Program Notes
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Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna.]
“One thing about psychedelics, you don’t have to be predisposed. It doesn’t work for those who believe it work. It works for those who think it doesn’t work.”
“The problems which face us, put very simply, are going to demand sacrifice. And sacrifice is what the ego doesn’t want to hear about.”
“Capitalism is as anti-human a philosophy as you can possibly conceive, because at this very moment we should be consuming less, manufacturing less, selling less, transporting less. And what’s the battle cry? Free trade everywhere!”
“The way a dream melts away is the way a DMT trip melts away, at the same speed.”
The Techno Pagan Octopus Messiah
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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 am pleased to begin today by thanking Katie M., Joel L., and Todd M., who recently made donations to the salon to help offset some of the expenses associated with producing these podcasts.
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And I appreciate your support, as do all of our fellow salonners.
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In addition to financial contributions, such as Kate, Joel,
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and Todd made, I’m also indebted to fellow salonners who send me recordings that I can
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play for you here in the salon. One of those salonners is Ian Wynn who joins us each week
00:00:57 ►
from the UK. Now a few weeks ago I received a package from Ian that contained a set of six Terrence McKenna tapes from a March 1996 Esalen workshop that was titled Countdown into Complexity. And as far as I can
00:01:13 ►
determine, these recordings aren’t available anywhere else on the net so far. So we all have
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those talks to look forward to. Now in his notes to me, Ian said about these tapes, and I quote,
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they were in a box in my parents’ attic for 20 years.
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I thought for sure the heat would have killed them.
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And if you could post or broadcast a shout-out to OctopusMessiah.com, I would greatly appreciate it.
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If you click on the Octopath, you can follow the long, torturous journey from meeting Terrence to the relaunch of the book he helped me catalyze, end quote.
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Now, in the future, I’ll have more to say about Ian’s book,
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and I’ll put that link in today’s program notes as well.
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But in the package, in addition to the Esalen workshop recordings,
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there was another cassette tape that is hand-labeled with only the notation Terrence No. 2.
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And I posted a picture of it in today’s program notes, which you’ll find at Psychedelic Salon, and I only did this to give
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you an idea of the way I receive a lot of tapes. So anyway, I digitized that tape first, and it is
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the talk that we’re about to listen to right now. Since I don’t know when or where this fragment of
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a talk was recorded, I thought about
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calling today’s program the Terrence McKenna Mystery Hour. But upon reflection, I realized
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how flaky that sounds, and that’s why today’s podcast is titled simply Terrence Number Two.
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Now, as we listen to this talk, which seems to have been recorded in a big room or auditorium,
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maybe you can help us figure out when and where this was recorded.
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There were two clues that I picked up on.
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One of them was when Terrence was talking about a politician from Austin,
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and my guess is that this was Bush the Younger when he was running for president.
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Additionally, at one point, he says he had hoped that John Mack would also have been there,
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and that seems to indicate a UFO conference of some kind, but, well, I don’t think it was the
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same UFO conference that Terrence spoke at in the podcast back in 2011 I had posted. It was called
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The Definitive UFO Tape and is my podcast number 261. Anyway, now it’s your turn to play detective How about this?
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Maybe there’s something wrong with that metaphor.
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Because notice it has to do with planes and transitions.
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It’s an inherently dualist metaphor.
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and transitions. It’s an inherently dualist metaphor. How about if we say there is no inside and outside. There is no with or without. You just use what you’ve got. Whatever works
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should be used. I spent time in India and visited all these people and so forth and so on, and I just became
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convinced that unless you were predisposed to believe in this stuff, that it would never carry
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you where you wanted it to. And one thing about psychedelics, you don’t have to be predisposed.
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It doesn’t work for those who believe it works.
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It works for those who think it doesn’t work.
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Then one last point, and then we’ll go on.
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There’s a story, maybe some of you know this story,
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of a man who lived by the side of a river,
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and he wanted to cross the river.
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He wanted to cross the river.
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So he practiced a siddhi of levitation so that he could walk across the water.
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And it took him 40 years to perfect this siddhi.
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And finally he could cross the river.
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And Buddha was preaching in the neighborhood and the guy came to him
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and he said, Master look what I’ve achieved I can walk on the water to
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cross the river and Buddha said, yeah but the ferry costs a nickel. And that’s the thing, I think we’re not going to be able to replace this tool
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without wasting so much time in the act of replacing it
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that Armageddon will catch up with us.
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I think we have to humble ourselves so thoroughly
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that you have to admit that you can’t get where you want to go
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unless you form a partnership with somebody
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whose idea of a good
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time is growing in a cow pie. And if you’re willing to partner up with this humble, humble
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member of the ecosystem, then you and it can fly to glory. Have at it. Woman at the end, you asked about the
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that any of the women, when they’re doing the
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with mushrooms, if you’re pregnant,
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stage a test to see if that’s how you ever
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Yeah, I wouldn’t recommend, especially in the
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late stages of pregnancy, doing anything
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that is going to wildly perturb you. And you know LSD was discovered in the act of
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trying to produce better drugs to induce labor. So that’s excellent advice. Honor the fetus. Yeah?
00:06:48 ►
Well, the true and honest answer is how the hell can you find out
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when they won’t let you do research?
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It’s totally insidious.
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We don’t know.
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We don’t know because they will not allow
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the research to be done.
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This is one of the reasons why I say
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that you should stick with
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shamanically sanctioned plants.
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Because we know, for instance,
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that people have been taking psilocybin
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in the Sierra Mazateca of Central Mexico
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for millennia.
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They don’t show blindness, tumors,
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miscarriage, madness, cataracts, whatever
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that’s your human
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data for that
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but you go to, let’s talk for a minute
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about something like ketamine
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nobody knows, nobody has
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any data, MDMA
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seems to be tremendously
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effective in facilitating
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interpersonal stuff
00:07:44 ►
that’s a psychological issue, chemically tremendously effective in facilitating interpersonal stuff.
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That’s a psychological issue.
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Chemically, what kind of data do we have?
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You know, six years’ worth of data gathered under duress. So to be safe, stick with the things that are sanctioned by human use.
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And then, in some more enlightened future, we will explore these synthetics and find out just what the parameters are.
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Yeah, finish up.
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No, I’m not saying that. I’m saying take things which have been sanctioned by human usage. I mean, how about a plant like Strychnos nox vomica? I mean, you’re dead in a minute and a half,
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and it’s a beautiful, wonderful plant.
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Why did it kill you?
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Well, because it’s jammed with strychnine.
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No, it’s nothing about its being a plant.
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It’s about having a repeated history of human usage.
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That’s what sanctifies it.
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Yeah, the Lodian magenta.
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This is what I like about the three of them. You said the whole month is prepared to be
00:08:51 ►
entirely different, more evolved by the point. I feel like it’s kind of a little different.
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That’s really an interesting point. I mean, it never occurred to me but somebody brought it up to me they said have you noticed
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that the trips are changing and once you do ask yourself this question it does seem to be so
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and I don’t know whether that what I mean that’s a deep assertion I’m not sure exactly what’s going
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on there for instance this goddess thing I don’t think people gave the goddess a thought in the early 1970s, late 1960s.
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Now people have, you know, some of the least likely people report intense encounters with the goddess.
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So is it amplifying the general mindset of the society and so there’s more
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goddess stuff there? I don’t really know. It’s a very interesting question. There are more
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questions than answers. I mean this is definitely wide open stuff. Yeah.
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We’re trying to restore the relationship of ego to the other components of the psyche that existed as recently as 12,000 years ago. The ego has become a deadly growth
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in the historical societies,
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exacerbated by the phonetic alphabet,
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monotheism, modern science.
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This is like you’re getting sicker and sicker and sicker
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as you load these things on
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and so the idea is
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that if we could restore
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the original diminished role
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of the ego that it had
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for that period
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however long it was
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that we could begin
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to solve our problems
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because the problems which face us, put very simply,
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are going to demand sacrifice.
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And sacrifice is what the ego doesn’t want to hear about.
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And when you go to somebody and say,
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look, to save this planet,
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we’re going to have to redistribute income radically that means
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everybody in this room is going to have less we’re going to have to honor a whole bunch of
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cultural positions that we previously just were going to bulldoze over and so forth and so on so on. So it’s the diminishing of ego by any means necessary that lies to getting any grip
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on our problem. I mean, if we continue as we are, I think we have probably less than
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30 years before life is irreconcilably screwed up. You know, nobody believes that the future is rosy and wonderful.
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I mean, if you go to the people at the World Bank and the IMF and these people who are straight,
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you know, suits, all of them, they have a set of curves which would stand your hair on end. When they propagate the curve of
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population, the curve of toxification of the environment, the curve related to the ozone hole
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disappear, you see, you know, it’s finished in sometime in the next 50 years. They don’t talk
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about this because they don’t want to panic the vast numbers of people who just go to work and raise their kids and pray somebody smarter is doing something about all this. But they don’t believe there is any kind of normal future. And I don’t either. we’re going to, that it’s business as usual is not on the menu folks, we’re either going to
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go into an era of
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immense resource scarcity
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regimentation
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governmental interference in our lives
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tremendous
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propagandistic efforts to make us
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do one thing or another
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or we’re going to
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pull the plug on
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scientism and its stooges and the institutions which feed us, feed it.
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Capitalism is an interesting problem, more easily discussed now that communism is out of the picture.
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Capitalism is as anti-human a philosophy as you can possibly conceive.
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Because at this very moment, we should be consuming less,
00:13:51 ►
manufacturing less, selling less, transporting less.
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And what’s the battle cry?
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Free trade everywhere!
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What does free trade mean?
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It means my right to come to your country and sell the most outlandish junk you’ve ever seen
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and you will have no right to turn it away because in the name of free trade, crap everywhere has to go everywhere.
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It’s really, see they try to tell you that capitalism and democracy are not at variance. Actually,
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the whole Marxist-Leninist socialist thing was a side dish. The real life and death struggle
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is between capitalism and democracy. Democracy says everybody has an innate worth that must be honored. Capitalism says those
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who die with the most toys win. You cannot reconcile these two things. And nobody wants to
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talk about this. We’re still having the party over the fall of communism. But, you know, you go to the Soviet Union
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or the former areas of the Soviet Union
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and you see that what it was
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was it was a deep freeze
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for traditional culture.
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In Turgisia and Turkmenistan,
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people are basically camel husbandry
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is what’s going on.
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Now, with communism on the rocks,
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McDonald’s will be there in five years
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and Kmart will be falling close behind.
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So I think we’re coming to a great crisis
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of our relation to our own fundamental institutions.
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I’m not anti-capitalist.
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I think capitalism needs to sever its connection to materialism.
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This is, again, why virtual reality is interesting.
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You sell things made of light.
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Not made of beryllium, metal, brass, steel, and wood,
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but light.
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We’ve got all the light we need.
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But we have to stop
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making things out of stuff.
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Or we’re not going to be around
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to tell the tale.
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You mean that in order to get
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anywhere we have to have a major shift
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in values.
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You’re suggesting that a way to shift our values is to
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maybe apply them to society. I don’t disagree with it, but your model has been that everybody in the
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culture participated in this and were able to shift their values simultaneously so they cooperate.
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shift of that in simultaneous physical operation.
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Are you suggesting, is that necessary?
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No, I think that, you know,
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revolutions are made by percentages.
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If 15 or 20 percent changed,
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then the example would spread. You see, we are not,
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psilocybin is the easy way to awaken.
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Take a psychedelic plant and have an experience and get your act together.
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But the future is full of sledgehammers.
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It’s not going to end with a whimper.
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It’s going to end with a series of thuds and bangs.
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It could begin almost any time.
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I mean, we could get a hot muggy day in Mexico City this summer and a million people would die.
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This thing in Los Angeles is a wake-up call. It is going to get uglier and more chaotic and more crazy. There is going to be more starvation,
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more fascism, more dictatorship.
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It’s unless we do something,
00:17:52 ►
until we do something.
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And how bad is it going to have to get
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before people say, you know,
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we’re doing something wrong.
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You know, people dance on the Russians,
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but you’ve got to admire people who have the guts to say, we did it entirely wrong. 100%. I mean, can you imagine
00:18:16 ►
in this country, being able to do, say, you know, I mean, it may be coming. It may be coming. This character from Austin is a peculiar item in the mix.
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You know, I mean, I for years
00:18:30 ►
had a fantasy speech,
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which I always imagined
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that I would somehow end up giving,
00:18:37 ►
but it’s the speech where you say,
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my fellow Americans,
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you have been lied to, screwed, and abused
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by these two criminal parties for a hundred years.
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And your only hope is to overthrow the Republicans
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and create a decent world to live in.
00:19:02 ►
Well, no Republican can make that speech.
00:19:05 ►
No Democrat can make that speech and be credible.
00:19:09 ►
It has to be somebody who wasn’t in bed with either of those forces.
00:19:14 ►
So I’m not at all pleased by who apparently will bear the mantle.
00:19:19 ►
But on the other hand, if change is what we need,
00:19:22 ►
then it’s probably not going to be a candidate that you and I can embrace.
00:19:27 ►
It’s going to be some oddball.
00:19:29 ►
So, you know, we have to recognize it when we see it coming.
00:19:34 ►
Yeah. couple of things. First of all, for me, in an attempt to place the
00:19:46 ►
spatial and temporal context of mission-quickness,
00:19:51 ►
period.
00:19:54 ►
Well, probably half at least in the room have the faintest idea what this question is about.
00:20:01 ►
I’ve stayed away from this because this is the personalistic stuff where I’ve created a certain model of reality
00:20:10 ►
based on a new way of looking at time. And I don’t want to go into it too much tonight, but I want to suggest something, you know, at the very beginning of this talk,
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we talked about mutation and natural selection,
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and Darwin’s insight was vast and deep.
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And what he offered was an explanation for how rainbow trout come to be,
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monarch butterflies, redwood trees, herds of elephants, so forth and so on.
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What it doesn’t address is us. We are the weird bird on the block.
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I mean, yes, we’re some kind of monkey, but when you stand us next to our nearest relative, it’s very very clear that it is
00:21:07 ►
not a very near relative. It doesn’t look like us much, certainly doesn’t act like us. What’s the
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deal with human beings? And I think that, you know how all these religions, these Western religions, have built in
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this idea of the end of the world and they’re always running around expecting
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the Messiah or something. And this, to the scientific mind, is just the final proof
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of the pudding that these people have water between the ears because science just says, you know, that’s just ridiculous.
00:21:48 ►
I mean, but I wonder, I wonder. I mentioned just a minute ago these curves that when you propagate them into the future,
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everything leads to the unimaginable and it’s all within the next 50 years. So I sort of think as human beings,
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as analogous to iron filings on a piece of paper,
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and you shake these iron filings out of a salt shaker or something,
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and there they lie, randomly arranged in heaps.
00:22:23 ►
Well, then you come underneath the paper
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with a very powerful magnet.
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And lo and behold, these little iron filings
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coherently arrange themselves
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into this beautiful double mustache pattern,
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which I’m sure you’ve all seen.
00:22:40 ►
Well, I think that there is an enormous punchline to the historical process
00:22:49 ►
that very, very few people suspect.
00:22:54 ►
And that what history is, it’s what happens to an animal
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who falls under the influence of a kind of strange attractor and that we
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are being pulled into a well of transformative intentionality. History is
00:23:16 ►
not pushed by the casuistry of the war, migration, imperial, dynastic families, and stuff like that. History is pulled toward
00:23:29 ►
an unimaginable something, which is continuously trying to mirror itself in us. This is why
00:23:38 ►
these Egyptians said, you know, I don’t know what it is, but I just think we should really build a big simple building.
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I don’t know why, but I’m going to enslave 50,000 people and do it, and don’t ask me
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why.
00:23:54 ►
And this is the same force that reared Chartres Cathedral.
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This is the same force that created the space shuttle. We are in a relationship to an unseen something
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which we keep trying to image with our mythologies,
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our religions, our technologies, our epiphanies.
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And I think that it’s not so far away,
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that it isn’t 10,000 years in the future. It is sometime in the next 50 years,
00:24:30 ►
and that this is what history was for. You see, history is an incredibly peculiar and brief
00:24:38 ►
phenomenon. I mean, viewed from the point of view of biology, it’s less time than it takes for a new species
00:24:46 ►
to emerge.
00:24:47 ►
I mean let’s call history 25,000 years.
00:24:50 ►
You know, in frame one, you’re chipping flint.
00:24:56 ►
In frame two, you’re hurling an instrument toward Alpha Centauri.
00:25:02 ►
Like that, this happened.
00:25:04 ►
Well what’s happening? It’s that mind
00:25:06 ►
itself is being pulled out of this creature and it’s being given hands and
00:25:14 ►
languages and past symbolic systems in order to image the unspeakable. The
00:25:22 ►
unspeakable, I call it the transcendental object at the end of time.
00:25:27 ►
It casts, and it’s in another dimension, it’s in a kind of super space, and what it casts
00:25:34 ►
into history is the enormous shadow of its eminence. This is what straight people call
00:25:41 ►
God. This is what all these visionaries are raving about. It’s that when you sink
00:25:46 ►
beneath the surface of ordinary causality and mundane wholeness, what you discover is
00:25:54 ►
this enormous transcendental object, which you could call it, you know, the sacred heart
00:26:00 ►
of Jesus, or the flying saucer, or the philosopher’s stone.
00:26:06 ►
It’s all of those things, and much, much more.
00:26:10 ►
It’s not only stranger than you suppose, it’s stranger than you can suppose.
00:26:16 ►
And it has called us out of animal organization.
00:26:20 ►
Over a 25,000 year period, hang in the balance and then we meet it
00:26:26 ►
and we’re going to meet it
00:26:28 ►
that’s the light at the end
00:26:29 ►
of that birth canal of transcendence
00:26:32 ►
that I referred to
00:26:34 ►
and now I see that our song is sung
00:26:38 ►
our time is done
00:26:39 ►
thank you very very much for turning in.
00:26:48 ►
If you’re just saying,
00:26:49 ►
we’re just taking you to day,
00:26:51 ►
you can just show up in the end,
00:26:53 ►
just like Saturday or Sunday.
00:26:57 ►
Yeah, we’ll dig into this deep, deep.
00:26:58 ►
In the interim,
00:27:09 ►
I think that it’s worth taking the time for everybody to just make a very brief,
00:27:17 ►
very, very brief statement about, you don’t have to say who you are if you don’t want to, but you can say what you’re hoping for or why you’re here or what your agenda is,
00:27:29 ►
you’re here or what your agenda is just so that if it turns out we’re 80% shrinks or you know 80%
00:27:38 ►
ceramicists or something then we turn it that way and those of you who are undercover please stay undercover so you don’t alarm anybody
00:27:41 ►
so you don’t alarm anybody.
00:27:47 ►
Especially me, right?
00:27:50 ►
So why don’t we just start and go across in some reasonably logical fashion.
00:27:55 ►
Yeah?
00:27:56 ►
We don’t want to record it.
00:28:00 ►
Well, that tells you what you’re worth, doesn’t it?
00:28:06 ►
Oh, true. No, let’s not record it so people…
00:28:09 ►
And also, I had at one point thought I would be an art historian.
00:28:17 ►
That was one of my real obsessions.
00:28:19 ►
So I had had enough art history to be trained in, you know, recognizing the evolution of motifs,
00:28:28 ►
how one artist passes on techniques and conceits to his students or his imitators,
00:28:35 ►
and all this art historical stuff.
00:28:38 ►
And I also had been very interested in Jung.
00:28:43 ►
And none of this seemed to explain
00:28:46 ►
the content of the psychedelic experience.
00:28:49 ►
I would get in there and say,
00:28:50 ►
well, how come I’m not seeing,
00:28:54 ►
A, archetypes,
00:28:56 ►
and B, things which somebody else,
00:29:00 ►
you know, I don’t know, Dali, Ensor, Caravaggio, Bosch,
00:29:06 ►
somebody should have seen this stuff and gotten it down.
00:29:10 ►
And there didn’t seem to be a trail through the history of Western art
00:29:17 ►
of the presence of this dimension.
00:29:21 ►
So then I thought, wow, is it that nobody knew about all this? I mean,
00:29:26 ►
Bosch would have given his right arm for a sheet of blotter, I would think. So, so
00:29:34 ►
it became for me like a mystery. What, where is this stuff coming from, and what
00:29:39 ►
does it say about our humananness. Yeah?
00:29:53 ►
Well, there’s a lot of ink been spilled over Bosch because he is such a startlingly radical painter in the context of his time. Many of his conceits were picked up after
00:30:08 ►
his life, Peter Bruegel the Elder being the foremost exponent of it. He may have been an
00:30:16 ►
alchemical guinea pig. Frager, I think, wrote a book called The Millennium of Hieronymus Bosch, in which he wanted to suggest
00:30:27 ►
that maybe detour use, that there was a cult called the Brotherhood of the Free Spirit,
00:30:36 ►
which practiced ritual nudity, which begins to sound something like the orgies we talked about last night.
00:30:45 ►
It was a cult of printers.
00:30:48 ►
And it may be that the Garden of Earthly Delights
00:30:51 ►
was actually painted as an altarpiece
00:30:54 ►
for a congregation of the Brotherhood of the Free Spirit.
00:30:58 ►
But this is all pretty murky stuff.
00:31:01 ►
It’s hard to get back to Bosch.
00:31:04 ►
He didn’t leave any written records.
00:31:07 ►
We have his birth is recorded in the parish church of the village where he was born. We
00:31:13 ►
know he was born sometime around 1450, died in 1516, but the details are pretty murky.
00:31:21 ►
Well, not to belabor Bosch. So what I thought would be a reasonable way
00:31:28 ►
to do this this morning is to take the most extreme psychedelic case and experience and
00:31:38 ►
describe it and talk about it a little and then see what issues that raises because my experience with this stuff has led me
00:31:49 ►
to the conclusion that in a way it’s to be thought of this other dimension is to be thought of like
00:32:00 ►
a mandala and different psychedelic compounds and generously different kinds of yoga and
00:32:08 ►
different kinds of techniques have also land you in different parts of this mandala but that what
00:32:16 ►
you’re always trying to do is get to the center of the mandala and it’s simply my bias my opinion but i think the center of the mandala is probably
00:32:28 ►
the dmt experience for a number of reasons and so i thought it would be interesting to talk about it
00:32:36 ►
this morning first let me talk about it physically uh dmt is uh an indole hallucinogen, a beta, no no, a tryptamine, and it’s
00:32:53 ►
produced endogenously in the human brain. This is very interesting. Very few
00:33:01 ►
psychedelic compounds are produced in the human brain
00:33:06 ►
we don’t know what DMT is doing there
00:33:10 ►
but it means essentially that we all are subject to arrest on a technicality
00:33:17 ►
because we all are holding a schedule one drug
00:33:22 ►
it’s sort of the ultimate catch-22,
00:33:26 ►
where if all else fails,
00:33:27 ►
they just say,
00:33:28 ►
well, you were holding anyway.
00:33:32 ►
The interesting thing about DM,
00:33:35 ►
another interesting thing about it is
00:33:36 ►
that it’s incredibly rapid
00:33:40 ►
in its onset
00:33:41 ►
and in its disappearance.
00:33:46 ►
The whole trip lasts about 15 minutes.
00:33:50 ►
This makes it a tremendous tool
00:33:52 ►
with which to challenge the critics of our position.
00:33:56 ►
Because if somebody wants to rise up in righteous wrath
00:34:00 ►
and condemn psychedelics,
00:34:02 ►
then you say, well, you have tried them, haven’t you?
00:34:07 ►
And of course, they never have.
00:34:08 ►
It’s like scientific denunciations of astrology.
00:34:12 ►
I mean, scientists love to denounce astrology,
00:34:15 ►
but find one who can cast a natal horoscope and I’ll give you a hen’s tooth.
00:34:34 ►
tooth you know so the the the bmt overcome this objection the entire experience lasts 15 minutes so you say to the critic you know you’re not going to experience it and yet you’re going to carry on
00:34:40 ►
a pogrom against it you won’t invest 15 minutes to checking out what this is about.
00:34:47 ►
You know, what kind of scientist are you? So it has that social efficacy.
00:34:56 ►
Now the fact that it is the strongest of all hallucinogens, at least if there are ones stronger, please keep them away from me.
00:35:07 ►
I mean, I don’t think anybody needs to get higher than that.
00:35:11 ►
I certainly don’t.
00:35:13 ►
I mean, I’ve at times come out of those places and said, this stuff is illegal.
00:35:19 ►
You know, it breaks cosmic law.
00:35:23 ►
Of course, then Tim Reary told me that cosmic laws are only
00:35:26 ►
local ordinances anyway, so it didn’t really matter.
00:35:32 ►
Okay. Oh, good question. Yes, it’s the commonest of all hallucinogens in nature.
00:35:41 ►
It occurs in many grasses, Phalaris tuberosa, Phalaris arundinaceae.
00:35:47 ►
It occurs in a number of leguminous plants, probably the most spectacular being Amidonanthra paragrena,
00:35:56 ►
this huge tropical locust-like tree from which the snuff called miota or epina is made.
00:36:06 ►
That’s a tough way to get your DMT, let me tell you,
00:36:10 ►
because there’s so much cellulose and other crap and corruption in the mix
00:36:16 ►
that you have to do like a tablespoon up each nostril.
00:36:23 ►
And the technique is you get a bamboo tube
00:36:27 ►
or a hollow tube about this long
00:36:30 ►
and you pour in this tablespoon of this stuff
00:36:34 ►
and then you squat down on your haunches
00:36:37 ►
and you get a friend
00:36:38 ►
and you put the tube up your nostril
00:36:41 ►
and then the friend blows
00:36:44 ►
with the full force blows his blows this stuff into
00:36:48 ►
your head well you fall it’s like being hit in the face with a two by four i mean you that it’s
00:36:55 ►
like you think he kicked you and you fall over backwards you scream you salivate, you get back up on your haunches, and by this time he has refilled the tub of the other nostril.
00:37:12 ►
So, and Waika, Yanomami, it’s also called Vilka in the Karib language.
00:37:34 ►
And then after four or ten minutes or so,
00:37:38 ►
it slowly begins to form up in your head,
00:37:43 ►
but, you know, God, your sinuses are in stat for sure, and it’s
00:37:50 ►
not very pleasant. And the other thing is, it never reaches the blinding transformative
00:37:56 ►
intensity that you can achieve with the chemically pure compound. No, no.
00:38:06 ►
Good point.
00:38:08 ►
If you orally ingest it,
00:38:11 ►
it will be destroyed in your guts.
00:38:12 ►
It won’t work.
00:38:19 ►
The Amazon Indians have encountered this problem and created a very sophisticated pharmacological strategy
00:38:24 ►
for dealing with this.
00:38:25 ►
You’ve all heard of ayahuasca.
00:38:28 ►
Ayahuasca is DMT from one plant combined with another plant,
00:38:34 ►
which contains a chemical which is called an MAO inhibitor.
00:38:39 ►
MAO is monoamine oxidase, and your gut is full of MAO,
00:38:46 ►
and its job is to take monoamines, small molecules,
00:38:52 ►
and oxidize them into a harmless byproduct,
00:38:56 ►
usually indoleacetic acid, which can be shunted to the bladder.
00:39:01 ►
Well, when you take DMT orally, these monoamines just, I mean, these monoamine oxidase
00:39:08 ►
compounds just grab onto it and destroy it. But if you take an MAO inhibitor with it,
00:39:16 ►
and harmine, which occurs in banisteriopsis copy, is an MAO inhibitor, then, lo and behold,
00:39:23 ►
it isn’t destroyed in your gut. Instead, it passes into
00:39:27 ►
the bloodstream. It passes through the blood-brain barrier, which is a very tight chemical filter
00:39:33 ►
that keeps the brain from being exposed to toxic materials. But these drugs can cross that barrier.
00:39:39 ►
And then what the ayahuasca experience really is, is a slow release DMT trip
00:39:47 ►
that instead of taking five minutes, takes about two and a half hours.
00:39:53 ►
And if you really know your psychedelics and your breath control techniques,
00:40:01 ►
on ayahuasca, over an hour hour or so you can work yourself to a place where you say
00:40:09 ►
more than me it looks just like a dmt flash and it does but you’ve had to do some hard
00:40:18 ►
climbing to get there with dmt itself once you push the start button there’s no stopping it and
00:40:27 ►
i think it’s worth describing it how many people have had this experience
00:40:34 ►
uh-huh well so they can somewhat anchor it um it’s very subjective obviously but I will describe what happens to me and then we can work
00:40:47 ►
out from there one point that I want to make about these things is that the the
00:40:53 ►
great strength of the psychedelic possibility is it’s democratic you know
00:41:01 ►
it isn’t that people of great spiritual advancement attain these states,
00:41:07 ►
or people who have studied under some lineage.
00:41:10 ►
It’s truly available to everyone.
00:41:14 ►
And when I had my DMT experiences, I realized, you know,
00:41:19 ►
either I am incredibly special, which doesn’t, there’s no other evidence to support that,
00:41:28 ►
or this is something which can happen to anyone.
00:41:33 ►
And that’s the more interesting possibility.
00:41:35 ►
After all, if it can only happen to very, very special people, then that lets most people out.
00:41:42 ►
But if it’s generally available then it’s big big
00:41:45 ►
news about the human condition yeah
00:41:52 ►
how did they find DMT in the human brain hmm interesting question no I think he
00:42:03 ►
means how did they find that it was endogenously produced.
00:42:07 ►
Well, I think they were studying,
00:42:09 ►
the group that did this was at the University of Louisiana,
00:42:13 ►
Christian and his group,
00:42:15 ►
and they were studying fast reaction in the brain.
00:42:21 ►
And for fast reactions,
00:42:23 ►
you have to look at chemicals
00:42:24 ►
that can go through some kind of cycle
00:42:27 ►
of structural change and return to their zero point very very quickly their original thought
00:42:35 ►
was that dmt mediated attention i mean i’m talking to you right now. Suppose there were a loud noise over here.
00:42:45 ►
We would all immediately project our mind onto the source of the sound.
00:42:52 ►
They thought that that was a neurological function mediated by DMT.
00:42:58 ►
Could be. I’m not sure.
00:43:00 ►
I suspect it has more to do with the chemistry of dreaming.
00:43:05 ►
Once they discovered DMT and began to track it,
00:43:08 ►
they discovered that there was a circadian rhythm,
00:43:12 ►
means a daily rhythm, in its production in the human organism,
00:43:16 ►
and that it reaches its greatest concentration in the brain
00:43:20 ►
around 3.30 a.m. in most people.
00:43:30 ►
Well, this is when the deep dreaming and the high REM states are really chugging.
00:43:37 ►
And I suspect, I mean, lucid dreamers may want to argue with this,
00:43:45 ►
but I suspect that every night we go deeper places than we can ever speak of.
00:43:50 ►
That ordinary dreams are right on the surface of consciousness.
00:43:54 ►
Big lucid dreams are an inch deeper.
00:43:58 ►
But I think we go a hundred feet down every night into places where you cannot say anything about it.
00:44:01 ►
Yeah.
00:44:02 ►
say anything about it. Yeah. I wanted to ask you about some thought of the eligibility of DMT and the specific
00:44:07 ►
limitations of that and…
00:44:09 ►
It’s hard as hell to find DMT. And this is a puzzle, because if you look it up in a standard
00:44:16 ►
work on organic chemistry, it presents it as a trivial synthesis, much more simple than LSD, which it always presents as quite a difficult
00:44:29 ►
synthesis. But when you actually talk to workbench chemists, it’s tricky to make DMT. It’s especially
00:44:37 ►
tricky to carry out the final crystallization. So what you’re usually offered in the underground is some kind of muck, which
00:44:46 ►
looks sort of like maple syrup half gone to sugar. I wouldn’t get near that, actually. It means they
00:44:56 ►
botched their synthesis. What you’re hoping for is a white powder. However, in 30 years of chasing this all over the world,
00:45:07 ►
I’ve only seen it as a white powder a couple of times.
00:45:11 ►
Usually the synthesis has fallen slightly below that standard,
00:45:15 ►
and what you get is a pale yellow powder,
00:45:19 ►
sometimes a pale rose or pink powder,
00:45:24 ►
and then the real rough trade is orange and this is what you if you’ve
00:45:30 ►
seen it this is probably what you’ve seen it looks like orange mothballs and it has the smell of
00:45:36 ►
indole this very sharp smell which if you’re not a chemist and you’ve never smelled indole and you reach in your mind for
00:45:45 ►
what is this like you’ll say well it’s sort of like mothball not quite but it has that same sharp
00:45:53 ►
chemical you know and this is what you’re going to smoke see so a lot of people beef about that
00:46:00 ►
and say well you know it’s like smoking burning plastic
00:46:04 ►
and say, well, you know, it’s like smoking, burning plastic.
00:46:10 ►
Eh, mas amenos, but it is a little bit like that.
00:46:16 ►
The other objection to DMT that has been around since the 60s is people say it destroys brain cells.
00:46:19 ►
There’s no evidence for or against this,
00:46:24 ►
but I would submit to you as, I’m afraid the people who are
00:46:27 ►
neurophysiologists can argue with this if they disagree, but I think an excellent index for the
00:46:35 ►
low toxicity of a drug is how fast it clears your system. And DMT clears your system in about 15 minutes. If you take some compound drug or
00:46:48 ►
whatever and 48 hours later you’re still taking hot baths and you know wishing you could have a
00:46:57 ►
massage and sitting staring at the wall then this drug is really sticking to your ribs. It means that your metabolic pathways
00:47:08 ►
have no way of dealing with it. They can’t grab it here, they can’t grab it there, and it takes a
00:47:15 ►
long time to leave your system. An example of this in the pseudo-psychedelic domain would be ketamine.
00:47:27 ►
psychedelic domain would be ketamine. You know, ketamine, the experience lasts about 45 minutes, but 48 hours later you can feel your knees suddenly go rubbery, or you can have what are
00:47:34 ►
technically called fugue states, strange states of disconnectedness from what’s going on around you.
00:47:42 ►
This is not a very good advertisement for a drug.
00:47:47 ►
Here, this woman and then you.
00:47:49 ►
How much do you take? How much do you take a day at the expense of a pill?
00:47:55 ►
Well, less, because if you smoke DMT, the dose is approximately 50 milligrams, which is like the size of a kitchen match head.
00:48:08 ►
If you combine it with an MAO inhibitor and take it orally,
00:48:13 ►
you can probably get away with about 35 milligrams of DMT
00:48:18 ►
and, oh, I don’t know a hundred milligrams of
00:48:25 ►
harmaline
00:48:26 ►
now harmaline itself is sometimes
00:48:29 ►
described as a psychedelic drug
00:48:31 ►
I really think
00:48:33 ►
this is sort of misleading
00:48:35 ►
you will have hallucinations
00:48:37 ►
if you take pure harmaline
00:48:39 ►
but only at doses
00:48:41 ►
approaching the toxic
00:48:43 ►
dose
00:48:44 ►
many compounds will give you hallucinations approaching the toxic dose. Many compounds will give you hallucinations
00:48:47 ►
approaching the toxic dose. Bee venom, rattlesnake venom, stuff like this. That doesn’t mean
00:48:55 ►
it’s a hallucinogenic drug. It means you’re dying. And you should take steps to correct
00:49:02 ►
the situation. Now, yes?
00:49:06 ►
You said that there was a short transit time,
00:49:09 ►
but how long did the memory of that experience last?
00:49:12 ►
Because that would indicate to me that there is still a presence,
00:49:17 ►
and perhaps a homeopathic dose at that point,
00:49:19 ►
in the mind, in the brain.
00:49:22 ►
Well, DMT, one of the things that has caused me to think
00:49:26 ►
that it might have a role in the chemistry of dreaming
00:49:30 ►
is that one of the frustrating things about it is
00:49:34 ►
you have this experience, without doubt,
00:49:38 ►
the most bizarre, appalling, peculiar experience
00:49:42 ►
you could possibly have.
00:49:44 ►
That’s at minute two. At minute five,
00:49:49 ►
you’re raving about it. At minute seven, you can’t remember it. And so it’s literally like
00:49:57 ►
gold running through your fingers. You say, you know, this is the most amazing thing.
00:50:02 ►
This is the most amazing thing. This is the most amazing thing.
00:50:06 ►
This is, what am I talking about?
00:50:13 ►
And you know how you can have a very engaging, complex dream,
00:50:16 ►
and the alarm goes off,
00:50:19 ►
and by the time your feet hit the floor,
00:50:21 ►
you’re grasping for it.
00:50:25 ►
And it’s just, it’s literally melting before your eyes that’s a very DMT like presentation
00:50:28 ►
the way a dream melts away
00:50:31 ►
is the way a DMT trip melts away
00:50:34 ►
at the same speed
00:50:36 ►
well over time
00:50:40 ►
and using tricks
00:50:42 ►
you can drag a certain amount of data out of it and what I’ll
00:50:49 ►
do is I’ll describe a DMT trip and it’s it’s a composite of maybe 40 of these
00:50:59 ►
trips and then you can see what you make of it. So this is, I’ll just describe it, I’ll
00:51:08 ►
be the graduate student, you be the guy with the clipboard. You’re saying to me, so what
00:51:15 ►
happened? Okay, here’s what happened. I took one takes. Most people can get off in about three to four hits.
00:51:30 ►
Now there’s a trick to it.
00:51:31 ►
Hash smokers are greatly favored in this endeavor
00:51:36 ►
because you really need leather lungs for this.
00:51:40 ►
The great problem is that people will cough
00:51:44 ►
or not be able to hold it in you take two hits
00:51:49 ►
in a situation where your clothes have been loosened and you can just flop backward
00:51:56 ►
when you need to you take two hits now many people miss the point because after two hits you feel completely peculiar.
00:52:08 ►
You feel as though your body is undergoing some strange kind of anesthesia. All the air has been
00:52:14 ►
pumped out of the room. This is the visual acuity thing I talked about last night. The colors jump up, the edges sharpen. And at that point people say, oh wow, it’s really coming on strong.
00:52:29 ►
And then what you have to do is you have to take one more enormous hit. And this separates
00:52:36 ►
the intrepid from the casual, believe me. And the facilitator doesn’t want to lean on the person you say you
00:52:47 ►
know dammit take the third hit and say no i feel completely weird i know you feel weird but take
00:52:53 ►
the third hit well if you can coax somebody into that then what happens is you close your eyes and you see the ordinary warm brown back, you know, closed eyelid scenario.
00:53:09 ►
And then these colors begin racing together and it forms this mandolic, floral, slowly rotating thing,
00:53:21 ►
which I call the chrysanthemum.
00:53:24 ►
This is a place in the trip that you want to see as you go
00:53:28 ►
by it. The chrysanthemum forms and you watch it for like 15 seconds. If it doesn’t give way,
00:53:40 ►
then you didn’t do enough. You have to do more.
00:53:45 ►
One more hit usually will do it.
00:53:48 ►
Well, then what happens is it like physically propels you
00:53:52 ►
through this chrysanthemum-like thing,
00:53:56 ►
and there’s a sound like a saran wrap bread wrapper
00:54:01 ►
being crumpled up and thrown away, know that crackle a friend of mine says this
00:54:07 ►
is your radio interlecky leaving through the anterior fontanelle at the top of your head
00:54:13 ►
i don’t know what it is but it’s something is being yeah right that’s what it is. And then there’s this very, very defined sense of bursting through something,
00:54:32 ►
a membrane. And on the other side, and this is now, remember, my experience, on the other side, as you break through, there’s a cheer.
00:54:53 ►
There’s a whole bunch of entities waiting on the other side.
00:54:56 ►
And they, you know that Pink Floyd song,
00:55:01 ►
the gnomes have learned a new way to say hooray.
00:55:04 ►
Well, it’s that place.
00:55:12 ►
It’s those gnomes. And you burst into this space and they’re saying, how wonderful that you’re here. You come so rarely. We’re so delighted to see you. And one of the things about the MT that’s really puzzling is, in a sense, it doesn’t affect your mind.
00:55:32 ►
In other words, you don’t change.
00:55:36 ►
For instance, if you take ketamine, the first thing you notice, the very first thing you notice before the trip hits,
00:55:43 ►
is you notice that you no longer
00:55:46 ►
are anxious about having taken ketamine. You just sort of, anxiety leaves you. That means it’s
00:55:52 ►
affecting your mind. It’s doing something to the judgmental machinery. DMT doesn’t lay a hand on
00:56:00 ►
the judgmental machinery. You break through into that space
00:56:05 ►
exactly who you were before breaking through.
00:56:08 ►
And the usual reaction of most people
00:56:11 ►
is something like…
00:56:15 ►
You know, you think,
00:56:18 ►
God!
00:56:20 ►
Heartbeat?
00:56:22 ►
Normal.
00:56:23 ►
Pulse?
00:56:29 ►
Normal. Everything’s normal. Yeah, everything’s normal, yeah, everything’s normal, oh God,
00:56:37 ►
because these things are there, and they’re hammering at you, and they come forward, they’re like jeweled, self-dribbling basketballs, and there are many of them and they come pounding toward you and they will stop in front
00:56:48 ►
of you and vibrate but then they do a very disconcerting thing which is they jump into your
00:56:55 ►
body. They jump into your body and then they jump back out again and the whole thing is going on in this very high speed mode
00:57:08 ►
where you’re being presented with thousands of details per second
00:57:12 ►
and you can’t get a hold on
00:57:15 ►
you say, you know, my God, what’s happening?
00:57:18 ►
and these things are saying
00:57:20 ►
don’t abandon yourself to amazement
00:57:24 ►
which is exactly what you want to do. You just want to
00:57:28 ►
go nuts with how crazy this is. They say, don’t do that. Don’t do that. Pay attention. Pay attention
00:57:36 ►
to what we’re doing. Well, what are they doing? Well, what they’re doing is they’re making objects with their voices. They’re singing
00:57:49 ►
structures into existence. These things are, and what they will do is they’ll come toward
00:57:56 ►
you and then, and you have to understand they don’t have arms, so we’re kind of downloading
00:58:02 ►
this into a lower dimension to even describe it,
00:58:05 ►
but what they do is they offer things to you.
00:58:07 ►
Say, look at this, look at this, and as your attention goes toward these objects,
00:58:15 ►
you realize that what you’re being shown is impossible.
00:58:22 ►
It’s impossible. It’s impossible. It’s not simply intricate, beautiful, and hard to manufacture.
00:58:30 ►
It’s impossible to make these things. The nearest analogy would be to the Fabergé eggs,
00:58:37 ►
or something like that. But these things are like the toys that are scattered around the nursery inside a UFO or something.
00:58:47 ►
Celestial toys.
00:58:48 ►
And the toys themselves appear to be somehow alive.
00:58:54 ►
The toys themselves can sing other objects into existence.
00:59:01 ►
So what’s happening is there’s just this proliferation of elf gifts. And
00:59:06 ►
the elf gifts are moving around, singing, and the whole thing is directed toward, they’re
00:59:14 ►
saying, do what we are doing. And they’re very insistent. They say, do it, do it do it and you feel like a bubble and now this is subjective i mean only you know five
00:59:30 ►
percent report this but it happens to me you feel like some kind of bubble inside your body that’s
00:59:38 ►
beginning to move up toward your mouth and when it comes out it isn’t sound it’s vision you begin to
00:59:48 ►
discover that you can pump stuff out of your mouth by singing and they’re
00:59:55 ►
urging you to do this they say that’s it that’s it keep doing it and the whole thing is like, you know, we’re now at minute 4.5 with this stuff.
01:00:08 ►
And you speak in a kind of glossolalia.
01:00:12 ►
There’s a spontaneous outpouring of syntax unaccompanied by what is normally called meaning.
01:00:21 ►
It’s sort of, you know,.
01:00:35 ►
And this is accompanied by a modality, something seen.
01:00:40 ►
And they say, do it, do it, do it.
01:00:43 ►
And then after a minute or so of this, the whole thing begins to collapse in on itself.
01:00:49 ►
And they literally begin to physically move away from you.
01:00:53 ►
And usually their final shot is they actually wave goodbye and they say,
01:01:01 ►
déjà vu, déjà vu, which makes no sense at all if you analyze it. So then you come down,
01:01:11 ►
and you’re now at minute six to seven, and you come down, and it’s like being more loaded than
01:01:18 ►
you’ve ever been. It’s like about a 700-mic acid trip, but you embrace it as totally down. You say, I’m totally down. I mean, you look
01:01:31 ►
like a termite from Arturus, and the room is decorated in Amish quilts, but I’m completely back.
01:01:41 ►
And then, over a minute or a minute and a half or so, the room just comes right back together.
01:01:49 ►
And four minutes after that, some people can give no account of it whatsoever.
01:01:56 ►
They just say, I don’t know, it was the weirdest thing that ever happened to me, and I can’t remember it now. And so that’s the basic run-through. Now a lot of stuff is going on in there. First of all,
01:02:16 ►
you know, what are these things? And why do they want you to do this strange activity?
01:02:25 ►
And what’s so great about it?
01:02:29 ►
Well, first of all, who are these things?
01:02:36 ►
We can be good scientists and make a list of the possibilities
01:02:42 ►
and then see which seems more likely.
01:02:54 ►
They could be a disincarnate race of hyper-dimensional dwellers who live in some kind of parallel continuum
01:02:57 ►
just over some kind of energy barrier,
01:03:01 ►
and they’re there all the time.
01:03:04 ►
You do have the feeling that they’re there all the time. You do have the feeling that they’re there all
01:03:07 ►
the time, that it’s ongoing, that you have just cut into their scene. So that’s one possibility.
01:03:17 ►
Another possibility is that behind all these psychedelics and especially DMT, that this is not a drug at all, that it is essentially
01:03:27 ►
a pay telephone of some sort to aliens, good old National Enquirer type aliens who are
01:03:39 ►
using this as a communication domain. So, you know, we can’t land on the White House
01:03:47 ►
lawn. That would create panic and hysteria. So let’s create a drug which
01:03:52 ►
inside the drug we will be able to deal with people. And I was hoping that John
01:03:59 ►
Mack, who’s an expert on UFO abductions would be here this weekend I expected him
01:04:06 ►
because I think this whole abduction thing is not going to be eliminated
01:04:12 ►
until they start giving abductees DMT and saying so is this what happened to
01:04:18 ►
you was it like this or was it completely different well so then those
01:04:24 ►
are the two possibilities
01:04:26 ►
that I’ve sort of dealt with
01:04:28 ►
over the first 10 or 15 years of thinking about this.
01:04:32 ►
And then recently…
01:04:33 ►
Just one second.
01:04:35 ►
So possibly that experience
01:04:37 ►
that people are interpreting as an abduction
01:04:39 ►
is just a hyper-production of endogenous DMT within the brain.
01:04:44 ►
It could be.
01:04:45 ►
What puzzles me is that the abduction thing
01:04:48 ►
is so non-psychedelic.
01:04:51 ►
It’s so cut and dried.
01:04:53 ►
And all this anal examination stuff
01:04:57 ►
with strange machinery,
01:04:58 ►
there’s nothing comparable to that,
01:05:00 ►
I’m happy to report to,
01:05:02 ►
going on in the DMT thing?
01:05:06 ►
But it may be, you see…
01:05:09 ►
Maybe the filter explains what they’ve done.
01:05:12 ►
Well, I’d be interested in looking at the possibility
01:05:15 ►
that DMT under normal or abnormal conditions
01:05:19 ►
could be sequestered in the human brain
01:05:22 ►
and then some unusual stimulus or stress
01:05:27 ►
could cause it to suddenly be dumped.
01:05:31 ►
And, yeah?
01:05:31 ►
I want to share that there have been some migraines
01:05:33 ►
that I’ve had where, you know,
01:05:35 ►
what you just described about the colors coming in
01:05:38 ►
and the fascination that’s happened,
01:05:39 ►
it’s been so fascinating that I’ve completely forgotten
01:05:42 ►
about the pain.
01:05:44 ►
Yeah, that’s an interesting possibility.
01:05:46 ►
I also have migraines, or the kind called cluster headaches.
01:05:51 ►
And yes, a lot of those, the nice thing about DMT is that it’s painless,
01:05:57 ►
but the sense of being split open and of the traveling scatometer,
01:06:03 ►
as they call these hallucinations that migraine people see.
01:06:07 ►
It’s related in some way, yeah.
01:06:10 ►
A larger spectrum?
01:06:12 ►
Yeah, I think, no, I think that that’s a very interesting avenue to pursue, this thing about frequency.
01:06:19 ►
Somebody told me, one of the great things about this job is you hear a lot of weird stories and somebody told me
01:06:25 ►
a story recently about it didn’t involve DMT it involved LSD but this guy and a friend of his
01:06:32 ►
took a quite large dose of LSD larger than they intended and they went to a party and they were
01:06:41 ►
so loaded by the time they got to the party that they realized they could not function as party goers.
01:06:48 ►
So they just moved into a corner and sat with their backs to the wall and watched this party rage in front of them.
01:06:57 ►
And after about 20 minutes of sitting there, they both simultaneously noticed, it was a dance party,
01:07:07 ►
noticed that the music was sounding really strange, and everybody was moving very slowly.
01:07:17 ►
And as they watched, the thing came to an absolute halt, and people were just frozen and there was absolute silence and at
01:07:28 ►
that point the door at the other end of the room swung open and an elf entered the room
01:07:40 ►
and moved among all these frozen people
01:07:45 ►
and then left by the door he came in.
01:07:48 ►
And they both saw this,
01:07:50 ►
and they said that they could tell that it was,
01:07:54 ►
that the people in the room didn’t know it happened
01:07:57 ►
because for them it occupied a microsecond.
01:08:01 ►
But this thing that was, you know,
01:08:03 ►
and Carlos Castaneda, who God knows
01:08:04 ►
is not the world’s most reliable reporter on these things nevertheless
01:08:09 ►
there is this thing about stopping the world so maybe it’s something like that
01:08:15 ►
that there is as you suggest a frequency phase yeah this sort of leads into the
01:08:22 ►
third possibility having to do with the origin of these things.
01:08:26 ►
And in a sense, this is the hardest one to swallow.
01:08:31 ►
But in another sense, this is the most conservative,
01:08:36 ►
in some crazy notion of conservative,
01:08:38 ►
the most conservative explanation,
01:08:41 ►
because we have no evidence other than the tabloids that this world
01:08:48 ►
is being visited by friendly visitors from Zenebogonubi or Zeta Reticuli or the
01:08:54 ►
Pleiades or anywhere else. I mean to my mind the evidence that this is happening
01:08:58 ►
is vanishingly small and totally underwhelming. The other possibility that there’s some kind
01:09:08 ►
of parallel dimension in which these things exist is also somewhat poorly
01:09:14 ►
supported. If we’re talking about something which thinks, something which
01:09:20 ►
can communicate, something which is intelligent, then we should look to
01:09:26 ►
ourselves as the source of it, because we are the only intelligent communicating
01:09:32 ►
things we know within a certain moral definition of these things. So that it’s
01:09:37 ►
occurred to me with greater and greater force and largely prompted by giving DMT
01:09:43 ►
occasionally to Tibetans and Amazonian shamans.
01:09:48 ►
And when you say to them, you know, to the shamans in the Amazon,
01:09:51 ►
when you say to them, what is happening with this stuff?
01:09:55 ►
And what are those little things in there?
01:09:59 ►
They say, oh, well, those are ancestor spirits.
01:10:02 ►
Didn’t you know? Haven’t you heard?
01:10:02 ►
Oh, well, those are ancestor spirits.
01:10:04 ►
Didn’t you know? Haven’t you heard?
01:10:08 ►
Shamanism is about doing healing through the intercession of ancestor spirits.
01:10:11 ►
So, hmm, ancestor spirits.
01:10:14 ►
Let’s get this straight.
01:10:17 ►
Dead people is what you’re talking about, right?
01:10:19 ►
These are dead people.
01:10:22 ►
And, you know, maybe because I was raised Catholic,
01:10:24 ►
I resisted this like
01:10:26 ►
grim death. But I’m beginning to think that what we actually break into in that place
01:10:33 ►
is something that we might call an ecology of souls. That is it possible to entertain the notion that at death you actually don’t just become worm food,
01:10:50 ►
but that something survives in some other dimension,
01:10:56 ►
and that it has this bizarre character to it,
01:11:00 ►
and that this explains their peculiar affection for humanity
01:11:05 ►
and their involvement somehow in our fate.
01:11:12 ►
Well, this is to me fairly mind-bending as a possibility.
01:11:17 ►
If what is awaiting us at the end of the 20th century
01:11:21 ►
is the erasure of the boundary between the living and the dead, then we’ve
01:11:27 ►
all been too conservative in our projections of what is going on now.
01:11:33 ►
Isn’t that one of the aspects of the returning of the Messiah, the potential of the law?
01:11:39 ►
Yes, that there will be some kind of erasure of the boundary between the two.
01:11:45 ►
Well, once I had this idea, you know,
01:11:48 ►
I mentioned my Jungian and art historical proclivities,
01:11:52 ►
and so that means you always look back through tradition and folklore
01:11:56 ►
to try and find something analogous to this.
01:11:59 ►
Well, there ain’t much, but there is one area that seems suggestive to me,
01:12:05 ►
and that is, as you all know, the Irish are a very haunted race.
01:12:14 ►
They’re also an intoxication-obsessed race, at least in stereotype.
01:12:20 ►
Well, it turns out that you probably all are familiar with the notion of purgatory.
01:12:29 ►
Purgatory is the place where you have to spend a lot of time before you get to heaven
01:12:34 ►
if you’re not bad enough to go to hell.
01:12:38 ►
So you put in a few chalculeocasms of eternity in purgatory,
01:12:45 ►
and then you get led into heaven.
01:12:47 ►
Well, I had always assumed that this dogma,
01:12:51 ►
I don’t know, I hadn’t really thought about it,
01:12:53 ►
I just sort of assumed it arose with early Christianity.
01:12:57 ►
But when I began looking into this,
01:12:59 ►
I discovered that the idea of purgatory was invented by Saint Patrick.
01:13:06 ►
And it was invented specifically to convert the pagan Irish,
01:13:12 ►
because the pagan Irish believed in the land of Fae.
01:13:18 ►
They believed there was this nearby dimension full of the souls of the dead
01:13:23 ►
surrounding us all the time, and that certain people with the
01:13:27 ►
gift of second sight could see this so patrick just said to them oh no that isn’t it it’s purgatory
01:13:36 ►
and was able to push that on them so successfully that a later church council adopted it as general dogma for the church to use in converting the pagan Slavs as well.
01:13:50 ►
So it’s an idea of a nearby dimension inhabited by disincarnate souls that is apparently very old but very alien to our tradition.
01:14:07 ►
There is another notion that there are some quantum figures and that there is going to be a growth of the solar system in the future
01:14:13 ►
but it’s kind of related and it has to do with the quantum wave function which is kind of a dual wave.
01:14:18 ►
It has two parts to it. well yeah this could be I mean I’ve always felt
01:14:25 ►
that what biology is
01:14:27 ►
is some rude
01:14:29 ►
kind of chemical
01:14:30 ►
strategy for
01:14:33 ►
amplifying quantum mechanical
01:14:35 ►
indeterminacy
01:14:36 ►
that you know macro physical
01:14:39 ►
objects are not subject
01:14:41 ►
to quantum mechanical indeterminacy
01:14:43 ►
but organisms apparently are, especially thinking organisms.
01:14:48 ►
We don’t know.
01:14:50 ►
That’s our perception.
01:14:51 ►
Our perception is that objects on a macro scale, large scale,
01:14:56 ►
are not subject to quantum fluctuations.
01:15:01 ►
But we really don’t know.
01:15:03 ►
What you’re sort of saying is that natural laws only apply some of the time,
01:15:09 ►
which gives them a curious status as laws in that case.
01:15:13 ►
Well, that’s sort of broadening the notion of relativity.
01:15:17 ►
I mean, what happens in a black hole, for example?
01:15:21 ►
What is singularity? It simply means that the laws that normally apply in everyday experience no longer are relevant.
01:15:28 ►
Well, one of the problems cosmology is meeting is that there are so many large black holes
01:15:34 ►
in the universe that you come up with, you know, ten high six singularities. That’s a
01:15:41 ►
few more singularities than a good theory would tolerate, I would think.
01:15:47 ►
I mean, what kind of theory is it that hands you back ten to the ninth singularities, which are exceptions to the theory?
01:15:57 ►
That’s true, but a lot of that’s based on assumptions that are special. And that’s the truth. It gets back to a psychedelic experience.
01:16:08 ►
It’s this whole lower dimensional language slice thing that we seem to have to operate in order to describe an experience that just does not fit.
01:16:18 ►
We do our best to do it, and sometimes it comes across being very crude and naive.
01:16:25 ►
Sometimes we kind of get close to the mark, but it’s difficult to know.
01:16:29 ►
I mean, the whole notion of Black Hole Singularity is just the present attempt at explaining some experience
01:16:39 ►
that is beyond ordinary experience.
01:16:43 ►
None of us have encountered a glass of dreidel anymore.
01:16:47 ►
That’s true.
01:16:49 ►
It seems to me one of the embarrassments of science
01:16:52 ►
is that the Big Bang begins with a singularity.
01:16:58 ►
And so then you have this whole vast interlocking schema
01:17:02 ►
of rational explanation,
01:17:05 ►
except that it begins with a hard swallow. You’re asked to believe that the entire cosmos of
01:17:12 ►
space and time sprang from a point no larger than a cross-section of a gnat’s
01:17:18 ►
eyelash. Whatever else one could say about that theory,
01:17:29 ►
I think you’d agree it’s the limit case for credulity.
01:17:31 ►
I mean, if you believe that,
01:17:35 ►
try to think of something that you would throw up your hands and say,
01:17:37 ►
well, I’m not buying that.
01:17:42 ►
It’s sort of like when you join the Catholic Church,
01:17:45 ►
you make a declaration of faith. Well, when you join science, Catholic Church you make a declaration of faith but when you join science
01:17:46 ►
you sort of make this declaration of faith
01:17:49 ►
but I do believe that the universe
01:17:51 ►
sprang in a single instant
01:17:52 ►
from an incredibly tiny
01:17:54 ►
hot dense dot
01:17:56 ►
unlikely
01:17:58 ►
but who knows
01:18:00 ►
there was something else
01:18:02 ►
as you two were dialoguing a bit
01:18:04 ►
I was getting this visualization of,
01:18:07 ►
you have to look at the pond of reality, so to speak, as not only being the visual of
01:18:16 ►
someone throwing a pebble from the top of the pond and creating the ripple effect or
01:18:22 ►
the wave effect, but also from the bubbles coming from below.
01:18:26 ►
And to me, the deep space that you’re talking about is the air inside the bubble coming
01:18:30 ►
from below.
01:18:31 ►
And so the dimensional reality of that picture is not a linear time perspective.
01:18:38 ►
It’s something coming from all directions.
01:18:40 ►
It is, again, a center of the mindala effect.
01:18:42 ►
Well, this is why I say the psychedelic experience
01:18:46 ►
is a boundary-dissolving experience
01:18:48 ►
because it takes away past, present, cause, effect.
01:18:53 ►
All of these things disappear.
01:18:57 ►
Now remember I said ayahuasca is a kind of slow-release DMT trip.
01:19:04 ►
And one of the really interesting things going on with ayahuasca,
01:19:08 ►
to my mind perhaps the most interesting thing,
01:19:11 ►
is that the style in the Amazon of taking ayahuasca
01:19:15 ►
is people get together in a darkened hut at night
01:19:21 ►
and they take it and they sing.
01:19:24 ►
But the songs, they’re selling them at the table back there,
01:19:30 ►
the songs, when there’s a break in the singing
01:19:33 ►
and you hear the people discussing the songs,
01:19:36 ►
they don’t discuss them like music.
01:19:40 ►
They discuss them like sculpture and painting.
01:19:44 ►
And they say to the shaman,
01:19:45 ►
I like the part with the gray bars and the blue speckling,
01:19:51 ►
but when you brought in the pink in combination with the beige and white,
01:19:56 ►
I thought it was too much.
01:19:58 ►
You say, what kind of a discussion is this about a song?
01:20:01 ►
You realize then when you take ayahuasca, they see the songs.
01:20:08 ►
And now this is really interesting to me because you remember in the DMT flash
01:20:14 ►
they wanted you to use your voice to make objects. Well then in the ayahuasca trance
01:20:20 ►
you use your voice to control these colored modalities and the whole thing is
01:20:29 ►
done that way.
01:20:30 ►
So then what it must mean is that the neurophysiology of ayahuasca somehow allows for the ordinary
01:20:40 ►
signal processing which is being shunted into the audio pathway in the brain is
01:20:46 ►
instead being shunted into the optical pathway. This is what’s called a
01:20:51 ►
synesthesia. These things have been fascinating for hundreds of years to
01:20:56 ►
people, but the synesthesia means that, you know, color as sounds are seen. Well,
01:21:03 ►
now, is this anything other than a neurophysiological curiosity
01:21:07 ►
well i maintain it is because i think that a language which could be seen would be a kind of
01:21:17 ►
telepathic language if you’ve thought much about telepathy, you might have naively assumed that telepathy is you hearing me think.
01:21:30 ►
That isn’t what it is, I think.
01:21:33 ►
Telepathy is you seeing what I mean.
01:21:38 ►
And it’s not something which happens dramatically.
01:21:42 ►
It is a function of eloquence.
01:21:46 ►
You know, first you have the speaker who is boring you to death,
01:21:51 ►
then you have the speaker who at least holds your attention,
01:21:55 ►
then you have the speaker of whom it is said,
01:21:58 ►
she paints a picture.
01:22:00 ►
It means we’re moving toward poetry.
01:22:03 ►
Well, it’s possible to imagine a transformation
01:22:06 ►
of the neural processing of language.
01:22:09 ►
It may be a behavioral possibility.
01:22:12 ►
It may not even require a gene shift,
01:22:15 ►
where then we would see what we each mean.
01:22:18 ►
You know, there’s this persistent idea
01:22:21 ►
promulgated by Robert Graves in The White Goddess,
01:22:24 ►
among other people that
01:22:26 ►
there was once what he calls an ursba, a primal language so emotionally intense
01:22:35 ►
that to be in the presence of poetry declaimed in this language is to see the
01:22:43 ►
poetry and that this is what the lost poetics of the high
01:22:47 ►
paleolithic were about and probably it was pharmacologically assisted that you could gather
01:22:55 ►
people in the presence of a great bard or singer and that person could then create telepathic modalities. And that telepathic modality, that richer,
01:23:10 ►
more unifying language, was the thing which was suppressing the formation of ego. The
01:23:17 ►
ego speaks and hears through sound. The superego projects images and is perceived as images.
01:23:26 ►
Now, it’s very interesting, at least to me,
01:23:30 ►
that in the pineal gland of ordinary human beings
01:23:35 ►
there is a compound called adenoglomerotropene,
01:23:39 ►
which, when analyzed in an organic,
01:23:43 ►
or just in the normal nomenclature
01:23:45 ►
of organic
01:23:46 ►
chemistry
01:23:46 ►
turns out
01:23:47 ►
to be
01:23:48 ►
a beta
01:23:50 ►
carboline
01:23:50 ►
closely related
01:23:51 ►
to harboline
01:23:52 ►
well is it
01:23:54 ►
possible
01:23:54 ►
that we
01:23:56 ►
are as
01:23:56 ►
close as
01:23:57 ►
a one
01:23:58 ►
gene
01:23:59 ►
mutation
01:23:59 ►
away
01:24:00 ►
from a
01:24:01 ►
shift that
01:24:02 ►
would switch
01:24:03 ►
our processing
01:24:04 ►
of audio
01:24:04 ►
input into the visual field, and
01:24:07 ►
that then we would cross over into a realm of beheld understanding, and that this is
01:24:15 ►
the evolutionary loop that we’re trying to make, that it’s in the body, not in the technology, in the body there is actually going to be a minor, a one gene click
01:24:28 ►
to another channel and then we will be able to see what we mean. And I maintain that if you can
01:24:35 ►
see what somebody means, you are that person. Contrast it to ordinary communication. Ordinary communication is achieved through
01:24:50 ►
small mouth noises. As primates we have’m the living proof of it. But it’s not a very efficient
01:25:11 ►
mode of communication because what happens is I have a thought. I look in a culturally sanctioned
01:25:20 ►
dictionary which I have copied into my head, I translate the thought into an acoustical
01:25:27 ►
signal using my mouth, which moves across space, which enters your ears.
01:25:34 ►
You rush to your interior dictionary, and you construct my meaning out of your dictionary.
01:25:42 ►
Now, notice that this process rests on a very shaky assumption.
01:25:47 ►
It rests on the assumption that your dictionary and my dictionary were published by the same
01:25:53 ►
folks in the same year. If your dictionary is different from mine, you will not correctly
01:26:01 ►
reconstruct my meaning, and you will have what we call misunderstanding. Notice
01:26:09 ►
how among us as a species, one of the most burned down things you can say to somebody
01:26:15 ►
is, would you please explain to me what I just said? Because it means, oh boy, here
01:26:22 ►
comes trouble. Now you’re going to find out that, you know, people didn’t understand you,
01:26:28 ►
they horribly misunderstood, and the communication is very provisional.
01:26:35 ►
The amount of noise in the circuit is huge.
01:26:38 ►
Well then contrast this to, I utter something, and it condenses as a sculpture in the air, and you and I then become
01:26:51 ►
its observers, and we rotate this syntactical object, and we look at it, we regard it from many
01:27:00 ►
points of view. This is not ambiguous, or it’s certainly considerably less ambiguous
01:27:06 ►
than this reconstruction from interiorized dictionaries.
01:27:11 ►
So perhaps what all this is about is evolutionary pressure on our languages to become visual
01:27:19 ►
and therefore to become more unified and less riddled with noise,
01:27:28 ►
which creates misunderstanding, which creates horrible social realities.
01:27:34 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:27:36 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:27:41 ►
So, have you figured out where and when Terrence gave this talk?
01:27:47 ►
Well, now I have a confession to make.
01:27:50 ►
After I digitized this talk and returned the tape to the package it came in,
01:27:55 ►
I discovered another hand-labeled tape that is, well, it’s most likely the first half of the talk that we just listened to.
01:28:02 ►
However, I didn’t feel like digitizing that and starting
01:28:05 ►
all over and putting this podcast a couple more days out, so I’m not going to tell you what it
01:28:11 ►
says right now. First, let’s see if anyone figures out where and when this one was given, and I’ll be
01:28:17 ►
sure to keep you informed of any progress on this mysterious front. Anyhow, since Terrence went into
01:28:23 ►
such detail about black holes, I feel I should
01:28:26 ►
probably point out to you that recently, with the publication of Stephen Hawking’s last paper,
01:28:32 ►
the view that the boundaries around black holes present singularities may soon fade away. So,
01:28:39 ►
you may want to take the discussion of black holes in this talk with a few grains of sand.
01:28:45 ►
I think the jury is still out about the physical phenomena that we call black holes.
01:28:50 ►
Now, since Terence spent so much time talking about the end of the world,
01:28:53 ►
and he also used the religious concept of a possible ecology of souls,
01:28:59 ►
I feel obliged to play the devil’s advocate here
01:29:03 ►
and point you in another direction of inquiry about
01:29:05 ►
these things. It’s been my experience that us psychonauts, having experienced some exceedingly
01:29:12 ►
strange encounters with what may at first seem to be otherworldly entities, well, we quickly fall
01:29:18 ►
back on the language that we grew up with as children when we were being indoctrinated into a religion, and that explains Terence’s ecology of souls metaphor.
01:29:29 ►
What I would like to suggest is that we all take a step back from the tenets of organized religion
01:29:34 ►
and discuss these experiences without the baggage of religious language that most of us are burdened with.
01:29:42 ►
To begin with, I suggest that you read Sigmund Freud’s short book,
01:29:47 ►
The Future of Illusion, which provides a solid argument against what I consider to be the
01:29:53 ►
superstitious beliefs that are the core of all religions. I’m not going to go into it here,
01:29:58 ►
but until you’ve read that book, we really won’t have a common ground on which to begin to create
01:30:03 ►
a new language in which to discuss the cosmos,
01:30:06 ►
a language that doesn’t use any of the normal buzzwords found in major religions.
01:30:11 ►
And I can attest to the fact that it isn’t easy to shed the religious beliefs we were forced to believe as children.
01:30:17 ►
I can also attest to the fact that once you overcome these childish fantasies,
01:30:22 ►
you will find a peace that, well, I never found in the religion of my parents.
01:30:27 ►
The way that I began my journey out of the darkness of religious belief is to ask myself a question that Terrence once posed,
01:30:34 ►
and that is, why do you believe what you do?
01:30:38 ►
What is the basis of your belief?
01:30:40 ►
No one can answer that question for you, but, well, it seems to me to be important that you answer that question for yourself,
01:30:47 ►
at least before you decide to indoctrinate your own children into a religion whose essence you’ve never actually questioned.
01:30:55 ►
Well, that’s enough lecturing from me for today.
01:31:00 ►
And I think that I’ve mentioned this before, but since Terrence was talking so much about DMT just now, I want to be sure that this little tidbit isn’t lost.
01:31:10 ►
Hopefully, some brilliant chemist will explore this in some depth and tell us what it may mean.
01:31:16 ►
But did you know that NN-DMT is piezoelectric?
01:31:21 ►
As you know, when a small hammer strikes a piezoelectrical material, it creates a voltage
01:31:27 ►
that’s sufficient to make a spark. And this technique is most often used in expensive
01:31:32 ►
cigarette lighters to eliminate the need for flint, which requires frequent replacing.
01:31:38 ►
Now here is a little known fact that I learned from Nick Sand. He told me about the day that he cooked up a large batch of DMT, and to cool it he poured the liquid into a big metal sheet that
01:31:50 ►
had been used for making cookies. And after it crystallized he decided to use
01:31:55 ►
a hammer and screwdriver to chip the solidified DMT out of the cookie sheet.
01:31:59 ►
And as he began to chip, he noticed that with every blow of the hammer to the screwdriver
01:32:06 ►
a big spark would jump up from the sheet of DMT. Now this may actually be a nothing burger but
01:32:13 ►
well it seems to me that at the very least some inspired chemistry grad student should investigate
01:32:18 ►
what I find to be a very fascinating phenomena. But hey, I’m still a kid at heart, and anything that makes
01:32:26 ►
a spark has always interested me, not to mention the sparks that DMT makes in my brain when I smoke
01:32:32 ►
it. And I guess that should be enough for now, so this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.
01:32:40 ►
Be well, my friends. Thank you.