Program Notes
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http://octopusmessiah.com/Guest speaker: Terence McKenna
Date this lecture was recorded: March 1996
[NOTE: All quotations are by Terence McKenna
“Nature is the original Internet. Nature is some kind of interconnected, communicating, data routing, self-regulating, non-equilibrium system.”
“I think what nature teaches, and what life teaches, is that worry is preposterous. Worry is a form of ego mania, because in order to worry you have to assume you understand the situation. What are the odds that you actually do understand the situation? Very low, I would think.”
Terence McKenna’s Website
The Techno Pagan Octopus Messiah
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Transcript
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Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic
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Salon.
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And, to begin, I’d like to thank Loaded for Travel for their generous donation directly to the salon
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to help offset some of the expenses associated with these podcasts.
00:00:35 ►
As for my patrons who are supporting my writing projects,
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I’m pleased to report that the following fellow salonners will have their names posted in the front of my next book.
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And I should point out that while sometimes a person’s financial situation changes and they
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have to stop their monthly donations, well, as long as someone has made a donation for only one
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month even, their names are going to be listed as well. Anyway, here are my newest supporters,
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whose full names will also appear in the front of Volume 2 of my Chronicles when it’s published later this year.
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And they are Logan W., Ricky B., RFS, Mark R., Sergio F., Mother Green, Father Blue, and Jordane R.
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Now, for today’s podcast, we’re going to pick up on the March 1996 Terence McKenna workshop that we began listening to in Podcast 573.
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And I’d like to repeat that this set of recordings was sent to me by Ian Wynn, the author of the newly re-released edition of The Technopagan Octopus Messiah.
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Ian tells me that the inspiration for this book arose when he attended the very workshop that we are now listening to.
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And I’ll put a link to his website in today’s program notes, which you can find at psychedelicsalon.com.
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Now, about halfway through this talk, Terrence makes a joke that I suspect the psychedelic version of Alex Jones
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is going to use to further his conspiracy theory about Terrence being a CIA asset.
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I can’t even say that with a straight face.
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His conspiracy theory that Terrence was a CIA asset.
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And by the way, if you do happen to believe such foolishness,
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then I’d like to speak with you about this bridge that my family and I have for sale in Manhattan.
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I can make you a really good deal on it if you want to pay cash.
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Well, that’s enough of my foolishness for now.
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And I’ll be back after we listen to this part of his workshop
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to further expand on my attempt to smile in the face of foolishness.
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And speed seems to expand people’s tolerance for sexual activity that they
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would ordinarily refuse. They will accept under speed. So these compounds change our sexual values
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around and a society using psilocybin on a regular basis would dissolve this male dominance hierarchy
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and replace it, I think, with the glue of an orgiastic
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and more egalitarian system.
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And for a long, long time, we lived like that.
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And in that period, when we lived like that,
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language, music, compassion, love, all the higher values emerged.
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Well then, at some point, and for complicated reasons not necessary to discuss, unless you want to,
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the mushrooms disappeared.
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And the chemical fix that had been in place for thousands and thousands of years
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that was suppressing this older male dominant style of behavior
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just drained out of the system.
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And suddenly men were very interested in controlling women’s behavior
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and the orgies were cancelled and the levels of anxiety began to rise and people began
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to think in terms of turf
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and property and my children
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and my food
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and in short
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the hideous union
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of the animal and the
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spiritual that we meet in ourselves
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came into
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being. We are
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like the inheritors of a dysfunctional childhood or something.
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Something terrible happened to all of us in our past. For a hundred thousand years, we
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were at our most human, without material culture, living in a world of magic and song and sexuality and husbandry,
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you know, living lightly on the land, herding cattle in the presence of mushrooms.
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This seems to be, that was the climax of the pre-technical phase.
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Well, then agriculture changed all that, created surpluses,
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ended nomadism
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provided a raison d’etre for
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cities the return of male
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dominance ended in
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god kings and standing armies
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and then
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you know we’ve had
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5,000 years of this now
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6,000 7,000 whatever
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and we’re at the end of our rope
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you know the planet is at crisis.
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Our politicians are clueless.
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Divine intervention is our best hope,
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either from flying saucers or the second coming or something.
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And in the presence of so much obvious overwhelming difficulty people are turning more and
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more toward irrational faiths and just waiting for the space brothers to pull
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us out of this mess oh yeah well you know to quote a Grateful Dead song, you can’t go back and you can’t stand still.
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If the thunder don’t get you, then the lightning will.
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This thing was set in motion 100,000 years ago,
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and now we are caught in the consequences of our forebearer’s stupid decisions or brilliant decisions, whatever,
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but we’re being forced through. I mean, I agree that there’s a lot of Q force building up in the society.
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In other words, vibration. It’s almost like as you try to push an airfoil through the sound barrier, as you approach
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hypersonic velocity, the thing begins to shake. And if it hasn’t been correctly designed, the wings
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will tear off. But if it has been correctly designed, the Q force will maximize and then
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very suddenly plummet, and that’s called breaking the sound barrier and you’re through it’s very clear that this
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culture is revving up to attempt the
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leap into hyperspace and it’s either
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going to succeed and we will become
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unrecognizable to ourselves and scatter
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through the galaxy as motes of light or
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we will fail and probably biology will cancel
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the R&D division on intelligent life
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and go back to ground squirrels, chipmunks, and monarch butterflies.
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That’s worked so well for so long.
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I understand a little bit the physics idea of matter seeking some sort of organization
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and then seeking a disorganization and kind of the back and forth that would flow.
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It makes me wonder about computers and the internet and the world wide web
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and how now we’re trying to structure ourselves in something that seems to be going against the human grain.
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Why do you think it goes against the human grain?
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Well, it’s artificial.
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Well, we invented artificiality.
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I mean, I don’t disagree with you.
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Somebody pointed something out to me recently that I find very interesting.
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They pointed out that in a cubic inch of forest soil,
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there’s about 11,000 miles of mycelial wiring.
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Now, we’re building something called the Internet
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and furiously laying copper and fiber optic everywhere
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and soon it will go wireless.
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I think that this net that we’re building
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is not the most artificial construction ever conceived.
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It’s a simulacrum of nature is what it is.
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Nature is the original internet.
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I mean, nature is some kind of interconnected,
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communicating, data routing, self-regulating, non-equilibrium system. And as we go nanotech, as we descend to the molecular level, our teachers are going to be plants, viruses, bacteria.
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They know how to do it down there, and we don’t.
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And I think that the artificial phase of technology
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is simply that, a phase.
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Remember in Arthur C. Clarke’s book
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The City and the Stars
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the central dictum of that society
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and it had been a rule followed for a million years
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was no machine
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shall have any moving part
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and that’s coming
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and those are machines we can barely imagine,
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and they will be smaller than a gnat’s eyelash.
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So the artificial natural thing
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seems to me a synthetic dualism.
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In fact, all dualisms are synthetic,
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because at least in my book,
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there is some kind of neoplatonic
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one that lies behind
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all the lesser
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understandings that
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give us category
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well I think you know what
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nature teaches
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and what life teaches
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is that worry is
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preposterous
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worry is a form of egomania
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because in order to worry,
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you have to assume you understand the situation.
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What are the odds that you actually do understand the situation?
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Very low, I would think,
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and the more abstract the worry.
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I’m worrying about you know ratkam ladich
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and he’s running around free over there in a country i’ve never seen now is this the same
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thing for me to be worrying about i don’t think so uh worry is preposterous and how i’ve understood
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that is i’m not a fatalist or a predestination person.
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Predestination is preposterous
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because if the world is absolutely predestined,
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then you think what you think
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because you couldn’t think anything else.
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That makes the quest for truth somewhat pointless.
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In order for there to be truth,
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there has to be error.
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Otherwise, how would we know truth so
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well that’s probably enough on that
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yeah
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I think maybe the last couple of comments
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and then my own are
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positing a third way
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which is not the technique
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of the aesthetic practices in religion or even psychedelics,
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but more a way of being in which one is open and receptive to the incredible patterns that exist within life and within wilderness.
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And maybe this is the shamans who don’t need psychedelics are able to contact that.
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And my own experience in providing a very safe experience
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for myself alone, with a great deal of solitude
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and wilderness is that things happen
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which are absolutely magical.
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And it seems to come out of my willingness to play
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and to imagine and to love the things in my environment.
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And that’s a little bit of what you’re talking about with your experience.
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And I would like that to be considered as a viable way of achieving the unity
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and the love of life that you’re talking about?
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Well, the key thing, I think, in what you said
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was to be open and aware.
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You can go to the wilderness,
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and it’s harder for some people than others,
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but psychedelics certainly make it easier.
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I mean, I’ve sat it makes it simply
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like with LSD in wilderness
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what I found is it simply makes it possible
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to sit still an unearthly
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amount of time
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and that’s all you have to do
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for it all to
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go on as soon as you
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disappear into the landscape
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then stuff begins to happen I mean amazing things go on. As soon as you disappear into the landscape, then stuff begins to happen. I mean, amazing
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things go on. I sat once on a beach in Asia, stoned on LSD, and a little crab came along
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and cleaned my fingernails, every one of them. It just moved from fingernail to fingernail.
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It had this little claw, and it etched them out.
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And it took a long time.
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And I was just like this.
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And it would climb down one finger, go out to the other one, finish, go down here.
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And, you know, only Buddha or LSD can give you that kind of power to sit still.
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I think it’s, and maybe I’ve misunderstood people,
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but I think it’s a really weird construct to dichotomize humans from nature.
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We don’t say that ants or the termites have separated themselves from nature
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by building a termite hill,
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which is a really good skyscraper for termites.
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Why all of a sudden when man goes out and builds a skyscraper
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and puts himself in it, he no longer participates in nature?
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It seems so strange to me, because we’re in a terrarium.
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It’s not like we can go leave.
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It’s such a weird thing to me to say that if you
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do certain things, sitting on the rock
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is in nature. Sitting
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on the top of the World Trade Center
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is not.
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We can’t judge that. We can’t judge
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it. It just seems so strange to me.
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There’s a categorical
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difference that people sense
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but can’t always articulate.
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What it is is nature is a genetic machine of some sort.
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Everything is under the control of genes,
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except that when you get to human beings,
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there are these things called epigenetic behaviors.
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In other words, how you make a Chevrolet is not written into the DNA of human beings.
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The anthill is a genetic program, but what we are is freakily out of control of our genetic
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heritage. We don’t behave like automata. We speak many languages. That’s unheard of, a species which has localized communication systems.
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And yet that’s how we do it.
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There is no human universal way of communicating.
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We’ve culturally fragmented that.
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Pardon me?
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Have local dialects?
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Yeah. Yeah.
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Yeah.
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Yeah, I mean,
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see, I think there’s, I mean,
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and I don’t want to get into huge arguments,
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but there’s, you know…
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Oh, no, don’t be shy.
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Different tribes will have cracked nuts differently.
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Okay?
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I mean, it’s not just a human characteristic.
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There are some that use a rock
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and a log, and they put the nut in the log and they crack it. And there are some that use a rock and a log.
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They put the nut in the log and they crack it.
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There are other gorillas that can’t crack nuts.
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Just because something is epigenetic
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does not mean it’s a part of nature.
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No, I agree with you,
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but I say people sense this difference.
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It would be quite astonishing
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if there were no epigenetic behavior outside
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of human beings. That would indicate it was some kind of descent from above. But I think
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when nature is fully understood, there will be no dramatic transitions. Everything is
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anticipated. Everything begins as a theme and then rises
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to dominate
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the orchestra.
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The other and more exciting
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possibility is
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that we are entirely under
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the control of higher order genetic
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programming and that history
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is a genetic process
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that has a purpose
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and that it is like gestation
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or fruition or something
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and that
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a good example to have
00:17:52 ►
in your intellectual toolbox
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is the slime mold
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slime molds are
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these organisms which have a very
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peculiar life cycle
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let’s cut
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in at a random point in their life cycle.
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And what we find are amoeba-like creatures,
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almost microscopic, living in the soil,
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the decaying leaves and stuff of the forest floor.
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They look like single-celled amoeba.
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But at a certain point,
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one of these individual amoeba undergoes some kind of stimulus. It’s not well understood. And it begins to emit a chemical signal which says, come to where I am.
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amoebae, which may be spread out over a few square yards of the forest floor,
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they all begin to congregate at this spot where this chemical signal is being broadcast from.
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And as they arrive, by the millions,
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the original cell and the first arrivals on the scene
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are literally lifted into the air
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by the arrival of millions and millions
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of individuals and this thing
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forms which is
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a couple of inches long and has
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a pointed stalk on it
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and now we’re looking at a macro
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physical organism with a weight in
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grams and
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it then sporulates
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and bursts
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and these spores spread out
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through the air and descend
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to the forest floor and
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become these free living amoeboid
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things and the whole cycle
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starts over again
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so this is, what is this?
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is this an animal that is
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dissolved into its cells
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at one stage of its existence?
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Or is it millions of animals that at one stage of their existence
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aggregate together to form something roughly analogous to a human city?
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I prefer the former explanation.
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It seems to me that…
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And we are like that. And history could well be a process like that.
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Something is torn loose in our species having to do with information processing and coding.
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And we literally have a symbiotic relationship with the word. And Western civilization begins, you know,
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in principio ad verbum, ad verbo carifactum est.
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In the beginning was the word, and the word is made flesh.
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So we’re like the carriers of this strange relationship
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to a logos, a kind of mind
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that doesn’t seem to be made of matter
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but that seems to permeate
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this planet
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various cultures
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contact this
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on various levels
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this is the spirit world of the
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shaman, this is the logos
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world of the Greek
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golden age, so forth and so on.
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And some societies call it God and some call it Gaia and some call it illusion.
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But all societies are aware of it as a potential experience.
00:21:17 ►
I think history has a purpose and that the obvious no-way-backness of it indicates that it is some kind of process
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that is designed.
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It is not a random walk.
00:21:35 ►
It’s not the accumulation of endless blunders.
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It actually has a purpose and an intent
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and it’s a style.
00:21:44 ►
And when it is fulfilled,
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it will be replaced by something else.
00:21:50 ►
Yeah, do you all understand the meme is
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kind of, you could say it’s the basic,
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if genes are the basic units of biology,
00:22:00 ►
memes are the basic units of ideology and culture
00:22:05 ►
so fascism is a meme
00:22:08 ►
Madonna is a meme
00:22:11 ►
all ideologies and all
00:22:14 ►
short term cultural phenomena are memes
00:22:17 ►
and these memes compete
00:22:19 ►
whatever happened to boy George
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that kind of thing
00:22:24 ►
apparently some go extinct
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and they can be replicated
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when you repeat my opinion
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it means you have copied the meme
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in the same way that you could copy a gene
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and when I write a book
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I am replicating my inner memes
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and sending out thousands of copies somewhat
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analogous to a virus and so
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inside society these memes
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are competing that’s what
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Buchanan means when he talks about cultural
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war it’s the meme war that he’s
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talking about.
00:23:05 ►
Shall we be white, Christian, upright,
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rectitudinous human beings,
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or shall we be dope-smoking, homoerotic?
00:23:14 ►
These are all memes.
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And as you said very well,
00:23:20 ►
they compete.
00:23:21 ►
And the human world is an environment
00:23:24 ►
in which these memes compete.
00:23:26 ►
And hopefully over time there is some kind of maximization of something.
00:23:31 ►
I don’t want to say progress,
00:23:33 ►
although casually people speak of progress,
00:23:36 ►
like we’re supposed to believe that Heidegger
00:23:40 ►
somehow has a deeper insight into reality than,
00:23:46 ►
I don’t know, I wouldn’t say Plato.
00:23:49 ►
I don’t think there’s been progress there.
00:23:51 ►
But who? What?
00:23:53 ►
No, I said please don’t.
00:23:56 ►
It was a bad example.
00:24:01 ►
The psychedelic meme is a perfect example.
00:24:05 ►
I mean, that’s a very strong, coherent, definable meme. It’s been furiously suppressed but
00:24:07 ►
continues to survive. It’s a
00:24:10 ►
healthy meme.
00:24:12 ►
It’s able to infect
00:24:13 ►
rapidly and spread through
00:24:15 ►
populations and somehow they accrue
00:24:18 ►
some benefit to it
00:24:20 ►
and so it’s
00:24:22 ►
preserved. I don’t know how
00:24:24 ►
we got off on this.
00:24:27 ►
Anybody else?
00:24:28 ►
Anything else?
00:24:30 ►
We still haven’t really gotten to what I planned to talk about this morning
00:24:33 ►
and we’re almost done.
00:24:34 ►
That’s a good sign.
00:24:36 ►
Well, it was basically just to make sure you’re fully up to speed
00:24:41 ►
on the psychedelic options available.
00:24:44 ►
No pun intended for example if
00:24:49 ►
you have a problem with the illegality of some of these substances then alpha salvinorin or
00:24:57 ►
salvia divinorum is a new plant and a new compound on the scene not scheduled, not illegal
00:25:05 ►
perfectly okay to grow, possess, advocate
00:25:08 ►
give people, so forth and so on
00:25:11 ►
and quite radical
00:25:13 ►
dislocation of the senses
00:25:17 ►
in Rimbaud’s phrase
00:25:19 ►
occurs with this, it also has some interesting
00:25:22 ►
technical aspects to it.
00:25:26 ►
The most impressive being it’s active at the one milligram level.
00:25:30 ►
A thousand micrograms of this stuff.
00:25:34 ►
And it’s smoked.
00:25:35 ►
So this is a one milligram smokable psychedelic
00:25:40 ►
that knocks the pins out from under you pretty dramatically
00:25:44 ►
for about 45 minutes.
00:25:46 ►
The leaf can be chewed.
00:25:48 ►
The plant can be grown as a house plant, so forth and so on.
00:25:53 ►
So that’s one option that’s available.
00:25:56 ►
The other thing you might…
00:25:57 ►
Can you give the name again?
00:25:59 ►
Salvia divinorum. Yeah.
00:26:01 ►
I’m growing something.
00:26:03 ►
Somebody gave me a plant.
00:26:05 ►
And so what do I do with it?
00:26:06 ►
If you just want to take
00:26:09 ►
the leaf,
00:26:11 ►
get some big leaves
00:26:13 ►
and there’s some controversy
00:26:15 ►
about how much you need
00:26:17 ►
or whether a lot is more than a little.
00:26:20 ►
But anyway, I took
00:26:21 ►
35 grams.
00:26:23 ►
But it was a huge mouthful, I must say.
00:26:26 ►
So try 20 grams and weigh it.
00:26:30 ►
Remove the mid-vein so it loses volume.
00:26:34 ►
Roll it up into a package and shove it in your mouth.
00:26:37 ►
And lie down in darkness.
00:26:40 ►
And slowly squeeze and chew it
00:26:43 ►
in order to expel this juice into your mouth
00:26:47 ►
and lie still.
00:26:50 ►
And after about 15 or 20 minutes,
00:26:53 ►
you’ll see what’s called streaming violet blobs of light
00:26:59 ►
sliding past your eyes.
00:27:01 ►
You see this after orgasms sometimes,
00:27:03 ►
and you see it in anticipation of psychedelics often.
00:27:08 ►
So that will happen.
00:27:10 ►
And about three minutes after that,
00:27:12 ►
it becomes dramatically visionary and quite bizarre.
00:27:17 ►
I mean, on a par with DMT,
00:27:20 ►
these stretching, sucking, liquid things,
00:27:29 ►
and very bright, the hallucinations. And interesting to me, I’ve never had this with any other compound, I was sitting in darkness in a house
00:27:37 ►
with a big pyramidal skylight and the moonlight shining in, the perfect circumstance for hallucinating with eyes open, sharp edges against
00:27:46 ►
darkness, eyes open
00:27:48 ►
there was absolutely nothing
00:27:50 ►
going on
00:27:51 ►
I would close my eyes
00:27:54 ►
and it was as dramatic as turning
00:27:56 ►
on a light, it was that quick
00:27:58 ►
there was no transition
00:28:00 ►
it was just I would close my eyes and here would be
00:28:02 ►
these
00:28:03 ►
slowly undulating three-dimensional tunnels and recessional surfaces and stuff.
00:28:11 ►
So I find it quite fascinating.
00:28:15 ►
And then to the chemist, it’s extremely fascinating because it’s in a class of compounds unknown to contain psychoactive compounds. Well now
00:28:26 ►
they’re going back into it
00:28:27 ►
and with
00:28:28 ►
liquid CO2
00:28:33 ►
chromatography, very cold
00:28:35 ►
solvent chromatography which is
00:28:37 ►
very precise
00:28:40 ►
and non-destructive
00:28:41 ►
they’re finding a whole
00:28:43 ►
family of these
00:28:45 ►
salvanorene compounds.
00:28:48 ►
And what this will lead to
00:28:50 ►
in terms of psychedelics,
00:28:52 ►
treatments for mental illness, who knows?
00:28:54 ►
It’s amazing that
00:28:55 ►
30 years, 40 years into
00:28:58 ►
the psychedelic revolution
00:29:00 ►
we would discover
00:29:01 ►
not a new compound,
00:29:03 ►
Sasha does that three times a week,
00:29:06 ►
but a new family, a new chemical family with psychoactivity.
00:29:12 ►
That’s a new continent in the world of neuropsychopharmacology.
00:29:19 ►
And then the other thing that people are doing that is very shamanic and challenging and good thing to do is you
00:29:29 ►
probably all know about ayahuasca, this South American combinatory thing where a monoamine
00:29:37 ►
oxidase inhibitor, banisteriopsis capi, is combined with a source of tryptamine, DMT,
00:29:43 ►
is combined with a source of tryptamine, DMT,
00:29:46 ►
usually cicotriaviridis.
00:29:50 ►
And because of the MAO inhibition in the gut,
00:29:55 ►
the tryptamine, which would normally be destroyed at that point,
00:29:59 ►
passes through into the bloodstream and then passes the blood-brain barrier.
00:30:01 ►
So you can make DMT orally active
00:30:04 ►
if you complex it with an MAO inhibitor.
00:30:08 ►
Well, a whole bunch of people have realized
00:30:11 ►
that in most environments in the world,
00:30:15 ►
there are tryptamine sources.
00:30:20 ►
And so if you could combine them with an MAO inhibitor,
00:30:23 ►
you could create local variants on Amazonian ayahuasca.
00:30:27 ►
And they call this pharma-wasca or ana-wasca, meaning analog ayahuasca.
00:30:37 ►
And what people are doing is they’re using pagamen harmala as the MAO inhibitor,
00:30:45 ►
the seeds of Pagamon harmala.
00:30:47 ►
These are little black seeds,
00:30:49 ►
and you can get them from seed companies,
00:30:51 ►
or you can get them at Iranian markets,
00:30:54 ►
and they call it hormal, hormal.
00:30:57 ►
And it’s sold in Iranian markets
00:31:00 ►
to be thrown on hot charcoal to fumigate
00:31:06 ►
rooms. This is just
00:31:07 ►
a traditional use of it.
00:31:09 ►
It kills fleas. It’s a very nice
00:31:12 ►
smelling thing and a kind of an
00:31:13 ►
incense. Well, if you take
00:31:15 ►
two grams of these little black seeds
00:31:17 ►
and grind them down,
00:31:19 ►
that will inhibit your MAO
00:31:22 ►
very effectively.
00:31:24 ►
And now, any DMT-containing plant that you orally ingest will become active.
00:31:33 ►
And it turns out that DMT is very, very common in nature.
00:31:38 ►
It’s the commonest of all hallucinogens in nature.
00:31:42 ►
It occurs in numerous grasses, in leguminous trees it occurs in the
00:31:50 ►
Ruby AC it occurs in the meristic AC on and on huge families implicating this even occurs in
00:31:58 ►
certain species of fish it occurs in human metabolism. This is interesting. A schedule one drug that you are
00:32:06 ►
carrying around in your body, every man, woman, and child on this planet. Kind of the ultimate
00:32:11 ►
catch-22. Everybody is breaking the law. You must have realized that anyway. So these things can be
00:32:22 ►
complex together. Now some of the DMT sources that you might want to be aware of
00:32:27 ►
are phalaris grasses.
00:32:30 ►
These are prairie grasses,
00:32:31 ►
and some of these strains are pretty stiff.
00:32:36 ►
Red turkey is a strain of phalaris arundinaceae
00:32:41 ►
that is pretty potent.
00:32:44 ►
There’s a plant called
00:32:45 ►
Desmanthus illinoyensis
00:32:47 ►
the Illinois bundle weed
00:32:50 ►
which apparently was
00:32:52 ►
not used by the North American
00:32:54 ►
Indians, it’s only been about four
00:32:55 ►
years that it has been discovered
00:32:57 ►
that the root bark of this plant is
00:32:59 ►
intensely
00:33:00 ►
contains DMT
00:33:03 ►
and wild crafters are now
00:33:06 ►
collecting it and you can buy that plant
00:33:10 ►
if you go to Mexico
00:33:11 ►
there’s a material sold in
00:33:15 ►
Mexican pharmacies called tepescojite
00:33:18 ►
which is the root bark of
00:33:21 ►
mimosa hostiles, the same plant
00:33:24 ►
implicated in Brazil
00:33:26 ►
in a cult of a drug called Vino de Jarema.
00:33:32 ►
That is a very mysterious and not well understood DMT preparation
00:33:39 ►
taken orally, apparently without an MAO inhibitor.
00:33:42 ►
Or the MAO inhibitor must also be present
00:33:45 ►
in the single plant from which it’s prepared.
00:33:50 ►
Other sources of DMT,
00:33:53 ►
lespedeza bicolor,
00:33:54 ►
that’s a clover-like ground cover.
00:34:01 ►
Those are probably the main ones.
00:34:04 ►
So people are experimenting with these things
00:34:06 ►
and making farmawaska,
00:34:08 ►
and in some cases getting off.
00:34:10 ►
I mean, there’s a lot of clenched guts
00:34:13 ►
and hanging over the porcelain bowl
00:34:17 ►
in this line of research,
00:34:19 ►
but if you hit it right,
00:34:21 ►
you’d be very gratified.
00:34:23 ►
Yeah, well, that’s the great thing
00:34:24 ►
about having an underground. You get well, that’s the great thing about having an
00:34:25 ►
underground. You get human data that you could never get in a situation of government licensing
00:34:31 ►
because people are willing to take chances. I had a real bummer one time. I took half a dose
00:34:40 ►
of mushrooms and half a dose of ayahuasca and it had me praying for mercy it it it was not
00:34:48 ►
not like anything i’ve ever i’ve seen some weird territory but what this was was apparent as i
00:34:56 ►
analyzed it later what must have been happening was short-term memory simply was not transcripting.
00:35:06 ►
And so I was sitting there, stoned out of my mind,
00:35:09 ►
and then this thought would come.
00:35:11 ►
Something’s wrong. Something’s wrong.
00:35:15 ►
So then I would search through pulse, heartbeat.
00:35:19 ►
Nothing’s wrong.
00:35:21 ►
You say, oh, nothing’s wrong. Okay.
00:35:23 ►
And go back to the trip. Fifteen seconds later, something’s wrong. You say, oh, nothing’s wrong. Okay. And you go back to the trip.
00:35:25 ►
Fifteen seconds later,
00:35:26 ►
something’s wrong.
00:35:28 ►
You say, nothing’s wrong.
00:35:31 ►
And it got loopier and loopier.
00:35:34 ►
And I had, remember that amazing scene in 2001
00:35:37 ►
where the guy is outside the ship
00:35:40 ►
and he says,
00:35:42 ►
open the pod door, Hal.
00:35:44 ►
And he says, I pod door Hal and he says
00:35:45 ►
I can’t do that Dave
00:35:47 ►
and I had this image
00:35:50 ►
of the molecular machinery
00:35:51 ►
jammed I could almost see it
00:35:54 ►
I could see the molecule
00:35:55 ►
locked in the
00:35:57 ►
synaptic receptor
00:35:59 ►
cleft and it was like
00:36:01 ►
and I was
00:36:04 ►
it was building toward panic and I finally I just I somehow got hold was like and I was it was building toward panic
00:36:05 ►
and I finally I just I somehow
00:36:07 ►
got hold of myself and I had
00:36:10 ►
a picture which I’m sure you’ve all
00:36:11 ►
had this picture of myself
00:36:13 ►
in a locked ward somewhere
00:36:16 ►
just they check in
00:36:17 ►
once every 36 hours
00:36:19 ►
and wash down the walls
00:36:21 ►
and then so I just said,
00:36:25 ►
I’m just going to sit here until it leaves.
00:36:27 ►
And I did, and after about an hour of real hell,
00:36:33 ►
you could just almost feel it click
00:36:36 ►
and begin to drift out of the receptor,
00:36:39 ►
and then the chemical, the pharmacokinetic dynamics
00:36:42 ►
of the thing cutting.
00:36:43 ►
I said, oh, we’re going to live to tell the tale, apparently.
00:36:47 ►
Yeah.
00:36:49 ►
There’s a wildflower that grows in the spring
00:36:52 ►
in the fields in California.
00:36:53 ►
I don’t know the name of it.
00:36:55 ►
It’s little purple flowers,
00:36:57 ►
and if the plant’s allowed to continue to grow,
00:37:00 ►
it becomes a woody stem, green leaf,
00:37:04 ►
sort of a sage green, with a stem of little purple flowers.
00:37:08 ►
I’m sure some of you must know what it is. They also come occasionally in yellow.
00:37:12 ►
When I walk through a field with those, I smell B&T. I know that B&T is there somewhere, but I have no idea. I’m sure you’re right there’s a yellow flowering tropical
00:37:26 ►
bahamia in a bot garden near where I live
00:37:29 ►
in Hawaii and the smell
00:37:32 ►
it just rivets you when you walk by
00:37:35 ►
and many times I’ve been in the Amazon
00:37:38 ►
walking along a trail in the late afternoon
00:37:41 ►
and suddenly it will just hit you
00:37:44 ►
it will just hit you and strangely enough
00:37:47 ►
smell is an incredibly
00:37:50 ►
imprecise
00:37:51 ►
sense
00:37:53 ►
standing in a jungle
00:37:54 ►
smelling a strange smell and asking
00:37:57 ►
the question what makes this
00:37:59 ►
smell
00:38:00 ►
there are thousands of sources
00:38:03 ►
you look around you have no idea.
00:38:06 ►
But yeah, I think it occurs
00:38:08 ►
as
00:38:09 ►
a volatile in flowers
00:38:12 ►
as some kind of an
00:38:13 ►
attractant. It has a sweet,
00:38:16 ►
sharp,
00:38:17 ►
indolic smell
00:38:20 ►
that’s very piercing.
00:38:24 ►
What’s Syrian rue?
00:38:25 ►
Syrian rue is Pag Pegamen Harmala.
00:38:27 ►
That plant I mentioned
00:38:29 ►
as the source of an MAO inhibitor.
00:38:32 ►
If you’re interested in making these,
00:38:34 ►
doing experiments,
00:38:35 ►
becoming a shaman slash alchemist
00:38:38 ►
and experimenting with making your own farmawaska,
00:38:42 ►
get Jonathan Ott’s book
00:38:43 ►
called Ayahuasca Analogues.
00:38:45 ►
I think they have some copies here.
00:38:48 ►
And he describes his self-experiments.
00:38:52 ►
And it’s a little book, very useful.
00:38:56 ►
It’s very satisfying, I might say,
00:38:59 ►
to make your own stuff.
00:39:02 ►
I mean, I wrote a book with my brother years ago
00:39:05 ►
called Psilocybin, the Magic Mushroom Grower’s Guide.
00:39:09 ►
Growing it is really a wonderful experience.
00:39:15 ►
I mean, I don’t want to advocate it absolutely
00:39:18 ►
because you could be dragged away to the can for years.
00:39:21 ►
There’s that little detail.
00:39:24 ►
But absent that, the way you experience
00:39:27 ►
the organism when you grow it is incredible because you you take a 25 sack of rye
00:39:37 ►
a human food that’s all it is you buy it at the organic grocery it’s a human food you take it home you have this snowy
00:39:46 ►
white mycelium it’s this pure it’s a symbol of purity it’s whiteness and it will convert it
00:39:55 ►
12 percent dry weight into tan on a cotter the flesh of the gods you know the doorway of the gods, you know, the doorway into the mysterium. And so it gets you out of
00:40:09 ►
the cycle of criminal syndicalism that inevitably accrues to fancy dope dealing. You have produced
00:40:17 ►
it. You know every stage of its unfoldment, and you have a very strong relationship with it.
00:40:25 ►
The other thing is, growing mushrooms teaches all kinds of virtues
00:40:30 ►
which serve you very well while tripping.
00:40:35 ►
Virtues like constancy, attention to detail, patience, so forth and so on
00:40:45 ►
so if you’re wondering
00:40:46 ►
if you should take
00:40:49 ►
mushrooms and you’re really in a dilemma
00:40:51 ►
about it
00:40:52 ►
grow them
00:40:53 ►
if you can grow them you can take them
00:40:57 ►
I mean that is the certain
00:40:59 ►
entry into it
00:41:00 ►
and of course there’s a certain mystical
00:41:02 ►
faith that we who grow are
00:41:05 ►
somehow more deeply in the service
00:41:08 ►
of this thing
00:41:09 ►
than those who simply trip
00:41:11 ►
that’s probably
00:41:13 ►
bullshit but it keeps us
00:41:16 ►
at the knife and the flame
00:41:18 ►
there’s sort of a papa mama feeling
00:41:20 ►
about it
00:41:20 ►
well when you
00:41:24 ►
see a large mushroom project
00:41:26 ►
go into fruiting,
00:41:28 ►
it’s awesome.
00:41:29 ►
It’s awesome. The power of
00:41:32 ►
this thing, what a workhorse
00:41:33 ►
this organism is. This thing
00:41:36 ►
is so
00:41:38 ►
efficient. I mean, imagine 12%
00:41:40 ►
conversion of rye
00:41:41 ►
to psilocybin. To put
00:41:44 ►
that in perspective, that $25 bag of rye to psilocybin to put that in perspective that 25 dollar bag of rye
00:41:48 ►
becomes 35 000 six weeks later at current market prices uh i mean not to bring the mundane in here
00:41:58 ►
but there’s nothing wrong with feeding your children either and staying off welfare and so forth and so on.
00:42:06 ►
Did you want to say something?
00:42:07 ►
Did you want to say something?
00:42:08 ►
No.
00:42:09 ►
How much irritation have you had
00:42:13 ►
from the government
00:42:14 ►
because of your public stand
00:42:17 ►
and you’re easily identified
00:42:19 ►
and all that sort of thing?
00:42:21 ►
Well, now this will be a hard swallow
00:42:23 ►
for all of us
00:42:24 ►
because the great faith
00:42:25 ►
of our culture is that paranoia is never inappropriate. None. None. Ever. I don’t know
00:42:36 ►
what that means. I’m paranoid enough to assume it must mean I work for them. How else could that be possible?
00:42:46 ►
The other possibility is that they are
00:42:49 ►
even stupider than we suppose.
00:42:52 ►
I mean, I used to say, you know, I just use big words.
00:42:55 ►
That’s all. They don’t clock that.
00:42:58 ►
It never appears on their screen.
00:42:59 ►
Another possibility, which is equally
00:43:03 ►
humbling to all of us,
00:43:08 ►
is that this isn’t worth bothering with.
00:43:17 ►
Some freewheeling Irish bullshit artist and his docile flock, who cares? I sort of have the idea that there’s something called the 5% rule.
00:43:26 ►
And it’s that you can believe anything,
00:43:30 ►
advocate anything, practice anything,
00:43:33 ►
and as long as you don’t gain adherence
00:43:36 ►
of greater than 5% of the population,
00:43:38 ►
you do not become a budgetary item
00:43:41 ►
for repression unless you start gassing subway stations or
00:43:46 ►
murdering judges or something and then of course you have to be dealt with But the sad thing about it is most people are thinking private health, thinking, no, it’s just a terminal.
00:44:06 ►
You know, they’ll be able to do something.
00:44:07 ►
I mean, they can.
00:44:09 ►
It’s scary.
00:44:12 ►
Lots of Prozac admissions.
00:44:16 ►
That’s interesting.
00:44:24 ►
Well, Prozac is a very peculiar drug in the sense that it never seems to work the same way twice.
00:44:26 ►
I’m not sure. I think timing is very important with Prozac. I really think Prozac hasn’t been understood. It’s being
00:44:34 ►
used to treat depression. I think what it is is it’s the magic bullet for, what is it called,
00:44:41 ►
bullet for what is it called
00:44:43 ►
seasonal light deficit
00:44:45 ►
syndrome
00:44:46 ►
I just think we are not supposed to be living
00:44:49 ►
this far north
00:44:50 ►
and that every year
00:44:53 ►
we go through a culturally managed
00:44:55 ►
depression called winter
00:44:57 ►
or holidays
00:44:59 ►
and people say
00:45:01 ►
why do I feel like shit
00:45:03 ►
and there are a million reasons but the real reason is
00:45:06 ►
because you’re not in the tropics, dude
00:45:09 ►
and I took Prozac
00:45:13 ►
in the past and the feeling
00:45:16 ►
when everything was stripped away
00:45:18 ►
I said, you know, what is this feeling that this drug gives me
00:45:22 ►
it’s the feeling that it’s summertime
00:45:25 ►
your body tells you
00:45:29 ►
that it’s the good old summertime
00:45:30 ►
and your body likes being told that
00:45:36 ►
I think it’s terrible
00:45:37 ►
I live in Hawaii
00:45:38 ►
and so I’m very aware
00:45:40 ►
every September
00:45:42 ►
the media of course has a totally mainland cast.
00:45:48 ►
And so every September, you say,
00:45:50 ►
the media starts talking about how,
00:45:52 ►
well, summer’s over now.
00:45:55 ►
We’re all going back to school.
00:45:58 ►
And, you know, the sports are changing
00:46:01 ►
and everything is changing.
00:46:03 ►
And you can just feel in the tone
00:46:05 ►
aha they’re fixing them all over there
00:46:08 ►
they’re getting them ready for another
00:46:10 ►
winter and I just
00:46:11 ►
channel surf
00:46:13 ►
we don’t need to be hyped
00:46:15 ►
about how well it’s another
00:46:17 ►
winter coming so
00:46:19 ►
I think a lot of people are depressed
00:46:21 ►
in the winter time and Prozac
00:46:23 ►
and of course it’s targeting
00:46:25 ►
serotonin reuptake and serotonin this is not air serotonin has a complex light mediated chemistry
00:46:32 ►
in the pineal this is all about light strangely enough this serotonin deep pineal hydroxy
00:46:40 ►
tryptamine chemistry melanin which gives you your suntan is a
00:46:46 ►
further breakdown product of melatonin which is a conversion from serotonin to melatonin that goes on in the pineal
00:46:55 ►
mediated by a harmine like enzyme called a denner oglu merotropin
00:47:00 ►
By the physiologist but called by the chemists six methoxy tetrahydroharmalan and there is
00:47:08 ►
actually a part of the optic pathway that breaks off and carries physical light into the center of
00:47:16 ►
your brain in order to drive this pineal chemistry that’s why light and depression are so dramatically linked I mean there’s actually a lot
00:47:26 ►
light actually gets into your pineal gland
00:47:29 ►
and there mediates certain chemical processes
00:47:33 ►
well the morning has fled
00:47:36 ►
as they always do
00:47:38 ►
enjoy your afternoon
00:47:40 ►
we’ll be back here at four
00:47:41 ►
and if you don’t like the way this is going
00:47:44 ►
come armed with questions and agendas
00:47:47 ►
thank you
00:47:49 ►
so I hope you’re enjoying
00:47:55 ►
Esalen and making good use of your time
00:47:58 ►
one way or another
00:47:59 ►
this evening we’ll talk about the time wave
00:48:04 ►
I see the computer is in the room
00:48:07 ►
so assuming we can get it up and running
00:48:09 ►
we’ll talk about that
00:48:11 ►
before I get started this afternoon
00:48:15 ►
I want to give you my URL
00:48:17 ►
so that you can find the website
00:48:23 ►
the website is really my substitute for myself,
00:48:30 ►
and I’m trying to make it more interesting than I am by far.
00:48:36 ►
And I’ve only been at it a year,
00:48:38 ►
but it’s already up over 15 megabytes and growing.
00:48:44 ►
And the idea is that if I have some enthusiasm
00:48:47 ►
I put it on the website and then even though my
00:48:51 ►
interests may wander elsewhere and I no longer care
00:48:55 ►
about reform in the Seychelles or
00:48:59 ►
something else, it’s there in its pristine form
00:49:04 ►
spell checked, illustrated, hair-combed.
00:49:07 ►
That’s the way we want to be seen.
00:49:10 ►
And there are many, many pointers
00:49:13 ►
to everything from developments in AI
00:49:18 ►
to pharmacology to nasty pictures
00:49:23 ►
because it’s a huge website
00:49:25 ►
so if some part of what is touched on here
00:49:30 ►
physics, mathematics, chemistry, sociology
00:49:33 ►
you want to follow up
00:49:35 ►
go to the website
00:49:37 ►
and there will be a button there for you
00:49:41 ►
so just to take one of these
00:49:44 ►
and hand them around
00:49:45 ►
and that’ll probably do it
00:49:49 ►
for the whole group.
00:49:51 ►
Do you all understand
00:49:52 ►
what a URL is?
00:49:54 ►
A uniform resource locator?
00:49:56 ►
Exactly.
00:49:56 ►
I don’t think you need
00:49:57 ►
to tell me much more.
00:49:59 ►
Well, but at least you know.
00:50:03 ►
It’s the address, as it were,
00:50:06 ►
of the website on the Internet,
00:50:08 ►
on the World Wide Web.
00:50:10 ►
This guy’s for real? He’s alive?
00:50:12 ►
He’ll talk to me? Wow!
00:50:14 ►
I mean, because you imagine people who write books
00:50:16 ►
reside in some seventh heaven,
00:50:19 ►
unaccessible by normal human beings.
00:50:22 ►
Well, or just inundated with too much stuff
00:50:24 ►
to bother with,
00:50:28 ►
you know, with a question about your writing.
00:50:30 ►
It was great. It was great stuff.
00:50:32 ►
Yeah, well, it’s nice to get questions.
00:50:37 ►
To put the greatness of writers in perspective,
00:50:40 ►
I’ll tell you a story about the last time I dealt with my publisher at Bantam in New York.
00:50:47 ►
time I dealt with my publisher at Bantam in New York, sitting across from those people above the 50th floor, how I come off to them is, well, now let’s see, Mr. McKenna, we have
00:50:55 ►
current sales figures in front of us. You’re kind of a 60,000 copy kind of guy, aren’t
00:51:03 ►
you? And frankly, Mr. McKenna, around here that really butters no bread.
00:51:08 ►
We’re interested in the million-plus seller.
00:51:12 ►
We can carry people like you, of course,
00:51:15 ►
given that we have substantial successes in other fields,
00:51:20 ►
and on and on like that.
00:51:23 ►
To which I replied,
00:51:24 ►
so I guess you’re not taking me to dinner at Elaine’s
00:51:28 ►
which was true
00:51:30 ►
not even tea
00:51:31 ►
well, is there anything out of this morning
00:51:36 ►
that anybody wants to take up?
00:51:38 ►
yeah, I had a question when you were talking about
00:51:41 ►
growing psilocybin and then
00:51:43 ►
or growing the mushrooms,
00:51:45 ►
and I, it just kind of sparked something in me.
00:51:50 ►
Do you have a connection with the devic realms,
00:51:54 ►
the nature spirits?
00:51:55 ►
Is that something that comes up for you in this work?
00:52:00 ►
Well, I don’t know.
00:52:01 ►
Is a self-transforming elf machine a deva?
00:52:05 ►
I don’t,. Is a self-transforming elf machine a deva? What do you mean?
00:52:06 ►
This is a phrase that has been associated with me for many, many years.
00:52:13 ►
I encounter self-transforming elf machines,
00:52:17 ►
which are creatures, entities, perhaps,
00:52:22 ►
although they’re not made out of matter.
00:52:24 ►
They’re made out of, as nearly as I can figure it out, they’re made out of syntax driving light.
00:52:30 ►
But if what your question addresses is the issue of entities on the other side, there are definitely entities on the other side for me,
00:52:45 ►
and there seem to be such for many, many other people.
00:52:50 ►
I’m not by any standard sensitive,
00:52:56 ►
so if I get entities,
00:53:00 ►
then they are substantial and capable of defending themselves.
00:53:05 ►
It’s one of the most challenging parts of the whole psychedelic landscape
00:53:11 ►
because most people can accept the idea of disordered sensory input,
00:53:19 ►
recovery of traumatic memory material, so forth and so on.
00:53:23 ►
But what are we to do with an elf
00:53:25 ►
that becomes a little harder
00:53:28 ►
to contextualize in psychoanalytic theory
00:53:31 ►
although Jung did a good job
00:53:34 ►
when he said autonomous elements
00:53:37 ►
can escape from the psyche’s control
00:53:39 ►
and present themselves as independent entities
00:53:43 ►
I’m not sure he’s ever seen a self-transforming elf machine.
00:53:49 ►
Are those devic entities, do you think?
00:53:55 ►
Yeah, I don’t have any homosynogenic experience.
00:54:01 ►
Myself, I’m more familiar with connections in nature
00:54:08 ►
and other experiences that people have had
00:54:10 ►
in horn group or being in the Himalayas
00:54:14 ►
that kind of thing
00:54:16 ►
so what you’re saying is through your experiences
00:54:20 ►
with pharmaceuticals
00:54:24 ►
you have that experience even if you’re not having it when
00:54:26 ►
you’re not oh it’s it’s the defining characteristic of the true dmt flash i mean it is not subtle
00:54:37 ►
it’s these things mob you like badly trained rottweilers they come bounding forward by the dozens, by the hundreds
00:54:47 ►
they jump into your body
00:54:49 ►
they jump out of your body
00:54:51 ►
and I thought
00:54:55 ►
it maps to some degree
00:54:57 ►
over the archetype of the little people
00:55:01 ►
the leprechaun, the fae
00:55:03 ►
and being Irish and being Jungian, I’m willing to entertain,
00:55:08 ►
you know, maybe I have a special relationship to this stuff. But then in the Amazon, the people
00:55:15 ►
using DMT that I studied in the early 70s, the reason they did it, they said, was to speak with the little people what puzzles me about my contacts with these
00:55:28 ►
beings is it conforms to
00:55:31 ►
let’s say the Irish model
00:55:34 ►
they are small, they live under hills
00:55:39 ►
or when you’re with them you have a sense that you are somehow underground
00:55:43 ►
they are full of merriment
00:55:48 ►
almost to a manic and frightening level it’s sort of like a Bugs Bunny cartoon gone berserk
00:55:55 ►
they are friendly but play rough in other words it’s a land of explosions and falling anvils. It’s like a roadrunner cartoon or something. But the overwhelming feeling is love, but I spell it L-U-V to distinguish it from the ordinary kind because it’s just this kind of crazy childish affection and they’re delighted
00:56:28 ►
to have me in their presence well now that all sort of corresponds with the Irish model or with
00:56:37 ►
worldwide folklore of little creatures little people in the woods what’s happening that is
00:56:46 ►
not mappable
00:56:48 ►
onto fairyland or
00:56:49 ►
leprechauns or findhornian
00:56:51 ►
beings or anything like that or anything
00:56:54 ►
else I’ve ever heard of
00:56:55 ►
is that these entities have an
00:56:58 ►
agenda and
00:56:59 ►
it’s a very curious agenda
00:57:02 ►
they
00:57:03 ►
use a language which you see.
00:57:08 ►
It is made out of sound.
00:57:11 ►
In other words, it is sound,
00:57:15 ►
but you see it in that state.
00:57:18 ►
And the entire point of the encounter,
00:57:23 ►
from their perspective, seems to be to teach you to
00:57:27 ►
do this they want you to transform your language they want you to speak elfish
00:57:36 ►
and you know what if you’ve never done DMT and you just smoked it and you’re 30 seconds into this experience and this is what it’s come down to, you wonder what to make of it.
00:57:52 ►
I’ve thought about this for years and years and years and I don’t know why there should be an invisible syntactical intelligence giving language lessons in hyperspace.
00:58:04 ►
practical intelligence giving language lessons in hyperspace.
00:58:13 ►
But that certainly consistently seems to be what is happening.
00:58:18 ►
I’ve thought a lot about language as a result of that,
00:58:21 ►
and several things about it.
00:58:27 ►
First of all, it is the most remarkable thing we do, I think. And we talked a little bit this morning about epigenetic behaviors.
00:58:33 ►
Chomsky showed that language, the deep structure of language,
00:58:37 ►
is under genetic control.
00:58:39 ►
But that’s like the assembly language level.
00:58:43 ►
Local expressions of language are epigenetic.
00:58:49 ►
And it seems to me that language is some kind of enterprise of human beings
00:58:55 ►
that is not finished.
00:58:59 ►
That we have now left the grunts and the digs of the elbow somewhat in the dust but the most
00:59:07 ►
articulate brilliantly pronounced and projected the english or french or german or chinese
00:59:14 ►
is still a poor carrier of our intent a very limited bandwidth for the intense compression of data that we are trying
00:59:28 ►
to put across to each other. And it occurs to me from studying McLuhan and other people that
00:59:36 ►
the ratios of the senses, the ratio between the eye and the ear and so forth this also is not genetically fixed
00:59:46 ►
there are ear cultures and there are eye cultures
00:59:51 ►
print cultures and electronic cultures
00:59:54 ►
so it may be that our perfection and our completion
01:00:02 ►
lies in the perfection and completion of the word.
01:00:06 ►
Again, this curious theme of the word and its effort to concretize itself.
01:00:12 ►
A language that you can see is far less ambiguous than a language that you hear.
01:00:22 ►
If I read the paragraph of Proust, then we could spend the rest of the afternoon
01:00:27 ►
discussing what did he mean. But if we look at a piece of sculpture by Henry Moore, we can discuss
01:00:36 ►
what did he mean, but at a certain level there is a kind of shared bedrock that isn’t in the Proust passage. We each stop at a different level with the textual
01:00:48 ►
passage. With the three-dimensional object, we all sort of start from the same place and then
01:00:54 ►
work out our interpretations. You know, is it a nude? Is it an animal? Is it bronze? Is it wood? Is it poignant? Is it comical? So forth and so on.
01:01:07 ►
So this is not a very scientific part of the rap,
01:01:13 ►
because it’s very hard to convince people that there are non-human intelligences this side of Gnebel-Gnubi.
01:01:20 ►
And when you tell them that these non-human intelligences are accessed through
01:01:26 ►
the diminutive mushrooms
01:01:27 ►
growing on their front lawn
01:01:29 ►
they just write you off as a squirrel
01:01:32 ►
but this
01:01:34 ►
question of the non-human
01:01:36 ►
intelligences is very
01:01:38 ►
very much
01:01:39 ►
on the agenda, all shamans
01:01:41 ►
in all times and places
01:01:43 ►
have claimed this. And the thing that
01:01:48 ►
so pleases me about DMT is, you know, a lot of people will not take a psychedelic like LSD or
01:01:57 ►
psilocybin or something because it lasts hours and hours. Inevitably, a thing lasting that long,
01:02:07 ►
hours, inevitably a thing lasting that long, you’re going to end up dealing with your stuff,
01:02:13 ►
your anxiety, your fear, your this and that. A lot of people don’t care for that sort of thing,
01:02:24 ►
whether that’s good or bad is another issue. With DMT, it lasts four minutes. And so how lost in an examination of childhood trauma
01:02:26 ►
can you get in four minutes
01:02:28 ►
especially when you have hundreds of elves
01:02:30 ►
tugging at your coat sleeves
01:02:31 ►
so it’s really an incredibly powerful tool
01:02:36 ►
we have the UFO people
01:02:39 ►
claiming there are non-human intelligences
01:02:42 ►
but they have no reliable method of contact that works for a skeptic.
01:02:48 ►
The great thing about DMT is it doesn’t require belief, a quality I mentioned last night as belonging to the truth.
01:02:58 ►
The truth requires no belief. It is the truth.
01:03:02 ►
belief it is the truth.
01:03:06 ►
I’m sure there are probably people listening to my words at this moment who have
01:03:08 ►
encountered these entities.
01:03:11 ►
This, to my mind, is the
01:03:13 ►
great and chilling
01:03:15 ►
mystery in the center of the psychedelics.
01:03:18 ►
And once you’ve encountered
01:03:20 ►
these things, you have
01:03:22 ►
to take them seriously
01:03:23 ►
to the point of you have to understand
01:03:26 ►
where do they fit into the great order of being?
01:03:30 ►
What are these things?
01:03:33 ►
How can there be a life form not made of matter?
01:03:37 ►
In other words, how can they be intelligent and coherent
01:03:40 ►
but have no fixed body outline?
01:03:43 ►
coherent, but have no fixed body outline.
01:03:49 ►
Are they, is the universe in fact populated by non-human, non-material intelligences
01:03:53 ►
that we somehow contact using drugs?
01:03:55 ►
I mean, that’s one possibility.
01:03:57 ►
That’s beyond the DMT experience.
01:03:59 ►
That’s the question, yes.
01:04:00 ►
Where are they when you’re not there?
01:04:03 ►
Is it an ongoing thing are they
01:04:06 ►
is something going on on this planet are these the controllers are you getting into a back
01:04:13 ►
channel that you’re not weren’t cleared for uh uh or and this is to my mind the most chilling and appalling and exhilarating possibility of all,
01:04:27 ►
when you go back over the shamanism thing,
01:04:32 ►
you say, you know, you shamans, now where is this all coming from?
01:04:36 ►
They will tell you it comes from ancestors.
01:04:40 ►
Well, that’s a cheerful and fairly sanitized concept,
01:04:43 ►
but when you deconstruct it, ancestors are dead people.
01:04:49 ►
What is actually being suggested there
01:04:51 ►
is that there is a kind of ecology of souls,
01:04:55 ►
one energy threshold over,
01:04:57 ►
that is co-present with this world.
01:05:01 ►
Well, strangely enough,
01:05:03 ►
that’s what the Irish myth of the Fae says says these are dead people these
01:05:10 ►
are souls that linger in our environment and this is what souls look like again folklore is only a
01:05:20 ►
guide but if what we are dabbling with if what lies at the end of the road of shamanism
01:05:26 ►
is the dissolution of the boundary between life and death itself, then the million-year
01:05:32 ►
intuition that this was a path worth following will be dramatically vindicated. And one of
01:05:40 ►
the reasons I’ve preached DMT so furiously is I just want a larger body of people to take it
01:05:48 ►
so that we can compare data.
01:05:51 ►
We need to understand, you know, how is this possible?
01:05:55 ►
It raises a whole host of questions.
01:05:59 ►
One is, not only how is this possible,
01:06:02 ►
but then given that it is possible,
01:06:05 ►
how has it been kept secret?
01:06:08 ►
How can millions of people go to the grave,
01:06:13 ►
raise children, hold jobs, so forth and so on,
01:06:16 ►
go to the grave, and the news of a doorway
01:06:20 ►
standing that agape hasn’t penetrated? I mean, most people believe they’re imprisoned
01:06:28 ►
in this world and that the only hope is maybe 15 years at the ashram and hideous acts of
01:06:37 ►
self-abnegation and control and so forth and so on. And actually, the boundary between us and an unspeakably bizarre world,
01:06:47 ►
it’s 30 seconds away at any time,
01:06:51 ►
as long as you have DMT available to smoke.
01:06:55 ►
That’s appalling to me.
01:06:57 ►
I mean, it means we don’t know nothing.
01:06:59 ►
Yeah.
01:07:00 ►
You talk about trying to map your experiences
01:07:02 ►
onto the myths.
01:07:04 ►
What if it’s possible that you could look at the myths for information of mastery?
01:07:08 ►
That is, we’ve no longer masters of this doorway.
01:07:11 ►
We’re trying to rediscover mastery that’s been held for thousands of years.
01:07:15 ►
Maybe there’s something we can find in the myths
01:07:16 ►
that tell us a behavior or a mode of being in that state that would be useful.
01:07:20 ►
For instance, catching a leprechaun and getting the pot of gold
01:07:22 ►
implies there’s some kind of game we can play with them that yields some value.
01:07:27 ►
Yeah, well, the
01:07:28 ►
classical myth about leprechauns
01:07:30 ►
is that they want to
01:07:32 ►
keep you.
01:07:33 ►
If they catch you, or if you
01:07:36 ►
mess with them, they’ll hold you.
01:07:38 ►
And then you have to bargain
01:07:40 ►
your way out. And the bargain
01:07:42 ►
is always the solution of a
01:07:44 ►
riddle. notice that what’s
01:07:46 ►
happening here is it’s all about
01:07:47 ►
linguistic prowess
01:07:49 ►
it’s all about poetic skill
01:07:52 ►
it’s all about language ability
01:07:54 ►
only the eloquent
01:07:56 ►
only the clever
01:07:57 ►
only those who are masters
01:08:00 ►
of riddlery and pun
01:08:01 ►
are acceptable to these
01:08:04 ►
entities apparently that’s what they value why? masters of riddlery and pun are acceptable to these entities.
01:08:05 ►
Apparently that’s what they value.
01:08:08 ►
Why?
01:08:11 ►
I guess because they’re made of language.
01:08:14 ►
And they themselves have,
01:08:17 ►
when I try to describe to people what they are,
01:08:20 ►
or what they look like, various things can be said.
01:08:23 ►
They’re like self-dribbling jeweled
01:08:27 ►
basketballs in other words they don’t have faces or anything not the little yellow leather jerkins
01:08:35 ►
and the curve pointed shoes not that dribbling self self-dribbling jeweled basketballs and they use the language to
01:08:45 ►
make objects
01:08:47 ►
that’s what this language
01:08:50 ►
how this language is different
01:08:51 ►
from ordinary English
01:08:53 ►
English we can make meaning
01:08:56 ►
the DMT
01:08:58 ►
language makes objects
01:09:00 ►
it’s like a higher dimensional
01:09:02 ►
language and so these
01:09:03 ►
things bound forward
01:09:05 ►
with the complete purpose of delighting you
01:09:09 ►
and they reach into the air
01:09:11 ►
into their bodies
01:09:13 ►
into some nearby invisible dimension
01:09:15 ►
and they pull out
01:09:17 ►
what I would call words
01:09:21 ►
puns
01:09:22 ►
objects
01:09:23 ►
hallucinations,
01:09:26 ►
things which manage to be all those things simultaneously.
01:09:29 ►
And they say, look at this.
01:09:32 ►
And it’s purely designed to dazzle and astound.
01:09:36 ►
And then a colleague will elbow the little guy aside
01:09:41 ►
and say, no, look at this.
01:09:43 ►
And they’re all in front of you, chirping,
01:09:46 ►
clamoring. And these objects that they make begin themselves to speak and float away and reproduce.
01:09:54 ►
And you’re, you know, you’ve arrived. 30 seconds ago, you were sitting in a room with your grubby
01:10:00 ►
friend somewhere pursuing spiritual understanding. Now this is going on, and it’s very hard to not be horrified.
01:10:09 ►
I mean, the cognitive dissonance, the neck-snapping switch of dimensions,
01:10:15 ►
and then after about three, four, five minutes, it retracts.
01:10:22 ►
It loses its vitality
01:10:26 ►
and it begins to
01:10:28 ►
pull away from you
01:10:29 ►
almost like a boat pulling away from a dock
01:10:32 ►
and in fact I had one trip
01:10:34 ►
where metaphorically
01:10:36 ►
not having hands
01:10:38 ►
they all turned and waved
01:10:40 ►
and said
01:10:41 ►
deja vu
01:10:42 ►
deja vu
01:10:44 ►
which is of course absurd and said, déjà vu, déjà vu,
01:10:47 ►
which is, of course, absurd.
01:10:51 ►
Now, people can say all kinds of things.
01:10:52 ►
They can say, well, this is just the autonomous sub-structures of the psyche manifesting themselves.
01:10:57 ►
That sounds to me like a lawyer’s explanation.
01:11:01 ►
Yeah.
01:11:02 ►
In light of that, allow me to extend the skeptical line
01:11:05 ►
just a bit further.
01:11:07 ►
Your description of
01:11:10 ►
the event, is
01:11:12 ►
it common to
01:11:13 ►
everyone who has participated
01:11:16 ►
to your knowledge as a representative?
01:11:18 ►
10%, 50%, 75%?
01:11:20 ►
Are they equal in
01:11:22 ►
description? Do they vary?
01:11:24 ►
Is this unique to your description?
01:11:27 ►
All good questions.
01:11:30 ►
It’s hard to smoke DMT, especially if you’re not a smoker.
01:11:35 ►
It’s harsh. Some people don’t get enough.
01:11:39 ►
I would say of the people who smoke as much as I think you should smoke,
01:11:49 ►
of the people who smoke as much as I think you should smoke, 75% probably report something like this. It’s hard for people to report. I mean, I’ve had years and years of practice. What I’ve
01:11:58 ►
just told you about this is an incredibly crumpled, compressed, edited version.
01:12:06 ►
Because what is really happening in there is unspeakably bizarre.
01:12:13 ►
Unspeakably bizarre.
01:12:15 ►
That seems in fact to be its quality, that it is unspeakable.
01:12:20 ►
And that therefore in order to speak of it, you have to make a leap of faith
01:12:27 ►
to this higher-order glossolalia-like language.
01:12:33 ►
Ayahuasca is a slow-release DMT
01:12:37 ►
if you deconstruct it pharmacologically,
01:12:41 ►
so that instead of it happening, DMT,
01:12:43 ►
instead of it happening in four minutes of it happening in four minutes it
01:12:45 ►
happens over four hours again at very high dose ayahuasca and at very high dose psilocybin
01:12:52 ►
these entities begin to emerge when I take psilocybin I sometime in the second hour I pass through a place which I’ve learned to recognize it’s a feeling and I call
01:13:09 ►
it elf country and there are no elves but there’s a feeling and then I call them you know and
01:13:20 ►
following the directions of a favorite episode of I Love Lucy,
01:13:26 ►
I call them by saying,
01:13:28 ►
come in, little green men, come in, little green men.
01:13:32 ►
It’s simply a permitting.
01:13:35 ►
It’s simply an invocation.
01:13:38 ►
And then they approach like a nawari band from a distance.
01:13:43 ►
You can hear the brass
01:13:46 ►
and the drum as they get
01:13:48 ►
closer and it begins
01:13:50 ►
as a sound, it’s very interesting
01:13:52 ►
it begins as a sound
01:13:53 ►
and as it gets louder
01:13:55 ►
there comes a point
01:13:57 ►
where imperceptibly
01:13:59 ►
it becomes visible
01:14:01 ►
and then all I can say
01:14:04 ►
is it gets bigger,
01:14:05 ►
just like someone marching toward you
01:14:08 ►
through three-dimensional space.
01:14:09 ►
And so it goes from being a little phenomenon
01:14:12 ►
on the horizon of your awareness
01:14:14 ►
to you’re there, you’re with them,
01:14:17 ►
you’re playing the tuba, you’re marching along,
01:14:20 ►
it’s happening.
01:14:21 ►
And then they sort of peel off and march away
01:14:24 ►
and leave you in the same way they came.
01:14:28 ►
The archetype of this phenomenon, as far as I can tell,
01:14:32 ►
is the archetype of the circus.
01:14:35 ►
DMT is somehow the cosmic circus.
01:14:39 ►
And if you analyze what the circus is,
01:14:43 ►
it’s a closed environment of permitted outrageousness
01:14:49 ►
that roves the straight landscape,
01:14:54 ►
setting up in one town and then another and then another.
01:14:58 ►
And it’s a thing of wonder and light.
01:15:03 ►
And carny people are loose. They’re not like you and me. I remember in the little town
01:15:08 ►
I grew up in every 4th of July the carnival would come to town for cherry day and
01:15:15 ►
We kids were told we couldn’t stay out after 9 o’clock when the carnival was in town because there was just this aura
01:15:23 ►
More liquor was being consumed,
01:15:25 ►
more people were staying up late,
01:15:28 ►
so forth and so on.
01:15:29 ►
And if you analyze the circus,
01:15:32 ►
it has all the elements of the DMT thing.
01:15:35 ►
I mean, there’s the center ring,
01:15:38 ►
the clowns,
01:15:39 ►
and Henry Munn, in a wonderful essay
01:15:41 ►
on psilocybin mushrooms,
01:15:43 ►
called The Mushrooms of Language,
01:15:46 ►
describes them as self-performing acrobatic bits of grammar,
01:15:54 ►
is how he describes them.
01:15:55 ►
This is clearly the same thing.
01:15:59 ►
The circus is a wonderful place for children,
01:16:03 ►
but it has behind that a dark side.
01:16:08 ►
I think my own earliest reminiscence
01:16:11 ►
of what I could call erotic awareness,
01:16:15 ►
I must have been very, very young,
01:16:18 ►
under three because I was being held by people,
01:16:21 ►
and I was taken to a circus,
01:16:23 ►
and there was a woman there in a tiny g-string costume
01:16:28 ►
spinning hanging by her teeth up near the center and it was all there death and eros and risk and
01:16:37 ►
drama and you know I got it so there’s all that in the circus but then there’s also the wiggy side
01:16:46 ►
you know, the bearded lady
01:16:49 ►
the goat-faced boy, the thing in the bottle
01:16:52 ►
that’s all just off the main event
01:16:55 ►
and then the circus
01:16:58 ►
packs up and leaves and everything is the same
01:17:01 ►
except there’s some crumpled paper blowing around
01:17:04 ►
in the wind
01:17:05 ►
and every little boy and girl worth their salt wants to run off and join the circus so this is
01:17:13 ►
the archetype of of dmt a completely uh self-contained transformative uh world filled with all kinds of implications.
01:17:28 ►
It’s incredibly mercurial.
01:17:30 ►
It’s incredibly trickster-like.
01:17:32 ►
Yes, it’s as though Hermes had divided into a thousand subalterns
01:17:37 ►
all set going at once.
01:17:43 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:17:46 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:17:51 ►
How much irritation have you had from the government
01:17:56 ►
because of your public stand and you’re easily identified and all that sort of thing?
01:18:03 ►
Well, now, this will be a hard swallow for all of us
01:18:05 ►
because the great faith of our culture
01:18:08 ►
is that paranoia is never inappropriate.
01:18:12 ►
None.
01:18:14 ►
None.
01:18:16 ►
Ever.
01:18:17 ►
I don’t know what that means.
01:18:19 ►
I’m paranoid enough to assume it must mean I work for them.
01:18:27 ►
How else could that be possible?
01:18:32 ►
The other possibility is that they are even stupider than we suppose.
01:18:39 ►
Now I realize that you are intelligent enough to realize that Terrence was joking just then,
01:18:47 ►
but there are some poor souls floating around in the world who are convinced that the only reason Terrence was never bothered by government authorities is that he was an undercover CIA asset.
01:18:51 ►
And this false assumption began with a podcast that I did many years ago,
01:18:56 ►
in which Terrence was joking about the mushroom being an intelligence that he was working for.
01:19:01 ►
that he was working for.
01:19:06 ►
But our psychedelic Alex Jones took that comment out of context and created a big conspiracy theory about Terrence being a narc.
01:19:10 ►
It’s complete nonsense, of course,
01:19:12 ►
but if you know anyone who is into conspiracy theories,
01:19:16 ►
then you already know that facts makes no difference to them.
01:19:20 ►
Hopefully, this recent comment by Terrence won’t be used to further this madness.
01:19:26 ►
Now, you may wonder why I left the segment in where Terrence went into great detail explaining what a URL is,
01:19:33 ►
but only passed out a flyer with his own URL on it without reading it out aloud.
01:19:38 ►
Well, I left that bit in because I thought that for our younger salonners,
01:19:43 ►
it would be good to hear how we talked about the internet back when it was only a couple of years old.
01:19:49 ►
In fact, in 1996, Americans with internet access spent less than 30 minutes a month
01:19:58 ►
surfing the web. Now, while today there are over 4 billion people who are connected to the net,
01:20:10 ►
Now, while today there are over 4 billion people who are connected to the net, back in 1996, there were less than 40 million people worldwide who were connected.
01:20:15 ►
So, it was a new toy that most of the people attending one of Terrence’s workshops had not yet used.
01:20:30 ►
I’ll put a link to Terrence’s site in today’s program notes, but it’s an easy one to remember. You just go to levity.com, that’s L-E-V-I-T-Y dot com, slash eschaton, E-S-C-H-A-T-O-N.
01:20:33 ►
And that brings you to his homepage, which says,
01:20:37 ►
There are three approaches to what is really one domain.
01:20:42 ►
Hyperborea, The Novelty Report, Terrence McKenna.
01:20:44 ►
And there are links to those three. And that entire site is
01:20:47 ►
still online and available for you to visit. And for a site back in 1996, Terrence was correct.
01:20:54 ►
It was a larger than average size site. Of course, the 15 megabytes that Terrence was bragging about
01:21:02 ►
as being the size of his website, well, that’s about one-half the size of the podcast file
01:21:07 ►
that you’re listening to right now.
01:21:10 ►
Now, that’s something to think about,
01:21:12 ►
because I’m sure that this single podcast file
01:21:16 ►
doesn’t have twice as much information included in it
01:21:19 ►
as does that old site of Terence’s.
01:21:22 ►
Now, on another note,
01:21:24 ►
I probably shouldn’t keep promoting
01:21:26 ►
Uval Noah Harari’s book Homo Deus
01:21:29 ►
until I do a full review of it here,
01:21:32 ►
but I couldn’t help think about it
01:21:34 ►
when Terence was talking about history
01:21:36 ►
being a genetic process
01:21:37 ►
and that we are possibly being controlled
01:21:40 ►
by our genetic codes
01:21:41 ►
as much as we are by our minds.
01:21:44 ►
And the reason I thought about Harari’s book is that, well,
01:21:47 ►
that particular topic is how the book begins.
01:21:51 ►
Now before I go, I’d like to insert a little heresy here.
01:21:55 ►
Over the years, and on numerous occasions, we’ve heard Terence
01:22:00 ►
speculate that these otherworldly entities, that ones that
01:22:04 ►
we sometimes seem to encounter in
01:22:06 ►
psychedelic states, are what he calls an ecology of souls, in other words, our ancestors. And before
01:22:13 ►
I state my heresy, I should add that on more than one occasion, I too have encountered what at the
01:22:20 ►
time I thought to be non-human intelligences. So I’m not putting down on the idea that something seemingly real and non-human
01:22:28 ►
does take place with a lot of people when they are in a psychedelic state.
01:22:33 ►
That said, I think that there may be another possibility for those experiences,
01:22:38 ►
and that is that they may be the result of us projecting our subconscious thoughts
01:22:44 ►
about dead people that we knew in such a way that makes their spirits the result of us projecting our subconscious thoughts about dead people that we
01:22:45 ►
knew in such a way that makes their spirits seem alive to us. In other words, the spirits of your
01:22:52 ►
ancestors are still present in your mind. They linger there, to use Terence’s phrase. Right now,
01:22:58 ►
in fact, as I think about my dad, his spirit is present with me. Could a similar but more powerful energy field of remembrance
01:23:06 ►
also be what Terence calls an ecology of souls? And in case you’re wondering what I think about
01:23:14 ►
this, well I’m sorry to say that you’re going to have to just keep wondering because I’m still
01:23:19 ►
wondering about it myself. Having been trained as a lawyer, where we had to be prepared to argue both sides of a
01:23:25 ►
case, I can argue both sides of that question as well. But before you accept Terence’s ecology of
01:23:32 ►
souls metaphor, maybe you can have some fun if you keep your mind open to consider all possibilities
01:23:38 ►
when it comes to what happens after we die, and not just take Terrence’s opinion as gospel.
01:23:47 ►
And on that cheery note, this is Lorenzo, signing off from Cyberdelic Space. Be well, my friends. Thank you.