566 - A Tribe of Selves

Program Notes

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Guest speaker: Terence McKenna

Date this lecture was recorded: April 1993

[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna

“I think it’s important to talk about and analyze your experience. There is no communication, even within the confines of your own mind, if you can’t describe what’s going on.”

“The crisis we’re in, as a planetary society, is a culture of consciousness. There ain’t enough of it. That’s what happens when women are raped in Bosnia. That’s a failure of consciousness. That’s what happens when rivers are polluted with DDT. It’s a failure of consciousness.”

“The idea that art should save humanity is very out of fashion in the cynical ’90s.”

“When Fascism comes to America it will be called traditionalism. That seems to be how it’s going to present itself.”

“Dancing your ass off in a noisy environment is a perfect strategy for clearing your system of a drug.”

“Your SELF is the instrument for the exploration of these dimensions.”

“Ideology is fairly absent in shamanism at a practical level. It’s basically about experience, not about an ideological preconception.”

“What if there is actually something that survives bodily death, that actually continues to exist in a dimension which we would have to call mental, or trans-real. And what-if you could come and go from that dimension using shamanic techniques? That is what in fact shamanism has always claimed to anyone who would listen.”

“What is language? It’s a strategy for escaping from the narrowness of the present moment.”

“I think that, well, frankly, I don’t know what I think. It depends on how recently I smoked DMT.”

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Transcript

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Greetings from cyberdelic space.

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This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic salon.

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

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And I’m pleased to begin today by thanking Alicia D., Michael Y., Ryan M., and Casey H.

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for their donations to the salon that are going to be used to offset some of the expenses associated with these podcasts.

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And I also want to send out a special thank you to Wendell, who has just made a significant donation to the salon in the form of Bitcoin.

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It actually should be called a grant because, well, it’s significantly larger than any donation that we’ve ever received in support of these podcasts.

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And I should say a little something about Bitcoin while I’m at it.

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The first Bitcoin donation that was sent to the salon came in 2014,

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and at the time it was worth $5 in U.S. funds. Since I’ve always been a big supporter of Bitcoin,

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my policy has been to hold on to those coins, because, well, I have a feeling that they’re going to increase in value, which they have, and that $5 d o na t i o nha s n o w b eco m e w or t hm ore t han$ 50. In fact, every Bitcoin donation

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that I’ve received is now worth a lot more than it was when the donations were made.

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From my perspective, Bitcoin is a gift that just keeps giving. So, to Wendell and the rest of my

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Bitcoin donors, I thank you as well as all of our other donors from the bottom of my heart.

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donors. I thank you as well as all of our other donors from the bottom of my heart.

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Now it’s time to get back to work on this series of talks that Terence McKenna gave back in April of 1993 when he held forth on a wide range of topics including what he saw as some important

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technology that was only a year old at the time. It’s called the World Wide Web. Another thing he mentions that I suspect will

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catch your mind is his statement that, and I quote, when fascism comes to America, it will be called

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traditionalism. That seems to be how it’s going to present itself, end quote. Now, I doubt that I’m

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the only one who sees the phrase make America great, to be the lunatic ramblings of a psychotic child

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who thinks that phrase refers to the power that has been traditionally held by only white men.

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When fascism comes to America, it will be called traditionalism.

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Welcome to 21st century America.

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Now about an hour and 17 minutes into this talk,

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I hope that you’re in a place where you can stop for a moment and re-listen,

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maybe more than once, to Terrence’s rap about how DMT shatters the illusion of self.

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I’ve listened to it several times now myself,

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and the more that I think about what he’s saying,

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it brings to mind that famous JBS Haldane saying, and I quote,

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Now my own suspicion is that the universe is not only stranger than we suppose, but stranger than we can suppose. End quote.

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See if that doesn’t come close to what you think when you hear this fun rap of his.

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Now, here’s Terrence.

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what you think when you hear this fun rap of his.

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Now, here’s Terrence.

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Well, is there a… You all went off to lunch somewhere,

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not where I was, so I don’t know where you went.

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You found the restaurant I couldn’t find.

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But did you…

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Are there issues outstanding from this morning

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or a direction you want to send us off in?

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Yeah.

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I think that you’re saying that maybe psychedelics is used more for teaching

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rather than it’s used in the sense of what?

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And later they were saying about needing to be name-lined or something like that.

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I think that that’s what’s helpful,

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because maybe once you learn the territory, you learn to think about what the purpose was. Maybe once you learn the territory, you learn the state,

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that the only thing that’s on you then is to operate from that more and more and more and more

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rather than just taking more time to develop.

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Well, I was just talking to this reporter from the San Francisco Bee,

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or from the Sacramento Bee about this very thing.

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I think if you’re stupid, there’s just no hope.

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You know, you have been afflicted with a terrible circumstance,

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and you have to struggle with that.

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You know, a lot of people took LSD in the 60s,

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and it seemed to have no effect whatsoever on them.

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I mean, you know, a lot of pretty colors and this and that.

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And then they went out to be war planners and corporate executives and so forth.

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I think it’s very important to talk about and analyze your experience.

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There is no communication, even within the confines

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of your own mind if you can’t

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describe what’s going on.

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And so, you know,

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the idea here is not that you should

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take psilocybin day in and day

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out or week in and week out,

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but that when you do it,

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you should do it with dedication

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and attention and pre-planning

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and while it’s happening, You should do it with dedication and attention and pre-planning.

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And while it’s happening, you must pay attention.

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And after it’s over, you must analyze it.

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You must understand it.

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It’s a tool for thought.

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It’s a tool for understanding. And as far as education is concerned, you know, I think one of the reasons I keep coming

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back to CIIS is because unspoken in what’s going on here is the idea that modern psychotherapy

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of the transpersonal sort is an embryonic kind of neo-archaic shamanism.

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And there is something to be said for judicious use of the concept of the guide.

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I think that the guide should, first of all, be very psychedelically experienced.

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A therapist who has never taken these substances can’t guide you because they’ve never been there.

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But in the presence of a skilled therapist,

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all kinds of progress in dealing with personal issues and complexes can be made.

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People say this stuff is escapist, but nobody who’s ever taken it

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will line up behind that.

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It’s too difficult.

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I mean, I’ve had people say to me,

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I’ve heard people refer to psilocybin as silly-cybin

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and said, I’ve never had a bad trip on psilocybin.

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And I think to myself,

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gee, I wish I were you,

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because I don’t think the goal with this stuff is to get through it without ever having a bad moment, sort of unscathed with the parental seal of approval stamped across your chest. The goal is to learn. And learning is often painful.

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to learn. And learning is often painful. And the most important lessons are often the most painful.

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And if you’re going to have to drop an attitude or a way of relating to somebody or an opinion about yourself or something, these things are painful. And often you don’t just say at the height of the psychedelic, oh, I see, I should change my mind.

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No, often there’s tears and soul searching and then a sense of dawning light

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and then the conversion.

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This is not easy work to do.

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It’s not easy for anybody to do.

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I had a guy tell me once in the Amazon,

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he said,

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don’t think because we wear penis sheaves and live in the rainforest

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that this is easier for us

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than it is for you.

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It’s not.

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It’s as challenging to your humanness,

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it challenges your humanness

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no matter where you start out from.

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So you have to bring something to it.

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But if you bring something to it, it will work for you.

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And I’m of the opinion, and I get a lot of flack from this,

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and you’re perfectly free to pile on,

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that many other spiritual techniques of advancement don’t work. Even if you are intelligent, dedicated, attentive, they just don’t work.

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Or they didn’t work for me, that’s all I can say.

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This will work.

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And if you bring sincerity and integrity to it, it will respond beyond your wildest dreams.

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Yes, did you want to say something?

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What do you have to offer in terms of in science, in your experience, about how to

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get into the body?

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Well, it’s a complicated question.

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I’m an alienated intellectual.

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Probably most of you are as well.

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I may have been that before I ever reached psychedelics.

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Basically, I think that it almost comes down to practicing a noisy form of aesthetic criticism of the society.

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If something is stupid, you should say so. And if something is tasteless or brutal or insulting or demeaning, we just have to say so.

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Now, the problem is there is so much that is tasteless, insulting, and demeaning

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that you would spend your entire time doing that.

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Well, isn’t that what the countercultural milieu is?

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Is that what the countercultural milieu is?

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I think it’s a group of people who, to greater or lesser degrees,

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are entirely uncomfortable with the official culture and then try to embody an alternative culture.

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And it’s a culture of tolerance, of broad-mindedness, of immediate experience.

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It’s not a work ethic culture.

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It’s not a pile-up wealth kind of culture.

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It’s a culture that lives in the moment.

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And to my mind, what we can do is be more adamantly countercultural and creative.

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That’s why I’m so happy to see something like rave and house and ambient music come along.

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Because, you know, rock and roll, which was previously the sustaining thing of the counterculture,

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was totally co-opted.

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And the official culture turns all criticism into a fashion statement.

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That seems to be how it operates.

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So in terms of embodiment, I think what we have to do is be creative.

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At lunch I was saying, you know, the crisis that we’re in as a planetary society

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is a culture of consciousness.

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There ain’t enough of it.

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That’s what happens when women are raped in Bosnia.

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That’s a failure of consciousness.

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That’s what happens when rivers are polluted with DDT.

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It’s a failure of consciousness, a failure to correctly appreciate cause and effect.

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And if there is anything which increases our consciousness,

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I don’t care if it’s a religion, a food, a drug, a sexual product, a magazine,

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if there is anything which increases our consciousness,

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we should find out what it is and get with it.

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And once you’ve increased your consciousness a little, a lot, some,

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it’s not doing any good then unless it is embodied.

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And the way it’s embodied, I think, is by pushing the art pedal to the floor.

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It’s the only pedal which we have been allowed to touch.

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We don’t get to touch the international investment profile pedal or the international diplomacy pedal.

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Those are all reserved for the masters.

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But art has been ceded to us. And art can either be fawning and sycophantic, or it can be radical and challenging,

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or it can be transcendental and inspiring.

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And I think what we’ve accepted in the arts in the last 20 years

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is the idea of immense fragmentation and personal expression.

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This is exactly the wrong thing because what that is is ego.

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We don’t care what Jeff Koons thinks about the person he’s sleeping with and all this other stuff.

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This is just self-indulgent nonsense. The idea that art should save humanity is very out of fashion in the cynical 90s. But I believe it. And I believe that the technologists who are working at our elbows are giving us tools more powerful than we or our critics ever imagined could exist.

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And if we use those tools for the explicit purpose of creating a new cultural agenda,

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it will be done.

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You know, we’re all a little confused about this, but those folks over on the extreme

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right wing, the Pat Buchanans of this world, they know exactly what’s going on.

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And they call it cultural war.

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And while they’re moving up their tanks and digging foxholes,

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what are we doing, you know, wandering around asking what’s happening?

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Cultural war is very real. And the people who are, you know, I realized sometime in the last 48 hours

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that when fascism comes to America, it will be called traditionalism.

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That seems to be how it’s going to present itself.

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So I think art is our great ace in this game.

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Right now the most, yeah.

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Well, one more thing.

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I was going to say right now the most exciting cultural frontier to my mind on this planet

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is the Internet and the World Wide Web. And that is a beast which escaped from the control of the dominator institutions.

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It was built to wage thermonuclear war and to be indestructible.

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Well, when thermonuclear war ceased to be a hot option,

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the indestructibility of it remained.

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And now it can’t be turned off, it can’t be controlled, it can’t be regulated.

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And look who’s on there.

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I mean, guys with long hair and girls with short hair.

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And this drives the masters crazy.

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So I look at the Internet as a vast canvas

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to which we are each invited to make our own contribution.

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And if we cede 3D to the orthodox culture, then we should make cyberspace our own.

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One of the things that I didn’t stress enough this morning was the visual acuity empowered by psilocybin

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leads to hunting success, but the higher doses of psilocybin propel you past observation of animal habits

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and environments and into the imagination.

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habits and environments, and into the imagination.

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And I think, you know, that the cultural compass of this species points toward the imagination.

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That’s where we’re going to live in the future.

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That’s what we were born for.

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That’s where we are at our best. In 3D, well, as James Joyce says in Finnegan’s Wake,

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here in Moycane, we flop on the seamy side.

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Moycane being the red light district of Dublin.

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But up in the end, prospector, you sprout all your worth and you woof your wings.

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Well, up in the end, it’s spelled these days,

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HTTP colon double backslash WWW yak, yak, yak, right?

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In other words, the imagination is being turned into a piece of real estate.

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And the faster we can occupy it and give it the caring, boundaryless,

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psychedelic communal tone of our community, the closer we are then

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to having a foothold or a grasp of a real solution.

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Yeah.

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Specifically around bioactive substance.

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I wanted to ask about intention.

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I noticed in journeys that I’ve had to David I. Watson that intentions were important to Tony and they shaded the experience and filtered the experience.

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And sometimes very strongly and sometimes hardly at all, I hope not, but I noticed.

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I’m curious if comedy had an issue about intention and also the intention as it relates to different substances.

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You get the same result, you get the same influence with the various substances you’re

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intending.

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Well, I would sort of agree with you and sort of differ.

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I remember once I was at some impasse in my personal life

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and I decided I should take a psychedelic and pose a question.

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You know, they sometimes say you should pose a question.

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And I had never done that.

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So the question was, am I doing the right thing about my life?

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Well, the answer came back,

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what kind of a chicken shit question is that to ask a galactarian intelligence? Well, I suppose that was the answer I needed to hear. It put my problems in perspective. I realized, you know, you don’t ask Freud to clip your fingernails for God’s sake.

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fingernails for God’s sake.

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So in that sense I’m not sure

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about intention. But

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the way I understand

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intention is that you

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should very

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conscientiously

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control set and setting

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going into it.

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Don’t take

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these things in crowded, noisy,

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socially complex environments

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on an empty stomach

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with people you don’t know.

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This is definitely a bad strategy

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to follow.

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And it’s, you know,

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dancing your ass off in a noisy environment is a perfect strategy for clearing your system of a drug.

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I mean, if you take a drug you don’t like, what do you do?

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You go outside and chop wood for three hours, and then you feel much better because you physically worked it off. The way I like to do these things is in silent darkness, on an empty stomach,

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at high, at strong to stronger doses, not recklessly high doses,

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but what I call effective doses, alone.

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but what I call effective doses, alone.

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And this last thing just seems to throw people, this alone.

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It tells me what a triple Scorpio I must be,

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that so many people are absolutely horrified of the idea of taking a psychedelic alone,

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when I wouldn’t, you’d have to twist my arm to get me to take it with someone.

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Because if I take it with someone, it’s inevitably going to be about them.

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And I may not want that much of them in my life, you know.

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Even if I take it with someone and they never say a word, and we both lie side by side not touching,

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I don’t drift deeply into my trip.

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I find myself listening.

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Are they breathing?

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I can’t hear them breathing.

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So maybe they’re dead, but maybe I just can’t hear them.

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So if I disturb them, that’s not cool.

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On the other hand, if they’re dying as a courtesy,

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and then my mind just goes into a tizzy. Well, maybe they’re dying as a courtesy, and then my mind just, you know, it just goes into a tizzy.

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Well, maybe you’re not as neurotic as I am.

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But, yeah.

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I have a question related to what you were saying around the methodology of the skew pitch.

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And I used to adhere to a similar model and used it on my own.

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Then I became involved in the Roquette type group, which provided me with a lot, including the maggots.

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There was another part of that which was that there was a tremendous amount of undercurrent perception

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and guru abuse in the group,

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which unfortunately I didn’t become aware of until a while later.

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So I guess the two-part question was now I’ve returned back to the previous model,

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basically thinking about myself.

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Now, so I’m wondering what you think of a highly structural type model,

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and secondly, do you have any thoughts about who would use

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and use the psychedelics?

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Do you all understand

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what he’s referring to

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by the Roquette type model?

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He’s referring to a person,

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a psychiatrist,

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Salvador Roquette,

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who’s operated in Mexico

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for years.

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I’ve never met him,

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so correct me if I’m not doing it justice.

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But as I understand it, this is basically the assault theory of psychedelics,

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where you give people, first of all, you give them multiple substances.

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It may be LSD.

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It may be LSD with ketamine.

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It may be a lot of substances and then a lot of input.

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It can be music, but I’ve heard of cases where he took a group of Jewish housewives from Long Island

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and showed them Holocaust footage.

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Well, it depends on what you’re after here.

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I mean, if you’re trying to break people down, this sounds like it would break me down.

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I would not know how I could even survive something like that.

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But I think my theory is almost exactly the opposite.

00:23:37 ►

I say there should be very little input.

00:23:40 ►

I don’t think you need to go out and buy a lily tank for your basement

00:23:45 ►

but as close to that as you can get is good

00:23:49 ►

in other words I lie on a bed

00:23:51 ►

silent darkness

00:23:54 ►

and look at the back of your eyelids

00:23:58 ►

with the expectation of seeing something

00:24:02 ►

it took me years to be able to articulate this because I thought everybody did this,

00:24:07 ►

but apparently not.

00:24:09 ►

I once talked to Roland Fisher, the guy I mentioned this morning.

00:24:13 ►

He’d given psilocybin to 2,500 grad students.

00:24:17 ►

He’d taken it 20 times himself, and I said,

00:24:21 ►

I said, well, Roland, what do you make of these hallucinations,

00:24:25 ►

of these volleys of visual hallucination?

00:24:28 ►

And he said, I never closed my eyes.

00:24:32 ►

I was floored.

00:24:33 ►

I mean, that is so antithetical to my instincts with the stuff that I couldn’t even imagine it.

00:24:41 ►

They couldn’t even imagine it.

00:24:50 ►

Then your question about guru abuse, I don’t know what it is in me.

00:24:53 ►

I guess it’s just deep cynicism. I discussed this once with the mushroom, and what I was told was simply this.

00:25:00 ►

For one human being to assume that they could attain enlightenment from another human being

00:25:08 ►

is like a grain of sand on the beach assuming that it can attain enlightenment

00:25:14 ►

from another grain of sand on the beach.

00:25:18 ►

In other words, all grains of sand are alike.

00:25:22 ►

Didn’t you know that?

00:25:23 ►

And all people in this particular area are alike. Didn’t you know that? And all people

00:25:25 ►

in this particular area

00:25:27 ►

are alike.

00:25:28 ►

How many gurus

00:25:30 ►

have to be caught

00:25:31 ►

with their hand

00:25:32 ►

in the cookie jar

00:25:33 ►

or the nookie jar

00:25:34 ►

or whatever it is

00:25:35 ►

before you get the message

00:25:37 ►

they are just like us.

00:25:40 ►

And that may be granting them

00:25:42 ►

a level of moral sophistication they lack as a class.

00:25:48 ►

What I truly believe is nobody knows anything.

00:25:54 ►

The more generous position is, you know, well, the Buddhists have a piece of the action,

00:26:00 ►

and the Mormons know something, and everybody has a piece of the action.

00:26:05 ►

The mushroom says nobody has a piece of the action, that no one knows anything.

00:26:11 ►

And that’s tremendously liberating and it carries a responsibility for you to take yourself seriously.

00:26:20 ►

You have no other source.

00:26:23 ►

Everything else is going to be hearsay, secondhand, rumor, thrice told.

00:26:30 ►

Your self is your instrument for the exploration of these dimensions.

00:26:37 ►

There is spread through the world a lot of what I call,

00:26:41 ►

and I hate the gender bias in calling it this, but it would be dishonest to change it.

00:26:47 ►

I call it wise old man woman.

00:26:51 ►

Wise old man knowledge.

00:26:54 ►

It could be wise old woman knowledge.

00:26:57 ►

There’s a lot of this all over the world.

00:26:59 ►

If you go to Asia, you will see men sitting in doorways at evening,

00:27:03 ►

smoking their pipes and watching the

00:27:05 ►

sunset as their grandchildren

00:27:07 ►

play at their feet. It’s a

00:27:10 ►

safe bet. This person never took

00:27:12 ►

LSD or psilocybin

00:27:14 ►

and yet they’ve attained a

00:27:15 ►

certain kind of

00:27:17 ►

existential validity

00:27:20 ►

wisdom, comfort

00:27:21 ►

with the phenomenon of their

00:27:24 ►

own being.

00:27:32 ►

And that can be taught and handed down and talked about and inculcated and cultivated.

00:27:37 ►

But this psychedelic thing is something very different.

00:27:45 ►

I don’t think anyone can lead because I don’t think anyone is in a position to lead. If you counter by saying, what am I doing?

00:27:48 ►

I’m pointing toward an open door.

00:27:51 ►

That’s all.

00:27:52 ►

The method and the material is what you need to take away from this weekend.

00:27:58 ►

The opinions of Terence McKenna are simply that and worth just that much.

00:28:04 ►

But if you take the techniques and the materials,

00:28:06 ►

you can create your own world of meaning and coherence.

00:28:11 ►

Yeah?

00:28:12 ►

A question on technique.

00:28:14 ►

By how many grams per mission?

00:28:18 ►

Five.

00:28:19 ►

If you weigh 145 pounds, five dried grams.

00:28:24 ►

Weigh it.

00:28:25 ►

This is the other thing.

00:28:26 ►

People don’t weigh their doses.

00:28:29 ►

They eyeball it.

00:28:30 ►

Well, the ego, in a frantic effort to save itself,

00:28:35 ►

has an amazing ability to overestimate the weight of mushrooms.

00:28:42 ►

When you actually show somebody five dried grams lying on a plate, they usually

00:28:48 ►

pale visibly. That’s a fairy thought that that’s what you’re talking about.

00:28:53 ►

Yes?

00:28:54 ►

One of the five dried grams is half ten doesn’t matter?

00:28:57 ►

Half ten doesn’t matter.

00:28:59 ►

I just wanted to add that there are species that are quite a bit stronger than that. Yes, good point.

00:29:06 ►

When I say five-dried grams, I mean Stropharia cubensis, the Lossaby cubensis,

00:29:13 ►

which is the commercially cultivated one, the large, silvery, stipe, golden-capped mushroom.

00:29:22 ►

Some of the Pacific Northwestern species are twice as strong or three times as strong.

00:29:31 ►

But if you were to have just applied this literally across the board, you’d probably get further faster than if you are careful.

00:29:39 ►

What about picking up mule around the area? Well, you know what they say. There are old mycologists and bold mycologists,

00:29:48 ►

but there are no old, bold mycologists.

00:29:53 ►

If you’re going to do that, learn your taxonomy

00:29:57 ►

or join the San Francisco Mycological Society or something.

00:30:02 ►

Many of these things are hard to confuse with anything else, but Psilocybe semilansiata

00:30:10 ►

is, in fact, easily confused with a species of Galerina that you don’t even know there’s

00:30:17 ►

a problem until 12 hours after you’ve eaten them.

00:30:20 ►

And at that point, you’re dead on arrival.

00:30:23 ►

There’s nothing science can do for you. Your

00:30:25 ►

liver has just turned to mush. So what I believe people should do is cultivate mushrooms. You

00:30:34 ►

want to take the alchemical path. The cultivation of mushrooms is an incredible spiritual and

00:30:42 ►

physical discipline. It will teach you all those good Lutheran values,

00:30:48 ►

cleanliness, punctuality, attention to detail,

00:30:53 ►

how to keep a clean workspace, for God’s sake.

00:30:58 ►

And then you are absolutely confident,

00:31:02 ►

and you have also obtained karma-free mushrooms

00:31:05 ►

outside of the cycle of inevitable criminal syndicalism and the karma that carries with it.

00:31:14 ►

And I participated in it plenty myself, so I’m not knocking it.

00:31:18 ►

But it would be nice if people would produce their own mushrooms,

00:31:22 ►

nice if people would produce their own mushrooms because

00:31:24 ►

inevitably you produce more than you

00:31:26 ►

can use and then you know can help

00:31:28 ►

people out down in 5B

00:31:30 ►

or something. Yeah.

00:31:32 ►

How long does it take to grow mushrooms?

00:31:38 ►

Oh start to finish

00:31:39 ►

6 to 7 weeks. It’s not like

00:31:41 ►

growing any plant you’ve ever

00:31:43 ►

grown. Mushrooms are not a plant. It requires

00:31:47 ►

the sophistication normally reserved for an

00:31:52 ►

eighth grade science project. You have to be able to cook petri

00:31:56 ►

dishes and this sort of thing. And then?

00:31:58 ►

How many days fresh? Fresh. If you will

00:32:02 ►

dehydrate the mushrooms, you’ll discover they’re 90% water.

00:32:07 ►

So five dried grams becomes 50 wet grams.

00:32:13 ►

And again, this is a plateful.

00:32:16 ►

So figure 10 times more than if it’s dried.

00:32:19 ►

Or if you’re a little conservative, eight times more than if it’s dried.

00:32:23 ►

Yeah.

00:32:23 ►

you’re a little conservative, eight times more than if it’s dried.

00:32:23 ►

Yeah.

00:32:28 ►

Is there any book that you can recommend in that whole, let’s see, front row?

00:32:32 ►

Well, two books I would recommend. The book I wrote with my brother called Psilocybin Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide

00:32:38 ►

is still in print from Quick Press.

00:32:42 ►

They have an 800 number here in the city, Quick Trade.

00:32:47 ►

I’m sorry, not Quick Press, Quick Trade.

00:32:50 ►

And then Paul’s famous book, The Mushroom Cultivators Encyclopedia, is a very good book.

00:32:58 ►

If you are serious about this, try and find someone who’s done it and get them to teach you,

00:33:04 ►

serious about this, try and find someone who’s done it and get them to teach you.

00:33:10 ►

Because it’s very easy to do, but doing it without being shown by someone is a little like trying to assemble a complex toy on Christmas Eve.

00:33:14 ►

You know, slap F into slot P, that kind of thing.

00:33:19 ►

It’s much easier to just be taught by someone.

00:33:23 ►

Yeah?

00:33:24 ►

I had a dream that I slept in the early part of the evening

00:33:28 ►

to wake up in the midnight to the two mushrooms at once.

00:33:31 ►

I had a dream about that.

00:33:32 ►

I’m wondering about doing it in the middle of the night.

00:33:36 ►

I always do it at night.

00:33:38 ►

Yeah, that’s a good point.

00:33:39 ►

And the reason is a practical one,

00:33:41 ►

and this gets into another realm,

00:33:45 ►

but I’m a hallucination chauvinist.

00:33:51 ►

I really like hallucinations.

00:33:53 ►

To me, the hallucination is the proof that I am connected to the other.

00:34:02 ►

that I am connected to the other.

00:34:09 ►

And so if I take a low dose and don’t hallucinate,

00:34:14 ►

even though I may have insights and write cover pages with ideas and so forth, I consider the trip to be somewhat of a failure.

00:34:19 ►

Hallucination is what’s important.

00:34:23 ►

Now, what was the other part of your question?

00:34:24 ►

Nighttime and daytime. Nighttime and daytime.

00:34:26 ►

The hallucinations are reluctant to form in light, I’ve found.

00:34:34 ►

That’s not true of everything.

00:34:36 ►

For instance, DMT.

00:34:38 ►

I prefer to, my ideal site for smoking DMT would be a grassy, sloping hillside somewhere in Marin County or something.

00:34:47 ►

Perfect in bright sun.

00:34:50 ►

But all other hallucinogens seem to prefer darkness and can organize themselves in darkness much better.

00:35:10 ►

It’s quieter, although, boy, there are some weird sounds in the middle of the night. It sounds like the entire house has been surrounded by a motorized platoon or something.

00:35:17 ►

Yeah.

00:35:22 ►

Well, I think the sincerest form of religious worship is an act of understanding

00:35:29 ►

that the universe wants to be understood by its creation.

00:35:36 ►

There is a need for dialogue.

00:35:39 ►

So when you take psychedelics, the way I think of it is once you get past the personal stuff,

00:35:49 ►

then the model for the psychedelic voyager that I use is the fisherman for ideas.

00:35:58 ►

Ideas are the proof of the pudding.

00:36:01 ►

And so you put your little boat out on the sea of mind

00:36:05 ►

and let down your nets.

00:36:08 ►

And what you’re hoping for

00:36:09 ►

is that minnows

00:36:11 ►

don’t swim through the net.

00:36:14 ►

Minnows are ideas

00:36:16 ►

that have a certain striking peculiarity

00:36:18 ►

but are ultimately unsatisfying.

00:36:22 ►

An example would be

00:36:24 ►

to spend much time meditating on why your little finger just fits your nostril.

00:36:29 ►

It’s an interesting insight, but you can’t build on that much, I think. And if an idea is too large, it’ll rend your nets and you won’t be able to wrestle it into the boat. And in

00:36:46 ►

fact, you and your nets and your boat will be dragged into the ocean and we’ll just put

00:36:51 ►

you in a corner somewhere and look in on you once a week. So what you want is middle-sized

00:36:58 ►

ideas. And they can be, any idea counts. It can be an idea for how to reorganize an investment plan,

00:37:08 ►

or what quantum physics is really trying to say,

00:37:13 ►

or the structure of cytochrome C.

00:37:16 ►

It’s a specific problem with an answer.

00:37:20 ►

And I really believe that salvation is an act of understanding,

00:37:26 ►

that the moral life is a precondition for salvation,

00:37:31 ►

but that the final step is an act of understanding.

00:37:35 ►

So I take seriously the idea that these things are consciousness expanding

00:37:40 ►

and that we should use them to add to the storehouse of culturally validated ideas.

00:37:49 ►

Yeah.

00:37:50 ►

I’ve been wrestling with the issue of human rights, and I’m just trying to think how to articulate it.

00:37:55 ►

It’s kind of confusing.

00:37:57 ►

I’m wondering about how age and intention come into the use of psychedelics.

00:38:03 ►

And I know when I was a lot younger, and I was using LSD and mushrooms,

00:38:07 ►

I didn’t have any intention to really use them for personal growth, for understanding.

00:38:12 ►

I just didn’t have a good time.

00:38:14 ►

And as I got older and my own awareness increased, my use of them changed.

00:38:19 ►

And I’m wondering what your views are, or if you have any insight on, is there a certain age when you think it’s appropriate to use these

00:38:26 ►

as part of the process for personal growth as opposed to those views with a lot of children?

00:38:34 ►

I think it’s more about the culture in which you’re embedded.

00:38:38 ►

In other words, I’m obviously considerably older than you.

00:38:44 ►

I’m obviously considerably older than you.

00:38:50 ►

In the 60s, we actually did it with fairly high purpose and did it at fairly high doses.

00:38:54 ►

I mean, you weren’t even getting into the game if you didn’t take 500 micrograms.

00:39:00 ►

Now people take 70 micrograms

00:39:03 ►

and feel that they can hold forth on the subject of what is LSD.

00:39:08 ►

I think what happened was in the 70s and then in the 80s, the dose was dialed down,

00:39:19 ►

and it permitted people to take it less seriously.

00:39:24 ►

And so you didn’t take it as a fun thing because you were young.

00:39:28 ►

You took it as a fun thing because you were young in the 80s,

00:39:32 ►

and that was how the 80s dealt with it.

00:39:36 ►

You can dismiss LSD as just kind of a fun thing if you keep the dose down under 100,

00:39:44 ►

but once it starts climbing, it begins to be more and more profound.

00:39:50 ►

I have noticed as I age and my peers age that we seem to get more sensitive to it,

00:39:59 ►

which is not to say that we don’t need to take it,

00:40:02 ►

but that when we do take it, we don’t need to take quite such flattening amounts as in the old days.

00:40:09 ►

But I think once you are conscious of your identity and of the world you’re in, sometime

00:40:19 ►

around 16 or so, then I think it becomes just a matter of circumstance and predilection and intelligence.

00:40:28 ►

I don’t think, you know, psychedelics work with intelligence, but they can’t increase

00:40:34 ►

it beyond a certain point.

00:40:35 ►

And some people are just, I almost said shallow, and then I decided simple.

00:40:42 ►

And some people just are beyond the reach of these things somehow.

00:40:48 ►

It just doesn’t address their agenda.

00:40:50 ►

What this seems mostly to have an appeal for is slightly culturally alienated members of a ruling elite.

00:41:04 ►

Where are the black people who should be at this thing?

00:41:08 ►

Where are the Latino people who should be here?

00:41:11 ►

These things are inevitably incredibly white and male.

00:41:17 ►

Why is that?

00:41:18 ►

Well, I’m not sure.

00:41:20 ►

Yeah.

00:41:21 ►

What about in the insurance market?

00:41:23 ►

I don’t know.

00:41:24 ►

Is that even in the insurance market? That’s a good one. Yeah.

00:41:28 ►

That’s a good one.

00:41:31 ►

What I would say is just make sure you are really in nature.

00:41:37 ►

Because the reason I stopped taking LSD outside or psychedelics outside was because every time I would take them,

00:41:39 ►

something so weird would happen that I just could not stand it.

00:41:44 ►

Usually having to do with another person.

00:41:47 ►

Usually a stranger.

00:41:49 ►

I mean, you can go up to the top of Mount Whitney,

00:41:53 ►

look around, make sure nobody is there,

00:41:56 ►

drop, and within 15 minutes,

00:41:59 ►

the ranger wants to see the camping permit,

00:42:03 ►

the army is doing helicopter maneuvers.

00:42:07 ►

30 Cub Scouts show up.

00:42:09 ►

I mean, it’s uncanny.

00:42:13 ►

And some people like to do that.

00:42:17 ►

I mean, some people’s idea of a good time is to take 500 mics of LSD

00:42:20 ►

and wander around lower Manhattan meeting people.

00:42:26 ►

Listen.

00:42:27 ►

Listen.

00:42:29 ►

What do you think on people that think they don’t have to drug around a lot of people

00:42:36 ►

to absorb learning experience from interaction with other people?

00:42:40 ►

A fair amount, a fair amount.

00:42:42 ►

Well, these have to be small doses because that effective dose is you’re lying on the floor as dead.

00:42:51 ►

So, yeah, I mean, and you learn what you can handle.

00:42:57 ►

I mean, some people can take vast amounts of LSD and it would never enter your mind that they’re loaded at all.

00:43:03 ►

And other people, you look over at them and they’re bursting into laughter and can’t behave themselves.

00:43:13 ►

In other words, the weather is all about DMT and what’s inside the changes.

00:43:18 ►

Well, I think DMT is, if DMT didn’t exist, we would have to invent it.

00:43:26 ►

There has to be something in the world.

00:43:31 ►

There has to be a weirdest thing.

00:43:34 ►

Once we have the concept weird, there has to be a weirdest thing.

00:43:39 ►

And DMT is simply it.

00:43:41 ►

DMT is simply it.

00:43:51 ►

DMT is that thing which, above all other things, you have convinced yourself doesn’t exist.

00:43:55 ►

It’s the one thing you are certain is impossible.

00:43:58 ►

That’s how it seemed to me.

00:44:06 ►

It completely deconstructs reality in a completely unexpected way.

00:44:10 ►

In other words, reality can come apart many different ways. And if it begins to come apart, you hope it will begin to move along some traditionally sanctioned spiritual arc,

00:44:19 ►

you know, toward Jesus or heaven or hell or something identifiable.

00:44:24 ►

or Jesus, or heaven, or hell, or something identifiable.

00:44:30 ►

What happens with DMT is there’s an eruption of the unexpected.

00:44:34 ►

It seems to be in its nature to be unexpected.

00:44:39 ►

And it seems to carry the message with incredible intensity that everything you know about reality is wrong.

00:44:44 ►

It isn’t what you think it is.

00:44:46 ►

When you smoke DMT, when I smoke DMT,

00:44:50 ►

and according to Rick Strassman’s research out at New Mexico,

00:44:54 ►

when most people are exposed to DMT,

00:44:56 ►

very quickly, like within 30 seconds to a minute,

00:45:01 ►

you are conveyed into an inconceivably alien and dramatic environment of 100% hallucination.

00:45:11 ►

Nothing you have ever seen before is there.

00:45:15 ►

There is nothing there that the English language can describe,

00:45:20 ►

because there is nothing there that any English-speaking person ever has encountered before,

00:45:25 ►

or German or French or Swahili.

00:45:28 ►

You are conveyed into not a unitary world, not the white light, the one, or any of that,

00:45:35 ►

but a complex, multiplicity world of motion, light, color, depth, interaction,

00:45:44 ►

and none of it makes very much sense at all.

00:45:48 ►

A metaphor for what I’m talking about is imagine that you were a paleolithic person

00:45:54 ►

getting loaded around a campfire somewhere on the grasslands of Africa,

00:46:00 ►

and imagine that for a minute and a half you suddenly found yourself standing

00:46:05 ►

in Times Square at rush

00:46:07 ►

hour. Well,

00:46:10 ►

you could sort of

00:46:11 ►

make sense of it. I mean, when you came back

00:46:14 ►

you would say, well, there were people

00:46:15 ►

sort of. There were sort of

00:46:17 ►

people and then there was a lot of

00:46:19 ►

motion and then there was a lot of

00:46:21 ►

verticality and

00:46:23 ►

but basically

00:46:25 ►

you’re just thrashing and clawing the air

00:46:28 ►

in front of your companions. They are

00:46:30 ►

not getting a picture of Times Square

00:46:32 ►

at rush hour from this description.

00:46:35 ►

DMP is like

00:46:36 ►

that. It seems to punch

00:46:37 ►

through to an impossible world,

00:46:40 ►

a parallel dimension.

00:46:42 ►

And it’s not as

00:46:44 ►

it would be shocking enough if it were purely incomprehensible.

00:46:49 ►

The problem is it’s not quite purely incomprehensible.

00:46:54 ►

There’s a 2% residuum that you seem to be able to relate to.

00:46:59 ►

These self-dribbling basketball-like entities that I call tykes

00:47:05 ►

that come bounding up and leap into your body and crawl all over you

00:47:11 ►

and jump in and out of your chest cavity.

00:47:15 ►

They are singing in some kind of language that you don’t hear but see.

00:47:24 ►

And so they’re singing objects into existence.

00:47:27 ►

Some kind of musical grammar is condensing small pieces of furniture around you.

00:47:34 ►

And you have to remember, 30 seconds before you were in some shabby apartment,

00:47:40 ►

you and your strange friends fiddling with some drug,

00:47:46 ►

you and your strange friends fiddling with some drug, and now that’s all gone,

00:47:53 ►

and you’re not sleepy, you’re not dazed, you’re absolutely who you were.

00:47:55 ►

That’s the strange thing.

00:47:59 ►

DMT doesn’t affect the part that we call ourselves.

00:48:06 ►

Say, I am who I was, I’m exactly who I was. But what the hell has happened to reality?

00:48:14 ►

And it’s been entirely replaced by something that I never saw in any science fiction film,

00:48:17 ►

never heard about in any fairy tale, never dreamed of, never hinted of.

00:48:19 ►

And now I’m fully there. And these little entities are dancing around your attention,

00:48:24 ►

and then they want you to do something.

00:48:26 ►

They want you to sing objects into existence with your voice.

00:48:31 ►

And they’re doing it.

00:48:33 ►

They’re showing you how it’s done.

00:48:36 ►

They somehow, grammar is seen in that world.

00:48:40 ►

It’s as though a switch has been thrown in your neurophysiological machinery and language,

00:48:46 ►

which you used to hear, you now see.

00:48:49 ►

And these things are putting a lot of pressure on you, saying, do it, do it, don’t question,

00:48:56 ►

don’t think, don’t reflect, just do it.

00:49:00 ►

And I sort of feel something cross between heartburn and satori begin to move its way up my chest.

00:49:09 ►

And when it reaches my mouth, my mouth flies open.

00:49:14 ►

And this glossolalia-like linguistic stuff begins to happen,

00:49:20 ►

which is like language, like liquid, like silk.

00:49:25 ►

I can see it.

00:49:26 ►

And it’s colored and it’s complicated.

00:49:30 ►

Now, I do not understand what this is for.

00:49:33 ►

I can join you in speculating.

00:49:36 ►

It looks to me like, first of all, language itself is a mysterious activity, a behavior.

00:49:45 ►

God on the body of nature, human language is the place to look.

00:49:51 ►

It is not anticipated in other forms of animal organization,

00:49:56 ►

and in us it reaches this excruciating level of expression.

00:50:01 ►

And with it, we have created culture, which is a virtual reality that we surround ourselves with,

00:50:08 ►

not only of ideologies, Marxism, democracy, monarchy, but buildings, highways, infrastructure.

00:50:17 ►

So it’s almost as though language is an alien artifact of some sort. You remember Bill Burroughs said it’s a virus from outer space.

00:50:28 ►

Well, this is sort of like that idea.

00:50:31 ►

But language is obviously not something that is a finished enterprise.

00:50:37 ►

And I think that we are approaching, either through our own, the natural evolution of the soma, of the body,

00:50:45 ►

or through technology, or through some combination of the two,

00:50:49 ►

we’re approaching a place where we’re going to switch channels

00:50:54 ►

and switch the language channel into a more broad bandwidth mode

00:51:00 ►

and we’re going to see what we mean instead of hear what we mean.

00:51:06 ►

That the convention of using small mouth noises to symbolically indicate objects in the world

00:51:14 ►

so that those who share the same set of linguistic assumptions can download this acoustical babble

00:51:21 ►

and reconstruct the thought out of it is going to be traded in for something more like a direct

00:51:28 ►

acoustical hologram, where then ambiguity is much less prevalent.

00:51:34 ►

You know, if I read you a paragraph from Proust, we can spend the rest of the afternoon discussing what did the

00:51:43 ►

author mean.

00:51:44 ►

You’ve all been in those situations.

00:51:47 ►

What did the author mean?

00:51:48 ►

But if I show you a sculpture by Brancusi, we just walk around and look at it.

00:51:55 ►

It self-evidently is what it is.

00:51:58 ►

It does not have the ambiguity that adheres to written and spoken language.

00:52:03 ►

And I think this ambiguity has allowed misunderstanding,

00:52:07 ►

and misunderstanding has allowed pain and agony.

00:52:10 ►

So it may be that we are on the brink of a higher form of language,

00:52:16 ►

the descent of the logos.

00:52:18 ►

This would be it, the manifestation of the logos and the psychedelics by allowing a look through the hyperspatial window

00:52:27 ►

at future states of human organization, as I argued this morning,

00:52:31 ►

is actually giving us a taste of a human future that may be far in the future.

00:52:40 ►

In the same way that if you had smoked DMT 20,000 years ago,

00:52:44 ►

you might have landed in Times Square circa 1960.

00:52:48 ►

It’s an insight into a future development in the physiology and mind of man

00:52:55 ►

and makes it very suggestive then that DMT is being elaborated in our brains

00:53:01 ►

as part of normal metabolism.

00:53:03 ►

We have genes that produce DMT.

00:53:06 ►

Well, what if those genes were to be switched on in a more dramatic way?

00:53:12 ►

Then what would the quality of culture be?

00:53:15 ►

If culture is the serotonin trip, then what kind of culture would we live in

00:53:21 ►

if the serotonin were backed out in favor of a DMT-maintained neural substrate?

00:53:28 ►

I don’t know.

00:53:28 ►

Lots of hands up.

00:53:29 ►

You’ve been patient.

00:53:30 ►

I have two questions.

00:53:32 ►

I’m pretending to be one of the living examples.

00:53:36 ►

You said that when you take a drug, you’re not suicidal.

00:53:39 ►

It speaks to you in English, and I know that’s not true.

00:53:43 ►

But how do you speak other languages? Are you saying that, you know, it speaks back to you in your own language.

00:53:52 ►

Let me tell you a story which seems to me really a strange story,

00:53:57 ►

but it happened to me, so I’ll tell it.

00:54:00 ►

When I first started growing mushrooms,

00:54:03 ►

I was testing all these batches and taking it quite a bit of the time.

00:54:07 ►

And one evening, I got locked into this voice thing.

00:54:12 ►

And it was singing a little song.

00:54:14 ►

And the song was something like this.

00:54:17 ►

Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da says.

00:54:21 ►

Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da says.

00:54:24 ►

It ended each line with the word says.

00:54:29 ►

So I thought, interesting.

00:54:31 ►

Then I went back and listened to Maria Sabina’s Mushroom Velada,

00:54:38 ►

where she’s singing in Foxville, which is a mountain Indian language of central Mexico.

00:54:47 ►

in Foxville, which is a mountain Indian language of central Mexico. She’s singing in Foxville and the interlinear translation is right there on the page. thing can do it in any language.

00:55:08 ►

It is apparently omnilingual.

00:55:08 ►

Yes.

00:55:09 ►

Ann?

00:55:15 ►

Well, there’s a lot of anecdotal talk about this,

00:55:20 ►

but I don’t think there’s ever been a statistically coherent study.

00:55:25 ►

Coming out of the 60s, of course, there was a rash of LSD babies. And some of those LSD babies are now 19, 25 years old.

00:55:30 ►

And they are perhaps in this room and can speak for themselves.

00:55:39 ►

But it’s never been studied.

00:55:40 ►

It would be an interesting thing to look at if you could follow up. The idea

00:55:45 ►

that LSD breaks chromosomes was simply a government lie, a smear that to this day survives in

00:55:53 ►

certain portions of the literature. It is not true. It is not even a little true. It

00:55:59 ►

is 100% horseshit. It just doesn’t do that. Aspirin and caffeine break chromosomes with

00:56:08 ►

an order of magnitude more alacrity than LSD.

00:56:13 ►

In Brazil?

00:56:14 ►

That’s right. My brother did a study, actually, Lawrence Rockefeller paid for much of it,

00:56:28 ►

paid for much of it, a study of these maestres in Brazil, these santo daime people who’ve taken, unhao, unhao de vegetal, these people who had taken ayahuasca weekly for 40 years

00:56:36 ►

and they did blood studies and tissue studies and they’re fine.

00:56:42 ►

In fact, they are slightly above normal in certain indices.

00:56:48 ►

It just hasn’t been studied.

00:56:51 ►

Many of these LSD babies were also born into very loving, communal, neo-archaic kind of settings,

00:57:00 ►

and they had lots of unconventional nurturing and raising, too.

00:57:09 ►

So it’s very hard to separate all these, to tease these factors apart.

00:57:10 ►

Yeah.

00:57:12 ►

Not everyone can try that.

00:57:16 ►

Well, you know, Merciliad, in his great book on shamanism,

00:57:21 ►

he subtitled it The Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy.

00:57:30 ►

What a shaman is in command of are techniques, and they’re not based on his personality.

00:57:50 ►

That’s where it’s different from the guru. Once the is fairly absent in shamanism at a practical level.

00:58:00 ►

It’s basically about experience, not about an ideological preconception of things.

00:58:06 ►

The way I handle gurus is just to simply say, what can you show me?

00:58:13 ►

And then if you’re told, well, you have to sweep up around the ashram here 12 years or so and do daily prostrations and then we’ll cut you in on the good,

00:58:18 ►

you just can pick up your knapsack and keep going.

00:58:23 ►

Because the real stuff is not hidden like that.

00:58:28 ►

When I went to South America and people said, I said, what can you show me?

00:58:33 ►

And they said, well, let’s just sharpen our machetes and go out here into the woods a half a mile

00:58:38 ►

and cut some vine and bring it back and boil it up and I’ll show you what I’ll show you.

00:58:44 ►

bring it back and boil it up and I’ll show you what I’ll show you. I’m very suspicious of lineages and secret knowledge

00:58:49 ►

and situations where somebody decides where somebody else is worthy to ascend to the next level.

00:58:57 ►

Because, you know, man for man and woman for woman,

00:59:02 ►

there doesn’t seem to be a more scheming,

00:59:05 ►

tawdry and venal subclass on this planet than gurus.

00:59:09 ►

I mean, there may be some good ones, but my God, they keep bad company.

00:59:17 ►

Yeah.

00:59:19 ►

From your last book, Red, I was picking up about, I heard what I was saying in my mind,

00:59:27 ►

synesthesia, sort of characteristics when you were describing the DMT,

00:59:32 ►

the hearing of colors or speaking words that became colors.

00:59:40 ►

It clearly is a synesthesia.

00:59:42 ►

Okay, so can that, and you might want to go into that for other people,

00:59:47 ►

but I’m really into this whole thing now.

00:59:49 ►

Can that happen and occur with the mushroom thing or another hallucinogen than the DMT?

01:00:01 ►

Well, no, I think, you know, if you take enough psilocybin, it begins to look like DMT.

01:00:08 ►

If you take an 8 or 9 gram dose of psilocybin, at about the 2-hour mark, it’ll be indistinguishable from DMT.

01:00:20 ►

To address this question of synesthesia. Obviously, the world is a unity,

01:00:28 ►

and it arrives at the surface of your body

01:00:31 ►

as a unity of electromagnetic vibrations and light and so forth.

01:00:38 ►

But your senses break it up at that point.

01:00:44 ►

Your eyes tell you about light.

01:00:47 ►

That’s a certain range of electromagnetic radiation.

01:00:50 ►

Your ears measure pressure waves in the air, the acoustical range.

01:00:58 ►

Your hands inform you about the tactility of the world.

01:01:03 ►

But the world is one thing.

01:01:05 ►

So it’s almost as though the senses are reunified in synesthesia

01:01:12 ►

in a way that may have been originally intended and has for some reason fallen out of our physiological repertoire

01:01:20 ►

or perhaps exists as a future state. But yes, tasting shapes, seeing colors, feeling music.

01:01:31 ►

There are people who have unusual neurological conditions who live in these kinds of spaces.

01:01:38 ►

It’s very hard to, some of you may know the guy who wrote Oliver Sacks’ book,

01:01:45 ►

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.

01:01:48 ►

It’s a wonderful book.

01:01:50 ►

And The Man Who Tasted Shapes.

01:01:51 ►

And The Man Who Tasted Shapes, that’s right.

01:01:53 ►

What’s the story of your book on your book called Finestines?

01:01:57 ►

Yes, I’m a little embarrassed by it because it breaks my proletarian mold.

01:02:03 ►

There were only 70 copies of that book, and it cost about $1,500.

01:02:09 ►

And what it is, it’s a showcase for an artist named Tim Eli,

01:02:15 ►

who is very famous in the world of made books,

01:02:20 ►

and he’s at the top of the made books thing.

01:02:23 ►

So I contributed a text.

01:02:26 ►

He made the paper and the binding and set the print

01:02:29 ►

and painted on each page of each book in a special, unique way,

01:02:35 ►

and it’s an art-marked object.

01:02:42 ►

Yeah.

01:02:42 ►

Your book on cultivating slow-moving mushrooms object.

01:02:47 ►

Yeah.

01:02:54 ►

You know, you’ve been cultivating psilocybin mushrooms and the very strong impact of the accessibility of mushrooms.

01:03:03 ►

And BMP is much harder to obtain than mushrooms. which is hilarious, but it’s very mixed. And I’m wondering if you have any thoughts about similarly accessible ways of making it become more efficient.

01:03:15 ►

Yeah.

01:03:17 ►

Well, I don’t advocate, if you’re not at least a third- or fourth fourth year biochemist, you shouldn’t attempt it in the laboratory

01:03:27 ►

because it involves the use of LIAH.

01:03:31 ►

Here’s a book called Psychedelic Shamanism that has recipes,

01:03:36 ►

but LIAH, lithium aluminum hydride, is very explosive and don’t make a fuel of yourself.

01:03:46 ►

The other approach is to try to find a weak source in nature and concentrate it.

01:03:53 ►

And phalaris grasses, phalaris tuberosa and arundinaceae,

01:03:59 ►

you can grow them and do a low-tech water extraction.

01:04:06 ►

I’m not sure.

01:04:07 ►

Nobody has ever handed me a gram of DMT created by these techniques.

01:04:12 ►

This is all sort of backyard theory.

01:04:16 ►

But in theory, it should be able to do this.

01:04:18 ►

There’s also a plant called Desmantha selenoyensis that grows in the Midwest

01:04:23 ►

that has a very high concentration of DMT in the root bark.

01:04:28 ►

It’s interesting to talk about that plant for a moment

01:04:31 ►

because it’s only been known that it contained DMT in the root bark for about five years.

01:04:38 ►

But it could have been used by the North American Plains Indians to produce some kind of a shamanic hallucinogen,

01:04:48 ►

but never was, as far as we can tell.

01:04:52 ►

And this is an interesting question,

01:04:54 ►

those of you who may be going on to ethnography or something like that.

01:04:57 ►

Why do some people use hallucinogens and not others?

01:05:02 ►

It simply isn’t a matter of availability. For example, second only to the Mexican

01:05:08 ►

concentration of species in Oaxaca and the Sierra Mazateca is the concentration of over of those mushrooms by the Tlingit, Chimsham, and the Northwest Coast Indians

01:05:30 ►

is very hard to come by, ranging from maybe none to maybe a little tiny bit.

01:05:37 ►

But by no means is it established that they did this.

01:05:42 ►

This desmanthus thing is another thing.

01:05:46 ►

Why was it never utilized?

01:05:49 ►

This new chemical and plant that I talked about this morning

01:05:54 ►

has an interesting relationship to all this.

01:05:57 ►

Salvia divinorum, this Mexican mint that contains salvinorine alpha.

01:06:04 ►

It’s used only by two fairly small language groups, the tzotzil and the tzotol.

01:06:11 ►

And they call it hojas de la pastora, the leaves of the shepherdess.

01:06:18 ►

But when you ask them, well, what do you call it in tzotzil?

01:06:22 ►

What do you call it in your language?

01:06:24 ►

They say, we have no name for this plant in your language. They say we have no

01:06:26 ►

name for this plant in our

01:06:27 ►

language. Well, that’s

01:06:29 ►

impossible if they’ve

01:06:32 ►

been using it for any length of time

01:06:34 ►

at all. It seems to

01:06:36 ►

suggest, and they

01:06:37 ►

say, that this is a new

01:06:39 ►

plant. But what’s puzzling

01:06:42 ►

about that is

01:06:43 ►

it’s known from nowhere else

01:06:46 ►

on earth.

01:06:47 ►

So is it that these people

01:06:49 ►

discovered this plant

01:06:51 ►

as recently maybe as 50 or

01:06:53 ►

60 years ago and

01:06:55 ►

having a tradition of plant use,

01:06:57 ►

they inculcated this one into it?

01:07:00 ►

There’s a similar case in

01:07:01 ►

Africa. You probably all know about

01:07:03 ►

iboga, tabernacle Iboga,

01:07:06 ►

which is the only really major African alkaloid-containing plant.

01:07:15 ►

And it’s the basis of a religion in Gabon and Zaire called Bawiti.

01:07:21 ►

And interesting on this gender issue, just as an aside, this

01:07:26 ►

stuff is used to hold

01:07:27 ►

relationships together.

01:07:30 ►

It’s well understood that

01:07:32 ►

that’s what it’s for, is to bond

01:07:34 ►

people. And

01:07:35 ►

these people who use it, the Fang

01:07:37 ►

people, they say they got it from

01:07:39 ►

the Pygmies. But what’s

01:07:41 ►

strange about Iboga is

01:07:44 ►

there is no record of anybody using it

01:07:48 ►

before 1870, anywhere. This is very puzzling because the Portuguese had been into West

01:07:55 ►

Africa since the 1440s and trading and buying slaves and bringing back artifacts and this sort of thing.

01:08:08 ►

No record of Iboga use before 1860.

01:08:13 ►

So we can’t assume always that these things are ancient.

01:08:16 ►

There’s a lot of controversy about peyote.

01:08:24 ►

Peyote, if you’re not looked into the matter, you might assume this is this ancient hallucinogen.

01:08:32 ►

But in fact, most of the evidence argues that until the 1880s,

01:08:41 ►

Sephora secundifolia beans were the preferred shamanic intoxicant of the Rio Grande drainage.

01:08:46 ►

Well, now, today, Sephora secundifolia is considered a poison.

01:08:48 ►

It has cytosine in it.

01:08:50 ►

It’s a terrible thing to take.

01:08:52 ►

This is another thing,

01:08:55 ►

and as long as I’m just riffing on these things,

01:08:58 ►

you have to realize that intoxication is a culturally defined situation.

01:09:03 ►

defined situation

01:09:04 ►

for example

01:09:06 ►

in Madagascar

01:09:12 ►

the Malagasy Republic

01:09:13 ►

the large island off

01:09:15 ►

eastern Africa

01:09:17 ►

there are no major psychedelics

01:09:20 ►

but there are what are called

01:09:22 ►

ordeal poisons

01:09:23 ►

these are plants where you take it, you think you’re going to die,

01:09:31 ►

you beg to die, and then you get better and are fine.

01:09:38 ►

Well, people come out of that reborn, rededicated to their families

01:09:44 ►

and their professions and their professions

01:09:45 ►

and their position in society.

01:09:48 ►

Why?

01:09:48 ►

Not because it was psychedelic, but because a near-death experience is intrinsically an experience

01:09:57 ►

which causes you to reexamine and reevaluate your relationships to the world and other people.

01:10:04 ►

Yeah.

01:10:04 ►

evaluate your relationships to the world and other people. Yeah. It’s not true.

01:10:40 ►

It probably will be in time.

01:10:43 ►

Some people have nominated DMT for that role.

01:10:47 ►

My friend Rupert Sheldrake, he calls it a thanatoptogen.

01:10:54 ►

He says, when you really die, when you are beyond any returning,

01:11:02 ►

DMT floods the dying brain, and the only way you can have that experience without dying is to artificially induce it.

01:11:11 ►

This may be so. I mean, one of the most challenging things about DMT, and we might as well, you know, it’s the afternoon of the first day, so we might as well dig into it. What about these entities that I talked about?

01:11:27 ►

What about the types, the self-transforming machine elves, the jeweled geometric basketballs?

01:11:35 ►

Are we to just dismiss this as hallucination, we whose lives are built on hallucination?

01:11:43 ►

Or what is to be made of that?

01:11:46 ►

What kind of an entity can have a mind but not a body

01:11:50 ►

and be loose inside your mind?

01:11:54 ►

I think that possibly,

01:11:58 ►

I mean, this is sort of the most woo-woo place we’ll pass through

01:12:03 ►

unless you bait me.

01:12:05 ►

But if you ask shamans worldwide, how do you do what you do,

01:12:13 ►

they will say, well, we use ancestor spirits.

01:12:18 ►

The ancestor spirits help us.

01:12:21 ►

Well, you know, you may think you’re countercultural,

01:12:24 ►

but most people hearing about ancestor spirits

01:12:27 ►

are able to dumb that down into, oh, these naive

01:12:31 ►

charming Indians, you know, that sort of thing. But

01:12:35 ►

what if there is actually something which survives

01:12:40 ►

bodily death that actually continues

01:12:43 ►

to exist in a dimension which we would have to call mental or trans-real.

01:12:51 ►

And what if you can come and go from that dimension using shamanic techniques?

01:12:58 ►

Well, that is in fact what shamanism has always claimed to anyone who would listen. They say, you know, the shaman passes back and forth through the same doorway

01:13:09 ►

through which the dead pass, but they do not return.

01:13:15 ►

The superhuman condition of the shaman, his or her ability to cure, to handle fire,

01:13:21 ►

to drive metal objects through flesh,

01:13:24 ►

to handle fire, to drive metal objects through flesh.

01:13:30 ►

All of this is to show that they are of both worlds,

01:13:34 ►

that they partake in the ontos of normal being,

01:13:38 ►

but they also partake in the ontos of transcendental being.

01:13:50 ►

And I think it would be the most astonishing cultural development of the last 500 years if we were to actually learn something about the after death that would strip away our materialist and cheerful assumptions

01:13:55 ►

that when you go into the ground you’re nothing but compost.

01:14:00 ►

In a way, that belief has been the permission for all of our dumbing down

01:14:07 ►

and devaluing of ourselves, our society, each other, and the planet.

01:14:12 ►

The belief that, well, ultimately it doesn’t amount to anything anyway.

01:14:16 ►

Well, what if ultimately you don’t know what you’re talking about?

01:14:20 ►

Then you have to come to terms with that.

01:14:23 ►

I mean, I think everybody should have a psychedelic experience,

01:14:26 ►

but to professionally dedicate yourself to a lifetime,

01:14:30 ►

you have to have a particularly intense 12th house configuration of some sort, I think.

01:14:38 ►

This metaphor that I tried to put out this morning about how the shaman goes to hyperspace and therefore can see next week’s weather, next week’s hunting,

01:14:50 ►

who’s going to recover from illness and who isn’t.

01:14:54 ►

What going into the fourth dimension means is all time becomes co-present.

01:15:02 ►

You know, there’s that piece of doggerel poetry,

01:15:05 ►

I dreamed I saw eternity the other night, an endless golden ring.

01:15:11 ►

In other words, eternity is all time in a completed form.

01:15:16 ►

And I think, you know, timelessness, stopping the world, as Castaneda said,

01:15:22 ►

this is an indication that you have truly crossed the boundary out

01:15:27 ►

of three-dimensional Newtonian space and into this hyperspatial dimension.

01:15:35 ►

Really, I can’t say enough about this because I think this is the key, that life is a process that conquers dimensionality.

01:15:50 ►

It always has been.

01:15:52 ►

The earliest forms of life were fixed slimes.

01:15:57 ►

They had no motility.

01:15:59 ►

They had an existence as points.

01:16:08 ►

an existence as points. Later they acquired motility, the ability to swim around, and were aware then of the concept here and there. And then really the entire evolution of life

01:16:15 ►

on this planet is simply to develop better organs for moving around in three-dimensional space. Stronger legs, stronger arms, better binocular vision, so forth and so on,

01:16:30 ►

until you get to human beings.

01:16:32 ►

And we invent language.

01:16:35 ►

And what is language?

01:16:37 ►

It’s a strategy for escaping from the narrowness of the present moment.

01:16:43 ►

Because if you have language, you can say,

01:16:46 ►

I remember the time, or you can say,

01:16:51 ►

why don’t we plan on doing so and so.

01:16:54 ►

In other words, and when you get written language,

01:16:58 ►

then you get history, then there is, in a way,

01:17:02 ►

the past never goes away.

01:17:04 ►

The past changes into history, or the present changes into history,

01:17:11 ►

and in that form it stays with us.

01:17:14 ►

And now, electronic culture, we dream of an information-lossless society,

01:17:23 ►

where no information is lost.

01:17:26 ►

And then that means, in a sense, where no time passes away.

01:17:30 ►

You know, we’ll have Marilyn with us and JFK, everybody, a kind of eternity. And so language is then seen as a strategy for the further overcoming of dimensional limitation.

01:17:52 ►

And now with the Internet about to go visual and all that,

01:17:57 ►

it seems like we’re again about to take another step deeper into the conquest of dimensionality.

01:18:03 ►

But there’s nothing new in all this.

01:18:05 ►

This is the business that biology has been about since day one.

01:18:09 ►

And then the glossolalia.

01:18:25 ►

There’s a feeling.

01:18:27 ►

It’s, you know, not to be crude, but it’s somewhat like a belch or something.

01:18:33 ►

It’s like a bubble of something moving up.

01:18:35 ►

And then when it actually gets to your…

01:18:39 ►

I mean, I’ve had…

01:18:41 ►

I always…

01:18:42 ►

My technique or my intellectual style, though it may not seem like it,

01:18:47 ►

is to always seek for a rational explanation first,

01:18:53 ►

and then from there more and more exotic explanations.

01:18:58 ►

So I was really floored by this type thing,

01:19:02 ►

because that seemed to me unambiguously not something which was supposed to happen

01:19:07 ►

in the universe as I was told it, that there were supposed to be small non-human intelligences

01:19:14 ►

leaping in and out of my chest.

01:19:18 ►

And one idea that’s occurred to me, and since some of you are interested in psychology,

01:19:24 ►

it’s maybe worth talking about, plus we get to inject a buzzword here,

01:19:29 ►

which is, as you know, it is now understood that we are really not one person.

01:19:36 ►

We have many personalities.

01:19:39 ►

Multiple personality disorder is simply when you manifest this on a level that irritates other people.

01:19:48 ►

Multiple personality order is when you have them all lined up in a row

01:19:54 ►

and the right ones always talk to the same people and so the illusion is maintained.

01:20:00 ►

Well, in the same way that, you know, if you had a big mirror,

01:20:04 ►

Well, in the same way that, you know, if you had a big mirror,

01:20:10 ►

you look in the mirror and you see a reflection of yourself.

01:20:15 ►

But now if you lift the mirror up and bring it down on the ground and shatter it,

01:20:21 ►

what you see now is not a shattered reflection of yourself,

01:20:27 ►

but hundreds of little reflections of yourself, each one whole.

01:20:36 ►

Well, may it not be then that what DMT does is it shatters the illusion of the self and says, you’re not a self, you’re a tribe of selves. And here they are, dancing, performing, singing. They are the fractal adumbrations

01:20:49 ►

of the personality. That was the buzzword that I wanted to get in. They are the fractal

01:20:55 ►

adumbrations of personality. That’s one possibility. The other possibility, souls. Like I said, an ecology of souls.

01:21:07 ►

That is the conservative explanation.

01:21:10 ►

Why is it the conservative explanation?

01:21:19 ►

Well, because we are here, and so if we think of them as human beings of some sort,

01:21:21 ►

they just happen to be dead human beings.

01:21:25 ►

Nevertheless, we see that there are human beings,

01:21:28 ►

so perhaps there is a residuum that survives death,

01:21:30 ►

and that is what these things are. Other possibilities must range more further afield.

01:21:35 ►

A parallel continuum actually inhabited by these things,

01:21:39 ►

that they are not human beings in any form,

01:21:42 ►

that they are autonomous entities with their

01:21:45 ►

own universe.

01:21:48 ►

That’s one possibility.

01:21:50 ►

Another possibility is that these are the long-sought extraterrestrials, that they don’t

01:21:58 ►

come in beryllium ships the size of Manhattan to take control of our gross industrial output,

01:22:05 ►

that that’s a crazy way of thinking about extraterrestrials,

01:22:09 ►

that they come through a technology of mind,

01:22:12 ►

that they come by collapsing space across megaparsecs

01:22:18 ►

and appearing in the mind as a hallucinogenic experience.

01:22:22 ►

But then, of course, the question is why?

01:22:25 ►

And why this sense of familiarity?

01:22:28 ►

And why this deep affection and concern for suffering humanity?

01:22:34 ►

I don’t have answers, but I know that these questions need to be answered.

01:22:40 ►

The domain is real.

01:22:42 ►

Yeah, we’ll do a question and then it’s break time.

01:22:44 ►

I just wonder if there’s really that much of a difference.

01:22:47 ►

I mean, you’re presenting these alternatives, maybe for clarity, as completely separate.

01:22:53 ►

But the idea of autonomous entities living in some hybrid eventual space,

01:23:00 ►

the idea of our separate personalities versus the idea of other beings that maybe have a more traditional existence that is very far away.

01:23:12 ►

Are they really all that separate?

01:23:14 ►

It seems to me that if the mind actually makes its home, at least in large part, in hyper-faith, in the everyday world of the mind. I mean, if that’s where our thoughts live, then

01:23:25 ►

if we take these drugs, they

01:23:29 ►

transport us to a place

01:23:32 ►

where we see that through another filter.

01:23:35 ►

In this

01:23:35 ►

hyper space, that’s where the other minds live

01:23:37 ►

presumably, there may not be that

01:23:40 ►

much of a difference between those three alternatives

01:23:42 ►

you actually composed. It may be

01:23:44 ►

the ego, which you talked

01:23:46 ►

about earlier, that is

01:23:47 ►

causing the confusion here. We think of

01:23:49 ►

our strong draft in this skin

01:23:51 ►

living at this point, and then all this

01:23:54 ►

stuff is very confusing. But

01:23:55 ►

if we expand our definition of mind

01:23:57 ►

to be what you’ve already

01:23:59 ►

said it to be, then perhaps

01:24:01 ►

these entities, I mean, they’re fascinating,

01:24:03 ►

but they’re not so mysterious. They’re outside the domain of where they should be. perhaps these entities, I mean, they’re fascinating, but they’re not so mysterious or outside the domain of where they should be.

01:24:08 ►

Well, yeah, I mean, you’re right, although, well, let’s take two of the possibilities.

01:24:16 ►

If it’s an ecology of souls we’re dealing with,

01:24:20 ►

then they should have complete knowledge of the history of the planet

01:24:26 ►

and everything that’s ever gone on and so forth,

01:24:29 ►

but they won’t have a complete encyclopedia of galactic history or something like that.

01:24:37 ►

I think that, well, frankly, I don’t know what I think.

01:24:43 ►

It depends on how recently I’ve smoked DMT.

01:24:47 ►

The overwhelming impression is of cognitive dissonance

01:24:52 ►

occasioned by the simultaneous perception of alienness and familiarity.

01:24:59 ►

These are the most alien things you’ve ever seen,

01:25:01 ►

and you know you’ve been here before, and you know it’s’s very important and you know it’s basic to who you are.

01:25:08 ►

But if it’s the self, then what have we done to the definition of the self?

01:25:14 ►

The self is supposed to mean that which is most familiar to me.

01:25:17 ►

If the concept self can also include the notion that which is least familiar to me,

01:25:24 ►

then it’s almost too broad a concept to use.

01:25:29 ►

I think what we need is scientists, meaning you don’t have to wear a white coat,

01:25:35 ►

but you do have to have the scientific attitude,

01:25:38 ►

rolling up their sleeves and going in there with the same attitude that Wallace went to the Amazon

01:25:43 ►

and that Darwin went to the Amazon and that Darwin went to

01:25:45 ►

the Galapagos.

01:25:46 ►

And let’s figure out.

01:25:48 ►

Let’s map the flora and fauna.

01:25:50 ►

Let’s get a taxonomy of these types.

01:25:53 ►

Let’s try and figure out where they’re coming from and what their purpose is.

01:26:01 ►

Shamanism, I believe, is the study of this dimension, and it’s not reached any conclusion.

01:26:11 ►

At this point, it is a phenomenology, not a science.

01:26:16 ►

And so the Amazon shaman, he has a language of control and description,

01:26:21 ►

which is satisfying in his context and to his people,

01:26:25 ►

but it may not be satisfying in your context and to your people,

01:26:29 ►

even if you assimilate it perfectly.

01:26:31 ►

It’s like physicists talk about charm and strangeness of quarks,

01:26:39 ►

but this has nothing to do with strangeness or charm in ordinary speech.

01:26:43 ►

These are very, very complicated concepts

01:26:46 ►

where the technical gloss has been to call it strangeness.

01:26:51 ►

And when a shaman tells you he deals with ancestor spirits,

01:26:55 ►

you, for whom Casper the Friendly Ghost is the image of an ancestor spirit,

01:27:01 ►

definitely get a cockamamie notion then

01:27:04 ►

when you try and map Casper the Friendly Ghost

01:27:07 ►

onto the Amazon shaman’s notion of an ancestor spirit.

01:27:11 ►

These concepts require a lifetime of manipulation and familiarity

01:27:16 ►

before you understand where the boundaries will lie.

01:27:22 ►

Well, why don’t we take a five-minute, ten-minute break here and then we’ll come back.

01:27:29 ►

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon, where people are changing their lives one thought at a

01:27:35 ►

time. Actually, we’re going to take a one-week break rather than Terrence’s suggested five-minute

01:27:42 ►

break, and then I’ll come back with the next installment of this Terrence McKenna course from April of 1993.

01:27:50 ►

You know, I guess that it’s a good thing that I’m no longer a young man in college,

01:27:55 ►

because if I was, I’m sure that I would pursue my studies in the area of science,

01:28:00 ►

and then do as Terrence just proposed.

01:28:03 ►

I would roll up my sleeves and go into psychedelic

01:28:06 ►

explorations with the same scientific cast of mind as did Darwin when he went to the Galapagos.

01:28:13 ►

Now, I know that probably sounds a little melodramatic, but if you’ve had a few dozen

01:28:19 ►

deep psychedelic experiences, you most likely have begun some of them in exactly that state of mind,

01:28:25 ►

at least subconsciously. Which reminds me, well, I’ve got more than 20 hours of cassette tape

01:28:31 ►

recordings that I made on solo mushroom trips over 20 years ago, and I’ve never listened to them.

01:28:38 ►

Maybe I should do that someday, but I can assure you that there won’t be anything of scientific

01:28:43 ►

value in them. And that’s

01:28:45 ►

the point, isn’t it? We need to have some of our fellow psychonauts begin a more scientific

01:28:50 ►

exploration of what will always be primarily subjective experiences. I have to admit that

01:28:57 ►

when Terence mentioned what he called small non-human intelligences, the first thing that

01:29:03 ►

I thought of were those insidious

01:29:05 ►

products from Amazon, Google, and Apple that listen in to your conversations at

01:29:09 ►

home. Some of my friends have these devices in their homes and I’ve noticed

01:29:14 ►

that sometimes, even when they aren’t intentionally triggered, these machines

01:29:18 ►

speak up and enter into the conversation. Now you may find them useful and I guess

01:29:23 ►

that they probably are, but to me they are

01:29:26 ►

simply creepy. Now when Terrence said that the best way to learn how to grow mushrooms is to

01:29:32 ►

have somebody show you how to do it, did you think about YouTube? Well I did, and I guess the reason

01:29:38 ►

that he didn’t mention it is because back then it was more than 10 years in the future.

01:29:48 ►

YouTube wasn’t invented until about 12 years after this talk was given.

01:29:55 ►

Another thing that Terrence talked about in this session was the work of Dr. Salvador Roquette,

01:29:59 ►

who isn’t nearly as well known in the psychedelic community as he should be.

01:30:04 ►

Arrowhead.org begins its entry about Dr. Roquette saying, and I quote,

01:30:15 ►

Salvador Roquette was a beloved psychiatrist who worked with different shamans and healers throughout Mexico between the years of 1967 and 1974.

01:30:21 ►

He trained many psychedelic therapists in his approach and worked with over 1,700 patients. He developed very intense methods of conducting group psychedelic

01:30:26 ►

sessions with powerful impact, end quote. Now, that little statement about very intense methods

01:30:34 ►

doesn’t even come close to describing what Dr. Roquette’s sessions were like. I’ve had the

01:30:40 ►

opportunity to view some of the videos that he showed, and, well, they were created so

01:30:45 ►

as to intentionally induce bad trips in his patients. I don’t even want to think about those

01:30:50 ►

horrific scenes, let alone describe them. I’ve met several people who participated in his sessions,

01:30:56 ►

and I’ve also met his daughter and the two people who organized his North American sessions.

01:31:02 ►

While no one that I’ve met ever directly criticized his methods,

01:31:06 ►

I don’t recall any of them

01:31:07 ►

ever wanting to repeat one either.

01:31:10 ►

That said, well, I hope that in the future

01:31:12 ►

some budding scientists

01:31:13 ►

will study Dr. Roquette’s work

01:31:15 ►

to see if maybe some of his techniques

01:31:17 ►

are worth further investigation.

01:31:20 ►

But I’m going to leave speculations

01:31:21 ►

about that to the professionals.

01:31:24 ►

Now, before I go, I’d like to bring you up to date on the Monday night salons that I’ve been hosting over on Zoom.us.

01:31:31 ►

Until now, I’ve kept the invite list to my writing patrons over at Patreon.com.

01:31:37 ►

However, I’m going to try a little experiment for this coming Monday’s online get-together.

01:31:42 ►

So far, we’ve ranged from 4 to 10 people who have been meeting online

01:31:45 ►

at 6.30 every Monday evening for what have been mostly unstructured conversations. But there are

01:31:52 ►

some features of this conferencing software that I’d like to try out with a larger crowd.

01:31:56 ►

And this may become a permanent thing, but I don’t want to commit to it until I see if it

01:32:00 ►

also is of interest to you and any of our other fellow slaughters who want to join us.

01:32:06 ►

It’s free, by the way.

01:32:07 ►

Here’s the announcement.

01:32:09 ►

On Monday, March 5th, and that’s in 2018, if you’re listening to this somehow in the distant future,

01:32:17 ►

well, on Monday, March 5th, I’ll host a Zoom.us conference from 6.30 p.m. to 8.00 p.m. Pacific Time

01:32:24 ►

for anyone who would like to join a few of us for a friendly conversation. Thank you. like Facebook and Google. Now for background, I suggest that you listen to a recent podcast that

01:32:45 ►

Eric Davis did with our mutual friend Mark Pesci. Eric’s podcast is entitled Expanding Mind,

01:32:52 ►

and the program that I’m referring you to was posted on February 22nd of this year,

01:32:57 ►

and is titled Goodbye Reality. Even if you don’t plan on participating in our discussion of this

01:33:04 ►

topic, I highly recommend that you listen to this interesting podcast

01:33:07 ►

that features two friends of mine who you’ve also heard here in the salon

01:33:11 ►

and if you’re interested in joining us on Monday night

01:33:15 ►

you’ll find the details in today’s program notes

01:33:18 ►

which are located at psychedelicsalon.com

01:33:21 ►

and for now this is Lorenzo signing off from cyberdelic space.

01:33:26 ►

Be well, my friends.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

566 - A Tribe of Selves

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Program Notes

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