527 - History Ends in Green – Part 4

Program Notes §

https://www.patreon.com/lorenzohagerty

Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

http://astore.amazon.com/matrixmasterscom/detail/0692353496Date this lecture was recorded: September 1990

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]

“It’s really true that the world at any moment could come completely and utterly apart. Have you seen that happen?”

“The whole impetus for my career is to convince myself that somebody else has seen the same thing, and that they can’t believe it either.”

“The one thing they tell you it isn’t, it is! It is! It is made of magic, anything can happen.”

“There’s nothing holding any of us back from becoming unrecognizable, not only to our friends and loved ones, but to ourselves.”

More Joy Less Pain:
The Life of Peter Gorman
A documentary film about Peter Gorman by James Michael McCoy.

Previous Episode §

526 - History Ends In Green – Part 3

Next Episode §

528 - History Ends In Green – Part 5

Similar Episodes §

• 386 - Loose Ends Time - score: 0.91123
• 566 - A Tribe of Selves - score: 0.90209
• 484 - This is the Mushroom’s Program - score: 0.89522
• 526 - History Ends In Green – Part 3 - score: 0.89209
• 028 - In the Valley of Novelty (Part 2) - score: 0.89160
• 486 - The Main Vein of the Peculiar - score: 0.88982
• 574 - Countdown Into Complexity – Part 2 - score: 0.88631
• 381 - A Stiff Dose of Psychedelics - score: 0.88603
• 310 - Introduction to the Valley of Novelty Workshop - score: 0.88327
• 538 - Are Psychedelics Spiritual_ - score: 0.87995

Transcript §

00:00:00 ► §

Greetings from Cyberdelic Space.

00:00:19 ► §

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

00:00:23 ► §

And right now, I’d like to thank fellow salonners Charles V. and Michael B.,

00:00:29 ► §

who recently made donations to the salon that will be used to keep us keeping on.

00:00:35 ► §

I really appreciate your support, Charles and Michael.

00:00:39 ► §

Now, getting on with today’s program,

00:00:42 ► §

we’re going to get to hear the fourth tape in the series titled History Ends in Green,

00:00:47 ► §

which is a Terrence McKenna workshop that was recorded in September of 1990.

00:00:53 ► §

I know that I sometimes try to connect something that Terrence said a long time ago with our situation here in 2016.

00:01:01 ► §

But you have to admit that in a few minutes when you hear him say,

00:01:06 ► §

it’s really true that the world at any moment could come completely and utterly apart.

00:01:12 ► §

Have you seen that happen? Well, when you hear him say that, it seems to me that we have to think

00:01:19 ► §

that perhaps some of the things that he is talking about are still very much worth taking into account.

00:01:30 ► §

But for what it’s worth, I think that we’re still a long way from having our world come completely apart. But of course, that’s most likely because I sat out the recent presidential

00:01:37 ► §

election here in the States, and so I’m not really emotionally attached to any particular

00:01:42 ► §

outcome. Some people, of course, are now acting as if the

00:01:46 ► §

world has already come apart. Little do they realize that the coming apart has only just begun,

00:01:53 ► §

and not a moment too soon, I should add. And I’ll leave you on your own to try and

00:01:59 ► §

dig out the meaning of what I just said. Now, here’s more Terrence McKenna.

00:02:04 ► §

out the meaning of what I just said. Now, here’s more Terence McKenna.

00:02:11 ► §

Do you think there’s any possible connection between this phenomenon and reincarnation?

00:02:13 ► §

And what?

00:02:14 ► §

Reincarnation.

00:02:21 ► §

Well, we talked a little bit this morning about the relationship of these ideas to death and how shamans claim that they’re seeing into a world of souls.

00:02:28 ► §

I don’t know.

00:02:30 ► §

I find it…

00:02:32 ► §

The thing which really got me is the presence of these English-speaking entities in the trance.

00:02:43 ► §

I mean, that I did not expect. From Jung and from Freud, you expect residual memories, but not these entities, these beings. And then the question is, where are they? Who are they well a conservative the possibilities are fairly limited

00:03:07 ► §

they are either dead people

00:03:10 ► §

because they are clearly more like people

00:03:14 ► §

than like animals

00:03:15 ► §

they after all speak and communicate

00:03:17 ► §

and have intentionality

00:03:19 ► §

in a purely intellectual realm

00:03:22 ► §

so that means they’re like people

00:03:24 ► §

but they’re not like anybody you’ve ever seen.

00:03:26 ► §

So are they dead people?

00:03:28 ► §

That’s one possibility.

00:03:30 ► §

Or are they extraterrestrials?

00:03:33 ► §

Well, that’s another possibility,

00:03:35 ► §

but the problem is we’ve never seen an extraterrestrial.

00:03:38 ► §

We’ve got dead people all over the place.

00:03:41 ► §

We know that there are dead people,

00:03:44 ► §

but we don’t know if anything survives bodily death.

00:03:47 ► §

Well, then the other source is,

00:03:50 ► §

are they from the future?

00:03:52 ► §

Are they future people?

00:03:55 ► §

We see people now,

00:03:57 ► §

so we can extrapolate there must be people in the future.

00:04:00 ► §

They might be different from us.

00:04:02 ► §

Perhaps they could come back.

00:04:03 ► §

So those are the fairly

00:04:05 ► §

uncomfortable and limited choices

00:04:07 ► §

they’re either an advanced state

00:04:09 ► §

of humanity, they’re the

00:04:11 ► §

souls of the dead

00:04:13 ► §

or they’re some kind of extraterrestrial

00:04:16 ► §

dwellers in a parallel

00:04:17 ► §

continuum

00:04:18 ► §

well now you’re supposed to generate

00:04:21 ► §

hypotheses conservatively

00:04:24 ► §

that means that the dead lead by a mile,

00:04:29 ► §

just by logical deduction.

00:04:34 ► §

So the strangest hypothesis turns out to be the least,

00:04:38 ► §

the most likely that these are the souls of the dead

00:04:41 ► §

and it’s possible that reincarnation

00:04:45 ► §

is something where at a certain point

00:04:47 ► §

in historical time

00:04:48 ► §

we find out about it.

00:04:51 ► §

We learn literally the secrets of death.

00:04:55 ► §

I mean, this would be big news.

00:04:57 ► §

It would be quite a surprise

00:04:59 ► §

in the forward thrust of scientific rationalism

00:05:03 ► §

if what it was going to lead to was

00:05:05 ► §

opening a communication

00:05:08 ► §

line to the

00:05:09 ► §

ancestors.

00:05:11 ► §

Do you see, for instance,

00:05:14 ► §

use of

00:05:16 ► §

psychedelics moving in a ceremonial

00:05:18 ► §

or ritual fashion in a way of creating

00:05:19 ► §

new ways of coming together as people to heal

00:05:22 ► §

that circle of the shield?

00:05:24 ► §

Well, where it’s most enduring, I think this is how it ends up being done.

00:05:29 ► §

People do the work on their own, but then they tend to form into circles.

00:05:36 ► §

This is how I think the serious psychedelic voyaging gets done

00:05:41 ► §

because the circle gives people permission and courage

00:05:46 ► §

if we had

00:05:48 ► §

an unbroken cultural tradition

00:05:50 ► §

we would be initiated

00:05:52 ► §

by master shamans

00:05:54 ► §

as it is

00:05:55 ► §

we’ve had to sort of reinvent

00:05:57 ► §

the whole of the world’s

00:06:00 ► §

oldest religion

00:06:01 ► §

and we haven’t done

00:06:03 ► §

that bad a job I mean we shouldn’t feel that we

00:06:09 ► §

have to fault ourselves the anthropological literature of the world is vast and if you

00:06:16 ► §

spend time with it you will know more about these things on a certain level than most people in a traditional culture. It was very

00:06:28 ► §

interesting being in the Amazon. You would go with the people and they would show you their plants

00:06:34 ► §

and then and it might come up that you would say, did you know that the Konebo, who live 50 miles away from you, also use this plant and they call it X.

00:06:48 ► §

And they would just be astonished.

00:06:51 ► §

Say, how do you know this?

00:06:53 ► §

Well, you couldn’t explain that you had read it

00:06:55 ► §

in a Harvard Museum botanical leaflet,

00:06:59 ► §

but that was how you knew it.

00:07:01 ► §

You knew it because you’d done your homework.

00:07:04 ► §

So what they had was tremendous vertical initiation into one culture but what you can bring

00:07:11 ► §

to this that is very useful and respected is a tremendous general

00:07:16 ► §

knowledge about this say well did you know that in Africa people use the same

00:07:21 ► §

plant and they do it like this or did you know that in Indonesia similar practices are going on

00:07:28 ► §

and so we’ve reconstructed a shamanism

00:07:32 ► §

but from then spending time with ayahuasqueros in the Amazon

00:07:39 ► §

and other kinds of shamans in other places

00:07:42 ► §

I really see that it wasn’t as formal as we thought.

00:07:48 ► §

There are rituals and songs and techniques,

00:07:52 ► §

but the spirit of shamanism is open-minded and open-ended.

00:08:00 ► §

And these people are really doing this out of curiosity to find out the mythological structures

00:08:11 ► §

created by any kind of shamanic system

00:08:15 ► §

are largely for the consumption of the client,

00:08:19 ► §

not the shaman.

00:08:21 ► §

The shaman knows that this is all provisional.

00:08:24 ► §

And what we found with the shamans in the Amazon not the shaman. The shaman knows that this is all provisional.

00:08:27 ► §

And what we found with the shamans in the Amazon was great curiosity,

00:08:30 ► §

great willingness to try out novel concepts,

00:08:35 ► §

to integrate weird ideas into their own cosmology,

00:08:40 ► §

electromagnetism,

00:08:42 ► §

viruses,

00:08:46 ► §

computers.

00:08:50 ► §

They loved all these things because they saw them as metaphors that they could integrate into their visions.

00:08:53 ► §

The flying saucer is a metaphor like this,

00:08:56 ► §

very strong in the ayahuasca mythology.

00:09:01 ► §

Liz, did you want to say something?

00:09:03 ► §

You said earlier today or yesterday

00:09:05 ► §

sometimes, and that’s why I have to write things down, the domain

00:09:09 ► §

in which we operate lies within our minds. And I’d like to

00:09:12 ► §

know how that, I’m always confused about

00:09:15 ► §

real and not real.

00:09:17 ► §

All these realities you’ve been describing with little elves, etc.,

00:09:21 ► §

etc., is that within your mind? And is the English, because

00:09:23 ► §

that’s the language you’re most familiar with?

00:09:26 ► §

Well, I think what I meant

00:09:28 ► §

when I said the domains

00:09:29 ► §

in which we operate

00:09:30 ► §

are all within our minds

00:09:32 ► §

is that inside culture

00:09:36 ► §

it’s all whatever we say it is.

00:09:39 ► §

In other words,

00:09:40 ► §

other than that it’s day and night,

00:09:44 ► §

nature doesn’t say much to us

00:09:47 ► §

we pursue our activities

00:09:49 ► §

all inside

00:09:51 ► §

a construct of culture

00:09:56 ► §

that comes out of language

00:09:58 ► §

so that’s what I meant when I said

00:10:02 ► §

that it’s all within the domain of our minds.

00:10:06 ► §

I mean, it’s all within the human world and potentially affected by the human mind.

00:10:14 ► §

The problem of real and unreal, which is supposed to be a naive problem, is one I have too. I think that the real world

00:10:26 ► §

is so strange

00:10:29 ► §

that it’s just almost too freakish to suppose.

00:10:35 ► §

You know, I quote all the time J.B.S. Haldane

00:10:38 ► §

who said,

00:10:39 ► §

the world is not only stranger than we suppose,

00:10:42 ► §

it’s stranger than we can suppose.

00:10:45 ► §

This is a tremendous liberation not only stranger than we suppose, it’s stranger than we can suppose.

00:10:48 ► §

This is a tremendous liberation once you grab onto it.

00:10:50 ► §

It’s really true.

00:10:52 ► §

I mean, how many of you know that?

00:10:55 ► §

That it’s really true

00:10:58 ► §

that the world at any moment

00:11:00 ► §

could come completely and utterly apart.

00:11:04 ► §

And have you seen that happen?

00:11:07 ► §

You know, that’s really what I’m concerned to communicate

00:11:12 ► §

is the provisional nature of reality.

00:11:15 ► §

It does have a certain momentum, and thank God for it,

00:11:19 ► §

because, you know, who could stand it

00:11:21 ► §

if it were always coming unglued?

00:11:23 ► §

But on the other hand, you know, if you’re an edge runner,

00:11:27 ► §

if you keep poking, there are these things you can do,

00:11:31 ► §

and then it just springs to pieces.

00:11:34 ► §

And I don’t say it’s all lies.

00:11:36 ► §

It doesn’t seem to operate in the domain of truth and lies.

00:11:41 ► §

It’s just that this is all just such a limited slice to what’s possible.

00:11:48 ► §

That was very liberating for me to find out. I remember the first time I smoked DMT and when I

00:11:55 ► §

came down, they practically had to hog-time me. And all I could say was, I can’t believe it.

00:12:07 ► §

I cannot believe it.

00:12:10 ► §

And I couldn’t. I still can’t.

00:12:16 ► §

I mean, the whole impetus for my career is to convince myself that somebody else has seen the same thing

00:12:18 ► §

and that they can’t believe it either.

00:12:22 ► §

Because, you know know it’s so weird

00:12:26 ► §

that it always floats to the top

00:12:28 ► §

it always calms down

00:12:30 ► §

and turns back into this

00:12:32 ► §

you know rooms full of

00:12:34 ► §

people sitting listening

00:12:36 ► §

but

00:12:37 ► §

beneath that

00:12:40 ► §

beneath that is just

00:12:42 ► §

this really

00:12:43 ► §

unspeakably bizarre thing, not as we’re told it should

00:12:49 ► §

be, not, in fact, as we’re told it isn’t. The one thing they tell you it isn’t, it is,

00:12:56 ► §

it is, it is made of magic. Anything can happen. I mean, these, to have elves by the thousands pouring into your

00:13:05 ► §

apartment

00:13:05 ► §

how can

00:13:06 ► §

a rational

00:13:07 ► §

what is a

00:13:08 ► §

person to

00:13:09 ► §

do with

00:13:10 ► §

that

00:13:10 ► §

you know

00:13:11 ► §

because

00:13:12 ► §

it’s

00:13:12 ► §

that what

00:13:13 ► §

happens

00:13:14 ► §

is that

00:13:14 ► §

in a

00:13:15 ► §

single

00:13:15 ► §

moment

00:13:16 ► §

in the

00:13:17 ► §

privacy

00:13:18 ► §

of your

00:13:18 ► §

own

00:13:19 ► §

reality

00:13:19 ► §

it’s

00:13:20 ► §

revealed

00:13:21 ► §

to you

00:13:21 ► §

that all

00:13:22 ► §

of history

00:13:23 ► §

is a

00:13:24 ► §

mistake a delusion, a horrible misunderstanding,

00:13:27 ► §

but you’re given no evidence, only the conviction that this is so.

00:13:33 ► §

And then you’re set down among your fellows, and they don’t know what you’re talking about,

00:13:40 ► §

can’t understand why you’ve become so agitated and addled.

00:13:44 ► §

And I think this is what we all as psychedelic people live with.

00:13:49 ► §

And we suspect each other.

00:13:52 ► §

We can’t be sure that anybody has ever really seen

00:13:56 ► §

the true naked heart of the stone but ourselves.

00:14:01 ► §

And so then it’s this tremendous catalyst to language

00:14:05 ► §

to try and build metaphors

00:14:07 ► §

to try and get the nod of recognition

00:14:09 ► §

so that we are satisfied

00:14:12 ► §

it’s not really stranger than the real world

00:14:16 ► §

it is the real world

00:14:20 ► §

I mean the so called real world

00:14:22 ► §

well it’s more brightly colored.

00:14:28 ► §

It’s moving faster.

00:14:31 ► §

Why is it so brightly colored?

00:14:34 ► §

Why is it moving faster?

00:14:36 ► §

What I’ve noticed in my DMT experiences,

00:14:39 ► §

and when I realized this,

00:14:41 ► §

it was with a certain amount of horror,

00:14:44 ► §

was you break into this space

00:14:47 ► §

it’s dome like

00:14:49 ► §

it’s warm, it’s diffusely lit

00:14:53 ► §

there are all these self transforming machine elves

00:14:56 ► §

and their toys which also are singing

00:14:59 ► §

and condensing and making objects

00:15:02 ► §

and so forth and so on

00:15:03 ► §

the whole thing triggers just wonder,

00:15:07 ► §

cascades of wonder.

00:15:09 ► §

But then I realized after seeing this several times

00:15:13 ► §

and trying to pay attention and hold my mind steady

00:15:17 ► §

that this is someone’s idea

00:15:20 ► §

of a reassuring environment for human beings.

00:15:30 ► §

It is in fact literally a playpen of some sort.

00:15:38 ► §

Well, that means that I’m not seeing who’s ever on the other side. I am emerging into an artificial construct of some sort, entirely their creation. Well, then it just begins to lift this veil

00:15:45 ► §

and this howling begins

00:15:48 ► §

and you just begin to fall forward into it

00:15:51 ► §

and you realize, you know,

00:15:52 ► §

it is the Sephiroth and the Shekinah.

00:15:55 ► §

It is the howling between the worlds.

00:15:58 ► §

But it is approached through an infinite number of veils

00:16:03 ► §

that reassure, coddle, control, confine. But you can move toward

00:16:11 ► §

it as fast as you dare. But it is entirely transforming and entirely real. It was a great realization for me to understand

00:16:25 ► §

that there was no limit to how far you could go,

00:16:32 ► §

that we all make a certain choice.

00:16:35 ► §

Once you discover psychedelics,

00:16:38 ► §

always before that spiritual progress is,

00:16:42 ► §

you know, grunt work,

00:16:44 ► §

suddenly you’re standing on ice cubes spiritual progress is grunt work suddenly

00:16:45 ► §

you’re standing on ice cubes

00:16:48 ► §

in terms of

00:16:49 ► §

spiritual progress and how you

00:16:52 ► §

make it, how do you control

00:16:54 ► §

it and the answer is most

00:16:55 ► §

people go a certain distance and

00:16:58 ► §

then give up, get off

00:17:00 ► §

stand there and talk

00:17:02 ► §

about it but there’s

00:17:04 ► §

nothing holding any of us back from becoming

00:17:07 ► §

unrecognizable, not only to our friends and loved ones, but to ourselves. You know the

00:17:14 ► §

stories told of the Taoist guy up on Cold Mountain, and he’s been up there 25 years,

00:17:21 ► §

and occasionally people see him, and yes, he’s still alive. Well, any one

00:17:27 ► §

of us could become that person, could march off into a dimension of magical narcissism

00:17:37 ► §

so alien to the concerns of other people that we would have to go and live up on the crags and in the mist and eat bird nests or whatever they do up there.

00:17:48 ► §

So then that puts a whole different light on the spiritual quest

00:17:54 ► §

because it means that we’re holding it back

00:17:58 ► §

rather than lashing it forward to ever greater exertion.

00:18:05 ► §

And I think that’s the proper attitude,

00:18:10 ► §

because the depth of spirit is infinite,

00:18:15 ► §

and in its benevolence towards suffering humanity,

00:18:19 ► §

it has made itself available in infinite amounts.

00:18:24 ► §

So then it’s for us to somehow come to terms with this.

00:18:30 ► §

It’s like having a living religion.

00:18:33 ► §

It is having a living religion

00:18:35 ► §

because it’s having an infinite source of gnosis,

00:18:40 ► §

of understanding available.

00:18:44 ► §

Somebody, yes.

00:18:45 ► §

A book that was recently written about meditation

00:18:48 ► §

has a preview for death.

00:18:50 ► §

It says that it conditions you to enter the bardo

00:18:53 ► §

so you won’t shy away from the idea of going to a cliff.

00:18:56 ► §

Do you see any role of meditation as a preparation?

00:19:00 ► §

You said deluxe, or would you just talk about meditation

00:19:02 ► §

and your opinion of it in general?

00:19:05 ► §

Well, it teaches you to sit still,

00:19:08 ► §

which is a precondition for psychedelics.

00:19:12 ► §

I mean, you know, keeping still

00:19:14 ► §

is one of the hexagrams of the I Ching.

00:19:18 ► §

People often ask the question you asked

00:19:20 ► §

or in slightly different forms, they say,

00:19:23 ► §

well, isn’t there another way to get there

00:19:25 ► §

is it so narrow is it so specific to these plants and you know the truth is i don’t know i’m not an

00:19:35 ► §

expert all i know is based on my experience in my experience these things can only be approached this way, and who would want to approach them any other way?

00:19:48 ► §

We don’t want this to become so generalized

00:19:51 ► §

that by closing your eyes and ripping off a few om-tots-sots,

00:19:56 ► §

you fall into the kind of states I’m talking about.

00:19:59 ► §

That would be extremely unwelcome and nearly pathological. I don’t understand this problem with how you

00:20:09 ► §

achieve it. To my mind, obviously you can’t do it by yourself. Obviously you can’t do

00:20:17 ► §

it on the natch because it’s a meeting with another entity. There has to be an other and it has to be objectified even if it’s

00:20:28 ► §

as a plant or a mushroom. So basically how I read these meditation texts is they teach you about

00:20:37 ► §

psychological phenomena. They teach you what you may see when you close your eyes and sit for days and watch.

00:20:47 ► §

The thing about meditation in my own experience is that it’s just tremendously boring.

00:20:53 ► §

However, everything you’re doing will be very useful to you when you take a psychedelic.

00:21:00 ► §

Then it works.

00:21:02 ► §

Then there is this flow of imagery

00:21:06 ► §

I am maybe a very lumpen person

00:21:09 ► §

but that’s alright because a lot of us are lumpen

00:21:12 ► §

and I wish to speak for that slice

00:21:16 ► §

there may be supremest thetes

00:21:20 ► §

balanced on such razor’s edge

00:21:23 ► §

of metabolic peculiarity

00:21:25 ► §

that at every moment they are at one with the mystery.

00:21:30 ► §

But that butters no bread for the rest of us.

00:21:33 ► §

We’re trying to create a kind of democratic consensus here about this stuff.

00:21:40 ► §

And it seems to me the plants were put there for this purpose

00:21:44 ► §

and they achieve it so easily.

00:21:47 ► §

I mean, I practiced yoga at times in the past

00:21:51 ► §

and had some amount of success with triggering exotic psychological states.

00:22:00 ► §

But they were very difficult and time-consuming.

00:22:04 ► §

And then they always told you that wasn’t what it was about anyway,

00:22:07 ► §

and you were becoming distracted by phenomena.

00:22:11 ► §

Well, why bridle then at just chowing down on five grams of mushrooms

00:22:17 ► §

with the knowledge that you’ll be fine in 12 hours?

00:22:22 ► §

So it’s really a matter of using the tools. There are all kinds of altered states,

00:22:29 ► §

weird states, states of sexual abstinence and states of various kinds of agitation and this

00:22:39 ► §

and that. But what I’m interested in is just this very specific set of phenomena,

00:22:45 ► §

and I don’t really make any claim for it to say, you know,

00:22:49 ► §

this is the spiritual path.

00:22:51 ► §

I don’t say that.

00:22:52 ► §

What I say is this is the most interesting thing around.

00:22:57 ► §

But it’s very specific.

00:23:00 ► §

For instance, I don’t like drugs which mess with your mind in the sense of that distort

00:23:08 ► §

your value assessing ability. The drug which comes to mind is ketamine. Ketamine is an extremely

00:23:19 ► §

powerful synthetic drug that creates an experience which if you haven’t had ketamine you don’t know what this experience is it’s that specific to it

00:23:29 ► §

but hell the house could burn down around you and it would arrive as an

00:23:36 ► §

unconfirmable rumor on the dark side of your metaphysical imagination with this

00:23:42 ► §

stuff I mean you would never lift a hair, it would never

00:23:46 ► §

enter your mind that there was a problem.

00:23:48 ► §

Detoura

00:23:49 ► §

is like this too. Detoura

00:23:52 ► §

severely distorts

00:23:53 ► §

reality. The day I knew

00:23:56 ► §

that my experiments with Detoura

00:23:58 ► §

had come to an end was one day

00:23:59 ► §

in Nepal. I was

00:24:01 ► §

talking to a friend of mine in the

00:24:04 ► §

market about his Detourour experiments and how much he’d been taking recently.

00:24:09 ► §

And in the course of the conversation, it came out that he thought we were in his apartment.

00:24:16 ► §

And I realized, looking at this poor soul, that there had been severe degradation of core information processing

00:24:26 ► §

and that we had to get back on the wagon

00:24:29 ► §

or we weren’t going to get out of there.

00:24:33 ► §

But so then let me describe for a moment

00:24:37 ► §

the state of mind on DMT is if you keep your…

00:24:42 ► §

There is a tendency to give way to absolute astonishment.

00:24:47 ► §

But if you can hold that back

00:24:50 ► §

and pay very close attention to what’s going on,

00:24:53 ► §

you will discover that it didn’t do anything to you.

00:24:58 ► §

That here you are suddenly in the midst

00:25:01 ► §

of a raging universe of hallucination

00:25:04 ► §

and you are you. And you are who you were before,

00:25:09 ► §

and it has not in any way inflated, repressed, suppressed, distorted, or skewed anything.

00:25:17 ► §

You’re just saying, aha, wow, I’m really smashed.

00:25:23 ► §

hmm, I’m really smashed.

00:25:28 ► §

The input is reaching overload,

00:25:32 ► §

but there must be this core observer who’s never overwhelmed.

00:25:33 ► §

And this persists with most of the tryptamines.

00:25:37 ► §

Now, sometimes it is overwhelmed,

00:25:39 ► §

but when it’s overwhelmed,

00:25:41 ► §

it’s the last thing to be overwhelmed

00:25:44 ► §

and the first thing to pop back into existence

00:25:48 ► §

at the end of the period of overwhelmment.

00:25:51 ► §

So sometimes on ayahuasca, you just lose it for a period of time,

00:25:57 ► §

20 minutes or something.

00:25:58 ► §

But then you reconstruct and you’re there like a little cork

00:26:03 ► §

popping up to the top of the

00:26:05 ► §

ocean say oh here I am it’s me again so this is very important to be able to

00:26:14 ► §

observe with DMT the reason it’s so fascinating is because the input the

00:26:20 ► §

content seems to be almost entirely confined to the visual cortex it’s something that you look

00:26:28 ► §

at and it comes toward you and it relates to you there is a weird distortion of body image but it’s

00:26:35 ► §

small potatoes compared to most of what’s going on and you can maintain this I-thou relationship.

00:26:49 ► §

So my tastes may be narrower than some people.

00:26:52 ► §

Some people just like to get fucked up.

00:26:56 ► §

And they go one way and then another and a few reds and a shot of this

00:26:58 ► §

and a hit of that.

00:27:01 ► §

There’s really nothing to be frightened about with the elves. I mean, it sounds like they could be demons’re demonic they’ve never done anything bad to me

00:27:15 ► §

it’s that their humor it’s like being trapped in a Bugs Bunny cartoon we all know how funny a Bugs Bunny cartoon is

00:27:27 ► §

but have you noticed that the humor is all based on

00:27:29 ► §

explosions, falling anvils and agony

00:27:33 ► §

and so imagine if you were actually

00:27:36 ► §

in a Bugs Bunny cartoon

00:27:38 ► §

it’s a parody

00:27:42 ► §

of that situation

00:27:44 ► §

I don’t know the vibe of these creatures It’s a parody of that situation.

00:27:50 ► §

I don’t know the vibe of these creatures is very strange.

00:27:51 ► §

They’re knowledge holders. Like I’ve often thought that what they were was meme traders

00:27:56 ► §

because they had the same feeling that I associated with the Indian hashish traders.

00:28:02 ► §

They’re meme traders.

00:28:04 ► §

When they spread out all this stuff in front of you and are saying, the Indian hashish traders. They’re meme traders. They are,

00:28:07 ► §

when they spread out all this stuff in front of you and are saying,

00:28:08 ► §

look at this,

00:28:09 ► §

look at this,

00:28:10 ► §

these marvelous jeweled objects,

00:28:12 ► §

these are things they are selling.

00:28:15 ► §

They want to trade.

00:28:17 ► §

They’re asking,

00:28:18 ► §

what have you got?

00:28:19 ► §

You know,

00:28:20 ► §

what can you show us?

00:28:22 ► §

Your Rolex,

00:28:24 ► §

your fountain pen,

00:28:26 ► §

your political beliefs,

00:28:28 ► §

your sexual orientation.

00:28:30 ► §

What do you want to trade?

00:28:33 ► §

So they’re sort of like cosmic pack rats.

00:28:37 ► §

Pack rats will take something,

00:28:41 ► §

but they always leave something.

00:28:43 ► §

Have you ever dealt with pack rats?

00:28:46 ► §

Oh, pack rats are fascinating

00:28:47 ► §

because if one finds you,

00:28:51 ► §

it will leave an object in trade for whatever it takes.

00:28:57 ► §

And the trick is to work it your way, you know.

00:29:01 ► §

So you give it a paper clip,

00:29:03 ► §

it gives you a fountain pen and there

00:29:05 ► §

are stories in the gold country of

00:29:08 ► §

Colorado and California of people having

00:29:11 ► §

relationships with pack rats where they

00:29:13 ► §

were trading at thumbtacks and it was

00:29:16 ► §

bringing them gold nuggets until you

00:29:19 ► §

know they had enough gold nuggets that

00:29:21 ► §

they could leave off trading with

00:29:23 ► §

varmints and get a life

00:29:25 ► §

laughter

00:29:27 ► §

yes

00:29:30 ► §

laughter

00:29:31 ► §

from your experience of other

00:29:35 ► §

I’ve told you about psychedelics

00:29:37 ► §

do they always make people

00:29:39 ► §

kinder and gentler

00:29:40 ► §

do psychedelics always make people

00:29:44 ► §

kinder and gentler laughter do they make us kinder and gentler? Do psychedelics always make people kinder and gentler?

00:29:46 ► §

Do they make us kinder and gentler?

00:29:50 ► §

Well, that’s an interesting question.

00:29:52 ► §

I mean, as I get older,

00:29:53 ► §

I ask it slightly differently of myself.

00:29:57 ► §

I ask the question, you know,

00:29:59 ► §

if this stuff is so great,

00:30:02 ► §

you know, what is so great about us that

00:30:05 ► §

we’re any different from anybody else?

00:30:08 ► §

Or are we just like holy rollers

00:30:10 ► §

and rolfers and Taoists

00:30:12 ► §

and Hasidic Jews

00:30:13 ► §

and everybody else who thinks they’ve

00:30:16 ► §

found the final answer?

00:30:18 ► §

What is so great about

00:30:20 ► §

it?

00:30:22 ► §

The answer to your question

00:30:23 ► §

is I don’t think so. I think of the Yanomami Yanomami culture

00:30:30 ► §

certainly from the exterior this looks like a fairly brutal culture the men it’s the only

00:30:37 ► §

culture where DMT is a regularly abused drug and the men blasted up each other’s nostrils with these hollow tubes and then the

00:30:49 ► §

name of the game is two guys square off and you plant your feet flat on the ground and the guy

00:30:58 ► §

who goes first hits the other guy as hard as he can with the flat of his palm in the chest

00:31:05 ► §

and the game is to knock the person over

00:31:09 ► §

so you absorb this blow

00:31:11 ► §

and then it’s your turn

00:31:13 ► §

and you get up and you do it

00:31:16 ► §

and these two guys totally loaded

00:31:18 ► §

saliva flying to the four winds

00:31:21 ► §

will stand and do this

00:31:23 ► §

until somebody has knocked off their pins.

00:31:26 ► §

Well, so then you ask them,

00:31:28 ► §

what’s going on here?

00:31:30 ► §

You know, is this like the Super Bowl?

00:31:32 ► §

Is this fun for you guys?

00:31:34 ► §

And they explain that they have demons

00:31:38 ► §

that live in their chest,

00:31:41 ► §

and they collect these demons

00:31:43 ► §

on their psychedelic trips

00:31:45 ► §

and the more demons you have

00:31:47 ► §

the harder it is to knock you over

00:31:49 ► §

so they’re doing this thing

00:31:51 ► §

but they’re also lacerating

00:31:53 ► §

each other with clubs

00:31:55 ► §

and this sort of thing

00:31:56 ► §

I think that it’s

00:31:58 ► §

fouled up

00:32:00 ► §

I have the faith

00:32:01 ► §

that if you have

00:32:04 ► §

psychedelic religious ritual in

00:32:10 ► §

combination with group sex in a small

00:32:15 ► §

tribal group whose economy is based on

00:32:18 ► §

nomadic pastoralism that then it will be

00:32:22 ► §

very very hard for these people to

00:32:24 ► §

maintain a neurotic lifestyle.

00:32:27 ► §

But that if you interfere with any of this, then you’ll get anxiety.

00:32:33 ► §

And so you have psychedelic cultures, but the Yanomamo,

00:32:37 ► §

this is a culture of male dominance and sexual anxiety and a lot of tweaked stuff.

00:32:46 ► §

But I think that the main thing is that the cultural group

00:32:54 ► §

must take the psychedelic frequently enough that the ego does not form,

00:33:00 ► §

and that the specific manifestation of ego that you want to watch out for

00:33:05 ► §

is concern for male paternity.

00:33:08 ► §

That once it’s gone that far, it’s lost.

00:33:12 ► §

Because then there’s male-male rivalry

00:33:16 ► §

for women and territory.

00:33:21 ► §

Yeah.

00:33:22 ► §

I’d like to go back to the Irish elves for a second.

00:33:26 ► §

My wife came across an article, she’s Irish,

00:33:32 ► §

and came across an article last year

00:33:35 ► §

drawing a loose connection between the ancient sweat houses

00:33:40 ► §

and the possibility of seasonal ceremonial use of shrooms.

00:33:46 ► §

We sent you that article.

00:33:48 ► §

I remember that article.

00:33:49 ► §

I was wondering if you followed that up

00:33:51 ► §

in light of your having written the introduction to the reissue of shrooms.

00:33:57 ► §

The Celtic faith, or the fairy faith in Celtic countries.

00:34:00 ► §

Well, it would be very interesting to prove psilocybin use

00:34:06 ► §

in ancient Ireland.

00:34:09 ► §

That people who have been

00:34:10 ► §

to places like Ionia

00:34:12 ► §

and like that

00:34:13 ► §

say they’re just overrun

00:34:16 ► §

with mushrooms.

00:34:18 ► §

And yet it’s not explicit

00:34:19 ► §

in any Celtic source.

00:34:25 ► §

There’s a lot of psilocybe in Europe.

00:34:28 ► §

I mean, I was surprised.

00:34:30 ► §

I thought that it occurred rarely,

00:34:33 ► §

and so you could make the argument

00:34:35 ► §

that it was possibly there.

00:34:37 ► §

But last year when I did a speaking tour of Germany

00:34:41 ► §

and we were from Hamburg clear down to Munich

00:34:44 ► §

and into Switzerland

00:34:45 ► §

everywhere there were mushrooms

00:34:48 ► §

and we would talk like

00:34:50 ► §

we’re talking here and then have lunch

00:34:52 ► §

recess and people would come

00:34:54 ► §

back two hours later with small

00:34:56 ► §

grocery bags full of these things

00:34:58 ► §

well I don’t understand

00:35:00 ► §

the peculiar

00:35:01 ► §

there must be

00:35:04 ► §

something we don’t quite

00:35:06 ► §

grok about why

00:35:08 ► §

the mushroom image is taboo

00:35:10 ► §

maybe because it

00:35:12 ► §

looks like a penis

00:35:13 ► §

but that doesn’t really sound

00:35:16 ► §

right to me

00:35:17 ► §

but why is it so rarely portrayed

00:35:20 ► §

in all these areas where it

00:35:22 ► §

must have been used for instance

00:35:23 ► §

in the northwest coast of Oregon and Washington,

00:35:28 ► §

there are something like 22 indigenous species of psilocybe,

00:35:31 ► §

no anthropological record of mushroom use

00:35:34 ► §

by the northwest coast Indians

00:35:36 ► §

who were clearly paying attention.

00:35:39 ► §

I mean, when you look at their carving and painting,

00:35:41 ► §

they were paying attention.

00:35:43 ► §

Where is the record of the mushroom use?

00:35:46 ► §

In ancient Ireland,

00:35:49 ► §

and throughout the Celtic area,

00:35:51 ► §

into Germany and Bohemia,

00:35:54 ► §

no visible use of mushrooms.

00:35:57 ► §

In the culture of old Europe

00:35:59 ► §

that Maria Gambutis talks about,

00:36:01 ► §

again, a prohibition of the image.

00:36:03 ► §

So this is puzzling,

00:36:05 ► §

not easy to understand.

00:36:08 ► §

I would like to believe

00:36:10 ► §

that in Africa 15,000 years ago,

00:36:13 ► §

the primary religion of humanity

00:36:17 ► §

was goddess-worshipping pastoralism

00:36:21 ► §

based on sacramental use of mushrooms.

00:36:24 ► §

But again, the physical evidence is just a few petroglyphs,

00:36:29 ► §

drawings on stone,

00:36:31 ► §

and it isn’t a strongly proven case,

00:36:36 ► §

so it’s not well understood.

00:36:40 ► §

It’s hard to believe that the Irish weren’t mixed up in this somehow.

00:36:45 ► §

I mean, it seems so basic to the Irish soul.

00:36:50 ► §

How many grams of mushrooms do you recommend taking?

00:36:54 ► §

Five dried grams.

00:36:56 ► §

And you should weigh it.

00:36:58 ► §

You should invest in a little scale and weigh it

00:37:00 ► §

because people eyeball it

00:37:02 ► §

and they inevitably choose much less

00:37:05 ► §

than is the correct amount.

00:37:08 ► §

And if you’re taking fresh mushrooms,

00:37:10 ► §

you should take like 60 grams

00:37:12 ► §

because it dries down by a factor of more than 9 to 1.

00:37:18 ► §

You’re referring to Cubensis?

00:37:20 ► §

Cubensis.

00:37:21 ► §

We’re always talking about Staphyra Cubensis

00:37:23 ► §

because that’s the one people cultivate

00:37:25 ► §

some of the wild ones

00:37:28 ► §

are stronger

00:37:29 ► §

can be taken in smaller

00:37:32 ► §

amounts but I think it’s

00:37:34 ► §

good to take Stropharia Cubensis

00:37:36 ► §

because then you know what you’re getting

00:37:37 ► §

because it’s, you know, some of these

00:37:40 ► §

small

00:37:42 ► §

psilocybes look

00:37:44 ► §

physically very much like galerina species

00:37:47 ► §

that have irreversible liver-destructive toxins in them.

00:37:52 ► §

So if you eat a galerina, you’ll have a very bad experience,

00:37:57 ► §

or maybe a very good experience, but none of us will ever know.

00:38:02 ► §

Speaking of mushrooms, how about the Amanita muscaria? I’ve heard people talk about that. will ever know well this is a very controversial mushroom

00:38:12 ► §

that occurs worldwide

00:38:14 ► §

you all know this mushroom

00:38:16 ► §

the red one with the white dots on top of it

00:38:19 ► §

the toadstool of European mythology

00:38:21 ► §

it’s used

00:38:26 ► §

in Siberia

00:38:27 ► §

and places like that as an

00:38:29 ► §

intoxicant and Gordon

00:38:31 ► §

Wasson thought that it was the basis

00:38:33 ► §

of Soma. But it

00:38:35 ► §

now looks like it probably isn’t the

00:38:37 ► §

basis of Soma and that it’s

00:38:39 ► §

very variable.

00:38:41 ► §

Seasonally variable,

00:38:43 ► §

geographically variable, genetically variable. So you never know

00:38:48 ► §

what you’re going to get. It’s very hard to obtain a reliable, desirable intoxication from that

00:38:55 ► §

mushroom. It’s another one of these. There are a lot of these things that are sickening and

00:39:03 ► §

distorting and that after you’ve gone through a night with them,

00:39:07 ► §

you feel reborn because you’re so damn glad you lived through it.

00:39:12 ► §

But they’re not really psychedelic, you know.

00:39:16 ► §

Any other questions?

00:39:17 ► §

I was going to say something before about this idea about the dead ancestors.

00:39:21 ► §

Oh, yeah, what about?

00:39:22 ► §

I saw a man recently on some news magazine

00:39:25 ► §

that stated

00:39:27 ► §

just because they’re dead

00:39:28 ► §

doesn’t mean they’re smart.

00:39:30 ► §

They actually have an IQ test

00:39:32 ► §

that you can give.

00:39:34 ► §

An IQ test to your ancestors?

00:39:37 ► §

Well, to the entity

00:39:38 ► §

that’s being channeled.

00:39:39 ► §

Well, that’s great.

00:39:40 ► §

We’ve needed that

00:39:42 ► §

for a long time.

00:39:43 ► §

Just the simple test for grammatical correctness

00:39:48 ► §

would eliminate…

00:39:50 ► §

The other thing I was going to say

00:39:52 ► §

was that I’ve had some experience with ketamine,

00:39:54 ► §

and I did not find it at all distorted

00:39:55 ► §

my central observer self,

00:39:58 ► §

the way you talked about the turret.

00:40:00 ► §

And I think at the height of a DMT trip,

00:40:02 ► §

we wouldn’t be able to do much

00:40:03 ► §

with the fire in the house either. I mean, when you take a psychedelic that powerful, height of a DMT trip we wouldn’t be able to do much with the fire in the house either

00:40:05 ► §

when you take a psychedelic that powerful

00:40:08 ► §

ketamine or DMT

00:40:09 ► §

you make sure you put yourself in a situation

00:40:12 ► §

where you don’t have to worry about physical surroundings

00:40:14 ► §

but the thing that I noticed about ketamine

00:40:19 ► §

is the first thing that happens

00:40:22 ► §

is you stop worrying

00:40:24 ► §

the very first thing that happens is you stop worrying.

00:40:27 ► §

The very first thing.

00:40:31 ► §

Before there’s any manifestation of any symptom whatsoever, you get this kind of, oh, what the hell.

00:40:35 ► §

And that’s the sign that it’s beginning.

00:40:38 ► §

But it’s also the sign that you’re not paying attention like you should.

00:40:42 ► §

The first couple of times I did that, I was scared that I was dying.

00:40:47 ► §

Well, I think it also depends on the dose.

00:40:49 ► §

How much did you do?

00:40:51 ► §

50 milligrams to 100 milligrams.

00:40:53 ► §

Yeah, well, see, I didn’t do it that many times,

00:40:56 ► §

and each time I did it quite a bit.

00:40:58 ► §

And it was reality obliterating for sure.

00:41:02 ► §

I’ve noticed that people who get into ketamine

00:41:05 ► §

tend to dose downward rather than upward,

00:41:09 ► §

tend to settle in somewhere around 50.

00:41:12 ► §

And this is probably,

00:41:14 ► §

I shouldn’t even be speaking about it

00:41:16 ► §

because I don’t know what 50 is like.

00:41:19 ► §

I know what 150 is like.

00:41:26 ► §

With the DMT, the main thing is,

00:41:29 ► §

at first you think,

00:41:30 ► §

my God, how could anyone ever retain

00:41:33 ► §

or remember any of this?

00:41:35 ► §

But it’s really that you have to learn

00:41:38 ► §

to control your own astonishment.

00:41:42 ► §

That it’s like having a heart attack of wonder and after you’ve had the

00:41:48 ► §

experience three or four times you just learn to be cool you say you know i am not going to give

00:41:56 ► §

way to a bunch of exclamations about how amazing this is and then and they tell you to do that. They say, don’t start raving about how

00:42:07 ► §

amazing it is. Pay attention to what we’re doing. We know that you’re blown out. We know that you’re

00:42:15 ► §

amazed. Yes, yes. Now, pay attention to this. And then they try to convey this linguistic thing,

00:42:25 ► §

to convey this linguistic thing, this visible language.

00:42:32 ► §

And I don’t understand what this is all about.

00:42:34 ► §

Has this always been what they’ve tried to convey?

00:42:36 ► §

Is the message always the same? Is there a new urgency about visible language?

00:42:42 ► §

Or how much of the message

00:42:46 ► §

is already present in

00:42:48 ► §

me? Is it a message

00:42:50 ► §

tailored for me?

00:42:52 ► §

Like this question of whether or not

00:42:54 ► §

these things are ancestors

00:42:55 ► §

then you get into questions like

00:42:57 ► §

what ancestors are they?

00:43:00 ► §

Like I do not feel when I break

00:43:02 ► §

into the DMT space

00:43:04 ► §

that this is my dead mother or my grandparents.

00:43:09 ► §

I feel that it’s more, that it’s just sort of local spirits.

00:43:15 ► §

Your grandmother became a self-transforming female.

00:43:18 ► §

Yes, who would have thought?

00:43:20 ► §

A little white-haired old lady.

00:43:23 ► §

thought a little white haired old lady and then sometimes I think that the

00:43:26 ► §

reason it’s so hair raising is because

00:43:29 ► §

the chief soul in this weird place is

00:43:33 ► §

actually your soul and that the hair

00:43:36 ► §

raising aspect is it’s not just any dead

00:43:39 ► §

person or a dead relative it’s you dead

00:43:42 ► §

and that’s the one thing

00:43:45 ► §

that causes the whole thing to shimmy

00:43:49 ► §

and fall apart

00:43:50 ► §

and go into a tailspin of cognitive dissonance.

00:43:54 ► §

When you realize that the entity you’re dealing with

00:43:57 ► §

is yourself beyond the grave,

00:44:01 ► §

then you just flood out

00:44:03 ► §

in the amazement, wonder, horror, and disbelief department

00:44:06 ► §

and lose the focus and come down.

00:44:11 ► §

Back here.

00:44:12 ► §

I’m trying to have a little checker for that.

00:44:14 ► §

I don’t know what it is, but still, it’s everyone’s issue.

00:44:18 ► §

There’s different lakes, there’s different genders.

00:44:21 ► §

I mean, you know, I know some very small people.

00:44:24 ► §

Small people. Who five seems like a lot. different genders I mean you know I know some very small small people

00:44:25 ► §

who

00:44:25 ► §

five seems like

00:44:26 ► §

a lot

00:44:27 ► §

well

00:44:28 ► §

five grams

00:44:30 ► §

is what

00:44:30 ► §

I think

00:44:31 ► §

would

00:44:32 ► §

destroy

00:44:33 ► §

most of the

00:44:34 ► §

resistances

00:44:35 ► §

of a

00:44:36 ► §

145 pound

00:44:37 ► §

person

00:44:38 ► §

a person

00:44:39 ► §

who weighed

00:44:39 ► §

90 pounds

00:44:41 ► §

could take

00:44:42 ► §

far less

00:44:43 ► §

but a person

00:44:44 ► §

who took

00:44:44 ► §

who weighed 90 pounds

00:44:47 ► §

who took five grams should be in no physical danger it is you can play with

00:44:55 ► §

it but at higher doses it gets stranger and stranger and stranger and stranger. I mean, anything above eight,

00:45:05 ► §

you’re definitely a pioneer as far as I’m concerned.

00:45:10 ► §

But it’s a good point.

00:45:13 ► §

If you weigh 90 pounds,

00:45:15 ► §

you maybe don’t want to chow down on five grams right on the get-go.

00:45:19 ► §

But the key is to do more rather than less

00:45:23 ► §

because otherwise you can miss the point, you know.

00:45:30 ► §

Did you say something about that? I know I’ve had numerous trips on different substances

00:45:34 ► §

where I felt like I took too little and it was almost more horrifying than if I just

00:45:39 ► §

knocked myself over.

00:45:40 ► §

Yeah, well, I think where the trouble comes is in the sub-threshold doses

00:45:45 ► §

where you’re neither fish nor fowl

00:45:47 ► §

and you’re thrashing around in it

00:45:50 ► §

and you get into these loops

00:45:53 ► §

of psychological

00:45:55 ► §

abrasive psychological self-examination

00:45:59 ► §

and stuff like that

00:46:01 ► §

and what you want to do is you just want to blast through

00:46:04 ► §

all that.

00:46:06 ► §

It’s hard.

00:46:07 ► §

Can you sing through that?

00:46:09 ► §

Yeah, you can sing through that.

00:46:10 ► §

So that’s one of the things that you use to sing through?

00:46:12 ► §

Uh-huh.

00:46:13 ► §

Yeah.

00:46:15 ► §

Singing and cannabis are my techniques,

00:46:19 ► §

and together I seem to be able to move it around.

00:46:22 ► §

You mentioned that you mushroom alone in the dark.

00:46:26 ► §

What is the effect of being with people

00:46:29 ► §

who are either observers or participants?

00:46:35 ► §

Oh, well, for me, I mean, I’m, you have to understand,

00:46:39 ► §

I mean, I’m a double Scorpio

00:46:40 ► §

and a kind of reclusive type anyway.

00:46:48 ► §

The reason I don’t particularly like tripping with people

00:46:49 ► §

is because I just worry

00:46:51 ► §

I’m a worrier

00:46:53 ► §

and if I’m stoned

00:46:56 ► §

and somebody else is stoned

00:46:57 ► §

then I worry and I listen

00:47:00 ► §

to their breathing

00:47:00 ► §

and I wonder

00:47:03 ► §

and I wonder how they’re doing and I wonder if I should ask how

00:47:07 ► §

they’re doing and I just lose all spontaneity and I become completely the victim of my imagined

00:47:14 ► §

concern for this other person well then if there’s if and then the other thing that happens is people are the weirdest objects in the universe.

00:47:26 ► §

And if you’re stoned and you come upon another person stoned,

00:47:31 ► §

I mean, they can just unleash something you could never have imagined or conceived of.

00:47:38 ► §

I remember, I think I learned this lesson the hard way in India,

00:47:44 ► §

but years ago once at Sarnath,

00:47:47 ► §

and it happened many times, but this was typical.

00:47:50 ► §

Sarnath is the place where the Buddha taught his first sermon

00:47:54 ► §

after attaining enlightenment.

00:47:56 ► §

He walked from Bodh Gaya to Sarnath.

00:47:59 ► §

So I took mescaline there with these two women who were friends of mine,

00:48:04 ► §

and it’s all nicely green and sculpted.

00:48:07 ► §

And we were sitting there under a tree,

00:48:10 ► §

and I swear, you know, 500 yards away,

00:48:14 ► §

there were these two Indian guys walking across my field of vision.

00:48:19 ► §

And I was sitting there, and I was loaded,

00:48:22 ► §

and I was watching the traceries.

00:48:25 ► §

And then I looked out across my field of vision

00:48:28 ► §

and I saw these two

00:48:29 ► §

Indian guys stop dead

00:48:32 ► §

in the center of my field of vision

00:48:34 ► §

and then they said something

00:48:36 ► §

to each other and then they turned

00:48:38 ► §

90 degrees

00:48:39 ► §

so they were now facing me

00:48:41 ► §

and they began walking toward me

00:48:43 ► §

and I was horrified.

00:48:46 ► §

And I looked down.

00:48:48 ► §

I was so horrified that I said, I can’t believe this is happening.

00:48:52 ► §

I refuse to believe this is happening.

00:48:54 ► §

I will just look at the ground in front of me like this.

00:48:58 ► §

So I started looking at the ground in front of me.

00:49:00 ► §

And I looked and looked and looked and looked until two pairs of brown feet appeared in my field

00:49:08 ► §

of vision and then I looked up at these guys and they they had caught the vibe and they wanted to

00:49:17 ► §

know what was going on and several experiences like this caused me to believe

00:49:25 ► §

that you should really bury it deep before you take it into public.

00:49:29 ► §

The other thing I’ve noticed is, you know,

00:49:32 ► §

if you’re stoned in a confined space,

00:49:35 ► §

there’s a certain amount of control of synchronicity.

00:49:39 ► §

I mean, there’s rustling in the corners and batting at the windows and so forth,

00:49:43 ► §

but this you can handle.

00:49:45 ► §

But if you take it out into public,

00:49:49 ► §

God, it’s just absolutely uncontrollable.

00:49:53 ► §

I mean, you could be struck by a meteorite.

00:49:56 ► §

You could be abducted by extraterrestrials.

00:49:58 ► §

A safe could fall on you.

00:50:01 ► §

Anything could happen

00:50:02 ► §

because the statistical disruption of ordinary probability

00:50:06 ► §

is so great

00:50:07 ► §

what did I say

00:50:11 ► §

oh I remember what I said

00:50:14 ► §

I looked up and I said

00:50:16 ► §

I cannot be interrogated

00:50:21 ► §

it was good but it didn’t work.

00:50:26 ► §

Say, how long have you been in this place?

00:50:29 ► §

You’re coming from which place?

00:50:32 ► §

No, what I found in India was

00:50:34 ► §

people were telepathic,

00:50:37 ► §

but it didn’t make them like you any better.

00:50:39 ► §

It just gave them a fantastic kind of in.

00:50:45 ► §

But I think group psychedelic taking is very promising

00:50:49 ► §

and people who can do it,

00:50:51 ► §

groups that can do it and stick with it over years,

00:50:54 ► §

log amazing experiences.

00:50:58 ► §

But it’s very hard because what immediately emerges

00:51:02 ► §

if you have a group of people doing this stuff,

00:51:05 ► §

is it will veer off in some weird direction.

00:51:09 ► §

One person will get a quote-unquote funny idea.

00:51:14 ► §

And then the funny idea, everybody polarizes for and against the funny idea.

00:51:22 ► §

And then they have to decide well you know they’re losing

00:51:25 ► §

so and so is losing their mind they’re in too deep

00:51:28 ► §

with this no no this is

00:51:30 ► §

the answer and we’re moving

00:51:31 ► §

and just you know and

00:51:33 ► §

quickly cognitive dissonance

00:51:36 ► §

builds up and it’s very

00:51:38 ► §

very hard I have a correspondent

00:51:39 ► §

in the midwest a group of

00:51:41 ► §

psychiatrists who over six years

00:51:44 ► §

took mushrooms once a month together

00:51:46 ► §

and they went through amazing contortions

00:51:51 ► §

of wife trading and not speaking

00:51:55 ► §

and speaking and denouncing and embracing

00:51:59 ► §

because it just unleashes this stuff

00:52:03 ► §

and then it crawls around.

00:52:05 ► §

So I prefer to do it by myself and then get all combed and pinned back together

00:52:13 ► §

before I present myself to the troops in the morning.

00:52:17 ► §

Because in the height of the thing, you could proclaim anything.

00:52:23 ► §

Do you think it’s possible for a group of people

00:52:25 ► §

who have been fairly experienced with psychedelics

00:52:28 ► §

to get together, wanting to do

00:52:32 ► §

this very wonderful group

00:52:35 ► §

telepathic thing, and to

00:52:38 ► §

create what they think, at least to try

00:52:41 ► §

to anticipate what might be things that would

00:52:44 ► §

pull it apart, that would unplug

00:52:46 ► §

one? It’s hard

00:52:48 ► §

to anticipate. I mean, I’ve really found

00:52:50 ► §

that the way the mushroom works

00:52:51 ► §

is it reads you

00:52:53 ► §

perfectly, much better

00:52:56 ► §

than you can read yourself.

00:52:58 ► §

And then it comes at you

00:53:00 ► §

with the one thing

00:53:01 ► §

that you are vulnerable to.

00:53:04 ► §

And because it knows you like an open book

00:53:08 ► §

and can lead you practically any direction that it wants.

00:53:14 ► §

But I think group work is interesting and should be pursued

00:53:18 ► §

and couple work is very interesting and should be pursued.

00:53:23 ► §

I’m very conservative.

00:53:26 ► §

I mean, my approach to it is I basically turn it on

00:53:30 ► §

and then I back off and watch.

00:53:33 ► §

That’s all I ever do.

00:53:35 ► §

And I’ve seen, I don’t have the magical mentality.

00:53:40 ► §

I don’t want to get something or take control of someone or a situation for good or ill.

00:53:49 ► §

But people who do make great progress in all of these areas.

00:53:55 ► §

I mean, people who want to design electronic circuits or play Bach on the piano.

00:54:02 ► §

But I don’t do anything.

00:54:04 ► §

I’m interested kind of in the

00:54:06 ► §

essence of the thing, what it is

00:54:08 ► §

the ding on sich, the thing

00:54:10 ► §

in itself and

00:54:12 ► §

that’s why I don’t listen to

00:54:14 ► §

music, this horrifies

00:54:16 ► §

some people, so you don’t

00:54:18 ► §

listen to music

00:54:19 ► §

no, I mean I have listened to music

00:54:22 ► §

I know what it does to music

00:54:24 ► §

it makes it the best thing in the world.

00:54:27 ► §

But without music, it also can do that.

00:54:33 ► §

And so I sit in silent darkness,

00:54:36 ► §

and I maintain that’s where the essence of the thing is.

00:54:40 ► §

Then it’s not colored by sound or light or expectation. I’m trying to see

00:54:48 ► §

beyond the mask. See what this thing is

00:54:51 ► §

in itself, for itself.

00:54:56 ► §

Anybody else? Anything else?

00:55:02 ► §

You mean in terms of

00:55:03 ► §

in the proximity to the trip?

00:55:07 ► §

A lot of people like to fast.

00:55:10 ► §

I don’t particularly say you should fast.

00:55:13 ► §

I just say you should have an empty stomach.

00:55:15 ► §

Five hours without eating is good.

00:55:19 ► §

You should just be cleaned out, you know.

00:55:22 ► §

Bring a certain amount of attention and respect to it. And it’s very,

00:55:30 ► §

very kind to beginners. The complexity comes later in the unfolding of the kinks of the personality but I think it’s very gentle to beginners

00:55:48 ► §

you mean actually what does it consist of

00:55:54 ► §

it’s

00:55:56 ► §

no sugar, no alcohol, no salt

00:56:02 ► §

sexual abstinence.

00:56:05 ► §

It’s basically a diet of manioc and certain fish,

00:56:11 ► §

and I don’t think many greens.

00:56:12 ► §

Is that it, Ken?

00:56:16 ► §

Bananas, plantainose.

00:56:19 ► §

It’s probably analyzed nutritionally.

00:56:22 ► §

It’s probably a serotonin loaded

00:56:25 ► §

diet because of the large

00:56:27 ► §

amount of

00:56:29 ► §

plantinose in it

00:56:31 ► §

but it’s a bland diet

00:56:33 ► §

it’s just setting you up

00:56:35 ► §

to be sensitive

00:56:37 ► §

I think to the uptake of the

00:56:39 ► §

alkaloids

00:56:40 ► §

that’s an MAO

00:56:44 ► §

inhibiting?

00:56:46 ► §

Yes, ayahuasca works through inhibition of MAO.

00:56:51 ► §

Good point.

00:56:52 ► §

You see, normally DMT would be destroyed in the gut,

00:56:58 ► §

but if you inhibit monoamine oxidase somehow,

00:57:02 ► §

then it passes through the gut

00:57:05 ► §

and is absorbed and passes into the blood

00:57:08 ► §

this was not known by western pharmacology

00:57:11 ► §

until the mid 1950s

00:57:13 ► §

but it’s always been known in the Amazon

00:57:16 ► §

so the strategy, you see what ayahuasca is

00:57:20 ► §

really is a slow release DMT trip

00:57:23 ► §

where you take a plant that contains DMT

00:57:28 ► §

and you combine it with an MAO inhibitor

00:57:33 ► §

and then when you take these together

00:57:35 ► §

the DMT slowly releases

00:57:39 ► §

and you get the equivalent of a DMT flash

00:57:43 ► §

but stretched out over about an hour and a half. And so you can

00:57:47 ► §

watch it more carefully. And some people say, you know, that I overstress the visual side of things,

00:57:57 ► §

that all kinds of things go on on psychedelic drugs. Insights, conceptual breakthroughs

00:58:06 ► §

weird distortions of body image and this

00:58:11 ► §

sort of thing and this is all true but

00:58:14 ► §

to my mind the visual thing is the most

00:58:17 ► §

striking because it is so other it is so

00:58:21 ► §

highly organized so demonstrably the product of intelligence. I mean, it’s not a

00:58:28 ► §

feeling, some weird feeling, you know, nausea or sub-threshold poisoning or all of these things.

00:58:38 ► §

These are feelings. But it’s simply the release of understanding and somehow visually processed understanding.

00:58:49 ► §

Ken.

00:58:51 ► §

In addition to the other three possibilities,

00:58:54 ► §

the souls of the dead and extraterrestrial,

00:58:57 ► §

would you entertain the idea that

00:59:00 ► §

what we’re saying might be simply

00:59:02 ► §

constructs from the subconscious.

00:59:08 ► §

Yes, well, that’s the other possibility.

00:59:11 ► §

Carl Jung had this wonderful phrase

00:59:14 ► §

in talking about elves and fairies,

00:59:17 ► §

and he said,

00:59:19 ► §

autonomous psychic components

00:59:22 ► §

escape from the ego’s control and present

00:59:26 ► §

themselves as independent

00:59:28 ► §

beings

00:59:29 ► §

well that’s just a

00:59:32 ► §

description of a pretty twisted

00:59:34 ► §

around state of mind

00:59:35 ► §

it’s the idea you know that

00:59:37 ► §

you see the self in the mirror

00:59:40 ► §

and then you bring

00:59:42 ► §

the mirror down and shatter

00:59:44 ► §

it and suddenly there are hundreds of

00:59:47 ► §

selves each fragment of the mirror reflects a self this is would be a conservative theory of

00:59:55 ► §

what these things are except that they don’t look very much like the self it the the shock in DMT is, if this is myself, then I don’t know who I am.

01:00:08 ► §

But, yeah, one thing I’ve thought of, in an effort to explain it,

01:00:13 ► §

is that they are fractally parts of the personality.

01:00:19 ► §

That an elf is, you know, you put ten elves together and you have a personality or something like that.

01:00:27 ► §

And so these elves are literally autonomous psychic components that have broken free from the control of the ego.

01:00:36 ► §

We say we’ve fallen to pieces, always talking about the psychedelic as a boundary dissolver.

01:00:43 ► §

talking about the psychedelic as a boundary dissolver.

01:00:46 ► §

Well, maybe what happens when you smoke DMT is the boundary dissolves so quickly

01:00:48 ► §

that you can say of the situation,

01:00:53 ► §

that’s me all over,

01:00:55 ► §

because you’re literally bouncing off the walls

01:00:59 ► §

and visible to yourself.

01:01:01 ► §

The illusion that you are stitched together within a body

01:01:06 ► §

has been shattered

01:01:07 ► §

and your several or multiple

01:01:10 ► §

personality components

01:01:11 ► §

are jumping around the room

01:01:14 ► §

I think the most extreme

01:01:15 ► §

case of that that I ever

01:01:17 ► §

saw was

01:01:19 ► §

once I used to

01:01:21 ► §

smoke, I don’t recommend this

01:01:23 ► §

but in my vanished youth I used to smoke DMT.

01:01:28 ► §

And I smoked the DMT and it was wild.

01:01:31 ► §

It went on for a long, long time and was very intense anyway.

01:01:35 ► §

And suddenly right in the middle of this trip, this woman came back from Easter vacation,

01:01:41 ► §

came charging up onto the front porch of this house and threw open the

01:01:47 ► §

front door and ran into my bedroom door and started beating on my door furiously. Well, being a double

01:01:55 ► §

Scorpio and secretive anyway, I just was like had a heart attack and I jumped off the bed

01:02:05 ► §

right out of this DMT

01:02:08 ► §

flash I jumped

01:02:09 ► §

out and I landed on my

01:02:12 ► §

feet in the middle of this room

01:02:13 ► §

and something about moving

01:02:16 ► §

so suddenly

01:02:17 ► §

had like shattered

01:02:19 ► §

the distinction between the two

01:02:22 ► §

continua and

01:02:24 ► §

I carried it all into the room with me.

01:02:27 ► §

And so the room was then filled with elves.

01:02:30 ► §

And they were hanging off my arms and spinning me around.

01:02:36 ► §

And there was this geometric object in the room that was spinning and clicking.

01:02:42 ► §

And every time it would click, it would hurl a plastic chit across the room

01:02:48 ► §

that had a letter in an alien language written on it.

01:02:53 ► §

And these elves were screaming and bouncing off the walls.

01:02:56 ► §

This machine was spinning in the air.

01:02:59 ► §

These chits were ricocheting off the walls.

01:03:02 ► §

And I was trying to deal with Rosemary in the middle of this.

01:03:06 ► §

And, you know, it was just, it was a too muchness.

01:03:11 ► §

It was a case of seeing too deeply into it.

01:03:15 ► §

And you have, you know, too many of those stacked up,

01:03:19 ► §

and then you become reluctant.

01:03:22 ► §

And this is why I’m very cautious with it.

01:03:24 ► §

The notion of having enough chutzpah or will or something

01:03:29 ► §

to want to try and use this stuff,

01:03:32 ► §

I can hardly imagine using it.

01:03:36 ► §

I mean, every time I encounter it,

01:03:38 ► §

my wish is to not be destroyed by it.

01:03:41 ► §

And the idea of using it for anything just seems like blasphemy, you

01:03:46 ► §

know, and probably is blasphemy. It’s probably a good way to get cut down to size. Yeah?

01:03:54 ► §

I know last night you were talking about how certain times harken back to other times.

01:03:59 ► §

Right.

01:04:00 ► §

And in the beginning of this weekend you were talking about the archaic revival,

01:04:07 ► §

we’re going towards or through.

01:04:09 ► §

And I thought you were talking about

01:04:11 ► §

going back to the time of that city in Turkey,

01:04:15 ► §

you know, that 30,000 years.

01:04:16 ► §

Çevtah-ı Hüryük, uh-huh.

01:04:19 ► §

Could you say a few words about that?

01:04:21 ► §

I mean, is that connected?

01:04:23 ► §

Well, no, that’s the basic notion

01:04:25 ► §

that somehow our future lies in our past.

01:04:30 ► §

Right.

01:04:31 ► §

And shamanism…

01:04:32 ► §

Yeah.

01:04:33 ► §

Well, the particular past

01:04:35 ► §

that I wanted to concentrate on

01:04:37 ► §

was this period of time

01:04:39 ► §

after the melting of the last glacier

01:04:42 ► §

20,000 years ago

01:04:44 ► §

and for the 10,000 years following that,

01:04:48 ► §

when there were pastoral populations in Africa

01:04:52 ► §

and leaving Africa

01:04:54 ► §

that had developed this ecological balance

01:04:59 ► §

and this shamanic doorway to nature.

01:05:04 ► §

See, at every…

01:05:05 ► §

Oh, the computer isn’t here,

01:05:07 ► §

but at every glaciation,

01:05:10 ► §

human populations were bottled up in Africa

01:05:15 ► §

during the time when the ice pack was thick.

01:05:18 ► §

Nobody was getting out.

01:05:20 ► §

But only the last time were the people…

01:05:24 ► §

was pastoralism developed

01:05:26 ► §

in the intervening period

01:05:28 ► §

so it was 20,000 years ago

01:05:30 ► §

those people leaving Africa

01:05:32 ► §

were herders of domesticated

01:05:34 ► §

cattle and all previous

01:05:36 ► §

radiations out of Africa

01:05:38 ► §

had been hunter-gatherers

01:05:41 ► §

yeah the

01:05:42 ► §

Manoan civilization

01:05:43 ► §

ended in 6500 BC,

01:05:47 ► §

but what’s interesting is

01:05:49 ► §

this is when you get the earliest Minoan settlements,

01:05:55 ► §

and they carry the pottery motifs

01:05:58 ► §

and building styles of central Anatolia to Crete.

01:06:03 ► §

So it appears that what happened was

01:06:06 ► §

Catalhoyuk was like the last outpost

01:06:11 ► §

of this goddess culture

01:06:13 ► §

and when these wheeled chariot Indo-European folks came down,

01:06:18 ► §

the survivors of that actually went to Crete. And Crete became this weird institutionalized backwater

01:06:31 ► §

where literally for three millennia,

01:06:34 ► §

the fossilized social forms of the previous matrilineal society

01:06:39 ► §

were kept intact.

01:06:41 ► §

While on Asia Minor, on the mainland,

01:06:45 ► §

it all became about kingship, male lines of descent, and all that.

01:06:50 ► §

It wasn’t actually until that turning point at the top of the wave in 980 BC

01:06:56 ► §

that the last vestiges of this goddess culture were crushed in Crete and even then

01:07:05 ► §

you see the strain

01:07:07 ► §

of mystical

01:07:09 ► §

of deep psychedelic mysticism

01:07:12 ► §

that enters Greek religion

01:07:14 ► §

is all imported

01:07:16 ► §

from Crete

01:07:17 ► §

the northern Thracian

01:07:20 ► §

strain in Greek religion

01:07:22 ► §

is rational and

01:07:24 ► §

airy and oriented toward

01:07:26 ► §

physical space but out of

01:07:28 ► §

Crete came

01:07:29 ► §

rites three, four, five

01:07:32 ► §

thousand years old

01:07:34 ► §

and it was always said even up

01:07:36 ► §

until classical times

01:07:38 ► §

that the rites that were celebrated

01:07:40 ► §

in secret at

01:07:42 ► §

Eleusis were celebrated

01:07:44 ► §

openly at Heracleion and at Gnosis. So that’s

01:07:51 ► §

the connection. My fantasy about all this is, you see, Chattahoochee represents such

01:07:59 ► §

an advanced civilization over anything else existing that, And it can be traced back a thousand years to Jericho. The people who built Jericho built a round tower there that was the absolute glory of the engineering world of 8000 BC, and it was a grain storage tower. But then

01:08:29 ► §

these Jericho people, it’s hard to trace where they came from. What I think happened is that

01:08:38 ► §

when you look at the stratigraphy of the Nile Valley, you discover that actually there weren’t people in the Nile Valley much

01:08:48 ► §

before 10,500 BC. Then suddenly these people appear who are called Natufan, and they build

01:08:58 ► §

under the overhanging lips of cliffs and have a certain style of fetal burial in a honey pot and certain other

01:09:08 ► §

characteristics not to fans and they appear out of nowhere well anybody who studied them

01:09:14 ► §

has wanted to connect them to the culture of old europe that maria gambutis talks about

01:09:21 ► §

simply based on the fact that they were so culturally advanced

01:09:26 ► §

that the bias of all these scholars is to say, well, they must have come from the Balkans.

01:09:33 ► §

But when you look at them as a cultural horizon, you see, to my mind, that they are unmistakably African.

01:09:51 ► §

And that when you go to the Tsele Plateau in southern Algeria, you find the same style of building, of living under the lips of caves

01:09:56 ► §

and this same coarse-grained black pottery called Sudanese ware.

01:10:02 ► §

pottery called Sudanese

01:10:03 ► §

ware.

01:10:05 ► §

The pottery,

01:10:08 ► §

the animal motifs, the fixation on the vulture, the

01:10:10 ► §

jackal and the cow, these are all

01:10:11 ► §

African animals that occur at

01:10:13 ► §

Chatal, seems to suggest

01:10:16 ► §

that there was actually a

01:10:17 ► §

sweep of African civilization

01:10:19 ► §

out of Africa into

01:10:21 ► §

the Middle East around 10,000

01:10:24 ► §

BC. These people built Jericho 1,000 years after that

01:10:28 ► §

and settled southern Anatolia 1,000 years after that.

01:10:32 ► §

Well, what this suggests then is that you could go out to the Tsele Plateau

01:10:41 ► §

with sufficient resources and conduct an archaeological survey

01:10:46 ► §

and the ultimate payoff in this fantasy

01:10:50 ► §

is that you would unearth the archaeological equivalent of Eden.

01:10:56 ► §

In other words, you would discover the Urspot

01:11:00 ► §

from which the Chatal civilization came, the site of this mushroom-using goddess cattle civilization.

01:11:12 ► §

And when you read the accounts of the Tsele Plateau,

01:11:16 ► §

there’s every reason to think that this strategy would work.

01:11:19 ► §

It’s a windswept sandstone escarpment.

01:11:25 ► §

And Henri Lhote, who did the preliminary exploration out there,

01:11:29 ► §

said that in these arroyos where the sand has been cleared away by the wind,

01:11:34 ► §

there would be Neolithic stone chippings and detritus,

01:11:39 ► §

sometimes up to half a meter thick,

01:11:42 ► §

indicating thousands and thousands of years

01:11:45 ► §

of continuous habitation when this was all green.

01:11:50 ► §

There is an enormous unexcavated tell out there

01:11:53 ► §

that has never been dated,

01:11:55 ► §

that is just carried on the archaeological surveys

01:11:58 ► §

as presumed pre-Islamic.

01:12:01 ► §

It’s enormous.

01:12:02 ► §

So digging out there might be a very useful thing to do. It’s from

01:12:09 ► §

that area that we get these 9,000-year-old images of shamans with mushrooms sprouting

01:12:18 ► §

out of their bodies, shamans carrying mushrooms over their heads and running in long chains with strange geometric motifs trailing along beside them.

01:12:33 ► §

So it would be a kind of recovery.

01:12:38 ► §

I think archaeology will play a big role in the archaic revival, that part of our cultural dilemma

01:12:46 ► §

and our political infantilism

01:12:49 ► §

comes from the fact that we don’t know any history,

01:12:53 ► §

so we’re easily led.

01:12:55 ► §

I mean, we don’t even really understand

01:12:56 ► §

the history of the 20th century.

01:12:59 ► §

I mean, you know,

01:13:01 ► §

you ask somebody who Joseph Goebbels was

01:13:04 ► §

and they think he served in the Nixon cabinet.

01:13:09 ► §

I mean, and so hardly to speak of who was Suleiman the Magnificent

01:13:15 ► §

and just exactly what was Frederick Barbarossa’s role in European history

01:13:19 ► §

and so forth and so on.

01:13:21 ► §

But recovering this is like waking up, gaining control.

01:13:27 ► §

And, you know, I said yesterday,

01:13:28 ► §

it’s only been 1,500 generations of people

01:13:33 ► §

that have walked us into this dilemma.

01:13:36 ► §

But the archaic revival is a huge paradigm shift.

01:13:44 ► §

You can imagine, remember the example I gave

01:13:47 ► §

about the shift from the Renaissance,

01:13:50 ► §

from the medieval to the Renaissance,

01:13:52 ► §

which really was a giving up of the universal power of the church,

01:13:58 ► §

the philosophical certitude of giving your allegiance

01:14:02 ► §

to the Holy Father in Rome and setting out into the pure existential universe.

01:14:11 ► §

I mean, Marcello Ficino said,

01:14:13 ► §

man is to be the measure of all things.

01:14:17 ► §

Well, this sounds like old hat in 1990,

01:14:20 ► §

but in 1480, this was such a dizzying notion

01:14:25 ► §

that it can hardly be imagined.

01:14:29 ► §

You know, Giordano Bruno went to the stake,

01:14:32 ► §

was burned at the stake for insisting that the universe was infinite in all directions.

01:14:38 ► §

You know, he said, no, the stars and planets go on to infinity.

01:14:44 ► §

And they just said, you know, this is off the wall.

01:14:47 ► §

Only a demon could inspire a thought like this.

01:14:52 ► §

But the transition that we’re asked to make,

01:14:55 ► §

that was a transition you see from the certitude of dogma

01:15:00 ► §

to secular existentialism.

01:15:04 ► §

The transition that we’re being asked to make

01:15:07 ► §

is somewhat similar, but to my mind,

01:15:10 ► §

deeper, more challenging, more profound.

01:15:12 ► §

It’s the shift from scientific certitude

01:15:18 ► §

to a complete embracing of non-closure to actually begin it’s a kind of

01:15:30 ► §

maturity you know what we’re being asked to do is to grow up and realize that you know there ain’t

01:15:37 ► §

no free lunch there aren’t always happy endings not every story ends with the German shepherd running in and licking grandpa’s face

01:15:47 ► §

and everybody laughing.

01:15:49 ► §

And so forth and so on.

01:15:51 ► §

You know, hard truths.

01:15:54 ► §

And this lack of closure thing,

01:15:56 ► §

I mean, I feel it in myself.

01:15:58 ► §

And I assume, you know,

01:16:00 ► §

that ontogeny recapitulates and so forth.

01:16:03 ► §

So that, you know,

01:16:04 ► §

the struggle to become a real human being

01:16:09 ► §

is the struggle to give up having it actually make any sense ultimately.

01:16:16 ► §

Where, I think it was, of all people, Robert Frost who said,

01:16:21 ► §

the secret of a happy life is learning to enjoy people

01:16:26 ► §

you don’t approve of

01:16:27 ► §

well

01:16:29 ► §

you know there’s something

01:16:32 ► §

there’s what that

01:16:34 ► §

means is you’re surrendering

01:16:35 ► §

to life you’re just saying

01:16:37 ► §

you know it’s bigger than I am

01:16:40 ► §

I may not like drag queens

01:16:42 ► §

but there they are

01:16:43 ► §

and I should get used to it, I should make the adjustment, this kind of thing.

01:16:50 ► §

In other words, recognizing the complexity of the situation. long bender to exercise precisely, exorcise precisely this kind of uncertainty from life.

01:17:10 ► §

And, you know, to reduce it all to atoms blindly running under the control of mathematically describable fields of force. The problem is all the higher order phenomena,

01:17:29 ► §

sociological, political, aesthetic, human organizational, got shoved off to one

01:17:37 ► §

side and just sort of festered there for a long time. Well, technology perfected itself, mass production, mass media, information transfer, but the human dimension lagged. like the technological descriptive power of the culture and its moral and ethical power

01:18:07 ► §

to direct itself toward any kind of rational goal.

01:18:12 ► §

Well, when this happens in a society,

01:18:15 ► §

or even in a personality,

01:18:16 ► §

you can sort of make a Jungian model of this,

01:18:20 ► §

you get what’s called compensatory phenomena,

01:18:23 ► §

or at least that’s what it used to be called,

01:18:25 ► §

means eruptions of material from the unconscious

01:18:29 ► §

that is organized and constellated like a message,

01:18:34 ► §

like an attention-claiming thing.

01:18:37 ► §

In a person, in a personality, it ruptures as a symptom.

01:18:43 ► §

It may be an attention-getting symptom

01:18:45 ► §

to then bring other people into the caregiving loop

01:18:49 ► §

or something like that.

01:18:51 ► §

In a society like our own, a scientific society,

01:18:55 ► §

it takes the form of the irrational,

01:19:00 ► §

the irrational appearing in strange forms.

01:19:04 ► §

A good example of this in the past

01:19:07 ► §

is the birth of Christianity

01:19:10 ► §

in the center of the late Roman Empire

01:19:15 ► §

or the early middle Roman Empire

01:19:17 ► §

where, you know, the people who were administering the world at that time

01:19:23 ► §

were Romans educated by Greeks who were

01:19:28 ► §

epicurean atomists not Platonists not followers of Heraclitus or Pythagoras or any of the flashy

01:19:35 ► §

folks we’re into they were democratian atomists rationalists material, would have been very comfortable in a modern chemical engineering company.

01:19:48 ► §

And they could not conceive that the irrational could hold any threat to their world.

01:19:58 ► §

Meanwhile, they had dark-skinned servants in the kitchens and in the gardens, Jews, Greeks, Phoenicians, people brought

01:20:06 ► §

from the eastern Mediterranean. And among these people, specifically the Jews, this rumor began

01:20:13 ► §

to tear loose about a Galilean politician who had somehow tweaked the Romans and then risen from the dead. Well, any Roman administrator listening to his illiterate cook or gardener

01:20:28 ► §

babble out this story

01:20:30 ► §

would just, you know, think,

01:20:33 ► §

these folks is getting stranger every day.

01:20:38 ► §

But what was actually happening, you know,

01:20:40 ► §

was a message was being enunciated

01:20:42 ► §

which within 50 years would be hammering at the gate

01:20:46 ► §

well make it 90 years

01:20:47 ► §

would be hammering at the gates of Rome

01:20:50 ► §

with all the power of an invading army

01:20:53 ► §

in a similar way

01:20:56 ► §

the kinds of eruptions from the unconscious

01:20:59 ► §

that characterize the 20th century

01:21:01 ► §

are trying to serve a similar function.

01:21:10 ► §

Well, I don’t know where you want to put it,

01:21:14 ► §

but like, for instance, the eruption of the Beast Man in the episodes of persecution that happened in Europe

01:21:19 ► §

during the 20th century,

01:21:21 ► §

persecution of Jews and gypsies and Slavs.

01:21:25 ► §

This was tremendously shocking to the sensibilities of so-called civilized people

01:21:33 ► §

because people said, my God, we thought that ended with Frederick Barbarossa

01:21:38 ► §

or we thought that ended with Nero.

01:21:40 ► §

How can 20th century people, the neatly clipped and manicured cities of prosperous

01:21:46 ► §

intellectual Germany, how could it spawn a thing like this? Well, you know, the answers are complex

01:21:53 ► §

and multi-leveled, but from a very broad perspective, what is happening is the unconscious

01:22:00 ► §

is erupting into history, leaping onto the stage of history,

01:22:08 ► §

claiming the undivided attention of people in a way that surrealism,

01:22:11 ► §

which was a limp-wristed artistic movement

01:22:13 ► §

by comparison to fascism,

01:22:16 ► §

never could.

01:22:18 ► §

Similarly, you know, you get that under control,

01:22:21 ► §

the beast is supposedly suppressed

01:22:23 ► §

by making notice a pact with a greater beast

01:22:26 ► §

that a demon can be summoned

01:22:28 ► §

from the heart of matter

01:22:29 ► §

with the purpose of wasting

01:22:32 ► §

the cities of Germany but then

01:22:34 ► §

it arrives too late for that but then

01:22:36 ► §

it’s good for the Japanese

01:22:37 ► §

so it’s this

01:22:39 ► §

opera

01:22:42 ► §

about how evil begets

01:22:44 ► §

greater evil

01:22:45 ► §

and people are reaching for ever greater weapons.

01:22:49 ► §

Then the intrusion of the atomic bomb into history

01:22:56 ► §

sort of halts that cycle.

01:22:57 ► §

Everyone stands back and goes for a middle class existence

01:23:03 ► §

and suddenly the skies of the planet

01:23:05 ► §

are filled with the craft of meddling extraterrestrials

01:23:11 ► §

who are obligingly dying in the desert

01:23:15 ► §

and turning up on blocks of ice for Eisenhower to inspect

01:23:19 ► §

and all, you know, this whole crazy story.

01:23:22 ► §

Well, clearly what this is, is, you know, this whole crazy story. Well, clearly what this is, is, you know, the unconscious will

01:23:27 ► §

not go away in the 20th century. Now the wheat fields of England lay down in hieroglyphic

01:23:34 ► §

patterns to try and shake awake the dreaming primates. It’s as though the whole of nature you know is infused with a linguistic intent

01:23:47 ► §

to communicate i mean i think this is one of the things you learn on on psychedelics that

01:23:55 ► §

everything has a story everything has a lesson and it’s not abstract or remote or removed.

01:24:05 ► §

I mean, to the degree that you can hold your ego aside,

01:24:12 ► §

nature can teach you almost anything you want to know.

01:24:17 ► §

I mean, you can learn hydrology by staring into a mud puddle, you know.

01:24:24 ► §

I mean, it is all happening right there

01:24:26 ► §

but ego is a very subtly interfering factor i always think you know in in my own experience

01:24:35 ► §

at one time in the amazon when i was at my most illuminated i could walk into the jungle and invite butterflies to come down and settle on

01:24:50 ► §

my outstretched hands like Saint Francis of Assisi you know and and I would do this and and it would

01:24:58 ► §

bring tears of joy and affirmation to my eyes and and then it would go on and on and the tears of joy and affirmation

01:25:07 ► §

would clear from my eyes and in the midst of this pure unadulterated ecstasy a tiny thought

01:25:15 ► §

would form which was wouldn’t it be nice to show this to somebody else so they could see how great I am.

01:25:27 ► §

So then, you know,

01:25:29 ► §

dismiss the butterflies,

01:25:32 ► §

scurry back to the camp,

01:25:34 ► §

gather up a skeptical colleague,

01:25:37 ► §

bring them back to the clearing and march out into the clearing

01:25:39 ► §

with outstretched hands

01:25:40 ► §

to just have nothing happen

01:25:42 ► §

except people just turn away in just my god you know what an

01:25:51 ► §

embarrassment you’ve become that it’s all going to end like this better you should be eaten by

01:25:59 ► §

termites it’s a better story so you, you know, it’s weird.

01:26:06 ► §

I mean, Tao is like that.

01:26:08 ► §

You can’t push it.

01:26:09 ► §

You can’t use it.

01:26:11 ► §

Somebody asked me once,

01:26:12 ► §

was I worried that the mushroom could be used for evil somehow?

01:26:19 ► §

And actually, early on, this occurred to me,

01:26:23 ► §

and I put it to the mushroom.

01:26:33 ► §

And it basically said, you know, you can’t grasp it.

01:26:37 ► §

It isn’t even there if you have wrong intent.

01:26:40 ► §

You can’t even perceive it.

01:26:43 ► §

It’s very selective and it must be so

01:26:46 ► §

because one of the puzzles

01:26:48 ► §

for me being in the communication business

01:26:52 ► §

is how it spreads

01:26:54 ► §

how the tree of information spreads

01:26:57 ► §

where it’s tolerated, where it’s repressed

01:27:00 ► §

where it’s embraced

01:27:01 ► §

it’s very interesting

01:27:03 ► §

you may have noticed mushrooms get extraordinary

01:27:07 ► §

good press, or none at all. Even in the height of drug war hysteria, the image of mushrooms

01:27:17 ► §

is largely neutral, unformed in any direction, otherwise viewed as rather comical, harmless, humorous.

01:27:28 ► §

It is somehow hardwired into our consciousness, connected into an archetype that we are inherently

01:27:36 ► §

friendly toward as primates. Probably this has to do with this deep food programming that went on for a long, long time.

01:27:45 ► §

We literally cannot bite the hand that feeds us.

01:27:49 ► §

So we have a kind of intellectual blind spot to this.

01:27:53 ► §

Nevertheless, of course,

01:27:54 ► §

it is a highly repressed Schedule I drug

01:27:58 ► §

viewed in the same category as heroin, cocaine,

01:28:02 ► §

and what have you.

01:28:03 ► §

This is because it has, quote unquote, no

01:28:07 ► §

recognized medical application. You know, I don’t know. It depends on what you think of as mental

01:28:14 ► §

health. I would argue that it’s an enzyme for the imagination without which, as the sign says on the blackboard, you’re not yourself.

01:28:26 ► §

I don’t know who wrote that up there,

01:28:28 ► §

but they must have heard an old tape of mine.

01:28:32 ► §

This was a graffiti on a wall in Cali in Colombia.

01:28:37 ► §

Without this, you are not yourself.

01:28:40 ► §

Elf, the elf, the self.

01:28:45 ► §

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,

01:28:47 ► §

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

01:28:52 ► §

If you’ve been with us here in the salon for a while,

01:28:55 ► §

you may remember me on several occasions saying that

01:28:58 ► §

I didn’t agree with Terrence’s idea that psychedelics should be taken in silent darkness.

01:29:04 ► §

And that, like most people,

01:29:06 ► §

I always played music during my trips. But while listening to this talk with you just now,

01:29:12 ► §

an interesting thought occurred to me. You see, for the past couple of years now, I’ve been in

01:29:18 ► §

the habit of going to bed kind of early and then getting up around one or two o’clock in the

01:29:23 ► §

morning. And what I do is just

01:29:25 ► §

sit in the living room, vaporizing the equivalent of a joint or so, and I just think. I found that

01:29:33 ► §

this is the perfect time for me to simply sit and think, because it’s so peaceful and quiet, and

01:29:38 ► §

I know that there isn’t going to be a phone call or other interruption of some sort. And so I’ve been amazed at how many insights I’ve gained during those hours,

01:29:48 ► §

which I now realize they’ve been spent sitting stoned in silent darkness.

01:29:55 ► §

And so I now have to admit that I should have listened to Terrence a little sooner

01:29:59 ► §

because, well, that silent darkness thing really does actually have a lot going for it.

01:30:04 ► §

well, that silent darkness thing really does actually have a lot going for it.

01:30:12 ► §

And in one segment, he riffs on the possibility that the elves and other visions he encountered on the psychedelic journeys might actually be projections from his own psyche.

01:30:16 ► §

And in that segment, if I understood him correctly,

01:30:19 ► §

he implied that he no longer did DMT, but had only done it in his youth.

01:30:24 ► §

Or did I get that wrong?

01:30:27 ► §

Now, before I go today, there are a couple of announcements that I want to make,

01:30:31 ► §

and hopefully I can remember them, which I don’t always do.

01:30:35 ► §

I tell people I’m going to announce something, and then, well, I don’t get to it.

01:30:40 ► §

You know, like that old cartoon says, next week I’ve got to get organized.

01:30:45 ► §

Anyway, one of the announcements has to do with fellow salonner and contributor to the salon, Peter Gorman,

01:30:52 ► §

who also was the editor of High Times, I should add.

01:30:56 ► §

As you know, if you’ve listened to my podcast number 276 through 280, plus 467 and 468, you know that Peter is also one of our leading experts in

01:31:07 ► §

ayahuasca, and he’s been leading groups to the Amazon for many years now. Well, another fellow

01:31:14 ► §

salonner, Michael McCoy, is producing a documentary about Peter’s work and has launched an Indiegogo

01:31:21 ► §

campaign to finance it. I’ll put a link to that campaign in today’s program notes,

01:31:26 ► §

which you’ll find at psychedelicsalon.com.

01:31:29 ► §

And on the Indiegogo site, there’s a short video describing Peter’s work

01:31:33 ► §

and what the film will be covering.

01:31:36 ► §

Well, you know, I think that Peter is one of our more precious elders,

01:31:39 ► §

and has an encyclopedic grasp on most things psychedelic that have taken place since the 60s.

01:31:46 ► §

So, in my opinion, his story is most definitely one that we should be working to preserve.

01:31:52 ► §

And while the following may still be subject to change,

01:31:56 ► §

my thoughts about Salon 2.0, which I hope to launch next spring,

01:32:01 ► §

are taking a slightly different shape than I first envisioned.

01:32:05 ► §

To be brief, we’ve had a lot of interesting conversation among the Slack team,

01:32:10 ► §

but we still don’t have any solid mechanisms so far to pull off what I at first envisioned.

01:32:16 ► §

So right now, it looks as if the first step is going to be a baby step,

01:32:21 ► §

and it’s going to be for me to post a list of a half a dozen or so

01:32:25 ► §

potential podcasts with brief descriptions of each of them, and then let members of the forums vote

01:32:31 ► §

on which one will be next. I’m still not sure exactly how this is going to take place, but

01:32:36 ► §

well, it looks like I’ll still be doing the podcast for a while. However, you and our other

01:32:42 ► §

fellow salonners will at least have a say in what types of programs I podcast each week.

01:32:47 ► §

And, yes, I still have a bunch of Terrence McKenna tapes that I haven’t yet previewed.

01:32:52 ► §

So there’s also going to be more of Terrence to come, for a while at least.

01:32:57 ► §

Now, in closing, I’m wondering what you thought when you heard these two short Terrence McKenna soundbites that were part of the talk

01:33:05 ► §

that we just listened to? It’s really true that the world at any moment could come completely and

01:33:12 ► §

utterly apart. And have you seen that happen? What is happening is the unconscious is erupting

01:33:21 ► §

into history, leaping onto the stage of history, claiming the undivided attention of people.

01:33:29 ► §

Did you think about the confrontations that are now taking place

01:33:33 ► §

between the supporters of the two main presidential candidates

01:33:36 ► §

in the recent U.S. election?

01:33:39 ► §

I’m afraid that it’s going to get a little ugly

01:33:41 ► §

when the unconscious impulses of both of these groups

01:33:45 ► §

begin to play out in our public spaces.

01:33:48 ► §

As much as the old activist in me

01:33:51 ► §

hates to say this,

01:33:52 ► §

I’m really thinking that

01:33:54 ► §

for the next few months at least,

01:33:55 ► §

it may be wise to more or less

01:33:57 ► §

keep our heads down

01:33:58 ► §

and stay in the middle of the herd.

01:34:00 ► §

But hey, that’s something

01:34:02 ► §

that each of us has to decide on our own.

01:34:09 ► §

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