Program Notes
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Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
Date this lecture was recorded: April 1993
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna
“And that’s what we are now, semi-human. We’re capable of enormous acts of kindness and appalling acts of brutality.”
“All of our institutions have been built up on the assumption of ego and dominance hierarchies, and deconstructing that is really what the future is all about.”
“I think the modern family is, first of all a very modern invention, and basically a cauldron for the production of neurosis.”
“Ego is like a cyst which will begin to grow in you, whether you are male or female, unless you take a psychedelic. The psychedelic will dissolve this cyst. The cyst is in your personality. It’s a tumor. It shouldn’t be there. We do need to have egos, little egos.”
“What is impressionism but LSD thirty minutes in?”
“I don’t think there’s much chance of survival without a major effort to reestablish archaic styles and institutions.”
“Hallucinogens are intra-species pheromones of some sort. They carry information across species lines.”
“History is the consequence of an animal species losing its connection to the Gaian mind.”
“I don’t think we can fix ourselves through rhetoric. If we could fix ourselves through rhetoric then Buddha and Christ would have done the job.”
“The private issue, certainly for me and probably for most of you, [is that] it’s easy to take psychedelics the first time because you don’t know what you’re getting into. Ever after that you have to really have a little chat with yourself, and there are barriers to overcome.”
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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 I’m very happy to begin today by thanking Michael H. and Samuel G.,
00:00:29 ►
both of whom made recent donations to the salon to help with some of the expenses associated with these podcasts.
00:00:36 ►
I really appreciate your help, you guys.
00:00:39 ►
Now, let’s get back to this Plants and Mind workshop that Terrence McKenna held in April of 1993,
00:00:47 ►
which would, well, it’d make it just about 25 years ago.
00:00:51 ►
And after we listen to today’s talk, I’ll come back and tell you about an interesting discussion
00:00:56 ►
that it raised in our Monday night Zoom conference
00:01:00 ►
when I mentioned one of the topics that Terrence covers in this segment of his course.
00:01:08 ►
So are there questions to this point or shall I just keep plodding?
00:01:15 ►
Yes.
00:01:27 ►
Well, I think the implication is yes.
00:01:35 ►
In other words, had we remained monkeys, we never would have gotten into this crazy situation. We became human by forming a relationship, a symbiotic relationship with a psychoactive plant,
00:01:43 ►
and then we became semi-human when we abandoned it.
00:01:47 ►
And that’s what we are now, semi-human.
00:01:50 ►
You know, we’re capable of enormous acts of kindness and appalling acts of brutality.
00:01:58 ►
I think conscious self-reflection can help here.
00:02:03 ►
I mean, if you know this story and believe it, and if evidence, God knows what evidence would look like,
00:02:10 ►
but if evidence could be found to support it, then it makes it easier to understand our dilemma.
00:02:17 ►
I mean, men don’t want to dominate, and it’s not a man-woman issue either.
00:02:22 ►
And it’s not a man-woman issue either.
00:02:30 ►
The ego is a sort of genderless way of attacking this thing.
00:02:34 ►
The ego was suppressed by psilocybin.
00:02:42 ►
And in the absence of psilocybin, men and women became much more egocentric, and that egocentricity created all kinds of institutions, which are
00:02:48 ►
very unflattering to us.
00:02:54 ►
So we need, I think, to, if this idea were accepted, that this is what happened, this
00:03:01 ►
is why we’re conscious, this is why we’re so uncomfortable with consciousness
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and this is where we are
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and somehow this dialogue could go
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on outside the distorting
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effects of Christianity
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male anxiety and so
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forth and so on, then I think
00:03:18 ►
the conclusion would be we need some
00:03:19 ►
very radical social
00:03:21 ►
reform, not
00:03:24 ►
simply obviously the legalization of spiritual transformation through substances.
00:03:30 ►
But all of our institutions have been built up on the assumption of ego and dominance hierarchy.
00:03:38 ►
And deconstructing that is really what the future is all about, I think.
00:03:44 ►
And it’s a challenge.
00:03:46 ►
Does that go to it sufficiently?
00:03:49 ►
Don’t be shy.
00:03:50 ►
That’s except for I feel like, well I also feel like in general in this theory of the
00:03:57 ►
evolution of consciousness, female is left out and here we have a period of erection and arousal and male dominance sort of tendency.
00:04:13 ►
I guess it’s just that if a matrifocal culture can exist only under chemicals,
00:04:21 ►
what is the implication of that? Yes, transformation is necessary.
00:04:25 ►
Well, I don’t call it metrophocal.
00:04:27 ►
I call it partnership.
00:04:30 ►
I don’t think there’s a pendulum swing between patriarchy and matriarchy.
00:04:35 ►
I think there is partnership, which is appropriate role expression.
00:04:39 ►
Everybody does what is appropriate to their position.
00:04:43 ►
And then there is the assigned role of the hierarchical situation.
00:04:48 ►
I think it was in science last week.
00:04:51 ►
Here is the frontier that is breaking right now, which is it’s just being realized that
00:04:59 ►
men and women are incredibly different anatomically.
00:05:06 ►
And at the micro-anatomical level, I think there was a list of 40 physical differences
00:05:13 ►
between the brains of men and women.
00:05:16 ►
And in a sense, and this is pure speculation, but I believe that especially in the archaic situation,
00:05:27 ►
well, we don’t even have to talk about the archaic situation.
00:05:30 ►
In 1800, the average American woman gave birth 13 times.
00:05:35 ►
The average American woman in 1800.
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So you put a statistic like that against the phenomenon of menstruation,
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and what you have then when you look at women is a life absolutely rooted in the rhythms and the fact of nature.
00:05:56 ►
Men are sort of more like a closed system.
00:06:00 ►
It’s sealed off, and there isn’t this connection into the biological world.
00:06:07 ►
So men are potentially more capable of getting off the track, if you want to put it that way,
00:06:16 ►
meaning leaving this Gaian-Creode of symbiotic self-reinforcement.
00:06:21 ►
It’s very obvious in the years I’ve been doing this, this looks to me like a fairly balanced group, but my groups tend to be heavily male.
00:06:32 ►
And women, in my own experience, tend to be far more casual psychedelic users than men. If you just look at cannabis use, usually women are very casual. A woman who
00:06:48 ►
is truly a smoker is a rare, rare thing. Well, that would go along with menstruation and
00:07:00 ►
birth and breastfeeding. Women are involved in biology in a way that men need not be.
00:07:12 ►
They can choose, you know, and that’s why abstraction is the great realm of male activity and so forth.
00:07:20 ►
I guess I want to pick up your example of women in the 1800s getting burned so many times and point out that that also was an aberration that came from what I consider to be the learned behavior of males into domination.
00:07:35 ►
That when women were in control of their own reproductive cycle, there was not that many girls.
00:07:41 ►
They were appropriately saved because the sexual activity was not
00:07:45 ►
dominant and women determined when sexual activity would take place based on what was
00:07:51 ►
best for the community and the office.
00:07:54 ►
No, you’re right. I probably yield on that. I guess then, but I try to save the point
00:08:00 ►
by saying this. You’re right. Probably in this archaic situation women had knowledge
00:08:06 ►
of plant contraceptives and they were well in control of…
00:08:10 ►
Dr…were not forced into sexual activity which was an important piece of the domination
00:08:17 ►
cycle. That women controlled the reproductive cycle and the sexual cycle and so children
00:08:22 ►
were safe. It was when the concept of domination began that they lost power over when they would have sex
00:08:30 ►
and then also how often they would have babies.
00:08:34 ►
And that was a real turning point in that reproduction aspect.
00:08:39 ►
But don’t you imagine that in a world without anesthetic,
00:08:43 ►
even if you gave birth only three or four times in your life,
00:08:48 ►
these would be immense, boundary-dissolving, psychedelic extravaganzas?
00:08:55 ►
I don’t have any homolytic conclusion.
00:08:57 ►
It’s just sort of a pathway there.
00:08:58 ►
And what the constructs were before that.
00:09:01 ►
No, well, I think you’re right.
00:09:03 ►
Such a large number of pregnancies and births indicate the pattern of subjugation.
00:09:09 ►
Yeah.
00:09:10 ►
I decided to add something about gender.
00:09:12 ►
I think we need to be really aware of how biochemically it is.
00:09:17 ►
I have a friend who went through a hormonal change.
00:09:22 ►
A woman over a five-month period, hormonally, you feel an aggression drop away.
00:09:28 ►
You feel a generous love about you. And then five months later you change your mind and come back.
00:09:34 ►
He hates being generous and loving.
00:09:38 ►
Doesn’t talk to me.
00:09:42 ►
And you can feel the direction coming back,
00:09:46 ►
and now you’re going to really,
00:09:49 ►
that’s a quite beautiful and rather interesting thing.
00:09:52 ►
Well, now I’m seeing it from both ends of the spectrum. As you said, I really understand how women feel
00:09:55 ►
and how they can use a total understanding.
00:09:58 ►
Oh, I know what I wanted to say about this.
00:10:00 ►
I don’t want to spend too much time on it,
00:10:02 ►
but you should be aware of this.
00:10:04 ►
It’s interesting.
00:10:08 ►
It’s always fun to talk about sexuality and so forth and so on. But you’re probably aware of these things called bonubos, these so-called pygmy chimpanzees.
00:10:16 ►
They’re actually not noticeably smaller than ordinary chimpanzees, but they are a distinct species. First of all, we differ from chimpanzees by 2% of our genome.
00:10:29 ►
98% of us is chimpanzee.
00:10:32 ►
We differ from the bonobos in about the same amount.
00:10:36 ►
Chimpanzees are male-dominant, highly monogamous, very territorial, so forth and so on. The bonubos, which are
00:10:48 ►
to a non-zoologist indistinguishable from the chimpanzees, all aggression is mediated
00:10:55 ►
through sex. Incredible, I don’t even, I’m surprised such animals can exist because I
00:11:01 ►
would have thought a virus would have jumped into this situation.
00:11:08 ►
But the bonobos are incredibly highly sexed animals.
00:11:13 ►
All forms of sexual activity are going on almost constantly, and all aggression and all social difference and everything is ameliorated by sexual activity,
00:11:21 ►
usually initiated by the female.
00:11:24 ►
Well, if you look at these two animals, chimpanzee and bonobo, you can’t tell them apart.
00:11:29 ►
I think what it means is that this matter of our sexual expression and dominance and so forth and so on
00:11:36 ►
is riding on a cusp of some sort.
00:11:41 ►
We can go either way.
00:11:43 ►
of some sort. We can go either way.
00:11:48 ►
That’s why we’re the only animal species where there is no defined style of pairing. In other words, we have
00:11:51 ►
monogamy in some societies, polygamy, polyandry,
00:11:56 ►
a whole smorgasbord of social and sexual
00:11:59 ►
arrangements that we will tolerate. No other creature
00:12:03 ►
is like that. And I think it indicates
00:12:06 ►
that we are in a zone of ambiguity on this matter. And that means we have a lot of leeway.
00:12:13 ►
We can send ourselves one way or the other. You know, we can build a nightmarish, male-dominated,
00:12:21 ►
crypto-fascist kind of situation. Or we can go the other way, bonobo or chimpanzee.
00:12:26 ►
We’re looking down both those roads.
00:12:27 ►
Are you saying that species have not been stabilized under the numbers or the…
00:12:34 ►
Well, we’ve been destabilized.
00:12:37 ►
I think we were stabilized in the chimpanzee-dominated mode,
00:12:41 ►
and then 100,000 years of psilocybin use put us closer to the bonobos.
00:12:48 ►
Now, the bonobos are almost extinct.
00:12:51 ►
There’s only a few thousand of them left.
00:12:54 ►
They need to be studied.
00:12:56 ►
There was a paper recently, I can’t give you the citation, but if you write me, I can.
00:13:07 ►
but if you write me, I can’t, studying chimpanzees in Africa,
00:13:12 ►
they would only leave the nest, they would only leave the trees and descend down onto the ground to forage,
00:13:16 ►
but the only thing they would do this for were mushrooms.
00:13:21 ►
Very curiously enough, the pygmy chimps are really the only animal where any success
00:13:28 ►
has been gleaned in the sign language communications and there’s more modern versions of that.
00:13:35 ►
But the pygmy chimps are the ones which can use the message boards actually to some effectiveness.
00:13:40 ►
The only ones that have language abilities, you know, the hopes for dolphins, whales,
00:13:44 ►
and regular chimps is still a blank.
00:13:47 ►
But the pygmy chimps, they’re doing it.
00:13:49 ►
So here we have the language thing on the cusp for them.
00:13:52 ►
So it would be very interesting to know if psilocybin, I mean, they might be an image of us half a million years ago.
00:14:00 ►
You know, I mean, in other words, were we to go extinct and the bonobos to flourish,
00:14:11 ►
there might be another anthropoid species take the stage in a million or two years.
00:14:13 ►
Yeah.
00:14:18 ►
This is a question to mainline the psilocybin.
00:14:22 ►
In my experience, I’ve seen many men,
00:14:32 ►
especially at a lot of educators in the psychedelic movement, take high doses and don’t care one foot about gender issues or justice or equality.
00:14:48 ►
So I’m not sure that that, I think the psychedelic experience can reinforce all the oppressions that philosophize themselves can’t necessarily open you up, melt down, and have you be out of justice.
00:14:52 ►
Well, I guess I’m more of a believer than you are.
00:14:55 ►
I just say they didn’t take enough.
00:15:05 ►
And the other thing is, you mentioned these were heavy hitters, male heavy hitters in the psychedelic movement. It may just be that some people can’t be saved,
00:15:09 ►
that Christ himself couldn’t lift some people out of chaos.
00:15:17 ►
I haven’t had that experience.
00:15:20 ►
I mean, I think that…
00:15:22 ►
Well, I think it’s good to ask the women in the psychedelic movement about their experience.
00:15:29 ►
Because, I mean, you come from the spirit perspective of male dominators.
00:15:33 ►
Uh-huh.
00:15:34 ►
And you check it out.
00:15:35 ►
What specifically should I ask them about their experience?
00:15:39 ►
If they feel that the men in their lives change to strictly high doses of psilocybin or other
00:15:47 ►
psychedelic use.
00:15:49 ►
That there’s more justice.
00:15:50 ►
I mean, my thing is that family is the most interesting personal stage.
00:15:54 ►
There is.
00:15:54 ►
Is there justice in the family?
00:15:56 ►
Is there a partnership model happening in the family?
00:15:59 ►
Is the father actually taking care of his children in the family?
00:16:03 ►
Well, that’s a sort of a different question.
00:16:05 ►
I liked your first question better.
00:16:07 ►
Do they see in the men in their lives a tendency toward a softening or justice?
00:16:13 ►
But the state of that is really a relationship, and it’s a family.
00:16:19 ►
Yeah, the problem I have with that is I think the modern family is, first of all,
00:16:23 ►
a very modern invention and
00:16:26 ►
basically a cauldron for the production of neuroses.
00:16:29 ►
But that’s what you have to work with.
00:16:32 ►
That’s what you have to work with.
00:16:35 ►
Well, let’s ask these women, how about this proposition that psychedelics make men smoother,
00:16:44 ►
evener, more… does anybody want to denounce that? Yeah.
00:16:49 ►
My experience, and I agree with the word Ray, which is an odd move,
00:16:53 ►
that’s the closest I’ve been involved with for the last year,
00:16:56 ►
is the psychedelic spirit combines this de-information and the risk-taking,
00:17:03 ►
the reinforcement of the tissue, the teaching of the balance.
00:17:09 ►
That has been not on that scale.
00:17:12 ►
I’ve read the book a lot back there,
00:17:14 ►
it’s a revival.
00:17:15 ►
It’s the city very after and saving all the children,
00:17:18 ►
they’ll reach everybody.
00:17:20 ►
And as opposed to that,
00:17:21 ►
maybe reaching the people that want to be reached,
00:17:24 ►
maybe the
00:17:26 ►
creators, the artists, the philosophers of this time.
00:17:29 ►
I have seen that experience and very confident on that.
00:17:34 ►
But you might have to do it in a pinch.
00:17:37 ►
So it has to be, I think it has to be that.
00:17:39 ►
That’s the point for teaching.
00:17:41 ►
You have to, and not some sort of like dominating teaching on either type of male or female,
00:17:46 ►
but some people
00:17:47 ►
who now comprehend
00:17:48 ►
kind of want it, basically.
00:17:51 ►
You mean there has to be
00:17:52 ►
a support about, you know?
00:17:54 ►
Yeah, there has to be
00:17:55 ►
some sort of…
00:17:56 ►
Yeah, and part of what
00:17:57 ►
complicates it is notice
00:17:58 ►
that the male-dominated society
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we’re living in
00:18:01 ►
is just fanatically concerned
00:18:03 ►
to suppress this.
00:18:05 ►
And to me, that’s a sign that it must threaten it at a very basic level.
00:18:10 ►
And yet it seems silly.
00:18:11 ►
I mean, they’re more concerned about suppressing psilocybin than, you know, all kinds of obviously
00:18:17 ►
greater social ills.
00:18:20 ►
Why?
00:18:21 ►
Well, it’s because it disrupts their model of how things should be run.
00:18:27 ►
Over here.
00:18:27 ►
I was going to say, I hope that we can assume that there are some men out there who aren’t dominators
00:18:32 ►
and trying to sort of grind everybody else down.
00:18:36 ►
There are men out there who have worked out relationships with women
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and with other men that are cooperative partners.
00:18:44 ►
A lot of them never took those.
00:18:47 ►
Well, you live in a society, you take upon yourself the tone of the time.
00:18:53 ►
I mean, a lot of people wear tie-dye who never took LSD.
00:18:58 ►
You sort of take upon yourself the ambiance of your time.
00:19:02 ►
I don’t really like the getting into a gender thing.
00:19:06 ►
I really think ego, here’s the way I put it, ego is like a cyst which will begin to grow
00:19:16 ►
in you, whether you are male or female, unless you take a psychedelic.
00:19:23 ►
The psychedelic is that it will dissolve this cyst.
00:19:28 ►
The cyst is in your personality.
00:19:31 ►
It’s a tumor.
00:19:32 ►
It shouldn’t be there.
00:19:34 ►
I mean, we do need to have egos, little egos,
00:19:37 ►
so that when I take you out to dinner, I put the food I order in my mouth.
00:19:43 ►
You put the food you order in your mouth. You put the food you order in your mouth.
00:19:46 ►
That’s what an ego is for.
00:19:48 ►
But if I start giving you orders, then that’s completely inappropriate.
00:19:53 ►
So rather than genderize it, which I think is a mistake because let’s face it,
00:19:58 ►
after thousands of years of this maladaptive cultural style,
00:20:02 ►
many women are hard-driving, egomaniacal, ambitious.
00:20:09 ►
It’s a bad style, and men may be born into it and women may be infected by it,
00:20:16 ►
but there’s plenty of it around in men and women.
00:20:20 ►
Yeah?
00:20:21 ►
I’ve been involved in psychedelic therapy, and basically people are drawn to it Yeah. of the ego and it has a revelation for people who are in a position to do that or they’re
00:20:47 ►
so involved in protecting their ego that they’re not in that place yet.
00:20:52 ►
But there’s also benefits from that and it goes beyond that for people who know they’re
00:20:56 ►
not using that.
00:20:58 ►
Yeah, that’s a good point.
00:20:59 ►
I mean, we should at some point in all of this say, obviously not everyone should take psychedelic plans.
00:21:08 ►
Well, then the question automatically follows, well, who shouldn’t?
00:21:12 ►
Well, in practical terms, we all know people who are likely here,
00:21:19 ►
who have diminished self-esteem, so forth and so on, for them ego dissolution is not the goal.
00:21:32 ►
They have been so victimized by egomaniacs that they have no sense of self.
00:21:37 ►
So for them, they should be encouraged to build up an internal structure in their personality
00:21:43 ►
and a coherent reference point in the self.
00:21:46 ►
But that is a state of dis-ease that most of us are not like that.
00:21:55 ►
Most of us are ordinary or more toward the spectrum of ego dominance,
00:22:02 ►
and we profit from the psychedelic experience.
00:22:06 ►
Women, I think, are less excited by psychedelics because they experience, by and large,
00:22:12 ►
it has less of an impact.
00:22:14 ►
I mean, I’ve seen many, many people change their lives on a dime, like after a big LSD trip,
00:22:21 ►
but most of those people were men.
00:22:24 ►
Most of those people were men. Most of those people were men.
00:22:27 ►
I wanted to ask, when you talk about traditional indigenous cultures that we have in Australia,
00:22:33 ►
I stayed with the group for about three months and I found it to be a very male-dominated,
00:22:38 ►
aggressive culture, and yet they were using shamanic and psychedelic plans for ritual and ceremonial?
00:22:46 ►
Well, here’s what I think.
00:22:54 ►
Once this African paradisical partnership thing was disrupted and people were scattered to the four corners of the earth,
00:22:57 ►
the memory never was lost.
00:23:01 ►
And there is even what’s called a nostalgia for paradise today,
00:23:06 ►
throughout time, the belief that in the past it was better.
00:23:11 ►
And since the Renaissance, it’s been fashionable to dismiss this as a kind of naivete,
00:23:18 ►
you know, the grass is greener kind of thing.
00:23:20 ►
But I think probably things were better, and that our nostalgia for paradise is what has caused us to be so subject to abuse and use of drugs.
00:23:33 ►
You know, no other animal shares this pattern of behavior.
00:23:38 ►
Sometimes elephants will push down fences to get to rotting fruit, and birds get drunk and fall down on their little feeders and this sort of thing.
00:23:50 ►
But human beings addict to a startling spectrum, not only of substances, but of behaviors.
00:23:59 ►
We addict to each other.
00:24:01 ►
I mean, heroin withdrawal and a broken heart look and feel exactly the same way.
00:24:08 ►
You know, abandonment, bursting into tears, insomnia, inability to eat.
00:24:15 ►
I mean, does this person have a broken heart or are they getting off junk? You can’t tell.
00:24:20 ►
And we tend to addict. And I think this is a kind of, we feel in ourselves a certain incompleteness
00:24:29 ►
since the breakup of the African Partnership Society.
00:24:34 ►
And, you know, alcohol doesn’t quite do it.
00:24:37 ►
Cannabis is good, but doesn’t quite go far enough.
00:24:42 ►
We’ve tried all kinds of things. And interestingly, in the last hundred years,
00:24:48 ►
the science of ethnography and anthropology has scoured the world and brought back to
00:24:55 ►
us data which we didn’t have 100, 120 years ago. Data about peyote, ayahuasca, detoura,
00:25:08 ►
of data about peyote, ayahuasca, detoura, psilocybin, morning glory, so forth and so on.
00:25:15 ►
The materia medica of the remote human cultures of the planet is now available. And I think it comes not a moment too late.
00:25:20 ►
That’s why I called my book The Archaic Revival.
00:25:27 ►
late. That’s why I called my book The Archaic Revival. I really see the whole cultural impulse of the 20th century as an impulse toward the archaic. In other words, if you think about
00:25:33 ►
it, it begins with impressionism. What is impressionism except LSD 30 minutes in. In other words, the sharpness goes, the colors brighten, everything begins to blur.
00:25:50 ►
The boundaries are beginning to dissolve.
00:25:53 ►
It’s contentless.
00:25:54 ►
I mean, it’s ideologically empty.
00:25:56 ►
It’s just how things look.
00:25:58 ►
They look this certain way.
00:25:59 ►
Well, then 20 minutes later, ideas are beginning to accompany this melting and flowing of perception.
00:26:08 ►
We’ve now reached surrealism and Freud and Jung, the discovery of the unconscious.
00:26:15 ►
Well, then it keeps going.
00:26:17 ►
It gets more and more intense.
00:26:19 ►
Now we don’t see dreamscapes, distorted gargoyle-like figures melting watches and burning giraffes.
00:26:26 ►
That has all been now replaced by just a blur, an energy storm.
00:26:31 ►
Now we’re in a Pollock of some sort.
00:26:35 ►
We’re down at the quantum mechanical level where energy is flinging itself around.
00:26:40 ►
And at the same time, things like jazz, which carried with it a heavy content of sexual
00:26:47 ►
looseness, the flapper era, that whole thing
00:26:51 ►
people weren’t Victorian ladies and gentlemen that they had the cannibalistic
00:26:55 ►
drive, the Oedipal drive, the this drive
00:26:58 ►
Hitler proved that you know 500 years
00:27:02 ►
of Western ethics have you shoving people into ovens as a political course of action.
00:27:08 ►
The whole of the 20th century has been an exploration of the archaic.
00:27:14 ►
And then in the 60s, LSD appeared, but without the rhetoric of shamanism.
00:27:21 ►
LSD, for those of us who lived through it, was presented as the latest thing after penicillin and birth control.
00:27:31 ►
It was better living through chemistry. It was now we have penicillin, and now we have orthonovum, and now we have LSD.
00:27:39 ►
It was better living through chemistry. You’ve all seen the poster of the kids in the hate holding the banner.
00:27:47 ►
In the 70s, it was realized that the psychedelic experience need not be confined to LSD.
00:27:54 ►
It was generally realized. And that there were all these ethnographic usages.
00:27:59 ►
Ayahuasca, peyote, detour, morning glories, so forth and so on.
00:28:05 ►
And then late in the 70s, the shaman became the paradigmatic figure for cultural emulation.
00:28:17 ►
And that’s basically where we are now.
00:28:21 ►
The nation state is dissolving.
00:28:23 ►
It’s a creation of renaissance rationalism.
00:28:27 ►
Electronic media is retribalizing the world.
00:28:33 ►
Pharmacology is throwing open a vast cornucopia of psychoanalysis, modern art, quantum physics and phenomenology
00:28:49 ►
have propelled us to the brink of a neo-archaic understanding of our world.
00:28:56 ►
And now it has to become more explicit.
00:28:59 ►
I mean, I don’t think there’s much chance of survival without a major effort to reestablish archaic styles and institutions.
00:29:10 ►
And it’s not an easy thing to do.
00:29:12 ►
I mean, if you’re idealizing 70 naked people with no physical culture who are following
00:29:19 ►
along behind their cattle on the plains of Africa, and you want to take their social institutions,
00:29:25 ►
psychology, philosophy, and aesthetic, and lay it on to a global electronic culture of
00:29:30 ►
seven billion, you’re going to have to, there’s going to be some creative twisting and turning
00:29:36 ►
in all of that.
00:29:38 ►
Nevertheless, I believe it can be done.
00:29:41 ►
Now, there’s one more aspect of this that I want to touch on that’s sort
00:29:46 ►
of philosophical in general, and that is we’ve talked about the psychedelic experience. We’ve
00:29:50 ►
talked about how it dissolves boundaries and changes cultural values and so forth. But
00:29:56 ►
what we haven’t talked about is what is it exactly? I mean, what’s so great about it?
00:30:05 ►
exactly. I mean, what’s so great about it? If you read a description of a psychedelic experience,
00:30:12 ►
it sounds sort of like, well, everything dissolves, you see a lot of bright colors,
00:30:25 ►
you have funny ideas, and then you have to rest for a day. Well, what is so great about that, I mean, why should that be a culturally transforming issue?
00:30:32 ►
Well, I believe that we misperceive the psychedelic substances if we simply think of them as an inert substance in a plant
00:30:37 ►
which, when taken by a human being, dissolves programming
00:30:42 ►
and shows you the basement of your mind, essentially.
00:30:46 ►
That isn’t what’s going on.
00:30:49 ►
I believe here is much closer to what’s going on.
00:30:56 ►
Psychedelics convey information.
00:31:00 ►
The other kind of chemicals in nature that we’re familiar with that convey information, aside from DNA, are pheromones.
00:31:09 ►
Pheromones are aromatic compounds released by plants and animals, usually to carry a message within the species.
00:31:17 ►
So ants, as you know, lay down chemical trails that other ants sense and can follow.
00:31:25 ►
Well, in a sense, hallucinogens are intraspecies pheromones of some sort.
00:31:34 ►
They carry information across species lines.
00:31:39 ►
And the kind of information that they carry, the message,
00:31:52 ►
The kind of information that they carry, the message, is one of harmony, balance, and integration.
00:32:04 ►
And so a human population with a psychedelic institution or sacrament will, in its pristine form, tend to be nomadic,
00:32:07 ►
have very little physical cultural expression,
00:32:11 ►
tend to have a very loose family structure,
00:32:16 ►
an extended family structure and child-rearing arrangement.
00:32:21 ►
And I believe that this is where we can introduce the concept of the Gaian mind.
00:32:27 ►
The reason the psychedelic experience is so paradigm shattering is because we believe that we are alone in
00:32:37 ►
intelligence on this planet, and what the psychedelics show is, no, there is a much larger field of mind than we ever could suspect in our ordinary state of consciousness. is flowing between species, between biosystems across biota,
00:33:06 ►
gradients of light,
00:33:08 ►
chemical release,
00:33:09 ►
water, so forth and so on.
00:33:11 ►
All of nature is a vast
00:33:13 ►
communicating mind
00:33:15 ►
of some sort.
00:33:17 ►
And the only portion
00:33:19 ►
of that vast system
00:33:21 ►
that is out of
00:33:23 ►
alignment
00:33:24 ►
is the human world.
00:33:27 ►
Because we closed the channel.
00:33:30 ►
We closed the channel by abandoning the shamanic institution.
00:33:35 ►
In many, many human languages, the word shaman means go-between.
00:33:42 ►
Go-between.
00:33:44 ►
Well, go-between what and what is the question?
00:33:48 ►
Well, the answer is go-between the safe pedestrian assumptions of an organized society
00:33:55 ►
and the vast churning ocean of mystery that is real being.
00:34:01 ►
And every society is an illusion reared against the mystery of real being. And every society is an illusion reared against the mystery of real being and pursued in ignorance of it. So the shaman mediates between these two worlds. The ordinary world people have to live in in order to catch fish and have children and form relationships and bury the dead.
00:34:25 ►
And another unseen dynamic world of energy, of process, of strange attractors, of the great unknown.
00:34:39 ►
But it isn’t an abstraction. It’s nature.
00:34:41 ►
an abstraction.
00:34:42 ►
It’s nature.
00:34:45 ►
And history is the consequence of an animal species losing
00:34:48 ►
its connection to the
00:34:49 ►
Gaian mind. And
00:34:51 ►
instead of then a Gaian agenda,
00:34:55 ►
integration,
00:34:56 ►
unity,
00:34:57 ►
cooperation, you get
00:34:59 ►
an ego agenda.
00:35:02 ►
Dominance, resource
00:35:04 ►
extraction, territorial acquisition,
00:35:07 ►
control of other human beings, and resources.
00:35:10 ►
So when shamanism died, when hallucinogens became stigmatized,
00:35:16 ►
when the climate changed, we literally fell into history.
00:35:21 ►
We became a different kind of animal.
00:35:23 ►
into history. We became a different kind of animal.
00:35:28 ►
And the consequences of untrammeled historicity being practiced for 12,000 years
00:35:32 ►
is to bring us to our present situation
00:35:35 ►
where we have immense intellectual understanding
00:35:40 ►
of some aspects of nature.
00:35:45 ►
We have an immense ability to coordinate group activity in certain areas,
00:35:52 ►
like building a bridge, but not disarming, for example.
00:35:57 ►
But we have no ability whatsoever to control this darker self
00:36:03 ►
that sort of drew itself up to the campfire
00:36:06 ►
12,000 years and said,
00:36:09 ►
you know, you banished me into the darkness
00:36:11 ►
for a million years
00:36:13 ►
while you lived in a psilocybin-driven paradise.
00:36:17 ►
But here I am again,
00:36:19 ►
and the piper must be paid.
00:36:21 ►
Now, all the cards are on the table,
00:36:26 ►
and it’s up to us,
00:36:28 ►
we who live on this planet
00:36:30 ►
at the end of the 20th century,
00:36:34 ►
to try and do something with these facts.
00:36:37 ►
If we go extinct,
00:36:38 ►
if we wreck the planet
00:36:40 ►
and toxify the environment,
00:36:42 ►
it will be a tremendous tragedy
00:36:44 ►
because there are
00:36:45 ►
ways out.
00:36:47 ►
There are answers.
00:36:49 ►
But how much of the baggage we’ve accumulated over the past 4,000 years are we going to
00:36:55 ►
be able to take with us into that new world?
00:36:58 ►
Bloody little, I maintain.
00:37:01 ►
Our music, our mathematics, our dance, our theater. I don’t think our technologies are going to be able to come with us unless they go through
00:37:09 ►
serious downsizing and detoxification.
00:37:14 ►
So really, the discovery in the 19th and 20th century of these ancient ways of relating
00:37:22 ►
to plants, it’s not just a curiosity of anthropology or an exciting subfield of botany.
00:37:29 ►
It is, in fact, very central to the human drama of our salvation.
00:37:36 ►
Because I don’t think we can fix ourselves through rhetoric.
00:37:42 ►
If we could fix ourselves through rhetoric, then Buddha and Christ would have done the job.
00:37:48 ►
We can only fix ourselves
00:37:50 ►
by consciously analyzing our dilemma
00:37:53 ►
and then intervening.
00:37:55 ►
And I believe these cultures
00:37:59 ►
that have existed in a kind of suspended animation
00:38:02 ►
in the rainforests of the world
00:38:05 ►
while Western European civilization charged through its merry adventure,
00:38:11 ►
the raison d’etre for the existence of those aboriginal civilizations
00:38:17 ►
is that they carry the archaic gnosis.
00:38:20 ►
It’s all still intact for maybe 30 or 40 more years if we act quickly.
00:38:27 ►
The material is there.
00:38:29 ►
The techniques are there.
00:38:31 ►
It can be saved.
00:38:33 ►
But it has to be brought into modern civilization.
00:38:37 ►
And so, you know, classes like this.
00:38:42 ►
And I will now offer a tremendously down
00:38:46 ►
interpretation. It’s the same thing.
00:38:48 ►
These things are all
00:38:50 ►
alkaloids. It may
00:38:52 ►
just be that
00:38:54 ►
in this universe,
00:38:55 ►
alkaloids are always bitter.
00:38:58 ►
So that Gaia herself,
00:39:00 ►
you know, it’s like, can God
00:39:02 ►
make an object God can’t lift?
00:39:09 ►
Can Gaia make an alkaloid that isn’t bitter? I don’t know. It’s a challenge. I know that alkaloids are bad. My question is, are these alkaloids something that we really should take?
00:39:18 ►
I kind of see the role of these foods in our conscience.
00:39:21 ►
I see, you know, I don’t doubt that when we were pre-humanoid and we were running through the fields and we saw a mushroom, we were like, okay, I’m going to see it.
00:39:30 ►
It basically looks like something I can eat.
00:39:32 ►
It doesn’t have a spine.
00:39:33 ►
It’s not running away.
00:39:34 ►
I don’t doubt that it’s probably been tasted good.
00:39:37 ►
Now we see fruit and it’s colorful.
00:39:40 ►
It’s sweet.
00:39:41 ►
And maybe the consciousness that we have when we eat fruit is just a different consciousness than we would have if we ate mushrooms.
00:39:48 ►
But I know that mushrooms take that,
00:39:50 ►
that pork practically kills everyone that doesn’t die from it.
00:39:57 ►
That is a recommendation.
00:40:02 ►
Well, I think we have tremendous resistance.
00:40:07 ►
I think the private issue, certainly for me and for probably most of you,
00:40:12 ►
it’s easy to take psychedelics the first time because you don’t know what you’re getting into.
00:40:17 ►
Ever after that, you have to really have a little chat with yourself.
00:40:23 ►
You have to really have a little chat with yourself.
00:40:28 ►
And there are barriers to overcome.
00:40:36 ►
And in the case of the psilocybin mushroom, which is the ur-halicinogen,
00:40:41 ►
or at least I’m arguing it is here, when I first encountered it,
00:40:45 ►
it took years for me to build up a gag reflex.
00:40:48 ►
I really liked it in nature.
00:40:49 ►
It didn’t taste bad.
00:40:51 ►
I used to say it tastes like cold water.
00:40:54 ►
That’s what it tasted like to me.
00:40:57 ►
Now I do have a gag reflex, but I think that has to do with accumulated association to it.
00:41:04 ►
Yes? accumulated association to it. Yeah.
00:41:05 ►
Could you talk a little more about, you referred to, I think probably in the question in particular,
00:41:11 ►
as being the most or one of the most benign substances,
00:41:16 ►
kind of the thing that you do on the brain or the body as a whole.
00:41:20 ►
It was very rewarding, but after waiting for the first 90 pages of the Invisible Land case,
00:41:25 ►
I think there’s stuff that I can understand.
00:41:26 ►
Some of that was mentioned in there.
00:41:28 ►
Anything from the Elabagon or the one?
00:41:30 ►
Well, I guess it’s important to talk about toxicity.
00:41:33 ►
This is an issue.
00:41:35 ►
And drugs, what you have to understand is all substances are potentially toxic.
00:41:40 ►
You can kill yourself with water if you will drink enough of it.
00:41:44 ►
You can kill yourself with water if you will drink enough of it.
00:41:53 ►
In the case of drugs, the toxicity usually lies much closer to the effective dose than it does with water.
00:42:01 ►
Pharmacologists have a concept called LD50, which is a horrifying idea, but you should know it.
00:42:10 ►
LD50 is if you have 100 rats and you give them a drug, the LD50 dose is the dose at which half the rats die.
00:42:14 ►
And what you want in a drug, whether it’s a psychoactive drug or a cancer drug
00:42:20 ►
or anything, what you want is a drug where the effective dose
00:42:24 ►
is many, many times lower than the LD50.
00:42:29 ►
Now, by that standard, LSD is the safest drug there is because you can feel 50 micrograms of LSD,
00:42:41 ►
and 200 micrograms of LSD is quite a full menu.
00:42:49 ►
But to kill yourself with LSD, nobody knows how much it would take.
00:42:56 ►
The LD50 for LSD has never been determined.
00:43:00 ►
It’s so high.
00:43:02 ►
That’s good news.
00:43:03 ►
Now, psilocybin is a mid-range in this way of classification.
00:43:10 ►
The effective dose of psilocybin is 15 to 30 milligrams.
00:43:15 ►
A fatal dose of psilocybin is around 150 milligrams per kilogram of body weight.
00:43:26 ►
So you can figure out what that is.
00:43:28 ►
That’s thousands of times or several thousand times the effective dose.
00:43:33 ►
Well, then something like mescaline, the LD50 is only about 40 times the effective dose.
00:43:42 ►
And by that measurement, then, you would have to say mescaline
00:43:46 ►
is a rather toxic compound.
00:43:48 ►
And it is, in fact.
00:43:49 ►
You have to take 700 milligrams.
00:43:53 ►
This is
00:43:53 ►
another way of talking about
00:43:55 ►
toxicity. How much do you
00:43:57 ►
have to take?
00:44:01 ►
Mescaline,
00:44:01 ►
you have to take 700 milligrams.
00:44:04 ►
That’s damn near a triple zero cap filled with pure alkaloid.
00:44:09 ►
LSD to 100 micrograms, you can lose it on the head of a pin easily.
00:44:18 ►
So that’s another way of thinking about toxicity and effectiveness.
00:44:24 ►
And then there’s one other parameter.
00:44:26 ►
How long does the drug last?
00:44:30 ►
If you take a substance and 48 hours later you still have your phone turned off and you’re
00:44:37 ►
lying around in warm baths and wishing for a massage, then you took a toxic substance.
00:44:44 ►
It’s not supposed to do that to you.
00:44:45 ►
It’s not supposed to leave you with backaches and insomnia and a wreck.
00:44:50 ►
Well, by that criteria, then, DMT must be one of the safest drugs there are
00:44:58 ►
because it carries you to a titanically psychedelic state of mind
00:45:02 ►
and returns you in under 10 minutes to the baseline of consciousness.
00:45:09 ►
Now, it takes 70 milligrams of DMT to do that.
00:45:15 ►
So then that’s, you know, it takes a lot more than it does LSD.
00:45:19 ►
Now, interestingly, and then I’ll let you go to lunch.
00:45:21 ►
We ran a little over, so we’ll go to 1230.
00:45:27 ►
Here’s some new data that you may not have.
00:45:36 ►
A new psychoactive plant has come onto the scene with a new psychoactive substance in it,
00:45:40 ►
previously unknown to science, in a chemical family,
00:45:44 ►
previously unknown to contain psychoactive compounds.
00:45:48 ►
And this new compound can justly claim,
00:45:51 ►
though very little is known about it at the moment,
00:45:55 ►
and the experience itself is absolutely white-knuckle terrifying,
00:45:59 ►
can claim to be the safest psychedelic in the world because it only takes a thousand micrograms, one milligram of this substance.
00:46:12 ►
Now remember it took 70 milligrams of LSD, or 50 to 70.
00:46:19 ►
One milligram of salvinorine alpha smoked will deliver you into a freakishly alien reality
00:46:29 ►
for about 15 minutes, and then you will return.
00:46:34 ►
We know almost nothing about this drug at this point.
00:46:37 ►
We don’t know it’s LD50, but it’s only the second compound ever discovered
00:46:43 ►
that is active in the microgram range.
00:46:47 ►
It is an isoquinoline.
00:46:50 ►
It is in a chemical family unknown to contain psychoactive drugs.
00:46:55 ►
They’ve all been alkaloids or tropanes or something like that.
00:47:01 ►
Suddenly, late in the game, here is a plant.
00:47:05 ►
You can get high on the plant, although you have to work at it, and it’s not dramatic.
00:47:10 ►
It’s like the first half hour of ayahuasca or something.
00:47:14 ►
But if you isolate this compound and smoke it, it’ll turn you every way but loose.
00:47:22 ►
And this is new data that has just come out.
00:47:25 ►
It should inspire those of you who are field botanists or ethnographers.
00:47:29 ►
There is a vast number of plants in the literature that are listed as suspect hallucinogens.
00:47:37 ►
What that means is somebody said or some Indian told some botanist,
00:47:43 ►
we take this and we see things at night or something.
00:47:47 ►
Salvia divinorum was known for 20 years,
00:47:51 ►
but nobody could find the compound and nobody could get off on it.
00:47:56 ►
Well, now people are getting off and the compound has been discovered
00:48:00 ►
and they’re looking at near relatives of salvia divinorum,
00:48:03 ►
including a Ukrainian mint and some coleus species.
00:48:07 ►
And we’re finding in microgram and smaller amounts
00:48:12 ►
a whole family of these new psychedelic isoquinolines.
00:48:17 ►
And what they will mean for us, it’s hard to say.
00:48:21 ►
I mean, previously DMT held all honors for, you know, weirdness, the depth of the call, as Heidegger likes to say.
00:48:34 ►
Now Salvinari and Alpha is on stage, and there’s lots of work to be done.
00:48:41 ►
Yeah.
00:48:41 ►
work to be done. Yeah.
00:48:41 ►
Yeah.
00:48:41 ►
Yeah.
00:48:41 ►
Yeah.
00:48:41 ►
Yeah.
00:48:41 ►
Yeah.
00:48:41 ►
Yeah.
00:48:43 ►
Yeah.
00:48:43 ►
Yeah.
00:48:43 ►
Yeah.
00:48:44 ►
Yeah.
00:48:44 ►
Yeah.
00:48:44 ►
Yeah.
00:48:44 ►
Yeah.
00:48:44 ►
Yeah.
00:48:44 ►
Yeah.
00:48:44 ►
Yeah.
00:48:44 ►
Yeah.
00:48:44 ►
Yeah.
00:48:44 ►
Yeah.
00:48:45 ►
Yeah.
00:48:45 ►
Yeah.
00:48:45 ►
Yeah.
00:48:45 ►
Yeah.
00:48:45 ►
Yeah.
00:48:45 ►
Yeah.
00:48:45 ►
Yeah.
00:48:45 ►
Yeah.
00:48:45 ►
Yeah.
00:48:45 ►
Yeah.
00:48:45 ►
Yeah.
00:48:45 ►
Yeah.
00:48:45 ►
Yeah.
00:48:45 ►
Yeah.
00:48:45 ►
Yeah.
00:48:45 ►
Yeah.
00:48:45 ►
Yeah.
00:48:46 ►
Yeah.
00:48:46 ►
Yeah.
00:48:46 ►
Yeah.
00:48:46 ►
Yeah.
00:48:46 ►
Yeah.
00:48:46 ►
Yeah.
00:48:46 ►
Yeah.
00:48:46 ►
Yeah.
00:48:46 ►
Yeah.
00:48:46 ►
Yeah.
00:48:46 ►
Yeah.
00:48:46 ►
Yeah.
00:48:46 ►
Yeah.
00:48:46 ►
Yeah.
00:48:46 ►
Yeah.
00:48:46 ►
Yeah.
00:48:46 ►
Yeah.
00:48:46 ►
Yeah.
00:48:46 ►
Yeah.
00:48:46 ►
Yeah.
00:48:47 ►
Yeah.
00:48:47 ►
Yeah.
00:48:48 ►
Yeah.
00:48:48 ►
Yeah.
00:48:48 ►
Yeah.
00:48:49 ►
Yeah.
00:48:50 ►
Yeah.
00:48:50 ►
Yeah.
00:48:50 ►
Yeah.
00:48:50 ►
Yeah.
00:48:50 ►
Yeah.
00:48:50 ►
Yeah.
00:48:50 ►
Yeah.
00:48:50 ►
Yeah.
00:48:50 ►
Yeah.
00:48:50 ►
Yeah.
00:48:50 ►
Yeah.
00:48:50 ►
Yeah.
00:48:50 ►
Yeah.
00:48:50 ►
Yeah.
00:48:50 ►
Yeah.
00:48:50 ►
Yeah.
00:48:50 ►
Yeah.
00:48:50 ►
Yeah.
00:48:50 ►
Yeah.
00:48:50 ►
Yeah.
00:48:50 ►
Yeah.
00:48:50 ►
Yeah.
00:49:05 ►
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah benign? Yeah, I mean, I think it’s fairly logic.
00:49:09 ►
It seems reasonable to say that, first of all,
00:49:11 ►
you don’t want to insult the physical brain in any time, anyhow,
00:49:17 ►
because you only have one or two.
00:49:19 ►
So you have to keep care of your brain.
00:49:24 ►
It’s very interesting that the most dramatic hallucinogen,
00:49:29 ►
and now I’m talking about DMT, let’s leave salvinorin alpha out of this
00:49:33 ►
because not enough is known about it,
00:49:35 ►
but the most powerful hallucinogen actually occurs in human metabolism.
00:49:41 ►
Every single one of us as we sit here is elaborating DMT in tiny amounts.
00:49:46 ►
We’re also elaborating 5-hydroxytryptamine, or serotonin, in quite extensive amounts.
00:49:54 ►
So I believe that ayahuasca, from this standard of judgment,
00:50:00 ►
is probably among the safest of the hallucinogens because it’s essentially brain soup.
00:50:07 ►
There’s nothing in it that you don’t already have in your brain.
00:50:10 ►
It’s just got more of it and in a different proportion.
00:50:14 ►
Oh, yes.
00:50:18 ►
They occur in the pineal gland.
00:50:32 ►
The pineal gland, 6-adenoglomerotropane is actually 5-hydroxytryptamine, 6-hydroxytryptamine.
00:50:37 ►
So a lot of these compounds are elaborated in the brain.
00:50:38 ►
LSD is not.
00:50:41 ►
Salvinorin alpha is not.
00:50:43 ►
Ketamine is not.
00:50:46 ►
Mescaline, close, but not. I mean, there are amphetamine-like compounds in normal metabolism,
00:50:50 ►
but that isn’t one of them yet.
00:50:52 ►
I have a question that you might want to do after this,
00:50:55 ►
or when we come back.
00:50:57 ►
It’s a simple question.
00:50:59 ►
One is, what is your opinion as to how these different substances
00:51:03 ►
open up different aspects?
00:51:06 ►
You know, each has their own little niche.
00:51:09 ►
And more specifically, if you could give me a point of view as to the different windows or the different dimensions
00:51:30 ►
of different blood cultures?
00:51:32 ►
Sure. I mean, it seems to me, and somebody with equal experience might differ,
00:51:39 ►
but it seems to me that the best model is like a target or a bullseye.
00:51:53 ►
The various substances exhibit more and more of their unique character the more you take. In other words, if you take a low dose of something that’s psychedelic,
00:51:59 ►
it will clarify your vision, stimulate you, and you can’t really tell whether you’ve taken psilocybin, LSD, mescaline, or what have you.
00:52:11 ►
As the dose increases, the specific characteristics of these substances begin to emerge,
00:52:18 ►
and often they’re contraintuitive to a chemical way of thinking. For example, ayahuasca and mushrooms, psilocybin is 4-phosphoriloxy-N-endymethyltryptamine.
00:52:34 ►
When you remove the phosphorus group, which happens as it crosses the blood-brain barrier,
00:52:40 ►
you get something very much like DMT.
00:52:43 ►
However, when you take psilocybin, you don’t get something like a DMT trick.
00:52:49 ►
You get, in the case of psilocybin, the most startling quality of it is that it speaks.
00:53:03 ►
It speaks in English.
00:53:06 ►
It tells you things.
00:53:08 ►
I mean, this sounds preposterous unless you’ve had the experience.
00:53:11 ►
It sounded preposterous to me for years.
00:53:14 ►
I just could not imagine what my friends meant when they said,
00:53:18 ►
these plants talk to you, until I had a conversation with it.
00:53:24 ►
So psilocybin speaks, and it’s a kind of a Spockian kind of message.
00:53:32 ►
It’s about enormous machines in orbit around alien planets.
00:53:38 ►
It’s about galactarian destiny and the history of the local cluster over the last half billion years.
00:53:46 ►
And it’s an enormous scale and it’s about races, worlds, technologies, civilizations, on and on and on.
00:53:54 ►
Switch over to ayahuasca, which is chemically almost the same animal, and it’s about the waters.
00:54:06 ►
It’s about birth, death, femininity, health and disease, relationships, energy flows between people.
00:54:18 ►
It’s very human. It’s very feminine. It’s very organic and enclosing.
00:54:29 ►
Well, these are quite different messages.
00:54:33 ►
I mean, if you had one in the absence of the other,
00:54:36 ►
you would have an unbalanced view, I think, of what is going on.
00:54:41 ►
However, then, if you take these things and push them all, do double doses or triple
00:54:48 ►
doses, I’m not recommending this, but I’m just saying it has been done and we have the
00:54:52 ►
data, what begins to happen is everything migrates toward the DMT flash. The DMT flash
00:55:01 ►
seems to be sort of like the center of the bullseye.
00:55:05 ►
Now, I haven’t personally had enough guts to smoke salvinorine alpha.
00:55:11 ►
I’ve watched people do it, and if you’re going to do it, I suggest you don’t watch people do it.
00:55:18 ►
Because I was gung-ho until then.
00:55:21 ►
Ho till then.
00:55:30 ►
But assuming it lies somewhere on this spectrum, what seems to be happening is all of these things propel you toward deeper and deeper states of boundary dissolution.
00:55:35 ►
At the first level, you simply dissolve the boundary between yourself and the part of
00:55:41 ►
yourself you don’t want to look at.
00:55:43 ►
That’s called dealing with your stuff.
00:55:45 ►
At the next level, you dissolve the boundary between yourself and other people.
00:55:51 ►
And this is the bonding situations and that sort of thing.
00:55:55 ►
At the next level, boundary between yourself and your memories of the past.
00:56:04 ►
All of your experience is returned to you.
00:56:08 ►
And beyond that, you dissolve then into what Jung called the collective unconscious,
00:56:15 ►
or something like that.
00:56:16 ►
And then beyond that, Gaian mind, cosmic mind.
00:56:20 ►
I mean, I’m no fan of these hierarchies of named, hypostatized spiritual entities,
00:56:28 ►
but that’s the basic idea.
00:56:29 ►
And finally, and astonishingly, I think the elf workshop of the DMP flash
00:56:37 ►
lies very close to the center of the experience, of what is possible.
00:56:44 ►
It is not simply, as you might have gotten the idea from reading the literature,
00:56:49 ►
you see, in the 60s they wanted to map it over Buddhism or Eastern religion,
00:56:55 ►
and they wanted to say that as the dose increases,
00:56:59 ►
somehow Satori or Shunyata or Nirvana or the white light or the great void or something like that.
00:57:07 ►
I never had that experience.
00:57:09 ►
As I raised the dose, the complexity of the state complexified.
00:57:15 ►
It never simplified.
00:57:18 ►
It never became neoplatonic.
00:57:20 ►
It became Borketsian and the universe is full of a number of things.
00:57:27 ►
So I don’t think we can, you know, some, this is maybe time to stop,
00:57:32 ►
but I’m reluctant to connect this entire enterprise to what is popularly called spiritual growth.
00:57:41 ►
I just think it’s more like about growth.
00:57:43 ►
I just think it’s more like about growth.
00:57:51 ►
And spirit implies some weird anti-materialist bias or something like that.
00:57:54 ►
You know, I would say Catholic.
00:58:01 ►
So to me, spirituality means do you visit the sick and imprisoned?
00:58:03 ►
Do you clothe the naked?
00:58:06 ►
Do you feed the hungry? Do you feed the hungry?
00:58:08 ►
Do you bury the dead?
00:58:10 ►
Do you comfort the afflicted?
00:58:14 ►
When I see somebody doing those things, I say, this is a spiritually evolving person.
00:58:18 ►
When I see somebody taking psilocybin,
00:58:20 ►
I say, there is an explorer.
00:58:23 ►
But I don’t try to lay on some moral judgment about good and evil.
00:58:28 ►
I think that’s inappropriate.
00:58:33 ►
Spiritual accomplishment is manifested by moral action.
00:58:38 ►
And the role these psychedelics play is they may make moral action easier
00:58:44 ►
because they show you your memories and your debts and your mistakes,
00:58:50 ►
but intrinsically they are not tools for spiritual development.
00:58:54 ►
They are tools for the exploration of mind, and we don’t know what that is.
00:59:01 ►
And we probably won’t figure it out this afternoon, but anyhow, we’ll come back here,
00:59:06 ►
and since it’s now 12.30,
00:59:08 ►
let’s come back at 2 o’clock.
00:59:13 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
00:59:15 ►
where people are changing their lives
00:59:17 ►
one thought at a time.
00:59:20 ►
I completely agree with Terence just now
00:59:22 ►
when he said, and I quote,
00:59:24 ►
the private issue, certainly for me and probably for most of you, is that it’s easy to take psychedelics the first time because you don’t know what you’re getting into.
00:59:35 ►
Ever after that, you really have to have a little chat with yourself and there are barriers to overcome, end quote.
00:59:43 ►
And although there are quite a few of our fellow saloners who have
00:59:46 ►
not yet had an opportunity to experience a psychedelic journey, I suspect that those who
00:59:52 ►
have are most likely to agree with that statement as well. In the ayahuasca circle that I participated
00:59:59 ►
in, it was always us more experienced psychonauts who had the most qualms during the time immediately preceding the beginning of a ceremony.
01:00:08 ►
It wasn’t unusual to hear a seasoned old tripper questioning himself or herself as to why they were about to participate yet again
01:00:17 ►
in what at times could become an extremely difficult few hours.
01:00:23 ►
Psychedelic exploration most definitely isn’t for the faint of heart.
01:00:27 ►
Another thing that stood out for me in this talk was when some of the women in the room
01:00:32 ►
began to call out the men for making the psychedelic experience too macho or some such thing.
01:00:38 ►
I thought it was a really good exchange of ideas,
01:00:41 ►
and I wish that the conversation had continued along those lines a bit longer.
01:00:47 ►
So, this past Monday night, after I had already previewed the talk that we just heard,
01:00:53 ►
I mentioned this conversation about gender issues in the psychedelic community
01:00:57 ►
to our fellow Saloners who were online in my weekly Zoom conference.
01:01:03 ►
Now, I should preface this by saying that this being our third
01:01:06 ►
week of these online get-togethers, our little group has now grown to seven of us. Actually,
01:01:12 ►
there was really an eighth person who was connected to us through FaceTime on the cell
01:01:17 ►
phone that his brother, who was in the conference, was holding up to the camera for us to see.
01:01:22 ►
And we could actually talk back and forth to him.
01:01:30 ►
You know, on top of that, another one of our group was coming in through his phone as he was driving home from work.
01:01:32 ►
And for an old hacker like me, that degree of high tech moved into the domain of magic.
01:01:39 ►
But that’s another story for another day.
01:01:42 ►
Anyway, I mentioned the gender issue that was brought up in this talk,
01:01:47 ►
and the comments by the guys in the conference were quite interesting to me.
01:01:52 ►
With only one exception,
01:01:54 ►
every one of us had experienced our first psychedelic experience
01:01:57 ►
from the hands of a woman.
01:01:59 ►
I still haven’t quite got my mind around this fact.
01:02:03 ►
It’s probably just an aberration with our small group,
01:02:07 ►
but wouldn’t it be interesting if,
01:02:09 ►
while men are the main public promoters and speakers about psychedelics,
01:02:13 ►
at least for the present time being,
01:02:16 ►
well, the actual work of initiating new members
01:02:18 ►
into this worldwide psychedelic community
01:02:21 ►
may be being done largely by women.
01:02:24 ►
I hope that we can hear the opinions of
01:02:27 ►
some of our women fellow salonners about this. Hopefully one of these Monday nights we’ll have
01:02:32 ►
a few women join in our discussion. But I have to admit that if the tables were turned and
01:02:38 ►
these conference participants were all women, well, I probably would be too intimidated to join them until the
01:02:46 ►
balance between men and women was more equal. So it’s going to take a few brave women to be the
01:02:52 ►
first to join us for our Psychedelic Salon Monday Nights Online. And as you know, for the time being,
01:02:59 ►
I’m keeping the potential audience of these talks restricted to my supporters over at patreon.com.
01:03:06 ►
But as our weekly meetings grow and I learn how to better use Zoom,
01:03:10 ►
I’ll eventually be able to open them up, maybe once a month, to everyone here in the salon.
01:03:16 ►
But right now there’s still a learning curve involved in coordinating online conversations,
01:03:21 ►
particularly as the number of participants continues to grow. Thank you. are now headed by women of color. The times, they are a-changing,
01:03:45 ►
and not a moment too soon, I should add.
01:03:49 ►
For now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:03:53 ►
Be well, my friends. Thank you.