Program Notes
Support Lorenzo on Patreon.com
https://www.patreon.com/lorenzohagerty
Guest speaker: Danny Nemu
Danny Nemu
Today’s podcast features a conversation that fellow saloner, Lex Pelger had with the Reverend Danny Nemu, author of ‘Science Revealed’ and ‘Neuro-Apocalypse.’ Their conversation covers how Danny found religion in Japan, looked for psychedelics in the Gospels, explored the world of legal highs, and how a tropical infection changed his life.
Danny Nemu’s Website
Danny Nemu’s Vimeo Site
Neuro-Apocalypse by Reverend Nemu
Danny Nemu’s Twitter Feed
Getting high with the most high: Entheogens in the Old Testament
Psychedelic Press Journal XXII
with Danny’s essay on racism and discrimination in ayahuasca-related anthropology
Danny’s Psychedelic Salon talk in Berlin on May 26 2019
A YouTube playlist of Danny Nemu’s lectures and podcasts
Download a free copy of Lorenzo’s latest book
The Chronicles of Lorenzo - Volume 1
Previous Episode
607 - Music, Psychedelics, and Magic
Next Episode
609 - The Rose Garden – Introduction
Similar Episodes
- 080 - Adventures of an Urban Shaman - score: 0.76923
- 505 - Ayahuasca Stories From 1989 - score: 0.75245
- 224 - McKenna_ Hermeticism and Alchemy Part 2 - score: 0.74781
- 381 - A Stiff Dose of Psychedelics - score: 0.74166
- 151 - Posthumous Glory - score: 0.73745
- 638 - Replanting Ayahuasca - score: 0.73552
- 484 - This is the Mushroom’s Program - score: 0.73504
- 486 - The Main Vein of the Peculiar - score: 0.73274
- 411 - Our Involvement With Matter - score: 0.73241
- 046 - The Psychedologist - score: 0.73115
Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from cyberdelic space.
00:00:19 ►
This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in Psychedelic Salon 2.0.
00:00:24 ►
This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in Psychedelic Salon 2.0.
00:00:31 ►
And today I am happy to welcome back my friend Lex Pelger with another of our Psychedelic Salon 2.0 podcast. You know, besides having to work for a living like most of us do, Lex is also the father
00:00:38 ►
of a young child who he gets to spend a lot of his time with. And well, Lex really has had his
00:00:44 ►
hands full lately and hasn’t been able to do a lot of these Sal with. And, well, Lex really has had his hands full lately and hasn’t
00:00:45 ►
been able to do a lot of these Salon 2.0 programs, but somehow he found a way to get yet another
00:00:51 ►
interview to us. I think we also owe Lex a big thank you for the subject matter of this conversation.
00:00:58 ►
As my close friends know, I’m not really a big fan of organized religion anymore,
00:01:04 ►
and so I’ve avoided religious
00:01:06 ►
discussions on these podcasts for the most part anyhow. However, that doesn’t mean that I don’t
00:01:12 ►
realize that a significant number of our fellow Saloners are still religious to one degree or
00:01:17 ►
another. So I don’t think that it’s my place to insert my own views about religion here,
00:01:23 ►
well, mainly because growing up as a Catholic left some scars on me.
00:01:27 ►
Nonetheless, after listening to the interview that I’m about to play for us,
00:01:31 ►
I really found it quite refreshing,
00:01:34 ►
and it contains information that I certainly wish that I knew when I was much younger.
00:01:39 ►
I also wish that back then I’d already learned that famous question Terence McKenna sometimes asked,
00:01:46 ►
Why do you believe what you believe?
00:01:49 ►
And that question, my friends, has been one of my most important tools in figuring out my own relationship to organized religion.
00:01:59 ►
Maybe you can try that question on yourself someday.
00:02:01 ►
It certainly can provide some revealing answers if you’re
00:02:05 ►
very honest with yourself. Now, I realize that some of our fellow salonners might treat this
00:02:11 ►
podcast like I once would, and that is to not listen to anything at all that dealt with
00:02:16 ►
Christianity. So, I totally understand how you feel, but after about 20 minutes, when Danny
00:02:23 ►
begins talking about the psychedelic chemistry involved with psychoactive plants that are mentioned in the Bible,
00:02:29 ►
well, let’s just say that I’ll be listening to this talk again to dig out the things that I missed the first time around while I was thinking about what was just said.
00:02:39 ►
It’s really that kind of an interview, and I hope that you enjoyed it as much as I have.
00:02:44 ►
It’s really that kind of an interview, and I hope that you enjoyed it as much as I have.
00:02:48 ►
And I’m not going to give a spoiler alert here,
00:02:52 ►
because I’m not going to spoil it by telling you what that psychoactive drug is.
00:02:58 ►
Now, here is longtime friend of the salon, Lex Pelger, who is going to take it from here. I’m Lex Pelger, and this is the Psychedelic Salon 2.0
00:03:09 ►
The Reverend Danny Nemu examines the Gospels and psychedelic drugs.
00:03:17 ►
He joins those researchers who see an entheogenic origin to some of the biblical stories and Judeo-Christian practices.
00:03:30 ►
In this conversation, we learn the true purpose of frankincense and myrrh, the fungal essence of our daily bread, and some of the good reverend’s favorite legal highs.
00:03:35 ►
As you’ll hear, his second book, Newer Apocalypse, is out, and I highly recommend it.
00:03:40 ►
So please enjoy this talk with the Reverend Danny Nemu.
00:03:43 ►
So please enjoy this talk with the Reverend Danny Nemu.
00:03:51 ►
Hello, everybody. I’m very pleased to be here with the Reverend Danny Nemu.
00:03:52 ►
Thanks so much for joining us.
00:03:54 ►
Thanks, Lex. It’s good to be here.
00:03:57 ►
I’m excited to hear more about your writings on the Bible and drugs.
00:04:04 ►
But I think the first question is, how do you come by the the reverend title? I got ordained on the internet for about $15.
00:04:09 ►
And we’re going back a long way now. This is last millennium. So it’s probably a bit more than that
00:04:13 ►
now. But when I lived in Japan, I got myself a job marrying, let’s say, marrying pagans,
00:04:23 ►
basically. And as everybody knows jesus was a white man and
00:04:27 ►
therefore i managed to land this job in a in a rather bizarre industry in japan
00:04:31 ►
uh so i would go along sometimes i’d do five weddings in a day um i would sing what a friend
00:04:37 ►
you have in jesus in japanese and they would be stained glass windows and all of that kind of
00:04:42 ►
monarchy so in order to do that i needed to be a genuine reverend, which meant I needed to get, I needed to send $15 off to the Universal Life Church.
00:04:50 ►
That’s great. I’m glad it’s official and that it worked out so well.
00:04:52 ►
Yes, my son.
00:04:56 ►
And I’d actually like to start with the beginning of your story, both with drugs and with religion.
00:05:02 ►
And I was curious how both of those came into your early life.
00:05:08 ►
Yeah, well, I was raised fairly secular, let’s say.
00:05:12 ►
I was raised Reform Jewish, which doesn’t have a great deal of mysticism to it,
00:05:17 ►
certainly not the way I thought it.
00:05:19 ►
And I think, I mean, I was always interested.
00:05:23 ►
Yeah, I got into fiddling with my brain from quite a young age.
00:05:28 ►
I think around 15 was my first joint. And that was just fascinating.
00:05:33 ►
But I was, what else? I got into chaos magic at about the age of 20, about the same time as I got into Buddhism.
00:05:43 ►
Almost exactly the same time. And yeah into Buddhism, almost exactly the same time.
00:05:50 ►
And yeah, that took me down some interesting pathways. But one of the, I guess, one of the foundational ideas of Chaos Magic is that nothing is true, everything is permitted.
00:05:56 ►
And I guess even before I got into that, I was curious about why people believed certain things
00:06:00 ►
and didn’t believe other things. So I of read all richard dawkins’s um
00:06:05 ►
stuff on memes uh for example and yeah i’m fascinated by why the mind does what it does
00:06:16 ►
in all dimensions you know why we see certain things why we miss other things why we think
00:06:21 ►
certain things why we disbelieve other things. And so I guess my
00:06:25 ►
interest in religion was more as maybe, let’s say, an anthropological interest. For quite a while,
00:06:32 ►
I did my dissertation at university, was on Jehovah’s Witnesses and 17th century American
00:06:41 ►
Protestants and their perspectives on health and the body. So I was always interested
00:06:48 ►
in what people believe and how that influences how they behave and how it influences history
00:06:53 ►
as well. My people. Yeah. Yeah. My church felt like it was 17th century Protestant.
00:06:59 ►
Oh, right. I see. And so that kind of interest made psychedelics a pretty natural discovery for you?
00:07:08 ►
Yeah, I guess so. I’m just trying to think what was first.
00:07:12 ►
No, I think probably the psychedelics first.
00:07:14 ►
I think once I realized just how malleable certainly our perception of the world is, maybe the world itself.
00:07:23 ►
Yeah, it just got me really fascinated about you know
00:07:26 ►
what we believe and how what you believe affects what happens uh both in terms of like like for
00:07:32 ►
example in chaos magic you have this idea that if you if you believe something with enough fervor
00:07:37 ►
uh then things arise within that belief system let’s say say. Kind of a similar track to what Robert Anton Wilson was on
00:07:47 ►
when he was talking about reality tunnels and switching between them.
00:07:51 ►
And can you explain a little bit more about chaos magic
00:07:53 ►
to people who might be new to it,
00:07:55 ►
where it comes from, how you discovered it?
00:07:57 ►
Yeah, I think it’s originally English.
00:07:59 ►
I wouldn’t be surprised if it is.
00:08:00 ►
It’s a kind of punk approach to to uh to magic or at least my friend
00:08:06 ►
julian vane talks about it as a magpies approach uh picking up shiny things and then you know uh
00:08:15 ►
kind of stealing stealing things from different traditions and putting them together into uh into
00:08:20 ►
different configurations so it’s a it’s it’s a system of of occultism let’s say where
00:08:26 ►
rather than you would believe in perhaps a particular hindu deity for the purposes of a
00:08:34 ►
ritual well then having done your ritual you would then put your let’s say put your beliefs back on
00:08:39 ►
onto chaos or onto you you would you then free yourself from those beliefs so the idea is certain beliefs will get you certain results so if you’re casting a spell for example you might
00:08:48 ►
cast it from within a kind of goetia solomonic magic system or uh you might go full-on kind of
00:08:56 ►
evangelical christian or you uh you can kind of do whatever you like. I guess what holds it together is beauty and coherence.
00:09:06 ►
Yeah. So I think punk think think think kind of punk goth magicians with a kind of screw you attitude to any kind of belief.
00:09:16 ►
So, for example, they don’t have they don’t have subordinates. They have insubordinates in the in the in the IOT, which is one of the magical orders there. The idea being that the person beneath you,
00:09:27 ►
so traditionally you’d have someone training underneath you.
00:09:31 ►
The idea of the insubordinate is that they will raise questions
00:09:34 ►
and kind of criticize your own belief system.
00:09:39 ►
Oh, wow. So a lot of pushback.
00:09:41 ►
So it’s one that lends itself to psychoactives.
00:09:45 ►
Yeah, I think so. I also think that psychoactives without… Psychoactives can be quite,
00:09:53 ►
let’s say psychedelics, can be quite problematic in some ways. You get quite a lot of people,
00:10:00 ►
for example, going off to the Amazon, drinking ayahuasca six times and then coming home with
00:10:05 ►
some very clear beliefs about beliefs about what they are and uh that they’re now doing shamanism
00:10:10 ►
or something like that a friend of mine was recently doing a um a survey of um
00:10:17 ►
kind of ayahuasca users in england he was asking people about
00:10:20 ►
asking about witchcraft and pretty much everyone everyone in England didn’t have any,
00:10:26 ►
just thought that was kind of a nonsense thing to believe,
00:10:29 ►
the idea of witchcraft.
00:10:30 ►
If you go into any traditional ayahuasquero culture,
00:10:34 ►
they know all about witchcraft.
00:10:36 ►
So I think you need to be quite careful with that kind of chaos approach.
00:10:42 ►
You need to be quite careful if you’re taking something you like and
00:10:46 ►
leaving behind something you don’t like um that can be quite unskillful as well if it’s not done
00:10:52 ►
with a good amount of honesty and understanding of what why you might not like something you
00:10:57 ►
understand what i’m saying um so yeah when when people take psychedelics they can often have a
00:11:04 ►
you know the edges get permeable and the ego kind of dissolves.
00:11:08 ►
And then when it comes back, it can kind of come back with a vengeance and it can it seems to expand often with people.
00:11:15 ►
So this is why I say the person come back from the jungle reckoning as a shaman after after six sessions.
00:11:23 ►
yeah so it’s I think it’s quite important that
00:11:25 ►
we’re not just a cultist just that anyone holds
00:11:27 ►
their beliefs lightly or wears
00:11:29 ►
their beliefs lightly
00:11:30 ►
one thing you’ve written about and spoken about a good bit
00:11:33 ►
is warnings against this
00:11:35 ►
ayahuasca light
00:11:36 ►
phenomenon kind of unfolding across
00:11:39 ►
the west
00:11:40 ►
and I was wondering what advice you would have
00:11:43 ►
for people who want to try to
00:11:46 ►
maximize the benefit and minimize the harm while taking ayahuasca.
00:11:52 ►
Yeah, I think the fact that ayahuasca has hit the West in a big way, I think that’s a good thing.
00:11:57 ►
I’m not overly curmudgeonly about that. I just want to, yeah, what advice would i give firstly i think it’s really important that
00:12:08 ►
you meet the person if at all possible you meet the person before you’re doing the session with
00:12:12 ►
them because you’re going to be putting your um soul in their hands for the evening and um
00:12:20 ►
imagine you know imagine you had a newborn baby or something like that. Would you be prepared to let this person
00:12:26 ►
look after your newborn baby for the evening? I think that’s kind of the first thing. Do you
00:12:31 ►
intrinsically trust this person? Also, do you have enough discernment to actually trust? You
00:12:41 ►
might be a person who trusts anyone. So it’s not necessarily the fact that you trust them
00:12:46 ►
that will make them, will make it a
00:12:48 ►
kosher thing to do.
00:12:50 ►
But that’d be like a very
00:12:52 ►
minimum
00:12:54 ►
thing. Do you trust this person?
00:12:56 ►
Is the person that you’re drinking with
00:12:58 ►
very prepared to take questions? Are they going to
00:13:00 ►
get offended by a question?
00:13:02 ►
You know what I mean?
00:13:04 ►
It’s quite important to
00:13:05 ►
again i would test someone for the degree of their self uh i don’t know self-righteousness
00:13:15 ►
that kind of thing if you get a whiff of arrogance of the guy who’s going to be
00:13:18 ►
providing you with ayahuasca i would say think think twice about. Or the woman. Yeah, that’s good advice.
00:13:26 ►
And I was curious about how your journey began with ayahuasca and how that went.
00:13:33 ►
Yeah, so I was living in Japan.
00:13:35 ►
This is going back 18 years ago now.
00:13:38 ►
So just the beginning of the millennium.
00:13:41 ►
And I was with a woman there who, she didn’t speak a great deal of woman there who she didn’t speak a great deal of
00:13:46 ►
english and i didn’t speak a great deal of japanese at that particular point and she asked me if i
00:13:51 ►
wanted to come to a a crazy drugs party and i said well yes of course i do and she didn’t really
00:13:58 ►
explain it much more than that and um i was sold anyway so off I went and was quite shocked, really,
00:14:06 ►
to discover a room full of Japanese people,
00:14:09 ►
the men on one side, the women on the other side,
00:14:12 ►
the men wearing kind of slacks and white shirts
00:14:15 ►
and the women wearing skirts and the cross
00:14:18 ►
and the scent of incense
00:14:20 ►
and all kinds of Catholic business going on. And I made a beeline to the only other white
00:14:28 ►
man in the room and asked him I said is this some kind of a church and he said yeah it’s a funky
00:14:33 ►
church and yeah so then I was kind of there what happens what happens in Daimyo is it begins with a prayer and so i kind of listened to these strange japanese
00:14:46 ►
people uh praying christian prayers in portuguese uh listening with some contempt i will add i was
00:14:54 ►
quite a um a belligerent um i don’t know if i was an atheist but um um i think i was just quite
00:15:02 ►
belligerent at the time in the way the way i thought and um and i was buddhist as well uh i was already starts practicing buddhism
00:15:09 ►
so yeah so i listened to that and then i drank a dose and um then all the you know eventually
00:15:14 ►
all the walls kind of melted and i uh i found myself um you know ayahuasca is very strong
00:15:20 ►
the the system of daime is a very strong ritual right the ritual form is very much central
00:15:28 ►
um people get a little bit confused about daime because you know it’s called the it’s called a
00:15:32 ►
religion it’s called a um called one of the ayahuasca religions the the progenitor the founder
00:15:37 ►
of of daime whose name is mestre uranio when he was asked he said that people should that
00:15:44 ►
that daimistters should call themselves
00:15:45 ►
catholics right so he didn’t see it as a religion itself he saw it as a practice that took place
00:15:50 ►
within the confines of catholicism and we’re talking about folk catholicism here so this is
00:15:55 ►
catholicism a long way away from the vatican and kind of deep in the amazon rainforest so it’s not
00:16:01 ►
it’s not quite what you might imagine uh uh less or more more more imperial
00:16:06 ►
catholicism uh might be yeah so so the ritual is really uh is is done ideally and in brazil done
00:16:18 ►
in a very tight way so you know exactly where you’re meant to be there’s a place that you stand
00:16:22 ►
you stand the person on your on your on your right is taller than you and the person on your left is shorter than you and you
00:16:28 ►
stand in your lines and um do a certain kind of three step all day or all night and they do it in
00:16:34 ►
brazil and um your next move is is very much uh decided i.e you sing the next line and then after
00:16:42 ►
you get to the end of the song you sing the next song and when you get to the end of all the songs you do a prayer um so in one way it’s very
00:16:49 ►
constricting uh in another way it’s very liberating because you don’t have to think about what you’re
00:16:53 ►
doing next you can you can allow your journey to go and you can follow it wherever it uh wherever
00:16:59 ►
it takes you but i guess what i wanted to say is in terms of beliefs, like Mestre Irineo, he removed the creed from the Catholic litany.
00:17:07 ►
So in most Catholic ceremonies, you will have to say something along the lines of I believe in God the Father.
00:17:12 ►
I believe in the communion of saints. I believe in the resurrection of resurrection in the flesh.
00:17:18 ►
And Mestre Irineo, when he kind of when he created his own his own lineage he took that out which is quite
00:17:25 ►
significant the idea you don’t actually have to believe in anything and if you ask someone if you
00:17:29 ►
ask the guy running a session or the woman running a session the the the answer to a spiritual
00:17:35 ►
question the the answer you will probably get is uh you’ll probably get pointed to the diamond
00:17:40 ►
basically you’ll probably get coined pointed to the brew so it’s it’s not a received tradition in the way that we don’t have priests to explain what stuff means we have a brew which
00:17:49 ►
is our means of understanding you know and different things within that ritual there are
00:17:53 ►
certain things there but the actual meaning of them you know what does the virgin mary what does
00:17:58 ►
that mean that’s something outside of the doctrine as in it’s not something that’s explained anywhere in the
00:18:05 ►
teachings uh you get kind of inklings of it um but we don’t have any dogmas which is really good for
00:18:12 ►
me yeah because you you’re particularly against the apostles creed because of its history and
00:18:17 ►
i was wondering if you could explain more yeah there’s a guy called irinais of leon another
00:18:21 ►
irinais who decided what the what the form of the Bible would be,
00:18:26 ►
or the New Testament. And he was the guy who basically
00:18:28 ►
chose Matthew, Mark, Luke and John
00:18:30 ►
from all the Gospels. And there were loads of
00:18:32 ►
Gospels at the time, you know, at least
00:18:34 ►
30, maybe twice as many.
00:18:37 ►
Gospel of Mary Magdalene, for example,
00:18:39 ►
Gospel of Thomas.
00:18:41 ►
The Gospel of Thomas
00:18:42 ►
has a line where
00:18:44 ►
when Christ walks, he doesn’t leave any footprints
00:18:47 ►
right uh now this so for example the this this was quite a contentious thing when the gnostic
00:18:54 ►
the early gnostic well scott pre-know when the early church or churches were setting up all
00:19:00 ►
around the mediterranean they all kind of, they believed quite a wide variety of things.
00:19:06 ►
And later you got the orthodox idea of what you’re meant to believe, i.e. I believe in God the Father,
00:19:13 ►
I believe in the communion of saints, I believe in the resurrection of flesh, in the flesh. And if
00:19:17 ►
you don’t believe in those things, you go to hell for eternity. Now, just to take one of those
00:19:23 ►
examples, for example, the resurrection in flesh, in the flesh, the opposite or the other alternative to that is the resurrection in spirit.
00:19:30 ►
Right. So if you look in the the Gospel of Mary Magdalene, for example, Jesus, after he’s died, he visits her in a vision.
00:19:40 ►
And he says something along the lines of don’t accept any laws from the lawmakers.
00:19:46 ►
Now, if you imagine trying to hold the Roman Empire together as there were various different groups who didn’t take their authority from the bishop,
00:19:58 ►
but they actually called the bishop a dry canal and they took their authority from invisible people who were appearing in visions and dreams
00:20:05 ►
and also you know they were kind of making prophecy and all these kind of things it’s
00:20:12 ►
really not conducive to an empire right um empires need to be administered with a firm hand and so
00:20:19 ►
the apostles creed was a very good way of uh let’s say, making heretical certain things like that, taking
00:20:28 ►
authority away from people and their own experiences of spirituality. Like, for example, the Gnostics
00:20:35 ►
said that what makes a church is the Holy Spirit, whereas what became Orthodox, he said,
00:20:42 ►
no, no, no, what makes a church is a bishop.
00:20:50 ►
And that’s quite a different idea. And they said the Holy Spirit is invisible, but it’s instantly recognizable.
00:20:59 ►
You know, so we look at Paul’s letters. He kind of touches on these kind of things. You know, he says, you know, some of you may have some of you may have a teaching.
00:21:04 ►
Some of you may have a bunch of ideas.
00:21:06 ►
But listen, what I’m saying is what Jesus Christ said.
00:21:09 ►
And if you’re not down with that, then you’re wrong.
00:21:11 ►
And so for your own history, what got you studying the hints of drugs in the Bible?
00:21:18 ►
What was your first looks where it’s like, oh, there might be something here I need to look at?
00:21:22 ►
I got totally obsessed by the book to begin with from another direction.
00:21:27 ►
I gave a talk at an anarchist conference about mistranslation in the Bible.
00:21:32 ►
That was one of the first talks I gave on the Bible, mistranslation in the service of empire.
00:21:37 ►
And so I looked into, I was looking at this line from Matthew, at the end of the world, there’ll be wailing and all kinds of bad things happen.
00:21:48 ►
I looked at the word in Greek and the word for world is not world.
00:21:51 ►
It’s aeon, which means the same as it does in English, aeon, an epoch.
00:21:55 ►
So at the end of the epoch, there would be all kinds of horrible things happening,
00:22:00 ►
which is exactly what the Puritans in England wanted at the time when that bible was put together so king james comes along and says now let’s make it uh let’s make
00:22:08 ►
this bible something which is not contentious something which isn’t going to cause any problems
00:22:13 ►
in this rather revolutionary moment we’re having in english history so i got into the bible through
00:22:17 ►
mistranslation and i’ve and i continue to find that fascinating uh just give you one example a lot of people talk about adam’s rib um i think
00:22:25 ►
there was a recently american um uh politician who came out with this um with this thing about
00:22:35 ►
adam’s rib and uh i can’t remember what kind of misogynistic purpose he used it for now that word
00:22:40 ►
for rib is elsewhere in the bible is translated aside, not rib. In fact, the only time it’s ever translated as rib is in that particular in that particular line.
00:22:49 ►
So the original line would be Yahweh Elohim divided the man in half and then sealed up the wound.
00:22:57 ►
He didn’t take out his rib. You know what I mean? So, yeah.
00:23:01 ►
So to answer your question about the drugs, how did I get into that?
00:23:05 ►
I think I just ate some frankincense.
00:23:08 ►
I’ve got a feeling that was my – it was just an inkling to eat some frankincense.
00:23:14 ►
Yeah.
00:23:16 ►
That’s great.
00:23:16 ►
And that would be a great one to start on because it’s so widely known.
00:23:20 ►
It’s one of the most widely known drugs in the Bible, but a lot of people don’t know it’s psychoactive.
00:23:24 ►
So can you tell us about frankincense and what it’s like when you share it with people?
00:23:29 ►
Yeah.
00:23:30 ►
Frankincense, just on your teeth, it’s kind of gummy.
00:23:34 ►
It makes a gum if you get some high-grade frankincense, and you’ll chew it up.
00:23:51 ►
stuff has been carried from Oman to Palestine for many, many thousands of years. Before it was burned to Yahweh, it was burned to Baal, the Canaanite god. And before it was burned to him,
00:23:56 ►
it was burned to Ra, the Egyptian god. So there’s been this trade, and that journey takes six months,
00:24:08 ►
a trade and that that journey takes six months um and it’s 1500 miles and it’s through rubber infested deserts it’s a real effort to get frankincense all the way from uh from where it
00:24:14 ►
where it where it grows to where it’s burned and um what’s it got in it um it’s got it’s got a
00:24:23 ►
bunch of stuff in it and like for example it’s got um dehydro
00:24:27 ►
abiotic acid which is a GABA receptor agonist so GABA receptors are the most common receptors in
00:24:34 ►
your brain your brain uh 40 percent of your neurons have GABA receptors on them and they’re
00:24:40 ►
inhibitory that means that if you take a GABA receptor agonist like frankincense or like valium then it makes that particular nerve less likely to fire so it dampens down the whole
00:24:49 ►
system um and it’s got other stuff in it as well it’s got um incense salt acetate which uh affects
00:24:58 ►
the the trpv3 ion channel which is quite an interesting one because in the brain well this this ion channel
00:25:06 ►
is found in the skin um where it’s involved in temperature uh temperature sensation it’s also
00:25:14 ►
found widely distributed in the brain but we don’t know what it does in the brain so it’s a mystery
00:25:19 ►
that one yeah so frankincense also contains pinine, alpha and beta pinine, camphene, sabonine,
00:25:27 ►
mercine, which is related to MDMA, limonene and linalool as well.
00:25:33 ►
Limonene is a really interesting one.
00:25:35 ►
It’s what makes lemons smell like lemons.
00:25:37 ►
And there was an experiment done in a hospital with depressed people.
00:25:42 ►
And basically what they did was to have a lemon fragrance
00:25:46 ►
a lemon vaporizer in the room the whole time uh so after i think it was two weeks this experiment
00:25:52 ►
people were basically inhaling vapors of lemons and of the 12 depressed people nine of them had
00:25:58 ►
come off their medication and their scores had got back to normal on their or on their depression schools now the reason i think that
00:26:06 ►
is interesting and these like like so these kind of minor well what might be considered
00:26:11 ►
not necessarily psychedelic in itself um but so for example the tranquilizer aspect of frankincense
00:26:18 ►
um there’s a really interesting experiment where people were tested for creative thinking or creative problem solving and they were divided into two cohorts two groups
00:26:28 ►
and both of them had to do this test but before they did the test they had to solve a maze
00:26:33 ►
and they had to solve the same maze but there was a slight difference in that
00:26:36 ►
one of the mazes was illustrated with a mouse trying to get a piece of cheese going through
00:26:43 ►
the maze and the other one was illustrated by a mouse trying to get a piece of cheese going through the maze and the other one was illustrated
00:26:45 ►
by a mouse trying to get away from a nasty looking bird of prey and then so people sat the maze ears
00:26:50 ►
and they went and did some problem solving now the group which was seeking the cheese
00:26:54 ►
did twice as well as the group that were looking at the maze which was you know had the unhappy
00:27:01 ►
looking mouse in it so I think that’s quite significant because
00:27:05 ►
frankincense and myrrh and these chemicals that are in the bible and that we’re going to talk
00:27:10 ►
about were used in divination basically the main function of them certainly in the tabernacle
00:27:16 ►
was divination so the high priest would go would be anointed with a bunch of oils and then he would
00:27:21 ►
sit in a kind of a hot box smoke chamber uh in clouds of
00:27:25 ►
in clouds of smoke and uh he would talk to the angels he’d see visions of the angels and then
00:27:32 ►
he would take whatever answers that he learned back out to the tribe and then uh guide the tribe
00:27:39 ►
which is very much how shamanism works in uh in the amazon the shaman goes off on his own or her own and comes back
00:27:47 ►
with information on what you know maybe he’s diagnosing a disease or maybe it’s military
00:27:51 ►
divination you know when should we attack or when the enemy going to attack us uh finding your way
00:27:57 ►
to game or to uh to resources that kind of thing um so if you think of divination as problem solving
00:28:04 ►
kind of very elaborate ritual
00:28:06 ►
of problem solving then it makes sense that something that will reduce your anxiety
00:28:10 ►
uh and increase your powers of problem solving uh it kind of makes sense to have a bunch of
00:28:16 ►
tranquilizers in there however having said all that uh it’s quite important that we don’t get
00:28:20 ►
too lost in words like tranquilizers and anxiolytics and so on and so
00:28:25 ►
forth because those chemicals do all kinds of things especially in combination they do some
00:28:30 ►
wonderful things in combination and that’s one of the interesting things about the ancient world is
00:28:34 ►
how many plants would get thrown into one brew and you have all these debates about um which plants
00:28:41 ►
are being used you know some people are saying’s cannabis, some other DMT contained materials. What do you think are the most common drugs that were being used
00:28:49 ►
in the Old Testament period of the Bible? Well, I guess what we recognize today as a drug would
00:28:57 ►
be cannabis. I think Chris Bennett has sewn up that particular line of inquiry. It seems
00:29:02 ►
at this point, looking at the evidence um at this point looking at the evidence from the bible
00:29:06 ►
looking at the evidence from uh linguistics and the archaeological evidence which is you know
00:29:12 ►
it was found cannabis both in uh in palestine uh and in every single territory around it um
00:29:19 ►
yeah there’s absolutely there’s almost no doubt that the can air bottom in the Bible is is cannabis.
00:29:26 ►
The way it was used is interesting because the the pipe hadn’t been introduced to that part of the world yet.
00:29:33 ►
And the way that, for example, Herodotus, he visits the Scythians in about 500 B.C.
00:29:39 ►
And he reports that they fold down the flaps of their tents and then they throw cannabis on the fire and then
00:29:46 ►
here’s the quote immediately it smokes and gives out such a vapor as no grecian vapor bath can
00:29:50 ►
exceed the sith’s delighted shout for joy right so that’s how they threw a party they did at funerals
00:29:57 ►
as well um the sithians um but yeah so this this idea of fumigation inside enclosed spaces, you see that in various different tribes.
00:30:08 ►
You see it in something similar happening in China.
00:30:11 ►
You see it with the Oracle at Delphi as well, who was prophesying from within the cave, again, in enclosed space.
00:30:18 ►
And she was burning all sorts, including myrrh, which contains opioid receptor agonists.
00:30:26 ►
And yeah, so you get this in the tabernacle as well.
00:30:29 ►
The tabernacle is a piece of kit
00:30:31 ►
described over five chapters in the Bible.
00:30:35 ►
And what you end up with
00:30:36 ►
is a very, very well sealed smoke chamber
00:30:39 ►
at the back of it
00:30:41 ►
and a thick veil to keep the smoke in as well.
00:30:44 ►
And the only thing that happens
00:30:45 ►
in there is uh handfuls of finely ground psychoactive resins are burnt in a sensor
00:30:53 ►
and uh the high priest talks to angels in terms of other drugs i mean um myrrh which is still used
00:31:00 ►
as a mood enhancer today is social lubricant there’s tribes in africa which still
00:31:06 ►
have take myrrh at parties the romans used to have myrrh infused wine
00:31:11 ►
something quite interesting about the way the romans did it is that
00:31:15 ►
you can imagine how sumptuous and how lavish a roman feast would be but you only got one glass of
00:31:23 ►
of myrrh wine because myrr my is soporific it’s hypnotic
00:31:27 ►
if you if you drink too much of it you go to sleep so they knew about not overdoing the dose
00:31:33 ►
there so yeah my um obviously it’s there it’s one of the one of the gifts that’s given to the baby
00:31:39 ►
jesus uh it’s offered to christ on the cross when he’s being executed.
00:31:48 ►
He’s offered myrrh and wine, probably because it’s a painkiller.
00:31:53 ►
And in fact, it contains one of the opioid receptor agonists. It contains has a tenth the painkilling power of morphine.
00:31:58 ►
What else? Yeah, frankincense. You’ve got a load, actually.
00:32:02 ►
There’s one called Costas, which I’m getting into recently sassara costas um it’s used in uh justics it’s kind of smoked in tibet um it’s used in ayurvedic
00:32:13 ►
medicine as well or you can get drops of it and um like the islamic um culture they say that if
00:32:20 ►
you put this stuff up your nose it will make you sneeze out your gin and it’ll make you sneeze out your bad spirits so i’ve been uh i’ve explained i’ve been experimenting with that
00:32:29 ►
it hasn’t made me sneeze yet um but it has made me feel really good because it’s got all kinds of
00:32:33 ►
nice chemicals in it it cost us to get that one off the internet do you have any other favorites
00:32:37 ►
you would recommend that are uh the so-called in the legal entheogen uh realm yeah i mean i like myrrh um myrrh is delicious um the combination
00:32:50 ►
of myrrh and cannabis is something quite extraordinary just a few crystals uh you know
00:32:58 ►
people will look at you funny at parties um but if you chug away on that for a little bit uh yeah it’s really really quite pleasant
00:33:06 ►
to to switch some back to something a little bit more um personal um because there’s a medicinal
00:33:12 ►
side to all of these as well which i think is really fascinating how it can be spiritual and
00:33:17 ►
medicinal and recreational intoxicant um and so i wanted to hear more about you going to South America and picking up that terrible parasite and how you used Aya and folk medicine to fight against it.
00:33:33 ►
Yeah. Well, thank you for that question.
00:33:37 ►
I hadn’t been in Brazil very long. I’d only been there a few months.
00:33:39 ►
And I went to cut some jagubi, to cut some ayahuasca vine. And I got bitten by a sandfly.
00:33:46 ►
I got bitten just underneath the nipple on my left hand side.
00:33:51 ►
And the bite kind of swelled into a pimple and the pimple kept growing
00:33:55 ►
and became a problematic pussy ulcer.
00:34:02 ►
And people looked very gravely at it and they said,
00:34:04 ►
this is a fiery da brava, which means an angry ulcer and people looked very gravely at it and they said this is a fairy the brava which
00:34:06 ►
means an angry ulcer they translate it um or leshmaniosa which is in portuguese which is a
00:34:12 ►
beautiful word i think leshmaniosa in english leishmaniasis and um they said the people around
00:34:17 ►
me said i needed to go and take injections of antimonium tartrate and um i’d studied this kind of thing my degree was in the
00:34:26 ►
history and philosophy of science technology and medicine and i kind of specialized in history and
00:34:30 ►
uh kind of real politics around medicine and this is kind of going back you know i stopped taking
00:34:36 ►
uh pharmaceuticals when i was a teenager um and uh it was still quite militant about that um
00:34:43 ►
so i didn’t believe the hype.
00:34:46 ►
And I knew that these people had been treating this same disease, you know, just decades before with local medicines.
00:34:54 ►
In fact, it’s always struck me about I remember when I was very young, my mum, I got stung by a stinging nettle and she pointed to a dock leaf, which was just next to the stinging nettle.
00:35:04 ►
got stung by a stinging nettle and she pointed to a dock leaf which was just next to the stinging nettle i don’t know if you’ve got that in uh where you’re from um but i always found that amazing
00:35:09 ►
that there’s something that stings you and there’s the medicine right next to it and you see that
00:35:12 ►
if you look you see that in many places in the natural world um and not just in space actually
00:35:18 ►
in time as well certain things will flower at the time when the flower is useful for for treating a
00:35:24 ►
certain disease for example so in
00:35:25 ►
terms of time and in space um your medicine is often right next to the disease so i didn’t believe
00:35:31 ►
that you needed to have i didn’t believe that i needed to have injections of of heavy metals into
00:35:36 ►
my body and um i’ve been drinking ayahuasca for about or daimish i should say uh for about six years at that point um so i already had
00:35:47 ►
plenty of um examples plenty of proofs let’s say of of spectacular things happening things i’d
00:35:55 ►
wished for popping into my hands or you know visions that had uh had been turned out to be
00:36:01 ►
really magical so um it was quite interesting because i’d gone to brazil
00:36:06 ►
with a very two very specific um jobs let’s say one of them was to learn more about how powerful
00:36:13 ►
daimi was and the other one was to finish writing my my book my first book uh which was about among
00:36:19 ►
other things medicine and the politics around it and also about um about autonomy of your own body and a bunch of stuff
00:36:28 ►
like that so what happens so i had this i had this uh this growing ulcer and people got started to
00:36:35 ►
get really scared they said you’ve got to have injections because this this particular disease
00:36:38 ►
um it’s it can’t be cured in natural medicines and the second stage of it attacks the cartilage
00:36:44 ►
in your nose and your ears and your throat and your stomach and everywhere you’ve got cartilage
00:36:48 ►
basically and then you know i remember this guy saying to me listen i’ll put you in my car we can
00:36:52 ►
drive around town and i’ll point out the people who haven’t got noses because they had this disease
00:36:56 ►
and they didn’t have any antimonium tartrate to treat it now i didn’t believe this i thought it
00:37:00 ►
was untrue from my academic background and um also, like I say, I already had plenty of proof that daime was magical.
00:37:11 ►
And here I was being given an opportunity to do the two things which I’ve actually gone to Brazil to do.
00:37:16 ►
First one was to learn about power of daime. And I had a very, very good opportunity because I had a serious disease.
00:37:22 ►
And the second one, which was to finish my book.
00:37:26 ►
As I said, the book was about medicine, among other things.
00:37:29 ►
And it it was so pertinent and it was the kind of perfect answer to the question.
00:37:36 ►
You know, it made my book into an autobiography rather than just the stories of stuff that I’ve learned.
00:37:42 ►
And I thought that was an opportunity that was too good to turn up or turn down.
00:37:47 ►
So, yeah, what did I do?
00:37:49 ►
I drank loads and loads of daime.
00:37:50 ►
I did it in ritual.
00:37:52 ►
I went to see a curandero who, so, yeah, in the lineage that I’m from, daime,
00:38:01 ►
again, I mentioned that guy, Mestre Reneo, his own curandero was called Padre Wilson.
00:38:06 ►
And Wilson’s son lived quite near where I lived in the jungle.
00:38:11 ►
So I went to go and see him and he said, no, no, no, I can’t treat this.
00:38:17 ►
And this is a very serious disease. You know, it can go away.
00:38:20 ►
It can come back again and it can destroy the cartilage in your nose.
00:38:23 ►
And I was quite cross because that’s what everyone had told me and i kind of i expressed this to him
00:38:28 ►
and i kind of challenged the guy really along the lines of well i hear your father was a great
00:38:33 ►
curandero um what about you so he agreed to to treat me and uh that involved drinking
00:38:40 ►
daime every day uh at four o’clock in the morning with a few prayers and then either going
00:38:46 ►
back to sleep or meditating or going for a walk or doing whatever I wanted at that point.
00:38:50 ►
I was celibate for the whole period which was about eight months and there was quite a few
00:38:56 ►
kind of dietary instructions as well because you want to keep the, as it was explained to me and
00:39:01 ►
as I understand it, you want to keep the infection on the skin and not let it get through your blood, let’s say.
00:39:09 ►
I’m not sure how nuanced that explanation is.
00:39:12 ►
But so I had this ulcer, kind of pus flowing ulcer that was growing on my chest.
00:39:18 ►
And what it would do is it would kind of it would form a scab.
00:39:21 ►
And then underneath the scab, this pus would would grow until it was um you know
00:39:27 ►
until it was about to burst and then i would put a mud pack on it and i put like certain herbs into
00:39:32 ►
the mud pack including ayahuasca actually i put the mud into the mud pack and then i’d sleep on
00:39:36 ►
it and then in the morning that would peel off and then i’d have a nice open like foul smelling um
00:39:43 ►
wound on my chest and i kind of went through that cycle over and over
00:39:46 ►
again watching it get bigger and smaller and bigger and smaller according to all kinds of
00:39:50 ►
things that were going on in my life and it was um it was terrifying actually it was horrible i’d
00:39:54 ►
wake up in the morning the first thing i had to do was clean this thing you know i had to clean it
00:39:58 ►
with um different like the bark of a cashew tree and the bark of a mango tree and and i was doing it in a
00:40:06 ►
richly way so when i was cutting the barks for example i would be making up poems to the tree
00:40:12 ►
which is something i do even now you know if you ever pick some medicine well medicine then make
00:40:16 ►
some elite you know offer it something offer it at the very least thank you and if you can some
00:40:20 ►
kind of some kind of piece of art uh i think that’s a good way to work with the spirits, wherever you might find them.
00:40:29 ►
So, yeah, I did that.
00:40:30 ►
So I was drinking that every day for about four or five months of it, doing a load of ceremonies.
00:40:37 ►
I lost 10 kilos.
00:40:39 ►
I lost – I’d actually – I’d already – so the Japanese woman I mentioned before who took me along to Daimi we split up we married and then we split up in Japan and then I left Japan and I kind of
00:40:49 ►
made my way towards Brazil and then she decided she wants to get back with me and I thought this
00:40:54 ►
was my dream come true and then she came over just as I got ill and uh so anyway I lost 10 kilos I
00:41:01 ►
lost an ex-wife as well I lost all kinds of things that i didn’t need in
00:41:05 ►
my life and uh lost a pair of rose tinted spectacles about what the world looks like
00:41:10 ►
um i think i see it a little bit maybe a little bit more cynically a little bit more magically
00:41:14 ►
and a little bit clearer uh now very formative experience wow um yeah and uh gutsy to to trust to the plants like that.
00:41:25 ►
And one line I really liked from your book was how all things do seem to work pretty magically.
00:41:31 ►
And the nurse that you met that helped you through this one year, one month and one day after meeting this nurse, something special happened.
00:41:41 ►
Oh, yeah. Baby. Two babies yeah two babies yeah um yeah the
00:41:47 ►
whole thing was totally magical like so i met her um first day of january um and i was uh i the way
00:41:57 ►
even the way i met her was interesting i was um i had some tarot cards and i was just uh playing
00:42:01 ►
my tarot cards and this woman came over I’d already spotted actually this woman was uh I’d spotted that she was kind of looking at me and I was like
00:42:09 ►
like I said I was celibate at the time I was also extremely paranoid because uh where I lived was
00:42:14 ►
quite a bad place it was uh um it’s kind of ayahuasca gangster central let’s say um it’s a
00:42:22 ►
little bit better now but where I when I was there it was it was really really bad
00:42:25 ►
terrible in fact and um the people around me had my anyway for a number of reasons i really was in
00:42:32 ►
quite a bad quite a bad situation and quite paranoid and um i thought that this woman was
00:42:37 ►
a crackhead and i thought that she was uh trying to rob me um so i was very wary of her as i was wary of everyone everyone at that time
00:42:46 ►
but she came over and uh drew a tarot card and it was the lover’s card and i very quickly
00:42:52 ►
disabused her of any romantic uh notions i said well this one’s you know it’s often called the
00:42:57 ►
brothers it’s often called the twins uh and i talked about the mysticism around it which as a
00:43:04 ►
way of kind of,
00:43:06 ►
because I knew she fancied me,
00:43:07 ►
but I was just not interested at all.
00:43:09 ►
And then what happened was she kind of followed me around for a little while.
00:43:10 ►
She proved to be,
00:43:12 ►
once I trusted her,
00:43:13 ►
I discovered what a wonderful person she was.
00:43:15 ►
And yeah, she looked after me.
00:43:17 ►
She nursed me for about four months.
00:43:19 ►
I used to wake up in the morning
00:43:20 ►
to her singing Kura songs,
00:43:22 ►
like songs of cure.
00:43:24 ►
And she was very, and still is very dedicated to to her singing Kura songs, like songs of cure.
00:43:25 ►
And she was very,
00:43:27 ►
and still is very dedicated to that tradition
00:43:30 ►
and that medicine
00:43:31 ►
and that particular way of working.
00:43:33 ►
But then we went off to,
00:43:36 ►
I basically,
00:43:36 ►
I’d overstayed my visa by this point
00:43:38 ►
by quite a lot.
00:43:39 ►
And I got kicked,
00:43:39 ►
basically had to leave the country in a hurry
00:43:41 ►
and went through to Bolivia
00:43:42 ►
and we went together
00:43:45 ►
um and uh in Bolivia I bought her a tarot deck and one of the cards was printed wrong all the
00:43:53 ►
all of them were printed right except for one of the cards it was double printed and it turned out
00:43:56 ►
to be the lover’s card so I thought it was quite interesting and then we ended up having uh twins
00:44:00 ►
and as I just said that card is also called the twins that’s one of its kind of the title as well
00:44:06 ►
and both my
00:44:07 ►
twins were born with birthmarks
00:44:09 ►
in the position where I had my wound
00:44:11 ►
beneath my left nipple
00:44:14 ►
and I’ll tell you something else which I thought
00:44:16 ►
was quite interesting there was
00:44:17 ►
when they’d grown a little bit I went back
00:44:20 ►
to Brazil and showed them
00:44:21 ►
you know kind of showed them off to the curandero
00:44:24 ►
who’d fixed me when I was sick and And he said, oh, it left a tag, did it? You know, and I was, I was expecting him
00:44:29 ►
to be, you know, clapping his hands and sending off fireworks at this profound piece of magic that
00:44:34 ►
had happened. And he was, you know, barely, you know, he barely raised an eyebrow, you know,
00:44:41 ►
because the, the, the way that um that culture and actually many cultures
00:44:46 ►
that are that aren’t um quite so let’s say materialistic and um uh let’s say free of poetry
00:44:55 ►
as this particular rotting uh culture that you and i inhabit uh are you know that was something
00:45:02 ►
that’s completely normal the idea of a tag being left
00:45:05 ►
from one generation to the next was um yeah it didn’t even raise an eyebrow from him all these
00:45:10 ►
stories just turned into some great books that i wanted to to touch on so you um of your trilogy
00:45:16 ►
the first part is science revealed and then in front of me i have neuro apocalypse which has a
00:45:21 ►
lot about drugs in the bible um and then to come is Apocalypse’s past,
00:45:28 ►
present, and personal. Yeah. So I don’t know when that’s going to come. Life has got really busy
00:45:32 ►
recently. The first one, Science Revealed. Yeah, twins. Yeah, exactly. I’ve actually got another
00:45:37 ►
baby now. I’ve got a one-year-old. Thanks. So he’s, no, not him um uh yeah so the first book science revealed um it’s out of print
00:45:50 ►
at the moment it’s going to be re-released um hopefully in the next few months uh we sold out
00:45:55 ►
that one is about revelation in science i’m looking at scientists who’ve discovered things
00:46:01 ►
in dreams or in flashes of insight um people like tesla
00:46:06 ►
for example who had a vision of the uh the alternating current motor as he was walking
00:46:12 ►
in budapest park um man who never made a never made a blueprint never made a calculation but
00:46:19 ►
took about 500 patents from things that he’d seen floating in the air in front of him um
00:46:24 ►
calvin’s another one
00:46:26 ►
interesting one who was sitting in his car waiting for his wife and uh in about 20 seconds he had a
00:46:31 ►
flash of inspiration about the calvin cycle which is the series of substrates that um a plant uses
00:46:37 ►
in order to absorb absorb um in order to do photosynthesis basically in order to turn
00:46:43 ►
to use the energy of the sun
00:46:45 ►
of light um yeah so i was looking at so part of the part of that first book is about uh
00:46:50 ►
stuff that’s been discovered in dreams uh and flash of inspiration and also how the academy
00:46:55 ►
then deals with that so i’m looking at the um the real politic uh in journals and uh how funding is allocated and what’s behind that uh yeah i’ve
00:47:09 ►
also that’s something i’m coming quite close to my heart is neocolonialism in the academy and
00:47:13 ►
generally uh all kinds of awfulness in the academy so if you look online uh for a talk called
00:47:19 ►
neocolonialism uh in the study of ayahuasca in the academic study of ayahuasca you’ll find me talking
00:47:26 ►
about um yeah about some of the things which are impediments to us learning stuff from indigenous
00:47:34 ►
people because it seems that we’re not very interested in studying what the indigenous
00:47:37 ►
people have to say about their own medicines it often seems that um you know we kind of give a
00:47:42 ►
nod to the indigenous people the same way you might kind of clap at a
00:47:46 ►
child’s finger painting and say oh isn’t that quaint isn’t that a nice thing but actually to
00:47:50 ►
believe they have some real wisdom which says more about ayahuasca than you know receptors for
00:47:56 ►
example is uh yeah but the academy is not not really there yet in my opinion well that’s my
00:48:02 ►
first book science revealed um then they they
00:48:06 ►
were released as a trilogy or the first two parts of a trilogy they don’t actually need to be
00:48:09 ►
read in order and in fact when the the uh the one you mentioned neuro apocalypse which was
00:48:15 ►
originally book two uh it’s uh when it gets re-released um in fact no that one’s already
00:48:20 ►
been re-released uh it’s um you know it’s a standalone book so the second one
00:48:25 ►
is about revelation inside your own head so i’m looking at uh how for example how different
00:48:33 ►
languages limit what we see so i do this comparison between english language and japanese language
00:48:38 ►
and psychology of perception in those two countries um you know what’s been measured about um i’ll give you an example if you
00:48:45 ►
if you if you show a um a fish tank like an animation of a fish tank to a japanese person
00:48:51 ►
and an american person the american person is likely to say uh there was a big fish and then
00:48:57 ►
tell you about what the big fish was doing and the japanese person is much more likely to say
00:49:00 ►
it was an aquarium and then start to describe the relation the background
00:49:05 ►
details and relative details i one fish was bigger than another um and then if you then take one of
00:49:12 ►
the fish from the animation once you know once the person’s uh looked at it you give them a five
00:49:17 ►
minute break and then you show them a fish but you put on a different background right different
00:49:21 ►
background to what it was originally shown on um it doesn’t make any difference to the american
00:49:24 ►
the american will say oh yeah that fish was in there it wasn’t in there
00:49:27 ►
but japanese takes longer to answer that question and makes more mistakes so it seems that something
00:49:31 ►
happens in the japanese person’s head uh which means that the individual gets bound to the
00:49:36 ►
background and you see that kind of filter out into all aspects of the of the culture for example
00:49:42 ►
when you’re writing a haiku it’s got to have a
00:49:45 ►
reference to the season for example it’s got to be contextualized if it’s not contextualized it’s
00:49:49 ►
not a haiku it’s just a bunch of syllables um you also see it in japanese art you know there’s no
00:49:55 ►
tradition of still life in japan because stuff doesn’t make sense in isolation it’s got to be
00:49:59 ►
contextualized again so you’ll often see in those charcoal pictures for example uh a small temple or
00:50:05 ►
something like that with all this kind of swirling waterfalls and clouds around it because the
00:50:10 ►
individual the the connection between the individual and the context is is is they do it
00:50:17 ►
differently in japan and i think it’s partly to do with linguistics partly to the geography
00:50:21 ►
as well of the country uh because you can’t really be an individual in a city or in a country where you keep having tsunamis and earthquakes.
00:50:31 ►
And they have to get together and rebuild their lives every couple of generations.
00:50:38 ►
So, yeah, that’s part of it is looking at the looking at how linguistics influence what we think, also how drugs influence what we think.
00:50:44 ►
at the looking at how linguistics uh influence what we think also how drugs influence what we think uh fear as well all the different things that’s going on inside your head and uh how it
00:50:51 ►
feeds into our our perception and also our our capacity so another area i’m looking at is is
00:50:57 ►
autism people who uh have heightened skills with autism which is actually quite a lot like one in
00:51:03 ►
10 autists has some kind of area of excellence uh and that’s only the ones that discovered and it can be
00:51:07 ►
anything from like balancing to there was a guy called j mac it’s a really interesting uh video
00:51:13 ►
of this guy who was an autistic kid who was um obsessed with basketball and he was the basketball
00:51:19 ►
team’s uh mascot he used to go and take people’s towels and stuff and glasses of water and on the
00:51:26 ►
last day of high school on the last match they let him they let this guy play in the last couple
00:51:31 ►
of minutes and he ended up shooting like three pointers from all over the uh from all over the
00:51:36 ►
the court and he describes how you know how the the the the basketball basket was like a huge
00:51:43 ►
bucket um because autists the way that autistic people their visual cortex for cortices are the basketball basket was like a huge bucket.
00:51:47 ►
Because autists, the way that autistic people,
00:51:49 ►
their visual cortex for cortices are different.
00:51:51 ►
They’ve got much more neurons,
00:51:53 ►
much more connections in the visual cortex.
00:51:57 ►
So when you see, you know, in Rain Man, for example,
00:52:00 ►
where all those toothpicks get spilt and Dustin Hoffman goes, says what number it is,
00:52:04 ►
it seems that the visual cortex in
00:52:06 ►
autistic people um is a lot more a lot more acute so they can uh see things a lot clearer in some
00:52:12 ►
ways so yeah goes into drugs for a bit um goes into anarchy goes into the construction of the
00:52:19 ►
bible the new book i don’t know i mean what i’m looking at there is again it’s about the apocalypse it’s
00:52:25 ►
my my fundamental obsession since i was a teenager was the apocalypse and by which i mean all of it
00:52:31 ►
um including the lifting of the veil which is what apocalypse means lifting of the male
00:52:36 ►
veil when something which is hidden is not hidden anymore and you can see it so the word discovery
00:52:41 ►
discover is another it’s a cognate of the word apocalypse.
00:52:45 ►
So the new book, if it ever happens, is looking at what happens when an individual’s apocalypse,
00:52:52 ►
an individual’s realization, opens up a new space across the community. So for example,
00:52:58 ►
when Galileo decided to turn a nautical instrument of the telescope up towards the sky and revealed the moon of Jupiter.
00:53:07 ►
He let’s say he revealed something that had been hidden before.
00:53:10 ►
So that’s another in other senses, an apocalypse.
00:53:14 ►
Again, the discovery of the new world to be another one where you get suddenly this new patch of land gets discovered and all these interesting things start coming back for it, including coffee.
00:53:24 ►
For example, you get coffee coming back from the new world and uh that was the first one of the
00:53:29 ►
first stimulants that arrived in uh in europe and then you get all this kind of revolutionary
00:53:33 ►
plotting in coffee houses in france and things like that um yeah i hope it gets written one day
00:53:39 ►
yeah me too it sounds very exciting uh and by the way for everybody listening we’ll have links to
00:53:44 ►
uh the reverend’s work um and especially to the videos that you have on Vimeo.
00:53:48 ►
You have all kinds of great lectures on there and all of the aspects of the things you study.
00:53:53 ►
So those are especially intriguing to check out.
00:53:56 ►
Thank you.
00:53:58 ►
And so the one last question I wanted to ask before I let you go because I think it kind of ties together.
00:54:03 ►
Can you talk about the phrase in the Bible or in the prayer, give us this day our daily bread, and the linguistics behind that?
00:54:12 ►
I thought it was the most interesting things in the book.
00:54:14 ►
Thank you.
00:54:16 ►
So give us this day our daily bread is a whole lot of day, isn’t it, when you come to think of it.
00:54:23 ►
Now, this is probably the most well-known
00:54:26 ►
piece of scripture of the entire new testament you know that that line is probably being said
00:54:32 ►
somewhere by somebody at any given moment um in the world and um yeah it’s from the lord’s prayer
00:54:38 ►
give us this day our daily bread the word um daily there is epiouson and that word doesn’t appear anywhere
00:54:46 ►
else in the bible doesn’t appear anywhere else in greek literature in fact um geronimo who’s
00:54:53 ►
translated the bible he translated as super substantiatum which means that which is beyond
00:55:01 ►
normal being or something like that epiouson epi is the epi of epitaph or epilogue.
00:55:08 ►
You know, it’s the end. It’s the beyond bit.
00:55:11 ►
And and it seems to have something to do with the word be.
00:55:16 ►
So it’s that which goes beyond normal, normal stuff.
00:55:20 ►
So it’s exactly the opposite of daily. Let’s say’s that which is not normally found uh in your daily life so give us this day our daily bread um a lot of people um see it as manna
00:55:32 ►
uh the manna that was in the the wilderness that the israelites ate which is also quite
00:55:39 ►
interesting stuff because not only people know this because we don’t we don’t really read the
00:55:44 ►
bible uh very
00:55:45 ►
much but there were two things given to the Israelites in the wilderness and one was quails
00:55:49 ►
like quail meat they had as much quail meat as they wanted basically uh we don’t really hear
00:55:54 ►
about that we hear about the manna and um yeah if you read the book you’ll get all the reasoning
00:56:00 ►
in fact even if you don’t read the book you you can check out one of my talks. I think
00:56:06 ►
that manna is ergot.
00:56:08 ►
The way manna is processed in the Bible
00:56:10 ►
is it’s ground up and then it’s
00:56:12 ►
boiled and then it’s baked, which is
00:56:14 ►
what Albert Hoffman said is how you would
00:56:16 ►
get a powerful
00:56:18 ►
psychedelic out of
00:56:19 ►
ergot. And he said this was
00:56:21 ►
open to early man. But yeah,
00:56:24 ►
back to the the lord’s prayer um
00:56:26 ►
people people you know it’s such a curious word you know it’s uh
00:56:31 ►
it’s um like i say it is not found anywhere else in the entire greek language
00:56:37 ►
wow and it might be given to this day our daily ergot lsd precursor. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.
00:56:45 ►
And that, you know, thy will be done.
00:56:47 ►
Quite interesting you bring up that particular prayer in Daime.
00:56:51 ►
This guy, Mestre, I know who I mentioned before,
00:56:53 ►
he altered one of the lines there.
00:56:54 ►
So in English, it normally says, thy kingdom come.
00:56:57 ►
In Portuguese, that’s venha, venha,
00:56:59 ►
which is how most Catholics say it in Portugal or in Brazil.
00:57:03 ►
In my lineage, in Daime, it was being changed to Vamos, nós, a vós, a reina,
00:57:08 ►
which means let’s go to your kingdom, right,
00:57:10 ►
which puts the onus on you as the initiate or as the person drinking that drink
00:57:15 ►
to do the work in order to take yourself towards the divine kingdom
00:57:20 ►
rather than waiting around for the divine kingdom to arrive with you.
00:57:25 ►
And I think, you know, that’s quite good advice for anyone, you know, working with
00:57:29 ►
psychedelics or even not with psychedelics, anyone working with spiritual technologies
00:57:34 ►
is that we need to make efforts in order to attain to the heights, to get our concentration
00:57:40 ►
up and not spend too much time focusing on mundane things.
00:57:47 ►
Well, thank you so much for sharing on this today.
00:57:49 ►
And we’ll put all the links there so people can learn more about your work.
00:57:54 ►
Yeah, thank you for all your study and sharing it with us.
00:57:57 ►
Great, Lex.
00:57:58 ►
Well, thanks.
00:57:58 ►
I appreciate it.
00:58:00 ►
All right.
00:58:00 ►
And good luck with those kids and good luck getting that next book written when it comes.
00:58:04 ►
Cool. All the best to you and also to Lorenzo as well. All right. Thanks good luck with those kids, and good luck getting that next book written when it comes. Cool.
00:58:05 ►
All the best to you and also to Lorenzo as well.
00:58:07 ►
All right, thanks.
00:58:08 ►
Take care.