Program Notes
Follow Lorenzo on Patreon.com
https://www.patreon.com/lorenzohagerty
Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna
“Psychedelics are like any other social phenomenon. There are a lot of wannabes. There are a lot of people who are along for the ride.”
“I want to talk about what to my mind is the quintessential hallucinogen, and consequentially the quintessential spiritual and magical tool of this dimension. And that is DMT, N,N-Dimethyltryptamine.”
“A long, long time ago I took an oath to tell all secrets that came my way. Don’t tell me a secret. I won’t keep it. I’m against secrets. I’m against hierarchies, lineages. All assumption of special knowledge on the part of anyone in the presence of anyone else is abhorrent to me. I am a true anarchist, first and foremost.”
“The psychedelic mantra: I’ve done it this time!”
“And yet, the DMT thing, it’s like and avalanche of orgasmic beauty, but a certain kind of beauty. The only words that I can find for the kind of beauty that it is are bizarre, alien, outlandish, freaky, and at the very edge of what the human mind seems to be able to hold.”
“What we are about to discover is probably the least likely thing any of us expected out of our dilemma. What we’re about to discover is that death has no sting. That what you penetrate on DMT is an ecology of human souls in another dimension of some sort.”
“I never imagined that a through exploration of life’s mysteries would lead to the conclusion that, in fact, this is but a prelude. We are in a very tiny womb of some sort. Our lives are gestations, and this is not where we are destined to unfold ourselves into what it means to be human. This is some kind of a metamorphic stage, like the pupa of a butterfly, and so this is deep water.”
“I think that the human body, the human mind, these are tools for the soul to use in the effort to unlock its meaning and its destiny.”
“A drug that you take and forty-eight hours later you’re laying around in warm baths and refusing telephone calls is a drug you shouldn’t have taken.”
Burner Podcast Episode 74
Interview with Lorenzo Hagerty
Download a free copy of Lorenzo’s latest book, The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1.
Previous Episode
561 - Psychedelics and Artificial Intelligence
Next Episode
563 - Plants and Mind (Part 1)
Similar Episodes
- 484 - This is the Mushroom’s Program - score: 0.89266
- Podcast 700 – Plants That Talk - score: 0.89144
- 486 - The Main Vein of the Peculiar - score: 0.88887
- 571 - Terence +2 - score: 0.87821
- 270 - Tryptamine Consciousness - score: 0.87711
- 444 - The Longest 100 Seconds You Will Ever Know - score: 0.87675
- 538 - Are Psychedelics Spiritual_ - score: 0.87192
- 216 - McKenna Under the Teaching Tree Part 2 - score: 0.86680
- 028 - In the Valley of Novelty (Part 2) - score: 0.86383
- 386 - Loose Ends Time - score: 0.86265
Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:20 ►
This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.
00:00:23 ►
This is Lorenzo, and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.
00:00:30 ►
And I am pleased to begin today’s podcast by thanking Valerie R. and Mark L., who made donations directly to the salon so as to, well, keep these podcasts coming your way.
00:00:37 ►
So, Valerie and Mark, I thank you on behalf of all of our fellow salonners,
00:00:41 ►
who are going to be reaping the benefits of your kind donations.
00:00:44 ►
all of our fellow salonners who are going to be reaping the benefits of your kind donations.
00:00:52 ►
And a little announcement from the Burner Podcast. A few weeks ago, the host of the podcast came by and we had a little chat, and that’s now posted as an interview on his podcast episode number 74.
00:00:59 ►
And you’ll find it at www.burnerpodcast.com.
00:01:06 ►
And while I’m pleased to have an interview there with him,
00:01:09 ►
I believe that you’ll find a lot of other interesting information about the Burning Man community and his programs.
00:01:15 ►
Even if you’ve never been to a burn, I think that, well, you’ll find the Burner Podcast to be filled with all kinds of interesting conversations.
00:01:23 ►
to be filled with all kinds of interesting conversations.
00:01:27 ►
And I’ll put a link to that podcast in today’s program notes, which you can find at psychedelicsalon.com.
00:01:31 ►
Now, there’s one more announcement that I want to make
00:01:34 ►
before I introduce today’s Terrence McKenna talk,
00:01:37 ►
and this has to do with my wonderful supporters at patreon.com.
00:01:42 ►
As you know, my supporters on Patreon have been making monthly
00:01:46 ►
donations that have made it possible for me to publish my latest book directly into the public
00:01:51 ►
domain. And you can get your own free copy of that book by going to lorenzohaggerty.com
00:01:57 ►
slash free books. And there you can download the PDF version. And soon I hope to put up the free Kindle version as well.
00:02:06 ►
Now, most of my supporters on Patreon donate from 5 a month, with a few of them making
00:02:12 ►
somewhat larger monthly donations, and today there are 60 of these wonderful people supporting my
00:02:18 ►
work, and I want to thank them also for indirectly supporting us here in the salon. You see, the last time that
00:02:26 ►
my wife and I had to move, I, well, I fell into a blue funk, and it took several months for me to
00:02:31 ►
get back in gear and restart these podcasts after a disruption of searching for a new place to live
00:02:38 ►
and packing our stuff and moving and getting resettled. I know that shouldn’t be such a chore,
00:02:43 ►
but it seems that the older I get,
00:02:45 ►
the more difficult it becomes to adjust to the changes that moving brings with them.
00:02:50 ►
So for the last several months now, I’ve been using the donations from my patrons to help my
00:02:56 ►
two children get back on their feet after the recent hurricane in Florida, and I’m happy to
00:03:00 ►
report that all is well with them now and their lives are back to normal.
00:03:10 ►
But a week ago, our landlord told us that he was raising our rent by $400 a month.
00:03:15 ►
So if it wasn’t for the help that my supporters on Patreon are furnishing,
00:03:21 ►
well, I’d probably be taking the salon off the air for a few months while I went through that moving process once again.
00:03:26 ►
But guess what? The monthly contributions of those 60 people now add up to just over $400 a month.
00:03:30 ►
So for the next 12 months at least,
00:03:32 ►
my wife and I will be able to remain where we are,
00:03:35 ►
and these podcasts from the salon
00:03:37 ►
are going to keep coming your way without an interruption.
00:03:41 ►
So you wonderful fellow salonners over at patreon.com who are helping me with your
00:03:46 ►
comments and edits of my new book, well you’re also keeping the salon open and providing a roof
00:03:52 ►
over my head in the process. I really don’t know how to thank you. The best that I can do for now,
00:03:58 ►
I guess, is that every Monday evening from now on from 7 p.m to 7 30 p.m pacific time,
00:04:04 ►
every Monday evening from now on from 7 p.m. to 7.30 p.m. Pacific Time,
00:04:10 ►
I’ll be available to visit with my Patreon supporters in a Zoom.us conference room.
00:04:12 ►
I’ve already posted the details on Patreon,
00:04:16 ►
and I’m looking forward to our first online visit later today.
00:04:19 ►
And how does this affect the salon, you may ask?
00:04:37 ►
Well, one of the things that I hope to do is to learn how to use Zoom.us well enough so that we could hold a few webinars here in the salon where I could invite some friends like Matt Palomary, Bruce Dahmer, and others to join us for a free online conference that anyone who wanted to could join.
00:04:43 ►
And I’ll be talking about these online meetings more in the future once I learn how to use Zoom.
00:04:45 ►
But today I just wanted to publicly thank my wonderful supporters on Patreon.com. You have ensured that 2018 is going to be a great year
00:04:53 ►
for me and my family. Now, just when I think that I’ve heard about every idea Terrence McKenna made
00:05:00 ►
public at one of his workshops, a talk like the one that I’m about to play for you pops up.
00:05:06 ►
And yes, you’ll recognize a few of the riffs that you’ve heard before, but for me there is really
00:05:11 ►
something fresh and new in this talk. For one thing, there is a section where he gets more
00:05:16 ►
metaphysical than I’m used to hearing from him, and maybe it’s just my imagination, but this could
00:05:22 ►
become one of my favorite talks of his. However, you’re going
00:05:25 ►
to have to decide things like that for yourself, huh? Anyway, I know that we’ve all heard Terrence
00:05:31 ►
talk about the DMT experience many times before, but for some reason I really like this one the
00:05:37 ►
best. Maybe it’s because he doesn’t start out with the machine elves, which I’ve never encountered,
00:05:43 ►
although I’ve tried on many occasions.
00:05:46 ►
Instead, he begins by describing that first visual of a chrysanthemum-like unfolding,
00:05:52 ►
and that description really hit home with me, even though I saw it in different colors than he did.
00:05:58 ►
And that’s something important to remember, I think. Many of these experiences are close to
00:06:03 ►
ineffable. You can’t put words around them,
00:06:05 ►
and so any attempt to describe them can sometimes throw people off to the point where they begin
00:06:11 ►
thinking that maybe they didn’t do something right if it didn’t seem just the same way you
00:06:14 ►
described it. So always remember that these experiences are unique to each of us individuals,
00:06:20 ►
and what you bring to them has a lot to do with what you get out of them.
00:06:24 ►
individuals, and what you bring to them has a lot to do with what you get out of them.
00:06:31 ►
Well, I guess that was just a long way of saying that I really like this description of a DMT trip that you’re going to be listening to Terrence give about 12 minutes from now.
00:06:40 ►
In order to make sure we all understand the domain we’re operating from here,
00:06:48 ►
I would like to talk a little about what it’s like to be loaded,
00:06:54 ►
because I think that’s the ground zero of what we’re talking about.
00:07:02 ►
Psychedelics are like any other social phenomena. There are a lot of wannabes.
00:07:09 ►
There are a lot of people who are along for the ride. I’m sure the pagan community is no stranger
00:07:16 ►
to this phenomenon because there are certain residual spin-offs, if you proclaim yourself pagan, that are hard to obtain any other way.
00:07:27 ►
Similarly, for being psychedelic, my notion of the psychedelic cosmogony, if you want to think
00:07:38 ►
of it that way, is it’s like a bullseye. It’s like a series of concentric circles and various
00:07:47 ►
substances place you in various quadrants of that mandala at various
00:07:54 ►
distances from ground zero which is at the absolute center. And Nature in her bounty has provided
00:08:06 ►
various coordination points. I mean there’s the cannabis
00:08:12 ►
coordination point the opiate
00:08:16 ►
coordination point
00:08:18 ►
The tropanes that were so important in European witchcraft the solanaceous
00:08:23 ►
that were so important in European witchcraft,
00:08:27 ►
the solanaceous plants, hyalcyamine, those things.
00:08:30 ►
That’s a different chemical family and a different group of plant families
00:08:37 ►
that these compounds occur in.
00:08:39 ►
And I’ve been at this fairly steadily since 1964, and I’ve tried to go armed with the knowledge of pharmacology, dose response, LD50, and all that,
00:09:10 ►
but I think as pagans and magicians, we really understand that the mind can do anything.
00:09:20 ►
And there’s a horribly frightening little passage in Jung somewhere where he says,
00:09:28 ►
the unconscious has a thousand ways to terminate a life that has become meaningless.
00:09:36 ►
Meaning, you know, you’ll step in front of a streetcar or something.
00:09:41 ►
So in my lifetime of looking at these things and being interested in
00:09:48 ►
many other things as well, heresies, obscure backwaters of art history and literature, peculiar philosophies that rose and fell centuries
00:10:09 ►
ago in obscure parts of the world. My theory of life’s exploration is to run
00:10:18 ►
edges and I’ve mellowed over the years but but I used to say, if a book isn’t a hundred years old, you shouldn’t read it.
00:10:29 ►
If a person isn’t dead, you shouldn’t worry about them.
00:10:32 ►
If they wrote in English, you shouldn’t bother with them.
00:10:37 ►
So forth and so on.
00:10:54 ►
In the course of sorting out as many peculiar and bizarre possibilities as life could offer me in many places,
00:11:00 ►
my attitude was always critical.
00:11:11 ►
My attitude was always a show me attitude I don’t believe in faith I don’t believe in belief my favorite gospel story is the story of the apostle Thomas who was not present when Christ
00:11:20 ►
came the first time after the resurrection to the upper room and then
00:11:26 ►
later Thomas came to the Apostles and they said the master has been here and
00:11:32 ►
he said you guys have been smoking too much of that red lab and then Christ
00:11:40 ►
came again but in this conversation with the apostles, Thomas said,
00:11:47 ►
Unless I put my hand into the wound, I will not believe it.
00:11:53 ►
And then time passed, and then Christ came again to the upper room.
00:11:59 ►
And he said, Thomas, come forward.
00:12:04 ►
Put your hand into the wound. And he did, and then he said, Lord, I am not worthy, so forth and so on. My conclusion about this story is that alone, among all humanity in all times and places, only one person ever touched the incorporeal body of God.
00:12:28 ►
Thomas the Doubter touched because he doubted. It was not necessary that the
00:12:36 ►
believers should be vouchsafed to such a boon, but the Doubter was awarded the supreme enlightenment.
00:12:49 ►
Okay, so much for that.
00:12:53 ►
So my thing has always been, whether you present me with a diet,
00:12:59 ►
a social arrangement, a society, a sexual conundrum, a work of art. My criteria is, is it shit
00:13:07 ►
or is it shinola? And I’m happy to give you the benefit of my personal life’s experience experience preceding along those lines. I want to talk about what to my mind is the quintessential
00:13:30 ►
hallucinogen and consequently the quintessential spiritual and magical tool of this dimension, dimension and that is DMT dimethyltryptamine a compound that occurs
00:13:48 ►
in the human nervous system it occurs in many many plants it is the commonest
00:13:57 ►
hallucinogen in all of nature and I don’t know how you got to where you are this afternoon but the way
00:14:08 ►
I got here is by testing and by hoping and by pursuing a magical if that’s the
00:14:21 ►
word a miraculous a transcendental ideal that over the course of life
00:14:28 ►
experience strips from you
00:14:31 ►
You know you have to get a job
00:14:33 ►
Your first love is not your last love
00:14:37 ►
slowly this pristine
00:14:40 ►
shining
00:14:41 ►
belief in perfect ability is
00:14:50 ►
shining belief in perfectibility is eroded by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune you know the dark oxen that turn the millstones of the world but i’m here to tell you that it is real. There is a doorway into another dimension.
00:15:09 ►
Aladdin’s lamp is real.
00:15:12 ►
Fairyland is real.
00:15:16 ►
Magic is real in the most real sense.
00:15:22 ►
In the same sense that what we call reality is real and I learned this
00:15:32 ►
through this compound and one of the great puzzles about this compound is why more people don’t know about it.
00:15:46 ►
No brotherhood initiated me.
00:15:52 ►
No lineage reaching back to the fall of Atlantis
00:15:56 ►
brought me into its circle.
00:16:00 ►
Therefore, I feel completely free to say anything I want.
00:16:06 ►
Nobody has ever come to me and said,
00:16:10 ►
you are spilling the beans, you are telling the secret.
00:16:14 ►
A long, long time ago, and we all have different opinions,
00:16:20 ►
this is mine, I hope it doesn’t offend,
00:16:24 ►
but a long, long time ago, I took an oath to tell all secrets that came my way.
00:16:34 ►
Don’t tell me a secret.
00:16:36 ►
I won’t keep it.
00:16:38 ►
I’m against secrets.
00:16:40 ►
I’m against hierarchies, lineages, all assumption of special knowledge on the
00:16:48 ►
part of anyone in the presence of anyone else is abhorrent to me. I mean, I am a true anarchist,
00:16:56 ►
first and foremost.
00:17:01 ►
So DMT, like all things in this world, has a physical body, a presence and a presentation.
00:17:10 ►
In this case, it looks rather like earwax. It is orange. It is crystalline. It smells vaguely of mothballs.
00:17:23 ►
It smells vaguely of mothballs.
00:17:31 ►
And for my money, it is the lapis, the quintessence,
00:17:35 ►
the universal panacea at the end of time has sent a reflection back through the temporal labyrinth.
00:17:42 ►
And wherever this touches, wherever this compresses, the mystery
00:17:47 ►
is fully present. So what is it then? Well, it’s an experience. And I maintain it’s the most intense
00:17:58 ►
experience you can have this side of the yawning grave without doubt.
00:18:05 ►
I mean, people say, is it dangerous?
00:18:09 ►
Well, the answer is only if you fear death by astonishment.
00:18:17 ►
Yes, that’s a joke here.
00:18:20 ►
It’s not a joke there,
00:18:23 ►
because you find yourself literally holding your heart to verify
00:18:29 ►
that you have not in fact had a coronary thrombosis induced by wonder terror reverence
00:18:37 ►
and astonishment so here it is the quintessence, the orange thing.
00:18:48 ►
Was it transponded in from our tourists?
00:18:54 ►
Was it handed down through some ancient eldritch brotherhood that found this secret before the pyramids were built?
00:18:58 ►
Who can say?
00:19:01 ►
Whatever it is, wherever it comes from,
00:19:07 ►
say, whatever it is, wherever it comes from, here’s what happens when you allow it to pass through the blood-brain barrier of your own alchemical vessel, which is your body.
00:19:17 ►
The first thing that happens is that there is a sense as though all the air in the room had been sucked out.
00:19:28 ►
All the colors brighten.
00:19:30 ►
This is that increase in visual acuity that I made so much of yesterday.
00:19:36 ►
All edges become sharp.
00:19:39 ►
Distant things stand out in their clarity.
00:19:43 ►
This is at one toke. At two tokes, you close your eyes,
00:19:51 ►
you feel a sense of anesthesia seeping through your body. You close your eyes and you see a
00:19:58 ►
floral pattern rotating in space, usually yellow-orange orange people who do this occasionally and nobody does
00:20:09 ►
it a lot call it the chrysanthemum it’s a floral pattern like a pattern in a chinese brocade
00:20:17 ►
this forms and stabilizes and then you either break through it or you require one more toke.
00:20:30 ►
And these are matters of physiology, shamanic intent, so forth and so on. The leather-lunged
00:20:37 ►
hash smokers among us have a leg up in this department. This is a spiritual discipline
00:20:45 ►
where the ability not to cough
00:20:47 ►
makes the difference between shunyata
00:20:50 ►
and, you know, try again, Sam.
00:20:56 ►
So, you take, let us assume,
00:21:00 ►
a third toke, long and slow,
00:21:03 ►
through a glass pipe. you vaporize this stuff you don’t mix it
00:21:09 ►
with weed or oregano or any of that which was done in the past you want the pure stuff and you take
00:21:16 ►
it in and in and in and there is definitely somewhere in here a threshold, a threshold which you must exceed.
00:21:27 ►
And when you do that, this membrane-like thing,
00:21:32 ►
this chrysanthemum will actually part.
00:21:35 ►
And there is a sound like the crumpling of a plastic bread wrapper
00:21:41 ►
or the crackling of flame.
00:21:44 ►
A friend of mine says this is the radio
00:21:46 ►
intellect key of your soul exiting through the anterior fontanelle at the
00:21:51 ►
top of your head. Could be. In any case this crackling sound and a tone, a tone, a…
00:22:10 ►
And then there’s this impression of transition,
00:22:15 ►
and you’re now 20 seconds deep into this experience.
00:22:20 ►
There’s an impression of transition.
00:22:23 ►
It’s as though there were a series of tunnels or
00:22:27 ►
chambers that you are tumbling down being propelled by some kind of muscle behind you
00:22:36 ►
that is pushing you i mean yes birth canal yes yes of course but anyway a tunnel and what i’ve noticed about this tunnel is the walls and ceiling flux
00:22:48 ►
and come down to meet each other and where they touch they pull apart with a
00:22:54 ►
and then you’re propelled into the next space and then the next and then the next and there is this right and then you are there and this is what i want to talk to you about, because of all communities, I hope, perhaps collectively, singly, someone can say, but there is an irreconcilable sense of enormous mass surrounding you.
00:23:50 ►
In other words, you are underground. You’re at the center of a mountain or something.
00:23:56 ►
And you’re in a room which aficionados call the dome.
00:24:01 ►
And people will ask each other, did you see the dome? people will ask each other did you see the dome were you there it’s softly lit
00:24:08 ►
indirectly lit and the the walls if such they be are crawling with geometric hallucinations
00:24:20 ►
very brightly colored very iridescent with deep sheens and very high reflective surfaces.
00:24:30 ►
Everything is machine-like and polished and throbbing with energy.
00:24:35 ►
But that is not what immediately arrests my attention.
00:24:41 ►
What arrests my attention is the fact that this space is inhabited, that the immediate
00:24:50 ►
impression as you break into it is there is a cheer. The gnomes have learned a new way to say hooray.
00:25:09 ►
You break in to this space and are immediately swarmed
00:25:11 ►
by squeaking, self-transforming elf machines.
00:25:17 ►
These things which are made of light
00:25:20 ►
and grammar and sound
00:25:23 ►
that come chirping and squealing and tumbling toward you and they say
00:25:29 ►
hooray welcome you’re here and in my case you send so many you come so rarely
00:25:37 ►
and and my uh my immediate impression no matter how many times I do this,
00:25:48 ►
and I’ve done it maybe 30 or 40 times, which isn’t a lot in a lifetime of worshipping it,
00:25:54 ►
my immediate impression is that they are welcoming.
00:26:02 ►
There is something going on which I, over the years come to call love, L-U-V,
00:26:09 ►
not light utility vehicle, but love that is not like eros or not like sexual attraction.
00:26:20 ►
I don’t know what it’s like exactly. It’s almost like a physical thing. It’s like a glue that pours out into this space.
00:26:29 ►
And my immediate impression in there is I’m appalled. I’m appalled at how far I’ve come.
00:26:37 ►
And one of the strange things about DMT is that it does not affect your mind in the ordinary sense in that you know
00:26:47 ►
drugs they make you giggly they frighten you they stimulate you they depress you
00:26:54 ►
DMT does none of this you go to that place with all your groceries you’re
00:27:02 ►
there and you’re there thinking Jesus H, H, fucking Christ, what is this?
00:27:09 ►
What is it?
00:27:10 ►
And you’re thinking, I must be dead.
00:27:15 ►
I’ve done it this time.
00:27:17 ►
The psychedelic mantra, I’ve done it this time.
00:27:22 ►
I must be dead.
00:27:24 ►
And so you think you know, you, you think heart, heart. Yes. Heart.
00:27:31 ►
Pulse. Pulse. Yes. Yes. And meanwhile, these things are literally in your face. And what
00:27:37 ►
they do is they jump into your chest and then they jump out again. And what they’re doing,
00:27:46 ►
and then they jump out again and what they’re doing and this is the point I think what they’re doing is they are singing chanting speaking in some kind
00:27:58 ►
of language that is very bizarre to hear,
00:28:09 ►
but what is far more important is that you can see it.
00:28:14 ►
They speak in a language which you see,
00:28:18 ►
and this is completely confounding,
00:28:25 ►
because syntax is not something you ordinarily reach out and touch.
00:28:28 ►
And in this space, that’s what’s happening.
00:28:32 ►
And so like jeweled, self-dribbling basketballs, these things come running forward.
00:28:35 ►
And what they are doing with this visible language that they create
00:28:40 ►
is they’re making gifts.
00:28:44 ►
They’re making gifts for you and they will say
00:28:48 ►
which condenses as something which looks like a cross between a
00:28:58 ►
Sopwith camel, a Havana cigar, a piece of abalone, an op opal and nookie and they offer it to you and
00:29:07 ►
you’re looking at this thing and as you look at it it also transforms changes
00:29:15 ►
speaks sings undergoes metastasis undergoes metamorphosis and these things
00:29:22 ►
are just accumulating and each elf machine
00:29:25 ►
creature elbows others aside says look at this look at this take this choose me
00:29:33 ►
and as you direct your attention into these things you have the overwhelming
00:29:40 ►
conviction that if you could bring a single one of these objects back to this world,
00:29:49 ►
that somehow you wouldn’t have to say anything. You would just walk up to people and say,
00:29:56 ►
friend? And people would say, oh my god, you know, you got a piece of the action, the real action.
00:30:09 ►
So, this state of ecstatic frenzy,
00:30:17 ►
and it’s like a Bugs Bunny cartoon running backwards in cyberspace or something.
00:30:24 ►
This state of incredible frenzy goes on for about three minutes.
00:30:28 ►
And all the time the elves are saying,
00:30:31 ►
don’t give way to wonder.
00:30:35 ►
Do not abandon yourself to amazement.
00:30:39 ►
Pay attention. Pay attention.
00:30:43 ►
Look at what we’re doing.
00:30:52 ►
Look at what we’re doing, look at what we’re doing, and then do it, do it.
00:31:10 ►
And it’s this thing where then everything stops, and they wait, and you feel like a torch, a spark lit in your belly that begins to move up your esophagus and eventually when it reaches your mouth your mouth just flies open and this comes out. Acoustically, it’s
00:31:25 ►
. But what you’re not hearing,
00:31:50 ►
the startled friends who sent you to this place
00:31:53 ►
are putting up with this.
00:31:55 ►
What you’re experiencing is a visual modality
00:32:00 ►
where these tones are surfaces,
00:32:04 ►
shading, colors, insets, jewels. You are making something.
00:32:11 ►
You know, erase, move forward, add cerulean, put in stippippling it’s that sort of thing and um and they go mad with joy
00:32:29 ►
when you do this and then you know this goes on for about 30 seconds and then there is like a
00:32:38 ►
ripple through the system and you realize these two continua are being pulled apart and I had one trip where the
00:32:49 ►
and often it’s very erotic although I’m not sure that’s the word but it’s something it’s almost
00:32:57 ►
like sex is the surface of something of which this is the volume and And I’m a great fan of sex.
00:33:05 ►
I don’t mean to denigrate it.
00:33:07 ►
I mean to raise DMT to a very high status.
00:33:12 ►
But it’s astonishing.
00:33:15 ►
And one trip as the pull-away maneuver began,
00:33:20 ►
all the elves turned simultaneously
00:33:22 ►
and looked at me and said,
00:33:26 ►
Deja vu.
00:33:29 ►
Deja vu.
00:33:32 ►
So, this is an experience which in some form,
00:33:40 ►
I mean, it will be different for each one of you,
00:33:43 ►
but in some form, at least what will be similar to my description is how dramatic it will be
00:33:50 ►
It will hit you as hard as it hit me if you do it, right?
00:33:56 ►
This to me this experience is of a fundamentally different order than any other
00:34:04 ►
experience this side of the yawning grave,
00:34:08 ►
and why religions have not been built around it,
00:34:11 ►
why empires have not risen and fallen around the control of its sources,
00:34:18 ►
why theology has not enshrined it as its central exhibit
00:34:22 ►
for the presence of the other in the human world? I don’t
00:34:27 ►
know. I can tell the secret, as you notice. Nothing shuts me up. But why this is not four-inch
00:34:36 ►
headlines on every newspaper on the planet, I cannot understand, because I don’t know what news you were waiting for,
00:34:49 ►
but this is the news that I was waiting for.
00:34:59 ►
It’s an incredible challenge to human understanding to try and make sense of this.
00:35:03 ►
And I started out, you know,
00:35:07 ►
reading Jung,
00:35:10 ►
doing my Hindu,
00:35:12 ►
you know, getting up to speed with all that,
00:35:14 ►
studying Zen Buddhism,
00:35:15 ►
studying shamanism. The thing that puzzles me about DMT
00:35:18 ►
is how little trace there is of it
00:35:22 ►
in the human world.
00:35:24 ►
I can’t point to a period in European art or the art of
00:35:30 ►
some group of islanders somewhere and say that is very much like DMT. It isn’t. And yet the DMT
00:35:39 ►
thing is, it’s like an avalanche of orgasmic beauty, but a certain kind of beauty.
00:35:47 ►
The only words that I can find for the kind of beauty that it is,
00:35:51 ►
is bizarre, alien, outlandish, outré, freaky,
00:36:00 ►
and at the very edge of what the human mind seems to be able to hold,
00:36:05 ►
well, where is this coming from?
00:36:08 ►
And what is happening?
00:36:11 ►
And this is what I like to discuss with people such as yourselves
00:36:15 ►
who have wide experience in the world and in the realms of the unseen.
00:36:23 ►
This has to be taken seriously.
00:36:26 ►
In other words, it’s only a hallucination thing.
00:36:29 ►
That horseshit is just passe.
00:36:33 ►
I mean, reality is only a hallucination
00:36:35 ►
for crying out loud.
00:36:37 ►
Haven’t you heard?
00:36:38 ►
So that takes care of that.
00:36:40 ►
It’s only a hallucination.
00:36:42 ►
What we’ve got here, folks, is an intelligent
00:36:48 ►
intellect of some sort that is frantic to communicate with human beings for
00:36:57 ►
some reason. And the possibilities can be logically enumerated.
00:37:08 ►
I mean, what we’ve got here is either this is an extraterrestrial,
00:37:13 ►
you know, evolved around a different star,
00:37:17 ►
possibly with a different biology,
00:37:20 ►
may not even be made of matter,
00:37:22 ►
came across an enormous distance sometime maybe long ago,
00:37:27 ►
has some agenda which we may or may not be able to conceive of,
00:37:32 ►
this is it, the real thing.
00:37:35 ►
As the little girl said in Poltergeist, they’re here.
00:37:39 ►
So that’s one possibility. That’s just one possibility.
00:37:44 ►
And I present these
00:37:47 ►
without judgment because I’m not sure
00:37:53 ►
if an extraterrestrial wanted to interact with a human society and it had
00:38:00 ►
ethics that forbade it from landing trillion-ton beryllium ships on the United Nations plaza.
00:38:08 ►
In other words, if it were subtle, I can see hiding yourself inside a shamanic intoxication.
00:38:18 ►
You would say, let’s analyze these people.
00:38:20 ►
Okay, they’re kind of hard-headed rationalists except they have this phenomenon called getting loaded and when they get loaded they accept whatever happens to them so let’s
00:38:32 ►
hide inside the load and we’ll talk to them from there and they’ll never realize that we’re of a different status than pink elephants.
00:38:47 ►
Okay, that’s one possibility. Now, another possibility is that this is not about extraterrestrials’ flight
00:38:55 ►
and enormous technologies and distant homelands.
00:39:01 ►
And this is maybe closer to friendlier to pagan notions, that there is a
00:39:08 ►
parallel continuum nearby, essentially right here, and call it fairyland, call it the western realm,
00:39:18 ►
whatever you like, but you don’t go there in starships. go there through magical doorways which are open via ritual and
00:39:28 ►
and things like that that is a possibility as well certainly human folklore in all times and
00:39:37 ►
places except western europe for the last 300 years has insisted that these parallel domains of intelligence and
00:39:49 ►
Organization exist there is a third
00:39:54 ►
possibility which I
00:39:56 ►
Leave it to you to decide whether this is the more conservative position or the more
00:40:02 ►
radical position and
00:40:09 ►
I reached this reluctantly and i’m not sure this is my position but these things have a weird these tykes as i call them these self-transforming
00:40:19 ►
machine elves these these syntactical homuncul, have a very weird relationship to human beings.
00:40:29 ►
First of all, they love us. They care for some reason.
00:40:34 ►
Whoever and whatever they are, they’re far more aware of us than we are aware of them.
00:40:41 ►
I mean, witness the fact that they welcome me. So is it possible that at the
00:40:49 ►
end of the 20th century, at the end of 500 years of materialism, reductionism,
00:40:58 ►
positivism, what we’re about to discover is probably the least likely denouement any of us expected out of
00:41:09 ►
our dilemma. What we’re about to discover is that death has no sting. That what you
00:41:17 ►
penetrate on DMT is an ecology of human souls in another dimension of some sort.
00:41:27 ►
I mean, this is hair-raising to me,
00:41:30 ►
and I spent my whole adolescence and early adulthood
00:41:34 ►
getting free from Catholicism and its assumptions,
00:41:38 ►
and I never imagined that a thorough exploration of life’s mysteries
00:41:44 ►
would lead to the
00:41:46 ►
conclusion that in fact this is but a prelude. We are in a very tiny womb of
00:41:57 ►
some sort. Our lives are just stations and this is not where we are destined to unfold ourselves
00:42:09 ►
into what it means to be human.
00:42:12 ►
This is some kind of a metamorphic stage, like the pupa of a butterfly.
00:42:32 ►
a butterfly. And so this is deep water because, you know, we are fairly agitated over the fact that we fear the planet is dying and us with it. This stuff raises the issue that you don’t know what dying is. Therefore, it’s very uncertain exactly what sort of an
00:42:49 ►
attitude we should take to it. And as I say, I am not advocating a position. Mysteries are not
00:42:58 ►
unsolved problems. They are mysteries. When you stand naked in the presence of the mystery, it is still utterly and completely mysterious.
00:43:10 ►
But I enjoy talking to people about this because I think that the human body, the human mind,
00:43:20 ►
these are tools for the soul to use in the effort to unlock its meaning and its destiny.
00:43:30 ►
And millions of people, perhaps billions of people,
00:43:35 ►
have gone to the grave without knowing that this is possible,
00:43:42 ►
this experience that I’ve just described to you.
00:43:46 ►
And it’s perfectly harmless I mean I think that if science would back out of politics
00:43:53 ►
and do its work we could establish that DMT is the most harmless the safest of all
00:44:12 ►
hallucinogens the fact that it occurs naturally in the human brain is the first clue to its
00:44:18 ►
The fact that it’s benign the second clue is the fact that
00:44:22 ►
It only lasts eight to twelve minutes
00:44:29 ►
What that means to a pharmacologist is the body perfectly understands what to do with this compound you take a hit of DMT and your
00:44:34 ►
body says oh I recognize this activate the animation cycle activate
00:44:41 ►
demethylation cycle activate it knows what to do and so within 10 minutes you’re
00:44:48 ►
down a drug that you take and 48 hours later you’re lying around in warm baths and refusing
00:44:57 ►
telephone calls is a drug you shouldn’t have taken because it’s hitting you too hard.
00:45:05 ►
That’s not, it’s not clean, it’s not smooth.
00:45:08 ►
DMT, the most powerful hallucinogen known to man and science
00:45:16 ►
clears your system in 15 minutes.
00:45:18 ►
I mean, you’re so down, you can’t,
00:45:22 ►
you don’t have a small headache or need to take a nap or anything you’re ready to
00:45:26 ►
do phone calls um so how can it be then that a compound which each of us carries right here
00:45:38 ►
right in the pineal gland right in the aj chakra. The philosopher’s stone is no further away
00:45:47 ►
than that. How can this be secret from us? How can we be trapped in a dimension of such limitation
00:45:57 ►
and such mundaneness when our own nervous systems and the ecology around us
00:46:05 ►
and our own history over the past half million years
00:46:09 ►
argues that this is what we were born and bred for.
00:46:13 ►
This is where we belong.
00:46:15 ►
This is what at play in the fields of the goddess must mean.
00:46:21 ►
And somehow history has made us dysfunctional buried the mystery made it
00:46:29 ►
a if at best a piece of secret knowledge jealously guarded by somebody I mean I
00:46:37 ►
don’t know there are lots of mystery cults and secret societies in the world, I don’t know if any of them are guarding DMT as a secret.
00:46:49 ►
It may be so. No one told me to keep my mouth shut. A very suggestive short story, I’m sure
00:46:58 ►
many of you know and love the Argentine surrealist writer Jorge Luis Borges. Well, Borges has a book, I believe it’s
00:47:09 ►
called Labyrinths, and in Labyrinths there is a short story called The Sect of the Phoenix,
00:47:16 ►
and it says there is a sacrament older than mankind. The sectarians have been the victims of every persecution in human history.
00:47:30 ►
And the sectarians have been the purveyors of every persecution in history.
00:47:38 ►
These sectarians are not identifiable by race or place or language or time. To the adept, the mystery appears
00:47:51 ►
ridiculous, yet they do not speak of it. One child can initiate another. It is orange.
00:48:01 ►
It is orange.
00:48:04 ►
Ruins are propitious places.
00:48:11 ►
Do it in the moonlight at the thresholds of buildings.
00:48:14 ►
And that’s all it said.
00:48:15 ►
It’s a page and a half. And it suggests, and see, here’s the thing.
00:48:20 ►
I mean, I am not as articulate on this subject as I wish I could be.
00:48:24 ►
I mean, I am not as articulate on this subject as I wish I could be.
00:48:30 ►
If this is not the secret that these lineages are guarding,
00:48:34 ►
then they’re guarding an empty house.
00:48:36 ►
This is the secret.
00:48:39 ►
It is. It is.
00:48:42 ►
It cannot be anything else.
00:48:45 ►
It is the Neoplatonic one.
00:48:48 ►
It is the transubstantient object,
00:48:52 ►
the panus supersubstantialis of the alchemist. And I’m not saying that people have known about this for a long time.
00:49:01 ►
DMT is in many plants, as said but spread very thinly and we don’t have
00:49:08 ►
historical records of anyone ever concentrating it I’ve done the DMT plant
00:49:15 ►
preparations of the Amazon the snuffs and the ayahuasca and on ayahuasca if it is heavily laced with the DMT containing plant after hours
00:49:29 ►
of breath work and drumming alone in the jungle you can begin to open it up to the place the DMT
00:49:37 ►
will carry you to in 45 seconds in an Upper East Side apartment whether you like it or not.
00:49:45 ►
seconds in an Upper East Side apartment, whether you like it or not. Some of you may have seen, I don’t, years and years ago, this B movie about a guy who
00:49:50 ►
has a big ranch in Mexico and one of the campesinos comes rushing back from having encountered
00:49:57 ►
a brontosaur in the forest. forest and he can only point inarticulately at the woods and say something something something
00:50:10 ►
something and that’s what i am i’m a monkey and i’ve come back to the truth and i’m telling you
00:50:29 ►
you there’s something over the next hill that is off the scale, off the scale. And I have made it my business to, you know, delve. I’m a delver. I’m a noethic archaeologist.
00:50:40 ►
Obscure heresies and strange rites and all of this stuff, been there, done that,
00:50:46 ►
it’s all pale soup compared to this.
00:50:52 ►
And so I hype it to you
00:50:55 ►
simply to try and inspire you to explore it.
00:51:00 ►
We are at the present state
00:51:02 ►
in the position of explorers of the new world, 50 years after Columbus. We have notebook entries. We have partial maps, but we don’t have a complete map of what this thing is. It’s another dimension. It is literally another dimension.
00:51:25 ►
I took DMT to a llama of great accomplishment.
00:51:32 ►
Not one of the grab-ass, can-of-Budweiser-welded-to-the-good-right-hand llamas,
00:51:39 ►
but a real llama.
00:51:41 ►
This guy was over 90 when he smoked DMT,
00:51:45 ►
and he’s since his wheel has turned.
00:51:50 ►
And he said to me, he said, it’s the lesser lights.
00:51:54 ►
He said, you can’t go further into the bardo and return.
00:52:00 ►
And so I think that we stand at the brink of an enormous frontier.
00:52:07 ►
Call it incorporeality, call it non-material existence,
00:52:14 ►
or, you know, bite the bullet.
00:52:17 ►
Call it death.
00:52:19 ►
But this is the frontier that we stand on the edge of.
00:52:23 ►
This is what history has been about
00:52:25 ►
history has been some kind of suicide plot for 15,000 years not a moment past
00:52:32 ►
that the plot was not advanced closer and closer and closer and closer to
00:52:39 ►
completion and now in the 20th century, you know, we see that this thing,
00:52:46 ►
this transcendental object at the end of time,
00:52:49 ►
this attractor that chose us out of the animal kingdom
00:52:55 ►
and sculpted the neocortex, opposed the thumb,
00:53:01 ►
stood us on our hind legs, gave us binocular vision.
00:53:06 ►
This thing is calling us toward itself across eons of cosmic time.
00:53:13 ►
We are asked to mirror it, and as we mirror it, we become more of its essence.
00:53:19 ►
And as we become more of its essence, we leave behind the animal organization
00:53:24 ►
that we were cast in in the beginning.
00:53:28 ►
And what this is about, who knows? Is this a drama of cosmic redemption? Is it the transcendental
00:53:40 ►
other at the end of time? Is it a Gnostic demon? Is it Ildabla? What is it? We do
00:53:47 ►
not know. But I really believe we are in the era when we will come to know. And what the psychedelics
00:53:56 ►
are, are periscopes in the temporal dimension. If you want to see a little bit into the future,
00:54:04 ►
If you want to see a little bit into the future,
00:54:08 ►
elevate your psychedelic periscope outside of the three-dimensional continuum
00:54:11 ►
and peer around.
00:54:13 ►
For thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of years,
00:54:18 ►
we have been pulled toward this omega point.
00:54:21 ►
The Earth is like an egg.
00:54:24 ►
It has come to its moment of fructification. The dawn
00:54:29 ►
that has been anticipated since we were herding our cattle across the plains of Africa is now
00:54:37 ►
upon us. The east is streaked with the blush of rosy dawn. It is coming upon us.
00:54:45 ►
And I think that it will redeem history,
00:54:49 ►
that history is not a nightmare.
00:54:52 ►
It is a passage.
00:54:55 ►
It is an initiation.
00:54:57 ►
Think of the fetus in the womb
00:55:00 ►
at the moment of transition.
00:55:02 ►
Surely it must despair.
00:55:07 ►
The walls are closing in.
00:55:10 ►
It’s being crushed and strangled.
00:55:12 ►
Gone are the endless,
00:55:13 ►
amniotic oceans of a few months before.
00:55:15 ►
The weightlessness,
00:55:16 ►
the effortless delivery of food
00:55:18 ►
through the umbilical cord.
00:55:20 ►
Suddenly it’s just boundaries
00:55:22 ►
and agony
00:55:24 ►
and crushing pressure. That’s where we are. And
00:55:29 ►
we are going to have to shed history like a snake sheds its skin if we want to slip off into
00:55:36 ►
hyperspace, where I think all of magical humanity is awaiting us and cheering us on, lending their weight. They’re all out there,
00:55:50 ►
you know, Proclus and Plotinus and Plato and Hypatia and Henry Cornelius Agrippa and John
00:55:59 ►
Dee and Robert Flood and Eliphas Levy, they’re all out there pulling for us.
00:56:06 ►
And every shaman and shamaness,
00:56:08 ►
every magician, practitioner,
00:56:11 ►
as far back in time as you go,
00:56:14 ►
was part of the plan, the conjuration,
00:56:18 ►
the great work, the distillation of the quintessence.
00:56:22 ►
History is a magical invocation, and at the end of that
00:56:28 ►
invocation, if it is correctly done, all boundaries will dissolve into the stone, the lapis, a
00:56:37 ►
transdimensional vehicle that can move through space and time, that is the collectivity of all human souls free at
00:56:46 ►
last in what William Blake called the divine imagination and you don’t have to
00:56:54 ►
wait for the general dispensation you can join up anytime by hyper spatialize
00:57:02 ►
in your metaphors and your point of view through psychedelic symbiosis
00:57:09 ►
with the plants that are pouring this hyperdimensional Gaian vision into the minds of anyone
00:57:16 ►
who will detoxify themselves from history and linear thinking and but open themselves to the presence of the transformative mystery
00:57:30 ►
that is going to leave this planet unrecognizable to us within our lifetimes.
00:57:38 ►
So that’s the basic spiel and I think it raises a lot of questions and yours is first. The answer
00:57:56 ►
is yes, yes. The question is are there herbs in the temperate zone that contain DMT?
00:58:10 ►
And yes, there are certain grasses,
00:58:16 ►
Phalaris arundinacea, Phalaris tuberosa.
00:58:19 ►
These can be ordered from plant dealers or gotten, ironically enough, from agricultural experiment stations
00:58:24 ►
because these are pasturage grasses. gotten ironically enough from agricultural experiment stations because
00:58:25 ►
these are pasturage grasses. A lot of people are doing wonderful work right
00:58:33 ►
now learning how to make DMT preparations out of native plants. The
00:58:40 ►
mature phalaris grass, it’s very diffuse, the DMT.
00:58:46 ►
So what people are doing is they’re getting the seeds and they’re sprouting them in a sprouter.
00:58:53 ►
And then they’re taking the sprouted seeds and air drying them.
00:58:58 ►
Well, you can imagine how powdery sprouts become if you air dry them.
00:59:07 ►
powdery, sprouts become if you air dry them. Well, then you can powder up a handful of these sprouts and
00:59:17 ►
roll that, twist that into a bomber and come very very close to the flash point. The other thing, I mean
00:59:19 ►
since I’m talking to
00:59:21 ►
recipe-oriented magicians,
00:59:27 ►
the other thing you need to understand if you want to work in this area is that the DMT can ordinarily not be taken orally because there is an enzyme system in
00:59:35 ►
your intestines called the monoamine oxidase system. Then it will destroy the DMT, but the good news is there are certain compounds called monoamine oxidase
00:59:48 ►
inhibitors. Didn’t you know it? If you take a monoamine oxidase inhibitor and then you take DMT,
00:59:59 ►
the DMT will survive the gut and pass into the bloodstream and pass the blood-brain barrier.
01:00:05 ►
So here is a very important piece of practical information I’m about to give you.
01:00:11 ►
If you want to inhibit your monoamine oxidase in order to make DMT trips longer
01:00:19 ►
or mushroom trips longer and more intense,
01:00:24 ►
or to activate DMT if you only have a little bit of it,
01:00:29 ►
then what you should get are the seeds of Pergamum Harmala.
01:00:34 ►
P-E-R-G-A-M-U-M, Pergamum Harmala, H-A-R-M-A-L-A.
01:00:41 ►
You can either order it under that name from seed dealers or go to an Iranian
01:00:48 ►
market and buy what is called hurmal, H-U-R-M-A-L.
01:00:55 ►
This is simply pagamin harmless seeds.
01:00:58 ►
They use it as an incense to fumigate rooms.
01:01:03 ►
But two grams, don’t take more, two grams of this macerated in a mortar and pestle
01:01:13 ►
with spring water taken from a spring at the new moon near a crossroads
01:01:27 ►
will inhibit your MAO.
01:01:30 ►
It will inhibit your MAO.
01:01:34 ►
Consequently, then when you smoke the bomber of phalaris dust, it will grab on.
01:01:37 ►
Or you can even smoke mushrooms then, and they will grab on.
01:01:42 ►
So knowing how to inhibit MAO is one of the key techniques
01:01:47 ►
in this kind of herbal shamanic magic. Other plants that contain DMT, and here’s
01:01:55 ►
one you all should be aware of because it’s probably right around here, is is Desmanthus illinoyensis, Illinois bundle weed.
01:02:08 ►
It’s a rank weed.
01:02:11 ►
I’ve not seen it except in the dried form,
01:02:14 ►
but people have grown hundreds of pounds of this stuff in a few months,
01:02:18 ►
and the root bark has the highest concentration of DMT ever measured in any plant. It’s higher than the
01:02:27 ►
ayahuasca admixtures used in the Amazon. Pardon? In the root bark, the root bark, which you dry
01:02:36 ►
the root and then scrape the bark off and you’ll get this reddish root bark. The red is actually the DMT. Varroa trees in the Amazon shed DMT in their sap,
01:02:48 ►
and it’s always a blood red sap. And to show you how strong it is, the Indians in the Amazon,
01:02:56 ►
some of the tribes, they roll their arrow points directly into that sap, and it’s a paralytic poison in the bloodstream of
01:03:05 ►
monkeys and small animals so there is a great deal of work is being done right
01:03:13 ►
now and you should if you’re of an experimental and herbal and alchemical
01:03:18 ►
and magical bent people are creating what they call ayahuasca analogs.
01:03:25 ►
This is where you use local plants to create a brew
01:03:29 ►
which is chemically equivalent to an Amazonian hallucinogen.
01:03:35 ►
And, of course, you have the satisfaction that it’s yours.
01:03:39 ►
It’s your magical recipe.
01:03:42 ►
No one on earth is doing quite what you’ve got.
01:03:46 ►
And it’s very, a lot of interesting work is being done.
01:03:52 ►
And you’ll hear more about this.
01:03:54 ►
In fact, Jonathan Ott just wrote a book called Ayahuasca Analogues,
01:03:58 ►
in which the state of the art is spelled out.
01:04:03 ►
And it would be worth your while to check that out if you’re an experimentalist
01:04:08 ►
Yeah
01:04:09 ►
The question is is there a more is there a simple reagent test for the presence of DMT?
01:04:16 ►
The answer is sort of you can do a paper
01:04:22 ►
chromatographic test and all you need is a little UV light
01:04:27 ►
and some chromatography paper and some solvent dishes.
01:04:31 ►
I mean, it’s at the level of a 7th grade science project.
01:04:37 ►
Yes, I don’t know how much I should say on this subject.
01:04:40 ►
I’m probably about to say too much.
01:04:43 ►
But at one gathering I go to, one of the people
01:04:47 ►
who’s a very regular part of that particular posse is a wheat breeder. So when he heard about the
01:04:56 ►
phalaris, he was a geneticist and a wheat breeder, and he has been working very quietly on his own to produce super strings of phalaris.
01:05:08 ►
And I think we will soon see super strings because the underground community is incredibly
01:05:15 ►
creative in this area. The compound I talked about yesterday, Salvia divinorum, that’s all
01:05:23 ►
underground work. Brett Blosser, the
01:05:25 ►
anthropologist who discovered it, is a complete freak. The guy, the chemist who
01:05:32 ►
extracted it, who would prefer I don’t put out his name, is a complete freak. And
01:05:38 ►
the people who then did the confirmation studies, my brother and his band of performing pharmacologists all freaks so
01:05:48 ►
we actually we do not take ourselves seriously enough I mean we have our scientists we have our
01:05:56 ►
philosophers we have our thinkers our legal experts we are a complete community. And it’s no longer, in my mind,
01:06:06 ►
even necessary to publish in straight journals and to seek a pat on the head from, you know,
01:06:13 ►
the American pharmacology community. They don’t understand what these things are for
01:06:19 ►
anyway. Yes. Yes, I’ll repeat this and strengthen once again my case
01:06:28 ►
to the guy who owns the company
01:06:29 ►
that he should pay me, for God’s sake.
01:06:33 ►
If you want a catalog of extremely rare
01:06:38 ►
and useful psychoactive and magical plants,
01:06:41 ►
probably the most complete in the world,
01:06:45 ►
the company is called Of the Jungle.
01:06:49 ►
P.O. Box 1801, Sebastopol, S-E-B-A-S-T-O-P-O-L, California, 95472.
01:07:02 ►
Write and ask for a catalog and tell them George Bush sent you.
01:07:09 ►
No, I’m teasing.
01:07:10 ►
Don’t tell them that.
01:07:11 ►
They won’t send you the catalog.
01:07:18 ►
Well, let me…
01:07:19 ►
I didn’t mean to diss Castaneda
01:07:21 ►
as a metaphor maker.
01:07:23 ►
No, I think The Teachings of Don Juan
01:07:25 ►
is a tremendous book.
01:07:29 ►
I’m very suspicious of some of his later stuff.
01:07:34 ►
It’s interesting what you said
01:07:35 ►
because you know the famous Crow transformation
01:07:38 ►
in The Teachings of Don Juan has been traced,
01:07:42 ►
and I’m sure many of you know this book,
01:07:44 ►
has been traced to and I’m sure many of you know this book, has been traced
01:07:45 ►
to George MacDonald’s book, Through the Gates of the Silver Key. And George MacDonald was a friend
01:07:54 ►
of Evans Vance. So I think what we’re getting here is a mining of late 19th century English folklore by Castaneda. Nevertheless, the presence of these small
01:08:10 ►
entities has been a part of folklore for a long, long time. Elementals, tykes. What puzzles me,
01:08:20 ►
I guess, is I’ve spent a lot of time in this magical literature and art historical
01:08:26 ►
area, and the descriptions don’t quite match.
01:08:32 ►
I can’t quite convince myself that the sprites, the afrits, the nixies, the djinns, these
01:08:41 ►
creatures of the woodland fae are the same thing.
01:08:46 ►
Or I don’t know whether I am contaminated by an early love of science fiction.
01:08:52 ►
Well, again, close, but no banana.
01:08:58 ►
All these popular aliens that are running around,
01:09:02 ►
you know, the Whitley Sttreboids and all these things,
01:09:05 ►
are much more mundane than what I encountered. I mean, what I encountered was terrifyingly
01:09:15 ►
not human, terrifyingly alien. And I just do not quite get, and Madame Blavatsky was
01:09:24 ►
into it, and they’re always saying, you know,
01:09:25 ►
I don’t know, they’re very sort of cut and dried about it.
01:09:29 ►
And when I encounter an extraterrestrial alien
01:09:33 ►
or a creature from another dimension,
01:09:35 ►
the main thing that’s happening for me is
01:09:37 ►
the implications are blowing my mind.
01:09:40 ►
They seem totally immune to the implications.
01:09:44 ►
Yeah.
01:09:46 ►
they don’t they seem totally immune to the implication yeah well a sufficient amount of DMT is smoked west of the Pacific Coast Highway that it wouldn’t
01:09:52 ►
surprise me if the writers of Star Trek I mean were on to this yes what and what
01:10:03 ►
I what is not much talked about the part of the experience which is anomalous,
01:10:08 ►
and maybe people who know more about magical literature than I do can correct me,
01:10:14 ►
but what the elves are really interested in is this stuff which I call visible language.
01:10:28 ►
stuff which I call visible language. That’s the whole point of the encounter, is to exhibit it and to get you to do it. Well, now, first of all, think for a minute about ordinary language.
01:10:36 ►
It’s really weird. It’s the weirdest thing we do. I mean, if you were looking for the thumbprint of God on creation,
01:10:47 ►
human language would be a good candidate because look we’re supposed to be some
01:10:53 ►
kind of animal who just went a little further than the next guy but to get out
01:10:59 ►
of that Shakespeare and Milton is a pretty amazing accomplishment, hardly to speak of the mathematical languages that we generate.
01:11:09 ►
So something happened.
01:11:12 ►
Some people think only 35,000 years ago.
01:11:16 ►
Imagine if that’s true.
01:11:18 ►
I mean, I don’t care.
01:11:19 ►
Some people say 150,000 years ago.
01:11:22 ►
But to speak, to take small mouth noises and to turn them into signifiers
01:11:29 ►
for symbols and relationships, in spite of some people’s enthusiasm for cetaceans and
01:11:37 ►
dolphins, I just am not overwhelmed by the evidence.
01:11:41 ►
I mean, to me, you know, it is a miracle to be able to speak
01:11:47 ►
poetry. It is a miracle. I mean, when Coleridge wrote,
01:11:52 ►
And south and south and southward I we fled, And it grew wondrous cold,
01:12:01 ►
And ice-mast high went floating by as green as emerald. I mean that’s
01:12:09 ►
language and it’s magic and we have a fascination then we also paint, then we
01:12:18 ►
sculpt, then we write, then we create electronic databases. Then film, television.
01:12:26 ►
Clearly, what we want to do is we want to communicate visually.
01:12:32 ►
And these things are saying there’s a way to do it.
01:12:36 ►
Do it!
01:12:37 ►
And I don’t understand.
01:12:38 ►
Do we all have to be loaded on DMT all the time?
01:12:42 ►
Can you learn to do this?
01:12:44 ►
The gentleman who asked about dreams, here is a piece
01:12:47 ►
of information that is critical in this jigsaw puzzle. If you have smoked DMT at any time in the
01:12:56 ►
past, it is possible to have a dream in which people are running around and you’re checked
01:13:03 ►
into the Mars Hotel and the luggage
01:13:05 ►
is lost and this and that and in the middle of all that someone drags out a little glass pipe
01:13:11 ►
and hands it to you. It will happen. It will happen in the dream. Not a memory, not a simulacrum.
01:13:21 ►
It will really happen. Well now to me that’s an amazing piece of
01:13:25 ►
data because what it’s saying is you can do it on the natch you may have to be
01:13:32 ►
dead asleep but still on the natch this can be done and the lucid dreamers the
01:13:39 ►
biofeedback people the people who claim these wonderful things that you can do
01:13:44 ►
with sleep and dream and
01:13:45 ►
programming, I challenge them, teach people to have DMT dreams in their sleep. And then let’s
01:13:53 ►
figure out how to drag that puppy come to believe is that we remember no
01:14:09 ►
more than 5% of our dreams, and it’s the most mundane 5%.
01:14:19 ►
I think, and there’s scientific evidence to support this, remember I said DMT is in the human brain?
01:14:26 ►
Well, it concentrates in the human cerebrospinal fluid on a 24-hour cycle,
01:14:32 ►
and it reaches its peak of concentration between 3 and 4 a.m. in most people.
01:14:39 ►
That’s when the deep REM sleep is happening. When you give somebody DMT, they lay back, they close their eyes,
01:14:50 ►
and the way you, the guide, the sitter, I don’t like the word guide, you, the sitter,
01:14:56 ►
the way you can tell that they’re getting off is their eyes dart wildly behind their closed eyelids.
01:15:04 ►
It means they’re in REM. They’re in REM
01:15:06 ►
sleep. They’ve been immediately shoved into deep dreaming. So I believe that the
01:15:13 ►
what DMT is doing in normal human metabolism is it mediates the descent,
01:15:19 ►
the spiral descent into dream, and that every single night we are reunited with the boundaryless
01:15:27 ►
oceanic mystery of being that we are so frantic about in waking life and so distant from and that
01:15:37 ►
if we could in fact just engineer a drug that would allow us to remain fully conscious as we drift deeper into dream, we
01:15:48 ►
would need no other drug or substance. That’s where we want to go. And I think that’s where
01:15:54 ►
history is headed. What the archaic revival is about is a revivification of the aboriginal
01:16:00 ►
dream time. We are going to live in the imagination.
01:16:06 ►
We are preparing to decamp from three-dimensional space.
01:16:10 ►
I mean, yes, the earth is the cradle of the human race,
01:16:14 ►
but you don’t stay in the cradle forever, you know.
01:16:19 ►
And it’s something like going into dream.
01:16:23 ►
It’s something like taking the hyper-technical, virtual reality, internet head of the snake
01:16:31 ►
and inserting the shamanic, late paleolithic, ecstatic, orgiastic tail of the snake,
01:16:44 ►
and then you have the Ouroboric completion then you
01:16:48 ►
have the quintessence and the work is complete and history ends and we live
01:16:55 ►
then in the light of the stone made manifest well it definitely has
01:17:04 ►
something this mystery that we’re talking, it definitely has something, this mystery that we’re talking about, it definitely
01:17:07 ►
has something to do with sound and the magical role of sound. Ayahuasca is a sort of different
01:17:19 ►
way of sectioning the DMT experience because ayahuasca is orally active, unfolds over hours,
01:17:28 ►
is not as dramatic as DMT. But the people who use ayahuasca as a ritual on a weekly basis,
01:17:37 ►
what their practice consists of is they take this stuff and then they sing. They sing like crazy. And then
01:17:48 ►
when they stop singing and people light a cigarette and take a leak and so forth,
01:17:54 ►
and you’re listening to these conversations, you hear people say stuff about the shaman-like.
01:18:01 ►
I like the part with the olive drab and the silver but when it became
01:18:07 ►
magenta and moved toward orange I thought he was over the top what what
01:18:14 ►
kind of a criticism of a song is that and the answer is sound has become a visually beheld medium.
01:18:26 ►
Yes, so the reason I’m interested in something as techno-nerdy as virtual reality
01:18:35 ►
is because you could program a virtual reality so that when you went Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavavava went, ahhhh, an iridescent blue line would be keyed to that to descend into the space.
01:18:49 ►
And I’m very interested in environmental and electronic simulations of psychedelic states.
01:18:56 ►
But we’re not going to do better than the psychedelics.
01:19:00 ►
If we can do as well, it will be a miracle. I mean, you see more beauty in the first wave of psilocybin
01:19:08 ►
than the human race has produced in the past 5,000 years.
01:19:12 ►
And who are you, you know?
01:19:15 ►
Yes.
01:19:16 ►
No, I promised this guy, Ben Hume.
01:19:19 ►
And I felt his flash of loathing.
01:19:25 ►
That’s… I hadn’t considered that, that that sounds possible.
01:19:30 ►
I mean, we’re definitely coming to some enormous cusp,
01:19:33 ►
and whether you think it’s the cusp of cusps or just a big cusp,
01:19:39 ►
it’s hard to say.
01:19:40 ►
Somebody faxed me.
01:19:42 ►
I got a fax right before I came here.
01:19:46 ►
I don’t know who sent it to me. It was just an anonymous fax, but in huge letters it said, when you strip away the hype,
01:19:52 ►
it’s just another concrescence. Yes. It’s interesting, and that’s a good question. The answer is yes and no.
01:20:06 ►
Obviously, there is hardly anything more personal than a psychedelic experience.
01:20:12 ►
It is a kind of summation of who you are, and it’s viewed through the filters of your personality.
01:20:21 ►
Nevertheless, when you put a whole bunch of DMT trips together
01:20:26 ►
Certain things seem to emerge
01:20:30 ►
My notion coming at it from a sort of union
01:20:36 ►
Attitude is if we had to say what is the archetype of DMT the archetype is the circus
01:20:44 ►
It’s the circus. And let me say why. First of all,
01:20:50 ►
a circus is a place of wild, exotic activity. And clowns are, you don’t have a circus without
01:21:00 ►
clowns. And clowns are wonderful for children a circus is a wonderful
01:21:07 ►
place for a child DMT there is something very very weirdly childlike about it in
01:21:15 ►
a very unchildish way some of you may know the third the 52nd fragment of Heraclitus where he says the Aeon is a child at play
01:21:28 ►
with colored balls. The Aeon is the child that you encounter in the Elf Dome. But the circus has other connotations than simply the three rings and the clowns.
01:21:48 ►
Eros is present, entwined with Thanatos,
01:21:54 ►
in the form of the nearly naked lady in the tiny spangled costume
01:21:58 ►
who is working without nets, hanging by her teeth,
01:22:03 ►
up near the top of the big tent and personally my own as my
01:22:08 ►
earliest experience of eros was that lady in the tiny spangled costume i was so small i was wrapped
01:22:16 ►
up in something and being held and i was horny as hell uh so there’s that and then there is also radiating off from the central ring
01:22:28 ►
the freak show, the goat-faced boy, the lady in the bottle, and you know the
01:22:36 ►
three-toed alligator kid and all of that. That’s there, the wiggy, weird, kinky, strange, alien stuff. And then, if you think
01:22:49 ►
about the archetype, not so much of the circus, but of the carnival, the carnival represents
01:22:55 ►
a breakthrough from another dimension. Because you live in some jerk water town in some, I almost said Iowa, but some, and it’s like
01:23:09 ►
normal. And then the carnival comes to town and children are told you can’t stay out and
01:23:17 ►
play. The carny people are in town. And what does it mean? Well, they may fuck differently than we do. They may steal things. They’re not like us. They’ve had more than one marriage, some of them. And then the carnival people are there and the hoochie-coochie dancers and the whole thing. And then they fold it up and they go away, just like a DMT trip. And every little boy and girl in the world worth their salt wants to join the circus.
01:23:50 ►
Of course!
01:23:51 ►
And go away with the tattooed lady and the tigers and all that.
01:23:56 ►
So it is the archetype of the circus.
01:23:58 ►
So then I’ve seen many, many people take DMT,
01:24:03 ►
and some get what I get, which is it’s sort of gone
01:24:06 ►
beyond the circus. It’s the circus, but the circus as presented on Zenebel Ganubi Prime
01:24:13 ►
or something like that. But one woman who was an anthropologist who I think got a sub-threshold
01:24:21 ►
dose, she had a very interesting trip because it was a light trip,
01:24:27 ►
but with no prompting from me.
01:24:29 ►
She said, I was at a carnival midway,
01:24:32 ►
but it was after hours,
01:24:36 ►
and there was nobody there,
01:24:37 ►
and there were just those ice cream,
01:24:38 ►
those square papers for holding ice cream
01:24:41 ►
were just blowing in the wind
01:24:43 ►
and getting caught in chain-link fences.
01:24:46 ►
It was like a sub-threshold dose.
01:24:49 ►
Well, then if she’d done more,
01:24:50 ►
she would have arrived there eight hours earlier
01:24:53 ►
when the thing was happening.
01:24:54 ►
And if she’d done yet another toke,
01:24:56 ►
it would have moved off into the zone of the truly weird.
01:25:04 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives
01:25:08 ►
one thought at a time. So, do you think that Terrence maybe thinks that, well, DMT might be
01:25:16 ►
worth looking into? I don’t know about you, but there were a few riffs in that talk that
01:25:22 ►
reinforced my belief that, at his most basic,
01:25:25 ►
well, Terrence was truly a bard.
01:25:28 ►
And what strikes me the most is that he was speaking extemporaneously.
01:25:33 ►
Few people can even write that poetically after a few revisions,
01:25:36 ►
and here is Terrence waxing poetic whenever the mood struck him.
01:25:41 ►
I may not agree with everything he said,
01:25:43 ►
but I’ve never been so captivated by any
01:25:45 ►
other speaker as I have been by Terrence McKenna. He was truly one of a kind, and we were so lucky
01:25:51 ►
that he appeared in an era when his thoughts could be captured and replayed years later,
01:25:56 ►
like just now. As I said, I don’t always agree with Terrence, but when he was talking about
01:26:02 ►
having a dream in which he smoked DMT and
01:26:05 ►
then he got high in his dream, well, long before I ever heard Terrence say that, it had happened to me.
01:26:12 ►
And it’s happened to me more than once. I don’t know what else to say about that other than,
01:26:17 ►
well, it’s really freaky. And do you remember when Terrence was talking about feeling that he was under the middle of a mountain when the DMT breakthrough occurred?
01:26:28 ►
Well, when he was saying that, I realized that my own DMT experiences were usually of being above ground level,
01:26:36 ►
but sometimes inside of a backlit, amber ceiling, great hall of some kind.
01:26:43 ►
I guess it could have been a cave,
01:26:45 ►
which I guess would also make it inside of a mountain
01:26:47 ►
if I was above ground.
01:26:49 ►
So maybe our experiences were more alike than I thought.
01:26:53 ►
Again, this shows me how similar experiences
01:26:55 ►
can be described in a slightly different language
01:26:58 ►
and possibly throw future explorers off a bit.
01:27:02 ►
This again, to me at least,
01:27:04 ►
shows us how important it is to
01:27:05 ►
continue to develop virtual reality experiences to show without words what was going on in our minds.
01:27:14 ►
And one last thing. During his talk, Terence mentioned using MAO inhibitors to accentuate
01:27:21 ►
various experiences. Let me just say that this can be extremely dangerous
01:27:26 ►
if you don’t know exactly what you’re doing.
01:27:30 ►
So before you even think about experimenting with an MAO inhibitor,
01:27:34 ►
like Syrian Roux, for example,
01:27:37 ►
be sure to first go to Erowid.org, E-R-O-W-I-D dot org,
01:27:42 ►
and do a little research.
01:27:43 ►
I’m sure you’re not going to be disappointed if you do.
01:27:47 ►
And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic space. Be well, my friends. Thank you.