that it is both so profound

01:12:50 ►

and so quickly quenched in the organism?

01:12:54 ►

It’s because in the human brain,

01:12:59 ►

biopathways exist which recognize and degrade this very readily

01:13:05 ►

because they are there all the time performing this function on DMT.

01:13:11 ►

So to my mind, you know, it isn’t that you sail out

01:13:14 ►

toward the most synthetic or complex or chelated molecules,

01:13:20 ►

but that in fact these things are highly suspect,

01:13:23 ►

that what we’re trying to do

01:13:25 ►

is actually tweak consciousness

01:13:28 ►

due reverence to the physical brain

01:13:32 ►

but tweak consciousness as little as possible

01:13:35 ►

to get the desired effect

01:13:38 ►

one of the really fascinating things about DMT

01:13:42 ►

I think is that once someone has smoked it, once someone has had

01:13:47 ►

this experience, you can have a dream in which it is introduced into the dream as a theme, DMT,

01:13:57 ►

and then you actually smoke it in the dream and it actually happens in the dream. And I don’t know of any other drug that this is true of.

01:14:07 ►

And it’s what it says to me is that even though this is an extremely radical psychedelic experience,

01:14:14 ►

apparently the chemistry that is the precondition for it is just under the surface almost within reach of conscious awareness.

01:14:26 ►

I mean, I’ve sat down at times

01:14:28 ►

and thought about smoking DMT

01:14:30 ►

and tried to invoke it

01:14:32 ►

and never succeeded the way I’ve succeeded

01:14:35 ►

in a lucid dream doing that.

01:14:39 ►

But it shows, I think, that the chemistry

01:14:41 ►

is very close to ordinary metabolism.

01:14:43 ►

I’m interested in knowing about the MQ.

01:14:47 ►

It’s not the same thing in mushrooms, then.

01:14:50 ►

Is it organically?

01:14:52 ►

Yes, it’s closely related.

01:14:55 ►

In the chemical families of the hallucinogens,

01:15:00 ►

you have the indole family,

01:15:03 ►

which is a fairly large family,

01:15:05 ►

and it includes the lysergamides that are the LSD-type drugs,

01:15:13 ►

the beta-carbolines, which are MAO inhibitors

01:15:18 ►

and occur in banisteriopsis copy,

01:15:21 ►

and the aboga alkaloids

01:15:25 ►

which are psychedelic aphrodisiacs

01:15:28 ►

from West Africa

01:15:29 ►

and then the tryptamine group

01:15:32 ►

and the tryptamine group is the largest group

01:15:35 ►

and it comprises psilocybin in the mushroom

01:15:38 ►

and DMT in the leaves

01:15:44 ►

of certain bushes and in the bark leaves of certain bushes

01:15:46 ►

and in the barks of certain South American trees.

01:15:50 ►

And then it also occurs in other plant genera,

01:15:53 ►

but not in very high concentration.

01:15:56 ►

But 5-methoxy DMT occurs in toads.

01:16:02 ►

5-methoxy DMT is interesting

01:16:06 ►

it’s recently had a kind of

01:16:08 ►

vogue because people

01:16:10 ►

discovered they could collect the

01:16:12 ►

exudate

01:16:14 ►

from the toad and dry it

01:16:16 ►

on their windshield

01:16:17 ►

and scrape it off and then smoke it up

01:16:20 ►

or sell it for

01:16:22 ►

about $80 a gram

01:16:24 ►

it’s a big thing in Florida smoke it up or sell it for about $80 a gram.

01:16:26 ►

That’s a big thing in Florida.

01:16:27 ►

It’s a big thing in Florida. Now they’re out in the pharmacy.

01:16:30 ►

They’re out there licking toads.

01:16:32 ►

Well, nobody actually licks toads.

01:16:36 ►

That’s just a slander.

01:16:38 ►

What you do is you milk the toad

01:16:41 ►

onto the glass of your four-wheel drive vehicle windshield and then let it dry in

01:16:47 ►

the sun and then scrape it up and collect it in a film canister. I know people who really like

01:16:54 ►

5-MeO-DMT. I don’t care for it. I find it weirdly empty. It’s not visionary like DMT DMT is a chaos of hallucination

01:17:08 ►

it is the most hallucinogenic compound there is

01:17:11 ►

I mean it’s just hallucinations stacked on top of each other

01:17:16 ►

I mean in every angle tiny demons are seen to be performing elaborate calisthenic exercises

01:17:24 ►

and you know much else is happening.

01:17:28 ►

But when you do 5-MeO DMT,

01:17:31 ►

for me at any rate,

01:17:33 ►

it was like this feeling,

01:17:35 ►

yes, it feels like DMT,

01:17:37 ►

yes, my heart is racing just like DMT,

01:17:40 ►

yes, yes, yes, no, no.

01:17:44 ►

Nothing happened.

01:17:45 ►

It didn’t do the thing.

01:17:48 ►

The other piece of information

01:17:50 ►

that I feel obligated to pass on to you

01:17:55 ►

as a spoil sport

01:17:56 ►

is that 5-MeO is fatal in sheep.

01:18:02 ►

They just fall over with their little pointed feet

01:18:05 ►

trembling in the air.

01:18:07 ►

And, you know, I guess it’s a way to tell

01:18:11 ►

whether or not you’re a sheep.

01:18:14 ►

But it’s a little alarming that a mammalian species

01:18:18 ►

so substantial and woolly and so forth

01:18:23 ►

falls over dead when exposed to this stuff

01:18:26 ►

that you and your friends are furiously smoking up in the den.

01:18:32 ►

Why?

01:18:33 ►

They don’t know exactly.

01:18:34 ►

It’s neurotoxic.

01:18:35 ►

These neurotransmitters fall into narrow ranges.

01:18:41 ►

Sheep are sensitive to a lot of stuff.

01:18:43 ►

That’s why they’re always dropping nerve gas on them and stuff like that, because

01:18:47 ►

they seem to have a fairly narrow

01:18:51 ►

tolerance to neurotoxins.

01:18:54 ►

It’s somewhat alarming, you know.

01:19:00 ►

Not 5-MeO DMT, not DMT.

01:19:06 ►

Well, just the difference of that methoxy group in the five position.

01:19:11 ►

But this is why sheep get staggers and die,

01:19:15 ►

because they’re eating phalaris species, grass species,

01:19:19 ►

with low amounts of 5-MeO in them.

01:19:22 ►

And they’re always getting staggers and getting problems with

01:19:27 ►

them. Anything else? Yes. Physical side effects from the mushrooms. Well, one of the things

01:19:36 ►

you have to understand is that research on psychedelics is illegal and not even encouraged among professionals. So a lot of what’s known

01:19:47 ►

is anecdotal. Whenever you talk about the side effects of any drug, you have to realize

01:19:57 ►

that people are highly variable. So tolerance and drugs are the area where these differences between people show up

01:20:08 ►

dramatically. Generally, psilocybin is thought to be a fairly safe compound in terms of crude

01:20:17 ►

measures of its safety. It’s very safe. I mean, for instance, the way pharmacologists talk about drugs is they talk about what’s called

01:20:26 ►

the LD50. This is the horrible concept of if you have a hundred mice, how much of this drug do you

01:20:36 ►

have to give these hundred mice so that 50 die? The LD50, the lethal dose 50. Well, for psilocybin, it’s huge,

01:20:46 ►

hundreds of milligrams per kilogram of body weight.

01:20:51 ►

So that’s not a possibility.

01:20:54 ►

That’s the cheerful news from the world of reductionist pharmacology.

01:20:59 ►

The problem is that when you get out there,

01:21:03 ►

the whole religion of taking these things holds that science doesn’t know what it’s talking about.

01:21:09 ►

So when you get out there and you have the complete and total conviction that you’re dying,

01:21:16 ►

then you have to grapple with this.

01:21:19 ►

And the thing is, it’s always completely convincing.

01:21:24 ►

And this is just something that it seems to put

01:21:27 ►

one through occasionally you don’t get much sympathy from straight people i mean they say

01:21:34 ►

well psychedelic drugs isn’t that the bit you think you’re in heaven and you think you’re dying

01:21:39 ►

then you think you’re god and you think you’re dying. I thought that was what was supposed to happen.

01:21:48 ►

Well, as we know, you try to steer around that.

01:21:51 ►

If there are episodes of fear,

01:21:56 ►

the only thing you can do is sit it out and breathe it out and sing it out.

01:21:58 ►

The one thing people shouldn’t do is clench up

01:22:02 ►

and hunker down and just go into

01:22:05 ►

the fetal position and stay

01:22:07 ►

what you want to do is circulate

01:22:10 ►

a huge amount of energy and oxygen

01:22:12 ►

through your body by

01:22:13 ►

singing this is what shamans

01:22:16 ►

do when they get into difficult

01:22:18 ►

places they sing

01:22:20 ►

their way through it

01:22:21 ►

and

01:22:22 ►

and it is ambiguous it is ambiguous.

01:22:27 ►

It is complicated

01:22:28 ►

to go into these places.

01:22:30 ►

I don’t think anybody

01:22:31 ►

voyages repeatedly

01:22:33 ►

into these psychedelic spaces

01:22:35 ►

without getting into

01:22:37 ►

some fairly weird stuff.

01:22:42 ►

What kind of songs do I sing?

01:22:47 ►

They’re usually based pretty much on the tonality of the situation

01:22:50 ►

and finding a tone

01:22:53 ►

that I can ride out

01:22:55 ►

of the situation

01:22:57 ►

and they’re synesthesia

01:23:00 ►

a tone like…

01:23:06 ►

You know, you’re feeling it’s doing something to you,

01:23:23 ►

and you can steer your way through weird stuff with this,

01:23:28 ►

then usually you become distracted

01:23:31 ►

by the act of making the sound itself.

01:23:35 ►

Because the sound, first of all,

01:23:38 ►

you either have or have the illusion that you have

01:23:41 ►

tremendous control over the production of tone.

01:23:46 ►

Your ear gives you a tremendous ability to differentiate these tones,

01:23:52 ►

and they’re appearing in front of you as colors if you’re loaded enough.

01:23:58 ►

So this is the modality in which you can experiment with the visible language.

01:24:03 ►

in which you can experiment with the visible language. You try to syntactically construct

01:24:06 ►

out of tonality and glossolalia

01:24:11 ►

some kind of convincing modality.

01:24:15 ►

Most of you have probably heard ayahuasca songs.

01:24:19 ►

I mean…

01:24:33 ►

they’re driving is what they are

01:24:35 ►

they’re repetitious and they’re driving

01:24:37 ►

and you discover in yourself

01:24:38 ►

the capacity for glossolalia

01:24:41 ►

which you can ride

01:24:43 ►

you can lift the meaning governor

01:24:46 ►

off of the language machinery

01:24:49 ►

and just let it spin.

01:24:53 ►

And it’s indefensible as art,

01:25:00 ►

but ecstatic to do, you know.

01:25:03 ►

I mean, I tend to do glossolalias,

01:25:06 ►

which are more conversational.

01:25:09 ►

And I like them because they play with meaning.

01:25:13 ►

So that kind of stuff sort of sounds like Yeah, I do this alone in the dark.

01:25:34 ►

And what it is, is it places an edge for the light to follow.

01:25:40 ►

And you discover meaning in the absence of context and you discover like the source of

01:25:51 ►

meaning before it is contextually located don’t ask me what this kind of these kinds of words

01:25:57 ►

mean this is what i how i learned to talk hanging out with these semiotics people

01:26:02 ►

but it’s something like that

01:26:05 ►

and I think people did this

01:26:08 ►

for hundreds of thousands of years

01:26:10 ►

for each other as a form

01:26:12 ►

of performance art

01:26:13 ►

long before somebody

01:26:16 ►

got the nuts and bolts

01:26:18 ►

notion that you could

01:26:19 ►

connect

01:26:20 ►

an action in the world

01:26:24 ►

or a linguistic intent to a sound

01:26:27 ►

that we’re just set up for this

01:26:30 ►

these small mouth noises

01:26:32 ►

and it’s tremendously

01:26:34 ►

under the influence of psychedelics

01:26:38 ►

you can make language get up and walk around

01:26:41 ►

you can literally peel it off the ceiling

01:26:44 ►

and set it dancing in

01:26:46 ►

your presence. If any of you have read Robert Graves’ book, The White Goddess, he talks in

01:26:55 ►

there about what he calls an ursprach, a visibly beheld language of primal poetry and he thinks our anxiety has to do with the fact that we

01:27:06 ►

have lost the true

01:27:07 ►

speech and that

01:27:10 ►

if you speak the true language

01:27:12 ►

the Ursprach

01:27:13 ►

it’s a beheld language

01:27:16 ►

it doesn’t require

01:27:18 ►

the conventionalization

01:27:20 ►

of dictionaries

01:27:22 ►

you know what you mean

01:27:24 ►

and that the loss of this

01:27:26 ►

genetic language

01:27:27 ►

is what made us so maladaptive

01:27:31 ►

and at unease

01:27:33 ►

with ourselves.

01:27:34 ►

Are there practices

01:27:36 ►

spiritual or otherwise

01:27:38 ►

that can be used in between

01:27:40 ►

psychedelic experiences

01:27:42 ►

to prepare oneself or strengthen

01:27:44 ►

oneself for the experiences? in between psychedelic experiences to prepare oneself or strengthen oneself

01:27:45 ►

for the experiences?

01:27:49 ►

I don’t know.

01:27:50 ►

I mean,

01:27:51 ►

I always go into it

01:27:55 ►

with knees knocking.

01:27:58 ►

And just,

01:27:59 ►

it’s terrifying to me.

01:28:02 ►

I know somebody who says

01:28:03 ►

the attitude they take mushrooms with

01:28:06 ►

is that each time they pray

01:28:07 ►

that they can stand more.

01:28:11 ►

And then some people don’t feel that

01:28:15 ►

and say that it’s easy,

01:28:17 ►

that it’s silly Saiban.

01:28:19 ►

But it isn’t all silly Saiban.

01:28:22 ►

I mean, it isn’t all dancing bunnies and all that stuff.

01:28:29 ►

Do you have any idea what makes the difference between the people of those two types?

01:28:34 ►

Oh, it’s very complex.

01:28:36 ►

It’s almost an X-ray of your horoscope.

01:28:43 ►

It’s your own expectation. The time can be wrong. I’m

01:28:48 ►

convinced that if the time is wrong, you can be a saint and it will shake your teeth out,

01:28:55 ►

you know. And yet what is the wrong time? How do you find it? I used to always throw

01:29:01 ►

the I Ching going into it. And if the I Ching said, don’t do it, I just wouldn’t do it.

01:29:10 ►

There’s psychic weather.

01:29:13 ►

There’s low energy.

01:29:14 ►

There’s personal anxiety.

01:29:16 ►

There’s also even, I think, the state of the collectivity

01:29:19 ►

that, you know, go into it when half the world is on the brink of war and you know the why it’s

01:29:27 ►

complex and it’s getting more complex in there because of all this knitted together

01:29:34 ►

stuff so it’s delicate it’s like skin diving or sailing or one of these things where you have to carefully judge the initial conditions.

01:29:46 ►

The initial conditions largely determine the end state.

01:29:52 ►

And then this is what shamanism is, is this ability to judge those conditions

01:29:56 ►

and call it right.

01:29:59 ►

Ken?

01:30:00 ►

Yeah, but, uh, Dr. Jones, don’t you think that as an ayahuasca diet helps?

01:30:05 ►

Yeah, I think that what Kahn’s referring to

01:30:10 ►

is in the areas where ayahuasca is a happening thing indigenously,

01:30:18 ►

the shamans say that the diet is the real precondition for doing it

01:30:24 ►

and how long you’ve kept this diet. And yeah,

01:30:29 ►

I think that shamanism, psychedelically practiced, is the, and that by manipulating indoles

01:30:48 ►

and manipulating growth hormones

01:30:51 ►

and all of these things,

01:30:53 ►

a kind of superhuman condition becomes available.

01:30:58 ►

And this is what these people figured out

01:31:00 ►

in these climax rainforests.

01:31:02 ►

They had nothing else going.

01:31:04 ►

They weren’t into metallurgy.

01:31:06 ►

They weren’t into the purification of chemical elements.

01:31:12 ►

These other directions that we followed were alien to them.

01:31:17 ►

And what they gained was a tremendous facility

01:31:20 ►

with natural chemistry and diet

01:31:25 ►

using the human body as the primary retort,

01:31:29 ►

the baseline, the alchemical furnace

01:31:33 ►

in which all these transformations were going on.

01:31:36 ►

I’m convinced that in its native setting,

01:31:40 ►

ayahuasca is a telepathic drug.

01:31:44 ►

I mean, people, small groups of tribal people are taking this thing and

01:31:50 ►

making group decisions based on group hallucinations based on the collective database of the of the

01:32:01 ►

tribal group they’re seeing the information from a higher dimensional space,

01:32:07 ►

but this is a kind of telepathy.

01:32:13 ►

You’re listening to the Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one

01:32:18 ►

thought at a time.

01:32:21 ►

Just now we heard Terence talk about there being such a thing as psychic weather,

01:32:26 ►

and that he took it into account before he ingested a psychoactive substance.

01:32:31 ►

Well, I hope that your personal dictionary translated the words psychic weather into the more common term mindset.

01:32:40 ►

You know, whenever we talk about set and setting, the set that we are talking about is this psychic weather, which I have to say strikes me as a somewhat better term than mindset.

01:32:52 ►

For me, mindset can mean a lot of things, but I think that anyone, man or woman, who has ever been in a long-term relationship knows exactly what is meant by psychic weather.

01:33:06 ►

relationship knows exactly what is meant by psychic weather. You wouldn’t take a fragile little boat out on the ocean when a big storm was taking place, and I hope that you also wouldn’t

01:33:11 ►

take your fragile mind out onto the ocean of consciousness when there are some storm clouds

01:33:17 ►

brewing. I know from personal experience that that could be a really bad idea. Before I forget to mention it,

01:33:25 ►

I almost cut out that part where Terrence was describing

01:33:29 ►

how to obtain 5-MeO-DMT from a toad,

01:33:32 ►

because, well, it really is something that none of us should do.

01:33:36 ►

There are enough sources for this substance on the net

01:33:39 ►

that there really is no need to do potential harm to another species.

01:33:44 ►

And for more information about this,

01:33:46 ►

I highly once again recommend that you watch Shamans of the Global Village,

01:33:51 ►

which I consider to be one of the most excellent psychedelic documentaries yet made.

01:33:56 ►

And I’ve spoken about this documentary in other podcasts,

01:33:59 ►

so I’ll leave that there, but I’ll link to it in today’s program notes,

01:34:03 ►

which you can find at psychedelicsalon.com.

01:34:08 ►

Now, since yesterday was the first Sunday in the month, that means that next Sunday I will again be at the La Costa Coffee Roasters near the Carlsbad, California City Library.

01:34:20 ►

And I’ll be there at noon for the second of our second Sunday salons.

01:34:24 ►

and I’ll be there at noon for the second of our Second Sunday Salons.

01:34:27 ►

Last month was our first one and my wife and I truly enjoyed an afternoon of conversation

01:34:31 ►

with Jeremy and Cindy,

01:34:33 ►

two friends that we first met at Esalen in 2012

01:34:36 ►

when Bruce Dahmer and I led a workshop there.

01:34:39 ►

And I should mention that they actually flew into San Diego from Utah

01:34:43 ►

and in part just to get together with us once again.

01:34:48 ►

Also, there was another person there who came as well, and he actually lived here in North County with us.

01:34:53 ►

His name is Uncle Dave, and he teaches people how to soar on the flying trapeze.

01:34:58 ►

He even has one student in her 80s, so if you’re in this area, well, that may be something that you’d like to

01:35:05 ►

give a try. It was the first time that I’d met Uncle Dave, and when I learned that he taught

01:35:10 ►

trapeze, I asked if he knew fellow salonner Darren, who was involved with the trapeze theme camp at

01:35:17 ►

Burning Man. As it turns out, it was Darren who first told Dave about the salon. Now, last month,

01:35:24 ►

I got together with Darren to hear

01:35:26 ►

some of the tales of this year’s Burning Man Festival and I learned that he was on his way

01:35:31 ►

out of town to help deliver firewood to the demonstrators at Standing Rock. And if you

01:35:37 ►

haven’t been keeping up with what’s taking place on the Lakota lands at Standing Rock,

01:35:42 ►

you most certainly need to get up to speed on that action,

01:35:50 ►

no matter where in the world you’re living. As you know, indigenous people all over the world are still having what little land they have left being taken away from them. At Standing Rock,

01:35:56 ►

the dispute is between the people who have been living on that land since long before any white

01:36:02 ►

people set foot on this continent, and Big Oil.

01:36:06 ►

Once again, it’s Big Oil trying to build a pipeline on sacred ancestral grounds, which

01:36:11 ►

is not only a desecration of their tribal traditions, it will also greatly endanger

01:36:16 ►

their water supply.

01:36:18 ►

And if you pay close attention, you’ll discover that, along with indigenous people everywhere, they have become

01:36:25 ►

our first line of defense when rich white oil men decide to destroy our environment just to feed

01:36:32 ►

their insatiable greed. And this on-the-ground protest is being done on our behalf, even though

01:36:39 ►

it’s far from where most of us live. And so I applaud Darren and all of the other volunteers that now include

01:36:46 ►

several thousand military veterans who are putting themselves between the demonstrators and the

01:36:51 ►

militarized law enforcement presence that has already hospitalized many women and children

01:36:56 ►

protesters. Not all of us can do what Darren and the vets are doing, but one thing that you may be

01:37:03 ►

able to do is to check and see if your

01:37:05 ►

own local police force is one of the dozens of out-of-state policemen who are being sent to

01:37:11 ►

terrorize the demonstrators. If your community has sent some of your law enforcement people to

01:37:16 ►

interfere in that matter that is outside of your local jurisdiction, you may want to ask your local

01:37:21 ►

authorities why they’re using your tax dollars to support this militaristic takedown of peaceful protesters.

01:37:29 ►

And just because the current president,

01:37:32 ►

after many months of delay and many serious injuries to demonstrators,

01:37:37 ►

has temporarily prevented big oil goons from proceeding,

01:37:41 ►

that Trump guy has signaled that he will reverse this decision and

01:37:45 ►

let big oil take over even more of the lands of our long-suffering indigenous fellow citizens.

01:37:52 ►

I think it’s time to begin getting a little noisy.

01:37:56 ►

And for now, this is Lorenzo, signing off from cyberdelic space. Be well my friends.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

526 - History Ends In Green – Part 3

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Program Notes

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Transcript

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